Fiction Vortex - June 2013



  Fiction Vortex

  A Speculative Fiction Typhoon

  June 2013

  Volume 1, Issue 2

  Edited by Dan Hope

  Copyright 2013 Fiction Vortex

  Cover image courtesy of NASA

  Website: FictionVortex.com

  Twitter: @FictionVortex

  Facebook: FictionVortex

  Table of Contents

  Letter from the Editor

  Short Stories

  Losses Beyond the Kill Point — by Marilyn K. Martin (1st Place)

  Freckles, Stan, and Peconic Joe — by John Byrne

  A Feeble Gleam of Stars — by R.W.W. Greene (2nd Place)

  Willow Grove — by T. Eric Bakutis

  A Misleading Dance — by Catherine Evleshin

  Bogged Down — by Jason Norton (3rd Place)

  Lyfe — by Tyrone Long

  In the Rain — by Lisa Lutwyche

  Writing Tips

  The Bus Test: A Simple and Merciless Method for Improving Characters — by Mike Cluff

  The Sins of Short Story Submissions — by Dan Hope

  About Fiction Vortex

  Letter from the Editor

  Did someone alter the temporal dampening settings on the time dilation cognetization initiator? It seems like we've been doing this for longer than two months. But here we are, celebrating our second issue of Fiction Vortex.

  Let's set aside the specifics of time perception and talk about what's really important: the stories. We have conclusive proof in this issue that the May issue was more than just a fluke because we have yet another month's worth of fantastic stories to deliver. This issue has some great surprises, too. While some seem to fit into traditional genres, such as alien invasion, fairy grove visitation, and haunting ghosts, there are also a few that defy description. For instance, what genre covers a botanist who finds more than he bargains for while searching for Ghost Orchids? There's a story that seems to be a general dystopia until you realize it's dealing with the most dystopic medium of all: reality television. And of course, how do you classify a story where the language changes as the story progresses?

  Now perhaps you can see why we're so proud of these stories.

  Of course, being the narcissistic sociopaths (say that ten times while drunk) that we are, we couldn't just let the fiction writers have all the fun, so you'll also see a few writing tips from me and the Editor-in Chief, Mike Cluff, near the end of this issue. They involve vehicular manslaughter and malicious fairy hit squads, so at least they should be interesting.

  Thank you for your support of the site, and we hope you continue to enjoy great speculative fiction from Fiction Vortex. Look for more every week on FictionVortex.com, now complete with NSA wiretapping so the government knows how cultured and widely read you are.

  Vortexical Wishes and Cyclonic Dreams,

  Dan Hope

  Managing Editor, Voice of Reason

  Fiction Vortex

  (Back to Table of Contents)

  Short Stories

  Losses Beyond the Kill Point — by Marilyn K. Martin (1st Place)

  Freckles, Stan, and Peconic Joe — by John Byrne

  A Feeble Gleam of Stars — by R.W.W. Greene (2nd Place)

  Willow Grove — by T. Eric Bakutis

  A Misleading Dance — by Catherine Evleshin

  Bogged Down — by Jason Norton (3rd Place)

  Lyfe — by Tyrone Long

  In the Rain — by Lisa Lutwyche

  (Back to Main Table of Contents)

  Losses Beyond the Kill Point

  by Marilyn K. Martin; published June 4, 2013

  First Place Award, June 2013 Fiction Contest

  The pig was green that morning. A bad green. Darker than the grass. The color of a laser-tank in the forest. Bad! Grunting and gobbling in its morning trough, the pig was a green mini-blimp, darker green stripes rippling the length of its back. Its stubby green legs were distorted, as usual. One floating out sideways, another one arcing over its back.

  OUCH!  His stomach-alarm had gone off. "No, No, No!" he said, a fist pounding on the small device permanently locked around his waist. "Bab, Bad, Bad!"  Blinking dazedly, he turned to look up at the large one-story circular building wavering above him in the near distance, like a mirage. His legs started stumbling toward it, even as his fogged brain was deciding what to do.

