Notes on the Previous Four Stories

“A Lakeside Tale” was a lark that came out of nowhere – always a gift. I just saw a pretty woman in my mind (although admittedly, I always see pretty women in my mind) and got to thinking about how that sight tends to make an idiot of most men, and how nice it would be if somehow a guy – even if only in fiction – somehow managed to keep his wits about him even after he has made a complete ass of himself. This story is what came out.

“The White Book” was my and my niece Emily’s entry to Three-Minute Fiction's latest round. As I wrote, I had already written a couple of other pieces in response to this round’s challenge of writing a 600-word-max story whose first line reads: “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.” But I wanted Emily to try her hand at writing, so we agreed to get together and each write a story, and whatever we wrote we would send in. Unfortunately, I discovered that the rules didn’t allow minors to enter the contest. To try to get around this, I suggested that we do a collaboration instead, and I would submit our story under my name.

I don't think I ever had as much fun (co)writing anything as this story, which Emily and I wrangled into shape over a couple of very pleasant days. I mostly steered and I did provide the twist ending (and put in some constraints: she wanted to include a bunch of adventures, and I had to tell her that we only had space for maybe one scene in a 600-word story), but the main idea and the great, weird imagery – the people with beaks, the medieval costumes, the skates made of animal bones – are hers, from her Social Studies lesson on the Black Plague. During a lunch break, I got to telling her about the Monty Python Black Knight scene, and when we went back to writing, we decided to add a black knight into the mix.

It turned out that we were probably disqualified anyway, since another rule of the contest was that a story should be the sole creation of the person submitting. But – what the heck. As I said, the experience of writing this story with Emily was priceless in itself.

The next couple of stories came from prompts from Flash Friday Fiction.

“Fear” came from the cue: “A story about fear using the words: dark, crunching, eerie, monster, and fear. Word limit: 1,313 words.” I had been wanting to write a story where a protagonist’s experience with a primal emotion shatters his self-conception. I had anger in mind, but when I saw the prompt on Flash Friday Fiction, I figured fear would do as well.

“By Mokelumne River” arose from the cue: “Write a Western short story using these words: rope, dust, whiskey, medicine, and ceremony. Word limit: 1,500 words.” I had thought that of all genres, the Western would be the most difficult for me to write, but it turned out to be very easy. All I had to do was think back on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of my favorite movies, and Firefly, one of my favorite shows, and try to emulate the tone and the penchant for twisty turnabouts of those two entertainments. I can only hope I succeeded somewhat.

By Mokelumne River

Frank Bosworth and Li Ping raised their heads from where they crouched by the shore when Medicine Mutt started barking. They peered up the slope and spied three figures on horses coming down the trail, kicking up dust behind them. Frank and Li Ping poured out the water and gravel from their tin pans back into the river, put the pans down, stood up, and watched as the three men drew nigh.

They were big, mangy fellows, with leathery faces and bristly beards and an ill-favored look about them. Pistols hung from their belts and rifle butts stuck out from their saddles. The one in the lead wore a tall, worn stove pipe hat, and he gave a gaptoothed grin as he drew his horse up half a dozen paces from Frank and Li Ping. Tall Hat’s two companions wore beat-up Stetson hats – one black, one white – and took their places behind him, one to each side.

“Well, now, what have we got here?” Tall Hat said to Frank. “How’s the lady river treating you, fella? She coughing up?”

Frank smiled amiably and shrugged. “She’ll favor us yet.”

Tall Hat looked down at Medicine Mutt and said evenly, “Will you get your dog to stop nipping and sniffin’ at my horse’s heels afore I plug him?”

Frank said, “Now, no need for that. He’s just doing his job.” Then to Mutt: “Down, boy, down. C’mere.” Mutt circled away and lay down at Frank’s feet, staring at the three strangers warily.

Tall Hat looked over Frank appraisingly. He nodded at the revolver that hung low on Frank’s right thigh. He said, “You carry that like you know your ways around a .45. You in the war?”

Frank responded, “I got me into a few scrapes in my time.”

Tall Hat eyed Li Ping, taking in his black pants and black robe, his shaved head with his queue – that long, rope-like braid of hair that Chinese men wore – hanging down his back. Tall Hat snorted and said, still addressing Frank, “Why you got a Chinaman with you? He your cook?”

Frank glanced at Li Ping. “Well,” he admitted slowly, “he’s actually sorta my boss. My prospecting partner, really, but this here stake we got is mostly on his coin.”

