Alone

Alone

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Kenny A. Chaffin

We built the dishes and listened. We scanned the skies seeking others, not knowing if we were alone or if we could even know. We launched probes, built silver orbiting machines to watch, to seek, to search from above an atmosphere growing more deadly with each passing day.

We studied fossils, physics, and chemistry to learn how life came to our lonely watery planet. We studied the universe for clues, for answers. We created computers, robots, and AIs and upon realizing our fate set them free. Others were yet to be. We would never meet. We had arrived too soon.

Dreaming of New York City

Dreaming of New York City

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Kenny A. Chaffin

We wore masks, filters, respirators on the streets. It was all so normal. Crowds rushing along the sidewalks, hailing taxis, tourists craning their necks looking up at the buildings and in Times Square. The hotdog vendors also wore respirators, prepared hotdogs to order inside transparent hoods atop their carts and served them in sealed plastic bags. My friends took me to their tenement. I went along. Inside the double-sealed door it was just long open identical connected ‘living spaces.’ There were raised squares, perhaps beds. Many had cats or dogs lounging on them. I recognized a couple of the cats. Each space had square depressions with bench-like seats surrounding a television that was recessed into something like a darkened underground cave. People watched, enthralled. The cats slept. I needed to pee as always and someone showed me the facilities. It was a utility room or janitor closet. A sink hung on the wall with a pipe and funnel draining into a hole in the cement floor. A loose rubber hose with a showerhead hung on the wall. I peed in the hole doing my best to avoid peeing on the floor or on the funnel/drain from the sink. When I emerged my friends had disappeared, I wandered through the connected domiciles looking for them but seeing only strangers sitting, watching TV. The cats slept.

The Book of Jobs (microfiction) published at Microfiction Monday Magazine

The Book of Jobs

The 40th issue of Microfiction Monday Magazine is published today and they chose my story - The Book of Jobs to lead with. Woo-Hoo!

Microfiction Monday Magazine

If you like it and would like to read more like it see my Prosthetic Amalgams collection from Amazon.

The Return

The Return

(from Prosthetic Amalgams)

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Kenny A. Chaffin

When I got up that morning and stumbled my way to the kitchen for my first cup of coffee he was waiting for me. Sitting at the kitchen table, back to the wall, he nodded. Rather than shock at a stranger in my home it was as if I had been expecting him though he’d been dead for over twenty years. I nodded my head, “Morning Daddy.”

“Coffee?” I asked as I filled my cup even though I’d never know him to drink coffee in his life. He shook his head and when he did I saw the crescent-shaped scar above his ear in his close-cropped hair – the one he’d gotten when a horse had kicked him as a boy.

“How’s the grandkids?” he asked. I shrugged, “Well as can be expected I suppose.” “Good,” he said. Silence filled the room. “Well I guess I best be goin’.” I nodded. He pushed his chair back and stood which is when I noticed he had his legs, he was whole, able-bodied. He stepped towards the front door and then turned back. “You remember that mean ol’ boar we had, the one that gored you?

“Daddy how could I forget, I’ve still got the scars.”

He nodded. “He’s up there.”

Physics (flash fiction)

Physics

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2015 Kenny A. Chaffin

By 2001 it was clear there was no HAL. It was just some garbage made up like fiction, like a Dilbert cartoon, like Frankenstein or Leonard Bernstein, yet still we would become machines listing into the future like slack-sailed ships crossing the Sargasso Sea. 

Snails - Flash Fiction from my Prosthetic Amalgams collection

Snails

(from Prosthetic Amalgams)

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Kenny A. Chaffin

The fluoride in the water did it, caused the snails to grow bigger and more intelligent than ever before. Soon they were invading homes, their fortified shells impossible to crush leaving a trail of glittering slime everywhere they went. Maybe you’re skeptical, you should be, intelligent snails you ask? I assure you it is true, not only that but they appeared to be able to communicate and coordinate their.... what other word can I use, but.... assaults. Because that is what they were, they could devastate a kitchen overnight, consuming and transporting anything of worth to their underground bases. The invasive pest people consulted with the wildlife biologists to try and figure out how they were communicating but were stymied until they brought in engineers who determined they were communicating with microwaves using the tiny antennae on their heads. Attempts were made to jam the signals but nothing seemed to work, the snails were using a coded frequency-hopping system that was both indecipherable and impossible to jam.

