Tag: fiction

Fiction: Road Hazard

Posted on by bryon

Stan and Peggy hadn’t taken any food on their trip, so they were hungry from the first day of being snowbound in the blizzard. On the second day, their carefully shepherded supply of cold coffee ran out; they couldn’t gather snow because the electric motors for the windows were frozen. On the third day they ran out of gasoline and could no longer even risk carbon monoxide poisoning to keep warm.

A few hours later, he confessed.

“Peggy,” he stammered in the cold, “I can’t die with this on my conscience. I’ve been having an affair with Lora. It’s been going on for almost five years. I even took her on the Acapulco trip, the one I told you the company wouldn’t let us take spouses on. And your mother’s diamond necklace? The one I said was stolen? I gave it to Lora. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

Peggy just stared at him, too bitterly cold to fully grasp the enormity of his words.

She awoke in the hospital a day later. Turning her head to her left she could see Stan in the next bed. She didn’t remember being rescued, but she did recall Stan’s confession.

She sat up in her bed and gingerly placed her heels on the floor. That didn’t hurt too badly and she hobbled the few steps to Stan’s bed.

“Stan?” she said softly. “Stan? Are you awake?”

“Hmmm?”

He came to consciousness quickly enough when Peggy yanked out his catheter.

Once the screaming had faded to a dull whimper, she told him, “And I’m just getting warmed up.”

Pen to Paper: Story Theory

Posted on by bryon

What is a story? What elements are so vital to a piece of fiction that if one is missing you would not call it a story?

At this teacher resource site, the crucial elements are setting, plot, conflict, character, point of view, and theme. At this one, we’re told the elements are character, setting plot, conflict, and theme. This writing site says the elements are character, plot, setting, theme, and style.

In my researches to try to improve my flash fiction stories, I’ve come across these quotes:

For our purposes a story is a story only if it contains the following four elements: 1) a setting, 2) a character or characters, 3) a conflict and 4) resolution.
– Steve Moss, editor of The World‘s Shortest Stories

The flash fiction story must include characterization, conflict, viewpoint, significance and resolution.  When many writers try to write flash fiction they end up with a sketch.
– Guy Hogan, writer

Well, writing fiction is an art, not a science. Scientists generally agree on what combined with what equals what and on how to measure an experiment to see if it was successful. We humanities majors have opinions.

How many times have we read something only to say, “That wasn’t much of a story,” or even, “That wasn’t a story”? Something was missing. Perhaps there was no overt conflict, or maybe the setting was too vague.

Writer Bruce Holland Rogers has a fascinating — I might even say liberating — take on the elements of story, particularly as they relate to short-short fiction. He respects the rules but argues that by slavishly keeping a checklist we’ll keep getting the same stories we always have. Only by experimentation can we discover new kinds of stories. They won’t look like other stories and may challenge us to accept them as stories.

Rogers renews our poetic license to push the envelope of prescriptivism to see what we can accomplish. I hope you’ll enjoy his article as much as I have.

Fiction: Lemonade Stand

Posted on by bryon

Darrell flopped into his recliner. “Hoo, boy! What a day. Am I glad to be home.”

“Rough day?” Bonnie asked. She came from behind the overstocked in-home bar and handed him a double martini. The bar took up the space where the previous homeowner had had both an organ and a grand piano.

“It’s always the same old stuff. No one has any vision, no new ideas. They stick with the tried and true and safe, and then they wonder why sales are slumping. I don’t wanna talk about it. I’m just happy to be in the bosom of my sweet, normal family. So what happened around here today?” He took a sip of his drink.

Bonnie was quiet for a moment. “The children set up a lemonade stand.”

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Fiction: Security Breach

Posted on by bryon

Arvid8 sat in the security room watching the monitors. The half-starved population outside the gates knew about Lord Grazorius’s food storehouse; Arvid8 looked for criminals who had slipped past the guards. Peasants could be tricky.

He was also vigilant for smaller intruders. Mice still plagued humanity in the late 22nd century. There hadn’t been any trouble since the Great Raid when more than ninety mice made off with an astonishing amount of food. Lord Grazorius had been furious, and security had installed hundreds of additional traps.

Arvid8 heard a motion alarm. He switched the view to the holographic tank, recreating the scene life size in his office.

A single mouse crept toward a box of food. The trap sitting by the box caught the mouse’s attention. As it should, Arvid8 thought as he magnified the view.

The trap’s enclosure was almost invisible. The mouse walked straight in and a little door folded down, sealing the opening. The mouse walked onto the platform and grabbed the bait. As the trigger tripped, the powerful spring propelled the titanium hammer onto the mouse’s back.

The hammer bent around the rodent.

Arvid8 gasped as he watched the unharmed mouse eat its prize. Then it backed out from under the hammer and one back leg kicked the trap’s door open. The mouse skittered out and looked directly into the hidden camera, making Arvid8 feel uneasy.

The mouse leaped to the box of foodstuffs, and its powerful jaws made short work of one corner of the steel box. Arvid8 dispatched a hunter-killer robot, but the mouse fled with its loot.

Arvid8 cleared the holoimage and turned to his hardwired communicator.

“Security Control, this is Security 2, Arvid8.”

“Go ahead, Security 2.”

“I need a probe team in here, armed and with extra robots for perimeter security. And tell Lord Grazorius the mice have evolved again.”

