Morgan Delaney

Dark, strange and fantastic fiction

Flash fiction

Own

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Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

This week’s flash fiction is great. The bee’s knees, in fact. Or at least the wasp’s work. Enjoy!

Eve collected wasps in an old five-liter water bottle. It hung on the tree next to the fence in their front garden, and she wouldn’t take it down though her parents begged her to. They had to go next door to pick up their post, as the postman, unnerved rather than scared by the trapped wasps, refused delivery.

If you held your hand against the warm plastic on your way past, it felt like the bottle shivered. The hollow buzz was the excited gossip of a distant crowd, punctuated by the *tock* of a wasp bouncing off the surface.

Don’t let Eve catch you touching it, though. She swears better than anyone else in town.

The only time she ever took the bottle down, was to remove the corpse when a wasp died. She’d take the bottle into the house, then hang it straight back up again, afterwards.

She met Alan by catching him touching the bottle, but he didn’t mind her swearing at him.

She told him he’d never get his post delivered again, and he said he hated getting bills anyway.

They moved into a flat with nowhere outside for her to hang the wasp bottle, but we could still hear it thrumming all through town.

Sometimes, you could hear a *tock* like a wasp hitting the side of a plastic bottle. 

The curtains in the windows were white with cartoon daisies, though the flowers had alternating black and yellow petals.

One day, the wasp bottle hung in the kitchen window in front of the curtains. That’s when we knew Alan had grown tired of not getting his post delivered.

If it was me, I’d have been scared of Eve getting pregnant, then presenting me with hundreds of tiny, stinging wasp babies.

She never got any bigger, though, so that couldn’t have been it.

You can’t touch the bottle any more, but Eve doesn’t mind people watching when she fishes the dead wasps out. The swarm clambers like crazy over her skin when she sticks her arm in, but they don’t ever sting.

In other news, there’s a great “buzz” around the latest double issue of Black Static! And for this week only, the ebook version is half-price on Weightless Books. Get it here, now!

Outrageous

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A tiny white alarm clock
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

The TV studio lights were too hot. After the interview, there was almost enough sweat on my forehead for it to breach the thickly-caked make-up I was plastered in.

An old man in a brown suit, with huge eyebrows ringing his eyes like glasses stood in the audience to ask the first question.

A girl in a short skirt and blonde hair fanned across her back handed him the microphone and he cleared his throat for a long time into it.

“How did you get this idea?” he asked.

I gave him my usual answer about finding inspiration for my books everywhere.

“No,” he said. He held up a wretched, dog-eared notebook held shut with a black ribbon. “How did you get the idea from here? I haven’t shown it to anyone.”

The audience murmured, and laughed nervously. The old man turned to them for support. “He should at least admit he stole it,” he said, and they started nodding.

“Is this a joke?” I asked The Book Show’s host. The producers had promised me the audience would all be fans, and there would be no difficult questions, but the host stared expectantly for my answer.

“This is outrageous. Have any of you even read my book?” I was ready to storm off, but the crowd’s murmuring grew angry when I stood up. The movement had raised my shirt to uncover my genitals, so I quickly sat down again, pulling at my shirt to cover as much of my lap and pale bare legs as possible.

The crowd didn’t wait for the microphone, but pelted their questions from where they sat.

How come you got to be on the show? Why did yo had  let that woman’s dog be put down? Hadn’t I realised that Mr Powell (my old maths teacher) was close to a nervous breakdown? How could you, how could you, how could you?

In the morning I wrote it all down and pretended it was my story.

And if you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll be living the dream this Saturday, when the latest edition drops, with your exclusive short story, “Last Chance To See”, and a picture of Manchee the Dog in Kazakhstan!

Late

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A sepia photograph of a regiment of perhaps World War 1 era soldiers.
Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

Here’s another one of those bittersweet stories you all love so much. Enjoy!

He’d ridden to the village to read out the names of those fallen in the war. He hated himself for reading the list, for being the one who had survived.

The mothers, sisters, and daughters gathered around while he read the list in a stumbling monotone. It took him more than an hour to confirm what they already knew.

A woman with mouse-brown hair under a scarf and a face that grief had stripped of age, put her hand on his arm, before he could climb back on his horse.

“Stay,” she said.

He needed to ride to the next village, but the weight of their loss had him in its gravity, and they sat him in front of bread and apples and ale before he could decide.

