Tag: 1000 words

Cold Fury

Pavowski2 Comments

This week’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Literary Mash-Up.

There’s no sense pretending on this one. I loved (no, let’s not even hide it, love, present tense) Frozen. So when my random selection gave me a mash-up of The Avengers and Frozen, it felt like Christmas coming around again.

I took the mash-up a little bit more literally than perhaps the challenge is meant to be taken, but I don’t care. I had more fun writing this than anything I’ve written in recent months.

Here’s Cold Fury, in 960 words.

 

 

 

Cold Fury

Get out of the ice business, they said. Market’s crashing, they said.

But what the hell was I supposed to do? I’m just an ice jockey from the sticks. No formal education, no particular skillset to speak of, outside of chopping ice, shaping it, transporting it, preserving it. Who am I kidding? It’s not like you couldn’t teach a rock troll to do what I do. The reindeer can practically do the job without me; he just can’t hold the icepick with his hooves. But that’s hardly the point.

Point is, the world is getting way too strange for somebody like me to make sense of it. I mean, one day I’m hauling a load of prime-cut crystal down from the peaks, and BANG, like magic, there’s this freak snowstorm out of nowhere. To say it’s a few months early is to overstate the obvious. Granted, weather can get weird up in the mountains, but this stuff settles in. Goes on thick, like marshmallow paste, and heavy, like reindeer dung; it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, and I might as well be dragging a sledful of sunlight in the summer behind me for all the good this ice is gonna do me. Pity, too. It’s a beautiful haul, but off it goes down the mountainside; no sense tiring out the reindeer. And I’m wondering what I’m going to do with myself for the foreseeable future when I remember there’s this shack back down the mountainside a stitch. Maybe I can ponder my troubles with a mug in my hand, away from the cackling of the jerks back in town.

I’m within sight of the shack when this guy steps out from behind a tree. Out-of-towner. Whatever he was doing out there is anybody’s guess, but I wasn’t gonna ask him. He’s got this leathery coat flapping like mad around his knees in the mountain wind, and a gleaming bald black head atop these massive, don’t-mess-with-me shoulders, and he’s staring hard at me like I stole his lunch money twenty years ago and he’s here to pay me back. Or maybe he’s just looking at me, and it’s the eyepatch that makes him look all ominous.

He tells me he needs me. That there’s this girl coming up the mountain, and she’s in trouble. That I should look out for her, help her find her sister. That he needs me to help “bring the sister in,” whatever that means. I ask him what’s in it for me, and he asks if I’ve ever wanted to be a prince. And I’m about to tell him to take a flying leap off the bluffs over there — seven hundred feet straight down. Then I stop. It’s not like I have anything better going on. Endless blizzard and all.

Looking back on it now, I don’t even know if he was real. All I know is, I turned to ask what he was gonna do for my reindeer, you know, to sweeten the deal, and when I looked back, he was gone… and behind him, in the distance, I see this girl lurching up the mountainside toward the shack. Tiny. Frail. Freezing. Then it gets worse. I follow her in, and she turns out to be gorgeous. Weird thing going on with her hair, this pale streak mixed in with all the red, but a face that’s cute like about a dozen baby reindeer and… well. I try to play it cool, but my brain is doing backflips trying to figure out how that angry eyepatch guy knew about her.

We talk. She needs a ride; I could use the money she offers me for giving her a ride. Next thing I know, it’s talking snowmen and imperial guards and a chase back down the same damn mountain we just climbed up. Oh, and her sister? Yeah, turns out she’s some sort of witch or something, and she’s all icicles and snow and eternal cold and… look, I’m not the guy to ask about everything that went down, all right? To be honest, the talking snowman gave me the screaming willies, and now he’s got his own room in the castle and he’s somehow still a snowman despite the fact that summer has come and gone six or seven times now. Ice Witch, right? Anyway. Sister and I get married, do the happily-ever-after thing, and the Snow Queen or whatever you call her rules in grace and splendor and all that good stuff. And then it hits me like an avalanche.

Eyepatch was right. I’m a prince now.

