Life is just a fantasy

Please find below three more of my previously-published fantasy short-stories.

Besides these three, I also currently have another short-story, called The Beast, in print. The Beast is featured in Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Volume 4, Book 2—which just came out last month. The Beast was borne of an exercise that I had done as part of Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass.

As for these three: Limited Omniscient is a UF piece from seventeen years ago. It was accepted by the now-defunct SDO Fantasy online e-zine.

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Half-Full

“Coming!”

The doorbell chimes again, mocking me. Grabbing the half-empty candy bowl, I open the door–

“Huh!” I gasp.

It is HUGE. Its front paws planted on the porch: two golden, fur-covered columns, each thicker than my torso. They hold up the massive lion’s body. I feel the dragon’s tail in the shadows. Giant eagle wings scrape my eaves and blot out the festivities.

Between its teeth, I see the tiny plastic pumpkin bowl. Its cat eyes just stare.

I lock eyes with it for some time.

“Trick,” I decide.

I mean, how often do you get a chance like this?

Limited Omniscient

He was very nearly already dead when he came to see me. Not at all what I had expected from the High Father: the Great Winged Serpent Who Rules All.

My first glimpse of him was through my specially located peephole. He leaned heavily against his wooden umbrella. He wasn’t dressed in ceremonial garb, rather he wore a light windbreaker and khakis. Picture a Chicano George Burns.

His face was completely hidden behind his own wrinkles. But his smile was patient. It had taken me several minutes to come downstairs in the lift and answer the doorbell in my wheelchair.

I asked who it was as I opened the door. Without a word of greeting, he stabbed at me with an exacto knife– of course he was too weak and only succeeded in falling on me and clumsily knocking us both over, back into my foyer.

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Sudoku

As long as anyone remembered, K…(that’s what they called him: “K”– the letter, not the nickname)…K was always counting: One, two, three as he walked. He measured time when his teachers talked, usually thousands, when his friends played tag (Edgar was the best, he always tagged someone before eight)– his first kiss was a one. But later him and Sally kissed all the way to seventeen before his friends caught them behind the school and made fun of them…

K sat in his room one night, long after everyone was asleep, and stared at the Sudoku book on his lap. It was a gift from his parents. His “focused” behavior– no one used the word “obsessive” in their house– was a source of shame for his parents. But they also realized that his genius wasn’t all bad. K got to hear his Dad tell people lots of jokes about visiting Vegas.

K was ashamed of how well he did at number puzzles. But he was proud, too.

He stared at the first puzzle in the book. He saw a grid of eighty-one squares, nine-by-nine– or, if you prefer: a grid of nine 3-by-3 grids. Selected squares had a single number, one through nine, inside them. Most of the squares were blank and you were supposed to fill those in. Each row, each column, and each 3-by-3 box within the overall grid was supposed to contain only one each of the nine digits, one through nine. That was the puzzle.

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Happy Halloween…Silver Shamrock!*

I’ve only finished one horror piece, a short short (or micro-fic, if you prefer) from last year. It’s called Happy Hollows.

When I was a small child, I had an uncle who inundated me with age-inappropriate horror movies and stories. This has served to make me somewhat impervious/desensitized to horror as a genre, which makes me a less-than-ideal creator of same.

Still, I kind of like this one. Less is More, maybe. I definitely get the impression that if I ever managed to write something that scared me, it would utterly wreck others. Something to shoot for, someday, perhaps.

Of course, the first thirty pages would just be trigger warnings. I wonder if you could write an entire short-story of nothing but trigger warnings? The reader would just absorb the story proper through a process of nothing but emotionally safe osmosis.

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Happy Hollows

If the carving wasn’t so fun, I’d skip it all and stay home.

The pumpkins make me sweat. I have to surprise ’em, or else they’re hard to carry.

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I stare at their pretty costumes for a while. One wakes up and tries to run.

It is first. That pumpkin bites me several times, but I don’t let go until we’re in the basement.

I start at the top. Have to slant the knife inward so the lid fits back right–by then they go into shock, so that makes it easy…

…Eventually, they’re all smiling.

Time for candy.

Long, long ago…

So, I am posting and curating my (published) works here on my website (Yay!). Now that I am querying, I reckon that this is as good a time as any to pull this site together.

The first two stories are below. They are from about 16 to 17 years ago.

Checking It Twice always seemed like a natural to me: Santa Claus was the original ‘big bad’ to many of us. So, why not tell the story of when he was neither of those things. And, yes, my very first short story featured a POC. I was always wanting to creatively explore the human condition by attempting empathy with ‘the others’.

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