"…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
This one’s an oldie. And unfinished. And kinky as hell! (Oh, and written under my erotica pen-name “Skip Hanford.”) Probably calling it “Nose Against the Wall.”
I was standing in the darkened hallway, hands behind my back, wrists grabbed, nose against the wall as my Master had ordered.
I glanced to my left, checking out the muscular young Asian guy standing in the same position; nose against the wall.
I could hear the noise made by his Master and my Master in the bedroom. We’d been ordered to prep them. I’d never seen Jose before. At least not from this angle. “Jose” tattooed on his shoulder.
Here’s some more snippets. A bit over six lines, but…
I checked out Jose. I saw the scar on his left arm. From an icepick. I saw the tattoo on his right leg. I remembered getting it.
“Jose.” I whispered. “Jose.”
“What?” he said, glancing at me nervously. We had been ordered to keep quiet.
“You re in my body!” I said.
He stared at me.
“That is my original body!” I whispered. “You are in my body!”
Jose glanced down at himself. Shook his head.
“It belongs to my Master,” he whispered. “Not you.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But getting back into that body is the only hope I have of getting free! Of getting out of this nightmare!”
I wrote the first part of this story around 2009, before I’d published any erotica. I ought to finish the damn thing, maybe make it into a novel.
Next week, something pretty weird (and for me, that’s saying something!)
AUTHORS NOTE: The draws for the August 2023 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were A Science Fiction story, set in a cave, involving an umbrella. Here’s what I came up with. —-mike
We went to see the Air Caves on Venus in the off-season. Possibility of acidic rain but a lot less crowded. Drogma Stee and I held hands in the bus-shuttle drive from the spaceport on Venus. We’d only been officially boyfriends for three months but when the chance to go to Venus came up suddenly around Semester’s Break, we jumped at it. Seeing the Air Caves was a big deal. Everyone wanted to go. Nonetheless, neither the flight or the bus was very crowded.
The driver was talking about the thick Venusian atmosphere and how we all needed to have our helmets fastened during the short walk to the Air Caves. He explained how the largely carbon dioxide Venusian atmosphere had air pressures comparable to the bottom of Earth’s oceans.
“And I oughta know,” he said. “I grew up in one of those bottom-feeder cities they built on the floor of the Pacific.”
Some of us laughed.
“Hey, Lalo,” Drogma said. “Look over there!” He pointed out the window and I craned my neck out of the pressure suit. “I think I saw lightning!”
I stared at the Venusian landscape. Through the foggy atmosphere I could see distant hills, lumpy rock formations like frozen magma and the flat road that had been carved out of the magma.
“All right,” the driver said. As we rounded a corner. “Here we are.”
I could just make out a big hill and the mouth of a cave visible over the big, opaque tube leading to the cave. “Soyce Glass” they called the stuff. The driver backed the bus to the airlock and we put on our helmets and walked through the tube into the cave. Once inside the driver’s voice crackled through our headsets.
“All inside? Okay. Take off your helmets.”
The cave was roughly the size of a high school gym. There was a back section blocked off by a divider. The cave walls were a dark blue-black and the floor looked smooth.
The air was nice, fresh and cool.
The driver went into his spiel; how big the Air Cave is, how it goes back far and deep into the ground, how nobody is sure what makes the air.
“Maybe earlier inhabitants, earlier Venusians or visitors from another world.”
Drogma and I just breathed deep and took it all in.
“The most remarkable thing about this cave,” the driver said, “is what we call the Air Shield. The barrier at the mouth of the cave that prevents the oxygen from leaking out and the thick Venusian atmosphere from coming in. It even stops the rain.”
As if on cue, it started to pour outside. Big blue green drops of what probably wasn’t water.
“Folks, don’t panic,” the driver said. “It rains like that all the time during this season. Just stay in the cave and watch this.”
He reached over to the side of the cave where a tall umbrella leaned against the cave wall. The driver didn’t open it, he just stuck it outside the cave into the rain, to one side of the tube we’d walked through. After a moment, he pulled it back in.
The umbrella was smoking and shredded.
“That’s what Venusian rain does,” he said. “But we’re safe in here.”
Drogma was standing beside me grinning. The cave walls glistened in the distorted light through the cloud cover and the rain. The play of light on Drogma’s face highlighted the light brown hair that fell over his forehead with the gentle sound of rain as a backdrop.
On impulse, I kissed him. We’d kissed before, of course but never in a cave on Venus. We didn’t know it right then, but someone had taken a picture.
And that framed picture has been in every home Drogma and I ever shared, from that first one-room apartment to the awful space-trailer we had when we were working at the Lunar Warehouse, to the nice two story brick house back on Earth we lucked into and still call home.
Right next to the kissing picture is another one, taken in the same cave; two young men in pressure suits, arm-in-arm, waving at the camera, helmets on, grinning like idiots through the visors.
