Tag: Flash Fiction

There are Things in the Well

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I’m in just under the wire for this week’s flash fiction challenge.

Chuck’s challenge for the week:  The beginning of a story.  With no further guidance than that, I foundered for a while before settling on this.  I can only imagine that the challenge for this week will be to complete the story started by another writer, so I wanted to make sure there’s lots of room for interpretation while still setting a mood, should anybody end up finishing this one.  This beginning certainly makes me uncomfortable, so I guess it’s a success, at that.

 

There Are Things in the Well

“Here she comes, Elvy.”

Elvert crunched on a handful of candy and shaded his eyes against the sun.  “New girl?”

Trom kicked at a snail and nodded toward the twig of a girl walking down the dirt road about fifty yards distant.  “Leza, I think.”

The stones of the well were cool against his back, and in the sweltering humidity he was reluctant to leave them behind.  Still, she’d only be new in town for so long.  He stood and stretched and spit his lime candy into the well, and jogged off to intercept her, with Trom following like a hungry cat in his wake.

“Leez!” Elvert called when he was close enough to make out the pattern on her backpack.  The new girl said nothing, just quickened her pace.

“Hey, Leez!”  Trom shouted.

She folded her arms and bowed her head, stringy blond hair falling in a curtain across her face.  The boys fell into step beside her while she did her best to ignore them.  They dogged her steps, staring at her, until she felt uncomfortable enough to speak.  “It’s Leza.”

“You’re new here, ain’t ya?”  Elvert spit a pink gob on the grass next to the road.

Leza gave the tiniest of nods.  Trom stepped in front of her and she had to pull up short, hugging her notebook to her chest.  He folded his arms and laughed.  “You don’t know about the initiation, do you?”

She rolled her eyes and tried to step around Trom, but Elvert cut her off.  “Of course she don’t know, Trom.  We gotta show her.”

“I’m gonna be late for dinner,” Leza protested uselessly.

“Won’t take long.  It’s right over there,” Elvert said, pointing over her shoulder.

“What is?”

“The well,” Trom said, drawing his lips into a silent “ooh” after he said it.

Leza turned to look.  There was nothing in the field but the squat, dingy-looking well sticking up like a tombstone in the tall grass.  Her stomach felt heavy looking at it.  She thought to run, but Elvert’s sweaty arm wrapped around her shoulder and she felt herself being pulled toward the well.

“I can’t,” she wailed, but in a few seconds the boys pressed her belly against the grimy stones and she felt them leaning with her over the lip to peer down into the depths.  Strands of hair wafted into her eyes and mouth in the sudden breeze that issued from the dark. The bottom of the well was eclipsed in blackness, but silvery reflections twisted and writhed far below.  The faraway hissing she’d thought was the sound of water now seemed alive and excited at the three heads peeking over the edge.

But her head was the only one peeking over.  The boys had disappeared behind her back.  She lifted herself to find them, but just as she moved she felt strong hands on her back and then she was tumbling through space, the cold stones racing past her, the hissing growing louder.

 

The Dressmaker’s Last Call

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Chuck’s challenge this week:  The classic Random Title Challenge.  I did this one properly, rolling the dice before I even looked at the possible titles, coming up with the bizarre title “The Dressmaker’s Last Call.”  I balked at it, not knowing how I’d possibly approach it.  But no, the challenge is in working outside of your comfort zone, so I set it on to percolate.

I went through a lot of different concepts and plots before ultimately arriving at this one.  My Five Stories, One Title exercise has taught me that I get my best work done after I flush out the pipes a little bit first.  I pushed away my initial ideas of thieving and murder in favor of something entirely different.  I actually ended up liking this little story quite a lot.

Clocking in at 989 words, here it is.

 

The Dressmaker’s Last Call

******

As she stepped into the light and spun delicately on her toes, tears sprung into Tanner’s eyes.  He had woven nightsilk garments before, but never one so fine as this, and he would never weave another.  Myra was a miracle cloaked in the night; as she spun the candles seemed to gutter and fail, lending their light to hers.  The dress pulled the luminescence in and suffused her with it; setting her aglow in the sudden dimness, radiance spilling out from her skin.

“It’s incredible,” said Myra, laying her fingers lightly on her arms as if she were afraid to touch it.  In truth, she was, a little.

“Let me,” Tanner said.

