"…his stories are always sharp and compact and interesting." ——Angel Martinez "(One of) the hottest authors in the independent horror scene…" —-Hellbound Books
The two of us got on the elevator at the same time. The twenty-something with the brown hair in the suit and tie punched the button for Floor 34.
The doors closed and the two of us started up.
“Did you ever hear about Alfred Hitchcock’s elevator story?” I asked.
“No,” the guy said, probably not really interested.
“Oh, it’s really cool,” I said. “Hitchcock, the director you know, would get on an elevator like this, and he’d start in telling this story about finding somebody ‘with blood everywhere.’ And the other people on the elevator would look up, kind of startled, y’know.”
The guy looked over at me, interested.
“And Hitchcock would go on, you know, describing the scene,” I said. “And he’d say he asked the guy what happened. And he’d time it so that this would be about when he got to his floor and the doors would open and he’d walk out of the elevator leaving everyone hanging.”
The guy was this close to asking me something. But I went on.
“Anyway, one day when Hitchcock did that, one of his friends was with him and when they walked out of the elevator the friend asked Hitchcock what happened and Hitchcock said ‘Oh, that’s just my elevator story.’”
The guy and I both laughed and faced front again, still going up.
Behind him, I pulled the weapon out of my bag, swung with practiced ease, glad I worked out as much as I did and hit him on the perfect spot on the back of his head. He fell over and I struck him again and he started to bleed but not to move.
I put the weapon back in the plastic bag and pushed a floor button. This time none of the blood got on me, luckily. I put the bag back in my jacket pocket.
I waited until the elevator stopped and the doors opened.
I walked out of the elevator into the empty hallway, whistling that old Beatles song, wondering how Hitchcock’s elevator story would have ended.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The story about Hitchcock’s elevator story is real. My story is made up. I was midway through writing it when I remembered about “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” —jeff
The Draws for the January 2026Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were: A Fantasy, set at a Skating Rink involving a Plastic Toy Horse. This is what I came up with. And yes, for a flash fiction story it got a little long… —-mike
The horse had been mentioned in my Mom’s Will. It took me a few weeks to find it among her things at her old house. She had moved into a care facility and thankfully it was over in a few months and she hadn’t been herself but she hadn’t suffered.
I guess I had somehow expected her to get better and move back in. I kept the house closed-up, mowed the lawn, paid the utilities, even kept the cable going. She’d never gotten on the internet but I had gotten her to use a cellphone. And then one day in early spring I was an orphan at thirty-five years old. Dad was gone and I was their only son. No real family to speak of, just some distant cousins and a very casual boyfriend.
The horse was a little plastic toy, a fine brown animal about the size of a kitten. Standing there on all fours, looking boldly forward. I think I’d glanced at it a few times when I was a kid but hadn’t given a thought to it. But when it was mentioned in the Will, I started looking and couldn’t find it. It wasn’t until I was home leafing through a bunch of old pictures that I found a picture of Mom as a little girl holding the toy horse. I remembered where I might have seen it.
I went back to the house the next day, not a big house but big enough for one person. I started looking on one of the shelves in the room just off the kitchen. One full of knickknacks and old Christmas cards. There was the horse, leaning against the wall behind a big card showing a snowy church lit for Christmas. I picked it up. It was lightweight, firm plastic. I pulled out a tissue and dusted it off.
“Well, now little horse,” I said. “It looks like we’re going on a little trip.”
As Mom’s only heir, I inherited everything. Her house, belongings, car (which I’d been driving for a few years anyway) and the bank account which was not a lot. Mom had been sensible and lucky but not rich.
There was no money involving the horse, just a request. Mom wanted me to take the horse to where the old Cumberland Stables were just outside of the city. I remembered her telling me that she had gone there to ride when she was a girl. That was mentioned in the letter I got in the Will. A request to take “Dilly,” which was what she called the little plastic horse, to the old stables “and let him have one more run.”
