Red-Handed

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What, seriously, Brookins? Seriously? You're just taunting me now, aren't you? Fine:

"Y-yep! Pistachios! Boy, I sure do love 'em!"

He could feel the sweat beading on his forehead, hear the roaring starting in his ears, and she still wasn't letting go of his hands -- his hands that were still stained, he'd scrubbed and scrubbed but still the stain was there...

She let go. "Well, don't spoil your dinner," she replied with a little smile, before walking away.

His eyes narrowed. He knew he'd been sloppy, worn out after his work out in the woodshed; he should have kept scrubbing, should have cleaned his hands until no trace of blood remained. But there was so much work to do, and he was just so tired...

But that smile. That smile she had given him, as she released his hands.

Had she been out there to the woodshed? Had she seen his work, or the signs it left behind -- the remains that had to be disposed of, the bodies dumped in the woods, or burned and scattered out by the old gravel pit? Had she seen something there? Or had he left other signs for her to discover?

Did she suspect?

His red hands flexed.

Did she know?

There you go, Gary. I took the bait and addressed the obvious, and, frankly, only interpretation of that dog-man's expression given the situation. I hope you're happy.

Also, I should figure out a way to distinguish italic me-comments from italic fic-text. Let's try a different font and color, see if that works. Any color-deficient folks out there? I wanna make sure this dark reddish is clear enough for everyone.

Biofuel

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Looked like the backyard hummingbird feeder needed a refill again. Well, that was easily enough done.

Ben stepped outside to grab the bottle from the feeder, then carried it into the garage, humming idly. He rinsed it out in the sink by the clothes washer, letting the hot water run for a couple minutes before adding a bit of bleach to kill any mold. Once the bleach was rinsed out, he stood the bottle on an old towel while he fetched his nectar solution from a shelf.

His ma had used a homemade mixture of sugar and water, boiled and stored in the freezer till needed; for a while after she'd died and left him the house and its hummingbird population, he'd tried various commercial solutions. Eventually, though, he'd tired of the results those gave him. After a few tries he'd come up with the mixture he used now, which had the benefit of being easy to whip up while also managing to not attract any bugs along with the birds. Ma's old sugar-water do had always wound up getting pillaged by ants.

Ben half-filled the feeder bottle from the gallon jug of nectar solution -- almost empty, now, he'd have to make some more soon -- then put the jug back and carefully carried the bottle back out to the backyard. Still humming, he screwed the bottle back onto the feeder, then stood back and admired his handiwork. He turned to go, and something went "crunch" under his shoe. He looked down.

"Heh," he said, scraping dead hummingbird off his shoe. "Guess you just couldn't help yourself, huh, little guy?" He surveyed the lawn around the feeder, where maybe a dozen dead hummingbirds lay in various stages of rot. "Was it tasty, fellas? I sure hope it was." He sneered. "Little bastards."

He went back into the house, careful to take off his shoes before entering. "Almost out of nectar..." he muttered to himself as he walked into the kitchen. Stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a cow was the beginnings of a grocery list; eggs, milk, toilet paper, Hamburger Helper. Ben rummaged through a drawer until he found a pencil, then walked over to the list.

Antifreeze, he wrote.

Ben grinned. "Little bastards," he said again.

Well-Balanced

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Kevin’s doctor’s appointment at four Elsie’s soccer practice at six Matt’s permission slip signed sometime tonight so he can go on that field trip tomorrow and sometime tonight, the bills paid.

MATTHEW, YOU PUT THAT DOWN RIGHT NOW

More bills every day, it seems sometimes, and really no money coming in to pay them. Rent and utilities, clothes and food, and Kevin’s medicine and Matt’s inhaler and the new glasses the doctor swears Rachel needs though how he can tell when she’s only three I just don’t know –

KEVIN I TOLD YOU TO STAY OUT OF THERE

If I could just get more hours at the diner it’d be something. Or if Paul could ever cough up on child support. Maybe I should just try to sell the car, instead of getting it fixed again.

ELSIE, KEVIN, NO

And Rachel’s cough just isn’t going away. Still paying off the bills from when she got sick last year, and we just can’t afford another hospital stay like that, but if I don’t take her in and it turns out to be serious –

BOYS NO FOOTBALL IN THE HOUSE

And of course I’ve still got to mop and vacuum and get the dishes done, and the laundry soon too if Elsie’s to have any clothes to take to camp.

