#fridayflash: knowing

It's like noticing that the light has turned greenish and realising that it will probably rain. It's like... it's like putting your hand on the hood of a car, and knowing from the temperature that the engine was turned off only recently.

But it's more than that. It's like hearing your boyfriend say "I love you" on the phone and knowing that the next time you meet in person, you'll be talking about breaking up. Or watching your five-year-old run up to you after swimming lessons and just knowing that she finally learned how to float today.

It's like none of those things. And the frustrating part is, it's uncontrollable. It comes and goes.

Usually the only hint that a bout of it is coming on is music in my head. I'll wake up in the morning with a song I never liked and haven't heard in years buzzing around my skull. Last Monday I woke up with "One on One" by Hall & Oates on the old cerebral jukebox.

The first thing I thought was, "Gah! Punch up the Black Flag playlist on the phone now now NOW!"

The second thing was, "Shit. It's happening again."

Nothing happened on the drive in to work, but as soon as I walked in and saw Kevin's back, I knew. He was leaning against the kitchenette wall, talking to some other people. I couldn't see their faces, but then Bernadette leaned around the entrance and said, "Hi Sheila!". I said, "So Gina said yes then, Kevin?"

And Kevin turned around and grinned and held up the hand with his engagement ring on it. "Yes on Friday, got the rings on Saturday," he said.

"Congratulations!" I said, and listened to the usual chatter about the date and the plans and booking the banquet hall and the honeymoon.

That's how they work, usually. It just seems like a regular, banal, communication thing, right?

Except Kevin came up to my desk at lunchtime, and  quietly asked how I knew his girlfriend's name was Gina. It's a good question. Hardly anyone knew for certain that he had a girlfriend, never mind her name. He's a pretty private person.

I didn't have an answer for him, so I just frowned and said he must have mentioned it at some point. Believe me, I've gotten pretty good at that frown over the years.

Kevin looked like he was going to start arguing with me, but then Tom from accounting came up to ask him something, and he sort of shook it off.

So I'm safe again, at least unless someone really notices that no-one actually said "marriage" or "engagement" or "congratulations" while I was within earshot.

It's like... it's like walking into a room that's empty, and you didn't see or hear anyone leave, but you know a huge argument just happened right before you got there.

Usually it's changes to relationships that I pick up on, even when I don't know the relationship exists. Marriages, divorces, deaths, pregnancies. The worst time was probably when I asked my next-door neighbour if she was feeling okay, two hours before she had a miscarriage. She was only three months along, wasn't showing yet, and her and her husband had decided they weren't going to tell anyone for as long as possible. They'd been trying to conceive for a long time. She met me on the sidewalk when she got out of the hospital and started screaming at me that I caused the miscarriage by suggesting it to her. Her husband accused me of reading their mail. I can understand why they got upset, but it was still scary.

It's like your spouse covering your eyes and saying, "Guess what I got you for your birthday?" and you guess right on the first try. It's like guessing exactly the right number of jellybeans in the jar.

I've been accused of stalking a few times. That's scary too, but mostly because I can't imagine half the stuff I pick up on being available even to a very dedicated stalker. The few times I've tried to explain it to people, they've told me that it's just déjà vu and I'm imagining things. That doesn't explain things like knowing Kevin's girlfriend's name, though.

There's a bookshop I like to go to on Fridays after work. They sell new and used, have a small but very cool selection, and they have a café at the front with the best gelato in the whole city.

There's this cute guy who works the café counter most Fridays. The afternoon I bought Punk is a Four Letter Word, I got some vanilla gelato and a coffee and tried pouring a little of the coffee over the gelato, like I saw in a French movie a long time ago. I sat there and ate my ice cream and read my book, and it turns out the cute guy is a huge Screeching Weasel fan, same as me, so we got talking about music and books and all sorts of stuff. Now we always talk for at least half an hour every Friday.

I'd never ask him out, because I know people who work retail can wind up getting hit on more than a Mexican piñata, but I always thought I'd love it if he asked me.

It's like walking into your apartment and realising you've been robbed before it registers which things are missing.

The cute guy wasn't there today, for the first Friday in eons. The woman behind the counter was completely friendly and polite, and everyone else in the shop acted fine, but I just know he's not coming back, and I just know it's not because he quit or got fired. I can never put my finger on the specifics before the news actually arrives. The mood in the shop... it's entirely possible that they don't have the news themselves yet.

It's like getting punched in the stomach by a ghost.

#fridayflash: do you remember me?

Have you forgotten me? I was your downstairs neighbour about ten years ago. Remember?

We both lived in that old house on that little cul-de-sac. Most of the road maps showed it as a through street, and cabbies were always getting lost on the way to pick one or the other of us up.

Ah, you remember the street. I knew you would!

I had that gorgeous Doberman pinscher you used to check up on when I left him in the back yard. Do you know my next landlord made me get rid of him? Just because he knocked over and bit a three-year-old who lived on the street. Poor doggie.

Wasn't the landlady awful? I mean the one who owned the house we used to share. What, you liked her? Oh, right, you always took her side about things. I remember you called her and ratted on me when I knocked down the wall between the dining room and the living room. It's okay, I'm not bitter. You two always insisted that renters couldn't make renovations, which is crazy, because, you know, it's a domicile, and you can decorate where you live.

I went by the house once after I moved out and saw the landlady tore down the detached garage. Wait, she actually told you the back entrance I put in it made it structurally unsound? That's complete and utter garbage, I never... look, it wasn't me who told the raccoon family to go live in the garage. I'm not exactly a wild animal wrangler.

Before we get carried away with that, there is one thing I wanted to ask you about. It's why I stopped you. I see you own a car now, right? This one is yours? So if you're not as anti-car as you made yourself out to be when you lived there... I mean, don't you feel like a hypocrite for reporting me to the city when I left the car battery on the front lawn? Seriously. I suppose you thought I should leave it in my living room or something.

Wait! Don't go! There's one other thing I never understood. You used to go to lots of concerts, right? You like music? I remember one time when we were discussing the baby gate I put across the front entrance I saw that you had two big bookshelves, one with LPs and one with CDs. So how come you were always getting at me to turn down my music? No. No, I do not believe that. If “MacArthur Park” sounds bad when you can hear it over your vacuum cleaner, then it's you who need to get a new vacuum cleaner. That's a classic song, right there. You need to turn it up so you can hear all the sounds.

I said, I'm not bitter. There are just things I need to know, come to terms with things, you know? It seems to me that you're a very harsh person. You should learn a little tolerance, you know, learn that not everyone has the same values as you. We all have to live together in this world.

Fine. Leave then. I don't think you realise how nasty you are. I'm not bitter, not at all, just trying to integrate the past with the present, and here you are, giving me attitude. You haven't grown at all.

Good-bye and have a good life. I mean that.

#fridayflash: newsmagazine story v2

This is the "happy" version of the same story I wrote for #fridayflash last week. It's more like what I originally had in mind when I got the idea, but overall I think it wound up being a good exercise doing the two different versions.

May 2068: small-town life in the late 21st century

HORNPAYNE, ON — Jane Fenton wags her finger at me. "It won't be the first time there were no physical roads into this town," she says.

The first road was built in 1958, over a hundred years ago. Before that, the only way in or out of Hornpayne was by rail. Rail was why the town was built to begin with — the town marks the farthest point between the major rail stations to the west and south that a diesel engine can go before it has to be refuelled. By the turn of the century, Hornpayne boasted not only rail and road access, but an airport as well. More people worked for the local logging company than the railway that founded the town.

The rail, the road, and eventually the airport will all be phased out, because as of tomorrow Hornpayne is officially switching from being a railway division point to a teleportation service hub.

"That was one of the perks of moving here," adds Roger Fenton, Jane's husband. "This town had the highest teaching salaries in the province. Basically it was isolation pay." He grins.

We're sitting around their kitchen table, drinking coffee. Roger and Jane have lived in this town for their entire marriage — fifty-two years next month. Jane worked for CN Rail, and Roger was an English and History teacher at the local high school. They are Hornpayne's oldest residents.

Tomorrow, Jane will come out of retirement for one day to help officially shut down the railway and start up the teleportation maintenance office. "There's a comment field on all of the rolling stock maintenance logs," she laughs. "I'm half-curious and half-dreading what people are going to enter for the last time they have to fill them in!"

I ask if there's going to be any kind of "last train" ceremony, similar to the "last spike" events that marked the building of the railway in the nineteenth century.

"We're having a waffle breakfast," says Roger. "It's a working day, but the community thought it would be a nice way for the crew to start the new work. Then Jane will give that speech she's been working on, she'll collect the old logs and hand out the new task lists, and people will start heading out to do their jobs." He sips his coffee. "Then the retired stiffs like me will help clean up from the breakfast."

"Once you're done making your video," says Jane. Since retiring from teaching, Roger has become the town's archivist, and got special permission from Teleport Inc. to record the first-day events for posterity.

Aren't they worried about the town being so dependent on employment from a foreign company? Teleport Inc. is based in Australia.

Roger shrugs. "The whole idea of 'foreign' has been radically redefined in the last hundred years," he says. "Besides, thanks to the Americans in the last century, Canadians are used to having a branch plant economy and making it work."

