As promised, this will be the cover for the first short story I plan on publishing through Amazon.
The Man Behind the Bar – Coming 9 April 2017
The past never really stays hidden or forgotten. Ben Stingler left his past for a quiet life, until a young man steps in his bar, and brings with him all the things Ben tried to put behind him five years ago. An overdue debt is back on the table.
I stepped out of the shop and scanned around me for anyone watching. The barrel of the gun felt warm through the leather holster. Across the street, a little girl with a huge swirling rainbow-coloured lollipop – couldn’t have been older than maybe six or seven, the lollipop almost half the size of her head – broke free from her mother’s grip. She halted, turned, and looked at me.
A voice growled in my ears. “I too create corpses, mortal. You’re next.”
The girl giggled and stuck her tongue out at me.
Today’s prompt:
Two dogs, with envelopes in their mouths, padded by her side. The boy in the stained green hood pointed at them. “You must choose one and do as instructed. Failure to do so will be catastrophic. For you. And if you think the Boss is joking, look what happened to me when I refused to do as as I was told,” he said and lowered his hood.
“If we want to be completely honest with each other, my short friend, it was the silence that woke your queen, not I.”
The constable still struggled to maintain his grip on the ever shifting apparition that looked like that feisty woman from last year, the only one who had managed to ruin a perfectly well-organised execution. “Don’t give me that. Silence doesn’t wake anyone, nor does it put them in a slumber afterwards. We saw you -”
“You saw me doing what exactly?”
“Pulsing,” the constable said and made a point by waving a fat hand before her face when no other descriptive word came to his mind, “over her head. Now she can’t wake up.”
“That’s ’cause she stopped listening. It demands her attention. Mine as well, and your voice is so annoying.”
“Listening what? What does it say? Who says it?”
The shimmering woman paused, focused on the air around her, listened earnestly. “It says, ‘we should talk about your unborn ancestors and the crimes they’ll commit’.”
The surface of the small puddle of water rippled and a quarter of an inch high tsunami raced to its edges. A deep resonance barely touched the soles of my shoes, sent vibrations up my shin. It was a clear day, not a speck of cloud on the horizon, and people came out to feel the sun on their faces, hands brought over squinting eyes as shields. Those dressed heavier now shed the extra layers. Perfection. Except the fact it was December and a blizzard was raging five minutes ago.
Stacey looked up, thin perspiration coating her forehead. She pointed to a dark and shifting mass on the sky. “What’s wrong with the birds?”
