Fumbling around the neck of the tank, he found a valve and opened it. There was a rush of gas that almost covered the stench of the creature advancing upon him. By the time he found the ignition button, the thing was already within the cloud of gas the tank had projected. Liam felt the fire flash across his hands as the gas burned up, but the creature was caught within the torch’s searing flame, set cooler and wider than necessary to weld steel. Its clothes and skin alight, it threw itself backwards, toppling over and crawling away. Liam followed it as far as the hose would allow, and saw its burning form topple down a short flight of concrete steps. Using the light of the torch, he located an electric lantern and the biggest wrench in the workshop. In the other, lower room, the thing scraped across the floor.
Ever so cautiously, Liam inched down the steps, listening for any sign of the creature. But the room was silent. The lantern illuminated only bare walls and old furniture. Stepping down onto the floor, he trod on something that buckled beneath his foot. He shone the lantern over it.
It was an empty can of 3-In-One oil. Somewhere beyond the workshop’s back door, the creature waited. Its wheel was silent now.
28
The Werewolf of Bedburg
There was a monster on Tim’s roof. With sticky hands and grubby feet, it sat there, rocking gently back and forth. Yes, it was quiet now, but he knew better than to provoke it. He had heard its terrible roar more times than he cared to remember: sometimes even by day. It had come to his roof every night for a week now, but it never seemed to sleep. If he poked his head out to look, it was there, wide eyes staring as it began to roar.
The monster shuffled a little, causing a thin stream of dust to trickle down from the ceiling. Tim couldn’t work out what he’d done to deserve this. He never caused any trouble, didn’t have loud parties, had never gone in for that Ouija board stuff. Why him and why here, he had no idea. His head ached. Maybe he should just move out. Maybe, like, right now. It occurred to him that the monster hadn’t moved for a while. Perhaps, just this once, it was sleeping. He poked his head out and twisted his neck around, looking out and up.
There were those eyes again.
“Mummy!” howled the frightful beast. Tim cowered inside again, trying to make himself as small as possible. The monster hurtled over his head and away, still spewing its hideous gibberish. “Mummy, there’s a monster under my bed!”
Tim continued to cower, wondering if he could take this chance to flee, or if it was merely waiting just out of sight.
“Now sweetie.” Oh no, thought Tim. There was another monster—it sounded even bigger—and the two of them were plotting something. “I know the new house is strange, but you have to go to sleep. There’s no such thing as monsters.”
29
A Twenty Year Decade
Challenge #13: Write a story responding to another writer’s piece from Flash Fiction Month 2012.
This is a response to Watching Butterflies by Elizabeth Mathis, aka. TwilightPoetess on deviantART https://twilightpoetess.deviantart.com/art/Watching-Butterflies-FFM-17-315340926
Robert always had people to talk to. That was, he considered, the strange thing about space. It was so big, so empty that you just had to stick together. Like the debris from a meteorite strike condensing into a brand new moon. Maybe. He had failed Astrophysics. He was happy just to watch the stars.
It had been exciting, getting onto the shuttle and seeing all those people. Everyone was off on their own adventure. “Space,” that old show had said. “The final frontier.” It really was. Except that frontiers didn’t really give you time for your own adventure. You needed to settle, to build, and to have someone check that your eyeballs wouldn’t go shooting out through a crack in your helmet the next time you went out for a stroll. Life in space was like a twenty-year coach tour. You’d see some interesting sights, but there was never really time to do your own thing.
Still, Robert had quickly got used to it. It was an adventure, even if it wasn’t his alone, and there was something invigorating about setting up camp not just on another planet, not just in another solar system, but in a whole new galaxy. It was like the human species had finally moved out of Mother Earth’s basement.
But twenty years in, with all the modules of the space station delivered and slotted together and the planet terraformed (for those who fancied getting their feet muddy again), it was beginning to feel much the same as Earth had. He could understand why people would want to feel at home, but this was starting to feel like less of a colony and more of a replacement goldfish. Swatting away one of the garden dome’s ubiquitous butterflies, he stared out at New Orion. He didn’t miss Earth, but he did wonder how much it had changed since he left.
