It has been a little over a year now since I first dreamed up the concept of "Southern Fried Weirdness." During this time, I have found decent sales and library presence with the first print anthology, grown to know many wonderful authors, and watched the weekly webzine grow in popularity. Overall, this first year has been a great success! I want to sincerely thank all of the authors who helped this dream become a reality.
Over this first year, I have also learned a lot about the publishing industry. From the beginning, I have wanted to pay more than just a token for accepted works, and have been trying to think of ways to better pay authors. So, I am revamping the format based on what I have learned in an effort to pay authors a little more and, hopefully, create an even more entertaining reading experience.
Southern Fried Weirdness is going to become a quarterly webzine, with new stories and features each season. Look for the debut of our reformatted publication to be published this summer. Each story, poem, and feature will be published here on the website for a season; archived for a year; and then, at the end of each year, will be showcased in a yearly print anthology.
I look forward to watching this concept continue to grow and evolve. Please see the updated submission guidelines prior to sending me your work.
Thank you for your continued support.
T.J. McIntyre
editor, Southern Fried Weirdness
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Lilies
by Rupert Merkin
It was a soft April night. The candle spluttered as a cool wind oozedthrough the open window. Barefoot on the chair stood Albert, a lonely man with thin hair and wearing a short-sleeved shirt. A noose hung around his neck. It was three minutes past nine.
"For my angel," he said, "I'm coming to fly with you."
With one final look at the snapped lilies sprinkled over the floor, he kicked the chair back with the heel of his foot. As everything faded he thought he saw a flock of bluebirds take off and fly out of thewindow. Then he was in the long white corridor. He asked Nurse Samuel,"Is it ok if Mildred has tea and toast?"
When the light returned Albert was still on the chair, the noose slack around his neck. 'I'm dreaming,' he thought, and then he looked at hiswatch. It was three minutes past nine. Outside it was still a hot dreary September night.
"I don't understand," he muttered. "Oh, what difference does it make?"He kicked the back of the chair once more. The gentle breeze in theroom died as the noose tightened and everything became hot and airless.
'She was weeping again,' thought Albert as he opened his eyes."Nurse," he said. "Do you think she'll come out of it?"
And then he realised. Same noose. Same chair.
"Is this it," cried Albert. "Are we having fun yet?"
He took the noose from his neck and swung it away. Outside it was still a chilly autumn evening. On a chest of drawers in the corner wasa vase full of lilies, Mildred's favourites. He took them out, snapped them in two and scattered them over the floor.
"See that," said Albert and climbed back on the chair. He slipped the noose around his neck, and then quickly stood down. He gathered the broken flowers up. "I'm sorry Mildred," he said. "I know how you loved lilies." Placing them on the drawers beside the vase, he said, "It will do, it will do."
It was three minutes past nine. Noose around his neck, he kicked the back of the chair with his heel. As the blackness folded over him he heard the pounding feet running down the long white corridor. He feltthe hand on his shoulder. "Stay here," said Nurse Samuel. "We'll come and get you as soon as she's okay."
Albert remembered walking through a park. Mildred's peach pink lipstick. The bluebirds cascading behind her head as the winter evening settled in. A smell of smoke, and in the trees a yellowishfog. Her green Wellingtons boots. The way she took his hand in hers as she said yes.
Albert opened his eyes. Snakes of frost patterned the window and Albert shivered. From his place on the chair he looked around the room, at the filthy, sheet-less bed, the piles of dirty clothes, his life tipped out all over the floor, and there in the corner, her vase,and the long slender lilies inside.
After leaving the States a lifetime ago, Rupert has now settled in London with a quill, two dogs, and a monkey. But sadly no ink.
It was a soft April night. The candle spluttered as a cool wind oozedthrough the open window. Barefoot on the chair stood Albert, a lonely man with thin hair and wearing a short-sleeved shirt. A noose hung around his neck. It was three minutes past nine.
"For my angel," he said, "I'm coming to fly with you."
With one final look at the snapped lilies sprinkled over the floor, he kicked the chair back with the heel of his foot. As everything faded he thought he saw a flock of bluebirds take off and fly out of thewindow. Then he was in the long white corridor. He asked Nurse Samuel,"Is it ok if Mildred has tea and toast?"
When the light returned Albert was still on the chair, the noose slack around his neck. 'I'm dreaming,' he thought, and then he looked at hiswatch. It was three minutes past nine. Outside it was still a hot dreary September night.
"I don't understand," he muttered. "Oh, what difference does it make?"He kicked the back of the chair once more. The gentle breeze in theroom died as the noose tightened and everything became hot and airless.
'She was weeping again,' thought Albert as he opened his eyes."Nurse," he said. "Do you think she'll come out of it?"
And then he realised. Same noose. Same chair.
"Is this it," cried Albert. "Are we having fun yet?"
He took the noose from his neck and swung it away. Outside it was still a chilly autumn evening. On a chest of drawers in the corner wasa vase full of lilies, Mildred's favourites. He took them out, snapped them in two and scattered them over the floor.
"See that," said Albert and climbed back on the chair. He slipped the noose around his neck, and then quickly stood down. He gathered the broken flowers up. "I'm sorry Mildred," he said. "I know how you loved lilies." Placing them on the drawers beside the vase, he said, "It will do, it will do."
It was three minutes past nine. Noose around his neck, he kicked the back of the chair with his heel. As the blackness folded over him he heard the pounding feet running down the long white corridor. He feltthe hand on his shoulder. "Stay here," said Nurse Samuel. "We'll come and get you as soon as she's okay."
Albert remembered walking through a park. Mildred's peach pink lipstick. The bluebirds cascading behind her head as the winter evening settled in. A smell of smoke, and in the trees a yellowishfog. Her green Wellingtons boots. The way she took his hand in hers as she said yes.
Albert opened his eyes. Snakes of frost patterned the window and Albert shivered. From his place on the chair he looked around the room, at the filthy, sheet-less bed, the piles of dirty clothes, his life tipped out all over the floor, and there in the corner, her vase,and the long slender lilies inside.
After leaving the States a lifetime ago, Rupert has now settled in London with a quill, two dogs, and a monkey. But sadly no ink.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Millipede
By Michael Fontana
Back in the 1980s, it was simple enough for me to enter a drug store, fake a raspy cough, and sign the register for a bottle of codeine cough syrup. Sure it tasted chalky but its physical thickness gradually translated into a head thick with sleepiness and nausea, nodding down into myself to listen to the hum at the center of my being.
I always had a hankering for hot tea and spicy fried rice on the nod so one night I tottered down to the Chinese restaurant nearest my apartment. They kept the interior dark but the various dragons on kimonos and screens kept my eyes busy with their glitter. I hunkered down in a rear booth and breathed the steam from my green tea. The food was salty but good, tickling my throat, sweet crunch of sprouts and snow pea pods.
In the thick of this rapture, my friend Bill the Millipede visited me. It wasn’t clear whether Bill was an apparition of the codeine or if he was as real as me, assuming of course that I was real. The way things hummed and vibrated in that space, it was difficult to translate anything into reality, including myself.
Bill sat in my booth with a squeak of faux leather on his feelers. “What’s shaking, hombre?”
“You sound like John Wayne.”
“I’m into westerns. Spaghetti westerns are especially toothsome. The man with no name entering a town and dispensing justice with a hot iron hand.”
“Is there a point to this?” I asked this with my forehead in the palm of my hand, a headache growing slowly like a violet inside my skull.
“I’ve come to talk to you about the direction your life is taking.”
“It’s not taking a direction. It’s totally inert like a brick outside a human hand.”
“No, this is a direction. A poor one for a man of your aptitudes.”
“What kind of aptitudes?”
“You have a certain, I don’t know, flourish with words.”
“It doesn’t pay. Little magazines dispense themselves as rich reward.”
“There are jobs to supplement one’s creativity.”
“Who’s going to hire me like this?”
“Are we indulging in self-pity? It isn’t very becoming.”
I took a loud sip of tea. The rings in the surface contorted my face like a funhouse mirror. “It’s not self-pity. It’s pragmatism.”
“There’s nothing pragmatic about a poor man’s junkie.”
“It’s not like I ride the white horse. This is just goofs.”
“The stuff does alter your consciousness. Take, for example, the fact that you’re conversing with a millipede.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. A waitress sauntered by and gave me a look but then simply nodded and moved on.
“This is very Burruoughsian, you know. The typewriter bug from Naked Lunch.””Book or movie?”
“No matter. Cronenberg’s just as warped as Burroughs. They both fed off their own respective forms of junk.”
“Your point?”
“This is reducing your creativity, not enhancing it. Don’t go romanticizing addicts like they have some key to a threshold of insight. Their brains are on the rack, being stretched to the limit. Not in a pretty way.”
“I make sure I create something every time I gobble down one of these bottles.”
“Some people create after every orgasm as well. There are saner ways to play with consciousness.” Bill fluttered his many legs like a wave in the stands of a stadium.
“You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t toy with my consciousness. I’ve decided that you’re a figment of my imagination. An entertaining figment, but a figment no less.”
“You think so? Then why am I able to do this?” With that he slapped a dozen or so feet into my teakettle and knocked it over so its luxurious green fluid seeped into the pale tablecloth like a moist lesion.
“Because I allowed you to,” I said, mopping at my trousers with a napkin.
“Then explain this.” Now he lunged across the table and kissed me with his tiny prickly lips. I swore I tasted tongue behind them.
“You all right, sir?” The waitress had returned and was methodically patting the wet tablecloth with a damp rag of her own.
I no longer saw Bill. “Fine,” I said, remembering to add a happy lilt to my voice, remembering to force a smile.
She smiled back and raised her sleeve. Out if its white depths came a dozen or so black and furry arms, thin as razors, all bent on tickling my head. That’s when I stood up gradually, brushed her arms away, hung the napkin from my belt so it covered up the growing wet spot on my crotch, and stepped away from t he table like it was a land mine.
Michael Fontana has been published in a variety of journals, electronic and otherwise. His most recent work has appeared in Arcane Twilight, Rope and Wire, Slow Trains, and Clockwise Cat. He works at a community mental health center in northwest Arkansas.
Back in the 1980s, it was simple enough for me to enter a drug store, fake a raspy cough, and sign the register for a bottle of codeine cough syrup. Sure it tasted chalky but its physical thickness gradually translated into a head thick with sleepiness and nausea, nodding down into myself to listen to the hum at the center of my being.
I always had a hankering for hot tea and spicy fried rice on the nod so one night I tottered down to the Chinese restaurant nearest my apartment. They kept the interior dark but the various dragons on kimonos and screens kept my eyes busy with their glitter. I hunkered down in a rear booth and breathed the steam from my green tea. The food was salty but good, tickling my throat, sweet crunch of sprouts and snow pea pods.
In the thick of this rapture, my friend Bill the Millipede visited me. It wasn’t clear whether Bill was an apparition of the codeine or if he was as real as me, assuming of course that I was real. The way things hummed and vibrated in that space, it was difficult to translate anything into reality, including myself.
Bill sat in my booth with a squeak of faux leather on his feelers. “What’s shaking, hombre?”
“You sound like John Wayne.”
“I’m into westerns. Spaghetti westerns are especially toothsome. The man with no name entering a town and dispensing justice with a hot iron hand.”
“Is there a point to this?” I asked this with my forehead in the palm of my hand, a headache growing slowly like a violet inside my skull.
“I’ve come to talk to you about the direction your life is taking.”
“It’s not taking a direction. It’s totally inert like a brick outside a human hand.”
“No, this is a direction. A poor one for a man of your aptitudes.”
“What kind of aptitudes?”
“You have a certain, I don’t know, flourish with words.”
“It doesn’t pay. Little magazines dispense themselves as rich reward.”
“There are jobs to supplement one’s creativity.”
“Who’s going to hire me like this?”
“Are we indulging in self-pity? It isn’t very becoming.”
I took a loud sip of tea. The rings in the surface contorted my face like a funhouse mirror. “It’s not self-pity. It’s pragmatism.”
“There’s nothing pragmatic about a poor man’s junkie.”
“It’s not like I ride the white horse. This is just goofs.”
“The stuff does alter your consciousness. Take, for example, the fact that you’re conversing with a millipede.”
“I’ll take it,” I said. A waitress sauntered by and gave me a look but then simply nodded and moved on.
“This is very Burruoughsian, you know. The typewriter bug from Naked Lunch.””Book or movie?”
“No matter. Cronenberg’s just as warped as Burroughs. They both fed off their own respective forms of junk.”
“Your point?”
“This is reducing your creativity, not enhancing it. Don’t go romanticizing addicts like they have some key to a threshold of insight. Their brains are on the rack, being stretched to the limit. Not in a pretty way.”
“I make sure I create something every time I gobble down one of these bottles.”
“Some people create after every orgasm as well. There are saner ways to play with consciousness.” Bill fluttered his many legs like a wave in the stands of a stadium.
“You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t toy with my consciousness. I’ve decided that you’re a figment of my imagination. An entertaining figment, but a figment no less.”
“You think so? Then why am I able to do this?” With that he slapped a dozen or so feet into my teakettle and knocked it over so its luxurious green fluid seeped into the pale tablecloth like a moist lesion.
“Because I allowed you to,” I said, mopping at my trousers with a napkin.
“Then explain this.” Now he lunged across the table and kissed me with his tiny prickly lips. I swore I tasted tongue behind them.
“You all right, sir?” The waitress had returned and was methodically patting the wet tablecloth with a damp rag of her own.
I no longer saw Bill. “Fine,” I said, remembering to add a happy lilt to my voice, remembering to force a smile.
She smiled back and raised her sleeve. Out if its white depths came a dozen or so black and furry arms, thin as razors, all bent on tickling my head. That’s when I stood up gradually, brushed her arms away, hung the napkin from my belt so it covered up the growing wet spot on my crotch, and stepped away from t he table like it was a land mine.
Michael Fontana has been published in a variety of journals, electronic and otherwise. His most recent work has appeared in Arcane Twilight, Rope and Wire, Slow Trains, and Clockwise Cat. He works at a community mental health center in northwest Arkansas.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Preditors and Editors Needs Our Help!
This week, instead of posting a new piece of Southern Fried Weirdness, I am writing a post to support Dave Kuzminski and Preditors and Editors.
Preditors and Editors has been an invaluable resource for writers since the inception of the site. Most writers/editors are already aware of this site, but for those who are not: they provide listings of publishers/agents, informative articles about writing, and other resources for writers.
They have become well-known for their bravery when it comes to reporting on potential frauds and shady agents/publishers which prey on writers. As a reward for their bravery, they sometimes face lawsuits. In fact, they're facing two at the same time in different states as I write this. Per Dave's thread on www.speculations.com:
"Ah, yes. Well, it's true. P&E/me are being sued by literary agent Barbara Bauer in a New Jersey court and by Victor E. Cretella, III, Esq. in Federal District Court, Eastern Virginia Division. Two suits at the same time have put a bit of a strain on resources so I did post a donation button on the P&E sites for funds to handle legal expenses."
Help them out, make a donation. I did. You can use the donation button on their news page here to donate.
I know any help, no matter how small, will be appreciated.
Thanks,
T.J. McIntyre
editor, Southern Fried Weirdness Online
Preditors and Editors has been an invaluable resource for writers since the inception of the site. Most writers/editors are already aware of this site, but for those who are not: they provide listings of publishers/agents, informative articles about writing, and other resources for writers.
They have become well-known for their bravery when it comes to reporting on potential frauds and shady agents/publishers which prey on writers. As a reward for their bravery, they sometimes face lawsuits. In fact, they're facing two at the same time in different states as I write this. Per Dave's thread on www.speculations.com:
"Ah, yes. Well, it's true. P&E/me are being sued by literary agent Barbara Bauer in a New Jersey court and by Victor E. Cretella, III, Esq. in Federal District Court, Eastern Virginia Division. Two suits at the same time have put a bit of a strain on resources so I did post a donation button on the P&E sites for funds to handle legal expenses."
Help them out, make a donation. I did. You can use the donation button on their news page here to donate.
I know any help, no matter how small, will be appreciated.
Thanks,
T.J. McIntyre
editor, Southern Fried Weirdness Online
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Leave Only Footprints
By T.J. McIntyre
My feet crunch through ice cold snow:
leave only footprints
and winding trails behind me.
The above photograph was taken by the editor in January of this year while on a walk through the Ebenezer Swamp Ecological Preserve. The peaceful scene drew out a haiku.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Lonely Man Bridge
by Wayne Summers
Clint spat another bug from his mouth. It was dusk and the midges were swarming. A gentle breeze sent the thinner branches of the towering gums surrounding him swooping and swaying, and at times the rustle of leaves was so loud that it drowned out the sound of his footsteps on the gravel road. An animal noise pierced the semi-light and Clint felt his heart skip a beat. It was time to look for shelter.
Behind him he could hear the sound of a car coming closer and closer until the way ahead of him was flooded with the light from its headlights. Clint stepped back from the road and waited in the tall grass for the vehicle to pass.
“Where ya headed?” asked the middle aged man as he leaned out through the window of his beaten and battered Range Rover.
“Nearest town,” Clint replied.
The man’s face was partly hidden by the shadow of his hat and partly by the shadows of the approaching night. Clint couldn’t make out any features on the man except for his bulk, stocky rather than fat.
“I ain’t going that far,” the man explained. “But I can give ya a lift up the road a bit.”
Clint smiled weakly and nodded. “That’s okay mate. I’ll walk it.”
He’d heard too many horror stories about what could happen to unwitting backpackers.
“Nearest town isn’t for a few miles,” said the man sending a spit ball hurtling into the dirt. “Sure ya don’t wanna lift? Cut ya journey in half.”
“No mate. I’m happy walking.”
Silence. Clint’s heartbeat was pounding in his ears. What was this guy waiting for? He felt the first flush of adrenalin flood through his body.
“Alright then,” said the man finally before driving off. “But I wouldn’t hang around here for too long.”
Clint exhaled audibly and only then realised that he had been holding his breath.
“Fucker!” he cursed.
The last light of a mid-autumn evening lingered over the canopy of the bush. Clint slid his backpack off and opened the flap. He dug around inside until his hand connected with the plastic of his torch. He removed it, did the backpack up again and switched the torch on. Ahead he could just make out what looked like an old bridge.
Lonely Man Bridge
The painted letters were cracked and peeling and Clint couldn’t help running his fingertips across them so that tiny flakes of dark paint wafted to the ground. Then he heard it. The snap of a twig. Just to his right.
He froze. More adrenalin.
Five more seconds passed and he began to doubt whether he’d heard anything at all, although the hair on the back of his neck was standing on end.
“Hello,” he called into the growing darkness, shining his torch across the thick vegetation.
The breeze picked up suddenly, tousled his hair and then swept further west. Somewhere in the canopy a night bird called and tiny winged things, perhaps bats, ducked and wove through the air above, feasting on the midges.
A small part of him wished he’d risked a ride with the stranger.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around almost blinding the woman standing in front of him.
“Hello. I’m Ivana.”
The woman was young, maybe in her mid-twenties. Her skin was pale, washed out, and her eyes were dull and grey. There were dark rings around them and just the slightest signs of bags. She smiled wearily for a second or two and then the smile slipped from her face.
“W-w-where did you come from?” Clint asked, scanning the area behind her with his torch.
“I can’t find my daughter,” she replied in the kind of voice that one uses when they have given up on everything.
“Your daughter?”
Ivana nodded then turned and disappeared into the shrubbery on the opposite side of the road.
“Hey wait. Maybe I can help you. Have you called the police?”
Clint kept the light from his torch squarely on Ivana as she navigated her way through the dense foliage. Soon Clint could hear the sound of water rushing over rocks. It reminded him he was thirsty. At about the same time the bushes and trees started thinning out and the ground became rocky. Above, the canopy gave way to a splendid, starry sky.
“Can you see her?” Ivana asked, her face a mask of worry.
