#ThreeWordWednesday (one day late :)), 5/23/13

Three Word Wednesday

Clever, Finish, Silky

Leslie sat at the intersection, leaned back and watched the semis blow by on the divided highway.

She couldn’t help feeling somewhere between smug and clever. Anderson didn’t have a chance. She reached back between the seats and touched the heavy briefcase. And now it’s all mine. ‘

Leslie smirked and lifted a glass of whiskey from the cupholder. It went down smooth, smoky and silky and lit a fire inside. So fine.

Another trio of semis zoomed past. She signed and looked both ways. There just wasn’t any way to get on the road here. As soon as one group of trucks passed, another came along, driving too fast to let her in. There wasn’t enough space to step on it and get started, let alone get up to speed.

She caught a reflection in the windshield and glanced over her shoulder. A dark-colored Acura was approaching from the rear. Someone else who went the wrong way. Leslie sighed and leaned back, adjusting the rearview – and froze.

The driver of the Acura was – what was it? He? She? The other car stopped not a foot from her bumper and she risked another glimpse into the mirror.

From the neck down, it could have been any businessperson – no, a woman, she decided. It was wearing a grey suit, closed at the neck, with pearls draped around its neck.  But from the neck up, it was a horror, jaundiced, warty skin, reddish eyes and a loose, wet mouth like a crooked line drawn by a child, stretched in a twisted mockery of a smile.

Leslie reached over and touched the power lock control  All four door locks clicked shut.  Not that the other driver showed any evidence of getting out of the car,  but Leslie believed in safety first.  She eased up on the brake and moved toward the main road. The traffic pattern held – there was no break in the semis and she cursed the luck that put her on this little podunk road and not at an intersection with a traffic light.

With no warning, there was a thud and the car jerked. Startled, she slammed on the brakes. Leslie saw smoke that had to be coming from the churning tires of the Acura behind her, and she panicked as her car inched slowly toward the highway. She pushed the gear shift into ‘park’. The car kept moving. She yanked frantically on the hand brake to no effect. The tip of the hood was nearly over the white line and a double FedEx tractor trailer was coming, too close to have any hope of stopping.

Leslie grappled with the door handle before remembering she’d locked the door. She flipped the lock. Nothing. Jammed.  Oh, dear God, jammed. She tried opening the power windows, one window after another. Nothing.

Oh, why didn’t I spend the money on one of those hammers.  She pounded hysterically on the window as the car moved forward in a sudden lurch. A few more inches and she would be far enough out for one of the trucks to make very small pieces of herself and her car.

She turned around and looked at the driver of the car behind her. The red eyes were glowing with a manic glee and the bizarre grin stretched from ear to ear. She heard the engine of the Acura rev to an impossible pitch and her car leaped forward, straight in the path of a semi and its horrified driver.

At the finish, she had just enough time to reach back with a mixture of terror ands apathy to once again touch the case that had meant so much just a few moments before.

Lock and Key #poetry 2/22/2013

The world turns too fast for  me to see;
Light chases shadow chases light
Sliding patterns and snapshots of time
Too many to catalog

So here in this fluid moment of time
well wishes all around but not yours
conspicuous by its absence
And this is enough

You were an inadvertant pickpocket
Stole this small part of me
you didn’t know and didn’t want it
No collector of bagatelles

I’ll return the favor – filch it back
In the interests of security
Behind this facade, lock it away
Never to be taken again.

How it was, how it is – #poetry – 2/15/2013

She remembers four roses
He gave her, shyly
Four months after they said “I do”
and how they always took turns at movies –

For her – Ghost, by him
She sat through “Under Siege”
And they giggled over jokes
No one else would get.

Yesterday, he came home
Slammed the door and
Swore at her for fifteen minutes.

When he watched Steven Segal
She sat crying in the bedroom
Singing “Unchained Melody” between sobs.

Tonight, #poetry – 2/5/2013

On this empty night, I listen
to the unromantic sound of the furnace
and in between snow spatting against the windows
Morse code of no meaning.

The cat scattered the deck; cards tossed across the floor
It’s okay – I was cheating anyway
Nothing holds my interest tonight
Not my thoughts or the quiet jazz on the speakers

I would like to not think of you
For my only considerations to be of
Silly games and my plans for tomorrow
Not of signing on and not finding you there

It’s not like I don’t have friends – good ones, too.
They are kind, but I want more than that.
I want what you will not give me
It hurts, and for tonight, I wish I didn’t care.

Fyrheart #FridayFlash 11/10/12

From the moment we could walk, every child in the village knew what berries were good to eat and which weren’t. Those who didn’t immediately learn the lesson found themselves ill and, we were told, at least one of us had died from eating from the wrong plant – but we took this tale told by our elders as a fable, as likely true as the Blackbeast that wandered the woods around us seeking bad children to eat or the Fire Sprites that were supposed to dance in the flames in winter.

Still, none of us knew what to make of this bush, new to us, sprung up almost overnight.  The berries hung from the bushes, shaped like glistening red tears, nearly clear, with a single shimmering seed visible. Susha, a girl I thought to be afraid of nothing and willing to dare almost anything, reached out a tentative hand and nearly touched one of the ruby temptations, but jerked her hand back and put it behind her, as if she feared being burned.

“Are they hot, Susha?” Little Pitar inquired in his gentle voice. Poor Pitar. His elder brother, Martu, was the britad of his father’s pride and could do no wrong. He used his position to make the little one’s life miserable. We had all seen the bruises that were evidence, though strangely, they were invisible to our parents, who feared Martu’s father and his influence with our ground lord.

“Are they hot?” Martu mocked him. “I doubt it.” He elbowed his way through us and snatched a berry off the bush, tossing it down his throat before anyone could stop him.  Not that we would, of course.

