Stimp, the Prophet Man

Vapor: Juniper's Gift

This was the first story I sent in to speculative fiction magazines. It was universally rejected, although I did get a nice note from one editor, saying she liked the prose, but the speculative element wasn’t what they were looking for. I felt like Stephen King when he sold Carrie. (Seriously, I can not tell you how excited that note made me).

It’s around 10,000 words in total, but Substack doesn’t favor longer stories, so I decided to experiment. I’ve decided to publish each in its own section. Each post should work like an episode, as stand alone short stories, and then as chapters of a longer work when you read it together. I hope you enjoy the format, and please comment if you do take the time to follow along in this series. Critiques welcome :)

This story is about a character named Stimp. He holds a special place in my heart. Some characters get under your skin. They feel like they’re real people somehow. Stimp is real to me. I see him in so many faces, strangers and loved ones alike. And he embodies the question I ask myself. If a prophet of God really came, would I recognize them?

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

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Vapor

The bench was cold beneath his back. Vapor puffed from his mouth into black night above him, obscuring the dot, dot, dot of the universe. He was sleeping in a park that was shadowed by low hanging tree limbs, blocking orange and neon light from Tejon street beyond. He stared into that blackness and wished for all the lights to go out, all the lights in the whole world. He closed his eyes and imagined the sudden silence from the modern world’s material buzzing, electrical currents zipping underground and through walls and into clear proud bulbs of halogen and LED. The silence.

That brought a smile to his face, and he fell asleep making plans to get out of the city. The only thing that brought him here was the booze and the drugs. Couldn’t find that in the foothills or national forest. Out there he found relief from the damn bee buzzing streetlights, but the numbness wore off after a day or two, and ol’ Stimp couldn’t have that. Stimp was the name he got on the street, given to him by an old guy he diddled for some money a few years back. Or was it ten years? 

He didn’t like that guy much, remembered a wide hole for a mouth broken up by splinters of teeth, and a laugh like a jackal that made Stimp want to crawl out of his skin. But he liked the name he got out of it. He liked it more than his given name, William. William was for princes and generals. For guys in tailored blue suits with brown boat shoes for the weekend. Not for a guy like him who lived the raw life of the street. Real life.

The morning came into sharp focus, cutting his dark womb sleep like a scalpel. Carved out. He sat up and looked around, thinking that this, like every other, was a day of reckoning. He hadn’t moved while he slept. You couldn’t on the bench without falling off, and his limbs were as dry and cracked as the thin forest of old trees around him. He yawned and stretched his arms out, and felt spring warmth on the dewy morning air. His breath came out sour.

“Stimp!”

A girl who looked to be in her early twenties with pink bouncing hair and combat boots came running across the park to meet him. It was Juniper. Her real name was Lahoya, but she didn’t like it much and switched it out after running away from home at seventeen. Most people didn’t know that, but Junie trusted Stimp. She stopped when she got to the bench, her fingers knitted behind her backpack straps, arms bent at the elbows like she was ready to do the funky chicken.

“I looked for you everywhere last night man. Where did you go?” 

Stimp stared at her, bleary eyed from the cold night and head pounding.

“I just needed some time. You know how it is,” he said.

Juniper looked at him, and he thought he saw hurt behind those bright blue eyes. “Oh yeah. I get it Stimp. If anybody gets it I do.” She reached into her pocket suddenly, feet tapping from side to side to keep the blood moving — or ride the high — and she pulled out rolled cigarettes.

Stimp’s arm shot out when he saw them.

“You didn’t say you had smokes.” He was already reaching for a light, digging through his pockets with purpose. Juniper smiled as he lit up, his hat pulled down to where his brow ended, lips pulled in fish like to hold the cig in his mouth. He puffed, held, and blew out smoke that hazed the world for a moment. Juniper slicked her tongue across beautiful, large teeth. 

“Who takes care of you baby?” 

“You do, bay-bee,” he said exaggerating. He wasn’t anybody’s baby. She kept coming around and he liked that. She was proud of her morning offering, the way a cat is when she slaughters a family of mice and lines them up at your door, and he liked that too. What he really liked was the inhale of tobacco, the burn in his throat and chest, the energy in his limbs after a nice long drag. Yeah, he liked that most of all.