Fantastic Fables of Foster Flat Read online

  Fantastic Fables of Foster Flat

  Fantastic Fables Series, Volume 1

  Orrin Jason Bradford

  Published by Porpoise Publishing, 2015.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Fantastic Fables of Foster Flat (Fantastic Fables Series, #1)

  A Little Foster Flat History

  Ellenore Finds Her Muse

  7th Avenue Buddha

  Elliot Savant

  The Diagnostician

  Charm House

  Babble

  The Gazebo

  Birthing Grapefruit

  Introduction

  ELLENORE LOSES HER MUSE

  A Message from | Orrin Jason Bradford

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  FANTASTIC FABLES OF FOSTER FLAT

  Suspenseful Tales with a Twist

  Orrin Jason Bradford

  Tucked away in a quiet corner of North Carolina lies the township of Foster Flat. By every appearance, it’s an ordinary place to lead one’s life, and the humble environs strike most as boring—quite a prodigious misjudgment.

  The population shares a mutual disapproval of new guests, and the reason for this will soon become clear, thanks to Mimi Rawlins, one resident who’s willing to indulge outsiders. For the whole of its history, Foster Flat has been home to staggering secrets and freakish phenomena. Are these ‘events’ the stuff of folklore? Overactive minds? Or more? You’re free to draw your own conclusions...should you dare to enter.

  You may also enjoy the science fiction technothriller FreeForm series.

  Pick up your free copy of Crash, the prequel at: www.wbradfordswift.com/crashlanding

  A Little Foster Flat History

  LET ME START OUR JOURNEY together with a brief introduction. My name is Mimi Rawlins. I was born and raised in Foster Flat, a small southern town nestled in the North Carolina mountains. For being such a small, normally quiet town, it has a surprising number of fantastic occurrences that I’ve had the privilege to witness in one form or another. In fact, I credit these bizarre occurrences with leading me to my career as a newspaper reporter for the rag, The Global Inquiry. Of course, you may doubt their validity. You’ll need to decide for yourself as to the truthfulness you’ll find in each fable. My role is simply to report upon them as they happened, or as they were reported to me by the honest, upstanding citizens of Foster Flat, many of whom have been my friends for most of my life.

  There’s not much information to be found in the state record books about the origins of Foster Flat, but my research did uncover the following:

  The village of Foster Flat received its charter from the North Carolina General Assembly as the township of Foster Flat on January 7, 1847, listing as its founder one Phineas F. Flat. Foster Flat’s original charter was fixed by the same Phineas F. Flat, who assigned the first five commissioners as the governing body of the town. The five commissioners took the oath of office and appointed a magistrate and a town constable under the direct supervision of...you guessed it...Phineas Flat. The constable also served as the city tax collector, city treasurer and the overseer of the city streets.

  Talking to some of the families that date back to the founding of Foster Flat revealed that the founder’s background and upbringing also influenced his eventual founding of Foster Flat. He was the child of a magician and the magician’s assistant. His mom was the magician and his father her assistant. Just one of many unexpected twists that made up Phineas’s life. Phineas grew up on the show circuit traveling from town to town in a gaudily painted wagon acquired from a troop of gypsies. It’s rumored that Phineas’s mother was of gypsy descent and passed the urge to travel on to her son.

  Thus Phineas had traveled thousands of miles over the first thirty years of his adult life, not to mention the many miles traveled with his parents as their stage hand starting at the age of ten. During these decades of travel, Phineas accumulated a wide assortment of weird and wonderful artifacts. Rumor had it that the common denominator of his collection was that they all held some seed of magic of one kind or another — some of dark magic, others of white and a few of the blackest of black magic. The story goes that it’s this rare collection housed in the subbasement of Phineas’s home that gives Foster Flat its unique magnetism for the strange and quirky.

  But, of course, that is all silly conjecture built on the shaky foundation that one believes in magic. And most Foster Flat residents know that it’s absurd...well, except for that time when...and thus the fantastical fables of Foster Flat were born.

  Whatever happened to Phineas F. Flat? No one knows for sure, though there are those who claim he was preserved by a local taxidermist after this death and can now be found in the sub-basement standing guard over his treasure. Others say that’s not true at all...that he was in fact still alive when the taxidermist got to him. But I digress.

  What is known is that Phineas Flat made sure to take care of his treasured artifacts as well as his family. He drew up an intricate plan for determining who would be the mayor of Foster Flat. Unlike most incorporated towns, Foster Flat was founded as a private piece of property owned exclusively by the Flat family. The majority of the property has been deeded over to various other founding families, although the Flat family maintains 100% ownership of Phineas’s home that sits in the center of the town on the highest point. Known by many as the Tower House because of its unique pinnacle shaped tower that is the highest point on the map for miles around, the home has been passed down through the generations from one family member to another. It is unquestionably the most unique, different, eye-catching and weird structure within five hundred or more miles.

