Lavender: a Strangely Slipstream Novelette

Mr. Sandcastle

He originally had grown where she planted him, from the sand where they spent so many days making a castle on the edge of the pond during a mild drought when they first moved to Lavender. Like the DayMare, Sandcastle had also become obsessed with her. 

She did like how he was always shifting, changing shape. She enjoyed his granularity.

She wasn't sure she could stand his dense behavior. Her obviously intensity of emotion made the DayMare flit around her more annoyingly, encouraging her to fling her anger out through her feelings, letting it disperse into the air, being absorbed into the salt. So smarmy. Gah!

Annatalia wished they would both fall into the Mirage of Mercury and die from the esoteric fumes. Characters like those two creatures exhibited Lavender's flaw. Annatalia wasn't the type to ignore reality like everyone else did -- everyone besides the other Anti-Heroes. People would inevitably make bad choices like she had. Planting the creatures was a terrible idea. But everyone on Lavender did it.

The DayMare and Mr. Sandcastle followed her pointed look and tentatively moved a step or two in that direction to check out what must be so inviting about the Mirage that they had never noticed before.

They obviously didn't have strong boundaries about where they ended and she began.

They didn't have patience for distance between themselves and what they wanted; she speculated the creatures she'd planted could have Borderline Personality Disorder. When they wanted something, they wanted it desperately. They were made for each other. Made to die together holding hands in a boat on the pond in a stupid dream.

Their death would have to be poignant. Because that was the very foundation of that time-share reality.

Because of the nature of Lavender, from the way the rules of that shared consciousness were drawn up in the original proposal orchestrated by Annatalia's parents. Every major event such as death needed to be reasonably poetic to avoid shaking up the delicate structure of the world. And if a mundane trend caught on, the world would become like an earthquake and implode on itself, and that would be that.

As it should be, she thought, nodding to herself with new resolve. Humans shouldn't be like wild children with no rules. They should stick to the size of the Earth and not just branch out indefinitely, taking up ever more space.

No one wanted to fix the cracks that occurred sometimes when a major event wasn't beautifully imaginative enough. The Planning Committee had stopped the institution of marriage altogether to avoid the need to make the ceremonies fantasmagorically whimsical. It was a lot of pressure: shotgun weddings, gold digging, bland photos, and boring traditional dress styles could have ruined Lavender's skyline entirely.

For safety's sake, they'd restricted important rituals to include only death, birth, graduation, children moving away, revelations of earth-shattering news, and retirement. Even those, as theatrical as the parties were to mark them, grew tiresome. People naturally wanted to relax and be crass and boring once in a while, not hone their artistic-behavior skills relentlessly, at all moments of their lives. They tended to drop friendships and stay home instead of having to keep up poetic appearances, to avoid having to dress uniquely and present touching gifts.

Truthfully, Annatalia wouldn't have picked any other time-share world; she was glad her parents and the others in the Planning Committee were interpretive dancers who liked foreign art film shorts, long trips into the countryside accompanied by avant-garde literature and wine. But it was a lot of pressure. She shook her head to get that word "pressure" out of it, as it was not poetic at all. It was almost as dangerous as the word "stress." Both words could create cracks in the world.

Annatalia came out of shock.

Bloodlings covered the Deer's body.

They oozed across the garden from all directions toward it.

Some of them clambered over her feet.

Sandcastle called out in his incorrigibly unmelodic voice: "Licking salt is illegal for humans. I was trying to shoot you. I missed."

It was a completely meaningless death.

Annatalia figured it could have easily been even worse. Since the Daymare wasn't looking, she shook her hands as instructed and sat down on the ground.

Sandcastle continued flatly: "Now, I'm out of bullets. But don't lick salt anymore, or you know what I'll do when I buy some more."