The Gobble-Uns Will Git You for Friday Flash Fics by Jeff Baker. September 16, 2022

Posted on September 16, 2022 by jeffbaker307

The Gobble-Uns Will Git You If You Don’t Watch Out!

By Jeff Baker

“See! There they are! I told you!” Abner said.

Pinkle’s Grocery wasn’t officially open for the morning and the two men in aprons and ties stared at the display just inside the front door. In front of the tables stocked with potted plants for sale were a row of tall ceramic pots shaped like smiling ghosts and jack-o-lanterns. Two of each.

“Halloween decorations? So? They go up every year right after school starts.” Roy said.

“Not those! They were out on the floor last year and the year before that and the year before that and I looked it up and WE DON’T CARRY THEM!!! And we don’t have them in the storeroom, I’ve had all year to keep checking!” Abner said.

“So? Maybe someone brought them in? Maybe that lady at the pharmacy who…”

“No! It isn’t!” Abner said. “We’re two men down, Murchison’s out with the flu and I’ve been coming in for him the last few mornings. Those things weren’t here one night and they were here the next morning.”

“So, what are you suggesting?” Roy said. “That there’s something unnatural about this?”

“I…I’m not sure.” Abner said.

“You’ve got Halloween on the brain.” Roy said. “Too many commercials, horror movies and candy.”

“Well, maybe.” Abner said. “But I was sure…”

“What about the security video?” Roy asked.

“Not working. Well, not recording anyway.” Abner said. “The security guy monitors those when the store is open.”

“Okay.” Roy said. “And the security guy’s out this week.”

The two of them stared at the ceramic decorations, casting shadows in the early-morning light.

“We should be opening up soon,” Roy said.

“Yeah.” Abner said. “And you know it’s probably some employee bringing these in or it’s part of some display for candy but I don’t see any signs or even candy on this table.”

“Yeah.” Roy said. “Let’s see if I can get the coffee started.”

“That sounds good,” Abner said as the two of them walked towards the office.

Behind them the ghost’s eye winked and the Jack O’ Lantern smiled more broadly if only for an instant.

—end—

Posted in Fantasy, Fiction, Friday Flash Fics, Friday Flash Fictions, Halloween, Horror, Short-Stories | Leave a comment

Flash Fiction Draw Challenge for September 2022—The Results!!!!

Posted on September 12, 2022 by jeffbaker307

Okay! Here’s the results for the September Flash Fiction Draw Challenge! This was started a few years ago by ‘Nathan Burgoine and carried on by Cait Gordon as a monthly writing challenge just for fun, no stress.

How it works is I draw three cards from three suits that correspond to a list of a genre, a setting and an object that must be in the story and anybody who wants to writes a story 1000 words or less, and puts it in the comments of my draw post and then I post them here a week later.

The September 2022 draws were:

A Comedy

Set at a County Fair

Involving a pile of books

E. H. Timms wrote “Dog, Dog, Goose.” https://thinkingthinking123.blogspot.com/2022/09/flash-fic-challenge-dog-dog-goose.html

And I wrote “Harm to my Wit.” https://authorjeffbaker.com/2022/09/12/comedy-under-a-pile-of-books-at-the-fair-september-2022-flash-fiction-draw-challenge-by-jeff-baker-9-12-22/

Thanks for participating!

Now, how about you? It’s never too late to submit!

———jeff baker

Posted in 'Nathan Burgoine, Cait Gordon, E. H. Timms, Fiction, Monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge, Short-Stories | Leave a comment

Comedy Under a Pile of Books at the Fair. September 2022 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge by Jeff Baker. (9/12/22.)

Posted on September 12, 2022 by jeffbaker307
Photo by shutter_speed on Pexels.com

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The draws for the September Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were: A Comedy, involving a Pile of Books, set at a County Fair. Enjoy! ——-jeff

Harm to My Wit

by Jeff Baker

“I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.” —–Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.

“Okay, nothing in there,’ Andy said. “Hey, you got a sandwich?”

Andy Freeloch was sitting in the cramped back room of the big tent his Dad and Uncle were using as the booth for Freeloch’s Sandwich Emporium at the Lebsack County Fair. There were books piled on the little table and a couple of couple of spiral notebooks and a canned soda.

“Sure,” John Rey Smith said pulling out a bag. “Roast beef, onions, hot off the grill. You making any progress?”

“Not really,” Andy said. “School reports were a lot easier. Work stuff, especially when this stuff probably isn’t on the internet.”

