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  SHARDS

  Shane Jiraiya Cummings

  Praise for Shards

  "With Shards, Shane Jiraiya Cummings takes us on a guided tour of the darkest backroads of the imagination. It is wonderfully moody and creepy."

  --- Jonathan Maberry, multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Patient Zero.

  "Shane Jiraiya Cummings with Shards shows he is not only a master of the flash fiction style of writing but has pretty much written the definitive statement on how it should work. The collection is a strong statement on the validity of an internet-driven writing style and is a must have for any collector of Australian dark fiction."

  --- Jeff Ritchie, ScaryMinds

  "Cummings' work possesses a Stephen King-like quality, creating rich and colourful characters in a handful of words ... Well worth the read."

  --- Mark Smith-Briggs, HorrorScope

  "This is how flash fiction should be written---sharp, brilliant images conjured by amazingly few words. Cummings' aptitude for flash fiction is evident in every carefully chosen phrase."

  --- Stephanie Gunn, HorrorScope

  "Shards cuts you right open and then sets about infecting the wound. Cummings' prose is as the title suggests: short, sharp, and deadly. The tales are relentless, battering you with their suggestive intensity or mocking with bleak humour."

  --- Dr Marty Young, Founder, Australian Horror Writers Association.

  "If flash fiction is the distinctive form of our internet age---and everything points that way---then I can't think of a better demonstration of the art than Shards."

  --- Richard Harland, award-winning author of The Black Crusade and Worldshaker.

  "Shards offers a worthy selection of short-short stories that reflects the author's prominence in the contemporary upsurge of flash fiction among Australian horror writers. It is varied, the stories sometimes giving a short sharp jolt, sometimes evoking a creeping dread, and at other times, suggesting a world that has already slipped over into darkness. Fans of the short-short form will welcome this darkly entertaining foray into a world gone subtly, and at times, unsubtly askew, from one of Australia's 'new bloods' of horror."

  --- Robert Hood, the 'Godfather of Aussie Horror' and award-winning author of Creeping in Reptile Flesh.

  * * *

  Copyright © Shane Jiraiya Cummings 2011.

  A print version, illustrated by Andrew J. McKiernan (Brimstone Press, 2009, ISBN: 9780980567724) is available from Brimstone Press: http://www.brimstonepress.com.au

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Except in the case of short-term lending, if you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All characters in this book are fictitious.

  No reference to any living person is intended.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Sacrifices

  Prescience

  Virgin in the Mist

  Revision Is Murder

  Personal Demons

  Stealing Fire

  Firewall

  Smouldering Eyes

  Shadow of Revenge

  The Unnatural

  Spin the Witch Bottle

  Countdown Macabre

  On Dark Clouds Borne

  Practical Joke

  Interlude, With Lavender

  Dread Seasons

  Cruel Summer: Sand

  Dread Seasons Quartet: Rainbow-Speckled Field

  Cruel Summer: Sun

  Dread Seasons Quartet: Naked Azure Sky

  Cruel Summer: Sky

  Dread Seasons Quartet: The Rustle of Autumnal Leaves

  Cruel Summer: Surf

  Dread Seasons Quartet: Pallid Wisps of Snow

  Cruel Summer: Shadow

  Under The Skin

  A Killer Smile

  Congo Jenga

  R U OK?

  Itch

  Obsessions

  Stop

  Postcard From Paris (A Reply)

  Song of the Infernal Machine

  Apocalyptic Visions

  Burning a Hole in the Sky

  Memoirs of a Teenage Antichrist

  Love in the Land of the Dead

  Wrack

  Genesis Six

  * * *

  Introduction

  When the short story appeared in the nineteenth century, it took people a long while to realise that the new form wasn't just anecdotal tale or cut-down novel. Edgar Allen Poe was one of the first to think through the distinctive principles. Now there's another new form, flash fiction, with different distinctive principles. Shane Jiraiya Cummings is a specialist in those principles.

