Open and Shut Case

 “You’re telling me this is an open and shut case? There is a mob outside baying for the head of Constable Parrish, social media sites are up in arms –.”

“They do so love their false outrage in the morning.” The Detective didn’t move from his chair. “The public does not get to eclipse fact, Ms. Brown. Nor should their arrogance assume they can judge what they do not understand. You cannot sum pages of police reports into a twitter feed, and I am not throwing a constable under the bus for political expediency. You can tell the mayor this however you like, of course.”

“Constable Parrish shot an unarmed man!”

“An unarmed white man, yes. And the good constable is Indian, if you wish to spin that into your narrative as well.”

“Detective –.”

“Call the mayor, Emily. Ask him about October 30^th 1997.”

Ms. Brown marched out of the room, returned in under four minutes. Her expression was made of nothing save shock as the Detective handed her over a folder without a single word.

“There are people who can do impossible things,” the Detective said quietly. “Terrible, impossible and grotesque things. It is not well understood, but Constable Parrish recognized the signs. And killed the target before he could kill a great many people with his power.”

“Telekinesis.” Ms. Brown let out a small laugh. “How do you expect me to spin this to the press, Detective?”

“I have no idea. But it is your job. Let’s see if you’re as good as spinning truth as you are at the rest of it.”

“That is uncalled for,” she snapped, but the Detective held her gaze until she looked away. After a time, she stood and walked to the door.

“Open and shut,” the Detective said softly, and closed the filing cabinet beside the desk with a glance.

prompt: the letter o

“Why?” Oh, they asked that as they died.

 "So you wonder about that now, do you? So long, with top billing, with all the fame. You die, and only I am brave enough to seek vengeance. I could not escape you, but now you cannot escape me…“

O leaned down, bending over the corpses of E and I.

 "E-I-E-I-O,” O growled. “Always the important letters, the ones everyone remembered. But it started with me, with the O in Old MacDonald. Old And oinks and moos and honks were mine! But everyone just remembered you."

"And all you could think,” O crowed as the letters burned, “was to ask me why I was doing this, when that contains not a real vowel at all!"

And so O left the scene of the crime, never wondering why U, with only two utterances in the song, had not joined in the seeking of vengeance.

But U and Y had plans of their own… and the less said of I the better.

flash fiction fun

“I am sorry,” he said roughly, pulling the book from the boy’s hands. “You can’t hide behind words. You can’t hide anywhere.”

The boy blinked, confused, since to him words were everywhere. His gaze skittered across the casket and away. “Not ready,” he whispered.

“You think anyone ever is?” The man asked almost gently.

The boy stood up from the floor and made his way through the crowd. Eulogies blended into each other to form a kind of white noise. He stopped beside the casket, stared inside at his own face.

“I look peaceful.”

“Yes,” the man said, coming up to lay a hand on his shoulder.

“Do I have to haunt somewhere, grandfather?”

“It is a tradition. If you desire.”

The boy nodded and left his funeral, beginning the walk to the nearest library. No one ever knew he haunted it and not a single seance reached him through all the books he read.

the geraniums will be lovely next year

“I know you get the feeling I’m patronizing you dear – it means talking down to someone, if you didn’t know that already, but as I was saying …”

And here, gentle reader, the story ended as I punched him in the throat and then buried him in the garden.

Discovery

“We live in a terrible world, a world where the truth has been reduced to a conspiracy.”

“You’ve been holed up in your office for days. We’ve been worried sick –.”

“It’s not an office. It’s a sanctum. I have cracked the code. White. Black. The lines we’ve stolen from the zebra, the theft of nature that governs our world. I know what they mean. That! I know what that means!”

“That’s a UPC code.”

“I have learned the secret language, the tongue that cannot be spoken. I have cracked the code!”

“You were supposed to be doing our taxes!”

“We don’t need those. Get me lotto tickets, and I will know what ones will win. I will be the scanner. I have seen and have known –.”

