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Mr. Grey ducked in the grass beside Honeydew. Overhead, an enormous arm droned through the air. It briefly cooled their quarter of the field in a wide shadow. The hand, however, rushed past, swooping to collect an unfortunate older woman. She added her screams to the alarmed score filling the clearing.
Then, with no playing-out, the old woman’s part in the performance ended. The hand chucked her. She shrank into the cloudless sky, past the edge of the cliffs. Mr. Grey expected she, like the others thrown before her, ceased existing shortly after. That was the logical assumption.
The number of still-existing passengers had, by then, shrunk to a sparse dozen. Every one of them ran from the giant, plunging hands, or crouched among the chicktails like Mr. Grey and Honeydew, or hid under the buffet. Some terrified persons even sought shelter in the metal marbles. The scattered balls too disappeared from the clearing, one-by-one, toss-by-toss. The hands crushed each like balled parchment and chucked them with a weighty whoosh. Oddly the colossal fingers made a courteous and gentle shake of each ball, and plucked the desperate passengers out before crushing. But these shaken ones then succeeded the marbles in flight.
Another passenger went screaming over the cliffs. Mr. Grey spoke in a hushed monotone. “I don’t think we’ll last long in open grass.” He nodded his head left. One of the hands raked through the grass. The fingers left behind wide furrows of tilled earth.
Honeydew looked up at him; she’d been busy scrabbling on her hands among the roots and dirt. “I can’t find anything! Not a rock or a stick in sight.”
“Those fellows under the table look safest.”
“It’s a long run. Got anything sharp?”
Mr. Grey was about to say that sharp things were weapons, and that he didn’t go in for those, when he remembered the quill and pencil. He withdrew both from the pockets of his robes and held them out for Honeydew to pick from. She clicked at him skeptically, shrugged, and took both.
Mr. Grey said, “I think there’s dining utensils stuck in the food.” He saw tiny handles, jutting from piles of motley meal on the distant table; like insect antennae, which - for all he knew - they might be.
Honeydew stalked ahead. She squeezed Mr. Grey’s quill and pen in her fists. Mr. Grey crouched close behind and watched her prowl resolvedly through the grass. He didn’t doubt her ability to inflict pain with those tools of pencil pushery, even against hands that cast shadows deeper than huge bat clouds. One of those hands scraped the ground ahead, and another swooped from just behind, and both Mr. Grey and Honeydew dropped flat in the fronds. Even without touching him, the hand-stirred air fluttered Mr. Grey’s robes and hair. The hand left behind a film of palm sweat on the chicktails.
After that, Mr. Grey set realistic expectations on the might of the pencil and quill.
The pair raised themselves slowly to a crouch after the hand had passed. Mr. Grey itched his nose and cheeks where the reed stalks had brushed. The plunging hands tilled and swiped nearby. Two more running passengers were harvested together and thrown together. Their screams cracked and dwindled, like mortar shots without the concluding boom. The passengers’ numbers dropped to a half-dozen in the open. Stealth, rather than flight, had become the favored plan of survival.
Honeydew moved again, low and quiet and angry. Mr. Grey followed. Another marble was plucked and crushed. Mr. Grey concealed his whisper under the screeching distortion of metal. “Has anyone tried communicating? With the, well, the hands? We might try and get…”
The thought withered before its bloom. Honeydew turned her glaring oil-bright eyes on him. She jerked the pencil to her lips in a gesture of silence, and stabbed with the quill in the direction of the left hand.
Another passenger was yelling. “Please! Mercy!” But before you could say ‘Terms and Conditions’, off he went over the cliff. Mr. Grey saw the improbability of reason with the giant hands.
When Honeydew started forward again, Mr. Grey followed quietly.
For a time they crouched and crawled in tense secrecy. They held their breaths whenever a hand swept the grass in a close rustling wave. They winced whenever a survivor vanished in an artillery yell. Mr. Grey’s own grey hands, and his grey face, itched horribly.
Another metal crunch broke their pace. They turned and saw their own marble - full of their own luggage - compressed and chucked. Mr. Grey went stiff. He didn’t quite stand, but his grey head rose from the mustardy chicktail sea. He forgot the fetching hands for a moment. His mind tangled itself with considering the forms he’d fill out for ‘lost and/or damaged goods’. Honeydew’s reaction was worse. She howled.
Both noticed the shadow of one giant arm rushing in behind. Too late. The fingers closed about Mr. Grey’s stiff robe. He was lifted; first to his feet, then off the soil. He didn’t yell - it wasn’t his style - but the grey disks in his eyes spread wide.
Honeydew jumped to action. In the suddenness of the moment she forgot the two sharp tools in her hands. She fell back on her instinctual form of combat. With a leap, she jabbed a shoulder into the thumb of the hand holding Mr. Grey.
The hand dropped Mr. Grey. The wooly grass seemed to pull him back into its itchy, soft folds. A terrific rush of air shook the fronds and their robes, as the hand flew backwards.
Over the edge of the cliff rushed a mountain of head and shoulders. Above them loomed a forest of thick coniferous hair and beard, two bonfire eyes, and a cave-mouth.
The giant - which is what it was - brought its shouldered thumb to its cave mouth. It sucked at a painful welt left by Honeydew’s hard shoulder.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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Utterly hooked. Such a cool concept, and I loved the "terms and conditions" line