"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
As usual, I wrote the weekly and monthly flash fictions. I posted my tenth anniversary Friday Flash Fiction story (which I’d written a couple of months earlier) and gave myself a break for a couple of weeks on the Friday stories.
Sometimes I make it to doing the four pages a day, sometimes it’s close to four, sometimes I just write a page or so and sometimes I slack off. Oh well, it’s progress! I’m amazed I’m still keeping at it!
I am still on a novella/novelette jag. Worked on two of them I’d started earlier and left off. One from an idea I had almost fifty years ago, and had used the characters in a couple of flash fiction stories.
Started a paranormal Gay romance novellette/novella (there are markets for them!) with a character I’ve written about before (he’s Bi.)
Worked on a novella (fourth different one mentioned here!) that I’ve been working on for a couple of months or so. Getting close to the end, just have to tie some of the sections together.
Worked on a new mystery short-story (not a novella!)
Wrote a couple of reviews and the QueerSciFi Column. I don’t have a nice backing of four or five QSF columns at the ready this time.
But the big writing news is I finally replaced my old laptop! It’s a delight to not have to go to the page where I typed-out numbers (12345…) and symbols (!@#$%…) and paste them elsewhere!
It makes me feel spoiled. Even if this new one is a bit selective with spellcheck and I have to do the spellcheck manually. No big. I was relying too much on the automatic thingie anyway.
Again, I probably did more writing than reading this period, and my notes are spread over two (or three!) spiral bound notebooks so I can’t vouch for the 100% accuracy this month. But hey, I’m probably reading more than the average person is. Reading rates have gone down in the last decade.
Oh, well. As Mort Sahl used to say: Onward!
For Arthur Conan Doyle’s May 22nd birthday, I read one of his Brigadier Gerard stories. “How The Brigadier Played For A Kingdom March 1813.” Doyle was a master storyteller and his spinner of tales about military service to Napoleon does not gloos over the realities of war even through the heroism. He explains why he cannot look upon red on white anymore and that those are tales he will not tell.
I read one of these every year on Doyle’s birthday, or in this case the early morning after his birthday.
Bumming through Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Magic Door,” a book he wrote about reading. Basically Doyle takes the reader by the hand and leads him on an ebulant tour of his bookshelves. It’s about a century before all those Book Tube videos that essentially do the same thing. It’s a fun book to dip into, from one of my favorite writers. (Big surprise! Doyle was more of a fan of Julian Hawthorne’s work than of his famous father Nathaniel Hawthorne! Same here, actually!)
Doyle is plain old fun and my Christmas present from the Kitties was Doyle’s book “Tales Of Pirates and Blue-Water,” collecting sea and pirate stories including several about Doyle’s Pirate Captain Sharkey. Read “Captain Sharkey; How The Governor Of Saint Kitt’s Came Home.” Loads of fun and thrills, and a mystery too!
Reading stories in a collection for a QSF column, which I will talk about in said column.
Started reading Theodore Sturgeon’s story “The Perfect Host.” Been ordering the Collected Stories of Sturgeon,, which I thought would be pricy. I found a couple of the books online for $3 apice! Others for a little more.
Got a copy of “Wish Upon A Crime” (edited by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson. Level Best Books 2026.) Crime fiction inspired by fairy tales. Several writer friends of mine have stories in this book. So far, I’ve read:
“Goldilocks And the Three Bears” by John Floyd. LOL!
“Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Michael Bracken.” Great fun.
“King O’ the Cats” by David Dean. An effective crime/horror tale!
Started reading Madeline Miller’s novel “The Song Of Achilles.” A contemporary Gay take on Greek Mythology (which was pretty Gay to start with!)
In honor of the passing of writer Jane Yolen I read stories from her collection “Sister Emily’s Lightship.” Read “The Gift Of the Magicians, With Apologies To You-Know-Who.” “The Singer And the Song,” and “Salvage.”