Tall Hat straightened up and leaned back in surprise. “Your boss? Well, don’t that beat all!” He turned back to his companions. “Don’t that beat all, fellas? You ever heard of such a thing?”

The one behind him to his right wearing the black Stetson said grimly, “Damned affront to the Almighty, if you ask me. A white man working for a John Chinaman.”

Tall Hat faced Frank again with a look of disapproval. “What’s the story behind that?”

Frank shrugged again. “Li Ping’s been wanting to bring in his girl from across the ocean; been mooning over her and planning his wedding ceremony and all. He’d saved up from his railroad work on the Union Pacific, but he needed a little more, so he thought prospecting might be the way to go. I worked on the Union Pacific myself and knew him from there. He asked me to join him, and so here we are.”

Tall Hat shook his head. “Now, that ain’t right, bringing in a China woman to breed more squinty-eyed pups. Unless’n of course he puts her up for some whoring, which might be okay. Them China women are sweet enough when you ain’t got coin for a proper white whore.” He guffawed when he saw that Li Ping had turned from staring narrow-eyed at Frank to glaring furiously at him. “Why, fellas,” he said, “I do believe this John Chinaman’s getting what I’m saying. So who says their heathen minds can’t fathom Christian talk?”

He sighed expansively and said to Frank, “Well, now, fella, seeing as how you ain’t exactly been living right, taking up with a swarthy Oriental and all, I gotta say that some righteous retribution is in order.” He looked around at the small encampment. “You got some nice prospecting gear here: nice tent, couple of good nags, probably got some good vittles and maybe even some whiskey inside your tent. Not to mention John Chinaman’s coin. And I got a feeling you weren’t exactly forthright about your luck and prolly got a few nice shiny nuggets squirreled away. Ain’t that so?”

Frank sighed.

Tall Hat continued, “So I think taking it all would be a good and proper fine for, you know, breaking all sorts of laws of God and man.”

Frank said placatingly, “Come on, fellas. If I read you right, you boys were in the big fight, same as me. We all seen enough plundering and shooting and killing to last a lifetime. Ain’t no need to go down this road.”

Tall Hat said, “You’re right, there ain’t no need to go down this road. All you gotta do is unhitch your gun belt and let it slide down to the ground and this’ll all turn out nice and peaceful.”

Frank sighed again. “Well, fellas, no one could ever claim I ain’t a peaceable man. Why, I remember a time in Kansas, when I came across a couple of fine gentlemen like yourselves and I – “

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Li Ping said and pulled a gun from his robe and shot Tall Hat in the chest.

Tall Hat’s horse reared, dumping him on the ground. Li Ping shifted his aim to the right of the horse pawing air and plugged White Stetson as he was drawing his rifle from its saddle holster. Frank got Black Stetson on the left. None of the three men got off a shot.

Li Ping strode to the men lying on the ground with Mutt padding by his side, barking excitedly. He kicked the bodies one by one. One of them stirred and moaned; Li Ping aimed at his face and fired.

He walked back to Frank, tucking his gun back in his robe, shaking his head in exasperation.

“What?” Frank said. “I was working my way to it.”

“How? By talking ’em to death?”

“I was, you know, trying to lull them so I could make my play.”

“Yeah, that’ll work. And what was that about telling them about me and my girl back home?”

“What? They was going to be dead anyway. Where’s the harm in shooting the breeze sometimes? You’re always so damn silent.”

Li Ping frowned. “I’m paying good coin for this here business venture. The least you can do is hold up your end and take care of these varmints when they show up, like you’re supposed to. Do I gotta do everything myself?”

“Ahhh, you always take things so damn serious.”

(June 2011)

Fear

It’s easier when you’re young, when fear can still be delicious. Think about the ancient, sacred rite of campfire tales. You and your friends sit around a flaring, crackling fire, conjuring ghosts and ghouls and monsters; you tell each other in hushed tones about noises in the woods – the crunching of leaves, eerie wails, words whispered just beyond understanding – and the darkness around you enters within, pounding, threatening to burst through your chest and eardrums. Then the story is done and the throbbing darkness recedes, leaving you terrified, exhilarated, replete with satisfaction. You can think of yourself as brave then for not trembling or jumping at every little sound as the tales were told, or begging that the stories end. When you are a child, you have the luxury of playing at fear, particularly when your childhood was more or less uneventful and you were raised by parents who kept you safe and free from harm. 

