A Rain of Frogs ~ The tales of onetinleg.com (free reads)

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Saint Velcro™ and the Swan
It had been, by the saint’s count, a thousand years or more since the last tour passed through—Attila and his Hunnic Horde, their hardy ponies pulling an endless cavalcade of Airstream trailers that stretched to the sunrise. “I’m a martyr,” said the saint. “Martyrs don’t shoot back.”
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Blue (as in an Early Frost)
The closed library smells of cluster flies, old books, hardly strange in a library, and an indefinable something―funerary linen from some millennial boneyard, perhaps. Elizabeth Profitt Pease strains to open the window. Shut. Tight. “What have I done for myself lately?” Libby Pease asks no one in particular. “Not much,” she answers, “have I?” Libby regards the pottery jar that contains her father’s ashes.
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Two of Swords
Capt. Futvoye Halfnight, D.D.S, popped his dropped eye into its socket. “Ahh.” What he saw ahead was not reassuring. “Ohh...” A great gnarly man was leaning against a tree and staring at him. He was naked but for the skin of a tiger which he wore nonchalantly over one shoulder. “You pilgrims should carry rearview mirrors. You leave an inventory of lost lesions and dropped appendages all over the landscape,” said the man.
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The Queen’s Head
The heart-breaking beauty—the original of the flesh and blood face with the moondrop eyes—resided, a carved and painted sandstone effigy, in the Bureau of Antiquities, the face of an ancient queen. The Sender of Dreams had sent him either a true dream or a false dream. It was for him to find out which.

