Tales From Snippettsville Issue 05

Hello, and welcome to the fifth issue of

Tales from Snippettsville

, Short Stories From A Small Town.

If you want to know what it's all about, go to

Snippettsville Group

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Contents of Issue 5

Mermaid by Moonlight

by Alex de Kok

Evidentiary Proceedings

by Quasimodem

Return and First Prey - Sian Sempreviva

by perdita

Another Furriner

by gauchecritic

Illustrations

Header Picture, (c)Couture, 2003

Footer Picture, (c)Alex de Kok, 2003

Now read on...

* * * * *

Mermaid by Moonlight

by

Alex de Kok

I couldn't settle in the heat. I wandered out onto the dock, naked. There's only our cottage in the bay and access is either by boat or by a private back road, so I didn't fear being seen. The moon was near full and on impulse I stepped down into the boat, hoisted the sails and cast off. It was a little cooler out on the water, but not much. The breeze was light, warm, and the boat ghosted along at a couple of knots. I knew where the hazards were and I didn't anticipate any problems.

Along the bay I could see the dying glow of a campfire on one of the beaches. I could see figures moving and I watched until they were out of sight. Near the main holiday cabin area I went about. I'd sailed down on a reach and I knew I was going to have to tack back.

I was startled suddenly by a soft hail. "Hey, Charlie!"

I looked around, wondering where the call came from because sound can carry a long way over water, when I heard a gentle splashing. I peered into the darkness and could just make out a figure swimming strongly towards me. I turned the boat into the wind and the way fell off. A few strokes brought the figure to the side and a familiar face grinned at me over her hands grasping the side.

"Hi, Charlie, surprise!"

"Sally! What are you. . . I mean. . ."

"What am I doing here? Waiting for you."

"Me? Why?"

"I saw the boat before and guessed it was you. I figured you'd be coming back, so I waited, then swam out. Can I come aboard?"

"Hell, yes." I reached out a hand to help her over the side and just about the time I remembered I was naked, saw that she was, too. The night hid my flush and I busied myself in dropping the sails. The breeze was gentle and I knew we would only drift slowly. Sally Jansen settled herself and grinned at me, comfortable in her nudity.

"Charlie, can I ask a favour?"

"Sure."

"Are you alone at the cottage?"

"Yeah."

"Can I stay with you until next weekend? I'll help with food costs," she said earnestly.

"Can I ask why?"

"Nine of us came up for the week, but the others have all paired off. I don't want to go home yet, but I feel like a spare part." She made a face. "All I hear is the sounds of fucking."

I laughed, jealous suddenly. "Yeah, you can stay. Have you got a sleeping bag?"

"Yep."

"How about I pick you up at the main dock in the morning?"

"Great. About ten?"

"Okay."

"Doing anything special up here, Charlie?"

"Some painting." I let myself look at her, silvered by the moonlight. Slim, athletic, beautiful. Emboldened by the dark I said, "I'd like to paint you, just like that."

She looked at me for a long moment. "Nude?"

I nodded. "Yes."

"Can you paint me so that no-one will recognise me?"

"Easily."

"Okay, then." She grinned, then sobered. "How's Nancy?"

"It's over. She's gone off to the West coast to try to make it as an actress." My ex. I missed her glorious body, her zest for fucking. I'd realised I wouldn't miss her pea-sized brain.

"I'm glad," Sally said quietly.

My heart leaped and life began to look good again. Sally stood, glorious in the moonlight.

"What else are you doing besides painting?"

I shrugged.

Sally grinned. "We can always fuck," she said and dived neatly over the side.

* * * * *

Evidentiary Proceedings

by

Quasimodem

(Follow-up to“The Golden Oak” by wildsweetone used with the author’s permission.)

Moving like an old man, Tom Holt lowered himself into the swivel chair behind his desk.

“Anyone who fucks up an important case like you have,” State Police Detective, Derrick Sarns began, “will be lucky to find work selling fishing licenses at Green Lake’s Ranger Station.”

Sarns then exited, slamming the door with a bang.

“What’s his problem?” Jennifer Tillies, Police Chief Holt’s secretary and general office factotum inquired.

“Snippettsville has had its first homicide in nine years. Sarns is pissed because the investigating officer screwed up.”

“Oh! You mean at ‘The Golden Oaks.’ I thought that was a suicide.”

“What it was, according to Sarns,” Tom enunciated bitterly, “was ‘a homicide and a suicide.’”

“Oh, dear!” Jennifer replied, laying soothing hands on Tom’s shoulders.

“When I saw Kevin with his hand grasping the revolver, I knew it was suicide,” Tom explained, blankly. “I was even thankful the old lady wasn’t there to see him like that.”