  He entered the circular building through the huge blue doorway, since he was wearing scrubs the same shade of blue. His feet seemed to know where to go, as he lumbered toward the medication dispensing desk.

  "That one! That one! That one!" His finger pounded the counter beside a pink pill, amid an array of thirty pills of all different sizes and colors. The pills were always spread out on the counter, for the patient to first approve them.

  "Okay, that one," said the Dispenser in monotone behind the counter. "Any reason you don't want to take that one?"

  "Bad pink!" the patient said, finger still jabbing the counter beside the pink pill. "It's dead!  Dead pink! Pink people dead!"

  "Alright, fine. Sign here," intoned the Dispenser with a sigh, and placed the electronic signature pad on the counter before the patient.

  The bald patient picked up the stylus and scribbled madly, then started jabbing the screen with the stylus. "Lines are fences. Can't escape. Bad!" he hollered at the pad. He blinked away sudden memories of street barricades, and no easy escape as the enemies' tanks approached. Meanwhile, the small screen's crisscrossing protective grid appeared underneath his signature. Then there was a tiny flash, and his thumbnail photo appeared in the upper right corner above his signature, to properly ID him as the scribbler.

  "Okay, here are the rest of your morning pills," the Dispenser announced, after scooping up the remaining pills into six small swallow-size cups. A large glass of juice was set on the counter for him.

  As the patient downed one cup of pills after the other, amid gulps of juice that dribbled down his chin, the Dispenser uploaded the patient's signature to the mainframe. Then the pad was noisily thrown back underneath the counter. The "bad" pill sat off to the side of the counter, to be logged in and then discarded.

  The patient spent the rest of the day down the slope at the farm, checking to make sure all the animals were their proper color. The purple chickens clucked and scattered from him. The green-striped pig grunted and ignored him. But the aqua-colored horse just stared at him, as it solemnly chewed its alfalfa. He listened carefully, but something was wrong.

  ~~~~~

  "That one! That one! That one!" the patient insisted that evening, a finger jabbing the counter beside an aqua capsule.

  "Okay, any reason?" asked the bored Dispenser, moving the offending capsule aside.

  "Horse color. Didn't talk to me," muttered the blinking, crazed patient, as the signature-pad was slid in front of him. "Bad horse! Bad!" he continued, as he scribbled lines and circles for his signature.  Another small flash, and then he shoved the pad back toward the Dispenser.

  As he downed his six tiny cups of pills with juice, the Dispenser uploaded his signature, and added a few notations: "Refused one pill each, morning and evening med dispensing. Reports horse didn't talk to him after morning meds. Did not jab signature pad for evening meds, and was the first time he pushed signature pad toward me when finished."

  ~~~~~

  For the next few days, the patient randomly picked out one pill to be removed at both morning and evening med dispensings. Then, at the farm one morning, he noticed something strange. The chickens were all white. Not one was purple. But the pig was still green.

  "Bad pig!" he hollered from the other side of the gleaming metal fence. But the pig continued to snort and snuffle, as it gobbl
ed its breakfast from the trough. "Don't eat all of it!" shouted the patient at the pig. "Some of it is bad!  Bad pills! Bad pig!"

  He was petting the nose of the non-talking aqua horse later that same afternoon, inside the horse stable. Suddenly he heard many footsteps and looked around. He spied an Official in a white lab coat, leading a small knot of nervous people through the stables. Since this happened fairly regularly, the patient had never paid any attention before. This time, however, he surprisingly seemed to understand most of the conversation. When the Official stopped and turned, to answer a question from the group, the patient jerkily turned to listen too.

  "Actually, this kind of therapy started by accident," the Official was saying to the knot of people, whose distorted faces stretched and twisted. "It had been a very controversial theory before the war, that someone's Soul or Spirit could guide a person's body and mind back to health," the Official was explaining. "Our psychiatric hospitals had just started to experiment with that theory, and even had some promising results. Then the war broke out.

