flash fiction

Writing Update

A.B. Kelly · May 16, 2019 · Musings · #amwriting, fiction contest, flash fiction, update, writing, writing update · No Comments

I ended up taking a good portion of April off from writing. Or at least from blogging. But unlike those plebiscite sites that come back from a long hiatus with an “I need to blog more,” followed by another six months of radio silence, I at least had the wherewithal to post a few times before acknowledging the fact that I was mysteriously absent for a while.

This wasn’t my first dearthful April. It turns out April is a bad month for me. I teach an AP Class, and with the AP Test in early May, I spend pretty much the entire month of April buried in essays that really need to be returned on a timely basis. The nagging in the back of my head, which usually says “You should be writing” whenever I’m wasting time, switches to “You should be grading” whenever I think about writing in April. Perfect time for one of the NaNoWriMo camps, huh?

Plus that Disneyland post took a lot out of me.

Oh, and there were at least three weekend-long curling bonspiels over the past two months. I don’t want you to think I’m responsible or anything.

Anyway, what I’m really here to talk about is what else has been going on in the background of my writing. March and April also held the latest incarnation of the flash fiction contest I competed in last year. Each competition has five rounds, which consist of a prompt coming out on Friday evening that is due Monday evening. Last year, I competed twice, making ten full rounds, and I placed twice. One time I came in first, the other time in third. Both were historical fiction and can be found on my Published Works page.

But this time I either figured something out or, heaven forbid, am getting better at this shit. Because how many times did I place this go-around? I’ll quote LeBron James when he moved to Miami and they asked him how many championships he would win there. “Not one. Not two. Not three…”

In the end, I’m better than LeBron, because I won FOUR times!

Okay, I didn’t technically win all four of those. I only won once. Plus two third-place finishes and one fifth. So okay, LeBron, I guess I’m willing to acknowledge you might be slightly better at basketball than I am at amateur writing competitions. But only slightly.

But I’m still thrilled. I made it in the running four times out of five. That means four of the five stories I wrote for this competition will be published. Even more shocking, only one of them was historical fiction. That’s the one that came in first. The others were about a teacher and a game show and a furry convention. Yes, that’s right. A Furry Convention!

I also found out that this competition was bigger than I thought. When I was super happy about winning a round last year, I thought there were forty or fifty entrants. TI have since learned that the number is closer to three hundred. And sure, not all three hundred actually wrote an entry each time, but even if that number is in the low triple-digits, I’m pretty proud of having multiple top-five entries.

The one drawback is those losing entries usually provide fodder for this blog on the weeks I don’t have much to write. Unfortunately for all of you, I won’t have a lot of fiction to post in the near future. And trust me, you don’t want to read that fifth story. It was horrible. The literary equivalent of that dentist who says you shouldn’t chew gum.

But keep your eyes out for “72 Hours of Insanity, Volume 6.” Or maybe “Volume VI,” since Amazon seems to be particular about that. My guess is it’ll be coming out in the December timeframe. I’ll probably mention it then. If I don’t, then I’m pretty shitty at promotion and marketing.

Oh, and I finally finished the book I had been writing for four years. And I’m about 2/3 of the way through another book. And every once in a while I feel like I should do some editing. But then I figure, nah, I’ve got some wonderful European history essays calling my name. Editing sucks, y’all. Maybe I’ll blog about that at some point. It would beat the hell out of… anything else I should be doing with my screentime on a given day.

In the meantime, I’ll try to find some more harmless musings about the world around us to keep the blog updated more often.

At least until next April.

Keep Moving

A.B. Kelly · January 17, 2019 · fiction · #amwriting, fiction, fiction contest, flash fiction, short story · No Comments

One more flash fiction and then I’ll be back to my normal musings. I might have other flash fictions, but they’re mostly crap. I know it might be surprising that I have quality control and that these are actually the ~~good~~ mediocre ones, but it’s true.

I think the prompt for this one was a picture of mountainous terrain. It was only a practice rounds, so let’s just assume this would have won and was the best work of fiction that any of the judges had ever seen. Yeah, let’s just assume that.

Keep Moving

Breathe in. Breathe out. Move on.

That sounds like a song lyric. Maybe Jimmy Buffett or one of those other wash-ups who middle-aged dudes listen to when they’re going through a mid-life crisis. Regardless, it’s some good advice right now. Focus on what’s in front of you. One step in front of the other. Deep breath. Always forward, never looking back.

Don’t look back.

The top of the mountain is within sight. I mean, not directly in sight. That’s the thing about mountains. There’s always another peak beyond the next one. Your perspective changes. And then, when you finally make it to the top, it’s a kind of plateau. You wouldn’t even know you’re at the tip-top without some sort of sign. The next step is lower than the last one? Okay, if you say so, GPS.

Not that I’ve made it to the top of the mountain yet. But I think that’s what’s there.

So why do you climb a mountain, anyway? Because it’s there? No. Fuck that. That’s somebody else’s answer. My answer’s got to be better. Shit, a river is there. A hole in the ground is there. Why would I want to do something just because it’s there? The losers back on flat land come up with asinine reasons like it’s there.

Kaitlyn’s back on flat land.

I’m not climbing this mountain because it’s here. I’m climbing it because I’m accomplishing something. I’m not sitting in front of a television on a Sunday afternoon, checking my fantasy football team and thinking I’m king shit because some random football player that I’ve never met is footballing harder than some other random football player that my co-worker’s never met and, whoa-hoa-hoa, how great is that going when we spend the first two hours of work tomorrow rehashing these exploits around the office coffee urn? Fucking losers.

But they’re in the past. Kaitlyn’s in the past. No looking back. Always look forward. Breathe in, breathe out.

It really is a beautiful vista. Little sage brushes dot the landscape. I’m well beyond the tree line. I left that thousands of feet below. It looks like I’m almost past the sagebrush line. Is that a thing? Is there a point where even the smallest plants cease to survive? When the air gets too thin? I mean, there’s a point where humans can’t exist, right? That’s why there’s all those frozen corp-sicles up on Mount Everest. If humans can’t exist without breathing masks, can plants survive? And if there aren’t any plants, what’s up there? Nothing but rocks and snow, I assume.

Only one way to find out. Get past these little bushes and see if there’s another copse ahead. See if there are more plants in another half-mile. Always onward. Always upward. Never look back.

At least those dead bodies up on Everest were accomplishing something. Not like those numbnuts who get stuck on Mount Rainier every April, because twenty feet of snow sounds like an excellent setting for a whimsical day hike. There’s ambition and then there’s impulsive stupidity. There’s trained hikers being led by sherpas and there’s bored twenty-somethings tempting fate after one too many hits on the bong. They aren’t moving forward. They’re just taking a very fucking stupid detour in life.

Maybe I should try Everest someday. Not there yet. This little sojourn will start my training.

Still, those Everest hikers made a vital mistake, too. They didn’t keep moving. They slowed down. They stopped. Life ends when you stop moving. Sometimes it’s not as literal as it is up on Everest, but it’s still true in Seattle or Singapore or Spain. Pretty much anywhere on Earth. I won’t make that mistake when I do Everest. I won’t slow down.

Kaitlyn slowed down. Kaitlyn stopped. She doesn’t think of it that way, but she’s wrong. She’s not on this mountain with me, and there’s your proof. The plan was to pick a new feat to conquer each year. What new feat is she accomplishing right now? Head buried in case files, preparing her seventeenth slam-dunk DUI case in a row, the bane of every first year prosecutor. Can you walk us through hat we see in this field sobriety test? What does that level of pupil dilation indicate? And when was the last time the breathalyzer was calibrated? Thank you. No further questions, your Honor.

That’s not an adventure. That’s not moving on or up. That’s just a quiet resignation to a long, slow fade into obscurity. Have fun listening to Jimmy Buffett in ten years, Kaitlyn. Don’t come bitching to me when you wonder where your mountain went.

Keep moving. Onward and upward. No detours. No complacency. Always forward. No looking back. Breathe out. Breathe in.

The air is definitely thinner up here. A full breath puts stars in your eyes. I wonder if this is part of the rush all those Adderall fiends at law school felt. Probably not. This is a natural high, brought on by my own effort and execution. Those losers wouldn’t know effort or execution if it came up out of their textbook and bit them on their ass-chin.

I could’ve taken the Bar a second time. That’s what Kaitlyn wanted me to do. Only a third of the people who take it pass it their first time. The pass rate goes up to fifty percent for second-timers. But what would that prove? Six more months of standing in place. Marking time, just to prove that I’m, maybe, in the top half. Watching my girlfriend head off to her fancy job each day, dreaming of distant mountains to climb.

And if you’re standing still, you’re actually moving backward. Because the rest of the world isn’t going to wait for you to catch up. How would that look if I was trying stupid DUI cases a year later, while Kaitlyn’s sitting second chair on murder ones? To say nothing of Rebecca in her high-tower law firm and Jimmy’s contract service.

It was time to move on. Life sent me a message, and thank God it did. If I had passed the Bar, would I be up here right now? Getting light-headed with thoughts of Everest? Nah, man. This. THIS. Is the life for me.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep moving. Never forward. Always look back.

No, wait a second. Keep looking forward, not backward. This thin air must be getting to me. There’s nothing worth looking at behind me.

Life’s a journey, not a destination.

I know that one’s a lyric. Amazing. Aerosmith. Steven Tyler. Now there’s a guy who doesn’t slow down. What is he, seventy? And he still runs around on stage and screams at the top of his lungs. That’s what I want to be. No, that’s what I’m going to be. Not a rock star, but still doing my thing. Still moving on. Journeying, not destinationing. Not sitting down at a desk reading case briefs. Not sitting down.

Sitting down sounds nice. Not forever, of course. Just to rest. My lungs are killing me. And my legs are… well, to be honest, I can’t really feel my legs. I wonder how high I am? The mountain just keeps on going and going. Life just keeps on going and going. Just a little rest here and then I’ll get up and finish.

What would be the use in taking the Bar a second time, anyway? As far as I could tell, only the girls passed. Except for Jimmy, but he has bubbly writing, so the graders probably thought he was a woman. What am I supposed to do, change how I write? Sure, I could study more this time. I could have studied more the first time. But studying seems so… so…

It’s so hard to catch my breath. Even when I’m sitting here in the cold. When did it get so cold? Probably when I stopped moving. But sitting feels nice. I can see all the way down the mountain from here. Such a long way I’ve come. The past looks so pretty from this vantage point.

I wonder what Kaitlyn’s doing right now. Probably kicking ass and taking names. I wonder if she’s moved on from me yet. She was always good at moving on. And moving up? She… She…

I should probably get up soon. But this is too comfortable. Once I catch my breath, I’ll get up. And then I’ll conquer my next big feat. Then I’ll be able to move on. Find a new mountain peak. There’s always another one just beyond the current one. Find a new girlfriend. Find a new career. Find a new life. Just right after I lie down for a bit.

I don’t think I’ve ever… listened to a.. Jimmy Buffett song. I wonder… wonder if he’s any… any…

Ear in the Sky

A.B. Kelly · January 9, 2019 · fiction · #amwriting, fiction, fiction contest, flash fiction, narrator · No Comments

Time to post another one of my near-miss flash fiction competition entries. The prompt on this one was to have the narrator be an inanimate object. I went through multiple iterations in a short span. I started out writing from the perspective of a rear-view window, and he was going to be in a mafioso’s car and would occasionally see the crimes and fights and whatnot happening behind the car, but he would never see what was in front. Oh, and everything was going to be reversed. Probably woulda been a cool story, but about two hundred words in, I realized there was no effing way I could crank that out over one weekend.

Then I decided to go with a bottle of wine on a restaurant table, because I was listening to a lot of Billy Joel Radio. Then I was about halfway through the story when I decided I actually wanted it to be from the music speaker’s POV. Because I was listening to a lot of Billy Joel Radio…

Don’t forget you can check out the two times my stories actually won here and here.

This one didn’t win. I present you:

The Ear in the Sky

Unmistakable chord. Yeah, I know this song. This is my jam, man.

A bottle of white. A bottle of red.

Billy Joel. “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.”

Fitting. This may not be an Italian restaurant, per se. But we’ve got plenty of pasta on the menu. Pasta goes great with wine. Forget the white. A complex red to go with a meaty pasta sauce, like a Bolognese.

We’ll get a table near the street. In our old familiar place. You and I, face to face.

Jeff and Karla have been here a number of times before. They’ve probably heard this song plenty of times before. The playlist here isn’t too long, standard repertoire of seventies and eighties easy-listening. This song is actually a little upbeat compared to the normal fare. Not this part of the song. This part, the part about the wine and the restaurant, is pretty standard, but it picks up. Turns into a song about a couple getting a divorce. Maybe not the lyrics you want playing in the background at a nice restaurant. More fitting for one of those red-and-white checkered, calamari-appetizer kind of a restaurant. Probably why we do an abbreviated version of the song here. Straight from the beginning to the end. Fits the ambiance better. Fits what people like Jeff and Karla come here for.

Let the bottle breathe a little bit. No need to speed through the wine. It’ll be here all night, sitting in the middle of lucky table seven. The table in the corner with the view of the river. The wine bottle can look out over the entirety of the place. Take the whole scene in. Frankie, the fancy waiter in his white shirt and long blue tie, both tucked into the black apron tied around his waist. He has a white cloth napkin tucked into the back of the tie rope, ostensibly to wipe his hands, keep them clean, but most of the time he just tucks his hands there, behind his back, out of habit. He pulls on the two sides of that napkin, checking to make sure they’re even with each other, more often than he actually cleans his hands. It’s a nervous disposition to stop him from hovering over his tables, of hanging his hands limply in front of his customers. If he doesn’t have pen and pad in his hands, they’re tucked behind him. The bottle of wine knows that about Frankie. I know that about Frankie. We all do.

If you’re going to be a vital piece of an operation like this, like I am, you need to know the idiosyncrasies. Frankie and his hands. Jenny’s worse with her hands. They shake. Whoa to the full bottle of red that she has to pour for a tasting. Many a nice cotton tablecloths have resembled a red-and-white checkered, calamari-appetizer style tablecloths after Jenny’s done a tasting.

