Category: fiction

Fiction: Memento

Posted on by bryon

“Can you believe this?” Tachibana asked. “T-minus four hours and counting and suddenly the captain has an unscheduled errand for us to run.”

Svitenko shrugged. “She’s the captain,” she said. “At least we’re here in the cockpit and don’t have to suit up.”

“That’s the other thing. She is the captain. She should have a million things to do this close to leaving Earth. Instead, she’s doing this herself and is going EVA.”

“Must be something pretty important to bobble up the schedule like this at the last minute,” Svitenko suggested.

“Given our landing coordinates it looks more like a pilgrimage. Chief Tak was pretty upset with losing us and the shuttle; he’ll be hopping mad if this isn’t a crucial trip.”

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Fiction: Replacements

Posted on by bryon

“A squid! A squid!” the children screamed.

“That’s right,” their father said happily. “Your very own squid. Go ahead and jump in the pool with him. Have fun!”

The three youngsters squealed their delight. They peeled off their clothing and jumped into the swimming pool to play with their new pet. Soon the squid was wrapping them in its long tentacles and swirling them around in the deeper end of the pool.

“Martin! A squid?” Alice asked.

“He’s a genetically altered 10-footer,” her husband said. “Just the right size for the pool and the kids.”

“But what if he harms the children?”

“There’s a 96-percent safety rate with this model. At least that’s what the salesman said. And even if something goes wrong, that’s what the backups are for.”

Alice couldn’t argue with that, and together they enjoyed the wonderful family moment, watching their three children – Annie, 12; Ron, 9; and Ben, 6 – splashing around with their new friend.

Alice’s concerns were eventually borne out, though, and Ben was heartbroken when his parents had some people come and take away Neptune the Squid.

“But he never killed me!” Ben sobbed. “Just Annie and Ron, and they were mean to him. He loves me!”

Alice rubbed her younger son’s back. “I know, honey, and Daddy and I are very sorry. But activating the backup clones of your brother and sister – and having new backups prepared – was awfully expensive, even with insurance. We can’t afford to keep doing that. But we’ll get you another pet. A walrus, or maybe a seal. Something the geneticists have really perfected.”

Needless to say, nothing can truly take the place of a beloved squid in a boy’s heart.

Fiction: Canoe Trip

Posted on by bryon

“How did it go bad?” Kallack asked.

Pordman sighed.

“Dabbler and I were headed to the state lake. You know, deep water, real good fishing. Planned to go out just after nightfall. All of a sudden, there’s a roadblock dead ahead and more cops than I’ve ever seen — in front of us, to the sides and outta nowhere behind us. I tell Dabbler to stay cool, but Dabbler didn’t know what cool meant or we wouldn’t have been going to the lake in the first place.

“I stop the car. It’s either that or plow into a couple of big cop SUVs, you know. Dabbler jumps out of the car and starts running. I turned away because I knew what was going to happen, and sure enough, a few gun-filled seconds later he’s dead.

“I kept my hands on the steering wheel and waited. It didn’t take long, you know. But I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. The cops drag me out of the car and push me up against the side. That’s when I see what happened.”

“Yeah?” Kallack prompted.

“We had the canoe on top of the car, upside-down like you carry them, you know. And her body was stuffed under the seats and her arms and legs were strapped in place with bungee straps. Well the hooks were just some cheap plastic and one of them broke, you know, and — we couldn’t hear it over the radio — her hand was flopping in the breeze under the canoe. Some driver behind us must’ve called the cops.”

“Rough,” another lifer said.

“Yeah. Dumb ol’ Dabbler bought the stupid things. I’da never bought cheap crap like that. You just can’t get a job done without quality stuff, you know?”

Fiction: The House of the Secret Revealed

Posted on by bryon

“Welcome, Seeker. Welcome to The House of the Secret Revealed. I am Garvey, the Keeper of the Inner Door.”

There were three doors in the small room where they stood. There was the door through which the Seeker had come and that would not open from this side. There was an exit that led away from the waiting pilgrims … and there was the Inner Door. It was richly jeweled with gilt inlays; the oversized handle was bronze and clearly bore, in silver, the shape of a sleeping dog.

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Fiction: Wishing Well

Posted on by bryon

Skunk Borster hadn’t heard his right name in so long it was no wonder he didn’t remember it. His own mother had practically renamed the boy – “You little skunk!” “You skunk! Get out of there!” “Skunk! Don’t think I don’t know who did that!” – when he was only four years old. Most folk in the area didn’t know it wasn’t his birth name and wouldn’t have cared had they been told.

Skunk fit him like a glove and it had pleased him for forty-seven years to live down to it.

The Depression and the War had both been over for some years, but tell that to the hills. There was still no industry in these parts and the miracles of the post-war boom steered studiously away.

As most people did, Skunk Borster tended his own little garden to help keep body and soul together. Sure, he ate the vegetables, but by and large it served as bait for small meaty creatures such as raccoons. This way, Skunk didn’t even have to go hunting; the prey came within twenty feet of his back door.

He had also made a study of getting money out of other people with little or no labor on his part. He was a wonderfully charming fellow, until one made his closer acquaintance. He could get anyone to trust him once, and maybe even twice.

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Fiction: Tag

Posted on by bryon

The handsome young man nervously smoothed his silk tie again. He stood outside the 52nd-floor office of an international trading company, peeking through the door’s small window and waiting until his quarry was in position.

