Tag: dark

Neon Carrots

Pavowski9 Comments

 

Aaand this one brings me firmly back into the wonderful wacky territory of WTF.

Chuck’s challenge this week is a story using a color in the title.  So I went to my trusty crayon box (okay, I went to Crayola.com) and started digging.  I was initially drawn to such fancy and whimsical colors as crimson and cerulean, periwinkle and chartreuse, but for some reason, when I saw the color “Neon Carrot,” my brain grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go, like a toddler grabbing hold of my leg hair.  (What, your toddler has never grabbed onto your leg hair?  LUCKY.)

So here’s “Neon Carrots,” a tale of vindication for every child who’s ever been a little bit leery of eating his vegetables.  I tried out a bit of a different style in this one: almost fairy-taleish.  Not sure if it reads or not.  Let me know what you think.

 

Neon Carrots

Zelda poked at a carrot, imagining that it jumped a little at the prick of her fork.

Bryan lifted a forkful of carrots and revered them under the fluorescent light.  “What’s with these carrots, mom?”

Mother gave a ceremonious clearing of her throat and smiled primly at him.  “They’re the newest thing.  I saw them in the grocery store this morning, and it was as if they were begging to be eaten.  I just had to try them!”

Father winked at Bryan and stuffed a bit of pot roast into his mouth.  “She just can’t help herself, your mother.  Sees something bright and shiny and it pulls her right in.”

“Well, aren’t they something special?”  She grabbed the pot and pulled it closer; the phosphorescent goop within illuminating her face from below like a campfire storyteller’s flashlight.  The orangey-yellow glow suffused her features and lent her a slightly sickly quality.  “Neon carrots.  Isn’t science incredible?”

Bryan and Zelda shared a look of mutual misery.  Zelda pushed her plate away.  “I don’t like them.”

“You haven’t tried them, dear.”

“I don’t have to try them.  They’re disgusting.”

Father leveled a steely eye at her.  “Eat your carrots, Z.”

“What about Bryan?”

“Bryan, too.”

Bryan scowled and elbowed her under the table.  “Thanks a lot, barf-bag.”

“Eat,” said father, in a tone which brooked no further argument.

Revolted, Zelda speared a slice of carrot and brought it to her mouth, pausing to take a deep breath first.  Like most of mother’s cooking, it was overcooked and undersalted, the end result being a pasty tasteless mass in her mouth.

Mother beamed.  “You can just taste the enzymes, can’t you?  They cross-germinated these carrots with bioluminescent kelp from the deepest part of the ocean to increase their nutritional value.  The glow is just a neat side effect.  Aren’t they fun?”

Bryan chewed thoughtfully before nodding.  “They’re not bad.”

Father winked at him.  “That’s the spirit.  Zelda, what do you think?”

Zelda swallowed.  They actually weren’t all that bad.  In fact, she suddenly felt compelled to try another bite, which she did.  She narrowed her eyes and bobbed her head up and down as the earthy undertones of the root, unnoticed at first, began to burst on her tongue.  She cleaned her plate and even asked for more carrots; mother grinned knowingly at father and spooned her another heaping helping.

They didn’t have the neon carrots again for a week, but in the meantime, mother brought home luminous squash and lustrous watercress, the latest genetically modified offerings infused with deepsea kelp and released by the Kane Farmers’ Association.  The children devoured their portions each more heartily than the last, with a zeal and excitement they had never shown for their food before.  Father became suspicious; he’d never known the kids to care so much about nutrition before.  Mother was just happy they were eating their vegetables.

*****

A week passed, and one afternoon while Zelda was playing with her dolls, she looked out the window and saw Bryan digging in the backyard like a crazed dog.  She dropped her princess and ran outside.  Bryan didn’t even look at her, he just kept scrabbling at the earth with mud-crusted nails, throwing handfuls of dirt and rocks over his shoulder.  His skin was oranger than usual, but she attributed that to the clay dust hanging in the air.  “Help me dig,” he insisted.

Zelda wanted to ask, “for what,” but she realized that Bryan’s digging wasn’t so strange, and in fact she felt like digging in the ground might not be such a bad idea herself.  They worked for the better part of an hour — neither of them thought to get shovels, and the feel of the raw earth under her fingernails oddly comforted her — and in the end had dug a little trench, two feet deep and three feet across.  Wordlessly, they nodded to each other, removed their shoes, stepped into the ditch, and began to cover themselves over with dirt — first the feet, then the ankles, then the calves.  The close, damp cold of the earth felt right around her toes.  They stood there, arms flat at their sides and chins upturned toward the sun, for a full hour before Father got home from work and asked them what they were up to.

“We’re neon carrots!” Bryan called, his face shining in the fading evening sun.

