One Writer’s Hell

“Morningstar” — Flash Fiction Piece #2 January 3, 2009

Posted by doubledown in Writing.
Tags: flash fiction, short stories
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Here is the second of my Flash Fiction experiments. Obviously, I went a little overboard with the length this time (it’s something like 1800 words as opposed to 850 like the last one).

And, just so we’re clear, I’m not passing off any of these stories as be-all-end-alls. My goal at this point is to finish as many of these stories as possible and, after a period of time, find that I am happy enough with some of them to evaluate them for re-writes.

Anyway, hope you enjoy…

Morningstar:

I’d spent the morning canvassing West Hollywood – talking to bartenders, beat cops, and some friends of Lilith’s who lived on the border to Beverly Hills. At eleven a.m. sharp, a black sedan pulled up beside me and a brutish voice said, “Get in”. Actually, I’d expected them sooner.

Two hours later, they dumped me at Union Station downtown. Their car was still moving and I rolled to a stop in the gutter – tired, wet, and badly beaten. From out of nowhere, a long, well-manicured hand slid into my bleary-eyed view. I took it and it helped me out of the street and onto the sidewalk. Rance (the owner of the hand) was dumbstruck by sudden appearance. “How’d you know I was here? I was gonna call you.”

I bent my spine back until it cracked and this made my new companion wince. “They’ve been following you too. Actually, they were tickled that you were already at the train station. They said the two of us could fuck off together. Maybe share a sandwich on the train.”

“Charming. Hey, you look like hell.”

There it was: Rance’s penetrating observational gift. “It’s been a rough morning. I spent most of the last hour with my head submerged in a toilet bowl. Forcibly, before you ask.”

“It looks like your nose is broken.”

“Yeah, something about me sticking it where it doesn’t belong. These guys’ve obviously seen too many gangster movies.”

We started walking toward the station, and I was drawing some disdainful stares. A cop near the entrance was minding our business a little too closely for my tastes.

“What’d you find out before you got pinched?” Rance asked, clearly eager to get to his own findings.

“Nothing useful. I traced Lilith’s movements on Friday night; got a picture of her state of mind. People that knew her said she wasn’t herself. Her behavior was erratic; she was scared. No one saw her more than eight hours before her body was found. At least no one honest.”

Rance smiled a smile full of mean little teeth. “Looks like I’m a better Sam Spade Junior than you.” He removed a tiny manila envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “Maybe I’m the one that should’ve gotten the beating.”

“The day’s still young.” I opened the envelope and dropped a silver key into my palm.

“Goes to a locker,” Rance said. “A locker in there.” He pointed toward Union Station and seemed about to bust with pride.

“Handy. Where did it come from?”

Some of Rance’s enthusiasm melted away, and his voice dropped to a more sympathetic register. “Lilith’s stomach. The autopsy. We had a man on the inside.”

“Don’t we always? So, you’re telling me Lilith ate this key before she was killed?”

He nodded once.

I held the key up so that I could see it more clearly. Etched into it was the number six-sixty-six. The locker number and Lilith’s idea of a joke.

Forty minutes later, Rance and I stepped out of cab in front of an old office building in Silverlake. “R. Evermeyer, Esq.,” said the shingle. “Hang out here,” I told Rance before going in. “Keep those beady little eyes peeled.”

Evermeyer was fat, apparently late forties (although it can be hard to tell with his type), and he smelled of old cheese. His office was unkempt – he obviously couldn’t afford a secretary. “Sit down,” he said. “I expected I would see you as soon as I heard the news. I would’ve thought you’d be here sooner.”

“Rough morning.”

“So I see. Can I offer you scotch? A cigarette?”

“Don’t drink, don’t smoke,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment and then clicked his tongue. “That surprises me. I guess I assumed you’d be just riddled with vices.”

“Don’t believe everything you read.” I sat down and, when he was down himself, I went point blank right out of the gate. “You know me apparently – at least by reputation – but I don’t know you. I’m not here to chat; I’m here for information. I got your business card from a locker in Union Station. Any idea how it got there, Mr. Evermeyer?”

“Lilith put it there, I would expect.”

I didn’t return his ironic smile. “More specificity, please.”

He nodded. “I met Lilith the first time in thirty-four – during one of her fabled Lost Weekends. I won’t lie to you: I coveted her immediately and, not being one to observe the Commandments too closely, I pursued her. I knew who she was and, by extension, I knew of her association with you. But she had such a power over me that I was only too willing to ignore the risks. You of all people must understand that…”

Was he goading me? Surely, he couldn’t be that stupid. Whether he was or not, I started to get angry, but I knew I needed to keep my temper in check long enough for him to finish his sordid little tale. I nodded and made a cavalier gesture with my left hand indicating that he should continue.

