Category: Flash Fiction Page 1 of 23

Fiction Fragment Friday

Ok, the inspiration for this story should be so obvious it doesn’t need explaining. Yes I have been stressed and am struggling to write. As always I just had to do it.

                “Damn it why can’t I write?”  I sat there with my head in my hands staring at the blank document on my laptop.  It has been weeks since I had written anything of any sort of substance, but every time I tried my mind just seized up.  Writing has always been one of my favorite forms of escape.  So why couldn’t I even start. 

                My dog chose that moment to rub his nose up against my arm and try to climb into my lap.  He had ignored me for hours, but when I had convinced myself that I was finally on the verge of starting he decided to want attention.  “Well, I can’t possibly write now,” I lied to myself as I pet his head.

                “Hey dipshit this is what we call avoidance.”  The voice startled me so badly I almost fell out of my chair.  My head followed the voice to the top of my bookshelf.  There sitting on the shelf was a tiny elf wearing a t-shirt that said Hey Babe, Wanna Get Your Stocking Stuffed?    

                “No, no, no.”  I shook my head.  “You cannot be real.”

                “I’m as real as you numb nuts.”  He jumped down to the ground and walked across the floor towards me. 

                “Some guard dog you are,” I said as my dog just tilted his head left and right watching the little elf. 

                “So why do you think you can’t write?  Too tired?  Too many distractions?  Any other excuses you wanna try?”

                “You seem to know so much about me.  Why don’t you tell me?”

                He hopped up on a shelf next to my tv and sat down with his feet dangling off.  “Do I look like a psychiatrist?  No, I’m an Elf on a Shelf not a doc on a rock.”

                “No, I do not support the Elf on a Shelf thing.” 

                “Well, that’s rude. Not that I need you to believe in me.  Unlike you I’m comfortable with myself.  I’m pretty awesome and I know it.”      

                “Kind of full of yourself for an overused meme aren’t you?”

                “So says the writer who doesn’t write.  More of you in the world than there is of me buddy boy.  I am what I am, but you are so lost in your own head you don’t even know what you are.”  His feet were kicking back and forth on the shelf.

                “Let’s just pretend that you are real for a moment.  Why are you here?”

                “Hey, a halfway intelligent question.  I’m here to be your muse.  I’m going to sit here and heckle you until you write.  Then I get to leave this dump.   Wait until you see who comes to help you edit.” 

                “This is supposed to be help?”

                “Why can’t you write?  Cause those voices in your head are telling you that you can’t.  Just write.  It’s that simple.  You afraid it’s gonna be bad?  Of course it is, but that’s never stopped you before.  I’m just gonna be so loud you can’t hear those inner voices.” 

                “So, if I write you will go away?”

                “Ding, ding, ding.  See you can use your head to figure out things.  I just have to give you all the answers first.”

                I reached out to my laptop and started typing.  It didn’t matter what I wrote as long as I got something out.  I could always just delete it and write something else. Then I looked up and saw the elf sitting there with a beer in one hand and a candy cigarette in the other.  “Really?”

                “No more stalling human.  Write.”

                “Ok, ok, I’m writing.”  I sat there for the next half hour typing.  Was the story good?  No, but it was just the first draft, and it was complete.  I let out a sigh of relief as I looked up and saw the elf was gone.  I reached up to close my laptop.  I could always edit tomorrow.

                “NEIN!”  There on the shelf where the Elf on the Shelf had been was a soldier action figure. 

                “Who are you supposed to be?”

                The soldier stood and pointed to the swastika on his arm.  “This should be obvious.  I am the Grammar Nazi.”

Fiction Fragment Friday (Snowed-in Saturday)

Ok, this week comes late, but I’ll just blame the holidays for it despite them having nothing to do with it.

I have been fascinated by the anomolies surrounding 3i/Atlas. Everytime they think they have it figured out some new strange occurance brings it back into focus. With the UN currently focusing the Earth Planetary defenses on it and the International Asteroid Warning Network dedicating time tracking it I can only imagine the scientific discoveries that will come from the next two months. These efforts are part of what inspired this story.

                Forty-nine hopeful systems explored in two years and zero planets capable of supporting human life without enclosed habitats.  With colonies on the Moon, Mars, and orbital space stations, we have the technology to survive just about anywhere.  If the colony can’t be completely sustainable on its own, there really isn’t any point in building it outside our own solar system.  As we jumped into the last system on our list, ship morale was at an all time low. 

