Issue 45 June 2017 Flash Fiction Online June 2017

The fires are small and out of season. Three in one week give the firefighters pause, make them shift in their heavy canvas suits and scratch their heads. No dry lightning, no kids with fireworks, and no damage except for the fences and some singed field grass.

And the missing cows.

I can see the dragon from my back porch. He’s hunkered in a crack between stones on the big hill behind our houses. The neighbors pretend they can’t see the smoke, but they all lock their doors, bring in their little dogs, and close their drapes for protection.

Another week and the fires stop. Nobody asks about the cows, and I start to wonder if I’m the only one who knows he’s there.

* * *

I discover what he wants on accident. Wednesday after work I ride my bike around the side streets, playing at fitness. I’ve been avoiding the rocks, but my curiosity gets the better of me, and I race past them with the bike chain ticking the seconds.

Maybe I’m twisting around to see the rocks, or maybe it’s just fate, but the chain of my gold locket snaps and I hear the metal tinkle to the pavement. My father gave me that locket for graduation. I don’t even consider leaving it behind, not even with a dragon smoldering at the side of the road.

When I stop pedaling, I can hear him breathing, deep gusts of hot air that smell like beef. I know he wants the locket even before I turn around and see his scaly arm sliding out of the crack. His hide is armored and gleams like a mirror, reflecting our perfect, matching houses across a hundred facets. A black claw plucks my treasure from the asphalt, and I get back on my bike and ride home empty-handed.

I close my drapes for a few days, too. But I’m pretty sure the dragon knows which house is mine. All the others have families, children’s toys in the backyard, and he’s already sniffed out my priorities.

* * *

I peek out on Thursday and catch him prowling. The gold seems to have stirred a new lust in the monster, and now he’s wandering between our homes, looking in windows. It’s me he wants, though. I never doubt that. He’s tasted my locket, my guilt.

Was it spicy? I try to imagine the flavor of unsaid goodbyes, of not making it home in time.

That night I fill a backpack with all my old jewelry. My hands shake. I throw in some silverware and a candlestick that is probably ordinary brass.

I wait until I see him vanish into the lair before pedaling out and flinging the pack toward the crack.  In the dark, the smoke seems thicker, the hiss of the dragon’s exhalations more pronounced against the sound of crickets. I race home and only find out he’s taken the stuff when I discover my shredded backpack on the porch the next morning.

On Friday I hit the thrift stores. I pack a week’s worth of duffle bags with cast-off jewelry, with cups and trays and little figurines made of glass. I drop half a paycheck on other people’s junk, on old furs and broken collectibles, on plastic gemstones and plated silver.

One by one I drop them at the crack in the stones. The monster takes my treasures, but it takes me another week to realize I own a dragon.

* * *

I don’t know where he puts it all. That gash in the stones isn’t deep enough. Maybe he eats the stuff, devours the detritus of our lives and leaves the cows alone—at least until I miss a feeding. Two months into dragon-keeping, work runs late. Some of us go for drinks after. We laugh until midnight and then flirt with impropriety for another hour at least.

I crawl home around 2 AM and find a dead cow on my lawn.

A concerned neighbor calls the police, and the next night I leave three backpacks outside the dragon’s lair. I pack better stuff, the medal I won back in High School, a watch that belonged to my grandfather. More jewelry that isn’t plastic.

The dragon follows me home anyway. I catch him peeking in the windows, and when I pull the drapes, the dragon looks straight through them. When I close the doors, he looks through me. He sees the good crystal. He sees the things I’ve been keeping for myself.

* * *

Some nights I wonder if the neighbors have their own dragons. Were they greedy too? Did they put material things above family? Did they stay away too long, come back too late? I sleep with the lights on now, and I can hear him gnawing on my Father’s locket. I can see the dragon smile, even though my drapes are closed. Guilt flavored trinkets can’t possibly satisfy him forever.

I’m running out of gold. Running.