“Oh, well, that’s entirely different. Why didn’t you say that in the first place? Everyone up, up, up: you’re going to buy lotto tickets while I may sure Maynard here has a proper shower and some food.”

“The fall of water. Each drop, combined with the others, singing songs –.”

“Yes, yes. Lotto tickets. Just don’t forget the lotto tickets.”

I keep running out of ways to tell people I’m not in hell

He used to write letters for me. Post-it’s, scrawled notes on handkerchiefs, missives on receipts hidden about the house for me to find. ‘I love you’ turned into haiku of small spaces and shaped containers. That was before everything began to fall apart. Not us, him. Not even really him. I didn’t admit it, not until he found a note I’d missed. Demanded to know who had written it, to know if I was having an affair. The first time I thought it a joke, the second — the second was when I realized I was losing him. Losing him to the past, to memories I was not always part of. I said I would stay: sickness, health, richer, poorer. But who is as poor as someone whose loved no longer remembers them? I haven’t been to church in two years. All I’d want to do is scream. And I keep finding those notes, the ones he hid so well against the future. All I can do is cry these days. Cry for so many things.

Loss

He was tired, the old wizard in his small house with only a familiar for company. Once, long and long ago, he had made a vow in the way of wizards, and such oaths could not be rescinded nor broken without shattering the feeble magics he still claimed as his own. Some days he had almost broke the vow in the bitterness of his despair, but his apprentice had pulled him up from it or hope waved toward him like a strumpet displaying her legs, and he had rallied himself for another quest, dug out musty grimoires and spoken ancient spells.

All for nothing. In the end, all for nothing, leaving behind an old man with rotting teeth, a back stopped from long toil and no power to show for it. He had worked wondered in this time, but his greed – oh, his greed had been greater than they. He could see that now, with eyes that scarcely saw the world.

“I worked wonders once,” he said, though there was no one to speak to. Scruple the apprentice had left long ago, stealing books and learning and fleeing for new masters. Not that the old man could blame him: he had done the same in his time, for lower reasons by far. And his familiar – well, Azrael had been dead for some time, even beyond all his skill at magic to return.

“I know.” He hears her voice, soft, gentle as he made her. “I was one.”

“Yes.” He turns his head slowly to the voice. “Yes, you were.You are the only one who could get past my wards.”

“I am.”

And he is old, but not feeble-minded, and something in her voice: there is something in her voice. “Why are you here?”

“You made me, and sought to kill the rest of my kind. Do you know why, father?” she says, and the word is only to wound.

“I sought to turn them into gold. To a meal fit for kings to win a place on the high council. To destroy them, in the end. Many things. Many things,” he says, and he is tired. “They are with you, then.”

“Some are,” she admits, and he can here them moving. Small as mice, the little people, and the sounds of metal scraping metal.

“I will ask why you are here,” he says, though he knows. Oh, how he knows.

“You tried to eat us,” one explains, in a voice rough with old wounds. “So many times. It’s only fair we return the favour and see how you taste.”

“Ah,” the old wizard breathes. “I could stop you. I have words. Powers. There are bargains.” He does not move. Some come closer, his greatest creation, and the small people with her.

“Do you have last words?” she says. “Gargamel, do you have words before we eat you?”

And he draws up what magic he can to see clear one last time. His gaze falls on the smurfs, and some quail back even now. But he turns it on the cat on his counter, stuffed gently by his own hand. “Oh, Azrael, I miss you so,” he says, and nothing else at all.

Not even when they begin cutting.  

temptations

“I know you want me to tempt your husband into oblivion,” the demon said, “but there just aren’t as many temptations as their used to be. Every pretty blond thing triggers worries about sting operations and you can find more than even Hell can offer on the Internet these days. We’re convinced, down Below, that Heaven made the Internet solely so we’d have to do a lot more work to tempt anyone at all.”

“You’re a demon!”

