Dana Blankenhorn

The Killer

In honor of the coronavirus quarantine, and because April 1 is coming, here's another fiction story for you. 

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“It was a joke. A JOKE!”

I screamed it as I was strapped to the gurney.

A doctor approached, holding the first of the syringes that would soon end my life. Across a window, a small group of witnesses looked on with anger. All except one man, of indeterminate middle age, thin, with a salt and pepper beard and glasses, who just shook his head mournfully. The man I’d spent my life hoping to meet.

It was the first execution in California for many years. It was real. It was happening to me. And it really was just a joke. This was the punch line I’d been waiting for.

I was born after my father joined the witness protection program, in Massapequa, on Long Island. I learned much later he had been born Giacomo Moroni, but the feds made him change his name after his career as a contract killer ended in Arizona. He got out by ratting on his capo, Don Julio Pasquale, the boss of Phoenix.

My dad’s mind didn’t work well back in the 1980s. I think it was coke. He didn’t remember things all the time. He said he couldn’t just make up a new name for himself, so he’d just take the vowel off the end. But that made his name moron, and that didn’t make any damned sense. So, he tweaked it just a little. He became Mike Maron.

I’m his son, Matt.

Operation Trump

While we're all in quarantine I'm entertaining myself, and hopefully some others, with some short fiction. You can find my entire collection of short fiction here.

Enjoy!

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Jack Wong was not just an expert on alternate history.

In the year 2080, he was the world’s leading expert on altering history.

Wong’s invention of the Turtledove Drive a decade before, his Ph.D thesis project at the University of Minnesota, stunned the world.

Since then he had succeeded in altering history twice.

First, he traveled from his lab to the 2075 Coronavirus outbreak, reached its Patient Zero, and brought him to a hospital before he could infect others. Three years later, from the front of his Minneapolis classroom, his team prevented the 2001 World Trade Center bombing by shooting the terrorists before they reached Logan Airport.

When New Yorkers woke up, on a fine spring day in 2079, to find two 120-year old buildings instead of one 65-year old one, it was a shock at first. Then the mass psychosis took hold. The attacks had never happened. The Twin Towers had always been there.

It was magic.

Now Professor Wong was Time’s Man of the Year, which meant even more was expected of him.  

Doug and Alexa in Quarantine

Doug and Alexa welcomed the quarantine.

Doug could spend his days reading and watching TV. He would be a hero. Wasn’t he an Amazon Prime member?

Alexa insisted he would be the hero of the age.

So, Doug cuddled up with a good book on his Kindle. Then another. Then another. He made himself coffee, he made himself tea. He binged everything on BritBox. He watched hours of Dr. Pol. He ordered what he needed, and it came. His savings dwindled, but very slowly.

Alexa ordered him a stationary bike and he rode it. Alexa ordered him a yoga mat and he used it. Alexa filled his apartment with music. Rock in the morning, show tunes in the shower, the soothing sounds of water as he slept. Doug was never lonely with Alexa around.

The days passed slowly. Doug didn’t trust his country’s leaders, so he didn’t watch the news. Doug had never known his neighbors, so that when they passed by his door he didn’t speak and neither did they. He didn’t even pet their dogs. He was very careful.

But Doug knew Alexa, and Alexa knew him.

The Coffee Man, A Short Story

Note: This story emerged from a small brainstorm. We know that climate change is driven by over-use of fossil fuels but what if, instead of an invention that burns coal or oil, someone had invented a machine that just sucked energy out of the air?

With just a tweet of encouragement from a well-known alternate history writer, I set to work

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The old man put on his “Juan Valdez” hat, a term his young employees did not understand, and walked slowly into the greenhouse, a sling across his left shoulder, the basket against his right hip.

The delicious fruit, with its precious stones, awaited him. His hands shook in anticipation.

Carefully, he pulled down a branch and picked only the ripest, reddest cherries, placing them one-by-one in the basket. It took him nearly an hour to fill the basket, not due to his age but to his care, for he avoided all the green, unripe fruit that had long been pulled routinely by those desperate for what lay within.

