"…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 March 2023 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge. Then my usual long-winded explanation:
An Shakespearian Story
Involving a Cup of Tea
Set on a Football Field
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 March 13th, 2023.
As I’m no good making videos I did the drawing offstage and the results were the Eight of Clubs (a cup of tea), the Ace of Diamonds (a football stadium) and the Jack of Hearts (a Shakespearian story.)
So we will write a Shakespearian story, set at a football stadium involving a cup of tea!. And, again, I’ve got to be crazy listing another writer’s style (like last month’s Aesop’s Fable!)
So, get to writing and I’ll post the results next week!
Take your seat to watch the parade or rather, to listen to a couple of parade-watchers.
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’d been staring at the parade for a while and my eyes were starting to frizz over. The drag queens and shirtless guys were starting to look alike. I glanced to my left and saw the folks at the other window; three, no, four guys with a rainbow flag. I glanced above them; guy in a leather harness who had the virtue of being kind of buff. With another rainbow flag. I smiled to myself, I needed to work out. But I was in pretty good health for my age.
Here’s the next snippet
I looked across the street, over the rooftops. Coit Tower was off in the distance, hidden by one of the buildings. I smiled. I remembered when the tower had been shiny and new, when the bridge had been just a fantasy.
I glanced to the left again; the youngish guy in a white t-shirt was staring over at us. I focused on the parade; a line of men and women in business attire were marching past, waving at the crowd.
“Oh, yeah!” came a voice from the above window. “Cubicle-dwellers! My people!”
Well, that’s that for this week, but our narrator has some secrets, don’t you think? Well, I’ll see you next week for a tale of magic and a menacing raccoon!—–jeff
I was sitting at the easel staring at the blank canvas, tapping the tray of chalk with my fingers, regretting taking an art class. Especially since I was in the hallway outside the classroom at five thirty in the evening. One of my classmates was letting me use the easel that was out by the art that was being put on display.
My project was due tomorrow. I stared. The canvas looked really, really blank.
What to draw. I didn’t have the damnedest idea.
My teacher, Sister Mindy Hortense would be okay with it as long as I was finished in time. She wasn’t expecting masterpieces from me. And the way it was going I wasn’t expecting anything from me, either.
I sat. I stared. I kept thinking of an old Norman Rockwell cover that showed him from the back, sitting at a blank easel. I sighed.
If I did something that inspired we’d hang it in the lobby of the dorm. Maybe rename the bunch of us that hung out there “I Draw Nada,” instead of “I Study Nada.”
I’d done cartoons for the school paper and I’d never drawn a blank like this and I’d been under a bunch of deadlines and had never lacked for an idea.
Just draw something and get it over with. It’s chalk so you can just smear something and say it was raining in the picture. You can put it on the wall of your dorm. Or burn it in the parking lot.
You can draw, dammit! Just put something on the paper so you can be back in the dorm.
I stared at the paper. The dorm. The brownish-red brick, those green corners the pale yellow around the doors.
I sorted through the chalk. In another minute or two I began to sketch.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I took the prompt pic in the hallway outside the art class at my old college (Newman University) the one that inspired the dorm stories I write occasionally (like the chili story last week!) Didn’t expect to write another one so soon! Oh, and the title is an old expression. —-jeff
My friend Kaje Harper has a new book out! “The Distant Hills and Other Stories” brings together over two dozen of her short stories, most of them involving men in love but they touch on other themes too.
The moods can be sweet, romantic, jarring, funny and heart-tugging. Sometimes all at once. There are longtime lovers in here as well as men trying to work on their relationship. Young people and old people and at least one zombie raccoon.
Many of these stories appeared on her Facebook page (“Kaje’s Conversation Corner”) where her weekly fiction offerings are not to be missed.
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
Willie sighed to himself. He shifted just a little in the chair. He talked without moving his lips. It came out. “Whurgga grro grffrmm?”
Dennis sighed and set down his paintbrush.
“Okay, what?”
“When do I get to go to the bathroom?”
Here’s snippet two.
Five minutes to get Willie positioned back in the chair exactly right. Willie had made the mistake early on of saying something about Norman Rockwell working from photographs. Dennis had grumbled that he couldn’t work that way, not for something special.
“And you think Thomas is special don’t you? That’s why you want this for him?”
Willie had smiled and nodded.
Gotta add this third snippet.
