My parents were omnivorous readers and among the magazines that came into our house via subscription was Reader's Digest. Don't mock, your parents probably had a subscription to Reader's Digest too. It sat in the bathroom more often than on the coffee table with Time and Newsweek and EQMM, and Family Circle and McCalls. Long before USA Today mastered the art of the micro-article, they offered short, pithy articles on every topic under the sun. (For some reason I seem to remember a lot of stories about plucky survivors of animal attacks, but that might just be selective memory.)
Reader's Digest is hosting a "Your Life" contest in which the best 150-word story posted on their Facebook page will win $25,000 and publication. Deadline is November 1st. Details here.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Chuck Wendig Made Me Do It
I sat out last week's fiction challenge but this week, Chuck was back with one that was irresistible. Guns. In a thousand words or less. 'Happiness is a warm gun," I thought, having just viewed Red on Netflix. And this nasty little story percolated up from the dismal swamp that is my imagination.
Check out Chuck Wendig's Terrible Minds blog ("Must Love Guns") to see the other stories inspired by the prompt.
And here's my story:
GUN CONTROL
Check out Chuck Wendig's Terrible Minds blog ("Must Love Guns") to see the other stories inspired by the prompt.
And here's my story:
GUN CONTROL
All the girls have a gimmick.
Charla’s got the snake, an albino ball python she raised as a pet right out of the egg. Ball pythons can live to be 30, so Slinky’s got another 15 good years left as a performer. Not Charla though. Nobody wants to look at a 40-year-old’s saggy tits.
Not that she’ll even make it to 30 the way she hits the pipe.
Rada shtick is “the dirty girl.” She never washes her ya-ya during the week, so by the weekend she’s built up a powerful stink. Men line up to dip their fingers in the poisoned honey of her rancid cunt, fumble all over themselves to pad her thong with their hard-earned cash.
Easy cum, easy go.
We’re not supposed to touch the customers unless we take them upstairs but Rada pays JoJo a cut and he looks the other way. Probably dips his fingers himself now and again. Probably considers it one of the perks of the job.
Mel’s gimmick is the body paint, which she mixes up special with little glittery bits thrown in so that when she peels down, she looks like that blue girl from the X-Men, the one who used to be married to John Stamos.
JoJo thought it was too weird at first but she convinced him to let her try it out and sure enough, the geeks from the university can’t get enough of her.
JoJo thought it was too weird at first but she convinced him to let her try it out and sure enough, the geeks from the university can’t get enough of her.
She’s so popular one of the girls over at the Pink Velvet tried to copy her style for awhile.
When she didn’t cease and desist after JoJo asked her politely, he sent Yusef to pay her a visit. Yusef thinks we’re all whores anyway so there wasn’t a lot of talking involved in their conversation.
She doesn’t dance any more. I think that’s a mistake. There are some real freaks out there, men who would enjoy looking a girl whose breasts have been sliced off. She could have made some serious money.
Some women have no imagination.
Men don’t come to a titty bar just to gawp at flesh. They can do that at home without the cover charge and the watered-down drinks. Even the paid porn sites have plenty of freebies, pictures and video clips and fetish trappings. When you’re at home, you can just rub one out when you get the urge. You can’t do that at a club.
Sure, some men have tried it here, but a quick word from Yusef usually convinced them to take it outside, or at least to the men’s room.
I think men come to the club as a way of convincing themselves—in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that they’re still the dominant sex on the planet.
And what’s the one thing men like playing with even more than their dicks?
Guns.
Men love guns.
That’s my gimmick.
I can’t dance for shit but the men love the guns.
I come out on stage like gun-whore Barbie, wrapped in bandoliers and strapped with holsters in all sorts of interesting places.
I writhe around for awhile and then fellate a Desert Eagle—always a crowd pleaser—and then finish off by firing a pair of Colt .45s hanging on either side of my g-string.
The crowd always goes nuts at that point.
They think I’m using blanks.
They’re wrong.
If they even notice the little puffs of powdered concrete when the bullets hit the back wall, they think it’s part of the show.
JoJo thinks I’m a crazy bitch and he’s right about that, but I’m the star attraction.
The audience eats it up.
Of course they do. It feels dangerous in a safe way, like fucking a crack whore while wearing a condom.