By the time his young workers arrived for work, chattering in a half-dozen languages, the old man was sitting at their shared lunch table, picking fruits from his basket like an aged chimpanzee, stripping off the thin fruit layer with his teeth and gums, then carefully placing each seed beside him in a dish. Satiated, he hefted the remaining fruit in its basket and placed it in the hopper of a processor.

The fruit had an intense, citrusy taste and a grape-like texture. He rubbed his hands together after emptying the basket, then smelled them with pleasure. The fruit not only tasted great, and energized him, but left a waxy residue which made his hands look younger. The fruit would be separated from the stones, dried into a pulp, and become a second harvest for the greenhouse.

His workers would go through the greenhouse today harvesting from several trees, separating the red fruits from the green, and processing them all so that, when the seeds were dried green, then roasted, they could be crushed to create what was now the most expensive beverage in all the world.

Coffee! Glorious coffee!

A Santa Story

Recently I woke from troubled dreams to find myself with white hair, a long beard, and a troubling impact on small children.

Little kids would look up at me, wide-eyed.

Their faces held a mixture of awe and fear.

I knew what they were thinking.

I gathered some of them together and told them a story.

Old Man on The Mountain

About once a year I write some fiction. This year I completed an entire novel, The Reluctant Detective Finds Her Family, now available for the Amazon Kindle and on Amazon Unlimited. It will also be available as a paperback.

But I also like to write short stories. Here is one. Enjoy.

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When Spencer Tracy made The Old Man and the Sea, he was 58.

The child watching that film saw him as unimaginably old.

But time passes. Today the child is a man. Today the child is an old man. Today the child is 63.

I hear you say, 63 isn’t old. Sometimes, it’s not. When the old man is sitting behind his typewriter, when he’s imagining himself in his dreams, when he is enjoying a drink with friends, 63 is not that old at all.

When he stands up, however, it can be very old. When he looks in the mirror, after a shower, he sees Santa Claus, complete with the distending belly. It’s not a jolly sight. So, like Spencer Tracy in the movie, he does things to defy his age.

The Second Debate

The second debate in the race to control heaven, between the Virgin Mary and Satan, was getting off to a rocky start.

For Mary.

“Why am I not 50 points ahead of you?”

“Because I’m smart,” retorted the Prince of Darkness. “Every angel wants to be like me. They want to have my freedom. They want to have my wealth. They are tired of reporting to some feudal lord on high, and eating the same stale, tasteless wafers.”

“The wafers are not stale. They’re the body and blood of…”

The Reluctant Detective is Good Summer Reading

Hey, fans!

I have a new work of fiction out on Amazon.

The Grail

(What follows is a work of fiction. I wrote it early this year, in about a week, after a weekend vacation to Asheville, touring artists' markets. Hope you like it.)

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It was a simple thing, I thought, something fun to have.

A cup or goblet, made of clay, and fired with a simple limestone-colored glaze. I saw it in a storeroom, by the workshop of an artist who was now working, instead, on cartoonish wiener dogs hipsters could hang on a wall.

The price was a snip, $19. I asked what inspired her to make it. She didn’t answer. All she said was, “It’s on sale,” as she wrapped it in newspaper.

I thought no more about it. I was giving my wife our hundredth honeymoon, a weekend in the North Carolina Mountains. There were other artists to visit, and the Google Map on my phone was buzzing in its cradle. We had to move on.

Advice For a Young Fiction Writer

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 37 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

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While on vacation recently I learned that my daughter Robin, in addition to her talents studying urban wildlife, is also becoming something of a fiction writer.

This caused me, while still on our cruise ship, to write the following, which I now offer to the rest of you in hopes it helps, just a little, with those struggling to write good fiction:

Dear Robin:

Fiction is hard. Wish I could do it better.

Anyone who starts in to write fiction is in for a lot of hard work. Creating worlds, stories, and people who never really existed is the most difficult task you can imagine -- it is a feat of pure imagination. Anyone who does it, anyone who succeeds at it, becomes a hero in my book. 

Here is what I've learned, and often failed to apply, in writing fiction.