flash fiction

Precious Little Treasure

· May 30, 2018 · fiction · , , · No Comments

Time for another flash fiction. The prompt for this was to describe how a treasure map was made. A prequel to an Indiana Jones. A Spot Marks the X type of thing. I decided to make it a child’s treasure map because, I don’t know, I thought it would be a fun diversion from the typical “pirate buries treasure.” And I have a three-year old…

PRECIOUS LITTLE TREASURE

“Cooooooool. That’s gonna be so, what was that word? Brawsome?”

“Awesome, Frankie.”

“Yeah, brawsome. It’s gonna be brawsome when I undig that tweasure.”

“When are you planning on digging up your treasure?”

“When I’m all growed up. Like four. Or maybe five.”

“Wow. That’s a long time. Are you going to remember where you buried it?”

“I’ll remember. It’s right by the cat.”

“The cat might not be there when you dig it up.”

“Yes he will. Kitty’s always there.”

“Maybe we should write it down, anyway.”

“Ooooo, a tweasure map! That sounds brawsome!”

Frankie ran inside to his thick-plastic Crayola writing desk. The desk also doubled as an easel, but there was no time for easels now. The memory of his super-secret treasure location was flimsy and fleeting, as was the reason he now stood in front of his thick-plastic Crayola writing desk. The flat portion, a red found nowhere in nature aside from children’s toys, called out to him. He swiveled it up and stared at the slick black chalkboard underneath. Two sheets of paper slid off the suddenly vertical table.

“Paper!”

Frankie remembered. He needed to make a map to the various treasures he had buried in his backyard. A time cat-sule, Daddy had called it.

“What did you put in your capsule, Frankie?” Daddy asked when the toddler returned outside, paper and red crayon in hand.

“Hatchimals. Lotsa Hatchimals. And some fruit snacks.”

“I wonder which will last longer underground,” Daddy mused, “the plastic tchotchkes or the preservative-packed food?”

“Okay, Daddy, how did I made my map?”

“You are going to make your map, little dude,” Daddy corrected.

“Uh huh. I said that, Daddy.”

Frankie placed his blank off-white sheet of paper, made from ninety percent recycled product, on the table outside. He looked up expectantly at his father for instructions, red crayon poised precipitously above the wide-open expanse of beige papyrus.

“Well, since you buried your Hatchimals, maybe you should put the letter H in the middle.”

“I can’t make an H.”

“F for fruit snack?”

The child shook his head.

“I’ve seen you draw an F before. F for Frankie.”

The child shook his head.

“Okay, what letters can you draw?”

“Um… X?”

“That’ll work. X marks the spot. Put an X right there.”

Daddy pointed to the center of the paper. Frankie put the crayon down and moved it in a diagonal motion, approximating a line. He then repeated the motion in the opposite direction, albeit nowhere near the same length or angle-of-ascent as the previous.

“I’ve seen a drunk sailor draw a better X,” Daddy opined.

Frankie didn’t respond, lost in concentration. Finished with the only letter he knew, he moved on to the other locations on the map showing the location of his buried trinkets. The only crayon in his possession, and as far as Frankie was concerned, the only crayon in all of existence at this precise moment, being red, he proceeded to draw the environmental factors in red.

“What are those?” Daddy asked.

“I drawed some trees.”

“In red?”

“Oh yeah. Silly me. Trees are brown.”

Frankie went inside to switch out the colors. He made it all the way to his Crayola table, currently transformed like his Optimus Prime into an easel, without so much as a glance at the various pitfalls awaiting him. He was focused. The prize was in his grasp, he could not take his eyes off it now. Frankie put the red crayon down, picked up the brown.

He looked down at his box, the rainbow of sixty-four distractions sparkling in the halogen glow of the shaded living room, and decided he might need others. Definitely a green, because he was pretty sure that trees have green. And black. Black always comes into play.

And what about those others? Orange? The sun is orange. Purple? I really like purple, there almost has to be some use for purple. The cat is grey, that might as well be purple. Oh wait, where is grey? It’s so hard to find grey amongst all the daffodils and mauves and fuchsias…

Frankie looked up from the shimmering pool of color and saw the door. It was tough to tear himself away, Narcissus looking at his own artistic brilliance instead of his reflection, but he found his focus. The door to the outside shone, a portal to a land of magical trasure, and Frankie would not be deterred. He walked forward, crayons held in a vice-grip. He would not be distracted, would not stray from the clear path to adventure.

Except for the refrigerator, off to his left.

“Daddy? Can I have some milk, please?”

“Sure thing, buddy. Hold on a sec.”

Daddy came in from the outside.

“Can I have some choc-ee milk?”

“Are you sure? Chocolate milk will take some time. Didn’t you want to finish your map?”

“Oh yeah, yeah. I need to finish my map. Choc-ee milk later?”

“Sure, Frankie. Chocolate milk later. You ready to come out?”

Frankie followed Daddy outside and resumed his artistic masterpiece. He looked once again at the straight red lines that he had been drawing, fanning upward in a spread pattern from a common point, and tried to determine how to fix them into the brown tree trunks littering his back yard. Unable to concoct any way to turn the red into brown, he drew new tree trunks, brown this time, stretching in the opposite direction from the same common point.

He lifted the crayon up, and was pleased with the four lines he had drawn, nearly perfect mirror images of the straight red lines above. Excited, he added more brown lines, then more lines and more. Before long, the brown portion looked less like distinct lines, and more like a solid brown triangle beneath a spray of red.

“That’s a pretty cool volcano,” Daddy said.

“No, Daddy. It’s a tree. It’s those trees.” Frankie pointed around his yard.

“Oh, my mistake. Those are great trees. What’s next?”

“I need to draw the kitty cat. He’s sitting right there.”

Although the cat had moved to a different spot, Daddy acquiesced, having already lost this argument once.

“Where are you going to draw the kitty?”

“Right here. Next to the H.”

“The X?”

“Yeah, the X.”

Frankie pulled out his blue crayon. Not that the cat was blue, but he hadn’t been able to find the grey and had already forgotten the previous false-equivalency of purple. He drew a full circle that he hoped would form into Kitty’s face. But it didn’t look right. It wasn’t the right shape. Frankie looked up at the cat and made another solid blue circle, then a third, in the vicinity of the red X.

“Maybe I can put a kitty sticker on it.”

“Good idea. Where are you going to put the sticker?”

Frankie looked at the piece of paper, furrowing his brow to a degree unimaginable in an adult face. He pursued his imagination like his kitty would pursue a prey. Focused, inching along until the moment of action, just as likely to flop over in exhaustion should the prey prove too elusive.

“I’m gonna draw in where the kitty sticker will go.”

Frankie picked his black crayon. His instinct had been correct. Black crayon was always useful. Always bet on black.

He drew one black dash, maybe a quarter-inch long, then lifted the crayon and made another black dash just north of the first. He moved the crayon again, creating a third dash.

“What are you doing, Buddy?”

“I’m making an outline. Then the kitty sticker will go here.”

“That looks more like a path.”

Frankie looked up at his father, a withering reproach in his blue eyes, which then rolled in their sockets, the three-nager in full effect.

“It’s an outline, Daddy. Duh.”

“Okay, it’s an outline,” Daddy responded, sufficiently cowed.

Frankie continued his outline, a staggering and meandering black-dash line that wove through his map. It came around the bottom of the brown, upside-down triangle topped by a spew of red. He wove the black line in between the three solid-blue circles, since that was where the kitty was truly sitting. Continuing through the circles, the outline finished at the spot of the X, because kitty would definitely want to look at Frankie’s Hatchimals.

Pleased with himself, Frankie surveyed his drawing and drew a circle around the entirety of his map.

“Can I go get my sticker now, Daddy?”

“Sure thing, Frank.”

Frankie went inside and moved toward the staircase up to his room. There might be some stickers in with his art supplies, but the vast majority, the mother lode as it were, would be found in a bin in his bedroom, where Mommy had put them all for what she called safekeeping. Frankie was pretty sure the containment of items designed to be flung free served some other purpose, but he (sometimes) kept that idea to himself.

A sharp pierce of pain shot up through Frankie’s foot as he placed it down on the first carpeted stair. Frankie whelped. His knees buckled, dropping him to his knee, tears welling up in his eye. Barely able to move, he still managed to find some inner well of strength and lifted his leg from the trap that had lain in wait. Shining in bright orange lay a Lego construction man. The Lego construction man, in fact. Emmett, the one from the movie.

Everything is awesome, Emmett. Everything is awesome, indeed.

Frankie looked at the underside of his foot and was surprised it was not a bloody mess. A small puncture was the only indication of his mortal wound. Regardless, he would definitely need a Band-Aid. Maybe Paw Patrol, maybe Star Wars. Or maybe, as a fitting bit of irony, he could ask Mommy or Daddy if he had any Lego Band-Aids. There should definitely be Lego Band-Aids. Lego should own stock in the Band-Aid company. And vice versa.

Frankie felt he should definitely go look for a Lego Band-Aid right now.

“No,” Frankie resolved.

The Lego man was a trap, a stone golem, a sentry set guard to stop him his desired goal. He could not be dissuaded, not now. If he could not get that kitty sticker, his entire afternoon was a sham. This minor flesh wound could not dissuade a valiant knight.The goal was in sight. Band-Aids were for losers or finishers. Which one would he be?

