Bert S. Lechner's Blog, page 6

Join Me for A Live Reading June 12

“I don’t know how I knew it was time.”

That is the first sentence of my first published story, ‘Manifest,’ which I posted on The Prose for a competition on June 12th, 2022. I didn’t mean for it to relate to my own writing career but it ended up working out that way. I don’t know how I knew it was time to get myself out there, but the prompt for that month simply hit in a way that gave me the energy to dive in and chase this crazy dream of being an author.

And now a year later I’m a published author with eight stories under my belt, spread across Kindle and my website! The end goal of being a successful author is still far down the line but the journey is well under way and I’m excited to take it.

To celebrate a year of publishing I’m going to be reading one of my stories live on Instagram on June 12th: The time, and the story I’ll be reading, are both TBD, but I’d love for all of you to come join me in celebrating this huge milestone!

If you’re not on Instagram and are still interested in hearing me read something, I’m also planning on doing a second stream on Twitch the day after (the 13th), and I’ll have more details on that soon.

Thank you to all of you readers and authors who’s encouragement and support has helped me reach this awesome milestone in my career!

Fortnightly Update, Episode 0: The Inaugural One

Hey there!

Welcome to Episode zero of the Fortnightly Update, where I cover what’s been going on in the Universe of Roots for the past two weeks: story updates, planned releases, writing goals, etc. Read on to find out more!

Story Updates

This week saw the release of Episodes 3 and 4 of my Kindle Vella miniseries, ‘Illusions of Grandeur!’ These episodes covered a new short story, ‘White Noise.’ Despite being a super short story, ‘White Noise’ took quite a long time to get onto paper and had a crazy adventure from starting off as flash fiction to earning a seat in a miniseries.

Now that ‘White Noise’ is done, I’m focusing in on the next story for IoG, which will span Episodes 5 and 6. This one won’t take quite as much time, since Episode 5 is nearly complete already!

If you’d like to read my Kindle Vella project, head over to this link here.

Writing Goals

My writing goals for Fortnightly Update #0 were pretty simple: publish ‘White Noise,’ and write 2800 words, and get IoG Ep.5 to the minimum word requirement for Kindle Vella, all of which I achieved!

For the next Fortnightly Update my goals are about the same as last: 2800 words on paper, and finish draft one of IoG Ep. 5.



That’s all I have for the update today! Let me know what you think of this sort of content! If you’re an author or writer I’d love to hear about your wins in the comments as well.

Fortnightly Update #0: The Inaugural One

Hey there!

Welcome to Episode zero of the Fortnightly Update, where I cover what’s been going on in the Universe of Roots for the past two weeks: story updates, planned releases, writing goals, etc. Read on to find out more!

Story Updates

This week saw the release of Episodes 3 and 4 of my Kindle Vella miniseries, ‘Illusions of Grandeur!’ These episodes covered a new short story, ‘White Noise.’ Despite being a super short story, ‘White Noise’ took quite a long time to get onto paper and had a crazy adventure from starting off as flash fiction to earning a seat in a miniseries.

Now that ‘White Noise’ is done, I’m focusing in on the next story for IoG, which will span Episodes 5 and 6. This one won’t take quite as much time, since Episode 5 is nearly complete already!

If you’d like to read my Kindle Vella project, head over to this link here.

Writing Goals

My writing goals for Fortnightly Update #0 were pretty simple: publish ‘White Noise,’ and write 2800 words, and get IoG Ep.5 to the minimum word requirement for Kindle Vella, all of which I achieved!

For the next Fortnightly Update my goals are about the same as last: 2800 words on paper, and finish draft one of IoG Ep. 5.



That’s all I have for the update today! Let me know what you think of this sort of content! If you’re an author or writer I’d love to hear about your wins in the comments as well.

The Orchestra

Inspired by the @horrorprompts flash fiction prompt for February 24th

Content Warning: this work contains graphic scenes of body horror.

Advisory: To ensure your safety while reading this story, Marrowtheadde’s name has been misspelled.

The conductor entered from stage left to thunderous applause. Exuberance precipitated from her every step towards the mahogany podium, her strides evoking the image of a dancer’s weightless grace. She bathed in the audience’s excitement, absorbed the rabid anticipation that dripped from the gold-filigree pillars and crimson, velvet curtains of the symphony hall.

How long had it taken to get here? How many decades of persistence, of pushing the boundaries of her skills as an artist, of gaining the prestige needed to conduct in a hall as grand as this? 

Far too long.

The score’s unassuming weight in the conductor’s arm sent her mind spiraling back to the night it had found its way to her: back to the hazy warmth of that dream. She remembered Marrowtheadde, its name plucked from some graffiti she had seen on the way home that evening, its long hands guiding hers as she conducted an unseen orchestra in a piece beautiful beyond description. How real the music had felt, and how terrifying: the painful ecstasy of its impossible harmonies, the baleful call of horns, the screams of fear and delight blending into haunting melodies, filling the deepest pits of her consciousness.

