KRIS ASHTON

The house I lived in as a kid was on a sloping block and the eastern end stood on brick stilts. The void this created was a storage area for a lawn mower, tools, timber, old furniture and an assortment of odds and ends. Most relevant to this discussion, however, our dog’s kennel was under there.

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One day, I was crawling around under the house, probably trying to retrieve a tennis ball, when I felt something prickling my forearms. I scrabbled across the dirt on hands and knees until I reached daylight. And there they were: dozens of little black grass fleas.

I wasn’t freaked out, exactly – provided it’s not carrying bubonic plague, what’s the worst a flea can do? – but it gave me a sense of infestation. I guess it never left my subconscious, because the fleas found form in a story.

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While I have some hard copy juvenilia in a box in our basement, quite a lot of it was lost when an old floppy disk got corrupted. One of the things I don’t have any more is the original short story on which ‘Starting from Scratch’ was based.

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I think I wrote it in my teens – maybe around 1994. I can’t remember what title it had then, but the fleas had the same effect on their victims. In characters and events, however, the two versions couldn’t be more different.

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I was a late bloomer as a storyteller, and the protagonist in the original story was a Russian bodybuilder with more than a passing resemblance to Zangeif in the Street Fighter videogames. As for the plot, I couldn’t begin to tell you. But ‘Zangeif’ wound up a flea victim – I mean, bodybuilders look like they’re about to explode anyway, right? How the fleas got their nasty venom I don’t know either, but at that stage of my development it probably had a lot to do with toxic waste.

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In mid-2008, I turned an abandoned novel into what I thought was a fair short story (‘Old Secrets’) and later that year got to thinking about the other ideas I’d had as a young ’un. Most of the concepts seemed to hold up pretty well. And, while Zangeif had to go, I thought the flea idea had merit. Just about every biting insect had seen the pages of a horror tale or movie, but not, to my knowledge, fleas. So I thunk up a scenario and ran with it.

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Unfortunately, ‘Starting from Scratch’ proved to be the unluckiest story I’d ever written. It was accepted for the Well Told Tales podcast, which folded before the story could be produced. Then it was shortlisted for an anthology of ‘creature feature’ tales but missed the final cut. The trend continued with Horror Library, which turned it down for issue 5 but asked to hang onto it for consideration in issue 6… only issue 6 never eventuated until years later, under new ownership. Then it made it into the ‘maybe’ box at Dark Discoveries before all contact from that market ceased, despite multiple query emails. It finally found a home in Lambda Literary’s anthology of weird fiction featuring deaf authors, Tripping the Tale Fantastic.

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What qualified me to submit? When I was two years old, a case of meningitis was misdiagnosed as a stomach bug and twenty-four hours later I was in hospital fighting for my life. I survived (obviously), but the bacteria caused nerve damage in my brain and I have been almost entirely deaf in one ear ever since.

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When I sent ‘Starting from Scratch’ to the editor, Chris Heuer, I added a note that it was “pulp horror of the kind popular in the 1970s and 1980s… but with its own nasty little twist”. It reminds me of early Stephen King – say, ‘The Cat from Hell’ or ‘Graveyard Shift’ – where it’s all about the story, and a bummer of an ending is both permitted and encouraged.

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