"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
First, here’s the prompts for the February 2024 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge. Then my usual long-winded explanation:
A Fantasy
Involving a Giant Mallet
Set in an Empty Gymnasium
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 February 12th, 2024.
As I’m no good making videos I did the drawing offstage. This time I goofed and was out of town for the draws and didn’t bring my cards! But I had the list and a random number generator, which worked just as well! So, the results were the Nine of Hearts (a Fantasy), the Four of Diamonds (An Empty Gymnasium) and the Seven of Clubs (a Giant Mallet.) So we will write a fantasy set in an empty gymnasium involving a giant mallet.
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.)
“Steve!” a voice called from behind me. I turned and saw a tall, reddish-blond guy in jeans and a green sweater climbing the small hill I’d apparently appeared on.
“You’re Steve, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re Walter, right” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. He pulled out a revulator and stared at the display. “Any idea where we are?”
“Nope,” I said. “According to this, it’s the twenty-seventh century. Probably.”
“Mine says it’s 1926,” Walter said. “Any idea which of us is right?”
“Nope,” I said, clicking on the display. “At least we homed in on each other.”
A few lines over six but you get the idea! Oh and the “revulator” gadget appears in several of my stories.
Next week, something that shows I like time-travel stories and looooonnnnnng titles!
The late afternoon sun was setting and the garage was cool as Joey fished in his toolbox from his position under the parked motorcycle.
From his perch on the seat of the riding mower the cat looked down on the scene a foot or so away.
“Vroom-Man,” the cat said. “You should…”
“Hey,” the man said, not even looking up. “I told you before, my name’s Joey.”
“Well, I think of you as Vroom-Man,” the cat said. “It’s the Harley.”
Joey let out a fart that vibrated his bluejeaned buttocks against the concrete. Okay, maybe the name did fit, Joey thought.
“Anyway,” the cat said. “the first thing you need to do to fix the engine is…”
“Hey! What is this?” Joey asked. “Zen and the Art of the Motorcycle Cat? I know how to do this!” He started tightening a screw. “I been working on bikes since I was in High School…”
“But you’re doing this one the wrong way,” said the cat. “You need to take the…”
“Nobody likes a backseat driver!” Joey said with a grin.
“You should be grateful,” the cat said. “Ginger, Charlie and Fritz next door wouldn’t help their food-guy like this.”
“Ginger, Charlie and Fritz don’t talk to anybody, remember?” Joey said. “And if they did, Mrs. Appelby wouldn’t listen to them.. She’s too busy stocking up on bleach because they told her to on the radio.”
The cat sighed. “Remember when if you heard someone telling you to do crazy things on the radio it meant you were hearing things?”
“Says the talking cat,” Joey said, pressing the cover of the engine back on with a final twist of a screw.
“I mean it,” the cat said. “Do you know how many of those preppy buckets of dried food she has stored in her basement?”
“Probably a lot I’m guessing…” Joey started to say. “Wait…how do you know?”
“Fritzie, Ginger and Charlie may not talk to people but they talk to me,” the cat said. “She has so many that there’s only room for one litterbox in the basement now. Besides, I look in the windows.” He licked a paw. “Nobody cares when a peeping tom actually is a Tom.”
“Thank you for not describing what you see in her bedroom,” Joey said standing up and pushing the toolbox to the side. “Now, let’s see how this works.”
He hopped on the motorcycle and pushed the pedal.
The motorcycle sputtered and made a clunking sound. Then, nothing.
“Told ya,” the cat said hopping to the floor. “Let’s go in and eat.”
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
I’d forgotten that for a little while I was actually writing a weekly flash fiction for TWO prompt sites! Monday Flash Fics and the then-new Friday Flash Fics which started in October 2017.
Schuyler Hampton Jones tossed his bowtie on the sofa next to his jacket, pants and shoes.
“As long as I remember where the bathroom is here, we’ll be okay,” he said. He grinned at Jim who had shucked out of his tuxedo and was seated on the floor next to their bed in just his shorts.
“Too bad you didn’t take my advice and wear the top hat,” Jim said.
“Not everybody can pull off the top hat,” Schuyler said, carefully taking off his cufflinks (they had been his father’s) and putting them in a box on the dresser. “J.F.K. did. I think Coolidge or somebody did.”
Okay, one more snippett…
“Don’t forget Armbruster,” Jim said. “He was so preoccupied he kept his top hat on all through the swearing-in.”
