Free Mini-Story Right Here and Now!!

[Fred Zackel]

(Yes, this has been previously published. And someday it'll be part of an anthology of short stories, novellas and prose poems up on Kindle. So ... until that day arrives, enjoy and share with others.)

"True Love When You See It."
by
Fred Zackel
(copyright @ 2009)

A baseball bat up against the side of the head kills the werewolves.
Aim for either pointy ear, or their furry mouths, or the soft part of
their throats. Strike as hard as you can. Pound 'em, like nails into
soft wood. Don't ever run out of gas on Apple Hill Road. Long walk to
town on a moon-lit night, it is, bashing werewolves as you go. And
she's got to come with you 'cause you can't leave her there behind,
just like she can't go alone, leaving you behind. Nope, you’re in it
together, unless it‘s over for you. Keep the bats in the backseat.
Give her the aluminum one. It's lighter. Show her how to swing. Girls
don't got upper body strength like boys got. Oh, she's got enough to
do the job and keep you going, and you can help her, if she's willing.
Swing as hard as you can, sweetie (you tell her.) Every monster you
kill, it's a home run. Your butt against her butt gives you both three-
sixty coverage. Gotta be touching, though; that's trust. And don't
step off the road. On the grass, you're theirs. Don't let them drag
you into the corn, corn high enough to hide the scarecrows, yellow
eyes amid the fireflies. Maybe if you each live through this, you were
meant for each other. Werewolves got skulls like eggshells. Hit 'em
and they dissolve like dandelion fluff. Hit 'em and they turn to
glistening powder in the moonlight. Butt to butt, keep swinging. Now
you know what love is.

[Fred Zackel]

(Because I love everybody who buys my books, here's another previously published freebie!)

"Por donde menos se piensa, salta la liebre.” **


My grandfather came up from Chiapas first, and then he sent
for his family. When my grandmother, my aunts and my father got here
in Matamoros, my grandfather still didn’t speak the locals’ Spanish,
but he got a job as a trucker. My grandfather was a lonely man, a
melancholic man who had a family to support and nowhere else to turn.
He had hair on his balls, his buddies said, and a short life facing
him. His days were shortened because he could tell no one all the
shit he faced because he would lose his job if he told. He stabbed
his cigarette out in his food because he lost his appetite too often
and because his future sickened him. Sudden death on the road scared
him the most. He would come home with pains in his forearms from
another white-knuckle ride. The stiffness in the ankles twisted him,
and he'd twist back as hard, as if opening a rusted jar lid, to get
the circulation back. He had strain in his calves from his legs being
so stiff with fear for so long, and the small of his back was a knot
no sword could cut. He was almost paralyzed by fear after work and
dreaded the next day and its monsters. His hands wouldn't stop
trembling. He drank because the bottle felt like part of his hand.
He drank because he had phantom pains -- real phantoms that haunted
him in the night and brought him grievous pain. No one knows how it
started. No one ever came forward. But on a warm Sunday after
midnight, he was on his own, alone outside Piedras Negras, coming
home, as sheets of white rain plummet to earth. Then: somehow the
steering wheel ripped loose from his hand. The tractor flinched, the
back lurched and straightened and then fishtailed, the tractor now at
a right angle to the trailer. The tractor tried a one-eighty, twisted
itself, and landed on its side. The trailer hurtled past the tractor,
then jerked the tractor, pulled it along. The tractor slid down the
highway, on its side, the driver's side. Foot-long sparks shot out
bright flashes. The sound was shrill and loud, like peacocks being
tortured. The tractor was sandpapered by the surface of the road. On
its belly sliding into third, sparks the size of our hands flying out,
sparklers in the night under the stars, skittered down the grade,
sometimes gravel and sometimes asphalt, the steel rail snapping like a
long bone, then the rig snapped, and the cargo shifted. The cab
became a tip of a whip getting snapped. A helpless man became
shrapnel. Flesh got shredded and then got skinned by pavement. He
kissed the rocks on a summer night. He died because of the whiskey
and the cigarettes and the other poisons he put in his body to keep
going. He died because of what he ate day in and day out because he
had no real choice or opportunity to eat any better. He died because
he was too scared to see a doctor because the doctor might say he
couldn't go to work. He died because his equipment wasn't as good as
he wished it was. He died because he worked surrounded by lunatics
and outlaws, and he always swore up and down that they were going to
get him killed, by the god above us all. He died because his bosses
don't care and he was invisible. He died because his body ached and
he was too tired to move out of pain's way, because he made an honest
mistake and he let down his guard, and he couldn't react fast enough,
and because his momentum scraped his flesh off his bones, and his face
off his skull. When the eighteen-wheeler slowed, the noises faded.
No one saw him. He lay silent, bleeding, a smear of blood on the
highway. No one stopped. No one ever came forward. Eight hours to
bleed out, said the coroner. Driver's error, said the trucking
company. Operator's error, said the insurance company. He died
because he thought he could do it one more time, and this time was his
turn.

