Kika Gumi and the Prism Cult – Part XIX: The Ballad of Little Johnny Minacelli

I’ve seen a lot through the years, lost friends, some even saying their final goodbyes while weeping in front of my gun, but I can tell you right now, there aren’t very many things that’ll stick with you the way choking near to death on your own blood will, but I had a long life before that scum-sucker Bullet Hands decked me to pieces.
I was born “John Peter Minacelli”, just outside of Slate City, in an area known as Pearwood. My mother was your typical, old school, Sicilian homemaker, and I’ll be the first to admit that she spoiled us rotten, not that we didn’t occasionally catch a wooden spoon or two to the temple when we made the mistake of getting a little mouthy with the old lady. My father though, he was part of something altogether different, yet he and his buddies made certain never to acknowledge exactly what that was around us kids, offering no more than the vague explanation that he was a dedicated member of – as he’d put it – “This thing of ours”. However cryptic my father chose to be, I was the oldest of three kids, and the only boy, so Sicilian tradition dictated that it would only be a matter of time before I’d be a part of it too.
After proving throughout the entirety of grammar school that I wasn’t worth a damn academically, and that I certainly didn’t seem to be responding at all to my father’s nightly belt lashings meant to steer me straight, the school attempted to hold me back a grade, so I dropped out and began running packages for my Uncle Giuseppe Francis Minacelli down at his diner. Without realizing that I had actually started to infiltrate my father’s business, I quickly began to rise through the ranks of one of America’s most notorious criminal organizations: La Cosa Nostra, or as it is more commonly known, the American Mafia.
Within the first year, I had graduated from running packages to torching trucks under Slate City’s so-called Cheesecake Bridge. The older guys who’d come to drop off the trucks – most of which I’d met as family friends during my childhood – instructed me, with the frostiest of stares, never to look inside the vehicles before I lit them up, but I don’t think I need to tell you that little Johnny Minacelli was never one for following orders.
Late one Saturday, while my old friends from the neighborhood were busy trolling for chicks downtown, an unusually dirty Giuseppe Minacelli came cruising into my burn pit with an old 1974 Mago Ironclad, a dream car for the teenage me. After soaking a monogrammed handkerchief a couple times through with the sweat from his forehead, my uncle flung the keys into my chest, told me to make sure no one ever saw even so much as a fan belt from the thing again, and hobbled off into the shadows where another car picked him up and sped off back into the city. As much as I wanted to follow the orders – that job was the first thing I ever really enjoyed doing – my need to plant my ass behind the wheel of that beautiful machine was overwhelming, so I waited til his car disappeared behind a set of abandoned row homes, fired up the six-cylinder, and peeled wheels into the night.
Up until that moment, I’d never had access to a vehicle like that. I’d lost my driver’s license before I even had it after stealing my first girlfriend’s sister’s car, and ramming it through the plate glass face of the junior high’s cafeteria. So it should come as no surprise that when I finally got my hands on one of the western world’s most iconic muscle cars, I wasn’t exactly trying to joyride inconspicuously. Somewhere up near 32nd street, I dropped my cigarette, and swerved just enough while trying to fish it out from under the seat to catch the attention of a passing patrol car. Sat in a stolen car, with no license, and a last name that almost every cop on the Eastern seaboard knew well to look out for, it took very little time for me to be cuffed, plopped down on the curb, and my car thoroughly searched. Once they caught sight of what my Uncle had always warned me not to go searching in the stolen vehicles for, I was arrested and immediately charged with the murder of the State’s witness they found shot, stabbed, and bundled up in the trunk.
