Shorts 2023

By Kevin Williams

A wide swath of super-shorts 17 in all that cover horror SF fantasy surreal and 1 rant

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Williams
• Release date: Oct 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215554838

Kevin Williams

ANNOUNCEMENT.For my ten year anniversary here? New covers+ upgrades for everything!At a million words a week, I should be done by the end of feb.(Man! Had everything proofed before posting. Shoulda been after.)Oh, the AI rev? Bring it.Stealing market share, capturing a demographic, developing a fan-base?That's the game. Always has been.Unfortunately, so are goons, thieves and legislation. Luckers, people.Latest novels:The Finest Evil in the System : AI Woes Jan 2024FANTASY Aaron+Henna: The Elfin Princess's Kiss may 2023SF: Teddyhunter Rogue planets June 2023BOTH The Finest Evil in the System : AI Woes Jan 2024Shorts : The Finest Evil in the System; Loons, goons + booms.Novels are usually 100,000 words: freebies vary. (And might be ANYTHING!)If you don't fall over laughing at least once while reading, the book is a failure.Other than that, SF is the lit/philosophy of western urbanization.Problem-solvingthe effect of techon peoplevia new mythology.Beware, you MAY learn something. Or think a bit here and there, even in the comics..Cartooning? Does-is-ought. Take a does, show what it is, (is is?) discuss the ought. (ie: table= work-server= that gossips)SF? what if, then what, so what?Fantasy? Any sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic. (Characters in conflict over issues)***Readers are welcome to proof-read; if I think it's a good correction, it goes in. (just send an e-mail, book-name + quoted line) Thanks. (One long-suffering reader got a few books dedicated to him.)On a personal note; I've got nearly 2 million words published at smashwords.com now. SF + fantasy novels, cartoons + short-stories.Jeez, lemme see; This whole mess got started in grade school; shorts in HS; novels after. (first one done in pencil.)Dozen or so 80,000 word novelettes (mostly type-writer.); first computer stuff, 80's; novels+shorts.Years of zines, quarterlies, novels, cartoons; (apple-clones, compacts, pcs) '86: BBSing a shorts echo (rogue-bone), blogs and cartooning. I THINK I can add another million words there. Maybe. Most of them are lost unless some old CD backups turn up.2021: Dead tree? If you don't make the best-seller list with your first novel today, you don't get a second. An 8-million web-wonder hit is entry-level stuff. (for movies. An ebook best seller is 10,000 or so) I think my count is 43 currently published over 8 years; and another dozen or so early works lost.******************* WARNING! * Live and live, (long i vs short) tho and thou. I use thou as tho sometimes. It's the most common complaint. Mostly edited out, but I still do.******************Writing has been a hobby of mine since the third grade, and was an ambition even earlier. Cartooning, music + philosophy are other bad habits I keep up. (Plus a few secret ones I'm NOT telling you about, so there!)Zining SF cons with shorts for years (on the freebie table) was a hobby. Well, till charging for intros,(lessons) freebie-table placements and contests became common. It was fun; quarterly editions, mostly. Fantasy, horror (Halloween), children's (Christmas), romantic comedy, (Valentines, st pats) hard SF, on july 1st or world con.Most are in the short-story collections, tho I'm still writing the occasional one today.Enjoy, thanks, pass it on! (Have a day of it, eh?)

Book preview

Shorts 2023

By Kevin Williams copyright 2023

Smashwords License Statement. Smashwords Edition. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Art: fragment of LiveFromIceland.is_Snapshot_reykjanesviti_2024-02-20T13 10 33.jpg

Disclaimer: This is a work of satire; similarities to persons is a coincidence?

Canadian ISBN:978-1-988261-65-2

ISBN:9798215554838

Author’s Note: Fan-mail, biz, complaints and suggestions to [e-mail]

Kevin Williams is on

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/packrat2

https://kevinwillpkgd.tumblr.com

He authors an SF series, Teddyhunter: -about runaway teddybear robots-, a few books of short stories, comics and the Aaron+Henna fantasy series. The first in every series is usually a free ebook.

Teddyhunter

• Teddyhunter: The Underground

• Teddyhunter: The New World Order

• Teddyhunter: The Nano-zombie War

• Teddyhunter: I Can Get Better In The Parking-lot!

• Teddyhunter: The Neanderthal Gene

• Teddyhunter: New Genes

• Teddyhunter: Baby-Blues

• Teddyhunter: The Underground Railway

• Teddyhunter: Blob2

• Teddyhunter: Rogue Worlds

• Teddyhunter: Right in the Shorts

• Teddyhunter: 2022 shorts

Aaron+Henna

• The Gateway Project

• Girl-Ghost

• Aaron+Henna: The Witch-Wizard War

• Aaron+Henna: The Singing Sword

• Aaron+Henna: The Way of The Rat

• Aaron+Henna: The Terrible Twos

• Aaron+Henna: Summer Rain

• Aaron+Henna: Broken Magics

• Aaron+Henna: Dirty Float

• Aaron+Henna: Dragon-Witch

• Aaron+Henna: Teen Learns

• Aaron+Henna: The Elfin Princess’s Kiss

• Aaron+Henna: Short Stories

UFO Observer (comic)

• UFO Observer Book 1

• UFO Observer Pt Two Book 2

• UFO Observer Part Three Book 3

Shorts!