** “When you least expect it, a jackrabbit pops up.”

(Do you think I should collect them all in a short story anthology of more than 83,000 words ... and offer them for $2.99? Weigh in!)

[Dr. Drib]

Collect them, yes.

Price....I don't know about that. Test the waters.



Don

[Fred Zackel]

(Shall we do another one? Oh, why not?)

"Naomi Now Loves Strawberries"

(first published on 1 March 2000)

"Strawberries," Naomi told me. "That's how you measure true success in this life."

Naomi Lewandowski is the wisest person in all of San Francisco. She may not have met everyone in this city, but she's met most of us. She may not have seen it all, but she has seen too much. Naomi is a San Francisco cab driver.

How can strawberries be true success? I asked.

"This guy gets in the cab down by the B of A building, salt and pepper hair, a nice suit, a clean look, and tells me to take him home to Nob Hill."

A rich guy, eh?

"This dude had gold dust dripping off his collar!"

And Nob Hill is where he lives?

"One of those tall apartment buildings by Grace Cathedral where the butler dusts the money all day."

The rich don't live like you and I.

"I do a U-ie across four lanes of rush hour on California Street, and we're going uphill before the tow trucks can blink at us, and he asks me what kind of car this is."

This cab we're in now?

She rubbed the dashboard as if rubbing her favorite puppy.

"This baby here."

One thing about Naomi, she always had one of the newest (and cleanest) cabs on the street, and she shamelessly babied it. Always a pleasure riding with Naomi.

"I'd just gotten her from the bosses. A brand new Ford Crown Vic with everything on her. Fast and gutsy, too. She still can carry six adults up California Street with no problem."

To prove this, Naomi hit the gas pedal and we whooshed around a cable car reloading at Grant Avenue. Scattering tourists, of course, but then Naomi always drove like a cab driver.

"The rich dude's leaning over the front seat, just like you are, and he's asking me what kind of a car is it, whether I like driving it, how much does it cost, stuff like that."

And you told him what you thought of it?

"Ford makes a wonderful car nowadays. I think people should buy American these days. Hey, call me a cock-eyed optimist!"

So he was thinking about buying a new car?

"He said he's not sure if he should. Said he had a car in his garage on Nob Hill, but he only puts four thousand miles on it a year . . ."

Four thousand miles a year isn't very much driving.

"I asked him what kind of car he had, and he tells me a Rolls Royce!"

Wow! Lucky man.

"Yeah. He says he really loves it, but he worries he's not getting his money's worth."

I suppose they must be expensive to maintain.

"I asked him about that. I said, just between you and me and the meter, how much auto insurance do you pay in a year."

And he told you?

"He said he didn't know."

He didn't know? How could that happen?

"He said his personal secretary paid it."

He never asked how much?

"Right. He said it was like the strawberries."

Strawberries?

"Strawberries."

I leaned back and laughed. Okay, Naomi, you got me hooked.

"He said he wasn't always rich. Said he made it the hardest way a guy could make it. Said he was dirt poor growing up. His family had nothing. He and his brothers and sisters ate gruel and mush every day growing up."

A rags to riches story.

"Exactly. But he also said once a year his mother would treat 'em all with a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes for breakfast."

They were poor!

"He'd eat the Kellogg's Corn Flakes and look at the box they came in and dream about being rich enough to have corn flakes every morning."

Some people's dreams . . .

"Have you ever looked at a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes? There's a bowl of flakes on the cover, right, and along with the corn flakes, in the bowl there's strawberries."

That's right! Strawberries!

Naomi nodded. "And this little kid would dream about being rich enough some day to have strawberries and corn flakes every morning."

