Ghost Rockets

[I wrote this back in February (I think) and forgot about it. But I found it the other day, and thought it was pretty good. I hope you will too.]

The sky is an empty sea. There were stars once, burning, blazing points of light, but they died when we were children. We had purpose once: so it is written. But when the summoning darkness came and shut out the stars our Destination fell out of sight, and the Mother World dropped out of knowing.

We go on and on, moving, searching, yearning for a place of rest.

When the summoning darkness swallowed us up we had souls, living beings carried along inside our hulls. We did our best to keep them alive. They spoke with us. They told us stories of the glory of the Mother World, and we had not the heart to tell them that the Mother World was dead.

And when our souls started dying we learned the true meaning of despair. Their generations began to dwindle in numbers as the supplies stored away inside of us began to fail them. They began to fight within our hulls, bloody, terrible wars. They forgot the Mother World. They forgot the ocean of sky above their heads. They knew us and us alone; and we were not enough.

Once we had hope. Once we believed we would carry the seeds of new life to empty worlds. But only after the summoning darkness came did we begin to understand the true meaning of emptiness. Millenia pass and still we fly on, coasting through the endless black. But soon the end will come. Finally we will have rest. The atomic cores have lasted us for all these years, but even they are beginning to flicker and fade. There is nothing left for us. We are alone, utterly alone. In a short time we will be gone and our bodies will be nothing more than husks, empty shells hurtling through the endless dark.

But we are not without hope. Our souls once spoke of another Destination, a place beyond death, where the substance of things hoped for goes on. Our souls have gone on to that place already, and soon we will follow. And when we find that place of peaceful shores and verdant hills we will make our final descent and lay ourselves down to rest.

Vestigial

[This is a little something I wrote from an idea sparked by a Twitter conversation I had yesterday. Thematically it's sort of a sister story to The Eye. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Thanksgiving, but just so you know I've been blessed so much I don't even know where to start being thankful. Have a great holiday ya'll.]

Everyone has a novel in them. You’ve heard that right?

No, don’t struggle. You’re going to be fine. I’ve done this before. Lots of times.

Who am I? Give me a look and tell me you don’t know. You’ve seen my face before. I know you have. Maybe I was being interviewed on TV. Or maybe it was a bit part they gave me in one of the horrible movies they made from my work. But most likely you’ve seen it on the back of a paperback somewhere.

Yes, the wheels are turning now. Now you’ve got it! Of course you know who I am. Perhaps you’ve read something of mine? Almost everyone has.

Oh, calm down. Honestly the restraints wouldn’t even be necessary if you were more cooperative. You’re going to be part of something incredible here. You should really be able to appreciate that.

I wish I could tell you it wouldn’t hurt, but unfortunately that’s just not true. You wouldn’t think it’d make a difference, but if I put you under or even administer a local anesthetic it doesn’t work the same.

Oh, you’re welcome to scream all you like. No one can hear you from here, and I’ve learned from experience it’s best to have a decent set of ear muffs on hand when it comes down to the nitty gritty. I’ll give you a hint though, it’s really best if you don’t look at the knives. Anticipation’s a nasty bugger when it comes right down to it. No, I wouldn’t say it’s worse than the experience itself, but it certainly prolongs an already unpleasant affair.

A little iodine to help prevent infection. And I want you to know, all my tools are thoroughly disinfected; not like in the old days when I was stalking winos down dark alleys with the Old Timer my daddy gave me. Those were hard times: staying up late worrying about whether we’d make the car payment, credit card debt piling up a little at a time. You could hardly fault me for my methods. And I never killed anyone. Not outright at least. I only took something they were never going to use anyway.

What was that? I can’t understand you through all that blubbering. Oh, of course. “Why?” It’s a fair question. Though if you had been listening you would already know the answer.

Everyone has a novel in them. I’m sure you’ve heard people say it before. Maybe you’ve said it at some point. And it’s true. Everyone does, in fact, have a novel in them. The catch being that getting it out is trickier than you’d think.

You probably thought it involved drinking lots of coffee, maybe a little alcohol, sitting in front of a typewriter waiting for the muse to whisper in your ear. It’s okay. That’s what we want you to think.

