Fish for Friday!

First off - thanks to SRH & Lynn for their comments on yesterday's post. They were both exactly what I needed to hear. I took your advice and tried to stop sweating it today and just enjoy the writing for its own sake . . . got 1,500 words on "First" for my effort!

Gracias!

So today -as promised- I am giving you a peek at a small section of "Fish". It is not my usual type of epic fantasy work, it's more of a modern horror/thriller mix. This one was rough to write, it brought up lots of bad memories from dark places I thought I'd buried long ago. Fair warning: the language is a little rough and the subject matter is less than charming.

As always: copyright by me, all rights by me, do not copy, fold, spindle, or mutilate without written permission from me, etc.

Have a great weekend!

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I puked right then and there. I tossed the entire contents of my belly up onto the tops of my Chuck Taylor’s and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Jesus, if you had felt half of it . . . The raw, naked, terror that poor kid had felt. The desperate pleading in her heart for Mommy and Daddy to come and save her, to make it all safe again; make the world the warm, smiling place it was supposed to be before the Smelly Man had grabbed her.

Oh Christ, the Smelly Man! We could feel the stench of him, not just the foul breath and dirty sweat scent Cindy had gagged on, but the putrid reek of his soul. My god, it was foulness like nothing either of us had ever even dreamed in our worst childhood nightmare. The slightest brush of those twisted, self-hating, warped, emotions felt like you were doing the backstroke on a cesspool with your mouth open. When it hit me, I heaved again, though there was nothing left to come out this time. When the spasm stopped, I went down on one knee, my whole body shivering and not from the cold. I looked over at Jiff. He leaned against the timber support of the bridge as if it were the only thing in the world that could hold him upright. Shit, it probably was. Tears streamed down his face, huge rolling droplets that welled up straight from his heart.

“God, Boomer. Oh, God!”

He couldn’t find any words for it but then, he didn’t have to. I pushed up off the ground and ran to him in a half shamble, throwing my arms around his neck and pulling him close. He didn’t even try to wrap his own arms; he just slumped to his knees, sobbing in huge violent jerks, his face buried in my stomach. I held his head and smoothed down his hair, barely even noticing the tears that were dripping from my own chin and splashing into his wind-tossed hair.

“He . . . he killed her, Boom,” he finally said when the tears his body could produce were all but exhausted. “He did things to her -really bad things- then he killed her.”

His words were a rough whisper, his throat swollen from crying. “How could he do that, Boom? How could somebody do that to her? She was so . . . nice!”

She was too. That’s the thing about life: shit things always happen to the good people while the assholes skate through like Dorothy Hamill on ecstasy. How did the world get like this? Did God make it this way as some sort of a test, or did we just do a stellar job of fucking it up all on our own? Either way, it sucks and good people like Cindy Gross are the only victims. I once heard a preacher say: “The devil protects his own so they can continue his work among us!” Seems logical to me -if you believe in that sort of thing- but you’d think God would have brains enough to try the same tactics; keep the good folks around long enough to help the rest of us poor ignorant fucks. Never works that way though. Maybe the Almighty’s gone senile, or maybe he just missed the memo on how to protect your own people. Ain’t that a cheery thought? I held Jiff until he cried himself out and we headed back towards the park and home.

As we passed the assembled police and federal agents who’d come in to take over the search I paused, my arm still around Jiff’s shoulder. His tears had reduced to dry hiccups and a good case of the shakes. The police -every last one of them- were crying. Crying big, snuffling, drippy-nose style, not the quiet type of mourning you usually see in adults, but kid style. Nine-year-old style. At first I thought they’d found her body, but quickly realized these were cops, not likely to fall apart at the sight of a dead child. I’d heard Jiff’s dad talk about some of the things he’d seen as a volunteer fireman and I’d had nightmares for a week. I figured these guys had seen as much and worse. No, they weren’t weeping because they’d found her, but because of us. They could feel Jiff’s anguish and it was tearing them apart. We’d never broken the link, we were still Pushing! I tried to pull away from Jiff’s heart but it was like trying to pull chewy caramel out of your teeth. He didn’t want me to go, so his heart just stuck onto mine in desperation.

“Jiff, we gotta stop! They can feel us, man!”