Clint joined her at the water’s edge. He shone his torch out over the river, sweeping the beam of light up and down.
“No, I can’t,” he replied. “Are you sure this is where you lost her? That current looks awfully strong. Perhaps she’s been washed further down stream.”
Ivana looked at him blankly. “She’s here somewhere.”
Clint began walking along the edge of the river, carefully scanning as much of the river as his torchlight would allow. Ivana followed slowly behind. They were getting closer and closer to the bridge, beneath which splashes could be heard. Clint shivered and tucked one arm across his chest.
“There she is!” he said, his torchlight illuminating the little girl clinging desperately onto the wreck of an old car. “Here, hold this.”
He thrust the torch at Ivana, who simply looked away from him and towards her daughter. Clint clicked his teeth, removed his backpack and then positioned the torch on a flat rock by the water’s edge. The beam was quite strong but only just reached the old car wreck. It would be enough.
Clint could feel how cold the water was the minute he stepped into it. By the time he was waist-deep he was shivering. His teeth chattered and it was getting difficult to move he was shaking so much. He looked back at Ivana but she hadn’t moved. He was now beginning to regret having passed up the chance of a ride. Another splash.
The current was incredibly strong and Clint had to fight against it, taking small steps until the water became too deep to walk. He tried swimming out and up, against the current and in the opposite direction but it was a real battle. The exertion was at least warming him up. A little.
Suddenly his foot became caught on something. He jiggled his leg frantically but whatever it was that had become tangled around his foot had it securely within its grasp. Clint began to panic. “Help!” he called as the icy water rushed over him but the cry was muffled by the water. His eyes bulged as he realised he was being pulled beneath the surface. He used his strong arms to swim back to the surface, just a metre or so above, however his body was growing numb and he was taking in more and more water. The world went dark for a moment. “No,” he told himself, “this is not going to happen.” He forced his eyes open, willing them open with every fibre of his being. Mustering up the last ounce of his strength he jerked his leg and miraculously it was freed. He swam for the surface, bursting through with a loud gasp.
Surprisingly he didn’t feel weakened by his ordeal. If anything he felt refreshed. He could see the pale stream of powdery light filtering across the river and he knew that at the end of that small beam of light there was a little girl waiting for him.
“Don’t worry, darling,” he called out as he neared the old car wreck. “I’m coming.”
The girl watched him in silence. No tears. No whimpers. And Clint heard yet another splash.
“Hello,” he said as he reached her. “Grab hold of my neck and hang on tight.”
At first she didn’t move. She stared at him, her brown eyes wide and unblinking.
“Come on, I won’t hurt you. Mummy is right over there waiting for you. See?”
The little girl turned her attention to the figure waiting on the river bank and then back again. Slowly she let go of the door and wrapped herself around Clint. Together they headed back to dry land, but as they got closer Clint noticed that there were other people waiting with Ivana. He couldn’t see exactly how many there were but there were at least half a dozen. All of them men. For a moment he stopped swimming. He exhaled deeply and then continued, the little girl’s eager kicks spurring him forward. Finally Clint’s foot touched the rocky floor of the river bed. It felt good to find firm land.
“My baby!” Ivana ran to meet them, her footsteps clumsy on the rocks.
Clint let the little girl slide off his back. He was happy that he had been able to reunite mother and daughter but the presence of the men was making nervous.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Ivana scooped her daughter up in her arms and kissed her on the cheek.
“They’ve never seen anyone rescue Tatjana before.”
“What do you mean?” Clint furrowed his brow and took a step back from the approaching group.
“We’re all so caught up in our own situations that no-one has ever considered rescuing her. I seem to have caught you at the right time.”
A nervous giggle escaped Clint’s lips. “This is getting freaky. What the Hell are you on about?”
“Although I suppose after a few more days I suppose it won’t seem so special.”
“Hey, I don’t know what you’re on about but I’m outta here. I gotta go.”
Ivana smiled for the first time since they had met and her grim-faced friends melted back into the night.
“Where can you go? You’re trapped here just as we are. My daughter will be back in the river tomorrow and you’ll rescue her again, only you won’t have an audience because the pattern is only broken when someone new comes along.”
“What pattern?” Clint had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“The moment of our death. Those sad and lonely men will plunge to their deaths from the bridge up there. I’ll go over the edge in that old car and you’ll drown again.”
“I am so outta here,” said Clint. He turned and ran into the bush, scrambling his way up the side of the small hill and not stopping until he came out on the road. Puffing, he rested his hands on his knees and sucked the night air deep into his lungs. If he was dead surely he wouldn’t need to catch his breath.
On the horizon the first orange, yellow glow of a new dawn kissed the tree tops. Clint was feeling weary and sat down against one of the bridge’s crumbling brick pylons where he soon fell into a dreamless sleep.
He was awoken by someone tapping him on the shoulder. It was night again.
‘Hello. I’m Ivana.”
Clint looked at the woman, at her pale face and at the dark rings around her eyes. She looked familiar but he couldn’t think why.
“I can’t find my daughter,” she explained before turning and disappearing into the bushes by the side of the road.
Clint followed her. “Maybe I can help you. Have you called the police?”
And in the distance another splash.
Wayne Summers was born in Narrogin, Western Australia. He grew up in Kojonup before attending university in Perth. He teaches English to overseas students and is currently studying to be a counsellor. He writes horror, science fiction and fantasy short stories and has appeared many times in print and online in both the UK and the US.
Clint spat another bug from his mouth. It was dusk and the midges were swarming. A gentle breeze sent the thinner branches of the towering gums surrounding him swooping and swaying, and at times the rustle of leaves was so loud that it drowned out the sound of his footsteps on the gravel road. An animal noise pierced the semi-light and Clint felt his heart skip a beat. It was time to look for shelter.
Behind him he could hear the sound of a car coming closer and closer until the way ahead of him was flooded with the light from its headlights. Clint stepped back from the road and waited in the tall grass for the vehicle to pass.
“Where ya headed?” asked the middle aged man as he leaned out through the window of his beaten and battered Range Rover.
“Nearest town,” Clint replied.
The man’s face was partly hidden by the shadow of his hat and partly by the shadows of the approaching night. Clint couldn’t make out any features on the man except for his bulk, stocky rather than fat.
“I ain’t going that far,” the man explained. “But I can give ya a lift up the road a bit.”
Clint smiled weakly and nodded. “That’s okay mate. I’ll walk it.”
He’d heard too many horror stories about what could happen to unwitting backpackers.
“Nearest town isn’t for a few miles,” said the man sending a spit ball hurtling into the dirt. “Sure ya don’t wanna lift? Cut ya journey in half.”
“No mate. I’m happy walking.”
Silence. Clint’s heartbeat was pounding in his ears. What was this guy waiting for? He felt the first flush of adrenalin flood through his body.
“Alright then,” said the man finally before driving off. “But I wouldn’t hang around here for too long.”
Clint exhaled audibly and only then realised that he had been holding his breath.
“Fucker!” he cursed.
The last light of a mid-autumn evening lingered over the canopy of the bush. Clint slid his backpack off and opened the flap. He dug around inside until his hand connected with the plastic of his torch. He removed it, did the backpack up again and switched the torch on. Ahead he could just make out what looked like an old bridge.
Lonely Man Bridge
The painted letters were cracked and peeling and Clint couldn’t help running his fingertips across them so that tiny flakes of dark paint wafted to the ground. Then he heard it. The snap of a twig. Just to his right.
He froze. More adrenalin.
Five more seconds passed and he began to doubt whether he’d heard anything at all, although the hair on the back of his neck was standing on end.
“Hello,” he called into the growing darkness, shining his torch across the thick vegetation.
The breeze picked up suddenly, tousled his hair and then swept further west. Somewhere in the canopy a night bird called and tiny winged things, perhaps bats, ducked and wove through the air above, feasting on the midges.
A small part of him wished he’d risked a ride with the stranger.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around almost blinding the woman standing in front of him.
“Hello. I’m Ivana.”
The woman was young, maybe in her mid-twenties. Her skin was pale, washed out, and her eyes were dull and grey. There were dark rings around them and just the slightest signs of bags. She smiled wearily for a second or two and then the smile slipped from her face.
“W-w-where did you come from?” Clint asked, scanning the area behind her with his torch.
“I can’t find my daughter,” she replied in the kind of voice that one uses when they have given up on everything.
“Your daughter?”
Ivana nodded then turned and disappeared into the shrubbery on the opposite side of the road.
“Hey wait. Maybe I can help you. Have you called the police?”
Clint kept the light from his torch squarely on Ivana as she navigated her way through the dense foliage. Soon Clint could hear the sound of water rushing over rocks. It reminded him he was thirsty. At about the same time the bushes and trees started thinning out and the ground became rocky. Above, the canopy gave way to a splendid, starry sky.
“Can you see her?” Ivana asked, her face a mask of worry.
Clint joined her at the water’s edge. He shone his torch out over the river, sweeping the beam of light up and down.
“No, I can’t,” he replied. “Are you sure this is where you lost her? That current looks awfully strong. Perhaps she’s been washed further down stream.”
Ivana looked at him blankly. “She’s here somewhere.”
Clint began walking along the edge of the river, carefully scanning as much of the river as his torchlight would allow. Ivana followed slowly behind. They were getting closer and closer to the bridge, beneath which splashes could be heard. Clint shivered and tucked one arm across his chest.
“There she is!” he said, his torchlight illuminating the little girl clinging desperately onto the wreck of an old car. “Here, hold this.”
He thrust the torch at Ivana, who simply looked away from him and towards her daughter. Clint clicked his teeth, removed his backpack and then positioned the torch on a flat rock by the water’s edge. The beam was quite strong but only just reached the old car wreck. It would be enough.
Clint could feel how cold the water was the minute he stepped into it. By the time he was waist-deep he was shivering. His teeth chattered and it was getting difficult to move he was shaking so much. He looked back at Ivana but she hadn’t moved. He was now beginning to regret having passed up the chance of a ride. Another splash.
The current was incredibly strong and Clint had to fight against it, taking small steps until the water became too deep to walk. He tried swimming out and up, against the current and in the opposite direction but it was a real battle. The exertion was at least warming him up. A little.
Suddenly his foot became caught on something. He jiggled his leg frantically but whatever it was that had become tangled around his foot had it securely within its grasp. Clint began to panic. “Help!” he called as the icy water rushed over him but the cry was muffled by the water. His eyes bulged as he realised he was being pulled beneath the surface. He used his strong arms to swim back to the surface, just a metre or so above, however his body was growing numb and he was taking in more and more water. The world went dark for a moment. “No,” he told himself, “this is not going to happen.” He forced his eyes open, willing them open with every fibre of his being. Mustering up the last ounce of his strength he jerked his leg and miraculously it was freed. He swam for the surface, bursting through with a loud gasp.
Surprisingly he didn’t feel weakened by his ordeal. If anything he felt refreshed. He could see the pale stream of powdery light filtering across the river and he knew that at the end of that small beam of light there was a little girl waiting for him.
“Don’t worry, darling,” he called out as he neared the old car wreck. “I’m coming.”
The girl watched him in silence. No tears. No whimpers. And Clint heard yet another splash.
“Hello,” he said as he reached her. “Grab hold of my neck and hang on tight.”
At first she didn’t move. She stared at him, her brown eyes wide and unblinking.
“Come on, I won’t hurt you. Mummy is right over there waiting for you. See?”
The little girl turned her attention to the figure waiting on the river bank and then back again. Slowly she let go of the door and wrapped herself around Clint. Together they headed back to dry land, but as they got closer Clint noticed that there were other people waiting with Ivana. He couldn’t see exactly how many there were but there were at least half a dozen. All of them men. For a moment he stopped swimming. He exhaled deeply and then continued, the little girl’s eager kicks spurring him forward. Finally Clint’s foot touched the rocky floor of the river bed. It felt good to find firm land.
“My baby!” Ivana ran to meet them, her footsteps clumsy on the rocks.
Clint let the little girl slide off his back. He was happy that he had been able to reunite mother and daughter but the presence of the men was making nervous.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Ivana scooped her daughter up in her arms and kissed her on the cheek.
“They’ve never seen anyone rescue Tatjana before.”
“What do you mean?” Clint furrowed his brow and took a step back from the approaching group.
“We’re all so caught up in our own situations that no-one has ever considered rescuing her. I seem to have caught you at the right time.”
A nervous giggle escaped Clint’s lips. “This is getting freaky. What the Hell are you on about?”
“Although I suppose after a few more days I suppose it won’t seem so special.”
“Hey, I don’t know what you’re on about but I’m outta here. I gotta go.”
Ivana smiled for the first time since they had met and her grim-faced friends melted back into the night.
“Where can you go? You’re trapped here just as we are. My daughter will be back in the river tomorrow and you’ll rescue her again, only you won’t have an audience because the pattern is only broken when someone new comes along.”
“What pattern?” Clint had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“The moment of our death. Those sad and lonely men will plunge to their deaths from the bridge up there. I’ll go over the edge in that old car and you’ll drown again.”
“I am so outta here,” said Clint. He turned and ran into the bush, scrambling his way up the side of the small hill and not stopping until he came out on the road. Puffing, he rested his hands on his knees and sucked the night air deep into his lungs. If he was dead surely he wouldn’t need to catch his breath.
On the horizon the first orange, yellow glow of a new dawn kissed the tree tops. Clint was feeling weary and sat down against one of the bridge’s crumbling brick pylons where he soon fell into a dreamless sleep.
He was awoken by someone tapping him on the shoulder. It was night again.
‘Hello. I’m Ivana.”
Clint looked at the woman, at her pale face and at the dark rings around her eyes. She looked familiar but he couldn’t think why.
“I can’t find my daughter,” she explained before turning and disappearing into the bushes by the side of the road.
Clint followed her. “Maybe I can help you. Have you called the police?”
And in the distance another splash.
Wayne Summers was born in Narrogin, Western Australia. He grew up in Kojonup before attending university in Perth. He teaches English to overseas students and is currently studying to be a counsellor. He writes horror, science fiction and fantasy short stories and has appeared many times in print and online in both the UK and the US.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Face in the Tree
By Walter Giersbach
Thirteen summers ago I discovered the true taste of barbecue—slow-cooked, smoky tasting and piquant as a woman’s thighs. It was the same time I discovered Belinda Lee in a little town outside Asheville, North Carolina. Belinda was as country as corn pone, a major change in my diet from northern boiled beef and skinny blondes in Boston. I never knew such a molasses-sweet girl existed. Two things distracted me from Belinda: my work researching Civil War strategy for my Master’s dissertation and guilty memories of Calista, whom I’d left back home in Salem, Massachusetts. They were minor distractions. Well, Belinda’s barbecue also distracted me from any more serious thoughts than eating.
Belinda called it “bobby-cue” and made such a deal about going out to strip shag bark from a hickory, light a low fire and cook the meat for—I swear—six hours. The first time Belinda made barbecue, I laughed to think someone would work so hard for a meal. Her Carolina-style was made with a vinegar sauce and a bit of Southern heat, both of which found a backdoor into a hidden part of my brain to start a circus of pandemonium. Her pulled pork was a magical blend of barbecue ingredients that was a versatile entrée that turned a simple bun into a palace of pulchitrude.
We would sit down with napkins around our necks, and then I’d dip the first morsel of pork into her sauce and pop it into my mouth. The buzz of ecstasy begin at the base of my throat and extended down to my stomach while, at the same time, the aroma of her sauce permeated my brain and flowed out my nostrils. My head swam as I closed my eyes to let the feelings extend through my arms and legs. I had never before tasted such enchantment in food. This was the discovery of a new religion, the essence of witchcraft capturing my soul.
Belinda smiled in a secretive way and said, “Down here, we say cookin’ doesn’t last like lovin’.”
Her granny would often join us along with her folks and some brothers and sisters. Barbecue was serious eating in their neck of the woods. Granny said, “You got it back’ards, B’linda. Lovin’ don’t last but cookin’ do,” and she cackled.
Ours was what Granny called a tornado romance there in Asheville. Nothing was left standing in its wake. “You two are just smitten,” the preacher said, as he accepted a glass of Champagne after I married Belinda at the little church in the hollow outside town.
Belatedly, I called Calista in Salem and sheepishly said I’d found another woman. She was outraged and used a really vulgar term. This was totally unlike the girl I had known since eighth grade. Calista was a folklorist, an oral history publisher and a self-described New England witch. She was royally pissed at losing what she thought was her property and flew down—on an airplane, not a broomstick—from Salem. I don’t know why she was angry; I’d never said we were going to get married. I never promised her a thing, but when she saw my wedding ring and met Belinda coming back from the woods behind our house, I knew there’d be trouble.
“Y’all stay for some barbecue?” Belinda asked real politely.
Calista was not amused at Belinda’s invitation. “There’ll be no more bobby-cue, Baby Cakes,” she said mean-like, and grabbed the bark out of Belinda’s hand. “This is what you eat?”
“It’s what we make the fire from,” Belinda said in confusion.
“I’m surprised,” Calista snarled, “it looks better than the care you give your skin. Maybe you should put your face in the fire.” With that, she stalked back to her Hertz rental and aimed it back to the airport.
A strange thing happened in the coming week: Belinda began to age quickly. I put aside my research and got her to a good dermatologist in Raleigh, but he was mystified as to why her skin was flaking. Soon, it was all I could do to look at Belinda without feeling my own skin crawl. Her friends began avoiding us. Her parents looked oddly at me, as if I had infected her with a Yankee virus. Granny clucked and said nothing.
In the middle of our confusion and fear I received a telephone call from Calista—a sarcastic Calista I’d never known. “Enjoying your bobby-cue? Eating your hickory-smoked pigs?”
I tried to make civil conversation, but she just wanted to relish her pain that I hadn’t done—what? Marry her instead of Belinda? She was sucking on her remorse the way a dog gnaws a bone. I hung up as quickly as possible and went in to see Belinda, who by that time had taken to bed.
Belinda’s lips moved behind the thick puffiness in her cheeks. Her eyes had sunk deep into the flesh of her head. Her skin was brown and flaking. “I’m dying,” she whispered. “But I’m so hungry….so hungry. Feed me.” I jumped forward as her head lolled to the side, then I realized she had fainted. I debated whether to call the doctor or her parents, but decided to obey her wish first. I went out to the field above the creek and up to the hickory tree Belinda had always pulled bark from for her authentic smoked meats.
I went to the opposite side of the tree and suddenly dropped the bag I’d brought. A section of the trunk the size of a dinner plate had become as smooth as a eucalyptus, and in place of the curled, scaly bark was a face—Belinda’s face. It came to me in a flash. Calista had taken her vengeance by turning Belinda’s face into a shag bark hickory while the features I loved had morphed onto the tree in the meadow.
Forgetting the basket, I ran back to our house. Belinda was hallucinating and mumbling. Her mother had come over while I was in the field and was trying to put soup into her mouth. Time was running out for Belinda the way the last drip of honey leaves the jar. Doctors had no medicine for what was eating my wife. My only solution was to do the irrational, the unscientific and seek help from Granny.
Afterwards, swallowing my apprehension, I telephoned up to Massachusetts. “She’s dead, Calista. Belinda’s dead.” I choked over my lie, “I’m so alone and need you. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“I understand,” Calista cooed. “Do what you have to do, bury the poor thing and then let’s meet and talk.”
“In Boston. This week,” I said.
By the next day, Belinda seemed to be better—at least, somewhat improved. “Darling,” I told her, “I have to go up to Boston for a day or two. I called the doctor, who’ll look in, and your mother will stay, but you’re going to be all right. Trust me.”
She nodded uncomprehendingly, and I walked over the hill on my mission of hope.
Calista met my flight at Logan Airport and we cabbed into the city. “I made a reservation—for us both—by the waterfront,” I told her. “We’ll see shows and there’s a new jazz club I’m dying to visit. Meantime, let’s celebrate with a drink.”