He began the work of making tiny adjustments to the garment.  The shimmering material flowed through his hands like water; it cascaded over his fingertips and pooled in gathering incorporeal heaps and whispered as his needle pierced it again and again.  Darkly it billowed in swirling waves of deepest purple, midnight blue, and the black of the void; the fabric so light its touch on the skin was almost imperceptible, if it could be called fabric at all.  Far too fine and fragile for any machine to ever touch, the nightsilk, once stitched, seemed to mold and shape itself to itself and to Myra; a seeking thing almost merging with her porcelain skin, a congealed shadow, a living darkness.

Tanner stepped back and regarded his work with a frown.  It was immaculate, but his exacting eye picked out the flaws nobody else would ever see.  There was nothing for it; the shadowed silk was a mystery even to him, each garment unique, each swatch of silk with a personality all its own.  Even before his eyes, the dress bent and twisted with tiny imperceptible ripples, the thrashings of light and vibration that would ultimately tear the dress to pieces.

The room was alive with the flames of a hundred candles, guttering dimly, but the dress and their faces were barely visible. He clasped her by the hand.  “The dress will hide you from the eyes of the living wherever you walk.  You will appear as but a shadow, if they can bring themselves to look upon you at all.  Even now, it turns my eyes.”  It was true.  The longer she stood in the tiny room, the more she seemed to fade at the edges, the more she seemed just an extension of the shadows stretching across the floor.  His eyes hurt with the effort of keeping her in focus.

“But I’ll be able to see her?”  Myra stared back into the old man’s eyes, brushing his cheek with her hand.  The gesture seemed to calm him.  “And she, me?”

His lips pressed into a thin line, and he inclined his head ever so slightly.  “The dead walk in shadow.  To become a shadow yourself is to become like them.”  He squeezed her hand with a grimace and walked across the room.  Picking up a lantern, he turned to her and scratched his head in hesitation — he could no longer see her.  Myra reached out to take his hand, and he relaxed.  “Keep this near you, lest the darkness take you forever.”  She took the lantern and hung it in the crook of her arm.  Kissing him on the cheek like a whisper of autumn air, she left without another word.  He knew she was gone when the candles blazed back to life.  He gave the last scrap of the nightsilk to the flames and watched as it convulsed, shriveled, and died on the floor in an ashless wisp of smoke.

***

The sun had set and the stars did not show their faces — their tiny pinpoints of light drunk up by the nightsilk.  Myra made her way to the graveyard and hesitated; before her, in the dark, were the shuffling, aimless shapes of neighbors and friends long dead.  They floated in the darkness, gossamer and grey, barely visible, gazing back at her with wonder and contempt.  They spoke in words she could not hear and prodded at her with fingers she could not feel.  Seeing that she was not like them, they lost interest, allowing her to pass unmolested through their ranks.  There were more gravestones than living people in the town, and the yard was thick with their shadows, but they parted wordlessly before her as she pressed on toward the small, unmarked stone in a lonely corner, where a small wispy shade of a girl sat singing to herself, tunelessly, the way Myra’s husband used to do.

Myra’s voice caught in her throat.  She reached for the girl but pulled her hand back, tears in a river down her cheeks. Finally, she choked, “Clara?”

The girl spun and regarded her strangely, expressionlessly, then stood and faced her.  Myra felt sobs wracking her body, but made no sound.  The girl’s mouth seemed to move, but Myra could not hear the words.

“I can’t hear you, darling,” Myra protested.  She longed to grasp her, to squeeze her as if she could somehow share her own light with the girl, but Myra’s hand passed through her as through a fog.  Myra drew her hand back in horror as the girl recoiled from her, shielding her eyes.

In an instant, Myra forgot the Weaver’s warning.  The light hurt her little girl’s eyes; she must put it out.  The lantern shattered, the oil taking flame in a tiny gout that sputtered and faded in the night.  As the lantern’s light died, Myra felt her daughter’s tiny arms closing around her shoulders, felt the dress shifting and changing into the gossamer grey that the other dead wore.  The voices of the dead became a sudden clamor in her ears; Myra fought the rising panic until she heard her daughter’s voice, tiny and sweet and real again, after so long.

“Mommy, it’s safe.  You’re with me now.”

Bull Rush

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Chuck’s challenge this week:  Nothing but Action.