I sighed. I’d passed the stables when I had been in grade school and my folks and I had driven somewhere. I really hadn’t thought of that in decades. I never got into horses and hadn’t any curiosity about seeing the stables again. I remembered that it had been just outside the city limits in a little wooded area with a big, welcoming archway. The trees and grass around it caused Mom to say “It always looked like Summer there.”
The next day I took the horse, wrapped in tissue paper in the passenger seat, and drove out to the stables. I was glad Mom had left the address in her letter to me.
In the intervening half-century since Mom had rode there the city had expanded and swelled around the stables. There were thrift stores and convenience stores and liquor stores as well as at least a couple of restaurants advertising BREAKFAST ALL DAY and LOTTERY SOLD HERE.
And the stables, of course, were gone. Instead, there was an ice skating rink with a big domed roof and a few brightly colored pennants over the entrance. Somehow it looked friendly and inviting and I saw a lady escorting two excited looking children into the building.
I sighed. Well, I could still do this. I was glad I always kept my coat in the back seat. You never knew about Kansas weather. I parked, picked up Dilly and went in. I thought I glimpsed a big tree at the back of the parking lot behind the building, maybe the last remnant of the stables.
As I paid my admission I asked the clerk if he knew about the old stables that used to be here.
“Oh, yeah,” the kid said. “My Boss bought the property when Mister DeLuno died ages ago.”
I thanked him and walked into the rink.
It was cold, of course, making me glad I had the jacket. I sat down on one of the benches near the stairs leading to the rink with the signs NO SKATES ON CARPET. I was sitting behind a padded barrier that was chest-high and I could see the glittering white oval with several skaters. One couple (cisgender, of course) skating around happily, other people of various ages skating by themselves and two teenage boys the one clinging to the wall and the other skating beside him who passed where I was sitting and I heard the skater tell his friend “you’re doing fine!” as they crept by.
I took Dilly out of my jacket pocket.
“Well, Mom. This is the best I can do. Hope it’s what you wanted.” I said.
I set the little plastic horse down beside my feet on the floor.
I glanced out at the skaters on the rink, their blurred reflections on the black, polished wall on the other side. For a moment I thought I saw a taller, larger blurred image on the wall, passing the other images, then there was an indistinct figure racing gracefully around the rink. A brown horse with a rider.
I shook my head and blinked a couple of times.
In that instant, it was suddenly outside, suddenly Summer, bright and sunny and I was on a brown horse, riding through a wooded area at a gallop, hanging on to a young woman from the back of the horse. I looked up and the woman turned around, young, brunette and smiling. It was my Mom, looking about the age she had been when she had me.
“Isn’t this fun?” Mom called out.
I held on and nodded. It was an hallucination I was sure but it was kind of fun.
“I got you here to tell you something,” Mom said. “Some advice. Take the Way of the Horse.”
“Way of the horse?” I said, realizing that in this dream-thing I was a lot younger and my voice hadn’t changed yet.
“Always go forward,” she said. “But always watch and be careful. You don’t always get second chances.”
“Yeah,” I said, still hanging on.
“Don’t let him get away,” Mom said.
“The horse?” I asked.
Mom pointed ahead on the little trail. There was a log blocking the way. Not a big one but still in the way.
“Watch out!” Mom said as the horse raced faster. I held on tighter.
The horse jumped up. Up. Past the tall branches of the tree, into the bluest sky I had seen, into the bright warm rays of the Sun.
“Wheeeeeee!!” Mom called out again as I held on for dear life.
There was a thud and I realized I was back sitting at the ice rink. Gripping the seat tightly. I picked up Dilly and shook my head.
I took the horse with me to my apartment and sat and thought about what she’d said. “Don’t let him get away.”
In the years afterwards, my onetime boyfriend and I refurbished Mom’s old house and kept the horse in a place of honor where we could see it in the morning when we ate breakfast together.
NOTE—January-ish pic taken by Ashton Tharp in NYC.