  "After the war, with so many insane and so few trained medical personnel who had survived, it suddenly became our Theory of Necessity," the Official continued. The patient had lost track of the conversation by this point, and stood blinking, unsure what to do next.

  "In order to help all these hundreds of thousands of psychotic people, driven insane by the war, we gathered them up into safe environments. Like this fenced-in compound, which used to be a military base," the Official gestured. "We watch them, protect them and medicate them, mainly to keep them calm but mobile.

  "The medications range from tranquilizers to mild hallucinogenics to herbal restoratives," the Official explained. "And the patients must see and approve all the pills before taking them. They are allowed to stop taking one pill per dispensing session, if they wish. Interestingly, the patients who are ready to heal usually refuse the hallucinogenics first.

  "Other patients, more damaged, choose to stay in a distorted hallucinogenic world longer," the Official sighed. "Based on this Spirit Healing Theory, our small staff has been instructed to help every patient find their own way back to health. Staff can't force anything on a patient, but are to encourage every glimmer of a patient wanting to make a change for the better."

  A woman in the group raised her hand with a question, and held up a small, blinking recording device to catch the Official's answer. "Doctor, why are hallucinogenics prescribed? If they've been driven insane by what they've experienced in the war, aren't they already drowning in horrific thoughts and memories they can't deal with?"

  The Official nodded. "Good question. However, it's been our experience that heavily tranquilized and sedated patients have practically no thought processes at all. Their sub-conscious may be repeatedly experiencing horrific imagery and shrieking for help. But keeping these thoughts and memories locked deep inside their heavily drugged bodies, the patients will only get worse. We think it's better to keep the patients conscious and somewhat alert. And by allowing them a distorted and more comforting view of reality, with mild hallucinogenics, it's the best way to help them work their way out of their own personal hells.

  "And now, if you'll follow me back outside, I'll show you the concert gazebo the nearby villagers built for us." The Official then turned and started leading the tour group out of the stable. The Official smiled and greeted the patient in passing, who only stood blinking.

  Half of the trailing group ignored him, and the other half only glanced at him with nervous smiles in passing. Their yawning faces, stretching sideways and up or down, were ugly to him. He remembered how some faces that pulled and twisted like that could bleed. He unsteadily turned back to the aqua horse, glad that the ugly people, who might bleed and die, were leaving.

  ~~~~~

  For weeks after that, the patient refused at least one pill about every three days. He was now down to five tiny cups of pills with his juice. So the Dispenser eyed him with interest as he approached the counter one evening.

  The blue-scrubbed patient surveyed the array of his pills on the counter. He jabbed his finger on the counter beside a black star-shaped pill. "That one!" The Dispenser picked up the black-star pill and put it aside.

  Suddenly he jabbed the counter beside a tri-colored capsule. "I want more of that one!" he yelled. "Another one! Like this! Yes!"

  The surprised Dispenser shook its head. "No. You can't have more of that pill. Only one."

  "Only one ... Only one ... Only one," the patient mumbled to himself, genuinely distraught, as he picked up the pill and put it hurriedly in his mouth. The Dispenser scooped the other pills into the tiny cups, and pushed them and the juice cup toward the patient.

  When the Dispenser slid the signature pad toward the patient, he asked curiously, "Why did you want more of that particular capsule?"

  "Colors," the patient answered, making loops and jagged angles in one long pen-stroke on the pad. "Need more colors. Chickens white. Horses brown. They need more colors. I remember ... animals with colors never get hurt or die. More colors!"

  ~~~~~

  Weeks later, all the farm animals had changed colors. Even the pig was just a dirty pale pink, its back covered with springy hairs the patient had never noticed before amid the rippling green stripes. He wandered away from the farm that morning, now that the farm animals were just their boring natural colors. He was afraid for them, but didn't understand why.

  He glanced up at the circular building as he climbed the slope from the farm. The building was solid suddenly, not hazy and distorted. This was new. This was scary.

  "NO!" he screamed at the Dispenser that evening. "MORE PILLS! MORE! NEED MORE PILLS!"