“Celebrate?” she asked curiously. “You just buried your wife.”
“A new life. I must have been out of my mind, staying in the South. Do you know what they do down there…?” I hustled her into a little bar and restaurant on Newbury Street I knew from earlier days and ordered up drinks. Margaritas, that would make her hungry enough to eat anything. The “anything” I put on the table were chips I’d carried north. Granny was a true witch of the South and had made up chips she called Something Special Surprises. She guaranteed they’d whet the appetite.
“I don’t want to be reminded of Southern cooking,” Calista said.
“Try one, as a token of what we once shared in the magic of our love.” Reluctantly, Calista took one and licked it with her long pink tongue. Then, she inserted the chip between her red lips. The glow of a smile crossed her face.
“Anngh,” she said, as though she were auditioning as a judge on a cooking show on television. And her mouth closed.
Granny had told me Yankee girls were skinny, anemic and a passionless bundle of nerves. Her remedy was a secret from the hollow where she lived—guaranteed, she said, to put flesh on those white Northern bones. Granny’s spell was beginning to work. “Ummm,” Calista said, swallowing and reaching for another. “What is this?”
I’ve seen the way the kudzu has invaded the South, growing to overwhelm trees and telephone poles until the result is an obscene mass of succulent green jungle that chokes the life out of everything natural or man-made. Almost before my eyes now I could see Calista begin to fill out as her manicured hands dipped into the bag of chips. Her cheeks puffed out, the pouches under her eyes filled in, her neck began to thicken. She was visibly growing as her hand waved the waiter to our table. She called for another margarita and began ordering a trio of appetizers, two entrées, a side dish of french fries and a couple of desserts. When I got up to go to the men’s room, Calista was d reamily stuffing food in her mouth as fast as her hands could move. She had finished two days’ worth of calories with no end in sight when I excused myself an hour later . I left my credit card number with the waiter, told him to fill her up, and went out the door to catch a cab back to Logan.
Belinda was much improved by the time I got back. Her face was smooth and shiny again. I checked on Calista through a friend a week later, and discovered she had ballooned past the two hundred pound mark. My friend said she hadn’t once mentioned my name as she continued eating.
But most interesting was that Belinda’s impression remained on the shag bark hickory until years later when I could point it out to our children. I taught our kids to make equally delicious barbecue fired over wood from a cherry tree. Cookin’ and lovin’ both last when they season each other.
Walter's short stories have been published over the past year in Mouth Full of Bullets, Lunch Hour Stories, Every Day Fiction, and Bewildering Stories, while Wild Child has just published two volumes of his stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue and Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, Vol. 2. Earlier, he directed corporate communications at Fortune 500 companies in New York for more than 30 years. A complete biography can be found on his website at www.allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com.
Thirteen summers ago I discovered the true taste of barbecue—slow-cooked, smoky tasting and piquant as a woman’s thighs. It was the same time I discovered Belinda Lee in a little town outside Asheville, North Carolina. Belinda was as country as corn pone, a major change in my diet from northern boiled beef and skinny blondes in Boston. I never knew such a molasses-sweet girl existed. Two things distracted me from Belinda: my work researching Civil War strategy for my Master’s dissertation and guilty memories of Calista, whom I’d left back home in Salem, Massachusetts. They were minor distractions. Well, Belinda’s barbecue also distracted me from any more serious thoughts than eating.
Belinda called it “bobby-cue” and made such a deal about going out to strip shag bark from a hickory, light a low fire and cook the meat for—I swear—six hours. The first time Belinda made barbecue, I laughed to think someone would work so hard for a meal. Her Carolina-style was made with a vinegar sauce and a bit of Southern heat, both of which found a backdoor into a hidden part of my brain to start a circus of pandemonium. Her pulled pork was a magical blend of barbecue ingredients that was a versatile entrée that turned a simple bun into a palace of pulchitrude.
We would sit down with napkins around our necks, and then I’d dip the first morsel of pork into her sauce and pop it into my mouth. The buzz of ecstasy begin at the base of my throat and extended down to my stomach while, at the same time, the aroma of her sauce permeated my brain and flowed out my nostrils. My head swam as I closed my eyes to let the feelings extend through my arms and legs. I had never before tasted such enchantment in food. This was the discovery of a new religion, the essence of witchcraft capturing my soul.
Belinda smiled in a secretive way and said, “Down here, we say cookin’ doesn’t last like lovin’.”
Her granny would often join us along with her folks and some brothers and sisters. Barbecue was serious eating in their neck of the woods. Granny said, “You got it back’ards, B’linda. Lovin’ don’t last but cookin’ do,” and she cackled.
Ours was what Granny called a tornado romance there in Asheville. Nothing was left standing in its wake. “You two are just smitten,” the preacher said, as he accepted a glass of Champagne after I married Belinda at the little church in the hollow outside town.
Belatedly, I called Calista in Salem and sheepishly said I’d found another woman. She was outraged and used a really vulgar term. This was totally unlike the girl I had known since eighth grade. Calista was a folklorist, an oral history publisher and a self-described New England witch. She was royally pissed at losing what she thought was her property and flew down—on an airplane, not a broomstick—from Salem. I don’t know why she was angry; I’d never said we were going to get married. I never promised her a thing, but when she saw my wedding ring and met Belinda coming back from the woods behind our house, I knew there’d be trouble.
“Y’all stay for some barbecue?” Belinda asked real politely.
Calista was not amused at Belinda’s invitation. “There’ll be no more bobby-cue, Baby Cakes,” she said mean-like, and grabbed the bark out of Belinda’s hand. “This is what you eat?”
“It’s what we make the fire from,” Belinda said in confusion.
“I’m surprised,” Calista snarled, “it looks better than the care you give your skin. Maybe you should put your face in the fire.” With that, she stalked back to her Hertz rental and aimed it back to the airport.
A strange thing happened in the coming week: Belinda began to age quickly. I put aside my research and got her to a good dermatologist in Raleigh, but he was mystified as to why her skin was flaking. Soon, it was all I could do to look at Belinda without feeling my own skin crawl. Her friends began avoiding us. Her parents looked oddly at me, as if I had infected her with a Yankee virus. Granny clucked and said nothing.
In the middle of our confusion and fear I received a telephone call from Calista—a sarcastic Calista I’d never known. “Enjoying your bobby-cue? Eating your hickory-smoked pigs?”
I tried to make civil conversation, but she just wanted to relish her pain that I hadn’t done—what? Marry her instead of Belinda? She was sucking on her remorse the way a dog gnaws a bone. I hung up as quickly as possible and went in to see Belinda, who by that time had taken to bed.
Belinda’s lips moved behind the thick puffiness in her cheeks. Her eyes had sunk deep into the flesh of her head. Her skin was brown and flaking. “I’m dying,” she whispered. “But I’m so hungry….so hungry. Feed me.” I jumped forward as her head lolled to the side, then I realized she had fainted. I debated whether to call the doctor or her parents, but decided to obey her wish first. I went out to the field above the creek and up to the hickory tree Belinda had always pulled bark from for her authentic smoked meats.
I went to the opposite side of the tree and suddenly dropped the bag I’d brought. A section of the trunk the size of a dinner plate had become as smooth as a eucalyptus, and in place of the curled, scaly bark was a face—Belinda’s face. It came to me in a flash. Calista had taken her vengeance by turning Belinda’s face into a shag bark hickory while the features I loved had morphed onto the tree in the meadow.
Forgetting the basket, I ran back to our house. Belinda was hallucinating and mumbling. Her mother had come over while I was in the field and was trying to put soup into her mouth. Time was running out for Belinda the way the last drip of honey leaves the jar. Doctors had no medicine for what was eating my wife. My only solution was to do the irrational, the unscientific and seek help from Granny.
Afterwards, swallowing my apprehension, I telephoned up to Massachusetts. “She’s dead, Calista. Belinda’s dead.” I choked over my lie, “I’m so alone and need you. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“I understand,” Calista cooed. “Do what you have to do, bury the poor thing and then let’s meet and talk.”
“In Boston. This week,” I said.
By the next day, Belinda seemed to be better—at least, somewhat improved. “Darling,” I told her, “I have to go up to Boston for a day or two. I called the doctor, who’ll look in, and your mother will stay, but you’re going to be all right. Trust me.”
She nodded uncomprehendingly, and I walked over the hill on my mission of hope.
Calista met my flight at Logan Airport and we cabbed into the city. “I made a reservation—for us both—by the waterfront,” I told her. “We’ll see shows and there’s a new jazz club I’m dying to visit. Meantime, let’s celebrate with a drink.”
“Celebrate?” she asked curiously. “You just buried your wife.”
“A new life. I must have been out of my mind, staying in the South. Do you know what they do down there…?” I hustled her into a little bar and restaurant on Newbury Street I knew from earlier days and ordered up drinks. Margaritas, that would make her hungry enough to eat anything. The “anything” I put on the table were chips I’d carried north. Granny was a true witch of the South and had made up chips she called Something Special Surprises. She guaranteed they’d whet the appetite.
“I don’t want to be reminded of Southern cooking,” Calista said.
“Try one, as a token of what we once shared in the magic of our love.” Reluctantly, Calista took one and licked it with her long pink tongue. Then, she inserted the chip between her red lips. The glow of a smile crossed her face.
“Anngh,” she said, as though she were auditioning as a judge on a cooking show on television. And her mouth closed.
Granny had told me Yankee girls were skinny, anemic and a passionless bundle of nerves. Her remedy was a secret from the hollow where she lived—guaranteed, she said, to put flesh on those white Northern bones. Granny’s spell was beginning to work. “Ummm,” Calista said, swallowing and reaching for another. “What is this?”
I’ve seen the way the kudzu has invaded the South, growing to overwhelm trees and telephone poles until the result is an obscene mass of succulent green jungle that chokes the life out of everything natural or man-made. Almost before my eyes now I could see Calista begin to fill out as her manicured hands dipped into the bag of chips. Her cheeks puffed out, the pouches under her eyes filled in, her neck began to thicken. She was visibly growing as her hand waved the waiter to our table. She called for another margarita and began ordering a trio of appetizers, two entrées, a side dish of french fries and a couple of desserts. When I got up to go to the men’s room, Calista was d reamily stuffing food in her mouth as fast as her hands could move. She had finished two days’ worth of calories with no end in sight when I excused myself an hour later . I left my credit card number with the waiter, told him to fill her up, and went out the door to catch a cab back to Logan.
Belinda was much improved by the time I got back. Her face was smooth and shiny again. I checked on Calista through a friend a week later, and discovered she had ballooned past the two hundred pound mark. My friend said she hadn’t once mentioned my name as she continued eating.
But most interesting was that Belinda’s impression remained on the shag bark hickory until years later when I could point it out to our children. I taught our kids to make equally delicious barbecue fired over wood from a cherry tree. Cookin’ and lovin’ both last when they season each other.
Walter's short stories have been published over the past year in Mouth Full of Bullets, Lunch Hour Stories, Every Day Fiction, and Bewildering Stories, while Wild Child has just published two volumes of his stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue and Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, Vol. 2. Earlier, he directed corporate communications at Fortune 500 companies in New York for more than 30 years. A complete biography can be found on his website at www.allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Queen Chicory and her Magical Feasts
by Shawn Huegel
Once upon a time and long ago, a Queen lived cloistered below the city of New Orleans in an underground village, chosen Boudreaux. According to legend, her name was Queen Chicory and no other Queen in the history of New Orleans could compare to her grace. Her warm tone was the color of hazelnuts, and her heart larger than a hearty help of heaping Jambalaya.
For generations Creole parents told the tale of Queen Chicory arriving in New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day, sitting upon a throne, aboard her elected float the Krewe of Ghetar. Always meticulously adorned in her traditional Mardi Gras sequined gown, and feathered mask; Queen Chicory threw gold coins and purple cellophane wrapped praline candy to New Orleanians gathered in the streets.
Old folks say, that on the eve of Mardi Gras, Queen Chicory would reluctantly leave New Orleans and return to Boudreaux Village; seldom thought of by a living soul until the following year. Despite lemon summer suns and baby’s breath nights, Queen Chicory was very lonesome in Boudreaux Village; and her heart was worrisome, woeful and weary. Quieting her despair, Queen Chicory would leave Boudreaux Village as the sun hid behind the red roux stained triple moon. Clothed in shabby, shredded, scruffy clothes, Queen Chicory set out for the ‘The Hot Pilly-Pilly Café’ in New Orleans. In two shakes of lambs tail, she would gobble one Po-Boy, one Muffuletta, two plates of Creole Seafood Gumbo, two Mudbugs, one crispy Beignet, and a piece of King Cake for dessert; yet, she never gained a pound!
It has been told, a crafty and magical green Olive anointed Henri the Hierophant, lived on a branch from an evergreen tree outside of Queen Chicory’s palace. For years Henri would hear Queen Chicory’s cries of loneliness, and was very saddened by her sorrow. “Ah coo, what can I do?” he cried, as stuffed pimento teardrops fell from his hollow eyes. For many moons, Henri would view the settling colors of the sunset from his time-less tree, pondering a solution to Queen Chicory’s desperation.
One enchanted evening, in the twinkling of an onion the marinated juices in Henri’s skin tenderized his nutty brain, processing a rather clever idea. “Ah coo, Joie de Vivre, I’ve got it!” Henri proclaimed. “A potion that will transform all of Queen Chicory’s favorite foods into a moveable, magical and whimsical feast!”
As the sky did a Two Step with the lemon sun, Queen Chicory awoke to echoes of hard tapping hammers, swooshing paintbrushes and piercing prune shears. “Bayou biscuits! Who could that be?” she gasped. Quickly she ran down the spiral staircase and flew open the marble door. Awaiting her arrival on bended knees was Martine the Muffuletta and Picot the Po-Boy. In unison the duo announced, “Bonjou Queen Chickory! Please, do not be alarmed. Henri the Hierophant created us to bring you companionship and foodhood.”
“Who is Henri the Hierophant?” Queen Chicory inquired.
Martine calmly explained, “Your highness, Henri the Hierophant is a magical olive that dwells in the evergreen tree outside of your palace.”
Well, Turtle Soup! Queen Chicory thought, a magical olive that lives in a tree? Why, I never knew…
Gaining control and collecting her thoughts, Queen Chicory delighted in the revelation of her whimsical friends, and assisted the delicacies in setting up house. However, Queen Chicory was unmindful of the envy and arrogance that would soon exist amongst her newfound feasts.
Martine the Muffuletta and Picot the Po-Boy built homes in the first parish of Boudreaux Village. Martine and Picot knew they were the royalty sandwiches of New Orleans and Boudreaux Village; however, boasting, bitter, bad-mouth tastes, were uncharacteristic for their bread. Queen Chicory became very fond of Martine and Picot; and every night Martine played salty sweet sounds of Zydeco tunes from his accordion, while Picot and Queen Chicory danced in the spotlight of the orange tinted triple moon.
In the second parish of Boudreaux Village lived the Crispy Beignets, and the King Cakes. The Crispy Beignets were never rude publicly to the King Cakes, but in their sugary hearts they loathed them. Every morning the Beignet’s would sweep the powdered sugar from their front steps; their pleasantries were composed of politely, polished, and perfected waves never uttering a word. In their fungi, fermented opinion, the Beignets were the royalty doughnut of New Orleans and Boudreaux Village; and their actions were justified!
Elder Beignet would often remind the clan of their superiority. “Remember to knead, fold, and rise to your lineage,” Elder Beignet loudly proclaimed. “King Cakes are an aftertaste, a ring-shaped mess from mere cinnamon dough; splattered with icing, and speckled with purple, green, gold colored sugar!”
The Crispy Beignet’s knew their powdered sugar didn’t stink.
In the third parish, dwelled the Mudbugs and the Creole Seafood Gumbo; and they were as thick as thieves. The Mudbugs were similar to their kinfolk the Lobster. The Mudbugs were not as large as their great cousins, but they were no small fry; their meat soared with more sweetness to savor in. Legend has it, both were a mouth-catching bunch, but their salty spores were to the bone. Their beliefs were akin to the Beignets; however, they hated ALL of the foods in Boudreaux Village especially Martine and Picot! “What are we? Spoiled leftovers from a crawfish boil!” confided the Mudbugs to the self appointed King Gumbo. “Queen Chicory spends all of her time with Martine and Picot, never giving us a food thought!”
When the sauce of the triple moon whirled into a white roux, the Mudbugs and King Gumbo, covered their mouths with Chinet dinner napkins, and snuck into Martine and Picot’s parish. Carefully checking if the coast was clear, the sect used tomato paste to food paint cruel words such as “Po-Boys: Walk west until your bread floats” and ‘Muffa What?” on their neat white fences. Their next stop was the Beignets and the King Cake’s parish. Delightfully dancing in their deviousness, The Mudbugs and King Creole food sketched, “Stank a Wank King Cakes!” and “Saccharine Sappy Beignets - Go away” on their foodmobiles.
It so happened the following morning, Martine overheard the Mudbugs bragging about the unsavory grafooditi - when all food broke out! The King Cakes smeared icing on King Gumbo’s face and Picot dealt a brisk ladle to one of the Mudbugs head. Meanwhile, the Crispy Beignets decided to desert their smug zone and join the food fiasco. Hour’s later, pieces of Crawfish tails, powdered sugar, chunks of Gumbo and French bread were scattered on the village streets. It was truly a food mess!
Suddenly, the doughy white clouds turned the color of dirty rice, and the red bean sky gloomed over the village. Heavy rain rapidly fell on the cobble streets; and a gust of wind blazed through the village like brown flour sizzling in fat. The moveable feasts were frazzled, frightened and fumbled for their food parts.
Legend has it; Queen Chicory had observed the wicked weather and food battle from her bedroom palace window. “Andouille Sausage! What can this be?” she questioned. “I must seek Henri the Hierophants counsel. Surely he has knowledge of this distasteful affair.” Grabbing her rainbow colored feathered umbrella, Queen Chicory rushed to Henri’s mythical tree.
And so it was told, Henri the Hierophant confessed to Queen Chicory that he had caused the intense rain and bellowing winds, to scare some food sense into the whimsical feasts. “Ah coo, my dear Queen Chicory,” Henri explained, “Your moveable and magical feasts are jealous and hatefulness consumes their swamp cooler hearts!”
“Why Genoa Salami! How can that be? Queen Chicory passionately proclaimed, “I love all of them and you as well Henri, my delectable green olive. Would you please calm the rains and settle the winds, Henri? I must speak with everyone immediately, and I want the weather blissfully beautiful!” Queen Chicory pleaded.
“Your wish is my desire!” Henri peacefully abided.
That afternoon Henri the Hierophant and all of the moveable feasts gathered in Queen Chicory’s courtyard. Tearfully Queen Chicory apologized to her newfound feasts; unraveling how her loneliness had trapped her thoughts and self-pity had consumed her emotions. “My words are pure and I will never again choose one of you over the other; let us be a be a gentle whisper for one another.
And it was so, their wicked thoughts evaporated into thin air, and the magical feasts embraced each other under the Mardi Gras bead lit sky. Elder Muffuletta wrote a song in celebration of their newfound kinship:
Olive’s green, Olive black. No more worries on our backs!
Beignets and King Cakes getting along.
Elder Muffuletta singing a song.
King Gumbo doing a jig!
Henri swinging on a twig.
Hate has departed from our hearts.
We stand together - not a la carte!
Ancients say, Queen Chicory, Henri the Hierophant, and the moveable feasts lived happily, heartily, and harmoniously together, forever and ever.
Shawn Huegel lives in Bella Vista, AR. A former substitute teacher, she is married and has one son who is currently in college at Willamette University in Oregon. She is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and moved to New Orleans, LA, after graduating from high school. She lived there for five years and this story is a tribute to New Orleans - her second home.