The Hornpayne maintenance division will be responsible for the maintenance of all of the pad hubs on the North American continent. "We're in a great location," says Jane. "We're in the Eastern time zone, but just barely. So people can work regular day hours and cover the whole territory without getting too much pad lag." The geographical advantage is extra-appropriate, she points out, since it was for the Canadian rail system that time zones were invented.

Do they think other businesses will be promoted by the pad maintenance hub being here?

"Definitely," says Roger. "Anyone who likes the great outdoors would love to come here as a tourist, winter or summer. People love to fish and swim here in the summer, and ski or snowmobile in the winter."

"There's the commuter aspect too," says Jane. "Pads mean you can live anywhere. People who like the salaries of big-city jobs but not the lifestyle can live here and commute easily." She pours herself more coffee and shakes her head in wonder. "Everyone who lives near a pad has a commute time of less than twenty minutes. Even if they're going to the other side of the world. Who'd have thought we'd see the day?"

"I'll sort of miss it, though," says Roger. "Travelling."

"What do you mean?" says Jane. "We're going to Berlin next month."

"Oh visiting, sure, but travelling... you know, like the time we took the train from here to Vancouver... those days are gone," says Roger. "You know — watching the world go by while you sit at a window and drink your cocktail. And air travel — people are going to miss that, you watch."

Jane shrugs and sips her coffee. "Can't stop progress," she says. "Maybe if you're lucky, you can nudge it a little so it doesn't run you over, but that's about it."

#fridayflash: newsmagazine story

The #fridayflash after this, I wrote the "happy" version of this story as I had originally intended. It was a good exercise to do both versions.

May 2068: Is small-town Canada disappearing?

HORNPAYNE, ON — "This is nothing," Jane Fenton tells me. "You should hear the stories about living here before they built the road."

The road was built in 1980, almost ninety years ago. Before that, the only way in or out of Hornpayne was by rail. Rail was why the town was built to begin with — the town marks the farthest point between the major rail stations to the west and south that a diesel engine can go before it has to be refuelled. At its height at the turn of the century, Hornpayne boasted not only rail and road access, but an airport as well.

"We used to have over twelve hundred people living here," adds Roger Fenton, Jane's husband. We're sitting around their kitchen table, drinking coffee. Roger and Jane have lived in this town for their entire marriage — fifty-two years next month. They are Hornpayne's oldest residents. Tomorrow, they will be the first family to be teleported out as the town officially shuts down and quietly wipes itself off the map.

They are philosophical about the changes. "This place was founded as a railway division point," says Roger. "Sure, other industries grew up here, like the logging, but now that there's no more rail..." He trails off and sips at his coffee.

Jane tries to fill in the silence. "Back in the early 1900s, when the town was founded, it was to support a relatively new technology — rail — in a relatively new country. Canada was only forty years old when Hornpayne was established. Now we're living through another major period of technological change. Vat-grown lumber means the logging industry has been killed off, and teleportation means no more rail or air travel."

"This is a wonderful place in the summer," Roger says. "Lots of boating, swimming, fishing... and in the winter, people ski and snowmobile all over. Great place for winter sports."

"But it does get cold," says Jane.

Roger shrugs. "It's Canada," he says. "It gets cold."

It's the cold that ultimately drove the decision to abandon Hornpayne. Teleportation pads don't work in weather colder than -12 Celsius, and even since global warming took effect the town has seen weeks each winter with temperatures colder than -20. The population is too small to justify having more than one indoor pad hub, but its layout makes walking to a hub in the depths of winter impractical. It's too small, too closely structured around the now-obsolete petroleum lifestyle.

Tomorrow, Roger's and Jane's neighbours will help them load the belongings they haven't already packed onto transport skids. First, their possessions will go into the specially-equipped, petrol-burning transport truck sitting in their driveway. The truck will be driven to the pad hub by a member of the relocation crew. Roger and Jane were offered a lift in a friend's car, but have decided they will walk the short distance to the hub instead.

"It's a way of saying good-bye," says Jane. "You know, see everything properly one last time."

When the truck gets to the hub, its cargo will be off-loaded onto the transport pad and sent to Sault Ste. Marie, where the Fentons have chosen to re-locate. They were married there, and have adult children who live in the area.

Roger and Jane will use the people-departure pad to follow their belongings to the Sault. Meanwhile, the transport truck will be pulling into their next-door neighbour's driveway to be loaded with another household's worth of belongings.

Jane starts to take a sip of coffee, then sets the mug down and says, "Oh! I almost forgot. I have cookies to use up. Please have some with us."

She rises and pulls a bag of cookies out of an otherwise-empty kitchen cupboard.

"It's always hard with moving," says Roger. "I remember the night we moved in here, we got into town after all the stores had closed and we couldn't get groceries until the next morning."

There are six chocolate chip cookies left in the bag. Jane puts two in front of each of us. "What about breakfast for tomorrow?" I ask. "By the time you get your things to your new house, it'll be almost lunchtime."

Jane smiles. "The community is putting on a waffle breakfast at the hub," she says. "I guess we'll get something to eat before we step on the pads. The relocation people said they'd do the cleaning up for us."

The pad hub will remain in place only long enough to secure the buildings and ensure nothing hazardous to the local environment has been left out in the open. The last load the petrol-burning transport truck will carry in Hornpayne will be the dismantled pad hub. Its driver will use the soon-to-be decommissioned highway to return to the relocation base in Thunder Bay.

I ask the Fentons what they think will happen to the town in the future.

"People still might come up here in the summer," says Jane.

Roger grunts and shakes his head. "Nobody uses cars anymore," he says. "Hardly anybody uses snowmobiles anymore, and they don't have the range of a car anyhow. Air travel is gone, even if the landing strip at the airport was maintained, which it won't be..." He sips his coffee, shakes his head again. "Nope," he says. "No-one will come here anymore."

"It's a pity," says Jane. "It's such a beautiful town."

#fridayflash: speed

I started my career as an emergency room doctor, and during my tenure at St. Jude's General, I learned something interesting: it's not whether or not you killed someone, it's how quickly you do it that decides what the police charge you with, if indeed they charge you with anything at all.

Take this example: a group of young men get into a fight, and one stomps on another's head. The victim is taken to an emergency room, some sawbones like me does triage, nothing's broken, just a concussion. Hooray, right? Not really. We could miss slow-moving damage that will worsen and eventually kill. It might take years. It might not even get linked to the original injury.

On the other hand, if the victim gets, say, a brain haemorrhage the same night, the poor youth who did the stomping could be looking at doing time for aggravated assault. Or manslaughter. Or even murder.

It all depends on how quickly the one who got stomped dies, you see.

St. Jude's was within spitting distance of some rough neighbourhoods, and so I had plenty of cases with which to come up with this observation. The police — and the hoods — got to know me by name. There was one year where I was spending almost as much time in suits as witness for the Crown as I was in scrubs trying to stitch patients back together.

Now that I've explained that, it will be easier for you to understand my more recent accomplishments.

I freelance, and like most freelancers in my current line of work I have a moniker, a title which both helps explain to potential clients what they can expect, and which explains to the competition whether I am an actual threat or not. Truth be told, I don't really have any competition. I work in a rather specialised sub-section of the field. Most of the competition go by monikers like The Ice Man and The Cleaner. I am known as The Artist.

There are only two services I offer: straight consulting or work for hire. The latter is more lucrative, but I prefer the former. It's less risky for me, and although the fee is quite a lot less I can get through several consultancies in a single day. With work for hire, on the other hand, I almost always wind up getting slightly underpaid. It's my own fault. I spend more time planning and doing post-project cleanup than I estimate and charge for.

You see, if a client hires me, it's not necessarily that they want someone dead. The Ice Man, The Cleaner, and a whole host of other common-garden-variety assassins will take care of that for them. They'll be a lot cheaper than I am, too, and they'll also assume a lot more of the risk. Killing someone outright, quickly, is a very risky enterprise, even for a seasoned professional.

No, if it's my name being uttered during the handshake contract, it means that the client desires to make someone physically suffer. Usually it's part of the job to ensure they will die of their injuries, eventually, but there are a lot of variables to consider for each project. How much suffering. How long. Whether or not they will retain the capability to communicate. How disfigured they will be. How much medical science can help them.

It may sound formulaic, but every single time it's something fresh. Sometimes the client doesn't wish their main victim to be the contract target — often my job is to focus on a spouse or child so that someone else can watch them helplessly while they endure whatever's been agreed to. Jobs like that take a certain type of delicacy. It helps immensely to know triage and diagnosis procedures, so that the individuals involved can ride the roller coaster of rising hope followed by crushing despair.

It's not all about other people, though. This job has been an immense benefit to my education and self-study. Back when I worked shifts at the hospital, keeping up with the medical journals was a chore that invaded my days off. Now I can often bill for it as research.

Now, by this time I'm sure you're wondering why I'm telling you all this. Confidentiality, after all, is an even more important aspect of my work than it was back when I had to honour my doctor-patient relationships.

Let's just pause the conversation for a moment, shall we? Beautiful architecture here. They don't make public buildings like they used to.

Have you ever had a chance to take a close look at that stairway? Come, let's walk over... ever seen that cherub up there? It's the only mythical creature that sculptor ever carved. He specialised in statues and busts of historical figures. Politicians, business leaders, and so on. No doctors though.