“Definitely not on the internet, if you can’t find it,” John said.

“Yeah,” Andy said, munching the sandwich. “You turn off the grill?”

“Yeah,” John said. “Cleaned it off and everything. Here, let me help you with that thing.”

John pulled one of the little chairs over and picked a stack of books off one side of the table.

“Hold it! HOLD IT!!!” Andy yelled. Too late. The table, now heavy with books on only one side, fell over, toppling the books. Andy grabbed his spiral notebook and pen and stood over the toppled table and piled books looking like a makeshift Statue of Liberty.

“Uh, ‘scuse me guys?”

John and Andy looked up. There was a guy standing there, not much older than they were. He had slicked back hair, glasses and was wearing jeans and a blue denim shirt.

“Uh, I’m Trevor, I’m on the prison road crew, the guys sent me over to ask. We saw your sign saying Smoked Meats. You got any cigarettes? Oh, you’re busy.”

They stared at him for a minute. Trevor shrugged and waked back outside.

“Okay,” John said. “Gonna be one of those days.”

—end—

Posted in Comedy, Fiction, Monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge, Short-Stories | Leave a comment

Rainbow Snippets Goes to the Beach; September 10th, 2022 from Jeff Baker.

Posted on September 10, 2022 by jeffbaker307
Photo by Ben Mack on Pexels.com

Every week we post six lines of our original fiction or a recommendation of a work by someone else that has at least one LGBT character on the Rainbow Snippets page here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974 This is from one of my earlier weekly flash fiction stories “Serenade on the Beach,” from a picture prompt of two guys sitting naked on the beach (with discreetly-placed legs and guitar.) Here’s the link to the original story: https://authorjeffbaker.com/2016/09/04/serenade-on-the-beach/

Being a calendar model is so glamorous.

Right then, I was sitting on a beach getting sand up my butt, listening to Eddie play the guitar. He didn’t actually have to play, he just had to sit there and fake it, but since he could play he did. Unfortunately, the only song he knew was the theme from “Gilligan’s Island.”

Meanwhile, Gary the Director was telling us how to sit, how to smile, not to smile, how to flex and to act like it was summer. Yeah, in March.

Here’s snippet two:

People who don’t think it ever gets chilly on a California beach have never sat naked on one. At least Eddie had a guitar covering his front, I’d never done a nude shoot before.

“Yeah, that’s it,” Eddie said, between choruses stranding the Millionaire and the rest on the island. “They hire us to be in the buff and then they make us cover our junk.”

If this was a romance novel Eddie and I would fall for each other and run off in the middle of the shoot. But I couldn’t stand the guy.

Okay, that’s it for this week! Stay warm (or cool, as the case may be!)—-jeff

Posted in Rainbow Snippets | 4 Comments

New Story in an e-zine! “Toward the Marogas Hills” on RoM/Mantic Reads. Jeff Baker, September 9, 2022.

Posted on September 9, 2022 by jeffbaker307

My story is the latest of several to be featured in this fine new e-zine! Check it out! And special thanks to Fiona Glass for all her work and for asking me for a story!

Here it is! Enjoy! https://rommanticreads.wordpress.com/2022/09/09/jeff-baker-toward-the-marogas-hills/

For the record, it is part of a serial and the next one will probably be up in a few months.

——jeff

Posted in Fiction, Promo, RoM/Mantic Reads, World of Three Moons | Leave a comment

“Someone To Watch Over Me.” Friday Flash Fics by Jeff Baker for September 9, 2022.

Posted on September 9, 2022 by jeffbaker307

Someone to Watch Over Me

by Jeff Baker

Buddy glanced up and pointed as the two of them walked past the downtown shop.

“Hey, what are those things, anyway? See ‘em all over this part of town.”

He was pointing at what looked like a grey stone face with wings on a panel near the top of a one story brick building that had been a carriage house but was now a liquor store.

“It’s a gargoyle,” Chaz said. “They put ‘em all over old buildings like this downtown in the 1800s. I guess when they refurbed the buildings they kept the gargoyles. They’re supposed to guard the buildings.”

“Yeah, right,” Buddy said. “More likely they have a load of security cameras and a couple of alarms. But maybe not there. Don’t look.”

“Ol’ Man Grimsby’s?” Chaz asked.

