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Thursday, 26 January 2012
Fan of Ray Harryhausen? Check this out...
Sunday, 22 January 2012
New NoHo story delayed
Resident NoHo mascot cat Sweetpea is dying.
Always a low-energy cat, in recent years she's mostly slept the days and nights away, getting up to eat and use the litter box and spending the rest of her time dreaming little cat dreams. It was kind of like having an animated pillow.
She normally snuggles up to the nearest warm body at night but now she wants to be by herself at the foot of the bed, flattening herself out like a small tiger-skin rug. (Although she's one of those black and white "moo cats" so she looks more like a cow hide with a cat head.)
She is 18 and has been with me since she was a runty little feral cat missing the tip of her tail and the fur on her ears who had to be bottle fed. Once she learned about tuna, she made up for lost time and at one point, topped the scales at a whopping 22 pounds. (She wasn't fat, she was just "big boned.") She is very sweet but not the smartest cat I've ever known.
She's been losing weight in the last few months and in the last few weeks has weakened alarmingly. She's now reached that stage, familiar to all cat owners, of deflated paws and general weakness. Her kidneys are failing her and there's nothing the vet or I can do except make sure she's comfortable and hoping for a gentle leave-taking.
I wish I could be tough about this but I can't. And I do not feel like writing...
The next NoHo story, "Hard Rain" will be up soon.
Always a low-energy cat, in recent years she's mostly slept the days and nights away, getting up to eat and use the litter box and spending the rest of her time dreaming little cat dreams. It was kind of like having an animated pillow.
She normally snuggles up to the nearest warm body at night but now she wants to be by herself at the foot of the bed, flattening herself out like a small tiger-skin rug. (Although she's one of those black and white "moo cats" so she looks more like a cow hide with a cat head.)
She is 18 and has been with me since she was a runty little feral cat missing the tip of her tail and the fur on her ears who had to be bottle fed. Once she learned about tuna, she made up for lost time and at one point, topped the scales at a whopping 22 pounds. (She wasn't fat, she was just "big boned.") She is very sweet but not the smartest cat I've ever known.
She's been losing weight in the last few months and in the last few weeks has weakened alarmingly. She's now reached that stage, familiar to all cat owners, of deflated paws and general weakness. Her kidneys are failing her and there's nothing the vet or I can do except make sure she's comfortable and hoping for a gentle leave-taking.
I wish I could be tough about this but I can't. And I do not feel like writing...
The next NoHo story, "Hard Rain" will be up soon.
Sunday, 15 January 2012
Brief Encounter
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| Illustration by Mark Satchwill |
BRIEF ENCOUNTER
By Katherine Tomlinson
The man who used to be a rock star smiled when he saw the girl in the laundromat.
Gary was a social guy and the last few weeks had been a lonely time for him.
The holidays always sucked and since Christmas he’d been nursing a low-grade depression like a persistent flu.
He’d dropped close to a thousand dollars on gifts for his kids and neither one of them had bothered to thank him.
He knew they’d gotten the presents because their mother had tweeted pictures of their Christmas tree and he’d seen the wrapped boxes in amongst the clutter of loot beneath it.
He wasn’t allowed to call their cell phones and every time he’d dialed the family’s land line he’d gotten voice mail. He didn’t want to leave a message; didn’t want to sound desperate and sad.
He’d thought about asking his ex if he could have the kids one Christmas so she and the asshole she was now married to could have the holiday all to themselves. Andi’s response had been snotty.
“Why would I want to send my children away at Christmas?” she had asked him. “And anyway, you don’t have the room.” That had been true enough, but his ex just couldn’t leave it there.
“What were you thinking, the kids could sleep in the bed with you and Lisa?”
Lisa was a sore spot with his ex-wife. More than one of his friends had pointed out that she looked a lot like Andi, only younger and hotter.
The ex didn’t like hearing that.
Thursday, 12 January 2012
Knocking on Heaven's Door--for Chuck Wendig's flash fiction challenge
Speaking of Chuck Wendig, as we were yesterday, this week's fiction challenge was for a 500-word story inspired by a song. Here's the original challenge along with links to the other stories submitted.
KNOCKING ON HEAVEN'S DOOR
By Katherine Tomlinson
“She ain’t here,” the boy with the lazy eye said as I knocked on the door of the rusty trailer squatting in my mother’s blighted back yard.
“What?” I asked.
“You looking for Heaven, she ain’t here.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
He gave me what he probably thought was a sly look.
“Who are you?” he rejoined with a grin that exposed rotten gums and broken teeth.
Meth mouth. Lovely.
I’m getting too old for this shit, I thought, but I’d promised my mother I’d evict her tenant’s sorry ass so she could find someone who might actually pay the rent.
“Do you know where she might be?” I asked him.
He considered the question for a long time.