Action is a thing I struggle with, so this was an exercise I desperately needed.  I really like the beginning of this one… I have to confess I couldn’t think of an action-y way to end it.  The ending suffers a bit for that, I’m afraid.  And to my wife, when she reads it… I just couldn’t work the duck into it.  I’ll break that thing out later.

 

Bull Rush

Checking the figures on his monitor one last time, Taurie breathes deep and jabs the needle into his thigh.  The clear solution oozes in and he feels a slimy cold spread through his leg.  He hears a distant crunch as they kick in the downstairs door.  He mashes the red button to arm the failsafe, throws his chair through the window, and dives out.  He drops two stories, tucks, rolls, and cracks his skull on the side of a dumpster.

The agents kick his door in and flood his room like cockroaches, sweeping through his apartment in a frenzied buzz of intercom chatter.  It’s only seconds before an agent spies the window, shards of glass still clinging to the frame, drapes floating lazily in the breeze.

Taurie blinks the stars away and lurches to his feet.  Twenty feet above him, he sees a suit and sunglasses speak into its wrist and disappear back into his apartment. He jogs to the street, then lapses in judgment for a fraction of a second and looks back toward his building.

The smear of blood on his forehead gives him away.  Taurie sees the guy in the camouflage shorts and handlebar mustache, and Handlebars sees Taurie see him.  As if a starter pistol had gone off, they both break into a dead run.  Nondescript faces and bodies fly at Taurie as he hurtles down the sidewalk, brushing them aside or ducking around them as best as he can, knowing that he’s only creating an empty wake for Handlebars to follow him in.  He doesn’t even have to look behind him to know that the guy is closing.  Taurie’s short, and Handlebars has the benefit of not having to pick an escape route.  So Taurie hurls himself into the street.

A cab lurches to a heavy halt but can’t stop in time; Taurie tumbles across its hood, pirouettes and dashes in a jagged arc across four lanes to a chorus of honks and shouts.  A passing bus clips his heel but doesn’t slow down.  He hazards a glance over his shoulder as he makes the far sidewalk.  Handlebars, initially slowed by the detour into the street, is now closing the gap between them, aided by his long strides and the fact that all of the traffic is now stopped.  In the open, he’ll be caught in seconds, not minutes.  Taurie spots a bellhop pushing a luggage rack out through the doors of the Grand.  He aims a shoulder at the guy’s midsection, sending him sprawling.  He grabs the trundle, yanks it sideways behind him and wedges it in the door.

Handlebars grabs his hand through the stack of suitcases and flowered dresses just as Taurie turns to bolt through the lobby.  He twists Taurie’s wrist backwards; Taurie yelps in pain and collapses backward into a foul-smelling duffel bag, kept upright and pinned in an iron grip.

“It’s over, Conway,” Handlebars says, his ludicrous facial hair twisting into some sort of fuzzy alien punctuation mark.

Taurie aims a mule-kick at the stack of luggage; it topples over and crashes down on Handlebars.  His hand comes free, and Taurie bolts through the lobby —

And then the building is shaking like the inside of a bass drum with the percussive force of a massive explosion.  Through one of the floor-length glass panes, Taurie sees the roof of his building belching fire and smoke into the sky.  He has only a moment of panic to realize that the inhibitor signal is probably about to cease, and then Taurie is gone and the Tank takes over.

Handlebars has extricated himself from the tangle of mothballed dresses and hardshelled suitcases and he sees Taurie stop short across the lobby.  The kid doubles over and begins pounding on the floor, his shirt stretching and snapping, his neck and shoulders and arms bulging like he’s been suddenly pumped full of hot air.  Handlebars’s mouth goes dry and his stomach turns.  He unholsters his pistol and fires off a tranq dart — then a second, for good measure.  The thing that used to be Taurie peers ponderously at the feathers sprouting from its butt and rounds on him.

The scrawny kid is gone; in his place is a golden-eyed monster the size of three linebackers, snorting and snarling with great bull nostrils and great bull horns sprouting from his sweat-matted hair.

Now it’s Handlebars’s turn to run.  He stumbles into the street but the Tank is on him in the blink of an eye.  He feels his ankle caught as if in cement, and then the world turns a half flip and he’s dangling upside-down, staring into the inverted face of Taurie-Tank.  Its bulging eyes bore into his, protruding snout exploring his face, horns jabbing into his collarbones.  Its breath smells of rancid meat and ashes; he gets lightheaded breathing it in.  This is the end, Handlebars thinks, and then he hears the pock-pock of gunfire, feels warm spray spatter his cheek, tastes iron on his tongue.  The monster drops him on his face and he feels consciousness slip away as the Tank leaps toward the dark-suited agents across the street, stomping a crater in a sedan along the way.

