penthius | Entries tagged with nature

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She liked the #vespers held in the park. She could actually attend the evening service because it wasn't held on church-guarded holy ground, but she could appreciate nature's peace. The darkness also made it easy to pick up a snack afterward.

Inspiration: vespers
Potential: low
Notes: Eh, it's a vampire thing. Although I like the whimsical nature of the character, this isn't particularly a story idea in itself. And she does appreciate nature and creation, still.

The green man moved into the city slowly, not sure how or if he'd be able to find a home. He shifted himself thin through weeds that grew up in the cracks of the sidewalks, and he spread himself in great leaps across the trees that dotted the streets. He scowled at a highway and a bridge with nothing living on it, but the green dash of graffiti that spread across it like a growing vine was, he found, close enough to allow contact. That was the key, when he figured it out. The graffiti might not be a truly living, growing thing like what he was used to, but it did grow and spread, it was temporary, and he supposed it would even mostly go away in the winter, going into hibernation until the weather was good again. He found a garage with some ancient, ugly graffiti on it. It would only remain because the owner was too lazy to clean anything off. He could take up undisturbed residence here, if he chose. He did so choose. He had plans for this city, after all.

Inspiration: Photo of a Green Man graffiti painting on a garage door, at http://www.flickr.com/photos/shirleysvision/12802481225/in/explore-2014-02-26
Story potential: High.
Notes: High mostly because what plans would a Green Man have? Note: tone not good. Need something more personal, probably from a human POV, to open.

The world was a joke, but nobody told the peoples who purchased it and immigrated en masse. Or rather, plenty of people told them, and in turn, the people told them right back that they didn't care, that it was their only option for a world of their own. It happened to be true. Earth no longer had space for reservations, no matter how serious the promises made to the peoples had been, and no matter how the history books made it clear that they'd already been wronged. Not all the reservations had yet been told that they had to go to the cities and live in stacked apartment buildings with lovely views of cement and no connection to the earth of their ancestors, but the immigration was written on the wall for those who knew how to read it. Already, the youth were being lost to the cities, and most who left to get a valuable education left swearing that they would return and ended up coming back only for the ritual ceremonies. So when they had a chance to buy their own world, pre-terraformed, they took it. When they reached it and realized that the only way they could live there and preserve a correct percentage of the world as "wild" was to move into homes stacked even higher than the cities they'd fled--

Inspiration: A miniature world photo - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cedarsphoto/11399229983/
Story potential: Medium.
Notes: Interesting setting. Because somehow they make it work.

She sank down into the blue-green waters and thought, "This is worth it. Being able to live here, being able to do this whenever I want, it is worth all the inconvenience and the trouble and the stress of the job." She hadn't swum this particular coral reef before, but it was far off from the major visiting areas and so she had some hope that it would hold some of the more shy and hard-to-observe species. After all, she told herself, there was nothing wrong with having a hobby, and hers was stilling underwater species in their natural environment. She'd managed to sell a few of her stills off-world for a sum large enough to buy out one year from her contract. Still twenty-six years left, but that wasn't so bad. Lots of people did worse. She was careful never to buy from the company store any of the luxuries that could have easily added even more time to her sentence--contract, she correct herself. She would probably have to bite the bullet, so to speak, in about twenty years when it was rejuv or head for the threshold beyond which you were nonrenewable. She didn't like the idea, but it didn't come standard as part of the contract, and it wasn't the sort of thing that--

Inspiration: Google "carved box skin" -> image of two angel skin coral carved Asian women.
Story potential: Medium
Notes: Could be a story, doesn't demand to be. Oh, and I'm pretty sure she finds carvings underwater, grown over or whatever.

The experiment was supposed to produce a hybrid of the tea tree that would have extra power against mosquitoes but cause no reaction on human skin. A few human genes were slipped in, to make it produce an oil that would "think" it was human. Later some lab scientists blamed the part-time voodoo priestess who was also an assistant in the gene lab. Others blamed the gene splicer, said he'd gotten confused and slipped a few tea tree genes into a human. Nobody could quite explain how it was even possible for the treegirl to come to viability, but there it was. All the little sprouts in their controlled nutrient pouches, and one sprout that stayed curled up for a long, long time. Jokes were made about it looking like a fetus. Then the jokes stopped, as it became readily apparent that that's exactly what it was, even if it was green and had rootlets trailing out from it.

Inspiration: Flickr photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/neon_tambourine/6904691093/
Story Potential: Medium
Notes: Could be whimsical magic realism, but that's not really my cup of tea at the moment. So to speak.

Art: poetic watercolour: dreams... never end...

The sorrow of the trees, that was what she felt when she was just a sapling. Her mother walked away from them, out to find her father who had never returned to them after that one moonlit night when she was conceived, but her mother had lost her heart, as was the way of their people. And when a tree loses its heart, it must regain it again or the tree will fall. She remembered some sunny mornings of being a toddler playing in the sunlight with her mother, before her mother left. But once she was old enough to have her own nutrients and not to need her mother's branches to protect her from the harshest winds and the drought, her mother left to find her heart. The daughter left behind stayed a sapling for a very long time, as if she hoped her mother would come back and awaken her if she only waited long enough. It took a forest fire to rouse her into the form with legs, and she stumbled and staggered alongside the graceful deer and the other animals--

Inspiration: The painting from Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/35475855@N05/6789097553/
Story Potential: Medium.
Notes: It is important that this is *not* an ecological fable. Because otherwise? Too trite, too easily done. Instead, dryad goes to the city and finds...a different thing.

It was the sound of crickets and frogs that startled her awake. She was in one of the most antiseptic sleeping rooms, and she knew that there were no nature tapes of the forest--they'd found those didn't help the subjects. There were wave sounds and whale song and white noise, but no tapes of the forest at night. This was not part of the experiment. She sat bolt upright in her bed, and saw that it was floating a foot above the ground in a scum of pond water. A frog surfaced and blew bubbles at her, then let a resonant belch loose. A cricket hopped up into the bed with her. She pinched herself, hard. She felt it sharp enough. She pulled out the journal she'd been reading and stared at the pages--and--

Inspiration: Marshlands - Dan Gibson
Story Potential: High, but mostly because it would be a nice escapist fantasy to write, not because it actually seems like a good short story, if you know what I mean.
Notes: She's not dreaming, and she's not gone through the looking glass into another world. More like Mother Nature went briefly into the looking glass to let us have some room, and now she's back and it's rain of frogs time. Actually, using that premise as the background for a magical realism story that's not about this might be a good story after all.

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penthius

January 2025

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