And now that he's rich enough . . . ?

"Now that he's rich enough, every morning he now has strawberries with his Kellogg's Corn Flakes."

What's that got to do with his Rolls Royce?

"Just like he never asks his personal secretary how much his Rolls Royce costs him each year, he never asks his personal cook how much the strawberries cost him every day. Because then all he'd think about is how much they cost him. Not how much they mean to him."

And he wouldn't want them anymore.

"Maybe he would. But for all the wrong reasons."


(Look for Fred Zackel on your Kindle or other e-readers. Read good writing in the privacy of your own home tonight. And remember to tell us in your review if you would like seeing more Zackel.)

[Fred Zackel]

(It's been a while. Perhaps time for another free mini-story. How 'bout something about San Francisco. Yeah!)

Fog

Some days the fog is eggshell gray.
Some days the sun burns through the fog onto the city streets, beams down a patch of bright gold, and suddenly people and buildings have shadows.
Some days the fog never burns off completely.
Sometimes it drizzled.

Fog so thick, the golden hills around the Golden Gate Bridge were purple bruises.

This fog was giving us weather like we get 'round Christmas; we were all stressed and depressed, but there were no lights on the trees.

Fog in the fir trees, like a Japanese lithograph.

San Francisco was a windy city, and the flags in front of City Hall were all standing erect on their poles. But then flags are always erect in San Francisco. It's those constant westerlies off the ocean that keep them snapping in the breeze.

I watched long enough for the heavy rain to change to a light mist, then back again to heavy.

She was freezing from summer fog and the westerly winds, all bundled up, standing on a street corner. A jogger ran past, covered in sweat, wearing only running trunks and a t-shirt. She stared after him, disgusted.
"They're going to inherit the earth, just you wait and see."

A tourist was taking pictures of the fog.

The fog hadn't burned off, and the sky was cloudy, like just before the rain starts.

August means coastal fog, with the awesome regularity that only God could create.

A stormy sky that looked pistol-whipped.

Seagulls soaring the slope, riding the updrafts along the cliffs, hovering in mid-air, on the beachside.

Offshore, a cold current that flows down from the Bering Straits.

A seagull flying through the fog down a city street.

The sky was ghost.

A lobster-faced sky

The weatherman on the car radio said lots of prevailing winds meant another storm on the heels of this one.

He lived in a pink pastel-painted duplex apartment on Dawnview Street off Burnett and Portola. But in the fog the pastels were muted, faded, and the duplex looked shabby. In this part of Twin Peaks, the fog was ground-level.

From Tiburon, the skyline was serrating the fog, and the buildings stuck up like rocks in the surf.

Hard to guess how tall buildings are in the fog.

The fog was ground-level.

The fog was thick. I couldn't see the billboard-size signs on the freeway.

The night was rainy cold and still. The fog was so thick, the Richmond bridge was all I saw, and the only reason I saw it was because I happened to be driving across it.

Most summer mornings the fog ends two blocks east of my apartment and almost right above the old Sears store on Masonic. From there eastward is good old California sunshine, never-ending sunshine in a sky that is never-endingly blue.

How bright the fog was. I realized this still was summer. Fog that made me squint. But San Franciscans eschew sunglasses. Sunglasses were affectations of Angelinos.

It was noon, and visibility was four blocks.

Nobody sweats in San Francisco.
During the summer the weathermen xerox a week's worth of their weather forecasts and phone them in. "Coastal fog extending inland. Temperatures will range from sixties along the coast to the nineties inland."
The fog begins as cold breezes from the constant westerlies that spread out from the Golden Gateway to ease the insane heat in the Valley.
The heat in the San Joaquin Valley sucks in the cool Pacific air. Fog forms from the hot air inland meeting the cold air off the ocean. Drive up or down the inland highways, and you will see "the fingers of God" curling over the coastal range.

San Francisco is the only major break in the coastal range from San Luis Obispo to Oregon. Sometimes the fog comes in at water level, below the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes it tumbles like a fluffy avalanche over the Bridge.
In the summer San Francisco usually averages three days of fog, three days of sun, then three days of fog again, all the way through until Labor Day.
The fog never disappears during August. Only waits a dozen miles offshore for the Valley to heat up again. Then the hot air rises and sucks the cold air in under it.

