"…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 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
Eddie wasn’t surprised an angel would know about Gino. They’d been fifteen that summer; Gino had been young, dark and gorgeous. They’d hung out at the lake. On the final day, Eddie had tried kissing Gino and Gino had shoved him away and used an anti-Gay slur. Thank God he’d never told anybody. But before that, the summer had been wonderful.
The angel grants him that last request. To re-live one moment when he was fifteen…Here’s the snippet.
“C’mon! Let’s jump!” Gino said, standing over the lake.
“Uh, no, it’s too high,” Eddie said, suddenly remembering that this had happened before and they hadn’t jumped. He grabbed Gino’s hand and jumped off the edge, the two of them whooping as they fell into the warm, beautiful water, surrounded by bubbles. As they broke the surface, laughing and splashing towards shore, Eddie took a last glance at young, gorgeous Gino and stepped onto the bank as he felt himself drawn upwards towards eternity.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The title is from Act 4, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”
NOTE: I went for my occasional pen-name for this story—-jeff
Leader of the Laundromat
by Mike Mayak
The young man in the brown suede jacket sitting on the row or green plastic seats in the laundromat sat talking into his cellphone.
“Hey, Honey,” he said. “I just put the clothes in and I’m sitting here, gonna either read a book or work in the notebook.” He patted the small duffel bag on the seat next to him. “Yeah, I’ll be glad when we get the washer downstairs fixed too, honey. Then I can put the wash in, hop upstairs and do my reading snuggled on the couch next to you. I’ll have this done in about thirty minutes and come home and use our dryer for free. I’ll call before I leave. Love you, too! Bye”
He put the phone in his jacket pocket and didn’t bother tapping it to shut it off.
A few minutes later, the taller man in the sweater approached him.
“Hey, sorry to bother your reading but do you have any of those detergent pods? I left mine at home.”
“Huh? Oh sure. Yeah.” He fumbled through the duffel bag and pulled out a plastic bag printed with the logo of the grocery store. “Help yourself.”
Thanks,” said the man in the sweater, his mind flashing to all the PSA’s he’d seen about keeping the pods away from kids. After a few more minutes, the man in the sweater sat down next to the young man who was back to his reading.
“I owe you for the pods,” he said extending a hand. “I’m Justin.”
“Mick,” the other man said.
They sat there for a few more minutes and then Mick put his book down and sighed with his eyes closed.
“I hate the washer being busted,” Justin said. “Nice of you to do this for your wife.”
“Nice,” Justin said. I had a boyfriend right out of college, Never made any real commitment though.”
“Mmmm.” Mick said nodding.
“I hope I find somebody who makes my face light up the way yours did when you were talking to your husband. Look, I’m bothering you, I’ll let you get back to your reading.” Justin stood up.
Mick took a deep breath. “My husband passed away…about eight months ago. Really sudden.” Mick stared at his feet. “He had some things wrong with him, but we hoped…”
“My God, I’m sorry…” Justin started.
“It’s okay,” Mick said holding up his hand. “I’m doing all right. We knew each other about twenty years. We got married out in California fifteen years ago. I guess I…well. I pretend to call him up sometimes when I’m away from the house. Like I used to.”
Justin sat down again. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Not really,” Mick said. “I don’t need to talk or anything.”
Then Mick talked. About meeting Paco at work by accident when they were both scheduled for the same shift by mistake, about their first date, about the spilled coffee, about coming out to his parents (his Mom had known all along), about how Paco’s Mom was gone and his Dad had run off somewhere when Paco was twenty, about how a redheaded white guy had gotten the nickname “Paco.”
Justin listened. He’d expected to maybe tear up, but he found himself laughing at some of this sweet couple’s misadventures. Before they knew it he realized both the washers had stopped, their washing finished.
“Wow!” Mick said. “I…I guess I needed to unload. Thanks.”
“No problem,” Justin said. “Listen, would you want to maybe meet up for like coffee or something?”
Mick sat there for a moment.
