The Society of Misfit Stories Presents... (September 2021)

By Julie Ann Dawson, Michael Gardner, Bill Suboski and 4 more

Each issue of The Society of Misfit Stories Presents… is a celebration of long-form fiction. These novelettes and novellas will entertain and surprise fans of the form. In this issue, stories by Michael Gardner, Ziaul Moid Khan, Mark Lord, Danielle Ranucci, William Suboski, and Rebecca B. Weiss.

 

A sample of the stories in this issue:

 

Jack Hiller believes he is destined to join a secret society that runs the world. But an encounter with an equally ambitious alligator stands in his way in Working Day.

 

After the suicide of his best friend, Balta must come to terms with his grief while working with his friend's sister to slay a demon in The Demon-Slayers.

 

A detective finds himself caught up in a bizarre web of secrets, intrigue, and murdered felines in The Mystery Killer of Cats.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages Publishing
• Release date: Aug 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201770310

Julie Ann Dawson

Julie Ann Dawson is an author, editor, publisher, RPG designer, and advocate for writers who may occasionally require the services of someone with access to Force Lightning (and in case it was not obvious, a bit of a geek). Her work has appeared in a variety of print and digital media, including such diverse publications as the New Jersey Review of Literature, Lucidity, Black Bough, Poetry Magazine, Gareth Blackmore’s Unusual Tales, Demonground, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and others. In 2002 she started her own publishing company, Bards and Sages. The company has gone from having two titles to over one hundred titles between their print and digital products. In 2009, she launched the Bards and Sages Quarterly, a literary journal of speculative fiction. Since 2012, she has served as a judge for the IBPA's Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Book preview

Working Day

By Rebecca B. Weiss

I’M RUNNING DOWN THE power line trail in Whitfield, Maine on a bright, crisp, early September day and feeling fantastic. No—better than fantastic, abundant. Abundance is what drives me, what has always driven me, what has, in fact, served to illuminate in sparkling bursts the enigmatic and often formidable path to my destiny. Only a handful of people, guys like me, understand abundance. It’s something you’re born with, I suppose, along with the skills you need to achieve it.

Abundance isn’t about money, although you need money, a great deal of it, just to play ball. It’s not about success or satisfaction or fulfillment, either. These concepts don’t actually exist, they were invented to provide people with a goal. A man with a goal stays in line. But it’s guys like me who tell the rest of the world what their goals should be, and how they should go about obtaining them.

Abundance is about attaining my birthright, I suppose, and for me this means—and there’s just no other way to say it—running the world. It’s far more complex than this, but the basic idea is that the half-dozen or so members of the BC, the Boy’s Club, men of abundance, every one, men of extreme abundance, you might say, buy up the world’s influencers—politicians, CEOs, marketing and advertising execs, sometimes even otherwise ordinary guys with enough charisma to attract the right kind of following. The BC stays in the background. They work via a party system, and only the Boys themselves and a handful of ambitious insiders, guys like me, are aware the organization exists. But it’s the BC’s responsibility to decide what the public believes, and how they behave. I assume the BC, like any business, operates on a for-profit basis. But there’s something more to it than money and power. Amusement, perhaps. But I don’t really know.

What I do know is that it’s not at all difficult to get people to do what you want. If you poke a clam in the exact same place, it will react in exactly the same way. Every single time. People aren’t any different. If you’re a guy like me, a guy who understands how people think, it’s easy to figure out where to poke them, and how hard, to establish what they think.

I’m not a member of the BC, you understand. I’m too young, for one thing. But I know who they are and what they do, and I’ve positioned myself to attract the attention of people who matter. The BC can’t afford to overlook a guy like me. I’m the one in a billion with the skills for the job and just as importantly, the drive, the intense and relentless motivation, to do what it takes, to know what it takes, to make it, make it all the way.

But becoming a member of the world’s most exclusive organization is a long game, even for a guy like me. You can never let up, never lose focus of the next level, and there’s always a next level. You have to utilize every second, you have to take risks, you have to make the tough decisions. For guys like me, every day is a working day.

