Monthly Archives: May 2020

Short Story (Flash Fiction) Of the Day, Hitch by Brindley Hallam Dennis

Posted on by Bill Chance

Whoever gets the vodka will wear the trousers in the marriage. She was dead keen and talked him in to it. They asked me to prepare the glasses and offer the drinks during the reception. It seemed like a good idea at first. We’ll have to explain it to everyone, I said. Neither family was Polish and nor were any of the guests.

—-Brindley Hallam Dennis, Hitch

Have a drink.

There is the wedding toast – actually, one of the few wedding traditions that I approve of. But even that can, if taken too seriously, spin out of control.

I remember once staying at some chain hotel along the Interstate in some God-forsaken East Texas oil town where I was working for a few days cleaning up a pipeline spill. When I came back to the hotel from a long day searching out and picking up wayward crude, exhausted, there was a wedding reception going on – the party was in full bloom. The bride and groom were good looking but frighteningly young.

When I passed down the corridor the (child) bride was collapsed in hysterics weeping – still in her vast cloud of a wedding dress. Her maids of honor surrounded her in their hideous matching dresses trying to calm her down. I went into the men’s room for a quick piss and discovered the tuxedo-ed groom – as much of a kid as his bride, violently drunk and fiercely puking all over the place. His grooms were trying to get him under control but mostly managing only to despoil their rented rainments.

As I trudged back to my lonely hotel room all I could think about was how sad I was at witnessing this handsome doomed young couple.

Read it here:

Hitch by Brindley Hallam Dennis

from Bhdandme’s Blog

We Can Only Scratch Away

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.”
― Jack Horner, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to Be Forever

Spring Creek, Garland, Texas

The bicycle bones are exposed yet slowly sinking into the muck along the flowing creek. Like a fossil from the recent explosion of eighteen thousand dockless shared rentals the bright yellow steel attests to the (possibly) well-intentioned  insanity that swept suddenly then faded even faster. No mastodon skeleton could be a better representative of the once-swarming extinct than this pile of tattered metal.

Short Story (Flash Fiction) Of the Day, 1,000 Feet by Andrew Older

Posted on by Bill Chance

I knew I couldn’t keep it a secret forever. But that was part of the pleasure, I suppose: the perversity of the event was what made it almost delectable. To be forbidden is to be desired.

—–Andrew Older, 1,000 Feet

Falling Water Fountain, Dallas Arboretum

Read it here:

1,000 Feet by Andrew Older

from Flash Fiction Magazine

Reborn

Posted on by Bill Chance

“We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

Birth II, by Arthur Williams, Dallas, Texas

Over the years, I’ve written about the sculpture that used to sit near the Lover’s Lane DART station – 2013, Egg – then 2019, A First Crack Reaching , and finally 2019, Birth II,

I found the sculpture referenced in a book I have on Texas sculpture and discovered it was called Birth II and was by a man named Arthur Williams.

The area is being extensively redone, and the sculpture disappeared – I wrote about that too Earthly and Mechanical Paraphernalia

I figured that was it – all she wrote.

But in the last few days I have been getting comments on my Birth II blog post. The sculptor’s son messaged me to say his father was retired from sculpting and teaching after losing his studio and work in hurricane Katrina, but was still alive and doing well. That was cool

And then I received a message from a representative from the University Crossing Public Improvement District. The sculpture had been donated to the district, and is being restored. “It’s planned to be placed behind The Highland Hotel at the base of the Mockingbird bridge here in Dallas.”

There is a little piece of green space along the bike trail – I hope that is where it is placed.

That is so cool. I hope to be able to go down the the ribbon cutting.

Mockingbird Pedestrian Bridge

Blue Angels

Posted on by Bill Chance

You must drink. I’m not paying for your art.

—-Kiepert, The Blue Angel

The Blue Angels flew over Dallas in honor of the COVID-19 first responders.

I was at work and pretty much everyone filed out into the parking lot to watch them fly over – wearing our surgical masks and staying six feet apart from each other.

They were over in a few seconds. I had brought my camera and snapped a few photos – though I have friends that were, say, downtown, and took much better pictures of the jets against the towering crystal skyscrapers. Still, I raised my camera and shot – something doesn’t really happen unless you have a photo of it.

 

The Blue Angels over my work parking lot.

The Blue Angels over my work parking lot turning with smoke.

The Blue Angels turning toward downtown Dallas.

