Every week we post six lines of a story of ours, a work-in-progress or from someone else’s work we recommend that has LGBT characters on Rainbow Snippets here https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974

My friend Kaje Harper has a new collection of her stories out: “The Distant Hills and Other Stories.” Well worth it! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75548077-the-distant-hills-and-other-stories Our narrator of “To Death and Beyond” is Roland, and this one starts with a zombie raccoon…

The creature trying to bite at my boot was a raccoon once, I think. I kick it away. Clumps of fur fall to the ground as it snarls impotently and it loses a tooth while gouging a scar in my leather instep.

Dammit, I like these boots. I dig in my belt pouch for salt and sprinkle it on the wide, moth-eaten forehead. “Earth to earth.” A flash of my Earth power to go with the salt, and the poor creature collapses at last in its well-deserved rest.

We meet Roland’s friend Colyn who is mourning his husband Mark and has decided to use his own magic to do something about it…something forbidden and grim…

The box is fine work, the kind of unit that might grace the home of the wealthiest citizen, large enough for a whole pig, and a haunch of venison, with a jug of milk to spare.

Large enough for a man, clothes still wet after a year, bloody hair matted to his deathly white face from where he struck something in the river, limbs tucked in and head bowed, when the door is opened.

The spell shimmers across the front, keeping everything inside from changing, as it’s designed to do. In a normal home, opening and closing the spell daily means the work would thin and need renewal every month. I hoped to the Goddess no sorcerer had been complicit in renewing that…living death.

“I saved the maker’s wife and baby.” Colyn runs a hand in front the control rune, but not close enough to activate it. “He gave the unit to us as a thank-you, just the day before…When Mark died, the stasis seemed providential. A gift of the Goddess.”

Well! Those snippets went a bit over six lines, but how far will Colyn go?

And on that macabre note, I leave you until next time when we will we meet a man who has encountered a dragon. —–jeff