They’ll never see it coming whe day I aim to kill.
I’ll take Yusef out first—he’s the only one who might be fast enough to stop me.
The others? It’ll be just like target practice, only more fun.
My daddy taught me two things in life—how to give a decent blowjob and how to handle a gun.
“Gun control,” he used to tell me, “is hitting what you aim for.”
I was daddy’s good girl.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Getting Lucky with Google Alerts
I love Google Alerts. I love having digests of news stories on topics of interest delivered to my email in box every day. Sometimes the alerts are short-term, reminders so I won't forget an upcoming event (a book publication date) or way of researching a specific project. What I love about Google Alerts is that even if you're careful about defining and refining your search terms, you can get some bizarro results.
Right now I have a Google Alert on Grimm, the upcoming NBC television series. I don't watch a lot of television and I'm always missing shows that sound interesting because I forgot they were on. And if they're not on Hulu or CastTv, I'm cooked. And don't tell me to DV-R them. To do that, you have to know when they're on in the first place. Hence the Google Alert.
So I get my Grimm Google Alert today and it includes this news story roundup from August 9, 1911, an account of various goings on at the time, including a speech by a suffragette named Miss Harriet Grimm. She stopped speaking when a dog fight erupted up the street, realizing that no one was listening to her. (She had a sense of humor about it.) I hope Miss Grimm lived to cast her first ballot.
Right now I have a Google Alert on Grimm, the upcoming NBC television series. I don't watch a lot of television and I'm always missing shows that sound interesting because I forgot they were on. And if they're not on Hulu or CastTv, I'm cooked. And don't tell me to DV-R them. To do that, you have to know when they're on in the first place. Hence the Google Alert.
So I get my Grimm Google Alert today and it includes this news story roundup from August 9, 1911, an account of various goings on at the time, including a speech by a suffragette named Miss Harriet Grimm. She stopped speaking when a dog fight erupted up the street, realizing that no one was listening to her. (She had a sense of humor about it.) I hope Miss Grimm lived to cast her first ballot.
Mystery Lovers' Kitchen Shrimp in Coconut-Lime Glaze
I love food.
I love mysteries.
I love blogs that talk about mysteries and food. One of my favorites is the Mystery Lovers' Kitchen site where today's post is for this delectable-sounding Shrimp in Colonut-Lime Glaze. Fire up your grill.
And thanks MJ!
I love mysteries.
I love blogs that talk about mysteries and food. One of my favorites is the Mystery Lovers' Kitchen site where today's post is for this delectable-sounding Shrimp in Colonut-Lime Glaze. Fire up your grill.
And thanks MJ!
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Stowaway--a short story inspired by Poe
This story was inspired by Bete Noire Magazine's call for submissions for their In Poe's Shadow anthology.
STOWAWAY
P. Ross Spero saw it coming. The economic collapse. The failure of the infrastructure. The extreme weather events due to global warming. The pandemics emerging from deforested land. The water wars.
He saw it all coming when everyone else turned their heads in denial.
While the pundits pontificated and the politicians waffled and the aid workers and the doctors and the military were overwhelmed by quantum disasters, P. Ross Spero analyzed and planned and took action.
When he began building the space ship, his escape vehicle from planet Earth, people called him paranoid and they laughed at him. People who had made fortunes investing in his companies—the robo-tech and bleeding-edge genetics and the nano-everything—wondered if Spero had lost his mind.
Two years into what he called “the Prospero Project,” people weren’t jeering any more. What had looked like eccentricity, even madness, now looked like prescience.
The space ark only had room for 1000 people and there was a waiting list of 8000, all of whom had put down a non-refundable payment of two million dollars to assure their place in the queue.
Spero had hand-picked 150 of the passengers—people he thought would be useful in establishing his new colony on Mars. There were male-female pairs of scientists and farmers and engineers and doctors, teachers and construction workers. He even had two attorneys, one a specialist in family law, the other with expertise in contracts.
Spero had selected another 50 people to propagate the arts—musicians and dancers, actors and novelists, poets and painters and artisans. They, like the other “experts,” got what amounted to a “golden ticket” for the ride.
The fee for their passage was minimal—a mere $1500. Three women, all of them beauty queens, none of them older than 21, were offered totally free passage in return for agreements granting Spero exclusive sexual rights for a period of ten years.