Once upon a time and long ago, a Queen lived cloistered below the city of New Orleans in an underground village, chosen Boudreaux. According to legend, her name was Queen Chicory and no other Queen in the history of New Orleans could compare to her grace. Her warm tone was the color of hazelnuts, and her heart larger than a hearty help of heaping Jambalaya.
For generations Creole parents told the tale of Queen Chicory arriving in New Orleans on Mardi Gras Day, sitting upon a throne, aboard her elected float the Krewe of Ghetar. Always meticulously adorned in her traditional Mardi Gras sequined gown, and feathered mask; Queen Chicory threw gold coins and purple cellophane wrapped praline candy to New Orleanians gathered in the streets.
Old folks say, that on the eve of Mardi Gras, Queen Chicory would reluctantly leave New Orleans and return to Boudreaux Village; seldom thought of by a living soul until the following year. Despite lemon summer suns and baby’s breath nights, Queen Chicory was very lonesome in Boudreaux Village; and her heart was worrisome, woeful and weary. Quieting her despair, Queen Chicory would leave Boudreaux Village as the sun hid behind the red roux stained triple moon. Clothed in shabby, shredded, scruffy clothes, Queen Chicory set out for the ‘The Hot Pilly-Pilly Café’ in New Orleans. In two shakes of lambs tail, she would gobble one Po-Boy, one Muffuletta, two plates of Creole Seafood Gumbo, two Mudbugs, one crispy Beignet, and a piece of King Cake for dessert; yet, she never gained a pound!
It has been told, a crafty and magical green Olive anointed Henri the Hierophant, lived on a branch from an evergreen tree outside of Queen Chicory’s palace. For years Henri would hear Queen Chicory’s cries of loneliness, and was very saddened by her sorrow. “Ah coo, what can I do?” he cried, as stuffed pimento teardrops fell from his hollow eyes. For many moons, Henri would view the settling colors of the sunset from his time-less tree, pondering a solution to Queen Chicory’s desperation.
One enchanted evening, in the twinkling of an onion the marinated juices in Henri’s skin tenderized his nutty brain, processing a rather clever idea. “Ah coo, Joie de Vivre, I’ve got it!” Henri proclaimed. “A potion that will transform all of Queen Chicory’s favorite foods into a moveable, magical and whimsical feast!”
As the sky did a Two Step with the lemon sun, Queen Chicory awoke to echoes of hard tapping hammers, swooshing paintbrushes and piercing prune shears. “Bayou biscuits! Who could that be?” she gasped. Quickly she ran down the spiral staircase and flew open the marble door. Awaiting her arrival on bended knees was Martine the Muffuletta and Picot the Po-Boy. In unison the duo announced, “Bonjou Queen Chickory! Please, do not be alarmed. Henri the Hierophant created us to bring you companionship and foodhood.”
“Who is Henri the Hierophant?” Queen Chicory inquired.
Martine calmly explained, “Your highness, Henri the Hierophant is a magical olive that dwells in the evergreen tree outside of your palace.”
Well, Turtle Soup! Queen Chicory thought, a magical olive that lives in a tree? Why, I never knew…
Gaining control and collecting her thoughts, Queen Chicory delighted in the revelation of her whimsical friends, and assisted the delicacies in setting up house. However, Queen Chicory was unmindful of the envy and arrogance that would soon exist amongst her newfound feasts.
Martine the Muffuletta and Picot the Po-Boy built homes in the first parish of Boudreaux Village. Martine and Picot knew they were the royalty sandwiches of New Orleans and Boudreaux Village; however, boasting, bitter, bad-mouth tastes, were uncharacteristic for their bread. Queen Chicory became very fond of Martine and Picot; and every night Martine played salty sweet sounds of Zydeco tunes from his accordion, while Picot and Queen Chicory danced in the spotlight of the orange tinted triple moon.
In the second parish of Boudreaux Village lived the Crispy Beignets, and the King Cakes. The Crispy Beignets were never rude publicly to the King Cakes, but in their sugary hearts they loathed them. Every morning the Beignet’s would sweep the powdered sugar from their front steps; their pleasantries were composed of politely, polished, and perfected waves never uttering a word. In their fungi, fermented opinion, the Beignets were the royalty doughnut of New Orleans and Boudreaux Village; and their actions were justified!
Elder Beignet would often remind the clan of their superiority. “Remember to knead, fold, and rise to your lineage,” Elder Beignet loudly proclaimed. “King Cakes are an aftertaste, a ring-shaped mess from mere cinnamon dough; splattered with icing, and speckled with purple, green, gold colored sugar!”
The Crispy Beignet’s knew their powdered sugar didn’t stink.
In the third parish, dwelled the Mudbugs and the Creole Seafood Gumbo; and they were as thick as thieves. The Mudbugs were similar to their kinfolk the Lobster. The Mudbugs were not as large as their great cousins, but they were no small fry; their meat soared with more sweetness to savor in. Legend has it, both were a mouth-catching bunch, but their salty spores were to the bone. Their beliefs were akin to the Beignets; however, they hated ALL of the foods in Boudreaux Village especially Martine and Picot! “What are we? Spoiled leftovers from a crawfish boil!” confided the Mudbugs to the self appointed King Gumbo. “Queen Chicory spends all of her time with Martine and Picot, never giving us a food thought!”
When the sauce of the triple moon whirled into a white roux, the Mudbugs and King Gumbo, covered their mouths with Chinet dinner napkins, and snuck into Martine and Picot’s parish. Carefully checking if the coast was clear, the sect used tomato paste to food paint cruel words such as “Po-Boys: Walk west until your bread floats” and ‘Muffa What?” on their neat white fences. Their next stop was the Beignets and the King Cake’s parish. Delightfully dancing in their deviousness, The Mudbugs and King Creole food sketched, “Stank a Wank King Cakes!” and “Saccharine Sappy Beignets - Go away” on their foodmobiles.
It so happened the following morning, Martine overheard the Mudbugs bragging about the unsavory grafooditi - when all food broke out! The King Cakes smeared icing on King Gumbo’s face and Picot dealt a brisk ladle to one of the Mudbugs head. Meanwhile, the Crispy Beignets decided to desert their smug zone and join the food fiasco. Hour’s later, pieces of Crawfish tails, powdered sugar, chunks of Gumbo and French bread were scattered on the village streets. It was truly a food mess!
Suddenly, the doughy white clouds turned the color of dirty rice, and the red bean sky gloomed over the village. Heavy rain rapidly fell on the cobble streets; and a gust of wind blazed through the village like brown flour sizzling in fat. The moveable feasts were frazzled, frightened and fumbled for their food parts.
Legend has it; Queen Chicory had observed the wicked weather and food battle from her bedroom palace window. “Andouille Sausage! What can this be?” she questioned. “I must seek Henri the Hierophants counsel. Surely he has knowledge of this distasteful affair.” Grabbing her rainbow colored feathered umbrella, Queen Chicory rushed to Henri’s mythical tree.
And so it was told, Henri the Hierophant confessed to Queen Chicory that he had caused the intense rain and bellowing winds, to scare some food sense into the whimsical feasts. “Ah coo, my dear Queen Chicory,” Henri explained, “Your moveable and magical feasts are jealous and hatefulness consumes their swamp cooler hearts!”
“Why Genoa Salami! How can that be? Queen Chicory passionately proclaimed, “I love all of them and you as well Henri, my delectable green olive. Would you please calm the rains and settle the winds, Henri? I must speak with everyone immediately, and I want the weather blissfully beautiful!” Queen Chicory pleaded.
“Your wish is my desire!” Henri peacefully abided.
That afternoon Henri the Hierophant and all of the moveable feasts gathered in Queen Chicory’s courtyard. Tearfully Queen Chicory apologized to her newfound feasts; unraveling how her loneliness had trapped her thoughts and self-pity had consumed her emotions. “My words are pure and I will never again choose one of you over the other; let us be a be a gentle whisper for one another.
And it was so, their wicked thoughts evaporated into thin air, and the magical feasts embraced each other under the Mardi Gras bead lit sky. Elder Muffuletta wrote a song in celebration of their newfound kinship:
Olive’s green, Olive black. No more worries on our backs!
Beignets and King Cakes getting along.
Elder Muffuletta singing a song.
King Gumbo doing a jig!
Henri swinging on a twig.
Hate has departed from our hearts.
We stand together - not a la carte!
Ancients say, Queen Chicory, Henri the Hierophant, and the moveable feasts lived happily, heartily, and harmoniously together, forever and ever.
Shawn Huegel lives in Bella Vista, AR. A former substitute teacher, she is married and has one son who is currently in college at Willamette University in Oregon. She is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and moved to New Orleans, LA, after graduating from high school. She lived there for five years and this story is a tribute to New Orleans - her second home.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Giant Cicadas and Other Odd Indignities
By Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon
Life used to be a lot simpler when the cicadas came out of the ground only once every seventeen years -- you could depend on things like that. Not anymore. Not since they dropped those nasty radiological dirty bombs on the East Coast. We didn't get hit directly here in North Carolina, but you could say we've been dealing with fallout of sorts for years.
The cicada which clung to the fake Grecian column on my front stoop, the column Martha insisted on putting up when we redid the siding a couple of years ago after I retired, was one of the smaller ones. But its glassy red eyes, big as the carriage light globes on either side of my neighbor's front door, why the damn stupid thing just sort of stared at me while I got the mail from the box.
"Martha!" I said when I got back in the house. "Will you get on the net and find out when those cicadas are supposed to come back? We've got a seven-footer on the front of the house."
"In a minute, dear," came the reply.
"Never mind," I said. "I'll do it."
I dialed up the National Mutant Biologicals Database and sure enough, Greensboro NC was listed in red for an outbreak of giant cicadas. Guess I don't have to worry about making that suggested second application of Scott's Turfbuilder Weed-n-Feed this weekend, if car-sized insects are going to crawl out of my lawn.
Of course, we don't have it bad compared to some. I hear the gangs of killer squirrels have made it almost to Chicago now. Who'd have thought the red and black little furry buggers would join forces to fight their treacherous gray cousins? I just wish they'd find the fool who taught squirrels how to shoot so they can try-n-fry his ass. It's possible the liberalistas, torn between opposing the death penalty and opposing guns, might even approve. We really don't need gun toting animals on the loose. And the vampire rabbits out in the hills of West Virginia? That's just plain wrong.
If I hadn't seen the first one, I would've completely forgotten about the cicadas in my lawn until that perky little newsgirl on WXII -- The First News Of The Greensboro-Winston Salem-High Point Triad -- came on and reminded us. They do so love to tell us the bad news while grinning and smiling. But now I've actually seen one, my first thought was to go next door and pester Greg Crenshaw.
"Yo, Greg!" I said.
"Oh... hi, Red," my sometimes neighbor said, looking up sheepishly from under the hood of his Buick. The man hasn't figured out how to fix his car ever since they stopped making carburetors and possibly never will.
"You hear about the cicadas coming out again?" I asked.
The momentary look of fear on Greg Crenshaw's face was just about worth any price of admission.
"I seem to recall you moved a bunch of them there shrubs and trees a coupla years ago," I added helpfully.
"Yeah," Greg said, knowing what I was getting at.
"Seems to me you better figure out where those little buggers got to," I said. Me? I'm not so stupid as Greg Crenshaw, not when it comes to cicadas. Of course, I don't go gallivanting all around the damn world all the time on business like Greg Crenshaw either. Or bragging about it hither and yon.
It was about then, I watched the one I saw earlier climb off my roof and onto that poor, sorry looking dogwood tree which had all the ice damage last winter. A couple of small branches cracked and fell, and I made sure not to laugh as old Greg ran into his house to call the lawn radar people and get his cicadas mapped. Bet he'd have to pay premium dollar to get the job done now they were emerging.
Sounding sort of like a sick chain saw starting up, my giant cicada began to sing for a mate. I did not stay to see if it found one. But if it did, I'm kind of hoping it takes out that dogwood. I know it's sacrilege in these here parts, but I never did like dogwood trees. They're too low to mow under and those pretty little blossoms everyone goes gah-gah over are only nice for a few days, then they fall into brown mush on the ground. And you just can't rake their damned leaves -- they just sort of jump in place and slip between the tines of the rake. So I was kind of hoping a cicada would come along, split the trunk in half and take that sorry old dogwood out. Put it out of its misery -- and mine.
Back when I was a kid, of course, we had the regular cicadas -- the ones my granddaddy always called seventeen-year locusts, even though they weren't rightly locusts. They'd come out of the ground every seventeen years just like clockwork and oh the racket they'd make in the neighborhood. Thousands of 'em, millions probably, would buzz and buzz, and the sound would waver in volume for a bit, then it'd all die down for a rest. You could hear the ones in the next streets winding down off in the distance, too. It was magic back then, especially in the days before we closed up all the houses tight with air conditioning all summer.
Anyways, when the bugs came out of the ground, they'd have to molt and you'd find these thumb-sized cicada shaped carcasses clinging to the bark of the trees in the back yard, with clear little bubbles where the eyes went, kind of like the Plexiglas gunner's bubbles you'd see on B-17's in old World War II movies. And each shell would have a big split down the back. Never caught one emerging, but we'd collect the best carcasses and save 'em for torturing the girls at school in the fall. Must've worked -- Martha married me in the next cicada year.
The city's Department of Sanitation will schedule a pickup of the empty giant cicada shells probably on Tuesday and Fridays. I think they composted them the last time, after running them through one of those chipper/shredder things they tow behind a dump truck. I don't want to even think about the mess when the adults start dying off after they've mated and made more giant cicada babies.
The ones which'll come out of the ground in the next giant cicada year.
***
On Tuesday I ran into my first of the just-chartered-in Japanese tourists. Practically knocked one over, coming round the Jeff-Pilot Insurance building. It was probably my fault. Not getting much sleep with all the damned cicadas all the time, and my car is tore up from where one of Greg Crenshaw's brood came out and collapsed part of my driveway and my insurance company is fighting Greg's. Plus I had to come downtown to City Hall to get a building permit to put in a carport on the side of the house -- tired of the berries from the trees baking into a sticky mess on the car as the summer sun and humidity do their worst. You have to park away from City Hall, because the meters right in front are set to expire in oddly short time intervals, just to make you get a parking ticket. I'm smart enough to avoid their mean little games.
Anyway, here was this man with a Sony Multicam peering straight up the side of the tall building. Naturally, I had to look, too. Big cicada slowly climbing up -- about a thirty-footer. It sure was impressive. Probably gave some of the office workers a scare. Can you imagine glancing out the window to see a giant cicada go by?
The Greensboro Chamber of Commerce keeps trying to remind us about the millions of dollars these tourists are bringing in, but I'm just seeing the damage and destruction everywhere. And all the racket! The cicada above let loose its rattle. Then I heard a diesel engine gunned and the beep-beep-beep as an earthmover backed up while trying to level a hole in the big city flower beds across the street. Then brakes squealed followed by sickening THUNK as one car stopped suddenly to avoid a cicada in the road and the next car plowed into the first car. I tell you, the whole damned city is beginning to fall apart.
Somewhere in the world there are places that not only have never heard of giant cicadas, the ground won't support 'em. Like Reykjavik. In Iceland. I saw it on The History Channel last night. Just before the cable went out when one of Greg Crenshaw's bugs got caught up with the wires at ten o'clock at night.
And right in the middle of that thought is when I saw it. Right at the edge of the park. Two black squirrels dragging a revolver into the bushes. Damn! I didn't know the squirrel gangs had made it south of Gaithersburg. Pretty soon it's going to become a Wild West shoot-out in the Gate City and people are going to get hit by stray bullets. It's inevitable -- the damned squirrels can't shoot all that straight. The birthplace of Dolley Madison and O. Henry is going to go the sorry way of Pittsburgh and Columbus, I can see it now.
Two blocks over I saw another tourist bus disgorge a couple dozen more Japanese, gawking and pointing and taking pictures up a storm.
"Godzilla!" the tourist I almost ran into said to me, pointing up with a big old smile on his face. "Ookii Gojira semi no mushi."
He seemed pretty excited. I smiled and bowed back to him, and tried to be polite. But all the time I'm thinking, if they like 'em so much, why don't the Japanese just take all these damned Godzilla bugs back with them when they go? Finally bring all those movies and manga to real life in their own damned backyards.
Can't they? Please?
I pulled out my cellphone to call Martha and tell her to start packing. Maybe we can still move to Reykjavik before everyone else gets the same bright idea. Pressed and held the "2" key to speed dial home.
Boo-doo-WEE. I'm sorry, your call on the network cannot be completed at this time due to disruptions in the network's tower and cable systems during the current cicada weather. Please try again in a few hours.
When I get home, we're heading straight out on Bryan Boulevard, right to the PTI Airport. And taking the first available flight anywhere.
God's truth, officer, that's why I was speeding. It's time to get the hell out of here.
Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo MI. He is also working on the Great American Science Fiction Romantic Epic and attended (with several other LiveJournal'ists) the 2004 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. He strongly believes that there would be less trouble in the world today if the People In Charge would've just asked him first, before doing something really stupid, annoying, inconvenient or threatening to end All Life As We Know It... but Dr. Phil has no strong opinions on anything.
Life used to be a lot simpler when the cicadas came out of the ground only once every seventeen years -- you could depend on things like that. Not anymore. Not since they dropped those nasty radiological dirty bombs on the East Coast. We didn't get hit directly here in North Carolina, but you could say we've been dealing with fallout of sorts for years.
The cicada which clung to the fake Grecian column on my front stoop, the column Martha insisted on putting up when we redid the siding a couple of years ago after I retired, was one of the smaller ones. But its glassy red eyes, big as the carriage light globes on either side of my neighbor's front door, why the damn stupid thing just sort of stared at me while I got the mail from the box.
"Martha!" I said when I got back in the house. "Will you get on the net and find out when those cicadas are supposed to come back? We've got a seven-footer on the front of the house."
"In a minute, dear," came the reply.
"Never mind," I said. "I'll do it."
I dialed up the National Mutant Biologicals Database and sure enough, Greensboro NC was listed in red for an outbreak of giant cicadas. Guess I don't have to worry about making that suggested second application of Scott's Turfbuilder Weed-n-Feed this weekend, if car-sized insects are going to crawl out of my lawn.
Of course, we don't have it bad compared to some. I hear the gangs of killer squirrels have made it almost to Chicago now. Who'd have thought the red and black little furry buggers would join forces to fight their treacherous gray cousins? I just wish they'd find the fool who taught squirrels how to shoot so they can try-n-fry his ass. It's possible the liberalistas, torn between opposing the death penalty and opposing guns, might even approve. We really don't need gun toting animals on the loose. And the vampire rabbits out in the hills of West Virginia? That's just plain wrong.
If I hadn't seen the first one, I would've completely forgotten about the cicadas in my lawn until that perky little newsgirl on WXII -- The First News Of The Greensboro-Winston Salem-High Point Triad -- came on and reminded us. They do so love to tell us the bad news while grinning and smiling. But now I've actually seen one, my first thought was to go next door and pester Greg Crenshaw.
"Yo, Greg!" I said.
"Oh... hi, Red," my sometimes neighbor said, looking up sheepishly from under the hood of his Buick. The man hasn't figured out how to fix his car ever since they stopped making carburetors and possibly never will.
"You hear about the cicadas coming out again?" I asked.
The momentary look of fear on Greg Crenshaw's face was just about worth any price of admission.
"I seem to recall you moved a bunch of them there shrubs and trees a coupla years ago," I added helpfully.
"Yeah," Greg said, knowing what I was getting at.
"Seems to me you better figure out where those little buggers got to," I said. Me? I'm not so stupid as Greg Crenshaw, not when it comes to cicadas. Of course, I don't go gallivanting all around the damn world all the time on business like Greg Crenshaw either. Or bragging about it hither and yon.
