Category Archives: Fiction

Listen To My Story (Being Read By a Podcast)

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Holy potatoes, you guys. Happy Halloween!

I have a special announcement that has everything to do with today.

Do you know Blurry Photos? They’re a couple dudes that run my favorite podcast about ghosts, devils, witches, aliens, ancient histories, unsolved mysteries, supernatural chicanery, cryptids, conspiracies, fantastical science. They’re a couple of improv actors from Chicago and they keep the funny rolling while they delve into the weird.

In short, they’re pretty much exactly my kind of podcast.

But you know what else they do sometimes? They tell spooky stories. Haunting tales to chill the bones.

And this year for their 4th annual Ghost Stories episode, they read one of mine.

Go check it out now! It is on Ghost Stories 4, and my story is Weeping Thief, which you may remember being posted to the blog once upon a time. Continue reading →

Weeping Thief

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For best reading, turn on some instrumental scary music from Youtube, turn down the lights, and listen carefully for the call of the Weeping Thief.

Updated 2015-10-31: If you want to hear this tale told instead of reading it, head on over to Blurry Photos and feast your ears upon Ghost Stories 4, where it is featured as one of their submitted stories!

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Weeping Thief

by Rick Cook Jr

The Weeping Thief is outside my inn door and I don’t know what to do.

How she knows me as a wanted man, a robber of banks, is unimportant. She is here. The Weeping Thief has come.

I know the stories. I could call out, but she’d silence me before help arrived. I could barricade the door but she’d find another way in. I could arm myself with flintlock or saber, but she’s impervious and relentless.

The song that children sing drifts out from under the door, a woman’s voice and yet somehow thin, translucent:

The Weeping Thief is come
to sweep away your dreams,
when night forever falls
no one will hear your screams. Continue reading →

Little Sister

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Well, how about this? Something a little unexpected from the blog’s usual schedule, some of that tasty fiction writing I’ve been harping about all year long.

Another flash fiction challenge from over yonder on Chuck Wendig’s blog, the Random Song Title Challenge, in which we get a random song from some kind of playlist somewhere, and run with that song title as the title of a story.

I did the random thing, and Shuffled through my collection of 20,000 MP3s for a few minutes until I hit Jewel’s “Little Sister”. And this is what came up. Hope you enjoy.

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Little Sister

by Rick Cook Jr.

He would often watch the girls on the playground, remembering his little sister, missing her.

She is on the park bench next to him, often is on days like this. Continue reading →

The Things We Love May Fight For Us

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Rated PG-13 for some strong language and tense situations, with some disturbing imagery and sexually suggestive themes.

6,400 words.

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 The Things We Love May Fight For Us

by Rick Cook Jr.

Tracy woke in darkness, buried under the crushing weight of corpses. She tried to cry out, to struggle, but couldn’t move, couldn’t use her power to save herself. Where was Shane? What had awakened them?

She shifted and tried once more to break free of the bodies of her companions, managed to thrust a fist up into nothing. A hand grabbed her by the wrist and yanked, so that she came tumbling up out of the bodies into harsh red light.

They weren’t corpses. They were her friends and enemies, piled and forgotten into a box last year when Olivia had grown too old for them. A box of forgotten toys. Continue reading →

White Waitress

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Time for another short story, this one firmly in the realm of dystopian fiction. I tried not to go too young adult dystopian or throw too many world-building words out there all at once so as not to infuriate people. Comes in at 3.4k words, hope you enjoy it!

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White Waitress

by Rick Cook Jr

The waitress in white offered me coffee and the first thing I pictured was splashing that coffee all over her pristine white outfit. The blouse, the skirt, the apron, the stockings, the pumps. They made her wear heels. I hadn’t even seen heels since my history lessons, and certainly had never worn them. The flash of her bra-strap when she leaned in to take my order told me all I needed about her underwear, too, and I suppressed the tingle that ran down my spine at the sight.

She was terrified, I could see it in her wide eyes, barely-contained tears. We were all terrified for her.

