Category: Will Coffin

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode three hundred and eighty-three.

Tonight we present Coffin: Time to Consider
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp383.mp3]Download MP3

(RSS / iTunes)

This week’s episodes are brought to you by Glow in the Dark Radio

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 Bunny Davis, roommate and apprentice to urban shaman Will Coffin, finds herself in conversation with his murderous dead wife.

Coffin: Time to Consider

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

Bunny found her newly obtained sobriety often made the apartment she shared with the Coffin a stuffy one. Rarely, however, did she step onto the balcony for air.

That Thursday there just wasn’t anything bad enough on TV to keep her attention, and her legs kept pulling her up from the couch before she realized she had nowhere to go. Books were stared at, but the words held no meaning in spite of multiple attempts. Worse, her appetite had abandoned her entirely, and she knew more alternating between opening cupboards and the fridge door would only give her mouth the satisfaction of expelling another long string of obscenities.

So she went outside.

Eighteen stories below, the shattered form of her roommate’s dead wife began the ascent that marked the sole objective the apparition ever held in mind when she moved from the cracked cement upon which she’d died.

Even without Will on hand to attempt to murder, still Sandy made the climb.

Despite the distance between them, Bunny had no issues hearing the phantasm’s broken-windpipe whisper.

“Is he sleeping?” asked Sandy.

“Yeah.”

“It’s almost 4pm.”

“I can take a message if you like.”

“It doesn’t make you uncomfortable to live in the apartment in which his wife died?”

“Like, when there’s a dead lady rotting on the balcony, or just generally?”

At that point the conversation had gone as far as it ever had, and Bunny was tempted to again head back inside. Instead she finally gave in to her curiosity – or perhaps she’d simply grown accustomed enough to the climber’s trail of broken nails and mashed finger meat to stay.

Whatever the case, she asked “why do you bother?”

Pausing beside a frost-covered window on the seventh floor, Sandy gave her taut shoulders an oddly familiar shrug.

She said, “let me tell you a story.

“Will and I, back in the early days, stumbled across a couple of star-crossed idiot teens, Vincent and Rosa. I guess it happens in every generation, but we’re talking about the sort of kids who would read too much into Romeo and Juliet while listening to Don’t Fear the Reaper on loop.

“They died in ‘71 in a Georgia backwater. He was scheduled to head to the Navy at the end of the summer, as his birthday was in September and his parents thought it would better if he picked a boat job rather than involuntarily backpack through the Vietnamese interior. Her parents couldn’t have been happier, and were really just hoping she wouldn’t get pregnant before the garbage man’s son was safely overseas.

“The problem started one humid August evening while they were making out and telling each other deep thoughts in the upper branches of the oak tree they considered “their spot.” I guess it was overlooking an old rail bridge, and they caught a brief flash of a transparent jumper. Back then that was the most you could ever hope to see of a haunt, but I guess they found something romantic in the way the pilgrim-looking girl had apparently gone over without hesitation.

“News from the war was pretty rough, so Vinnie was sure he wasn’t coming back if they shipped him – and, frankly, Rosa was sure she’d die simply from being apart from him.

“They talked until it was dark and they were exhausted, then they settled on the age old tradition of a lovers’ suicide pact.

“Saying good night with endless dedications to each other, they went home. It was then that Rosa stole the cyanide bottle from her mom’s amateur photo development kit.

“Once their households were asleep, however, they both crept from their beds, put on their most impressive band t-shirts, and snuck to a meadow on the southside of town.

“Her hands were shaking too bad, so she asked for help with the spoon. They kissed and cried and swallowed the powder.

“It was Vincent, though, who couldn’t stay still. Cyanide is no easy way to go. Even as she’s collapsing he’s stumbling off with the notion that he’s got to puke away the pain and he doesn’t want to do it into his beloved’s lap.

“Twenty feet over he collapses. They were found the next morning.

“They thought they’d always be together in the afterlife, but twenty feet means a lot.

“The meadow didn’t stay a meadow. A developer bought it and threw up a suburb which immediately went into decline. Rosa found herself half-beneath someone’s kitchen sink and half projecting into their front room, while Vincent was stuck on the floor of the garage next door.

“They could visit, but it took a huge effort and no matter how tightly they clung to each other the pull of death was – and is – ceaseless.”

As if to demonstrate, Sandy grunted and shifted her bloodied finger tips between the building’s brickwork.

She continued her story, but made no effort to scale any further.

“Worse, by the time Will and I found them the neighbourhood had basically been abandoned, so they were left to weep in the ruins while being unable to see or talk to each other without great difficulty.

“Actually, heh, we helped them by burning it all down. That was my – fortieth birthday? I remember Will turning to me while we watched it catch and telling me to make a wish before blowing out my candles.

“Once they were free to yell at each other it took less than a year until things ran their course and they moved on just to get some space.”

“Uh?” asked Bunny, her eyes unsure.

“Never let twenty feet get between you, you never know what it’ll mean in the long run.”

“Huh.”

There was a pause then, and neither woman moved as they inspected the gray sky and silent horizon.

Finally, Bunny asked, “I always got the impression you wanted him dead? I mean, that’s why you climb, right? Isn’t that why you spend the occasional afternoon rubbing your deadness against the locked balcony door and ####ing up my Saturday viewings of Captain Kaiju’s Monster Madness?”

The phantom again gave that same shrug, and Bunny realized why it seemed so familiar: She’d seen it on her roommate’s shoulders a thousand times.

“Look at me and tell me what exactly death means these days,” answered the specter. “If I was careful enough to keep him close, would it be so bad?”

Yet, before Sandy might receive an answer, she allowed her form to drop to the pavement below and return to the position in which she’d expired. With the speed of a blink, her trail of gore followed.

Suddenly Bunny was desperate for toast and the last of the peanut butter she’d seen hiding at the rear of the cupboard.

She went inside.