It was about then, I watched the one I saw earlier climb off my roof and onto that poor, sorry looking dogwood tree which had all the ice damage last winter. A couple of small branches cracked and fell, and I made sure not to laugh as old Greg ran into his house to call the lawn radar people and get his cicadas mapped. Bet he'd have to pay premium dollar to get the job done now they were emerging.
Sounding sort of like a sick chain saw starting up, my giant cicada began to sing for a mate. I did not stay to see if it found one. But if it did, I'm kind of hoping it takes out that dogwood. I know it's sacrilege in these here parts, but I never did like dogwood trees. They're too low to mow under and those pretty little blossoms everyone goes gah-gah over are only nice for a few days, then they fall into brown mush on the ground. And you just can't rake their damned leaves -- they just sort of jump in place and slip between the tines of the rake. So I was kind of hoping a cicada would come along, split the trunk in half and take that sorry old dogwood out. Put it out of its misery -- and mine.
Back when I was a kid, of course, we had the regular cicadas -- the ones my granddaddy always called seventeen-year locusts, even though they weren't rightly locusts. They'd come out of the ground every seventeen years just like clockwork and oh the racket they'd make in the neighborhood. Thousands of 'em, millions probably, would buzz and buzz, and the sound would waver in volume for a bit, then it'd all die down for a rest. You could hear the ones in the next streets winding down off in the distance, too. It was magic back then, especially in the days before we closed up all the houses tight with air conditioning all summer.
Anyways, when the bugs came out of the ground, they'd have to molt and you'd find these thumb-sized cicada shaped carcasses clinging to the bark of the trees in the back yard, with clear little bubbles where the eyes went, kind of like the Plexiglas gunner's bubbles you'd see on B-17's in old World War II movies. And each shell would have a big split down the back. Never caught one emerging, but we'd collect the best carcasses and save 'em for torturing the girls at school in the fall. Must've worked -- Martha married me in the next cicada year.
The city's Department of Sanitation will schedule a pickup of the empty giant cicada shells probably on Tuesday and Fridays. I think they composted them the last time, after running them through one of those chipper/shredder things they tow behind a dump truck. I don't want to even think about the mess when the adults start dying off after they've mated and made more giant cicada babies.
The ones which'll come out of the ground in the next giant cicada year.
***
On Tuesday I ran into my first of the just-chartered-in Japanese tourists. Practically knocked one over, coming round the Jeff-Pilot Insurance building. It was probably my fault. Not getting much sleep with all the damned cicadas all the time, and my car is tore up from where one of Greg Crenshaw's brood came out and collapsed part of my driveway and my insurance company is fighting Greg's. Plus I had to come downtown to City Hall to get a building permit to put in a carport on the side of the house -- tired of the berries from the trees baking into a sticky mess on the car as the summer sun and humidity do their worst. You have to park away from City Hall, because the meters right in front are set to expire in oddly short time intervals, just to make you get a parking ticket. I'm smart enough to avoid their mean little games.
Anyway, here was this man with a Sony Multicam peering straight up the side of the tall building. Naturally, I had to look, too. Big cicada slowly climbing up -- about a thirty-footer. It sure was impressive. Probably gave some of the office workers a scare. Can you imagine glancing out the window to see a giant cicada go by?
The Greensboro Chamber of Commerce keeps trying to remind us about the millions of dollars these tourists are bringing in, but I'm just seeing the damage and destruction everywhere. And all the racket! The cicada above let loose its rattle. Then I heard a diesel engine gunned and the beep-beep-beep as an earthmover backed up while trying to level a hole in the big city flower beds across the street. Then brakes squealed followed by sickening THUNK as one car stopped suddenly to avoid a cicada in the road and the next car plowed into the first car. I tell you, the whole damned city is beginning to fall apart.
Somewhere in the world there are places that not only have never heard of giant cicadas, the ground won't support 'em. Like Reykjavik. In Iceland. I saw it on The History Channel last night. Just before the cable went out when one of Greg Crenshaw's bugs got caught up with the wires at ten o'clock at night.
And right in the middle of that thought is when I saw it. Right at the edge of the park. Two black squirrels dragging a revolver into the bushes. Damn! I didn't know the squirrel gangs had made it south of Gaithersburg. Pretty soon it's going to become a Wild West shoot-out in the Gate City and people are going to get hit by stray bullets. It's inevitable -- the damned squirrels can't shoot all that straight. The birthplace of Dolley Madison and O. Henry is going to go the sorry way of Pittsburgh and Columbus, I can see it now.
Two blocks over I saw another tourist bus disgorge a couple dozen more Japanese, gawking and pointing and taking pictures up a storm.
"Godzilla!" the tourist I almost ran into said to me, pointing up with a big old smile on his face. "Ookii Gojira semi no mushi."
He seemed pretty excited. I smiled and bowed back to him, and tried to be polite. But all the time I'm thinking, if they like 'em so much, why don't the Japanese just take all these damned Godzilla bugs back with them when they go? Finally bring all those movies and manga to real life in their own damned backyards.
Can't they? Please?
I pulled out my cellphone to call Martha and tell her to start packing. Maybe we can still move to Reykjavik before everyone else gets the same bright idea. Pressed and held the "2" key to speed dial home.
Boo-doo-WEE. I'm sorry, your call on the network cannot be completed at this time due to disruptions in the network's tower and cable systems during the current cicada weather. Please try again in a few hours.
When I get home, we're heading straight out on Bryan Boulevard, right to the PTI Airport. And taking the first available flight anywhere.
God's truth, officer, that's why I was speeding. It's time to get the hell out of here.
Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo MI. He is also working on the Great American Science Fiction Romantic Epic and attended (with several other LiveJournal'ists) the 2004 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. He strongly believes that there would be less trouble in the world today if the People In Charge would've just asked him first, before doing something really stupid, annoying, inconvenient or threatening to end All Life As We Know It... but Dr. Phil has no strong opinions on anything.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Cryobarbecue
by Frank Roger
A beam of sharp sunlight hits my eyelids, pierces its way through : there's my free wake-up call, delivered daily at sunrise. I open my eyes, stretch my cramped legs and arms, and crawl into an upright position, groaning, shaking off the last vestiges of sleep. Even at this early hour, people are already on the move, going to work, clutching briefcases, their faces contorted into their usual no-time-to-lose-expression, moving hurriedly but making sure not to trip over my body and my encampment made of cardboard and discarded newspapers.
About time I get out of the way, before the subway entrance grows dangerously bustling with activity and I would run the risk of getting trampled. But I'm clever: I know where to set up camp at night, I know where exactly the rising sun will send down its slanting beams of light, so I make sure my eyes are in their path. It's a flawless method, and it's absolutely free! It took me quite a while to hone it to my present level of perfection, though.
I gather my meagre belongings, and move to the side of the subway entrance, resting my back against the graffiti-smeared wall, allowing the quickly swelling stream of passengers to flow past unhindered.
Deep down in the back of my head, something is winking on and off, trying to draw my attention to a fact that just has to be of tremendous importance, but I can't seem to grasp it right now. Wait a minute, wait a minute! Could it be...?
Well, there's only one way to find out!
I clasp the tattered bag containing all my belongings under my arm, and go up to the surface, my legs still a bit wobbly. My empty stomach isn't exactly helping much, my haze-clouded mind even less. I know there's a newsstand close to the subway entrance. I emerge in full daylight, and I stand still for a few moments, allowing the light to wash all over my body, an invigorating shower of warmth and brightness. Then I head for the newsstand, its decoration of magazines flaunting their gaudy and garish covers waving invitingly in the wind. But it's not the magazines I need to see, the dazzling toothpaste smiles gorgeous women flash at me leave me stone cold, as do blitzy sports cars, shiny futuristic computer hardware, exotic travel pictures and even voluptuous bare-breasted girls from silicon heaven. What I need is one glance at a newspaper, one fleeting glance.
The man behind the counter notices me, understands right away why I'm heading for him, and as my presence might prove bad for business he shouts what I need to know.
"Hey, pal, it's your lucky day all right. Last day of the month. March thirty-first, to be precise. So don't come any closer now, go where you're expected. I'm sure you don't wanna be late, do you?"
I nod, wave at him gratefully, and turn around. I was right: last day of the month! That means best day of the month! Off I go, my wobbly legs and misty mind forgotten. But not my empty stomach. But then again, that problem is about to be dealt with. Last day of the month! Long live rich people! Long live fat rich people! Long live fat rich people who don't wanna die! Off I go, cavorting like a madman.
It takes me half an hour to reach Thomas More Square, in the heart of the business district. On any other day of the month I wouldn't exactly be welcome here, but today my presence will be tolerated. Many homeless guys and winos and society's other dropouts are already gathered here, and more are bound to join the crowd.
We exchange warm greetings, even though most of us don't really know one another. We embrace total strangers, slap each other on the back, some even hug and kiss. This is after all a day of celebration, of happiness, of fulfilment. But, just like on any previous occasion, I gaze around and wonder at the disparity between the opulent, baroque buildings circling the Square and the motley crew gathered in its midst : this is the time and place where both ends of society's spectrum meet in perfect unison... only to be flung back to their respective extremes tomorrow, until the next day of celebration dawns on us.
Some of us wait patiently, others sing and dance with wild abandon, while the preparations for the great event are being made. Our attention is riveted to one, and only one of the towering, overwhelming marvels of dazzling architecture gracing the area: the majestic building of the Eternal Life Cryogenics Corporation, and the scaffold structure erected in front of its massive entrance, a sculpture of glass and metal of rare beauty, sparkling and scintillating as if with a life of its own.
The gathered crowd erupts into cheers and applause as a man in a red-and-white uniform appears on the scaffold, and the name of the organisation he represents is chanted as if this were some religious ceremony: "Intensive Care, Intensive Care,..."
When the ovation has died down, the man grabs a microphone and addresses us. "Welcome, dear friends, welcome on this last day of March. As has become a tradition, Intensive Care will once again provide an invaluable service to those among you who are deprived of the most basic…"
Once again cheers and shouts go up, making it impossible to understand everything the man says, but who needs to hear his words? We know what he's saying, what he's repeating month after month. Do the good people of Intensive Care (God bless their souls) think we're guilty, and our guilt has to be eased? Come on, fellas! So these rich guys paid huge amounts of money to be frozen in liquid nitrogen (or is it ammonia? or their own urine?) until they can be resurrected and resume their spoiled-brats' lives, and now a few of them are again (after a mild contribution by Intensive Care to the ever-so-slightly-corrupt Cryogenics Corporation) pulled out of their tanks (coffins?) to be thawed and sliced and roasted (and well-seasoned!) and distributed free among us poor guys. So what? We're not guilty, just hungry! Let lunch come our way! Pick some really fat ones this month, please. Many of these rich guys were fat, and that's how we like 'em best.
"...and yet," the man continues his sermon, like a preacher desperately trying to convert a flock of heathens, "the people who are to be sacrificed presently are not being cheated. Little did they know the technology to thaw them without causing extensive and irreparable brain damage was never to be developed, leaving them doomed to remain frozen forever..."
Who cares about brain damage, pal? They've got more than enough body parts that are bigger and tastier, believe me!
"...the eternal life they paid for will not be within their reach anyway... unless one considers this ultimate sacrifice, this yielding of their mortal flesh as food for their less affluent fellow men a form of resurrection. So in a sense, they will live on in your bodies, and hence one could posit they achieve thus what they paid for, albeit in a way different from the one originally intended..."
Applause and cheers swell into a deafening roar as three bathtub-like contraptions are rolled out of the Cryo Corp building. Through the din I can catch a few words, while the three chunks of meat are being prepared for the final phase of this gastro-religious ritual.
"Brothers, sisters, think of the symbolism this event is laden with while you eat. These people's riches have by no means been spent idly. Their highly cherished dreams are about to come true. They will live forever inside all of you. Thank the good people of Eternal Life Cryogenics Corporation for parting with three more of their clients, thank our sponsors for making this Intensive Care action possible, thank all of you for coming, and... be sure to be back here on the last day of April!"
And now those smells are reaching our nostrils, our jaws and palates tingle with anticipation, our hands tremble with expectancy. Stomachs growl, saliva drips, teeth are eager to sink into tender meat. Cryolunch is coming! Cryobarbecue is here again! Long live rich people! Long live fat rich people! Long live fat rich people who don't wanna die! And you bet we'll be back on the last day of April, you bet...
Frank Roger is a Belgian author with more than 500 short story publications (including a few short novels) to his credit in more than 20 languages.
A beam of sharp sunlight hits my eyelids, pierces its way through : there's my free wake-up call, delivered daily at sunrise. I open my eyes, stretch my cramped legs and arms, and crawl into an upright position, groaning, shaking off the last vestiges of sleep. Even at this early hour, people are already on the move, going to work, clutching briefcases, their faces contorted into their usual no-time-to-lose-expression, moving hurriedly but making sure not to trip over my body and my encampment made of cardboard and discarded newspapers.
About time I get out of the way, before the subway entrance grows dangerously bustling with activity and I would run the risk of getting trampled. But I'm clever: I know where to set up camp at night, I know where exactly the rising sun will send down its slanting beams of light, so I make sure my eyes are in their path. It's a flawless method, and it's absolutely free! It took me quite a while to hone it to my present level of perfection, though.
I gather my meagre belongings, and move to the side of the subway entrance, resting my back against the graffiti-smeared wall, allowing the quickly swelling stream of passengers to flow past unhindered.
Deep down in the back of my head, something is winking on and off, trying to draw my attention to a fact that just has to be of tremendous importance, but I can't seem to grasp it right now. Wait a minute, wait a minute! Could it be...?
Well, there's only one way to find out!
I clasp the tattered bag containing all my belongings under my arm, and go up to the surface, my legs still a bit wobbly. My empty stomach isn't exactly helping much, my haze-clouded mind even less. I know there's a newsstand close to the subway entrance. I emerge in full daylight, and I stand still for a few moments, allowing the light to wash all over my body, an invigorating shower of warmth and brightness. Then I head for the newsstand, its decoration of magazines flaunting their gaudy and garish covers waving invitingly in the wind. But it's not the magazines I need to see, the dazzling toothpaste smiles gorgeous women flash at me leave me stone cold, as do blitzy sports cars, shiny futuristic computer hardware, exotic travel pictures and even voluptuous bare-breasted girls from silicon heaven. What I need is one glance at a newspaper, one fleeting glance.
The man behind the counter notices me, understands right away why I'm heading for him, and as my presence might prove bad for business he shouts what I need to know.
"Hey, pal, it's your lucky day all right. Last day of the month. March thirty-first, to be precise. So don't come any closer now, go where you're expected. I'm sure you don't wanna be late, do you?"
I nod, wave at him gratefully, and turn around. I was right: last day of the month! That means best day of the month! Off I go, my wobbly legs and misty mind forgotten. But not my empty stomach. But then again, that problem is about to be dealt with. Last day of the month! Long live rich people! Long live fat rich people! Long live fat rich people who don't wanna die! Off I go, cavorting like a madman.
It takes me half an hour to reach Thomas More Square, in the heart of the business district. On any other day of the month I wouldn't exactly be welcome here, but today my presence will be tolerated. Many homeless guys and winos and society's other dropouts are already gathered here, and more are bound to join the crowd.
We exchange warm greetings, even though most of us don't really know one another. We embrace total strangers, slap each other on the back, some even hug and kiss. This is after all a day of celebration, of happiness, of fulfilment. But, just like on any previous occasion, I gaze around and wonder at the disparity between the opulent, baroque buildings circling the Square and the motley crew gathered in its midst : this is the time and place where both ends of society's spectrum meet in perfect unison... only to be flung back to their respective extremes tomorrow, until the next day of celebration dawns on us.
Some of us wait patiently, others sing and dance with wild abandon, while the preparations for the great event are being made. Our attention is riveted to one, and only one of the towering, overwhelming marvels of dazzling architecture gracing the area: the majestic building of the Eternal Life Cryogenics Corporation, and the scaffold structure erected in front of its massive entrance, a sculpture of glass and metal of rare beauty, sparkling and scintillating as if with a life of its own.
The gathered crowd erupts into cheers and applause as a man in a red-and-white uniform appears on the scaffold, and the name of the organisation he represents is chanted as if this were some religious ceremony: "Intensive Care, Intensive Care,..."
When the ovation has died down, the man grabs a microphone and addresses us. "Welcome, dear friends, welcome on this last day of March. As has become a tradition, Intensive Care will once again provide an invaluable service to those among you who are deprived of the most basic…"
Once again cheers and shouts go up, making it impossible to understand everything the man says, but who needs to hear his words? We know what he's saying, what he's repeating month after month. Do the good people of Intensive Care (God bless their souls) think we're guilty, and our guilt has to be eased? Come on, fellas! So these rich guys paid huge amounts of money to be frozen in liquid nitrogen (or is it ammonia? or their own urine?) until they can be resurrected and resume their spoiled-brats' lives, and now a few of them are again (after a mild contribution by Intensive Care to the ever-so-slightly-corrupt Cryogenics Corporation) pulled out of their tanks (coffins?) to be thawed and sliced and roasted (and well-seasoned!) and distributed free among us poor guys. So what? We're not guilty, just hungry! Let lunch come our way! Pick some really fat ones this month, please. Many of these rich guys were fat, and that's how we like 'em best.
"...and yet," the man continues his sermon, like a preacher desperately trying to convert a flock of heathens, "the people who are to be sacrificed presently are not being cheated. Little did they know the technology to thaw them without causing extensive and irreparable brain damage was never to be developed, leaving them doomed to remain frozen forever..."
Who cares about brain damage, pal? They've got more than enough body parts that are bigger and tastier, believe me!
"...the eternal life they paid for will not be within their reach anyway... unless one considers this ultimate sacrifice, this yielding of their mortal flesh as food for their less affluent fellow men a form of resurrection. So in a sense, they will live on in your bodies, and hence one could posit they achieve thus what they paid for, albeit in a way different from the one originally intended..."
Applause and cheers swell into a deafening roar as three bathtub-like contraptions are rolled out of the Cryo Corp building. Through the din I can catch a few words, while the three chunks of meat are being prepared for the final phase of this gastro-religious ritual.
"Brothers, sisters, think of the symbolism this event is laden with while you eat. These people's riches have by no means been spent idly. Their highly cherished dreams are about to come true. They will live forever inside all of you. Thank the good people of Eternal Life Cryogenics Corporation for parting with three more of their clients, thank our sponsors for making this Intensive Care action possible, thank all of you for coming, and... be sure to be back here on the last day of April!"
And now those smells are reaching our nostrils, our jaws and palates tingle with anticipation, our hands tremble with expectancy. Stomachs growl, saliva drips, teeth are eager to sink into tender meat. Cryolunch is coming! Cryobarbecue is here again! Long live rich people! Long live fat rich people! Long live fat rich people who don't wanna die! And you bet we'll be back on the last day of April, you bet...
Frank Roger is a Belgian author with more than 500 short story publications (including a few short novels) to his credit in more than 20 languages.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Southern Writers
By Charles Langley
Let me tell you about Southern writers. They are different from you, and from everyone else. For one thing Southerners start living life much earlier than other people. Twelve year old boys operate farm tractors. Fourteen year old girls raise their siblings and keep house while their mother joins Dad in the fields. So when you have a Southern writer and one the same age from any other section of the country, the one from the South likely has more years of experience to write about.
Then there's the thing with words. Southerners have love affairs with words. People sometimes think they speak slowly because they think slower or because they are naturally lazy. Not so. They speak slower because their love of the words is so great that they can't stand to part with them. They caress them, massage them, polish them and linger over them lovingly before allowing them to go on their way with a lilt and an inflection found nowhere else in our country.
They care about things deeply and when they talk about them they use words unfamiliar to you. Sometime these words are right out of Elizabethan speech or are borrowed from Shakespeare or from works that Shakespeare borrowed from. Other times they are brand new, coined for the occasion, but perfectly understandable because they are crafted to fit the context in which they are used.