Fog at the end of the alley.
Fog that came in rivers of oyster sauce and salt sea air.
Foghorns, like songbirds, fewer each year.

Blue as the summer fog at twilight, as blue as twilight itself and thicker than lambs wool.

I looked up at the bland fog-colored sky.

Foggy streets like a foreign country.

Sometimes the fog is so thick that it becomes a wet cold mist for windshield wipers. Sometimes the mist is thick enough to convince the tourists it's raining. But the natives refuse to call it rain. It's just heavy dew, they proclaim.

Fog at noon. All day had been grey overcast, and I wondered again what had happened to summer. Christ, this is supposed to be August. Meter maids in down parkas had their scooter headlights on at noon.
Sometimes the fog doesn't burn off all day.

"Why is there fog?"
"I think because the dew point and the condensation point met."

A sea breeze came through the alleyway, rattled the brittle ivy on the brick walls. The ivy was multi-colored, had died with last autumn.
Three walls of the lot were fenced. The chain-link fence was threaded by ivy. The ivy was multi-colored, brittle and dry, having died the last season.

Golden Gate Park was dripping with fog.

I could see my breath in the cold air. Even my piss steamed.

Flags were snapping to attention from the winds off the ocean. The winds pressed her dress against her body.

See from Marin the tips of the skyscrapers above the white fog bank.

A fog advisory had been issued on the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog looked like some mad scientist movie, looked like foam spilling over the rim.
Brutal wind and rain on the bridge.
The daily sea breeze on the Bridge was an icy draught that gave me goosebumps.

The fog had come in. I couldn't see the top of the hill. It was ice-cold.

Something sinister about the fog.

Fog and wind blowing up skirts.

Fog = cold smoke-filled town.

I found sprinkles on the windshield.

One location has patchy fog and bright blue sky. On the other hand, another place has grey low clouds, and some airplane flies through the patch.

The fog in San Francisco contrasted with the hot sunshine of Orinda, Santa Rosa, Palo Alto, and the other suburbs of the City. The temperature rose a degree for every mile driven east of the Golden Gate Bridge, until Sacramento was reached, and the 100 degrees Fahrenheit mark was topped.

Fog, like another season altogether.

The City had a killer fog. The stop signs were silhouetted in the white out. The weatherman on the radio said this blizzard of cold clouds was clocked at 40 miles per hour.

Bayside fog.
On the ridge side, under fog I could see the blue sky of SF bay.

A gray car in the fog.

Tourists were frantic to find the sun.

"I need a beach," she moaned.
It was Getaway Weekend in August.

She loved the fog, she said. "I couldn't stand a regular summer. All that bright light for days and days. I couldn't take it."

Fog like a snow bank. Fog like a first snowdrift.

Fog thick with raindrops, alive and growling, a wind that buffets the blue tourists.

"I always wear a hat in San Francisco. You lose a third of your body heat from your head."

Fog like a horizontal waterfall across the Golden Gate Bridge . . .

Morning had brought fog and drizzle.

[Fred Zackel]

I once had an idea for a science fiction story: what if the world had become so Mass Produced that the most valuable object d'art would be an unpublished manuscript, the kind in the bottom of the dresser?

“An Unpublished Manuscript”

"It's the only one of its kind," the dealer cooed.

"Signed?" asked the buyer.

"Better than that," the dealer said. "See, here's the stack of rejections from all the major publishers and agents of the Twentieth Century!"

"Have you read it?"

"What! Of course not. That would ruin its virginal status." The dealer leaned closer and whispered to the buyer, "It hasn't been read in over a hundred years. That's what makes it so priceless."

"You guarantee it's the only one in existence?"

"Not even a Xerox!" the dealer boasted.

The buyer said, "Good!" He pulled out his gun and shot the startled book dealer between the eyes. He caught the manuscript as the dealer slumped to the floor. "Now it's mine."



(Does the story still work? Or has Kindle made this piece ... obsolete?)


Fred Zackel

author of ...
COCAINE & BLUE EYES
CINDERELLA AFTER MIDNIGHT
CREEPIER THAN A WHOREHOUSE KISS
A DEATH IN KEY LARGO
TOUGH TOWN COLD CITY
&
MURDER IN WAIKIKI
All (and more) are available on Kindle and smashwords