Lily Krause
Stories (2/0)
The Year of the Rat-King
Hàorán was born on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the year of the golden dragon. Hàorán's mother said that made him special meant he had great things waiting for him. But Hàorán never felt special; he wasn't at the top of his class, far from it. He did not have the good connection with his ancestors that his birth should have guaranteed. Moreover, he wasn't particularly concerned about any of this. He didn't spend his free time trying to work his way up the educational ladder, and he didn't understand why he was supposed to care about his ancestors in the first place; they were of no importance to his life. In fact, it seemed that the only thing Hàorán cared about were the animals. During the free months, when most children his age could be found studying or helping out around the home, Hàorán could be found sheltered away under the crooked old cherry tree in the backyard, poking at the dirt watching the little ants run around and the worms writhe their way from one point to the next. He had fashioned makeshift terrariums and feeders to draw more animals to their backyard. It wasn't until the year of his eighth birthday that this hobby began to worry his mother, and had she maybe been able to see through that thick, glassy haze of motherly love, she may have been able to change the outcome.
By Lily Krause3 years ago in Fiction
It Begins
The summer of my 23rd birthday, I moved into my first apartment. A dingy little place with peeling paint and musty corners that shouldn't be examined too closely. It was a tiny one-bedroom cottage on the corner of Fifth and Magnolia, but the rent was cheap, and my landlady, a writer herself, didn't complain about the scraps of poetry and short stories I frequently offered her in lieu of an on-time payment. Living and working in that one-room cottage, the days and the words, and the steady flow of time all jumbled together into a monotonous heap. But that final week of August, when the leaves on the trees were just beginning to think about shifting, and my whole life changed, I will remember forever with immaculate clarity.
By Lily Krause3 years ago in Journal