First, here’s the prompts for the January 2026 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge, the first one of the New Year of 2026! Then my usual long-winded explanation:
A Fantasy
Involving A Plastic Toy Horse
Set in A Skating Rink
Now, on to the details.
Hi! I’m Mike Mayak, I also write as Jeff Baker and I’m the current moderator for the monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge, which was started by ‘Nathan Burgoine a few years ago and carried on by Cait Gordon and Jeffrey Ricker. It’s a monthly writing challenge mainly for stress-free fun that anyone can play.
Here’s how it works: the first Monday of every month I draw three cards; a heart, a diamond and a club. These correspond to a list naming a genre, a setting and an object that must appear in the story. Participants write up a flash fiction story, 1,000 words or less, post it to their website and link it here in the comments. I’ll post the results (including, hopefully, one of my own!)
As I’m no good making videos I did the drawing offstage. So, the results were the Five of Hearts (a Fantasy), the Eight of Diamonds (A Skating Rink) and the Nine of Clubs (A Plastic Toy Horse.)
So we will write a Fantasy, set in a Skating Rink involving a Plastic Toy Horse.
We’ll have the results here in this same space around Monday January 12th, 2026.
So, get to writing and I’ll post the results next week! And I’m putting the 2026 Flash Draw sheet at the end of this message, again! (* indicates those have been used.)
Thanks for playing, and I’ll see you in about week!
The Flash Fiction Draw Challenge prompts I didn’t use this year were: A Fantasy, involving a Bicycle, set in A Swimming Pool.
Too good to pass up, so I wrote this. Happy New Year, everybody!! —-mike/jeff
A Bicycle Built Fortuitously
by Mike Mayak
“Oh, crap!” Anthony said. “We’re goin’ down!!”
“You’re the one steering this thing!” Franco said, hanging on to the back of the bicycle. “Pull up! Pull up!”
“It isn’t working,” Anthony said pulling on the handlebars. “Here we gooooo…”
Anthony MacDowell and Franco Scarlatti were learning there were drawbacks to touring the world on a magic bicycle. For one, it didn’t always go where they steered it. For another, it wouldn’t stay aloft if it seemingly didn’t want to. They had been flying over the city in the early-morning dark gawking at the houses and stores when the bicycle started to descend. They had been slowly drifting over an apartment complex by a man-made lake on the edge of town when the bike started dropping. Slowly but still dropping.
“Oh maaaaaannnn! I hope we don’t hit a window!!” Franco said closing his eyes.
“No such luck!” Anthony said. “Here comes the pool! We’re gonna…”
There was a splash as the lit blue rectangle of water seemed to rise up to them. Instantly they were immersed in the blue chlorine-tasting water as the bike kept going downward. Franco thought they’d hit the shallow end but they kept descending through what he thought for a moment was a flat fog bank but he realized it was the bottom of the pool which had dissolved when the reached it.
There was water, still blue and glowing but they couldn’t see any light source. Anthony glanced upward. He couldn’t see the pool, just a lot of water like at the bottom of an ocean. The water getting darker and murkier the further down they went. He realized to his surprise that he was breathing.
Another surprise; there were city lights beneath them.
As the bicycle drifted closer they saw the outlines of a city skyline. Some of it looked like Manhattan, some of it looked like an abandoned temple they’d seen in Asia. But none of it looked abandoned. It was all well-lit and they could see people walking around like they were opening shops for the day.
“I think the bike wants us to go here.” Anthony said.
“Or it wants to go here.” Franco said.
They circled an open area and softly drifted down for a landing. The murkiness that surrounded them was breathable and didn’t feel like water.
There was a tall man in a yellow robe with a matching yellow peaked hat making adjustments to a lamp on a tall lamppost.
“Hi,” Anthony said. “Uh, we’re new here.”
“I noticed.” the man said.
“This place is really amazing,” Franco said.
“What’s so amazing?” the man said. “We always turn the lights on at night.”
“Uh, this isn’t Atlantis, is it?” Anthony asked.
