Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“I don’t regret what I’ve done. I sleep like a baby every night. Most of them were bad people anyway, killed at the behest of other bad people maybe but usually as deserving of death as anyone on your death row. People don’t target the crusading lawyers and politicians like they used to, at least not in this country. Too many questions, too many badges. But if a drug middleman dies, who cares? That’s where professionals like myself make a living.”

“Then why leave it behind?”

“No one sees the work. No one appreciates the work, not even the clients. I’d like to do something people can see and appreciate. That’s not to much to ask after an early retirement, is it?”

You started feeling this way weeks ago, even though you can’t pinpoint exactly when or how. It’s like a dream, where the beginning fades away into tendrils of pale smoke the more you grasp at it. Even in the now the feeling ebbs and flows, all the keener in moments of stress or contemplation.

It’s more an absence of a feeling than a feeling, an utter emptiness right in the center of your being. Not heartbreak. You’re been there–we all have–but not heartbreak. Not love either. That’s a filling up, a welling, not an empty chasm.

Almost as if someone has reached in and removed something you never knew you had, never knew you could miss, the emptiness gnaws at you, begging to be filled. But how, and with what?

This post is part of the March Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is to describe a secondary character that surprises you in some way in 50 words or less and then to post a scene that shows why this character is special in 100 words or less.

Officer Charlie Bulforth, GRPD: eight-year veteran of the force who’s only just transitioned from his high school nickname ‘Bullshit Charlie’ to the more socially acceptable ‘Bullhorn Charlie’—appropriately, given his gravelly voice and lack of volume control. He is cheerfully, openly corrupt, though he sticks by friends—to a point.

“You need to figure out how to work a little extortion and corruption into your workaday life. How do you think I manage to keep myself in the style which I’ve become accustomed on a cop’s lousy take-home? I seek business opportunities wherever I can find them, be they shakings down, beatings up, or something sideways.”

“Frank about it, as always.”

“It’s a long way from being an upstanding citizen to a bastion of cheerful corruption like myself,” Charlie said. “But here we are. Just don’t ask me to do actual police work; I’m not sure you can afford it.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines (direct link to the relevant post)
Yoghurtelf (direct link to the relevant post)
Proach (direct link to the relevant post)
Knotane (direct link to the relevant post)
Dolores Haze (direct link to the relevant post)
smaddux (direct link to the relevant post)
LadyMage (direct link to the relevant post)
xcomplex (direct link to the relevant post)

“Ah, okay. Mr. Y-A-Y-C-O-S-H.”

“No, not Yaycosh. Hjecosh.”

“Oh, sorry. Mr. H-E-A-Y-C-O-S-H.”

“No, no, no! Hjecosh! Hjecosh! It’s spelt H-J-E-C-O-S-H!”

“Oh. Why’s that?”

“It’s Dutch!”

Maintaining a garden was no easy task, least of all for someone with Marie’s fastidiousness. Any intruder, any interloper, any seed or spore that was there without her express permission was to be sought out and eradicated. Crouching in the finely-parted earth with calipers in one hand and gardener’s shears in the other was in many ways the perfect outlet for her obsessive compulsion.

“Oh no you don’t,” she muttered, examining a newly-sprouted maple sapling that had sprung up over the long holiday weekend. “Don’t even think about unfolding your usurping petioles in my garden.”

Normally a pacifist who made annual payroll-delectable contributions to PETA, Marie was vicious to garden intruders. She tore up the sapling by its roots, snapped its fragile stem in half, and threw it on a pile to be incinerated as yard waste.

“All that exists are a billion tangential experiences which are incorrectly called the real. People have struggled for years against the notion that nothing is objective and subjectivity poisons any hope of truth or reconciliation between beings, but it remains an inescapable fact.”

“That’s a rather dim outlook, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps. But it is and remains the only outlook.”

I never understood why Annie Gross set up her practice in town. There was an optometry school at Osborn University just a few miles down the road, so the county was always overrun with eye doctors looking to set up shop. Usually they stuck around because of spouses or children or love of the area–all reasons which, as far as I knew, didn’t apply to Dr. Gross.

Then there was the indelicate subject of her name. I knew, of course, that it was a German name and didn’t mean anything particularly bad when her ancestors had borne it across the pond, but that didn’t make it any less of an issue. Heck, Wanker is a semi-common German surname too, but that doesn’t keep people from discreetly spelling it Vanker when they emigrate. She could at least have spelled it Grosz or something.

Despite that business always seems to be good; I never saw a waiting room that wasn’t full of teens and adults. That may have had something to do with Dr. Gross herself, of course. Me, I was always too shy to make eye contact with her–ironic, I know–and would bury my nose in the waiting room books until called.

That could be a little dangerous, though, because more often than not they were Dr. Gross’s old textbooks, full of lurid color photos of diseased eyeballs leaking pus or escaping their sockets. In that respect, at least, her name was apt.

“Near as we can tell. After that, Engineer Abbot sounded all stop without any input from the bridge and ordered the fenders out.”

“Why would he do that? They weren’t in port and no communications to other vessels are recorded.”

“Look, I’m just telling you what I see. GPS confirms that there weren’t any transceiver-equipped vessels nearby at the time, and that’s the the last order entered in the log. You saw the fenders when we boarded.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense…”

I parked between two black Jeeps of identical make, model and year today. Slotted right in between them. I have to wonder, when I see things like that, about the greater designs lurking behind such everyday coincidences.

Or maybe, just maybe, they had hoped for a white Hyundai to sit between them, the ultimate contrast. Like ivory and ebony on a set of 88 keys.

The far northern realm of Sannikov, the only remaining bastion of civilization in our world after the great conflagration. Even in the shadow of such destruction, war rages on between two mutually hostile groups: the Daqin in the north, and the Seres in the south. Its cause long forgotten, the conflict serves only to threaten the fragile embers of civilization that still flicker.

Despite the relatively small population and land,the fighting was nevertheless fierce and seesawed back and forth with no real gains.

That is, until recently.

Soldiers of Daqin have recently been emboldened, attacking with complex strategies and new weapons never before seen, or imagined, in Sannikov. Suddenly, the war seems in danger of ending not in stalemate but in the annihilation of Seres and all its people.