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

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

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 seventy-nine.

Tonight we present Coffin: The Drop of the Shoe, Part 3 of 4
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp379.mp3]Download MP3
(Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4)
(RSS / iTunes)

This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Skinner Co. Store

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, Will Coffin, urban shaman, and Bunny, his apprentice, discuss old dead friends with the Lady of the Northern Reaches.

Coffin: The Drop of the Shoe, Part 3 of 4

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

They’d sent no word, as Will had known it to be unnecessary. Those who remained of the Lords and Ladies which once held domain over the primeval lands were a reclusive lot, but news of a death amongst their ranks would carry on the song of every mourning sparrow and in the howling of every lamenting family hound.

“I’ll wait here,” was the extent of their driver’s statement upon their second stop, but Bunny suspected that the shark-faced man would rather sit in silence than encounter the likely wrath of the occult nobility awaiting them in the abandoned motel’s husk.

Still, it was in the arcane ambulance’s nature to be forgotten as soon as it had passed, and no one questioned its right of way or meteoric pace. She did not relish the thought of having had to try to explain a dead raccoon in the back seat to a highway patrolman, nor having the blood on the upholstery to the rental people.

Stepping across rusting mattress springs and the scattered remains of a shattered television, Bunny and Coffin entered the collapsing shoreside resort. They found Sour Thistle not in her usual place, but at a window overlooking the snowy calm of the frozen lake.

“How many times have I gazed upon this pond? Have I mentioned before that Blackhall and I used to meet at this same spot? There was no construction then – those few who walked these shores knew enough to move through my realm on tender feet. Now I’m lucky not to be run down by an eighteen wheeled rig while chasing my breakfast.”

Her attendee, the Dead Faced Man, stood in the corner and said little. His rotting mask was beyond expression, but Coffin suspected the former swindler could not be terribly pleased to see the man who he deemed responsible for ending his career as a lawyer and the life he had made for himself in Capital City.

Fortunately, Will didn’t especially care.

“I’m sorry for the loss of your associate,” he told the wolverine.

Dropping her mystically over-sized fore paws to the rotting carpet, the Lady of the Northern Reaches gave a welcoming nod to both Bunny and Coffin, then set her rump beside a recently erected card table at the room’s center.

Without comment, her lackey stepped into the hall.

Once the trio were alone a snarl entered Sour Thistle’s voice.

“Do not hand me your cool condolences, reaper, you forget that I have seen you in tragedy before. You must have quite liked the sticky-fingered bandit to work so hard at calm.

”I had known Pisky some seven centuries. I can not say I liked him, but that does not mean we were not friends. Perhaps you can not understand, given the short spans afforded to you temporary bags of meat, but I assure you that two beings do not need to find moments of laughter or shared interest when faced with the commonality of a slow starvation.

“A death of a hundred years can forge a bond deeper than any correspondence or childhood memory.”

For the first time since they’d discovered the murder, Will struck Bunny as agitated.

“It wasn’t just Rocky Raccoon you know,” replied Coffin. “There were several spirits in the area that seem to have been – erased. There’s nothing more than a stain where they once rested.”

A series of slowing clicks came from deep within Sour Thistle’s throat, and Bunny briefly wondered if perhaps she was about to witness an occult throw down.

Instead the forest queen lowered her head and nodded, saying, “there is murder, and then there is murder. I apologize, Coffin, and appreciate your concerns.

“Do the records of your office include the account of how that idiot and I survived those desperate days when the energies were at their lowest and there was little to sustain beings of our nature? There were many emergencies of course, but it was truly Pisky who made what most consider the bleakest decades livable.

“For a generation I survived solely by having my scouts on constant alert for brain-poisoned fairies and feral-eyed gnomes. Half-dead themselves, they were tidbits that provided only enough to hold me to the next meager meal.

“Then Pisky arrived.

“He’d tracked one of the foolish lake monster myths to a pool in the northwest. The territory’s tenant was ill with the red plague, though we did not know it – we knew simply that he was absent, which was all the justification for poaching that we required.

“Until then Pisky had been clever enough to get the better end of every deal between us, so I thought him likely onto something when he came to me for help.

“His mind was sharp, but his teeth were no match for my claws.

“In those days you’d barely infected these lands, and there were still pockets, even starving as it also was, that a titan such as the hydra could hide its bulk.

“We cornered it in a muddy bay, really little more than a lakeside swamp, and the contest lasted three days.

“Two heads in place of every one, as legend says, and it had already sixteen at its command. Its neck meat was glorious, and my appetite was boundless.

“When it was finally so top-weighted that it’s shattered legs could no longer think of escape, we collected our first harvest – some six hundred heads – and ate them between deep gulps of the cold clean water. In time our agents actually purchased the dirt and lay a barn overtop its form, but there was a certain sort of revelry to those early open-air picnics.

“We slept with full bellies that winter, and I swear I have never tasted blood so sweet since.”

With the tale told, all eyes fell to the tabletop.

It was the queen who broke the silence, and Bunny couldn’t help but notice how chatty the old dame was being. It left her wondering if perhaps she was stalling the process of having to see the body.

“Do you know who to hold accountable?” asked Sour Thistle.

Coffin replied, “I’ve a discreet private investigator looking into the ownership of the place, but I think it’s pretty obvious.”

“The festering disciples of the arachnid? Do they not understand their ultimate reward is oblivion?”

“You can still have a lot of fun with unlimited power between now and the end of the world.”

“It’s true then that they consumed him?”

“Partially. There’s still plenty left to gnaw on.”

“The dead queen will wish to hold the feast in her northern castle, will you attend and taste of his flesh?”

“Nope.”

Sour Thistle gave a sound that was half sniff and half snort.

Somewhere a crow aired its grievances to the winter air, then the room was filled only with the misty wisps that marked the trio’s breathing.

Finally, Will’s shoulders fell.

