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Martin Ross

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2021

Stories (124)

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124 Stories

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Karakuri-Netsuke: A Mike Dodge Minimystery

Martin Ross

Seth Waldron’s living room was overpopulated with hares and dogs and mice and octopi and dragons and spirits and skeletons and not a few couples engaged in eternal copulation.“Ah, you’ve found the shunga,” the master of the house breathed behind me. Dad had a 30-year run of National Geographics shelved in the new bedroom I demanded at nine, and it didn’t take long for me to develop a literal Indiana jones for the more fascinating anatomical aspects of sub-tropical anthropology. I couldn’t feign studying the use of cowrie shells as indigenous...

8 likes

Mum: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

“Well,” the elfin gift shop volunteer reflected. “I suppose it depends.”There are three basic types of hospital volunteers. She was the third variety, and so came around the counter to peer at Ecumena’s meager floral selection.“Frankly, a nice houseplant provides a positive life force, and do you know, I read somewhere that a tropical like a spider plant can purify the air in the room?” “Verna” related, almost breathlessly.“My wife wanted something more, ah, ornamental,” I smiled, almost apologetically. She patted me on the forearm. She unde...

8 likes

Jeff and Gina's Wedding: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

“Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”I immediately shifted for a look-around. Sarah’s fingers, resting softly on my right paw, constricted into a vice I might not have anticipated from one who forced me to scientifically document her lunchtime fats and calories.Just as Sarah’s tender(er) mode had activated the second the organ sounded the bride’s approach, my Pavlovian adolescence kicks in when I hear those words followed by even the slightest rustling or throat-clearing. In film – or at least the genre of film Sarah prefers com...

10 likes

Like Hell: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear. It is scarcely less bitter than death: but, in order to tell of the good that I found there, I must tell of the other things I saw there…”Saanvi was running exceptionally late, so I decided I’d roam the halls of academe. Academe wasn’t thrilled.I’d met two of what sufficed as the University’s finest within about fi...

9 likes

Perfetc.

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #188

“It was a perfect day.” For a nanosecond, I think it’s an auditory hallucination.Part of the blood on his face, his arms, the Jimi Hendrix tee, is his. Only people with tubes and pipettes and machines will be able to distinguish that that isn’t.The blood on my fingers, my “Keep The Immigrants/Deport the Racists” tee, is of the same composition, though as the minutes pass, the blend richens with fresh arterial. My skin is unbroken, but whatever perfection he found in this day is now draining onto the sidewalk and soaking through my shirt.**No...

14 likes

The Cat, The Dragon, and The Maneki-Neko: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #187

The mid-September breeze caressed my newly shorn neck, and I felt like the shit, senior heavyweight class.At the right-angle gutter between the Dollar Palace and Sandy’s Beauty Supplies, warm, brisk cross-currents had trapped a dust-devil of discarded Rescue Squad Subs wrappers, dead Fireball nip bottles, used vape pods, and even a deceased Trojan kiting about like a Man-of-War in a hydrothermal vent of sadness. The sirocco coursing in from the Beltway bore an incense of double-stacked burger, non-trans-fried chicken, cumin and curry and gar...

18 likes

Deader Yet: A Mike Dodge Story Within a Story Within a Story

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #186

“Yeah, I remember the little asshole.”It wouldn’t have won me a Pulitzer or a National Book Award or even 112th Place in the Bad Hemingway Contest, which ended in 2005.But it was enough of an opener for the half-dozen or so writers left in the Press Room to turn from their late afternoon deadlines, and for a couple to grab a now-lukewarm Coke and join Rich Hawksley and I at the table.This was a year after United Airlines stopped underwriting bad Hemingway, and the National Agricultural Federation Annual Policy and Bad Motivational Speakers C...

13 likes

Opposite Days: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

“So when I was 16, I visited Broadway for the first time with my high school drama club,” Dr. Carol Brandauer began.It seemed like an odd departure point. But if I’d learned anything in the course of 30 years interviewing agronomists, economists, and political scientists, it was that academics enjoy a leisurely stroll to the point.“Of course, we saw ‘Rent’ -- Mr. Ricci even got us an audience with Jesse L. Martin – Ed Green on Law and Order or Barry’s dad on The Flash, if you never saw the musical or the movie…”No law a globally renowned soc...

