Wrote about a page (in various chunks on different parts of the ms.) and now I have about 1,100 words. Not bad, for something that started out as an idea from a dream that I wrote down about four years ago! I may have it ready to send off in about a month!
Keeping odd hours, the writing took place in the early morning hours of Wed. 29th.
That’s all for now!
Good News! I just got my copies of “The Necronomicon of Solar Pons” in the mail. Including my story “Solar Pons and the Testament In Ice,” the book is full of stories involving August Derleth’s version of Sherlock Holmes, Solar Pons, battling the Eldrich creepies of H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos stories. I had fun writing this, and best of all I wrote part of the story in the house my folks (and I) had lived in for a long time before they moved.
Nice to be published again after a dry year last year! Feels good!
Wrote some on one of the three or four stories I have in progress, and started next week’s Friday Flash Fiction story, based on a dream I had a while back. Oh, and I added some notes to another story.
That’s all!
Angel Martinez, herself a fine author, does a weekly reading on Fridays on a podcast on her website. While you’re there, check out some of her other features; loads of fun and information! Here, she gives a reading of one of my flash fiction stories from about two and a half years ago. (The picture above was the prompt which inspired it!)
When He Reached The Town-O
By Jeff Baker
There was no moon, just a starry sky. Dark, the way the Fox liked it. He smiled to himself; with any luck there would be rabbit or egg or fowl for his den tonight as he raced across the field towards the edge of the town. There was a farm near the town where they did not always guard their stock, and that made it a fox’s larder. He heard and smelled a young mouse run across his path. Carless! It would become a mouse-morsel except the Fox could see the dark bulk of the barn and farmhouse ahead. He stopped and sniffed the air and listened.
The soft rustle and murmur of nesting hens. Distant sounds from the town. No other noises other than the rustle of leaves and grass. The Fox quickly squeezed under the wire fence around the small yard around the chicken coop. It would have to be quick; find a hen, a sharp, quick bite, the quick removal of the hen amid the noise and a quick run into the dark with his meal for the night.
The Fox was stealthily approaching the dark of the henhouse when there was a stirring and fluttering in the air in front of him. In the dark he could make out a form slightly larger than a hen; birdlike, with a beak, spread wings that glinted with color and a long tail that swished back and forth like a snake.
“I am Echeveriagallinapotel,” it said. Not in the tongue of the hens or the foxes, but understood plainly nonetheless. “I am the Protector-Lord of this flock. Who dares approach to feast of their flesh?”
“I, the Fox,” he said. “I seek what is mine, by the law of the land. I ask only a meal to fill my belly.”
“The laws of your land are not the laws of mine,” the bird-snake thing said “My brethren and I felt the blood of sacrifices spill on the land. It is consecrated to us. When those who worshipped us moved north, we moved with them. Who are you to claim the land?”
“My ancestors roamed here when yours were confined to the lands near the Equator,” the Fox said. “We know the grasses and the winds here. Our name is spoken in hushed whispers in this land’s nests and burrows. We are a part of its smells; the flash of our tails in the dusk is a sight well-known here. The taste of hens and mice is part our being. We claim the right to eat, as any creature does.”
“You seek what is under my protection,” the bird-snake thing said. “This I cannot allow.”
“I do not recognize your authority,” the Fox said, carefully eying the bird-snake thing’s beak. It was curved and sharp. “And I claim a hen as tribute.”
“You have not earned tribute,” Echeveriagallinapotel said, clicking his beak and fluttering his wings.
“I have earned it by raising my kits and providing for them. And by being a part of the non-human community here. We were here before humans, we will be here after,” the Fox said.
The bird-snake thing flapped its wings and clicked its beak. The Fox glared and barred his teeth.
The bird-snake thing began to swell and grow before the Fox’s eyes. The beak clicked menacingly, the Fox noticed, for the first time, a sharp spike at the end of the serpent tail.
“Hear me, intruder!” Echeveriagallinapotel said, voice booming. “I defend those in my protectorate! I will tear your flesh and strew it along the ground! You will become food for other flocks! Mine are sacred and eat of the grains, not the lesser animals!”
There are times to fight, the Fox thought, and times to retreat. This was the latter. The Fox quickly fled the way he came and was soon skirting the houses near the edge of town. There would be a rabbit or a mouse or some unwary bird. And they would not have protectors. He would not go hungry.
The Fox sniffed the air.
—end—
Photo by Mike on Pexels.com
People are celebrating Shakespeare’s Birthday (probably April 23, 1864) in this strangest of years. Shakespeare himself lived in strange, dangerous times, so I think this is appropriate. My offering of fiction here is something of an alternate history, riffing on a real event touched on in one of the Bard’s most famous plays (and a favorite of mine!)
The Siege of Agincourt
By Jeff Baker
“So you won’t produce it?”
“Won’t produce it?” I said. “The Players won’t even go near it!”
“Why?” Will asked. “Be you afraid this play be treason?”
“Nay! It be boring! Worst fear for any player!” I said. “I’d rather face the French myself than go before a crowd hungry for fresh-cooked goose and give them dry grass such as this!”
“But ‘tis true to life! I have read the accounts of Bedford! And of Salisbury, who was with Henry ‘till his deathbed in 1453!” Will said.
“True to life and boring! Henry V was a poor king and a poor strategist! He lost to the French, who pushed him back, and had it not been for the Channel and the grace of God we would have been French these hundred-and-sixty years!” I said.
“Henry was a man of great mercy, and I show him thusly!” Will said. “The weight of decision! The true mark of a King! He could have slain the French prisoners right there on the battlefield, instead he let them live…”
“Live to realize they outnumbered Henry’s exhausted forces and thus grabbing up the weapons strewn on the battlefield joined in again and caught them off-guard and sent the survivors running.” I said. “Now if you could find why the French did not follow Henry’s forces in their retreat all the way to England and begin to conquer the island, you might have something.”
“But…” Will began. I cut him off.
“The British audience is not ready to re-live the bitter history of a King running tail between his legs to Monmouth, or of an emboldened France beginning an empire which now runs to the very coast of Africa.” I said.
“So, what do I do with the play?” Will asked.
“Burn it, but save one man from the conflagration. This Oldcastle,” I mused. “Ignore young Hal and make Oldcastle the central figure. There’s a play in that with wenches and drink and merriment which will pull the crowds in, mark what I say.”
—end—
