Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 7

February Flash Fiction Draw: The Results

Thanks to everyone who wrote a story inspired by this month’s Flash Fiction Draw writing prompt!

A Stitch in Tāne by Colin Colgrave (note his CW: it’s a wee bit NSFW)

The Great Blackout of 1989 by Iarra Warriorfeather

The Golden Goose by E.H. Timms

Down by the River by Jeff Baker

Deceptive Expectations by ’Nathan Burgoine

And if you missed mine, it’s right over here.

If I missed yours, let me know! It’s never too late to add.

And by the same token, it’s never too late to pick up a writing prompt and run with it. They don’t expire, and you can come back to them whenever you’re ready. They’ll be waiting.

February Flash Fiction Draw: Out of the Woods

And here we are, right down to the wire yet again with February’s Flash Fiction Draw story. If you’ll recall (or if you don’t recall, you can go back and check the post), this month’s prompt called for a suspense set in a sewer containing a suitcase.

Suspense, sewer, suitcase. No, I did not plan the alliteration. This was totally random. A little bit like the story I wrote as a result.

This is a sequel of sorts to “Shufflers,” the Taylor Swift, Zombie Hunter story I wrote back in December. It centers on a different character, but don’t worry, she’ll need help from a certain singer songwriter before the story’s over.

Lastly, can I just say that a week is not a long time to write something? Hats off to everyone who attempts it. Also, this is pretty much unedited, which is not when I recommend showing anything to anyone, but do I follow my own advice? Oh, child.

Out of the Woods

Reine switched the suitcase to her other hand and looked behind her. The shufflers were getting closer. She faced forward and started running faster down the tunnel—

Sewer. Call it what it is. God knows I’m never getting this stink out of my nose.

It felt as if the funk of the place had seeped into her skin, even though the concrete floor beneath her was dry. There hadn’t been rain for weeks before… well, before. No rain since, either. She’d stayed indoors with all the doors locked, curtains drawn, windows already barred because her grandmother had always been a little paranoid. There was less and less of Nana “there” as the months drew themselves out, and before long Reine, the youngest grandchild and the one whose parents thought she needed “something to focus her attention,” was looking after a stranger.

Until the night before Nana passed, when she grabbed Reine’s wrist with surprising strength and caught her gaze with clarity.

“When I’m gone,” she said, “you need to get out of here.”

“Stop talking nonsense,” Reine said, “you’re not going anywhere. And neither am I.”

Nana’s grip remained insistent. “We both know that’s not true. And if you don’t leave,” she waved her other hand toward the window, “you won’t survive those things out there. They’ll find you in here. It’s only a matter of time. Do what the girl on the radio said. Head for the tunnels.”

The effort seemed to take the last of her energy out of her, and Nana sank back into the pillow and the blankets of her bed. It was the last thing she said to Reine. She died  that night.

There’d been a young woman on the radio, saying that the best way to get out of the city was to use the underground sewers and utility tunnels. She didn’t say what to do after that, though. Her grandmother was right, though. Reine didn’t have much choice.

She wrapped her grandmother’s body in the bedsheets and pinned them tight to her. Reine didn’t know if that’s what you were supposed to do, but it seemed the best she could manage. She wouldn’t let the things outside have her, didn’t even know if they would come after her, but they wouldn’t get her. Reine saw to that before she left by lighting every candle in the living room, blowing out the pilot light on the stove, and then turning all the burners to full. If there was an explosion, she was too far away and too far underground by then to hear it.

The bag she brought with her wasn’t big enough to be called a suitcase, more of an overnight bag. She’d packed it without thinking, grabbing whatever was close at hand in the bathroom and pulling clothes at random from her dresser drawers. She dumped the contents of Nana’s jewelry box in as a final thought, and wished her grandmother had collected something like handguns or axes instead of earrings and necklaces that she never wore anyway.

Most of the journey was uneventful. She’d pried up a manhole cover on a side street and climbed down beneath the pavement. She used her phone’s GPS to keep from getting lost, and followed tunnels that matched up with streets overhead. She kept her screen’s brightness as low as possible, and turned it upside down when she passed beneath other manhole covers in the street above. Occasionally, she glanced up and saw feet moving across the ventilation holes in the manhole covers—this was when she was still in the heart of the city—and she held her breath as she went by.

Maybe the stench of this place was covering her own scent, if that was how they managed to find people.

After a few hours, she was exhausted, her feet hurt, and it was getting late. Sunlight no longer came down through the holes in the manhole covers, and she hadn’t seen any feet shuffling past for at least a mile or two.

She couldn’t stay down in the sewers forever. She had to at least go up and make sure she was where she thought she was.

[climbs up the ladder to the manhole, opens it as quietly as she can, drops her phone, yelps, a shuffler turns and begins to approach her.

And another.

And another.

They seemed to come from everywhere, separating from the shadows and shuffling out into the middle of the street. She ducked down and dragged the manhole cover as much as she could to cover the entrance—maybe it would do a little bit of good—and then she half climbed, half fell down the ladder to the bottom of the tunnel. She didn’t know where her phone had landed. She couldn’t see it. She ran.

