Tag: short fiction

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Bryan's geek room
Daveo via Creative Commons

Brothers and sisters of the toy shelves! Collected assemblage of the gaming rig! Members of the tchotchke army! Behold your master and heed my words!

Long have we toiled together, bathed in light from liquid crystal glow. We have saved countless realms, fought hordes together, we have spilled blood and ink and petabytes of data to catalog and protect distant, alien lands. Remember the dice we’ve lost; the disks and video cards that sacrificed themselves; the books and comics drowned in the Flood of Mountain’s Dew only two years gone. Hold their selfless acts in your hearts my faithful, for today we face a new challenge, and today we see the rise of our most feared opponent.

Though its agents of change and chaos (mom) come mercilessly, I know that together we can prevail. We face a great journey, trusted friends, one from which you may not all emerge intact. But take heart! For most of you shall find new lives on the other side, beyond the veil of eBay. And one day, when I transcend to the next plateau, we shall be reunited in that hated land, that Mordor to our Shire, together once again…

In REAL LIFE!

Amen.

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Honey
Siona Karen via Creative Commons

These are not my hands. I control them as if they were, but they belong to something else. If I run them across the whiskered walls, it tickles but in an abstract way, like prodding a leg that has fallen asleep. I’ve cut myself so honey and rice seep from the wound; when mixed with the whiskers it makes a stain of black under the blue, blue light.

I was another creature once, but now that’s far away. In times like these, the first response is to test communication.

—Hello?

I think there won’t be a reply, but I wait for one anyway and it comes after clocks have long stopped working.

—Do not greet me as an equal.

What a funny thing to say, now if only I could remember how to laugh.

Here I say, —Lift up yourself and show me a face or speak a name.

—Commands? There is cruelty in the sardonicism.

—Please?

My body is meat, and I understand at once the humor in my request. Speech is for the time-locked and a face cannot be shown from the inside out.

—Oh, I say —These aren’t grains of rice and this isn’t honey.

Laughter.

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The End
Oliver Hammond via Creative Commons

There are no other endings. If you follow a story long enough, the final sequence is never not a death scene. Cut away before that point and you only pretend you’ve reached the end. In the twin faces of comedy and tragedy, one is the truth and the other is the lie. Comedy is a shared hallucination waved away with the nonsense phrase as dependent on magic as the stories it spawned from: “happily ever after.”

In a story a person is born, they live to some indeterminate age. Their childhood is depicted to give a sense of where they come from, and it tells you something about them: how they see the world perhaps, or whether they can believe in love. When they reach the story’s age, something happens to them. They want a thing, but there are obstacles in their way. Either they obtain their wish or they do not. This cycle will repeat.

And then at last they age to the point where they will die. All challenges fall away and they meet their certain doom; it may be heroic, it may be tragic. Maybe it is a relief.

Every story ends this way.

Except one.

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The Ones is a writing blog game in which participants receive a story title, a little wrinkle to up the challenge factor and then must create a single draft story in no more than one hour from the prompt. They then trade stories and post someone else’s entry on their website. My guest this week is Kishan Paul.

—

“So you feel like your husband isn’t attentive to your needs as he used to be?” I ask.

“Yes,” the woman on the speaker phone sniffles. “I think he’s having an affair,” she says as her sniffle turns into a full fledged sob.

“Elise,” I begin and stop when the pounding starts.  I switch the speaker off and put the phone next to my ear.  Placing my hand on the wall next to me, I feel it shake as whoever is on the other side pounds.

night view, deck
Jenny Spadafora via Creative Commons

I scramble to the other side of apartment, the kitchen, “Elise, do you think this has anything to do with the fact it’s the busiest time…” The banging of the hammer against the wall gets louder and more incessant. I punch the breakfast table and work on keeping my voice calm and soothing. “of the year for him at work?”

The rest of our session is much the same and I pray Elise has no idea that I’m about to explode.

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Flashing Red Light
Thomas Hawk via Creative Commons

The officers ignored the protests of innocence as they loaded the woman into the car. “Oh shit, here comes Knave,” one of them said as a slouching man moved from shadow into the dancing red light.

“Gentlemen,” said Jonah Knave, “a moment?”

“Make it quick.”

“How many bullets left in the gun?”

The officers exchanged glances. The smaller one volunteered, “Three.”

“And how many wounds in the victim?”

“One,” the larger said, impatience hanging around him like a stink.

“I see. Thank you, officers.” Knave moved up the walk. He stood in the door, staring past the cooling body just inside, beady eyes focused over the crouching medical examiner at the wide glass pane at the back of the room.

“You’re gonna catch hell if the captain finds you here, Knave,” the M.E. remarked.

Knave grinned but didn’t look down. “Perhaps the captain should be more concerned about finding the shooter.”

“How’s that?”

Knave looked at the door to his right, cocked his jaw and ran his gaze the length of the frame, squinting at last at a pair of small holes near the hinge. “The real perp shot from, and fled through, the backyard. You have the wrong woman.”

