The Roommates

Image by Fanghong via Wikimedia Commons

Author's Note: The first part of this story was previously published on the blog. You can find it here.

Back at the house, I managed to pass through the door on the third try.

"So was I killed here? In the house?" I asked Darius.

He flopped to the floor and stretched out. His tail thumped against the floor in a manner I took to mean he was thinking.

"Yes, I believe you were. I wasn't around at the time."

I stared at him for a moment, waiting for him to go on. He stared back at me.

"And?" I prompted.

"And what?" he said.

"And where were you?"

He sighed. "I was out doing business. It's not like I have any obligation to see what you were up to at all hours of the day, Roy.”

"What business was it you were doing?"

"My own." He gave his tail a mighty thump.

"Okay. But I was alive when you left?'

He sighed. "You had gone out. When I arrived later, you were transitioning into a Monad in the bathroom."

Vikings Aren't Dumb: A Tale of the Afterlife

Image by Sven-Steffen Arndt via Wikimedia Commons

Author Note: This story is the first chapter of a novel. 


I was surprised to wake up in the bathtub because I only took showers. Events would overshadow this first fact of the day, and its significance would only come back to me later. I found myself fully dressed in my only suit, the one that served for weddings, interviews, and funerals. The wedding ring I had buried at the back of a dresser drawer fit loosely on my left hand and an old watch was strapped around my wrist. At least I was dry.

I tried remembering my last thoughts before waking, but everything seemed far away. I wasn’t even sure if I had gone to bed the night before. Was I dreaming? I didn’t think so. Hallucinating? Not likely. I lived a pretty clean life: no drugs, no meat, and hardly ever alcohol. What time was it? My watch said 10:10. Where was my phone?

I got up and stomped my foot farther into my shoe. It wasn’t tied with my slip-proof knot, just a normal shoe knot that I had abandoned at the age of 12. And as I moved around, my underwear was slightly twisted and there were sock wrinkles trapped under my feet. I looked in the mirror, expecting to see a moustache, kitty whiskers, or profanity drawn on with marker. My face was unblemished, apart from the hooked nose that I could blame on no one but my parents. My hair wasn’t even mussed, and the circles under my eyes from too many nights at the office had faded. I had to admit that I looked better than I had in months. I winked at myself in the mirror and opened the bathroom door.

I stumbled and scraped my knuckles on the doorjamb. The cat at my feet had long grey and black fur, and was the size of a small dog. It rolled to its back and looked up at me.

“Darius?” I said. This wasn’t right. Darius had died of leukemia, and was buried in the back yard.

Mainstream Geek

Image by Ron Riccio via Wikimedia Commons

A red-faced girl of no more than four stared at Melvin. In her hand, chocolate ice cream flowed from her cone over her fingers, dripping onto her dad’s Jedi robes. Dad, oblivious to his mounting dry-cleaning bill, held his daughter in one arm and held out his phone with the other, recording the spectacle of Darth Vader and his stormtroopers gyrating to Michael Jackson’s Beat It. Melvin stumbled, and stutter-stepped back into position, knowing that the mistake would not go unnoticed. The girl fixed her gaze on him and pointed. A bead of sweat rolled into his eyes as he spun around, and Mevlin wished for the thousandth time the park would have provided ventilated suits to offset the hot Florida sun. He finished his dance with a heel-stomp a half beat behind the others; the music ended and applause began. Dad put the little girl down and fiddled with his phone. She waved at him, then extended her arm palm out and spread her fingers so that they formed a V between the middle and ring fingers: the Vulcan salute.

Melvin wished, also for the thousandth time, that the park would have provided working blasters. Tourist scum.

Merry-Go-Round

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The children screamed and rhymed as the merry-go-round spun, each taking a turn (or not) at jumping down and pumping their legs around the dusty track when the group had fallen below some arbitrary but important minimum speed. The less adventurous pumped back and forth on the swings or clambered around the jungle gym. At the edges, in the shade, parents watched (or didn’t watch) from benches.

Mark sat next to Lauren, watching a girl hop down from the merry-go-round and wind the group up. Mark, in dark jeans and gold-swirled shirt, sat with his arms folded and his ankle resting over a knee. He twirled the pointed toe of his dark cowboy boot in time to his daughter’s circuits on the merry-go-round. Lauren sat with an elbow propped on the back of the bench and rested her head on a wrist. Her legs curled behind her on the bench and she watched the playground through dark sunglasses, though an observer would be hard-pressed to know whether her eyes were on her kids or Mark.

“I know you were sleeping with her,” Lauren said.