“I…uh…I don’t think so.” Mick said. “I mean, you’re nice, but I don’t know if I’m ready to date yet. Maybe not ever. I guess I still consider myself married.”
“That’s okay,” Justin said. “Hey, I’d better put my laundry in the dryer before I forget.”
Mick pulled his own laundry out of the washer and put it in the trash bags he had brought along. “A basket is so cliché,” he’d muttered to himself. He didn’t bother using the carts the laundromat provided, he needed the exercise.
When he’d finished taking both bags (wet laundry was heavy) to his car trunk he went back inside and grabbed his book and duffel bag, nodded politely at Justin and walked out to his car.
Mick was in their…his basement at home and had put the wash in the dryer, checked the lint trap and turned the dryer on. He opened the duffel bag and pulled out the little bag with the detergent pods when a piece of paper fell out of the duffel bag.
It was a piece of notebook paper, carefully folded. On it was scrawled a phone number and the name JUSTIN.
Underneath that was written: “For when you’re ready.”
Mick smiled. He stuck the paper in his pocket and headed upstairs. He’d sit in his old spot on the couch and enter the number into his phone.
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 may have posted this, from my story “Something In The Dark” before. It features a loving couple who I admit were based a little on my late husband and myself. Fortunately we never got into a situation like this. Our snippets are from the earlier, domestic set-up. Although this is a horror story it was written with a lot of love. It was read over the “Monsters Out of the Closet” podcast by Eric Little. https://www.monstersoutofthecloset.com/listen/2018/12/25/episode-15-darkness
I sleep with the lights on now.
Kevin and I had been officially married for four months. We owned our own business flipping houses. We’d worked through a lot of towns in Western Kansas near where Kevin had grown up. Hugoton, Elk Ridge, Rachel, even Dodge City. By the end of that summer we were in Darley, Kansas, working on a house at the edge of town.
Here’s more snippets, maybe a few lines over.
Buying fixer-uppers, fixing them up and selling them at a profit was a pretty cushy job, and was no sweat for us. We’d both been practically born with a hammer in our hands and once we got the power on and the plumbing working we stayed in the house we were working on, usually with the big inflatable air bed along with a cooler full of ice, food and soda. Saved a lot of money that way, and gave new meaning to the phrase “working from home.” Darley, Kansas wasn’t much. A main street with old brick, one story buildings, grain elevator by the railroad tracks to the north, water tower overlooking everything. Surrounding that were several streets with the newest houses mostly dating back to the 1960’s. The one we were in was a ranch style with faux brick below painted wood along with a concrete front porch with an awning. Most of the paint was peeling and the grass was overgrown in brown waves like a tan comb-over.
Okay, that’s enough before things get spooky (and they do!) Next week, an appointment with an angel.
I had to tell Brad that AUNT CLARA wasn’t my Aunt and wasn’t a reference to that old TV show. He actually believed me when I acknowledged it was a secret intelligence organization and I belonged to it.
“Nobody at school would have figured you having anything to do with intelligence,” he said.
He was smirking when he said that.
Well, they’d recruited me just after college. AUNT CLARA specialized in what you’d call “Cold Cases.” Sleeper agents. Hidden information. That sort of thing.
Brad was really suspicious when I told him I needed to get into the basement there at the bank. Actually the offices across the street from the bank, not into a vault. And Brad had a key to the door. He was security after all.
The basement area was usually locked. It was always locked Saturday afternoons, which is when we went down there. Hardly anybody at the offices or downtown for that matter at that time of the week. Brad unlocked the door, we trotted down the short flight of stairs, which were marble or faux marble with an ornate railing. This building had been the original bank before they built the one across the street in the 70s.
“Just make sure you lock that door behind you,” I said.
We reached the bottom of the stairs, the room was dim but there against the wall was an ancient mailbox, maybe three feet off the floor, about another three feet in height. It looked like brass, it was probably some painted metal. There was a mail slot with a little door which I tried. It had long ago been sealed.
There was a small sign in magic marker where the card telling the mail pickup times would be. It read: “Do Not Use. Not In Service. USPS.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thought so.” I felt the keyhole at the side of the box where the Postman would have collected the mail.
