Two Things Can Be True
Guest post by Jack Boone
“Set ye down, set ye down. Play a round with Barclay Down,” is a chant that will get an appreciative shiver from anyone in the West Virginia town of Clear Holler, and utter bafflement elsewhere.
Continue reading “The Ballad of Barclay Down”
The Snarly Yow is a legend told ’round South Mountain Maryland and the West Virginia Panhandle. It’s a legend that takes its roots from the grim spectral dogs of Wales and the British Isles, that came over the ocean with the miners and laborers who settled in the area, padding through land that saw some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the Civil War. Terrified hunters have sprayed it with shotgun blasts, and baffled motorists have struck it on lonely highways, only to turn and watch it lope off, unharmed, into the darkness. A vast black dog with a red mouth, glowing eyes, and a supernatural resistance to bullets or bumpers, it has never been known to harm a soul or cause any sort of damage apart from the need for cartridges to be refilled, or pants to be changed.
The exception is when the Snarly Yow came to Clear Holler, West Virginia.
What happens when you combine listening to too much true crime and a fondness for cryptozoology? Our next novel, for one. Jack Boone, podcaster of the paranormal, for two. In the Appalachian town of Clear Holler, armed only with a microphone, an EMF detector, and a dangerously open mind, Jack is on the hunt for high strangeness – and a murderer. Even if the only person available to help her solve the mystery is the ghost of the victim herself.
Jack’s story is still in process, but her tracklist is available for snooping.
No, not our fanmail. It’s a story about horrible celebrities!
Or: 3 weddings and a funeral. Weird things happen when you’re a celebrity. Mostly at conventions.
In honor of father’s day, an update! And, more importantly, a new story.
With The Fairy Dealer off with our agency, we’ve turned out attention to revisions of our very first manuscript together. Star Boys was our first original project and our first love – and we realized, after a year without peeking at it, that a first love can be…sloppy. Still beautiful! Still lovable! But worth some fixing up.
As we hack and slash our way through Star Boys: Redux, frankly loving the rewrite process as we get the chance to revisit characters we know better than ever, we wanted to keep up the cadence of sharing short stories on here.
What better way to celebrate father’s day than with the tale of one of our hero’s magical upbringing? Magical is one way of putting it, anyway.
Enjoy!
Happy Sunday!
We’re trying to get into a better cadence of posting on here, and the good news is that, since we’re categorically unable to resist writing short stories for our own universe, we have no shortage of material.
This week, we’re celebrating the submission of our final manuscript to the agency by posting the story of the origins of Weed Brownie – the favorite pun and chief descriptor of our main character, as well as what we called this work for way too long.
Enjoy the tale below – and as always, you can keep up with us on Twitter, Instagram, and via our mailing list.
Fairies are finicky creatures, and so we must not expect a lot from them and we must be patient in our search for them
It had been almost two weeks and Wes wasn’t worrying. He was much too busy with papers and rotation and shopping and food prep, which took up way more time than he considered reasonable. But Pidge would want him to eat properly, even if he wasn’t there to bully Wes into it.
Leaving the window open with a glass of oat milk on the sill hadn’t lured Pidge back, and nor had the pile of glitter or the Claire’s plastic bracelet he’d got out of the hospital’s lost and found. His WhatsApp messages were left unread too and no birds had tapped on the window to tell him, in Pidge’s voice, that the Alaskan Thunder Fuck was budding and he’d be right over when the harvesting was done. Wes knew, because Jessica kept repeating it, that this was to be expected, it came with the territory of dating a supernatural creature, or a guy who was almost thirty and sold weed out of a derelict warehouse. Wes worried anyway though because maybe another of Pidge’s siblings had hurt him, or maybe he’d gotten bored of playing house with a mortal, or maybe he’d just gotten bored of Wes.
Continue reading “Building Relationships with the Fair Folk: 5”
To welcome fairies to your home, leave out a small bowl of milk before you go to bed. Fairies love milk, and will take this as an offering to them.
In some ways, Pidge was a lot like the stray cat that Wes left food out for on the porch. He came and went as he pleased, and you never knew for sure how long he’d stay.
The cat, actually, was a bit more predictable.
“Seen him?” Wes asked, scratching the orange tabby’s ears as it butted against his shin and pushed its nose into the bowl of kibble he’d set out. “Down an alley maybe? Up a tree? Is he hanging out in the colony with you?”
The cat made no answer beyond enthusiastic chewing noises, so Wes stroked its back once more and went back inside. He futzed around in the kitchen a while and then retreated to his room. It was getting late – even for Wes, for whom bedtime was usually when his face collided with his laptop – and so he shut of the lights, arranged something on the windowsill, just in case, and rolled into bed.
Continue reading “Building Relationships with the Fair Folk: 4”
Fairies are whimsical and enjoy changing their shapes. They can even take the form of animals and plants for fun and to play pranks.
“…Pidge?” Wes said warily.
The pigeon stayed where it was, looking fat and stupid. It was sitting where Judd had said it was, on weathered boards of their porch, legs sticking out in front of it, feathers puffed out, dull eyes staring in opposite directions.
“Did you fly into the window?” Wes asked it gently. “Or get mauled? I think you’re in shock, but maybe you’re just a pigeon?”
The pigeon continued to be a pigeon.
Continue reading “Building Relationships with the Fair Folk: 3”
Denali Stannard 