K.D. Burrows
Short Stories
A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. - Stephen King
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Women want love to be a novel, men a short story. - Daphne du Maurier
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Somewhere around the place I’ve got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger’s Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting. - Terry Pratchett
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I love short stories. They are a whole world in a few pages. Here are a few of mine. I'd love for you to read them. Please don't reprint them without permission. I retain all rights to my work, copywrite, blah, blah, mood-spoiler things I have to say when I'd rather just let people read my stories for free and not have to worry about theft. Thanks.
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Click the title or picture to read the story.
I love this story! It's so creepy. The ending gets me every time even though I wrote it, because the scene where the narrator and her friend Sue are sitting in the car actually happened to me and my friend Sue. We were parked on the side of a one-way street, talking in her car, and a guy pulled past us and parked on the other side of the street. He got out of the car, smiling very weirdly. He took a briefcase-like thing out of his car, put it on the trunk, took something out of the case and put it together, and then pointed something long at us. Sue took off and drove us all the way home, and we were both so freaked out that we didn't say a word to each other the whole way. I swear to this day it was a rifle in that case and he was going to shoot us. It was so weird and stuck with me so long that I wrote a whole piece of fiction around that little bit of truth.
I wrote this story for a writing competition that had to include a frozen pond, which was a reference to Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye asking about where the ducks go in the winter when the pond in Central Park freezes. (Who has the job of thinking up these story contest prompts, and how much does it pay? Because I want that job.) I'm usually not a sore loser, but I still think I should have won with this one, especially when I went the extra mile and named the father in the story Duck Stradlater after the ducks in Central Park and Holden's roommate. lol. But I did get this cool story out of it, so...
I wanted to write a classic Twilight Zone kind of story with a twist ending, and I love Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin (actually anything by Levin), so I threw in some devilry. I used to live in an old, decrepit but really cool carriage house on a huge, gilded-era estate on the shores of Lake Erie that I rented from a wealthy heart surgeon. He and his family would leave their mansion on the lake shore and go south in the winter, and I'd be there on the estate alone during the winter snow season, so that's where the setting comes from. And if you've ever lived near the Great Lakes, you know what lake effect snow is.
I love unreliable narrators. But maybe sometimes it's the reader that's unreliable because they're thinking one thing when it's really another. Did that make you want to read this story without giving anything away? I hope so. Plus, I love ambiguously worded titles because I'm just weird like that.
Back to Lake Erie. Once you grow up on a Great Lake, it's always part of you. It's the ley lines, or the way that Jenny Green Teeth beckons to the sailors to come join her, or all the lost souls that perished in the water over the centuries that call to us. Or maybe it's just that not seeing sunshine for eight months of the year makes us weirdly dark and dramatic. Who knows? Anyway, we used to love to party on the beach during the summer. But don't worry, we never killed anyone. Well, except for that one time...
I read this cool story that had kind of "asides" built into a character's inner dialogue that hinted at things maybe being different than what they seemed. I wanted to try my hand at that, so I blatantly stole the technique from another writer, which is fine because they probably stole it from someone else. We writers are like that. Plus, I love twists so much. I should probably get some help for that since it ends up being disappointing that there aren't that many twists in real life. Is there a Twists Anonymous?
This is a story about love, happiness, and finding your freedom. I almost cried when I read it to my husband for the first time (probably because I was totally blowing away my credibility as a writer of dark and twisted literature with this happiness fest). He was amazed by this story. I'm sure he didn't think I had such a sweet love story in me (except for ours, of course, and the romance I've written for various jobs) after all the not-happily-ever-after love stories and other dark stuff I've made him read and edit for me over the years. This story just came to me one day after reading a news story. It's based on a bunch of articles about a Flamingo that escaped from a zoo. Someone, please buy it from me and make it into a Hallmark movie. A really good Hallmark movie. lol.
This is a kind of companion piece to Flying the Coop, in as much as it's also a story that was inspired by news articles about real animals. In this case, a cow born with a question mark on her face and another cow in Poland that escaped being sent to a slaughterhouse by swimming across a river to an island. Yeah, I don't know what's with me and animal-inspired stories lately either, but it's probably all those cute animal videos on Facebook and Twitter I watch when I should be writing. This one is more a "love yourself'' story than a regular love story. Or maybe it's an "embrace your inner cow and find yourself" story. I'll let you decide.
