Guest Writer: Harris Tobias

A Taste for Music

“Before you can save your world, you have to save mine,” the voice said. A few seconds before I had been noodling around with mom’s old cell phone and the inside of my new Play Station. Like everyone else on Earth, I had never even heard of the Lumi and then there I was conversing with them as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
I’m a kind of a gadget freak, always fooling around with electronics just for the heck of it. When I plugged the cell phone into my game machine, the screen got all fuzzy and weird. Suddenly there they were, talking to me like we were old friends. The image was indistinct. The Lumi appearing as fuzzy blobs on the edges of the screen. If you weren’t looking for them, you wouldn’t notice them at all. Even being aware of them as I was, I could hardly make them out. Speaking to them was easy though and the sound quality was pretty good..
“This is not what we look like, you realize,” said the Lumi. “You appear the same way to us— a rather dim, foggy blob on the edge of the screen. It must be an effect of the trans-dimensional shift. In our respective realities we might look very much alike.” I had no opinion on the matter. To me the Lumi looked like smudgy blobs and that was that.
“You want me to save your world?” I asked almost laughing out loud at the preposterousness of the suggestion. “Why me? I’m just an ordinary kid from an ordinary family in an ordinary town. I go to Mt. Clemmon’s Middle School. I’m in the seventh grade for Pete’s sake. Saving worlds is not something I have a lot of experience with. I play trombone in the school orchestra and not too well at that. I have English homework.”
“Why you is a fair question,” the Lumi said. “Naturally you wouldn’t be our first choice but, then again, we don’t have any other choices. You are, in fact, all we have. Communication across the dimensional divide is quite rare and yours is the only receiver we could find. I don’t know how long this connection will last so please listen carefully, the fate of both our worlds depends on it.”
“What makes you think your world even needs saving?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s easy. The Eaters are here now. They’ve already eaten the moon and they have begun devouring our world. Our continents are shrinking. When they’re through with us they’ll eat right through the dimensional barrier and start on your world next.”
“Isn’t there anything they can’t eat? Something to poison them or contain them?”
“Nothing we have here can stop them,” the Lumi said, “We were hoping there might be something in your world we might try.”
“Even if we had something, how would I get it to you?
”We are working on that, in the meantime, will you help us?”
I said I would do what I could but I really did have homework and my mother was calling me to walk the dog so I said goodbye rather abruptly and went down stairs.
When I got back on line, The Lumi were there waiting for me. Boy were they angry. “I hope this isn’t the way you’re going to treat us. This is not some prank you know? Just leaving us like that was rude. You don’t seem to appreciate how desperate our situation is.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do. I can’t just stop my life because your world is in trouble. I have a hard time believing you are even real. What are the Eaters anyway?”
“Let me see if I can explain it to you. Many years ago we developed nano-technology to a high degree. We built microscopic machines to do our bidding. They made our world a paradise. We could have anything we wanted, all we needed to do was desire it and the nano-bots would make it for us. Want a new house, the nanos would scoop up the raw materials and construct it for you. Want a fancy meal, a new car, no problem, the nanos will do it. Overnight there was no more hunger, no more poverty, everyone lived well, drove fleets of cars, had boats. There was no end to our wanting and the nanos provided.”
“Sounds great,” I said. “I wish we had some of that here.”
“No you don’t,” the Lumi said. “After a few generations, our greed used up our resources; our world was stripped clean of every usable thing, Every tree, every mineral, every animal and plant. Our beautiful world was turned into a desert. At the same time, the nano-bots began evolving. They began using the things they had built for their own purposes. When we realized what they were doing, we rounded them up, packed them into a spaceship and sent them to the moon. I think you can guess what happened next.”
“They ate the moon and found a way to get back to Earth..er your world. What do you call your world anyway?”
“We call it Lumi and once it was the most beautiful place. Now it’s wasteland filled with useless things. If we don’t stop the nanos we’ll lose what little we have left.”
“What are they doing with the stuff they are eating?” I asked almost afraid to hear the answer.
“They are making more nanos and building a huge machine powerful enough to cross the dimensional barrier. When it is finished they will be coming for your world next.”
“I don’t know what you expect me to do. I’m just a kid,” I said.
“There must be a reason we made contact. Maybe you have the answer and you don’t even know it. Tell me something about your world. Maybe you have a weapon we can use.”
“Even if we had something, how would I get it to you? This is useless.”
“Please,” the Lumi said, “you are all we have. You said you went to school. We have schools in our world. You said you were in the orchestra. I don’t know what that is. And you play a trombone? What is that?”
“You mean you don’t have music in your world?”
“We do not know the word “music”.
“Well. Stay right there and I’ll show you.” I ran and got my trombone from the closet and put it together. As soon as it was assembled, I played a simple tune.
The Lumi clapped for joy. “That’s wonderful,” they said. “That noise you made, that is music?”
“Well I’m not very good but if you wait a second I’ll play some real music for you. Here’s what an orchestra sounds like.” I turned on my CD player and blasted a few minutes of whatever I had in there. I think it was the Beatles. When I stopped the recording, the Lumi were very excited.
“That was amazing. I think we can use that. The nano-bots won’t know what to make of such complex sounds. It might scramble their tiny brains and change their destructive behavior. We would like to copy some of your music, maybe amplify it and see what effect it has on the nanos. This is very exciting. Music, ha! We knew there was a reason we found each other.”
I spent the next several hours playing CD after CD. The Lumi were transfixed. I went through my music collection playing everything from Mozart to Metallica. I felt good that I could be of service. The Lumi sounded positively up beat about the prospect of cleansing their world of the eaters.
I didn’t hear from the Lumi again although I tried to contact them many times in the weeks and months that followed. My Play Station communicator remained blank and silent. I hoped the Lumi triumphed but if they did you think a thank you would have been in order. As the days wore on and the school year drew to a close, I thought less and less about the Lumi and their problems. When I did think of them I tended to think the entire episode was a hoax. Some internet prankster who some how managed to hack into my game box.
The last week of school was the big concert. Our orchestra had been rehearsing for it all year. It was a sellout crowd. I took my place on the horn section and took out my trombone and warmed up a bit with the rest of the kids. When we were all ready, Mr. Thiery, the music director, tapped his baton on the stand, we raised our instruments and waited for his signal to begin. But it never came. First the baton dissolved in his hand. Then the instruments began disappearing one by one. I watched as my trombone vanished before my eyes dissolving away from bell to mouthpiece. At first there was a stunned silence in the hall then Marion Allen, our first violinist, screamed as her instrument and bow disappeared completely. That scream set off a scramble for the exits in which several parents were injured. No one could figure out what was happening, but I knew. It was the eaters. They had crossed the dimensional divide. They were on the Earth and they had developed a taste for music.

