Friday Fiction!

Stud
By Jennifer Williams

“And how much of the planet does your company own, Ms Myatt? Real estate here must be very expensive.”

Ms Myatt smiled at the question, and tapping her heels to her horse’s flank led them to the edge of the path. There was an especially spectacular view from that position. Expensive maybe, but worth every penny.

“Call me Lavinia, please. The Ranch owns this entire valley, right up to the hills you can see there.” She pointed with her free hand. The sky was a deep blue at the moment, but the sunset later would be violet and pink, which always struck Lavinia as particularly apt. Escapar really was the perfect planet. “There are ten separate complexes in this valley, all entirely self contained and remote enough that we can keep the illusion going as long as you need, Kia.”

The woman on the horse next to her stiffened slightly, obviously put out by the use of her first name, but Lavinia just smiled some more. Nobody kept to formalities very long when they planned to stay at the Ranch.

“Shall we go down and take a tour?” she continued. “It’s a beautiful day for it.”

Kia nodded, and the two of them took their horses down the final part of the path and into the soft grasses of the valley itself. In the near distance was the first complex, a simple fenced paddock and a robust but quaint looking little house. It had been designed very carefully to be as quaint as possible. The scent of the grasses greeted them like a friend from a dream, bringing half forgotten memories… Lavinia almost laughed at herself. This place even got to her, sometimes.

“And the men? They are all in on it, are they?”

“Of course.” Lavinia bit down her impatience. Kia was not like most of the other clients they had. It wasn’t unusual for them to want to have a look at the place before they signed over their credits, but they didn’t normally have so many questions. After all, most of the information was there on the adverts, and besides, most of the clients didn’t want to know too much about it. That would spoil the fun. “They all have a degree of acting training and are fully committed to the experience. Oh, here we are, look, Troy is a great example of what we offer.”

A tall, bronzed man had stepped out of the wooden house, a coil of rope slung over his naked shoulders. He had glossy black hair, a hint of stubble, and was ridiculously handsome. Lavinia waved at him, and he waved cheerfully back, flashing a perfect white grin.

“Troy used to be the villain in a long running TV show, The Chambers of Our Love Collide. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? He did that for a few years and then the character got killed off, so he works for us now.”

Troy walked to the paddock, where a chestnut mare waited to be brushed down. Lavinia was particularly proud of the horses, all of which were shipped in from Earth or bred from original Earth stock. They were beautiful animals, and a large part of the attraction of the Ranch. All ridiculously expensive, of course.

“And how does it all work, exactly?”

“We have a number of different scenarios.” They rode past Troy’s paddock and passed a wide strip of grassy land. Ahead there was an almost identical complex. The wooden house was a little larger and perhaps more recently painted, but there were horses in the paddock and Lavinia could already see a tall figure toiling outside, oiled muscles glistening in the sunlight. “Our clients often go with the more traditional storylines. A single woman, lost in inhospitable country. Perhaps her travelling party suffered a hit by raiders, or there was a terrible storm. She comes across a little ranch in the middle of nowhere, and asks a man there for help.” Lavinia grinned, warming to her subject. “Of course at first he will be a terrible brute, full of stormy rages, and a dark past is absolutely a given, but eventually through persistence and a good heart she will win him over. As well as his love for her, he will reveal himself to be a deeply kind man whose passions are as big as his rages. He probably looks after stray animals too.”

Lavinia caught the look on Kia’s face, and shrugged. “What can I say? Those are the classics. Sometimes our clients want to reverse the situation and our men are the ones who turn up on their doorsteps, but it all amounts to the same thing.”

They had drawn level with the house, and again Lavinia waved to the impossibly perfect man tending the horses. He had tousled blond hair and a tiny scar on his cheekbone. The women went crazy for that scar.

“Ray there is one of our most popular models.”

“And the men…” Kia shifted uncomfortably in her saddle. She was looking at Ray with keen interest. “They sleep with the women?”

Lavinia laughed.

“I’m not altogether sure exactly how much actual sleeping gets done, but believe me, all the women are very satisfied by the end of the week. And it’s never longer than a week. We don’t want anyone getting too attached.”

“And what about the men?” Kia had still not smiled, not once. “How do they feel about all this?”

Lavinia shrugged.

“They get all their food and bills paid for, generous holiday entitlement, full medical insurance. Free accommodation, obviously. And an unending parade of women to adore them. Everyone is checked out before they come, by the way. No one’s health is ever at risk.”

