Cold Winter

Her long-sleeve shirt clung to her like a second skin on that unusually warm November day. I found Susanna barefoot and bent unnaturally over the Adirondack chair in her mom's backyard, with her face a few inches above the grass. Her glasses lay broken beside her.

"Suze!" I cried, and raced over, but she was long dead; the bullet had left a bloody trail through her body, now contorted and draped across the lawn chair.

"So, you didn't think I'd do it, and now that it's too late you believe me," Donny said from behind me.

I clenched a fist without turning around. "You think Vinny's men will protect you? They can't stand up to Virginia courts."

Donny laughed. "Peter! We killed the D.A. this morning. What, don't you watch TV, you snot-nosed beggar?" As he spoke he punctuated his words with his palm, for all the world like some benevolent class lecturer. "Lucky for you it ain't too late. Lucky for you the old man's got a soft spot for you. Lucky for you, he's still got a spot on his payroll." He chuckled grotesquely. "Looky. He even got you a welcome-home gift."

I turned reluctantly from Susanna's warm body. Donny tossed me a box of socks. I stared at him.

"Nothing quite as comforting as a warm pair of socks when you're having a cold winter," Donny said gleefully. "Now look inside the sock."

I did. There was a key.

Donny nodded, not smiling for the first time since I'd seen him. "That safe has a cool forty mill in it. Peter. You know what to do."

"Yeah, I do," I said, and punched Donny in his fat gut.

Later they'd find my prints on the gun that killed both him and Suze. That's okay though. Even if I hadn't left prints, Vinny's men would make sure I got blamed for both murders.

I threw the key to the safe down on the lawn by Susanna's feet. I wasn't going to take their money. Not after what they did to Suze.

But those woolen socks were great. I know. I wore a pair of them that cold night on the blind baggage of the overland, and that overland went west.

• A response to Prompt 8

Den of Thieves

Jack Dawkins looked across the table. The buxom blond was chewing gum, rolling it about with her tongue and working her jaw rapidly.

"So, miss... Nancy, is it?" he said. "I see you've got quite an unusual list of references."

She chewed her gum faster. "Yeah, well. Just ask any of 'em, I'm the best at what I do."

"And you don't get caught?" he prompted, glancing at her hands. "You have light fingers."

She laughed, a little taken off guard, but never stopped chewing gum. "Light Fingers. Aint never been called that before. But sure! Light enough for the work," she insisted, and gave a nod of her head. "Never had any trouble with the law, neither, leastwise none I couldn't wiggle my way out of." She demonstrated her wiggle.

Dawkins stared. "...Yes, well." He looked away, then back again. "I need people on the streets who can handle themselves. I'm sure you wouldn't have any problems artfully dodging any trouble--MISS NANCY!"

Grinning, she paused, her hand hovering delicately at the buttons on her blouse. "What? This is an interview, ain't it? Want to see as I can handle myself, don'tcha?"

Turning red, Dawkins said grimly, "I'm afraid you've misunderstood my particular need for this job. We're a pick-pocket gang, Miss Nancy."

The blond straightened, her gum momentarily forgotten. "Streetwalkers, your ad said," she snapped.

"An ad that shall need to be clarified, I'm afraid," Dawkins told her. "Good day, and - do check to see your purse is in order before you go. Some of the new recruits like to practice."

Nancy snapped open her purse with a furious gasp.

"And, er, should you ever decide to reconsider your career, Miss Nancy - come back and see old Jack Dawkins."

• A response to Prompt 7
  

Invisible Man

There was silence.

"Er," said Claude. "That's all."

Vinny sat back in his seat. His face twisted in displeasure, but his fingers withdrew mercifully from the button. "I have more sins than that, you know."

"Yes, sir," Claude agreed hastily. As an afterthought: "Most of your sins have probably never seen the daylight. There's no way I could recite them all."

"You could have found a lot more than one," Vinny's measured voice rebuked. "You could have researched. You could have spied on me. Or you could have made someone else spy on me for you. You could have walked in to the FBI office in Virginia, faked a memo or two, found their passwords, found their data on me, and destroyed it."

Claude blinked.

"In fact, that's what I'd like you to do," Vinny said, spreading his hands. "How does five grand and another shot at life sound?"

Claude, the Invisible Man, sat down with a wumph in the chair opposite Vinny.

Claude had always counted himself a "good at heart" kind of guy. Though no one in his life had been able to actually see him, somehow his mother and Sunday school teachers had connected enough with him to instill a sort of morality. Before a big decision, he would ask himself, "If the world were to end tomorrow, come Jesus and Satan both, to judge mankind, what's the decision I'd be proud to say I made?"

But this encounter led Claude to discover that his mother and Sunday school teachers had instilled something else deep inside him... something that no fear of mortal judgment could shake.

The moments that passed in heavy thought were short. "I want to be seen," Claude said decisively. "I want you to look me in the eyes and talk to me. So help me God, if you can do that - if you can teach me how and why you can see me - I'll do whatever you want."

Keeping Claude's gaze, Vinny nodded. The rings on his fingers glittered as he moved his hand to the button on his desk, and pressed it.