7 likes

Mrs. Wexler's Things

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #182

“Things are coming back,” Mrs. Wexler said.At some point, Dorothea Wexler might have suggested a goose had walked over my grave. For me, it’s always something dank and slippery circling for the kill or at least a succulent chunk.  Dorothea Wexler at 94 was nearly as petite and and pixie-ish as 80-year-old Dorothea Wexler. But for me there’d been a 14-year void between the two, from that first Sunday bulletin “Aftercare” listing through a displaced hip, a Monday Silver Alert resolved by Tuesday morning drive-time, and periodic praye...

11 likes

Rock, Paper, Schisms: A Mike Dodge Adventure

Martin Ross

Me and Nature, we got an understanding. I take only photos, leave only footprints, and pick up a T-shirt on my way out if Nature doesn’t f***ing maul me or pitch me off a rock ledge. I love the Planet. I’m just not ready to take it to the next step and risk coming away with a scorching case of rabies or Lyme’s. Pardon the whore-y analogy — Nature’s more like a freewheeling hippie chick, full of energy and lush beauty and innocence and promise and lethal, swarming critters. No raw dogging for me — I’ll take mine roasted over a firepit, packed...

9 likes

Liked Leastly Suspects: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

I might have halfway enjoyed it if somebody I actually knew had died.In some cultures, you’d have called it a wake. Everybody’d come out in their Sunday finest, pack the parlor tight enough everybody’d barbecue if one cigar spark went awry, crack the top drawer whiskey, lift a few or maybe a few dozen to the deceased with a generous sidecar of Joyce or Yeats, and hope the schmuck had reached St. Peter’s before the guard on duty or Satan got a chance to check his rap sheet.In fact, the only thing I actually know about wakes is that the term s...

5 likes

The Ideal

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #179

Caution: Adult languageRid your life of toxic influences.It was in the throes of one of those half-wasted couch confessionals a half-hour after everything dazzling and intimate and promising and hopeful and false fades away. Cohen had cajoled Anderson Cooper into a giggling, inebriated near-stupor for an audience of everybody. “He’s no friend,” Somebody’s Cousin’s Girlfriend’s BFF states, climbing over a comatose partier’s outstretched legs to land jarringly on a sprung and stained couch. Empowered by alcohol and eye contact. “Guy’s a celebr...

16 likes

Neveragainland: Tinkering Part 3

Martin Ross

CAUTION: Bilingual strong languageDecember 22, 2014Unit 113"Mom's back," Pete announced.The patio gate rebounded as Dodge glanced up and pulled short, driving the corner of a crumpled Fiddle Faddle box into his left thigh. Happily, Dodge's thigh was shielded by a dense sheath of pre-retirement fat and newly bike-honed muscle. Having recently come off 33 sedentary years of bureaucratic hearings, ballroom PowerPoints, and chronic monitor glare, Dodge nonetheless winced even as his brows arched with interest. On the patio opposite, Pe...

4 likes

Boughs Unholy: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

We looked like a depressing Whatever The Eff Happened to the Brady Bunch? documentary. Evan, our moderator – pleasant-looking middle-aged sort - was in the Alice position, in a sweet pine-paneled den against a mouth-watering backdrop of floor-to-ceiling books.All mysteries – Evan was group administrator, and had edited or introduced a few dozen collections of “lost” Golden Age/pulp/slick magazine crime stories and novellas, most of which were now on my Kindle. Sarah had thrown a flag on basement library expansion a few years back.Eclecticall...

6 likes

Camarones With The Crocodile: Tinkering Part 2

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #177

Disclaimer: Strong language, violence, and the aftermath of sexual abuse. 2015 San Ignacio, Sinaloa, Mexico The Crocodile was rapidly becoming the stuff of legend. A regionally popular band was making the charts with a driving narcocorrido about "Los Dientes Del Cocodrilo," and his bloody exploits on behalf of the Cartel de Sinaloa. The rising star of Mexico's Golden Triangle thus had bristled about meeting in this filthy side-street marisqueria in the tiny backwater of San Ignacio. He preferred the gran entrada -- the splashy entrance, t...

10 likes