Clintonaut

The Sweet Dolly Fordham Cat House Curse

It's flash fiction time again, and because it's Halloween, you knew this one had to be creepy.

Chuck at Terribleminds gave us a set of parameters, including:

• Sub-genre
• Conflict
• Setting 
• Must-feature ingredient

There's, oh, around ten things under each.  You choose one thing and go to work on 1,000 words -- which is never as much as it seems.  I'm going with:

Southern Gothic; Revenge; Strip Club; Succubus

So, if it wasn't obvious from that -- or from the title -- this one may not be all too SFW, as they say.  Happy Halloween, everyone, and enjoy.

# # # #

On cool Halloween nights -- just like this one -- if you listen close you can hear her scream, unchained and echoing through the low marsh like the wicked spell it is. 

She’s waiting. 

Waiting for the full moon, waiting for the right time.

Will it be tonight?

# # # #

The old plantation house withers among the overgrown sawgrass and stunted junipers, decaying cypress trees and the cottonmouths, the majesty of it long dead.  What's left of it rots deep in the back woods, the sandy soil devouring the wooden carcass board by weathered board.  The house, burdened only by the memories of old secrets and shame, slouches far off any road you'll ever drive down.

Not long ago enough, the moss and vines were part of the appeal of the place, part of the character of Sweet Dolly Fordham's.

Directions to Sweet Dolly's place were convoluted, elaborate by design.  From Miami you had to drive clear up around the Everglades just to get to the back roads winding to the old plantation.

From Tampa, it was an uneven drive south, then east, across cattle and citrus country, before the old dirt ruts leading to the courtyard, then the house.

No one was going to simply stumble upon it.

There was a password involved usually, something that changed frequently.
And you'd have to know to ask for Dolly herself.  That was if you wanted to get involved in the real business of Sweet Dolly Fordham's place.  Otherwise, for your trouble you'd be treated to a simple evening of fining steak house dining and the topless wares of some of the prettiest women north of Havana.

In the best of times, Sweet Dolly and her crew entertained dozens and dozens of men a night in the restaurant and strip club.  The dancers earned hundreds of dollars a night -- unheard of at the time -- and on that business alone, it would have been a raging success.

But that was not the only business in which Sweet Dolly trafficked.

With the password -- and an up-front down payment -- the night would get much, much better.

Sweet Dolly had hired Clarice, a girl just 19 out of New Orleans, on sight.  Gorgeous.  Red hair, the perfect shape -- rounded hips and large, soft breasts.  A smile tinged with wickedness.

Within weeks, Clarice was earning her way on the dance floor.  Within a couple of months, she was on her way to being the star attraction in the back rooms.  

Men would roll in from Tampa, Miami, sometimes, even Daytona and Tallahassee and ask for Clarice by name after whispering the password to Sweet Dolly.  She was happy to oblige them.

# # # #

Like everyone else, the Mayor of Cardo -- a repulsive man and a southern politician in the worst tradition -- had heard of Sweet Dolly Fordham's but had never seen it, had never quite known where it was.

Except for hunting and fucking women not his wife, the Mayor didn't much care about very much of anything, except being Mayor.  He got to appoint the local police chief -- himself.  And the best part of that job was busting speeding college kids flying through the state to get to the beach.  And carrying a loaded gun.

It was a late night, a dark night and the booze had long worn off the four men in the Cadillac, leaving it reeking of bourbon and a good time.  When the Mayor -- red bubble light in the windshield of his Dodge -- pulled them over to the side of the desolate highway, they said they were headed back to Ybor City.

The Mayor could smell the lie as easily as the booze on their breath.  

He pulled the gun and threatened to leave them stranded among the gators and mosquitoes if they didn't tell him the truth he already knew.  

They called bullshit.

He shot out a tail-light, happy to be able to fire the .44 for a change.

A cock of the hammer on the Mayor's gun and they gave up the password.  He let them speed out of town and hustled to his own car.

She didn't like the Mayor the minute she saw him amble out of the car.  But when he offered the password and a sweaty handful of cash, Dolly Fordham had little choice but to bring him to the back.

There night could have ended no other way.

"Her," he growled, pointing at Clarice. "Let's go."

