Tag: fiction

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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Fiction: Their Serene Majesties

Posted on by bryon

Once upon a time, in the faraway land of Arevnia, there lived a handsome king and a beautiful queen. Their Serene Majesties lived in a strong, beautiful castle set midway between the top of a beautiful mountain and a beautiful valley with a long, beautiful lake that trailed off beautifully into the distance. And all their people loved them, and they were very happy.

Just not with each other.

Theirs was a match made in, at best, one of Heaven’s slums, where the Protestant work ethic had never taken root. Heaven’s management held to a strict policy of “no comment” on the matter.

They had loved each other well at first, and had gone to the altar full of joy. Shortly thereafter, however, they began to notice little habits and idiosyncracies and one strained nerve led to another, as will happen. Passion’s flame flickered and faded and they then saw each other in the light of cold wax and charred wick and took a dim view of the subject. Rather than live and let live and love, as wiser couples learn to do, King Arvid and Queen Shelly took counsel of General Grant near Spotsylvania Courthouse and fought it out on that line all summer. And into the fall. And winter…

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Fiction: One True Man

Posted on by bryon

“Let me be certain I understand you,” the president said. “You are arguing against prosecution.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” he said.

“Even though we have clearly identified the lawbreakers and have ample evidence to prosecute and gain convictions.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” he repeated.

“You’ll need to explain why again.”

“Mr. President,” he began, “I firmly believe it is in everyone’s best interest to simply move on from this point; my colleagues and I all agree on this. We don’t wish to wallow in the past. The people are tired of this matter and want to put it behind them.”

“How can we possibly do that?” the president cried out.

“Mr. President, those at the top who organized it all are gone. There is, obviously, a new administration in power and we know that similar things will not happen. To hold these people accountable for the things they were ordered to do would be unfair. They were doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, and even though matters went much further than any of us would have wanted, prosecutions won’t change what has happened.”

“What about the simple, old-fashioned concepts of law and order and justice?” the president demanded.

The other man sighed slightly. “Sir, those are very high-minded ideals, but many of us believe following them blindly is not pragmatic at this time. These men who could go on trial were among the brightest and most capable. If we prosecute them, it will send a signal that government service is dangerous and no place for bright, capable people.”

“These men have lied, have sanctioned torture, and have had people killed. That doesn’t deserve a response from our legal system?”

“Mr. President, we greatly fear that any prosecution could establish the precedent for a new administration taking revenge on the previous one every time there is a regime change. It would be politically destabilizing.”

“The people we’re talking about prosecuting deserve their day in court to plead their cases,” the president replied, “and the rest of us deserve to see that no one, no matter how highly placed, is above the law. Tamper with that and you tamper with the foundation of civilized society.”

“Mr. President, again, these are fine ideals, but…”

“But nothing!” the president fumed, and he slammed his open hand down on his desk. “I’ve had enough of your bullshit! The trials will go forward, as scheduled, in Nuremberg. And I hope I never again see the day when any official of the United States would shy away from our sacred responsibility to justice. Get the hell out of my office!”

The defeated bureaucrat slunk out of the Oval Office in the direction Truman’s finger pointed.

“How do people get into government without understanding its most basic functions?” Truman mused. “I can only hope this pusillanimous attitude doesn’t spread.”