“Atlantis? No,” the man said. “You’re in The Under.”
“Under what?” Franco asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t make the name up.” said the man. “It’s ancient.”
“Yeah,” Franco said glancing around. The city did look ancient.
“Who are you exactly?” Anthony asked. “Are you in charge here?”
“Me? Hardly!” the man said. “I just turn some of the streetlamps on at dusk. I’m the Yellow Man. I light the Yellow Area. Which isn’t really yellow except on the map the City Planners have hanging in their hallway. Say, how did you get here anyway?”
“On this,” Franco said patting the bike. “It’s a magic bicycle. Well it wasn’t magic when we built it. That happened afterwards. Since then we’ve been flying all over the world and some other worlds.”
“A bicycle built fortuitously,” the Yellow Man mused. “Makes sense.”
“It sometimes takes us where it wants to go,” Anthony said. “Oh, I’m Anthony. He’s Franco.”
“Nice to meet you,” said the Yellow Man. “So you came from somewhere up there?” The Yellow Man said pointing.
“Yup.” Anthony said.
“Most of our visitors come that way,” the Yellow Man said. “Come to think of it, maybe that’s why they call this place The Under.”
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: A little vignette I may work on later. In my mind reminiscent of the Oz books which I read when I was a kid.
Here’s wishing all my readers a Happy 2026. There are more stories to come
I wrote the December QSF column, a rant actually, and then wrote another one so I am ahead about a month on the columns.
Wrote the usual weekly/monthly Flash Fictions.
Started writing a flash thing for the end of the year, a bit of fluff.
And actually have knuckled down and worked on a couple of the longer stories. I intend to have at least one of them ready to send off to “Strange Horizons” when they open for submissions briefly in about a month. My New Year’s Resolution is to write every day. I’m trying to get a head start.
Wishing you all the best for Christmas and the New Year.
Listened to a recording of Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million.” I’d never read it before.
Read Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpekis’ story “Oil On Water” online. It’s in the magazine LOLWE. A well-done horror story that doesn’t pull its punches.
Listened to a reading of L. Sprague deCamp’s story “The Ordeal Of Professor Klein” on You Tube. It appeared in a couple of anthologies in the 50’s but hasn’t appeared in any of deCamp’s collections. Set in the future it’s a satiric riff on academia building to a punchline, albeit a funny one.
Finally finished John Maddox Roberts’ historical mystery novel “The Temple Of the Muses,” which I actually started reading about twenty years ago. A well-done mystery which ends with Decius telling us that he “finally got to settle matters” with the culprit when he returned to Alexandria twelve years later, but this is a tale I don’t think Roberts ever wrote. Fun courtroom scene with the physician Asklepiodes (a riff on Asklepios, I wonder?) recounting some ancient forensic science. And there’s a glossary in the back! How cool is that?
And it just hit me, I finished reading “Muses” on Thanksgiving 2025 and I started these monthly reading reports on Thanksgiving three years ago!
Also read (Re-read?) Roberts’ story “The King Of Sacrifices” (in Mike Ashley’s old “Mammoth Book Of Historical Mysteries.”) Decius, in his old age, is called to solve a mystery by Emperor Octavius (Decius won’t call him Agustus!) in the Rome of about 20 BC. Wish Roberts had followed this up with another story set in the later years of Decius’ life in his well-described Rome.
And I’ve started reading Robert’s novel “Nobody Loves A Centurion” where Decius is serving with Caesar in Gaul and the killigs are not all on a battlefield. Well-described period setting and characters.
I hadn’t really heard of Keith Roberts’ stories about Anita, the teenaged witch. Read one I had anthologized: “Timothy.” Well-done and carrying Hawthorne’s “Feathertop” to its logical extreme.
And I re-read Pohl’s “Day Million.” I’m doing a column on that.
Read the usual weekly offerings by Kaje Harper who is also re-posting several of her stories on another Facebook site in conjunction with a “Twelve Tropes Of Christmas” Blog theme. She covers all the bases.