Spero was not an ugly man and he was known to be a generous lover, so the three women eagerly signed on, packing sexy underwear in the small duffel bags they were allowed to bring onboard.
None of these “economy class” passengers were gay. Spero only wanted colonists who would procreate and populate his new domain. He made a few exceptions for First Class passengers, but only for a price and only for a few.
The ship was mostly automated, run by an extremely complex computer program overseen by a flight crew of 10 recruited from the remnants of NASA and eight other decimated space programs.
The five-man security team was all ex-military and all had proven themselves under fire.
The crew members counted themselves lucky. Not only were they not being charged for their passage to Mars, they were being paid for their work.
Their jobs also came with a guarantee of their own homestead. The ship’s co-pilot had already made a connection with a cute history teacher and was happily planning her post-voyage life.
The paying passengers had all forked over a hefty price for their cramped berths and uncomfortable quarters. Used to luxury and excess, they now gladly shared tiny cabins and drank recycled water and ate food that was reclaimed from their body waste.
The journey to Mars was not a pleasure cruise. Although Spero had insisted on psychological as well as medical screens for all prospective passengers, there were inevitably some problems.
Most of the passengers suffered from a mild form of claustrophobia. The ship’s doctor prescribed drugs and sessions on the huge observation deck where the giant window offered a view that seemed to encompass the whole galaxy.
That worked for most people but halfway through the voyage, a software engineer from Bangalore had tried to break through the observation deck window with an explosive device cobbled together out of cleaning products and leftover electrical parts.
When security arrived, he fled to the maintenance bay, managed to open a garbage chute, and ejected himself into space.
Part of his boot lodged in the airlock as it hissed shut, amputating Sunil’s left foot above the ankle. The two men who witnessed his death--a former Navy SEAL and an ex-SAS officer—had seen much worse but were still unnerved.
They’d reported the incident in the driest possible military jargon and then sneaked a couple of hits of bootleg booze the ship’s doctor was brewing in sick bay.
Spero, loved jargon. Throwing it around made him feel manly. Almost from the start of the journey, he’d taken to wearing custom-fitted quasi-military garb that made him look like a Third World dictator.
Nobody told him that though. No one wanted to risk igniting his increasingly volatile temper.
Spero’s always larger-than-life personality had begun to decay into something more disturbing. He spent hours on his computer, designing and redesigning the cities he planned to build on Mars after his terra-forming machines had done their work so the atmosphere would support life on the surface of the planet.
He described his architectural style as “future Gothic,” and thought that was a good thing.
The architects he’d brought along to implement his plans soon agreed that his grandiose schemes were just one symptom of his growing mania and made comparisons to the monumental architectural monstrosities designed by Albert Speer for Adolf Hitler.
They were careful not to express these opinions out loud, or even in whispers. The ship was wired with audio and video devices and the feeds all came into Spero’s private quarters.
The Prospero used a high-transfer orbit, burning fuel recklessly to shorten the transit time from the Earth to Mars, cutting the voyage’s duration to 130 days, half the time a more conservative route would have taken.
Even so, two and a third months crammed together in such close quarters is a very, very long time for people who are not used to suffering silently; a long and stressful time. There were no servants aboard the Prospero, no under-class assigned to cater to the passengers’ whims and fancies.
Tempers flared.
There were suspicious accidents, falls in the artificial gravity that should have been survivable but weren’t, incidents with tools slipping and mechanical failures that looked more like sabotage.
When the first murder occurred, Spero and his security team dealt with it discreetly, drugging the killer before dumping him out like so much refuse. He’d still been alive.
But not for long.
When the second murder occurred, a fight over a woman, Spero took more forceful action. He told his security men to film the execution and beam it to every device aboard the ship.
He ordered them to make the punishment messy and memorable.
They obliged.
The accused killer was locked inside an airlock while the oxygen was replaced by a vacuum. The result was viscerally impressive.
The lawyers had argued for a trial but Spero had already decided that his new colony would be a monarchy and the operative legal system would be the Napoleonic Code.
In other words, guilty until proven innocent.
Not everyone was happy with this decision, but since the only weapons aboard the ship were in the hands of Spero’s loyal security team, there were few objections to the policy.
Some of the passengers briefly considered rebellion, but they were of a class that had always paid others to fight their wars for them and they had no idea how to go about it themselves.