A feeling of anxiety flared up in her lungs as the conductor relived her memories. She recalled the panic she had felt as she began to slip from the dream before the music reached its conclusion, the existential fear at the idea of losing those sounds forever. You could have the score, if you wished. You could play it again, but for real, Marrowtheadde had whispered at the boundary of sleep and wakefulness, its lips pressed to her ear. Would you like that? She had woken from that dream with a jolt, her cry of “Yes!” still on her lips.

What joy she had felt upon discovering the score clasped in her hands.

Her mind warm with the glow of nostalgia, the conductor reached the podium. She took a moment to trace the fine inked title, as she had done so long ago, before placing it upon the stand with utmost reverence. So much work to get here, and now it’s finally time. The soothing chill of Marrowtheadde’s unseen fingers settled over her shoulders, as they had so many times in her most difficult moments. It’s eagerness for the performance trickled down the back of her neck with its every breath, eliciting shivers along her spine before its presence dissipated to join the audience.

The conductor turned and took her bow, bathing in the ceaseless rippling applause and cheers of affirmation, pride swelling in her chest at the lack of empty seats. Her eyes sailed over the sea of people, the dim light of the hall reflected in eager eyes and mirthful smiles and constellations of opulent jewelry. In a normal concert she would have taken this opportunity to speak to the crowd, to introduce the works for the evening. Instead she gave another bow and a hearty wave before returning to face her orchestra. She didn’t want to wait any longer.

Silence filled the hall, the last of the applause fluttering into nothingness. Before her the musicians sat, statuesque, instruments at the ready. The conductor gave them a knowing nod. In the gleam of the stage lights her eyes picked at the glints that belied the large inscribed nails she had used to keep them sitting upright and bind them to her will. With a final deep breath the conductor opened the score and raised her baton, the creak of the musicians’ stiffened limbs echoing into the silence to form the opening note of her masterpiece. 

—————————-

So it began.

A murmuration of strings. A drone of reeds: soft, intangible wisps of melody and harmony that defied the ranges of their instruments, sewn together by the dexterous swaying of her baton. A fog of sound rolled past the conductor’s legs, her skin prickling at its tender chill. Sweeping her wrists she fanned the tangible strains of music towards the audience, soft cries of rapture from behind her weaving themselves into the blanket of sound. Chuckles of embarrassment and hisses calling for silence reached the conductor’s ears. A smirk danced across the corners of the conductor’s lips, satisfaction cradling the back of her skull as her eyes darted across the pages, each note of the audience’s calls marked upon the score.

The conductor stabbed her baton upward, a smiting blade piercing the haunted mists of the introduction to call in the second act. With her next downward stroke a piercing scream rang from the balcony, answered by a static braying of horns. The scream became many, punctuated by a fleshy, crunching squelch among the seats of the ground floor. Cries and retching and jumbled words of panic bubbled from the crowd. “Stop the performance,” someone cried, their call inscribed verbatim underneath the musical bars reserved for the baritone soloist. 

Accelerando, dictated the score. The conductor obliged, a buzz of strings filling the air, sweeping up the growing fearful chatter of the audience. In the distance a percussive rapid of footfalls rumbled, panicked cries from those trying to make an exit parroting the flutes as they found the doors barred.

The conductor yelled with excitement as the torrent of melody flooded past her, relishing in the steady climb towards the climactic finale. Summoned with a wave of her arms a terrified choir of screams erupted alongside the groan of the string, a frenzied call and response of cacophonous wails and nightmares that rode upon the cello’s haunted strains. The din of heavy drums pulsed through the hall, accompanied by cries of fear and the rumble of many hands trying to rip open the doors without success.

She conducted on, the flail of her baton carved a white grin into the air to match the glint of her own teeth in the half-light of the concert hall. Raising her left hand she summoned one final bellow of brass and horns, a sound that burrowed into her chest and burned with furious pleasure. The audience replied, laughter and shrieks of joy and the soft crunch of cartilage pulling from bone echoing in the hall. With a laugh of her own the conductor closed her eyes, ecstasy bubbling under her skin, electric joy arcing between the hairs on her arms as the music of her dreams embraced her.

—————————-

The music ended much as it had begun, the last moribund strains crawling back to the stage to leave the concert hall a soundscape of dripping fluids, fearful sobs, and silent chewing. By far, the best performance I’ve heard yet, whispered Marrowtheadde from the near distance. Bravo!

As if prompted by its command a smattering of applause erupted from behind her, mad howls of satisfaction echoing throughout the hall. The conductor, butterflies of joy and relief in her stomach turning into giggles as they reached her massive grin, turned to face her audience. With all the gravitas she could muster she gave a deep bow, soaking in the cheers of those concert goers not preoccupied with sucking the marrow from the bloody charnel house of a symphony hall. Laughing at the carnage she blew kisses to the half eaten bodies in their seats, their hands compelled to clap as their final act before sitting forever silent.

The conductor left the stage to fading applause, a youthful bounce in her step. No standing ovation, but a thrilling success, nonetheless, she decided, picking her way through the wrecked human remains to reach the sound booth.