I love the details on the apple the cherub's holding, see it? Lean over... no, a little more...

Can you hear me? Can you tell me your name? Here, I'm going to get out a penlight I brought with me... try and follow the beam of light with your eyes.

Hrm. You can. You're supposed to collapse into a persistent vegetative state. At worst, you should be dead outright. I'll get less money for that, but the risk will be greatly reduced.

Good job I brought my walking stick with me tonight.

#fridayflash: amazons vs. aliens

"OHMIGOD! Fifty per cent off everything! We have to check it out!" Cyndy pulled on Margaret's sleeve.

Margaret sighed. "Le Citadel never has anything in my size."

"Oh please, you are so not fat. You need to get a better body image." Cyndy pushed open the shop door and half-led, half-pulled Margaret inside.

"Just because I'm not fat doesn't mean they have anything in my size," Margaret muttered. She ducked under a sale sign hanging from the ceiling, and saw a shop clerk roll her eyes and pointedly turn away from her.

"SO CUTE!!!!" Cyndy flipped through a rack of white mini-skirts with little pink flowers appliqued on them. "You've got a point about the sizes. All the 0s and 2s are gone." She took a skirt off the rack and held it up to her hips. "The 4 looks small, though." She scampered off towards the changerooms, randomly stopping at clothing racks to choose more items.

Margaret caught the eye of a clerk who was not quick enough to turn away. "So what is the biggest size you carry here?"

"Ten," said the clerk. "We have a men's section over there," she added, pointing.

"Thanks," said Margaret. "I'll keep that in mind if I'm ever shopping with a guy."

"So you don't ever dress like.... you know...." the shop clerk trailed off and bit her lip.

Margaret sighed. "I'm cis," she said. "I'm just a tall woman. Born this way and everything."

"Ew," said the clerk, then covered her mouth. "Sorry."

"Happens all the time. Is there anywhere to sit in here?"

"By the changerooms."

Always by the bloody changerooms, thought Margaret.
 

"I don't see what you're so bitchy about," said Cyndy while they waited in line at the cash.

"You took an hour and a half by the clock, and every time I said I'd meet you at the bookshop you said not to go because you were almost done."

"I kept finding stuff."

"Uh huh."

"You know, you can't get mad at people for thinking you're a guy if you keep acting like one."

"Maybe in this particular scenario guys don't act like this because they're guys."

Cyndy huffed and caught the eye of a clerk at a free checkout counter. Margaret went to wait for her by the exit. She knew from experience that Cyndy would need to be herded out before she found more bargains between the checkout and the door.

She noticed that the street had emptied of people and cars since they'd gone in the store. It had got dark out too. Maybe a thunderstorm was about to start.

Cyndy squealed behind her. "The jewelry is on sale too! And it doesn't come in sizes! You should get yourself a treat."

"We've got reservations at the restaurant, Cyndy."

"It doesn't take ten minutes to get there!"

"It's going to rain any second now."

Cyndy pouted and set the jewelry down on the bottom of the jewelry stand.

Outside, it became obvious that it wasn't just the threat of rain keeping people off the street. Margaret looked up at the sky, then stopped and pointed. "That's not a thundercloud. That's —"

Two red, glowing circles appeared above their heads, and Margaret found herself being pulled up into the air. A couple of metres away she could see Cyndy being pulled up in her own red beam of light. Cyndy was waving her arms and kicking her legs, and, judging from the look on her face, probably screaming too. The tips of Cyndy's fingers touched the edge of the red light and got... stuck somehow on the outside of the beam. The rest of Cyndy kept floating up, parallel with Margaret's own ascent. Margaret saw Cyndy hold up the hand with the missing fingertips and scream even more.

Margaret had kept still since the red beam had engulfed her and started pulling her towards the dark grey whatever-it-was. All those years of never having enough room to stretch out or move the way she wanted to had made her self-conscious about excessive motion.

The red beams pulled them through the round holes in the grey whatever-it-was. Margaret was dropped onto a metal floor, a wall between her and Cyndy. She bent her knees as the pull of the red beam vanished and gravity took hold of her again, and managed to land in a semi-crouch. To her left she heard a muffled clang and imagined that was Cyndy falling onto the floor.

Something made a groaning sound behind her. Margaret whipped around, and saw that the hatch of the portal she had been pulled through was starting to close.

The portal's hatch had a bar attached to it, not so much a handle as something that resembled a towel rack. Margaret squatted her broad hips, supported by legs with muscles built up from years on the girl's intramural rugby team. She sprang for the bar just as the hatch became horizontal.

She looked down, and was surprised to see that the ship (if that's what it was) was closer to the ground than when she had been caught in the beam, and was still lowering. It's bracing itself to take off, just like I just did, she thought. She hung from the hatch until the angle was so steep she worried she might get caught between it and the edge of the portal, then let go.

She still had to fall about five metres, but that was much less than the original distance from the ground to the ship. She landed on the street, and let her knees buckle to absorb the impact, grateful that she was wearing her usual flat shoes. Still, she fell forward with the momentum and skinned her hands and forearms badly on the asphalt. She looked up at the ship just in time to see the hatches crunch shut.

Margaret ran for the nearest shelter, back into the Le Citadel shop. In the same moment that she pulled the door shut behind her, the pavement outside rippled like water on a pond caught in a gust of wind. The ship rose into the air and vanished.

"Are you all right?" said someone behind her.

"For all intents and purposes," said Margaret, holding out her scraped hands. "Got a first aid kit?"

"In the back." The clerk left.

"What about your friend?" It was one of the women who had been standing in the checkout line behind Cyndy. Her face and hair were different, but in body shape and size they could have been twins.

Margaret turned to look into the street, now slowly filling with people. Somewhere in the distance there were sirens wailing. "I guess for once there was an advantage to being a big girl."

what happened to columbine

The American National Public Radio (NPR) service recently ran a short story contest called Three Minute Fiction. The idea was to write a story that began with that week's sentence prompt. Since you have to be an American resident to enter, I couldn't throw my story into the ring, but I did write one for the eighth and final prompt.

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.

We know this because the door was left unlocked, and her husband got home last. He is certain that he locked the door after he let himself in. The placing of the book on the table is certain as well: it was found there, and the amount of dust under it is equal to the amount of dust on the rest of the table. The bookmark was probably placed on top of the book, but it was found on the floor, under the table. From this it was deduced that the bookmark fell as she walked through the door.

She left without putting a coat on. All of her overcoats were accounted for when the inventory of her belongings was made. We also learned that she is wearing a pair of low-profile canvas sneakers. She wore them around the house as slippers, but also in the back garden or to pick up the mail from the mailbox at the end of the driveway. They would be insufficient for the cold night temperatures at this time of year, but comfortable enough during the day.

She did not take any items of clothing with her over and above what she was wearing today. She was last seen wearing jeans, a blue t-shirt, and a black cotton cardigan. Her husband says that was her usual after-work outfit.

Her purse is still sitting in the front hall closet, but her wallet is missing. This is a good sign. It may mean that she wanted to have a means with which to pay for things, and points away from suicide.

Her car is still in the driveway, and her set of car keys are still hanging from the rack by the front door.

Her husband says their marriage was sound and they had been happy together. Both of them had decent incomes, and they hadn't had any major disagreements for about a year. The last disagreement was when she bought herself a new car. She wanted a compact because she had to drive downtown for work, and he wanted her to get an SUV for safety. In the end she bought the compact, and the husband says he dropped the issue after she made the final decision. Since the car was left behind it seems insignificant.

There is no suspicion of foul play at this time.

She didn't leave a note, and her husband didn't hear her say anything about leaving. He vaguely remembers hearing the front door open and shut, probably around six-thirty. He didn't draw any conclusions from this; it was normal for her to check the mailbox while dinner was cooking. When he went to check on the food himself it occurred to him that he'd heard the door about half an hour before he got up, and it didn't feel like she'd returned to the house. He searched the house for her, then checked the front and back yards.

Then he checked for her purse, and saw the wallet was missing, so he figured she'd gone to run an errand at the convenience store on the corner. He started to get worried when he'd finished dinner and she still hadn't returned.

By the way, the book on the table is a paperback copy of The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie. The husband says that it was her favourite book, and that she had read it several times over the course of their marriage. He has never read the book himself.

#fridayflash: light

In truth he'd been sketching a still life in his cottage all that evening, but the sheriff declared that he had been seen stealing the saddle, so he was thrown in prison until he had served his time and paid back the debt. He had no family to back him, and no source of income in prison. Effectively he was locked away for life.

He had no money to buy candles from the prison warden, and his cell had no windows. He was in darkness all the time. Once a day (he hoped it was once a day; it is hard to tell when one is hungry and thirsty all the time), the flap at the bottom of his cell's door would slide open, and a guard would push a bowl of gruel forward through the dim shaft of light. The flap would be closed as soon as the bowl was within the cell, and he learned to run towards the light as soon as he heard the flap being slid back, because he had to compete with the rats for the gruel. He had to eat the gruel in about ten minutes and place the bowl against the door-flap for collection. If he failed to do so, there would be no bowl the following day.

He discovered within an hour of his incarceration that he was not really alone with the rats in the cell. The wall opposite his cot had iron manacles bolted to it, and the dessicated body of the cell's last human inhabitant still hung from them. He decided it was a blessing that the walls were too smooth for even the rats to climb up, and the corpse was too dry to stink. Much.

