iTunes Shuffle Challenge
1. "All The Little Lights" by Passenger
(Zani, Elnor & Picard)
Summer nights on Vashti were never completely dark, even when the stars were hidden behind a cloud. Elnor smiled in awe at the candleflies swarming above him, bathing the courtyard of the Qowat Milat Temple in flickering golden light.
"Imagine, child," said Zani, tucking one arm around his small shoulders and pointing up at the sky with the other, "That this is how our spirits might look, if they were visible. Every time we speak or act in a way that is true, we spark another light."
"And if we lie, a light goes out?"
"Exactly."
Elnor frowned at the darting insects, which suddenly seemed very small and fragile against the darkness. He wondered how many lights he had lost.
"I've rarely found the truth to be that simple," said Admiral Picard, who was sitting on the same bench on Elnor's other side. He sounded tired, or perhaps unhappy; it would take Elnor years to understand why.
"Maybe you should grow more lights then," he said simply.
"Excellent advice, my young friend." The older man smiled and ruffled the boy's hair. "Perhaps someday, I'll be able to take it."
/
1. "Spieglein Spieglein" by Ina Mueller
(Raffi)
Some mornings, Raffi looks in the mirror and doesn't recognize her face.
The woman in the mirror is haggard, hungover, her eyes swollen from lack of sleep, her teeth turning yellow from smoking. She's bleached her hair so often and with such dubious materials that it's turning dry as straw. But she could live with all that, if only it wasn't for the expression on her face.
The woman in the mirror is dead around the eyes.
She flicks off the light in the tiny bathroom at the back of her trailer, on again, off again. Her reflection is still there.
When Picard shows up, she has many reasons for trying to send him away, but one reason she would never tell him.
She doesn't want him to see her like this.
/
3. "Alone" by Heart
(Jurati/Maddox)
The night before meeting with Dr. Maddox, Agnes stares at the ceiling with her arms wrapped around her pillow.
It's not a date. She's told herself that a million times. He's her professor, for God's sake. Professors do meet for coffee and cake with their students sometimes, especially graduate students, most especially when said students' work aligns so perfectly with theirs that a one-hour seminar just isn't enough time.
But there was something more than that in the way he smiled at her.
The most brilliant, original, charismatic man she's ever known, whose research she's been following for all her adult life, and he wants to work with her.
She falls asleep dreaming of a Daystrom Prize trophy with two names on it, and a sentient android who calls them Mother and Father.
Little does she know that dreams are all they will ever be.