FUNNY BONES

The
Collected Short, Odd Writings of R. Patrick Gates
 FUNNY BONES
A COLLECTION OF HUMOROUS AND ODD STORIES
AND POEMS BY

R. PATRICK GATES

TM
E-Published by Imagine Your World Books
Copyright 2018 by R. Patrick Gates
All Rights Reserved
Cover art: “Possessed Cookie Jar” by R. Patrick Gates/All photos & art by R. Patrick Gates,
Copyright 2018
***Poker Face

It was half past nine and a quarter of my mind

Was wandering a lonely street.
I was holding two pair, that were pretty fair,
With an ace to spare—how sweet!
When all of a sudden,
There came a thuddin',
Like a drum roll with precision;
And out of the back room,
Comes this wild dame whom
Looked like she'd just made a nasty decision.
She brandished a knife, like any good wife,
Only cutting carrots weren't her intention.
She cut off the ear
Of a fellow quite near,
Then stabbed a part of him I won't mention.
That’s when the lady fair,
Tossed her blond hair
And said something to the poor sap:
“Charlie, boy,
I just stabbed your man-toy
‘cause I know you’re a cheatin’ scum.”
Poor Charlie just moaned
And grabbed his cojones
And cried, “Sis, I’m tellin’ Mum!”

******
(“Long Lips” was my first adult horror short story, in more ways than
one—it is the first horror story I ever wrote as an adult, and it was my
first horror short with a twisted adult-ish sense of humor [though
some may argue with how adult my sense of humor is, to which I can
only maturely respond: “Your mother wears army boots! Nyah!”] It
was also my first short story sale, to JN Williamson who put it in his
first DANSE MACABRE anthology. A slight nod of the head is due,
Deep Throat, the classic smut film, for reasons that will become clear
as you read.)

LONG LIPS

Fog slips in from the sea like cold blood sliding from an old wound. It
drips over the seawall. It stains the cobblestone streets. It chills the air like
the icy breath of Death. With it slinks a shadow – thin, quick, ethereal. It
dances like fine rain in the night. It slithers smoother than a snake through
mud. It laughs and fills the night with a hideous tinkling sound like razor-
sharp slivers of glass slicing through dead flesh…
She paused at the corner and listened, then shivered. The night was
damp for June. She closed her coat against the fog and hurried toward the
friendly lights of the tavern. Behind her, a black cat skittered sideways
through the fog. It yowled like a human baby in pain. The sound ran over
her spine like an ice cube dropped down the back of her blouse. She
exhaled loudly; the air bubbled out of her lungs like water through a straw.
It masked the dead laughter floating on the fog, causing her to mistake it for
the echo of her own frightened breathing. She did not see the shadow
slipping close behind her.
The music from the tavern was distant, fading in and out of the mist. It
sounded as if a dirge were being played in the depths of a mausoleum. The
woman paused and listened as she fumbled out a cigarette. In the damp
air, the match would not light. She struck it until the head was worn off then
nervously started on another. A hand came out of the fog. It offered a light
from a lighter she could not see. The blue flame seemed to be emitting
from the hand itself. She shuddered and refused to believe her eyes.
The man stepped out of the mist.
"Good evening," he said in a voice deep and rich, yet distant and
vaporous. She smiled and relaxed. It was just another john. She lit her
cigarette, took a deep drag, and ran her tongue seductively over her lips as
she gave him a wink.
"Hello, Sugar," she said in a sweet, Southern drawl. "What can I do
you for?"
The man just smiled showing a glimpse of white, luminescent teeth.
"Oh, you shy, Honey? That's all right. You can tell me. What do you
want Mama to do?" She peered into his face, but the swirling mists
shrouded it. She could only see his eyes. They were a deep purple and
seemed to glow in the fog. She shook off the sudden chill that rippled over
her skin and took his hand.
"I can't help you, Sugar, if you won't tell me what you want."
He pointed to an alley a few feet away.
"Now we gettin' somewheres. Come on, Sugar. Don't be scared."
In the alley her blouse was open. Dew droplets gathered on the deep
brown hardness of her nipples. His tongue glided over them, licking them
dry. She giggled at the sandpaper feeling. He pushed her to her knees.
She unzipped his pants. He sighed….
"Oh my God!" she said with fear and amazement in her voice. "I'm
sorry, Sugar, but I can't. I –" her voice was cut off suddenly. She gave out a
muffled cry followed by gagging.
The fog carried away the sound of her death and the thin, mean
laughter which rejoiced in it.

"What have we got?"

The detective barked the question as he got out of the squad car. His
voice was hoarse and raspy from too many cigarettes and too many years
in the damp, seaside town. He was a short man, but stocky and wide. With
a little more height on him he would've made a fine football player. His face
was wind-burned and deeply creased with lines of weathering. He looked
more like a lobster fisherman than a police captain. His hair was getting
sparse and gray. He never combed it, leaving it to wave in the ocean’s
breeze.
"I asked a question!" he shouted at a group of patrolmen standing at
the entrance to the alleyway. They were laughing over some joke and
hadn't seen the captain pull up. Their laughter quieted quickly, and they
dispersed, looking embarrassed but unable to wipe the foolish grins from
their faces. The man closest to the captain turned, tried to subdue the smile
that kept forcing the corners of his lips up, and stuttered out an answer.
"Th … There's b…b… been a homicide, S … Sir."
The captain sighed and frowned. "No shit, Dick Tracy? I thought
maybe we had a mad jaywalker on the loose."
And insuppressible giggle bubbled out of the patrolman's mouth.
"What's the MO?" the captain asked, scowling as he headed into the
alley. The patrolman only smiled more foolishly, and his face turned a
bright red. He tried to stammer out an answer but giggled instead.
Disgusted, the captain pushed him aside.
The woman lay on the pavement. A worn, gray, police department
issue woolen blanket covered her. The captain pulled it back to reveal her
face, in shadow, turned to the alley wall. Her blouse was open exposing
large chocolate-colored breasts topped with magenta red nipples like
cherries on twin scoops of fudge ice cream. Her skirt was hiked up around
her midsection, but her silk panties were still intact. Her legs were long,
smooth and brown. Near the body lay a pair of red, high-heeled shoes and
a sequin covered pocketbook.
"She was a hooker," Lieutenant Hedstrom said as he approached the
captain. "We busted her just about a month ago. She usually worked out of
the tavern down the road. She must've met a john on her way there."
"So what's the MO?" the captain asked again as he crouched next to
the body and examined the ground around it. Lieutenant Hedstrom looked
embarrassed and didn't answer.
"Well? What the hell's the MO? Was she shot? Stabbed? I don’t see
any blood; was she moved?"
 "That's a little hard to determine, Chief. I think you'd better talk to the
medical examiner. He’s over by that squad car, there."

"She what?"
The captain couldn't believe his ears.
"I know it sounds strange, but that's what happened," the doctor
answered.
"You mean to tell me that she drowned in … in … sperm?"
"Yes, combined with choking on … well, it's hard to tell exactly what
she choked on at this time. I'll need to do a full autopsy."
"Wait a minute. You're insinuating that she drowned in sperm and
choked on a … a … penis?" the detective asked with incredulity. Next to
him, Lieutenant Hedstrom let out a muffled snigger. The captain shot him a
hard glance that immediately shut him up.
"Yes. That's a rather crude way of putting it, but yes."
The detective leaned against the medical examiner's car and looked
back at the body in the alley. "You're playing a sick joke on me, right?" he
asked Lieutenant Hedstrom.
Hedstrom stared at the ground and shook his head. A tiny smile
played at the corners of his mouth. "No –"
"Because if you are, I don't think it's very funny!"
"Believe me, Chief. It's no joke. I mean, who could make something
like this up?"
The captain pushed past Hedstrom and went back to the body in the
alley. The county morgue’s meat wagon had just pulled up. Before he let
them take the body, the captain again knelt by the dead woman's side and
gently turned her face so that he could see it.
He wished he hadn’t.
He had seen corpses before; had seen murder victims before, but
never had he seen anything like this. The shock of what he saw didn’t
registered on his face, or in his eyes – he was too much of a pro for that –
but he felt it inside. It assaulted his innermost being; when he looked into
her open eyes, they stared up at him with the horror of death still lingering
in their glazed, dilated pupils. She might've been a very pretty girl once, but
the ravages of her profession, and the violence of her death had made her
ugly. Long thin strands of milky fluid ran from both nostrils, over her cheeks
and into her ears. Her mouth appeared to be locked open; the jaw broken.
The bottom part lay on the base of her neck. The latter, and her face, were
blotchy with purple black bruises.
It was a sight that would haunt the captain’s dreams for the rest of his
life.

The road runs through miles of cranberry bogs. There are no lights,
no traffic, no signs, just a long empty stretch of narrow coastal road skirting
a few small villages. The car sped along at a constant, law-breaking rate of
speed. The driver, a pretty young woman on her way home from college for
the weekend, sat slouched against the door as she steered the car along
the fairly straight road. The radio was loudly tuned in to the ‘oldies’ station
and music poured out the open windows leaving a fading wake behind the
vehicle in the night: The Kinks playing, "Nightstalker." She tapped her
fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music.
At the outskirts of the small town something, a dog or cat which
appeared as a fleeting shadow, shot out in front of the car. She slammed
on the brakes, causing the vehicle to fishtail to a stop. Anxiously, she
scanned the road behind her. It was empty. Whatever it was, it wasn't there
now. She hoped it was unhurt. Sighing, she rolled up the window, put the
car in gear and drove on.
A moment later she screamed, and the car swerved off the road.
Sitting in the passenger seat next to her was a naked man. His build was
powerful and his body hairy. His eyes glowed with a purplish light. The
young woman screamed again as she looked at his lap. The wheel spun
wildly, and the car went into a slide and off the road as the naked man
grabbed her head and pulled it down to her demise.
The car came to rest on the sandy shoulder at the side of the road,
the motor still running. Under the sound of the engine could faintly be heard
the sound of choking.
 The captain sat staring out the window. His feet rested on the pitted
top of his old oak desk, and an unlit cigar butt hung from the corner of his
mouth. Around the room sat Lieutenant Hedstrom, the medical examiner,
and the DA.
"This can't be for real," muttered the captain. The DA coughed and
the captain pulled his eyes away from the window. "It's the exact same MO
as the hooker downtown, you're sure?"
The medical examiner nodded.
"Is there any way this guy could be faking this?"
Lieutenant Hedstrom giggled.
"I mean," the captain continued after an angry glance at the
Lieutenant, "is there some way he can make it appear that he has…. That
he has…." The captain fumbled for the right word.
"Fellatioed his victims to death?" offered Hedstrom. "Or maybe a
better word would be, fellaticide, or oralicide, or how about, headicide?"
"Okay, knock it off!" barked the captain. He turned to the medical
examiner once more. "Well? Is there any way to fake a death like this; to
make it appear that he killed these two women the way he did?"
The medical examiner sighed. "I suppose there could be, but I don't
think so; not in this case. Abrasions and bruises at the back of the throat,
coupled with sperm analysis and the skin cells found in the victims’ mouths
and on their teeth, unfortunately, prove conclusively that the murders took
place the way I have described them."
The captain considered a moment and took a deep breath. "So, it
looks like we've got a serial killer with an unusual – to say the least –
modus operandi on our hands."
"He shouldn't be that hard to find," Lieutenant Hedstrom commented.
"All we've got to do is find a guy that looks like he's got a third leg."
The captain glared at him.
"Actually," the medical examiner interrupted, "that's not too far from
the truth. By measuring the bruises in the victims’ throats, the killer must
have a sixteen to nineteen inch penis with a very large circumference of at
least five inches or more."
"Holy Christmas!" mumbled the DA. "You know, if you catch this
bastard, his trial will be a sideshow. I sure as hell don't want to try him. If
we catch him, it might be best if we just put him away quietly, like they did
with the Boston Strangler. And heaven help us if the papers ever get wind
of this."
"Putting him on trial is the least of my worries right now," the captain
answered. "But you're right, I do want to keep this out of the papers. We’ll
put out a standard release saying the guy is a strangler, nothing more." He
pointed at Hedstrom. "Circulate a description of the murderer's um …
anatomy to the hookers in the red light district, but do it discreetly. You'd
also better check all doctors and hospitals within a fifty mile radius. It
seems to me there should be some record somewhere of this guy if he is
such an anatomical freak."
Hedstrom nodded and started out of the office.
"And double the night patrol in the red light district. We’re going to
crack down on the john's until we find this guy. Anyone soliciting sex is to
be picked up and examined."
Lieutenant Hedstrom started to laugh, but smothered it quickly under
the captain's harsh gaze.

The sign read: THE TOOL BOX

When the door opened, the stench of sweat and smoke poured out of
the tavern like steam from a cauldron. It mingled with the sea fog gathering
outside. A shadow, disguised and hidden by the mist, slid under the sign
and lingered near the entrance way. The door opened again and two young
men holding hands came out. They paused in the doorway and kissed
passionately. The shadow slipped past the closing door and the lovers
unnoticed, and entered the bar.
The smoke was thick and the smell of stale beer, tobacco, and urine
strong. The jukebox flickered as it ground out a low, sax-heavy perverted
jazz version of, "Strangers in the Night." The hubbub of conversation was
low and rumbling but stopped as the door clicked shut. Bloodshot eyes
under visored leather caps looked up. Mustaches bristled, chains rattled,
and leather squeaked as all the men in the bar strained to get a look at the
newcomer. Lips were licked, eyes were winked, and heads were nodded,
but the stranger in the long, black, flowing trench coat stared through them.
Moving as if he rode a cushioned wave of hot air, he traversed the floor and
went into the bathroom. A chill ran through the patrons of the bar but was
quickly shrugged off. Conversation resumed.
In a corner at the back of the room, a thin young man wearing tight
leather pants and a fishnet jersey eyed the black-clad stranger as he
floated past. Their eyes met momentarily, and the young man nodded. A
trembling smile quavered on his lips. He knew what the glance meant. He
had exchanged the same glance with men hundreds of times at the club,
and at the adult theater down the street. This time, though, there was
something different. This time, the look brought a thrill like nothing he had
ever felt coursed through his loins like an electrical current.
He ran his tongue over dry lips and followed the stranger into the
bathroom.

The captain pushed open the tavern door and recoiled from the
clammy feel of the black leather padding on it. He entered and glanced at
the shabby interior; the rough wooden tables and chairs, the scratched bar
and the posters of leather-clad he-men adorning the walls.
"What a fucking dump," he muttered as he went to the crowd of
policemen milling outside the bathroom door. They parted slowly as he
squeezed between them and into the foul smelling lavatory. The sight of
the young man, jaw broken, lying in a puddle of milky fluid, which still
flowed from his nostrils and gaping mouth, sickened the captain. He looked
up and faced the crowd of officers.
"All right. You know what to do. Question everyone who was in here
tonight. Let's go! Move! Stop gawking like a bunch of idiots!"
 The officers quickly moved off to carry out his orders as Lieutenant
Hedstrom stepped forward. "What do we call this one, Chief?" Hedstrom
asked, a sarcastic smile twitching the corners of his mouth. "A homo-cide?"

"There's someone to see you, Captain."

The door opened and a woman in black entered the chief's office.
She was in her late 50’s with grayish black hair and stern, rock-hard
features. The first impression the captain had of her was that she looked
like Indira Gandhi. The second impression was that she was a weirdo. She
remained near the door, standing stiffly still, eyes staring straight ahead
and lips moving silently as if she were reciting the Rosary.
"Can I help you, Ma'am?" the captain asked as he made a mental
note to chew out the desk sergeant who had let her in to see him.
"I know what he is," she said in a deep resonant monotone.
A slight chill ran down the captain's neck.
"Who what is?" he asked, but he already knew the answer. He asked
in the hope that he was wrong. This case was too strange already; he didn't
want to get any stranger.
The woman ignored his question and went on in the same deep voice
as before. "I saw him in my dreams. He was laughing at me, ridiculing me."
She looked deeply into the captain's eyes, and he nearly balked at the
intensity of her stare. "He is evil. He is a demon. An Incubus. He rides the
night air and feeds on perversion and death." Her voice rose hysterically.
"He must be stopped! He is evil! He will destroy you! He will destroy us all!
He must be stopped! He–"
"Whoa! Calm down," the captain interrupted as he got up. "Just calm
down and tell me what you know."
The woman glared at him, balefully.
"I know how to stop him," she declared. She continued speaking, and
the captain listened with disbelief at first, followed by the growing
realization that the old woman might just know something of value….
 The DA and Lieutenant Hedstrom were back in the chief's office. The
DA nervously chewed at his fingernails while Hedstrom stared at the ceiling
and tried to keep the sarcastic smile the captain hated so much off his face.
"Before I say anything, I want to get one thing straight." The chief
looked directly at Hedstrom. "This is no joking matter! We have a serious
situation on our hands that has reached a point where I'm ready to take
unorthodox measures."
Hedstrom smiled.
"So if you feel the need to joke, don't!"
Hedstrom coughed into his hand and wiped the smile from his lips.
"Like I said, what I am about to suggest is extremely unorthodox, to
say the least, but at this point I'll try anything. If we let this go any longer it's
going to start attracting national attention. So far we’ve been lucky; the
local newsboys are lazy from years of nothing much happening around
here and they haven’t really started to dig at the story, but that can only last
so long. Sooner or later this will break and break big if we don’t do
something about it.”
"We can't have that," the DA said nervously. “Something like this can
turn your career into a joke for the rest of your life! Forget politics; forget
ever being taken seriously again!”
"Okay, take it easy. I agree, and we are not going to let that happen.
That's why I want you both," he glanced at Hedstrom, "to listen to me
carefully and seriously."
The DA nodded, immediately and repeatedly, and Hedstrom,
managing to contain his smirk, followed.
"As you may already know," the captain went on, "I had a visitor
yesterday who was … well let's say she was a little weird. But, weird or not,
she made some sense as far as giving me an idea about how to nab this
guy."
"What did she say?" Hedstrom asked.
"A lot of it was pure delusion. A lot of hocus-pocus crap about the
killer being a demon – she called him an incubus, which I gather is some
kind of sexual vampire. But that's not what's important. While she was
babbling, she also gave me an idea of how we can get this guy. She said
we need someone who can drain him, which I take to mean someone who
can take all he's got to give and survive."
Hedstrom started to chuckle but quickly subdued it under a withering
glance from the chief. The DA looked uncomfortable. He sat up and leaned
forward.
"I don't understand," he said.
"She said this guy feeds on death created through sex. I think that's
true, though not in a literal sense. I think the guy gets off on it, but not in
any supernatural way—he’s just a sicko who gets off on choking people to
death with his johnson, plain and simple. If we can get someone, a hooker,
or even a gay guy to go undercover for us, and who can handle this guy’s
unnatural size, we might frustrate him to the point where he does
something stupid, and we can nab him. At the worst, we’ll get an
eyewitness description of him which is more than we've got now. We have
to bait this guy with someone he can't kill in his usual manner. With
surveillance, we might get lucky and be able to grab him."
"I don't know," the DA said. "I think this guy’s too smart. He's been
baiting us all along. Do you really think we can turn the tables on him?"
"Yeah, Chief," Hedstrom added, "this guy has been a real master
baiter!"
The captain ignored Hedstrom's remark and spoke to the DA.
"Yes, I think we can." He turned to Hedstrom. "And you, wise guy, are
going to find the right bait for us."
Hedstrom's mouth dropped open, and his face turned crimson.
For the first time in days, the captain smiled.

The phone rang in the middle of the night. The captain started from a
sound sleep and cursed loudly. Without turning on a light, he fumbled on
the bed stand for the receiver.
"Hello?" he mumbled sleepily.
"Chief? It's me, Hedstrom. I think I've got something."
The captain sat up in bed and turned on the lamp. "Has he struck
again?"
 "No. I'm calling about the bait."
"What?"
"The bait. The bait!" Hedstrom shouted into the phone.
The captain threw back the covers and got out of bed. Next to him his
wife groaned and rolled over. "Good!" the captain said quietly. "What do
you have?"
"I called a friend of mine in San Francisco. We went to college
together, now he's a pornographic film producer. He has his own film
company. One of his stars is willing to help us out."
"Can she do the job?" the captain asked.
Hedstrom chuckled but quickly covered the phone with his hand so
the captain couldn't hear. "Yeah, I think so," he remarked after he took his
hand away from the receiver. "Have you ever seen or heard of the movie,
Deep Throat?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I've got someone who makes Linda Lovelace look like a
lollipop sucker. I've got the star of, Long Lips," Hedstrom said proudly.
"So, who the hell is that?"
"Lorna Lipps, of course, Linda Lovelace’s successor. She'll help us
for ten thousand dollars, plus expenses."
"Ten grand?" the captain said loudly.
"Yeah, pretty expensive bee-jay, huh? But, considering the risks, she
won't do it for less."
The captain considered for a moment, then nodded his head in the
dark. "Okay. The mayor wants this guy caught no matter what, so I think I
can squeeze the money out of him. Meanwhile get her on a plane out here
as soon as possible. And tell her to keep it quiet."

She was tall, and she was blonde.

The captain was surprised at how tall and blonde she was. He
wondered briefly if her hair color was natural. She towered a good four
inches over the chief, and he was five foot nine. Her height, however, didn't
detract from her looks – didn't make her look gawky or awkward. She was a
very pretty woman; not scuzzy or whore-ish the way he’d expected a porno
queen to look. A little age showed in the tight wrinkles around her eyes,
and the tiny grim lines at the corners of her mouth, though both could've
been a consequence of her profession. In any case, these small flaws were
easy to overlook when he gazed into her large, round, crystal blue eyes.
They held him and nearly mesmerized him. Her mouth was full and sensual
under a long, thin and noble nose. Her chin melted gracefully into a neck
that was long, lean and aristocratic. Her shoulders were broad, and they
had to be: her breasts were huge, tight and firm; pushing against the
seams of the tank top she wore.
The captain couldn’t help but caress her body with his eyes and
found it hard to look away. She smiled wryly at him and shifted her weight
on her hips. The bright pink hot pants she wore looked as if they had been
painted on. They rode up her smooth sleek thighs and creased around her
crotch and her ample round buttocks. The captain swallowed and licked his
suddenly dry lips as he stood to greet her.
"I'm pleased to meet you, Miss Lipps," he stammered.
"I can see that," she smiled down at him.
"Did Lieutenant Hedstrom fill you in on the plan?" the captain asked
nervously as he sat again and crossed his legs.
"Oh, he filled me all right," she said. A smirk curled the left corner of
her mouth.
The captain coughed and muttered, "Why am I not surprised?"
"Don't worry," she said, placing a small leather travel bag on the
captain's desk, "I’ll include it in the price; he’s cute." She opened the bag
and pulled out a pair of black satin hot pants, and a red see-through
peasant blouse which she laid out carefully on the captain's desk. "First
things first, however. I believe you have some money for me?"
The captain fumbled an envelope out of his desk drawer and handed
it to her. "Here it is, cash like you asked."
She took it from him and tucked it inside her bag.
“Aren’t you going to count it?” the chief asked.
Her intense blue eyes gave him the once over, once more, and she
grinned. “If I can’t trust a cop, who can I trust,” she answered coyly and,
picking up her outfit from the desk, went into the small bathroom connected
to the chief's office. She left the door open.
"While I get changed into my working clothes, why don't you give me
the details of this operation," she said, sliding the tank top over her head.
Her breasts were lifted and flopped free of the stretchy material. They
made a soft smacking sound as they slapped back against her body.
They were the fullest, most perfect breasts the chief had ever seen.
He could not take his eyes off her. She watched him watching her and ran
her hands slowly over her chest and down to her shorts. She unbuckled the
hot pants and slid them seductively down her thighs. The captain started to
speak but noticed, with a sharp intake of breath, that she wore no
underwear. He looked away and busied himself with papers on his desk.
Lorna Lipps smiled and said, “I’m glad to see you’re a gentleman,
Chief.”
The chief blushed and couldn’t help but think, Not too much of a
gentleman, since he’d been careful to notice she was, indeed, a natural
blonde.

