Effing Feline celebrates Memorial Day #8Sunday

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I, Effing Feline, know that tomorrow is Memorial Day, a patriot US holiday. In honor of said patriotism, I dug out my sun glasses honoring the US and the other nations in Mr V’s heritage. How many of these flags do you recognize?

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The first two are easy — along with Great Britain’s Union Jack, they’re the most widely recognized flags in the world. The other two, though, separate the Effing Felines of the world from mere puddy tats.

Ed is working on rewrites of his near-future SFR tentatively titled Audra Fleeing Audra Finding. Audra Verhailey, a runaway young mother, flees with her baby from Oregon to Kwadra Island — a “duplicate” of Vancouver Island that its Native American rulers “hopped” here from an alternate Earth.

Penniless and desperate, twenty-something Audra lets a Kwadran construction worker guide her up a mountainside to a forbidden back entrance to Kwadra’s abandoned underground cities. He says they’ve reached their goal, but she sees nothing.

“Look again,” he said, “and this time, see what’s invisible.”

No matter how she stared, though, she saw no eight-foot oval ventilation shaft into the hillside, no entrance to a safe haven in the now-abandoned underworld where Kwadrans had holed up when the environment of their alternate Earth went bad.

“I see an overgrown cliff, a bunch of trees, half of them dying — your forest isn’t adapting well to this Earth — and bright red berries on some bushes.” Glancing at him through narrowed eyes, she added, “And a guy I don’t trust.”

His eyes twinkled; “Notice anything about the bushes?”

“They’re, you know . . . bushes, okay? I have no idea what kind they are, if that’s what you’re after.”

But after several seconds, she saw something — something invisible.

A hundred feet uphill, shrubs were bending to and fro as though in a breeze, yet she felt no wind on her face. Feeling like Lewis and Clark exploring the wilderness, she licked her forefinger and held it up in all different directions; no breeze.

“Wind from the ventilation shaft,” she said, inordinately pleased even though she told herself she didn’t care what this guy thought.

Effing Feline here again. In honor of Memorial Day, here are a couple of patriotic songs that Mr. V’s woodwind quintet recorded a number of years ago, in honor of the commissioning of the USS Tucson:

Be sure to visit the other writers in Weekend Writing Warriors and Snippet Sunday.