Issue 48 September 2017 Flash Fiction Online September 2017

Step 1:

Dig for parts in the Gearwoman’s scrapyard, through dead frames and the rotted pages of old schematics. Find one of her bots, with thin limbs not yet rusted, intact and broken like yourself. Collect, and run away.

* * *

Step 2:

With no schematic, put him back together. Shape his face with molds and iron casings, give him eyes of copper bulbs. Make his muscles of kinetic wire, to make him strong like Kennan wasn’t. Try to forget Kennan. Fail. Give the bot a body it—he can use. Make his legs good for running, just in case.

Make his heart. Do not skip this step. Make the core with logic mods, with those chips that simulate emotion, but fill the space with pieces of yourself. Give to him your dreams and fears, those parts of you that always hurt. Put your heart inside of his, so when it sputters and flickers and comes to life, you recognize that beat, that heat that used to shine inside you.

* * *

Step 3:

Sit on your porch when the Gearwoman comes. Let the bot sit by you, neither of you hiding. Let her see what you made from what she threw away. Listen as she yells at you, tells you what becomes of boys who take her bots. As she barks, lean back on your hands and feel the heat of the bronze-blue sun. Let her anger build as she threatens you with death, and worse.

Let her promise. Do not skip this step. Let her point and tell you what she’ll do to you, how when she’s done you’ll be just another body in her scrapyard, and wait. Watch as your bot rises, hearing the promise of violence in her tone.

Watch him leap at her, strong and fast and moving to the beat of your own heart. Watch him soundless and perfect as he shoves her, sending her sprawling down your gray grass yard, a tumble of leather skirts and oil-stained skin. Watch and admire him, protective, proud and powerful.

When the Gearwoman rises, notice how hollow her new threats, how laced with fear her voice. But listen, because she tells you how you might as well be one of them. She knows a bot when she sees one. Take in this idea—that you could be just like him—and thank her.

* * *

Step 4:

Build a body for yourself, one that matches his. Find the casings that will be your limbs, casts that will replace the flesh and bone. Let him help you, because he’s more open, now. He remembers the still and silent pain of the Gearwoman’s yard as well as he remembers the strongest types of metal. He shows you what’s best, not the ones that shine but the ones that last.

Listen to the creak in his voice, and when he asks, follow him. Go to that scrapyard where you found him—take minor visceral joy in the Gearwoman’s absence—and walk among the leavings of her work. All bots, all boys, limbs and chasses and heaps that don’t have faces. Too far gone to be awakened, he says, even by your heart.

Say nothing as he kneels among the husks of a thousand broken souls, as he remembers how deep his pain can go.

* * *

Step 5:

Fall in love. Do not skip this step.

* * *

Step 6:

Take the best of his fallen brothers, to make yourself anew. Make your mind of stronger things so you can feel what he does. Sell your house, your clothes, all the human things you’ll never need, and pay another Gearsmith to make the change.

Let him hold your hand when they rip your brain and move it, strip your nerves and hollow out your veins. Believe him when he tells you you’re not dying, as if he knows.

Ask him if he ever felt like this, and listen when he says yes. When he says that’s why the Gearwoman burns the pages of her schematics. Why she’s so good at what she does, why her boy-bots feel so real—because they were. Because they, like you, only need to give up pieces of their heart.

Be hateful when he tells you this, and make that hate a lasting thing. Keep it with you in your new body, so when you wake with copper eyes and hollow limbs, when your heart beats like his does, remind him what that fury feels like.

* * *

Step 7:

Love him hard and often, like you never could with Kennan. Let him give you what he never shared when he was a person, that life cut short when the Gearwoman found him.

And after, when he finds you, making that creak that sounds like crying, let him come to you. Feel his pain through the parts you share, and feel him let it go. Let him show you how to do the same—for Kennan, for your hate, for the pain once thought too deep to heal.

Make a promise, that he won’t feel that pain again. As when you built his body, as when he helped you remake yours, take the best of what you find. Not what hurts, but what lasts. Do not skip this step.

Previously published in Daily Science Fiction, July 28, 2015, and Wilde Stories 2016. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

She takes another bite of her salad as the restaurant around us crumbles into ash. A sip at the glass of merlot beside her plate as the picture windows shatter, shards raining down across the dark hardwood floor.

The tables near the door disappear into flames, then the servers and diners go up in smoke with them. There’s a sound like the world being swallowed by waves as the air itself burns and the walls fall apart.

