Flash Fiction at Five

Flurries of Words has featured my flash fiction on their site today. I wrote it about a year ago and it remains a favorite of mine.  Sirens takes place in a dystopian world where all the rich kids explode nuclear weapons for fun as if they were fireworks.  I hope you enjoy it and check out the other great authors on the site.

Flurries of Words

The Kindle Voice Guy

And Now an An Erotic Flash Fiction

I had sex with the Kindle voice guy. It was everything I thought it could be. The way his monotone sighs seduced me as he touched my back was unforgettable. His hands moved with the syllabic momentum of his voice, stopping and starting in quick succession. Pressing his up arrow with select aroused him too. I thought of all the books he read to me throughout the past year. I shivered with delight recalling Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson. Kindle Voice Guy knew exactly where the g-spot was with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He read the last lines and I lost control, screaming out the names of my favorite authors. “Tolkien, oh, God, yes! Give it to me Kindle! Send your ship to Valinor! Mama needs Dahl’s BFG! Big fucking girth!” The release was tremendous as I cuddled up against his leather case. He pressed all the right buttons and he knew me better than anyone. If only I never had to upgrade…

1st Place: 4~Whips Erotica Flash Fiction Turkey Slap

Hello, everyone.  I bet you never thought of me as an erotica writer. Well, you'd be wrong. I won first prize in a flash fiction contest for just that: erotica. It's a story about gnomes no less. Better yet, it's free on Smashwords. So, give it a download and read the other great winners too.

Turkey Slap 2012

Din the Dragonfly Part 1

And now a two-part flash-fiction event...

Din was the runt but he didn’t act like it. He fought with greater spirit than the other dragonflies. But they were always bigger. He struggled more for food. None of the others thought he’d make it past his larval stage. But they were wrong. Din, grew up as much as was able and set out. The pond by the yard held nothing for him. He wanted rivers and great plains his brethren could only dream of. They would tell stories of Din the Magnificent taking on the different birds and lizards, breaking out of spider webs and conquering the clouds.

Away from the pond however, was very different than Din thought. Life seemed colder, unpredictable. Birds were everywhere he flew. He couldn’t hide inside a bush because the lizards found him. And the spiders were the worst of all. They built the most expansive webs to catch him. He narrowly escaped and wondered if he made the right decision, going out into the world. Even the other dragonflies he met were of a different breed. Some ignored him, others eyed him hungrily. But Din was his own dragonfly. If the world wasn’t his he at least belonged to the world and that was something.

The world was a cruel parent, thought Din as smoke filled the air. He had the first day of flying he could remember without predators. They all went off somewhere but he didn’t think where. It was too good to be true, skimming the grass, eating gnats and mosquitos. His wings brushed by the leaves. It was surreal until the smoke began pluming.

Din ran smack into a tree, unable to see. What was going on? He flew as high as he could. That’s when he saw it in the distance; a real dragon. Din couldn’t believe his glassy eyes. They were supposed to be myth. And here one was. It was headed straight for… Din gulped. That’s the way he had flown. The others were in danger.

100 Word Flash Fiction

The Good Fight

“Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time,” she said, naively in a condescending tone. Beth was a bitch. She didn’t understand. What hard choices had the rich, former Homecoming Queen of Rhodes High School ever had to make? What shoes to wear? Which job not to work? Some of us didn’t have a choice in either. We wore the only pair of shoes we owned to the only job we could find. Even then, it wasn’t enough. We had to cut corners. Most borrowed, some begged and a few, like me, stole. Mostly, from bitches like Beth.

Fireflies

Hello, bloggers. I have returned. I took a brief hiatus, but kept up writing. There's poetry, fiction, a play and even a comic in my journal! All new and all for you! So let's start out this jazz with a little story I wrote.

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Fireflies

My family told me they were fireflies. Mark and Bobby laughed at me for knowing what they really were. I grabbed a jar off of the railing, running through the yard to prove them wrong and catch a fairy.

At first, they fought, flying out of reach but I soon gained on them. They came closer out of curiosity. One or two were in my reach. I swung my bottle over them and closed the lid. Three creatures stared at me. None of them were insects.

One possessed a face not too unlike my brother Mark's. The others hid behind translucent hands. My grin reflected over them. Their light shined a glimmer over all of us. The fairies, I saw that they now were, were beautiful yet flinching creatures, pale green and pink from different angles.

"Come back with me" I whispered to the glass. I felt they understood though being far too terrified to speak. Their small tears spoke volumes but I had to prove myself to Mark and Bobby. They were sitting on the porch, still doubting me.

I turned and broke into a sprint, forgetting the small creatures misery. Adreniline and pride at my discovery took hold. I had discovered something extraordinary! My brothers would never hear the end of it! I became so entranced in fantasies of their humiliation I forgot the jar entirely. It slowly floated from my arms above my head. The fairies had lifted it together, just high enough before it dropped!

