by J. R. Rain
So the boy crept out of the field, moved quickly around a huge mud puddle, and stepped cautiously up onto the wooden porch. His heart was really pounding now. It always pounded when he was about to rummage through the old man’s bag. This was stealing, after all, and he had been taught better than that.
I’m a bad boy, he thought, and then almost laughed.
But the chocolate is good. So very good!
Mouth watering, he did what he had been doing all along for the past few months. He crept slowly along the wide wooden porch until he reached the glorious paper bag. With his heart hammering even harder in his little chest and stomach growling, he peered down into the open paper bag—
Yes! The gleaming of metal. A rectangular shape. Chocolate!
Smiling from ear to ear, Alfonso thrust his hands down inside the bag and had just closed his thin fingers around the tin-foil wrapped chocolate, when the screen door burst open.
Hands outstretched and reaching for the boy’s throat, a wild-eyed figure lunged at Alfonso.
Alfonso screamed and tumbled backward, falling off the porch and into the soggy mud below. He landed hard and awkwardly, hurting his wrist. But he didn’t have time to consider his injuries. He needed to get away from this wild-eyed maniac coming at him.
So he scrabbled backward like a sand crab on hands and feet, until he realized that the crazy man coming at him was the old man. Alfonso slowed down and finally stopped altogether.
After all, he had nothing to worry about. Old Man Gomez could barely walk, let alone give chase to a nimble-legged boy of eight. So Alfonso sat there in the mud and tried to catch his breath. He could feel his heart jack hammering in his chest, and briefly wondered if it would ever slow again.
The old man was shaking with rage, and, amazingly, even seemed to be considering giving chase, but finally thought better of it.
Good idea, thought Alfonso, you would only break something.
And then, to his utter shock and delight, Alfonso saw that he was still clutching the chocolate bar. Ha! What luck!
Still grinning, Alfonso looked up. The old man was staring down at him. Staring down at the chocolate bar.
Maybe I should give it back, thought Alfonso.
Hell no, the old goat nearly gave me a heart attack. And he tried to choke me!
Alfonso found his feet and triumphantly waved the glittering rectangular package at the old man, who seemed nearly beside himself with rage. Still standing in front of the shack, Alfonso grinned and slowly unwrapped one corner of the chocolate bar and took a healthy bite. Alfonso thought he had died and gone to heaven. Best of all, the old man, the same person who just tried to strangle him, was red-faced and shaking even harder with fury. So Alfonso took another bite in front of him. Then waved and trotted off.
Serves him right, trying to hurt an innocent little kid, he thought.
At the edge of the old man’s field, Alfonso stopped and looked back. The afternoon sun was high and bright and shone straight down into his face. Alfonso shielded his eyes and saw that the old man was muttering something.
That’s when Alfonso thought about curses.
Curses could be hell. They could ruin your whole day or sometimes week. Heck, if the curse was bad enough and uttered by someone with enough skill, according to his grandfather, a curse could ruin your life.
Alfonso shuddered.
But all he had stolen was a piece of chocolate, right? It’s not like he’d robbed the old man of his entire life savings. Granted, he’d been robbing Gomez twice a week for the past three months, but still.....
Go back and return it, said a voice in his head.
Alfonso looked down at the chocolate, briefly considered going back, and then took another bite. Another big bite.
Go back.
But Alfonso ignored the voice. The chocolate was too good, and the old man was too scary.
The path to his house was a defunct game trail, barely visible through the ever-encroaching jungle. Alfonso knew it by heart, which gave him time to think more about curses.
His uncle on his mother’s side had reputedly died from a curse. His heart had apparently exploded, literally, leaving a huge hole in his chest. The story was that his uncle had supposedly crossed someone familiar in the dark arts.
Alfonso shivered. Stories of the dark arts always freaked him out. The boy seriously hoped the old man wasn’t familiar with the dark arts.
Alfonso suddenly felt sick to his stomach. He didn’t want the chocolate anymore. Maybe he would sell it at school tomorrow. Besides, it was too late to go back, right? The chocolate was already seriously melted and he had eaten nearly half of it.
Alfonso ignored the voices in his head and cut his way through his family’s small papaya field, through the vegetable garden, dodged some clucking chickens, and headed toward his small adobe and waddle home. As he absently kicked away an annoying rooster, Alfonso decided that the old man had only been muttering, because, well, that’s what old men do: they mutter!
That made him feel good.
He took another bite of chocolate.
As usual, the door to his house was open. As he approached it, he could see his mother in the front room folding clothes. She was a big woman and worked harder than anyone Alfonso had ever known. Harder than even his dad. Harder than any two dads combined! He didn’t know how she did it. She had two jobs and was raising six kids and worked tirelessly around the home.
Alfonso suddenly felt guilty. Very guilty. What if his mom found out about the chocolate? She would be very disappointed in him. But she wouldn’t yell at him. No, she never yelled at him. She always talked to him like a little adult, and Alfonso could already feel the heat of shame creep into his cheeks.
