Category: Flash Pulp

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and forty-seven.

Tonight we present Waiting Up
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by Talk Nerdy 2 Me!

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we present a Halloween tale of household haunting and chronic insomnia.

Waiting Up

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

Dwight’s first warning came while sneaking into his son’s room to deposit a freshly folded pile of underpants into his bright yellow dresser.

Fluttering eyelids gave the boy away.

“Are you awake, Boop?” he asked Yoshi.

“Yeah Dad.”

Dwight nodded as he laid-out laundry by the glow of a Winnie the Pooh night light. “At least you didn’t try to lay a fake snore on me. Why are you up though?”

The four-year-old rolled to face the wall before answering, “I never sleep. I just pretend to make you happy.”

Hiding his chuckle with an honest yawn, Dwight smiled.

“Well – make me happy by not pretending and actually going to sleep.”

“I’m waiting for Mum to get home.”

Long practiced in the art of altering the flow of conversation around any mention of the woman, Dwight simply said goodnight and left.

* * *

The next day, well after midnight, Dwight was sternly shutting the door.

“I’m not playing anymore. Go to sleep,” he told the flat white expanse that doubled as a finger-painted art gallery.

After their brief discussion, the previous evening, Dwight had curled up for some much needed rest, but his slumber had been interrupted at dawn by a pressing request from his bladder. Finally stirring from a tedious dream, he readied himself for a quick run across the washroom’s cold floor and back, then turned over.

Any thought of returning to sleep had been wiped out by the sudden discovery that a form was hunkered on his bed, not three inches from his face.

He’d let fly with a rare “Christ!” but Yoshi had only laughed.

To the father’s mind the problem was that the tyke had started to consider the situation as a game. Still, shouldn’t sheer exhaustion have done him in at some point?

He paced the short hallway for twenty minutes, then, when all seemed silent and he could no longer lift his legs to maintain his gait, he headed for bed.

Lying alone in the darkness, however, Dwight began to wonder if it were actually a case closer to noticing the arrow in the FedEx logo. Could he have missed that Boop was faking? Had he really always been pretending?

He was still paying down the bill’s for Mamiko’s treatment, he couldn’t afford to have the boy in for a sleep study.

Damn foolish was what it was. The child just needed to shut his eyes.

Yet he didn’t.

* * *

Friday, at two in the morning, a commercial for car alarms brought Dwight out of an unexpected couch nap.

Even as he stood, his knees popping, the sound of Yoshi’s moaning reached his ears from the far end of the bungalow.

As he stiffly walked the hallway the evidence trail was obvious to read. The closet they’d designated a pantry, just off the kitchen, was ajar, and a trail of stray Fruit Loops led him on.

Dwight entered just soon enough to watch three months worth of bulk-box cereal decorate the walls.

Once he could, Yoshi, through tears, said, “I was hungry.”

It was nearly dawn by the time Dwight cleared the smell of stomach acid and artificial flavours from the room.

* * *

Drifting, only half conscious, through work and dinner, Dwight had fallen asleep midway through an explanation to his son that his mother, now dead nearly a year, was not coming home.

Generally such a sensitive discussion would have had the father’s full attention, but into the second hour of alternating between telling the boy to sleep and explaining why his naive logic was wrong, he’d sat down on the thinning blue carpet and rested his head on his hand.

Now, at 3am, Yoshi had startled him awake with the tumbling of a pot-and-pan tower.

Crawling into the boy’s undersized bed, the father wrapped his arms around his son and held him.

It was not a calm slumber, though, as every movement roused the vigilant parent – and Yoshi could not cease his childish wiggles.

* * *

Dwight was so taut with fatigue the next night that he was barely aware something was amiss before his eyes began to sting with tears.

Staggering to the kitchen he found the latest calamity.

Yoshi had pulled his trike in from the rain and dirt of the backyard and created a mud track surrounding the kitchen table. The venetian blinds were blowing in the wind of the open sliding door, and water had begun to pool on the simple black carpet Mamiko had chosen for the threshold.

Worse, the youth had marked the edges of his course by burying the contents of the family knife block, tip first, into the linoleum floor.

“Don’t worry, Dad,” Yoshi said, kneeling beside his weeping father, “Mom will be home soon. I’m waiting up.”

The unending emergency was too much. Dwight’s exhaustion had been snowballing, in truth, from the moment of Mamiko’s diagnosis.

Would he ever sleep? Would they ever sleep? Was she the only one sleeping?

An odd thought came to him: She must be so rested – yes, so rested.

It became clear then: All he had to do was wait for her arrival. Things would be better when she got home.

The thought lifted the weight from his shoulders and cleansed the ache from his mind.

Yes, he too would wait up for her.

Gaining his feet, he asked Yoshi to move his Big wheel outside and headed for a mop.

There was a lot to do before she came home.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Freesound.org credits:

Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.

– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and forty-four.

Tonight we present The Silver Dollar Samurais, Part 1 of 1
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This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Donut Button – thanks to all who’ve used it!

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we present the tale of a young warrior, Darlene Crowe, as she takes to the field with her father watching.

The Silver Dollar Samurais

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

Darlene’s eye was not on the ball.

The breeze had quit trying to push through the hanging ball diamond dust, but the sun seemed to have doubled its intensity in an attempt to bake the dirt out of the air. Even as a curve flew from the pitcher’s fingers, the outfielders shifted from cleat-to-cleat in boredom.

Twenty feet to her left, Darlene’s father was stuttering his way through an explanation regarding a spilled coffee, and, even over the shrill cheers of her first strike, she could hear his heartfelt, but protracted, apology.