MATT I SAID NO FOOTBALL, GO TO YOUR ROOM YOUNG MAN

Well, hopefully I can get to the chores sometime after the kids go to bed and before it’s time to leave for work…

MATTHEW I SAID GO AND THAT MEANS RIGHT NOW

I need to calm down. Calm. Maybe do the dishes. That’s relaxing. Nothing but me and the dishes and –

ELSIE YOU QUIT IT RIGHT NOW OR I SWEAR I’LL

No no calm now just me and the dishes.

Just me and this plate, and this sippy cup, and this spoon.

And this knife.

Calm.

Calm.



Because kangamom there is very obviously about two seconds from snapping.

Typewriter

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Oh, the typewriter?

I just dragged it in from the garage for a little project. Kind of a secret, really... oh, what the heck, I might as well tell you. But don't tell anyone else, all right? Eventually I'll want everyone to know, of course, but not quite yet. I'm still getting it off the ground.

Complexity.

That's what starts it, you see; all the complex things they can do with computers now, things that people couldn't even dream of a hundred years ago. Huge math problems, and genes, and whatnot. And all of it stored on computers. Think about that for a second -- how many tiny little bits of information there are. It's actually zeroes and ones, my nephew told me, and then they get translated into English. Like Morse code for computers. Ones and zeroes and zeroes and ones until there's enough to bury the whole human race in 'em. And that's just in one computer.

The problem is, you don't necessarily know where all the ones and zeroes go. Maybe you put a picture of your cat on the computer, and the ones and zeroes go somewhere in there. And then maybe you write to your sister on the e-mail, and in go all those zeroes and ones. And then your nephew puts on a game when he comes over to visit and the ones and zeroes just get all jammed in the middle somewhere. He explained it to me. The information isn't all in the order you put it there in; it's all broken up and mixed around because that's how the computer works. So all the ones and zeroes get all mixed up.

So how do you know just what the computer actually says inside?

What stops the numbers from lining up just so to unlock something that wasn't there before?

There's a lot of computers in the world, after all. Billions, I suppose. And every one of them with billions of zeroes and ones in nearly every combination. But there are some combinations that open locks that you just don't want to mess with, aren't there?

That's why I've got the typewriter out, and why I've been working so hard -- you can see what I've got so far in the drawer on the left there. I typed every copy myself. By hand. Because we can't trust computers or copier machines or all these new things -- we can't -- we're courting a fate worse than death if we do.

Yes, every copy's the same, or as close as I could manage. I think there's a couple thousand so far, even though that's not nearly enough. Every single man, woman and child in the world needs one of these flyers -- everyone has to know the danger we're in, and how close we might already be to unlocking Yog-Sothoth -- he is the gate -- he is the key --

Wait, where are you going?

Take my flyers with you!

Warn the world!

More And More

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"Oh lord," Prudence groaned.

Jill laughed delightedly as she held her prize aloft. "Ohhh yes, this little guy is a real gem... and won't Uncle Henry just love him?" She laughed again at the expression on her sister's face.

"That," Pru said deliberately, "is the ugliest lawn gnome in the long and ugly history of yard decór."

"Which is why Uncle Henry will love him."

"Ugh," Pru groaned again.

Jill set the gnome down on the table next to the box it had been packed in -- packed with rather a lot of care, Pru thought, seeing as it would've been a blessing to humanity if the thing had shattered in transit. Its chipped plaster hat and clothing were all the same delicate shade of puke-green, and the garishly painted face leered from behind sculpted tangles of beard. One hand was raised in what looked like a drunken salute. The other was behind the gnome's back, as though he was hiding something back there, even though if you turned him around you could see that the hand was empty. Not that Pru would touch him to turn him around; that expression of his looked a little too knowing for her.

"Doesn't he look just evil?" Jill asked, unconsciously echoing Prudence's thought. "Like a tiny little serial killer."

Now it was Pru's turn to laugh. "Well, when you put it that way, it makes it seem like such a lovely gift for Henry," she teased.

Jill grinned as she picked up the gnome and placed it back in the box. "He's got so damn many of these already, it's hard to keep from duplicating one of his old ones unless you really look for something strange. Thus, Chuckles the Deadly Lawn Ornament."

"He just keeps collecting more and more gnomes the last few years, doesn't he?" Prudence mused. "Why does he even need so many? I mean, most of them just sit in the garage and gather dust anyway."