Even now, running down this isolated trail in Whitfield, Maine, I’m working. Every day is a working day, hell, every minute is a working minute. Keeping my body in top physical condition is part of the job, and that’s exactly what I’m doing right now. Meanwhile, my brain is taking note of my surroundings, on autopilot. A guy like me knows that anything, anything at all could be just around the corner, a guy like me knows that he must always be prepared for opportunity whenever it chooses to appear.

This run feels oddly exhilarating. I work out every day of course, from 5 AM to 7 AM, even during a bout of pneumonia a few years back. But I do it in my home gym, custom-designed for efficiency. My workouts require the attendance of a personal trainer, whose current duties include turning my six-pack into an eight-pack, as well as an assistant to finalize my calendar. At the end of the session, my physical condition is that much improved, and every second of the day is accounted for. Every day is a working day, after all. It’s what sets a man of abundance apart from the rest of the world.

But this run is special, and I’ve allocated time to enjoy myself. This is the last time I’ll ever come here. It’s also the last time I’ll ever be alone. People, animals too I suppose, avoid the power lines. The electricity makes them feel nervous, jittery, they say. But I’ve always loved this place. This trail is where I feel most alive, possibly because nothing else lives here, or near here. Or at least whatever does keeps well hidden.

The trail exists courtesy of the CMP, the Central Maine Power company. Power lines stretch in a neat row across Whitfield and beyond, creating a break in the impenetrable forest. At exactly 2.38 miles off the main road, according to my GPS, the path is intersected by the Sheepscot River, a wild rush of white water and jutting rock, impassible in any season. It’s just as well. You don’t want to go too far into the Maine wilderness, even on a trail. Maine is a dangerous place, the kind of place that could swallow you whole. It’s also a beautiful place, sure, but that beauty is best enjoyed, in my opinion, through the windows of a car that’s on its way to someplace else.

At any rate, today’s plan is as follows: I am to run from the house to the path, then down the path to the river. I’ll climb to the top of the boulder on the riverbank and allow myself five minutes to relax and enjoy the view. Then I’ll run back to my childhood home, shower, and go to the hospice to visit Dad.

Dad did me the favor of choosing to expire in early September, which is my off-season. My clients are too busy settling their kids into new schools and reopening their winter residences to worry about their investments. Mom went in the spring, a few years back. I can’t leave the office at that time of year, which you’d think people would understand. Still, there were murmurs, which didn’t look right. And looking right is part of the job. With any luck, Dad will die today, and I’ll be on a plane to LAX before sundown.

When I climb the boulder, I notice something in the river, something odd. It’s lumpy and brown. But Detached automatically discards it. Any idiot can observe his surroundings, but it takes talent and a great deal of training to instinctively recognize the details that matter, and perhaps more importantly, those that don’t. There’s mystery here, sure, the wilderness is crackling with it, but I have no need and even less desire to investigate.

I don’t know if it’s the outdoor run, the solitude, or the anticipation of my rental car sleekly traversing the Piscataqua Bridge for the very last time (where I’ll maybe or maybe not allow myself a final glance in my rearview mirror as Maine recedes forever into my past), but a pleasant, even euphoric feeling begins to drift into my brain. That’s OK, I scheduled time for this. I’m enjoying the sensation, but I know it doesn’t mean anything. I learned decades ago that emotions are just observations in fancier wrapping paper, dangerous to indulge in and just as dangerous to ignore.

Emotions fuel Assess and Decide, my decision-making process and the keenest weapon in my toolbox. Acquiring this skill required innovation, experimentation, and years of training to perfect. As far as I know, I invented it. Even I don’t understand exactly how it works, but it’s something like this: When my brain incorporates an emotion I don’t recognize, my mind slips out of its resting state of Calm and Detached, and Emotional takes over. My Rational Mind senses this shift, considers the fact that Emotional has noticed, and tells me what to do next. I’ve practiced this for so many years that I don’t have to think about it anymore. It just happens.

