Below we see four images. Three of them are takes on the characters of my novel, in order from left to right: Chloe Athena Marks, Kain O'Giro Y'inx, and Jessie Vian. If there's someone small, gray, and furry in there, his name is Fuzz. The first image is only Kian and Fuzz, by far my favorite of the Fuzzes.

Understanding- A short story

“That is it,” Torren announced, dumping his bag on the table and starting to peel off the polymer suit hiding his variable and only partially solid skin from the general public. “Cultural exchange my ass.”
“How did it go?” Xi asked, keeping his voice diplomatically mild.
“The only thing that could have made it worse would have been if there had been a dump of radioactive slag while I was there. And at least that would have been different!”
Xi snorted and followed after Torren, picking up the soft, floppy bits of Torren’s suit as he went.
“It couldn’t have been that bad,” he chuckled.
“It was! I had to-“ Torren stopped mid-gesture. He frowned, hunching over slightly, and began to cough. Xi watched him thump his fist against his chest, hacking loudly.
“Going to need a bucket?”
Torren shook his head between chesty coughs. After a moment, he spat a crumpled aluminum can into his hand.
“Ouch,” Xi hissed sympathetically.
“I’m full of this junk,” Torren croaked. He swallowed hard, the semi-solid portion of his throat rippling, and sighed. “I’ll be coughing it up for days.”
“I’m sorry,” Xi murmured. He set the suit to the side and settled on the couch. “Some here and relax while you tell me about it.”
Torren nodded wearily and put the can on the coffee table. He lay down between Xi’s legs. A small cloud of steam hissed up wherever they touched, produced by the hefty difference between their body temperatures.
“Now. Talk to me.”
“Well, first, don’t ever let me do that again. Or anything like it.”
“Noted.”
“Okay. I wasn’t the only one there. There must’ve been at least five or six others, from all over…five. One mountain stream, like me, a couple of lakes, one poor sap from the Dead Sea, and a subterranean spring. All six of us in a couple miles of river and all six of us fully grown. We were practically on top of each other.
Xi nodded and dug his fingers into Torren’s short, dark hair.
“Winter wasn’t too bad. Cold as hell, of course, but I’m used to that and I’ve had worse. There was a little ice-fishing, some skating, and one idiot who fell through near the south shore. Peaceful, I guess. And then spring came. The melt waters washed all the trash and junk off the shores, nearly all at once. The spring had to call it off and leave, he got so sick. It got a little better once the melt eased, for awhile. And summer started slowly; just some casual boating and fishing, the kind of idyllic pastimes you see in old books, y’know? The stuff that’s almost worship, in a quiet way. The parties started in July. Trash, kids, and all the remains from barbeque grills dumped in on us.”
He stopped talking to cough, half sitting up so he could try to breathe around it. Xi waited patiently, moving his hands down onto Torren’s shoulders to knead slowly.
When Torren could speak again, there were two more beer cans, an empty Spam tin, and a partially bald tennis ball in his lap and part of a fishing line hanging out of his mouth.
“Hook in my tongue,” he said carefully. “Get it out.”
Xi reached around and poked two fingers into Torren’s mouth, feeling blindly for the hook. He announced when he located it with a sharp yelp.
“Ow! It’s barbed!”
Torren snorted but didn’t move. After a moment, Xi managed to get a decent grip on the metal and began carefully working it out. It took a bit of whining on Torren’s part and some irritated muttering on Xi’s, but the hook finally came free. It was a treblehook that boasted an extra set of barbs at the junction of the branched hooks and four lead sinkers ranged up the line, which there was nearly three feet of.
“No wonder I’ve been feeling weird,” Torren muttered, shoving the line into the Spam tin and wiping a streak of pale blue blood off on his leg. “I’ve had lead in my system for months.”
“You left off around midsummer,” Xi said helpfully, pulling Torren back down into his lap. “Keep talking. I want to hear about everything.”
“Near the end of the summer, the frat boys showed up. I thought the parties had been bad before…I wound up with a hangover after this unbelievably rowdy kegger. I kid you not. I actually had to crawl out of the river to barf in a bush and just lie in the grass to feel horrid for awhile. They managed to dump or spill that much beer in the water.”
“Poor baby.”
“Things calmed down a bit in the fall; decent weather, fewer people….a few leaves on the water when they were just starting to fall. For a little while, it was almost as good as my own bed.”
He sighed and turned onto his side, resting his cheek on Xi’s stomach. Xi stroked his hair gently.
“Autumn is very wet there,” he murmured. “There was flooding upstream of us, and we were swollen with it, all the mud and the trash and the dead and the chemicals from industrial operations. They had to pull me, the other spring, and the guy from the Dead Sea out for detox……they quit when we were cleared. I went back. Two weeks later, the bed was dredged. Someone had gone missing while we were out.”
“Did they find whoever it was?”
Torren nodded faintly, digging his fingers into Xi’s side.
“She was nine. She did ballet and liked horses. Wanted to be an actress when she grew up.”
Xi’s skin rippled, leaking small hisses of steam at the corners of his eyes.
“Oh, Torr…she wasn’t-“
“In my chest,” Torren whispered.”Nine days dead and eight days in the water. When they pulled her body from me a young eel fell from her mouth. I couldn’t sleep for days after.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“She still had her backpack on. It was purple and white, and there was a doll inside, dressed like a director, and a pair of ballet shoes.”
“Torr-“
“She was raped after she died. Not before, Xi….after. She told me. She watched him”
Xi opened his mouth to say something else, but Torren spoke before he had the chance.
“Her name was Leilani.”
“It happens.”
