Terrible Minds Flash Fiction Challenge: 200 words, part 2

Written for the 2nd part of Chuck Wendig's 5 week flash fiction challenge on Terrible Minds.  Basically, one picks 200 words written by someone else for last  week's challenge, then adds their own 200 words to the mix.  Below, the story beginning I chose by Fatma Alici, and following that, the 200 words I added.


Another shot glass slammed down as Toops flashed her big, black eyes at me.  “Are you going to black out.”  Her tone as dry as the desert planet we had left.

“I never black out. “  I grinned motioning for another shot.  “I’m only resting my eyes.”

 Toops rolled her eyes and crossed her arms.   “Yeah, I believe you, Lancer.  I really do.”  Her scarred fingers pushed her still full glass back and forth across the metal bar top.  “Didn’t you say we have a man coming in to offer us a job?

“You handle all the contracts.  I’m your simple minded muscle.”  I winked at her.  “Me big man.  Me hit things hard.”  The burning fire scalded my throat as I took another shot.

Her hand snapped out faster than my eye could follow.  Those strong fingers crushed mine into my palm.  “Do not call for another shot.  I swear I will break your fingers right now.”

A hearty chuckle rumbled up my throat.  “Alright, alright boss lady.”

My fingers were released.  “We are partners.”

“You say that now, but once the client gets here you’ll change your tune.”  She couldn’t deny it.  It was true.

---

The mark joined us not too long after that. I know they're supposed to be clients, but I can't help thinking of them as marks. Lancer likes to think of us as noble ruffians, taking on jobs to help the weak and disenfranchised. Truth is, we take on the jobs that pay the most. Sometimes that means we take the client for a bit of a ride.

Lancer was right about one thing: when the client arrives, I play boss. Pretty much have to; no one would buy me as the hired muscle – at least no one with all their bits in tact. Marks are always weary of a girl without a purpose. They'll buy me as the brains, but not the brawn.

Lancer brought this one in. I let him do that once in a while because it makes him feel like we're equal partners. More importantly, it makes the marks think that I'm hot stuff. They're so lucky to get me, I send one of my peons first to see if they're worthwhile instead of going myself. Doesn't always work, but when it does, it's a much bigger payday.

Terrible Minds Flash Fiction Challenge

Wrote this for Chuck Wendig's most recent flash fiction challenge on Terrible Minds.

Blurred, crystalline shapes whined into view.

Rebecca blinked, but otherwise kept still while she assessed the damage. The glass had exploded inward, which bothered her less because it had knocked her down, and more because exploded inward was a contradiction. She didn't like that.

Her habit had protected her ears and God had protected her eyes. Her hands hadn't been so well looked after.

She put a cautious, bleeding hand on a pile of glass cubes, another on bare concrete, and started to push herself up. For the first and – she hoped – only time, she was glad Mother Superior insisted on those ugly, thick-soled shoes. Her stilettos never would have gained traction.

A hand appeared in front of her. She took it without questioning its origin. It was strong, warm, masculine. She was happy to allow the man to help her stand, to accept her glasses as he handed them back. For a second, Rebecca let herself believe she might escape. She put her glasses on.

She started, which startled the man. His one hand hung awkwardly in the air, as if he was still waiting for her to take her glasses; the other rested on his gun.

Invaders from Beyond the Sky - Flash Fiction Challenge

I wrote this for a flash fiction challenge on Terrible Minds.  The idea is to combine two sub-genres in 1000 words.  I decided to combine three, Dieselpunk, Alien Invasion and BDSM erotica.... which means, NSFW.  Reviews welcome.

The dashboard had five dials in it. Five dials and 16 toggle switches. It seemed like more than enough, but what did I know about motorcycles? How to fix them, but not how they should look. 

Anyway, Ace Savage was impressed with himself and I wanted to be polite.

“She's a beaut,” I told him. “Looks just like a jewel or something.”

“Like a bullet,” he corrected me. I didn't argue, even though a bullet like that would never get out of the chamber.

Ace was a nice enough kid. He was a couple years older than me, blonde, handsome. Not my type. We'd known each other growing up and he always wanted to wear the pants. He'd boss me and I'd let him, but if I'd ever wanted to, I'd have had him grovelling in a heartbeat. I didn't like that. Inconsistent.

I batted my eyelashes at him. “Can I go in front?”

He shook his head. He wasn't about to let a girl drive his new toy.

My baby blues were losing their charm. I sighed. “OK. I guess I'll just get behind you and hold on real tight.”

Ace smiled and handed me a pair of goggles.

The road was empty, but the sky was full of zeppelins. I closed my eyes, smelled the cedar and squeezed Ace tighter. It was too quiet. The calm before the shit storm.

When we got to the base, my hair was mussed, so I pretended to worry over it while Ace went to talk to the guard. I didn't catch much, but I heard Ace refer to me as his girl twice. Their talk ended with him turning to me and saying, “You don't mind waiting with the bike, Millie? There's a good girl.”

I nodded and sat side-saddle on his bike. “Aye-aye, Captain.”

Ace went through the gate. I looked at the trees.

After about a half-hour, the guard got a call on the radio, put his gun over his shoulder and high-tailed it down the road.

