Morgan Delaney

Dark, strange and fantastic fiction

Flash fiction

Silver

by

Moon through trees
Photo by Aleksei mln on Unsplash

I like silver, isn’t that ridiculous? It doesn’t matter, silver isn’t anything special. Same as the full moon: I don’t change when the moon is full. I change when I change. Like now. I have my rainproof backpack, and enough warning to take my clothes off and pack them up neatly.


I’m in the park, going for my after-work jog, when I feel the ache. I get the sweats, then my bones ache, and then I better get naked pretty damn quickly if I don’t want to ruin my clothes.

My whole body is aching and I’m wondering if this is a good tree to hide my rucksack in. Plenty of cover, but it looks like all the others. Will I be able to find it again? I’ll have to hope so. This is the dangerous bit. I’m nude in Central Park, it’s getting dark and I’m not a wolf yet. If anyone sees me I’ll get raped, arrested, mugged or murdered.
I crumple at the base of the tree as everything stretches (well, not ‘everything,’ unfortunately). I change.


Look at that! There is a full-moon. That’s not going to help with stereotypes…. I lope into the trees. I don’t want anyone to see me until I’m well away from my tree. I’ve got brand new Nike kicks in the backpack, and I’ll be very annoyed if they’re gone in the morning. Near 110th Street is a playground. That’s where I’m heading. (I know what you’re thinking: those poor children, you monster!) But I want to make sure the park is empty first. No witnesses. The night is warm and I feel good. I can bench press 50, do 100 squats and plank for 30 minutes, but my human body never feels as good as this! I splash into the lake, get out, shake myself off.
There’s someone on the far side. Filming me. Come on! I’m as big as a bear and you’re not running?


Ha! They are now. There goes the phone. I bite through it. Probably not a good idea what with exploding batteries, but I feel so damn powerful. I let the wannabe photographer escape, screaming. Without the footage, nobody is going to believe him. This is New York. Nobody is even going to listen to him. I make my way over to the playground. Back in the day? Junkies and dealers hanging around, and try get those guys to run! Jesus! But that’s improved, at least. The playground is empty. I sniff, can smell rats. Lots of them. But I don’t worry about rats. I don’t eat them either. I don’t eat gluten; you think I’m going to eat a rat? A New York rat? Yeuch!
And here we go.


I jump on the swings. It’s hard to grab the chain properly, but I can hook my ‘wrists’ around them. The moon is right there and I’m going higher and higher. Man! This is awesome.
“Wheeee!”
It comes out a little different because I don’t have human jaws, but it’s so much fun. Higher, higher!
“Wheeeeeeereearrooooooohhh!!!”

Waiter

by

Close up of a leaf
Photo by Josefin on Unsplash

“One for the road?”
I hate that expression. I don’t quite know what it means.

He poured. The purplish wine formed a tongue against the inside of my glass as it filled. I lit a cigarette and held the smoke until he went back to the bar.
I had been coming here every night for the last week, much as I disliked it. The Gaststätte was deep in the woods, yet it was the nearest place to me. The ‘town’ was merely three narrow houses clustered around a Church. The mistress of my rooming house started drinking at breakfast, for which she was jovial and entertaining. By the evening, she was angry and desperate for attention. On my first evening I had mistakenly assumed she would surely soon pass out and had been quite savagely manhandled by her. So now I went to the Gaststätte, when the day’s work was done.
I tossed off my wine and paid. One of the waiter’s eyes was larger than the other but perhaps did not see too well for all that. It hung immobile, perhaps fixed on matters that most of us could not see, while the little one darted around the material world.
“My greetings to Mrs Harber,” he said.

The door closed after me. The dizziness of alcohol can do strange things to time, and I soon worried that I had chosen a wrong turn somewhere. The trees rustled around me in a way I, as a city man, did not like. Finally, I glimpsed the glow of the candle that Mrs Harber put in the window so that I should find my way back.

The door was locked when I reached it. I cursed. Every other night I had been able to get in and reach the safety of my room without waking her. But the rustling was getting louder. It was cold, and I had paid for a room. I knocked. And again. Hoary feet on floorboards inside the house answered me. I would be quite firm when she opened.
She wouldn’t look at me, and I passed quickly through the downstairs room to the stairs. I lay fully clothed on my bed and was quickly asleep.

I examined myself carefully the next morning in the sliver of mirror that was provided with my shaving water. I looked pale and felt poorly. Mrs Harber ignored me when I came down for breakfast.
There was a knock at the door and my friend the waiter came in.
“Come on,” he said. He fixed me with his big eye. I followed him back to the Gaststätte for another day.

