Author’s Note: Throughout this story, I mention several pieces of music the reader may not be familiar with. Where appropriate, I’ll add links to a performance. These aren’t necessary to understand the story, but I’ve included them for readers who want to listen to what the characters are playing.

Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner

First Movement

Fours is sitting where he always is, legs swinging from the tailgate of his pickup truck, which—to my knowledge—has never vacated its perch overlooking the northbound lane of County Road 34. At this point, you’d need a crane to move it. The tires are a study in dry rot. The axle would split in two if you tied a string to it.

The truck’s owner doesn’t look much better. Old and thin, Fours is more rangy than muscular, with too-long arms and a paunch that untucks the hem of his shirt every time he reaches for something. You couldn’t tailor a suit to fit him, and I doubt anyone’s ever tried.

“Evening,” he says as I walk up, which is true. It’s the first Thursday night of summer break. Three months until the start of senior year, which feels more and more like a deadline, like time is slowing down and speeding up all at once.

“Evening,” I say, hopping onto the tailgate and nestling the violin case between us. Atop this meager table, I lay out an offering of cold sandwiches and a Ziploc bag with three chocolate chip cookies. He eyes it all, greedy, then nods and reaches for a sandwich. One of Fours’ many unwritten rules is that he doesn’t talk while he eats, so I sit quietly until he brushes the crumbs off his jeans.

“What are we working on tonight?” he asks.

“Rieding,” I say. “The B minor concerto, first movement.”

“Kid stuff,” he says. “You should play Bach.”

“I’m not good enough for Bach,” I say, but he shrugs this off.

“No one’s good enough for Bach,” he says. “But okay. Show me where you’re at.”

I pull out my violin and cradle it between my chin and collarbone. The harsh light of Fours’ camp lantern blares against the varnish, so I turn half an inch and stare off into the woods at an audience hiding somewhere in the trees.

I play atrociously, like I always do, like I’ve never played the violin before. Part of the trouble is that I can only play fast or slow but can never manage both in the same song. Either I dance over the eighth notes and rush the legatos, or I get a perfect tone from the long pulls and trip over the accents. Worst of all, I get nervous at the thought of my own imaginary audience. I rush through the end of the piece and end up limping over the finish line, grateful to be done.

“Not bad,” he says. “Hand her over.”

I pass Fours the violin, and you can almost see the trees lean in to listen. The bugs stop chirping. The underbrush falls quiet. Birds leave their nests and gather on branches at the edge of Fours’ campsite.

He plays, and it’s like rain falling on dry earth. Every note lands exactly where it’s supposed to, resolute and inevitable, but with a few pauses here and there to leave you twisting with the music. The first movement ends and he continues on to the second and third. Halfway through I notice him humming his own counter melody, adding the piano parts back in so that the violin has something to lean against. I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it.

The piece ends, and the night rushes to fill the silence with a breeze that ripples through the trees like scattered applause. Fours hands me the violin.

“You’re up.”

That’s the thing about Fours. He doesn’t actually teach you anything. He doesn’t correct your posture or your hand position, doesn’t show you the proper way to hold a bow. He just makes you believe in magic and then asks you to prove it.

I do better on the second attempt, which isn’t always true in orchestra. I usually choke up in front of other people, repeating all the mistakes I made on the first try and adding in a few new ones for good measure, getting worse and worse the longer I play. Out here in the woods, I can relax a little. I can coast in the wake of someone else’s talent without comparing it to my own.

“Better,” Fours says when I finish. It’s a threadbare compliment, but I beam anyway.

“I’m also working on a few other things,” I say, trying to twist the rules a little. “We could play Bach, if you want. Anything.”

But Fours is already shaking his head. “One meal, one song,” he says, like it’s something older than the written word, like he’s explaining how the sun comes up.

Disappointed, I pack up my violin and wish Fours a pleasant evening. I trudge home through the woods, shedding little motes of magic and starlight onto the path until the world reasserts itself, heavy and obtrusive. Brambles snag against my jeans. The violin case thunks into my knees as I walk. Dirt gets into my shoes. The moon is too dull to be useful to anybody.

The house is dark when I get home because it’s my job to turn on the front porch light and I always forget. I jump in through my bedroom window and walk to the front door to flick on the light. Then I make myself dinner, followed by half an hour of violin practice.

Sometime around midnight, I hear my mom’s car crunch into the driveway and idle for a few minutes while she finishes a cigarette. In the morning, I’ll hear another story about how I should never ride on a motorcycle, how the guy came into the ER with a pound of gravel in his kneecaps, how his wife just kept crying and crying when she saw him, and I’ll cram spoonfuls of cereal into my mouth and chew until I can’t hear her talk.

***

I get my usual summer job at the hardware store. I don’t even fill out an application this year, I just walk in on the first Saturday in June and punch my time card, and Hector nods at me as I clip on my nametag and start stocking shelves. Hector is fifty or sixty years old, quiet and imperturbable. I feel a burst of pride whenever we communicate like this, without speaking.

I start my work week on Friday morning and usually manage a few hours of overtime by Tuesday afternoon. The work is both easy and satisfying, which worries me because some of the other guys here are forty years old and working the same job as me for an extra two bucks an hour, and I keep thinking how easy it would be to accidentally spend your entire life unpacking little boxes of screws.

There are only about six hundred paychecks between being seventeen and being forty, which used to sound like a lot.

My mom works the evening shift at the hospital from Tuesday to Friday, so we barely cross paths during the week. Mostly, this means I can play without bothering anybody as long as I keep the windows closed, which I do anyway because June is murder in Ohio. The heat sinks into you here, dulls your sense of time. I find that I can only count the hours after they’ve passed.

By the time Thursday evening rolls around, I feel human enough to play music again, so I walk past the chain link fence at the edge of the woods and follow the trail to Fours’ campsite. When I get sick of Rieding, we move on to Küchler and Seitz. Aside from being the best violin player I’ve ever heard, Fours’ knowledge of concerto music is comprehensive. Even when I bring sheet music, he plays without so much as glancing at it.

“How did you learn all this stuff?” I ask.

The question isn’t off-limits, but it’s close. Fours doesn’t like to talk about the past, but if you’re fine with a vague answer, you can pick up hints every now and then.

“The trick is to pick a worthy obsession,” he says. “Humans are addicts by nature. Just look at all the great composers. Vivaldi didn’t write five hundred concertos because he liked music.”

I chew on this for a minute. “So you’re addicted to the violin?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t you?”

Toward the end of July, Fours convinces me to try Bach’s Partita no. 2, and he sweetens the deal by counting Chinese leftovers as two separate meals. He plays along with his own joke by unwrapping a fortune cookie after the lo mein but before digging into the pork fried rice. He reads the fortunes out loud and directs me through the tempo changes in the first movement by waving his fork.

When I finish, he wipes the grease onto his jeans and plays all five movements–all the way to the Chaconne–without missing a note. Then he hands the violin back to me and nods patiently while I butcher the first two minutes of the Allemande again.

“How long did it take you to get so good?” I ask, deflated.

“Years and years,” he answers, which could mean anywhere from four years to four hundred.

“Will I ever be that good?”

He shrugs. “Up to you. But I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Meanwhile, summer flows along.

***

Orchestra tryouts happen on the first three Fridays in September, which is better because you don’t have to risk everything on a single performance. Our teacher, Ms. Landy, is a reformed perfectionist. There’s a picture on her desk from when she was a soloist in the Columbus Symphony, but she drops hints about it being a dark time in her life, and she runs a “stress free” classroom like she’s an alcoholic knocking drinks out of her own hand.

Underclassmen get rotated between sections depending on the piece, but seniors typically stick with their section for an entire semester. First violins handle the higher melodies, and if the piece needs a soloist, Ms. Landy pulls from that group first. Second violins play harmonies in the lower ranges and usually have more of a supporting role, but she tries to pick pieces that challenge both sections, and good violinists need to understand both sides of the music anyway.

Given my nerves, I don’t trust myself not to choke during a solo, but I’ve also had three years to figure out my strengths. What I want–what I need, if I’m going to have any chance at a scholarship–is section leader for second violins. Section leaders work directly with the conductor to figure out what’s needed from their section, and you need a pretty good ear to manage it.

The first two auditions are group performances, but since Ms. Landy picks two of our big pieces from last year, I do well enough. For the final audition, I choose the second violin part from the first movement of Profokiev’s Sonata for Two Violins.

“Oh, good,” Ms. Landy says when I hand her the sheet music. “Emily found a partner.”

I reach for a face but come up empty. The name doesn’t mean anything to me.

“Who?”

“Your new classmate. She picked the same piece, but she wanted the first violin, and now you want the second.”

She nods to a girl sitting off in the corner. Short, with dark hair and one of those nose studs that look cute until you think about cleaning them. She’s reading a book, but the fingers of her left hand are covering the title, and she looks up at me just as I realize I’m staring.

I turn back to Ms. Landy. “I haven’t met her. She picked the same piece? Kind of a weird choice,” I say, and I’m not just making excuses. Profokiev’s sonata is kind of unique in that the second violin part is much more interesting than the first. It’s almost written to let the second player show off.

