there are recent stories posted under the NEW STORIES heading
SHORT STORY INDEX
Matched to story numbers or story letters in the lower part of the column to the left. You probably won't see the links from a phone. I did a little order change with the POTPOURRI, throwing the numerical squence off, so designated letters to those stories. It's mostly in order, but might have to fish for some STORY A, 76 TROMBONES follows below this list---a glitch I can't seem to fix. You' can also find it clicking by on STORY A
COLLECTION ONE, MODERNITY
STORY 1 IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT
a tale about being a teenager in the Bronx, I'd think to say. maybe Holden Caulfield finds West Side Story
(also listed under novellas, easier to read there in one part)
STORY 2 THE ASSASSIN
a French Resistance tale about a young man about to die, who'd prefer to live first
first published in ADAM Magazine, Volume 10, Number 1
and
reprinted in LVP Publications anthology REVISITING THE UNDEAD, 2019
STORY 3 WILLY AND THE LAUNDROMAT
first published in ADAM Magazine, Volume 10, Number 10
STORY 4 SANTA'S HELPER.
first published by KOAN MAGAZINE, an imprint of Paragon Press, 2018
STORY 5 WHAT ARE YOUR DREAMS LIKE?
published by Havik Press in their 2019 anthology MAGIC TRICKS
STORY 6 DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
being earnest is important
STORY 7 THE COOL KID
cool as a state of mind
(accepted for publication by teachafar)
STORY 8 HOTEL WITHOUT A NAME
it's a place where the numbers matter
STORY 9 MODERNITY
set in Hansan, rural South Korea
encountering others
STORY 10 NOSTALGIA
published by Austalasia Assoc of Writing Programs AASP, Meniscus Jourrnal. Issue 10, No 2, in 2023
a man and woman stuck on a ledge, who aren't sure anymore they want to get rescued, and about which
I'd blurb "Magic Needs Illusion"
COLLECTION TWO
ACCOUNTS AND GLIMPSES
STORY 11 15 SECOND GLIMPSE
could you take it?
STORY 12 VAN GOGH SYNDROME
emotion, immortality and artificial intelligence at a downnscale Bangkok tourist hotel
published in Havik Press's 2018 anthology RISE
the novella LIKE A HUMAN, published by Running Wild Press, 2019, is the sequel to this story
STORY 13 GLIMPSE OF THE PAST
why do we have to go back?
STORY 14 "What?...WHAT"
something wrong here?
STORY 15 SHATTERED REFLECTION
we don't all see the same thing
STORY 16 DETERMINOL
what's happening. where we're going
STORY 17 REVERSATOL
which way do we want to go here?
published by Straylight Magazine, 2017
STORY 18 THE ORIGINS AND CURRENT STATUS OF STICKBALL IN BANGKOK
the game's the thing
STORY 19 ABSOLUTION
we all need a little forgiveness, especially two small boys who killed a butterfly
STORY 20 THE GHOST OF FAIRFAX
a strategic ghost, in Fairfax California
COLLECTION THREE
CURRENT AND CONTINUING
STORY 21 OUT AND ABOUT
when you'll need permission to walk
STORY 22 GET A LIFE
before you can't
STORY 23 THE UNBURIED
one funeral director's adjustment to the high cost of dying
STORY 24 NIGHT SHIFT
what happens in the night stays in...
STORY 25 DOWRY
published June 5, 2024 by London based wriers' co-op fictionontheweb.co.uk
"Money can't buy me love" Or...?
STORY 26 PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
is it inallienable?
STORY 27 A RECON; SLEEPY PEOPLE
published by (in paretnhesis) magazine, april 2020
STORY 28 ICE MAN
forgotten but not gone
STORY 28 (b) ICE MAN 2
STORY 29 OCEANIC
"boos and bongos"
what does the ocean know?