“I meant no disrespect,” he answered, “I’d go, but I don’t think I could choke down my portion.”

“It is not your refusal that worries me,” said the ancient beast, “it is your mood. Do not overreact in this, William.”

Coffin’s posture stiffened and his battered leather jacket rose at his neck like the fur of a confronted cat.

Despite his demeanour, however, his voice was still and empty.

“Hey, if you wanted self control you should’ve talked to the Mute.”

With that their palaver ended, and Bunny and Will exited to discover the casket already transferred into the RV that would carry Pisky to his ultimate destination.

It was a long and silent ride home.

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

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

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 seventy-eight.

Tonight we present Coffin: The Drop of the Shoe, Part 2 of 4
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp378.mp3]Download MP3
(Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4)
(RSS / iTunes)

This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Skinner Co. Store

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 return to our tale of arcane murder and questionable dinner parties as Will Coffin, urban shaman, and Bunny, his apprentice, travel northward.

Coffin: The Drop of the Shoe, Part 2 of 4

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

Perhaps the proximity to death reminded their driver, the last crew member of the Phantom Ambulance, of his own recently lost companion, or perhaps the phantasm kept to himself to prevent exposing the strings of saliva entwining amongst the spiraling teeth beneath his paramedic’s face mask. He could not help the desire, even if the carrion that might be his meal was forbidden.

Whatever the case, Bunny was happy the ring-mouthed chauffeur wasn’t feeling conversational.

The procession’s first stop was a short one, but, as Will explained it, still a diplomatic necessity. Wide Eye, the animal lord who held sway over the lands to the north of Capital City, was a ruler in decline, with his presence barely felt in his realm even in those days of growing power – yet, after a moment of silence over the corpse, the massive golden-pupiled owl had extended the smaller set of its four gray wings to summon a brown mass of rats bearing upon their backs a proper casket in which to lay the visiting dignitary’s remains.

The box was made of simple wood bound together with tree-bark twine, but the lumber – a collection of driftwood, ancient and splintered downed maple, and fragrant fresh pine – had been etched and shaped by a multitude of beaks and claws. A single shard no bigger than Coffin’s thumb might hold a magpie’s pattern intricate enough to be mistaken for Victorian wallpaper, while other slabs held delicate spirals dug by chittering and weeping squirrels. The only gap in the construction looked upon Pisky’s shadowed face, and in that poor light it now almost appeared as if the raccoon had found some peace.

Coffin had spent his brief time outside the surrogate hearse making insistent phone calls that otherwise would have felt inappropriate in the sanctified hush of their catafalque, but, two hours later, he finally broke the rattling quiet of the ambulance’s steady highway pace.

“I remember one time – in the mid-’80s I guess – when this woman came to us for help. Francine. She was a nice lady; big hair, heart, and hips. She was having issues with her husband, who she was sure was possessed.

“She was the sort to keep to herself, but he was the type that liked to roam downtown with the boys while wearing the too-tight pants of the era. On three or four occasions he’d woken her in the middle of the night. Once he was jabbering in a language she couldn’t understand, the next he was going through some sort of naked ritual dance in the living room.

“Sandy asked around, but none of the dead folks had heard anything. We were starting to wonder if another magic peddler was moving in on our territory, so we began taking turns following him in the evening.

“She figured what was going on on his second outing and set the trap.

“It was a fairly simple thing – he was heading into Mierau Park, off of Fifth, and it was as shady then as it is now. He must have just done another bump of coke, or whatever he’d bought, when he came down the last stretch of sidewalk to the subway.

“He was be-bopping to himself, his shoulders swaggering, and suddenly there was a five-foot-tall talking raccoon in a full tuxedo – Pisky insisted on the tux – demanding everything in his pockets.

“You’ve got to picture it, the guy was deep in Don Johnson territory: sport coat, pastel shirt, white guy Jheri curl, the whole thing. He pulled out a big baggy of suspicious powder, a wallet fat with the bills he planned on blowing that night, and a ring of keys, but Pisky didn’t even blink, he simply tossed it all in the air and ate the whole collection.

“Well, Francine’s fella wet his pleated teal trousers and ran. Far as I know he gave up his weekend ways.

“Pisky, though, spent the next two days raving about ants.”

Bunny shifted on the bench opposite and did her best to chuckle, but her mind was weighing the murder of a being that had lived hundreds of years.

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

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

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 seventy-seven.

Tonight we present Coffin: The Drop of the Shoe, Part 1 of 4
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp377.mp3]Download MP3
(Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4)
(RSS / iTunes)

This week’s episodes are brought to you by The Skinner Co. Store

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, Will Coffin, urban shaman, and Bunny, his sobering apprentice, are notified of an arcane murder.

Coffin: The Drop of the Shoe, Part 1 of 4

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

The restaurant, Spinerette’s, was packed with deep red leather and thickly varnished mahogany, but, from his view behind the small porthole in the swinging kitchen door, The Insomniac could see only the end of the banquet table that had been set at the center of the room. A forty-ish woman in a well cut suit, with close cropped graying hair and more than a passing resemblance to Judy Dench, was standing for a toast. Her champagne flute was in her raised right hand, and a skittering collection of thin-legged arachnids marched in and out of the sleeve cuff of her gesturing left.

In whispered Spanish the meal’s chef, Santiago, caught the intruder’s attention.

“You need to go,” he said, “there are only a few servers on hand, but they’re definitely better friends with those people than I am, and they’ll be coming for the next course shortly.”

Nodding, the sleepless man’s sharp elbows cut through a turn.

He asked, “how will you explain the missing meat?”

“If these people are dumb enough to think I’d believe I’m just cooking a bunch of eccentrics a roadkill meal, fine, I’ll tell them I tossed it in the rear for the mutt that raids the dumpsters.

”Listen though, I regret ever having had a part in this. Will – will there be problems? I meant no offense.”