But then you grow up, and one bright day, you are walking down the street with your own son Matt, only half listening to his six-year-old chatter, your mind on the list of grocery items your wife has just texted you to pick up on the way home. You hear him call to you, “Hey, Dad! Dad!”, and you realize he has fallen behind you. You turn and see him pausing before a store window, pointing at some video games displayed within. Your eye is caught by an old woman shuffling up the street towards you, looking down at Matt, and the instant you notice her smile the side of her head leaps off in a gush of crimson, chasing the shattered fragments of the store window as they fly inwards in a thunderous crash. You hear a loud pop! pop! pop! from the street and the sound of more glass bursting, and you find yourself lying face down at the bottom of a stairwell to a basement door, eyes shutting away the light, burrowing your head into your arms. You hear screams and yells and more pops and dull booms, and then the slamming of car doors and the screeching of tires, and then the keening of sirens in the distance, coming closer, becoming shrill and maddening. The screams continue, from several quarters, and after an eternity in the darkness, a flicker of a memory rouses you: you have a son; he was with you.

By sheer dint of will, you open your eyes, unlock your frozen limbs, and drag yourself up the four steps to peer into the street. You see Matt still standing where he had been, on a slick of blood, the old woman lying prone at his feet. His tiny body is enlarging, sucking in air like a bellows, then blasting it out in a piercing, wrenching howl. His cheek is spotted red, his face contorted in complete and utter terror. You try to stand up but fail, and so can only start crawling towards him. A flash of dark blue rushes past him and jumps through the open, broken window – and Matt is gone. A gargling, guttural moan escapes you, and another dark blue shape suddenly appears, looking down at you. You see his face mouthing words, but though you hear the sounds, their meaning will not settle in your churning mind. He lowers himself on one knee, puts a hand on your back, stays beside you as he scans the street, his drawn pistol pointing to the ground.

More sirens, and other figures in a lighter blue come running up, and they crouch around you in a circle, and more hands are touching you, prodding you. They bring you to your feet and guide you towards red trucks with flashing lights. You can barely feel your legs beneath you as you stagger forward. In time, Matt is brought to you, wrapped in a blanket, smudges of blood still smearing his face, and you find yourselves clinging to each other desperately, wailing into each other’s ears, the two of you a single creature convulsing with fear and grief.

Speech and wit return to you, in fits and starts, and the putting together of the story begins. Words begin registering again; you hear them from the police, the emergency personnel: bank robbery, automatic rifles, shootout, multiple fatalities. And you start speaking your words, telling your story, what you can piece of it; first to the police, then to the doctor at the hospital, then to your tear-stricken wife, who cannot let go of her tight embrace of Matt. And then you tell it to Dr. Johansen, in weekly sessions in a cozy room with dark, paneled walls, with sunlight streaming in through the slits of green, Venetian blinds.

* * *

Dr. Johansen has reassured me over and over that my reactions on that bright day were perfectly normal, and I have come to believe it, for the most part – though I am still apt to start at sudden noises, my throat still constricts whenever I walk past store windows, and I sometimes still imagine I see flashes of contempt in people’s faces – in my wife’s, most painfully. Matt is doing fine; the currents and eddies of childhood and a blessed forgetfulness have long swept him away from that street, so that the memory of it has no more hold on him than a story of ghosts and goblins. I in my adult circumspection am denied this solace.

It’s a little death, isn’t it?, fear: a touch of oblivion that foreshadows the void awaiting us in the end. Before the fear you are yourself; but while it has its grip, you are gone. You disappear. And you tell the stories afterwards to try to come back to yourself, to find yourself again. Sometimes it is not so easy. Before that day, I was sure of who I was: a devoted husband, a good and decent man – and most of all a loving father who would give his life for his son in a heartbeat. Since that day, I have lived with fear's bitter aftertaste in my tongue, knowing this is not true.

(May 2012)

The White Book

by Emily Isip and Glenn Ricafrente

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. The book had been forbidden to her, but Kayla had read it anyway. She had not finished it, because she was afraid of how it would end. Nevertheless, the book had already started working its magic and things began changing.

It was snowing outside, though she lived in a small village that had never seen snow – and anyway, it was the middle of summer. The landscape and the buildings were the same, but the people were no longer her neighbors, the villagers. They were exactly like the characters she had just been reading about. They were all playing in the snow. Their jaws, mouths, and noses were stretched out in foot-long, downturned beaks – like the protective masks people wore during the plague in medieval times – only the beaks were outgrowths of their faces. They were all wearing silk – the men in stockings and tunics, the women in long dresses with long sleeves that flowed past their arms – and some of them were skating on a frozen pond on ice skates made from animal bones.

