rinc3w1nd
In a green valley that has looked the same for ten thousand years, a Neanderthal quarry worker named Grug is eating his breakfast when strangers begin to arrive.
They come through a seam in the air. They are taller than him, and louder, and warmer. They bring objects he has no words for and opinions he has not asked to hear. They call him neighbor. They mean it in much the same way a colonizer means to offer blankets and beads.
These are the stories he tells about what happens next.
Told in Grug's own spare, watchful voice, the pieces in this collection will span a single changing valley across a handful of years. A gourd appears on a flat rock and will not leave. A line forms at the watering hole for the first time in history. A shell necklace is worn, removed, worn again. A daughter bites a man she should not bite. A wife uses a word her husband has been waiting three weeks to hear her not use.
Each story is the length of a morning coffee, and each morning will bring you on the journey of some specific thing going quietly wrong, or quietly right on the valley's voyage to gradual interdimensional gentrification.
The stories are darkly funny. They are funny the way a kitchen is funny, the way a long marriage is funny, the way a man is funny when he has decided, against all available evidence, to keep finishing his breakfast.
Scheduled release - About 1 per day for the first two weeks until I run out of what I have already prepared. Then I will try to keep it up at 1 per week (or so) as I finish writing them.