THRICE TOLD TALES
ROBERT W. WALKER
Copyright © 2010 by Robert W. Walker, www.robertwalkerbooks.com
Cover copyright © 2010 by Stephen Walker, www.srwalkerdesigns.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Robert W. Walker.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
500 Word Short-Short Stories:
500 Words
Bat Guano
Zomflies
Longer Stories:
A Snitch in Time
Pet Project
Rules of Fog
Longest Stories:
The Unread
Stump Grinder
Afterword/Advice to Writers:
Tension in Fiction
Advice Column
INTRODUCTION
Ever write a 500-word story? Think it’s easy? Got to be easier than writing a novel, right? Wrong!
Some time back a friend, who was putting together an anthology asked me if I would contribute. It was a horror anthology, so the story had to have a monster in it or some truly scary psychological thrills, or simply be a hoot, a laugh fest. Much of horror walks a tightrope and on one side is fright, the other side hilarity. In fact, there is a long and noble tradition of humor linked to horror, and the best purveyor of such a seemingly wild mix was none other than the author of Psycho, Robert Bloch, whose short works are classic. You might call Bloch the Mark Twain of horror writing, as the man could make your cry, start, and laugh in the same paragraph. Another great author of the sort who himself gets a good belly laugh at your goose bumps is Richard Matheson. These two men have been among my favorite authors forever. Getting back to my friend who wanted a frightful story from me, he added, “And oh yeah, it has to be 500 words.” To which I replied, “You mean 5000, don’t you?” His response, “No, five hundred. Every story in the anthology must be kept to five hundred words. Short enough to read during a bathroom sitting.”
The gauntlet was thrown down, and I love a challenge; in fact, if an editor anywhere knew—just knew the secret—that when challenged by an idea, I go nuts and I must—absolutely must take on said challenge. My four novels in my DECOY series came by way of an editor’s challenge: Can you…in three sentences, she challenged me to create a series character that became Lanark, a Chicago Decoy cop and actor par excellence. But this…five hundred words? Was it possible? It took rewrite after rewrite when the story came in at 750 words. I believed after about the tenth rewrite there was nothing more that could come out if I wished to maintain the integrity of the story, but with the editor’s help on the final-final draft, I finally managed a five hundred word story, and I entitled it 500 words. By way of demonstrating a short-short-short story, I am herewith going to share Five Hundred Words with you, and I hope you know that I became a better writer learning to cut, then cut, then cut more, and when I thought nothing more could be cut, I remained open to someone else adding cuts. I learned so much writing this little story…
500 WORDS
“In writing…500 words, Alfred! Now regale us.”
“Everything?”
“The whole wretched story, yes. What precipitated Charlene’s murder,” asked Detective Kyle Begum.
“Self-defense,” bitched Alfred.
Begum, fed up, went for snacks. “Right back.”
With one hand to write, the other handcuffed to a bolted table, Alfred glanced at Detective Dick Trent. “She-bitch outta hell, cannibalized spleens and livers.”
Trent grumbled, “Write it.”
“Easy for you to say. When was last time you wrote 500 freaking words! Look, Charlene became this godawful she-bitch. Whataya do when a wife becomes a were-dog and attacks you in the living room? You want it from the beginning, it’s gonna require a 1000 words, sir.”
“500’s all the computer can handle,” muttered Trent. “Just the facts.”
“Shit hit the fan when I accidentally broke her neon filigree-framed painting.”
“Christ as Elvis; last supper at Graceland?”
“You saw it? Charlene insisted the thing proved the efficacy of the DaVinci Code.”
“Write!”
“—divinely guided, she said, but surely no way Jesus looked like Elvis.”
“Write!”
“And I don’t believe Jesus slept with a woman or sported sideburns.”
“Sideburns? Civil War,” Trent muttered. “Long after JC.”
“And long before Elvis.”
“Just write it.”
Trent had claimed that he and Begum had ‘heard it all before’. Nothing new under the precinct sun. “Put it on paper. Write….”
“Never was much of a writer,” Alfred offered.
“We found your wife’s body torn to shreds and smeared with salsa. Write!”
“I loved Charlene, but she was gonna kill me.”
“Yeah… we know… love is murder. Now, Alfred, write it!”
