Them: “You’ve got a great personality.”

Me: “Umm…it’s actually a mental disorder.”

All Jerry seemed to do was work and it was never enough. Jus’ ask his wife who constantly told him how worthless he was as a wage earner.

Further, he heard the same thing from his in-laws, who lived with him and their daughter, his wife. Neither thought him the proper husband for their only child.

It didn’t matter to them that he was the soul provider of the family. Nor did they mind the fact that they ate out nearly every night and often wouldn’t even bring him home a morsel from their meal.

One evening after a particularly hard day at the mill, Jerry came home late from work to find everyone asleep. So he decided to pour himself a shot of whiskey, sit on the couch and relax.

Before he knew it, he fell asleep. But sleeping provided him with no relief as he had a nightmare that he’d changed into a cockroach.

When he awoke, he discovered that his nightmare was real and that he had indeed turned into a cockroach. He tried to get off the couch, but fell to the floor and had to scurry away before he was stepped on or the cat caught him.

“Where is that worthless, husband of yours,” the father-in-law asked his daughter.

“Probably out screwing around,” the mother-in-law interrupted.

“Who cares,” his wife finally answered.

Staying close to the living room wall he hurried as fast as his six legs could carry him to the front door, slipped beneath it and onto the porch. The world looked very different to Jerry and he realized he was free.

It would be the best 160-days of his life.

Her: “I like you.”
Him: “Give it five days.
Her: “No, I really like you.”
Him: “Okay, ten.”

Narrator: It would, in fact, take only four.

The charnel oddity envisioned the strange appliance as it twisted and turned within the abject void of space and time. It reached out, not with hands, but with crimson tendrils that drew the darkened thing into itself.

Never had the oddity seen, felt or breathed in such a confusing puzzle. With in it were malformed slips of pulp, dried and repurposed, with vile, disgusting images and ductile rectangles.

It rifled through the object before deciding it would be best to place in the keeping of the great dreaming god. Surely, it would know what it was and why it had been floating unguarded through their reality.

The great dreaming god examined it and concluded that it belonged to a human, that it had once imagined their hideous odors and warm skinned faces in a most pleasant nightmare. The god decided that their must be a human residing, no hidden, within their antiquarian longitude and that it must be discovered and destroyed.

As creature set upon creature seeking to discern the location and to kill this human, the dreaming god further examined the unfamiliar entities shrouded  within the device. One was a hard surfaced, a strange glyph embedded in it that held much interest.

More intelligent than the other, the dreaming god could decipher these unusual and simplistic scribings which read: Taylor Rundel. The hard surfaced thing also held an image of this bipedal mortal, an image far to abhorrent for it to describe.

“This corporeality must be found, then destroyed at all cost,” the dreaming god demanded, waves of energy rolling from it’s massive misshape.

Within time, those commanded would find no human among their aberrant beings, but by then their world was a shamble, death and rot twisting and turning in an abject void of space and time. And not even the commanding dreaming god was above the ensuing suspicion left by a wallet lost from some other latitude outside their now dead multiverse kingdom.

If a novel is a relationship and short stories are love affairs, then flash fiction must be the quickie.

look in the mirror,
whose seeing you seeing?
your own reflection?

I want to feel Jung again — oops that was a Freudian slip.

Klamath, California is where I grew up and it’s constantly being confused with Klamath Falls, Oregon. Dad work for the federal government, Mom for a local tourist attraction and with four kids, money was always tight.

We never had a fast-food place like McDonald’s, Burger King or Taco Bell. Fast food was a bologna or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with milk or Kool-Aid, taken outside to the redwood picnic table Dad built.

Going to restaurant was a huge deal that only happened for very special occasions. We ate at the dinner table each evening after Dad said a little prayer. The television was never on during meals. And we ate what was made for dinner or we didn’t eat at all.

Mom made a lot of our clothes and every late summer, we would go shopping for school clothes in Eureka.

Our school clothes also came mail order from the Montgomery Wards, the Sears or the JCPenny catalog. We wore a lot of hand-me-downs. And sometimes we’d get to wear our favorite outfit or best shirt and pants to the county fair.

Teachers were trusted and respected. We went to school everyday. If you were sick and didn’t go to school, you didn’t get to play outside either. We learned our ABC’s, math, how to read and to write in cursive. You took your school clothes off as soon as you got home and put on your play clothes. And we had to do our homework and chores before being allowed outside to play.

Staying in the house was punishment and the only thing we knew about ‘bored,’ was “You better find something to do before I find it for you.” We spent most all of our time, especially our summers, outside. We played Mother May I, Hopscotch, Cops and Robbers, Combat, 1-2-3 Not It, Red light-Green Light, Red Rover, Hide and Seek, Truth or Dare, Tag, Baseball, Kick Ball, Dodge Ball, Barbies, GI Joe, house, football, baseball and rode our bikes, jumping off scrap-wood ramps, or roller skates and skate boards everywhere.