The music from the car radio was full of static, and faded in and out
with pops and crackles that hurt the ears.
"Shut the damn thing off!" the captain said to Lieutenant Hedstrom
who sat in the passenger seat. "It's giving me a headache."
Hedstrom clicked the radio off, and watched Lorna Lipps standing on
the opposite corner in her skin-tight black pants and see-through red
blouse. He smiled and glanced sideways at the captain. "Give her half a
chance, Chief, and she'll give you a real headache," he said, smirking.
The captain frowned at the remark but didn't say anything. He had
given up on his lieutenant. Not to say that the thought of a roll in the hay
with Lorna Lipps hadn't crossed his mind – he knew he'd had his chance
when she had put on her little strip show in his office – but unlike Hedstrom
the captain did believe some things were still sacred, and his marriage
happened to be one of them. Even though his wife showed all of her 50
years in her gray hair and the rolls of fat around her waist and hips, he
would never cheat on her and never had.
Not that he hadn’t been tempted.
"Where did she go?" Hedstrom asked suddenly in a panic.
The captain looked up from his musings. The corner was empty. He
searched the mist-filled street frantically in both directions.
Nothing.
How could that be? He’d looked away for mere seconds!
It didn’t matter—Lorna Lipps was gone!

The captain sipped cold coffee and looked at the clock on his desk—
3:00 AM. Lorna Lipps had been missing for five hours. A coastal dragnet
had failed to turn up any trace of her. The captain was ready to give up and
chalk her down as another victim. The problem was that she wasn't just
another victim. She was a celebrity of sorts, and the captain was
responsible for her.
The door opened, and he looked up hopefully. It was Hedstrom, and
he shook his head. Still no word. The captain slumped back in his chair,
and his eyes fell on Lorna Lipps leather bag in the corner. He found himself
wondering what it would have been like if he had acted on impulse that day
he had first met her. He shook the thought off with the realization that if he
had made it with her, he'd be feeling a hell of a lot worse now than he
already did.
The telephone rang, startling him and making him sit up straight. The
phone rang again before he snapped the receiver from its cradle.
"Hello?"
The voice that answered was distant and weak. It sounded hoarse
and gravelly, yet familiar. The captain strained forward as his heart skipped
a beat.
It was Lorna Lipps.
 The small, dingy hotel room was at the back of a long dark corridor.
The building smelled of raw sewerage and garbage. The captain hurried
down the hallway toward the room at the end. His footsteps echoed like
ghostly shots. The building seethed with sweat and perversion – of death
itself – the closer he got to the door. He called out Lorna Lipps name, and
thought he heard a deep faraway scream seemingly coming from the
depths of the building. Panting, he reached the door and grabbed the knob.
Hesitating a moment, afraid of what he would find, the knob feeling like an
ice cube coated with Vaseline, he opened the door and gasped.
The room was filled with thick, pungent black smoke. Waving his
arms, the chief made his way inside. The air began to clear. Lorna Lipps
lay on the bed, naked, glistening with sweat and some sort of slimy black
goo.
She was alive.
"Where is he?" the captain asked as he pulled out his gun.
"There," Lorna said pointing at the wall. "And there," she added
pointing at the ceiling and then the floor. Most of the smoke was drawn into
the hallway when the door opened so that the room was clear enough for
the captain to see. From the ceiling hung a hand, suspended by a long
string of gelatinous black slime. Likewise the walls were covered with bits
and pieces of goo covered flesh: an ear plastered against the window, an
eyeball over the door, part of a foot on top of the old scratched dresser. As
the chief glanced down, he saw at his feet the seventeen inch piece of flesh
that had been the killer's murder weapon.
"What the hell happened?" the captain asked incredulously.
Lorna Lipps shrugged and smiled weakly.
"I guess some guys just get all burnt up and go to pieces when they
can't get off."

X0X0

(Post note: Can you hear the rim-shot and cymbal crash on that
last line? Fair warning—there is a definite R rating to nearly
everything in this book. )
***Depression

Bend here,
Fold there.
Fuck life,
It’s nowhere!

****

“Eclipse” (oil pastels on paper) 2016

(This story was first published in the anthology, SHADOWS, from
Cemetery Dance Publications. A longer version was supposed to
have been published in a ‘Dead’ anthology inspired by Romero’s
films, but which I withdrew after a falling out with the editors over the
maturity level of my work. To which I had the definitive last word: “I
know you are but what am I?”)

DEAD HEAD

“The first purpose of all life is to survive—eat, breathe,

drink…stay alive. The second purpose of all life is to procreate—
further the gene pool…insure the continuation of the species. At least
that’s what the so-called experts say, but I could tell’ em different.”
Newly promoted and transferred Colonel John Hill looked up
from his pseudo-celebratory beer and fixed his drunken gaze on his
older brother, General Thomas Hill.
“What the god-damned-Christ-in-a-Cadillac are you talking
about?”
“You forgot to say, Sir!” Thomas said, smirking, but his eyes were
menacing.
“Fuck you,” John mumbled, followed immediately with: “Sir!”
General Hill chuckled and slapped his little brother on the back. “How
the hell did you ever manage to make colonel, you dumb fuck?”
“The same way you did,” John retorted dryly over his beer, “by putting
my nose so far up superior officers’ asses they used to call me ‘Major
Enema’! And, of course, by being brilliant.”
The general didn’t laugh. “Well, now you’re under my command, little
brother, and I do not want your nose or any other part of your anatomy
anywhere near my ass.”
 Unlike when we were kids? Colonel John thought sarcastically.
“I do, however, want you to remain being brilliant; it’s why I got you
transferred to my unit. Do I make myself clear, soldier?” Anyone who didn’t
know General Hill might have thought he was joking with his brother, but
John knew better.
“Yes sir, Sir!” John slurred and raised a middle-fingered salute to his
brother when the general wasn’t looking. “Speaking of which, how the hell
did you manage to pull this off? I thought there was a regulation against
brothers serving in the same unit.”
“You are correct, son. But you are with the big boys now. The normal
rules no longer apply.”
Colonel Hill put a hand to his mouth and spoke in a crackling voice,
mimicking a radio transmission. “Say again headquarters; we got us a
jumbled transmission, over.”
Big brother general leaned over and spoke in a low voice. “You know
what my title is at the Pentagon?”
“Actually, no,” John answered. “You’re always so god-damned
secretive.”
“Yeah, well, you’re about to be let in on the secret.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m the Pentagon’s Director of Covert R & D. You know what ‘R & D’
is, right?”
“Retards and degenerates?” John answered slyly.
“Very funny, shit-for-brains. Do you know what kind of R&D I’m
directing?”
“Hmm,” John said, “seeing as how the word ‘covert’ is in your title, I’m
guessing secret weapons?”
 The general ignored his brother’s sarcasm and smiled
condescendingly. “Oh yeah! We are working on secret weapons, but
nothing like you could ever imagine!”
Colonel Hill regarded his brother for a moment. Imagination had
never been his older brother’s forte. He was good at using people who
possessed imagination, which had got him to the position of power he now
held, but he had never possessed any himself. Even as a child the most
imagination he had ever shown was in devising cruel, perverted and
abusive tortures for John. As far as the younger Hill was concerned, putting
the words imagination or creativity next to the name General Thomas Hill
would create an oxymoron as bad as Military Intelligence.
The general’s cell phone rang, and he answered it, barking: “Make it
good!”—his standard phone greeting. He listened for a moment, grunted,
and snapped the cell phone shut.
“Okay mama’s boy, I’ve got marching orders. I’ll expect you at the
Maryland facility at oh-five-hundred hours tomorrow. And remember….”
General Tom leaned close to his brother, jutting his square jaw and Roman
nose into John’s softer, more effeminate face. “You’re now under my
command. Mark me well, brother; I’m not fucking around here. If you screw
up in any way, shape or form, I will have your balls for bocce…and you
know what a bocce-ball-busting-bastard I can be. Do you read me?”
“Yes Sir,” John mumbled using every ounce of self-control he had not
to flinch or cringe from his brother’s intimidating countenance.
“Fuck you,” he muttered moments later to the general’s exiting back
and downed the rest of his beer. He considered having another, decided
against it, and left the small bar that was less than two blocks from the
Pentagon. He didn’t have far to go. Being secretive, Tom had put him up in
a hotel—the one across the street from the bar—instead of at the nearest
base, or with him at his Georgetown home.
John pulled a Black Jewel, wooden-tipped cigar from his breast
pocket, unwrapped it, and lit it, savoring the rich aromatic scent of the
tobacco. Being made colonel is supposed to be a good thing, he thought,
but then, promotions had never meant much to him—certainly not as much
as they meant to Tom or had meant to their father, the two-star general. In
truth, if John had had a little more balls he would never have gone to West
Point and become a career military man.
Military man! Even after all this time he still had a hard time thinking
of himself in those terms. He was a scientist—more specifically a
geneticist—who previous to this transfer had been teaching Advanced
Genetics at West Point and pursuing research of his own in ways to
genetically neutralize potential biological attacks by terrorists or a military
enemy. Now, with one call from his big brother, he’d been given a
sabbatical from the Point, his research put on hold, and he was going to be
subjected to—after more than twenty years of being free—his big brother’s
mental abuse. It was hard enough being Tom Hill’s brother; he didn’t even
want to think about what it was going to be like to serve under him.
A memory flashed through his mind, crystal clear for a moment, then
it was gone, but the moment was long enough to burn the image into his
mind’s eye: Him age 6, naked, gagged, and tied face-down to the bed while
Tom, age 14, raped him with a stick of pepperoni and gave him thirty
lashes with his leather belt.
John pushed it away; shut down his emotions; forced himself to feel
nothing. He was good at coping this way—he’d had a lifetime of practice.
He finished his cigar, flicked it into the gutter, and crossed the street to the
hotel and went up to his room, focusing on the numbness so he wouldn’t
think about what lay ahead.

“I’d like you all to meet Colonel John Hill, my brother,” General
Thomas Hill explained to his staff gathered in the Maryland facility’s largest
conference room the next morning. “I had to pull a lot of strings to get him
here because I’m sure he can solve our problems with Project Romero. I’m
not going to waste valuable time introducing him to each of you individually;
my brother is not a people person any way.” He smirked and shot John a
squinty-eyed look. “He’s got a personality like a rock, and he can be an
even bigger prick than I can.”
He slapped John on the back so hard a shot would not have sounded
louder. John remained unmoving, stoic, numb.
“He’s not here to make friends; he’s here to get the job done. That’s
all.”
John kept his steely-eyed posture, holding the blush of
embarrassment at bay through sheer will power alone. When the room had
emptied out, he turned stiffly to his brother, the general, who did not seem
to notice his unease.
“So, are you going to tell me what ‘Project Romero’ is and how I’m
supposed to help you, or did you bring me here just to belittle me in front of
your staff?” John asked with forced calm.
“Still touchy, huh?” General Hill laughed. He ignored John for over a
minute while he collected papers and arranged them in his leather valise.
Finally he turned and regarded his younger brother thoughtfully. “Tell me,
Colonel, what do you think of when you hear the name, ‘Romero’?”
John had always hated it when his brother would not answer a direct
question, choosing to play a condescending game of Q and A instead so
he could feel superior. “I don’t know,” John answered, dully.
“Come on! You’re not trying. Think about it—that’s an order!”
“Fine … It’s a Spanish name? Um … let me see…. Oh yeah! Isn’t that
the name of the guy who made all those ‘living dead’ zombie movies you
loved so much as a kid?”
“Affirmative,” General Hill exclaimed. “George Romero, creator of the
greatest horror movie ever made, Night of the Living Dead. The original,
60’s version, of course.”
“Of course!” John acquiesced sarcastically. He had never shared his
brother’s penchant for horror films. “So?”
“You remember, Night of the Living Dead?” Thomas asked.
 “Vaguely. The dead come back to life and eat people, right?”
The general nodded. “I’ve got something to show you.”
General Thomas Hill led Colonel John Hill out of the conference room
and to the elevator where they descended to the lowest level of the ten
story underground complex. John noted that to reach the bottom level, his
brother had to insert a special red key into the elevator panel.
“When I got command of Covert R&D they were mainly working on
stealth weaponry; stuff like combat suits that make the wearer invisible in
certain light, also tanks and other vehicles that can blend in with different
backgrounds, like chameleons.” The elevator doors opened on the bottom
level and the general paused in the doorway. “Just to remind you, Colonel,
anything you see here, or read while under my command, goes no further
than these elevator doors. You don’t talk about any of this on the upper
levels of this facility. Are we on the same page?”
“Yes sir,” John answered. “I already signed off on all that.” Despite his
trepidation over serving under his brother, he had to admit his curiosity had
been aroused.
The elder Officer Hill led the younger to the left along a maze of
sterile white corridors, through several thick, double steel doors that
required the general to punch in a code on small, wall-mounted keyboards
before they could pass. Finally they reached a room that was set up like a
small movie theater complete with a dozen plush theater-style chairs. In
front of the first row of chairs was a table with a telephone and console with
an array of buttons on it. The entire wall behind the table, facing the chairs,
was a movie screen.
The general motioned his brother to sit in the front row while he
punched a button on the console and barked: “Alright Corporal, run number
fifty.”
The room darkened and the screen blipped to life. John saw that it
was actually a wide-screen HD television and figured it was on a closed
circuit cable network. The screen showed a stark, white room. Its sterility
was broken by a single, doctor’s examining table in the center of the room.
Strapped to the table was a naked man.
General Tom turned to his brother. “Think about the affect, and effect,
of a virus that could be sprayed over large areas, that would bring the dead
back to life as flesh eating zombies. The enemy dead would turn on their
own comrades. We could even give it to our own troops in certain situations
so that when they got killed, they would continue to be death-delivering
weapons. When this idea was presented to me by Colonel Raditz, the
geneticist on my team, I immediately saw its potential. Can you picture it?”
John could, quite easily, and what he could see was a disaster
waiting to happen if such a virus was real.
The general continued: “I was a little skeptical about the zombies
acting like they do in the movies—and it seems I was right—but Raditz
assured me that Romero had got the science of his story right; if the dead
actually did come back to life, functioning at the most basic, animal level of
survival, their first need would be food and they would eat anything, or
anyone, they could get their hands on.” The general laughed, more of a
bark than a happy sound. “Hell, even if they didn’t eat people, and ate all
the food, starving the enemy, it could still be devastating; never mind just
the psychological impact of the dead coming back to life. Fucking
Outstanding!”
John couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“But Colonel Raditz—Colonel Dumbfuck—was wrong. All the fucking
experts on man’s hierarchy of needs are wrong. Food is not man’s most
basic need.”
A door opened in the room on the screen and a man in a gray
jumpsuit similar to what a convict might wear entered. John did a double
take and looked closer. At first glance, the man appeared normal, if a little
dazed. But discoloration around his eyes and neck were tell-tale signs of
necrosis. With a start, John realized the man was dead, yet … not.
The dead man approached the naked man strapped to the table,
looked him up and down, and turned away. He walked to the far corner of
the room where he fumbled with the zipper on his jumpsuit until he
managed to undo it and take the garment off. He sported a raging, if
discolored, erection which he immediately began to stroke rhythmically with
his right hand.
Colonel John Hill looked at his brother; he didn’t have to say a word.
“Wait,” the general instructed dryly. “It gets better.”
The dead man masturbating in the corner was the most obscene
thing John Hill had ever seen. He was no Puritan, but this was something
else, especially when coagulated blobs of blood began to fly from the
man’s penis as he masturbated furiously enough to tear the dead flesh.
The door opened again and a woman, who could only have been
homeless in life by her filthy and ragged attire, wandered in. John
immediately recognized the signs of death in her as well and, despite his
revulsion, couldn’t help but marvel at the corpse’s apparent reanimation.
The dead woman barely glanced at the other zombie in the room.
After a vague look at her surroundings, she focused with interest on the
naked live man on the table. A look that John could only describe as one of
hunger came over the woman’s face, and she approached the table. For a
moment, John was afraid for the man and braced himself for a scene of
unimaginable carnage, but he was thankfully disappointed. The dead
woman did not bite into the restrained man’s exposed, naked flesh and tear
his internal organs from him to devour bloody and raw. Lightly, delicately,
with great sensuality and tenderness, the dead woman instead reached out
and caressed the man’s penis and testicles. A moment later her other hand
joined in and soon the man was erect and moaning under his gag.
The woman, whom John guessed to be about 50, began tearing at
her ragged, threadbare clothes and continued to do so until they lay in a
shredded heap at her feet. Her body was a three-dimensional topographic
map of her life’s sins and injustices. It was not a pretty sight, but John could
not look away.
The reanimated corpse clambered onto the table, onto the man, and
inserted his live sex organ into her dead one.
 She rode him.
General Hill tapped a button on the console and the screen went
dark, the lights came up. “Those were our first two test subjects. We
thought it might be a fluke, but it wasn’t. All the experts were dead-fucking-
wrong! Mankind’s most basic need is sexual pleasure. It’s not even
procreation because these things have no way of procreating.”
“They don’t know that,” John commented. “And neither do you, really.
Nature can do strange things….”
“Save the ‘Twilight Zone’ crap. Whatever the reason, what it boils
down to is we’re all just a bunch of rutting, horny bastards, even in death.
We ran test after test; Raditz tweaked the virus, created new strains, but
still we got nothing but a bunch of randy corpses who are about as effective
a weapon as a cap gun.”
John couldn’t help but smirk. “Instead of Night of the Living Dead, you
got, Night of the Fucking Dead, huh?”
“Not amusing, Colonel!” General Tom barked.
“So what’s the problem?” John said, placating his brother’s obvious
rising temper. John knew from a lot of experience how unpredictable his
brother could be when he got angry. “So dead soldiers come back to life
and fuck anything that moves—it’s perverted and demented, but as a
weapon of terror, why not?”
His brother nodded. “Yeah, we thought of that. If only that were the
case. But they’re all like this one you just saw. It would be great if they
became raving sex maniacs ready to rape any living thing, but they all
come out so goddamned loving and tender. We even used convicted
murderers and rapists thinking they would certainly attack, but they became
Romeo’s—every one of them caressing and kissing—so fucking gentle….
It’s enough to make you sick!”
John hid a grin behind a cough. He loved seeing his brother so put
out; loved when things didn’t go the asshole’s way. But he didn’t love what
came next, though he should have been expecting it—Tom had been using
John to bail him out of crap since childhood.
“That’s why I brought you here, John. I would have brought you here
right from the start, but until you ranked colonel; at least, I couldn’t get you
clearance to work in our lab. Security regs, you know. I want you to fine
tune the Romero virus and create me some zombies who either want to eat
people or want to rape ‘em and fuck ‘em to death. I want to see some
aggression in these dead fuckers, capeesh?”
“What’s wrong with Raditz? He created the virus; he would be the
best man to do what you want. If he hasn’t been able to do it, what makes
you think I can?”
“Yeah, well, little brother, just between you, me, and the nicotine
stains on my shorts, I’ve come to the belated realization that Dr. Raditz is a
hack. He did okay with creating the basic virus, but that’s as good as he
gets. He’s like the guy who pours a foundation—he don’t build the house.
The contractor, that’s you, comes in and does the detail work, the actual
building. If there was a better genetic expert in this man’s army he’d be
here instead of you. As much as I hate to admit it, every source gave me
your name as the best the military has to offer.”
Which isn’t saying much, John thought sarcastically. He didn’t believe
any of his brother’s bullshit, but didn’t say a word. It looked like this was
going to be just like old times; Big Brother General Tom was setting little
brother Johnny up once again to take the blame for something he had
fucked up.
A half hour later, Colonel John Hill sat in front of a computer console
in Colonel Raditz’s lab, looking at the program model of the virus Raditz
had constructed. Raditz was a small man, and probably the most
unmilitary-like officer (or soldier for that matter) John Hill had ever met. His
hair was too long; his five o’clock shadow was at half-past seven, and his
uniform was wrinkled and smelly. The entire time John was reviewing his
files, Raditz hovered and talked non-stop, at times drifting into a monologue
and giving John the distinct feeling Raditz was no longer aware of his
presence in those moments. Despite being one of the most annoying and
unlikable men John Hill had ever met, what Raditz had to say in his
ramblings was very interesting, and very revealing.
John soon learned his hunch was true; things were going badly to say
the least. Project Romero was out of hand; abuse and corruption were
rampant. Raditz was openly critical of General Hill, blaming him for
everything. Finally John had to stop the man and ask, “You do know
General Hill is my brother, don’t you?”

To which Raditz replied: “I pride myself on being able to read people

very well—not that it does me much good in life, being basically a coward—
but it’s obvious that you like your brother, the general, less than I do.
John had to re-evaluate Raditz for a moment; the man wasn’t as inept
as he appeared. During another lucid moment Dr. Raditz revealed the
worst of Project Romero. “If I had known my work was going to be abused
and misused in such a way, I never would have created the Romero virus. I
mean, first we used condemned prisoners on death row from Texas
prisons, then we started to somehow get people who had signed organ
donor cards—to donate their organs, not have their bodies turned into
monsters! It’s not right that we keep them here. Not right!”
“How many are kept here?” John asked, feeling a chill down his back.
“You don’t know? Oh yes. In the north wing on this level. Thirty three to
date with new ones added all the time—God only knows where they get
them now; General Hill has made that information classified for his eyes
only. We keep them in two large rooms called The Tombs for obvious
reasons. We keep the men and women separate. We found that when
there are no live potential partners available, the dead will have sex with
each other. They don’t eat, they don’t sleep; they just rot away and have
nonstop orgies unless you keep them separate. But that’s not the worst of
it. This place has become a veritable whorehouse—a whorehouse from
Hell!” Dr. Raditz paused, stuck his finger in his nose, retrieved a small
gooey blob, and wiped it on his pants. “Why do you constantly let people
take advantage of you?” he mumbled, seemingly questioning himself,
oblivious of John.
“What do you mean, ‘whorehouse’?” John asked, bringing Raditz
back to the here and now.
“I mean just that. I understand it started with the general himself. He
took a fancy to one of the dead girls that came in and….”
“You mean my brother has sex with the dead?”
Raditz nodded. “It’s surprising how sexually accommodating the dead
are. The women will readily perform fellatio, but only until the phallus
achieves erection. Then they immediately initiate coitus. I suppose it was to
be expected that sooner or later the men would start to take advantage of
the dead also; especially since their commanding officer was doing so. Of
course I didn’t find out any of this until one of the men tried to force a dead
woman to continue performing orally when she tried to pull away to initiate
coitus. She nipped him and the man developed a nasty infection and
almost died. The general was encouraged and ordered tests to be run to
see if the zombies could be induced to violence and cannibalism through
force or mistreatment, but it was a fluke. Every subject we tested, men and
women, suffered degradation and brutal mistreatment and did nothing.
They merely waited for an opportunity to begin copulating and took it as
soon as it appeared.
“The only thing to come out of that whole debacle was the general
became very nervous about catching a disease from the dead. He ordered
the teeth removed from all female test subjects and started wearing a
condom and gloves in his own sessions.”
“My brother actually has sex with dead people. He’s a necrophiliac,”
John said, smirking.
“Um, I don’t think that really applies because they are reanimated,”
Dr. Raditz said in a very scholarly tone that made John laugh. “From what I
understand the general only likes to receive fellatio. He likes the subjects
chained and on their knees.” John shuddered; he knew what that position
felt like—only as kids Tom had used rope, and no condom.

