Lavender: a Strangely Slipstream Novelette

Bloodlings with Their Little Saws

The fluffy Singing Goat tangled in the leash. It rolled over on the ground, waving its hooves, torn edges of their transparent cowl adhesions waving in the wind. A scowling neighbor lady slammed her window, cutting off a vine's tendril. The Singing Goat bleated more loudly as it resonated with the vine's pain. A little like Yoko Ono.

Annatalia pulled off the wrinkled bits from the hooves and stimulated its skin with her hands to prepare it for walking without its cowl, that piece of skin generally found over the faces of babies said to be witchy psychic. Her touch had grown electric with empathy, as she and goat had bonded during its infancy in her patch of sunshine-soaked dirt.

The Singing Goat flexed its long legs and righted itself, gamboling in celebration. Jagged bits of root attached to its hooves knocking off in the rocks and rough grasses in a rectangle around the garden.

She picked some Bloodflowers, which were planted out of the Singing Goat's reach, for a bouquet to balance out her family's inevitable shock about her decision. She shook her head over how much the Bloodflowers leaked when she cut them and how much they resembled livers.

But the neighbor girl had not kept hers cut back, and they had grown over into Annatalia's. Annatalia wanted a timeshare world of her own where no one else could go.

The free-flowing redness splashing about onto the ground gave the leachy creatures called the Bloodlings a break from chewing the Bloodflower plants in order to get at the sap. The Bloodlings were ill-equipped for cutting into the stalks, as they'd only slowly evolved saw-teeth. She was glad for the protection offered by her anarcho-utilitarian vigilante outfitmade of black 3-D printed vegan leather of bacteria-juice ink.

Annatalia's forehead contracted when she stared at the neighbor girl's direction, miffed at her for growing the plants in the first place. As she grabbed them, they got on Annatalia's skin, leaving swaths of slow-healing cuts. Annatalia felt they approached Gothic cliché, like angsty rhyming poetry.

She'd prefer walled-off gardens so that she didn't have to deal with such differences in neighbor aesthetics. And the worst was that she had to make her annoyance at the neighbor girl poetic enough not to crack the sky. She moved like a ballerina to dance out the anger, her lips pursed against letting herself feel anything too unballet-like. This was the nature of Lavender -- its foundation was the poetic.

She had ideas about what to do with the time-sharing alternative world that her mother had named Lavender, after Annatalia's favorite color.