#Fi50: River Mist

iction in 50 is a regular feature in the last week of every month and I invite any interested composers of mini-narrative to join in!

    

What is #Fi50? In the words of founder Bruce Gargoyle, "Fiction in 50: think of it as the anti-NaNoWriMo experience!" Pack a beginning, middle and end of story into 50 words or less (bonus points for hitting exactly 50 words).

The rules for participation are simple:

1. Create a piece of fictional writing in 50 words or less, ideally using the prompt as title or theme or inspiration.
That’s it!  But for those who wish to challenge themselves further, here’s an additional rule:

2. Post your piece of flash fiction on your blog or (for those poor blog-less souls) add it as a comment on the Ninja Librarian’s post for everyone to enjoy. 
And for those thrill-seekers who really like to go the extra mile (ie: perfectionists):

3. Add the nifty little picture above to your post (credit for which goes entirely to ideflex over at acrossthebored.com) or create your own Fi50 meme pic….
and 4. Link back here so others can jump on the mini-fic bandwagon.

This month's prompt is Horror. 

At this time, I'm only planning to continue the hop through the end of the year, as it doesn't seem to have gotten any momentum.  

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And now, my story: 

River Mist

The house, unsold for years, was occupied the last of October. The new owners were delighted until nightfall.

Doors and windows closed against the night did nothing to stop the mist that crept up from the river and passed through the graveyard.

Nothing could stop the fingers of the dead.

 ©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2018

 As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated.

Friday (recycled) Flash: The Tomb of the Strange Feast

What with pounding away on my NaNo novel and finalizing the formatting and all for The Problem With Peggy (see below), there really was no time this week for a new story. So I dug into the archives, and as a way to get warmed up for Thanksgiving feasting (for my US readers!), I bring you again,

The Tomb of the Strange Feast

Mom never was a good cook, but that night she really outdid herself.  Her smile when she brought in dinner didn't convince even Lily, and she's only five.

"Brussels sprout-tofu casserole, with non-fat cheese," Mom announced, all bright and enthusiastic, the way grown-ups sound when they are trying to convince kids of the wonderfulness of something they really don't like it.  Totally fake.  Mom could pretend, but we all knew she didn't like the food she made any more than we did.  She didn't even put crumbled potato chips on top of the stuff, the way Nana does, which at least means there's some part of her “hot dishes” a kid can eat.

Trouble is, Mom's on a health-food kick.  Health food and bad cooking are a really awful combination.  When my buddy Lianne's mom cooks healthy food, it's things like grilled veggies and chicken breasts.  Kind of boring, but you can eat it.  Sometimes she gets these veggie-burger things that are really good, especially with plenty of ketchup and mustard.  You’d hardly know they were healthy.  But my mom makes Brussels sprout-tofu casserole, and tofu "cheesecake" for dessert.  Sometimes I think I should run away from home.

So that night Mom put the pan on the table, and we all just sat looking at it.  Lily looked like she was about to cry, and Dad swallowed hard.  The stuff looked nasty and smelled worse.  Mom was still trying to smile, and she served each of us a nice big heaping pile, but she had to work harder and harder to keep smiling as she went on.  She knew.  That’s the worst part: Mom knows she's a lousy cook.  She always has been.  Used to be, she just went ahead and made hot dogs and frozen pizza and stuff like that, which was fine.  When she was dieting, she’d get those “Lean and Mean” frozen dinners, and I got pretty used to them, too.

But last month she got hold of this book about fat kids and how bad eating and junk food was going to kill us all, and maybe that’s true.  But in our family, Mom’s attempts to cook her idea of healthy food are going to kill us all a whole lot sooner.  Like this casserole we were all staring at like gawkers at a traffic accident.  Horrified and fascinated at the same time.

Dad’s a real hero.  He smiled at Mom and picked up his fork.  “I’m sure it’s marvelous, Dear,” he said, and plunged his fork into the heart of the steaming pile on his plate.  He didn’t take a bite, though.  I figure the telephone saved his life, because before he could lift the fork, his phone rang, and he got up to answer it.  Mom doesn’t allow our phones at the table, so he had to hunt for it, and when he found the right one, it was Mom’s phone that was ringing after all.  I don’t know why they don’t use different ringtones.  Maybe they haven’t figured out how.

Anyway, Mom got on the phone and came back a minute later with her purse in her hand.  “Poor old Mrs. Carruthers is sick, and she needs me to go pick up her medicines.  She uses that discount drug store on the other side of town, so I’ll be a while.  Don’t worry about saving dinner for me—I’ll grab something while I wait for her prescription.  Just clean up when you finish.”