Resolved, he planted his good foot past Emmett, then pulled his crippled foot alongside. With a plant-hobble-plant motion, he dragged his way up the stairs, a desperate man struggling toward a desert oasis.

By the time he made it to the top, Frankie had already forgotten the pain, lost to Toddler Attention Span Land. He walked into his room, eternally focused on finding the-

Stuffies! All of Frankie’s stuffies were waiting for him on his bed. There was Kangaroo and Pineapple the Horse and the blue octopus he had named Greenie. Mickey Mouse was lying next to Minnie Mouse, which must mean that Donald and Daisy were buried in the pile. And Snuggle Pumpkin! Frankie swore he had not seen Snuggle Pumpkin in… how long had it been since Halloween? A day or a week, or maybe a lifetime. He couldn’t remember. He only knew that once, Snuggle Pumpkin had been his special favorite, and now Snuggle Pumpkin was lying there, calling to him.

They were all calling to him. Bears and mouses and ducks and kangaroos, all screaming out Frankie’s name. Pleading with him to please forget his current task, to come cuddle with them instead. That task, the task that couldn’t be named, didn’t matter. One thing mattered, and that was cuddling. A wonderful, ginormous pile of cuddling!

“I’m coming,” Frankie shouted and, giggling up a storm that dwarfed the earlier cry of pain, leapt onto the pile of animals on his bed.

He dove deep, letting all form of animal and character swallow him up like quicksand. His giggling mouth filled with cloth and stitching and plush fur. The animals coalesced around their loving owner, sucking his body down into hugs and snuggles and cuddles. Once lying underneath, Frankie reached a dramatic hand up through the pile and screamed out.

“Stuffies!”

All thought of stickers disappeared, as did memory of crayons or papers or buried Hatchimals or a patient father waiting outside for a toddler that would not return.

Daddy left his standpost to follow his child’s route up the perilous stairs, leaving behind a piece of paper.

A sudden gust of wind grasped the paper and blew it out into the world.

Glutton Games

· May 5, 2018 · fiction · , , · No Comments

I seem to remember, in a distant, far-off land and time, that I started a blog page intending to write some fiction.

And then it turned into a sometimes-weekly, usually longer, drivel about my real-life life.

I blame Chuck Wendig. He used to have flash fiction prompts every Friday. Now he doesn’t. So it’s all his fault. It can’t possibly be me who is responsible for my own lack of writing, or the fact that, when I do finally sit my ass down in front of the computer, it’s much easier to unload whatever happened to me that day than to create a work of fiction from my own brainy parts.

Well, I found another website with flash fiction contests, so there goes one of my excuses. Might as well try this, and then I can post it on that fiction blog I started all those years ago.

This month’s prompt was a bit awkward. They gave us five things that we had to incorporate into our story. They were: 1. the main character’s flaw must be one of the seven deadly sins, 2. a dream vacation goes awry, 3. MC’s strength is the same as mine (I went with organizational/analytical, since I had just finished creating the teams and schedule for a curling league), 4. The MC has a rival, and 5. The MC needs to break the rules to win.

Et, voila:

The Glutton Games

“This is no good.”

Robert lowered the chicken wing from the front of his mouth. Every ounce of meat had been removed, the sinews and crusted nub gnawed clean enough to pass inspection. He licked residual gristle and sauce off of his bottom lip, looked at his fingers, glistening with a pale orangish-red residue, then proceeded to place them in his mouth.

Beyond his hand, he saw the beginnings of a scowl in the bartender’s . Rob thought back to his last comment.

“Oh, not the wings. The wings were excellent. Savory and filling. Just enough chutzpah to make the wings worthwhile, but not those hulking monstrosities that look like bona fide drumsticks. The sauce never protrudes the meat enough on those, and what you’re stuck with on bites two and three is just a flavorless piece of dark.”

The bartender’s brow went from shrewd to confused. He shrugged and was in the midst of turning away when Rob continued his critique.

“The sauce was poignant. Not too much vinegar, a bountiful combination of flavor and heat. I can’t stand wings that are afraid of heat, but those who feel that simply adding heat is a way to avoid needing flavor are equally as problematic. My compliments to your chef.”

“Our chef?” The bartender responded. “Sure. Our chef. I’ll pass those compliments along.”

I’m sure the guy sitting on his ass and dropping pre-packaged shit in the deep fryer will love the compliments, he thought.

“No, waht I was referring to as not optimal is this,” Rob continued, waving his arms at the plate-glass windows opened up to sheets of drenching rain dumping on the tarmac outside.

The bartender shrugged. “Hurricane season.”

“In December?”

“Haven’t you heard? It’s always hurricane season in Miami.”

“So you’re stuck in Miami for an extra day. Could be worse. If your flight gets grounded an extra day, you’ll get a tropical New Year’s.”

“If I’m stuck here, then the crown is as good as gone.”

The bartender knew a baited  statement as well as anyone. Airport bartenders might run into a different sort of customer than a divebar,  a lot less “drinking myself to death,” and a lot more “I’m working through my mid-life crisis.” Especially in Miami. But bar customers are bar customers, and they’re all searching for an audience. Or else they’d be drinking at home where it’s cheaper.

“Can I get you a drink?”

“I don’t know about a drink, but maybe a bit of dinner to drown my sorrows.”

Rob made a show of picking up the menu, even though he had already looked at everything on the menu multiple times and knew exactly what he was going to order.

“Not much of a drinker?”

“Gave it up when I was in my early twenties. I think it was bad for me.”

“But you sit at the bar?”

“It’s more comfortable.”

Robert shifted his weight, causing the cushioned stool to squeak. Frankie wondered if comfort was just a euphemism for not being able to jam his fat ass into a regular sized chair. Or under a regular sized table.

“How’s the Monte Cristo?”

Once it’s out of the plastic? 

Frankie shrugged. “Good.”

“Then I will take one of those.”

The barstool creaked under Robert’s weight.

“Fries?” Of course.

“Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. But sure.”

Frankie turned to punch the order into his computer screen, then turned to do his bartenderly duty, like the husband or wife of most of the mid-life crisis Miami patrons.”So what’re you in Miami for?”

Robert harrumphed enough to shake his jowls.

“Evidently what I’m here for is to watch wind and rain. What I was supposed to be here for was a shrimp eating competition.”

“Oh yeah? I didn’t know there was a competition for that.”

“Well, as it turns out, there wasn’t. The hurricane canceled the event.”

“Topical storm.”

“Whatever. My chance at the belt is gone.”

Frankie looked at his customer again. There were so many responses that his job had indoctrinated out of his vocabulary. The fact that this rotund man, who probably had not been able to fit a belt around his girth for the last two hundred pounds, was whining about a belt was comical. But Frankie’s job required tips, and tips required discretion.

“Are you a competitive eater?”

Robert’s gut heaved up to his chest.

“I am. Perhaps you recognize me from Nathan’s Hot Dogs on the Fourth of July?”

“I don’t really-,” Frankie responded, and was pleased to hear the ding from the back room signifying his customer’s sandwich was ready. His tip might have been teetering if the conversation progressed enough for Robert to hear his lack of interest, bordering on disdain, for what was clearly the man’s sole purpose for being. The Monte Cristo would go a long way in earning the tip back.

Robert bit into the crusty sandwich, choked out of his full mouth, spraying some of the powdered sugar forward in a fine cloud. He made a small moaning sound as he chewed through the ham, cheese, and greasy dough in his hand. He breathed heavily, causing another spray of powdered sugar into the air between he and his server.

“I came in,” Robert started, then swallowed the chunks still in his mouth, “-sixth at Nathan’s. Nathan’s isn’t a real-,” chew, chew, “-competition. Too many amateurs that saw it on TV. Too many specialists that have figured out how to eat hot dogs without really embracing the spirit of the-,” two more chews and a large swallow. “Again, my compliments to the chef.”

Robert put the remains of this half of the sandwich down on his plate, looked at his greasy hands, shrugged in a futile attempt at mirroring the bartender’s smoothness, then picked up a french fry.

“Do you have any ketchup and ranch, maybe some barbecue sauce, to dip these in?”

The bartender nodded and produced a small plastic cube of ranch and two small plastic pouches of ketchup. He had no barbecue sauce but didn’t feel the need to announce that fact.

Robert’s cell phone buzzed. He finished the three french fries in his hand, wiped his hand on the navy blue polo shirt, and reached around to his back pocket for the phone. As he pushed his thumbprint on the bottom circle, Frankie found himself wondering if Robert needed to have grease on his finger for the phone to register its owner.

“Oh, this is no good.”

He turned his phone toward Frankie despite the bartender never asking for that courtesy. With no other customers, Frankie leaned in to see a selfie of a wiry man, smiling a grin with enough gaps and crooked teeth to make a British dentist shudder, wearing John Lennon-style sunglasses inside a casino. The text underneath the photo read, “Tasting the victory, Bobbie!”

“Who is that?”

“My rival. Cameron. He made it to Vegas.”

“I take it that’s a bad thing?”

“Doubly so. That’s where my flight is indefinitely delayed to. The ice cream contest that Wynn’s is running tomorrow will finish out the yearly competition.”

