A story for you…

The Black Horse
By Gareth L Powell

I’m standing outside a country pub at nine o’clock at night, holding a guitar case. In either direction, the road vanishes into the darkness. The wind smells earthy and damp. Inside, in the warm, I can hear Bill and Connie arguing. They’re going through a bad patch and life in the van’s become edgy and uncomfortable.

Bill’s the keyboard player and Connie’s the singer. We schlep around, from pub to pub, hall to hall, playing our music. A little blues, a little folk. As long as they pay us, we’ll play whatever they want. Some nights we attract a good crowd. Some nights nobody shows up. And some nights, like tonight, the van breaks down in the middle of nowhere.

“You’re fucking useless,” Connie shouts. I hear a glass smash. Bill curses. He’s been drinking since lunch, on and off.

“It’s not my fault,” he says.

She laughs and it’s an ugly, scornful sound.

On the other side of the valley, I can see headlights moving on the motorway, where it cuts through a gap in the hills. It’s a cold spring night. The stars overhead are hard and sharp and there’s mist hanging over the river.

And right there, in the middle of nowhere, it hits me. A cold certainty crawls up my legs and into my heart. I know we’ll never be famous. We aren’t going to make it. In fact, I’ll be lucky if Bill and Connie don’t kill each other.

And so I walk out. I drop my guitar case in the middle of the road and walk off. Away from the warmth of the pub, the fields on either side are dark and imposing. They’re so dark I can hardly breathe. But the clouds ahead are orange with the reflected lights of a provincial town, and the promise of something new on the wind.

I put one foot in front of the other.

I’m done with music.

Mid Life Crisis
By Gareth L Powell

One morning, as he was getting ready for work, Lester looked in the mirror and saw two reflections staring back at him. The first showed him as a slim, confident young man: a successful novelist and father, the kind of man he’d always wanted to be. The second showed the true picture: in reality, he was going to be thirty-nine in a few months; he was single, stuck in middle management, working long hours, and staggering home every night too tired to do anything more than drink beer and watch TV.

For a long time, he sat on his unmade bed, listening to the sound of traffic in the street outside. Then he rang his office and quit his job. He threw his business cards in the bin. He gave his landlord a month’s rent in lieu of notice, and used what little savings he had left to buy an old VW camper van. He packed a few warm clothes, some books and an old manual typewriter.

He headed north into the hills, where pine forests filled the valleys and sheep grazed the high slopes. He ate once a day. He stopped shaving and learned how to cook over an open fire. He stayed away from alcohol and cigarettes, and read at night by the gently hissing light of a paraffin lamp. In the mornings, he wrote, battering out stories on the typewriter, page after page.

He wrote about his childhood. He wrote about music and girls and dancing, and the peculiar pains of adolescence. He threw everything he had onto the page. He wrote about loss and missed opportunity, and he wrote about the beauty of the world and the lessons he’d learned in his life. For the first time in years he felt clear and focused, and his mind bubbled like a mountain brook.

Sometimes, he would leave the van and hike up into the hills, returning at dusk exhausted and happy, his skin tingling from the wind and sun. Other times, he would lie out in his sleeping bag under the stars listening to the crickets shuffling in the long grass, watching the great vault of the night sky wheel overhead.

On one of those nights, curled up beside the red embers of his cooking fire, he saw something in the sky. A few minutes after sunset, a long, dark storm cloud rose over the hills in the east, bristling with electricity, blowing before it an immense, blood red cross that span slowly across his field of vision, shedding sparks like a pinwheel, screaming like a crashing jet.

When it had gone, Lester cowered in his sleeping bag too scared to move, shivering until he fell asleep, dropping into a series of terrifying, exhausted nightmares.

The following morning he didn’t write. He couldn’t. The urge had gone. Instead, he rose early and packed his typewriter. He didn’t want to be alone any more. He wanted to get back to the city. He badly needed to see a friendly face.

He thought he might give Sherry a call. She had worked in his office, before he quit. She was blonde and cute and used to laugh at his jokes. He had her phone number somewhere, and he thought he might give her a call, maybe invite her out for coffee.

Anything would be better than spending another night alone.

As he drove away from his campsite, his front tires crunched over the embers of the previous night’s fire. They were cold and grey and lifeless in the sharp dawn light.

In case you missed it, TTA Press included a link to my story “Mid-Life Crisis” in their selection of Christmas goodies:

Click here for link.