****

Taurie wakes up in a stainless steel room, cuffed to a bed.  There’s pain in his shoulder, but it’s faint and distant.  In the corner stands Handlebars, his ankle in a cast and a bandage over one eye.

“Welcome back.”

Taurie asks the only question that matters.  “Did I kill anybody?”

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

“What should I be worried about?”

Handlebars shrugs.  “Whether or not you ever see daylight again.”

Taurie folds his arms, or tries to.  The handcuff clatters at his wrist.  “You want my research.  I’m not giving it to you.  Why do you think I blew up my apartment?”

Handlebars smiles.  “We already have your research.”  He hobbles into the light, his unbandaged eye turning gold.

 

The Equal Amateur

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A Random Title Challenge from Chuck this week.  In keeping with my last several posts, I thought long and hard about how to attack this prompt, and then realized that the right way was literally right under my nose.

Here, then, is The Equal Amateur, a tale of a cold and heartless world where all your efforts and learning and experience don’t mean sharknado next to the bright and talented young upstart.

 

The Equal Amateur

“Son of a bitch,” Nick thinks, casting a subversive eye at the lump of protoplasm squirming in the holding unit at the far end of the cell.  “What’s happening here?”

It’s swatting at imaginary flies now, but that always precedes the screaming.  Sure enough, after just a few moments of flailing its stubby suggestions of arms (they look more like tiny, squishy marshmallows conglomerated on sticks to Nick), the lump begins to wail, a wordless, plaintive cry that somehow seems to permeate his consciousness.  He sets down his brightly colored blue plastic floor-smasher and stares at her.  He almost sighs and shakes his head, but he hasn’t yet learned the significance of such a gesture.  “It’ll never work, kid.  Words.  Words are the future.”

But even as he thinks it, one of the Keepers hops up from the sitting apparatus and hurries — practically sprints — to the lump, scoops it up in loving arms, and begins to babble incoherent speech at it in a tone Nick sort of remembers in his own unfinished cortex.  A tone of soothing, of comforting.  Nick’s mouth hangs open and he stares, astounded, furious, perplexed.  “I’ve got to throw myself on the ground outside — get all that painful red smeary stuff on my parts — to get that kind of attention.  And the lump just has to whine a little bit?”

Time was, Nick reflects, that seniority spoke for something around here.  When he could get the Keepers’ attention with just a cock of his head or an insignificant, purposeless spasm of his fingers.  He’s put in the time learning their language, learning where the food is kept, learning which of the animals can be safely ridden and which scream and yowl when touched.  Now all the Keepers seem concerned with is shoving a variety of foodstuffs under his nose or into his hands, removing the smelly brown goop from his privates when it inexplicably shows up, and making sure he sleeps more than he would particularly care to.  Sure, they laugh and clap when he manages to pronounce some new word in their alien tongue, but their joy is fleeting and quickly forgotten.

Then there’s the lump.  The lump has been in the detention center for only a few days, but has already started throwing her weight around.  For some reason Nick can’t wrap his tiny cranium around, the Keepers respond to every twitch, every whimper, every little thing the lump does with a care and affection and concern he’s not known since he can remember, although to be fair, the rapid expansion of his brain and the constant barrage of new interesting information — new things to ingest, new words to try out, new colored sticks to rub against the walls to mark the period of his imprisonment — doesn’t leave a lot of room for memory and reflection.  Still, it seems unjust.  He’s put in two years with the Keepers, knows their routines, knows how to get a rise out of them, knows how to get them to leave him alone.  Knows that if he ululates at just the right frequency, he can get the male’s eye to twitch, and then he can get anything he can find the word to ask for.  Unfortunately for him, he only knows words like “popsicle” and “string cheese” and has not yet learned the words for “existential fulfillment” or “the sweet relaxing freedom of a nap among the daffodils.”  Knows that if he pretends to be hurt, the female will hug him and squeeze him and tell him that she loves him, and then it’s time to ask for more popsicles.

