He swept a hand over the roof of his car. It looked like finely ground particles of rust in the palm of his hand. Wasn’t the surface of Mars supposed to be covered in stuff like this? He stared at the particles, fascinated. How could it have been carried on the wind when there hadn’t been so much as a light breeze for the best part of a week? And yet it was everywhere; hair, clothes, roofs, drifting in through open windows; this strange phenomenon had become quite a talking point in Billy’s Bar. Jack made a fist, and then unclenched it. The sand left a russet stain on the palm of his hand.
All of a sudden it was night, sheeting with rain, and Jack was gripping the steering wheel of his car. The night was dragging and he had two more pizzas to deliver. He was cruising down the main drag, glancing at the prostitutes who hung out on the street corners. Most of them were addicts trying to earn enough for their next fix. Half of them looked as if they were going to collapse at any moment.
Then he saw something in the corner of his eye and jammed his foot on the brake.
He blinked; then found himself back in the present day, staring at the particles of sand.
“Weird!”
Then the strangest thing happened. The particles seemed to dissolve, as though seeping into the pores of his skin. In seconds the sand had gone; even the red stain, which had marked the palm of his hand, had vanished.
What you’ve just read is an excerpt from Dave Price’s short story titled A Town Built on Dreams, which you will be able to find in the first issue of The Ashen Eye. David Price is an ex coal miner who started writing for the small press in 1995. Since then he’s had over 70 stories published in such diverse magazines as “Not One of Us”, “Nasty Piece of Work”, “Kimota”, “Shadow Writers”, and “Dream Zone”.
Between 1997 and 1999 David Price was the editor of dark fiction magazine “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque”. In 2001 a collection of his stories, titled “Evil Eye”, was published by BJM Press (now Rainfall Books)
Click here to visit David Price’s website.
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