She looked behind her. The shufflers had climbed down the ladder and were heading in her direction now. There was nothing but pitch black ahead. Reine switched the bag from her left hand to her right—her fingers were starting to cramp—before she finally let go.She abandoned the suitcase. It didn’t matter anymore, if it ever had.

She ran into the pitch black ahead, knowing she was probably wasting her time. They would catch her. They would… they would eat her.

That was when she ran into someone in front of her.

Reine shrieked. The echo of it was deafening even to her. Hands grabbed her arms, holding her in place. She braced for the feel of teeth against her neck.

“Hang on, you’re safe.”

She recognized the voice. It was the woman from the radio. A flashlight clicked on, and when Reine’s vision recovered from the temporary blindness, she saw the voice belonged to a woman dressed all in black, and at least nine inches taller than Reine, only three of which were the heels on her boots.

Something about her looked familiar, but Reine didn’t have time to figure it out. The woman in black pulled Reine behind her and raised an arm to point at the shufflers. Did she—was that a gun?

Reine stumbled, her hands hitting the filthy concrete floor of the sewer as the air above her exploded with gunfire. It sounded like heavy sandbags were hitting the floor behind her. The woman raised her other arm—this time Reine could see clearly what she held in that hand, some kind of crossbow—and she fired again. A whistling sound buzzed over her head and more sandbags fell behind her.

Then the woman was helping her up. “Are you okay? We have to move quickly. More of them might be coming.”

Reine recognized that voice. She looked up at the woman, her heart-shaped face framed by a black hood that had slipped back, revealing blonde hair. She smiled at her gently. “It’s going to be okay.”

“You—you’re—”

She’d heard about the woman’s escape from Las Vegas, when so few had managed to get out. Her mad dash down the Strip to the airport, the way she’d made the helicopter that came to rescue her stop and retrieve another woman from the roof of a house. How she’d put an axe through a shuffler’s face.

The woman shook her head. “I’m just a survivor like you. Come on. I’ll take you to the others. We’re almost there.”

She held out her hand. Reine didn’t even think twice before taking it.

Flash Fiction Draw for February 2021

Okay, where did January go?

I mean, I know where it went (into the past, obviously). Is it just me, though, or did it go by at warp speed? At the same time, it seemed like the longest month ever. Now that it’s over, I look back and am surprised I remembered to use 2021 every time I needed to write out a date.

But anyway. It’s Feb. 1, and that means it’s time for a new Flash Fiction Draw prompt. For those who aren’t familiar, check out last month’s prompt as well as the stories people wrote for it.

Basically, I build a prompt based on three cards drawn at random from three different suits: clubs for genre, hearts for setting, and diamonds for an object that must appear in the story. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a story, 1,000 words or less, based on the prompt. Simple, right? Right.

As a reminder, here’s a table outlining all the variables for this year’s prompts (the ones we’ve already used are grayed out):

Card drawnGenreSettingObject1RomanceSpaceshipRay gun2Science FictionRestaurant kitchenKey3Fairy TaleStudio apartment in a big cityHairbrush4HorrorAuditoriumLength of rope5MysterySewerPendant and necklace6ThrillerHighway tollboothPotted plant7ComedyFarm fieldTablet computer8FantasyPawn shopFountain pen9Ghost StoryMarshDecorative pillow10SuspenseTulip fieldVacuum cleanerJCrime CaperTrunk of a carBouquet of rosesQAction/AdventureToolshed / Utility closetA stray sockKHistorical FictionShopping mallSuitcase

Ready for the prompt? Here goes.

So, to recap, our prompt is:

A thrillerSet in a sewerIncluding a suitcase

You’ve got until next Monday, Feb. 8, to write your story and drop a link in the comments below (or email it to me; I love email). I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with.

January Flash Fiction Draw: The Results!

This is the thing I love about a writing prompt. Give it to a bunch of different writers, and they’ll all come up with something completely different. Even poetry. Check them all out below. (And if I missed your story, please let me know. I want to make sure I give everyone recognition.)

Balcony Gardening by E H Timms

A Fairy Tale for the Little Acorn by ’Nathan Burgoine

I Must Be Dreaming by Iara Warriorfeather

I Owe a Lot to Iowa Pot by Jeff Baker

Once Upon a Flat by Cait Gordon

Thanks to everyone who wrote something this month! And if you didn’t get around to it, there’s always next month, and there’s no expiration date on the writing prompt itself. Just like multiple people will come up with different scenarios for the same prompt, the same writer can take one prompt and spin it multiple different ways. Why not? Choose your own adventure, then choose another, and another, and…

January Flash Fiction Draw: Towers

So, this month’s prompt, if you’ll recall, was a fairy tale, set in a studio apartment in a big city, including a potted plant. I’m going to skip any preamble except to say that, as usual, I bent the rules. But! I did manage to clock in under a thousand words, and for me that’s saying something.

It’s saying less, is what I guess I’m saying.

Right, on with the show. Check back later when I’ll have a roundup of all the other folks who wrote stories based on the prompt.

Towers

Once upon a time, there lived a prince in a studio apartment high over downtown Vancouver.

You were expecting a princess, weren’t you? And a castle, where maybe she would be locked in a high tower? Sorry to disappoint you.

(I’m not sorry, by the way.)

