I did this funny experiment where I was getting AI to critique some of my favourite authors on Hive, including myself. Then I said 'create a post that's a mix of honeydue and riverflows writing' and this is what it came up with.

A gull stood on the rusted railing like it owned the weather.

The tide had gone out hours ago, leaving the estuary ribbed with silver mud and the tiny hieroglyphics of crab feet. You said the flats looked like the inside of an old woman’s hands and I laughed too hard because grief has a habit of disguising itself as humor in this part of the world.

The wind smelled of salt and wet bark and the smoke from someone’s burn pile inland. Everything here seems half-feral, half-domestic. Even us.

You were talking about monsters again. Sirens. Women who become dangerous simply by surviving too long in the wrong story. Your words came loose and bright as fish scales, catching light in impossible places. I wanted to tell you that not every wound needs mythology wrapped around it like velvet ribbon, but then your hand brushed mine and I remembered how badly humans need symbols when ordinary language fails.

A black dog barked somewhere beyond the dunes.

The sea answered in its old exhausted voice.

You said:
“Maybe softness is just another form of camouflage.”

And for a moment the whole evening seemed suspended inside that sentence — the bruised sky, the cold tea in our cups, the long animal loneliness we carry from house to house like a rescued thing that still bites when touched too quickly.

Later, walking home, we found mushrooms pushing through a rotting log after rain.

White as little moons.

Alive because something underneath had finally agreed to decay.