sketches & shorts

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Jenny can't ruin her looks, and she can't ruin her health. It's like she's made of plasticine instead of electricity. The Amazing Rubberized Woman. Fling her at a wall and she won't shatter, just glob and re-form on the pavement. Every sodding day her body springs up new again, nineteen and starry-eyed. She can't keep scars: even bullets and puncture wounds fade within months. Ought to be a law, there ought. Statute of limitations. Sometimes Jenny wonders if this is what being a vampire feels like.

The Authority, 86 words

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Years from now, Clark's hair will be fine and glossy, still blue-black against Bruce's coarse salt-and-pepper. Apple cheeks to sallow skin, blue eyes to amber. Bruce's pupils are permanently dilated. This is why Clark comes back: he needs a lover that resilient. He wants the illusion of a body as tightly coiled as his, a body he can't break.

DC Comics, 59 words

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Living off of poker is like hooking a leg up and an arm down at the same time. Deal with lowlifes and you can live like the Knish. You can have the nice apartment and Japanese sedan, can have the gym membership, frequent flyer miles. Play safe, and you can live that comfortable, middle-class life.

People who believe in luck want to pretend they're not in control. Luck is bullshit. Poker is a talent, and winning is a skill. If you believe in luck eventually you get stupid, think you can push it. Luck will screw you over every time.

"Rounders," 100 words

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It amazes Gimli that he can find Legolas steady when the elf treads so lightly on the earth. Even his name is as light and restless as his body. Greenleaf: a thing which grows and withers within a season, is trampled and returns to the earth as mulch.

Hobbits he understands, with their square hands and broad feet. Men are familiar. Those of the Fellowship, in the end, are hewn from the same earth as those of Dale. Boromir smells of mortar and limestone. Aragorn smells of granite and northern loam.

Gimli knows the deep possesses its own dangers, yet cannot bring himself to trust the world above. Here, weather is changeable, the air mobile and wild. In the halls beneath the Lonely Mountain air flows cool and sluggish. Sky appears, when it does, in stark patches above airshafts that glow, gray and white-blue, or do not. There are no sounds but those the dwarves create.

The night he hammered out his breastplate storms broke over the lake. Water breached spillways, wind tore down small trees and outbuildings. Gimli heard nothing but hammer and bellows, felt nothing but sparks on his cheeks. Weeks later he heard of the season's worst storm. He had not truly known the mountain a foreign country until that day.

Lord of the Rings, 214 words

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The air tastes different here: heavier, damper. I learned to count heads of horse as they galloped and wheeled on the horizon, but in Ithilien that line is nearer and less sharp.

How grand, to know that for which you were made. How like a sword, with its clean lines and fine metalwork. There are those, my lord, who were born under ordinary stars, who pay for their destinies in blood. They fitted a helm to their heads with packed sedge-grass, picked up the discarded sword, and rode into battle on a contrary, untameable mount. Those are my people, my lord. The unexpected heroes.

And if I entered the lady Arwen's chambers in the night, dressed in your garments? The eyes of the elves are keen, yet their hearts know many things their lips do not speak. There was a time not long past when my small hands were rough as a man's. I do not think she would refuse me.

Lord of the Rings, 161 words

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They've been fucking for weeks and she still calls him sir. It might as well be his name. She won't let herself get any closer.

Not Jack, never Jack. She didn't know him when he was just Jack and she guesses it's too late now. It's always sir, sir, Colonel, as if she's trying to describe an arc between the soldier she knows and the man who fucks her deftly, silently. Their relationship is nothing, it should not be, and so she names it over and over.

Stargate SG-1, 87 words