If you would like to submit a drabble (a short work of game-related fiction exactly 100 words), please @mail Queens with your submission, the title, the name you would like it to appear under and which category you feel it belongs best in.
Challenge Drabble for October 2018's the topic is Books.
316 String Theory drabbles written — and counting.
Categories
Abilities (9)
Animals (15)
Challenge: Books (10)
Character Study (101)
Family (43)
Life and Death (19)
Love and Relationships (108)
Miscellaneous (4)
New York City (6)
The Resistance (14)
Authors
Abby (19)
Adel (2)
Anonymous (14)
Asi (1)
Astor (1)
Audrey (2)
Aviators (1)
Barbara (1)
Bao-Wei (3)
Bella (3)
Benji (3)
Bolivar (1)
Cardinal (2)
Calvin (3)
Cash (1)
Claire (2)
Colette (4)
Cooper (2)
Corbin (3)
Dajan (1)
Danko (2)
Daphne (4)
Deckard (6)
Delia (2)
Delilah (21)
Eileen (15)
Elisabeth (2)
Emily (1)
Evan (1)
Faye (1)
Francois (7)
Gabriel (3)
Gillian (12)
Hannah (2)
Helena (6)
Howard (2)
Huruma (9)
Ingrid (2)
Iris (1)
Jane (1)
Jenny (1)
JJ (2)
Jonathan (1)
Joseph (3)
Joshua (2)
Judah (2)
Kaitlyn (1)
Kaylee (21)
Kincaid (2)
Lancaster (1)
Lene (2)
Lexington (1)
Logan (4)
Lynette (3)
Magnes (1)
McRae (1)
Melissa (32)
Meredith (1)
Monica (1)
Murdoch (1)
Nadira (1)
Nick (1)
Nicole (1)
Nora (3)
Odessa (4)
Pandora (2)
Peyton (3)
Quinn (1)
Raith (3)
Robyn (1)
Roderick (2)
Ruiz (2)
Ryans (9)
Sable (2)
Stef (1)
Sylar (1)
Tasha (3)
Tavisha (1)
Teo (8)
Tess (1)
Veronica (2)
Walter (2)
Fawns
by Anonymous
All fawns grow into stags.
She's proud of the way these two carry themselves. Gone is the clumsiness of youth, their soft bleating voices and downy hair. Many seasons of hardship have wept the innocence from their eyes and supplanted it with understanding that's still several years shy of true wisdom, but like their antlers did, this too will come in time.
Both are her blood. One born from her womb and the other born from her chosen sister's. Love is their milk. Knowledge, too.
It has made them strong and in a word that once embarrassed them both: beautiful.
November in Yerevan
by Eileen
The stairs outside the Matendaran are the highest the girl in the white headscarf has ever climbed, and she's been up and down the four thousand, four hundred and forty-four steps at Lysefjorden above the sea and communed with the emerald doves of Chand Baori.
Neither altitude nor number makes them so tall. It's the nuclear fire at her back and the unforgiving man standing in Mkhitar Gosh's shadow at her front, but Tyr sees the terror in her eyes. Lets her pass.
When she finds their god-king, Munin alights as she has been taught and, weeping, tells him everything.
Sleeping Giant
by Eileen
She climbs the trunk with the tips of her fingers, finding footholds where his vertebrae meet the yielding oak of his spine. A broken nail's edge traces each branch, crooked and threadbare, before it alights somewhere in his canopy and she presses a kiss to the fist-knot where his shoulders meet.
When he shifts, the earth moves. His breath is the wind passing through the memory of leaves. A voice creaks in the dark and she wraps arms around him, rests a cheek against his roughness.
Sap tastes like salt. One breath fills her with the loamy smell of him.
Willing
by Eileen
If more people knew about us, they'd think it was rape, and although this makes me a worse person than the one I am for spreading my legs in the first place… I might let them.
They'd say you plied me with drugs or alcohol, accuse you of forcing my consent, ability dragging your name from my mouth—
Well. Somebody's name. It doesn't matter whose when it's leaking hot and wet into your ear or when I'm opening myself for you regardless of the history we share.
The truth is that while it wasn't always good, I was always willing.
Europeans
by Eileen
"Je t'aime," he says, and maybe this time he means it. The Sicilian's hands are rough, weathered, his palms made callused by long months spent at sea during arduous cross-Pacific passages more demanding than the compact press of his mouth sealing around his. He smells like salt and sweat and the slow burn of tobacco wrapped in porous brown paper — in South America, he remembers that they used plantain leaves to roll them. His lover is almost as pliant, and unlike the medicinal herb relieves nothing. He aggravates his condition instead, making him want love more than he loves wanting.