Day two of the TTA Press advent calendar features a link to my short story “Hot Rats”.

TTA Advent: Day Two

Doing What You Have To Do To Get By

By Gareth L Powell

The three inflatables rounded the headland an hour after sunrise. Kadie Jones crouched in the lead boat, wrapped in the noise and fumes from the outboard motor, gripping a heavy service revolver in one hand. She wore a thick military surplus coat and a fur cap with khaki earflaps. As soon as the prow of the boat hit the beach, she sprang out and splashed up onto the shingle, her boots crunching noisily as she ran. Ahead, in the town, the church bell tolled.

“We’ve been spotted,” she said.

Continue reading “Friday Fiction”

Over the past 24 hours, I’ve pulled together and submitted a 30,000 word book manuscript. It’s a collection of articles (mainly advice for budding authors), interviews and other pieces of writing, some of which first appeared on this website. It’s rough at the moment and probably needs the attention of an editor, but I’m still proud that I’ve managed to pull it together in such a short time – and I’ll post further developments as they happen.

This is an extract from a short story called “The Winding Curve” which I co-wrote with Robert Starr, author of Creek Water and The Apple Lady. The full story appears in Rob’s 2008 collection Sophistry By Degrees.

A year after his wife’s death, Mike finds himself on the old coast road south of town, with his daughter in the back seat. They’ve lingered too long at the cemetery, and now they’re driving around because he can’t face taking her home to an empty house.
Continue reading “Friday Fiction”

I’ve written and published 25 pieces of Friday Flash Fiction this year. That’s slightly less than one per fortnight, which isn’t bad going. As we’re approaching the end of 2008, I’ve compiled the following list of my 10 personal favourites from 2008, with links.

1. Roswell
2. Carnival
3. Natalie
4. Mid Life Crisis
5. Fresh Meat
6. God’s Gift
7. Hot Rats
8. Life Goes Wrong
9. Chip Heads
10. Jetsam

THE CLOUD PRINCESS

By Gareth L. Powell

 

He came in fast, aerobraking hard, scrawling a fiery trail across Jupiter’s pristine clouds. And then, when he’d shed enough velocity, he dropped, spreading black carbon fibre wings to catch the pummelling jet stream.

 

Ahead lay a dark whorl of cloud – a raging storm the size of Earth’s moon. And before it, dwarfed by the fury of the maelstrom, he saw the Cloud Princess.

 

The old airship was labouring at a depth far deeper than the one she’d been designed for, her vast impellers spinning furiously as the storm dragged her in.

 

She’d seen better days. As he got closer, he could see where some of her docking spines had been torn off. There were panels and aerials missing. Whole vanes had been ripped from their mounts.

    

He pulled in his wings, falling in a swooping arc that carried him under her rudder, into the shadow of her gas bag. He was aiming for the promenade deck at the rear of the gondola, and the airlock that accessed the main ballroom.

 

Once there, if he could get to her bridge, there was a chance he could save her.

 

CHIP HEADS

By Gareth L Powell

Five years ago, the first neural chip implants appeared – soft biotech gel memory chips that held our schedules, important birthdays and anniversaries, the phone numbers of our friends and families…

Over the next few months, the chips were steadily upgraded. New models were released with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. They took the place of our mobile phones and our internet browsers, giving us inbuilt access to the sum total of human knowledge, twenty-four hours a day.

We became reliant on them.

And then something in the net ate everyone’s brain.

Well, not everyone. There are still some unaffected people – children, some pensioners… and people like me, who dug the chips from their heads and survived.

The affected people move in strange patterns, like shoals of fish or flocks of birds. They are calm and do not see the world around them – until whatever it is that controls them releases its hold, which it does every few days, for them to eat and shit and go crazy… Then they’re back to walking in strange, soothing patterns again.

When they’re released, they’re usually starving. Like ravenous zombies, they’ll eat anything to hand, pursue any animal or unaffected human they see and tear it apart.

Trust me; you don’t want to be caught in the open when that happens.

Currently, I’m living with a handful of unaffected men and women on the upper floors of a downtown tower block. The lift doesn’t work and we’ve blockaded the stairs – but we’re not going to stay here forever.

There are mobile phone masts and Wi-Fi servers everywhere. Somehow, they still have power. If we can knock out enough of them to disrupt the signal that controls the chips, maybe we can make a difference… And maybe we can start to rebuild.