“Sometimes I am happy that I’m not in your shoes.”<\/p>\n
“You wouldn’t fit.\u00a0 My family has always had big feet.”<\/p>\n
“Not even with extra socks?”<\/p>\n
“Hah!”\u00a0 I grinned. “I do want to point out that you’re still breaking the essential rule.\u00a0 You’re going out with a vampire.”<\/p>\n
“She’s interesting.\u00a0 She’s educated.\u00a0 She’s not human.\u00a0 That sounds like it should be the tagline for a movie.\u00a0 It’s not really a matter of life or death, is it?”<\/p>\n
“Life or death are not small things.”\u00a0 I stopped cold, and repeated that sentence to myself mentally, adding the capital to the S.\u00a0 I swore.<\/p>\n
“What?”<\/p>\n
“Nothing.\u00a0 I just can’t tell if someone’s misleading me, flat out lying, or trying to get me into trouble.\u00a0 Or any combination.”<\/p>\n
“Meaning they’re not all the same thing?”<\/p>\n
“Intent?”<\/p>\n
“As they say, that doesn’t make it magical.\u00a0 Um, unless, of course, in your world it does.”<\/p>\n
“Freakin’ magical.\u00a0 Well, that’s disingenuous, and it has to do with applying will, which belief by itself rarely does.\u00a0 Philosophy.\u00a0 Forget it.\u00a0 OK.\u00a0 You try to convince yourself that the dark powers are not manifest and clouding your mind.\u00a0 I’ll sit at home and be moody about sending you off to your doom.\u00a0 Don’t do it twice.”<\/p>\n
“You have some weird hang-ups.”<\/p>\n
“Most people say, `Good-bye,’ but sometimes I do push them far enough to just drop the receiver.”<\/p>\n
“And you’re old school.\u00a0 These days we just hit a button on the screen or flip the lid closed.”<\/p>\n
I smiled wryly.\u00a0 “I’ll call the local equivalent of the Frog Brothers if you don’t make it home by what time?”<\/p>\n
“I’m fine, Mom.”<\/p>\n
“Midnight it is.”<\/p>\n
“Huh.”\u00a0 He gave it a fair guffaw.\u00a0 “Fine.\u00a0 And I’ll call you if I end up dead.”<\/p>\n
“You’d better.”<\/p>\n
We said our goodbyes and I got off the phone.\u00a0 I set it down next to the computer and completed a perfect headdesk.\u00a0 Life and death are not Small matters.\u00a0 So was he playing with me?\u00a0 They wanted me to go somewhere and do something.\u00a0 I had presumed the whole time it was a matter of closing a door.<\/p>\n
I have a recurring nightmare that there’s a door between life and death that someone will blast open some day.\u00a0 It’s not the kind of nightmare that has places and events and people, it’s a feeling.\u00a0 It was\u00a0a sentence that crawled into my brain and down my spine one day.\u00a0 I kind of believe in reincarnation, meaning that it’s more a revolving door, but even if it only opens up once, it’s a door that should stay closed.<\/p>\n
Simulacrum, simulacrum… it sounded kind of like a girl’s jump-rope beat for a moment.\u00a0 I guessed I could go and try to look at the body or something.<\/p>\n
I busied myself with the more mundane tasks, trying to talk to the insurance company again, making payments over the phone and internet, and checking my gaming calendar.\u00a0 My GM was due to come back into town.\u00a0 I also looked at the phases of the moon, and some of my favourite Fortean almanacs.<\/p>\n
There’s this bit in Ghostbusters where they talk about the end of the world.\u00a0\u00a0 For all that it’s a comedy, there’s a serious moment about, “What if it is?”\u00a0 I mean, for all that I didn’t believe a bit about the whole concerns about 2012 (seriously, the only worry I have is the worry I have this and every year: that some person is going to flip out and do their best to destroy everything, and even then, there’s a lot of Everything to try to destroy) there was a lot of activity with which I was suddenly in touch.<\/p>\n
I am actually surprised that I don’t have to suspend my disbelief so much at books where the protagonist finds themselves the center of a plot that destroys the world.\u00a0 First, I am a tiny bit of a “personal world” viewpoint type, where we do have our own worlds that are under attack by our own insecurities, let alone that of others.\u00a0 Second, I think that it’s like the bit about having an open mind and not trying to have it so open that rationality falls out: the more you are aware of happening, the more you know about other things.<\/p>\n
I like to watch the news, although I hate the “packaged” feel of so much of it.\u00a0\u00a0 I vote, and I encourage other people to do so.\u00a0 It’s important.\u00a0\u00a0(It does matter.\u00a0 I’ve seen too many stupid things get put into place legally by a margin of less than a thousand people.\u00a0 I\u00a0might not know a thousand people well\u00a0enough to change their minds, but I definitely know a hundred who\u00a0could have helped change that.\u00a0 Besides, supernatural beings rarely vote, so I like to think of it as a way we keep our world ours.) \u00a0I keep my ears open at various jobs, and while I might not always appreciate the spin on a certain issue, I might learn a lot about what the opponents to my viewpoints have to say.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
(By the way, I am rapidly growing to be a disciple of the school that says you call bigotry and bullying what it is.\u00a0 This is something changing in me that I would have to explore.\u00a0 Maybe being nearly et by a Dragon is enough to put some steel into a spine?\u00a0 Or at least fragments of Dragon teeth, enough to plant a warrior?\u00a0 Nah.)<\/p>\n
All of this is to say that I was beginning to think there was something to the timeline for which I was drafted to do a Small thing.\u00a0 There were signs of something big on the horizon.\u00a0 I wished I’d seen them sooner to know that something big was going to try and eat me, but without thinking there was some kind of cosmic conspiracy (the only fulcrum of my life is me: the Smalls and the Gillikins and the witches and the Shadow King and the -cubi are not all part of a net of incidence) I had a feeling something was truly shifting and, well, us small practitioners kind of just needed to learn how to keep our head above the waves… how to get to metaphysically-higher ground.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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