"Open Enrollment"

This story takes place in the same world as two of my earlier short stories, "Sometimes I Feel Like I'm Being Watched" and "The Best Medicine", which focus around the character Jillian Nightingale, human nurse practitioner to the supernatural community. She actually doesn't appear in this story, but... well, you'll find out. 

The Salisbury steak wasn’t from Salisbury, and it sure as hell wasn’t steak. More like a mound of meat someone had smashed flat and poured over with cold, brown sauce that slightly resembled gravy. I didn’t want to be rude, but I looked up at the waitress and hoped my disapproval and confusion were plain. If she picked up on my cues, she gave no response before walking back behind the counter.

Disappointment was bringing on a pain between by eyebrows. I closed my eyes and kneaded the spot with two fingers and tried to control my temper. I was getting better at it, but my therapist said I still had a long way to go. And stuff got bad when I lost my temper.

“Is something wrong?” Came the voice of the guy on the other side of the white-and-red checkered table.

“What exactly is Salisbury steak?” I asked calmly without opening my eyes.

“It’s a sort of minced-meat patty, served with gravy,” said the other person. “It was invented by J.H. Salisbury in 1897, while he was trying to patent the first low-carb diet.”

“Not from Salisbury,” I spoke my realization. “And I think ‘steak’ is a bit of a misnomer.”

There came an uneasy clearing of a throat, and finally I opened my eyes and gazed at the skinny guy in the suit sitting across from me. He sipped from his glass of water, pushed his glasses further up his wide face, and shuffled the papers in his hands. “Mammon, if you don’t mind, I could read over the policies while you eat. That way, you can already be deciding which one might be best for you.”

I sighed and, just to make he and the waitress feel better, I unwrapped my fork from my napkin and cut a piece from the Salisbury ‘steak’ with its edge. I didn’t exactly relish the idea of eating a steak I didn’t need a knife to cut. “If I don’t eat, does that mean you won’t read?”

“Oh, come on. Don’t be that way,” Tim Greenbrier, head of human resources for the department, said. “You’re the only one who hasn’t signed up yet, and open enrollment ends today. Templesmith says that if I don’t get you signed up today, you’re going to be stuck doing deskwork until the next open enrollment.” He set down the paperwork and leaned forward a bit. “And so will I!”

“You already do deskwork all day,” I said, finally gaining the courage to stick a forkful of Salisbury steak into my mouth.

“But you don’t! You love fieldwork. And you can kiss it good-bye until November unless you sign up. So, why not just sign up and get it over with?”

I chewed slowly. Hmm. Maybe I had judged Salisbury steak too quickly. “Do I seriously have to?” I asked out of one side of my mouth. “What kind of medical coverage could I possibly need?”

“Well, for one, we have a plan that would cover your therapist sessions. Wouldn’t it be nice to simply pay a little every month and not have to worry about writing a check every time you saw Dr. LaRue? Or not having to pay out of pocket every time you catch a piece of furniture in her office on fire?”

My eyes snapped up from my meal, and Tim flinched a little under my gaze. My skin, which is already tomato-red during my best moods, started to glow.

It was days like this I wished I hadn’t had my horns filed down. Tim got to keep his, although he was mostly behind and desk and not on patrol (not to mention that a satyr’s horns don’t get much bigger than nubs). Apparently the department was trying to soften their image, and iffrits’ curved, black horns apparently made me seem less than approachable. As did my outbursts that tended to make things combust.

I forced myself to breathe more slowly, through my nose, like Dr. LaRue had shown me. In doing so, I chewed the bite a little more slowly. Tim’s only trying to help, I told myself. And he’s just doing his job. You can’t get mad at him for that.

Actually, now that I thought about it, Salisbury steak was pretty damn good. “That would be pretty nice,” I said. Though I hadn’t told anyone about the periodic fires at my therapist’s office, apparently word had gotten around the rest of the precinct.

“You bet your ass it would,” Tim said, practically cheering. He shuffled the papers in front of him and pulled a few from the stack. “I already picked out a few policies I think you’ll like. I’ll read through them, and you tell me which ones you like best.”