A man on a flaming black horse came up the road, and everyone stopped and turned to him – then began running in all directions. Within seconds, everyone was gone. The man, who wore a black cape and black armor (with a helmet that extended outwards to conform to his long beak), rode up towards her. She was petrified. “This is impossible,” she said, “how could the book have come to life?”

She rubbed her eyes, and suddenly felt something push on her hands. She opened her eyes, and saw that her mouth and nose were elongating. She was growing a beak of her own. The black knight drew his sword and spurred his horse onwards, charging directly at her. She screamed, but it came out a loud squawk.

She leaped back inside her house and shut the door. Her beak disappeared, which allowed her to holler, “MOM!!!”

Her mother suddenly appeared right in front of her, a look of alarm on her face. Kayla ran to her mother’s arms, and her mother asked, “What’s wrong?”

Sobbing, she confessed to what she had done. Her mother held back her anger and said, “I told you to never open that book. And yet you did. I can see you are really upset right now, so we will talk about your punishment later.”

Kayla said, “How could you keep such an awful, horrifying book? How could you put a spell on it so that anyone who read it would see all those horrible people come to life? That black knight almost killed me!”

Her mother, who was the village sorceress, stared at her, then said, “It’s not an awful book. It’s just that anyone who reads the book writes the story. Here, let me show you.”

Her mother let her go and took the book from the table. She started opening it. Kayla backed away in fear. Her mother reassured her, “Nothing will happen. I removed the spell for now.”

Her mother opened the book and showed it to her. The pages were blank.

(March 2012)

A Lakeside Tale

I watched the water pour through the jagged crack in the hull and lap on my feet, feeling chagrined more than anything.

“Are you all right?” she cried out. I turned and saw her standing on the dock fifteen, maybe twenty feet away; saw her face, finally, and thought to myself, Holy shit, she’s pretty.

“Yeah, I’m fine. The water’s great.” It was crawling up my ankles now.

She looked at me quizzically. “Are you getting out? Your canoe looks like it’s going to sink.”

“Nah, I’m good. Hey, listen, will you do me a favor?”

“You want me to throw you a line?” She cast about the dock, searching for a rope.

“No. Will you sing something?”

She turned back to me. “What?”

“Sing something. Anything.”

She looked at me blankly. “Umm, why?”

The water was up to my calves. “Is this any time for explanations? C’mon, just sing something.”

She peered at me anxiously. “Why don’t you have a life vest? You can swim, right?”

“Nope. That’s why you have to sing. Now. Before I go under.”

After staring at me a few seconds, she gave a half smile. “You can swim. You wouldn’t be so blasé otherwise.”

Blasé. I was liking her more and more. “Are you going to sing or aren’t you? Look, my canoe’s slipping into the water.”

Her smile was full on now. “You’re insane, you know that?”

The water was starting to soak my cargo shorts. I’d be in the lake in half a minute. “Yeah, and going down with my ship fast. What, you won’t grant a dying man his last wish?”

She shook her head in mock exasperation. Then, after a moment’s thought, she sang:

My Bonnie lies under the ocean

My Bonnie lies under the sea…

Her singing voice was clear, melodious, tinged with mischief – I noted with satisfaction the slight, playful change she made to the lyrics. The canoe, filled with too much water to retain its buoyancy, slid into the depths. I grinned at her as my head sank beneath the waves.

* * *

I had seen her from afar as I paddled along the lakeshore. She was sitting alone on a dock, leaning against a wooden post, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed Havana hat, her eyes by turtle shell sunglasses, her nose buried in a book. Yes, yes, her body was what caught my eye at first. She was fair and long limbed, and the cut-offs and aquamarine bikini top she was wearing revealed and concealed her figure in all sorts of enticing ways. But – honest to God – what drew me in was her face; that is, curiosity over what she looked like, since all I could see were the parts not hidden by the book, the sunglasses, and the shadow cast by her hat. I came in closer to get to a distance and an angle from which I could her face clearly. Since she didn’t even glance up at me as I glided by, I gave up on any pretense at nonchalance and was unabashedly staring at her – so intently that I failed to see the orange warning buoy I had inadvertently steered towards, not noticing it until my canoe had already crunched on the rocks just beneath the surface and scraped over them, mortally wounded.