It’s too good to be true, right? Me, the ice-chucker from nowhere marries into the royal family. For years I don’t say anything — don’t look a gift reindeer in the mouth, right? — until one day I’m heading down for breakfast in the lower dining hall and I hear that voice. I go running in and see the guy, eyepatch and shiny head and all, sitting down talking with the queen. And he’s spouting all this stuff about parallel dimensions and ancient artifacts of untold power and how the world — no, the universe — needs her. Before I can even get my wife out of bed (she sleeps like a yeti, that one) the queen goes and gets on this — what can I call it? Like a boat, but made of steel, and flying, just floating over the ground like a hummingbird, if you can believe that — and leaves with the guy. And I try to explain, but my girl just goes into this… this FURY, you know?

Anyway, my wife and I rule the kingdom now while her sister, the Frost Fairy or whatever, is off fighting the evils of the universe, or something. And that’s how I became King of Arendelle.

 

 

Smoke Rings

Pavowski1 Comment

Chuck’s challenge this week: “Who the F*** is my D&D character?” The challenge links to a character generator that rolls up ludicrous characters with a mouthful of abuse. Good fun. I lucked into “a halfling wizard from a company of sellswords who doesn’t believe in magic, EVER.” (Profanity redacted.)

As I was writing this, my wife pointed out how rather much like fan fiction this topic was. I argued at first, but ultimately I can’t help but agree. Fantasy is not really my schtick, but I’ve always loved the Lord of the Rings and I felt compelled to press on with this topic anyway. For a first challenge of the year, it was good fun. It ran a little long, but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any more.

Here, then, is “Smoke Rings.”

 

Smoke Rings

“Did I ever tell you about the time your uncle, Glorfindel, and I fought off the goblin hordes?” Klobo puffed absently at a pipe, then blew out a fantastic ring of cloying purplish smoke.

Kludu coughed but didn’t wave the smoke away. Klobo had told the story many times, but Kludu loved to hear his granddad spin a yarn. “Tell me again?”

“Your uncle and I were coming back from a grand old adventure. Elves and orcs and all that. Treasure in hand, we were making our way back through the Mirthless Marshes of Misander –”

“I thought it was the forest out back of the Vale,” Kludu broke in. And indeed it had been, at the last telling.

“No, it was the Marshes, I remember it distinctly.” Puff, puff. “The rest of our company had gone their separate ways the night before, of course, so it was just old Glorf and me, toting our haul down the Marsh path.”

“Don’t you mean …”

“Don’t tell me what I mean, thank you. Now, it’s unusual to see goblins that far south, but we were holed up in an abandoned guard tower, and we saw them coming out of the woods.”

“Last time, they came from the Marshes.”

“For pity’s sake, Kludu. We were in the Marshes, the goblins came from the woods. I was there, after all.”

It was getting to the good bit, so Kludu left it alone.

“There were fifty of them, if there were five. Have you ever seen a goblin up close, my boy?”

Kludu bit his lip and shook his head, his shaggy hair flopping furiously.

“Of course not. No reason to, at your age. See to it that you avoid them, if you can. Horrible creatures. Tiny daggers for teeth. Greenish grey skin, like the fog off the hills at twilight. Breath like rotten pumpkins.” Klobo shuddered, but his eye twinkled and he winked. “We were in the tower, your uncle and I. Nowhere to go. And Glorf — fool of a Pikelander as he was — sneezes. Can you imagine? Sneezes! Goblins can hear a mouse break wind at a hundred yards, you know, so of course they knew exactly where we were.”

“What did you do?”

“Well!” Here Klobo leapt to his hairy feet and gave a horrific halfling battle-snarl, brandishing an invisible axe. “There was nothing for it, was there? They climbed the tower, one by one, and one by one, we started lopping off their heads. Whop, whop, whop!” He swung and chopped with his imaginary axe. “But even such exceptional and fearless hobbits as your uncle and I can’t fight forever, and those goblins — a hundred of them! — kept swarming over the walls like ants on one of your grandmother’s sandwiches.”

The goblins had gone from fifty to a hundred in the space of a few minutes, but Kludu was rapt; nobody told a story like his granddad.

“We thought we were finished. They had us surrounded, back to back, just your uncle and I and our bags of dragon-gold.” This was patently ridiculous; Klobo had never faced a dragon. Everybody in town knew it, but there was no stopping him now.

“That was when your uncle bumped into the powder keg. Quick as a flash, I struck a spark off the stones, the powder caught, and … BOOM!” Klobo was ninety, but as spry as any halfling in the Vale. He leapt two feet in the air and spread his hands, and despite having heard the tale dozens of times, Kludu still flinched. “They said it was raining goblin arms and legs for weeks in the Vale after that.”