I pile everything in the center of my living room. The furniture stacks neatly, but the rest I just toss into a heap. Jewelry, clothes, knick-knacks—it’s all junk now. Dragon food. I leave everything, and I leave the gas on. All it would take is a spark, and my dragon is made of fire and greed.

I leave the car, too, the house unlocked for him. He’s already crawling from the crack in the stones. The hiss of his breathing chases me out.

I drive away in something used and rented, flying, and owning nothing.

“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
~Neil Peart of the band Rush.

Neil Peart is considered to be the best percussionist of all time.

Here’s a link to one of Neil’s amazing percussion solos.

We discovered a few years ago—much to our chagrin—that our youngest child is a percussionist. One does not become a percussionist. One simply IS a percussionist. There are, as Terry Pratchett puts it in his fabulously funny book, Soul Music, natural drummers. And then there are the rest of us. Natural drummers thrive on constant noise. They MAKE constant noise, usually percussive. They tap with pencils, feet, hands, fingers, on anything and everything.

Still, choices had to be made. Do we allow her to pursue percussion? Do we put up with the constant noise, the nearly-inevitable hearing loss (ours AND hers), the need to find a space large enough for a drum set? Do we commit to buying a never-ending supply of sticks (because drumsticks ‘die,’ turning, quite literally, to sawdust at their core, making them sound dull when they come in contact with whatever surface they encounter—and, believe me, drumsticks have encountered more surfaces that you can imagine in our house—not to mention that different sticks are needed for different purposes and on and on and on … )?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

She is happy as a percussionist. It fills her with joy and a sense of self that nothing else could have.

And, really, what is the very purpose of choice? Is it not an effort on the part of every individual to find that ever-elusive thing called happiness? We’re all on an epic quest for happiness. That’s what life is all about. We may define happiness differently. We may look for it by making choices that are destructive or don’t seem to make sense. But, at the core, that is why we make the choices we make. And that is why we face the consequences that come with those choices—because choices ALWAYS have consequences. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes a bit of both.

This month’s stories are all about choices and their consequences.

First, in “Touching Strangers” by C E Aylett, a woman and her husband choose to take a risk-filled journey to a new life.

Next, Frances Pauli’s hero faces some dire consequences for past choices at the hands of a dragon in her poignant tale, “Owning the Dragon.”

Then, from returning FFO author, Lora Gray, a hauntingly beautiful story about the struggle between choosing what is right over the very essence of self, “Water like Air.”

Last up, our reprint of the month, “Spring Thaw,” by G L Dearman. Originally published in the Iron Writer Challenge 2016, “Spring Thaw” tells the story of a man who finally chooses not to be broken.

Happy reading!

Dates do not exist in the camp. Today is today; there is no yesterday, no tomorrow. If only 5168 would learn that.

Spring has finally melted the months-deep snowdrifts, turning the ground to ankle-deep muck. Plants, long hidden, emerge from the soil. Flowers rush to bloom and die before Siberia’s winter returns.

In Siberia, even warmth brings suffering: mosquitoes gathered in clouds thick enough to choke a man. They breed in the camp’s decrepit water tower, which still stands, though it is useless to the diesel trains that bring men here and leave empty.

The mosquitoes swarm us as we stand at attention on the soggy parade ground. I hate them, but, after so many years, I’ve become numb to their bites. 5168 smiles like a fool as they crawl on his face.

In the soup line, he whispers, “The anniversary of my wedding day approaches. May thirty-first. I know by the thaw.”

I shake my head. “Today is today. May thirty-first doesn’t exist.” I learned when I first arrived. Commander Kozlov taught me. The scars he left on my back ensure I don’t forget.

“They arrested me moments before our wedding. But Vera will wait for me.”

A guard glares at him. Talking in the soup line is not permitted.

“No one waits,” I whisper. “Stop saying such things, 5168. You’ll get yourself killed.”

“I have a name,” he says. “Volodya. And yours?”

