Category Archives for Fiction

THE HUNTER

It smelled dark.

The air was sweet and cold, moonlight-sharp. The flowers had closed their blooms, their scent gone pale without sunlight.

The hunter slid through the shadows, head tilted, her tongue flickering in and out of her mouth. Great battles had robbed her of both eyes and riddled her fur with scars, but she – the last of her kind – remained the greatest killer of man.

The leaves beneath her paws were damp with decay, their cloying scent all-but masking the sweet earthiness of the insects wriggling in their midst.

She had bigger prey to catch.

There! A gust of stale breath on the air, the sour stench of sweat.

She stopped, lifted her head into the breeze to triangulate her quarry. The trail was faint but as she crept forwards it grew stronger.

Soon she was close. All but masked beneath the richness of deer excrement was the scent of man.

“How much longer do we have to wait?” a boy whispered in the darkness.

She couldn’t hear him, but his stale breath was enough.

“Patience,” a woman replied. Her breath was fainter, laced with mint.

The hunter breathed slowly, mapping the clearing.

“I’m scared, momma,” the boy whispered. “I want to go home.”

“The beast has found our home before. Do you want that to happen again?”

A pause. “No.” The boy barely exhaled as he spoke, and the hunter didn’t smell it.

“We’ll get it, son. We’ll make it pay for what it did.”

“It wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t–”

The woman raised an arm, sending a wave of deer scent through the air, tinged with fear. The hunter froze.

“It’s coming,” the woman breathed.

The hunter padded through the trees, circling her prey, using the earthiness of tree moss to guide her.

Then, when the scents were right, she stopped. She gathered her legs beneath her, took one last deep sniff, and leaped.

Her jaws collided with a bundle of straw and cloth that smelled human but had none of the salty richness of blood beneath.

The sweet pile of damp leaves that should have softened her fall crumbled beneath her. She fell deep into the earth, past the sweet worms and the musty soil. Upon impact, the scent of blood and fear overtook everything else.

Far above, tainting the fresh air, was the woman. She stood at the edge of the pit, reeking with satisfaction.

“I told you she’d come back for her eyes.”

* * *

To celebrate National Short Story Month, I’m running the Senseless Challenge throughout May. Each Friday is dedicated to a different sense – the challenge is to write a piece of flash fiction inspired by that sense. The third week was dedicated to smell.

WAR ON NOISE

The crackle of gunfire has long since lost its meaning.

The sound now makes the soldier think of other things. Of popcorn and late night cinemas. Of the bubble wrap in Amazon packages. Fire crackers popping on New Year’s Eve. How his girlfriend cracks her knuckles. (Ex-girlfriend? Her last letter hadn’t started with Dear John but the message had been the same.)

But he is far from home and the memories of his childhood sounds are fading. Soon the sounds of war will be all he has left.

The soldier stretches his neck, rolls his shoulders. Every joint pops. His heartbeat throbs in his eardrums, a personal timepiece.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

The ditch he’s lying in amplifies his fellow soldiers. The new guy sniffling at seven second intervals. The fidgeter who toys with the safety on his gun. Their collective shallow breaths. It’s hide-and-seek all over again, that loud waiting silence he remembers from lazy summer days.

He cannot hear their heartbeats but he knows they’re all the same.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

Today marks his ninth month at war.

(Nine months: a gestation of trauma. If this is what it’s like being in the womb no one should have children.)

Nine months of screams, explosions, the snip-snip of the doctor’s scissors. Nine months of his friends’ heavy, shuddering last breaths. He hasn’t been able to make that sound lose its meaning; nothing in his memories compares.

He’s the last one left.

Da-dum. Da-dum. Da-dum.

In all this war has come to have its own symphony for him.

The percussion of footsteps. The xylophone of zips. The tinkle of loose buckles. The deep bass of rolling tanks. If he closes his eyes, he can almost remember the quiet creak of his dad’s rocking chair as classical music rumbles from the record player.

But he cannot remember the sound of a woman’s voice. Of her voice. No matter how many times he rereads that last letter, the only voice he hears is his own.

