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    Goddess
    Goddess
    Goddess
    Ebook95 pages1 hour

    Goddess

    By David Downey

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Goddess is a collection of David Downey’s short stories.  The tales explore love, loss, and longing, against the quirky and psychedelic backdrops of one night stands, time travel, jilted gods, nuclear war, alien invasions, and junk mail hording.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Downey
    Release dateApr 27, 2013
    ISBN9781540125415
    Goddess
    Author

    David Downey

    David Downey is the author of NeoSparta, the short story collection Goddess, and the apocalyptic horror novel The Alpha And The Omega. He currently lives in San Jose, California, where he works as an engineer, to support his career as a writer. He is working on the opening novella of a sci-fi serial.

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      Book preview

      Goddess - David Downey

      Introduction

      Thank you for e-picking up this humble collection of short stories.  Truly, your interest honors me.

      This collection represents the bulk of my literary work from 1996 to 2015, and is presented here in chronological order: The Trip (1996), Dazzle (1998), Goddess (2000), Odd Jobs (2002), Future Hence (2003), and Sinon (2015).  Some were published in magazines, most were not.

      I must confess that these stories are not in their original published/rejected form.  I had to update some of them to reflect the changing times.  (For example, in Odd Jobs, I changed the phrase ...busy scribbling notes. to ...busy tapping notes into his tablet.)  But it was mostly my insecurity that compelled me to give all these stories an editing facelift before rereleasing them in this volume.

      Most of the stories are science fiction (Goddess, Future Hence, and Sinon) or fantastical (The Trip).  Dazzle and, oddly enough, Odd Jobs are more rooted in contemporary reality.  Pick and choose what stories you want to read (and skip) accordingly.

      As all authors do, I plagiarize from my own life.  Hence, some of these tales (Dazzle, Goddess, and Future Hence) were inspired by people who have come and gone in my life.  Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

      This collection is by no means complete; I purposely left some stories out.  These omitted works fall into two groups.  By far, the largest group contains stories that were mercifully never published (Can Of Soup (1997) and Time’s Arrow (1997)), along with a slew of atrocious Vogon-worthy poetry.

      The second group of omitted stories consists of the shorts Chameleon (1996) and The Omega And The Alpha (1997).  Sickly rich with characters and action, Chameleon demands to be expanded into a full-length novel, which I plan to do sometime in the future.  And The Omega And The Alpha was adapted and republished as the Prolog (2,401 Years Ago) to my horror novel The Alpha And The Omega.

      I hope you enjoy reading these stories, as much as I lost myself in writing them.

      David Downey

      May 1, 2013

      (Updated November 16, 2016)

      The Trip

      I’m squatting on the knuckle of a giant earthen hand, whose fingers are lazily swaying in a lake of fluid mercury.  The deep blue sky is littered with the ivory skeletons of soldiers clashing with the endless vertebrae of serpents.  I feel like a point of light.  Sometimes, I forget I’m even here.

      Someone’s behind me.  It’s her—Impossible!—standing away from the shore, watching me.  I scurry over a bed of skyward faces, their mouths gaped open.  Falling to my knees, I embrace her, resting my head between her pale breasts.  Oh god, I loved you so much...  I did this because of you...  Her skin becomes bone, unyielding, cold.  Cracks worm up her body.  I look up at her.  Her chiseled face looks straight away.  Chunks of her head are missing.

      Pulling away, I’m startled at the sight of my arms, surprised I have a body.  The pinpricks on my arm are still bleeding a little.  Bubbles under my skin travel to the punctures, slowly at first, then faster.  Much faster.  Snakes geyser out of the holes, snapping at my face.

      Pain slices through my chest, dropping me on my back.  I open my tearing eyes to a blood sky.  Purple lava spurts out of the side of a nearby hill, threatening to engulf me.  Tribal drums beat in the distance, the beat in sync with the throb of pain.  She finally moves, peering down at me, smiling, her head whole.  The beat grows irregular.  I smile as I cross the thin line between everything and nothing.

      Dazzle

      The first time I heard the song Dazzle, I was dancing next to her, pretending she was dancing with me.  Her black scuffed 12-eyed Doc Martens stomped to the Banshees’ merciless beat.  Her denim cutoffs barely covered the garters dragging up her fishnets.  Her black leather jacket jerked open in rhythm to Siouxsie’s wailing, revealing a white untucked tank top.  Her sharp severe profile was crowned with a black mohawk.  The spider web tattoo cut into her scalp was a dark blur.

      ...In the face of stagnation, the water runs before your eyes...

      And when the lights strobed her, I closed my eyes, savoring her image.

      Never asked for her name.  Never even talked to her.  Didn’t have the nerve.  She was so free, so wonderfully fringe.  And I was so...grounded.

      Never confessed this attraction to my college friends.  No surprise they couldn’t understand my allure to The House of Usher, the club she frequented.

      I eventually graduated, went to Stanford Law, joined my father’s firm, and married the daughter of a family friend.

      And now Dazzle is playing softly on the radio, as I’m lying spooned against my wife.  She’s pretty enough, I think, as I delicately prop my head up to survey her slumbering form, in the dying city lights.  Her salon-tan legs defy the New York winter outside.  She’s wearing one of my t-shirts, its edges tight against her hips.  Her arms are crossed over her chest, concealing the smallish breasts she’s self-conscious of, even in the sleeping world.  She has the soft profile of a little girl, a scared little girl who never cared to venture beyond what was expected of her.  Mud-colored roots betray the blond mop of hair, splayed on her pillow.

      Dazzle’s violins are dying off.

      She stirs as one of my tears spills on her cheek.

      Goddess

      He cracked open his eyes to a white lace sky.

      Intertwined iron rods, thick with chipped black paint, corkscrewed from each corner of the bed, dissolving into the white canopy above.  In the window, tiny silhouettes of fiery suns, five-pointed stars, and crescent moons chimed as they swayed in the morning breeze.  Wisps of chilly air eddied with scents of sandalwood incense and stagnant sweat.  A curtain of beads separated the bedroom from where he remembered the living room was.

      Happy Hour at Dirk’s with George and Vic from Accounting.  Striking up a conversation with her at the bar while ordering a round.  Inviting her and her girlfriend to join them at their cocktail table.  Deciding to go to The Rage.  Vic opting out, returning home to his wife.  Endlessly circling The Rage, trying to find parking.  George telling a joke at the bar, her girlfriend snorting as she laughed.  Dancing.  Losing track of the girlfriend and George sometime after the third round.  The damp warmth of her back as he pulled her close.  The syrupy taste of fruit as he kissed her under the strobes.  The sting of the icy air on his cheeks as they left the nightclub.  Concentrating on the streak of her taillights, as he followed her white Isuzu hatchback.  On her worn couch, wetly mashing his lips against hers, his hand finding a taut nipple under her bra.  She

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