Wichita Pete

Image via Wikimedia Commons

When I was growing up, there was an old hermit at the end of the street named Wichita Pete. I always remembered him as an old man who wore baggy GI surplus pants held up with red suspenders. His hair was always slicked back with something like Vaseline, but different because it never stayed put like the high school boys’ did. His basketball-sized face had this thin gray moustache like there were cigarette ashes balanced on his upper lip. Wichita Pete lived at the edge of the neighborhood, in a little tarpaper shack with its blackout curtains. Kids dared each other to ride bikes past his yard, or knock on his door and run away. If Mother had ever found out about that, she would have whipped me, but she was in charge of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, and always busy. I don’t know if Father would have cared, he pretended Wichita Pete’s house didn’t exist. Nobody seemed to know what Wichita Pete did with his time, but somebody heard that he was once the meanest gangster in Kansas City.

There was one time, at the market, where I saw Pete shuffling down the aisle, razors in one hand, and a can of peas in the other. He stopped to look down at me, but I wanted him to move along, since I had been sneaking vanilla wafers right from the box, and had the evidence hidden behind my back. He kept looking at me, that ashy moustache of his quivering. He smelt of wood smoke and cesspit, with something else that I would later learn was lavender. We stared at each other for a while, and I knew he knew about the cookies. His runny eyes stared into mine, but I didn’t feel like he was going to yell at me about it, or get me in trouble. Instead, my arm was yanked out of its shoulder socket by Mother. The cookies dropped to the floor, still open, but she was dragging me down the aisle and hadn’t noticed.

“I didn’t say anything to him, Martha,” Wichita Pete said.

“Time to leave, Chester,” she said, and stared a mean one at Pete. I took one glance back, and saw him picking the box from the floor. Mother tanned my butt right there in the car, and I understood I was not to go near Pete again.

Sins and Accolades

Author note:  This is an urban fantasy story featuring characters from the story Carne Fresco

The boy: nine or ten, snarls and thrashes at the bed sheets tying him to iron bedposts. His bloodshot eyes roll in darkened sockets and he gurgles black speech with a voice deeper than any human ought to produce. The priest: Bible held over his heart with one hand, eyes closed, Latin rites on his lips. His other hand quivers, sending the crucifix twirling in circles on its silver chain over the boy’s head. My hand: steady, holding the priest’s head in my pistol’s iron sights.

Our Operators are Standing By ...

Image by SimonInns via Wikimedia Commons

Author's Note:  Here at Black Coffee Fiction, we celebrate the holiday season by posting depressing stories about Christmas to make our readers feel better about their own holiday experiences. Know that while writing this story, I was laughing the whole time.

The telephone sat before him, lit only by the glow from his laptop’s screen. Jordy Lestrange had decided that as the only employee in the building, he could throw caution to the wind and turn on the overhead fluorescents that his fellow service techs kept off. After five minutes under full illumination, Jordy turned the lights back off, unable to bear the revealed dust bunnies, candy wrappers, and unidentifiable carpet stains. Two hours into his shift, and the phone remained silent. On any normal day, he would have fielded at least five questions from irritated customers, perhaps kicking one over to one of the engineers or a manager if the customer started shouting obscenities. But on the day after Christmas, the technical support line was dead as old Marley.

The Battle for October Sky – Part Five

They ran up the hill’s path pushing a cart laden with gas cylinders, disarmed rockets, and a crate of weasels. Sweat stung Beaumont’s eyes, and his gums throbbed as Ives cursed them for laggards. Beaumont’s pocket watch, secured to the cart by its fob chain, swung before him. The sweeping second hand told him that no matter how his legs burned, or his lungs ached, he would need to keep running for thirty more seconds. They needed to make it another hundred feet, and then he could rest.

Chevket pushed beside him, seemingly at his ease apart from casting nervous glances down the path behind them. Beaumont hoped his first officer’s luck would continue to hold. The man escaped the explosion that both knocked out Beaumont and Ives and claimed the lives of his crewmen, ironically, by hiding in the cave filled with hydrogen cylinders. In the ensuing chaos, he secured a fully-loaded hand cart from an unwary deliveryman, and circled back when he realized Ives and Beaumont were being held in the main building.

The cart hit a rock in the path and bounced, the cylinders jostling with heart-stopping clangs, but thankfully no sparks. The weasels chittered and snapped in their cage, which also mercifully remained latched. Beaumont was hunched forward as he pushed, and his face mere inches from the cage. It would be a particularly horrid experience to be swarmed over by their rancid bodies and sharp teeth should they escape. The weapons’ inclusion went against Chevket’s wishes, who had a heated, whispered argument with Ives when the agent insisted on including them. Chevket urged for immediate escape, citing the remaining crew of the October Sky relying on them all for getting the ship back to port, while Ives argued that bringing home this evidence of a new weapon of paramount importance. Beaumont reluctantly agreed with the agent only because the cold calculus of strategy placed this new weapon’s importance over the safety of an airship’s crew.