I recently read a book of fairy tales (Angela Slatter’s A Feast of Sorrows, very good) which I think might have rubbed off on me for this one.

Closer

by

Cinema seats
Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash

The names of the crew replaced those of the actor’s onscreen, and the snotty punk music changed into an orchestral score played on a synthesiser.
“These are the guys who make the film, you know.”
“I know, Mal.”
“The actors just do what they’re told. Or, you know, try to.”
The Slaughters of Christ was being praised—on genre websites—with single-handedly bringing back Nunsploitation movies. Mal didn’t like it.
The deal was, we took it in turns. I watched the auteur-director-drivel films he chose and he watched the films I chose. Admittedly they weren’t art but at least something happened in them. Mal wanted to be a screenwriter-slash-director. I wanted to be a screenwriter-slash(haha!)-actor.
“I could hardly see the final scene, the lighting was off,” he said.
“Sure, Mal.” He was right, but that was clever. They didn’t have the budget for convincing effects for the, what would she be called? the Boss Nun? the Nun Queen? to morph into a demon and eat all the naked younger nuns in bright light. Besides they were in a cave, why wouldn’t it be dark?
“I suppose we’re watching Slaughters of Christ, Part 2: The Nunnoning, next time you pick a film?
“Sure Mal,” I said. “And before that we’ll watch Bearded Mumblecore Monologue, Part Whatever, when you choose.”
He tilted his beer bottle to get the last warm drip of beer. “I’m going to bed,” he said.
I turned in too. I had my script almost finished. Tomorrow. Then a quick second draft and start submitting it. It was good. It was going to start me on the road to success and the fist of many busty Hollywood wives.

I couldn’t sleep. Whenever I was just drifting off, Mal intruded. He pointed at me and laughed getting closer and closer, until I could feel the heat of his breath. A nightmare. He was going to make more money than me. He was a better filmmaker. He was a director. I woke covered in sweat. He was in the doorway, watching me. “Sleep well?”, he asked.
I shook my head.
“All those cheap horror films are giving you nightmares,” he said. Then he continued talking about how men went to the hairdresser more often than women, even though they supposedly cared less about their appearance, and a guy he went to kindergarten with, who might be gay, not that it mattered but he was allergic to avocados, and being creative shouldn’t be about ego although how can it not be?
I woke up with a start, covered in sweat.
“Sleep well?” he asked. Then he told me about a documentary he’d seen. About how pigs were raised for slaughter, in darkness but with some kind of UV light, but they didn’t get a tan, wasn’t that strange? And palm oil was used in biscuits and ice-cream, which meant it was soft and crunchy, and he wanted me to help him take a new profile photo for Tinder, because cats were no longer in, like they used to be. Why didn’t people eat cats, if they ate dogs? Everybody thinks dogs are dirtier than cats but nobody eats cats, so maybe it’s a cultural thing.
I woke, covered in sweat.

Tricky

by

Beach from above
Photo by Nazarizal Mohammad on Unsplash

Jamie puffed into his floatie. Air whooshed into the plastic like he was Darth Vader. The beach was warm but the sound caused gosebumps on his arms. The dinosaur had been packed away after their last holiday. Jamie had dug it out, when his parents weren’t watching. They were at a different beach, in a different country. Jamie had different swimming trunks, and his parents would have bought him a different floatie if he’d asked. But the only thing that made the holidays bearable was his dinosaur. He’d pulled it out of his backpack this morning. His mother’s lips had disappeared when she saw it, his father had shied back from the flattened wrinkles of Jamie’s brashly coloured T-Rex.

They sat behind him on the hotel’s branded loungers on the sand. Jamie took a break, inflating the dinosaur was hard work and if he took really big breaths, then it left him dizzy, like spinning around. His lips were tangy from the suncream his mother had smeared over him. The dinosaur stuck to his arms. It was taking shape, the monster’s round red eye looking excited.
Happy to be back.
“Good to have you back,” said Jamie.
“What’s that?” his father asked. Jamie ignored it. He didn’t have to explain himself to them. Not after last year. Occasionally someone walked by, usually another tourist. Didn’t the locals go to the beach?
Jamie kept puffing into the dinosaur. The plastic nozzle was built into the dinosaur’s leg and the dinosaur was now big enough to stand lop-sidedly, while Jamie knelt.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a new floatie, James?” But his mother’s question had the defeated air of one who already knew the answer.
“Don’t overinflate it or…,” his father warned.
As if.
His blood rushed through his ears, the same way air rushed intpo the dinosaur: J-Rex. The most fearsome animal to have ever lived. He took a break from watching the rise and fall of the plastic skin of the J-Rex to eye the people in the ocean.
Enjoy it while it lasts!