“My only name is 1117.”

The guard slaps the ceramic bowl from 5168’s hand. It shatters on the wooden floor. The other prisoners laugh, glad for the distraction. I look away. The camp will not issue 5168 a new soup bowl. Now, he must survive on bread alone or starve.

* * *

After yesterday’s beatings, 5168 cannot rise from our shared bunk this morning.

Kozlov bends over the broken man, a smile raising his fat jowls. “Tell me,” he says, “what is today’s date?”

5168’s eyelids flutter but don’t open. Through bloodied lips, he whispers, “May thirty-first.”

* * *

I am fortunate Volodya died in the spring. I dig three feet down before striking soil too frozen to continue. In such a spacious grave, he shall sleep well.

I bury him facing west. When he arises on the day of judgment, he’ll have his back to Christ, but he’ll face his beloved Vera.

Around the brown patch of turned earth, new grass covers hundreds of low mounds. There is only one escape from this place.

As I return to the barracks, shovel in hand, an empty train rumbles out of camp. The new arrivals line the parade ground at sloppy, unpracticed attention.

Commander Kozlov waves me over.

“I am not a cruel man,” he says to the assembly. They look to each other, doubtful. “You can make life in this camp easier on yourselves. Meet 1117, one of our hardest workers. He has learned how to stay out of trouble. You could all benefit by his example.”

I stare at my mud-encrusted boots. I can’t meet the eyes of the new prisoners.

“1117,” Kozlov says, “tell them today’s date.”

A mosquito lights on my cheek and stabs into my skin. I smile at the pain. A name, long hidden, emerges from my memory. “My name is Yuri Maximovitch Dumanovsky.” I look into Kozlov’s watery eyes. He stiffens in impotent shock. “It is the first of June.

Previously published in The Iron Writer Challenge, 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

The Gutters return! 

The Gutters are spaces between brag-worthy milestones and achievements, the space where we spend most of our lives.

In this case, the short seventeen-year sojourn between first published short story (2000) and securing my first traditional book deal (2017) for The Brimstone Files (and pre-order HEX-RATED now! I need money for gas!). Consider this column the antidote to the 1001 books telling you how to be a bestseller, an apex achieved by the One Percent while the rest of us are here, in the gutters where, as Oscar Wilde noted, “some of us are looking at the stars.”

Anywho, when we were last here, I’d just graduated the Odyssey writing workshop (2005). I had a phenomenal time, and you can read about it here, where I challenged my friend and colleague Norm Partridge on his dismissal of writing workshops as a waste.

I was only writing short stories because of my dissertation (available now for a cool $36 bucks!). When I returned home, I kept up the Odyssey momentum by getting a story done every couple of weeks. And in researching production and enthusiasm, I came across an essay by a writer who was something of a phenom in the short story world, Jay Lake.

Jay’s Rules of Writing spoke to me. Lake had a drive and attitude that was smart and pragmatic. He, like Ray Bradbury and others of the “Fast Writing” school, held to the belief in the value of getting a story completed a week. Bradbury famously quipped that you could spend all year writing a lousy novel, but he dared you to write 52 stories and have all of them stink. Lake was even more voracious, arguing that constant production would create your voice, not just writing out the bad stuff. He was also one among the “fast writing” school who believed that revisions were both good and necessary (a truth many fast writers deny, stupidly).

So naturally, I read more about his career. His short story output was scary. He sold to tiny markets and major ones. He edited an esteemed anthology series. He won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer (2004) and published a single novel with a small publisher. He had a blog that often discussed the “process” of writing (as well as politics, parenting, reviews, and NSFW stuff on sex that I found perplexing). I found Lake’s dedication to short fiction, writing, and discovering voice through enthusiastic production a siren song. A writer who was so relentless and positive appealed to this perpetual workaholic.

So, I bought a short story collection, which included drawings from artist Frank Wu. I read the first story, then the second, and it dawned on me before the fourth:

I didn’t like Jay Lake’s fiction. At all. Full stop.