“Yes, but what are all the powers of Hell next to ten hours of YouTube videos? What can we offer that the dark matter pit of fanfiction cannot? You see our problem.”

relief

After the doctor told him, it was almost a relief. “How long?” That was all he asked. How long until sickness eats me from the inside out? How long until I die or take my own life? How much do you know even if you cannot heal me? The doctor told him, trying to be gentle, and the writer took the information in calmly and went home. To write. This was a deadline. His body. His death. His legacy. Everything else fell away from the future and he wrote the novel he’d have never tried to write earlier. The one he considered his Great Novel. The one that scared him, because it would eat him up as well and nothing he could write after would ever be as good.

The words flew out from under his fingers not like any metaphor at all and he wrote in record time, turned it into his publisher and held on grimly until the first reviews came in. It hurt to hold on, but by then the pain was an unwelcome friend he endured. He had forgot, in his eagerness, that this was the social media age. Everyone knew he was dying, if they wanted to. And every review compared his novel to his death. He told them: “No.” And: “I planned this novel years ago. It is not about the cancer. It is not about the fucking cancer!”

And not a single reviewer believed him.

Idea in my head this morning

The teleconference was small, made in meeting rooms a world apart. There were two hundred of them, as people had always supposed, the men who ran the world. It was no longer true that all were white men, and not even strictly true that all were men, though one of the two cases had once been a man. No one talked about that, and it was seen as a sign of progress. Both sides had chosen one to speak for them. On one side one who had drawn the long straw, the other one who had drawn the shortest.

“Our civilization is a dead-end road,” One said in a voice of rolling vowels and perfect elocution. A gift of breeding rather than lessons, as so much is.

“It might be,” the Other said, younger. He was perhaps younger, and his eyes were hardened with desperation. “It doesn’t have to be.”

“We have the figures,” the One said, with a mirthless smile. “The facts. We consume more resources than the world produces.”

“We have done so since records began,” the Other said, softer.

“And it destroyed so many. Easter Island. Rome. So much fallen, so much lost to time. We cannot think our civilization will be any different though we leave less behind than all others did.”

“The solar project –.”

“Ah, yes.” The One cut him off, causing a murmur from both sides. “Science will save us, because it has always done so. Because each time we were about to fall, someone built a bridge. That cannot go on forever. Every sign says this is a dead-end road but no one believes. Such is the power of science, such the strength of the promise. Do you not wonder at that?” the One continued, softer still. “If we did not have this hope, we would be forced to make due with less. We would pull back. We would entrench and put reins on the drives of growth.”

“We will be undone by hope?” the Other said, but his laugh cut off as the One merely nodded.

His hands flew over the keyboards, one on each, macros and command lines firing out into the void. He used to tell his friends he worked in computers before people got savvy about it; how he tells everyone is a consultant, a word so bland as to mean nothing at all. Politician is another such word, and Dave does admit to sending spam emails but even he has standards.

The macbook pro pinged up a notice. A reply to the offer of a vacation in the Maldives, but the name was familiar. He paused to get coffee, instructing his computer out loud to search for that name. Proper voice activation cost money, but money was not an issue: spam emails existed because people responded. In Dave's experience a sucker wasn't born every minute as much as every kilobyte of data.

His coffee didn't grow cold – he was a professional, after all, if only in a profession most found morally abhorrent – but the list that scrolled down the screen gave him a moment's pause. She – he'd decided the other person was a she (you can make of this what you will) – hadn't replied to every spam, no. But every one about a vacation, with comments about her husband, hurling his credit card at the internet as if daring someone like Dave to sink into it.

He hadn't when it first came up, expecting a trap, and it had fallen off the radar. Now he wasn't as certain, and more sad than anything else. He checked the balance on his swiss bank account twice, wired money into another account. It didn't happen often, that the spam emails were real, but enough for urban legend. Enough for people to sink more time into them. He normally didn't make it a whole vacation, but in the face of such hope he felt half-compelled to answer it.

He thought he understood the high God must get on answering a prayer as he hit the enter key and put money in her account with the dates of the flight he had booked. Then he turned back to the other screens and bombarded yahoo email accounts with offers of free televisions for filling out a simple virus-laced survey.