So I ate, and Tim read. He used a lot of big words like ‘copay’ and ‘deductible’ and ‘premium’ and ‘in-network’. For the most part, what he said made sense. There were a few plans that seemed identical, and when I asked Tim to clarify he only made me more confused. In the end, I picked a plan called the ‘Commonwealth Plan’, because I liked the name the best.

The more I ate the Salisbury steak, the more I realized I liked it, and the more I realized I had unnecessarily given the waitress the stink eye. I would have to make good with her before I left the restaurant. That’s something Dr. Larue told me I should do: as soon as I realize I’ve done wrong by sometime, make amends as quick as possible.

A thought occurred to me. “Hey, if the department says I have to go to counseling, I’m not sure I should have to pay for that. I mean, it’s for my job, right?”

“You still have to pay for it,” Tim replied without looking up from the stack of paperwork he was rapidly shorting. “But you can write it off on your taxes as a work-related expense. Your NP should be able to tell you more about it.”

While Tim had been talking, I had flagged down the waitress and apologized for my behavior over the Salisbury steak. Satisfied with my apology, she now poured coffee for Tim and I. “NP?” I asked, lifting my cup. “What does that stand for?”

“Nurse practitioner,” Tim said, ripping the tops off of three packs of Equal. He dumped them into his coffee, along with a drop from a small cup of half-and-half. “Our new heath plans are through the Agency for the Betterment of Cryptohumanoid Kind. They have a bunch of NPs on staff that do housecalls and stuff. One will be by your place to check on you every month or so.”

“Aw, crap,” I breathed, after I had swallowed my firth mouthful of coffee. “I don’t want to have to clean up my apartment for company that I don’t even want.”

“You don’t have to clean up anything,” Tim added. “Their visits aren’t for more than a few minutes each. It’s supposed to be a new initiative to bring down insurance premiums for all cryptos.”

“Tired of paying extra premiums of offset the mummies’ rapidly rising cost of bandages?” 

He smirked. “More like, tired of paying for iffrits who catch their therapists’ couches on fire.”

I sipped my coffee. “See how I’m not killing you now? I think I’m making progress. I should send Dr. Larue a text.” I finished my Salisbury steak, vowing to return soon for another. Our waitress, a pretty faeling with curves in all the right places and shimmery dragonfly wings that emerged from the back of her uniform shirt, set our check on the table. She smiled at me, I smiled at her, and I considered that I might not be coming back just for the steak.

“Oh, and get this,” Tim suddenly added as he pulled out his wallet. He set down a few bills to cover his part of the tab. “They Agency just hired a human NP!”

I froze with my hand in my wallet. “Wait. What?”

“You heard me.”

Finally thinking again, I scooped Tim’s money from the table, put it into my wallet, and sent my credit card off with the check. “Why the hell would they do that? Only a tiny fraction of humans even know cryptos exist.”

Tim rose and pushed in his chair. When he wasn’t looking, I wrote my phone number on the check beneath my signature. “Way I heard it, she saved a gillgonder that got hit by a truck. Noticed his gills and, instead of losing her mind, got him to water before it was too late. They offered her the job to thank her.”

I made sure to smile at the waitress one more time before Tim and I headed out the door. In the sunlight, our covers, the enchantments that let us (mostly) blend in with human society, shimmered to life. “A human nurse,” I said, shaking my head and following Tim down the sidewalk, back toward the Cryptohumanoid Police Department precinct. “What’ll they think of next?”

"The Evils of Polka Dots"

“And polka dots. Be sure to watch out for polka dots.”

I lowered the notepad I was writing in to my lap and turned my face to my old aunt. “Evil? What are you talking about, Aunt Catherine?”

The woman across the table was more than sixty years older than me, but still she looked at me with child-like eyes. “It’s a little-known fact that polka dots are the most evil thing in the known universe, Maggie. Never forget that.”

“How could polka dots be evil?” I asked, closing the notepad. I was definitely not writing anything else until she answered. “And besides, you told me that no magic is good or evil on it’s own. You said that it’s the user of the magic that chooses good or evil.”

“What patterns have we already covered?” Aunt Catherine asked, pointing at my notepad.

I groaned. It would be like her not to answer my question until I answered hers first. So I flipped my notepad back a page to where I had started writing a few minutes before. “Lesson three: magic in patterns.”

“Beautiful rendition of the title,” she said with a smirk.