He decided to name the dead prisoner Richard.

When he wasn't busy collecting gruel-bowls or trying to avoid bumping into Richard as he paced his cell, he would lay on his cot with the fleas and the lice and think of light.

He remembered sketching a poppy field in the vivid autumn gold of a late afternoon.

He remembered running with his box of artist's tools to the pasture, just before dawn, so he could draw the sheep grazing as the sun rose.

He remembered moving his chair until the highlights and shadows from the hearth-fire were just right. That was for the still life he was working on the night before he was arrested. He remembered he was especially proud of how he had captured the reflections on the pewter tankard.

In a dream he walked through the local apple-orchard at midday. He found a ripe apple, picked it, and bit into it. When he awoke, the after-taste in his mouth was that of gruel, and that was when he realised he had been locked away for a very long time.

He sat on the edge of his cot and concentrated on feeling where the other objects in the room were, rather than trying to see in the eternal dark. The wall opposite the cell door was easy; it was colder in that direction. The wall with the door in it was not only warmer, but had a different echo, because some of the stone wall was replaced by wooden door. The wall with Richard on it was different again. He practised, and eventually he could rise from his cot and know exactly where Richard was without touching him.

Richard gave a sudden lurch about half an hour after bowl-collection one day. He gingerly inspected his cell-mate and discovered that the flesh on his forearms had come away, causing Richard's arms to slide down in the manacles until the wider and still-intact collection of hand-bones caught him. He felt the rats under his feet and deduced from their movements that they were feeding on the fallen Richard-jerky.

"I hope you make them ill," he said aloud to his friend. It was the first time he had spoken aloud since he had been imprisoned, and his voice came out somewhere between a croak and a whisper.

After that he decided to tell Richard stories, both to help keep his voice and to pass the time. The poor man had been in prison longer than he had — surely even out-of-date news would amuse him.

The village gossip got re-told so many times even he got sick of it, so he began to tell Richard about drawing. He started by apologising for being a bore, but Richard said nothing about stopping, so that encouraged him.

"My old master explained it very well," he said. "People think it's about drawing what's in front of you, but that's not true. What you really want to aim for is to represent the light. I was known for my natural-light landscapes, but lately I'd been practising working with firelight. It's a bit harder, because it's not steady. It moves around. You see this lovely gleam or shadow, and you grab your chalks and start to represent it, and the fire dies down or someone puts another log on, and the light changes entirely again. It's the same thing with candles or lamps. My old master used to keep several candles handy and burn them down a finger-width at a time to keep things consistent."

Richard didn't comment, but he seemed to enjoy listening.

He was asleep on his cot when the running and shouting came close enough to hear. He started — it was strange to hear a voice that wasn't his own — but the voices came closer and he could make out what they were saying.

"Down with the tyrants! Free all the prisoners! Liberate our brothers!"

He rose from his cot and approached the door, wondering what on earth they were going on about.

"Don't worry," he told Richard. "I'll get it sorted."

Someone pounded on his door, and he started back, crying out. "Brace yourself, Richard," he said. "I think we're in for a brawl."

"Is anyone in there?" someone shouted on the other side of the door. "Can anyone hear me?"

"We mean no harm!" he called back. "Please, we are not your enemy!"

"There's some in this one!" he heard, and then cracking, creaking sounds, as if they were applying crowbars to the door.

He saw a vivid gold rectangle outline where the door was supposed to be, and realised they were breaking into his home. He thought of hiding under the cot, but it was too low to the ground for that.

With a crash the door gave way and fell to the floor. He sank to the ground, blinded by the lamps in the corridor and the glaring torches held by the men standing without.

"We're here to rescue you," one said, walking over the door, torch in hand.

But he covered his face with his hands and screamed.

"Put me back in the dark!"

#fridayflash: the purple mantle

I'm taking an on-line writing workshop right now, where we write to random prompts provided by the facilitator (Cary Tennis). Two weeks ago the prompt he chose had already been used recently, so he chose a second one. I managed to work both of them into this H.P. Lovecraft-type story.

I learned from writing this that there's a reason why people often write to formula — it's easy to do!

Prompts: I wish to tell the truth but am afraid. OR We had drinks and then went up to her room.

---

I wish to tell the truth but am afraid no-one will believe me. In this modern age of science and reason, it is very difficult for all but the most open-minded and liberal philosophers to admit there are still secrets in this world that man was not meant to know. Still, I will put these words to paper and entrust them to my lawyer, Mr. Gibbs, in the hopes that, should this terror ever make itself or herself known again, there will be at least one other voice corroborating the experience of the next poor soul to encounter her.

I call her female, because that is how she identified herself. I do not know if these creatures have differences between the sexes as humans do.

I met her on a cloudy and moonless night on the road that leads from Arkham to Boston. She was wearing a mantle of dark purple stuff that hid her figure and her features from the carriage lamp. We were far from any human habitation. It looked like rain. Basic courtesy prompted me to halt my pony and trap and enquire if she would like a lift to the next town. She nodded acquiescence and gave me a gloved hand with which to help her climb into the trap beside me.

She settled deeper into her mantle as I lifted the reins and called to the pony. The usual innocent enquiries into her name and home town were greeted only with shrugs and nods. I received a grunt when I asked her opinion of the weather.

Finally, in exasperation as much as in a hope for a proper response, I asked her if she was mute.

“No,” she replied, in a curious rasping voice, “but I have been very ill lately. I hope my silence is not interpreted as rudeness to you.”

“Not at all,” I replied, and ceased making any attempts at conversation.

By the time we reached Bright's Peak the gusts of wind were blowing sheets of rain in our faces. I decided to stop at the inn there for the night, and when I mentioned this to my mysterious companion she agreed she would like to do the same.

The inn's kitchen was already closed, but after seeing to my pony and arranging rooms for us the innkeeper offered us some of the local ale.

We sat together in front of the fire in the sitting room. My companion removed neither her mantle nor her gloves, and sipped her ale in silence.

“May I ask, madam,” I said, “were you the victim of a smallpox epidemic? I had not heard of one passing through Arkham, but I have not been there in a long time.”

The lady shrugged and barked out “no.”

Then she said that if I wanted to know why she hid, I was welcome to follow her and find out for myself. We finished our drinks and went up to her room.

“Shut the door behind you,” she rasped when we reached her quarters. I hesitated, then closed the door until it was resting against the frame, but not latched.

I thought that she would just lift her hood, but she turned away from me with her face and head still covered. I heard the squeak of leather gripping leather, and saw her toss her gloves on the bed.

She raised her arms and tucked her hands into her hood on either side of her face. Bowing her head, she turned to face me again.

Then she straightened up, which had the effect of pushing the hood back and revealing her head and hands. She brought her arms to her sides just as I opened my mouth to scream.

My senses failed me as well as my voice. The hand-like things were greenish-grey and had a moist sheen to them, as if slimy. The fingers were more like tentacles, and writhed on their own as if they were separate organisms, captured and anchored captive.

The soft-looking, somewhat bulbous head was covered with the same greenish-grey skin. And the face... I suppose I have no choice to but call it a face, but how can one call it that if it lacks eyes, ears, or a nose, and indeed appears to have two mouths, one above the other? Even so, I had the impression...

It was smiling at me.

She took half a step forward, and with that movement some part of my brain finally discovered the will to act. I threw open the unlatched door, sprang into the corridor, and ran down the hall to the staircase. I didn't stop running until I reached the stable and harnessed my pony. The poor beast rattled out of the inn-yard as fast as his exhausted legs could carry us. I urged him on until we reached the crest of the next hill. The road curved there, and although the night sky was still pitch-black, I let the pony halt and looked behind us to check if we were being followed.

I saw and heard no-one. No shadows interrupted the glow of the lights from the inn.

After that I let the pony walk more leisurely, glad he was holding up and gladder still the rain seemed to be easing. We reached the next town a little after midnight, and I roused the landlord of the first inn I could find. He was in a rough mood after having his slumbers so interrupted, but I believe he noticed something in my face and manner which led him to take pity on me.

In the morning I wrote Bright's Peak, explaining I had urgent business in the next town and realised I could not stay the night as I had planned. I requested they let me know how much I owed for the room, since the landlord had agreed to let it to me for the night. I provided my Boston address for the reply.

The letter that eventually arrived explained that no money was owing. The lady, the inn-keeper wrote, had settled both our accounts. He winkingly indicated I had caught the lady's fancy and may expect to be called upon by her in the future.

That was two years ago. Since then I have moved six times and changed my name thrice. Somehow I believe that when the lady chooses to make my acquaintance again, it will not matter.

#fridayflash: the haunted atheist

Mark Leslie Lefebvre's "Spirits" short story inspired me to write down this true(ish) tale that happened about twenty years ago. His fictional tale of a not-quite-a-ghost is a great example of "single serving" e-reading — I read it over lunch at work and got a nice break all in one go. The e-book version also contains a worthwhile afterword.

the haunted atheist

Once upon a time there was a woman who was an arts major, who read the newspaper horoscopes every day for fun, and who hated doing math in her head. When asked if she was religious, she would always say she was an agnostic, but that she felt it was important to study world mythologies since they informed so much modern literature.