Ten long years I sat there in prison, no cars, no girls, no money, nothing. My uncle knew exactly what was in that car, and that meant my father did too, but they dropped it on me anyway, let me take the life sentence. All that time inside changed little Johnny Minacelli though, helped me become the man neither of those jerk-offs ever were. I took to studying law every chance I got, even swiped a few books about forensic testing, and the related legislation from the library, and kept them stashed inside my seemingly gravel-stuffed mattress. Eventually I managed to file the necessary appeals to the Supreme Court, and was provided a public defender that a few intimidating words about my familial connections ensured would do everything in their power to see my conviction overturned. Two years later I was a free man, twenty nine years old, wearing the same outdated suit I’d borrowed from my Uncle years before, but with a brand new head twisted onto my shoulders, one that not only carried the best damn pompadour money could buy, but the most cold-blooded and foolproof revenge scheme the world would ever know.
In the decade that’d passed since my incarceration, the bulk of the Minacelli family’s criminal enterprise had been shifted away from waste management – and the obligatory hit – to a series of high-stakes hijacking operations targeting freight trucks that were deployed by a cousin of mine who’d agreed to allow the occasional cargo load to “disappear” for the sake of the family’s financial interest. I knew right from the get-go that my cousin had been positioned deliberately to act as the family’s next fall guy; if any of the local police caught wind of the stolen freight, he’d be the one facing the charges, just as I had before, and he’d be the one sitting in that hellhole of a prison. Considering how deeply screwed he’d already allowed himself to get, I had no problem putting a few rounds in the back of his head that night I broke into his warehouse; the bullets would be coming from one direction, by the hand of some other member of our extended “family” soon enough anyway. Besides, he was a means to an end, and that end was one I was not willing to allow his continuously valueless life to obstruct. In the business, we call that collateral damage.
I stuffed my cousin’s body in a corner behind his cluttered desk, wiped the pistol down, and tucked it into his palm, carefully placing the barrel in as convincing a position as possible as to imply that he might have just shot himself. From there, I flipped on his CB radio, and began to listen for the call of my Uncle’s men; a little espionage told me that this was how they communicated with the warehouse, and that there was to be a meeting of sorts that night. About an hour and a half later, the call came through, and within fifteen minutes, my uncle Giuseppe, my father, and three other high-ranking members of the Minacelli crime family were sauntering on through the massive loading bay door into the darkened warehouse.
Though I’d hit most of the lights after whacking my cousin, I made sure to leave the one in his office burning bright; this was the cheese on my rat trap, if you will. As expected, the men made their way across the building, and pushed open the door of my cousin’s office to find him tucked-up like a forgotten rag doll, soaking in blood in the corner.
“Ricky!” screamed my Uncle, Ricky’s father, “Those Fradlianni bastards hit Ricky”!
“ No damn way,” I heard my father say, “we’ve got a deal with them, this had to be the cops”.
I dream nightly of the looks on their faces when I flicked the eighteen-wheeler’s headlights on, and flooded the tiny office with a halogen blast. I yanked the chain hanging near my head, and sounded a mighty horn that almost knocked the group of them onto their asses.
“Hiya pops!” I yelled, hanging out the driver’s side window, before I slammed the accelerator to the floor, and drove that truck straight through the open bay door, into that dingy little office, and right over top of my scumbag “family”.
Somehow my father managed to survive the initial impact, and when I walked around to the mess of concrete, glass, and flesh at the front of the truck, he coughed up a nice, black wad of blood, and cursed me through his broken teeth.
“You always were shit, boy,” he told me, “I knew you’d never amount to nothing, but I never thought you’d tear the whole family down”.
“Tear it down?” I said, “Nah Pops, we‘re about to be bigger than you ever imagined”.
I muffled his final words with a nearby oil rag, and put two bullets between his eyes.
The king was dead. Long live little Johnny Minacelli.