"Last time I asked, he said he needed them close to 'keep an eye on them,'" Jill replied, one eyebrow cocked ironically. "I'd say our dear uncle was going loopy in his old age, except he's always been that way."

"Which is why you two get along so well," Pru grinned.



Sure, I already did this one, but if Brookins can recycle then so can I. It is up to you whether Uncle Henry is the same guy as in the earlier post! I could go either way.

Also, yes, I did get all the character names by listening to A Shoggoth On The Roof while I worked; why do you ask?

Garden Gnomes

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Eventually I got tired of watching him watch the yard, so I cleared my throat. He jumped, gave one last look out the window, and then turned to me; I gave him my best attempt at a smile, though it was probably looking pretty threadbare by this point. "Honestly, Mr. Pratchett. I don't think the gnomes are actually trying to kill you."

"Exactly!" he hissed, thrusting a finger towards me. "You don't think the little buggers are up to anything, which makes it all the more easy for them to work unnoticed beneath your very nose!"

"Aha." He turned back to the window, apparently well satisfied with his logic. Granted, it was pretty hard to argue with on anything resembling rational grounds, but I still gave it a shot. "Or maybe it's just that they're not up to anything at all. I mean, how could you ever tell the difference?"

He grinned over his shoulder at me. "The tiger rock argument, right?" I stared at him blankly, and he continued. "I could show you a rock and say that it keeps away tigers. You might then ask how I know a simple rock could possibly do such a thing. And I would then reply that, well, I don't see any tigers around, do you?"

I nodded. "So the gnomes are like a tiger rock."

"No!" he exclaimed, whirling around again and beginning to pace the small room. "They're not, because while the rock has nothing to do with why there's no tigers in North Carolina, the gnomes are hiding something!"

"Yes, murderous intent, I know." I sighed. "And you know that it's not just that they're inanimate lumps of plastic because...?"

He returned to his post by the window, leaning in close, shoulders hunched. "Because of their eyes," he answered quietly. "Every once in a while, you can see it in their eyes."

Almost in spite of myself, I shivered.

Soap Opera

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They talked about it for years to come, in that town: how a perfectly respectable man, a successful businessman and a pillar of the community, had somehow managed to go completely mad without anyone noticing.

Perhaps it is unfair to say that no one noticed, because for some time before the end, his wife Joy had been known to occasionally hint at something unusual. While it is impossible now to know whether she realized what was happening, one can still piece together a sort of narrative out of what hints she let drop to friends and relatives.

The first thing his wife seems to have noticed was the singing. It was not singing, exactly, to hear her tell it. Perhaps chanting would be a better word. Joy never gave any indication that she could understand him, and in fact, she apparently rarely heard it at all. He seemed careful to do it out of her hearing, and sometimes she would enter the room where he was, only to hear him suddenly stop talking, as if she had interrupted a conversation with someone. Mostly she heard him doing it in the shower -- not singing, exactly, but saying something in a kind of rhythmic pattern that defied comprehension. It had worried her in a way she could not quite articulate to anyone.

At some point a bizarre obsession with cleanliness apparently emerged, as well. Specifically he had become fixated on soap. Bars of soap appeared all over the house, tucked away in soapdishes on dressers and counters, in closets and boxes and one bar, for some reason, always kept in his left slipper. Attempts to move any of them met with loud protest. Joy had confided to one or two people that threats of violence were also involved.

During all this time he presented a perfectly normal face to the outside world, and it was only at home that his behavior began to degrade in a number of ways that likely Joy did not even begin to scratch the surface of in her talks with others. Eventually, of course, came the event that remains legend to this day.

The sight of his wife and three daughters, bound with electrical tape and murdered in their beds, needs no repeating, as much as it has fueled local gossip for ten years and counting. Nor does the fate of the man himself really need to be rehashed; he remains in an institution till this day, still half-singing, half-muttering things to himself whenever he is led, closely supervised, into the shower.

More peculiar by far, however, is an aspect of the crime that was never discussed with the public, being as police felt the family had already had a bad enough time of being massacred. So it is that few people know of the full story, and especially what the murderer had done, either before or after taking those four innocent lives.

He had written his Red Right Hand on the wall.

With a bar of soap.


I... don't know either. His eyes just look so mad in the comic, and, well.

If you're wondering, yes, I am referencing the thing you think I'm referencing. That is an amazing album.