The woman was dating a man who was a physicist, who declared that fiction was an inferior art form, and who could do rather complex math in his head. He was an atheist, and very proud of it.

Perhaps this makes it odder that he was the one who wound up haunted. Perhaps it is only poetic justice.

One day the man's place of work was burned down by an arsonist, and the business owner made the then-radical request that the employees work from home until he could find another suitable office space.

The atheist agreed, and set up a workspace in the living room of his small apartment. He spent all his daylight hours working in his living room. He spent all his evening hours as he always had, relaxing in his living room. He spent all his meal-times eating on the living room couch, because although there was a kitchen table in his small apartment, it was used as storage space and never had enough room to set a plate of food down on it.

So it went for months, and still the man's employer had not found a suitable office space.

One evening, when the woman had come over to have dinner with the man, he shakily asked if she believed in ghosts. She said she believed that ghosts were simply a natural phenomenon not yet scientifically explained.

The man swallowed. "Well, I think I've seen a ghost." He pointed towards the living room entrance that led to the hallway. "It was walking along there."

"When?" said the woman.

"Two nights ago."

"Ah." And she changed the subject.

The woman stayed over that night. About halfway between midnight and dawn, she was woken up by the man, who was sitting up in bed and trembling.

"It's here! It's back! Can't you hear it?"

The woman listened carefully. "No," she said. "I don't hear anything."

"Maybe it's a burglar, and now that he's heard us he's stopped moving."

"Maybe, but if it is, he's either going to leave or attack us, and if he's going to leave he's going to have to leave by the door, because none of the windows open far enough to let a person get out."

"Good point," said the man, and he gingerly got out of bed and picked up a baseball bat he'd got to threaten intruders with. "Follow me."

"But I don't have anything to defend myself against —" the woman started, and then realised that she already knew there was no burglar there. She got up and followed the man down the hall.

"Can you hear it?" the man whispered when they were halfway down the hall.

"No, nothing."

"There it is! It just went by, this white light..."

"I didn't see anything."

They reached the entrance to the living room. "It's moving around the room, very fast," the man said.

"I still can't see anything," the woman said.

The man stuck his hand into the living room. "The air is colder here," he said. "That's one sign of a ghost, right? Cold spots?"

"Yes," the woman said, "but on the other hand, we're standing close together in a narrow hallway, reaching into an open room. The air is bound to be colder in the room than it is in this part of the hallway."

The man was upset that the woman had come up with an analysis of the local heat sources and exchanges when he was the one who was good at physics. "That makes sense," he said with as much authority as he could muster.

He watched the ghost whiz around the room for another minute or two while the woman waited with him. "It's fading now," he announced.

"Tell you what," said the woman. "I'm falling asleep on my feet."

"How can you be, when we just saw a ghost?"

"You saw the ghost, not me. As I was saying, tell you what — let's go to the kitchen and have a nightcap, then try to get back to sleep. The ghost or whatever it is doesn't seem to be in a hurry to harm anyone."

She took one step back to reach the kitchen entrance and flicked on the light. "Let me pour the drinks," she said. "You're still all shaking and freaked out."

The man agreed and followed her into the kitchen. The woman was getting the bottle of whisky down from the top shelf when the man cried out.

"Is it back?" said the woman.

"That's what it looked like!" said the man, pointing at the uncurtained kitchen window.

The woman turned and saw the man's reflection in the glass. She thought it over while she got the drinks ready. Meanwhile the man decided that "what it meant" was that he was actually dead. Obviously all of this was taking place in his dying brain. Really he had died at some point, probably recently, although it was hard to tell because all of his observations were being interpreted by his dead or dying brain.

"That means you're not real," he said, turning to the woman. The woman gave him one of the drinks and clinked his glass with hers.

"I think you've made an echo," she said, taking a sip. "The path you said the ghost was taking — it was moving from the stereo to the computer desk to the couch, then back to the stereo again, right?"

"Very quickly," said the man, gulping at his drink. "It was almost a blur."

The woman nodded. "But that's what you do every day," she said. "You work at the desk, you relax and eat on the couch, and you play music constantly."

"An echo," the man said.

"That's the way I see it. Much more logical than telling me I'm dead or nonexistent."

"It's one explanation," the man said. He stared into his drink and didn't seem very happy with the implications.

The woman shrugged, finished her drink, and went back to bed. The atheist did as well.

He never mentioned this or any other ghost ever again.

#fridayflash: she is, she really is

"Thomas! Good to see you again. Have you decided to sell the house at last?"

Thomas shook the old real estate lawyer's hand. "Not yet, Mr. Sachen. But there is a legal document I was hoping you could help me with."

Sachen raised his eyebrows.

"I need an eviction notice. A proper one, one that would be hard to contest."

Sachen frowned. "I hadn't realised you'd become a landlord."

"I rented out a room in my parent's house. After they.... passed away last summer, I thought I could live there and just find a room-mate, use the rent to cover the utilities while I finished my MA, and save a bit besides."

"And it isn't working out."

"No." Thomas took a deep breath. "Anne came with great references, passed the credit check with flying colours. And she's pleasant enough to live with, personality-wise. But...."

"Yes?"

"When she moved in, she asked if she could repaint her room. I said all right, so long as it was a light colour that could be painted over if need be when I finally sold the house. She painted the entire room, I mean not just the walls, but the ceiling and all the furniture as well. Everything in this beige colour. Then a week later she went over everything again and did it all in a pale blue-green."

Sachen grimaced. "You might be able to claim damages for the furniture when she finally moves out, but unless you had a very watertight landlord-tenant agreement, you're going to need more than that to evict her. What's this Anne's last name?"

"Tropy, like 'trophy' but without the H in it. She has this odd little joke about how it used to be trophy but degenerated."

Sachen pulled over a legal pad from one edge of his desk and started making notes. "And is this Anne a student as well?"

"No... at first I thought she was a grad student or professor since I did meet her at the university, but she says she 'is given losses', whatever that means, whenever an event involving the Second Law of Thermodynamics takes place. I've seen her mail — she gets cheques from all over the world. What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, anyhow?"

"Not up on patent law myself," said Sachen. "All right, so you want to evict this woman because she repainted more of her room than was reasonably expected when she received your permission..."

"It's more than that!" said Thomas. "Way more! Mr. Sachen, every single appliance in the house has broken since she moved in! And the furnace, and the water heater, and the hardwood floor has warped in the dining room, and last night I came home and the porch awning had half fallen away from its anchors.... The whole place is falling apart, and it was in perfect condition before she moved in!"

Sachen made some more notes. "I helped your parents close the deal on that house thirty years ago. Sometimes new home owners feel like their property is falling down around their ears because they're not used to being responsible for repairs."

"But it's her, I know it is! She always acts so contrite when she tells me something else is broken, but it always feels like she's secretly laughing at me. It's hard to explain, but she really is a bitch. Everything else is just a veneer."

Sachen sighed and put down his pen. "I can't just write 'Anne Tropy's a bitch' in the Description field on an eviction notice, Thomas."

Thomas clenched his fists and started to say something, but caught himself and took several deep breaths. "I know," he said at last. "I just don't know what else to do. I charged her market rent and budgeted for some repairs, but it's gotten way out of control. And..."

"Yes?"

"She says that even if I sell the house and use the proceeds to pay rent on an apartment, she'll always be with me."

"Interesting. Any other signs of stalking?"

"No."

"Pity, we could have had something there, but you need to show it's a pattern for it to stick legally. Would you take some advice, Thomas?"

"That's why I'm here, if you think an eviction notice is out of the question."

"I suggest," said Mr. Sachen, "that instead of fighting this Anne Tropy, you work with her. Encourage her to let you know when something is starting to break, rather than waiting until it's broken."

"I have to work with a destructive tenant?"

"A destructive tenant, or a tenant whose rent was seriously in arrears, that you could do something about. but you can't fight Anne Tropy."

#fridayflash: how i like to read

The literary buffet is packed today; must be the recent reminder in the media that public lending libraries are, in fact, free to the public. Gaggles of kids are reaching for multicoloured confections as fast as their little hands can stuff them into their mouths. Parents hover just behind, chanting, "now now, let the little girl try that story too" and wistfully looking at the more grown-up offerings on the tables closer to the window.

I dodge around three boys chasing after each other in a circle and pass through the teen section. The bubblegum-with-everything flavours of my own youth are thankfully gone. They've been replaced with stuff made from  ripe cherries and black plums, all covered in thick layers of very dark chocolate.

A dark-haired, pale-skinned girl holds a truffle up to an Asian boy's mouth. "Try this," I hear her say. "It's so sweet and strong, and just so about what's wrong with the world now."

He pulls away and rolls his eyes. "Not into the romantic sugary stuff," he says. "The fantasy section here sucks. The one where I used to live, they had a roast pig and drinking horns."

The girl glares at him and pops the chocolate into her own mouth, letting cherry syrup run down her chin.

Blancmange, macarons, and almost entirely women — I must have got to the romance section. Right, there's the non-fiction tables just beside it, piled with trail mix, jerky, and samples of "astronaut" freeze-dried ice cream. Some of the trail mix has bright specks of candy-covered chocolates in it. That would never have been allowed back in the day. Creative non-fiction has really changed things.

It's as loud as it was in the children's section in this part of the buffet, but it's not the happy squeals of young brains discovering new worlds. There are only grown-ups here, with the odd teen or tween trying and failing to get a word in edgewise.