[To be continued]

Copyright Wonder Void Studios 2019

Thanks for taking the time to read yet another epic chapter in my ongoing sci-fi/fantasy serial Kika Gumi and the Prism Cult.  I really hope you enjoyed the tale, make sure to come right back here every Tuesday for new pages. Be sure to follow so you don’t miss this, or any of our exciting upcoming releases. Follow me on Twitter @ItsMrGChris for all sorts of flash fiction, and related literary material. Thanks again for your continued support, I’ll see you next time!

Lazarus T. Brass, Esq. – Part II: An Afternoon with the Cult

Walter Elias Brass, Esq. was a man of traditional values. He’d developed a machine-like study routine during his years in high school with which he went on to graduate from Princeton Law School in 1968 summa cum laude. After serving as lead prosecutor during the landmark conspiracy trial of notorious cult leader Yuri Hilks, Walter went on to establish the Brass, Montford & Cohen law firm with college friends Summer Montford and A.B. Cohen. The fame generated from the Hilks trial led to the firm’s booming success; Walter decided to finally settle down with his then-girlfriend Rebecca Tibulti, and in the summer of 1971 the couple gave birth to a son, Lazarus. Following Summer Montford’s semi-controversial decision to elope with Walter’s brother Horace – which resulted in both her becoming “Summer Brass” as well as a costly name change to all the law firm’s signage – Walter took on the task of imbuing his son with all the tenacity and love for criminal prosecution that had fueled his life up until that point.
Lazarus T. Brass, Esq. sat along the shoreline of Massachusetts Bay, reflecting on his father’s life, fondly flipping through his many memories of statute memorization, and public speaking drills. He’d received word via his secretary of Walter Brass’ passing, despite the event in question actually taking place – precipitated by a undiagnosed heart valve issue – just outside the door to Lazarus’ office. Lazarus had been on lunch at the time, reclining on a luxury leather sofa with a pastrami on rye clenched in his transparent fingers; the very cured beef treat that doctors would later imply was at the root of his father’s heart problems

.
He’d been counting on his father’s aid in tracking down Medina, recalling Walter Brass’ famous independent efforts to apprehend Yuri Hilks and the rest of his so-called “Unit”. Hilks was the focus of a massive manhunt following the kidnap/murder of Boston police commissioner Francis Cahier’s eldest son Marcus, during which over fourteen separate state police departments had unified in their efforts only to be thwarted time and again by the elusive cult leader. Brass’ father had met a rather bizarre pair of teenagers at a local diner called Stack’s amid the far reaching investigation, and posing as an LSD manufacturer, had agreed to join them for a party at nearby apartment building.
The youths spent the journey to the party expressing a deep adoration for a man called “Judas St. Christ” whom they alleged was the messiah reborn, as well as a man that would find great use of a psychedelics supplier. Upon arriving at the building, the pair ushered Brass’ father to the basement where a hole had been cut through the laundry room wall using illegally obtained boring machinery and covered over by the kinds of stringed beads one might expect to find guarding the entrance to an herbalist’s master bathroom. Inside sat Yuri Hilks, posted cross-legged under an uprooted pine tree, fatter than allowed him very much mobility, with a crown of thorns perched atop his head wrought more in the shape of King Arthur’s royal cap than that of any Judeo-Christian idol Walter Brass had ever heard of.
This had been, in fact, the very first time any member of law enforcement had ever even seen Hilks, largely due to the Mafia-esque power hierarchy he’d established within his “community” which kept him far separated – through the use of a variety of bagmen and enforcers – from any of the criminal aspects of his enterprise, and the chance meeting proved a significant break for both the police efforts to apprehend Hilks, and the complex prosecution case Brass would eventually build to take him down. It was during their first encounter that Brass caught wind of a philosophical concept referred to by the group as “The Big Bottle-Up” which, as Hilks explained it in his own wildly colorful, and wholly prophetic words, consisted of the group’s final collective stripping of their “human shells” at which point their spiritual selves would bind into one great hive-mind, and settle in to a new form – that of a “pure” child – who’s body they will rule with their collaborative mind as the “perfect manifestation of total human consciousness”. It was through this psychotic, hazy blend of psychedelic transcendence, and communal reincarnation that Brass first pieced together the truth regarding Marcus Cahier’s death: the boy had been the group’s first proposed “vessel”, and indeed, had not survived the bizarre ordeal. This truth, however depressing and tragic, served as the inspiration for Walter Brass’ ultimate plan to shut the monster Yuri Hilks down for good, and he was determined then more than ever before to ensure that Cahier’s death would not have been in vain. For Walter Brass too had a young son, and little Lazarus Brass may not have been perfect, but he would certainly make an adequate “vessel”.

[To be continued]

Copyright Wonder Void Studios 2018

Thanks for taking the time to read this continuation of my short story Lazarus T. Brass, Esq., their will be more to come as I think it up.  Be sure to follow us for a new short story every Thursday, in addition to a new issue of our webcomic So Fantastic every Sunday, and a new chapter in my ongoing Scifi/fantasy serial Kika Gumi and the Prism Cult every Tuesday.  Follow us on Twitter: @ItsMrGChris and @RinniKipp for all sorts of flash fiction, illustration, and news regarding our upcoming projects.  Thanks again for your continued support, we’ll see you next time!

The Legend of Lazarus T. Brass, Esq.

