"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
The hair sofa crinkled as Lev shifted his position.
“How long have we been sitting here?” Lev asked.
“Since Midnight, Walter said. “Just about three hours.”
The two men glanced around the darkened Heckel Street Synagogue. Familiar but dark and quiet except for the occasional sound of a car from outside.
“Rabbi Klein must’ve been pretty worried or he wouldn’t have us standing guard in the place at night.” Lev said.
“Glad we don’t have to stand!” Walter chuckled. “Rabbi has a right to be worried, considering how things are in this country right now.”
“Protests, threats of violence,” Lev sighed. “Who would have thought things could change like this after just one election?”
“My Grandmother used to say that “In the darkness, the stars are still there if we look.” Walter said.
“Still, if there’s trouble I brought this,” Walter said pulling the object out from under the sofa.
“My nephew’s baseball bat.”
“I’ve seen those!” Lev said. “Did he get that when he visited America?”
“Yes,” Walter said, smacking the bat in his palm. “He said if things get bad I could use it on Hitler.”
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Draws for the February 2025 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were Historical Fiction, set in a Synagogue involving a Hair Sofa. A pretty obvious story but one I felt I ought to write. —–mike
“Pop! Pop!” Maxwell called, running into the back office.
“Don’t call me Pop,” the older man behind the desk said. “What happened?”
“They broke down the fence again,” Maxwell said pointing towards the front of the shop. “And they’re in the parking lot.”
The two of them walked through the shop full of fashionable, decorative items, festooned in veils and lights and a special Valentine’s Day display. They walked out the front door, under the sign reading “Luanne’s Fashionable Boutique” and into the small parking lot. The lot was black asphalt surrounded with small bushes, trimmed and sculpted into various shapes and festooned with small white Christmas lights.
The two small dinosaurs were happily munching on one of the low bushes, blissfully unaware of anybody or anything.
“See?” Maxwell said. The kid was tall, pale, dark-haired and in his early twenties. He remembered riding a brontosaurus at DinoPark next door when he’d been in Grade School.
Pop was old, at least forty-five and looked a lot like Ed Asner. The kid didn’t know who that was. Some people said Pop looked like he should always be smoking a cigar, but he didn’t smoke.
“They trampled that flimsy wire fence and marched right in again,” Pop said disgustedly.
“It’s probably the lights on the bushes,” Maxwell said. That’s what attracts them.”
“No, I think it’s just the fact that the greenery looks like a buffet,” Pop said. “I went over and told the owners last time they ought to make extra money renting those things out to mow people’s lawns.”
“Yeah,” Maxwell said.
“Hey! You!” Pop yelled. “Get away from there!”
The smaller dinosaur looked up for a moment and went back to munching on the bush. The slightly bigger one spat out a light bulb and stuck it’s head further into the greenery, only it’s own long, deep green neck visible.
“Swell,” Pop said. “And one of those damn things is gonna swing his tail and put a dent in somebody’s car. You go over to DinoPark and tell them to come get their green…” Pop sputtered.
Maxwell nodded. He tried not to grin; he’d get to talk to Kurt at DinoPark again. He wasn’t quite sure if that was the reason they never reinforced the fence.
Maybe he could ask Kurt out—and he’d be on the clock to do it!
As Maxwell was walking away, giving the munching dinosaurs a wide berth, Pop called out behind him.
“And see if you can sell your boyfriend on a couple of our decorative bushes. Maybe if they have their own they won’t eat ours.”
Maxwell blushed and grinned as he headed over to DinoPark.
Since I’m replacing my worn-out laptop, I’m doing these draws a couple of days early! So, here’s the prompts for the February 2025 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge. Followed by my usual long-winded explanation:
Historical Fiction
Involving A Hair Sofa
Set in A Synagogue
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 King of Hearts (Historical Fiction), the Seven of Diamonds (A Synagogue) and the Jack of Clubs (A Hair Sofa.)
So we will write Historical Fiction, set in a Synagogue, involving a Hair Sofa.
We’ll have the results here in this same space around Monday February 10th, 2025, if my laptop is ready!
So, get to writing and I’ll post the results next week! And I’m putting the 2025 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!
And have fun!
——mike
Here’s the list:
Flash Draw Sheet for 2025 (“*” indicates prompt has been used.)
I was working in a little diner on the outside of town when I found the money.
Corley’s Burgers was about the size of a couple of single-wide trailers fixed together at a big right angle, with the kitchen in the other trailer behind the counter.