In a moment, we’re all that’s left of the building, the brick and mortar strewn in charred heaps around us. She stares at me across the table, the smile in her green eyes fading away.

“You see it again,” she says with a frown.

I nod slowly and survey the decimated room, struggling to keep the fear from my face. She, out of everything, has somehow failed to vanish, and that is some solace, at least.

“Different this time,” I reply. “Worse.”

She reaches across our table, the pristine white tablecloth an untouched island in the sea of rubble. On the ground beside my feet, all that’s left of the chandelier is a puddle of silver.

“It’s all right,” she whispers. “You can tell me.”

She squeezes my hand, and the nightmare reverses. Piece by piece, the room rebuilds itself until the world is whole again.

“All of it,” I mutter. “They’re going to burn all of it.”

I can’t lie to her, no matter how much the truth hurts.

“How soon?” she asks, keeping a straight face, to her credit.

“I don’t know. But soon enough that we need to leave.”

* * *

We pull up to our street half an hour later, jeeps patrolling the road, and helicopters cutting through the sky overhead. A young soldier stops the car and asks for our IDs.

I could tell him what I’ve seen—that this whole city will be gone by morning—but he wouldn’t believe me. At most, he’d take me half-seriously and think I was making a threat.

I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t even believe myself if I hadn’t seen the soldiers and planes arrive weeks before they actually did.

She takes her hand from mine to reach inside her purse, and the world disappears again. Outside our car, the lights flicker out, until all that remains is the cold glow of the moon on an endless sea of soot.

I watch the soldier crumble, his body growing gray and cracked like overused charcoal, then breaking away in the light evening breeze. Before he has time to completely fall apart, his charred remains hand our cards back through the open window.

“Have a good evening,” his ashes instruct.

She turns to me and takes my hand again, the houses and gardens re-emerging from the dark. On the corner, our home reforms from the ruins, and a dog barks happily in the neighbor’s front yard.

“All this, too?” she asks.

“All of it,” I reply.

She cries for the better part of an hour, but I can’t lie to her.

* * *

We reach the mountains just before daybreak, cracked roads and stalled convoys turning what should be an hour’s trip into the entire night. The aging pines stretch like towers along the side of the gravel road, the light from the city still glowing at their edges.

The car sputters out of fuel a few miles from the trailhead. Not perfect, but farther than I thought we’d get on half a tank of rationed petrol. Not perfect, but close enough, I hope.

She shifts the car into park, and I reach into the back seat for the bags we crammed with all the canned food and bottled water we could find in the cupboards. “We’d better start walking,” I say.

As her hand slips from mine, the pines go up in flames, smoldering, charred stumps lining the road like misplaced torches.

“All this, too?” she asks, staring behind us. The light from the city is gone until she takes my hand again.

I nod.

We trudge through the dark until we find the place on the map where the entrance should be. An abandoned copper mine with just enough stone that it might keep her safe. I unsling the rope from my shoulder—the old, fraying one we kept in the garage–and toss it down the hole in the ground. The sound of its end slapping onto cold stone echoes up from the mineshaft.

I let go of her hand to tie the rope around a boulder, and watch the trees around us tilt and fall. Dark clouds rush across the sky, blotting out the stars until I take her hand and help her into the hole.

“You first,” I say, glancing over my shoulder. The rope is too weak to hold us both at once, and the fall too far to risk it.

She pauses for a moment at the mouth of the mine shaft, and for the first time since dinner, she looks me straight in the eyes. Then she asks the question I’ve been dreading all night.

“You and me,” she says. “We’re going to be all right, aren’t we?”

I let her hand go as she starts to climb down. See the forest burn and topple around us. I stare at my own arms like I have been all night. Watch my skin fade from amber, to gray, to black, then my fingers and feet blow away with the wind.

As I watch myself crumble away into dust, I see that her smooth, pale skin never changes—the freckles on her cheeks still untouched by the storm. And for the first time all night, I can believe she’ll be safe.

I lean down and plant a kiss on her lips—taste the soot and smoke on my own—and for a moment my body reforms.

“Hurry,” I whisper, as our lips move apart, because I can’t lie to her.

On the horizon, a bright orange light begins to bloom.

In the past we’ve asked you, dear reader, to bear with us, to stretch your minds and hearts, to try new things.

For example, last March we asked you to indulge us in a Horror issue. You trusted us, and we gave you four terribly creepy tales that we hope you enjoyed, despite your preconceived notions of what makes horror what it is.

We’re asking you to trust us again. This time with Science Fiction.