It was almost as if they had had violence bred out of them.
Still, resentment simmered just below the surface.
When the red planet first appeared in the observation window, visible to the naked eye, a palpable sense of relief spread through the ship.
What the passengers didn’t know, and what Spero hadn’t told them, was that there was no margin for error on landing. They’d sacrificed so much fuel for speed that if they missed their landing, there would be no go-around.
Fortunately, the landing was textbook. There was a jolt and a shudder and that was it. It was almost an anti-climax.
In celebration of their arrival, Spero threw a party. He produced a secret stash of liquor and freeze-dried meats and fruits, candies and confections, and all manner of delicacies for the new colonists to feast upon.
He encouraged the passengers to dress up for the fête, which was held on the observation deck.
The shutters on the window were wide open, providing all a fine view of the Martian landscape.
Spero even opened up his own suite of apartments, including his inner sanctum, a black-draped bedroom that had a window overlooking the red rocks of their new home. As the sun set on the rocks, it cast a bloody light into the room, giving everything a macabre glow.
While the other passengers had been granted limited luggage, Spero had furnished his suite lavishly with antiques and treasures. All of the furniture, including an exquisite 19th century clock, was made of a black hardwood that was long-since extinct.
His bedroom was luxurious in the extreme but not many wanted to spend more than a few minutes there.
There was something…vaguely repellant…about the over-the-top opulence of Spero’s quarters. Something just a little…sick. Spero’s guests took a quick tour and then retreated to the festivities on the observation deck
The party was a welcome relief for the passengers after so much austerity.
One of the musicians wrote a piece to commemorate the landing and dubbed it “Spero’s Symphony.” Artists endeared themselves to the celebrants by improvising masks both fantastical and grotesque for the party.
The wine and liquor flowed freely and inhibitions were shed just as freely. One of the wealthier passengers, an entrepreneur who’d made a fortune as an electronics recycler in Korea, hooked up with the flight engineer and retired to the ship’s library, which had been painted a soothing blue.
A performance artist and a computer programmer joined forces to produce a holographic puppet show of such stunning invention that they set it on a loop so everyone in the room could have a chance to experience it.
There was dancing and singing and all manner of unrestrained revelry.
In fact, everyone was having such a good time that when two security men dragged in the tall gaunt figure wearing the oxygen mask, at first no one even noticed.
“Stowaway,” the security men reported to Spero, who was more amused than annoyed.
He strolled up to the figure and smiled.
“Welcome to Mars,” he said. “You owe me $50 million for your ticket.”
A few of Spero’s sycophants laughed.
The security men did not.
“Don’t get too close,” the ex-SEAL warned but Spero had been drinking for hours and had lost all sense of situational awareness.
It came as a total surprise to him when the Stowaway suddenly lunged and plunged a small knife into his belly.
Spero fell to the deck, blood pumping from the wound.
The two security men fell on the Stowaway, wrenching off the oxygen mask to get a look at his face.
What they saw made them recoil.
Blood covered his face in Rorschach-like patches.
“Oh my God,” said one of the First Class passengers. “What is that?”
“Looks like some sort of Zaire-Ebola-Marburg strain,” said the ship’s doctor who’d had a whole lot of champagne too. “Nasty stuff. You bleed out of pores.”
She finished off her champagne in one swallow.
“Is it contagious?” the passenger asked.
“Oh yes,” said the doctor, caught in a drunken space between fatalism and dark humor, “close personal contact is one way it spreads.”
She peered at the Stowaway blearily, watching closely as he struggled to shake off his captors.
“It has a one-hundred percent mortality rate,” the doctor added helpfully.
The horrified passenger backed away from the doctor, turned around and ran for the door.
The Stowaway spat in the faces of the men who held him and they let him loose and didn’t follow as he began a circuit of the huge room. It was almost as if he were herding everyone to the exits, like a rancher urging cattle into a chute leading to the slaughter house.
The exodus was not orderly; it was more like a battlefield rout.
One of the lawyers was trampled by the panicked passengers when he fell against a door. The only person who turned back to help him was an agronomist who had successfully concealed his sexual preference.
The first colonists died within two hours, bleeding from every orifice in their bodies.
