Norfolk Winters

“Fuck Frank, and fuck Bruce, and fuck everyone in that old boy’s club,” Julie said, running her hands through her long blonde hair in front of the mirror. Her brown eyes stared back at her from a face that looked older than she felt. She turned on the faucet and held her hands under the cascade of cool water. The trembling was worse than usual today. “You know why that asshole Frank told me Bruce got the promotion instead of me?” “Why?” asked Rachel, turning her head slightly as she ran lipstick over her pursed lips. Her reflection in the mirror locked eyes with Julie. “He said Bruce is a team player.” Rachel rolled her eyes as she dropped the lipstick back in her purse. “What, and you’re not?” “It’s all bullshit,” said Julie. “I think they know about… You know.” She turned off the water and held a trembling hand up, staring at it accusingly. Rachel’s eyes widened. “But how? Who else have you told?” “Just you and my daughter,” said Julie, closing her eyes. She gripped the sides of the sink. “You don’t think s

This week’s podcast features two spooky stories for your listening and/or reading pleasure. Wake Words starts at around 3:40 The Walled Garden starts at around 17:05 Wake WordsThe sun hung low over the horizon, its fizzled edges shimmering through the soup of thick brown smog obscuring the tops of distant skyscrapers. Three kids–Mohammed, Jack, and Wendy–stood facing each other, casting long dark pillars of shadow across patches of yellow-brown grass and frowning down at a smoking machine in the dirt. “Augmented reality projector? More like augmented shit projector,” Jack said. He spat, missing Wendy’s foot by an inch. “Eww, gross!” Wendy cried, taking a step back. Mohammed shook his head, still looking down. “But it worked,” he said listlessly. “We had it working.” “Yeah, for three seconds,” said Jack. He scuffed his foot across the dirt toward the broken projector. “Maybe we can try again tomorrow,” said Wendy. She glanced hopefully at Mohammed. Mohammed looked at Wendy, then back down at the machine. “N

Three million years was a long time. An awful long time. It was so long that Doyle Tingler believed his brain fully incapable of processing the implications of its length, and so did his best to spare the poor thing that unpleasantness. Doyle vacillated his thoughts between two subjects. The first was his quest to find his girlfriend Kirsten, who ran off to join the Nikola’s Children cult shortly after Doyle had proposed to her. Three million years crammed in a stasis chamber with Sarah the security officer–his friend’s would-be-kidnapper–had not dulled his desire to complete that quest, though thinking about how he might go about it now, given his current predicament, tended to darken his mood considerably. The other subject towards which Doyle more frequently steered his thoughts was, much to the chagrin of those around him, thinking of and listing all the films, television shows, and books he knew of that resembled his present situation in some way. “Red Dwarf,” said Doyle, staring absentmindedly at the ce

It all started on a dreary Friday afternoon. It had been over a month since my last case, and twice as long since I’d heard from Magnus. They say idle hands are the devil’s workshop; if that’s true, my devil was either on vacation or one lazy son of a bitch. I must have looked a sorry sight–a lone, courageous dribble of saliva fought its way through five days worth of stubble on its way down my chin as I leaned back in my chair, feet up on the desk, with a fat stogie in one hand and a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the other. The rain crashed in hypnotic waves against the rickety window at my back. I’d been drifting in and out of sleep all afternoon–dreaming that I was on the deck of some ancient wooden barge, swaying back and forth on its creaky deck, staring out at an endless dark ocean. The clock on the wall was broken, but the dimness of the sun fighting its way through the rain clouds told me it was about time to quit drinking at the office and pick it back up at my apartment. I deposited my long-since expi

The station’s docking bay doors soundlessly swung open on Dak’s viewscreen, like the gaping maw of a hungry rust-covered space creature. Dak hated mining colonies–they stirred up too many unwanted memories. Under normal circumstances Dak wouldn’t have so much as farted in the colony’s direction as he blinked past, but for some reason they had gone out of their way to hail him. It wasn’t normal. Mining colonies in the Orubus Belt were xenophobic to the point of madness. The one Dak had grown up in would have preferred mass suicide to dealing with outsiders. That this colony was hailing passing strangers meant they must be in trouble. Real trouble. The kind of trouble that paid well. “Initiating automatic docking procedure.” The ship’s voice reminded Dak of his sister, to the extent that he had started calling it by her name. He didn’t believe in reincarnation, but the fantasy that Aylix somehow lived on in the ship’s computer brought him comfort. “What do your scans show, Aylix?” Dak asked out loud. “There are

