"And All the Tribes of the Earth Shall Mourn" at Mythic Delirium

Mythic Delirium returns with, among many others, my story "And All the Tribes of the Earth Shall Mourn," in which a man fails to understand other people's religious ecstasy, and also McDonald's.

UFO 3 Out Now!

The grand and hopefully long-standing traditional annual UFO anthology is out early!  My story, "Why I Bought Satan Two Cokes on the Day I Graduated High School," can be read there, along with a lot of other very funny stories by people more famous and better at writing than I am.

You can buy it at Amazon or (eventually, I presume) from the UFO Publishing page.

Smuggling Dragons

The 7-11 parking lot was empty except for the rust-eaten white Buick.  The guy standing beside it looked like low turnout at the casting call for Suspicious Character #5.

“You got the money?” he greeted me.

I stared at him levelly and indicated the junker.

“Money first.”

The roll was all hundreds.  We’re thorough.

“All right.”  He popped the trunk and cracked it.  A gout of flame nearly took his hand off.  I saw a glimpse of a golden, slit-pupiled eye.  “Satisfied?” he asked.

“I’ve seen enough,” I agreed.  I pulled out my badge.  Fish and Wildlife.  “You’re under arrest.”

Bean Sidhe

The banshee’s wail heralds the death of a loved one.  The popular imagination has imbued the shriek itself as ill-omened or deathly, but in truth, it is not so.  It is only sorrow for the death that comes to us all.  Being fae spirits, they sense the death as or even before it happens, and their cries honor the fallen, eerie and upsetting as mortals might find it.

The world is broader, now.  Faster.  More connected.  Moment by moment, now, they fall, and moment by moment the banshee sings them to sleep.

Play them off, Keyboard Cat.  Play them off.

Hand-made, Locally Grown, Artisanal

Emily looked over the makeshift table, lips pursed.  The nightmare peddler swayed, ugly face indifferent.

“This one?” Emily asked, pointing to an angular silver one.

“Cut you,” the man grunted.

“And these?”  Two distressed yarn balls.

“Spiders.  Spiders everywhere.”

“Not very creative,” Emily sniffed.

“Scare you,” the man gasped, “to death.”

Emily raised an eyebrow and smirked.  “We’re done here,” she told me.

We’d crunched three steps across the gravel when the nightmare man spoke again.  “No,” he said.

The opening of his tent was dark behind him.  “Please,” he said again, straining to focus his eyes.

We kept walking.

Contributions to the War Effort

It’s Donation Day, and we line up outside the cafeteria.  Afternoon classes are canceled, which would be good except today is Art day.  I like Art class.

I line up with the others.  One by one we pass by the open warhead and add our hatred of the enemy to the seethe.  When I make the sign and spit, only a few dribbles emerge.  The soldier doesn’t say anything, but I know he’s recording it all.  Too many under-donations and my whole family will get marked as Unpolitical, maybe even Seditious.

I can’t even feel very upset about that anymore.

Rush

The Beast passes by, and we must jump.  I jump well and catch hold of the thick fur along his flank.  My sister Mia does not jump so well, and she falls.  I wish that I could have caught her.  I wish that anyone could.

The Wall looms ahead.  How many of us, clinging to his hair and skin, will be shaken off by the impact?  And even then, what will we find on the other side but more Beasts, huge and terrible and indifferent?  It is no way to live.

But I will live.

The Beast is gathering speed.

GISHWHES 2014

So apparently there is a thing called the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen, and one of the items on this year's list is to get a "published SF author" to write a 140-word story with the phrases "Misha," "Queen of England," and "Elopus" in it.

Well, shoot, son.  Y'all have come to the right place, I tell you what.

Hit me up on Twitter @scattercat or here in the comments; I get e-mails either way.  Drop a few dollars in my hat over there to the right and you'll have your story ASAP.  :-)

"Roundabout" at IGMS

My borderline-sociopath-versus-evil-elder-god-of-the-U.S.-highway-system story is up at Intergalactic Medicine Show, right here.  And no more paywall over yonder, either!

Measured in Coffee Spoons

Herbert wandered, lost in thought.  He came to a fork in the road.  Confused, he bent and picked it up.  Fine silverware, no sign of tarnish.  Curious.

"Well?" said a voice from below.  Herbert glanced down to see a kneeling man in what had once been a fine suit, now dirty and bedraggled, straining at the seams to contain the immense girth of its owner.  Indeed, it was odd he hadn't seen the man, so large was he.  His mouth was smeared with dirt.