There aren’t that many castles or princesses in the world, anyway, and not even that many princes. (Although there are plenty who will try to make you believe they are at least princely. Don’t fall for it, is all I’m saying.) And while we’re being honest here, he wasn’t a real prince, although he was a nice guy. He’d also been burned one too many times by those princes-who-are-not, which was how he found his way from the heartbreak of the prairies to this city of glass towers on the edge of the western sea.

He lived in one of those towers; high-priced, high-rise apartment buildings that are on every corner in downtown Vancouver. He’d moved in with little more than a couple suitcases and a potted plant that was one of the few things not smashed by the last prince-who-was-not. Now that he was safely away, he thought of getting a cat, but decided to see first if he could keep the plant alive for at least one season. He placed it near the balcony door so that he could take it outside on nice days, although mostly it had been gray and rainy since he’d arrived.

Those gray days, it felt as if the city were closing in around him. That was especially true on the day an almost preternatural fog rolled in through the Georgia Strait, snaking its way along the Burrard Inlet and blanketing English Bay and the city in a cloud of white. When he stood on the balcony and peered over the railing, he couldn’t see the street below. It was as if the building had risen into the sky and was now hovering above the clouds.

That was when he noticed, across the street, someone waving at him.

It was another tower, partially constructed, just the skeleton of I-beams and concrete taking shape before being dressed in its glass skin. Standing at the end of one of those beams was a man in a yellow hard hat. The street was narrow enough and the buildings close enough that he could make out the creases in the construction worker’s leather gloves, and the creases around his smiling mouth.

When he realized he had his attention, the construction work pointed toward his feet. Along the side of the beam was written a number in yellow paint: 604-446-1… as soon as he realized it was a phone number, he picked up his mobile and started tapping.

“You stand in your window a lot,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

“You should probably be paying more attention to where you’re stepping than looking at me,” he said.

The voice on the other end laughed. “You’re probably not wrong.” A pause, during which the sound of the breeze filled the line. It must have been cold up there. “My name’s Eric.”

He hesitated, maybe just for a moment or two too long, so that Eric followed up with, “You don’t have to tell me your name just yet. But… look, I’m due for a coffee break. You want to meet me on the ground and go with me?”

Again, he paused and looked over the balcony railing. He was sixteen floors up—well, fifteen, since there was no thirteenth floor; he always wondered what the people who lived on the fourteenth floor thought about that—but from his point of view over the fog, he could have been miles away from the ground. And he knew Eric across the street could see him looking down there, as if something menacing might be lurking below the haze. Here be dragons.

“It’s weird, huh?” Eric said. He looked up to see Eric now staring down at his feet. “How the world just seems to end before you get to the ground. Have you ever been up to Squamish?”

“No.”

“It’s like that up there sometimes. You can climb to the top of the Chief and on some days it’s like there’s nothing but clouds below you.” Eric’s voice took on a dreamy quality when he said that.

“Okay.”

He looked up, and Eric looked up just a second after that, their eyes meeting.

“Okay?” Eric asked.

“Yeah. Let’s go get coffee.”

He felt the smile on his own face after he saw the flash of teeth from Eric’s smile across the street. “Meet you downstairs in ten minutes?”

He nodded. “Ten minutes.”

He felt breathless stepping into the elevator at the end of the hall. Once the doors closed, he put a hand on his chest, taking measure of his frantic heartbeat. He hadn’t pressed the button for the lobby yet, and he knew that if he didn’t soon, the elevator might whisk him up or down to a different floor. He felt, if only in his imagination, that he was suspended above the clouds, and he could choose whether to fall or fly.

Did he live happily ever after? Who could say. But right then, on his way down to meet a boy, he was happy, and for the moment, that was enough.

Flash Fiction Draw for January 2021

Happy New Year, I hope. If you want to skip the preamble and get the writing prompt, go ahead and scroll down to the video below and mash the play button. And if you don’t want to watch the video (where I’m sure to be awkward and fumbling), then click here to skip all the way to the end and just get the prompt itself. OK? OK.

For the rest of you, hi. I’m Jeff, and this year I have the privilege of filling Cait Gordon’s shoes, metaphorically speaking, for the monthly Flash Fiction Draw. This was started in 2018 (I think it was 2018?) by my friend ’Nathan Burgoine, and if you haven’t read any of Cait’s or ’Nathan’s work, please do take a moment to check out their websites. They’re both fabulous writers and lovely people to boot.

So, how does this work? It’s simple: on the first Monday of each month, I draw three playing cards, each from a different suit, that correspond with a theme, a setting, and an object. The challenge, should you be up for it, is to write a flash-fiction piece, no more than 1,000 words, in the specified genre, set in the specified location, and incorporating the aforementioned object. You have a week to do it, and once you’ve posted it online somewhere, come back and drop a link in the comments below. I’ll write a round-up post with everyone’s stories.

Now, for some disclaimers:

This is supposed to be fun. If you don’t feel up for it in any given month, no pressure! I skipped a few months in 2020—okay, more than a few—when things got hectic.

Write more than a thousand words? So what! I overshot almost every one of my stories last year. No one’s keeping count, so go ahead and post the whole thing.

Play as fast and loose with the prompt as you see fit. December 2020’s prompt was supposed to include the Eiffel Tower. Well, there’s an Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, so I figured that would do.

