novelettes

Austentatious Punk: Attorney-at-Genre

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

Welcome to Helens, where books (looking an awful lot like people) show up to have their genres assigned by the publishing courthouse.  The gorgeous and vivacious Valentine Lots appears, claiming to be a contemporary romance, but the sour soggy publishers say she has to be labeled as erotica.

Enter her representative Austentatious Punk: passionate, funky, and wearing as thin as her home.  Valentine’s public defender will stop at nothing to see her get the genre label she deserves, but there might be time for a few breaks to get to know each other, bake a decent dessert, and talk love lives in this metafictional courtroom procedural slice-of-life novelette!

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 37 minutes)

Austentatious Punk

Attorney-at-Genre

by

Blaine Arcade

The Valentine Case: Public Reading 1

Double doors burst and the works flooded in. None of them had any idea where they were going, hence the guides with their red sashes and gold calligraphy titles. ‘Right this way please’ they say, polite as a first time flight attendant, white gloves beckoning in slow motion: the flight of serene and knowing doves.

Using cues only they have memorized, the guides split the new works based on one glance, into different tributaries of shuffling feet headed for their very own doors. The space was tall but tight; you had room to breath but not to run. Wooden doors were stapled into buzz cut carpets. New works never brought any odors along from the imaginary places that spawned them, so despite the crowds the publishing courthouse always smelled like office printers breathing their last and spine glue.

A pair of dovely gloves fluttered in her face, momentarily nonplussed, then grabbed her and pulled her into another line. Nobody else was so much as touched. She couldn’t catch the plaque on the door before she was pushed through into a dimmer room, quieter too, so much quieter that it left her stunned. Continue reading →

Cardiac Zack’s Healthy Human Shack (an animatronic horror tale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 5 Comments

Holden Geats makes his scratch snapping pictures of abandoned places, and he’s heard of a new one: a kid-centric educational play place about the human body.  A quick bribe and he’s in, only the singing and dancing animatronics populating the place didn’t exactly get the ‘abandoned’ memo…

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 27 minutes)

Cardiac Zack Thumbnail

Cardiac Zack’s Healthy Human Shack

by

Blaine Arcade

Sometimes it was difficult to get all the animals out of the way. Bugs were the worst of course, too small to shoo and too fast in flight to keep their trails out of the shafts of light coming through any fissures in the ceiling. They weren’t the only ones though: birds, rats, cats, and occasionally frogs tried to ruin it too.

An indoor miniature golf course where the artificial turf now had mountain ranges of artfully-fallen ceiling plaster. A former public park where vines with sunhat leaves had eaten a listing seesaw. The outdoor section of a dilapidated lawn goods store, a flock of plastic herons standing vigilant even though their feathers and eyes had peeled white.

Every shot was devoid of live animals, but there was a big one just behind the lens, and his name was Holden Geats. Snapping pictures was his livelihood, and what renown he had came from his very narrow purview, as he only sold pictures of a world abandoned, of a speculative future Earth where mankind had vanished months or years prior achieved by finding the quiet little places that found themselves for a time unprofitable, suitable for investment only to Mother Nature herself. Continue reading →

Franklin’s Monster

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Many know the tale of Frankenstein, but few remember its alternate title ‘The Modern Prometheus’.  Long before its penning someone else was called the ‘Prometheus of modern times’, and it was none other than the American founding father Benjamin Franklin.  This tale supposes that he was the one to engage in the doctor’s dread experiments, and success came through his most famous effort with the key and the kite…

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 17 minutes)

Franklin’s Monster

by

Blaine Arcade

1749

It was said that the birds ate uncommonly tender, but only by the man who had prepared them. In truth most of the preparation was performed by cooks, and they treated the turkeys the same as they would animals killed and handed to them any other way. Roasted. Salted. Anointed with thin golden gravy.

All the while they warily eyed the Leyden jars set out behind their cooking utensils as if they might explode. They looked like bottles from which the infants of molten giants might be fed, the glass lined with metal foil inside and out. There was no lightning hopping between them, but it had to be in there, invisible, for it had been brought forth to instantly end the lives of the seven birds that were to be served to the crowd of thirty that evening.

By this time Mr. Benjamin Franklin was already well-respected as a printing and publishing magnate, and currently served as the postmaster of Philadelphia alongside his joint appointee. Perhaps the job could’ve been handled by one man, but two helped avoid political squabbles, also having the effect of giving Benjamin the spare time needed to indulge his scientific fantasies, which, as the guests of his dinner party were now learning, were frighteningly close to reality. Continue reading →

Big-Saw-in-Law

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

Glassy eyes, gaping mouths, matted fur…  Sports mascots are supposed to be fun, but if you see them in the wrong light you can feel a jolt of fear.  What if they weren’t just a joke?  What if they were as alive as anything else, with their own instincts and hungers?

