Category Archives: Short/Flash Fiction

Bad Dolls

This is an alternate universe story about an America where German genetic scientists were brought over during Operation Paperclip and created clone factories of perfect humans. Barbies, Kens, GI Joes, Matt Houstons, all the perfect plastic people from our world molded in living flesh in theirs. In this bit, two enforcers from the people factory pick up a wayward Barbie working outside the accepted industries for “reprogramming”. She could have been a doctor or an astronaut…but not a stripper. Not in this world…

———-

Across the street, the dark van sat silently. It had started life as a Malibu Barbie Surf Van, but the bright colors had long ago been covered by spray cans of poorly matching matte blacks.

The flickering neon sign on the front of the Bad Doll was reflected off the van’s windows, swallowed up by its sides. The “B” in Bad kept going on and off, alternating from a promise of naughtiness to a misspelled marketing campaign.

A Barbie stepped cautiously out of the shadowed alley to the side of the building. Coming off shift, wearing shapeless sweats, leaving by the back door like they were supposed to, so that the customers didn’t see them on and off stage.

She looked up and down the dimly lit street, empty of traffic at three am. She looked at the van for a moment and its occupants looked back at her, but she couldn’t see them behind the mirror tinted glass.

“She knows she’s not supposed to be here.”

“Yeah, nervous that one is.”

The Barbie evidently decided to ignore the van, that it was no threat, that it was just part of the scenery, scenery you wanted to ignore. She walked down the block past it towards the main strip, where she could get a cab back to the life she was supposed to be living.

Behind her the van’s engine purred to life and she felt a chill that made her perfect skin tighten, despite the moist heat of the summer night.

The van moved slowly past her as she walked steadily on ward, watching out of the corner of her eye. She relaxed a little as it passed, not noticing the footsteps behind her until the strong hands of the Joe slipped a cloth around her face and she smelled the reek of chloroform.

Eeyore’s Cocktail Party

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In which our favorite depressed donkey finds that it is better to give than to receive, Owl learns a valuable lesson in spelling, Kanga discovers something about leaping, Pooh finds that all stories are actually not about him, and many other interesting things are revealed.

None of them pretty.

  • Piglet on a Blanket
  • Kanga and Roo Take a Leap of Faith
  • Tiggers Mostly Bounce
  • Eeyore’s Cocktail Party
  • The Payment Continue reading →

Shamus/Shaman

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It was dark in the Stygian depths, and a light drizzle of sulfur didn’t help any as I made my way into the gloom. Up ahead was a red glow that I knew wasn’t a neon sign, and the chorus of cries from damned souls echoing off the dank walls was enough to make me wish I was back in my office, worrying about bills I hadn’t paid and promises I hadn’t kept.

I couldn’t turn back, not and face myself. Sure, the kid shouldn’t have gotten in deep with the old ones, but she swore she’d learned her lesson…and I’d taken the job of getting her the chance to prove it. This could take some time though, and as it was the shortest night of the year, time was something I was didn’t have much of.

I’d come in from out of the cold, chilled to the bone from the cold winter air, and though the heat up ahead was making me sweat, I still felt an icy grip on my heart.

“Hey. You aint supposed to be down here…not without a special invitation.”

A hand gripped my shoulder, as rough as the voice that came with it.

My shoulder was being held by a vice, and there wasn’t a lot I could do about it, including turn my head to look my new friend in the eye. My hand was free, but the piece in my pocket was loaded with silver jacketed 9 mils, and I knew from painful experience that slugs weren’t likely to make much of an impression on a low grade demon, especially since this one was little more than a mass of animated rock. The little scissors on my swiss army knife probably wouldn’t help either, but this wasn’t my first rodeo, and I knew the rules of the game.

Paper covers rock.

I slid a folded sheet of parchment out of my jacket and held it up for the demon to see (Yeah, I know parchment isn’t paper, it’s skin. In this case treated kosher skin, which works much better. And if you really thought I wasn’t going to mix metaphors, you don’t know me.).

“This is my handy all purpose special invitation, Rocky.” I said out of the side of my mouth while holding up the codex like the ticket to hell it was. “You’ll note that it specifies that, and I quote, ‘any duly authorized shaman may enter the underworld for the duration of sundown portion of the winter solstice, as experienced by said shaman’s corpus residuum.'”