“Must be fate,” Ms. Landy says with a smile. “You don’t mind playing a duet, do you?”

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Here are a few stories that turned my head in March.

Dead or Alive by

Old Wellsprings: Dark Folklore & Horror

Dead or Alive

The first thing I remember is boots on dry boards…

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a month ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Clara MacGauffin

Strong voice, cool setting, and one of the most unique narrator-protagonists I’ve seen in a minute. The threadbare prose turns a slightly goofy premise into a surprisingly cool Six Guns and Sorcery revenge tale.

“Quick work. Doorways taken without hesitation. No speech. No warning. The hush around him held. No bark from the yard, no shout, no scramble of feet—only the short, wet sounds of bodies learning too late what was happening to them.”

He Does It Better by

AroundSciFi

He Does It Better

<he> <does it=”better” /> <source ref=”you” status=”offline” /> </he…

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a month ago · 29 likes · 17 comments · Michael B. Morgan

Very disturbing SF tale. This one reminds me of the stories I used to read in Analog, where the fiction and non-fiction elements hit like a one-two punch. If nothing else, it’ll convince you to leave your phone in another room for a few hours.

Safe Spaces I by

In a Room

Safe Spaces I

On the television screen, immigrants from countries I’d only heard about on NPR or visited from the safety of a cruise ship deck were dragged from their homes, down icy walkways, through snow, and into unmarked vehicles…

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a month ago · 42 likes · 25 comments · RM Greta

Short, simple, and effective. This one hurt to read (but also made me cackle (but also hurt to read)).

The Drive by

This one reads more like an excerpt from a larger work, but it stands out for doing a few difficult things well. The overlapping narrators kept me guessing on who to root for, and the jagged time breaks added to the tension without being overly confusing. Interesting piece!

The Verhoeven Sci-Fi Trilogy by

This Is a Newsletter!

The Watchlist: The Verhoeven Sci-Fi Trilogy

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a month ago · 22 likes · 18 comments · Sam Colt

Finally, this was my favorite essay of the month. I’ve mentioned RoboCop on the blog before, but only in passing. Sam’s analysis of Verhoeven’s SF trilogy is dead on, and it serves as a reminder for just how prescient some the early heads in science fiction really were.

Unfortunately, a small but influential minority of sociopaths decided to interpret these “warnings” as “business models.” But at least Philip K. Dick can rest easy knowing that he called AI delusions early!

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This one’s a bit outside my usual milieu, but I’m going to skip the preface on this one and let it speak for itself. If anyone knows what genre this is, let me know in the comments, because I’ve had a hell of a time classifying it.

Super
by J. Kyle Turner

At six foot six, the building superintendent shrinks the doorway by virtue of standing in it. He’s built like a hippopotamus, with wide shoulders and a wider gut. The denim hatchweave of his boilersuit strains against muscle and fat, and the veins in his forearms are thick as pipelines. No way is light from the hallway getting in past this bastard.

In his left hand, a black flashlight brims with raw sunlight from the ground level, sixty floors above. Its beam is narrow and focused, just how he likes it. On slow days he carries a flamethrower instead, which isn’t as good. Things this far down have felt heat more often than they’ve seen the sun.

In his right hand, he’s got the broom. Its polished handle is alder, twice-blessed and engraved with ancient runes. There’s a battery pack along the shaft with enough juice to jump start a Humvee. Its flared end has more bristles than you can count: bristles on bristles, all the way down to the microscopic. It exorcises as it sweeps. Banishes as it brushes. Tapping it against the ceiling has been known to kill upstairs neighbors in their beds.

In this line of work, there is no such thing as overkill.

He steps into the room. “Someone called about a spider?”

“In the bedroom,” comes the trembling hiss from the far corner. It’s pitch dark in here, but the super doesn’t dare shine the light. Calderids live on these levels, and they’re sensitive to just about everything until their first molt. Supers have been known to kill kids on accident by flicking a switch.

“How many?” he asks.

“Just one,” says the tenant. “It’s really big, though.”

The super smiles. In his thick gorilla skull, there are floor plans by the hundreds. He tromps off in the direction of the bedroom.

“Stay put,” he says to the corner as he passes. “Be done in just a minute.”

And then it’s just business.

Back in the maintenance office, the super emerges from the chrysalis of his suit. Underneath it is sweat and tattooed skin and the kind of scar tissue you can see in the dark, but nobody bats an eye. This is simply his resume, his list of qualifications on display. They knew what they were hiring when they met him. If he’d been less than this, someone else would’ve gotten the job. He tosses the suit into the corner and reaches for his time card.

“Not so fast,” says the shift supervisor, a mean-eyed drill sergeant by the name of Sheri. “You got a call a minute ago.”

“Christ, Sheri. I just got outta the suit.”

“You won’t need it,” she says. “Third floor job, nice and easy.” She grins at him, and the expression is somewhere between flirty and malicious.

A previous head injury keeps the super from rolling his eyes, but he gives it his best effort. “What, did their hot water go out?”

“Close. Toilet won’t flush.”

The super slides his time card back into the slot and reaches for his tools. “You know, we really oughta unionize.”

“We did unionize.”

“Somebody oughta tell the landlord, then.”

Sheri looks over her desk, past the receptionist, and out across the lobby to the black door marked ‘OFFICE,’ where smoke is currently billowing like fog out of the keyhole. “Who’s gonna tell him? You?”

“Why not me?”

“Don’t do that to me, sweetheart. I don’t wanna hire your replacement.”

The super grabs an auger from the mop room and tugs on a pair of rubber gloves on his way out the door. The third floor is just two floors down, but the service elevator won’t take him there. The top five floors have their own staircase, cut off from the rest of the building. They also have their own plumbing, their own hot water system, their own ventilation, even their own building codes.

But most of all, what the top five floors in any apartment have is money.

They come down here to get away from the pristine noise of the upper city, to walk on the wild side, to slum it up for a weekend. They meet call girls down here, where no one among the upper crust would ever think to look. They come here on vacation, these slick bastards with their tan skin and filtered cigarettes, and they piss away a fortune every month fortune to do it.

But that’s not why the super hates working the top five. At least, it’s not the only reason.

The super hates working the top five because he is, above all else, a specialist. And he gets paid a very specialized salary for risking life and limb in the pursuit of a very specialized career. But when he does janitor work, he gets paid like a janitor. And at five o’clock on a Friday, no less.

He knocks on the door. A man answers.

“You here about the toilet?”

The super lifts the auger.

“Fantastic,” says the guy. “I need to piss.”

The super steps over the threshold, and right away the room is so clean he almost needs to cough. His eyes go blurry as he adjusts to the extra oxygen in the air.

“You all right?” asks the guy.

“Super,” says the super.

The guy is wearing a towel and nothing else, and on his way to the bathroom, the super sees why. The girl might be fifteen or sixteen, pale as a corpse but pretty in spite of it. She’s stretched out on the bed like a cat, but when she sees the super, she tenses up. In that one moment, the super knows her story—born not far from here, in a sublevel just like this one, and the only way she sees the sun is when she’s riding around town with a guy like this, and maybe, just maybe, it won’t be this way forever, but for now it has to be, because that’s how they made the world, all those people she’s never known—and she knows that the super knows, and she hates him for it. She’s got the duvet pulled up to her shoulders, but she pulls it even higher before she rolls over to face the far wall. The super ignores her and gets to work.

“Just about quittin’ time, huh?” says the guy.

He’s leaning against the door jamb of the bathroom, watching the super work. His bare feet are sweaty and covered in carpet lint. The towel is so close to falling that it’s offensive.

“Just about.”

“Any plans this weekend?”

The super turns on the auger. At the far end, the cable snakes out into the pipes, plowing through excrement and wadded tissues and used condoms with cold fury. “No.”

The guy stretches, and the towel exposes another inch of stomach muscle. He yawns. “I’m thinking of taking the girl to see a movie.” He jerks his head in the direction of the bedroom. “You know anything good out?”

Down in the pipes, the auger slams into a blockage and starts twisting it around like a dog worrying a slab of meat. “Couldn’t tell ya,” says the super.

And suddenly the guy notices how terse the super is being, and you can tell he’s playing back the conversation, to see if he’s being made fool of. He rolls his shoulders once, twice. Considers whether or not he should get indignant about it. Cause a scene in front of his girl. Show the help who’s boss.

But when he opens his mouth to say something, there’s a sound like a weight dropping into a shallow bowl, and the water rushes through the pipes.

The super stands up, auger dripping cloudy water all over the floor. He’s so tall his head almost brushes the ceiling. He’s just as wide as the door, with a bull neck and knotted forearms. And the guy gets a dose of something cold from way back in the primal part of his brain, and he slumps his shoulders and leans back against the door frame…

…and smiles, suddenly nervous. “Great!” he says, and lets the super through.

Out in the bedroom, the girl is pretending to be asleep. The guy clutches his towel with a white-knuckled fist on the way to the door. Beneath it, he’s shriveled like a handful of prunes. They get to the door and the guy pauses to take a good look at the name tag on the suit. “Thanks again... Larry.”

