"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
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
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
“Raymond DuPass,” Andy read, squinting at the card by the painting.
“Let me make a pass,” Ajuliano said, running his hand through Andy’s blond hair.
Andy grinned and kissed him. “Careful, we’re in public!”
“So let’s stop being in public,” Ajuliano said grinning back. “My place is right near here.”
Here’s juuuuust a little more:
“You’re what? Forty?”
“Closer to five-hundred and forty,” Ajuliano said grinning again. “I’m really a succubus.”
“Hey, it’s my bus and you can…” Andy began, as they both started laughing again.
Hope that whets your appetite! Someday, this and a bunch of my other flash fiction stories will be published in a book. (Not even in the planning stages yet!) Oh, and I love it that “Arrangement in Black and Gray” sneaks in a reference to Eldon, Murphy Brown’s artist friend!
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas around 1993, a week before finals and I was going to St. Nigel’s College in Kansas. To my mind about as far away from where Scott Garcia (that was me) grew up as you could get and still afford to go to school.
Sometimes Albuquerque seemed so far away.
I was studying biology, playing intramural sports and dating around that semester, my Junior year and somehow I got dragged into what was called the Hispanic Students Alliance. It was a way to meet girls and check out guys so I went through it.
One of the ideas we had floated around with the Campus Ministry Department was to do Las Posadas. I’d been in it a few times when I was a kid, but I wasn’t a kid anymore. Still, that evening we all got dressed up and made the procession, followed by a bunch of onlookers.
For the uninitiated; “Las Posadas” recreates the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. Usually the competition to portray the Holy Couple can be pretty fierce and un-Christ-like but we had Zack and Marta, who were actually married leading the procession.
It was a warmish December evening but we still confined the walk to the inside, through the Administration Building and across the quad to the old dorm building that was used as overflow faculty offices. The way Las Posadas works is Joseph and Mary knock on the doors of houses (or offices) looking for a room and (by tradition) they are turned away. This goes on until we reach the planned destination and since the chapel was closed for renovation for most of that semester we were using the lobby of the old dorm where the offices were.
The big concession to student schedules and finals was we only did this one night instead of for nine. I needed to cram for a couple of finals anyway and I was sure even the Holy Family felt the same way.
It went on the way it was supposed to; we sang Christmas songs (the really old ones, not the one about the Grandmother getting flattened by a reindeer) knocking on doors and being turned away until we reached Professor Meyerbeer’s office on the third floor. He was old, at least I thought sixty was old when I was twenty, and he taught courses in Judaism which was not as incongruous as you might think at a Catholic school; he and Father Gareth had known each other for ages.
Zack and Marta knocked on Professor Meyerbeer’s office door, asked for a room and he sharply told them “No” and shut the door in their faces. We were heading down the hall singing “Silent Night” when we heard a door open and the Professor’s voice calling for us to stop.
“You folks may have a long way to travel,” the Professor said as he handed us all small, warm bags. Roasted peanuts. To this day I don’t know how he kept them so warm in the office.
“My Mother would never forgive me if I let travelers go on their way without a meal,” the Professor said. He smiled and waved. “Now, be on your way and let me know if you find the Messiah.”
We wandered downstairs, knocking on offices, singing and munching peanuts until we made our way to the lobby where Campus Ministry had set up a little Nativity scene by the fireplace that didn’t work anymore, along with some food and cans of soda. We sang more carols, had an impromptu Christmas service and ate.
I went back to the dorm, studied some and crashed.
I dreamed of vast, midnight skies of two-thousand years ago and of voices in ancient language singing, their songs rising to the heavens.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This Christmas story was inspired by an article in my old college’s paper from a few years ago about students doing Las Posadas. I remember reading about it when I was a kid and yes, I have family in Albuquerque.
And to all the readers out there, on behalf of all the writers on this site I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
The December 2021 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge story’s prompts were a Mystery set in a highway toll both involving a ray gun. A perfect case for my 23rd Century Detective Captain of the Air Police, Captain Aimes. Here he’s faced with a ground-based mystery.
It had been a while since I’d officially been called down to Traffic Row. At least, not since I was promoted to the Homicide Division of the Air Police. I’d spent some of my early years on the Force “ground-based,” checking cargo and wheels, not bodies and weapons.
But here, we had a body and no weapon.
I’d finished scanning the area and entering the data into my saver. The flat, paved highway was long and had three traffic lanes. The area on either side of the pavement stretched out into green prairie which I had scanned, no trace of metal weapons or otherwise.
Captain Aimes, my boss, was staring into the toll both. The attendant was sprawled backward in his chair, a nasty burned hole in his chest. What I could see. As usual a fatal wound was a bloody mess. Tell-tale signs of a blast from an old-fashioned ray-gun. An antique that would be largely untraceable, which made it fashionable with modern criminals.
“We have a time established yet Lieutenant Ciervo?” Captain Aimes asked me.
“About 1300 hours,” I said. That’s when his saver went offline,” I said, fingering my saver in my front shirt pocket.
“You talk to the guy who found him?” Captain Aimes said.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s still in his truck.”