Ray Bradbury, a legendary master of science fiction as an art form, a writer whose work you probably read in high school, said this about Science Fiction

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

How true. And, in our opinion, Science Fiction is at its greatest when it touches the heart as well. Our four stories this month do all that in spectacular and beautiful ways. From heartbreaking apocalypse to heartwarming sequel; from sweet revenge in an alien saloon to bitter heartbreak in a robot scrapyard.

Enjoy!

There’s this story we like to tell on Deck 3—we, the quiet ones. The voiceless dishwashers and short order cooks and house musicians who scrub and busk in grimy bars on a space station full of grimy bars. It’s about a girl who was quiet too.

One night, this girl met a trader, just like you, wearing cuts that were too expensive for his pay grade. That all but said, “I’m a stealing bastard.”

And I’m sure, darling, once that trader realized she couldn’t talk, he gave her the exact smile you’re giving me now. A smile that doesn’t need translation. A smile that says, “Prey. And prey again.”

“I have what you’ve lost,” you whisper in my ear when I serve you your drink, all sugar, all lies. “We’re going to be good friends.”

I nod. Pretend to agree. We quiet ones call traders like you something else. Voice Stealers.

“Maybe we can work something out,” you say.

I don’t say anything.

* * *

In the story we tell, the girl plays music at the bar when the glasses are full and cleans up after they’ve all been emptied or spilt. So no one wonders why she’s there long past closing. No one else is there to see this go down.

When she and the Voice Stealer meet, it’s in the ungodly hours of the morning, when the Deck’s so quiet you can hear the space station humming tunelessly to itself.

“I’ve got what you want,” says the Voice Stealer. But the way he slip-slides into the chair says, “Like hell you’re getting it back.”

The girl sits across from him anyway and taps her throat.

He smiles like a predator. “Do you remember how you got here?” he asks.

* * *

Of course we remember how we got here. It’s a story so familiar and smooth that it slides right off of the cops’ shrugs and the bar owners’ grunts. Gestures that mean: “Great, more stranded stowaways. More cheap labor. Shame, they can’t tell us what happened.”

It always starts with a Voice Stealer. Except us quiet ones, like the girl, like me, never realize the story has begun until after we wake up in a cargo box on a space station far away from home. The last thing we remember is an iffy decision to take a strange trader up on that drink. Well, they’re wearing a nice suit, we reassured ourselves. What’s the worst that can happen?

So we ended up drugged, dumped on a godforsaken station, voiceless and too broke to get back home.

But I’ll give it to you, darling, you Voice Stealers are careful. Only choosing victims from planets too insignificant or crowded for anyone to care. Taking voices from people whose voices wouldn’t be missed.

My aunties always said there’s a market for everything in the universe. They said, watch out, everyone has a price.

I didn’t believe them. But I was an idiot back when I had a voice.

* * *

When we meet, the bar’s been closed for hours. I’m cleaning my battered violin and you’re finishing your last drink when you slide into a chair beside me. All smiles, all teeth.

“Can you remember how you got here?” you ask. But what you’re really asking is: “Do you know who to blame?”

I shake my head. I don’t remember who took my voice. There’s lots of Voice Stealers in the universe. There’re even more quiet ones.

* * *

In the story we like to tell, the Voice Stealer presents our girl with an irresistible offer. A new voice for a price. He pulls out a box no bigger than a thumbnail and holds it up to his throat. When he speaks, he sounds like an old man.

“Yours. For ten thousand,” he says. But the posture of his shoulders says: “More than you have. More than you’re worth.”

The girl’s face falls, but not for the reason he thinks. That’s not her voice. She was half hoping he had her old one, but it’s probably for the best. She’s learned how to talk to other quiet ones through expressions, hands, and gestures. The language everyone speaks without words. The vocabulary isn’t great, but it’s always honest.

Music helps too. The girl has a knack for the bass. Even in grimy bars, people stop slurping their drinks to listen to her riffs.

“Too much?” the Voice Stealer asks in his creaky voice. “How about a trade, then?”

* * *

The thing is, this story repeats itself like a bad melody.

You’re holding a box the size of your thumbnail up to your throat. You sound like a bratty four-year old.

“I have a client that’ll pay real good money for this. But I heard you on that violin tonight,” you say, sweetly. “A trade, maybe? This voice for your musical ear. You need to talk, yes?”

This would be a more tempting offer if I didn’t know you were a lying bastard. If I hadn’t heard the girl’s story before or the dozens of others like hers.