The super pauses in the hallway, his hand still on the door frame. “Larry’s dead, pal,” he says over his shoulder. “We reuse the suits.”

A week later. Quitting time. And what a week it’s been.

Monday had him down in the trash chute with a construction grade jackhammer, chipping away at the detritus of half a dozen underworld species in the dark: plastic bottles and wadded up newspapers; glass pipes and steel syringes; the flaking exoskeleton of a Calderid junkie; chitinous skin and discarded bones; filth. All of it fused together, sulfurous, warm to the touch even as it decayed.

Tuesday through Thursday, he served eviction notices down in the Black. Tenants that far down had a tenuous grasp on leasing agreements, but they all respected one rule: if you could stick the paper to the door, they cleared out without another word. Emphasis on if. The super started on the 200^th floor and worked his way down. By the time he got to 250, there was less skin on him than there were scars and bruises.

And Friday? Don’t even get him started on Friday.

When the super goes to punch his time card for the week, his hands shake so bad that almost misses the slot. His jaw is all but splintered, his arms cut to ribbons. For a moment, he’s not sure if he can make it down the stairs to his apartment, but he’s sure as hell not sleeping in the lobby, so he fights through it.

With Sheri gone (sick day, flu) the super’s got to hand in all the time cards for the maintenance crew. He stumbles to the door marked OFFICE, which swings open beneath the weight of his knock. Thick, black smoke pours out of the room as the super steps in.

In the corner, the landlord is lying pupate in the sun. Interlocking granite scales lay open, exposing its molten innards. The landlord is something the super has never seen before, not even below the 300^th level, and this alone keeps him wary. Six white eyes stare fixedly at the ceiling while the super crosses the room to the massive desk. Asleep, or something like it. It’s been this way for weeks.

The super tosses the time cards onto the desk and turns to leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices two things.

The first, a stack of employee insurance claims in one corner of the desk. Innocuous. Boring, even. Notable only in the sense that one folder is thicker than the rest put together.

His, of course.

The second pile is a stack of resumes with photos attached. The super flips through them with his free hand. Some of them even have the same scars he does.

Wordless, the super leaves the office. The door swings closed behind him. On the floor, there’s a stack of time cards, crumpled, almost unrecognizable in the dark.

Slide thirty years back and the super is just a kid in a one-room with his mom, eking out playground space between the narrow corridors of an apartment building built a hundred meters below sunlight. He goes to school via subway, mail orders his comic books with quarters taped to the forms. In his sock drawer, he’s got enough action figures to qualify as a franchise. No boy scouts here; we’re talking lava demons that chew rocks and spit black mortar. His favorite comes with its own wall to crash through, and you can hear the plastic clattering on the floor from across the hall. To him, laser vision seems fun, but dangerous. The notion of flight is as foreign as the moon.

When his mom tucks him in at night, you can tell that she’s exhausted, but since when does an eight-year-old notice? She asks him if he needs a night light, but he tells her that he’s never been afraid of the dark and he means it. She looks down at him, and she can’t help but worry about how thin he is. But when he brushes his teeth, he flexes his muscles in the mirror, and you can almost see something, just there, on the bicep...

Meanwhile, the construction crews tunnel, ever downward.

One day, she thinks she’ll save up enough to move into one of the domes. Get something small—smaller than this, even—and keep a window box by the sink. She could grow herbs in it, or flowers, or grass, or anything. Just something to catch the sunlight and show her something green. At this point, she’d be happy to see mold.

When her son closes his eyes, she kisses his forehead and crosses the room to her bed against the wall. She slides out of her dress for the night and tosses it on the foot of her bed.

And when her breathing starts to slow, you can almost see something, just there, on the lung...

Thirty years forward—in the now part of the story—the super kills time in front of his television. Beer bottles lie like casualties on the floor. A thin haze of something red obscures his vision. There are words for this level of self-destruction, but the super doesn’t know them. He takes a drink.

The bulbs in his room are always on, pounding ultraviolets and vitamins into his pores. There’s a mask on the wall for when he sleeps, but he doesn’t use it anymore. He’s used to the light. In the corner, his air filter chugs on mightily. It’s the best he can afford, but even so, he spits up black phlegm when he coughs.

The trade magazines all talk about supers who make eight, ten, twenty times as much as he does. They offer night courses on words of power, weekly seminars on tackling elder wyrms and lesser dragons. Brooms and dustpans that kill magma spiders in their eggs without even stepping off the lift. Certified Bad Dude Kits with a money-back satisfaction guarantee. Just send check or money order to this address. No credit cards accepted.

And sometimes he thinks about what it would be like. A new broom, a new suit. Maybe a lightning wrench or two just for the hell of it—the kind of ordinance that causes rolling blackouts when you plug it in. He’d get a place in the lower levels and battle demons in the boiler rooms. The air wouldn’t be any better down there, but he could afford better filters, maybe. Better bulbs. Better channels. A better life.

But what it comes down to, in the end, is time. Time, money, and a stack of resumes on a hardwood desk.

Far below, the earth rumbles something indistinct. The bulbs hum an answer as the super falls asleep.

In the morning, he wakes up with the kind of headache you measure in liquid volume. Liters of pain—gallons of it—slosh behind his eyelids as he stumbles into his kitchen. His gums are so loose they bleed when he eats his breakfast. His knees feel like someone stapled them together, and his shoulders pop as he worms his way into the suit. He needs medicine. Better yet, he needs a vacation. But he knows he can’t afford either, so he gets to work.

The lift keys hang in the office on the first floor, bronze and brass and rusted iron, mismatched against the cardboard backing. Next to the key cabinet, there’s a stack of work orders for the day. His vision blurs, focuses on one marked ‘42.’ Geothermals have been acting up on the whole level, boiling tap water in the pipes. Wouldn’t be a problem if the landlord would invest in some fucking ceramics already, but the super’s a cheaper alternative and he knows it.

And suddenly there’s blood boiling up his spinal column and into his hypothalamus, swelling it to the size of a grape. One heavy fist slams into the keys, and they scatter to the ground. Chest heaving, he stands over them. The veins in his neck are pumping magma. The tendons in his jaw might be tectonics, the noise they’re making.

“Something wrong?” The receptionist is standing next to the coffee maker. She looks worried.

The super turns to look at her. Human, but with the kind of all-over tan you never see anymore. Part-time worker, top-fiver for sure. The super spits black phlegm onto the carpet. “Anybody late on rent?”

The tan face pales. “Just a few on 317, but...”

The super grabs the key before she finishes. He pauses at the door of the lift. “When I come back,” he says over his shoulder, “tell the boss I’m looking for a raise.”

The lift door slams closed and he punches the button marked ‘317.’ Beside the rows of buttons there’s a scrap of paper, the top of which reads ‘--rranty’ in faded letters. The bottom corner mentions a date that might have been on his grandfather’s tombstone. As far as the super can tell, it’s the only original part of the machine. The rest is just spit and chicken wire, with protective wards etched into the flat surfaces via blowtorch.

And yet, it creaks slowly downward.

Floor 317 smells like brimstone set out to curdle in the swamp. There’s no music down here, no conversation. Just the steady rumble of the earth grinding against the sheath that encases the building. At one end of the hall stands the super—feet set, shoulders wide. At the other end of the hallway, a door.

The super walks the length of the hallway, his pain receptors in open rebellion. He reaches the door and knocks. It opens, just a crack. A serpentine eye the size of a grapefruit looks him up and down.

“Rent’s due.”

A clear eyelid flicks horizontal over the eye. “You’re not the landlord.” The door closes.

Something like adrenaline lifts the super’s foot and sends it crashing through the door. He steps into the room. Already the equipment at his side is buzzing with anticipation. “No,” he says. “Just the super.”

And then it’s just business.

The beam on his flashlight throttles wide, bathing the room in sunlight. This tenant has guests, half a dozen things the super doesn’t even have names for. Must’ve come in through the sublevels, which means it’s illegal for them to even be on the premises. Hell, as far as he knows, the tenant’s probably subletting the lot of them.

Most of them go up in smoke in the first second. The tenant shrieks, covering his saurian face with a scaled arm. Tables clatter. Someone sends a scorpion tail toward the super’s face, and a casual flick of the broom sends it sailing over his shoulder. Horns glint in the darkness, and he’s pushed against the wall, his arm pinned to his side. The flashlight drops to the floor, spinning wildly.

The super curses, and swings with the broom.

In a closed space like this, the force multiplier on this thing is exponential. Horns go flying into the air, flinging ribbons of gore that sizzle against the walls. His boilersuit is ripped now, but he barely notices the heat creeping into his flesh, cauterizing his cuts. Everything is snarling and snapping and ripping and tearing and spitting acid and flame and Hell itself knows what else, all the time and in every direction, and if the super’s heart beats any faster, he knows it’ll burst through his fucking chest, but it doesn’t matter right now because he’s alive and everything else is dead, and he’s king here, and it’s all heads off but his.

And the room is quiet.

The tenant is cowering under the remnants of a television stand. The super kicks the charred pile aside with a booted foot.