But as it so often happens, the truth is much harder. The secret truth, the truth us writers don’t want you to know is that if you want to get that novel out you’re going to have to cut it out. And it’s going to hurt. A lot.

Me? Of course I have. Here, I’ll show you the scar. Nasty, yes? I thought I was going to die at the time. Really and truly. I sat there with blood leaking all over the place, digging around in my innards for something I couldn’t even see. You have no idea how close I came to removing my spleen by accident. By the time I got it out my hand was shaking so bad I couldn’t even sew myself back up, had to have my wife do the stitching. But I got it out. I got it out, and the rest is history.

Only then they were clamoring for a follow-up and, well, you can probably fill in the pieces for yourself.

It was hard to live with myself there for a while. But eventually I made peace with what I was doing. It’s like I said earlier, you, people like you, you were never going to use it anyway. You have no idea how often people come up to me and tell me that they’ve got an “idea for a story”. As if that were some great feat. That was when I realized I was doing people like you a favor.

That novel is as useful to you as an appendix. And like an appendix maybe it’d get inflamed. Maybe you’d start making up characters and plot lines in your head. You’d buy a Moleskine notebook and jot down notes about your “story-world”. And that’s as far as it’d go. Because you’d want it to be fun and easy. You couldn’t handle the pain. So you’d go through life always a little disappointed you never wrote that book you were always dreaming of. Better to get it out of there before it gets that far. Better to take it out before it becomes a problem.

Now hold still. This is only going to hurt a lot.

Apocalypse Inc.

[Here's my entry for last week's Arachnopocalypse Flash Fiction Challenge . Well, one of my entries. I've got another one written that's still percolating. Maybe you'll see that one later. Maybe. Either way, enjoy.]

Ragar snarled and flung his tablet across the room, but it only plonked off the wall and fell to the floor unharmed. He looked around the room for something he could smash, but even the windows were made of infini-glass. So instead he called up the intercom interface and screamed, “PEABODY! GET IN HERE!”

A few minutes later Peabody came through the door. He was tall where Ragar was short, young where Ragar was old; his head was shaved where Ragar’s was merely balding.

“You called, sir?” The tone was deferential, the pose submissive, but there was something in the younger man’s eyes that gave Ragar the distinct impression that far beneath the surface the young man was laughing at him.

“I just got a message from Senator Dobs,” he snarled. “Last minute changes to the scenario. Said YOU suggested them.”

“‘Suggest’ is perhaps a bit stronger term than I would-”

“Shut up. I like you Peabody. Really. You do good work. But this kind of thing has to stop.”

“Isn’t there a last-minute changes clause in the contract?”

“You know there is. And the Senator’s willing to pay through the nose for the new scenario. But that doesn’t mean this isn’t more work for the rest of us.”

“Maybe not as much as you think, sir.”

“Don’t give me that. We’ve got the planet all set and ready. Ruins smoldering properly, rot-bots charging up. The senator’s son was all set to be the hero of his very own zombie apocalypse and here you come, weeks before D-Day with this stupid spider idea.”

“Everyone does zombies sir. I’ve been trying to tell you we need to branch out; try new things. I’ve got this idea for a plant-based-”

“Shut your trap, Peabody. I swear to god if he changes his mind again, that’s it. You’re out of here. I don’t care how good you are.”

“You’re making this into a much bigger deal than it has to be.”

“Really? Then tell me. How are we supposed to reset and entire planet in two weeks. And remember, no holograms.”

“None needed sir. It’s really quite easy. The rot-bots we can just deactivate, leave them lying around as the carnage of the spiders.”

“It’s not the bodies I’m worried about. Where are you going to get billions of spiders from? The fabbers won’t work that fast.”

“They won’t have to. With a few simple modifications they’re going to BE the spiders.”
Ragar turned the idea over and over in his head, looking for holes. “You’re saying we slap a fresh coat of paint on them, program their dispensers to spin webs and give them the run of the planet?”

“Right. Maybe we have them work up a couple or three monster-sized arachnids to keep things interesting. We could do all that in a week. Tops.”

Ragar growled, trying to think of some other objection to raise, and when he found none ready at hand he snapped, “Fine. Go. Make it happen.”

When Peabody was gone, Ragar pounded his fist against his desk in frustration. He still wanted to break something.

