"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
The draws for the January Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were a Westen, involving artificial grass set at the Tower of London. I’ll post them here as I get them, no rush! Here are the results! Thanks to everyone who played along!
NOTE: The Draws for my first month moderating the Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were a Western, set in the Tower of London involving artificial grass. Darryl helped by drawing the cards, and came up with the general idea.—–mike
“Over here!”” Chas said. “I found the door!”
“Shhhh!” Niles said. “Tourists.”
“Shhhhh!” Benny repeated.
The three boys stood by the ancient stone wall inside the Tower of London as the American tourists trouped by, a couple of them glancing at the boy’s school blazers. Niles (the tall one) watched as they turned the corner, heading to the rooms where the cool stuff was (crowns, swords and the like.)
“Coast is clear!” Niles said. “Let’s go!”
Chas quickly stuck the ancient key into the crack in the wall. In another moment, part of the wall swung open and the three boys ducked inside, shutting the door behind them.
“Turn on the light, oh hey it still works!”
The three boys stared at the small room, the unadorned wooden desk and the battered file cabinet. And the green plastic shag covering half of the floor.
“Oh, my God!” Chas said. “Dad’s old putting green!”
“Yeah.” Niles said. “Nobody else seems to know about this secret office. So, you got the stuff? The real grass?”
“Hell, yeah.” Benny said, pulling the rolled joint and a lighter out of his pocket. “Glad they let you guys use the employee entrance.”
“Glad my Dad kept this stuff here when they promoted him.” Chas said. “Don’t think a lot of people know about this private office.”
“Nobody who still has their head,” Niles said, taking a drag and passing the doobie.
“Must’ve been a dungeon cell at one time,” Benny said. “Hey, this stuff is strong”
“I know,” Chas said giggling.
Within a half-hour the sixteen-year olds were toasted. Niles was fondling the fake grass on the floor and humming while Chas started rummaging through the closet.
“I knew Dad stored some of this here,” he said. He stepped out wearing a cowboy hat.
“Hey, give that to me!” Niles said.”
“I got another one,” Chas said. “It was for some American Day they had here. Pain in the butt, he said.”
“I remember your Mum telling my Mum that there were more reasons than one they called it The Bloody Tower.” Niles said, grabbing the hat Chas tossed at him and putting it on. “Lookit us! We’re cowboys.”
“Yeah, reach for the sky hombre!” Chas said, miming a draw with an imaginary six-shooter. He almost fell over.
“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us,” Niles said.
“Hey, where’s my hat?” Benny said.
“You mean, this tower ain’t big enough,” Chas said.
“Where’s my hat?” Benny said.
“Only got two hats,” Niles said. “You can be the horse.”
Benny giggled and whinnied. The three boys laughed.
There was a clunking sound from the closet, like something thumping on the stone floor.
A white horse stepped out of the closet, ridden by a man in ancient dress with no head atop his shoulders. They were both faintly glowing like a half Moon.
“Clip-clop, clip-clop. The floor is stoned and so am I” Niles said.
“Guys, you see that?” Benny said, staring at the apparition.
“Yeah, it’s the sheriff,” Chas said. “Boy this room is tilting.”
The horse let out what would have been a whinny in the days of Tudor kings but sounded like skeletons dancing on a tin roof.
Chas, Niles and Benny ran out of the room and slammed the door shut behind them.
“Maybe that’s why your Dad doesn’t use that office anymore.” Benny said.
“Yeah,” Chas said.
“Now what do we do?” Niles asked.
“Just act natural,” Chas said.
The three of them wandered down the hall, whistling a cowboy song they’d heard in a movie.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: My apologies to anybody who knows how the staff at the Tower of London are organized.——m.
It was about five years ago (Marty said) I was still with my ex-boyfriend Alex, and there was this big party on the beach near where we were living. Lights, surf music, a big archway like you were entering Wine Cooler World or something. We were standing around, drinks in hand, checking out the buff young guys in swim trunks. Then I looked out on the water and saw a lumpy green thing surface. I thought it was a log until it opened its eyes. I’d never seen a sea monster before, but it was in the sea and kind of green and monstery so that was probably what it was.
I didn’t expect to be staking out a field of snowmen. Certainly not in a cold middle of the night in January but that was what I’d been hired to do. The College had a snowman contest and somebody had smashed a couple of the snowmen the last two nights. So they hired me to make sure nobody bashed any snow people.