© Harris Tobias 2010

Harris Tobias was raised by robots disguised as New Yorkers. Despite an awkward childhood he learned to read and write. To date Mr. Tobias has published two detective novels, The Greer Agency and A Felony of Birds, to critical acclaim. In addition he has published short stories in Down in the Dirt Magazine, Literal Translations, Electric Flash and Ray Gun Revival. He currently lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Equation: A Collection of Six-Sixes

Open publication

Guest Writer: Salvatore Buttaci

Hazy, Hot, and Humid

On a scorching day like this, it was hard to believe six months had gone by since she had first met Foster. It was cool then. Now at a traffic dead-stop, all four windows open, Carolyn regretted not having taken the Chevy to the auto shop to get the air conditioning repaired. Who the hell expected a heat wave?
She punched the radio off. It annoyed her that suddenly everybody on the radio was a weatherman. "The three H's again today," said a disk jockey on WHOO-FM, "hazy, hot, and humid." Reports already placed the number of heat exhaustion deaths in the state at two hundred. To make matters worse, the water had been shut off in most of the outlying areas in order to prevent further shortages.
Record-breaking temperatures made early evening rush-hour anything but rushed. Long snake lines of cars were jammed in both directions of Route 46. Some of them, overheating, puffed white smoke from under uplifted hoods.
Now and then somebody blew a horn, but for the most part it was quiet outside. Nothing moved. The highway seemed quiet as a cemetery.
The word "cemetery" raised hairs on the back of her neck. She thought of Foster dying, perhaps already dead. He had called her about an hour ago, desperate, pleading. She could hardly decipher what he was struggling to say. But this much she knew for certain: he was in some kind of deep trouble and he needed her now. That was what love was all about, wasn’t it? The one she had loved, the man she would’ve died for, hardly had voice to beg her help, and she was running––trying to run in stand-still traffic.
"I'll call the police!"
"No! No! Don't do that. Hurry!" he said in a voice so tremulous and far away.
And here she was--stuck in the middle of Route 46, the nearest exit a mile away. Trembling hands whitened as she gripped the steering wheel as if squeezing it could somehow––magically––start the traffic moving. Foster needed her. God, get me there before it's too late!
Guilt wormed its way inside her head and sat there like a nagging mother. Only days ago she had finally decided to call off the whole affair. Affair? There never had been an affair. Foster said he loved her; he wanted to marry her. Yet, in all these months, since that cool February morning they had met outside the science lab, he had never even kissed her. At first she was excited by his aloofness. How different he was from the usual out there who thought kissing on the first date was old-fashioned, nothing but a waste-of-time preliminary. Foster was not at all like other men.