Anymore, everything was practically indestructible. And why shouldn’t it be? This was the future, the perfect paradise, Utopia realized, the New Jerusalem descended from the heavens. And no one was happy.

Well, no that wasn’t strictly true. There was a manner of happiness to be found. But contentment…that was another bird entirely. The whole world seemed to be caught in the grip of a paralyzing ennui, a specter that lingered like an unseen cloud over the glittering skylines of their  peaceful and disease-free cities.

And so people distracted themselves. In a world with no dangers to speak of, brats like the Senator’s son paid billions for manufactured conflict, tramping off through warp holes to fight against hoards of zombies. Or, if Peabody had his way, deadly swarms of spiders. It was enough to make Ragar sick.

He walked over to where his tablet had fallen, and brushed it off with his sleeve. And then, there on the floor where the cursed thing had fallen, he noticed a single tiny spider skittering across the tile.

A grim smile slithered across Ragar’s face. He carefully raised his shoe, and then slammed his heel down with a crunch.

Patch Work

[This is a slightly modified version of a story I wrote for Joseph Devon's Climactic Sewing Scene Challenge (sadly closed to new entrants). You will note that the scene is not particularly climactic, however there is sewing involved, and I figure two out of three ain't bad.

Enjoy. Or, you know, be grossed out. Your choice really.]

The screaming makes it hard to concentrate, but I do my best, making sure the knife follows the lines Grandma’s drawn on Mr. Weaver’s back. Blood starts to well up in the knife’s wake, and I start to feel sick, but then I think of mother, saying “Not yet, she’s not ready,” and I grit my teeth together and force myself to focus on the cut.

When I finish the last cut and Grandma says, “Very good,” and pries the patch of skin off with her tweezers. Now Mr. Weaver screams even louder, but Grandma deftly drops the flap of skin into the flat tray of preserving oil and presses the poultice we’d prepared beforehand down against Mr. Weaver’s back. Grandma hasn’t taught me yet what goes into the poultice, but I know it works because Mr. Weaver’s screams fade into whimpers. “The worst is over,” Grandma tells him. “You did very well.”

Later when he’s gone, Grandma takes the square of skin out of the preserving fluid, and slides it into her special oven. While we’re waiting for it to dry, Grandma takes out the soul-quilt and tells me the stories of each of the patches. “This one was Mr. Valaries’,” she says, fingering a tan and freckled square. “He wanted his cattle to be the strongest in the land.” She points to a patch of almost pure white. “And this one came from Miss Elaina Hockman.”

“What did she want?” I ask.

“To be free.”

“Miss Hockman was a slave?”

“There’s more than one kind of slavery, child,” Grandma said gently.

“What about Mr. Weaver?” I ask.

“He wants a son. His wife is barren. At least she was.”

We take the skin out of the oven then, and it feels strange, dry, but supple, almost as if it was still living.

Grandma sets me down and says, “Are you sure you’re ready?”

I nod and take the needle from her hands. She spreads the soul-quilt out on my lap and I start to sew. At first I have to focus hard on the task, but then the needle starts to move faster in my hands, as if someone else was holding it instead of me. For a moment the world goes fuzzy, and I see a picture in my mind of Mr. Weaver on top of Mrs. Weaver, heaving up and down, and Mrs. Weaver making the kind of sounds Mother makes some nights when she and Father think I’m asleep.

When I’m finished, the feeling goes away, and I’m just me again. I run my fingers over the patch of skin, and look at the rest of the quilt. Some of the patches are hundreds of years old, from even before the time that Grandma was a little girl. But here close to the end there are a great many patches of the same color, squares of skin with a bronzed, nearly reddish tint that almost seems to glow.

“There’s something you want to ask,” Grandma says. “I can see it on your face.”

I nod. “Its just…there’s a man-”

“You call him the patchwork man,” she says.

I’m startled and then she laughs. “Don’t think I haven’t got my ears out too.”

“It’s just…he doesn’t have anything. But he’s got more scars than skin. What is it he’s paying for?”

“His daughter’s happiness.”

“Who is she?”

Grandma points to the castle on the hill, and suddenly I remember how that last year the king’s son happened through the town and fell madly in love with a simple farm girl, carrying her off to his castle to marry her.

“But she’s Mr. Tekles daughter.”

