Staff Spotlight: Jess Flarity

Interview

What do you write?

I love writing about the near future, so most of my pieces file under spec­u­la­tive fiction (espe­cial­ly science fiction). I’ve dabbled in pretty much every­thing though. I’m kind of a chameleon that way.

Is there an author or artist who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work?

Philip K. Dick is my number-one influ­ence. I’m inter­est­ed in ideas, so I see the prose of a piece as the wrap­ping paper around the gift inside. PKD really shines if you reflect on his work under this lens, and con­sid­er­ing the range of his writing, it’s quite impres­sive what he was able to accom­plish in his life­time. Also, in German, “gift” means poison (that’s from The Three Stig­ma­ta of Palmer Eldritch).

Why did you choose Stonecoast?

Stonecoast wel­comes a kalei­do­scope of writers, and the range of dis­ci­plines in this program gives us incred­i­ble strength. You get to drink your own Kool-Aid here. Pick any flavor. I rec­om­mend the snozzberry.

What is your favorite Stonecoast memory?

My most vivid memory is of my cohort’s “bad haiku” skit during our first Residency―wow, that was fun! All of us coming togeth­er and really nailing it was both hilar­i­ous and heart-warming. Haikus For Days!

What do you hope to accom­plish in the future?

I’d like to publish short stories in the SFWA market and “finish” a novel. I’m also co-writing a book with the tal­ent­ed Timothy Schei­dler, a fellow Stonecoast student who’s done exten­sive studies on medieval lit­er­a­ture. What’s really inter­est­ing about our project is the fusion of a science fiction setting with a sword and sorcery plot struc­ture. Stay tuned for more details…

If you could have written one book, story, or poem that already exists, which would you choose?

The Three Stig­ma­ta of Palmer Eldritch by PKD is what inspired me to write. The novel is about a hal­lu­cino­genic lichen from another solar system threat­en­ing the fabric of our col­lec­tive reality. It’s a pipe-dream of mine to trans­form the story into a screen­play and make it the next Blade Runner.

---

Featured Work

Time of Death

Detec­tive Harris had seen a lot of corpses during his twenty years on the M‑Squad, and they only kept getting weirder. This one was col­lapsed onto an ellip­ti­cal machine in the corner of a local gym, behind a barrier of yellow police tape. The body was so des­ic­cat­ed, he couldn’t even tell the gender of the victim—as if an Egypt­ian mummy had put on a track suit and gone for a thou­sand-year workout.

Some­thing about it made his soul start to itch, a place he couldn’t scratch.

“What do you think, Ramirez?” Harris asked his partner, as they crossed into the crime scene. He glanced at the con­cen­tric rings in the foam of the drop-ceiling and caught a whiff of dusty mildew. It had been a while since he’d had a gym mem­ber­ship, but the damp odor of the gym was still famil­iar. Quite unlike his wobbly biceps and zero-pack abs. His gaze swung past his own reflec­tion in the wall-to-wall mirrors and fixed itself on the uni­formed woman next to him. Ramirez hes­i­tat­ed as he moved in to get a closer look.

“Has to be time magic,” she said, and then mut­tered in a lan­guage Harris couldn’t speak. She began tracing pro­tec­tive glyphs in the air, blue-white symbols crack­ling with elec­tric, magical energy that made his arm hair stand on end. He took a pen out of his jacket pocket. Using the pen as a probe, the detec­tive pushed back the track suit’s collar and noticed a silver chain around the wrin­kled neck. A tri­an­gu­lar diamond was clasped at the center of the necklace.

“Ah, hell. It’s the guild. Do we know this person?” he asked.

Ramirez fin­ished the spell with a snap of her wrist, and the illu­sion of “normal police work” dis­persed into the air around them. The crowd of sur­round­ing offi­cers didn’t seem to notice that any­thing strange had hap­pened, and they con­tin­ued sipping coffee as the first day­light spilled into the gym’s front windows, where a glass door led into the parking lot outside.

“It’s pos­si­ble,” she said. “We’ve got to go back and find out.”

Harris sighed, then stood next to his partner and closed his eyes.

Zipping back­wards through time was always unpleas­ant, like an amuse­ment park ride that both began and ended with the atten­dant punch­ing you in the stomach. After the initial shock of the spell set in, Ramirez kept whis­per­ing, until Harris heard the word crui­tate­ny, and the spell ended with a jarring rush of last night’s Thai food in his throat. When he opened his eyes, the sun­light and the other offi­cers were all gone. The gym was empty now, the rows of tread­mills and weight racks against the walls silent and still. They both watched as the door to the parking lot opened across from them, and Harris got a good look at their corpse, pre-mummification.

He was a thin man with wide, blue eyes, and he was staring right at them as the door closed. The diamond neck­lace winked in a flash of reflect­ed flu­o­res­cent light.

