"How is everything," she asked with a well rehearsed and well delivered grin. Her cheeks were pulled back in the same way Pembrow pulled off. His smile was feminine enough to disarm, but his teeth meshed in the jagged way reptile teeth matched, spine to gap, with a force of mechanical perfection one finds when watching rolls of razors shred paper into perfectly neat slips of refuse. A mechanical perfection so well geared to turning order into charming chaos it was a wonder to see it work. I blinked. Was it Pembrow towering over me from the corner of my eye? His face was the same, but where Larry and I hit our ceiling, all he did was grow taller, larger, thick necked in his time away. The snap of the fireplace lighter's switch brought me back to the table,
Scanlon
Rick swiped hard at his nose with the full flat of his palm, the heel of his glove coming away with a sheen glistening like plastic wrap. Sherri met his eyes as he glanced up before he could fight himself to make sense of his sights that ducked and bobbed like buoys on bad water. Her confusion was the only thing he could understand, the only thing that came clear as a church bell in springtime as he hunched. The muscles of his abdominal wall balled into eight individual fists and pummeled his stomach like a heavy bag with no sand or cotton inside it. He wretched. His rifle fell from his hands, steel plated knees meeting the concrete of the warehouse floor in twin claps, the muzzle brake touched the glass and as he clutched in the space before him for a thing to stop him from completely doubling over his fingers caught the natural grip of his rifle, slipped behind the guard, and dumped the spring.
Last Flight of The Odesta
In the shifting waves of gravity, the terrific warped mass of spiked, thick bodied, momentarily amplified being, she began to peel apart like a bloated artichoke shedding its leaves bursting with life, ire, and purpose, an autumn Oak before winter winds. She fell, without spark or fire, against the face of displaced Dianus, yanked tight to her hip like an animal on a leash and as she began to crumble in the farthest reaches of Dianus's atmosphere the black body rose prominent and in line with Gallot's red and gushing belt...
Tub Song
The odd thing about bathtubs in small apartments is that they are never deep enough to fold a body into and still be able to bury that body in pipe tanned water. Chris tried anyway. He curled himself into an ampersand of naked limb and raw bone, the water from the tap churning against his feet. The ampersand of being coiled harder, a cross section of a torsion bar pressing back the weight of carriage against the gaps in a road hidden well enough to take the most seasoned local driver by surprise. His head touched the pistachio green paste colored fiberglass at the tub's opposite end while the water, as hot as it could come, rippled inside his left nostril and lapped at his right. Both eyes stood open. One beneath the waves. One above. He could taste the salt of his day worn skin through the socket. The spikes and tines of the tang pricked the soft tissue behind his tongue like toothpicks to yellow cake. He made no effort to breath, allowing the natural drive for self preservation to tick his neck a few degrees this way to suck air, air still chunky with the scents of summer park greens and rain soaked tennis shoe soles left to dry, into his lungs. With one eye he watched the steam lap at the bathroom mirror. With the other eye he watched his breath bubble through and stick to the fiberglass of the tub wall in tiny, forgetful, silvered mercury spheres.
The trickle and blubber of water into water was joined by the thrush and hiss of water through a downspout. Skin drawn as tight as it can go over muscle dimples easily. Body builders take diuretics before competitions to produce the effect of forgetting to drink. Forgetting to eat. He opened his mouth and drank some of the hot water. The taste was not unbearable. He heard from someone at his job, someone who was more accustomed to rations and starvation and kneeling in sandy holes than splitting coffees at fast food joints in the titular hours of the morning after a night's eight hours, that if you drink hot water it can trick the stomach into believing it is full of chewed food. "How do you trick a mind into believing it is empty of chewed thought," he asked him that day. Chase laughed and shook his head. There was no joke. The gap glared like a newspaper swatted hound. In that gap there was too deep a glimpse at a thing they both knew existed. A thing they both wondered at in the small hungry hours of fingering dollar bills and counting days until the next pay cycle. He wanted to ask Chase if he ever killed anyone over there. "What was it like?"
Chris swallowed again. "An Easter egg. I am an Easter egg in a pool of dye and I am not dying," he considered. Hugging his knees to his chest, he realized, was not necessary. The slender width of the tub could hold his knees to his chin on it's own. He let go and, careful not to swish the half hot, half tub filling, water to the floor he wrestled his left arm from beneath his body weight and allowed it to rest in the few inches of space between his thighs and his stomach, like a cracked bone in a cheap blue sling. "What do you do with an Easter egg that will not take it's dye," he wondered, toes touching each other in conference. "You could eat it," he answered. "Boil it, maybe." His mind began to count the number of people that would be able to answer the question, the number of people he knew that would be willing to answer the question. "You would have to break it open of course, to see if the dye took on the inside." He considered for several seconds the principles of osmosis, deciding several neck twisted breaths later that high school was not worth revisiting for any length of time. There was no single piece of information locked up in those years worth searching for. His stomach tightened. Pressed his hips and his knees against the plastic tub wall and forced his spine against the opposite.