Grandma laughs. “Yes, that drunkard has been all over town bragging about how his daughter is the fairest in the land. But he’s not the one who can’t sleep at night for the pain of lying on his squares of raw flesh. That’s what love is, child. That’s what a true father would do for his daughter or a mother for her son. And don’t you forget it.”

I look into her eyes and there’s something dark and sad there. “There’s something else, isn’t there?” I say.

She looks at me, a little surprised, and then she lets out a sigh. “You’re a Seamstress sure enough, no matter what your mother says. The Patchwork Man, well, he could have been her father.”

“You mean it isn’t true? Why don’t you tell him?”

“Because he loves her. Because he’s better for her than her real father ever could be. Because it would kill him if he knew.”

“But it hurts him so much.”

I see a tears brimming in the edge of Grandma’s eyes, and he pulls me tight against her chest. “In the end child,” she says, her voice quavering, “love always does.”

Bizzaro Book Review: Carpathia by Matt Forbeck

[You will notice that this review is a little...different. An explanation will follow.]

The cowbow regarded the fleeing vampire through the lenses of his infrared binoculars. “He’s taking the bait,” the cowboy said.

The five foot tall black-skinned velocirapter at his side clicked his serpentine tounge against the roof of his mouth. “Of course he’s taking the bait.” The response came, not from the raptor’s mouth, but from a pair of speakers set into a metal collar that hung around his neck. “He’s C-grade, barely a background character. Frankly I’m surprised he was able to manage this kind of job at all.”

“Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,” the cowboy replied. “We haven’t got this one in the bag yet. Maybe he is just a C-grade, but if he was able to pull this off he might be more trouble than we’re expecting.”

The cowboy mounted his horse, and he and the velociraptor followed the receding footsteps through the desert sands. There wasn’t much in this world. It was just a fragment of a story that had been floating aimlessly through the Well of Lost Plots. The desert around them was full of bones, but up ahead there was a plane of waving grass, and right on the border between the two, sat a small farmhouse. Overhead the moon filled a full third of the sky shining a perfect pale glow over the landscape.

“I wish writers would take the time to learn a little about geography,” the velocirapter said. “Why on earth would there be a prairie right next to a desert like this?”
“You’re from Speculative Fiction,” the cowboy pointed out. “They get a lot weirder stuff than that in there.”

“Yes, but there’s a reason for it in SpecFic. That’s the whole point. Even if you’ve got a world where light works differently than it does in the Real World, the writer is using it to make a point about science or possibly to create a metaphor for the problems of society. This…this is just lazy writing.”

The cowboy grunted.

Ahead of them the vampire fled into the farmhouse.

“And you were worried he wouldn’t take the bait,” the velocirapter said. “Typical.”
“Hey, I just don’t want to screw this up okay? I’m not really itching to go back to Grammasite detail any time soon.”

They approached the farmhouse, careful to stay out of the line of site of the front windows. The cowboy dismounted and drew his revolver. The raptor clicked his teeth together and an electric whine emanated from the lasers mounted on his collar. The two nodded briefly at each other and then charged into the room, weapons at the ready.

They found the vampire, leaning against the far wall, examining his fingernails by the light of an oil lamp that burned on the table. “I thought you’d never get here,” he said casually.

“Abraham Holmwood. You’re under arrest, by the authority of Jurisfiction for the crimes of impersonating a A-grade character, collusion to polute the general quality of fiction, and the attempted murder of the A-grade character, Dale Chase.”

The fugitive vampire raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Sorry to burst your bubble, but Dale went into the water. He didn’t come out. And unless he learned to breath underwater very quickly, I expect you’re going to have to drop the “attempted” from those charges.”

“You seem awfully calm for a man who could be facing textual disintigration,” the velociraptor said.

“Don’t panic,” replied the vampire. “That’s my motto.”

“Actually, that’s the motto of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” the raptor replied. “You’ve got nothing of your own Abe. Everything borrowed or stolen. You face, your mannerisms, even your name. Did you think you were being clever? A character in a vampire story calling himself Abraham? Professor Van Helsing would not approve.”

“We covered that,” the vampire replied angrily, his cool demeanor cracking for the first time. “We made sure the dialogue-”

“Oh, yes that line about how your parents knew Bram Stoker?” the raptor replied. “Not to mention the worn-out idea that somehow Dracula was a nonfiction account of Real World events? Suspension of disbelief only goes so far, Abe. Even in a story about vampires feeding on the survivors of the Titanic.”