"Well," the man said again, "start eating." 

Eventually, Herbert regretted taking an extra cake at tea.

Social Engineering

Nua was disconcerted when she entered Tyo's apartment.  "Last week this was a shitty economy with a roach problem," she said, eyeing the solid gold fountain bubbling with Dom Perignon.  Overhead, a flock of phoenixes sang classic Limp Bizkit songs with full orchestration.

"Yeah, well," Tyo shrugged.  "I found the old Telnet server God used to make the universe.  Dude never changed his password.  Old people and computers, right?  Family members and birthdays, t'cha."  Tyo spat and laughed.  A diamond robot scurried out to clean the marble.

"Twelve twenty-five?" Nua asked.

"Jeez, how Americanized are you?  One over zero, babe."

"The Shallows" at Toasted Cake

So if you aren't listening to Tina Connolly's Toasted Cake podcast, first, you should do that, so go ahead.  I'll wait.  They're short, mostly.

You can then listen to the newest episode, which features "The Shallows," originally published at Flash Fiction Online.  :-)

Apparently No One Had Actually Staked a Claim Before

"Mine!" Jory yanked the toy truck away.

"Come on, what do we say?" said Greg wearily.

"MINE!"  Jory ran to the front door and tugged at the handle.  He spun and pointed at the rest of the house.  "Mine!"

"Hon?" said Rachel from the kitchen, "why did the mortgage statement come in Jory's name?"

"Open door?" Jory instructed.

Greg hesitated.  But then, it was his house.

Jory ran outside and gripped the ground.  "Mine!"

He really couldn't do much worse, Greg reflected, as the helicopters and sirens started in the distance, coming to retrieve the toddler who ruled the planet.

Unseen Workers

Cursing, the doll-sized gnome picked himself up from the plaster dust and the splattered remnants of breakfast.

"You were in the ceiling," Brent said numbly.

"Cripes," said the gnome.  "Now we're in it."

"Why do you have pliers?" Brent asked, beginning to feel concerned.

The gnome tried to dodge aside, but Brent menaced him with a fork.

"Look, I'll give you a hint, okay?"  The gnome held up his pudgy hands.  "Your warranty ends tomorrow, doesn't it?  On the dryer?"

"...what?"

"Just act surprised.  That's all I can safely say."  The gnome tapped the side of his nose and fled.

Expedition

"What we're primarily interested in," said Neeling, stepping cautiously across the feed-yard, "is how you managed to cross in the phoenix.  They're rare, finicky eaters, and ? most pertinently ? parthenogenic.  We'd never managed to even get one to survive long in captivity.  How did you manage it?"

Clem shrugged.  "Patience."  

There was a commotion to the side.  One of the birds was standing stiff, hiccuping.  Neeling stared.  "For myself, I suppose I might ask... why?"

The distressed bird emitted a single, sharp cry, then burst into brief flame.  Clem stepped in and plucked up the sizzling body, now denuded.  "Self-cookin' chickens."


The expedition to the polar entrance of the hollow Earth went as smooth as silk.  Even the descent had been no trickier than expected, the zeppelin inflating without issue and only a few moments of upsetting free-fall when the pressure differential started to collapse the bag.  Now they were landed safely on the safe green sward of one of the interior continents, and the Turing Automatic Servant was working to translate the language of the short, fuzzy bipeds that dwelt there.

"They want to know," the robot said in its metallic voice, "how we got out of the hollow universe."

A Red and White Fuse, Burning Slowly

A few seconds of ticking from inside a jack-o-lantern: that's all the warning we got before Halloween exploded.  It was a terrible scene; ghosts splattered against windowpanes or spread across streets like ectoplasmic butter on burnt toast; witches jammed hat-first through trees, their striped stockings all higgeldy-piggeldy; splintery candy shrapnel peppered walls, doors, and the occasional cursing parent; and everywhere, everywhere, the sobbing of children deprived of sugar.

But it could have been worse.

In a couple of months, we might have aerial bombardment to worry about.  How many presents do you think Santa stores in his sleigh at once?

The Backwards Man

I met a backwards man today.  His head face the right way, and he walked forward.  No rakshasa nonsense or anything like that.  But he was backwards.  I could tell.  He moved against the flow of the current.

