Hunkering

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers18 Comments30 views

I says to him, heck Bill, why not stay right here?  I mean it ain’t like you can open regular, not with these national guards and all. And we can’t go home.

He says, where do we all sleep?

That ain’t a problem, I says. I got about nine thousand square feet of foam panels in my shop, plus all that plywood. Move some of them tables and we’ll be snug as houses.

He scratches his beard, thinking. Well, he says, maybe so. Plenty of food yet, long as the electric don’t cut out. Good view of the streets, too.

Friday Fictioneers

 

 

The Better Alternative

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, What Pegman Saw6 Comments32 views

She started skipping her meetings, staying home with her face glued to Fox News.

Normally she don’t watch the news except Hannity. Mostly it’s reality TV, game shows, and the occasional 90s comedy.

I started paying attention, using  my laptop to double-check the sources.

As the days ticked by and things started closing down, I knew total lockdown was just a matter of time.

I’d seen movies about this sort of thing, zombie films and the like, but now it was real.

I looked around at her cramped mobile home and thought no fucking way. 

I packed my musette with a change of clothes, my knife and fishing line, my poncho.

I’d been through it before, the summer I was homeless.

I knew I could do it.

I slipped out.

“You going out, pick me up a couple cartons of Newport,” was the last thing I heard her say.

 

What Pegman Saw: Silver Bay Minnesota

 

inlinkz frog

With the curtain of pandemic encircling our planet like a coming winter, it is easy to be filled with dread for what is to come. 

Take heart  in the resilience of human beings, and how kindness and love will often be the response to emergency. We’ll get through this. 

I hope that all of my friends who have participated in Pegman will stay safe and healthy, and that their loved ones will be with them.

Have faith, be safe, and take care of each other. -JHC

Ruse Astray

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers26 Comments56 views

“Only a couple days, Chinhua. It’s just play-acting.”

She bit her lip, sorry she’d answered the ad in the South China Morning Post. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just tell them?”

He paled. “My parents are very traditional. Gay is not a thing they would ever understand.”

She sighed, then took the notepad he held out.

It was straightforward.

They’d met the year before, started dating.

Her name was now Lan. She was a student. They were in love.

Later he’d tell them they’d broken up.

It was only for a few days.

After the New Year, they’d leave Wuhan.

Friday Fictioneers

Al Kafir

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, What Pegman Saw8 Comments20 views

They hang together, these al Kafir, cling to one another as flies do when they discover a carcass,  setting about tasks with tremendous attention and then scattering at the slightest disturbance.

Their skin bakes an unwholesome red in the sun, and despite their mastery of machines and firearms they are helpless as children, especially when alone.

This is perhaps why we seldom see them  so.

A man alone in the desert has only his soul between himself and Allah.

He is a moving shadow against the curtain of infinite stars that map the terrestrial world as clearly as a line drawn in the sand, only to vanish with the coming dawn.

The desert is Allah’s country.

When from its barren wastes life springs, it is all the more precious because of its rarity.

All the more fleeting.

All the more ridiculous.

These meat-faced al Kafir will never understand this.

They do not know silence.

They cannot know Allah.

 

What Pegman Saw: Saudi Arabia

inlinkz frog

 

Reflections

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers20 Comments40 views

Abdulla studies himself in the mirror, turns this way and that, smooths his coat.

The mirror was his mother’s pride, said to come from a famous Tel Aviv department store, a seven-foot slab of silvered glass in a gilded frame.

Abdulla remembers that it took four men to bring it up the stairs to her room.

In the reflection he sees her bed behind him, made up just as she liked it, as though she might come in and lie down for an afternoon nap.

He smooths his coat again, then unbuttons it to check the detonators a last time.

Friday Fictioneers

Good Enough for the Home Guard

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, What Pegman Saw7 Comments16 views

Salman bangs on the roof of the truck. “Here she comes.”

Chaim watches through the windshield as the woman crosses the street, an imitation SKS slung across her shoulders, her hiking boots shimmering with newness.

He considers pretending he only speaks Hebrew but decides against it. Doubtless she’s been hazed enough. Besides, she’s pretty.

“Chaim?” she says in her American accent. “I’m Hannah Stern.”

