Dinner Rush

The petite ceramic coffee mug rattled loudly on its saucer. Jurgen pulled his hand away as if burnt; socially shamed. His newest servo-motors, whirring and shiny in his right forearm, had not yet been fine-tuned. But there had not been time before this meeting to visit the steam-surgeon’s office to get them aligned. He looked out the frost-covered porthole window wistfully and then at the coffee, desiring its warmth in his belly. 

The fog arising from The Ground-level steamworks lazily obscured any view out of the window. Here in Third Zone, the fog was barely even noxious, though all the patrons of The Brass Filter had their filigreed, hammered metal gas masks hanging loosely from their belts. Status symbols, thought Jurgen. Most of them would choke to death in less than five minutes even just down in Second Zone. Jurgen’s hand went of its own volition to his own heavy and ugly mask, made of thick layers of vulcanized rubber and smoked glass, with its ugly prosthetic breathing cylinder. 

Even his Asian server, barely tall enough to see over the table, and completely bound from the throat down, knew he didn’t belong here. The oil-stained ducked-canvas jacket he wore was all function and no form. As were the calf-high boots, caked stiff with substances that were probably illegal up here. And that was a short list. 

He tried to keep an eye on the pneumatic-sealed front airlock, though the wafting opium smoke from the back room kept distracting him. His father always wanted some sort of social upper-hand in their meetings and dragging him here had certainly given him that. Jurgen sighed. What could his evangelical, double-breasted power-monger father need to see him about today?

The fact that the meeting was scheduled for an hour ago also didn’t surprise Jurgen. Again, a social power-play of some kind to make someone wait on you, he guessed. The midday rush was dying off and customers were slowly straggling off into the swirling daytime, their cute little breathers wrapped daintily around their fat faces. Jurgen was bored, but not unwary. 

The doors to the back room swung open on creaky hinges and billows of blue-gray smoke roiled along the riveted metal ceiling. Jurgen swiveled his head back and saw his father emerge, leading two short columns of helmeted troops with their breathing masks still on. His goldspun pinstriped suit was tailored exactly to his heft and his clockwork oculars seemed to have grown in its monstrosity since their last meeting.He stopped short, and the troops silently fanned out on either side of him, spanning the width of the coffee speakeasy. For a moment he looked around, as if confused, then reached up and pushed a button that started cogs and wheels in his oculars moving, switching out lenses. He immediately saw Jurgen and smiled.

Holding out his hands, he said, “Jurgen, my boy. Good to see you.” His voice hung strained in the quiet atmosphere around them. 
Jurgen’s insides were boiling. Each pair of shiny gas mask goggles were trained directly on him, and he wondered how it had all come to this. His poker face would not betray him, though, and he nonchalantly leaned his head to one side, inviting his portly father to sit with him. Social upper-hand, he laughed ruefully. Merely a mousetrap for an errant pest..  

The game was afoot and the large man ambled over to the askance chair, but instead of sitting he merely rested two giant boulders of hands on the back of it and leaned down a bit. He paused, reached up, and hit another button on his oculars, causing a third pair of lenses to slide into place. He smiled, able to once again focus on the task at hand.

“Hello, father,” Jurgen replied. “Who are your friends?”
His father looked over his shoulder and tsk’ed with his tongue. “Even a humble man of the cloth, like myself, cannot afford to be too careful in this day and age, Jurgen. You know that.”
Jurgen stared into the refracted golden depths of his father’s oculars and laughed out loud.
“That I do, Father. But such an ostentatious display? It really doesn’t become you.”
“Such insolence, boy...,” his words trailed off.
“If only you had the support of those you lord over.”
The large spectacled head shook slowly. Without averting his eyes, however, Jurgen was calmly judging sightlines and distances to exits. He realized he didn’t know if he physically could flip the table. The countdown for this social standoff was rapidly approaching zero.
His father broke the staring contest first, lifting his head to the ceiling with a sigh.
“When the seedling begins to choke and strangle the mature plant, nature abhors. When the mother dies in stillbirth for the offspring, nature abhors. When the mountain …”
Jurgen interrupted, “Letters, chapter 7, verse 9...”
Though affronted by the interruption, his father beamed at him. “Correct. Do you still study the Word?”
Jurgen shook his head softly. “I don’t, but from distant memory I’ll offer Edith, chapter 3, verse 4, instead?”
The eyebrows behind the heavy lenses furrowed.
His father intoned, “He who sits most high in judgement, will be Reckoned before the lowest masses and subjected to the sums of their inequalities.”
Jurgen’s guts clenched. The large man stood up, paused, and threw down the chair he had been resting his hands upon.
“You dare mock me with my own Word? You craven, sulking fiend! You work against me at every turn! Tirelessly! Just to spite me!” The fire in his voice reverberated in the coffeehouse.
“Not just to spite you, Father, but because I believe I’m right. That’s what makes me dangerous.”
“A danger no longer, foolish child!”
The gold suit sparkled in the muzzle flashes. He looked down at his shoes and sighed about having to replace these, now.