Short Story (flash fiction) Of the Day, Confrontations by David Galef

Posted on by Bill Chance

Maggie kept saying I should exercise restraint, that I might still have my teller’s job at First National if I’d been more polite. I had several replies to that, once bottled up, but no longer.

—–David Galef, Confrontations

(click to enlarge)

This guy came to see me at work. “I was almost run over in the crosswalk coming from the parking lot,” he said to me. This happens a lot, especially at certain times of the day; a good portion of the campus population goes by our entrance. When they are late they drive too fast and distracted and when the sun is just rising it’s hard for everyone to see. The guy at my desk though… I had seen him before walking around, very fast, with his head down – like a maniac.

“Do you have any details?” I asked, “What kind of car? Did you get a license number? How fast were they going?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t looking, I actually walked into the side of the car as they drove in front of me. Never even saw it.”

“Umm, that’s a bad spot, you should look before you step off the curb.”

“No!” he said. He was angry. “It’s a crosswalk and I have the right of way. I don’t have to look.”

I think about this all the time. Technically, he is right. The cars have the responsibility to look for pedestrians and to stop. Of course.

But you are a sliver of soft flesh and delicate bone and they are huge metal machines that weigh more than a ton and rush around at high speeds. You are going to get killed and they are going to get smudged. To me, that gives them the ultimate right of way. You are responsible for your own fate, as much as possible… you should… you need to look out.

It’s amazing how drastically different other people can look at the same world that I do.

Read today’s flash fiction here:

Confrontations by David Galef

from BRILLIANT flash fiction

It’s Got Them Disraeli Gears

Posted on by Bill Chance

I just managed to convince my grandmother that it was a worth while that was something to do, you know, and when I did finally get the guitar, it didn’t seem that difficult to me, to be able to make a good noise out of it.

—-Eric Clapton

Dan Colcer
Deep Ellum Art Park
Dallas, Texas

There’s this show that shows up on AXS television – on the cable, you know – called Classic Albums. On the show they take an hour and go through the production of a classic rock album – usually with the musicians, producers, artists, hangers-on… the whole works. It’s pretty cool. I watch for these and DVR the ones that look interesting to me. I’ve seen a few, let’s see… Aja, Dark Side of the Moon, So, Damn the Torpedoes, Pet Sounds.

Last night I watched one on an album I wasn’t all that familiar with – Cream’s Disraeli Gears. I’m old enough to remember Cream back in the day but a bit too young to be a huge fan. They were only together for two years – Disraeli Gears came out in 1967 – and I was ten years old. I didn’t really start listening to popular music until 1968 – I would scrounge up a dollar each week and buy one 45 single on Saturday, the first one I bought was the theme song for Hawaii Five-O (jeez, don’t be hard on me, I was only eleven).

So I remember the Cream album covers in the stores and over the years I heard all the hits (Strange Brew, Sunshine of Your Love, Tales of Brave Ulysses) but didn’t know much about the band except that it had Eric Clapton in it. I did see a documentary about Ginger Baker once – he was a madman.

The show was interesting and gave me a new appreciation of this classic rock music.

But the best part was finding out what Disraeli Gears meant. I always assumed it was some sort of British political statement. It isn’t. It’s a malaprop and a cycling reference.

“You know how the title came about – Disraeli Gears – yeah? We had this Austin Westminster, and Mick Turner was one of the roadies who’d been with me a long time, and he was driving along and Eric (Clapton) was talking about getting a racing bicycle. Mick, driving, went ‘Oh yeah it’s got them Disraeli gears!’ meaning derailleur gears… We all just fell over… We said that’s got to be the album title.”

—-Ginger Backer, 1967

How cool is that! You learn something every day.

Short Story (flash fiction) Of the Day, Havenless by Emily Marcason-Tolmie

Posted on by Bill Chance

The sea of black umbrellas swirls and ebbs around me

—- Emily Marcason-Tolmie, Havenless

Statue on top of a crypt, Saint Louis Cemetery Number One, New Orleans

Read it here:

Havenless by Emily Marcason-Tolmie

from Every Day Fiction

Emily Marcason-Tomie blog

 

Short Story (flash fiction) Of the Day, SALT, SPICES, FAT, HONEY by N. R. M. Roshak

Posted on by Bill Chance

Shelley steers me to an antiseptic alcove and talks at me while I contemplate the bags of dinner cooling at my feet. She monologues about obesity, codependence, enabling, mortality. Finally, she asks if we have an agreement. I tell her we do not and head back to his room to feed him, clean him, oil him, turn him.