It never occurred to Dave to think that such a thing would let him understand the Devil as well.

Briefing

"Our agent wasn't supposed to actually attempt to kill you. He was going to be stopped by another one of us who would have asked you to join our organization."

"You could have tried asking me?"

"An asset saved from harm is more loyal. It seems we have failed in this and every other respect." She began to gather up papers. "We cannot allow word of our failure to get out. A bank robbery."

"What?"
"We will arrange for you to be killed foiling a bank robbery. Saving a child, if you like. We can't let you live, but if you cooperate in your death with us we will make sure there is a book and movie deal so your family will not want for money."

"What?"

"We could arrange for George Clooney to play you," she said, as though sensing some reluctance on my part. 

This story still has no title.

She was not surprised when they came for her. Her mother had warned her, each admonishment more hysterical than the last.

"You never had a father," she had said finally over the phone last week, her voice cutting in and out. Static and sobs. "I was never married." And finally, in a bleak tone devoid of hope: "They will come for you. You will understand when they come for you."

 There were thirteen of them, the youngest fourteen, the oldest gum-mouthed and using a walker. Each had a baby as silent as they, eyes cold and judging.

 "Choose," the youngest said, in a voice as innocent as sin.

"Choose," the oldest said, in a voice thick with regret.

She could have fought. She knew that even then. But she recalled her mother's missing eye, the limp, the way her mom flinched when she saw more than three women together. She did not understand, not yet, but butterflies rolled in her stomach. She pointed to one at random, mute. The woman stepped forward, face veiled in shadow, and pressed the baby to her stomach. It slipped inside her, the butterflies giving way to something else.

It hurt. Hurt is not big enough for that pain, but it was all she had.

She fell, tears tearing themselves free of flesh. She wanted to say she was too old, that she never wanted children, but her screams said all the words for her.

When she could finally stand, there were only twelve women staring back at her.

"Choose," they said, and the voice came from inside her as well. "You may join us. If you do not, this is your choice." And the oldest patted her belly, already looking swollen, a nameless hunger stirring in her eyes.

She stared at her stomach, thought about her mother. Wondered what happened to men who didn't want children. They could tell her, she knew. And she thought of her mother, of each blind date that had been thrust at her in a desperate frenzy. She had not understood it as hope, then. Had not understood how desperate hope could be.

She closed her eyes, and made her choice.

Unstory. Or: a war between a narrator and a novel.

The grass rippled across the field like half-melted ice cream given a combover.

What? No. I'd never think that. I need a new narrator.

He thought, satirically, in a drug-induced post-ironic haze.

... I don't drink. Why would I do drugs? "If I speak aloud, will you listen?"

He said, and his voice was rough as wool, a hint of steelwool under it as the echoes of his flu rubbed against his throat.

"Wait, did what? What does that even mean? I'm just walking across a field to get home after a late shift at work. I'm not on drugs or – or seeing fields of ice cream. Are you on drugs?"

He said, to God, as if the myriad sunsets were not proof enough that the world had some small unique qualities still to offer in a land of vending machines and fast food. And it was all fast food: chickens could become sandwiches in under an hour, the cow strung up and mutilated into bacon and sausage, on a plate within hours.

"Really, he said. I know that, do I? Can I cite my sources? I'm almost home. You could have put down, 'he walked through the familiar field, a few beer cans glinting under the wanning sun to give the sameness a different cast.' That would be better than this ..."

He fell silent, staring at the beer cans to his left, the field a zen garden out of place, the feng shui of the world shifted slightly nayward at the discarded refuse amid the paean of nature's soft glories bringing a slight rapid blinking to his eyes.

"A slight rapid ... what? It's a field. I walked in dog turds crossing it. You know what, I give up?"

He said to the world at large, and exited the field, the fence post marking its boundaries at least devoid of an exit sign, the boundary between field and world not as clear a she believed, the air above him strung through with telephone wire as if the sky itself was being covered in silly string.

"Please shut up."