-----

The small Asian server had her scrub bucket ready, hoping to get all the stains out before dinner rush.
Flash Fiction Writing Assignment: Genre: Steampunk. Conflict: Betrayal by a loved one. Element: Vengeful God. Word Count: 998 

Living Humor

The kind of town it was, it wasn’t so much as a town, as it was just a spot where buildings sometimes were. Sometimes. Sometimes there were two roads that intersected here, sometimes one road passed nearby and sometimes there were no roads at all. No one ever really traveled on the roads, anyway. And we don’t need anything from the buildings, not food, not beds, not even the shelter. There wasn’t any weather. I’m not sure there was even day and night, or time, for that matter. A nice place to visit but a terrible place to live, right?

You wouldn’t think that a place like this really existed. And maybe it doesn’t. But I find myself here pretty often. As often as the wisps that sort of, kind of resemble my feet can carry me here. All the most popular wisps congregate around these buildings, when they’re here. I’m not sure where we go when the buildings fold into themselves like some erasing origami skeletons. Aspen, maybe?
That’s a “living joke”. I don’t even remember why it would be funny, but some part of my wispy brain tells me that it should be. Was it? None of us here would get it. I don’t think any of us know how to laugh.
We know how to scream, though. I remember that. I’ll always remember the sound of the screaming; of one of us experiencing something other than just the high winds whistling and the aimless drifting of our existence...

-------

The sound was whiny and high pitched, but with a thinner tone than when a building vanishes. A nearby wisp looked back at me with some uncertainty. We were hovering on a slight hilltop that had erupted out of the landscape recently. We could see all of the buildings in such a way that the word “skyline” might come to mind, if that could happen here.
The sound faltered, stuttered a couple times and then resumed with even more power. Without really thinking about it, I found myself maneuvering down towards the sound. I can’t recall feeling scared or apprehensive about it. Just felt a simple pull that direction along with everything else here that was shifting. But there was a crowd.
Lots of wispy bodies, shambling and shuffling towards the beacon of sound, which got louder and more painfully off-key as we all got closer. There was a dark wisp, which upon closer inspection would prove to certainly not be a wisp, hovering over and partially through another one of our regular wisps. Focusing on anything here seems to be a monumental task, as very few things are ever fully in-focus. But we were all intently trying to focus on what was happening; as difficult as our situations made that.
The wisp that looked like us was the one making the sound, and it was purely and terrifyingly afraid. Emotions were not often felt here, and they certainly were never heard. All of us, as a group, suddenly tried to remember the words “confusion”, “panic” and “hysteria”. Wisps began to scatter. I, unfortunately, had found focus and I was wishing I had not.
The wisp that did not look like us seemed to have glinting sharp pieces in odd places and was able to move them quickly about. Like teeth, but not. Like spikes, but not. Like claws, but not. They were rending and tearing the other wisp. Tendons sprang from odd places inside of it, with a faint spray of dusty, burgundy blood that was immediately carried away on the wind, spattering the the dark wisp. Some sort of entrail, heavy in its opaqueness and solidity fell to the rubbery ground with a splash, still connected deep inside the wailing wisp. It was instantly disconnected with a reddish-stained silvery snip of the dark wisp’s sharp pieces and fell again with the same sickening splash. Something dark and viscous leeched out of the two severed ends.
With an upwards thrust of a strangely animate appendage, the dark creature drove some sort of undulating and pulsing spike up through the now gaping and sucking open cavity of the wisp, through its neck and into its head. The screaming had reached a peak and then it was suddenly replaced with a quiet gurgling sound of fluids leaking.
There was an underlying chattering noise, like a horde of metal insect legs walking, and a kind of ragged breathing joining it. The dark creature stood over its kill and absently picked flecks and pieces off of itself. The ground was already folding and undulating beneath it, as though to clean up the pool of congealing fluids.
I looked around and realized I was the only wisp left in the vicinity. I don’t remember what self-preservation felt like, but for one moment, I remembered what all of the hair on your body standing on end felt like. The dark one flashed its head over its shoulder towards me. The chattering noise got louder.
A loud noise rang out and even found enough purchase from the tenuous architecture to echo. The dark creature’s head evaporated in a fine mist; one moment there, the next, gone. Its body fell stiffly to the ground, its claws spasming three times before finally laying still. I nervously angled towards the sound.
A real living man stood there. His weapon still smoked as he took a deep breath and lowered it to his side. He walked with heavy, corporeal steps towards the grisly scene and knelt over the dark one’s body. A gleaming knife appeared in his hands and messily dissected a small token from the corpse. His boots left thick smudged footprints in the surrounding puddle. He stood and wiped the filth from his fingers and blade on his cloak. His body was opaque, and buffeted by the high winds.
His eyes flicked to me, briefly and back to the two bodies intertwined nearby.
“Sorry about your friend.”
I obviously don’t get “living humor” anymore.