  Flash fictions aren't just ultra-short short stories because at this length there's no time for story in the usual sense. No full action, no trajectory of this-leads-to-that, no build up to a climax. There's only time for a snapshot, a frozen moment. What comes before and what comes after must be implicit in that moment.

  The dynamic of the pieces in Shards is the dynamic of something-coming-clear. It's like a change in the quality of the light, a sharpening and deepening of shadows. Rarely are we given a huge twist of revelation, where a situation that looked one way turns out very different in the end. This is more a matter of mood.

  Carl Dreyer, the great Danish film director, must have had this kind of effect in mind when he said: "think of a room, an ordinary domestic interior; then suppose that there's a dead body in the room next door---and see how everything changes."

  Dreyer was talking about a horror that works by subtlety and suggestion. In Shards, there are a few pieces of out-and-out horror, but mostly the horror is delicate, the kind to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. I had an aunt who used to shiver and say that someone had just walked over her grave. That's the feeling I get from the pieces in Shards.

  One of my favourite pieces is "Rainbow-Speckled Field". A happy scene ... overtaken by a nameless dread ... the uttered phrase 'the moles are hunting' ... and that's all. What does it mean, 'the moles are hunting'? Why is the phrase so chilling when it could so easily be comic? What's going on here?

  If you insist on explanations, Shards probably isn't for you. Explanations are for novels or longer stories. The only explanation here is that fears come true: fears about disease, fears about fire, fears about dead leaves and sand. In "On Dark Clouds Borne", snakes start falling from the sky---but don't look for rational causes. The irrationality is the point.

  The fears often spring out of the tiniest real-life moments. We all know the experience of being honked at repeatedly by the car behind as we wait for a break in the traffic. But what if it went one step further? ("Stop") Or---as a child---being left with the towels and beach paraphernalia, waiting for the family to return. But what if they never do? ("Cruel Summer: Shadow") In Shards, the ordinary safe world doesn't return. Those brief moments of dread are given free rein, spiralling out of control.

  Some of the pieces are linked by title: the "Cruel Summer" series and the "Dread Seasons" series. But more than that, almost all the pieces are linked by an evenness of tone and similarity of vision. Across the whole volume, a particular sense of world accumulates. It's not a locatable world geographically; there are almost no place names. Rather, it's a world of free-floating anxiety and insecurity, a state of the soul. The individual pieces are like separate sections of a multi-sectioned poem.

  I've tried my hand at writing flash fiction, but reading Shards has bee
n a revelation. Now I realise I've never truly mastered the form, only a few special cases of ultra-shortness. By contrast, Shane Jiraiya Cummings can carry it off successfully time and time again. If flash fiction is the distinctive form of our internet age---and everything points that way---then I can't think of a better demonstration of the art than Shards.

  --- Richard Harland

  * * *

  Prescience

  The ghost of the wound itched and burned from deep within my side. It burned with greater intensity as I climbed the stairs to the Marynth branch of Savings and Equity. Marble and steel ushered me inside, where I met the long line to the teller. I pocketed my mobile phone with a sigh and took my place in the queue behind a broad man in a grey suit. My side throbbed.

  Two more circles of pain burned in my chest---one close to my right shoulder, the other hovering over my heart. They were different to the pain in my side, just heat under the skin. They didn't belong to me, but I felt them anyway.

  I smoothed my blouse and soon caught sight of the security guard. He was young and nervous-eyed, with a Brylcreem part. I left my place in the line to approach him. George, the name badge said, just as it should. My sneakers squeaked on the marble floor with each step towards him.

  He tensed up at my approach, his shoulder a knotted ball of muscle as I lightly laid a hand on it. He took my whispered words with good grace, nodding not once but twice, before unholstering his pistol. A Smith and Wesson, just as it should be. I wondered then, as I did in my dreams, if they still made revolvers like his anymore.

  I reached into my pocket just as the masked gunman stormed through the glass doors.

