Talk from a Kindling Salesman

 Old Gepetto has one eye.  And only I knows how he lost the other.  You heard tell of that thing he had, a wooden toy that spoke truth and walked around without strings.  Whatever magic it had went bad.  Toy got him drunk one night and tripped him.  And it stared in that eye, nose pointed like a javelin as it said over and over,
   "I love you, papa.  I love you papa."
   Next day I came to deliver the firewood, same as ever.  Old Gepetto didn't buy.  He had a patch, bloody, over his eye.

Still Making Stuff

Posts are becoming more regular, but I'm still far from my goal of writing and dedicating a short story to the blog every week exclusively.  They take a while.  I've got four different stories I'm working on right now, two SciFi and two weird horror.

Nomina: A Train Story is about the terror of losing your anonymity in a crowd.  It's a SciFi story.

Lady Ergot is about a woman who can detect ergot poisoning in granaries.  That's an Ebon the Waste story.  Post apocalyptic SciFi.

Red Gelato is about a spooky ice cream man..nequin.

The Celfer is a weird one.  Definitely the riskiest in terms of complicated plot.  We'll see if I'm in a place where I can tell pull it off.

All the other stories I've been talking about are done.  I sent most of them off, and I have some news to share that will be good in the near future.  But I can't share it yet.  And yes I hate doing that.  I've been setting up some credits I'll be able to drop in the future.

Unrelated, check out the NovoPulp SciFi anthology for 2014 and keep an eye out for the 2015 volume.  The best short scifi G+ has to offer.

That Sun Never Set on Pine Falls

Matthew Wilcox is the one that made the bomb stop exploding.  And no one knew where it came from, or who dropped it.  We didn't even really know the payload, whether it was a full megaton or ten or a splinter from a cluster bomb.  All we knew, when everyone in Pine Falls woke up at three thirty-six and fifteen seconds, is that it was hanging in the sky just outside of the city limits, and that a man named Matt Wilcox had made it stop - just after it started to go off.

Everyone.  Every woman, every child knew that name.

It happened at three thirty-six and fifteen seconds, and the town meeting happened a little less than an hour later.  I say it that way for a reason.  The town meeting happened, it wasn't called.  People woke up, got out of their homes, and they started walking toward city hall to talk about it.  There was a thick orange glow in the sky, just bright enough to trip the sensors in the automatic street lamps, and make baby birds start crying from the nest for early worms.

Some denied what they knew, denied knowing it, claimed it was just the morning sun - and they ignored that the light was coming from up north, over by where the air field was.  A lot of the older folks, who had lived through the Cold War figured that's probably what the target was.  Lots of silos underground up by the airfield.   And Pine Falls was just a bullet hole's width from it on a map.

The mayor got on the phone, called up Califax where the O'nasses Dairy Plant was to see how they were doing.  The phones just whistled, like electric wind through an old house.  He set it down and chewed his cheek for a while, and then assembled a team to head out into the world to check on them.  Sixteen men we never heard from again.  Their trucks just stopped on the highway as soon as they reached the exit to town.  Six people working at the Farm 'n Fresh saw it.  They just stopped moving, like their truck had turned to Polaroid.

The first real question asked, when that strange meeting at the town hall started, wasn't about what had just happened.  It wasn't about the phones, and it certainly wasn't about the truck no one knew had already been sent.  The first question asked when the room finally got quiet, was from Jessica - who was sitting at the head of Pine Falls city counsel.  No one had asked her to go up, but Jessica was known for her initiative and, though young, the people in town tended to listen when she spoke.  Jessica had a good heart, the kind where you could tell just by listening.  It was an odd question she asked.

"Why do we all know it was Matt Wilcox that stopped it?"

And nobody really had an answer.  Matt wasn't much of a man to speak of.  He worked down at the autoshop, but he didn't know much about cars so he was low on the totem pole there.  He was married to a woman of his same forty years, name of Janet.  Janet McHiggens-Wilcox was a nice woman, hard of hearing.  Had no patience for drinkers.  She took the stage next, and Jessica let her.

"I woke up the same as everybody else.  And I knew Matt had done it.  Somehow I knew."  She paused then, shaking her head and pantomiming how her hand had reached over to where her husband should have been in bed, "He wasn't there, though.  I don't know where he went."

