B. Morris Allen's Blog, page 5
July 9, 2019
Beginnings 100 – Cupernicity
The center of the universe shifts. When you’re young, it’s all about your principal carer, and food, and bedtime snuggles. As you age, gravity intervenes, and the center moves further away, to cliques and clans and who’s gone furthest into the danglepods. Then you learn about the dark matter carers always try to hide, and the center gets focused, intimate. For me, it was Carsa Ubiye.
I wasn’t the center of her universe, of course. The Fifth Law of Thermodynamics is ‘For every cool girl that...
July 8, 2019
Beginnings 099 – The Plural of Die
It’s ‘dice’, not ‘dies’, but this godforsaken planet is as short on grammar as it is on everything else.
Come back to life more than once, and they give you a nickname. Names are something we have plenty of. Names, myths, rumours, theories, we’ve got them. I’d trade any two of those for a thimble of hope, if there were such a thing.
Anyway, after I came back the second time, they started calling me Dies. Naomi Dies. Has a hopeful ring to it, doesn’t it?
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“The Plural of Die”
About the story...
July 7, 2019
Beginnings 098 – Tumbler
A spider hung across from me, the barbed spikes of its legs dug deep into the walls of its prison. It was caged in a network of tunnels and tubules that wrapped around and through each other in an immense tangle. Trapped. Just like me.
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“Tumbler”
About the story: Sometimes love will surprise you. The details of an alien lifecycle.
July 6, 2019
Beginnings 097 – He Don’t Love Nobody
I was nobody. That’s why I did it.
They always ask, when they come in their school and church groups. “Why did you do it, Mr. Mbonyumutwa? Why did you share Blue Star’s revolutionary plans with the True Government? Weren’t the rebels your friends? Weren’t you a rebel?”
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“He Don’t Love Nobody”
About the story: Betrayal, and why to do it.
Inspired by a John Hiatt song.
July 5, 2019
Beginnings 096 – In the Thick of Time
Time was uninterrupted. It extended down the hill in one direction, while in the other it was lost amid a line of septs that streamed down like ants. The septs were brief, momentary, clans stretching across a handful of generations at best. They faded in and out, overlapping, conflicting, forming thickets and tangles that thinned out into broad reaches of individuality and isolation. At the peak of the hill they formed a great clot, and after that were gone forever.
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“In the Thick of Time”...
July 4, 2019
Beginnings 095 – Roller
The track stretched out like a shadow, the long, narrow trace of some monumental tower fit for magic and sorcerors. She looked the other way, but there were no pillars, no turrets, no mages invoking the vanished Stone People. The dark granite track curved gently up into the hills, and past them to the mountain. Her own shadow lay across the smooth stone, pointing toward the south, and slightly east. That way lay the quarry, and salvation. Perhaps.
“You don’t need saving,” her brother had arg...
July 3, 2019
Beginnings 094 – Fatherhood
He had done his best. Had raised the girl as if she were his own, though she was not.
“You’re not my father,” she had said, flat and cold, as she left his house for the last time, left the bedroom full of music and makeup, the front room full of games they’d seldom played, the kitchen with the portrait of her mother. It was the last thing she’d said. An alien message she’d broadcast in the chopped Romanian of the city; the last cryptogram in a decade-long transmission of codes he’d never und...
July 2, 2019
Beginnings 093 – Shift
“I will catch the bus.” Jean Pierre spoke firmly, decision made.
“Don’t be foolish, Jean Pierre.” His wife Nicole made a point of restraining a sigh. “The bus comes only once per day. You will waste a day getting to Gitarama, and another getting back. That is two nights’ lodging you will need.”
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“Shift”
About the story: The same story told at shifting levels of realit
July 1, 2019
Beginnings 092 – The Irrigation Ditch
She’d shifted a cottage-weight of stone, lifted uncounted shovelfuls of soil, dug her way with mattock and sweat and bruised fingers. Before her, beneath her, all she had was a hole. The same as when she’d lifted that first shovel load, the same as she’d have after countless more.
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“The Irrigation Ditch”
Shards
Published 01-Oct-2018
About the story: Names have power. When does a hole turn into a ditch?
June 30, 2019
Beginnings 091 – Building on Sand
He had been ready; a small bag packed, boots oiled, axe sharpened. He had meant to go, but he had not gone.
He could remember the feel of it still, the sense of a burden lifted, of freedom at last in his grasp. It had felt … lonely, in a way; frightening. Before, he had had his task, his role, his definition. In that brief moment of independence, those certainties had gone, vanished like rain seeping into sand, leaving just a damp, irritating grit behind.
It rubbed now, between the thick cal...
