Sara Raasch's Blog, page 164
July 31, 2017
Snatched this pretty fiery thing from @kris10writes today!...
Snatched this pretty fiery thing from @kris10writes today! #books #bookstagram
July 26, 2017
LISA BADASS MOFO MAXWELL HIT THE NYTIMES LIST GUYSSSSSSS. This...
LISA BADASS MOFO MAXWELL HIT THE NYTIMES LIST GUYSSSSSSS. This book is the one I oh so brilliantly described as the book with “just like so many sexy people.” Ya know how when good things happen to good people/books it just makes life RIGHT? This is one of those instances. @lisamaxwell13, you darling creature, this book is glorious and rich and vivid and sexy and so are you!
Food so fancy. #foodporn
Food so fancy. #foodporn
When you have to go somewhere fancy only you NEVER go somewhere...
When you have to go somewhere fancy only you NEVER go somewhere fancy so you have to pull out your HIGH SCHOOL HOMECOMING DRESS and also you’re wearing flip flops because you NEVER GO SOMEWHERE FANCY but maybe it’ll be dark and no one will see. (And the fact that I can still fit into my, let me say it again, HIGH SCHOOL HOMECOMING DRESS baffles me, praise be to empire waisted dresses)
July 25, 2017
Hummingbird will not leave my garage. Considering adopting it....
Hummingbird will not leave my garage. Considering adopting it. Taking name suggestions now.
A hummingbird trapped in my garage. Door is wide open behind me....
A post shared by Sara Raasch (@sara_raasch) on Jul 25, 2017 at 12:15pm PDT
A hummingbird trapped in my garage. Door is wide open behind me. BE FREE, SMALL FAIRY BIRD.
Today’s #minutewriters video: a la carte the writing...
A post shared by Sara Raasch (@sara_raasch) on Jul 25, 2017 at 5:53am PDT
Today’s #minutewriters video: a la carte the writing advice! #amwriting
July 24, 2017
hanginggardenstories:
Seven Lifetimes
by Sara Raasch
Lust
Some...
Seven Lifetimes
by Sara Raasch
Lust
Some lifetimes, the Angel doesn’t come at all.
Those let me have my ignorance, for however short a time. I trick myself into believing the damage will be minimal. I haul up in some forgotten corner of the world where weapons haven’t progressed beyond bows and stones and pray that I’m contained.
(Which is absurd—none of us prays anymore.)
But each of those lifetimes ends the same: with ignorance cracking, and war being there all along. I wake up one morning to the sensation of having forgotten something vital, and I’ll yawn and stretch and roll over to my constant companion, a bedmate that knows every lifetime I’ve tried to escape but it sticks with me all the same: hatred. It trails me like streams of smoke from those disgusting cigarettes Lust puffed on when smoking was sexy, choking the world around me until all the humans can inhale is fury.
(I admitted to being jealous of Lust once, that his curse wasn’t destructive. He smiled, slow, seductive, because he’s incapable of anything else, and told me he’d show me one day just how destructive he could be.)
And though the Angel doesn’t show up for those lifetimes, I can feel her there, watching, taking stock of my destruction with all the adoration of a mother appraising her child.
(Not that I’ve ever experienced the love between a mother and child. But I’ve killed enough of them.)
Pride
The Angel is there one day, after too many lifetimes of solitude. Six to be exact—Pride told me he keeps a calendar of when she’ll appear. Every seventh lifetime, perfect clockwork designed for an imperfect system.
“I like to be prepared,” Pride explained, snapping shut his pocket calendar and leaning back with a satisfied smirk.
(He’s been a Caucasian male his past fourteen lifetimes. It’s a little predictable, and a lot sad, which I told him, because it makes him so incensed that I can tell myself the destruction caused is from him, not me.)
Preparation has nothing to do with it, though. The only thing it has to do with is need.
Pride is desperate to see her. Lust never visits for long should the Angel be unable to find him in whatever forgotten corner of the world I haul up in. And all the others—they pace, and they count, and they wait for her to show up, because they need to win.
I’m the only one who hides from her. Who pretends I don’t see her when she appears—a reflection in the window of a store, then in the yard outside my house, then standing over my bed with a soft, ethereal smile made for rapture.
So when she shows up this time, my instinct is to ignore her. I twitch to keep my head bowed, shoulders hunched against the scorching summer sun as I make my weekly supply trek from my shack to the nearest village.