A media magnate attempted to leave the ship in an environmental suit but with no shelter from the extremes of heat and cold and the too-thin atmosphere, he was dead before sunrise.
He died bloody, his face a mask of red.
The fatalistic doctor was the last to die. She had stayed on the observation deck, toasting her impending doom with the last of Spero’s very good champagne.
When the electricity went out she was glad because it meant she wouldn’t have to look at her own blood leaking out of her pores.
She didn’t notice when the heating grid failed and it began to get cold. Her body was already beginning to shut down.
Hearing is the last sense to fade and so the doctor heard Spero’s ebony clock strike twelve. It took her a moment to realize the clock was still working because it was an analogue timepiece and not digital. Soon after that, the doctor was no longer capable of rational thought.
And soon after that she died in the cold and the dark with nothing but death as her companion.
STOWAWAY
P. Ross Spero saw it coming. The economic collapse. The failure of the infrastructure. The extreme weather events due to global warming. The pandemics emerging from deforested land. The water wars.
He saw it all coming when everyone else turned their heads in denial.
While the pundits pontificated and the politicians waffled and the aid workers and the doctors and the military were overwhelmed by quantum disasters, P. Ross Spero analyzed and planned and took action.
When he began building the space ship, his escape vehicle from planet Earth, people called him paranoid and they laughed at him. People who had made fortunes investing in his companies—the robo-tech and bleeding-edge genetics and the nano-everything—wondered if Spero had lost his mind.
Two years into what he called “the Prospero Project,” people weren’t jeering any more. What had looked like eccentricity, even madness, now looked like prescience.
The space ark only had room for 1000 people and there was a waiting list of 8000, all of whom had put down a non-refundable payment of two million dollars to assure their place in the queue.
Spero had hand-picked 150 of the passengers—people he thought would be useful in establishing his new colony on Mars. There were male-female pairs of scientists and farmers and engineers and doctors, teachers and construction workers. He even had two attorneys, one a specialist in family law, the other with expertise in contracts.
Spero had selected another 50 people to propagate the arts—musicians and dancers, actors and novelists, poets and painters and artisans. They, like the other “experts,” got what amounted to a “golden ticket” for the ride.
The fee for their passage was minimal—a mere $1500. Three women, all of them beauty queens, none of them older than 21, were offered totally free passage in return for agreements granting Spero exclusive sexual rights for a period of ten years.
Spero was not an ugly man and he was known to be a generous lover, so the three women eagerly signed on, packing sexy underwear in the small duffel bags they were allowed to bring onboard.
None of these “economy class” passengers were gay. Spero only wanted colonists who would procreate and populate his new domain. He made a few exceptions for First Class passengers, but only for a price and only for a few.
The ship was mostly automated, run by an extremely complex computer program overseen by a flight crew of 10 recruited from the remnants of NASA and eight other decimated space programs.
The five-man security team was all ex-military and all had proven themselves under fire.
The crew members counted themselves lucky. Not only were they not being charged for their passage to Mars, they were being paid for their work.
Their jobs also came with a guarantee of their own homestead. The ship’s co-pilot had already made a connection with a cute history teacher and was happily planning her post-voyage life.
The paying passengers had all forked over a hefty price for their cramped berths and uncomfortable quarters. Used to luxury and excess, they now gladly shared tiny cabins and drank recycled water and ate food that was reclaimed from their body waste.
The journey to Mars was not a pleasure cruise. Although Spero had insisted on psychological as well as medical screens for all prospective passengers, there were inevitably some problems.
Most of the passengers suffered from a mild form of claustrophobia. The ship’s doctor prescribed drugs and sessions on the huge observation deck where the giant window offered a view that seemed to encompass the whole galaxy.
That worked for most people but halfway through the voyage, a software engineer from Bangalore had tried to break through the observation deck window with an explosive device cobbled together out of cleaning products and leftover electrical parts.
When security arrived, he fled to the maintenance bay, managed to open a garbage chute, and ejected himself into space.
Part of his boot lodged in the airlock as it hissed shut, amputating Sunil’s left foot above the ankle. The two men who witnessed his death--a former Navy SEAL and an ex-SAS officer—had seen much worse but were still unnerved.
They’d reported the incident in the driest possible military jargon and then sneaked a couple of hits of bootleg booze the ship’s doctor was brewing in sick bay.