The Marshes were nowhere near the Vale; the story was ludicrous. But Kludu had just turned thirty-three, and he was feeling adventurous. He didn’t argue about the Marshes (even though the tower in his granddad’s story had been located, without question — blasted top and all — in the forest). He wanted to ask the question all his friends and relations had told him never to bother asking.

“Granddad?”

Klobo, a little winded from the telling, was sitting back in his rocker and puffing again at his pipe. “Yes, my boy?”

“There was no powder keg.”

“Don’t be absurd. Of course there was.”

“Glorf says there wasn’t. And if it happened thirty years ago –”

“It did.”

“Well, there was no powder in these parts back then. Not until the Martinsons took over in Parth and started importing it from the East.”

Klobo huffed out a puff of smoke through his nostrils. “I suppose, then, you’d like to tell me what a barrel of powder was doing on the guard tower in the middle of the forest?”

Again, Kludu let it pass. “Uncle says there never was any powder. That’s why you and he didn’t get blasted to hell along with the goblins. Uncle says you’re a …” He stopped. Klobo’s temper was well documented.

Through a fiery eye, Klobo stared at Kludu. He seemed to be smoking, no longer from his pipe, but rather from the top of his head. “A what?”

“A wizard.” Kludu braced himself, picking up grandmom’s basket of knitting and holding it in front of him as if that might protect him.

Klobo fumed. His breathing intensified and his eyes took on a fierce shade of red. Smoke was very definitely now curling up from his head, and also his fingertips. He seemed to grow a few inches as he crept toward Kludu. “Wizards don’t exist,” he whispered. “Magic is the stuff of children’s stories. It’s not real!” With that, a crackling fire leapt up in the fireplace, and there was a howling from the wind outside. Thunder shook the walls and Kludu dove for cover beneath the armchair, his tiny hairy hands folded over his head.

A moment passed in silence. Feeling rather silly indeed, Kludu crawled out to face his granddad, who seemed to be his normal size again. He wasn’t a wizard. Couldn’t possibly be. There had never been a halfling wizard and there never would be.

“I know there are lots and lots of stories about your old granddad, but don’t believe them.” Klobo was patting his pockets; his pipe had gone out. Kludu leaned his head to the side, stared at the pipe. The leaf within had been ablaze not a moment ago. It seemed such a silly and small thing to…

“OUCH!” Kludu yelped and pressed a hand to his forehead. There had been a great heat there for an instant, almost as if his brain had caught fire.

“Goodness, my boy, what’s wrong?”

“Sorry, I…” but Kludu found it very hard to focus on anything except the suddenly blazing embers of his granddad’s pipe.

The Screaming Comet

Pavowski2 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week is another Random Title challenge, which is always so much fun.

My title was “Screaming Comet,” for which I had a couple of ideas right away but none of them seemed to fit. I pondered on it for a few days before finally arriving at this one, which was at least influenced in its inception by Stephen King’s short story, The Jaunt.

I don’t know what it is with me and kids, but they’re having a run of bad luck in my stories of late. Nonetheless, I actually quite enjoy the idea behind this one and the society I started to build for it, even if … well. I guess I’ll just let you read it.

Here’s “The Screaming Comet,” at 1499 words.

 

The Screaming Comet

“…reaches over two thousand miles per hour before it leaves the tracks and turns skyward…”

A pencil jabs Brian in between the shoulder blades, and he spins around from his doodle to see his friend Jessica looking at him with big deer eyes. “My Gran is going on the Comet tomorrow,” she says, “isn’t your grandpa going, too?”

Brian nods proudly. “He doesn’t have to go for another three years, but my Grandma went last year, and he says he’s ready.” He puffs his chest out as much as is possible in the confine of his Edu-enforcer. “He’s showing me the train.”

“…achieving a top speed of over twenty-five thousand miles per hour as it delivers our Elders on their final voyage…”

Jessica stifles a snort. “Big deal. I saw the train last year.”

“And perhaps Mister Roberts can tell us,” Miss Remnand asks pointedly, as every head in the class snaps around to stare at Brian, “why the train is called The Screaming Comet?”

Brian whirls in his seat and his face darkens. He knows it’s something to do with the speed…

Eddie Verner shouts out, “Miss Remnand, I heard it was because everybody inside starts screaming as they go into orbit.”