“Plaid and tartan: holds enchantments of heightened physical abilities,” I read from the paper. “That’s why Scottish and English warriors wore it as part of their military uniforms for hundreds of years. Until people stopped believing in magic.”

“And part of why socks are still patterned with argyle today,” Aunt Catherine put in. “Be sure to add that part.”

I wrote in the margin as she spoke, then read more from my notes. “Houndstooth: power of persuasion. Someone working magic through houndstooth becomes very easy to follow.”

“Only black-and-white houndstooth,” Aunt Catherine corrected. “That’s why you see it so frequently on business attire. Someone wearing blue houndstooth can make their words have the opposite effect of what they say. And red houndstooth… well, that just looks ridiculous.”

I scribbled more notes next to what I had already written.

“And under that,” Aunt Catherine added. “Be sure to put, ‘Polka dots: pure evil’!”

I wrote what she told me. “Aunt Catherine, why are polka dots evil?”

“Why is the sun hot? Why is rain wet? We’re not meant to understand everything, Maggie. Some things just are.”

I wanted to tell her that I had learned why the sun was hot and why rain was wet in 6^th grade science class last month, but I held it inside. Instead, I asked, “If plaid holds physical enchantments, and houndstooth can make a person more convincing, what does magic worked through polka dots do?”

“Exactly what I told you. It does evil,” she replied, curling her hand like a claw when she said evil. “No matter what you try to do with your magic through polka dots, it comes out evil. Trying to make your friend lucky? They’ll get bad luck. Trying to get rid of an itchy rash? You’ll catch a worse rash. Trying to get school cancelled for the day? It’ll get smashed by an asteroid.”

I looked up from my notepad long enough to raise a skeptical eyebrow.

“It’s happened!” Aunt Catherine insisted. “Polka dots are no laughing matter! They’re seriously bad news! Why do you think they were so big in the 1950’s? We were in the middle of the Cold War! Everyone was having dark thoughts!”  

I knew nothing about the 1950’s, and I had no idea what a ‘cold war’ was, but if Aunt Catherine said so, then it made sense. I jotted it down on my notepad. “Hey Aunt Catherine,” I began. “Why does magic flow so easily through patterns?”

When she smiled, the lines beside her nose deepened. But instead of making her look older, they actually made her look more vibrant, more full of life. “Why, the same way everything flows through colors and patterns, Maggie,” she replied. “For example, describe what you’re wearing today.”

I looked down at my shirt. It was bright yellow, and on it there was a cartoon of a walrus with a huge handlebar mustache and a top hat. “Well, I’m wearing my fancy walrus shirt, a jean skirt, and gray leggings.”

“Why did you choose to wear those this morning?”

“Because it’s Monday, and fun clothes always cheer me up on Mondays, because otherwise it’s the worst day of the week.”

She lifted her eyebrows and gestured with her index finger. “See what I mean? Colors and patterns have a great effect on our emotions! Another example: when you think of people who are sad, like at a funeral, what color are they always wearing?”

“Black,” I responded instantly. 

“Good,” Aunt Catherine replied. “But black is not always a sad color. Black is reserved, inward-seeking. It doesn’t see to impose on others; it simply wishes to be itself, accepted. On that idea, what color is a bride’s wedding dress, usually? And what is it made from?”

“White,” I replied. “And usually something smooth, like silk or lace.”

“White is an extroverted color,” Aunt Catherine said. “White wants to be seen, to be heard. And magic worked through those slick fabrics repel other things – bad emotions, bad luck, bad magic – which only makes white that much more outgoing.”

I nodded, enthralled by her story-telling. “Tell me some more!” I prodded.

Aunt Catherine nodded sharply with her forehead. “Why? You haven’t written down what I just told you!”

I looked down. Though I hadn’t realized it, my notepad and pencil had fallen to the floor.

“Are you the next Weaver Apprentice, or ain’t ya?” Aunt Catherine said, but there was some laughter in her voice. “How am I going to teach you about the forces of creation and destruction, light and darkness, order and chaos, if you don’t write any of it down?”

I laughed a little and stuck my tongue out at her, but wrote down everything she had told me about weddings and funerals and black and white. “What about paisley? You know, the pattern on handkerchiefs? What kind of magic can you do with paisley?”