A lot could happen in a twenty year decade, and thanks to relativity he’d been gone for two.
30
A Rose by Any Other Name
“Wait!” shouted Frank, hurrying up the last few steps. “Wait, don’t jump!
“Do not stop me!” The man had a thick German accent. “I do not you want to interfere!”
“Okay,” said Frank, stopping and putting his hands out in front of him. “Okay, just wait. Just wait for a bit. Whatever problems you have, there must be a better way of solving them.”
“No.” He turned back to the edge and shook his head. “No, is not. I thought how much I had to win, but now have nothing. Cannot get what I left back.”
Frank took a cautious step closer. “What did you leave?” he asked. “Whatever it is, I’ll help. There must be a way.” To his relief, the man took a step back.
“In East Germany,” he said, “I was…” he searched for the word “…chemist of nose.” He mimed spraying perfume. “Pssht-pssht. My work very fine was, but few buy it. Few could afford, so here I came: grand ideas I had—sell to gentlemen as well as ladies—but here nobody buy. Nobody buy, and…” he looked back at the edge again “…I cannot go back.”
As quick as he dared, Frank walked up and put a hand on his shoulder. “How long have you been here?” he asked.
“A whole three months.”
“Well, that’s not long! It’s bound to take some time to get a business started in a whole new country.”
The man stared at him. “Do you think?”
“Of course! I’ll even buy some from you: I’ll tell all my friends.”
“No,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket. “No, you saved me. To you is gift.” He handed Frank a small bottle.
Frank read the label. “Ah,” he said. “I think I can see why you’ve been having problems.”
“Why? Is not nice bottle?”
“The bottle’s fine, but I don’t think ‘Man Stench’ is the most appealing name.”
31
Overwrite 369
Challenge #14: Write a story that includes elements from either Cyberpunk or High Fantasy, where one of the characters is either an Omnicidal Maniac or a Knight Templar, where the themes are either Vigilantism and Morality or Love and Death, and is in the form of a 369er. A “369er” is a piece comprised of three separate but related 69 word stories.
Rick couldn’t believe it. He had expected that kind of slip-up from the thugs who smuggled in the weapons. He had even expected it from the back-alley ‘planter who’d fitted his new arm. But Jenna? After all they’d been through together, she should have been smart enough to spot a government spy. His own wife…he would have killed her if he’d had to, but that wouldn’t have been enough.
***
The boot caught Jacob in the side of the head, knocking him to the curb. “It’s your lucky day,” said the chiphead standing over him. “I got bigger problems than petty crooks.” Ripping the morphymer lockpick out of his car door, he crushed it in one great hydraulic hand.
As the sports car swept out into the road, Jacob certainly didn’t feel lucky. Then it exploded, and he did.
***
He’d wiped her ID chip, medical records, bank account. She couldn’t be sure, but she had a fee
ling that when she got home her stuff would be gone, too. It was fifty-fifty her fingerprint wouldn’t even open the front door any more. But there were upsides, she supposed. The claymore mine in the glovebox was bound to be messy, but “I don’t exist” was one hell of an alibi.
The Section with Graphs and Stuff
One of two things has happened. Either you have just finished reading Story #31, or you just passed up an opportunity to read a story about a vampire. In any case, you’re in for some science now, as I attempt to analyse the results of this thirty-one day challenge. If that’s not your kind of thing, feel free to skip this section. Otherwise, feast your eyes on this line graph:
The x-axis shows the number of days into the month. The y-axis shows the number of words. The blue line (square dots, for those of you reading in black and white) follows the word count for each and every day. Not much of a trend, really, unless you count my tendency to do a really long story one day and a really short one the next. The green line (triangular dots), however, puts things into perspective somewhat. Each point on the green line represents an average of five days: the day itself, and the two either side of it. This evens out the crazy “Bart Simpson hair” jags, revealing what everyone already knew: it’s hard to finish what you’ve started. It’s pretty clear from this line that the stories generally got shorter as the month went on.