His head jerked twice, for all the world like a hen pecking at grass seed. Then he coughed, once, twice, three times.  The third time, a tongue of flame passed between his lips and singed the stand of sweetstrips in front of him.

There was silence for a moment. Anthe, the great friend of my childhood, looked at me in amazement.  “Did you see that, Mak?  Did I?” his bright blue eyes wide.

“We did.”

When nothing more happened to Martu, some of the others went ahead and took a single berry each.  One after the other, they spouted fire, except for Susha, who merely coughed up a tiny cloud of smoke and then laughed as it spread itself thin on the breeze.

“No more! This is my bush!” Martu stood between us all. “Mine!”

He wasn’t that much bigger than the rest of us, but we all knew where he stood and where we did. No one wanted to bring trouble down on his or her parents, and Martu was trouble. Turning his back on us, the bully grabbed handfuls of the berry from the bush and crammed them down like Long John after the fast.

At first, it was amusing to see him spouting flames from his nose and mouth, and in one memorable spurt, from his nethers. Hands were stuffed in mouths to stifle the giggles Martu would never have forgiven.

“Martu, what’s on your hand?” Anthe’s voice was puzzled.

“What?” But then we all saw it. Martu’s hand – both hands, actually, were slowly turning a strange dark green, a weirdly familiar color, and scaly –

As one, we stepped back.  Every one of us knew what he was becoming, even if we didn’t understand how. The skin of the last Fyrbeast to menace the village was wrapped around the chimney of the Broderhall. Every child knew the story of Karne Stronghand and how he brought the fyrbeast down with a well-shot arrow, but only after many sevendays of death and damage to animals and crops.  Now, we were about to have another such among us.

Martu’s head snapped back and his face merged together, elongated.  His voice changed from the cries of a human child to a frightening alien bellow.  Two bumps appeared on his back and began to tear his shirt.

“What do we do?” Suddenly, all were looking to me, as the eldest. It was a responsibility I didn’t want.

“Do it now, Mak, while they can still see it’s him, see how he changed.” Anthe was grappling at my belt, for the hatchet I never went without.

“Do it!” “Yes, you must!” The cries went up from every side. Martu’s eyes, the only truly human part of him left, pleaded with me, whether for saving from the horrible change or for the mercy he had never shown anyone else, least of all his younger brother.

For myself, I thought that the bully might enjoy ravaging our village and any other he came across once he adapted to being a fyrbeast. I took the hatchet from Anthe and swung it twice.  The girls turned away and were sick.  Some of the boys, too.

It took us an hour to drag what was left of Martu back to the village. His father raved and swore, but in the end it was plain as the Guide Star what had been in the process of happening.  It took nearly a sevenday and delayed the harvest, but the men went into the fields and forests in pairs and brought back every one of these new bushes they could find.

We had a bonfire with them the following night. Every sound brought anxious glances to the skies. We had destroyed all we found – but who knew if all were gone? Or who might have found them and eaten?

My very first story in a real book (or, here comes BOFF2!)

I think almost everyone who has any bent for words writes when they’re in high school. Some of it’s good, some of it is hopeless self-pitying teenage blather (raises hand sheepishly — ‘yes, your Honor, I’m guilty of that!’).  I did.  I wrote poems, mostly, with the occasional short story and even, in 8th grade, I wrote a Mary Sue novella about a high school girl who helps an undercover cop expose  a drug ring in her high school.  (I can only plead a bad case of “Starsky and Hutch” and “Adam 12″ and all those 70s cop shows).

About 3 years ago, I started writing again. Initially, it was fanfiction for the 1960s series Combat!  Then I stumbled on a new (to me) thing called “Flash Fiction”.  That’s the idea that you can write an entire story in 1000 words or less.  This was followed by the discovery of a hashtag (I believe I can give Tony Noland credit for pointing it out to me) on Twitter called “#FridayFlash”.  People write flash fic and post it on their blogs. Then they post tweets about it (and now can also publicize it on the eponymous Facebook group). I enjoyed this a lot — I’m something of a minimalist when it comes to writing and the very short form suited me.

Jon Strother, who started the whole megillah of #FridayFlash, collected a number of the best of the stories that are posted back a couple of years ago.  It was enough of a success that he’s done it again, with the help of Jody Cleghorn, another member of the club, and has produced a new book called Best of Friday Flash 2.  I’m pleased and honored to say they found my story Boarding Call worthy of inclusion alongside some very fine writers whose work I have enjoyed reading over the past couple of years.

You can find the book here, if you’d like to order it:  Best of Friday Flash 2.  I hope you will, not only for me, but for all us authors who are finding our voices and sharing our work out here.  It can be hard to be heard — the Internet has so many voices — but I know the people here who contributed their work deserve the effort.  Let the good work continue.

NaNoWriMo — at least I hope so

It’s almost November — and that means it’s time for NaNoWriMo.  For the uninitiated, that would be the National Novel Writing Month.  This is the time of year when writers commit to an output of 50,000 words in a month (about 1,667/day). Said writing should result in a novel (hence the name of the “contest”), although some writers also use this as time to output enough short stories for an anthology.  I suppose that comes down to whether you’re more comfortable with short-form or long-form writing.

This year, I’m hoping to get up enough energy to write “The Greening”.  I’m basing my novel on “When the Sky was Blue” — a flash fic I wrote earlier this year, and a followup I did, Waste Not, Want Not.  It may seem like a stretch, to get 50K (or more) words out of a couple of flash pieces (1,000 words or less).  But I think I have pieced together a workable plot.  I’ll find out when I get started, I guess, although I have a lot of it thought out — more than I did 2 years ago, and I finished then.

We’ll see what happens! Wish me luck!