Flash Fic Challenge: Climb Every Tower

 Climb Every Tower

Robbie fiddled with the candy cane tucked in her shirt pocket to identify her to her contact, then tipped her head back and stared up at the tangle of ironwork disappearing into the fog above her. Rumour claimed that every girder was forged from the souls caught by the Puppets, and every time someone new was caught, the Tower got that little bit taller. She certainly couldn't see the top of it, not from down here.

Ten more minutes, she told herself, and then she was retreating to her fall-back position.

It was only five minutes before she heard quiet footsteps, and then her sharp ears caught the mumur of someone directing the Puppets. She flinched despite herself, as the mist began to swirl on both sides of her.

She was trapped. Her contact had either been caught, or had betrayed her willingly. She looked upwards. If she was going to be caught and turned into part of the Tower anyway, she might as well explore it of her own free will first and satisfy her curiosity. She reached for a girder, and began to climb.

Flash Fic Challenge: Snake Eyes

Snake Eyes 

I took advantage of being alone in the lift to slide my dark glasses off and knead the knot forming between my eyes. It had been a very long day chasing down a gang of magical thugs, and one was still missing, so it didn't look like it was going to end any time soon. 

The lift chimed, and I hastily jammed my glasses back into place again. They tried to slide down my nose almost at once. Such are the perils of wearing a slippery mask. 

When the door opened, the missing gang member stood there with a gun in her hands. She pointed it at me, and I sighed and tipped my head down to catch her gaze over the top of my glasses. 

 She forgot enough to meet my eyes - and turned to stone. Rather nice limestone, in fact, rather than the shale the rest of the gang had become. I don't choose what stone someone becomes, there are a whole bunch of factors involved, from the bedrock of your birthplace, to what you connect to as a person. 

The gun changed with her, as did the clothes she was wearing, and I shoved my glasses up my nose once more and hoped they stayed this time. Stepping around her as I left the lift, I pulled out my phone and brushed the snakes away from my ear. "Last one to be picked up in the hospital," I told my contact on the other end. "Statue again. Yeah, I had the lenses in, so it'll wear off tomorrow, you can do what you like with her then." I ended the call, sighed again, and trudged onward to get the final witness statements and wrap up the endless day.

New Book Coming: Create My Own Perfection

 Create My Own Perfection, my queer retelling of Medusa, will be out in April 2021!

You can preorder it in the following places:

iBooks: https://bit.ly/36qysfh 

Kobo: https://bit.ly/2GRdbCY 

 B&N: https://bit.ly/2Uo3RcI

Common Bonds is on the way!

 Common Bonds, the anthology of platonic stories, (one of which is mine!) is coming very soon to a shelf near you.

If you backed it, check your email for ebook deliveries and address confirmation. It's on the way!

Flash Fic Challenge: (Old Habits) Die Hard

 (Old Habits) Die Hard

Things get weird when you can't die. Two centuries ago, I used to practice my drawing and aiming skills for duels on old pots and plates, getting good enough so people would assume I'd won fairly rather than because bullets slide harmlessly through me, like I'm a sand dune. Today I found my old targets in a museum. Apparently they had some "ritual purpose".

I wonder if they'd accept the real explanation. It's not like they can kill me, right?

Flash Fic Challenge: Dancing Shoes

 Dancing Shoes

Kate pulled herself through the gap in the fence with Jackie's help and stared up at the warehouse in front of them. "That's where they keep the dancing shoes?"

Jackie shifted on his crutches, and patted the fairy flute in his shirt pocket. "That's the one. That's where they store them until they can ship them off downriver to Aris."

