My Life Isn't All Laughs, You Know

Last week, Karina presented a bit of a tale I'm telling her to her crit group.  They loved it--why wouldn't they?--but everyone wondered when the jokes and pratfalls were going to start.  They thought it seemed kind of dark.

That's because it is.

Is your life always funny?  Trust me, mine hasn't been, and in the legendary definition of adventure, I've had a lot of danger and discomfort.  However, like to many dangerous and uncomfortable situations, they've also been interesting, so I choose to tell them.  Why Karina tends to make these shorter stories and write the funny ones as novellas, I don't know.

Here's the piece she submitted.  She's finishing the story this week.

Dante assigned Judas his own special place in Hell for betraying his Savior.  I was wondering what horrible sin I’d committed to deserve my own unique inferno.

I slunk my way along the streets of the Faerie side of Los Lagos, trying to ignore how the glare of neon signs and pixie flash did nothing to dispel the gloom.  A temperature inversion had trapped the noxious fumes of Mundane technology, shrouding the autumn afternoon in a dismal, dirty gray fog.  People had been warned to stay indoors.  The Mundanes, insular by nature, anyway, were only too glad to hole up with their televisions and Xboxes, but the Faerie were still too new to this dimension to give up their social ways.  The many races that made their homes in this “brave new world” wouldn’t let a little smog get in the way of their gossip and shopping.

With my treasure left behind in the mountains of Caraparavalenciana, I didn’t have the means for shopping—even if dragons did shop—and I was hoping to avoid any gossip about why the resident undersized drake was prowling the streets.  Unfortunately, the higher you got, the thicker the air; my nose balked at the idea of flying.  I kept to the back alleys until I got to my destination, then flapped my way to the second story of a ramshackle hotel that dared to call itself The Ritz.  It was putting someone on, that’s for sure.

I didn’t care about the digs.  I’d come to visit another Judas in his hell.