                  Just because the systems were not useful as colonies didn’t mean the jumps were not valuable.  Our ship had gathered enough data to keep scientists on Earth busy for years.  That was not our primary mission, though, and none of us liked the idea of failing in our goal.  Forty-nine straight disappointments had left me feeling hopeless.  That was my mindset as another new starfield filled the main screen.  What had been a moment of pure excitement at the beginning of our mission had come to be a moment of dread.     

                “Launch probes and start the system scans.” 

                “Woah try to contain that enthusiasm, sir.  You might hurt something.”  My first officer tried to bring a bit of levity to the situation. 

                “You’re right, Lucy.  Sorry everyone.  It has been a long string of disappointments, but that’s no excuse.”

                “Sir, I’m picking up notable radio emissions in this system.”  I could not tell if the tone in my sensor operator’s voice was excitement or alarm.  Perhaps it was a bit of both.

                “Natural?”

                “No sir.  Narrowband radar sweep.  Same frequency every thirty seconds or so.”  

                “Is it similar to anything you’ve seen before?” 

                 “Honestly, it looks a lot like our own planetary defense radars.  The asteroid watch system. Same narrowband pulse, consistent repetition interval, and a long-range sweep pattern.  It’s unmistakably artificial.”

                “Could something like that detect us?” 

                “I don’t want to guess at capabilities, but yes easily.  We would stand out not just as a new discovery, but one that doesn’t move like anything natural.”

                “Great.  Well, we shouldn’t assume we’re in a first contact situation quite yet.  How long until the probes return data from planets in the habitable zone?”

                “A little over a week to get first scans, but I don’t think we’ll have to wait that long.”

                “Explain.”

                “Well sir, I’m detecting carrier leakage from tight beam radar between the fourth and eighth planets.  We should have some solid data from the eighth planet in the next day.” 

                My first officer had been quietly shifting attention between the two of us, but with that, spoke out.  “Sir, I recommend we classify this information to the three of us until we have something more solid.  I’m afraid of causing a panic.”

                “Recommendation noted and rejected.  That’s not how we operate on this ship.  There are only twenty of us, and I don’t plan on keeping anyone in the dark.  You never know where a brilliant idea might come from.” 

* * *

A day later we got our first answer and far more questions.  The eighth planet had a technological satellite in orbit.  While the design was completely unfamiliar to us, the principles behind its function were not.  The satellite was a space telescope with communication functionality.  It was in an extreme state of disrepair, but the fact that it was still functional at all proved to be a feat of engineering genius.   Our teams were studying the satellite and trying to reverse engineering the communication protocol for weeks.   

Two weeks after our arrival, we got the next wave of answers.  The orbit around the fourth planet was littered with space debris, including a handful of functional satellites.  The planet itself showed signs of devastation from what we determined to have been a violent war a little over a hundred years prior.  There were indications of nuclear detonations along with something far more devastating that we had thankfully never achieved on Earth.  Our first signs of life in another solar system and it had destroyed itself just one hundred years before we could make contact. 

I walked into the conference room and sat at the head of the table.  My science team and first officer were already gathered and waiting for me.  “Ok folks, let’s hear some theories and assessments.”

Doctor Havish cleared his throat and spoke first.  “We have two theories about the weapon that devastated the planet, and I have evidence supporting the use of both.  First, some of the crater sites have perfectly concentric blast rings and actually exhibit less radiation than the surrounding areas.  This would indicate an antimatter blast.  In other areas, the scars on the planet are deep enough to have penetrated the crust.  For each of these types of gorges, there is a depleted area of ozone in the atmosphere.  This leads us to to the conclusion that relativistic weapons were also used.  Obviously, neither theory can be confirmed without exploring the planet ourselves.” 

“That’s not happening on this trip, but I suspect we will be returning with multiple teams for further investigation.  What is your initial assessment of habitability?” 

“Possibly after another couple hundred years of recovery.  At the moment, we would need self-contained environments for any long term stay on the surface.”

“Noted.  Get your final reports ready.  We leave for Earth in twenty-four hours.  The probes can stay gathering data so get any last orders in for them.  Dismissed.”

I watched as the room slowly emptied of everyone except my first officer.  When we were alone, she finally spoke.  “I can’t help but think this could have been us.  Earth was so close to the final war for almost a century.”             

“I was having the same thought.  Fifty systems and fifty failures, but at least we haven’t failed as badly as those poor bastards did.” 

“Only you could see finding proof of intelligent life as a failure.” 

“It wasn’t our mission goal.  Even so, if they were still alive, I would have seen it as a huge success.”