The long vehicle with the huge tank behind it was something a lot of people hadn’t seen, but I was familiar with ground-based vehicles from my earlier work. The driver had pulled up to the booth to put in his toll and saw the attendant dead in the booth. He’d called the Air Police. That had been about two hours after his saver stopped transmitting. The log transmitted from the truck showed that the driver hadn’t been near the toll booth anywhere near the time of the attendant’s death.
In other words, we had nothing.
“Not even a scratch on the windows of the booth. It hasn’t been tampered with,” Captain Aimes said. “But the hard money and credits chip are gone.”
There was a small metal box on the outside of the booth where someone could insert hard money or a credit chip. The money was gone. And that was the puzzling thing. Someone would have needed to break into the box and it wasn’t damaged. Even more puzzling, a scan of the receiver showed that the credits had been transferred a little more than two hours ago.
“That’s the way we know he had customers,” Captain Aimes said.
I nodded. I was remembering another case where someone had slipped a hard money coin into the slot of a deposit machine and the coin had exploded.
A pre-timed laserblaster. The size and shape of a hard money coin.
I sighed. Captain Aimes was staring at the dead attendant. He waved the technical crew over.
“Open the dome,” he said. “But be very careful. It’s possible there might still be an explosive in there.”
The technical crew quickly transmitted the opening codes and had the dome open. No explosion. No weapons. Captain Aimes picked up the remains of the attendant’s saver from the floor, looking like a small lump of twisted metal. He stared for a minute, then he quickly pulled out his saver and barked a series of orders into it.
“I know where the killer is, if not who,” he said. “And I know what happened here. This wasn’t a robbery gone wrong, this was a planned murder.”
The technical crew and I listened.
“It was supposed to look like an armed robbery but it was an inside job. The attendant’s accomplice arrived and the attendant turned over the hard money, several hundred thousand dollars, at least a pocketful of coins. And the credits, doubtless transferred with the help of the attendant. The attendant had at least one of the laserblaster discs on him, possibly in his jacket front pocket with his saver. He didn’t realize his accomplice wanted it all and sent a hypersonic which set off the laserblast in his pocket, destroying his saver and a chunk of his chest. And we had a laser wound and a vanished ray gun with no hole in the dome.”
“How will we find this killer or the credits?” I asked.
Captain Aimes smiled grimly. “His accomplice won’t want to attract attention. There have been no sensed reports of flights from this area, so he is ground-based. The highway runs East-West, so he won’t want to attract attention. At the speed limit, the next station to turn off the highway is just over three hours from here. He doubtless arrived here from the highway entry ramp two miles East. Turning around in the middle of a one-way highway would attract attention, and besides he may want to pull a genuine robbery at the toll both nearly three-hundred miles from here.”
“Greed,” he added, as if that explained everything.
Captain Aimes’ saver buzzed, and he answered, listened and nodded his head with a smile.
It had explained everything.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE WITH A SPOILER: This is the second mystery I’ve written for Captain Aimes (whose first case appears HEREhttps://authorjeffbaker.com/2018/05/14/murder-above-the-clouds-may-flash-fiction-draw-story-by-jeff-baker/ ) This is the second of these draw challenge stories I think I’ve done where the prescribed object turns out not to exist! My sincere thanks to Jeff Ricker for hosting these draws over the past year! ——jeff baker, 12/12/21. 4:35 a.m.
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. Posted at Rainbow Snippets here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/963484217054974
Here’s some more snippets from a Christmas story I wrote. This one from 2016 when I had just started posting a weekly flash fiction story on the blog https://authorjeffbaker.com/2016/12/11/christmas-story-christmas-at-demeters-bar/ and about a year after I started writing (and selling!!!) sci-fi tall tales set in a Gay bar inspired by Clarke’s “White Hart” and de Camp and Pratt’s “Gavagan’s Bar.” For the record, I wrote this one so I’d have some of the characters I wanted to use in print but I haven’t gone back to a lot of them. I actually re-posted this whole story on my blog about a week ago, so this may be overkill.
Demeter’s Bar closed up early the Wednesday before Christmas for their annual Christmas party. The lights were hanging over the side of the bar and around the big, round mirror behind it that Mrs. DeLeon said had come with the place, somehow making it look bigger.
Zack, the young-looking bartender with the shoulder-length red hair, grinned as he hoisted a crate onto the bar.
“Found these in the back, Mrs. Deleon. Under the box of napkins.”
“Good,” she said.
Here’s a little more:
The little Christmas tree had been set up at the corner of the small dance floor right next to the DJ’s booth.
“Hey, here’s mine,” Samuel said, handing her a small ornament. “You did this last year, didn’t you?”
“I do it every year, inviting all my friends and having them bring a decoration,” she said. “This is my family, so I have them come and decorate the party tree.”
The tree was festooned with a couple of plastic oranges, a little nutcracker, a model of the Golden Gate Bridge, a tiny spaceship whose lights twinkled and a stuffed bear in a Santa Claus suit.
Okay, one more snippet:
There was a sudden whistling whine which rose over the music. The twinkling lights of the little gray spaceship shone brightly as it rose from the tree, circled it once and then darted across the room. Zack ducked as it flew over him and crashed through the small upper window to the side of the bar.
“That fits in with some of the stories I’ve heard around here,” Scotty said.
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