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  • Endless Joke
    Endless Joke
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    Here's that writers' manual you were reaching and scrambling for. You know the one: filled with juicy writing tidbits and dripping with pop cultural snark and smartassery. Ew. Not an attractive look. But effective. And by the end, you'll either want to kiss me or kill me. With extreme prejudice. Go on. You know you want to.

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  • First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
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    My story "Unquiet Slumbers" appears in the zombie anthology First Time Dead, Volume 3. It spills blood, gore and genuine tears of sorrow. Anyway, buy this stellar anthology and judge for yourself.

  • Seasons
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  • Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited

    I have two stories in this delightful compendium of every 2012 winner of their Flash Fiction Challenge—one a nasty little horror short, the other an amusing misadventure of Og the caveman, his first appearance.

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Friday
Dec052014

The Draw

We got caught in a dry draw, night falling fast in the small valley at our backs. A ragtag bunch of fugitive daughters and sons and their long shadows, befouled refugees alongside the mockery of refugees.

Where a creek once flowed, some vegetation followed, scabrous and mean, this dry gulch a seam scrawled by a child holding two antitheses of green pencil. To our left, looking skyward, a narrow fan of grey scree, a trod-upon bridal veil.

"We oughta head for higher ground." Lucas had already begun scrambling the talus slope, heavy pack be damned. The dry spray of stones behind his boots was the sound of agitated bones, a charnel house desecration.

I saw if we went further we could still climb, more gradual, mind, and then loop back around, come out in the same damn place, so that's the way I went. Three of our group went the same way, two others clambering after Luke. As we made our own slower course, rejoining our party in time, we heard the others excitable in the hushed gloom.

"We found ourselves a cave!"

Was indeed a darker smudge on a short cliff face, reminiscent of a cavemouth. We seen it before we reached it. Then we reached it.

Before, we'd come up through what was once fruitful pasture, irrigated by man in defiance of an arid climate, now returned to truculent desert itself: cacti, sagebrush, greasewood.

Never could we figure out what happened, fully.

Whatever it was had done for the honeybees and for most of the butterflies, whether through the air or by way of the water, some subliminal thing or a hot toxin, a mite before the unspooling of men's minds. Most went utterly mad. Madder even than usual on this misbegotten earth. Could be some had wandered in pointless circles and fell forward, bashing their loved ones with cast iron pots or digging tools, over and over, while those had bashed right on back till all were crimson pulp on the thirsty ground and no one soul now stood anticipatory. Except us few, our own exemption a puzzlement even to us.

"That ain't no cave. It's a long abandoned mine. Silver or nickel I'm surmising." Luke was already peering into its impossible blind depths.

"What if something got here afore us?" Colette was beside him, also squinting.

I looked around the entrance in light that had near emptied from the world and saw no scat or leavings, human or otherwise.

"Think we're good," I said.

I ran my hands over the rock inside the black maw of the mine and felt the striations and boltholes where posts and beams once gave spurious comfort to the subterraneans inside. Made my nerves dance like heat lightning and my mouth parched as the desert we'd done walked, but with crazies down there roaming all ways to hell and back we hadn't been able to light fires too often, and maybe we could have ourselves a pot of coffee a ways inside the tunnel. Searing hot as the days got, nights could freeze your bone marrow; even a small fire might lift our spirits.

We all seemed to reach a similar opinion without needing words, because everyone up and moved as one inside the darkness, and a couple of us still had batteries back then, so our way was preceded by two dim swordplay beams.

Which was how we first discovered the mutants.

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