# # #
Detective Lyle Begun entered pissed that Trent didn’t open the door when he kicked at it. Begum had his hands full when he entered Interrogation Room #4. The Cokes and chips went flying the moment he realized Alfred had somehow chewed off his cuffed hand and left it dangling, still in the cuff at the table. Blood and Trent’s body everywhere in pieces filled Begum’s vision, when suddenly the werewolf dropped from the ceiling overhead and onto him.
“Your turn now, Begum—take a seat!” the werewolf ordered, his face fierce, fangs bare, claws extended. Begum instinctively went for his gun, but the creature’s massive paw clamped over his hand and holster. “Go ahead, Begum, make my day.”
“What…what do you want from me? Safe escort? OK, OK…we’re outta here. Money, ransom? You got it. My wife? Take her. What?”
“Sit down at the table Begum.”
“Sit?”
“I didn’t say shit.” The wereman that Alfred Holmes had become slapped the pencil and paper before Begum where he sat now at the bloodied table and chair. Trent’s blood. It was awful and the room reeked of it.
“What do you want from me?” asked Begum.
“Not much, but your buddy Trent couldn’t cut it.”
Begum begged him now. “What is it you want?”
“Just five hundred words.”
From Rob:
So that’s it! Lots of fun around the blood and guts. Why humor and horror work in tandem like a good vaudeville act, I don’t know. Will leave that to the psychiatrists. Hope you enjoyed the story and perhaps, if you too write, you see the value of brevity. There does exist an old book out there you might find on a library shelf near you entitled How To Be Brief, which I read as a kid. It didn’t take all the advice, to be sure, as my novels often run way past the number of words the contract called for, but I do recall it was great advice. Not too long ago, I had to rewrite City for Ransom for HarperCollins down from 140,000 words back to the contract agreement of 90,000. We finally settled on 100,000 after three—count them—three consecutive rewrites after the many rewrites already done! Three in a row nonstop. Nonstop cutting, cutting, cutting.
Now onto another short story. This one about Bats in Belfries…hehehe…
BAT GUANO
“Every freaking morning, the same old shit. Bat shit. Comes, parks it in my attic, uninvited, and the hellish thing shits all day while sleeping inside my head.”
“And ahhh… this ahhh… excretion… is thi
s what disturbs you most about Algernon?” Dr. Soreasel jotted notes.
“Hold on, doc, this clown’s got no idea the bodily functions we bats gotta go through. You ever try shitting while hanging upside down? Tail end up?”
So crass. Charlie apologized for the bat.
“If it’s so difficult, shitting upwards while hanging upside down, then why do you do it? One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over—knowing it does not work.”
Great psychobabble for the buck. “Look, Doc, it ain’t so much we’re asleep as our bodies get jostled the least bit, and damn, end of snooze. The real nightmare is trying to get back to sleep.”
“Oh yeah, that pisses me off too.”
“So we bats are stark still; can’t do that if you follow Charlie’s bathroom processes. I know…I’m there.”
All the time, Algernon is there. Charlie looked on the verge of tears. Dr. Soreasel jotted faster. Charlie kept talking in irritating bat personae.
“The john for us bats is wherever we’re at. Gotta go, gotta go…”
Dr. Soreasel tapped pencil over pad. “Sounds like you two have a basic co-dependent, gunny-sacking relationship here.”
“And is that a bad thing?” the bat flutteringly asked.
“What precisely does it all mean, Doctor, precisely what?” Charlie fidgeted.
“Means you gunny-sack away all perceived slights, hurts, humiliations, and yes, even your affection and mutual admiration. All stuffed in that emotional sack.”
“Never talked it out, I guess.”
“Guess we do kinda put things away instead of…”
“Gunny-sacking, huh?” More tears.
“Do you mean to say you’ve never talked about this before?”
“Never.”
“No, not once.”
“Ever?”
“Swear to God. Charlie’s never complained about shit before.”
“Charlie, you want to address that?”
“Well… how do you broach the subject… I mean, if you are a delicate-minded fellow?”
“Delicate-minded, he calls it.”
“And you resent that, Algernon?”
“Whenever he refuses to communicate, he hauls out that delicate crap. Delicate prick oughta wear a bonnet.”
“Name-calling is counter-constructive.”
“It’s just Algernon’s way.”