Of course, I read the usual online stories by E.H. Timms and Kaje Harper.th the to bumps
And I read Nathanial Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux.” It plays like a riff (or a precursor, not sure which he wrote first!) on his own “Young Goodman Brown,” only without a hint of the supernatural. Unless, the fellow with the two bumps on his head is who I think he might be…
Also read Hawthorne’s preface to his collection “Twice-Told-Tales.” Self-depricating and very charming!
The Hawthorne selections from “The Portable Nathaniel Hawthorne.” I love those “Portable” collections from The Viking Portable Library and I practically collect them!
To the extent, that I looked up a couple of publication dates and went off on a tangent reading up about more of the “Portable” books!
“Hey! Look at this!” Jim said, pulling the small plastic baggie out of the small cardboard box box from the closet.
“Let me see,” Kevin said.
He took the clear bag, one of those little sandwich bags that re-seals, that contained what looked like several small bars of soap. Some in colorful paper wrappers.
“Hotel soap, I bet.” Jim said.
“Wow!” Kevin said. “I haven’t seen these in years!” He pulled a bar out and showed Jim the wrapper.
“Sleepy Bear Motel, Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Jim read from the wrapper, which depicted a smiling bear in a nightshirt sleepwalking. Jim was smiling at the memories.
“We’ve got a bag full of soap, how come we never use any of it?” Kevin asked.
“We’re lazy.” Jim said. “We stuffed the boxful of junk in the back of the closet, remember? We were tidying up the house a few years ago? Yeah, there’s a closet joke in there somewhere?”
Kevin laughed. “I guess we didn’t want to use them up,” he said. He pulled out an unwrapped bar of soap and held it up. “Here’s one for you. From a few Christmases ago.”
The little bar of soap was cream colored with three words in red on the front:
HO!
HO!
HO!
“Oh, man!” Jim said. “Mom and Dad gave us this one.”
“That first Christmas after I moved in, remember?” Kevin said.
“I remember.” Jim said, breaking out into a broad grin. “You were so worried!”
“Oh, yeah.” Kevin said. “I was kind of paranoid.”
“Yeah. As soon as we were driving back home you started asking ‘Do they know? Do they know?’” Jim said, trying not to laugh.
“I had reason to be paranoid,” Kevin said.
“I can’t say I blame you.” Jim said. “I mean, we didn’t tell them the whole story of how we met.”
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “Just that we met in a bar and we hit it off. That worked.”
“Didn’t tell Mom and Dad that I’d been trashed out of my mind and I hit on you because the bartender told me you were…well…”
“Hustling.” Kevin said with another smile.
“Yeah, didn’t tell them that.” Jim said. They both laughed.
Jim sorted through the box some more.
“I’ll just consider myself lucky that I was always really careful.” Kevin said, as he pulled out an old razor from the box.
“Yes.” Jim said. He’d been worried when they’d gotten together.
“Oh, just imagine telling your folks; ‘Hey Mom, Dad. This is my hustler boyfriend Kevin. We met when I tried to hit on him when I was drunk at a bar and he drove me home in my car and I let him sack out in my bed and we just slept and he didn’t charge me.’” Kevin said.
They laughed again.
“And you didn’t have a place to stay and I didn’t have to work that next day so you stayed and we talked…” Jim said.
“And kissed a little.” Kevin said, smiling with the memory.
“And one thing left to another and you never left.” Jim said.
“And I got my first legitimate job in a while.” Kevin said. “Didn’t make as much but probably safer.”
Yeah.” Jim said. “You know, I’m betting Mom and Dad wouldn’t have been that shocked if they’d found out you’d been…”
“Ho, ho, hoing?” Kevin said with a wicked grin, holding up the soap.
“Right.” Jim said snickering.
“This was what? Thirty-six Christmases ago?” Kevin asked.
“Goin’ on forty.” Jim said, rubbing his bald spot, fringed with grey.