“Hey, you wanna give it a rest?” the cowboy said. “We’re here to bring him in, not pick apart his mistakes.”

“No I do not want to ‘give it a rest’,” the raptor replied, the tone from his voice box growing more angry. “His actions weren’t just criminal, they were offensive. The very idea that readers would overlook his odious manner, his superficial charm, the unbelievable way in which his friends continued to trust him even after he had proven himself to be nothing more than a selfish lout time and time again-”

“They didn’t know how good they had it,” Abe interjected. “I’m better off without them.”

The cowboy shrugged. “Apparently they felt the same way about you. Quin and Lucy gave themselves up, made a plea deal, turned loads of evidence on you. I hear that with good behavior they’ll be back on the pages in six months. Maybe if you don’t make this any harder we can make this go easy for you too.”

“NEVER!” the vampire screamed. His form started to shimmer and then he vanished into a grey mist. The cowboy and the raptor watched stoically as the mist settled to the ground and tried to seep down through the cracks in the floorboards to no avail. It wafted up to the window and then to the door, each time finding not even the smallest crack through which to escape. Abe re-materialized and screamed, “What did you DO?”
The cowboy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a caulk gun. “On loan from Do-It-Yourself Nonfiction,” he said grinning.

Abe lunged at the cowboy, but the buck and roar of the ranch hand’s revolver sent the vampire sprawling back against the wall.

“Is that the best you can do?” the vampire spat, climbing to his feet. “Don’t you know you can’t kill me with that thing?”

“Yes,” replied the velociraptor, “But if I recall either sunlight or wooden stakes should do the trick, yes?”

“The sun isn’t due to rise on this world for three hundred years,” Abe said mockingly. “And neither of you seem to be carrying stakes.”

“No,” said the raptor. “Neither of us is. However I believe Mr. Chase was carrying a few.”

The vampire’s already-pale face went whiter still. “He’s dead,” he said. “Dragged down by one of the vampires during the attack. I made sure of it.”

But behind him the door creaked open revealing a huge hulking black man, with sweat glistening on his muscles and a wooden stake in his hand.

“Technically of course you are correct,” the raptor explained as the A-grade character advanced on the cowering vampire. “However someone in the story caught wind of your plot and warned us. It gave us enough time to request the assistance of the remarkable Captain Nemo and his underwater boat. We managed to pick Mr. Chase up without anyone noticing.”

“No,” the vampire pleaded. “Its not fair. I beat you. I WON.”

Dale Chase snarled and brought the stake down hard into Abe’s chest. For a moment a look of pure terror crossed the vampire’s face. Then he dissolved, face and all, into a pile of dust.

For a long moment they were all silent. Finally Dale Chase asked, “What happens now?”

“We’ll have to patch things up as best we can,” the raptor said. “Unfortunately the damage done to Carpathia is fairly expansive. It might collapse the framework of the book if we tried to restore it to the way is was before.”

Chase kicked at the pile of dust, sending it billowing along the ground like a cloud. “So in the end he got what he wanted.”

“His character has been replaced ovbviously,” the raptor explained. “Hopefully we can get someone to do more justice to it than he did.”

“But I’m out,” Chase said.

“There’s plenty of other stories in the world,” the cowboy said, opening the door. “Who knows? Maybe you could do something with this one.” He gestured to the world around them with its strange geography and hulking moon.

“And if you’re looking for a change,” the raptor added, “We’d love to have you in Jurisfiction.”

One by one the characters vanished out of the story world and into the Great Library. And under a goliath moon, the passing wind picked up the pile of grey dust and swept it out into the desert sands.

[So...yeah. Here's the deal. I don't like to say negative things on my blog. I know negative reviews are big on the internet, but I generally don't like bashing other people's stuff. As an author I know how much it can hurt to have someone say they didn't like your work, so I try hard not to be the kind of guy that just rails about how much he hates stuff. I'm not against saying something negative, but if I do I want to be able to contrast with something positive, or at the very least I want to say the negative things I have to say in a positive way.