“We only had a short time together, but it was magical – or at least my selective memory has painted it as magical. The truth is, she spoke of you often, and often she cried.”

I bit my lower lip. “Was there a chase you were cutting to?”

He smiled and I could definitely see that he was enjoying having me on the hook. “You did say you wanted me to be specific. Now, where was I? Ah, yes, the Salad Days.” He leaned in. “Lilith lived with me for two weeks. At that time, I had a house in Pasadena; I wasn’t the shriveled husk you see before you now.” Apparently, his idea of ‘shriveled’ differed from mine, but he went on. “There were good times, certainly, but she was a fragile thing, and I was in a panic nearly every hour of the day. I would have said or done anything to keep her from leaving, but Lilith was not a woman who could be controlled. She left one morning while I slept and then she became the tide – endlessly returning and disappearing, returning and disappearing.”

He seemed to want commiseration, and I’d be damned before I would give it to him. My blood was up, but I spoke to him as calmly as I could. “Let me say this again: Lilith is dead – an apparent suicide (although I don’t believe that for a second). The fact that she set me on your trail hours before she was killed adds some weight to my hunch. I won’t rest until I find her killers. Even if you know me by reputation alone, you must have some idea of what I can be like when I take a notion to do a thing.”

One of his eyebrows went up. “Was there a threat in there somewhere? I’m not sure.”

“No threat. Not yet. But I am asking you – again – to confine yourself to the facts. Keep the… embellishment to yourself.”

He nodded and a layer of his persona melted away. For the first time, I felt as though I was looking at the Man rather than the Act. He pulled a bottle of scotch and a tumbler from his desk drawer and poured himself a drink. He gestured at me with the neck of the bottle. “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“You won’t remember me,” he began quietly, “but we met once in the days leading up to the War. I was a peripheral figure – a bureaucrat – but I was in a position to hear things. Things which shadowed my conscience and forced me to abstain from choosing a side.”

Right away, I knew exactly what he meant. Ordinarily, I can spot one of my own kind right away, but he had gone so badly to seed that I didn’t recognize him for what he was. “You were a… Bystander…”

“I prefer the term ‘conscientious objector’. As I indicated, I had reasons for the stance I adopted. But, in the end, our punishment was the same as yours – banishment. We could either follow you into Hell or – as long as we behaved ourselves – we could come here and live amongst the Second Born. I chose the latter, obviously.”

“And what does all of this have to do with Lilith?”

Evermeyer’s eyes grew misty and his look drifted far away. “In my selfish need to hold onto her, I told Lilith things – things she had no business knowing. Had she been able to keep a secret, all would have been well, but she was emotionally volatile; a drinker. She was indiscreet and it got her killed. I got her killed. The fault is mine.”

“What did you tell her?”

He looked up at me and his eyes were not only clear but brave. “I know you’ll think me a liar, but everything you’ve ever believed has been predicated on an untruth. You have a reputation as a deceiver and a seducer, but long ago, it was you who was deceived and seduced.”

“What in blazes are you talking about?”

“You didn’t fall from Heaven, Lucifer. You were pushed.”

I had no reason at all to believe him, but if what he said was true, so many of my questions would be answered. I needed so much to believe what he was saying was true, and in that need, I found an awakening faith. “Tell me everything,” I said, trying hard to hide my eagerness.

He nodded, resigned. “Of course. I – “

But then there was a sound like the tinkling of a tiny glass bell. While we both puzzled over its origins, a round, red circle appeared on the front of Evermeyer’s white shirt. He looked down at it and said, “Oh, how about that…” and then his face dropped down onto his desk blotter, and the tumbler rolled onto the floor.

Looking over my shoulder, I saw a perfectly round hole in the office window. I stood quickly and took sharp, right-angle turns back to the street. Rance was slumped against the building, a red dot prominent in the middle of his forehead. I began to walk down the street with long strides, determined to escape but also to avoid attention. The latter was a real trick since I was bruised and scraped, my suit was in ribbons, and my eyes were burning like angry coals. Someone had made a patsy out of me, and now someone was trying to rob me of the truth. A hate I hadn’t felt in a very long time entered into me, driving me relentlessly forward. I was a man on a mission, and I would see worlds quake before all was done.

“Awake” — Flash Fiction Piece #1 December 26, 2008

Posted by doubledown in Writing.
Tags: flash fiction, short stories
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Here now is my first piece of flash fiction for the site. Please let me know what you think!

