Word of the Day: adventitious

I’ve been cooking up some ideas for some multi-part stories again. Well, actually, this time they will be each self-contained, but, variations on a theme. sorta like 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I have no idea how many ways I will be looking at my various blackbirds, but you can bet it’ll be something akin to “as many times as I can look at that blackbird and milk it for story ideas.”

I’m feeling really sorry for the blackbird, let me tell you.

This is not one of those stories. I’m just giving you something to look forward to.

Today’s Word:

adventitious

As in:

The world is always stranger in truth than in fiction. I’ve always told my husband that, more than once. He’s a good sport about things, which is really good for me. No one deserves to have a freak show for a wife.

I’ve been hanging around this part of the world for 300 or so years, which is only one stripe on my personal freak flag. I broke that one to my husband first. I thought it might make him feel good, dating an older woman. And, if it bombed, then I’d know, and could get out of the whole thing before I told him the even weirder stuff.

He just sorta nodded. After he realized I wasn’t joking, he said, “Well, you don’t look a day over 200.” He sure knows how to charm a girl, doesn’t he?

Of course, most people would guess I am closer to thirty. I have a great metabolism, and moisturize. Never discount the value of a good moisturizer.

It is pretty unusual for my kind to live this long. Certainly, I don’t know of any, and I would know. Nature is weird. Sometimes the inexplicable just happens.

Like Clyde. There I was, minding my own business, running with my pack, who were hunting some buffalo. We had picked out a likely candidate, and were running him to ground, when my eye caught an adventitious buffalo, bison, watching intently.

Our eyes locked, and I knew, instantly. He was like me. He’d lived a long time, longer than any of his kind. After a quick bite, and my companions had drifted off in a food coma, I went to the very normal looking quadruped. We bonded over our mutual freakish condition, and I started to call him Clyde. Most people think the strangest thing about my pet is his species, and that I just replace him every few decades.

And before you get all excited about me hunting a threatened species, this was a few centuries ago, when the buffalo, bison, whatever it is, were plentiful. They’re pretty tasty, too. They’re still tasty, just not plentiful.

And yes, I said pack. I’m a werewolf. There. I said it. If I could wear my race with pride, out in the open and all, I might even call myself a “Lycanthrop-American,” but it sounds unbelievably pretentious. When you’ve run with the wolves, there isn’t much room for pretense.

That’s really my big secret. My husband, the mild-mannered chiropractor from Montana, is fine with all of this. One secret at a time, he just went with it all. And, if you think it’s weird being a 300 year-old werewolf with a pet bison, well, try finding someone who is willing to stick with a 300 year-old werewolf with a 200 year-old pet bison. Let me tell you, *that’s* much more rare.

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It’s probably better not to ask where this idea came from. Not that I could really answer that question. So we’ll just leave it at that.

adventitious / ad – VENT – ish – us / accidentally intruding from an unexpected quarter