CarmenKern.com
writer of fantasy and other strangeness
It was the time when day drinkers morphed into night drinkers. The noise in the bar multiplied with each drink poured. At least that’s how it seemed to me. I wore a scowl that normally scares people away. But one pint earlier, a tall, twiggy man, dressed in style-mashed clothes, planted himself across from me....
The sun touched its fingers on the mountain tops as I found the cave. It was steamy and damp. The air fluttered with dust mites and flies. In the distance, I heard water running. In my mind, the cave would pulse with a thousand black wings as I’d trudge through layers of droppings, or a...
The small alien clutched the ticket in its hand and danced from one limb to another as it waited in line next to its guardian. They had come early, long past feeding time, but neither seemed to notice the growing hunger in their guts. The guardian flashed multiple rows of teeth at the alien behind...
The Fates, sisters, weavers, sat in the stiff theatre chairs they had complained about for decades. They were the sort who took comfort in stiff and creaking joints. The morning show was a doubleheader. Two lovers who found each other late in life. The one sister crocheted a long scarf, alternating spring green and...
Last week she received a small bundle of postcards postmarked from heaven. The date stamps were for the past seven years, each one dated on her birthday. The person who wrote them told her of the eternal choir practice that had resulted in honing their voice to something aligned to angelic, but there was also...
The secret is to let the words simmer in a broth of irony and truth, the butterfly said to me. Add a dash of laughter and a single teardrop. Sprinkle two parts empathy, one-part fantasy and three tablespoons of humor. Make sure this is well mixed before continuing. This will offset the cup of tragedy...
Across the dry tundra, full of night and blackened suns, the wind stirs the dirt into two swirling devils, thirty feet between them. The girl tightens her grip on her fire staff. “There you are, dragon,” she whispers. Stars disappear behind a monstrous shape. Scales upon scales glisten under a yellow moon as...
Andre sat up on his bike seat in the back alley of his house and flicked the tassel he’d attached to his handlebar. The drink in his other hand warm and untouched. His friends George and Zane waited for him, drinks open and half drunk. They had asked what was wrong with him, why he...
This is a story of a mighty lion who chased a tiny mouse—a slip of a rodent with little meat on his bones. But the lion who thinks much of himself, roars and pounces and shakes its golden mane more for theatrics than anything else. The lion’s massive paws eat up the ground in chase....
Ghosts don’t walk unless they have to. A last resort kind of thing. The train, now that’s a luxury. I’ve ridden with beasts and humans, but only a handful of each can see my once handsome face and lank hair resembling ill-cut string. There are those who scream and stuff fists or handkerchiefs into...
Home. Where I shed my coat, my day, my tears. Where we said things we wanted to take back and sat in silence when there was too much to say. Where small feet pattered to the same six hiding places over and over again until none of us could stand to hide or seek...
They woke me up. I should have been scared, their beaks peck, pecking at my window while the other boys slept, dreamed and farted, but I wasn’t. I opened the window to two white birds with wings that seemed too big for their bodies. One of them flew through the window to the trunk...
“Fifty cents,” the kid says, holding out his scarred hands and smiling with blackened tiny teeth in a thin-lipped mouth.” He must have sensed my hesitation. “That’s a bargain, Mr. A turn of the focus ring and voila, your future, plain as the nose on your face. Clarity like you’ve never known. Your whole life...
Twenty miles from here is a crossroad with no name—just two dirt roads meeting like old friends in the middle of the desert. A place where tears, longings, and souls are bartered for heart’s desires. How do I know? My neighbor told me as much. It turns out she’s the goddess of such places. ...
I heard screams from the other end of Center Street as I pedaled my bike away from the flying black disks that had appeared over the city in the early hours of the morning. People crowded into streets, patios, and rooftop restaurants, filming and texting images of the large ships hovering over them. And...
I wore pajamas and flipflops while drinking coffee from my Snoopy cup—never did pay much attention to what I looked like. A woman, hair bottle-bronzed, sat next to me on the bus stop bench. She had a sensible look, white tennis shoes with an A-line skirt down past her knees, you know, sensible. I...
