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Martin Ross

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2021

Stories (120)

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340 Followers

320 Following

120 Stories

4848 karma pts

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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

Tinkering

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #176

1957Danzer felt a frisson of humility as he strode through the cavernous dining hall. It was an unpleasant sensation for the American wunderkind.The Augustiner Keller was a dazzling paradox -- raw masonry arched over elegant banquettes and the finest white linens. The last of Vienna's ancient monastery cellars, the grand “basement” had survived der Fuhrer and his Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the communists, and a quadripartite postwar occupation that had ended only last year with the Austrian State Treaty.Danzer spotted th...

11 likes

The Lawn Goodbye

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #175

It turned up like a wooly mammoth in the last snowdrift of spring. Had I not been a teen biology geek, I would have raked it into a 39-gallon bag, dumped it at the gutter in front of Shih Tzu’s Mom’s house, and thought no more off it until the city “sucker” crew rumbled along on its seemingly random schedule.This was the last “harvest” of 2022, brought on by a half-week of high winds which according to Channel 25’s buzzkill meteorologist would become a far more frequent phenomenon because petrochemicals, deforestation, and ice caps. Sarah ha...

11 likes

Night of the Litigatory Dead: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

“So what’s he supposed to be?” Curtis inquired. “Game of Thrones Guy?”“Nandor,” I supplied. Reluctantly. Detective Mead regarded me like I’d scrupulously avoided regarding Nandor when he synopsized the latest season of What We Do in the Shadows for me. I was a reporter for 33 years, and the Countenance of Benign Validation had become my key superpower.Curtis Mead was a cop, and Nandor was dead, the object of ridicule for a collection of malevolently smirking jack-o-lanterns, so amenities were now pretty much out the window.“He’s like a vampi...

9 likes

Trepidation in the Teahouse of the Dolls

Martin Ross

“Our American Ladies High Tea special today is Princess Kailani’s Hibiscus, in honor of our Great American Lady of 2022,” Lady Brynda chirruped. “It has a delicate hint of ginger and a sprinkling of pineapple-infused turbinado.”I inspected the open pink leatherette case and its multicolored selection of packets, each adorned in a gilded, Disney-infringing script. “Ah, Marquis of Queens' Berry. Just like The Crown.”“I’d have to ask, but it IS a very popular choice,” our tea wench sang. Sarah’s toe connected under the table. “So’s the Duchess ...

8 likes