“It’s impolite to stare, James.” He wasn’t staring, he had called and called, and she hadn’t answered. She sounded sleepy, the way his parents always did on holidays. As if they felt the exhaustion of the bar staff who raced back and forth, bringing food and drinks, and drinks.
“Please! Can you help me onto my dinosaur?”
James had been on tiptoe, blowing into the magnificent beast. It had a sand-brown belly and a crocodile green colouring along it’s back and sides. A red slash for a mouth and those red eyes. It was twice as tall as his father and he couldn’t climb up, the plastic was too smooth. There was still air leaking through the nozzle. He needed to get onto the huge chicken drumstick-like leg, so he could continue inflating it. From there he could use the black plastic handles to get on its back.

His father pretended to wake, and lifted Jamie onto the dinosaur’s leg. “If you fall…,” he said. All of his father’s warnings ended without being finished. His parents fell asleep again fairly quickly. They didn’t hear the roar as Jamie closed the nozzle. Nor did they hear the screams of the swimmers, as he rode J-Rex into the waves, gobbling down people in gaily coloured holiday wrappings.
The beach was awash with blood and the police had sent a helicoptor, which J-Rex had also eaten, when it flew too close. The carnage had attracted sharks and killer whales and J-Rex had eaten those too. Now Jamie was hungry for chips and woke his parents. Besides it was surely only a matter of minutes before the army sent out a strike team, or perhaps deployed a tactical nuclear weapon to get rid of the holiday menace.

“Don’t stare!” His mother no longer sounded sleepy, but irritated. His father was worse. Jamie had ridden J-Rex back to their loungers and then slid down to the bloody chicken-drumstick leg and from thereto the ground.
Jamie helped her up and together they tugged his fther out of his lounger. They couldn’t walk and he couldn’t carry them back to the hotel, so he let them sit on the dinosaur’s tail and they rode back. Blowing the dinosaur’s cover, if anyone came looking.
Once his parents were in bed and definitely sleeping Jamie allowed himself one little swear.
“Every bloody year,” he said.

Sugar

by

Coloured ice
Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

He already had a moustache. His daddy had made him a little gun-belt, too. The biggest, ugliest baby I ever seen. Not that I’d say that out loud: he was the Sheriff’s son. Burl was his name, but his Momma called him Burly, when she was out and about. And wherever she went, the place emptied out pretty quickly. I felt sorry for her, but there was no saying anything in case the Sheriff caught wind of it. 
So she was stuck with the baby most days, the Sheriff himself having a lot of business around town, all of a sudden. The only thing on everybody’s mind was little Burly Baby. With his moustache and his thick shoulders and his little gun-belt shooting off reflections as he drooled and scowled. He was shaping up to be as much of a bully as his Daddy. Couldn’t stop thinking about that damn baby. The whole town went quiet after he was born. Even in their own homes, in case the wind changed, and carried their words out the window and into the Sheriff’s ears.
It was a relief when the kid started walking around. On the other hand, it wasn’t. We’d spent so much time thinking about little Burly without being able to say a damn thing, that it was a relief to see he wasn’t some shared hallucination. The first time he came out his Momma was behind him, but he had no more need of her. His moustache was halfway to his chin and his Daddy had bought him little toy guns to put in his holster. The poor Momma looked tired and Burl quickly left her behind. 

I bumped into him in the woods. He gave me the foulest look I’d ever seen. He was still drooling, his moustache grey from slobber and his single eyebrow going from ear to ear. He’d found one of the cats that made a good go at being a stray. He had his toy gun out as he played with it. Bashing its head in. I passed on and never said a word to anyone in case his father thought I was bad-mouthing his son. 

It was agreed he should be homeschooled after he attended his first class. In return the school children should first apologise for laughing or whatever it was they must have done to set him off. Then he was out of sight for a few more years. He didn’t mix well. We went through so many teachers, that the sheriff arranged for the new teacher to stay in the jailhouse when he wasn’t at work. For his own sake. 