And so they ran, heedless of the shouts and rifle reports behind them, hoping that Ives assertion that they get to the top of the valley with their cart in eight minutes and not a second less was correct. The rifle fire fell off, and an ornithopter’s engine whined as its pilot prepared it for launch, doubtlessly with a rifle squad on board. Within minutes, they would be caught in the open.

“Fifteen seconds,” Beaumont hissed.

Ives cursed their collective legitimacy and speculated on their mothers’ improbable indiscretions with the animal world.

The Battle for October Sky – Part Four

Beaumont woke up on hard-packed earth next to Ives, in the only cage not filled with weasels. To his left and right, the mangy creatures scratched and chewed at the wire mesh separating their enclosures from his own, their rancid musk adding to his blooming headache. Ives huddled in the cell’s middle, wiping at the dried blood at his ears and nose. From somewhere beyond their cage, the thrumming and buzzing of machinery filled the air.

“How long?” Beaumont asked.

“About an hour,” Ives said a bit louder than necessary.

“Any ideas as to where are we?”

Ives pointed to the cage’s door, where someone had obviously and hastily nailed boards to reinforce their enclosure to withstand escape attempts from larger occupants. Beaumont moved to peer through a gap to find that they were in a dark corner inside the wooden building housing the electrolysis plant. The true scale of the operation made Beaumont blanch.

Battle for October Sky – Part Three

False dawn’s light blotted at the darkness. The October Sky listed to its port side, weighed down by its flaccid envelope. Crewmen scurried over the craft’s superstructure like ants on a dying whale, shouting out reports of battle damage to their section chiefs below. Beaumont paced the ground from bow to stern, allowing the crews to see him as they went about their jobs. Agent Ives trailed behind him, saying nothing.

They had been fortunate to land in a pocket canyon; the enemy would have to be directly overhead to spot the October Sky. However, their hidden berth would only buy them a few hours extra should the Caliph’s airships discover the battle-wrecked ornithopters and begin an organized search. With steep walls lined with loose rock, the canyon would become an unescapable killing ground once under attack. Captain Beaumont checked the riflemen at the canyon’s rim, braced against the scree and ready to call out should anything approach.

“Captain,” Chevket said.

“How bad is she?” he said.

His first officer ran a hand through his hair and glanced back at the ship. “A dozen injured, but thankfully no lives lost. We have twenty cells holed beyond repair, twice that need patching to become airworthy again. The belly turrets are inoperable, and we have numerous twisted struts and popped rivets.”

Beaumont had feared as much. “And our helium?”

Chevket blew out and shook his head. “Mister Wallace is still making his estimate.”

“You’re quibbling, aren’t you?” Ives said. “You know, but you don’t want to be the bearer of bad news. Just spit it out, man.”

The Battle for October Sky – Part Two

Beaumont climbed the bridge ladder with Ensign Charles and nodded at Helmsman Docks, who stood from the captain’s chair and held it for Beaumont.

“Report.”

Docks looked nervous, and glanced at Agent Ives, who was studying the navigation table. “Craft secure, all sections nominal. We are tacking across a four knot wind along a heading of three-zero-four at five hundred feet.”

“What?” Beaumont roared. “What’s our speed?”

“Nineteen knots.” Docks steeled himself and shifted his gaze to Agent Ives.

“I see,” Beaumont said. “Very well, Mister Docks, you are relieved. Go find some supper.”

The normal murmuring of the bridge crew was missing, and all seemed abnormally focused on their stations. Beaumont composed himself and swiveled his chair around.

“Mister Ives, I imagine you dictated this course and altitude?”

Ives looked up, unconcerned. “I did, Captain. Did you have a nice dinner?”

“We’re heading into the heart of the Caliphate.”

“We came across a supply column heading back along the deaders’ path. They’re winding through a narrow pass that will take them most of the night. We’re going to be waiting for them when they emerge.”

Beaumont turned to the man at the damage control panel, Airman Tooley. “Battlestations. I want the gunnery crews ready to fire in two minutes. Helm, take us to altitude one-triple-zero and put her abeam the wind.”