“GO GO GO!”

He obeys without thinking, leaping out of the ditch and towards the enemy line.

The roar of adrenaline consumes him. For a blissful moment he finally hears her calling his name.

Then the thunder of an ear-bleeding explosion, rippling through the air. A high-pitched hum dizzies him. The ground rushes upwards.

Then silence.

* * *

To celebrate National Short Story Month, I’m running the Senseless Challenge throughout May. Each Friday is dedicated to a different sense – the challenge is to write a story inspired by that sense. The second week is dedicated to sound.

CITY OF GHOSTS

From a distance it looks like he’s yawning.

The road where the man is kneeling is blocked with abandoned cars. From my vantage point on the second floor of a Cafe Nero’s all I can see is his profile, his open mouth and dark hair, the lurid green of his coat.

The yawn has lasted too long. I squint and realise it’s a scream.

I break off a nail-sized bite of bread from the last sandwich I have left and squeeze it paper-thin. I place it in my mouth, then take a glass of water and tilt it against my lips until it is empty. I rub my throat, hoping the bread goes down the right way.

I glance outside. The man is still kneeling in the road.

It’s been weeks since I’ve seen another person. Curiosity gets the better of me.

Going down stairs isn’t easy. I crane my neck to watch my feet, place my hand on the handrail. The sight of it reassures me. My hand still looks young, strong. Still looks like my hand, although it’s long since stopped feeling.

I walk across the ground floor of the coffee shop and lean against the front door until it opens. The man is still kneeling in the middle of the road, his head bowed, defeated. It’s a grey summer’s day and the sky is heavy with rain clouds, but the air in London has never been clearer. There’s no one left to pollute anymore.

The wind pushes my hair into my eyes as I zigzag through the abandoned cars. Most of them still have keys in their ignition, doors left ajar. London has become a city of forgotten things. We are all ghosts, fading slowly away.

The man has already lost his hearing. He doesn’t notice when my hand knocks against a car door even though my knuckles are now bleeding – it must have made a sound.

I walk closer, until he notices me and freezes, his shoulders tensed, nostrils quivering.

For a moment we stand there, staring at each other.

When he mouths words at me but they’re impossible to read. Another language.

There’s a pair of car keys by his feet but he cannot curl his fingers around them. He straightens, slowly. His hands hang uselessly by his sides, forgotten, like plants left out in the sun. Tears trail down his cheeks as he lifts an arm towards me.

It’s just your hands, I want to say. Wait until your feet go. You’ll have to learn to walk all over again.

* * *

To celebrate National Short Story Month, I’m running the Senseless Challenge throughout May. Each Friday is dedicated to a different sense – the challenge is to write a piece of flash fiction inspired by that sense.
This first week is dedicated to sight. I had a hard time resisting the temptation to describe temperature (hot, cold, etc).

SHE STILL DREAMS OF HIM

She still dreams of him.

Of strong arms lowering her onto a table or pinning her up against the wall, his body looming over hers and exuding a dizzying maleness. She struggles deliciously against him, shivers at his hot breath in her ear. But before anything else can happen, she wakes up.

The logical side of her mind knows that he is gone. He is buried. He is dead. Yet she cannot erase the tattoo of sensation on her body, and a part of her is glad to have some piece of him still. She dreads the passing days, the minutes, the approaching seven-year mark when every single cell in her body has been replaced and his touch no longer remains.

A small, dark corner of her heart is fascinated by the prospect.

In her dreams, in that delicious moment of terror before she awakens, she is partially relieved that finally—finally!—she will have an excuse to go mad, to suffer, to sink into the numbing depths of depression. She experiences a guilty moment of pleasure at the thought that she can stop trying to be happy all the time, because it is something she is not very good at anyway. And how she hates to be bad at things.

That is why she has so few hobbies. Anything she picks up is eventually discarded when she discovers that she had no natural talent or skill, and that to be good would require work, work, and more work. She cannot understand the people who have the patience to keep trying when their first attempts are so dismal, so utterly depressing. Even though she realises that striving for perfection is impeding her from truly experiencing anything, she cannot change her standards.