  Let’s now meet the citizens of Foster Flat. They are good people by and large — average Joes and Janes going about the job of living their lives — working, shopping, eating, making love, playing, attending church. On the surface, all is calm, all is quiet...normal. On the surface. But every now and then, something happens - a ripple in the fabric of reality. The magic acts out, or overflows, or escapes its confinement, and the citizens are affected. Sometimes they initiate the ripple, sometimes they are the victims of it — sometimes both.

  Each of the fantastic fables included within chronicles these ripples. In the process of reading each story, you, the reader, will get to know the citizens of this fair town a little better. You will notice that the citizenry falls into three groups. First we have the “born and raised” founders who view it as their sacred duty to protect the special nature of their fair mountain burg. Then there are the implants who have moved to Foster Flat from elsewhere, and even though they may have lived there most of their lives, they are still viewed as the new neighbors by the founding faction. They too often have their own secrets to protect. And last of all we have the visitors, those just passing through. Most of the residents, be it founders or implants, feel it’s their job to make sure the visitors do not stay, especially if they become too nosy. But you, my friend, have a special invitation to visit this fair town through the pages that follow.

  Mimi Rawlins

  Roving Reporter for The Global Inquiry

  Born and raised in Foster Flat, North Carolina

  Ellenore Finds Her Muse

  LET’S START BY MEETING my dear Aunt Ellenore. Well, she’s not really my aunt, but I’ve known her as that most of my life. I knew Aunt Ellenore as a single woman who danced to the beat of a different drummer, something that many of her Foster Flat neighbors frowned upon. But she became a role model for a young girl trying to follow her own bliss and love for expressing her creative self as a writer. Many a night I would go to bed early just so I cou
ld curl up under the covers with a flashlight and one of Ellenore’s romance novels. My collection of her writing continues to be one of my prized possessions.

  While I found her early books entertaining, the quality took a dramatic leap when Ellenore finally found her Muse. Here’s how it happened.

  Mimi Rawlins

  ELLENORE Mishner discovered the Muse sleeping on her porch when she returned from her volunteer work at the local soup kitchen. Once again, she'd been convinced to help out at the homeless shelter by her best (and if truth be told, only) friend, Allison McKemp, the same way Allison always convinced her to do crazy things—by making her feel guilty.

  “You have to go. It's the right thing to do. You should want to help out those poor wretched people,” Allison had said. What had ever happened to, “It'll be good experience for your writing,” a common theme Allison had used in years past to spur Ellenore out of her tight little shell of a life?

  Well, maybe even Allison realized that ladling soup to an endless line of crotchety old men with halitosis from their rotten teeth might be a good writing experience for a Hemingway or Faulkner, but not for Ellenore, who only wrote stories of romance. She trudged up the walk to the white cottage with jade green shutters that had been her home for the forty-seven years she'd been on Earth.

  Ellenore looked up from the sidewalk, where she'd been concentrating her gaze to avoid walking on a crack so she wouldn't break her mother's back, even though her dear old mom had been dead for almost five years. Old habits were hard to break, and she'd avoided those dangerous cracks for close to half a century.

  But for some reason on this day, she found herself suddenly staring at a large lump of fur, leaves, and horns that had pushed aside the two rocking chairs that were normally lined up neatly on the porch. In the process, she stopped dead in her tracks on a crack. On the other side of town in a poorly manicured graveyard, Mrs. Mishner's backbone crumpled into a heap of dry bones.

  Ellenore's first inclination was to run screaming from the yard that had been her haven for so many years. But a combination of realizing the beast on her doorstep was snoring pleasantly away and her recent memory of Allison McKemp's advice from years ago, "This will be a great experience for your writing," kept Ellenore standing open-mouthed before the beast. Something told her this might just be the time Allison had been talking about.

  Ellenore pulled the dull gray wool coat closer around her frail body, suddenly chilled despite the day being warmer than most for this time of year. What is that? she wondered as she finally noticed where she was standing and quickly skipped a couple inches forward.

  She didn't have long to wait to have her question answered. No sooner did she think it than the mountain of flesh shuddered, looking strangely like a South Pacific island during an earthquake. It stretched its full length of eight or nine feet, licked its thin lips with a fat purple tongue, and turned its black-pupil eyes flecked with rims of gold dust full upon the diminutive Ellenore.

  "What are you staring at?" it asked in a voice much milder than Ellenore could imagine coming from a beast so large.

  "I was wondering the same thing," she replied, taking a short step back, landing once more on the crack.

  Is that a smile trying to form on the beast's face? Ellenore wondered as she fought off the urge to shudder, then run. Research...it's all research for my next story.

  “Why, I'm your Muse, of course,” the beast replied as it finished its stretch with a yawn. “I've been waiting for you to come home so we could get to work, but in the meantime, I've grown quite hungry. Could we go in where it's warm, and where you can fix me a hot meal?”

  My Muse? Ellenore puzzled over the introduction. She'd heard about artists needing to tap into their Muse but she always thought that had just been a metaphor...something most artists talked about as often missing, a convenient excuse for why they weren't writing, drawing or painting.

  A cough from the beast brought her back to the situation at hand. “Ahh, warm house, hot meal...inside, please,” the Muse said as it stepped aside to give Ellenore room to open the front door.