Chris listened to the drum roll of his vertebrae against the flex of plastic. The slow roll of knuckling pops knocked through the water to his submerged ear like fingers tapping against the thick clear plastic of a receptionist's desk. The knocks sounded like the weak fist of an aged man pounding against his own door in a blizzard. Locked out of his own home by his oversight. Frozen to death because he left without his keys. Never leave home without your keys the lolling, muted, dots of sound whispered to his left brain. His right heard nothing save the dribble tickle of air bubbles through water. He blinked, unsure for a moment that the pair of soft crushy spheres in his head were his own. They were. "I can't remember the last time I sat in the sea."
He shifted, a chain dangled bench on a summer night's planked porch touched by a breeze of thought. The water waved it's agreement. "I know you," the water said. "Where have you been?" Chris did not answer. He did not know how to answer. The water waved like a stranger to another stranger, half recognition, half courtesy, half hoping to be right, half too embarrassed to be wrong. The faucet was red in the face already. With splayed toes Chris reached the water softened palm of his foot to the heat of the hot water knob and cranked it gently until the burble and glass chute of falling water to water was superseded by the shush of falling water to crusted drain pipe. The tub was as full as it would ever be, and hot water came with a price tag only manageable when managed. And besides, the tongues of heat swathed everywhere along his still exposed skin where the tongues of water did not. "I am a continent," he thought, "kissing these waves of sea water. A continent rapping it's time gnawed knuckles against the heart of the Earth. Waiting for you," he blinked his water eye, "I have always been here."
"I know you."
"Can you feel me? Can you touch me," he thought"
"The way I used to?" The hiss quieted. The water was settling, cooling, to the ring of shedding that ran like a seam of skin along a scrotum. The steam on the bathroom mirror began to bead like sweat on the tip of a nose. Chris tucked his arm downward and in between his thighs. "Are you dying on the inside?"
"I don't know," he whispered and swallowed again. He tried to break himself open before. Once. Twice if his memory could serve him well enough to know a thing with certainty. He came apart then. Came apart like the pages in a book too old to be read, pages too furnace crisped to turn without flaking away like the ashes of a dream in the seconds after eyes snapped out from behind lids like roiling laughter from behind clenched teeth. He peeled then. A flower cut and destined for the press of paper weights for preservation and posterity, but left too long on a sun room's shelf and fractured between gripping fingers into a confetti of lost property and faded rainbow sliver dust. There was nothing left to know in the heap of scraps then. Nothing to study. To confirm or deny. His skin was beginning to prickle.
Pruning, Chris read somewhere, was actually sweat trapped beneath a layer of dead skin. Trapped beneath a layer of matter that used to function and whose only purpose, since ceasing to, was to protect the skin that still did. If you scratched at it hard enough, it could come off. If you had the fingernails for it. Geologist fingers. He squeezed his left forearm between his half submerged legs. It was still his arm there, still his hand and veins, still his limbs. "Are you going to fall asleep in me," the water asked?
"Like I used to," he moved in his cradle, the chunky air beginning to fall in brine brush strokes of chill and darkness. A streak of lightning touched the water and the light switch and sprinted away through the obscuring dappled film of the bathroom window. The afternoon hours were spent and dancing in evening streets, waiting for a bath of their own. He turned, a landmass farther from the sun, unbroken by the human touch of neither hand nor passage of foot. He kissed the waves. "I can try."
The trickle and blubber of water into water was joined by the thrush and hiss of water through a downspout. Skin drawn as tight as it can go over muscle dimples easily. Body builders take diuretics before competitions to produce the effect of forgetting to drink. Forgetting to eat. He opened his mouth and drank some of the hot water. The taste was not unbearable. He heard from someone at his job, someone who was more accustomed to rations and starvation and kneeling in sandy holes than splitting coffees at fast food joints in the titular hours of the morning after a night's eight hours, that if you drink hot water it can trick the stomach into believing it is full of chewed food. "How do you trick a mind into believing it is empty of chewed thought," he asked him that day. Chase laughed and shook his head. There was no joke. The gap glared like a newspaper swatted hound. In that gap there was too deep a glimpse at a thing they both knew existed. A thing they both wondered at in the small hungry hours of fingering dollar bills and counting days until the next pay cycle. He wanted to ask Chase if he ever killed anyone over there. "What was it like?"