STORY 29 (b) OCEANIC, Part 2
"all washed up"
STORY 30 EYES AND EARS published by Underwood Press
sequel to novella HOLLYWOOD VERITE
STORY 31 JUST A LOOK Part 1 and Part 2
(the eyes have it)
stories ON A SPACESHIP CALLED WANDERER and WHO? and SHADOW AND LIGHT are under NEW STORIES
POTPOURRI
(mostly old and older, a few more recent)
STORY A 76 TROMBONES, 101 DALMATIIONS 20,000 COCKROACHES
might spoil your appetite
******* there's a glitch, this story comes in by scrolling after the end of this list *****
STORY B THE MAN WHO READ YESTERDAY'S NEWSPAPER
no news is not always good news
STORY C FLIGHT
one woman's plane trip into the past
STORY D THE DAY THE WAR ENDED
a small boy learns about change
STORY E HER0
more unwelcome change
STORY F CASTLE BY THE SEA
some things never change
previously published in CAD Magazine
STORY G ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
English lesons, loyalty, trickery, ejection into the cosmos, struff like that
STORY H EULOGIES AND IMAGES
what's the ghost of a merchant seaman doing in the New York theatre district?
STORY I (EYE) OUT BEYOND THE STATUS QUO
STORY J INTERVIEW WITH A DEAD MOVIE STAR
gone but not for...got...ten
STORY K THE RIVER
life flows through it
76 TROMBONES, 101 DALMATIANS, 25,000 COCKROACHES
short story
by
Patrick Breheny
(with apolgies to whom I am sure are the many fine people of Bakersfield, who I don't know, and can't deserve it. it. Bakersfield here is a purely fictional town.)
No story is truly ever over. Life does continue, unless of course the principal character is dead at the end. Even then, sometimes…Ah, I get ahead of the tale.
It all goes back to a radio announcement Horace Grimes heard while driving, about a fella’ somewhere who was setting a new world record by sitting in a glass case with 25,000 cockroaches. Seemed the fella’ liked them, liked to eat them raw, so they was just going to be snacks for him until he---I don’t think it was break any old record, just set one of his own. Food wasn’t going to be a problem, not t’all, so he didn’t much need anything special in there---just some cases of bottled water, and a construction site type of portable latrine. Yes, WAS going to be important considering his diet. Stop that now or how can I tell you?
Horace heard about this record setter while he was driving his old Chevy pick up truck from the farm near Bakersfield where he grew melons, turnips and beans. As y’all know, B’field is the city to those of us farmers near Highway 99 a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Now somebody in Los Angeleeze might not get excited about a contest like that----What contest, you ask? Didn’t get to it yet, but a’course the contest between Horace and whatzis-whoever-his-name-is-wherever, which later turned out to be John Stover. That one. Naturally, Horace took him on, or what would I have to tell you about? The last drought?
You understand what its like to drive our two lane blacktops here running through that flat, baked sunbeaten farmland that only aint in the middle of nowhere because it aint in the middle of anywhere. On the horizon all around, the green of crop fields meets the merciless blue sky that looks like some kind of fiendish bottomless lake with that big hot orange ball floating on it, surrounded by a few pathetically useless white puffs. There aint a tree, is there? There aint a building. And a mirage or hallucination of any type would be a gift from God. And we know, when you drive, you listen to ANYTHING you can fiddle up on the radio---oldies but goodies static, syndicated Wolfman Jack recorded thirty years ago, evangelical ministers, Mexican evangelical ministers in Spanish, Mexican mariachi music, Mexican rock and roll oldies but goodies, any friggin’ human voice, recorded or live or dead, in any language, will do. A hitchhiking prostitute, it there was such a thing here---I hear there’s some in Los Angeleeze, and I seen one once in Bakersfield---would seem like an apparition of the….well, I won’t blaspheme. I think some of those Mescan charismatics I listen to are Catholics.