There was no doubt about it–the old man’s coordinates were in the Orubus Belt. The Belt was a lawless zone, claimed by none of the prefectures. Whispers of missing ships and entire crews gone mad kept all but the most foolhardy of adventurers far from its borders. All trade routes between neighboring systems circumnavigated it, leaving the Belt almost entirely uncharted. Zuli was a more than a little apprehensive, but she had promised to deliver the old man to his coordinates. And Zuli was not one to break her promises. Zuli made the sign of the Prophets across her face and muttered a short prayer. She pressed the comm button next to the navigational display on her console. “Are you certain of these coordinates?” Zuli said. “They are taking us into…” “Yes, I’m sure!” the old man’s voice came crackling over the comm system. “I know where it’s taking us. You promised! You can’t back out now!” Zuli frowned. She had no intention of breaking her promise. “No worries,” Zuli said. “The Prophets shall watch over us,

A hook formed out of thin wire carved a narrow trench through the sand as Doyle steadily dragged it toward him. In his right hand he held a chunk of metal shaped like a cricket bat, which he had christened Grub Smasher. He had salvaged both the wire and Grub Smasher from the debris that had dropped from the Ark. The sound of shifting sand came from the loose end of the wire. Doyle’s muscles tensed. “Come on you little bastard,” whispered Doyle. A small hole appeared in the ground next to the wire, and a pale finger-sized worm poked out. The squirming creature snatched the loose end of wire with dozens of hair-like tentacles surrounding its mouth. Before it could drag its prize underground, Doyle swung Grub Smasher down. A cloud of dust puffed up around the impact. Doyle turned the weapon over and observed a wet purple smear at its center–confirmation of his kill. He put Grub Smasher down and yanked the dead worm’s body out of its hole. Purple slime dripped from its smashed head onto the sand. Doyle tossed the

The phone rang at around three in the afternoon. I stared at it for a long time–the beige rotary antiquity sitting far back on my desk next to a scrambled Rubik’s cube and a book of chess puzzles. I had almost forgotten the thing even existed, despite the fact that it had directed the flow of my entire life for the last three decades. Its ring was loud and tactile–like those old alarm clocks with a hammer that physically pounds back and forth against two bells. The sound gave me goosebumps. I guess for you to understand why something as innocuous as a ringing phone could cause me such trepidation, I had better start from the beginning. When I was in high school, I was a gaming fanatic who was blessed with wealthy parents and a generous allowance. I owned every home console available in North America, as well as a couple that weren’t, and every penny that didn’t go towards expanding my game collection got converted to quarters at the arcade on a regular basis. An obsession with video games was certainly not an

Orange fingers of flame gripped the Ark like a slender fiery hand as the battered ship plummeted through the upper atmosphere. Flecks of carbon tore from thermal plating and flashed as they burned up in the ship’s wake. A mile from the surface, the Ark’s retro booster burst to life, further slowing the Ark’s descent. Three yellow parachutes deployed from the uppermost section of the Ark. Two of them inflated, the third flapped limply in the wind. The imbalance caused the ship to tilt. The Ark’s corrective thrusters attempted to compensate, streaking their blue flames brilliantly across the night sky as the Ark spiraled out of control. Crumbled ruins of an ancient city cast quick-moving shadows across a barren desert landscape as the tumbling ship passed overhead. The Ark crashed at the edge of a dry lake bed, buckled slightly in the middle, then toppled and skidded half a mile. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, the damaged Ark lay on its side, half-buried in the valley-sized trench it had gouged. S

“The engineering team has been having trouble loading the ML data onto the Ark’s computer,” Commander Chin said. He was sitting across from the Nikola’s Children Board of Directors. He hadn’t had much experience interacting with the Board, but Commander Chin was now the highest ranking officer not in stasis, and the Board had been demanding daily progress reports. “Some kind of problem with storage. They’ve assured me it’ll be sorted by tomorrow.” Shadow cloaked the three Board members–amorphous dark figures against an even darker backdrop. The Board room had one light on its high ceiling, pointed down at the top of Commander Chin’s head. “The Ark launches in one week, Commander Chin,” said one of the board members. “The rest of Engineering was to board tonight.” It wasn’t clear which of the three dark figures was speaking; Commander Chin always assumed the one in the middle did the talking, because that’s the only one he had ever seen move–a slight nodding motion in response to good news. He wasn’t nodding n

“Punch me as hard as you can, bruh!” A shirtless, flaxen-haired Heady Armstrong pounded his fists into his well-defined abdominal muscles and laughed. His friend, also laughing, stepped back until he was out of the frame. “Here I come dude, you sure?” the unseen friend called out. “I’m ready! Do it bruh!” Heady’s friend barreled into view and raced across the screen. Heady visibly braced himself. The still-charging friend swung his arm back, and then thrust it forward. Swinging fist connected with Heady’s groin. Heady yelped and keeled forward. The camera started shaking as its operator burst into laughter. “Officer Jefferies?” Sarah looked up from the phone hidden beneath the monitoring control panel that doubled as her desk. She was startled to see Officer Thompson standing in the small security office. Sarah wondered why he hadn’t used the intercom, like a normal person. Probably to annoy her. Sarah pushed a loose strand of jet black hair behind her left ear, surreptitiously grabbing the wireless earbud s