Chris swallowed again. "An Easter egg. I am an Easter egg in a pool of dye and I am not dying," he considered. Hugging his knees to his chest, he realized, was not necessary. The slender width of the tub could hold his knees to his chin on it's own. He let go and, careful not to swish the half hot, half tub filling, water to the floor he wrestled his left arm from beneath his body weight and allowed it to rest in the few inches of space between his thighs and his stomach, like a cracked bone in a cheap blue sling. "What do you do with an Easter egg that will not take it's dye," he wondered, toes touching each other in conference. "You could eat it," he answered. "Boil it, maybe." His mind began to count the number of people that would be able to answer the question, the number of people he knew that would be willing to answer the question. "You would have to break it open of course, to see if the dye took on the inside." He considered for several seconds the principles of osmosis, deciding several neck twisted breaths later that high school was not worth revisiting for any length of time. There was no single piece of information locked up in those years worth searching for. His stomach tightened. Pressed his hips and his knees against the plastic tub wall and forced his spine against the opposite.
Chris listened to the drum roll of his vertebrae against the flex of plastic. The slow roll of knuckling pops knocked through the water to his submerged ear like fingers tapping against the thick clear plastic of a receptionist's desk. The knocks sounded like the weak fist of an aged man pounding against his own door in a blizzard. Locked out of his own home by his oversight. Frozen to death because he left without his keys. Never leave home without your keys the lolling, muted, dots of sound whispered to his left brain. His right heard nothing save the dribble tickle of air bubbles through water. He blinked, unsure for a moment that the pair of soft crushy spheres in his head were his own. They were. "I can't remember the last time I sat in the sea."
He shifted, a chain dangled bench on a summer night's planked porch touched by a breeze of thought. The water waved it's agreement. "I know you," the water said. "Where have you been?" Chris did not answer. He did not know how to answer. The water waved like a stranger to another stranger, half recognition, half courtesy, half hoping to be right, half too embarrassed to be wrong. The faucet was red in the face already. With splayed toes Chris reached the water softened palm of his foot to the heat of the hot water knob and cranked it gently until the burble and glass chute of falling water to water was superseded by the shush of falling water to crusted drain pipe. The tub was as full as it would ever be, and hot water came with a price tag only manageable when managed. And besides, the tongues of heat swathed everywhere along his still exposed skin where the tongues of water did not. "I am a continent," he thought, "kissing these waves of sea water. A continent rapping it's time gnawed knuckles against the heart of the Earth. Waiting for you," he blinked his water eye, "I have always been here."
"I know you."
"Can you feel me? Can you touch me," he thought"
"The way I used to?" The hiss quieted. The water was settling, cooling, to the ring of shedding that ran like a seam of skin along a scrotum. The steam on the bathroom mirror began to bead like sweat on the tip of a nose. Chris tucked his arm downward and in between his thighs. "Are you dying on the inside?"
"I don't know," he whispered and swallowed again. He tried to break himself open before. Once. Twice if his memory could serve him well enough to know a thing with certainty. He came apart then. Came apart like the pages in a book too old to be read, pages too furnace crisped to turn without flaking away like the ashes of a dream in the seconds after eyes snapped out from behind lids like roiling laughter from behind clenched teeth. He peeled then. A flower cut and destined for the press of paper weights for preservation and posterity, but left too long on a sun room's shelf and fractured between gripping fingers into a confetti of lost property and faded rainbow sliver dust. There was nothing left to know in the heap of scraps then. Nothing to study. To confirm or deny. His skin was beginning to prickle.
Pruning, Chris read somewhere, was actually sweat trapped beneath a layer of dead skin. Trapped beneath a layer of matter that used to function and whose only purpose, since ceasing to, was to protect the skin that still did. If you scratched at it hard enough, it could come off. If you had the fingernails for it. Geologist fingers. He squeezed his left forearm between his half submerged legs. It was still his arm there, still his hand and veins, still his limbs. "Are you going to fall asleep in me," the water asked?
"Like I used to," he moved in his cradle, the chunky air beginning to fall in brine brush strokes of chill and darkness. A streak of lightning touched the water and the light switch and sprinted away through the obscuring dappled film of the bathroom window. The afternoon hours were spent and dancing in evening streets, waiting for a bath of their own. He turned, a landmass farther from the sun, unbroken by the human touch of neither hand nor passage of foot. He kissed the waves. "I can try."