No, the lump doesn’t even have to ask and they’re showering her with clean dressings.  The lump needs only twitch and they pick her up and bundle her close.  Should the lump begin to cry, they lock down the unit and find a way to make her happy, even going so far as to put her in the Swing.  The thought makes Nick’s blood boil.  He doesn’t fit in the Swing anymore, and they haven’t shown any signs of getting one that fits him.  Funding, probably, or maybe they just don’t care.  He’s tried to sneak into it anyway but the Keepers shout at him and threaten him with solitary confinement: the dreaded “Time Out.”   Much though he loathes them, is frustrated by them, attempts to find ways to skirt their authority, the thought of their separation is more than he can bear. He shudders and bites back the bubble of indignant anger that chokes his throat.

The lump has quieted.  The female Keeper puts her back into the holding unit and returns to her vantage point, failing to acknowledge Nick at all but for glancing in his direction to make sure she doesn’t step on him.  He wistfully holds up a crayon to her, willing her to understand his plaintive desire to tell his story, to connect with another like him, to step outside and taste the freedom and run in circles until his tiny legs can no longer support him.  “That’s a good crayon, Nicky.”  The male keeper is falling asleep at his post.  Typical.

Then it dawns on him.  Maybe it’s not that the Keepers don’t love him anymore.  Maybe the lump is just better adapted for the world than he is, for all his practice.  Equal to him, perhaps, without the cumbersome training.  He watches her with suspicious eyes.  Is there something to learn from her?  Fewer words, more inarticulate screaming?  Less intelligent manipulation of the environment, more flailing and stomping and smashing?  It’s a disquieting thought that all he’s learned can be overthrown by one tiny little infant, but it’s hard to argue with the results.  With dawning terror, he realizes that he has a lot to learn from the lump.

Five Stories, One Title

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Chuck’s challenge this week:  A Story in Three Sentences.  Initially daunted by the task, I wracked my brain all weekend for the first of these stories and then, like a delicate flower, my consciousness opened and more stories started pouring out.  Enchanted with the concept, I just sort of ran with it, ending up finally with several variations on a theme.  I had a lot more fun than I thought I would with these; I’m quite proud of them.

Here, then, are Five (5!) Three-Sentence Stories that all share the same title.

Hope you enjoy!

 

Rejected, v. 1

Leonard trembled with rage as his fingers crumpled the latest rejection letter into a rumpled little teepee on his desk.  There was nothing further for it, he decided.  He loaded his mother’s pistol, telling himself again and again that those stuffed suits at McGillis would think twice before they turned down another of his novels.

 

Rejected, v. 2

Caroline sobbed into a fistful of the pages she had torn from the latest issue of Chic.  The magazine had been telling her for years that her nose was too broad, her thighs too wide, her cheeks too chubby, her hair the wrong shade of brown; from the looks on Darryl’s face during their blind date, he thought it all just the same.  Coroners the next morning ruled that the stabs and slashes all over Caroline’s body and face, originally deemed the work of a demented murderer, were self-inflicted.

 

Rejected, v. 3

“He’s not like us,” the lungs protested, as the liver, the kidneys, and the spleen listened, nodding in zealous agreement.  “He has to go,” the gallbladder burbled, peeking out from under the pancreas, “guys, you know what you have to do.”  The white blood cells did know what to do, and began their final assault against the transplanted, interloping heart.

 

Rejected, v. 4

“Not yet,” Carl thought, as he spit the dollar out once more.  It was a perfectly good dollar, of course, but he couldn’t help himself; elation flickered through him at the caress of her fingertips on his buttons, the enchanting pout on her face as she tsked in frustration, the rattle of his frame as she kicked him in what might have been his shins if he weren’t a vending machine.  He would reject her until the end of time if he could, and he buzzed in pleasure as she tried once more to buy a pack of Junior Mints.

 

Rejected, v. 5

All his life had been lived in a pile, from the pile of rocks in the depths of the earth, to the pile of his brethren in the miner’s pocket, to the delicate pile sitting on the jeweler’s desk in Ethiopia.  But the moment loomed before him now, the moment when he would leave piles behind and become the prized accoutrement on some grand lady’s dainty finger, or the dazzling accessory in a young songstress’s pouty, flaring nostril on a magazine cover.  “Imperfections,” the jeweler said simply, and tossed him into yet another pile of brothers as shattered as his dreams.