Eggs

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

It was Halloween night and there was a horse at my door. Or at least a horse’s head. And he was carrying a basket of candy. And he stood six feet tall, wore a wine colored sweater, artistically ripped jeans and expensive tennis shoes.

I sighed and started to close the door, and the horse said, “No, Eileen, listen.” He lifted the basket, “I brought candy for Tori and Talon.”

I sighed again. I hadn’t seen Paul in six months. The lawyers had almost made everything neat and ready for signing. Seeing him at the door hurt. I didn’t want it to hurt. On the other hand, really, he had never been abusive or done anything that justified keeping him away from the twins. Particularly on Halloween.

This story is now part of a collection for sale here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09W3WBJYJ

63 thoughts on “Eggs”

  1. Not meaning to quibble nor complain but, even with rolling the clocks back, tomorrow has not yet started on the East Coast. You couldn’t have waited a couple hours to post this? Instead you had to make a liar of yourself?

    That’s the first step down the road to voting Democrat.
    –

    2. My muse is contrary. The moment I said I wouldn’t write a story, I had to write a story.
      Geesh. I hope my muse doesn’t vote democrat. In Colorado you don’t need to have a physical body. You can register on line and mail it in. Colorado is now a funny way to spell “Chicago.”

      1. My muse is having a mid-universe crisis.
        “I need to write more of The Winter Solist.”
        WRITE THIS EXPERIMENTAL IDEA THAT WILL GET YOU LYNCHED AT EVERY SCI-FI CONVENTION THAT ISN’T LIBERTYCON.
        “That isn’t figuring out the plot point where I get to hunt down and kill a monster in Queens.”
        YOU HAVE TO WRITE THE EXPERIMENTAL IDEA OUT. AND PUBLISH IT.
        “Pseudonym?”
        NO. YOU WOULD BE A COWARD, IF YOU DID.
        (If you get the idea that my Muse is a combination of gender-flipped Werner Herzog (that looks better in latex than Werner Herzog should look like) and Death, don’t worry. I don’t know why, either.)
        “Look, can we at least get to the next chapter before I have to put everything aside to do viral biology, endocrine chains, and Stockholm Syndrome research? Besides, David Brin wrote a better story on the idea years ago, before the Martian Brain Fungus got him.”
        YOU’RE THE ONLY ONE THAT REMEMBERS IT.
        “Not the point.”
        I WILL START SINGING THE COCONUTS SONG UNTIL YOU WRITE IT.
        “I normally have to pay for this kind of torture. And most female dominants can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
        SO, YOU REALIZE HOW FORTUNATE YOU ARE IN THAT REGARD?

      2. I understand this muse… When my Node of Perversity is informed that it cannot write a story in thus-and-such a way, five minutes later it spews forth a story using exactly that forbidden technique.

        1. Absolutely. I wouldn’t mind so much, if my muse wasn’t this massive pervert that is capable of debauchery and insane concepts that no sane mind would normally not even touch with a ten foot pole.

          Or the Japanese. One, the other, and/or both.

          1. Does that mean you need a FurAffinity account so the utter $WHATEVER can be lost in the noise?
            (There are things there that… well… no I will *NOT* explain. You’re welcome.)

            1. I was a regular con attendee of Further Confusion in San Jose for years. There is very little in the furry fandom that I haven’t seen. Haven’t been back for three years, it used to be “curiosity about how non-human cultures would work (and porn)” and now is “all barely-legal yiff, all the time.” That, and I have learned about some of the people in our local furry fandom that makes me sick that nobody is demanding that they leave and never return. Ugh.

              1. Alas, I do comprehend. I attended *ONE* AnthroCon (it was Too Big way back when, IMO), several Midwest FurFests, and most of the Rocket City FurMeets…. (damn, I miss RCFM) and there were …. Those People… at least at the bigger cons that… well, you know. I was amused, pleased (and also quite concerned) that at an after-con (but NOT “dead dog”) gathering I was included as one of the speculative members of a proposed ‘League of Responsible Furs’ — what qualified me for such? I kept my commitments (few as they were) or at least gave as much notice as possible if Something Came Up. Oh, and I paid my own way.

                It STILL amuses me that many times those desperately seeking to “get inside” were frustrated… while I *tried* to keep to the periphery, but kept getting invited in (not just furry stuff. I’ve been ‘backstage’ at RenFaires where I quite honestly had NO damn business being… but simply being Not Pushy can oft do wonders. There’s one place I do really minor support where the guy doing almost ALL the real work told me I could get a performer’s pass. Nice idea, but I think the place DESERVES my paying support. If I can help out a tiny bit, alright. Sometimes it takes so very little to be Mythical!)

                1. I worked FurCon one year and fandom communities make the various Houses in Game Of Thrones look sane and civil in comparison. Less absolute violence, but definitely a lot more character assassination and they were starting to get the Martian Brain Fungus during my time when I was there.

                  And, it didn’t help that the local furry fandom had a serious gay capture.

            1. Six books. ‘A Deeper Blue’ came out in 2007, and ‘Tiger By The Tail’ in 2012.

              Obligatory “OH, JOHN RINGO, NO!”

              Dammit, I want the Keldara, at least, in OUR world!
              ———————————
              “And here we have shovels.”