The two men shuffled stuff around in the box. A bunch of packets of bath soap that had been Jim’s Mom’s. Lipstick. Stuff they couldn’t identify.
“Hey, the cleanout is a good idea.” Kevin said. “What do you want to do with all this stuff?”
The two of them stared at each other for a moment.
“Finish it later,” they said together. Then they laughed.
“Finishing each other’s sentences,” Kevin said as they slid the box back into the corner of the hall closet.
“And putting off what we can do today ‘till next year.” Jim said. They helped each other up and shut the closet door.
Kevin held up the bag of soaps. “This is going in the bathroom cabinet,” he said. “We need to get some use out of them.”
Jim pulled out the Christmas soap. “And use this one first.”
The two of them stood there and kissed.
“Merry Christmas,” Kevin said as they walked towards the bathroom.
“Look out there,” the father said. “Can you see it?”
“See what?” his son replied. He was sixteen. “I can’t even see across the street because of this fog.”
“Yes, I know,” said the father.
“Just glad we’re inside,” the son said. “That fog came out of nowhere.”
“Yes, I know,” the father said. “But this is no ordinary fog. Watch this.”
The father pulled out his cellphone and snapped a picture. He showed it to his son.
In the picture, the street scene was bright and clear. Broad daylight. Tall buildings rising up from downtown in the background. Not a trace of fog.
“Hey, that’s cool!” the son said. “How’d you do that?”
“I didn’t,” the father said. “Try it yourself.”
He handed the cellphone to his son who flipped through the pictures then took one of the swirling fog himself.
“No fog,” the son said staring at the new picture. “That’s lowkey weird.”
“Not everybody can see the fog,” the father said. “People go through the day not realizing the fog is there.”
“Wow.” the son said.
“Fog covers,” the father said. “It hides. But if you see the fog you know that there is something hidden. Maybe by apathy or ignorance. Even willful ignorance.”
“Ignorance,” the son said. “Of what?”
“Current events,” the father said. “Turmoil. This is the 250th year of this country. There is danger all around the world and people are retreating into their own fog but only some other people can see it.”
The father sighed.
“People listen or look at the news they want to hear. What they want to believe,” the father said. “And that is a major first step in the undoing of everything. This fog doesn’t just hide, it announces to people that the ones who can’t see or won’t see the fog are lost in it.”
“So, what can we do?” the son asked.
“We can stand up,” the father said. “Stand for truth and honesty. Even in a world where the word ‘truth’ is distorted and misused. Stand up to help the downtrodden, the disabled, the disadvantaged. For those who haven’t been as lucky as we have.”
The son nodded, grim-faced.
“In ‘A Christmas Carol,’ Dickens has the Ghost Of Christmas Present show Scrooge two figures and tells him; ‘This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, but most of all, beware this boy.’”
The father sighed again.
“The world is at war and doesn’t know it,” he said.
The father and son stood there at the window and watched the fog.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Thanks for reading! Nice to be back! —-jeff
The First Lord of Apes stared at the members of the Council of Primates assembled there in the stable. Chimps, Gorillas, Orangutans. The entire gamut of Primtes. They listened to the First Lord of Apes because he was bigger than they were.
He paced back and forth in front of the trough of hay as he spoke.
“I have called you all here because someone has robbed the Shared Storehouse. Taken without asking.”
“What was taken,” the Oldest Orangutan asked. “A jar of your precious grubs?”
There was general laughter from the assembled groups and their leaders. Representatives rarely traveled alone, and they generally regarded the storehouse as being for the First Lord of Apes’ private use unless you groveled.
The First Lord of Apes glared. He did not like being laughed at, even though the chimps would laugh at anything.
“This is a serious matter,” the First Lord of Apes said. “The last bunch of bananas was stolen. A big bunch.”
The chimps began to titter. The Prince of Chimps raised a hand.
“Great Sir,” the Prince of Chimps asked. “You do know that bananas grow wild in the trees near the river?”