You’ve got to know the back of the house, too. Luis, the sous chef, hates doing desserts, so when Luis is on the line, expect the desserts to come out slow. Joshua, the line cook, is dating Katie, the expediter. Well, I suppose you can call it “dating.” Let’s just say that the peppercorn steak might not be the only thing coming out spicy when the two of them are working together. But watch out if there aren’t any tickets up at this particular moment, those two might disappear into the walk-in refrigerator and whoa to the next tickets coming up. Better hope a nice long song comes on to bridge that particular gap in the service. Better hope the wine is pouring well, and not by Jenny.

You’ve got to know the customers, too. You’ve got to be able to read the room. Predict what each table, what each set of individuals with their individual goals and desire for the evening, want. Table three has tickets to the show tonight. They want to go fast. Table twenty-two isn’t quite a bachelorette party, but it might as well be. Raspberry mojitos, all around.

Jeff and Karla are taking their time tonight. They haven’t even sipped from the bottle of wine yet. The bottle senses that. I sense that. Frankie senses that. Jeff and Karla want some time to reminisce. Or at least one of them does.

“We’ve been coming here a long time, huh?” Jeff says.

“We have,” Karla answers. “A long time. Since the beginning, really.”

“What was it, our second date here?”

“Was it? I know it was early.”

Karla looks off into the air. Perhaps in thought. Perhaps absorbing the Billy Joel.

“I guess you’re right. It’s hard to keep track of stuff that long ago.”

Something seems a little off between Jeff and Karla. It’s hard to put a finger on it. Not that I have a finger. But it seems like Karla would usually be the historian in a conversation like this. Maybe they’ve just been traveling a lot. They haven’t been at table seven for quite some time.

Is it too early for a little Barry Manilow? Trick question, of course. It’s ALWAYS time for some Barry Manilow.

Karla’s ear ticks her eyes back toward the table when the piano melody starts. “Speaking of our early dates.”

Jeff looks confused. His brows meet in the middle, then his eyesight follows the direction of Karla’s ear, so that he’s looking up into the ether. Looking right at me.

“Who is this? Barely Man-enough? How would he remind you of our early days? Jason Mraz, maybe. Not Barry Manilow.”

“Not the singer. The song. “Weekend in New England.” About a couple that’s always apart from each other. Always traveling. Missing each other.”

Jeff doesn’t look all that interested in listening to the lyrics, but Karla’s now looking up at me. The conversation is over until the lyrics get to the part she wants to hear.

And tell me, when will our eyes meet? When can I touch you?

Jeff grabs for the bottle of wine. Pours a little bit in Karla’s wine. Turns it back to his. If the conversation isn’t going to highlight the evening, maybe the wine will.

And when will I hold you again?

“I guess I traveled a lot,” Jeff finally opines when the crooner moves into his signature key change. Man, nobody can signal an upcoming quarter-octave change better than the Manilow.

“We spent a lot of nights on the telephone. Me whispering sweet nothings from my heart, you dictating a porn diary of what you’d do to me when you got home.”

Jeff smiles. “Those were from the heart.”

Karla should smile at that. Her last comment should have been said with mirth. But there was a bit of pain in it. Her lips didn’t twitch upward at Jeff’s response. Instead, the muscles in front of her lower incisors contract. Not quite a frown, but a set.

I notice it. The bottle of wine notices it. Frankie notices it. He starts to swoop in, one step forward, hands untucking from his back-napkin.

“A little farther south than the heart,” Karla says.

A retreat. A joke that is not quite a joke, but carries the illusion of civility. I can relax. The bottle of wine can relax. Frankie can relax, which is good because there wasn’t much he could have done. Jeff had just filled their glasses and neither of them have touched the menus. Sure, he could offer up an apeasatory appetizer, list off some specials that neither of the regulars would be interested in. Thank you, Karla, for keeping things civil.

No thanks to you, Mr. Manilow. Maybe it’s time for a change.

“Deperado?” Really? The Eagles? The playlist has a mind of its own tonight. Not sure if it’s the best segue from the travelin’ man in the last song. What’s next, some U2 song about wild horses?

If I had my choice, I’d but out a little Yacht Rock here. Some Air Supply. “Every Woman in the World” or “Two Less Lonely People in the World.” Oh, how about Kenny Loggins’ “Danny’s Song?” Even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with you, honey.

Not that I have any say over the playlist. I can’t pick the tunes, but I can make you hear them. Probably a metaphor in there.

All I can do is let the sounds be heard. The ear in the sky. Probably closer to mouth in the sky, but I like Ear in the Sky. Closer to a song. “Eye in the Sky.” Alan Parsons Project. And I don’t need to see anymore to know that I can read your mind.

I don’t think Alan Parsons Project’s ever made it onto this playlist. Not sure why. It would totally fit the mood. Maybe not the lyrics, but the tune. Instead, I do my workman’s best to the likes of…

Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses? You been out ridin’ fences for too long, now.

Still, Karla tamed the Desperado. Pick up that thread if you know what’s good for you, Jeff.

Instead, he sips a little bit of his wine. Not good, buddy. Not good.

Karla follows suit.

Don’t you draw the Queen of Diamonds, boy, she’ll beat you if she’s able. You know the Queen of Hearts-

“Hey, remember the lyrics that the pastor said at our wedding?”

There you go, Jeff.

But Karla is the confused one now. Jeff didn’t get the Barry Manilow connection, and now she’s at a loss. The only difference is she remembers. She makes the connection. She just doesn’t really get it.

“Kenny Rogers?”

Kenny Rogers?

“Yeah.”

Wrong Kenny, Jeff.

“‘The Gambler?'”

Really, Jeff? I don’t know what’s worse. That you used “The Gambler” in your wedding vows or the fact that you think it’s appropriate here.

“Yeah. Every gambler knows,” Jeff is singing nowhere near what The Roaster can do. It would be painful in its own right, but it’s even worse against the Don Henley I’m spouting. Or is this a Glen Frey song? “That the secret to survivin’ is knowing what to throw away, and knowing what to keep.”

Okay, I’ll give it to you, Jeff. Or maybe to your pastor. It’s got a little bit of flair. But you know the gambler, like, dies in that verse, right?

“I suppose he’s right,” Karla says in response.

Oh, damn! Red Alert. Red Alert. Frankie, what are you doing just sitting there with your hands behind your back. Get in there and do something. There’s dead silence down there. All they can do is listen to the Glen Frey. Or maybe Don Henley.

It’s hard to tell the nighttime from the day. You’re losing all your highs and lows. Ain’t it funny how the feeling goes away?

Where’s the Air Supply? I need some Air Supply, stat!

“I was never really sure you wanted to be tamed,” Karla keeps going. “You were always the gambler, the traveler.”

“Until I met you.”

And now Frankie moves in. A verse too late, but Jeff seemed to recover. Sure, Frankie, refill their glasses. Talk about the specials. Ask if they want any appetizers. No? Okay, grab them some bread and butter. Great. At least it’s long enough to get this godforsaken Eagles song off of the Ear in the Sky.

Jimmy Buffett. “Coast of Carolina.”

Kind of a crapshoot here. Buffet wrote it as a sequel to “Come Monday,” yet another song about long-distance love. Man, I never really realized how many of those songs there were. But still, if the couple survived “Come Monday,” this sequel song has to be happy, right? Give these two something to focus on.

I live this dream and still it seems I’ve got you on my mind. From the bottom of my heart, off the coast of Carolina. After one or two false starts, I believe we’ve found our stride.

“What are we even doing here?” Karla asks.

And here it goes. I wish I had a record to scratch the needle across. No Frankie to jump in this time. The wine bottle can’t just tip itself over. And anyway, it’s halfway done its job. That’s a dangerous place, being halfway into a bottle of wine. Just far enough down to yank on the thread, but not far enough down to lose the thread.

“What do you mean? You love this place.”

Jeff just looks dumbfounded. He wasn’t connecting the dots up until now. I guess none of us were. Not the bottle of wine. Certainly not Frankie, who should be swooping in. Save a marriage to save a tip. But instead he’s in the back somewhere, putting little pats of butter in a tiny blue plastic ramekin. He’s probably hitting on Katie, the expediter, totally oblivious to the fact that he’s got no shot because she’s already been into the walk-in freezer with Joshua tonight.

So instead Jeff is here to fend for himself in this world that nobody was prepared for. While Jimmy Buffett does no help in the background.

These days I get up about the time I used to go to bed. Living large was once the deal, now I watch the stars instead.

No fault to Jimmy, really. These words could go either way. If Karla was in the mood to reminisce, if Karla was being her usual self, she’d eat these lyrics up. She’s usually focused on the fact that she’d tamed the wild horse, instead of how much work it was to get him to this point. Most people hear the Beatles sing “When I’m Sixty-Four” and think it’s a wonderful, forever-and-forever tale. But right now, Karla would just say, “Really, Jeff? You want me to wait until I’m sixty-fucking-four before you’re going to be a part of this fucking thing?”

And that’s the problem, really. Their roles are reversed. Jeff is usually the aloof one. He loves her, sure. That much is obvious, and always has been. He always came back. To Karla. To this restaurant. And he was always happy. But he isn’t always emotive. He isn’t always the one who can hear a lyric in a song and use it as a springboard to explain how he’s found his soulmate, his anchor, the one that puts his whole life in order. Bryan Adams. “(Everything I Do), I Do It For You.”

Unless the lyric is from “The Gambler,” evidently.

And so now that Jeff’s in this position, he doesn’t know how to respond. He can’t take the initiative. He’s figured out a way to be Newton’s equal-and-opposite reaction, but Karla needs to be the action. Karla’s not being the action. Karla appears to be done being the action.

All he can do is open and close his mouth. Knowing something needs to be said, but not knowing what it is. Open. A sound escapes. A “whuh” sound. Closed. Open. A “Kuh” sound. Closed.

The song changes. Oh no, playlist. Not this. Anything but Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand.

You don’t bring me flowers. You don’t sing me love songs.

FML.

“I love you, Karla. I don’t know what else to say.”

Jeff is trying, I’ll give him that. I think he might’ve even noticed the song choice. Desperation. Hail Mary here. And honesty is a great policy. Especially if you’ve got no other viable policies.

“No, you know what, Jeff? I don’t know that-,”

“Did you guys want to hear about our specials tonight?”

Oh, Frankie. I applaud the effort, but you’re a day late and a dollar short. Actually, with this going on at one of your prime tables, you’re going to be much more than a dollar short.

“Sorry, Frankie,” Karla says, sticking her hand out at a forty-five degree angle. The universal sign for not-being-rude-but-stop. “Can you just give us a minute?”

Frankie backs away, his hands fumbling through the metaphorical tail no stuck in his legs. He’s going to try to be sneaky, slink off to the back to tell Katie and Joshua and Luis and all the others to take a wider berth around table seven. Oh, and to keep an eye on table seven.

“Like I was saying, Jeff.” It used to be so natural (used to be) to talk about forever.“I don’t think you know how to love. I think you only know how to pursue your own interests.” But used-to-be’s don’t count anymore, they just lay on the floor till we sweep them away.“And, yeah, I know that I have, invariably, been part of your own self interests. But the only reason we’ve stayed together this long is because I was always something you could come back to.”

“Dammit, Karla, that’s not true.” Baby, I remember all the things you taught me. “You weren’t just what I was coming back to.” I learned how to laugh and I learned how to cry. “You were the whole reason I was going in the first place.”

Oh, Jeff. I know what you mean. You mean that she helps you experience the world. That she’s what grounds you. That you’ve learned how to love and you’ve learned how to cry. The lyrics were right above you. You only had to grasp them. But instead you said… Are you aware of what you said?

The wine bottle can’t help anymore. Even if Jeff or Frankie had the wherewithal for a pregnant pause while pouring, it wouldn’t do any good. The bottle’s empty. That’s the thing about wine bottles. Everyone considers them quintessential to a dining experience. The first thing you order. But wine bottles usually don’t last the night. Four glasses per bottle. With two people dining, that’s only a couple glasses each. The wine isn’t there when the dessert rolls around. Or when the opposite of a dessert happens.

You know who’s still here? Who’s always here? I am. The Ear in the Sky. And I know what you’re thinking.

I just wish I could do something about it.

So you’d think I could learn how to tell you good-bye.

“Check!”

Karla attempts to flag down Frankie.

“It’s fine,” Jeff says. “I’ve got it.”

The only response he can give. Pay the tab. Slightly misogynistic, but well meaning. Kind of like Jeff. And, to be honest, half the gentlemen that reserve table seven. If they can’t come up with the nice words or the sweet sentiments, they can at least bust out the wallet for the nice view.

But whatever Jeff was hoping for, Karla’s taking him at his word. She stands up to leave.

“I’ll send the paperwork over tomorrow.”

And just like that, one of table seven’s most distinguished couples is done. Jeff is left footing the bill, both literally and figuratively. Frankie’s swooping in to drop off the literal.

Oh, hey, I hear a distinctive Australian duo coming up. Probably a song too late for you, Jeff. Not that I think it would’ve worked, either way for you tonight. But it’s the thought that…

I’m lying alone with my head on the phone, thinking of you till it hurts.

Ouch, playlist. Of all their songs, I feel especially bad for playing this one right now. Sorry about that, Jeff. I’m a speaker. I can only play the music, not pick the songs or when to play them.

Air Supply. “All Out of Love.”

Got Yer Published Work Right Here!

A.B. Kelly · January 5, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · #amwriting, fiction, fiction contest, flash fiction, pubishing, published · No Comments

Hey!

So, I know some of you have enjoyed some of my “loser” flash fiction entries. And more of them are coming in the next week or two. But did you know that I don’t always lose? For copyright reasons, I couldn’t post the winners because they were going to be published along with the other winners.

Well, now you can check them out. And if you’ve liked some of my non-winners, you owe it to yourself to see the good ones, don’t ya think?

Although, let me say up front that I don’t get any royalties from these sales. The money all goes to the company that put on the contests so that they can hire interns to be totally wrong about all of my other entries (but totally right twice, just like the blind squirrel on the VCR clock). The main thing I get from being published in these anthologies is that I can now expose myself in public without… hold on, I’m starting to think that’s not what they meant by “exposure.” Hmm. Good thing it’s too cold for me to test my theory this time of year.