Mom has a sort of business running errands for the old people in our neighborhood.  I’m not sure how many of them pay her, but she does it for all of them, regardless.  Mom’s a great person.  She just can’t cook.

When the door closed behind her, Dad, Lily and I looked at each other, then at the casserole.  Then Dad stood up.  “Karla, you get the shovel.  I’ll bring this stuff.”

“I’ll get that dessert thing,” Lily said.  We’d tasted that before and knew better than to do so again.  Of all the things to mess with, dessert is the cruelest.

Dad began scraping plates back into the dish, and I got the shovel from the shed.  By the time I’d picked a good place, Dad and Lily were outside, and I held the dish while Dad dug a hole with a few quick stomps on the shovel.  We scraped in the mess, shoved the dirt back over it, and sprinkled some leaves over it to make it less obvious.  Then we loaded the dishwasher and Dad took us to the Burger Prince and got us burgers and strawberry shakes.  They make their shakes with real fruit, so we decided that was close enough to health food for tonight.

That was hours ago.  When I looked out my window just now, with the moon lighting up the yard, I swear I could see that fresh pile of dirt and leaves moving.

I hope we really have seen the last of that strange feast.

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©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2016
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

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Just ten days until release day! The Problem With Peggy goes live on Nov. 28, but you can preorder now from Amazon and Smashwords for the ebook. For the best deal, Preorder the paperback directly from this site and we'll pick up the shipping costs.

Friday Flash Fiction: Knock, Knock

I'm beginning to conclude I work best under pressure. Every week I read Chuck Wendig's writing prompt, and think I'll jump right on that, have the story written by Monday, and for once have time to post it early. And every week I realize Thursday morning that I've not quite finished a draft (if I've even begun it), and every Thursday evening I end up editing the story at 9 or 10 p.m., barely making my deadline.

This week is no exception. We were to start with a knock at the door. Here's the result, another bit of fun for JJ MacGregor of the Pismawallops PTA as she sits working upon a midnight dreary. I ran a few words over my 1000.

Knock, Knock

Rap-a-rap-a-rap! Thump!

I practically crawled out of my skin when the knock—more like a pounding—sounded on my door. I was working late, trying to finish a short story, and the house was both empty and dark, aside from the light over my desk. Brian was at Justin’s house for the night so I was alone.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been trying my hand at writing horror. But I was, so when the hammering on the door echoed down my front hall, I jumped about a yard in the air, and then sat a moment staring at the line I’d just typed: “Juliet opened the door and screamed.”

This wasn’t a horror story. This was Pismawallops Island, where a knock on the door at—I looked at the clock—one a.m. probably just meant…what? None of my friends would be out at that hour. The only thing open was The Club, a dive of a bar that still felt smoke-filled despite years of no-smoking laws. It was that kind of place. Not where you’d find members of the PTA in the wee small hours.

I got up and went to the door. What if it was Brian? Maybe he and Justin had been displaying the lack of good sense 16-year-old males were said to possess in excess. They never had before, but there’s always a first time.

There’d been enough disconcerting disruptions to my quiet Island life lately that I didn’t fling wide the door without looking. I peered through the peephole Ron insisted I install, but could see nothing in the darkness.

“Who’s there?” No answer. I called three times before opening the door cautiously, a foot planted to prevent it being pushed open wider. There was no one on the porch.

I rather belatedly turned on the light, but it didn’t change anything. There was no one on the porch, nor on what I could see of the yard and driveway. I shouted a few more times before retreating and locking the door. For good measure I checked the lock on the back door as well.

Then, insane as it may sound, I went back to my horror story. The hapless Juliet flung wide her door without fear or precaution, and was grabbed from behind. I realized she must have been grabbed by someone in the house, and was wondering how I’d resolve that, when the knocking began again.

“Jehoshaphat!” Juliet’s plight fresh in my mind, I considered barricading myself in the den and ignoring the pounding.

I also considered calling Ron. He was chief of police, and a friend, and I knew he’d want me to call. But our relationship was, as they say, “complicated” and asking him to come over in the middle of the night was more than I could handle.

Someone must be in trouble. The hammering was loud and desperate. Had something scared the person off the first time? I’d left the front porch light on, but now the visitor was at the back door.

This time I flipped on the light at the same instant as I pushed aside the curtain and peered out through the window. There was no one there. The knocking had stopped as I entered the back hall, and the knocker was gone. I’d more or less expected that.

