"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
Since last time, I did very little writing-wise. Wrote a couple of the weekly flash fictions (haven’t even started on this weeks!) and worked on a horror story I hadn’t touched in years. Started up another Demeter’s Bar story, and it was good to get back to them, and today I wrote about a page on “Youth Like Summer Brave” while waiting for an appointment. I quoted something a while back about the advantage of finishing a first draft is you have something to work on, and does this thing ever need work! Cliches, sloppy writing, plot holes you could fly a Deathstar through! It can only be made better!
“Okay, Mr. Gonzalez,” the Foreman said. “We’re under deadline and you need to have this all dug out by tomorrow. Get that machine moving.”
I said “Yes sir,” and hopped in the cab of the digger (“Excavator,” they kept correcting me.) I had the job for the summer working on the construction crew; I’d gotten good enough at it to be left to my own devices on site. And this site was huge. Sand, everywhere you could see. I could convince myself we were in the desert except I knew we were on what used to be an artificial lake before the water had drained out. The job was no big; just dig the hole here and put the sand there.
It was hot, the sun was high in the sky and I was taking a break. Drinking a soda and eating the sandwich I kept in the little cooler I had. No way a food truck was going to come way out here in the country.
I sat and stared at the sand. It seemed to stretch to the horizon, but this patch wasn’t that big, was it? Maybe a square mile?
I switched the fan off in the cab. I thought I’d heard something. Bells jingling rhythmically. I stepped out of the cab and stood on the wheel, staring in the distance. There was a speck on the far horizon. It wasn’t a car. The bells continued to sound from nowhere. Not loudly. In a few minutes, the speck came closer. It was a boat, an old barge like I’d seen in those sword-and-sandal movies I’d seen as a kid back when I’d hoped nobody would notice I was checking out both the female and male extras. There was a canopy over most of the barge but I couldn’t see any wheels. The boat was moving through the sand under its own power.
I started. There was a man standing on the deck. I hadn’t noticed him before. He was tall and dark. Not African, maybe he was Egyptian. He wore a long, golden robe open in front. There was a glistening headband around his forehead. His head was shaved.
The boat stopped. There wasn’t a breath of air. It had gotten hotter. The man on the boat stared at me then raised a hand in salute.
“This is Mesektet,” he said. “The Boat of Millions of Years. The Boat of Ra.”
“Oh, Ra,” I said. I’d had enough really strange things happen to me to dismiss this as a hallucination or a dream.
“I’m Billy Gonzalez,” I said. Introducing myself seemed like a good idea. It had worked with the group of Sasquatch I’d run into a few years ago.
“The Solar Boats travel with the great one,” he said. “Ra rides Mandjet, the Boat of the Day.” His hand swept above him, indicating the sun. “I control the Boat of Night. I must meet Ra, but I am nowhere near Ra in this strange land. In some way, I have arrived on the wrong sand.” The man glared at me. “I suspect the work of Set.”
“Uh, I didn’t really study Egyptology,” I said, “but if you want to meet Ra, you should head west towards the sunset.”
The man shook his head. “It must be at the point of Iah at this time of the cycle. It is Iah who will escort Ra from the day barge to the night barge.”
“Iah?” I asked.
“One of the many phases of the many-faced god…”
“Of the Moon!” I said. I pulled out my phone. If I had the minutes I could do this. “Yeah,” I said.
“No, Iah.” The man said.
“Look; you got turned around. You want to turn around and head that way,” I said pointing and showing him the display on the screen. But I kept my distance; something told me not to touch the man or the Boat of Millions of Years. “That’s the display from the Naval Observatory, and that’s the compass.”
The man stared. He pointed toward the horizon. “Yeah?” he asked.
I nodded. I stepped back and the boat began to move and head for the horizon. The man again raised his hand in salute.
“Hey,” I called out. “I didn’t get your name?”
The voice drifted to me on a sudden breeze as the boat and the extended desert vanished in ripples of heat.
“I once was Akhenaten. Once I was great.”
I got into the cab and started the engine.
A few nights later in the motel, something woke me. Moonlight streaming through the window. I closed my eyes and words from a poem I’d heard in grade school floated through my head:
Guess What Happened On Our Way Down the Milky Way?
