Tag Archives: flash fiction

The Stalker: I’ve Been Published Again at “Theme of Absence”

Theme of Absence, an online magazine of fantasy, horror, and science fiction has posted another of my stories, The Stalker. I originally submitted that piece of flash fiction for their Halloween Contest, and while it wasn’t selected as a winner, Jason Bougger, the site owner, suggested I resubmit for regular publication. I did and this morning, my story is online.

As you may recall, Theme of Absence was the first to publish an original fiction piece of mine, a story called The Anything Box. I’m very excited to see another of my creations published at their site.

Here’s an excerpt from “The Stalker”.

The girl panicked when she literally stumbled over my last victim. The body had been steadily decomposing at the bottom of that shallow gully for months, and it must have been pretty disgusting to trip over and nearly fall on top of a rotting corpse.

The poor girl. She can’t be older than sixteen. She had gone for a walk through the forest near the cabin her friends had rented, the sun went down, and she got lost.

She’s running blindly now, certain she can hear my breathing, my heavy footfalls, the rustling of tree branches I push aside as I stalk her. It’s a deception to get her moving. She could hardly suspect the truth.

For the rest, visit Theme of Absence and read The Stalker.

Two Eternals

shadow man

Image: jimharold.com

“Rafe Johnson.”

At first, Rafe thought he was dreaming. He rolled over in bed, grabbed his mobile, and looked at the time: 2:31 a.m.

“Rafe Johnson.”

He sat bolt upright in bed. It was no dream. He looked around the darkened room in the basement of his Mom’s house and saw no one.

“Who’s there?”

A shape slowly coalesced near the foot of the bed. It was a shadow, then it was a man.

“Do you remember me, Rafe?”

“What the fu…”

“If you kill a man, you should at least remember what he looked like.”

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Angel In The Night

angel

Angelina Jolie

“What do you want? Can’t you see that I’m in pain?”

Everett Temple was 86 years old and dying of cancer. It was late, after 2 a.m., and yet he had a visitor in his private hospital room.

“I want to help you, Everett. I want to ease your suffering. Why won’t you let me?”

Even in the semi-darkness, the old man could see she had the appearance of a young, very attractive woman. Short, raven black hair, piercing blue eyes, succulent ruby lips, elegant yet brief black gown. His body had long abandoned the ability to react to the erotic, but he remembered when he longed for a woman like her.

Yet for all her beauty and sexual allure, there was something about her he feared. He didn’t know her name but he knew who she was. He had been running from her for years, nearly a decade, and tonight, she had finally caught him.

“You? Ease my suffering? You are my worst enemy.”

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The Day After Thanksgiving

thanksgiving

Image: greatest.com

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’m exhausted. The holidays wipe me out, especially when I have to spend them with family.

I really wasn’t looking forward to that flight from Chicago to Oakland. Couldn’t get a direct one of course since I waited until the last minute, so the whole trip took nearly seven hours.

I really hoped Mom would have just accepted my excuse that I had too much work to do to take the time off, but she knows how to get her way. She’s always known how to manipulate me. She uses guilt, that’s a favorite. What about my ailing father? What about my sister and her obnoxious husband who never get to see me? What about all the snotty-nosed nieces and nephews who miss their Uncle Jerry.

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Thankful

wraithMick knew he only had a few minutes left. His son Tyler couldn’t stop the bleeding from his throat. Mick looked up and smiled. He wished he could tell him how much he loved him, Tyler and his little boy Jimmy.

Mick knew tomorrow’s Thanksgiving meal would taste like ashes to them, to Tyler’s wife Jenny, three months pregnant with their second child, a grandchild Mick would never know.

He knew they would find it hard to be thankful, but Mick was thankful.

He was thankful he’d stopped the son of a bitch from taking Jimmy.

