Filed under: fiction
In the light of the full moon on a cloudless night, Ron walked to the middle of the bridge and put one leg over the guardrail, and then the other. He stood on a narrow catwalk meant for the use of painters and inspectors. Ron planned to use it as a launching pad, to launch himself into the deep waters of the Tondoscinewa River and end it all.
He took a deep breath, and released it. Depressed as he was, he thought perhaps he should get right with God before jumping. Of course, jumping itself was guaranteed to get on God’s bad side, and there was no point in asking for forgiveness and then committing the sin. So, no prayer.
Ron took another deep breath, thinking it would be his last. Then he heard the footsteps approaching slowly from the tree-laden far end of the bridge. He blew out the breath and wondered who was coming.
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Filed under: fiction
“So, Agent XR9 - or should I call you Major Arthur Shining? - you have found my final lair, my sanctum sanctorum, and defeated all my henchmen. I am defenseless … except for my attack robot!”
“Oh, please, Dr. Baddar; we both know that pile of nuts and bolts is worthless.”
Dr. Baddar aimed a remote control at the robot and pressed the activation sequence anyway. The silver robot, six feet tall, three feet wide, and designed with lots of odd, sharp angles, lurched toward XR9. It waved its arms menacingly and made a mechanical growling sound. XR9 watched idly as it slowly drew closer.
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Filed under: fiction
“Hey, Joey.”
“Hey, Tommy.”
“What’cha doin’?”
“Runnin’ away.”
Tommy took in the picture for a minute. There was simply no evidence to support Joey’s statement.
“How are you runnin’ away by diggin’ a hole in your back yard?”
“I’m goin’ to China.”
“Oh.” That made better sense.
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Filed under: fiction
The cell door swung out, and Sherdon saw a beautiful young woman standing in the opening.
“Philip? I’m Jana, and I’ll be with you this morning. If you’ll stand up, please?”
She had a pretty smile, but she was not overdoing it. As the jailer handcuffed him behind his back, Sherdon noted that Jana’s dress was both low cut and short, but only pleasantly so, not enough to be titillating. The jailer led Sherdon out of the cell and Jana took over, putting her arm around him.
“It’s sunny and warm out in the yard. That’ll be nice after the cold cell and this hallway.” Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: fiction
Mayor Harvey Pendleton banged his gavel a dozen more times. “Order! Order! I said, ‘Order!’”
The sanctuary, the largest available room in town other than the saloon, came to something like a hush.
“Now I know everyone’s upset, and I know most of you have never been to a town meetin’ in your lives, but there are rules about how this works. First and foremost is you speak when you’re spoken to and not otherwise. If you want to talk, you raise your hand and wait until I call on you, just like back in school. That’s the only way this can work.”
He cleared his throat and lowered his voice just a little. “Now,” he said, and he paused, thinking of what to say next. “Now. I know that everyone’s still atwitter about what happened last Tuesday. It was a dark day when the Fu Shi Gang came to our town and burned the hotel and shot all those folks. Why, I’d known some of them for years myself.” He cleared his throat again. “It’s hard. Hard losin’ ‘em to that rotten rabble of Chinese.”
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Filed under: fiction
“Welcome back. For those of you just joining us, today on NewsTalk 102 we have Sheriff Ralph Tarbridge. I want to turn now to a sensitive topic: this weekend’s Tri-County Rodeo. Sheriff, as our listeners know, the rodeo used to be the biggest event in the tri-county region. In recent years it’s developed a reputation for being the deadliest place to be on Independence Day weekend.”
“That is, unfortunately, true, Keith. There’s been a murder committed at the rodeo each of the past three years. So far, despite the assistance of the FBI, the murders are unsolved.”
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Filed under: fiction
Did you ever have one of those days where you’ve got a 15-story drop in front of you and a guy with a gun behind you? That’s the kind of day I’m having.
I am not speaking metaphorically. This is where I am and what’s happening to me and I’m relating this to you because, well, I need someone to talk to just now. I’d talk to God … but we have sort of a history. It’s looking more and more likely that we’ll be seeing each other pretty soon and it may not go well. So I’m leaving Him alone for the moment. And you seem nice, so here we are.
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Filed under: fiction
Croxen sat down in the booth across from Pereson and, without a word, opened a vial containing a white powder and emptied it into Pereson’s coffee.
The vial went back into his left jacket pocket and he waited.
“Just like that?” Pereson asked, and Croxen nodded.
“Just like that. If you spill it, I have more.”
Pereson stared at his cup and looked fretfully around the little coffee shop.
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Filed under: fiction
The ghost was back again. Every day in the early evening, just for an hour.
“Listen!” the ghost said cheerfully.
Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.
Warren tried to work around it, tried to do the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, tried to wash the dishes, tried to weed the flowerbed. He could hear it wherever he went in and around his house.
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Filed under: fiction
There were seven public rooms in the museum, and Jalene Naysure had seen them all a thousand times. She had gotten friendly with the curator, Aileen Royer, and had been in the private office many times.
That left one room Jalene had never seen, the one that was off limits to everyone but the curator. It was an oddly placed addition to the house and was accessible only from the outside. Someone unfamiliar with the floor plan wouldn’t have known of the room just from walking around inside. It was behind a bare wall decorated only with a little molding and two brass candle sconces.
“I’ve never been in there,” said Arnold Pinkhause, a retired volunteer fire chief and one of the volunteer docents. “Cora says it’s just storage.”
“Oh, odds and ends,” Cora Belling, chief volunteer docent, told Jalene. “Junk, really, but junk no one’s made the decision to get rid of over the past fifty years. I’ve never been in there myself, but there’s nothing worth looking at in there.”
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Posted on August 14th, 2008 by bryon
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