Addiction

Soccer fans have a saying: "it only takes a second to score a goal." But that has its flipside. Sometimes the moments that end up changing our lives, utterly refashioning them, and not always for the better, also occur within a heartbeat of time. We might only recognize them in hindsight. I realize I am becoming addicted to flash fiction, which is another level of irony given the latest one I wrote for Dan Mader's Friday flash fiction challenge is titled Addiction. Why? I wonder. I think it's partially the brevity, the minimal time commitment in a crowded, busy world filled with deadlines. Honestly, I don't know if I'll ever get to my abandoned novel, and even traditional short stories are becoming increasingly daunting in terms of time, but flash fiction? Especially timed (although I admit I often play pretty fast and loose with that part, and since Dan is a good guy he doesn't give me too much of a hard time about it). Surprisingly, you can say a hell of a lot when everything's pared down to a moment, whether it be a moment of comedy, a moment of fear, a moment of transcendence, a moment of horror, a moment of pure loss. This short piece is a nod to noir, of course, with its femme fatale and smoky barroom setting, but it's also a moment. A moment in which... Okay, that's enough. I shouldn't need to explain it. Plus, it doesn't even matter what I think. I hope someone gets something out of this. I very much enjoyed writing it, how it emerged like slow ribbons of smoke from a cigarette held between slender fingers.

Addiction

The bar is dark in daylight. What paltry light there is moves sluggish, thwarted by dust motes and smoke.

"I can't help it if I have an addictive personality." Liv leans forward and presses one slender finger into my sternum. "And you don't exactly help, my lover, my partner, my significant other."

"How so?"

"Indulgences. Temptations. Urges."

I have no idea what she's talking about, so I decide to enjoy the view down the front of her shirt. Significant other. Ha. She's being an asshole, albeit a flirtatious one. I don't believe in addictive personalities; I believe only in strength or weakness. I smirk at her. She raises one perfect eyebrow, a brunette Lana Turner. Like she knows what I'm thinking, like she knows this postman will not only ring twice, he'll keep on ringing until somebody damn well answers.

"I can quit them all, you know."

I can feel my smirk stretching my face.

"Fuck you," she says, as if she's telling me about the weather. Her face is placid as Arctic ice.

All of a sudden I'm scared. She's out of her chair and at the door before I can think. Confused, I look down at the table.

"Wait! You forgot your cig—"

The Last Debrief

Again, Dan Mader's weekly flash fiction exercises provided a kickstart for another short piece last week. I had his permission to upload this clearly-longer-than-two-minutes excerpt. And I mean excerpt, as it feels like it could be a part of some vast space opera... not that I'll ever probably write it. It's like a brief farewell transmission, a threat whispered along the interstellar dust highways, something ominous lurking far beyond any conceivable future. Yet it's there.

Seriously. Go read Unemployed Imagination; follow the link above. Every Friday there are some excellent pieces of writing on there. Anyway, here's mine:

The Last Debrief

Perhaps it's because you have two of everything. Two lower appendages, two upper. Two mammaries. Gonads. Binocular vision. You are obsessed, bound and determined, to choose this over that, the far over the near, the left and the right, the up and the down, the purest dark and the damnedest light. 

And because we're many-limbed and multivisioned, a field of possibility so much more complex than your stark binaries, we don't need to make your kinds of choice, between faith and nihilism, release and execution. We can live beneath the layered greys, comforted by those rings of lambent light against charcoal backgrounds our generations have always dreamed under, a space less void than some firefly twilight.

Your rage is inevitable given you can only dwell in either the birth agony of sunfire or the raw, biting negation of interstellar cold.

In the banal, prosaic spirit of all your kind's doomed couplings, especially when one party finally grasps the pure harm they've so recently undergone, at the tail-end of a tarnished tryst, we would like to say this: we wish we'd never met you. We wish that fervently and, in terms you yourselves will understand more than most, eternally, with profound revulsion.

As we recoil from you, we realise how ironic it is the extent to which our chance encounter has unsettled and perhaps damaged our own historic, even genetic, equilibrium.

We hope and expect to recover from this after the passing of millennia. We're a long-lived people. If after eons of reflection and purification it so happens that we can't shake your taint, can't scrub away the stink of you, we will return to your skies and, from a sense of both mercy and vengeance, we will obliterate your kind from this universe, for good and for all, and most likely for the good of all.

