"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or published or a recommendation of someone else’s work with at least one LGBT character. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
We were filling up at the Pic-Mart on the West side of town when Joey glanced across the street and saw the old building on the corner. Last time we’d been in the area the windows had been boarded up but now somebody was putting in new glass.
“Hey Bryant!” Joey said. “Didn’t you say you used to work over there?”
“Yeah, when I was in High School,” I said. “That was about twenty years ago back in the Nineties.”
“More like Thirty,” Joey said with a grin.
Okay, just a little bit more…
Joey had been born the year after I graduated High School. Despite a twenty-year age difference we’d hit it off when we were fixed up on a blind date and had been together almost ten years.
“Yeah, I worked for Old Man Higgins selling candy and whatnot before Pic-Mart came in and he sold the place and retired.” I said, watching the price zoom up on the pump.
“Hey, what was that you were telling me about when they knocked down a wall or something?” Josh asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “One of the shelves started to fall apart and Mr. Higgins had someone come out to replace it. They pulled out the whole case, shelves and all and found a door behind it what nobody had opened in years.”
A friend of mine thought the story was spooky and mysterious! I DID borrow the title from an ancient radio horror show “The Sealed Book.”
Next week, something spooky and mysterious! Till then, take care! ——–jeff
Dalton sat on the couch in his Brother’s basement sipping a soda. He glanced at the clock; 12:33 A. M.
“Okay,” Dalton said, tossing his book to the side. “Alberta…”
The little computer flickered to life, looking like a hockey puck with glowing blue highlights.
“…play the theme from ‘Bewitched.’”
“Looking…” said the artificial voice. “Playing. Theme from ‘Bewitched.’”
The familiar music filled the room and Dalton leaned back imagining the cute cartoon witch soaring around the basement, remembering afternoons in High School when he would watch afternoon reruns.
In a few minutes, the tune was finished.
“Alberta, play Gordon Jenkins’ ‘Manhattan Tower.’”
“Looking,” the computer voice said. “Playing. ‘Manhattan Tower.’”
“Ahhhhh!” Dalton said as the jazzy score filled the air. “I could go to sleep listening to this.”
In just a couple of minutes, the song finished.
“That’s it?” Dalton said. “Mom and Dad’s record of that lasted an hour.”
He thought a moment.
“Okay, Alberta, see if you know this one; Play ‘Vexations’ by Erik Satie.” Dalton smiled to himself. The piece bore the composer’s instructions to repeat it 840 times.
The melody played for about three minutes, then it was done.
Dalton wondered if Jean-Luc Picard’s computer did stuff like this.
“Okay,” Dalton said. “Alberta, play the ‘Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.’”
“Looking…looking…” Alberta said. Then, nothing.
“You don’t have that?” Dalton asked with a grin.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Alberta replied.
Dalton about jumped out of his skin. He stared at the speaker.
“Alberta, what did you just say?”
“Repeating…Looking…looking,” the computer voice said.
Dalton sat down and shook his head. He sighed. It was late.
“All right, Alberta. Play Errol Garner’s ‘Concert By the Sea.’”
Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or published or a recommendation of someone else’s work with at least one LGBT character. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
These snippets are from an early Flash Fics story “Atmosphere” from 2018, and I posted another snippet from it a couple of years ago. We meet Bryan and Nico as they are making out on a comfy blanket on the ground…I actually wrote a sequel about the characters and If I ever get motivated there could be a longer story in it somewhere! https://authorjeffbaker.com/2016/08/28/monday-flash-fic-for-august-29-2016-atmosphere/
“You know, I don’t even remember how this weekend started,” Nico said. “I don’t even know how I could afford to come to a place like this.”
“I remember,” Bryan said. “The acclimation thing didn’t work on me all the way. Sometimes it doesn’t.”
Nico sat up on his elbows.
“Wait, what ‘acclimation thing?’”
“Programming,” Bryan said. “They hooked you up to an, an encephalitic mind thingie. Programmed you,” he said flatly. “Me too.”
A little long, but here’s more snippets:
“We’re supposed to believe that this is really us, that this is how we really feel. It’s the programming. We were programmed to fall in love and get romantic and physical and, and, oh, God you have nice legs!”
Bryan started rubbing Nico’s leg, and playfully stuck a thumb under Nico’s shorts.