By Jeff Baker
The thing about Cyburnius was it looked so much like Earth we could almost forget where we were and that caused the problem. Kendrick and I had parked the Solar Scooter (actually it was close to being a junker) in the Civic Parking and we were basically picnicking sitting on the green grass, surrounded by trees, scanning through our filter-browser, (we could still pick up service) when the girl showed up. We’d been pretty careful and hadn’t jacked-up our cards too much but we spent some on what Sol called a picnic basket from one of those machines.
“Hey, guys!” The girl’s voice was so perky it made my hair bristle. “You two alone? Or are you with each other?” She let out a giggle and I felt it in my hair. Her hair was brown and curly, contrasting to her slender build and pale skin and twinkling eyes behind her glasses.
“I’m Kendrick-41,” I said with a grin. “The quiet one is my buddy Sol-19. Yeah, it sounds like a planet.”
Sol waved and said “Yo.” She giggled again. Again, my hair tingled.
“I’m Eeenie,” she said. “So, what brings you boys out here?”
“Just traveling,” Sol said. “We got the scooter juiced up and we’re, well, going to see what we can see.”
I’d never heard Sol talk that much at once. That should’ve been the second warning, but I ignored it.
“Basically we’re sliding down the Milky Way,” I said.
“Sounds fun!” Eeenie said. “Got room for one more in your scooter?”
“Don’t think so,” Sol said.
“Hey, that looks good!” Eeenie said, pointing to the packaged stuff in our picnic basket. Her smile grew broader. And broader. And broader… I was just staring up at her. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Sol was staring at her openmouthed too.
Eeenie moved in closer.
There was a sudden crackle and a flash of blueish light. I blinked my eyes, feeling like I was waking up. I made out a uniformed Cosmos Patrolman with a long pair of tongs crackling with energy. In the grip of the tongs, Eeenie shriveled and dwindled down to a wavering stick figure, giving off the piercing giggles and was quickly stuffed into a silvery carrying bag on the ground which the Patrolman sealed shut.
“You boys are lucky to be alive,” the Patrolman said. “That was an Eeenimite. A dimensional parasite. Usually they stick to the caves, but this one had absorbed enough mass to mimic human form. She was able to mesmerize you with that high giggle noise of hers.”
“Wait; there are a lot of these around here?” I asked.
“The caves are their natural habitat, but people have been going down there a lot lately and they aren’t supposed to,” the Patrolman said. He shook his head, prodded the bag with the tongs, making sure it was secure and then went on. “Eeeniemites usually don’t grow this big, but this one had been feeding a lot,” the Patrolman explained.
“Feeding?” Sol asked, looking at me uncomfortably. My mouth felt dry.
“Bodily fluids, essential salts, the usual,” the Patrolman said. “Blood. Tears.”
The bag wiggled. I shuddered. We didn’t feel like eating the rest of our lunch. We got in our SolarScooter, checked the seals and took off, putting Cyburnius behind us.
Over the last week or so I worked on a column that’s due this weekend, did three flash fiction stories (the two weekly ones and the monthly one for the Flash Fiction Draw Challenge) worked on a couple of other stories I have in the pile and (to my surprise!) wrote the beginning of a mystery that occurred to me after chatting with someone this afternoon.
I’m going to break with tradition here (and go against the advice of one of my favorite writers, Henry Kuttner, who advised against talking about works-in-progress) and list a few things I have in the pipe. Some I’ve started recently, some from a ways back. I’m not going to be too specific. Better writers and bloggers than I do blogs this way; maybe this will goad me into finishing more of them!
A full-length “slick fantasy” baseball story I am aiming at the Saturday Evening Post. (I actually got a nice rejection for an alternate history I sent them a while back!)
Another baseball story, this one a mystery/crime story titled “Over the Fence Is Out, Boys.” (The title is an ancient baseball song quoted in the Three Stooges theme.)
A domestic horror story titled “Please Don’t Eat the Neighbors,” for which I owe Robert Lopresti for the idea to actually write what started as a Facebook joke.
A mystery/crime story set on a prison work crew called “The Absent-Minded Convict.”
A Christmas Mystery, just revised that is going to Ellery Queen’s.
A non-genre story that is also going to the Sat. Eve Post, titled “Youth Like Summer Brave, Age Like Winter Bare.” (Title from Shakespeare.)