Lazarus T. Brass, Esq. was a man of moralistic action. A third generation lawyer who cut his teeth prosecuting the slew of methamphetamine-fueled gangland violence that bore holes through the serene exterior of his home city of Boston, Massachusetts. He’d excelled at most everything in his life, though he had always been a bit of a social pariah; having been trained from an early age to follow in his father and grandfather’s legislative footsteps, Brass all but withdrew entirely from the world around him, pouring over volumes of serial murderers and assorted Mafioso while his peers drank and courted. Friends were not something he found himself missing though; he found companionship in the likes of capitol crime case files: Gregg v. Georgia, Roper v. Simmons, Ring v. Arizona; those decisions so ethically weighted they sent shockwaves around the globe, and shook the criminal element to its core. It wouldn’t be until his time enrolled in Princeton Law though, that Brass would discover his true passion in the legendary, grey-area legislation known as RICO.

Signed into effect by the 91^st United States Congress on October 15^th 1970, the so-called RICO Act, or less succinctly put, The Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, was designed to bring charges down on those higher ranking members of various organized crime syndicates, usually separated from their crimes and subsequent prosecution by several layers of insulating patsies and fall-guys. Brass became possessed with a need to understand and further develop these laws, viewing them as an intellectual challenge, and the criminals that had so far been avoiding their effect, as the big game “trophies” of the prosecution world.

During his law school years, Brass met and began a romantic relationship with Tom’s River, NJ native Luz Medina, owner of a local artisanal candle shop, and youngest daughter or famed Mexico City drug kingpin Hector “El Coronel” Medina. The two fast fell deeply in love and were wed in secret by a justice of the peace at the local courthouse only three months after their first outing as a couple. While honeymooning along the Atlantic Coast, Brass would discover his new wife’s peculiar obsession, one that came to play a much larger part in his life over the following years. Medina was a zealous follower of the South American folk religion dedicated to the worship of a deity known as Santa Muerte.; her father’s god and guiding light, a pseudo-Catholic saint rendered in the image of the Virgin Mary clutching a large scythe, albeit devoid of her usual skin and unwillingness to extend aid to those living outside the normal moralistic bounds of Christianity. Brass had never heard of this deity before, his own family notably separated from the church due to their central preoccupation with the world of law, and inability to allow any additional time for studying bibles. Luz was his world though, the only reality he knew outside of the emotionless data recorded in law texts, so he too devoted himself this Santa Muerte, going as far as to convert the garage of their newly purchased home into elaborate shrine to the figure where he and his wife would spend each afternoon taping dollar bills to its vestments in honor.

Despite the rather optimistic appearance of it all: Brass’ immediate appointment to head prosecutor of his father’s firm upon returning to Boston; the beautiful two-story home he and his wife had commissioned by famed post-modernist sculptor turned architect Jackson Freethought; his continued success in a long string of high-profile racketeering cases brought against increasingly powerful members of the various Boston crime families; the union of Brass and Medina had brought with it her notorious father’s relocation to the area, and a growing number of obvious illegal operations stemming from his influence. Brass too had become the target of frequent harassment by his father-in-law’s men, culminating in his midnight abduction from the steps of the Brass, Brass & Cohen law offices following the successful prosecution of one of Medina’s most profitable fraudsters. Swept off in wire ties and blindfold to a secluded former lumber yard on the outskirts of Danvers, Brass was brought face-to-face for the first time with his wife’s terrifying father.

Through a thick cloud of Turkish pipe tobacco – Hector Medina’s signature puff of choice – the powerful crime lord offered his congratulations to Brass and best of luck for he and Luz’s marriage. Brass knew well that it was nothing but a false courtesy; Hector Medina was not called “El Coronel” due to some military ranking, it was intentionally deceitful, drenched in a horrifically violent past, much the same as the passive-aggressive pleasantries he was being offered at present. The nickname was in reference to famed fast food tycoon Colonel Sanders, the creator of the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain; it had been bestowed upon Medina as a result of his unfortunate habit of cutting his victims into eight separate pieces and deep frying their remains in an effort to obscure forensic evidence. Brass kept that very thought spotlighted in the back of his mind throughout the remainder of the ultimatum-laden conversation, digesting the possibilities of his life ending in a similar fashion if he chose not to back off the Medina crime family, something he was sure not to do given his genetic predisposition for justice. Medina wrapped up, offered Brass a firm handshake, slapped him around awhile with a rusty bit of plumbing, and tossed him back headfirst into the streets of Boston. Brass made a quick call to Luz, told her he loved her, and apologized for having to work through the night, before climbing the steps back to his office and piecing together the case that would take Hector “El Coronel” Medina down for good.