“Nonsense, Eddie. Nobody would be able to hear anybody inside the train doing anything. No, the sound is a combination of the train breaking the sound barrier and the friction on the tracks…”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Brian silently thanks Eddie for saving him, even if Eddie is an idiot. The Comet carries people to the Great Beyond; nobody would scream because of that.

**********

Final departure will commence in t-minus twenty minutes.

As his grandfather points out the features of the train, Brian runs a few steps ahead, running his hand over the shiny vinyl seats, pressing his face to the big panoramic windows, staring at the sparkling array of digital displays and the wide-mouthed air vents that dot the aisles.

“Here we are,” Grandpa says, pointing to the aisle seat just a few rows from the back.

Brian plops into the seat, buckles the belt and starts kicking his legs. “Aw, why couldn’t they give you a window?”

The old man laughs, mirthless and empty. “Some of us just aren’t so lucky.”

Packs of people mill about, mostly silver-haired men and women moving quietly to their seats, a few adults giving hugs or listening as the elders whisper in their ears, a handful of kids like him moving about the car in wonderment. “Grandpa,” Brian says, his voice hushed, “Eddie Verner says they call it The Screaming Comet because the Elders scream when it leaves the station.”

Grandpa’s face creases with concern, and he sits next to the boy, squeezing his shoulder and mussing his hair. “Don’t listen to your friend. The Comet is the best gift our old world has ever given to people like me.”

“It looks really cool. I want to ride it someday.”

“Not for a long time, son.”

Brian nods to himself. “And Eddie’s not my friend. He’s stupid.”

**********

On the loading dock, a commotion has broken out — pushing and shoving and shouting — at the center of which is a gaunt, bald and wild-eyed Elder. His family can’t be found, and he’s waving an old knife around at anybody who gets  close. It’s only moments, though, before a tiny dart sprouts from the side of his neck and he collapses, drooling and babbling. A contingent of white-clad attendants shoulders through the crowd and ushers him onto the train.

*********

…no cause for alarm. All non-passengers, please exit the train at this time.

It’s orderly, but it’s chaos as the aisles jam with people evacuating the train at the announcement and the appearance of the drooling, nonsensical man being hauled into a seat. The attendants buckle him in as a sudden crowd of people surges past, seeking the exits.

Grandpa kneels next to Brian, his faraway, mist-veiled eyes piercing through the boy. “I love you, grandson. You take care.” And Brian feels himself yanked into a bone-crushing embrace. He thinks he hears the old man sobbing at his shoulder, but the moment Grandpa releases him, his wrinkled hands spin Brian around and point him toward the front of the train. In a heartbeat, Brian is lost in the close press of people emptying off the train. Grandpa dabs at his eyes and straps in.

*********

The initial stir has ceased, but now a general unease has settled over the loading dock, a foul miasma that the onlookers are breathing in. Nervous chatter breaks out here and there, then voices raised in argument, and the attendants as one cock their heads at the directive streaming in through their earpieces. They share a nod and then, as the last people debark the train, seal the doors. It’s seven minutes ahead of schedule, but they’re sending The Comet off early.

**********

The face of Grandpa’s dearly departed wife floats to the surface of his memory as a leaf across a pond. He steals a glance across the woman next to him — smiling in her sleep, hands clutching a weathered picture — and spies the onlookers. Some look angry, others anguished at being held back from the train by the outstretched arms, and in some cases, batons, of the attendants. Not supposed to be this way. Old fool on the dock ruined this nice moment for all of them. The thrusters begin to fire, one after another, at first sounding far away up by the engine, then growing closer and louder, until all is a dull roar muffled by the tin walls of the Comet, like a kidnapping victim screaming in a trunk.

It’s at that moment that Brian peeks his head out from underneath the seat in front of him. Sure he’s seeing things, Grandpa blinks his eyes again and again, until the boy speaks and dispels all hope that he was an illusion: “I’m stowing away, Grandpa!”

The elders are slow to react, and it’s hard to hear over the roar of the engines, but first Grandpa’s seatmate wakes up, then the pair across the aisle, and in moments the traincar is alive with shouting and protesting: “A kid… just a boy… where’d he come from… open the doors…” it all bleeds together in a growing torrent of disbelief and panic.