Our finger and thumb or an oddly angled stick served as a gun when playing Cowboy and Indians. A pine cone or dirt clod made the perfect hand grenade in a game of War. We trusted and respected the Law because they had the real guns and would protect us and our families in a time of trouble.

We played deep in the redwood forest, at the neighbors house, in our own backyards, down by the creek and river, and waded in the ditches and ponds. Kids from all over the neighborhood, even kids visiting cousins would come to our house and play. And it didn’t matter whose kid you were, you were always welcomed to stay for lunch and dinner.

We hardly paid attention to time while playing. Not many of us owned a wrist watch or a wallet. We were undaunted by the rain or wind. We knew it was time to go in when the street lamps came on. And we had set bed times, even on the weekend.

We had paper routes, mowed lawns and collected soda-pop bottles and aluminum cans for extra cash and before we could get real summer jobs. There was no bottled water and we drank from the warm water from the faucet and garden hose. And we watched cartoons on Saturday mornings because that’s the only time they came on.

Our only phone sat in the hallway, where there were no private conversations. We didn’t have cellphones or TV remotes and satellite dishes. Television was mostly black and white and came with three channels. And not only did we skin our elbows and knees in the dirt, gravel and rocks, some of us skinned our young hearts on our first puppy-love.

We watched our mouths around our elders, women and younger children. And we were mindful at all times that our Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents, Parents, the best friends of our parents and our best friend’s parents could and would spank us for misbehaving.

And if they were still living, I’d call my folks and say, “Thank you for everything.”

“Happened again,” a Corporal to my left whispered.

“What?” I asked.

Someone answered, “Skipper got us lost again, Doc.”

“Oh.”

We’re on night patrol, maybe two clicks north and west of our fire base. The scuttlebutt is that we were outside the wire to ‘chase our tail,’ meaning we are out here to impress some V.I.P.

“I hate night patrols, so this better be worth it,” I think.

Left and only a hundred yards ahead of us are some ruins. They remind me of the old adobe walls, remnants of an ancient village, like the kind you’ll find at Chaco Canyon.

“Hey!” a harsh whisper came down the line, “Movement in the ruins!”

Suddenly on alert, we drop to the sand, watching, listening, rifles up and at the ready. The Gunny signals and two men, jump to their feet and zig-zag towards the spot where the movement was last seen.

This was followed by yet another pair, who moved in the same zig-zag pattern to the opposite side of where the movement came. A classic pincer-movement.

Within a minute the all-clear hand sign is given and we are all on our feet, breathing again, though slightly heavier than before. We are moving forward toward the ruins.

“Guess, we ain’t lost after all,” I chuckled to the Jar-head to my left.

He says nothing.

Night vision goggles cast an eerie green glow over the crumbling walls of the village. We set up a comm-site near one of the thicker, longer and higher walls.

Quietly and quickly, I’m moving between our six two-man teams, making certain they have been keeping hydrated and that even the smallest of scratches are cared for. The men both hate and love me for this shit, but it’s my job.

An almost inhuman scream pierces the chilled morning air and everyone drops, heads swiveling from side to side, searching, trying to find the source of the sound. With no noises following it, an immediate head-check is called for; all are accounted for.

Then there’s more movement, all twelve of us saw it this time. A man, whose eye’s captured the indirect glow of our equipment or the stars overhead, darts between the broken walls.

“What the fuck’s that?” a Lance Corporal asks.

No one has an answer, and no one has the chance to answer as a dark-robed figure, eyes cast in a white-glow appears from the darker recesses of a door way, and with a shrill screech, sprints into our blazing gun fire.

As if made of a billion-upon-a-billion dots, the thing fades as if it were mere dust, taking its unholy shrieking with it. It’s quiet for a few seconds as our unprotected ears fight to recover from the pounding of rapid gun fire.

“Fuck! Did’ja see that shit?” someone asks.

The hand signal for ‘silence,’ goes around. Someone’s either crying or laughing, I can’t tell, nerves probably shattered, and soon we are withdrawing back to our fire base.

There will be no after-action briefing.

Sure, it was full moon, but not every monster in the underworld was out making mayhem and sowing fear. Werewolf wasn’t interested in blood, guts or gore, knowing it would harsh his mellow.

Instead he was hanging out waiting for some excitement to pass his way, getting high and feeling the munchies coming on. Then he saw Little Red Riding Hood on her way back from visiting her grandma and his mood turned to romance.

As she walked by, he let out a long, low wolf-whistle. She simply ignore him and continued down the street.

“You think you’re too cool for me?” he called to her.

“No,” she answered, “It jus’ you need a hair cut and some better threads, what you’re wearing is all tore up.”

As she continued down the sidewalk, her returned to the shadows complaining, “Damned red-heads anyway.”

Feeling the empty pit that was his stomach, he tripped down to the local Kwiki-Mart and bought a bag of Corn Nuts and a Mountain Dew.

“Maybe the Bride of Frankenstein’ll wanna hang out,” he thought as he struggled to open the back of nuts.