Pat J's published ficlets
-
Black iron, black feather
She played a song for me that broke me inside, a song that tortured me; one that, wordless, told me that the woman I had spur…
-
Something blue
The fox was looking at me again. Narrow gold eyes, watching me, waiting for weakness.
The mechanism clicked and clacked in t…
-
Ice cream
Thunder follows lightning like travails follow a bride. The sky so dark, so grim, purple like a bruise, and I sit in my green…
-
Negotiations
Part of me still hopes this is a hallucination, that my dying brain is having me on one last time. But the rest of me hopes i…
-
Walkin'
It’s a hundred miles from here to the next town. Easy enough in a car, but when you’re walking with an empty jerry-can that y…
-
The Contract
They told me it’d be easy, damn their eyes. They paid me cash up front, nonsequential serial numbers, twenties and fifties an…
-
The end of all things
First we assaulted death with pills and targeted radiation, and then with nanites, gene therapy, and anti-ablative cladding w…
-
The wait
She planted the seed and waited. After a while rain came down from the sky, pelting her skin, chilling her. She shivered but …
-
Following Cloudy
Cloudy came to my room and woke me up with her hand over my mouth. I opened my eyes, and she had her finger to her lips: _be …
-
Eating Everything that Ever Was
It started with a local hot-dog eating contest. Lou Verbain took first place, and moved on to the provincials, where he place…
-
The Trick
“You want to see a trick?”
Her eyes narrowed. “What kind?”
“Like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he said, and took a swig straig…
-
Jenny and the TV (Jenny, pt 2)
Jenny, who is a dog, watches entirely more TV than I do these days. She can’t read, yet, but she has figured out which button…
-
The Inversion
They shot me at dawn for my sins, gave me a pauper’s grave and a bunch of wildflowers plucked from the riverbank. They regret…
-
Stone Language
Stones speak in long drawn-out growls,
seismic waves that reach deep into the infrasonic
or in a rapid clatter-clatter-clatte… -
Drilling into the Aqueous Humour
The sappers assembled the drill, and the sergeant called on the mindlink for volunteers to pedal the pistons that, somehow, d…
-
Climbing the giant
We entered the eye late the third day, after spending a night camped in the forest of his beard. In those days I was the newe…
-
Axe-age, sword-age (Fimbulvetr.1)
Hoarfrost limned a spiderweb, fattening fine silk lines gone slack with disuse. Drew touched it, half-expecting to hear music…
-
If Wishes Were Horses
Take a perfect sphere of some idealized material, colored black, and heat it up. It’ll start to radiate in the infrared, heat…
-
The simulation
“It’s too perfect,” I said. “Tone the green down at least ten percent, and those clouds need a little more menace, a little…
-
Jenny, who is a dog
Jenny, who is a dog, came into the living room, sat down on the floor, and spoke. “What supper?” she said, tail thumping on t…
69
2
2
