Hello!
If you're new here, here's how this works: in the beginning of the
month, I ask a question. I get answers from people, hopefully. I take
one of those answers and write a short story based on it, then put it
out on the last day of the month. Sometimes they're actually pretty good, and
sometimes they're a real mess. But at least every time I put some words on paper. Screen. Whatever.
Here you can find that story.
I
also read it into an audio format, if audiobooks are more your thing
than actual written words.
If you found your way here, maybe you can help me by answering my December question: What's the most ridiculous thing you're bought in December?
__________________________________________________
What’s the best thing about November?
That it doesn’t last more than 30 days (answer from both Erika and Oona, separately)
It’s warm and cozy under the blanket, most of the sleep still clinging to Leta. She comes awake slowly, not wanting to rush it. It’s finally December, the cold and the wet and the dark of November replaced by… the cold and the wet and the dark of December. But at least in December there’s a good chance the rain will turn to snow soon, and then the world will be bright with the white and the lights of mid-winter celebrations. And the damp cold that seeps all the way to the bone and never truly goes away will change into a cleaner, fresher, sharper cold.
She doesn’t move, simply enjoys being comfortable for a long time. Until the doubt starts to make its way into her brain. It is the first of December, right? It must be. She thinks it through. It must be. She thought about it yesterday as she went to sleep. But the nagging feeling won’t leave her alone. And now she’s fully awake, the last of the sleep evaporated with her thinking too hard.
So she gets up and checks the calendar. It says November 31.
November 31
Time usually gets wonky as the Winter Solstice nears. That isn’t new. The gods get fidgety, and start arguing among themselves, or something, and that causes ripples. Why the end of the year would affect them that way, she doesn’t know, because she’s never cared enough to find out. The theologians have probably asked, and one of the gods must have explained it.
What is new is a whole day being added. She doesn’t remember that ever being a thing. Once, a day in mid-December lasted fifty hours or so, but that was still just one extra long day.
Tomorrow it will be back to normal (as normal as it ever gets this time of the year). Leta goes on with her day as if this isn’t weird at all, because why make a big deal out of something so temporary, and something she had no control over. And really, this gave her an extra day to work on some things she’s behind on.
November 32
Leta knows it the instant she wakes up. She practically tastes it in the air.
What is going on? This is getting weird. All throughout the day she hears people hypothesising about why it’s still November. One of the gods (which one depends on the source. Most commonly it’s Drannor) wants to piss off another, so they’ve stopped time. Nova decided she wanted a longer month honoring her, and none of the other gods care enough to stop her. Aerith and Tannatar are in the middle of the fiercest competition in thousands of years, and this is a side effect. But no one seems to actually know.
November 36
She’s really starting to get annoyed. Whatever the gods are doing, they need to stop. She knows a lot of them aren’t hugely interested in how they’re affecting humans, but usually the ones who do care keep those who don’t in check. They have some kind of internal rule system that they’ve all agreed to that should stop things like this from happening.
November 48
This is going from weird and annoying to ridiculous. The only upside is that there’s all this time to do a lot of things she wouldn’t have had the time to do otherwise. She’s been reading a lot. Spending more time with friends than she usually has time to. She even started painting again. She hadn’t realised how much she’d missed it until she had a brush in her hand, surrounded by the smell of the paints again. She should make time to keep doing this after November finally ends.
Leta’s painting today. She isn’t doing anything special, just drawing lines into a canvas from the joy of doing it. She likes the way she gets lost in her thoughts, in the moment, in the strokes of the brush as she paints. It’s only the gathering dark that pulls her out of it. The light is becoming too dim to see properly. She looks at her canvas and frowns. It’s mostly a mess, she’s completely out of practise, but there’s also something oddly esthetically pleasing in the colors and shapes her brush has made.