The final appalling irony being that, in the act itself, we will ostensibly have become you.

Of Wharves, Loneliness, and Monsters

Yes, I know I've been discussing horror movies on a writing blog, and my justification is that I'm writing about them, aren't I? Okay, that's fairly lame, but it's my train set and I'll crash the engines into the bridge supports if I damn well want to, okay? But I also don't want to forget those little orphaned pieces of writing, or indeed writing news, that can so easily end up scattered amid a flurry of desktop files or even somewhere out there in cyberspace, where no one can hear them digitally scream.

First off, Indies Unlimited just published Indies Unlimited: 2013 Flash Fiction Anthology—their latest collection of Flash Fiction Challenge winners from last year—and I am particularly proud of my own small contribution. You can buy the anthology here, but I'll also repost my story with its prompt. Remember, these are accompanied in the book by the beautiful photography of K.S. Brooks, and I really urge anyone to get their hands on the full-colour print edition. So here's the prompt, followed by my story: 

This is where it had been happening. Back in the summer, when Gary Kessler disappeared, everyone had thought he had drowned. When they found his body, they knew differently.

Then there was the little Hamilton girl, Old Tom Billings, and half a dozen more.

Most of the time they never found the bodies. Sometimes they would find parts. The town council didn’t want to hear about it. They stuck their heads in the sand and hoped it would go away. Deputy Aldridge knew differently. He had seen it. He saw it take Sheriff Wilson, and he knew it had to be stopped. He came here tonight to put an end to it. He just had to wait till dark.

***

Till Dark

Although he’d seen terrible things, a pretty sunset never failed to bring a tear to Deputy Aldridge’s jaundiced eye. And this was as pretty as any, down by the lake that lay placid as mirror glass under the warm hues of a fading day.

No time for sentiment tonight, however—he had come to stop a monster. A thing he called, simply, The Horror. The town had suffered enough. He would wait until full dark, the time it always indulged its predations, and he would end its thrall. Checking his Glock 17, he felt a strange calm descend.

Crouching in the dwindling light, senses alert to the gentle sounds of evening—the creak of a frog, water sounds, a distant train—he recalled the awful endings already endured by the townsfolk: the Kessler kid, rangy adolescent limbs torn off; old Tom’s unspeakable final minutes; and worst of all, little Lucy Hamilton. His nightmares about her fate alone fueled the raging insomnia he’d picked up after Gulf War I. No, it would end tonight. Only one of those killings had been prompted by cunning not bloodlust: Sheriff Wilson. His old friend had come so close to solving the mystery.

Aldridge was tired. No more. All light had leached from the sky, barring a sprinkling of stars. It was time. All was quiet. Even the frog seemed to hold its breath. Deputy Aldridge sighed, inserted the Glock into his mouth, pointed up toward his brainpan, and put an ending to The Horror.

Second, and this is a simple one, I wrote a haiku recently. It's my first, but I kind of like it. Here it is:

Now I am alone

I hear the windchimes sing, though

there's no longer wind

And last but not least, now and again I join Dan Mader and co on his blog for the free writing exercises he hosts there every Friday. The latest one had a two-minute limit which, as anyone who's ever attempted it knows, is actually very difficult in terms of building any coherent narrative. They're more ephemeral and impressionistic, usually. But on this occasion a tiny short story appeared unbidden, which you can read among the other excellent entries here, but I also felt like I wanted to embellish it a little, which I've now done and will post here for posterity... or because I hate to see lost little orphans. (Oh, and yeah, it's still short. Just not that short.)

Wharf

"It's down at the wharf." Lauren was insistent. Her frown was adorable, always was. "The thing in the water."

"Then we'll go there." I wanted to see it, after all.

"You'll see it." Trembling, tears beginning.

We were fast. Wharf rats ourselves, really. Running between the ancient guano-spattered pilings and docks, laughing in that serious way we always had. One that was also kinda sad, truth be told. 

Lauren needed this and I wanted her to. Show me, I mean.

But we looked everywhere. All over hell's half-acre and then some. Red neon Firestone signs from pure memory. A tawdry motel named The Shamrock. These were the years soon after the noisome winds blew garbage like soiled snow through the rusty alleyways and gunmetal gantries. These were the quiet days following. The high plains whistle inside our flinching ears.

