Scriptorium Summer Writing Competition Short Fiction Voting Thread
Here are the submissions for the short fiction category. Please vote for your favorite one.
Also, bear in mind, anonymity is still required. Authors of any works below may not declare what submission may be theirs, or in any other way ruin the anonymity of theirs or another member's submission. Those found to be doing so here or anywhere else will be rightly and sneakily punished (You were warned when you submitted to this competition that if you screw up you will be publicly flogged and embarrassed). This thread is for discussion of the articles at hand and voting, NOTHING ELSE.
Also please note one or more entries were originally submitted to the Non Fiction category, which did not have enough entries to stand on its own so its entries are instead merged into long and short fiction voting, at the author's permission as well.
A Bridge - Entry #1
Regrets and Beginnings - Entry #2
Sweet Dreams - Entry #3
A Midnight Meeting - Entry #4
The Devil's Duelist - Entry #5
The Devil's Duellist
May 1816.
The gun powder stained the chest of his unwashed, ivory skirt was perhaps more telling than my tightly compressed lips about the silence the duellist could demand and as none of us broke. A high forehead framed by brown curls crowned keen eyes. It was only his voice that was heard ever so often in the little room, the same words I had heard three eves in a row now. “It has a heavy barrel, smooth bored, a spur on the trigger guard to let the middle finger rest, platinum-fed trigger and home-made bullets. Well molded, weight about thirteen grams, well balanced stopping power to incapacitate, though not necessarily kill.” I sat quietly, more so than youngsters are even expected, at the table next to the duellist while his words were lined up like chain links in front of me. Even if the voice was low it contained no doubt, in his memory it seemed to be a painting where all details lived on no matter the fate of the objects. That ability had stunned me more than once already.
Old Runge was the third and last in the company. Doctor, he was keen on the title, Runge sat on the opposite side of the table, with me on the side, but seemed to not listen, as out of habit. Or rather as if the big ears behind the grey whiskers heard everything but decided to ignore the world around, unless it was for the open fire where fresh firewood crackled. A bottle of lukewarm herbal liqueur in front of him was emptied in good pace. The duellist cleaned his heavy army pistol over the table by the light. This was not the slender duelling pistol he spoke about, that specially commissioned weapon which belonged to a baron von Mauthausen, Runge had explained in passing. “It has a heavy barrel, smooth bored, a spur on the trigger guard to let the middle finger rest, platinum-fed trigger and home-made bullets. Well molded, weight about thirteen grams, well balanced stopping power to incapacitate, though not necessarily kill.” On my bench the black coat of the duellist with watered down red facing and yellow buttons lay. The black color had surprised and disturbed me when I met them and got hired, it is a color formal, of priests, or burials. Doktor Runge, who himself wore decent grey and brown, had simply dismissed me as extremely childish and ignorant of the Schwarze Jäger.
I stared at the box in which the army pistol was stored during the days. 'The coffin' Runge had called it when he thought nobody heard. The cover was graced with two Madonnas, of which one was Our Lady and the other the Roman goddess of war, Duellona. 'The coffin' had gear to mold bullets and was outfitted for two pistols, but only contained the one that right now was polished by the large, smooth hands of the duellist. The pipe cleaner was unsullied, as the nights before, but he would not stop work with it. It worried me, so I turned my head but the doctor stared back at me. If the dimples and the small, dark, wet eyes that stuck up above the edge of the glasses burned of the liqueur or pure malice, I could not tell. “...Well molded, weight about thirteen grams, well balanced stopping power to incapacitate, though not necessarily kill.”
The duellist orderly tested the hammer. In my mind I could picture the duelling pistol of baron von Mauthausen by now with its heavy barrel, not rifled and the bullets that would eat into me. A faceless ghost aiming at me from the shadows, I try to run but can not get away, the bang of the pistol, it flash behind my eyes. The baron, or was it the duellist himself? I shook my head. The duellist still polished and talked about a platinum-fed trigger while Runge stared at me like a laughing wolf and made me swallow hard. They nailed me where I sat, one by his glare, the other by his utter uninterest in my existence. “How do you know it do not kill?” My sudden and unstoppable question broke the silence like cannon fire, and I regretted it at once. Rune jerked and tried to look away from us both, like if my voice was a leper. The duellist continued cleaning, did not pay me any heed and after a minute or two I could not help but ask again: “How do you know it do not kill?” His brown eyes darted at me, obligingly they met mine. He said: “Tested.” It was the first time I understood why Runge was so damn frightened.
Last edited by Hader; September 14, 2012 at 01:51 PM.
Scriptorium Summer Writing Competition Short Fiction Voting Thread