Over the next two months, Colonel John Hill worked on reconfiguring
the Romero virus and learned that Colonel Raditz had not been lying nor
exaggerating about the sexual shenanigans going on at the research
facility. The debauchery had spread beyond the general and officers to the
enlisted men. It had got out of hand. A group of the more enterprising
officers on the project had begun booking stag parties with the inhabitants
of The Tombs. They had to be blackmailing the general; there was no other
way John could see him letting them get away with it. The only thing that
had ever scared Tom Hill was being exposed as a fraud and pervert.
With his entire military career at stake, General Hill was even more of
an asshole than John remembered. For the first few weeks, his brother
pretty much left him alone, keeping his visits short and unobtrusive in
obvious hope that John would come up with a solution quicker if left alone.
When that didn’t happen, however, General Brother’s attitude began to
sour.
At first he berated John privately for not being able to fix the problem
and save his ass. He went as far as accusing John of trying to sabotage his
career and threatened to take little brother down with him if he didn’t
deliver. When that did not bring immediate results, General Hill began
belittling John in front of the other officers at the weekly staff meetings and
even in front of the civilians working in the upper levels of the facility.
Usually the taunts questioned his sexual orientation and manhood—really
childish, immature stuff, but galling nonetheless. The truth was that John
was trying to fix the virus—mostly out of pure professional pride at being
the best—and a part of him did want to be able to impress his brother with
success, despite the hatred he felt for him. Tom was, and always would be,
his big brother; a figure to be looked up to at some level, no matter what.
At 42 John Hill had thought his nightmare childhood of constant abuse and
torture at the hands of his older brother was thirty years behind him, at
least, but he found himself in a time warp, thrust into the past emotionally
and psychologically, if not physically. As the weeks wore on and success
remained elusive, the general’s verbal attacks became more vicious and
personal. The abuse occurred on a daily basis until John felt seven years
old again, when life under his brother had been a living hell.
It wasn’t long before he reached the breaking point. It happened the
morning after his brother tried to entice him to have a go with one of the
subjects of Project Romero. Tom had invited John into his office for a drink
and an actual apology for riding him so hard recently. Softened up by that,
John had several drinks with his brother and was more than half in the bag
when Tom suggested they ‘visit’ The Tombs.
At first, John agreed, thinking it might not be a bad idea to eyewitness
his brother’s debauchery—it might come in handy when Project Romero hit
the fan, as it was bound to do sooner or later. While walking to The Tombs,
and feeling a little drunk, John thought about what lay ahead and, despite
himself, became aroused. By the time they’d arrived, his little soldier was
standing at attention. Though when presented with a naked dead girl—a
quite attractive, freshly dead girl—John’s stiff resolve had become
immediately flaccid, much to the delight of General Tom who derided him
unmercifully. That had been bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst of it. The
worst was the next day when General Tom had showed the videotape of
the incident at the staff meeting, suggesting in his narration that the video
exposed the real reason John’s wife had left him two years before.
Colonel John Hill reached a psychological breaking point, and a
scientific breakthrough, that day. The result of the former was a resolve to
get a fitting revenge against his brother, the general, no matter what. The
result of the latter was to present a means to that revenge. It was that very
afternoon, while he fumed and stewed over the morning’s embarrassments,
that he finally came up with the strain of the Romero virus that far
surpassed what his brother had demanded, or, John guessed, had ever
even hoped for. His first considered act of revenge was to immediately
destroy the new virus, thus crippling the program. His second thought was
to take it to the Washington Post and expose his brother, but a third idea
soon presented itself when Raditz came in all worked up that one of the
senior officers on Project Romero had brought his dead girlfriend in to The
Tombs. There was some question as to how she had been killed—the
officer claimed she’d killed herself, and he had brought her in because he
couldn’t afford the scandal; him being a married man. A little light bulb went
off in Colonel Hill’s head when Raditz told him that General Hill had been
livid and ready to have the officer arrested until he saw the dead girl who,
by all accounts, was an extreme beauty—Playboy centerfold material. After
seeing her, the general changed his mind and ordered that she be given
the Romero virus ASAP so he could be the first to do her that evening.
Raditz had been ordered to the lab to get the injection, but John relieved
the grateful scientist of the duty told him he’d take care of it.
On his way to The Tombs to administer the virus, John overheard two
soldiers discussing the new girl, giving him insight to his brother’s extra-
ordinary interest:
“Have you seen the new girl?” said one of them. “I think she’s a
terrorist.”
“Really? Why?” asked the second soldier.
“’Cause she’s got a nice Iraq!”
The general liked his women busty.

What the hell are you doing here?” General Hill growled when John
walked into The Tombs.
“I thought I might try it out again, after you’re done, of course,” John
lied.
The general laughed. “You got a look at the new bitch, huh? You
think she’s hot enough to get even you hard, faggot?” He laughed again,
shaking his head at John. The panel in the wall in front of him began to
slide open. Behind it, an exceptionally beautiful, and obviously undead,
young woman was on her knees, chained to a platform that would slide her
out to where the general stood, bringing her head level with his crotch. The
general unzipped his pants and exposed his swelling commanding officer.
“Or maybe you wanted to watch because you miss being the one on your
knees….” General Hill laughed louder than ever at that and sneered at
Colonel John’s hotly blushing countenance.
John ignored the remark and said brightly, “Actually I’ve also got
some great news for you,” holding his brother’s attention on him while the
platform and the dead girl slid forward. “I’ve solved your problem,” John
said.
“Really?” General Hill asked, excitement showing in his voice to
match his growing member.
“Yes, and I’ve gone far beyond your hopes. Now the zombies want to
eat the living as well as screw them. Sort of a ‘Have your sex and eat it,
too’,” John explained, smirking. The dead girl was in position. “In fact, I
gave the new strain of the virus to your friend there….”
The general looked down at the dead girl about to give him some
dead head. “Oh, and one more thing, General, Sir,” John said, smiling
broadly. “I left her teeth in!”

XOXO
***Beyond

It's beyond me;

Beyond me,
Why anyone
Would do the work.
It's beyond me;
Beyond me,
Why I should?
All the time I feel like this,
And it all seems so unreal.
It's been quite a long time
Since I don't know when,
But I do know
Who.

“Surrealist Selfie” (mixed media on paper) 2017

(Okay, are we starting to see a bit of a pattern developing? Am I [or
more accurately, was I] preoccupied with sex much? Well, yes and no.
Many of these stories were written specifically for the anthology
series HOT BLOOD, of which there were a few editions published. The
theme of the series was horror and sex. The following story appeared
in the second collection in the series, HOTTER BLOOD.)

A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND

She was wet. Again.

Why did I insist we sit by the window?
The answer was obvious. Right outside the window a crew of bare-
chested men were digging up the road. Several of them had decent bodies.
One of them was drop-dead gorgeous.
She crossed her legs. The food came.
"This doctor at the hospital says I suffer from chronic fatigue. That's a
very 'in' disease, you know. Shelly, the head nurse on my floor, says he is
just trying to get in my pants, but I don't know." Her friend, Darlene,
stopped talking long enough to pick through her chef salad with a fork and
remove all of the purple onions.
"Jeff, that's the doctor, called it the ‘yuppie disease’. One of the other
nurses said it was contagious, and I must've caught it from someone, but
when I asked Jeff, he said that was baloney. Still, if it is contagious, I bet I
got it from that weirdo Roger. I mean, Lissa, he is just too strange, even if
he does drive a Ferrari and have a condo on Martha's Vineyard."
Darlene rattled on, but Lissa wasn't listening anymore. Everything her
friend said she had heard a hundred times before. Outside, the gorgeous
one was running a jackhammer, making his muscles ripple and dance.
"When was the last time you really, I mean really, got laid? I mean
laid till you cummed your brains out and collapsed?" Lissa asked Darlene,
but never took her eyes from the jiggling muscle outside the restaurant
window.
 Darlene, interrupted in the middle of listing the merits of Martha's
Vineyard, looked in shock at her friend. She blushed a deep red, but a
twitch of a smile played at the corners of her mouth. "Liss! The way you
talk! You sound like one of the guys!" Darlene giggled.
It was true. Lissa knew it. She had always sounded like one of the
guys. That was part of the problem.
The jackhammer stopped. The gorgeous one had noticed her
practically drooling over him as he worked, and now he took the time to rest
and look at her. Lissa couldn't help herself; she licked her lips. He smiled.
"I only got … had … you know, sex like that once. I guess," Darlene
said softly and self-consciously. "It was on the night of my senior prom in a
vibrating bed at the Dew Drop Inn. A bunch of us rented a whole slew of
rooms for a party –" Darlene stopped as she suddenly realized that Lissa
wasn't listening anymore. She followed her friend's eyes to the window. A
good-looking construction worker stood there, his hips thrust out, one hand
on his crotch, beckoning to Lissa. Darlene could read his lips as he
obviously mouthed, "You want this?"
Darlene gasped with shock, then gasped again when she saw Lissa
nodding and smiling back. "Liss!" Darlene exclaimed, embarrassment
blushing her cheeks. "My God! You're unbelievable! You had better cut it
out or he's going to think you're serious! That's how women get raped you
know!"
Lissa looked at her friend sideways, then back at the construction
worker who was gathering up his coat and lunch pail, his eyes still on her,
beckoning. "Look, I'm sorry, Dar," she said, "but I've got to go."
Darlene sat agape as Lissa left with the construction worker.

The weekend went by in a blur for Lissa. The guy's name, ironically
enough, Lissa thought, was Rod, and he was a weekend coke head
working his way up to a full time habit. Lissa didn't care. She had tried the
sexual enhancements of cocaine before, had even gotten into it heavily for
a little while. If it hadn't been for her deviated septum, which gave her voice
its nasal twang and often prevented her from snorting and getting off, she
could've easily been a full-blown coke head as well. Now, she was a lot of
things, but a nymphomaniac cocaine addict would've been hitting the
bottom of the barrel as far as she was concerned. If she had gone that
route, it would've only been a matter of time before she would've been
reduced to prostitution or ended up dead.
As they got to his apartment, Rod produced a large baggie of the
nose candy. Lissa did a few lines and managed to get enough up into her
sinuses to get her going. When Rod used an artist’s feathery brush to apply
some of the South American jungle dust to her nipples and other sensitive
areas she became lost. She had snatches of memory: Rod doing line after
line of coke off her stomach, then making wild, gymnastic love to her for
hours on end; drinking Jack Daniels straight from the bottle, then Rod using
the bottle on her, filling her, drinking from her; people coming and going
(Did she make it with several of Rod's friends – Hey guys, check it out! This
bitch’s a nympho! – at once?") Her overall memory, though, was of a
blurring, bubbling endless eruption of sexual pleasure that had sent her
soaring into the depths of orgasmic unconsciousness.
When she woke on late Saturday night, her body ached everywhere
and her mouth felt as if a proverbial army had marched through it – twice!
Rod was asleep next to her, the rim of his nostrils caked with the remains
of his last hit. Lisa looked at his naked body in the moonlight coming
through the window and felt the burning desire begin again deep in her
loins.
The past forty-eight hours had been the best sex she had ever had.
She had finally come as close to the perfect orgasm as she figured she
was likely to get, but it had taken drugs, liquor, and group sex to get there,
and still she had come up short; still she felt unsatisfied. In the moonlight
she played with Rod’s rod and despaired. She was never going to get what
she needed. She was never going to reach the perfect plane of orgasmic
fulfillment. There was no man alive who could satisfy her, she was certain
of it. She was 32 years old and had been searching for the perfect orgasm
since she was 13 and discovered her addiction to orgasms when she’d also
lost her cherry to a bicycle seat on a long bike ride.
Since then she had suffered every bizarre sexual humiliation and
degradation, from having to be taken to the hospital at the age of 15 to
have a chunk of pepperoni stick removed from her womb, to taking on the
entire football team after the Thanksgiving game her senior year in high
school. Two decades of sexual adventurism and the closest she had ever
come to the perfect cum was this pitiful weekend with Rod and company. If
STDs didn't get her, boredom surely would.
Still asleep, Rod began to stir under her touch. He moaned deeply in
his throat and his breathing became shallow. Lissa stroked him and felt the
fire in her loins begin to spread. Moaning, more a cry of pain than of lust,
Lissa went down on Rod and awakened his sleeping lust with her tongue
and lips. He moaned and Lissa heard an echo of her own pain in it. She
worked him faster, bringing him to the point of swelling release, then
backed off. She was surprised to see that Rod slept on, but his desire was
fully awake and standing tall.
With a whimper of despair at the futility of it all, Lissa mounted him in
the moonlight and pulled him deep inside her. She felt as if she could pull
all of him, his entire body, inside her and maybe then she could be
satisfied. Her breathing became choppy. Rod began to buck beneath her
and she rode him as tiny orgasms started to fire deep in her.
She sighed at the frustration of it all.
Rod began wheezing loudly with exertion beneath her as he
convulsed orgasmically. Just when she thought he had reached his climax
and would collapse and lie still, he began to make strange gargling noises,
and his bucking took on new frenzied energy. His writhing awakened the
start of what she knew was going to be a truly momentous orgasm …
maybe even THE momentous orgasm.
"Yes! Yes!" she cried. Please don't stop! Please don’t stop! she
prayed.
His hands closed on her arms, and he began to shake her violently.
The first wave of an orgasm washed over her, electrifying her hips and
driving her grinding motion to a piston-like frenzy. Rod let go of her arms
and reached for her breasts. He clutched at them feebly as the second
wave of the orgasm hit her, much stronger than the first. Her stomach
shimmied like a belly dancer’s.
"Oh God! Don't stop!" she cried as Rod's hands collapsed to his
sides. He's finished! she lamented. He lunged up into her once, twice, then
a third time and drove so deep inside her that the fourth and fifth waves of
the orgasm hit her simultaneously.
Rod then lay unmoving beneath her, but Lissa rode him faster, trying
to keep him from wilting. Just a little longer! she silently pleaded.
You're never going to make it; he's going to get soft; you're going to
lose it, again!
But the unexpected happened: Rod did not get soft. In fact, he got
harder! It felt as if he was swelling inside her, getting larger. Lissa shrieked
with joy.
Orgasms six through one hundred were a chain reaction constantly
bombarding her within the space of twenty minutes. After that the endless
stream of orgasms she experienced ran together into one endless super-
orgasm that got incredibly better and better and felt as if it could go on
forever.

It was still dark when she woke again, but what time it was, she was
unsure. She had the feeling that more than just a few hours had passed.
She woke on the floor at the foot of the bed, her legs tangled beneath her,
her thighs glued together, a bump the size of a golf ball on the back of her
head.
I must've fell out of bed, she realized and giggled. Despite the pain in
her head and soreness in her body, she felt fantastic.
"It's happened!" she whispered to the dark ceiling. "I've done it!" The
itch felt satisfied; the burning was quenched. She didn't know for how long,
and didn't really care at the moment. This was the first time since that
fateful bike ride long ago that she felt fully and completely sexually satiated.
And it was fine; it was oh so fine!
Massaging her legs out from under her, she got to her knees. From
there she was on eye level with the bed. She looked, blinked, looked again,
and gasped at what she saw in the moonlight. The sleeping Rod was still
erect! In fact, he was more than erect. His already ample size had swelled
thicker and seemed to be standing taller than ever! The memory of it doing
so inside her made Lissa smile until a hysterical cackle of joy streamed
from her mouth. Laughing herself breathless, she climbed onboard Rod for
another ride and was instantly consumed by another endlessly perfect
orgasm.

The next time she woke it was daylight, and she was dying of thirst,
lying upside down in bed, her face only inches from Rod's testicles. They
were shriveled and blue, but the rest of his organ still stood hard and
raging, though it was now a deep purple color. It had something on it. Lissa
blinked and tried to focus.
The something moved.
It was a cockroach.
The pun alluded her as, just for a second, she saw the bug in perfect
detail: its chestnut brown exoskeleton, its antenna waving in the air, the
legs clinging to the purple flesh, the mouth nibbling at the head of Rod's
rod.
Lissa screamed. It was a loud, long, horror movie scream – the kind
of scream she had always despised hearing from B-movie scream queens
in distress. She ran from the room and barely made it to the bathroom
before everything in her stomach, including bile, came up and out. Ten
minutes later, after dousing her head and aching body under a hot shower,
she wrapped herself in a towel and crept back to the bedroom where she
peered around the open door.
The cockroach was gone, but Rod's nibbled manhood still stood
ramrod straight. The color was very bad, matching the rest of his body. His
skin had taken on a grayish purple tint that had settled into black and deep
blue around his neck, under his arms, at the ankles, and, as she had
already noticed, at his groin. His face was the worst. The eyes were open
and staring. The skin was blue-gray and the lips were white and parted
slightly as if awaiting a kiss. Inside his mouth, and filling both nostrils, a
greenish vomit had dried to a hard crust.
Lissa went to the kitchen and made coffee. She tried to keep calm.
She had to think this through or she was going to be in some major trouble.
Even more important than her involvement in Rod's death and whether or
not she was guilty of any crime, however, she had to know if his deadly
erection was a freak occurrence or a commonplace thing. After all, she had
finally discovered a method of achieving the perfect orgasm, and she had
to know whether it was a fluke or not. She felt bad that Rod was dead but –
she was a realist if she was anything – she had barely known him. And as
far as consciences went, hers had died a long time ago on Thanksgiving
Day in the boys’ locker room.
Lissa drank coffee, then called her friend Darlene at the hospital. She
tried to keep her voice light. "Hey Dar, it’s Liss. How you doing?"
Darlene's voice came back icy. "I'm very busy right now."
"Look Darlene, I'm sorry about lunch yesterday."
"Yesterday? You mean last week, don't you?"
"Um, yeah," Lissa said hesitantly. How long was I screwing a dead
man? "Yeah, I mean last week. I'm sorry about that. Really."
"Hmmm!" Darlene answered doubtfully. "That's why it took you a
whole week to call, I guess."
"Aw, come on, Darlene. I said I was sorry. What more can I do?"
Darlene did not answer.
"Listen, Dar," Lissa ventured, "I need some medical info."
"Well then, you'd better speak to a doctor. There’s one here right
now, and I hear he has a hot body so you can make a fool of yourself over
him." The phone thumped in Lissa’s ear.
"Darlene?" she asked. In the background she heard a muffled voice
ask, "I have a hot what?"
Lissa was about to hang up when a male voice came on the line.
"Hello? This is Doctor Peter Ruttles, can I help you?"
"Um, hello," Liss answered awkwardly.
"Are, are you a friend of Nurse Lemay’s?" the doctor asked, matching
her tone of awkwardness.
"Yeah, well…I guess—at least I used to be."
"Oh, is there anything I can do to help?"
Lissa hesitated, then decided to plunge ahead no matter how
awkward she felt. This was too important. "Yes, Doctor, actually, you could
answer a question or two for me," she replied in her best damsel in distress
voice.
 "I'd be delighted," the doctor replied. "Perhaps you would care to ask
them over dinner at my place, say tonight?" he added in a suave voice.
Lissa ignored the invitation, for the moment, and said, "All I need to
know is: is it unusual for a man to die with an erection?" she asked boldly,
getting the reaction she expected, immediately.
"What? Are you kidding? Seriously?" The doctor sounded shocked,
but then excited. There was a nervous giggle behind his words. “Is this a
joke?”
"No, no, no, you see, I'm having an argument with a friend who's
always trying to pull stuff over on me,” Lissa quickly lied. “I say she's pulling
my leg about this, and I want to show her up.”
"Oh," the doctor said, trying to sound as if he understood, or even
believed her, but he wasn't very convincing. A hint of lechery crept into his
voice when he spoke again. "I still think we should discuss it at my place. I
can show you that live erections are much more fun than dead ones."
Don't bet on it, Buster! Lissa thought with a wry smile. "Yes, that
might be nice," she said flirtatiously, "but I need this info right now. I'm
meeting my friend for lunch in ten minutes!"
"All right, as long as we can call it a date for tonight, I'll answer your
question." Lissa agreed. "I’m sorry but your friend is right," the doctor
explained. "It is very common for the blood to collect in the groin, causing
the penis to become engorged and remain erect in death."
Lissa smiled into the receiver. "Um, how long would something like
that necessarily last?"
"Oh, I guess until an undertaker removed the blood from the body, or
the thing just rotted away, I suppose," the doctor said and laughed
awkwardly. "There is a statue in France of a fallen general, taken from a
body cast of him done on the spot where he died, several days after his
death, and his erection is very clear in the bronze. Now, what time shall I
pick you up for dinner?"
"Make it seven. And Doctor Ruttles, please do me a favor? Please
don't tell anyone that we have a date? I know for a fact that my friend,
Darlene, has a thing for you and this would not help heal our little rift."
The doctor said he understood, and she gave him her address.
 Lissa hung up and went back to the bedroom. From what Darlene
said Lissa knew it had been at least a week since she had first shacked up
with Rod. She wasn't absolutely sure when he had died, exactly, but she
had a pretty good idea it was probably Saturday night since, by the look of
him, he was at least a couple of days overripe. She figured she had been
screwing a corpse for at least three days before it had begun to attract
bugs. She gave a shiver of disgust at the thought of the roach, but not at
what she had done.
She got dressed quickly and, taking an ounce of Rod’s Bolivian
Marching Powder and several of his syringes with her in her pocketbook,
left the apartment quietly. No one saw her. All she had to worry about now
was Rod's friends. She was counting on the fact that all they knew of her
was her first name and what she looked like, and, because of all the heavy
cocaine use and drinking that had gone on, they probably wouldn't
remember even that, or want to get involved. When Doctor Ruttles showed
up at her door that evening, Lissa greeted him in her hottest leather outfit
and easily talked him into taking her to the local Holiday Inn where she had
taken the liberty of reserving a room for them in his name. What she didn't
tell him was that she had reserved the room for exactly three days.
At the end of that time, during which a, "Do Not Disturb," sign hung
on the door constantly, Lissa slipped from the room and out a side exit of
the hotel unnoticed. When the cleaning lady finally saw the, "Do Not
Disturb," sign taken from the door of the room the next day, she entered
and found the corpse of Doctor Ruttles. He lay naked and bound to the bed
with nylons. An empty syringe stuck out of his arm and his decomposing
member was still erect.
An equally undying smile was etched on his face.

X0X0
***Tomorrowland

Ever get the feeling

That it's all too hard to stand?
Ever want to take a trip
Into Tomorrowland?
You do?
Well then,
Come with me.
We’ll go slowly
At first,
But then
We’ll crash
At the finale.
We will go
Together,
Gradually
Ascending
Ascending
Ascending
Into … insanity.

“Self-stract” (metallic acrylics on paper) 2015

(The Monster Alphabet was a short children’s book I created for my
son when he was a toddler. I found a publisher who was interested in
the project but was unwilling to pay the royalty/licensing fees needed
to use pictures of the many copyrighted and trademarked monsters
mentioned in the text. I was given the option of paying the fees myself
until I discovered they would be around 30,000 dollars [or so my
publisher said—now I’m not sure it wasn’t a scam]. Needless to say
the book when into the files only to be used as an example in my
college creative writing classes. But now, here is the text of the book,
sans pictures, which [I hope] is not a copyright infringement. The
piece is best if read out loud to a child, and then you can further
explore what the monsters look like via the great internet!)

