Historical Fiction Flashfic

     This was a historical fiction flashfic in-class assignment for Dr. Dial-Driver's Pop Market. The first historical quote that leapt to mind to indicate setting was Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!" speech from June 12, 1987.

     "Mr Gorbachev, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!"
     I was nine, and so I didn't understand what President Reagan meant. I just knew I liked his movies. (And yes, I knew how weird that made me.) But Dad liked him, and so I figured that maybe he could explain.
     He tried to.
     "The Russians - y'know, from WarGames, they - well, this is in East Germany, and they're similar to the Soviets. Dangerous. Anyway, people over there are tryin' to escape - there's a MacGyver episode about it, remember?"
     I nodded. Sort of.
    "Okay, well, what Reagan is tryin' to do is get the Soviet prime minister - sort of their president - to do is let the East German people escape by tearing down the Berlin Wall."
     "He prob'ly wont, will he?"
     "I don't think so, but maybe. It could be like Rocky IV, where we decide that the other side is human, too."
     His tone was mystified and pessimistic, so I figured that that was enough politics and that it was time to do math homework. Mrs. Jackson was attempting to teach us fourth-graders division, and that was going about as well as comprehending metrical feet would in a poetry class I'd take in college.
     "Fourteen goes into ninety-two - no, that's not right... If you have ninety-two, and there's fourteen..." I muttered on my way up the screaky stairs, my Keds furthering the erosion of the woodstain in the middle of each step.

Suspense Flashfic

     For Dr. Dial-Driver's Pop Market. This was an in-class timed flashfiction assignment, making a suspense story ending with the line, "Some days I almost forget about the scar. And some days I still feel like I'm being followed, but I always remember to [blank]." Brian suggested the closing phrase, and there were a lot of interesting spins put on the phrase.
     It's not a great flashfic, especially compared to Lauren's - suspense is her wheelhouse, and she delivered a great tale of an assassination attempt with an Agatha Christie twist. McKenzie had a great fight scene in a coffee shop MacGyvering kitchen implements into weapons. Brian had a psycho attack a guy in an empty movie theater, which was a great use of setting, and Deborah set her story in an aquarium, where a stalker was eaten by a shark. A guy named Shane had us all thinking that his narrator was kidnapped by a cult, until the twist ending revealed that the narrator was actually a sugar glider, and what we thought was a cult was just the normal world seen from a rodent's perspective. That provided some material to chew over.

     Things were tense. That's the best way of describing where we were in life at that moment. I was without a steady job, and my girlfriend Jamie's parents were divorcing.
     It started when the guys from one of the frats got drunk one Thursday night. I was walking back to my apartment when I heard some scuffling noises. I went to see what was up. Three guys, a girl - this wasn't good.
    "HEY! What the -?" This got their attention, as did the fact that my phone was up to my ear reporting the rape.
    The girl - she was a small redhead - slipped away into the night. The dudes chased after me. I evaded them as best I could, running more or less in a circle across back alleys and untraveled sidewalks until the cops showed up. They were locked up for about a month, then released, somebody rich was there to clean up "this minor mistake," as they called it.
     So they tailed me, waiting for an opportune time to strike back. This didn't help ease the tension between me and Jamie, either. She knew I wasn't telling her everything, but she didn't press. That wasn't her way.
     I was walking out the store to deliver a pepperoni when they jumped me, slashed up what felt like everywhere. Someway or another I got to the hospital - since they knocked me out those details were fuzzy - and I slowly healed, except for the large jagged scar on my right forearm. It was raw and red and every day multiple people commented on it, or pointedly didn't. Eventually it faded into a nasty-looking birthmark sort of thing, and once I had enough saved up I got a tattoo to cover it.
     But the paranoia continued, as did the pain.
     It was rough.
     And it took a while, but I'll finally graduate in a couple months, after missing all that time recovering and paying off medical bills. Some days I almost forget about the scar. And some days I still feel like I'm being followed, but I always remember to --
     "Brad? Are you okay?!" Jamie looked distraught.
     I looked around, groggy, from her couch, where I'd been taking a nap. And then I knew. Not sure how that works, but it wasn't a dream: It was a vision. This was all going to play out, someway.
     The final line of the voiceover haunts echoingly in my mind - "Some days I almost forget about the scar. And some days I still feel like I'm being followed, but I always remember to..."