It should be noted that Day 22 represents the celebrity monkey story which was limited to the minimum fifty-five words. Day 23 I spent at the zoo instead of writing anything serious, so I guess you can blame both 55-worders on monkeys. At the other extreme, Day 27 represents the collaboration challenge, so half those words weren’t actually mine. Basically, I went more than a week without writing more than about five hundred words in a day.
However, that’s not to say that more words are better. Have some more science. Boom! Another graph!
Okay, so it’s not really science at all. It’s just speculation and pretty pictures. But that’s the next best thing to science (and let’s be honest, newspapers do it all the time). This graph shows the word count as before, averaged over five days, along with the number of times each story was added as a “favourite” by members of deviantART (the navy blue bars). Since the “faves” are mostly dealing with single digits while the word count deals with triple, I’ve multiplied them by 100 for comparison. A value of 100 on this graph represents either 100 words or just one solitary fave.
So what does this tell us? Well, nothing very much. Some stories picked up quite a few faves, others none at all. The word count—and the time since the start of the month—don’t seem to have had that much of an influence. There do seem to be a comparatively high number of faves on the stories submitted in the first few days, but since many of the readers were Flash Fiction Month writers themselves, it’s likely they felt the pressure piling on in much the same way I did: just like my average word count dropped over the course of the month, so too did the number of other writers’ flash fiction pieces I managed to read each day. The number of times a story is added to users’ favourites is not directly representative of its quality (it’s influenced by, among other things, the number of people who read it in the first place), but hopefully it gives some idea.
Based on the reasonably consistent (or at least consistently erratic) quality of these stories, I believe that the decreasing word count is not only the result of me getting lazy, but also a consequence of practice. Towards the end of Flash Fiction Month, I had the feeling that I was getting better at putting these stories together, using fewer superfluous words, and this is one reason I would really recommend it to any writers out there.
Though I initially compared Flash Fiction Month with NaNoWriMo in my bunny analogy, they’re really very different events. NaNoWriMo seems to be intended to get words on the page: it encourages its participants to produce that daunting first draft, something they can hopefully clean up later. Flash Fiction Month does something quite different. Instead of slogging away at the first draft of a novel, providing a starting point for something huge, it demands that its participants produce a great many separate stories, small but complete. Where NaNoWriMo asks writers to dig the foundations for a house, Flash Fiction Month gets them to put up the same tent again and again and again. I’m aware that I’m not making either of these things sound tremendously attractive.
The point is, NaNoWriMo encourages you to get a big job out of the way in many small steps. Flash Fiction Month, on the other hand, encourages you to complete the same small job many times over. In doing so, it improves your aptitude at this particular job. It’s not all great, though. Have a look at this pie chart:
As you may have noticed (if you didn’t come here instead of reading about the escapades of that vampire), most of these stories are funny, silly, light-hearted. This is not Atlas Shrugged. If you make me write one story every day for a month, I will most likely produce stories based around stupid jokes. Don’t get me wrong: I like stupid jokes. But the pie chart of my complete works would look very different (probably more like 50/50). Flash Fiction Month really hones your ability to write one sort of story, but it doesn’t exactly encourage variety. That said, very few of these stories would have got written without it, and the kind of stories it prompted me to create was a little out of the ordinary. I hope you have enjoyed them.
The End
That’s it. This is the end of the book. Unless you still haven’t read that vampire story, in which case I admire your dedication to graphs and pie charts but strongly recommend making a start on the actual book itself: so far you’ve read nothing but front and end matter.
If you have enjoyed this book, please consider sharing it with a friend. If you have not enjoyed this book, you should be proud to have slogged through to the end: you are a trooper. In either case, here’s a sideways Gandalf:
>>>>>>
“Thanks for reading,” says Gandalf.
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Books by Damon L. Wakes
Prehistoric Fantasy:
Face of Glass
The Flash Fiction Month Series:
OCR is Not the Only Font
Red Herring
Bionic Punchline
Osiris Likes This
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