In case you’re wondering what this year’s set of prompts will include, here’s the whole thing in a handy table:

Card drawn
Genre
Setting
Object


1
Romance
Spaceship
Ray gun


2
Science Fiction
Restaurant kitchen
Key


3
Fairy Tale
Studio apartment in a big city
Hairbrush


4
Horror
Auditorium
Length of rope


5
Mystery
Sewer
Pendant and necklace


6
Thriller
Highway tollbooth
Potted plant


7
Comedy
Farm field
Tablet computer


8
Fantasy
Pawn shop
Fountain pen


9
Ghost Story
Marsh
Decorative pillow


10
Suspense
Tulip field
Vacuum cleaner


J
Crime Caper
Trunk of a car
Bouquet of roses


Q
Action/Adventure
Toolshed / Utility closet
A stray sock


K
Historical Fiction
Shopping mall
Suitcase

OK, ready? Here we go:

So, to recap, our prompt is:

a fairy tale;
set in a studio apartment in a big city;
and must include a potted plant.

You’ve got a week to bang out a thousand words. You can do this.

Flash Fiction Draw: Shufflers—And Some News for 2021

I’m tempted to ask how we got to December so fast and how it took so long at the same time. To recap, for those just tuning in, the first Monday of every month this year, Cait Gordon has offered a writing prompt with three elements chosen based on a random draw of playing cards: a genre, a setting, and an item to be included in the story. For the last month of the year, the prompt is a dystopia, the setting is the Eiffel Tower, and the item is a cane.

As Cait said, it’s surprising it took this long to get to a dystopia. And, as always, I took a few liberties with the prompt (although this time I at least came close to the 1,000-word maximum word count).

Today’s story is also inspired by this post from Instagram:

“Netflix marketing team: So for the poster, we were thinking- Me: CAN YOU MAKE ME LOOK LIKE A ZOMBIE HUNTER”

Have I mentioned I’m a massive Taylor Swift fan? In any case, I’ve wanted to write something inspired by that photo ever since I saw it—Taylor Swift, Zombie Hunter!—and now I have.

But first, a programming announcement: inspired by Cait’s prompts this year, and with permission from the originator of the Flash Fiction Draw, ’Nathan Burgoine (you might recognize his name from around these parts), they’re permitting me to carry the baton for next year’s Flash Fiction Draws. So, starting January 4, you’ll find a new writing prompt here from me, selected at random based on the luck of the draw.

I suppose I should figure out how to take a video of myself before January 4… not to mention how to enable comments.

Details, details, though. Anyway. Without further ado, and with apologies to Ms. Swift:

Shufflers

Taylor raced down the strip as fast as the heat and her spectacularly impractical boots would let her. They were meant for the stage, not running along sidewalks while a mob of brain dead, flesh-eating shufflers pursued her in relentless slow motion. Less worried about the ones behind her, she kept an eye on the cross streets ahead, hoping she’d have a straight shot down the strip to Tropicana Avenue and the airport.

She’d always kind of hated Las Vegas. The zombies were just one more reason to add to the pile.

As terrifying as the shufflers were, the thing that made her nearly scream was the Bellagio fountains suddenly coming to life and spewing geysers into the air next to her. She managed to stifle her outcry, which turned out to be fortunate: sparing a glance behind her, she saw the shufflers now mingling almost haphazardly in the middle of the road. The outburst from the fountains must have masked her footsteps. She started running again, the Eiffel Tower of the Paris hotel a blur on her left.

Taylor had figured out a few things about the shufflers: the first was that even though they were slow, they were strong. Stronger than the human beings they’d once been. The man outside her hotel who’d tried to fight one off hand to hand had proven that in especially gruesome fashion.

Second, and maybe more important, was that they were completely blind. What they lacked in vision, though, they made up for in keen hearing and an almost animal-like sense of smell. Even more of a reason for her to ditch the boots, but the pavement was too scorching for bare feet.

She had to do something, though, or she was going to break her neck or bring another horde of shufflers her way.

The street ahead was still deserted, although the pavement was littered with the grisly remnants of shuffler victims… one of whom had been wearing running shoes that looked close to her size.

It was gross. And appalling. But she had to do it.

I’m so sorry she repeated in her head as she slipped the red Brooks shoes off what remained of the woman’s corpse. Her wrinkled, spotted left hand still clutched the handle of her cane, its tip smeared with blood.

Sitting in the middle of the road to change her shoes seemed like madness, but what choice did she have? She set down her weapons and unzipped her boots. A little snug, once she had the laces tied, but still her feet breathed a sigh of relief. She picked up her crossbow and axe and set off at a jog.

She’d grabbed the axe from the “in case of emergency” cupboard on the floor of her hotel. Finding the crossbow in the circle drive of the hotel, along with a nearly full case of bolts, had been pure luck. Whom had it belonged to? And what had happened to them? She’d wondered these things only for a moment before she looped the straps over her shoulders and ran.

One thing she hadn’t been able to figure out was why her booking agent thought a show in Vegas was a good idea. What about my last two albums says ‘Vegas’ to you? she’d asked. Trust me, he’d said, and somehow they’d made the forest stage set look almost cozy in that massive arena. So she thought maybe she should apologize the next time she saw him… until she woke up the morning after the concert to find Las Vegas overrun by the walking dead.