February over, March roared in unpredictably as ever. In fact, though some days were warm, for the most part the month was cold and snowy. She hadn't seen Foster during most of March. He said he hated the cold. As a kid he had loved it, especially the snow, but he had come to hate it, so much so that he rarely left his apartment during the winter months. Luckily there was the telephone, both of them calling each other and spending what she referred to as "long-distance quality time." Still, it was a weird kind of relationship. She had fallen in love with a very brilliant, generous, and handsome man--maybe the handsomest she had ever laid eyes on!--but he did not as yet demonstrate in any physical way this undying love he insisted he felt for her.
Funny, she did not even know his first name. "Call me Foster," he had said. "Everybody else does. I'm Foster and my uncle is Dr. Foster, head of the Science Department here at the university."
Two years before, Dr. Nathan Foster had won the coveted Academy of Science Award for his groundbreaking work in botanical genetics, particularly with flower hybrids. It had been Dr. Foster who had given the world its first taste of the now famous edible Tomato Rose, the reddest, most fragrant of the velvet-soft roses that bloomed throughout the summer months. In early autumn, when falling rose petals start to discolor and wilt to a dry thinness, the huge petals of the healthy Tomato Rose are picked and added to salad bowls or placed inside sandwiches. What had been a rose of beauty to admire in spring and summer became a tomato more delicious than any natural tomato had ever tasted. Dr. Nathan Foster had opened the eyes of scientists everywhere to the unlimited possibilities of cross-pollination.
Carolyn found it hard to believe that Foster, the timid recluse with whom she had fallen in love, was really the nephew of the outgoing, creative genius who restructured botanical genes.
It was true, however, that Foster was also a scientist of sorts. He had told her that he was seriously involved with his uncle in another of his scientific projects, one that required much of his time. He hoped she would be patient with him, at least until he managed to publish his findings in one of the prestigious botanical journals.
When she had first met him in February, he was exiting the university lab as she was entering. At the time, Carolyn was in her final semester, taking science, never a favorite of hers, just one of the left-over, save-them-for-the-end courses she had to sweat through in order to graduate.

Three months later, at the end of May, Foster was there at the ceremony to watch her receive her B.A. in Communication Arts. He said she made him proud.
Up ahead Carolyn could see the traffic moving, not as quickly as she'd like, but a highway policeman was now directing cars around stalled vehicles. At least she was moving.
She wondered what she’d find when she got there. It would be the first time she'd see his apartment. He had always put her off with, "It's not a pretty sight. A mess is what it is, but it's the only place I can get my project going." Now, weeks later, on the phone, in his desperation, he had blurted out, "The Harlowe Apartments. 23 Davison Road. Hurry!"
On the radio Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand were singing to each other, "You don't bring me flowers. You don't sing me love songs." She had to smile at that one: Foster didn't think it was right to yank flowers out of the ground just to satisfy weddings or funerals or women who would do better to look, and touch, and smell the flowers where they lived and grew.
Oh, let me hear it one more time! she thought sarcastically. Tell me again, damn it, that the weather out there is hazy, hot, and humid. "We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave," sang the disk jockey in mock overkill. “No shit, Shakespeare,” she said through clenched teeth. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
Like what made Foster so puzzling? Something about him that downright scared her. Sure she had loved him; sure he still claimed he loved her, but love wasn't everything.
"It’s like a flower," her philosophical mother told her often enough. "You water it, give it sunlight, take care of it day by day and that flower will grow. Neglect it and love will die."
I've done all I can, she reassured herself. What have you done, Foster? But when she had asked him for answers, he had none to give. He was too busy with his work; he hated the cold; things would be better once the spring and summer came.