“What happens if you don’t make it?”

Robert breathed out, deflating his shoulders in defeat.

“The belt was mine. I already had a lead on Cameron. I gambled on the weather to attempt the Miami Shrimp Fest contest to pad my lead. But if I can’t make either of the last two contests, all Cameron needs to do is finish in fifth place to win the year.”

“So the non-gambler is winning because he went straight to Vegas?” Frankie chuckled.

Robert was not moved by the frivolity. He buried his head under his hands, in an action that Frankie assumed was for emphasis, although he wondered if Robert did in fact believe in his own histrionics.

“So what are you going to do about it, Bobbie?”

“Robert, please. I hat Bob. Or any derivation thereof. It’s cheating. A shortcut that destroys the essence of a being. It’s like dipping a hot dog bun in water to consume it faster. You’re not really eating a hot dog bun.”

“Sorry, I assumed your friend was calling you by your-,”

“Not a friend. Cameron is a rival. And he calls me that to chide me.”

Clearly it works, Frankie thought, but instead repeated, “So what are you going to do about it, Robert?”

“What can I do? He was only fifteen points behind me. I got no more points in Miami, and I shan’t be in Vegas.”

Robert alternated dips with each french fry. With one, he would dip it in ranch first, then in ketchup. On the next he would reverse the order, carrying the runny red liquid into the thick white one. Frankie started wiping the counter in order to break the hypnotizing pattern after the fourth such routine.

“Are there any other eating contests you can hit?”

“Without access to an airplane? Doubtful.”

“Well, what are the rules? Is there some over, um, overarching board you can appeal to?”

Frankie congratulated himself for replacing “overeating” in his mind with “overarching” out of his mouth.

“There’s nothing official. It’s just a yearly rivalry. We’ve established the ground rules ourselves.”

“If it’s just the two of you, tell him to go pound sand.”

“There are six of us. But Cameron’s the only one who can give me a run. In fact, he’s won it two years in a row. And I guess this make it three.”

The fat man lowered his head and put his greasy fingers through his rolly neck one more time.

“What do the rules specify? What counts as an eating contest? Can I just say you have the best ketchup-and-ranch dipping skills and give you a french fry award?”

“It doesn’t work like that. Nothing arbitrary. You just get twenty points for first place, nineteen points for second place, and so on.”

Frankie shrugged and turned to look at his wonderfully-stocked bar, glass bottles glistening in the incandescent halogen that would get little use today if the only customer willing to chance any non-delayed flights only wanted to stuff his mouth with more solid matter.

“Unless…,” Robert said, dragging out a thought that he had already worked through for ten seconds. “We wrote down some rules seven years ago. I don’t know the last time I looked at them. I don’t know the last time Cameron or anyone has. We’ve always just ascribed to the ‘Spirit of Eating.’ But I wonder if there is a technicality I can use to secure my position.”

“Sure. Like an Act of God clause.”

“I highly doubt we would have put any of those in. Most of us are agnostic, if not atheist.”

Frankie was about to explain what an Act of God provision was but decided it wasn’t worth his time.

“I think I have it stored on Google. Do you have free wi-fi here?”

Frankie shook his head. “The only place in the airport that doesn’t charge for wi-fi is Starbucks. And not the counter Starbucks. There’s an actual Starbucks in between terminals. You shouldn’t have to go back through security.”

“Thank you. I suppose I could go for a Frappuccino after that Monte Cristo.”

“Glad I could help.”

Robert pulled his wallet out to settle the bill, leaving his customary 19.5% tip.

Robert smiled and waved at the bored workers in each of the eateries en route to the promised land. He passed Fish n’ Chips, Waffle House, a place named Cubano’s, a Hardee’s, and three different Starbucks counters before making it to the end of the terminal. With scintillating thoughts of cinnamon dolce syrup and extra whipped cream on his mind, each coffee mermaid ensconced in her circular field of green seemed to beckon to him, telling him that the journey would be tough and that there was no need to pass her by for her sister two hundred yards further. She could offer him up some frozen, caffeinated concoction for him right here.

But he ventured through, powered by more than just a sweet tooth. His Google Drive was the true goal of this expedition. The Frappuccino was merely a reward for the exertion and something to soothe himself while he did a little bit of research on how to topple Cameron’s dreams of a three-peat from twenty-five hundred miles away. And in a torrential downpour, to boot.

After a cheery wave at the teenager girl working the McDonald’s register and the dour-looking scrawny middle-aged man leaning against Dunkin’ Donuts counter, he finally saw the sign leading to Terminal Two, and the familiar green circle guiding him to a venti drink and some wi-fi.

Robert waited for his Frappuccino to be finished before finding a seat and pulling his laptop out of his carry-on bag that was not likely to be carried on to anything on this particular day. It wouldn’t do any good to find a seat and then have to stand back up to get his drink. And he wouldn’t be accomplishing any research on an empty stomach.

The Starbucks employees seemed just as bored as Frankie had, but they didn’t engage Robert the way the bartender had. They were not working for tips, and they were used to customers wanting speed and efficiency, a temporary fix in a temporary cup, that they could take away with them.

With his caffeinated milkshake before him, RObert opened up his laptop and logged onto the Starbucks wi-fi. Ten clicks later, he was skimming down the rules that had been crafted, he looked more closely, a decade before. Google Drive didn’t even exist back then, or at least Robert was unaware of it if it did exist. Somebody, he wasn’t sure who, had moved the document onto the web and shared it with everybody a few years ago. And there it had sat. Robert checked.

Only one revision since 2014, and that was a technicality that had arisen due to one of the eating competitions losing its status as an officially sanctioned Major League Eating designation. He remembered it well. Three of them had already signed up for the waffle competition in Tulsa when the MLE dropped the competition from the official list. Something about the waffles not being a uniform size and weight. The seven members involved in Robert’s competition had spent weeks arguing back and forth over e-mail, the four that were not going to Tulsa finally being overruled by the three who were. Non-sanctioned events were added to the DIning Belt competition. Robert had made the change on the Google Doc, and it hadn’t come into play since then.

Robert pulled the bylaws over to one side of his screen and picked a spreadsheet for the other half. As he read through each provision, he listed ways to earn points on the spreadsheet. On the column next to the points possible, he placed a column for himself and a column for Cameron. He wrote the number of points each of them had earned on each of the competitions. As he knew it would, the totals added up to him being ahead by eleven points. A ninth-place finish was all Cameron would need to repeat his annual victory for the third time in a row.

Seeing it in spreadsheet form did nothing to assuage Robert’s nerves or spirits. He had been methodical, all year long, and now he was stuck in a Miami airport, a “working” vacation gone horribly awry. He felt an emptiness deep in his gut.

The pastry case called out to Robert, and he figured he would think a little better on a full stomach. Leaving his empty venti cup, he stared into the display case, in deep contemplation over the texture of a croissant versus a scone. Which would compliment the cinnamon dolce still lingering on his tongue? He looked up for some help, but the only employee facing the front of the counter was standing sentry by the cash register with all the personality of the Queen’s Guard.

“Double-smoked bacon, cheddar, and egg sandwich, please.”

In the end, Robert decided to split the difference, getting the savoriness of the scone in meat form, placed between a croissant bun. It was a go-to he had gone to many a time before.

The Starbucks employee, whose nametag listed a doubtful name of Spike, swiped Robert’s Starbucks card while one of the diminutive employees behind him bent down, opened a refrigerator, and removed Robert’s sandwich from its plastic wrapper to place into the toaster.

“What are you working on?” Spike asked, more out of the discomfort at being face-to-face with a motionless customer staring at his coworker’s back than out of a genuine desire for an answer.

“I’m trying to win a competitive eating competition,” Robert said, choosing not to engage in the verbal parlay he had played with the bartender earlier. Spike was not going to go fishing for deeper understanding.

“They have a breakfast sandwich eating competition?” Spike asked.

“No. The eating contest isn’t here. But unfortunately, I am. The contest, and my rival, are in Vegas.”

Robert took out his phone, showed Cameron’s text message and selfie to Spike.

“He’s a competitive eater?” Spike asked, surprising Robert by showing even this modicum of interest. “He’s so skinny.”

“Yes, he is.”

Robert looked down at his phone. He was satisfied that somebody else noticed one of the things that had always bothered him the most about the two-time defending champion.

“You can never trust a skinny eater. He’s not doing it for enjoyment, only to win. I bet he purges it all later. Maybe I should follow him to the bathroom next year and disqualify him.”

A croissant sandwich protruding out of a white bag appeared between Robert’s eyes and phone. Robert’s eyes followed the feminine arm of the employee who had cooked it back up until he was looking into two stone faces. Neither Spike nor the newcomer, Bianca, were enjoying his current line of logic. Robert thanked them and returned to his seat.

Back at his table, Robert stared at his spreadsheet while he ate his prepackaged sandwich. The egg was poached too hard and the pastry was not nearly flaky enough to call itself a croissant, but the bacon was sublime. The right amount of crisp with subtly marbleized pork fat saved the sandwich.

Unfortunately, the spreadsheet did not have the saving grace of bacon. The numbers all looked the same. A seven here, a six there, side-by-side empty cells on columns b and c, an xxx next to shrimp-Miami, the total of column b eleven points higher than column c.