You hear voices. Whispered, slithering words that climb over each other as they crawl across dirt and dead grass to get to you. You can’t remember the last time you heard a human voice, but you know these aren’t human. These are the sounds of the dead, buried under your field. Fertilizing the seeds...
It was the boys turn to seek. Where was his sister hiding? The boy smelled candy and ginger. From a distance, the ruin of a wall looked like stone and mortar, but as he crept closer, as the light hit its textured face, the boy saw marshmallow oozing between slabs of gingerbread. He swiped...
The chains rattled and clanged as they wrapped his arms and locked him down. They had left him there wearing the same peeled paint and weathered wood suit he always wore. He hung his lattice in shame. He never did know his crime, even to this day.
I told the fool not to look at me straight on. Keep to the mirrors, to puddles, chrome bumpers or windows––I don’t want to see the red-veined whites of your eyes, I told the fool. But like all fools, he wasn’t the listening kind. It was the kind of day when anything could happen, sun...
Here’s the thing about Rapunzel, she was a DJ and lived on the second floor and truth be told, it wasn’t but a twenty-foot drop from her window to the street. She had cut her hair when she was eighteen and has rocked an indigo blue mohawk ever since. Colorful inked images of dragons...
The heart lies beside him, whole, pink and beating. Thump. Thump, the drumbeat of someone who knew how to make music or war. She picks it up and cracks it open on the nearest rock. Rumors and legends spread throughout the kingdom of unimaginable treasures found inside human hearts. They are just rumors, but still,...
The price of a call to the afterlife is ten cents and a femur bone. Just so you know, I don’t make them rules. But I can tell you how to bend them a little. Nowhere in the admissions guidelines does it say whose femur it has to be. I’ve seen all kinds, animal, and...
the sun pouring like honey through our bedroom window drinking lukewarm coffee because I don’t want to get up and not hear you breathe just to nuke it hot the red of the apple I had for lunch, the crunch of it when I bit in the white of fresh stucco on...
“The sad thing is, we are just like you,” it said. “Only better. We don’t toil and slave for others. We just are. We dress better than you but wear no designer labels. We have no traffic jams or guns or old hurts. We just are. The rains and sun feed us and we...
“Look, honey, making art you don’t like will make you sick.” She took a drag on her smoke. “You got any chalk on you?” “I don’t,” I say. “You should. Never know when inspiration will strike you down.” With one last puff on her cigarette, she collected her plastic bucket of rainbow-colored chalk and left....
What you don’t know is how Goldilocks got to the bear’s house in the first place. She was running, from her father’s silence and to her mother’s ghost––a shimmering figure who wore the face of her mother but had longer hair, slimmer hips, and black button eyes, but it was her alright. It was...
They call it the Chariot. And if you’re wondering, it didn’t always look this––patinaed. Back in the day, I kept it spit-polished to a heavenly shine. The sleek body was black as a bottomless hole. And the chrome, it shone with the brilliance of a dying star.
In the day, he wore a robin’s egg, blue suit. He spiffed up and shined up and rolled smooth as a movie star down a red carpet. Street lights blinked a slow sexy rhythm for him, a green for three blocks tops, then red. A drawn out red so they could get a good long...
Freda the Dragon Slayer pushed a screwdriver into the ignition. Her arthritic hand shook and ached as she twisted the handle. The old farm truck sputtered but started. Every day the same thing, Franko the truck would moan and complain but he always came alive. The morning was crisp and dark. The distant mountains...
Ollie had found the truck on the side of the freeway. The ‘For Sale’ sign handwritten in the window. Five hundred or best offer, it said in bright blue marker. He called and made their best offer which wasn’t much. Racheal had groaned and rubbed her large belly when she saw it. “How are...
Dixie drank moonshine from a mason jar and watched the sky crack open from her front porch. The Radioman had warned them all the end of the world was coming. He warned and warned while people rushed and ran to who knows where. And while they ran in circles, Dixie pulled out what was...