Okay, one more snippet…
“But who did this to us?” Nico asked. “Who messed with our minds and our emotions and played with us like we’re, we’re…”
“You did!” Bryan said. “We both signed up for this. We were hired,” Bryan said, nuzzling Nico’s neck. “People pay a lot to come to this romantic resort. We’re hired to add atmosphere. They pay us pretty well. But we always stop just short of, well, doing what the customers do when they get back to their rooms.”
Well! That was interesting! Click on the link “Atmosphere” at the bottom of the original story to read the sequel. Next week, our snippets open a door that had been sealed…
We were filling up at the Pic-Mart on the West side of town when Joey glanced across the street and saw the old building on the corner. Last time we’d been in the area the windows had been boarded up but now somebody was putting in new glass.
“Hey Bryant!” Joey said. “Didn’t you say you used to work over there?”
“Yeah, when I was in High School,” I said as I punched in our ZIP code at the gas pump. “That was about twenty years ago back in the Nineties.”
“More like Thirty,” Joey said with a grin.
Joey had been born the year after I graduated High School. Despite a twenty-year age difference we’d hit it off when we were fixed up on a blind date and had been together almost ten years.
“Yeah, I worked for Old Man Higgins selling candy and whatnot before Pic-Mart came in and he sold the place and retired.” I said, watching the price zoom up on the pump.
“Hey, what was that you were telling me about when they knocked down a wall or something?” Josh asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “One of the shelves started to fall apart and Mr. Higgins had someone come out to replace it. They pulled out the whole case, shelves and all and found a door behind it what nobody had opened in years.”
“Wow!” Joey said.
“The knob was busted, so they pried it open. I didn’t know what to expect; maybe a dead body or Narnia.”
Joey laughed at that.
“Well, what we found was a little storeroom, about the size of our bathroom at home.”
“Not that big, huh?” Joey said.
I laughed. I had regularly stood in front of the bathroom mirror while Joey stood in the empty bathtub shaving.
“Yeah.” I said. “It was dusty and dark with cobwebs and a lightbulb in the ceiling that still worked, amazingly. And on the floor was one of those old wooden boxes they used to ship stuff in, not too big but it was full of old magazines.”
“Magazines?” Joey asked.
“Yeah.” I said, watching the pump. “Old science-fiction and adventure magazines and a bunch of old comic books. Dating back to 1946!”
“Wow!” Joey said. “What happened to them?”
“Ricky, the other kid I worked with, he said he wanted them and Mr. Higgins sold them to Ricky for ten bucks, and told him he wanted that box back.” I topped off the gas and put the hose back in the pump.
“Ten bucks?” Joey said laughing.
“Yeah.” I said. “Mr. Higgins said they were trash and nobody would be dumb enough to buy them.”
“Oh my gosh!” Joey said.
“Ricky sold them for about two hundred bucks,” I said. “The local paper did an article on him and Mr. Higgins was so mad he fired him!”
“I’ll bet he didn’t care!” Joey said laughing.
“Well, anyway a year or so later Pic-Mart opened this store and Mr. Higgins decided to retire.” I said. “That was after he’d scoured his store for more old magazines!”
MODERATOR’S NOTE: My friend Kenny Blasco sent this to me as an e-mail. It’s not the kind of thing he usually writes, and since he doesn’t have a blog or website, I’m posting it here. He says it was inspired by the kitty picture. Enjoy!—-mike
“Awwwww! One more story!” the First kitten said.
The Second Kitten said “Yeah, one more!”
There was a chorus of mewling kittens and Mama Cat hushed them.
“Okay, one more,” Mama Cat said. “Back when one of your Dads and I were living under a porch there was a burger place across the street.”
The First Kitten asked “What’s a burger place?”
“Something that smells wonderful,” Mama cat said. “One night, late when the people were all asleep your Dad and I crept over to the burger place.
The Second Kitten asked “Which Dad was this?”
“Tom,” said Mama Cat. “But they’re all named Tom. Anyway, he and I found the dumpster, the big thing out back where they throw away food.”
“Throw away?” That was the Third Kitten.
“Yes. And it’s full of goodies. We crawled up the wooden fence behind the dumpster and saw it was piled high with food and trash. And remember, always look before you jump in, if the dumpster is empty you have no way to climb back up the metal walls.”
The Second Kitten said “Wow!”
“We feasted on meat and cheese and even chicken pieces. Then Tom found something strange: It was long and wooden but too smooth to claw. But he pawed at it and it fell against the wall of the dumpster with a bang and broke open spewing pepper!”