Building the state’s case proved a particularly difficult task, but Brass had focused his studies at Princeton on the very RICO cases that would form the basis for his, and had been provided easy access to a number of disenfranchised former associates of Medina’s by way of his wife, many of whom proved vital to securing the fraudulent income reports and necessary testimony required to place wiretaps on the kingpin directly. Several grueling months, late night surveillance operations, and Everest sized stacks of tedious paperwork later, the state of Massachusetts officially indicted Hector Rodolfo Medina on a laundry list of charges including racketeering, counterfeiting, illegal gambling, and the golden ticket capital murder that was sure to send “El Coronel” to the darkest corner of maximum security.

Brass delivered the prosecution’s opening statements before Medina, a jury of his peers, Luz, and a packed courtroom on May 29^th 1996. Massachusetts v. Medina was an ironclad case, Brass had secured testimony from three Medina family soldiers that linked “El Coronel” to the brutal 1989 slaying of reputed money launderer James “Rattle Tooth” Franklin, and despite the kingpin’s efforts to destroy any damning physical evidence of the crime, forensic detectives had uncovered bits of Medina’s signature Turkish pipe tobacco on the floor of Franklin’s 1976 Buick Regal after pulling it from the Quabbin Reservoir, much to the disgust of those still drinking tap water in Boston. Despite all his efforts, and the intensely devote work of Massachusetts’ finest criminologists, little attention had been paid to Brass’ briefcase, which while still containing the complex web of files that composed the bulk of the prosecution’s case, had in fact been hijacked by Medina’s men shortly before court convened, and rigged with the crudely constructed explosives that would grind the entire trial to a halt not minutes later.

Brass boldly called Medina to the stand early on in the proceedings, intent on leveling his credibility by exposing the long history of blackmail between he and his highly-paid defense council. In the middle of his first question, Brass thought to punctuate his argument by making a show of flipping his briefcase open and whipping out a series of incriminating pictures for the jury. On hitting the clasps though, the case erupted with the force of a truck, blew both Brass’ hands clean off at the wrist, ripped several layers of skin from his face, and stopped his ethical heart dead. Medina himself might have been laughing at his successful revenge, had stray bits of shrapnel not flung across to the witness stand, pierced his corneas, and wrenched both his retinas from their roots. The courtroom erupted into hysterics as the judge, bailiff, and jury all dashed for the exits, and those of Medina’s men in attendance carried their grievously injured boss out of the courthouse, and sped off with him in a heavily armored town car that had been left idling just outside.

Amid the ashes of his prosecution desk, a lifeless Lazarus Brass lay clutched in Luz’s heartbroken embrace. Her father maimed, her husband dead, Luz turned to the only person she had left in the world: Santa Muerte. She evaded police investigators, and the understandably confused coroners that had been called to retrieve Brass’ now missing corpse, and drug her husband’s mutilated body back to their garage/shrine. Stuffing every window sill, drawer, and flat surface she could find with her multicolored candles, she lit a cigarette as an offering to Santa Muerte, sipped a customary taste of tequila and launched into her invocation. By dawn she’d managed to rouse the all-powerful mother of death, and pleaded her case; succinct, well researched, and persuasive, the way Lazarus had taught her. She begged for her husband’s life, spoke of his work, his devotion, and finally offered enough smoke – candle or otherwise – that Santa Muerte agreed to raise Lazarus from the depths of the afterlife.

Lazarus Brass was indeed risen, breathing again, and back to work at the firm. Santa Muerte had not been able to repair his mangled limbs, though the fully functional “ghosts” of said appendages took up the work of their terrestrial counterparts, providing Brass with a rather entertaining set of fully operational, and completely invisible hands with which he continued in his paperwork-heavy criminal justice fury. All would not be well for the reborn Brass though, much to his chagrin Hector “El Coronel” Medina had been missing for a full year since the incident on that day in court. Authorities believed him to have sustained such serious injuries that he would likely not survive unless seeking immediate treatment, which they hoped he would have found at one of the local hospitals, providing them with an opportunity to arrest him again, but this never came to pass. Brass’ father remarked that Medina was likely to force treatment from a veterinarian under threat of death should he speak a word of it. Luz knew the truth though, and it took her awhile to admit it to Brass, mostly out of fear for his life, or what her undoubtedly still-living father would do to him the next time they met. Luz had learned what she knew of Santa Muerte from her father; Hector Medina had actually been a missionary of sorts in her name in the earliest years of Luz’s life, before turning to drug trafficking in an effort to survive in an increasingly crime-ridden corner of Mexico. Luz knew that her father would have followed the same line of thinking that she had after the incident, and it would have most certainly led him to Santa Muerte as well.