Spero, loved jargon. Throwing it around made him feel manly. Almost from the start of the journey, he’d taken to wearing custom-fitted quasi-military garb that made him look like a Third World dictator.
Nobody told him that though. No one wanted to risk igniting his increasingly volatile temper.
Spero’s always larger-than-life personality had begun to decay into something more disturbing. He spent hours on his computer, designing and redesigning the cities he planned to build on Mars after his terra-forming machines had done their work so the atmosphere would support life on the surface of the planet.
He described his architectural style as “future Gothic,” and thought that was a good thing.
The architects he’d brought along to implement his plans soon agreed that his grandiose schemes were just one symptom of his growing mania and made comparisons to the monumental architectural monstrosities designed by Albert Speer for Adolf Hitler.
They were careful not to express these opinions out loud, or even in whispers. The ship was wired with audio and video devices and the feeds all came into Spero’s private quarters.
The Prospero used a high-transfer orbit, burning fuel recklessly to shorten the transit time from the Earth to Mars, cutting the voyage’s duration to 130 days, half the time a more conservative route would have taken.
Even so, two and a third months crammed together in such close quarters is a very, very long time for people who are not used to suffering silently; a long and stressful time. There were no servants aboard the Prospero, no under-class assigned to cater to the passengers’ whims and fancies.
Tempers flared.
There were suspicious accidents, falls in the artificial gravity that should have been survivable but weren’t, incidents with tools slipping and mechanical failures that looked more like sabotage.
When the first murder occurred, Spero and his security team dealt with it discreetly, drugging the killer before dumping him out like so much refuse. He’d still been alive.
But not for long.
When the second murder occurred, a fight over a woman, Spero took more forceful action. He told his security men to film the execution and beam it to every device aboard the ship.
He ordered them to make the punishment messy and memorable.
They obliged.
The accused killer was locked inside an airlock while the oxygen was replaced by a vacuum. The result was viscerally impressive.
The lawyers had argued for a trial but Spero had already decided that his new colony would be a monarchy and the operative legal system would be the Napoleonic Code.
In other words, guilty until proven innocent.
Not everyone was happy with this decision, but since the only weapons aboard the ship were in the hands of Spero’s loyal security team, there were few objections to the policy.
Some of the passengers briefly considered rebellion, but they were of a class that had always paid others to fight their wars for them and they had no idea how to go about it themselves.
It was almost as if they had had violence bred out of them.
Still, resentment simmered just below the surface.
When the red planet first appeared in the observation window, visible to the naked eye, a palpable sense of relief spread through the ship.
What the passengers didn’t know, and what Spero hadn’t told them, was that there was no margin for error on landing. They’d sacrificed so much fuel for speed that if they missed their landing, there would be no go-around.
Fortunately, the landing was textbook. There was a jolt and a shudder and that was it. It was almost an anti-climax.
In celebration of their arrival, Spero threw a party. He produced a secret stash of liquor and freeze-dried meats and fruits, candies and confections, and all manner of delicacies for the new colonists to feast upon.
He encouraged the passengers to dress up for the fête, which was held on the observation deck.
The shutters on the window were wide open, providing all a fine view of the Martian landscape.
Spero even opened up his own suite of apartments, including his inner sanctum, a black-draped bedroom that had a window overlooking the red rocks of their new home. As the sun set on the rocks, it cast a bloody light into the room, giving everything a macabre glow.
While the other passengers had been granted limited luggage, Spero had furnished his suite lavishly with antiques and treasures. All of the furniture, including an exquisite 19th century clock, was made of a black hardwood that was long-since extinct.
His bedroom was luxurious in the extreme but not many wanted to spend more than a few minutes there.
There was something…vaguely repellant…about the over-the-top opulence of Spero’s quarters. Something just a little…sick. Spero’s guests took a quick tour and then retreated to the festivities on the observation deck
The party was a welcome relief for the passengers after so much austerity.
One of the musicians wrote a piece to commemorate the landing and dubbed it “Spero’s Symphony.” Artists endeared themselves to the celebrants by improvising masks both fantastical and grotesque for the party.
The wine and liquor flowed freely and inhibitions were shed just as freely. One of the wealthier passengers, an entrepreneur who’d made a fortune as an electronics recycler in Korea, hooked up with the flight engineer and retired to the ship’s library, which had been painted a soothing blue.
