The draws for this month’s Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were Fan Fiction, set in a Pizza Parlor including a Sack of Potatoes. I’ll post the results here as they come in (No rush!)
Here’s mine “Three Hours at Nocomis” (See if you can tell who it is!)https://authorjeffbaker.com/2022/02/13/three-hours-at-nocomis-a-fannish-flash-fiction-draw-challenge-story-for-february-2022-by-jeff-baker/?fbclid=IwAR0nVQ9x7sy0FkXeKaroThPVTYU89vG5p78dgF6CL81XX61_tAfbYQUd8nc
Three Hours at Nocomis’
by Jeff Baker
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The draws for the February Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were A Fan Fiction, set in a Pizza Parlor, including a sack of potatoes. Enjoy this and see if you recognize the characters I’m riffing on here. I’ll have a spoiler after it’s over! ——jeff
Willie Nocomis sighed. The last three hours had not been going well.
Two of the servers at the Pizza parlor hadn’t shown up for their shifts, and there was a prospective buyer coming in that afternoon. He’d gotten Annie to come in and he’d managed to wait tables and do dishes and help Skip Grumby make the pizzas. Usually he just stood by the register and handed out menus during the noon rush.
He glanced at the clock. Just about three hours of this. It was slow enough to take a break. But somebody had to peel the potatoes. He walked into the kitchen. Skip Grumby, big and bluff was filling the bin with tomato sauce.
“Y’know, if I wanted to work like this in a kitchen I would never have left the navy, Little Buddy!” Grumby said with a grin, playfully tossing his chef’s hat at Willie.
“Tell me about it,” Willie said. “At least in those days, nobody used to walk off a ship if they didn’t want to do their shift.” He pulled the fifty pound sack of potatoes out from under the dishwasher and started peeling.
“What happened to the guy you hired to peel the potatoes?” Grumby asked.
“You mean the guy I hired to wash dishes, peel potatoes and bus tables after the last guy I hired to wash dishes, peel potatoes and bus tables quit?” Willie asked.
“Yeah,” Grumby said.
“He quit.”
“Oh,” Grumby said. “Glad we know how to make the fries.”
“Willie!” Annie said. “You’ll never guess who just walked in!”
“The investor?” Willie asked, dropping the peeler in the sack of potatoes.
“No,” Annie said. “Her! She used to work here! Before you bought the place! Before she went to Hollywood and became famous!”
She was sitting in a corner booth wearing a sequined dress and red, bouffant hair. Willie walked up to her with a menu.
“Hi, I’m Willie Nocomis,” he said. “Would you like to try our special minnows and anchovy pizza?”
He tried handing her a menu but instead handed her a half-peeled potato.
“Oops!” Willie said handing her the menu.
“That sounds absolutely heavenly!” she said in a breathy voice. “Don’t make any fuss over me. I’m just here to be like anybody else having a pizza. Oh, and I’m expecting my P. R. man, Mr. Feldman to join me. If he doesn’t go the wrong way again.”
Willie took her order, and was in the kitchen when he saw the front door open. The man who entered was immaculately dressed with a diamond stickpin and a cane with a gold handle and an opera cape. The woman who accompanied him was tall, dignified, silver haired and wearing pearls AND diamonds.
“Hello,” he said in a Harvard accent. “I’m Thurlow Filthyrich the First. I’m here to place an order of pizza and a pizza franchise to go.”
“Thurlow, dahhhhling,” the woman said. “Don’t forget to buy the parking lot and an order of fries.”
“Yes, my lovey-dovey,” Thurlow said. “We’ll see if they have a box big enough for the parking lot.”
Willie had ducked back into the kitchen and brushed the potato peel off his shirtfront, talking to himself all the while.
“This is important, this is important, don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous. We’re gonna franchise, we’re gonna franchise!”
He stepped back into the dining room and was about to say something when he was interrupted by a bespectacled man, a customer in his thirties holding a sheaf of papers who had jumped up from under one of the booths.