The first story, which appears in “72 Hour of Insanity, Vol. IV” is called “Those who Rule the Stars and the Universe,” and it’s the first one with that title. They gave us the title and we had to run with it. It’s a historical fiction. There were a few other options to choose from, such as a sci-fi story called “The Cartographer” and one that I really, really wanted to write, which was a romance called “Beating the Boardroom.” Hoo boy, mine woulda been sticky. But instead, I decided to go with the Trial of Galileo, as the question at its heart was, quite literally, about who rules the stars and the universe. Oh, and there are some distinct nods to “Assassin’s Creed.” See if you can find them.

In the second round of contests, I again placed one story, although this one was only a third place finish. I don’t care. I’ll take it. The story in “72 Hours of Insanity, Vol. 5” (yes, they went from Roman numerals to Arabic – something about Amazon publishing being less user-friendly than CreateSpace was) is titles “Over the Top.” It’s another work of historical fiction. Hey, I’m seeing a trend. We were given five options. My first inclination was the Gunpowder Plot, but then I focused in on the Spanish Flu. This was a major epidemic that started at the tail end of World War I. It ended up wiping out more people than the War did, at least in the United States. So I went with that motif, a soldier who escaped the trenches but couldn’t escape the Flu.

So out of ten events, I won one and came in third place once. They gave out five places for each event, so let’s see, two times out of fifty places. I’m four percent of a writer, now! Although I technically couldn’t place more than once per event, so two out of ten? Twenty percent? But then something, something, third place out of the number of entries, and carry the four, and…

You know what? I think I’ll stick to historical fiction.

Thanks for all of your support, peeps.

Sorry Mario

A.B. Kelly · December 11, 2018 · fiction · #amwriting, fiction, flash fiction, short story · No Comments

More flash fiction. The prompt for this week was that the character that the story revolves around can’t appear in the story. Not sure why, but the “Sorry, Mario, but our princess is in another castle” popped into my mind right away. Then it was a matter of getting there.

Sorry Mario

“Are you ready?” Jeff asked.

His wife looked back at him in the darkness.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t go to the police?” Melissa asked in return.

“The note said no police.”

“I doubt an ill-advised rescue attempt is sticking to the ransom, either.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll be in and out before they know what’s going on. You just saw the same thing I did. Three of them left. They didn’t have Daniella with them. That means she’s still inside.”

“I just…,” Melissa trailed off, then changed her tact. “You know you’re not Mario, right?”

“Who?”

“Mario. I don’t know, Luigi. This isn’t a video game.”

“Really? You went with Mario? Not Assassin’s Creed? Not James Bond?”

“Whatever. Isn’t Mario the one who’s always saving the princess?”

“That’s Link.”

“Okay, but Mario is the one that changes direction in mid-jump. You know you can’t do that, right? Hell, you can’t really jump, at all.”

“This won’t require jumping.”

The silence between the married couple stretched on.

“This isn’t a video game,” Melissa finally said, returning to the beginning of her argument as summary.

“So are you in or out?” Jeff asked.

“I guess it’s too late to go back now. It’s not like we have the ten grand they’re asking for anyway.”

“Okay then. Let’s go rescue our daughter.”

Jeff climbed through the hole in the fence and began to tiptoe toward the brick building that he had traced the kidnappers to. Melissa followed behind him, carrying the pistol that they had owned for a decade but never used. Melissa had tried to get rid of the thing when Daniella was born, but Jeff would hear nothing of it. He kept it in his bedstand, but kept the bullets up high in their closet, where a child could not accidentally find them or load them or shoot them. Without its bullets, it wouldn’t offer much protection, but Jeff assumed the sight of a gun might be enough to make a home invader flee. Nobody wants to hang around long enough to see if a gun is loaded or not.

Melissa might be right that this wasn’t a video game. But the vast number of heist movies and Liam Neeson thrillers had laid the groundwork for what lay in front of Jeff. Working for the City Comptroller gave him the rest of what he needed. No need to keep the kidnappers on the phone for ten extra seconds in order to triangulate the cell towers if you can just get a listing of the blocked phone number after the fact. From there, all he had to do was check the blueprints of the abandoned book depository, which were public record and available to any citizen of the city, as long as said citizen knew whom to ask.

Don’t fuck with civil servants, Jeff thought, was the moral of the story.

Once he saw the blueprints, it was obvious how this warehouse could be turned into a prison for a kidnapped child. Jeff knew, without even needing to think, where the bastards were holding Daniella. The old manager’s office lay in the back of the open warehouse, and it had a fortified vault in one corner. It didn’t take a criminal mind, or even a dozen watchings of “Ocean’s Eleven,” to know where he needed to go.

And with the three perps having just left, Jeff and Melissa should be able to waltz right in and save their daughter. Jeff patted himself on the back as he padded toward the door the kidnappers had left ten minutes ago.

The room beyond the door was dark. Jeff was happy. That meant none of the kidnappers were still inside. Everything was going to plan.

The booby traps were not part of the plan.

“Ouch.”

“What’s wrong?” Melissa asked from behind, raising the gun in her two hands, as she had been trained to do in the one class Jeff had made her take a decade earlier.

“Nothing. It’s just that the doorknob is warm. Even through these gloves.”

Melissa laughed to release some tension, pointing the gun back toward the ground. “Do people really use the old hot handle trick? I thought that only happened in Bugs Bunny cartoons.”

Jeff laughed, too, in spite of himself. “Ye- yeah. We’ve gone from video games to Looney Tunes. Let’s hope these guys are more Elmer Fudd than Bow-“

Jeff didn’t finish his thought. As he inched the door open, the subtle heat turned into a fireball. Jeff fell backward as flames exploded out of the doorway. Melissa screamed, dropping the gun as she shielded her own face from the conflagration. Her husband crashed to the ground, losing his wind as his back hit the ground.

It was not a continuous spout of fire. Not a flame thrower, nor a blowtorch. Not the type of sustained heat to make a creme brulee. This was just one explosive flame, a barbecue finally lighting after the fourth push of the igniter button. Perhaps more to frighten people away than to actually harm them.

“Further proof there’s nobody here to guard her,” Jeff said as he rolled over on to his stomach.

Melissa nodded, even though she had not been privy to his internal monologue. They had been married for a decade, and dated for an extra five years before that. She could follow his train of thought better than anyone. And she agreed.

Wife helped husband regain his feet. She wiped the dirt off the back of his shirt, while he did the same to the front of his jeans. Tentatively, Jeff reached forward. He grasped the cooling doorknob and pulled on the door, just enough to open it a crack, while ducking to his left, fully prepared to dive for the floor once again. But the fire was a one-time deterrent. The door opened without a hitch.

A dark expanse faced them. The scant light from outside only showed a few feet near the open door. But Jeff knew this room. The blueprint showed a seventy-foot-by-seventy-foot square. Jeff took a confident step forward. Then another. His eyes could still make out the general shape of the grey-brick, windowless walls from the scant light spilling in through the entryway. This was a convenient reinforcement, as the two into darkness as soon as the door closed behind Melissa.

The last picture Jeff had seen, filed by a construction firm filing a “Use of Historic Building” form, showed the room to be empty. All of the bookshelves had been removed to the school district’s newest warehouse. The old storage room was perfectly suited for the air rifle arena that the construction firm had been hoping to open, or an urban-themed disco, but both of those applications had been denied. The Comptroller was holding out for an artist enclave or some other upscale business to begin the gentrification process in this part of town.

His mind’s eye seeing the blueprint and the picture, Jeff took one cautious step forward in the darkness, then another. Within a few steps, Jeff was sure his eyes had adjusted as much as they could. He walked forward with purpose, his mind focused on the distant door to the manager’s office on the blueprint in his head.

Until his foot missed the floor. Or didn’t miss, per se, but came down on something else. A round object. A group of spheres, (Marbles!) rolling out from under his step, toppling him over once again. He tried to fall forward this time, flailing his arms out in front of him. In the end, he thought he pitched to the right, the brunt of the impact hitting his right shoulder. His head came to rest on his assailant. Not spheres, but tubes.

Not marbles.

Jeff thought back to the marbles on Daniella’s floor. He had almost tripped over them. He was always stepping on Daniella’s toys. The marbles weren’t as bad as those damned Legos. Marbles on a carpeted floor won’t cause any harm. But they had been there nonetheless. Sitting on the floor, as if Daniella had just been playing with them. It was all he could focus on at first. Not the open window, outside breeze blowing the tree outside gently against the side of the house. Not the ransom note on the bed. “$10,000. Instructions for delivery in two hours.” Only the marbles on the floor. And an indentation on the carpet. How long ago had Daniella been sitting there, playing with her toys?

When did the two hours begin?

A light switched on. A faint, LED glow illuminating the area in front of him.

“Not sure why we didn’t think of this before,” Melissa said, her phone having replaced the gun in her right hand.

The glow started to fade. She turned it back to her face and double-tapped the screen. Lumens returned, and she turned the screen back toward to scene on the floor.

“Can you turn on the flashlight,” Jeff said into the picture on her screen. A selfie of the three of them, Daniella’s face smiling between her two parents, the “Welcome to Disneyland” sign hovering behind their close-up faces. Jeff never liked that picture. He never knew where to look on a selfie. The other two beamed straight at the camera and he was gazing off to the right as if something had just caught his eye. A naked lady or a terrorist attack or an alien coming down in a flying saucer. Or maybe he was looking into the future, and a kidnapper taking his daughter from his very house while he was busy looking the other direction.

“Isn’t that the app that the Russians were using to steal your identity?” Melissa asked, but turned her phone back around to see if she could find the app in question. She thumbed the safety on her pistol and tucked it into her back pocket.

“I think that’s just an… ow… an old wive’s tale,” Jeff said, finally feeling the impact on his shoulder as he shifted his weight in an attempt to get up off the floor. Although he hadn’t felt any initial impact, he was pretty sure his wrist had lost some of its structural integrity. “Besides, at this point, the Russians can have my fucking identity.”

Three thumb-clicks later, the flash on Melissa’s phone shone down upon her husband as he regained his knees. Around him lay a scattering of white PVC pipes. Moving the light around, she saw them stretch on for five feet or more. It would have been impossible to avoid them in the dark, no lucky, walk-over bypass.

“Who the hell leaves a bunch of pipes laying around in the dark?”

Whether they had been lain there intentionally or leftover from some random inhabitant or potential owner, it was hard to know. But with the flash of a digital camera to lead the way, husband and wife were able to avoid this obstacle, and another batch of PVC pipes twenty feet further on.

“The positioning looks a little too precise to be there randomly,” Melissa opined, and Jeff was forced to agree. Eight pipes in a row, the last two angled to the right and the left, ensuring the whole batch would roll.

“I don’t get it. Did they want us to pay or did they want us to come here?”

It was a question that hung over the two of them as they made their way to the door near the corner of the far wall. Jeff thought he heard sirens in the distance, but it was too hard to be certain. Everything on his body was screaming. His injured wrist, his bruised shoulder, his scorched face. There was enough ringing in his ears to easily mask any exterior sounds. To say nothing of the thick warehouse brick. So instead of straining to make sense of a distant noise, he focused to the only sense that was working: his eyesight following that single trail of cellphone light to the inner office door.

Once there, Jeff and Melissa only stared at the doorknob. Melissa’s phone illuminated it perfectly. An utterly normal sphere of chrome, a simplistic keyhole in the middle. Jeff reached forward, then stopped himself. Once, twice. He finally reached all the way, tapped it with his finger. It didn’t budge, it didn’t melt, it didn’t morph into a evil maw with teeth ready to snap an assailant’s hand off. It did exactly what a doorknob should do when tapped, which is to barely notice, to continue existing precisely as intended. Slowly, ever so gingerly, reaching through a morass as if the ice age might sneak back into this room in time to rescue both father and daughter, Jeff grabbed hold of the knob and turned.

The mechanism released. The door released from the doorjamb. Jeff pulled on it while his wife removed the gun from her back pocket. Both sensed that, make or break, their journey would end on the other side of this barrier. The sirens from the street rose in pitch, adding a sense of urgency and dread. Melissa moved her phone to her left hand, thumbing the small safety nub into its receptacle.

The door swung open.

Nothing was there. Jeff blinked. Melissa blinked. Melissa shone the flashlight left, then right. The dimensions of the room were correct. Ten by ten. No desk. No furniture. And no vault door behind where the desk should have been.

Jeff took a giant step to his left, in the direction of the phantom vault, the spot on the wall that showed nothing. Straight forward, no variance. No time to think. Had he slowed down, he might have seen the trip wire. But probably not, strung as it was at shin height, as thin and as taut as an E string on an acoustic guitar.

Gunfire rang out. A bright flash to Jeff’s left. Reverberating crashes, a cacophony in an enclosed place. Four shots in rapid succession. Melissa returned fire without thinking. Bullets flew in both directions over Jeff’s shoulder. His knees gave out and he once again plummeted for the floor. Melissa stood stock still for a moment before belatedly realizing she should have ducked behind the wall.

But it didn’t matter. They were alone in the room. The gun that had fired and, blessedly, missed, had been yet another trap. Not another person in the room. And when Melissa shone the light on the wall opposite the muzzle flashes, they saw, to the right of the doorway where one would expect it, a light switch. In his mind’s eye, Jeff saw himself reaching for the light instead of darting to the left as soon as he entered the room. What any sane person would do.

He started to laugh. Quietly at first, then it grew. The entire idea was absurd. And the two of them were making it through not because they were trained, not because video games and movies had shown them the way to do it. But because they were just strung out enough, just impulsive enough, to ensure they were continually doing what no sane person would be doing at this time.

“I’m Mario!” He finally said between his laughs.

“What?”

“A fireball. A pipe. A bullet flying through space at nothing in particular! Hahaha! You were right! This is Mario. I just lost my third life. How many do I have left?”

Melissa only stared at her husband, through the smoky haze of residual gunpowder, laughing maniacally on the ground. She tried to make sense of what he was saying. Her senses were as overloaded as his. Darkness and light and smoke and gunfire. Sirens getting closer and closer. Only she wasn’t cracking, as her husband clearly was. She needed to stay grounded in reality, where neither of them had any extra lives.

“It’s over there,” Jeff continued between gasps. Melissa shone her light back to him, then followed the direction he was pointing. Her phone showed a vault door. “I was reading the blueprint wrong. I zigged when I should’ve zagged.”

Melissa started to laugh now, too. Seeing the vault door, knowing Daniella lay beyond. They were almost to the end. The end was in sight. The emotion that had been pent up for the last twenty hours finally came out.

