Friday 13th Flash 55

The Death Card is nothing to fear. It only indicates change, the 'death' of a phase or an aspect of life. But she'd pulled it first in every client's reading today--all thirteen of them.

No matter.

Right?

She hurried homeward, too worried to think of anything else, even people, even traffic, even crossing 13th Street.

---

That was a 55-word story for Friday Flash 55. To join in the fun, write any story you like in 55-words (no more, no less) then tell Mr. Knowitall by leaving a comment on his own Flash-55 post today. You'll also find a whole collection of links to fantastic 55-word stories to read.

If you like the card, that's from the The Gothic Tarot by James Vargo, and yes, "Death" really is number 13 in the major arcana.

If you like to write:

Flash Fiction Offensive wants "the kind of stories you tell when you're with your pals down at the bar, knocking back your thirteenth beer. Tales about things that went wrong when Joe Asshole punched his woman a little too hard, about the stranger Crack-whore Jenny met on the streets that she wants to forget, about the time when Loser Steve should have gotten arrested but didn't."
Dang. I need to work up to thirteen beers it seems.

Thirteen Myna Birds "is an online poetry publication seeking the evocative, the connotative, the creepy, the odd, the paranormal, and the dark... Thirteen Myna birds will consist of 13 pieces at any given time. Our favorite kind of pieces are poems, but we are also in favor of other poetic blurbs and blurts and brambles and darts and snippets such as dreamscapes and petite fictions and the hybridized innards of pomosexual beasts..."
Hey. Who you calling pomosexual??


HAPPY FRIDAY THE 13TH EVERYONE!!
Now be careful out there...

The pedestrian fatality photograph comes from the NY Daily News.

Three Word Thursday: somewhat derailed.

Three Word Thursday is hosted by Quilly. I love this one, because it lets me run wild with two of my favourite things: learning cool new words and making stories.

Every Thursday, she pulls three wonderful old words from the mothballs of lexical history, and the rest of us give those words all-new stories to live in. Tales can be as long or short, sad or silly, or whatever as you like, so join in! You'll find all the details at Quilldancer.com.

This week's words are:

confabulation: conversation, discussion

pudify: cause to be ashamed

rimestock: an almanac written in runes.

Off the Rails

"I say we should just call Mr. B," Joe said. "Nobody knows that old engine better."

"He's been retired ten years," their new boss said. "You boys just haven't given it enough thought. Did anyone even read the manual?"

Dave snorted. "That old rimestock? Nothing in it applies anymore, and it wasn't much help in the first place. Besides, they stopped making parts for her in 1978, and Mr. B. had to rebuild her engine twice since then."

Joe laughed. "The last time, he used parts out of one of the motorcoaches and a Volvo truck to get her going. There might have been voodoo involved too, who knows? Everyone else had given her up for dead." He looked through the office window at the little diesel locomotive waiting on the tracks outside, her green paint shining in the afternoon sun.

"Well," the boss said, leaning back in his leather chair, "I suppose that's the alternative, isn't it? All she does for us anymore is the daily run taking paper from the mill to the newspaper building in town, and that can be done by truck."

"Fifty trucks you mean," Dave said, but the boss shrugged.

"It means losing the paper account of course, be we could just concentrate on the---"

"It means losing the Santa run too," Joe said, "and losing it too late in the year for any alternative plans." He shook his head. "I won't be the one to call the children's hospital and tell them their only annual fundraiser isn't going ahead because seven professional mechanics can't get an engine going---it'd be too pudifying."

The boss sat forward again and leaned his elbows on the table, resisting the urge to ask what the hell pudifying meant. No matter—he had a few big words of his own. There they were, right there on his word-a-day calendar on the desk. He scanned the word for November 12th and made his decision.

"Enough of this ...confabulation, boys," he said, leaning back in his chair again. "If you all don't mind admitting your failures, well, I don't mind if you want to call your old friend Mr. B. back again for a day. Just don't raid any of my motorcoaches for parts this time, y'hear?"

---

Ok, that's not really a story is it? It's more a vignette or a scene, but Thursday snuck up on me too quickly this week and I haven't had time to do a proper one.

My other excuse is that my head is full of locomotives and engine parts and the fragrance of diesel and motor oil: all memories of life with my Dad, who would have been 93 years old today: if only! The above scene is completely fictional but it's based on a true story. My mother's phone rang ten years after Dad died, from someone desperate for help fixing that old locomotive he used to care for. She burst into tears then, though she loved to tell about it afterwards. Nobody else could fix the old locomotive again, bless her big diesel heart, and she was retired to the local railroad museum, where they put her outside and let all her shining chrome stairs and rails and bits go rusty. My father would never have allowed that.