Tree had left dozens of messages on her phone that morning. When Taylor finally reached her, Tree said the rest of the crew had gotten out the previous night with the equipment trailers, before things started quickly going bad. Get to the airport, Tree said. A helicopter’s coming to pick you up.

Between the draining heat and dodging random groups of shufflers—for some reason, they seemed to cluster together—it took her half an hour to reach the airport perimeter.

Which was, of course, fenced.

Fuck. She jogged along the fence line, hoping to find a way through or maybe under. No luck. Until she came to a service road blocked with a gate held in place by a heavy duty padlock.

CCTV cameras flanked the gate at the top of the fence; was anyone left alive in a control room somewhere to see her lift the axe over her head and bring the blade down on the lock once, twice, three times before it broke, the clang of metal against metal deafening in the silence. She shoved the gate open and ran up the road and onto the tarmac, pausing for a moment at the end of the runway. Now what?

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She slid it out and put it to her ear.

“Hello?” she whispered.

“Taylor!” Tree’s voice was practically a shriek. “The helicopter’s on the way. Can you see it?”

Taylor spun in a slow circle, squinting into the bleached desert sky. No sign of the helicopter yet. But she did see a line of shufflers slouching through the open gate behind her. She started down the runway again.

“It’s not here yet,” she said, still keeping her voice low, “but I’m being chased by a group of those things. I’m at the end of the runway right now. Can you tell them to head this way?”

“I’ll try, but it’s getting harder to get through. I had to call you a dozen times at least before it finally connected.”

“Listen, if I don’t get through this, please tel Joe—”

“No.” Tree’s voice was like a buzz saw. “You are not going to talk like that because you are getting through this, do you understand me?”

Taylor sighed. It wasn’t even noon and already she was so exhausted. “Okay.”

That was when she heard the beating of helicopter blades in the distance.

It wasn’t until she was strapped into the seat next to the pilot—big fan of yours, he said, glad I could help—that she finally loosened her grip on the axe and let it slide into the footwell. They headed away from the city—from up here, it didn’t even look as if anything out of the ordinary had happened—and she wondered if there was a song anywhere in this.

She looked over at the man at the controls. A strong profile, mouth set in a grim line. Maybe a little younger than her dad. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember the name of the pilot. She’d have to make sure she found out. He’d saved her life, after all.

November Flash Fiction Draw: Nurse Erin

My entry for this month’s Flash Fiction Draw is coming right down to the wire, it seems. You may have noticed that’s a trend. I think I’m overextended, is why.

But anyway. This month’s challenge came a little late because Cait Gordon gave those of us south of 49 a little bit of a break on account of the election we recently had in the United States. (You may have heard something about that.) As an aside, one of my common typos is to misspell “united” as “untied.” I think “Untied States” may be an apt description of the state of our disunion.

Again, anyway. This month’s prompt features the urban fantasy genre, set in a hospital elevator, and including a gun as an object. Well, if that’s not a fun set of parameters, I don’t know what is. Granted, we don’t spend much time in the elevator itself, and the gun remains in the protagonist’s pocket—sorry, Chekov—but they do help set the mood, I think.

First, though, a content warning: although there’s no on-page gore, it’s heavily implied, as I’ve been fairly bloody minded lately. (I can’t imagine why.) In any case, be warned.

Nurse Erin

Erin, the nurse who was not a nurse (or a human, for that matter), rode the elevator up to ICU with another passenger, who was a human, and who watched her with what she could tell was a growing sense of unease. Erin kept her hands shoved in the deep pockets of her smock, both to hide her talons as well as keep one hand resting on the butt of her gun.

The gun was a backup. Just in case.

The man got off the elevator two floors below ICU—his sense of relief was detectable even after the doors had closed—and she ascended the rest of the way in silence, no longer distracted by the sound of his racing heart. How was it that some of them knew even when they didn’t know?

Erin went through her plan one more time, and wondered if the target would know, too.

The target had the advantage of being unconscious. He would likely not feel a thing when she severed his carotid. Nor when she put a bullet through his forehead, just in case. Her customer wanted proof of a successful outcome, so she hoped she had time to remove the head. If not, a finger, at least. Proof of identity, if not of actually elimination.

Still, better a finger than nothing.

The elevator doors slid open to reveal a sterile looking hallway, but beneath the odor of disinfectant, she could detect it: the heady scent of death. She breathed deeply of it while trying not to look like she was enjoying it. (She was.) So much delicious malignancy, such exquisite suffering.

Maybe she should have become a nurse. She could feed off this agony for ages.

But first, the job. Squaring her shoulders and forcibly resisting the urge to skip in joy at the banquet of pain around her, Erin sobered her face and started down the hall. She lifted a tablet from a counter as she passed and stared down at it intently, not bothering to try and decipher the information it displayed but trying to look as if it made sense to her. Touching the device also gave her a flicker of information, an afterimage of thoughts from the last person who’d held it. In an instant, she had the target’s room number.

Of course, he wasn’t alone. That would have been too easy. Her last job, there had been… collateral damage. It was complicated. Still, she hadn’t been ID’d and the city council was talking about block grants to rebuild the neighborhood, so it wasn’t like it had been a total losing proposition for everyone.