The only ones who look like they're having any fun are the science fiction and horror fans, who have started a food fight. The people on the SF side of the table are pelting the opposing side with super-frozen spheres of ice cream, while the horror side squirts grenadine syrup all over everything. Many of those involved change sides whenever it takes their fancy, and the whole group flings verbal abuse as cheerfully as they toss the bits of the buffet.

"Trope!"

"Derivative!"

"Purist!"

"Stereotype!"

Someone on the buffet organisation committee has a sense of humour, because the experimental fiction comes next. There, readers munch thoughtfully on canapes that look like Oreo cookies, but are made from scallops and black caviar, or sample "sushi" composed of rice cereal marshmallow mix wrapped around Swedish fish. Some grenadine syrup has landed on one of the seafood cookies, and the man holding it only hesitates a little before licking it off, catching a few caviar on his tongue.

"It's not bad," he says to the person standing beside him. "Definitely wins for novelty."

The next table over is for spy and mystery story fans. Not much going on there — everyone's looking at a smooth black dome that is sitting on a tray in the middle. They're all debating whether it's edible, edible but poisonous, or a bomb.

Apple cider, Three Kings cake, tea-time favourites very old and very new... finally, I get to the literary section. It's a bit of a hodge-podge here, as some of the offerings from the genre tables find their way onto this table after a time. I help myself to a maids-of-honour cake and wander around, eavesdropping.

"All this lighter-than-air stuff," says a young man wearing a tweed jacket and John Lennon spectacles. "Real literature has meat to it, substance. It's nutrition for the mind and the soul."

"You realise that's a pecan roll you're gesturing with, right?" says a bored-looking woman who might be his girlfriend.

"And that the brain needs carbohydrates to work properly?" adds another young man, in a t-shirt and Elvis Costello horn rims.

It's noisy here, and there's a lot of sentences that start, "You can't be a feminist if -" or "Unless you come from that culture you can't -", or "The unique experience of Generation Y is that -".

"I was having a discourse about Doritos versus the traditional place of tortillas in Central American society the other day, you know, with Cheryl, and it made me realise about magic realism, the thing is..."

I find a quiet corner and nibble on my cake. Closing time is in fifteen minutes.

At five minutes to closing, the librarians start gently kicking everyone out, and as the crowds thin at the buffet tables, I take out a bandanna I've lined with waxed paper and start to sample from the trays. Vanilla cake with a curl of chocolate icing, a slice of juniper-poached pear, and one of my favourites, a small blue marzipan egg that has a drop of grenadine syrup on it. A couple of things I can't recognise but that look interesting.

There's a back door out, with a garden and benches to sit on. Time to settle in and savour every texture and flavour.

citizens of the dream, unite

Cary Tennis re-launched his web site last fall. As part of the re-launch, his book Citizens of the Dream was offered in electronic versions (yes, plural), and since he was smart enough to use non-proprietary formats, I bought it. (It's available in paper form too at the Cary Tennis site and in the Kindle format at Amazon.)

The book is a collection of Tennis's advice columns from Salon which deal specifically with how to be a better creative person. I read it quickly just after I bought it last November, but lately I feel like I need  to read it over again, more slowly, noting the parts that would be of particular help to me. Your own mileage may vary, but one thing I found interesting is that the most  personally useful advice often came from responses where the letter-writer's concerns didn't mirror my own at all. It was the concepts and scenarios considered in the response that got me thinking.

Tennis has a quiet, almost dreamy style of writing, much in contrast to the typical agony aunt who leads with quips and frames responses to jolt the reader (and supposedly the letter-writer). Having said that, there are a number of passages here that made me laugh out loud — like when Tennis advises someone to make themselves at home at the crossroads instead of worrying they don't know which way to turn once they get there.

There's also responses which are poignant, even sad. The passage about what it was like being a nine-year-old boy living in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis almost had me in tears.

My favourite piece of advice in the book: the suggestion that writers should have someone who checks up on them and makes sure they meet their deadlines and other writing goals. It has always seemed to me that there are too many well-intentioned people out there who are too quick to say, "There there, it's okay if you didn't work on your craft today, you're still a good person" when what the artist needs to hear is, "okay, so how can you get some work in tomorrow?".

There are loads of books out there about how to market your work and yourself, how to make pitches, how to get practical and turn your art into a business. There are also loads of books that take a self-help approach and give you tasks and methods to transform yourself and your art-making.

In my reading experience, there are far fewer books that acknowledge that there is more than one way to make art, and that a lot of the struggle with making art is trying to do so in a society that doesn't appreciate or give space to its artists as much as it should. Citizens of the Dream helps with that.

#fridayflash: but it's a lifestyle

The thing that makes noises in the morning is... making noises. I don't like it. It sounds like a very big and angry squirrel barking.

The thing won't stop making noises until she wakes up and forces it to stop, so unfortunately I have to work with the thing instead of destroying it, at least for now. I sound the alert, right in her ear, and she tries to hit me (but she misses, because we do this most mornings and I'm ready for it), then she rolls over and makes the thing quiet.

Some days she falls back asleep after we go through this, then she wakes up later and runs around in a panic before heading out the door. I don't like that either, so I jostle the bed to make her finish waking up.

She says what she always says when she's angry at me. I get out of striking distance. Then she looks at the now-silenced thing and gets up on her own. She heads to the washroom. I didn't actually feel like waking up myself yet, so I find the warm spot on the bed and settle in for a late-morning nap. I hear the toilet flushing.

I do not like the thing, because it makes loud angry noises. She doesn't seem to like the thing either, for all that she allows it in the room. Today I will try to knock the thing to the floor again. It's harder to do than it sounds, because it's tethered to the wall.

The shower is running. She won't come back in here for at least another ten minutes. Bliss.

She made the angry sound from inside the shower! I'm not even in that room! The shower sound stops, so I lift my head to listen and watch for what will happen next.

She appears in the doorway with a towel wrapped around her, dripping water everywhere. I lift my head to get a better look, because she's got the angry face on, and notice one of my mouse dolls in her hand. It's completely drenched in water. She squeezes it and a puddle forms on the hardwood.

Oh. Oh right. Mouse dolls aren't supposed to go in the shower. This has happened before.

She takes a step into the room. I leap off the bed and run under it, making for the spot in the exact middle, under the headboard, that I know from past experience she can't reach.

I hear the angry sound again, and then ridicule noises. I do not like being ridiculed, but it means I will not get hauled out from under the bed.

She leaves, and then I hear the shower again. I come out from under the bed carefully, in case the shower is a trick. Sometimes she runs water to hide the sound of food being released from the metal traps.

No, she really doesn't seem to be around. But there is water all over the floor! I take a running leap over it, and just get a little bit on one foot. Ick. I eat some food and drink some water in case I need to hide under the bed for the rest of the day. The mornings the thing makes noises she usually leaves for the whole day, but it's good to be safe.

The shower stops, and she sees me by my food and water. She makes good mood noises. I signal the food and water are getting low, just in case. Sometimes she leaves with more bags than usual and doesn't come back for two mornings.

She cleans out the water holder and refills it, then does the same with the food holder. I should be good for another two days. I check the food and water while she goes back to the bedroom.

She comes out wearing the clothes that mean she's going to leave. She picks me up and strokes my head. I let my chest rumble to show I mean no harm, and she's still making good-mood noises, so I must be communicating effectively. Then she lets me down, and I notice that there is a sunbeam on the couch in the living room, so I go sit in that.

She's about to leave when she goes to the living room, picks up the little window in the black case from the table, and taps at it for a few moments. I look after she leaves, and the glyphs are:

SheHasACat: I wish I had my cat's lifestyle. [tweeted at 7:30am from Twitter]

I tap the window a few times, but all that happens is that the glyphs vanish, and a creature who looks like me appears. It's not moving, so I don't get concerned.

I figure it's time to go back to my sunbeam.

#fridayflash: picture tour

This is another description exercise, along the lines of prose sestina but using different methods. I wanted to play around with showing versus non-showing, action versus stillness.

The bottom frame of the window sits level with the sidewalk outside. The window is unusually large for a basement apartment, and passers-by could easily look in if it weren’t for the lace curtains that Helen has hung up inside. She’s proud of those curtains; they were sewn from her wedding veil, but she did a good job when she made them over to fit in the window.

The door to the apartment is four concrete steps below the sidewalk. The door has some small panel windows in it, but they’re frosted and so otherwise unadorned.

The pine coat rack almost stands in the doorway. It supports Helen’s beige winter coat, her brown felt hat, and the old black umbrella that probably used to be Gene’s. The hook furthest from the door has tomorrow’s dress hanging from it so the wrinkles will have a chance to fall out.

Today’s dress is white cotton with a small print of violets, washed so many times it’s as soft as old bedsheets. Helen likes it because it’s comfortable, especially now that she’s thinner, but the full skirt keeps getting caught under the legs of her chair when she changes position.

Helen sits at her old hall desk that stands next to the coat rack, right under the lace-curtained windows. She’s writing a letter and looking at photos. That is, she looks at the photos she’s arranged on the little ledge at the back of the desk for several minutes at a time, then out the curtains for several minutes more, the lace printing shadows of roses and ferns across her face. The sunlight that steals past the curtains makes her white hair glow. Every once in a while she seems startled to discover the pen in her hand, notices the letter-paper as if it just fell from the ceiling, reads what she has written so far, and adds another paragraph, or maybe just a half-paragraph, because the photos distract her and start the cycle all over again.

