Jul
24

Friday Flash Fiction: Trust

A bit of fun this week, qualifying for my new criteria for Friday Flash on the grounds it’s damn near impossible to sell this type of story due to the over-used nature of the sub-genre. Candy floss fiction. Black, naturally.

Trust
By Neil Beynon

As long as he lived he could never forget the smell of the street that night, the stench of piss wrapping itself around the diesel of the passing cars as they zipped past. He gripped the knife in his hand tight, his gut twisting like a caged cat and glanced around for a more substantial weapon. In the mouth of the alley Ceridwen stood unmoving. She blocked the path to the street.

“Why do you raise your knife?”

He stepped back.

“Why do you attack me?” he replied. “After what I did.”

“It is because of that I am here.”

He blinked. “You asked me to do it. The things I’ve done to…Gods, I would never have…”

“I wanted you to do it, but now I have a different use for you.”

She stepped towards him.

“No, I don’t want to.”

“Pity, but it doesn’t change anything. I have been noticed and so I must leave.”

“Then go,” he sobbed, snot and tears hanging from him like chains.

“I cannot, I need the energy.”

She took another step.

“I trusted you,” he said. “I trusted you to look after me.”

“And I shall.”

He wiped his face with his sleeve. He met her eyes for a moment, he felt numbness settle on him like snow and for a moment there was acceptance. He nodded but did not let go of the knife.

He leapt forward in sprint and she leapt forward in hunger.

They struck with a meaty thump that turned him through one hundred and eighty degrees and dumped him on his back on the pavement, his knife cluttering far away from him. She lifted him to his feet before he could recover the air that had been pushed from his lungs.

“No more talking,” she said as she took him.

“I trusted…” he moaned as the moon slid behind the clouds and the alley fell dark

Jul
03

Friday Flash Fiction: Endings

There’s flash this week largely because I wanted to write something new but I wanted a warm up before I started. It is likely that F3 posting will continue to be a bit irregular as I need to start trying to write stuff that I have a chance of getting published elsewhere and so I’m planning to focus F3 more on story forms that only really work on the internet

This will by its nature mean that I have to be more selective about ideas and that will, in turn, take longer.

I’ll experiment to see what a likely frequency is and then let you know. For now here’s this weeks:

Endings
By Neil Beynon

I can tell their story just as easy as looking at them. Always can.

There is the woman leaning against the wall as if listening for something, only she isn’t listening. Not any more. Her purse has spilled open on the paving stones, a big chunky black Mercedes key, a mobile phone, and a note – a shopping list – flapping between her fingers in the breeze. A time written in biro on the back of her hand bearing the legend KIDS.

I move on. The sound of sirens in the distance speaks of comrades on the way and I know I could wait but the screams are still coming from inside. I move up the steps. The grip of my gun is slick from the sweat on my hand and I can feel the sun burning the back of my neck as I move up to the doorway. There have been a lot of slipstreams this summer.

I don’t know why they always pick libraries.

The man that’s sprawled between the automatic doors is still breathing but the black pool of blood underneath him, slowly seeping into the files under his arm, means he won’t be for much longer. Nothing I can do. The pink charity rubber band on his wrist tells enough without the too pale skin, the broken spectacles taped at the arm, the ghost of a ring on his wedding finger and the take away belly.

I avoid the blood and step through the doorway into the building. The aircon is cool on the back of my neck. My shirt envelopes me in a misguided effort to keep the heat that feels more like being covered in a wet flannel. My gun is loose in my hand but I dare not wipe my hands dry.

Bodies and books lay everywhere. Tales entwined with stories, lives with legends.

An out of work writer down on his luck but who believed he had one more tale in him, on the verge of getting signed by the look of the letter clutched in his hand.  A coked up dealer next to him, possibly hiding from one of my colleagues…but no… a chemistry book lies next to him. The man’s stash has spilled across the floor and has turned pink with the creeping blood as if mocking him.

The working mum on the phone to one of her family when she shouldn’t have been, her Bluetooth flashing in the dim light of the library like an LED heart. I can hear someone calling, concerned, over the little headset speaker as I round the corner but there is no one to reply.