The grand ball was being held in Aris, the capital city, and invitations had gone the length of the land, as was traditional, inviting all who could come properly attired, with a coat to their back and dancing shoes on their feet, so that the princess might choose one of them to wed. In practice it meant that only those who could afford a pair of soft satin dancing shoes as well as their everyday work shoes or school clogs could go. Only one year-round family in their small mountain town could do that (the ones that came and went with the summer palace and its court didn't count), and it wasn't Jackie's or Kate's. Jackie didn't mind for himself, but Kate had loved and been loved by her Jessie - Princess Jessamine if you were being truly formal - since both girls were little things and Kate's mother was a summer-guard to the princess. If Kate didn't somehow get to the ball, they'd be split up forever.

Which brought him back to the warehouse. He tucked his crutches firmly under his arms, lifted the flute to his lips and played a phrase of dance music. Fingers tapped. Toes tapped. And the lock on the door danced itself open.

Kate hauled the door open and left it open so they could get out easily if they had to, looked around until she found the map of what was where, and led the way through the maze to the shelves packed with dancing shoes.

Jackie looked along the shelves, and then eased himself down to sit on the floor, his leg stretched out in front of him, and pulled out the flute again. His fingers danced over the holes. One pair of shoes twitched, then danced themselves off the shelf and over to Kate, who cradled them close with a look of delight. Jackie grinned and kept playing. Another pair of shoes danced themselves off the shelf, through the warehouse, out of the open door and up into the town, slipping in through an open window and nestling into the bed of a silently weeping boy. Yes, their presence said, you shall go to the ball!

More music, more shoes dancing their way to new owners, until every person in the town had a pair of dancing shoes to wear, and there was only one pair left in the warehouse.

Jackie finally stopped playing long enough to grab his share, and he and Kate got out of there.

All that remained on the long shelves was the single left shoe that Jackie hadn't needed, and the memory of a melody.

Flash Fic Challenge: Run, Run, As Fast As You Can

 

Elsie was making gingerbread people when it began.

"The baker is nothing but unbaked dough!" a child's voice cried, and the blob of dough under hands twisted away from her. It stretched and folded itself into a small, faceless humanoid and started towards her.

Around the room, a dozen finished gingerbread shapes stirred, rising from their trays and baking racks, echoing the words as if they were the truth.

"I'm not!" Elsie protested, groping for the large wooden spoon to defend herself. It skittered out of her reach. "I'm NOT!"

Other voices drowned her out. "Bake the baker!" came the cry. It rattled from dozens of throats, then from scores, and every bit of the gingerbread people she had made turned on her as one massed body. Their faces were blank save for the iced mouths shouting her down. "Bake the baker! Bake the baker!"

"Nooooooo!" It came out as a rising scream and she backed away as they came on, grasping hands reaching out to clutch at her, to pin her, to drag her over to the giant oven. She lashed out, knocking hands away as hard and as fast as she could, but there were more of them. So many more of them, and she couldn't swing fast enough to clear all the hands away.

Then her back came up hard against a stone wall, and the faceless crowd surged forward. She couldn't flee. She couldn't escape. There were more than she could fight off. They overwhelmed her every defence, driving her down and down and down until she was curled on the kitchen floor like the ball of dough they called her. She wept, slow tears of terror sliding from her eyes and soaking into her skirt.

And so they shouted in triumph and hoisted her up and carried her to the oven. They threw her in there, among the glowing coals, and sealed the door.

Flash Fic Challenge: Mudlark

Even the aristocratic members of parliament couldn't deny the Great Stink now. With the sewer-choked Thames running almost directly under the windows, the smell had overpowered all the precautions and preventatives they had taken to keep it out.

As a result of several members being knocked out by the Stink, Parliament had called a recess, and the rich had left to pass the heights of summer in the country.

For Ant, that just meant fewer people buying pomanders to block out the smell, and therefore less income, even though the same rent had to be paid to those now absent landlords. Which was why he'd turned to mudlarking along the edge of the river to make a few extra coins.