Her head is starting to hurt. She’s probably been in the small room with the paints for too long. She goes to a window and throws it open, letting the cold, fresh air wash over her and start filling the room. Rain is pattering on the roof, but it doesn’t reach her window. There’s barely any wind and the eaves reach far enough above that the rain never gets close to her. She leans on the windowsill and takes a deep breath. Something flickers at the edge of her vision, and a goldcrest lands right next to her elbow. It ruffles its feathers, spraying tiny droplets of water around itself.
She smiles at the tiny bird.
“Terrible weather, huh?” she asks it. “I wouldn’t want to be your size and flying out there with these huge, freezing raindrops falling everywhere.”
The goldcrest tilts its head, looking at her. It almost seems like it's wondering about something.
The colors of the stripes on its face and head seem more intense than those of others she’s seen. The yellowish orange is bright even in the dim light, the black pure and strong. They stare at each other for a long moment.
She moves her elbow. The goldcrest startles and takes flight, disappearing into the rainy gloom. She looks after it for a few heartbeats, then turns back and pulls the window closed behind her.
November 61
Leta barely even thinks about it anymore. This is just how the world is now. Neverending November. It’s been raining freezing water for five weeks now. She’s seen the sun half a dozen times, and almost every time it’s been little more than a glimpse. Last week there were two cold, bright, sunny days in a row, and she thought November might finally be over. But then the clouds returned and every day she, with the rest of the world, keeps waking up to another November day.
The goldcrest has apparently moved into the garden. She keeps seeing it, first every few days, but now it seems to be around every time she looks outside. She isn’t sure how she can tell it’s always the same one, but she’s sure it is. There’s something about it that sticks out if she pays any attention.
She’s airing out her painting room after a long painting session again, and the goldcrest comes jumping around on the windowsill. The rain is hammering the world relentlessly again, and the wind is pushing the rain all the way to the windowsill. She’s at the window, breathing in the fresh air and watching as the goldcrest tries to get dry and fails. She should close the window soon anyway. She wants the worst of the paint fumes out, not the rain in.
So she steps in from the window and moves to close it. That’s when the bird flaps its wings, and suddenly it’s inside the room. Leta stares at it for a moment, then opens the window wide. She tries to shoo the bird out, first with a hand, then with a broom. Nothing works. And it doesn’t even seem panicked. It gets out of the way and refuses to be guided anywhere. It’s like the bird knows where it is and has no intention of going back out into the freezing rain. Which she would think of as fair, except birds aren’t that smart. It might realise it’s somewhere dry and warm, but it won’t realise it’s trapped until it tries to go back out.
The bird snuggles into some towels on the corner stool and stares at Leta.
“I’m going to close this window, and then you’re stuck in here,” she tells the bird, as if that would help. The bird ruffles its feathers and sets deeper into the towel.
She’s getting cold. She has to close the window. So she does. She stares at the bird for a little moment longer, then checks her supplies are packed away so that the bird can’t get to them, takes her fresh painting and leaves the room. She closes the door behind her. If she can’t get the bird out, at least she can get it to stay in the one room.
November 70
They’ve figured it out. The gods finally told the theologians, Tessa tells Leta over a card game. It’s Naeth. He decided it’s going to be November forever, then disappeared.
“Disappeared?” Leta asks.
“He’s gone into hiding. The other gods can’t find him, and they can’t reverse this, because he’s the one who did it.”
“There’s hundreds of them. Surely finding one of them shouldn’t be this hard for the whole group.”
Tessa shrugs.
“You try finding a trickster who doesn’t want to be found.”
The goldcrest chirps in the corner. Tessa turns to look at it, then back to Leta with a question in her eyes. It’s Leta’s turn to shrug.
“I guess it got tired of the cold and the rain. It came inside over a week ago, and I haven’t managed to get it out since.” She switches back to the subject at hand.
“So why did he do this?”
“Oh, they don’t know. He didn’t give any warning. But Naeth being Naeth, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just to sow confusion and chaos.”
Leta’s silent for a moment. Then she nods.
“That’s fair. If I was a god I’d find this funny too.”
The bird chirps again, its goldcrest song almost sounding like a laugh.