Her standards have always been high; not only for herself but also for any potential partners. That is why she is lying here alone in bed, thinking about her odd dreams, her only companions two world-weary teddy bears. She is 32, and single. Her friends are all in relationships, engaged, married. Some even have kids. The thought of such commitment frightens her senseless because she knows that she will never find another man who, after days or weeks or years, will remain a mystery. All of her relationships have ended abruptly because of that growing complacency, the tedium of coupled life, how boring and predictable it becomes.

He was the only one who broke that tedium, and he is gone.

She rolls over to her side, curls into a protective ball. She is good at being depressed. Sometimes she thinks it is the only thing she is good at, and the thought depresses her further, an oddly satisfying circle of despair. She resigns herself to living alone the rest of her life, spending her time in bed, dreaming about happier things.

Eventually, she summons the effort to get out of bed and trudge to the bathroom. The shower makes her slightly more alive. She picks out flattering, feminine clothes, then discards them in favour of jeans and a t-shirt. Then she puts the dress back on. Indecision paralyses her until she chooses the jeans. As she slips the clothes on, the blanket of depression crumbles onto her bed to wait for her return.

She applies her makeup carefully, her lips parted as she stares at the dull-eyed girl in the mirror. The white eye shadow brightens her face, makes her look younger, cheerful. She smiles, tense, strained, but the girl in the mirror looks convinced.

* * *

Hours later, she shudders in bed, cold. Someone has left the heating off, so she takes the blanket and wraps it around her shoulders, huddling safely under its numbing swathe. The sorrow seeps back under her skin insistently and she welcomes the feeling with quiet relief: this is something she’s good at, the only thing she’s good at.

If only she had a reason, an excuse, she’d gladly disappear into her bed forever.

LIES

Liars!

The word pounded through her head as her sword slashed left and right in quick succession, blade gleaming in the moonlight.

They had tricked her into coming to this God-forsaken place, and here she was, battling against people that had called themselves her friends.

She sliced Mike’s stomach open. Felt the tip of a blade bite into her arm. Duck, weave, sidestep. Again her sword drank blood.

When she’d first found the ragtag group, they’d been living in the sewers, scavenging a living out of the city ruins. They’d welcomed her arrival, proclaimed her their protector. But the atmosphere had soured.

Only one left to go. She held her sword upright, ready.

He fell to his knees. “Please,” he breathed. “For our friendship….”

Could she blame him? What wasn’t a façade in this war-savaged world? Who didn’t hide behind several masks? Everyone lied now, because only the liars survived.

“Friends?” She spat. “A friend wouldn’t trade my life in for food.”

Now she was the one who was lying. It had happened before. Her own mother had abandoned her so that she would not have to feed another mouth.

The sword never wavered. She sliced open his throat.

When no one trusts, does it matter that everyone lies?

WOLF ON DEMAND

“Are you sure it’s safe?” The old woman pushed her glasses further up her nose and peered at the screen, her face so close to the monitor that Mark was afraid she’d leave smears across the glass.

“Sure,” he replied with a too-wide salesman smile. “It’s the latest technology. Everyone’s using it.” He eased the mouse out of the old woman’s hand, clicked back through the demo screens. “See? Every book you could want, ready to print on demand. It’s instant.” He clicked print. The machine started churning.

Instant Book Machine, it was called. An ugly black box no larger than a coffee maker, it perched on the edge of the old lady’s desk like a futuristic insect. One minute and forty-two seconds later, a book popped out of the side. Little Red Riding Hood. He handed it to the old woman.

“I don’t like instant coffee,” the old woman said tremulously, “and I like going to the bookshop, you know.”

He did know, but he wouldn’t get his weekly commission until the old biddy joined the twenty-second century. He was a salesman, sent forth like a wolf among lambs, determined to take them all.