I waited until he was out of sight, walked along the fence a little ways and slipped under it into the forest. I didn't always snoop around the base; I'd planned on waiting right where Ace told me to – but it was strange for the guard to abandon his post like that, and I was curious.

I walked parallel to the road, right up to the marble building and in through a side door. Usually this is where my heart would start pumping so hard I could hear it, where I'd have to duck into a doorway to avoid being caught – but the halls were empty, just like the road.

There was a faint buzzing sound, and I followed that. Everybody was gathered in one room, silent.

I crept in through the open door. The sound was coming from the projector. The screen was full of tiny discs, nothing too impressive, just blobs of dark grey on white. There was a big blob that was lighter than the rest. It took a second for me to see it was a zeppelin – which meant that all those black blobs were filling up the sky.

I covered my mouth to keep from gasping and backed through the door. I hit something, and before I could turn around, I felt a giant hand pinning my arms together at the wrist. I tried to turn my head, but another hand pushed my face forward. I felt lips against my ear and heard, “Don't bother, just walk,” and was pushed down the hallway.

I'd been around the base enough to know I was lost. I hadn't even known there were elevators until he shoved me into one.

I hit the wall hard, too fast to get my hands up. I turned around in time to see the doors close.

“Want to tell me what you're doing here? Who are you spying for?”

Tears stung my eyes. This was the problem; I'd get roughed up and I'd be such a mix of turned on and spitting mad that I wouldn't know what to say. “No one. I was just—” I thought about mentioning Ace's name. It would have been the fastest way out of the mess I was in. “I was just snooping. You know, in general.”

“Which General?” the man demanded.

I blinked at him, disappointed that a man like this should be so stupid. “Sorry, bad joke.” He cracked a smile. Gorgeous white teeth. I thought I might provoke him, see if I could get him to bite.

His uniform wasn't one I recognized. Some special division, maybe. Definitely not in Ace's unit.

“I'm Millie.”

“Vale.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Basement.”

“Why?”

He crossed the elevator in half a second, backing me into the corner he'd thrown me into. “Questioning.”

My heart thudded in my ears. I pressed myself into the railing to keep from pressing into Vale. The elevator bell dinged and the doors slid open.

At first Vale didn't say much, just asked me questions and tightened my restraints when he didn't like the answers. He finally worked out that I got off on it and gave up on interrogation. Every time he came down, he looked a little grayer, a little weaker, sometimes beat up pretty bad.

One day he came in, looking rough and told me, “This is the safest place for you,” chained my arms above my head and fucked me against the bars of my cell. That was the closest to a heart-to-heart we ever had.

The aliens have taken all the big cities. Not just here, worldwide. This base is one of the only ones left and I have to wonder who's holding it together.

I don't know what's happened to Ace. Vale still comes to see me sometimes, but we don't do much talking.

Another 25 Things from Chuck

Clickit

Flash Pulp, Baby

I wrote this in response to the Terrible Minds Flash Fiction Challange, Baby Pulp. My first attempt at pulp fiction. Enjoy.

Let Sleeping Babes Lie.

The question wasn't where the girl had got the kid – that was easy enough to guess. The question was, where had she kept it? Where, on that narrow, perfectly proportioned body, had she stored the damn thing?

Red satin. I close my eyes and all I see is red satin. It clung to her like a drop sheet on a stiff, showing off what it was put there to cover up.

The kid was still pink, tiny and wrinkled, its eyes barely open. She had it wrapped in a white flannelette; I don't think it had ever been dressed.

The girl was a force of nature. In this business, you have to have a secretary, pretty and perky or deadly no-nonsense. Gladys is an ice queen. She has this stare that can make a crook turn tale or a welch pay up. It sends grown men weeping to their mothers. And no one sees me without an appointment. But the girl wouldn't take no for an answer. She sat in the anteroom, in that red satin gown, clutching her baby and staring right back at Gladys until curiosity got the better of me and I went out to have a look.

Gladys glared daggers at me without adjusting her gaze and the girl stood to greet me.

Red satin,unwrinkled and sweat-free – miraculous, in the stale, damp heat of the office – swirled around her feet, while the baby slept in her arms.

“Dix, this is Miss—”

“I've got money,” she interrupted.

“I can see that,” I told her. Although, in that dress, where she had the money was also a mystery. “What do you want?”

She glanced down at the baby in her arms.

“Oh no,” I told her, before she had the chance to ask. “Lady, I'm a P.I., not a nursemaid.”

She squared her perfect shoulders and her desperate little girl demeanour melted away with the heat. “How much do you want?”

“It isn't about the money. I'm not a goddamn—” I caught the look on Gladys' face. It was a look that clearly said, You're two weeks behind in my pay, Dix. You'll be a nursemaid and you'll damn well like it.

I looked a the girl. There was nothing for it. “Why don't you step into my office?”

My office was cool – relatively cool. Gladys prefers to keep the reception hall unconditioned, frigid in the winter and sweltering throughout the summer. I think she does it to keep people on edge. I don't question her methods; that area is entirely her domain. I have a desk fan and a slow, lazy ceiling fan, so my office is an icebox in comparison.