The Battle for October Sky – Part One

Author's Note: this story takes place in the same world as my fantasy/steampunk world featured in a previous story:  Badlands Journal

Captain Reginald Beaumont stared out over the sea of dunes searching for signs of life: a dot suggesting a head, natural oases, a line of tracks in the sand, fresh kills, man-sized shadows. In short, anything that could harbor a threat to his airship. One loony with a rifle would be all it would take. One lucky shot to deflate the wrong air sac, or jam an elevator, or the rudder, to consign his airship and crew to a slow death upon the sands. Damn the desert heat! Beaumont reached up to his collar buttons but stopped short. No, better to wait until he was out of the crew's view. Let them see sweat, not weakness.

A faint cough sounded behind him, more as an announcement of presence than actual need to expunge the lungs.

"Yes, Chevket?" Beaumont said.

"Sir," the younger, taller, and much thinner man said, "the engine room reports that our powerplant will need changing within the hour."

"Have we lost the capability of hot-swapping deaders?"

Chevket turned his head and gave an apologetic bow. "The engineer feels it would aid the deaders' recovery if we did not subject them to the undue stress of swapping while under load."

"Duly noted. Inform Mister Wallace to proceed with the hot-swap."

"Sir." Chevket moved to the brass tube and began relaying the order to the engine room.

Engineers, thought Beaumont, must have fears of becoming deaders themselves the way they coddled their charges. More interested in their unnaturally-animated husks and the precious engines they powered than for the integrity of the of the October Sky's gleaming silver envelope floating the airframe and all the truly living souls aboard. Such was the luxury of a ship’s engineer, but not its captain.

Colleen Sutherland, Storyteller

This week, we lost our friend Colleen.

In the almost eight years I knew her, Colleen was the bohemian writer and provocateur that I aspired to be. Her life was like a series of short story hooks: getting married on a lunch break, waiting out a riot in a bar, living in a house cut in half, or living through the Summer of Love. She was woman whose only regrets were never having been arrested, and not writing her stories earlier.

She was my greatest cheerleader, and often said that our writer’s group meetings were important because while family and friends could be sympathetic, they could never truly understand the maladies of the daily writer. We celebrated getting our stories published by magazines no one knew existed, thumbed our noses at rejection letters from even more obscure publications, held book sales in supermarkets, and challenged each other’s boundaries. I consider getting Colleen to kill a dog in a story to be one of my supreme accomplishments as a writer. She taught me that a writer’s voice develops naturally from writing, and writing, and writing some more.

She told me she used to be afraid of death, so she started hospice volunteering and got over it. I like to believe that at the end, she stared at the reaper and was not scared, only curious. Maybe she flipped him off. The cancer took away her words first, so I will never know. She didn’t want a funeral; she said that when you’re dead, that’s it. I urge you to keep that in mind when you read her story this week and know that while she was writing it, she was laughing the whole time. 

This week's story:  The Funeral

-Wade 

Royal Puppet – Part Two

Image by Richard Schofield via Wikimedia Commons

They had taken him in the night, and thrown him in an old well. His bare feet slipped in the mud and loose gravel, so the young prince had to brace his elbows against the crumbling stonework to keep himself up. He hurled threats and insults up at his captors, who laughed and dropped offal on his head. Rotten slops found ways down his clothes, slid into his ears, and threatened to slide into his mouth.

“What do you want?” he cried.

The faces pulled away, and a man in black came to the well’s edge.

The man asked questions that the prince had no answers for, and at each failure, more refuse was tossed down the well. Within an hour, the prince was shoulder-deep. He tried pushing himself higher by bracing against the walls, but his limbs found no purchase on the slick rock. The questions continued from the man in black and the garbage was replaced with loose mud, weighing down his arms.

He was going to die. His lungs would fill with mud and rot. He would never rule. He would choke and gag and die alone in a pit. He screamed.

“Oh, your’re no use to us like this,” the man in black said.

Royal Puppet

Image by Richard Schofield via Wikimedia Commons

Lord Turlough twisted at a golden signet ring. Across from him, behind a heavy desk sat Adrian Sigmund, the Master of the Wardrobe, who smiled blandly as Lord Turlough stuttered on.

“I just cannot see His Majesty agreeing to such a move,” Turlough said. “He is, after all, Vorali on his maternal side, fostered in King Mathis’ court up until–“ he looked up at the Master of the Wardrobe, who indicated for the man to go on.

“Well, up until the unfortunate events,” Turlough said.

“Yes,” the Master of the Wardrobe said, brushing a piece of invisible lint from a diamond pin at his jacket collar, “I am familiar with that fact.”

Lord Turlough reddened. “Of course, of course. My point, Master Adrian, is that I have suffered for supporting you in the past with the railroad tax, conscript levy, and procuring repeating rifles from foreign interests. My position in parliament would be in utter ruin, not to mention my own personal investments should this gambit fail.”

