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.

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."***

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 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.***

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.***

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 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.

“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.***

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...***