WRiTE CLUB 2013 - Bout 12

Another slot for WRiTE CLUB has been filled and its by The Scribbler.  Congratulations to you!  I'm on the road traveling, so no time for frivolity today.  Let's get right to it!

Making their way into the ring now is a WRiTER representing the Paranormal Fantasy genre and weighing in at 500 words...please help me welcome Mary Ann March.




The man next to me will die soon. In thirty minutes he’ll crash his car and then he’ll die. The lady behind me is going to have a heart attack in five years, the guy to my left will kill himself next week, and the woman to my right will have some rare disease that takes her in six months. She’ll find out about it in three. I hate traffic lights. I end up learning far more about the drivers around me than I care to know. Death is mysterious for most people. For me it’s inconvenient. I’ve never had friends and don’t get me started on dating. Awkward is getting halfway through a date with some beautiful girl and having the urge to mention her impending doom. I fidget instead and they usually write me off as a weirdo. It would be easier just to tell them, but they wouldn’t believe me. I was six when I discovered my power. I told a lady at the supermarket that she would die soon. She panicked and called me an evil child. I swore to never bring it up again and I’ve kept my word for fourteen years. I feel guiltiest about the suicides, but I’ve never believed that I could stop someone once they’d made up their mind. I look at the suicidal guy to my left. I don’t know why he’s going to do it. My powers don’t tell me much, but I can see defeat on his face. I won’t say anything, but I should. The guilt sets in as a girl crosses the street. I see some wires from her ear buds though her long hair covers most of it. Her face is hidden, but I bet she’s cute. I’m awestruck when she passes my car. She moves deliberately, like honey. I imagine she’s that way in every aspect of her life. Her death seizes me. In a few minutes she’ll turn the corner and begin to cross another street, but a speeding driver will keep her from making it there. Panic sweeps over me. I’ve seen enough deaths to understand that no one escapes it, but hers bothers me like no one else’s has. I think of her honey-like movement and I’m overtaken by my emotions. I leap from the car.

“Wait!” I yell. She turns slowly. I’ve barely moved, but I’m out of breath. “Don’t take Corley. It’s closed. I think they’re doing construction. Take Mitchell” I say.

I shouldn’t know where she’s going. She’s going to think I’m nuts. To my surprise she smiles, nods, and continues on. I watch her disappear around a different corner. A vision grips me when I get back into my car. She escapes death this time but the one that takes its place is far worse. The horror of it makes me want to vomit. I slam my fists into the wheel and search in vain through my windows, but she’s gone and the light has turned green.
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And in the other corner, offering us 495 words in the Rural Fantasy genre, I present to you Muleshoe.

In travel, as in life, the first of all virtues was self-control.

Presently, Holly could not control the blood spattered on his collar, nor the mud slopped over his trousers, nor the crack in the left lens of his spectacles.

But it was well within his power to fold his sack coat crisply over one arm, keeping a jaunty grip on his carpet-bag with the other, and to smile as he approached the rustic fellow leading a mule along the rain-swollen road.

“Pleasant morning, sir,” Holly said, and would have tipped his hat, had he retained its possession.

The rustic touched his battered straw brim in reply, but it was the view beyond Holly’s shoulder that received his open-mouthed amazement.

Holly turned to share it with him.  The mud-mired wreck was a good quarter-mile behind him now, the stagecoach’s skyward-facing wheel having long since ceased to spin.  “Oh, don’t be alarmed,” Holly said.  “The reinsman and the shotgunner were both thrown clear, and my fellow passengers have enjoyed the grace of God and steel-ribbed corsetry.  You see how they’ve set to drying their skirts on firmer ground, there – we’re all just cuts and bruises, nothing worse.”

A gunshot split the humid morning air.

“Well, perhaps not the horses.” Holly turned back to the rustic, whose expression had deepened its resemblance to a shriveled apple.  “It’s not far to town, is it?”

He could not recall the name – something picturesque, Hobnail or Boot-Hump or Stye – and perhaps the rustic had the same difficulty, as it was a considerable time before he replied.

“…no, not hardly; Hockit ain’t but two miles up the road.”  He crafted a helpful compass from his thumb.

“Splendid,” Holly said, as the sun was already making a white-linen swamp of his back and underarms.  “Do you know whether they might have a doctor in residence?”

“Oh, sure,” the rustic said to the drying blood in Holly’s hair.  “Doc Fitch's place is cat-a-cornered from the hotel, can’t miss it.  Just watch out for his boy Lan-Yap – he’s one of them hellbenders from the bayou, and you know what-like THEY are.”

Holly didn’t, but that was fine: this was surely rural racialism at its finest, a delicacy as authentic as any that had ever been plated and sold to a world-hungry expeditioner.  He smiled.  “Fantastic,” he said, “I certainly will.  –And while we’re exchanging confidence, you’ll do very well by Miss Hinchcliff back there if your mule can spare his blanket.  We pulled her out by the window before the coach began to sink, but her crinoline wasn’t so fortunate.”

His debt thus repaid, Holly took his leave and went on, boots squelching, carpet-bag’s contents clinking merrily.  Here was the true art of the traveler: one had only to retain mastery of one’s own person – and hand-luggage, where possible – in order to enjoy all the education and entertainment that Nature reserved for the portable man.

And that was before profit even figured into it.

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