There was no hurry to ride to the next village to tell them what they already felt in their hearts, and he spent the evening at the inn, sitting opposite one of the few remaining old men.

They fed him too much food for breakfast the next day, and he accepted a glass of schnapps to ease the pressure in his guts, and then he was too tired to find his horse. His commanding officer had not given him a schedule or a specific date when he needed to return, and there was a girl in his bed that night. She was pretty through the tears dripping down her cheeks as they made love.

The villagers surrounded him whenever he went out until he couldn’t bear to be alone. The women took it in turns to keep him company at night, and on the nights when they were busy, one of the old men would sit up with him in front of the fire.

They watched him eat, but touched no food themselves. They had turned the mirrors to face the walls, after hearing his list of names, so he relied on them to do his hair the way it was supposed to be, and tell him when he was too fat, or not fat enough.

The old men insisted that gin had always been his favourite drink, or brandy. Or that he had never drunk anything other than sweet wine.

The villagers grew fat, and the man slept poorly through nightmares that he did not live there, but had ridden in on a horse, which they had eaten to prevent him from leaving. Once its meat was all gone, they would eat him, too.

One after the other, though, the women’s bellies popped, and they smiled in relief at having got him out of their systems. They strolled the streets with tiny new people. He did not recognise them, and yet he knew exactly who they were.

It was time to go home. As soon as he had read out the list of names that he carried around to tell the children who they were.

And speaking of coping with the past: I don’t recommend much hip-hop, so when I do, you know it’s the bees’ businizzle. Experimental hip-hop pioneers Dälek have just announced the release of their raw new album, Precipice. Check out the first song right here!

Noise

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A futuristic looking greenhouse in Singapore
Photo by Kelly Heng on Unsplash

I’ve got a short science-fiction piece for you this week, as well as science-fiction themed recommendation at the bottom. Enjoy!

It sounded like wind, though there was no such thing on the moon. Safe in her biosphere, she didn’t want to go out. Didn’t need to. The walls were clear plastic to utilise the Moon’s meagre light. She could see there was nothing out there, and her suit would mean she wouldn’t be able to feel if there was a breeze. But her radio was squawking. HQ could read the sensors’ disturbance and demanded to know what was going on.

She consoled herself that there were no monsters on the moon either. Nothing and nobody until the next starter colony miles and miles over the horizon. She armed herself with a camera and a microphone to record what was out there, and a screwdriver to protect herself. Earth-learned patterns of behaviour were hard to shake.

Even when she adjusted the camera’s settings to cycle travel through different colour frequencies, she found nothing, and the microphone’s needle twitched at her footsteps, but otherwise remained still. She could hear it, though, a low rushing like wind or waves. No wonder HQ was getting excited.

If they were to find water, then the mission would start paying dividends in this generation, rather than in two or three down the line. She had been sent out to be caretaker for the enormous greenhouses full of engineered plants which were designed to pump oxygen into the air, jumpstart an atmosphere in preparation for humanity’s invasion. Arrival, not invasion. That was just how they had joked during training, when management wasn’t around. Still, she glanced up at Earth’s red and brown ball, which had only recently come back into view. When she had been a kid, it had been green and blue with white clouds for contrast. The sound was coming from behind her now, from inside the sphere.

When she turned around to see what was happening in the biosphere, it looked, from this angle, like the tall plants were also staring up, as if they’d also noticed the burned ball in the sky. Wind swirled around their green shoots, but it wasn’t the wind that was causing the plants to move. It was the plant’s movement that was causing the wind as they communicated with each other. She took a step towards the biosphere, and they turned to face her.

They whipped their bodies, and a gust of wind slammed the airlock door shut. She had four hours of oxygen left in the suit, plenty of time to prise out one of the sphere’s hard plastic panels. Instead, she sat down to watch the red rock of Earth. She could turn the air supply off now, but in this case, using up all the oxygen was the right thing to do.

Bandcamp is bringing back Bandcamp Friday this year. It’s always the first Friday of the month when Bandcamp waives their fees, so it’s the best day to support independant musicians.

The first one of 2022 is tomorrow, and if that’s too short notice to decide what to buy, then I’ve got you covered!

You know that scene at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the apes are messing around with bones, until one of them works out how to use it as a tool to kill other apes, thereby initiating evolution/civilisation?*

And you know the way you’ve always wondered what it would sound like if, instead of apes, it was a bunch of primitive Jarvis Cockers, and they were messing about with bones until they suddenly invented music? Well, head over to Bandcamp tomorrow to buy Thank’s new album, Thoughtless Cruelty, because that’s exactly what it would sound like!