He stepped up onto the front porch, which consisted of many planks of silk cottonwood bound together, grayish now with age. The porch sagged under his weight, creaking. His foot landed neatly between two planks of old wood, narrowly missing a seamless crack.
Return the chocolate.
It suddenly sounded like a damn good idea.
But you’ve already eaten most of it.
Doesn’t matter. Return it and apologize and save yourself from shame.
Or from a curse.
Through the door, he could see his mother deftly folding a huge sheet. She was humming to herself, unaware of him. He could see sweat on the back of her neck. Her calves were thick and strong. He loved his mother with all his heart.
Return the chocolate.
Okay.
He turned to leave, turned to apologize to the muttering old man. And as he did so, his twisting left foot moved over the narrow crack that separated the third plank from the fourth plank.
Crack!
Something snapped loudly behind him. Very loudly. A sickening sound that turned his stomach. The sound of breaking bones and pain and...death.
Alfonso gasped and spun around and saw his mother bent perfectly in half, like a jackknife.
He screamed.
His mother’s gleaming forehead, as if swaying in the wind, bounced gently against her kneecaps, her body somehow still standing, somehow still supported by those thick calves. And then slowly, very slowly, she toppled over, landing hard on her side, shaking the simple home down to its foundations.
Alfonso, the son of poor Jamaican parents, was, of course, unfamiliar with the famous Western superstition.
The End
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Two Ghosts
She was a pretty young thing, despite the fact that I could see through her.
Her name was Dawn and she had died a year ago from an accidental drug overdose. And, like me, she was still hanging around the same apartments. Unlike me, she didn’t say much, and so I did most of the talking.
We were in her death apartment; that is, the place where she had died. Or, more precisely, the place where she had been found foaming at the mouth after a long night of partying. I had been there, too, minus the partying. I had sat in
the far corner of the living room, secretly watching the living destroying their lives.
What else was a ghost supposed to do on a lonely weekend night?
Anyway, she and her friends had been partying hard. Too hard. Dawn had taken one too many snorts of something of this, and one too many syringes of something of that, and sometime in the middle of the night, she was spasming and vomiting violently.
As her friends rushed to call 911, and others clumsily—and drunkenly—applied CPR, she expired. And from the corner of the room where I had been observing the party and her death, I watched as a very bright soul rose up confusedly from her dying body.
I came back later that night after the paramedics and police had come and gone, and found her soul huddling in the far corner of the room—the same corner I had been watching the party from.
“Hi,” I said.
* * *
That was about a year ago—or maybe longer. Or shorter, for that matter. I can never remember dates these days.
It’s hell being dead.
It was late and we were alone in her death apartment. Her spirit was quite bright tonight, a veritable silver fireball. New spirits are always like that, so full of energy and life. Mine, not so much. The life is still there, granted, but the energy is mostly gone. And the longer I stick around the duller I get. Someday I suspect I will just be an amorphous, brain-colored mist with no form or identity, flitting about randomly. Why this happens, I’m not sure, but I think the memory of who we are helps define our spirit’s shape.
Unfortunately, with each passing day, I’m losing my memory faster and faster, and thus losing my shape.
A sick circle, for sure.
So here she was tonight: this bright, pretty young thing, dead before her time and regretting every second of it. I knew she regretted every second of it because I often found her sobbing in the far corner of the room, which is how I found her tonight. As she sobbed into her ghostly hands, I had slipped through the apartment and gone over and sat on the couch.
“I’m sorry you’re sad,” I finally said.
She gasped, startled, and turned her tear-stained celestial face toward me. The tears cascading down her cheeks looked like twin streams of molten silver. She absently wiped the pseudo tears from her eyes and looked down at her fingertips, which now sparkled with silver drops of liquid moonlight.
“Those aren’t real tears,” I said. “At least, not in the physical sense. The soul seems to remember what it was like to cry, and emulates it quite amazingly. Then again, who knows, maybe they are tears. What the hell do I know? I’m just a ghost.”
I drifted up off the couch and moved cautiously toward her. As I did so, she huddled deeper in the dark corner. She usually shrank away from me in fear. I was, after all, a ghost. I sensed she had been an atheist in life and just couldn’t accept what had become of her in death. I also sensed she didn’t really believe she was dead. That she was living a nightmare. A nightmare from which she could not awaken.
I paused in the center of the room. Actually, I paused in the center of the coffee table. I’ve been doing that a lot lately; that is, walking through furniture. In the old days, in the months following my murder, I had instinctively tried to avoid such things as chairs and couches and bar stools.
That instinct is gone now. That instinct was now defunct. Why go around, when you can go through?
Anyway, her soul was still quite a bit brighter than mine, although lately it had been dimming somewhat. As always, the dimming starts with the feet. In her case, the ghostly hint of her tennis shoes—which she had been wearing at the time of her death.
I hated to see her dim. She was too pretty to dim.
The apartment’s tenants were asleep, and so we had the living room to ourselves. I continued standing in the middle of the coffee table; she continued huddling in the far corner of the room.
Just two lost souls, lost in every sense of the word.