“That’s typical,” Jennifer avowed, stoutly. “You’re the most considerate man I know.”

“Ha!” Tom snorted. “That’s not Sarns’ opinion. While I was downstairs with Kevin waiting for the meatwagon, Elizabeth Dresden was upstairs, murdered in her bed.”

“Oh, no!”

“I held a half hour seance with the nephew, while his aunt’s murderer made a clean getaway.”

“Oh, Tom!”

“The way Sarns sees it, Kevin came home, found his aunt murdered, and became so unbalanced, that he committed suicide.”

“Kevin?” Jennifer’s voice filled with disbelief. “Kevin Dresden committed suicide over his aunt’s murder?”

“Well, the two were kind of close.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Why? What do you know about Kevin?”

“Thankfully, very little,” Jennifer began. “Just take my word for it, if Kevin committed suicide, it was to escape something far worse than grief. He cared for nothing but playing the horses.”

“Are you sure? Of course, you’re sure! Jenny, get me the coroner's office at Mary and Joseph General Hospital. I’ve got to make certain Doc Haliburt doesn’t overlook a certain stiletto I found.”

*

“Find another desk, I’m taking over here,” Detective Derrick Sarns snarled. “I’ve set up roadblocks around a fifty-mile perimeter of Snippettsville, put out an APB, and released a statement through CrimeStoppers via the media. I’ll need your office to coordinate from.”

“Busy little beaver,” Chief Holt observed shortly.

“At least, I know my job!” Sarns sneered.

“You may coordinate the recall of all your meddling from your own cruiser, Derrick. I’ve already got the perp. We have the murder weapon, with the doer’s fingerprints and the vic’s blood, found in the murderer’s possession.”

“There have been no calls for an arrest. I’ve monitored all radio traffic.”

“No doubt,” Tom responded, “There was no need. We already have the perp. in custody at the morgue.”

“Whu. . . .”

“Seems like it didn’t go down, quite according to your theory,” Tom explained. “Kevin Dresden killed his aunt, then took his own life.”

“Don’t give me that,” Sarns exploded, “the old broad was raped.”

“Maybe,” Tom conceded, “maybe not. At least she had no defensive wounds. Doc Haliburt ran a rape kit on her. Preliminary evidence confirms that the perp. was Kevin Dresden. Once the DNA comes in, the case will be airtight.”

“I don’t believe. . . .”

“I don’t give a good God damn what you believe, Derrick,” Tom growled with suppressed fury. “Just get out of my office, call off that dragnet and your other foolishness. And stop,” he suggested, “wasting the taxpayers’ money!”

Behind a hastily slammed door, Chief Holt, in a compromising position with his general office factotum, added, “I almost feel sorry for old Derrick, but damn, that felt good!”

* * * * *

Return And First Prey -

Sian Sempreviva

by

perdita

Before finding a place to stay, Sian Sempreviva first caught sight of the boy walking up Main Street. He looked twenty or so, pale and lithe as she favored, tall enough and plainly lewd in the deliberate stroll of his long attenuated thighs beneath scruffy jeans. He was obviously a visitor, perhaps from Europe, as he had a cultivated disheveled look among his well-worn clothes and untidy long dark hair. He also carried what would be called a rucksack rather than the ubiquitous American backpack.

He had no arse to speak of, which she preferred, and a sad tilt to his head. His nose was long and irregular in a long gaunt face, his mouth not as plump as she liked but not thin which she disliked. It would do, especially the wider more roseate lower lip. Even with no expression on his face she knew he would have an alluring smile and that his downcast eyes would light up and speak to her under the right circumstances. She knew immediately she could manage the best time and place to make him grunt and moan with her. She hoped he had a deep voice, minimally baritone.

Sian was revisiting Snippettsville, from San Francisco, to research her hometown life for a film script. She’d been away since the last day of high-school, an academic film theorist at Berkeley for over twelve years; now at 52 she wanted to test her writing on the real thing and had just resigned her tenured appointment. Her ex-lover and mentor suggested the return thinking it might provide the right environs and personalities for the tone of her story. It would also be a cheap stay of time for researching the early work of setting scenes and characters. From the moment she decided to come home she began to work at not remembering; she wanted to create the place and herself anew. She could not afford to be a memory.

As the boy ambled by Sian stood fast, midway against the shaded side wall of the General Store. He seemed introspective, or perhaps simply listless, and did not seem to notice her in the shadows. At the moment when he directly passed her standing point the Junoesque woman felt a swelling in her heavy breasts and the immediate sensation of a current zipping between her hardening nipples and her dampening cunt. She gasped only slightly but noticed the boy’s head rise as if he sensed something in the air.