November 76
She comes home, soaked, cold and tired. She kicks off her wet shoes in the hall, takes her groceries to the kitchen and sets them on the table. She turns and stops on her tracks. The goldcrest (she’s named it Mat) is on the counter, eating raisins out of a jar. It’s frozen too, and stares at Leta, looking guilty, like she caught it red-handed (red-winged?) doing something it shouldn’t have.
Which, she supposes, she did. She doesn’t care about the raisins, but how in the names of all the gods did it get the jar open? It has the kind of lid that a bird could technically get open, if it knew what it was doing, but there’s no way…
It suddenly snatches a raisin into its beak and flutters away. She stares after it for a moment, thoughts swirling in her mind.
November 77
The goldcrest is the king of birds, she learns. There was a competition the birds had, once upon a time. Whoever would be able to fly the highest would be their king. They all started from the ground, climbing higher and higher. It looked like the Eagle would win. It was practically a sure thing. All the others were getting tired, but the Eagle kept rising. And then it started to get tired, too, its climb slowing until it was barely rising anymore.
That’s when the Goldcrest appeared, from somewhere between the Eagle’s tail feathers, continuing upwards even when the Eagle had to give up and start its descent back to the earth.
The Goldcrest said it was simply flying so close to the Eagle no one noticed it. It is tiny, after all. It wasn’t hiding. It certainly wasn’t hitching a ride with the Eagle and resting until it was as high as any other bird could take it, tricking everyone and getting the title for itself, like some of them suspected. That was ridiculous. It would never do something like that.
The judges agreed it was ridiculous, and crowned Goldcrest the king. The Goldcrest sung its song, and it kind of sounded like a laugh.
The goldcrest, Leta also learns, eats insects and other small arthropods.
November 78
“Does my home not have enough spiders and flies for your liking?” Leta asks the goldcrest. It turns its head, looking at her. She stares at it for a moment, and it stares back. It’s bizzare to her that she didn’t see it earlier. “I know goldcrests don’t eat raisins. And I know a goldcrest wouldn’t have even been able to open the jar. A crow, maybe. A goldcrest, no.”
The goldcrest keeps staring at her. She tries to stare it down. It doesn’t work. She sighs in frustration.
“Cut it, Naeth,” she says. She swears the bird grins at that. Somehow. An eyeblink later there is a young man standing in front of her, with messy hair and a huge grin on his face.
“Is that how you talk to a god?”
“It is when the god stops time for almost two months and then hides from his peers in my home for almost three weeks in the form of a bird.”
He just grins at her.
“Why?” she asks.
“Because it’s warm here. It’s out of the rain,” he says. “And honestly, you’re kind of funny for a mortal. I like it here. And a mortal’s home is pretty much the last place the others would look for me.”
“No,” she huffs. “Why are we stuck in November?”
“Oh,” he shrugs. “Why not?”
“Because,” she stops what she was about to say, starts again. “You were here when I said I’d find this funny. I feel like there isn’t much I can say. Just that I’m not a god, and this isn’t funny. I want December. And I want snow instead of this never ending rain.”
The god in front of her laughs. It kind of sounds like a goldcrest’s song.
“Oh, but it is. You’re just too mortal to appreciate it. But fine. You’ve amused me for long enough, I shall grant your wish,” he bows theatrically. “This was starting to get boring anyway.”
He starts heading towards the door.
“And besides,” he says as he walks, “I’m curious to see what you’ll make of December.”
It takes Leta a few heartbeats to realise what that implies.
“You will not make December last for eighty days!” she calls after him just as the front door clicks shut. She can hear his lilting laugh through the door as he walks away.
December 1
Leta knows it the instant she wakes up. She practically tastes it in the air. It’s finally December.
She scrambles out of bed and pulls the curtains open. The ground is covered in white. There isn’t much snow, but there’s some, and it fills her heart with happiness.
There’s a goldcrest sitting on the windowsill outside. She grins at it, and it chirps back, and then she turns away to start her day.