“I read where Shakespeare dedicated; I think his sonnets, to ‘the only begetter.’ Everybody wonders what he meant by that. I think it was to the guy the sonnets were dedicated to, y’know. Not Shakespeare’s boyfriend, but the boyfriend of the guy who commissioned the sonnets. They’re really erotic and powerful and I’m glad I don’t write dangerous potent stuff like that,” Willie grinned.
Okay, that’s enough from me. Next week, we travel to San Francisco and watch the passing parade. Until then, take care! —-jeff
The whole mess started because Steve saw the poster they put up in our dorm lobby about the 40th Anniversary Millington Chili Blowout. The school (University of Millington or Millington University) usually had a group entering the annual contest but this year some of it would be taking place right on campus because of construction downtown. So the University started urging campus groups to take part and enter their own team to compete with their own chili.
College kids usual idea of fancy cooking was using the microwave but Steve got the idea for us to enter the chili contest as “I Study Nada.”
We started calling ourselves that when we all found ourselves living in what had been the old girls dorm before they built the big new one. They used the old one to house the overflow when the other dorms got too crowded. I didn’t mind; it wasn’t that noisy and we were at the edge of campus which meant we were just a block or so away from the convenience store. The dorm was two stories and only about a third of the rooms were occupied and I’d hardly seen most of the people who were living there. Most of us either had jobs or were serious students or both and there were even a couple of guys the college just let rent rooms there. A few of the guys I did know started hanging out when we weren’t in class and joked about being a fraternity called “I Study Nada,” and it stuck.
It didn’t take us long at all to get a booth ready; we had it in the dorm lobby and just carried it across campus to where a few other campus groups had set up. We decorated it with the name “I Study Nada” designed to look like they were Ancient Greek carvings.
Making chili was not going to be a problem. It was about the only thing I’d learned how to cook before I went off to college. We were supposed to make it the morning of the contest at our booth, so all we needed to do was try out the recipe (we did) and be ready to make it that Saturday morning. The ingredients were another. matter. We got the meat stored in the second floor fridge and we had onions ready. The only thing we hadn’t counted on was Friday night after we tested the recipe our running out of beans. Our remaining cans of beans were way outdated and the stores were out of all the ingredients.
That was when Kev came to our rescue, he’d been growing the things. Part of a project for his botany degree, he had a bunch of cross-polinated beans growing in the greenhouse. They were safe he swore, he’d been eating them himself and he had a lot of them.
A LOT.
I went to the greenhouse with Kev Friday night; I’d really never seen beans in anything but a can (“its natural habitat” I quipped) before. But these were reddish-green and growing in pods about as big as my fist.
“One of these pods,” Kev said, “will fill up a couple of those cans. That’s what I’m trying for, an increased yield.”
“And you’re sure they’ll be safe for chili?” I asked.
“I’ve been eating them in my salads for months,” Kev said.
We took enough for a couple of big pots of chili.
The day dawned, bright and clear and we were set up in our booth next to the other booths on campus on the old tennis court that they hadn’t used in a decade. Our booth was a little bigger than a couple of portable toilets. We basically were a table with a big sign and a combination of plywood and cardboard, with a small cooker and a makeshift sink in the booth. From the front it looked like a glorified version of the booth where Charlie Brown seeks psychiatric help.
By nine that morning our first big pot of chili was ready and we could smell the chili from some of the other booths. Before we could sample any, we had our first sale; some Freshman I didn’t recognize who said he’d been up all night and needed breakfast. He bought a small bowl, pronounced it “Real good” and wandered off singing something I recognized from an opera I’d heard on the radio when I was dating a guy who loved opera. I was trying to remember something from the one opera Marcus and I had gone to see when a couple of other customers wandered up and we started dishing out chili in earnest.
We could smell the chili from the other booths and they were also doing a booming business. The competition wasn’t exactly fierce, one of the guys at the other booth gave us a thumbs up and about an hour later I took advantage of a pause in the serving to go over and sampled some of the chili from the other booths. Not bad, I thought. But that was when I started to notice the singing.
I had been thinking about opera so that might have been the reason I hadn’t really noticed but there were several people in the area singing opera arias. I recognized “Aida,” “Madame Butterfly” and “Carmen.” Some promotion the school was doing alongside the Chili Blowout?
That was when Kev nudged me and said “I think there’s something funny going on. Everybody who eats our chili starts singing like that.”
“The opera stuff?” I said.
“That’s opera?” Kev said.
“Think it could be those beans?” Steve started to ask but that was when the four judges for the Chili Blowout came over to our booth.
We glanced at each other. Couldn’t be. Too crazy.
“I Study Nada,” one of the judges read from his sheet, checking it with our sign. “Clever.”