And read E. H. Timm’s fine monthly story which you can find linked in the Flash Fiction Draw Challenge part of this blog.
Again, I wish all my readers the best for the Season and the New Year. To quote maybe my favorite book: “A Merry Christmas to Everybody! A Happy New Year to All the World!”
All the kids on my street knew the old grain elevator was haunted, especially around Christmas.
The street stretched into a dirt and gravel road with a gully and overgrown weeds on either side and the grain elevator on a patch of fenced-in land at the end of the road. It was outdated and never really used except in December when the town lit up a Christmas star made up of multicolored lights at the top which helped it dominate the evening sky in the last month of the year.
My Aunt, who visited us for the holidays from Wichita, thought it was sweet.
“Reminds me of Christmas when I was a little girl,” she would say.
My friends and I thought it was just plain spooky. We called it “The Tower.”
Sometimes, my Aunt would stand on the front porch and look over at the tower and sing Christmas songs about the Star of Bethlehem, like she was serenading it. Like I said, Spooky.
Old Man Corcoran, who must have been around fifty, was the one who turned the star on every evening at dusk. He would drive down in his battered pickup, unlock the gate of the wire mesh fence and go into the grain elevator to flip the switch. One night, right before Christmas, my buddy Jerome and I decided to go inside the tower. It was a warm evening for December and our folks thought we were playing one of those new video games in Jerome’s room.
It was the early Eighties. We were eleven.
We took our bikes and made it out to the tower before Old Man Corcoran got there. We hid behind some bushes across the road from the fence and watched as he opened the gate and went in to the tower. While he was inside we ran in through the gate and hid behind a corner of the tower, waiting for our chance to sneak in. But instead we had to stay hidden when Corcoran stepped out of the tower, glanced up to see that the star was lit and closed the gate and drove off.
I’m still not sure why we didn’t just jump out and tell him we were there. Maybe we thought we’d get in trouble. As it was, we were locked inside the gate. We glanced up at the star which looked like a big flat line of red, green and blue and walked around the tower.
And then in the growing dark a tall rectangle of shadow, twice as tall as a man, emerged and started moving towards us. It wasn’t a shadow being cast by anything or somebody in some kind of black drapery. It was just a shadow. Dark. Inexorable. Looking like the open mouth of some thing.
Jerome and I ran, somehow finding an old metal drum that may have had oil or gas in it at one time, standing empty by the fence. We climbed on top of it and puled ourselves up the rest of the way on the wire mesh fence. We climbed faster than we ever had in Gym Class. There was no barbed wire on top of the fence but we wouldn’t have cared if there was. We made it down the other side and ran for our bikes, images of the shadowy thing gliding up to the fence and passing through coming after us.
We were halfway home before I glanced back and saw we weren’t being followed.
My Mom asked me how my pants got ripped and I told her Jerome and I had been playing outside. Which we sort of had been. She wasn’t that upset. She always made me change out of the clothes I wore to school when I got home and for once I was glad if it kept her from being upset. I don’t remember what Jerome’s Mom did or if our folks ever found out where we’d been but I do know that the town put barbed wire at the top of the fence early that next year.
And some nights when I am dozing off I see that tall dark tower, star shining in the twilight. Except the tower turns to watch me with its starry eye and then the tall shadow moves between me and the star, coming closer, closer…
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! Hope you enjoyed this spooky Christmas story. Taking a break for the Holidays but I may have something special for New Year’s Week.
I’ll be back with another prompt pic in early January.
Okay,” Zane said tossing his jacket on the couch just inside the front door. “You think the house is haunted? You always say your house is haunted. What’s the reason for calling me over?”
Del sighed. “I think I know what’s going on.”
“What?” Zane asked. “Ghosts?”
“Specific ghosts,” Del said. “Or ghost.” He sighed again, then took a deep breath.
“I think my ghost is a cat.”
Zane was surprised he didn’t laugh. But he and Del had been through a lot since dating ten years ago and then deciding to be “just friends.”
