tooth soup

photo credit: Sam Ili?

nebulous/tenacity/birthplace

from Steph’s prompt

The road trip down to the farm started out awkward. The radio tuner on my ute doesn’t work and my sister has always had a bit of trouble with silence, so she determinedly filled the air up with stories about her job in the city, and kept filling it up until I had to wind down the window just to get a breath. At that point she looked at me sideways and apologised. She didn’t say anything for a while and and neither did I, though I knew it killed her. Just when I knew she was about to burst from the fidget of her hands, I asked her about someone or other that she’d been gossiping about before the silence, and she picked it up just as if she’d never stopped, smiling gratefully at the chance to talk.

We were making the trip because we hadn’t in a while. That was it, really. My father and mother were still in good health, and the farm was still doing okay though they had a lot more farmhands than they used to, to make up for the creaking of bones. The reason for our visit was simply the fact that it had been almost a year since we had; our family, while small, wasn’t particularly close knit. Thanks to my sister’s water-cooler tirade, I now knew more about her co-workers than I did about her.

This fact brought me up short. I took my hand from where it guarded the gear stick and rested it on her shoulder. She quieted. “Sis, that’s great and all, but how are you?”

I learned more about my sister on the rest of that trip than I ever knew before.

photo credit: freefotouk

falling man/closed room/two-heads

from Amber’s prompt

“This,” the detective-inspector said, with as much gravity as he could muster, “is what’s called a `closed room’ mystery.” He paced the perimeter of the crime scene, a basement in the suburbs. “A door that can only be locked, and formidably so, from the inside. A head like a punctured melon, decapitated from a body like a piece of beef jerky.”

“It certainly looks grim, sir,” offered one of the constables.

“Of course it looks bloody grim! No way in or out, no murder weapon. I mean, just look at his face; except you can’t because he doesn’t have one any more!” The D-I spun on his heel and approached the body. “Yes, definitely signs of a struggle, though I dare say he was surprised by the attacker. Just look, there’s barely any evidence of defensive tactics. No knife wounds on the forearms, only the body. How much would you say the victim weighs, constable?”

“Oh, I don’t know. One-ten, one-twenty kilograms, sir?”

“I’d say closer to one-forty, but right you are. He’s a big lad, and built too, not just flabby. Yes, you’d expect he’d have had a good go at any unknown assailant. Which means this must have been someone he knew, or at least trusted enough not to suspect an attack.”

“What are you think, sir?”

“I’m thinking…” the D-I sat down on his haunches behind the constables turned back and took out a small metal object. “I’m thinking that the victim’s future-nemesis came through a time portal around about here, stabbed him to death with an electrical whip dagger of some kind, then used a remote wormhole generator to escape.”

The constable blinked and turned around. “Sorry, just what did you say your division–?”

But the D-I had disappeared.

No related posts.