The Third Kitten said “Eeeeeewwwwww!!!!”
“Tom and I started sneezing and suddenly there was a rustle from under the food and another cat jumped up, sneezing. We looked at each other for a moment and then we jumped out of the dumpster and ran home.”
The First Kitten asked “What was that thing?”
“I think it was a thing humans use to put pepper on food, but Tom thought that it was a trap laid for cats to keep them out of the food they think belongs to them.” Mama Cat said. “All right! Off with you! Bedtime!”
The kittens crawled into the warm, cozy nest under the prickly bushes. When they were sleeping, Mama Cat went searching for another dumpster.
I decided not to deal with the traffic and go see the total eclipse, besides I’d seen the total one in 2017. And I had things to do here. So, I stayed in town, feeling that I liked watching the partial phase in the city I grew up in.
And I did more than that.
Back in February 1979 I was in my first year of College at Newman University (then called “Kansas Newman College”) when the last total solar eclipse for about forty years to cross the US. swept through Canada and a lot of the Pacific Northwest. Much of the rest of the country got to watch the partial phase and that day not a lot of us were paying attention to our classes. Fortunately I didn’t have any classes at the peak time for the local eclipse, so I grabbed a camera from the Journalism room and took some pictures, mainly of eclipse watchers and the crescent shadows on the ground.
So, April 8th, 2024, I drove over to Newman University and watched the eclipse, not too far from where I had stood and photographed the one forty-five years earlier.
The sky was clear, except for some filmy clouds high in the sky and the sun blazed its usual blue-white. There was a crowd of students gathered outside the Bishop Gerber Science Center, most with those eclipse glasses that I frankly don’t trust. The kids and maybe some of the faculty probably hadn’t been around in 1979.
I found a spot on the sidewalk where trees cast leafy shadows and started taking pictures around 12:55pm, and took one a few minutes apart for a while. About fifteen minutes later I could notice a thick crescent shape in the mix of sunlight and shadow, but I later saw that it was visible in the earlier pics I took.
I pointed out the shadows to some kid who hadn’t known an Eclipse did that. And I hadn’t been able to watch that in 2017; it had been largely cloudy.
The eclipse went on, the sky got a little darker, around 1:30 it got noticeably cooler, although the evening news only listed a five-degree difference.
Around 1:40 the crowd cheered; we had reached maximum eclipse, about Eighty Per Cent of the Sun covered by the Moon.
Then it started to recede and the crowds slowly started to disperse.
The experience actually made me a little wistful; much has changed for me in forty-five years, mostly for the better. The campus had improved a lot. McNeill Hall, where I ran in to check the TV coverage in 1979, was now faculty offices. On that eclipse day I didn’t live on campus yet. Several of the buildings I knew were gone, and new ones had been put up. I smiled to see students watching the eclipse from the courtyard that was where the old Science Building had been.
There won’t be another country-crossing Total Eclipse until the ones in the 2040s. I will be in my Eighties by then, if I’m still around. I may have someone drive me where I can watch totality.
Or I just might go back to where I was standing in 2024 and 1979 and watch the shadows bend.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Draws for this month’s Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were: A Bedtime Story, set at a Burger Place, involving a Pepper Mill. I’d been where a buddy of mine had stayed in college and this story just breezed out of me! —-jeff
It was back when I was in college. A couple of my friends and I were renting this old house on the edge of campus by the tennis courts. We didn’t play but we liked it. Charlie could check out the guys, Hector could check out the girls and I could check out both. Plus it was a three minute walk to class or to the cafeteria or to the convenience store and burger place down the road.
Of the three of us, Charlie was the only one who had grown up in town, and so he went for a dentist appointment one Friday afternoon after class (I drove we only had the one car, a beat-up old Nova with a Dr. Who bumper sticker on the back) and sat and read comic books while he was getting checked out. Then he came out (wearing a bib) and said “J. D., uh, I’m gonna have to have a couple of wisdom teeth pulled. Can you stick around?”
I nodded. I had no place else to go. My next class was a lab class but that wasn’t until Monday morning. So I sat there and read and about four comic books later, the doctor helped Charlie out of the room. He was staggering like a TV drunk and had a sloppy grin on his face.
“He’s okay, but he’ll be out of it for a while” the dentist said. “Take him home and get him to bed.”
“Thas’ right, get me to bed,” Charlie said.