The girl followed me in, breathed the familiar sigh of someone no longer at risk of melting, and burst into tears. She handed me the kid wordlessly and I had to take it; I think she would have dropped it if I hadn't. She stepped back and collapsed into a seat without turning or slowing her sobs.

I leaned against my desk and watched her cry – and only felt mildly lecherous for noticing the way the air from the fan beside me made her her nipples harden under her red satin gown.

The crying didn't last long, and thank God. As nice as the view was, dames crying is one thing I can't handle for more than a few minutes. I think if the baby had started in, I would have chucked it out the window.

When it was over, the girl looked up at me, calm and collected, every bit of her perfect and in place, except for her eye makeup, which had run down her face. She leaned back in her chair.

“I've got people after me,” she said. “How much do you want?”

The baby cooed and squirmed in my arms. I gave it back to its mother. “For how long?”

“Just until tomorrow night. After that, it won't matter.”

“You planning on getting yourself killed?”

She shrugged “Maybe. If I do, the kid will looked after. How much do you want?”

It's good to have a number in your head, in case the question ever comes up. In my experience, it almost never does. “My standard rate is five hundred a day.”

She didn't react. Just asked, “Five hundred?”

“Plus expenses,” I added. It came out a little more hurried than I'd intended.

“So, a thousand will cover it?”

“A day?” A thousand a day? Yeah, I could get used to that.

She sighed a long, tired sigh, one that was too old to have any business coming out of a skinny, freckle-faced girl like her. “Of course.”

“That will do,” I said, struggling to sound like it was my regular fee.

“Good.”

I was expecting her to reach into her brassier for the money – Except, of course, she wasn't wearing one. So where—

The girl unwound the first layer of flannel from the kid and pulled out a wad of cash the size of a brick. She carefully peeled two bills off the top, then shoved the rest into its makeshift pocket and wrapped it back up.

She handed me my two thousand and with the same hand, pulled my pocket square out of my vest and used it to dab her eyes.

She didn't say another word. She handed me the kid, leaned over me to kiss its forehead and walked out.

I stood in the doorway and watched her leave, the crimson fabric of her backless gown swishing just below the dimples in her back, not a single wrinkle or drop of perspiration to be seen.

I watched out the window and waited until she was in a cab before I unwrapped the kid. That brick of money was gone – and damn it, so was my gun.

Another Gem, Courtesy of Chuck Wendig

I was reading Terrible Minds and I found a link to this article by Edward Docx and Chuck Wendig's response. While the debate rages on on Terrible Minds, I thought I'd put my own opinions up here, since, well, I'm a DevCo writer first - and I've already posted two rather long comments on Mr. Wendig's blog.

*Warning: reading Docx's article may lead to fits of rage, swearing, smacking the desk and late night exclamations of "This is bullshit!"*

Usually, I feel that I shouldn't respond to these kinds of things, because any response legitimizes the arguments being put forth and all that. In this case, though, I feel like I have to stick up for myself and my fellow genre writers.

This debate is strange to me, in part because I'm not sure that anyone really has a clear definition of either genre fiction or literary fiction in their head. Wikipedia (ok, not the most reliable source, but the best I could find) says:

Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term for fictional works (novels, short stories) written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre in order
to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre.

Huh. Maybe I don't write genre. Ok, yeah, I do.

Literary fiction is a term that has come into common usage since around
1960, principally to distinguish "serious fiction" (that is, work with claims to literary merit) from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction (i.e., paraliterature).

Which makes me wonder what constitutes literary merit.

Literary merit is a quality of written work, generally applied to the genre of literary fiction. A work is said to have literary merit (to be a work of art) if it is a work of quality, that is if it has some aesthetic value. The concept of "literary merit" is impossible to define, and it is hard to see how such an idea can be used with any precision or consistency by policy makers, magistrates or judges. A common response to this criticism is that, while the process of establishing literary merit is difficult, fraught with dangers, and often subjective, it is the only method currently available to separate work that has significant cultural value from work that is ephemeral.

I actually love this definition a little. In the first line, it points out that literary merit is a concept that's caught in some cyclical reference to literary fiction and hence is essentially meaningless, and in the last, says, "Well, yeah, it is kind of meaningless, but we don't have anything better".

Which I think sums up this argument nicely, actually. I mean, I write genre fiction, which is definitionally only genre fiction because it doesn't qualify as literary fiction, and nobody knows what literary fiction actually is, because it's defined in its own terms... but really, let's all sit down and try to figure out which one is better.

I hate all of this highbrow/lowbrow stuff. How about, good fiction/bad fiction? or better yet, how about, fiction that I, personally, like/fiction I don't? Why do some writers, like Docx, feel it necessary to write long articles championing their kind of fiction (I wonder if other literary authors would consider his work to posses literary merit), degrading others and cramming more pomp into one web page than has any business floating around the Internet in general? Did no one ever tell him, if you don't have something nice to say...

But who knows? Maybe that kind of posturing is necessary, if you're afraid your work won't stand on its own.

Now, that wasn't fair. See? This kind of bile-driven, mindless putting down of other writers is contagious.