Hero Status
***Without looking up he nudged his coffee cup toward the tender's edge of the bar and Fran, a sometimes friend and fellow member of the local bartending fraternity topped him off to the likely protests of the throngs of kids that always came to the bar at the same time and expected light speed service when there were 9 of them and just one Fran. The ebb and flow of the kids coming and going buffeted him like rough tides. It was fine when they all jammed up because they were stationary, and it was great when they were gone because he had space to breath. The hard part was dealing with the influx and out flow in between high and low tides as they banged shoulders and hissed at each other like drunk penguins all trying to use one fax machine to send the exact same document to the same exact recipient, none of them realizing they had no business being in an office to begin with.***
Halved With Time
***Londa did not notice it back then, so many years ago, but since she had so much more time to simply look around her, she noticed now. She saw some transporters come in with great holes torn in their bellies, bits of wing missing, or no wing at all. Some that came straight down and dove right into the Earth in plumes of glittering and molten steel confetti, plastics, wire, and pulverized flesh, billowing in high black smoke. No matter what direction they came from they always came in a vertical dive from the ceiling until only a few miles above the airspace of Rallypointe. All around them something was happening, and had been for years. ***
Causeway
***"Roads out. Washed out." He squinted, he couldn't make out her face from where he stood. His nostrils flared a moment as his lungs nipped into the filter. He spat the butt onto the gray, time slashed, pavement of Route 8 and watched Rawna climb through the empty windshield onto the hood. She formed her small hands into the shape of a megaphone.
"What!?"
He scratched his chin a moment, casting his eyes away from her sweat stretched pink tank top tweed slacks ensemble they'd picked out together at the local flea fair last season and into the cat tails in the ditch by the road side. He turned back to where Yipsbend road was supposed to have been. "The road's out! Causeway's gone."***
"What!?"
He scratched his chin a moment, casting his eyes away from her sweat stretched pink tank top tweed slacks ensemble they'd picked out together at the local flea fair last season and into the cat tails in the ditch by the road side. He turned back to where Yipsbend road was supposed to have been. "The road's out! Causeway's gone."***
Ken Sunrise Dan
***The black eye came loose and rolled onto the wax paper of the dissection tray with a thick thud. He avoided looking at it directly. The milky film surrounding the dilated iris was ribbed with deep brown veins, but within the iris was a darkness that reflected the bright white LEDs with a twinkling intensity of intelligence that gripped his stomach with a mercilessness that could hang on for hours after he left for home. Those expressing the traits of the true psychic were institutionalized and medicated until their deaths. He read the rumor pulp about the military having plans for developing true psychic soldiers, but he also knew there were already biological and hardware machines that could wage war much better than any man ever could or ever would. His finger slipped within the orbital cartilage of the red fin's skull and jabbed a lobe of the softball knot of the hard cased brain. "Jesus," the thing's thick tail twitched hard and slapped his elbow, sending his torch pen to the floor. He quickly bent to pick it up and returned it to his tray of tools as he tended to his task. The reason was more primal and closer to every human being's core than fear could ever cut.***
See, Feel, Find Me
***Can we transact." Steven planted the jar, full of glistening dark love firmly in the dirt beside the coffee can mini-hotplate contraption. The smell would have been as fresh as a half buried corpse were it not for the severe overtones of amonia, scorched colon and vaporized bile. "I'm just saying can we please transact. Or," Ron Wynn did not like how Steven's gaze made the skin on his chest attempt to claw away and hide at the small of his back, "you know. Or not. It's up to you." A small storm radio kicked on loud enough to rouse a "fuck, god damn" from Ron's already weak gut, then just as quickly as it started it cut off as the camper ripped the square battery out of it and chucked it across the way with a splash into the duct.***
April 7th: Imported More Stories
More stories have been recovered from the old defunct website. And by recovered I mean I pulled them up in their last known form and redid all of the edits. But, from now on I'll just call it importing.
New to blogspot Bits:
Science Fiction>>>>>>
New to blogspot Bits:
Science Fiction>>>>>>
The Death of Joseph Watkins
Curio>>>>>>
344 Boxer Ct
Someone Raises the Wolves
Drama>>>>>>
Blue Balls
As I continue to import the old stuff and pen new stories, I will start writing the dust jackets for the index pages so you can know what a story is about and who is in it and where it's set without giving the whole thing away. Sort of like the "read more" except more functional.
Anyway, thanks for reading.