Then he opened the door and strode in quietly. The receptionist barely had time to look up before the man crept behind Gundersen, who was in a conversation with the company president. The intruder smacked Gunderson’s back, firmly but not to hurt.

“Tag! You’re it!” the young man shouted before fleeing the office.

It took Gundersen a moment to extricate himself from his boss, his coffee mug, and the office to chase after his assailant. “I’ll get you!” he yelled down the corridor. “You can’t escape!”

Indeed, there was the young man, standing before a closed elevator door. He was prying the door open.

“No!” Gundersen yelled. “You won’t get away from me!”

The other man summoned every erg of energy he possessed into the muscles of his arms and forced the doors open. He flung himself into the dark, dirty abyss and his laugh echoed down after him. Forty-six floors later, it abruptly stopped.

“Damn you!” Gunderson shrieked. “Damn you!” His howls of outrage now filled the tall space the laughter had vacated.

The young man, William Snyder Craftt IV, left behind a burgeoning law practice and his grief-stricken mother and father, who could not possibly have known that their son was one of a handful of endlessly reincarnated souls who had played tag through the ages and preferred dying and being reborn to being “it.”

But then, children are often unthinkingly cruel to their parents.

Fiction: Living on the Air

Posted on by bryon

Lorraine didn’t believe in astrology. Nor did she, as so many people do, open a book, point to a sentence and use that as a guide for the day. Further, she had no truck with runes or tarot or any other fortune-telling schemes.

She had something much better than all those petty and discredited oracles.

On Monday morning, Lorraine bopped the alarm clock and sat up in bed. As always, she felt the sense of the day’s mystery both surrounding and permeating her. She got out of bed, made it carefully, and went in to shower.

After drying her hair, she poured her usual bowl of bran flakes and made two pieces of toast with elderberry jam, which reminded her of her father. Just before eating, she reached into a drawer. Inside were a little transistor radio, a pair of scissors, and fifty-four unopened packages of AA batteries, two to a package. She drew out the radio, the scissors, and a package of batteries. She cut open the package of batteries and opened the radio’s battery compartment. After placing the scissors back in the drawer Lorraine put the batteries in the radio.

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Fiction: Popgun

Posted on by bryon

“Stay close, now, Philip,” Warner told his son. “It’s still a bit drizzly; you’ll want to stay under the umbrella.”

“It’s OK, Daddy,” Philip said. “I’ve got my hat on. And it’s not too wet out here.”

Warner just smiled down at his 6-year-old who was bouncing a little in place and taking in all the fascinating sights at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, New Jersey. He glanced at the truck from the radio station and that nice Mr. Morrison whom Daddy had taken him to talk to as they waited.

As always, Philip held tightly to his favorite popgun. Both barrels were corked and ready in case of trouble. He wasn’t planning to shoot because the corks in the barrels weren’t attached to the gun with string. They had been, once, but that was a few hundred shots ago and his parents hadn’t yet put new strings on the corks. Eager as Philip was to take aim and let something have it, he knew it would be a nuisance out here.

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Fiction: Keeping Cool

Posted on by bryon

“OK, Mr. Avers,” said Detective Curtis. “Let me make sure I’ve got your story straight. You got here a little after 1 p.m. and had been working on the central air unit in the basement for about half an hour when you heard the shots.”

“That’s right,” Avers agreed.

“You waited several minutes and when you didn’t hear anything else, you came upstairs and looked around.”

“Yeah. Maybe I should have come up sooner, but I was afraid.”

“Afraid isn’t a bad thing when you hear gunshots, Mr. Avers,” the detective told him. “Then you looked around and found the bodies in the living room and you called the police on your cell phone.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

Curtis tipped his head a bit as he looked at the clipboard. “Then you went back downstairs and completed your work on the central air unit, after which you gave an officer your statement.”

Avers nodded in agreement.

“Mr. Avers … I hope you don’t mind my asking, but why did you continue to work on the unit when the people who hired you were dead in the living room? I mean, you’re not likely to get paid for it.”

Avers shrugged. “I never leave a job unfinished. I’ve got my pride, y’know? And besides … isn’t it about 101 in the shade out there?”

“Yeah, it’s a scorcher, all right.”

Avers motioned toward the living room. Curtis looked around the corner where the bodies were lying in blood. It was about 75 degrees in the house.

“Aren’t you glad I kept working?” Avers asked.

“That’s all I need for now, Mr. Avers. Thank you for your help,” Curtis said. He extended a hand to the repairman. “And yes, thank you very much. I guess we’re both making the best of a bad job.”

“Life’s all about keeping cool, Detective,” Avers said. “You can see in there what happens when you don’t.”

Fiction: Ancestral Home

Posted on by bryon

It rained all day on the Gulf Coast of Arkansas. It was a steady, drizzling acid rain that kept 14-year-old Jaci from going down to the shore to see if anything interesting from the Gulf’s past had washed up.

A huge underwater net prevented most things from reaching the massive seawall, but once in a while something interesting from sunken Louisiana would get through a big hole or over the top and through the seawall’s little channels. The Coast Guard’s hazmat beachcombers notwithstanding, it was usually a local child who found it first and then ended up in the hospital for treatment of a wound or decontamination or both.

Jaci didn’t complain to her parents about not being able to go to the beach. She’d been told often enough not to go there anyway; she’d just get another lecture and no sympathy.

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