Issue 75 December 2019 Flash Fiction Online December 2019

After a marathon day of coding, Cordelia1564 completed the night’s VR-cast just in time to go live with it. She held her breath as her avatar disemboweled four Khazak horsemen with a stiletto she’d pinched from the harem master, hung their bodies from a tower, and decorated their nude backsides with pointillist designs copped from edu-holos of some 19^th-century, bougie, French oil painter.

Ten supercools unfollowed her. The comments were scathing:

“Seen it in a video my grandmother uploaded to OldFartTube.”

“Crappy CGI could have come from the Star Wars generation.”

“Be real or get out of the Cloud, loser.”

They were right. Cordelia1564 had faked it, inserting her likeness into a mash-up of bargain-priced content she’d licensed. Nobody followed the boring, and ad-men wouldn’t jingle those feeds without followers.

Not that money had ever driven her. Like her namesake, the character in a play she’d attended many times with her grandmother—by Grandma’s favorite content creator, or playwright, or whatever they called it back in the 16^th century, the dude who rapped with the flowery language that sang like music—love meant more to her than treasure. But her kid liked to eat. So did she, and no jingle, no food. Her belly rumbled, and she tasted stomach acid in the back of her throat.

Wrenching her gaze from the screen, she blinked to clear her rheumy eyes and massaged an ache in her neck. Who was she kidding? Un-modded, too copper-lacking to get inked with animation, she couldn’t even pull off porn enticing enough to reel in clickthrough moola, much less a sponsorship. Only sponsored channels could afford to subscribe to Synthosynch^TM, so Cordelia1564 couldn’t customize hallucinogens. Her show streamed solely in audiovisual mode. The supercools preferred IV-infusion-enhanced entertainment.

She returned her eyes to the monitor and trembled as her followcount decremented. Five thousand forty-six, five thousand forty-five—if she fell below five thousand, the algorithm would stop suggesting her. To anyone.

She’d climbed the five thousand cliff the old-fashioned way: singing, playing guitar, telling jokes. Now, with those performances archived, her followers clamored for the new, the bold, the exotic, and she had nothing more to offer. And, apparently, her graphics apps weren’t jagged-up well enough to fabricate cool.

The urge to cry burbled up, but then Cordelia1564 spied an antique book poking out of a cardboard box she’d yet to unpack following her latest round of eviction, homelessness, public housing lottery, and resettlement: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. It had been her grandmother’s.

She bounded up and snagged it. Grandma had tried reading her the play about Cordelia Lear and her dysfunctional family, but while she’d felt loved sitting in Grandma’s lap, she could never focus on just one info-feed long enough to breathe the geezered-out text. The short poems were easier.

The heft of the tome in her hands and the scratch of the worn leather binding rescued a memory of snuggling beneath a comforter with Grandma. As a child, she’d relished the brush of paper beneath her fingertips when Grandma let her turn the pages, but with cams and holos and phones, who fucking read these days? Sure, the public schools still assigned a story or two every semester, but most kids clicked past the modules and cheated on the accompanying questions.

Who fucking read? That was it! Novelty.

After gagging from the musty smell and blowing to clear the dust, she leafed to the twenty-ninth of those fourteen-lined blasts. She readied the cam and spoke into the air-mic. “You buttwipes who unfollowed will be sorry. You ain’t getting rad shit like this anywhere else.” Cordelia1564 paused and gazed at the followcount. It had stopped falling.

One deep breath later, she sat up in her chair ramrod straight and affected her best faux-British accent.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state…

She could go no further before the verbalizer captured her followers’ spontaneous utterances, shifted the language to match the rhythm she’d set—rhythm matching being core to coolness—and blasted them out, ordered according to the social status of the utterers, of course. “Delia’s talking awful funny…” “Must be on some wicked shit…” “What’s she doing with men’s eyes…?” “A lone bee weep? Don’t get that bit.”

The language had tripped up the few supercools still following. Ponying up the coin to silence them, for a moment at least, Cordelia1564 scanned the next lines:

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate…

Maybe, she could keep the rhythm but translate into good English?