She had never wanted to be here, and the unsightly enthusiasm at her failure annoyed her.

This was no tournament game, it was just another entry in the long August season, but Darlene’s opponents, the Mooretown Medusas, had arrived with an especially energetic group of parents. Their crisp pinstripes had contrasted heavily against the t-shirts of the Silver Dollar Samurais, and by this, the fourth inning, the Medusas held a three run lead.

Her father hadn’t forced her to sign up for the sport, but she’d read the worry becoming chronic along his cheeks and brow, then made the decision herself: Thursday nights would be baseball night, a nice, normal, childhood activity.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, Darlene reflected, if the adults of Mooretown weren’t constantly shouting criticism at the supposedly “playing” eleven-year-olds.

As if to drive her point home, a round faced man in a loosened tie shouted, “swing or go home, little girl!”

In truth, Darlene was one of four female Silver Samurais, which was four more than the Medusas had fielded.

Placing her bat to her shoulder, she descended into a well-honed state of focus.

The world shrank, and everything became immediate. A practiced scrutiny judged the flex and lean of the boy on the mound, and skilled fingers – though in a grip they found strange – steadied themselves on the taped handle.

Even the crowd seemed engaged by the girl’s intensity, and a hush fell over all – all except the coffee soaked man in the white polo who was still waiting on her father’s apology. In the silence Dad’s “d-d-d-d-d-didn’t” carried clearly to the plate, as did the exasperated reply of “Jesus, talk normally,” from the Medusa fan.

It was enough of a distraction to slide the second strike across without even a swing.

Darlene frowned.

Five years earlier she’d had her hair laid across her mother’s lap, as the pair watched an old samurai flick, Ichi, when the phone had rung. It was their preferred Saturday night activity, but both knew to expect the possibility of a sudden end.

After a short-worded conversation, the six-year-old had sleepily asked the standing woman, “good guys being hurt?”

“Not while I’ve still got my sword in my hand,” Mom had replied with a smile.

Twenty minutes later the plainclothes police officer had been gunned down by a muddle-headed alcoholic upset over his defeat in a child custody case.

It had left only Darlene to care for her too-gentle father, but the girl knew somehow that it was what her mother would have wanted.

By the time the third pitch was in the air, Darlene was already running.

There’d been an involuntary, “hurk,” and she’d turned to see the coffee-wearing man’s face now fully inflated. Though Dad’s palms remained open and exposed, the Mooretownian had caught hold of his handmade Silver Dollar Samurais shirt, and the attacker’s right fist was slipping backwards in increased frustration.

The red-cheeked man had not appreciated the suggestion that it was his own enthusiasm, and possibly slightly drunken state, that had sent the styrofoam cup flying – nor had he enjoyed waiting through the length of time it had taken Darlene’s father to make it.

The punch landed sloppily across the still stuttering apologist’s left cheek.

From her position on the far side of the chain-link backstop, the eleven-year-old had made a decision. Had she trained for the last five years just to watch Dad be pummelled in the stands of a crummy little league game?

Not while she had her sword in her hand.

She snapped off the matte black batter’s helmet, and, with the addition of a single half-loop from her pink hair elastic, adjusted her spritely blonde ponytail into a combat-ready topknot.

When Darlene once again lifted her bat, her grip was unlike any ever used by a major leaguer.

Despite the stickiness in the air and the silliness of her bright yellow uniform, it felt good to run. Too often this ridiculous sport had come down to waiting for a brief moment of activity. The sense of personal command had always been one of her favourite things about kenjutsu practice: She might not be able to control the world, but her blade moved only where she placed it.

The samurai landed in a flat footed stance with her arms braced at her side. Her weapon’s hilt was low to her belly, and the club’s shaft stood as ramrod straight as her spine.

There was no wavering in either.

“I will strike you in three seconds if you do not release my father,” she said, though she had to fight not to clench her jaw.

The damp man in the second bleacher row turned, though he did not think to release his grip on Dad’s now-crumpled collar.

“Three,” she said.

She knew he was probably just too surprised at the demand to react quickly, but she lept anyhow. Stepping lightly between an oversized pleather purse and a denim ensconced Silver Dollar supporter, as if they were no more than the silent grasses lining a still pond, Darlene closed the distance and swept her stand-in sword upwards.

Before the impacted forearm had even finished its new skyward arc, however, she’d checked her swing and pivoted. With a two-fisted grip, she planted the tip of her aluminum temporary-katana in the meat of her opponent’s calf muscle.

The seizing of his leg left the irritable pugilist empty handed and on his back for several deep exhalations. The watching crowd, who’d unanimously opted to give the combatants a respectful distance, had, in turn, stopped their own breathing.

Darlene simply waited, with the sun at her back and her makeshift gunto raised.

A lone cicada sang to them from somewhere beyond the outfield fence.

Despite the collective anticipation, by the time the girl’s adversary had righted himself he no longer had any interest in discussing the incident. Instead, with sullen jowls, he announced to no one directly that he would wait out the second half of the game in his car.

For ten full minutes the Medusan coach expounded loudly on the inappropriateness of the incident, but, when it became apparent his Silver Dollar counterpart wasn’t likely to forfeit, justice had to be held to benching Darlene for at least the rest of the game.

Still, she’d been reminded of the taste of combat, and her stinging gaze sweeping the field was impossible for the Medusans to ignore. Nerves alone lost them the game at 7 to 5.

The win was her first, but, upon returning home, Darlene decided Thursdays would instead be better spent quietly with her father – perhaps they could learn the nuances of temae together.

For his sake, though, she would occasionally call the traditional ceremony a tea party.

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Freesound.org credits:

Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.

– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.