The dentist bill was paid by his folks insurance so I drove home with Charlie happily dozing in the back seat.
Got him home just as Hector got back from his last class. The two of us helped Charlie into his room, got him down to his shorts and into bed, all the while he was babbling away like Dick Wilson on an episode of “Bewitched.”
We were about to turn out the lights and leave when Charlie called out that he wanted a bedtime story. He insisted on it.
So I sat down beside the bed and faked it.
“Once upon a time,” I said. “Not too far from here, a car drove up to the burger place on the corner. The car radio was playing Buddy Holly or The Shirelles and the kid behind the wheel wanted to impress his girlfriend.”
“Hey! How ‘bout makin’ it his boyfriend?” Charlie said groggily.
“It’s my story, remember?” I said. “Besides, this is back about Nineteen-Sixty-Two.”
“Oh,” Charlie said.
I went on.
“Anyway, this guy pulled up to the drive-in place the Burger place had and grabbed the microphone and ordered a couple of burgers with fries for him and his girl. The voice asked if they wanted their special Seasoned Pepper Fries (which cost extra.) Of course, the guy said yes, to impress the girl.”
“Impress th’ girl,” Charlie said with a snorting laugh.
“Works for me,” Hector said from the doorway.
“Okay, the carhop brought the order out and the girl and the guy started eating and then the girl said she couldn’t taste the pepper on the fries. So the guy grabbed the microphone and said they needed more pepper. The carhop showed up a few minutes later with a little shaker of pepper and sprinkled it on the fries. She left, the girl tried the fries and there still wasn’t enough fries for her.”
“Thas’ why I date guys,” Charlie said.
“So, the guy gets on the microphone again and yells at them to send out more pepper. About a minute later, this old pepper mill floats up to the car all by itself!!!!
“Hooray.” Murmured Charlie.
“It starts sprinkling pepper on both of them in the car and there’s this weird, ghostly laugh, and the kid shifts gears (he’d had the car on for the radio) and barrels out of there, jumping the curb.”
I paused for dramatic effect and then began saying (in a spooky deep voice) “And THAT was the Last time they ever went to: The Haunted Burger Place!”
I was about to give off a weird, loud laugh, when Hector grabbed my shoulder and pointed at Charlie. Happily asleep. We snuck out of the room, turned out the lights and shut the door.
And I had forgotten about that evening nearly thirty years ago until this afternoon. Car cut me off in traffic; beat up old Nova with a ragged Dr. Who bumper sticker on the back.
I breathed out “My God! When we owned that thing I was amazed it made it around the block!”
First, here’s the prompts for the April 2024 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge. Then my usual long-winded explanation:
A Bedtime Story
Involving a Pepper Mill
Set at a Burger Place
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 (and hopefully have one of my own written!) the week of April 15th, 2024.
As I’m no good making videos I did the drawing offstage. And this month I had help! I fanned out the cards and let Ebbet and Miss Meow-Meow (picture above) nose whichever card they “picked.” So, the results were the Seven of Hearts (a Bedtime Story), the Ace of Diamonds (A Burger Place) and the Six of Clubs (a Pepper Mill.) So we will write a bedtime story, set at a burger place involving a pepper mill.
So, get to writing and I’ll post the results next week! And I’m putting the 2024 Flash Draw sheet at the end of this message, again! (* indicates those have been used.)
Thanks for playing, and I’ll see you next week!
And have fun!
——mike
Flash Draw Sheet for 2024 (“*” indicates prompt has been used.)
Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or published or a recommendation of someone else’s work with at least one LGBT character. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
Dimitri and Chuck had met at the day shift at the warehouse. After a couple of after-work beers they had agreed to officially “go out,” but had agreed to stay “just friends.” Dimitri was dark-haired, short and muscular. Chuck had long reddish-blonde hair and was lean like a soccer player.
Here’s one more snippet (I’m getting hungry!)
“You know, we’ve got a better relationship right now than a lot of couples I know,” Dinitri said, finishing the last of his pasta.
“Yeah,” Chuck said. “Hey, do you ever wonder what would have happened if we’d, you know?”
The two young men stared at each other for a moment, then broke into broad grins and laughed.
“This is better,” Chuck said.
“A lot better!” Dimitri said.
I didn’t realize I was channeling one of the last episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. And a lot of this story has happened to me!
Next week, something old…till then, take care! —–jeff
authorjeffbaker 