  “Would you really want to meet a race capable of doing that to their own planet?”

“I fear we already have in ourselves, and now finding new homes just became that much more important.”

Fiction Fragment Friday

I’m going to be honest and say I am not happy with this story. I think it starts strong and ends strong, but the middle just doesn’t work. I agonized about what to do after the elevators opened. There were three different ideas around what direction to take and in the end I went with a watered down version of two of them. I also think I lost the tone.

This story is begging me for a rewrite and I think I might do so at some point.

“Really?”  My trainee was standing in the hallway using two fingers to pull the shirt away from his chest.  It was a black T-shirt with the words Grim Reaper in Training written in red across the front.  The look on his face could only be described as incredulous. 

“What?  It’s true, isn’t it?”  I asked him.

“We’re going to a hospital.  The place with the single largest concentration of people who can actually see us.  Don’t you think it’s pretty inappropriate for that setting?” 

“Never let it be said that Gigi doesn’t have a sense of humor.”  Gigi is my pet name for our boss.  The entity that is the very representation of death.  She comes to all of us in a form we can best accept and for me that is a goth girl I had a crush on in college.  Get it?  GiGi is a play on two letter Gs to represent Goth Girl.

I could tell Richard was about to ask once again why I called Death that, but the question never came.  Instead, he pointed down the hallway and asked, “Are they reapers too?”

Before turning I felt out for reaper energy and was almost overwhelmed with how much of it surrounded us.  When I turned, I saw a familiar face.  “Steven?”  There at the end of the hall was my former trainee with a new trainee of his own.  He gave me a silent nod of recognition.  If what I was feeling was correct there were no less than ten teams in the hospital. 

“Why are there other reapers here?”

If my face could have turned paler, I’m sure it would have happened at that moment.  Multiple reapers could only mean one thing.  Whatever was about to happen in this hospital was going to be extremely bad with many deaths.  It was going to be traumatic. 

When most people die, they move on to whatever comes next on their own.  Sometimes though a soul cannot accept their death and sticks around.  This inevitably leads to them becoming angry and twisted.  That is what happens when a reaper fails.  Our job is to help souls accept death and let go of their lives so they can move on.  We all take our jobs very seriously because each of us is a soul that stayed behind but somehow returned to a state of sanity.  No one should have to go through what we did.

Traumatic death is the type that most often causes a soul to reject moving on.  The unexpected leaves you without a sense of closure.  There is still so much of life to have seen and done.  If it is taken from you and that person lives it just feeds the bitterness.  In all my time as a reaper I had never seen this many of us in one place before.  It was going to be bad.

“Keep your eyes open kid.  Whatever’s going to happen, we’ll get through it.”

“Stop calling me kid.  I was forty-three when I died.”

“The day you graduate from being a trainee is the day I’ll stop calling you kid.  If you make it there.” 

A ding cut our conversation short as the elevator opened.  When you have been doing this job long enough, you start to be able to read strong emotions from living people.  The man who stepped from the elevator was radiating pain and anger. 

“He’s got a gun.”  My trainee was correct.  I could see it under his arm through the front of his jacket.  “We have to do something.”

“There’s nothing we can do.  We’re here to help his victims move on.  That’s our job, not interfering with the living.”  I tried to sound strong, but deep down I dreaded what was about to occur.  Some things I had seen since becoming a reaper haunted me.  We couldn’t interact with the physical world, though, so there really was no other option. 

                The man exited the elevator, walking with a purpose towards the nurse’s station.  Instead of waiting with me, my apprentice got in front of him, walking backwards.  He tried to make eye contact, but the man could not see him. 

                “Come on man.  You don’t want to do this.  Whoever you lost wouldn’t want this.”  The man raised his gun and took aim.  “NO!!”  As he pulled the trigger, my apprentice screamed and reached for the gun.  Instead of my apprentice’s hand going through like it should have, his fingers wrapped around the barrel and pushed it up towards the ceiling.

                The sound of the gunshot was deafening in the enclosed hallway.  Screams soon joined, and panic spread.  I stood unable to accept what I was seeing.  There in front of me, the shooter was kneeling on the ground crying, and my apprentice was talking softly with one hand on his shoulder.  The gun lay on the floor next to them, and I could see a glowing aura surrounding my apprentice.  In front of my eyes, he faded from existence.

                “Gigi, get down here now.”  I yelled, knowing that she would hear me.  For a moment I thought I had been ignored, but then I felt the telltale chill come through the hallway.  Even the living amid panic could feel it as their breath started to freeze before them.

