hmmm....... top 5 short stories, for the ask game?
oooh. okay, thinking! (<- as many as several minutes after typing this out, future sparrow here to say: UH okay i have so many tabs open now! oops! i didn't realize i had so many short stories i liked! this turned out to be a bit trickier than anticipated, but in a fun way :] )
Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist by Isabel J. Kim - I Like It When There Are Stories About Stories. I Like Metafiction. I Like When Saying Something Is True Makes It So. I Like Weird Fucked Up Cities. And anyway, Isabel J. Kim just writes great stuff in general. I'm also obsessed with The Narrative Implications of Your Untimely Death.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang - There's something so lovely and gently curious about this one. A friend of mine sent me the link several years ago and I have never quite been able to stop thinking about death as an explosion of gold flakes.
Twilight Mirage Episode 63: Guaranteed Events, Or: An Accounting of the Time When We Built The Machine by Austin Walker - Every time people ask me for recs. I point at Friends At The Table Twilight Mirage. This is almost always cheating on account of It's A Podcast but LOOK THIS IS A STAND-ALONE SHORT STORY AND HERE'S THE TRANSCRIPT. I'm saying it counts. The last sentence stuck in me as soon as I heard it and has not unstuck from me since.
Alien Hand Syndrome by Molly Ofgeography - This world and these people are so specifically weird; it's unbelievably charming and I like it so so much.
L'Esprit de L'Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente - Retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice. There were a couple others I considered for this spot but I've been in a rotting bodies mood lately and this is REALLY good for that. Also type of thing I cannot stop thinking about. Came back wrong in the sense of 'the whole world knows she's supposed to be dead, herself included, and it wants to make this right.'
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My girlfriend and I had our first new year's eve together! She looked so beautiful in her suit and I think we made a handsome couple <3 both of us included a small lesbian detail to our outfits!!!
But as often we had a tendency to be mistaken for Just Some Guys - but that's just because the people around us weren't so used to seeing handsome butch women
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thinking about mizu from blue eye samurai. thinking. thinking so much. thinking about how mizu operates outside of gender. like we joke about her gender being revenge but straight up? it literally is. like she grew up as a boy and is most comfortable being a man, but behind that is the feeling of betraying himself because he isn't being honest about who he is and he lives in fear of being discovered. and when he lived as a woman, she found joy there as well. she fell in love, and though she wasn't good at it, she liked being a wife and enjoying a simple life. but in that life too, she isn't being honest about who she is. and when she reveals her true self, it's not a woman, she's a demon, a weapon. she's to masculine to be a woman, and too feminine to be a man. ultimately, mizu is most comfortable when they are being a murder machine. that's when they feel they are being the most true to themself. like a sword, they are neither man nor woman, but a blend of both, which makes them stronger.
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Dp x dc twin au where Danny and Damian were in fact conjoined/siamese twins, but the most dangerous type - one head, two bodies.
Their early removal from talia being because their shape would not have allowed for natural birth, they were written off but talia begged for the chance to send them off in the lazarus pit.
By some bizarre miracle, before she turned to leave, two small bodies bobbed to the surface - identical in every way, except for the eyes. The previous blue eyes now split in two, one left, one right, and the new eyes, pit created, a bright green.
She took her child, her two children, and together, they survived.
Being removed prematurely, their early years were tough, but soon they blossomed into promising heirs for the league. In sync with every step, the closest of brothers, the league was certain the old fairy tale of twins being telepathic had been granted by the pit that separated them, the remnants of being born as one mind, one brain, one skull.
But then Danny had to flee, and leave his other half behind. Stretched by distance for the first time, the bond grew thin and stretched, and Damian grieved his brother as dead. When he started being sent on public missions, he hid his distinctive heterochromia, choosing the green in memory of the pit that had given him and his brother life.
Danny, hiding his pit aura in the ocean's worth that was Amity park, took to blue, the colour that he and Damian were born with.
Damian moves to Gotham, and continues to mourn his brother as dead, right until one day when he is twelve, when he learns what the death of your other half truly feels like.
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Their reunion is a thing of family legend. Violence runs hot in both bloodlines, ghosts are highly emotional and prone to fighting a the drop of a hat for bonding, playing, testing, every reason under the green sun. Their training and play often consisted of friendly spars, competitive spars, furious spars, venting spars. Both have been exposed to unhealthy amounts of ecto since before their birth.
There is a long, long minute of staring, before they rip themselves away and lunge at each other like wolves.
The bat family are horrified by their brutally efficient youngest suddenly barreling towards a clone (?) and trying to claw his throat open with his bare hands while openly sobbing.
It ends with them wrapped around each other crying into the others shoulder as their minds finally meet again and relax from the painful stretch for the first time in years.
But nobody else has any idea what to do.
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