#but maybe they were further north and we just don't have the fossil records to prove it! who knows!!

[galwednesday]

KIND

Her arms ached, but she couldn't bear to put Jack down, so he drooled onto her shoulder the whole walk back from the woods. 

They hadn't even asked about the changeling, whose face had matched but actions hadn't, who'd flinched at a hawk's cry and rescued drowning spiders. Who didn't have Jack's happy carelessness, the surety of a beloved son.

Home at last, she set Jack down in the already occupied bed, smoothing the hair of his sleeping copy. In the morning, she would ask for their name. To them, names were binding; she would make this one an anchor.

(100 word inktober drabbles; EAGLE, FORGET, EMPTY, and ARMADILLO below the cut)

EAGLE

"That's not what we sound like," Callie hissed. "This is like when there's a bald eagle in a truck commercial and they play a hawk sound or whatever. Banshees don't do slasher movie screaming. It's a death song, emphasis on song."

"Babe," Yoli said. "You were the one who wanted to watch this movie."

Callie shoved popcorn into her mouth, conceding the point. They watched the doomed soldier crumple dramatically at another piercing shriek.

"Oh what the hell," Callie exploded, "we don't kill people, what is this garbage--"

"Booooo," Yoli agreed, seizing the bowl to throw popcorn at the screen.

FORGET

He cultivated the garden with a desperation he didn't always understand. Early spring brought a brief respite, but inevitably the days lengthened, forget-me-nots giving way to daffodils, and he was left kneeling in dirt littered with fallen bruise-blue petals. He built the greenhouse quickly, sloppily, giving himself splinters on the wooden frame but careful with the life-sustaining glass panels he sealed in one by one.

He coaxed the first bulbs into flower in late fall. The moment his shaking hands cupped the unfurling buds, he remembered what he needed; her face, her smile, and the name to guide her home.

EMPTY

"Huh." She held the flashlight with one hand and the magnifying glass with another, peering into the back rows of teeth. There were more incisors than average, with an empty gap between two of them. "Yeah, I can see some shards of the broken tooth still in there. Will it grow back?"

"You're the dentist," her crocodile merman patient said, articulating with difficulty as he kept his jaws wide. "Shouldn't you know?"

"Oh, honey, I'm not licensed," she said, gesturing at the airboat she used as a mobile clinic. She picked up a pair of long-handled tweezers. "Now hold still."

ARMADILLO

Historoscopes had a fourteen-month waiting list to borrow from the university archives, but they were invaluable for field research. Ahmed recorded observations of the ghostly outlines of Glyptodons, armadillos' ancestral megafauna, as he and his thesis advisor surveyed the plains around them, minus several million years.

"Now why are those ones in color?" his professor mused. 

Ahmed glanced over, did a double-take at the approaching bison, and scooped his professor up over his shoulder. "Those are here now."

"So they are!" his professor exclaimed in delight, and swapped the historoscope for regular binoculars as Ahmed sprinted back towards their van.