  "Get down!" His scream was muffled by an over-tight balaclava. He shoved the man in the grey suit to the ground---he crashed like a felled walrus, taking an elderly couple down in his sprawl.

  George stepped forward with both hands wrapped around his Smith and Wesson, his legs splayed wide. A classic pose of authority for a classic weapon. "Freeze," he yelled, playing it by the numbers.

  My side radiated heat, the irritation and pain tunnelling right through me.

  The gunman swivelled and fired. No warning, just a blast louder than thunder and deadlier by far. The gauze pad in my pocket was in my grasp and I wasn't letting go.

  When the bullet struck, I don't know whether my side burst open to meet it or it made its own hole, as it should. In that moment, as the bullet tore through my soft insides, I knew why I'd had my appendix removed as a girl. Gunshots create all sorts of complications if you aren't prepared for them.

  A potted hibiscus broke my fall, bruising my hip in the bargain. My hand worked on its own, trained by countless dreams of this moment in the weeks before. With the gauze pressed tight over the wound, I tilted my head to watch the gunman go down.

  He seemed to drop simultaneously as two booms rocked the foyer. Good boy, George. Plumes of blood sprayed from the gunman's shoulder and chest. The phantom pains in my chest, overshadowed by the very real pain from the hole in my side, subsided as the would-be robber crashed to the floor.

  I didn't need to take a closer look to know the man was dead. George's second shot had exploded his heart, just as it should have.

  Everyone was huddled in clumps on the floor, still too afraid to rise. Most kept their eyes to the floor, with only furtive glances spared for me or the fallen gunman.

  "George," I stammered, although it took two tries to get the name out right. The metallic tang of blood was already on my tongue. Not a good sign.

  George was still frozen in his stand-off pose, the Smith and Wesson smoking from doing its duty. At the sound of his name, he holstered his gun and rushed to my side.

  "You alright, Miss?" His words were as stammered as mine.

  "No, George, I've been shot." This came out clear enough.

  He pulled up my blouse to inspect the wound, careful to remove my hand, and the gauze pad, while doing so. The blood surged when the pad was taken away. He pressed his hand over mine as we reapplied the gauze to my side. Blood swallowed both sets of fingers and pooled along the floor. It soon encircled his shiny black shoe, just as it should.

  "Sorry about the mess," I said, then choked back a cough.

  "Where'd you get all these scars, Miss?" George was transfixed on the naked skin beneath my bra.

  "Shootings, stabbings, that one's a cattle prod," I traced an ugly scar along my ribs with a limp finger. "I'm drawn to these things. A moth to a flame."

  "What?" George's brow creased in concentration.

  "I'm a sucker for punishment. Empathy and prescience. It's a sacrifice thing. Don't sweat it, you wouldn't get it anyway." I coughed again, much harder than before. The heat from the wound was subsiding. A chill was steadily creeping into my limbs.

  "Don't worry, Miss---"

  "Verity."

  "Verity, then. Don't worry, we'll get an ambulance here pronto."

  "I called one a few minutes ago."

  George was puzzled but said nothing.

  I closed my eyes, waiting for the wail of the ambulance to fill the silence. Responses were slow this time of year. I concentrated on the ebbing blood and George's fingers entwined with mine.

  The warmth was reassuring as new phantom pains emerged to nag at my neck and left arm. Knife wounds, most likely. The tingle went deep enough.

  The pain---the real and the imagined---was also reassuring. More work and more days left ahead. More sacrifices.

  Just as it should be.

  * * *

  Virgin in the Mist

  She appeared in the mist of my bathroom mirror, her eyes haloed by the light, her face on the cusp of a scream or a prayer. My faith was strong when I told Father Morales about her. His faith was stronger when he told the Vatican.

  Now the queues of worshippers, with their candles and incurable diseases, have taken over my house. Poor as I was, I now live on the streets---pushed out by droves of fanatics. All desperate for a glimpse of their vision or clutching for 'holy relics' like my bathroom tiles. Anything to be close to her. The pilgrimage line to my bathroom fills the streets.