Drogma always says it looks like the cover of one of those ancient 20th-Century adventure books for boys they made 200 years ago. This picture we signed and dated: “Drogma Stee and Lalo Vaxx—Venus, June 2153.”
When we got married on an Earth beach, Venus was high above us in the evening sky.
I went custom cutting during the hot summer of 1980 when I was nineteen years old.
Growing up in Millington, Kansas we were always around farm country even if you live in town. My cousins had grown up on a farm between Millington and Pending and so I’d helped out at harvest time but since I was nineteen I signed up for custom cutting.
My Brother had done it the year before and told me it was a great way to meet girls. I was also interested in meeting guys but I didn’t tell him that. Besides, it was better than spending the summer working at the grocery store again.
Custom Cutting involves taking a combine and harvesting somebody else’s crops for pay. Between my cousin and a couple of their neighbors we had enough people and equipment to make some serious money.
It was the second week of cutting and we were up in Nebraska just sitting around outside with a couple of beers, enjoying the cool of the evening when Big Arlo asked if any of us had ever heard about the Wheat Stalker?
“Yeah,” said Benjy. “Isn’t that the Wichita State mascot?”
“Naaaah! It was a TV show,” Jonnie Miller said. “Darren McGavin was in it.”
They started laughing. Big Arlo wasn’t laughing.
“The Wheat Stalker,” Big Arlo said, “is a Spirit of the Prairies that follows the wheat harvest. It was rejected by the other spirits and so it goes its own way. It’s made up of failed crops, vanished dreams and dashed hopes. It makes a sound like a mournful wind through the trees and a crunching noise like walking on crumbled, dried wheat stalks. But nobody ever sees it.”
“So what does this thing do?” I asked. “Eat people or wheat?”
“It finds somebody who is having doubts about themselves,” Big Arlo said. “It feeds their fears, their doubts, their inadequacies. Makes them leave the prairie. Move to a city where they are more comfortable surrounded by concrete and steel.”
We went on talking about other things and when the beer was finished we reluctantly went into our cheap motel rooms for the night.
It had gotten down to eighty degrees with a breeze outside but that was cooler than inside the motel room where the wall air conditioner barely worked and we slept four to a room. Two of the guys took the bed and Benjy and I slept on the floor. We’d flipped a coin for the bed and I figured I won because the floor was probably cooler than two guys cramped on that bed would probably be.
Something woke me up. I stared at the room; dim light coming through the curtained window. The motel. Yeah. I checked the luminous dial of my watch; 2:15. Been asleep a couple of hours. I sat up and listened for a moment. I knew I’d heard something.
There! A low, mournful noise made by the wind. Probably blowing through the harvester. That kind of noise had spooked me when I’d heard it as a kid, it shouldn’t have spooked me as an adult.
I was dead tired. My head plopped back down on my gym bag that I was using as a pillow and I was out. The last thing I heard was a crunching noise outside.
The next morning we headed out, only to find that Jonnie Miller had checked out in the middle of the night.. The desk clerk (who Jonnie had woken up) said he’d caught a lift with a trucker and said he was going to get a bus to the East Coast.
Big Arlo and I looked at each other but didn’t say a word. Had he heard the wind in the middle of the night? I was sure Jonnie Miller had.
Me, I’d heard the wind but I stuck with the job and came back home with nothing worse than a sunburn.
And I stayed in my air conditioned bedroom for a week.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: My best friend in College, the late John Bogner, went custom cutting in the summer of 1980. The rest is totally fictitious. I wanted to do a riff on a Fritz Leiber story, but this is what came out. Big Arlo’s story is highly reminiscent to me of Ray Bradbury. —-mike, 8/11/23
First, here’s the prompts for the August 2023 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge. Then my usual long-winded explanation:
A Science Fiction Story
Involving an Umbrella
Set in a cave.
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 August 14th, 2023.
As I’m no good making videos I did the drawing offstage and the results were the Jack of Clubs (an umbrella) the Two of Hearts (science fiction) and the Seven of Diamonds (a cave.) So we will write a science fiction story, set in a cave involving an umbrella!
So, get to writing and I’ll post the results next week!
Thanks for playing, and I’ll see you next week!
And have fun!
——mike
(Science fiction! Whew! Easier than faking Kipling again!)
Every week we post six lines of a story of ours, a work-in-progress or from someone else’s work we recommend that has LGBT characters on Rainbow Snippets here https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
I’m quite crazy about anything Kaje Harper writes! Here’s a snippet or two from her shared-world novel “Magic Burning,” part of the multiple author “Carnival of Mysteries” series. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/157842008-magic-burning
Here young schoolteacher and sorcerer Alan is picking out a wardrobe for a date with a hot young firefighter. Helping (?) is his familiar, Sunny. A wisecracking, opinionated bird…
“Not that one.” Sunny walked across the bed to peck peevishly at the shirt I’d laid out.