My mother used language which, when I was an ignorant, callow youth, I took to be the result of lack of higher education. When I later saw the same phrases in Shakespeare or Marlowe I was amazed that she had allowed them their use. She never came up short for a word to express any scene or any emotion because she so readily invented her own. "Any damn fool can use words they get from a book but it takes a fine mind to design words that are needed and will be understandable to anyone who reads them, she said." Others have said similar things, but I would bet that my mother beat them to it.
Southern writers have a way of putting a distinctive twist on their writing. Others write about a subject. The Southerner will write around it. Like a singer sings the note while a bel canto singer sings all around the note, the Southern writer will go so far afield in his or her embellishment of the writing that the meaning lies not in the lines but between the lines.
Actually, most Southern writers are not writers at all, but story-tellers who just happen to tell the story in writing. So you can ordinarily look for a rhythm and flow in the writing not often found in that of writers from different areas.
William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe wrote in sentences that seemed to run on for half a page. It wasn't that they didn't know the ban on run-on sentences. I'm told it was because they had the habit of taking a sip of the elixir of life at the end of each sentence, and if the sentences were too short, so would be the story for they couldn't survive very many hours of short sentences.
I once asked a novelist friend of mine who had similar writing habits "How long is your latest book?"
"About a quart and a pint," he told me. I read the book. He was only off by two sips and a swallow.
Some time ago I watched an interview with an author who happened to be head of the Atlanta, Georgia, bureau of the New York Times.
He said he was insulted when people assumed that his grits and gravy speech patterns and his down-home vocabulary were affectations designed to make him a marketable commodity. "My ignorance is just as genuine as anyones," he said, not necessarily in those words. I'm not sure I believe him. I think he goes back to his home state university about once in three years to take a refresher course in "Illiteracy 101" and renew his popular appeal. Having everyone underrate your intelligence and learning can be helpful. You have a head start when no-one around you feels threatened by your intelligence so they just ignore your presence while you sneak around them to the head of the promotion list.
Me? My ignorance and illiteracy will hold their own against anybody's. They're as genuine as the snake-skin belt I have that's made out of plastic. Can't be many things more authentic than genuine plastic snakeskin.
Since returning to writing five years ago after a fifty-nine year hiatus, Charles Langley has published over one hundred and twenty five short stories, poems, or articles in print magazines, ezines and books. Two years ago Gannett Newspapers gave full-page, nationwide coverage to his time as cub reporter at the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in Flemington, NJ in 1935 for the kidnap/murder the infant son of Colonel Charles Lindbergh.
Let me tell you about Southern writers. They are different from you, and from everyone else. For one thing Southerners start living life much earlier than other people. Twelve year old boys operate farm tractors. Fourteen year old girls raise their siblings and keep house while their mother joins Dad in the fields. So when you have a Southern writer and one the same age from any other section of the country, the one from the South likely has more years of experience to write about.
Then there's the thing with words. Southerners have love affairs with words. People sometimes think they speak slowly because they think slower or because they are naturally lazy. Not so. They speak slower because their love of the words is so great that they can't stand to part with them. They caress them, massage them, polish them and linger over them lovingly before allowing them to go on their way with a lilt and an inflection found nowhere else in our country.
They care about things deeply and when they talk about them they use words unfamiliar to you. Sometime these words are right out of Elizabethan speech or are borrowed from Shakespeare or from works that Shakespeare borrowed from. Other times they are brand new, coined for the occasion, but perfectly understandable because they are crafted to fit the context in which they are used.
My mother used language which, when I was an ignorant, callow youth, I took to be the result of lack of higher education. When I later saw the same phrases in Shakespeare or Marlowe I was amazed that she had allowed them their use. She never came up short for a word to express any scene or any emotion because she so readily invented her own. "Any damn fool can use words they get from a book but it takes a fine mind to design words that are needed and will be understandable to anyone who reads them, she said." Others have said similar things, but I would bet that my mother beat them to it.
Southern writers have a way of putting a distinctive twist on their writing. Others write about a subject. The Southerner will write around it. Like a singer sings the note while a bel canto singer sings all around the note, the Southern writer will go so far afield in his or her embellishment of the writing that the meaning lies not in the lines but between the lines.
Actually, most Southern writers are not writers at all, but story-tellers who just happen to tell the story in writing. So you can ordinarily look for a rhythm and flow in the writing not often found in that of writers from different areas.
William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe wrote in sentences that seemed to run on for half a page. It wasn't that they didn't know the ban on run-on sentences. I'm told it was because they had the habit of taking a sip of the elixir of life at the end of each sentence, and if the sentences were too short, so would be the story for they couldn't survive very many hours of short sentences.
I once asked a novelist friend of mine who had similar writing habits "How long is your latest book?"
"About a quart and a pint," he told me. I read the book. He was only off by two sips and a swallow.
Some time ago I watched an interview with an author who happened to be head of the Atlanta, Georgia, bureau of the New York Times.
He said he was insulted when people assumed that his grits and gravy speech patterns and his down-home vocabulary were affectations designed to make him a marketable commodity. "My ignorance is just as genuine as anyones," he said, not necessarily in those words. I'm not sure I believe him. I think he goes back to his home state university about once in three years to take a refresher course in "Illiteracy 101" and renew his popular appeal. Having everyone underrate your intelligence and learning can be helpful. You have a head start when no-one around you feels threatened by your intelligence so they just ignore your presence while you sneak around them to the head of the promotion list.
Me? My ignorance and illiteracy will hold their own against anybody's. They're as genuine as the snake-skin belt I have that's made out of plastic. Can't be many things more authentic than genuine plastic snakeskin.
Since returning to writing five years ago after a fifty-nine year hiatus, Charles Langley has published over one hundred and twenty five short stories, poems, or articles in print magazines, ezines and books. Two years ago Gannett Newspapers gave full-page, nationwide coverage to his time as cub reporter at the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in Flemington, NJ in 1935 for the kidnap/murder the infant son of Colonel Charles Lindbergh.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Three Rams of the Beckwith
by D.N. Drake
She mixed the biscuit batter slowly in a reflective metal bowl. Her eyes were nowhere special, they just found something to do as her mind went to work.
Gnawing and gnashing at angry images. They’d been put there. She never wanted this life.
“Hey sweetie.” A man in a dark grey suit came in and gave the back of her head a kiss.
Yes, the back of my head. Don’t look me in the eye like a human.
“Work really smacked my ass today.”
She kept on stirring. I’m peaceful. I’m alone in here. He’s out there.
A bird swooped and hit the kitchen window in front of her. It dropped to the ground outside and rustled down through the bushes.
“Damn, that scared me!” Her husband stood up on his toes and leaned passed her to glance out the window, “Poor little guy.”
Blood flushed her face like she was hanging upside-down. Her stirring motion became that of a loose jointed animatronic doll.
“Should I go check to see if...”
A cutting board hit him in the face. He stumbled backwards into the stainless steel island. His eyes tried to rationalize the pain.
Again! The board hit him in the face. This time his nose was bent sideways. A red ooze came from his visible nostril. He wiped it and looked at his wife as her arm stretched back far over her head.
Again! The board broke in half with the final hit and the mans head was flung back on his neck like a hinged counter-top. The body fell forward onto its knees before hitting the linoleum.
The woman dropped the remaining bit of the cutting board to the ground. She walked out from the kitchen into the living room and sat at the piano.
A tune, she thought. Her fingers found the keys that had been burned into her mind so many years ago.
“Play the song you wench! Play it!”
Moonlight sonata. It eased no tensions nor raised any questions. It kept it the moment at bay. She looked up at the Wysocki on the wall. What a whimsical world that man lived in. Where were his dead birds and bludgeoned men? Where? Maybe on the other sides of the buildings.
The phone rang. She stood from the piano bench and picked it up.
“Mrs. Beckwith?”
She didn’t answer.
“Mrs. Beckwith?”
She remained silent.
“Mrs. Beckwith! Answer me!”
She hung up the phone. What? What do you want, she thought. She stepped to her dark leather sofa and sat, hands folded on her modestly clad legs. A house-dress with a flower print. She turned her neck to face the big picture window to the left.
The bird. It was in the middle of the floor and moving ever so slowly. One slight motion of the wing. Slide. One slight motion of the other wing. Slide. The neck of it was twisted so its head was backwards. It came closer. Closer to her feet.
“What?” she shouted.
It stopped and turned its broken head to look at her.
“What!” she shrieked as her legs curled up under her.
Its beak opened slowly as if it was going to utter a reply, but Prometheus, the family cat, snatched up the bird as he passed through the living room.
D.N. Drake recently sold work to PostScripts SF, FoliateOak, and 6S. He is also the editor of The Courier, a quarterly PDFmagazine.
She mixed the biscuit batter slowly in a reflective metal bowl. Her eyes were nowhere special, they just found something to do as her mind went to work.
Gnawing and gnashing at angry images. They’d been put there. She never wanted this life.
“Hey sweetie.” A man in a dark grey suit came in and gave the back of her head a kiss.
Yes, the back of my head. Don’t look me in the eye like a human.
“Work really smacked my ass today.”
She kept on stirring. I’m peaceful. I’m alone in here. He’s out there.
A bird swooped and hit the kitchen window in front of her. It dropped to the ground outside and rustled down through the bushes.
“Damn, that scared me!” Her husband stood up on his toes and leaned passed her to glance out the window, “Poor little guy.”
Blood flushed her face like she was hanging upside-down. Her stirring motion became that of a loose jointed animatronic doll.
“Should I go check to see if...”
A cutting board hit him in the face. He stumbled backwards into the stainless steel island. His eyes tried to rationalize the pain.
Again! The board hit him in the face. This time his nose was bent sideways. A red ooze came from his visible nostril. He wiped it and looked at his wife as her arm stretched back far over her head.
Again! The board broke in half with the final hit and the mans head was flung back on his neck like a hinged counter-top. The body fell forward onto its knees before hitting the linoleum.
The woman dropped the remaining bit of the cutting board to the ground. She walked out from the kitchen into the living room and sat at the piano.
A tune, she thought. Her fingers found the keys that had been burned into her mind so many years ago.
“Play the song you wench! Play it!”
Moonlight sonata. It eased no tensions nor raised any questions. It kept it the moment at bay. She looked up at the Wysocki on the wall. What a whimsical world that man lived in. Where were his dead birds and bludgeoned men? Where? Maybe on the other sides of the buildings.
The phone rang. She stood from the piano bench and picked it up.
“Mrs. Beckwith?”
She didn’t answer.
“Mrs. Beckwith?”
She remained silent.
“Mrs. Beckwith! Answer me!”
She hung up the phone. What? What do you want, she thought. She stepped to her dark leather sofa and sat, hands folded on her modestly clad legs. A house-dress with a flower print. She turned her neck to face the big picture window to the left.
The bird. It was in the middle of the floor and moving ever so slowly. One slight motion of the wing. Slide. One slight motion of the other wing. Slide. The neck of it was twisted so its head was backwards. It came closer. Closer to her feet.
“What?” she shouted.
It stopped and turned its broken head to look at her.
“What!” she shrieked as her legs curled up under her.
Its beak opened slowly as if it was going to utter a reply, but Prometheus, the family cat, snatched up the bird as he passed through the living room.
D.N. Drake recently sold work to PostScripts SF, FoliateOak, and 6S. He is also the editor of The Courier, a quarterly PDFmagazine.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Misty Morning Snow by T.J. McIntyre
The above photo was taken by the editor in February of last year while on vacation near The Great Smoky Mountains National Park with his family.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
You Write It. I Publish It. -- Question #1
Southern Fried Weirdness Online is starting a new interactive feature. Every few months a new question will appear. Please email your responses of under 200 words to rumples@hotmail.com with Question #1 in the subject line. Every submission recieved before February 1st will be posted together as a weekly feature on March 1st.
Here's the question:
In your opinion, what makes the Southeastern United States such an ideal setting for speculative fiction?
Here's the question:
In your opinion, what makes the Southeastern United States such an ideal setting for speculative fiction?
Sunday, December 23, 2007
The Present
By Thomas Head
A light appeared in the backyard.
Nickolas Whaley crumpled his napkin, crumpled the hell out of it.
“What the Hell?” he muttered.
The backyard maples seemed to welcome it down, down past their bows until it came to rest in the clearing where he had been bullshitting his wife about putting up a gazebo. He dropped a spoon laden with gravy.
Mildred was startled by the splash.
“What is it Walt?”
“I ain’t got no clue,” he replied.
He adjusted his glasses. Examination only muddled his thoughts. The object hovered a foot off the grass. Silly as it seemed, it resembled a glowing boob.
“Well whatever it is, you’ll be rubbing them gravy stains outta my linens,” she said.
“There’s a big floating titty in the backyard.”
Mildred flinched before setting a fearsome stare on him. Her eyes became angry slits.
She turned her head, craned her neck to look out the window informed him that there was indeed some kind of big floating titty in the backyard.
Mildred had a bad habit of that sort of thing, not believing a thing that Walt said. Despite her many faults, she made a passable gravy. Their relationship was complex.
Walt thought for a moment the object had disappeared, but in the next instant the noise and the light returned.
“Whoa!” Mildred barked.
“Ouch, hey!” said Walt.
The noise hurt. Light blazed with a retina-burning intensity. Oversized shadows of Walt and Mildred were sent throbbing against the wall.
“What the hell’ve you done Walt?”
“Hush! You think I did that?”
“Aren’t you going to do something!”
He grunted under his breath and blinked repeatedly.
“Uh oh,” she said. “What’re you doing?”
“I’m going outside.”
“Christ’s sake, you stupid fool!”
Walt delivered a glance.
“What are you going to do, idiot, invite it in for biscuits and gravy? Get the gun!”
“Nonsense,” Walt said, to all of it. He had no idea what he was going to do, but grabbing the gun seemed somehow impractical, and inviting it in for his share of the gravy was out of the question.
Briefly, he wondered what Mildred thought of the universe, if she ever imagined stars and planets. He put it out of his mind and buttoned his sweater, stepping out onto the back porch.
The object was still there, dimmer now, less noisy.
Walt grunted. His disapproval grew. He grabbed at trees, where handy, used branches and trunks as overgrown walking sticks as he trekked up a tree-covered slope. He went loudly, as if it were a raccoon in the trashcans.
It was unaffected.
Some vent tubes spun toward him.
Walt paused.
He glanced back to see Mildred observing from the safety of the paned glass windows – no doubt glad they had purchased them last winter.
He stared at the somehow obscene-looking vent holes. A blackness pooled underneath the lighted tit. Walt stepped a bit closer. The pooling void was so profound it seemed to bend the ground into a bowl. It rippled here and there with rivulets of aquamarine, like moonlight on a different planet.
The object itself, it was dark, more ceramic-looking than metallic, and rimmed with vaguely hieroglyphic writing.
“En hmm,” he said flatly. “Ye-ep.”
After plenty of squinting and breathing and some second-guessing about what in the hell he should do about all this, he knocked on what he supposed the hull, careful to avoid the vent holes.
The knock revealed a number of things, principally that the object was sizzling hot.
He was blowing on his scorched paw when a porthole sphinctered open.
Breath-high and just to his left, out popped the head of a remarkable creature.
Walt froze.
A glimmer of a smile crept across his face.
It was a little English fellow.
A gnome?
He was scarcely able believe what he saw. A gnome, yes. It might have come from outer space. But it was, in fact, an almost clichéd-looking garden gnome.
Without warning, the creature’s head rocked back before producing a joyous laugh.
Walt jumped, then crouched, pummeling the air with fists and elbows.
The garden gnome regarded the maneuvers. Then several quiet moments passed between them, a silence which married well with Walt’s lack of ideas concerning exactly he should do with this surprise.
Walt breathed, then invited the gnome in for biscuits and gravy.
It nodded at Walt.
And, that settled, they resumed staring at each other. Walt took stock: he had in-laws more freakish.
Wordlessly, he extended his hand for a handshake, but the craft’s warbling erupted into a whine.
Walt spun. “Whoa!” he shouted, arms waving. “Hey! Get back here!”
The craft rose stiffly, up past the trees. It rose higher still, before blinking across the sky. And that was it.
A pale, watery streak stretched into the heavens. The wake faded, falling like the afterglow of a fireworks display.
Gone.
“Son a bitch!” Walt shouted.
The gnome laughed.
“What’s your game, mister?”
The gnome answered with a silence.
This was not going to cut it. “Well your ride’s gone, jackass!”
It nodded at him.
Walt palmed his forehead.
He once again invited it in for biscuits.
*
Mildred was stiff, plastered against the dishwasher. Her eyes were frozen little ponds, and it did not seem to be occurring to her to breathe.
Walt grabbed a plate and fork out of the sink. “Have a seat, then, fella.”
Mildred passed out.
Walt thought about the moments and the unreality of the present reality struck him like a sudden slap and he joined her, unconscious, on the floor.
*
The blurry dining room spun.
The gnome enjoyed a biscuit, plowing it on a fork (improperly) through the gravy before stuffing a mouthful in. His feet dangled from the chair.
Mildred watched the thing. She was playing dead, half-crouched in a sort of predator’s stance.
Still on the floor, folded with nausea and grief, she said, “Walt, you have got to do something to fix this.”
A giggle rose from the gnome. It nodded at him.
Walt smiled as he sat up. He felt hung-over. He looked up at Mildred. He still had no idea how to exit his shock. Too much in denial to do much else, he got up and sat beside the gnome. He showed it the right way to sop up gravy.
“No need for the fork. Save it for the chicken.”
It smiled politely.
It continued using the fork on the biscuit.
“God’s sake,” he whispered. To Mildred he said, “There’s no telling how far this fellow came. Come in here and visit.”
Wearily, she rose and approached.
She came and sat, just before vomiting across the table.
“Are you satisfied now?” Mildred asked.
Sighing, more embarrassed than ever, Walt got up and grabbed the apple print towel they kept draped over oven handle. He wetted it and cleaned up. “You know good and damn well I’m not.”
“I tried to warn you this would happen!”
“Hm!” he told her. Then he turned to the gnome. “So, you in town long?”
*
The hours that followed were the strangest of Walt’s life.
He lay in bed, quite unable to sleep, a gnome asleep on the bare wood kitchen floor. Walt compared his wife to a Japanese suicide bomber in his racing mind. That night, in fact, was stranger than the time during the war when it occurred to him, out of the blue, that here he was a Kentucky boy, floating over nearly a mile of ocean, gunning down men he didn’t know before they could slam their planes into his vessel.
It just came to him all of a sudden, and he could not get over the sheer naked absurdity of that night for a number of weeks.
He found it all so remarkable. It was remarkable that a gnome had come from a space ship. That he had invited it in.
It was somehow even more remarkable that Mildred had fallen asleep. Just a few words: “First thing in the morning, you got to get rid of that thing!”
Crazy.
Walt managed a few zees himself before the sun rose, which it did over a frosty morning. The chimney was ablaze, apparently fed sometime during the night by his visitor – who was markedly absent from the kitchen floor.
Walt panicked. Christ, he thought, that thing could be out anywhere stirring all kinds of stink.
“Milly!” he barked into the bedroom. “Mildred, get up. It’s gone!”
“What’s gone?”
“Our little English buddy.”
“What!”
“He took off. The gnome took off.”
“Sweet meat, Walt! Settle down.”
“What do you mean settle down? I’m calm.”
“Calm? Going on about elves!”
“What! A gnome! Elves are… Oh, whatever. It’s gone.”
“You feeling okay?” she asked holding a clammy palm to his head.
“Mildred, for crying out… Are you telling me you didn’t…”
“Of course I saw it, jackass. But it wasn’t a gnome.”
“Alright, leprechaun. Whatever. It’s gone.”
“Of course it’s gone,” Mildred laughed. “Leprechaun!”
“Okay, smarty. What do you wanna call it? And what do you mean: ‘of course it’s gone?’”
Mildred continued laughing. Walt waited.
