Category: fiction

  • Going to the chapel…

    Another four prompts from Jolene.

    Another absurd little tale. Okay, maybe not that absurd.

    The prompts:

    1. laundromat 
    2. shocking announcement
    3. person who takes shortcuts 
    4. person who needs to remove a tattoo right away
    Gee, I really love you
    And we're gonna get married
    Going to the chapel of love

    The sunlight was more blinding than it had any right to be, piercing even eyes closed tight against such insults and it sent my head spinning. Or the room spinning. Or, the whole world had become a giant tilt-a-whirl and I fought the urge to vomit up all the liquor I had consumed at the—

    Umm. Record release party on the Strip. That sounded right, the answer hiding just behind the pounding on the inside of my skull by some wee gnome with a steel hammer.

    After which, I think it was followed by an an after-hours rave.

    I think. Things went all wobbly right after hailing the Uber with Jessie and that producer she had the hots for that we were chatting up at the release party.

    (more…)

  • Down by the wyching tree

    I toed off my shoes all mouse quiet to avoid the verbal hiding I was about to receive, but that weren’t gonna fool him. The man was like one of those psychic kids from the Stephen King books. The early ones. Those good ones left all beat to hell in the library cos so many hands have held them they are permanently fanned out with especial gaps where the good parts are. The scary parts. Sometimes the sexy parts.

    It weren’t the well-oiled hinges that betrayed me, but the gust of autumn wind come raging through the open I had slipped through on my way in tattled by way the flickering of the candle light dancing shadows as it rush on past.

    “Where you been.” It weren’t a question.

    “Out.”

    “Out?”

    “Out.”

    I didn’t bother hiding my footsteps no more as I walked down the hallway, didn’t skip that creaky part right by the picture of my ma when she weren’t much older than me.

    (more…)

  • A tale to be told of murder and betrayal:

    There’s this story I have flipping around my mind. Yeah?

    Maybe it’s a true story.

    Maybe it’s not.

    I haven’t written it down yet, so it could be either.

    It might even be both.

    (more…)

  • Stooks Before Reeves [one]

    “Mal,” said Man Rivers once time, gnawing on a tobac leaf like he always was as he wound up wire and pulled stake. “There come a time you have to accept you’re bein’ snookered.”

    “Howdat?” I asked watching how he coiled the snare for used elsewhere.

    Man shot an glance sidewise up to the steading. You could see that fatboy Lawson up the guardtower looking real hard like his attention was on something, anything, other than Man and me.

    My eyes narrowed.

    “I’m just sayin’ you need know when time’s come to find a new place to snare a bit of game. ‘Times there’s a fox waiting in the underbrush waiting for your snare to catch.”

    (more…)

  • On bounty

    “You saw the bounties, dinja?”

    I took my time looking up.

    That ragamuffin had been quiet as a sceaducat padding her way through and behind rangy scrub, mustering courage to speak out. Spooky quiet. I might have missed it had I been ranging like most folk do through here.

    But I’d heard her all the same. And I had a mystique cultivated to protect, so I drew out the minutes in a yarn stretched taut to lend it further credence, showing her all brim on my widehat until my eyes slow-locked onto hers.

    She’d be the pretty type some day, that much was clear. But now she was more Jack than Jane and all gangly-limbed. Those eyes would eventually kill at fifty stride, if the storms didn’t take them first. Or some reaver.

    She earned my respect right off, staying silent like she was. Said her bit, expected answers. Weren’t gonna beg for nothing.

    “Bounties?”

    (more…)

  • Drone of ice

    I drone of ice. Crystal. Pale luminescence.

    I show him how I shuttercock the gun to skate the lake in tin flechette under a neon sky, dancing somewhere between Nijinsky and ictus rigor, near both wolf and dog on the Betweens.

    In a word, I say: They cannot see me.

    In yet more: They cannot hear me, save for the hollow of my entrance.

    And: They cannot taste me, for their screams.

    Explaining: They all have sharp ends, just as I will have a sharp end. It is the only way we can be. When you waltz with knives and cold eyes blue, everything becomes razor cuts through the gloom.

    “And you never tire of this?” he asks, knowing the answer.

    Of course I do.

    I shrug. But I know nothing else. I only know the northern cold.

    An exchange. As agreed, fifteen in advance. To hold me, to unspring my aching need. There was crimson spilled the last time, the time they thought to give me mere seed instead of what we had agreed.

    Word travels, as they say.

    “Fifty more when it is complete?”

    I stare. He knows. I have no desire to bleed him for more. Yet anyway. Perhaps later. In his mistress’s boudoir, as I smoke his expensive cigars.

    He does not know it, but he is lucky.