Then it hit him. The two empty cells. Non-sanctioned events. He went back to the Google Doc to read the wording. “Any commonly accepted eating competition, whether sanctioned by the Competitive Eating Board or not, which may include, but is not limited to…”

A commonly accepted eating competition.

They have a breakfast sandwich eating competition? Spike had asked.

Frankie the bartender had said.

Finish four fish and fries in ten minutes, your soda is free. That would, by any definition, be a commonly-accepted eating competition. In fact, the rules accounted for these Man vs. Food style events. But they maxed out at three points each. Robert would need three of them to secure his victory.

Robert leapt to his feet. The chair skidded across the faux wood floor. His gut bumped the table, nearly toppling his laptop, but he didn’t care.

“How many breakfast sandwiches have you sold today?”

Spike looked at Bianca. Both shrugged. “You’re the first one.”

“Can I get that in writing?”

“I guess so.”

“Better give me two more, just to be sure. Then I’ll come by at the end of your shift to verify.”

“You just want me to write that you ordered three egg sandwiches?”

“No. Write ‘Most Breakfast Sandwiches of the Day.'”

Robert slapped his laptop closed and attempted to run out the door. Fortunately, Spike called after him, allowing him to slow down and catch his breath.

“Where are you going?”

“Tugboat first, then back to the bar. Didn’t you know you’re amongst the greatest french fry eater in the entire airport?”

Beach Road, Part Three

· February 27, 2015 · fiction · , , , , , · One Comment

Again, I am continuing a story started by others. This time, I am writing part three. Go ahead and read part one, written by Paul Willet, here, and part two, by Peter MacDonald, here.

And here’s my part three:

The battle was farther away than it seemed. She walked over the pockmarked roads and muddy fields that were the mark of this new world. As the sun started to wane on her right, she was finally able to see some of the carnage in front of her.

If the sun was setting, how far had she walked? Distance was hard to judge without GPS on cellphones. Or road signs, for that matter. Was she in National City now? Chula Vista? Hell, Tijuana? She felt like she was definitely south of San Diego, but shouldn’t she have passed through some wrecked out urban landscape to get here? It was disease that had wiped out the world, not nuclear war. Other cities she had seen were abandoned, not missing.

But Southern California geography left her mind as she passed the first smoldering bush, indicating the outskirts of the helicopter’s reign of fire. Heat still swept across her path, although not as unbearable as it must have been an hour earlier.

For not the first time, she thought back to her initial goal. The Coronado Bridge. Get across it, and the land would be easier to defend. What was she doing, being diverted by a helicopter attacking the ground? Curiosity and the cat, she reminded herself, and this cat should be safely digging in her well-defended island litterbox.

Tomorrow, she promised herself. Tonight, she would investigate then find a secure place to spend the night. By midday tomorrow, she’d be playing her own version of Crossy Road.

A hint of azure caught her eye from the road beneath her. Unnatural colors stuck out in this post-world. Dirt, sky, ocean, and mostly-dead grass – these were the hues of the Plague. A powder blue halfway between a Caribbean lagoon and a Vail slope jumped out, even in the failing light of dusk.

The pattern inside the blue was even more unnatural, and downright frightening. A yellow lightning bolt haloed in white. The mark of the San Diego Chargers, a virulent bands of marauders.  She had heard terrified whispers of hapless wanderers being hacked to pieces for roaming into the wrong territory of town, unable to respond to the scathing screams of, “Show us your lightning bolt!”

At least it verified her location. The Chargers and had gone on the defensive in recent years, so any road markings would have to be in San Diego proper.

So perhaps the entire conflagration was nothing more than a simple turf war.  Even better, since the remnants of the blue-and-gold had clearly lost this engagement, there must still be some swag to scavenge. She breathed a sigh of relief at both the turn of events and the confirmation that she wasn’t losing her instinct.

She continued to climb over divots and pockmarks, made even craggier by the helicopter attack. With the sun finally set and the only light source coming from dwindling fires, she came upon the focal point of the damage. On the precipice of a giant crater, she was faced with yet another decision. Climb in and scavenge or wait until morning? Whoever was behind the attack would surely be here by morning. There might even be some Chargers under shelter right now, waiting to counterattack. She needed to get in and out before any group materialized. The way an individual made it this far was by avoiding groups. Any groups, but particularly groups as strong as the Chargers. A group able to rout the Chargers? She shuddered.

So over the lip of the crater she crept, leaving the amber glow of the surface behind. Waiting for her eyes to adjust to the starlight twinkling down, she remembered the night the lights didn’t come on. Before that night, every town she entered still had people trying to make do, convinced that they would persevere through dwindling numbers, believing that society would overcome the obstacles, that humanity’s progress would triumph. Even if the population of each town was halved by the time she left.

The lights going out ended that underlying hope. Yet, looking up at the sky as her ancestors once had, as she was doing again right now, gave a new sense of the future. The stars and the moon illuminated just enough to get by. All it took was adjusting to the new world. By scavenging, by defending, and, for some people, by joining gangs like the Chargers.

Like most nights, she looked up at the first stars of night, and thought back on the before and the after. The things that were unnoticed and background before, but so desperately vital now.

An unnatural sound broke her out of her reverie. A click. One she knew too well. Then another. And another.

A bright white, a color she might once have called fluorescent, spread out over her section of the Earth. The first shadows she saw in the floodlight were the muzzles of AK-47s trained over the lip of the crater. She was blinded, disoriented, and they had the high ground.

Shit, shit, shit!

“Hands up!” came a booming voice through a sound system.

She looked for a way out through squinting eyes. No cover at the bottom of the crater. Guns pointing down from eight directions, covering every spot on the compass. These guys were good.

“We knew the helicopter would get you here,” the voice came from the southern lip. She turned back to him, finally seeing beyond the muzzle. He, and his companions, were not wearing Charger gear. They were all in black, body armor from the look of it, with faces covered by a modernized World War I gasmask.

“This doesn’t have to end badly,” he changed tact. “We just want to talk to you. Study you. Just put your hands in the air, Typhoid Mary.”

One more decision. Fight or flight? Reluctantly, she let the tension leave her body and followed his instructions. Hands in the air.

“Sir,” the man turned to report behind him. “The mission is a success. We have Patient Zero in custody.”

Murder Unannounced, Part Two

· February 19, 2015 · fiction · , , , , , · No Comments

As I mentioned last week, the flash fiction challenge right now is about continuing other people’s stories. I chose to continue a murder mystery started by CJ, which can be found on her blog here: http://imagination.cjreader.com/ (second story down, as of now)

Here is me trying to advance the story…

TWO

Two steps inside the apartment, Mailie already knew something was wrong. The oppressive heat was bad, but expected. The open windows and lived-in feeling of the front room, however, were unexpected. She scanned the room but didn’t see her nosy roommate. Just the open window and an empty couch. An empty couch with a sweaty divot in the middle, and on the table right in front of it, next to Mailie’s cellphone, sat a laptop.

“Dammit, Tina,” Mailie muttered under her breath.

Everything had to go right today, and now Mailie’s worthless roommate was throwing a wrench into the mechane.  At this time on a Saturday morning, Tina should still be sleeping. What time had she stumbled in last night? It had to be past 3:00. Mailie had been in her dark room, listening for the telltale signs, then snuck out as soon as her roommate passed out.

Given normal patterns, Mailie should have had a good ten hours to do what needed to get done. Tina would sleep until noon. That would have given Mailie the time she needed to finish her work. She still had the murder weapon. She had the cash, much more cash than she had been led to believe the couple would have on hand. Thank God for Honeymooners.  And, of course, the envelope. If the blessed couple hadn’t been trying to smuggle that particular item out of the country, they’d probably be sipping mai-tais right now.

The extra cash and the ring had been the cause of Mailie’s early-morning sojourn. In addition to her normal laundering conduit, she needed to check on the viability of hawking the diamond.  But now that the second-hand jeweler had been secured, there was a new wrinkle in her plans.

Mailie had needed to be back, playing the vapid coquette persona she had worked so hard to establish, when her roommate woke up. There would be a half-hour of Tina whining about finding her muse and staring at a blank screen before she packed up and headed to Starbucks for the afternoon, under the guise of distraction-free writing, but really just to chase some of last night’s booze away.  All Mailie needed to do was say, “Oh, Emm, Jee, Tina. Pete was such an asshole last night. I might just cry in my room all day. How’s your writing coming? Hey, when you come back from ‘Bucks, can you bring me a white mocha?” but she hadn’t made it back in time.

Mailie went over to the coffee table to pick up her phone grabbed her phone from the table. She had left it here because she damn-well knew the boss used it to track her. He needed to know the job was done. He did not need to know about the bonus cash and jewelry.

When she grabbed the phone, however, that faint instinct that something was amiss grew. The phone was warm, meaning it had been illuminated recently. Had the boss called early? Shit, what time was it?

Mailie’s panic increased as she double-tapped and swiped the phone.  The little “missed call” icon was nowhere to be seen. She frantically swiped from the side and the top looking for the call log.

“Why the fuck do they make it so hard to find a missed call?” She said out loud, not realizing her transition from internal monologue to verbalization.