A performance artist and a computer programmer joined forces to produce a holographic puppet show of such stunning invention that they set it on a loop so everyone in the room could have a chance to experience it.
There was dancing and singing and all manner of unrestrained revelry.
In fact, everyone was having such a good time that when two security men dragged in the tall gaunt figure wearing the oxygen mask, at first no one even noticed.
“Stowaway,” the security men reported to Spero, who was more amused than annoyed.
He strolled up to the figure and smiled.
“Welcome to Mars,” he said. “You owe me $50 million for your ticket.”
A few of Spero’s sycophants laughed.
The security men did not.
“Don’t get too close,” the ex-SEAL warned but Spero had been drinking for hours and had lost all sense of situational awareness.
It came as a total surprise to him when the Stowaway suddenly lunged and plunged a small knife into his belly.
Spero fell to the deck, blood pumping from the wound.
The two security men fell on the Stowaway, wrenching off the oxygen mask to get a look at his face.
What they saw made them recoil.
Blood covered his face in Rorschach-like patches.
“Oh my God,” said one of the First Class passengers. “What is that?”
“Looks like some sort of Zaire-Ebola-Marburg strain,” said the ship’s doctor who’d had a whole lot of champagne too. “Nasty stuff. You bleed out of pores.”
She finished off her champagne in one swallow.
“Is it contagious?” the passenger asked.
“Oh yes,” said the doctor, caught in a drunken space between fatalism and dark humor, “close personal contact is one way it spreads.”
She peered at the Stowaway blearily, watching closely as he struggled to shake off his captors.
“It has a one-hundred percent mortality rate,” the doctor added helpfully.
The horrified passenger backed away from the doctor, turned around and ran for the door.
The Stowaway spat in the faces of the men who held him and they let him loose and didn’t follow as he began a circuit of the huge room. It was almost as if he were herding everyone to the exits, like a rancher urging cattle into a chute leading to the slaughter house.
The exodus was not orderly; it was more like a battlefield rout.
One of the lawyers was trampled by the panicked passengers when he fell against a door. The only person who turned back to help him was an agronomist who had successfully concealed his sexual preference.
The first colonists died within two hours, bleeding from every orifice in their bodies.
A media magnate attempted to leave the ship in an environmental suit but with no shelter from the extremes of heat and cold and the too-thin atmosphere, he was dead before sunrise.
He died bloody, his face a mask of red.
The fatalistic doctor was the last to die. She had stayed on the observation deck, toasting her impending doom with the last of Spero’s very good champagne.
When the electricity went out she was glad because it meant she wouldn’t have to look at her own blood leaking out of her pores.
She didn’t notice when the heating grid failed and it began to get cold. Her body was already beginning to shut down.
Hearing is the last sense to fade and so the doctor heard Spero’s ebony clock strike twelve. It took her a moment to realize the clock was still working because it was an analogue timepiece and not digital. Soon after that, the doctor was no longer capable of rational thought.
And soon after that she died in the cold and the dark with nothing but death as her companion.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
A short story for Thursday--Kaidan
I am putting together my second collection of short stories, Toxic Reality (due in September), going through them one last time before turning them over to my editor Joy Sillesen of StonyHill Productions.
I'm enjoying the process, although weeding out stories that ... aren't quite there ... has been like killing my children. I wrote this story for Dark Valentine's "Dark Water" fiction frenzy in the spring. I still like it.
KAIDAN
They made a mistake when they took Chika.
Her name meant “near and dear” and so she was to Akihiro Tsukimoto. They had known each other since childhood and now, when both were in the winter of their lives, she remained his most trusted confidante, his closest companion, and his only friend.
Unlike Hiro, whose bones were brittle and whose hair was iron gray, Chika seemed ageless, as supple in her tenth decade as she’d been as a fry. And she was beautiful, her coloration still vivid. She was black, red, and white, a Showa Sanshoku, one of the first of her kind and given to Hiro’s father by Emperor Showa himself.
His father had given Chika to Hiro on his tenth birthday, the same day he’d taken his life in the old samurai way. A gift given for a gift taken away. Only Chika had seen Hiro cry and she kept his secrets.