The Death of Joseph Watkins
***Polynyde tracked Joseph, country to country, continent to continent, around the world in 80 days, 8 days, 8 hours, it never mattered. Joseph hadn't spent the money because he couldn't. Polynyde was always minutes behind, hours, rarely days. His life was 54 hundred days of nerve annihilating fear and nothing more. And now, on the catwalk of a 400 meter tall wind dam in Kansas it was dawning like a full moon breaking from behind towering clouds. "You have no where to go," the wind died as if the sinking realization that his trump card was so much chaff killed its spirit too, "no one will take you in. No one will touch you. No one will hide you," the 100 meter wide blades of the turbines thrummed gently, only meters below and spaced across the entire multi-kilometer expanse, as they adjusted their angles of attack to catch as much air as possible, "no one will smuggle you any further. This operation became much less about you as soon as I reached the fullness of my service life 15 years ago," the process failure warnings increased their torrid pace. The time was now. "Go peacefully." In a fraction of a fraction of a second the impulse flowed from Polynydes main processing center, to his distributor plates, to the fibers gripping the dull black cross hatched grip of his .22***
Someone Raises the Wolves
***"I'll tell you something, sir. That property probably isn't worth more than the deed it's printed. Not in Devonshire. Second, there is nothing out here but loose dirt and dogs so if you do find yourself owning something that is not one or the other, I suggest you let the Chesapeake lay her claim, cause she is going to claim these parts eventually." The truck hurdled earth mound and fallen branch alike in comparative silence for the next few miles. "Just, my suggestion is all," the cabbie qualified with a stiff tip of his woven straw hat. He leaned his head out of the window, ignorant of the thick clouds of mayflys and gnats that hovered in pockets thick enough to cut with a blade to spit his cheek full of chewing tobacco into the low brush. "See if you feel like honoring rain checks after a 43 year long whipping," he laughed as he handled the pickup with his left hand and placed more tobacco in his bottom lip with his right.***
344 Boxer Ct
***"Pinky swear?"
"I don't see it!"***
"Pinky swear," Will performed a like gesture and they shook on it. Winton wiped his palms together a few times. He vanished from the shoulders down as he picked his way through the thatched blades in the beating heat. Nearby, a fat flightless insect began its mid-afternoon song as though it were trying to imitate the sound of a stick dragging across the open mouths of an endless line of metal cans, several frantic yards at a time. "I think I last saw it near the middle of the yard," Will shouted, his thoughts racing back to several nights ago. Winton trundled on hand and knee for several more feet before sitting up.
Blue Balls
***"Fifteen minutes to grid, Tino!" Scott shouted as he came alongside the two Eddleton wood hounds. He fished inside the passenger side window and found the cable that connected to the onboard processor right where he left it. He unraveled it from the roll cage side bars, hooked it into the laptop, and downloaded his figures. Oscar and Joney watched intently, arms over eachother's short shoulders like a couple of bar flys stumbling back to their hay stacks. They loved this part. A few short moments passed and the deep throated V8 gave a cry like a lion in heat with nothing but vaginas as far as the eye could see. The twin turbochargers spooled like a pair of dive bombers to full compression then evened out to a thin whine that promised instant death to anyone foolish enough to venture into the driver's line of sight. The entire car seemed to tremble with the will to devour everything in its path or die trying.***
Page Indexes
Updated the page indexes.
New story: Coral.
Page index art still in the works somewhere. I will say coming soon, but I honestly am not sure how soon "soon" will be. Let's shoot for the end of April, as I'm splitting time with poetry and other art projects and a completely unrelated job that unfortunately sucks up a lot of time. Also still haven't finished putting up all of the old content that I have to port over from the defunct url, but I will make a renewed effort to regenerate it.
Cheers.
New story: Coral.
Page index art still in the works somewhere. I will say coming soon, but I honestly am not sure how soon "soon" will be. Let's shoot for the end of April, as I'm splitting time with poetry and other art projects and a completely unrelated job that unfortunately sucks up a lot of time. Also still haven't finished putting up all of the old content that I have to port over from the defunct url, but I will make a renewed effort to regenerate it.
Cheers.
Coral
***Coral turned back to his walk, the sweat on his brow cooling his skin despite the 102 degree heat. "I'm sorry you don't have any more time for me to help you deepen that understanding," his smile was one of satisfaction. It was the easy smile of a peace corps outreach officer who hadn't fixed the world, but who had helped, perhaps, to raise the wall of a home for an uncivilized tribesman in need of outside help. As he walked his footsteps fell in time with the sound of the shovels; one splitting the dry and sun stiffened Earth, the other splitting bone and flesh. "At least now we understand each other."***
Getting Warmer
***"I will not be silenced," he raised his voice to the pitch of small auditorium speech delivery. Lizabeth glared for long seconds before thinking better of it and instead turning her focus and her body toward cleaning the taps and brass spill trays. He crumbled a little and slouched once again to rest his elbows on the bar top, his hand gently sliding his mug a half inch this way, then a half inch that way. "It wasn't nice was it?"
"I don't know why you do this to yourself, Dave. Don was nice. I thought he was nice. He dressed nice. You two always laugh a lot."
"Here. We laugh a lot here," he corrected her, his eyes momentarily losing focus as he brought the mug to his face a little sharper than he intended, then dropped it back down having succeeded only in smacking his teeth with the hard rim. "Fuck."***
"I don't know why you do this to yourself, Dave. Don was nice. I thought he was nice. He dressed nice. You two always laugh a lot."