I was actually stunned at how much his work didn’t speak to me, considering how much I appreciated his method. His talent was undeniable, and he clearly loved his work and making it and exploring it. But in a year where I only read short fiction, I never finished his collection. When he switched to novels and became a rising midlist star, I hoped maybe they’d speak to me. But they didn’t. In hindsight, I was a horror and crime guy with deeper roots in realism than the fantastical, and Lake’s canvas dipped heavily into “sense of wonder” territory that left me frigid or bored.

Sadly, this disconnect soured me on Lake’s growing media persona a bit, and, honestly, I was jealous of his success as the fastest gun in the genre world when it came to short fiction. Hell, Lake got to be the “cool fast writer” of his generation first! No fair! Other passions soon consumed me, and Lake’s impact on my life diminished. Still, the fact that I didn’t like his work didn’t mean it was bad, or that he was a bad guy, right? So in 2008 I reached out and interviewed him for an article I wrote with Justin Howe at Clarkesworld Magazine about the influence of role playing games on writers of fantastical fiction. He was nice. His answers fit alongside current gods of genre like Jeff VanderMeer, Catherynne M. Valente, and China Mieville. Cool beans.

Sadly, Lake died in 2014 after a harrowing and public battle with cancer. He left an impressive body of work behind that I will likely never read. But his impact on me as a novice, driven, and relentless writer was deep. Hell, I still use Jay’s Rules in my own writing classes. In a funny way, one of my most profound influences as a young scribe is a guy whose work I didn’t care for. I suspect he’d get a kick out of that.

Instead, I was writing under the influence of dark writers who were also winning awards in short fiction, tiny markets and major ones, and earning mad respect through cult followings just as the small press horror world was recovering from the horror bust of the 1990s. While Lake shot for the stars, I walked into the shadows of East Texas and Cedar Hill, Ohio with pit stops to the Pacific North West and darker spots in between. It was here I learned to write with emotional grit and intensity through a lot of fucking horrible stories.

The years of “I write horror” were upon me.  

When the ship’s captain and the fat man who brought us all here stood together on the dock, talking low, I should have taken it as a sign. Their hands jabbed the night air in anger, and a murmur passed through me that my husband and I had made a mistake. The shuffling crowd propelled us forward. There was no choice but to move with them.

Glints of uncertainty passed among the crew as we all boarded. Instinct compelled me to step back, remain on land. I glanced at my husband for his agreement, but he set a grim smile, tugged my hand, and gave a subtle yet sharp nod of his head. We’ll risk it.

And so we squeezed in with all the others—backs, shoulders and knees touching. Touching strangers.

Once the morning had paled the night waters, my husband took out the postcard from his inside pocket and held it in his lap. His thumb caressed its creases. Neither of us had slept—my stomach was too bunched with worry. If the vessel capsized, I wanted to be ready to swim. He put his arm around me, and we stared in silence at the picture: a lake in Java with a beach. A small flock of tourist huts skirted that side of the shore, and mist lingered amid the trees on the surrounding mountain slopes. An empty deckchair sat alone in the middle of the sand.

My seat, my husband had written back late one night. He’d sent the letter by clandestine post. That’s where I’ll live out my days. Be sure it is empty when we arrive.

That’s where we were headed, to live with our son. He said he could find us work, if we could escape.

I put my arms around my husband and hugged him tightly.

* * *

Weeks passed and we clung to that postcard, even though the tropical sun paled the image and darkened our skins until they peeled like the paper bark of a cajuput tree. The hope that we might make it to Sumatra faded too, trapped on this craft as we were—weak, rations low. For us passengers, at least. The crew seemed strong, able. But we were too old to fight our way through the young men who dived upon and snatched up our daily provisions and could only scavenge what little we found overlooked on the floor. If we were quick.