A science-fantasy story I dreamed up (the basic idea anyway) while driving my beat up old Chevy Nova (my first car) home from work one night in either 1983 or ’84.
And I need to start up the second of a series I DO have planned out of a mystery series set in Ancient Rome. The first of this series in in a slushpile at the moment!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The draws for this month’s Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were a ghost story set in a tulip field involving a key.
The field was quiet, green and dotted with multicolored blooms. Chuck stared at the ornate key in his hand. The house had been here once at the edge of the tulip field in the middle of the Kansas nowhere. The key was all that was left of the house. Now, there was just the land.
“And you’re worth something,” Chuck said. “Maybe oil, maybe farming. Maybe a big hotel with a view of the open prairie.”
Chuck strode out among the tulips, not caring if he crushed any of them. What was it he heard about the house? His distant cousins had left Holland for America in the 1880s; they had built the house and planted the field, intending to raise tulips, and everything had gone wrong. The wife had killed the husband and then herself, or maybe the other way around, nobody was sure. The children had fled, they only found the daughter, and she never discussed what happened. Some of the family had tried living in the house, but had not stayed long; there were reports of strange whispering, odd lights in the house and, in a hastily-scrawled note found on the kitchen table by an aunt who decided to move back to St. Louis after only a week, a reference to “the faces in the flowers.” The house had burned just after World War One.
Stories didn’t bother Chuck. This would be only the latest property he had taken over, by hook or by crook. An oil well would fit well here. It was too bad he hadn’t had this land a month ago; it would have come in handy to bury his cousin when he’d…
Chuck smiled. The tulips did remind him of flowers he’d once seen in a cemetery.
“What the hell?” Chuck stopped and stared. The clear blue of the daytime sky stretched to the horizon, and for a moment it had parted like a fog and he had seen a Victorian house, three stories high with plenty of decoration and an awful purple color of paint. Then it was gone.
Chuck shook his head. He just wanted to inspect the old foundation which he had been told was still there. He took a breath, glanced back at his rental car and walked forward. He heard the crunch, crunch, crunch of his feet in the dirt but stared straight ahead at the blank blue sky. He glanced downward as he walked.
The flowers were bending and moving out of his way. Not uprooting, but still moving of their own volition. It couldn’t be. He stopped and glanced apprehensively behind him, expecting to see a pathway of crushed blossoms. They were standing untouched, undamaged, un-trampled. They were waving in the breeze but he couldn’t feel a breeze but he could hear a breeze. What sounded like a breeze. Whispering.
He looked down at the flowers. What had the old note said about faces? Instead he saw the flowers puckering, saw tongues licking. He began to run back the way he came, it was a shorter distance. But the field stretched on, further than he had ever seen. He dropped the key. He started screaming as he ran.
“Mommy! Come quick! There’s a man out in the tulips!”
Mrs. Van Dall turned and went over to the window, her big skirt making a breeze in the Kansas heat. She looked out the window. Nobody.
“There’s nobody there, Peter,” she said. He stared out the window.
She sighed. She had married for love, but love had vanished when they moved into this house. She hated it here.
Greg Toliver stepped off his front porch into the light from the rising full Moon.
“Here, boy! Bryan! Come on, boy!” he said whistling. “Dammit!”
They’d loved the short cartoon of the guy going after his boyfriend when he turned into a wolf under the Moon, but it was no fun when it happened for real. It hadn’t happened in a while, though. It was probably all the stress, usually Bryan kept it under control, but not tonight.
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, zingo! He was a big, yellow-gray wolf. He’d pushed open the door and out he went.
Bryan had changed several times when they had first gotten together; he explained that it was just a matter of willpower to keep the wolf in check. Nothing dangerous, but a wolf in a neighborhood was still a wolf.
“C’mon, Bryan, dammit!” Greg wondered how much intelligence Bryan had this time. Usually when he willed the change, he kept his faculties but with a wolf’s instincts, he’d explained to Greg. Changing totally involuntarily like this probably meant the wolf had largely taken over.
But he’s still Bryan, Greg thought. He’s stressed, he’s scared, and he’s overwhelmed. What does Bryan do when he feels like that?
His car!
Greg unlocked the side door to the old wooden garage detached from the bungalow they rented. There was a doggie door on the side, just like the one on the back door just in case he was locked-out when he changed, voluntarily or involuntarily. When the full Moon did it, Bryan was a wolf for the night. Greg shut the door and listened. He heard a panting. 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.
