Search Results for: dog man

DP FICTION #62B: “On You and Your Husband’s Appointment at the Reverse-Crematorium” by Bill Ferris

You place the urn carefully onto the examination table. The doctor opens the lid, takes a peek inside, sniffs a little. He nods, like he’s evaluating a new blend of coffee, then dumps half of your husband’s cremains into a big metal mixing bowl, the kind they had in the restaurant kitchen you used to … Continue reading DP FICTION #62B: “On You and Your Husband’s Appointment at the Reverse-Crematorium” by Bill Ferris

DP FICTION #59B: “Beldame” by Nickolas Furr

I never had a driver’s license, you see. Instead I was born blessed with epilepsy. The doctors said it was bad form to put a two-ton vehicle into the hands of a young man who could seize at any time, medication be damned. Grand mal, tonic-clonic—whatever you wanted to call it, it was the big one, and I grew up afraid to be responsible for running off the road and killing someone because of it. I tell you this simply to explain that I was completely at the mercy of the bus line when we stopped at the small town in Kansas where all the houses faced west and I met the whispery old crone who sat at the intersection of two worlds.

At the time I was suffering through a crisis of identity and ennui. It was more than just the listless, relentless boredom of youth. The side effects of the Dilantin I popped to keep the seizures at bay made me irritable, anxious, and dark—sometimes at different times, sometimes all at once. I came from a good family in Kansas City, with two parents who loved me and supported me and a sister who put up with me. I was holding down a 3.88 grade point average at the University of Kansas, and I’d just met a guy.

James was from Pueblo, Colorado. We met at school and were looking into whether or not we wanted to pursue a relationship. He brought a beautiful pair of stark blue eyes, a lingering echo of the English R.P. accent he’d developed during the first 10 years of his life, and a tolerance for my nervous flutters. We weren’t exactly dating, but there was something between us. He wasn’t the first guy I fell for, or the first that I’d had sex with, but he was the first I really started to love. When you’re already pharmaceutically primed for nervousness, anxiety, and agitation, worrying about falling in love really adds to the stress.

GAME REVIEW: Undertale

written by David Steffen Undertale is an RPG game developed by indie developer Toby Fox published by 2015. Its based on a familiar format to many gamers–the RPG, walking around the map and contending with random monster attacks and boss fights as you go fulfill your quest. You can fight the monsters, like you’d expect. … Continue reading GAME REVIEW: Undertale

DP FICTION #58B: “The Problem From Jamaica Plain” by Marie L. Vibbert

I was waiting for the teakettle to boil, and the office wasn’t due to open for, oh let’s say three minutes. The phone blinked and I considered not answering, what with those three minutes of leisure ahead of me, but I needed every client I could get. I put on my phone voice and chirped, “Jasmine Alexa, Attorney at law.”

The voice on the other end trembled with fear and flat, Bostonian vowels. “I’m not shuh, but Ah think I might have killed someone.”

That was as good as a shot of straight caffeine. “Excuse me? Wait… right now?”

There was an unsettling long pause. “No?” It was a woman’s voice, rough and deep, but definitely feminine.

You are no doubt thinking exactly what I was thinking at this point: This person is a murderer. After years of handling divorces and wills, I was suddenly transported into an episode of Law and Order: Special Weird Calls Unit. 

Before my brain could decide if murderers paid well, my mouth said, “I’m sorry, this is a civil law office. I don’t do criminal cases.”

“Crap. Wrong number.” She hung up.

Award Eligibility 2019

written by David Steffen Hello! This is one of those posts where I declare what is eligible for speculative fiction awards (such as the Hugo and Nebula and Locus) and in what category from Diabolical Plots offerings. In past years I’ve also included fiction that I wrote that was published elsewhere, but alas, this year … Continue reading Award Eligibility 2019

DP FICTION #57A: “Consider the Monsters” by Beth Cato

Jakayla crouched in front of her dark closet. She hadn’t turned on the light because that was an awfully rude thing to do when trying to talk to the monster hidden inside.

“You gotta listen to me,” she whispered. “The news is saying really bad things, like rocks are gonna fall out of the sky and a lot of people are gonna die. You can’t stay in my closet. You gotta go to the basement. There’s dark spaces down there for you to hide in. I won’t tell no one you gone there.”

“Jakayla!” She turned to find Grandma leaning into the bedroom. “I got to run to your auntie’s house. The phone network’s down.”

“The phones don’t work?” Jakayla gasped. “Why? I didn’t think anything had fallen yet?”

“Nothing has, yet. Everyone’s trying to talk to everyone on the phone, and the system can’t handle that. Listen, girl.” Grandma waddled forward to cup Jakayla’s face. “We’re going to be just fine, you hear me? Don’t you worry. Just stay here. We’ll have everyone here together in the basement tonight.”

The Horowitz Method: A Metrics-Based Approach to Rank-Ordering Musical Groups

written by David Steffen (and no one else, alas) INTRODUCTION Since time immemorial, one of the perennial topics of humankind has been to compare music.  Whether pop is better than country, whether this band is better than that band, or this song better than that song.  Before the invention of writing, one can imagine heated arguments … Continue reading The Horowitz Method: A Metrics-Based Approach to Rank-Ordering Musical Groups

DP FICTION #54A: “The Inspiration Machine” by K.S. Dearsley

“I’ve got it!” Barnes leapt out of his chair and knocked hot synth-coffee over his work interface and paunch. Perhaps that was why the idea vanished. By the time he had swabbed away the mess, the brilliant flash of creativity was no more than the memory of something that had almost been within his grasp. He needed a few breaths of bottled fresh sea air–his last multi-million global craze–to boost his brainpower.

He had exactly twenty-three minutes to find the next big thing, the product that everyone–young, old, straight, gay, white, black and everything in-between–had to have. Innovations Manager Oona Hardy had smiled at him at the last project development meeting–that smile. Barnes was sure it was produced by twitch implants that pulled back her lips to reveal entirely too much gum and teeth. No one who had been on the receiving end of that smile survived the next meeting unless they came up with something so good no one could understand why it had not been thought of before. The trouble was, the harder he tried to snatch at ideas, the faster they fled. What was that idea he had been about to have?

MOVIE REVIEW: Bumblebee

written by David Steffen Bumblebee is a 2018 action science fiction film distributed by Paramount that’s a prequel to the Transformers film series that started with Transformers in 2007. A war rages between two factions of intelligent shape-changing robots on the mechanical planet of Cybertron. The vicious Decepticons have scattered the remaining Autobots and driven … Continue reading MOVIE REVIEW: Bumblebee

DP FICTION #51A: “What the Sea Reaps, We Must Provide” by Eleanor R. Wood

The ball bounces off the tide-packed sand and Bailey leaps to catch it with lithe grace and accuracy. He returns to deposit it at my feet for another go. It’s nearly dusk; the beach is ours on this January evening. It stretches ahead, the rising tide low enough to give us ample time to reach … Continue reading DP FICTION #51A: “What the Sea Reaps, We Must Provide” by Eleanor R. Wood