**********

The crowd on the docks is unruly now, some of them with tears streaming down their faces, some pointing furiously at the train. One attendant takes his eyes off the crowd for a moment and steals a glance at the Comet — sure enough, the Elders in there are pressed against the glass, banging on the windows and shouting soundlessly. Rare for it to go this way, and a shame, too. Better when they go with dignity, but it looks like it’ll be a Screaming Comet this year.

Then the locks disengage, the train lifts up on its hover-rails, and in the space of a breath the Comet winks away into the distance, a sound like shearing metal and a thousand voices in pain dissipating on the dock as it disappears.

*********

Brian watches, his eyes the size of bowling balls at the window as the houses fade to dots, the cities turn into a formless blur. The entire landscape resolves itself into one huge patch of green and blue as the Comet streaks into the upper atmosphere. The Elders, all their sound and fury spent and useless, sink back into their seats, some of them grasping Grandpa’s shoulder with heavy hands before they do. Some are crying. None of them will look at Brian.

Brian pulls himself away from the luminescent panorama and stares at the Elders. “Why are they crying?”

The words seem to tangle in Grandpa’s throat. “Because you’re not supposed to be here.”

“But I wanted to go to the Great Beyond with you.”

Grandpa wants to explain to the boy. But the sun is shrinking over the radiant blue curve of the earth. It won’t be long now. He chokes back tears and flashes the biggest smile he can manage at Brian. “Then let’s go together. Have you ever seen anything like that?” And he smiles and laughs with his grandson as the sun disappears from view, the last sunset they’ll ever see. And it’s such a marvelous sight, this final gift to the Elders, with the inky black of space behind and the infinity of sprawling starscapes ahead, that the Elders forget their rage and fury that Brian has to take this journey with them and they smile silently. The cabin fills with the boy’s innocent laughter as the vents release the numbing gas, and the passengers of the Screaming Comet drift off to sleep.

In the seconds that follow, the hatches on the Comet open and its contents are ejected into the void to begin their final journey into the Great Beyond, while the Comet begins its balletic descent back to the Earth.

All in One Night

Pavowski11 Comments

Chuck’s challenge for the week: Holiday Horror.

At first I was delighted by this challenge, but now I feel horrible about what I’ve written. I guess even in my jaded, irreverent heart, there are still some things that you just shouldn’t mess with.

That said, Santa takes a dark turn in this one. Spoiler Alert. It ain’t pretty.

 

All in One Night

By every rubric, Bucky Burkhalter was a naughty kid of the highest degree.

When the other kids cleaned up their act, starting after Halloween when parents began dropping Santa’s name, Bucky redoubled his efforts. He terrorized his teachers by leaving upturned tacks in their chairs and erasing their blackboards when they were out of the room. He harried his classmates with endless wedgies, noogies, spitballs to the back of the head, and slammings against lockers. He trapped stray cats in the neighborhood and tortured them, twisting their ears and lopping off the ends of their tails.

Bucky’s mom stayed later and later at work, and his dad stopped coming home at all. Which meant more time alone for Bucky to practice his reign of terror.

On Christmas Eve, while the other kids lay in their beds dreaming of sleds and wagons and video game systems, Bucky roamed the streets throwing eggs at cars, yanking icicle lights off of houses, and depositing dog turds in mailboxes. He arrived home just before midnight and found the lights on in the house. Mom was passed out upstairs, one hand still limply cradling a half-drunk bottle of Kentucky whiskey. Dad was gone for the fourth night in a row. But as he crept in through the rickety screen door and padded across the peeling linoleum to steal a beer from the fridge, Bucky’s heart froze in his throat. He smelled something. Through the haze of stale cigarette smoke and the lingering air of mildew and despair, the impossible aroma of cookies and peppermint tickled his nostrils. Somebody was here.

Bucky ducked back outside, wrapped his sweaty, stubby fingers around the Louisville Slugger he’d stolen from Bradley Allen, and stole into the house ready to swing for the fences. His mom didn’t cook. More likely some insufferable grandparent had come by to “rescue” him, like his dad’s mom had tried to do a year ago. (Mom threw a knife at her and then called the cops.) Stopping at the hallway to the living room, Bucky took a deep breath. Whoever it was was in there. Had a fire going. He stole a glance, but all he could see was a pair of big, shiny black boots propped up on the ottoman–dad’s threadbare, puce-colored armchair was turned away from the door, obscuring his view.