The dining room had a row of tables with metal cushioned chairs on one side and cushioned seats built into the wall on the other. Napkin dispensers and ketchup on every table. They made an effort to make the place more homey, with several big potted plants and multi-colored curtains on the windows and pictures on the wall of outdoor scenes.
I bussed tables, vacuumed the floors and washed dishes. Stuff I’d done before. Polly, the owner had started as a waitress ten years earlier back in the ‘60s and she was nice but firm. You did your job right things were okay.
Polly was tall and lean with brown hair streaked with grey. She liked me and if she didn’t believe the story I gave; that my name was Bryce Going, that I wound up in town after an argument with my girlfriend where she tossed me out of the car on the highway and I was twenty years old without any I. D., she never questioned it.
I was glad, especially the part about the girlfriend. She may have caught me glancing at the backside of Robbie, the regular dishwasher once but she didn’t say anything. And she paid me in cash which was nice. The town wasn’t big and I was renting a beat-up old trailer from someone. Not really furnished but it had heat and a toilet so I didn’t complain. For a closeted Gay kid whose parents had bailed on him and was avoiding a boys home by pretending to be in his twenties I was doing okay.
Burgers and coffee were our most popular item, emphasis on the coffee. We had our regulars, a lot of them truck drivers who stopped for lunch (we closed at seven in the evening) and a handful of people from town who spent the afternoon shooting the breeze and ordering coffee refills for their table.
Mr. Mortonson was one of them. He looked seventy-ish, had long grey hair hanging down from a bald spot and usually wore a green overcoat and slippers. I talked to him a few times; he asked me a couple of questions when I was cleaning off the table next to his and was generally pretty nice. He asked if I was going to the community college in the nearby town and I told him no, I’d dropped out of High School. Which I guess I had, although I’d never thought of it that way before.
He even tipped me once as he was leaving; pressing a dollar bill into my hand and telling me he’d had a few lean times too.
“Noblesse Oblige” he said with a grin as he walked out the door.
Believe me, I thanked him and saved the dollar.
The store was closed and I was sweeping up and cleaning off the tables when I found a funny-looking coin in one of the booth seats in the crevasse where stuff usually wound up.
It was the size of a quarter but it didn’t look or feel like any quarter. There were symbols on one side that I couldn’t read and the other side had an engraving of a face with a long beard. The coin was worn as if from years of rubbing and the beard looked stringy almost like a squid’s tentacles.
Polly had left to make the night deposit at the bank. I was glad Victor the cook had gone with her. He was big and intimidating and he had a gun that we weren’t supposed to know about.
As I grabbed the little wastebasket behind the counter I glanced out the window. It had been cloudy all day but the sky was clearing and I could see the full Moon.
I dumped the wastebasket into the trash bag I was carrying and I heard a rustle from across the room. I looked up. Nobody. I walked over to the trash can by the front door and I heard the rustle again.
I glanced up.
The potted plants were moving.
I was never sure what they were, some kind of fern or some tall kind of grass. But they were all waving, like in a breeze. They were waving in unison. I walked over, feeling for a breeze, maybe the air conditioner had come on.
One of the plants reached out and grabbed my wrist with a long leafy tendril.
I screamed and jumped back.
The plants wobbled and shuddered in their pots and a couple of them started wobbling towards me. I yelled again and was going to run but I tripped and fell. With a clink, the coin fell out of my shirt pocket and lay there on the faded carpet. It glinted with a glow all its own, a glow like the full Moon.
The wobbling plants were advancing on me. I managed to pull myself up and ran for the door. I almost screamed again; Mr. Mortonson was standing there in the big glass door an anxious look on his face. He pointed at the door handle and I opened the door, intending to run out but he brushed past me and grabbed the coin and held it up in front of the advancing plants and began to mutter or chant.
I couldn’t catch what he said but part of it said like “Aye-Aye,” and “You-Hoo Flagging.”
The plants wobbled back to where they had been and suddenly I KNEW they were just plants again.
Mortonson pocketed the coin and smiled apologetically.
“They won’t bother you again,” he said. “It was a bad day for me to bring this outside,” he patted his pocket with the coin in it. “But I forgot. I’m old.”
He shrugged and headed for the door.
He turned around and smiled again. “You’ll be fine,” he said.
“But what?” I started to ask.
He put a finger to his lips. “Noblesse Oblige,” he said and walked out the door.
I finished cleaning up and considered quitting, all the while keeping an eye on the plants.