“You… You changed the direction of your jump in midair.”

He stepped forward to hug her husband. The two of them laughed and sobbed for what seemed like an eternity. Exhausted and delirious.

“This is the police! You are surrounded!”

The amplified voice permeated through the building. Jeff and Melissa looked at each other in confusion.

“The police are here?” Melissa asked. “For us?”

“Did we set something off?”

“Did the kidnappers send them? No police, the note said.”

How many lives do we have left?” Jeff asked again.

The two blinked at each other in the cone of lightness.

“It’s okay. Just get Daniella out of there. Then we can explain what we’re doing in here.”

Jeff nodded. It would be easy enough to explain. They weren’t trespassing, after all. They were saving a captured little girl. Their daughter. They had every right to be in here. The cops would be very interested to hear about what had prompted this whole endeavor. Jeff took Melissa’s phone and walked toward the vault. At the last minute, he worried about a lock. Maybe the cops would be able to open the vault door and save his daughter from the other side.

He heard the distant door open, and footsteps storming into the building, as he reached the padded door. He turned the handle, this one a long metal bar instead of a chrome sphere, and was relieved when it swung freely. The door swung inward.

“FREEZE!” came a multitude of voices from behind.

Bright light blazed behind Jeff, illuminating the office. He raised his hands in the air, wanting to make sure he was seen complying. He hoped Melissa was doing the same, and he hoped her gun was not in her hand.

“TURN AROUND!”

But Jeff couldn’t turn around. All he could do was stare straight forward. Into the vault, now fully illuminated in the police lamps. He could see every corner of the tiny vault. The tiny, empty vault.

Daniella was nowhere to be seen.

Sorry, Mario, but our princess is in another castle.

For the fourth time today, Jeff fell to his knees. He dipped his head as cops grabbed his hands from behind. He stared straight forward as cold steel clasped his wrists.

The room was empty. Jeff was out of lives.

Campfire Story

A.B. Kelly · December 5, 2018 · fiction · #amwriting, campfire story, flash fiction, short story · No Comments

Don’t let your blog die during NaNoWriMo, I told myself. I’m going to post some old flash fiction, I actually posted in said blong. And here it is the first week of Decemeber and, let me check… one post, three weeks ago. Bang up job, Wombat.

Okay, here you go. Some of my flash fiction that didn’t win any contests. This one was supposed to be a Campfire Story. So I tried to make it read as if it was being spoken aloud in front of some kids. They said I had too many rhetorical questions, and I guess it was too late to say they weren’t supposed to be rhetorical. They were assuming that people were responding to them. But I’m telling you that now. So no complaining!

Enjoy.

And the Queen of England

The night was a night a lot like this.

Do you see the way the moon sits above the tree line? The way it just hangs there, a dull amber hue, lighting up our surroundings. It’s big. It’s bold. Not the type of moon you see in the city. It isn’t hiding behind a skyscraper or around the corner of the church on Third Street.

The farmers call it a harvest moon. It’s closer to the Earth this time of year. It keeps a watchful eye out over you so you can keep a watchful eye out over your crops. It’s a moon that wants to remind you that once upon a time, people thought he was a god. They prayed to him. And, boy howdy, by the time this story is finished, you’ll be praying to the almighty light of that moon, just like those old farmers were. Just like I was.

Because the last time I saw that moon was the first time I saw the half-human, half-…

You know what? I’m getting ahead of myself.

There were four of us out in the woods that night. David, the bald one. And Josh. Well, I guess Josh was bald, too. Mostly, anyway. Not everyone can have locks as luscious as your uncle, here. But I don’t really remember Josh’s hair. I think of him more as the burly guy. Built like a brick sh-, um sorry. Built like a sturdy outhouse. No? No frame of reference for that? A port-a-potty? Although those aren’t very sturdy, I know. Think of a port-a-potty that is made out of brick. Okay, sure, like the bathroom at the park.

And then there was Sonia. Poor, little Sonia. I don’t remember why she was out there with us. She had always just kind of been there. Part little sister, part would-be girlfriend. The glue that held together our motley crew. Whether we were smokin’ in the boys room or home, sweet, home. Ha, ha! Trust me, kids, when one of your college roommates introduces you to that old-school, hair-band rock music, you’ll get what a funny joke I just made.

Although I shouldn’t joke about Sonia. I haven’t seen her since that night. Diminutive little Sonia. Stood maybe five-foot-one, dripping wet. She’d have to stand on her tippy toes to hit a hundred pounds. Pixie-ish is what I used to call her. Now I know how apt that was. She really had no business being out there. None of us did, it turns out. But Sonia, least of all.

The Queen of England was there, too. I don’t quite remember when she got there, but I know she wasn’t there at the beginning. I’ll get to her later.

Have you heard that saying, “you can’t see the forest through the trees?” Well, that’s true. You see those trees right there? I know it’s dark, but that ring that’s illuminated around us. What’ve you got there, a Douglas Fir? A Noble Pine? It’s like a veritable Christmas Tree farm here. Some of them are tall and some of them are short. I mean, short to the other trees. Not short to you or I. Heck. See that one right there? What is it, twenty feet tall? On a Christmas Tree lot, that would be one of the top money getters, but here he’s just a little runt, barely stealing enough sun and nutrients from his big bullies next door.

And speaking of those bullies, check out that bad boy over there. He’s gotta be fifty feet if he’s an inch. Flickering orange in this light, but what do you think he looks like in the light of day. Is his trunk grey, like an elephant, trumpeting its power over the rest of God’s creation? Or is he a meek brown, trying to camouflage himself amongst his brethren. “Hey guys, I may be the one that everyone looks at, but I’m just one of you all. Come on, group tree hug.”

But here’s what I was saying with that whole forest-and-the-trees thing. We’re looking at that tree. But can you see the forest? Can you see what it all means? Can you even see what’s behind it? What could it be hiding? Well, that’s what David wanted to find out. So he got up from around the fire, a fire very much like this, to kill that cat’s curiosity and try to see the forest with his very own eyes.

And what did he see? You want to know what he saw, don’t you? When bald, wiry David tiptoed up to a giant pine tree standing sentinel on the edge of the light, warding off the darkness, or maybe it was vice versa, protecting the darkness from the evils of the light. What did David see, crunch, crunch, crunching through the dried pine needles like a drunken lion on shore leave?

Well, I don’t know. Because as he got to the tree, as he peered behind ever so subtly, I saw him lean in behind the tree, take a step, lean in some more and then…

David was gone.

Gone! A ghost! Like the tree had swallowed him whole. I know. I didn’t believe it at first, either. Thought maybe it was a trick of the eyes. A vantage point kinda thing. But no. David was gone. We called for him. Said his name. No response.

Josh was up first to follow David beyond the tree. That’s the kinda guy Josh is. Was. David was curious, always chasing some tantalizing, ethereal distance. Josh was sturdy. Grounded. Ready to go as soon as the going got going. I followed shortly behind Josh, because for me it was a thought and for him it was instinct.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Josh is going to disappear behind the tree, just like David. They’re going to join each other in some Great Beyond like in that nineteen-eighties Netflix show. But no. Maybe it was a one-time thing, or maybe it was because I was right behind him. The darkness can only take you when you’re lonely.

Whatever the reason, Josh rounded the pine and came out clear on the other side, rounding back out into our clearling, moments before I broke the plane of the forest myself.

But there was nothing behind the tree. It was just the back side of a tree. Or the front side, or the side side, depending on your vantage point, I suppose. My point is that David wasn’t there and David had never been there. No sign of him anywhere. No black, size-eight Converse tennis shoes. No svelte, tan, designer jacket signifying “Dave was here.” If I couldn’t see his tent over by the campfire, I might not think he had joined us on our trip.

Wait, was Sonia still sitting at the fire when I looked back in that direction? She should’ve been, but I don’t remember, definitively.

What I do remember, definitively, was Josh circling the tree, and me circling behind him. Once around. Twice around. The sun and the moon. Like a yin-yang, always on the opposing side. The fighters in the “Beat It” video. Tell me your dads have shown you the “Beat It” video. Good. I don’t want to have to disown my little brothers.

Finally, I came to a stop. Josh plowed into me from behind. I had just rounded the black pine, my field of vision bleary from yet another darkness-to-light transition as the fire came into view.

Was that when I saw the Queen of England sitting in Sonia’s spot by the fire? No. No, I don’t think Her Highness was there yet. I think what had caused me to stop on this particular revolution was the sound. Or rather, the complete lack thereof.

Silence. Too silent. The cackling of the nearby fire was gone. There was no crunching of footsteps or rustling of twigs in the breeze. A silent that shouldn’t exist in a library, much less outside in the woods. I don’t even think Josh stumbling into my backside registered a single decibel. It was as if the world had put those noise-cancelling headphones on, then forgot to push “play.”

Until the scream. AHHHHHHH!

A cry. A wail. A scream both natural and unnatural. Super-natural. Like a human wail belted an octave higher than Mariah Carey’s falsetto. Like an animal trying on its human vocals for the first time. The ghost of a cat. The wraith of a raccoon. The role of a human baby’s first wail will be played in tonight’s performance by a demon from Hell.

I ran. Straight forward or left of right, I couldn’t tell you. I just ran. Past the clearing and the fire and the four empty chair, like the points of a compass, containing neither me, nor David, nor Josh, nor Sonia. Nor the Queen of England. Into the forest and the trees and the underbrush and the darkness. Somehow I avoided them all, a pinball maneuvering between every flipper in sight. Unclear about direction or destination, I just ran. Like a blind man racing against Usain Bolt.

Josh was behind me. I could feel his breathing. I could hear his grunting. I could smell his breath on my legs, then my back, then my neck and the top of my head. His hot, humid breath. A mussy, Mississippi windstorm. A slobbering, guttural growl as Josh finally overtook me.

It wasn’t Josh.

I tripped and I pitched, sprawled through the forest, sprawled through the trees, came skidding to a stop on the undergrowth. A soft, mossy landing. A pillow that cushioned me from the landing I deserved. I sent a silent thanks up to whatever spritely spirit had saved me from scratches and worse.

But as the snarls and the groans and the slobbers and the heat pressed down upon my prone form, I wondered if I was being kept whole for a more nefarious reason. A fly taking a well-deserved rest in a comfortable silken web.

AWWWOOOOOOOO!!

The sound was more distinct this time. Closer. So very, very close. Not a wail or a cry, but a call. A triumphant trumpet of victory.

I couldn’t turn around to look. I mustn’t. And yet a voice told me that I must. A tiny voice. Feminine, discreet. Either in my ear or in my head. A heart of resolve. Turn around, it was saying. See what you must see. A defendant must face his accuser. A fly must look into the maw of its spider.

The hairy, crushing, snapping, poisonous mandible of the spider.

The hairy, crushing, snapping, bloody muzzle of a creature most foul.

I’d like to say it was a werewolf. I’d like to say it was a giant rat. I’d like to say it was a rabid wombat. It was all of those things and none of them, so all I can say is what I saw bending over me from its nine-foot height.

Sharp teeth, ragged teeth. Not the precise canines of a predator, but the mangled maw of a scavenger instead. Rat’s teeth dripping with fresh blood that glistened in the near-darkness. The snout above the snarl was rounded, like a marsupial instead of a rodent. But not one of those cute marsupials, like a panda or a wallaby. One of those nasty-looking ones. A snub-nosed opossum. A hairy-nosed wombat. The flat, pale triangle of a nose at the tip of the snout curled up to smell my delicious fear and despair.

The eyes were coal black orbs. No iris, no cornea. One hundred percent pupil, an endless pit into the depths of a scorched soul. Black like soot, the aftermath of a forest fire. The surest sign nature has to tell us of swallowed-up lives.

I tore my eyes away from the slathering face only to be mesmerized anew by its legs. Human legs. Hairier than a human, lankier than a human, but the unmistakable bipedal structure and gait of an upper primate. Human thighs. Human calves.

Human legs in camouflage cargo shorts. And black, size-eight Converse tennis shoes.

The creature was David!

“Hey, Buddy,” I said, trying to crab-walk backward, but finding no grip in the moist, silky moss. A fly caught in the Hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

“Hey, sorry I took the last hot dog last night, David.”

The monster snarled.

“I promise I’ll get up early tomorrow and percolate some fresh coffee for you.”

It growled.

“I take it back. You’re right. Reese’s make much better s’mores than Hershey’s.”

David opened its mouth wide. It descended toward its prey. Me. Hot saliva scorched my exposed neck.

“You stop that, David.” A high-pitched, high-classed voice rang out. Melodic. Regal. Royal. Large and in charge.

I looked up, and who did I see, hovering above the imposing nine-foot figure of the WereWomRat, shining in the moonlight like the crown jewels herself? Do you know who? No, it wasn’t the Queen of England. It was…

Sonia! Tiny, diminutive Sonia. Spritely little Sonia, towering ten feet in the air.

But not towering. She was hovering. She had wings! Honest-to-goodness wings. A double layer on both sides, strutting out to form a couple of upper-case B’s bordering her body. A body which, if you can believe it, was even smaller than it had been when she had her feet on the ground.

“Now, David, this is not a proper way to greet our host.”

AWWWWWWW!!! The WereDavid screamed. It was not a cry of hunger, or triumph, or even anger. It was a cry of frustration. A wail of disappointment. A child asking for just one more episode of “Dora the Explorer.” But Mommmmeeeee….

“I don’t want to hear it,” Sonia piped. “It might very well be a full moon, but it’s also time for tea. And if you do not come back to the safety of the roost soon, I cannot account for how the Troll might respond to your dalliance.”

A glow, which I had never really realized was always a part of Sonia, grew in luminosity until it was unavoidable. From the cherubic red cheeks that I knew well to the comforting warmth of a sunset over a Hawaiian sea. Then, before my very eyes, the sunset became a sunrise. Then midday. A dazzling sheen of explosive yellows and oranges and whites, with the popping brightness of twenty stars’ luminosity. The glow erupted from the Pixie Queen, who I could swear now had a perfectly apt wand with a, wouldn’t you know it, star-shaped business-end in her hand, right before everything in my sight disappeared into the bright.