Clarice, ever confident, put her arm around the Mayor and escorted him to her room.
Ten minutes later, the shots and the screams rang out.  Sweet Dolly knew that instant it was the end of Sweet Dolly Fordham's.

Men ran out of the front, girls ran out the back, and Sweet Dolly stood in the doorway of Clarice's room, watched the Mayor fumble up his belt buckle and pants.  She looked at Clarice's lifeless, beautiful form.  Gorgeous red hair still cascading over her wicked smile.  Her elegant eyes, still open, still shining like a secret. 

"Dumb bitch," he was huffing and puffing, red-faced. "Wouldn't do what I say!  Wouldn't do it!  Teach that bitch a hard lesson... had to... had to..." He brushed past Sweet Dolly and was gone.

The disrepair to the once grand cat house happened virtually immediately.

Sweet Dolly moved away.  Some say she retired to Miami.  Others say L.A.  She was never heard from again.

The Mayor of Cardo is still there, though, after all these years.

But he is not alone.  He is never alone.

And as the full moon on this Halloween night approaches, his time grows shorter.

If you find old dirt ruts out past the tall sawgrass and the snakes and the mossy trees, listen close.  They say she -- once called Clarice -- is prepared to take her revenge.  You won't need the old forgotten passwords to hear the cackle and screams.  

Neither will the Mayor. 

The Extraordinary Rendition

It's flash fiction from Chuck Wendig at Terribleminds!  This one was good -- "Five Ingredients Make a Story"... so we picked five of ten, limited ourselves to 1,000 words, and, well, here you go.

I went with a little different format this time around, so the five I picked are pretty self-evident.

Please enjoy.

# # # #

I.    A Missing Corpse

How do you lose a body on a plane this small?

It was all he could think.  Not the time.  Not where they might be in the world.

How do you lose a body on a plane this small?

He’d heard her the first time.  And if he hadn’t, he could have read it on her face.  One of her best features: she couldn’t keep a secret.

“What?” he said again, anyway, the husky voice nearly lost to the heavy thrum of the Curtiss-Wrights roaring outside the fuselage.

“Gone!  It’s… he’s just… gone!” She threw her hands up into the air and tossed her lush, auburn hair from side to side, looking up and down the passenger cabin again.

She was panicking.  He would panic, too, in time.  For now, though, he could see: she was right.  The upper bunk, not five feet away, empty.  Missing was a large body wrapped in yards of industrial gauze, carefully placed inside a white pine box, sanded smooth like the water where they departed only a few hours earlier.

“Where in the hell is he?  Where’s Quintano?” Standing, the remnants of bourbon-induced sleep fading.

“I don’t know!” she said, her eyes going wide, palms up again. “How do you lose a body on a plane this small?”

II.     A Half-Burned Notebook

“This is it?  This is your lead?” He held the half-burned notebook in his hand like a turd.

“I told you, Mr. Emerson, this job would not be easy.” The Man in the Crisp White Suit said, drawing deep on the Cuban, the smoke swirling up past his gray head like angels dancing away from a demon.

“It’s barely readable,” Emerson said, leafing gently through the charred pages and brushing back the black, flaking cover.  He examined each page carefully.

A map.  List of names.  Sketches.

“Barely readable,” Emerson muttered again. “I don’t know.”

But he knew.  He’d take the job.  Knew he would take it even before the Man in the Crisp White Suit mentioned the money, which was considerable.  He knew it.

The Man in the Crisp White Suit, leaning back in his chair, the smoke haloed around him, the slant of the late evening sun cutting through the dark wood shutters, said nothing, because he knew it, too.

III.    An Indestructible Tree

They had found him by what the notebook called the Indestructible Tree.  Upon first glance, Maddy thought it looked pretty well destroyed.  Then she peered closer, gingerly brushing a brown curl out of her face.  The tree – a gnarled tangle of ancient roots and knots plowing through surprisingly lush earth – was bent heavy to her left, still sprouting small green sprigs along tired branches.  It begged to be let to the ground.

“It’s real,” she said before she saw him, looking at the mound of stone and brick, hidden only a bit by the tree, water clear as spring air gurgling, soaking the lush, mossy grass around its base.

But when she saw him, she forgot – just for a fleeting moment – what J.B. Emerson looked like, and somewhere deep in her full, generous heart, something broke forever.

