Greetings and salutations, faithful followers of this blog! I am Timothy Scott Purvis and THIS is another week of Story Time With Tim! An ongoing series where my writings are posted up here. Either I’ve self-published them or they’ve gathering dust in the deep and unfathomable depths of my files, I’ve been presenting them here for your perusal.
Today, I am posting a twofer. Two flash fiction titles I wrote for contests. They have never been published but I intend on putting them into a collection in the future. But, for now, I hope you enjoy these two and read to you again next week!
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QUEEN OF THE FLIES
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TINY LITTLE LEGS flitted across the flesh of her forearm. She brought her hand down hard, the slap across her skin stinging. Her teeth gritted as she sat up and turned on the lamp beside her bed. Looking down, the corpse of a tiny gnat lay flattened against the fine blonde hairs covering her arm. She grimaced.
Addy sat up in bed and looked up at the ceiling.
“Son of a—!”
The veins in her head pulsed as she came to her feet and kept her eyes fixated on the swirly patterned white ceiling. A color that allowed her to clearly see the dozens of black dots merely sitting there, staring at her as if they owned the entire apartment.
“You little black bastards,” she growled. “Why won’t you die already?”
Addy looked at her phone. The time said 06:50. Early morning on a Saturday. And the job she’d thought she’d finished the night before, all of her efforts, had obviously gone unheeded by the pests. A grimace crossed her face as she entered her walk-in closet and grabbed a shirt. The grimace grew deeper as she was force to shake all of the little gnats loose and threw it on over her shoulders and down her torso. Doing the same to a pair of jeans she shook her legs and buttoned the pants around her waist then headed towards her dresser to grab some socks.
All the while she was doing this, trying to dress herself to take care of the business she knew she had to take care of, those little tiny flies continued to fly around. Taunting her with their audacity to even exist.
You have no idea how much I despise you little bastards, do you? I do all the dishes, clean all the counters, clean out all the sinks, take out all the trash, douse the toilet, do all the laundry, check every, single place that is dank and moist, treat them with spray, and what do I get for it? An apartment full of you cocks! I’m done with it! Time for desperate measures!
She finished dressing, stood up off the side of her bed, and made her way through the doorway of her bedroom and down the hall of her apartment. Little tiny bodies surrounded her as she reached the end of that hall and flipped on the kitchen light. She looked back. The hall was full of them. Covering the walls, the ceiling, even some meandering about on the floor.
A shiver crossed her body. However, the flushing of her face and the heated hate building in her skull caused her grimace to turn into a snarl.
“Don’t go away, you little turds! I’ll be right back to finish the job! You can count on it!”
Addy turned away from the pulsating layer of insects and cut through her living room just beyond the kitchen. They were there too, of course. Why wouldn’t they be? she figured. She grabbed her keys off of the key holder by the door and exited her apartment.
#
IT WAS AMAZING how many different varieties of insect repellent and poisons there were. One for just about any sort of bug, creepy crawly, or general pest that existed. Addy chose a general fogger that included every sort of insect that was likely to be hiding in her apartment. True, there were probably spiders in there. And she liked spiders well enough. However, they were obviously not doing their jobs in eliminating the rest of her fly probably. Oh, they were probably fungus gnats, she was sure. And no matter how much cleaning she did, they just kept coming.
Let’s see how you fare after a little chemical warfare… She smiled at the thought and went up front to the check out counters.
“Wooa, that’s a lot of fogger,” the clerk there said. A young man of maybe twenty.
“I have a lot of pests.”
He nodded with a smile to match her own, checked her out, and off she went back home. To deal with the menaces who’d taken over her residence. Her castle. Not theirs. Hers. They were pests that needed to be expunged.
Permanently.
#
ADDY RETURNED HOME. She went to work setting up the foggers. She placed one in her bedroom, one in the spare bedroom, one in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, one in the utility room, and one in the living room. The flies seemed to have multiplied exponentially in the time she’d been away. Some were flying. Some were just sitting on the surface of whatever thing they’d found themselves on. She knew she should cover up her appliances and computer. Her TVs and other sensitive equipment. However, she was exhausted and just wanted them gone. She went through, set all of the bombs off. Left the apartment.
#
LUNCH WAS GOOD. The park was nice. The day warm, sunny, with that slight breeze that made one feel alive.
#
SIX HOURS LATER, she returned. Opened all of the windows and looked around. They were all dead. She felt bad about the spiders, but she was hopeful that the breeding grounds of all those little trouble makers had been decimated.
“Finally. I can replace everything else, I’m just glad you’re gone. You little black bastards.”
The tang of chemical chaos clung to the air as she went about cleaning up the bodies of the insects and fixing dinner. Remarkably, the TVs still worked and the computer was fine. Nothing a little cleaner couldn’t fix.
At half past nine, she closed the curtains to the deck doors. Prepared for bed. That was when the buzzing began.
Addy looked around, eyes wide, mouth agape.
“What… what’s going on?”
From every vent, every hole in the wall, every nook, cranny, and hold came hundreds of the gnats. They swarmed her covered her body.
“Get off me! Get off me!”
She swatted at them, rubbed her hands across her skin as they swarmed every each of her existence. Yet, there was no way to brush them all off and they began digging into her pores. Her hands slapped down roughly, her skin welting under her own attacks. The scream she gave off was piercing, even to her own ears. She could feel them digging into her flesh. Crawling under her skin, an almost ticklish sensation as they made their way up and under her flesh.
“No! No! Noooo!”