“Are you making excuses for the vampire bat nesting in your head?”
“I’m under a spell.”
Soreasel considered Giddings and his imaginary animas, the one living in his belfry all right. What a fucking great write up for Go Psychiatry Magazine.
“Think it’s all in my head, don’t you, Soreasel?”
“Now Charlie… please sit back—”
“How can I sit? Would you sit for this shit? Algernon’s eating away at my brain, and that bat guano he exudes stinks up my whole head, smokes my nostrils, drifts down my throat.”
As he spoke, an enormous vampire bat inched, clawed, squeezed its way from Charlie’s scabbed over bloody left ear. “Damn, never know which side he’s gonna come outta next.”
“Cramped quarters, Doc, but now you—you got a swell head. Come ‘ere, big boy!”
From Rob:
Quick and dirty advice from a pro on writing the short-short story --
To be successful as a short story writer it’s a pretty good idea to have the ending and the beginning occurring as close to possible as possible, and to do this you concentrate on ONE—the magic number one. One main character, one point of view, one location, one time period…or at very most two of each of these important story elements like setting. DRAW a circle and mark the top the beginning, then behind that at the top mark the ending.
See now how I practice what I preach in this 3rd 500 word story before we move on to longer and more complex works which do indeed have multiple settings and more character interaction, and more dialogue-driven aspects of the dramatization. Enjoy:
ZOMFLIES
Never easy being a zombie, and now this—fly eggs. Lucia Vincetti had felt disturbed to her core while lying in her top-of-the-line mahogany box; disturbed by the sound of maggots nibbling away inside her cranium where they’d migrated from the eyes—already gone. Flies laying eggs in her supposed sanctity--six feet under—the distance Lucia had clawed her way back from. She’d come to have satisfaction. The damned coffin was supposed to be insect proof, and the warranty was nearing an end.
She confronted her cousin Binney at the mortuary. All he could stutter out was a shaky, “W-w-when…did you first no-notice the prob-lem?”
Sleazy little living weasel’d never honor that warranty unless she threw a real scare into him.
Binney stood shaking at the back of the mortuary.
“Freaking maggots’re popping out of crusty little scabby balls inside places I didn’t even know I had,” she screeched at Binney. “I couldn’t just lay down for that. Binney, you allowed a fly into the lid before lowering it.”
“W-w-what do you expect me to do about it?” Binnie’s bow tie snapped.
Binney and his father before him had taken care of every scatological problem normally with class, but that was when Carmine lived. Now the old mortuary was headquarters to Binnie’s Itinerant Embalmers. Their motto: Call US or Suffer….the final brainchild Carmine had hatched. To give the old mortuary a makeover. A fleet of RVs was the dream, and back of each RV an entire embalming theater equipped with all the essentials from sutures to Smile & Glow fixitive, tooth replacements and wigs.
A real money-saver. The embalmer came to the corpse rather than the corpse coming to the embalmer. But tonight, the corpse had come to the embalmer.
“So…so what do you want from me?”
“A makeover,” said the zombie. “Restitution in a makeover.”
Binney dug out his plaster of Paris, sutures, fixatives, and his Smile & Glove.
“This is for all the many zombies who’ve been mal-treated by your kind, Binney.”
“Mal-treated?”
“Seen too many zombies fail on the outside. And why, Binnie?”
“They fail to fit in?”
“Wrong. Zombies fare no better than the bipolar, the clinically depressed, mentally deranged. Zombie flies are a small annoyance beside zombie prejudices, but worst than any hatred held for a zombie is the outright mistreatment of a zombie by the living, all of whom seem bent on keeping zombies down, or raping us, unaccountably beating and throwing us into asylums.”
“No way,” replied Binnie, mouth agape.
“C’mon, who hasn’t heard stories of perfectly normal zombies being stabbed, robbed, brutalized, thrown from rooftops, set afire, tortured, and ridiculed as idiots?”
“Bullshit, any zombie has as much rights as all of us.”
“One zombie even came back stripped naked. His genitalia removed, and not in a neat surgical precision sort of way, either.”
“Look, that’s not my problem.”
In the green glow of a neon sign over what once was Carmine’s House of Sleep Mortuary Parlor, no one saw the zombie dragging a coffin toward home.
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