And God makes me his bitch and steals my shoes,

My selfie screen yells back my bootless cries…

She’d kept bootless in the mix, figuring her followers would fathom a loss of fashion footwear as tragic.

No such luck. “Her bootless cries? Maybe her booty cries!” “Hell no, you mean her booty calls…” “She don’t call you, you ugly, coinless fuck… She laughs at your small dick and shriveled balls.”

Most commenters heckled. Way fewer defended Cordelia1564, but her count rose and rose, and the jingles tided in. Enough to pay the rent. Enough for groceries. Supercools posted approval; new followers sent love emojis. The rush bested any pharma.

And, who-da-believed-it, trumpets blared from her speakers: an offer for sponsorship. Total buyout—the company would own her likeness and drive posts via AI. She’d no longer need to live-cam.

She donned her People’s Attorney^TM glasses and scrolled through the contract that augmented her reality. No scam-flags, no wording highlighted as deceptive; the transaction was legit.

Her heart raced. She bit her lip and shook her head. Social media was back to being fun. She couldn’t wait until tomorrow to read more to her followers; she loved them too much to abandon them.

Her text-only, last post for the night captured her rapture:

I scorn to change my state with kings.

“The thing about Heisenball,” Paulie tells me with a grin on their face, “is that you can’t win. But you can’t lose, either. Not really. It’s not about the game.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know. You’ve told me like a million times.” Ever since we started dating, I add in the privacy of my own head. Even if this is the first time I’ve asked for a game, it doesn’t mean I’m stupid.

The court’s smaller than I’d thought it would be: a square about three paces across set inside a hexagon twice as large. The walls are a shimmery purple colour that changes slightly every time I look away and back again.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Paulie says as they set the ball in the center of the square. “I don’t blame you for anything.”

I shrug, looking away. This is why I’m ending it, I want to tell them. I’m sick of your measured disinterest, your magnanimous bullshit justifications. Why can’t you admit it when things hurt you?

Instead, I ask: “What’s up with the walls?”

“Let’s just start the game, then,” they say. “You’ll understand after.”

It sounds like a dismissal, which would sting if I wasn’t so pleased to have gotten under Paulie’s skin for once. “Fine,” I say.

“Here we go, then.”

They walk over to the wall near the door and flip a switch. The lights in the room dim, and the shapes on the floor flicker into three dimensions. The walls glimmer briefly, then fade to black. From the corner of my eye I can see the ball glowing, but I’m too busy staring to do anything about it.

“Cool, huh?” Paulie says. “But that’s not the best part. Where’s the ball?”

“Right where you put it, in the center of the square. Are we going to play or are you just going to talk down to…” I trail off. The ball, of course, is not where they put it. “What did you do?”

“Me? Nothing.” I can practically hear the grin on their face. “You’re the one who observed it and changed its momentum.”

“What does that even–“

There’s a whack, and next thing I know I’m lying on the floor with an aching shoulder, the ball rolling to a stop beneath my feet.

“Ah,” Paulie says. “Your first conundrum.” Laughter barely restrained from their voice. “Now watch…”

I’m about to demand an explanation when the walls suddenly light up with silent, flickering images. There’s our first date on one wall, Paulie grinning at the look of concentration on my face while I try to fish a rubber duck out of a pond at the state fair. Another shows me, alone, and a third shows me with some blonde guy in sunglasses and a popped collar, looking utterly miserable as he puts one arm around me. Only I’ve never seen the guy in my life. There are others, too. Things I’ve never done mixed in with things I remember quite clearly.

“Why am I–” I start, but Paulie cuts in before I can finish the question.

“Ah ah ah,” they say. “No talking about your observations. It’s bad luck.”

“You mean you can’t see them?”

“Only the player who gets hit–that’s what we call a conundrum–gets the observations. They look like they’re on the walls, but it’s just a trick of the light.”

“Weird.” I’m quiet for a minute. “Too weird. At least the ball’s stopped.”

But as soon as I say that it vanishes with a quiet little pop and appears right under Paulie’s feet. They slip and land on their butt on the ground with an oomph, and the ball ricochets around the room like mad, popping in and out of existence as it goes. It give me a headache and I close my eyes just in time to hear the hollow, echoing whack as it hits Paulie straight in the arm.