The first thing he did was pull a knife out of my back.  He slapped me across the face, then leaned in for a lingering hug.  He kissed me on each cheek and walked away, waving in greeting.  I watched the bubble of mild confusion in the people around him until the crowds obscured him completely.  Totally backwards.

I kept the knife.

First Person

The First Person was on the move again.  It hadn't changed position in subjective years.  What that meant outside the game, the NPCs couldn't be certain; they only had the barest notion of what 'outside' even meant, and differential time flow was only one of many theories the best NPC scientists had managed to concoct to explain measured discrepancies.

The First Person was unstoppable, a juggernaut, a demigod, but it had long since stopped trying to hunt and kill the NPCs with any verve or vigor.  It barely even bothered to gun them down if they passed through its line of sight, though as catastrophically (and expensively, though again, 'money' was a theoretical construct for the NPC population, and most of them thought it was too silly to be real) overpowered as the First Person was, "barely bothered" tended to obliterate a few neighborhoods every time someone misjudged the placement of their hit boxes.

Now, though, it was moving.  It found the streets deserted, and though it might have entered the buildings and slaughtered every living thing inside quite easily (every year, another NPC inventor insisted they'd found a way through the invisible walls that penned them into their levels, but none had ever worked), it ignored the doors and alleys and ladders, instead plowing straight ahead, guns bristling, only firing off a rocket to jump from every now and then.

No one knew where it was going, but everyone wanted to keep out of its way.  On the other hand, no one wanted to let it completely out of sight, either.  Better to know which way the danger might be coming from.  So the NPCs trailed along at as safe a distance as they could manage, across the miles and through the levels.  Cycles passed and animations reset.  Items spawned and despawned, and still the First Person walked on.

Then, at last, they saw something coming the other way.  Another armored colossus, another following cloud of terrified NPCS.

Another First Person.

No one in the crowd had known there could be more than one (though the NPC poet-historians could recite the oral history of the servers and their long, slow decline.  Ping, ping, lag, went the mantra, in pursuit of the mystic state of latency).  A second First Person.  It seemed somehow obscene.  How long had it been since anyone had seen another?  How long had it been since anyone had even learned the word "multiplayer"?

They thought they had seen destruction.  They thought there was no more that could be done to them.

They soon learned otherwise.

Fun Factory

Jake found happiness under the couch cushions.  It was drippy.  It had been there a while.

Years later, the factory was fully automated.  Extractors, dehydrators, compounders, filters.  It squirted seltzer into bottles dosed with the minimum active dose of essence of happiness, added sugar and a label with a barcode, and shipped them out in pallets.  The trucks never stopped.

The main laboratory was off-limits to all non-authorized personnel, which at this point meant functionally everyone.  The sealed titanium "Happiness" cannister had long since fallen empty and dry as dust.

What Jake had discovered was that it didn't actually matter.

Good Cop

Ramsey pulled the badge off using both hooves.  The slick plastic stuck to his wool and squirmed from his grasp as if alive; it had, after all, been designed for someone with claws.  Lupine sniggers filled the locker room.  No one met Ramsey's gaze when he glanced around.

"I think it went okay out there today," said Doulpho.  He was Ramsey's partner, gray fur showing all around his muzzle.  Doulpho didn't like the situation, Ramsey knew, but Ramsey gave the old wolf credit for keeping a positive attitude on the outside.  For trying.  "It's hard for anyone to be the first."  Doulpho coughed and scratched at his chin with one paw.  "Hey, look," he said slowly, "it's Friday.  Everyone's going down to the watering hole after work..."

Ramsey could sense ears pricking up all around them.  Barely suppressed snarls vibrated in a dozen throats.  Inside his head, Ramsey adjusted his opinion of Doulpho sharply upward.  Assuming the offer was genuine, Doulpho had just made a lot of enemies for the sake of a comradely gesture.  Ramsey forced a smile.  "No, thanks, Doulpho.  I've still got those night classes.  Maybe next week."

Doulpho nodded his understanding, his predator's eyes wide.  The tension in the room ebbed slightly.  No sheep in the bar, not yet.  Ramsey worked his bulletproof vest over his horns, which just this year had started to curve inward at last.  Fuck the night classes.  He'd go home and watch television, then sleep.  Then on Monday he'd come back, and the job would start again.  He'd wear a badge.  He'd carry a gun.

He would be a cop among wolves.