What do you do when one-syllable words aren’t simple enough? I wondered. Maybe I should have used sign language.
“I know where she might be,” he finally said, but offered no further information.
“Where?”
“Well, she might be at the White House but she’s kinda racist so it’s not likely,” he said and looked at me to see how I’d take that information.
My mother, who’s really my stepmother, is black, so that explains a few things about the whole dysfunctional landlady/tenant thing going on.
“Might be she’s at the library,” the tweaker added, vastly amused by his own wit. “Might be she’s in Nashville, writing a song for Carrie Underwood.”
I wished I hadn’t come straight from work. I really didn’t want to blood on my best gray suit.
“You’re a regular Ron White,” I said, pondering my next move.
He looked confused.
“Do what now?”
“Comedian,” I said. “Google ‘You Can’t Fix Stupid’ and he’ll come up.”
“Huh,” he said.
I reached for the trailer door.
“Hey, that’s private property,” he protested.
“You live here?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted.
“Great,” I said. “You owe my mother five months back rent.” I made a show of counting on my hands as if I needed the help to do the calculation. “That’s one thousand, seven hundred and fifty.” He looked blank. “Dollars,” I added helpfully.
“Shee-it,” he said. “I ain’t got that kind of money.”
No, really?
“Then get out of my way or you and me are gonna have a problem.”
It’s scary how quickly I can revert to the bubba I was in high school. I used to eat little pussies like him for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.
The kid was fucked up on something, his eyes so pinned he looked like a zombie, but he wasn’t fucked up enough to take me on. He stepped back with a weird smirk.
“Be my guest.”
I wrenched the trailer door open and immediately wished I hadn’t.
Heaven was inside, or most of her was.
“I think she might be in hell,” the tweaker observed with a phlegmy laugh.
“Heaven’s in hell,” he giggled. “Get it?”
I broke the little fucker’s nose, then pulled out my phone to dial 911.
How Will You Die?
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| Art by Joey Hi-Fi (Angry Robot Books) |
There is a lot of death around NoHo Noir but have you considered the circumstances of your own demise? Writer Chuck Wendig has started a Tumblr blog called This Is How You Die, a community storytelling/art project and he's asking for contributions. You can read the original post where he outlines what it's all about here. Have fun!
Sunday, 8 January 2012
Hilda's Big Day Out by Allan Guthrie
Return to Sender
Nicole was day-dreaming.
Well, not day-dreaming exactly, more like letting her mind skitter along on a stream of consciousness.
It’s how she spent most of her days.
Nicole had not grown up wanting to work for the post office, but after she got out of college, there weren’t a lot of prospects for a history major without a teaching certificate.
“What were you thinking?” her father had grumbled, as if he’d had no idea what she’d been doing for the last four years.
It wasn’t like she’d kept it a secret. She’d lived at home all through college, helping take care of her mother, writing her papers and doing her reading in the wee hours when her mother finally fell into an exhausted sleep.
Her mother had been very proud of her and one of her last outings had been attending Nicole’s graduation. They’d gone out for Cuban food after and her mother had managed a couple of bites of fried plantains.
One of the last conversations her mother had had been an argument with Nicole’s father over their daughter’s future. Nicole had been sad about that. She hadn’t wanted her mother to waste even a second of her precious life worrying about her.
“Once a mother, always a mother,” her mother had said to her when Nicole had protested that she could argue on her own behalf.
“A mother till the day I die,” she’d added, and then she’d laughed.
Nicole had laughed too because that was her mother, refusing to succumb to self-pity, taking refuge in black humor and a rock-ribbed faith that had never failed her, though the chemotherapy had.
To get her father off her back, Nicole had taken the Civil Service exam, breezing through it, and then taken a job with the post office. Her father hadn’t been pleased by the choice.
He persisted in referring to her as a “mail man,” which was just hateful, pointing out there were lots of other Civil Service jobs she could have taken.
`He did have a point, Nicole had agreed, and that mollified him some. She didn’t feel like telling him the real reason she’d taken the blue—that some of the other jobs had sounded interesting enough that she might have been tempted to sink into them like a hot bath, only to emerge 30 years later with a gold watch and a sense that life had passed her by.
She was pretty sure that she wasn’t going to be a letter carrier for life.
Mainly because the post office was coming apart at the seams; it wouldn’t last another 30 months, much less 30 years.
In the meantime, she had a route she liked—not too many apartment buildings—and a salary that covered her bills, and she had time to plan her next move.
She liked that it was easy to leave the job when she took off her uniform. She had friends who were killing themselves to climb up the corporate ladder and were still living on credit cards because they owed so much money in student loans.
There hadn’t been a lot of money left over after her mother’s bills were paid, but what there was went to Nicole. She’d resisted the urge to throw it away on a vacation or on new stuff and had paid off every single debt she had.
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