Inna Box

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Though Crystal's attempts at thinking were still not entirely meeting with success, she nevertheless vaguely grasped that perhaps calling Vicky had been a bad idea.

It had started out seeming reasonable enough. Freshly dumped by her boyfriend, Crystal would naturally have wanted to find someone's shoulder to cry on. She could no longer remember quite why she had settled on Vicky. True, they went back over a decade, and the woman was possessed of both a caring heart and a brilliant mind. The problem, of course, was that her brilliance tended to exert itself in a mad-science sort of way. Vix tended to see most problems as engineering problems. Usually best solved using some sort of doomsday device.

Perhaps things would have gone better had Crystal's ex not chosen New Year's Eve as the time to drop the bad news. Alternately, perhaps Crystal should have remembered that Vix kept a large supply of boxed wine around her home even without it being a holiday greatly dedicated to drinking. As it was, though, her outpouring of woe, combined with Vix's wicked mind, all swirled up with liberal amounts of cheap booze... she could see now that it had been a bad combination.

Still, it had been really something watching her assemble that trebuchet so rapidly.

The two women paused by Vicky's truck, the bed of which held a tarp-covered pile of stuff that might have been recognized as a hastily disassembled bit of medieval siege weaponry. The access road they were on snaked through low hills covered with small trees and brambly undergrowth. Downhill and across the street proper, barely visible through the branches, the flashing lights of several emergency vehicles illuminated a small huddle of people outside of Crystal's ex's house.

From this distance it was impossible to hear much, but it was still delightfully easy to imagine how he must be reacting to the unexpected new hole in his living room ceiling.

She turned to Vicky, somewhat unsteadily. "Where did you even find a cow at this hour?"


Man I am finally up to 2007. Awesome.

In celebration, a little tale of vaguely Narbonic-style hijinxery! I got the idea in the shower and just couldn't resist using it.

Glasses

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Sometimes I like to watch the TV without my glasses on. I know I shouldn't do it; certainly all the nurses say so, and Doctor Paul when he comes by. They say it's bad for my eyes, and maybe it is.

Only I've discovered the real reason they don't want me watching the TV that way. And it isn't my eyes at all, not really.

It's what I see.

Everyone here at the Home watching like normal, they see whatever the TV people want them to see -- the soaps, or some movie, or the commercial where the little talking lizard tells people to buy car insurance.

They see what's on the surface.

But I, I know to take off my glasses -- I'm very nearsighted, you see, so everything becomes all blurry -- and I know to take them off, and then to watch the TV. And I see such things. Such amazing things.

The first time I tried it, it was because I had managed to bend one side of my glasses, and they didn't sit on my face right. It was giving me a headache, so I tried watching with them off. And at first it was just like normal, "Mary Poppins" playing on the screen just like before, only all blurry since I couldn't see.

Only then I realized that it wasn't just blurs, that I was looking at a face, that there was a face on the screen, and the face was speaking, only I couldn't hear because the sound was still "Mary Poppins" plus Geraldine has these fits sometimes and she was having one then. But I could still tell that the face on the TV wanted to tell me something.

Something important.

Something just for me.

The more I watch the face -- when the nurses aren't around to tell me to put my glasses back on, because they don't want me to know about this -- but the more I watch it, the more I think I can almost understand what it's telling me. What it's telling me to do.

I think if I can just get everything else quiet, I'll be able to hear what the face is saying. I just have to get to the TV when no one else in the Home is watching it, and turn it down down down almost all the way, and listen carefully when everything else is silent.

It's hard to get everyone to be silent, because there's so many of us in here and some of us yell a lot and some of us don't really know what's going on anymore anyway, but I think I can make them be quiet. If I just make them, they'll be quiet. As quiet as I want them be, for a very long time.

I think that's what the face wants, for me to listen. For me to hear it.

For me to hear what it has to tell me.

The nurses still try to stop me, and Doctor Paul; "put your glasses back on, Emma," they say, "you'll ruin your eyes."

But I know what they're really up to. They want to keep me from seeing. And listening. Not that they can stop me.

Soon enough I'll finally hear what the face in the screen has to tell me. And no one will stop me.

No one at all.


Meta: I guess it was only a matter of time until I gave in and wrote something that aspires to be from the diary of a lunatic. It's either that, or read about poverty and desperation day after day, then saunter off to slit my wrists and draw animal-men on the bathroom walls in my own blood -- and I never was too good at drawing animal-men.