*If you’re a keen Kubrick fan with strong feelings about this film and hate how I completely misunderstood the true significance of this pivotal scene: keep it to yourself, okay?

Rush

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A snarling street cat with birds flying overhead
Made with photos by Vadim Sadovski and Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

It’s still -20 degrees in Kazakhstan, but we’re going out in the garden for this week’s flash fiction anyway. You can imagine it’s somewhere else.

I’m not really sure what genre this one is. Perhaps you can write in and tell me?

Sean brought me another dead bird this morning. Sean means “old” in Irish to remind him to enjoy life while he can. He’s my cat.

Sean likes to bite the heads off the birds, and I can’t decide if it means he doesn’t respect me (“Here, you can have the rest of this bird”), or that he pities me, like a patient mother chopping up already soft vegetables for a finicky sickly child.

Do children eat vegetables? That’s something I’ve forgotten over the course of a long life. I know my cat’s name is Sean. I named him after an old boyfriend. Or husband, or something. And I know that the little birdies in my garden are trying to tell me something important, which is why Sean kills them when they come too close.

He buries their heads in the flower beds with their secrets still inside.

I don’t remember buying a cat.

I don’t remember the last time I bought anything, or even went as far as the garden gate. If it weren’t for the dead birds’ bodies that Sean feeds me, then I might have starved years ago.

What kind of name is Sean for a cat? If I had a cat, I’d call him… Puss, perhaps. That’s not a good name, but I don’t have time to worry about that. I have to concentrate on digging up the birds.

Sean doesn’t like it when I go into the garden, but he won’t tell me what the doctors say either, so I have to ask the birds that a neighbourhood stray buries in my garden. Sometimes the head isn’t there yet, so I have to kill the bird myself. Sean will try to take it if he catches me, but I won’t let him. He can have the body if he wants. There’s nothing left worth having in a cold body, but I won’t give him the head for all that I pity him. He’s getting older and older, while I intend to go on forever.

As soon as I’ve put the bits of the birds’ secrets together, I’ll be flying right out of this prison, leaving the old man behind.

And here’s something a little birdie told me: the new album from psychedelic rockers Earthless is out tomorrow, January 28th. If we learned anything from this week’s story, it’s that life is too short to waste. Make the most of yours with Night Parade of One Hundred Demons!

Sun

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A setting sun at a crossroads
Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash

I don’t know why they call them “crossroads”, they always seem like a mighty peaceful place to me. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, it’s safe to read on for this week’s supernatural flash fiction.

As soon as the sun disappeared over the horizon, the devil stepped out from the crossroads’ shadow, as if he’d been there all the time.

“Take a walk with me?” His slow accent reminded me of an old headmaster. We headed back to town — according to the signpost — but I didn’t recognise the way.

“People often call me when they need help with something, and I can see you’re one of those people. If I can help, I surely will,” said the Devil.

“I want to know why my wife is with you,” I said.

We walked a piece in silence, followed by shadows that stretched like elastic without the sun to give them shape, pecked at by birds without heads that hopped down from the dark branches around us.

“I don’t get asked that very often,” said the Devil. “Sometimes I’ve been asked to make sure a wife stays there, but…”

“She wasn’t always easy to live with, but she wasn’t bad.”

The Devil sucked in a lungful of air while he thought. If we had really been going back to town, we’d have been there by now, but there was nothing around us, except for the road we were on, and the trees passing us by. The same ones, again and again, like cheap background in a cartoon. The birds hurried us forwards by stabbing at our shadows with their sharp claws.

“I dare say you’d like her back,” said the Devil.

“I dare say I couldn’t afford the price, if I did.”

“So you’re just curious?”

“Human nature.” I stopped. I wouldn’t walk any further with a man — you know what I mean — only pretending to be my friend.

“Hannah Scott, née Cassidy, born ‘54? She’s there,” he said. “Didn’t respect her parents when she was little.”

So she was there, and for such a stupid reason. I sliced the Devil in the throat with a sweaty-handled knife.

He didn’t make the rules, but it wouldn’t kill him either.

He was done up like a man, so I guessed it was the kind of thing a man gets sent to Hell for.

If you’d like to listen to some horror, instead of having to do the work of, you know, moving your eyeballs, >groan<, why not try The Hotel on BBC Sounds?