“And on the trees down by the lake!” Laughed the other chimps. “And in the trees by the road!”
The first Lord of Apes growled. He suspected the chimps of the thievery. By Hanuman, he suspected everybody. But the chimps would have brazenly brought the banana peels to throw at him, had they been guilty.
“We shall know,” said Oldest Orangutan, “when we find what manner of strength was used to batter open the storeroom door. We have all seen it, how thick it is. One of the larger primates or a group of the smaller ones could have forced their way in.” He eyed the chimps suspiciously.
“The doors were not damaged,” the First Lord of Apes said. “The intricate system of locks I devised were undone and opened.”
There was a murmur among the primates. Even the chimps were subdued in wonder.
“I shall now ask the heads of each group in the Council in turn what they know of the theft.” The First Lord of Apes narrowed his eyes. “And who they suspect.”
“It sounds to me that what was stolen was your pride,” said the Chief of the Gorillas.
“Yes, your secure storehouse is not as secure as you said it was,” said the Prime Minister of the Monkeys. “Is it?”
The Queen of the Rhesus Monkeys stood up with all her dignity.
“We may need a new leader,” she said.
At this statement, chaos erupted in the stable. Chittering, yelling and growling. The First Lord of the Apes doing most of the yelling. The chimps jumping up and down, one of them swinging from the rafters of the stable, another rolling in the trough of hay. An orangutan was arguing with the Queen of the Rhesus Monkeys whose bodyguards shifted uncomfortably on their feet and looked from side to side. A clump of feces flew through the air over the heads of the assembly. One of the monkeys was screaming for order.
Far from the stable, in the thick branches of an ancient tree, hidden from sight, a primate sat and gorged himself on the stolen bananas. Eating them all at once might make him sick. He didn’t care.
He told himself he was celebrating his stealth and dexterity which enabled him to raid the storehouse the First Lord of Apes believed to be impregnable. The storeroom the lithe, nearly-hairless primate would now consider to be his as well.
He smiled. The others considered his kind to be beneath their notice. He finished off the last banana and headed on his way.
He was Man.
—end—
The draws for the June 2026 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were: A Mystery, set in a Stable involving a Bunch of Bananas. I must have been channeling Rudyard Kipling a little bit when this came out of me. Hope you liked it! —-mike
First, here’s the prompts for the June 2026 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge, then my usual long-winded explanation:
A Mystery
Involving A Bunch of Bananas
Set in A Stable
Now, on to the details.
Hi! I’m Mike Mayak, I also write as Jeff Baker and I’m the current moderator for the monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge, which was started by ‘Nathan Burgoine a few years ago and carried on by Cait Gordon and Jeffrey Ricker. It’s a monthly writing challenge mainly for stress-free fun that anyone can play.
Here’s how it works: the first Monday of every month I draw three cards; a heart, a diamond and a club. These correspond to a list naming a genre, a setting and an object that must appear in the story. Participants write up a flash fiction story, 1,000 words or less, post it to their website and link it here in the comments. I’ll post the results (including, hopefully, one of my own!)
As I’m no good making videos I did the drawing offstage. So, the results were the Six of Hearts (a Mystery), the Ten of Diamonds (A Stable) and the Five of Clubs (A Bunch of Bananas.)
So we will write a Mystery, involving a bunch of bananas, set in a stable.
We’ll have the results here in this same space around Monday June 15th, 2026.
So, get to writing and I’ll post the results next week! And I’m putting the 2026 Flash Draw sheet at the end of this message, again! (* indicates those have been used.)
Thanks for playing, and I’ll see you in about week!
Every Week at Rainbow Snippets https://www.facebook.com/groups/RainbowSnippets participants post six lines of a work of theirs, a work-in-progress or a work by someone else that has LGBT characters. This time around, my short snippets are from a long, long erotica/fantasy/adventure novella I’m in the process of writing.
