Thursday! The E-Zine, for May 31, 2023

May 31, 2023

Let’s just see how this goes, what do you say1? This is my first-ever e-zine, which surprises me a little. See, I grew up in the Age of Zines2, when you could drop into the school office and crank a bunch of pages out of the mimeograph machine3. Your creation would be rough, purple, and smelling of hallucinations, but it would be your thing.

Thursday! is my thing. It’s not purple and, to my knowledge, won’t make you slightly woozy so that you have to put your head on your desk for a while4, but I’m sending it to you in the same spirit as those hand-written, hand-cranked zines. I’m using a shiny newsletter platform and asked my amazing illustrator friend Rachael Sinclair to whip up a suitable header for me, but that’s about the limit to the spit and polish you’re likely to see.

My plan is to give you a couple of stories and a couple of poems every two weeks. To start, I’ll find some stuff I’ve written in the past but I’ll wrote a whole bunch of news stuff as we go. I intend for this to last a good, long time and to give all of you something interesting and entertaining to read. You may not like every story and poem — in fact, it’s a good bet you won’t since I tend to run from genre to genre like a crack-addled roadrunner —but my hope is that you’ll like at least one. The comment section is open, as is my e-mail box. Let me know what works and what doesn’t. This isn’t going away so long as I can still spin that mimeograph drum around and don’t faint from the fumes5.

Oh! When I pulled these four pieces together, I noticed they all shared a common theme. I wonder if you’ll catch it6?

Cool? Cool. Let’s jam.

Share Thursday!

Star Light, Star Bright

Every warning light in the capsule yelled and flashed and there was nothing Captain McGovern could do about any of them. The chunk of Russian debris had smacked his craft at just under six miles per second, and wrecked almost everything. He had no boosters, no guidance, and BrightStar 3 was half a minute from hitting the atmosphere head over tincups.

He cursed and flicked the MASTER ON switch yet again. Nothing. His heart fluttered in his chest and he took three deep breaths to settle it down. No sense in panicking now.

He keyed his radio, which amazingly still worked. "Sorry about that. It's a mess up here."

"Roger that," James, the controller, was crisp and professional. He'd been a veteran police dispatcher before he joined the company. McGovern was glad he was there. "Ten seconds to re-entry. Godspeed."

He shrugged in his harness and grinned. Make a wish, Jimmy-boy. I'm coming in hot!"

* * * * *

Lena peeked out the window at the deep, dark night. She couldn't sleep, not while the monster was still out.

A bright streak of light caught her attention. A shooting star! Mommy said they were lucky, she thought. You could wish on them!

She clenched her eyes tightly shut and prayed.

* * * * *

Jack Gardner was drunk, angry, and headed home fast to work out some frustrations on his wife and kid. His fists itched.

He never saw the light streaking down. Never even heard.

The blazing remains of BrightStar 3 hit Jack's Buick dead-center and granted Lena's wish..

(Photo Credit to adege on Pixabay)

Morning of the Roo

Alice walked up the riverbank toward the bloody camp, naked under the full moon. She wrung blood-tinged water from her hair and grimaced as a rib twisted back into place. After hundreds of transformations from human to The Roo and back again, that last sharp pain always caught her unawares. So many bones moved as she changed back to human, she could never tell which one would be the last. It always surprised her.

In the outback, though, it's about the only thing that still surprised her. The poachers she hunted were so predictable. They followed the troops' routes and stuck to the easy places, like the wide river in which she had just bathed. They knew, eventually, the kangaroos would come here to drink. They'd make a hasty camp at dusk, when their depredations couldn't be well-spotted by government drones. None of them set security, not even whisper-sensors that might have picked up her muffled moans as she changed or ground-ears that would have detected the heavy leaps that brought her among them. So stupid. So predictable.

Not that sensors would have helped them much. Even if they had taken their time, they wouldn't have had a chance, not against her. No poacher had ever survived Alice on the moon-bright nights when her legs sent her dozens of feet in a leap, her claws cleaved metal, her tail crushed bone. Still, the sensors fetched a decent price at the secondhand shops and selling the valuables she scavenged from the dead paid for her needs and a couple luxuries, like the autonomous skimmer that would arrive soon to take her back to civilization.

Alice straightened and stretched. It felt good to be clean, to be a human again, instead of the Roo. After the din of battle, she relished the time spent in the quiet of the wildlands just before dawn, alone save for the night insects and the rustle of breeze through the scrub brush that grew along the river bank.

The rustle of the breeze and something else. Alice turned quickly, just as a coughing bark sounded from by the river. A moment later, a dark shape the size of a Great Dane crested the rise of the bank, saw her, and barked again. Answers came from her right and her left, as two more grinning, slavering beasts moved in. She knew there would be at least two more not far behind. Dire dingoes never hunted in packs smaller than five. Worse, they were chipped; she could see the dull metal patch embedded between their eyes. Someone had put them on her trail.

Alice spat a curse word and reached inside herself for the Roo. The change would be quick and painful, but she'd never survive without it. As her bones began to shift, the dingoes charged her. Alice snarled a challenge at them and whoever was looking through their eyes. She'd been lazy and they had finally surprised her. But she and the Roo had something for them.

My Friend Lives Next to a Graveyard

My friend lives next to a graveyard.
She goes walking in it almost every night
When the weather is nice
But sometimes even when it’s not.
Those nights are her favorite.

She dons her walking cloak, the one with
A satin cobweb lining and the batwings collar.
She likes how it flares out behind her
As if the night could lift her into flight.
She also wears a hat, warm and not at all evil.

Her heels click on the cracked stone walkway.
They rap out a jazzy backbeat
For the skeletons to imitate when they rattle.
She hums an old song she heard in a century gone
So the wind can moan properly through the gravestones.

My friend takes graveyard walks, but she’s not a witch.
Her cape is a puffy red parka with cute snowflake buttons.
Her heels are clad in sensible and warm boots.
Her song is a ditty she heard last week
At Whole Foods where she picked up sushi for dinner.

Her hat, though. Her hat is pure evil.
Especially the pom pom on top.
No pom pom can be that fluffy and not be evil.
Aleister Crowley would have loved that pom pom
And worn the hat while he wrote wicked poetry.

If I Could Give

If I could hurl a lasso around the moon,
Drag it from its orbit, and give it to you,
I wouldn’t. Because, where would you put it?
They don’t make display stands that large.

It I could haul in the stars with a mighty heave,
Present them to you all in a net,
I definitely would not. Because that much mass
Would undoubtedly cause a black hole.
And not just one of those little lab-grown buggers,
Like the magazines like to scare us with,
But a granddaddy universe-eater.
The kind that makes Cambridge physicists dream
Of a whole ‘nother shelf of Nobel Prizes.
Except this black hole wouldn’t just eat
Planets and stars and nebulas --
Or is that nebulae? No matter --
Which is kind of the point. There’d be no matter.
Just a gaping maw leading to another dimension
Where the Blind Idiot God Azathoth sleeps,
Surrounded by insane pipers.
And then he might wake up,
Which would make a bad situation worse.

Maybe we should just stick to flowers.
A brilliant bouquet of yellows and deep, passionate purples.
And a vase to hold them just like the universe,
Which continues to exist, holds our love.

Fancy more stories and poetry? Read all you want at JimmieWrites.

Buy my picture book of poems about werewolves and atomic monsters!

Read “The Paper Swans of Ellendell” in Postcards from Mars!

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