She said, or rather sang, something in some long-forgotten tongue. It might have been an “abra cadabra,” or a “ziggity zaggity,” or maybe even a “slainte chugat!” I couldn’t have told you then and I can’t tell you now. Because as the world got brighter, as Sonia’s voice got louder, my consciousness grew dimmer.

And then I was out.

I don’t know how long I was out. It could have been five minutes or five hours or five seconds. The next thing I knew, someone was shaking me awake. The hulking (trolling?) form of my good-friend Josh knelt beside me as I opened my eyes on a bed of green grass. Not a silky trap of moss, just a comfortable grassy mattress.

“You okay, guy?” Josh asked.

I tried to nod through a tight head. I tried to say yes through a mouth full of marbled cotton. Both attempts failed.

Josh lifted me up with a strength that shouldn’t exist in any human being and escorted me back to the campfire. I don’t know how I moved. I merely slumbered on, like the zombie that was missing from this story of the mystical.

When we made it back to the opening, who do you think was there?

No, not her.

It was all of my friends. David, looking just as bald and svelte as he always was. And Sonia, sitting there talking a mile a minute as if nothing had ever happened. Nobody said anything about what had happened, or if anything had happened at all. We just sat down, like all of us are doing now, and busted out the marshmallows and sticks.

And like I said before, I have never seen Sonia since that day. I don’t really know why.

What’s that? Is my wife’s name Sonia? Yes. Your Aunt Sonia. Why do you ask?

Anyway…Here’s the part you’ve been waiting for…. Into the copse of trees and the campfire of friends walked who else but…

No, you know what? I don’t think that was the time we met the Queen of England. That must’ve been a different time. Sorry.

Who’s got some Reese’s?

Awaiting Delivery

A.B. Kelly · July 10, 2018 · fiction · #amwriting, fiction, flash fiction, story · No Comments

Ye Olde “Locked Room” Story.

Well, the room isn’t really locked. Characters could leave the room, but the story couldn’t.

The judges said they liked it, but I think they wanted more backstory. They said they wanted details as to precisely when it was happening. Evidently, “thirty years after the Austro-Prussian War” and “The Bavarian (Chlodwig Carl Viktor) is chancellor of Germany” weren’t big enough hints. Are they saying not every reader that will ever view my writing isn’t an expert in late nineteenth century German politics?

They also wanted more backstory with the father. But the contest runners had said backstory shouldn’t be outside of the room, so I tried to toe the line a little.

Here ya go:

Awaiting Delivery

The room is sparse. The only real furniture is a small writing desk in the corner and a twin-sized bed along the opposite wall. The bed and its frame are locked in a competition to be the most lackluster. The latter is a collection of four steel legs with a few black splotches to indicate that, somewhere in its distant past, it might have attempt to provide some hospitality. The former is a stripped-down, flat piece of cloth with a permanent indentation down the middle, representing those countless prior inhabitants who might have seen the frame in its former glory.

Grey, clinical walls. Or perhaps not clinical, but regulation. Everything about this room is uniform and regulation. Nothing extravagant. Nothing inviting. No indication that the visitor is welcome.

Which is a shame, Margaret thinks she will spend a fair amount of time here. How long, she is not quite sure. The strange, alien language being thrown around in her presence conveys little information Margaret can use. But the clipboard and the inspections and the pointings tell her this is her new home.

Not much to look at inside the room. But the view outside the room is simultaneously majestic and infuriating. Visible through a thick, warbled window, both a bit too thick to give a true sense of its view, but opaque enough that the sight cannot be ignored. The most inviting sight in all the world, mocking her by denying entry.

“Ha famiglia in l’America?”

Margaret looks up at the new entrant, confused. She doesn’t understand, but she is closer to understanding than before. This language is not quite as foreign as the one that everyone else is speaking.

The speaker of the new language looks back at Margaret in equal confusion. Her dark eyes, curtained by two, even darker, locks of hair that have broken free from the tight bun atop her head. It has been a long day for her, yet her white smock is as pristine as the moment she got off the boat this morning, a short boat ride by comparison. The only evidence of the day’s stress is those two strands of hair out of place.

Still, the worker can’t worry about her hair right now. Her days are always long, and this day will be longer if she can’t communicate with the residents. That is precisely her job, her profession. And her experience tells her that the last question should have produced a response. She looks down at the clipboard in her hand, looks back up at Margaret.

“Mi hai capito, Senora Maguerita?”

French? Margaret doesn’t think so. It sounds close, similarly sonorous. But the French don’t enunciate the way this olive-skinned girl does. Which probably means one of the other Latin languages.

“Keine Franzosisch,” Margaret says.

They are the first words Margaret has spoken since arriving. Words don’t have much meaning when nobody understands. Everything about this place is designed to avoid verbal communication. Solid yellow lines, signs with pictures, drawings with numbers attached, clipboards.

And pointing.

Pointing, pointing, and more pointing.

Margaret followed the yellow lines and the signs and the pointing. She nodded when the workers, in their white smocks or their grey shirts or their black jackets, said things to her in their alien tongue. She was starting to wonder if this new land was nothing but silent compliance.

Except this woman addressed her differently. No pointing, but a pen poised above the clipboard. She was waiting for a response. Expecting a response. So Margaret responded.

“Keine Lateinish.”

“Tadesco?”

The social worker with the two strands of loose hair turns to the other official in the room. This one, a gaunt man wearing a grey coat over a crisp white shirt and regulation-red tie, looks back at the woman in the smock, then to Margaret. There is no understanding between any of them. Here they are, three people in the same room, speaking three different languages.

“Scusi,” White Smock says. “I meant German. I think she is German.”

Finally, a word Margaret knows. She is German. Not that she calls herself that. None of her people think of themselves as German. Her language is Deutsch. And, increasingly since the unification, people are calling Deutsch their nationality, too. But it is slow going. Margaret still thinks of herself as Bavarian most often, even if that particular state ceased to exist when she was three years old.

But German, she knows, is the word that the English called the Deutsch. And Americas is just a mini-England. Typical of English arrogance to not call a people what they prefer to be called. Bismarck had been wrong about a number of things, for which the Kaiser had rightly fired him and finally, after one more misfire, replaced him with a proper Bavarian. But one thing Bismarck had been correct about was how the rest of the world saw the upstart Deutsch. Like little kids, only capable of breaking things.

“Ja.” Margaret seizes upon the word she knows, even if it is insulting and diminutive. “Ja, ich bin deutsch. Um, German.”

The man with the regulation tie and regulation shirt and regulation coat raised his bushy eyebrows above his bushy mustache. The mustache was not regulation, and had been out of the norm since the Chester Arthur administration, but government officials are not always known for being up on fashion.

“You’re German?” He asked. When Margaret doesn’t immediately respond, he points to her. Always with the pointing. “German?”

“Ja. Yes.” Margaret follows suit, pointing at herself. “German.”

Mustache Man and White Smock both lean in to look at the woman’s clipboard. The man scratches his head.

“Well then I guess you should go get a German translator.”

The man pats the social worker on the rump in an act of dismissal. The woman takes the gesture for what it is and turns to leave. Margaret now assumes she must have been Italian. She used the word Tadesco for German. That is not a reference Margaret knows, but she is at least cognizant enough to know that the French refer to her people as Allemand. One cannot grow up in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War without knowing some of the words used on each side.

Tadesco. Allemand. German. Every country has their own word for her people. Just as long as nobody respects them enough to call them by their own name. Here she is, barely considering herself German, but now fiercely defensive of the idea. Immigrants are always much more unified in America than they were back home, she has heard. You may not be Deutsch now but you will be when you’re off the boat. And here she is, off the boat and separated into a room from which she may never escape, and she finds herself more Deutsch, more German, than ever before.

Nationalism at its finest.

Margaret feels awkward being alone in the room with the man. She wonders if he is going to pat her on the rump like he did the Italian woman. What would she do? There isn’t anywhere to go. And this man holds her future in his hand.

But the man doesn’t move. Perhaps he only touches those he works with. Those he is superior to in an official sense, as a superior and a worker, and not just superior in a generic sense, as a native to an immigrant.

Or perhaps Margaret’s current state is working as an agent in dissuasion. It has been months since a man has looked at her with any sort of lust. Not when she is so clearly lusted out.

The man merely stands near the doorway in something akin to attention, albeit with his hands clasped in front of his stomach instead of rigid at his side. His eyes stare straight forward from between the two forests warring on his face, his gaze encompassing all of the room and none of it at the same time. He will stop her from trying to dart past him, but short of that, he will let her have the run of the room. And in Margaret’s current state, she won’t be darting past any guards or doors.

Feeling secure, if not safe, Margaret puts her hand on her lower back and turns away from the government worker and all of his facial hair. She once again looks around the room, her new home for the foreseeable future. It remains sparse. The desk has a chair, which looks much more inviting than comfortable, but there will be plenty of time to sit there later. And to lie on the bed.

For now, the only thing worth seeing is through the window. Margaret walks closer, hoping to get a better view of the azure heaven lying beyond. Warbled as it is through the window, it still sends a clear message of potential. Painted above a deeper indigo sea beneath, the two blues meet together at a not-too-distant horizon, where another island, a larger island with buildings and people and commerce, lay.

And between Margaret and this land stands the guardian. This Statue, Lady Liberty, shows her profile to Margaret and all of the previous and future residents of her well-worn room. She looks out to sea, to all of the incoming immigrants, her hand raised in the international sign for “Stop!” The torch in her hand might be a firearm, preparing to shoot any trespassers who deign to sneak behind her billowing bronze skirt into the land beyond. The book in her hand, so similar to the clipboard in the hands of the various smocked and suited and coated officials in the officialdom Margaret finds herself in. Like the Italian lady who had left Margaret alone in the room with the mustachioed statue behind her, guarding the exit from the room as surely as Liberty on her pedestal in the ocean guarded the exit from the island.

“Frau Marguerita?”

The new voice pries Margaret’s gaze away from the locked gates of Heaven. Another woman in another white smock with another clipboard stands next to the government official now. This woman has blonde hair and blue eyes, but other than that she might be the same person. Same age, experienced enough to be fluent in two languages, but young enough for a mustachioed man to pat on the rump. The smock fits her the same way, hanging loosely to avoid any personality being exhibited from bodily proportions, the same way Liberty’s dress falls around her own steel frame.

“Heisen sie Frau Marguerita?” The new arrival asks in German. “Is your name Mrs. Marguerita?”

Finally, something Margaret can respond to.

“No, I am Mrs. Shengel.” ,” Margaret answers, also in her native tongue.

“So sorry.” The woman writes something down on her clipboard. “Someone copied your last name down as Marguerita, so they assumed you were Italian.”

“My first name is Margaret. Margaret Shengel.”

The woman nods without looking up from the clipboard. “Good thing you responded in the negative or else your name would have officially been listed as Stephania Marguerita and you would have been delivered to Brooklyn.”

“They can do that? Just change somebody’s name?”

“We try not to. But it happens.”

The translator shows her clipboard to Herr Mustache, points at what is written there, and then hands the clipboard to him. He takes the top paper from the clipboard, returns the clipboard to his co-worker, and leaves the room. Margaret notes that the German-speaking woman doesn’t touch any part of the man on his way out of the room.

“I am Anna,” the translator says when the two of them are alone in the room. “Please have a seat.”

She points Margaret toward the desk chair. Margaret hobbles the three steps away from the window and tries to ease herself down but instead plops into a seated position. The chair squeaks.

Anna sits on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs in a friendly, on-your-level stance. The mattress does not shift at all under her weight, and Margaret is impressed she doesn’t sink toward the central indentation.

“Was Anna your original name or the name they gave you here?” Margaret says with a smile.

“Both,” Anna responds with a smile of her own. “We honestly don’t change too many names here. We try to avoid it.”

We. Margret notes the word choice. Anna is part of a “we.” Margaret is still part of a “you” or a “they.” Until she can leave this room, she will always be a “they.”

“You say you are going to Milwaukee,” Anna says, looking down at the piece of paper left on the clipboard in her lap. “Do you have family there?”

“My brother,” Margaret lies. Her brother has been to Milwaukee before, but he is back in Bavaria, back in Germany, now. But there are many Germans in Milwaukee. A community to take care of her and her child. A chance for her to be part of a “we” again.

“Mmm, hmmm.” Anna writes something down. “And that is the Hans you wrote?”

“Yes. Hans Stengel.” Margaret responds, immediately knowing she should not have said it. Would they already know the whereabouts of Hans Stengel? Certainly the name must be common enough. Or perhaps the real danger lie in her and her brother having the same last name.

“And the father?”

Margaret acts confused. She knows where this line of questioning is going, but she hopes to avoid the subject. She decides to be intentionally obtuse, in the hopes of steering the conversation.

“My father died in the war.”

Now Anna is confused. “Is there a war I’m unaware of?”

“The Seven Weeks’ War.” Maybe Anna is too young to have heard of it.

“That was thirty years ago.” One does not work in an immigration station without being up on all of the push and pull factors.

“Yes. My mother was carrying me at the-,”

“No, I’m sorry,” Anna interrupts Margaret’s narrative. “I mean the father of…”

The interpreter points toward Margaret’s enlarged womb. Margaret nods.

“Is the father of your child in Milwaukee?”

“Yes,” Margaret lies again. What else can she say? For all she knows, the father of her child might actually be in Milwaukee. She hasn’t seen him in eight months. If there’s anyone in need of a fresh start, it’s Margaret.

“And his name?”

“Mikkel Jensen.”

This time Margaret need not lie. That snake is assuredly the baby’s father.

“And you are Stengel? Are you to be married?”

Margaret nods and resumes the lie. “That is why I have come. To be married before the baby.”

“How far along are you?”

“Six months.”

One last lie. Margaret doesn’t want to go back on the boat. There is only one direction she can leave this room in, and it is toward the Statue.

Anna raises her eyebrow at the claim. But fortunately, Anna is young. As was the Italian woman. Margaret’s hope rests on the propensity of mustachioed gentlemen to hire damsels of the younger ilk. If Anna had given birth herself, she’d take one look at Margaret and, in order to preserve the” we,” push her right back on to the next boat back to the Old World.

Margaret wants her child to be born in America. If the child is born here, he will be an American, and so, by extension, will she. She knows the stories, and she knows the customs. If they think she is close, they will put her back on the boat. If they think they have time, they will investigate her claims. Look all over Wisconsin for a Hans and a Mikkel. And by then…

“Okay, six months.”