It was a hungry month. I ate the house empty, even the salad that turned to green soup. The ‘Apocalypse Pantry’ was all but empty but for the cases of water. I haven’t left the apartment since it all started. But at some point, I opened the window. Rain came in that night, and I...
The Crawler stinks dark purple. The color of a nasty bruise. I see the haze of violet before the smell hits my nose, before my cartoon monster hisses from behind three rows of needle teeth. He’s not the first monster to come to life from the pages of my sketch pad. There’s a wet...
I dream you every night, clear as the empty bottle of gin on my table. I once thought you lived in the bottom of them, so I did my best to drink you free. Turns out you’re someplace darker, more dangerous…my head. I see you like a memorized photo, bouncing that official sized ball...
I think about moving south, away from the mountains, but the chinook winds blow me back every time. I want to run away, pretend I’m alive, but this morning, I know its too late for all that. There’s a knock. I open the door wondering if I’m letting in the living or the dead....
If we’re being honest here, I almost didn’t go in that place, all broken down and life-worn. It’s the church I’m talking about not the Reverend. He was a kid. Barely cut his teeth is what I was thinking. But he invited me in and I felt the Lord right away, in the form of...
We slept in the house of a woman we didn’t know. She made us coffee and showed us what she called her urban porch. I sat in the sun, you in the shade, drinking our coffee wondering when the car would be fixed but not really caring one way or the other. It was...
I was in a part of the city I didn’t know, in a diner that was open at 3 am and had a Pepsi sign in the window. I was on my third coffee when a rich and rowdy group of thick-gutted men came in, stumbling and talking like their volume dial got stuck on...
You dragged me around the corner and pointed––that’s it, that’s where I saw Twilight Zone, that creature crouching at the edge of the airplane wing just staring. You know the episode. It was real. It was there, looking at me through the glass. Babe, I say, the tv isn’t even plugged in. You sure...
The voices whispered in my head, hammering away with quiet, deadly words. They were the only ones in there now. They’d tied up Hope, shoved memory of better times and better dreams in her mouth, gagging her. Forcing her silent. They injected me with nightmares and fear––I saw their evil faces, tasted their foulness until...
We drink black pop and stare past the yellow tape. I ask, what do you think happened here? This is how we start the game, the story game. I think the papa bear came back to finish off Goldilocks, you say. He ripped the place apart, ate some Captain Crunch and when he couldn’t find...
Nine in the morning, the best time to break in, take what I want and leave. I’m not saying its sexy. And no, it isn’t legal. But it puts food on the table, at least most of the time. The trick is to do your homework. Know a routine. Most people leave for work by nine––and...
I remember talking to the sky that day––after Nikki had kicked over our last jug of water and we had only one granola bar between the three of us. I hated those bars, the kind with the yogurt coating. The damn thing had melted into chemical goo and poured out as we tore open the...
You said if I told, the Devil would get me while I was sleeping. Reach right up from under my bed and drag me to hell. I wore socks to bed for two years. My feet sweating under the covers and one morning, a sock was gone. Snatched right off my foot. You said that...
You can always tell the ones who are lost. They drive real slow but not too slow cause they think they’re gonna get carjacked or shot in our neighborhood. They are the ones who got lost by mistake, made a wrong turn on the way to the interstate. They are scared and stupid. We...
Closing time. The last eight ball slammed into the right, corner pocket. Beers were drained, and money slapped down on the sweaty table––we were ravenous, cast out into the streets past midnight and looking for greasy hash browns, chicken and waffles. You slid out of the taxi as if you’d fallen from the sky....
P. is almost 60 years old (but looks 74 in good light), an early retired analyst and a wannabe hipster. It doesn’t suit him, I’ve told him as much, but he just scowls and keeps waxing his surfboard. This morning, little flakes of white wax float to my balcony––I’m in a good mood, so...