  “It's not locked,” she replied, slowly climbing the few steps to the porch. “It's never locked. You could have just gone in and made yourself comfortable.”

  “Oh no, I couldn't do that. Muses never go where they're not invited. It's not allowed – Muse Union rules.”

  Ellenore opened the door and walked ahead of the Muse, taking off her coat as she did so and tossed it on the coat rack next to the door. She was almost to the kitchen before she realized she was alone. She turned back to the door to find her Muse standing just on the other side of the door jam.

  “Ahh, what did I just say about being invited?”

  “Oh, sorry. Won't you come in?”

  “Thank you, don't mind if I do.”

  ELLENORE GLANCED AROUND her at the busload full of mostly parents with their kids and reflected on how she'd been conned into such an uncomfortable situation, this time by the Muse rather than Allison. She remembered just two days ago glancing down at the paper she had clutched in her hand to see the circled ad for the Bingham's Circus and Sideshows. Next to the bright red circle was her Muse's simple instruction—Go!

  She'd tried to get a fuller explanation from him—she'd figured out by then that her Muse must be male, given how much he ate and how little he seemed actually to like to communicate. With his mouth still full of her food, he'd circled the opening date with the red marker usually reserved for editing her stories, and then took another huge bite of his triple-decker sandwich.

  “But why do you want me to go to the circus? Circuses are for kids and families, and if you've not noticed, I'm not a kid and I don't have a family. Besides which, it's all the way out to the fairgrounds. How am I supposed to get there? Remember, no car either.”

  The Muse flipped the paper over a few pages and pointed to the ad about the expanded local bus service, then jammed another acre of sandwich into his already full mouth.

  So, here she was, riding with a bunch of squealing kids and worn out parents to the fairgrounds to see the Bingham Circus and Sideshows. At least the weather had warmed up a bit, and the sky was brilliant blue, the air crisp and clean. She'd never admit it to the Muse, but this did feel good. Who knows, maybe the day won't be a complete waste of time. And it'll be a great experience for my writing, she thought before Allison could jump in and say it. Of course, Allison had to come along. She was always with her, had been her constant companion ever since she'd suddenly appeared not long after Ellenore's father had brutally beaten her mother and left eight-year old Ellenore to figure out how to get her to the emergency room.

  That's where they'd met—in the emergency room, shortly after the doctor had come out to let her know that her mom would have to spend the night so they could run some further tests in the morning to assess just how severe the brain damage had been. He'd asked her if she had anyone to call, or an adult with whom she could stay. That's when Allison had piped up even before they'd been formally introduced and suggested what to tell the doctor.

  “Oh, yes, I'll just call my aunt to come for me,” young Ellenore had told the doctor—exactly, word for word what Allison had suggested, and it had worked. She'd walked over to the pay phone, pretended to make the call, and by the time she returned, the doctor had gone on to the next case. The emergency room was so busy no one noticed that no one came for her, so after sitting around for a respectable time, she walked outside to the bus stop. That was the night she'd taken her first bus ride all by herself—well, by herself with her new friend, Allison.

  Formal introductions had been made on the bus, such as they were, mostly an exchange of names, but Allison had said something Ellenore still remembered to this day. I'll never leave you, and I'll always be here for you. We're friends for life. Of course, she'd not actually spoken the words. It wasn't necessary since one of the magical things about their relationship was they could communicate mind-to-mind. But that declaration becam
e the foundation of a friendship that had lasted almost forty years. Allison had never abandoned her, although it felt like their friendship had deteriorated somehow over the past few years.

  The bus slowed for the speed bumps that crossed the drive leading up to the Foster Flat Fair Grounds, and there before her was the big top—a huge tent with a red roof, except the sun had bleached it to more of a faded, dingy pink. Still, it was magnificent. She didn't realize there were still circuses that performed under canvas. The last she'd heard, most of them had become sissified, preferring the warmth and comfort of performing in conference centers and coliseums. Of course, those larger circuses wouldn't show their face in such a podunk town as Foster Flat.

  That meant the Bingham's Circus and Sideshows probably wouldn't amount to much—maybe a long-in-the-tooth lion, a zebra or two, a few boozing bozo clowns, and an over-the-hill ringmaster—just enough show to keep anyone from raising too much of a ruckus over the five dollar admission fee. Ellenore had learned years ago to keep her expectations in check. The lower the expectation, the less likely she would be disappointed or hurt. So far, that principle had served her pretty well...until the damn Muse showed up on her porch.

  “How can you expect to write stories about life, love and romance when you've hardly lived, much less loved or experienced romance?” the Muse had said as it eyed her fridge on that first day.

  “What...what are you talking about?” she'd asked indignantly. “I'm forty-seven years old. That's plenty of life.”

  “No, that's plenty of time,” the Muse had replied, heading to the fridge. “Plenty of time to have lived, but you've sequestered yourself in this tiny cottage for most it. It's time for Ellenore Mishner to get out and live a bit. Who knows, maybe there's even a little love and romance in your future.”