20 In 5
Twenty stories you can read in 5 minutes each.
Volume II -- January 2012
Publisher: Kevin Shockey
Editor-in-Chief: Gil C. Schmidt
Copyright 2011, 2012-- Mis Tribus, Gil C. Schmidt
Published by MisTribus Publishing at Smashwords
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The Editor's Minute
Welcome to the second collection of 20 in 5. This monthly e-book/app features a wide range of flash fiction, stories of between 500-750 words, perfect for reading over a cup of coffee, tea, chai or some multi-syllabic confection you order from a barista. Or for reading in bed, just before entering your world of slumber.
Wherever you may be, we hope you find these mini-breaks in your day an enjoyable spicing, a mini-trek into someplace else and a welcome addition to your digital device.
Thank you and we look forward to your comments!
20 In 5 -- Volume II -- January 2012
All stories in this volume authored by Gil C. Schmidt
Nothing like an early start...
She came into the bakery as she did every morning…A little flustered, slightly flushed, her hair sporting a stray tendril or two, her hands flitting about her slim figure in a near-frantic search for keys, wallet, sunglasses or change.
Milton was always there, often kneading dough for one of Eiffel Pierre’s delicate pastries. The quiet dawn hours were his favorites, but they gained a new aura once he knew that she—Jean Marie—would walk in. She was simply beautiful, not in the glamorous, plastic modern way, but in the natural “look twice and you’ll see” way, the kind of beauty that slips across your eyes, brings a small smile to your lips, then gradually absorbs you until you can’t remember ever thinking she wasn’t beautiful.
Milton’s claim to fame, at first glance, or maybe down to a third or fourth, were his eyes, a deep green that shimmered with gold specks reminiscent of elves in a wondrous fairy tale. Sadly, those beautiful eyes were obscured by the heavy lenses of glasses that kept him barely this side of legally blind. His eyes were the main reason he took up baking, for the work relied very little on seeing and oh-so-much on sensitivity and feeling.
Jean Marie breezed in and Milton, as was his habit, smiled shyly, wiped his hands of flour and stood in rapt attention as she flittered and flexed in search of…something. Milton waited patiently until Jean Marie smiled up at him and asked his usual opening question: “Will you buy a pastry or three?”
She laughed, as she usually did. Their morning ritual complete, Jean Marie bit her lower lip and scanned the display, hovering over each item as if absorbing its essence. Milton watched, entranced, taking in her profile, the gleam in her eyes and the very sense that Jean Marie was alive in a magical way no one else was.
Milton’s heart sped up. It always did when Jean Marie was around.
“A maple-glazed doughnut, a pair of ladyfingers and a medium coffee, please.” She frowned slightly. “I may be overdoing it.”
Milton shook his head. “No, ma’am. Seems to me you’re just having a solid Continental breakfast.” He quickly placed her order in a waxed box and served her coffee, to go.
“That’ll be $5.87,” he said. “Busy day today?”
Jean Marie stopped suddenly. “Oh, yes. Today’s my last day at work.”
Milton took her money and sombered a bit. She was leaving town! He was afraid to ask, but simply had to know. “Did you get a new job?”
Jean Marie shook her head. “No. I did something better.” Her smile was half delight, half roller-coaster rictus. She seemed happy and on the verge of fainting. The she laughed happily and he let out the breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Something big!”
Milton chuckled. “You bought the company?”
Jean Marie clapped once in surprise. “You almost guessed! I did buy a company, of sorts.”
Eyebrows rising like semaphores, Milton said “’Of sorts?’ What did you buy?”
“This!” Jean Marie twirled, a lithe ballerina under golden hair, swirling like a vision of happiness in the morning light. “I bought Eiffel Pierre!”
Milton’s jaw dropped. His first words got lost somewhere between brain and mouth, but his next group came out audibly, if somewhat strangled. “You’re…my new boss?”
Jean Marie dimpled, and Milton’s jaw dropped again for he’d never seen that touch of beauty before. “I guess so.” Then, with a blush of shyness that made Milton’s heart break and soar at the same time, she said “That way we can see each other more than just before breakfast.”
