Samuel Minier:

Writing in the Dark

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Fiction Samples

From "Falling Stars":

            Meteors.

            That's what I thought, hoped for - solitary fireballs arcing the night.  But these soared too low, too close to home, and when one crashed through my bedroom window - shattered glass like a rattled cage, three burn-mark skips across the area rug before plonking against the baseboard and rolling back, the sinewy twine snapping and the leather casing cracking apart so that the rubber-encrusted cork core crumbled out like a rotted walnut from its shell - then I had to face what it was, a charred baseball, and I knew she was back . . .

From "Stuck":

           “Goddam mice.”

            “I’m sorry,” she said absently, thinking he’d said “mess”.  She swept at the clean table top around their dinner dishes.

            “Just look at this.”

He pointed inside the kitchen cabinet with a jutting finger. They seemed too big to share his palm with each other, his fingers. Every line and whorl permanently stained by decades of oil and other machine fluids, ugly black ridges -  

            “Nora.  Earth to space cadet, come in?”

            She had to cross the room before she could see the grainy nuggets scattered around the coffee filters.  Hard little pellets that could almost be mistaken for coffee grounds, except that Jerry would never leave a mess like that.  Who would have suspected a life-long bachelor, someone with such discolored hands, would be so orderly?   Nora had looked forward to the role of housekeeper and gentle nagger.  Instead she was the one who needed reminding to pick up the towels, put away her shoes. 

            Jerry lifted the bag of sugar before seeing the gnawed-open corner.  A comet-tail spilled from the cabinet to the counter to the floor, immediately turned to paste in the damp sink. 

“Goddamnit, that’s it!”

Nora stood with her hands holding each other at her belt buckle while he stamped into the garage.  Jerry would probably want the sugar thrown out.  Weren’t mice filthy, the bearers of the Plague . . .

From "Game of Friends”:

          We killed Devon on a bored Tuesday night, after the deathmatches.  I’d won the last five by sniping, which pissed Icky off to no end because he kept forgetting how to look up.  He’d finally get the controller figured out, and I’d plant one in his forehead.  He called me a mother-fucker and slammed his controller down, dumping pop all over the carpet.  Yu was going bug-shit about his parents’ carpet, and Icky was bitching about how the controller doesn’t work, how he always got the shitty controller, when Devon looked up from behind his thick glass and said, “I think we should play a new game.”

He’d been quiet and preoccupied most of the night.  None of that was new, especially after Brandon, but it had gotten worse in the last few days. 

“Like what?”  Icky demanded.

“Man, move your leg, that shit’s gonna set in!”  Yu was back from the kitchen, armed with paper towels.

             Devon barely shrugged.  “Something other than sittin’ in front of the stupid TV”. . .