Little in young Kendric’s twenty-three summers has prepared him from being kidnapped in the Territory his father rules and to be marched to the land ruled by the evil Saratos.
(I’d list the title of the story, except I have to come up with a better one for this!)
A young man, a slave my height and probably my age brushed past us, glancing at me for an instant, long enough for me to take in his deep brown eyes, his lean but muscular light-brown body, his straight dark hair that hung down just below his ears and the outline of a bird of prey seared into one of his bare shoulders. At that moment, I heard a voice calling out something I could not make out. I glanced up in time to see a tall man in robes that seemed to denote authority gesturing at us. One of my captors gestured back. As we drew nearer the robed man pointed towards the entrance to a corridor in the inner wall. We went through the entrance, down the corridor and down a flight of stairs where I struggled to maintain my balance with my hands still bound behind me.
So, how does this end? Does Kendric ever encounter the dark-haired young man again? Does he ever get out of this predicament? I’ll let you know; it isn’t finished yet! Thanks for reading!
Since today is the actual tenth anniversary of my first near-weekly flash fiction, here’s a favorite from 2018: “Shine On Harvest Moon.” —–jeff
Shine On, Harvest Moon
(A Demeter’s Bar story)
By Jeff Baker
The sun was streaming through the back window at Demeter’s Bar as the old man sipped his drink and started talking about genetic engineering.
“We were a lot more knowledgeable about science a few millennia ago,” he said. “There were ancient peoples that adapted themselves to exist in other environments. For example, why travel across the ocean when you can build a civilization under the ocean? That’s where the legends of mermaids and mermen come from.”
I sat at the end of the bar and gave a wink at Zack, the cute bartender with the long red hair. He seemed to be paying attention, but I knew better.
“Where did you find out about genetically-engineered mermen?” I asked, glancing at the poster on the wall of the stud of the month, wearing nothing but a purple G-string.
“Long ago, I used to go swimming with mermen,” the man said.
Yeah, that explains it, I thought. He went on.
I was eighteen years old and just out of school (the man said.) It was the summer of 1958, and I was living on the East Coast. Working at a resort in the evenings and exploring the beach and the occasional obliging man during the day. Not that my life was something out of a book by Greenleaf Classics. It was on one of those beach explorations that I heard the music, coming from an area I hadn’t been to before, mainly because of the rocky part of the coast. Nonetheless, the music seemed to draw me to it. Bell-like chords that seemed to echo. I rounded a rocky cliff and saw a group of nice looking, muscular young men out a ways in the water singing and harmonizing. Before I knew what I was doing I took a couple of steps forward and fell several feet down into the water, which thankfully was not shallow. I was lucky I didn’t hit my head but I had the wind knocked out of me. I was sinking to the bottom, stunned when I felt hands pulling me swiftly to the surface. I gulped air and stared at the quickly receding shoreline. I was being pulled out to sea with great speed! After a few minutes we stopped and I was let go as a voice said “You’ll be all right. Just tread water. We won’t let you sink.”
The voice was right, and I was able to catch my breath and get my bearings. We were a ways away from shore and I was able to examine the young men who had pulled me to safety. They were young, muscular and of various ethnicities and I was too stunned to be cautious and openly ogled them. They laughed, explaining that they were well able to tell my proclivities and they lived in (as the put it) a country where such things are not shunned but taken for granted. When I asked them how they were able to get this far from shore so fast, they laughed again and several of them flipped over in the water revealing that, yes, they all had fish tails, like an ad in the back of an issue of a very racy magazine the Mattachine Society would recommend.
In answer to my questions, they explained that their ancestors had been able to evolve themselves to live underwater and had founded a great civilization.