THE MONSTER ALPHABET

While working one night in my laboratory, there came a sight both

grim and gory. It was Igor who had come to get, his latest lesson in the
alphabet.
"What subject tonight," I asked, "shall we cover?"
"Monsters, please master," he said, "and no other."
"Then listen close," I replied, "and don't forget, as I recite the Monster
Alphabet:
"A is for the Killer Ape of, 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,’
"B is for the Bogeyman lurking behind the closet door.
"C is for the, 'Creature from the Black Lagoon,'
"D is for Dracula, Prince of Darkness and Gloom.
"E is for Evil, possession is its desire,
"F is for Frankenstein, he's afraid of fire.
"G is for Godzilla, descending upon Japan,
"H is for Mister Hyde, the monster inside a man.
"I is for the Invisible Man, he can't be seen in the light or dark,
"J is for, 'Jaws,' the man-eating great white shark.
"K is for King Kong, the giant gorilla men tried to break,
"L is for the Loch Ness monster, living beneath a lake.
"M is for the Mummy, who kills because of a curse,
 "N is for Nosferatu, of movie vampires he was first.
"O is for the giant Octopus in, 'It Came from Beneath the Sea,'
"P is for, 'The Phantom of the Opera,' acted by Lon Chaney.
"Q is for Quasimoto, 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’
"R is for Rodan, destroying with fire and flame.
"S is for the Spooks and Spirits, and scary headless riders,
"T is for the killer Tarantulas of, 'Kingdom of the Spiders.’
"U is for the Undead, climbing out of the grave,
"V is for the Vampires, human blood is what they crave.
"W is for the Werewolf, howling under a full moon,
"X is for, 'The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,' who can see through the
walls of a room.
"Y is for the Yeti, of Abominable Snowman fame,
"Z is for the Zombie, voodoo magic controls his brain.
"That ends my Monster Alphabet," I said, as Igor took his leave, "and
though they are all quite frightening, remember Igor, they are all just make-
believe!"
X0X0

“Jurassi-surrealism” (collage on recycled cardboard) 2012

 (Echoes is not a humorous story, though it is certainly odd and
‘funny’ in a different way. It was one of my first attempts at what I call
‘surreal prose,’ and telling the story through the eyes of the
antagonist, so as to make him/her the protagonist as well. I have long
been a lover/admirer of surrealism in art and film, but in writing,
surrealism has not been as influential a style as in the other arts.
Truly, the only author I can think of offhand who consistently wrote in
a surrealistic style was Edgar Allen Poe. Of course, one can argue
that all fantasy fiction [horror, sci-fi, D&D] is surrealistic, but that is
only true of the plot lines. Nearly all fantasy novels, especially horror
and sci-fi, try to ground themselves in a solid reality in order to make
the surreal plots and settings more believable—I feel Poe was the one
of the very few to not bother with that. With stories like, “The Pit and
the Pendulum,” we are simply thrown into a surrealistic situation and
have to work as readers to figure it out. Surrealism engages readers
on a whole new level. In many ways, this short story was a rough draft
for my TUNNELVISION trilogy of novels, [TUNNELVISION;
DEATHWALKER; and [in the works] LITTLE LAMBS EAT IVY. I think I
can also safely say the style of this story, like so many of my stories,
was greatly influenced by Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”)

ECHOES

Her heart pulsated against my fingers; liquid, smooth, slick. My hands

were warm, wet. The night was cold, damp. A whispered nothing whistled
from her lips. The reflection of the street lamp was frozen in her eyes. Her
sighing scream reverberated in my ears. Her blood mingled with the rain. It
ran into the sewers. Sirens floated on the night; spinning, rising, wailing.

I stand at my window staring out at the tenement house across the

street. On the third floor a young man watches me through a telescope. I
make believe I don't see him.
I unbutton my blouse.
 He focuses the telescope.
I take off my shirt.
The sun bounces off the lens.
I run my hand over my breasts down to my belt.
He lowers the telescope slightly.
I undo my belt, unsnapping my pants.
The telescope quivers.
I pull my pants down, let them fall to my knees.
The telescope strains forward.
Slowly, I hook my thumbs into the waistband of my panties and push
them down to my thighs.
He focuses frantically.
I play for him.
The telescope sways rhythmically.
The door opens behind me.
He looks up from the eyepiece.
Mother grabs my hair, screaming.
The telescope disappears behind a drawn shade.
I am dirty, unclean, sinful.
Mother shouts it to the world.
I flee the shame in her voice.
I run across the street. I climb stairs through musky darkness. I hide
in the slivered shadows of the stairwell. I wait. The boy with the telescope
comes out like a ball-bearing drawn to a magnet. I step out of the gloom.
The light fragments over his face creating louvered shadows. He never
flinches. His mouth remains closed. He never screams. He kneels calmly
like a nun preparing for penance. He watches with intense curiosity as I slip
the cold steel inside him. Again.
Again.
He smiles.
He falls.
 I stood at the window, staring out at the empty lot across the street.
Memories reverberated, diminishing slowly like footsteps down a long
corridor.
The phone rang.
My left eye twitched. The air pinged against my eardrums. The room
swayed.
The phone rang.
I watched it. I expected to see the receiver jiggling with the ring. It
didn't. My hands did. My knees did. They trembled like Jell-O quivering in a
bowl.
The phone rang.
The floor was a vast plain. It stretched before me like a surrealist’s
plateau. The furniture dripped like melting clocks. I took a step. The pinging
air rushed in upon my ears. They popped. The room swayed and nearly
fell, taking me with it.
The phone rang.
Like a stone pushed down a hill, I stumbled forward and gained
momentum until I crashed into the wall. My hand slithered out of my sleeve.
My wrist followed. My fingers closed around the black plastic.
The phone rang.
I grabbed it off the cradle. It felt slimy in my hand. My muscles
spasmed. I jerked the phone to my ear.
"Hello?"
Music from a mausoleum. Chill air blew from the tiny holes in the
receiver. It chapped my lips. It stabbed into my sinuses. They throbbed.
"Why?"
It was a woman. She sounded hoarse, monotone, strained, dead.
"Why? Why?"
The phone squirted from my grasp. It bounced on the floor. I picked it
up. I handled it like hot coal. I shoveled it back onto its cradle. My hands
stung. The palms were red, smooth, shiny. My ears felt numb.

Father dances into the room. He spreads his arms. The stench of gin
breeds around him. His hat is on crooked. His coat is wrinkled. He winks at
me. A thin swinging string of snot hangs from his nose. He chuckles. It
sounds like air bubbles being sipped through a straw.
Mother swears. He tickles her. She squirms away. He wants to play.
She is angry. He kisses her neck. Her hand reaches out, finds a bowling
trophy on the shelf behind her. She grips it tightly. It dents the back of
father's head with a dull, wet thud. The sound is repeated. Her arm moves
reflexively. Father is battered down. He falls to the rug, kneeling. Bleeding.
She hits him again.

The phone rang.

I ran from the house. Whispers followed me until I lost them in the
twisting, sweaty streets.
She whistled while she walked. She wrapped her collar around her
neck. Her high heels clicked like tiny hammers driving tacks into the
sidewalk … and my skull. Her whistling was soft, whispery. She paused
from it, smiling at me as I passed.
She said, "Hello."
I smiled back. My hands shot out. The left one covered her mouth.
The right one grabbed her by the hair.
I read her mind.
Arms flailing, she pointed to an alley. I took her there.

"Is he dead?"
My anus quivers. I long to pee. It burns in my kidneys.
"He was dead a long time ago," Mother spits out. She stands over
him. His gray hair is stained dark red and getting darker. "He's just like all
the others." She points the bloody trophy at me. "He never had a backbone
or an ounce of ambition, and he never will. The weakest little girl has more
than he does."
On the floor, Father moans. A drop of blood falls from behind his ear.
It takes an hour to reach the rug. It splatters like a nuclear explosion.

Her throat was open.

 My hands were warm. I cupped them. They filled with blood. Crimson
light played on my lips. My tongue snaked into the pool. Hot, salty metal. I
deeply drank. It stained my tongue. It hurt my teeth.

"They all need a woman to live off! They all rob our strength. He tries
to drink mine like some bloodsucking vampire!" She kicks father in the
stomach. A flood of stale beer gushes from his mouth. It washes around
her high heels. It flecks the leather.

Headlights washed over me. Her face was burned into the air by the
light. It glowed white, then orange. It turned green. It floated away. The girl
lay at my feet. Her head askew, her eyes turned up to me. They were
laughing.

"They're all pigs!"

Mother rubs her shoes against Father's pants. "He can try to bleed
me dry, but not if I have something to say about it. He’ll have to kill me
first."
She walks from the room. I watch her go. My kidneys give. My bowels
let go. Wet heat flows down my trembling legs.

My mouth was very dry, sticky, thick. I walked through the cones of
light cast by the bug-filled streetlamps. I couldn't remember the song she
had been whistling. It bothered me. I was sure it was a clue. It alluded me.
The puddles on the street became her eyes, laughing.
I cried.
My key wouldn't fit the door. I stood in the tunnel darkness of the
hallway. A radio played above. The smell of boiled cabbage soured the air.
My key fought the lock. It didn't fit.
Like me.
A cockroach skittered up the doorway. A tiny thread of light caressed
its back. It was silvery brown. Its antenna waved wildly in the air toward me,
feeling me. I pushed the key. The cockroach flitted away. The key wouldn't
turn. I jiggled it. A click. The door swung open.
The phone rang.
 I ignored it.
My keys sailed through the air. They hung there.
The phone rang.
They fell clattering on the table. The silence ticked, waiting.
The phone rang.
It was a key. It unlocked an inner door.
"Hello?"
"Why? Why me?"
"You wanted me to. You made me!"
She laughed. The sound of dead leaves rustling. "You didn't get it, did
you?"
I lied: "I didn't want it. I don't need it."
She giggled. Sludge gurgling in a drain. "That's not what Mother
says."
"Mother's dead!" I shouted.
The telephone wire came free of the wall with a snap. It whipped
against my face. It left a red mark on my forehead in the shape of a
crescent moon.

My father stumbles around the room.

"I lost my keys."
He hiccups. He farts. He is a walking advertisement for death. It
clouds his eyes. It stains his breath.
"They’re in your hand." I point to them. The silver pieces dangle in
front of his eyes. He stares at them uncomprehendingly. A speck of light
burns on the rim of one. It reflects in his eye.
"I know where she's living." His voice is a sigh. I can hear liquid in his
throat. "I'm going to get her." He clutches the keys as if he remembers what
they are for. He staggers from the house. His back pockets bulge – Jack
Daniels and a .45.
I stand by the open window. Hot, stale, city air blows through the
room. The street below is black, white. I wait for an hour. I wait for two. I
watch dust collect on the sill. I watch urchins play in the gutters. I watch
bums go through trash cans. Everything is black, white; white, black. Far
away I hear sirens.
 An hour later the phone rings.

I threw the telephone into the closet. It tumbled over a suitcase. It

clanged in the dark.
I lay in bed. I stared at a fly on the ceiling. The room blurred. The
ceiling tiles stretched, spread, melted. A dirty whiteness blotted out the
room.
The fly became everything.
It was an opening at the end of a tunnel. It was a keyhole. I floated to
it. I entered the rainbow crystallized world of fly wings.
The television came on.
It hummed. It clicked. A needle point of white light collapsed in upon
itself. The screen blipped. It grew bright. The picture wavered. The fly
buzzed away.
I sat up. My eyes burned. Slivers of light stabbed into my brain. They
stuck there like pins.
The channel changed.
The dial spun until it was on Channel 13. It stopped.
A shadow in an alleyway. Headlights spinning. A white face, red
hands, frozen in the cold light.
Murder on the late show.
I looked out from the screen. My face was white. The mask of a
tragedian. I looked into my eyes. I cringed from what I saw written there.
My hand found a lamp. I threw it. It splintered the TV tube. Sparks burst
from the set. They rained from the smoking glass. They shot from my ears.
They burned into the rug.
In the closet the phone rang.
I sank into my bed. The ringing was muffled. The ceiling pressed
upon me. I lay in the spinning darkness. I waited for ghosts to appear. I fell
asleep waiting.
Far away, the phone kept ringing.

The smell in the kitchen is hot, burning, foul. Smoke rises from my
father's hands. His cigarette filter burns. It sears his finger skin. He stares
at the ceiling, unseeing, unfeeling. The radio is playing. My father hums to
the sad songs. The back of his head is black, crusty. The dried blood flakes
off like dandruff. It settles on his shoulders.
"Where's Mommy?" my little brother asks. He is her favorite. Father
hums to another sad song.
"She's gone." I button his coat for him. I push him into the hallway.
"I want Mommy." His voice whines, high-pitched, irritating.
"She's never coming back."
I push him into the tunnel darkness. He slides along the wall. He trips,
falls, bounces. The stairs catch him. The stairs toss him. The stairs twist
him to and fro. He lands on his stomach. His head is turned back at me. His
eyes are dull, shiny, empty.
"It was an accident," my father tells the police. But he won’t look at
me. Ever. Again.

There was a knock on my door.

Red, eyelid filtered light coaxed me awake. A tinkling sound filled my
head. It tickled my fingertips. It pinched the back of my neck.
There was a knock on my door.
My feet found the floor. The rug was gritty against my bare toes.
In the closet, the phone rang; the phone I ripped from the wall.
I turned on the radio.
I went to the door. The knob wouldn't turn. It squirmed in my hand.
Like a toad it slipped through my fingers.
"Who is it?"
There was a knock on my door.
I peered through the peephole. The hallway tunnel was empty. I
trembled.
In the closet the phone stopped ringing.
I sweated.
Ghosts are supposed to wait for night time.
Sunshine leaked through the windows proving me wrong.
There was a knock on the door.
With two hands I turned the knob. The door opened. It creaked like a
crypt gate. I closed my eyes. I expected Icy Death to breathe into my face.
Hot, stuffy air choked me instead.
 "Excuse me. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about one of
your neighbors? She was found dead this morning."
A badge dazzled my eyes. It glowed with truth. It burned with justice.
It shone with retribution. I squinted. I looked past the shining symbol.
The detective was short, squat, wheezing. He stuttered slightly. His
feet slid cautiously in front of him as if testing the floor with every step.
Using them like feelers he gradually entered into the room. I closed the
door behind him. Slime dripped from the knob. He didn't notice.
I offered him a seat at the kitchen table. I made him coffee. I
answered his questions.
In the closet, the phone rang.
I turned up the radio.
"Why?" The voice over the air was monotone, strained, dead. "Why
me?"
I change the station.
"Was that Mystery Theater?" The detective jotted in his notebook.
I laughed. It was a chipmunk sound; timid, high, squeaking.
I tuned in another station. "Why me? Why did you have to kill me?"
In the closet the phone rang.
The wall became the floor. I leaned away from it. The detective drank
his coffee. He ignored the ringing. The air crackled. The fine hairs on my
arms whispered with static electricity.
In the other room the television came on. Sparks flew. Smoke
billowed forth. In the jagged shards of the broken picture tube an image
formed.
An alleyway murder bathed in headlights.
The detective smiled pleasantly. His teeth were gray. His eyes were
mocking.
"The electricity has been doing strange things," I stammered. He
grinned and nodded as if I had said it was a nice day.
"Did you know the victim well?" he asked. I heard no hint of
accusation in his voice, but he couldn't fool me.
"I hardly knew her at all."
The memory of her blood salted my tongue. The detective saw my
lips pucker.
 "I used to say hi to her."
He blinked. Her face floated on the television screen. His pupils
dilated.
In the closet the phone rang.
"These walls are like paper." I spoke too loudly.
The detective didn't seem to notice. I knew better.
The radio squawked, "You drank my blood, but you missed my soul."
I giggled. It sounded off key. Headlights from the television set swept
across the walls. I ducked before they could discover me.
The detective smiled. He wrote in his notebook. He made believe he
saw nothing. He made believe he heard nothing. He didn't fool me. I knew
he knew. I tried to read what he had written.
There was a knock on the door.
"Who could that be?"
Blood spots appeared on the ceiling. They spread into crimson
puddles. They dripped on the detective's head. He smiled a maddening
smile.
There was a knock on the door.
Smoke billowed around the hinges. It seeped under the door. It
carried the smell of burnt, rotting death. The room was suddenly cold. A
mist blew from the detective's lips.
"The furnace must've gone out." My voice was faltering. I stammered.
He pretended not to hear.
There was a loud, insistent knock upon the door.
Smoke filled the room. I reached for the knob. It stuck to my skin like
a wet, frozen pipe. Glass tinkled in the other room. In the shadows by the
window the television set trembled. Like an old silent film run in reverse, the
broken glass jumped from the floor. The jigsaw pieces reassembled
themselves into the screen. The TV tube reformed. Cracks healed.The
headlights faded.
A tunnel appeared. A tunnel full of people. They moaned. They bled.
They laughed at me.
A tunnel full of corpses.
There was a knock on the door.
 The detective stood. The screen grew brighter. I recognized the
stairway outside my door. I recognized the tunnel darkness like shadows in
a freshly dug grave. I recognized the smell of cabbage like a recurring
nightmare.
I recognized the dead – victims all.
There was a knock on the door.
"I guess we’re done," the detective said. He looked at his watch. He
looked at the television. "Nice set." He moved toward the door. Frost
patterns formed on the wood.
I backed away from him. A large drop of blood fell from the ceiling. It
caught all the invisible colors of the universe. It sprayed them around the
room like a disco ball – the colors of death, the colors of rot, the colors of
despair. The drop landed on his cheek. He did not flinch.
The detective reached for the door. I opened my mouth. Bile rose into
it. He grasped the doorknob. Smoke rose from his cauterized fingers. Dry
laughter trickled under the doorway; headstones crumbling into dust. The
drop of blood slid down his cheek. He grinned. His eye teeth were black.
Slowly the door swung wide. The smell of rain-drenched streets filled
the air. The detective opened the door. Glistening eyes looked through him,
passed him. They drilled into me.
The dead crowded the doorway. A blue-green fungus-covered hand.
A lidless eyeball staring over a feasting yellow jacket. A slug – wet, slimy –
crawled from a blackened, blood encrusted throat gash. It fell at the
detective's feet.
The dead jostled each other aside. A pathway formed. A shadow
came forward.
Father.
His hands were drenched with blood. His shirt was stained with vomit.
"She's mine now," he said. "She'll never leave. Never again. I own
her. Eternally." He faded like an old dry funeral wreath. He became
transparent. He disappeared.
"I'll be going now." The detective's lips moved. His voice came from
far away.
Corpses moved closer. Worms fell on the rug. Another shadow
pushed a path between.
 Mother.
Her forehead was shattered like a broken window. By her side, little
brother held her hand. His head was on backwards.
"I told you! He'll never have me!" Her voice was fingernails on a
blackboard. My teeth ground against one another.
"I'm her favorite!" Little brother turned his back to face me. He stuck
out his tongue. Black, swollen.
The dead closed in. Their disease ridden nails reached for my flesh.
Their foul mouths hung open. Their headstone teeth yearned to dig into
living flesh. A cold rotting hand locked upon my throat.
"Wait!" I cried to the detective. The words squeaked through my lips.
"Help me!" The communication was lost. Dead fingers probed my mouth.
"I killed them! I killed them all!" High-pitched, I was screaming. "I
killed them all!"
The detective turned and faced me. "I know." His rubber lips
stretched around the words. His face melted.
The phone rang.
Teeth sank into my neck. The detective grasped the phone. The flesh
of his hand peeled like old wallpaper. He picked the receiver up. Tiny
beams of light flew out of the small holes. His face dripped, revealing a
mocking skull.
"Why? Why me?"
The voice is monotone, strained, dead.
It is a casket closing, hollow.
It is a faucet dripping in the middle of the night, thundering.
It echoes.
Flesh tearing.
Echoes.
My neck is opened.
Someone whistles.
Echoes.
"Why? Why me?"
I laugh, hysterical.
It is my voice. All along. Me.
My ears ring. The eardrums burst.
 The attendant’s footsteps ricochet down the long corridor.
Asylum laughter dancing with gibberish.
My last breath.
Bouncing off quilted walls.
The cold hungry blade…
The pool of widening blood…
Echoes…
X0X0

***Kabuki's Dance

I dreamt a dream
Of Kabuki's, dancing
A romance dance.
I saw a light,
That flickered bright.
Tight, were my eyelids shut.
A stream of unconsciousness
Flowed through my mind…
Flash…
Flash….
Sleep your life away….
****
“The Conversation” (multi-media/cgi collage) 2005
 (This story has an interesting history to say the least. It was written in
response to a phone call I had received from a writer who was editing an
anthology and had asked me to contribute. I did, and got a call from said
editor during which he reamed me out for submitting what he called
‘immature sexist pornography’. He went on to disparage ALL of my written
work as being sophomoric and immature. I was just starting out and nearly
allowed this jerk to stop me writing. Instead, I wrote ‘Sloppy Punks,’ and it
is dedicated to Dean Koontz who came to my aid with a personal phone
call. I told him about what had happened with the editor, whom he knew,
and he went off on him [and his writing partner—both shall remain barely
nameless] with a vengeance. It made me feel much better and after he used
the term “Sloppy Punks” [a play on ‘splatter punks,’ a subgenre of horror
that I -- and the editor -- had been labeled with] to describe the jerks in
question, I was inspired to write this story, which has a lot of similarities to
the last one, ‘Echoes,’ so much so that it is nearly a parody of that work,
among others.)

SLOPPY PUNKS
(For Dean Koontz)
I work undercover. Nine to five in a hospital. As a janitor. When
something gets spilled, when something becomes a mess, the word goes
out for me, Inspector Skip.

The world is full of slobs. Full of people who drool. People who have
boogers couched in the rims of their nostrils for everyone but themselves to
see. People who don't properly wash. People who don't use deodorant.
People who don't change their shorts more than twice a week, if that. They
walk around with dried Hershey squirts flaking between their legs.

Unclean, that's what it is. The world is unclean.

In the midst of it all I stand with a bottle of Windex, wiping smudgy

fingerprints from the glass entrance door, but a small child puts them back
as fast as I remove them, and his mother is sitting right there, but she
doesn't see because as long as the kid isn't killing anyone or destroying
property she might be forced to pay for; she doesn’t care; and I wipe and
wipe and the kid smears and smears until I get angry and point the spray
nozzle at his face and press the plunger, but the bottle is pointing the
wrong way and the blue ammonianized detergent hits my eyes like
retribution, and I drop the bottle, and it shatters, and I stumble backwards
moaning, and kick over the pail of warm soapy water that I was going to
wash the floor with –

Slow-motion water spreads like a tiny flood over the linoleum. Its suds
sparkle in the light from the fluorescent bulbs like the freshly brushed teeth
of an actor in a commercial. I fall to my knees. The suds soak my pants.
Slowly, with the grace of Death, I remove a rag from my back pocket. It is
long and dirty and full of the stains of a thousand lost spills. It sings to me
of messes cleaned up as I unravel it and refold it, readying it for the nasty
job at hand.
THRUST!
I plunge it into the spill. It makes a heavy, wet, mushy sound, like a
fat slice of cantaloupe being squished between the fingers of a young
albino girl.
WIPE!
It collects liquid, sopping it up like a crust of bread dipped in a plate
swimming with bloody gravy, trying to sluice up every last bit. Some of it
escapes and runs in a thin stream to the edge of the edge of the lobby
carpet and seeps into it like mortal sin.
SQUEEZE!
A sigh, a moan. The deed is almost done. The rag is dripping,
saturated, sopping, satiated. I push it and make it work overtime, but I can't
seem to get everything. I become frantic. Some idiot walks right through the
mess, tracking his dirty footprints over the clean parts, and I have to start
all over, only now it's mud; thick, slimy, oozing. I plunge the rag into it.
THRUST!
And—
WIPE!
And—
 – Flashback –

I was in the cafeteria for morning break, drinking my coffee, minding

my own business. Two nurses came in, their uniforms filthy with the stains
of God knows what. They smelled as if they had just given an entire ward
of old people leaky enemas. One of them smiled at me, and I could see she
hadn't brushed her teeth, much less flossed them, for many, many years. It
reminded me that I had forgotten to do my own that morning so I pulled the
number two Eberhardt-Favor pencil I always carry and keep sharpened to a
wicked point, and used the latter to clean the crevices and cracks of my
teeth before the collected foodstuffs could begin to rot the enamel away
into cavities.
I reached for the sugar and the sleeve of my shirt brushed the coffee
cup just enough to start it teetering. The creamy tan fluid inside sloshed to
the rim in an attempt to overflow and escape. I tried to grab the cup with my
other hand, but too late; it was going, spilling. I shrieked as hot liquid flowed
over my hand and onto the Formica tabletop.