                The elevator once again dinged, and as the doors opened, what looked to be an early twenties goth girl stepped out.  Her hair was black, matching her lipstick and eyeshadow.  On her t-shirt across the front in a dripping red font were the words ‘Got Blood?’  Spiked leather bracelets circled her wrists just above long black fingernails.  Rounding out the look were a flared black skirt and striped thigh-high socks.  Her boots were loud on the hard floor as she approached me. 

                She stopped chewing her gum long enough to ask, “What do you want, dipshit?”

                I pointed to where my apprentice had just been.  “Explain yourself.” 

                “Not how this works.”

                “He moved on.”  I tried to make it a statement, but there was a question in my tone.

                “Duh.  You should know what that looks like by now.”

                “How?  He got through to that man and saved lives.  I thought we couldn’t influence the living.” 

                She reached up and knocked on my head.  “Did I ever say that?  Not my fault your apprentice was brighter than you.” 

                I thought back to all of my interactions, and no she had not ever said it outright.  She certainly had implied it though.  “He moved on though.” 

                “You think you’re so smart.  Big man got it all worked out.  You don’t even know the right questions.”  She tapped on her own head.  “Fix your damage and maybe you can move on too.”

                “Working through his trauma let him move on?”

                “Maybe.”  She smiled at me, and it unnerved me right down to my core.  “Don’t worry, you’re not bright or self-aware enough to leave me anytime soon.”  She leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.  Then she slapped me so hard I crumpled to the floor before walking away.  She did pause for one moment to glance back.  “Don’t ever try to summon me again.”       

Fiction Fragment Friday

The inspiration for this week’s story came from taking my dogs out in the morning when it was around 40 degrees and then going back out around lunch when it was an incredible 71 degrees. I’m always amased by the swing in weather that can happen in a single day, but of course my body usually just decides to get sick from the quick changes.

Once I had my topic I knew my first few lines. That was when it became a writing challange. Could I write a story with only dialog? No naration, tags, or anything at all that was not words being said by the characters. The challange was to give each a unique enough voice they could be kept seperate despite no dialog tags to indicate who was speaking.

I thought about picking a color for each character’s dialog to make it easier on you all reading it. That would be helpful, but if it is required then I failed my challenge. We will never know if my challange was successful or not without ovoiding all dialog tags.

                “Explain to me how it goes from 41° to 75° in the same day?  That has to be magic, right?  Some supernatural jerk messing with the weather?”    

“No magic, just Missouri.  It’s kind of normal around here.”

“Why do you live here again?”

“Asks the guy visiting me from Florida to get out of the path of a hurricane.”

“Don’t you have tornadoes here?” 

“Don’t you have alligators?”

“Hey now, alligators aren’t weather.  You don’t hear me going to mountain lions and meth labs, do you?” 

“Fair, even though you just kind of did.  How about this?  We have humidity here, but you have a sauna you like to call a state.”

“I’ll take a sauna over two feet of snow any day.”

“What’s wrong with snow?  You get snowmen, sledding, and snow ice cream.”

“Snow ice cream?  You made that up.  No way that’s a thing.”

“It most certainly is.  As a kid, I always looked forward to snow so we could make it.  You take a giant bowl of snow, add some milk and sugar.  If you wanted to flavor it, just mix in a Kool-Aid pack.”   

“Ok, I admit I’m kind of curious.  You haven’t lived until you’ve had a Florida stone crab.”

“No thanks, I’ll pass on the seafood, but I don’t think your state has ever even heard of real barbecue.” 

“If I lived so far from the coast, I wouldn’t know how to appreciate good seafood either.  We know barbecue though.  We have four different kinds.”

“Sure, because none of them are good enough to stand on their own.” 

“Can we at least agree that St. Louis style pizza is the worst?”

“Okay, I’ll give you that.  Provel is not cheese, and crust should not crunch like a cracker.  Can you admit that every headline about your state sounds like a madlibs gone wrong?”

“Florida man on insert drug name was seen insert present tense verb while dressed like insert animal.  News at 10.” 

“Never at the beginning though.  You have to watch at least half way through or more to get the one story you really want to hear.”    

“Now that we’ve found something we can agree on, do you think you’re ready to tell me about magic?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever actually be ready, but yeah, I suppose we should.  Maybe I should introduce you to my friend Lily.  Do you think it would be easier to hear coming from a pixie?”

“Wait, pixies are real?”

“Something tells me it is going to be a long night.”