“Don’t remind me!” Schuyler said with another grin. “I’m just old enough to remember that!”
“A little before my time,” Jim said. “Besides, Forty-three isn’t old. Not for you!”
“Neither is thirty-seven,” Schuyler said, bending down to kiss Jim.
“You don’t look old and gray,” Jim said.
I stumbled across a couple of flash fiction stories I’d forgotten I’d written while bumming through my blog.
As for the fictional Presidents Armbruster and Norcross (Mentioned in the full story) the first is my creation, the second appeared in a 1960’s superhero cartoon “Super President.”
Next week, a date that goes a little “ca-ca.” —-jeff
(Author’s note: Turned it over to my other self ”Mike Mayak” for this week’s story.)
Kenny’s Pool
By Mike Mayak
“Awright. Hey, hand me the towel and I’ll tell you the story. It was back in July of 1961 and I had just turned eighteen. Yeah. I really looked like this. Crew cut, perfect teeth, muscles, tan, worked at the pool. Great Summer job for Kenny Blasco. Coolest music in the world playing over the speaker hooked to the radio. My boss hated all the rock and roll. I wasn’t a lifeguard, I was more a towel boy who helped clean the pool.
I was on the school basketball team and that got me the girls usually. One reason I loved the job; I could bang girls behind the bushes when we weren’t busy and my boss had given me a key to the storeroom which I made a copy of, so I took girls in there at night. Yeah, fun, fun, fun!
Hang on, I’ll grab you a soda. No, we get ‘em free here. Just gotta work a lot. Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah, the girls.
My boss may have known what I was doing, he certainly encouraged me to wear nothing but my swim trunks and flirt. He thought it brought in more customers. I smiled at that. I was a young hunk who was having the time of my life at an age where summer lasted forever.
This girl showed up, looked just like Marilyn Monroe. Blonde, red lips, stacked, the works.
My tight black swimming trunks got tighter when I saw her. She smiled. I was dazzled. I loved to watch her swim. She had me, not Chris or Ricky or Ray towel her off when she got out of the pool. I remember thinking that maybe she had sprayed the hair to look like Monroe. I didn’t know anything about girls’ hair.
So, it was a slow afternoon and the Marilyn girl shows up. She knows my name. She jumps in the pool in this, wow, white one piece swimsuit, and dares me to race her. Well we swam around the pool for a while and she says “I love your arms, Kenny,” and I just grin and my trunks get tight. I ask her what her name is and she says “Nymphette.”
We are floating in the pool then and she grabs my, you know, with one hand and then brushes my lips with a finger and says if I want more she’s going to have to see what a jock I am. She climbs out of the pool and lays down on the diving board (oh, God! Hot!) and tells me to pull myself up to kiss her but I had to agree that I was hers from now on.
Hey, I was Kenny Blasco! I’d made a lot of promises to girls so they’d put out!
So I jumped up, grabbed the board (thinking “You look really good, Kenny!”) and she’s there on the edge of the diving board grinning at me, and I glance down and I’m young, tan and muscular like guys envy me and the music is playing and I pull myself up a little more and we lock lips and I realize she’d just got out of the pool but she wasn’t even wet at all and I feel my lips stuck to hers and my crotch feels like it’s freezing and my fingers go limp and I let go of the board and fall into the pool but the water spreads apart beneath me and I’m falling into air and spinning and I’m screaming and I feel like bristle brushes are hitting my body all over and then I splash down in the pool.
Well, you know, it isn’t the same pool, but trust me, it’s an exact copy. And Nymphette is here. She’s one of the Water Nymphs. I serve her, well, you and I serve her now. Towel her off, do whatever she says. Got no choice.
I stand on the side of the pool and flex my muscles every now and then, when the Nymphs order me to. I liked doing it for girls when I was in High School. But I don’t now that I’m the object of lust.
It’s kinda boring, actually. I mean, you’d think being the, uh, toy of nymphs would be wonderful but it’s for their pleasure. I don’t get pleasure here. Well, not often.
So, that’s pretty much what you can expect here. That and being a towel boy. When did you, I mean, what’s the last year you remember? In the world, I mean?
2458? Wow.
Okay, the only food we get here is cheap snack bar pizza…”
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
Saturday arrived and I was dressed in my best jeans, a shirt that wasn’t too fancy for a sandwich bar (I hoped) and I headed out the door, giving a glance at the thermometer. 68 degrees. Good. It barely registered with me what the figure was doing.
