Cough: Genre Undetermined

It begins with a cough. I know--who's going to notice a cough, right? We're all coughing, all the time. I mean, our breathing and ingestion tubes are crossed (bad design, I'll complain when I meet the entity-in-charge), and then there are allergies, summer colds, dust. A million and one reasons to cough! It's just too bad that that million-and-first reason is a real killer, and not even of the person coughing. Unless a mob forms up to get the person coughing. It's happened several times. Once, I think the person even had the syndrome. Once they had strep. Four times they just had a cold. Once I heard they weren't even coughing, just sneezing. Me, I wear a face mask. Trend-follower, that's me. Not because it actually keeps any of the pathogens away, not because it reduces sneezing or infection, but because it makes it very difficult to tell *who* sneezed. Safety in concealment.


Inspiration: Baby coughed.
Story Potential: High.
Notes: Not a story on its own, but has the right sort of paranoia-inducing fear.

"Warmth in the Cold Time"

The Again has published "Warmth in the Cold Time" in their September issue! This is one of my older pieces (so it wasn't inspired by one of these posts), a very short, creepy-cute story that may keep you from ever looking at a nature trail the same way again.



Excerpt:
After all the Others had gone, leaving the hillside strewn with trash, the People came out. Rocks shifted, rattling as if they were in a pan of boiling water. Stones rolled to a clear spot and began to rock back and forth like violently hatching eggs. Limbs extruded themselves, unfolding with the screech of nails on a chalkboard. They rose out of the hillside, from under trees or next to streams, from the very path that tourists had tread on earlier that day.

Read more.