“Is he looking at us?” Harris whis­pered, his hand moving toward the pistol under his jacket. “I thought we were outside of the time flow…”

One look at Ramirez and he knew she was in a panic. This was a trap.

Before she could begin another casting, the man shouted some kind of force magic at them, an angry gong sound echoing off of all the gym equip­ment. The spell slammed into them, and they were both knocked back into the mirror like they’d been scooped up by a hur­ri­cane. Harris heard his partner’s head thunk on one of the racks of weights next to them as they fell.

His gun was blaring as he stood, bullets flying across the gym, the trigger ham­mer­ing over and over as he emptied the whole mag­a­zine at the enemy. But the man had already cast another spell. Harris felt the bullets re-enter­ing the gun, sliding back up the barrel and growing down into the clip.

“Goddamn, I hate time magic,” he mut­tered, and quickly hol­stered the pistol. He grabbed one of the five-pound weights next to him and hurled it as hard as he could in the man’s general direc­tion, then strafed around the side of the room. The weight caught the man in the shoul­der, and he yelped as his hands moved to cast another spell. Harris stomped across a row of tread­mills toward him. One sud­den­ly came to life, ripping out his feet, and he crashed to the floor, arm twist­ing in the wrong direc­tion as he caught himself. His oppo­nent was moving away from him, pos­si­bly trying to circle around to where Ramirez lay, unconscious.

Harris pushed himself up with a wince and vaulted over a weight machine. The man in the track suit was already stand­ing next to Ramirez, his hands extend­ed in front of him, sin­is­ter-sound­ing words escap­ing his lips. All of those “k’s” and “s’s” meant it was some kind of com­pul­sion spell, some­thing that would turn her into a mind slave. The detec­tive quickly tackled him into one of the ellip­ti­cal machines, the one where they’d found the body. That’s when he knew it was time for him to unleash his own cursed powers.

Harris removed the barrier from his soul, like men­tal­ly taking off his jacket, and all of the magic in the room twisted in anger. He hadn’t asked for this.

It wasn’t his fault.

The man recoiled when he saw Harris’s spirit, worse than if he’d been phys­i­cal­ly struck, and magic began boiling around them, causing reality to flex. All of the reflec­tions in the mirrors started turning inside out on one another, until every object that was even remote­ly circle-shaped began trans­form­ing into an eyeball. Then they opened, reveal­ing a green-flecked snake eye with a ver­ti­cal slit for a pupil.

“What the hell are you?” the man screamed.

Harris gripped him firmly, pinning him against the machine. The com­pul­sion spell he was casting lin­gered in the air, drift­ing next to them in an ochre mist. The energy wanted to go into Ramirez, but Harris willed all of the magic back into its caster instead, watched it swirl down a funnel into the man’s mind. Then all of the snake eyes in the mirrors blinked, and their pupils dilated into almost nothing. There was some other spell that had been cast on the build­ing, some kind of time magic that must have set the trap. The eyes found it for him, hidden in the rings of the ceiling, and Harris drew out the magic, a dark purple, and crammed it into the man along with the com­pul­sion spell. Then he took the man’s hands and placed them on the ellip­ti­cal handles. There was only one thing left to be done.

“Looks like you could lose some weight,” he com­mand­ed, and the man in the track suit twitched as the com­bi­na­tion of spells took root. The man started pumping his arms and legs on the ellip­ti­cal machine, moving faster and faster with each stroke. Harris couldn’t look away, and he watched in horrid fas­ci­na­tion as the magic sped his victim forward through time. The guy must have burned a million calo­ries before his body with­ered from the magic, until he even­tu­al­ly he slumped forward and decayed entirely.

Until he was in the same posi­tion as when they’d found him.

Harris knelt down next to his partner and checked her pulse. It beat in a steady rhythm. The snake eyes in the mirrors wanted her, too, but he relaxed enough to put the barrier back up, and the walls stopped flexing. That would have to be enough, for now. Sweat­ing, he sat down next to Ramirez and waited for the time travel to wear off, stretch­ing through the pain in his arm where he’d fell. Even­tu­al­ly the magic dis­si­pat­ed, the curse along with it, and every­thing flashed forward to the moment where they’d left off. Harris took his partner under his arms and tra­versed the magical barrier she’d put up, handing her limp body to a nearby paramedic.

“What in God’s name hap­pened in there?” the officer in charge shouted at him.

Harris sighed and stared at the mum­mi­fied corpse. He was tired of the M‑Squad. He was tired of the guild.

For once, he wanted to find a corpse at a crime scene and dis­cov­er that mur­der­er was some­body other than him.

The detec­tive shrugged at the man in charge and went outside. The sun was up again, a shining gold disk, and the morning air held a crisp feeling of uncertainty.

“Hell,” Harris said, scratch­ing at his head. “I’m getting too old for this.”

---