It would not have been easy to abduct Chika. She was large for her breed, nearly 60 centimeters in length and heavy. Hiro hoped they hadn’t hurt her when they took her from the pond that had been her home for nearly a century. He was sure they’d been tempted to just club her over the head but knew they hadn’t because they’d sent him video of Chika swimming in a tank that was filled with murky water and much too small.
The ransom demand had come with the first video. The kidnappers wanted money and nothing more, which told Hiro he was dealing with amateurs and not a rival. They had to be skilled amateurs to have circumvented his state-of-the-art security system but their lack of imagination and ambition struck him as pathetic. It had been a bold move to take the only thing on earth Hiro loved and if the thieves had followed up their strike with a decisive blow, he would have respected them.
They would still have had to die, but he would have given them a swift and honorable death. Their own cowardice had sealed their doom and earned them a much more unpleasant fate.
Akihiro Tsukimoto was one of the most powerful “senior advisors” in Tokyo’s biggest crime syndicate. He had many “younger brothers” who would be happy to earn a favor from him. It was only a matter of time before Chika was back home and the thieves were in his hands. And then…and then there would be vengeance.
Koi are omnivores. He would feed them to Chika one bloody chunk at a time.
I'm enjoying the process, although weeding out stories that ... aren't quite there ... has been like killing my children. I wrote this story for Dark Valentine's "Dark Water" fiction frenzy in the spring. I still like it.
KAIDAN
They made a mistake when they took Chika.
Her name meant “near and dear” and so she was to Akihiro Tsukimoto. They had known each other since childhood and now, when both were in the winter of their lives, she remained his most trusted confidante, his closest companion, and his only friend.
Unlike Hiro, whose bones were brittle and whose hair was iron gray, Chika seemed ageless, as supple in her tenth decade as she’d been as a fry. And she was beautiful, her coloration still vivid. She was black, red, and white, a Showa Sanshoku, one of the first of her kind and given to Hiro’s father by Emperor Showa himself.
His father had given Chika to Hiro on his tenth birthday, the same day he’d taken his life in the old samurai way. A gift given for a gift taken away. Only Chika had seen Hiro cry and she kept his secrets.
It would not have been easy to abduct Chika. She was large for her breed, nearly 60 centimeters in length and heavy. Hiro hoped they hadn’t hurt her when they took her from the pond that had been her home for nearly a century. He was sure they’d been tempted to just club her over the head but knew they hadn’t because they’d sent him video of Chika swimming in a tank that was filled with murky water and much too small.
The ransom demand had come with the first video. The kidnappers wanted money and nothing more, which told Hiro he was dealing with amateurs and not a rival. They had to be skilled amateurs to have circumvented his state-of-the-art security system but their lack of imagination and ambition struck him as pathetic. It had been a bold move to take the only thing on earth Hiro loved and if the thieves had followed up their strike with a decisive blow, he would have respected them.
They would still have had to die, but he would have given them a swift and honorable death. Their own cowardice had sealed their doom and earned them a much more unpleasant fate.
Akihiro Tsukimoto was one of the most powerful “senior advisors” in Tokyo’s biggest crime syndicate. He had many “younger brothers” who would be happy to earn a favor from him. It was only a matter of time before Chika was back home and the thieves were in his hands. And then…and then there would be vengeance.
Koi are omnivores. He would feed them to Chika one bloody chunk at a time.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
What's in a name?
You say "plucot" and I say..."black velvet apricot."
My local supermarket has been loaded with new breeds and crosses and mixes of fruit this summer. If it's not new varieties of apples, it's forty-nine different versions of melons. (There's an "orange-fleshed honeydew" that's pretty tasty and the lushly delicious "Sugar Kiss" cross is the best melon ever.)
Stone fruits are in season now, so there are three varieties of cherries on offer, including "Royal Anne," which I've only ever seen canned in syrup. And there are all sorts of peaches and plums (including the "Dinosaur Heart" with its greeny-bronze skin and dark red flesh). Yesterday they put out the "black apricots." They're beautiful things. Dark purple like Damson plums or Concord grapes, they are faintly fuzzy like peaches and apricots. They're a 50/50 cross between plums and apricots and the plum genes overwhelm the apricot. It's a delicious fruit, but if you're a fan of apricot-ness, it's probably not for you. On the other hand, there's something called a "white apricot." Can't wait to try it.
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