Yard Fail

By Simon Haynes

When Ralph Swindon tinkers in his workshop, the whole world holds its breath ...

A 2700-word short story.

Trivia: Features the characters from Sleight of Hand.

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I was rinsing my hair when Jenny hammered on the door, yelling something about an accident at Ralph's place. Despite the hot water I felt a sudden chill.
"Is he okay?" I yelled.
No reply.
I killed the taps, shoved the clingy curtain aside and stumbled from the shower. Half blinded, I slipped and groped around the bathroom until I found the towel. I wiped the soap from my face, wrapped the towel round my waist and ran for the hall. I know the kind of things Ralph messes with in that workshop of his, and an 'accident' could have levelled the street.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Haynes
• Release date: Nov 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465900784

Simon Haynes

Simon Haynes lives in Western Australia, where he divides his time between herding deadly spiders, dodging drop bears, and making up wildly inaccurate sentences like this one.By day he's an author. By night he's also an author.He loves wry, dry humour, and his hobbies include daringly inserting the letter U into words where -- in some parts of the world at least -- this simply isn't the done thing.As for his genre-spanning novels, they include epic fantasy (with robots), scifi comedy (also with robots), middle grade humour (featuring robots AND the wanton use of the letter U), as well as a series of historical mystery novels set in 1870's London. (No, of course there aren't robots in those. He's not completely out of his mind.)When he's not writing Simon is usually renovating his house, sim-racing online, using twitter (@spacejock), gardening, tweaking his book covers, pondering the meaning of the universe and reading, and if you think it's easy doing all that at the same time you should see what he can do with a mug of coffee, a banana and a large bag of salt.When he's not making outlandish claims he likes to count how many novels he's written, and how many genres he's written them in. (Lots and too many.)Finally, if you want to hear Simon reading one of his award-winning stories, you'll find an enticement to join his newsletter here: spacejock.com.au/ML.html

Book preview

Yard Fail

A Short Story

When Ralph Swindon tinkers in his workshop,

the whole world holds its breath.

© Simon Haynes 2011

All Rights Reserved

Bowman Press

Bowman Press

Stock images © depositphotos.com

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Yard Fail

I was rinsing my hair when Jenny hammered on the door, yelling something about an accident at Ralph's place. Despite the hot water I felt a sudden chill.

Is he okay? I yelled.

No reply.

I killed the taps, shoved the clingy curtain aside and stumbled from the shower. Half blinded, I slipped and groped around the bathroom until I found the towel. I wiped the soap from my face, wrapped the towel round my waist and ran for the hall. I know the kind of things Ralph messes with in that workshop of his, and an 'accident' could have levelled the street.

Jenny was just putting the phone down when I got there. She gave me a look - the 'Told you he was trouble' look, the one