"He's up on the hill," Jerry Bivens' kid said.  Jerry Junior was seventeen, sitting at the town hall with his girl Tonny.  They didn't say much else.  Most folks were able to deduce which hill they meant.  The old quarry lip where high school kids liked to go.  You understand what I mean.

Half the town went up there then, to that man on the hill, drunk, stopping that spark from swallowing us all.  He had half a bottle of paint thinner whiskey in his hand, and a receipt for it from Sir Gas-A-Lot where he had made the purchase just a few days prior.  He was sitting on a stump with red eyes, staring as hard as he could into the burning face of a frozen nuclear holocaust with piss snaking his trouser legs.

Janet ordinarily would have started yelling then, finding out that Matt was drinking out in the world without telling her.  But she wasn't mad then.  She just sort of looked at him with a patient kind of love, then up at what he was looking at.  He was rocking a little and talking the words to an old Hank Williams song.  Car headlights were pulling around him, spilling on his back and then to the side as they parked behind him and whole families got out to look up at the sky.

It took the better part of an hour to talk him down off the hill.  Someone brought him a blanket, and others asked him a lot of questions.  Eventually, he agreed to stop staring at the thing in the sky.  He explained later that he had thought the thing would start moving again if he blinked too much, or looked away.  But he had been wrong.  And after everyone got him a fresh set of clothes and enough coffee to sober a little, he said he had the biggest headache of his life - and everyone let him sleep.

Hours passed.  Many hours.  The sun never rose.

More groups were assembling, thinking about leaving town to go out into the world to see if explanations could be found there.  The television channels showed single frozen images on every channel, constant streams of the same tone of sound.  The internet didn't work.  Phone reception all over was fine, but no information came in or went out.  The rest of the world, at least as far as Pine Falls was concerned, had simply stopped in mid stroke.  And so they could see that the world wasn't offering them anything in the way of answers.

Without facts, the townspeople shared words.  At the end of the first day, the mayor's office got wind that a second group, Robby Hicker and his boys had set out to leave town on foot with rifles in hand for anyone who tried to stop them.  They were found in a field, like scarecrows, standing still with their guns.  They stayed like that.  For them, time had stopped.

No one went near them.

Matthew got a lot of visits that week.  Work resumed in the farms, but that first month we mostly stuck to the fields well inside the perimeter of town.  No one knew for sure just how far existence went, how far you could go without getting stuck.  After the first month, the grass kept growing and we used that to indicate where we could and couldn't go.  Signs went up at the edge of town.  Don't go into the short grass.

Hard to say why the grass kept going, but Marge over at the florist shop noticed that all her sunflowers were pointing at that big orange thing in the sky, like it was a sun.  There was no day and no night, just that dull orange raining whatever light we could get down.  And the plants loved it.

That's how Dr. Mackel from the university guessed that time hadn't stopped exactly, as best he could tell.  There was still some kind of a transfer of energy happening, just at a rate slow enough that the nuclear explosion was not harmful, more like a sunrise.  When asked what might have caused something like this, he shrugged angry,

"I don't know, Judith.  Why don't you get a PhD in thermal engineering and tell me?"

The boys in town started up a hobby of sticking arrows in the sky.  After a month, most of the birds disappeared.  Well, they didn't disappear.  They were like a big black halo in a ring around the perimeter of town.  Funerals for the men who stopped in the field never happened.

Dalton Fuller, the greasy spoon line cook was the first one to ask to be taken to the edge of town after his heart attack.  With Pine Falls cut off from the hospital it wasn't looking good.  He asked to be taken to the park at the edge of town, and that's where we pushed his wheelchair - down the hill until it stopped in the short grass, him with his arms up like he was riding a roller coaster.  Dalton Fuller never died, way we see it.

A year passed like that.

Life in the town was simple, but in its own way we were still living through the end of the world - just not the one we had pictured.  We had to learn to live on our own, make what we needed.  Matt stopped working at the auto mechanic's after it closed, and he started working the soil on his property to grow food for him and Janet.  The Wilcox's never had any kids.  Never had the time for it.