IV.    An Ancient Curse

The earthly delights of an ageless body.

The terrible supremacy of a timeless mind.

The power of sentience across endless millennia.

This is not the ancient curse to which the prophecy speaks.  Nor is it the unbearable loneliness, though straying too far from the wretched fountain brings years like the merciless waves of the angry Atlantic, ne’er to be undone.

I live now with this tortured tree.  And with this fountain, her cool, clear, awful water as clean, as blessed as the day it first touched my naïve tongue, the mouth of a young man.

I live here.  Until God, great in His Glory, sees fit to set upon me peculiar circumstances only which may free me from the curse.

For I live with that demon as well.

I live with that most horribly of all.

V.     A Sudden Storm

Emerson sat on the floor of the small bodega, doors opened to the outside salt air, cradling Maddy in his arms.  He barely felt the burn of the bullet hole in his left shoulder, swallowed the salty blood in his mouth and worked for half a second on a loose molar.

Maddy was out, but he knew she wasn’t dead.  Could see her breathing, angelic wisps of flowing brown hair falling up and down around her open rose lips.  He gave her a quick pat-down, check for anything he missed.  A bullet hole could be smaller than you thought, and two minutes ago, there’d been plenty.

Long legs, fine.  Hips, fine, and he had enough discipline to keep his hands off her ass which seemed to look good in anything.  Pulled the fabric of her shirt against her abdomen – soft, so soft.  No blood dotted the fabric.

Each arm was limp, fallen to her sides, scratched but fine.  He took a moment to breathe her in, and as he brought his hand up -- past her breasts -- to touch her hair, it stopped, caught in the vice of her grip.

“Don’t you even think about it, you cad!” her eyes were puffy and dark, and there was a bruise forming on the side of her perfect temple.

“Just checking for any damage,” he smiled as innocently as his sinful thoughts would let him.

“We did it,” she breathed out. “We’re alive,’ she breathed again, letting him fall into her. “Kiss me.”

They sat there for hours in the open bodega, waiting on the next adventure, looking out past the body of the Man in the Crisp White Suit towards the sudden storm coming in off the bay. 

Festival of Reading

I'm going down to the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading tomorrow.  I'll be there at 10:00 to see Dennis Lehane, and if I have a chance at all, to make a complete ass of myself in front of him.  Should be a good time.

I'll tweet a bit @bkirby816 -- using #TBReads and #tampabaytimes -- and will surely take at least a couple of Instagram shots.  

Spellbound

Did not forget to do Flash Fiction this week.  

It was just... different.  Three sentences, under a hundred words.  And it had to be totally creepy.

Hard to do a story -- a whole story, not just a vignette -- in three sentences.  I usually do terrible on stuff like this.  Thought I'd give it a run, though.

What do you think?

# # # #

The ruby-tipped finger went to her lips, “shhh” escape from the crooked yellow snarl, and his heart, beating ever harder in his chest, counted down the last moments of his life. It had been too painful, too short between then — finding the wretched hovel deep in the sun-hidden woods during a youthful weekend at the cabin on the lake — and now. He closed his eyes, felt that bony crick of a finger brush his cheek, and like that, the spellbound life was over.

Image via

The Black Lighthouse

Well, my little extended summer break -- which turned into a summer and fall break -- from fiction has finally come to an end.

Frankly, I'm glad.  There's been a lot of stuff I've been wanting to do on this blog, but between the convention coverage at the Spencerian and the arrival of Finn, that has been harder to do than it sounds.  So I gave myself a little break.  

I've missed several of the flash fiction challenges over at Terribleminds, and that's too bad, because Chuck has had some good ones.

So I'm back with a new one.  This one is good, because it eases me back in: a list of five titles, and we write 1,000 words.  I knew which one I'd go with the minute I saw it.

Enjoy.  It's nice to be back.

# # # #

Nico

The blade goes in, fast and easy.  Butter and a hot knife.  One hand has a good grip, pushing the knife in-between the ribs, past muscle into the heart and the left lung.  One hand on his mouth.  Can feel his hot breath on my palm.

Usually always goes the same.  They get one good try at a scream with the last breath.  You keep that quiet, you're probably in the clear.  No one going to hear anything after that.  Then you get something husky, more like a cough.  Then kind of a wimper, like they're giving up.  Then it's just air escaping.