A sly smile crossed her face. “Oh, you’re not ready for paisley yet, sprout. That’s advanced level stuff. We’ll be lucky if we make it to gingham today.”

I playfully rolled my eyes at my great aunt, but continued to write as I hung on her every word. After all, I liked the Weaver Apprentice lessons. And, the longer she and I talked, the longer I got to put off doing my math homework. Win-win!

"Scrap Paper" - A "Sleepwalking" short story, by Graham Patrick Smith

Saturday, February 15th, was the four-year anniversary of the day I started on what would become Sleepwalking, the first novel in my young adult series, Who Was Veronica Dawson? Ronnie has come a long way in four years; four novels completed, gaining a literary agent, losing a literary agent, and starting the whole 'seeking publication and representation' process anew. 

In honor of Ronnie's fourth birthday, I wrote a new short story starring her. I hope you enjoy it. 

Oh god. Oh god, he noticed me staring. Oh god, oh god.

My breath quickened and I felt my heart thundering in my chest. I felt my face start to grow hot, so I quickly tried to bury it in my copy of Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. I hoped it looked like I was absorbed in the book and not the boy sitting one row and one desk to the left of me.

Jonathan McGregor had sat in the same seat since the first day of school, and I had purposely taken the seat one row behind him, one desk to the right. It gave me a beautiful view of the side of his face, his awesome hair, and his muscular shoulders and arms.

And, of course, his butt, whenever he got up to sharpen his pencil.

Minutes before, I had been found myself in my usual trance of watching him instead of paying attention to Mr. Edwards, my English teacher. Jonathan’s pencil had slipped from his hand, bounced on the eraser, and flipped back into my shoe.

He had turned, looking for his pencil.

Our eyes had met. For one long, slow second, we were locked on to each other.

He had leaned for his pencil the same instant I had, on instinct alone. Our eyes had finally departed when I picked up his pencil by the eraser and handed it to him. He had taken it without our fingers even coming close to touching.

“Thanks,” he had said softly, in his gentle baritone.

My lips had stopped working and my mouth had filled with sand, so I had simply mumbled and retreated back to my book. When I looked up to Mr. Edwards, the page number that was written on the board was not even close to where I had opened the book.

Oh god, he knows. He knows, I continued to panic. He knows I was watching him all class period. He thinks I’m a total freak.

What was I going to do? I couldn’t just let him walk out of English class thinking I some kind of weirdo stalker. Even if that’s precisely what I was acting like.

What does it matter if he saw you? I asked myself. Just enjoy the view. You still have fifteen minutes of class to admire him.

I thought my inner monologue was trying to make me feel better, until it added, It’s not like it hurt your chances with him. You had zero chance of him liking you before, and you still have zero. Nothing lost, really.

I didn’t want to believe it, of course. I wanted to have hope that, for once in my life, the cute boy that I crushed on would actually return my feelings. Too often I daydreamed about having someone walk me to class, greet me in the morning by the attendance office, and kiss me good-bye when we got on separate busses at the end of the day.

My skin broke out in gooseflesh as a cold sweat started forming on the back on my neck. What would it feel like to kiss Jonathan McGregor?

Not like you’re ever going to find out, the voice inside of me said.

Something inside me flared to life, and I thought defiantly in reply, Oh, yeah? Watch me.

While the rest of the class continued to read, I rummaged around in my backpack until I produced a piece of lined paper. It was crumped and had been battered by weeks of textbooks, and it had some notes from Algebra scribbled on it from a few months ago. It would do.

Still trying to hold the book open with one hand to give the illusion that I was actually doing classwork, I smoothed out the paper with my arm and pulled a red pen from my pocket.  Before my brain could catch up with my gut impulse, I poured out my heart in red ink.

Jonathan,

Confession time. I think you’re really cute. Actually, I’ve thought you’re really cute since the beginning of the school year. Seriously; I just thought about kissing you, and I got goosebumps all over. I want to get to know you better. And then we can… you know… see where things go.

~ Ronnie (the girl behind you, to the right)

When I stopped to catch my breath, I was mortified at what I had written. The mean voice in my head was laughing hysterically at me when I wadded it up and shoved it back into my backpack. If anyone would have walked by and seen it, I would have been absolutely mortified.

That might have been coming on a little strong, I told myself. Try it again.