"Here. We laugh a lot here," he corrected her, his eyes momentarily losing focus as he brought the mug to his face a little sharper than he intended, then dropped it back down having succeeded only in smacking his teeth with the hard rim. "Fuck."***
Interview #448-01C
***I tried a radio not too long ago, but the stations in Deeprath are worse than empty static. Half a conversation can keep you awake a lot longer than the buzz of a dead antenna. Half of an investigation can keep you up at least as stubbornly. Weeks and Smith takes subcontracts at a lot of the facilities the state can't afford to keep its thumb on, partly because they're less glamorous posts, but mostly because the state is about out of thumbs between City Hall and plugging what spews out of its asshole and with the kind of week that my eyes saw and still cannot believe I'm sure the state badges are happy to have the hose pointed in anyone's face, but their own.***
Working Out the Kinks
I'm still working out the kinks of production through blogger and the feed settings. What I've realized is that a lot of the things that wordpress allows you to do automatically or create processes that then maintain things automatically, you have to maintain manually. It's not a huge problem, but it's there. Page header art is coming soon. The separate pages will have lists of related stories along with blurbs about the stories like jacket covers so readers can get a teaser before diving in. The RSS will only carry teasers and not full texts, but I still need to work out getting what I feel is the best content for a tease into the portion that appears in the feed instead of just the first few sentences of the story.
The page names are mostly self explanatory except possibly Alternate Worlds and Curio. Curio started off as Horror, but a lot of what horror has become (mingling and meshing with splatter pulp to the point where they're basically indistinguishable) is not what I write. A lot of what I think horror was or should be considered, more like the things in a freak show tent or museum of strange and super natural artifacts and tales, is what I feel I am more inclined to produce and I feel the concept of a collection of curiosities is more the speed I am looking for.
Alternate Worlds is a collection whose settings play as much a role in the weave of the story as the characters. They'll cross genres now and then, but I think I'm okay with that. There will also be other stories set in the same imaginary places in roughly the same timeline or around the same years. It'll be fun. I suppose, the main drag of Alternate Worlds is that the stories contained in that group are not stand alone stories, but parts of greater whole, whereas the other pages will list stand alone tales.
Header artwork for the pages is on its way too. Be warned, it'll be rough, but I'll do my best and see what escapes the cutting floor.
The page names are mostly self explanatory except possibly Alternate Worlds and Curio. Curio started off as Horror, but a lot of what horror has become (mingling and meshing with splatter pulp to the point where they're basically indistinguishable) is not what I write. A lot of what I think horror was or should be considered, more like the things in a freak show tent or museum of strange and super natural artifacts and tales, is what I feel I am more inclined to produce and I feel the concept of a collection of curiosities is more the speed I am looking for.
Alternate Worlds is a collection whose settings play as much a role in the weave of the story as the characters. They'll cross genres now and then, but I think I'm okay with that. There will also be other stories set in the same imaginary places in roughly the same timeline or around the same years. It'll be fun. I suppose, the main drag of Alternate Worlds is that the stories contained in that group are not stand alone stories, but parts of greater whole, whereas the other pages will list stand alone tales.
Header artwork for the pages is on its way too. Be warned, it'll be rough, but I'll do my best and see what escapes the cutting floor.
The Great Signet
***"Rooster, I think I'm in a bit of trouble here." The medical technologist used to tell him he must have been born in space every time he took his readings in what passed for mid-morning aboard the Signet. Rick was the first one to call him Rooster when he asked for a plastic baggie for personal maintenance months before. "Would you come down here?" Down was relative. He usually had to remind Rick to give exact locations relative to the equipment rooms and gangways. Rick's stout face filled the communication's screen in the pilot's capsule. He asked him what the problem was. "I'm having some issues with Busky's tests and I need a second pair of eyes to make sure I'm reading these figures right." They were all heavily cross trained and the team, almost to a man, could swap positions at any time if the need arose. "I already asked Tolle. He's in the middle of a sequence and has to watch it closely. I couldn't raise Scudero either." He told him to hang on a moment while he ran the day's checklists for the attitude adjustments and promised to come to Busky's sleep rack when he finished. From the corner of his eye, as he toggled the communicator switch, he thought he saw Rick frown, but the screen winked out and the checklist touch screen was already in his hands.***
Dream Scar
***Her hair was still wet from her morning shower and hung in thin and clumpy blond strands. Steve could not see her face clearly, but she knew without a word from his mouth that the bags under her eyes were only deeper and darker than they were two nights ago. She gathered the green and pink printed and tasseled blanket tighter around her shoulders, curling her thin toes into the nearly pastel gray and sandy tan of the pebbly earth beneath her. The ground was cold and feeling her blood chilling in the soles of her feet before it rushed back to her heart and head was a delicious relief. The shower water was never cold enough inside the cottage. "Hey," she paused to gather her vocal cords more tightly under control, "did you think about what we talked about last night? At all?" She did not look back at him.
