Read Now, Nap Later

By Gretchen Rix

READ NOW, NAP LATER short stories for insomniacs.

Welcome to my world (insomnia). I’m the author of the short story collections Ill Met By Moonlight, Baby Sings the Boos, and Twisted Rixter.

Most of these READ NOW, NAP LATER stories are cozy-level mysteries, but then you have my vampire tale Things Go Better and what’s maybe a science fiction story Burning Down the Barn. Most of these stories are quirky, some out-and-out funny, a few serious.

For insomniacs? Well, I hope they don’t put you to sleep, (only Cerulean Blue was deliberately designed to do so), but if they do, they’ve served a good purpose don’t you think.

Sweet dreams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gretchen Rix
• Release date: Oct 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005481346

Gretchen Rix

Gretchen Rix--I write Texas cozy mysteries in the Boo Done It series set in Lockhart, the barbecue capital of Texas. Tag line: Where there's more than indigestion brewing.I've worked as a bookstore clerk, a newspaper writer, and a book reviewer. I've had jobs as a professional typist, a truck dispatcher and a health insurance claims processor. I learned a lot from these jobs. But my true inspiration for these mysteries was our family's stubborn, huge, skittish and always-hungry dog Boo Radley. This dog could drag anybody into an adventure.My sister and I created and ran an international ghost story writing contest. It lasted four years. Now I no longer ever desire to be a magazine editor. I go to science fiction conventions. I'm a member of RWA. Halloween is my favorite holiday and I take the motto "Keep Austin Weird" seriously even though I live 35 miles away."Talking to The Dead Guys" is the first in a series of murder mysteries about a dog, strong women, and small-town living (or is it dying?). Check out all my books at http://rixcafetexican.com and my blog at http://gretchenrix.com.

Book preview

Read-Now-Nap-Later-1440x2240-Embed-Inside-Epub.jpg

Table Of Contents

A FOREGONE CONCLUSION

COLD CUTS

PILFERING

BACTERIUM’S LAST HARRUMPH

JUST BROWN, MA’AM

THE LAP THE CAT SITS ON

BURNING DOWN THE BARN

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE MISSING BOOK

CERULEAN BLUE

THINGS GO BETTER

OTHER BOOKS BY GRETCHEN RIX

READ NOW, NAP LATER: Short Stories for Insomniacs

Copyright 2022 by Gretchen Rix. All rights reserved.

Published by Rix Café Texican

Cover and formatting by Streetlight Graphics

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons –living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

A FOREGONE CONCLUSION

T

he prisoner Roth Borradaile had

only the four walls of his own mind to keep him reined in. And safe from the rapid decline into insanity some earlier prisoners had experienced. It also kept him moderately entertained. The walls stood sentinel around his head like a lead-lined box. And just as heavily. He could barely keep them centered.

But they were primarily designed to keep him confined until the foregone conclusion to his case was finalized. Why bother, he wondered.

That was all there was to him, those four walls. He called them Wall One, Wall Two, Wall Three, and My Wall. My Wall was the only section under any of his control. It currently showcased various loot from Roth’s past. Gold coins in a pail hanging from a peg, exotic animal skins stretched on a metal frame, a few worm-eaten ancient book pages nailed to a blank spot.

Computers owned the legal system, and they had for the past hundred years of human history. It was best this way. Roth had signed the contract just like everyone else. Like his ancient books, the contract was brittle paper smelling of dust. The only people this was going to hurt were the ones who broke the law, and that wouldn’t be him.

Four walls, only one of which he controlled. As far as Roth knew, he was still on his private spaceship, the Marginal Line, it was still the year 2201, and they were still orbiting Mars.

But that might not be true.

The Marginal Line was an oblong capsule of burnished steel, pitted with hard use. Some would say the same of its owner.

The jury had caught up to them a scant few seconds after the crime. Roth had been whisked to the jury, then whisked immediately somewhere else. He suspected it was back to his own ship. It smelled like his own ship. Cinnamon and cloves drifting out of the cook’s storeroom, lavender and sandalwood from the navigator’s bunk.

Roth sneezed. Remanded into custody. He had been remanded into the custody of the jury. Nothing he’d ever thought would happen to him. He had his own hot temper to blame.

Computers tended to be literal minded, and the jury was no exception, being that it was nothing more than another jumped-up computer (Roth’s opinion), now virtually hotwired into the Marginal Line’s own system.

He hadn’t been outrunning justice, he’d explained to his crew of five, but just getting the current job done. They wanted to get paid, didn’t they?