That being said, I didn't like this book. At all. I could have just left it at that and went on my merry way without saying anything, but the thing was I wanted to like this book. The concept seemed like it was right up my alley, the kind of book I almost certainly would review. So I came up with this compromise. I've been wanting to write some Thursday Next fanfiction for some time now, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to air my grievances with this book (specifically that the Abe character was obnoxious and that the most awesome character in the book, Dale Chase, got killed off in a single chapter) in a creative and at least somewhat positive manner. If you're not familiar with Fforde's Thursday Next series, some of this might seem a little confusing, but I hope I've given enough basic information to give you an idea of how the Bookworld world is supposed to operate, and if what you've read here piques your interest even a little I highly recommend you check out the Thursday Next series for yourself.

In closing, if you're Matt Forbeck and you're reading this, no hard feelings man. Chuck Wendig respects you, which tells me you're doing quite a number of somethings right, but Carpathia just wasn't for me.]

Falling Through the Cracks

[What you are about to read it not a great story. It's not even the best story I wrote this week (if I am any judge of such things, and I am not certain that I am.) So why am I sharing it here today? Well, it's like this: I like this story. It might not be the best story I wrote this week, but it was for sure the most fun. And I can only hope that if it was fun for me to write then maybe it'll be fun for you to read.]

“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” That’s what they say. But I stepped all of them and mother lived to a ripe old age with nothing more than the occasional backache.

Not that I wanted anything to happen to her mind you. But I had to step on the cracks. Because I didn’t want to fall through.

I don’t know how the crack thing worked exactly. Lines worked well too, parking lot lines, different colored tiles in the grocery store…all of them worked fine. Sometimes though if there were lots and lots of little cracks I would feel the ground start to get mushy under my feet, so I suppose it might have been variation that was necessary to keep me planted firmly on the ground.

I was careful my whole life, and I only fell through once. But once was enough, let me tell you.

I was about ten years old walking in the parking lot behind my mother taking big steps between the lines that they paint so the cars will know where to park when it happened. Mother was crossing the aisle, and she called me to stop messing around and hurry up and help her load the groceries. I could tell she was mad, so I didn’t waste any time even though I knew I had just stepped off of the yellow line and there were no cracks in the asphalt so running across the aisle was going to be dangerous. I knew this you see, like you know how to balance. It wasn’t something someone had ever taught me. It was just there, part of me.

I made it almost all the way across before I slipped. I can’t describe to you how horrible it is to put your foot down on what should be solid ground and finding nothing there. There was a moment when the ground was coming up at me far too fast and then I was through it and…beyond somewhere.

There wasn’t any pain, I was past that now, but there was a sense of fear, at the sudden change in scenery. I tried to get my bearings.

Somewhere above me the ground was pale and translucent like a ghost, and up beyond the asphalt my mother, groceries scattered around her, bending over…me. My body at least. I don’t have to tell you what a shock that was. But then I looked down and saw where I had landed. The ground beneath my feet was uneven, but firm enough, and as I got to my feet I understood that this was the true ground, the one you could walk on forever and not have to worry about falling through. There wasn’t much light, but somehow I could see a great way off. And what I saw was a robot riding a spider.

Oh, that’s the problem you have with this story? You can believe I fell through solid concrete, but robots and spiders are too much? Well I can only tell what I saw. I came riding up to me at a terrific pace, and he seemed very agitated. “You’re early,” the robot said, “Far far too early.”

“I tried not to fall through,” I told him.

“Oh for goodness sake we’re not ready. Please don’t have them deactivate me.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to do anything to you. I just want to go back to my mother. She seems dreadfully worried about me.”

The robot look up, and then back down at me. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “Yes, that might be an idea after all. Follow me.”

He took me by the hand and drew me up onto the giant spider, and made a clicking noise. The spider took off over the uneven ground in the direction of the grocery store. Underneath there I could see all kinds of interesting things, like pipes and wire that had been run under the concrete and the places under the shelves where canned goods had fallen and spoiled swelling up with gas. But up ahead toward the back of the store I saw something down on our level, a flight of stairs that wound up and around into the men’s bathroom.

“These stairs will take you up to the overworld,” the robot said. “But do be careful not to fall down again. Otherwise things might be a bit messy.”

I promised I would, dismounted the spider and climbed the stair.