And we kept looking awhile. Beneath the water and out. Backs of warehouses, well inside loading bays, deep within oily backwaters, long-dead feathers floating on scum. Alert we stayed. Studied reflections aplenty and craned our necks to the mostly birdless sky. Where light came. But we never once saw Lauren's creature. Sure didn't mean it never existed. Just never saw it is all.

No One Ever

After the party, we all go down by the shivering river. 

Winter, cold, but nowhere ice. Kirsten laughs at the richly carved salmon sculptures curled all perfect for the tourists, while live herring gulls circle overhead, warm someplace within their torpedo torsos, and occasionally screaming. Ornery as fuck.  

Rafe, one acquisitive eye on the tawdry sub-stripmall liquidation warehouse bargain world outlet stores, at last says this: "Let's go. Find something good. Could we?" 

And Lucinda knows she gotta head back south soon enough, cross the stupid dumbfuck border before it gets even stupider with dumbfuck holiday traffic, beat the cheap gasoline and dairy hound dogs, the Costco bandits, Walmart outlaws and Bellis Fair pillagers, and make time and peace with the toothy, chummy, American dumbfuck country mouse. (Here I might point out the green, mostly submerged and peeling boat, not so much offshore as offbank, but there have been many observations throughout our history every bit as profound yet equally and utterly ignored.)

An anticlimax, then.

The real cruelty of life is this, a gathering of negatives: We stumble on the only soul who makes us want to do nothing but sing, only to find that their song is not ours, and never will be.

After which the rains come. And boy, do they come. Gets so the local critters all abandon this place, leave their possible return to fate and the glimmering stars. Bridges, backroads washed out. Nowhere left to ford, all ravelled up in muffled acreages and submerged indeterminacies.

I probably loved Kirsten the most, who always laughed and never succumbed until the very end. She revered things with such lively aplomb. The quiet reserve, the crow score, the chicken-scratch bordello throat-song.

"You'll never follow me all the way," she taunts. And she's right. I went on some tangent, sparking off of the mainstream, reading from some profane backwoods gospel, gleaning banjo pickings in scree-fanned draws, collecting possums and coons a-plenty and hurling them half-assed and wild, aimed mainly potwise, learning their death scents too. Like I learnt her sex scent all along. Her sex scent. Near makes me pause it does.

While Rafe laughs his cynic laugh. Not because he's a cynic but more 'cause he lost all belief in being anything beyond or aside from someone won't do nothin' all that good or ere that bad. Settled for things. Best equipped to hang from the fugitive's neck and chant the death knell requiem. Which may as well be a cynic, I guess, oh lord so jaded and lost.

But Lucinda. The real Lucinda. She will return. Again and again, tires crunching cheap motel parking lot gravel, her serious face levelled athwart a serious plane. She will sit alone, her cold, hard nipples gathered like fat, dry raisins, her elbows jutting chickenwise, her lorn, gone cuntwarmth terrible in its loss and desirous in its recall, she unable to feel her twitching nose or pursing lips, her arid breath a spectre so lonely it makes loneliness itself seem near gravid with joy.

"Love is what I felt back there, and love is where I'm headed," she says, a chastened banshee, heart defiant while eyes downcast.

Rafe sneers. Sucks on what's left of his teeth.

"What the fuck you got to sneer about?" I ask, the first thing I ever said in this furious, chaotic world that ever mattered.

No one ever answers. No one ever. I think about crying and realize I got no tears, and everything moves relentlessly on, even if the world itself stops. Especially then.

___________________________

Not even sure why or how, but this post by my awesome friend Dan Mader somehow birthed this piece. Oh, and Faulkner.

The Crow Highway

Thanks again to Dan Mader and his Friday flash fiction challenges. Here is the latest two minutes-worth of strangeness to be dredged from the dank recesses, in which Ted Hughes meets Iain Banks, maybe? Along with something far less savoury.

Exercises like these force you to not think about your writing, to allow the words to emerge largely unedited and unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness style, which makes them interesting on a psychological and a literary level. Not sure what they reveal. Not sure I want to know. Although I suspect Crow knows.

I live on the crow highway. We all do. Crow wants us to bleed. Crow wants us to smile and reveal rotten teeth. Crow himself smiles as he hears us moan in our sleep. As children are beaten. As wives are punched. Crow doesn't smile because any of this makes him happy. No, crow smiles because he knows all things find resolution somewhere along the loop and that a predatory beak stab here will become the tugged, torn earthworm there, and that the once-assailed will be the assailant, somewhere along the crow highway.