Each step jarred the ache behind his eyes, but the meddler was moving quickly now, the paranoia of not being able to see who might be coming adding speed to his feet.

“I honestly don’t know,” he answered as he shuffled along a chrome alley of knives and hanging pots.

Entering the walk-in freezer, he took in what was left of the massive racoon. The beast’s ears were pierced with a dozen copper loops, but it looked as if someone had ripped out a dozen more, and, even though most of its lower body had been butchered to the bone, it still required two oversized black garbage bags to hide the shaved flesh of its torso and the canine grin full of shattered teeth.

Once the job was done the salvager retrieved his phone and messaged the man who’d saved him from the horrors that lurked in his dreams, then, with the bagged corpse straining his exhausted arms, he slipped out the back door and into the night.

* * *

Two hours later, Coffin and Bunny were in possession of the stretched and ripping parcel.

They were in an alley five blocks from Spinerette’s, and the sun was rising.

“Holy ####,” Bunny was saying, “no disrespect meant to the dead, but it’s like the set of a Nightmare on Elm Street is leaking out of that thing.”

A lack of transportation had hindered their arrival, and it was not the sort of neighbourhood in which a sack leaving a conspicuous trail of blood would go unnoticed. The hiding spot, behind the fenced rear of a spa that would open in the next forty-five minutes, was the best their informant had been able to do when a broken fibula had punctured the plastic.

Will, who’d hoisted the sacks to see if he could stem the flow of gore, dropped the remains without ceremony.

His trip to the now-abandoned restaurant had been brief.

Clearing his throat, he said, “I’m sure the back entrance used to be haunted by the leftovers of a guy who caught a broken beer bottle in the neck in the early 1990s, but he wasn’t there. In fact, I walked a half block over to talk with a woman who bled out from a failed abortion, Bernita, and she’s missing too. She was a soft touch; always happy to trade info for whatever family gossip I could scrape from her niece’s blog.”

Though she’d been left behind to keep watch on the remains, Bunny’s gaze had landed on everything in the cement lot but the cadaver.

“You’re sure this is Pisky?” she asked.

“Yeah, not a lot of other gigantic raccoons full of piercings in this neighbourhood,” replied Will. “Did you hear what I said about Bernita?”

“That dumb bastard saved your life, and this #### is sadder than weeping ####ing kittens with emo haircuts – still, you don’t seem terribly broken up over it.”

Coffin shrugged and began to dig in his pocket.

“What’d’ya got in mind?” asked Bunny.

“Calling the ambulance,” answered Will.

“Little ####ing late for that, ain’t it?”

“Not that kind. I plan on having a – vigorous conversation – with whoever’s responsible, but first we need to take a trip.”

Within moments the pair, their driver, and the corpse began their long northward procession.

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

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

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 seventy.

Tonight we present Coffin: Looking Down, Part 1 of 1
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp370.mp3]Download MP3

(RSS / iTunes)

This week’s episodes are brought to you by We Are Not Here To Please You

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, Will Coffin, urban shaman, tells a tiny tale of woe to his unusually miserable apprentice, Bunny.

Coffin: Looking Down

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

Bunny was furious with her nose and everything around it.

She was sure pancakes, fry grease, and the cologne of the guy two booths over, were giving her a migraine.

“F##k Denny’s,” she said.

Will looked up from the club sandwich pictured on his menu and shrugged.

“It’s cold. You’d prefer to hang around on a bench with snow in your shoes and no feeling in your fingers?”

“How is anyone supposed to know we’re here?”

“Consistency.”

For a moment the bar she normally would have been sitting in came to mind, and Bunny nearly opened her mouth to follow up on the conversation – the problem, of course, was that the bar reminded her of good stories and dancing with the three Steves and every other excuse she’d ever used to get drunk.

She might have complained about how hard she was finding sobriety. She might have told Will about the monstrous figures that sometimes seemed to shimmer at the edge of her vision. She might have launched into the actually rather eloquent argument for permanent drunkenness that she’d written and re-written in her head while shaking and sweating beneath her sheets.

Soon, she reckoned, but not yet. Instead, she repeated herself.

“F##k Denny’s.”

Coffin took in the way she was picking at the skin beside her thumbnail, the bobbing of her leg, and the utter lack of focus she was showing the menu.

He asked, “have you found the Morrow diary?”

Beneath the table the tap-tap-tap of her bouncing boot heel ceased.

“Nope,” she replied, “I’m still gnawing my way through the clusterf##k littering the hallway bookshelves.”

Will scanned the post-lunch stragglers for anyone close enough to overhear, then started to read the details listed beside the Philly Melt.

Nodding, he said, “it opens in July, 1972, and it starts pretty boring.

“Conrad, its author, talks about buying a second car, the scores of his kid’s little league games, and enjoying the occasional cigar. That’s about as exotic as his tastes get. He loves his wife, his son, and his train set – in that order.

“The set was one of those old-school affairs setup on multiple tables. H.O. scale countryside and green felt as far as the eye can see. He called it Macropolis. Based on what he describes I assume the thing absorbed most of his basement. Twice he mentions knocking out walls to make room – once before the death of Agnes, his wife, and once after.

“His description of how it started put me in mind of Victorian London, but with more steam trains plodding through rows of fake trees.

“Agnes seemed nice, although I only have what he wrote to go on. She must have been a patient woman to have put up with that level of nerdery. There are a few scattered reviews of drive-in movies they saw with Dean, their kid, snoozing in the back, and they tended to spend their Saturday nights drinking gin and tonics together while playing cards with friends in the kitchen.

“She got sick in early August, and she was dead by mid-October. ”

Coffin paused there, as a server had arrived. Her name tag declared the pixie-cut wearing teen’s name to be “Carrie.”

“Ah, f##kin’ Denny’s,” muttered Bunny, her eyes quickly dropping back to her menu.

“What can I get you today?” asked Carrie, but Will caught the twitch in her smile.