“Rent’s due,” he says, and the tenant nods once. Then he stumbles out the door and back into the lift.

Back on the service elevator, the super’s neck starts to itch. He traces the bare skin with his finger to where the lymph nodes have swollen to the size of golf balls. Within the puckering flesh, he thinks he can feel the scratch that did him in, delivering the poison to his veins. The numbers on the display read 127... 124... 121... and he knows he won’t make it to the top.

His legs give out, and he settles onto the floor of the lift. He checks the battery panel on the flashlight’s side, and there’s just enough sunlight left for something like a cloudy day. He thinks about the last time he saw clouds, and realizes that he can’t remember what they look like, not even in pictures. With a shaking hand, he flicks the flashlight on, and dies with the sunlight on his face.

A hundred floors above, six white eyes flicker open and flare to life.

The sun is gone now—the landlord can only stand its light during a molting trance. Even now it shudders at the thought of those hideous rays, its thick granite plates retracting to cover its exposed vitals.

Another week, maybe two, and the cysts will begin to form along its spine, ready to encase the critical parts of its nervous system during the next molt. And then it’s down into the Black for another dozen years, shifting and squirming in the heat while its body forges itself anew. Its broodmates have already begun their cycles, but the landlord is in no hurry. Its extra time in the sun will save it a year in the fires. Only a hatchling rushes such unpleasant necessities.

With its outer shell reformed, the landlord shifts into place behind its desk. Arrayed in front of it are two stacks of papers. The first, an army of new superintendents: the ones who will carve the way down into the pits. Their scars are numerous and vile, their expressions grim. They’ll protect its softened outer shell during the early stages of the molt, and it will make special dispensations for them in return upon its rebirth.

And in the second stack, the general who will lead them, his mettle already proven.

The landlord leans back in its chair, content for the moment. The trade magazines talk about landlords who make eight, ten, twenty times as much as it does. They offer online courses in expansion strategies and maximizing profit margins. Weekend conferences that promise a three-fold return on your investments every quarter. Just send check or money order to this address. No credit cards accepted.

Sometimes the landlord thinks about what it would be like—the pursuit of profit, that mad subservience to the bottom dollar. It is, after all, a creature of relentless determination and considers itself well-suited to the work. But for now, it’s content to manage what it has and lay its own plans for the future.

Out in the lobby, the service elevator dings as it reaches the top.

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The Flood

The plague crept into the village in the midwinter dark. It kindled a bonfire in every chest. Warmed the weak and weary in its own fierce way.

The ground had already frozen when the first victims fell. We carried the dead into the hills, wagons steaming in a miasma of unspent fever. We sprinkled dirt over the snowbanks, said good Christian prayers to quiet the dead and comfort the living.

Then spring came. Rain cracked the frozen surface of the lake. Snow melted in rivers. Our dead came back to us, a bleak flood of everything we never buried.

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Here are my current/upcoming projects for the next couple months.

March 16th - Regularly scheduled Micro Monday post. This one’s called The Flood, and I’m really pleased with it.

March 27th - A speculative short story called Super. Honestly not sure how to classify this one. Blue-collar horror? Broompunk fantasy? I’ll let the reader decide.

March 30th - Too Many Mondays. This is a tradition where I devote the fifth Monday in a given month to sharing work from other writers I enjoy. I only have two stories in my folder so far for March, so send me your recommendations!

April 3rd - Chapter one of a new serial called Crickets. It’s my take on the Fossegrim story, though I’d say it’s more magical realism than modern fairy tale.

April 10th - Crickets, Chapter 2.

April 17th - Crickets, Chapter 3.

April 24th - Crickets, Chapter 4.

May - Hiatus.

All other waking moments - Second draft of The Hope and the Ruin, which I hope to have done before I go on vacation in May. This is a sequel to my debut fantasy novel, Company of Ghosts, so if you haven’t checked that one out, please do so!

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The Train

Edgar had just crossed into Wyoming when he heard it: a sharp cry, followed by two rapid thumps as the locomotive’s pilot collided with something and feathered it away from the tracks. The jolt followed the couplers into the first boxcar, which registered a faint echo of the impact before the sound disappeared completely beneath the steady hum of the engine.

There were pronghorn goats in Wyoming, Edgar reminded himself. They could make a sound like that. Sheep, too, now that he thought of it. Moose, even.

Ahead of him, the headlights cut a narrow swath of light through the night-shrouded prairie. Dark mountains buckled the horizon. It would be hours before Laramie glowed like a fistful of scattered coals in the plains below.

Plenty of time to decide what that noise was. Plenty of time to convince himself it couldn’t have been anything else.

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I made a deal with myself at the beginning of the year that I wasn’t going to miss any writing deadlines, and I’ve been good so far. But the last Friday of the month is when I usually post flash fiction, and I don’t have a flash fiction piece for you.

I have something that could be flash fiction, if I felt like cutting until I hit bone. It could also be a novella, if I felt like giving it room to grow. It could be a lot of things, and I’ve devoted a decent chunk of mental energy this week trying to figure out what it should be.

After lots of deliberation, I’ve decided to release it as a serial, with a chapter set to release each Friday in April. I’ve never done serialized fiction before, but there are a few natural breaks in this story, and I think it would work well in this format. I want to give it a little more time to rest (and give myself time to edit, organize, and schedule posts), but I also kind of want to keep my promise about deadlines and posting when I say I will, which is today.

So here’s a sneak preview of Crickets.

First Movement

Fours is sitting where he always is, legs swinging from the tailgate of his pickup truck, which—to my knowledge—has never vacated its perch overlooking the northbound lane of CR 34. At this point, you’d need a crane to move it. The tires are a study in dry rot. The axle would split in two if you tied a string to it.

The truck’s owner doesn’t look much better. Old and thin, Fours is more rangy than muscular, with too-long arms and a paunch that untucks the hem of his shirt every time he reaches for something. You couldn’t tailor a suit to fit him, and I doubt anyone’s ever tried to.

“Evening,” he says as I walk up, which is true. It’s the first Thursday night of summer break. Three months until the start of senior year, which feels more and more like a deadline, like time is slowing down and speeding up all at once.

“Evening,” I say, hopping onto the tailgate and nestling the violin case between us. Atop this meager table, I lay out an offering of cold sandwiches and a Ziploc bag with three chocolate chip cookies. He eyes it all, greedy, then nods and reaches for a sandwich. One of Fours’ many unwritten rules is that he doesn’t talk while he eats, so I sit quietly until he brushes the crumbs off his jeans.

“What are we working on tonight?” he asks.

“Rieding,” I say. “The B minor concerto, first movement.”

“Kid stuff,” he says. “You should play Bach.”

“I’m not good enough for Bach,” I say, but he shrugs this off.

“No one’s good enough for Bach,” he says. “But okay. Show me where you’re at.”

I pull out my violin and cradle it between my chin and collarbone. The harsh light of Fours’ camp lantern blares against the varnish, so I turn half an inch and stare off into the woods at an audience hiding somewhere in the trees.

I play atrociously, like I always do, like I’ve never played the violin before. Part of the trouble is that I can only play fast or slow but can never manage both in the same song. Either I dance over the eighth notes and rush the legatos, or I get a perfect tone from the long pulls and trip over the accents. Worst of all, I get nervous at the thought of my own imaginary audience. I rush through the end of the piece and end up limping over the finish line, grateful to be done.

“Not bad,” he says. “Hand her over.”

I pass Fours the violin, and you can almost see the trees lean in to listen. The bugs stop chirping. The underbrush falls quiet. Birds leave their nests and gather on branches at the edge of Fours’ campsite.

He plays, and it’s like the sky opening up, like rain falling on dry earth. Every note lands exactly where it’s supposed to, resolute and inevitable, but with a few pauses here and there to leave you twisting with the music. The first movement ends and he continues on to the second and third. Halfway through I notice him humming his own counter melody, adding the piano parts back in so that the violin has something to dance over. I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it.

The piece ends, and the night rushes to fill the silence with a breeze that ripples through the trees like scattered applause. Fours hands me the violin.

“You’re up.”

That’s the thing about Fours. He doesn’t actually teach you anything. He doesn’t correct your posture or your hand position, doesn’t show you the proper way to hold a bow. He just makes you believe in magic and then asks you to prove it.

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This one originally appeared in Erica Drayton’s MicroZine as a response to the image prompt below, but I never posted it to my own site, so it’ll be new for most of you. Enjoy!

The Breakup

“Together or separate?”

“Together,” he lied.

She smiled, and didn’t that just twist the knife? He’d told himself that he was doing this for her: the date, the park, the ice cream shop. But honestly? He’d been stalling, working up his courage.

“So what did you want to talk about?”

“I think we should break up.”

She nodded. “I think so too.”

“You do?”

She licked her ice cream: chocolate, with rainbow sprinkles. “We go to school in different states. And... I met someone.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?”

He wants to say no. His ice cream, melting, reaches his wrist.