• Shorts From All Over

• Christmas Shorts

• The Apprentice’s Shorts

• The NWO: The Orderlie’s Silent Spring V2.

• Bogus Shorts

• SF Shorts

• By The Shorts

• 2021 Shorts

• 2022 Shorts: Odds and Ends

• Shorts 2023

comics

• Friday The 13th Sex-cult Problems

• Stalking Millionaires

• The Pour Witches of Fenwick

Canada

• The Cold Grows, The Roads Shrink P2

• The Maple Dyraid Life

sf • JoyToy:Singularity

FEITS

• The Finest Evil In the System: Omnibus

• The Finest Evil in the System: Goons, Loons and Boons

• The Finest Evil In the System: AI Woes.

chapter 1 the wild hunt

Autumn Desperation Time. Hunting season, eventually. AC last week, heater next.

The last gasp for some. Horror-scope landing? I’m on the sign-cusp and can make claim to either sign; it’s just days into fall. I love this time of year.

Autumn? The darkness grows. Days shorten fast and it’s story-season. When a squirrel skitters and scampers across the roof it’s the claw after the kiddies.

The colors grow. Those leaves are red for a reason. Mostly the Wild Hunt, really.

Wind-storms start and strike hard; cold and wet most times too.

The cold grows at night; last year’s forgotten treasures are found tucked into dusty coat pockets. Be careful of hand-me-downs, tho. A few petrified relics and strangling items turn up in them, and in things that never were coats anyway.

The Wild Hunt is common and vicious at this time of year. The prey are this year’s cubs just kicked out of the den. Runts as prey-bait, all that. Leaders that’d lost their last fight, trampling about despondent now. Young, roaming, seeker bachelors. Fights over ripe harvests and girls that turn into pitched battles; ones that end with aching losers on the run.

But this was my garden, not the deep woods. Fruit-flies collect and cluster buzzing around windfalls under the apple tree; fat, brown fermenting balls tinged with red. Gooshy ones. So do spiders, after the fruit-flies. The things that hunt spiders also have hunters after them.

Wasps, birds, cats, us. You’re next in this, pookie.

Why are you surprised?

My garden had changed. Morning-dew in the flowers is no longer nectar-sweet; it’s cold and has hard seeds in it. Cranky wasps buzz abound the rattling, brown-dry, raspy-cracked stems. The monsters that were after the hummingbirds clustered and hovering most summer-mornings are hungry now.

Ravenous, actually. And the skunk-traps I set for pumpkin garden-raiders?

Guess what I caught. Go ahead, guess.

***

Here’s a hint at what the trap had in it. A six-inch mini-gnome. A whole tribe of them were frolicking in warm afternoon sunshine around the trap; since they were in my garden, a tribe of smalls with lots of hunting and foraging problems.

Well, one in the trap. The rest were having a party as they feasted on fermenting apples.

Sabotage, bull and thieves! I’ve had enough from your minions, barley-breath! Your elfin relatives are nothing but personal politics! Spies!

That not-so-plaintive (and fairly slurred) screech from a trapped sprite was accompanied by a wild swipe with a cane at someone. It came nowhere close but did splat into a rotting apple inside the cage. The one he was eating. After rattling a few bars and staggering the unhappy senior, of course.

They’re your relatives too, pa.

I blinked. Ever go to a wrestling match and see a hockey-game break out? The elves were like that, a jostling crowd of walking staffs and brown leather hoods, most of them drunkenly rolling apples at each other.

All dozen of them still awake being rowdy, that is; the young ones on the ground were snoring already, nearly invisible under their capes.

Those still awake were fighting over the choicer fermenting apples, using them as soccer balls as they rolled windfalls to a leaf+twig bonfire.

Hoods were being used as distilleries somehow; the tribe was roasting the more explosive fermenting apples in a wee fire. (You do not want to see that, by the way.) The tiny fire crackled, hissed and spat; and a hot splorp splatted off a roasting brown apple and ended up splashing into the cage with trapped elder.

He seemed to think it was tasty. It steamed at him.

I blinked. You can tell a passionate culture; they have public lynch-mobs built in, usually as a very noisy tradition. A hysterical ‘I’m the leader now.’ was the game being played by the other roasters right now, not a ‘This isn’t up to code!’ lynching.

The old goat hadn’t noticed he was in a trap or didn’t care. He was ref and prize; or at least it looked that way to me.

On the other hand, the elves were cheering each other on fairly indiscriminately. Making brandy? They were getting sidetracked by fights, primitive biotech and they seemed to be enjoying it. Myself, I was backing a watching webcam to the cloud from the comfort of my living-room.

I now had a record of the intruders and the festivities. Unfortunately, also how fast the sneaks in my garden turned on peeping toms, but I didn’t know that yet.

***

Look all ye want, fool. You’ll never take me alive. Or keep me here. The unhappy snarl came from the cage where the captive was busy snarfing back liquid courage from the rotten apple in the skunk-trap with him. Attention from the merry pranksters elf-tribe is not healthy for humans. They’re on their way to you now.

That’s us. He slurred in my general direction, staggering a bit as I looked at him puzzled. If I was any judge of the way he was wolfing apple-jack back he’d be asleep in minutes. The miserable complainer was already more than a little rocky on his feet.

Someone already captured and kept you today. I pointed out, dropping to a squat to look at