“What’re you gonna do, Adrian?” Brad asked. I said nothing.
I got down on one knee where I could feel under the mailbox. I pulled out a penlight, which was easier to use than my phone. Then I pulled out the key that was on a chain around my neck.
Maybe Brad had thought I was a little nuts at the start of this, he didn’t right then. I found the keyhole under the mailbox, inserted the key and after a couple of tries it turned.
The bottom of the box fell open; a door to a small compartment smaller than a cigar box. A fat, brownish envelope, not big enough for inter-office mail fell out.
I picked up the envelope. It was several decades old and wrapped with several rubber bands, the thick kind Brad and I would have treasured back in grade school.
I stuffed the envelope in my inside jacket pocket and closed the little door.
The Sloppy Joes get into their performance. Photo by Jeff Baker
In Which Mike Gets a Little Sloppy
by Jeff “Mike” Baker
Regular readers of this blog know that the past few years have been rough for me.
So tonight, I went out and got sloppy. That is I went to my old Alma Mater, Newman University here in Wichita to catch a show from their student improv group “The Sloppy Joes” who I had never seen.
There was a nice crowd in the Jabarra Black Box theater and the Joes didn’t disappoint. Taking suggestions for a setting, an addiction (pineapple!) or even a crime (vandalizing a jungle gym) the Joes proceeded into flights of fancy ranging from Caesar’s court to a sports network play-by-play.
The laughs from the audience of maybe 40 people were genuine, including from me. I seriously needed a good laugh, and it does have a power to take you away from troubles for a while.
There was nothing like this on campus when I went there back in 1978-’83, and I doubt they could have gotten away with the very funny semi-musical breakup between two boyfriends.
With the suggestions from the audience, poop seemed to be the order of the evening with the sports network broadcasters calling a toilet-cleaning contest and a superhero (“Backpack Man”) emerging from a Port-A-Potty.
After the hour long show one of the members said he wondered if the stuff would “work” this show. It did. And I told them I needed the good laughs.
I went into the theater with my mask on but pulled it off midway through the first improv sketch. If I get COVID it was worth it.
The performers for this show were:
John Suffield
Corbin Molina
Minh Nguyen
Isaac Iseman
Daniel Cubias
Dannicka McGraff
Austin Schwartz
ADDENDA: When I went to see the show I did not have my notebook and did not get the performer’s names. Thanks so much to the folks at their Facebook group for providing them. I’ve added them to the article. If anybody who sees this knows them, please show this blog to them. Thanks! —-mike
Here’s house again. Open car door. Sniff yard. All okay.
Open house. Look back at yard. Head in.
Curl up by sofa.
Niiiiiiice.
Wag tail.
Dream…..
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Written pretty much in one sitting from a prompt pic I snapped of a dog looking out a car window. Didn’t quite know where it was going to go. I knew it would have a happy ending, but I wasn’t sure why the guy was going out. Not for food (I thought about a drive-through.) The prosaic mailing of a letter seemed to fit; it just popped into my head. Looking at it again, maybe the guy was mailing off his taxes. —–jsb.
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
The Errant Kidnapping and Inadvertent Time Travel of James Sandall Jnr
by Jeff Baker
“Okay,” Eddie said. “You can take the blindfold off now.”
“Great,” James said, pulling off the black blindfold and tossing it onto the floor of the rental car. “Hey, where are we?”
“Look around.” Eddie said with a grin.
“It’s dark!” James said.
“Not that dark,” Eddie said pulling the car out of the shadow of the building. “It’s Monday and a lot of the places around here aren’t open this late. But look.”
They were on an old brick side street that had been kept up by the city. The area was fashionable for the end of the week after work crowd. Old buildings surrounded them, mostly brick, some with dates carved along the top. Dates about a century old from the days when there were train tracks running down the street to unload shipments into the warehouses.
All that was missing, Eddie thought, was Batman chasing the Joker. James gawked around, his eyes adjusting to the dark.
“Oh, my gosh!” James breathed. “You brought me back down here?”
