Ever have that dream where you’re following a herd of deer across the city; the one where they lead you from the maternity ward to the cemetery? No, doesn’t sound familiar? How about the one where you’re struggling to keep up with your own peers? The dream gives you the perfect vantage point to see them accept their degrees, tour good homes, and enjoy extravagant wedding ceremonies.
In this dream journal entry, the two themes intersect. Listen as the deer devoir the future. Lag behind the herd as they chew on life events. Witness the nightmare of every millennial, the terror of every man child struggling to fly their way out of never never land.
This work of flash fiction is part of my Dream Detective series. To read the others Click Here.
It took a lot of restraint to prevent myself from calling this article “Drew Detective”
Earlier this week, I made eight images inspired by the opening title sequence for True Detective. Not knowing what I’d do with them, I settled on writing a short story for each one. Due to the abstract nature of these collages, I decided to make this collection of flash fiction about dreams, pairing the ones I can remember with the right picture. This collection is dark, funny, and more than a little personal.
I love horror stories that toy with the audience’s expectations. The ones that set us up for a scare, but give us a far more rewarding payoff. The stories that zig when we think they’re going to zag. This short was written to play with the age old disappearing silhouette gag. Our hero wakes up to find a figure leering at him from the shadows. He reaches for his desk lamp, and decades of horror cinema tell us what to expect, but instead of an empty room our hero gets a good look at a truly nasty creature, a knotted mound of flesh that doesn’t fit into a convenient monster mold.
With the audience’s expectations ripped out from under them, the real scene begins.
The soundtrack for this short lays the atmosphere on thick. In the spirit of a radio play, there’s a sound effect for the monster’s every footfall. The progressive piano score rises with the tension to a throbbing synth, and a stomping beat.
Listen to it late at night, with a light switch at arm’s reach.
This is the dark conclusion to my cyber-bully storyline. It’s the reason the entire piece is called, “The Moderator.” I write flexible outlines to allow my stories to swerve into the kind of dark territory this one lands in. The ending had me questioning if this was one of the worst, or best things I’ve ever written. The jury is still out on that, but the story had an impact on me.
I owe a debt of gratitude to @Raishimi for scanning through the story for grammatical mistakes. If you like intensely clever dark short fiction, check her blog out here.
In part 3, Jeremiah Jenkins has tracked down the cyber bully that outed him online. A man named River. Armed with his target’s whereabouts, Jeremiah has come to San Diego with a plan of his own.
The Moderator PART 3: Bridge Trolls
River walked down the sidewalk with his eyes buried in his phone. It was as big as any touchscreen tablet, except this one made calls. He was using an application that took advantage of the camera. It allowed him to type and see the ground at the same time. With an e-cigarette screwed into his lips, River was a master multitasker. He took a puff. Static crackled inside the pipe. He exhaled. The vapor trailed behind him. Continue reading The Moderator PART 3: Bridge Trolls→
Photo by Keane Amdahl, follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned
In the previous installment of The Moderator, Jeremiah Jenkins found himself outed by a fellow cyber bully. He’d made a death threat and his rival The Straw Man called him on his bluff. That night a cyber mob hacked his accounts and warped his online identity. They posted pregnancy news on FaceBook, turned him into a rogue NSA agent on Twitter, and added terrorism to his LinkedIn resumé. They killed his career opportunities, his relationship prospects, and his reputation. The trolls put his head up on a pike for all the world to see.
In part 2 of this 3 part tale, we catch up with Jeremiah in the middle of a psychotic break.
I owe another debt of gratitude to @Raishimi for catching many of my grammatical mistakes (I love it when people point those little buggers out to me).
The Moderator PART 2: The Straw Man
That night, Jeremiah dreamt he was sprinting down cobblestone streets. Oil lanterns passed by in a blur. He swerved as a horse drawn carriage barreled down on him. He dove to avoid being trampled. When the horses past, he heard his pursuers’ feet stomping behind him. Their numbers had grown. Minute men had answered the call. Pedestrians had been enveloped into the horde. Street workers dropped the tools of their trade, and picked up other ones.
Photo by Keane Amdahl, follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned
I’m afraid of the kind of traffic this story will bring to my blog. There’s some nasty buzz words lurking in these prose. Words I wouldn’t want to show up in a search engine, or across a national security agent’s desk.
The characters who use these words have no regard for their meaning. They sling vulgarities at the wind, with the glee of infants hurling smartphones onto concrete. They make casual death threats. They reference acts of terrorism with the enthusiasm of screenwriters referencing pop culture.
These characters speak their minds with not a filter, but a megaphone. Their real life counterparts have been jailed for things they’ve said in jest. They’ve ruined lives, or worse, played a part in ending them.
If the government makes revisions to the First Amendment, it will be because of something one of these people said.
Don’t worry, I’m not about to berate you with racial or homophobic slurs. These characters have used them so often they’ve lost their meaning. They have to resort to craftier insults to get their points across, to scrape the bottom of the barrel clean through, to mine it for new depths.
They’re a case study for etymologists. Linguists will cite them as the ones who broadened our definition of profanity.
Their real life counterparts will desensitize us to things we hope to never see. They don’t pull punches. If I’m to tell their story, neither can I.
Tragedy plus time equals comedy. The hero of this story has interpreted the quote to mean that making fun of tragedy is funny. He’s about to learn that some words are sacred. Some invocations summon things that won’t go back into the depths. Some threats have consequences.
Especially when he makes his threats here, in the Twilight Zone (sorry I had to do that).
I owe a debt of gratitude to @Raishimi, @FoodStoned, and many others who post under the hashtag #AmWriting. Many of you were eager to let your inner trolls go on a rampage. You helped come up with many of the cyber pranks featured in this story. You’re all very evil people.
I cannot stress how much hair this story had me pulling out. At seven-thousand plus words, I decided to break it up into three different parts:
Photo by Keane Amdahl, follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned
This is a story about my first attempt to wow people with my work. I was a kindergartner hosting a Halloween carnival in the middle of July. I poured my heart and soul into the project and got negative returns.
There’s a lesson to be learned in failure: if at first you don’t succeed, you’re doing it wrong. If humiliation teaches us anything it’s how to wear humiliation better. Every artist has to learn to take feed back. Every artist has to develop a callus around their heart, a skin so thick they could stop bullets with it.
This is a piece for those people brave enough to put themselves out there. The ones who go out among the trolls seeking validation. The ones whose bright eyes never dim. The ones who no matter how many times you knock them down, they scramble back up to their feet, and brush their shoulders off.
This is for the people who look to the Internet and say, “I have something valid to contribute and I’m going to keep trying until it finally resonates with someone.”
Photo by Keane Amdahl follow him on Twitter @FoodStoned
This was originally posted on Alana Chapman’s website as part of her summer shorts series. Check her site out here, and follow her on Twitter @AlanaofOz
***
The arrows on the floor have taken on the texture of the linoleum. They look like shadows made of light. When I peer inside the coat room, they animate around me. They beckon like fingers leading to a pie in a cartoon.
“Not this way,” The arrows say.
Yes, this way. I press on. Here in the dark, the coat room is unattended. I roll my eyes. Everything goes green. The coat racks present themselves in shades of lime. Pixels line their sleeves. Staircases line their shoulders. I feel the pockets for lumps, discard scarves, and gloves to the floor. I gag when I get a palm full of tissues, still wet with snot.
It’s all worth it, when my hand strikes pay dirt, a business card with a picture of a manuscript with fluttering pages on one side, and a QR code on the other. I hold the QR code up to my eyes. I scan the boxes from left to right. I hear a ding. The eureka sound effect that accompanies light bulbs.
