My new short story comes out tomorrow!
In an effort to flood the Internet with the exciting, new Timothy J. Meyer content that it's begging for, I've started writing a series of short stories, one a month, for the year 2014. Each month, I take the same handle and a new genre and attempt to spin as different a tale as I possibly can.
January's Genre:
Post-Apocalypse
The Handle:
"Water has absconded with Fire. At the behest of Earth, Wind must give chase."
January's Story
Battery Low, a post-apocalyptic tale about snow, solitude and an earth frozen over.
Available February 1st for download on
Amazon and
Smashwords!
Here's an excerpt, just for you, my loyal readers:
da da dum dum da
The town named Orla, Texas
elected to sleep in, snugly wrapped in its blanket of downy white. The man
named Orla, Texas could afford no such luxury and was awake with the dawn.
Plentiful chores this morning. Plentiful chores every morning.
Sleep could consistently
be counted as Orla the Man's enemy. An enemy he was obliged to invite into his
home every evening, granted, but an murderous foe nonetheless. He'd first
witnessed sleep's homicidal tendencies during his mother's reign. A little
shut-eye had, come dawn's early light, cemented a vagabond's corpse to the
spare mattress with morning's hoarfrost. His mother, if Orla could recall
properly, was forced to burn both man and mattress together, they became so
inseparable.
What was his mother's
name? She surely had one and it surely wasn't Orla. This many years distant,
details became as fuzzy and indistinct as the horizon line.
As with every other
morning, shoveling announced itself as this particular morning's first and most
frequent chore. The previous night's snowfall conspired to plug all of Orla the
Town's passages and the task fell to Orla the Man to clear those passages, by
hook or crook. The surest antidote against sleep's enervating drain was
physical activity, was red blood pumping through busy veins, and he was glad of
the exercise.
dur da dee da dum
Pecos. He remembered now;
his mother's name was Pecos. Pecos, the mother and Orla, the son. The
knowledge, the confirmation that his mother belonged to an earlier time, was
lucky enough to retain her human name, warms Orla more than any physical
exertion might.
Venturing outside reunited
Orla the Man with two more of his ancestral enemies. The sleep was a foe
masquerading as a friend. The damp was a henchman of the true danger. It was
the cold who was the wolf at the door, the monster whose fangs gnawed
ceaselessly at the edges of Orla's the Town's fortifications and Orla the Man's
toes and fingers.
The cold clenched one's
lungs. The cold coated one's teeth. The cold insinuated itself gratingly
between the joints like shards of ground glass. Sleep was treacherous, damp was
parasitic but the cold was thick with evil, with constrictive white hands and
vile black thoughts. It was against the cold everything was buttressed and
safeguarded, the reason for all the precautions and the vigilance, the capital
e Enemy that killed half the world.
Download, read, rate, review, recommend?