The room she peered into was dim enough that she couldn’t make out much about the person sitting at the target’s bedside. Stepping further inside, she knocked gently on the door and tried her best to look, well, human.

It wasn’t the wife, at least. Thank heavens for that… although, if the rumors she’d heard were true, the wife had quickly processed her grief and was, so to speak, moving on with her life.

Well, good for her.

Possibly worse, though: it was the daughter. She crumpled a tissue in one hand, and her impossibly pretty face was sallow and blotchy when she looked over her shoulder. Erin braced herself for discovery, for the daughter to recognize that she was no nurse, was no human.

Instead, the daughter turned back to her father, looking forlorn. “Do I have to go?”

For a moment, Erin was at a loss for words. Making human sounds was a challenge at the best of times. She sounded like someone who was perpetually laryngitic. One of her nest said she sounded like Brenda Vaccaro, but she didn’t know who that was.

“I suppose,” Erin said. Then, surprising herself, “Are you all right?”

The daughter laughed and dabbed at her eyes. “I think you’re the first person here who’s asked me that.” She reached for her bag, which sat on the floor under her chair. She opened it and pulled out another tissue. “The way most people look at me, I think they must take me for a fucking idiot.”

Erin wasn’t one to be startled easily, but the casual profanity brought her up short. “Excuse me?”

“I may be foolish, but I’m not blind. I know what kind of man my father was… is. I know what his company makes and I know how many people are dead because of that. At least, I know the official unofficial figures. The real body count is probably even higher.”

Erin tilted her head, frowning. “So, why do you come, then?”

The daughter settled her bag in her lap, hugging it. “Sometimes, I imagine I’m waiting here in case he wakes up, and hoping that I’ll have the guts to put a pillow over his face. For the sake of the world.”

Abruptly, the daughter pushed her chair back—the legs squealed against the tile, but her father remained oblivious, of course. Erin stepped back to let her pass through the doorway, and had a feeling that if she hadn’t, the daughter might have bowled her over.

She stood a moment in the doorway, looking after the daughter until she disappeared around the corner toward the elevators. Erin finally took her hands from her pockets and shut the door, placing one claw briefly against the latch. She let it smolder beneath her palm until the entire mechanism was a twisted, immovable metal lump. Privacy.

The body—for it couldn’t really be called a man, not at this point, when the machines were the only things keeping him alive—lay motionless apart from the occasional rise and fall of the chest. It may have been life support, but as far as the board of directors was concerned, he was still alive, and nothing at the company would change as long as that was the case.

Maybe it would turn out that her client’s payoff would bring some measure of relief to the man’s daughter.

That was not her main concern, though, as she flexed her claws and traced a line across his neck, determining where she would strike and where she should stand to avoid the blood splatter. She had time for more than just a finger. And besides, she would enjoy the pleasing thunk his head would make when she dropped it on her client’s desk.

October Flash Fiction Draw: Howdy, Pardner

So, last week was the first Monday of the month, which means that Cait Gordon did her monthly flash fiction draw writing prompt. If you’re not familiar, this is where she draws one card each from three suits of cards, specifying a genre, setting, and an object that must be included in the story. Participants have a week to write a 1,000-word story incorporating those three elements.

This month’s draw? A western, set in a museum, including a cracked pot.

OK, no complicated preamble this month because I’m getting this in almost at the last minute. Also, I’m way over the word count. This is no surprise.

Anyway, without further ado:

Howdy, Pardner

Marcus has come to the museum again to see the simulation about the cowboy. He has to change transports two times in order to reach the transition station where the orbital tether takes him up. The trip eats up most of his allotted free time per work cycle, but he doesn’t think twice about it. The cowboy’s worth it.

The ticket taker doesn’t give any indication of recognition when she scans Marcus’s ident. He usually arrives at the same time—his schedule is rigorously monotonous—and she’s always staffing the ticket counter when he visits. But she just waves his ident over the scanner and hands it back to him, saying, “Old West North America, Earth Wing, up three flights and to your left. Enjoy your visit.” She doesn’t even look up from her display as she says it.

The lift takes seven seconds to whisk him up to the Sol level. When the barrier dissolves, he exits and turns left, past the pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations experience —he makes note of the cracked and broken pottery at the entrance only as a landmark. He’s wondered if the broken pot is real—why replicate a piece in a broken state? But surely there wouldn’t be an original artifact here, all the way from Earth, even a broken one. Broken like Earth is, has been for centuries.

Regardless, it means he’s close now, close to the cowboy.

A docent stands near the entrance to the Old West experience. It’s someone he hasn’t seen before, but she nods as Marcus approaches and gestures him inside.

“The experience is ready when you are,” she says.

A thrill rushes up his spine at the thought that he might be the only one with a ticket for this reservation time. He hurries inside and finds that, yes, it’s just him.

Marcus stands in the middle of the projection chamber and holds still while the emitters pattern him and project a period skin over him. He looks down toward his feet and sees dust-covered boots, threadbare tan trousers, a belt with a tarnished buckle, a faded blue shirt. His heart’s beating faster as he glances around, waiting for the town to materialize, waiting for the only man he’s ever really cared about to appear in front of him.