Aquila
by Eileen
I can't call you one of mine because you're not, but if you were I'd wear you on my arm, let you press your face into my cheek and feed you from my fingers, thumb braving the curve of a hooked mouth carved for killing.
Instead, I settle for blunt nails and revel in the graze of sharp teeth, always wishing my smallness didn't compel you to be so gentle with me; when I look into your eyes lit gold it's impossible not to draw the comparison between man and bird. My Garuda, my Aquila, they name constellations for you.
Mio Caro Fratello
by Eileen
Leonardo da Vinci: Italian polymath.
Galileo Galilei: physicist, astronomer, philosopher.
Valentinus: patron saint of happy marriages, affianced couples and bee keepers.
Teodoro Laudani: saved a little lost girl.
Unless you go before me (I feel in my heart that you won't), no one will remember to attribute this to you when you die. They'll swathe your body in black and wash your face with warm water, dutifully scrub under your nails and maybe if you're lucky you'll have someone to kiss the blood from your mouth, brush closed your eyes and whisper, "Grazie, mio caro fratello."
I wish you were.
Waiting Room
by Eileen
Sophia made her stay in the waiting room alone with the woman whose husband stepped out in front of the lorry. She holds her hand because she feels as though that's what she ought to be doing but cannot bring herself to meet her eyes when she asks what happened to her brother.
A man in a white coat comes out, tells them that the woman's husband has passed and suddenly: Eileen is afraid.
The surgeon puts Nick's jaw back together with metal plates and fine screws. Much later, she'll wish he'd been hit by a lorry and died too.
Parasite
by Eileen
She knows she should feel some guilt for using threats to frighten her into compliance, but what she feels instead is a grim kind of satisfaction that leaves a taste in her mouth which, while bitter, isn't entirely unpleasant.
It's not because they're in love with the same man, and it's not because she slept with her father, draped herself in his shirt and wandered the apartment like a lost little lamb sheared for the first time.
It's because she looks at her and she sees someone who reminds her of what she remembers she once was. Desperate. Needy.
Parasitic.
Regrets
by Eileen
Ask me what I regret the most.
It isn't refusing to fight him when he used his hands to cover my nose and my mouth.
It isn't breaking myself into pieces like bread, stale and unwanted, and throwing it all away to a flock of thieving birds.
It isn't signing an execution warrant with my tongue every time I whispered a name into his ear.
What I regret the most is showing strength, resolve and restraint the one time I should have succumbed to temptation and given you strychnine with your water when you were too weak not to drink.
Equal Measure
by Eileen
I wish I could fill this space with a story about how I was lifted up by a halo of white light and born into the waiting arms of my ancestors, or how death is a solitary birch at the top of a snowy hill with a flock of starlings for leaves and a knot that changes shape between the faces of those I loved the most when I was still alive.
Something pretty.
The truth is that I was and then I simply wasn't.
Yours was an act of cruelty, selfishness and love. The equal measure makes it forgivable.
Lila
by Eileen
When children die, it's always before their time. Three is still very small; there are developmental milestones she'll never reach like catching a gently tossed ball, understanding the concepts of "same" and "different" and the realization of self as a whole person involving mind, body and soul.
And she is whole. Sickness has not taken the glass-brittle fingers from her hands, her hands from her arms or her arms from her torso, which is cold and naked as they wash it, preparing the little girl whose name began with an L for a hasty burial.
Her sister will not remember.
Weighing of the Heart
by Eileen
The ancient Egyptians called it the Ib, seat of emotion and thought, dropped from the heart of a mother into her child at conception. At death, it testifies before the gods against its possessor and if the weight it carries is heavier than a feather, the soul is consumed by the monster Ammit: Devourer of the Dead.
The Norse had Niflhel. The Greek, Tartarus. No one mourns lost civilizations or dead religions, only people.
Last night I lay awake wondering if that isn't the greatest sin of them all. Then, for the fist of lead in my chest, I wept.
His Shoes
by Eileen
At four, she pulls on her ballet slippers sewn from pink satin and stands behind the door, listening to Mummy speak in terse hisses with a shadow whose face she can no longer remember even though he roughly wrenched her away when she tried to hold it in her hands. Instead, his shoes: black and polished with hard soles that sound like an open palm on a blushing cheek.
At six, when her father leaves them, she asks Mummy if the man with the fancy shoes will come and be her new daddy. "Leenie," Sophia breathes, "you should hope not."
Wisdom
by Eileen
The girl needs him more than he needs the girl. He knows this because wisdom comes with age, and nineteen is very old for a raven — especially a wild one. It wasn't always this way; there used to be a Yeoman Warder who kept his belly full, clipped his wing and ensured the metal band around his leg was never too tight.
He loves the girl more than the girl loves him. He knows this because the extra time they used to spend together is time spent with the big man.
Wise as he is, he does not understand.