“Everybody listen to me!” the man said. “I’m from the University, I’m a professor studying everything including Reverse-Geology. We have to take cover! If my calculations are correct we’re about to experience an…”
The building began to suddenly rumble and shake.
“…earthquake!”
There was yelling, the clatter of dishes, potatoes flying everywhere and suddenly everything began spinning, spinning, spinning…
Willie woke up flailing his arms in the air, falling out of the hammock. He landed safely (he’d done it enough times.) He glanced at the bottom bunk.
“At least you coulda broken my fall,” he said to the snoring figure in the bottom bunk. Hadn’t even woken up.
He took a deep breath of the island night breezes wafting through their hut. Then he sniffed the air.
“Skipper,” he said. “Have you been eating pizza?”
—end—
AUTHOR’S ADDENDA: The last T. V. show I would have thought I could bring to a mainland pizza parlor was “Gilligan’s Island.” Then I remembered the imaginative dream sequences they used to do on that fine and underrated series. If it was one tenth as funny, I’ll be happy! Oh, and “Nocomis” is a type of minnow!—–jeff
Staying home with the hubby for Valentine’s Day. So, I have a couple of snippets from a romantic story today.
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
I surprised myself and wrote two flash fictions about Henry and our unnamed narrator, closeted High School boyfriends and Henry’s habit of turning invisible. Here’s a link to the first story “Boot-Scootin’ Boogie:”https://authorjeffbaker.com/2017/11/12/out-of-sight-story-for-monday-flash-fics-nov-13-2017-by-jeff-baker/
And here’s the first snippet:
High school had been seventeen years ago. We’d both been serious closet cases. Then Henry had his “little accident” at the research facility his Dad worked at the summer after our freshman year. He’d gotten his invisibility largely under control by the start of school but he still needed to be invisible about twelve hours a day or he’d start fading. That meant a lot of ducking out to the restroom in the middle of class. The next two years felt like a very weird cable kid’s show, with both of us jumping around to keep anybody else from finding out that Henry spent part of his time literally out of sight.
Here’s another snippet
Senior Prom was cool. By that time Henry and I had discovered each other. I was ostensibly taking Jan Hall but Henry was my real date. Invisibly. It looked like I was slow dancing with myself during the last dance and kissing thin air, but I didn’t care. I told everybody I’d been stood up and the Principal gave me a breath test, but still, Senior Prom was cool.
That’s it for this week, and yes, the idea did come from my being in High School and wondering what it would be like if I could turn invisible (I read too many comic books and watched too many TV shows like that!) And I have no idea how many fonts I’ve used here!——jeff b.
Our Life Exempt From Public Haunt
By Jeff Baker & Wm. R. Baker
I was there late that evening in the old Lopresti Library because the books I needed weren’t online and I couldn’t check them out. Somehow the guard and I must have missed each other when I wandered from the old reading room in the basement to go to the Men’s room because when I walked from there through the back corridor I realized the only lights on were the emergency exit lights and a couple of bulbs that were always on.
I walked into the old reading room, which was pretty much a storeroom with boxes lining one wall, a bookshelf lining the opposite wall and a long table straight out of a grade-school lunchroom in the middle of the room. I picked up my notebook (spiral bound, this was about 1986) and glanced up at the old light bulb with a metal shade on top of it hanging from the ceiling. I didn’t know if it ever shut off.
I wandered down the hall and up the short flight of stairs leading to the old checkout desk that had been there since the library was built there in Pending, Kansas in 1919. I figured if the security guy was still there I’d explain things, tell him I was Carl Fiske and I was studying for a big midterm and he’d let me out. Small college town, they all knew everybody. If not, I’d go out the back delivery door, hoping it didn’t trigger an alarm.
I looked around. Nobody there. Lights almost all out. I sighed and headed towards the back of the building.
That was when I heard the voices.
“Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet: nobody in his…I used that, didn’t I?” the first voice said.
“Yes, you used the lines before, but they do have the ring of poetry,” said a female voice.
“While poetry is all to some, prithee attend to the task at hand,” said a third, this time male, voice.
