Spinning
My body led by the drink in my head I'm floating, off the ground Ground coming towards me now
Falling
"Ha ha," the drink seems to say "You fell for me again. Ha ha."
The floor isn't stable either
Rocking
Stirring
Like a fish in a soup pot Slowly coming to boil Cooked by a slow monster
When will it end? "It ends when you stop falling."
"Patroclus, not again." I sighed, entering the broken-in door, and tossing my bag onto the entry table, the small living room already filled with late summer flies the size of my thumbnail.
"I tried knocking, no one answered, I let myself in." Patroclus - Pat - shrugged and scratched at his sparsely bristled chin. He looked up at me, overlarge watery eyes seeming to gleam with the right of his powerful lineage. But I knew better. Pat, for all his gleaming eyes, had about as much mana running in his blood as the cockroaches that lived in my kitchen.
Imps usually didn't last long in the human realms, despite their (usually immense) mana reserves, but Pat was an imp of some resilience. Years of drinking human whiskey have him an edge most Impish were profoundly lacking, or so he liked to say. I figured it had something to do with his tendency to push through things that were bad for him.
Pat was as craggy and rough as an inner city dumpster. I'd never met another Imp, and I was fine with that.
"You can't keep breaking in here. My landlord is gonna be pissed when he sees I've changed the locks for the fourth time this year. He thinks I have a stalker. He asked me if I wanted to install security cameras around the house."
"So sorry to inconvenience you, toots. You know I have my orders."
"And I need another moon. I told you last moon I needed two."
"Yeah and I figured you was fibbing. Humans are resourceful, I figured you'd be fine. Plus, the Colony's not accepting that you need another moon, they need the goods now. People are getting antsy. You should see the gruel lines."
I moaned and sank into the moldy smelling couch, which was missing it's left cushion. Springs poked into my back.
Pat looked up at me from where he was standing on the floor. His oversized feet shuffled, curling talons and hairy tops reminding me of Hobbit feet, if Hobbits were smaller and demented.
"You can moan and sigh all you like, toots, but I have my orders. They need the stuff today, not next moon."
"You make me sound like a drug dealer. You had to break into my house to tell me this?"
"Yup."
"Get a phone."
"You know they break around me, toots. Too much magical interference."
"You don't have magic."
Pat chuckled, the sound like multiple soft rocks gridning together and creating rocky dust that gets all over everything.
"I'm still more magical than anything you've got going on in this realm, toots. Anyways, I just came by to let you know we need the stuff by tomorrow night. I'll leave you alone until then."
He grunted and leaped onto the air, his small wings carrying him out the swinging door.
A fly landed on the tip my nose.
I screamed, leaping into the air and flailing my arms around me to get it off of me.
"FUCK!"
Moths batter against the window, desparate in their desire to surrender to the light inside.
Annika looks up from the papers on her desk to watch them slamming their soft bodies into the tempered glass.
She rubs her eyes and sighs.
The work isnt done, but she knows she needs a break.
She lets the flittering of the moths purpose-driven wings lull her, her body slumping into the chair, days of stress melting into a puddle.
Pitti-patti-pitti-patti.
Pitti-patti-pitti-patti.
SLAM.
Annika leaps up and yells, "FUCK."
A large barn owl picks itself up from the ground in front of the window, and shakes itself off before giving a startled Annika a withering glare as if it hadn't just careened beak-first into the glass of her ground floor office.
Annika stares.
The owl stares back a few seconds before reaching it's wings to ascend into the heavy darkness.
"It's been a rough day for me too." Annika murmurs, her heart still beating it's rapid rhythm as if calling her blood to war.
"We've all been there I guess."
The Door mocked the old man, whose name was Angus.
"Don't look at me like that you damned thing. Leave me be."
The door did not reply, its silent presence a shrieking rebuke.
"Who are you to tell me to leave you be when you came to me?" It seemed to say. "Who do you think you are?"
The chastised old man went over to the tree that was his shelter and sat down near a glowing lantern. The earth under his creaking bones was packed down to a comfortable smoothness. The bark on the westernmost side of the tree was scraped away, hundreds of tally marks marring the smooth muscle of the trunk.
The old man seemed to shrink into himself as he sat beneath the tallied tree, silhouetted by the lantern light and mocked by the unassuming door.
The Door stared at the old man, whose name was Angus.
The old man, whose name was Angus, stared at the Door.
"If staring at me would bring her back to you, you'd have her by now." The Door seemed to say.
Angus shook his head, shaking the voice from his ears.
"Speak not to me, wretch."
The Door seemed to laugh, "you are the only wretch here."
Angus took his knife and marked another notch into the tree.