I remind you of all this so’s you understand WHY a fella’ like Horace---hard working, honest and dumb’s the day is long, God forgive me and God help ‘im, and the day is long here, aint it, flat sunrise to flat sunset---why he would be enticed to challenge somebody like this demented roach eater in, I think, Australia, where exactly that is I don’t know, but then if that pop singin’ gal don’t know, why should I? Horace done it, you must understand, because there was NOTHING else to do. The occasion rose up. It allowed him to do something else besides plant seed, cultivate, harvest and puff up Muriel. It gave his life a new variety.
Now course we have some buildings aint visions, and Horace that day he heard the radio announcement drove to one of them, Grade’s Lube and Tune at the junction for a grease job on his pick up he could well have done himself, but like I been stressin’, we all do things to break up the monotony. There was a fella’ a few years back, Clay Royball---maybe it was decades---used to ride the roads all afternoon sometimes, drivin’ faster and faster, until he’d get himself chased by Tex, the cop then. Tex’d persue him for hours and not arrest him when he caught him. It gave Tex something to do too. He’d just write a speeding ticket when Clay ran out of gas, or when he gave up and drove home, Tex would follow and cite him there. I think Clay saw the money he spent on those tickets as entertainment expense. You’d think somebody like Clay might go out in a ball of flames, but he passed away in his sleep one night, sitting on a rocker in front of the TV with the rasslin’ on.
I heard Horace mentioned to young Dexter Grade at the Lube and Tune---Dex was under the rack greasing the truck---that he’d heard on the radio about this roach eatin’ guy-a-somewhere, but there was nothing from him yet about trying for his own record.
Dex remembers it for his own comedy, when he said Carla Smith at the Palace Hotel on Main Street in Bakersfield should hire him as the new housekeeper.
After the greasing, Horace drove back, back naturally being to the turnip, melon and bean farm. Oh, you notice I changed the order of the crops? Yes, and that’s got nothing to do with priority or anything like crop rotation or first planted, first harvested. No, no. It’s a beanmelonturnip farm, a farm of melons, beans and turnips, a turnipasparagusmelon
bean farm---Anyhow. I do have this story to tell you, thank God for all miracles, small and big.
Horace got back and parked on the gravel in front of his modest little rectangular one story wooden house. It wasn’t a shack and not a cabin, those words would be too harsh, but it was a wee house diminished to insignificance on our green prairie. Horace had seven little ‘uns, and a factory they come out of, the Muriel I mentioned, who’d once been a fine looking woman, and still had a pretty face, but never went down in the middle after the last three or four, part of that bein’ that as soon as she did go down, Horace had her right back up again.
She was, Horace himself once informed me, the first person he told of his intention. And aint that only right? His wife, his confidant---tell her what he was going to do to get away from her and all those kids for as long as he could hold out to beat the other’n.
And the way he had it planned from the git, he WOULD know how his competitor was doing, because Muriel would come by once a day and shout into the cage to tell him. In actuality, it was sometimes one of the bigger kids who took up that chore.
To hell with what’s been put in the ground and when it’ll come out, Horace had him a MISSION. His wife and kids could harvest or let rot. He was not letting any Aussie or whatever he was beat a red blooded American farmboy at roach sitting. Incidentally, there was nothing record-wise being achieved by the roach eating, that was just a frill for this first fella’, but Horace decided that was the way to go too, in case for instance he won and the first guy came back to ask for a record of a guy sitting longest while eating them. He didn’t want to lose by any loopholes or technicalities. If an Aussie or New Zealandic could eat them, so could Horace.
So into the cage goes Horace, right downtown on Main Street in Bakersfield, and wouldn’t you know, directly across the street from the Palace Hotel. Dexter would say, maybe they was delivering take-out. Once a headline in the Bakersfield Herald said WILLY COMES HOME when Councilman White’s son came back to visit, so old Horace was the biggest story in town since V-E Day. But he couldn’t have no radio or TV in his cage, even though the local radio station was partly sponsoring him and covering the event. Ground rules. It would make it too easy and distracting for both of them. He only got his news, all he cared about getting anyway, from Muriel or one of the kids. And all they ever said was, “John Stover’s still in there.”