“Oh, you poor, sweet man,” she said, and dropped to the floor, clutching her chest.
She never woke.
*
It’s weird, but some things happen and you almost can’t tell the truth about it. So screw it, you don’t. Just keep it to yourself and never let the world know. Besides, once you think you got a grip on something like the truth, it laughs and snakes around. It digs into your haunches with the little teeth of truth.
Especially when the truth is as bizarre as this: Santa Claus came to visit you the night before your wife died, which she up and did on Christmas morning.
Walt breathed, and the world’s silly rampages did not bother him.
In fact he rather enjoyed the gentle absurdity of those moments. He stayed in the present.
Trying to make sense of that present, he wondered if his present had been the present. And if so, was it a sugarplum or a lump of coal?
Thomas Head makes his home these days in Tennessee with his wife Ann and his dog Jock, a Scottish terrier who growls and cusses too much but means very little of it. His fiction appears from time to time in literary and genre publications.
A light appeared in the backyard.
Nickolas Whaley crumpled his napkin, crumpled the hell out of it.
“What the Hell?” he muttered.
The backyard maples seemed to welcome it down, down past their bows until it came to rest in the clearing where he had been bullshitting his wife about putting up a gazebo. He dropped a spoon laden with gravy.
Mildred was startled by the splash.
“What is it Walt?”
“I ain’t got no clue,” he replied.
He adjusted his glasses. Examination only muddled his thoughts. The object hovered a foot off the grass. Silly as it seemed, it resembled a glowing boob.
“Well whatever it is, you’ll be rubbing them gravy stains outta my linens,” she said.
“There’s a big floating titty in the backyard.”
Mildred flinched before setting a fearsome stare on him. Her eyes became angry slits.
She turned her head, craned her neck to look out the window informed him that there was indeed some kind of big floating titty in the backyard.
Mildred had a bad habit of that sort of thing, not believing a thing that Walt said. Despite her many faults, she made a passable gravy. Their relationship was complex.
Walt thought for a moment the object had disappeared, but in the next instant the noise and the light returned.
“Whoa!” Mildred barked.
“Ouch, hey!” said Walt.
The noise hurt. Light blazed with a retina-burning intensity. Oversized shadows of Walt and Mildred were sent throbbing against the wall.
“What the hell’ve you done Walt?”
“Hush! You think I did that?”
“Aren’t you going to do something!”
He grunted under his breath and blinked repeatedly.
“Uh oh,” she said. “What’re you doing?”
“I’m going outside.”
“Christ’s sake, you stupid fool!”
Walt delivered a glance.
“What are you going to do, idiot, invite it in for biscuits and gravy? Get the gun!”
“Nonsense,” Walt said, to all of it. He had no idea what he was going to do, but grabbing the gun seemed somehow impractical, and inviting it in for his share of the gravy was out of the question.
Briefly, he wondered what Mildred thought of the universe, if she ever imagined stars and planets. He put it out of his mind and buttoned his sweater, stepping out onto the back porch.
The object was still there, dimmer now, less noisy.
Walt grunted. His disapproval grew. He grabbed at trees, where handy, used branches and trunks as overgrown walking sticks as he trekked up a tree-covered slope. He went loudly, as if it were a raccoon in the trashcans.
It was unaffected.
Some vent tubes spun toward him.
Walt paused.
He glanced back to see Mildred observing from the safety of the paned glass windows – no doubt glad they had purchased them last winter.
He stared at the somehow obscene-looking vent holes. A blackness pooled underneath the lighted tit. Walt stepped a bit closer. The pooling void was so profound it seemed to bend the ground into a bowl. It rippled here and there with rivulets of aquamarine, like moonlight on a different planet.
The object itself, it was dark, more ceramic-looking than metallic, and rimmed with vaguely hieroglyphic writing.
“En hmm,” he said flatly. “Ye-ep.”
After plenty of squinting and breathing and some second-guessing about what in the hell he should do about all this, he knocked on what he supposed the hull, careful to avoid the vent holes.
The knock revealed a number of things, principally that the object was sizzling hot.
He was blowing on his scorched paw when a porthole sphinctered open.
Breath-high and just to his left, out popped the head of a remarkable creature.
Walt froze.
A glimmer of a smile crept across his face.
It was a little English fellow.
A gnome?
He was scarcely able believe what he saw. A gnome, yes. It might have come from outer space. But it was, in fact, an almost clichéd-looking garden gnome.
Without warning, the creature’s head rocked back before producing a joyous laugh.
Walt jumped, then crouched, pummeling the air with fists and elbows.
The garden gnome regarded the maneuvers. Then several quiet moments passed between them, a silence which married well with Walt’s lack of ideas concerning exactly he should do with this surprise.
Walt breathed, then invited the gnome in for biscuits and gravy.
It nodded at Walt.
And, that settled, they resumed staring at each other. Walt took stock: he had in-laws more freakish.
Wordlessly, he extended his hand for a handshake, but the craft’s warbling erupted into a whine.
Walt spun. “Whoa!” he shouted, arms waving. “Hey! Get back here!”
The craft rose stiffly, up past the trees. It rose higher still, before blinking across the sky. And that was it.
A pale, watery streak stretched into the heavens. The wake faded, falling like the afterglow of a fireworks display.
Gone.
“Son a bitch!” Walt shouted.
The gnome laughed.
“What’s your game, mister?”
The gnome answered with a silence.
This was not going to cut it. “Well your ride’s gone, jackass!”
It nodded at him.
Walt palmed his forehead.
He once again invited it in for biscuits.
*
Mildred was stiff, plastered against the dishwasher. Her eyes were frozen little ponds, and it did not seem to be occurring to her to breathe.
Walt grabbed a plate and fork out of the sink. “Have a seat, then, fella.”
Mildred passed out.
Walt thought about the moments and the unreality of the present reality struck him like a sudden slap and he joined her, unconscious, on the floor.
*
The blurry dining room spun.
The gnome enjoyed a biscuit, plowing it on a fork (improperly) through the gravy before stuffing a mouthful in. His feet dangled from the chair.
Mildred watched the thing. She was playing dead, half-crouched in a sort of predator’s stance.
Still on the floor, folded with nausea and grief, she said, “Walt, you have got to do something to fix this.”
A giggle rose from the gnome. It nodded at him.
Walt smiled as he sat up. He felt hung-over. He looked up at Mildred. He still had no idea how to exit his shock. Too much in denial to do much else, he got up and sat beside the gnome. He showed it the right way to sop up gravy.
“No need for the fork. Save it for the chicken.”
It smiled politely.
It continued using the fork on the biscuit.
“God’s sake,” he whispered. To Mildred he said, “There’s no telling how far this fellow came. Come in here and visit.”
Wearily, she rose and approached.
She came and sat, just before vomiting across the table.
“Are you satisfied now?” Mildred asked.
Sighing, more embarrassed than ever, Walt got up and grabbed the apple print towel they kept draped over oven handle. He wetted it and cleaned up. “You know good and damn well I’m not.”
“I tried to warn you this would happen!”
“Hm!” he told her. Then he turned to the gnome. “So, you in town long?”
*
The hours that followed were the strangest of Walt’s life.
He lay in bed, quite unable to sleep, a gnome asleep on the bare wood kitchen floor. Walt compared his wife to a Japanese suicide bomber in his racing mind. That night, in fact, was stranger than the time during the war when it occurred to him, out of the blue, that here he was a Kentucky boy, floating over nearly a mile of ocean, gunning down men he didn’t know before they could slam their planes into his vessel.
It just came to him all of a sudden, and he could not get over the sheer naked absurdity of that night for a number of weeks.
He found it all so remarkable. It was remarkable that a gnome had come from a space ship. That he had invited it in.
It was somehow even more remarkable that Mildred had fallen asleep. Just a few words: “First thing in the morning, you got to get rid of that thing!”
Crazy.
Walt managed a few zees himself before the sun rose, which it did over a frosty morning. The chimney was ablaze, apparently fed sometime during the night by his visitor – who was markedly absent from the kitchen floor.
Walt panicked. Christ, he thought, that thing could be out anywhere stirring all kinds of stink.
“Milly!” he barked into the bedroom. “Mildred, get up. It’s gone!”
“What’s gone?”
“Our little English buddy.”
“What!”
“He took off. The gnome took off.”
“Sweet meat, Walt! Settle down.”
“What do you mean settle down? I’m calm.”
“Calm? Going on about elves!”
“What! A gnome! Elves are… Oh, whatever. It’s gone.”
“You feeling okay?” she asked holding a clammy palm to his head.
“Mildred, for crying out… Are you telling me you didn’t…”
“Of course I saw it, jackass. But it wasn’t a gnome.”
“Alright, leprechaun. Whatever. It’s gone.”
“Of course it’s gone,” Mildred laughed. “Leprechaun!”
“Okay, smarty. What do you wanna call it? And what do you mean: ‘of course it’s gone?’”
Mildred continued laughing. Walt waited.
“Oh, you poor, sweet man,” she said, and dropped to the floor, clutching her chest.
She never woke.
*
It’s weird, but some things happen and you almost can’t tell the truth about it. So screw it, you don’t. Just keep it to yourself and never let the world know. Besides, once you think you got a grip on something like the truth, it laughs and snakes around. It digs into your haunches with the little teeth of truth.
Especially when the truth is as bizarre as this: Santa Claus came to visit you the night before your wife died, which she up and did on Christmas morning.
Walt breathed, and the world’s silly rampages did not bother him.
In fact he rather enjoyed the gentle absurdity of those moments. He stayed in the present.
Trying to make sense of that present, he wondered if his present had been the present. And if so, was it a sugarplum or a lump of coal?
Thomas Head makes his home these days in Tennessee with his wife Ann and his dog Jock, a Scottish terrier who growls and cusses too much but means very little of it. His fiction appears from time to time in literary and genre publications.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Spreading Holiday Cheer
by Lynn Pinkerton
Most people just send Wal-Mart Christmas cards, but not Dola Fern’s Uncle Ike. Caring enough to send the very best, he took Hallmark greetings to a whole new level. If Uncle Ike and Elsie Jean Ishes had not gotten caught, she probably would never have known what holiday secrets Uncle Ike held close.
It all began to unravel when Dola Fern got a call from the Southern Sunsets Retirement Home over in Gun Barrel City. Somehow Dola Fern had ended up being Uncle Ike’s nearest living relative when his remaining kin died off last year. She was told there was a crisis at the home and she needed to come right over. All they would tell her on the phone was that Uncle Ike had expanded his extra curricular activities beyond playing dominos and watching “Wheel of Fortune.” Way beyond.
Wishing that Uncle Ike belonged to someone else, Dola Fern sat in the stuffy office of Miss Prudehome, the prissy director of Southern Sunsets and wondered if she could fix whatever Uncle Ike had done. Miss Prudehome sat down, folded her hands across her desktop Bible and began to reveal how Uncle Ike was making the most of his golden years.
It seems Uncle Ike had spiced up life at Southern Sunsets by shooting a series of videos called “Geezers Gone Wild” and then peddling them on the Internet. Featuring other bored Southern Sunsets residents who wanted in on the action, his best selling video had a rural theme and was called, “Redneck Geezer Hotties”. The same group often seen eating the early bird special at the local Luby’s Cafeteria now appeared in pastoral scenes sitting on tractors, gathering eggs in off the shoulder overalls and peeping up from behind bales of hay wearing big straw hats…and nothing else. Wicked winks and beguiling smiles helped compensate for sagging imperfections.
The sexy senior star of “Geezers Gone Wild” was Uncle Ike’s main squeeze, Miss Elsie Jean Ishes. Dola Fern had met Miss Elsie several times and had a hard time believing that this powdered and prim grandmother was developing a sizeable following of Viagra enhanced men. So far as Dola Fern knew, Miss Elsie’s only hobby was knitting covers to hide an extra roll of toilet paper.
Hovering somewhere between proper shock and suppressed, side-splitting laughter, Dola Fern wanted more than celluloid verification and asked to speak with Miss Elsie alone. Appropriately shy at first, Miss Elsie quickly warmed to the idea of discussing her amorous high jinks. Taking a cue from her “Geezers Gone Wild” videos, she began to expose tantalizing tidbits about her red-hot romance with Uncle Ike. Fanning herself as the story heated up, she excitedly prattled on and then confidentially leaned forward and offered Dola Fern the golden nugget.
“Do you know about Ike’s special Christmas greeting?”
Thinking maybe Miss Elsie should still be gardening and canning, Dola Fern shook her head and waited.
“Honey, I’m here to tell you that old man has 'Merry Christmas' tattooed right on his hootus.”
Eyes popping in disbelief, Dola Fern wondered if the holiday greeting was tattooed vertically, horizontally or wrapped around and around. Was “Merry Christmas” spelled out or abbreviated “Merry X-mas?” Was the tattoo in black or traditional red and green?
Finding herself a little jealous of Miss Elsie’s scandalous shenanigans, Dola Fern escorted Miss Elsie back to her room and her knitting. Dola Fern had walked on the gray side of the wild life enough for one day and told a disapproving Miss Prudehome that she would return tomorrow to get Uncle Ike back on the path to a virtuous life. She drove home wondering how much money Uncle Ike had saved on Christmas cards.
Lynn Pinkerton announced in the fifth grade that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. Although she hopes to never be a full-blown grown-up, she does continue to doggedly chase her fifth grade dream of writing. Part of a on-going series, this is Dola Fern’s debut to the public. Although Dola Fern is fiction, long gone Uncle Ike did exist. However, no one can confirm his legendary Christmas tattoo. Lynn (and Dola Fern) live in Houston, Texas.
Most people just send Wal-Mart Christmas cards, but not Dola Fern’s Uncle Ike. Caring enough to send the very best, he took Hallmark greetings to a whole new level. If Uncle Ike and Elsie Jean Ishes had not gotten caught, she probably would never have known what holiday secrets Uncle Ike held close.
It all began to unravel when Dola Fern got a call from the Southern Sunsets Retirement Home over in Gun Barrel City. Somehow Dola Fern had ended up being Uncle Ike’s nearest living relative when his remaining kin died off last year. She was told there was a crisis at the home and she needed to come right over. All they would tell her on the phone was that Uncle Ike had expanded his extra curricular activities beyond playing dominos and watching “Wheel of Fortune.” Way beyond.
Wishing that Uncle Ike belonged to someone else, Dola Fern sat in the stuffy office of Miss Prudehome, the prissy director of Southern Sunsets and wondered if she could fix whatever Uncle Ike had done. Miss Prudehome sat down, folded her hands across her desktop Bible and began to reveal how Uncle Ike was making the most of his golden years.
It seems Uncle Ike had spiced up life at Southern Sunsets by shooting a series of videos called “Geezers Gone Wild” and then peddling them on the Internet. Featuring other bored Southern Sunsets residents who wanted in on the action, his best selling video had a rural theme and was called, “Redneck Geezer Hotties”. The same group often seen eating the early bird special at the local Luby’s Cafeteria now appeared in pastoral scenes sitting on tractors, gathering eggs in off the shoulder overalls and peeping up from behind bales of hay wearing big straw hats…and nothing else. Wicked winks and beguiling smiles helped compensate for sagging imperfections.
The sexy senior star of “Geezers Gone Wild” was Uncle Ike’s main squeeze, Miss Elsie Jean Ishes. Dola Fern had met Miss Elsie several times and had a hard time believing that this powdered and prim grandmother was developing a sizeable following of Viagra enhanced men. So far as Dola Fern knew, Miss Elsie’s only hobby was knitting covers to hide an extra roll of toilet paper.
Hovering somewhere between proper shock and suppressed, side-splitting laughter, Dola Fern wanted more than celluloid verification and asked to speak with Miss Elsie alone. Appropriately shy at first, Miss Elsie quickly warmed to the idea of discussing her amorous high jinks. Taking a cue from her “Geezers Gone Wild” videos, she began to expose tantalizing tidbits about her red-hot romance with Uncle Ike. Fanning herself as the story heated up, she excitedly prattled on and then confidentially leaned forward and offered Dola Fern the golden nugget.
“Do you know about Ike’s special Christmas greeting?”
Thinking maybe Miss Elsie should still be gardening and canning, Dola Fern shook her head and waited.
“Honey, I’m here to tell you that old man has 'Merry Christmas' tattooed right on his hootus.”
Eyes popping in disbelief, Dola Fern wondered if the holiday greeting was tattooed vertically, horizontally or wrapped around and around. Was “Merry Christmas” spelled out or abbreviated “Merry X-mas?” Was the tattoo in black or traditional red and green?
Finding herself a little jealous of Miss Elsie’s scandalous shenanigans, Dola Fern escorted Miss Elsie back to her room and her knitting. Dola Fern had walked on the gray side of the wild life enough for one day and told a disapproving Miss Prudehome that she would return tomorrow to get Uncle Ike back on the path to a virtuous life. She drove home wondering how much money Uncle Ike had saved on Christmas cards.
Lynn Pinkerton announced in the fifth grade that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. Although she hopes to never be a full-blown grown-up, she does continue to doggedly chase her fifth grade dream of writing. Part of a on-going series, this is Dola Fern’s debut to the public. Although Dola Fern is fiction, long gone Uncle Ike did exist. However, no one can confirm his legendary Christmas tattoo. Lynn (and Dola Fern) live in Houston, Texas.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
How the Old Man Died
By Mary Overton
Long before the Old Man died, his body began to mummify. How horrified El Viejo would have been, had he known, to see the changes in his skin, to see his fine, aristocratic paleness turn the color of mahogany wood. He darkened like something smoked over a slow fire, and the heat from that unseen flame began the drying process.
The heat came from inside the Old Man. In the fullness of life he had glowed with it; he had been brilliant, irresistible, potent, and merciless. According to his daughter, according to the documentation of his American life, he expired at age 103, in the year 1970, but if one interviewed the ghosts of his Guatemalan youth, the dead from the villages of Ch___ and T___, and other places now unnamed because the words for them are lost, one might be told that El Viejo died several times, and that when one counted all his lives, he would be closer to 428, give or take a decade. Of course, how reliable are the confessions of ghosts?
The Old Man had that sort of glamour about him, a prosperous vitality that kept him working into his eighties. His pace could tire the whippersnappers, which is what actually did happen, when he pushed a crew of his loggers past what was wise – the Old Man had been known for many things, but rarely for wisdom – and the accident struck. Two men died. The Old Man was expected to die, but he wasn't ready yet, so he didn't. He wasn't ready for twenty more years, during which time his daughter bathed him and changed his diaper and administered the complicated regimen of medications and talked to him. Talked and talked and talked, not one word of which he ever answered. She forgave him everything but his muteness. She knew he was listening.
The Old Man mummified so slowly that his daughter did not realize what was happening until six years into her caretaking. She had brought him to the cabin to die. It had been his favorite place, amid second growth forest off a logging trail, and six years into her vigil there she was pleased one day to see what she thought was the white mist of his soul rising up from his body. That soul was absolved, having been blessed by the priest when El Viejo first entered a coma. That soul, his daughter firmly believed, prepared to vault directly into the company of saints among whom he had his own personal throne awaiting his arrival.
She opened the iron box and retrieved her rosary. Popi – she was the only person in the world with such an informal name for the Old Man – had given her the crystal beads for her first communion. Now a woman of 26, she sat at the bedside, reciting her prayers, filled with exultant gratitude that at last he was dead or dying, she wasn't sure which. But it became apparent, bead by bead, that the corpse still breathed. The more fervently his daughter repeated Hail Marys and Our Fathers, the more noisily the Old Man's breath whistled through his nostrils.
The white smoke continued to rise. It was not El Viejo's soul. It was exactly what his daughter had seen – a mist evaporating off his body, a coiling trail of moisture grown dense enough to be visible. The man was dehydrating, like fruit preserved on drying racks.