Anna writes something down on her clipboard, and now it is official.

“You are being quarantined,” Anna speaks aloud the German translation of the official statement she has recounted numerous times, “pending official investigation of your claims. At that point, so long is there an American resident to claim you, you will be allowed onto the harbor boat for entrance into the United States.”

Margaret pats her stomach. There will be an American resident in a few weeks, she knows. In fact, an American citizen.

“In the meantime, please make yourself at home. This room is yours. The latrine, complete with flushing toilets,” Anna pauses for effect, as many immigrants gasp at this mention, “is across the hall. You may go to the cafeteria at meal time. Or, in your current state, you can request food to be brought to you.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“You also might want to go see the doctors. To check on the health of your…”

Anna again gestures toward Margaret’s stomach. Margaret silently thanks God for giving her a girl so squeamish about nature as to not even be able to reference the very evidence of said nature right in front of her.

“I know that my child is very healthy,” Margaret says, placing her hand on her stomach again.

Anna stands up. “Welcome to Ellis Island.”

“Thank you.” Margaret strains herself out of her seat and shakes the translator’s hand, a custom she hears is the normal form of greeting in her new home.

“Yes. I am off to file your paperwork. You should have an answer in four to six weeks.”

“Wunderbar!”

Margaret turns back to look out the window. Six to eight weeks? She won’t even need half of that. Within a month, the Statue of Liberty will be admitting her and her child to the land beyond.

“And don’t forget,” Ann says from the doorway behind her. “You can see the doctors at any time.”

“I most certainly will,” Margaret responds.

Anna leaves the room and shuts the door behind her.

“At the right time,” Margaret says to her womb.

For now, though, she might as well get used to her new room. Her new life. Her new world.

Poisoned Parlance

A.B. Kelly · June 27, 2018 · fiction · #amwriting, fiction, flash fiction, short story · No Comments

I just came back from a vacation, which I’ll be blogging about in the near future. But in the meantime, to assuage all of my fans, or my only fan (HI MOM!!!), here’s another flash fiction.

The theme was facing fear. I wanted to go with a more mundane fear, so I went with public speaking. Then I threw in the stammer, cause they never specified whether it needed to be an irrational fear.

The judges said they wanted more backstory of the main character and his friend. How/why he was invited to be the Best Man/Toast Giver. They might have a point. I certainly made it up as I was going along, and by the time I was done, I could really only edit for errors, not add a shit-ton of content and context.

So now you, intrepid explorer, get…

Poison Parlance

My adversary stands before me as I rise from security. Legs tremble, ready to pounce, fight or flight instinct fully engaged. Except there’s no place to go but forward. Into the face of evil.

It rises in front of me. Solid, erect, pockmarked visage eyeing me warily. A soft, guttural hiss emanates from its mouth.

“Snakes. Why did it have to be s-s-snakes?”

It’s not a snake. But I hoped an Indiana Jones line might calm me down. It didn’t.

I wish it was a snake. I could throw a fucking brick at a snake. Not that I have a brick. But at least a snake is a mortal being that can be killed.

I inch toward it. Dragging every ounce of my body, every ounce of time, in an effort to put off the inevitable as long as I can, despite knowing this goes against the priority of getting it all over with as quickly as possible.

Bright silver in the blinding spotlight, hissing and spitting and crackling, stands a microphone. Why did it have to be a microphone? Why the hell did it have to involve me, standing in front of a group of people who I barely now, who I can’t really see, and delivering a canned speech?

Thanks a lot, Ron.

My great aversion to public speaking came during adolescence. All the great social phobias do, right? Kids will take the stage at all-ages karaoke, belting out that song from Frozen at the top of their lungs, completely oblivious to the faces in the audience cocking to one side like a dog, one eye pinched in the universal sign for “you’re a half-note flat.” The kids just keep singing like they’re Idina fucking Menzel.

Hey, remember that time John Travolta butchered Idina Menzel’s name at the Oscars? He called her Adell Dazeem, or some shit like that. That should make me feel better, knowing that even people who do this type of thing for a living can make a faux pas in front of a microphone. But all I can think is that if John fucking Travolta can’t deliver a prepared speech without fucking up, what the hell chance do I have?

“Thuh” I say into the microphone. “Thanks.”

The reverberating echo of my voice sounds tinny, unnatural as it comes back to my ear. I hate recordings of my voice on phone recordings, too. But at least an answering machine doesn’t come with threat of feedback.

“Ron asked me to…”

My tongue tastes desert. Arid, dry, probing for moisture that should exist somewhere in its environ. But all it finds is the jarring back of teeth and a palate as dusty as the cratered surface of the moon. Or the soundstage where Martin Scorsese directed Neil Armstrong to bounce around a bunch. Whatever. Right about now, I’m thinking if scientists haven’t figured out a very basic hydration formula for the inside of a mouth that is trying to speak into a microphone there’s no way in hell they actually made it to the moon.

Or maybe it’s the alcohol’s fault. I have a friend who is afraid of flying. She drinks before a flight. Suggested I do the same here. Plenty of free booze at this place. Except that she can pass out on a flight. If I pass out right here, in front of this microphone, as I desperately want to do, it would probably put a damper on the mood of the crowd. My mood be damned.

“Ron asked me to…”

I did some reading in preparation for this. Don’t make eye contact, the website said. Look above their heads. Except I had a teacher in junior college who did that. And it’s pretty fucking obvious when someone’s looking at the top of your head. Maybe someone in the front row might think you’re making eye contact with someone in the back row. But if you’re sitting near the back, where the people who are most likely going to mock you are sitting, it’s obvious that you’re just staring at the back wall. Hell, sometimes my professor’s eyes rolled up in her head like the goddamned Exorcist, staring straight at the ceiling. Half of us could have snuck out of the room without her noticing. She’d probably just respond by spinning her head around and projectile vomiting.

And trust me, noticing all the miscues of other public speakers does wonders for somebody with public speaking foibles himself.

“Ron wanted me to s-s-say… ssssome things about how him. And, um, J-J-Jake.”

The presentations in middle school were bad. I think that’s where it started. Who the hell decided that middle school students should have to do class presentations? Hey, you’re going through puberty! Acne up the wazoo! No control over your body odor, not to mention all of those other bodily functions! How about you stand in front of a group of your peers, who will continue reminding you of your failures and foibles every day for the next six years?

I didn’t pee my pants that time, at least. I saved that particular reaction for high school. Romeo and Juliet can go fuck itself. Because, again, freshman year doesn’t have enough shit to weigh a fourteen year-old down. Let’s add a mortifying incident that will consign him to the hallway shadows for every passing period in the next three years.

No, in middle school, it was only a profuse sweating. Just enough to make me never want to do this shit again. Yet here I am, a decade later.

“I’ve, um, I’ve known Ron since middle school. But we didn’t really hang out till high school.”

I seriously thought of telling Ron no. It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve had a chance to be a groomsman before. I’ve always said no. They act like being a groomsman is such an honor. Stand up there and make me look good. Tell some carefully-sculpted anecdote that Aunt Gertrude, whom I haven’t spoken to since I was eight, can go home and tell her knitting circle that her nephew’s living a full life.

Not that anyone with half a brain would want my sorry ass standing up for them. Best Man? More like worst. Nothing brings a party to a screeching halt like a minute of dead silence, broken by an occasional stammer. Stammer is sexy. Just ask all of the zero girlfriends I had before alcohol became involved.

But Ron was one of the few people who didn’t hold it all against me. High school as much hell for him as it was for me, just for different reasons. He hadn’t come out yet. Maybe he didn’t know himself yet. But he knew he didn’t fit the mold. Neither of us did. Me, because I couldn’t talk about Romeo and Juliet. Ron, because he liked Romeo and Juliet way more than any ninth grader should.

“Ssssso. I know Ron doesn’t have a l-l-lot of friends from high school. Neither do I. High school kinda suh-sucked. For both of us.”

Way to go, asshole. That’ll slay the crowd. Aunt Gertrude’s gonna have her girders in a bunch after this shitshow.

Imagine all the people in the audience naked, they say. Except, looking around, I really don’t know that I want to see any of these people naked. Except for maybe the bridesmaid, but that’s clearly never going to happen.

I guess she’s not a bridesmaid. There’s no bride. Best maid? Does that make me the Man of Honor? Semantics are stupid. Maybe I should just say that into the microphone.

I never understood how the whole “imagine them naked” thing is supposed to work. Am I supposed to be clothed? Like that episode of “Westworld,” where they’re having perfectly normal conversations in front of an orgy? I imagine if I was the only clothed person in a room with a hundred naked people, that would be weird. That would not calm me down. I would assume I got the invitation wrong, and if I’m already self-conscious about standing in front of them, then being the only one that didn’t get the memo isn’t going to make me feel more comfortable.

You know what? Probably not the best time to be thinking about “Westworld” and orgy scenes.

Or maybe the “everybody naked” thing is supposed to have me naked, too. Like, we’re all in this together. They’re just as humiliated as I am. Except they’re sitting down, legs crossed, privates underneath a wedding program, and I’m standing in front of them, behind this crackling, feedback-prone microphone, and now I’ve got my shwantz out for the whole world to see. One more thing to be self-conscious about.

“S-s-sorry. I, um, this isn’t about, um, ssschool. It’s about, um, Ron and… um, Ron and Jake.”

I’m off script. Good thing, too, because I can’t read the fucking script., because it’s crumpled in my hand. I’m shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. That eighth-grade, puberty sweat is coming back. Sure, I know about deodorant now, but I didn’t have to wear a tuxedo in middle school. It’s a wash, at best, but thinking of a wash just makes me perspire more.

Off script. What made me think I would be able to read pre-written remarks, anyway? Do I even know my own cadence, or lack thereof?

Like in theater. My dad made me do the school play in tenth grade. He was one of those “make the kid smoke a carton to get over his interest in cigarettes” kind of guys. Figured if I was gonna be a pansy-ass when it came to speaking, he’d get it out of me by humiliating me. I stammer because I can, right, dad? If I’m put on a stage and forced to sing along with the chorus, I’ll spit it out, right?

Or I’ll just knock my fucking knees and faint on stage. Right at the front, near the orchestra pit. Thank God for the gong player. That cushioned mallet raised above his head for the big strike really helped break my fall. The gong player definitely wasn’t thanking God for me though, that’s for sure.

Ron’s father isn’t here, either. He’s probably still back at home, praying the gay away. Maybe that’s what drew the two of us together. A couple of ripe old assholes taking care of us in our formative years.

“Ron met J-j-jake at one of those… after the G-g-giants won.”

Oh shit, they might not know what I mean.

“Not the football. B-b-baseball. The Wuh. The Wwworld Suh, suh.”

No shit, dumbass. We’re in Northern California. Who the hell would think we were all out celebrating Eli Manning. And maybe I shouldn’t add in how Ron had spent the whole game gushing over the abs and thighs Buster Posey must have to be able to squat behind the plate for three hours and still leg out an infield single. Or maybe I should add that anecdote in. That’s real life. Shows his mindset. How the only two gay guys in a sports bar of toxic masculinity can find each other when they’re least looking.

Except that’s not how it would come out. Yeah, I can come up with wonderful lines about toxic masculinity inside my own head. People assume I’m dumb because I can’t enunciate my thoughts. Or just because I’ve now been standing in front of this microphone, radio silence, for what has probably been ten minutes now.

Why the hell did Ron even want me here? Sure, I’m one of his best friends. Yeah, I was there when he met Jake, but is that really a vital piece of information? I already fucked up the delivery of it once. So now all I can do is fumble over part two of their relationship. The bridesmaid is here for a reason, too. Can’t she add anything to the “how wonderful you guys are together” story?

Or Ron could come up here. Or Jake. Aunt Gertrude will talk about how strong of a public speaker he is after that debacle of a cavalier.

I know what I want to say. I want to talk about the change that has come over Ron since he met Jake. The sparkle in his eye, the new way he sees the world. The subtle, little optimisms where there would’ve been sarcasm. His propensity to talk about plans in weeks and months instead of minutes and hours. How the true Ron, the one who I always knew was there because I’m the only one who doesn’t interrupt him or talk over him, is finally out for the whole world to see.

Instead, I just stumble over his damned husband’s name.

Screw it. I’m not talking to all of these judgmental fucks in the audience. I’m here as a best man for Ron. And for Jake, his real-life best man. I’ll just turn around and talk to the two of them. Ignore Aunt Gertrude and the bridesmaid and the bartender. Okay, maybe not the bartender. But the bartender can wait. But I definitely can’t look at the bridesmaid.

For now, it’s just me and the two grooms.

“Hu-Hey Ron. Juh, juh… You know what? I’m nnnnot gonna say your name. I love what you d-d-done for my guy, but I fucking hate your name.”

There’s a smattering of laughs in the audience behind me. Fuck. Are they laughing at me? Mocking me because I can’t stand looking at them? Turned my back? Fuck you, Aunt Gertrude.

Or do they think I just made a joke? Did I just make a joke? Timing’s never been my strong suit.

Ron and Jake are both smiling at me. Jake is nodding. I’ve told him I hate his fucking name before. He usually thinks I’m joking. I guess I am. I mean, it would be a hell of a lot easier if his name was Aaron or something, but I don’t begrudge a dude his name. And Ron had enough trouble finding someone he could be happy with. It’s not worth throwing a fish back into the pond for his name.

Maybe I should say something along those lines.

“Yeah. J-j-jake. You’ve been the best thing that’s ever happened to m-m-my boy, Ron. I wuh. I wish you had a du-, a different name, but Ron won’t let me, let me call you Aaron.”

More laughter from behind me. That one was intentional. I think for a brief moment about turning around and mugging for the crowd. A wink to let them know I got this. But that would be a really, really bad idea. Like, pee my pants, pass out kind of bad.

“At least your nnname isn’t B-b-buster P-p-posey.”

Less laughter that time. I need to leave the stand-up to Kevin Hart. Just speak from the heart.

“Anyway, I’ve never. Never s-s-seen Ron s-s-so happy. It’s like. It’s like he always had s-s-so much to give and it p-p-pissed me off that he c-c-couldn’t find anyone. Probably mmmy fault. I kuh, I kept taking him to sports bars. Not a lot of gay dudes there. Not a lot of straight girls, either. Hey Ron, I thu, I think I… fffigured out my problem.”