“Yup.” Buddy said with a grin. “Been there since this was just abandoned warehouses, not a bunch of trendy sports bars and stuff. Ol’ Man Grimsby has a security system but it’s pretty old-fashioned. We just cut the cables back of the shop, break in and get out of there fast.” He grinned. “We may set off another alarm system, but nothing too modern.”

Grimsby’s building was another low, former carriage house, with another stone gargoyle above the door.

“’We’ break in, you said?” Chaz said.

“I mean me,” Buddy said. “You’re my alibi. You’re always my alibi.”

“Anybody asks we were playing video games at my place all night,” Chaz said with a grin.

Buddy grinned back.

The early morning was dark with no moon. The bars and clubs had closed and the gang members were home asleep.

Buddy quickly cut the wires in back of Grimsby’s. He smashed in a window, reached in and opened the back door. It took less than a minute for him to find the register, riffle through it and pocket the cash. Grimsby never listened to warnings about taking the cash and leaving the register empty with the drawer open. Buddy quickly strode towards the back room and the exit. He’d heard a scraping sound out front, then on the roof.

Buddy stared at what was standing in the dimly lit open doorway. It fluttered it’s wings and grinned.

Buddy screamed.

All the police found the next morning was the evidence of the broken back window and the money strewn on the floor of the back room. Chaz never heard from Buddy who he assumed had taken more cash and ran. When he passed the front of Grimsby’s he barely glanced at the gargoyle, which some people described as “looking self-satisfied.”

And Chaz never looked at the back of Grimsby’s store, so he never noticed the new gargoyle high up on the brick wall, the grey stone face with it’s eyes wide and its mouth frozen open in a terrified scream.

—end—

Posted in Fantasy, Fiction, Friday Flash Fics, Friday Flash Fictions, Horror, Short-Stories | 2 Comments

September 2022 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge—the Draws. Sept, 5th, 2022. (Mike Mayak.)

Posted on September 5, 2022 by jeffbaker307

Happy Labor Day!

First, the results:

A Comedy

Set at a County Fair

Involving a Pile of Books

Now to the details:

I’m Mike Mayak, and I also write as Jeff Baker (one’s my real name, not sure which!)

Every month we do a flash fiction writing challenge purely for fun. How it works is I draw three cards, a Spade a Diamond and a Heart. These correspond to a genre of story, an object that must be in the story and a setting for the story. Participants have a week or so to write up a flash fiction incorporating those three elements in 1000 words or less (or more. We aren’t picky!)

Post your results to your blog and link it in the comments below and I’ll put them all up on their own post sometime around the 12th or 13th of next week. But feel free to write up a story and post it anytime!\

So, have fun! And I’ll see you next week!

———–mike

Posted in Monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge | 1 Comment

Rainbow Snippets” for September 3, 2022: “Saint Rabbit’s Eve” by Jeff Baker

Posted on September 3, 2022 by jeffbaker307

Every week we post six lines of our original fiction or a recommendation of a work by someone else that has at least one LGBT character on the Rainbow Snippets page here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974 I’m really liking my series about two best friends (and maybe more than friends!) Skid and T’amec who work at the Food Garden Court in a mall in a magical world. I’ve published three stories in this series so far with another on the way in a few months. Here’s a link to the original story: https://authorjeffbaker.com/2021/04/15/hop-with-the-rabbits-for-friday-flash-fics-by-jeff-baker-april-16-2021/

Here, T’amec and Skid find themselves working a late shift on a night when it is not good to be out of doors.

Skid wished the Augury shop was open. Saint Rabbit’s Eve was their biggest day and the shop had shut down in the afternoon after selling out of amulets, but the Food Garden Court was still open. Nobody was asking for anything else, not that Thursday night.

“Hey, I got all the pans and dishes washed.” That was T’amec, leaning out the swinging doors into the back kitchen. “Got anything out here we can wash up?”

Here’s a few more lines as the story (and the mall) get dark…

Something caught Skid’s eye; the mall was getting darker. He glanced down the hall from the Food Garden Court; the lights were going off. No; there was darkness, like a rolling fog slowly moving towards them.

Saint Rabbit.

T’amec and Skid stared at each other; they weren’t kids walking around with necklaces of meat to offer Saint Rabbit if they crossed his path like in a Festival pageant or folktale, they were facing it for real.