The corner between the desk and the night-table is piled with books. Some of them were definitely always hers. Others may have been Gene’s. She’s put the books that make her happy near the top. The ones on the bottom are mostly bait to lure the mice and the mildew away from anything important.

The night-table is adorned with a china lamp in the shape of a poodle and an old wedding photo in a brass frame. The groom is tall and handsome and wears his blonde hair in a crew cut. The bride is a brunette, and her long lacy veil with its pattern of roses and ferns has been wrapped around the happy couple’s feet.

The coverlet on the white-painted twin bedframe was originally sized for a double bed. Helen cut the excess width of fabric off and hemmed the raw edges by hand, using green thread to match the background leaf pattern. Her favourite cabbage rose fell right on the cut line. Some things just can’t be helped.

A three-tiered chest of drawers sits opposite the hall-desk on the other side of the bed. Helen’s clothes are hidden in it. On top are more secrets – photos of the man and woman from the wedding picture laughing in a Hawaiian-themed nightclub, at a backyard barbecue, in front of a living room Christmas tree. The barbecue and Christmas photos are in colour, but they’re faded.

The chest of drawers shares the wall with an upside-down milk crate that keeps the pantry items and dishes off the floor.

Helen hung the excess strip of fabric from the bed coverlet over the door to the shared bathroom. Mr. Braemar, her neighbour, does not always remember to close and lock both bathroom doors before he does his business, and Helen would rather not fight with him about something so stupid.

The wall opposite the foot of the bed has a bar fridge plugged into it, and a hot plate sitting on top of another upturned milk crate. There’s also a small sink, which is nice so Helen doesn’t have to do her dishes in the shared bathroom. She’s hung a little mirror above the sink. That way she can get dressed and brush her teeth in the morning without having to wait for Mr. Braemar to finish and leave for work.

The gap between the bar fridge and the door is empty, so the door has somewhere to swing when Helen opens it. The door is open now, and an extra sunbeam is hitting the vinyl-covered dining room chair that Helen sat in until she finished her letter. The bits of glitter embedded in the vinyl sparkle in the sun.

The photos are still on the back ledge of the desk. The shaft of sunlight narrows and vanishes as Helen closes and locks the door. She pauses to check how much change she has in her pocketbook before she heads to the post office to send her letter.

#fridayflash: from

On Mars the daytime sky is pink — it’s the sunsets that are pale blue.

After over two years of not being on a planet at all, Audrey didn’t care what colour the sky was, so long as she had one over her. She paused for a moment as she stepped off the spaceliner and onto the walkway that led to the Martian welcome centre. It was strange to walk without feeling engine vibrations coming up through the floor. She tilted her head back and gaped at the huge glass dome. Fred Peters, her job contact here, had told her that eventually people stopped thinking of the domes as “being inside” and identified anywhere without an opaque wall as “outside”. Audrey shook herself and continued to the welcome centre. It was going to take a while to get used to this.

She scanned the crowd for someone looking like the photo of Fred Peters that was on the employee intranet, then noticed a teenaged girl holding a sign that said “Audrey” on it. The girl made eye contact with her and smiled.

“Are you Audrey Fremantle? I’m Sarah Peters, Fred’s daughter. My dad got called into work at the last minute, so I said that I would come and meet you.” Sarah put away the sign. “It doesn’t happen that often.”

"Nice to meet you, Sarah.” Audrey guessed the girl was about sixteen. “Thank you for stepping in.”

"No problem — I’ve never met someone who was actually from Earth before. You know the government will move your things to your residence, right?”

Audrey nodded. “Right.” She paused as Sarah’s words sank in. “Never? Both your parents were born here?”

Sarah nodded. “I’m third gen. All my grandparents were part of the construction crews that built the first domes, but they had all died before I was born. My older brothers can remember them a little. Want to have a tour of the colony, or do you want to go straight to your residence?”

"A tour would be great.”

Sarah led Audrey out of the welcome centre to a trio of glass tunnels. They stepped onto a movator, sort of like the ones at Earth airports, except this one had chairs. The two women sat down, and Sarah started pointing out things.

"I picked this tunnel because it gives you a good view of the dome layout, and it’s nice and long so we can talk about what you want to look at. The government area is over there — that’s where we live, and where your residence is too. I used to go to school there, but now I take the tunnel to the university area. The senior high schools are in the same location.”

Audrey compared the two dome clusters, but from this distance they looked identical. She supposed there would be better identifying landmarks once they were actually inside the domes.

"We’re going to go through the agricultural district now,” said Sarah. “This is my favourite place in the colony.” The movator slid past a field of tall plants. “Those are sunflowers. You can eat the kernels, and you can cook with their oil.”

"My mother used to grow sunflowers in her garden on Earth,” said Audrey.

Sarah looked surprised. “Really? I didn’t know they’d been exported to Earth.”

"They’re not, they were exported from...” Audrey started to say, but Sarah was pointing out a field of spelt, carefully explaining to Audrey what spelt was and proudly announcing it was a Martian staple.

Yeah, on Earth too, thought Audrey. She peered at the spelt. Maybe it was a Mars-specific strain invented to be grown under glass domes, but to Audrey it just looked like plain old spelt.

They trundled along more domes filled with fields of beans and strawberries. Each time, Sarah’s explanation indicated that she believed the plants were native to Mars, and that Audrey would never have seen them before.

“Ooh, the botanical gardens!” Sarah jumped off the movator. “Let’s walk around!”

Audrey followed Sarah into a walkway that led to a dome set out as a formal garden. There were plaques in front of each kind of plant stating what its common and scientific names were, but not mentioning that all of them, down to the last shrub, were transplants from Earth.

Sarah had stopped explaining what everything was when Audrey started reading the plaques out loud, but Audrey was still troubled by the misconception. After all, the reason why she was on this three-year research stint with the government was to ensure Earth-Martian links remained strong.

She decided to take her stand by a clump of rose bushes. “These are lovely,” she said. “I used to grow the exact same variety outside my townhouse on Earth. This kind’s from England originally, as I recall.”

Sarah smiled, but Audrey could see it was forced. “Those are Martian roses. Everyone in my family volunteers here. I planted that bush myself.”

"The plant is Martian, sure, but as a variety —”

"They’re Martian! It’s true, everything they say about Earthers is true! You’re all in total denial that Mars is Mars, you think this is all just Earth under a bunch of domes!”

Audrey tried to recall everything she had ever learned about staying calm. “The colony’s been here a long time,” she began. “Certainly long enough to have its own identity and culture.”

"I know,” said Sarah.

Audrey tried again. “On Earth, roses grow all over the world, but they’re from Asia, mostly.”

“These are from Mars.”

Audrey pointed to the emergency hatch at the end of the garden path. “If these are Martian roses, open that hatch and see how long they last without the dome’s seal protecting them.”

Sarah muttered something under her breath and stomped back towards the movator. Audrey caught only a few swear words and decided not to push it. She was here as a researcher, not a teacher.

The roses were lovely, though. She envied the Martians' ability to control the climate so precisely, thanks to the domes.

She heard Sarah shouting something, but couldn’t make out what it was.

Then she noticed the abrupt temperature drop, and how the wind started blowing.

#fridayflash: prose sestina

I've been meaning to try this out for a while — an exercise in description and point of view. I've come across similar stuff and always thought it was fun, and of course as a device it's been used to create entire novels. No points for guessing what kind of establishment I was in when I wrote it.

Inside the café are chatting couples. There are elderly women browsing magazines. Most of the people in the big, overstuffed armchairs are frowning into laptop screens.

The baristas repeat their phrases of greeting, of order confirmation, of giving change. They stand behind cash registers with more computing power than the Manhattan Project. They operate espresso machines bristling with spigots and knobs. The steam hisses and the pucks of spent coffee get dropped into a little drawer attached under the counter. Tea bags are dunked into cups of freshly boiled water.

The walls of the sitting area are exposed brick. On the long wall there is a triptych showing the inside of a café. The tables are populated with chatting couples, with elderly men leafing through newspapers. Most of the people in the big, overstuffed armchairs are smiling into laptop screens.

The baristas pose cheerily behind brass cash registers that were antiques even at the time of the Manhattan Project. Some peek out behind espresso machines bristling with spigots and knobs. Steam floats above the machines, and above the fresh cups of tea being handed to grateful customers.

The walls of the sitting area are smooth and perfect. On the long wall there is a mural showing the inside of a café. The tables are occupied by chatting lovers holding hands over their cups of cappuccino. There are elderly grandparents sharing cocoa with small children. Most of the people in the big, overstuffed armchairs are reading books.

There is no cash register to be seen, but the two visible corners of a black iron box suggest that this is long before the Manhattan Project. The lone barista manipulates the brass apparatus of the espresso machine. A waiter wearing a long white apron stands at the counter, waiting for a demi-tasse to be filled.

The walls of the sitting area are exposed brick, where they are not covered with bright posters suggesting the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. Gas fanlights illuminate the scene. A larger poster hangs just behind the order area of the espresso bar. It shows the inside of a café.