It registered with Patrick. He took a picture of it with his phone and sent it to me.
The Li’l Gay Dude was standing there frowning, holding out his hand, thumb down.
Okay, snippet two is the post-date post-mortem…
The date went okay, but later that week I found that the guy had two other boyfriends, a girlfriend and a wife in another town. Open relationships I could probably deal with but not this blatant dishonesty.
Thursday at home I sat down on Patrick’s sofa with a bottle of beer and stared at the pic I’d saved on my phone. Had the Li’l Gay Dude had been trying to tell me something? Or was it some kind of glitch in the thermometer?
To my amazement, the original post got more response than any story I’ve posted in quite a while! Next week, the first of a few stories I forgot I wrote! And to borrow from an ancient TV show: “Here’s hoping you get the date you really want.” —–jeff
The music was playing soft and the radio and Doug was sitting on the front porch of his family’s lakeside cabin, watching the Moon reflect in the water when Scotty bounded up the steps.
“Doug!” Scotty said. “I got your message! To meet you here at 9:30. Are you okay?”
Doug smiled. As usual, Scotty looked good. He was wearing slacks, brown shoes and the white button down shirt with no tie. The shirt was sweaty; he’d run from his folks’ cabin.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Doug said. “Just that Mom and Dad and Janie left this afternoon. I’m taking off in my roadster in a couple of days. So we got the cabin to ourselves for a day or so.”
“Yeah?” Scotty said. “So, you want to go inside?”
“Later,” Doug said. “Right now, I want you beside me on this bench, looking at the Moon, the lake, the stars. Listen to the romantic music on the radio.” He paused. “We can hold hands.”
“Sure,” Scotty said, sitting down. He glanced around and kissed Doug on the cheek. Doug squeezed his hand as they settled down on the bench; the radio playing a fake Spanish romantic song.
“This is nice…” Scotty said.
“Yeah,” Doug said. He took a deep breath. “Thank my Mom for the idea, she figured it out. She knows.”
Scotty looked at Doug, shocked.
“Dad and Janie don’t know.” Doug said. “Mom said we ought to take advantage of the front porch in the dark in late summer. She’s okay with us. Being us.”
Scotty waited a few moments and let out a deep breath. “Yeah.”
Doug and Scotty had met in College. They’d hit it off and fallen for each other. But this was just after World War Two, the conflict they had spent on the home front.
After a few more minutes, Doug took a deep breath.
“She said we ought to stay together. I mean, not tell people but just room together.” Doug said. “I mean, I can get you a job at the bank, you have that degree and your experience and nobody else knows. About either of us.”
Scotty looked over at the lake for a moment then turned to look at Doug.
“I snore,” he said. “Runs in my family.”
Doug grinned. “I will love your snoring!”
They kissed sitting there, holding the kiss, feeling each other’s faces with their fingers, the romantic music playing on the radio from inside the house. Music which suddenly segued into a Spike Jones record. Gunshots, Belches, Explosions. All punctuated by an orchestra.
Scotty and Doug broke off the kiss and started laughing, all but collapsing on the bench.
Doug stood up, grabbed Scotty’s arm and pulled him off the bench into his arms.
“I was gonna ask you to slow dance, but we gotta dance to Spike Jones!”
They laughed and bounced around the dark porch, kissing and faking the Jitterbug to the wild, happy radio music.
Janie smiled as she finished reading the browned letter.
“And we always played Spike Jones on our Anniversary,”
Mark and Carlos had stared as she had read the old family letter, the letter she had pulled out after they had told Mark’s Grandma Janie they were going to get married. They had hoped for acceptance, the kind they didn’t get from Carlos’ family.
“And you would have loved your Uncles,” she said. “They were together for just over forty-three years before they passed.”
“I didn’t know, didn’t know ever!” Mark said. “About them, I mean.”
“Well, they didn’t wear it on T-shirts but it wasn’t that secret,” she said. “And they donated to a lot of LGBT causes. What we called Gay Rights back then.” She smiled broadly. “Mark, did you know that your Uncle Scott’s middle name was Mark?”
Mark’s jaw dropped. He hadn’t known.
“So,” Grandma Janie said with a smile. “You take this letter, in this old envelope and someday you read it to some niece or nephew or cousin who needs to hear it.”
Mark carefully set the letter beside them on Grandma’s sofa.