Until John Stover wasn’t, and then they stopped coming to tell him anything, because they didn’t want to LIE to him on top of everything else they was doing. You see, this Aussie guy---I don’t know for sure to this day he was Aussie, let’s just say he was and let that be, s’not as important as what happened to him---this fella’ lasted six weeks eatin’ them roaches and sleeping among them, and eating them and sleeping. Cause he had to sleep, you see. Then one night when nobody was looking in because everybody was pretty much tired and disgusted of the whole business---well, one night the roaches took revenge. When somebody did check up on him in the morning, he was a goner.What goes around comes around. The roaches et him for a midnight snack.
Now you could pretty much calculate Horace was a-goin’ to meet the same fate if he stayed at it, and all he had to do was stay one more hour to win after Mr. Stover’s demise---some damn confusion with the time difference and not figgerin’ in daylight savings time in the U.S.---but things happened pretty fast that day before Muriel or one of the brats had a chance to drive or bus out to the city to give him the good news about Stover.
What happened first, after t’was obvious Horace was going to set the record, was that his suspicions about John Stover as a goal post mover proved founded, because that’s exactly what Stover’s family did. They claimed a posthumous prize for John Stover as the record holder for a human bein’ bein’ et by 20,000 roaches. I know! There WASN’T 25,000 anymore, because he’d ingested approximately 5,000 of them in the six weeks. Approximately! Of course nobody did a head count. Shh!
What happened was somebody that day put up a monetary prize for Horace to beat that record, to be the human eaten by more than 20,000 roaches. Presented a problem too, because he had the big old country boy appetite, and had been chomping away like all get out, same’s Stover. Family was goin’ to have to get more roaches, maybe from the people who first went along with it all, or the Palace Hotel, or somewhere, and document it.
Don’t know who put up the money. T’was anonymous. I’ve heard Roach Motel. Okay, okay, but you ask me a question, I give you an answer. Dex’d say that’s just another name for the Palace Hotel anyway. Maybe was the Diner’s Club. Nah, don’t go away. Course I’m just havin’ a little fun.
We farmers didn’t know anything about any prize money, and we all wondered why Horace stayed in the cage, but thought maybe it was just his orneriness and determination to set a record nobody could ever beat, or just to stay away a bit longer from home, or wait out the harvest, or maybe a little of all those.
I wonder what he was a-thinkin’ when his family stopped coming with news about the competition, but whatever he thought had gone wrong, he just hung tight to make his own record. And we all know what a-happened, as could be expected. Yeah, LET’S take a moment to reflect. Mmm, mmm, mmm, what a man won’t do for glory!
Now this is the part where I mean what I said about no story ever really bein’ over. You’d think once, may he rest peacefully, Horace croaked, would be all over, but, well, with the prize money eventually public there come out, as if you stomped your foot in the dark kitchen and turned the lights on real fast, all kinds of well intentioned, sacrificial suicidal nuts who hoped to leave their families money too by bein’ et by even more roaches than Horace (the difference between them and ol’ Hor’ bein’ they KNEW and wanted to be roach feed.) There was ones wanted to set a record bein’ et by other insects, and two others wanted cannibals to eat them if anybody could find some---and of course if they couldn’t find any, somebody could offer to become a cannibal to set his own record.
This kind of leads to a clue about maybe who put up the prize money for Horace to beat John Stover’s bein’-et record, because all these people demoting themselves down the food chain led to a new reality TV program. Now you took issue with my little joke back there, and there’s no evidence that the Diner’s Club, the credit card company, had any hand in it (or leg or thigh or breast, ha-ha-ha. Okay, okay okay!) but you know that reality TV show called itself “Diner’s Club” for as long as they could fight off the law suit.