I hung suspended in the cold water ten feet below in silent contemplation, until my chest began to tighten in its desire for air, and I started swimming up.

* * *

I broke surface with a gasp and with a few strokes covered the distance to the dock. I reached out to grab the overhang and looked up to see her relieved face looking down at me. She said, “Damn, I thought you were dead.”

I combed my dripping hair back, shrugged, and held out my hand. “Would you help me up?”

She crossed her arms, head tilted to one side, lips tightening around a suppressed smile. “Umm, I don’t know. I’m not sure I want a strange guy up here who, one, scares the shit out of me making me think he had drowned, and, two, makes me sing. What was that about?”

I sighed and retracted my hand. “Well… I felt stupid. I was – and I say this totally shamefaced – I was looking at you and didn’t see the rocks until I’d hit them. Since ‘idiot capsizes canoe ogling pretty girl’ makes for a fairly ridiculous story, I thought if you sang to me, I’d at least be able to embellish a little and make it like it was, you know, your singing that made me crash into the rocks.”

“My singing,” she repeated, uncomprehending.

“Yeah, you know. Like the Greek myth.”

After a pause, she said hesitantly, “You mean like the Siren? The Siren’s song?”

I smiled. I was really, really liking her. “Yeah. Stupid, I know.”

Her brow furrowed. “But you crashed before I started singing.”

“Blah-dee-blah. Details are meant to be fudged.”

She looked at me sidelong. There was an almost imperceptible shift about her face, the kind that comes over women when it starts dawning on them that power over a guy was being slipped into their hands. “So, I’m a Siren then? Enchanting seafaring men into a watery grave?”

I gazed up at her, nodding my head slowly. “I think so. I’m still kind of drowning right now.”

“Uh-huh.” She uncrossed her arms. “Okay, good line. And I’ll give you points for creativity. You’ll have a good story to tell your friends.”

“We’ll have a good story to tell our kids,” I said, “about how we met cute.”

She arched her eyebrow. “Oh, really now? And what makes you think that this goes even one step further?”

I grinned. “Because I’m your Bonnie; you said so yourself. And here I am, brought back to you from the sea. Now, will you please help me up?” I said, extending my hand to her again.

(May 2012)

The Siren by John
William Waterhouse 

Notes on the Previous Six Stories

Sometimes stories come at you sideways. Working late one night, the image of a guy lying in bed in the dark seeing the visage of a lost love just as a new love has become a possibility came to me unbidden. So I put work aside and wrote “Night Voices” as an exploration of that image. Some things are just more important than work.

The latest round of the Three-Minute Fiction contest opened in March, and this time the challenge was to begin a story with the sentence “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.” As always, the story had to be 600 words at most.

I kept playing around with so many story possibilities that went nowhere that I decided to go meta and incorporate several story beginnings into one whimsical tale: “Round 8.” The story was too self-referential to be my entry; in fact, I hesitated even posting it here (a lot of the bits are inside jokes), but obviously I decided in the end what the hell.

“Canciónes de Amor” started off as a possible entry, with the contest line being the first line of the song stanza that starts the story. But the stanza kept bugging me; the story required lyrics that were mediocre, and what I had written was downright awful. So I chucked the original stanza and came up with a different one – and there went the first line mandated by the contest.

The story I ended up submitting for the contest was one that I co-wrote with my niece Emily (which I can’t post here until the results are announced – in a few weeks). After we had sent it off, I felt that I needed to write just one more story that wasn’t a lark, that actually had the required first line, that wasn’t co-authored; just a straight-up story of my very own in response to the contest challenge – just for my own satisfaction. “Stepping Through” was what I came up with.

A few months ago, I found a flash fiction website, Flash Fiction Friday, that offers weekly story prompts that anyone who cared to could use to write stories. The next two pieces arose from a couple of the prompts.

“Wild Heart” emerged from the cue: “Take your typical fairy tale villain or monster and make them the protagonist. Must use ‘something wicked this way comes’ as a line in the story. Word limit: 1,200 words.” Rather than write about a wolf or a witch or a wicked stepmother, I went with a creature from Philippine folklore instead – the tikbalang – and wove a fable around it.

“Driving Away” was in response to the cue: “Write a story where your protagonist is mistaken about something they ‘know’ to be true. Length: up to 1,200 words.” The obvious route was to create a character who was cocksure about some belief, comfortable in his certitude. Contrarian that I am, I decided to write instead about someone who was absolutely certain about his flaws. Someone, in other words, a lot like me.