#fridayflash: waiting

Matthew crossed the threshold to the drawing room. Both his grandparents glanced up to see who it was. The effect was immediate — his grandfather stood and cried out, while his grandmother shrieked and burst out weeping into her handkerchief.

Bloody hell, thought Matthew, it’s only been three years since I last saw them, and Mum and Dad said they were sending photographs.

His grandfather made a visible effort to calm himself. “Matthew, my dear boy, we thought you’d be arriving with your father. Come have a drink with me in my office.” As they strode out of the room together, his grandfather rang the bell and whispered, “Mrs. MacFadyen will take care of Nan.”

Matthew followed his grandfather across the cavernous main hall and up the central staircase, wishing that he’d just shown up for the pheasant shooting with his father instead of agreeing to start his visit a week earlier.

They reached the office, insulated as ever from the world in thick layers of mahogany and red velvet.

“How do you like your whisky, Mattie?”

“Just with soda,” Matthew said, biting his lip. “I’m Matthew, Granddad.”

“Eh?”

“I’m Matthew.”

“Of course you are,” said his grandfather, fixing the second drink. “What did I say?”

“You said Mattie.”

His grandfather tried to put the stopper on the whisky bottle, but his hands were shaking too much to get it into the bottle’s neck. Matthew gently took it and replaced it for him.

“You sit down. I’ll carry the drinks.”

His grandfather sank into the wing-chair on one side of the fireplace. “You’re the same age now that he was when....”

“I know.”

Matthew spent the rest of the evening listening to his grandfather ramble on about Uncle Mattie. How he’d adored his much-older brother, Matthew’s father. How he’d been top of his class, an excellent athlete, a friend to everyone. How he’d been one of the first to sign up when the Great War started. How his letters had shown that he’d written home regularly, even if their delivery was less so.

And now whatever’s left of him is under some Belgian farmer’s field, thought Matthew.

Of course his father had named his eldest child and first son after his beloved brother. It was just awkward that Matthew would so strongly resemble his namesake.

He fixed his grandfather yet another drink, carefully adding just a little more soda than last time, and a little less whisky. The stories would just get more depressing if the old man got drunk.

He handed the tumbler to his grandfather, who took a sip, made a face, but didn’t say anything. Matthew sat down. At some point the butler had been called to light the fireplace, and it was relaxing to stare into the flames.

“We see him around the house, you know,” said his grandfather suddenly.

“Who?”

“Mattie. But always outside. That’s why it startled us earlier — we thought you were him and that he’d found a way in.”

Matthew forced himself not to roll his eyes. “It’s probably just someone looking for work, Granddad.”

“We’ve been seeing him for twenty years,” said his grandfather. “Both your Nan and I. At first we didn’t want to tell each other because we each thought we were going mad, but then we both saw him at the same time. The MacFadyens have seen him too, and they never knew him when he was alive. He’s always wearing a long tan coat and brown trousers, just like you did today. And he never ages. He’s always a lad of twenty-one.”

“I’m sure there’s a rational explanation,” said Matthew, making a mental note to never wear the tan coat around his grandparents.

The mantlepiece clock chimed. “Look at that,” said his grandfather. “I’m sure your grandmother has gone to bed already. We should turn in. Fresh start in the morning.”

“Good night then.” Matthew finished his drink. “Which room did my bags get put in, do you know?”

His grandfather opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated.

Matthew nodded. “Uncle Mattie’s room. Do you mind if I borrow a book to read?”

“Anything you like, my boy. Good night.” His grandfather waved a hand at the bookshelves, got up and left.

Matthew scanned the bookshelves. He settled on a Dickens that looked like it could have been a first edition, then headed down the hall to the wing the bedrooms were in. There weren’t any lights on, but he knew the way well. Nothing had changed in the three years he had been abroad studying.

He reached automatically for a light switch by the door, then remembered that his grandparents still used gas. He cursed softly under his breath, and stretched out a hand. Sure enough, there was a little table near the door with a candle set in a brass holder and a box of matches.

Matthew set down the book, lit the candle, and shut the door. Now that he had made it to the bedroom he realised he didn’t feel sleepy at all. As much as his grandfather had promised him a fresh start to the visit in the morning, he had a bad feeling about being here alone with them.

He put the candle on the bedside table nearest the window and parted the curtains. It was so overcast that he couldn’t see anything but his own reflection staring back at him in the window. He studied his face, wondering what he could do to make his grandparents more likely to remember he was their living grandson. He glanced down at his clothes with reproach. He should learn what colours Mattie wore and try to avoid them. It would be difficult since, of course, what had suited Mattie now suited him.

He looked at the window again without lifting his head, and was surprised to notice that his hair was parted in the middle. He always wore it parted over his right eye. He raised a hand to part it the usual way and then gasped. The reflection in the window still had both hands at its sides, and its expression hadn’t changed when Matthew had gasped.

Then the reflection raised its own hand and reached through the window...

#fridayflash: the timeline

• 2039: Scientists working at the University of Melbourne successfully teleport a coffee cup from a dedicated departure pad to a dedicated arrival pad. Later that same year, they work with another team in Wellington, New Zealand to teleport another coffee cup, this time with a note in it laying bets on which team will win the Rugby World Cup. The New Zealand team confirms the coffee cup and note arrived safely, and in their original states. This proves that a) long distance teleporting is possible and b) teleporting two things at once will not "blend" them or stick them together. The Australians win the Nobel Prize for physics that year, but lose their bet.
• 2040-2045: Development of the technology continues. Pads may now be built large enough to accommodate a shipping container.
• 2047: The first commercial teleportation pads are rolled out around the world. Ship's captains, seamen, and freight airline pilots demonstrate in New York, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, and elsewhere, claiming the technology will destroy their industries.
• 2048-2053: Shipping via teleport becomes the norm for anything but very large items. Several industries are transformed as shipping costs flatten — the Australian corporation founded by the scientists uses a global flat fee, scaled only by the size of the item to be shipped, rather than weight or distance.
• 2053: a dock worker in Hamburg shows up for work drunk, gets sacked, screams he's going to kill himself, and runs into a departure pad just as a shipper hits the teleport button. Much to everyone's complete shock, he arrives in Johannesburg with the shipping container alive and unharmed. The teleportation company owners hold an emergency meeting to discuss human and animal transport on a large scale. The South Africans arrest the dock worker for entering the country illegally, and decide the least expensive thing to do is deport him back to Germany the same way he arrived.
• 2053-2055: Countries around the world start using teleportation as a method of deporting illegal refugees en masse. Human rights groups complain that often people are deported to countries they did not come from, without being able to speak the local language and with no means to either return to their home country or find a new safe haven.
• 2056: the teleportation company applies a global firmware upgrade that checks the DNA of any organic matter on the destination pad. If more than two kilos of it belongs to any single human, the pad will not operate until it is removed. Shipping companies complain this slows transmission speeds to unacceptable levels — one tenth of a second instead of one hundredth.
• 2057: the first "parallel" teleport networks are set up using discarded and reverse-engineered components. After two fatal accidents, one involving a political leader who encouraged the alternative network, the Australian company decides to allow licensing and franchising of the pad centres. They insist, however, that there be one global network, pointing to the problems caused with the Internet when countries tried to split off and form their own.
• 2058: the first public transportation pads are rolled out. No more than four people are allowed on a pad at once, and destination keycards have to be paid for in advance. Most pads are for only one person to use at a time. 
• 2060: Suburban areas around the world get retrofitted so that their residents can walk to the nearest pad centre in a reasonable amount of time. The average fitness levels of North Americans and Western Europeans improve for the first time in decades.
• 2062: The automobile and train industries run a smear campaign against teleportation, resurrecting the old twentieth-century slogan "Getting There is Half the Fun" and claiming teleportation uses more energy and is more polluting than internal combustion vehicles. Unfortunately for them, the scientists who own the teleportation company have been studying energy consumption and the total carbon footprint of their technology almost from the start, and have hard numbers (and a good ad agency) to refute this. They start a counter-campaign aimed at families: "Never have anyone ask 'are we there yet?'".
• 2065: teleportation leads car driving in terms of kilometres travelled. More and more neighbourhoods are becoming "car free zones".
• 2070: most countries have laws banishing the few remaining cars to rural areas. No one notices much.

nature in nature exhibit

This past week saw my friend Cathy's first-ever photo exhibit, hosted at The Gladstone Hotel's Art Bar. Just because I heard this question asked over and over again during the evening launch event, I feel obliged to mention off the top that none of these images have been Shopped at all. It's just Cathy, a DSLR, the plants, and a lot of patience. She doesn't even use a fancy lens; she says it's just a case of getting right up to the plant until the camera is almost touching it and then getting the focus right. The depth of field is very shallow, so the backgrounds look like they were painted in, but it's the shot construction giving that effect.

The photos filled one brick wall:

And two plaster walls:

I love how the rather plain gallery space shows up how much the photos are full of colour and texture. They aren't just "pretty flower" photos — most of the plants used for the photos are either dead or dying — but it's like the title of the exhibit says: the nature in nature is exposed.

Cathy found a way cool mod dress to wear to the launch event:

There was a good turnout —lots of interesting (and interested) people showed up:

The exhibit ended today, but if you want view/purchase info, you can contact Cathy via the info on her Twitter home page.