Besides the column, I worked on a couple of my longer stories. And, of course, I resumed writing the weekly flash fiction stories and it was nice getting back in harness after the break! Wrote a couple of extra flashes including the monthly draw story and an end-of-the-year story from the three leftover prompts from the 2024 list.
Wrote a longer flash fiction for Clark Ashton Smith’s birthday that might have fit in a Sword-and-Sorcery magazine somewhere.
My plans for the year are to get back into doing longer fiction. I have several stories started I need to finish, as well as one that needs revising.
I also want to get a backlog of a few months worth of Queer Sci-Fi columns written so I don’t have to dash around just under the deadline to finish it.
I can’t believe that this will be my ninth year of near-weekly flash fictions and I have passed the 400 mark of produced and posted stories!
Continuing my Rudyard Kipling jag I (re-)read “The Bridge Builders,” a story I had read before maybe 30+ years ago.
Read some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book,” where he re-tells Greek Myths for a young audience. I read a lot of these stories but never his version. A lot lighter tone than in his more famous works (like “Scarlet Letter.”)
Finished reading Kipling’s story “The Maltese Cat,” a story about Polo from the horse’s point of view. Funny and actually sweet! (I had to look up a couple of the old songs mentioned in the tale; at least one of them quite bawdy!) It’s Kipling’s December 30th birthday and I plan on reading at least one more Kipling story today. And I did! “Children of the Zodiac,” a downbeat tale I’d read before.
Wrapped up the Kipling Birthday read with his poem “Envoy.”
Finally got around to reading stories in Peter Cannon’s “Scream For Jeeves,” which places P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Bertie Wooster in the world of H. P. Lovecraft! Started with “Cats, Rats And Bertie Wooster,” and read “Something Foetid.” The latter a mix of “Cool Air” and “Fawlty Towers!”
Those stories are collected in Cannon’s spoof-laden collection “Forever Azatoth.” (The original “Scream For Jeeves” has become rather pricey!)
Also in H. P. L. mode, listened to “At The Mountains Of Madness” done up as a Dr. Seuss book by R. J. Ivankovic. Great fun!
For Clark Ashton Smith’s January 13th Birthday, read his story “Mother Of Toads” and his poem “The Old Water Wheel.” The poem was sweet and wonderful!
(Oh, and Smith is an offstage character in Leiber’s “Our Lady Of Darkness” which I’m also reading!)
Started reading Stephen King’s “The Gunfighter,” the first book in his “Dark Tower” sequence. This is the version he revised about twenty years ago as there were some inconsistencies with later books in the series. He said he set out “to tell a tale of wonder” and it is a gripping read!
And of course I read the excellent offerings online by E. H. Timms and Kaje Harper.
There was in ancient Averoigne a sheltering spot, well-known to travelers and available to all, with a fireplace that was always tended. Food and drink were ready, prepared by grey-robed monks who were hooded and veiled so their faces were never seen. The shelter’s roof and walls protected visitors from the elements, though the style of architecture indicated no human builder.
The table by this fireplace was marble and made in a semicircle like a half-Moon with a similar divan surrounding that half, with cushions and blankets. The flat center of the table was where platters of hot tea, wrapped meats and cups of broth were placed.
To this spot, one wintry day with a cold rain driving down, came two sets of travelers; one pair down the road that led from the mountains of the far North. The other across the barren plains of the East. The Northerners were garbed in furs, the larger man carrying two huge swords at his belt. His brawny arms seemed ready to wield both swords in battle and have no problem with their heft. His brown beard trickled with rainwater.
His companion was smaller, leaner and was carrying a large bundle in each arm, with another strapped to his back. The smaller man saw to it that their furs hung by the fireplace to dry.
The other pair was the mirror-inverse of the first. The tall one, skinnier but with muscles beneath his layered robes. He had a stubble of beard and his greying hair belied his youth. His servant was squat and fat but gave the impression of being equally adept in battle. He was wrapped in robes similar to his master and was carrying their belongings in two large, oilskin bags.
The taller man had a long, thin sword at his belt. The squat servant had a knife.
The robes were likewise hung to dry by the fireplace.
The two pairs of warriors eyed the others carefully, until the servant of the taller man said plainly “Master, I smell no hostility from this pair, at least none towards us. We should find kindred spirits here. Their weapons have the scent of enemies blood and ichor, doubtless drawn in battle.”
The servant of the fur-clad warrior stepped forward and bowed to the other pair.
“This is Iodos, the grand Warrior of the Mountains of the North, his soul forged in a hundred battles. I am his loyal servant Thal. I am ready to serve my master to the last drop of blood.”