I pulled my jacket tighter around me and shivered hiding in the clump of bushes. Another fun night for Andrew Navarro, private eye. I glanced around. The snowmen had been built on the far end of the snowy campus with the big stone wall to one side. It wasn’t too hard to keep an eye on everything. The lights at the edge of the sidewalk cast long shadows on the deep snow under the cloudy sky, making the snowmen look like they were in some secret meeting.
I’d had a better chance to check out the snowmen earlier in the day. Some of them were traditional, right down to the carrot and scarf (one rotund snowman in a snow armchair labeled “Nero Wolfe.”) Some were as finely sculpted as Michelangelo’s David. I could see that one and grinned as I found myself thinking of a hot snowman. Between two of the larger figures there was a small, traditional snowman about a foot high with a mini-carrot for a nose and a sign saying simply “dieting.”
I stared. The mini-snowman was moving.
It wiggled from side to side and then sunk into the ground. I stood up carefully from the collapsible stool I had brought with me. Then I saw the snowman and a chunk of the snowy ground rise again. Two figures bundled up in black pushed up from the ground, carefully setting the section of ground with the snowman on it to the side.
A manhole cover, I thought. Or some kind of trap door.
The two figures hoisted themselves out of the hole and one of them pulled out what I thought was a baseball bat.
I stepped out from the bushes and drew my revolver. Any other time what I said might have been funny.
“Freeze!” I yelled into the frigid night air.
I called Campus Security while I had them covered.
It turned out they hadn’t been in a sewer but in some old tunnel that had been overgrown and forgotten. The old tunnel had led from the administration building to the old gym that used to be on the site where the snowmen were now standing. The snowman-bashers had found out about it and took advantage of it. There were plenty of footprints right around the snowmen, so nobody could tell that they weren’t walking across the campus to do the damage.
They didn’t even have a snowman entered in the contest.
I sighed. I’d be paid, but for now all I wanted was to find a place open at one-thirty that sold coffee.
Or hot chocolate.
—end—
AUTHOR’ NOTE: My previous story about private eye Andrew Navarro “WRUD New Year’s Eve?” appeared on this site December 21, 2017. ——-j.s.b.
I’m the current moderator for the Monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge, which was stared 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 each month I draw three cards, a club, a heart and a diamond. 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/blog and link it in the comments. I’ll post the results on January 10th. As I’m no good at making videos I did it off stage and the results were the Nine of Hearts (a Western), the Ace of Diamonds (the Tower of London) and the Nine of Clubs (artificial grass.)
So the stories will be a Western,
Set in the Tower of London
Involving (or including) Artificial grass.
(I didn’t see that coming!!)
So, I’m looking forward to the results! And I promise I’ll figure out a way to post my list so we can all see what we’ve used and what might be coming up!
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/RainbowSnippets
Here’s my snippet this week, from one of the earliest of my weekly Flash Fictions. Andy is on a bus writing a letter to Jake with whom he has spent a relaxing (?) weekend. I didn’t think much of this one when I wrote it but now I think it has a kind of kinky charm! Happy New Year!
Thanks so much for everything, and I guess I’ll see you in a few weeks, huh? I could e-mail this, but sometimes the old stamp-and-envelope mail seems so romantic.
I didn’t even hear you get out of bed this morning. Oh, and after I got out of the handcuffs I took ‘em with me. They’ll be waiting for you up at my place, not sure about the key!
The sun was setting as the little girl and the old man stared at each other there on the beach.
“Nobody told me it would be a girl!” he said with a smile.
“Hey! I’ll be a woman in another couple of months,” the girl said. “You’re not what I expected either!”
“Ninety is the new sixty,” the man said with another smile.
“And you’re supposed to be a bent-over old man with a scythe,” the girl said.
“Not if I eat right and take care of myself.” he said. “Still, it’s been a long year.”
“I heard,” the girl said.
“Well, it’s almost Universal Midnight,” the man said. “Time for you to show up and me to leave.”
“Don’t I even get a sash? You know, with the date?” the girl asked.
“You won’t need it,” The man said. “Well, here I go! Happy New Year!”
“I’ll try,” the girl said, suddenly feeling very old.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Happy New Year to all our readers and writers! Join us every Friday in 2022 for more Flash Fiction. And watch this space for the draws on the Monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge, beginning January 3rd, 2022!