—- N. R. M. Roshak, SALT, SPICES, FAT, HONEY

This woman was waving a turkey leg out of her food trailer. When someone came up to buy one, she said, “Let me get you a fresh one hon, this is my demo model, I’ve been waving it out this window for hours.”

Is there anything more frightening than toxic codependency? Today’s story is harrowing and depicts toxic codependency that has decended to Munchhausen by Proxy territory.

For a while I watched the television show Intervention – stopping when it became repetitive for me. There were two things that fascinated me especially – both of which are condensed into today’s flash fiction.

One was that the drug addicts (heroin, cocaine, crack, pills, booze, you name it) had a long, tough road – but there was hope. A good number of them got better. But the people with non-drug addictions (food, eating, not-eating, puking, exercise, gambling, shopping) were out of luck. I don’t remember any of them being successful at getting over their addiction.

What I really found interesting were the enablers. The addicts were ill, they were overcome with a sickness that most of them didn’t want. But every addict had someone that was keeping them sick. These were the people, the loved ones, that for their own (usually selfish or lazy or based on guilt) reasons gave in and allowed the downhill spiral to continue. And none of them even knew or could understand what they were doing and how evil and dangerous it was. The Interventionist would always zero in on these people and make sure they understood and would commit to ending their support for the illness. They were rarely successful in this.

But, in the story, there is horror, but there is love. Maybe that is the ultimate toxicity.

Read it here:

SALT, SPICES, FAT, HONEY by N. R. M. Roshak

from Flash Fiction Online

I’m Just Here For The Stories – N. R. M. Roshak’s blog

N. R. M. (Natalka) ROSHAK on Twitter

Borne

Posted on by Bill Chance
“Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

Chihuly Glass (click to enlarge)

 

I have now read all the Borne series of books and stories by Jeff VanderMeer, pretty much – as far as I know… but the thing is I read them out of order. And I think that was a good thing.

   First of all was the newest Borne book – The Dead Astronauts, which I read on behest of the Wild Detectives Book Club (back in the day when you would actually go to a book club). The book was incredibly weird – so difficult to read that I thought that would be the end of the Borne Dystopia for me.

    But before I finished The Dead Astronauts I stumbled across and online short story/novela written about the same world – quite a bit earlier as it turns out – The Situation. This detailed a very strange world but told the story in a familiar way – the destruction of everything told as a story of corporate back-stabbing. I really enjoyed The Situation and that led me to check out The Strange Bird from the library and devour that short novel. It too told a strange tale but was written in a familiar style – that of a quest or journey. It was set in the same world and had a few characters in common with the other two works – enough to continue to increase my interest.

    So, I bought a copy of the central novel in the series Borne – and finished it late last night. It was really good, a crackerjack of a novel. The most complete of the books, it explains a lot of what what mysterious and curious in the others… explains some, maybe not a lot, really, … and definitely not everything.

    At the book club discussion of The Dead Astronauts someone describe Borne as a love story.  And it is the typical girl finds odd plant in fur of giant bear, girl falls in love with plant, plant turns out not to be a plant but a ruthless killer, girl loses plant/killer, and finally girl discovers her love is something else entirely type of story. Yeah, it is a love story.

    Having read it last it was inevitable that I would read it trying to ferret out the connections with the other works. The three Dead Astronauts from their own epynomous novel made an appearance in Borne but they didn’t do much probably because they were dead. The story of The Strange Bird and Borne are dovetailed – the identical tale told from two different points of view and in very different styles – the same characters populate both.

   The Situation is a prequel to all the others. It contains the origin of the Giant Bear, Mord, along with other clues. In Borne, it is strongly hinted that Wick is the narrator of The Situation but I wasn’t absolutely sure. In researching this, I came across a graphic version of The Situation  from Tor books – where Wick is named explicitly. Now I wonder if Scarskirt is the Magician from Borne and The Strange Bird. She is described as someone who “stared at reflective surfaces all day” which is a connection. I don’t know – but it’s fun to speculate. At any rate, click that link and look at the drawings – they are very good.

  So now I’m done with Borne and I can get back to reading Zola. Except… now I’m thinking about VanderMeer’s Annihilation (I liked the movie) and the rest of its Southern Reach trilogy. We’ll see. So many books, so little time.

    By the way, I’ve been reading rumors that AMC has optioned Borne for a miniseries. Wow, I have no idea how this goes onto the screen. It would be like a science fiction version of Game of Thrones… except on acid.