“Not to me! It’s not my lot in life! I exist to become a part of a larger whole, to carry the melt to the rivers and lakes. I feed the soft meadows and the tiny flowers. Mine is the delicate and the rare- life, cold and sweet and clear! I don’t kill! Death is not what I do! I shouldn’t have had to hold her spirit until they pulled her body from the water and she followed after it. She was crying, Xi. Crying because she knew. She knew it was all over. She knew that the sorry creep who did this had done it to others. I shouldn’t have to bear that!”
“Death is the ultimate equalizer,” Xi whispered, stroking Torren’s hair hard and trying to ignore the water trickling over his stomach and leg. It was icy cold, and there was enough of it to lower the heat simmering under Xi’s skin.
“What did she have to balance? She was an innocent child.”
“There’s more to it that you’re telling me, isn’t there?”
Torren nodded silently. Xi sighed.
“Tell me everything, Torren.”
“I’ve….I’ve seen death before. I run through a forest where once there was a tribe of humans hunting the animals that bedded and grazed in the green places, and I saw them die. I saw it but I didn’t really get it. It’s different when a fish or a plant dies….it feels different. With Leilani, I felt it. I touched it and I tasted it and I was surrounded by it. And I still don’t understand it! Why can’t I understand it?”
“Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.”
“What?”
Xi smiled.
“So said Epicurus, a philosopher of Ancient Greece. It means that we do not know or understand death while we live, and, when we die, we still won’t understand it. We are never the same thing, and can therefore never truly grasp what it is, just as death will never know what we are.”
Torren sniffled miserably.
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re young, Torren. You’ll understand it someday.”
“You’re telling me riddles.”
“I was born when the Ice Age was just beginning and I still do not entirely understand it. Time and experience teaches us what scholars cannot, after all. Wait until you have more than just a few hundred years under your belt. Wait until your passing has worn a canyon into the forest and the trees there tower far above you, so it is always twilight in your bed. Wait until a new spring is born to bolster your source and swell your shores. There will be falls from your cliffs, and accidental drownings nearer to the valleys where humans gather to picnic and vacation. You will understand parts of it then.”
This news prompted Torren into fresh tears. Water ran from his skin as well, coming from nowhere in response to his emotions. Xi shifted uncomfortably but held him close anyway.
“I don’t want to have to know it again!” Torren wailed. “It was like everything that had ever sunk into my bed and returned to the earth was back and I was buried in it all. I was suffocating in it. There was no water, no air, no world around me. Just death. I can’t do it again.”
“Death can neither be stopped or defeated, Torren. It comes to us all. I’m just lucky in that it hasn’t come for me yet.”
Torren hiccupped and choked on his tears. Xi sighed and lifted him into a sitting position.
“It was a terrible thing that was done to her,” he said softly, rocking him slowly. “Children should not have to learn how cruel and cold the world can be when they are still learning where they are in it.”
“I wanted to help.”
“We can’t.”
“I know, but I thought, maybe……when I asked, they told me to go back to my part of the river and forget about it.”
“Good advice.”
“How can I forget that? How can I forget what it felt like to hold a soft body against my heart and feel it coming apart? How can I forget what it was like to see a crayfish nibble at her eyes? Am I supposed to discard the ghost of a child hovering around my face as a normal thing? Does death mean so little?”
“No, Torren, it doesn’t, but it is treated as such because there are few who could go on with living if they didn’t discount it as a little thing worth no attention.”
Something solid shifted in Torren’s belly, pressing hard enough against him to separate the pebbles patterning his skin. Torren shuddered and gagged, apparently trying to get rid of it. Xi watched him, waiting to see if his help was going to be needed. Torren gagged again, jerked, and a bundle of water weed and wet leaves fell into his hands. He pawed the plants away and showed Xi what had been inside it.
It was a cloth doll, one with short, dark hair, square-framed glasses, and a megaphone in one hand. A folding cloth and wood chair with DIRECTOR printed on the back lay under it, folded flat for storage.
“She gave it to me,” Torren whispered. “She thought I was all alone. I was the only one of us she could see.”
“You held her body,” Xi explained, touching two fingers to the doll’s face. He saw, for a moment, a young girl with short, curly brown hair and big blue eyes, pirouetting across a classroom with the doll in her hand. He smiled faintly. “A part of her remains with you. That is the way it is. We are living vaults of memory.”
“It hurts.”
“I know.”
“Will it stop?”
“Never.”
“Never?”
“It dulls, after a time. Life goes on. Time passes. Cities rise and fall. The earth turns and the tide comes in. We go on in our course, remembering and holding as we always have. There is more joy in the world than there is sadness, more than enough life and laughter to wrap death in and soften the hard edges.”
“Really?”
Xi nodded and wrapped his arms around Torren, pressing the doll agasint Torren’s chest. He squeezed him gently. Torren curled into the hug, letting the water weed and leaves slide off his leg and onto the floor with a wet splat.
“Really.”
“And you’ll never let me talk myself into doing a cultural exchange program again?”
He snorted.
“I make no promises. Now get off me, little one, we need to clean up before those weeds stain the floor. I doubt we’ll get our deposit back if we leave water stains all over.”
Torren nodded and got off the couch. He held the doll up, looking it in the embroidered eyes for a moment, then held his hand over it and drew upwards. Water streamed from the wet fabric, moving up to his hand in smooth ribbons until the doll was dry. Satisfied, he swallowed the water and carried the doll to the nearest window sill.
While Torren and Xi picked up weeds and trash, the little doll watched from its chair on the sunny windowsill. The shadow it cast shivered, then morphed into one belonging to a ballerina in a stiff tutu. The ballerina waved, and vanished.
Xi waved back when Torren wasn’t looking.