There is too much glass in here. It’s not like how libraries looked when I was a boy, now they aren’t just full of books but computers, CDs and magazines. Everything spread out in chrome and glass in an attempt to acknowledge the 21st century, to cling to life just a little longer.

I can see my own face, reflected, as I turn the bend. I don’t recognise myself. I haven’t been able to for a while. For all my certainty about others’ stories I am uncertain what my own is.

The slipstream stands in the next corridor. It pays me no attention as it lowers its mandibles to tear the head from the body of the security guard whose shirt looks worn on the shoulder, his hat fallen to reveal a Mohawk and whose right hand nails seem to be a tad too long. I wonder if he was a good player.

I lift the gun and remove the safety.

The creature looks at me. Its carapace is a mottled purple that shimmers in the light and makes it seem almost insubstantial and its tar black eyes are bigger than my mouth. I can see myself in them but I look different again, distorted and almost heroic if with a dash of the tragic – grey around the temples does that. We stay like that for what feels like an eternity but in reality it is only as long as it takes it to swallow the man’s skull. I place the gun down in front of me and move back five paces. My eyes do not move from the creature until I am a way back. Then I run. It seemed like the only thing to do.

I could see my story: and I didn’t like the end.

May
29

Friday Flash Fiction: Between the Breakers

Between the breakers
By Neil Beynon

He wobbles across the uneven rocks, scattered like broken teeth across the beach, until he reaches the smooth compressed sand beyond. He pauses for a moment, turns to look back at the cliffs behind him. If he is looking for something he does not find it on those rocky peaks looming large.

The tide is out and it takes him a little while to reach the edge of the ocean. He walks between the twin rows of breakers that line either side of his path like watery sentinels. He does not pause as he steps into the water, heedless of the cold saltwater on his shoes and trousers: it is not the first time he has done this. He wades out further into the water, ignoring the persistent slapping of the waves that almost push him back and his breath coming in short sharp drags.

When the water reaches his belly he stops but he does not turn back.

He looks down at the seabed; the sunlight breaks on the water casting small fragments of rainbow into the brine. She is waiting when he lifts his head. There between the half drowned breakers she stands, head and shoulders out of the water, face looking back at him. She looks exactly the same as she always does. He does not move as she draws close.

“You’re back?”

“Yes,” he answers, “I said I would be.”

“And you are such a keeper of your word?”

The woman’s hair is slightly wrong, just a hint too dark, the texture just a step the wrong side of smooth but beneath that she is slim as ever, gazing on him with beauty sculpted from high cheekbones and eyes that shone azure.

“You want more?” she asks.

“I want you,” he says. They are close enough to touch and he reaches forward, his hand running down her arm as if reassuring himself she’s real. “I want this.”

She does not flinch, as her eyes suggest she might, but steps closer. She raises her own hands, they slide up over the side of his face, she is cold to the touch but he sighs as if slipping into a warm bath. She holds him by either side of his temples, stopping him moving or looking away.

“It hurts,” she says.

“Why?”

“This form, her skin, it is not my shape.”

“What is your shape?”
“Is it even her shape?”

“I have missed you.”

“I am not her,” she says, letting him go. He could run now but he does not. “Why did your kind…? Is this how she felt?”

He shrugs.

“Even now, second time round, you will go again and carry on as normal. Until the next time.”

He says nothing for there is no answer: she is not wrong.

“It hurts, this shape hurts.”

“It’s not the shape,” he replies. He is tempted to look away, guilt coiling round his stomach and he fancies he feels something brush past his skin, an eel perhaps.

“No: it’s not,” she replies, staring at him with unblinking eyes.

He does not resist as she pushes him down under the water. It’s like a sheet of moving glass has been put between them as he looks up at her holding him down, the light splintering around her like a halo. From this perspective he can’t even notice the differences, she is the woman he remembers but not, he realises, the woman he knew and not even the salt water burning in his nostrils can distract him from her stare. He can feel the anger in her arms pushing him down, the proof of feeling, of caring enough to rage, and it is wonderful.

His chest is bloated tight with carbon dioxide and his hands do a frantic crab dance across the seabed, divorced from his mind and in search of a weapon. He finds one, pulling it free of the suction of the sand before letting it drop back to the floor. Afraid it will break the spell.