She finally found it and the feeling erupted into a certain knowledge of catastrophe. Seven minutes ago, a call had come in. Unknown Number. Didn’t matter, it was the boss. But it was listed, not as missed but as incoming. The phone had been answered.

“Dammit, Tina!”

She turned to march on her roommate’s room when she noticed the door to her own room. It was open, and her room was clearly visible. She diverted her trajectory until she was standing in her own doorway, trying desperately to assess the damage and run through contingency plans.

But she could not focus. All she could do was move her eyes from problem to problem. The window she had crawled out of in the dark pre-dawn hours was back open.  Her dresser drawers were open, her clothes tossed on the ground. The silk scarf she had used to transport and store the murder weapon was unraveled on top of the drawer and lying there, on top of the clothes, the bloody knife proudly announced itself to the world. The manila envelope had fallen to the floor, the file it contained partly spilled out.

Mailie picked the easiest, and most pressing, problem to deal with first, grabbing the envelope and file off the ground. As she went to put the file back in, she noticed how thin, how empty, the manila container was. The ring was not there.

“The bitch stole it!”

Mailie ran to the window, looked out at the alleyway. It was precisely the way she had left it in the dark. She had moved the trashcan in front of the gate. There was no way Tina could have answered the phone that recently and escaped out the window without moving some items. So she was still inside.

She ran back to the front room and spoke in a loud, clear voice. Not a shout, but enough to be heard through the thin walls. No need to alert the entire neighborhood through the open windows.

“Tina, I don’t know what you think you saw, and I don’t know what you’re planning, but you need to listen to me. Some very bad things are going to happen if we don’t-“

Mailie was cut off by the unmistakable brzz, brzz of a phone vibrating on a table. The illuminated screen shone across the living room like a spotlight. Unknown Number.

“I’m sexy and I know it…”

Story Part I

· February 12, 2015 · fiction · , , , , , , , · 2 Comments

Trying to get back into the flash fiction game a bit. This week’s prompt was to write the first quarter of a story. In the coming weeks, I might continue another writer’s story, and hopefully someone will take up the mantle of poor Cyrus…

Spoiled Bacon

Cyrus silently cursed IKEA as the Allen wrench twisted through his fingers and fell to the ground again. Not that this creation was made of flimsy Swedish wood. This was the result of years of research, experimentation, and trial. But every time that damned L-shaped hex key spun too fast or too slow for the screw, he found himself using the furniture store’s name in vain.

“Straightedge and Phillips did fucking fine before those Aryan SOBs showed up in every neighborhood,” he exclaimed before wetting his raw fingers in his mouth.

Three more rightie-tighties, accompanied by one more tiny-tool projectile, and he stepped back to look at his masterpiece.

The time machine. His time machine.

It didn’t look too impressive in the dingy motel room off of Interstate 64. No light came in through the thick curtains drawn over the window that they had probably hung in front of since 1950. The faint illumination came from an incandescent light bulb that might as well have still had Thomas Edison’s initials on it, peeking out from underneath a lamp shade made from that same curtain cloth.

But he had to be here in the 21st century. Because what Cyrus had created was a time machine, not a time and space machine, a fact which had become all too clear on his test run. He went back a week. What could go wrong? Until he missed materializing inside a late-model Buick by a manner of inches.

So it was back to the drawing board. Kept most of the time elements intact, but allowing for objects which might exist in that spot in the past. Cyrus didn’t expect to find any Buicks in 1676, but who knew how the riverbank had grown or moved over the last three-and-a-half centuries.

Regardless, Cyrus needed to be here in Virginia when he went back, because it would be a hell of a lot harder to get to Jamestown back then. No Interstates, no satellites to guide the GPS on his phone. To say nothing of the Native Americans. Or Indians, as he was going to have to get used to calling them.

As he left the dingy motel in the direction of the Historic Jamestown Settlement, his thought shifted from the where of his destination to the when. Seven years after Cyrus, the naïve college senior, proclaimed the election of Barack Obama signaled a new age in race relations, little had changed. They might have gotten worse. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. And on a more personal note to Cyrus, the constant skeptical glances, the “Affirmative Action” quips,  at a smart, college-educated black man.

Racism was embedded in America. The only way to change that was to go back to the source. His first thought had been stopping Lincoln’s assassination, but that might be too late. Would an extra three years of “be nice to the south” Reconstruction have made that much of a difference? Segregation and an intrinsic belief of inferiority of the former slaves would still reign.

So maybe he could go all the way to the beginning. Literally. The first black slave coming to America, right here in Jamestown, one year before the Pilgrims even arrived. But what good could he do then? Kill a few slave traders. Then what? The slaves he freed wouldn’t even survive the conditions, probably. And a few months later, the next ship would arrive.

So not too early in race relations, and not too late, he finally decided to split the difference and arrived like a racial Goldilocks and the just-right spot, precisely one hundred years before the hypocritical Declaration of Independence. Bacon’s Rebellion, the great schism between white indentured servants and black slaves. If those two groups could be kept together with common goals, the permanent racial divide might never emerge.

Standing over the back channel of the James River, Cyrus took one last breath of 21st century air and flipped the switch. The machine whirred and whooshed as it attempted to pierce the ether of time, like a 1994 modem making the painstaking connection to AOL. Cyrus wondered about what sight would greet him on the other side, in order to avoid focusing on the vertigo about to hit. Traveling across one week had been bad enough. How nauseating would three hundred years feel?

Then it came, much worse than before, and he no longer cared about what he would see. Only that he would survive.

As Cyrus fought to keep his breakfast and every other meal he had ever eaten down, another stray thought ran across his mind. A suppressed query. When he revamped the space element on the machine, had he re-checked the time component? Before the test run, he had configured and reconfigured every step with time as the only variable. He had triple-checked his math, dotted every imaginary i, crossed every theoretical t.

Had he done that this time? Had he rechecked the time components after fixing the spatial variable? As the world started to shift, as his body began to stretch and condense through time, his mind kept returning to the vague iron-left-on-at-home feeling that something had been overlooked.

Then the constriction of his abdomen stopped all tangential thoughts.

“Definitely gonna hurl.”

Cyrus lurched out of the time vortex onto all fours as heat spewed from his bowels onto the hard forest soil. Twice. A third time before he could even inhale. Stomach still convulsing, he focused on the hard-packed dirt still wobbling under spittle hanging from his mouth like taffy.  The world, reality itself, transitioned from a shake to a swoon as sobriety and sanity fought for control.

After what could have been a minute or could have been a week – what is time, really? – Cyrus pulled his right hand off the ground to wipe his mouth. Then his forehead. He slowly raised his eyes off the vomit-splattered dirt to take in his surroundings.

“Shit,” he muttered.

This was not 1676 Virginia.

Basis of the Book

· November 10, 2014 · fiction · , , , · 2 Comments

Behind on my word count. Shocker! So I’m cheating a little on this Monday post. The idea for the novel I’m currently writing came from a flash fiction I wrote six months ago. It’s something I’m dubbing “peat-punk,” where feudal society has continued until the year 1999.  In fact, King Charles I is still king after 375 years. How he is still alive, and how the world became frozen after the English Civil War, form the basis for the book. And, in fact, are still being determined by the author as we speak…

Next week, if I stay behind, I might just print an excerpt from the novel in progress – the updated version of this scene.

So without further ado, I present to you the original 1,000-word flash fiction, jestingly called “Charles in Charge,” after which I will briefly describe a few of the things that I’ve changed in the novel-length version:

—————————————————————————————————————

“By order of his majesty, King Charles Stuart,” the town crier yelled. “To honor the approaching millennium, an extended Yule commenceth today! For one week, all manorial obligations are suspended! Your gracious Earl hath also decreed that peat shall burn in the Town Square every night until the arrival of Anno Domini Two Thousand!”

Elly cheered with the others in the village square, thoughts focused on the coming week.  He would not step near his baron, his plow, or even his hovel for a week.  Mead and a cheeky lass were all he needed.

“Verily,” the crier continued, rolling up the scroll he was reading, “Feast, frivol, nay… Party like ‘tis Nineteen Hundred Ninety-and-Nine!”

If only he could tinker with his new seed drill while off the manor. Sharpness wasn’t a problem. The iron was too weak. Heat was needed, he was sure, to make iron into steel.

“What burn hotter than peat?” he asked himself.

“Nice shirt,” came a whisper in his ear, barely audible amongst the crowd. “Be that cotton?”

Elly turned toward the voice, saw a short, surly man standing there.  The man had black matted hair that drooped almost to his eyes, dark eyes that bore into Elly.

“Aye, ‘tis,” responded Elly.

“Cotton be expensive,” the man responded, scratching at his own woolen clothing to emphasize the point. “And time consuming.”

“I devised a contraption,” started Elly.

“A machine?” the man responded.

“Know not that word, good man. It removes cotton seeds. I can trade excess food or peat for raw cotton, make the clothes me’self.”

“Cotton gin?” The man asked, and received a blank stare back. “Ye are a regular Eli Whitney.”

“It’s pronounced Elly,” he responded, getting the same confused stare back from the man.

“Ha’n’t seen ye ‘round.” The man changed the subject.

“Bartholemew’s my baron. ‘Tisn’t often I can make it all the way to the village.”

“Aye, Bartholomew’s almost to another Earldom. Tell me, who was your baron before Bartholomew?”