And they did just that, for the next forty-one years.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
When Pritchard was about to turn 17, he figured out the secret to anti-gravity. Over a furious four weeks between his first kiss with Melanie and his mom's loony "Sweet 17" party (that included a clown, to the utter humiliation of everyone at the party, including the clown), Pritchard (he hated his given name, Percy, so he fixed it) drew up the design, polished the theoretical underpinnings in a 34-page article (never published) and built the prototype, that he tested on Muggs, his loopy bulldog. The dog's maiden, er, flight, caused the poor mutt to vomit and run away for almost a week. The anti-gravity prototype was now disguised as an 8-track player in Pritchard's home-built display of passé technology.
Between Melanie (who went off to college somewhere in Michigan, while Pritchard stayed near home) and Sally, Pritchard figured out faster-than-light travel, pushed to a superhuman effort in consolidating theoretical physics and what he called "hyperquantic thrust dynamos" for lack of a better name. Sally, a smashing little redhead with birthmarks in the darnest places, was Pritchard's first lover, and the extended post-coital daze dampened Pritchard's other thoughts about FTL travel until Sally joined the Navy and was eventually shipped out to some port in East Asia.
Pritchard tinkered with hyperspace signals based on string theory tunneling until he met Lois, the tall brunette with the perfect dimples on her (most-often) unseen cheeks. Inspired by Lois' fond memories of her childhood in eastern Louisiana, Pritchard made the conceptual leap between his anti-grav concepts (already proven) and FTL travel (which he tested by sending a 54-inch probe to the Moon and back in 6.4 seconds...twice) to discover that time could be unlinked from gravitational space-time and moved anywhere. After a frenetic series of tests, drafts, edits, rebuilds and several cameras destroyed in tests (though one brought back an intriguing half-picture of what could only be a T-Rex in full attack mode), Pritchard finally got his prototype to work after using parts from his last FTL probe (disguised as an over-sized Sith lightsaber) to power his "time capsule." Two trips later (17th century France, smelly, and 15th century Japan, bloody), Pritchard plonked Lois on his lap and took her back 16 years to the tree-lined Alexandria streets of Lois' childhood home.
Only to lose her there when she absolutely freaked out after seeing her mom sneak out of their house, climb into Russell Graham's house through the den window and rock his world in a way that made Lois sick and made Pritchard want to get to know Mrs. Killian a helluva lot more.
With much effort, involving a frantic car chase, a brush with fat, chaw-chewing Southern cops, another couple of looks at the Killian Method for World Rocking and getting Lois blitzed on cheap tequila, Pritchard got them both back to their time/home and took an extra two days to convince Lois her pot dealer was dealing from the bottom, not the top.
Redecorating the time capsule into a home entertainment center with a rad game system and enough speakers to drown out Spinal Tap, Pritchard gathered the fake 8-track player and the über-nerdy fake lightsaber and tucked them into a hidden panel at the base of the new 72-inch plasma screen he bought for himself from the beaucoup royalties he made on his only patented invention: a cell phone accessory that found your wallet, purse, briefcase, keys, car and nearest coffee shop for you.
But every once in a while, Pritchard would carefully dismantle the home entertainment system, and use the time capsule, anti-grav and the now-real lightsaber he invented for fun to hit the Cretaceous creatures like a meteor strike, or leave the anti-grav and Sith weapon home and just drop in on Mrs. Killian...for old times' sake.
Time has a weight eternal...
Across the valley, the torches broke the night, floating through the darkness like beacons of hell. From the tower, the torches barely illuminated the villagers, the raving mob that made its way up the craggy foothills to…attack.
The lone figure in the tower, indeed in the entire castle, looked behind him, into the lofty crypt, to again glance at the stone coffin. The center of all fears. The cause for the villager’s riot.