Things I have learned....today

First off: Starbucks isn't as bad as all the people at home claim it is. While it does seem a bit overpriced, the coffee is good for a massive chain store, the service is good, the atmosphere isn't bad (and it's great for people watching), and they make a killer lemon tart.

Second: English workshops are highly underrated and actually worth putting aside an hour of your evening to attend. I was surprised, but I learned a few things and had some fun, actually.

Third: While I know that my hobbies are not always the most popular or publicized, there are still many out there who practice them. I am not alone, and I have friends in places I didn't know I had them.

Fourth: Sometimes, all you need to perk up is to walk down the sidewalk in the dark, balancing on a wall with your music on and your head held high.

Fifth: Even when I'm feeling plain, I can still turn heads.

Sixth: I can help, even when I don't really know what to do.

Ugh

It has been twelve days since I last posted. *sigh* And here I was trying to keep this regular. Ah, well.

So. I have had headaches off and on for the last week or so. Why? STRESS on all sides and of all kinds. It sucks royally, but so far I'm soldiering through it. I don't know how but....well, it's working.

I think I'm gaining weight. Maybe it's just me, but it's starting to bug, so I'm thinking about trying to do something about it. We'll see how that goes.

SPRING BREAK is almost here! If all goes well, I'll spend a day or two at Aunt Scoob's,then go home for the rest of break and come back the following Saturday. I think I'll go through Las Vegas this time. It's a lot prettier than taking the interstate. *shudder*

I get to take as much home as possible, to lessen the load I'll be taking at the end of the semester. That'll be....interesting.

Anywho, here I am, tired and headachy but alive.