The heat of the enormous fireplace, a fireplace large enough to roast an animal that could feed a large family, billowed out of the front door and wrapped around the twin piers of his plaid pajama panted, legs before spilling a short way across the ground and vanishing. He thumbed the thick band as he answered, "I did." He sipped again.***
The heat of the enormous fireplace, a fireplace large enough to roast an animal that could feed a large family, billowed out of the front door and wrapped around the twin piers of his plaid pajama panted, legs before spilling a short way across the ground and vanishing. He thumbed the thick band as he answered, "I did." He sipped again.***
Half Lives
***Mickey did not need to walk far to see the damage. In the clear starlight his eyes were able to collect he could see that the rear passenger window was reduced to bits of glittering pellets, yawning at him like a black eye socket on a bone white shard of skull. There were no footprints in the freshly fallen powder for him to trace. He walked no further. The window was not difficult for him to repair. In fact the entire thing would be as easy as signing the paperwork and passing the bill receipts to the reimbursement clerks. “Kids just don’t know the value of respect,” he sighed. “Probably threw a frozen one from the street,” he hugged his arms about his stomach as he hustled his way the few feet back to his porch and began to stomp the excess snow from his thick boots. Grasping the door knob, puzzlement descended on his eyes. The door was locked. “Anita,” he grumbled then chuckled, “what are you worried about.” He fished the spare door key from beneath the floor mat and let himself in.***
Sand Pipers
***"Rob, look at you," her eyes smiled as she turned her round face toward his. She let go of her knees and crossed her short, muscular, legs. "Even for the white kids here you work ridiculously hard." Sunnie turned her face back to the twinkling white caps as they sloshed onto the rocky beach several yards below them. The sun was on the verge of rising above the haze and was starting to take on its familiar brilliant yellow again.
"I do not ," he said, and kicked himself. The words sounded whiny in his own ears. "Well, I mean that's just my mom and dad giving me shit, you know," he rebuffed.
"Whatever, man," she laughed again, but somehow with less mirth. "You have any smokes," she asked.***
"I do not ," he said, and kicked himself. The words sounded whiny in his own ears. "Well, I mean that's just my mom and dad giving me shit, you know," he rebuffed.
"Whatever, man," she laughed again, but somehow with less mirth. "You have any smokes," she asked.***
Richmond County Fair
***"No, not here to visit. Not visiting at all." The pallor of the man's skin was not the white of poor health, nor the pink of wellness, but more and more as I stared, transfixed, it took on the gray of mausoleum walls and head stones. His eyes focused sharply on my own, one definitely yellow and the other white with cataract. "Not visiting at all."***
Richmond Is for Lovers
***“Alright, Desmond,” Loreen was not unattractive, but Mule was not at the shelter to shop for women. “Good luck out there. I know the world can be a harsh place. Come on back if you need to.” Her attempt at doe eyed concern was genuine.
“You can keep that,” she offered a finger wiggling wave of her own, nailing elementary school coquette square on the head. If Mule didn’t have other things to do he would most certainly take advantage of every opportunity to do fantastically athletic things to her. He gave her a nod and turned for the door. The thin strap of his shoulder tote was cutting into his neck and pulling his green t-shirt askew. He reshouldered it, and struck a match, giving the cigarette a few healthy breaths before tossing the smoking match head into one of the leafy balls of shrubs lining the short walk to the street.***
“You got a lighter, sweetness?” He wiggled his thumb in front of the black stick still pinned near the corner of his mouth. Loreen placed a matchbook on the counter.
Silhouettes
***Remmi shaded his eyes from the mid-day sunlight for several silent moments as he looked at Flint and then beyond him to the strip of asphalt that was his driveway. “Is that all you came here to ask me?” He shifted his weight from one prosthetic leg to the other, tiny servos spooling and absorbing and dampening microscopic measures of incremental movements. The first time Flint saw Remmi’s bare legs he was astonished at how well Remmi was able to handle himself, having no nervous contact with the Earth beneath his feet from the middle of both of his femurs on down.