    Ahh. Now he sees, coughs. Chair screech, standing back from my obsidian eyes empty.

    “Em. Hum. Contact me when you have done the deed.”

    I knappedflint smile. Only a smile.

    It is already done, this job. Before we met. For joy. But he can wait for that news. Make him wonder.

    He stumbleleaves, does not even finish his drink, does not count the jack he leaves on the table for the tab for all his hurrying. Out the door, letting in winter.

    I am tired. Yet, I have pride.

    I am drone of ice.

  • Dead Letter Office [fragment]

    I started this a while back for Jolene Rice’s story prompts and never got around to finishing it. This particular list included: a key that nobody else has, a bumper sticker offers excellent advice, a slow poke, and an oddities collector.

    This time, I was going to eschew my normal fantasy/noir/horror inclinations and lean fairly straight, non-genre storytelling. I do that on occasion. When I do, chances are there are still hints of some kinds of odd in the tale, but the world’s chocked full of odd kinds of tales.

    Anyway, it seemed a shame to let a not-terrible beginning to a story molder in a draft folder, so I decided to share it in the story’s unfinished state.

    All apologies offered in advance.

    Bonus points if you can figure out the inspiration which informs the tone of the planned story.

      There was a traffic jam on the kudzu-lined gravel road leading into Gideon. There were already at least three cars lined up behind whatever was obstructing the road around the canopy of vines hanging down from telephone wires and what-all the greenery could find for support to cling to.

      (more…)

    1. Forfeit

      Here’s another short bit of fiction based on writing prompts from Jolene Rice. They are the following four items with the only rule being that you cannot kill off your main character

      1. attacked by squirrels
      2. what nobody wants to talk about
      3. mascot for a professional team
      4. animal psychic

      Apologies offered in advance.

      I do lost cats, mostly. Colic in horses if the vet’s backed up. Twice a year somebody’s parrot stops talking and I sit with it for an hour and tell the family what they already know, which is that the parrot wishes they would ask for more than “Polly wants a cracker.” One, in particular, had a secret habit of shouting “Fucking hell!” whenever the house was empty, it told me. Practiced it all day long, most days, by his reckoning.

      (more…)

    2. Dawnstar

      He goes to Dawnstar’s back room to listen to the speakers. Got a lifetime full access to all the courses from back when they still sold such things. Tomorrow night, they have a guest speaking on certain secrets who might be able to help illuminate passages in a certain book he keeps on his person for the past month.

      Consider me squared up on the debt to your grandmother. Forget who I am. I never want to hear from you again.

      Dawnstar.

      She checked the timestamp. The email was sent yesterday. Tonight, then. An accounting.

      “Coffee?”

      She did not look up from her laptop, but continued staring at the screen, an absent-minded wave of her hand — long, lean fingers made longer by fingernails at the fringe of staying a sensible length and painted matte black — a universal gesture in cafes around the world that said, “Fill her up.”

      She considered typing a response that would remind the recipient that they did not get to dictate the terms of the balance of their debt, but decided against it. It would just land on empty ears in the dustbin with other spam.

      She made a mental note to remedy that with an in-person visit after her business had concluded.

      Last week, she would have taken in the scenery as her server refreshed the coffee in her cup, watched the hip-wiggle as the young woman walked away. She had done it enough over the past few weeks since arriving in the city, taking up residence in the overpriced rental rising above the already-broad Mississippi.

      She was worth it. And that delightful rear end was given the backseat in her mind as she pondered how to catch the fraud who had absconded with her family’s secrets and probably was responsible for the murder of her grandmother. He had an alibi, of course — they always did. But that did not mean he was not responsible.

      The stains left behind, the lingering smell of brimstone detectable to her nose — it was all she needed to know to put Marcus Kane, or whatever his name was, at the scene.

      And he had finally made a mistake. Eagerness to unlock those secrets from the written word were a regular part of the downfall of people like Kane. They were intemperate by nature, something she had counted on since she came back to reclaim what was her birthright.

      She sipped at her coffee, black as sin.

      He would regret his life’s choices by the end of the weekend. He just did not know it yet.

      But now she had the information she needed to begin.

    3. Reunion

      Participating in Jolene’s (Chico’s Mom) prompts where the only real rule is that you can’t kill off the main character. Oh, and use the four prompts provided:

      1. not so Good Samaritan
      2. vampire
      3. reunited
      4. pills

      Here is my humble offering below.

      Vladimir opened the heavy wooden door on the third knock, as though he’d been expecting this all along. Which, of course, he had been — for eleven years.

      “Aldric.” With warmth, arms outstretched. That slight lisp that came with elongated canines. “Come in, come in. You’ll catch your death.”

      (more…)