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It’s fair to say that I loathed the first draft. I’d gone so far off the outline by the end of it that I didn’t even know what I was writing anymore. The characters were flat, the writing was atrocious, and the plot was completely unsalvageable. I knew I still had a story worth telling, but the baby-to-bathwater ratio in the first draft was virtually all denominator.

So I threw it out.

When I tell most people this, they tend to fixate on the act of destruction (“You just deleted everything and started over?”). For me, it was much closer to an act of faith. I trusted myself to rediscover those plot points that were inevitable, rather than merely convenient. If I forgot characters or scenes from the first draft, fine. They were, by definition, not memorable—and therefore not worth including.

I’ll admit that this is a pretty extreme way to approach rewrites, but fortune favored my boldness with a workable second draft, and it eventually grew into a novel that I’m fiercely proud to have written.

The Art of Bonsai

The reason I’m bringing up second drafts is because I just started another one (God help me). I finished the first draft of The Hope and the Ruin near the beginning of December, and I reread it for the first time last week. There are, of course, lots of changes to be made, but I’m mostly pleased with how it turned out.

At this stage, I’m not really shooting for a final version. My main focus is to discover the central theme of the book and rework the major plot points with that in mind. My go-to analogy for this process is the bonsai tree:

Beginning with the central trunk (theme), I work my way outward to the major branches (character arcs), encouraging growth where the branches are already growing in the correct direction, or else pruning those branches that weigh the tree down without adding to its beauty—all while remaining within the confines of my target word count.

As an example, my intended theme for Company of Ghosts was something like this:

“Find a way to reconcile your past, or else be haunted by it.”

The three main characters (Jalina, Andza, and Rahad) must have an answer to this by the end of the book, and their answers should reflect what they learned on their respective journeys. If a character arc didn’t serve this central theme, it changed. (In Jalina and Andza’s cases, I got pretty close to this in the early attempts, but Rahad needed more work.)

Secondary characters also had to serve the theme to a lesser extent. Ferrec, Jurald, Kyrede, Sethric, and Reia all had their own answers to this question, and each person that Jalina encountered shaped her own answer in some way.

Finally, the tertiary elements of the story (what many people refer to as the genre tropes) had to justify their place on the page. Magic Is Evil served this theme, so it became a crucial part of the setting. Only the Chosen May Wield might be a fun fantasy trope, but it didn’t serve this particular story, so it got the axe.

Now that I’ve read The Hope and the Ruin with fresh eyes, I have a good idea of what the theme of book two will be. Three of the primary characters are close and only need a few changes here and there. The fourth primary character is a problem child at the moment, but I have a few ideas about how to get her back on track.

Book Club… Blues?

Sunday was another milestone for me because someone in my book club suggested reading my book for February and the rest of the group agreed.

I usually show up to book club with the same energy that wrestling fans bring to Monday Night Raw. I’m there to see a fight, and if I can hand someone a steel chair, all the better.

To that end, I made it very clear at the beginning of the meeting that I wasn’t going to take offense at any criticism, and I definitely wasn’t going to settle any arguments (because we all know that the best moments happen when the ref isn’t looking).

It actually went pretty well! People called out things they didn’t like or didn’t understand, and someone else usually rushed to the book’s defense. I don’t think I spoke at all for the first hour and a half. Several people came prepared with notes, and it was a surreal pleasure to hear someone bring up an exact quote or flip to page 237 to settle an argument.

But my favorite moment of the meeting happened at the very beginning, where I thanked my friends for reading my book. I pointed out that in the grand scale of favors, reading your friend’s book cost more time and money than driving your friend to the airport.

“Yeah, but it’s also more fun than driving your friend to the airport.”
— my friend Jimmy

I wonder if he’ll give me a blurb for book two.

Buy Company of Ghosts

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Practical Magic

What you need to remember is that Victor knew real, actual magic.

When he pulled a rabbit out of a hat, he didn’t bother with secret compartments. He summoned one from the aether, good and proper. Kids who walked into his vanishing cabinet disappeared forever. When he cut someone in half on stage, they stayed cut in half.

Handcuffs couldn’t hold him. Snipers covered exits he didn’t use. Evidence disappeared seconds after they bagged it.

When they finally executed him (injection, firing squad, hanging, firing squad again) they buried him in a lead casket and filled the grave with concrete.

And for his final trick…

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Winter finally showed up this month, so I’ve been stuck indoors more than I like. I’ve only braved the cold once or twice for short walks around the neighborhood, which got me thinking about strolls, and detours, and shortcuts, which eventually led to this story.

It probably works as a metaphor for something, but I generally hate pure allegory, so don’t feel pressured to look for deeper meaning anywhere. Much better to take the paths as the come, to meander as you see fit.

Enjoy!

The Shortcut

The first time Jake took the Shortcut, he went missing for seven hours.

It happened on a Wednesday afternoon. His school bus normally stopped at the Elm Street intersection, right across from Mr. Nelson’s house, but with so much ice on the roads it had to let the kids off at the bottom of the hill by the playground. From there, Jake would normally cut across the field to Pine Street and hop the fence into his backyard, but for some reason he felt like taking the long way around: Oak, to Chestnut, to Aspen, and so on.

The running joke was that the streets in his neighborhood were named after the trees the developers had cleared, but Jake’s 7th grade biology teacher had taught them better. Aspens didn’t grow at this elevation, for one thing, and the American chestnut was critically endangered. Even if it grew here, you couldn’t get a permit to chop one down, let alone a whole row of them.

But as he walked, Jake imagined what it would be like to visit that other world, to take shelter from the freezing wind beneath those impossible trees.

He stepped forward. Instead of asphalt, his tennis shoe sunk into soft, forgiving earth, a crisp layer of dried leaves over the loamy soil of the forest. He looked around. Trees stood where houses should have been, brilliant with lichen. Ferns and shrubs crowded the forest floor. The air, which should have been brittle with cold, carried the sweet, damp scent of rot.

If this had happened to him at any other age, Jake might not have made it home. Any younger and he’d have been lost to the enchantment of the place; any older and he’d have despaired at the impossibility of it. Fortunately for Jake, twelve years old is the correct, agreed-upon age to find yourself suddenly transported into another world.

Even so, it took him hours to find his way out. The officer who came by to take his statement asked—very gently—where he had gone after school. Jake didn’t have a name for the place, didn’t know it as the Shortcut yet, so he just said he got lost in the woods.

The adults in the room traded looks. His mother started to cry. His father held her, face grim. The police officer wrote down Jake’s answer without believing it. There weren’t any woods for fifty miles in any direction.

***

Jake kept on using the Shortcut through the rest of middle school and into high school. He wrote down the rules as he learned them and kept them in a notebook beneath his bed so he wouldn’t forget.

The first thing he learned was how to cross from one world to the other. The trick was to treat the place you were standing as the real world and imagine the other place as a kind of daydream. On Elm Street, that meant thinking about elm trees. In the Shortcut, it meant convincing yourself that the forest was real, that the little neighborhood of khaki houses and green lawns and gleaming cars was a funny joke. In order to cross, you had to admit that the other world was impossible and then step into it anyway.

He also learned to bring food and water with him when he used the Shortcut. There were no grocery stores or vending machines, obviously, but there were also no fruit trees, no berries, no mushrooms. If you wanted something to eat, you had to bring it with you.

Finally, he learned that you could only use the Shortcut if you were on your way somewhere. You couldn’t just sit in the park and think yourself to the other side, and you certainly couldn’t stay forever. The other place didn’t offer sanctuary—only safe passage. A detour. A shortcut.

***

Halfway through 10th grade, Jake did something stupid and fell in love with a girl who was already in love with somebody else. He knew this to be a mistake but couldn’t help himself. Aside from the usual excuses of adolescent hormones and youthful optimism, he’d spent years believing in the impossible and didn’t want to admit that love might work any differently.

So he wrote the girl a letter.

Two weeks later, Jake found himself on the losing end of a fistfight. The girl’s boyfriend—11th grade, Junior Varsity and built like it—hammered him with jabs until Jake fell to the ground. More embarrassed than hurt, but still plenty hurt.

The older boy looked down at him, adrenaline already ebbing into guilt. He bent to help Jake off the ground, but Jake pushed his hands away, already turning, reflexively, toward the other place.

Jake staggered up off the forest floor, brushed his hands against his jeans. Two steps away, the other boy stood with his mouth open.

“Where are we?” the boy asked.

If he’d been afraid, Jake might have taken pity on him, but he couldn’t forgive the sense of wonder in the older boy’s voice. This was his place, his alone. Bad enough to suffer the first injury without this added insult. He felt a sudden, overwhelming desire to make the other boy suffer, to punish him for this second, unforgivable sin.

And then, almost immediately, realized how he could do it.

“See for yourself,” Jake said. Then he stepped backward, out of the Shortcut and into the hallway.

Alone.

***

Police came by the school the next day. Posters went up around the neighborhood. There was a story in the newspaper, a special report on TV, a candlelight vigil.

All the while, Jake tried to find his way back into the Shortcut. He packed food, water, first aid kits, flashlights, everything he would need for a proper search. But the gate wouldn’t open for him. He couldn’t reach the mental state that undid the lock, couldn’t convince himself the Shortcut wasn’t real when a real person was starving to death somewhere inside.