A ragged scarf wrapped around his face did little more for the Stink than a lifetime of becoming used to it. The summer sun baked his stooping back, and turned the tidal mud splattering up his legs to dry, itchy, dirt, as he dug his bare toes and fingers into the mud, sifting through it for anything that might be remotely saleable. Scraps of cloth, or metal, or wood, or pure dog-dirt that hadn't blended into the general muck yet (the tanners paid a premium for good dog-dirt). His questing fingers hit something smooth, and oddly cool, and he froze for a moment to get a better sense of its location.

Once found, he scrabbled deeper, scooping a hollow in the mud, and found a small bottle of the sort apothecaries used. Ant grinned. Often there was a deposit on these bottles, and if he handed it back to the right apothecary, he'd be the one to get the coin deposit back in his hands.

The bottle itself was stoppered, but empty, just a bit misty on the inside with condensation. Ant tucked it carefully into a pocket, out of sight, and completely missed the moment when the mist sealed inside the bottle took on the shape of a face crying "Let me out!"

Flash Fic Challenge: Takes One to Catch One

Takes One to Catch One

The man they were chasing whipped through a door, silk opera cloak just missing being trapped as it closed.

Ned grabbed the heavy fire-door before it quite shut and wrenched it back open. "Can't be far now," he gasped, as he pelted through. "Not like he's going to blend in."

Jack followed right on Ned's heels with a breathless nod. They turned another corner, and skidded to a halt on the edge of a huge convention crowd, a large proportion of whom appeared to be dressed as some kind of vampire. Cloaks, hats, canes, rags, fangs.

The perfect place for the man to blend into, as if he'd been aiming for here all along.

Jack swore, long and extensively.

Ned quite agreed.

They kept moving, kept looking, following the swirl of the crowd as it parted ahead of their running prey and his stolen plans, then closed in behind him (and in front of them).

Ned yelled, "Stop that thief!" and heads turned, but no one made as if they were going to help.

The swirl widened momentarily, as their prey darted around yet another costumed person with slicked back hair, cloak, and cane.

The cane flashed out sideways, hooking around the man's leg.

He went sprawling with a hiss and a snarl. The person planted the tip of their cane between his shoulders and leaned on it, apparently unshaken by the thrashing limbs beneath it.

Ned used the time to make up the distance, hurling himself into the fray. "Thank you," he managed, once he and Jack had the man secured.

The 'vampire' grinned, flashing a very realistic looking fang, and withdrew their cane. "My pleasure. It's those like him that give vampires a bad name. I really can't be having that." They bowed with wordless elegance and vanished back into the crowd without so much as a swirl of movement to mark their passage.

Ned put them out of his mind. "Right, you. You're coming with us," he snarled, and he and Jack began the long process of hauling the thief home.

Flash Fic Challenge: Old Wounds

Old Wounds

The bell over the door jangled, and I looked up as the customer entered. He was a lean man with a head of dark curls and a short beard and the sort of muscle that suggests frequent, heavy, lifting. I eyed the clean but much mended clothes and came down on the side of poor-with-steady-employment rather than brawler. "What can I do for you, Mr...?"

"Josephson." He filled in this year's name politely enough, though as ever I couldn't place his accent. "I'm looking for a good wound salve, please."

"A new wound?"

"An old one, that broke open again." He smiled ruefully and laid a hand on his side. "I was pushing too hard to get a job finished in time, and the scar didn't take the strain well."

I nodded. "Comfrey, Octavia," I ordered, and the spider automaton activated with a hiss of pistons and scuttled off along the shelves to retrieve the correct jar. While I waited, I rolled round the end of the counter. "May I see?"

He sighed, but seemed unfazed by my wheelchair. He carefully untucked his clean but shabby shirt and lifted it to reveal equally clean but shabby bandages wrapping his lower ribs, then stood quietly as I unwound them and inspected the wound.

It was a puncture wound, small and round and deep, the sort that is, as he had said, prone to split open when pulled the wrong way. Stabbed by a long, thin, knife, perhaps. I took the jar Octavia brought and sent her off after a few other things, while I measured out the herbs I wanted and ground them in my mortar, before beating them into the base cream I used for salves. The sharp clean scent filled the air of my apothecary.