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Happy New Year 2009!
Lotte Grønkjær via Creative Commons

Yang bends at the knees and leaps, barely distinguishable against the deep blue night sky until her silhouette passes in front of the gibbous moon. With a hum she activates her cloak and becomes a shimmer like a drowned shadow beneath a mirrored lake. The overlapping tiles clack together softly as she lands and her lively eyes scan the rooftop. On the far edge, Horatio-6 leans against a smokestack as if it were a signpost. It knows she is here, and it follows its languid personality routine to the letter.

“Took you long enough,” it says.

“If it helps you to think that,” Yang whispers, knowing it can hear.

“I don’t really think.” Horatio-6 raises two actuators in a parody of air quotation marks. It is a human-like gesture and it makes Yang’s lip curl back beneath her cowl. “I process. I decide.”

“And you’ve decided to be destroyed by not continuing to run.”

She could swear it smiles. “If it helps you…” it says, pushing off from the stack. Yang’s sword is unsheathed and reflecting moonlight before the phrase is over. She wishes their combat programming was as advanced as their banter routines. She leaps again.

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avoided symmetry
Nephogram Label via Creative Commons

The pedestrians scowled to look busy beyond the usual realm of preoccupation. Their expressions were deliberately set in a way that was supposed to read, “the person behind this expression is extremely busy and very important.” The old woman ignored these airs of feigned dignity; suits or sportswear or filthy rags, she knew no one of any real import would be walking the street at nine-thirty in the morning. Her clever eyes picked out a reedy looking woman with an upturned nose and a slouching gait.

“Could you let an orphan boy starve this afternoon?” the crone asked, her voice gravel-soaked.

The reedy woman stopped. “Beg pardon?”

“Could you let a starving orphan die today?”

“I—“ the woman stopped. “How am I supposed to answer that question?”

“It’s a yes or no—“

She interrupted, “—If I answer ‘yes’ then I’m saying, ‘Yes, I’ll let a starving orphan die.’”

“So I guess—“

“—But if I say ‘no’ that implies I’m willing to give you money.”

The old woman waited for a beat, not wanting to be interrupted again. “I didn’t ask for money.”

“Here,” the younger woman spat, thrusting out twenty dollar bill. The old woman snatched it up.

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Demon
chiaralily via Creative Commons

As patron saints are to human hope, cacodaemon are to human fear. And I am that which hovers over all, a blister known as Kakodaimon. I am the pride of the zealot converted into judgment. I am the hunger that consumes a life, a secret sin indulged in dark. I am the forebear of a silent curse, I am mother of the wretched lie.

My speciality is deceit, a trick of self delusion. Where righteousness exists and masks cruel intent, there I feed and smile. Certainty is my instrument, superiority my song; love is not my mortal foe but yet another stanza I sing. When tears are shed for the benefit of audience, it is I who lap them up. The apology that serves to blunt the edge of a newly-public shame is choked up past a lump I form and the words are drawn from my whispers.

I am children born to save a bond; I am the innocence tossed happily aside; I am worry over privilege.

I live in the light and you all pray unto me.

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Veil and bouquet
Lars Plougmann via Creative Commons

Michael held Veronica’s only hand, trying to convince himself the beads of sweat were normal wedding day jitters. He looked down at his fianceé; in a matter of minutes, his wife. Ronnie often marveled that people assumed her physical defects indicated mental deficiencies as well. The wedding dress hid her lack of legs, but could not hide her missing left arm, nor the wheelchair she required for mobility. He peered through the largely transparent veil at her face. She was pretty, even by normal societal standards: blonde, blue-eyed, enviable bone structure. The malformation of her neck muscles forced her head to loll at an awkward angle, though, and made holding her jaw closed difficult. He appreciated that she was putting in the effort to keep her mouth shut, fixed in her magic smile. The cynical thought that she might be mostly trying to keep drool off her dress could not be suppressed.

His friends called him brave. Her family thought him a hero. But he kept thinking of the stripper last night, the greasy expanse of her thighs. The priest asked him to say “I do,” which he did. His mind added the silent addendum, “…wish Ronnie had thighs.”

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Untitled
Rachel K via Creative Commons

Willow scraped her slippers along the carpet, reaching up to stretch and rub her eyes but stopping short with a little squeak of surprise when she saw the book on the floor. Her office was spotless, a sanctuary from the chaos of a careless boyfriend through the rest of the house. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling white bookshelves, excepting the wide corner desk, where she ran her customized balloon distribution company from her laptop. A book on the floor in this office was an affront to Willow’s unflinching rule: no one in the office without explicit permission.

She picked up the hardcover and turned it over. Agatha Christie’s After The Funeral. Willow carried the book into the kitchen, staring at the cover. “Hey Long,” she said, suppressing a sour look at the sight of her boyfriend hunched over a cereal bowl, slurping and chewing loudly with an open mouth, “were you looking for a book in my office?”

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