His cars looked and ran like new even when they were twenty years old; he was able to diagnose engine problems just hearing a car pull in the driveway; he loved tinkering with motors and engines of all kinds and was a mechanical genius. At his funeral a young mechanic he'd mentored hugged me and offered, "God must have needed a good mechanic 'cause he called home the best." I still laugh at that line (sooo...God drives a car... and can't fix it??). It's a wonderful memory, a small light that shone in the darkness of a terrible time.

They say the pain of losing someone gets better in time. I say that's some big BS.

This weekend I'm going to celebrate his birthday by going out to buy a brand new 00-scale model train set complete with tracks, locomotive, rolling stock, the whole works, as a Christmas present for my son who is every inch the motorhead and locomotive-lover my Dad was (also the joy of my life). I can't wait to tell him all the old train stories my Dad told me, while we set it all up on Christmas Day. I hope I can find a locomotive that's green.

Anyway.

Happy Birthday Daddy.

My Dad as he was usually photographed: behind the wheel of his car.

That's his father standing, circa 1958. Dig those white-walls: how I'd love to have that car now!

Armistice Day in Pink and White

I have a cameo, the one pictured here on photographs of my grandmother and some of her nine children. It's quite big for one of these things, and quite old too, being purchased in Italy by my great-uncle during the Great War. He bought two, and lived to bring them home: one for his mother, and one for his sister who was my grandmother.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place...

He was in the navy then and very young. When I knew him sixty years later he was still big, strong, handsome and always laughing, and I can only imagine what he was like back then, in his uniform and on the ship, among friends. And I like to wonder about the day in port when they went ashore to send their letters, and pick up small gifts for the girls and mothers and friends waiting for them at home.

...and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

When my mother handed this cameo to me the year before she died, I promised to take care of it, and to pass it down to my own daughter in turn, with its story. A gentle wash with clean water once a year, she said, a drop of oil: remember it's only a shell and it's old; don't let it dry out.
Ok, I said, knowing I'd never remember to do it... then a few days later I thought of what to do. I'd take it out the 11th of November every year, at 11am, and my minute of silence would be spent caring for this pink and white memory of my great-uncle and the family he loved.

We are the Dead. ...

I wonder sometimes, as I care for it, about his choice. In the middle of war, and on a Navy ship, purchasing something so fragile seems a brave (dare I say foolish) choice. And so femininely pink among all the steel and weaponry?—so odd.

What would I have chosen in his place? Something unbreakable perhaps – a silver cross or a ring? Or something more in context---a portrait of him and his comrades, a memory captured against the risk that some among them would be lost and perhaps forgotten? Or, something manlier---but what , and what would his 'girls back home' do with that?

 ...Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

After cleaning it, I hold it up to the light to find any dirt I missed, and the sun shines right through it in a glow of polished pink. I suddenly think of what a brave choice this was, to take on something so delicate and so precious, to care for it amid all the dangers and hardships of war.

Then I think of how fragile a sailor's life was in those war years, yet how precious to themselves and the ones back home, and suddenly his choice makes perfect sense. Suddenly I'm no longer thinking of his sacrifice so much as his mother's, and realise that perhaps, he may have been thinking the same thing.

The centenary years of that war are approaching now, and I like to think that my great-grandmother would smile if she knew her son's love for her would still be remembered in the family so many years later. But I don't think I'll pass it on to my daughter in the little blue box that it's lived in so long. I think the time's coming to frame it, along with other mementoes of its time, and let it remind my family of those long-ago loves and sacrifices every day of the year, not just this one.

...To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow...
In Flanders Fields

--by John McCrae, May 1915

For my great-uncles Charles Goodrich and August Bachman, and also my father and brother, my uncles, my great-nephew Bradley who died in Afghanistan in September, and all my nieces and nephews who are still alive and in uniform though behind your backs I call you nuts:

I love you, and wish you all a blessed and peaceful Armistice Day.

Idea Aid 2009 and a wee ranty thingy

Please pardon my rant. It's brief and leads to something better.

So...

The Irish Times reports that Mary "Hanafin told a meeting of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party last week that savings of €81.3 million could be made in a year through a weekly reduction of €1 in [Social Welfare] payments,... affecting nearly 1.5 million people."