“Why not?” The green silk was a favorite.
“Too bright and eye-catching.”
“Says the orange, yellow and green bird.”
“You’ll need to go a bit slow with Jason. Don’t spook him. I get the feeling he’s a secret kind of guy.”
“Cannonball!” Scott yelled, jumping into the pool.
“Not so loud!” Chad said. “The neighbors are asleep.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry!” Scott said.
“Oh, wow! Will you look at the stars! There’s the Summer Triangle, right overhead!” Zach pointed upward, tracing the Triangle in the August sky with a finger.
Zach Abruzzi was taking care of his folks house while they were on vacation and he was home from college. He’d invited his cousin Chad and their friend Scott over for a couple of weeks. They all went to the same school together and they were serious students (Chad was pre-law) but that wasn’t apparent from the way they were goofing around in the pool. The big above-ground pool that took up half of Zach’s family’s backyard in Pending, Kansas.
“Y’know, I could float out here for hours,” Zach sighed.
“Yeah, me too,” Chad said. “I mean, we don’t have anywhere to go for a few weeks.”
Scott held up a finger. “Store,” he said. “We’re almost out of soda and chips.”
“Part of your nutritious breakfast,” Zach said in a mock-serious announcer voice. The three of them laughed.
They floated and bobbed in the pool, silently for a few minutes, listening to the water lap the sides of the pool and watching for a hint of breeze stirring the leaves of the overhanging tree lit by the pool lights and the lone porch light.
“Hey, Zach,” Chad said. “You remember when we went out to the lake with our folks that one summer?” “Yeah, we did that a lot of times.” Zach said.
“Remember skinny dipping?” Chad asked with a broad grin.
“Oh, God!” Zach said.
“Skinny dipping?” Scott asked, grinning himself.
“We were, what? About eleven?” Chad said. “We went swimming up at the lake, spending the day out there. We didn’t go in too deep or out to far and then Greg Louganis here…”
“Oh God!” Zach said, sinking down in the water almost up to his ears.
“…says ‘Hey! Let’s try skinny dipping!’ So we pulled our trunks off and floated around naked for a few minutes…”
“Oooooooooo…” Zach said blowing bubbles in the water.
“…when all of a sudden this seaweed or something brushes the inside of Zach’s leg and he screams ‘SNAKE!’ and runs out of the water stark naked, carrying his trunks in one hand!”
They were all three laughing.
“I didn’t know if it was a snake or if it was going to bite me so I tried to pull my trunks on before I got out of the water but they caught on a branch or something that was underwater and they ripped.” Chad shrugged. “Cheap trunks!”
The three of them laughed loudly for another minute. Then Scott cleared his throat.
“You know, it’s gotta be around midnight. Most of the people in this town are asleep right now. How ‘bout we…you know?”
“What?” Zach asked.
“This!” Scott said, ducking underwater for a moment then popping back up with his shorts in his hand. “These aren’t even trunks, they’re my basketball shorts from High School. I’ve been going commando all day!” Yeah, the blue shorts had the South High School from Wichita logo on them.
Zach and Chad looked at each other and then quickly shucked off their trunks.
“Toss ‘em over by the ladder,” Zach said. Three pairs of sopping wet shorts went sailing over the edge to plop on the ground. Chad laughed and ducked underwater, launching himself from the wall of the pool to swim underwater to the other end, feeling the rush of water and hearing the clicking of sound.
“Marco!” Scott yelled, splashing water.
“Oh, no!” Zach said, laughing.
There was laughter and splashing for a few more minutes.
“Hey! I’m gettin’ cold!” Scott said.
“Yeah, that breeze came up all of a sudden. Wait ‘till it dies down.” Chad said.
“Hard to believe it’s been in the hundreds all week,” Zach said. “I gotta go to the bathroom anyway. Okay, here goes.”
Zach hoisted himself up the ladder and plopped down on the ground and slipped grabbing a rung of the ladder to steady himself.
“You okay?” Chad yelled, swimming towards the ladder.
“Yeah,” Zach said. “But we’ll need to wash these trunks. They all landed on a doggie present and I stepped on them and got them all messy.
Soon the three young men were standing by the ladder, not wanting to touch the trunks.
“So, do we leave ‘em there?” Chad asked.
“Naaaa.” Zach said. “Scrape ‘em off and throw ‘em in the washer. “We can walk into the house in the raw.”
“Yeah, we’re guys!” laughed Scott.
“MIS-ter Abruzzi!! It is almost twelve-thirty and some of us need to sleep!” The female voice belonged to Mrs. Hamilton who was sticking her head over the fence between the two properties.
Scott, Zach and Chad stood there frozen in surprise. She went on.