There was a river a couple miles out, real secluded, and people’d go there and talk about the Baby—he remained Burly Baby, even though he was in his twenties by now. They’d talk about the things he’d done, how he looked at them, and how no one was allowed to say anything, and the water took the words away downstream and they’d feel better. 

There was a knock on my door.  I knew it was him.  I’d been young when the Sheriff’s wife gave birth and it had put me right off the thought of marriage. The town was dying out.
There he stood, with the same moustache and the same angry look. I shrank back, but I don’t think he noticed, because we’d all had so much practice.
‘Hi Burl,’ I said.
He pushed his way in and he had real guns in his belt. ‘You got whiskey?’ he asked. I didn’t. Anyone who had whiskey had drunk it. It was only the teetotallers left. And Burl, who couldn’t get his Daddy to buy him more after last time. 
‘I’m thirsty,’ he said, twitching his moustache in a manner that I could never figure out. I had some coffee on the stove and he drank that, which made him talkative.
‘I’m thinking of getting a wife,’ he said.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘But there ain’t no women.’
‘Right,’ I said. There weren’t. You had a daughter you married her off real quick, before Burl came around.
‘How come you never married?’ he asked. He started wandering around my room, poking at the photo over my hearth and my pan of food and sucking my evening meal off his finger.
‘Never fancied it.’
‘I think it’s time we married you off, as well,’ he said.
‘Sure, just need to find us some women.’ I relaxed. I couldn’t think of a single one anywhere that we could get in trouble by talking.
‘But I’m getting married first. I need to have kids, carry on the line.’
There was another knock at the door. 
‘So if you can wait a few years, I’m going to give you my eldest.’
‘Sure.’ But I didn’t feel so fine no more.
The sheriff pushed into my room when I opened the door. Dragging his wife in after him.
‘So you’ll be my best man?’

Basket

by

A frog's eye
Photo by Drew Brown on Unsplash

I bet there’s something you would change if you could go back in time, isn’t there? Even if it’s just your shirt (seriously, that shirt with those shoes? Really?)

Wouldn’t it be great? Read on…

That’s the advantage of time travel: the goods never go off. I’ve got fruit, I’ve got vegetables. Always fresh. And they don’t hardly cost me a penny. I bought them once wholesale, now I sell them, put on my time travelling hat, and go back. There are some things I don’t quite get about time travel, but I know how to make money. The only disadvantage is that the view is pretty awful. What with the people screaming and the skeletons and the Eyeball.
‘There you go, darlin’.’ She’s brought her own bag, which I appreciate. I stuff it right up to the top with juicy Jaffas. Send her on her way.

I sell my stuff nice and early, and then knock off for the afternoon. The market smells best in the morning. Aromatic oranges, leafy cabbages and washed pavements. It gets a bit niffy later on.
I have lunch in the pub and then I put on my hat. Twist it around, three times, tilt it back. And you’re there.

See? I leave my van near the market, tilt my hat and I’m back at it again.
It’s this morning again. All my lovely Jaffas, my crispy lettuces. The cherries are a bit hard, need an hour in the sun. The same lot I’ve been selling for years. I start unloading.
This is the bad bit. Because it’s not just me. There are corpses. They start screaming, clutching at me. The sky is red. And between me and the sky, towering over the houses is a skeleton herding the corpses. At the end of the street is an Eyeball. It takes up the whole street. The iris is green, and the pupil moves, watching me. It’s bloodshot, probably because it’s lying out in the street. I stack my stall and take my hat off and all the scary stuff disappears.
Here comes the first old love. She’s got her basket ready and I know what she wants. I’ve been selling it to her for years.

I don’t understand how I keep making money. I go back selling the same fruit and veg to the same people so it should be the same money. But my pockets fill up. I suppose anything I have on me, stays with me? It makes me wish I was selling something a little more upmarket. Electronics. I’d be able to retire a lot quicker. Move somewhere sunny. Somewhere far away. Saw myself in the mirror the other day. I looked old.
Maybe Fiji. I fancy somewhere with a volcano.

Today I bottled it. I couldn’t face going back again. Sat in the pub instead. The face looking out of the mirror was worse than the Eyeball. I’d be lying if I said I knew what was going on, but I can’t keep going. So I made a promise, One more time. Tomorrow and that’s it.
It’s an easy promise to make.
Sounds familiar, too.

Could you not write something with a bit of action in it? A couple of lads after some other lad, and they all have guns. You know the sort of thing.

Yes.

People like that sort of thing. You’d have loads more readers.

Yes.

So you will?

…

Hello?