It’s dim in the room, but I can still see Paulie’s eyes go unfocused for a moment, before they shake off whatever they’ve seen and grin at me. Then I find the ball, set it moving with a glance, and the game is on.

We play for what seems like hours. I see scenes I’d forgotten from our shared past together. Scenes of things that never happened. Scenes from what I guess might be the future. One time I see my own funeral–that I shake off immediately, looking at the ball so it moves away. Paulie, for all that they’re more experienced, takes just as many hits as I do from the glowing ball. I don’t ask what they see.

The lights come on again just after Paulie gets a conundrum, and they’re sitting on the floor as the ball loses its glow and rolls to a stop against one wall. For a while, neither of us speak. We just stay where we are, panting.

After I catch my breath, I clear my throat. “I’m sorry,” I say. “For whatever it’s worth. For everything.”

“Thanks,” Paulie says. They look up at me from where they’re sitting, eyes moist but not crying. “And it’s okay. Some of it was my fault, too, and some of it was nobody’s. Sometimes things just don’t work out.”

I think about everything I’ve seen just in the past few minutes–choices I’ve never questioned before, playing out before me on the walls–and understand, suddenly, what Paulie’s meant all this time about there being no winning or losing. And why they never seem to get mad, no matter what I do.

I’m sad, then, for what I’ve had with Paulie. What we’ve lost. But only a little. Hiesenball’s not about the game. Neither is life. What matters more is who you’re with when you play. Why you play. What it is you see on the walls.

Previously published in Daily Science Fiction, April 2017. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

David suggests having drinks on the verandah to escape the heat building inside the house. The bulk of the afternoon sun is kept at bay by a tattered awning. Our chairs are close enough that we can touch if we want to. If we want to. Maybe he does want to. These days our attraction is tenuous and our movements asynchronous. He’s talking about work, and I’m staring at the road beyond our wall. The sweltering heat burns the asphalt, and I focus on the waves of heat slowly emanating from the road. How long has it been since we watered the plants? I should water them later. David touches me and I flinch involuntarily. I almost apologize though I don’t know what I’m apologizing for. Our gazes lock but neither of us speaks.

We look away and settle into the awkward silence that is now an old friend. How did this happen? Is it really because we didn’t have that second child I wanted? Is it because I told him I would resent him for it? I can’t speak that kind of thing into being, can I? Perhaps I did. We were supposed to have three children, but he changed his mind after the first. I didn’t find out until I was ready to try for our second. Our Arianne. Our baby had been struck from the to-do-list without my knowledge or permission.

I was livid. Our nightly arguments slithered through the house on hushed angry whispers intended to protect our daughter from our unhappiness. Sultry nights of passion morphed into scheduled motions of hands geared towards accomplishing the goal in as little time as possible. Bothered by the contraception I refused to take, the aim quickly became getting what he wanted without giving me what I wanted. Eventually it didn’t matter because time was on his side. My chances of a child dried up along with the tears I used to shed in that “extra room” that became David’s gym. Nowadays, our intimacy is still sporadic but at least satisfactorily well-paced.

I twirl my index finger around my wine glass’s rim. I’ve had it for a few years but in my mind, it’s still new. It reminds me of David ruining the evening after our daughter’s high school graduation by remarking he wasn’t surprised I was late “for the daughter I actually had.” I threw my favourite wine glass at him, and we both watched it shatter at his feet. His apology was this newer, fancier wine glass.

Marriage may be about compromise, but we had no middle ground to stand on. We sought advice from trusted friends, but they were as stuck as we were. They hoped our marriage would survive the standoff, but we have only settled into a daunting survival, taking “til death do us part” as seriously as we thought we should. I’d thought about leaving more than once, but each time it seemed like the wrong thing to do–like pulling my family down into the depths and standing on their corpses because I thought I was drowning.