(reading time: 1 hour, 7 minutes)

Big-Saw-In-Law

by

Blaine Arcade

The Kleinbury High Spinners were up three games that season so far, so morale had improved in the neighborhood. Perhaps enough that he could return uneventfully, which was what Kevin Woods tried that Saturday afternoon. He was never the biggest football fan, more of a baseball guy as he always told people, but his son Matt was on the team. Continue reading →

Brawny Blue Blerkafeld

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

The beast Blerkafeld is one of the mightiest dragons, and even more conceited.  After pilfering magics of time and space he has built his own little pocket world, pulling people from all over the Middle Ages to be his loyal worshipers.  The only problem is, one of these groups is secretly a Renaissance fair…

(reading time: 1 hour, 36 minutes)

Brawny Blue Blerkafeld

by

Blaine Arcade

The beast of Kidnapt Valley

Four waterfalls marked the center of the cavern’s many tunnels and chambers. The place was most curious, as the passageways looked naturally formed, the walls porous and uneven, but its layout was certainly the work of intelligence. Each fall was a curtain separating four identical tunnels from each other.

By unknown force, one fall’s flow ceased just as a cluster of four people reached it, letting them view the rising column of the central shaft. They dared not step over the wet line in the dirt; their invitation had warned them not to do so.

Led they were by Peter Iconius, lord of the red heath, equally red of hair and beard. He was a bear of a man, he insisted upon it in fact, wearing a bear tooth necklace whenever his bear tooth crown seemed too formal for the occasion. He’d brought with him the greatest warriors of the village he ruled, masters of sword, bow, and hammer. Continue reading →

The Field Guide to Fantasy Birding (for enthusiasts only)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

In the world of bird watching competition can be intense, sometimes even deadly, sometimes even magical.  There are birds you can’t see unless you devote your life to seeing them, and a few are in this short story with an aesthetic best described as ‘birdwatchingpunk’.

(reading time: 43 minutes)

The Field Guide to Fantasy Birding

(for enthusiasts only)

by

Blaine Arcade

NAME: boreal chickadee (Poecile hudsonicus) download

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: a four to six inch bird which may weigh as much as an ounce. Gray wings and a brown streak across the head are the most common features, but the easiest way to identify it is by its white face with gray patches at the sides. It also has short wings and a short dark bill.

DIET: feeds mostly on seeds and insects by probing in bark and across the forest floor. It favors wood beetle larvae most highly.

RANGE: Maine, Vermont, Alaska, Canada, and New York. Migration happens quickly, with hundreds of miles traveled in just a few days.

BEHAVIOR: not picky when it comes to choosing a mate, though they will often mate for life. Boreal chickadees rarely build their own nests, instead choosing to occupy the abandoned efforts of other birds like the woodpecker. Only one egg is laid, its size surprising given the diminutive creatures that produced it.

…

To nearly every person who looked at the amateurishly-produced paper it was just a page out of a field guide, a work in progress at best, something to keep an old lonely man busy. Even his family members would not have recognized it for what it was, because they, even the widower’s children, didn’t recognize him for what he was. Continue reading →

Eyelids of an Aristocrat

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

Everett finds himself trapped underground, prisoner of a most peculiar family, missing their sanity as well as a few other pieces…

(reading time: 54 minutes)

Eyelids of an Aristocrat

by

Blaine Arcade

Overboard

This account exists, in various lengths, a hundred times over, and the world over at that too. I suspect this will be the longest version of it, and the most difficult to stuff in a bottle or box, but I’m going to bury it the deepest as well. It brings me joy to imagine the sense of reward of reading it to be directly proportional to the effort put in to acquire it. Continue reading →

Mary Annette’s Big and Beautiful Dog and Pony Show

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

(reading time: 51 minutes)

Somewhere in the enchanting space between dinner theater and the wild west, performer Madrigal Mora finally gets his shot to use that ol’ dirt-kicking magic, but the owner has seen fit to cast him as the villain…

Mary Annette’s

BIG

and

BEAUTIFUL

Dog and Pony Show

by

Blaine Arcade

Voice 1: Alright Miss, I think we’re ready for a trial run. Can I take you through it one more time?

Voice 2: Sure thing Sugar. Continue reading →

Feisty Faustus Ferret in “Machine Works”

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

Inky animated stars make the world smile with their films and theme parks, and none are better known than Feisty Faustus Ferret.  Everything is perfect for our plucky little weasel with the train whistle voice, until someone insists he needs a costar, and the ground under his hallowed studios and parks starts to rumble…

(reading time: 1 hour, 39 minutes)

feisty credits

feisty fancy

It is notoriously difficult to hear, the voice of creation.  The mind naturally listens for it at all the wrong times.  It expects to hear god singing when a flower blooms, or when a child is born, or when lovers embrace.  The mind looks out when it must look in.  The voice of creation comes from within man.  It is when her or his creations are born that it can be heard. Continue reading →