“I am Ahmodrias,” the other servant replied with a bow. “I serve Nobie, he of the silent sword. We have traveled from Pengtousha, across the arid plains and through jungle worlds. Ever ready to meet in battle those who would strike against us.”
“I believe for now we should strike battle with the foodstuffs that have been laid out for travelers,” Iodus said, stroking his long brown beard.
The four men, warily at first sat down on the couch that was in a semicircle at the table. Without a word the servants sampled the food and drink first. No ill effects produced they nodded at their masters and they all partook of the offering.
“Thal is ready to serve me to the last drop of food,” Iodos said with a laugh.
The servant smiled and began eating another of the meat rolls, which were succulent pig wrapped in one of the vegetables native to the province. There was, for a while the sort of convivial talk from warriors who have sat down at table instead of battle. Mixed in with the sounds of rain on the roof.
“A fine repast,” Iodos said. “Perhaps our servile ones should entertain us by copulating for our amusement.”
Nobie shook his head. “Amodrias has been slow to follow orders in the sleeping chamber so a fortnight’s deprivation is his punishment.”
Amodrias busied himself with a cup of broth and Thal gave him a sideways glance and Iodos smiled in his beard.
Ahmodrias suddenly stiffened and sniffed the air.
“Master, beware!” he cried jumping to his feet and grabbing the knife at his belt with a fluid grace that belied his girth.
The scraping of feet on the floor and the ringing unsheathing of swords was background to the shuffling of the eight monks stepping silently forward, cowls withdrawn revealing faces of rotted flesh, partly exposing skeletal mouths, mouths that had been nothing human in life. Teeth that looked used to devouring what they wanted.
One of the monks dove for Thal who seemed unprotected but the servant swung his staff in a swift arc which connected with the robed abomination with a harsh crack, a crack which was not the sound of the sturdy staff shattering.
Another monk went for Ahmodrias who slashed at the grey robe with the small knife in his left hand, then with a longer knife which had been concealed up the right sleeve. He swung back and forth, shredding cloth and bone with eye-blurring speed until with a sudden popping sound the skull and right arm of the monk fell clattering to the floor, the hand still reaching to clutch as Ahmodrias made short work of the rest of the robed nightmare.
Nobie took on three of the monks who surrounded him, slashing out with his long sword. One of the skeletal monks gripped it, stopping its swing in midair; it’s skeletal grin seeming to widen. But with a triumphant roar Nobie flung the monk at the end of his sword into the two of its fellows before it could let go. Nobie then skewered the skeletal trio and with a mighty heave exploded them in a burst of robes, bone and dried flesh.
Iodos did not bother with preliminaries; huge sword in each hand he threw himself at the remaining monks and spun and bounded until his adversaries were shredded to pieces.
For a moment, there was quiet. Then, Ahmodrias spoke, sniffing the air.
“Master, I believe that is all of them.”
Nobie smiled. “His nose never fails!”
“A wonder he can smell anything else with the stench from our playfellows,” Thal said gazing at the wreckage that had been the animated monks.
“I have seen too many battles, witnessed too much thaumaturgy to believe that the originator of this might be either traveling hence or reading another assault by something from someplace worse than the grave.” Iodos said, not bothering to wipe his swords as he sheathed them.
“I agree, Master,” Thal said helping Iodos into his furs and grabbing their belongings.
“We had best head away from here,” Nobie said. “What is your destination?”
“The Southern Mountains,” Iodos said. “The ‘Witched Mountains.”
“Ours too,” Ahmodrias said helping Nobie with his robe and sword, only pausing when Nobie kissed him.
“I fear they know of our intent and this may have an origin in their Mountain witcherey,” Iodos said.
“So we take this battle to them,” Nobie said, patting his sword.
“Look, the rain stopped!” Thal said.
“If it was ever there,” Ahmodrias said sniffing the air.
The four warriors stepped out of the shelter, headed for the road south.
—end–
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The prompt pic is part of what was once a dorm lobby at my old college and I imagined a contemporary story, but then I noticed that January 13th (when I wrote most of it) was the birthday of the legendary fantasy writer and poet Clark Ashton Smith. So I set out to write a Smithian tale, remembering that it had been said that nobody since Poe “loved a rotting corpse” as much as Smith did in his fiction. One of his settings was Averoigne, a mythical version of a region of Medieval France.
My meager effort is dedicated to Clark Ashton Smith.—–mike mayak, January 14, 2025.
authorjeffbaker 