Addy fell to the floor clawing at her own skin. Before long, the world was a black haze and her mind blank.
#
HOURS LATER, ADDY emerged from her skin that had become a sort of shell. Her mind was singularly focused: Mate. Keep the brood alive. Stop those who would seek her extermination. After all, hadn’t that been the task all along? Finding the right body to bring the brood back to life?
Yes, that was the purpose. That was the need.
She wiped one hairy leg across the myriad of eyes of her bulbous head. The brood was tiny in form at first. But they grew. They grew and they extinguished the minds meaning to harm them.
After all, they were all pests, weren’t they? And they deserved to be expunged.
Permanently.
#
WHO LET THE CLOWNS OUT?
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“HURRY! GET IN the cart!” Elliot raged, dragging Pauline behind him by her arm. “There’s no time to lose!”
They were coming. He could hear them. Loud, obnoxious, and deliberately vile. Their footsteps a soft flopping on the moist soil of the carnival grounds. It had rained earlier. As all of the carnival goers fled home, rainwater pelting their tender and sensitive flesh.
“He’s right there! Get him! Don’t let him leave the grounds!”
The lead clown’s voice was a growl in the wind. A vehement anger competing with a growing thunder somewhere far in the distance.
It was going to rain again and Elliot couldn’t stand it.
“No, no, no!” Pauline pleaded. “I can’t do this anymore! It’s too much!”
“Don’t worry, we can do this! We can escape this trap and we’ll be fine! Don’t give up! Not now!”
“Just let me go, Elliot,” Pauline cried as fresh droplets of water pelted their bodies. “I’m only holding you back. Maybe they do have me, but I swear to you, I’ll find a way to survive! You have to go on without me! Please!”
“No! I’ll never leave you… we will always be together. I swear it to you!”
He reached the cart parked in the drive and tossed her into the passenger seat. Then ran around to the driver’s side and entered the vehicle. He gunned the accelerator. The crazed clowns chasing after them plodded through the soggy soil screeching their hated howls piercing the night air.
Pauline held on tight, her gaze wide and fearful as they sped through the narrow and dirty roads ringing the carnival festival’s perimeter. The clowns fell behind as he raced through a fresh downpour.
All at once, lightning struck a place far beyond the fairgrounds highlighting a group of people, dead people he was sure, trying to stop their escape. He twisted the wheel as the silhouettes stretched across the dirt path before them, forming a blockade.
Pauline had gone dead silent.
Then, the cart tipped over onto its side, tossing them both out onto the makeshift road. Pauline tumbled over her sides over and over again as he rolled head over heels after her. He laid in the muddy water, rainwater pummeling his face. His vision blurred and then he saw a revolver pointed towards his face.
“Jesus Christ, Elliot,” the person said. “Jesus Christ, what have you done!”
“Mason?” Elliot muttered staring up at the middle-aged security guard.
Elliot turned his head towards Pauline. Her face battered and bloody. She’d been like that for days now. Ever since she told him he had to leave for good. There hadn’t been any other choice, then.
He reached a hand towards her cheeks, felt the cold in her flesh. Smiled as he stroked downwards. Thunder rang out and the earth shook as if all of the demons were surfacing from Hell.
And said in a gentle, loving tone, “We’ll always be together now.”
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Thanks for reading and hope you had fun! There will be more to come next week! Until then, have a good week!
~Timothy S Purvis
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SHAMELESS SELF PROMOTION STARTS!
I would appreciate if you have Kindle or even if you want some paperback goodies if you’d head on over to my page and maybe show me some love there. I mean, if you’ve been reading a while and see something you like, wouldn’t you like to have it in your personal library? I have some cool short stories available for cheap. Also Tales From A Strange Mind that collects my short stories (there’s also a Kindle edition but, for some reason, Amazon wouldn’t let me link them together) , Tales From A Strange Mind II which collects my old novellas, Red Star Sheriff (Which also has a Kindle edition but Amazon, am I right?) my first novel ever released, though, yes, it does have some grammatical errors and drags on for way too long, sigh. But I still love it and I will be writing a follow up sometime within the next few years. I have a collection of my poems called MisAligned: The Heart Waxes Poetic which collects my old poems but not some of my newer ones included those flash fictions! I’ll probably do that in the future as well. And if you love the perfectly inane, why not check out my Star Cloud scripts presented in book form? Star Cloud The Original Scripts. Another one where Amazon was being difficult with me in connecting the Kindle and PB versions. Still, the paperback they let me sale for cheap and it’s well worth a look if I say so myself. Or, if you don’t want to click on individual links (all of which will take you to my author’s page anyway), just click on my author’s page directly by tapping my name: Timothy S Purvis See for yourself what all I’ve published since I began this venture in 2016.
I mean, if you like my work, of course. No pressure. Just trying to find my way in this world without working menial tasks and suffering physical and mental issues as a result. If only I could merely stay home and write. That would be my most epic fantasy brought to life. Well, if you don’t want to do that, you could also donate to my cause down below after all is said and done. It would help. You know, if you liked what you saw and all. Up to you. I don’t have a lot of reviews on my materials because of low sales. I mean, very, very low sales. In the single digits. Right now, I have to rely on Pubby for reviews and those people only read your synopsis and recap it for a five star review. I want honest opinions. Not mean ones, but honest. So, if you ever find yourself buying some of my work, I’d certainly appreciate some feedback. Again, up to you.
Also, I’m selling my work for cheap over at Smashwords.com! Check out that page here: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TSPurvis
END SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION!
iCentrist 