The chamber darkens for a moment before filling with a soft, diffuse light that quickly resolves into the town. A dusty rectangle of ground is lined by wooden buildings on two sides with plank sidewalks running between the buildings. Light from a bright yellow star beats down on the baked earth beneath his feet and bleaches the boards that side the buildings. People move between the buildings, spending as little time as possible outside in the heat, but he lingers in it, letting it warm his skin. It won’t burn him like the sun might have in reality.

The town is basically two perpendicular streets, one of which parallels the railroad tracks. The other dead-ends at the cemetery, which is behind him. In a few moments, the cowboy’s horse will enter the scene from the right, appearing from behind the corner saloon. He hooks his thumbs through the belt loops of his trousers and tries to ignore the inflating feeling in his chest, as if his heart’s a balloon.

The horse is never in much of a hurry. It ambles around the corner like it has all the time in the universe, like it hasn’t been dust and memories for five hundred years, if it ever really existed. It may simply be a creation of the programmer’s imagination, an idea of what a horse must have looked like in the flesh.

The cowboy, he thinks, could be the same, an amalgam of 2D moving images, pictures, and stories. Even though he has a name in the simulation—Randall Potter; he knows, because he asked—it’s probably made up. He searched the data banks (using more of his precious time and creds) but came up with no records from the time frame.

And what difference would it make, anyway, since even if he were real, Randall hasn’t been alive since the 19th century on the old calendar.

The horse turns the corner and comes down the street toward him, and Randall tilts his hat back. He smiles down from his saddle and gives a polite nod. The way his face heats up, which has nothing to do with the sunshine, makes Marcus certain he’s blushing. He looks down.

“You’re back,” Randall says. His voice is deep, a hint of gravel in it. The first time Marcus heard that voice, it sent a shiver racing along his spine, the same way it does now.

“Just passing through,” Marcus says, walking alongside the horse as the cowboy guides it toward the hitching post outside the general store.

“Just my luck you’re always passing through when I come into town,” Randall says, swinging down from the saddle and hooking a lead rope to the horse’s halter. As he ties the rope to the post, he adds, “Or maybe it’s not luck?”

Marcus frowns. The shift in tone is subtle, but it’s different from the five other times they’ve spoken. “Excuse me?”

“You spend a lot of time in this town,” the cowboy says, taking time with the knot, “but you don’t live here. Do you wish you could live here?”

Randall has never asked him questions like this. “I… I don’t know. Maybe, a little.”

The cowboy doesn’t look up from his work. “Why?”

Marcus stammers a moment. He doesn’t want to say “I don’t know” again, which would also be a lie. He keeps coming back because he has to look up to meet Randall’s gaze, and because of the hint of gravel in his voice, which goes with the pattern of stubble on his face, framing a set of lips that are almost delicate by comparison.

“Why do you keep coming here?” Marcus asks, turning the question back on Randall. The cowboy rests his arm on the hitching post and looks off into the distance.

“I guess because I always wanted to be a cowboy, but there’s not really much call for that on this station Or down planetside, for that matter. I mean, no cows, no need for cowboys.”

This is the strangest conversation Marcus has ever had with a hologram. It’s as if he’s speaking to the program itself.

Or maybe to the programmer.

“Who are you?”

The cowboy meets his gaze now. “You really want to know?”

Marcus doesn’t trust his voice to remain steady. He nods.

“Go back out, turn left toward the service lift, take it up two flights, and when you get off turn left. Last door on the right.”

A couple minutes later, Marcus stands outside a blank white door in a nondescript hallway. His heart is racing the way it might if he’d climbed two flights of stairs to get up here rather than taking the lift. He pauses with his fist raised to knock on the door. Maybe this isn’t a good idea.

The door slides open before he can reconsider. The room beyond is dim, a waft of cool air making him shiver.

“Come on in.” A hint of gravel. Marcus steps through the doorway.

It’s not a big room. A bank of holographic displays runs along one wall in front of a single workstation. The person seated in front of it has their back to him, so Marcus can only see their hands on the controls and the back of their head.

“Hello?”

The chair swivels around. Sitting in it is the cowboy.

Except, not the cowboy. Yes, the face is the same, but it’s clean shaven, and his hair, instead of dark brown, is lighter, almost blond. The shape of the lips, though, is identical.

The cowboy stands up. “I take it you like the simulation.”

Marcus looks down toward the floor and nods. “It’s very… realistic.”

“What’s your favorite part?”

The question makes him look up. The non-cowboy is smiling at him, almost smirking. Is this guy messing with him? “I think you can probably figure out the answer to that.”

“Fair enough. I guess what I’m really asking is whether you have a thing for cowboys in general or, or this cowboy in particular.”

It’s then that Marcus detects the note of nervousness in the man’s voice. “I take it you’re the programmer.” He nods. Marcus continues. “And you decided to make the main character look exactly like yourself.”

“Not exactly.”

“The stubble’s a nice touch.”

Even in the room’s dim light, the man’s face brightens. “You think so? I wasn’t sure if… never mind.”

Marcus steps a little closer, as if he didn’t hear the man right. “Wasn’t sure if what?”

The man takes a deep breath. “Wasn’t sure if you’d like it.”

For a moment, all Marcus hears over the whir of the ventilation is the man’s breathing. At the same time, things whir in Marcus’s head, and he starts to get a clearer, if different, picture.

“This was for my benefit?”

