Crossroads

Her eyes flashed in the darkness.

There was huge energy in the place tonight.

I felt her watching me, judging me, driving me on. But with the energy came a sullen and dangerous undercurrent. Spilled drinks might mean spilled blood and a clumsy push might be met with a glassed face. But God, I felt on fire!

By the final set of the evening, the walls ran with sweat and the people surged like a rowdy, restless storm tide against the stage. I stepped up a pace or two, towards the front, oblivious to hands grasping at my ankles. I sang with new ferocity, feeding on their emotion. My harp licks were sharp and breathless, prodding and driving the crowd ever higher as my voice soared across the songs.

Davie moved in close and prodded me with his bass, eyes searching for what had got into me. I short armed him back and he slid on the beer slick floor, almost losing the beat along with his footing.

In the pause before the final number I basked in the warm swell of raucous noise.

Instead of the familiar strains of my only minor radio hit, I stamped and clapped a quick, high tempo intro and launched into an edgy, rock version of an old folk song that I hadn’t done on stage for years, beckoning the band to follow me.

As they fell in with the frantic, unfamiliar rhythm, I saw her drift to the front, right below me, staring up at me. The footlights’ glare framed her glowing eyes and wild grin in a red henna halo, writhing snakes biting at her face as she bounced and swung her head to the beat, one hand on the air. I goaded the crowd now, conducting them in repeated, ever louder chants of the chorus, before finally dropping my hand to end the song like flicking a master switch. The sudden silence stunned them and they stopped for a second before erupting in a final, frenzied, feral roar.

I jumped the footlights, grabbed her hand and fished her from the swirling maelstrom, hauling her up, weightless, to stand triumphant beside me. She grabbed me by the neck, wrenching me around to face her and I felt her tongue probing for the roots of my songs. Tiny mirrored images of me danced, reflected in her jade green eyes, and I clung to her, like a drowning sailor to a spar. I reeled back when flashing lights from lack of air dappled my vision. Still clutching my hand, she dragged me urgently from the stage and toward the street.

The clammy heat of the gig steamed from our clothes and hair as we ran, headlong, towards the sodium oases scattered among the buildings by the few, still working street lights.

She pulled me on, hair flicking at my face as I tried to match her wanton energy. At last she stopped near the shadowed doorway of a boarded up brownstone and I doubled over as the midnight chill stole my breath away, and my ears rang with the unamplified silence.

A china white finger under my chin forced my head up and I stood with it, still gasping, marvelling at her pale, shining composure.

“Did you feel it?” she asked. “Did you feel the power?”

“Yeah, it was a good gig, sure...”

“Good? It was your best – ever...” She stepped back, regarding me, her face a porcelain mask. “...and you can have that, and more. You can have great.”

Another backward step into the doorway left only her beckoning hand in the light. She hooked a finger in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. I peered for her in the gloom.

Her voice slipped sinuously into my ears and tugged at my soul.

“Do you want it? You know what you need to do. Come and get it...”

I paused, but then, my treacherous foot moved towards her.

Her eyes flashed in the darkness.

And she laughed.

 

662 words

@nickjohns999

This story was written for Jeff Tsuruoka's Mid-Week Blues Buster Flash Fiction Challenge and was loosely inspired by this week's song 'Sally MacLennane' by The Pogues

Beyond the Binding - Charity Anthology out now on Amazon and elsewhere

In December I contributed a story to an anthology to raise money for the victims of Typhoon Haiyan that had devastated the Phillipines. The resulting ebook 'Beyond the Binding'has now been published.

Samantha Redstreake Geary rounded up 28 writers who each took a track from the charity music album 'Composers for Relief' a project collaboration coordinated by Peter Ebbinghaus including the brilliant music of over 30 composers hailing from 16 countries.

Beyond the Binding is available at just £1.87 for Kindle on Amazon  it is, or soon will be, available on iTunes, B&N, Kobo, Sony, Diesel & Smashwords

Please support these projects and buy the ebook and album. Every penny raised goes to charities helping those who have lost everything that you and I take for granted. A few pounds of your cash could mean the world to someone who has suffered dreadfully.

Beautiful Dreamer

 

The flames from the shack convert my dreams to smoke and waft them aloft to float, swirling and diminishing, towards the distant horizon.

I watch from the ridge, hunched down in the long grass, imperfectly hidden but safe. My tormentors are swept up in their infectious, heady moment of destruction. Their hate binds them together in this instant. The Dalton boys stand shoulder to tattooed shoulder with Billy and Asa Hardesty, egged on by other, lesser players. For this endeavour the raised weal scars across Billy’s back, a tangible roadmap of their feud, are forgotten.

I worm my way backwards, not standing until the crest shields me. I brush the rich dark loam from the knees of my already stained jeans. My hands shake off the last dusty traces of this place and I set off for the road.

Walking has different tunes as well as different rhythms. Walking away is an etude; in a minor key. The notes repeat over and over. A practice piece for your future, constructed from fragments of the ballads of your past. Each step is a beat, echoing your heart, running down towards its last tick.

