"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
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.
More of The Best of the Best of Ballantine’s The Best of…
Compiled by Jeff Baker
From about 1974 through at least the late 80s, Ballantine Books published a series of over 22 (paperback and hardcover) “Best of” collections of the work of science-fiction writers, many from the “Golden Age” in the 30s and 40s, with a representative sampling of the work of some masters of the craft. Many of the authors were around to contribute an afterward to their books and the forwards were written by a friend or someone who had intimate knowledge of the author in question.
A while back I speculated about a “Best Of” collection of stories, one each, from these books that I collected in used stores in the 90s when I was studying short stories and hoping to write my own. This list counts as a sequel or second volume.
I am happily a retro writer, influenced by stories like the ones I read here.
“The Day is Done” by Lester del Rey. One of three very good Golden Age stories about an immortal Neanderthal I know of. Del Rey also collected some of his earlier stories in a Doubleday book (reissued as two Ballantine paperbacks) “The Early del Rey” where he provides a lot of background commentary about his career. Very encouraging to writers. (Del Rey later co-founded Del Rey books an important publisher of sci-fi and fantasy.)
“The Days of Perky Pat” by Phillip K. Dick. Another post-apocalyptic story by a somewhat apocalyptic writer. Dick’s stories and novels have been reissued all over. This one involves a game, rivalry and children who are more forward-looking than their elders.
“A Gun for Dinosaur” by L. Sprague de Camp. A time travel story written to poke a few holes in another author’s historically inaccurate vision of dinosaurs. De Camp was known for his meticulous research and fact-checking. And while his wit is dry it is there in almost all his fiction. De Camp wound up writing a whole book of stories based on time traveler Reggie Rivers; “Rivers of Time.”
“Surface Tension” by James Blish. Like a lot of younger readers I first heard of Blish from his books of authorized adaptions of Star Trek scripts. He was one of the serious hard science writers of the genre who led a double life as a critic under a pen name.
“Old Faithful” by Raymond Z. Gallun about a very alien but nonetheless sympathetic extraterrestrial reminds me just a bit of the Weinbaum story I picked in the previous installment of this column. Gallun is one of the writers I had never heard of before I stumbled across his “Best of” collection in the short-story section of a used bookstore.
“The Taste of the Dish and the Savor of the Day” by John Brunner is one of the stories he wrote intending to break from the less-challenging science fiction he felt was being written at the time. A fine example from a master whose career was derailed by a stroke.
“Uncommon Sense” by Hal Clement. Clement is one of the other writers I had never heard of before I saw his name listed in another “Best Of” collection and I apparently was not alone in that. He was described in a review as one of the least-known of the authors in the series. He also specialized in hard science fiction and the story I selected was awarded a Retro Hugo Award in 1996.
“The Color out of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft. Yes, there was a “Best of H. P. Lovecraft” published by Del Rey/Ballantine and I’ve seen it listed with the others I’ve mentioned here. This story was originally published in Amazing Stories and Lovecraft considered it one of his best. The full title of the 1982 collection is “The Best of H. P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre.” And it’s great fun!
“Star Mouse” by Frederic Brown closes out my second imagined collection with a writer known for both mystery and science fiction as well as his quirky plot twists. The latter earned him comparisons to O. Henry. The title character of this story, a mutated mouse, is named Mitkey. Yes. I could have picked Brown’s story “Arena,” which was adapted (without pay!) for the original “Star Trek.” Brown’s work appeared in the pulps including the legendary magazine “Unknown.”
So that’s it! I think this would make a great anthology. The original series was drawn from writers Ballantine had in their catalog and was also self-promotional but very good. They may be phasing out paperbacks but an e-book could be wonderful!
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 snippet may be appropriate for Valentine’s day.
Remember Skid and T’amec? The two twenty-something guys with the budding relationship who work in the Food Garden Court restaurant in a magical mall in a magical world? https://rommanticreads.wordpress.com/2022/11/11/jeff-baker-all-the-pleasures-prove/ This unpublished vignette came to me while I was dozing off one night; in it T’amec is showing Skid his cramped new apartment after work one evening. Think of this as a snippet of a snippet:
“I figure this whole apartment was probably the kitchen for a bigger apartment, then they partitioned it off into smaller apartments, or something,” T’amec said.
“Yeah,” Skid said, edging by T’amec to look out the small back window. They brushed together and stopped for a moment, looking into each other’s eyes.
“Hang on, here’s the fridge,” T’amec said opening the door. “Not much in there.”
“Yeah, anybody could tell you work in a restaurant,” Skid said.
Here’s a few more lines from “Skid and T’amec in Slumberland.”
Skid followed him out of the kitchen to the darkened doorway to one side. T’amec flipped on the light revealing a medium-sized bed and a small nightstand that largely filled the small room. There was a small space between the bed and the wall and Skid noted a pair of shoes sticking out from under part of what he assumed were T’amec’s dirty clothes.
“This is the, uh, bedroom.” T’amec said.
“Yeah, I noticed,” Skid said. “Nice bed.”
Let’s leave them to happily snooze. The whole thing will probably never see print unless I write a few more full-fledged stories and put them together as a novel. Until then and until next week, pleasant dreams! —–jeff
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