"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
(I highly recommend E. H.’s story, it is excellent! But her stories usually are!)
I’ll see you April 3rd, 2023 for the next draw! And it’s not too late for you to write a story for this month’s or any earlier months Flash Fiction Draw Challenge! Happy writing!
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 creature trying to bite at my boot was a raccoon once, I think. I kick it away. Clumps of fur fall to the ground as it snarls impotently and it loses a tooth while gouging a scar in my leather instep.
Dammit, I like these boots. I dig in my belt pouch for salt and sprinkle it on the wide, moth-eaten forehead. “Earth to earth.” A flash of my Earth power to go with the salt, and the poor creature collapses at last in its well-deserved rest.
We meet Roland’s friend Colyn who is mourning his husband Mark and has decided to use his own magic to do something about it…something forbidden and grim…
The box is fine work, the kind of unit that might grace the home of the wealthiest citizen, large enough for a whole pig, and a haunch of venison, with a jug of milk to spare.
Large enough for a man, clothes still wet after a year, bloody hair matted to his deathly white face from where he struck something in the river, limbs tucked in and head bowed, when the door is opened.
The spell shimmers across the front, keeping everything inside from changing, as it’s designed to do. In a normal home, opening and closing the spell daily means the work would thin and need renewal every month. I hoped to the Goddess no sorcerer had been complicit in renewing that…living death.
“I saved the maker’s wife and baby.” Colyn runs a hand in front the control rune, but not close enough to activate it. “He gave the unit to us as a thank-you, just the day before…When Mark died, the stasis seemed providential. A gift of the Goddess.”
Well! Those snippets went a bit over six lines, but how far will Colyn go?
And on that macabre note, I leave you until next time when we will we meet a man who has encountered a dragon. —–jeff
(The house pic DID inspire this week’s story but I forgot to mention it in the story! Oh well, it’s where our narrator lives! —–j)
Fools That Will Laugh on Earth
by Jeff Baker
The alien invasion failed but it still got me in a lot of trouble at school.
My name is Christopher Normand, but they call me Kip. I was a Junior in High School that year, trying to keep my head above water and keep a low profile. And I’m gonna blame my cousin Andre Prezetti for the whole thing. Well, most of it anyway.
Andre was my Mom’s sister’s (that’s my Aunt’s) youngest son and so we were the same age. We didn’t really hang out, he was awfully full of himself and always getting in trouble. And a lot of the time he could talk or charm his way out of it. Well, some of it anyway. And on Mom’s side of the family, we were Firsters.
“Even after all this time, a lot of people didn’t even believe in the Firsters, despite all the evidence.” That’s from a ‘cast I saw about the 150th anniversary of the initial contact when the aliens landed in the middle of the 21st Century
The aliens said they were the First so they got called the Firsters. They showed up around 2062 and gave us the usual sci-fi movie shtick about “coming in peace,” “boon to mankind” and all that. But their real motive was to breed with humans and create a superior version of their race.
The invasion was a terrific fail. The Earth’s magnetic field proved fatal to the aliens consciousness and only a few advanced traits showed up in the descendants without any sign of alien personality. The Earth governments figured any other alien invaders would be warned away.
As for the descendants, these “firsters” were human except for some flashes of advanced perceptions, super intelligence (we were able to upgrade communications satellites and colonize the Moon) and a few genuine super powers like Andre’s.
I just had this funny perception gift sometimes. I could look at something and analyze its physical mass. It only came in handy in chemistry and geometry which I was aceing anyway, and once I was going home from school and glanced at an old building and I knew that its one wall wasn’t firm enough and it did collapse a few months later.
Andre could change shape. Make himself look like anything he wanted. The catch was that he would still have the same general mass as he always had. He could turn himself into an elephant but it would be a 5’7” 155 pound elephant. And he couldn’t do anything about the clothes he was wearing.
Andre and I were both Juniors at Lyle Monroe High School that year. Even without the shape changing, Andre was one of those guys who could charm the socks off of anybody and managed to not do a lot of classwork. I really didn’t hang out with him.
Anyway, Andre and I only had one class together that semester and we weren’t even in the same lunch period. But it was at lunch I realized something was going on. I walked up to the serving counter and was told I didn’t get two lunches per school day. I didn’t think anything of it at first, I grabbed a MunchieHealthBar from one of the machines but while I was eating the bar I remembered a couple of the guys in one of my classes snickering at me and I’d heard something about my messing around with one of the girls behind the old gym during second period when I was supposed to be in class.
Andre.
He could do it. We were about the same size. He knew I wouldn’t have the nerve to ask any girl out, or any guy either.
But I checked first. I knew what class he had second period so I went to the teacher and gave her a story about my Aunt wanting to know if he had any homework and she said he just needed to read chapter four and she hoped he was feeling better and would be back in school soon.