This time, that first breath, it's like he was trying to tell me something.  Happens every now and then.  Usually begging for their life.  I've got him in a half a bear hug, right arm pinned down with my right arm that's driving the blade into his chest.  My left arm is covering his mouth, holding his head straight.  

He points with his free left hand.  All over the place.  Off in the distance.  Too dark to tell.  

He says it, but it's lost by the second breath, a hack, a cough, and then that's it. 

He goes down on his knees.  It's all over.  Fast and easy.  

You can hear the blood gurgling out, like a leaky faucet.

I don't feel anything.  Nothing at all.

It's a new place.  I don't much like that.  But it wasn't really up to me.  

I don't much like that it's one of our own, but like they said, the evidence was irrefutable.  Nothing more to be done.

They call it the black lighthouse.  Not too many people know about it.  Not really a lighthouse, either.  It's got lights, not too bright.  Green on one side, red on the other.  Something about shipping channels in the bay.  They explained it, but I don't really care.

We drove over from Ybor, the four of us.  He thought we were coming out here to take care of a connection gone bad.  That's why the new place.  We drive to our usual spots in the Everglades, he'd know something was up.

He wasn't always a sucker.  Maybe he should've guessed.  I don't know.

They say you look around, you can't see the sucker, it's you.

Jonesy

Fucking Nico, knifes him right there on the road.  We're barely out of the goddam car.

What we'd said was we'd get him walking out to the thing with the lights, do it there.  Be out on the rocks, but at least we'd be standing behind that thing obscured from any drunk-ass late night fishing parties, or whatever.  Be harder to see us from the road, too.  

Dumb fucker.  Shouldn't be out here doing one of our own, anyway.  

What, some FBI douchebag comes knocking on your door, first thing you do is freak the fuck out?  Wear a goddam wire?  

A fucking wire.  You know how pissed the they were back in Ybor?  

What kind of sucker wears a wire for the feds?

In our business, the dead kind of sucker, that's what. 

There's always a sucker at the table.  You look around and don't see him, it's you, motherfucker.

Rick

I do feel bad.  Just for a moment.

After all, I got him into this business.  We started with small time dealing in Tampa.  Then smuggled cigarettes and booze coming from Mexico across the Gulf.  A good enough operation that it got the attention of the big bosses in Ybor City.

We graduated to managing dope off fast boats.  Then coke in airplanes.  

Then gambling and whores.

Always enforcement.  Always ready to make a problem disappear.   

We were good at all of it.  Maybe even great.

They're called obscure sector leader beacons.  They signal shallow water and land in a blind spot to the big ships coming around to the Port of Tampa. 

No one is ever here.  Maybe once every year or so to check the lights and the circuit.  Other than that, it is a worthless jut of rock and land, at the end of the salty bay.  

It's a good spot, by what Nico called the black lighthouse.  It'll be deep because of the shipping channel.  I would guess the tiger sharks will get interested at some point.  Maybe not.

Nico's already done it, so I just go back to the trunk to get the plastic sheeting and the duct tape.  

I see him squirming under the knife.  

It's almost like he's trying to say something, though I can't imagine what it would be.

When you find out your best friend is wearing a wire for the FBI, you feel like a sucker.  There's no worse feeling.  And so as soon as I feel regret, I let those emotions go, losing them to the salty breeze coming off the bay.

The sucker is easy to spot.  When you're sitting at the table and you can't pick him out in five seconds, then it is you.

Meyer

Suckers.

The black lighthouse is perfect.  We'll get out of the car and they'll walk me right up to it.  Hides 'em from the road, hides 'em from the water.  You have to walk over some pretty serious rocks and shit to get to it, so it'll take a minute or two.  

Plenty of time.

Agent Dougherty tells me they'll swarm the place.  Tells me I'll be safe.  Says I've given him a lot of good information.  Says I'm a valuable asset.  

Says they're going to invest a lot in me.  Witness relocation.

They tell me I'm making a smart play.  Tell me all the chips are going to come in for me.  I just have to play this hand right.  

And when we step out of the car, those suckers will get what's coming to them.   