“You can print birthday cards, Christmas cards. Whatever you want without leaving the house. And it’s cheaper than in the bookshops because you’re cutting out the middle men. No more pulping books, wasting trees; no more authors getting ripped off… Everything you’d need, on demand. ”

When she didn’t look convinced, he pulled out the big guns. “Your family don’t visit much, do they? You get one of these, guaranteed your grandkids will come visiting.”

She hesitated. “What’s it called again?”

“Instant Book Machine,” he said. His smile was sharp. The end was close. “And it’s print on demand.”

via Bubbels on stock.xchng

“I see, I see,” the grandmother said, voice quavering. “But can it wolf on demand?”

Mark frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Wolf on demand,” she repeated. “Like so.”

And then the old woman turned into a wolf and ate him.

UNDERGROUND

It was only after death that I realised the London underground was modelled after Hell.

The air was stagnant with dust and the nostril-clenching tang of BO, everywhere a sea of unsmiling faces and bodies–every size, every age, every religion.

I joined the long queues of recently deceased and peered at the labyrinthine map on the wall, a spaghetti plate of coloured lines and odd names.

“The map’s useless,” a man beside me said, his hot breath sticky against my cheek. “Last updated a thousand years ago.”

The crowd carried us forward three miserly steps before coming to a standstill. “Some nitwit took the zones off the map,” he continued. “No way to tell what circle of hell each stop is in. Imagine, you’re meant to be in the first and end up in the very middle with old Luke for company.”

I turned my head just enough to see him. My neighbour was dour-faced, saggy-cheeked. His ears leaned away from his head in a bid for freedom.

“You’re new,” he said. “I can tell. Not miserable enough.”

“Yeah.” Somehow I’d expected my voice to sound different in death. Instead it was the same, disappointingly high-pitched. Another few steps forward, the crowd pressing in as the tunnel narrowed. The forced intimacy sustained our conversation. “Have you been queuing long?”

“Years.” He twitched his shoulder in a restricted shrug. “Feels like it, anyway. Hard to tell down here.” The crowd pushed us from behind. Through a gap in the bodies I saw the end of the queue, a row of burly ticket inspectors calling for tickets. “Every time I get to the barriers, I pretend I’ve lost my ticket,” my neighbour continued. “Then you’re sent to the main office–takes ages. Then to the back of the queue. Then do it all over again. This if my fourth time.”

I put my hand in my pocket. My fingers touched the familiar plastic edges of my travel card. In the dim light, it looked the same as ever.

“Break it,” he said, miming the action. “Get a paper ticket. Then you know where you’re going.” He flashed his ticket at me, obscuring the writing with his thumb. “I know where they’re sending me,” he said, “and I figure sticking around here in purgatory’s better than going there.”

Every ounce of English propriety in me rebelled. “Isn’t that illegal?”

“It’s straight to ninth if they catch you,” he said. “But that’s only if they catch you.” A sly wink. “Just the once. Get the paper ticket, find out where in Hell you’re going. Aren’t you tempted?”

We weren’t far from the barriers now. The ticket inspectors were calling people forward, asking for tickets, in all appearances normal men on the job. Then one of them looked up. His eyes were solid black, soulless pits that drained the last remnants of life out of me. For a moment my vision blurred. I saw scaled wings tear free, the skin of his face melting into a misshapen, inhuman blur, a forked tongue tasting the air. When I blinked the vision was gone.

“I’m… I think I’m in the wrong queue,” I said to my neighbour, swallowing bile. Only four people were ahead of me. “There’s been a mistake. I’m going to Heaven.”

“Heaven?” He cackled, his laughter so loud it sent ripples of unease through the waiting crowd. “Heaven?” he repeated, shaking his head. “You sure?”

“Of course. I’ve been baptised, christened… even got my last rites.” I was now third in the queue, close to hyperventilating. Did I dare to snap my travel card? I turned to my neighbour, held up the card. “Please, help – what do I do?”

“Hm.” He scratched his cheek, running his fingers over a scar at the corner of his eye. “Even if you’re not going to Heaven, it’s bound to be better than where I’m going.”

“Tickets, please!” the inspectors called. Only one person ahead of me.

