I'm not faster than a tree.

Hello again from my cocoon. The trees are changing much faster than I can. I saw Lady Gaga this month. That's not related to anything; I just thought you should know. She (and the people she performed with) was (were) obviously incredible.

A friend helped me realize this month that my real specialty, more than any of my language, creative, or work-adjacent skills, is just consistency.

I started playing Clair Obscur this month, and as the game is set in a fantasy France, I had no choice but to play it in French. Despite my linguistic leanings, a lot of people study languages at some point in the U.S. without it really going anywhere, so he was still surprised when I was able to just . . . play the game. Which is also incredible, by the way.

But when he mentioned it, I said something about how it wasn't too surprising, given that I'd started studying French in 2011. Then, I realized what that implied about the passage of time.

Instead of the classic existential crisis I could have chosen to have, I realized the positive spin was actually more interesting: all I did was choose to keep at something, making slow, barely perceptible progress over the days and weeks and months for almost fifteen years, and now I guess I can just do things in French.

That was a dream right there, and I stumbled into it without really noticing. Good job, university me. You didn't stop.

How many other dreams might we stumble into, if we just let the pieces become so regular we forget we dreamt them there in the first place?

Anyway, it's story time. Both for your mild amusement, and for whatever it is that this is inevitably doing to the Martin of fifteen years from now.

What the well holds

Something shone down there, brighter than anything she could readily explain.

She wasn't stupid, of course. She was too old to think it was something nefarious. She just wasn't too old to let curiosity take the wheel of her consciousness, nor would she ever be, if she had her way about it.

So far, she knew a handful of facts about the well, and lacked the only one that mattered.

She knew it didn't hold a key to an eldritch pocket dimension, or a lens that could show her more than most can see. She knew it didn't hold the body of a psychic, or any curses stemming from one. She even knew that there weren't any neighbor kids or their oddly cognizant collies. Probably.

But she knew there was something very, very bright down there. And she knew the adults didn't like to be asked about it.

They also probably didn't like to be asked whether she should spend her Saturday finding out with her mom's old rappelling gear. So she didn't ask. But she would very much have liked to ask how one should get back up when old gear turns out to be boxed away for a reason.

Ingrid stared up at the bright, grey portal of sky and took a breath. She was now knee deep in cold, translucent water, next to what turned out to be the pointless, broken half of an audiobook CD. It wasn't very mysterious from up close. The rope she meant to climb bobbed idly from a nearby stone, colored with just a hint of the blood it had taken from her arms as she used them to shield her face when it came down.

She was dizzy.

She looked down again from the light. Her eyes must not have liked the adjustment, showing their displeasure as a ball of static in the air ahead. She looked up again, but the static stayed still in the center of the well.

Wait, no—it was closer.

She made a move to swat it away, and as her hand passed through it, everything went dark. She screamed, stumbled backward, and fell onto her hands in the water, scrambling now to find the wall.

"Stop that," a muffled voice echoed through her thoughts, like a radio two rooms away from a running shower.

Her vision filled in again, and she started breathing in fours. In, wait, out, wait. She was clearly having a panic of some form, and that was at least something she knew how to deal with in the short-term.

"I'm still in the well, then. I thought I might be." The voice began to sound closer, clearer, distraught. "Where's the boy?"

The breathing wasn't working. "You're not real, there must not be enough oxygen down here, and there is no boy." Shallow breaths now.

"I wouldn't search the water too closely, then, just in case. Take me from the well. Don't scream again. Can you climb? Wait, let me check something."

Her left eye went black.

"Look around for a moment. You're right about the oxygen, but you have time enough to leave if you don't gamble it screaming."

Fight and flight were both invalid responses down here, so she swiveled her head and looked around. "What am I looking for?"

"We're looking for that—there are holds in the wall there, to the left of the rope. Your arm feels functional, for now. It gets a little narrower above. Press yourself against the walls and climb slowly. Keep not screaming."

Her mother's obsession with climbing in all its forms was both blessing and curse today, but at least it was familiar. She easily made it to the narrow parts before grabbing the end of a tree root she didn't remember seeing on the way down.

"I need my second eye for this part."

"Fair enough." Her left ear went silent in its place.

