Kwik Krimes (2 page)

Without the normal constraints of a printed book, which can be neither too long nor too short, the editors of these innovative sites have the freedom to run stories of any length at all. Many are very, very short, and would almost always be unsuitable for traditional print magazines or books. Some of these stories, I further learned, show remarkable creativity on the part of the authors who produce them.

It seemed a good idea, then, to collect a lot of these nasty little tales and assemble them in a book. It is tempting to draw the
analogy of a meal made of tapas, lots of little dishes of wonderful variety, rather than a single giant portion of one dish, however delicious it may be.

This compilation went a little further than plucking the best short-short stories off the Internet, however. I thought it would be fascinating to see what authors could conjure if given the specific assignment of producing a mystery, crime, or suspense story of no more than one thousand words.

The range of style, plot, tone, voice, sensibility, and characters assembled here will astonish the reader. I didn’t think it possible to have this kind of variety, given the extraordinary restriction of so few words in which to tell a complete story, but here is the evidence that I was wrong.

Most of the stories, not surprisingly, are criminal adventures rather than detective tales because, let’s face it, it is hard to hide clues and have enough reasonable suspects in a total of about four pages. However, having said that, I must prepare you for some remarkable revelations in these pages that will turn your expectations upside down. Be prepared, too, to be at the edge of your seat as these hugely talented writers create the kind of suspense that a less accomplished practitioner would need ten times as many pages to concoct.

Please indulge me for a second while I express my gratitude to Ian Kern and Nat Sobel, both of whom who did a lot of reading and made so many excellent recommendations of stories for this collection.

Otto Penzler

New York

December 2012

Patricia Abbott

T
he first time Kyle Murmer’s mother tried to kill him, he was nine. But he couldn’t remember a day when he didn’t worry about it. At night he asked God to smite her, but he had no hope this would happen, and it did not.

“Let me see your teeth.”

Her personal supply of dental tools twinkled fiercely in the transparent case on the top medicine chest shelf. Her left hand held his chin as the right one forced his mouth open.

“People not much older than you have lost all their teeth.”

The desire to bite down on her fingers was nearly overpowering.

On the days when she got up early enough for a frenzied completion of household chores, she hadn’t taken her medication. On good mornings, the ones when the perphenazine made her sleep late, his father fixed them a bowl of cereal and they tiptoed out of the house, sharing an embarrassed smile.

She was waiting for him when he came home from school in October of fourth grade. Hair curled, makeup applied perfectly, neatly dressed in a khaki skirt and white blouse, she wrapped panty hose around his neck. It happened with such speed, he wondered if she’d practiced it on the back of a kitchen chair.

“Where have you been?”

Her nails were inches from his face, and beads of spit, scented with dental wash, shot into his eyes. He wasn’t surprised. His life so far seemed exactly like a place where such things happened. A place where mothers might practice lassoing kids.

“At school.”

“Liar,” she said, dragging him around the kitchen by his neck. “The devil has you in his grip.”

“I
was
at school,” he repeated, trying to wait out this bad stretch.

That’s what his father always called it—a bad stretch. Kyle and his father were always waiting for the other shoe to fall—another phrase his dad used a lot.

“They called and said you weren’t there. Said your desk was empty, no coat on your hook.”

“That was on Monday.” His mouth was so dry, his voice scratched it.

Her eyes looked like the dead blooms on an African violet, and a sort of eggy smell began to radiate from her mouth.

“You forgot to call the attendance line, and they called here. On Monday,” he repeated.

Her grip on the panty hose loosened. Then she was sitting at the table, collapsed and sobbing. “Don’t tell your father. I wanted to lift you up to God.” She raised her arms, and he tried hard not to flinch.

But he did tell his father; how could he not?

“Let me see your neck.” His father ran a light finger over the bruises. “Your mother means well, but she gets confused. Must’ve been a hormonal thing. Maybe the thought of having another kid just broke her. Probably flushed her meds.”

Another kid—no one had told Kyle. In fact, he understood none of what his father had said but knew he’d have to be even more careful.

His father also told Kyle he’d found signs she tried to kill the baby.

At the Church of the Living God, even birth-control devices were forbidden—an impediment to the holy duty of women to bear as many children as possible. Children were the lambs of God. Abortion would mean expulsion.

When Kyle was sixteen, his mother attacked him while he slept. Her fists were hammers on his head. In her pocket was a small knife. She tried to carve Aramaic words into his forehead.

“The devil will flee once you’re marked.” She’d flattened a crumpled piece of paper with the proper marks on his bedside table. A flashlight shone on it.

His mother was jailed for several weeks, and he went to school with two strange marks on his forehead. Nobody asked about them. Such things were not unheard of at his school.

Kyle began college in Ann Arbor and never came home if he could help it.

“I have to work at the library over the break,” he told them. “I need to study for finals—I’m helping out at my church.” The last was a lie. He’d given God a chance and been turned down.

“Kyle.” It was his sister, Jolene, whispering on the phone. “Mom thinks I’m having sex. I don’t—I don’t even know what having sex means.”