The tide is starting to turn and before long there will be no sign of his tracks as the ocean’s sweeping journey up the beach wipes clean the stains of his passing from the sand. Light is exploding behind his eyes warping his view of her, melding her into something else, his lids grow heavy and it’s hard to remember to keep his mouth closed.

She’ll let him up soon. She always does.

Apr
24

Friday Flash Fiction: Move On

Move on
By Neil Beynon

See the worn stones, uneven and scattered like die cast by the giants.
Let your feet find the path, they do not forget.

Feel your skin raise as you draw closer.
But do not worry: the magic will not hurt you.

Pause by the wall; trace the words beneath the paint.
Find the gap and remember to hold in the years as you go.

Should you pass another soul do not stop, do not speak.
The spell is easily cast and swiftly shattered.

At the bronze be wary of the metal or wake the frozen from their icy embrace.
They would not thank you to be freed of their chains.

Look up at the slate sky and walk the grass of the hill that does not change.
Further down, further in: past the alleys, paste the wasteland.

Mind the shades as you go: the buildings that have sunk away.
The snippets that loop endlessly, the faces faded and distorted.

Stop in the stone courtyard.
Raise your eyes to the window looking for the ghost not there.

Feel the dark heat locked away, hear the stone speak.
See the fragile chains that tether and know how thin your protection is.

See the mirror and the stranger looking back from the land you cannot tread.
Give thanks he is on the other side. That he is gone.

Move on.

Apr
10

Friday Flash Fiction: Buck

This week’s flash fiction. Feedback, as ever, is welcome.

Buck
By Neil Beynon

It feels like I’ve been on the run forever. In reality it’s only been a few days and already I’m tired of it. The city is almost disserted, many of the shops are boarded up and construction works lie abandoned as if someone started operating on the city, trying to save it, and then gave up. The wind carries dust on it and whips round the corners of buildings that don’t look like they’ve been cleaned since they were built in the nineteen hundreds. This city bites. I raise my collar and start out across the square towards the hotel.

I can still taste the sugar from that too sweet soda. One more than I should have had and so thick with syrup that I could practically chew it, my heart is racing a little from the E numbers, my mouth covered in a light moss of acidity. Perhaps that is why I feel like the few people I encounter are staring at me, that they know what I am and why I am running. But how could they?

It is a relief to reach the hotel and I tread the thirty-year old carpets to my tobacco stained room at a pace, eager to lock myself in its musky but safe embrace for a few hours. The door is ajar when I get there like the silent hello of an unexpected punch to the belly. I stop.

“I know you’re there,” he says, from within the room.

My eyes dart for either end of the corridor, calculating whether I have enough time to run or not. I know the answer even as he, helpfully, provides it.

“No where to go,” he says. “You might as well come in.”

There is a new smell in the room. It is like sweat mingled with straw and something else that I can’t quite place, it doesn’t matter: I recognise it anyway. Buck is sat in the chair by the window, his long legs stretched awkwardly in front of him, backlit by the sodium streetlight outside the window and smoking on of those thick cigars I loathed. The room, a small box like affair, showed no signs of being turned over, that is I left it looking turned over and so it still appeared. Bed linen strewn in memory of lost sleep, my few possessions scattered where I left them and a half eaten pizza, breakfast, left on the nightstand.

“I don’t have them,” I volunteer.

I can hear him smile in spite of the shadow that masks his not-quite-right features. I can imagine the gleam of his pearly white buckteeth flashing at me as he breaks into a low chuckle.

“Did you really think I would be bothered about the product disappearing?”

I am as silent as the city that appears to have expired while we’ve been talking.

“I am never short of product my friend. No, I have come here because of principles.”

“How did you find me?”

“I have my ways.”

Ma always told me not to be afraid of him. She said he was a good thing, that his arrival was something to be celebrated and that I should be grateful he came at all given how little we had. But then she described him. Later and all too recent in my mind I discovered just how much she celebrated his visits, the memory burned into my retina like the cigarette burn on the back of the hand I’d seen her running over his bare back.

“You’re not allowed to use your ways,” I offer. “I know the rules: only for the duty.”

“ Ah yes, but you interfered in the duty,” he replies. “Like I said: it’s the principle of the thing.”