I leapt to catch it, feeling the cold glass slip through my hands and shatter. Three fairies quickly freed themselves to pull my ears and cackle through the moonless night.

They faded to the distance as I stared. Mark and Bobby would have the last laugh - their brother who couldn't even catch a firefly - not knowing I had found a great deal more.

The Floating Man

Jill had just had the worst day of her life.  Everything she held dear was crashing down.  Her mom was sick again and in the hospital.  She didn’t know how she’d pay the next month’s rent.  The love of her life was cheating with a friend.  It was true; she didn’t have time for him.  But she thought their love meant more than that.

She looked out the window while she still could.  The grass was dead; she hadn’t watered the lawn in ages.  How could anyone with three jobs in addition to everything else?  At least it hadn’t grown so much to get her fined.  Death was the better alternative.

Jill pondered this and gave a shudder.  It certainly wasn’t for her mother.  Perhaps for herself if so much didn’t rely on her.  How nice it would be to just end all of the stress and worries with one little slit, she thought.  Maybe a sibling would step up and care for her mother in Jill’s absence.  But a more cynical side told her they would not.  Ted, Johnny and Dianne moved far away and hardly ever called.  They weren’t ignorant either; they knew perfectly well their mother needed them.

The sky was cloudy.  But it wouldn’t rain.  The heat would hold adding to Jill’s misery.  She stared longingly hoping for the contrary.  That’s when she saw it.  Not rain but something else.  It wasn’t a cloud; rather some sort of shape.  There were legs and arms…

Jill gasped.  It was a man.  Had he fallen from an airplane, or been thrown out?  It couldn’t be, he wasn’t falling.  The man was floating with no chute or glider of any kind.  His face was stony and expressionless.  Was he dead?  Some law of gravity appeared to be broken.  The man stayed perfectly still not swaying the least in midair.

She picked up the receiver but paused.  What would she tell the police?  This might all have been her imagination.  Jill rubbed her eyes and went to splash water on her face.

When she returned to the window nothing had changed.  He was still floating there, expressionless. Did anyone else see this?  She can’t have gone mad.  She had too much to do.  Her night job started in another hour.

Slowly, however, dread left Jill and was replaced with calm.  There was something serene about the man as he floated.  Jill couldn’t explain why but the world suddenly seemed workable.

She blinked again and he was gone.  Jill noticed other neighbors with relaxed expressions staring out their windows as she had been.  Who was this floating man; why had he come?  Jill imagined him an outcast soul, pining for the ones he lost up high but realized this was silly.  Or was it?

The Winnower

Jeremy touched a wilted flower.  It blossomed and he sneezed.  The petals looked undamaged and well nourished.  Jeremy found his eyes and skin a little dryer.  But it didn’t bother him.  There were worse things in the distance.

Screams led him down the block.  Heat grew more intense with every step.  Jeremy continued to unwilt flowers along the way, bringing beauty to a pervasive macabre that had now consumed the sky in black.

Flames began flickering on houses and trees, or they had been already; it was hard to tell.  They mixed with noxious smells, the origin of which Jeremy could not place.  It would have been enough to stop most others in their tracks; Jeremy kept walking.  The city was not far ahead; just another mile.

The trail of new flowers following Jeremy ended abruptly.  Flames consumed them as fast as he absorbed their wounds.  Jeremy stepped onto a winding stretch of broken pavement, mourning the loss.  Cracks forced themselves together as he winced.  There was much work to be done.

Bombs were falling from the sky; bodies strewn, some thrashing in agony.  Jeremy reached his hand out toward the warplanes first.  Their incendiaries dropped, but didn’t fall.  The force had been taken as Jeremy felt an intense spell of vertigo.  He almost lost balance but steadied himself on a still standing fence post.

People were sick.  They needed help.   Jeremy fought his dizziness and aching back.  Legs, arms and heads were gashed; most barely breathing.  He took it all.  The wounds became his own.

Jeremy’s head began to bleed and his breaths slowed.  The people around him came to, not understanding the strange phenomenon.  Some rushed toward to stop Jeremy but felt themselves held back.  The blackness of the sky was turning blue.  Jeremy’s eyes, once green, were gray.

Engines blared; the planes were coming back.  None seemed confident that he could stop them all.  Jeremy, whether he believed or not, looked in the direction of the sound.  Smoke left his entire body in a whirlwind.  The planes approached and hit dead on.  They sputtered, losing all control.

But Jeremy still had more to do.  Burns had scorched the grass and many people’s skin.  Both, found themselves renewed.  But Jeremy had finally taken on too much.  He collapsed.  A young man managed to rush up and catch him before he fell.  Jeremy smiled, though the smoke had rendered him blind.

“Why did you do this all?” The young man asked.