Decisions were outside of her current capability, so Bunny turned on the girl. “What’s the least s##tty thing you sell? Actually, gimme the second least s##ttiest as well, I need options.”

With a grace that Coffin thought spoke well of her, Carrie ducked forward and jabbed a finger at the photo of a towering burger.

“That’s definitely not shitty,” she said.

“Fine,” answered Bunny, “I’ll take three.”

Frowning, Will considered her order, then his wallet.

“Just coffee,” he told the teen.

Bunny’s mind was already elsewhere. She’d taken to listing every individual item in the restaurant and internally telling it to f##k off.

The lights were too bright and the cutlery was too loud and sobriety was just too goddamn hard.

Once Carrie was beyond earshot, Coffin asked, “you covering lunch today?”

Though her roommate was still well down the list, the obvious implication that her ass was broke was enough to convince Bunny to jump ahead.

Her face puckered, and Will prepared his ears for an extended auditory assault.

An in-breath was as far as her retort went, however. She hadn’t paid for a meal in months, and she knew it. She had one friend left, and she was about to compare him to the worst sort of cattle rapist.

She felt her eyes grow wet. She was suddenly only mad at herself.

Her chin sagged, her shoulders collapsed, and she asked, “the f##k’s the point of anything anyway?”

Coffin cleared his throat.

“The diary restarts in February ’74,” he said. “Conrad was still mourning, and there’s no more mention of little league games. I think he started writing again for the same reasons he re-focused Macropolis: He was seeking direction.

“His project, he’d decided, would mirror the town he and Agnes grew up in. Sometime in 1973 he tore down pseudo-London entirely and started laying out the massive black-iron train engines of the 1940s.

“The notes become obsessive: Plans for how to approach what wasn’t built, ways he could modify hobby shop figures to fill in for people he once knew, scrawled listings for upcoming swap meets that seemed likely to yield useful architecture.

“It gets so bad that I was almost surprised when Dean is mentioned a few months in. Until then it was as if he’d died too, or at least like he’d been sent to live with a distant relative.

“He only received one line of notice – that they’d stopped at a farm, on the way back from a rummage sale where Conrad had scored some bungalows, and the kid had convinced him to let him have a dog.

“The mutt, which Dean named Beagle Bailey, actually gets a few more footnotes after that, but once he’s housebroken both he and the boy fade into the background again.

“Late in the summer, while buying a stack of teeny bicycles from the trunk of a station wagon parked at the edge of a farmers’ market, a toothless grandmother looks over at him from her lawn chair and pegs him instantly.

“‘What is it?’ she asks, ‘dead child?’

“He didn’t wonder how she knew till later, but he answers, ‘wife.’

“The page following that is ripped out, but the results are obvious.

“The next entry is two days later, and he’s talking about ‘the process.’ Macropolis has a new Mayor, he reports, Mr. Madigan. Mr. Madigan is a short man – well, shorter even than his tiny friends – who wears a top hat and sports a thick white painted beard.

“Mr. Madigan is named after the real Mr. Madigan, and his appearance is as close as Conrad can recall from his childhood. More impressively, the new Maddigan has quickly taken to helping with the construction of his town.

“Upon being provided with sewing scissors, for example, the miniature mayor takes to trimming the cloth and felt shrubberies. A police force of three quickly follows, then the Morrow family doctor, the teen who Conrad envied for working the soda fountain counter, and as many of the man’s classmates as he can remember.

“The classmates, children really, need teachers, and the teachers need a principal, and the principle needs a maintenance crew – and the cycle continues until one morning Conrad wakes to discover a train has hit Glen Herbert from third grade.

“Now, the impact itself wouldn’t have been so bad, but the Macropolans’ hand motions make it clear that Glen had been sent flying from the edge of the table. I can only assume Beagle Bailey figured it was a bug he was chewing.

“Conrad erects a plexiglass wall around the outside of his fiefdom, zones and develops a graveyard, then organizes a funeral so the people of Macropolis can gather to say goodbye.

“A week later, though, he gives in to temptation and builds a new Glen. Still, by the way it reads, he was plenty angry with Dean for having let the dog into the basement in the first place.

“With a bit of work he gets a fountain setup at the center of town. He builds a post office, then organizes a theoretically functional postal system. There’s really very little the mailmen can do, given that none of the town’s inhabitants have functional fingers or writing implements, but everyone in Macropolis seems pleased to have something to do.

“The incident with Glen Herbert kept him from ever animating any dogs, but the memories of a big black Tom that used to howl outside his window brings him to create a few cats to prowl the thumb-wide alleys.

“Making them speak was beyond him – probably beyond me too, if I’d ever been able to track down the ritual he’d obviously ripped out.

“Anyhow, he couldn’t help himself. Like a train barreling down the tracks he ran his memory right to the end of the line. The second last figure he painted and brought to life was Agnes at sixteen.

“He couldn’t talk to her, like I said, but she seemed to understand his lopsided conversations all right, and he would often find himself passing the hours simply watching her.

“It still wasn’t enough though. He placed a perfect replica of his own boyhood home, then he began painting a mini him.

“The last few entries are rough. Conrad grapples with the fact that he built a perfect simulation of everything he wanted that he’ll never be able to enter. Less than a week after his project was complete, Morrow put a gun in his mouth while standing at the cusp of this creation. I guess it says something that the papers reported that Dean found the corpse two days later.”

Three burgers and a coffee arrived, and there was a beat of silence as Carrie did her best to politely toss the food onto the table and sprint away.

Finally, once she’d collected her bread and beef in a row, Bunny asked, “what happened to the little b#####ds? Is there a pint-sized Stepford sitting forgotten in some basement?”

“No,” answered Will. He blew on his coffee. “They must have crawled down the corpse and scattered. Maybe they’re living in the walls of the house, maybe they spread out across the neighbourhood, or maybe the dog got ‘em.