You’re mistaken, darling. We’re voiceless. Not mute.

You start to slump in your chair.

We quiet ones have learned from you Voice Stealers. Little tricks, like how to seem non-threatening. How to lace your drinks, like you first did to us. How to wait. The girl in our story wasn’t a Voice Stealers’ victim again. She was first to perfect this method. The first of us to transform from your prey to your predator.

So let me tell you how this story will end. In the morning, you’ll find yourself slumped in the cops’ doorway with that stolen voice taped to your throat and I’ll use your cash to get back home to my very large and very vocal family. It’s a fair trade, don’t you think?

Your eyes widen in realization. “But… you need… a voice.”

Really? I flash you my hungriest smile. ­Haven’t you been listening, darling?

This month, we shook things up a little. Jason’s newest novel, HEX-Rated: A Brimstone Files Novel released this month and I had a couple questions for him about the process. And a few questions about his writing life in general.

What’s your writing process? Are you a pantser or a plotter? Or do you throw the laptop at the wall until the holes in the sheetrock resemble words?

HAHAHA!  I wish my life was more cartoon than real. My process is protean and changes all the time. When I was just writing short stories, I was a pure “write by the headlights” fella. Though unlike a lot of pansters I like revision. Novels have recently started as synopsis and pitches and then plotted out. I’ve studied plot and format and have a decent handle on some general forms, but for longer work like HEX-RATED, I employed some fun plot techniques from everyone from James Campbell to Michael Moorecock.

I love experimenting in short controlled bursts with short stories but doing some detailed considerations with novels . . . mainly because my first novel was so awful. It was done by the SEAT OF THE PANTS until the protagonist turned around, looked at me, his god, and said, “Why the fuck am I running around a graveyard? There’s no one even after me!” The novel collapsed under the weight of its own inadequacies, and my takeaway was that for the long narrative I needed to do some kind of plotting. Most of it takes the form of dialog (I HATE PLOT DIAGRAMS), but recently, chapter bullet points and other techniques pop up.

Best part? The final product almost NEVER looks exactly like my outline because I’m willing to take the risk that what emerges from creation is often better than an ingredients list!

To those of us reading your work, it’s safe to say, it appears pretty unfiltered. How true is that? Are you actually more outrageous inside your head than you even put on the page? Is there a dialing up or down process you go through to make your manuscripts ready to go out the door?

Wow. Good question. Sometimes it’s unfiltered and even then the wildness of my head and heart aren’t always grafted well on the page. Like the dream I had where Henry Rollins was driving me to improv practice and telling me he has a kid he never sees, or when the entire female cast of The Young and the Restless rode a rollercoaster with me! Not sure what to do with THAT stuff. I often have to dial things down some because I come from a pretty punk rock place in my thinking. And sometimes a battle cry is what is needed. And things MUST be turned to 11. But if your writing is just the equivalent of SOMEONE SCREAMING INTO YOUR FACE IN ALL CAPS ALL THE GODDAMN DAY . . . you’re going to check out (some idiot in the horror scene actually recommends this approach and holy fuck did I laugh). Plus, as a writer, I want to play with dynamics. Atonal ain’t my bag. I love writers who can freak you out by being quiet, like Steve Tem, or just everyday goddamn weird like Jeffrey Ford and Liz Hand. So I’m generally unfiltered but know when to mix it up.

FXXK WRITING, the book. Mea culpa here. KDP mangled the first round of mobis released. I know I was chewing through my laptop but I still had some control over the process. How frustrated were you? Did it feel like one more “of course this happened”?

While mildly frustrated, I also get ZEN kind of quickly. The first two reviews are all about bad formatting and rude words, which I find unfortunate (and I hope they got free copies once the formatting issue was fixed), but also hilarious (why would you buy a book called FXXK WRITING if you were not cool with swearing?).

And for all the kids at home, we’re discussing A Christmas Installment of The GUTTERS. Are you totally insane or just a glutton for punishment? Or is this business model of walking headfirst into the weedeater beginning to pay off?

HA! Just trying to keep the flame alive. Plus, the GUTTERS was a fascinating experiment for the second year of the FXXK WRITING column since it was about all the shit I was doing BEFORE I landed my book deal. So much of writer biography in articles is “Well, I wanted to write, tried really hard, got stuff out, and fast forward to ten years later and . . .” And hold the fucking phone! WHAT HAPPENED IN THOSE TEN YEARS MATTERS! Stop creating illusions of shit just working out! It took me seventeen years to go from “I want to write short stories” to “get a regular book deal.” What I did in between (in comics the space between dominant action is called the gutters) these poles matters. What choices I made or didn’t. What I wanted and what I didn’t know I wanted. What illusions I had ruined my life.