As I saw it, there were three possibilities. The least likely was that someone I’d upset was looking for revenge, either by frightening me or by luring me out where they could do me actual harm. Unlikely, but frightening, and not beyond the realm of possibility.

The second most likely case was that someone was out there who needed my help. I’d gotten a bit of a reputation after helping to solve a couple of murders. I supposed that a person in trouble might think I could help.

But what I believed was that Brian and Justin, or a similar set of young people, were pranking me. They’d run me back and forth between the doors until I got visibly angry or frightened, and then there’d be laughter. I hated being made the butt of a joke.

I stood in the dark kitchen and thought. If it was either of the two less likely cases, calling the police made sense. But if it was a prank… I was still thinking when the knocking started up again at the front door.

I’d left the light on there. If I could get there fast and quiet enough, I might catch the miscreant. I slid out of my hard-soled slippers, and in my stocking feet ran tip-toed and silent down the length of the house.

It almost worked. They must have been counting seconds and judging how fast I could get there, because the knocking stopped just before I reached the door. I sprinted the last yard, plastered my eye to the peephole, and peered out.

They almost made it. I just caught a glimpse of a shadowed form disappearing around the corner of the house, the reflective stripes on their running shoes gleaming in the porch light.

I knew those shoes and that way of moving, and considered my options, grinning. I could go back to writing my story and let them hammer away until they gave up in disgust. I could call Ron and see if he could catch them and scare the devil out of them.

Or I could prank them in my own turn.

I slid out the door, closing it silently behind me. My porch offered no hiding place, being just a landing at the top of the steps, but the stairs made a deep shadow opposite the light. I crouched in that pool of darkness and waited.

The boys were back in a minute. I let them get within a few feet, then lunged to my feet, roaring like a madman.

Then I sat on the bottom step as the boys screamed and sprinted up the driveway, pursued by my cackling laughter.

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©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2016
As always, please ask permission to use any photos or text. Link-backs appreciated!

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Friday Flash Fiction: The Disease

This week's challenge from Terribleminds.com (author Chuck Wendig) was to write a horror story about a disease, just in time for Halloween. I think this one is horrible enough (no snide comments, you in the back!).

Disease

It took the old first, and people accepted that they were relieved as well as saddened. Food was in short supply, with little to spare for those who were past contributing. When the disease began to move among the children, the grief was greater. Some saw it as sparing them the slow death by starvation, mental and physical, that seemed the doom of the colony.

The disease itself was not so horrible, Marda thought. The old grew feverish, stopped eating, and wasted away in a few days. She didn’t say it aloud, because it sounded absurd, but she thought that they just lost the will to live. Maybe they had.

It looked more sinister in the children. They, too, grew mildly feverish, but with them it was not so much that they lost the will to live, as that they lost any kind of will at all. The first a parent might notice was a child who became silently obedient. The initial response of many was to rejoice at how well-behaved their child was. Then the parent would notice the child said nothing, did nothing unless directly commanded. They showed no initiative, not even enough to eat or drink. Within two days, the fever set in, and the next the child ceased to speak or move. Death by starvation followed. If they were medically fed, they only lived long enough to lose the will to breathe.

“For all that,” Marda told her partner, Erno, “death is better than life as an automaton.” She was thinking of the last stage before the fever.

Erno had seen what Marda was afraid to say. “The only ones who aren’t getting sick are the ones who are too dull to think for themselves anyway.”

“It kills any who show a will,” Marda whispered, horrified. “It’s as though the disease is selecting for a world of mindless drones.”

Marda returned to that thought in the following weeks. The disease spread among the children. It responded to no treatment, no containment strategy. If a child was dull-witted and docile, no exposure resulted in illness. And no efforts at quarantine could prevent a bright, quick and curious child from falling ill. A few recovered, after a fashion.

It was while treating these listless, obedient shells of children that Marda broke down. “We’re being culled!” she told Erno. “We’ll soon have no one left with the brains to do anything original.”

He nodded. “And have you noticed who’s getting pregnant and who’s not?”

She had told herself it was only that the smarter and wiser among them would not try to reproduce while this disease ravaged the colony. Erno wouldn’t let her believe it. “Kim and Lee can’t get pregnant. Tom and Erika lost their baby.” He listed a dozen other couples, all leaders and scientists. “We started testing. They are all sterile. We are all sterile.”

“What kind of disease selects for stupidity and dull-wittedness?”

He shrugged. “One that prefers sheep to sheepdogs.”

They sat and stared together into a future that was no future.

The disease had spread over the whole planet, despite the complete separation of the two populations. The planet was not large, and there were only two habitable land masses, each colonized separately. As they had quickly reached their carrying capacity, the two populations had severed all ties; it was the only way to keep their uneasy peace.