“It was actually Dean who gave me the book, and it was the last of Macropolis he had.

“He was in his mid-twenties when I visited, but he’d started a family of his own in the same house: Him, his wife, their own young son, and old man Beagle Bailey, who was asleep by the door. Dean had sold or given away everything that hadn’t run off, and said I was the only person who’d ever come around asking – till then he’d just believed his dad was a nutter. I think my showing up made Dean hate him slightly less, at least”

“Sweet weeping dog balls,” said Bunny, “what the f##k was the point of that story? Which are you telling me, to stick a gun in my mouth or that I’ll never achieve my dreams? F##king f##k, man.”

“No, I’m saying instead of building a fantasy in your mind that you can never achieve you should buy a goddamn dog and start moving on.”

For a moment the air was filled with the noisy entry of a trio of college boys in too-tight t-shirts, then, with a sigh, Bunny pushed one of her pearl-white plates across the table.

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

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

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 sixty-six.

Tonight we present Coffin: Vision, Part 1 of 1
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp366.mp3]Download MP3

(RSS / iTunes)

This week’s episodes are brought to you by Tales from the Archive

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 find ourselves locked into a conversation with a vagrant as our urban shaman, Coffin, his apprentice, Bunny, and perhaps even the creeping dead, watch on.

Coffin: Vision

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

Bunny was finding some hours better than others, but it was cold outside and her denim jacket felt like little more than a pair of pasties as the north wind elbowed its way along Capital City’s sidewalks.

She’d been trailing her shaman roommate, Will, to Czech It Out, a West Slavic restaurant that was actually better known for its broad red-brick patio than its menu. The fact that her tongue had regained the ability to taste a palette beyond fried and salted items was one of the few comforts she’d been able to latch onto since finding sobriety, and she was determined to fill her time with new tastes even if she had to sit at the tiny interior tables the place used in the winter.

They’d just stepped off the bus, a block from their destination, when Bunny had begun to seek something to focus on other than the approaching woman.

The lower quarter of her beige raincoat was covered in a spray of mucky snow, and her legs, beneath, were lost in layers of faded jogging pants. The frayed sweater collars that were visible behind her jacket’s missing top button seemed to have been selected from similar running sets, but not the same ones.

If she asked for some change, Bunny decided, she’d give it to her – but the nouveau gourmand knew that if she could get away with looking like she hadn’t noticed the thickly-lined eyes and trembling fingers she gladly would.

Then the story had come in a relieved rush, and Coffin had done nothing to stop it.

“I was coming out of the McDonald’s,” said the woman, “and I noticed him in the crowd crossing at the walk. It’s nothing but waves of people rolling back and forth, like the tide, down by the mall, but I couldn’t miss him. He looked surprised. I’ve never seen anyone so wide eyed. Scared too, like he’d watched someone kill his dog and he wasn’t sure if he was next.”

The chronicler – who, upon a further inspection, appeared to be a rough-worn forty and not the sixty Bunny had originally guessed – stopped her high energy recital and turned a full circle, scanning the distant sidewalks and slush-heavy road.

With the stranger’s back turned, the hungry ebriate tossed her roommate a questioning brow, but Will simply pushed the the black leather that made up his office’s uniform into a shrug. Every one of his multitude of zippers was as tightly shut as possible, but she could tell from his stance that it was his intention to wait the newcomer out.

However, she’d also just seen him thumbing a rare message into his cheap phone, and, together, the two actions convinced Bunny that he knew something she didn’t.

Squinting, she did her best to find warmth at the bottom of her shallow pockets.

The woman continued. “It startled me because, even though he was on the other side of the crosswalk he was staring right at me. I don’t have much to spare for clothes lately, so sometimes people judge, but it wasn’t a look like that. It was like he recognized me. It was like I’d done something.

“My first thought is to turn back and go inside, but then the light changed and the messenger bags and the briefcases were coming at me and I felt like he was in the swarm somewhere, getting closer.

“I started walking away, towards downtown. Fast. My legs ache fierce on a day like this, but I can still jackrabbit when I want to.

“Three blocks down I ducked into a Whole Foods to catch my breath and get some warmth in my toes. A clean cut college kid started following me around though. I know I’m not the the type that’s supposed to in there, but I explained that when it’s cold, it’s cold. He blushed, but he still told me to leave.

“Wasn’t the first time I’ve been asked to leave. Wasn’t even the first time I’ve been asked to leave that Whole Foods.

“I turned to go, though, and there was the scared man, standing on the far side of all the organic meats behind the butcher’s glass display. His face was terrified. Ugly terrified. His chin was low and he was screaming without noise and every part of him was trying to pull away, like he was at a rollercoaster drop and realizing he hadn’t done up his seatbelt.

“That’s not the worst of it though. It was as if an invisible giant had placed the palm of their hand against the little bit of bone at the top of his nose and started pushing. His skull hadn’t shattered, exactly, but it had buckled and bent, causing him to stare in two different directions.

“I’m not a drinker, or I try not to be, but that was too much for me. I bolted and didn’t look at anything but my feet till I was digging out my change bag to pay for a bottle of Bacardi.”

The tale drifted into the wind as the haunted woman’s gaze settled on a form on the horizon.

Bunny was nearly convinced the figure would be carrying the smashed features of the story, but, when he finally turned from the door through which he’d apparently exited, he was no more damaged than a mild case of acne that any sixteen-year-old might carry.

As the distant boy was joined by a friend in a puffy black parka the storyteller found her thread.

“I couldn’t drown the ghost, though I tried pretty hard. If I kept moving it wasn’t so bad, I’d see him in the reflections of shop windows or across the subway platform, but when I stopped he’d creep as close as he could. Sometimes I get distracted, and I think he knew it, ‘cause he’d wait until I was lost in a bit of news scrolling across an on-sale big screen TV or checking an outdoor ashtray for leftovers, and he’d step up right between my shoulder blades.