So Andre had been cutting his classes and going around school as me. I asked a couple of kids we both knew if they’d seen Andre around and I guess word must have gotten to him that I was onto him and then I saw myself turning a corner down a hallway and I ran after him but he was gone and then I passed the office and saw one of our neighbors, this tall, older guy In poorly fitting clothes asking somebody for directions in the office and I was wondering what he was doing at school and so I looked at him with my perceptions and I saw that his distribution of mass was all wrong. And besides, he was wearing Andre’s clothes.
I wasn’t a very physical guy, no good at gym but I ran and tackled the guy and I was right because suddenly I was on top of Andre on the floor and we were both hollering.
Well, Andre and I got sent to Mr. Bradford’s office and he was pretty old-fashioned about discipline and he also didn’t believe a word about the Firsters, he said all that alien invasion stuff had been faked. Of course, Andre just played dumb and let all the blame fall on me but he couldn’t explain what he was doing in school when he’d missed all his classes supposedly being out sick. So Mr. Bradford put some things down on our input sheet and we both had to do the after-school class for the next few days but when he was going all disciplinarian on us something clicked in my head…
…and I saw through him to who he really was, or part of him anyway. Not his physical mass like I usually could but his, well, his inner self I guessed. And I saw that he was scared. Maybe scared of us. Maybe he did believe Firsters were real and we were Firsters. I couldn’t tell that. In the instant I remembered something I’d heard about our gifts possibly expanding as we grew up and I glanced over at Andre and for an instant saw something hungry for power, love, money, all of it. Then, I was just looking at Andre again.
And that was the first time I got extra sight. It didn’t happen again for months but I spent the next few days glaring at my teachers, my parents, everyone. Hoping for another glimpse into who these people really were. By the end of the week, I was bleary-eyed. Control of the gift and its responsibilities would come later. And I still had to make it through the rest of High School.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is the second story I’ve written about The Firsters, the other was called “Four Star Review” and was accepted by an online magazine which vanished without a trace before the story could get published. I’d always wanted to write another story about The Firsters and this idea had been roiling around in my head. Although it’s set in the future it is a version of the more innocent school days some of us remember. Oh, and the title is from Christopher Marlowe. —-jeff
The lights at the football stadium were off and they could barely see the grass in the reflected light from the city.
“Gimmie that thermos,” Hammie Dane said from where the two twenty-somethings stood in the shadow of the stands.
“Careful unscrewing the cup,” Horacio said handing him the thermos. “I about lost it once.”
“Okay, I…hey! This is hot!” Hammie said.
“Careful!” Horacio said.
“I am,” Hammie said sipping the tea. “Wish we’d put whiskey in it.”
Hammie and Horacio had come here to kill Hammie’s Uncle Claude. They knew he liked to go for walks on the old college football field where he had played as a young man. The voice of Hammie’s late father had spoken to them, claiming murder and demanding vengeance. Claude was now married to Hammie’s mother.
“You want some tea?” Hammie asked.
“Maybe later,” Horacio said rubbing Hammie’s arm fondly.
In the dim light they briefly looked into each other’s eyes. Then Horacio gazed across the field.
“Look!” Horacio whispered pointing. “There he is! Or there somebody is.”
They saw a dark figure in the shadows under the goalpost on the other end of the field.
“It’s him,” Horacio said.
“He can’t see us,” Hammie said. “Keep quiet. Follow me.” He felt the knife he had brought. They needed to get close.
The two men edged along the shadows of the stands. Then Hammie pressed his hand against Horacio’s chest and they stopped and stood deathly still.
Uncle Claude had fallen to his knees in the end zone. Was he celebrating? Was he ill?
“He’s praying,” Hammie whispered.
“Yeah.” Horacio said.
They stood and stared. They could almost hear Claude’s whispered prayers.
Hammie quickly turned and walked back the way they came, Horacio following.
“I can’t do it,” Hammie said, looking exhausted, bending over to grab his knees, breathing hard.
“You okay?” Horacio asked.
“I can’t kill a man,” Hammie said. “Even him. I don’t care who tells me to.”
Horacio patted his friend on his shoulders.
“I’m here for you, buddy,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks.” Hammie said. “I wanna get back to my apartment. Hey, would you stay with me tonight? I mean, we don’t have to, you know…”
“I’ll stay.” Horacio said. “You need your sleep.”
“Yeah.” Hammie said. “Hey, you’ve always stuck by me.”
“Yeah,” Horacio said as they walked to the car. “Hey, I got a CD from Flights of Angels. Should help you get to sleep.”
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The draws for the March 2023 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were A Shakespearean story, including a cup of tea, set on a football field. My story is sequel to “2B or Not 2B” https://authorjeffbaker.com/2022/08/19/someones-not-at-the-door-for-friday-flash-fics-2b-or-not-2b-by-jeff-baker-august-19-2022/ a story that I wrote in the heat of summer set in an air-conditioned apartment as an homage to one of my favorite fantasy writers. This was a chance to do a sequel, following the much better original. And the title is a line from that original. ——jeff
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.