“You can come in, Bucky,” came a voice as deep and hearty as a bowl of beef stew on a cold night. “And you might as well put down that bat, too.”

Gobsmacked, Bucky let the bat fall from his fingers and wandered, dreamlike, into the room.

It was his living room, all right. Same old dusty room. Bare wooden floor. Frayed rug in front of the fireplace that hadn’t been used in ages, though now a fire crackled merrily there, throwing a jubilant light across the depressing furniture. Bucky gave the chair a wide berth as he passed it, and couldn’t keep his mouth from dropping open as he beheld the man in a bright red suit sitting there, sipping from a mug with his white-gloved hands, the froth of some steaming beverage caking his prodigious mustache under his ruddy cheeks.

Santa Claus.

It was every kid’s dream, even Bucky’s, and even though every instinct in his head told him that this was all wrong–this wasn’t supposed to happen, you aren’t just supposed to walk into your living room and see Santa Claus–he went all gibbery and started fawning anyway

“Santa Claus? It’s really you?”

“Sure as snow,” the old man replied with a wink.

“What are you–” Bucky started to ask, but realized that he was probably in trouble. He’d been a bit naughty lately. He chafed at the word “naughty” in his mind but couldn’t help thinking it anyway. This was Santa. He clammed up.

Santa seemed to sense his disquiet. He offered Bucky a plate from the side table, mounded high with the most aromatic chocolate chip cookies he’d ever smelled. “Help yourself, son.”

Gratefully, Bucky stuffed a cookie in his mouth and chewed. It tasted even better than it smelled, and his teeth grew sticky with chocolate.

With a grandfatherly smile, Santa sat back and folded his hands across his belly. “Now, then. I imagine by now you’ve done some thinking, and you must know that you’re on the naughty list.”

Bucky’s eyes darted around the room. The cookie felt like it had turned to cement in his mouth; he swallowed it down like a pill and gave a somber nod, his head inclined toward the floor.

Santa huffed out his mustache and removed his spectacles, folding them in one gloved hand. “I see everything, you know. Got it all up here.” With his other hand he tapped at his temple, just below the fuzzy band of his hat. “Mind like a trap, even after all these years.”

Bucky grinned a little, the corners of his freckly cheeks pulling up, even though he felt stupid and ashamed. Santa was real, really real, and he’d been bad. Worse than bad. He’d been awful.

A tear squeezed itself out of Bucky’s evil little eyes, and in a flash Santa popped up from the chair, knelt by the boy, and caught it on a gloved finger. “Hey, there. Listen to me, son. I know you’ve had a rough time of it. Your mother and father have been on my list for years, and, well, they’ll probably stay that way. And you, just a kid. Mom’s drunk herself half to death upstairs and your dad’s… well. He’s not here, is he? And you didn’t know what to do about it, and you lashed out. Isn’t that right?”

Bucky was choking back sobs now, tears staining his cheeks. He nodded, mute.

The old man clucked his tongue, stood, and taking Bucky by the shoulders, straightened him up to look him in the eye. “Let’s go for a ride, eh?” And, wrapping his arm around Bucky, walked him toward the fireplace. Bucky gave Santa one nervous look, but Santa just chuckled, ducked into the fireplace, and with a whoosh they were standing on the roof, surrounded by a gaggle of reindeer, lazily pawing at the uneven shingles.

And the sleigh. Oh, the sleigh. Fire-engine red and almost glowing in the moonlight, Bucky couldn’t help but run toward it. He stopped, laying one hand upon its edge, and cast a glance back at Santa, who gave him that grandfatherly grin again and motioned with his hand. Go ahead. It was all the encouragement Bucky needed. He clambered into the smooth, leathery seat. The sleigh seemed to purr as he did so, as if it had been waiting for him. The reindeer whickered nervously, and Santa hopped in beside him, taking the reins in his hand.

“Your house was my last stop in town,” Santa explained with a twinkle in his eye. “We’re off. Hyah!” And with a crack of the reins, the reindeer soared off into the night, tugging the sleigh along in their wake. The cold wind whistled in Bucky’s hair, and the lights of town dwindled to pinpricks in the dark.

For a while, Santa said nothing. Billy thought he saw the old man’s eyes watering, but thought it must have been the wind.