I smoothed the first dose on myself. "Was the job worth it?"

"It paid for a lot of things," he said, shrugging the shoulder on his good side.

That was as good as it got for a lot of people, I knew. I rebandaged the wound, smoothing the folds down.

He smiled when I had finished, and tucked his shirt in as carefully as he had pulled it free. "How much?"

I named my price, and he grimaced faintly. I shrugged. "You wanted a good salve. You get what you pay for."

"True, true." He pulled out a thin purse from hiding and began to dig out coppers one by one, setting each down on the counter with a small precise clink, like clockwork settling into place. He got the required price laid out eventually and pushed the coins over to me with calloused fingers. "Here. My thanks."

I checked it over and handed him the little pot of salve, with instructions on how to use it.

He listened solumnly, nodded, and then vanished out of my door, leaving me to clean up the remains and close up for Easter.

He'll come back next year, I'm sure. He always does.

Flash Fic Challenge: Race to the Top

Race to the Top

I know it's a wide open field now, but what made me really interested is why the favourite pulled out, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't that he had to dash down to the shops for a new beard trimmer.

Let me back up a moment. We have a roof running race every third year. This one, everyone thought that the winner would be obvious. He's quicker and nimbler than anyone I've ever seen, and he can get across even the worst set of tiles like a scuttling lizard. But like I said, he dropped out. Vanished. Vamooshed. Left the field of competition wide open, and I could scrape up a bit of hope again. Or try to, because too many of them were looking at me now and I couldn't be sure that whoever nobbled him wasn't going to come after me next.

Which was how I found myself following his trail across roofs and walls and fences until it finally dropped to ground level in a tangled workshop district, next to a tiny abandoned space - one of those nooks and crannies that all its neighbours think one of the others owns, and is actually not owned by anyone.

He was waiting for me when I got there, his arms protectively round a couple of tiny kids.

I put my hands up and out at once. "Not going to hurt you. Just wanted to check you were ok."

He grinned, and the shadows danced behind him like errant wings. "Go win the race," he told me. "It really isn't my scene."

I gave him a confused look, because who wouldn't want to win the roof-race if they could?

Turns out, those weren't shadows behind him. They were real wings.

Book Sale!

Both Birthday Landscapes and Holding Onto Day are now on sale until 7th March. Only at Smashwords!

Grab them while you can!

Birthday Landscapes now out!

Birthday Landscapes is now available to buy. Enjoy!

Blurb: Cavallan Kee, legendary hero, faces an important task. Home on leave just in time to celebrate his twin children's birthday, he has little to offer other than this: "For today," he tells them, "I'm yours to command..."


Order here
iBooks: http://bit.ly/2GeZpGp 
B&N: http://bit.ly/36t6Unu 
Kobo: http://bit.ly/3aQcR1A
Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1001445

Flash Fic Challenge: Waiting For You

Waiting For You

Alice leaned her elbows on a marble slab and watched as Antonia's coffin was brought in. Against the cold, pale, walls of the mausoleum, the black clothing of the few mourners looked like smudges of smoke. Like smoke, they didn't stay long, but drifted away, splitting between the main house, and the cars that would carry them even further. They didn't notice or speak to her, but then she always had blended into the background rather well.

Antonia had noticed her, but then Antonia was - herself. Bright firelight to Alice's moonlight, warm and inviting and getting into things and places that she shouldn't. They'd first met on a winter's day when the clouds had hung low and dark like a shawl pulled tight against the cold. They hadn't touched then, of course. Antonia had been so young, and so alive, blazing with delight at finding someone to talk to. And talk they had, for so many snatched hours, as many as Antonia could spare.