This isn’t magic, although to be honest, it comes close. But Assess and Decide is a prerequisite for where I’m going. Guys like me are required to make the right decision, every time, down to my choice of shoes or how far back I recline in my office chair. The wrong decision, even an almost-but-not-precisely-correct decision, might go unnoticed or might bar me from the BC forever. There’s no way to tell. Guys like me need to make the tough decisions, decisions one might call distasteful, even, although the philosophical aspects of the process don’t interest me. What does interest me, interests me intensely, is demonstrating my abilities to the right people while keeping the less savory aspects out of the public eye. It’s this skill that will cause the eyes of the BC to turn favorably upon me. It’s this skill that makes me not just extraordinary, and not just a man of abundance, but the man who will become the leader of men of abundance. I don’t know exactly what this means, it’s just a quiet truth that will, in due time, allow me to scrawl my name across the fabric of the universe in indelible ink. Part of the excitement is having no idea exactly how.

So I watch the undeniably lovely river. I indulge in the September sunshine, the pale blue sky. I allow myself a rare moment, just a second or two, of satisfaction: I, Jack Hiller, am 28 years old, and at last count (taken three days ago, right before I caught my flight from LAX to Logan Airport), I was worth just under 31 million dollars. Not bad for a kid who put himself through Boston University serving lobster to tourists with a side of local charm. Not bad for a kid from Whitfield, the first in his family to even consider college. Not bad, but a guy like me can’t allow himself to rest on stepping-stones. I plan to join the BC by the time I’m 40, preferably sooner, and there’s a lot of work to do before I get there.

At precisely three minutes and thirty-four seconds into my five minutes of relaxation, I hear a splash. I look down and see an alligator, half in and half out of the water. It appears to be sleeping, at any rate, its eyes are closed. There’s something wrong about this, something I don’t like. This is Maine and that’s an alligator, Detached points out, and yes, I understand, the alligator doesn’t belong here. Its presence makes the river and the rustling, evergreen wilderness that surrounds me seem off-balance somehow, like a billboard slashed through with graffiti. I touch my face, half-expecting to feel nothing but the slick side of a photo, but no, I’m still here. At least I think so.

Then it’s Rational’s turn. Who cares where the alligator came from? You’re miles away from civilization, in spitting distance of a dangerous predator. So get out of here right now, OK?

I climb down the boulder, keeping the alligator in the corner of my eye. I walk for about a hundred feet, then glance back. The creature hasn’t moved, but its eyes are open now, and watching me. I turn away quickly and begin to run. While I’m running, my brain starts spitting out possible explanations. I allow it to wander.

My first thought is that the alligator is a local eccentric’s escaped pet. But the more I think about it, the more implausible that seems. Acquiring an alligator would be costly, and the added expense of setting up some sort of home terrarium for it to live in would be beyond the means of any locals.

So, a tourist, maybe. Some stupid fuck of a tourist who has money to burn, someone who doesn’t understand abundance and never will, some idiot who thought it’d be cute to go down to the Everglades with a stun gun, or hire someone else to do it, get himself an alligator, and set it up in his summer home in Ogunquit or Camden or Boothbay Harbor. He thinks it’ll make him seem interesting, get people to pay attention to him for a change. Then he gets bored with it, or doesn’t want to set up winter maintenance for the thing, and lets it go. The alligator finds its way to a river and, I suppose, dies when fall sets in.

I feel a stab of pity for the thing, possibly brought on by my irritation with the undoubtedly pot-bellied, sluggish tourist, so full of self-importance that he found it entirely reasonable to capture an alligator, to forcibly remove it from its lush and comfortable home, just for the purpose of trying to impress other wealthy, overfed tourists. To leave it to fend for itself in Whitfield, Maine, in the freezing, frothy waters of the Sheepscot River. Surely the alligator understands what’s been done to it, surely it’s cold, ravenous, miserably aware of the increasing discomfort of the weeks to come and the inevitability of its death. The alligator didn’t ask for this. The alligator would go home if it could. And now the alligator has to make the tough decisions. It can’t rest, it can’t relax, it has to give everything it’s got just to live a little longer. And in this, we are not so unalike. I wish I could tell the alligator that I get it.

I’m feeling something, something familiar, but I don’t know what. Right on cue, Rational speaks up. You’re getting out of here, right, Jack? And then you’re going to take a shower, visit your dad, and forget this ever happened. Got it?

Yes, sir, I reply, and just like that, Jack Hiller snaps out of