Marda hoped that old enmity would have kept the other colony safe, but radio communications from the other continent crushed that hope. All their efforts to find a cure had failed as well.

Efforts to cure the disease were hampered by those who saw children recover and believed the crisis had passed. Marda saw only that no one among her friends had a living child, though a few acquaintances had been left with the hollow husk of a formerly sparkling son or daughter. Some of those whose children “recovered” were unable to bear life with the shell of a person. Others rejoiced that their child was spared, and some boasted of their well-behaved offspring.

Marda had to stop visiting such friends, after she had screamed at one proud mother, “Don’t you see? That’s not a child, it’s a machine! She’s not alive, she’s just breathing!” Erno had had to pull her off the weeping parent. After that, they stopped going out. Their whole group lived in the lab anyway, though with less and less hope. They were past the point where a vaccine could do any good, and they had little hope for an actual cure. Yet against all reason they held onto hope, or at least the habit of working.

That lasted until the day when Tom turned from his computer to ask a question, and saw Kim sitting, staring into space with a vacant smile. “Kim! What is it? Do you have an idea?” he asked in desperate hope.

She didn’t turn, or even blink, just sat. A question was not a command.

The next day Kim had a fever, and her partner, Lee, sat starting blankly, moving only as told. They set him to bathing Kim’s face, resorting in their desperation to ancient ways of reducing a fever, for whatever good it would do.

When Lee, too, began to run a fever and ceased moving, the remainder of their little group knew what the future held. The Disease—they had begun to think of it as the Farmer—had selected those to keep, and it was culling the others.

“Do we wait for it?” Marda asked the question in all their minds. “Do we wait to turn into mindless husks and die of starvation because we lack even the will to eat?”

“No.” Tom said, Erno’s echo only an instant behind.

Erika said nothing, but held out her hand. On her palm lay four capsules. No one spoke as each took and swallowed the only cure they had found. They would not stay to see the end.

The Farmer had won.

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Copyright Rebecca M. Douglass 2014

Thursday Flash Fiction: The Horror of Spam

Yeah, I know. "Flash Fiction Thursday" doesn't alliterate like it does on Friday. But I  do like to post to Chuck Wendig's challenges on Thursday, before everyone has lost interest.

This week's challenge was to write a bit of horror framed as a spam email. I didn't go very horrific, of course. In fact, at first I thought I couldn't do this at all. But while I was out biking on Sunday it occurred to me that one kind of scam/spam was perfectly suited to a Halloween theme, if not real horror: the grandchild in need.  Chuck suggested limiting this one to under 500 words; mine is only 367 including the title. I regret that I cannot reproduce the machine-translated English of most spam (well, no, I don't regret it at all. But you know. I had to say it).

The Horror of Spam, the Spam of Horror

To: Grandma
Subject: Need help!

Dear Grandma,
I am in such trouble and I need your help. I was on our school trip to Romania and we were staying in this really cool castle in Transylvania. So I totally fell in love with our host, this guy Vladimir who lives in the castle. He is sooooo cute! And he says he loves me too, but he’s pretty desperate so I don’t know.

See, now he’s saying that he wants to keep me forever, and that I need to give him money. I mean, I know that castles like his cost a lot to run, and that’s why he rents it out to tourists and sleeps in the basement. Well, in the crypt, really, but it’s totally nice and dry and all, and he says he doesn’t mind a few dead ancestors. Real aristocrats are so much more matter-of-fact about that stuff, aren’t they?

But if I don’t come up with the money, he says—well, I never noticed his teeth, because you know, guys with those smoky sultry good looks don't grin or anything. He’s making me kind of nervous, I mean this is Transylvania after all. And I don’t think I want to be his bride, even if he is a Count, and for sure I don’t want to let him bite me on the neck. But that’s the thing: he says if you don’t send money, I can either join him in his crypt or he’ll give me to his friend Wolfgang. The one Vlad calls “Vulfie” with a raised eyebrow, just to make sure I know what sort he is.

I’m afraid I kind of boasted about how rich we are, when I was first getting to know Vlad. I mean, he’s a Count, you know? I didn’t want him to think I’m from some ordinary family. So he wants like, a million dollars? Please, scrape up whatever you can and wire it to me at 1600 Transylvania Avenue, Transylvania, Romania, unless you want your favorite granddaughter turned into a vampire. Or eaten by a werewolf.

Your loving Granddaughter,
Elvira

P.S. Hope your arthritis is better!