“Atlantis?” I gasped. This was greeted with more laughter, and they explained that the legends of Atlantis predated the mermen’s civilization, and may have been just legends. Nonetheless, the mer-people could live underwater and had keen senses and their voices had the power to attract land-dwelling humans with their less-developed senses, which was why I had been compelled to walk into the water, as they had been singing too close to the shore and I had been in earshot. They then revealed their great ambition; to take the greatest music of all back to their people. They had heard it from the beach, young men harmonizing. And they demonstrated with their version of what they had heard and I was stunned to realize that I was hearing mermen performing barbershop harmony! That was their other dream; to perform for humans. But, as they could not walk on land and as their singing would draw people hypnotically to them it seemed an impossible goal.
For the rest of the afternoon, the mermen and I frolicked, kissed, sang old songs I knew (I taught them “Shine on, Harvest Moon,” and several others) and swam at incredible speeds with me happily in tow until the sun began to dip towards the horizon and my new companions deposited me on the rocky shore and bid me farewell for now.
The next week, the last of the resort season, it stormed so I couldn’t get to the beach and by the next summer I was in the army. When I finally made it back to the beach, years later, the rocky area had been torn down. They were putting up a bridge from there to one of the islands. I had no way of knowing where the mermen had gone, and no real way of finding them. I certainly couldn’t put an ad in the local paper asking if anyone knew the whereabouts of a group of singing gay mermen, could I? Not even in the supposedly liberated 1960’s.
The man finished his drink and stared off into space.
“And you never saw them again?” Zack asked. In spite of himself he’d been listening.
“No. But I did try,” the man said. “I’ve spent countless vacations combing beaches listening for that tell-tale harmony. And just to be safe, I watched every episode of ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ hoping Ed would roll a big tank on stage and introduce a singing sensation from near Atlantis. And, speaking of water,” he held up his glass. “Scotch and water. Again. Thanks.”
Well, it doesn’t seem like yesterday but it was ten years ago this month I saw a post on Facebook for a weekly flash fiction page and decided to try a story myself. That first one was okay and I decided to try another one the next week, which was not that good. So I did the third one the next week and I was off and running.
It’s been a real challenge sometimes, and I won’t pretend it’s made me a better person but I am a better writer. I am certainly a much more disciplined writer. And I will recommend writing on a regular deadline to teach you a lot of discipline. I’m not sure of the exact count but between the weekly stories and the monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge stories and a few extras I’m up to about six-hundred tales written for and posted on this blog, under my own name and my pen-name “Mike Mayak.”
I need to thank a lot of people here; First all the moderators of the Monday and Friday Flash Fiction pages as well as everyone who wrote a story, commented on or read a story I wrote (Bless you, especially for reading!!) My friends and family, my late parents and late husband Darryl and the friends I have amazingly made writing these weekly stories. I will do a special shout-out to ‘Nathan Burgoine, Brigham Vaughn, Kelly Jensen, Elizabeth Lister, Cait Gordon, Jeffrey Ricker, E. H. Timms, Kaje Harper, Brent and Lori Silveria, Rick and Amy Tharp, Jan Grape, Danny Boling, the late Helena Stone, the late John Bogner and all the teachers who tried to teach me how to write and others too many to mention. And I will tip my cosmo topper to my late College buddies Terry Jones and Mark Lebsack who would have seen themselves referenced, if obliquely, in one or two of these stories.
Sometimes writing under a deadline gets a little, well, deadline-y and I actually did consider ending the run of weekly stories at the ten-year mark a while back. But I can’t do that—it’s usually too much fun seeing what comes next!
Like this anniversary story. I’ve written a lot of series characters here; the weird adventures of Billy Gonzalez, the supernatural wanderings of teenage Gay runaway Bryce Going, the science-fictional denizens of Demeter’s Bar as well as a host of detectives and romantics some of which have longer adventures published in anthologies and other online venues.
Wonky the Dog has a lot of fans on this page. Canine TV cartoon co-host and part-time detective whose name was suggested by my late husband Darryl. Wonky hasn’t wagged his tail (or tale) on this page in a few years, so here he is just in time to celebrate ten years of stories with a brand-new story of his own: “Wonky And the All-Seeing Eye.”