“You can’t hear him, but you can – you can hear his lack of noise, if that makes sense. You can hear the emptiness on your neck.

“Your ears tingle with the nothing.

“I – my memory plays tricks on me a lot, but I remembered your bench. Your benches. Your stores. Your offices. Whatever you want to call them. It took me a long time to figure how to get to there, and they were both gone when I arrived.

“That’s why I’m so glad to have bumped into you like this. He’s – I think he’s right behind me. I think he knows we’re talking and he’s hiding in my shadow.

“It’s worse now. I mean, it’s been getting worse the whole while. His face is coming apart. He – he had blue eyes, but they’ve both popped. Shards of bone are pushing through brain and the yellow fat beneath his skin – I don’t even know that he means me harm, but just looking at him…”

A braying laugh came from the teens, who were now waiting out the crossing light some ten feet off. The leftmost, in the puffy parka, seemed embarrassed that they’d been noticed, but the other, the first they’d seen, gave the trio a broad smile and an invitation to make something of it.

Bunny turned from the wet cheeked woman to the worn lines on her partner’s face then to her own cracked Doc Martens.

She felt like a teetering glass statue. She felt like a lopsided tower in a high wind. She felt like a rag doll on the cusp of a cliff face.

She felt like a goddamn drink.

“Hey, you grimy mouthed dog-ball juggler,” she said to the lingering grinner, “clear the f##k out or I’ll lodge my boot so deep in your d##k hole you’ll be pissing polish.”

As they watched the boys retreat into a welcomed change of lights, Will cleared his throat and asked, “Georgiana, do you remember why you know where I used to set up shop?”

The woman’s pale lips flushed. “No, I’m sorry, I know – I know you’re sort of a sorcerer or something, but my mind is full of holes these days and sometimes things slip away. Honestly, I don’t even really recall how I know you are who you are, I just do.”

Coffin nodded. “Do you remember Donna?”

Her tongue said, “I’d have to see her,” but her wrinkled forehead said “no.”

“I’ve already, uh, summoned her,” continued Will. “The last few times you were here we learned that I’m just not powerful enough to help you. Donna’s talents, though, are greater than my own.”

As if on command, a Volkswagen Jetta pulled tight around the corner and came to a stop along the damp curb. Its driver, Donna, exited, her thick and wavy halo of hair silhouetting her features against the street’s gleam of ice and white frost.

A nod from Coffin was enough to convince Georgiana towards the passenger seat, and the shaman exchanged nothing more than a silent wave with the newcomer before the illegal parking maneuver ended and the pair pulled away into traffic.

“What kind of magic man bullshit was that?” asked Bunny. “Who was she and when the fuck have you ever not gotten your goddamn Egon Spengler on and busted some ghosts?”

Will chewed at this thumbnail, then replied, “Georgiana had been with her husband for nearly twenty years before the accident. Nice couple, no children but a lot of love for each other. Apparently collecting old radios was their big hobby. It was a head-on coming back from a swap meet. She got cracked up pretty badly too; plenty of brain damage but most of the insurance money went to getting her legs stapled together enough to allow her walk again.”

“She doesn’t remember anything from before?”

“Sometimes, sometimes not. I think it’s the crash, in slow motion, that she’s seeing play out. I take the time to listen when she finds me, because a friendly ear beats a blade when fighting fear, and Donna, her social worker, appreciates the calm when she arrives.

“Respect is all the comfort I can offer, though. We’re not equipped to exorcise spooks that solely exist in someone’s head.”

Blowing heat into her numb fingers, and coming to the surprising realization that she regretted not having a chance to invite Georgiana along, Bunny pushed her feet towards the restaurant.

The cup jiggling man she passed along the way was terrified at the sheer force of her eye contact, but he gladly accepted the fiver she tossed on top of his collection of change.

By then she was only feeling hungry enough for soup anyhow.

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

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

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 sixty-five.

Tonight we present Coffin: Misfire, The Very Brief Tale of the Romance of Josephine Hart and Edward Love, Part 1 of 1
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp365.mp3]Download MP3

(RSS / iTunes)

This week’s episodes are brought to you by Tales from the Archive

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 hear a tale of feverish love as told by a feverish, but sobering, drunk.

Coffin: Misfire, The Very Brief Tale of the Romance of Josephine Hart and Edward Love

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

Between the snow and Bunny’s ongoing withdrawal, Coffin was pretty much done with February.

As a younger man he’d taken every chance he could to be in a warm locale during the month, but the duties of his office, and the sort of entanglements that settle around old men, now limited his travel.

He’d once faced a headless goblin whose flesh was speckled with writhing tongues, but even a shaman of his experience did not relish moving from the heat of his blankets on so bleak a morning.

It had not helped that his dead wife had spent the evening slapping the remnants of her bloodied hands on the glass balcony door at the far end of the apartment. He’d denied her the satisfaction of a confrontation, but he’d lain awake most of the night staring at the shadows on the ceiling, and he knew she knew it.

Coffin was surprised, then, to discover Bunny sitting on the counter reading when he finally managed to touch down on the floor and enter the kitchen to swat at his ancient coffee maker.

He was doubly stunned to find there was also already coffee made.

“What’s that?” he asked in an attempt to fill the time until his mug cooled.

“A Blackhall book,” answered Bunny without looking up, “‘Frontier Magic: An Occult Journey Through the Canadas During the ‘30s and ‘40s.’”

She was wearing a clean Led Zeppelin t-shirt and a pair of jeans that were probably threadbare intentionally. Her box-dyed hair, weeks overdue, was pulled back in a ponytail, and she’d managed not to drop any abrasive language through the entirety of her first sentence of the day.

With a nod, Coffin considered that she might just be finding her feet.

Taking a leaning position against the stove, he said, “I skimmed it way back. It’s not really a book of magical instruction, it’s more like a travel journal about things he encountered. I think he maybe briefly actually considering publishing – but of course he couldn’t. Maybe he was hoping he could do it after solving the problems he caused.

