Work-in-progress: Ripple: Reapers

 San Antonio, Texas

Bleys

She liked San Antonio, despite there being so many drugstore-all-hat-no-cattle cowboys. You could always tell the real ones from the wanna-be’s, the real ones had a look—tanned, seamed, weathered faces, the shirts and jeans and boots good quality, but never new-looking. And something about the eyes, their gazes taking in everything, silently judging all they saw. Lot of them Mexicans—boys and girls—in this part of the state, and nobody gave them any shit—at least not other real cowboys.

The Daisy Bar and Grill was twenty degrees cooler than outside, early in the evening, but it was still about seventy-five. Lights were dim, lot of beer signs. A good crowd, fifty, sixty people, men and women, a big dance floor, and there would be line-dancing later in the evening when the band showed up. Called themselves the Yee Haws, the band did.

Nobody in the place wore a mask against Covid. She didn’t care, she was immune.

When she was in San Antonio, she usually stopped in here for dinner. 

They served burgers and fries, chicken strips, and burritos, and the shrimp burritos were excellent, drenched in molé sauce and melted cheese. Probably three thousand calories, though she worked out enough to stay ahead of the weight gain.

Had to eat the burrito with a knife and fork, and she washed it down with a Dos Equis dark. They made pretty good margaritas, which was probably where the bar’s name came from, that being Spanish for “daisy.”

She was at a table for two, alone, enjoying the burrito and beer when a tall man in a dark, shellacked, three-crease Cattlemen straw hat, a black shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps, and new Levis came to the table and sat across from her. 

She glanced down, and saw what had to be dark-gray alligator-hide boots, then back up at a smile that revealed expensive orthodontia. 

“Hey, darlin’, how you doin’?”

He was a handsome man, maybe thirty, a fake tan, dishwater blond, a cleft-chin. The accent was Texas, but she’d bet a year’s pay he was as much a real cowboy as was a champagne-colored Toy French Poodle.

Under other circumstances, it might be fun to lead him on and see how long it took before he messed up his cowboy act, but all she wanted to do was finish her meal and get back to her hotel. She had driven five hundred miles since yesterday, and she was tired.

“You a reaper, by any chance?”

“’Scuse me? A what?”

She smiled. She could almost hear Glen Campbell singing the opening of A Rhinestone Cowboy. “Never mind. No offense, but I had a long and tiring day, and I just want to finish my burrito and then go to bed.”

“I like that second part,” he said. “Happy to keep you company.”

More orthodontia shined.

She smiled back at him. “You know, I bet you’re a pretty good dancer when the Yee-Haws crank it up. Probably you can ride a horse. But you’re about as much a cowboy as this bottle of Dos Equis. That hat? Set you back, what, five, six hundred dollars? Tailored-shirt, that’s another two hundred. Somebody cut those Levi’s to make your ass look good—and no back pockets to spoil the line. Another couple hundred. That’s an Omega Speedmaster watch, seventy-five hundred. That pinkie ring is gold, with an Australian opal, three, maybe four thousand. Those boots, another three grand. Call it fourteen, fifteen thousand and change, so unless you own a thousand-acre ranch, or ten acres of downtown San Antonio, you ain’t no kind of cowboy.

“Got some muscle, so a gym and personal trainer, three times a week? Good-looking woman jock, I bet.”

“I’d guess you are a … stockbroker? Maybe a high-end lawyer, or have a rich daddy? You come to the bars for your cosplay, and pick up a different sweet young thing on the dance floor every time, take her to a nice hotel, fuck her silly, and feel like God’s gift to women. 

“How am I doing?”

His face wrought into an angry snarl. “You bitch!”

She laughed. “There you are.”

“I might just wait outside until you leave,” he said.

“That would be a stupid mistake. I’m too tired to kick your ass, so if you are there when I go? I will put a few rounds of 9mm into your crotch. One of them might hit your dick, tiny as it likely is, and tear it right off. If you live, you’ll need a penile implant just to pee, and sex just won’t ever be the same.”

He blinked at her.

“Oh, yeah, I have a pistol—probably you do, too, out in your car, hell, this Texas, everybody is strapped. But you don’t have a gun on you—that would spoil the line of those snug jeans and fitted-shirt. Might have a boot-dagger, but bringing a knife to a gunfight is usually a bad tactic.

“I’m an excellent shot, and fast, and you won’t be the first idiot to find that out the hard way. So you want to sit right there until I finish my burrito and beer, and then watch me leave. Are we clear?”

“Bitch!”

She took a sip of her beer. “You have no fucking idea, pal.”

Memories and Time

 

Those of you in the bloom of youth — yea, even unto middle-age — might not yet be aware of a double-edged thing that happens as you get older. Allow me to speak of this:

1) The speed of time increases.

2) Your memory regarding time degrades.

A thing you do, a movie you saw, a song you liked that your degraded memory gives you?

One that was only a couple years ago? This can — and will — turn out to be much, much longer than that when you look for the evidence.

Had a conversation online yesterday in which I spoke of training with a spear in my martial art. Only been a year or two since I started down that road, right?

Um. Well, Stevie, actually, no.

You bought a wooden training spear in 2017. A couple entry-level live-bladed weapons in 2019. Your first designed-for-your-art spear, custom-made by Chuck Pippin was in January, 2023. Your ultimate Damascus spear Ch’elema — Our Lady of Darkness — again from Mastersmith Pippin, arrived in the middle of 2025.

Moreover, your first thoughts on drills, djurus, langkahs, and a pedagogy? Why, you wrote that down in October of 2022.

The first two spear djurus were created between January and May, 2023. The third djuru came in June, 2024. You did eight short reference videos covering this material, in January, 2025.