More than this, he felt trapped. He recognized the days before the fight as a long, continuous journey from childhood to adulthood, a road with crossings and waypoints and occasional shortcuts. Choosing to kill someone had frozen him in one place, no longer on the way to anything. He was too old for his age now; he was as old as he would ever be.

***

Time passed. People grieved, accepted, forgot. Jake went to college out of state, got married, found work, had kids. He found ways to live with the guilt, to build layers of himself around it until no one could see through to the center.

When his daughter was old enough to go to school, Jake found a remote job that let him work irregular hours so long as they added up to forty every week. He spent his lunch break in the pickup line at the elementary school. He tapped his thumb against the steering wheel, changed the radio station without ever listening to the music, rolled the windows down to catch the fresh air, rolled them back up to block out the fumes.

He hated the feeling of being stuck between the cars, unable to move. Couldn’t bear the thought of his kids walking home from school.

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Marooned

What nobody knew—what nobody could have guessed—is that Jimmy wanted to be shipwrecked.

The fuel gauge had been close to full when he’d hopped over the rail. By the time it emptied, his rescuers would be a thousand miles off course, choppers weaving a careful net over the wrong square of ocean.

In the meantime, Jimmy pulled his life raft off the beach and covered it with branches. Then he cracked open a can of tuna and washed it down with warm beer. At his feet, tide pools bloomed like a garden of pink orchids beneath the sunset.

There were worse things than dying alone.

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Way back in July 2024, I went to a writing conference where someone suggested posting on Substack. I’d never been a very good (or even consistent) blogger, but I liked the idea of a social media platform centered around long-form writing. I clicked around the site, scrolled through a few tutorials, and signed up. Ten days later, I published my first short story on the platform.

One of the big decisions when starting a Substack is deciding what to put behind a paywall. I assumed (correctly!) that this blog would never really rake in a significant amount of dough, and it seemed counterproductive to ask people to read my stories only to hide half of them in a Members Only section.

On the other hand, Substack isn’t doing this for free, and I strongly suspected that a 100% free blog would be viewed less favorably by the algorithms. I needed something to lure in paid subscribers. But what?

I eventually decided to set up paid subscriptions and pledge the proceeds to charity. From my About page (which I’m certain no one has ever read):

If you do decide to subscribe, here’s a short breakdown of where your subscription goes.

- A portion goes to Substack, because that’s how they make money

- A smaller portion goes toward maintaining the site, whether that’s registering domain names, hiring web designers, or paying graphic designers to generate assets

The rest goes to non-profit charities to promote literacy

2024 came and went. I published 24 posts and ended the year with 17 free subscribers. The textbook definition of a flop, but I was still committed.

The First Subscribers

In 2025, I slowed down the posting schedule and started to devote a little more time to promoting my fantasy novel, Company of Ghosts. I participated in a few submissions calls, got more active on Notes, and made a few friends. Total subscriptions crept steadily upward, and I landed my first paid subscribers, to whom I am eternally grateful.

As a result, I’m pleased to announce that I made $250 in subscription revenue last year. After Substack’s cut and Stripe’s processing fees, that leaves $216.55 for my chosen charity, Reading is Fundamental.

According to their donation page, this is enough to get books into the hands of 54 children across the country. By way of comparison, I published 46 posts last year, which means that every time I sat down to write a post, I was—in effect—buying a book for a kid.

This is my new North Star. Those other lights in the night sky? Pure decoration, at best.

But Wait, There’s More!

The cynical readers stopped to scratch their heads a few paragraphs ago, and we should take a moment to address their concerns.

After all, wouldn’t it make more sense for my subscribers to just donate their subscriptions directly? It would cut out two middlemen, which means that more kids would get books, and they’d still be able to read the exact same posts.

Well, I had the same thought myself, which is why I decided to match my subscribers’ donations and give $216.55 to a local charity.

Technically, this means that I lost money on Substack last year, but it’s hard to see it that way. These kids live in my neighborhood. They walk on the same sidewalks as I do. They will—someday, I hope—wander through the same bookstores, driven by a lifelong love of reading. A love that started, as mine did, in childhood.

A writer without readers is nothing. By supporting me, you’ve made sure that I’ll be surrounded by readers for years to come.

Other News

The Hope and the Ruin is well underway. My first reread starts in February, and I’ve committed to finishing the first major rewrite by the end of April, so we’ll see how much I get done. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the unseasonably warm weather and trying to stay sane.

That’s all for this week! See you on Monday for your regularly scheduled microfiction.

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Today’s story is inspired by any one of the countless pit stops on countless road trips I’ve taken through the years. I’ve found that there are two ways to approach these.

The first (and worst) is to count them as lost time. Glance at the clock when you walk in, check it again when you walk out, and mentally add 47 minutes to the arbitrary ETA you staked your pride against when you set out. Instead of “chocolate shake,” think “twelve minutes.” Tap your foot while you wait for the check. Et cetera.

The better way, if you can pull it off, is to remind yourself that the pauses are part of the journey—not distractions from it. The road will be there when you get back, and it’ll be just as long as you left it, so you may as well enjoy a decent cup of coffee while you can get it.

Crossroads

Marge’s diner had two regulars, though she never learned their names.

Traveler-Headed-West was usually twenty, thirty at most. He ordered from the Specials menu and always treated himself to a slice of pie. Traveler-Headed-East was older, quieter, fed up with her own broken heart. She sipped black coffee and stared out the window: wondering, wondering.

Every now and then, they met in the parking lot and got to talking. Marge saw this as a personal victory and celebrated by pouring free coffee for everybody. It pleased her to put some good into the world, to be in charge of a place where good things could still happen.

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Here are a few stories that turned my head in December.

Red Creek Boy by

Kindling

Red Creek Boy - Index

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5 months ago · 11 likes · Shaina Read

Red Creek Boy is a new serial from Shaina Read, and holy hell does it check a lot of boxes for me. Creepy rituals in the woods? Supernatural killers? Small town horror with a dash of police procedural?

Be still, my bloody heart.

Chapters One through Six are up on the index page, so you can follow along from week to week or wait until April to binge them all at once.

You Cannot Spell Paradise Without Lies by

Realms.

You Cannot Spell Paradise Without Lies

Reader Question: What’s the worst job you ever had…

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3 years ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Zachary Roush

This one was posted way back in January 2023, but I didn’t hear about it until it got a Runner-Up nod from the Lunar Awards, so it was new to me in December. Dystopian, alien, surreal. This line alone is worth the price of admission:

“There are dogs patrolling here, eye stalks turning at every sound.”

I AM TRYING TO TELL YOU A DREAM by

They don't all have to be good

I AM TRYING TO TELL YOU A DREAM

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4 months ago · 19 likes · 22 comments · Ian Patterson

This one is a vignette, rather than a full story, but it grabbed my interest. For a guy who “doesn’t write horror,” Ian nailed it with this one. The voice is superb, the descriptions are killer. Allegedly, this is meant to be part of a larger tale, and I’m excited to see what else he has planned for it.

(Obligatory link to Ian’s award-winning book, which I also enjoyed!)

The Last Useful Man by and

The Metropolitan Review

The Last Useful Man

About halfway through Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Tom Cruise goes for a run on a treadmill. The treadmill is on the USS Ohio, a submarine manned exclusively by implausibly attractive people. One of those people is not who they seem: a cultist, radicalized by the Entity, the f…

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4 months ago · 1532 likes · 82 comments · Aled Maclean-Jones and The Metropolitan Review

Finally, this was my favorite essay of the month. The tagline might fool you into thinking this is a movie review, but it’s actually a very salient analysis of the uses of technology. When is technology a crutch, and when is it an extension of human expertise? Read and find out.

It’s also very accessibly written, even if you’re like me and haven’t seen Tom Cruise in a starring role since your dad showed you the original Top Gun on VHS.

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There’s a prevailing sentiment that there’s such a thing as Too Much Christmas, which is absolutely true—for people who celebrate it the wrong way. I believe, wholeheartedly, that we live in a world with Too Much Commercialism, Too Much Waste, Too Much Greed, and Too Much Canned Pop Music.

But what do any of those things have to do with Christmas?

When Ebenezer Scrooge vowed in A Christmas Carol to “honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year,” he wasn’t talking about jamming Mariah Carey tracks in September or buying cheap plastic shit for your cousin’s kids to throw away. He was talking about the basic human concepts of Charity, Generosity, and Kindness for your “fellow passengers to the grave” (one of my favorite lines in any book, ever).

Too much Christmas? Humbug. It gets cold and dark in November. Let’s put up some lights and bake each other cookies.

Read a Book, Feed a Neighbor

Speaking of charity, the numbers have started to roll in for last month’s food bank drive. For those who missed the post, a group of authors banded together and pledged their November royalties to their local food banks. We had a total of 13 participating authors across 7 states, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who chipped in to help.