So in other words, once again the poorest of the Irish poor are being hit up for money to shore up the staggeringly selfish and irresponsible spending of their Government ministers, as reported almost daily in the nation's newspapers. That's just great.

So here's MY idea, Mary. My idea is that Ireland gets rid of every single one of its current Government ministers (preferably by public execution) and replaces them with people who are willing to do the same work for a comfortable salary but without the benefit of a shining new black Merc every year, without charging taxpayers for every €900 dinner with their friends, and without hiring €30,000 private jets to 'meetings' in Florida during which daily hairstyling and nightly pay-per-view porn films are charged as expenses.

Is that what this €1 cut per week is about? You want us rabble to stop buying a newspaper each week so we no longer know about these things? That might also explain the cuts in education, such as the one that recently took away my son's Special Needs Assistant: in a generation or two, nobody will know how to read such damning articles anymore anyway, right?

Yes, doing away with our current government is a good idea I think. I'll send it in to Idea Aid when it opens this Saturday.

What's Idea Aid? Mensa Process is supporting a "global brainstorming benefit where people will donate ideas instead of money" to help solve world issues, such as this year's theme of poverty. The goal is to make a contribution -- as in Band Aid and Live Aid -- but with solutions and ideas instead of individual donations of cash.

You don't need to be a Mensa member; everyone's invited to chip in for the week-long event. Signing up is free and going on right now at Idea Aid's website. You can also become their fan at Facebook, or follow their updates on Twitter.

Many of us feel helpless in the face of global poverty, especially if all we can afford is $5 once in a while, which we send while knowing it doesn't really solve anything. So go on over to Idea Aid and hopefully, we can watch great things happen; we might even manage to be part of some small answer to make a difference to somebody, somewhere. Helping even one family would be worth it. I've signed in.

Meanwhile, here are some Irish markets for fiction and poetry. If any of them currently depend on Arts Council funding, they probably now need all the support they can get, so please pick up an issue too if you can:

Moloch is an interesting blend of various art forms. I'll let them explain: "Moloch is a journal of new art & writing, providing a forum for the arts to compliment and enhance each other using a variety of styles and mediums. We are looking for submissions of art, poetry, and short stories." They also need "people willing to create new art pieces based on poems/stories, and people to write new poems/stories based on art." Not a word about payment however; you might be doing it for the love.

Crannóg is a literary magazine with a blinding website design: put on your sunglasses before clicking. Send in your poetry, flash fiction or short stories; contributors receive a copy of the magazine in which their work appears.

Albedo One is "always looking for thoughtful, well written fiction. Our definition of what constitutes SF, horror and fantasy is extremely broad and we love to see material which pushes at the boundaries." These are the folks that sponsor the Aeon award, and they pay their chosen authors along with a contributor's copy.

The Dublin Review publishes fiction and other creative writing, but is not currently considering poems. I like the way they request a "typescript" which is of course far more correct than the more usual "manuscript" which indicates handwritten copy. Bravo. Not sure if there's payment here however: let me know if you know.

Southword and the Stinging Fly are (I believe, correct away if I'm mistaken) temporarily closed to submissions.

Microfiction Monday #4

Welcome to Microfiction Monday,

where a picture only paints 140 characters.

Here's this week's picture, and my story to go with it:

OOPSIE...

Mum explained
that faeries always disappear
when little girls grow up.

We never told her that,
in our case,
the lawnmower had been involved.

Thank you if you play!!

---

About Microfiction Monday

Microfiction means the shortest of short stories. Think Aesop's fables, comic strips, or even jokes: complete stories that can be told in under a minute. For this game, the limit is a tweetable 140 characters or fewer.

Every Sunday evening I'll post my own 'microfiction' inspired by a photo or illustration, and invite you to do the same. If that degree of brevity scares you, feel free to use my own microfiction of the week as your first line instead, and spin something longer.

You can leave your story in the comments here, or better yet, post on your own blog and leave your link in Mr. Linky.

Hate counting letters and spaces? Try Design 215's character counter, which will count for you as you type. Microsoft Word will count for you too, of course, as part of its word count feature under the 'Review' tab.

Photos will be from my own archives; illustrations are by Dover Publications.

And finally, why 140? A whole new fiction market has arisen via mobile phone texting and Twitter, who limits 'tweets' to 140 characters including spaces and punctuation. It's fast, it's fiction, it's fun. Want more?

Nanoisms
PicFic
escarp
Thaumatrope
Seedpod
Tweet the Meat

For slightly longer works:
Flashshots
Flashes in the Dark
Flashquake
50 to 1