“Santa, can I ask you something?”

Santa looked at the boy and wiped at his eyes. “Sure, son. We have some time.”

“How do you visit all the houses in the world, all in one night?”

Santa exhaled heavily, and fixed his gaze on the bouncing flanks of the reindeer.

“It’s magic, right?”

At that, Santa chuckled. “Of a sort, Bucky. Magic of a sort.”

“Is it the reindeer?”

The old man shook his head. “The reindeer are very dear to me, and they have a magic of their own. And the elves have magic, too. Even I have a bit of magic. Flying, seeing into the hearts of children… those are neat little magic tricks. But to visit every house in the world in just one night?” Santa stared at Bucky now, his eyes suddenly cold and far away. “No, that’s outside the bounds of the laws of this world. That requires another kind of magic altogether.”

Santa got quiet again, and Bucky felt himself growing nervous. If Santa was uneasy about something, shouldn’t he be worried?

Almost to himself, Santa began to mumble. “…hate it when they do this. Why do they have to ask…” Then with frightening urgency, Santa grabbed Bucky by the arm. “Look. I want you to know something. It’s not your fault you’re on the naughty list. Your parents gave you a raw deal, and nobody in your life has thought twice about you for a long, long time. But I’m not here to save you.”

Bucky yanked his arm away, and Santa let him go, but there was nothing else Bucky could do, nowhere for him to go. All around them was the emptiness of the endless night, and the ground, thousands of feet below. “I’m sorry, Bucky,” Santa continued, and now there were definitely tears creeping into his eyes. “I really am. But magic has a price, and this sleigh is driven by the worst magic I’ve ever known.”

The wind seemed to go quiet, then, as Santa pulled on a lever set in the floor of the sleigh. A trapdoor opened under Bucky’s feet: a gap through which Bucky felt he should have seen the lights of land far below, but which only contained a blackness blacker than the inside of his eyelids. A horrid chorus of disembodied, agonized voices issued from the hole. For an instant, Bucky thought about jumping out of the sleigh and taking his chances with the fall, but before he could move, a thick, grasping tentacle lanced out of the void within the sleigh and entangled his ankle in a death grip. He screamed and grabbed onto Santa’s arm.

“I’m sorry, Bucky,” Santa cried. “It takes one every year. I give toys to all the rest of the children in the world to make up for it.”

Bucky’s fingernails sought purchase on Santa’s red velveteen sleeve, snarling and snagging the fabric. He’d have to have his wife mend it again. But the beast had the boy now, dragging him slowly into the void in the heart of the sleigh. With a howl, the boy disappeared and the hatch hissed shut, and all was silence in the stratosphere but for the tinkling of the sleigh bells on the reindeer harness.

Santa dabbed at his eyes and ground his teeth as time and space twisted themselves around the sleigh. “On, Dasher!” he called, as the sleigh streaked through the night.

Lettuce Be

Pavowski6 Comments

Chuck’s Challenge of the week: The Stock Photo challenge.

Mine is the photo you see below. The story follows. I fear the end is a little abrupt, but it was really tough keeping this one from running away with me. You know. Like kudzu growing out of control.

VineMan

Lettuce Be

“Hey, Hoskins, leave ‘im alone,” Nelson said.

Hoskins broke off sprinkling water on Green’s head and guffawed loudly; the pun never got old.

Green2378 ruffled his foliage and turned to the men slowly, the way all Greens do, and regarded them indifferently. A Green can’t look at you–not really–but it’s still disconcerting to feel those eyeless stalks straining in your direction. His (all Greens are considered male; Dr. Feingarten, who created the Proto-Greens, could not abide calling them “it”s and never thought to call them “she”s) thin, sinewy dendritic appendages stretched out toward Hoskins.

Green2378 only wanted to communicate, but Hoskins pulled away with a jerk, tripping over his feet and spilling coffee on his rumpled shirtfront. Nelson laughed and held out a hand, allowing Green’s thin spiraling vine-hands to rope around his fingers and slide across his palm. Hoskins felt his stomach turn just watching, but Nelson suppressed a girlish giggle.

“How can you let that thing touch you?” Hoskins asked.

“It tickles,” Nelson said simply. “Kinda like holding a snake. Or maybe a lot of snakes.”

“Creeps me out.”

