“What can you buy with money? Does it buy you human blood?”
“Do not be silly. I have Ethan for that.”
“Ah, your pet.”
“My lover. My human lover.”
“And that is why you exist here, among prey.”
Tag Archives: fiction
A Vampire Takes a Selfie
The waitress was cute, perky and most likely seeing someone on the weekends, not to mention busy as hell during her shift, sapping all of Ethan’s courage to strike up a real conversation. Probably wasn’t worth the trouble anyways, lest she use her charm to sell him more drinks and empty his wallet. She began to walk over to him a third time, so he had to give her the “five more minutes” sign again. Once he saw her discontent, no matter how much she tried to hide it, he impulsively pointed to the picture of the dark porter on the menu, which seemed to ease the concerns on her face about a large enough bill that would justify a large enough tip. Just keep everyone happy, Ethan thought to himself.
He checked his watch, and it had been twenty minutes since he was able to sit down at a table for six in a bar that was soon to become crowded with the Friday evening rush. So Ethan, ever the good co-worker, volunteered to get the table and hold it for everyone until they finished their last-minute work upstairs. He tried to look busy and not at all lonely sitting at a large table by tapping away on his phone. He even made sure to type with both hands and stare intently at the screen with serious, narrowed eyes to look like it was work, even if it was really just the daily sudoku puzzle.
He had nearly figured out where to put the last two sevens just when a figure cast a shadow on his table. Ethan looked up to greet his first beer of the night, but it wasn’t the waitress standing over his table. The figure hovering over him was that of a shorter woman in casual, non-waitress clothes, staring curiously at his phone as if she’d never seen one before. He didn’t look hard enough just yet, only catching the sense of fascination in her eyes.
She was cute. Creepy, though. He smiled nonetheless.
“How’re you doing?” he said. Continue reading A Vampire Takes a Selfie
Apples (or How I Spent My Winter Vacation)
John Chapman, as the legend goes, crisscrossed much of what was America in the 19th century planting trees just about everywhere. Those trees, of course, would take years to actually bear any fruit, but in time, they would grow and flourish, and everyone in America would be able to enjoy its fruit. Thus is the legend of Johnny Appleseed.
Dream big, and expand everywhere.
I’ve been spending the last few months working on three very different works of fiction, two shorts and one full novel. All different genres, with something for everybody. I don’t want to give everything or even most of everything away, but I figured a few teasers (by way of the material I wrote for all the queries I send out) are in order.
You get a snippet of one page each. Continue reading Apples (or How I Spent My Winter Vacation)
New Playlist 2
A sip of coffee, a bite of the pastry that the server recommended, and a turn of the page of whatever book he had been reading but had long lost interest in. At least the coffee shop that a friend suggested to him wasn’t bad. A place to spend a Saturday afternoon if he needed to get some work done.
The Adele track had faded to silence, and was replaced by some Rascal Flatts, which didn’t seem to match the atmosphere around him. So he shuffled through his reading playlist, adjusting the volume for the errant download that was always much louder or much softer than the others.
His music player started playing familiar notes of a lone guitar – typical Staind, and actually the last track of Staind’s last album. He remembered purchasing the entire album based on a thirty-second sample that sounded like it would make for good music to listen to on a long trip.
So when the day comes and the sun won’t catch my face
Tell the ones who cared enough that I’ve finally left this place
Then he recalled it was depressing enough that he spent much of the trip in silence after two or three similar songs. He was running a theory that, when making the playlist, he had mistaken the track title for that of a brighter James Taylor song, and was going to skip ahead, until that man entered his field of vision.