        2. When I finished Isabelle and the Siren I walked about telling anyone who would listen that I would never write another story with a depressed main character.

          It’s been a quarter century.

          The Muse has remained meek and docile on the point.

  3. Since this is Halloween, I think it’s interesting that there’s a Full Moon out and I’m rereading Alma’s Familiar story concerning a possible Were-Wolf. 😆

    1. 2020 is one of the years where the ritual in Zelazny’s last book is possible; only a few more hours for the openers to possibly win, and prove Ian’s comment in “I’m Sorry” wrong. Full moon on the first, and now on the thirty-first. I think the closers may have won again this time.

        1. Someone hasn’t read “A Night in the Lonesome October.”

          Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula become involved in a witches’ ritual magic battle royale, an event which can occur every October with two full moons. Openers and closers are the basic factions of the conflict. If it were real, and if the openers had won, we would know, or at least not know anything. Openers are sorta like if communists had concluded that the great old ones should wake, and ‘become involved in human society’.

          So, “the real fight was Saturday, and we already won” is a take on the election.

          Anyway, I probably need to buy a copy of Anubis Gates someday, and give it another go.

    1. As long as Missus Hoyt doesn’t start dealing with Them from Clare – it’s grand.

      *shivers*

      I heard the wolves behind the moon tonight. I think He was out riding.

  7. Wait. Did… did we convince you that adding a little self-promotion wasn’t a bad thing? WOOHOO!

    And i’ll chime in again with, “I enjoyed all of the items linked at the bottom of this post.” Because I’ve read them all. And I did enjoy them.

  9. I’m liking these modern fairy tales. And like fairy tales of old, they all have a moral attached. Without hitting you over the head with it.

  13. After the Independence Day displays of disobedience I witnessed in July I had hope that people hereabouts would ignore Little Benito’s diktats and go do what American parents and their children have been doing on Halloween for over a century. Unfortunately they did not and Halloween here was depressing. No trick-or-treaters showed up to take my candy. We usually do not get a lot but this year there was not a single one. Maybe July really was the last gasp of resistance in California.

    Anyways, thank you for an uplifting story to counter the blues.

    2. Most of my neighborhood went with either the table by the street method (a few per street, often sharing space) or the really-decorated-up house with bowl on the porch OR real live person answering the door. I had a table and tons of sidewalk decorations, and while I was driving the kids around (because of the sparse nature of the setups), my husband kept an eye on it, said there was hardly anybody.

      They all came at 8PM. Seriously. something like 30 kids within a five-minute span, cleaned out my candy bowls (I brought more out) and took treat bags. (Those don’t have candy but trinkets that I usually buy at the post-Halloween sales, but Target was EMPTY of Halloween stuff this morning. One aisle of clothing and a few sad piles of Halloween candy, absolutely nothing else.) My final count was 44, subtracted from the treat bags I’d made up.

      Lots of compliments on my decorations. Yay!

      1. Oh, and our usual weekday numbers are around 80, with a higher chance on weekends. So it was a goodly number, but only about half of what it should have been. But those giving candy out were giving out LOTS.

  14. Since our tiny country church is closed (older congregation and there have been some deaths reported recently so they’re skittish), we streamed our former, city church with their All Saints Day service. And they sang a hymn that spoke to me. Modern hymns – ok, this dates back to 1986- aren’t my favorites, but this was written by a woman for her dying husband and today it spoke. The last verse is,

    In our end is our beginning, in our time, infinity
    In our doubt there is believing, in our life, eternity.
    In our death, a resurrection, at the last, a victory
    Unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.

    A reminder, for all of us.

  16. and she made a weird honking sound that was probably a swear word in goose.

    Oh, that’s cheating.

    EVERYTHING is a swear word in goose.

          1. And if anyone plays Invisible Inc. there’s a mod that adds the goose from the game mentioned above as an agent.

        2. Dan and I actually like the (wild) Canada geese in Denver city parks. It used to be one of our joys in life to go walk and see them.
          Of course, now it’s full of homeless….

          1. In Portland, OR, the portion of Waterfront Park between the Hawthorne Bridge and the Riverplace Hotel is a lovely grass lawn extending from the street down to the Willamette River. A large flock (100+?) of Canada geese live there much of the year, grazing on the green green grass. And pooping all over the green green grass to keep it green green.

            There are few things as slippery as goose poop and 100-plus adult geese produce a prodigious amount of poop. Which means nobody with any sense of self-preservation walks across that beautiful grass on their lunch break, but must go the long way around to get to the path by the water.

            Makes me wonder if those geese are all Democrats? 😉

    2. I actually snickered at this bon mot. You sound as if you still have a small, faded scar from your first encounter with a goose. “HONK!” 🙂

      1. *grin* Glad to hear it.

        No scars, I was really good at avoiding animals who were saying “Hey! You! Get offa my cloud!” Partly because my dad taught us to listen for when animals started cussing you out.

  20. Another well-told story – I like it! I am glad your Muse is working you hard right now. It gives me hope you will get thru this more-or-less intact. 😉

  21. Nicely done, a gentle tale of of reconciliation that evokes Halloween in its oldest sense before the REAL Halloween erupts on 3 November 2020. For whom the terror lies on that day, I cannot say. Heaven willing, it’ll be the people who are all from the other end of the horse. ^^;

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