Mid-Week Blues-Buster Week 2.48
Welcome to the Mid-Week Blues-Buster Flash Fiction Challenge, Year 2, Week 48.
This is a flash fiction challenge. The prompt is a song. You are not required to write about or even mention the song. It’s there only to get the ideas moving around in your brain pan. If you want to write about the song (or the video- it’s all good here) go for it but don’t feel like you have to.
The rules;
500 words, but it’s a slushy 500, meaning you can go up to 700 or as low as 300.
Post your entry right in the comments section of this post.
MAKE SURE TO PUT YOUR TWITTER HANDLE NEXT TO YOUR WORD COUNT AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR POST. IF YOU’RE NOT ON TWITTER GIVE ME AN EMAIL ADDRESS OR SOME OTHER WAY TO GET A HOLD OF YOU!
The challenge starts whenever I post this on Tuesday and ends at MIDNIGHT PACIFIC TIME on Friday. You read that right. Pacific Time.
This week’s song prompt is a nasty little tune by the Foxboro Hot Tubs.
The name of the song is, “Dark Side of Night”. Here’s the link; https://youtu.be/XCqSUxyWaMw
This week’s Judge is well-known around the flash fiction circuit.
Say hello to Judge Nick Johns!
The challenge opens the moment you read this and runs through MIDNIGHT PACIFIC TIME on Friday May 1st.
Now… Go Write!!!
Posted on April 27, 2015, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
The Tsuruoka Files 
Word Count – 447
@susanOReilly3
#mwbb
Purged
Constantly battling my demons, they never leave me alone, screaming. Whispering day and night, you’re no good, you should never have been born, why torment me this way? I’m torn. Voices that taunt, belittling, egging me on, when they see blood for a while there done. I cut my wrists to keep them at bay, now I have to do it every day. The pain satisfies them for a while, then with distraction they beguile. They play with me, toy with me, paw at me. Their paranoid and controlling, they feed on my fear, there all I can hear. They’ve called me whore, slut and bitch, this time I needed a stitch. Mummy silences them now and again with a hug and a kiss, I parade in front of the mirror and at my reflection I hiss.
They like to dress me up pretty and buy me little gifts, sometimes my spirit lifts.
I’m their property they own all of me, say without them where would I be? Cover me with their special scent, eau de skunk, pissing all over my lamppost, there often blinding drunk.
They like to feed, they like me fat, I am making my own welcome mat. They breathe in my every pore I can not wash them off, itching my skin they scoff. They follow me to school and control my pen. They scribble all over my art I have to do it again. Their vile thoughts control my speech they swear at all my friends, it never ends. They sit on my shoulder and rain on my parade, I keep smiling, a clever charade. They like me on my own, vulnerable and scared, reminding me that no-one really cared.
I’m never free, they reside in my head often I wish I was dead. I’ve pulled out my hair at its roots, fidgeted and yanked, anything to try and stop the brutes. Prised off my fingernails thinking part of them is living there, I can feel them crawling, in my underwear. I’ve wet myself in fright, they’ve cackled and heckled in delight, reveling in my plight.
Sometimes they’re my friend and I think it’s all come to an end they make me smile for a while. When counselors visit they smile and are serene a loving scene. When unobserved there tweaking my brain driving me insane. No-one will believe me, I’m sick you see. They’ve poked until I’ve bled and said if I tell I’m dead.
Tonight I have had enough the demons are going to pay, it’s my day.
I slice from ear to ear now at them I jeer “Put your dick away, daddy, and no play time today”.
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Peace at Last
@laurenegreene
639 words
The rain rushed in as Yvette tried to kick in the door with her heel.
“Let me do it,” Steve said, pushing her out of the way.
We thought the house was empty. It’s true what they say—when you’re wrapped up with the wrong group of friends, you never realize it until it’s too late. That night, as the lightening crashed down around us, and the moss on the oak trees swayed like ghosts dancing in the rain, fate started shaking its ugly fist.
Steve and I both had pistols. Yvette and Coco raided the kitchen. I didn’t know why in the hell they always went there first. I followed Steve toward the bedroom. The house was dark, but looked lived in. A magazine was tossed on a coffee stained table in the living room, a stuffed bunny abandoned on a multi-colored rug. We rounded the corner, and looked up stairs that led to a loft, but continued past to the master bedroom. If the girls had told us food was simmering on the stove, we would have walked out the door, but that’s not what happened.