They began feeding in waves across the country. Attacking and consuming the elderly, the homeless and the incapacitated. It was beyond biblical proportions. Then someone noticed that in all the devastation, all the destroyed kitchens and cities, the one thing they never touched was salt. Cities began laying out rivers, moats, mountains of salt and they were saved. The air force began slurry bombing with salt-water and the crisis was averted.  But clearly these were no ordinary snails, they had only retreated to their underground bases, biding their time, evolving, building saline-resistant shells, growing more intelligent and preparing to dominate the Earth, to take their rightful God-given place stamping their massive feet upon the soil, the sea and the salt.

[ If you enjoyed reading this there is much more like it in my Prosthetic Amalgams Collection at Amazon. ]

Smokejumper (flash fiction)

(first published at Eunoia Review)

Smokejumper

by

Kenny A. Chaffin

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Kenny A. Chaffin

They call us smokejumpers but that’s a misnomer, we never jump into smoke if it can be avoided and it can always be avoided. It’s just a sexy, headline-grabbing moniker for what is a dirty, difficult, dangerous job.

After the Crystal Mountain fire Janie left me again. She said she couldn’t deal with not knowing if I’d be back or not. I sometimes think she doesn’t understand my work, how important it is and the care, safety and conviction we take in doing it. We almost always come home. I love her. I do. With her it feels more real than ever, but I’m torn by her reluctant support. Can’t she see this is my passion, my love? I’m a smokejumper. We save lives, the environment, perhaps even the world from global warming.

My dreams are of fire. It does not frighten me. It is warm, welcoming.

At first you do it for the thrill, the rush. Like wild passionate sex. It consumes you, draws you in. There’s building anticipation as the plane makes its way to the drop zone, your heart pounds as you step into the air and slows as silence engulfs you while drifting towards the ground.

All relationships are difficult, but more so when you’re a smokejumper. You can be called out any time of day or night for unknown durations. Even the military has better defined time-frames for deployment, leave, and duty. For smokejumpers it’s all up to the fire. Almost all of us are single, some in relationships, a few married – mostly the firebosses who somehow find a way to make it work. We don’t talk about relationships. On the fireline there’s no time for that anyway. We’re overwhelmed with clearing brush, digging firebreaks, setting backfires.

You do it for those that died. The fourteen on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, the nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots on Yarnell Hill in Arizona, the twenty-nine at Griffith Park, California; Three hundred in the last ten years.

A wildfire burns at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. It can consume you. You must constantly be on guard. We jump from planes to reach the fire in the backcountry before it gets out of control. With a forest fire you know exactly what you are up against.

They drop us in and once on site we establish a fireline, a perimeter. We fight the fire by clearing fuel it would burn, often by setting a backfire. When our work is done we pack out to the nearest access point. On rare occasions they transport us out by chopper if there is a base nearby.

Before Janie it was Mary. She was a vixen. We did it everywhere – in the car, in the shower, in the woods, in the elevator and yes we joined the mile-high club on a flight from Denver to Seattle. It was pure passion, pure raging sex. She was a wildfire.

The cones of the Lodgepole pine are sealed with a resin that requires fire to release the seeds. This is an evolutionary adaptation to wildfire called pyriscence.

Fire can be fast, passionate, intense, like first-time sex. Each fire has its own personality. Some are torrid and tempestuous others slow and sordid but all have the power to destroy.  The first time Janie and I made love I lost myself in her. It was a week after the Wind Ridge fire. She said she could smell the smoke in my hair.

Have you ever watched a wildfire move? It can be forceful, overpowering -- crowning, flashing and torching trees as it races across the forest and up slopes in a vortex of conflagration. It can be gentle like a first-time lover, moving slowly and carefully across the forest; caressing, embracing and loving the trees with its warmth.

The tools we use are minimal, a pulaski -- a combination axe and grub hoe, our helmets, protective clothing and fire shelters. That’s it. One-on-one, man against wildfire, digging a firebreak, setting a backfire, working with air support if we are lucky enough to have it.

It was the Rawlings Ridge fire that got us, climbing the hill in a swirling blast-furnace updraft, preheating and consuming everything in its path. We had only precious seconds to deploy our shelters and the rocky slope was a poor place to survive a wildfire. Jonathan didn’t. The rest of us are lucky to have made it, me with third degree burns on my back, and right arm, the others with similar injuries. Only Carol came away unscathed, having found an optimal place to dig in.

Janie was waiting at the hospital when I arrived. She never said it, but I knew from the look in her eyes, it would be the last time.

I’ve been through the initial healing, the therapies. Will need additional grafting, regrowth and recovery of muscle tone and I will never be as flexible as I once was, but I’ve had time to think, to realize and to know that the only time I am alive and at peace with myself is when fighting a wildfire. It consumes me, thrills me, centers me. It makes me who I am. Janie is gone, but the fire still rages. I will jump again.