“It’s true, you know, when the lights are low, gotta go with the flow…” said a fourth voice.
I peeked around a stone column and a bookcase and saw several people at one of the main library tables in a dim light. The one who had finished speaking was wearing jeans and a plaid, long sleeved shirt and was actually smoking. He took a long drag, leaned back in the chair and blew a long puff of smoke upward.
“And it works just so…” he finished.
I wondered for a second if this wasn’t a late night book club. I hadn’t seen any fliers advertising it. Then I got a good look at the others. The woman was in a long, white gown of an earlier era. The bald man was wearing a suit with long stockings, puffed-out shoulders like on Dynasty and a white collar and another man was in a velvety blue suit that looked vaguely Nineteenth Century. He had a dark beard and looked familiar. And there was a Black man in modern dress I could not see clearly.
The whole thing made me think of that show PBS had aired years ago when figures from history would be on a talk show. Maybe this was like that.
I stepped out from behind the column where I could get a better view. The five of them had papers and pens in front of them. They didn’t seem to notice me, but I was still in shadow.
“The stars above trudge their nightly path, the working man below trudges the dust.” This was the Black man, who pointed upward as he spoke. “And we will get nothing accomplished if we do not write this down.”
“Well put, Langston,” said the bearded man in the velvety suit whose voice I identified as the first speaker.
“I still do not know about this,’ said the woman in white. “My poems were my garden, but a private little one by a house of all my cares.”
“Surely nobody will know who has done this work, were we to sign it ought none to believe it,” said the bald man. “Our life exempt from public haunt.”
They laughed at this and one of them chortled and repeated the word “haunt.”
I was going to announce my presence but I had glanced upward and saw no source for the light streaming down upon them. Instead, they were in a light with no source, like the haze of sunlight in the dark sky at the middle of the night’s cycle.
I quickly backed away and headed for the exit. The metal door opened after a moment of pushing on the bar, thankfully not setting off an alarm. I walked around the building to where I’d parked my car. By the time I reached the car I was running.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: My late father, Wm R. Baker, wanted to be a writer but never got around to it. This was an idea he told me about some forty years ago. I decided to finally write it down, because we both loved libraries and authors. ——jeff b. 2/10/22
Don’t I look demonic?
First things first: The cards drawn for February, 2022 were a Three of Hearts, a Four of Diamonds and a Two of Clubs corresponding to a Fan Fiction, set in a Pizza Parlor including a Sack of Potatoes.
So, Participants have until sometime next Monday (February 14th, Valentine’s Day) to write a fan fiction set in a pizza parlor with a sack of potatoes, 1,000 words or less. Everybody’s welcome to play!
Actually, take your time, do it whenever you want and the length is no biggie. Because this challenge is for fun! No pressure! Link your story to this blog or e-mail it to me or link it to my Facebook (where I’m posting it) or my (as Mike Mayak) Twitter, where I’m also posting it.
Special thanks to Jeff Ricker, Cait Gordon and ‘Nathan Burgoine who started and maintained this challenge for the past few years!
Well, good luck and I’ll see you with the results in a week!
——-jeff, a.k.a. mike
Oh, Yeah: Here’s the chart where I list all the choices for the draws! I’m no good at doing graphs online!
I haven’t done as much writing as I should but I have kicked it up a notch on the reading in the last month. Yesterday, I bummed through a paperback edition of a 1962 Y. A. anthology “Teen-Age Outer Space Stories” (Lantern Press, edited by A. L. Furman.) I remember this type of anthology; several stories from Boy’s Life Magazine, several others, none by authors even I recognized. (Probably one of Heinlein’s Boys Life tales would have cost too much!)
Most of the stories haven’t aged as well as one would think, but there was one delight: “Flying Teacup.” I found nothing about the author, Fred Gohman and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists no more credits, other than several editions of “Outer Space Stories” (as it was renamed.) http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?34638
“Flying Teacup” is told in first-person by young Kenny who lives near a classic whacky inventor. Any more would spoil this charming, lighthearted story. Just one more bit of information; that particular outer space story takes place largely on Earth.