He had been sentenced to death for turning off a computer.

For turning off his own damned computer!

Until judgement was passed, he had only the four walls of his mind to contemplate.

Roth didn’t know if it was only his head that remained (the rest of his body lasered away and incinerated with the rest of the trash), or if he was now just a brain section snuggled in a petri dish.

His heart raced like a rabbit’s that was barreling through an open field chased by a hawk, and he struggled to breathe. It wouldn’t slow down. He breathed out, he held it to the count of ten before inhaling. Still racing! In, hold it in, hold it in, hold it… Roth didn’t want to know how he looked, who cared what he looked like, he was breathing regular-like again. His face had flooded with color. His lips cracked with the effort.

He sighed.

That settled that question, Roth decided. No reason for that reaction if he didn’t still have a heart.

So, and here he paused and ran a projection of what he looked like onto the fourth wall, My Wall. He and his body had been warehoused. Until the trial’s conclusion.

Projection Roth shook his head from side to side until he had his progenitor sighted. What Roth saw in front of him was a thin, lightly muscled, and shorter version of himself. Much shorter. And with buzzed hair only an inch long covering his scalp.

Which was not accurate at all. Roth topped the chart at six feet, had power muscle definition, and his blond hair (this cycle it was color-coded dark blue) was long enough to waft into his first mate’s mouth while standing close to her on the bridge, and usually smelled of sandalwood soap.

The projection of Roth on his fourth wall snorted with a combination of derision and amusement, a twinkle in his eyes. Projection Roth then shot himself the finger.

Nothing new about that obscene gesture. It had been a gesture of defiance for centuries, an oddment Roth remembered from his chemical induced education. He used it often himself.

The other three walls in Roth’s mind abruptly quivered, then swayed outwards in what Roth assumed was fury at his continued defiance. Or his unwillingness to take things seriously.

Like a circus acrobat spinning plates in the air on a pole, Roth waited for the crash. He was brand new to this type of confinement. Physical jail cells made of hardcrete he was familiar with. His hands shook in tiny tremors he couldn’t control. But did he really have hands anymore? And how long had he been here? It felt like forever.

The wall to the left of the only wall Roth controlled had always before presented as a satinwood floor-to-ceiling cabinet stuffed with plants in brown faux-paper containers. The yellowish-brown wood had a satiny luster that had made Roth’s mouth water, and made him taste vanilla-iced vanilla cake. He’d drooled. Or thought he drooled. Right now the paper containers looked like they’d exploded. Shredded flora. Potpourri all over.

The plants themselves were a mix of red Venusian vines sweating a purple syrup, and zygospores of the various local fungi the Marginal Line had been hired to collect. The faint light green of the Mucor circinelloides and the almost dandelion appearance of the Rhizopus oligosporus were the only ones he recognized as still intact.

And as a practical joke on him, Roth supposed, the wall to the right of the only wall he controlled had always been totally black. There might have been some brown color bleeding through the bottom panel. Roth had originally suspected his jailers were showing him Mark Rothko art. Ha! Ha!

Now, not so much. The brown had gone out from it. Total black remained.

But the final wall that Roth didn’t control had always nonplussed him. It had showed the stirrup cup collection from his rich father’s house. Done in silver, finely-detailed Earth animal heads, not all of them snarling (but he’d be snarling if anyone made a cup out of his head), poked out from depressions in a special display case.

Nothing had changed on that wall.

Why then leave that alone of all the things his jailers could have chosen?

His blood ran cold all of a sudden. The tiny tremors escalated, and goosebumps ran down his spine. He thought he smelled a dead animal, the putrid stink, once encountered, was never forgotten.

Was this a clue that he was only a head now?

His bladder let loose, the sharp stench of urine reaching his nose, then making his eyes water. They were torturing him with these scenarios. Weren’t they? Because he’d killed one of their own?

Because that was what turning off a computer meant in the year 2201. Murder.

Why bother with all this? Roth asked himself. His trial result was a foregone conclusion.

The jury computer had access to everything Roth had done on this ship from the first moment he’d excitedly clambered aboard to the Oh, shit! he’d exclaimed when the jury computer stumbled into his ship’s purposely convoluted flight plan. And with the jury it was a simple binary decision.

Did he do it, or not. If he did it, he was guilty.

And Roth Borradaile had certainly done it.

Wait! If he could feel the humiliating warm piss slithering down his trouser leg, he must still have a body.

He had a body! He had a body!

The four walls around his mind slowly faded to black. He should have known not