Category Archives: Fiction

Present Company Excluded

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Posted by on in Fiction

January 22, 2016, Prescott-

“You should never have come back to this town, Eddie.”, Marco hissed.  Eduardo Figueroa was not exactly many girls’ idea of Mr.Right.  A large, ungainly man of 36, he had never quite made first base, and wouldn’t even have been a candidate for Ballet Voluminosa.  Marco Soso-Blanco, on the other hand, was El Jefe, with several exquisite ladies keeping tabs on his every move.  This was Little Havana, and Marco had come in on the ground floor, all swagger and confidence, from the moment he stepped off the Mariel boat, at the age of 10.

Marco ruled his schools, from then on, getting his first kiss at 11 and the rest unfolding as he wanted it.  Upon graduation, it was all business for Marquito.  Eddie, on the other hand, as previously noted, had his work cut out for him.  He struggled in school, physically, socially and academically.

Nonetheless, there came a point in Senor Figueroa’s life, age 22, to be exact, when the intellectual part of life started to come together.  He learned skimming.  He mastered numbers, and made a bundle.  This took Eddie away from Miami, and brought him to Atlantic City.  Marco, by contrast, found the day-to-day grind a bit nerve-wracking.  He relied on a crew of sleazy accountants, muscle men and abogados to keep him atop the food chain.

The thing about Atlantic City, though, is that it started to go downhill, sliding ever towards Miami, figuratively and literally.  People began to move to brighter climes, and for Eddie, the lure of home, as harsh as that home had been, back in the day, proved irresistible.  Eduardo visited a few untethered muscle men of his own, and had no trouble recruiting them for what he had in mind.

For the first time in his life, Eddie Figueroa sauntered into a room that wasn’t his bedroom.  He had been driven out of Atlantic City, true, but he had left nothing behind.  The dinero had gone to the Cayman Islands, close enough to Cuba that he could take it out in a series of day trips, should the need arise.  He was set, and so, Eduardo, “El Gordo”, hissed back at Marco Soso Blanco, “Maybe I shouldn’t have, but here I am.  So, Marquito, how about you watch-and learn.”

Eduardo had taken pains to make sure his men had pennied the front and side entrances “to the nondescript “furniture store” and bodega, across from Copacabana.  There was only the rear entrance available for quick egress.  Marco and his two immediate bodyguards were thus transported out of the office, horizontally and feet first, twenty minutes after Senor Eduardo Figueroa took control of Little Havana.  Eddie looked down at his now lifeless former tormentor.  ”  It’s a lucrative game, Marquito. It’s just not suitable for present company.

(Not suitable for present company is a prompt in the Winter Scavenger Hunt)

Sleep? Whazzat?

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Posted by on in animal and plant life, children, Fiction, Striving

January 17, 2016, Prescott-

It had been about four months, since the last sighting of the fishermen.  Nadia, a red head among Romanians who had mostly jet-black hair, could feel the energy of those African fishermen, as they stared at her, and at the two, equally-ginger toned wolf-men who alternately barked orders at her, sometimes literally, and led her, tethered at the neck by a leather-collar, which they had devised from the hide of a small eland they had captured, about five months earlier.  Rather ironic, her plight, Nadia thought- a woman being walked about by wolves.  It all reminded her of an old Korean film she had seen, “To The Rose Inn”, she recalled, in which a man leads his female captive around on a leash, she walking on all fours.  “At least, I am allowed to walk upright”, she mused.

Narcolepsy was affecting the were-creatures, especially as they had discovered the local beer, which they were foolishly imbibing even in the the throes of a full moon.  They had stolen a goodly amount of the brew from some inebriated fisherfolk, whom they found snoozing in midday, about two weeks earlier.  It was this act which led to Nadia Donescu’s recovering her freedom.

On the morning of a waning gibbous moon, Nadia awoke to find her captors snoring, and lying in a copse, about 40o meters away from their usual spot- which was practically right next to where she was tethered.  Across the glade, she heard strange noises:  It seemed someone was slashing brush with a machete, but she couldn’t be sure.  The noises got louder, waking the two brutes.  The vocalist became clear:  It was a bull elephant!   The wolf-men looked at one another, then at the pachyderm.  They chortled to one another,  in delight.  Not paying the slightest mind to Nadia, they each grabbed a roughly-hewn atlatl, which they had fashioned from local flint, and attempted to encircle the snorting beast.

Nadia had her eyes on the elephant, too, but was more concerned with loosening the collar around her neck.  With the men otherwise engaged, and the bull warily eyeing them, she was able to extract herself from the shackle, and dart behind a baobab tree.  The bull elephant suddenly made for the man to his right and lifted the shrieking werebeast clear off the ground, throwing him into the cove.  A  Nile crocodile had an unusual lunch, that morning.