The story is worthy of being reprinted in a contemporary anthology of comic science fiction, and there have been plenty of those!
As for the rest of my reading, I read a few short stories in the Greenberg co-edited anthology tie-ins with the Superman, Batman and Dick Tracy movies of several decades ago. As well as part of C. W. Grafton’s novel “The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope,” several of the stories in “The Women of Weird Tales” (Valancourt Books) and some of an anthology of the late Mike Resnick’s collaborations with Lezili Robyn: “Soulmates.”
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
I got a nice response a few weeks ago for snippets from one of my stories about closeted Gay teenage runaway Bryce Going, out on his own after his Mom bails on him around 1975. In this one; “The Milk Grotto” Bryce thinks the police may be after him so he’s hiding in the basement of a nearby abandoned football stadium. He finds the basement inhabited by some men who are not what they seem…
I felt my way carefully down the stairs and stayed still, listening for any sounds from upstairs. Instead, I heard a rustling in the room with me. I stayed in the middle of the stairway, unwilling to walk into a basement of scurrying rats.
“Company,” a voice said.
“Don’t turn the lights on yet,” said another.
I heard a scuttling on the stairs behind me and I groped for the lights.
Here’s another snippet:
When my eyes adjusted to the light I realized this wasn’t the huge stadium basement I’d imagined in the dark; just a medium-sized storeroom lit by a bare bulb. I took that in in an instant as my major concern was the three men I saw standing at the bottom of the stairs, all wearing gray sweatpants and sweatshirts.
“We saw you running from next door,” one of the men said.
“We figured you were trapped,” said the other.
“Cornered,” said the third man
“Shhhhh,” he said. “People. Upstairs. Lights.”
That one stretched a few words beyond the usual length, but what the hey! Here’s a link to the original story from a few years ago: https://authorjeffbaker.com/2019/04/26/the-milk-grotto-walk-into-the-dark-in-friday-flash-fics-by-jeff-baker/
Also, the first few stories about Bryce have titles taken from the Biblical story of The Flight Into Egypt, which was the title of the first story and is part of the title of a full-length Bryce Going story I’m working on.
Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it!—-jeff
The Grey Ferris
by Jeff Baker
“Okay,” Ross said. “In another minute, kiss me.”
“What? Are you crazy?” Burt said. “Your Mom and Dad are…”
“Sitting down in the beer garden,” Ross said. “In another minute, the Ferris wheel will turn enough that we’ll be hidden behind the building and nobody can see us.”
“But everybody can see…” Burt started to say.
“Not up this high if we don’t hang out the edge of the car.”
“But we’re…” Burt said.
“Do you love me?” Ross asked. His eyes were wide and his lower lip was shaking a little.
“Yeah, yeah I do.” Burt said. They’d never said that aloud before.
Ross’ Mom and Dad had driven the two teenagers over to the county fair. Neither of them had a car yet. Ross stretched his legs and Burt stared at his bluejeans-covered thigh.
The Ferris wheel creaked as it started moving again. For a moment they were at Twelve O’clock. Then One O’clock. Then it stopped at the Two O’clock position.
Ross glanced over at the building that filled their field of vision.
“Okay…now,” Ross said.
The two young men embraced and kissed. It wasn’t the first time but it was the closest they’d come to kissing in public. Certainly not in this little town at their rural high school.
They hadn’t started by embracing, but Burt moved his hand behind Ross’ back. Ross rested his hand on Burt’s leg. It felt like the stars, Sun and Moon were swirling around them.
Then the Earth moved.
The Ferris wheel started up again with a “clunk.” Burt and Ross sat back in the seat, sure they’d heard an electric pop when they pulled their lips apart. They grinned at each other.
The wheel turned and the two of them stepped off trying to look like two high school buddies looking for popcorn, girls and games while maybe talking about college.
“My Dad’ll kill me. I mean, really.” Burt said.
“Yeah, my folks too.” Ross said.