I am insane.

Flashing visions—falling glass jars of peanut butter shattering on tile

and spraying their thick brown substance with loud gloops and plops rip
through my confused mind –

I must be insane…

– And I smell the dark coppery smell … of peanuts –

I have to be insane…

And I am reminded of my mother, and the pain of the past is a stain

upon my shirt that I can never get out no matter how many times I treat it
with Tide.
 Because … if I'm not insane…
And my heart beats faster: Lub-dub! Lub-dub! Lub-dub!
If I'm not insane then that must mean…

Lub-dub!
Yes! It would mean…

Lub-dub!
Mean…

Lub-dub!
No! I can't face it.

Lub-dub!
My fear is as real as the gunk that collects around the mouth of the
Guldens Brown Mustard jar…
Lub-dub!

I'd rather be insane…

Lub-dub!

I must be insane.

Lub-dub!

Truly insane.

But my heart stops its erratic beating, pulsating, throbbing –

Yes. I am insane.

It slows to a palpating beat, a thrum, a rumpa pom-pom…

I must be insane.
 Pahrump a pom-pom…

I have to be insane!

Rump a pom-pom…

Like gumballs falling from an open fist and bouncing on a dirty

industrial floor…

Because if I'm not insane…

They are greasy and slimy but I eat them anyway…

If I'm not insane … then that must mean…

They taste better that way…

That must mean…

I'm a ROCK STAR!

X0X0
***Self-Portrait?

Who am I?
Am my real?
Or
Am I a reflection
Of my other self?
What am I?
Am I right?
Or
Is it just the moon,
Revolving slowly,
Until it's blistered,
Screaming:
“I think somebody's twisted?”
****

“Selfie in B&W” (oil on canvas board) 2012

(This is a story I wrote for the anthology, Shock Rock, which
had the cool distinction of an introduction written by Alice
Cooper. Once again I found myself influenced by my muse,
Edgar Allen Poe, and wrote a parody of his most famous
short story [and in my opinion, the best horror short story
ever written]: “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

HEAVY METAL
(With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe.)

“TRUE! … Nervous – very, very, dreadfully nervous I had been and

am; but why will you say that I am mad? The incident had sharpened my
senses – not destroyed – not dulled them! Above all was the sense of
hearing acute. I heard all things in the heavens and in the earth. I heard
many things in Hell – like the music coming from that infernal – but I get
ahead of myself. Listen and observe how healthily – how calmly – I can tell
you the whole story.
“When this whole thing started, I was a simple artist, a sculptor, toiling
away in my Village loft. I had started out working with clay, but had found
my fingers too indelicate for molding the unwieldy stuff. It was with metal
that I found my forte – hammering, riveting, soldering, and battling the
metal to make it bend to my creative will. Metal was to test my mettle, as it
were.
“Though I was far from achieving financial success with my art, I had
received some critical acclaim with a small show I did last year in a Soho
gallery. Perhaps some of you saw it?
“… Perhaps not…
“No matter. A small inheritance left me by my mother has allowed me
to spend two years devoting myself full time to my art, if I live frugally, that
is. Two years to establish myself and make it was all that I had, so you can
see why I was so very nervous and why any interruption was costly and
upsetting!
“Ahem. Excuse me.
 “I was working on a particularly difficult piece – a mesh of copper and
iron that I was attempting to make soar to some vague expression of my
imagination that I couldn't quite fully grasp, no matter how much I tried. All I
knew was that I wanted the metal to transcend its mass somehow; leave its
base weight behind and become a symbol of spiritual metamorphosis—a
representation of my own inner-most desire, perhaps.
“I was working at my anvil, a genuine blacksmith’s anvil, huge and
weighing several hundred pounds that I had picked up for a song at a dingy
little antique shop in New Jersey, when suddenly the miraculous happened.
I was hammering some scrap copper tubing into flat, ribbony lengths when
I began to have a revelation about the piece. Suddenly, it all started to
come together! Like a pyramid under construction, the idea for the
sculpture began to rise in my mind.
“It was fantastic!
“It was beautiful!
“It was going to be the best thing that I had ever done!
“Truly, if I may be immodest, this idea was going to be the best work
of art anyone had ever done! This masterpiece would make me famous;
would make me rich! This wonderful, amazing idea …
“… was suddenly gone! A blaring, jarring cacophony of screaming
guitars, demonic singing, and the whining feedback of electric amplifiers
assaulted my senses, my very mind!
“My greatest (the greatest) idea for a work of art was driven right out
of my head! Replaced by a piercing, horrible noise that surely was the
Muzak of Hell itself
“I threw down my hammer, spilling coppery ribbons everywhere, and
furtively searched for the source of the sound. It came from outside. I
rushed to the window, looked down, and there it was, the Destroyer of
Ideas, the Bane of my Creativity.
“It was the size of a suitcase and shone with chrome and black plastic
in the hot, summer city sun. Its volume gauge danced spastically to the din
pouring from its speakers. It was the biggest boom box I had ever seen,
and with the horrible auditory torture it produced, it was surely the ugliest!
“A madman would have screamed at the young, long-haired youth to
whom the Ghetto Blaster from Hell belonged. And I certainly had good
reason since his infernal machine had just wiped out perhaps the greatest
idea in all of the long history of Western Art! A crazy person would have run
down the stairs and accosted the youth! Would have screamed for the
police and threatened the boy with wild words and maybe even wilder
deeds!
“That is what a madman would've done, but as I said, I am not
insane, nor have I ever been insane.
“I never blamed the boy. He was the product of a poor home – his
mother was a drunkard, his father nonexistent. I didn't begrudge the boy
the futile escape he sought in the wretched tunes of the loud and crude
heavy metal bands that he listened to. He had never wronged me. He had
never given me insult.
“It was the boom box that I hated. From the moment I first heard it,
the mere sound of it, no matter how muffled by closed windows and
background noise, made my blood run cold!
“I calmly closed the window, even though the temperature in my loft
was reaching for the high 90s, and acted as if all was well. Deep down,
however, there was nothing I desired more than to see that screeching box
of noise, that destroyer of fame, lying smashed in a heap of glass and
plastic, transistors and wires, all over the front steps of my brownstone!
“I lay awake nearly all night that first night, and for every night
thereafter, listening to the thumping of the boom box’s heavy metal
vibrations coming up through the floor and shaking the very walls
themselves. The boy's mother passed out from her drink like clockwork
early every night and a nuclear explosion would not have awakened her.
Until the wee hours of the morning the dreadful noise some call music
tortured me. AC/DC banged on the walls; Black Sabbath pounded the
floors; Iron Maiden shook my bed. Each night, I did not sleep until the
music stopped, usually shortly before dawn. I was awake again in a couple
of hours, trying to work before the cacophony returned when the youth,
after a leisurely sleep-in, took up his perch on the front steps again to while
away another day.
“Night after night this went on and night after night I lay staring at the
ceiling, my very bones vibrating. Those nights were not wasted, however. I
did not toss and turn, cursing the noise, banging on the floor for a respite
from its torture. I did not call the police and have the youth arrested for
disturbing the peace. As I said I had no wish to do him harm.
“No. Instead, I planned.
“Now … this is the point! Pay attention! You fancy me mad! Madmen
know nothing! But you should have seen me! You should've seen how
wisely I proceeded – with what caution – with what foresight – with what
dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the boy. When I went
out, I smiled at him and said hello, all the time eyeing the accursed box as
it blared at me, seemingly mocking me with its ear-shattering volume.
“I would have the last laugh, however! I would see the thing
destroyed, and to this end I spent my insomniac nights, and all my creative
energies, trying to devise a suitable revenge against the monster music
maker.
“Curiously enough, it was while watching television one day that the
perfect plan came to me. I was often in the habit of putting the television on
while I worked, but rarely looked at it, enjoying rather its unobtrusive
background noise. One day, however, sluggish from lack of sleep and with
the hellish noise from outside still accosting my ears, I found myself staring
at the screen quite frequently.
“A vintage cartoon was on RetroTV, and, as I watched, the idea hit
me like a hot blast of air from a passing subway train. It was a classic Road
Runner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote (Beastus Starvicus) stood atop a cliff, a
ribbon of highway that the Road Runner (Swiftus Beepus) sped along far
below. Wile E. was unpacking one of his infamous ACME do-it-yourself
kits. I watched in fascination as he set up the trap, then had it go all wrong
as it always did, backfiring on him. But that did not matter, for I had found
the perfect revenge, and unlike the comic, bungling coyote, I would not fail!
“Now, tell me truly, is that crazy?
“I spent all night prepping for D-Day. In the depths of darkness I crept
down to the stoop, tape measure in hand, notepad and calculator handy. I
measured. I estimated. I calculated. I did it all with such acute precision – a
precision that madmen are incapable of. By the time the lad had resumed
his perch on the step the next morning, Metallica screaming from the boom
box, I was ready.
 “I had taken a long, smooth board and propped it between a small
stepladder and the window sill at just the right slant and angle and nailed
the outer edge to the sill. Several times during the early morning hours I
rolled quarters off the board, making minor adjustments, until the trajectory
was just right. A thick coating of axle grease on the board’s surface, and
several strenuous moments spent lugging my anvil to the top of the ladder
was all it would take and then … bombs away!
“I would show that blasted sound machine what Heavy Metal really is
and the evil boom box would boom no more!
“Can you still say that I am mad? Could a madman have planned so
meticulously, so thoroughly, so ingeniously?
“But my plan failed you say?
“Yes, it did, but through no fault of mine!
“My measurements were exact! Perfect! Genius!
“Was it my fault that the youth chose D-Day to set his boom box on a
different spot than the one it had occupied every other day since the
beginning of its torturous presence in my life? Was it my fault he chose to
occupy the former space himself?
“Is it any wonder that after I dropped the anvil out of the window, yet
still heard that torturous noise go on unabated, the beat of the music
mocking me more than ever, that I flew down to those front steps in a fit of
rage and then smashed the thing with my bare hands as I slipped in the
splattered remains of the lad’s head?
“Was that crazy?
“Was it?
“Was it?”

X0X0

(Um …Yep, pretty crazy.)

***The Walk Home
Walking through the darkness,
The terror always near;
A move,
A sound,
A sudden turbulence of the air.
Turn quick-
No matter, no one there.
Soon in cold sweat,
A tingling of the spine.
A rush of breath,
A thought of death;
Horrible, murderous, but still in the
Night air.
Pacing faster,
Almost at a run,
The crack of a twig;
Now racing,
Racing,
Thinking of sunlight—
Light to dispel the fear.
Stumble,
Catch the pace,
Stumble and fall.
The sound of heavy breathing,
A faraway siren call.
Shake and tremble,
The desire to flee is numb.
Starry sky above—
Wet misty dark earth below.
Gaze back, the fog parts:
An empty terror and
A thought of sunlight “Abstractme” (acrylic on paper) 2009
To dispel the fear.
****
(“The Sin” is a strange little story that, quite honestly, I
barely remember writing! I found it while going through my
stacks of journals, rough drafts, and works in progress that
I’ve never finished [I never throw away anything I’ve written,
so I still have stuff from junior high!] The two biggest literary
influences on my writing have been Edgar Allen Poe and H.P.
Lovecraft. “The Sin” is definitely a Lovecraft inspired tale
reminiscent of, “The Dunwich Horror.” Its humor is tongue-
in-cheek and subtle. I hope you enjoy it!)

THE SIN

"If I ever find out that either of you has committed The Sin, I will send
you away. Send you somewheres they'll lock you in a cellar and throw
away the key.
"I'll lose you at the shopping mall!"
That's the one that always got Sister. She was scared to death of the
shopping mall, for some reason, and of getting lost whenever we went
there. It never took long for Mother to use that against Sister in her regular
tirades against The Sin. It generally took longer for her to get to me, but
she always did. She had a knack for scaring the bejeezus out of people.
She always said that she should've been Protestant instead of Catholic so
that she could’ve become a preacher and scare the hell out of people with
her sermons. She always said she could put, "the fright of the Lord," in
anyone. I believed her. It was her mission in life.
And Sister and I were the prime beneficiaries.

We lived in Blood Creek, a tiny, backward little village tucked away in

the craggy wilds between Deerfield and Northwood in the upcountry of
western Massachusetts, not far off the Mohawk Trail. The people in this
area are hard-working, down-to-earth farmers with a slight smattering of
yuppies from Boston who don't mind the two and a half hour commute each
way to the city as long as they can have a place in the country. Mother
says they are all ex-hippies and drug-takers – committers of The Sin. She
says they should be excommunicated. But the way she said it, I always
knew she meant more than just excommunicated from the Church – she
meant cut-off from the Earth; from Life Itself.
Our mornings always started with Mother waking us at four a.m. by
singing a hymn. She usually sang, "Ave Maria" but sometimes would belt
out, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," while marching in place.
(Whenever she did that, Sister and I knew we had best tread lightly.) We
would get out of bed and kneel in front of her until she had finished singing,
then she would lead us in seven, “Our Fathers” and seven “Hail Marys”
before taking us, one at a time, to the bathroom where she would wash,
inspect, and dress us for school.
On Sunday mornings we got baths. When it came my turn for my
Sunday bath, Mother always examined my body closely before scrubbing
my skin hard with Lava soap as if she were trying to wash something off
that she could never quite get at. She washed especially hard when it came
to my privates. I endured thousands of scrubbing's until I was raw down
there. This went on until Mother’s passing.
After our baths Mother would always lead us in more prayer, which
meant saying the Rosary seven times before we could have our breakfast
of dried fruit and hand squeezed orange juice. If it was a school day Mother
would pack us off on the fifteen miles to school with a lecture to stay away
from the other kids (who were the spawn of people guilty of The Sin). For
lunch she packed us each a pear and a crabapple (from the trees in our
back yard) and a piece of hardtack spread with oleo. Gluttony was one of
many things Mother believed would lead to The Sin so we never got much
to eat.
If it was a Sunday, we went to church at Saint Ignatius's, down in the
village center, and sat through every service from dawn until noon, and
then made us do the Stations of the Cross for at least two hours
afterwards, sometimes three. During Lent, Mother took us to church every
day; sometimes twice a day. We took every holy day off from school so that
we could go to church with Mother and help her keep vigil. We took
communion at every mass, which was okay for Sister and me because we
were always hungry and every little bit helped.
After school and on weekends we worked the farm, which is only
eight acres, but it is wild and unruly land full of streaks of granite and shale
just beneath the soil. We also had over a hundred chickens from which
Mother derived most of our income through supplying eggs to a local
cooperative farmer’s market over in Greylock.
When after-school chores were done we were allowed to wash our
hands and faces before beginning our daily, "God Study" led by Mother.
During these lectures, which could last three to six, sometimes seven,
hours with only a break for a meager supper of vegetable soup and
hardtack, my mother would rail against everything from television, which we
weren't allowed to watch—or even own—to having an ex-reality TV star for
president. Everything was sinful in her eyes, and no matter what the
subject, she was always able to connect it to the root of all evils – The Sin.
Our lives centered on it, revolved around it, and were anchored to it.

The funny thing is, she never told us exactly what was The Sin.

Sometimes she hinted vaguely at it, saying it wasn't only a sin, it was
against the laws of man and nature as well. Sister and I never knew what
she meant by that, but she would always cry at that point and look up at the
ceiling with fear and guilt blatant on her face, as if she would expect a
lightning bolt to strike her from above. She would mumble and sigh that
The Sin was okay for Lot and others way back in Bible times, but not
anymore.
It got so I knew more about the consequences of The Sin than I did
about the thing itself. I knew if I did it I would be burned in Hell and tortured
throughout eternity by horned demons who would tear me to shreds and
devour me only to spit me up whole so that they could begin all over again.
I knew that if I ever was guilty of The Sin my private parts would shrivel up
and fall off and Sister's stomach would swell with maggots which would
consume her from the inside out. Of course, the easiest to understand
consequence, being beaten with Mother's large wooden cross, was the one
that loomed most tangibly and threateningly for Sister and me.
 The only thing Mother would never talk about was our father. For a
long time Sister and I never knew it was normal to have two parents. We
thought one was normal for everyone. It wasn't until we went to school that
we learned differently. When I asked Mother why our family didn't have a
father, too, she said he was dead and then wouldn’t say anything more
about him. After that, whenever we prayed, "Our Father who art in
Heaven," I used to direct it to my father. I made the mistake of telling
Mother one day that I was doing that; I thought she would be pleased just
as I was certain that my father was in Heaven—where else could he be?
When I told Mother she let out a shriek and knocked me down. She chased
me all over the house, beating me with her cross. Sister hid in the closet
and pretended to be dead. She always did that when Mother beat me.
"Your father is burning in Hell!" Mother screamed as she chased me.
She emphasized the word Hell with a hard lick across the back of my legs
as I ran up the stairs.
"Your father was evil!" she shrieked, underlining the word evil with a
double-fisted swat to my lower back. "He committed The Sin!" she sobbed.
“He made me commit the Sin as well!” she wailed and dropped sadly to her
knees upon the steps. She began to cry. I went back to her and put my
arms around her neck. She grabbed me by the hair and dragged me down
to the kitchen sink where she washed my mouth out with Lysol disinfectant
to get rid of all, "that evil that is in your mouth from praying to a false God!"
After that, I never again asked, or talked about, my father.
I also learned never to ask Mother why every night just after feeding
us a supper of soup or watery oatmeal and bread, she put us to bed and
then would take a second dish of food for herself up to the third floor and
eat it, crying and muttering to herself alone in the dark. We were never
allowed on the third floor. My mother kept the two rooms up there, and the
stairway leading to them, locked. Once when I tried to ask her about it she
glared at me so fiercely I quickly changed the subject. This wasn't long
after the beating for praying to my father, so I was understandably wary of
raising her ire any farther.
 We went on through childhood and into our teens in this way and
slowly became more and more isolated from the rest of the world. The kids
at school always laughed at Sister and me, and teased us relentlessly
because we wore awkward handmade clothes and our hair was chopped
short by Mother's sewing shears. The only store-bought things she would
allow were shoes. Once a year we would go to the Kmart store at the
Mohawk Mall on Route 2A and get a pair of heavy work boots for year-
round wear, and a pair of dress shoes only to wear at church. Mother would
always be sure to tell us a week in advance when we were going to the
mall so that she could get the most out of her threats to lose us there.
Those weeks were devastating for Sister.
When I was twelve and Sister was ten, Mother took us out of the
regional school we were attending and told them she’d had enough of the
public schools’ Devil’s teachings and we would be home-schooled from
then on. Mother became our teacher and our curriculum consisted of day-
long lectures on The Sin in addition to reading and memorizing religious
books, from, the Bible to Dante's, Inferno.
For years this was how we lived. We saw no one except once a week
at church when Mother always sat at the very farthest back corner and
prayed constantly and so loudly that people avoided sitting near us. During
this time Sister withdrew into herself and would speak only to me in furtive
whispers. To Mother she always nodded yes. She would shake her head
no and cry if anything more was required, but usually it wasn't. Mother
frowned on us speaking unless spoken to. Through repeated practice
whenever I had any free time, I learned to read and write very well.
On the evening before my fourteenth birthday, Mother was getting the
mail from the postal box on the road at the edge of our farm when a drunk
driver slammed into her, and the mailbox, and kept going. She managed to
drag herself to the house and collapsed in the front doorway. Sister and I
struggled to carry her inside and put her in bed. We did not own a phone
and Mother would not let us get a doctor.
That night, while I sat by her bedside listening to her speak in a
pained, wheezing voice that sometimes gurgled as if fluid were filling her
throat, she recited the story Lot and the evil twin cities of Sodom and
Gomorrah. When she finished, she feverishly told me that while Sodom had
died at birth, Gomorrah lived upstairs, on the third floor where we were
never allowed. She told me that if she died I was to take care of Gomorrah.
Then she told me Gomorrah was our brother, and gave me the keys to the
third floor.
By the next morning, Mother was dead. I didn’t know if I should get
anyone; we were never allowed to speak to anyone but Mother, especially
since being home-schooled, but Mother lay on her bed with her mouth
open and her eyes glazed over. From her waist to her feet her body was
covered with blood. Sister and I said seven Our Fathers and Hail Marys
over her, wrapped her in the bedsheets, and buried her behind the chicken
house in dirt that Mother had blessed and made hallow for burials, just in
case. We kept a vigil over her for three days, just as she would have
wanted us to. Then, we went upstairs to the third floor, untied Gomorrah
from the bed and carried him downstairs to live with us.

That was six years ago and, until recently, everything had been fine.
Gomorrah, with more food, soon became strong enough to be able to crawl
around on his stumpy limbs. No one has bothered us, except for one time a
bunch of kids from our old school came out to park and drink beer near our
house one Saturday night, during Lent, and saw me and Sister walking
home from church. They followed in their car, taunting us and teasing us all
the way to our house. Then they sat out front and threw beer cans onto the
lawn and front porch. It wasn't until Gomorrah climbed into the front window
and screamed at them to stop that they left, and then it was in a hurry.
They took one look at Gomorrah—with his long, flaming red hair that
frames a face with no nose, no chin, his jaw just flat bone on the bottom,
with a raw gash of flesh wielding upper and lower rows of long pointed
teeth for a mouth above it—and fled. His twisted visage resided under one
large bulging brown eye. As the kids ran I heard one of the bullies cry,
"Monster!" and his face was as scared and bloodless as if he had just
looked into the face of the Devil himself.
 We went on living, as we always have, until a few months ago. Lately,
I have been wishing that Mother hadn't died, which is something I have
never done before, and I've also been doing a lot of wishing that Mother
had got around to telling us exactly what The Sin is.
Maybe then we could have prevented ourselves from committing it. I
know that what we have done must be The Sin because Mother warned us
what would happen if we did it – and it has come to pass as she foretold.
For the past nine months Sister’s stomach has been swelling until it
looks as if it's going to burst. She tells me she can feel the maggots
squirming around inside her. They make her sick in the morning and then
she's hungry the rest of the day because of them eating her from within.
She eats constantly to try and keep them satisfied so that they won't
devour her completely from the inside out.
This is exactly as Mother said it would be if we committed The Sin.
Any day now I expect my private parts to shrivel up and fall off.
It is inevitable.
We have committed The Sin even though we didn't know it was The
Sin. The only good thing to happen from this is that the blood has stopped
flowing from inside Sister every month.
Now, however, I am afraid there is something worse inside Sister …
soon it will be coming out…
…And I find myself often wondering why Gomorrah looks the way he
does….

X0X0
*****tRUMP IS IN THE AIR
Got an evil feelin’… tRump is in the air
Reelin from the dealin’… tRump is in the air
Election IS a Russian-rig, ya dig? ... tRump is in the air
Tell the lie til it’s the truth … tRump is in the air
Beware….
The highest glass ceiling
… tRump is in the air
The old boys club
stealin’…
tRump is in the air
FBI concealin’… tRump is
in the air
Tell the lie til it’s the truth
… tRump is in the air
Beware… “tRump’s Amerika” (bas-relief collage) 2016

We’re gonna need some healin’… tRump is in the air

After we’re done kneelin’… tRump is in the air
The layers need peelin’ … tRump is in the air
Tell the lie til it’s the truth … tRump is in the air
Beware….
It doesn’t look appealing … tRump is in the air
Unless there’s some repealin’… tRump is in the air
We’ve got to stop the dealy-wheelin … tRump is in the air
Tell the lie til it’s the truth … tRump is in the air
Beware … Beware … Beware!
(“Jimmy’s Magic” is a tale with a humorous twist that was originally
called, “The Cellar.” I rewrote it several times before it achieved this
form, then it was expanded into a young adult novella for my German
publisher, Harlequin Cora Verlag. It was retitled, “The House on
Mystery Hill”, and is a tight, fast-paced, scary tale whose protagonist
is a teenage girl (soon to be available in paperback). Though it is
classified as “Young Adult Fiction” it’s a very adult story and one of
my favorites, but it all started with, “Jimmy’s Magic.”)