Years started slipping past us, and bit by bit the old world faded from memory.  We never exactly forgot about it, but after a few years it came up a lot less in conversation.  Matt Wilcox got older, old enough that his eyes started turning yellow and his doctor told the rest of us that his liver was showing signs of giving up.  He'd been drinking this whole time, quietly, by himself.  He never bothered anybody, so we never really noticed.

And so the second meeting in the history of
Pine Falls was called to discuss Matt.  Janet didn't go to this one.

"Matt's dying," mayor Jessica said, older now, "The doctor says it could be next month, or a year from now.  Now ordinarily I wouldn't consider it our business, but there's that fire in the sky and I'd like to just talk to you and see what you all have to say about it."

"What's going to happen to us when he dies?" someone said.  It didn't matter who.   Anybody could have said it.  We were all thinking it.

"He doesn't have to die," another said.

The dying were like statues, immortal at the
edge of town where they stood in fields, caught mid-stride as they backed away, waving inward.  There was a circle of them all around us, all dressed in their sunday finest.

No one ever had to die.

But leave it to Matt to go off and find that hill while everyone in town figured out what to do with him.  He sat there yellow eyed, staring at that sun with a half bottle of fine scotch in his hand.  When the Sheriff found him, the first thing he did was feel the drunk's neck for a pulse.

Matt Wilcox was dead.  But the sun - our new old sun - never set, never grew and swallowed us up.  It just stood, burning over us in the cool forever morning.

Maybe some day time will start again, but I don't know.  And I don't know what will happen when it does.  I know the bomb will finish what started all those years ago, and whoever tries to find out what happened to Pine Falls will find a crater, same as you'd expect.  I'd say they'd find more bodies than usual buried in the cemetery, but no one's visited it in years.  And without new deaths, there's no need for head stones.

I still get a kick out of some politician somewhere talking to America, mourning our town publicly, saying every life in our town was snuffed out in an instant.  Maybe he's right.  Or maybe our town will just go on forever - in this doomed footprint.

The End

My drain sang a lullaby. I stayed up all night.

I've always held in my mind the definition of the third kind of terror Stephen King gave.  I don't remember the first two, but I remember the third one.

"...when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

That third kind is something I think most horror fans share.

The other night I heard "Things Are Looking Up" coming out of the drain in my bathroom.  It's a nice upbeat song by Billy Holiday.

Horror doesn't seem to be a problem in the wrong context, seen by the right people.  It's when the wrong people show up that things get interesting, the sweet song gets caught in the pipes at three o'clock in the morning, and something turns it bad.  Something starts looking up.

Coming Soon: The Cathedral

I've always liked writing weird fiction, so I knew eventually I'd come across one that was over the top on the weirdness scale.  The weirdest stories are always ones where everything seems to work the exact same way as before, except for one core thing - a small detail that changes everything.

Dave has a normal life living in the rural farmlands of southern Illinois, formerly Chickasaw tribe territory.  Every day is the same.  He wakes up, kisses his sweetheart, makes breakfast, and spends a few minutes training his rooster to crow if it ever sees a strange building floating in on a cloud.  He has a neighbor, an old farmer whose name has been in these parts for four generations.  They all know the cathedral is going to show up some day, with impossibly long pale arms dragging fingertips from sky to Earth.

The story starts with a rooster crowing.

No one knows what it is, where it came from, if its bizarrely familiar motifs have any link to the cosmic spectacle promised in dead men's books.  All they know is what it collects.

The Scent of Fire and Lemongrass

Two figures sat side by side atop a high cliff in the Sonoran desert, watching a small city walk on legs fifteen stories tall across the flat plain in front of them. Robby, the bigger of the two, let out a rattling cough as he leaned down and drew his eye near the scope of the sniper rifle that made up the third shape on the hill, itself hardly dwarfed by the shadow that coughed or the other that spoke.

"What do you see?" Pointer asked as he leaned against the wall and ran the tip of a hunting knife uselessly beneath his fingernails.

"Same as you," Robby said, "The city's alone out there."

"And you aim to keep it that way," Pointer said, his grin gapped and drawing tense, uncertain breaths.

"I aim to keep it that way," Robby repeated, missing the joke as it died in the air like a bird under blighted rain. Robby wasn't a man for puns. He was a man for shooting.