But this time, she isn’t standing at a distance. She’s right on the road, two feet in front of me.
And she isn’t smiling.
Gluttony
Gluttony won the last game.
“Shit, he’s never gonna let us live this down,” Pride had complained just after. “He’s almost as insufferable as Sloth.”
(Because of course the real problem is our egos, not the abuse the world will suffer under Gluttony’s reign.)
I was relieved, though, because Gluttony’s curse could almost be a blessing, if he used it right.
But these things aren’t made to be used right. They aren’t made to be ignored, as I try to ignore mine, or shirked, as I do every game.
And so when the Angel appears this time, in front of me on the dusty road, I know all those years of me intentionally throwing the game have finally caught up to me.
Greed
The Angel is standing there, cradling part of a bloodied corpse against her stomach like an infant. In her other hand, a gore-drenched knife glints sunlight, and she rakes the back of her hand across her bloodied lips.
(She’s appealing to the parts of me she misses. The Warmonger, the Conqueror, the Murderer.)
She’s hungry. You’d think seven years of Gluttony would have satisfied her, but the need in her eyes is primal, and I wonder for half a second if she’s here because she’s looking for Greed, because she wants her to win, but no.
(Greed wins often enough—it’s her nature to win, and to hate it anyway.)
The bloodied corpse falls from the Angel’s hands with a wet thunk. Her lips move only to lift in a smile, but her words are in my mind, as inescapable as the destruction I wrought simply by existing.
“It’s time,” she tells me. “It’s time.”
Envy
“You lucky little shit,” Envy tells me when we’re there, all of us, gathered like every seven years. “She’s rigged the game for you, you know that? God Almighty, you better not mess this up.”
(What god is she talking about?)
The look on Envy’s face is an echo of what all the others are feeling. They won’t show it, of course, but they’re fumingly envious, so much so it’d be easy to foster that emotion and help Envy win.
The Angel will have prepared for that, though. The Angel is prepared for everything.
Sloth
I threw the game so Gluttony would win last time. It was easy—play against the others, use their curses to my advantage. I could do it again. If not to help Envy win, then to help Sloth, maybe—she’s harmless. Mostly.
Yes, Sloth. The world would much rather have seven years of lazy resting than …
The Angel’s voice resounds in my head, a thousand trumpets, a hundred screaming voices.
“You know how this will end.”
Wrath
I know how this will end, because I’ve won before. When I was newer, and stupid, and all of them combined.
They hated me then, as they should have, because I was better at being them than they were. I was far too slick for someone made of destruction, and invented words like dominance so Lust trailed behind me, picking up ideas in my wake. I was boastful, so resplendent as I desecrated entire countries with one well-placed livid ruler that Pride had only murder in his eyes when he looked at me. My appetite was the epitome of insatiable, and while the world turned itself inside out trying to feed me, Gluttony picked at his teeth and wondered how I could crave things like blood and bodies when there were far more delectable treats. Greed hated me, and that hatred fueled me, and her constant leech, Envy, did the same. Sloth was the only one who didn’t care, because she can’t care, and so she became a tool I used to make some nations pliable while others slaughtered them.
(The humans gave me names like War and Death. They made me gods and worshipped me, and made me demons and feared me. I was Everything, and I knew it.)
I won the game so many times the world became unrecognizable as a habitable planet. And by the time my hatred caught up to me, it was too late. There were scars in the very earth that would never heal.
As the Angel smiles, moments away from signaling the start of the game, her eyes stay on me, and I relive every lifetime I won. Every death. Every war. Every surge of groundless fury that destroyed homelands and crippled lives.
(I’m sorry, it’s all I can say, I’m sorry.)
She wants me to win, because it’s been too long since the world suffered under my particular brand of horror.
It’s been too long.
And I don’t know if I can stop it this time.
Sara Raasch has known she was destined for bookish things since the age of five, when her friends had a lemonade stand and she tagged along to sell her hand-drawn picture books too. Not much has changed since then — her friends still cock concerned eyebrows when she attempts to draw things and her enthusiasm for the written word still drives her to extreme measures. FROST LIKE NIGHT, the final book in her debut YA fantasy trilogy SNOW LIKE ASHES, comes out September 20, 2016. It does not feature her hand-drawn pictures.
That time I wrote something SINFUUUUUUL for @hanginggardenstories
Captive Prince As Onion Headlines
Damen: Badly Injured Man Not Done...