For awhile, during May and June, he had kept his word. They took in movies, went out to dinner, though Foster rarely ate. "But don't mind me, Carolyn," he'd say. "I love to watch you eat!" Then he'd pop some more of the countless number of vitamins he took every day and swallow them down with a tall glass of water. When the heat wave came, Foster made himself scarce again. He did not like the cold; he did not like extreme
heat. For God's sake, what the hell did he like?
Finally she could feel what little warm wind was out there drafting through the open windows of her car as she accelerated to fifty-five. Should she call 911 and let the police find Foster? Instead she mulled over how love that seemed so strong and promising could possibly just end? The sad part was Foster had no idea she had been considering a way to end it. He had this naive idea once his project was over, they would marry and live the proverbial happily ever after. Carolyn was sorry she'd have to hurt him, but what choice did she have?
At last she swung left onto Davison Road and parked the panting Chevy inconsiderately straddling two reserved spaces in front of The Harlowe Apartments. Hurriedly she moved towards the numbers on the apartment units, searching for 23.
"My Uncle Nathan," she remembered Foster telling her months ago, "says the Tomato Rose is only the beginning. He honestly believes the day will come when beautifully fragrant flowers in all shapes and colors will be genetically manipulated so that they will live as long as you or I. And humans who seem so determined to kill each other off, will in time learn the peacefulness, the contentment, the velvet softness of the flower."
Carolyn raised a fist to knock, then decided instead to call out, "Foster, Foster," but he did not answer her. She turned the doorknob. The hallway was beastly hot. Still, she could feel the cool breeze that was blowing through the crack in the opening door. She could hear the loud whirring sound of a fan inside.
At first she did not see him. Looking into the kitchen, she saw it was bare except for a very bright fluorescent light that shone like a kind of sun on the dirt floor.
Cautiously, and more than a bit frightened, she turned towards the bedroom, tiptoeing towards it. Flowers everywhere! Their cloying scent pinched her nostrils, gagged her almost to nausea. Flowers of every imaginable variety; flowers in every conceivable size and shape: an explosion of fragrance and color.
Here too the floor looked like someone's backyard dirt. She walked carefully so as not to step on the stalks and stems of flowers growing out of the dirt, but not carefully enough. Carolyn screamed. Then she screamed again and again and again.
Beneath her feet lay Foster whom for a few months she had loved so much. His handsomeness was gone. In its place thin green stems sprouted like whiskers from every pore on his face.
Instead of dark-brown curly hair, thick spokes of yellowing grass grew tall and unruly; patches of dirt marked his scalp. In place of eyelids, wilting pink rose petals fluttered above his blue eyes. He resembled a humorless Scarecrow, a pathetic figure made of grass dying to hay, frightening enough to keep away crows and humans. His lips moved to speak. Lips red and velvety, sweet as roses, thin petals trembling in the breeze of an overhead fan. In his gnarled, brown, tendrilled fingers of bark he held the spigot end of a long green garden hose from which only a few drops of water dribbled in the dark cracks of his hand.
"Water," his lips said in a voice soft as summer, gone the deep, resonant voice of the once handsome Foster. "Please. Some water."
There was no water anywhere, not for hours. Not for who knew how long. Carolyn could not save him. From the corner of her eye, she saw the fluttering two notes under the paperweight on Foster's desk.
Reaching the notes, she saw that he had written them in crude cursive print, then she turned from the pathetic look of Foster's lips gasping “wa…wa..“and from his fluttering petaled eyes and read one of the notes: "Help me, Carolyn," then she read the other: "Uncle," he had scrawled in hardly legible, feathery thin strokes, "A rose by any other name?"

© Salvatore Buttaci 2010

Salvatore Buttaci is an obsessive-compulsive writer who writes everyday. His collection of 164 short-fiction stories, Flashing My Shorts, is available from http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com or from http://amzn.to/Flashing-My-Shorts

FLASHING MY SHORTS (by Salvatore Buttaci)
ORDER A COPY
http://www.allthingsthatmatterpress.com/buynow.htm

HoW 2010: New Orleans

House of Writers meets in New Orleans, Labor Day Weekend 2010

l. to r.: Dwight, Julia, Jared, Mike, Sandra, Gita, Teresa

not pictured: Shauna, Michael

Guest Writer: Brittany Beltram

Emotional Geography

As a young adult I spent so much time skimming stones over the troubled waters of my adolescence, wanting to change, trying to run away from the familiar, trying desperately to create an existence that was far removed from the nest made by my parents. The comfort and safety brought by their twigs and grass was stifling to my newly molted exterior screaming for independence. Like a seed that is released into the wind and haphazardly takes flight; attempting to germinate anew with bigger blooms seeded by brave determination on a prized hill top location to bask in all the sun's glory.

