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  • Angry Levi (Flash Fiction)

    “Who’s our first volunteer for bear patrol?” Mitch asked.

    Huddled next to the fire eating mushy baked beans out of a tin plate, I exchanged covert glances with my fellow rookie scouts. None of the four of them looked anxious to volunteer. They kept their faces buried in their food bowls.

    Mitch snorted. “So much for Helpful, eh Joe?”

    Joe barked a laugh. “Untrustworthy lot we got here, looks like.”

    (more…)

  • Bobo’s Haunted Circus (Flash Fiction)

    Photo credit: Wee Willy Wicked http://stayingscared.blogspot.com

    Okay, guys. Chill. It’s getting dark. I need you all around the fire so I can keep track. Nobody wander off. Two steps into the trees and it’s pitch black. You’ll get turned around and lost. I don’t want to explain to your parents why their kid didn’t make it back home.

    Jimmy, come on. Why didn’t you pee when it was still light? Fine. Just to that tree there, no farther. Hurry. You don’t want Bobo to find you out there alone.

    What? You guys haven’t heard about Bobo? Hurry up, Jimmy! You don’t want to miss this. Finish up over there and hurry back to the fire.

    They say years ago, in this very spot, a circus pitched their big top once a year. Right where we’re sitting. They had elephants and dancing dogs, a high-wire act. They had everything. The Macelli Brothers owned it.  Giovanni and Enzo. They did everything together, and the circus was their dream. (more…)

  • The Fools on the Hill (Flash Fiction)

    Alan positioned the flashlight directly in front of his mouth and made eerie ghost sounds. The light, tainted red from shining through his flesh, made disconcerting shadows on the sides of the tent.

    “Bre-e-e-tt, are you afraid of the da-a-a-a-rk?” Alan asked in the same ghost-mimicking voice.

    “No, of course not,” Brett replied, all the while thinking Yes, yes, oh dear God, yes I’m afraid of the dark. But they were safe in the tent they had pitched in Alan’s backyard, Brett chided himself.

    “We should tell ghost stories.”

    Even in the dim light, Brett could see the wicked gleam in his friend’s eye.

    “I don’t know any,” Brett muttered.

    “Have you ever heard about the house on the hill?”

    Brett shook his head.

    “They call it the Fool on the Hill, like that Beatles song.”

    “What’s so scary about a fool on some hill?” Brett asked skeptically, and then wished he hadn’t asked because he knew that now Alan was going to tell the story whether he wanted him to or not.

    “Some crazy guy used to live there. Just a regular dude, worked at the factory, and then one day he just snapped and killed his wife and kids and boarded himself up inside of his house up there. Nobody has seen him since, and now it’s haunted by his restless spirit.”

    The flashlight was back to illuminating Alan’s mouth, and Brett watched, mesmerized.

    (more…)

  • The Devil’s Hole (Flash Fiction)

    Hole in the groundDuring the summer, I was allowed to stay up late, which usually meant bedtime was an hour or so after dark. But I stayed up with my mom, waiting for dad to return.

    She was reading one of her tabloids from the grocery store, and I had my nose in a comic book. But I don’t think either of us was getting much reading done. Every time we heard a car in the distance, we thought it might be him coming home with news.

    Around 11:00, a car finally pulled up to the house. The sound of tires crunching gravel on the driveway drew me to the window. Mom went to the door, but it opened before she could touch the knob. Dad came in with Mr. Johnson, both men covered in sweat and dirt. Dad looked shaken. Mr. Johnson helped my dad into the door and left without a word.

    (more…)

  • Shadow Puppet (Flash Fiction)

    If you’re looking for something profound and spooky that you can share with your friends back home, I can’t offer you that. I can only tell you what happened, what little I know, and from there we’ll take up the thread together.

    This thing … this, whatever it is, I don’t even think you could call it a man … I started seeing it about a year before my wife died. It scared the hell out of me the first time, when it walked into our bedroom, slow and smooth like it belonged. I guess it was about three in the morning, one of those times when you wake up and feel so exhausted you don’t even want to look at the clock. Because no matter how much time you have left to sleep, it won’t feel like near enough.

    When it walked in, this tall, thin man-shaped thing that looked like it was made of shadows, a jolt of adrenaline-laced fear shot through my body. My wife, Ellie, slept peacefully beside me, oblivious to the intruder. I both envied and hated her for that, as if somehow she had chosen for me to be the one who was awake and watchful and terrified.

    This thing, this Shadow Man, walked to the foot of the bed and seemed to consider us for a moment.  In truth, I have no idea. It had no face. How can you know what a shadow is thinking?

    (more…)

  • Whose Woods These Are (Flash Fiction)

    Hank woke up, drenched with sweat, cold from the dying campfire. His slimy body felt slimy, sandwiched within a soaked sleeping bag. For Hank, every morning was a reminder of age. His shoulder ached, jammed into the socket by the bone-dry ground. Hank winced as pain shot through his spine. His muscles played tendon tug-of-war. Hank always lost.

    Hank unzipped the sweat sponge sleeping bag and stood, careful not to surprise his left knee with any quick movements. If the fire died, he would have a lot of cold, cranky cub scouts. He had promised to keep the fire going, lest the dark consume them. The campfire stories were too effective. Already stressed by the lack of Xbox and what terrors may wait in the woods, the lack of a fire might make them snap.

