Tag: chuck wendig

One Award

Pavowski4 Comments

This week’s challenge from Chuck:  Five Words.  In short, write a short story of under 1000 words using 5 words out of a list of 10.  I used just over 800, but managed to squeeze in six of the words.
I started this one out intending to write something a little happier.  WHY CAN’T I WRITE A HAPPY SHORT STORY.
Anyway, here goes.
One Award
A light glinted in the hermit’s cave atop the cliff, hazy in the mist of the salt spray off the ocean. It was the third time Henry had seen the light this week.  His bedroom window, at the back of his house just across the inlet from Marbler’s Bluff, afforded him a perfect line of sight on the nook: a craggy opening carved into the side of the cliff face a hundred feet below the trail that led to the peak, and a hundred feet above the sharktooth rocks pulverizing the surf.

Henry had visited the cave again and again as a child, leading secret adventures up there.  He’d follow the nigh-invisible dental floss path down to the cave and pretend to be a pirate or a bandit while his lazy hound dog watched with weary eyes.  He chuckled to himself; he had probably left a stash of lollipops in the box he’d buried in the back.

And now, there was a light twinkling up there.  Almost like a flashlight winking at him from a neighbor’s window in secret code, but there was no message hidden in its luminous semaphore.  At least not one that he could decipher.  He wondered if anybody else even knew about the cave at all.  It didn’t seem likely.

His parents had bought the house just before he’d been born, an enviable little split-level right on the waterfront, with nothing around it for a mile.  There had been other houses, once, but their supports were cracked and sagging and one by one they had tumbled to the earth.  This house, too, would not last long — it already had deep fissures in the foundation, caused by shifting topsoil or something like that, they’d said — but he couldn’t bring himself to leave it.  He’d inherited the house when his parents had heart attacks within two years of one another, leaving him alone at the age of twenty-three.  Jobless and broke, it had seemed to him a fortuitous misfortune, and he had moved back to his childhood home after only five years away.  For twenty years since, he’d stayed here, never thinking of leaving.  The town was nice enough; sleepy, dull, safe.  Just what he’d needed after his years in the field.

As the sun descended, the flashing of the light grew less frequent and finally stopped altogether.  Perhaps he’d only imagined it.  He made his rounds of the house, checked all the doors and windows, and let himself drop off to sleep.

Next day, his thoughts wandered up to the cave once more, to the times he’d used it to hide from bullies, to hide from his parents, to hide from his friends.  In retrospect, it was easy to see how the troubles he’d hidden from were no different from anybody else’s, but like they do for all kids, the troubles had seemed all encompassing to him at the time.  That cave had been his sanctuary, his hideout, his refuge.
At twilight, the twinkling started again, beckoning, signaling, like runway lights on a starless night.

At daybreak, he packed a bag for a hike and set off for the old cave.  The whooshing crash of the waves on the rocks accompanied him all the way to the summit, and the old familiar vertigo seized him as he wended his way down the craggy path to the cave.  It was deserted, of course.  No sign of anybody having been there in years.  Just some old brittle bits of driftwood, bleached as whalebone, littering the craggy recesses.  Henry collected a few twigs and lit a fire, felt the warmth seep into his face and his hands as he traveled back in his mind to a time before he’d known about evil, before he’d known about death and guns and landmines and night attacks and suicide bombers and the horror of making a five year old into an orphan right in his own living room.  Before he’d forgotten how to smile.  He exhaled thickly, the chemicals swirling as they always would in his lungs.  He massaged the shrapnel scar in his side.

He left his pack and walked to the mouth of the cave.  There, to the right of his shoulder — about as high as he would have been able to reach at the age of 11 — hanging on a tiny outcrop, was the medal he’d won for “Outstanding Performance” in his youth league soccer team, the only award he’d ever received.  Somehow it had remained shielded from the elements and, in the last moments before sundown, reflected a tiny beam of light down toward his window.

In the distance, he could see his house, the orange glow of flames behind the downstairs windows, fingers of smoke prying their way out around the panes.  Henry took off his shoes and his shirt and stood with his toes hanging out over the sharks’ teeth a hundred feet below.  They had never looked so inviting.  The sun’s light mingled with the mist collecting on his face, warming and cooling him in the same instant.  He smiled.

The First Wave

Pavowski10 Comments

I approached this week’s Flash Fiction Challenge from Chuck with a healthy dose of self-doubt.  I tend to be a bit long-winded when I write, and the limitation of 1000 words spread out into 10 chapters felt tailor-made to put the screws to my brain.  I pondered on it, meditated on it, kicked around about four or five different story ideas before finally arriving at one I liked and then mutating it into something horrifying.

Honestly, I don’t know if my short stories are trending dark because I’m writing comedy or if I wanted to write comedy because I’ve got these dark stories bubbling up.  One way or another, this one’s probably the darkest yet, and I don’t really know what to make of it except to let you know that this is all artifice and is probably the product of too many crime procedurals and alien movies.

I wasn’t sure about the first person viewpoint, but I didn’t know how else to write it.