“I turn 18 next summer.” Ross said.
“I’m 18 in March,” Burt said.
“We get out of town as soon as we both can,” Ross said. “After we graduate.”
“Yeah.” Burt said.
They ran into one of Burt’s cousins who was at least in her 40s and would be in the area forever.
“You boys having a good time?” she asked.
They looked at each other and grinned.
“Yeah,” they said.
Next summer seemed so far away.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story just popped into my head and went a little differently than I imagined. I thought I hadn’t put enough detail in it or that I should leave it at a cliffhanger. But I think it’s fine the way it is. And I borrowed the title from Ray Bradbury’s fine story “The Black Ferris.” ——–jeff February 1st, 2022
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
I’ve been writing at least one story a week since mid 2016 and this is from the most recent. I had a full-length version of this plotted out a few years ago but it is too much like a recent episode of “Ghosts” so I did the shortened version here. Our narrator, Billy Gonzalez, has appeared in several of my stories and has a knack for stumbling across the supernatural. Here, he’s the designated driver for Marv, a ghost who died in 1949 and haunts the house Billy’s college buddy Jayce is renting. Jayce agrees to let Marv temporarily take over his body so he can go to a local bar.
Here’s the first snippet:
The waitress came over and took our order. Small pitcher of beer, glass of cola for me, order of chips and dip for both of us. Marv gave the waitress who took our order a backward glance like he hadn’t seen a woman in seventy years.
“I’ve seen girls,” he said pouring his beer, “but I haven’t had a body to feel like I’m seeing girls since 1949.” He raised his glass and I raised mine. He drained the glass in a couple of gulps and poured himself another.
Okay, here’s another snippet:
Jayce and I used to drink beer on weekends when he lived in the dorm. We even made out a couple of times, but we never talked about that and I always wondered whether he remembered.
Marv took the next couple of glasses pretty slow, just looking around the bar and gawking. He really hadn’t seen a big-screen TV in operation before and was impressed. Not so much by the music.
“Last time I went out with my buddies they were still playing a lot of Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby, I don’t go for a lot of this Rocking Around the Clock stuff,” he said.
Hope you enjoyed that! Here’s the link to the whole story:https://authorjeffbaker.com/2022/01/28/beer-nuts-with-billy-gonzalez-for-friday-flash-fics-january-28-2022-by-jeff-baker/
Beer Nuts
by Jeff Baker
(A Billy Gonzalez Story)
I wasn’t out drinking with the ghost but I was the designated driver.
I’d been at a couple of parties at Jayce Mackey’s’s house. He’d started renting it my Junior year in college. One of those old bungalows between thirteenth street and the river. Little but cozy. And of course, it was haunted.
The ghost in question was Marvin, a twenty-something who looked pretty normal if you could see him. Sometimes things like that happened to me. I thought I should have gotten some cards printed out: “Billy Gonzalez: Weird Stuff a Specialty.” Jayce could see him too, probably because he was renting the house. Or maybe he’d hung out with me for too long.
Like I said. Weird stuff.
Marv was (or had been) a pretty nice guy. He said he’d been gunned down a couple of blocks away back in 1949 and had been buried in a construction site when they were adding the big sun porch onto the back of this house.
Jayce and I had both offered to dig Marvin’s remains up or call the police but Marv always said that it was too late for the police to do anything about it.
“The time to call the cops would have been before they pulled the guns on me,” he would joke.
Marv didn’t give a lot of details about the afterlife, mainly because he said he didn’t know many. All he knew was that he had to sort of “hang around the area for a while.” Largely he went unnoticed by anybody else. Sometimes he’d walk a few blocks away and wander through some of the shops and restaurants they’d built on the intersection. “When I got into town, that was all undeveloped land,” he said.
It was spring of that year when Marv suggested going out for a beer. Something he hadn’t done in a long time, and had never done in Kansas. But the suggestion went a lot further than that. Marv wouldn’t be able to have any beer unless he had me as his designated driver (he said he’d heard the term on television) and borrowed Jayse’s body for a few hours.