“I’ve told your family to keep it quiet on weeknights. Now if you don’t…”
The elderly lady (who must have been in her fifties, Zach thought) stopped talking. Here eyes were adjusting and focusing without her glasses. There was enough light for her to see all of Chad, Zach and Scott.
Every week we post six lines of a story of ours, a work-in-progress or from someone else’s work we recommend that has LGBT characters on Rainbow Snippets here https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I haven’t done one of these bar stories in about a year or so, possibly because the hostile and downright violent anti-LGBT mood in the country seemed to preclude a comedy set at a fictional venue similar to real-world ones that are getting attacked both metaphorically and physically. But I figured that enough was enough and so I wrote this; which is a bit of a nod to my favorite writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.
Here’s snippet one where Demeter’s Bar bartender Zack is explaining about his bandaged hand.
“Some homophobic assholes jumped him in the parking lot the other night, that’s what happened.” That was from Paco, sitting at the end of the bar looking muscular and young in the tank top he wore after workouts.
“They just caught me off guard,” Zack said, pouring the refill with his unbandaged hand. “I got a couple of bruises and this hand got bashed up against a car. One of the thugs caught the worst of it.”
“Yeah, Zack got him in the knee!” Paco said, giving him a thumb’s up.
“I was aiming higher,” Zack said, wishing he’d kept up lessons at the Dojo when he was in high school.
Okay, more than six lines. But the professor they are talking to offers them a solution. A few days later, we meet the solution. Here’s snippet two:
Mrs. DeLeon stood open mouthed at the tall, grey metal figure that stood by the door of Demeter’s. It was about six-foot-four, built like a muscular Tin Woodsman and had a face of frozen grey features that she had seen on a statue somewhere. It was actually dressed in shorts and a tank top that would have made Paco look scrawny.
“What the hell is this?” Mrs. DeLeon asked, to no one in particular.
“Um, that’s mine,” Zack said rushing from behind the bar. “At least it’s a loaner. For now. I’m giving it back.”
Okay, one more snippet
“About two nights after he talked to us,” Zack said, “Professor Ginastera shows up right before closing. And this…guy walks in right behind him. Metal. Professor said he called him Vengador. that’s Spanish for Avenger.”
“Yes, I know,” Mrs. DeLeon said.
“Well, he tells me this is a defense robot he’s been working on and that he figured I could help him test it out. For a week or so. Kind of like a test-drive.”
Well, that’s it for this week. Next week something very good not from me. —-jeff
Helpful tech Brodie at Ribbit Computers, West Street Wichita, KS.
I had to replace my old laptop about a month ago. I’d spilled beer on it and took it to see if it could be repaired. They advised replacement. So I selected the Dell (smaller keyboard, more memory and faster speed) which I now use and they proceeded to transfer my precious documents and pictures to the new laptop. Got it at a good price and it is performing well.
Time and again I take my computers to Ribbit and get either serious repairs or free tech advice. I’ve always found their efficient service well worth it! I recommend them highly!
(And I apologize to Brodie if I misspelled his name!)
I’d been banging on the delivery door for about three minutes when I finally got a response from inside. It was like that old comedy bit.
“Who is it?” the voice said.
“Delivery!” I said.
“Read the sign. No deliveries between Eleven-Thirty and One-Thirty.”
“It also says ‘Taco Grande’ and they moved.” I said. “Look, your boss called us up and wanted this stuff immediately. Open up, it’s hot out here.”
“I can’t open this door before one. Besides, we’re in our lunch rush.” the voice said.
“I drove around through the front parking lot,” I said. “You don’t look busy, and you need…”
“Look, you don’t bring anything in here without my approval,” the voice said. “I don’t care who said what or how hot it is. You’re not getting in here right now.”
“Your boss wanted this stuff as fast as we could get it here,” I said. “I have the cooler in the van and I…”
“I don’t care what anybody said,” he said opening the door a crack. “You get out of here and come back after…”
He was a tall, lean man with brown hair and one of those corporate-looking button-down shirts restaurant managers wear with the company logo on his tie.
He stared for a moment.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, pointing to my two-wheeler and the brown cardboard tub oozing a purple glop all over the pavement.
“That,” I said, “is the tub of raspberry ice cream your boss called up for and wanted in a hurry. We had instructions to bring it out as fast as we could and put it in your freezer. Your boss has big plans for it. And,’ I said pulling the wheeler out from under it, “he already paid so you don’t have to sign for it.”
I turned and went back to my delivery truck.
The joke was on me. They made that idiot who wouldn’t open the door a Supervisor.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Actually, everything in this story really did happen to me at various times in my career as a deliveryman (about 25 years!) I thought about inserting dragons, zombies or a flying saucer but truth is stranger than fiction! ——jeff
authorjeffbaker 