Nelson shook his head and thought into his fingers, the way the Committee on Green-Human Relations had recommended. “He means no harm, Greenie.”

Green2378 twitched his encephalic bundle, and his leaves quaked with understanding. His vines traced a graceful pattern on Nelson’s hand and Nelson heard a tiny whisper in his head: friends?

Nelson grinned and spoke aloud, folding his other hand over the first and allowing the vines to encircle them both. “Yeah. He’s a friend.”

Hoskins’s face twisted. “I ain’t that thing’s friend.”

“Oh, lighten up. No, not you, Green.”

Hoskins shook his head. “Crime against nature, you ask me. It’s bad enough they walk and talk. Why do they have to cram them into suits?”

Nelson assumed that know-it-all tone he reserved for talking about economic trends and inflation fluctuations. “Studies show that people react more favorably to the Greens when they appear more human.”

Green2378 appeared to be looking back and forth between the two of them. His stalks coiled and uncoiled in what looked like a nervous gesture, not that Greens could feel nerves. “More human,” Hoskins muttered. The Greens only looked more bizarre wearing clothes, to his mind. Green2378 spilled out of a smart-looking pinstriped suit with a neatly pressed shirt and immaculate tie, and looked a good bit sharper than Hoskins did, despite being a sentient tangle of vines.

“Have you ever spoken to one? I mean properly spoken?” Keeping one hand in contact with Greens’ tendrils, Nelson reached out for Hoskins, who shied away with a sneer.

“Come on,” Nelson insisted. “What’s the harm?”

Hoskins’s lip curled, but he couldn’t deny his curiosity. It was, after all, just a plant. What could be the harm? He reached out his hand and suppressed a shudder as Green2378 laid first a few leaves, then a few tendrils, on his fingertips.

Then a whisper bloomed in the back of his mind, a soft insistent voice, like the wind in the trees, though he couldn’t make out any words.

“Go on,” Nelson urged, “say something.”

“…Hi,” Hoskins managed, squinting his eyes shut. The vines were encircling his fingers like dried-out octopus legs. It tickled a little bit, but it wasn’t all that bad.

Green2378 was in love. The taste of Hoskins’s skin was like water and sunlight and rich, loamy soil. He tried to tell Hoskins as much, but his thoughts became a tangle.

Hoskins cracked an eye. Green2378 quivered before him, whispering madly in Hoskins’s thoughts, the words indistinguishable. Then Green2378 reached out another leafy appendage for Hoskins’s hand, and in a flash the vines enveloped him to the wrist.

Hoskins squeaked out a surprised yell and yanked his hands back, rubbing them furiously together as if to scrub them clean. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.

“I think he likes you,” Nelson said, snickering a little.

“Keep him away from me,” Hoskins said, and stormed off.

Nelson shrugged at Green2378 by way of apology. “Sorry, Greenie. He just needs to warm up to you.”

Hoskins finished his shift that day trying not to think too much about the Greens, but always feeling like he saw 2378 out of the corner of his eye.

*****

That night Hoskins awoke in a cold sweat; he’d dreamt that he was drowning in tangling vines that pulled him downward forever, strangling and choking him as they bore him into an infinite dark.

Outside the window, the trees seemed to loom a little closer to his windows. Hoskins got out of bed to look, and sure enough, down by his front walk, he saw Green2378, still wearing his pinstriped suit, spilling over and merging with the rosebushes.

Hoskins flew into a panic. He called the police and shouted obscenities at the Green from his window, but it didn’t matter. The police had never arrested a Green before and they weren’t about to start now; no Green had ever shown any sign of malice or intent to harm. They didn’t have the brain capacity. No, they assured Hoskins that Green2378 had simply gotten lost on his way home. They told him not to think any more about it. Ignoring it proved troublesome, though, when Green2378 was back again the next night, and the next.

Hoskins was going slowly out of his mind. Green2378 was always there at work, almost stalking him. The weeds were overtaking his lawn and growths of kudzu were beginning to envelop his house, but the police wouldn’t do anything about Green2378. They thought the idea of arresting a plant was funny.

Hoskins had had enough. The next night, he saw Green2378 on his lawn again and invited him in for a cool drink of water. Green2378 greedily accepted, not knowing that Hoskins had laced the drink with enough herbicide to clear a football field. Hoskins tossed the limp pile of leaves on the refuse pile in his backyard and kept the suit for himself.