Salman says something  Chaim can’t hear that makes the girl blush crimson.

She unslings her rifle and sets it in the back next to the Uzi.

“Lot of firepower,” she says as she climbs in. “Especially with that ma deuce upstairs.”

“Ma deuce?” says Chaim. “Oh, the fifty cal. Right. Is that what you call it in the American army?”

“I was a Marine,” says Hannah. “And yes, that’s what we call it. It’s a Browning M-2 heavy machine gun, but ma deuce is easier to say.”

 

What Pegman Saw: Israel

Ironic, or Apt

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, Friday Fictioneers20 Comments49 views

Fifty-seven years of stagecraft.

Miller, Albee, Mamet, Moliere.

And Shakespeare. Troilus, Henry IV, Oberon,  Macbeth.

Stunned at his pale face hanging in the mirror as he wiped the Ben Nye from his eyes with cold cream.

This he could still do without thought.

Ironic, or maybe apt.

He closed his eyes again, tried to summon the line as he had onstage.

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison;

And then nothing.

The stunned silence of the audience turning to unease and finally to derision at the sight of a mute Lear while burning shame consumed him like a house fire.

Friday Fictioneers

Truth in Silence

Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw1 Comment8 views

It was years before I realized my father was a criminal.

I am sometimes tempted to argue this point, but everybody already has an opinion. Once the tabloids got hold of a story,  it didn’t matter if what they said was true or not. When a mob smells blood, that’s all the bastards can think about. Trying to fight it is like trying to keep out the tide with a push broom.

We come up here from Ohio in 1971.  I was twelve. Pop swung by the school and pulled me out of Mr. Elfbrandt’s third-hour history. We got into his Jimmy and headed north.

I made a game keeping my mouth shut, seeing which of us caved first. I didn’t ask, he didn’t volunteer. We drove in total silence across two-thirds of the continental United States and a big chunk of Canada.

Looking back now, I can see how much he appreciated it.

What Pegman Saw

Mister Nervous

Fiction Prompts, Flash Fiction, Folklore20 Comments53 views

Ellie’s voice in the darkness. “Mommy.”

“What is it, honey? You have another bad dream.”

In answer she crawls into the warm bed, face wet and hot. I hold her slim back as she sobs.

I stroke her hair. “You want to tell me about it?”

“It’s Mister Nervous,” she says. “He comes in because he’s a-scared of the barn.”

It’s the same nightmare she’s had two or three times a week since we moved to the farm.

My husband and I are having them, too.

A sad boy.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of him swinging from the barn rafters.

Friday Fictioneers

 

I just realized that I posted a remarkably similar story  in 2017.  Both are based on truth. My youngest daughter saw Mr. Nervous when we moved to an Iowa farm fifteen years ago. We had many an unexplained occurance for the first few months we lived there, including seeing a hanged boy in the barn. Such things leave an impression. I started a YA horror novel based on this that is about 20k words in, but was set aside for other projects. I hope one day to go back to it.

An American God

Fiction Prompts, Historical Fiction, What Pegman Saw, WWII6 Comments15 views

Every fifteen February we come down to Tanna for John Frum’s Day.

Chief Isaac, he give us the GIs we all wear, each one with a flag. My woman Wanda at the time, she embroider the flags on here, as you see.

These rifle we make ourself from the bamboo, except for Chief Isaac.

Chief Isaac, he got a genuine Springfield  Uncle Daddy get from a US Marine himself when they come here for the Japan war.

When the US Marine come, they bring things like none of nobody ever seen. Flying airplanes and vast boats full of radios, riding jeeps, beer and Coca-cola in glass bottles of endless supply.

The old Chief David see in these US Marine the promise of John Frum himself, his magical boats of plenty that come from beyond the farthest sea.

Most us still believe just enough in John Frum that each year we give him his day.

 

What Pegman Saw: Vanautu

inlinkz frog

Note:
February 15th is Vanautu’s  holiest of days where islanders honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

The John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas.  The locals didn’t know the source of the endless supplies, so the assumed that they were summoned by magic from the spirit world.

After the war, the islanders prayed for ships and planes bring back the jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy, beer and scotch whiskey.

They Americans never returned in force, but the John Frum movement has endured. Hope springs eternal.