The moon shown down through the sliding glass windows, slipping through the Venetian blinds, splashing silver bars across the Pergo floor. Somewhere in the apartment building someone was playing music; it thumped up pleasantly through the floorboards. Some smooth R&B.
I stepped out of the coffee table, and continued slowly toward her. Normally, I didn’t approach her. Tonight was different. Tonight it was time for her to come out of the corner. Why was tonight different? I didn’t know, exactly, but it felt different. Perhaps I didn’t like her fading away before my eyes. Perhaps it was time for her to quit living in fear of me.
That is, living in death.
So I moved as slowly as I could, drifting like a bed sheet caught in a small wind. A bed sheet with a very low thread count.
As I approached, she huddled deeper into her corner, utterly terrified of me.
But I continued coming.
And she pressed deeper into the shadows, so deep her shoulder actually disappeared into the wall. When I reached the middle of the living room floor, somewhere between the TV and the couch, I finally stopped.
And held out my hand.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I promise.”
She stared at my outstretched hand for a long, long time. The faint music continued thumping up through the floor. Finally, she seemed to come to some sort of decision. Her shoulder which had disappeared into the wall, reappeared.
I continued standing in the center of the floor, continued holding out my outstretcheded hand. Silver beams of moonlight came in at an angle through the Venetian blinds. The moonlight shined straight down through my phantasmagoric arm. I couldn’t help but notice I didn’t even leave a shadow on the faux wooden floor below. Like I wasn’t even there.
Anyway, I said nothing to Dawn, and simply waited. I suspected that if I spoke, I would scare her away. Spook her, so to speak.
I didn’t want to scare her away. Not tonight. Not ever.
Even though she had never spoken a word to me, she was all I had. And I would take even that little bit, because without her I would be alone. Alone with the living.
I continued standing there, continued holding out my hand to her. Waiting. An open invitation. To what, I didn’t know. But at least we had each other.
She took a tentative step away from the corner, and with that first step, my heart leaped for joy.
She took another, and then another, and soon she was standing in the center of the living room floor, just beyond my fingertips. She looked at me with the biggest, roundest eyes I had ever seen.
Then she did something I thought she would never do.
She reached out and took my hand.
Her soft touch sent a ripple of pleasure through me, the first such pleasure I had felt in God knows how long.
I closed my fingers around hers and drew her carefully toward me. She came willingly, even though fear still flickered in those round eyes. I kept drawing her to me until her face was pressed lightly against my bullet-riddled chest.
With her palm in mine and her head on my chest, with the moonlight shining through us and the music thumping away from below, two lost souls danced the night away....
The End
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Deal With the Devil
Backstory: “Deal With the Devil” is not technically a short story. Sure, it’s short and sure it’s a story, but it’s actually a script for a graphic novel.
Oh?
A few years ago a graphic novel publisher asked me to write a supernatural detective story to include in an upcoming graphic novel anthology. (For those of you who don’t know, a graphic novel is a comic book that’s packaged to look and feel like a book.) Anyway, the publisher was quite specific: they wanted no more than fifteen pages and they wanted the story to be the first half of a story that would be concluded in the next anthology volume. Cool beans. I could do that.
Well, I already had an idea brewing in my noggin that included Satan and a private investigator, but it wasn’t until I received the offer to write the graph
ic novel that the story truly fell into place. A week or so later, I wrote my first graphic novel and sent it off to the publisher. Luckily, they liked it and accepted it, and soon they had a young artist lined up who seemed eager to work with me. Everything was going smoothly. I was excited. I couldn’t wait to see this artist’s vision of my dark mystery.
And that’s when the publisher went bankrupt.
Ah, well, these things happen. The rights reverted back to me, and now I’m publishing it here on Kindle for the first time.
A note on how to read a comic script. The story itself is clearly laid out in 15 pages, as you will see. Each page is sub-divided into different panels. What are panels? They’re the little boxes you see on a comic book page. Each box or panel represents a shift in the camera (or shot), so to speak. So basically, what you’re reading is a comic book minus the drawings. Easy enough, right?
Anyway, I do hope you enjoy my first foray into the graphic novel world.
—J.R. Rain
P.S. Yes, the format is a little tricky, but I think you will get the hang of it. Remember, you’re reading a script to a graphic novel, so when you see words like “caption” and “bubble”, I’m giving cues to the artist (and sometimes you’ll even see me actually speak to the artist directly).
Deal With the Devil
PAGE ONE
FULL SHOT. New York City. Bustling street corner. Cutting through the sea of humanity is a tall figure in a trench coat. The man is given a wide berth by all those around him. He is blond and incredibly good looking, perhaps the best-looking man alive. Except he’s not a man. He is Satan. The Devil. The Incarnation of Evil himself. Lucifer. The Fallen Angel.
Although evil through and through, Lucifer has retained his incredible beauty. His blond hair is long and flowing. He wears a half sneer. But he is not just beautiful, he is also the ULTIMATE BAD BOY. He is Tommy Lee and Rob Zombie and Brad Pitt rolled into one.