As it would come to pass, Medina had indeed sought the aid of the grey-area deity, had his eyes replaced with a ghostly pair that could both seize a man’s heart with fear, and foretell the future of whatever his wished. Brass no longer feared the mighty kingpin, he’d stared the abyss in the face, transcended death, and risen stronger than ever before. With passion in his voice, and a hotter sort of blood pumping through his veins; Brass vowed that he would rebuild the case, and promised Luz and the people of Massachusetts that Hector Rodolfo “El Coronel” Medina would see his day in court.

[The End]

Copyright Wonder Void Studios 2018

Thanks for taking the time to read my new short story The Legend of Lazarus T. Brass, Esq., I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.  Be sure to follow us for a new short story every Thursday in addition to a new issue of our weekly webcomic So Fantastic every Sunday, and a new chapter in my ongoing scifi/fantasy serial Kika Gumi and the Prism Cult every Tuesday.  Follow us on Twitter @ItsMrGChris and @RinniKipp for all sorts of flash fiction, illustration, and news regarding our upcoming projects.  Thanks again for your continued support, we’ll see you next time!

*”Lazarus T. Brass, Esq.” and “Hector “El Coronel” Medina are the sole property of Mr. George Christopher and Wonder Void Studios. All rights reserved.

Collected Flash Fiction – June 2018

I

I shudder to think of a world beyond Boston, a girl beyond Salem, a bay not stinking of moldy tea leaves and the blood of patriots.  Tonight we set sail for what some think is the edge, but I can’t shake the feeling that this beautiful world keeps circling on forever.

II

He was like an open book, Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” to be exact.  He spoke o a pyramid by the lake, one of awesome slickness and commiseration.  It told him to set things straight, become both love and the hands of death, carve life lessons into the ignorant.

III

I’ve always admired my Grandmother’s proficiency with a needle.  The subtleties of her crocheted balisongs, the smoothness with which she answered insubordination with hotshots of psilocybin and pure dread.  It’s not her cooking, but the smell of fear wafting through the streets.

IV

It’s a cold place, that dread, at the proper temperature for revenge.  I’d find peace in lifting the weight from my shoulders if another wasn’t still swinging above my head.

V

Always the dreamer, my mother had her eyes replaced with stained-glass kaleidoscopes.  “The better to see your souls with”, she’d tell us before succumbing to anemic unconsciousness.  She wasn’t so much a medium as she was a XX, the devil kept his own room a our house.

VI

When they condemned me to live burial, I wasn’t surprised.  What I didn’t see coming was the undertaker’s heart seizing up just one nail shy of a fully sealed casket.  Suffocation, while never a comfortable way to go, is quick.  Starvation though, it’ll be a memorable week.

VII

Rich, the ice cream man, can be found behind the gas station tying mouse tails together.  Years ago, our parents had our sweet-teeth removed, Rich lost his livelihood overnight.  Unwinding, he spends his nights screaming at the skies from his rocket-pop hut in the woods.

VIII

Death throws dice in darkened alleys, trades ribald tales of dangling cadavers with the neighborhood kids and any drunks that shuffle in.  Life, he says, it’s all a joke, the key is in the timing.  Might be the fumes, or Revelations, but we’ve been laughing since he left.

IX

They came in hard, kicked the door clear of its hinges and halfway through the adjacent wall.  I held them in the moment, dangling over the abysmal truth.  This wasn’t our house either, but we’d gotten there first, and from the look of it, we’d brought the bigger guns.

X

Hope dangles from a thin rope a mile above the pit, a single bowl of water.  All agnostics in the hole; Just one day and you’ll see Him, they said, then back to the surface.  Weeks on, mud is rising, the people crying, still no god.  Faith plays out different in the dark.

XI

Weekly trip to Hammurabi’s corner store, a favorite of my errands, but i’ll admit each visit takes something out of me.  Special promotion today, a thing of retail wonder and ominous sociology.  Two eyes for an eye, all teeth for a tooth.  He’s wise to what sells in America.