He knew to alternate between the scope and his naturally adept eyes, to watch movement, to breathe. Out there in the desert he might see a mangy rabbit clinging to the shadows as it leaped from rock to thirsty bush. If he saw it, he knew he'd be able to hit it. But the thing on his mind now wasn't anything out in the field, it was the man sitting with his back against the rock slowly sprinkling tobacco onto a sweat damped piece of cigarette paper.

"They say it'll happen today," Pointer said as he deftly rolled the paper into a thin tube and put it between his dry tacky lips, "They found a few of the rebels. They've been singing like gulls up there on the plate."

'He means torture. We've started torturing now,' Robby thought, trying to keep his upper lip from twitching up over his teeth in a reflexive snarl of disgust. He said,

"You believe the talk that the king's lost his mind?"

"We don't know they're being tortured," Pointer said, as if he could read Rob's thoughts. He paused as flame sprang from his lighter and started dancing embers on the end of his cigarette, "Maybe they suddenly found their loyalty."

"You believe it, though. You believe the king's crazy."

"Mm-hm," Pointer hummed around his cigarette, lilting his voice up at the end to signal the affirmative, "Oh yeah."

"We're lucky to be on his good side," Robby said as the crosshairs of the scope traced up to the blinding white tower where the king's window rested. It was high up, even higher than the rest of the city plate that sagged on that ancient whimpering carapace.

"That we are. Still, I've been hearing some nasty talk about the whole affair. Some say we should switch leaders, move away from the status quo into something a bit more democratic. Like the old days."

Robby made himself snort, hoping the sound his throat made was adequately derisive,

"Democratic."

"It would never work, though," Pointer said, "No one with the king's history would expose himself to the will of the people. Not everyone is as loyal as you or me. And you're no rebel, right my friend?"

Robby could feel muscles in his hands twanging, starting to shake. Was it possible Pointer had listened in on the wrong conversation? Had he and a host of the king's other men sniffed him out as a rebel sympathizer? Pointer was better with words, more adept at picking up subtext.

'Maybe,' thought Rob, 'I just thought the wrong thing at the wrong time. That alone might have alerted him.'

"Rob," Pointer said, his hand curling slow as a snake up his leg to where a knife rested in its sheathe, "I notice your rifle has traveled a bit high. Can you see the king through your crosshairs?"

"I was checking for assassins," Robby said as the scope plunged altogether too fast down at the ground once again, "Perhaps someone slipped by without our notice, started climbing the outside. Perhaps someone is in the window right now ready to strike at his back."

"Or maybe," Pointer said as the knife blade started pulling out soundlessly, gliding across well oiled leather and dripping slick globs along its serrated edge, "Maybe you were looking at the old man's back, thinking about the consequences, the possibilities."

"Pointer," Rob said, "Stop talking now. The king does alright by me. I've got three meals a day and a house and a wife to call my own. A man knows where his security lies. If he dies, I lose all of it."

"Still," Pointer said, "I know how you like to drink. And you like to talk."

"Name me a man who doesn't," Rob said, trying to hide behind a gust of laughter, but finding it just wasn't in him. This was it. This was how he was going to be found out. That bastard Pointer had been coming out with him on guard duty for years. And in all that time, Rob had been perhaps too generous with his complaints, his own hatred for the king's brutality. From day to day that wasn't dangerous. But on a morning like this, a morning when men were cloistered behind steel walls dropping every manner of name into paranoid ears...

"Your first wife. She was shot as a sympathizer, yes?"

Pointer's words lit a fire in Rob's chest, and it hungrily crawled outward, like the glowing tobacco spiders at the end of a cigarette. He turned his face away from the scope to stare Pointer down.

Two shadowed pairs of eyes met on that desert cliff to the tune of a cool breeze from the southeast. After a moment of searching Pointer's face, Rob found nothing. It was blank, possibly amused. Rob turned back to the rifle to hide the reflexive fog invading his eyes, nodding silently as he hid in the scope once again. He said,

"Yes."

"And you never even suspected her rebel sympathies," Pointer said, "Not even a little. That's bad luck for someone as suspicious as yourself."

Rob was in his own head now, safely locked away in the unchanging footsteps of history. He was standing over her in the town square, a gun weighing heavily in his hand as she tried to smile one last time.