Fiction: Wisdom

Posted on by bryon

Philippe arrived at the Mountain of Wisdom, eager to climb it and meet the Wisest of the Wise, who lived near the summit, and learn the great lessons of life.

The peace of his surroundings was interrupted by a pounding sound, and he went to investigate.

He found five men, four of them obviously native to the area, erecting a sign. The fifth man looked up and saw Philippe and walked toward him.

“Greetings, friend,” the fifth man said. “I am Karl. You have come to meet with the Wisest of the Wise?”

“Indeed I have, Karl. I am Philippe. I have walked the pilgrim trail from my beloved France to meet with her.”

Karl looked down a moment, apparently trying to compose himself.

“I deeply regret, Philippe, that I will always be known as the last person to talk with her.”

“Then … she is…?”

Karl nodded. “Yes. The aged one now sleeps forever.” He drew a deep breath. “I climbed the mountain, just as you came to do. I found her at death’s open door. She spoke only briefly. I have had this sign made in the village below to tell other pilgrims of her death and to record her last words to humanity.”

Philippe, his mind crying out against fate, permitted Karl to lead him over to the sign. It was written in several languages. Philippe read the French version: “The Wisest of the Wise, as all do, has died. Her final words were, ‘Do not make a shrine of my dying place. Seek the truth of life in your own way.’”

Tears ran down Philippe’s face. He knelt on the ground and sobbed unashamedly as the other men looked on. Then he abruptly pulled himself together and stood.

“My sorrow is nothing,” he declared. “I must go and fulfill her instructions. She left great wisdom, and I must follow it.” He embraced Karl and kissed him on each cheek and then went back the way he came.

The sign maker and his men followed at a discreet distance, leaving Karl alone to contemplate the mountain.

And thus it was that none ever after climbed the Mountain of Wisdom to speak with the Wisest of the Wise, who lived until she died without another visitor.

Karl took the wisdom she had given him and twisted it to build a vast financial empire. He became one of the world’s great plutocrats and died at a greatly advanced age, rich, powerful, and gleefully unrepentant.

Fiction: Outstanding in Their Fields

Posted on by bryon

The oblong little spacecraft overtook the truck on the road and landed gently in front of it, scarcely disturbing the gravel. The driver of the truck, a Blazer from the previous decade, slowed and stopped and stared.

A hatch opened on the side of the spaceship and an extraterrestrial, all four-foot-five of him, stepped down to the ground, his iridescent green scales shining in the afternoon sun. He approached the truck’s driver, a stocky man wearing a brand-new seed cap.

“Good soil to you,” the alien said. He held a small, round device from which the English words flowed; nothing about his mouth seemed capable of producing those sounds.

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Fiction: Blades Sharpened Wile You Wate

Posted on by bryon

LaVon limped and trudged from his little house to his workshop after lunch. He hadn’t eaten much; it was too hot to care about food. He had made himself drink one glass of water, but even that had been an effort.

“Don’t rightly know why I’m botherin’,” he told himself as he wiped his brow. “Ain’t no one ’round here been needin’ any blades sharpened in a month of Sundays.” He grunted softly. “Folks ’cross the tracks have their own sharpenin’ man.”

But a man went to work; LaVon had been going to one kind of work or another since he was eight years old, and that had been more than six decades ago. Now his work, when he got any, was running a foot-powered grindstone to sharpen dull blades. He couldn’t lift and tote and bend like he had done in his younger days, and this was what was left to him to keep body and soul together.

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Fiction: Given the Circumstances

Posted on by bryon

Seth led the horse into the barn and let it drink from the trough before pitching some hay under its nose. He gave it a quick rubdown, more a lick and a promise than proper care of a tired animal, but the human was also a tired animal. Plowing twenty acres of someone else’s hard land twelve miles distant in heat and humidity he had never even had nightmares about – but would from now on – was more than a middle-aged man could stand for too long. Seth had stood it for longer than that because it had to be done.

He walked toward his house. He didn’t smell supper being made, but it was too hot to eat, anyway, and he was too tired to care; he just wanted to lie down. But he forgot his exhaustion as soon as he walked through the back door into the kitchen. He stood perfectly still for a moment and took in the situation.

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Quotable 17

Posted on by bryon

Sometimes students seem shy about writing about people who do the wrong thing — we’re all taught to do the right thing and focus on the right thing. But all of literature is about people who do the wrong thing, despite themselves. What would the story be if they did the right thing? No story at all. Fiction wants to look at all the things that go wrong.
– Chang-rae Lee

Fiction: Unraveled

Posted on by bryon

Margaret busied herself with her knitting. When the dark green sweater was finished, she would send it, along with some other homemade treats, to Paul Jr. He could wear the sweater under his army uniform and be just a little warmer while he strove to make everyone safer.

At the rap of the door knocker, Coral, the family’s cat, leaped off the couch and trotted into another room. Margaret set her knitting aside.

She picked it up again hours later, long after the army men and then the Rev. Hauser had gone. She had done her work so well, but it had been fated to be wasted.

She took up her scissors and snipped the yarn close to the sweater. The ball dropped to the floor, and as she went toward her bedroom she kicked the yarn out of her way. She folded tissue paper around the unfinished sweater and packed it away in a shirt box.

The young man had been gone for months; he was out of Coral’s thoughts unless she walked past his bedroom and caught his scent. All she knew was that she had a new toy, and she played with it all night.