They were in bed, and the commotion had awakened them. A terrified look on their faces like a deer right before he’s hit by a car.
“I thought you said no one was home,” I said.
“Shut up,” Steve said.
The half-naked man and woman in the bed shook, huddled together with fear. Steve had his gun out now, and so I took my gun out too.
The half strangled word came out of their mouths, “No,” before it was cut off by the sound of the bullet crashing into the man’s skull and the woman’s scream, which I quickly silenced with a bullet of my own. My heart raced in my chest like thunder rolling down a mountain, and I couldn’t believe what I’d done in that split second. Now, I wasn’t just a thief, I was a killer.
“Oh my God, we have to get out of here.”
Steve laughed. That nervous type of laugh, you know the one a kid has after he’s done something he’s not supposed to.
“We killed them, Ollie.”
My face blanched, but I refuse to look back at the bed where Steve was staring.
“I’m going.”
“We came here to rob the joint and that’s what we’re going to do.”
The girls were sitting sullenly in the living room.
“What happened?” Yvette asked.
I was too stunned to answer. A few minutes later Steve came out with a bag full of Lord knows what. I didn’t want any of it—I just wanted to rewind time. My head was spinning with the knowledge of what we’d done.
And then we heard it.
“Mommy.”
We all looked up. A little girl, no more than four, stood up at the top of the loft stairs looking down at us. Steve pulled out his gun, but I grabbed his arm. It happened so quickly, when he pulled the trigger, the bullet traveled into my skin and through my side.
“It’s just a flesh wound,” Coco said.
“I can’t believe you were going to kill that kid,” Yvette said.
“Let’s get out of here,” Steve said.
I stood, blood dripping everywhere, and I looked up the stairs to see the little girl’s wide blue eyes looking down at me, like an angel from above beckoning me to join her. Coco, Steve, and Yvette were gone by the time I stumbled over the side of the couch. I tried to stand, to get my footing, but I slipped on something wet. When I hit the floor, the blood pooled around me like embryonic fluid. When I closed my eyes for the last time, I felt the little girl’s hand on my face, soft and warm. Peace at last.
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Club Night
522 words
Robby was late and broke. Jean would be waiting at the club, Robby just knew she was there early and blaming him for waiting in the rain. The rain fell just hard enough to get you wet but not enough to seek shelter. A summer rain, the moon was full and gave the alley light. The kind of rain that happened when the sun was shining, the kind the old folks back in the country called “the Devil beating his wife.”
The music from the club bounced off the brick walls in the maze of alleys, Robby ran them like a prize rat, his shoes splashed in the filthy puddles. Shoes like he had never worn at home, home, that place would never be home again, he was at home, the city was home. In his city home he wore shoes for how they looked not for how they held up in the mud. The pointy toes reminded him of his father’s cowboy boots, boots that Robby had shined every Saturday afternoon for years.
The music from the club was nearing, more distinct, less echos. Robby was nearing the scene he would soon be having on the street with Jean. The moment approached when he would have to tell her he didn’t have enough money to get them in much less enough to buy drinks. His pace slowed, the rain stayed the same.
Robby turned another corner, nearly there, this alley, a turn and then a straight shot to the club. The moon’s glow, the music and his internal compass guided him. Next to a dumpster stood a man facing the damp brick wall, adding more wetness. The urine stench in the alley wasn’t going to get any worse for one more and the rain was sure not going to wash it away. The bricks were saturated, the alley got more use than the facilities in the club. The man wore a white jacket and in the moonlight it almost glowed in its whiteness. Robby saw the man was unsteady, unaware, alone.
The moon glinted on Robby’s knife. The rain fell in the alley. The music seemed to soften as Robby began to hear his own heartbeat. Robby’s shoe splashed in the filthy puddle of rain water and beer scented urine. The man stood there swaying, white jacket glowing. Robby struck, lower back, twice, three times in rapid forceful blows. The knife in his hand dripped black in the moonlight as the man fell wordlessly to the pavement. A moment to find the wallet, a moment to pull out the cash and another to throw the empty wallet into the dumpster.
Robby wiped his hands on the wet, white jacket. The white glow of the jacket dimmed from the stains. Blood, urine, alley water. Robby pushed the dumpster over the body. In the dark it wouldn’t be seen, in the rain no blood pools would be noticed, in the alley no odors would betray.
“Hey Jean, been waiting long?” Robby handed the doorman a bill and he let the couple into the club. The music covered the sound of Robby’s beating heart.