Flash Fiction Assignment. Genre: Splatterpunk. Setting: Limbo. Character: Vigilante. Word Count: 998

Pidgin, tourist Spanish from a pitiful, tortured soul.

“Hey buddy, do you think you could change the channel on that thing...?”
The bartender seemed very interested in something, some sort of speck that I was unable to see, in one of his dishwashing sinks. I’m not sure he spoke English, but then again, I had known “cerveza, por favor.” The talking head on the fuzzy little black and white unit was speaking Spanish at a rate that seemed dizzying to me, at least, what I could hear over the whirring and sputtering air conditioner unit it sat upon.
It was a newscast though, and my palms were clammy and gross. 104 degrees of dry heat and I’m guessing I would feel like a cadaver if anyone else was here to touch me. Anything but a newscast. They had told me I’d be gone and could forget about everything before it happened. Somewhere with a beach and no newspapers, I’d asked, dry-mouthed. They smiled, even over the phone, even over the online checking of my bank balance, I could tell they were smiling. They were smiling at how easy it was to get their way. My stomach convulsed.
I looked at my watch. I didn’t know anything, I didn’t know any kind of anything, schedules or locations, or anything. I told myself that every time I looked at my watch, which meant every ninety seconds or so over the past thirty-seven minutes. I didn’t know anything. I could feel the bright light and the hard wooden seat of the interrogation room as I repeated my mantra. I didn’t know anything. Anyone would have done the same thing. The amount they offered. I still didn’t know any particulars. You have to believe me, right? Sweat ran down my temple.
“Amigo? Amigo? Change the el channel on the televis-ee-own?”
Pidgin, tourist Spanish from a pitiful, tortured soul. His head didn’t even waver. He was still inspecting a microscopic nothing about fourteen feet away from me. I couldn’t blame him. I was doing the same thing, in a way. Except the TV was messing it all up. The newscaster at this point seemed like a 33 ⅓ record on the 45 setting. A high-pitched highway pileup of phonics. Every grainy picture that flashed up on the screen rang out like a car’s backfire and made me twitch.
Where is my plane, I begged in my mind. I want to get out of here and further along on my way to nowhere. Where I belong. The windows, translucent from dust and scratches, gave no hint of any approaching or arrived craft. The single roughly paved landing strip just outside the swinging door of this “terminal” would certainly alert everyone to any kind of impending arrival.
My bottle of beer had accumulated a little lake of condensation at its base. I noticed it when I turned my frame back square to the bar. My brain latched on to the detail to avoid the television drone. It had to be soon. It had to be today. Not that I knew, of course. Those bags could have been just drugs.
Just drugs. I laughed a horrible and desperate laugh into the sour top of my beer bottle. Tears welled up along the lower lids of my eyes and I told myself it was just the dust in this shitty little fucking airport shanty bar. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t. Do. Anything. Wrong.
“Hey! Change the goddamned channel. Hey! Buddy!”
This time he turned around but I doubt that changing the television set was on his mind. His eyes smoldered and he was muttering something under his breath like a dog panting. My breath was ragged and hurt my chest. My eyes jumped non-stop from his menacing face to the flickering awful stream of unknown words and images on the little idiotbox.
I fumbled in my pocket for some cash, threw down a bill on the nauseating formica countertop and, after a moment’s hesitation, pushed over my beer bottle. The few ounces backwash in the bottom sloshed out on the bar and the bottle rolled off and busted on the floor on his side.
My lips curled into a sneer. I turned, seemingly oblivious, and walked outside. I was counting in my head, a silent timer until he would emerge and threaten me, enraged at this gringo polluting his space. I reached in my shirt pocket, pulled out a cigarette. I put it to my lips and lit it with the lighter that had NOT been confiscated from me for the plane ride down here. I smiled at that.
A small black dot circled around in the blue that wrapped around me. My angel, my salvation, my winged rest; coming to take me away. That bartender was long overdue out here, ready to bust my chops, to be up in my face. I could have used the release of tension. Even a solid one right in my jaw might have been a welcome distraction. Guess it just wasn’t my day.
With each puff of the cigarette, the plane drew closer and as it landed, I threw the butt in the dust carelessly. I looked over my shoulder, at the dilapidated clapboard building and my duffle on the bench just behind me. I waved to the pilot not to stop anything, grabbed my bag and headed over to sling myself and all my belongings left in the world into the co-pilot’s seat of the tiny prop plane.
I was in the prop wash when the bartender ran out of the bar. “Too late,” I thought of his tardy need to fight. He was screaming something.
“Muchacho... Senor... “
I already had one leg in and was ducked under the overhead wing and could barely hear.
“Senor... They crashed into...”
I closed the door. I spun my finger in a tight circle to signify it was time to go. The pilot shrugged and started taxiing back from whence he came.
I was asleep before we were airborne.


Flash Fiction attempt, assignment between friends: Genre: Noir/Hardboiled. Element: Terrorism. Theme: Man vs. Himself. Word count: 999