Wonky And The All-Seeing Eye
by Jeff Baker
Benjy Baxter, tall, redheaded and not looking like he was almost thirty leaned back in the soft swivel chair in the TV studio and grinned, listening to the interviewer. They were sitting under a banner that read “WUBG TV 1956-1996 Celebrating Forty Years!!”
It was like old times, being in the WUBG studios. Beside him, Wonky the little mixed-breed dog listened attentively from his own chair. Benjy’s grin grew broader as he remembered that the studio had loaned him the suit he was wearing but the dressing room was registered to Wonky.
“Benjy, you weren’t actually supposed to be Wonky’s co-host, were you?”
Like the question, Benjy’s story was on cue cards but he’d told the story so often he just launched into it without thinking.
“I was on-set as Wonky’s trainer back when we were doing the show live and the new host they’d hired was at a bar celebrating. Anyhow when he couldn’t do the show the director all but begged me to go on with Wonky. They threw me in a different shirt and poofed some makeup on my face. I must’ve looked like I’d gotten into a fight with a bag of flour.”
The interviewer laughed.
“The camera came on and there we were! I was awful! But Wonky was a pro, just like his Dad had been.” Benjy reached over and scratched Wonky behind the ears. “And the revival of the show took off!”
“And a few years later you two got to take the show to cable TV all across the country.” the interviewer said.
“Yeah,” Benjy said.
“And that got Wonky those dog food commercials,” the interviewer said.
Very lucrative commercials, Benjy thought.
Wonky looked over and smiled as Benjy launched into the story of being there during the commercials filming.
Benjy sat there and glanced around the darkened studio as the Interviewer showed a couple of pictures of the original Wonky from the Sixties and Seventies and told the story of how Wonky Number One had been the current Wonky’s Grandfather and had been a shelter dog that Benjy’s Uncle, a dog trainer, had rescued and trained. Two Wonkys had co-hosted the show until it was discontinued in the early Eighties.
The cameraman moved the camera in closer as Benjy was telling about his actually being in the studio twenty years earlier when Wonky bristled and started to growl.
Wonky jumped off the chair and ran up to the cameraman, grabbing his pants leg in his teeth.
“Wonky! No! Stop!” Benjy yelled, jumping up and rushing over to try and grab the dog.
Wonky usually didn’t act like this, Benjy thought, unless…
The cameraman ran off and Benjy glanced down and realized what had been bothering him; the camera wasn’t connected to any cable or cord. Benjy started to open the big camera, as Wonky rushed up and started to bark.
“Oh, golly!” Benjy said. “Somebody call security! And maybe the bomb squad!”
“Fireworks, not dynamite,” said the man from the Bomb Squad when they let people back into the building an hour later. “Could still do a lot of damage. This empty camera was full of them.”
“We have a couple of old cameras like this in the storeroom,” the Station Manager said.
“The cops grabbed the guy,” Billy Gander the security guard said. “Remember Bill Sykes?”
“Don’t think so,” Benjy said as Wonky growled at the name.
“You’re the guy who took his job a few years ago when he didn’t show up,” Gander said.
“Oh, wow!” Benjy said. “I never even met him. I’ll bet when I was telling that story he started seething and Wonky noticed.”
“Sykes said he was here for revenge on the station,” the Station Manager said. “Glad Wonky was here!”
“Yeah, he’s a good fella, aren’t you?” Benjy said as Wonky wagged his tail and accepted Benjy’s backrubs and petting. “And y’know, I’ll bet Wonky knows a lot more than he ever lets on!”
Wonky let out with a happy “Ruufff!”
—end—
Author’s Note:
I am going to be away from the laptop for a week or so but I promise I’ll be back, even if I may slow down a bit in the future. But there will be more stories. As Ernest Hemingway said: “I know some good ones.”
authorjeffbaker 