Empty now, the coffin was his only true refuge. Without it, he would be reduced to ashes in moments, a horrendous burst of pain delayed by centuries. He knew, he knew with every fiber of what humanity he had left, that those few final seconds would burn him with the vengeance of time, the weight of sins and the heat of so much blood.
A rising murmur brought him back to the humid night and its view. The mass of villagers had elongated, what was once a fist was now a lance, with the spearhead moving fast up the rocks to the castle walls.
Not much of a castle, an ancient token of a few centuries gone by, when the land held very few people and the valley was the farthest reach of a forgotten tribal empire. The walls took months to repair, working alone, using night as cover until the villagers saw the changes. Then it took silver to hire workmen, and as some of them disappeared, it took gold. Fortunately, the gold lasted long enough to repair the walls, the drawbridge over the deep dry moat and secure the coffin at the castle’s highest point. An affectation, that, his penchant for sleeping high above the ground. He sighed, looking again at the stone coffin. Maybe this time his eccentricity would cost him dearly…
At the castle walls, the spearhead was reabsorbed into the fist, not so massive as it seemed from a distance. He screwed his thin, sharp lips into a parody of a smile. Many had stayed behind. With alarming speed, evidence of a well-thought plan, the villagers sloshed a liquid on the massive wooden drawbridge, the tossed torches at it. The whole gate was engulfed in flames and a ragged cheer wafted above the roaring fire. It was pitch, he knew, and the wood was terribly dry. It might last an hour.
Or less. In the commotion, he missed the second group to arrive, bearing an immense battering ram, steel-shod at the tip. His eyes narrowed brutally. The game had definitely changed.
Again with speed, the crown parted, the most massive men grabbed the huge ram and with a shout, they lunged at the drawbridge. The resounding crack made him wince, and within seconds, the ancient wood cracked even more, crumbled and burned with sparks. The castle was breached.
Daring burns, the raging mob rushed through the fiery gate, screams and shouts mixing with shrieks of fury. This was the endgame, for though the tower had a narrow staircase, there were hundreds of villagers rushing up its steps. Many would die, but ultimately, their shrieking fury would overwhelm him.
Adjusting his cape, he walked from the tower’s highest window into the stone coffin’s aerie, pausing long enough to run his hand across its rough surface. The motion stopped abruptly as the screams and shouts changed in tenor. The villagers were seconds away.
With a sigh, maybe of pain, he walked to the head of the staircase. The first villager rounded into view, torch and axe raised high. He stopped at the sight of him, standing serenely, and was almost knocked over by those behind him. But in a blink, he roared defiance and attacked.
The count opened his mind and unleashed the accumulated burden of centuries, the untold hours and minutes of a life unchanging, the unfathomable pain of knowing eternity is yours, that it is yoked by monstrous pain and that it cannot—it never—will end. Except to get worse.
He closed his mind, the unseen roar of his life having extinguished all around him. The castle, the night, was quiet, for even the torches had gone out.
He turned to his stone coffin. Time to sleep. Tomorrow was yet another day.
A man's gotta have priorities, right?
Seven miles to go… The horse died back near Turner’s Point, its body so flecked with foam he went from roan to palomino. It coughed a bloody froth, lurched with stiff legs and collapsed into the sand with a hideous scream. Hank barely jumped off in time, rolling badly over his left shoulder, now swollen and scraped raw from the gravel.
The saddlebags were blazing heavy, stuffed with the envelopes and small parcels coming through Cheyenne, on the edge of the prairie. Here in the Bad Lands, the godforsaken range of the Dakotas, the summer heat cooked everything: Even canvas could get scorching hot. Hank had grown up in Oklahoma, where even the worst summer heat was broken up by a soft breeze. But not in the Bad Lands. The only breeze here died with his horse.
Hank looked up. The sun was nearly overhead, which meant he had three, maybe four hours to make it to Lewisburg Station, the three-shack train stop that would take the mail past Fargo and into civilization. If Hank was late, the mail wouldn’t go through. That had never happened and the Pony Express was fiercely proud of that. Worse than that, though, was that late mail meant Hank didn’t get paid. Hell or high water, he was going to make that train.