As far as being a glutton, yeah. As you know, I’m a workaholic who fears he’ll vanish if he doesn’t try something new, make a change Bring it.

Talking of paying off, let’s talk Hex-Rated. NPR just gave it a glorious review.

“Smutty, profane, and unapologetically slathered in pulp, Hex-Rated is a loving homage to all the musty, dog-eared paperbacks stuffed in the used bookstore’s spinner rack.”

How did you react to reading that?

I WAS STOKED! Jason Heller GOT IT! He got that HEX-RATED is both pulp fun but also has an undercurrent of smarty pants thinking about the nature of illusion, lust, and desire. So yes, enjoy the sexy adventure and magic and all the crazy fun of James Brimstone’s life, but if you scratch under the surface you’ll find something deeper!

Where did Hex-Rated come from?

From sticking around long enough that my skills and interest and general good humor found an opportunity. My friend and colleague Nick Mamatas informed me that Night Shade Books was interested in doing something like a groovy detective series. I asked if I could pitch them my take on such a work since I was raised on 70s TV detectives and love mucking about with pulp traditions and lost noir gems like NIGHTMARE ALLEY. Plus I’d read an article (I really did) on the history of the pornography industry and how much more like Hollywood it was back in the day. So, I crammed all these influences into a blender. The result is a mystery set in the adult film world of 1970s LA with James Brimstone as the lead, a wise-cracking PI who can do stage magic but was a failed apprentice to a REAL magician and solves the groovy crimes the cops won’t touch. It lets me use my history chops, play with the mythology of LA, and the iconic figure of the Cult Detective in a world of sex cults, drug madness, and the death of the love generation. Plus, it’s funny as hell!

You teach writing classes. What’s your favorite part of working with new writers? And are you as tough love with them as you are in your FFO columns? Do you find that they try to emulate your style?

For young writers, I focus on developing their strengths. There’s enough “tough love” in other workshops. I approve and use “tough love” crits all the time. But beginners tend to see everything they do as awful, and it’s not, so my goal is to get them to understand how their themes and strengths function to good effect. Once they’ve got a hold of that strength, they’ll be able to navigate how best to use with the stuff they need to change or revise.

I’ve NEVER had anyone in my class who writes like me. Ever. I’ve had tons of talented folks who’ve come from amazing subcultures and do wild and punk things that get on the page, but no one writes alike and yet I can help them to write more like THEMSELVES. I don’t want clones. I want to give students every tool I know so they can sound MOST like their best selves.

You’re also an improv actor and perform on a regular basis. How does being an improv actor help with your writing? Or is it vice versa?

Improv is way weirder, but it allows me to brainstorm and even sometimes create scenes far quicker than others because I’ve created narratives out of nothing on stage for four years! But improv is also inherently collaborative so I have to keep my mind sharp to all the details OTHER people make, ones I’d normally make up on my own. It’s a great mental workout, though, and the best part is that improv teaches you that a mistake or a failure is a fantastic thing, a true beginning, a true improvised moment because you didn’t want it or plan it and yet it’s here. And from such things can come wild ideas and stories. I’m much cooler with crashing and burning and picking through the wreckage to find the jewels amidst the junk.

You’ve been under the slush pile for a long, long time and I’ve had more than one laugh at your slush pile comments. I can’t publish them for obvious reasons, but for posterity, what’s the most offensive common mistake you see in the slush pile?

It’s not so much a mistake as a story form that I call “my wife divorced me and now I’m going to kill sexy vampires, zombies, and other stuff to prove I’m a real man.” If I never read another version of this form, I’ll die happy.

What’s that thing you read in the slush pile that’s probably scarred you for life?

People who are allergic to punctuation.

If you woke up tomorrow and had a bazillion dollars, what would you do?

I’m so not money driven, but I’d buy some goddamn stability in property and investments. Then donate much to research on cancer, support oppressed peoples and buy ETERNAL LIFE! But I’d do what I’ve done because that’s what I’m here to do: write history, fiction, teach.

Last question: why don’t you write more cheerful peppy things, Jason?

Oh, I do that now. Sure, I used to write rough tales of fuggly people on the wrong side of the tracks. But not anymore! Check out the happy go lucky and sexytime adventures of James Brimstone and you’ll see Dr. Ridler can do happy endings and then some!