“His father, Obediah, naturally,” responded Elly, not sure what this stranger with the intense dark eyes was getting at.

“And do you remember when Jonathan became Earl?”

“’Aye. I was eight years old. ‘Twas the last time we’ve had a week off of the manor.”

“And the king?”

“Charles,” answered Elly. “Has always been Charles. At least as far as I can remember.”

He scratched his head, thinking back.

“I’m only in my twentieth year,” he continued. “My father must have had another king, though I do not remember a name.”

“I be twice yer age,” the odd man continued, eyes and head darting in multiple directions while he spoke. “Charles has always been king. Talk to anyone and-“

“Stop! Cromwellite!” Elly turned to see two knights, wearing chainmail emblazoned with the red Cross of St. George superimposed on a field of yellow below the blue-and-white checkerboard pattern of the House of Stuart, barging through a group of peasants.  Pointing in his direction, they began to run. The sound of swords scraping from scabbards scattered the crowd.

“Don’t mention your machine if ye want to avoid the Taser,” the stranger said, turning to run.

“And wood burns hotter than peat. There still be wood in England.”

Before running, he snuck something into Elly’s hand, a clear bag with a piece of paper clearly visible inside. But the bag was not made of any substance he had ever seen, feeling both filmy and slick simultaneously.  The clearness was also unquantifiable, neither opaque nor creamy, but unnaturally see-through. The top was fastened together with inter-locking ridges.

“What’s in the plastic?” a knight asked, sword pointing at Elly’s chest. The other knight raced after the man who had disappeared into the crowd.

“Plastic, sir?” Elly was turning the odd new word over in his mouth when the knight ripped the clear bag from his hand.

“A cotton shirt and a plastic bag,” the knight addressed Elly. “What have you to say?”

“I,” Elly began, then remembered the stranger’s admonition. “I traded some extra peat for the cotton, sir.”

“What does this say?” The knight held up the bag, allowing Elly to see the writing on the paper inside.

“I know not, sir. I’ve not learned my letters. King and Charles re the only two words I recognize.”

“Yes,” the knight responded, sounding both suspicious and annoyed, “I know it says ‘Who was King before Charles?’ And then it has a meeting time. I need to know what this is at the bottom.”

Elly looked more closely. Underneath the wording were some shapes and symbols. Two circles, one with lines inside, the other with a jagged edge, separated by two triangles facing opposite directions, bordered on either side by a thick line. The entire design was entwined in two leafy vines.

“Maybe a noble crest, sir?” Elly offered.

“This serf’s illiterate,” the second knight said as he returned. “No comprehension in his eyes.”

The first knight grumbled, sheathing his sword and placing the pamphlet in his large coin purse. He then struck Elly in the gut with a gauntleted fist.

“Watch yourself, peasant,” the knight said after Elly crumpled onto the ground.  “We find you anywhere near any Cromwellites again, we might not assume you are such an idiot. You wouldn’t want us investigating where you got this alleged extra peat from.”

“Come,” the second knight said. “Let us find someone who can interpret these symbols.

As the knights departed, Elly slowly got up on his knees and dusted himself off.  The crowd appeared to be returning to normal, yet everyone avoided coming to close or even looking at him.

So much the better, he thought.  He had to get out of the village square.  His plans for the Millennium Holiday had just changed.

His tinker’s mind already knew the significance of the symbols.

They made a map.

——————————————————————————–

The major change in the novel is the “modern item” changed from a Zip-Lock bag to denim jeans, because I’m not sure I want to go too modern. But jeans aren’t too far ahead of Medieval technology. When I first conceived the story, the rest of the world had moved on, and steel destroyers would be blockading the island. Now I think the whole world is in a state of arrested development. After all, no Glorious Revolution, no Industrial Revolution, no American Revolution… so no Zip-Lock.

I’ve also changed the main character’s name, or at least how I write it. It is still Eli (a la Whitney), but pronounced Elly (close to Oliver Cromwell). But I am now writing it Eli except when it’s in dialogue. Not sure if this is the proper way, but it’s what I’m doing.

There’s also a girl. More than one, in fact. Rebecca, the bucolic ingenue from his manor, who he’s always dreamed of marrying, and Nessa, the smart, quasi-Marxist in the resistance movement, who sweeps him of his feet as soon as he’s making headway with Rebecca.

Spammerpunk Horror

· October 19, 2014 · fiction · , , , , · One Comment

Getting in the Halloween spirit, the weekly flash fiction challenge was an interesting one. We were supposed to write a horror story, but in the style of a spam e-mail. Obviously this is a short one. If you don’t have a common last name, you might not get as many of the “a relative died” e-mails, but I’ve received a few.

Dear <INSERT_NAME>,

As you may have been aware, your relative, <INSERT_RELATION_NAME>, recently perished while traveling through the Romanian Carpathians.  <INSERT_RELATION_NAME> listed you as his heir, and an extensive Internet search confirmed you as his only living relative. You, therefore, are entitled to inherit the estate of <INSERT_RELATION_NAME>, including all of his bodily possessions.

In order to prove that you are in fact <INSERT_NAME>, the legal and rightful inheritor of the body, mind, and soul of <INSERT_RELATION_NAME>, we are to be requiring you make a small deposit. Be assured that this small deposit will be returned manifold when the decedent’s estate is returned to you.

Your deposit should be in the form of one (1) body part. The body part in question must be larger than a finger, for verification purposes, but should in no way exceed the size of a forearm. Please note that the body part need not originate from you, but merely obtained and provided by you.  Internal organs will receive a premium return on investment.

<INSERT _NAME> is responsible for shipping and handling costs.

Upon receipt of requested item, the body of <INSERT_RELATION_NAME> will be sent to you in fulfillment of stated contract and stated testament. While some choose to take the estate in one lump shipment, we offer another option to help alleviate problems with taxes or other law enforcement. You may opt to receive one piece of <INSERT_RELATION_NAME> on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. Please note that even if you choose Option A, the body will still arrive in small pieces.

Please do no DNA testing on any included parts.

What are you waiting for? We know <INSERT_RELATION_NAME> would not want his estate to go to waste, nor for <INSERT _NAME>, his beloved beneficiary, to miss out on this opportunity.

Sincerely,

Vladimir T, Lawyer

Burn, Baby, Burn (Fiction)

· October 9, 2014 · fiction · , , , , · One Comment

Flash Fiction Challenge this week was to take somebody else’s sentence and make a story out of it. I started with “That bridge was burnt long ago, though I never knew if it was my match or my friend’s that started the fire.”  Hopefully I did it justice.

Burn, Baby, Burn

“If you’re ever in Vancouver, look me up,” had been the innocuous statement at the ten year reunion.

Sure, why not? Time should have put out the fire, the long burning embers we had been stoking since Freshman year. Maybe we could rebuild that bridge that had existed before.

Kitty-n-Kassie, peas in a pod. Kitty-n-Kassie, soul sisters. Kitty-n-Kassie, chasing the dragon.

So I came to Vancouver. Isn’t it just like that bitch to flee the country?

“Kitty, OMG!” I heard shouted from across the Tim Hortons. She actually said OMG!

“It’s Katherine now,” I corrected her before the whole weekend devolved into sixth grade nicknames.

“Well, la de dah, Miss Grown Up,” she said, half condescending, half joking. Not bitchy enough to get angry at, but enough to know it was there. “Katherine. I like it!”

Of course she did. Nothing ever made any difference to her. She could roll with anything.

I’m totally fine if you go for Gio. I hope he’s into you.

He wasn’t. They dated half of eighth grade.

Wasn’t that some great E last night? We’re totally in high school now.

While I buried my blues.

“Come on,Kit- er, Katherine,” she continued. “I’ll show you around. You’ll love it here. You always loved the outdoors.”

I paused, thinking back, “I guess I did.”

“Stanley Park is just like Golden Gate,” she rambled as I followed her north. “Remember our senior trip to SF? That was so much fun.”

“Nope,” I interrupted. “I was on academic probation. Heard it was fun, though.”

“Really?” She stopped her reverie for a moment. “I totally thought you were there. Who was it that snuck off to the Jamba Juice? You always loved smoothies.”

“Wow, you remember my past better than I do,” I said, not sure if I was sarcastic or serious.

But she probably thought I was one of the masses sitting behind her sanctimonious Honor Society ass in the front row at graduation. Instead, I was miles away and high as a kite with the other drop-outs.

“OMG, Kitty. I tried forever to find you. Nobody on Facebook knew you. We heard you died in a DUI or something. Where have you been?”

It got me thinking. She certainly misremembered the trajectory of our friendship, but had I been the one to leave her behind? I always assumed it was the highfalutin AP student ignoring her druggy friend.

Was I the bitch that had burned the bridge?

“Katherine?” She finally stopped her interrogation and waited for an answer.

“There was a DUI,” her questions were easier to answer than mine, “but I didn’t die. Spent the weekend in jail. But whoever was looking for me wasn’t looking very hard.”

“Isn’t this place beautiful?” Kassie returned to tour guide mode. “It’s bigger than Central Park.”

She had the attention span of a cat. The park was beautiful, though.