We hadn’t talked for days. I don’t remember why; why you threw down the book you were reading, why I walked out. But the flowers I bought at Mr. Higgins corner store, I still see them plain as smog over the city. Daisies. White ones. The black center dark as midnight. I stood outside...
What you selling? Asked the young man, or maybe he was old, who could tell under the sweat baked dirt. Every morning for three weeks he asked the same thing when I opened up the lifeguard tower. He slept under my feet, in the shade. Nobody cared but the cops. They made him move...
You didn’t know––I rented a space down on Van Buren Street––a place you’d never go. It wasn’t planned, not until we moved in together and you threw out my antlers. It wasn’t the look you were going for, you said. I let you have the win and moved them to my warehouse. I put them in the...
This is where we said we’d meet, by the Ferris wheel in my dreams, like it was a real place and not on the edge of all the worlds. You were anyone, faceless and holding white flowers in one hand and pink cotton candy in the other. They’re for you, you said without any lips....
We argued that day, looking for the safe house. There’s no one to ask for directions, I said. It’s not a guy thing. You clicked your teeth, the way I hate, the way you do when you want to piss me off. But the pencil drawn map said 434 Amity Rd. I held it in...
You did everything in squares. Four was your magic number, the one that calmed you, the one you divided everything by. It took your mother and I a few years to figure this out, how you slept better in the refrigerator box you made into a fort, and how fifty-six cheerios in your bowl went...
You told me once that you were Alice in another life. The Alice. You said this while looking out your fire escape window. Three Tabby cats, well feed and rough looking, stared at you from the outside. At night, their eyes glowed orange, the same color as their fur. You were always making stuff...
We were layered up and walking with our Tim Hortons coffee. You left your lid open so it would cool, and I went straight in for the mouth burn. You didn’t say much, and I was cool with that. I didn’t like your voice. For an English teacher, the voice was all wrong––growly and sandpaper...
Half a lifetime ago, I came here to take pictures, to drink, to get infested by the city. It’s where I found the Fox Den and Leto with his wild, blonde dreads and black reader glasses. There were others like me; creatives, doubters, dreamers and drunks. We told stories and drank, threw darts and drank...
Valentine’s day, twenty-three years ago, was the first time I gave you flowers. You were ten, same as me. I didn’t know I’d do it when I got up that morning, not until Jessie hit the ball over Mrs. McGinley’s fence. I went after it, climbing over the new fence boards. I ripped my...
You said it was poetry––the block of grey blue sky and greasy clouds. You patted the bench beside you, but I didn’t sit. The park smelled of fried chicken and waffles from that place across the street, the one we never did try because who mixed chicken and waffles? The rain started up, slow...
Your mom’s selling her house, your house. She called me up, needed some help with the toilet in her bathroom. Always hated fixing other people’s plumbing (kinda goes without saying) but I didn’t say no to her, I never could. She was the gateway to you… She made me lunch when I finished up,...
I quit smoking. Did it without you. But that’s not how I wanted it to be. There was a lady at the picnic table, smoking, flicking ash on the ground. I sat down anyway, hanging onto my coffee with both hands so I didn’t rip that cigarette out of her fingers. Both of us...
She was crouched down in the corner, clenched up and tucked like a scared dog. The street was empty but for her and her crying. The kind of crying I don’t know what to do with. The hiccup, snotty kind. I asked if she was ok, if she was lost. She talked through her fingers,...
It was a cold night and most of us weren’t dressed for it. We collected dead wood in the trees and started a fire on the beach. The usual place, but not all the usual people. Turned out we didn’t have much to say. So, we watched the waves and the day surfers becoming...
It’s morning. There’s a sense of waiting for someone, like I’d forgotten a friend was coming over. The squares of light on the living room floor got me thinking of how we’d play checkers. How we’d take plates or plants or books and set them up on the floor like game pieces. We’d skip...
I’m back in my car but I may as well be walking. Traffic forgot how to move and I think I’m high on exhaust. In the rearview mirror, in my back seat, you’re looking at me, brown eyes too big. Nose too straight. You’re young. Younger than I remember you. On the street, a...
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