  They run my hot water all day for a glimpse of the Virgin's face. And they get it---her eyes ablaze in the fluorescent light, reflecting their convictions, their need. Like Father Morales, and the Vatican Cardinals, they wonder at the expression on her face.

  When I still cared and still had a home, I had asked the first pilgrims what they saw. They had offered only fervour, vagueness, and prayer.

  But I know now. Life in the gutter has made it clear.

  She's laughing.

  At me.

  * * *

  Revision is Murder

  I'd written many short stories, trying to break into the writing scene, but it was with this particular manuscript that I had a special affinity. It was my first, my masterpiece---the great unpublished novel.

  Wedged between a dozen coffees and 3am, I struggled to focus. My eyes blurred as I banged away at the keyboard. Words and whole sentences formed almost unbidden, pouring from me with abandon---the product of trained hands running on automatic. The blurring intensified, forcing me to squint at the letters floating in pixelated clusters across the screen.As I typed, a whirl of colours filled my peripheral vision. Too tired to care, I continued typing. Chapter seventeen was drawing to a close, and the protagonist was headed for a cliff-hanger. The colours swirled and danced in my field of vision but never swam close enough to cloud my view of the screen.

  Rounding off a page, my eyes committed their betrayal, whirling the spectrum of light and haze into a tunnel. Only the words on the screen existed, everything else was swallowed by the luminous fog. Within moments, even the white document background dropped away, disappearing into the depths of the screen and the abyss beyond. The words and letters were left hanging like baby spiders clinging to the smoky monitor glass.

  I tapped away, flooding the glass with more black characters. I typed like a madman, the sentences forming from fragments only half-con
ceived in my fogged mind. Even as I continued to create, the individual letters were sucked from the glass, hurtling into the blurry abyss that had engulfed the rest of the computer screen. One at a time at first, and then in clumps. As the letters were drawn away, so too was my focus. In my weariness, I succumbed to that same black hole. It sucked my consciousness into a place beyond thought or reason, turning everything dark.

  I snapped my eyes open again, pulling myself upright in my chair. The screen was there, as were my typing fingers, still performing admirably under their own steam. But filling the screen was a collage of the manuscript and a world beyond.

  Blinking couldn't dispel the illusion, nor the fogging rainbows still swimming in the halo obscuring the study.

  In the world within my screen, animated letters floated in a luminous void. An abstract realm of subtle consciousness, where angles and points, letters and numbers, coexisted in embryonic forms of life. Metallic clouds of gas undulated, gently propelling the fleshy letters through the dense atmosphere. In the distance, noises penetrated the void, akin to the rise and fall of a whale's song.

  Through my twenty-one-inch window into this abstract plane, waves of empathy radiated into my core. Contentment, an innate peace with the universe, saturated my being.

  I watched through blurry eyes as more of the letters I created, bunched into words, sprang into being on my screen. Simultaneously, fleshy simulacrums appeared amid the coppery-gold cloud. With my skewed perspective and tiny viewing frame, I had no idea whether these newborns were twelve pixels in size or mile-wide monoliths.

  I typed and typed, lost to the joy of creating these passive life-forms. It was rapturous---my fingers hammered out line after line of prose, outlining the peril of the protagonist, while the souls of the letters appeared in the reality beyond, breaking apart from their parent word and floating unfettered, soaking in the glow and radiating contentment.

  As my rational mind intruded, my hand drifted to the delete key to correct a misspelled word of my character's plight. Three letters were all I corrected, but the outcry from beyond nearly shattered my eardrums. The dirge, so much like a distressed whale, was heartbreaking. The newly birthed letters, the ones I deleted, faded from a rosy-flesh colour to a sullen grey. An instant later, they disintegrated to ash, their carcasses diffusing into a steely cloud.