“So you are, so you are,” Father laughed.  “Come on inside.  Your mom’s picked up some incandescent cauliflower to go with the lamb chops.”

*****

During his bath, Mother noticed a tiny leaf on a tinier green stem just above Bryan’s ear.  She plucked it out, assuming he’d rolled in some grass, but Bryan began to howl and thrash in pain and could not be quieted again until mother agreed to give him another helping of carrots at dinnertime.

As they sat down, Zelda brushed her hair back behind her ear, deliberately showing him the tiny sprout at the nape of her neck.  “It’ll grow back,” she whispered.

Bryan wiped his eyes and grinned at her.

*****

Some nights later, signaled perhaps by the moon or a change in the weather, they met in the yard again to dig their ditches: deeper this time and faster, their bleeding fingers seeking the depth and the quiet and the dark of the earth, their vegetated brains numb to the pain.  As they stood in the earth with just the creeping tendrils of root and branch peeking up from the tops of their heads, they smiled at each other before entombing themselves in the ground until the harvest.

The bioluminescent produce was pulled from shelves a few days later with no explanation, and the Kane Farmers’ Association vanished like a thief in the night.

Mother and Father were upset when they disappeared, but  pleasantly surprised at the newfound bounty of neon carrots sprouting in the backyard.  Soon, Mother was pregnant again, and she was positively glowing.

Powdered Chaos

Pavowski4 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week:  Infocomm Inventory.  This one really called to me because I enjoyed the heck out of these games back when I was a young’un.  That said, squeezing eight items from a grab bag into a single story of only 2000 words is not an easy task.

My list of items was: a crucifix, a jade figurine, a soccer ball, an ionic diffusion rasp (!), a veil, a coin, a pearl necklace, a manuscript, and Chaos (capital letters included).  That’s right, one of my items was CHAOS.

Anyway, another dark one, and my apologies if it doesn’t hold together as well as I thought it did — I have been on some pretty serious painkillers for the past forty-eight hours.  They may have affected my judgment and / or creativity and / or ability to tell if what I’m writing is any good or utter crap.

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Bound Howler

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Chuck’s challenge this week:  Subgenres.

This one’s a bit longer than most, but I think it’s worth it.  That in mind, I won’t beleaguer you with a drawn out explanation, I’ll just let the story speak for itself.

 

 

Bound Howler

*****

Trina threw down an armload of ropes and a sturdy length of chain on Ark’s counter, drawing a hearty laugh from the proprietor.  He leaned his smudged elbows on the smudged oak and leered at her.

“And what on earth are y’doin with all that, then?”  His eyes traced a long slow route down her blouse and her skirt before arriving, much too late, back up at her face.  She wasn’t the prettiest girl in the village by any stretch, but she wasn’t the ugliest, either.  He’d certainly had worse.

“Not sure if that’s any of your concern, Mister Ark.”  She, on the other hand, stared fixedly into his eyes, she had no use for the rest of him.

Ark spat.  “My supplies, my concern.”

Trina sighed and leaned in toward him across the countertop.  Again, his eyes strayed south; she wasn’t above using what wiles she had to her advantage.  “Storm last night.  Spooked my horses.  They broke their gate and scattered all over MacLaren’s land.  I need to secure the gate,” she nodded at the chain, “and throw together some bridles til I can have proper ones made,” she nodded at the rope.

Ark’s eyes fell on the bandage just above her left elbow; she’d tried to conceal it with her sleeve.  “What happened there?”

She yanked her sleeve back down, covering the dressing.  “Snagged it on a nasty tree branch.  Chasing after the horses.”

His eyes began creeping down her body again.  “So, how do you plan to –”

“I’ve got coin, you lout.”

Transaction completed, she rushed home.  The darkening sky was all the sign that the village needed to begin closing up early; it was already a full moon, and likely to storm again besides.  Storefronts were being closed up and bolted shut, horses tied a little more securely in their stables, children hurried inside over their whines of protest.  As she crested the little hill before her squat stone house, Trina paused next to the perfectly intact stable door; all her horses were completely undisturbed.  She shifted the ropes and chain on her shoulder and moved on toward her house as the first drops of rain began to fall.Read More »

Ornithoscillation

Pavowski5 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week:  The Opening Line Challenge.  I used the opening line posited by a member called, simply, Nikki.

This was a fun one, and not nearly so dark as some of my other flash fiction.  But still pretty weird.

1000 words exactly.  Enjoy!  As always, I welcome feedback and comments if you’re out there reading.

 

Ornithoscillation

There was a dead bird on the porch again.

When the first one had shown up, Gerald thought that the family tomcat had simply started bringing him gifts again.  Trouble was, the second day there was another, and the day after that there were two, and tubby little Snuggles had never been much of a hunter.