For most of us, November was a slow month, so book sales either held steady or dipped slightly compared to previous months. Most of the authors rounded up their donations, which puts us at an estimated $877, with a few folks still waiting for our sales reports to come in. I’m guessing we cleared the $1,000 mark, but probably not by much.

While that definitely isn’t quit-your-job money, even small gifts at a crucial time can go a long way. My local food bank says that it can provide two meals for every dollar donated, which puts us at about 2,000 meals (rounding up because a lot of the donations landed on Giving Tuesday). Doing some rough napkin math, that’s three meals a day for a family of four for… 166 days.

If you don’t believe that has an impact, walk up to a family of four and offer to buy their groceries for the next five months. (Warning: People will think you’re weird for doing this. But they’ll also probably thank you.)

Book Two Announcement

Last week, I announced that I’d finished the first draft of book two, tentatively titled The Hope and the Ruin. This book picks up a few years after Company of Ghosts with a mostly-new cast of characters as they attempt to build a settlement in the ruins of their abandoned homeland.

As you might expect, it goes very, very well (until it doesn’t).

Where the first book dealt with altered historical records in the immediate aftermath of a low-magic fantasy civil war, this book zooms out a lot further, delving into the cataclysm that sent the Kerrans across the ocean in the first place and their attempts to reconcile the sins of their collective past.

I decided early on that each book was going to serve as a primary, in-world source for an important chapter in this world’s history. I think it’s a cool approach, and it gives me a lot of flexibility to make changes between books, but it does come with some drawbacks.

Book two has much darker tones than the first, to the extent that it might alienate some readers who enjoyed the first book. It’s also written as a third-person account rather than a first-person memoir, and has very little overlap with the events of the first book.

I’m pretty sure any one of these points would earn a veto from an agent or a publisher, but as a self-pubbed author, I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. I can do what I want, and this is how I want to write book two.

Upcoming Milestones

I thought I’d post a quick overview of my writing process and some milestones for next year. I’m never going to be a prolific author, but at the very least, I can try to set reasonable expectations and meet my own deadlines.

December-January: Two month break so I can reread the story with fresh eyes. Stephen King says to take two months off after the first draft, and I don’t argue with the King.
February-April: First reread and an initial pass to tweak major character arcs and sew up plot holes. At this stage, I’m mostly trying to make sure that the plot and characters coalesce around a central theme.
May: Another month off. I usually take a hiatus from posting around this time as well.
June-July: A third draft, where I focus more on language, voice, and tone. This is the draft I’ll deliver to some beta readers for feedback.

After this, the timeline starts to depend on others’ availability, and I don’t have as much say in the schedule. I’m still aiming for a Summer 2027 release date, but I’ll post here if there are any changes.

Finally, Some Personal News

I started playing the harp about two years ago (at the ripe old age of 36). I don’t talk about it much on my writing blog because I approach writing and playing music very differently. When I write, my goal is to impress. The audience’s reaction is essential to the process.

Music, on the other hand, is my safe space. I don’t want to think about posting schedules or subscriber counts or what the audience wants. I just want to play songs that I enjoy.

Most of the time, that’s traditional Irish music. I got a Turlough O’Carolan songbook for my birthday, which I’ve been working through little by little. Irish music is typically written in G or D major (or their relative minors), which means I tune the harp to C major. When I play a song in G, I flip the levers up on all the F strings. When I play a song in D, I also flip the levers up on all the C strings.

Since I only have access to naturals and sharps, I can’t play music in any key that requires a flat note. F major is out of luck, and you can forget about E-flat major.

But! One of the cool things about being a musician is that you meet other musicians, and sometimes those other musicians will let you borrow instruments. This happened a few weeks ago, when my friends dropped off a 36-string harp for me to play with.

I’ve already tuned it down to E-flat major, which opens up a huge number of keys that were impossible on my old harp. Notably: B-flat major, C minor, D minor, E-flat major, F major, and G minor (also A-flat Lydian, which has never been used in the history of music).

Unless you’re a music theory nerd, this was probably really boring to read, but it’s exciting news for some people!

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It’s officially December, which means that the Read a Book, Feed a Neighbor program has concluded. There are a few holdouts who extended their contributions into December, so if you missed it, you can check the list below. Many thanks to those who contributed, spread the word, and especially to those who actually bought a few books!

For those who subscribed during November, you probably didn’t see much else from me. I wanted to keep that post at the top of the page, and I was also putting a lot of work into maintaining and sharing the list. Since December marks a return to my normal posting schedule, I should probably give a quick breakdown of what to expect.

• Newsletter - A monthly post about book details, works in progress, and random life events. Expect these on a Wednesday somewhere in the middle of the month.

• Fiction - Microfiction on the first and third Monday of each month, flash fiction on the last Friday of the month. If the month has five Mondays, I’ll devote the last Monday to resharing some of my favorite recent stories on Substack.

• Essays - Infrequent essays whenever I feel like dusting off the old soapbox.

This week’s microfiction is a repost. It originally landed in the comments section of , but I never posted it here, so it’ll be new for some of you. Partly inspired by our first snow of the year, which came a lot later than usual for Colorado, but looks pretty just the same.

I hope you enjoy it.

Infiltration

“Gutierrez. we need you to infiltrate the Lopez Gang.”

“Right away, Chief.”

Later:

“You’ve earned my trust, hermano. I need you to infiltrate the Diamondbacks.”

“Of course, Jefe.”

Much later:

Gutierrez adjusted the straps on his penguin suit and waddled down the snowbank into the east side colony. He needed a mate by April or he’d freeze to death.

He raised his flippers and waited for the first female to approach.

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When I set a publication date for Company of Ghosts, I earmarked a few hundred bucks for an advertising budget. I saw this as a necessary evil. Despite the pain of yet another upfront expense, payola is a real thing that works, assuming you a) have the budget for it, and b) can stomach the thought of writing a check to a trillion-dollar company that’s already getting paid to sell your book.

At the time, I thought I could stomach it, but the world is a different place than it was in January. I could write long, passionately worded essays about why this is the case, but this is one of those situations where a picture really is worth a thousand words. Or in this case, two pictures.

Here’s the first, courtesy of the “Promote and advertise” button in my KDP dashboard:

And here’s the second, courtesy of my local food bank:

And so I’m sitting here with a little imaginary envelope marked “Ad Spend,” but with SNAP and WIC benefits set to expire in November, and the Colorado governor asking for $10 million from the state’s General Fund to make up the shortfall, I’m starting to wonder if I could “promote and advertise” my book in a way that actually benefits my community.

Here’s what I’m thinking.

The Pledge

For the entire month of November, I’ll be donating my royalties from the Kindle Unlimited program to the Larimer County Food Bank. Based on the latest royalty calculator, this comes to about $1.65 per book. Assuming the food bank’s math is right, this means that for every copy of Company of Ghosts you read, I can feed one of my neighbors for an entire day.

I’ll also be donating $1.50 for every physical book sold, whether it’s through Amazon or your local bookstore. On the Amazon side, I would make a little more in royalties than I would spend in donations, but I would lose a little bit on the IngramSpark side. Since I sell more copies through IngramSpark, I assume this will be a wash.

The Invitation

I’m also extending an invite to other authors to participate. If you’d like to take part in Read a Book, Feed a Neighbor during the month of November, leave a comment below or send me a message with the following info.

Book: the book you’d like to advertise (limit one per author)
Genre: the genre of your chosen book
Blurb: a one or two sentence plot description
Program: the food assistance program you’d like to sponsor, whether it’s a local food bank or something larger
Pledge: the amount you’re pledging
Purchase: your preferred link(s) to purchase the book

Once you’re added to the list, share the post in your own feed to help get the word out. As the list grows, would-be readers should have a pretty sizeable list of titles to choose from.

The List (sorted A-Z by genre, then title)

🕰️ Historical Fiction 🗺️

Book: Desiderium by Julie Furxhi
Genre: Historical Fiction
Blurb: Three resilient women navigate the dangerous paths of love, revenge, and loss in 20th century Albania.
Program and Pledge: 100% of profits will be donated to the Food Bank for Larimer County
Purchase: Buy a Copy Here

Book: Searching for Shakespeare by
Genre: Magical Realism
Blurb: Shakespearean expert Wesley Jameson has always known the truth: that Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, is the true author of these timeless plays and poetry. But now, anti-Stratfordian time traveling villains, The Gathering of the Hours, are out to stop him from telling the world, once and for all.
Program: Kyrene Family Resource Center (through Ahwatukee Mamas)
Pledge: All proceeds in November
Purchase: Amazon

Book: Song of the Spirit: A Story of Love and Freedom by
Genre: Historical Fiction
Blurb: In this breathtaking tale of courage and romance, two Cheyenne sisters are kidnapped and taken to Rose Academy, a harsh boarding school established to eradicate indigenous children’s knowledge of their language and culture. These unforgettable characters intersect with historical events, including the Wounded Knee, as they risk all to be free.
Program: Fall River Community Food Pantry
Pledge: 100% of my royalties for sales of Song of the Spirit: A Story of Love and Freedom for the month of November
Purchase: Amazon