“Tell you what,” my neighbour said. “Let’s do swapsies.”

He grabbed my travel card, pushed his paper ticket into my hand, and then shoved me, hard, before I could react.

“Tickets, please,” the inspector said to me, pulling the ticket from my numb fingertips. He handed it back with a sharp, fanged smile. “Straight ahead,” he said. “The ninth circle.”

LONDON COLD SNAP KILLS 42 ZOMBIES

Brrrrr!

Courtesy of stock.xchng

LONDON, United Kingdom – A bout of severe, snowy weather has left at least 42 zombies dead as the second snowfall of the year hits the capital. Officials are taking extra precautions to protect the zombies, dozens of whom froze to death on the streets of London during last week alone.

Nearly 300 zombies sought defrosting procedures from University College London Hospital, with scores of hospitals overrun by the heat-seeking undead.

Emergency officials have said many of the zombies are homeless, and desperate for heat and nourishment. 800 shelters have been opened to provide shelter and brain-substitute burgers, but authorities are struggling to communicate with the zombies, whose cognitively impairments are exacerbated by the cold.

Unable to locate the shelters, many zombies are seeking protection in phone booths and tube stations. Oxford Circus and Bond Street stations were indefinitely closed after twelve commuters were injured in a zombie incident. All twelve have been inoculated and will be under quarantine for 72 hours.

The extreme weather comes at a bad time for undead rights group ZombieAid, who are currently lobbying Parliament to classify zombies as ‘non-human persons’ in order to accord them with basic human rights.

Police are appealing the public to keep zombie relatives indoors and to take care when travelling through the city.

THE LONG LINE

Fur-trimmed coat, dyed blonde hair that brushed her elbows. Legs closeted in tight leather and denim, slyly parted in invitation. The girl was leaning against a motorbike — his motorbike — with such casual indifference that he almost smiled.

Almost.

He let the diner door close behind him with a loud jangle of bells. The streets were empty, but they often were in this small town. He walked over, asked where she was headed. A faint breeze breathed life into the drying puddles at their feet.

“Anywhere but here,” she drawled. Perfect voice, low and smoky. Must have taken weeks of practice.

His tongue traced the outline of his teeth. “Anywhere at all?”

The shrug gave her away. Too innocent for those clothes.

He couldn’t resist playing her game. Leant forward, arms on either side of those long, long legs. Let his breath draw a line across her cheek. “You think you’re ready?”

The shiver said no. Her mouth said yes.

This was how he loved her: nervous, indecisive, a flower on the cusp of bloom. If she came with him that frailty would be lost forever.

He leant closer still. Stubble grazed her delicate cheekbone. “You get those clothes in a brothel?” he whispered.

The heat of her blush warmed his cheek. “I… I thought you’d like them.”

He drew back, let the cold wind seep back into her bones. “Not on you,” he said. She deserved better. One last long look. He breathed in the curve of her jaw, the honey-warm eyes. He should have left town weeks ago.

“Take me with you,” she begged.

He shook his head, gently pulled her off the motorbike. Slung a leg over, got the engine rumbling. “You don’t have what I want,” he said, wistful. “Not any more.”

And then, because he had to be harsh, because he had to be cruel lest she spend the rest of her life pining for him, he lied: “I only sleep with virgins.”

By the time he left town she was just a name, another name on a long list of heartbreaks.

RED HERRINGS

His beard is a disguise.

People see the dark skin, the thick hair, the traditional clothing, and come to all the wrong conclusions. But it is his beard they notice first, the thickness of it, its length. It is the first of many red herrings in his appearance.

Hiding behind its thick, curled tangle are gentle cheeks, a sad smile, soft lips that mouth poetry on the underground.

He’s clutching two open notebooks, one on top of the other. His nails are rough-ridged and cracked but he holds the pen delicately, copying words from one notebook into the other.

The words themselves are another red herring: words of pain and suffering, of loneliness and anger, carefully misspelled to feign ignorance.

He needs these — the beard, the words, the disguise — because without them, he is nothing, no one. Just another man on the tube, another forgettable face.