“That’s about all I can do,” Marv said.
There was something more than a little creepy about the idea, but it must have appealed to Jayce’s sense of adventure, so he agreed.
Jayce had Thursday off so I met them at the house Wednesday evening. Jayce was wearing his old college sweatshirt and jeans. Marv looked like he usually did; tousled reddish hair, white button-down shirt, black slacks and shoes and a suit jacket that had gone out of style when Eisenhower was alive.
“So,” I said standing there awkwardly in the living room. “We ready to do this?”
Jayce took a deep breath and breathed it out.
“Yeah.” Jayce said.
“Give me a moment,” Marv said. He stood there and shut his eyes, maybe gathering strength, reminding me for a moment of a stage mystic I’d seen. Then he walked over to Jayce, walked into Jayce, who shuddered and blinked a couple of times.
Jayce (or he looked like Jayce) looked up at me and grinned. “Yeah, this feels good.”
“How long are you staying in there?” I asked.
“I can manage it for about four hours, Billy.” Jayce/Marv said.
Okay,” I said heading out to the car. “Hey, is Jayce still in there? And what do you call you?”
“He’s kind of asleep. And just call me Marv,” Marv said out of Jayce’s mouth. He stood on the porch for a minute and then fumbled in Jayce’s pockets pulling out the house key. He grinned and locked the door.
Quentin’s Bar and Grill was a local place with good food and beer. When we walked in the sun had set and the music was loud and so was the big screen in one corner. We sat down in a booth and Marv pulled out his, I mean Jayce’s wallet.
“This round is on Jason,” Marv said.
The waitress came over and took our order. Small pitcher of beer, glass of cola for me, order of chips and dip for both of us. Marv gave the waitress who took our order a backward glance like he hadn’t seen a woman in seventy years.
“I’ve seen girls,” he said pouring his beer, “but I haven’t had a body to feel like I’m seeing girls since 1949. Cheers.” He raised his glass and I raised mine. He drained the glass in a couple of gulps and poured himself another.
“Hey, take it easy,’ I said.
“I really haven’t done this in a long time,” Marv said. “I’ll be okay.”
Jayce and I used to drink beer on weekends when he lived in the dorm. We even made out a couple of times, but we never talked about that and I always wondered whether he remembered.
Marv took the next couple of glasses pretty slow, just looking around the bar and gawking. He really hadn’t seen a big-screen TV in operation before and was impressed. Not so much by the music.
“Last time I went out with my buddies they were still playing a lot of Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby,” he said. “I don’t go for a lot of this Rocking Around the Clock stuff.”
Whatever was playing was more heavy metal grunge than anything else.
We were going to be here a while. When the waitress passed by I ordered a chicken quesadilla with lots of guacamole.
Marv kept drinking and talking, telling me about the women he dated and the gangsters he’d worked for and the gangsters who shot him up. I ate my quesadilla and checked out some of the guys in the bar which was fairly busy for a Wednesday night.
Within an hour and a half Marv was plastered. I figured I would be able to walk him out to the car. Then he mumbled something about needing to go to the men’s room and having not peed since 1949. Then he tried to stand up, slipped back in his seat and then Marv, the ghostly Marv in his 1940s outfit stepped out of Jayce who was still sitting there.
“Aw, man!” Marv said, standing by the booth shaking his head. Nobody seemed to notice him. Some guy heading for the pool table walked right through him.
Jayce sat there looking bewildered. Then his eyes bulged, his cheeks puffed and he bent over and unloaded whatever he’d eaten onto the floor.
Swell.
I apologized to the owner, luckily I’d been in there a few times before and knew everybody. Besides I was the designated driver. I left the waitress a big tip and helped Jayce out to the back seat of my car. We drove back to his house with Jayce groaning in the backseat and a totally sober Marv singing old songs my grandparents knew.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I plotted out a longer version of this several years ago. It bears too much of a resemblance to an episode of the new series “Ghosts.” So, I’m offering the short version here!
————jsb
authorjeffbaker 