"Marco," Vinny said into the intercom, never breaking eye contact with the invisible man, "Get the limo ready. Gonna send the new hand to Langley."

• Continued from Part One
• A response to Prompt 5

Quantum Doctor

Trembling like tiny ice crystals beneath an unforgiving summer sun, a thousand glass vials precisely nestled in the time machine's carefully-chilled core waited helplessly for their doom.

Doctor Malone thought she might be killed in order to protect these fragile essentials from her crushing, murderous hands, yet no one waited for her in the core chamber. No armed guards shouted at her to stop, and neither did she feel that tingling sense that always came when someone else altered part of her timeline. She could sense impending danger in those half-formed molecules that made up her future, but that was far easier to face than any danger in her inaccessible past.

The glass tubes were all around her in this circular chamber. Her latex-gloved hand gripped one, ready to crush. For the thousandth time she wondered if she could escape with the machine all to herself, without destroying it--just leave and never return, always running away from danger. Malone's affinity for the machine, even after all it had done to her life, was strong.

They had called her the Quantum Doctor because she had made the Machine cooperate unlike any other doctor in Saint Benrime General Hospital. Where other doctors used the Time Machine, she communicated with it; where other doctors used it to anticipate trouble during surgery, Malone used it to manipulate timelines and paradox and causality in very finite pockets of the human body, across myriad alternate realities.

One month without a single death in the hospital won her every medical award on Earth.

She tried to train others to do as she did, to see as she did--but she found upon examining her techniques that, once measured and taught, they began to break down.

Worse, a bad intuiting of the quantum forces in time could lead to Earth-threatening paradox. More times than she could count in a month, Malone had to clean up after time-mucking nincompoop doctors, until finally, the Saint Benrime General Director's Board agreed the machine could not be used unless Malone were supervising. While supervising, she felt like an overly aggressive elementary-school art teacher criticizing every child's work -- "Not that brush stroke, this one!" -- and one day, she thought bitterly that she had wanted to be an artist before she ever wanted the responsibility of saving lives.

H.R. tried to help her. They couldn't allow her to leave the hospital - "Liability, you see, we're obliged to give everyone the same quality care, and if you're not here they won't get it" - but they offered to let her use the time machine to catch naps. That worked for a while, but one day she accidentally slept for two months instead of 8 hours.

That slip-up did not sit well with the Board. Someone hinted if she messed up like that again she might find herself at the wrong end of a well-placed time accident.

That was when she knew humans were not meant to time travel.

Now Malone stood in the cold core chambers of the time machine, and stared up at the security camera fixed on her. She wondered whether anyone in security was watching, and whether or not they would flip the trigger that would set off alarms and would trap her in here, but the tingly intuition that served her so well with the Machine told her it's okay, only the future is watching. Simultaneously she understood those folks in the future would condemn her for this, but Time never would.

"I quit," she told the camera, and with one final, freeing sweep of her arm, she broke the glass essences that both chained and linked mankind to the secrets of life.

Timely Demise

"There is nothing untimely about demise.

"For example, Aunt Crystal," I noted aloud. "She died young, had little ones--I'd call it an unfortunate demise, even... a surprise demise." I grinned at the unexpected poetry. "But never untimely. Do you," I said, "remember Aunt Crystal, or were you too young?"

The portly gray-suited man in my living room said nothing. He continued to stare around my house, squinting, pretending to listen.

"Everything has a place and a time," I prattled on, pretending his silence didn't hurt, pretending he wasn't being rude. "I'm sure you agree. Just the other day I told Advance, I said, wasn't Crystal's death timely?"

This time he nodded. He was frowning at my kitchen window, running a finger down the length of the sill, and now as I paused in my soliloquy, he tsked at it.

The gesture was too rude to ignore, but too disrespectful to acknowledge. "Ahh, like my new curtains, do you?" I simpered. "The purple velvet isn't too much, is it? And I rather love the gold flowers myself. Pull those beauties back on a summer midnight and look through that window, and you're sure to see our unicorn graze on the sagebrush."

To this proclamation the man deigned to answer out the side of his mouth with an insincere, uninterested, "Mmm, I see," and pulled a dull wood-framed pocket watch from his suit jacket.

"Tight schedule," I observed bitterly. "I see how it is. No one has got time for their elders anymore."

He peered into my face for a long, careful moment. "You're wrong," he said, looking away with some relief. He closed his pocketwatch with a punctual shnick. "I should jolly well think so, anyway. This didn't take long."

"Oh? Then you're staying?" A note of hope in my voice.

"Rightly so. This house could fall down any second now, any fool on the street could see that," he said.

I blinked.

"Look, I'm sorry about the unicorn comment," I told him. "She never meant to bite you. You're too old to ride on her back, now, but... They say, in the Dreaming, anything is possible. You could... you and I could... What are you doing?"

He drew out a clipboard, made a few marks, and stabbed a few disapproving glares at my fabulous, intricate decor.