Jeremy could barely speak.  The young man told the others the best that he deciphered from the near inaudible gasps.

“What did he say?” They asked.

“He said… for life.”

It was apparent Jeremy was fading fast.  The healed formed a circle and said a prayer in his last moments.  He was then carried outside the city and laid on resurrected flowers that were more than happy to embrace him.

The Man

THE MAN stood at a window, overlooking his empire.  Cars drove below past houses he owned, indirectly, through the different mortgage companies.  They were his, the people and machinery.  But there was no love or paternal affection.  It was purely lust and domination, driving him.

Radio played the music he liked; television the shows he watched.  And the man watched and liked what made the money.

No one stood up to him.  Many doubted his existence.  The man was folklore and that’s how he preferred it.  The truth was often too dangerous or surreal for anyone to know for sure.  People merely liked the idea of controlling their own destinies.  Too much or too little liberty would always lead to chaos.  And the man saw this as his role, his purpose if you will.  He called the shots so no one else had to; a silent dictator by trade.

The story of Job often came to mind.  He, like most was a man blessed to live in ignorance.  Of any force protecting him, he was blissfully unaware until a day came when he was left to endure the full brutality of nature.  It took his health, his wife and children.  Job appealed to God, but in a larger sense any degree of control.

The Man realized he wasn’t God but  figured he had to be close.  He gave and he took: money, life, happiness, the whole kitchen sink.  If his interests were affected in the slightest there was hell to pay, and all too often… war.

He was often responsible for or played a large part in virtually every armed skirmish around the globe.  It was a necessity controlling the gun industry while at the same time being a major player in Sierra Leone.  Diamonds were lucrative and aided in his womanizing.  The man treated women not too unlike business.  They weren’t people, they were objects and disposable.  But then again, no one really qualified as human in the man’s chess board of a world.

Dinner was brought in.  The man sat still as a servant placed a napkin in his lap and cut food for him; lobster topped with Almas Beluga Caviar.  It was always delicious, but more importantly, expensive.

Most men would feel lonely in such seclusion but not the man.  He wanted nothing else.  Friends, family and relationships were simply a means to an end.

Wisconsin

Gerard was sick.  As sick as he had ever remembered being.  But he had to hide it.  His boss couldn’t know.  And even more importantly, they couldn’t.

Who were they?  They enforced the law.  It was illegal to be sick and Gerard was damn near guilty.

Once word got out it was over for him.  The black insurance truck would come and take him away before he became a risk to the system.  People couldn’t be expected to pay more for his failure to stay healthy.  Gerard was a leech, a parasite, an impending virus to good companies that simply wanted to make jobs.  And nothing else.

He felt shame for allowing his body to become such a socialist utopia but he wanted to live.  It is all my fault, he thought.  But Gerard knew if he survived he could start a business and make the world more capitalist.  He would do anything, deny workers the most basic rights to appease the lords in Washington.  If they just let him live.  They would not, though.

The news told of a protestor the other night, pleading for his life in front of the Speaker.  The Great Speaker would not be bothered, however, and simply struck him down with the large staff he carried everywhere.  It was pure gold with a large, ornate ruby on the top.  The news later praised his courage in facing down the progressive menace.

That was Gerard’s fate; being taken by them, or dying at the hands of the speaker himself.  His complexion had already become so pale you’d think him deathly if you saw him.  He coughed and sneezed and wheezed and hacked….

Maybe it was just the flu.  It didn’t matter.  People were taken by them for far less.  If lazy, freeloading Gerard showed weakness, they would lock him up and start the gas.  It was for the greater good, the greatest good. 

Low profits were the worst plague imaginable.  Locusts, falling skies, did not compare.  It stopped the flow of capital, endangered jobs, and hurt the economic outlook.  One man’s life was not worth the damage that would cause.  Gerard knew it himself, as the companies and the Great Speaker did.

Loudspeakers in the town square encouraged the sick and potential burdens to society to take their own lives.  Gerard had thought it over.  He knew he wanted to live.  If he compromised his conservative credentials, however, there was no turning back.  He might say he’d start a business and deny workers time-off and bathroom breaks, but it was a slippery slope.  If he lived and became a burden on the system for even one minute, he’d end up giving workers healthcare and God forbid, allow a union.  It had to end.

Gerard opened up a velvet case, containing his gun.  It was mandatory for every citizen to have.

He pointed it inside his mouth.  Sensors inside the barrel began ticking to determine he was not killing a CEO or public leader.

“Suicide approved,” it said before firing the bullet into his brain.  “Scum neutralized.”

The Coaxing

We never blast a planet off the charts. The paperwork would be horrendous. What we do instead, when one is in the way of something, is slowly turn the heat up. The inhabitants will blame themselves, or better yet, each other. Old tensions rise to the surface and boil over. A gun is fired, wars begin and then… extinction. It sounds simpler than it really is.