Starting off with the last week in December, 2023, I finished reading James Moran’s story “A Canadian Ghost In London,” from his collection “Fear itself.” I THINK I’ve read all the stories in the book. “Canadian Ghost” was fun and spooky and felt like a pilot or the start of a series.
For my Poe Project, I read Edgar Allan Poe’s “Von Kempelen and His Discovery.” Sort of a humorous science-fantasy story with the surprise treasure being a topical reference to the recent discovery of gold in California! Also read “The Imp of the Perverse, after seeing it mentioned on a Rod Serling blog (maybe in a post about Charles Beaumont.) The story takes a while to get going as the narrator spends pages philosophizing and only kicks in on the final page and a half, but then it really KICKS!!
For Fritz Leiber’s December 24th birthday I listened to audio of Leiber reading two of his stories; “Gonna Roll the Bones,” and “In the Witch’s Tent.” The latter being one of his Fafard & Grey Mouser stories, which I have neglected. I plan to read some of them in ‘24, as well as his “Change War” series.
I finished reading James Thurber’s “My Life and Hard Times,” (“The Night the Bed Fell,” “The Day the Dam Broke” and “The Dog That Bit People,”) as well as his introduction which has some insights for writers. I’d read some of the book when I was about nine years old but it and the introduction hit me differently now; I laughed at the right places in the stories and I appreciated the introduction more. (One jarring note; it was written in Sandy Hook, NJ!)
Well worth reading and re-reading.
I read Joe Haldeman’s “An Angel of Light” in a sci-fi Christmas anthology I bought and found that I’d read it before. Still worth the time!
And I read Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Lift.” Suspense with a premonition. Also read Doyle’s “The American’s Tale.” Set in Arizona, including Arizona’s swamps and giant man-eating plants. Put the inaccuracies down either to Doyle’s not having been to AZ or to the admission at the end of the story that the narrator may be a big liar! Great fun!
I should have mentioned that back in November I read Heinlein’s Weird Tales story “Our Fair City.” Funny and Weird. It’s in his collection “6 x X.”
Just breezed through Scott Coatsworth’s novelette “Slow Thaw” (in “Love and Limitations.”) Of course it’s a romance but it’s also an adventure set in the Antarctic (and around Christmas too!) Scott has been compared to Robert A. Heinlein and it’s an apt comparison. But Scott is his own individual self as a writer. The setting is meticulously researched and vividly described and the, uh, slow thaw between the two characters is presented realistically. And may I say he handles the feelings of widowhood well.
I read a few of the turn-of-the-last-century Philo Grubb stories by Ellis Parker Butler from “Philo Grubb; Correspondence-School Detective.” This may have been the first of several series (by different authors) about Sherlock Holmes wannabes who take a class by mail. I thought the first story (“The Hardboiled Egg”) was funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny but worth several smiles. I imagined Grubb being played by Larry Storch and Oritz being Forrest Tucker. I kind of guessed the ending but still fun!
I continued on with Grubb and read “The Pet,” and I did laugh out loud! Especially at one character’s description of Grubb in disguise; “He looks like an intoxicated pterodactyl…only hairier.” LOL!
Also read “The Eagle’s Claws,” which tied into an earlier Grubb story. Humor ages very badly but this book is fun!
For January 2024 (!!!!) I read Scott Coatsworth’s story “What the Rain Brings” from “Androids And Aliens,” and his story “Tight” from “Spells and Stardust.”
Commemorated Charles Beaumont’s January 2nd birthday by reading his “Infernal Bouillabaisse” and “Insomnia Vobiscum.” Both of which I think I’d read before. Wonderful stuff!
Read a few of Stephen Vincent Benet’s poems from “Young Adventure.”
Started my Fafhrd and Grey Mouser read by starting Fritz Leiber’s novel “The Swords Of Lankhmar.”
Had to look up an O. Henry line for a story I was writing and wound up reading his “The Love Philtre Of Ikey Schoenstein” and “After Twenty Years.”
Sat down to read a different story and instead read Rex Stout’s “Christmas Party” from “The Oxford Book Of American Detective Stories.”
Read Mark Twain’s “A Medieval Romance.” Warning to readers: Twain prankishly states he had no way of getting his characters out of the fix they were in so he just stopped the story there!
Been reading through the Doctor Who novelization “The Romans.” Great fun!
Read some of the poems in Shamir Griffin’s excellent poetry collection “Identity In Shades.”
