Noir Society Vinyl

Just a single piece of flash fiction this week for Flash! Friday. A phonograph theme.




Noir Society Vinyl

The parties were always the same: After polite introductions, Paulson took requests for the first hour then played another hour of curated recordings from his own collection. The twenty people seated before him were a shadow of the original Adventurer’s Society that had birthed their splinter movement. These refined men and women were those dedicated to the darker, more sinister, and truer experiences in the world around them. Through pain, one could better understand life.

Paulson slid the vinyl disc from the plain matte black sleeve. Careful not to graze the incision on his thumb from the night’s earlier blood ritual. He may have been a practitioner of the black arts, but was no masochist. The polite chatter, clinking glasses, and even the whimpering of the corgi puppy in Dame Grenier’s lap stopped as he laid the needle on the record. With a hiss and a pop the audience were treated to Paulson’s latest sound recording: a murder by strangulation.