He’s talking again and I’m struggling to listen. It’s not that I don’t want to listen to him; I’m just tired of the casual surface banter that we try to pass off as conversation. There was a point in our marriage when our words were neither casual nor pleasant, but that’s the problem with avoiding taboo topics. The list of words that shouldn’t be said becomes so long there are no more words worth saying. Maybe “til death do us part” includes the steady decay of this union.

A slow sigh escapes my lips and I realize he’s gone silent.

I turn and meet his sad eyes.

“I’m not happy.”

The words feel heavy and fluid as they unfurl from my lips. I’m not sure if that’s what I meant to say, but I don’t take it back. He looks at me as if he’s truly seeing me for the first time in a while, and I marvel at how wrinkled his face has become. Tears well in my eyes and I blink them away. Should I have said it sooner? He takes my hand and this time, I don’t flinch.

“I know. Is it too late to fix us?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s a sad truth, but it’s the first truth I’ve spoken to him in years. The smile playing on his lips tell me it’s at least a start.

September 2019  marks the twentieth anniversary of Jay’s decision to become a writer. His gift to you all this celebratory year is DO IT – Twelve hard lessons on learning by failing, succeeding by accident, never giving up, and saying FXXK WRITING all at the same time. You’re welcome!

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In the wake of the recent news about ChiZine Publications, I decided to terminate my book contract with said publisher. Normally, an author cancelling a contract is not good news, but here it was the right decision. So, given the time of year, I thought I’d share some moments of gratitude over the past twenty years of being a professional writer. Chronological, no less!

1. 1999 – I had the guts to fight my fears and try writing, even though I was ten different kinds of awful.
2. 2000 – Grateful to the handful of people who read my drek and saw a glimmer of something good while the rejections mounted and I garnered about two sales… then nothing for two years (ouch).
3. 2001 – All the fun rejections I could from magazines in my self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE), which I collected like baseball cards, prizing the ones that actually had information on them I could use!
4. 2002 –  Finding authors like Joe Lansdale, Gary Braunbeck, Norm Partridge, and more, convincing me I could be a horror writer, and finishing my first abysmal horror novel, Chains of Bone, which remains buried in a friend’s basement somewhere in southern Ontario. 
5. 2003 – Writing the very first story that I thought had my voice, called “Blood and Sawdust,” about a fat vampire and an abused kid who became friends. 
6. 2004 – Created a short story about where RPG characters go when they are no longer used and then getting it sold to an Australian SF mag with a bizarre multi-tiered editorial process.
7. 2005 – Accepted to the Odyssey Writing Workshop and getting six weeks to improve my craft, make life-long friends, and meet such outstanding mentors like Steve and Melanie Tem.
8. 2006 – Sold a bunch of short stories, had a minor rep as “the guy who often writes about pro wrestling.”
9. 2007 – I was a PhD student with seven part-time jobs, did my first international research trip, and ran an alumni week for Odyssey grads while also attempting to write a short story a week for a year… Great times, but the cost was depression and burnout.
10. 2008 – Kept chugging away at short stories.
11. 2009 – Turned my short story “Blood and Sawdust” into a novel. 
12. 2010 – Met Norm Partridge, author of Dark Harvest and a great short story writer, and went to many bad movies together.
13. 2011- Nancy Kilpatrick blurbed my indie novel A Triumph for Sakura.
14. 2012 – Grateful I was told I’d do well writing a thriller with a female lead; though after completion was told by the same person, “How can I sell a thriller with a female lead? Men read thrillers.”
15. 2013 – Survived unemployment, end of marriage, and death of mother.
16. 2014 – Largely gave up on writing, minus an indulgent novella called The King of Saturday Morning, but came soooo close to selling at least three comic book series!
17. 2015 – Visited the Philippines and the UK thanks to a research fellowship for a history book.
18. 2016 – Contracted to write The Brimstone Files.
19. 2017 – Hex-Rated released to good press and sales.
20. 2018 – Black Lotus Kiss released to less press and less sales, though I worked with a wonderful editor and love the book more than the debut.
21. 2019 – Completed a crime thriller about the world of pro wrestling, agent jazzed about it, and finishing a novel about the hell of being a historian in Silicon Valley.

And I am just getting started.