That’s it for this week! Pleasant dreams, everybody! ——jeff

Posted in Fantasy, Fiction, Food Garden Court, Horror, LGBT, Rainbow Snippets | 4 Comments

The Flight of the Robin by Jeff Baker for Friday Flash Fics September 2, 2022

Posted on September 2, 2022 by jeffbaker307

The Flight of the Robin

by Jeff Baker

The small, red-breasted bird fluttering around the suburban yard looked as startled as a bird could look.

“Off the ground, off the ground, there are cats on the ground,” the bird thought, eyeing the mailbox at the end of the drive. With an effort (he’d never really flown before) he took off and arced through the air, flying haphazardly like the sixteen-year-old-kid that he was, landing on top of the wooden post the mailbox was attached to.

He remembered a story he’d read where a bird had said that feet were more important than wings. He believed it as he used his feet to clutch and claw at the post he was standing on.

Steady now, he thought as he held on tightly and glanced around. Small, light-dappled neighborhood. Early afternoon. No cats in sight.

“C’mon, Richard, how screwed are you? Assess! Assess! Clown-Face captured you and sprayed you with that stuff and you dwindled down into this, this…”

He’d been quickly caged and driven here, the maniac laughing like the insane clown he was, and pulled from the cage and tossed unceremoniously onto someone’s yard as the van drove off. He’d been stunned but he’d glimpsed the van’s license plate: I PAGG.

He turned around on the post and managed, by angling himself to glimpse his transformed body. Some kind of bird.

A robin.

Okay, that was ironic. What was it the newspapers were always saying he said? “Holy Birdcage!”

He was trapped worse than when he had been in Clown-Face’s cage. That way, at least, he might have been held for ransom and eventually taken back to…

Back…Of course!

He recognized the neighborhood he was in, he knew where the mansion was, where the cave was. It was on the edge of town but it wasn’t that far as the crow, or robin flies. And Bruce would know somehow. When a robin flies into their headquarters he would figure out who it had to be.

Besides, there were ways of signaling him.

He just had to watch out for hawks on the way. Better than staying here and becoming prey for some cat.

And there would be a way to turn him back—if Bruce couldn’t find one, he’d pound it out of Clown-Face.

Unless, he thought wryly, it wore off in flight and he fell naked into someone’s swimming pool.

Richard took a deep breath, spread his wings and took off, heading home.

—end—

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Obviously fan fiction. And our hero comes out better than in my first plan for the story; he wasn’t going to get out of this! But I think he does!—–jeff Sept. 1, 2022

Posted in Fan Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Friday Flash Fics, Friday Flash Fictions, Science Fiction, Short-Stories | Leave a comment

A Rainbow Under the Moon: Rainbow Snippets and “Underneath the Moon” by Jeff Baker. August 28, 2022.

Posted on August 28, 2022 by jeffbaker307
Photo by Alex Andrews on Pexels.com

Every week we post six lines from a work of ours, a work-in-progress or a work of someone else’s that has at least one LGBT character, posted on the Rainbow Snippets page, here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974 This one is a werewolf story about a happily married couple, inspired by a couple of friends of mine who went through chemo as well as my habit of going outside to watch the Moon. Here’s the original story. https://authorjeffbaker.com/2021/03/05/underneath-the-moon-on-friday-flash-fics-for-march-5th-2021-by-jeff-baker/ And here’s the first snippet:

Greg going through chemotherapy had been rough on both of them, but Bryan had been the tough one. Always there, always encouraging. Driving him back and forth to his doctor’s; not objecting when Greg had come back from the store with a six pack of beer and gotten drunk after he was told he had cancer. At least everything was looking pretty good after six months; the chemo seemed to be working. But all the worry had probably built up on Bryan and when the Moon rose that evening, he was a big, yellow-gray wolf. He’d pushed open the door and out he went.

Okay, here’s some more:

Greg bent down under the vintage car Bryan was restoring. He always came out here to relax. Usually in coveralls, not fur. He squinted in the dim light. Bryan, the yellow-gray wolf was lying down beside the rear tire under the car, head on his forepaws, eyes looking up, glittering in the light.

Bryan crawled over to Greg and nuzzled his face as Greg rubbed his fur.

And I’m really breaking the rules here, but here’s one line; the happy ending:

The Moon was high in the sky and Bryan’s belly was full of the slices of leftover meatloaf as he sat on the sofa next to Greg, head resting in Greg’s lap as the soft sound of their breathing and snoring filled the room.

See you here next week! ‘Till then, may all your personal stories end happily!

———-jeff

Posted in Moon, Rainbow Snippets, Uncategorized, Werewolves | 2 Comments