His partner-in-crime readied his makeshift atlatl and aimed for the crazed bull.  The weapon grazed the animal on his left temple, further maddening him and directing his attention to the now-hapless werewolf.  The man could not outrun the elephant, but tried to shimmy up the baobab.  The mad bull wrapped his trunk around the man-wolf, threw him to the ground, and stomped him, in one fell swoop.

Nadia wasted no time in clearing out of the disheveled camp, and ran towards the road she remembered from one of their infrequent forays into the fishing camps along the lake.  In short order, she happened upon a Chinese construction worker, and his two children, sitting by a koi pond they had devised, in which the children’s pet goldfish were happily at play.  The older child, a girl, took two of the goldfish, placed them in a plastic bowl with some lake water and covered it with wax paper, secured with an elastic band.  This, she proudly offered to the disheveled Nadia.  The father spoke some German, as did Nadia, and offered to take the newly freed woman to the nearest town.  Nadia was only too happy to accept.

The Odd Fishmonger

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Posted by on in animal and plant life, Fiction, Striving

January 14, 2016, Prescott-  (The following is based on a Scavenger Hunt prompt including love letter, werewolves, taxi service, lost key, fish sticks.)

Laszlo had grown up in a Hungarian community in Constanta, a port on Romania’s Black Sea coast. So he found it second nature when, as a young backpacker exploring the outer limits of our world, he decided to stop a while on the island of Lamu, off Kenya’s golden shore.

He camped on the beach,  filleting and grilling the fish that he caught, each morning, and bringing it to a local woman, who dipped the meat in a spicy batter and baked it her beehive oven.  She then sliced the fillets into fish sticks, which were sold to German tourists, who reliably showed up for a quick lunch, each day, nearly ten months out of the year.  Lasz got enough of a percentage from these sales to allow him to live a simple, but satisfying life, under the radar of the National Police.

One day, while walking the beach, with a metal detector he had purchased, Lasz found a lost key.  It turned out to fit the trunk of a taxi, and had been lost by a former Somali pirate who had also settled on Lamu, and used his vehicle as sort of a Lamu-style Uber.  The taxi service was quite lucrative, and the grateful ex-pirate offered Lasz a partnership, making him an alternative driver, three days out of the week.

This, once cleared with a suddenly attentive Kenyan police captain, involved a bit of “gifting” to the captain.  Lasz drove the captain’s children to school, free of charge.  In return, he got a work visa.  Between the fish mongering and taxi service, Laszlo was becoming a fixture on Lamu.

He wrote his long-ago sweetheart, a Romanian girl, who had studied at the London School of Economics, and who was casting about for a future.  Nadia was intrigued by her dear friend’s love letter, and made arrangements to travel to Kenya.  On the night before she was to fly from London to Mombasa, she was approached by two rather scruffy, but suave, men.  They learned of her plans, and asked whether they might accompany her to Africa.  They did not seem to have any ulterior motives, and were not threatening to Nadia, so she agreed to meet them next morning, at Heathrow.

The men showed up on time, documents and tickets in hand, and the three boarded the plane together.  It was a delightful flight, from London, over Europe and the Mediterranean, North Africa and Sudan.  As the plane flew over Uganda, however, night fell.  Then, the two suave, scruffy men started to transform.  Somewhere over Lake Victoria, encountering a full moon, the werewolves appeared.

Laszlo waited several days for his Nadia, until a news flash from the BBC reported that a plane had gone down, with 300 aboard.  All but three were dead.  The three missing passengers were not found, but the word among tribesmen on the north shore of Victoria is that two hairy wolf-apes, and their captive white woman, are occasionally spotted in the rough terrain above the Lake.

An Alligator’s Tale, and Other Tidbits

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Posted by on in Fiction

January 10, 2016, Prescott

I need to lighten up a bit, so here are # 2 and 3 of this Scavenger Hunt, given me by #Infiniterally

Scavenger Hunt, Winter 2016 ( can be subject, title, literally, conceptually, as  metaphor, merely incorporated in details, used thematically, used  as inspiration, but should use all elements from that prompt one way or another. Technically. Just let your mind wander between them- it will come to you 😉  ) ( I am doing them in order for the first time ever, but there is no actual rule about it) ( because there are no rules) ( except for maybe do something you love, every day.)

