What We Don't Talk About

“Breakfast!” Mom trilled.

The horror opened its misshapen jaw as the bowl of porridge passed.  Green sludge dripped between its crooked, needlelike teeth and spilled with a hiss into the vessel.

“Mom...” said Harriet. 

“Shush!” Mom said.  She turned away, deliberately not looking at the horror’s spiked tail as she stepped over it.  “Eat your food.”

“But I can’t.  It’s...” Harriet paused.  The horror was staring at her, tense and readyAll she had to do was acknowledge it, just once...  “I don’t want it.”

“Well, you have to sit with us until we’re done,” Mom said.

“Okay.” 

The horror waited.

Success in Your Chosen Field of Endeavor

"Aha!" said the Great Detective.  "I see that the murderer was a tall man, imposing and likely popular with the ladies."  He hefted the great brass candlestick, the blood yet dripping upon his sensible leather shoes.  "That this crime occurred recently is obvious, but what is less obvious is the motive.  In truth, even I - are you listening?  Are you listening? - even I might find it difficult to unravel were it not for the crucial, one might even say the crowning insight of my career."

He leaned in and whispered, "It's easier to solve them if you do them yourself."

Sunday, Early Morning

Trash day.  Simon heaved a sigh and smiled.  All down the street, the lumpen gray-green trash bins stood sentry beside his neighbors' driveways.

"C'mon, Bugsy."  Simon rattled his dog's leash and walked on, enjoying the pre-dawn chill.  But Bugsy whined and held back, refusing to step onto the grass to do his business.

"What?" Simon asked.  Abruptly, he heard a peeping sound.  He leaned closer to the garbage bin.  "It's only a frog, Bugsy."  He considered trying to let the poor thing out, but he had no idea how he'd find it.  This wasn't even his bin.

The peeping returned, more forcefully.  There must be several frogs, two or three.

Louder.  Perhaps ten...

Louder.  Twenty?

The sound kept increasing.  Simon stepped back, Bugsy cringing at his heels.  There were deeper croaks, now, the sounds of larger frogs.  He almost expected the bin to start vibrating with the force of the voices within.

Something bumped Simon's back and he jumped with a shout before he realized he'd run into the bin across the street.  Then he heard the peep behind him.  And another.

One by one, all down the street, the frogs - the things in the trash bins - began to call.

In the Dark and the Wet

At first, Ida thought the child was crying, slouched on her knees in the road, covered by an oversized raincoat.  He could see her shoulders shuddering, gleaming wet in the streetlamp's glow.  There was a dark lump on the road before her, visible as a gap in the yellow lines.  Had someone run over her dog?

He slowed when he heard her chanting.

When he saw her hands rise to her mouth, he stopped.  With a grunt and a tearing sound, she began to chew.

By the time he realized it wasn't a raincoat at all, it was too late.

The Nearness of You

The walkway offered one of the most magnificent views in one of the most architecturally rich cities in France, but Nicky's eyes stared out, unseeing.  She kept her feet moving forward, one after the other, and didn't stop to look down for fear she might find the prospect tempting.  This wasn't how she'd wanted the trip to end.

The cold stone of the elaborate gargoyles passed under her hands; sloping backs, rough and weather-pitted rock, a brief bristle of sparse and wiry hairs...

Nicky paused.  Hairs?  She whirled.

Nothing was there.  All around her, the night was silent and still.

Symbiote

Naomi kept her distance, unwilling to sit.  The gleaming black eyes of the furred predator flashed at her from within Sam's jacket.

"It's not like he wants to kill you," Sam said.  "It's a mutually beneficial relationship.  I get rid of waste and excess, and he ensures a steady food supply.  He only eats what I don't need."

Naomi tried and failed to keep her eyes from drifting toward Sam's left hand, where two fingers were sheared off at the knuckle.  A bandage peeped out from beneath his shirt when he moved.

"You'd be surprised what's actually necessary," said Sam.

"Playing to Win" at Penumbra

My flash fiction "Playing to Win" appears in V2 Issue 6 of Penumbra Magazine.  It's the tale of a man and his chess opponent.  Also jerky.

Check it out; the whole issue is Space Opera themed, so spaceships and lasers and aliens all around!

Fifty Cents a Play

The earth-movers rumbled along the road.  The wire cables, thick as tree branches, stretched up and back, humming like guitar strings.  The vast disc ground slowly forward, the ridges along its edge cutting furrows deep as a man's waist into the dirt.  Ahead, their goal loomed, its top lost in the clouds. 

"Another week and we'll be at the base," said the general.  "We can begin lifting operations then.  The cranes are already in place."

"Soon," said the president, shading her eyes against the flaring neon of the Jukebox, "soon the whole world will know what it is... to party."

The Fourth Wall

Lisa sat across from him.  She toyed with her spaghetti carbonara.  The date was not going well, but Brian consoled himself that it had not been his idea. 

“You’re so distracted,” she burst out.  A ninja gently tousled her hair, mimicking a breeze from the ‘ceiling fan’ overhead.  “Am I that boring, that you can’t even look at me?”

Brian glanced over her shoulder.  The ninja winked at him.  Brian could see the glint of a razor-sharp blade, mere inches from Lisa’s neck.

“It’s nothing,” Brian said.  Outside, the ninjas were preparing the street scene for his lonely walk home.

Commutation

“Morning, Dave,” said Carl.  He opened his car door and did a few brief calisthenics.  Carl was a health nut.

“Morning.”  Dave rubbed at his stubble and un-reclined his seat.  The driver’s seat only went back so far, but there was always the chance traffic could start moving.  Dave was an optimist.

“I’m going to walk down to the cafe.  You want anything?”

“Nah,” said Dave.  He gripped the wheel, ten and two.  He was ready.

“’K.  See ya!”  Carl walked off, weaving through stopped cars.  The grass that grew stubbornly through cracks in the asphalt whispered as he passed.

About a Dollar

“Uh...” the cashier hesitated as Tilda came down the conveyor belt, holding her knees up to avoid the gum rack.

“I’m a can of beans,” Tilda said. 

“I don’t... that’s not safe, is it?” 

“What’s safe matter to a can of beans?  Scan me.”

“You’re not supposed to point the beam at your eyes...”

“Scan me!  I am a can of beans!  I will nourish my family!  I’ll keep for years!  Don’t eat me if I am dented!  Scan me, you addled twit!  Scan me now!  I’m beans!”

beep

The cashier consulted the screen.  “Actually, you’re sugar-free caramels.  On clearance.”

Perhaps Tomorrow

Brian got up too early.  He got stuck in traffic anyway.  At work, he got yelled at for not wearing the stupid hat, and then he found a hole in his uniform shirt.  When he got out, some asshole had added a new dent to his side door.

At home, the ancient computer rattled and whirred, and he wondered if this would be the time it finally didn’t boot.

At last, the prompt appeared, in blocky, greenish text:

NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN. 

CONTINUE Y/N?

He stared at the screen for a long time.  He pushed a button.