Flummoxed, Gerald had called Animal Control.  The man who answered the call had poked around the property for thirty minutes, inspected the crawl space, and stuck his nose under some of the bushes before telling him that he had no idea what was causing the deaths.

On the Monday that followed (and the eighth bird) Gerald had bagged a few of them up and taken them down to the University, where a raccoon-eyed grad student named Samir met him at the veterinary building and took them in for testing.  Tuesday arrived (birds nine and ten) and Samir called back to say that physically the birds showed no signs of illness or trauma.  They certainly hadn’t been killed by any cat.

Now, Wednesday.  Bird number eleven.  Burying them had gotten too tedious, not to mention all the unsightly little patches of dirt on his immaculate lawn in back of the house, so Gerald took a shovel and dumped it in the corrugated trash can next to five of its little feathered friends.

That night, in his dreams, Gerald heard the sound of a deep humming.  It penetrated the walls of his mind, it reverberated behind his eyes, it pulsed deep in the soft tissues of his brain.  He woke to a ringing in his ears.  The clock read 2:30.  A disoriented minute followed, in which he realized that the ringing was outside his head, not inside it.  He followed it, to the bedroom door, down the hallway, to his son’s room.  His son, twelve years old, fascinated with trains and clocks and electric things.  A dim light shone underneath the doorway, brilliant against the dark of the night.  Gerald cracked the door, making as little noise as he could, planned to see little Simon snoring away, tuck him in, and return to bed.  Instead, he saw Simon silhouetted against the tiny desk in the room, hunched over the makeshift desk of milk crates and plywood, earphones clamped to the sides of his head, scribbling madly on a notepad while he fiddled with the dial of a radio with the other, twisting it this way and that, a lunatic safecracker dialing until his fingers bled.

“Si,” Gerald whispered, but Simon did not waver in his work.  “Simon!”

Simon stopped, but not because he heard Gerald: the noise-canceling headphones made that nigh impossible.  No, he had stopped because he had heard something.  A phantom wavelength, a rogue echo of a noise which should not have been there.  It had only been there for a moment, an infinitesimal crackle of static in a sea of white noise, but it was there.  He stopped writing, craned his neck, and twisted the dial back in the other direction.  There, again, and gone, just as quickly.  He focused his entire being on the noise, gripped the dial as delicately as his clumsy adolescent fingers would allow, and ticked it by the tiniest of degrees back toward the noise.

Gerald had crept up behind Simon, his hand outstretched to shake his boy’s shoulder, when Simon found the frequency, and this time he held it, letting go of the dial as if it might shatter.  Behind him, his father clutched at his head as a lance of sound seared his ears and burned his vision hot-white.  He fell to his knees, and the noise was gone.  Simon, still oblivious, tapped and banged at his receiver, checked his notes and began to spin the dial again, chasing the lost frequency like a rabbit into the brush.

A thump at the front door.  Fatherly instinct pushed all else aside and Gerald dashed downstairs, stopping at the side door to the garage to grab a worn and polished Louisville Slugger off the wall.  He crept to the door and peered through the keyhole.  Nothing.  Flexing his fingers on the bat, he unlocked the door with his free hand, stepped back from it, and used the end of the bat to shove it open wide.  Nobody there.  He stepped out, in bare feet and boxer shorts, ready to swing for the fence at the sight of anything moving.

Squish.

He jumped back in horror.  Another goddamned bird.  This one had hit the door so hard its neck was bent in the wrong direction, as if it had been built of Legos and put together backwards.

Then it clicked.  Simon had brought his science project about radio frequencies home from school the night before the first bird showed up.  Something about how sound frequencies, properly amplified and directed, could alter living tissue.  Gerald hadn’t really paid it that much attention — it was a sixth grade science project, for god’s sake — but Simon had been engrossed.  Obsessed.

Breaking out in a cold sweat, Gerald ran back upstairs, taking them two at a time.  “Simon?” He called, rounding the corner into Simon’s room — where the boy jumped in circles, pumping his fist and shouting, the headphones still clamped to his ears.  Gerald yanked them off.  “Stop it!  You’ve killed them!”  And if the sound had killed all those birds…

But Gerald caught a glimpse of the radio equipment, as Simon stared at him, open-mouthed.  It wasn’t a receiver.  It was a transmitter.

“Dad,” Simon said, tugging at his sleeve, “I’m not killing them.  I’m saving them.”  Simon pointed to the window.

With trepidation, Gerald peered out the window.  Something had set off the motion sensor in the driveway.  The light was on; he saw a cloud of birds spilling from the trash can and from his lawn like swarming bees, twisting and writhing as one like some great dark winged beast, spiraling out of the light and ascending into the darkness.