The man shakes his head. “Not at first. I noticed you on your first visit, but didn’t really think much about it after that. It’s sort of… happened before. But then you came back, and Old West was the only simulation you visited. So, after that, I started… improving things. Tweaking the storyline in case you came back. Augmenting Randall’s appearance based on things the biometric scanners said you responded to—”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing invasive. Elevated heart rate, respiration, that sort of thing. Not a lot more than what I could tell just by standing in the same room as you… which is not something I expected would happen.”

Another silence, both of them looking down at the floor. When Marcus looks up, the man who looks like a cowboy but isn’t a cowboy is staring at him expectantly, almost hopefully, his earnestness nothing like the casual swagger of the cowboy simulacrum with the stubble and the wide-brimmed hat. He’s waiting, clearly, for Marcus to speak. To confirm either a hope or a disappointment. And now Marcus has to figure out what he wants.

He wants to know something, he decides. “Randall’s not your name too, is it?”

The man shakes his head. “Randall Potter was a real person, just not a cowboy.”

“And not on nineteenth-century Earth, I’m guessing. In that case, you are?”

Marcus extends his hand. The other man looks at it, his expression not exactly calculating, but deciding. A moment later he takes Marcus’s hand. His grip is warm. “Mika.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Same.”

“So, now what?”

Mika puts his hands in his pockets. “My shift is over in a couple hours. Dinner after that?”

Marcus does a few mental calculations. It probably means he’ll have to catch the overnight back home, and he’ll be half asleep at work tomorrow, but hopefully it’ll be worth it.

The post October Flash Fiction Draw: Howdy, Pardner appeared first on Jeffrey Ricker.

September Flash Fiction Draw: The Thaw

Whoa, I haven’t done the monthly Flash Fiction Draw that Cait Gordon presents since June. I would say I slacked off over the summer, but nah: I finished revising a novel and put all the pieces in place for my sci fi novella The Final Decree, which is coming out at the end of the month. (Yes, really, go check it out over here.)

So, yes, I’ve been a bit busy. But this month’s prompt involves young adult genre, set in a warehouse, incorporating a boot or a shoe. I mean, come on, how could I resist. It’s like Cait knows what my next work in progress is about.

So, this is a little bit of something from the YA novel I’m in the very early stages of drafting, tentatively called The Ghost in You (with much gratitude to the Psychedelic Furs). So, without further ado:

The Thaw

At first, Dale thinks something has gone wrong. He waits for the cryo drugs to take effect and pull him under, but all he feels is cold. Drowsy, but not asleep. Fragments of voices—the doctor, the nurse—make themselves heard through the clamshell of the Lazarus chamber. He can’t see them, his eyes sealed by the drops the nurse put in them a few moments ago. But he shouldn’t be able to hear them either, should he?

He should be asleep, unconscious. Almost dead. Why can he hear them?

There’s a moment of blankness, then the whoosh of the chamber’s hood opening. Dale tries to blink—nope, eyes still sealed shut. Rattling. A tug on his right arm, the clack of the cables. A hand against his cheek, gentle fingers prying open one eye, an insane burning, then the other eye. It feels like both his eyes are on fire now. He tries to say something—stop, please, it hurts—but there’s something in his mouth and he can’t speak.

And then he can see. Time feels slippery, as if more than a few seconds have passed since the whoosh of the hood and the burning of his eyes but he can’t account for them.

“Don’t struggle,” a voice says. A man, he thinks. So, not the doctor or the nurse. Where did he come from? “You’re okay. Try to blink your eyes.”

Dale does what he says. At first all he sees is a filthy smear, before a few other drops are put in his eyes—at least they don’t burn now—and he gets a watery glimpse of a face hovering above his, and a high, dark ceiling beyond that.

The man, young, not much older than Dale, smiles. “Hey, buddy, welcome back.”

Dale tries to ask what happened? but all that comes out is a garbled mess because of whatever’s in his mouth. The man makes a shushing noise.

“Hang on. Let me take out the tube. Hold tight. This may hurt a little.”

There’s a tug, and suddenly it feels as if Dale’s windpipe is being pulled out. He flails, and the man grabs one of his hands—warm—and makes more soothing noises. Dale’s pretty sure he’s crying by now, but it’s not just because of the pain.

If they’re waking him up, it means Sarah’s gone. Really gone.

There’s a pop and a sigh, and the end of the tube comes out of his mouth. Dale coughs—retches, really—and the man puts a hand behind Dale’s back and helps him sit up. From this vantage point, Dale sees a stack of his clothing perched at the foot of the chamber, his jeans and shirt sealed in a plastic pouch along with… one shoe. Where did his other shoe go?

“Hey,” the man says. “Are you okay?”

Dale thought it would be easier now, knowing she was gone and he didn’t have to live through it; didn’t have to live through her sickness and death while not being with her, while not being her boyfriend anymore, but it’s still like someone’s taken an ice cream scoop and hollowed out the place in his chest where his heart should be.

The man rocks him gently. “Hey,” he says. “Hey. You’re okay. It’s going to be okay. Trust me.”

Dale knows that’s a lie, but for the time being, he’s grateful to be lied to.

The post September Flash Fiction Draw: The Thaw appeared first on Jeffrey Ricker.