    Hank decided to keep his promise and look for firewood, rather than risk playing the role of piked pig’s head in a live rendition of Lord of the Flies. He rubbed his eyes. His tears pushed away the fogged protein-haze of smoke-dried contacts that felt like scratch-and-sniff stickers on his eyeballs. Hank then noticed he was alone.

    (more…)

  • Stories Around a Campfire (Week Ending June 30)

    Over at the Confabulator Cafe, all our writers decided to do a little camping this week. As they sit around the fire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and kicking back with an adult beverage or two, they’re going to share some stories. Specifically, campfire stories.

    A campfire story is a spooky story told around a campfire. It could be a ghost story, a story of being lost in the woods, or even an urban legend (one of those stories that begins with “this happened to a friend of a friend of mine…”). The campfire is one of the most primal settings for storytelling, and the campfire story reflects our fears about the world. Often there’s a turn at the end of the story which leaves the listener wondering if being out in the middle of nowhere is really a good idea.

    So pull up a log and grab a stick for roasting. The fire is warm and it might help keep away the things that live out there in the shadows.

    See you next week,

    The Cafe Management

  • Do you have your own blog?

    For some of us, the Confabulator Cafe is our only internet home, and this is the only place to find our words of wisdom. The rest of us have dabbled in varying degrees with our own blogs, from personal to critique, informational to opinion. If you’re ever curious to see what we do outside of the Cafe, take a gander and visit any of the blogs mentioned below.

    Jason Arnett

    I’m on the Web at www.jasonarnett.com and have been since 2007. What you’ll find there are pages about the stories I’ve written, a short bio, and a page where I take on the somewhat daunting task of writing commissions for anyone who’s interested. I write about whatever interests me but I tend to focus on what I’m writing at the time, where the idea came from, what I’m doing to research it, and where it will eventually appear. I also talk about music, film and books. You know – all the things that go into one’s writing.

    Muriel Green

    No, I don’t blog. Unless one counts the Confabulator Cafe as blogging. I do, however, make videos which one can watch by going to documinutes.wordpress.com.

    Jack Campbell, Jr.

    You can find my home website, This Average Life at www.jackcampbelljr.com. I have samples of flash fiction that I have written, and I write about whatever else comes to mind. It began as my thoughts on various aspects of writing. It later evolved to be more about my thoughts on my life, as well as current events. I find that the things that affect you affect your writing, so my blog is mostly about how current events in both society and my life shape the art of writing.

    Kevin Wohler

    Yes, I actually have a couple of different blogs that I have managed over the years. I used to run a film blog, but that’s been on the back burner for a year or so. I also have a professional blog that I use for my copywriting career. But my main blog is The Creativity Well (www.kansasbard.com). I use it to talk about creativity, writing, and anything that grabs my attention. Though I don’t update it every week, I try to post something new every month.

    Sara Lundberg

    I’m a bit of a blog addict, which actually makes me a horrible blogger. I have half a dozen blogs, and I’m bad about updating most of them. The two that get the most attention these days (other than the Cafe, of course) are my personal writing blog Prospective Writer (selundberg.blogspot.com), and Red Wine Reminiscence (redwinereminiscence.blogspot.com), which is a blog I use to track and rate all of the different red wines I’ve tried.

  • Rhyme for a Reason

    I am the first to admit that as an appreciator of art, I am bone lazy. I like my paintings and sculptures pretty, my music melodic, my novels to have plots and sympathetic characters, and my poetry to rhyme.

    Yeah, the nerve of me!

    Each weekday morning I drift into consciousness to Garrison Kiellor’s Writer’s Almanac on NPR. Each morning he reads a poem by a contemporary author. None of them rhyme. What is up with that?

    I’ve been told that rhyme and rhythm are for children and song lyrics. As if Kipling wasn’t writing drinking songs? As if “Banjo” Patterson got his name because nobody in the outback could spell Benjamin? As if Robert Service wasn’t whooping it up to the strains of a ragtime piano himself?

    Poetry was once written to be memorized, recited, spoken aloud, listened to. This was how people entertained themselves and one another while riding the rails as hobos, while crouched over a campfire in the back of beyond, in the officers’ mess of a remote outpost, between decks as the ship pitched in the swells.

    The Iliad, when recited in ancient Greek, scans and rhymes. So do the Canterbury Tales, if you happen to be familiar with middle English. Rhyme and meter are primal. How did we lose them?

    I ran across a great line in a book I read last week. The author was remembering a conversation he had with a college English professor. The professor said that in Dickens’ time great literature was written to appeal to an audience of millions, but today great literature is written to appeal to a few hundred. I say that if only a few hundred get your stuff, you’re doing it wrong.

    Screw artistic pretentiousness— give me something I’ll enjoy.

  • Poetry in literal motion

    In college, I took a class on writing poetry—I needed another creative writing course to graduate, and this was the only one I didn’t have credit for already that was offered that semester—and it only served as confirmation about something I already knew. Poetry and I don’t get along. The final for that class was to describe who we were as a poet, and I believe I summed it up best by saying: “I am a reluctant poet.”

    It’s not that I believe poetry is a lesser art form, it’s just that it doesn’t click with me. I like things straightforward most of the time. If I read a poem about a dandelion, to me it will be about a dandelion—not the intangibility of life.

    I spent an entire semester writing poetry and having far more meaning read into it than I’d intended to put there. My usual response to “What were you feeling when you wrote this poem?” was “That it was due in less than an hour and I still hadn’t started it.” (more…)