The rest of the wait-staff wore the usual dark blue, and your run-of-the-mill stains wouldn’t show up. But Willa, the waitress in white, had to be careful about a coffee stain or a drip of syrup on her skirt.

Every speck, splotch, stain, drip, and dribble counted. Continue reading →

Reaper’s Pincushion

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Time for another writing prompt! This one’s from Chuck Wendig again, Let Fate Choose Your Title.

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Reaper’s Pincushion

by Rick Cook Jr.

I hate it when it’s the pediatric wing. But the job’s the job and I’m not ready to give it up yet. Continue reading →

Against Me [1,500 words]

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Another flash fiction prompt from Chuck Wendig, this time smashing a couple subgenres together and writing a story about it.

I rolled “Parallel Universe” and “Revenge”!

 

Against Me

by Rick Cook Jr

I watch myself getting a ticket and smile.

The me I’m watching isn’t me, in the strictest sense, of course. No one but me could ever be me. But the other me is pretty close, and pretty close is close enough.

The whole “alternate dimensions” theory, string theory, ten dimensions, quantum entanglement, what-have-you: it’s not infinite. More like trinary. There are two other worlds out there, running parallel to our own. Ours seems to be in the middle. Continue reading →

The Deciding Factor

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Been a good long while, but I’m back with a writing prompt from Reddit:

You have died. While waiting to be judged, you are offered the chance to clear one entry from your file before the decision is made.

There were no other parameters so I took a couple small liberties, as I am known to do. Hope you enjoy!

 

The Deciding Factor

by Rick Cook Jr.

I was staring at a physical manifestation of all the deeds of my life. It was curious, in that it seemed much smaller than I expected, maybe the size of a petty criminal’s rap sheet. As I flipped through the pages and came to what should have been the end of this small file of paper, the pages just kept being there to turn. And the stack of read pages never grew larger as I flipped pages onto it. Curious.

“Clear an entry? What’s that mean?” I asked. Continue reading →

‘The Recluse and the Runaway’ on Amazon Kindle!

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‘The Recluse and the Runaway’ on Amazon Kindle!

So this is by way of an announcement that The Recluse and the Runaway, formerly titled The Recluse, the Rott, and the Runaway, has been removed from my blog and is now available through Amazon Kindle for $0.99. I’m excited to be able to offer this novella through an e-reading service, since it exists in that gray space between short story and novel, it’s hard to place it anywhere that people are willing to sit down and read on a computer screen.

If you head over there today (April 29, 2014) through Friday (May 2nd), you’ll be able to pick it up for free as part of Amazon’s Kindle Select promotion!

So if you liked the story and just want to be able to read it again, go over and grab it. If you haven’t read it yet, what better way than through a phone or tablet with Kindle? It’s free until the end of Friday for US and UK residents, so the only thing you have to lose is a little drive space to snag it now for free.

The Recluse and the Runaway

The hardest lessons can never be taught.

The Recluse and the Runaway

Carbon Empathy

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Today’s Flash Fiction comes to you thanks to two people: Chuck Wendig for the prompt, and JC Hemphill for the opening line.

The challenge was to choose an opening line from the submissions on the previous week’s prompt challenge (there were quite a number to choose from), and write a flash fiction piece of 1,000 words or so using that line as our opening line. So everything but the first line in today’s story is original by me. I’d really like to thank JC Hemphill for the excellent sentence and I hope a dozen people write flash fiction using it. There were a lot of good ones to choose from, but this one caught my fancy more than the others. So let’s get this party started, eh?

Carbon Empathy

by Rick Cook Jr.

“I met a man made of smoke today.”

I almost slammed on the brakes when my five-year-old son said that. As it was I practically drove off into a ditch less than two blocks from the school after his first day. The front tire bumped the curb, I over-corrected into oncoming traffic and my heart skipped a beat as we dodged a plumber’s van and righted us in our proper place.

“A man made of smoke?” I asked. We had run from one of them before, and I thought we’d given them the final slip.

“Yeah, he was walking around at recess talking to everybody, asking questions.”

I grabbed my cell phone and dialed home. “What kinds of questions, sport?” Continue reading →