Well, you can imagine the commotion. The pope hisself condemned it, backed by the pro-lifers, and for the first time ever, the pro-choicers were in agreement with them. There were protests outside the studio. There were even counter demonstrations by a group who called themselves S’Nuff, as in s’nuff of everything now, they was annihilationists and wanted the end of the world, not to fulfill any religious prophecy but because we’d been around too long already and it was about time to call it quits, we’d just made a ballacks of it all. Had a point, didn’t they?
It was the grossest entertainment in the history of humanity, and that includes the gladiators and those throw-them-to-the-lions games. Seemed everybody complained except the s’nuffers, but all of America was watching it. It had the greatest ratings since The Sopranos. There was more people watching that show on Tuesday nights than watched any of the Super Bowls. And most of the time, there was nothing to see. Just feel anticipation waiting for it to happen. Some of those contestants coated themselves with honey or sugar to entice their varmints and keep viewer interest up, but didn’t usually have the hoped-for result. The critters just filled up on that and quit. Best strategy was to starve ‘em into it, eat a few of them to get ‘em mad. And regarding the cannibals idea, the D.A. in Los Angeleeze was a real bad sport about that one, said he couldn’t charge insects with homicide but damn well would any humans et any others, no imported savages getting’ by on ignorance of the law.
People said Horace’s family murdered HIM, and I mean, they did, didn’t they, but how you gonna prove that? A little malicious negligence maybe, sure, but ol’ Hor’ killed hisself with his foolish go-on.
People had Tuesday night popcorn parties, beer drinking parties, pot smokin’ parties, the more Starbucks types et chocolate ants and drank latte with their marijuany, but you know, there was a study done a few decades ago---this time I’m right about the time gap
---up there in the cold of the Yukon or Alaska or the Antarctic, on a bunch of GI subjects, and they showed them pornography until they just got tired of it. This was before a pornography INDUSTRY, y’understand, so maybe t’was Bakersfield syndrome. I mean, it was only magazines, no films, so how much variety did it have? Did they get tired of the same old magazines, just a-lookin’ at the same folks doin’ it, no matter how good looking? Everything needs regeneration.
At any rate, the novelty diminished with TV watchers too. Not so many people were coming forward to meet a revoltin’ end, and the network picked up higher ratings with a new million dollar give-away every week, for the best personal insult, in a program called You’re A Chump.
Old Horace’s family has him mummified and entombed right in the glass case on Main Street, exactly like those two taxidermied Bolshies, Lenin and Stalin, used to be. The worst is that the case still has a roach problem, and from time to time, right out in full view of little kids in their strollers and grannies and men of the cloth, they get to nibbling some more on Horace’s hide until somebody sprays them off a him. Might say of those roaches, even if you DO succeed, try, try again.
Nah, come back, come back now. Ah, well okay, g’on then. Heck with you I’m just about finished talkin’ anyway. Time for m’own dinner. Liver tonight, and I aint sayin’ where from neither. Hee-hee. Well, thank you, then, and I surely hope you’ll be enjoying your supper too.
What’s that? You never heard of that Diner’s Club program or t’other’n? Where you from/? You’re new around here. These fellas’ll tell you, you just have to take as faith what I’m saying, or I’ll start charging you ten cents a minute to listen.
No, you don’t have to buy me a beer from the cold box. I’m heading home now.
Hey? Well, maybe tomorrow.
The rest of you go on and fill those big overalled bellies of your’n. Eat all you can. You just never know when you’ll be having some hungry visitors come looking for a little dessert, and might be best to have a protective layer for them.
See you.
Yeah, same to you. If I do see you first, next time I could want to tell you what happened to the man who was always reading yesterday’s newspaper, like you. He saved himself a quarter a day too, and a quarter a day keeps the bad news away, ‘cause no news is good news.
No, didn’t turn out too good for him either. What kind of story would that be to be botherin’ people with?
Yeah, nighty night, now.
Bon apetit.