Jimmy’s Magic

The house was old. The gabled roof, over the tattered, peeling paint
on the face of the house, stretched so high it appeared to be on the verge
of toppling over. Below its peak the house windows were like blind, cloudy
eyes. When the wind blew, the glass rattled and gave the effect of water
rippling. The shingles of the house were ancient beyond their normal
lifespan. They were cracked and discolored like dead fingernails.

It was a very old house.

Jimmy Day didn't like it. The windows reminded him of eyes that were
blank and devoid of life, character or personality. He was too young to think
in terms of what curtains in windows and a coat of paint might do to make it
more appealing; he only knew he didn't like it. He didn't want to move out of
his old house, and he certainly didn't want to live here.
Jimmy got out of his father's car and spat on the sidewalk to show his
contempt. When he looked up, he saw the cellar windows. He smiled at
these as he stood before the house. They were low and close to the
ground; just the right height for him to peer through or see his reflection in.
They were narrow, thin windows, and he thought they looked as though
they were secretly pretending to be asleep, the way he did sometimes on
long trips in the car, but always listening … and watching … and waiting.
"Come on, Bucko!" his father called tapping him on the shoulder as
he went by and up the front walkway. "The movers and your mother will be
here soon, and we've got to open the place up for them." Dragging his feet,
Jimmy followed his dad up the walk.
The inside of the house smelled like wet wood left too long in a dark
place. Jimmy's father lit a cigarette and didn't seem to notice, but Jimmy
did. It enveloped him like an invisible blanket; it jarred his senses like
walking into a plate of glass in a carnival House of Mirrors. It filled his
nostrils and left a bad taste on the back of his tongue. He wrinkled his
nose, making his face crinkle around it, and coughed. The smell was so
thick it was almost overpowering. It seemed to have levels to it, like
descending a ravine where at the top you smell flowers and fresh air, but at
the bottom your nose discovers the rotten egg smell of a stagnant pool of
sewer water. With a shallow breath it was almost savory, but the deeper
the breathing the more pungent became the mustiness. When he breathed
very deeply, he noticed an insidious, fathomless scent of rotting things,
cloyingly sweet – like the time he’d hid his spinach in a hole in the wall
behind the bathroom door, and it molded there for weeks before his mother
discovered it.
It was a strange smell.
To Jimmy it was both pleasant and nasty at the same time. He
breathed it, toying with it and tasting it before spitting it out. It made him feel
light-headed and slightly sick.
A loud rumble and the screech of metal on metal came from outside.
His mother's car, with its squeaky brakes, had just pulled in the driveway.
Behind it was the Allied moving truck.

The playground was full of children. They laughed and played in the
dirt. They ran around the swings and under the chute. Occasionally one, or
several, of them would notice Jimmy watching. They eyed him as if he were
a zoo animal, and they were uncertain as to whether he was dangerous or
not. None of them ventured a greeting or invited him with a gesture to join
them. They simply looked for a while and then went back to playing.
Jimmy clung to the chain-link fence surrounding the playground and
wrapped his thin, seven-year-old fingers through the metal mesh and
sagged his body against it. The playground was smaller than the one at his
old home. It didn't have monkey bars or an obstacle course either. There
were no spring-powered bouncing horses or climbing poles. All it had was
one rickety set of swings, a rusted sliding chute, and a wobbly whirly-go-
round. Jimmy viewed it all with disdain, spat on the ground, and turned
away.

"Do you like our new home?" his mother asked as she tucked him
into bed that night.
"It's okay," he mumbled. He missed their old house and his friends,
but he wouldn't tell her that. She sensed something was wrong, however,
as mothers often do.
"Don't worry, Punkin’, you’ll like it here better the longer we stay.
Soon you'll have a ton of friends." She kissed his forehead and ran her
hand lovingly over his hair and down the side of his face. He smiled up at
her as she said good night. She departed the room but left the door half
open.
In the silence that followed, the musty, old smell Jimmy had first
noticed upon entering the house returned stronger than ever, and, with it,
faintly at first, like an echo dying at the bottom of a canyon, a soft
whimpering.
Jimmy sat up in bed.
The sound grew louder.
His head swiveled on his neck as he used his ears like sonar to
pinpoint the source of the noise.
Silently, he pushed the covers back and slipped out of bed, padding
across the cool, hardwood floor to the far corner. There, behind the round,
wicker clothes hamper, he found the source of the sound – a heating vent.
He put his ear to it and listened to the high, thin, mewling coming from the
depths of the house.
Coming from the cellar.
 Jimmy curled into a ball and listened to the lonely sound. He fell
asleep imagining it was himself whimpering alone in the unfriendly
darkness of the basement.

The air blowing out of the cellar door was cool yet sweaty. It
moistened Jimmy's forehead and crept down the back of his shirt like a
slimy bug. He shivered with the chill but smiled as well. On a hot summer's
day it was not an unpleasant sensation.
The steps creaked as he descended. The cool clamminess of the air
increased the lower he went. The smell of old damp things was strong
here. It grew stronger with every step he took. It surrounded him like a
living thing. Under it, the rotting smell boiled up and tried to dominate. At
the bottom, his slippered foot touched the gritty dirt of the cellar floor, and
he stopped.
He looked around. The cellar, which had appeared steeped in
darkness when he had been at the top of the stairs, was now brought into
shadowy focus around him by the gray, dust-filled light coming in through
the narrow windows. He was surprised by how large it felt even though it
was low-ceilinged and should have felt cramped. Except for at the very
bottom of the stairs, a tall man would have to stoop to avoid hitting his
head. The walls were rough-hewn stone as if the basement had been
carved out of solid rock. The floor was hard packed dirt covered in spots
with a fine haze of greenish-white lichen. Not too far from the stairs, stacks
of boxes and piles of junk formed a barrier that choked off access to the
rear areas and made the cellar look smaller than it actually was. Peering
beyond the junk, Jimmy could tell there was a lot of room behind the
stacks, maybe more than was in front of them. He couldn’t tell how much
room was back there, but it was enough that he couldn’t see the rear cellar
wall.
He wondered what was back there.
He walked over to the wall where the barrier of boxes and junk had a
small gap in it just low enough for him to be able to peer over. He saw
nothing in the darkness beyond. Dust motes sailed by his face and were
swallowed by the shadows within.
"Hello?" Jimmy softly called. He held his breath and listened.
Nothing.
He let the air out of his lungs slowly.
He noticed something; the smell of rot had grown stronger.
"Is anyone there?" Jimmy anxiously whispered. It fell into the
darkness behind the stack and died. Within seconds, however, there was
an answer—a quick, soft scratching sound.
Startled, Jimmy stepped back from the barrier.
The sound stopped.
The rotting scent seemed to have become stronger, and somehow
thicker, as well. He could almost feel it in his nasal passages like packed
snot and taste it on his tongue like a sour burp. Jimmy held his hand over
his mouth and breathed shallowly. After several seconds, he took his hand
away. The smell, though still strong, no longer sickened him. Strangely, it
had become almost a comforting smell. Cautiously, Jimmy breathed deeply
and it made him feel slightly giddy, reminding him of the time he had
worked too long on his oil paint-by-number set and had gotten dizzy from
the paint fumes.
Behind the stack … something moved.
Jimmy stumbled backward and let his breath out in a loud, shocked,
"Pah!" The back of his neck became hot and tingly, then cold and clammy.
His ears buzzed. Carefully, he stepped closer to the gap and peered into
the space beyond. His eyes adjusted slowly to the heavy darkness.
Suddenly something moved in the darkest part. This time Jimmy held
his ground. The stench became like a liquid enveloping him. A shadow
blacker than the blackness around it moved closer.
"Hello?" Jimmy said in a dry, cracked voice. He swallowed spit and
tried again. "Hello? Who’s there?"
Faintly at first, but rapidly growing louder, the cellar became filled with
the sound of tortured breathing. Jimmy held his own breath but the sound
went on – a wheezing, gravelly, sucking of air.
"Hello?" Jimmy again ventured. The breathing quieted and was
replaced with the soft, pathetic mewling he had heard through the heating
vent the night before. He strained forward and listened intently. It was a
strange sound, familiar yet foreign. He listened some more and a smile
began to dawn on his face.
It’s a voice, he realized; a strange weird voice – but a voice all the
same.
And it was speaking to him.
Jimmy bent closer and listened carefully for several moments. The
voice was indeed saying something, one thing, over and over again. The
problem was Jimmy had trouble understanding the word – it sounded like it
could be either, lonely … or hungry!

Jimmy stood in the kitchen doorway and watched his mother at the
sink doing the breakfast dishes. He frowned. With his mother there he
couldn't get anything from the refrigerator for his friend in the cellar to eat.
He wandered slowly into the room, eyeing his mother and playing with the
Matchbox car he always kept in his back pocket. He drove it over the table
top and along the front of the stove and the cabinets. His mother remained
at the sink, humming softly to herself and paying no attention to her son.
Jimmy drove the Matchbox over the front of the refrigerator. He was about
to open it and try to sneak some food when he heard a soft meow. He
looked around and saw a cat at the back door, digging its claws into the
screen.
Jimmy looked at his mother and then went quickly to the door. He
opened it, and the cat poked its head inside. Jimmy grabbed the tabby by
the back of its neck and picked it up. Cautiously, he crept across the
kitchen, heading for the hallway and the cellar door.
"Jimmy! What are you doing with that in the house? You know your
father is allergic! You take that animal outside this instant!"
"But Mom, it's for my friend! He's lonely and…"
"No buts. Just do as you're told." She held the back door open for
him.
Reluctantly, cat in arm, Jimmy shuffled out to the backyard muttering,
"Dad wrecks everything!"
 Turning the rear corner of the house he spied a cellar window open.
Jimmy held the cat tightly and went to it. The slightly ajar cellar
window was at the rear corner of the house. Jimmy got on his knees and
peered through it. Excitedly, he saw that the window was on the dark side
of the barrier of boxes and junk. He shifted the cat to his left arm and,
reaching out with his right, tried to push the window open some more. It
was stuck. It wouldn't budge.
The cat squirmed in his arms trying to escape. He held it tighter.
It meowed loudly.
Jimmy pushed harder on the window.
The cat struggled.
Jimmy sat in front of the window and put his feet against it. The cat
scratched his arm.
Jimmy kicked at the wooden window frame, and it gave a little.
The cat scratched him again, drawing blood.
Jimmy kicked the window frame as hard as he could. The swollen
wood screamed and the window slid open a few more inches. He kicked it
again and again; the wood crying out and giving a little bit with each kick.
The cat began to struggle frantically in his arms. It dug its hind claws
into his flesh and bit his wrist.
Yelping, "Damn cat!" Jimmy gave the window a furious kick, pushing
it all the way open, and threw the squirming feline into the cellar.
Jimmy's expletive was answered by a loud, warbling meow which
soon became a spitting, hissing growling. It grew in intensity and ferocity
until it was silenced abruptly in a strangled whine. This was followed by a
wet, snap, a smacking sound, and a low grinding and rumbling noise.
Jimmy put his face close to the window and looked into the cellar.
Suddenly, he rolled out from in front of the window just as something shot
out and flew past his head. It landed on the grass behind him. He got up
and went to see what it was.
"Oh wow! Neat!" he exclaimed.
Laying at his feet was the cat’s skeleton, completely intact, and
completely picked clean of meat. It glistened white and wet with saliva in
the morning sunlight.
 "Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls!"
The children crowded around Jimmy as he stood before the open
cellar window.
"You are about to see the most amazing feat of magic ever witnessed
by mortal eyes!"
Jimmy held a cone of cardboard to his lips like a megaphone as he
spoke. It amplified his voice just like the circus hawker he had seen in an
old movie on television. Taped to the front and back of his shirt were signs
he had made. In bright red crayon they proclaimed: "COME SEE JIMMY'S
MAGICK SHOW – FREE!"
He had donned the signs and paraded around the neighborhood and
the playground all morning, beating his toy drum and calling the children
away from their play like a midget Pied Piper. Now they were gathered
around him anxiously awaiting the start of the show.
Jimmy held up a large toad he had found in his mother's garden that
morning.
"Now you see it," he shouted and tossed the wriggling reptile through
the open cellar window. A squishing, churning, grinding sound, like bones
in a garbage disposal, emanated from the cellar. It was accompanied by a
wave of hot, foul air that forced the children's hands to their mouths and
pushed them back several steps. Seconds later, the toad’s skeleton, picked
clean, came spewing whole from out the cellar window. It landed on the
lawn in front of the children.
"And now you don't!" Jimmy crowed. A few children aahed with
excitement, but the rest took a wary step back.
Next, Jimmy held up another cat; the next door neighbor’s.
"Now you see it," he tossed the cat into the cellar, "and soon you
won't!"
The sound from the open window was worse this time. The cat hissed
and spit and let out a long painful, wailing screech before that was drowned
out by the wet, mulching, shredding and chewing noise. A sputum of fine
fur blew from the window like dandelion spores blown by the wind. The
children gasped when the cat skeleton popped out of the cellar and landed
softly on the grass. A small trickle of blood lingered on the spit-soaked
skull.
A small girl in the front burst into tears and ran from the yard. The
children, moving as one, backed away from Jimmy and the cellar window.
"That’s all for now folks!" Jimmy shouted holding his cardboard
megaphone to his lips. "The next show will be this afternoon! Tell your
friends! Come one, come all!"

"Your son has become quite popular," Jimmy's mother told his father
that night at the dinner table. "He had a yard full of friends here all
afternoon."
"How did you manage that, Bucko?" his father asked.
Jimmy shrugged, smiled and replied mysteriously, "Magic!"
After supper, Jimmy went to his room and sat next to the heating
vent. In the gathering gloom of dusk he put his ear to the vent and listened.
Now from the depths of the house came a deep, contented rumbling much
like the purring of a large cat. Smiling, Jimmy fell asleep listening to the
soothing sound.

"Can you do it?" The small dark-haired boy asked Jimmy seriously,
then looked over his shoulder nervously.
Jimmy eyed the boy carefully and slowly let out his breath. "It'll cost
you," he said carelessly.
The dark-haired boy looked nervously over his shoulder again.
"Okay. I guess it'll be worth it. She’s such a brat! How much?"
Jimmy considered. "Five bucks," he said slowly. He saw the dark-
haired boy's eyes widen at the sum, but after a few moments he agreed.
Jimmy told him: "Come to my backyard after lunch. My mother will be
out shopping. Make sure you have the money with you, or no deal."
 Jimmy was sitting next to the cellar window, waiting, when the dark-
haired boy came around the corner of the house. Following him was the
little girl who had run crying from the yard the day before.
"This is my sister, Sarah," the boy said. He handed Jimmy a sock
filled with coins. "And here's my five bucks."
The little girl tugged on her brother's arm. "I wanna go home. You
said I’d get a s’prise! I don't wanna see no magic show. I just wanna go
home!"
"But Jimmy's going to show us some new magic, Sarah!" the boy said
persuasively.
"No!" little Sarah adamantly replied. "I want to go home! I'll tell Mo-o-
om!" she whined. The boy pushed her at Jimmy.
"You can go home in a minute," Jimmy said soothingly. "First, there’s
something I want to show you." He took her hand and pulled her to the
open window. "Now, just look in there, and you will get a surprise—a real
surprise!”
"I don't want to!" she said, on the verge of tears.
"It's okay," Jimmy coaxed. "There's a special toy in there just for you
if you look," he said in an enticing sing-song voice.
"There is?" Sarah warily asked.
"Yes! I will make a nice new dolly appear like magic in there just for
you."
"A Cabbage Patch doll?" the girl asked, showing interest.
"Of course!" Jimmy said and smiled broadly.
Cautiously, the little girl knelt in front of the open window.
"Just lean over and look inside," Jimmy said as he moved behind her.
She did as she was told. Jimmy crouched behind her and shoved. She
went halfway through the window and sprawled on her stomach with her
legs still outside.
She screamed. "Get me out! I don't see no dolly!" Her voice was a
high-pitched weapon. She began to cry. Jimmy looked nervously at the
dark-haired boy and waited.
Nothing happened.
"Help me!" the girl sobbed, sounding hysterical.
 Jimmy grabbed her legs and shoved with all his might, trying to push
her further into the cellar. She fought him frantically, kicking with her feet
and grabbing at the inside of the window frame with both hands to stop.
"Mommy!" the girl screamed.
"Help me!" Jimmy frantically whispered to the boy. The latter backed
away, his face white with fear.
"Help –" Jimmy stopped in midsentence. He felt a slight tug on the
girl's body. She let out the most horrifying scream Jimmy had ever heard,
and her legs were wrenched from his grasp. Like dirt being sucked into a
vacuum cleaner the little girl was pulled into the cellar. Her terrible scream
was stifled abruptly by a loud snapping sound. Then … nothing.
Nothing … but the sound of chewing.

Jimmy and the dark-haired boy stood in the backyard, looking at the
fragile skeleton lying on the grass between them.
"What do we do with that?" the dark-haired boy asked. His eyes were
wide and scared and fear trembled in his voice.
Jimmy looked at him with contempt and picked the skeleton up with
both hands. He was surprised at how light it seemed, yet disgusted at the
wet, soft, slimy feel of the bones – like a dog's toy that has been slobbered
over. As quickly as he could, Jimmy ran to the cellar window with the
skeleton and threw it back into the darkness. He grinned from ear to ear
while the dark-haired boy ran from the sound of bones cracking and
splintering.

"I'm sorry, Son, but that's the way it is."

"But Dad," Jimmy whined, "we just moved here! I just made a whole
bunch of new friends!"
"I know, Bucko, but there's nothing I can do about it. I've been
transferred, and we’ll have to move again."
"No!" Jimmy shouted. "I won't go!"
 His father reached out, grabbed him roughly by the arm, spun him
around, and swatted him hard on his fanny before Jimmy could react.
"You don't tell me, Mister! I tell you! I'm the father!" he bellowed. "Now
get up to your room until you can say you're sorry!"
Crying tears of anger and hurt, Jimmy ran upstairs.

"I don't want to leave you."

Jimmy sat by the heating vent in his room. Tears streamed down his
face as he whispered his lament fervently into the ventilation screen. A
rumbling sound came from the depths of the house and Jimmy grew quiet.
He listened intently for several moments, nodding slowly.

In the lengthening shadows of summer twilight, Jimmy crept

downstairs and stood in the doorway to the living room. His father sat in the
easy chair watching the evening news.
"Dad?" Jimmy softly and meekly said. "I'm sorry."
His father didn't say anything at first, or look at him for several
seconds. Finally, he smiled and held out his arms. Jimmy ran to him.
"You understand don't you, Bucko?" his father asked. "If there was
any way I could get out of this move I would."
"I know a way, Dad," Jimmy said and smiled a small secretive smile.
"It's magic! If you come down cellar with me, I can show you."
His father laughed and rubbed Jimmy's head. "Sure, Bucko. Let's see
your magic."
Jimmy's smile broadened, and he grinned from ear to ear.

X0X0
***Ten Years from Now (written in 1972; reaffirmed in 2018)

Ten years from now, I should very much like to be

The vision of my promised self, the self I’ve longed to be.
To put behind my childish days
And make up for my immature ways,
That self I see – that I’ve longed to be – will be able to say:
“That was yesterday.”
Ten years from now, I should very much like to live
The vision of my promised life, the life I’ve longed to live.
To put aside the unimportant
And increase the peace that is dormant,
That life I see—that I’ve longed to live—will be far better
Than this reality.
Ten years from now, I should very much like to have,
The vision for necessary knowledge; the knowledge I’ve longed to know.
To empty out my ignorant mind,
And fill it with the wisest finds—
That knowledge will set me free;
Will let me be,
Who I am to be.
*****

“Cambodian Boys” (oil on canvas) 2015

 (“Midnight Popeye” has an interesting history. It was first published
in, Whispers, an anthology from Cemetery Dance Publications, to
which I was invited to participate along with four other writers.
The idea for this story came about some time before that, shortly after
my second novel, Grimm Memorials, was published. I went to the
NECON convention in Rhode Island where I was listening to a panel of
writers discuss writing when Joe Citro, (author of, The Unseen,
among other great horror novels) was asked the question, “Is there
anything, or any one, that you can think of that CANNOT be made into
a horror story, or put into one?” Joe’s answer was that he doubted it
but if any could, it would be certain cartoon characters. He felt that
beloved ‘toons from childhood’ could never be considered scary—
characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Popeye the Sailor. Then
he amended that and said that maybe Popeye could be turned into
something scary, and then he used the term, “Midnight Popeye,” and
it struck a nerve. I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I felt the
challenge to use something as innocuous as a cartoon character in a
horror story. Around the same time, I read a biography of Mark
Wilson, the leader of the Beach Boys, whose father had a glass eye.
The way he used it to discipline Mark inspired the same in “Midnight
Popeye”. The Popeye ditty comes from my own father—whether he
made it up or picked it up is unknown, but my dad was a treasure
trove of funny songs and sayings.)