You been doing this a while, Stevie. Don’t listen to your degraded memory. Write things down, and then look ‘em up when you want to feel bad about losing your marbles. If you can remember where you put the file.

I am about ready to hide my own Easter eggs — assuming, of course, I know what they are when I see them. Still, I can tell the difference between a horsie and a tiger, so I must be smart, right?

Star Trek New Voyages: World Enough and Time

 

My short voice-over as the pilot of the shuttlecraft Sturgeon, on the fan-fic episode of ST: New Voyages, World Enough and Time.

Mirror Don't Lie ...

 

Mirror don’t lie …

See the image: From what I understand, the extremes on both ends are unhealthy, for different reasons.

Morbid (Class III) obesity carries a raft of potential problems — heart or kidney disease, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, arthritis, sleep apnea, anxiety, depression, some cancers, and higher incidence of hospitalization with other illness, like Covid-19.

But being seriously low-fat — less than 10% — can cause dizziness, depression, weakness, low-pulse and blood pressure, fatigue, hormonal and electrolyte-imbalance, feeling cold, hair-thinning, and a depressed immune system with more frequent and longer recovery time from illnesses.

There have been bodybuilders who looked like Superman, only more cut, who have dropped dead on stage. Looking good is not always the same as feeling good, and feeling good is, despite what Fernando offered, better.

Kinda like Goldilocks at the bears’ house. Too soft, too hard, or just right. 

If you are a competitive bodybuilder, you might want to peak at 8% bodyfat on contest day, but holding that percentage is risky. 

For health, you need fat in your diet and in your body, to help cradle your organs. 

What “just right” looks like is subjective, of course. My ego would like 14-15%, and that seems to be about where I feel the best. Your mileage may vary ...

Short Story Collection - Foreword

 

I’ve thought about doing a collection of my short fiction for a long time. Never got around to it for various reasons. I’ve always been more comfortable with novels, and wrote stories for the magazines because that was how one broke into the field, back in the day. Sell some, use those to get an agent, write a novel, get that in front a book publisher, that was the standard route, when I was still young, before the internet.

Fifty years ago.

Ray Bradbury, in The Zen of Writing, said if you wrote a short story a week for twenty years, you’d get pretty good at it. 

I can do that, I thought.

I was wrong. 

I cranked out one a week for forty weeks, then crashed—I was no Ray Bradbury. (And he didn’t write a story a week for thirty years, either.) Trying did put me into the magazines after a few months—along with three hundred rejections that first year.

Early on, I sold but one in four, and the rest went into a file drawer, to be mined for ideas later. Or maybe another shot at them when I had a few more chops.

When I started writing books, I stopped writing short stories. Didn’t have the time, and what it cost to do one was more work than a chapter in the novel-in-progress, and worth less money anyhow. For me, it’s a harder form, the shorter stuff.

However: The odd—sometimes very—odd idea for a story would sprout up unbidden and unwanted from the swampy sedge grass in my brain—usually when I was on a novel deadline with no time for such foolishness—and these wild weeds demanded that I pluck them. I’d write a draft in a white-heat, touch it up, send it off, and because  these seemed passing strange to me, I never expected any of them to sell.

Almost all of them sold—which surprised me no end. 

So, they’ve piled up. 

Anyway, in the middle of the work-in-progress novel, this idea sprouted:

Time to do a short story collection.

So …

What you have here is a representative selection of my short works, most of them published elsewhere, a few never seen by the general public. Relatively-new, though that’s, well … a relative term. 

Herein are twenty-two stories, just under 70,000 words, from short-short to novelette-length—science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, martial arts, sex, mayhem, and even a couple set in other writers’ universes, rated PG to R, with dabs of NC-17 hither and yon.

Most of these, I consider character-pieces, which I have come to enjoy doing more than those that are plot-driven. More introspection, less action, but that’s what calls to me, so those are the ones I have mostly showcased. There are some thump-and-bump stories, too.

I’ve added a short afterword at the end of each story. Some folks find these interesting.

I hope you find things here that will amuse, make you think, even be a little shocked when you read them.

Woke Up Dead Blues - Jam

 

Antiques R Me

 

 My father and mother were, respectively, an Oakie and a West Virginia hillbilly. 

They both lived outside the cities as children, and learned to shoot early on.

When I was a boy, my father owned a couple .22 rifles, a 16-gauge shotgun, and later, two .22 handguns, both of which, oddly enough, he won in raffles.

My grandfather, Perry, had a .22 rifle, a shotgun, and a Colt .38 Special revolver. He gave the handgun to my grandmother, but unbeknownst to her, removed the firing pin, because he was worried she might shoot him some night when he got home late from working on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

I learned to shoot with a single-shot .22 rifle, a generic Sears or Monkey Ward gun that belonged to my father as a boy; with his .22 lever-action Marlin M 39, and the handguns, an Iver-Johnson revolver and a High-Standard pistol. The shotgun, a Browning, when I was about twelve, as I recall -- it was too long for me to shoulder when I was younger.

My grandfather taught me how to use his rifle, a semi-automatic Browning SA-22.

Eventually, I got the .22 bolt-action single-shot, and my brother the lever-action rifle.

When my father sank deeper into dementia, my mother found him in her walk-in clothes closet, rummaging around. 

What are you doing? she asked.

Looking for my gun.

So my mother had my brother-in-law come by and remove the guns still there from the house. I wound up with the Iver-Johnson revolver, which I passed on to my son. 

Feeling nostalgic, I went looking for what those old rifles were going for these days.

Lord, the Marlin, the Browning .22’s, and the Browning shotgun run more than ten times what they cost when my father and grandfather bought them new …

If I could go back in time and tell my younger self to hide the comic books I had from my Grandma and to keep all the guns I’d ever buy wrapped up in oily rags in a safe? I’d be rich now.