Which is to say, when you take a walk on the dark side, you leave your physical self at the door and take your spectral self along. Really, it’s the same deal for anyone on the other side who comes to call on the quick, all we get is their ectoplasmic projection, but that doesn’t mean it’s not connected to the corpse. Or that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, if you get my drift.

The hold on my shoulder loosened, and I turned to look at my metamophic mugger with eyebrows raised.

“I’ve got to see a demon about a dame. Care to come along?”

An Adventure With Rock

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Rock, relaxing/guarding the couch.

Rock, relaxing/guarding the couch.

Rock and I were walking along a trail made from cooled magma, which was pretty much all there was in those days.

Rock, as you may or may not know, is my pet dinosaur, who happens to be a stegosaurus, and by extension a leaf eater, but he thinks he’s an attack dinosaur, and so far nobody has dissuaded him from this belief.

Rock veered off into a stand of big ferns by the side of the “road” and chomped down on an especially tasty looking plant, which he dragged along, picking off the leafy fronds until there was nothing left but a stalk, which he shook from side to side and tossed aside with a snap of his head.

“You know what I wish?” Rock growled.

“That you had opposable thumbs?” I raised my eyebrows as I turned to look at Rock shaking his large head.

“No. I wish that deciduous trees would hurry up and evolve so that you could invent the stick.”

“The stick is a great invention.” I agreed. “From it comes the lever and all manner of force multiplier tools.’

“Well. Yes,” replied Rock. “Mostly I was thinking that you could throw it for me and I could run and bring it back.”

“I could throw you a bone.”

“It’s not the same. For one thing, if you throw them too high they turn into shuttles on the way to the space station, which is too high for me to jump.”

“Good point. And since that’s a jump of a million years or so by itself, waiting for it to come back down would get old.”

“So how long before trees evolve? ”

“Hmm. Given that we’ve got 25 foot ferns and it’s warmer than I care for, let’s call this the Upper Carboniferous period. 300M before history. In another 50M or so you can have something like a pine tree, but hardwoods need cold to evolve, and that could be a while.”

“Well, you could throw a bone if you kept it low.”

Up ahead something was raising a cloud of dust. Rock raised his head and stared down the road.

All Judgement Fled

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fanIt was hot in DC, which is to say it was August. And this in a town built on a swamp that no one wanted anyway. Fortunately for me, my offices aren’t in the Capital (area with an “a” object with an “o”) but on a side street in Alexandria which got spurned by yuppies even before the housing bubble popped like the soap bubble of dreams it was.

Even so, it was damn muggy in my office, and the aging swamp cooler was losing its battle with the thermometer, which was pushing the century mark on the outside and working itself up to it by way of the mid afternoon sun beating against my windows. My shades were drawn, but they were cheap cloth and instead of granting some decent darkness, they glowed like the filaments a lightbulb…the kind that had filaments, and were too hot to touch.

There are other things too hot too touch as well, and the minute she walked into that office I knew she was one of them. Long legs that flowed into stilettos that could stab a man in the heart without ever pricking his skin, a red dress that clung to her body like a drowning man clung to a scrap of wreckage, and sensual lips that had been painted to make the dress seem tame and looked every bit as soft as the blue eyes above them looked hard.

Yeah, she was hot all right, and I’m not talking about the bead of perspiration that glistened just above her lip, begging to be tasted.

Fortunately for me, I’m not a punk kid anymore, waiting for some damsel in distress to wander in so I can save her and win her affections in the process. At least that’s what I kept telling myself, though the beads of sweat that were forming on my brow and the quickening of my pulse as she crossed the room kept making a liar out of me.

I caught the glint off the rock on her ring finger and decided that If she wanted me to find her husband, I’d do it as a public service. Leaving a woman like that untethered was like letting a pit bull run free, or leaving a manhole cover open. Someone was either going to get badly bit or fall in deep enough to break their neck…either way it wouldn’t be pretty. The fan drifted back and forth across the room and a stream of warm air animated the dark curls that drifted down across her face.

And then she spoke, and all judgment fled.