The talk went back to the last decade. Her time at UW. Sororities, soccer, a pregnancy scare. I added an occasional “uh huh” to keep her talking about herself instead of asking about me. Nobody needed to hear about annual trips in and out of rehab. Or how much I had blamed on her. The burning hatred I had carried for her.

“This is Lost Lagoon,” she turned back to tour guide on a small wooden bridge. “OMG, I’m totally loving this. Let’s blaze, Kitty!”

That’s when she pulled a joint out and started lighting up.

“Jesus, Kassie, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Oh relax,” she inhaled the flame, igniting the paper. “We’re in BC. It’s practically legal here.”

She coughed out the pungent smoke,  close enough to make me twitch.

“I’ve been sober for three years!”

“Relax,” she repeated, handing the joint in my direction. “Does ganj even count?”

She still said ganj wrong. Rhymed it with and, not on. That always annoyed me. Now it made the insulting offer even worse.

“Hell yes, it counts,” I batted the weed out of her protruding hand.

“OMG, Bitch! You need to chill. This is just like last time.”

“What, the ecstasy party? You never noticed that I couldn’t do drugs like you. I couldn’t just wake up and be all chipper. That night started the downward spiral of high school. Of my life!”

I gasped after my tirade, and noticed smoke. The smell of marijuana was mixing with smoldering wood.

“No, when I came back from college,” she responded. “At Jenny’s party. I said sorry for spreading all of those rumors about you in high school.”

“That I gave handies for booze? You started those rumors?”

“Uh, yeah, but I came clean. You can’t hold that against me.”

“Why didn’t I remember that?” I asked out loud, although it was a bigger question for myself. Any thought of smoke disappeared.

“Because you were drunk,” Kassie answered for me. “You flew off the handle. We did some heroin to calm you down.”

“Heroin?” I was bewildered. “That was the first time I did heroin.”

“Yeah, and we made up. Then you disappeared for eight years, just like the emo bitch from high school. And I thought we were finally connecting again. Just like today.”

“You gave me my first heroin? Do you have any idea of the hell that the next five years of my life was?”

I slapped Kassie just as flame erupted beneath her. She screamed and waved her arms.

“Help, help, the bridge is on fire” were the last words I heard as I started to trudge back to the train station.

Bridges are easier to burn than build.

The Lost Lagoon bridge would survive the small conflagration from a wasted joint.

But the bridge between us?  That bridge was burnt long ago, though I never knew if it was my match or my friend’s that started the fire.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Equal parts kindling and neglect. Play with enough fire, there’s bound to be a blaze.

The Roaring Game

· September 23, 2014 · Blog Entries · , , , , , · 3 Comments

AKA My Introduction to “Good Curling.”

The last few Winter Olympics, I’ve become more interested in curling. You may have seen it buried on USA Network or CNBC After Dark or whatever the 75th network down the NBC depth chart is. It’s the one that looks like shuffleboard on ice with a bulls-eye at the end.

Oh yeah, it also has brooms.

I would watch these games with fascination. What the hell were they doing? Why were they yelling so much? And who the hell sweeps ice? By the time the Vancouver Olympics rolled around, I was starting to understand the basic scoring and resulting strategy. My Italian grandpa had me playing bocce ball since the age of five, so it was easy to convert – one point for every stone of yours that is closer than your opponent’s closest stone.  When Sochi rolled around, I found myself armchair quarterbacking – “Why don’t they just put the stone right there? That seems simple enough.”

I started to wonder how one gets into this crazy Scottish/Canadian creation? The fact that most of the American Olympians hailed from Wisconsin and Minnesota made me assume I’d never find out. But boy, if I ever found myself in a place with tundra as the dominant vegetation, I’d have to check it out. I mean, the Olympians don’t look all that fit, they’re not flying at 50 MPH on ice skates, they’re not cross-country skiing. They’re pushing a little rock and walking alongside it to the other end. I’ve played bocce. I’ve bowled. I’ve even swept a floor once or twice in my life. I know I’m the kid that always got stuck in right field for Little League, but seriously, how hard can curling be?

Turns out, in a few ways I was right. And in many more, I was wrong.

It’s not that difficult to find or get started in a curling club. There are actually six clubs in California alone, and others in such frigid locales as Las Vegas and Phoenix. It’s a sport that most people without knee or hip problems can probably learn and play with some ability after a few hours. But mastery? That takes much more.

Most start with a Learn to Curl class.  It starts with a 20-30 minute preview of how the game works, for those rare few who hadn’t been DVR’ing the Sochi matches from 2:00 AM. Then it goes out onto the ice rink to practice setting up and delivering the stone.

It was at this point, long before I had actually set up “in the hack,” that I realized my early assumptions were a bit off.  The distance to the target is way farther than it looks on TV. I figured it would be about the length of a bowling lane, but it’s double that. It more or less runs the length from one hockey face-off circle to the other.

After a half hour or so of practicing delivery without the rock, then with the rock but without letting go, and of course plenty of sweeping, we finally got to make a legitimate curling shot. I crouched myself down into the hack and looked toward that distant target. You can’t even see the bulls-eye, since it is on the ground. Instead, a person stands at the other end and gives you a target. In this Learn to Curl class, the target was laid down by the instructor.  Go ahead, he was showing me, shoot for the button (that’s the middle of “the house,” or bulls-eye area). I reared back, focusing on the target and remembering all thirty minutes of form practice, and let it fly.

My first shot made it just about to mid-ice. Hey, in my defense, had this been as long as a bowling lane, like I originally thought, that would have been dead on.  It took me three more throws before I could get a stone past the “hog line,” the minimum possible distance for stone to be in play. The hog line is a little bit beyond the blue line in hockey, so I had increased my throw by maybe fifty percent, but the hog line is also still a good twenty feet from the house.

With a half-hour or so to go in our two hour training, and still with only a couple of legal shots to my name, they wanted us to “play a couple of ends to see what that’s like.” We only managed to get in two ends (an end is the equivalent of a baseball inning), and each player throws two stones per end, so I only managed to throw four shots. This is the most common complaint about Learn to Curl classes – by the time you put it all together, you only get to take a handful of real shots. But that’s how they keep you coming back for more, I suppose.

And that’s how it happened to me. My final shot, with some good sweeping by my teammates (more on that in a moment) landed directly on the button.

Oh, Damn! I thought to myself. First time out and I hit the hardest shot in curling? Maybe it’s too late for #Sochi2014, but #Pyongyang2018? Here I come.

Turns out hitting the button with no other stones blocking the way isn’t really all that hard. Maybe not as easy as a free-throw in basketball, but not all that much harder. Maybe like an undefended three-pointer.

“You know what we call that?” another instructor asked when I made a similar shot at a later practice. “A target.”

So here I am, some six months later, having gone through two Learn to Curls, two “advanced trainings” (basically Learn to Curl without the first hour), a six-game league, and a bonspiel. In the league, they paired newbies with veterans, and I benefited from this arrangement to the tune of an undefeated 7-0 (counting the playoffs). In the “bonspiel” (what curlers call their weekend-long tournaments), I played one sheet over from two women who had four Olympic appearances between them. Veterans want newbies nowhere near them at a bonspiel, so we fielded a team where my ten times curling was tied for the most. From both of these experiences, I learned more about how simple, and yet how difficult, this game can be.

Each player on the team throws two rocks in a row, interspersed with the other team.  Each player should, then, have a different forte or strategy. During our season, I was the lead in all but one of the games.  The lead’s job is to intentionally throw the rock short of the house.  These “guards” can either be curled behind or raised into the scoring area later. If the lead were to throw that definitive button shot, like I had in the Learn to Curl, it would likely be knocked right out by the other team, and then we’re either back to square one or else the other team is now in a better position. I’ve actually had a team knock my own rock out of the way, then have their stone ricochet behind a guard, making it very difficult to knock out.

The strategy for the second and third team members (throwing rocks 3-6) varies depending on what the play area looks like after the two leads throw those first four stones. And, at least at the level I usually play, those first four have done some kooky, crazy things.  Rare is the game where there are four perfectly placed guards, or even three guards with a well-placed point behind them. The two basic shots for them  are a takeout, which is exactly what it sounds like, or a draw, which is an attempt to score a point closer to the button than the other team’s stones. The one game I did not play lead was quite an adjustment, as I was trying to throw harder than the lead throws.

Then there is the skip, the captain of the team, who spends the first six shots providing the target at the far end of the sheet before taking the team’s final two shots. I skipped during the bonspiel because of my huge experience advantage of having curled one more time than the rest of my team. Skipping is a very lonely life. All the other curlers hang out with each other, walk back and forth while sweeping, even chitchat with the opposition. The skip stands at the far end, calculating and permutating  the constantly changing game. And particularly with a team of newbies, he must think of what might happen if (nay, when) the shot is missed. What is Plan B? Or Plan G? Or what is the worst possible thing that can happen with this shot?

Then, when the skip gets in the hack to take those final shots, the “what’s the worst that can happen” strategy is much more noticeable. I can’t count the number of times my final shot knocked a couple of my opponent’s stones into the house, raising their score from two to four. The lead is like the kickoff return guy. Can a good kickoff return help the drive? Absolutely. Can he fumble or lose ground? Sure. But most of the time, he’s not going to affect the game much. Set up a guard or return the ball to the 25 and the other players on the team are in position to do their thing. When you’re skipping, you’ve become the kicker attempting a 50-yard field goal to tie or win the game. You’re Dennis Eckersley facing Kirk Gibson. Except I was never Dennis Eckersley. At my best, I was in Byung Hyun Kim territory. I can’t count the number of times I made the long walk toward the hack only to tell my teammates, “Well, if I can draw around those five stones with a perfect button shot, we might be able to salvage one point.”

