Jude S. Walko

“Dead Ringer” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #119

Content warning: Mention of violence.It was just after two in the early morning hours of upcountry Esan Thailand. It was well known that Thais in this part of the country were early risers, especially those with the extra burden of being self-sustained farmers just to survive. Neung was no exception, but even he was usually asleep at these hours. A muffled and incessant pinging pierced the night air and had aroused him from a deep and peaceful slumber.Like all good Thais he had already done his nightly rituals before bed including evening pr...

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“Lucy” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #118

It was the day after Halloween. All Saint’s day. But as far as Jermaine could see there were no saints to be seen within a very wide radius. The bite in the air had just snapped the coniferous leaves into their colorful reds, yellow and oranges. Change was in the air. He was the son of one of Baltimore’s most famous African American Catholicism mavens. As such he had done his stint in the seminary and had almost taken his vows twice. But his love of the opposite sex, made the Chastity one a hard pill to swallow. His mother had...

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“The Unhallowed Horseman ” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #117

Content warning: horror and some goreIt was a particularly rainy All Hollow’s Eve, just on the outskirts of Tarrytown, New York, a sleepy little hamlet nestled in the Catskills of upstate.There at the covered bridge, just on the outskirts of town was the boundary between two worlds. One being the here-and-now earth dimension most of us are familiar with, and the other being the netherworld part of the multiverse where the Unhallowed Horseman resided.Many had heard of his tale. A particularly astute scholar by the name of Washington Irving ha...

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“The In Crowd” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #115

Cheyenne didn’t know why, but she always felt cut off from the popular crowd.Sure she was pretty enough, that wasn’t it. Her mixed ancestry of Thai and Native American guaranteed her high cheek bones, and smooth olive skin. Her piercing hazel eyes and radiant smile made her irresistible. In fact, it was arguable that she was among the prettiest young women at UCLA.But no matter how much she tried it never seemed to be enough. Whether it was binging the latest shows that were all the buzz on Netflix, or the other streaming giants, or buying t...

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“Pee-Wee's Big Adventure” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #114

"You want to do something fun?", Genny asked as she barged in on Harold while he had his hand nonchalantly down his pants watching Jeopardy! Thank God they were just resting there."Sure" he bolted upright hoping she hadn't noticed.Genny was the hottest girl on the block, but the cool part was she had no qualms about hanging out with socially awkward boys like Harry. She always wore those jean shorts that rode up just a little too high on the cheeks. It drove Harold insane. He tried to ignore his raging hormones."Cool. Grab some water, we're ...

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“Tommy LaFontaine” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #113

CW: drug dependency, suicideTommy LaFontaine had always dreamt of going to other dimensions. No, he literally always dreamt of going to other worlds, and every time he did, he learned something new.For example, did you know there's a place where books read people? They have libraries instead of homes, and rather than dying they become overdue. The entire world is literal, right off the page... so they find the unpredictability and emotional outbursts of humans, quite entertaining. Their leader's name is Dewey Decimal, and they live a very or...

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“The Bee's Knees” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #112

A story as told through the Epistle of Maia.A hunter’s moon hung low in the early evening sky. It was the first rain after the Autumnal equinox, and officially the first rain of fall. That didn’t mean much up in these parts of Maine, though, where the wet season lasted nearly 8 months out of the year. Rev. Sean A. Doherty was just thankful it hadn’t yet turned to snow. He had only spent one other winter here and it had been brutally, bone-chilling cold. The local Mainers loved the snow. It kept the pesky tourists from Boston a...

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“To Boldly Go...” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #111

John and Sarah Burroughs beget David, who beget Tyler, who beget Abner, who beget George, who beget Edgar. It sounded like some humdrum bible verse; the kind a monotone Quaker preacher might drone on with to his congregation, in a musty Massachusetts one-roomed church house, during the dead heat of summer. Sweltering humidity and palpable boredom lay about heavily.But it became a mantra for little Edgar; one that he would recite his entire life. It helped ground him in reality, in that it reminded him from when, and from whom, he actual...

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“LAST RIDE” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #110

The 1959 Pontiac Hearse skidded to a full stop along the gravely southbound shoulder of State Highway 2A, just south of Reed, Maine. There was a biting chill in the autumn air. Halloween was just around the corner, and it was already getting cold. This was a surefire sign, that Father Winter was not going to play nice this year.Ansel threw down the butt of his 3/4 smoked menthol. He hated to waste the rest, but most people didn’t like smoking in their cars, these days, and he couldn’t chance it. He really needed to make into Bangor by sunris...

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“Allegiance” by Jude S. Walko

Warning: Adult sexuality themes, homophobic bullying, suicide, some language.“I Pledge allegiance to the fag!” The biting homophobic slur cut deep through the air, like a sharpened razor blade, even though they weren’t even aimed at Charles, but rather his best friend Ronald. Charlie, would never forget them though, and they would repeat themselves in his mind, for the rest of his life. Ronald had spent the brunt of his young life being teased for his weight. Starting with his Mom’s shopping for “husky” sized jeans at Hills Departm...

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“House of Lies” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #107

Jeremy didn’t know the first thing about real estate, other than what he might have learned on those fixer-upper flip shows. He actually hated those shows. They were always the same. Some overly attractive couple, with a more than modest income, relocating or looking for their first home, in which to start their 2.5 kid-rearing family. They weren’t real, anyone could tell that. People didn’t look like that, nor talk like that. Plus those couples had about as much chemistry as a beacon full of Fiji water and motor oil. And who had t...

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“The Ballad of Marie-Augustine” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #106

Marie took nothing for granted, especially the love she felt for her family. The grey clouds of mist and steam slowly parted to reveal the clearest blue sky Marie-Augustine had ever seen, or would ever see again. And slowly, then suddenly, sound, consciousness and reality hit her as equally as hard as the masonry, in fact the train, that so violently had, just moments before.    Her eyes began to scour the intricate detail of each brick that the masons had so delicately, and skillfully, carved onto each and every square inch of t...

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“Universal Appeal - The Meeting of Songwriter X & Z'Orion the Wizard” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #105

Songwriter X hadn’t been in the Kingdom of X23 all that long. In fact, he didn’t really know how he ended up here in the first place. One minute he was shooting YouTube videos with his self-proclaimed “Skeleton Band”, deep in the bowels of his makeshift garage turned music studio, and the next he had literally fallen from the Sky and washed ashore on some salty beach which he was unable to recognize.He knew right away this wasn’t Earth anymore. He could tell by the metallic taste of the air, that he was a very long way from Whittier, Califor...

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“Fight or Flight” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #104

"Are you coming tonight, Sarah?", came the question from young Gerard, out of the blue.He was already dressed to the nines, and his Axe body spray was wafting over and overpowering her Kung Pao Chicken. Plus it was distracting her from being inside the horror film she was watching, even if she had seen it a hundred times. “Why on God’s green earth would I bother doing that?”, came her curt reply, between two large tablespoons of sweet and sour pork. “Because it’s Friday, you ain’t got no job, and you ain’t got shit to do!”; He was ...

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“Finders: Keepers” by Jude S. Walko

Submitted to Contest #103

Some of the train cars had been here so long their wheels had rusted stiff. Here on Old Track 29, was where unclaimed and discarded boxcars went to die. Benjamin Samskowski always got the Glenn Miller tune stuck in his head when he was here, but up here in the Catskills of New York, they were a long way from Chattanooga. It was hard to believe that with such large amounts of merchandise at stake, that anyone would abandon such a vast array of assets, but the truth was it happened all the time. People died, companies went bankrupt, things g...

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