XII

Crank the radio, werewolves howling in rhythmic Londonese.  Blood on high, but i’ve seen the movie, there’d be a fair amount of slapstick too.  I lose my night in the churning guitars, basking in wonder of the intense human violence required to breed such colorful myths.

XIII

Boiling tides washed through the streets, filling the subways to the brim with human stew.  In an unprecedented case of Aerodynamic Heating, the hurricane had achieved the velocity required to become the whirling inferno of independent-party mayoral candidate prophecy.

XIV

My best friend changed his name to “Sic Semper” and eloped with his girlfriend Tyrannis.  He kept so many devices sewn into the brim of his hat that Jules Verne sued him for fictional identity theft.  Sometimes I wonder how the air tastes at his prison cell in the clouds.

XV

At Event Horizon, space-time pulls visibly inward to effect a sort of puckering in the void.  Escape is impossible, but with one black hole already screaming towards Earth, direct contact is paramount to survival.  Back home they called it suicide, but a legend never dies.

XVI

He had a black-eye like a pit in his head.  As with the one he’d dug in the woods, this one too had hands in it, only they were coming out not going in.  He watched them crawl about his face, tearing at the mask he’d worn to hide that devil beneath.  Raze before the rise.

XVII

Oh, the black.  I’ve spent days staring into it, dancing in the deepness, transcribing the whispers I find in the darkest parts.  It was only three years ago I walled myself in here, and i’ll stay til I find a way to write myself out.

XVIII

Fiery cries of frontier justice spread evenly across the dining table.  The Packards had long feuded with the neighboring farm, but the surprise processing of the family’s prized pig ignited a war.  Pappy Packard had needed that walking pork to save his thumbs from the mob.

XIX

Hughes worked best hurtling toward penthouses in the fiery front-half of a passenger plane, finding inspiration in the faces of Hollywood starlets as they twisted just before the collision.  Either the USAF wanted a damn good prototype, or considerably less Beverly Hills.

XX

There are things about my daughter I find a bit disquieting.  Started with the diagnosis, “Cognitive Dissonance” was to blame for the way she laughed at roadkill.  Her tea-parties grew into grand feasts, blood, mutton, and political assassination recorded in the minutes.

XXI

The RICO predicates allowed us a degree of legal “looseness” when building our case against Fradini family patriarch Ralph Costinzo, but we were the leashed in those dog-eat-dog times.  Wiretaps did nothing to protect us from the device planted under the prosecution desk.

XXII

She was a feast for the eyes I would learn the night her spectrum was siphoned off by the Greys.  Roswell 1947, classified: “weather balloons”; her death revealed the truth.  Repo-men from the end of the rainbow – a realm stripped of pigment by ours – they came to collect.

XXIII

She kept a blade strapped to her thigh with a rosary, prowling the streets by night.  The Clone Integration impending, she would not allow the State’s ignorance to damn the innocent people of her city.  She’d pick them off one-by-one, anyone without a belly button.

XXIV

A swelling in his head, I crack the skull plates and go inside.  Teeth rattle, a steady bass-line most unbearable as I push through the gray matter.  Upon cerebrum sits a hooded girl, barking in Dactylic Hexameter.  She introduces herself as god, and the universe collapses.

XXV

It swelled up fast and photogenic, “Pacificus” a post-modernist city sprouting from the coral reef.  During a press conference on the waves, their premier urged us not to equate them with our fictional Atlantis.  His people had worked too hard to be overshadowed by a myth.

XXVI

Part and parcel of the plague, man’s demonization of the rat.  I aim to pluck the beast from the grey betwixt earthly genocide and his own personal circle of Hell, place him upon the pedestal he deserves.  Until I too acquire a taste for heaping filth, I will champion him.

XXVII

“Parts Unknown” the papers called it, a paradise for teenage runaways.  There they’d learn to laugh and love, and study the art of knife fighting.  Their goal was to build an army in the name of nostalgia, to crush the 21st century and usher in a second round of the 90s.

XXVIII

There’s been a part in the clouds since the day the bomb fell through them, the vapor curled and burnt away along its irregular edges.  Through the gap we spy the god’s Uranium enrichment, kicking off an aggressive arms race between mankind and the heavens.