One planet, I’m not naming names, took longer than the rest but eventually succumbed. These apes were under the delusion of civility. Philosophers and artists convinced their silly little brains other creatures were below them. But clearly they were no more empathetic than a lion feasting off an antelope or an anaconda slowly strangling a child. The taking of a life for food paled in comparison to them destroying every single eco-system that they touched.

So how did we accomplish our goal? They found ways to cope with the heat. Better cars were driven, less electricity and water wasted. But our trump card was as it had always been the glaciers. Releasing these, the illusions of grandeur so pitifully clung to had begun to disappear. Currents stopped, temperatures dipped dramatically and agriculture ceased.

They tore each other apart. Old dominions of vested power fell to the strongest. All that was nuclear was possessed by warlords.

It did not take long for a warlord to threaten another with cataclysmic terms. Naturally, their whole rule based off strength, they could not back down from outrageous demands that went unmet.

As the missiles at long last launched, my company and I felt pity mixed with pride. We had shown them fission in the dessert of New Mexico; we had helped send Sputnik into space. But old doubts still persisted.

How many lives would we destroy for profit? How long before the slow-simmering of apocalypse would finally eat away at us? Thankfully, it was not now, I thought as the last bottle of champagne from the lifeless planet below was poured. I felt rejuvenated, more confident as inebriation sifted through my veins. I was ready once more to face the hundred demolitions left, in our vast measurement of time, before the day was through.

The Canine Human Reversal

The greyhound sentenced me to death. A pitbull sheriff had brought me in the other night. I can’t be sure what I’d done wrong. All I know is I was searching through the garbage for some food a Chihuahua family threw away when a Pomeranian had spotted me. Its bark rang out across the city, alerting the authorities. A human on the streets must be up to no good.

Bulldog guards ran from all directions to pin me down. I was dragged to a rickety, wood wagon. From there, a team of haggard humans pulled it forward. Whenever anyone of them slowed down they were bitten and scratched quite brutally.

I can’t remember much after that. My head had hit a tire rim. All I recall is waking inside a dank cell with forty other humans. Occasionally a mastiff passed outside on patrol.

The humans appeared famished and dehydrated. Some had wounds from fights they had gotten into with each other. Any food provided apparently was fought for brutally.

I didn’t have an owner; things looked grim.

In seventy-two hours a volunteer Dachshund would administer lethal injection. Some did not even make it that far, being dragged off mere hours after arrival. Even if their masters had come, they stood little chance against the odds.

Twenty-four hours passed. I had gotten a few bites of food that fell from a stronger human’s mouth.

Forty-eight hours passed. The only drink I had was sweat and what dripped off after others had secured their share of water. They had no compassion to share.

Seventy-one, seventy-one-and-a-half, seventy-one-and-three-quarters… I was granted a hearing. They were to determine if I was fit for adoption. A pug-child and her mother had thought I looked endearing.

The trial commenced. My lawyer was a Cocker Spaniel named Toby. He was black with a white chest and seemed largely indifferent to my plight.

“The court is now in session,” said a Great Dane atop his chair.

“This human,” began Toby “is an innocent dim-witted creature but deserves the compassion of those far better.”

I thought more was coming but that was all he said. Evidence passed from the prosecution to the judge in the mouth of a Newfoundland bailiff. He looked it over with a countenance inspiring little confidence.

“Let the record show,” a chocolate Labrador stated, “This human was roaming the streets without proper tags. He could have given innocent families any amount of disease or injury in his confused state. The only rational course is execution. I ask the jury to see the wisdom of our laws and not cave to outlandish emotional displays from the defense.”

“I believe,” said the judge, “he intended no harm. Therefore, I’m releasing him into the custody of –“

He never finished. A messenger came in to tell the judge the girl had picked another human. And I, out of time with no prospective buyers was strapped to a cold desk where the needle pierced my arm, sending me to darkness.

Fiction Writing 1

I had to drop Fiction Writing 1 but I had written something in class before I did.  If anyone from class wants to tell me of more projects, I'll do them too.

***

A hand is reaching toward me.  Each time they drink my blood.  All it takes is a twist off the top.  Who would think it’d be so easy and convenient?

My blood may be carbonated, dark brown and delicious but maybe yours is too.  Mosquitoes, bears and tigers probably feel as if they’re simply enjoying a Coke as they feed upon your fluids, and sometimes, bone.

TWIST

I feel a drain coming on.  There’s light headedness about me, or light bottle-capedness perhaps depending how you view things.  It’s like that feeling you get when you’re low on blood sugar or in my case syrup.

GULP

I can’t move.  Not that I could before but my bubbles danced about on their reflective plastic stage.  I was more alive with carbonation than most could say without.

SLURP

The end of all things.  It’s time to be recycled toward another life.  Or rejoin nature in the landfill.

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