Mr. Edwards called for an end to the silent reading and started asking discussion questions, a telltale sign that we were in the last five minutes of class. I was running out of time to get it right.

I rummaged in my backpack again until I found another piece of scrap paper. Without bothering to smooth it out, I started writing. This time, I made a conscious effort to tone down my teenage hormones.

Jonathan,

So here we are. English class, huh? I mean, we already speak English; isn’t that enough?  Ha ha.

~ Ronnie (the girl behind and to the right of you)

I wadded it up and crammed it into my backpack the second I had finished it. The mean voice howled with laughter in my head even before I had produced another piece of wrinkled notebook paper. My pen flew across the paper, scrawling words conjured by my frantic brain.

Jonathan,

Sorry for staring earlier. Well, not really… see, I think you’re cute. So it’s hard not to stare. Sorry if that creeps you out. (Also, not really sorry)

~ Ronnie (the girl behind and to the right of you)

Before some base, lower portion of my brain destroyed the note, I placed it between the pages of my copy of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and closed the book shut. An inch of paper stuck out of the end of the book, making it completely obvious.

At first, the demeaning voice in my head started laughing again. When I stood from my desk, it’s laughing diminished. And when I stepped forward and placed my book on Jonathan’s desk, so the piece of paper inside was facing directly at him, the voice shrieked in horror.

Oh, wait. That was just my common sense.

What the heck are you doing?! Screamed every shred of common sense in my body.

I was so nervous that it felt like I was tingling all over. But I was in too deep to back out now. Any second, he was going to pick up the book, notice the note I had left him, and finally know how I felt about him.

In the middle of a class full of people.

Oh, god. What had I done?

The flood of teenage hormones in my brain that had made this attempt at flirting seem like a good idea was instantly burned away in an inferno of fear. And not wimpy fear, either, like walking through a dark house in the middle of the night. This was lower-brain-function Fear, with a capital F, like our ancestors had the first time they had to outrun a saber-tooth tiger.

Like the cavemen of old, I was afraid for my life.

A total of three seconds had passed since I had placed the book on Jonathan’s desk. On the fourth second, I reached down to take it again, before I did something even more stupid (although I wasn’t sure how I could possibly achieve that). But also in that fourth second, Mr. Edwards took both books from the desk and added them to the stack in his arms.

In the fifth second, the bell rang to end class.

Time returned to its normal speed. Jonathan gathered his things and left the room with the rest of the students.

Mr. Edward took the stack of books to the bookshelf behind his desk and started placing them inside, where they would stay until they were randomly passed out to the class tomorrow: when someone in class would find my note containing my feelings for Jonathan, complete with mine and his names written on it.

The inferno of turn had turned into a full-blown Chicago fire. And I was Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

Oh, god. What have I done?   

"Coveralls"

I wrote this short story when given the prompt "Soot" by a competitive writing community. I grew up in eastern Kentucky, the mountains of Appalachia, the heart of coal mining country. Appalachia, the mining industry as a whole, and the people associated with both, often get poor publicity. And although prescription drug abuse has infected the area like a plague, most people from the area have always been hard working, salt-of-the-earth individuals, simply providing for their families. Among them are my father and grandfather, who both went into coal mines for as many years as their bodies would allow. My grandfather's name is Elmer. 

"Coveralls" 

His knees ache so badly when he lowers himself into bed that, for just a moment, the releif takes his breath away. The springs creak with his weight. A slow exhale, from a breath he didn't realize he was holding, escapes his lips in time with his body sinking into the matress. 

"Elmer? Did you get in bed with your boot on?" 

He looks down. He's just in a t-shirt and his undershorts, but bunched around his feet are his coveralls. When he'd arrived home, he'd been in such a hurry to unbutton the coveralls and take them off that he hadn't removed his boots. Now the coveralls are bunched around his feet. When he wiggles his toes, though, he can still feel the boots' protective steel plate, laced in place. 

He looks like a banana with a persistent, blue peel. "I did, Betty. I'm sorry. Will you help me get them off?" 

There are footsteps through the house, but it's not his wife that enters. Instead a bright little face, framed by bouncing brown hair, charges into the room. "I'll help you, daddy!" She says, stumbling to a stop by the end of the bed. 