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Mark Twain in Milan
A woman popped out of thin air beside me. She was swinging a serious looking cavalry saber; she gave me the once-over and attacked. I ducked. Her pale gray eyes grew huge. “Oh, terribly sorry, old chap. I thought you were someone else,” she said. “Are you still alive?” I said yes. “I say, good fun, what?” she remarked. A bullet zinged past and we dived under the desk.
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The Prophet Harry (from The Return of the Orange Virgin)
The smell of fresh cut grass with the roar of a two stroke engine said Harry was doing the library lawn. He must have been at it for hours and that meant he was drinking, riding circles and massaging the turf until the beer or the gas gave out.
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The Beewolf
A tall insect with feathery antennae and a nervous tic paused before the mirror of a machine plastered with multicolored blurbs announcing it as a dispenser of a popular brand of chewing gum. The walking nightmare spoke to his human companion. “Harry, you wait with the bags, there’s a good fellow.” Evenly modulated tones carried the force of a command.
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The Diplodocus Effect
I covered my eyes. The face on the phone was cloaked in a halo of light, an iridescent gold and blue lapis mosaic. "You are very bright," I said.
"Transcendence. You’ll get used to it," said Teaberry Balcom. "I have taken this appearance lest you be stricken blind by my radiance."
"Hold on a minute. You're pretty much like a god, right? Then how come you have to use FedEx to deliver your miracles?"
"Competitive bidding."
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The Tirewoman Gabriel
Twice a year and regular as clockwork, when Barbara’s School of the Dance trots in the latest corps of majorettes and ballerinas, the classic backdrop―Mediterranean hillsides with Raphaelite shepherds and shepherdesses discreetly about their distant businesses―was always requested. In addition to shepherdesses on their backs in the grass under fluffy clouds, there is a backdrop of a convent garden at dusk. Giant bumblebees prowl thick wisteria, vines knot to frame a lovers’ bower. Before the foreground, hogging the floor, lies a toppled faun, his lips curled in a sneer of passion. I could not bear to throw the stuff out. Some day someone would want to be immortalized with a leering, panting satyr.
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The Missingest Man in America
“I am Joseph Force Crater; I am a judge of the New York State Supreme Court. I am not the Adversary. Your chastity is safe with me; I am a Democrat.”
―The Miracles and Death of Judge Joseph Force Crater and His Questionable Resurrection, excerpted from Midwife in the Tire Swing, a novel in progress.
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Cherokee Purple
Thelma Wagstaff blew herself away as she sat on her high red upholstered stool supervising the cash box at the White Street Billiards and Snooker. Thelma hit the floor like she had fallen out of an airplane, no parachute, and her pistol went bouncing toward Ed Seitz and me. Ed and I were absorbed in the cushion shot he was negotiating. We did not look up; there was a fiver riding on Ed’s shot.
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The Moose in the Noösphere
The man, an Algonquian, met the moose head on on a springy forest trail. The moose had come that day to drop his antlers and wanted to be alone. It had been an open winter, roots and lichens dying off for lack of snow cover. With bad foraging the moose was tired and irritable. The moose had dropped antlers before and anticipated the loss with regret. His antlers amplified the fall of snow, the separation of a dry leaf from its stem, the impact of a pine needle on the padded forest floor. To go antlerless was to imitate the solitude of starvation and withdraw into himself as into a heavy, windless snowfall.
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Magnetic Betty
Magnetic Betty explained the problem. “And so you see, things fly through the air and stick to me when I walk by. None of my friends’ mothers will let them play with me.”
“A tricky business,” replied Dolby Jenks, World's Number One Champion Detective. “Not my field, I'm afraid, Betty. I would suggest that you find different friends with different mothers.”
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The Francher
An odor of mint attracted the francher to an unpromising patch of brown scrub. It spread its fetlocks and arched its neck down to feed. It munched contentedly for some minutes then collapsed. The francher's nostrils flared as it gulped at the thin unsatisfying air. A pounding bright blue sky watched, thin and close, as the francher's body stiffened. Under the brilliant glare of the high, dry sun its knee joints cracked, emitting soft popping sounds. An Andean vulture circled closer.
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Chimaera Constant
“Sweet Jesus!” Elizabeth Profitt Pease has—for just a moment, a split second—the queer idea that there is an eyeball in her teacup. “Uh... hello, eye.” The eye does not speak. She takes a swallow of Dr. Pomeroy's straight from the bottle and shakes her head to clear it. She squints; the eye in her teacup squints back—the eye is hazel and clear. It is her mother's eye.
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The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie
“My sister, is she dead? Go and give her a poke, would you?” The great white presence that was the Lady Mother of the Long Walkers indicated the row of captive queens on their dais beneath her, deferentially lower.
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The Year They Invented Frozen Lemonade
“I am midtown. Manhattan?” Linda Winkelman speaks her question out loud in the middle of the rush hour push; no one takes notice. Linda is standing in the middle of a street. She can not recall who she is or why she is here. “I remember lemonade,” says Linda. Buildings disappeared, people disappeared. Now it is her turn. Linda Winkelman was born the year they invented frozen lemonade.
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Scope Virgin
The woman at the far end of the kaleidoscope had not been there last week, of this Simon was sure. She was naked or near enough, thinly dressed in a diaphanous veil. “Holy shit!” Simon Alexander breathed on the lens and gave it a wipe with his sleeve. “I see that I have your attention...” said the woman, “...finally.”
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McMuckle Makes a Minyan
The ineffable, unnamable God of Hosts stood with a burly, bearded personage who held a bar towel draped over one arm, a symbol of his trade. The golem toyed nervously with an ear. “My people should quake at My unutterable Name, not fall on their tukhes,” God sighed. The ear came off. “Bim... this is not about you. Try to stay on topic.”
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Platterland
It was a real nice laying-out—tasteful. Well, maybe not so much tasteful particularly, but neat. They’d got Ed’s left arm attached to his head and not his shoulder. And they had the remaining right arm attached on the left side. To look like them, I supposed.
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Daphne Longhandle's Last Flight
“See that, Franklin?” said Eleanor Roosevelt. “That’s O’Brien.” Franklin observed a line of stars on the eastern horizon. There were four. “Oops, sorry.” Eleanor nodded at her new constellation, O’Brien, and the fourth star blinked out.
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The Runaway Bungalow
“Arrgh! See me neck, lad?” The pirate's head hung at a grotesque angle from where the long executioner's knot had settled at the base of his skull. Theophrastus Bigelow was a big man—the weight of his fall through the executioner's trap had broken his neck but had not killed him immediately. He lifted a ten-kilo strand of gold chains to reveal his scars. “Admirable, what-oh?” The mark of the hangman was stamped on Bigelow's throat.
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E Pluribus Human
“YO, BABE!” a man's voice blared at Grenadine McKenzie, “SURPRISE, YOU’RE PREGNANT.” A craggy male face bloomed before her. The face was a hero's face, Lance Davenport from Rights of Spring. There was an odor of patchouli.
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A Pass on the Tabouli
Errol Flynn, aged 120, has been kept alive with hormones and organ transplants until 2025 for the last, final, remake of Kipling’s ‘Kim.’ It will be a musical.
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Boys' Night Out
Jim bit the dog’s ear off. He spat―dog blood was different, somehow forbidden.
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I Want to Share Your Wheat
Prosper Epilegomenes is a mouse demon in service to Sminthian Apollo. He blows up a car dealership and kills a troublesome neighbor.
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The Perfect Homburg
Duckpin bowling in Taunton, Massachusetts. A duel over a magic hat sacred to Artemis, sister of Apollo.
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An Unwarmed Fish
A barroom in Hell’s Kitchen. There is a meatball buffet and it is always Thursday, August 14th. Artemis, Apollo's sister, is ahh... difficult.
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The Ninepatch Variation
Libby Pease remembers her girlhood as a litany of lost callers. Now a visitor: William Powell has misplaced Myrna Loy.
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The Red Sneaker Zones
Libby Pease accepts having her own personal shaman as an article of faith, which faith she could not tell. The dead Indian smells rank, but not unpleasantly so―fresh earth clinging to over-wintering vegetables, plug-cut tobacco and molasses.
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Klein, the Clone
Twins play which kid’s got the papers. Originally published as The Flags of All Nations Hors D’eouvre Toothpick Caper.
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A Special Providence
“I thought there was a special providence that looked out after these things,” said Gerry. A ten-dollar jackpot dropped into the takeout drawer. “There is," said a voice. “And don’t whack the machine—the lottery corporation doesn’t favor muscleheads abusing church property.”
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Tomcat
His great green eyes invited her to share a secret knowledge, intimating she was trusted, but not yet ready for a full revelation. Her species would have to mature.
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Dead Man in the Yard
There was a dead man in the yard this morning. I checked in my wallet for my latest picture of the front yard. I have a collection of yard pictures that goes back for years but I usually carry only one photo at a time. No, he was a new arrival. I called Sheila. Sheila is my ex-wife.
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Facelift
Lord Zorgon of Alymeade sighed, a great exhalation redolent of smoldering carpets. “Where was I? Facelifts, yes. Women, whatever their ages, never wish for sensible things like orthotics or a tonsillectomy.”
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Return of the Orange Virgin
A tale of the Fata Morgana, Lady of the Wild Things―a serial novel with a new chapter each month.

Lost in Willipaq―Lovers, Losers, and Part-time Demons
Willipaq, the book: new stories, fresh forays into the fantastic―sixteen tales plus a novella.

Magnetic Betty―has big trouble. Her omelet pan has run off to Australia. Magnetic Betty, an eight-year-old Brownie Scout, marshals the Browntown Ocelots to save the world, Santa Claus, and Christmas as we know it, assisted by Walt and Madge, her bewildered parents, along with Dolby Jenks, World’s Number One Champion Detective.

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