Eventually my thumb fishes a big truck out of the raging, smoky waters of the highway and I climb aboard, my melancholy etude now drowned out by the roaring techno beat of the accelerating diesel engine.

I lean back into the cracked leather seat and breathe in the driver’s world, savouring it like a gourmet. I identify a tang of bitterness and an aroma of long lost love overlaid with the more mundane strains of tobacco and loneliness. He casts a sideways glance at me and I catch it easily.

“Where you headed?” the road warrior’s standard opening.

“Second star to the right and straight on ‘till morning.” My unfamiliar return gambit causes him to pause before venturing his next move.

“I guess you aint from round here?”

“Not anymore.”

“Travellin’ man then?”

“Since they burned my place down this morning.”

He gives a disgruntled huff, cricking his road stiffened neck with audible clicks while I reflect on the unsatisfactory quality of truth as a conversational medium.

After thirty minutes and a similar number of silent, awkward miles, I spot an approaching town.

“You can drop me off here.”

He crunches roughly down through the gearbox, grinding my unwelcome presence between the cogs, before stopping obviously, rudely short of the town outskirts.

“Thanks. Have a safe journey.” I jump down, gravel crunching beneath my feet before stepping back to avoid a lungful of diesel smoke as the truck pulls away with a disapproving roar.

I set my feet to the road. They know the routine of the blacktop. My old familiar friend and I once more reunited, we settle immediately into the companionable cadence of my resumed rootless existence.

Above me I notice wispy shapes running before the stiffening breeze and wave the net of my imagination above me, trying to capture some new dreams, suitable for this new place.

502 words

@nickjohns999

This story was was RUNNER UP in Jeff Tsuruoka's Mid-Week Blues Buster Week 47 and was loosely inspired by this week's track 'I'm not from here' by James McMurtry

Judge Miranda Kate - the Purple Queen said:-
 

"Second place goes to Nick Johns – @nickjohns999

This moody piece offered so many snippets of a bigger story. It drew me in and kept me reading – I wanted to know more. I also liked the sense of rhythm of walking, and associating it to tunes and describing it so the reader could hear and feel it at the same time. Great imagery created with few words, painting and weaving an enticing tale."

'Love Among the Ruins' now available in 'Haiku of the Dead' - new from Dreamscape Press

Image copyright Dreamscape Press

My haiku 'Love Among the Ruins' appears in 'Haiku of the Dead', newly published by Dreamscape Press

Poetry to eat your brains. "Haiku of the Dead" is an anthology that pieces together a warm-hearted story of guts and gore. Told through the imagistic language of haiku, every flesh-ripping moment of the zombie apocalypse is covered, from dawn to demise. Thirty-five narrators take the readers through infested streets and graveyards from the points of view of both survivors and the undead. With haiku from authors around the world, including Adrian George Nicolae, Alyssa Black, Andrew Miller, Betty Villareal, Bruce Harris, Cathy Bryant, Chris Fradkin, Christopher Evans, Clarice Radrick, Colin M. Drysdale, Colin W. Campbell, David Revilla, David S. Pointer, Donald Raymond, Fanni Suto, Irene Smith, Jason Kirk, Jennifer Courtney, Jessica McHugh, John McCarthy, K. R. Smith, Laura Huntley, Marie Churchman, Mathias Jansson, Matt Fallaize, Matthew Wilson, Nick Johns, Olivia Arieti, Pattie Flint, Robert E. Petras, Sarah Winn, Seth Frederiksen, Sonja Johanson, Tim McLafferty, and Winston H. Plowes. 

 On sale now from Amazon

Visit my Amazon Author Page for details of other publications containing my work

Image copyright Dreamscape Press

If You Go Down to the Woods Today...

   

If You Go Down to the Woods Today...

“Come back, you idiot!”

“One photo, we’re made for life! If we get close enough.”

“We got close before. It ripped the damned car’s wheels off!”

“...then ran for Johnson’s farm. Old bastard’s experiments finally produced something really weird.”

“Where’s the tracks?”

“What?”

Tracks, on the path...”

“Tracks schmacks. C’mon.”

“Shit! Billy - above you!”

55 words

@nickjohns999

This story was written for Lisa McCourt-Hollar's 55 Word Challenge 3/14

The Sound of Silence

The Sound of Silence

He had been a storm. Thunder followed him. The booming collapse of singularities as he banished them and all their chattels had been enough for him back then. Vengeance was less satisfying than he had imagined in the heat of his rage. All he had now was eternal echoes of thunder in the empty streets.

55 words

@nickjohns999

This story was written for Lisa McCourt-Hollar's 55 word challenge.
It received an honourable mention from judge Jeff Hollar, who said -
Its exceptionally difficult with such a minimal word count to craft a complete story. That being said, Nick did the next best thing and established a coherent and continuous overall emotion/tone that was truly ominous. Spooky!