And I’ve been reading some of Robert E. Howard’s boxing storied. A couple of letters he wrote to boxing magazines, a story that appeared as a “true” ghost story in “Ghost Story” magazine “The Apparition In the Prize Ring,” which was okay, I guess.
And then I read “The Pit Of the Serpent.” Sounds like one of Howard’s Connan the Barbarian stories doesn’t it? Nope! It’s the first of his stories featuring two-fisted sailor Steve Costigan. The laughs are plenty in this story narrated first-person by the Runyonesque Costigan himself. The brawl (in a former snake pit!) turns into something out of All Star Wrestling as Costigan and his rival from another ship toss the referee out of the ring!
All in all a breezy fun read and not what I expected from Howard!
Oh, and it calls the place a “Fight Club.” This was in 1929…
And I finally started reading Fritz Leiber’s “Changewar” stories, from the “Changewar” collection that came out about 1981 or so (paperback.) I started with the first in the book “Try And Change the Past,” which I think I read about thirty years ago on one of those wonderful weekend afternoons at my Brother’s house when he lived nearby. A wonderful blend of science-fantasy and a dash of horror. The book doesn’t have all the Changewar stories he eventually wrote and there’s a novel, “The Big Time,” which I will read eventually. I may have read “A Deskful Of Girls.” I have the 1968 MFSF where it first came out, so I’ll find out when I get to that story later in the book.
Okay, I DID read “Deskful of Girls,” from the original magazine—couldn’t resist! Fun and of course a lot of talk about “sex,” well actually “sexiness” probably. Pretty shocking for 1958! The story is also in the “Changewar” book but I can’t see how it fits into the series, unless it’s because a character keeps referencing “The Big Time.” (I’ll have to read the rest of them!)
And the story got the cover of the magazine, with an illustration by Frank Kelly Freas no less! Brian Aldiss’ famous “Poor Little Warrior” debuted in the issue and he doesn’t even get mentioned on the cover!
Of course, I did my weekly read of Kaje Harper’s fine stories (usually romantic, always worth it!)
I’ll close out here for the monthly report, on Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, January 19, 2024.
Hey! January Nineteenth is Edgar Allan Poe’s Birthday! Perfect time for a Progress Report!
I’d spent a few months last year working on stories for anthologies on deadlines (and sold at least one!) So I took a kind of writing breather for the last weeks of the year.
For the New Year I decided to finish some of the stories that are incomplete in my files and get them ready to send off. I actually did pretty well on that, a lot of the time doing it on my laptop down at the Wichita Public Library. (I like the atmosphere!)
So, I finished a funny story (about birds) that I set in Mom & Dad’s old backyard and sent it off to the Saturday Evening Post.
I typed-up and edited a sci-fi Christmas story that may be saved on my old computer but I found the original handwritten draft in a notebook.
I finished another story for “RoMMantic Reads” that I started about a year or so ago. Lots of changes since then. About all I had to do was to add a paragraph or two joining a couple of sections.
I wrote up some of the Friday Flash Fics stories and did the Flash Fiction Draw Challenge story for January.
I may be leaving a story out that I can’t recall, but that’s pretty good even if I didn’t start anything new.
I worked on two Queer Sci Fi columns. The one for January, where I had to go online and check name spellings because my handwriting was so bad! The other for a few months from now, which was already partly written. I have about three other columns finished so that fixes that up through May (unless something big comes up!)
All of this makes me feel good, and I need that!
And I’ve kept up on the reading and doing the monthly “Reading Report.”
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: [LINK]
Tales are told of the wandering Prince Almazotz, and of his many adventures attempting to escape his Royal Father’s wrath as well as an arranged marriage to a stuffy and boring prince of another realm. But when the three moons ride high in the sky the ancient chronicles recall the wild night of the Prince’s encounter with the Horse-Drover YoPo and his attempt to find the legendary Horse of Gold.
It had transpired earlier that evening that the Prince (disguised as usual in more humble garments) had come across the Horse-Drover watering his horses at the Fountain Of the Really Smelly Animals. The Prince remembered the Prophecy about the Golden Horse. (The Prince had a mental catalog of any prophecy that involved gold, silver or jewels.)
Prince Almazotz is my attempt to do a de Camp style comic fantasy, so I set it on my mystical sci-fi-ish World Of Three Moons and have several stories posted on my blog and a longer story making its way through the slushpiles. And yes, there will be a book!
Next week, something for those of us who are watching the thermometer! —–jeff
authorjeffbaker 