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@Harmony77uk
Betrayal
word count: 515
The night had started like any other night when you are on the run from the law. It seemed funny to me now that it was only two days before that we had become killers. It was supposed to be just a normal night featuring mugging and so forth, but somehow me and Hayley had got carried away. That is the way that things go when you lead a life like my own. We had simply shrugged that off, and carried on as normal.
“The police have found us,” Hayley warned as she looked out of the window.
“Shit!” I walked over and joined her. I could see blue and red lights as they approached the house, and had to smile about their lack of subtlety. “We definitely have time to move before they get here, and there are plenty of ready to harvest fields for us to hide within.”
Hayley nodded her head and stalked towards the kitchen. “I am just going to grab some of our ill gotten gains.”
I smiled to myself as I listened to those words, and watched her hair bounce as she moved. Hayley was just something that was beyond perfect, and I would so lucky to have found her on that night so long ago. There was so much that we had in common, it had seemed that we were destined to end up together as partners in so many ways.
It was too late for me by the time that I realised that we did not keep any of our stash in the kitchen. As I turned to ask what she was really doing, she drove the knife that she had collected into my chest. The red blood spurted over my hands and I fell forwards. “Why?”
She shrugged and put the knife in my hands. “They are only looking for one killer, babe, and they are just about to find him. Meanwhile, I get to run free and can rejoin society as I see fit.”
“Hayley…” I paused as I gazed into her innocent looking face for one last time. “I love you.”
“I know you do, Martin, and that is why you are helping me to escape.”
Hayley disappeared from my vision, and I suppose at that point she left the house. I stared up at the window and noticed the droplets of water that were obscuring my view of the moon. The rain seemed a fitting end for me as I felt myself becoming empty of everything that had once encouraged me to breathe.
The moon was certainly what I would describe as a liars moon. It all seemed to be too perfect, even with the covering of rain over the glass. Live with Hayley was definitely too perfect, and, for me, the rain symbolised my blood. One of my last thoughts was to wonder if she had ever loved me at all, or if it had just been an act. This was something that I was never going to know the answer to as I slipped into darkness and my flame flickered out.
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Walk On The Dark Side
Kelly walked across the hall and knocked on the apartment door opposite hers. “Come on, Janine. Open up.”
The door swung open to reveal a sleepy brunette. “What’s wrong?”
“I need your husband to come watch the baby while we go across town.”
The brunette a hand on her ample hip. “I thought we weren’t doing that anymore.”
Kelly sighed. “Yeah, well, I guess I lied.”
“Well isn’t that nice. Maybe I don’t want to work with a liar.”
“I didn’t lie to you. Not exactly. I lied to myself. I said I didn’t care. That I wasn’t going to get involved. That raising my nephew was more important than the other stuff. But how can I raise him and not care what kind of world he’s going to grow up in and live in?”
“Damn it! I hate when you make sense. Now I gotta go wake Trent up and tell him he’s back to changing diapers so we can take Laura to rehab. I hate lying to him. I know. It’s necessary. But I wish there was another way. Don’t stand there making sad puppy faces at me. It’s not going to change anything. Give me a ten minutes and we’ll be over,”
Kelly had a pot of coffee brewing by the time Janine and Trent arrived. A couple minutes of instructions about diaper rash and warming baby bottles, and Kelly and Janine were out the door, headed for the elevator.
Soon as the elevator doors closed and they were alone inside, Kelly said, “Another corner coffee shop got robbed tonight. But this time the owner got roughed up pretty good. They have her down at Mercy General. Laura’s down there now getting the details.”
Janine sighed and rested her head against the cool metal wall. “You know she has finals in the morning, right? Poor kid. But what else are we going to do? You’re right. Nobody else will stand up to these assholes, so it’s on us. A couple of soccer moms and a college kid running around in in the middle of the night busting the chops of every low rent criminal this side of county.”
Kelly chuckled. “Low rent, we can handle. We can take care of business in bathrobes and nunchucks.”
“But when things get worse”: said Janine, “like carjackings and murder, we’re going to need to bring somebody else into the mix.”
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open, revealing the empty foyer of the ground floor. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So long as we feed coffee to the babysitter and basketball tickets to the parking lot attendant, we’re doing all right.”
And side by side, dressed in black sweats and ponytails, they stepped out onto the sidewalk and headed to Mercy General under the watchful eye of a Liar’s Moon.
– – – – –
@bullishink / 541 words
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