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  Fallen Stardust: A boy, an outcast and an alien must find salvation in a world of ruin. Samuel must find a medicine to cure the fever ravaging his village. Markus must find the motive that murdered those he loved. And an angel must find a future in a city crumbled into debris. But something lurks beneath the wasted world, and waking it may doom what little of humanity survives.

  The Sisters Will Dance: Blaine Woosely claws his way back to the living. He has cleaned his blood of his addiction, and an unexpected, family farm home rewards his efforts. Only, the country acres isolate Blaine when a sharp-toothed monster hunts to bring Blaine back to dark. The sad history of Blaine's blood brings magic to the country home's new master, but in the end, only Blaine himself can break his chains.

  Mr. Hancock’s Signature: The dead walk in Monteray. The corpse of a nearly forgotten farmer named Hancock arrives via train. Ian Washington remembers Mr. Hancock and vows to return the body home. Yet Mr. Hancock's body will not rest while Ian works to reopen a cemetery, and the corpse staring each morning upon the doorstep forces the town to choose between the isolation of their fear or the hope of their fellowship.

  The Resonance of Sweet Mrs. Queen

  Brian S. Wheeler

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2014 by Brian S. Wheeler

  Contents

  Chapter 1 – Humming Over Antibiotics and Preservatives

  Chapter 2 – Groceries and Ultimatums

  Chapter 3 – Catastrophes in the Public Library

  Chapter 4 – Fried Chicken and Hope

  Chapter 5 – Riddle Games Needing Patience and Attention

  Chapter 6 – Storm and War

  Chapter 7 – Mrs. Queen’s Duty

  Help Spread the Story Across the Flatland

  About the Writer

  Other Stories at Flatland Fiction

  The Resonance of Sweet Mrs. Queen

  Chapter 1 – Humming Over Antibiotics and Preservatives

  “Mrs. Queen, dear, is there anything I can help you with?”

  Mrs. Queen hummed as she stood at the front of the customer line at her local grocery store’s deli counter. Indecision morphed her into stone. Fear paralyzed her thought. How could she know for certain that antibiotics had not tainted the chicken thighs? How could she guess what preservatives had been added to the hotdogs? Was there something unnatural about those cheeses on the other side of the glass that might cause her to break out in hives? How could she trust that a pound of ground beef might not bubble the Mad Cow disease within her brain?

  “Lady, maybe you should step out of line and decide what you want without keeping the rest of us waiting.”

  The half dozen customers behind Mrs. Queen’s shoulder applauded their waiting companion as the man growled at the elder woman who hesitated at the front of the deli counter. Mrs. Queen felt their eyes burning into the back of her neck, into that vertebra where skull connected to spine, and the sensation didn’t make her choice any easier. The growling, the coughing, the sighing sounded by those in line behind her led Mrs. Queen to sweat. Did none of them appreciate the gravity of the choices they were about to so casually make at the front of that line? Did none of them understand how a carelessly chosen diet might choke an artery with cholesterol? Did they never stop to consider what effects the steroids that the ranchers fed to their cattle might have on the human anatomy? Was she the only member of her community who cared at all how pesticides trickled into waters from which so many salmon fillets had been harvested?

  Mrs. Queen noticed that the woman behind the deli counter didn’t wear any of the protective gloves that were supposed to go along with her uniform’s hairnet.

  “I could discount the ham salad for you this morning, Mrs. Queen. We just made it up this morning, so it should be very fresh.”

  Mrs. Queen took a breath and hummed. She didn’t know when her habit of humming had started, could not name the original catastrophe that first motivated her to hum those cracking notes – notes that never repeated any melody no matter how often Mrs. Queen’s neighbors tried to recognize a song in the pitiful sound. Most of the time, Mrs. Queen never realized she hummed at all. But she knew she was humming while she stood at the front of that deli counter. She knew she was humming very loudly, and she knew her humming was certainly spiking the frustration of those behind her.

  A toddler standing in a shopping cart wailed at the back of that line, and the child’s mother shouted. “Go ahead and put together a pound of the Cajun turkey for me while you wait for that senile woman to make up her mind!”

  “Hey, you can’t help her before you help me!” Another man hissed from the middle of the waiting pack. “I’ve only got a half hour for lunch, and I don’t want to waste it standing in this line!”

  The woman with the ungloved hands behind the counter could only wait so long. Her encouraging, soft smile turned into a frown. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Queen, but I’m going to have to ask you to step out of line if you don’t know what you want.”

  Mrs. Queen’s hum lifted in pitch, a second later sounding like a choked cry. She tilted forward very slightly onto her toes, and she shouted her choice with what confidence remained to her.

  “Two pounds of the honey-smoked ham, please.”

  Those in line calmed. The woman behind the counter sighed in relief as she hurriedly sliced the lunchmeat, and Mrs. Queen worked her hardest to ignore how close that grocery employee’s ungloved hands came to the whirling blade. Mrs. Queen’s confidence was spent with that order, and so she dared not lift her voice another time to express her concerns that the woman’s ungloved touch might contaminate her lunchmeat. How could Mrs. Queen know if that woman in the hairnet had diligently taken that season’s flue shot? How could Mrs. Queen know if that woman in the hairnet incubated a terrible cold? Mrs. Queen was again humming loudly as she hurried away from that deli counter, her gaze locked upon her shoes, lest her eyes stray into frustrated faces that would only curse her with mockery.

  She couldn’t imagine consuming any of that honey-smoked ham, and so she detoured into the snack aisle, where she hid the plastic bag of meat behind several bags of tortilla chips. The beets she had preserved last summer from her garden would have to stretch a little further. The cucumbers picked in her mason jars would have to last a little longer. Mrs. Queen could eat oatmeal at lunch as well as at breakfast. She would stick to the crackers and peanut butter her worries had yet to drop from her diet.

  What if that wasn’t enough? Did she need to find something more, just in case the basement freezer broke and ruined the bags of peas and lima beans? Did her grandson David not visit more often because she kept no frozen waffles, or because she refused to place soft drinks inside her refrigerator? Mrs. Queen’s hum grew louder and louder as she hurried about the store’s aisles. The smell of coffee reminded her how she had cherished a morning mug of java, but she didn’t dare taste from that bean any
longer for fear of spiraling her blood pressure out of control. She refused to reach towards the boxes of cookies she craved, for what would her doctor say if she put on another few pounds? Mrs. Queen hummed as she strolled down the freezers of ice cream and pies. Did no one else care that obesity was a pandemic raging through the child population? She hummed as she read the labels on the loafs of bread, perplexed why additives were included in the recipe for no other sake than to control the product’s color.

  Mrs. Queen did her best to pass unnoticed through the closed register lanes, her empty basket again needing no attention from the teenage girls who smacked their gum as they scanned barcodes across their registers. But Mrs. Queen’s hum was too loud, and those standing behind their carts, brimming with frozen pizzas and cases of cheap beer, couldn’t help but look away from the tabloids to find the source of that strange noise. The teenage boys shoving cans of soups and chilies into paper bags sighed as they watched Mrs. Queen hurry out of the automatic doors. They had heard that woman’s hum many times before, and that was not the first time they had watched Mrs. Queen flee from their store. The boys wondered where they would that afternoon find the package of sirloin or the melting container of ice cream that Mrs. Queen had no doubt hidden somewhere among all those aisles.

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