The Good Old Days: Me and HRC

This was probably around 1996, 1997:

No, my smile is not always that smirky.  

Okay, it kind of is.  It's why people think I'm being an asshole when I'm not being an asshole.

No, my hair doesn't look like that anymore.  It's thinner and grayer.  By a factor of a lot.

Mrs. Clinton -- she was the First Lady in that picture, before her time as Senator and Secretary of State -- is not ignoring me.  Well.  She is, but she doesn't mean to.  She's talking to my then-wife, whose permission I did NOT get before posting this picture, so I cropped her out.  

They both went to Wellesley, so they had that connection.

Images I Like: My Backyard

My backyard, just after I mowed it.

The Mission at Tapalpa Jalisco

Chuck Wendig has another flash fiction challenge at Terribleminds.  This time it's a story in three sentences, under 100 words.  

I ususally think these challenges are a lot harder than his usual challenges -- 1,000 words and a usually some kind of prompt.  

If you hadn't noticed, I like to embellish on detail -- probably a Wendig-designated sin -- so keeping it short and sweet is pretty tough.  Here's my submission.  81 words, not bad.  

Be sure and read the other submissions (in the comments of Chuck's challenge post); they're always entertaining.

# # # # 

The bullets rain in to the old bell tower, the air sprays with bricks chipped at the openings, and it all ricochets with a flat, sad sound off the bells; the riflemen are getting better faster.  One of them will get lucky soon enough.  Bradford may still come through with lawyers, guns or money, but not matter what, the long road that started on a desperate patch of land outside Fort Smith will end here at the lonely mission of Tapalpa Jalisco.

photo credit: Hugo Vázquez

Nora Ephron: RIP

The writer and director Nora Ephron died.  She was 71.  

I like to think tha the movies which had the biggest impact on my youth and early adulthood were action-packed thrillers like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or "Star Wars."  My connection to the James Bond film franchise was built through my father, who always loved the movies.  

But the real experience of movies are that they are enjoyed culturally, that you are able to talk about them with other people, make references and others take the cues.  

The real cultural film phenomenon of my generation was almost assuredly "When Harry Met Sally," the romantic comedy with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.  It came out the year I graduated high school, and here more than 20 years later, you still can't say "I'll have what she's having" without someone immediately saying "When Harry Met Sally" immediately after.  

There's a little more than a ten-year age difference between me and Duncan.  I don't know if she would categorize it as a generational touchstone, but for her, that movie would be the Ephron-directed movie that came out almost ten years later, "You've Got Mail," starring Tom Hanks and also Meg Ryan.  If I'm wrong about that, then it's 1993's "Sleepless in Seattle," another Hanks/Ryan movie Ephron wrote and directed.

The idea of writing for film -- or a play -- has always fascinated me.  I've always wanted to try it, but I have no idea where I'd start.  It seems like it would be a lot more complicated, a lot more technical (maybe; again, I really don't know).  I still love Indiana Jones and Star Wars, but you can bet if I ever try, I'll have the work and life of Nora Ephron on my mind.

Crooked Tree

I'm back.  

Kind of.  I took a bit of a break from the fiction, and these challenges, which I missed.  But like I said, I'm back.

So now here's more flash fiction from Chuck Wendig at Terribleminds.  He's had several over the last couple of months -- several I wish I'd done -- and I just didn't.  Too bad for me.  

Anyway, you know the rules -- 1,000 words or less, he sets the parameters.

This time the subject is an image he took of a crooked tree in the fog.  Got a story I'd had swirling for a bit going... 

Enjoy.  And thanks for coming back and reading.

# # # #

Roy Lee Raven was never supposed to make it to Florida.  

The retired State Trooper was supposed to be catfish food beneath the Big Dam Bridge, somewhere between Murray Park on one side of the Arkansas River, Cooks Landing on the other.  Good Lord willing, his body would never wash ashore downstream around Rebsamen.

But here he was, the old beach house that used to belong to his dead alcoholic brother.  Standing in the dark, duffle bag on the floor.  The dust on the covered furniture he stirred up opening the door made him cough, reminded him he was still alive.  Absently, he could hear the crash of the waves on the beach.  Some part of his brain registered the sound of the wind blowing through a nearby row of palms.  It was the heat of the day, and though the sweat glistened and trickled down his skin, he didn't move.  The sun burned at the edges of the windows where the tape holding the trash bags had peeled back.  He ignored it.