“So what you going to do? Kill me?”

Buck chuckled again. He removed his fedora with care and placed it on the coffee table next to him, his ears springing up with what seemed like palpable excitement at being freed. As he stood I was reminded just how tall he was and how much power he had in those legs. If he was going to kill me I was dead already. Knowing wouldn’t help.

They never show him like that on the cards. On the cards he’s just regular sized and regular shaped but then they don’t seem to have much idea about him at all. I mean: six-foot bunnies don’t grow on trees do they? My plan had been to draw him out into the open, to force the public to see him for what he was, to expose him. Instead it was me that felt naked.

I’m a bastard, figuratively and actually. Everywhere I shouldn’t have been I was, everywhere I should’ve been I wasn’t and constantly in trouble with the man, not to mention Ma. Yet, I never went round climbing into people’s houses leaving eggs everywhere. Don’t you ever wonder why a six-foot bunny would do that? Do you really think it was out of the goodness of its heart? Ma was the last straw. She’d had visitors before but a bunny? No way.

He lifted his arm, the gun should’ve gleamed I suppose but it didn’t. Instead the weapon was another shadow, only one with sharp lines instead of the usual charcoal smudge.

“You going to kill me Buck?”

“No Nicholas. I have something far worse planned. You’re coming with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“North.”

And we did. And it was.

Mar
27

Friday Flash Fiction: Still Rising

Due to Internet fail I am posting this using the equivalent of smoke signals. It may look a mess.

Still Rising
By Neil Beynon

“Where are you going?”

Fahl stopped at the foot of the stairs, turning to the speaker with the creak of age as old as the tower he intended to walk up. It was Lumin staring defiantly back at him, his robes freshly pressed and his bright blue eyes gleaming in the torch light. Fahl sighed and leant on the rail that lined the stairs, in his other hand a long stone knife gleamed.

“Where are you going?” repeated Lumin.

“To do what must be done.”

“The city is no longer under siege Fahl.”

“And I would have it remain so,” said Fahl, turning to climb the stairs. The Mage’s pale skin looked even worse under the torch light, he moved as if the scars crossing his arms were piped with lead and his hair fell in matted knots.

“No,” said Lumin. “Nonsense, they’re gone and it’s time for you to get some rest. When did you last eat?”

“It is my duty.”

“If they return you will be no use to us in this state,” said Lumin. “You can barely stand.”

Fahl paused. The arm stretched out to the rail bore an angry scab from the last time. It still hadn’t healed. Not a good sign. His eyes felt like orbs of sand that were slowly disintegrating into the dust he had to keep wiping from his face.

“OK,” he acquiesced.

“Let me take the knife.”

Fahl passed the blade handle first.

“Good, now come and have some breakfast.”

The two walked out of the tower into the courtyard. The troops had been busy overnight and the grass that had sprung up during their long confinement had been removed. The sun rose over the city walls on the still beat of pink wings. The warmth made Fahl stop and let his tired eyes bathe in the light.

“See,” said Lumin. “The sun still rises.”

Fahl smiled.

In the distance, beyond the walls, there came the sound of swords crashing and lives lost.

Feb
20

Friday Flash Fiction: Tongue

Tongue
By Neil Beynon

“What is it?” you ask.

I say nothing.

You look up from your knees where you’ve dropped down to check why I have not moved. Your hair falls across your face, you push it back behind your ear with two fingers whose ghosts I feel on my neck and the brief glimpse of the sun through your window points out freckles I never noticed before. The room is musty still with the scent of the night before and I wish you’d opened the window while I was gone. You seem made of glass as the growing quiet between us knocks you on your arse.

“Oh.”

I could not speak if I wanted to.

“Can’t we talk about it? Is it me? I can’t fix it if I don’t know what’s wrong?”

I cannot bear this. Outside a pigeon lands on the window, it buries its head under its wing, grooming its pink breast whilst shielded by the slate of its wing. I am racked with jealousy.

“That’s it: you’re not going to say a word?”

I look back at you looking at me with eyes that scream at me “I will not cry” but know they lie. Part of me unfurls, detaches and watches the scene with something like wonder only more bitter; I am not sure I will get this piece of me back. This isn’t happening. This isn’t real. I reach out a hand.