"Yeah, sure, thanks. You're still not real, but that's for future me to deal with." She pressed her back against the wall and began inching her way up, yelping and freezing for a moment when a loose stone shifted and fell into the water. Or maybe it was two stones.

"One or two? How many stones did you drop? Let me see." It borrowed her eyes again. "Tilt your head down."

She looked quickly as it borrowed her right ear as well. With nothing else to take in, she noticed how pungent the air had gotten.

"Look up again. Just up."

She did so, the overcast light suddenly seeming much brighter than the thing that brought her here. "What about my hearing?"

"Not yet. Climb faster."

Cabin fever for a coward

This was it: the last sound he was ever going to hear was the tireless rattle of an off-kilter bathroom fan.

South Dakota cabin party? Bad plan. Terrible plan. The worst, maybe.

No, the second worst. The worst plan was trying to pass a note without having the required dexterity to pull it off. Dropped it right on the pool table. Andrew saw, the others saw, Lars snatched it back up and darted off to the bathroom. But it's been too long now, and it's even more awkward to admit it was awkward, and there's no escape, and also there are or were a handful of mountain lion cubs and their protectively squeaking mother, as closing the door is apparently harder than it sounds.

Where were the others? There were yells at first, but that's gone now. Lars couldn't bring himself to leave. More sound would be nice, but flipping the switch would make a new sound and change the lighting, and Lars didn't want to make any new cat friends today. He also didn't want to die in the dark—he just had to wait. For something.

It's been an hour. The screams weren't that loud, right? Was everyone dead? Unlikely. They were a loud group. But now what? Walk out, possibly turning the motherly chirps of the big friend into the warning hiss or worse of a very much not friend? Or to the friends and pointless crush he had decided to abandon to awkwardness, danger, and now some strange combination of the two that only grows more bewildering by the moment?

If it were safe, someone would be moving by now. He hadn't heard a car, so at least they hadn't abandoned him. Yet.

It wasn't even that bad of a note: Pinball? —L.

Okay, no; it was bad. L? He couldn't even write his own name? Not smooth. Terrible. Why hasn't anyone fixed this damn fan? Don't they maintain these places?

Pinball. Cougars. Andrew. Unmitigated predisposition toward panic.

No way out, no way out.

Okay, one way out. It's all the same now. Fine.

Lars stood up and grabbed the doorknob. He twisted it. His heart raced. He steeled himself against the pending possibility of his mangled companions.

He decided the only way through this was to take his therapist too literally. His brain wanted to be careful and slow, so he braced himself and did the opposite. Screaming and sprinting and slamming his way through the cabin, he found himself alone, eventually sitting down at the kitchen table near a bag that had been thoroughly eviscerated, presumably just for fun, exhausted and overheating.

Everything started turning and clicking at once: the coat closet, a large trunk in the living room, and the cupboard beneath the sink all revealed themselves to be feasible hiding places for three perfectly alive and aching persons, unmangled and all.

Lars froze. His hand gripped the note in his pocket, soaking it with sweat.

He should have stayed in the bathroom.

Thus ends the Bloomside B-Side Brawl . . . side.

Ashley really wanted me to write that second one anyway, so I'm glad I got an extra chance to see it through.

But May will need yet another story, so I offer you yet another choice.

From a potential story called Check for lasers:

"Sorry—your knight can't move there, either. You'll have to try again. Twenty seconds."

Or, from another called A hesitant journalist:

He couldn't remember yesterday, and he wouldn't remember today. He had one page left, and he wasn't ready to fill it.

Votes will be counted until the 11th, and if you voted last time, you'll get a reminder on the 10th if you haven't done so for this one. If you subscribe between now and then, you'll find the poll in your welcome email.

Keep blooming,

Martin

P.S.: Happy belated Indie Bookstore Day—did you celebrate? It's the last Saturday in April in the U.S., and also all of the other days if you're me. I did get married in one, after all.

We have over thirty independent bookstores here, it turns out. Books are neat.

P.P.S.: Can you name all of the things Ingrid knew for certain weren't in the well?

If you know someone who might find value in any of these words, feel free to send them this link. They won’t need to be subscribed to read it.