“Yeah, and look right there,” Eddie said pointing out the car window.
James looked where Eddie was pointing. A narrow brick four-story building, wooden steps leading down from a big steel door under a big neon sign glowing with the word “ARCADE.”
“Oh, wow!” James said. “I thought they tore that down!”
“Nope!” Eddie said. “I drove by when I was up here on business last year and I checked online before we left. Of course it isn’t the produce company warehouse anymore.”
“Sure isn’t,” James said. “And my days driving delivery are long gone.”
“The bar and grill’s still a couple of streets over,” Eddie said pointing. “But it’s expanded into a big restaurant now. They serve more than beer and fish sticks.”
“And that’s where you were working in the mornings when I delivered your load of breaded mushrooms, those damn fish sticks and the frozen cheese sticks nobody liked!” James said, smiling broadly with the memory.
“And we met and we got to talking when I’d check stuff in, and well…” Eddie said.
“And here we are almost twenty years later.” James said. He leaned over to kiss his husband.
“You know,” James said a couple of minutes later when he was settling back in the passenger seat. “I wondered why you were being so mysterious back at the hotel.”
“Yeah, asking you to put on a blindfold and not ask questions does count as mysterious,” Eddie laughed. “I’m just glad this is the hotel I stay at when the company sends me up here. They know me so I could explain we went to college here, we’re up for a reunion and I wasn’t kidnapping you.”
James laughed again. “The Erratic Kidnapping and Inadvertent Time Travel Of James Sandall Junior. Yeah, there’s a title for a novel!”
“Time travel?” Eddie asked.
“Isn’t that sort of what we’re doing right now? Going back twenty years?” James asked.
They sat for a few more minutes holding hands in the car.
“You know, I still have that picture I took somewhere,” Eddie said. “The one of you waiting on a shipment and sitting on that dock that’s where the door is now reading some science fiction novel. And now you’re a published author.”
“Yeah.” James said. “Couldn’t have done it without you beside me.”
Eddie reached under his seat and pulled out a book. “So, how about you get up there and we take an author photo?”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” James asked with another laugh.
“Pretty sure.” Eddie said looking around.
Under the neon sign, James Sandall tried to look serious holding up his latest novel standing by an ancient building that held a lot of his and Eddie’s history.
The Draws for the April 2023 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were:
A Hardboiled Detective Story
Involving a Model T. Ford
Set at a Prison Work Farm
I almost didn’t do a story for this month’s Challenge..
As some of you know this has been a very very bad week for me. I had a good beginning for this story, written right after I posted the draws. It looked good and I figured I’d finish the thing in a couple of days.
But then, on April 4, 2023 early in the morning, my Husband Darryl died. He had been in intensive care and we thought he was getting better but then we found he was sicker than we thought.
I will be all right, but I figured the story would not be finished until a later date if ever. Then a few mornings later I went out to my car and found it had a nearly flat tire. So I drove it two miles to Kansasland Tire to have it repaired. (Nail. Repairs. $35.00 Whew!) But while I was sitting in the shop I pulled out my notebook, read what I had written and finished the story. And, to my amazement, I had fun doing it.
Darryl encouraged my writing, especially in the early 2010’s when I was not making time for it and complaining I wasn’t writing. Then he told me to make time and I did; working on writing stories on my lunch hour. He was as proud as anything when I started placing stories in anthologies. Who I am is a writer, and Darryl loved me for that among other things.
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/RainbowSnippets
Josh and I had been hired to find some missing jewelry, gems that hadn’t even been reported stolen yet, the owner felt he was to embarrassed to do what he should have done and called the police.
Early Breakfast usually had more customers in the morning but that was the morning of the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade downtown. I had said something about the big rooster on top of the building being the Saint Patrick’s Day Chicken and Josh grumbled something about sticking to business.
In this case, “business” meant sipping coffee at a back corner table and keeping track of everyone in the restaurant. Including the owner.
That’s it for this week! Join us next time for an encounter in a motel. —-jeff
authorjeffbaker 