At first, independence was a child of four, filled with fury, parked at the end of the driveway with a suitcase packed full of the essentials—Barbies and clean panties. I was anxious to escape the dysfunction that ruled a nest meant to foster and feed. Then as the feathers fell and I was a teenager, independence was running away with temporary friends while clutching to the tailgate of an old Ford pick-up truck following the fork in the road that led me back home—defeated and despondent. My first solo flight was in a lover's arms as he cradled me over his troubled and addictive behaviors trying to help me fly with stoic but toxic charm. I later learned to fly alone but with the broken wings of addiction which when I gained height and distance my transgressions would find me plummeting towards the ground to taste the asphalt of reality.

The geography of my freedom was filled with new ground that was visually unfamiliar and all consuming in its landscape of strangers and big city indulgences. I created my own towers to scale in flight that left me feeling a master of my own chaos.

Whether a city or forest dweller, over time my mapping skills changed and I epitomized all the destructive behaviors that my parent's nest, filled with hovering hands and a flora of ultimatums, wanted to prevent.

As time moved forward and the tree of my existence was rooted with love and eventually bore fruit, I too began the journey that my parents did before me by stitching the squares of my past together forming a cloak to shelter my own precious chicks from harm.

We are all plagued by the desire of wanting to be free—to roam, to fly and just to be.

So as my children grow and begin seeding their tomorrows with the experience of today I know their eyes will eventually turn skyward. Soon they will spread their blanketed wings that have been fabricated by me and with outstretched arms and the will of Superman they will set forth and fly.

© Brittany Beltram 2010

Brittany Beltram doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up... but hopes it involves telling stories.She blogs at http://twitwit-britt.blogspot.com/

Guest Writer: Cath Barton

Not a Good Start to the Weekend

“Michael!” she yelled up the stairs at him. “My coat is completely covered in your cat’s hairs.” Oh, it was his cat today, was it?
“Well, you shouldn’t have left it lying on the floor.”
“I didn’t leave it on the floor. The ruddy cat pulled it down.”
Michael had by this time reached the bottom of the stairs, where Franny, fierce-faced, was holding up her once-black coat. Noise was still coming out of her mouth.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll get the cat’s comb and brush your coat for you.”
“You better had.” Franny, very red in the face, stomped upstairs.

*

Michael spent the next ten minutes searching for the comb. He knew the cat was moulting. But then so did Franny. They had both wanted to get the animal, though it was not the time to remind her of that. He couldn’t remember when he’d last used the comb. He rooted through drawers and cupboards, resolving, for the umpteenth time, to have a good clear out one day. Meanwhile, no comb. Sod it, he thought. What a way to start the weekend. This of all weekends.
“Franny,” he shouted up the stairs, “have you seen Merlin’s comb?”
No answer. And, come to that, where was Merlin? Gone to spread hairs somewhere else apparently.
Michael thought he’d better go out and buy a new comb. It wouldn’t exactly cost a fortune. He picked up his wallet, put on his (so-far-untouched-by-Merlin) coat and left the house. He knew that along the road and down the second turning on the right there was a short parade of shops. One of them was a sort of general store where he’d bought bird food in the past. He was pretty certain that he’d seen dried pigs’ ears there, and these were for dogs so it was a fair bet they’d have stuff for cats too.
Bugger! He thought to himself. This is not what I was planning on doing today. Making an effort, he straightened his back and took a deep breath. He was jolly well going to act as if everything was fine. Which it was supposed to be. Except that acting it didn’t quite work. He noticed the clouds coming over rather than the blue sky, the dog poo on the pavement rather than the daffies in the gardens. And wondered how and when there was going to be a calm moment to tell Franny his news.