Why does the skip tell his teammates what he’s aiming for? Because they are the sweepers. When someone first watches curling, the first question is usually about sweeping. What is the purpose of it  and does it really make much of a difference? The simple answer is yes, sweeping matters. In my league team, the other rookie and I didn’t always hit our shots, but we were two of the stronger sweepers.  Our ability to salvage a short shot into a guard, or to raise a guard into the house, made us partly responsible for some of that undefeated season.

The curling ice is not clean like in hockey.  No glassy Zambonied surface here.  Instead, the ice is “pebbled” by tiny droplets of water, delivered like an exterminator spraying for bugs.  The pebbles do two things to the stone – slow it down and cause it to curl.  Sweeping flattens out those pebbles for a short time, allowing the stone to both go farther and straighter.  Sometimes the stone is light and you need to sweep like hell just to get it over the hog line.  Sometimes you need to sweep it straight until it gets past a guard, then you stop to let it curl behind the guard.  What happens if you want it to go farther but also curl? Or if you want it to go straight but slower? Well, then you’re screwed and that’s when everybody is quickly assessing plan B. It might be better to keep it straight so that it misses everything instead of curling into and raising the other team’s guard into the house. If you ever watch curling and hear them alternate between on and off, usually they’re trying to make it go further but curl. Or the skip might say “off, off, off,” then all of a sudden, scream “Yes, Hard, yes.” That means the stone finally curled in the right direction and now it needs to be swept as far as possible. Or it could also be an indecisive skipper, but that’s not likely at the level that is on TV. Plus the indecisive skip will say things like “Off. Shit, no. On. I mean… shit… Hard, I guess?”

The one thing that sweepers can’t do, that nobody can do once the stone leavers your hand, is to slow it down. Imagine if you were bowling and instead of throwing your ball through the pins, you had to make it stop right at the five pin. That’s the finesse part of curling, and that (plus the other team getting in your way) is really what makes it difficult. After the first few throws in a Learn to Curl, pretty much anybody can throw the stone hard enough to get through the house. So what’s constantly on your mind as you throw is to try to “take a little off.” Better to be a little short and have the sweepers get it where it needs to go than to send a meaningless stone flying through into the hockey goal. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been worried about it going too far and end up hogging the stone. And then on the next throw, I over-compensate and sail right through the house.

So while I’m far from a grizzled veteran, I guess I’m no longer a raw rookie. In some ways, my initial thoughts were accurate. It’s a game that can be learned quickly. And after three or four shots, most players can at least line up and play a game. And most of the leagues I’ve encountered or heard of have spots for these new players, and these new players can be competitive. However, there’s also an upper level of competition that takes years to reach. The Olympians that were on the same ice as me never called shots with Plan B or C in mind. They make their shots.

Although sometimes I pity their accuracy – there’s nothing as entertaining as watching an awesome cascade of unintended ricochets that steal some points. In the one game we won in the bonspiel, we were up by three and were playing a very conservative final end. On the other team’s final shot, we had one point on an outer ring, and there were about ten stones of various colors clogging up the area in front of the house. With no other option, she threw a stone at full force up the middle, knocking three of her stones in, one of which knocked mine out. We then had to take one final shot each on an empty sheet, with the closest to the button winning the game. That’s curling for you.

And if you don’t score any points? Still no big thing. After the game comes broomstacking, when  you shake hands, say “good curling,” and grab a drink. Oh, did I mention the winning team buys drinks for the losing team? So that 1-5 record my Team o’ Rookies compiled at the Bonspiel? Hell, we pretty much made our entrance fee back in free libations.

Nothing beats sitting around with the team you just spent two hours competing against and re-hashing the game. Man, I can’t believe you missed that shot by an inch. Did you see when that stone lost its handle? Why’d you call for that one shot? Do you think I called off the sweepers too soon?

                 Followed by the line repeated by curlers everywhere.

“If it was easy, they’d call it hockey.”

Yellow Snow (Fiction)

· August 22, 2014 · fiction · , , , , , · No Comments

This week’s flash fiction challenge was to start with a color in the title. Shocker that I went with…

Yellow Snow

Cold.

Wet.

Salty.

My numb tongue retracts, attempting to absorb nutrients from the frozen froth.

Who ordered the sunflower seed Slushee?

My right eye flutters open to a vast expanse of white. A glaring, blinding white.

Snow? Makes sense.

Not sense like remembering an Arctic sojourn in my recent past. But logical sense – the cold, the wet.

The salty?

My left eye struggles open through resistance, hindered by the frozen drift. The radiance becomes blurry , tainted by my dominant eye’s limited range of vision. The white becomes more muddled with each blink, mixing and merging with shades of yellow. Canary blinks to ochre blinks to tan.

The snow isn’t white, my viscous brain processes. It’s yellow.

Yellow snow!

I start the rest of the way awake, spitting. Reflexes bolt my body upright and my hand to my mouth at the same time.

Pain. A splitting headache, but more than that. My legs feel weak, my stomach feels raw. Groping beneath me in a failed and flailed attempt to stand, I finally settle for a kneel. Eyes drop down from the reflected sunlight to the shadow of my body.

The snow beneath my body’s divot is a pool of faded yellow. Another smaller pool of creamy off-white is to my left. Another and another, smaller splotches trail away in regular intervals

If your stream is losing strength, you may have an enlarged prostate, pops into my head as I trace the tainted drippings. Oh joy, I face planted in the latrine.

“Ahh-woooooooo!”

The reverie is broken by a blood curdling sound. Something between a scream and a howl pierces through the crisp air.  My neck rotates still dilating eyes around searching for the source direction amidst countless echoes

No luck. The field lay as vast and barren as before. No prehistoric  animals, no smoky apparition of a beheaded goddess, which seemed the only two things capable of such a cry.

“Ahhhhhhhhh!”

A glance behind me, in the direction of the trailing off yellow snow, sees a copse of trees fifty yards distant.

“Woooooo!”

Certain that the sound is coming across the snowy field, I take one unsteady step toward the trees.  My ankle buckles under my weight, and I plummet back toward the snow. I’m unsure if my ankle is twisted or if this is just a city slicker attempting to cross country in tennis shoes, but instinct dictates I shuffle to safety before finding out. Using my calves and knees like a snowshoe, my hands reach forward and pull through the frozen sea, half swimming and half crawling, toward safety.

I refuse to look back as the sound gains on me. A gusty wind blows upon my back, except the unnatural heat in this frozen tundra makes me sure it isn’t wind. The howls become deafening as I lurch through the thin green line.

The wailing stops. I close my eyes and curl up behind the cylindrical wooden forcefield of an ancient oak. After the horrifying sounds of the run, this blanket of silence is serene.

Until the smell hits my nose. Musty. A car left in the rain with the windows cracked. Rancid. That car had some leftover McDonalds. Putrid. That old McDonalds is in the trunk next to a dead opossum.

Eyes open to a drooling mandible of matted grey-brown fur. A glistening black nose twitches above an open mouth of sharpened canine teeth. Atop it all are two black eyes, intense yet toying at the same time. My ears register the satisfied, guttural growl that has replaced the howls of the hunt.

Whatever energy I have left forces me up the tree. Halfway up, I learn the extent of my injuries. Stomach is indeed raw. Rough bark bites through two layers of cotton clothing, scraping skin that feels like this is not the first tree it’s encountered. The legs feel chaffed and punctured as they attempt, but fail, to find traction around the shaft. Wounds I was unaware of open anew.

The furry harbinger of doom below me skulks around the base, sniffing and attempting to climb. Growls transitions back to howls, but a different howl than before. More of a whine.

Or a call to action. Other howls respond from the thicket of woods. A prey has been treed. The pack is coming to dine. I look back out to the snowy open field, still vast and empty, virgin minus a few splotches of yellow.

They can’t leave the woods, screams my brain, or perhaps my instinct. Whether through reason or intuition or blind hope, I know I must leave the tree before the other creatures arrive.

A leap of faith vaults me over the hunter. I tweak the other ankle upon landing and pitch forward yet again, a position to which I am becoming quite adept at and averse to. But no time to consider my current plight nor position as the canine makes a final dash toward his escaping prey. Claws scrape through denim, shredding the legs beneath, as I revert to the familiar crab-swim into openness.

The howling returns, this time behind me for sure. Energy fading, I stumble out as far as I can go. The blood from my legs drips past the constricting jeans just as I get to the urine spot. Another two steps, with bright crimson drops merging with faded tan drips.

Three steps forward, I fall for the final time. The stomach wounds open as a bloody pool forms right where the yellow snow had been.

As consciousness wanes, it occurs to me that blood fades over time. Wash out a white shirt, the blood will turn brown, then tan. Eventually a creamy yellow.

What about in snow? Would it turn yellow? Probably.

And it sure tastes salty.

At least I wasn’t lying in piss.

Then white and red and yellow fuse together to become black.

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