“A cat?” Zane asked.
“Look at the evidence,” Del said. “Little things move around when I’m not here. Little things get knocked off the shelf or counter. Little things disappear…”
“Little things?” Zane said, trying not to sound skeptical.
“Yeah,” Del said. “Little things. The kind of things a cat could bat around or carry in its mouth.”
“Could something have gotten into the house? A stray cat or maybe a raccoon?” Zane asked.
Del shook his head. “House is sealed tight. Even the attic. I checked. And raccoons would have torn up the place.”
Del walked over to the table and picked up several small items.
“Look at these,” Del said. “I pulled them out from under the couch this afternoon.”
The items included a wooden spool, a small Christmas ornament, a sock and a small ball made of some fuzzy material. Del held up the ball.
“This is a cat toy. I don’t have a cat. And you and the guys helped me move that couch in here six months ago. There was nothing under it. And I cleaned this house. Nothing on the floors. Nothing in the closets.” Del smiled. “Not even me.”
Del rolled the sock up and tossed it into the empty laundry basket on the other side of the room.
Zane smiled. Del was working his behind off to pay for this nine hundred-foot vintage sixties suburban house with an actual attic and basement. Nothing fancy but it was home.
“You know, I read something about poltergeists once,” Zane said. “They may be a manifestation of someone’s emotional state. Mind working overtime. Pent-up-adolescent angst. Mind-over-matter.”
“I’m hardly an adolescent,” Del said.
“Yeah, but you may have some adolescent emotions,” Zane said. walking towards the desk where Del had his computer. “And maybe you…hey…”
Zane was staring down at the laundry basket. He gestured at Del and signaled for him to be quiet. Del walked over.
They stared.
Curled in the laundry basket was a cat. A tortoiseshell cat, not big, not flashy, just a cat.
A cat they hadn’t seen come into the room or crawl into the basket.
A cat that vanished as they watched.
“A manifestation…” Del said.
“Yeah,” Zane said. “A furry manifestation.”
“You know,” Del said. “This house gets awfully quiet sometimes. I could use someone here to make it warm, like a cat. Or maybe…”
He suddenly kissed Zane.
“Haven’t done that in a few years…” Zane said.
“We could talk?” Del said.
“Yeah.” Zane said.
For just a moment there was the sound of a soft, silent purr.
I thought clowns were creepy long before I saw that Stephen King movie. Last thing I wanted to do was sit through some clown movie. But I was on the Library Board and so was Dwight and the whole idea was to get kids involved in reading, so the downtown Library had a circus theme that weekend.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor and looked down. Yeah, a clown, a ringmaster, even a juggler. Plenty of kids books and plenty of screaming kids. Well, it won’t be so bad in the third floor auditorium with the doors shut, I thought.
But the Board members were all coming dressed as clowns.
My costume was improvised; a silly little hat, a ragged jacket and a red nose left over from that other charity thing from a few years back.
I was right, you couldn’t hear the screaming kids from this part of the top floor. I breathed a sigh of relief and walked down the hall to the auditorium, opened the door and went in.
It wasn’t dark yet and one of the librarians was making a speech, some kind of intro. I saw where Dwight was, in not full costume; long coat, floppy hat and red nose. Kind of like Doctor Who on Red Nose Day. I edged past a couple of people and sat down next to Dwight.
“Glad you could make it,” he whispered. “Know what day this is?”
“Huh?” I whispered back.
“Anniversary of our first date eight years ago?” Dwight said with another grin.
It was…It had been his late Grandmother’s birthday so he always remembered the date.
“You remember we wanted to see a movie but couldn’t find one open?” Dwight whispered. “Well here’s our movie.”
The movie was actually a collection of shorts with Charlie Chaplain and then the Three Stooges. No clowns in makeup, but maybe they counted.
Dwight and I sat there, held hands and laughed.
—end—
NOTE: The draws for the December 2025 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were a Romance, set in a Library involving a Clown Costume.
authorjeffbaker 