"Yes," he continued, as though he hadn't heard me. "Condemned. The council won't argue. Neither, I think, will the neighbors." He put the clipboard away and dusted his suit jacket.

"You miss this place... Don't you? Even a little?" I begged. "I miss you, you know. You're the reason I stayed here."

He sighed. There wasn't even enough passion in his voice to mistake for anger, or for pain, or for any kind of imagination or hope. "I kind of wondered," he said vaguely. "I kind of thought... But whatever was here when I was a kid is gone."

"I'm not gone! I'm here!" I shouted, fearful he wouldn't listen, fearful he'd end it all.

He looked at me. "After all this time," he said. "You're just a timepiece."

My heart broke. My essence would soon follow.

"You can't even keep the right time," he reproached, and, dusting off his pressed pants, he left.

• A response to Prompt 2
  

Dulcina

(The prompt for this one is the poem in italics here.)

He had but one flower – not a bouquet, not a wreath, just a single flower. This he pressed into her hands.

"Its fair petals are but a faint reflection of the beauty in your eyes, Lady Dulcina," he told her.

She blushed. "Fair words, good sheppard," she said sweetly. "I have only a small favor to offer you in return. And when you have won the contest I shall be honored to reward you with a kiss."

He quirked a smile and leaned in close. "Won't you kiss me now, sweet lady? One kiss, one small preview…To ensure my victory…"

She grinned and turned away from his outstretched face. Theatrically: "Nay, nay. Not until your victory is complete – for how sweeter the kiss once earned in brave battle. How my heart yearns for the moment when our lips will touch!"

He frowned. "You're sure you don't want - ? But I need that kiss to win, my dear." He planted his arms firmly around her waist.

"Nonsense," she said, pulling back, a little alarmed. "Why so impatient? It shan't be long now."

"But my good looks," he said. "And my rose--that rose is magic, you know." He turned his face up imploringly to the sky. "Come on, I'm seducing her!"

The voice of God, apparently, is not booming and forceful, but wheedling, normal. It came from nowhere. "Okay," God said. "Roll it."

The man has a set of dice and drops it immediately upon the ground. "Natural 20 with a plus-four seduction from the flower!" he announced with glee.

"No," the girl breathed. "No, no, no. You can't just roll like that. Don't I get a choice?"

God is infinitely patient. "Of course," he said soothingly. "What's your willpower?"

"It's not a question of willpower, it's a choice." Her arms were crossed angrily.

"But the flower. You have to resist it."

"We-ell," she said finally and slowly, "if it's magic, then I suppose I must…"

The dice were dropped again.

"YES!" she cheered. "Tie goes to the defender."

The man's face clouded over. He reached out and caught her wrist in one hand. "I don't have to seduce you," he said. "I need the kiss to win, and so I won't let you go until you've kissed me."

Angrily she tried to break free. "I can't kiss you until sundown, you fool," she snapped. "You will miss the competition, keeping me here like this."

"Then we are at an impasse," the sheppard said gruffly. From nowhere and everywhere, the wheedling voice of God sniggered.

"You both have the same strength modifiers, the same charisma modifiers, and the same intellect modifiers," God laughed. "Even the same protective charms around your necks. Statistically speaking, you'll both be here all day."

"Great," Dulcina grated. "All day. We've only got two options… Kiss now or kiss later, and I'm not kissing you now," she snapped. "I'll be a frog if I kiss before sunset tonight. Look, go find someone else to seduce? Someone weaker. Someone with better stats. Let GO."

"Wait," gasped the Sheppard, to the sky. "What was that you said about charms?"

"You each," said God, "have the same protective charm about your neck."

Dulcina stared at the Sheppard. "You mean to tell me he's got – "

The Sheppard's jaw dropped. "You mean she has the royal charm – "

They both released each other in shock.

"We could be cousins!"

"Or siblings!"

Dulcina made a face. "Let's not be melodramatic. If I kiss your cheek will you at least be able to take third place?"

"I… I guess," the man shrugged. "I don't really know how the whole thing works."

"Then if you do win, come back and kiss me on the cheek. I won't be a human but at least I won't be a frog. Stupid curses…"

"Right," the man said. "Okay."

She brushed his cheek with her lips.

He turned to leave, turned back with a little guilt in his eyes. "Thanks," he said. "Er. Meet me at the pond? Sundown?"

"Oh very funny. I'm not a frog yet, you know. Fine, whatever. Just be sure to come back!"

The sheppard nodded emphatically.

Dulcina waved to the shepard's back as he fled.

"He will return on time," promised God.

"Just, please, do me a favor?" Dulcina said.

"Anything for you," God wheedled.

"Don't make him roll for it."

Repurposed

I've decided to re-purpose this old Magazine Writing blog for the Write Club. It's still bear wrestling (I mean, writing practice) but this time it's with fiction instead of fact.

Fuzzy! Fun!

The Rules: We each have one week from the sending of the prompt to write a short story (or poem or whatever) inspired by the prompt. Then we read and comment on each other's stories. Then we wrestle a bear. Er, wait, what did I sign up for again?

Pens at the ready... Wait for the start bell... DING!