Awake:

Underneath the searing pain, Ruth saw a tiny, beckoning glimmer, and she recognized it for what it was: relief. The question would no longer be hers to answer; the responsibility would fall to someone else. Another wave of agony rolled through her. The chest into the arm, the chest into the arm – the left arm. Her vision contracted to a pinhole, a rippling tear surrounded by black. Through it, the porch. The porch Henry had painted three days before he died. Her home for the last fifty-two years. A fitting place for this. She listened, but she did not hear Daniel’s voice, or the clomp-clomp-clomp of his sneakered feet. “Now,” she whispered. “Now would be good.”

The pinhole dilated closed, completing the ebon field. Sound collapsed away too, like the inrush of too much water into the ears. Then the separating, the tingly disjointedness. The pinhole reopened, and the porch was replaced with… replaced with… One word came to mind: “Disney”. Amber, orange, blue, red, green, purple, yellow, and white – like a Technicolor cartoon of the forties, and everything was suffused with the scent of honeysuckle. A momentary flash of herself as a child – maybe six – standing by the fence of her parents’ home, patiently drawing the white tube from the heart of a honeysuckle flower, placing it in her mouth, and relishing the tiny beads of nectar.

“Take my hand.” The voice was Sharon’s – to the right and clear in a way that no voice had ever been. Without ears, without ear canals, without cartilage, bone or blood to obscure the sound. This was a voice not heard in almost four years and it was all the sweeter for its heart-breaking clarity. Ruth held out what she thought was her hand and she felt Sharon take it. She felt every line, every fold, every crease of their palms conjoin, and she felt their two pulses synch in their rhythm and become one.

Over the sound of their commingled heartbeat, Ruth heard a new rhythm, a familiar rhythm which unnerved her and which she tried to ignore.

“Come with me,” Sharon said. “There’s no reason to be afraid.” And, if Sharon said there was no cause for fear, Ruth knew that it was true. Sharon had become for Ruth a model of courage. The girl had lived on that table longer than any doctor’s power to force her. She had willed herself alive until the moment Daniel had passed from her – a final, brutal act of motherly love which had left Ruth awestruck. Sharon knew something about bravery, and Ruth trusted her implicitly.

A clomp-clomp-clomp made resonant by the wooden plank flooring. The familiar creak of the old screen door.

“We have to hurry,” Ruth said. Ahead, through the slow-turning kaleidoscope, there was another presence. The smell of linseed oil joined the smell of honeysuckle. Henry.

But Sharon moved no more quickly.

“Gamma?” The voice came from outside. Outside the movement, and the tube of color, and the strange presences. Its tone was questioning, but too innocent to be tinged with real concern. The clomping of small sneakers drew closer to Ruth’s head, lying now quietly upon the porch floor.

“Please. We must go faster.” But they moved at the same maddeningly slow pace. Sharon seemed incapable of quicker progress, and Ruth was suddenly cross with her. Hadn’t Sharon been watching? Hadn’t she seen what Daniel could do?

The little voice again, terrifically loud, echoing through her brittle form like a weapon of sound. “Gamma?”

Ruth remembered the baby bird from last summer, fallen from its nest, broken and gray, covered with ants. Daniel had approached it, ignorant of death and coldly curious about what this inert form upon the lawn might be.

“Don’t touch,” Ruth had said. “Icky-dirty.”

But Daniel had touched the bird with a tiny pointer finger, nudging the oversized head with unsophisticated tactile curiosity. Immediately, the baby bird had come alive though its body was broken, and varicolored liquids leaked from many fissures. It screamed in a way that Ruth had heard no bird scream before – terrifying, tragic and accusing. She had been locked in place for a moment, unsure of what to do, but then she had taken up one of the heavy stones separating the garden from the lawn.

“Awake?” Daniel had wondered.

And then Ruth had dropped the stone onto the baby bird, killing it again.

There had been other instances since, banishing doubt. A calcified spider on a windowsill. A mouse in a trap under the sink. What was Daniel, and what would he become?

A small hand touched her cooling neck, and the tunnel of color collapsed. Sharon was there and then not. Henry never had been. Ruth could no longer smell either linseed or honeysuckle. She opened her eyes and looked into a freckled three-and-a-half-year-old face. “Gamma?” it asked.

Ruth coughed, gasping for air, wheezing inside a dry old throat. Tears sprouted and a vertigo she didn’t realize she had was suddenly gone.

“Gamma? Awake?”

Finally, Ruth could speak. “Yes, honey,” she said. “Gramma’s awake.”