Sweet Cathrine. "Thank you, Kitty," he says with a smile, sitting up and dropping his legs over the side of the bed. His knees make him wince, but Cathrine doesn't notice. She simply busies herself with unlacing the tall books and yanking them with all her might. He still does most of the work, but seeing her desire to help warms his heart like nothing else. 

After all, it's why he goes into that mine every day. 

With the boots now discarded on the floor, he is free to extricate himself from the coveralls. His wife enters the bedroom with their youngest, his son, on her hip. Cathrine wipes her brow with her hand, smearing a black streak over her eyebrows. 

He laughs. Betty frets, with a smile, "Kitty, look at you! You've got coal dust on your face!" 

Cathrine looks at her mother, then he father, and exclaims, "I look like daddy, now!" With reckless abandon she climbs into her father's lap, over his aching knees. He barely notices as he takes her into his arms. 

"Will you make sure she gets washed up before dinner?" Betty asks him, smiling. 

Careful not to make her even dirtier with his own blackened face, Elmer smiles and nods. 

"Hello Darkness, My Old Friend" - A Beck and Tansly short story.

This short story focuses on a character named Beck, whom I've written a little about in previous entries. I've punched out a few snippets of his story, which I keep thinking is worthy of something novel-length. Oh well... maybe I'll get to it one of these days, after I've cleaned the other writing projects off of my plate. 

Title: Hello Darkness, My Old Friend 

Prompt: Phase 

Word Count/Warnings: 575 words, rated PG-13 for some crude inner monologue. 

Author: Graham Smith 

Tansley screams in my ear. I simply pat her back and stroll through the shack once again. “Come on,” I whisper for the seventeenth time. “Just stop crying. Stop crying. Everything is okay. Please stop crying.”

The six-month-old doesn’t understand what I’m saying. That, or she can understand me, and simply doesn’t give a shit about me or my needs. I know it’s the first one, that’s there’s no real way she can understand me. But, in my delirious state of sleep deprivation, I get a little laugh out of the first thought.

“You can’t understand a word I’m saying,” I coo softly, covering my little shack in five steps again. I happen to glance at the clock radio by the table on my pass, and notice it's three-twenty-five in the morning. I have to be at work in three hours and thirty-five minutes.

In my most sickeningly sweet voice, I say, “If I ever see your mom again, I’m going to beat her in the head with a wrench. Yes, I am. Yes, I am.”

Of course, I will never do that. I am not a violent person, by any stretch of the imagination. But, after her short-lived, despondent attempt at motherhood, Amanda disappeared from our apartment months ago. Unable to raise the baby by myself, I left Tansly with my parents and drove west, finally stopping at a little town in New Mexico, deep in the Mojave desert.

I’m not sure how Amanda found me. But she did, two days ago, and she brought Tansly. After one night together, one night where she waved our old relationship in my face, reminded me of what we could have had together, she disappeared. Again.

And she left the baby with me. Again.

I can’t be late for work again. It’s the only thing keeping gas in my car. The only thing keeping food in my stomach. The only thing keeping me in the pathetic little shack in the middle of the desert.

I have to be at work in three hours and thrity minutes.

Tansly screams louder, for some unknown reason.

“Just shut up and go to sleep,” I whisper soothingly, trying to bounce her a little in my arms. It simply elicits more screams.

I am so sleepy that I can barely stand, but somehow I get the front door open and step outside into the cool evening. Nothing stays hot for long in Mojave nights, so I cuddle the baby a little closer to me in the chilly air. She’s wrapped in a blanket; there’s no way she should be able to feel anything beyond its warm embrace. Still, she manages to find something to scream about.

Tansly’s not hungry. She ate three hours ago, when she first woke up. Her diaper isn’t dirty. She’s just crying the “Screw you, I’m a baby!” screams of an unhappy toddler.

I want to call my mom and ask what to do. But it’s the middle of the night. Not to mention that she’s an hour ahead of me, back in Wisconsin. It’s even closer to morning, for her, although she’s probably been in deep, deep sleep for hours now.

More screaming.

I have to be at work in three hours and twenty-five minutes.

“It’s just a phase, it’s just a phase, it’s just a phase,” I tell myself as I tread, dream-like, semi-conscious, in circles under the clear, black sky of the Mojave.