She could only hope the recording of the evening’s performance would elicit the same excitement.

Mourn

February Flash Fiction: Mourn

Prompt from Instagram’s @horrorprompts

The path stretched before her, its dusty surface a wound carved into the sullen wild grass. The question of where she was had dissolved into the briny morass of her twisting thoughts hours ago, the oppressiveness of the fog in her head in sync with the dreary, sunless sky above. Soft hills came and went around her path, rolling waves of green stretching to the gray horizon. Occasional mounds, crowned with weathered stones and stunted, tired trees, punctuated the empty landscape. Beyond that there was nothing save grass and its secretive whispers.

She continued on her path. Her nose wrinkled with a gust of frigid air. A slick, greasy scent of motor oil tried to force its way into her nostrils: the first smell she could recall experiencing in hours. The faintest of cries buffeted her ears, an all too human sob just audible above the whistle of the grass. Anxiety settled its electric web over the top of her mind, certainty that something awaited beyond the top of the next mound setting down roots. 

For a moment she considered turning back, a sickening pit forming in her stomach as her legs continued to move forward without her input. In her head a silent, wordless thought floated into her consciousness: a need to witness the source of the cries. The notion that the thought did not originate in her mind only added the well-fueled engine of fear purring in her chest.

Mercy allowed the object of her anxiety to be brief. Cresting one last small hill a vague shadow on the road caught her eye, swaying back and forth with the rhythmic accuracy of a pendulum. At a distance she could pick out the contours of an emaciated, kneeling human frame, their face resting in their bony hands. Fear gave way to morbid curiosity as she approached, the figure’s ceaseless wailing catching in her ears with hooks of pity. That this person mourned over something she had no doubt, and so she allowed herself to walk faster until she stood only a few paces away.

She stopped for the first time she could remember. The kneeled figure rocked before her, their agony a flower, a beacon of emotion in the bleak world around them. Little remained of their clothes, or their flesh: only ancient remnants spared from the wastes of time by mere luck, held together by fragments of the heartiest threads and tenacious strands of sinew. And grief. Some odd, dream-logic sense of intuition told her that grief alone remained of whatever person they had once been.

She watched over their mourning. Watched as the corpse rocked and wailed over some pile of dust, punctuated with scraps of cloth. Winces danced across her lips with each hoarse scream of grief that filled the space, the coarse sound driven into her bones with the cold, uncaring relentlessness of iron nails hammered by an unpracticed hand. Despite the cries of pain she found herself without tears to shed. Guilt made its home in her lungs, guilt that her emotions had become as empty as the landscape around them. At the same time a sense of release grew within her, another wordless feeling that perhaps being witness to this long dead person’s mourning was all they needed.

With that thought in her head she planted herself next to the kneeled figure, warm pain stabbing at her legs from the path’s loose stones. Tentative at first she reached her arm around the rocking figure, resisting the urge to recoil at the cold, coarse texture of their ruined body. No words found their way to her lips, no empathetic condolences or affirmations: just silence. The figure sobbed on, their overwhelming grief now accompanied by an odd, warm sense of gratitude.

She watched over their mourning, held them, projected her condolences until the figure ground itself to dust upon the coarse path, joining whatever it had been mourning over. 

And once nothing was left she moved on, soles crunching against the rocky, dusty path: wondering if she would too weather herself into dust walking its infinite expanse.

Icy

February Flash Fiction: Icy

Prompt from Instagram’s @horrorprompts

What drove him to dig in the icy clearing he did not know. Into the bank of firm snow he thrust his shovel, the crunch of uncountable ice crystals against metal pelting his eardrums. Without care he tossed the snow back behind him, eagerness to witness what lay below gnawing at his joints: or was it the cold? What did it matter? He had to dig. The sky grew only more gray, the sun hiding for fear of what he might uncover. Hibernating, skeletal trees looked on out of morbid curiosity, little more than shadow puppets backlit by the pallid light.

Knee deep in his excavation he expected soil, but there was only snow. He kept digging. Speckles of crimson strewn within the icy mass rewarded his efforts. In a moment of panic he checked his face for blood, finding none. Murmurs reverberated under his boots: why did you stop digging, the snow whispered, the words crawling up his legs, pricking at his skin with the icy brambles of their needle-sharp consonants.

He kept digging, flinging shovels full of red snow out of the pit, laughing at the way the veins strewn through the ice quivered and flailed as though releasing compressed air. His heart fluttered, exhilaration soothing the ache in his arms as, neck deep in the pit, something firm stopped the tip of his shovel. Throwing the tool away he fell to his knees, sifting through the last layer of snow. Corpulent flesh pulsed in his grasp, webs of veins spewing from the raw muscle to constrict his hands. With a mix of panic and joy he locked eyes with the eyeless mass, its ravenous hunger crawling out of every corner of his consciousness.

The solemn trees alone stood witness to his final, cackling screams of terror, themselves shuddering as if tossed by the wind until his final cries died upon the pristine snow of the icy clearing.