People were dying, dehydrated, sick, starved. We’d stopped covering our noses when they relieved themselves overboard, barely glanced when their bodies were rolled into the sea. More food for us—we recognised the cogs turning in our neighbours’ eyes, to our shame. What little good it did us.

Our ‘liberators’ honed the same mean glare as the military slavers of home. They were not going to share. And especially not the man in charge, whose heteroclite bulk amid this kettle of scarecrows no doubt came from years of feasting on misery and fear. Smugness mooned from his fat face—as did the shine on his chicken greased lips. Belu.

One day, tensions whipped into a tempest, snapping what tenuous tethers were left. The usual melee of arms over rice and hacking voices for water became a scuffle, fists flying. Men toppled onto us and sprang back up only to tumble down the other end of the boat, a roll of tangled brown limbs and snagged t-shirts thumping the planks.

There was shouting, so much shouting.

Then screaming.

And blood!

Blood slapped onto the wood, our backs, our knees.

Belu hacked and hacked at a young man’s back with a machete, its blade wide, silver catching sunlight while crimson arched wet and thick in the air.

Other crew members, they slashed and sliced too.

I screamed.

People were jumping out of the ship—women, children, grandmothers, fathers. My husband dragged me by the shoulder, the cloth of my dress bunched firmly in his fist. We scrambled as far to the bow as we could, ready to bail out ourselves. But they stopped. They glowered. Their eyes said no more but they never said a word.

At the edge of the boat, a child screamed for her parents, her arms outstretched to the V of foam and blood speeding away behind us. Belu stroked his thumb on the knife’s handle, his attention tugging from us to her.

I grabbed her, brought her down to us before he decided to push her over. It took just minutes until we could no longer see the silhouettes of heads bobbing above water.

* * *

The child cried until I thought she had died. I kept her to my chest, stroking her head. No more than nine and already seen more than was fit. She sat in between us, our arms tightly embracing our trio, even though emptiness swelled in the spaces around us.

In the following days, we showed her our postcard and told her over and over of the beach and the bungalow where we would live. She would have her own boat to go fishing on the lake and bring us all supper in the evenings.

‘Could I have a cat?’ she once asked, the first thing she’d spoken.

I kissed her and said, ‘Of course.’

Every day for a week we talked of our lake, until one night when the siren came and the big boat pulled up beside us.

‘Be sure to tell them you’re our daughter!’ I whispered. ‘Remember, or they’ll take you away from us.’

When we arrived at the refuge, their brows insinuated our lie by our age, but they accepted it nonetheless. And so now we must wait.

Our postcard is pinned to the wooden chair—the only furniture we have by our beds. My husband took a pen and redrew some of the details. He also added a boat.

Somehow, we’ll make it to the lake, the chair, and the cat, us three. Strangers.

Strangers, touching.

She begins in the pond at the edge of Tom Hatcher’s cornfield, where the stalks drag needy fingers across a summer moon. She digs one toe, slender and clear as glass, into the murky bottom and begins to spin. Round and round. Faster and faster. Until sludge climbs up her body and binds to the translucent armature of her calves and thighs. When the mud covers her fully, she heaves herself out of the water and onto the shore.

Elodia closes her eyes.

She remembers the photograph in Tom’s kitchen. The farmhouse with its slanted walls and bowing roof. His wife, wrinkled and smiling in front of it. Pale hair. Blue gingham dress clinging to sagging breasts and a fleshy, dimpled waist. Looking loved and happy and wanted.

Elodia scoops mud from the lip of the pond and begins to sculpt that smile and those breasts onto herself. The extra weight trembles her delicate body as she stands.

Her sister, Thalia, would have laughed if she saw her then, alone and draped in mud. Thalia doesn’t understand. Her world is quick death and clean water. She lures velvet skinned boys into the deep of her lake. The young ones. The beautiful ones. The ones who walk barefoot and alone in moonlight. Thalia calls to them, and they paddle, unthinking, out to meet her. “Who are you?” they ask. Thalia only laughs and winds around them, warm and slippery and sweet. She teases them into confused pleasure, lust fast and fragile as moth wings. She hooks her fingers into them. She drags them down. She holds them beneath the water until the thrashing finally stops and they are silent and still.