Sian wondered, “Can he smell me?”

She kept still until he passed her view, then in her cultivated solitude leaned harder against the wall and fantasized him there, knew she would have him there, or against another not thoroughly secluded wall, or doorway, or tree in Snippettsville.

She laughed aloud now quickly going through her first fuck with the boy, how she would press him against the wall to straddle him, raising herself on tiptoe and placing one leg, bent at an angle locking him in and giving her leverage for the required rhythm and pace, which needed nothing of a man but that he be alive and vaunt a hard cock. Sian needed to be in control of the fuck.

With closed eyes and the sexual current further igniting her favored fantasy, she wondered if the extrinsic creature might surprise her.

“Godfuck let him kiss well, messy and hard like a fuck, tender when I leave him.”

She let herself come down, gave her thighs a quick squeeze then went round the wall’s corner to the edge of the store’s window to observe her first victim.

* * * * *

Another Furriner

by

gauchecritic

"Parley Fronsays?" Enquired Jack across Ethel's pinafored shoulder.

"Je ne ce pas," intoned the boy in his best broken accent "Je suis comprend Francais? J'amais."

Turning her excited face towards her husband she urged "Try the poor mite with German." Jack's brow furrowed with thought.

"Spracken see doij?"

"Nein. Nein, nich sprechen. Uber. Ich bin ein donut."

Jack frowned once more. "Donut? Did he say donut? I think he said donut."

"HANNAH" shouted Ethel across the counter of the diner. "Hannah. He said donut."

"Donut?" Asked Hannah, coming from the kitchen wiping her greased hands on her non-existent tunic top. "Oh damn and to hell." Her large hands fluttering like sausage-butterflies over the bright stain. "He wants a donut? I'll get him a donut."

"Well, this ain't getting us nowhere fast." Jack scowled as he dredged his mind for generations unused 'foreign'.

Hannah returned with donuts. Offering them to the boy, he took one in each hand, his eyes never leaving the grease stain which had forged a transparency through blouse and bra alike giving him a misty clouded show of her large, dark areolae. Ethel, noticing where the boy's gaze was riveted, glared at Hannah.

"Give me those," Ethel’s liver-spotted hands dragged the tray of sweetmeats from the hefty short-order cook. "and cover your embarrassment." She nodded towards Hannah's smeared frontage. Stealing a glance and then a reprimand from his wife, Jack coughed and spluttered.

"Ok. What about this?" He addressed the boy once more. "Poe Russki?"

"N'ye n'ye n'ye," the boy vehemently denied "Eh Russki zapruski."

"I think that means no." supplied Jack, crestfallen.

"Well what language does he speak?" Ethel mused aloud.

Hannah strode from the kitchen with determination on her countenance and a clean blue tunic covering her chest.

"Did anyone think of trying English?"

Spluttering stridence the old married couple declaimed over each other. "Of course we tried English. We speak English. We tried English,"

"Spanish, Frenchy,"

"German, Italian and "

"Russian," finished Jack proudly. He even hooked his thumbs into his threadbare vest.

"No," patiently from Hannah, "I mean English. Not American."

The pair looked non-plussed. It suited them.

Hannah turned to the young man again. “How do you do?” she asked with as little accent as she could convey, extending her hand.

The boy extricated the half eaten donut from his right hand, wiped his palm on his chest, paused and looked at the now covered chest before him, then into Hannah’s willing expectant eyes, watching her cheeks begin to flush at his obviously sorrowful gesture. He took her fingers in his palm and said with sincerity, “Hardyado.”

The Carr’s voices drifted towards the door along with their hopeless expressions.

“Two straight hours."

“Every language we can lay our tongues to.”

“Give him a room, Hannah.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight”

The boy called, “Nanite.”

It had been a long day. It had been several long days since Hannah had, you know. And now here was this hungry young man thrust on her doorstep. Money. Yes. Clean. Yes. Handsome. Devilishly for one so young.

Without hope Hannah asked, “How old are you?”

“Twennytoo.”

“You know what I’m saying don’t you? You understand every word.”

He nodded and around a mouthful of donut exclaimed “MmmMmyeah.”

With great interest and some anxiety Hannah stated rather than asked, “English?”

And with some slight exasperation the young man replied, “Yeah.”

“You don’t sound exactly English.”

“That’s probly cos I talk Yorksher.”

“Well I’ve always wanted to learn foreign.” She held his gaze, raptured, inveigling. “Can you teach me something?”

He smiled, slowly. “I doubt it.”

* * * * *

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