Roy Lee stood motionless and stared. 

But his mind was not in the present.  It was at the crooked tree on the fog-covered hillside.

That tree.

He was supposed to be dead.  Yet life, and the memory of that tree, persisted even now in the unlikliest of places.

There was the tree.  The crooked damn tree.  

It was a spring day in Arkansas, beautiful, the most beautiful time of year there.  Raven still considered that -- spring in Arkansas, and it was so dreary and cold when he got the call.  

There'd been a murder -- a terrible, gruesome murder in a small northwest Arkansas town, a place in the old, rolling hills south of Harrison and Yellville, just north of the Buffalo River.  There, off Arkansas Highway 123 there's a little rising bump in the road called Hasty.  

Near Hasty is a crooked tree.    

A crooked tree, bent low, cold in the fog of an early spring morning.  

Roy Lee sees it only every time he closes his eyes to sleep at night, only every time he blinks. 

Then again, the memory is recent enough.  Five years.  

At the crooked tree there just wasn't enough evidence.  In fact, there was no evidence.  Just the Mayor of Harrison's daughter tied to it like a tragic, awful figurehead on a ship at sea.  Though she had long been dead, the naked girl still looked cold, raw in the morning fog. 

There were no fingerprints, no fibers.  She had not been raped, which everyone took as a quiet consolation, but that also meant no semen samples.  

The murderer had left only one clue: the word Raven written in a delicate, flowing script in the girl's own blood across the porcelain skin of her chest, just below her clavicle, above her breasts.  The killer had used, they learned later, an actual quill -- a feather, in fact, from a raven.  Her head, unencumbered by the synthetic climbing rope which bound her arms behind her, her ankles, and her legs and torso to the tree, lay forward, pulled by gravity.  

The killer murdered her before tying her to the tree -- making the act of actually tying the ninety-five pound teen something of a macabre accomplishment.  Though no one disputed this fact, the reasons why differed among the experts, including Roy Lee.  Most believed it was because the killer used the girl to participate in some twisted ritual.  Others though -- like Roy Lee -- believed the murderer did it so that he could open her mouth, leave it open as rigor mortis set in, freezing it in place.

The girl, tied to the crooked tree, looking down in the fog, appeared to be screaming.  

Screaming, perhaps, the word Raven.

Or the name.  Roy Lee Raven.  An old cop with a long list of enemies he'd shut down or locked up.

Roy Lee Raven, standing in the beachside cottage his dead brother left to him.  

A cop with a nearly flawless record.  Nearly.

He knew he'd been a suspect, but not for long.  He'd been a hundred and fifty miles away at the time Megan Marley Whitcomb had died.  Still, his talk with Internal Affairs was a career low point.

The young girl's body was eventually cut down, and buried properly.  

He had been thinking of retirement, anyway.  Then his brother was still alive, but not doing well.  Just before the crooked tree, he'd begun to devise a rescue plan.  

After the crooked tree, it all seemed to fall apart.

Roy Lee had concocted a bullshit retirement story for his Trooper colleagues.  Was going to go to Florida, live in his brother's house, do some fishing.  

The lie became the truth when at the edge of the Big Dam Bridge, he felt fear.  Doubt.  Weakness. 

And so he made his way to Florida, and the little house, with the dust on the furniture covers, gathering for three years, now.  Palms blowing in the wind down the street, waves crashing on a shore that may as well have been a world away.  Sun shining in the edges of the taped up windows.  Creaking rafters and that Florida summer heat, heat that makes you feel like your bones are sweating.

A lifetime in policing, a lifetime of noticing the small things.  Roy Lee noticed none of it.

He could only see the piece of parchment, delicately taped to the center of the sliding glass door across the house from where he stood, directly in his line of vision.  Beyond it, the beach and the ocean he didn't even see.  A welcome card of sorts.

Roy Lee blinked, and again he saw the crooked tree, the awful, crooked tree.  And the screaming, frozen face of Megan Marley Whitcomb and the word -- the name, the message -- scripted on her chest.  

When he opened his eyes, the paper was still there.  The same red, awful script.

And the same name.

Raven.