We dished out four little cups of chili in smaller bowls. The judges each took a nibble, then a swallow. They seemed to like it.
Then they started to sing.
Years later I heard the song again and discovered it was a four-part song from “Marriage of Figaro,” but I never heard it sung as good as I did that morning.
By noon we were almost out of the chili and we kept an eye on our customers. The musical effects didn’t last long and they seemed none the worse for the wear. After all that, none of the campus booths won. Not even an honorary mention.
We shut the booth down after one-thirty and carried what was left of the chili back to the dorm. And yes, later that day we heated up what was left of the stuff and took turns sampling the stuff. Pretty good, and the strange side effect only seemed to happen when those beans were used in chili.
So into the evening, as long as the chili lasted, we were happily raising our voices in operatic song.
For Valentine’s Day Week, how about somebody who’s running away from romance? “The Spirits of the Night” https://authorjeffbaker.com/2018/12/01/spirits-of-the-night-for-friday-flash-fics-by-jeff-baker-november-30-2018/ was the first of my stories about Prince Almazotz; youngest son of the youngest son of a prince and on the run from an arranged marriage to a guy he can’t stand. He’s about 26th in line for a throne in an itty-bitty principality on my quasi-Arabian Nights fantasy world of three moons. Here’s the first snippet:
After two weeks sleeping in fields and eating handouts from taverns, Prince Almazotz was beginning to realize that while the title sounded good, there were a lot of princes around and the title was no good without an army or money and he had neither at the moment. But for that evening anyway, he was the guest at a castle, or what was left of one. The main house may have been more comfortable but he wasn’t going to complain about a hot meal, or a room at the top of a tower with a comfortable bed, windows with shutters and a fine view and even a fireplace, if he needed one.
Prince Almazotz rolled over, under the warm blankets and was still half-asleep when he noticed the pale figure half in, half out of the room’s shadows. The figure was male, which was a plus, dark haired and very pale. At first, he thought the figure’s arms were covered in tattoos, but the moved and Almazotz realized they were wings.
Here’s a little more:
“I am one of the Spirits of the Air,” he said in a breathy voice. “A Spirit of the Night Air, I was flying past your open window and I saw you slumbering so peacefully, looking like a young god.”
Prince Almazotz wiped some drool off his chin and hoped his hair wasn’t too much of a mess.
“Allow me to caress you as a wind, as if we were both mortals, the spirit said. It is the thing most spirits truly desire and you, oh handsome one, are one that any spirit would desire.”
Prince Almazotz shrugged and said “True.”
And on that breathy note, I will bid you farewell and a belated Happy Valentine’s Day until next week!
—–jeff
Oh, and I’ve written about the Spirits of the Air before! Check the links below or to the right of the original story! —-j
My older Brother and I were both on Spring Break in 2011. I was a Junior in High School and he was in Grad School. He was about ten years older than I was. Anyway we were driving around town and I was showing off my car, this beat-up old convertible where the top wouldn’t go down. We had a cassette player on the dash (no C. D. player) and I was playing the cassettes I’d bought cheap at the used store.
So, we were driving around singing along with the tape. “Deck The Halls,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” and “Twelve Days of Christmas” when we pulled into a convenience store to grab a soda and maybe unload the sodas we’d been drinking in the men’s room. Anyway we walked around the corner and Bryan stops dead when he sees an old yellow Plymouth parked in front of the door.
“Oh, my gosh!” Bryan blurted out. “That looks like…” And he runs to the back of the car and gawks at the back bumper and starts laughing.
“This was my first car!” Bryan laughs. “I bought it when I was in my first year in college.”
That was why I didn’t remember a Plymouth. I’d never seen it.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“Look here, Nate,” he said pointing at the back bumper. “That old bumper sticker I put on is still sort of there.”
I stared down at the bumper. The paper stuck to the bumper was green and blue with faded reddish lettering.
“Um…I brake for…” I read aloud. “Not sure…”
“I Brake for Not Sure sounds better,” Bryan said. “Wow!”
“How much time did you spend in the back seat with girls?” I asked.
“Not much!” Bryan said. “I had to study.”
I hadn’t told him yet that I would be more interested in making out with guys in the back seat but really hadn’t done it yet.
“It’s been a long time since I drove this thing,” Bryan said. “Maybe a lifetime.” He looked up from gazing at the Plymouth and gazed into the distance. Then he looked over at me and grinned.
“Always remember, Little ‘Bro. Enjoy it all when it’s happening.”
“I nodded and the two of us went into the store to get some useless junk food.
authorjeffbaker 