Colin Gee

He had been developing a new strategy game in his sleep to pass the agonizing hours, and it involved placing different colored rocks on a three-dimensional pitch that he had carved out of the sandstone bunker beneath the house where he lived in his sleep that year. It was a few years ago. The field of battle spread through many many rooms of the bunker where he explained the rules to his greasy little companions, who slept in the walls. There was a light system that recorded all of the moves and projected the position of the different pieces (grey, pink, blue, purple, teal, oak, cream: perfectly round and polished with one flat edge) and stored the positions and moves in a locked database. Or else the gnomes, who had elephant trunks and tiny human hands, would cheat by moving the pieces whenever he turned his back, and to his disappointment they started stealing the rocks, too, for the pieces had become very costly. They were unique in that world, born from his own thoughts like drops of brain, which he dribbled onto wax paper as they ran out of his nose and baked in an oven, and in addition the game was now very famous. Not only were the stones priceless, they had become essential for the survival of that world and its humans and by extension the elephant people. In fact, the man realized one night with a start, the movements of the pieces now dictated the movement of the mechanized armies out on the supercontinent. The dreamer and his trunked gnomes had become generals in a war of robots, and the map in the sandstone bunker had become the map of the world. Now the pieces also flew on silver dollar sized platforms that notched into the board squares with a whiz and a click, and drove upon remote control flatbeds across miniature superhighways that zoomed in and out of tunnels in the bunker, and ran upon tracks that the dreamer fashioned, that crawled upon the walls and twisted into fantastical loops and corkscrews.

The pirates came aboard in a bloody dusk in a tussle of meaty hands and rouge and bonepierced lips and grim little bursts of powder and the first thing was they stood our captain and officers up against the rail and executed them one by one with pistol shots to the face, very gory, without saying a word. We knew it would happen this way because we had turned and run from them for a long time and put up a hard fight. More gunshots were heard belowdecks, following the slap of bare feet, then the situation was taken care of down there, apparently.

LAM CHOPS

Excerpt from the forthcoming Ransom On The Wrong Side Of The River: A Ransom Mones Mystery

Jackson’s old lady opened the door in house heels and a dress the size and color of a three-page high-school love letter. She told me to come right in.

Her exact words were, ‘What the hell do you want?” but I knew an invitation when I heard one. She had on long sturdy legs, bounding breasts, and back fat like a pork barbecue. A lot of body parts for a young white widow to pack into one little love letter, I whistled. She had picked up the habit of letting her mouth hang slightly open in jail or from the television like she could not believe the judge she had just bribed would not look down inside her hot air balloon.

It was about eighteen months ago when I made the acquaintance of Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good. This is what happened: I was up by Bamangwato hunting elephants and shit just kept hitting the fan, and I got the dengue, so I gave up and limped back into Cape Town and got a passage back to Natal on a ship known only as the Dunkeld.

‘Dunkeld, Dunkeld, never heard of her,’ I told the station master, fear and worry evident in my face and aching luggage bearers. ‘Are you sure it ain’t the Dunker?’

I drank my way through that year, half on the sly. Put down a bottle of hard stuff every two days without a thought. But this story isn’t about that, it is about Grandpa.

We were living in a cabin way down a holler south of Mexico when he decided to drive himself down in his 98 grey Caddy with the crimson faux leather interior. The last US highway patrol to interfere with him told him to drive faster, or else get off the interstate. Then in a blink of an eye Grandpa was through Tamaulipas, oblivious to the bullets and grunts of falling bodies that played like a cartoon across his rear view, the slugs from semi-auto sawed-offs and cholos thrown like stuffed bunnies from their white Suburbans yo-yoing blood and spit horizontally from their smitten, slow-motion screaming mouths, their last testament to this earth, of the way they had chosen.