The Red Scarf

Lucy clenched and twisted her hands against each other as she walked. When she could not endure sitting still any longer, she had thrown the red scarf over her shoulders and left the house alone, not caring what her mother would say later. Now she was walking quickly and blindly through the snowy fields just outside the city, thinking about the soldiers who were just then—and not so far away but that she could hear the faintest noise of the big guns—fighting and dying to defend their country. Almost to the capital city the army had been forced back by the invaders, and if this battle was lost, everything would be lost with it. And there was nothing, nothing, nothing, she could do for the country she loved or for the soldiers who were giving even their lives to protect it and her. She dropped down beside a small brook at the roadside, put her hands over her face, and wept.

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Prince Gabriel: My First Quest

Seven is an important number. There are seven sacraments, seven deadly sins, seven virtues, seven gifts of the holy spirit, seven days of the week… and as of this month, it’s been seven years since I wrote my first fantasy story. Covering six sheets of lined paper in a big, messy handwriting, and dated 4/17/12, this fairytale never properly had a name. (I find “Prince Gabriel” the handiest thing to call it.) I could say that this is the foundational work of all my later writing, the first full story that I wrote, and that it was a remarkable achievement for a ten-year-old—but I’d rather say that I now find it very amusing.

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Haley’s Latest Fan: A Short Story

Kyim breathed deeply and stared at his bedroom wall. Then he stretched his stiff neck, rolled onto his side, and read the acknowledgements and the author bio. He almost always did. That way he could stay inside the book for as long as possible, even if he wasn’t reading about the characters anymore. At last he had to close the book. It was a physical one, paper and covers and ink. Kyim liked a book he could hold. This book was Haley Ferrier’s Ichthus: a Planet. He thought for a moment. Yes, he had read it five times now. Each time he wanted it not to end. A good book, he thought, should be like that: at the end you should feel both that it had to end there and that you wanted it to go on and on forever. Each time, too, he wondered about the second-last acknowledgement: To Kyim, who showed me all about the Leaf. Who was this mysterious person with his name? And how had this Kyim of hundreds of years before known how to describe a piece of modern technology so perfectly, even to the name? In her teen journals, Ferrier occasionally mentioned when she’d been alone for afternoons, even when she was sixteen, his own age. If only…

Kyim was getting the vacuum cleaner out when he realized: of course he could! He followed the silent little machine around, lifting chairs out of the way for it, in a daze. It would take some doing, of course. It wasn’t easy to secretly finagle a trip into the past, even when your dad did work in ACTeR, and that was short for Authorized Cross-Temporal Researches. But if Cora could do it, he could. And his sister had used it to go to some twentieth century Olympics or other!

Whoever wanted to go to the Olympics?

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