“But they are just puppets,” said Kia. “Objects for these women to lust over, to control.”

The horses had taken them past Ray’s paddock and on to the next. A man younger and slimmer than the previous two stood at his front gate. His soft brown hair was artfully combed to fall over his big blue eyes, and he had cheekbones to die for.

“These men find it empowering,” said Lavinia. She was beginning to tire of the questions. “None of them has ever complained about their treatment.”

“It’s prostitution!” said Kia hotly. “Slavery!”

“That’s ridiculous.”

The slim young man at the gate watched them approach with interest. Kia called out to him as they got closer.

“You, what’s your name?”

He looked briefly to Lavinia before answering.

“Carlos, ma’am,”

“Are you happy here, Carlos? Do you like being a pet?”

Carlos blushed slightly, and looked up at them through long eyelashes.

“In truth… it is a little degrading.”

“Oh, come on now.” Lavinia held up both hands. “We treat you well Carlos, and I don’t remember anyone giving you permission to talk.”

“I’ve had enough of this.” Kia tugged at the reins, turning the horse so that she faced Lavinia, and took a petite handgun from within the folds of her loose blouse. “I’m giving this boy his freedom. He’s coming with me!”

Without hesitation she shot Lavinia square in the chest, sending the older woman flying off the back of her horse and into the dirt. A dark red stain spread across her shirt and she did not move again. Giving Carlos her hand, Kia helped him up onto the horse to sit behind her.


Lavinia waited for the hoof beats to retreat a fair way before sitting up. The safety mat had broken her fall well enough but the thump from the blood squib would probably leave a bruise. She patted gingerly at her damp chest and clambered to her feet. Kia and Carlos were a dot in the distance, riding off together into their own story. An unusual request perhaps, but Kia was an unusually rich client. A bruise and a ruined shirt wouldn’t matter much one way or another.

The sunset, thought Lavinia as she clambered back onto her horse. A few hours later and the sunset would have been a treat.

Bad Apple Bone

One of the things I'll probably talk about on here is the book I'm writing, so I thought I'd give it a sort of slight introduction here, so you'll know what I'm on about.

I started it in May 2007; I came home from work one day (really cheesed off, actually) and decided to write down the scene that had been going around in my head all day, for no other reason than it would take my mind off my bad mood. While I was writing it I realized that I wanted to know the history behind the scene, and what happened after, so I began to plan that out too... and that's how I started writing Bad Apple Bone. Kind of an accident really.

If I were asked to provide a synopsis for the novel, I would probably whinge and complain that I'm not any good at synopsises, but to give you the most basic of basic outlines; a horror/fantasy novel in which a child has been abducted by an old and dubious witch. The child's older brother sets out to find him with the help of a younger, less experienced witch. Bad things move in the background, pulling strings and causing trouble.
Now what worries me is that as soon as you say "young witch" these days, people tend to assume you mean the ass-kicking, sexy, scantily clad witch made popular by Buffy and horror romance novels where the heroine sees an awful lot of willy action. This is not that sort of book. Just so you know. Don't expect much willy action. If anything, it has a traditional fantasy setting, along with a more modern approach to story and character. Er, yeah.

I love writing it, and I'm tremendously fond of the two main characters, who have managed to surprise me, make me laugh, and make me cry, all unexpectedly. It'll probably be around 100,000 words long (about average for a book) and at the moment... *checks wordcount* ...I'm at 81, 249. I'm well into the third act. The endgame. The shit has now hit the fan. And this is proving to be the complicated bit!

One of the things I learnt from doing NaNoWriMo last year is that with people watching you, and expecting you to get something done, you can suddenly find yourself doing much more than you thought you could. So I'm hoping that by occasionally blogging about Bad Apple Bone on here there will be an added incentive to get the bugger written. I'm so close to the end now!

So if you should see me, bumming around on the internet, looking at pictures of cats with funny captions or twittering about what I'm making for lunch, feel free to say, in your best Stewie Griffin voice: "How you uh, how you comin' on that novel you're working on? Huh? Gotta a big, uh, big stack of papers there? Gotta, gotta nice litte story you're working on there? Your big novel you've been working on for 3 years? Huh? Gotta, gotta compelling protaganist? Yeah? Gotta obstacle for him to overcome? Huh? Gotta story brewing there? Working on, working on that for quite some time? Huh? Yeah?"