Get the Job Done

     Dr. Dial-Driver's Creative Writing for the Popular Market is the final creative writing course left for those RSU English majors who made their minor Creative Writing. It's basically genre fiction, which is fun to explore. That two-thirds of the class are computer-science people is a pain (this class was originally called Writing Video Games), though it provides examples of what we're trying not to do.
     This flashfiction assignment was ghostwriting practice; we were given a random selection of six elements - plot, character, character relationship, setting, and scraps of dialogue and background info. Then we had to turn them into a two-page Western. I was definitely thinking of a Clint Eastwood/Firefly vibe while working on this.

     “Remember those days when we were together? Before you changed?”

     Jack McClain rode through the dusty town of Yatesville, the scalding sunlight roasting everything in sight. It didn’t improve his mood much. Replaying his wife Maggie’s forlorn questioning about their relationship wasn’t helping with the current task at hand, either. That task was to apprehend one Garth Boggs. Yatesville was a three-day ride from their homestead, but bounty hunting was a job. It was difficult to balance when there were problems at home to sort out. Glimpses of corruption of various types were seen in almost every building he passed as he pulled up at the saloon. As long as the drinks kept coming, his relationship with Henry the barkeep were fine. When they weren’t – things were strained, likely because of that time years ago when Jack had to pull Henry into the ranks of the freshly-incarcerated. It was about a year before he and Maggie were hitched – most men would reckon her as pulchritude if it weren’t for that scar ‘long her cheek. So he laid a claim, her drifting days were finished, and it had worked out pretty well. The dubious business dealings of the Yatesvillains wasn’t his problem; keeping a low body count of uninvolved persons was.

     “What the hell’s this?” Jack frowned at his beer after tasting it. ”Don’t look normal.”

     “New truck at a discount. Cain’t say properly th’ name, sold by some German fella out of St. Louis.” Henry slid his Remington revolver across the tabletop and whipped out the lopped-off Winchester underneath the bar. The cowhands in the corner – the only other souls in the establishment at the moment - quit their hand of poker and slunk under their chairs.

     Boggs had entered the saloon.

     Jack whipped around, slinging the mug of beer into Boggs’s face while scooping up the Remington. Blood dripped from a gash over Boggs’s forehead into one eye, and it mixed with the tears and beer droplets running down his face. None of that kept him from swinging the Bowie knife towards Jack’s throatal region.

     Henry emptied the Winchester into Boggs’s hip, and Jack had already pegged his right arm. He was beginning to unholster his Smith & Wesson, just in case, when Henry vaulted over the countertop and snapped Boggs’s left arm.

     “Damn - what’d ya do that for?”
     “You know how much those mugs cost to replace?” Henry snorted. “And it’ll cause you trouble, explainin’ the condition he was hauled up to Wichita in.”

Jack ignored this reply and hoisted Boggs’s unconscious form towards the livery stable where he’d kept the farm wagon, staggering and almost faltering under the weight. Once the cargo was deposited, he retraced his path back to the saloon.

     “You’ll need that, I reckon,” he said to Boggs, flipping the outlaw’s hat into the wagon bed. “No need t’ git overheated any more’n can be helped.”

     “Thank ye,” Boggs whispered.

     “Changed for the better, I hope, Maggie,” he muttered as the horse plodded along some time later, not realizing he was speaking aloud. “Or at least that’s a start, anyway, ain’t it?”

     “It’s a sight better than leavin’ me daid,” Boggs answered from the back. “Who’s Maggie?” 

     Jack ignored him.