“Please…” you say, rocking back out of reach. “Just go.”

I walk. I do not want to but my body picks itself up, oblivious to the part of me left behind and my feet pick a path. The latch snapping shut behind me sounds more like a chain snapping and the stairs are lost to me in the stench of bleach from the cleaner two floors above.

She is waiting on the tarmac outside, arms thrust in the pockets of her coat, collar turned against the weather or perhaps against the twitching of the curtains behind me. She risks her neck in the gusty wind as she meets my gaze, eyebrows raised.

“Is it done?” she asks when I do not answer her silent query.

I nod.

“Good,” she says.

She pulls the jar from her pocket and holds it up for me to see. My tongue is a gaudy brown-red smear against the dishwater grey sky. She shakes it in the jar but does not hand it over.

“I think I’m going to hang on to this for a while, “ she says, returning it to her pocket. “Now, come on.”

And I do.

Feb
13

Friday Flash Fiction: Thirteen

Bit of a scheduling error this week and so this is a little later than planned. Also, constant readers will recall Arches by Gareth L Powell was one of my favourite short stories of last year and GLP has an excerpt up on his site – check it out here.

Here’s my offering:

Thirteen
By Neil Beynon

There are tears in my eyes as we reach the summit and I can barely see.

Your hand slips into mine to pull me up. Your skin is soft and I feel light as air. I wouldn’t know you were holding me if it weren’t for the coldness of your flesh against mine. You do not linger against me. There is something you want to show me as you move across the flat plateau.

You look back at me from the cliff edge. The grey before the dawn makes you look like you walked off the silverscreen of some ancient movie and my heart is contemplating exploding from the ascent. It feels like we’ve climbed to the top of the world although, in reality, it’s only been a thirteen-minute climb; the feeling of height has more to do with the gradient of the hill and the flatness of the plain around us. If it were daylight we would be able to see across to the Crystal ranges where you were born.

“Once a year the stars in this system, the lovers, come close enough to appear over the horizon at almost the same time,” you say, sounding an awful lot like a tour guide. That used to bug the shit out of me, like you viewed holidays as some kind of homework exercise and there was me wandering round like the class dunce, knowing nothing.

“Look: here they come.”

The dawn breaks. The swollen, older star slides into the sky on a crest of fire that soaks the plains in light and then the other – as if dragged by the hand – rolls into view coating the world, coating you, in honey. I should like to hold this moment in my hand, cup it safely against the wind and carry it with me back to the skimmer but I know I can’t.

“Just once a year,” I hear you whisper, your hand reaching for mine.

“Why did you bring me here?”

It is too late. The stars are much higher in the sky now, the honey-glazed world has tarnished to the dull pastels of reality and the wind slaps me in the face with the knowledge that you’re gone.

Lost in the ether like a solar flare, like you were never there.

Jan
30

Friday Flash Fiction: A short story about nothing

A  short story about nothing
By Neil Beynon

It begins on a street.

I do not know why.

Indeed I have no idea where this is going except that the street is wet from the rain and cold from the wind and in front of me someone lies bleeding. The whole thing has an air of not being real until their hand grabs my ankle then I can feel their stickiness seeping through my sock. There is someone bleeding at my feet, dying perhaps and all I am doing is standing here. My brain slips into gear.

I bend down to get a closer look at the stranger. He is bearded and familiar although I cannot place him. Perhaps I have seen him in the coffee shop or possibly at the station? He murmurs something but I cannot understand him. The blood is coming from his chest, he appears to have been stabbed but by what I’m not sure and I am reluctant to pull his other hand – the one not holding my ankle – from the wound. He is pale, skin the colour of gone off milk, and his breath is coming in long wet gasps that suggest the tearing of something important. He is not in a good way.

I look up to call for help but the street is a wasteland: no one emerging from the office behind me, no one ambling down the street and no one looking up from the main road. Not even the rubbish, travelling on the gusts, is willing to stop for me. I cannot find my mobile. I must have left it in the office. Typical. And so I call for help. Shout, actually. Yet no one comes. I am concerned now.