"You were mad. I could see it on your face," Pointer said.

"Mad," Rob said. He was running over the dialogue from the event again, monitoring his own lips to ensure he didn't start mouthing what his wife had said.

He had caught the spectacle by chance, walking home with a bundle of freshly picked lemongrass in hand. She loved the smell of lemongrass. That's when the blur of white silks fleeing from men built like himself had stumbled out of his home. She stopped, standing in front of him with hard dignified breaths passing between her lips and it was clear. She had been discovered.

The town guard would schedule an impromptu trial to take place three days after her capture, after they had a chance to gain her compliance and give up the other sympathizers in the city. But Rob had taken the gun right then and there.

He had taken the gun and shot her in the street. No trial. No public hanging. No interrogation. He heard the word traitor, and his hand had done the rest without him.

"Such loyalty," Pointer said as he twisted the knife around and jabbed it deep under his own fingernail, trying to draw out the deep muck and grit that had lived there long enough to tattoo his cuticles a perpetual black, "I thought about that a long time."

"Think about it quietly," Robby said, "It's not an easy thing to do no matter. I don't think about it. The sun set that day like any other."

"Your honor restored, you were given a new wife and the king's commendation. But I wonder what we might have learned from her. It might have been even better to keep her alive."

The knife was pinging, tapping against Pointer's long fingernails.

"You know you can't trust a traitor," Rob said, "They will always lie. That you can count on."

"If traitors always lie," Pointer said, "then if I asked you if you were a traitor - and mind you, you were a traitor - what would you say?"

The king was pacing in front of his window now, looking over his shoulder uncertainly toward the hidden spot where his door stood. It didn't look like an event happening in real time through that scope. It looked like a picture, impossibly defined and rendered in full living detail.

Rob watched, listening to the silence, searching it for signs of movement. Pointer already had the knife out. And Rob's back was turned upward toward him, facing danger like a man who had nothing to fear, nothing to hide.

"Same as you in that situation," Rob said.

"What did you think of her?" Pointer asked, "Your wife."

"Don't ask me that," Rob said. Even now he knew the answer Pointer would be looking for. It was that final cynical proof his conscience would need to collect before deciding to kill Rob or let him live.

Say you hated her, curse her memory, and then there might still be some doubt.

Pointer was daring him to speak treason.

Those words were a gentle wind on the fire in Rob's heart. He watched through the scope, nodding imperceptibly long before he would answer. The king in the window walked away in his room, out of sight, out of Rob's crosshairs. There would be no execution today. Of that Rob was certain. No execution but his own.

Because he decided then that he had said enough.

"Pointer," Rob said, "It's none of your goddamn business."

The sun was starting to spill over the rim of the mountain above them, drawing their shadows backward slowly. And as Pointer moved, Rob could see it even from his prone position at the edge of the cliff. He cast his eyes right and saw a hand and a knife drawn in sunlight. Pointer was standing now, having moved out of sight while Rob was watching the king. And he had drawn the knife out, but not to clean his nails.

"My peace of mind, Rob. For our continued friendship. Please tell me."

There was an impossible smell on the morning breeze, overpowering the scent of men and weapons. It was familiar, but distant. And yet it was what Rob noticed as he lay prone on the cliff's edge, dropping his eye from the scope once again to look at the sunlight creeping across the ground.

"Pointer," Rob said. This was it. Die an honest man, or live.

His life had already started to flash before his eyes.

He had never joined the king. He had been born in the city. And when he had sworn his fealty day after day as a child, he hadn't understood the terrible cost.

Rob would be his own man now, if only for this last instant. In his mind he cut every bond tethering him to a lifetime of deception. It was natural, like a ship cutting its anchor. He was smelling lemon grass now. Drifting on unfamiliar water.

"Pointer," Rob said, "I'll tell you now. Men like you can't understand what love is. The answer is yes. I did care about her. And if you need so much to erase that to satisfy your king, then do it the only way you can. The truth is, I hate you all."

There was silence then. It lasted a long time as the two of them passed the moment. Pointer said,

"Something just dropped off the side of the city. A banner."

He was right. It was being held by a dozen specks of hands. Pots were being banged by heavy spoons as men in the background raised rifles overhead rhythmically in chant. Rob lowered the rifle down to read the words on the banner.