“Of course not.” Flint glanced down at the matte black, vinyl taped, carbon fiber limbs and then at the white and candy red striped boxer shorts loosely draped over distributor coils and genitalia. He brought his eyes back up to Remmi’s. “The project needs you back, Remmi.”***
The Dreaming Door
***"Alright, boys in back, ladies in the cab," Brad smiled, tossing his keys into the air and snatching them back mid flight. "That was not as easy as I'd hoped, but some help is better than no help, " he thought to himself. He turned and strode to his pick up, unlocking the passenger side door before walking around the front of the car, waving to Mack who gave him a nod between glances at his functioning black and white television, and unlocked the driver side. He opened the door and flinched back. Rodney was already seated in the middle seat. "Kid, you are something else," he shook his head and began to climb aboard once again. Will's bicycle came to halt against the plastic rear window of the cab with a crack loud enough to make him jump a half inch out of his skin. "Come on, Will," he muttered, taking a breath, "she isn't new, but she's worth more than you," he sighed. Everybody was in. He turned the engine, reversed, and headed for his horse pens...***
Sleep Away
***...current passed through a half coil of memory metal sprang the metal to whatever shape it was in when it first firmed in its electrified stamping mold. Looping the coils all around the Skaps various equators, a sequencer and gyro could spring the coils in quick succession and push the device like arms flying against the ground at the rear of a wagon or an infinite set of oars shoving against the water. The Homann's perfected them. A metal was used that was so strong as to be thin enough to slide through flesh like a speeding whip through a sheet of paper. Capacitors were used that could quickly store charges strong enough to whip the 40 kilogram things 50 centimeters into the air and a meter across the ground with a single discharge. Trailing each arm were barbs tipped with enough biological material to outright slay a healthy man under favorable conditions and require amputation of wounded limbs when simply grazed. And when the battery completely discharged or forward progress ceased they did not simply shut down, but triggered an internal explosive charge that converted them into fragmenting grenades...***
8 Bit Start Up Song.
A new city, a new town, a new street, a new home, a new room, a new bed, a new door, a new dream.
This is the new home for my bonfire of fiction. All of the old feed links are dead. The lease on the webspace unfortunately ran to a close in the middle of resettling from New York City to Pittsburgh. Hopefully the content is not lost, but all of the final, medium polished, edits most certainly are. Unifying links will be drawn later to the open conversations of my selves and their continuing struggle with existence along with the poetry generated like a magnetic field around a changing core (the original offering at the pplg.me home page). I hope to rebuild this new space into something more than the space that died and feature and grow the fiction much more prominently and actively.
The stories and characters will repopulate this territory as quickly as possible, but the civil engineering needed to make a logical layout is still unknown and may end up being a lot less friendly to the curious passerby. That is not what I wanted, partly because one of the biggest obstacles to reading a new author is finding what you like about them, and partly because one of the other biggest obstacles to reading in general is the ease with which the reading can be done. It'll be a day to day project in my free time from my labor job, but I will do my damnedest to make it work because I need to write and I need a place to keep it where it will be happy.
I have moved town to a new place and part of the cost is turning out to be very little time for the things I love and want to do, but as I take care of the absolute needs and musts there will without a doubt be more time for the loves and wants. I'll be composing things imaginary all the while, but they may make it to paper with less frequency for now. It is nice to be home again, and thanks for listening to a compulsive confessor and story teller (though I assume most of the time I am talking to the sky and recording these things to read them later, it puts a smile inside me and makes me feel a little less crazy to believe someone else may be smiling over my shoulder once in a while too).
This is the new home for my bonfire of fiction. All of the old feed links are dead. The lease on the webspace unfortunately ran to a close in the middle of resettling from New York City to Pittsburgh. Hopefully the content is not lost, but all of the final, medium polished, edits most certainly are. Unifying links will be drawn later to the open conversations of my selves and their continuing struggle with existence along with the poetry generated like a magnetic field around a changing core (the original offering at the pplg.me home page). I hope to rebuild this new space into something more than the space that died and feature and grow the fiction much more prominently and actively.
The stories and characters will repopulate this territory as quickly as possible, but the civil engineering needed to make a logical layout is still unknown and may end up being a lot less friendly to the curious passerby. That is not what I wanted, partly because one of the biggest obstacles to reading a new author is finding what you like about them, and partly because one of the other biggest obstacles to reading in general is the ease with which the reading can be done. It'll be a day to day project in my free time from my labor job, but I will do my damnedest to make it work because I need to write and I need a place to keep it where it will be happy.
I have moved town to a new place and part of the cost is turning out to be very little time for the things I love and want to do, but as I take care of the absolute needs and musts there will without a doubt be more time for the loves and wants. I'll be composing things imaginary all the while, but they may make it to paper with less frequency for now. It is nice to be home again, and thanks for listening to a compulsive confessor and story teller (though I assume most of the time I am talking to the sky and recording these things to read them later, it puts a smile inside me and makes me feel a little less crazy to believe someone else may be smiling over my shoulder once in a while too).
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