XXIX

Tourniquets tight, a belt to bite the pain.  He feared the amputation, and the doctor who seemed more likely to sew something on than take something off, but it was his vestigial twin’s politics that truly disturbed him.  They couldn’t be closer together or further apart.

XXX

Pacing along the shoreline, I found him pawing at a tin bucket.  He bore the same marks I had woken up with, a string of deep punctures running from chin to forehead.  “Welcome to the Farm” he said, filling the bucket with the raw imagination flowing from his face holes.

XXXI

He caught sight of them the first day, the multicolored paw print tattoos under each eye a dead giveaway.  “The Shuffle”, an all girl, ages 12 and up prison gang so brutal they had to be housed with grown men.  The held the secrets to papier-mache, the key to his escape.

XXXII

Staring down the noose, I remark on the complexity of the knot, ask why they need to be so dramatic.  Crowd’s starting to gather.  It’s my time.  I draw a breath, inch over to allow room for the condemned and prepare myself for another day of gubernatorial public speaking.

XXXIII

I live in the town where storms end.  No tapering, all hard edges.  Here a downpour, two feet left, bone dry.  Packed in the center, a row of mud yurts from which the roaring crowd arises each morning and makes a mad-dash for the borders, where the only vegetation grows.

XXXIV

A roaring silence cut through her.  There was nothing left, save for scars and a gnawing existentialism.  They were her people though, dirty and angry and afraid, but hers.  Had she really been abandoned, or was the doctor right when he told her they were all in her head?

XXXV

The televangelist played it straight, all prophecy and presentation, but had been steadily losing parishioners.  He worried little at first, faith would bring them home he thought.  The truth was, the people had begun to fear him and the roaring goat for whom he spoke.

XXXVI

She saw what she could of the zoo through the layers of steel they’d used to reconstruct her face.  Taking note of the Antarctic security, she plotted her penguin abduction.  It had done this, crushed her features to spite humanity.  She had a secret cabin, time would blur.

XXXVII

Speeding up the coast, a pulse of reds and blues tinting the interior of his ’59 Fiat Jolly an appropriate shade of circus.  Just before the cliff, he remembers Isabella Stewart Gardner.  Six in all he’d cut from her halls, in hopes art would die and rise again anew.

XXXVIII

Father had delighted them with varnished tales of Vietnam.  Swords in place of guns, a dragon in Ho Chi Minh’s stead.  He’d survived it all only to fall in the Cardiac War.  Empathetic, their one-eyed neighbor gifted them a spirit board to conjure the old man on rainy days.

XXXIXL

Swallowed hole by the role of a lifetime.  For her it was immortality, painted and framed up 24 times a second.  She was method, pieces lost in every part.  This one wanted more: 50lbs, teeth, her mother’s life.  Now beloved, she sits comatose on the cutting room floor.

XL

Moonlit march up mountainside to watch the pale mare’s nightly descent.  Those below line stone carved gods along the borders of their village, and pray themselves unlucky in the lottery of death.

XLI

“There’s a man in my closet” she told me, all pale-faced and shivers.  He’d been there all along, hiding in the walls, trying to get us to believe in ghosts.  He’s stuck now though, pleading, and i’m getting excited.  So fun was our phony phantom, i’m ready for a real one.

XLII

Hit the lights, whole house comes alive.  Breathing, shifting scale and tone just enough to stay ominous without straying too far down the uncanny valley.  Fridge pours itself a glass of milk, vent puffs cigar, the bookshelf speaks of black magic and epic poetry.  Grandma’s.

XLIII

The ash grows wild at the end of my cigarette, smoke forgone in favor of watching a colony of ants slowly denude a bee on my stoop.  Before long, they bore through the uppermost layers to reveal a small microchip beneath.  One last drag, a sudden downpour of 1s and 0s.

XLIV

He sips from lambent oil slick, crudity an indication of just how far off lay the beast.  His is a pollutive ruse, essential to human proliferation.  He drops anchor, toasts a glass of tap Uranium as it breaks the waves, hungry for another year of mankind’s trash.

***

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed my collected flash fiction from this past month.  Be sure to follow to catch my various weekly releases: So Fantastic webcomic every Sunday, new Epically Art every Tuesday, and a new short story every Thursday.  Follow me on Twitter – @ItsMrGChris for new flash fiction every single day.  Thanks again for reading, i’ll see you next time.