"Go," Alice had told her, the last time Antonia had been out here. "Live life to the full. Live and laugh, love and learn, as you are made to. I'll wait for you, for as long as it takes. I'll be here when you come home again." And now here she was again, hair gone to starlight, eyes framed in laughter lines, reading callouses on her old hands.

Everyone else had left, except for the workman. He closed the lid on Antonia's dead body, pulled welder's goggles over his eyes, and sealed the lead lining on the coffin. The tomb closed, the man left.

Alice drifted closer. "Olly-olly-in-free!" she teased.

Antonia's ghost sat up through the lid of the coffin, looking only a little older than the young woman who had helped Alice grow ivy over her tomb. "You waited," she said, sounding surprised.

"As I promised," Alice retorted, with a wide, delighted, grin. "You haven't changed."

"Neither have you," Antonia quipped back. "But that's to be expected. It has been a while though, hasn't it?"

"Just a few decades." Alice extended her hand and bowed over it, courtly style. "May I have the pleasure of this dance, my little dearling?"

Antonia laid her hand in Alice's and stepped down from the tomb, as elegant as any courtly lady of Alice's time. "The pleasure is mine," she said, "and I have so much to tell you."

"I missed you," Alice admitted, "but we have all the time in the world now."

They ran together, ghostly hand in ghostly hand, down the line of marble slabs, past Antonia's new, sharp-edged carvings, past Alice's older resting place where the ivy hid the name she'd been wrongly buried under, until they came to the empty end. And there, unshadowed by loss, they danced by the light of the moon.

Cover: Birthday Landscapes

And here's the cover for Birthday Landscapes featuring the title scene!

[Image: Two horses racing through shallow water. Text reads: E H Timms, Birthday Landscapes, A Warrior's Guild Story]

Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

 


Blurb: Cavallan Kee, legendary hero, faces an important task. Home on leave just in time to celebrate his twin children's birthday, he has little to offer other than this: "For today," he tells them, "I'm yours to command..."


Pre-order here
iBooks: http://bit.ly/2GeZpGp 
B&N: http://bit.ly/36t6Unu 
Kobo: http://bit.ly/3aQcR1A

New Story Coming: Birthday Landscapes

Gentlefolk of all genders, I have an Announcement! My story Birthday Landscapes will be out as a standalone on February 22! Now available for pre-order at iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo, but not Amazon.

iBooks: http://bit.ly/2GeZpGp 
B&N: http://bit.ly/36t6Unu 
Kobo: http://bit.ly/3aQcR1A

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50629949-birthday-landscapes

Flash Fic Challenge: Time To Sleep

 Time To Sleep

Rosie, 42nd of that name, tucked her toes neatly under the foothold and leaned into Mother's shoulder. "The hedge doesn't make any sense," she said, tracing the delicate hologram of Sleeping Beauty's castle with her finger. "It ought to be a dome if it's to keep people out, otherwise you can just push off the deck and float upwards until you're over it."

"It's magic," Mother replied, paging onward to Rosie's favourite part, with the needle prick and the sleep. "It works how the fairy thinks it should work."

Rosie smiled. "Time for me to sleep, soon," she said, her eyes lingering on the new image. She unhooked her toes and a small push sent her floating over to fetch the adapted tea press. "Will you be here when I wake, Mother?" she asked, handing it over.

"I will always be here."

"Even if I sleep for a hundred years?"

"Even if you sleep for a hundred years." Mother filled the tea press, and they both placed a finger on the rod, so like an old spindle, and pressed down together. Mother poured the tea through a tube into Rosie's drinking bulb.

Rosie took it in both hands. "To sweet dreams," she said, toasting for the last time. She pulled herself up and into her glass cold-sleep coffin and stretched out her hands for the needle prick. The last thing she remembered before her eyes closed was Mother kissing her goodnight.

The robot, Mother, closed the lid, slid the coffin into its place in the long line, and wrote another name on the list. Around her, the children slept forever, and the lost colony ship Briar Rose's Castle floated onward through endless space.