  But the Dispenser quietly shook its head. "No. No more pills. You can't go back. You can only go forward."

  ~~~~~

  The patient took his shrunken piles of pills in four tiny cups faithfully for weeks after that, without asking for any more removals. Things were changing. Outside of him. Inside of him. He was unsure. But he felt strangely good. Like he could do other things now. Other things, besides stare at animals. New things. Scary things.

  Maybe.

  When he arrived at the counter for his morning pills one day, the Dispenser smiled at him. The Dispenser was an old man with white hair and a sad face, wearing white scrubs. The patient had never noticed that before.

  "You're late," the old man Dispenser said in a mildly chastising tone. "Didn't your waist alarm go off to tell you to come get your morning pills?" Suddenly he noticed that the patient had placed a faded green washcloth between his waist alarm and stomach.

  "Yes," the patient said, blinking. "I felt it. I put something ... over my tummy. So it ... doesn't hurt. Anymore. I felt it ... a little. And came. So ... I am here."

  The Dispenser smiled even more, and gave him his three small cups of pills. The patient's signature that morning read "nokill me good nokill good." The Dispenser, still smiling, added copious notes to the patient's signature on the pad.

  ~~~~~

  Days later, the patient was studying the high fences that marched up the lawn to end at the circular building. He was in a large wedge-shaped enclosure of only men like him, all bald and wearing blue scrubs. Their extended fence ran from their blue door into the building, to down and around the farm animal pens.

  But there were other people beyond the fences on both sides, people who also stayed in the circular building. There were people wearing pink on the other side of one fence, with access to the building through a pink door. The pink people looked female.

  There were also small people wearing yellow across the fence on the other side. The yellow people were short, some running in circles, around and around, calling "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" They were ... childs. Children? Blinking away sudden memories, he turned and hurried down to the farm. He didn't want to remember when he'd been small like that. When people had hugged him, loved him, and protected him. People who had bled red and died. And then left him all alone.
>
  ~~~~~

  More time passed. One morning the old man Dispenser asked the patient why he was late again for morning meds. The patient stroked his long, scraggly hair. "I was looking. In bathroom mirror. My hair is bad. Someone ... someplace to fix it?"

  The Dispenser smiled. He'd uploaded enough notes that the Officials knew that the patient was beginning to heal. So they had instructed the weekly Shaver to only shave off the man's beard, but let his hair start growing. They wanted to see if the patient would take the next step in his personal grooming. And he had.

  Suddenly the Dispenser noticed something. "You've changed the washcloth under your waist-alarm, I see," he said pleasantly.

  "Yes. It's blue. I wear blue," the patient explained. "I like blue. Now I'm all blue." He patted his hair again and seemed agitated. "Shaver? Can fix my ugly hair?"

  "Yes," the Dispenser nodded. "You can find the Shaver beside the cafeteria, in the hallway."

  "No! No! No!" the patient was saying a short while later. He was sitting in the barber chair, watching his shortening hair in the big mirror in front of him. "All off! All gone!"

  "No," soothed the Shaver, who was also an old man in white scrubs. "You can't go back. Only forward, Dmitry. Wait until I finish. You'll like having a nice haircut, instead of being shaved bald. I promise."

  "Can't go back. Can't go back. Can't go back," Dmitry muttered to himself as he stared in the mirror and watched the Shaver comb and clip his hair. His hair was brown, like the horse. With some silver strands. Old strands. But he wasn't old. Not like the Dispenser and Shaver. Someone ... someone had liked his brown hair. Someone else. Someone ... special.

  "Dmitry ... Dmitry ... Dmitry," he mumbled to himself, as he walked down the long curved hallway to his room that evening. That was his ... name. He had a name. He suddenly felt ... more complete. He fell asleep that night with his new prickly haircut, amid echoes from the past. He dreamed of other people calling him by that name, long ago. Parents and siblings, teachers and friends. And ... special friends, very special. Even one who had loved him passionately, as only a woman can love a man.