The bastard had been preying on children all over Orange County for a year and a half, sneaking into houses at night, forcing a window or coming in through an unlocked patio door. He’d been taking children, probably followed them home from school or spotted them playing in front of their houses, cased their homes, set up a plan so he could kidnap them, rape them, and murder them.

Not this time.

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Trying to Wake Up

dreaming

Image: alghad.com

Jeremy woke up from the nightmare that was rapidly vanishing from his memory. He meant to stay up late enough to find out the election results, but after pulling a double-shift in the E.R., he was exhausted.

Turning on the coffee, he opened his Macbook and searched the national news. What a relief. The 45th President of the United States was going to be Olivia Marsdin. She was originally considered a long shot that had little chance of beating her political rival Charles Remington, but as one scandal after another surfaced to plague the Remington campaign, Marsdin steadily rose in the polls.

Marsdin was an outsider, a moderate fiscally and a liberal socially, so she appealed to a wide audience. Remington was conservative both fiscally and socially and while he appealed to the Washington insider crowd, he also was the early favorite among college educated voters, especially white males.

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Why Don’t I Trust You?

trust“If you trust me, why are you so upset?”

“Are you out of your mind? Just look at what’s happening to me? How could you do this?”

They were sitting together on the edge of Mallorie’s bed in the dark. It was just after two in the morning but she couldn’t sleep. She barely ate. She hadn’t been to class in a week. She just stayed in her bedroom in an apartment she shared with two other girls, toggling between mind-numbing despair and panic.

“I never said bad things wouldn’t happen in your life, Mallorie. I just said I’d be here to help you deal with them.”

The young college student wiped tears from red, swollen eyes and tried to compose herself.

“I do trust you.” She started sobbing again, then forced herself to stop.

“I don’t know. Maybe I don’t. I mean if I did, why are my emotions so out of control? Please, please have mercy. I need to heal. My Daddy’s throat cancer need to heal and only you can help.”

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A Late Night Visit

shadow

Image: Business Insider

Jerry was finally dozing off when his doorbell rang. He had a tough time sleeping alone, but Susan and the kids were visiting her mother in California so he had the place to himself for the next week, whether he liked it or not.

“10:30 at night? Who the devil?”

Then he abruptly got out of bed and grabbed a robe. No good news arrives so late at night. What if something happened to Susan, Denise, and little Frankie? “Please don’t let it be the cops.”

Jerry pulled on his robe, turned on the front hall light, and then the one over the front door before opening it.

“Bill?” It was Bill Henderson, the guy he used to share a cubical with at work until…

“Let me in Jerry, it’s freezing out here. What took you so long to answer the door?”

“It can’t be you, Bill.”

“What? Are you blind? Of course it’s me. Let me in.”

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Entering the Slow Dark

wraith“Why am I so tired? Where am I? Is this my bedroom? Everything’s all gray.”

Rand Chambers found himself in an indeterminate environment. He was lying down and covered up like he was in bed, but this was different. He could neither fall asleep nor wake up and was suspended in a state somewhere in between.

“You all ask the same questions. It’s as if it hasn’t been explained to you before.”

He heard a woman’s voice but it was not kind. Rather, she sounded impatient and annoyed and bored, as if she couldn’t be bothered with Rand’s condition, whatever that was.

“What do you mean? Who are you? Where are you?”

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Leaving Mother

planet

Image: hongkiat.com

“But we don’t want to leave you, Mother. We love you.”

Shawna was the leader of the people from the NorAm Contingent. There were four Contingents on the generation ship, NorAm, SouAm, EurAsia, MedAfrica. When their ancestors left a dying Earth some two-hundred years ago, it was with the single hope that their descendents would perpetuate a thriving humanity on the second planet orbiting Proxima B.

It had worked. They had arrived. Thousands upon thousands of human beings were ready to occupy an Earth-like planet, this time turning into a garden instead of a cesspool. The lessons taught by their parents and their parents’ parents about living with a planet and not exploiting it were well learned.

The problem is, no one wanted to go.

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