*

As Michael approached the ironmongers Franny was out in the garden, looking for the cat. She was, to put it mildly, not feeling well disposed towards it. Blasted beast. Who in their right minds got a long-haired white cat? The hairs got everywhere. Merlin! Where was he?
Franny was worried. This was the first weekend for ages that she and Michael had been home together, and it was already going Horribly Wrong. They had to sit down and talk sensibly. She turned towards the house. The sun was glinting on something near the back door. As she walked up the path she could see that it was a key. She bent down to pick it up but before she could do so she was distracted by a small miaou. The sound was coming from under the mahonia bush. Merlin? The cat came towards her very slowly. He was holding up his right front paw. Oh, Merlin! The paw was hugely swollen and looked like a boxing glove. “My poor Merlin.” She spoke gently, but the cat backed off as Franny tried to pick him up, and retreated into his prickly den.
Franny snatched up the key and flung it onto the kitchen table as she went in. Seeing it had given her a funny sinking feeling but there was no time to think about that now. She had to call the vet. Damn! The surgery wasn’t open on Saturdays. She’d have to find out where there was a vet doing an emergency service. She felt by turns worried, cross and anxious and then the feelings all swirled together inside her and she burst into tears. Merlin crept through the back door and peered up at her. His paw looked awful. Oh, where was Michael?
Sod Michael, she thought. She’d take the cat to the emergency vet herself. She rang and found out where to go and then fetched the cat’s box from the cellar. She set it on the table and lifted the lid.

*

At that moment, unheard by Franny, Michael arrived back at the house and let himself in. As he reached the kitchen door he saw her, with her back to him, fastening the leather straps on the cat basket.
“What the hell are you doing?
Franny jumped. “I could ask you the same thing. Where have you been? “
“Out,” he snarled.
At that moment the cat, now shut in the basket, let out a piercing howl. “What in the world is going on Franny? What have you done to my cat?”
“Michael, the cat’s injured. I haven’t done anything to him but we need to get him to the vet.”

*

The emergency vet gave Merlin an injection of antibiotics. The cat recovered quite quickly, as cats do. That story had a happy ending.
Unfortunately the bigger story did not. Michael tried to explain how that key came to be lying outside the back door of the house, how he’d simply dropped it. Franny didn’t believe him – though she should have done, as it was true. Neither did she believe his story about getting a shiny new job, with a new shiny salary. Which was also true. He’d been planning to tell her that morning.
She threw him out. But kept the cat, who is still leaving his white hairs all over her clothes.

© Cath Barton 2010

Cath Barton lives in Abergavenny, Wales, where she writes, sings, gardens, walks and generally enjoys life. You can read her blogs on the 6S Social Network.

Guest Writer: Jenny Picciotto

Digging Up the Past

The trees stood like sentinels in the falling sunlight, silent witness to the falling leaves, fallen rotted fruit. Soon it would be first frost. A fox stole across the lane between the trees, eating, quickly, the remains of the red life-giving apples.

It had to be done. The house was up for sale. He had to finish it now, before the ground was frozen. He kicked at the stinking apples, fermenting where they fell. Chink, Chink, Chink. His spade cut into the earth, seeking the shallow grave. The corpse was rotting too. “It must be here” he thought.

The trees shivered in the chill air; brittle leaves rustling. He was sweating, his flannel sleeve sopping as he wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. Hitching up his worn overalls, he began to dig again. Night was falling quickly now. His wife would be home in another hour. He would have to work fast. He imagined the corpse turning in its cold earthy embrace, evading him in death as she had in life. “I’m sure this is the place:” he thought.

His shovel finally bearing down on the body, the image of her face rushed back at him, crushed by another shovel. She had been running, bare footed, past the watching trees. He was chasing her, flying, fleeing, her feet flapping softly on the firm muddy orchard soil. His leather boots pursuing, arms reaching for her streaming hair. He grabbed her, a red rose blooming on her cheek as he struck her; back of hand like a stone.

“Where d’ya think your goin’?” he taunted.

He fell on her, his chest covering her mouth so she couldn’t make a sound. Hands gripping, tearing open her blouse, her lacy bra strap pulled taut – until it tore. He clawed at her, hungrily. Holding her with one arm across her chest, with one hand he tried to unzip his jeans, but she struggled free and ran again, half nude, past the silent trees and into the woodshed.

He saw a startled fox escape behind the woodpile. She was inside. She tried to brace the door shut with a shovel, but he pushed it in. She was scrambling backward to the far edge of the dark shed. He didn’t know she had found a knife, was holding it to her bare chest. He fell on her again, his hot lips gnawing at her face. She plunged the knife into his side; steamy sticky redness welling up, soaking his shirt, running down his leg.

“Bitch!” he screamed, backing away. Finding the shovel, he raised it over her head, leveling blow after blow onto her face and arms, until she was drenched too; red with blood; red like the apples on the trees in her father’s orchard.

© Jenny Picciotto 2010

Jenny Picciotto is a writer, massage therapist, yoga instructor, mother, wife and office manager. She has written poetry and short stories for private consumption for most of her life. Her work was included in the publication “6S – Mind Games”, a collection of stories told in 6 sentences.