Master Adrian let the silence stretch for uncomfortable moments before speaking.

“My Lord,” he said, “We are caught between two great powers and war is inevitable. Our kingdom will be swallowed up by one or the other if we keep to this so-called path of neutrality. Our only hope of survival is to ally ourselves with the winning side.”

“The Sandurians, you mean.”

Master Adrian brought his palms together. “It is within our power to tip the balance between the Sandurians and Vorali. We have secured certain concessions that will put your investments at ease should we throw our support behind the Sandurian Empire, my Lord.”

“And yet we are set to host both powers across the courtyard, in the motions of peace. Moreover, His Majesty seems quite serious in his pledge for a diplomatic solution. Forgive me if I find your ability to speak for His Majesty suspect.”

Master Adrian leaned forward, pinning Lord Turlough to the chair with his gaze.

“His Majesty and I have differing opinions on domestic issues of late, but when it comes to looking outside our borders, he and I are of one vision.”

All Jokes Aside

Image by Traci Hall via Wikimedia Commons

Dan hadn’t been listening much to Sara and Teri’s discussion, but he took an interest when Teri blurted, “I’m so horny.”

“Oh, you can have Dan.” Sara replied. “I’m done with him for now.”

Both girls began laughing. Dan raised his eyebrows and looked up over his textbook. They stopped laughing for a split second, and then began laughing even harder. He looked from one girl to the next, then his eyebrows shot back down. Dan gently put down his textbook and mid-term notes, then got up from the ratty couch he had been studying on. He held out his hand to Teri. “Well, you heard her, let’s go.”

President of the Board

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Miles got the call at 6:25 in the morning, five minutes before his alarm was set to go off. He checked the number, and considered tossing his phone across the room, except that would just bring the caller to his front door. His wife, Katlin, stirred beside him but did not wake. A buzzing phone she could sleep through, but a doorbell? Miles chose the lesser of two evils and answered.

Jason Wants to Go Fast

Image by SORG Rollstuhltechnik GmbH+Co.KG via Wikimedia Commons

The thing my mom doesn’t understand is that Jason wants to go fast. She’s always yelling at me to slow down because I’ll tip Jason over or get in an accident or something. She always pushes him slow, like they’re at the museum. She says he likes it, but she can’t tell, not really. She’s like forty years older than Jason, but I’m his sister and only two years older, so I should know what a kid wants. A kid wants to go fast.

A Campfire Song

Image by Lukas Riebling via Wikimedia Commons

Walt fed the campfire with twigs and dead pine needles, though it had taken a can of Sterno to get it started. Earlier in the hike, Marlin had pointed out a small hawk on the other side of a clearing that Walt couldn’t identify. The brochure’s rustic lunch tuned out to be PB&J. Whatever inherent mystique a Yukon trail guide might have, Walt was destroying it.

Marlin hummed a tune, watching for Walt’s reaction. The guide had to recognize the song. He had to.

“Cut that racket out,” Walt said.

Ah success. “Don’t you like the song?” Marlin asked.

“You’ve been carryin’ on with that nonsense since the trailhead. Christ himself would have told you to knock it off by now.” He tossed more needles in the fire and searched around his feet for more.

“I heard that singing or talking in the woods will keep bears away,” Marlin said.

“They’ll stay away just fine with or without you making jibber-jabber.”

Neutral Ground

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Author's note: this story features characters introduced in Carne Fresco.

I stare at my number. It is printed on a thumb-sized slip of paper in the kind of ink that gets all over your fingers but never wants to wash off. My number today is G106. Yesterday it was H55. I wonder if the guy who replaces the roll of tickets in the take-a-number machine each night is trying to be funny, going backwards through the alphabet while time moves forward. Maybe he just grabs a roll at random. But then I think that can’t be right because the red LED display behind the counters has to read the same thing as the tickets or the system all falls apart. If there’s one thing the DMV values, it’s a system.

A man in a ripped-sleeve denim jacket stares at the ceiling. He’s mouthing words silently, tilting his head this way and that as if weighing them in his head. The words are short, single syllables all, but his head sloshes from side to side as if they weigh tons. The reason the DMV needs its systems are for people like him.

“The word of the day is …” he says out loud.

The younger woman sitting next to him taps at her phone’s screen. That’s what most people do while waiting for their number to be called. It used to be magazines or books, but now it’s all hand-held idiot boxes. Stimulus, response. She pops the gum in her mouth and sighs when she realizes the guy is waiting for a response.

“Is what?” she asks.

The man holds up a finger. “Boobs.”

“Boobs?”

He nods with a smile. “Ding.”

The woman shakes her head and turns back to her phone.