“Hey, Bryan,” Greg said. “It’s okay, buddy! I know you’re stressed-out, but everything’s all right. What with everything that’s been going down this past year I’m surprised both of us haven’t turned into animals. Hey, come over here, okay? Come on?”
Bryan the wolf whimpered.
“Awwwww! I know, buddy! C’mon. This floor is cold, let’s go inside where it’s warm and I have leftover meatloaf. C’mon. C’mon. Atta boy.”
Bryan crawled over to Greg and nuzzled his face as Greg rubbed his fur.
After a few minutes, Greg stood up. “C’mon, Bryan.” The wolf wagged his tail as he followed Greg out the side door.
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.
Last couple of weeks I wrote bits and pieces on a few stories and did the Friday Flash fictions and started on the monthly one and just wrote up another flash story that’s going out next month. (This month, I mean! March has snuck up on me!) Also, checked over and rewrote the Christmas mystery that I will fire off in a few weeks, the one I wrote in one sitting a couple of weeks before this past Christmas.
I looked around the decorated gym; streamers and banners proclaiming “Welcome Class of 84!” And “Thirty Years Since College.” Dancing couples, loud music from a band and three girls I didn’t recognize sitting on a table probably not sipping punch. I sighed and looked around for the snack table. It felt like a hundred years since I’d been in this gym. And in my case, it was at least close to that!
“Hey! Andrew! Dude!” This was from a big guy with glasses and thinning blonde hair who I barely recognized. Dewayne Somebody-Or-Other. “You haven’t changed a bit!”
“Yes, I have,” I said smiling to myself. Thanks to some spaceships, some decelerated aging and a little time-travel. Dewayne Ross, that was the guy’s name (funky memory), had put on maybe thirty pounds, one for every year since college.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” Dewayne asked.
“Um, various jobs.” I said. “Worked out of a warehouse for a while. Drove a delivery van.” Got picked by some alien overlords for a few galaxy and time-spanning missions; spent some time in the 1800s, lived through Reconstruction twice, that was no fun I thought.
“Hey! Andy! Andy Dominski!” The kid dressed in a t-shirt decorated with the logo of some band I couldn’t remember skidded up to us.
“Andrew,” I said.
“Yeah! We got a survey question, this’ll be fun,” the kid said. He pulled out a clipboard. “What class from Millington College have you used most since graduation?”
“History,” I said. “Got to do some in-depth research a while back. A long while back.” I recognized the kid; he was probably fiftyish but skinny and wore his hair long with dark glasses. He wasn’t any of the guys I’d come close to hitting on. I took advantage of his question to lose Dewayne and wander over to the table with drinks and chips. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
I sniffed the punch, couldn’t tell if it was spiked or not. I grabbed a can of soda instead and put some chips and a little sandwich with a toothpick in it on a paper plate. The band kicked into high gear and I could barely hear anything. That meant I didn’t have to pretend to know anybody I couldn’t remember. I glanced up at the ceiling. Lights played on it, making me think of a disco. I’d been in a disco one time. I was a lousy dancer. I grinned. There was something so wonderfully normal about all this. After zipping around like I was Dr. Who for a century, I really appreciated normal.
I sat down on a chair near the wall with the plate on my lap and slurped the can of soda. It was just like College or High School for that matter; going to the dance and just sitting around with my friends instead of dancing. Well, 1975 through 1984 I couldn’t have gone dancing with a guy even if I’d been out or had the nerve to ask anybody. I surveyed the dance floor; couples dancing, some I recognized. The captain of the basketball team had apparently gotten together with the head cheerleader. I smiled again and munched on the chips. I hadn’t expected to have a good time but I was!
“Hey, Andrew! Is that you?”
I looked up. Took me a second but I recognized Kenny. I’d kind of crushed on him when I was about 20.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, shaking his hand. “How you been?”
“Okay,” he said. “Went to Grad School. Got married. How about you?”
Married. Of course, I thought.
“Oh, I started working, did a lot of traveling.” I said, faking a smile.
“You look good,” Kenny said.
Oh, God you look good I thought.
“You too,” I said. “Married, huh? It suits you.”