  1. an owl.
  2. a bonnet, pudding, alligator, stone, oboe, mermaid
  3. A doctor, a lost recipe, church.
  4. a herpetologist, obscure records, coffee, broken glasses.
  5. winter planets and constellations.
  6. love letter, werewolves, taxi service, lost key, fish sticks.
  7. Everlastings
  8. strange noises, wax paper, narcolepsy, gold fish, red head.
  9. Hibernation
  10. vivisection, ants, Scandinavia, horseshoe, susurration
  11. Things that shouldn’t be discussed in present company
  12. happiness, beet root, angels, tacks, noose
  13. first kiss, a planet, a type of plant, bread crumbs
  14. conch shell, a memory, pending failure, root beer.
  15. portrait of the artist as ______________
  16. contains a line from 18th century poetry
  17. wet sheets, fire, corvids, milk
  18. garden shed, moon, antlers,
  19. mild, ochre, bulb, tail, scale
  20. sonnet, astronaut, cheese, glitter, karaoke
  21. gin, delicate, hook, basset hound, pearls, hibiscus
  22. contains a line from a famous diarist.
  23. tea, tiger, night, train, television, tie
  24. tower, kettle, hawk, charm, cotton
  25. Contains a quote from a notable convicted felon.
  26. stag, crown, high beams, pin, reckless
  27. thumb, thistle, whistle, blizzard, canned peaches, bell
  28. contains a line from a National Geographic
  29. algebra, lip, chalk, music, hair, eyelash, storm
  30. hamster, ornamental grass, Tokyo, phone book, popcorn machine
  31. ice fishing, sock, coyote, magazines, deception
  32. embryo, kangaroos, peat, bones, blister, ring
  33. conceptual art
  34. con-artist, puberty, spider venom, Cheetos.
  35. contains a line from WebMD.com
  36. oil, dog fish, huevos rancheros, estranged sibling, pocket knife
  37. something that happened in first grade, a Winnebago, a rocket kit.
  38. heron, billiards, locket, guitar pick, promise, scar
  39. contains a line from a Bob Dylan song.
  40. rain dance, microscope, mercury, road trip, beef jerky
  41. contains a line from a historical document
  42. mystery, flannel, honey, long-distance romance, elm leaf
  43. bergamont, denim, elevated, keening, millipede, going dutch
  44. contains line from the label on  a house-hold product
  45. comic books, poison ivy, chain, fire pit, tooth
  46. Flight of the Bumble Bee, blue eye shadow, garage door, wiener dog
  47. ganache, cancellation, magnifying lens, unmentionable sex toy, birds
  48. hypoglycemic, tarragon, mountains, fleas, stitches, Dear John
  49. contains a line from a utility bill.
  50. tadpoles, anniversary, pin prick, bbq sauce, teleportation, geneology
  51. blood oranges
  52. contains a line from a short story written in 1957.
  53. treasure map, turkey vultures, dodge pick up, mosaic, port-a-potty
  54. fork, cockroach, iceberg, tendril, regret
  55. Northern lights, prehensile, love in all its forms, dish soap
  56. chain saw, archipelago, tandem, rabbit, emerald
  57. phobias
  58. an ornithologist, bad jokes, erector set, cormorant, Elvis
  59. folk musician, cabbage, elk, fortified, mystified, terrified.
  60. Emu, lunatic, drone, missing, Hank Williams, music box
  61. fur trader, damsel fly, okra, true love’s kiss, organ donation
  62. Contains a line from a pet care manual.
  63. secretion, ambulance, dahlia, gale, Job, tassles
  64. hula dancer, subway, harpoon, faith, Moscato
  65. botany
  66. beautician, spaceship, hot dogs, Fig Newtons, The Grateful Dead
  67. pirates, foil, needle, turpentine, wigs, garden gnome
  68. contains a line from a movie starring Anthony Hopkins.
  69. alchemy
  70. orchard, denial, ember, last call, insomnia, pigeons.

It was almost 8 A.M., and the sun was getting a bit too high in the sky for the swamp creatures to stay close to the water’s surface.  Alphonse, being a grouchy sort of alligator, decided to stop checking out the nosy, noisy humans who were standing around his corner of the pond.

The bayou is fairly close to the Gulf, and the water in this particular pond was getting to be a bit brackish.  Alphonse was getting used to more salt in his food and drink, though it was giving him a fair amount of indigestion, though not nearly as much as he had after that oil spill.

It seems funny now, but he had somehow managed to end up wearing a child’s bonnet, after that accident.  It had fallen into the water, been carried to the bayou and covered Al’s head and eyes.  He bonked into a rather large retaining wall stone, while thrashing around, trying to get the darned thing off.  Tourists gathered and were photographing the hapless alligator.  One, who was eating butterscotch pudding, from a cup, listened to Alphonse’s growling and moaning.  He said the gator reminded him of a mermaid playing an oboe.

It’s not all fun and games, being an alligator.

#3- Doctor Miranda’s wife was a bit ill today, so he generously offered to take her enchiladas con pollo to the parish potluck. He placed the recipe in his suit pocket, in case any of the other ladies wanted it, after eating some of his dear Luisa’s signature dish.

As he was going towards the parish meeting room, after church services were finished, he took the recipe out to make sure he understood all the terms.  A gust of wind came up and blew the recipe out of the good doctor’s hands and off into a copse of trees.

Everyone raved about the enchiladas, though.