DO IT, POINTER.

But he wouldn't have needed the scope to read it. Not if he'd known ahead of time what it might say.

"What do they mean?" Rob asked.

"They mean do it. Kill you," Pointer said as he holstered his knife and leaned his hand on the pistol at his side, "They'll be expecting to hear my gunshot."

"But how could they know?"

"They don't," Pointer said, "They know who I am. They don't know who you are. Not yet. Look up at the tower again."

Once again through the scope, Rob looked up at the tower. The king was hanging out the window by his hands, purple silks blowing in the wind as he ran felt shoes raw on the tower's ivory exterior. He was trying to pull his own weight up, back into the window, past a man with a rifle.

"This changes things," Pointer said, "I would have slept easy if you'd said you hated your wife. As it stands, I might have to let you live."

A strange purple shape was diving to the ground from the tower. In the distance on the city's plate more gunfire was echoing. It wasn't the rattling exchange between two opposing forces. It was the ecstatic rumble of celebration. The king is dead. Long live the king. May we live forever.

There was a scent like fire and lemongrass.

Piss 'N Vinegar

(Image: Marek Okon)

Some people say it's still a colony ship, but I can remember the rainy streets of San Francisco. The rain is where I draw the line. When a ship is big enough to accidentally pick up weather patterns you're not on a ship anymore. And don't even get me started on the rats. We're on a boat full of rats and not a feline in sight. They tried to make machinecats out of metal, but it took mother nature sixty million years to cram enough piss and vinegar into the common felis catus. And the rats evolved to keep up.

Walking in rain without an umbrella is how I first saw Yvette. She had three shadows then, in addition to her own. They were men. Silent men.

"Hey there, blue eyes," I said. Ordinarily that would have been enough to tip a lady off that I wasn't a good man. But when you're living in the guts of a metal arrow flying between worlds, you learn to make compromise. You learn to live without umbrellas, find companionship in a mechanical cat, and take a compliment from a decent man when what you need is a good one. And if the prowlers that stalked away when she embraced me were any indicator, she was in need of some kind of decency. Her hands clasped around my neck and she whispered over the roar of steady falling condensation,

"You take me to a cafe and I'll buy you a drink. This isn't a good night to be alone."

Actually, that summed up the first few hours of our friendship pretty well. If we were ships passing in the night, we were blockade runners - heavy in an indifferent ocean, each one staying afloat despite a cargo hold full of bad decisions. I looked past her into the alley where I saw three shadows, maybe themselves bad decisions, lurch back into the night.

At the cafe we talked about everything but ourselves. That's when her eyes danced across the barcode on my hand, and she divined meaning from the irregular cage bars running from knuckle to wrist. In the past people had their fate on their palms in mystical signatures from the universe. They were interpreted by fortune tellers and gypsies. These days we do things differently. My hand had a signature from the colony ship's detention bloc. This guy did some hard time for some of his bad decisions.

But when she saw it, she breathed a sigh of relief. I know two kinds of men. Those that have crimes to hide and those who haven't had the chance yet - those that have been treated, made gentle.

She knew then that I could never hurt her.

"You folks want a cat?" the old man behind the bar said thumbing over his shoulder at a twitching metal creature grooming itself. The animation was a perfect facsimile of a feline, minus the fur. Minus the piss and vinegar.

"Got an umbrella?" I asked.

"Fresh out."

Always fresh out.

I did sixteen months for robbing this place three years back. When they let me out, the old man behind the counter and I became friends. He knew I couldn't do it again. I had the barcode to prove it. They changed me. When you don't have umbrellas you use a newspaper. When you don't have cats you make one out of metal. And when you don't have decent men...

"Thank you for the time, stranger," Yvette said, "Mind walking me home?"

When you don't have decent men, you work with what you've got. I carry a gun all the time now, but damned if I can pull the trigger. Something in me just won't let me do it. I'm in that cage on my hand that says I've been tamed.

When we file out the door for Yvette's apartment I think about her shadows. If they come out of the woodwork out there on the rainy street I wonder if I could do it to protect that pretty blue eyed girl. That's when my trigger finger twitches, and there's a sour taste on my tongue.

Tastes like vinegar.