Midnight Popeye

FAST-FORWARD
STOP
PLAY
The crackle of a recording:
"I don't know what you want me to do, Doctor…"
"All right. This is the one I want you to listen to. I had been treating
this client over several months for an advanced case of acute sexual
addiction—satyrism—when one day, after missing several weeks’ worth of
sessions, he walked into my office acting as if he had never been in to see
me before, or that he knew anything of me. Listen and you'll see."
PLAY
"...I've never been to a psychiatrist before. To tell you the truth, I don't
see much use for psychiatry."
The voice is nervous, warbling. It pauses. Dead air comes from the
recorder interrupted only by the abrupt sound of a chair leg scraping
against the floor.
"Then why are you here now?" The doctor's voice is calm and
resonant, revealing none of the surprise he feels at his long-time patient's
response.
"Over the past few weeks I've come to realize that either I have some
weird partial form of amnesia, or I’m going completely crazy."
A moment of silence. A slight cough.
"Go on," the doctor urges softly.
"Well, it's just that part of my life is missing." The voice is low,
muffled.
STOP
"What did he say there? I couldn't quite catch it."
"Hold on."
REWIND
VOLUME UP
PLAY
"… part of my life is missing."
PAUSE
"Interesting."
"It gets better."
PLAY
"I'm not sure what you mean by that. Can you explain that statement
a little further please?"
"Well Doc, that's just it. I don't know if I can. I mean, it doesn't make
much sense to me either. The best way I can explain it is it seems that a
part of my life is gone; that I've completely forgotten a big piece of who I am
and what I do. A part of my past seems to be missing; just erased from my
memory."
 The voice is distraught, trembling, on the verge of succumbing to
emotion. The doctor remains silent while the patient composes himself.
"I'm sorry, Doctor. It's just that this is really getting to me, scaring me,
you know?"
"It's all right. Let's just take it slow and start at the beginning. When
did you start to think you'd forgotten certain past experiences?"
"I didn't think it, Doc!" The voice is suddenly angry. "This isn't all in my
head you know. I mean it is, but … Oh hell! You know what I mean. This is
really happening to me!"
"Of course it is. Calm down. Like I said, let's start at the start. When
did you first feel that you had a problem with your memory?"
"Okay. Sorry. I don't mean to get huffy with you. It's just that I feel
uncomfortable talking to a shrink like I was some kind of sicko. Oh. I'm
sorry. I didn't mean to call you a shrink."
"It's all right. I don't mind. Please continue."
"I guess it all started with the dream." A long pause.
"Yes?" the doctor finally prompts. "You said it started with the dream.
Which dream is that?"
"Oh. Yeah. The Midnight Popeye dream." Another lengthy silence.
"Midnight Popeye? Can you explain?"
"Yeah, yeah, sure. Sorry.. That's the name I gave the dream,
Midnight Popeye. I started to have it about a month ago –"
PAUSE
"I just want to mention that the time around which the client started
having his Midnight Popeye dream coincided with his breaking off therapy
by not showing up for his usual sessions. Since he had often missed
appointments without notice, I didn't think anything of it. I had always billed
him for appointments he didn't keep or that he canceled, and he never
balked, so it wasn't a problem."
PLAY
"– and at first it was kind of funny. I remember the first night I had it I
woke up laughing, but shivering in a cold sweat at the same time. I
shrugged it off as being caused by something I had eaten – maybe some
bad spinach." He chuckles. "But when the dream began to recur every few
nights, then every night, it started to frighten me, and I woke up shivering
and sweating, but I wasn't laughing anymore."
"What has this dream got to do with your feeling that you have
forgotten a part of your life?"
"It was around this same time that the dream started that I began to
realize that a lot of people I didn't know – people I had never met or heard
of – seemed to know me pretty good, even intimately. I began getting calls
from a guy named, Freddie. He talked in a sort of code, and I quickly
figured out that he had to be a drug dealer selling cocaine. He talked like I
was a regular customer, though I've never used the stuff, and I don't
remember him. I also started getting regular calls from a woman who calls
herself Madame Marianne. She was very blunt and offered to arrange more
weird and perverted sexual experiences for me, like that was something I
did on a regular basis! She acted as if she knew me and had known me for
a long time and the services she was offering were something that I had
been anxious for in the past."
The patient can be heard clearing his throat and taking a drink of
water.
"I guess because I started having it around the same time, the dream
seemed connected to the strange people who obviously knew me, but that I
swear I've never met before."
"Let's go back to the dream. Tell me about it."
"I… I don't know if I can without laughing … or crying, I guess. It is
pretty funny when you think about it. No. More silly. At least in the light of
day, especially sitting here talking to you about it. I mean, you'll really think
I'm wacko when you hear this. But when I have it in the middle of the
night… It's terrifying!
"It always starts the same way. I'm in bed, only it's not my bed, not
the one I sleep in in my condo. It's the bed from my old room at my parents’
house, and I'm a kid again, maybe eleven or twelve years old. A light
wakes me, a bright light seeping around the edges of my bedroom door. Or
maybe it's the gong of the grandfather clock in the hallway striking midnight
– I don't know – they both happen at the same time so it's probably a
combination of the two. All I know is that I wake up to these incredibly
bright beams of light penetrating the darkness of my room from around the
edges of the door while from downstairs I can hear the grandfather clock in
the front hall chime twelve times midnight.
"I sit up in bed. The light around the door moves across the ceiling
and the floor, and across the walls in rays that I think should seem holy, but
are somehow threatening instead. It's like someone has a powerful
spotlight aimed at my door and is walking slowly past it. The beams of light
move across the room, the clock chimes, and I begin to tremble with a
sense of trepidation, but that's not all. There's more; there's a sense of…
excitement, too. And for some reason the excitement makes me feel guilty
and is much worse than the fear."
The patient stops. He is breathing heavily; the air rasping in his
throat.
The doctor waits several moments before prompting him. "Go on."
"Shit! This is where it really gets weird. Just as I think the bright light
is going to move past my door and keep going, it stops. I hear the clock
strike its final gong at twelve midnight, and I hear music. At first I can't
place it, can't quite make it out. It's scratchy and faint and tinny sounding,
like an old 78 RPM record, you know, vinyl? Then it gets louder and
clearer."
A moment’s pause, then the patient begins to sing in a soft,
tremulous voice: "You gotta eat your spinach, baby, if you wanna grow
strong…"
"It's Shirley Temple from one of her old movies – ‘The Good Ship
Lollipop,’ I think – but the song is familiar to me because my mom loved
Shirley Temple and would watch those old movies like she was hypnotized
whenever they came on TV. In the dream, the song seems to be coming
from within my head, and yet far away at the same time. I begin to hum
along.
"That's when there's a knock at the bedroom door – a loud, heavy,
ominous knock – and I hear another song in a different voice begin to sing."
There is a moment of silence before the patient starts singing again,
this time in a deep, raspy voice: "I'm Popeye the sailor man. I lives in a
garbage can. I loves to go swimmin’ with bow-legged wimmin, I'm Popeye
the sailor man."
 A longer pause during which the patient can be heard chuckling softly
and coughing quietly as if in an attempt to stifle his mirth.
"You find the song funny?" the doctor softly asks.
"Yeah. No. I guess so. I don't know." The patient lets out a loud
guffaw.
"I must admit I have never heard that particular version," the doctor
says and a smile can be heard in his words.
"My father used to sing it when he had had a few too many beers. My
mother would blush the way she always did when my father said something
dirty or sexy. I never really understood what was dirty about that song,
though."
"No?"
"No, not really. I mean the bit about the garbage can is dirty-dirty, but
not sexy-dirty."
"Maybe. What about the other part?"
"The swimming with bow-legged women part? I don't know. I don't
get it."
"Don't you? Think about it. Bow-legged women?"
A short silence ends with a high-pitched giggle from the patient.
"Of course! How stupid of me. Right! Bow-legged women! The easier
to swim between their legs." Another pause. "You know, I think he didn't
even mean swimming like in the water. I think he meant swimming as a
euphemism for fucking! And living in a garbage can—can is slang for ass! I
wonder why I could never figure that out before." It's a rhetorical question
and the doctor doesn't answer.
"You were describing your dream," he urges after a few minutes.
"Huh?" The patient seems startled as if from deep thought. "Oh yeah.
Midnight Popeye. Yeah. Well, the voice singing the perverted Popeye ditty
is coming from outside my bedroom door. I know this sounds crazy, but it
sounds just like Popeye himself from those old Max Fleischer cartoons.
You know the ones?"
"Yes, I'm familiar with them."
Yeah. So I start to get real scared when I hear Popeye sing my
father's song about him outside my bedroom, but I get even more excited,
which makes me feel even more guilty, but I also get really anxious, too,
and curious. I mean, it’s so-o weird! I'm scared to death to get out of bed,
but I’m also dying to know, to see if it really is Popeye outside my bedroom
door."
Another long pause in which the patient can be heard humming the
Popeye song softly to himself.
"Please go on," the doctor prods.
"Sorry. Guess I was spacing out there for a little bit."
"Were you thinking of anything in particular just now?"
"No… No… I don't think so. Just that dumb song … and my father."
"What about your father?"
The patient clears his throat and his chair squeaks as he squirms
uncomfortably. "I was just thinking that it was kind of funny, and
appropriate, that my dad would sing that song."
"How so?"
"Oh, I guess I didn't tell you, did I? Well, my dad, my mother, too, had
a glass eye. That's how they met, at a doctor's office. They both had had
accidents as children that caused them to lose an eye. My mother had hers
put out by an umbrella in a mock sword fight with her brother when she was
seven. My dad lost his when he was fishing with a friend and got a fish-
hook caught in his eye when his friend was casting his line. He was
eleven."
A soft chiming is heard.
"I'm afraid our time is up for today," the doctor softly says.
"It is?" The patient sounds surprised. "A whole hour? Wow! That went
by fast. I guess time doesn't fly just when you're having fun, because I sure
wouldn't call this fun."
"I understand. This can be difficult, but you are doing very well. When
you first came in you expressed a great deal of urgency in resolving this;
shall we continue tomorrow? Is that all right with you? Can you make it?"
"Um, sure. I guess that'll be fine. I do want to find out what's going on
here. So, same time? Okay." There is the sound of wood groaning as the
patient pushes himself out of the chair.
STOP
"Very interesting."
 "Isn't it though? It's the most intriguing case I have had in years; a
real puzzle. And it is so immediate, too. The client obviously experienced
some deep trauma quite recently that triggered his amnesia, his personality
change, and the Midnight Popeye dream. This excited me because it
meant we wouldn't have to work our way slowly through his past to
discover the source of his sexual addiction. This was obviously a
breakthrough and a turning point in his treatment and recovery. I could
sense that whatever had happened to him was the key to unlocking all of
his secrets."
"Yes, yes, quite true. Have you written the case up yet and submitted
it for publication?"
"I'm working on it. The thing is, there is so much more than just an
article for the medical journals here. I think there might be a book here as
well, and even a movie – at least a TV movie."
"You don't say?"
"Don't sound so doubtful, Doctor. I'm quite sure of it. When you hear
the tape of the next session, I think you'll agree. Do you have time, or
should we get on with our regular business?"
"I think I'd like to hear the rest. My service knows I'm here every week
at this time. I have several clients that are right on the edge now who may
need to call me here, however."
"Very good. Let's go on then. The next session was a true
breakthrough, and ended up being the last meeting I had with the client. I
haven't heard from him since. Never have I achieved such success with a
client in only two sessions. But, as you'll hear, he was ripe for this
breakthrough; desperate for it in fact."
PLAY
Doctor’s voice: "Client number 6997; Date: October thirtieth. Time:
four PM.”
"Hi Doc."
"Hello. How are you today?"
No response.
"Are you all right?"
"It's getting worse."
"The dream?"
 "Everything! After I left you yesterday, that Madame Marianne I told
you about called me again. She wanted to know why I haven't been around
lately, like she's used to seeing me every goddamn day! Then she
mentioned you-know-who, and I almost freaked out."
"I don't understand. Who did she mention?"
"Who the hell do you think? Didn't you listen to anything I told you
yesterday? Popeye! She mentioned fucking Popeye!"
"I'm sorry. I was merely trying to clarify what you were saying. These
outbursts will not help us get to the bottom of your problem."
The patient sounds remorseful. "I know, I'm sorry. Again. It's just that
I'm so stressed out over all this that when Madam Marianne mentioned
Popeye I felt like my sanity was being blasted with a twelve-gauge at close
range. And on top of that, the drug dealer, Freddie, called and threatened
to shoot my dick off if I don’t pay him fifteen hundred bucks he says I owe
him for some cocaine. I don't remember buying any coke – shit! I don't
even remember ever doing any cocaine, period!"
"All right. Calm down. First, exactly what did this Madam Marianne
say about Popeye? In what context did she mention him?"
"Not him," the patient mutters and groans, "her!"
PAUSE
"Did he just say what I think he said?"
"Yes. You heard him correctly."
PLAY
"She said, 'Popeye's been asking for you. She wants to know when
you're coming back.' "
It is the doctor’s turn to pause before asking, "Did this ring any bells
for you; have any special significance? Did you have any memory or idea
of who she was talking about? Any recognition of the name?
"No, but…."
"Yes?"
"The Midnight Popeye dream certainly came to mind. And when I
went to sleep last night, I had the dream again, and it was the most vivid
version yet. It… it… was horrible!"
The sound of water being gulped and slurped.
"Tell me about it."
 "The dream started like I described to you yesterday. Only this time
when I heard Popeye singing outside my bedroom door, I got up and went
and opened the door."
Silence interrupted only by a shuddering sigh from the patient.
"What happened when you did that?" the doctor asks when he deems
too much time has passed.
"It was him."
"Him? Popeye?"
"Yes, Popeye."
"Was he a cartoon or a real person?"
"I don't know. Both, I guess. He was like a three-dimensional cartoon
character from a movie, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? only better, more
real. I mean, I could actually see the pores in his cartoon skin; could see
his chest rising and falling as he breathed!"
"How big was he?"
"Oh, big! Bigger than life! Bigger than I remember Popeye looking in
those old cartoons, that's for sure. He was at least seven-eight feet tall, and
wide. He filled the whole doorway and then some."
"And the light you mentioned yesterday, did it disappear when you
opened the door?"
"Oh no. It grew brighter! It was coming from Popeye; he fucking
glowed with it!"
"I see. Go on. What happened next?"
"I just stood there staring at him."
"Were you frightened?"
"No.... Not really. Not at first anyway."
"You became frightened later?"
"Yes."
"How did you feel at first?"
"I'm not sure…. Funny. Shocked maybe. No, it was more excitement
than shock. I was thrilled, enthralled. I was mesmerized at the sight of him;
a cartoon character come to life! I just stood there, eyes wide, mouth
hanging open, my mind a total blank while I watched his weird cartoon lips
move and his corncob pipe jiggle in his mouth as he sang, 'I'm Popeye the
sailor man. I lives in a garbage can. I Ioves to go swimmin’ with bow-legged
wimmin, I'm Popeye the sailor man.' Then he blew on his pipe like a
whistle, 'toot-toot' and that's when I started to get really scared."
"Why?"
A breathy, shuddering sound escapes from the patient. When he
speaks again his voice is a whimpering whisper.
"Because he touches me then! He leans over and grabs me with his
horrible cartoon hands. His fingers are like soft rubber against my arms as
he takes hold of me." The patient stifles a sob.
"Go on. What happens after Popeye leans over and grabs your
arms?"
"He pulls my face right up close to his and says, in a real menacing
voice, 'If you fuck up again, I'm going to swallow you, in here,' and he
points to his bad eye and pries it open real wide with two fingers so that I
can see deep inside his head. I can see bone and raw flesh – not cartoon
bone and flesh, but the real stuff; real blood vessels and tissues and
muscle. I start to scream because it's the most horrible thing I've ever seen.
I woke up then, still screaming and shaking and sweating like I told you."
"When you had the dream last night, did it trigger any immediate
thought when you woke up?"
"Just … terror I guess."
"What about now while you were telling me about it?"
"I don't think –" The patient lets out a startled, strangled cry. "Oh my
God!"
"What is it?" The doctor's voice loses some of its professionalism and
shows concern.
"My… my father! My father…." The patient's voice trails off in a quiet,
pitiful sobbing.
Gently, the doctor probes, urges, "Yes? What about your father?"
"He… he used to do that to me when I was bad! He… used to take
out his glass eye and make me look, up close, into that horrible, empty eye
socket and tell me that if I fucked up ever again, he’d swallow me into that
disgusting hole in his head."
PAUSE
 "Ah! Now it begins to make sense! However, I still don't understand
the Popeye imagery tying in with the Madam's reference to Popeye as a
female, or the patient's satyrism."
"I did not at this point either, and I actually thought it would take many
more sessions to unravel it all, but the recapture of that memory of what his
father had done to him was a powerful catharsis and jogged his memory
further. Listen."
PLAY
A loud, painful groan comes from the patient.
"What is it?"
"I saw them! It's all coming back now. I used to watch!"
"Who? Who did you watch?"
"My mother and father! They were doing it! He was doing it to her!"
"He was making your mother look into his empty eye socket?"
"No, no, no. He was… He was fucking her head! He was putting his
johnson into her empty eye socket and fucking her head." The patient
laughs hysterically. "She was giving him head… Literally!" The patient's
laughter escalates, becomes mad sounding.
"Easy! Take it easy. Calm down!"
"No, no! It's all coming back to me now! It's all coming back!" Fresh
laughter erupts from the patient.
"What?" The doctor's voice has lost all semblance of detached
professionalism. He sounds as eager as a child wanting to hear the end of
an intriguing tale that has been purposefully drawn out by the teller.
"Midnight Popeye! She is a real person! I remember it all now! And I
remember coming here before! You were treating me for what you called,
acute satyrism, a fancy name for being addicted to sex. I couldn't get
enough of it; when I did, I got bored really quick.
“Oh God! I remember it all now!
“I was always seeking out some new thrill, some new weird
experience. I did drugs – I do owe money to Freddie the coke dealer – I
sought out S&M, bestiality, wet sports, group sex, gay sex. I tried anything
and everything, or so I had thought until I met Madam Marianne and heard
about Popeye. When I told her I was looking for something I had never tried
before, she told me she knew someone who could provide the kinkiest,
weirdest yet most satisfying sexual experience I would ever have. My God.
I can remember it so clearly now!"
"Go on," the doctor prompts.
"She gave me the address of a small hotel on the outskirts of town.
She told me to go there at midnight and ask at the desk for Popeye. It cost
me a grand but I paid it. I was intrigued, and I really needed something
different. I did as I was told, showed up at midnight and asked at the desk
for Popeye. The clerk smiled at me very strangely and directed me to
Room Thirteen. I knocked and went in, and there she was. Popeye. She
wasn't young – she had to be at least 40 if she was a day – and she didn’t
appear to be any great beauty either. She sat in the middle of the near
empty room, on a low, ladder-backed chair. There was a really bright light
on behind her that made it kind-a hard to see her clearly. Next to her was a
small table with her tiny portable black and white television set on it. Shirley
Temple’s, The Good Ship Lollipop, was playing on it. Popeye was naked in
the chair, and she looked like she might've had a great body in her prime,
but now it was getting flabby and her tits sagged like leaking water
balloons. I took one look at her and was ready to split. I was going to go
find Madam Marianne and beat the shit out of her if she wouldn't give me
my money back. But Popeye obviously sensed my reaction – I'm sure it
showed on my face, and she was probably used to guys being turned off by
her at first.
"'Don't go,' she said, and her voice was real pretty. 'Didn't your mama
ever tell you not to judge a book by its cover?' Well, that stopped me,
because, of course, my mother had said that to me, often, like I imagine
most mothers do. You know, it's one of those motherly words of wisdom
things. And something about the woman reminded me of my mother,
though I couldn't quite put my finger on it right away.
"Then she said, 'Come over here so I can get a good look at you.
Believe me, if you're looking for something really different – and you must
be since that's the only type Marianne sends me – then I promise you won't
be disappointed.' My horny nature and curiosity took over then, and I
decided to stick around and see what could be so different about this
woman.
 "I crossed the room to her – Shirley Temple singing the spinach song
on the TV, stirring my memory and exciting me at the same time – and
Popeye unzipped my pants. She oohed and aahed appropriately and took
a tube of KY jelly from next to the TV. She lubricated me, getting me very
aroused in the process, and then…" The patient giggles uncontrollably for
what seems like several minutes.
"Please!" the doctor anxiously pleads. "Try to control yourself and tell
me what she did!"
The patient's laughter tapers off, becomes sporadic, and he speaks in
the lulls. "She (giggle) did with me like my father did with my mother. She
(giggle) had a glass eye that she popped out and (giggle) she gave me
head!" The laughter erupts with renewed force.
"I… I freaked out. I couldn’t help it! I came and pulled out! Then I
turned tail and ran!” The laughter subsides and the patient lets out a
relieved sigh. "I guess the shock of it caused my temporary amnesia and
the Midnight Popeye dream, huh Doc?"
"It would certainly seem so." The doctor sounds perplexed and
overwhelmed. "Wait. Where are you going?"
"Sorry, Doc. I got to go back and see Popeye."
"Wait. Please, don't do anything rash. Sit down and let's talk about
this some more."
"Can't. Don't worry, Doc, I won't do anything rash. I'm going back to
get more head! It was the best damn sex I ever had. Now I know why my
father did it to my mother so much!"
"But how do you know she'll be there? I thought you said she took
appointments only at midnight."
"Oh she’ll be there. As I ran out the door she called after me and
said, 'Come back any time. I'll keep an eye out for you!'"
STOP
END TAPE
"Very interesting. Very interesting indeed, Doctor. It should make an
absorbing and much discussed journal piece."
"Book."
"Oh yes."
"And maybe even a TV movie!"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, Doctor, it seems we have enough time left. Shall we?"
"Yes, let's. Is it your turn, or is it mine?"
"I believe I tied you up last week."
"Very good. Let us commence then."
"By all means, Doctor."

X0X0
***Night Tripping

The deep black pines loomed overhead,

The water glistened in its icy bed.
The moon, disregarding cloudy piles,
Fed upon the stars instead.
The silent sleeping snow,
Gave the faintest glow,
And the wind, with its song, “
Began to blow.
The night held the light of a brand-new day;
The sky turning black and then turning gray.
The trees bent their heads
And shook,
Regaining the color
The nighttime took.
I paused by a stream in the first light of day
And watched the night sky float away.
****

“Moonsea” (acrylic on canvas) 2017

(“KD’s Wish” was my second story for the Cemetery Dance anthology
titled, Whispers. It is an example of ironic humor if ever there was
one. ‘Irony’ is defined as, “an expression that means the opposite of
what is said,” or “an event that occurs that is the opposite of what is
expected, often with humorous insights”—Webster’s Pocket
Dictionary. The story fits the latter perfectly. The character of KD has
been renamed, BB, for a novel of the same name that I am presently
writing and should see publication by 2021. The plot deals with the
horrors of animal testing and cruelty, and its themes echo those
explored here, i.e. What is normal?)

KD'S WISH

She disappeared at 3:29 PM.

She was walking through the small wooded lot behind her house. It
was thick with trees and underbrush and had but one narrow path
dissecting it, running from Milk Street to her backyard. She was walking
home from the bus stop when she vanished. When she didn't arrive at
3:30, her mother, a short, wide Italian woman, began looking out the
kitchen window and searching the backyard and the edge of the woods. It
was July and the sun was high. She could see well into the woods along
the pathway and there was no sign of KD. When she didn't arrive by 3:45,
her mother called the workshop. She spoke to KD’s counselor who told her
that KD had gotten on the bus at 3:00 o'clock as usual.
That damn kid, her mother thought. She's probably out in those
woods looking at a flower, not giving a thought to the time or whether or not
I might be worried sick! But when KD didn't arrive by 4:00 PM, she called
her husband at the paper mill. He hurried home and searched the woods,
calling his daughter's name. He didn't find her.
At 4:45 they called the police.
"Can you give me a description of your daughter, Mrs. Ducci?"
 KD’s mother's touched a small white hanky to her broad, short nose
and sniffled. "Yes," she softly said. She cleared her throat and went on.
"Her name is Kathy, but everyone calls her by her initials, KD. She's
twenty-eight years old, and she has Down’s syndrome. She works at the
ARC- that’s the Association for Retarded Citizens workshop. She's four
foot, eight inches tall and weighs around a hundred and fifty pounds. She
has straight, shiny, very, very shiny hair (her voice caught in her throat, and
she nearly burst into tears), shoulder length. She has brown eyes and
heavy eyebrows. She’s wearing a white t-shirt that says, ‘Property of the
New York Yankees,’ on the front. She loves the Yankees (another deep,
heart wrenching sob). And she has on jeans and white sneakers, too."
She broke down and sobbed until she thought she couldn't cry
anymore. But she was wrong. At 8:36 that same evening, she again burst
into tears and couldn't stop crying. It was at 8:36 that KD walked out of the
woods that had just been thoroughly searched by police and the neighbors.
Her mother burst from the kitchen, nearly ripping the screen door
from its hinges, and ran the length of the backyard in four seconds. She
wrapped her heavy arms around her daughter's neck and pulled her to her
pillowed breast.
"Oh! Thank God! Oh! Thank you, Jesus!" she said and crossed
herself quickly with her right hand. She kissed KD's head and wet her hair
with tears of joy.
KD endured the embrace quietly until she felt the pressure of her
mother's hug lighten. She pulled back a step and held her arm up. Her
overly large tongue thickened her words but did not make them
unintelligible unless she tried to speak too fast.
"Mom! Look’a my brace’et. Ma!" she demanded. "My frien’ gay to
me."
Her mother finally heard her and looked at the bracelet on KD’s arm.
It was a rounded, almost translucent, white metal of some kind with very
thin veins of electric blue coursing through it. It sparkled with a subtle light
like thousands of pinpoint low watt neon bulbs exploding.
"Where did you get this?" her mother cried and grabbed KD by the
arm.
 "I tol’ ya. My frien’ gay to me," KD explained again, exasperation
sounding in her voice. "You nebber listen ta me!"
"What? Where did you get it?" her mother asked again as panic
returned and began to grow. "What friend? Where?"
At this, KD became very excited and launched into a long animated
answer that was completely unintelligible because she spoke so fast her
swollen tongue could not keep up with her excitement. She grew frustrated
quickly when neither the police nor her mother could understand what she
was saying. Even when she forced herself to speak slowly they didn't
understand what she was trying to tell them. The problem was solved when
KD's counselor, Sherry, called to see if she had been found yet. KD
immediately asked her mother to tell Sherry to come over. Sherry had a
good ear and formal training as a speech therapist. She was the only one
who understood KD all the time.