“Hey, Ken,” came a voice behind us. “If the punch is spiked it’s watered down.”
This was from a tall, balding guy sipping a cup he’d just filled from the punchbowl.
“Oh, Andrew Dominski, this is Marc Garretson, my husband.”
The tall husband guy smiled and extended his hand. I shook it and said hi, all the while thinking It would have been nice to find out that Ken was playing on my team about, oh nineteen-eighty-two or something.
And I said it. I grinned at Kenny and said, half-jokingly, “I wish I’d known back in school!”
“Same here,” Kenny said. “But I wouldn’t have met Marc.” The two of them looked at each other the way my Mom and Dad did.
“Hey,” I said. “Would you two mind, I mean, would it be okay if Kenny, Ken and I, well, did the next dance?”
Marc laughed. “Sure, if it won’t freak everybody out! I mean, if it’s okay with Ken.”
Kenny nodded and we made our way onto the dance floor as the band slowed the music down. We held each other and danced and I don’t think anybody noticed.
“You doing okay?” Kenny asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I am.” The dance was worth waiting a hundred years for.
After a few blissful minutes, I waved Marc over and he took my place with Kenny. One of the other dancers stared but I didn’t care and I was sure Marc and Kenny didn’t.
I snagged another canned soda and stepped out of the gym, flashing back for an instant to all the times I’d gone through that door. I sipped my soda and stared up at the night sky, noting a couple of stars that really weren’t there anymore, just Earth was still getting their light.
“Hey, you got a cigarette?” This was somebody who’d just stepped out of the gym that I didn’t recognize.
“Nope,” I said. “I don’t smoke. It helps keep me young.”
Grandfather was sitting in his chair under the tree a ways from the house when the kids ran up to him excitedly.
“Gran’pa! We saw it! We saw three Suns in the sky!” That was the youngest girl, always excited about every new thing.
“Three!” Grandfather said.
“Yes,” said the oldest girl. “Right beside each other.”
“You didn’t look long did you?” Grandfather said. “You could hurt your eyes.”
“No, we didn’t but we saw them!” The youngest said.
“Honest,” said the oldest. “They were right up there!”
“Well, they’re gone now,” Grandfather said.
“What were they?”
“Well,” Grandfather said. “People call them Sun Dogs, and they say they’re just reflections of the sun on ice or clouds way up high. But I’ve seen them someplace besides the sky.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really!” Grandfather said. “Let’s see, I was just a boy on my Grandfather’s farm out in Western Kansas back about 1890 or so when I saw a couple of little girls I’d never seen before, running up Green Hill. The hill was covered with grass and yellow flowers that didn’t do anything but they were pretty. Anyway, I didn’t want the girls to get into trouble by running into the pasture where we kept the bull, so I called after them and when they didn’t stop I ran after them myself. I was pretty fast but they were way ahead of me and reached the top of Green Hill in no time. Probably because it wasn’t very big. I could hear their little-girl laughter and saw them run over the top of the hill and disappear down the other side. In a moment or two I was at the top of the hill and I looked all around but I couldn’t see hide nor hair of the two little girls and there was no place they could have hidden; the grass wasn’t that tall and they weren’t that fast. So I went back and I told my Grandfather and he asked me ‘Were they a little blond girl, kind of glistening in the light like the sunlight on the pond? And a little brown girl who was as clear as the dappled sunlight under the trees in summertime at noon?’ And when I said they were he told me those were the Sun Dogs come to earth, but they aren’t dogs they are the daughters of the Sun. We can’t always see them in the sky but when they come down to the ground we can see them plain as day. He told me to look in the sky and sure enough, there were two Sun Dogs side by side with Old Sol. So, that was what you two girls saw today. The Daughters of the Sun come here to run and play like little girls on the Earth do, but you can never catch up to them any more than you can catch sunlight in a bottle.”
“Wow!” “Really?” the girls said.
“Yes, really!” Grandfather said.
“Were you really that young, Gran’pa?” asked the youngest.
“Sure I was! Back about seventy years ago!”
“Gran’pa,” the oldest said. “ I saw a Moon Dog once. It was real cold and there was a big bright spot in the sky right by the Moon. Is that the Moon’s son?”
“Naaaah! That’s just a reflection of the Moon on ice or clouds way up high,” Grandfather said with a smile.
authorjeffbaker 