Ron smiles, chuckles a little, gives me a thumbs up. I think this is what he was looking for from me. Time to finish before I fuck it up.

“Anyway. Juh, uh, Jake. You’ve made Ron happy. He acts like himself when he’s with you, which is… sssomething he hasn’t always done with boyfriends in the past. You guh. You guys are guh, great together. I’m sssso guh-glad you found each other. Even if you’re an A’s fan.”

A few more laughs. A thumbs up from Jake. Better pass this snake off before it bites me.

“Okay, I nnneed to get rid of this m-m-microphone before I fuck things up worse.”

The DJ takes the microphone from me. I sit back down and breathe for the first time in a half-hour. I stare down at the table, trying to find my composure. According to my Fitbit, my heartrate is only 110, but that can’t be. It must be at least double that.

The table looks very interesting. The table is my one solace as the DJ introduces the Maid of Honor. Not sure how I couldn’t come up with that moniker myself.

After she gives her speech, a much more eloquent recounting of her life with Jake, filled with beautiful anecdotes from grade school through high school placed naturally throughout, I finally look up. Nobody’s looking at me. My flush slowly recedes. After five minutes, my Fitbit finally drops below ninety, and I take that as a sign that I can have another drink.

I slink off to the bar for my deserved free drink. Then another one. I’m perfectly content to stay on this stool the rest of the night. I’ve already signed the marriage certificate, so they don’t need me upright for anything.

“That was a nice speech you gave.”

I’m about to haul off and tell the person where they can shove their sarcasm, when I look up and see the Maid of Honor. She’s smiling. I think she’s serious. Or, at the very least, sincere.

“Th-Thank you.”

“Mind if I sit? I could use a drink, too. These things are daunting.”

“I cuh. I couldn’t have said it b-b-better myself.”

I wave to the barstool next to me.

“I’m Rick,” I say, extending my hand for a shake.

She smiles and takes my hand.

“You can call me Erin.”

Polly Esther and the 54 of Clubs

A.B. Kelly · June 20, 2018 · fiction · #amwriting, children's book, flash fiction, short story · No Comments

This week’s flash fiction asked for a children’s story. Definitely not the forte of a writer who has trouble writing cock-bursting cunt-bubble every other sentence.

So I went tongue-in-cheek. Never expected to win, and sure enough, I didn’t.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not proud of what I wrote. The judges responded that the humor seemed a bit adult. My response: they haven’t read a lot of children’s books. Like when my daughter makes me read a book seventy fucking times in a row to her. The ones that stay in the rotation are the one’s I find enjoyable, the one’s that have something in it for me. The rest are magically transported to the bottom of the pile (or the bottom of the trash can), I don’t give a shit how precious the fucking pictures are.

So, with that as background, I offer my completely off-color Children’s Book:

POLLY ESTHER AND THE 54 OF CLUBS

A very, very long time ago, further back than anybody can remember, there was a time of turmoil. A time of scary sights, of scary sounds, of scary hairstyles.

It was called the seventies. Ask your parents. Or better yet, your grandparents.

During this long-ago time, a mythical city rose up above the land. Towers of steel and glass reached toward the sky in the merry old town of York. Or rather, the very New town of York. Although, from your perspective, the New York of the 1970s would be Middle York, at best.

In this far-off land, in this very olden time, there lived a happy damsel named Polly Esther.

Polly Esther was known for many things. Her clothes was sleek, made of a magical cloth. Cloth of dazzling colors that don’t appear in nature, paired with other colors in stripes and zig-zags and polka dots. Polly Esther’s cloth was amazingly durable and breathable, but didn’t seem to fit to the form of a body, nor lose its own form, no matter how much she twisted or turned.

And Polly Esther twisted and turned a lot! She loved to dance. Every night, if she could, Polly attended galas and balls. She sang and danced to the falsetto grooves of the Brothers Gibb Bards.

The ballroom she really wanted to atten was the 54 of Clubs, a ball that catered to princes and princesses, and other magical beings, as far as the eye could see. This was the Club, it was rumored, where Cinderella ran away from Prince Charming. Or where Rumpelstiltskin spun himself through the floor. Polly Esther had never seen those things happen, but she was pretty sure she had seen Snow White dancing at the other end of the floor one night. Snow White was very easy to spot, for the seven dwarves dancing around her cleared the area around her face.

Now, 54 is a very big number, indeed. It is probably bigger than your parents are old. And that’s a VERY big number. There had been fifty-three Clubs before the 54 of Clubs. There had also been balls of Hearts and Diamonds. But never of spades. A spade is a shovel, and who wants to have a party with shovels? That’s silly!

Polly Esther had not been to all of the fifty-three Clubs before the 54 of Clubs, but she had been to many. And all of the princes and princesses, the earls and bards, even the dragons, used to love Polly Esther and her strangely static clothing of dazzling colors. But all of a sudden, on this, the fifty-fourth Club, they turned up their nose and turned her away.

“I’m sorry, but you cannot come in,” said the grumbly old gatekeeper at the bumbly entryway. It wasn’t a moat or a drawbridge or a thick prison door, but it might as well have been any or all of those things. Because right now, Polly could not pass through the mean old hag of a man.

“But, but why?” Polly Esther asked.

The dragon dragoon looked Polly Esther up and down with a withering eye. Polly felt like he was casting a spell on her. A spell of judgement. He did not approve of something about her, and because of that, he was barring her entry.

“If you don’t know, I shan’t tell you,” the doorman finally decreed, then turned away from Polly Esther as if he had something else, very important, to tend to, some very important person to allow through the magical portal of entry. Even though nobody could be seen for blocks and blocks.

“But I have always been allowed in before.”

“And that,” the not-so-wizened Wizard of No said, barely offering a glance over his shoulder, “is why you shan’t enter under my watch.”

Polly Esther ran away, crying in shame. She thought about leaving behind a shoe, but knew that no prince would come running after her. Besides, elevator platforms are as difficult to remove as a goblin’s tooth!

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” a voice said from beside Polly when she finally slowed down enough to hear.

She took her hands away from her face, where she had been hiding her tears. Tears can be very harmful in a summer wind, so Polly thought you must always shield them from the world.

Sitting in a doorstep, barely even noticeable if he hadn’t just spoken, was a ghastly monster. He might not have been an actual monster, but his pockmarked skin and crooked nose made him very scary, indeed.

“I have been trying to get into the Club since it was in the twenties,” the monster continued. “It can be frustrating, I know.”

The monster was trying to cheer Polly up, or at least to lessen her pain, but it was no good. The monster didn’t look like he belonged in a club. So now Polly had to wonder if she looked just as monstrous. The doorman had looked at her clothes when he dismissed her. Did her clothes make her look like this imp of a person? This person who, smiling to show Polly his support, showed teeth as mangled as his skin.

“I’m so sorry,” Polly Esther said to the monstrous man hiding in the doorway. “But I have only been barred from the Club by mistake.”

“I’m Guido,” said the monster, sticking out his hand.

In order to not seem mean, Polly shook Guido’s hand. He smiled again and Polly Esther did her best to not to cringe. She had only answered him because he made her feel uncomfortable. She was trying to sound empathetic, but Guido might have mistaken it for compassion. Do you know the difference between empathy and compassion? Empathy is when you try to understand somebody, to put yourself in their shoes. Compassion is when you feel sorry for them, but not in a bad way.

“Forget about what happened,” Guido continued. “Beauty is only skin deep. They only look at what’s on the outside.”

“There must be some mistake,” Polly Esther repeated. “They didn’t send me away because of the way I look. He must have had the wrong list.”

Guido merely shrugged. “That’s what I thought at the twenty-fifth Heart Ball.”

“I have a friend, Jim-Bob,” said Polly. “He never goes to Clubs or balls. Maybe he’ll explain it to me.”

“Jim-Bob?” asked Guido. “That sounds like a peasant name.”

“He comes from the countryside. His daddy is a farmer. But that doesn’t mean anything.”

“If you say so,” Guido said. “See if your friend Jim-Bob agrees.”

Polly Esther decided that was exactly what she would do. She prepared to leave Guido by apologizing for being brisk with him earlier. Guido said he was used to it. Polly said goodbye in a much nicer manner than she had said hello. In fact, after she was away from Guido, she wondered if she had ever said hello to him in the first place.

Polly Esther ran home as fast as her legs, swishing back and forth with an unnatural slickness, would carry her. She knocked on the door next door to her flat, on the 53rd floor of the Castle Gardens residential tower.

“Hey Polly Esther, how ya doin’?” Jim-Bob said when he opened the door.

“I’m doing fine, Jim-Bob.” Polly Esther said. “How are you?”

She wanted to delve right into her problems, but thought it might be rude. Jim-Bob, being from outside the city, enjoyed engaging in small talk first. Small talk is always polite.

“I’m right fine, thank you very much,” Jim-Bob answered, nodding his head and tipping its invisible straw hat in Polly’s direction. “I thought you were dancing tonight.”

“They didn’t let me in,” Polly Esther.

“Well, that’s a right-fine how-do-you-do, isn’t it?” Jim-Bob asked.

Polly Esther nodded. She didn’t really know what a right-fine how-do-you-do was, but she was pretty sure being blocked from the 54 of Clubs was definitely one.

“I never understood why you like going into those dungeons of fashion, any ol’ way.”

“You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never been inside. It’s not a dungeon. It’s a magical land of wonder and delight. Everyone that’s anyone is there. No offense.”

“None taken.”

Polly Esther looked in Jim-Bob’s face to see if there was truly no offense taken. He only smiled back at her. Either he really felt no offense, or he was better at hiding his feelings than a crocodile playing Go Fish with a fox.

Polly wished she could be as easy-going as Jim-Bob, but she just couldn’t let it go. Before long, the 54 of Clubs would be the 55 and then the 56 of Clubs. Would they let her in? Probably not. And what about the Heart and Diamond Balls? Polly Esther was still a single woman in the seventies. How would she find love if she couldn’t go to a Heart Ball?

“You should go talk to Bella,” suggested Jim-Bob.

“Bella, with the golden dress?”

Not THAT Bella-with-the-golden-dress. Or maybe it was. It was the seventies in the Village, after all, so who knows?

“Sure. She usually has a good crystal ball into what’s going on.”

Polly and Jim-Bob traveled to visit Bella. Through the tumultuous hallway, down the interminable elevator, out of the foyer of grime, they finally found themselves out on the streets of not-quite-New York. Two blocks later, they rang the doorbell and waited for the familiar brunette hairdo and the familiar yellow gown.

“I can make a phone call,” Bella said, and invited her two visitors inside.

“Who are you calling?” Polly asked Bella.

“Ringo,” Bella answered.

Not THAT Ringo. Or maybe it was. It was the Village in the seventies, after all, so who knows?

Bella picked up her phone and dialed. A telephone was an ancient device that somebody used to speak to someone far away. Like a teleportation spell for your voice. There were no text messages or Angry Birds or even Google. And it was tied to the wall by a cord. Can you imagine such a horrible device?

“He always knows what’s going on at the Clubs and the Diamonds and the Hearts,” Bella continued, then turned her attention to the phone receiver.

Polly tried to listen in on the phone call, tried to glean what was being said on the other side, based on how Bella was reacting. She couldn’t, and it probably served her right. You should not try to listen in on private conversations. And even worse, you should never base your judgement on only hearing one side of the story.

“I’m sorry,” Bella finally said when she put the phone down on its base (which is how phone calls ended before there was a big red “END” button). “It was no mistake. They meant for you to be left out.”

“But why?” Polly asked.

“It’s your appearance,” Bella confirmed.

Polly looked down at her clothes. She grabbed her long, straight hair. It felt horrible to be judged for her appearance, and even worse, to be judged poorly. They were calling her a pock-marked monster, like Guido, or an outsider, like Jim-Bob. Or a… actually, Polly realized she didn’t know why Bella-with-the-golden-dress didn’t go to 54. She hadn’t gone to 53 either. Polly wasn’t sure if she had ever seen Bella at any of the Clubs. Or the Diamonds. Had Polly even seen her at a Hearts?

“But I’ve always gone to the clubs before,” Polly tried.

“Ringo says the age of Polly Esther is over. It’s time to move on to something else.”

“Well, how do you like that?”

“Maybe you can change your clothes,” Jim-Bob suggested.

It was very nice of Jim-Bob to offer his advice. He had never been to any of the Clubs. He never seemed interested in the Clubs, and he always told Polly Esther that she shouldn’t be concerned with them. But he was a friend, and a friend supports a friend, even when they have different interests. Polly had gone to baseball games with Jim-Bob, and if the Yankees hadn’t let him into their stadium, she assumed she would help him go to a Mets game.

But the Yankees would never bar Jim-Bob. Only Clubs like 54 barred people like Polly. And Guido and Jim-Bob and…

“Bella, why don’t you go to any of the Clubs?”

“I’m more of a Broadway girl.”

“But you’re such a good dancer.”

“The Clubs don’t have my kind of dancing. Not my kind of music.”

“Would you go to a ball if it had music you liked?”

“Maybe. It depends. I don’t like places that shut my friends out.”

That’s when it hit Polly. She shouldn’t be changing her appearance, or changing the way she acted, just to be allowed into a place that didn’t want her. She had friends here. And music. And even more.

“What if I put on my own ball? We will play whatever music people want to listen to. We will put the Yankees game up on the TV. And best of all, anyone who wants to dance can come and dance.”

“That sounds like fun,” Bella said. “How will we get the word out?”

“I know a guy named Guido,” Polly said. “He’s the first person I’ll invite, and I bet he knows a lot of people who want to attend a ball.”

The following night, Polly Esther made a comeback. She had the biggest party in the entire city. Everyone who was anyone wanted to attend. And everyone, whether they were anyone or not, was allowed to attend. The music varied from the Brothers Gibb to Ringo’s old band (not THAT band) to some of Bella’s theater hits. Some of the older patrons, who hadn’t been allowed into a ball for decades, requested some old song by the King about his Hound Dog. After that, a young pup requested a new sound from the Prince of Minnesota, a purple sound ahead of its time, that the Clubs would not catch onto for another five years.

Some patrons danced the cha-cha. Some danced the polka. Bella twirled a pirouette that was elegant to behold.