Lambs of God didn’t need such information. Information led to experimentation, ruin.

“I’m locked in my room. She’s looking for a way in.”

He borrowed a car and drove home. His mother was in the garage, looking through his father’s tools.

“Kyle,” she said. “Can you help me find something to jimmy a lock? I hate to use a blowtorch. The wood’s oak. Maybe we can remove it with a screwdriver.”

Her eyes were fixed and dull, dead moths again. “Jolene doesn’t understand I’m trying to lift her up to God.” She looked at him closely. “Like I did with you.” She smiled beatifically.

He put out his hand, and she gave him the blowtorch. He used it without hesitation, watching her cheap acrylic blouse go up in a flash, her face melt away. Her screams seemed inconsequential coming from a black hole as they did.

She was cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.

He didn’t try to deny it when the police arrived, didn’t try to run or hide. He’d heard about Judgment Day often enough to recognize it when it came.

T
HIS STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN
S
PINETINGLER.

Patricia Abbott is the author of the e-book
Monkey Justice
(Snubnose Press) and co-editor of the anthology
Discount Noir
(Untreed Reads). More than one hundred of her stories have appeared in print and online outlets. She won a Derringer Award in 2009 for her flash story “My Hero” and has had three stories included in Ed Gorman’s yearly crime-fiction anthologies. She lives outside Detroit.

Richard Aleas

I
t wasn’t the rain, Jack knew, that would keep them from going into town. Mother would say that was why, and Father would nod behind his newspaper, and Celia would believe it because she was only seven and believed anything you told her. But the rain had nothing to do with it.

Jack got up from the table and went to the window. Buckets of the stuff were being flung against the glass. The waterspout on the side of the roof was pouring like a faucet. Dark clouds made everything gray.

But rain doesn’t last forever, not even a storm like this one. By the day after tomorrow, it would be gone. Then they’d roll the tent out again and bring the elephants and horses out of the traveling cages they were cooped up in. They’d string the high wire and hook the trapezes and lay the nets and set the harnesses. And then Kenny would take his place behind the barred window of the ticket booth, and he’d thumb off tickets one by one to each kid who showed up with three dollar bills in his fist.

Would he wonder why Jack didn’t show up? Oh, probably not. After the scene Mother had made—in front of everyone, in front of everyone!—he’d probably be glad not to see Jack in the crowd.

Jack kicked the wall, as hard as he could.

They’d promised. He’d x-ed off the days on the calendar they’d given him for Christmas, had watched as the crisscross of ink grew, snaking from one week into the next, toward the last day of the month. The last day before the tents were tucked away into the monster hauler that would follow slowly as the performers’ vans lumbered onto the highway and out of town. It was all Jack had asked for, for Christmas. It was what they’d said he’d get.

Jack closed his bedroom door and hung a metal coat hanger on the inside knob. It’d clatter if anyone turned the knob.

He opened the closet and knelt inside, in front of his toy chest.

Mother had screamed. That’s how Jack had known she was there. He hadn’t seen her; he’d been looking at the green and blue woman inked into the flesh of Kenny’s arm. The woman had moved as Kenny drew, her upraised arm waving from side to side.

And then the scream. Were there words, or just the sound of it? There were words later, many words, words for Kenny that Jack had never heard his mother use and words for Jack, too, shouted as she pulled him out through the flap of the tent and stood him in the sunlight, surrounded by kids from school, and rubbed at the ballpoint ink Kenny had put onto his arm.

That night it had started to rain.

Jack unpacked the top layer of toys and pawed through the folded sweaters underneath. He pulled out the box he found there.

It was a flat box that said
Brunckhorst’s
on it. The picture was of green leaves, and the box had a minty smell to it. Jack had no idea what had come in it originally.

Before opening the box, Jack turned his left arm palm up. Kenny’s half-completed drawing was still there in ghost-lines on the red surface, rubbed raw by Mother’s scrubcloth.

Comet will take that off, she’d said.

Celia had stood in the doorway watching, three fingers in her mouth and her eyes showing that she wasn’t sure if she was seeing something bad or something good.

Where had Father been? In the living room behind his newspaper. He’s your son, he’d said. Jack had heard the pages turning while the chlorine scoured his skin.

His arm was still raw, but it didn’t hurt very much anymore. And under the pink, still visible if you looked hard, he could see the faint lines of blue, the half-finished woman with her upraised arm.

The Brunckhorst’s box was packed with Kleenex, which Jack carefully placed next to him on the floor. He took out the knife that lay underneath, held it by its heavy handle the way Kenny had showed him when they’d cut the tent’s binding cords together.

The day after tomorrow.

The rain will stop, Jack thought, and I will go to the circus.

The pseudonym of an American mystery writer and editor, Richard Aleas was nominated for both the Edgar Allan Poe Award and the Shamus Award for his first novel,
Little Girl Lost,
and won the Shamus for his second,
Songs of Innocence,
which was described by the
Washington Post
as “devastating…an instant classic.” The author lives in New York City.