Book: The Lucky Hat Mine by J.v.L. Bell
Genre: Historical Mystery/Cozy Mystery
Blurb: Wife-wanted ads are always risky business, but Millie Virginia never imagined she’d survive the perilous trip across the Great Plains and arrive in the mining town of Idaho Springs only to find her intended husband in a pine box. Was his death an accident, or murder? Millie might not live long enough to find out.
Program: Food Bank of the Rockies
Pledge: 100% of royalties for copies purchased at Filter Press, indie bookstores, B&N, Bookshop dot org, and all ebook retailers besides Amazon; 30% of royalties for all copies (ebook or print) purchased on Amazon. The author pledges to donate $250 to the program if royalties are below this dollar amount.
Purchase: Filter Press

💀 Horror 🪦

Book: Hallway by
Genre: Horror
Blurb: In a crumbling apartment building, Tim and Jess struggle to hold their lives together amid failing lights, strange noises, and a restless cat fixated on a mysterious locked door. When their neighbor disappears without a trace, the thin veneer of reality begins to crack, revealing shadows that blur the line between paranoia and something far darker. “Hallway” is a chilling psychological thriller that explores the fine line between fear and madness, where every creak and whisper might be more than just in the mind.
Program: Upper Valley Haven
Pledge: All Hallway royalties for November
Purchase: Amazon

🖋️ Literary 📓

Book: Mars in Retrograde by
Genre: Literary/Speculative
Blurb: After his trailer park vigilante efforts go awry, Marshall is forced to skip town with the selectively mute love of his life, his newly sober ex-lover, and the twelve year old kid he’s accidentally adopted, as they seek solace at the approaching end of the world. From rural Georgia to a sustainable cult in Missouri, Marshall and his friends are forced to reckon with their past mistakes and reclaim a sense of free will before it all falls apart.
Program: Greater Boston Food Bank
Pledge: 50% of all profits
Purchase: Nascent Night Press or Bookshop

Nonfiction

Book: Alternate Worlds by
Genre: Memoir, Gaming
Blurb: A former R&D lead for Magic: the Gathering walks through memory lane of playing and making the well-known card game.
Program: SF Marin Food Bank
Pledge: 100% of all royalties from Amazon & Kindle Unlimited for the month of November
Purchase: Amazon

🤖 Science Fiction/Fantasy ⚔️

Book: Company of Ghosts by
Genre: Fantasy
Blurb: Born in the final year of a civil war that claimed her mother’s life, Jalina grew up with more questions than her quiet father was willing to answer. When a visiting professor named Andza hints that he knows more history than he’s allowed to teach, she leaves school in order to learn more.
Program: Food Bank for Larimer County
Pledge: All Kindle Unlimited royalties, plus $1.50 per physical book
Purchase: Bookshop or Amazon

Book: Transference: Book One of The Narrator Cycle by
Genre: Sci-Fi, Dystopian
Blurb: What illness would you trade for survival, what bargain would you strike with death? In a mysterious city where diseases can be transferred, the rich buy longer lives without pain, and the poor get a short life of constant sickness.
Program: Care and Share - Food Bank for Southern Colorado
Pledge: All ebook, kindle unlimited, and paperback royalties
Purchase: Bookshop or Amazon

🔍 Suspense/Thriller 🔪

Book: All (Dead) Girls Lie by
Genre: Young Adult Thriller
Blurb: In the Fall of 2004, Quinn Levi’s sleepy town is roused by a string of murders of the most popular girls in school, one of which Quinn can’t help falling for. This spooky slasher is equal parts gay, girly and only a tad bit gory.
Program: Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina
Pledge: 100% of royalties for books sold in the month of November
Purchase: Barnes & Noble

Book: Anyone But Her by
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
Blurb: In 1979, when clairvoyant Suzanne Parry is 14, her mother Alex is killed during a robbery at Alex’s record store in Denver. After Alex’s ghost raises alarm bells about Suzanne’s father’s new girlfriend, what Suzanne can’t foresee are the lifelong consequences as she heeds Alex’s warning. In 2004, returning to Denver with her family, Suzanne must reckon with the ghosts—and repercussions—of the past.
Program: Food Bank of the Rockies
Pledge: 100% of royalties for copies purchased at indie bookstores, B&N, Bookshop dot org, and all ebook retailers besides Amazon; 30% of royalties for all copies (ebook or print) purchased on Amazon
Purchase: Books2Read or Bookshop

Book: Lethal Succession by Ruben Elustondo
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
Blurb: The dynasty is on the brink. With his health failing, a CEO must choose between his three children and a loyal associate. But as greed, betrayal, and blackmail rock the fight for succession, the struggle for power turns deadly.
Program: Houston Food Bank
Pledge: 50% of ebook, kindle unlimited, and paperback royalties during the month of November
Purchase: Kindle or Paperback on Amazon

📕 Anthologies 📘

Book: Weird Waypoints: A Speculative Travel Guide to the Between
Genre: Anthology of weird fiction (scifi, fantasy, and horror included)
Blurb: These thirteen weird, surreal, and bizarro tales shine a spotlight on pitstops and side trips, celebrating that the journey can be stranger than the destination.
Program: World Central Kitchen
Pledge: All proceeds for November and December
Purchase: Amazon or Bookshop

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Story #5

Prompt: Sanctuary (43 words)

The Rose Island Animal Sanctuary seemed like the perfect place to hide out. The lights went off at 7:00, and police dogs wouldn’t go anywhere near the Africa enclosure.

Freddie crouched behind a bush and waited. Behind him, a lioness did the same.

Story #6

Prompt: Sourdough (13 words)

Sourdough starter usually ate flour and water, but Audrey 3 wanted something bloody.

Story #7

Prompt: Fall (66 words)

It only took three seconds to fall 150 feet.

In the first second, Mike’s entire life flashed before his eyes. Very little had happened, and nothing interesting.

With two seconds to spare, his brain reran the highlight reel. Twice.

By the time Mike hit the pavement, he was 128 years old. He never really did anything, but even worse, he never really did anything four times.

Story #8

Prompt: Atmosphere (12 words)

The aliens liked Earth’s atmosphere so much that they took it home.

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It’s also been about a month since Company of Ghosts came out, and I’m enjoying watching the reviews trickle in. Most are from friends or family, but I’ve seen one or two from complete strangers, which is cool. If you’ve picked up a copy, consider this your reminder that reviews are how unknown authors get discovered. People are more likely to take a chance on something with a few stars attached to it, so click the button and leave a short review if you have a moment.

For anyone who’s worried about hurting my feelings with a negative review, consider that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Your “slow pace” might be someone else’s “slow burn.” Your “poorly explained magic system” might sound perfect for someone who’s tired of spreadsheets and elaborate diagrams.

I’ve read books on the basis of a two-star review because all of the reviewer’s negatives sounded like positives to me. I’ve avoided books on the basis of a five-star review because I knew I didn’t have the same taste in books as the reviewer.

And at the end of the day, I’d much rather have 100 reviews with a 3.9 average than 10 reviews with a 4.9 average. I’m writing book two anyway, and nothing you say is going to stop me, so you may as well say what you think.

SPEAKING OF BOOK TWO

This is a question I’ve been fielding a lot lately, so this is probably a good time to give a quick breakdown of the planned series.

Will there be a series?

Yes. I have four books planned with ideas for one or two more. Each book is intended as a potential stopping point, so there are no unresolved plots or cliffhangers at the end of any book. If you feel like stopping after book one, that’s fine. If I kick the bucket after writing book three, the series will be considered “finished” at three books.

There’s no need to wait until all of the books are out, and no pressure to read more than you feel like reading.

Will each book follow the same characters?

Yes and no. The goal for the series is to cover roughly a century of historically significant events in this fictional setting. Since each book is diegetic, it would be impossible for one person to write them all.

Instead, each book will take place in the aftermath of the previous book. Major characters from book one will be minor characters in book two. Events in book two will naturally lead into the starting point for book three.

What does “diegetic” mean?

It’s most commonly used in reference to musical scores. When you hear the Jaws theme, that music is for the benefit of the audience. The shark attack victims don’t hear it (and would probably act very differently if they did). When you hear “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca, it exists within that scene. You’re hearing it because the characters are hearing it.

By the same token, if you ventured into the Library in Sharme, you could find a copy of Company of Ghosts somewhere on the shelves. Everything between the title page and THE END was written by the principal narrator, and at least a few of the people in book two have probably read book one.

A good example of this is Glen Cook’s The Black Company series, which spans a few decades and makes use of at least seven narrators. Canonically, the narrators are the ones who wrote the series, and if you snuck into one of their tents, you could read it in their handwriting.

Any other details?

How about some tentative titles?

1. Company of Ghosts (Autumn 2025)

2. The Hope and the Ruin (Summer 2027)

3. Everything Out of Season (Winter 2028)

4. As the Crane Flies (???)

What if I have other questions?

Ask them in the comments, and I’ll answer what I can.

Coming up next…

I’ll have another round of microfiction this Monday and probably a flash fiction toward the end of the month. I usually take the month of November off, but I may write a short newsletter if I have anything significant to share.

That’s all for now. Stay warm out there!

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