In her frustration, she berated the Old Man for his legendary selfishness, his extravagant pride, his many cruelties, and once started she launched into a catalogue of his crimes. She spent two years reminding him, detailing for him the specifics of his wickedness, and those were the deeds of which she was aware. God and the Devil together would be hard pressed to say how long it might take to list them all. By the exhausted finish of her tirade the Old Man’s daughter could see the changes in him, how bit by bit his flesh diminished, his skin thickened, his bones shrank.
By the end, he was a doll that fit into her arms, a nut-brown, curled infant of a doll made out of impermeable shoe leather. He was naked, because his bodily functions so decelerated that he had not fed or excreted in several months. He was fleshless by then, entirely dried like a gourd. When she moved him, she heard the rattle and shush of desiccated organs, some of them hard seed pods, others disintegrated into dust.
In the end, his heartbeat and respiration slowed to an imperceptible rate. Time lengthened between each pulse. His daughter measured them hourly, then daily, weekly, fortnightly. His daughter waited until the body went a full month, from one new moon to the next, without movement of any kind, before she wrapped him, like a gift, in tissue paper, placed him in the iron box, and buried him three feet deep in forest loam. Even then she could not know for certain that the Old Man was wholly, exclusively, indubitably dead.
Mary Overton's published work includes a book of short stories, The Wine of Astonishment, from La Questa Press, 1997, and short fiction in several anthologies, among them , Grace and Gravity from Paycock Press, 2004. Her stories have appeared in both literary and commercial magazines, including Glimmer Train, Zahir, So to Speak, and Potomac Review. This story first appeared as part of the Invisible Cities wiki-novel experiment.
Long before the Old Man died, his body began to mummify. How horrified El Viejo would have been, had he known, to see the changes in his skin, to see his fine, aristocratic paleness turn the color of mahogany wood. He darkened like something smoked over a slow fire, and the heat from that unseen flame began the drying process.
The heat came from inside the Old Man. In the fullness of life he had glowed with it; he had been brilliant, irresistible, potent, and merciless. According to his daughter, according to the documentation of his American life, he expired at age 103, in the year 1970, but if one interviewed the ghosts of his Guatemalan youth, the dead from the villages of Ch___ and T___, and other places now unnamed because the words for them are lost, one might be told that El Viejo died several times, and that when one counted all his lives, he would be closer to 428, give or take a decade. Of course, how reliable are the confessions of ghosts?
The Old Man had that sort of glamour about him, a prosperous vitality that kept him working into his eighties. His pace could tire the whippersnappers, which is what actually did happen, when he pushed a crew of his loggers past what was wise – the Old Man had been known for many things, but rarely for wisdom – and the accident struck. Two men died. The Old Man was expected to die, but he wasn't ready yet, so he didn't. He wasn't ready for twenty more years, during which time his daughter bathed him and changed his diaper and administered the complicated regimen of medications and talked to him. Talked and talked and talked, not one word of which he ever answered. She forgave him everything but his muteness. She knew he was listening.
The Old Man mummified so slowly that his daughter did not realize what was happening until six years into her caretaking. She had brought him to the cabin to die. It had been his favorite place, amid second growth forest off a logging trail, and six years into her vigil there she was pleased one day to see what she thought was the white mist of his soul rising up from his body. That soul was absolved, having been blessed by the priest when El Viejo first entered a coma. That soul, his daughter firmly believed, prepared to vault directly into the company of saints among whom he had his own personal throne awaiting his arrival.
She opened the iron box and retrieved her rosary. Popi – she was the only person in the world with such an informal name for the Old Man – had given her the crystal beads for her first communion. Now a woman of 26, she sat at the bedside, reciting her prayers, filled with exultant gratitude that at last he was dead or dying, she wasn't sure which. But it became apparent, bead by bead, that the corpse still breathed. The more fervently his daughter repeated Hail Marys and Our Fathers, the more noisily the Old Man's breath whistled through his nostrils.
The white smoke continued to rise. It was not El Viejo's soul. It was exactly what his daughter had seen – a mist evaporating off his body, a coiling trail of moisture grown dense enough to be visible. The man was dehydrating, like fruit preserved on drying racks.
In her frustration, she berated the Old Man for his legendary selfishness, his extravagant pride, his many cruelties, and once started she launched into a catalogue of his crimes. She spent two years reminding him, detailing for him the specifics of his wickedness, and those were the deeds of which she was aware. God and the Devil together would be hard pressed to say how long it might take to list them all. By the exhausted finish of her tirade the Old Man’s daughter could see the changes in him, how bit by bit his flesh diminished, his skin thickened, his bones shrank.
By the end, he was a doll that fit into her arms, a nut-brown, curled infant of a doll made out of impermeable shoe leather. He was naked, because his bodily functions so decelerated that he had not fed or excreted in several months. He was fleshless by then, entirely dried like a gourd. When she moved him, she heard the rattle and shush of desiccated organs, some of them hard seed pods, others disintegrated into dust.
In the end, his heartbeat and respiration slowed to an imperceptible rate. Time lengthened between each pulse. His daughter measured them hourly, then daily, weekly, fortnightly. His daughter waited until the body went a full month, from one new moon to the next, without movement of any kind, before she wrapped him, like a gift, in tissue paper, placed him in the iron box, and buried him three feet deep in forest loam. Even then she could not know for certain that the Old Man was wholly, exclusively, indubitably dead.
Mary Overton's published work includes a book of short stories, The Wine of Astonishment, from La Questa Press, 1997, and short fiction in several anthologies, among them , Grace and Gravity from Paycock Press, 2004. Her stories have appeared in both literary and commercial magazines, including Glimmer Train, Zahir, So to Speak, and Potomac Review. This story first appeared as part of the Invisible Cities wiki-novel experiment.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Billy Ann's Box
By Charlotte Jones
My big sister, Billy Ann, was in the shower, getting ready to sneak out with that handsome new lawyer in town, when she slipped and hit her head on the edge of the bathtub. At least that’s what her husband Russell said, and he’s sticking to it. God knows, she cheated on him every chance she got, so I don’t blame him much. I haven’t spoken to her since she made a pass at my husband three years ago. He delivered the mail one day, just like every other day, when she greeted him at the door in some fancy-pantsy negligee and invited him in. When he told her no, she had the nerve to get mad at me, like it was my fault.
Anyway, the police chief ruled her death an accident – probably because he owed Russell a favor, ever since Russell caught him bare-assed and red-handed with Billy Ann and didn’t shoot him.
So there we were, me and Russell, sitting around the kitchen table eating breakfast with Momma and Daddy, trying to determine the final resting place for Billy Ann’s body. My husband couldn’t be found. He was down at the hunting lease shooting himself a deer.
“I say we cremate her,” Russell said.
I figured he was trying to get rid of the evidence. But I did know that’s what Billy Ann would have wanted. When we were little, she used to tell me, “If I go first, don’t you bury me. I don’t want to spend my eternity with critters crawling in and out.” Then she’d drop a worm down the front of my shirt and I’d run crying to Momma.
“That just isn’t Christian,” Daddy said as he took a bite of bacon. “We all know Billy Ann had her faults, but I’m not going to the funeral if you fry her up like, well, like this shriveled piece of bacon here. I won’t be party to something that just isn’t natural. True Christians don’t cremate their loved ones.”
“More creamer, Georgie Sue?” Momma said to me. She had set her grief aside and fluttered around the kitchen with her apron on, just like she always did, trying to make everyone else feel comfortable. She always taught us girls that a mother’s job is to make sure everything turns out right, no matter what the situation and no matter what you have to do. Probably why Billy Ann and I never had kids.
“Well, cremation IS what Billy Ann wanted.” I decided to speak up. While I wasn’t a big fan of Billy Ann’s, I’ve got enough respect for the dead that I figured my sister ought to get what she wanted. I think she would have done the same for me, if I’d been in her shoes. ’Course, I’m not in her shoes.
“In that case,” Russell said between mouthfuls of biscuits and gravy, “I’m gonna bury her. She always got everything she wanted in life. I think it’d be fitting if just this once, Billy Ann didn’t get what she wanted.”
“So, it’s settled then,” Daddy said.
“I don’t know, Dad,” Momma said. “Seems to me we ought to do right by Billy Ann and cremate her if that was her desire.”
“I said, it’s settled.”
So later that day, me and Russell went over to the funeral home to pick out a casket. The funeral lady met us at the door and talked to us in soothing tones about how grief is God’s way of calling us unto Himself, and how surely we must want the very best for our dearly departed loved one. Then she guided us into the casket room where they had the most expensive caskets displayed at the front. I guess most people buy the first one they see, but when I saw the $9000 price tag on the bronze model complete with a guaranteed rubber gasket seal and a stainless steel American eagle on top, I said, “Do you have anything less shiny?”
I wasn’t going to spend any more on my sister than I absolutely had to since she had already dipped into my inheritance by stealing from Momma and Daddy. She did it by pretending to be the good daughter and doing their grocery shopping for them. When the money they gave her should have purchased two bags of groceries, she brought home only one, making some excuses about how high the prices were. Then she’d pocket the rest. I can’t prove it, but I know she did it. Russell knows it. Momma and Daddy know it, too. She had too many nice things, like one of those singing trouts you hang on the wall, and Russell knows he didn’t buy them for her. I doubt any of her lovers could’ve afforded them.
Well, when I asked for something less shiny, you’d have thought I’d asked if the funeral lady believed in ghosts. The mood in the room turned icy and her tone of voice wasn’t all sweet and soothing anymore when she said, “We do have some wooden models, but they do not offer eternal protection for your dearly departed like these stainless steel models.”
“Protection from what?” Russell said. “She’s dead.”
The funeral lady glared at Russell. “We do have one pine box in the back,” she said. “We keep it around for, you-know, Jewish people.”
No, I didn’t know, but a Jewish pine box sounded just fine to me.
“What’ll God think, a sweet little Christian girl showing up in a Jewish box? As if she’s headed to heaven anyway.” Russell loved it.
“Just don’t tell Daddy,” I said.
“That’ll be $477,” the funeral lady said through tight lips.
“Can I put this on lay-away, or you know, pay it over time?” I asked.
Now the funeral lady glared at me.
On our way out, we ran into Momma. She looked as surprised to see us as we were to see her. “What’re you doing, Momma?” I asked. “I told you me and Russell would look after things.”
“I’ve got some business here, that’s all. Now you run along.” Momma pushed right past us.
“That’s funny,” said Russell with a puzzled look on his face.
“That’s Momma,” I said.
There was no telling what she was up to. She didn’t come back until late that evening smelling faintly of hickory smoke.
So the arrangements were all made. Nothing fancy, just a graveside service with cocktail wieners back at the house when it was over. The cousins were all called, the minister was notified. The funeral home even put a notice in the paper. Billy Ann always did want her picture in the paper. We used her favorite — the one from high school when she was crowned Miss Pork Sausage by the FFA.
We were sitting around at Momma’s and Daddy’s drinking coffee on the morning of the funeral when Russell decided he’d better double-check everything, almost like he wanted to make certain she wasn’t coming back. After he hung up the phone, he called me into the other room.
“The body’s gone,” he hissed while peeking around the corner to make sure Momma and Daddy hadn’t heard him.
“What do you mean, the body’s gone?” I couldn’t believe my ears.
“You’re not pulling some kind of joke are you, Georgie Sue? It’d be just like you to pull some last-minute stunt on your sister.”
“Excuse me, but you seem to have me confused with Billy Ann. I’d never do something like that! Probably one of her lovers saw the notice in the paper and decided he wanted Billy Ann for himself, you know, bury her in his own back yard so he could dig her up every now and then and see her.”
“You could be right, Georgie Sue. God knows there are enough crazy people in these parts. Should we tell your Momma and Daddy?”
“That’d only upset them. I think we should just go through with it as planned. The whole family is here. It’s going to be closed casket anyway, so nobody’ll know if she’s in there or not.”
“The pall bearers will know. The box won’t be heavy enough.”
“Maybe we can stick some bricks in it. That’ll make it heavy. I say we go through with it. We can figure out where her body went later.”
So after the service and we’d put Billy Ann, or rather Billy Ann’s box, in the ground, all the relatives came over to the house. Nobody seemed the wiser. Momma was busy setting out the trays of wieners and pouring coffee for everyone. I noticed she had a new flower vase on the table, one I’d never seen before. Looked right pretty, even if there weren’t any flowers in it.
I sat stirring my coffee, trying to get that creamer to dissolve when Momma came up to me and said, “More creamer, dear?” She shoved that flower vase under my nose and scooped some more into my cup.
It was that little glint in her eye that caused me to reexamine the gray lumpy powder floating in my coffee. I looked back up at her in horror. “Momma, please say you didn’t . . .!”
Charlotte Jones has seen her work featured in over 60 literary and commercial magazines including Bordersenses, Nerve Cowboy, Barbaric Yawp and Zygote in My Coffee.
My big sister, Billy Ann, was in the shower, getting ready to sneak out with that handsome new lawyer in town, when she slipped and hit her head on the edge of the bathtub. At least that’s what her husband Russell said, and he’s sticking to it. God knows, she cheated on him every chance she got, so I don’t blame him much. I haven’t spoken to her since she made a pass at my husband three years ago. He delivered the mail one day, just like every other day, when she greeted him at the door in some fancy-pantsy negligee and invited him in. When he told her no, she had the nerve to get mad at me, like it was my fault.
Anyway, the police chief ruled her death an accident – probably because he owed Russell a favor, ever since Russell caught him bare-assed and red-handed with Billy Ann and didn’t shoot him.
So there we were, me and Russell, sitting around the kitchen table eating breakfast with Momma and Daddy, trying to determine the final resting place for Billy Ann’s body. My husband couldn’t be found. He was down at the hunting lease shooting himself a deer.
“I say we cremate her,” Russell said.
I figured he was trying to get rid of the evidence. But I did know that’s what Billy Ann would have wanted. When we were little, she used to tell me, “If I go first, don’t you bury me. I don’t want to spend my eternity with critters crawling in and out.” Then she’d drop a worm down the front of my shirt and I’d run crying to Momma.
“That just isn’t Christian,” Daddy said as he took a bite of bacon. “We all know Billy Ann had her faults, but I’m not going to the funeral if you fry her up like, well, like this shriveled piece of bacon here. I won’t be party to something that just isn’t natural. True Christians don’t cremate their loved ones.”
“More creamer, Georgie Sue?” Momma said to me. She had set her grief aside and fluttered around the kitchen with her apron on, just like she always did, trying to make everyone else feel comfortable. She always taught us girls that a mother’s job is to make sure everything turns out right, no matter what the situation and no matter what you have to do. Probably why Billy Ann and I never had kids.
“Well, cremation IS what Billy Ann wanted.” I decided to speak up. While I wasn’t a big fan of Billy Ann’s, I’ve got enough respect for the dead that I figured my sister ought to get what she wanted. I think she would have done the same for me, if I’d been in her shoes. ’Course, I’m not in her shoes.
“In that case,” Russell said between mouthfuls of biscuits and gravy, “I’m gonna bury her. She always got everything she wanted in life. I think it’d be fitting if just this once, Billy Ann didn’t get what she wanted.”
“So, it’s settled then,” Daddy said.
“I don’t know, Dad,” Momma said. “Seems to me we ought to do right by Billy Ann and cremate her if that was her desire.”
“I said, it’s settled.”
So later that day, me and Russell went over to the funeral home to pick out a casket. The funeral lady met us at the door and talked to us in soothing tones about how grief is God’s way of calling us unto Himself, and how surely we must want the very best for our dearly departed loved one. Then she guided us into the casket room where they had the most expensive caskets displayed at the front. I guess most people buy the first one they see, but when I saw the $9000 price tag on the bronze model complete with a guaranteed rubber gasket seal and a stainless steel American eagle on top, I said, “Do you have anything less shiny?”
I wasn’t going to spend any more on my sister than I absolutely had to since she had already dipped into my inheritance by stealing from Momma and Daddy. She did it by pretending to be the good daughter and doing their grocery shopping for them. When the money they gave her should have purchased two bags of groceries, she brought home only one, making some excuses about how high the prices were. Then she’d pocket the rest. I can’t prove it, but I know she did it. Russell knows it. Momma and Daddy know it, too. She had too many nice things, like one of those singing trouts you hang on the wall, and Russell knows he didn’t buy them for her. I doubt any of her lovers could’ve afforded them.
Well, when I asked for something less shiny, you’d have thought I’d asked if the funeral lady believed in ghosts. The mood in the room turned icy and her tone of voice wasn’t all sweet and soothing anymore when she said, “We do have some wooden models, but they do not offer eternal protection for your dearly departed like these stainless steel models.”
“Protection from what?” Russell said. “She’s dead.”
The funeral lady glared at Russell. “We do have one pine box in the back,” she said. “We keep it around for, you-know, Jewish people.”
No, I didn’t know, but a Jewish pine box sounded just fine to me.
“What’ll God think, a sweet little Christian girl showing up in a Jewish box? As if she’s headed to heaven anyway.” Russell loved it.
“Just don’t tell Daddy,” I said.
“That’ll be $477,” the funeral lady said through tight lips.
“Can I put this on lay-away, or you know, pay it over time?” I asked.
Now the funeral lady glared at me.
On our way out, we ran into Momma. She looked as surprised to see us as we were to see her. “What’re you doing, Momma?” I asked. “I told you me and Russell would look after things.”
“I’ve got some business here, that’s all. Now you run along.” Momma pushed right past us.
“That’s funny,” said Russell with a puzzled look on his face.
“That’s Momma,” I said.
There was no telling what she was up to. She didn’t come back until late that evening smelling faintly of hickory smoke.
So the arrangements were all made. Nothing fancy, just a graveside service with cocktail wieners back at the house when it was over. The cousins were all called, the minister was notified. The funeral home even put a notice in the paper. Billy Ann always did want her picture in the paper. We used her favorite — the one from high school when she was crowned Miss Pork Sausage by the FFA.
We were sitting around at Momma’s and Daddy’s drinking coffee on the morning of the funeral when Russell decided he’d better double-check everything, almost like he wanted to make certain she wasn’t coming back. After he hung up the phone, he called me into the other room.
“The body’s gone,” he hissed while peeking around the corner to make sure Momma and Daddy hadn’t heard him.
“What do you mean, the body’s gone?” I couldn’t believe my ears.
“You’re not pulling some kind of joke are you, Georgie Sue? It’d be just like you to pull some last-minute stunt on your sister.”
“Excuse me, but you seem to have me confused with Billy Ann. I’d never do something like that! Probably one of her lovers saw the notice in the paper and decided he wanted Billy Ann for himself, you know, bury her in his own back yard so he could dig her up every now and then and see her.”
“You could be right, Georgie Sue. God knows there are enough crazy people in these parts. Should we tell your Momma and Daddy?”
“That’d only upset them. I think we should just go through with it as planned. The whole family is here. It’s going to be closed casket anyway, so nobody’ll know if she’s in there or not.”
“The pall bearers will know. The box won’t be heavy enough.”
“Maybe we can stick some bricks in it. That’ll make it heavy. I say we go through with it. We can figure out where her body went later.”
So after the service and we’d put Billy Ann, or rather Billy Ann’s box, in the ground, all the relatives came over to the house. Nobody seemed the wiser. Momma was busy setting out the trays of wieners and pouring coffee for everyone. I noticed she had a new flower vase on the table, one I’d never seen before. Looked right pretty, even if there weren’t any flowers in it.
I sat stirring my coffee, trying to get that creamer to dissolve when Momma came up to me and said, “More creamer, dear?” She shoved that flower vase under my nose and scooped some more into my cup.
It was that little glint in her eye that caused me to reexamine the gray lumpy powder floating in my coffee. I looked back up at her in horror. “Momma, please say you didn’t . . .!”
Charlotte Jones has seen her work featured in over 60 literary and commercial magazines including Bordersenses, Nerve Cowboy, Barbaric Yawp and Zygote in My Coffee.
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