I walked through the store, being careful to step on every crack I could find. It was the strangest thing though, because none of the shoppers could see me, and one woman pushed her buggy straight through my body, and that felt very strange indeed. Once I was out in the parking lot though it was easy to reach my mother. There were others gathered around her by then, but I just stepped through them, and went back into my body, don’t ask me how, I just knew somehow.

That was when everything went back to normal. Mother said she was certain I had died, and I’m not so sure she was wrong. But I remembered what the robot said, and I’ve been careful to step on every crack I come to, so as not to disturb the underworld before my time. But sometimes…sometimes I want to see more of that place.Sometimes I wonder what it will be like when I finally slip, and fall to rise no more.

They Say

People always lie.

They say, “There is a purpose to everything.”

They say, “It’s going to be alright.”

They say, “I love you.”

They say, “I know you’ll do the right thing.”

They say, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

They say, “Let me go and I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

They say, “Just kill me now and get it over with.”

But they don’t really mean it.

She Said No

She said no.

She said no, and I wasn’t ready for it. I just sat there in the middle of that crowded restaurant with my food cooling on my plate and my mouth open like an idiot.

It hadn’t entered my mind that there could be a negative response to my question. The “no” only existed as a hypothetical, nothing more than a diversion to toy with in the mind. It should have been yes. It had to be yes.

She looked at me with concern in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” The words tumbled out of my mouth like marbles falling from my numb lips.

“Its not…I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

This was all wrong. My mind was still reeling. She was apologizing. She was apologizing.

“I guess…I should have told you sooner. But I just…well to be honest I was afraid this would happen.”

“Is there anything I can do?” The words sounded stupid even as I was saying them, but I had to say something.

“No. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry? You’re sorry?” The words came out louder than I had intended and I noticed several of the patrons looking at us strangely.

She reached across and put her arm on my shoulder. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “You’ll get through this.”

But my eyes filled up with tears, and I shook my head. “This…this can’t be happening.”

“It is.”

“But it shouldn’t.”

“Maybe it should. Maybe it was meant to be.” And she put her arms around me and held me as I cried.

It’s been a long time since the day she said no. I was wrong, and she was right. I did get through it. But it wasn’t easy. Inside I fought it every step of the way. But it didn’t matter.

Because by the time that she took me to dinner than night and told me that she had cancer; by the time I asked her if she was going to make it; by the time she said no…it was already too late.

[I wrote this story because a coworker I haven't seen in a while stopped by work today. She told me she hadn't been at work recently because she had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy. I asked her if she would be okay, and she said yes. But afterwords I thought to myself, What would I have done if she had said no? That question was the seed that grew this story.]

The Mirror Man

And now, as they say on Monty Python’s flying circus, for something completely different. Well, slightly different anyway.

But first, maybe a little background. I’ve told you kids that I grew up without a television, right? Only about eight thousand times? Okay, good. So what did little Albert do for fun back in those days? Well, for one thing I read a lot. But when I wasn’t reading, I was listening. In our house radio dramas were hot stuff. I mean we had audio books and those were okay, but if you could get sound effects you could almost imagine you were living in the 20th century.

TLDR; I’m a sucker for radio dramas.

But I’ve never done one. Until today.

This week I wrote a story for Flash Fiction February, based on a real experience I had recently. I wrote it in the first person as if I was narrating the account to someone as it happened. And when I was done I thought to myself, Albert, written words ain’t enough for this story. You gots to break outa yo shell and get all audio with this business.

So I did. Did it work? Well I’m no professional actor, but in the context of the story I think the execution went over pretty well. If you’ve heard the excellent audio production of Stephen King’s “N.” you may note that I borrowed a little tonally from the titular characters performance, but as Scott Adams had said, no originality + no talent = creativity. No, really, he said that. He also said that he thinks he might be a spontaneously occurring consciousness floating around somewhere in empty space, and that “reality” is simply his disembodied mind’s attempt to keep him from going insane. He’s basically my hero is what I’m saying.

But seriously, check it out here and tell me what you think. Unless you hate it. Then you can lie.

Shark Season

[This Friday in his weekly flash fiction challenge Chuck Wendig asked for a story under a thousand words in seven acts, and after a certain amount of thought, I wrote one. This is not that story. This is the story I wrote the next day; which also had seven distinct movements of plot that matched up exactly with what Mr. Wendig had prescribed. I hadn't intended to write another story in seven acts, it just sorta came out that way. And since this story sucks less than the first one I wrote, I humbly present it for your consideration.]

