"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
Exactly one year ago, February 12, 2024 I drove the 240 mile, four-and-a-half-hour trip from my Brother’s family’s house to my house in Wichita with something very special; I had adopted three kittens from the litters of two strays they had adopted after they wandered into their lives.
Kittens, maybe but they were ten months old and growing. I met them in June of the previous year, fell in love and decided I wanted them, as the house had gotten too quiet after Darryl died. I made sure they had all their shots and the like and made plans to take them with me in February.
They knew me already from my trips up there and we got along wonderfully. I named then Camden and Ebbet (baseball names honoring Darryl’s love of baseball) and Amy named the third kitty “Miss Meow-Meow,” and never was a cat more appropriately named!
We arrived in Wichita in the afternoon and the kitties quickly settled in to exploring and climbing. There was no real period of adjustment; it’s like they have always been here. They run and play and are indoor cats here in town, outdoor cats when the four of us visit my Brother’s house with its big backyard and tall fence.
The kitties are still growing (to my amazement) and they are loving and a big pain in the butt sometimes!
They have made this house a home again just by being in it. They eat, they snooze, they demand attention. When I was sick over the holidays in December (we all got colds) they slept with me as I crashed out over a couple of days.
They are the Sweet Kitties as I call them. Give them a fallen tissue and they live up to their other nickname: “The Kitties Without Pity.” The house is warm and happy with them here.
So, thank you, Kitties. It’s been a fun year and I can tell by your purrs you feel that way too!
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.
authorjeffbaker 