Jim-Bob watched the Yankees game on the TV. He REALLY didn’t like dancing.

The called the ball “The First of Spades.” After all, a spade is a shovel. And what better name for a ball that digs up and buries all the outdated and exclusive ideals of all of the other three suits?

Not Quite Gilligan

A.B. Kelly · June 8, 2018 · fiction · fiction, flash fiction, short story, writing · No Comments

Time for another one of my not-winner flash fiction entries. For this one, the prompt gave us the first line (“They leap from branch to branch, soaring with grace and poise”) and the last line (“They command attention, leaving their spectators breathless.”). We had to fill the part in the middle. I immediately thought of a zoo-type setting, but wanted to twist it around so that the “breathless” part was literal. Blood and mayhem, baby. I didn’t care for it at first, but by the end I was okay with what I had written. Definitely not my strongest, but I’ve usually struggled getting to the action part, so it was nice for that part to come out okay.

Of course, I was really annoyed when I was 2/3 of the way through and all of a sudden realized that the first and last line were in present tense…

NOT QUITE GILLIGAN

They leap from branch to branch, soaring with grace and poise. At least that’s how it appears to their spectators.

“Oooooo.”

The zoo’s visitors gasp as one through the plexiglass that is not quite plexiglass. One of the graceful specimens comes up a little short on this particular soar, and begins a plummet toward the soft grass canopy that doubles as their bedding. The anti-gravitational boosters kick in. The spectators learned the hard way that these specimens do not recover from a fall as easily as the research indicates.

“Why the hell did they give us branches to jump around on?” Chuck asks, sitting up and wiping grass off his tunic.

“We’re primates,” Arthur says, still sitting in the branch above. “They didn’t bother to classify us beyond monkeys.”

“I thought they were supposed to be super smart. They can’t even tell the difference between humans and goddamn monkeys?”

“Would you know the difference between a greyhound and a bulldog?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t feed Meow Mix to a friggin’ lion.”

Chuck stands back up. Experience tells him that the mild electric tingling he is currently feeling will grow to a legitimate shock and beyond unless he leaves = the grassy canopy. The zoo is open, and during opening hours, they can’t be allowed to rest out of sight. The show happens up on the branches.

He walks over to the nearest tree that is not quite a tree. It looks like wood and acts like wood, but it doesn’t feel like wood. The best route up is a ladder embedded into its back. The spectators don’t seem to notice, or don’t seem to care, how their specimens climb up to the observational branches.

“At least that bought me another ten minutes before I have to make another leap.”

“And what are you going to do with it?” Arthur asks, standing up on his own branch and preparing to make a leap of his own. He flips his foot backward and grasps his ankle, stretching his hamstring. “Flip them the bird again?”

“I just might,” Chuck says, cracking his knuckles and wiggling his fingers toward the customers as if he is a wizard preparing to cast a spell on them instead of throwing up a universal signal that is not quite universal.

“You might as well fling your poo at them.”

Arthur leaps from one branch to the next, soaring with a bit more poise and grace than usual. Seeing a fellow captive stumble often has that effect on the next few leaps. It’s nature to relax a bit on a mundane task, until you are reminded how easily it can be made un-mundane.

“If I thought my poo would get through to those a-holes, I would,” Chuck says. “But it would just splatter on the plexiglass, and I don’t need a reminder that I’m in a cage.”

No one responds, so Chuck feels an impulse to continue.

“Besides, it would probably disintegrate in their poisonous atmosphere. No effect whatsoever except for me with a bunch of dingleberries left in my hand.”

Chuck laughs. He knows he’s made a good one, and screw the rest of the humans if they don’t like it. Besides, they’re all minding their own business. The zookeepers don’t like much fraternizing between the specimens. But Chuck’s already been buzzed once this hour, what’s the harm in getting another tingle?

“Their atmosphere isn’t poisonous,” Arthur responds. “We could breathe it.”

“How the hell do you know that? You been holding out some laptop or something?”

“Not at all. They come in to feed us, clean out our cages.”

Chuck says nothing. No one says anything.

“And what do they have with them when they do?” Arthur probes, enjoying the upper hand.

“Cattle prods and shit.”

“And what don’t they have?”

“Qgrxry.” A disembodied, synthetic voice garbles from the air above, a sound all of the humans have become well aware of. They learned quickly to understand the subtle nuance of an alien language.

James, the third male prisoner, shakes out of his forlorn spot near the front of the cage, and turns to leap away from the spectators.

“Hey numbnuts, qgrxry doesn’t mean jump. It means-,”

“QGRXRY!” The voice booms everywhere, a god that is not quite a god.

“Silence,” Chuck mutters under his breath, refusing to let E.T. get the last word, but not wanting another shock. His internal bravado meets external reality.

James leaps. Layla leaps. Before too long, it’s Chucks turn to once again leap from branch to branch, soaring with grace and poise. This time, he even manages to stick the landing, one branch away from Arthur.

“I’ll bite.” Chuck tries to look like he is only absorbed in his own thoughts, muttering under his breath. “What don’t they have?”

Chuck picks his nose for effect. He saw a real chimpanzee do it at a real zoo once. He twirls it in between his fingers, acts like he’s talking to the booger.

“They don’t have any environmental protection. The zookeepers look the same as the spectators. If they can breathe the air in here, we can breathe the air out there.”

Chuck pops the booger in his mouth. For effect, of course.

“Not bad, professor. Now can you turn a coconut into a radio and fix the fucking boat?”

Arthur just shakes his head at the amazingly failed allusion. It’s his turn to leap away, and he is all too happy to do it.

Chuck steps up to stretch, and leaps in the opposite direction long before any sort of warning can come from above. A couple times a day, he varies his schedule. Got to keep them on their toes, he thinks. He imagines some bureaucrat alien staring at a spreadsheet, trying to make rhyme or reason of the exercise habits of humans.

Plus this time, he has an idea brewing. The first person he encounters is Layla.

“So if he’s the professor, I guess that makes you Mary Ann. I mean, not that I’d like to see you in a halter top or anything, no offense.”

“None taken,” Layla responds. “I wouldn’t show you my halter top if you were the last… Come to think of it, you are one of the last three, and I still won’t show you.”

“Not the last three on Earth, toots. Earth’s still out there, with plenty of humans on it, and I’m starting to concoct a plan.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus. Try not to get us all killed in the-,”

“GRZYXR,” the disembodied voice calls. Chuck clenches, but then relaxes. It isn’t the silence command, and he was planning on leaping away, anyway. He lands near James.

“Hey Gilligan, I got a plan. Sorry, Jimbo, but I figure, if we’ve got the professor and Mary Ann, and clearly I’m the Skipper, that leaves you as Gilligan. You don’t strike me as much of a Thurston Howell type. Do you mind if I call you Gilligan, Jimbo?”

James looks up, then immediately looks away. He likes neither Gilligan nor Jimbo, so he plots his next two leaps, hoping to get far away, fast. Of the four prisoners, he interacts the least, choosing to perfect his leaping and posing ability in hopes of being promoted.

“So I figure if they can breathe, then we can take their breath away, right? And I don’t mean in some cheesy eighties pop-rock sorta way. I mean kill ’em. Dead. Breathless. Although that sounds like eighties cheese, too. Tin roof rusted, and all that.”

James is astonished, and more than a little ashamed, that not only does he understand all of Chuck’s pop culture references, but the idea behind his misguided drivel, too. Chuck thinks he has a plan. It is not quite a plan, but it is, at least, an idea.

“Okay, so at the next feeding time, and man I hope we’re getting mac and cheese tonight.” Chuck pauses for a moment, thinking of the blue box of Kraft goodness that they’ve somehow perfected on this far away planet. “But at the next feeding time, we-“

“Qgrxry.”

James leaps from branch to branch, soaring with grace and poise. Chuck has to admit that, of all of them, Jimbo has the most grace and poise. Even if he seems to jump away at the wrong commands. Doesn’t seem to know his Qgrxry from his Grzyxr, if Chuck is honest about faults. But he’s a damned fine physical specimen, and he should do well as front-line cannon fodder like the Gilligan he is.

“They brought an egghead and a stud,” Chuck mutters under his breath, a compulsion he often feels after the Qgrxry command. “Then there’s me, the streetwise guy. And the girl rounds it out as a foil, like any good story. Stand by Me, right? No wait, there was no chick in Stand by Me. What’s the other one? Oh yeah, It.”

The four specimens continue to leap in silence. If the bureaucrat with the spreadsheet is paying close attention, he might see a spike in their leaps from branch to branch, although the bureaucrat, not actually in the vicinity of the four humans, would fail to note their additional grace and poise. They leap with a vigor, with a purpose, that they have not had in ages.

While they command the attention of their spectators, their own attention is in a different direction. They leap for different vantage points, always mindful of the entrance. From each direction, the entrance looks the same. No hidden trick, a simple portal that leads to a hallway beyond. An airlock, the chance of breathing true air laying beyond. Although each human, apart from Chuck, rues the man who brought the idea to their attention, they cannot deny the merits of the idea. James and Layla and Arthur share glances with each other as they pass each other in silence. Eventually, they must even share their upraised eyebrows in with the malcontent. Everybody needs to be on the same page.

Not that it matters. The box is open, Pandora is free. Chuck is going to bum-rush the first alien motherfucker that walks through that portal, come hell or high water. The other humans were either going to let him fail, and be guilty by association, or help him succeed. It is no choice at all. No more soaring. It’s time for breathless.

“Chgrchx.”

Feeding time always comes with anticipation, a moment to be human instead of spectacle. The anticipation of this particular Chgrchx, however, rivals all since their first one, when they weren’t yet sure if their captors could even produce human food. For the first time since that feeding, their survival is again in the balance when the zookeepers walk through the door.

Chuck knows the timing. He arcs through the grass, seemingly random but always with a direct line toward the door. If he is correct, he will be directly in front when they appear. Of course, he is correct. There is nothing to learn in this cell except for the timing between a Qgrxry or a Grzyxr or a Chgrchx and its insequential action, like a primitive culture knowing that the Winter Solstice sunrise will shine through a pillar. And when this Winter Solstice of a feeding comes shining through this particular Stonehenge, Chuck is ready to pounce.

He runs right at the alien, shoulder lowered. The alien is unarmed, holding only a tray with four plates of macaroni and cheese. Chuck’s shoulder makes contact with the tray, slamming it up into the chest that is not quite a chest. The alien stumbles backward, one step, then two, and is about to regain its footing when the second wave hits.

Chuck is vaguely surprised that it is Layla, not James or Arthur, that steps in from the alien’s left. Not a full step, only a half step. Only enough to prevent the alien’s third step, the one that would plant and pivot its gravity back forward, from landing on the grass. The alien’s tottering becomes a sprawl, and the alien sprawls backward through the portal, a spray of neon-orange pasta somersaulting through the air the only proof it had been in this location at all.

“Could’ve waited till the armed guards were in first,” says James, still poised on the branch closest to the door.

“Now what the hell do we do?” Arthur asks, already winded from running in on a diagonal course.

“The portal’s still open,” Layla says, returning upright and attempting to avoid being covered in macaroni. “Do we just run through it?”

“But we know there will be armed guards right behind the-,” Arthur starts.

“We keep the element of surprise,” Chuck says, and barrels into the around the corner into the hallway beyond.

Chuck doesn’t have the element of surprise anymore. Two shock sticks ignite simultaneously, one on each side. Thousands of volts course through his body. Chuck drops to his knee.

Layla kicks out again, this time higher up, knocking one shock stick away. Chuck can at least breathe, but even one shock stick is enough to immobilize him.

James aims his leap at the other weapon, but instead of kicking out at it, he grapples for it. The force of gravity, combined with the element of surprise, gives him enough leverage to seize the stick from the alien body he is tangled with. He rolls onto the ground, a move he was not capable of before his years of forced gymnastics, and comes set as the other two humans follow into the hallway.

Layla kicks again, this time in the direction of a groin that is not quite a groin, incapacitating the alien she had just disarmed. Arthur, in typical Arthur fashion, does not break a sweat as he walks through the portal. He picks up the shock stick the picks up the shock stick Layla kicked out of the first alien’s grasp. He thinks about brandishing it himself, but realizes that would make him a target. Instead, he hands the weapon to Chuck.

Chuck tries to stand, but can only get to his knees. He grabs the weapon and nods his thanks to the nerd. He wheezes and coughs, and pretends the air smells so different now, even if it is stuffier in the hallway than in their cage. He is trying, once again, to find his footing when a new sound comes from the next room.

It is not a new sound, entirely. It is a sound the humans are all too familiar with, but have not heard for years. The click, chink, chunk, of a gun being loaded. And not a gun-that-is-not-quite-a-gun, but an honest-to-goodness, steel assault rifle.

Chuck tries to stand once again. He wants to press the advantage. He knows the cause is lost if they wait until the machine gun makes its way into view. One foot up, dragging his knee behind, he takes one step, that is not quite a step, forward. He uses the shock stick not as a weapon, but as a crutch, dragging himself toward his adversary and his freedom.

Chuck never hears the bracka-bracka-bracka that slices through his body. He is breathless before he even sees the lone gunman, a cowering, diminutive zookeeper that had probably been staring at spreadsheets two moments before.

Chuck doesn’t know that James had already gotten into a defensive position next to the doorway, much as the two aliens guards had lain in wait for him, moments ago. He is long gone before James uses that shock stick to fell the alien and upgrade to an assault rifle. Not that it would have done Chuck any good to be in on the plan. One human was going to be the cannon fodder.

“He never knew he was Gilligan,” says Layla, grabbing a gun of her own from the second room. “Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho.”

Arthur smiles at the reference. “Old Charles would be so sad to know you waited until he was gone before making a Die Hard reference.”

“That’s why I waited.”

There are only two guns, just as there are only two shock sticks. For emergency purposes only. This is a zoo, after all. The zookeepers, the spectators, even the guards, scarcely need a gun.

“So what do we do now?” James asks.

Arthur ponders for a moment.

“We fight for as long as we can. If we can make it to a spaceport, so much the better. But failing that, we take as many of those spectators with us as possible. They are just as guilty as the one who captured us. Agreed?”

Layla cocks her gun. James cocks his gun. Both nod.

The three humans break out of their confinement. They emerge, guns blazing, into the crowd of zoo-goers.

They command attention, leaving spectators breathless in their presence.