The man is still breathing when I help him to his feet and thank god he isn’t bigger than me, I never realised how heavy a person can be when they’re a dead weight. And that’s when I feel his wallet. Propped up against the wall as I try to help the man onto Oxford Street where we can catch a cab. It’s in his inside pocket and so full at first I think he’s armed and I’ve stumbled into a gang fight but this man doesn’t look like a gangster. Not that I know what a gangster looks like.

In any case, he is barely conscious and there is no one else around. I glance briefly back at my office block but I know I am the last to leave just as well as I know my own wallet is empty. There would be no one to know.

I pull the wallet out and sure enough it is stuffed with cash. Fumbling, I stuff it into my own inside pocket, ignoring the blood it leaves on my top and leave the man propped up against an alleyway wall. His breathing is shallow now and he no longer looks at me or holds onto me. He really does look familiar but a momentary glimpse of guilt is lost in the feel of the money in my pocket. I am struck by the sense I should feel something and I don’t – in fact I feel nothing. It won’t be long now.

I walk away. I pause at the corner of the street just long enough to check in the reflection of a shop window if I still have blood on my chest but the worst of it is gone. I muse that I should shave again because my beard is looking as untidy as that poor bastard’s. Then I’m on my way again, no one paying me any attention, nothing out of the ordinary, and I’d be whistling if it wasn’t for the twinge in my chest.

Jan
23

Friday Flash Fiction: Full Meta Jacket

This week is themed on idea suggested by Gareth D Jones (altered film titles), please take time to check out excellent pieces from Shaun C Green and Gareth D Jones. No doubt there will be a full round up on Futurismic later. I hope you enjoy:

Full Meta Jacket

By Neil Beynon

I’m sitting in the small airless meeting room we use for interviews. It is stark white with no exterior window and a small pinewood table that almost fills the room. The chairs are stained with the echoes of hundreds of meetings and the blinds looking out at the reception area are closed. I do not want people to look in – it’s lunchtime and I’m writing.

Or at least I am meant to be writing. What I am actually doing is chewing my pen and wondering if this is the day it happens. If this is the day the words dry up. I write a line – “There was a man with only one eye.”

I stop. I cross out the line.

I have been at this for most of the hour and now my lunch is nearly gone I don’t have much time left. My head aches in throbbing waves and my left eye is ghosting so much it’s hard to see. I’m getting a migraine.

I pop two ibuprofen and hope for the best. Washing them down with tepid tea that makes me gasp, it’s colder than I realised. In the aftershock I think of the hangover god and from there Terry Pratchett and then it’s not a big leap to Small Gods. The title spins round my head like a kid on a skateboard, grinding in the turns.

I write a description of my own small god. He is twenty centimetres tall, wrinkled like worn leather and wearing a tiny robe that might once have been white and may once have hidden his bare feet. He is not a happy god and he does not mean anyone well. Characters in my stories so rarely do.

My head is aching as I stop. It’s not a bad character idea, not a brilliant one either, but it isn’t a story and I realise I’m not going to hit my deadline. Balls.

The pain is sharp and intense like someone is pulling my hair tight enough to take away skin. My hand bats it away in a reflex I cannot control and I leap from my seat at the shock of actually having flung something across the room.

The thing hits the door and slides down to the carpet. It is still holding a chunk of my hair and blood is flowing down my neck, at least I think it’s blood.

I am mad.

No, I reason; I’m bleeding. They are not the same thing. The creature is now muttering at me in a language I do not understand. Its dirt encrusted sleeves flapping as it punctuates its meaning with a wave of my detached hair. I feel sick.

I reach for the door. To do what I’m not sure…? Independent verification perhaps…? Medical attention would certainly be wise. It doesn’t matter. The creature – the god I suppose – is forewarned this time and raises its free hand. I stop. I cannot move – It lowers its hand and I fall to the seat.

Then it leaps onto the table.

I still cannot move as it walks up to my notebook and reads the text. It glares up at me before pointing to the pad. I do the best shrug I can given the invisible straightjacket in which I am trussed up.

It points at the pad once more and my hand rises slowly and reaches for the pen. I am not moving my hand as I begin to write and although I am relieved I do not know where the words are coming from. The sound of the pen on the paper seems to soothe the creature as it would me were it not for the sound of my blood dripping onto the page.

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