Category Archives: Short Stories

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 →

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 →

An Artist’s Legacy [430 words]

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This is in response to a writing prompt over at Reddit, in /r/writingprompts. As of this posting it was the highest rated story for that particular prompt. The prompt was simply “In this world, you can instantaneously teach somebody a new skill and trade or give them a precious memory of yours, but once you give it away, you lose it yourself.”

An Artist’s Legacy

by Rick Cook Jr

I’m old and my time is coming to an end. The Department of Traded Skills has advertisements everywhere, targeted at people like me.

Sell your experience on the DoTS market! Apprentice and Journeyman rates comparable to your experience! Master rates pending evaluation!

Don’t want to wait for those drum lessons? Shred like Neil Peart in a fraction of the time! In the fine print it reads: Results not guaranteed to make you a rock star.

Somewhere out there Mozart still composes. Continue reading →

The Terminator [1,100 words]

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Fair warning, this is less a story and more a narrative. An angry, cursing, rambling, narrative about drinking and fighting. Seriously, lots of swearing. It’s also for Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge of the week A Drink with a Story, A Story with a Drink.

The Terminator

by Rick Cook Jr

I’ve never been able to fight, let’s just get that out of the way right now. The number of times I’ve curled up into a ball to avoid the worst of the kicks is equal to the number of times I’ve gotten into a fight.

I tried to learn karate, or… judo, or something. I don’t know. It was hard. The sensei or whatever was a real dick. I quit and then took a piss in his gas tank. Well, I tried. Just ended up with a kidney punch and piss all over my karate outfit. Continue reading →

Rose Petals Spinning in Space [1,040 words]

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This short story is posted in Science Fiction.

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It’s time for another of Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction challenges, and this week’s is pretty bizarre. Fairy Tales, Remixed.

I hope you enjoy!

Rose Petals Spinning in Space

by Rick Cook Jr

She was awake for two years all by herself, running system diagnostics, maintaining the ship, checking the garden to ensure the water tubes nourished the plants and flowers. The tulips grew, but the roses never bloomed. Continue reading →

Whispering Luck [2,500 words]

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This short story is posted in Supernatural.

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Time for another piece of fiction prompted by Chuck Wendig’s weekly Flash Fiction Challenge. This week’s is titled “The Who, The Where, and the Uh-Oh”.

Whispering Luck

by Rick Cook Jr

The day they killed me was the day Lucky Joe’s stopped being so lucky.

I could tell you the story of how I died, but let’s just say I was doing something stupid and dangerous against just pure dangerous and I lost.

But I’m still here. Locked to Lucky Joe’s, or so it would seem. If you remember Beetlejuice, you have some idea of what happens when I try to leave. Only instead of badly-animated graboids it’s a keening, wailing, sucking darkness.

Sometimes, like now, I stand at the doors to the outside world, staring at the blank abyss, and I want to step in. My brother must be beyond that. Maybe my first girlfriend who I’d later found out died in a bombing in Iraq. My grandparents, my ancestors.

Or maybe it is just the nothing it looks like. Continue reading →

Minotaur Kid’s Club [2,066 words]

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This short story is posted in Fantasy.

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It’s been a hot minute since I posted anything at all, but new year and all that. Time to start fresh with a new short story response to Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge, Roll For Title. Twice as long as the word limit, but I really don’t adhere to that very often.

Minotaur Kid’s Club

by Rick Cook Jr.

“This is it, this time, I can feel it, guys!” Marth whispered, his voice cracking. He was in the back, by torchlight reading yet another map to the Labyrinth. Corley huffed. Wenda wrung her hands together.

They rounded a corner in the sewer tunnels, finding another long, straight stretch. The tunnel walls sagged and crumbled, forlorn with age. Continue reading →