Quick. Clean.

But Elodia has always been a murky thing, and her feet are mud heavy as she walks through the cornfield toward Tom Hatcher’s farmhouse.

* * *

Tom Hatcher doesn’t believe in ghosts. He believes in living things. In growing things. But one evening in July, six months after his Meredith has passed, he thinks he sees her in the pond at the edge of his cornfield.

It’s the damn cough that forces him to stop. That heavy dampness in his chest that won’t quite dry out, that jitters him out of his sleep and follows him like a ragged shadow wherever he goes. If his Meredith were there, she’d hold his hand as he tried to squeeze oxygen into his lungs. She’d wrap her arms around his shoulders when that shadow grew teeth and loomed beside him and murmured “not long now not long now.”

He is panting and wiping cold sweat from his lip when he sees the movement in the pond. A strange ripple shudders through the center of the water. And there! A girl-shaped something, slender and clear as glass, skims the surface.

He calls, “Hello?”

But nobody answers.

He hobbles to the pond to find her, but the glass girl is nowhere to be seen.

Meredith had loved to swim when she was young. Tom still remembers the way she dove, supple and smiling, into the water. Sunburned skin. Long limbs. Gentle laughter.

That night, Tom dreams of his dead wife. Meredith is a freckled Esther Williams in a turquoise pool, splashing and laughing and darting away quick as a minnow. He can’t catch her, but he falls in love with the curve of her bare shoulder, the gentle slope of her back, the fine, red plump of her lower lip.

The next morning, cough lurking in his chest, Tom opens the screen door and sees muddy footprints leading away from the farmhouse.
He follows them to the pond.

Tom Hatcher doesn’t believe in ghosts, but tonight he sits in the kitchen beneath the photograph of Meredith, the one taken before the cancer began creeping into her bones, and he waits for her to reappear, young and beautiful, hair damp from swimming. Her freckles will crinkle when she smiles and she will gather him against her breast, cool and lovely as water.

* * *

It is midnight when Elodia emerges from the cornfield and lumbers through the abandoned marigolds to the farmhouse. There, on the other side of the screen door, she sees Tom hunched at the kitchen table, fingers steepled beneath an unshaven chin. Wallpaper peels behind him, yellow flowers on nicotined paisley. A mountain of dishes slumps in the sink. Above him, in her blue gingham dress, is the photo of his wife, a snapshot of flesh and blood that never needed mud to be whole or beautiful.

“Hello,” Elodia says.

Tom turns, startled, breath hitching at the sight of her, his fingers curled tight around the edge of the table, wheezing and ragged as his lungs snatch at the air.

Elodia can hear the water inside him. The slow wet smother. The inescapable flood.

As he stands, she waits for the inevitable question, but when Tom is finally able to speak, he doesn’t ask “Who are you?” Instead, he slowly crosses the kitchen. He opens the screen door like a secret, the kitchen light feathering the remains of his hair. “Oh, I knew you would come,” he says, his voice damp and rusting, his face soft as he reaches, trembling, toward her and caresses her cheek.
Elodia closes her eyes. She imagines tender hands sinking through the muddy shell separating them, his touch heavy as water, gentle as air. She imagines a life of sunlight and gingham dresses. Hazy mornings in an ancient and rumpled bed. A familiar hand folded over her wilted breast. Bodies grown old together, entwined and intimate as roots.

Elodia smiles like she imagines a wife might smile.

She pretends her heart isn’t aching as she folds her arms around Tom’s shoulders and lowers him gingerly to the kitchen floor.
She pretends the love in his eyes is for her as his breath withers, as his heart slows, as the sun rises, as the shadows lengthen, as she whispers, “Not long now.”