"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
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
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!