This is the first one of these reports I’ve posted since early November and I’ve made some progress writing-wise but not as much as I’d hoped. But I have made up for it recently. First: I’ve written the weekly and monthly flash fiction stories as well as a column or two (I’m way ahead on the monthly columns, at least!) Secondly I’m going to be the moderator for the Monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge in 2022 so I made out the draw sheet.
And thirdly, I managed to finish the short-story that is due New Year’s Eve. I’ve written a mystery hopefully evoking the humor of Norbert Davis. The deadline was extended from October 31st to December 31st and I should have had this done by now, but I got lazy and I also hadn’t figured out how tarnished my tarnished knight of a P.I. really was.
So that’s how I spent the evening of Christmas and part of the early morning of the 26th. Writing, revising and cutting. (I cut about 1000 words.) It may be too long but I have yet to read through it, check the spelling and maybe trim some more. I figured I would have it done over the weekend and it looks like that’s what I did! Then, I will send it off.
The song I based it on may be too obscure (novelty songs always are!) but I win nothing by not trying.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!
That’s about it for now (I promise more later this week!)
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’m recommending a whole book this week: “Handmade Holidays” by ‘Nathan Burgoine. Based on something that really happened and started a real-life tradition for the author this book deserves to be a TV movie and I feel it is already a classic! Well worth the read. Also, a perfect gift to find under a tree. And there’s a Tom of Finland reference! Can’t top that! Here’s an excerpt: Nick is on his own after his homophobic parents toss him out of the house. He has next to nothing, but it’s Christmastime so he decides to get a tree. Here he is, returning to his apartment with the only tree he could afford.
They’d just shoved in all the branches and the stand and then used packing tape to keep it closed. The end result was a lumpy mess, so he used a knife to cut the tape free. If he was going to be on his own for Christmas for the first time ever—not to mention the foreseeable future—he was at least going to have a Christmas tree, dammit. He was nineteen. An adult. He could do this.
I wish you all the best for this holiday season, full of good things to read!
The sunsets were getting earlier so on the evening before the New Moon I took the shovel and went out to the Northeast corner of my backyard. I glanced at the darkened, cloudy sky, the deep red stripe of sunset I glanced at my neighbors houses. A few lit windows, a few streetlights but mostly the dark of late Fall.
It was a small yard so I didn’t have a lot of trouble finding the exact spot over the brown grass and leaves that always made me think of driving to my Grandparents for Thanksgiving when I was a kid. But it was December and I was no longer so young.
It took me a few minutes of digging. The ground was cold and hard but not impenetrable. I turned over the earth and I saw the first: light blur, red, green and pink. I set it to the side and ran my hand through the small pile of dirt I had turned up. I resumed digging. I didn’t worry that an animal had dug it up; animals stayed away from this spot.
It was darker when I saw the small chunk of dark green in my overturned dirt. I picked it up: small, ceramic like the other one only this one was glazed a deep sea-green.
Stalarovyotep.
I gently put it in my jacket pocket. Then I reached down for the other one, the pink and green and blue and red one and placed it in my other pocket. I pushed the earth back into the hole with my shovel.
I walked up to the back door of my house, kicked some loose dirt off the shovel and propped the shovel up just inside the backdoor. I went into the house and placed the two objects on my mantelpiece. One was the figure of an elf; blue elfin coat, red shirt and pointed hat, green lapels and shoes, pink face and yellow hair.
Emilthrii.
The other, small and squat, was a green gnome: dark with a solemn expression, sitting on the ground with his head in his hands.
As I had done each year I lit the green candle I set on the ashtray beside them.
There was a flicker of light from outside.
I stepped outside. The dark was illuminated with light. The dark houses now had the bright, what did they call them? Christmas lights strung around the roof, Christmas trees visible through front windows, merry music playing from car stereos. I stepped inside and glanced at the daily paper on my sofa, now thick with ads.
And when the season was done, I would bury the elf and the gnome in the yard again as the old ritual prescribed. And everyone else living these weeks would believe it had always been this way.
Thus the season dawned again.
But I wondered, at what price?
—end—
AUTHOR.S NOTE: Christmastime is also a time for tales of ghosts and the macabre. We hope you enjoyed this unsettling Christmas chiller. And we seriously wish you nothing more strange than visions of sugar plums and pleasant Christmas dreams! ——-jeff baker, December 24, 2021
authorjeffbaker 