Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called The Band: The Kaleidoscope's Children, #1

By Peter M. Ball

Their final gig ended with two hundred people dead. Patrick's only regret is that he wasn't there to be a part of it.

There were three things everyone knew about the band: they played like demons, sang like angels, and there was definitely something magic about the way they glowed onstage. Patrick's still hanging onto that, 15 years after their final gig. All those people may be dead, but they were part of something special and he chickened out before the end.

Now he's back on the Gold Coast for the first time in years, walking the streets where he used to see the posters, going past clubs that have been turned into Korean restaurant instead of a home for punk gigs. He can remember everything about those years when he was a fan, and he's loaded with regrets about the gigs he missed.

The band were called many things in their day: Hornet's Attack Your Best Friend Victor; Whisky-Whisky-111; All that Glitters and We Will Always Have the Lighthouse My Melancholy Bride. None of those names stuck. None of them felt real. And Patrick isn't sure he cares what the band was called—he just wants to touch that feeling he lost, no matter what it might cost him.

 

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Other Things We Called the Band is a dark fantasy short story about rock-and-roll, going home, and chasing the dreams of your youth. It's the first story in The Kaleidoscope's Children, a mosiac series of interweaving stories tracing the aftermath of the bands last, deadly gig.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brain Jar Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386023494

Peter M. Ball

Peter M Ball is the author of more than fifty short stories and six novellas, along with essays, RPG material, articles, and poetry. His short stories and non-fiction have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Dragon Magazine, Writing Queensland, and Apex Magazine, and has been included in several Year’s Best anthologies. He’s previously taught creative writing at Griffith University and the Queensland Writers Centre, spent five years as the manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace, and convenes the biennial GenreCon writing conference in Brisbane, Australia.

Book preview

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called the Band

The Kaleidoscope’s Children Series

Singles

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor

(And Other Things We Called The Band)

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Unauthorized Live Recording

(Coming August 2020)

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called the Band

The Kaleidoscope’s Children #1

Peter M Ball

Brain Jar Press

Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Other Things We Called the Band

Selby showed up for the lecture with pink hair.

I sat behind her, ignoring the professor drone on about Deleuze and rhizomes and hypertext. There were thirty-two students in Contemporary Issues in the Arts, maybe twenty of them who bothered showing up . I recognised the other regulars now, the folks who attended class every week. I didn’t get along with them, more often than not. No-one except Selby seemed interesting.

On the break, as we ducked out to grab overpriced vending machine coffee, I tapped her shoulder and said, Your hair. It’s new?

I cringed the moment the idiotic question left my mouth, but Selby chose not to hold my awkwardness against me. Yeah, did it yesterday. My brother helped.

Big change, I said. But I like it. Not because I thought my opinion mattered, just trying to keep a conversation going. A fumbling gesture towards a friendship built on something other than sharing a lecture.

Selby wore sunglasses and a grubby gray shirt that morning, her cuffs streaked with paint and ink. The sunglasses meant she was nursing a hungover, surviving on Red Bull and stubbornness. I fed three dollars into the machine, hit the buttons for white and two sugars. The internal mechanisms gurgled, then pissed a stream of dirty liquid into a paper cup.

If you squinted, you could kid yourself the resulting drink approximated coffee. I drank it because it bad coffee better than nothing, at