In fact I’m not sure about the story as a whole.  I just don’t know if it works.  But this blog is not about what works, it’s about THE WORK.  So here’s the latest.  Like all my short stories thus far, it’s edited only a little bit (mostly to get down to the word limit).  If you’re out there, let me know what you think.

Coming in at 1000 words on the nose:

The First Wave

1.

Things aren’t supposed to happen like this.

I’m a scout, not a soldier, but the link has been silent so long that they must think I’m dead or lost.

It’s been almost eleven months since I was last contacted.  The feeling is unmistakable.  A tingling at the back of the neck, a rush of blood to the head, and then a ringing in the ears that means a transmission is coming.  The body becomes a lightning rod for sensation, and underneath the sensory rush that follows, the messages can be heard.

So when my skin tingles while I’m waiting in line at the Starbucks to sample my two hundred thirty – third flavor/texture combination, I know in an instant that I’m not forgotten, that today may be the day it begins.

But something’s wrong.  The waitress notices me. Looks at me for half a second too long, the way you look at a misspelled sign. You know what it’s supposed to say, what it should look like, but it’s wrong, and you pause to process it.  She smiles to cover it – very cagey – but I know what she saw.

Maybe she doesn’t know, though, so I ask for her phone number and she gives it to me, scribbling it artlessly on my coffee sleeve.  I return her empty smile and beat it out of there, cursing myself.  She distracted me, and I missed the transmission.  I can only hope they’ll send it again.

2.

Back home I scan all the frequencies and search my residence for signs of contact, but come up empty. The receptors are as blank as they’ve been for months, their green glowing grids blipping ceaselessly.  Maybe the shiver was a false alarm.

But if that’s so, what did she see?

3.

A tap at the window wakes me up.   I fly to the sill and throw it open, and the freezing air smashes me in the face. No signs of life on the ledge or on the street below. I don’t look up; never up.  If I look up and they’re there, then it’s over. If I look and there’s nothing, it only reminds me I’m alone.

I’m so tired from loneliness.  Tomorrow I’ll call that waitress, even though I’ll probably have to kill her.

4.

Somebody was here last night.  Whoever it was took something or…  moved something or…  I don’t know what it is, but there’s a wrongness here, pressing outward against the walls, an over-inflated balloon ready to burst. I tear the apartment to pieces looking for what’s lost but it’s gone, stolen, maybe destroyed.

I remember that I have to call that waitress. She can’t see my place like this – it looks like a lunatic lives here. I methodically put everything back exactly the way it was before I lost it.  I even put the dirty dishes back on the table.  It only takes me three hours.

5.

We met for sandwiches. I asked why she didn’t want to meet for coffee like normal humans do and she looked at me like I was stupid. I’m not stupid; just because you serve coffee doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a coffee. I think she thought I was joking because she laughed, her pretty cheeks stretching back the corners of her mouth.

She knows.

6.

When she left me, the transmission came through clear as day. The time is not right. She cannot interfere. I tried to question them, but as ever, my words spiraled out into the ether, and no further directions were forthcoming.  I was, as always, on my own.

7.

It’s unsettling how little people look out for their own safety.  Lock the front doors, lock the windows, and call it a night.  But my waitress doesn’t lock her balcony door, and she only lives on the 7th floor.  A quick shin up the fire escape, a shimmy along the ledge to her window, and I’m with her.  Granted, most people wouldn’t risk their necks on this three-inch concrete outcrop, but thoughts of my own mortality were taken from me long ago.

It smells of her, and it smells of coffee, and I’m overcome by sadness and doubt.  In a few moments, she’ll be gone; all that she is and was and ever might be will be erased.  For a long moment I pause at her bedroom door, my hand slick on the handle, the blade humming in my pocket.

The act sickens me.  I’m on her before she’s even awake, the silver sings across her throat, and my hands clamp down on her windpipe as the life sprays out.  In seconds, she’s gone, but I stay there, holding her, hyperventilating.

The parasites ooze out of my ears and flow down my arms in a grey-green river, mingling with the blood and rushing in through the smile in her neck.  The horrible sucking sound of their ingress turns my stomach until I hear it, the transmission again, whispering under the tumult  in my brain.

And I understand.  I’m not scouting for the first wave.  I am the first wave.  It begins with me.

8.

Giddy with hope and purpose, I convey her body delicately out onto the balcony, where she will find the moonlight that she needs.  I stay with her until the sun is almost up, then I leave.  She’ll need some time.

9.

The next day, she is back at work.  I order number two hundred thirty-four, and she smiles at me knowingly.  They are hard at work in her.  I smile back and drink my coffee thoughtfully.  The sweetness is almost too much to bear.

10.

I step outside and feel the sun on my shoulders.  I look up, for the first time in a lifetime.  They’re not up there.  But I’m not alone anymore.

A woman, engrossed in her phone conversation, bumps me, dropping her armload of papers.  I help her pick them up, but when I hand them back to her, she looks at me for a little too long.  I feel my neck start to tingle.