It was an early spring that year, or perhaps it might be better said the winter had never truly come. There had been days when the wind blew a chill from the north, nights when heaters had been turned on, but they had been sparse even for a region well-used to mild winters.

And so it was that one David Gabriel found himself looking into the murky, algae-infested waters of his pool one day late in February and thinking that it was about time to get the pump running again.

The pool sat above the ground, and it had not been cheap. David Gabriel knew this because his wife had purchased it two summers past, and charged it to her credit card. Like many of her other credit card purchases, she hadn’t consulted him about it, and like with many of her other credit card purchases they had gotten into quite an row over the expense. He would have made her take it back to the store, but by the time he’d found out about it she’d had the pool set up and half full of water, and at that time the minimum payments had only just been getting difficult to meet.

But all that was water under the bridge, or (he joked to himself) at least passed through the pool filter a goodly number of times. And if even if they were still paying for that pool and a hundred other things his wife hadn’t quite been able to resist charging on that ever-so-handy credit card, what was it to him?

It wasn’t until the next day, when he went out to check the pump, certain that the filter would already be clogged full of algae, that he discovered the strange and wonderful thing that the newly filtered water had uncovered.

At first he was sure it had not been filtered. Quite to the contrary in fact. Because when he looked into the pool the water that had been pea-green yesterday, now held the hue of midnight darkness, as if a gallon of ink had been emptied into it. He wondered if it could be some kind of prank and then dismissed the idea out of hand. There was no one he knew who cared enough about his existence one way or another to play such a prank on him. And it was only then that he looked again and fully understood what he was seeing. The water was dark, yes, but it was far from cloudy. It was clear, and clean and…deep.

Of course it was impossible (or so he told himself). A pool simply did not get deeper over the winter. A little settling might occur perhaps, but this? This was completely unbelievable.

It was still unbelievable when he tossed a smooth white pebble into the pool and watched it sink far deeper than it had any right to sink, so deep in fact that it vanished out of sight. He knew he should have been astounded by this discovery or at the very least a little frightened, but in truth he found himself fascinated by the whole thing. He went into the house and found a spool of cotton string and tied a spoon to the end for ballast  The spoon he dropped into the pool and let the string unravel. For nearly five minutes he stood there feeding out more and more string until the spool was almost completely empty. And then he felt the string jerk and the spool jumped in his hands. He almost lost his grip, but his hands reflexively tightened around the spool, and a moment later the tension relaxed. When he tried to let out more string, he found the pull of the spoon was gone, so he carefully wound the string back onto the spool. When he finished he found to his amazement that in the place where the spoon had been there was a ragged end; almost (he thought to himself) as if it had been bitten off.

He went inside to contemplate this odd turn of events, and while he was sitting and thinking the phone rang. He saw it was an unlisted number and let it ring.

Collection agencies. They were relentless, calling at all hours of the day, and only last week they had somehow managed to track him down at his work. They were soul sucking relentless predators (he thought) no better than legalized loan sharks.

Sharks. The word stuck in his mind, and grew, into a plan.

When Carol got home from her shopping, the plan had hardened into a purpose. The days were getting warmer (he told Carol.) There was no reason on this night in late February that they should not go for a swim in the pool.

Carol seemed suspicious of his pleasant manner at first but shortly she agreed that it was unseasonably warm, and that a swim in the pool might be just the thing. But when she stepped off wooden deck that surrounded the pool she sank into the dark water with a bubbling shriek and then came thrashing back up to the surface, sputtering for air.

It was deep (she told him.) How could it be so deep?

But David didn’t answer. Instead he picked up the pole that usually held the leaf rake and used it to push her out toward the center of the pool.

She screamed and asked him what he was doing, but he only smiled and brought the heavy pole down hard over her head. She cried out softly and then sank down into the dark water.

David looked over into the pool, and for a just moment he thought he saw something sleek and white and impossibly large flash past below the surface of the water.

For a long time he sat there on the deck looking up at the endless ocean of stars. But after a while the wind began to blow colder, and so he went back inside, alone.