Random lobsters

Apparently random lobsters are showing up on sidewalks on both the East and West Coasts. The last time that happened, I wrote this story, The Next Best Thing.


Priscilla Newnam had seen some peculiar things in her 87 years, but she had never seen anything like the bug that crawled across her spotless kitchen floor one sunny July morning as she was eating her oatmeal. For one thing it was huge, at least a foot long, maybe more. And it was strange in a disturbing way. It looked like what you’d get if you mated a roachy bug to a lobster. She decided it probably was some kind of mutated crustacean that had somehow crawled up from the harbor and found its way into her house. And now she was going to have to deal with it before she’d had a chance to finish her coffee.

There wasn’t much that Priscilla Newnam was afraid of but the sight of the creature scuttling across her kitchen linoleum was…unsettling. Priscilla’s husband Tom had been a lobster man, and once or twice he’d brought home some strange things he’d found in his pots. There’d been a yellow lobster once, a freakish thing that he’d sold to the owner of a clam bar in Massachusetts who wanted to keep it in a tank to attract customers.

A reporter and photographer from the Cape Courier had come up to the house to interview Tom about the one-of-a kind find. The photographer, a young fellow named Julien Thibidoux, had take Tom’s picture holding the yellow lobster up by one claw. Then Julien had taken a picture of Tom and Priscilla just because he wanted to and sent it to them later. That had been thoughtful of him, Priscilla thought. She still had the picture on her bedside table.

As she watched the thing move from one end of the kitchen to the other, Priscilla decided that she was going to play the “age card” and turn the problem over to someone else. She hardly ever did that because she didn’t want people to start thinking of her as an old biddy, someone who’d outlived her usefulness. But just this once, she decided she would call animal control and let them handle it.

When she described what the thing looked like, the dispatcher sounded skeptical but said she would send someone out right away.  Because Priscilla had a young voice, the girl on the phone didn’t dilly-dally around asking her foolish questions like, “Are you sure that there’s really a foot-long bug on your floor? Priscilla hated people who assumed that because you were no longer young, you were somehow stupid. She’d been a math teacher until she was 65 and she could still do long division in her head.

The animal control officer they sent was a young man, just out of college from the look of him and he took one look at the thing on her floor and said “Fuck me.” And he didn’t apologize for the profanity in that falsely smarmy way so many people did when they were talking to old people. As if they’d never heard a bit of salty language. Priscilla liked him for that.

“You ever see anything like this before?” she asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, surprising her, “I have.” He excused himself and went back to his truck and when he came back, he had a little collapsible trap with some kind of stinking bait in it. 

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked him.

He didn’t look up as he answered, his attention focused on coaxing the thing into the trap. “Gonna ship it to the university. Marine biology professor up there is paying $100 for specimens. He says they’re showing up all over.” It belatedly occurred to the exterminator that Priscilla might claim ownership of the bug so he added, “I’ll split it with you.”

She waved away the offer. She knew young people always needed money and Tom had left her comfortable. “No, just ask him to email me when he knows what it is,” she said.

“Email?” he repeated, as if he’d never heard the word before.

"Death of a Fairy" new fiction from the Misbegotten universe

I have been writing "Misbegotten" stories for almost seven years now, urban fantasies set in the City of the Angels where paranormal creatures exist alongside normal citizens. (In L.A., it's sometimes hard to tell the difference.) I decided to test the waters of the short fiction marketplace by putting "Death of a Fairy" up for sale(under my pseudonym Kat Parrish) as a stand-alone story using their beta cover generator to put together a cover. It's an experiment. I'm curious to see how it'll turn out but in the meantime, I am pleased with the story, which begins when a homeless woman mistakes a dead fairy for a discarded Barbie doll in the alley she calls home.

Story for a Wednesday: The Temperature at which Love Freezes

Here in Los Angeles we're experiencing our sixth month of summer, but I remember winter... Here's a new story for a chilly day. Because somewhere it's chilly.

The Temperature at Which Love Freezes

By Katherine Tomlinson

Credit: Websurfer6

The front door shut with a soft but emphatic click as Jonathan slipped out of the house. Even though he knew Kaye wouldn’t have heard it—she slept like a hibernating bear—he still found himself looking over his shoulder to make sure she hadn’t wakened, that she wasn’t following him with her furious eyes.

But Kaye had merely grunted and turned over, burrowing deeper into the 600-thread count sheets and goose-down comforter.

There was only one person who would send Jonathan a text in the middle of the night; only one person whose text he’d read in the middle of the night.

Jonathan had grabbed the phone, fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table and read the message without turning on the light.

Come outside. I have a surprise for you. <3 span="span">

She’d attached his favorite picture of her, the one he’d taken after surprising her in the shower.

With barely a glance at his sleeping wife, Jonathan had slid out from beneath the covers, squeezed his bare feet into the fleece-lined slippers Kaye had ordered online without checking his size, and padded silently across the carpeted floor. 

He’d tied his plaid bath robe tightly before venturing out into the cold, well aware that all he had on underneath the flannel was a pair of thin cotton boxer shorts.

Outside, Jonathan breathed deeply. Purged of the vague day-time petroleum scent that always lingered in the wake of rush-hour commuters using his street as a short-cut to the freeway, the night smelled like pine needles