“Anyhow, I thought you found his Victorian stylings painful?”

“Those long ass titles remain ####in’ ridiculous, but – well, it’s a lot easier to understand if I read everything in Dick Van Dyke’s #### accent from Mary Poppins.

“Do you remember the bit about Josephine Hart and Edward Love?”

Before answering Will blinked twice – slowly. “I’ve only been standing for five minutes and all of the caffeine I possess remains outside of my body. You’ll have to remind me.”

Bunny pulled her legs out from under her and let them dangle from her countertop seat, then began the tale.

“She’s traveling west and he’s headed east when they meet at this, you know, hotel. Not a sneakin’ in the back door so you can sneak it in the back door sorta place, though – a classy ####in’ joint.

“They didn’t know each other, had never met, and would only be in the same place one night.

“Now, apparently back then Cupid was an actual thing? Like, there was this armed semi-invisible imp wandering around Hunger Games-ing people into bed?

“Blackhall seems to think that in his old age the love-dispensing little bugger was either growing lazy, senile, or sentimental – whatever the case, he got to firing away because he thought their names looked real ####in’ cute together.

“I swear I’ve met ####in’ yuppies who’ve married for the same reason. The little ####-sack wearing arrow chucker probably thought it was poetic.

“It’s the Victorian era though, so things start slow. They eye-fondle from across the parlour. He moves to a table closer to hers, she drops a hanky so he has an excuse to begin a conversation. She had a head of black hair so thick she could tie a man up in it, and he had the body of a farm boy used to carrying stubborn calves from the barn to the dinner table.

“They sit around chit chatting a while, and Josephine’s head is swimming. Thing is, she’s not much of a go-with-the flow kinda lady. Her brain is telling her that a fellow who spends the exciting moments at the opening of an apparent relationship discussing the finer details of horse maintenance is not the sort she would normally be interested in, and somehow she manages to pull herself away to her room.

“Fully consumed by her, however, Eddie followed looking for a little make-out action.

“She couldn’t help herself, but, again, Victorian era in a proper proper spot, so they tongue wrestle for a minute at her door and then she locks herself inside, alone.

“They go to bed, both probably wank furiously, then, the next day, they decide to elope.

“It’s not what she wants, but, without Edward on hand to ruin his own chances, her imagination has spent the night being pushed by the mind-controlling prick of that little ####in’, uh, #####.

“First, though, she’s gotta go meet his parents. Worse, he pretty quickly starts yelling at her.

“I guess love has a different definition for different people.

“They’d decided that the pony he rode in on wasn’t going to cut the entrance they were looking to make, so they pitched in equally to hire a wagon and driver who could bring them out to the Loves. To keep costs down, though, they agree to share the space with another fellow who’s headed about half the distance in the same direction. While they’re waiting, Josephine starts chatting with the guy about how late their ride is – you know, the small talk any strangers make – but Ed puts a hand on her elbow and pulls her aside.

“He gives her the speech – I guess it hasn’t changed much from then till when Tim gave it to me.

“Thing is, sure, Edward’s a dick – but he’s also kind of right. There’s a knife on the man’s hip and he smells of quality whiskey, which makes him exactly the sort of gent that Josephine usually prefers.

“She almost says something, but the carriage arrives and he basically shoves her in; hurts her ribs squishing her into the corner, and sets their stuff on the opposite bench so that the supposed competition has to sit at the furthest possible distance.

“Cupid’s poison is still doing its damndest, but she’s having none of it. They start whisper fighting and it quickly escalates. She shouts, he shouts harder. She sticks a finger in his face, he slaps her. You know how it goes – same ####, different year.

“The driver is chuckling to himself about it, but the other passenger, Mordecai Brown – a name the baby archer would’ve seen no ####ing poetry in at all – tells Edward to lay off.

“Edward responds with a suggestion involving the man’s mother and an array of farm animals, and Mordecai just shrugs.

“By then Eddie’s pissed, but he’s taken to trying to subtly squeeze the #### out of her arm while hissing at her to shut the #### up.

“He’d told her he had a nickname back at home: The Bull. He’d made some awkward #### jokes about it during their short courtship, but with his thick fingers around her wrist she understands how he really got the name.

“‘Haw haw,’ laugh’s the driver, holding out his lash, ‘trouble with the new bride? You outta try one of these – always fixes my missus.’

“Well, that’s it, she’d had about e-####in’-nough.

“See, Josephine had a nickname too: Death’s Duchess.

“They also had classier names for their serial killers back then, I guess.

“She had these panels she’d carefully crafted into her dress, almost like big pockets, that were held closed by magnets. Underneath, holstered below the frame of her crinoline, were a ####ton of monster pistols. She’d used them plenty to rob carriages, at least until she became uncomfortably well known on the far side of the ocean.

“Now, you gotta remember the era – these weren’t Glocks, they weren’t even six-shooters, they were single shot pistols with howling dog mouths – and she always strapped on eight of them.

“She used four on Edward – the first two out of a lover’s rage, the second two because he was killed instantly, the spell was broken, and she was generally in a ####ty mood.

“Josephine was surprised to discover Mordecai covering the driver, who had a blunderbuss held loosely to his chest and the tip of Brown’s knife under his left eye.

“‘There are a couple ponies pulling,’ Brown says, ‘I’m happy to surrender my comfortable ride if you want to split ‘em.’

“They didn’t though, they took the whole god#### wagon and left the wagonman with piss down his legs and the corpse at his feet.

“By the time Blackhall heard their story they’d taken to inviting well bankrolled man-hunters north, with news of recaptured slaves, then murdering them for their money.

“####ed up, but still kinda romantic.”

Coffin nodded, but said little. In truth, his attentions had drifted away mid-telling.

The slapping at the glass had begun again.

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

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

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.