Sherry stepped out of KD’s bedroom and into the kitchen, closing the
door behind her. KD’s mother sat at the table, wringing her hands. A
plainclothes policeman stood leaning against the refrigerator. Sherry
motioned for them to follow her into the living room.
"What did she say?" the policeman asked. KD's mother nodded her
head in eager agreement with the question.
"I wasn't able to get it all, and what I was able to understand doesn't
really make a lot of sense. She says she was walking through the woods
when a silver woman stepped out of a tree and took her by the hand. Then
it really gets confusing. She says she didn't stay in the woods. She went
with this woman to her home, though she doesn't remember walking there.
One minute she was in the woods, the next she was in this silver woman's
home. She said the place was filled with shining metal like her bracelet and
brightly colored lights. She said the woman was very nice to her and could
talk inside KD’s head. The woman told KD she liked her. She said the
woman asked her a lot of questions inside her head while she sat in some
kind of a small glass room with many colored lights attached to her head.
Then, as far as I can make out, she suddenly found herself back in the
woods again where the silver woman gave her the bracelet as a gift. She
called it a whisk or a wisp bracelet – something like that. I couldn't quite
make that part out. She's really exhausted so I thought it would be more
productive if I take this up with her again tomorrow."
The policeman turned to KD’s mother. "Since your daughter is not
injured, and until we find out who this supposed woman is, there isn't much
we can do. Call me if you learn anything … useful." He cast a doubtful look
at Sherry and left. KD's mother thanked Sherry profusely.
"But I'm not really sure she's okay," Sherry said with concern. "Her
story just sounds too weird!"
Mrs. Ducci clucked her tongue and dismissively patted Sherry's arm.
"Don't worry. If I know my daughter she probably found that bracelet, or
someone at work gave it to her, and on the way home she stopped to look
at some flowers and fell asleep in the woods and dreamed that whole crazy
story. You know, just because she's handicapped doesn't mean she
doesn't have an imagination. The important thing is that she's okay." She
shushed Sherry's objections and escorted her to the door.
When Sherry was gone, KD's mother went into her daughter's room.
KD was just finishing buttoning up her pajama top. Her mother pulled back
the covers on the bed while KD slid between them. Then, overcome with
happiness and emotion, her mother again wept, but quietly this time, and
gathered her daughter into her arms and held her tightly.
KD wrapped her smooth pink arms around her mother's comforting
bulk and let herself be surrounded by her enormous love. After a while her
mother's eyes dried, and she kissed KD's forehead before letting her settle
back onto her pillow.
"Goodnight, honey. I love you," she whispered softly as she closed
the door and left.
KD rolled over and looked at the soft moonlight playing across the
window shade. Her stomach gurgled loudly in the darkness, and she felt a
pang of hunger. She realized that in all the confusion and excitement of the
past few hours, she had not had any supper. She sat up in bed and looked
at the bracelet on her wrist. The blue lights swirled like tiny electric worms
in the darkness and the depths of the metal. She remembered what the
silver woman had told her.
 She put her left hand on the bracelet, closed her eyes, and
concentrated. The air in front of her began to ripple, then sparkle with a
multitude of tiny explosions of light. Slowly, from out of nothing, a Big Mac,
sack of French fries, and a large chocolate shake materialized on her lap.
Smiling at the bracelet, she picked up the burger and began to eat.

Sherry drove home and sat on her couch in her dark living room
thinking about KD's story. Sherry liked KD the best of all her clients,
although, out of fairness to the others, she'd never admit it. KD was one of
a great many intellectually challenged people Sherry had worked with who
were normal enough to realize they were different. Sherry had had long
talks with KD when, like her older sister, she had wanted to go away to
college, and, most recently, get married and have children. She knew she
was different but didn't understand why that should keep her from doing
things. She knew what life was about. All she wanted to do was live it like
everyone else. It was some of the toughest counseling Sherry had ever
done. Now something important had obviously happened to KD, and her
story intrigued Sherry.
The next day at work, Sherry didn't have a chance to talk to KD until
just before lunch. The workshop, which performed assembling and
packaging of products for local factories—mostly plastic shops—had
recently received a new job order to package and label combs from a
plastics shop in town. Sherry was busy all morning taking inventory. She
became so engrossed in her tallying that she all but forgot KD until Diane,
counselor of the workstation next to KD's, mentioned that KD had produced
more finished work that morning than the entire shop put together.
When Sherry went to KD's workstation, she was amazed. KD was not
usually an ambitious worker. She liked to daydream and talk to herself. She
had even fallen asleep at her table a few times. But now, boxes filled with
perfectly packaged and labeled combs surrounded her.
"KD, how did you do all this?" Sherry asked as she inspected the
boxes. Each package had been sealed and labeled exactly the same way,
as if a machine had done it.
 "I whist it," KD replied.
"You what?"
"I whist it."
"You mean you wished it?"
"Yeah, wit’ my whist brace’et."
"That the silver woman gave you," Sherry thoughtfully said, finally
understanding KD's words completely. She stepped closer to examine the
bracelet on KD's arm.
"Yeah."
Tiny blue coils sparked and danced like neon insects on the surface
of the bracelet.
"Are you telling me the truth, KD?"
"Yeah!" KD nodded her head wildly with sincerity. "I can show you!"
She reached over and picked up a box of combs that needed
packaging. She placed the box in front of her on the table then put her left
hand on the bracelet and appeared to be concentrating. The box became
blurry for a moment. Sherry rubbed her eyes then gasped.
The combs were all packaged and labeled. Perfectly.
"Oh my God!" Sherry softly said. She sat down opposite KD. "Tell
me," she said slowly, "exactly what the silver woman said to you."
"She say I beau’ful." KD smiled brightly as she remembered.
"What else? What did she say about the bracelet?"
"She say ‘cause I beau’ful, she gimme brace’et." KD held it up for
admiration. "She say it take care a me."
Sherry licked her lips and leaned forward. "And she told you how to
use it?"
"Yeah. She say touch it like dis and whist somepin and it come true.
She say brace’et change t’ings."

For three days Sherry thought about what KD had told her and what
she had seen with her very own eyes. She told KD not to use the wish
bracelet at work and not to tell anyone else about it. KD, always willing to
please, had agreed.
 What is that thing?
The thought occupied Sherry's mind constantly. If it was what it
seemed to be, then the moral implications were incredible. Her rational side
told her it was ridiculous.
A wish bracelet? Come on! Those things are only real in fairy tales!
So then … how did she explain what she had seen? That was when
her imagination would kick in and tell her that it was scientifically possible.
What if the silver woman was an extraterrestrial and the bracelet some kind
of machine, like a very advanced 3-D copier, thought activated by its
wearer that can replicate and rearrange atoms at the molecular level? That
sounded great, but what exactly did it mean? Did it mean the bracelet could
just change material things, or could it actually change time and space –
change the fabric of reality itself?
By Friday Sherry decided to put the bracelet to a test once and for all.
Now the problem became what to wish for. If she thought of wishing for any
personal gain it was very fleeting, or she only saw herself receiving credit
for bringing great things to humanity. For her, the incredible possibilities of
the bracelet went far beyond any consideration of personal profit.
I could cure cancer. AIDS. I could stop wars, crime… Even death
itself.
But what if the bracelet only worked for KD? How could she get KD to
understand the possibilities?
Suddenly an answer came to her like an epiphany, and she laughed
at the beauty of it.
Of course! The answer was right in front of her!

"KD, can I try your bracelet?" Sherry asked just before lunch on
Friday. She had invited KD into her office and closed the door.
"Yeah, okay," KD good-naturedly answered. Contrary to the promise
she had made to Sherry not to use the bracelet, she had been wishing up
snacks in secret all week and had just wished up a box of Junior Mints
before Sherry had called her into the office. She was dying to eat them, and
if letting Sherry use the bracelet would get her out of there, she was all for
it.
Sherry took the cool metal into her hands and slipped her right one
through it. It felt light as air, yet warm on her skin. A nice warm. She put her
left hand over the bracelet lightly the way she had seen KD do. Her
forehead became knotted in concentration.
Nothing happened
She tried step two of her test and thought of something material, like
a dollar bill. Again nothing happened.
"Here, you try," Sherry said and gave it back to KD.
"Wha’ should I whist for?" KD asked.
"Anything. Um, let's see, a candy bar? How about a candy bar?"
KD blossomed into a smile. That she could do. That she would gladly
do! She decided that a Snickers bar would go nicely with her Junior Mints
and took the bracelet back from Sherry. She slid it onto her wrist. A
moment later the candy bar appeared on the table. Katie quickly opened it
and bit into it.
Ok. I’m not surprised it’s programmed only to work for KD, thought
Sherry. I expected this. However, that did not necessarily mean that the
bracelet could not be used for all the good of mankind that she had
envisioned. Sherry had thought long and carefully about it. After all, she
thought, KD was smart enough to understand; she was sure of it. Of course
there was still the question of whether or not the bracelet could actually
change the fabric of reality, or if it was just a molecular restructurer of
material things. Sherry had come up with a way to test it that she felt
certain KD would understand.
"KD, I want you to wish something else for me, okay?" KD nodded. "I
want you to wish it was yesterday."
KD giggled and looked at Sherry as if she thought her counselor were
playing a joke on her. "Yessaday? Why you want it yessaday?" She asked,
looking around the workshop. "Today's payday!"
Sherry had to smile at KD's practicality. She valued money almost as
much as food. "I just want to see if the bracelet can make today into
yesterday. We can change it back right after."
KD looked doubtful and confused. "How I do that?" she asked.
 "Just use the bracelet like you did when you wished for that candy
bar, only wish that it was yesterday. Think, ‘I wish it was yesterday.’"
KD popped the last of the Snickers bar into her mouth, chewed it and
swallowed. "Okay. I guess so." She looked at the bracelet then at Sherry.
She giggled. This was the silliest thing she had ever heard of. Why would
Sherry want it to be yesterday? Yesterday KD had had a fight with Big Bill,
her middle-aged co-worker who thought he was the shop foreman and liked
to boss people around. She didn't want to do that again, but if Sherry
wanted her to, she guessed she would have to. Besides, Sherry said she
could change things back, so maybe she could do it before Big Bill started
yelling at her. She touched the bracelet and closed her eyes.
"I wist it was yessaday."
Nothing happened. Well, almost nothing. Sherry did feel a slight
queasiness in her stomach, as if she were on a jet plane that had just taken
off, but other than that nothing seemed different. Then she looked down at
her clothing and gasped. She was wearing the gray skirt and blue blouse
she had worn yesterday. KD giggled at her own instant return to the
previous day’s garb. Quickly, Sherry looked at her watch. Instead of July
10, the digital date read-out said, July 9. She looked out her office’s bay
window, overlooking the workshop, at the large calendar on the far wall. It
read: TODAY IS THURSDAY JULY 9.
"It worked!" Sherry breathed. Excitement welled inside her. It worked!
"Sherry," KD said nervously, looking around the workshop to see if
Big Bill was nearby, "can I change it back now?"
"Yes, yes, KD. Go ahead and do it."
Again Sherry had that feeling of taking off, of leaving her stomach
behind for a moment, then everything was fine. Sherry looked at her
clothing. Her attire had returned to the white slacks and short-sleeved
green blouse she had put on that morning. KD’s clothing, too, and much to
her delight, changed back as well.
“It tickles,” KD said and giggled.
Sherry looked at her watch and saw it was July 10th once more. The
calendar on the workshop wall showed the same.
"I can't believe it!" she said softly.
"Can I go eat lunch now?" asked KD. She was getting hungry.
 "Yes, KD. Absolutely. But I want you to stay after work today a little
while, okay? I'll give you a ride home, so when three o'clock comes, you
come right here to see me, okay?"
"Okay," KD happily agreed and went off to the lunch room.

The afternoon trudged on at a snail’s pace; minutes stagnated and

seemed like hours, while hours seemed like days and the time between
noon and three became a century. Finally, however, the dismissal buzzer
sounded and all the workers lined up at the door to get on their respective
buses. Sherry waited anxiously for KD. When she didn't come to her office
after five minutes, Sherry went looking for her. She found KD about to
board her bus for home; she had forgotten what Sherry had told her.
"Now," Sherry said after she had KD in her office and had closed the
door. "I want to talk to you about something very important." Sherry tried to
choose her words carefully. If she could just get KD to carry out the first
wish, which would be to cure all forms of mental retardation and make
herself, and everyone else like her, normal, then KD should be able to fully
understand the importance, and the weight, of what the wish bracelet could
do. She could then carry out all the humanitarian wishes that Sherry had
envisioned, like wiping out disease and war and poverty.
Sherry could barely contain her excitement.
"KD, do you remember when you talked to me about going to college
and getting married, and wanting to be like your sister?"
KD nodded.
"Remember how we talked about how some people are different from
other people, like you and your sister? Like you and the rest of the
workshop? Wouldn't it be great if all people could be the same? Wouldn’t it
be great if everyone could be normal? Then you could do all the things
you've always wanted to do."
KD nodded happily yet vacantly. She was confused by the word
normal. She wasn’t sure what Sherry meant and was too embarrassed to
say so.
 "KD, you could use the bracelet to wish that everyone could be
normal. Like you and Joey who sits next to you, and all the other workers
here. Everyone could be normal. You could make everyone in the world,
like you, normal."
Slowly, Sherry’s meaning became clear and understanding dawned
on KD.
So that's what normal means!
KD smiled happily and nodded. She touched the bracelet, and before
Sherry could do or say anything, she quickly wished:
"I whist ev’yone in the worl’ coul’ be like me, normal!

X0X0

“Dal-eye-ism” (oil pastels on paper) 2017

**I’m Waiting for You … In the Park

Meet me at the place of echoes,

Where I hide in the glistening darkness,
Waiting for your voice to capture
And feed writhing memories.
Like a dying torture victim,
Praying silently before Heaven: a confession quaked from lips that quiver
then quiet.

I'm waiting for you where the daylight grays

And falls into dusk.
Meet me on the precipice of the night,
Where I hover against the muddy sunset,
Waiting for your heart to capture and devour
Like a spider feasting on a fruit fly
That struggles and strains,
But goes numb at the first taste of poison.

I'm waiting for you at the dark spot,

Just before the dawn,
Where I drink in the deepening blackness,
Waiting for your eyes to wander my way.
I'll pierce them and pluck them
Like a pimento squeezed from an olive…
And you’ll wander, hands out,
Knowing love is blind.

I'm waiting for you … In the park.

*****
(“The Tell-Tale Nose” was my final contribution to the Whispers
anthology. Once again I found inspiration in Edgar Allen Poe’s short
story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Unlike “Heavy Metal,” where the story is
modelled on the plot and mimics Poe’s use of language and style,
“The Tell-Tale Nose” uses only the title. The actual inspiration for this
story comes from something my sister-in-law told me, about how she
awoke one night to hear a woman screaming. The ensuing tale sprung
nearly fully-formed into my head, except for the ending—which was
unusual. Normally, the ending is one of the first things I know about
any story, but this one eluded me until it was time to write it. Then
what should happen was so obvious I wrote the final couple of scenes
quite quickly. One last note, the song sung at the office party [to the
tune of “Auld Lang Syne”] is another of my father’s ditties, and he
was not afraid to sing it loud and clear whenever he suspected
someone of slinging bullshit.)

THE TELL-TALE NOSE

The sound of screaming woke Ellen. Far away screaming. The July
night felt hot and muggy, making it hard to sleep, otherwise she might
never have heard it at all. She lifted her damp head from the pillow without
opening her eyes, and strained to catch it again. A few moments later there
it was: a woman screaming! Not an angry, lover's quarrel type of scream, or
a drunk teenager’s whooping it up scream, but a long, painful, tortured
scream – the scream of a woman being beaten, brutalized … raped!
Her eyes flew open, and she sat up in the bed. The murkiness of
sleep fell away with the realization that she actually was hearing this! It was
no dream. No illusion.
The scream drifted through the steamy night to reach her ears once
more.
It sounds at least a few streets away, Ellen thought. Maybe in the
fens, a swamp that boarded the neighborhood. She reached out to shake
her husband awake, but her hand found the bed empty, and she
remembered that on hot nights like this Tim liked to sleep on the couch on
the screened-in front porch.
Ellen got out of bed and pulled her sweat-dampened T-shirt over her
exposed bottom only to have the cloth ride up to her stomach again. She
padded on bare feet out of the bedroom and down the hallway.
She heard the scream again.
Strange.
Now that she was away from the open bedroom windows, the scream
sounded clearer and closer when it should've been distorted and further
away. By the eerie green glow of the microwave oven digital time display,
Ellen crossed the kitchen to the living room.
A short, abrupt scream split the night, most definitely closer than the
last one.
What the hell is going on? Ellen wondered.
Now the screamer sounded as if she were right out on the street in
front of the house instead of blocks away as Ellen had originally thought. In
the living room, with the moon lighting her way to the front door and the
porch, she realized that something else was strange – she couldn't hear
Tim snoring. Tim, who suffered from a badly deviated septum, always
snored, no matter what position he slept in.
Ellen heard the scream again, even closer now. In fact, it sounded
right outside the window! She noticed something else as well – it was
recurring with far too much regularity and sameness to be the scream of a
woman in trouble.
Ellen paused in the living room and wondered if it could be a
recording, or maybe the cry of some nocturnal bird, or the shrill mating call
of an insect distorted by nighttime acoustics and her muddle-headed sleep-
state until she thought she was hearing a woman screaming in distress.
Both theories proved wrong, however, when she opened the front
door.
The screaming came from the porch.
Startled by the sound of it so close by, Ellen jumped and hit her left
arm’s funny bone against the front door knob. She gingerly shook it as the
painful, tingling sensation spread out from the elbow. She stepped onto the
porch and was startled again by the scream, even though by now she
expected it.
It's coming from the couch! Where Tim is sleeping!
What the hell?
Instead of being ear-splittingly loud the closer she got to the source of
the screaming, it seemed to fade and become distant again, as when she
had first heard it. In fact, it sounded almost … tiny!
On tiptoes, she approached her prone, sleeping husband on the
couch.
A small giggle bubbled up her throat as the truth became apparent.
She had been wrong when she had thought her husband wasn’t snoring.
He was snoring all right, but instead of the deep, sonorous buzz-saw he
usually produced, tonight the unbelievably realistic sound of a woman's
tortured scream came from his nose at regular intervals, as though he had
a tiny victim trapped in his sinuses and was slowly drowning her in snot.
The last image was too much for Ellen and her giggle became
laughter. It poured out of her mouth and through the fingers she clamped
over her lips to try and stifle it. The scream came again, making her jump
and her bout of hysterical giggling worse, and she had to run, doubled over,
back into the house to the kitchen where she could let the laughter out. She
ended up doubled over, gasping for air by the time the hysteria finally left
her.
From the porch, Tim's nasal screams continued.
It’s eerie, Ellen thought. Weird. And just too damn funny for words!
The giggles took hold of her again and quickly escalated into deep,
gut-wrenching, hiccupping laughter that, before too long, sounded more like
sobbing.
I think I'm going to be sick, Ellen thought and laughed harder. Just
when she was sure she really was going to vomit if she didn't stop
laughing, she stopped laughing, just like that, as though the giggle switch in
her brain had been abruptly turned off.
It was a new sound from the porch, however, that was responsible for
killing her painful laughter. The screams had ceased and been replaced by
a sound even louder than the screaming. The new sound was a powerful,
frightening one; so powerfully frightening it was capable of curing Ellen's
giggles in the blink of an eye.
Laughter.
For a moment, she thought she was hearing a weird echo of herself,
but, no, this was different. This was wild, cackling, ridiculing, downright
mean laughter coming from Tim's clogged nasal passages.
Crazy as it seemed, Ellen felt the damnedest certainty that the
laughter was directed at her, mocking her!

Tim Rosenbaum shuffled his way to the kitchen table, yawning

soundlessly and scratching himself vigorously. He plopped into a chair and,
with both hands, clutched the coffee mug Ellen placed in front of him. He
blew on the hot liquid, sipped it, and grimaced, eyes barely open. Tim was
one of those people who cannot wake up suddenly, or quickly. Without a
strong cup of coffee, or a cold shower, it could take him up to an hour or
more to wake up fully. With the java, he was completely conscious within
fifteen minutes, twenty tops. A cold shower was quicker, but was a very
rude awakening—too rude for Tim.
As such reluctant wakers often are, Tim was a bit of a bear when he
first got up, and Ellen had learned over the seven years of their marriage
that he was best left alone and unspoken to until after that first cup of joe
began to take effect.
This morning it was difficult for Ellen to wait until Tim finished the
coffee and was human again. She was dying to tell him about the strange
(and even more hilarious in the light of day) episode with his snoring during
the night. When she did tell him, she tried to keep it light and make it sound
funny; Tim could be very touchy about his snoring. Upon waking him one
night when his snores had been so loud that she hadn't been able to sleep,
he had insisted vehemently that he didn't snore, and when Ellen had asked
how he knew that, he had said groggily, "I stayed up all night one time to
see."
Today was no different. As she went on about his snoring sounding
first like a woman screaming, then like laughter, Tim looked at her as if she
were from Dimension X and had just materialized in the kitchen. He was
also, to say the least, insulted.
"I'm sorry," he curtly said, and added in a pouting tone, "I can't help
it."
"You don't have to apologize," Ellen soothed. "It was just kind of
funny, you know? And weird! Your snoring has never sounded like a
woman screaming before!" A buzz saw, yes, she thought, but wisely kept it
to herself.
"I can't help the way it sounds," Tim said grumpily.
"I know, Babe. Don't be so touchy. I’m just telling you what happened.
It really was funny … Really!" She didn't tell him how uncomfortable she
had felt when his snores had turned to mocking laughter.
Tim relaxed a little and sheepishly grinned at her. "I guess I’ll have to
stay up all night again to see if you're right." They both laughed at that and
Ellen kissed his nose.
"They put new carpet in my office at work and ever since I've been
really stuffed up. I think I might be allergic to it. My nose whistles when I
breathe through it. Listen." He breathed solely through his nose as Ellen
leaned over the table.
She did hear whistling – a shrill wine that brought a chill to her spine
when she realized the whistling was a song, in fact, the theme from The
Twilight Zone.
"Are you doing that?" Ellen asked, pulling sharply back.
"What?" Tim asked, looking genuinely perplexed.
"That!" she replied and pointed at his still whistling nose. "Do do do-
do, do do do-do. Like The Twilight Zone?" she replied.
He breathed louder through his nose and listened. "I don't hear it."
"You're not doing it now," she said, listening as well.
He shrugged, and she laughed it off, but later, as he was leaving, and
she stood washing the breakfast dishes at the sink, Tim kissed the back of
her neck, and she could have sworn on a mountain of Bibles that she heard
The Twilight Zone theme coming from his whistling nose again.
 On his way to work, with the car tuned to WAAF (The Rock 'n Roll Air
Force!), Tim found himself breathing in time to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s, "What's
That Smell?" and whistling with his nose to the rhythm of the music rather
than its melody.
Maybe I was whistling Twilight Zone subconsciously to Ellen.
He turned the radio down and tried to replicate the theme from the old
TV show. As with the Lynyrd Skynyrd song, he could get the rhythm and
beat of it, but not the actual notes. As he turned into the parking lot at work,
he had to shake his head and laugh at himself for the weird things his wife
could make him do.
Tim worked as a human resources manager, specializing in worker
compensation and benefit analysis at Data Tech, a fledgling software
company started by a former Microsoft programmer. Things had been tight
at the company of late, forcing a series of layoffs in an attempt to turn
things around. Part of Tim's job was to sit in on meetings where employees
were told they were being given the boot, and to give those employees a
rundown of their severance package and the limited continued benefits
they could expect to receive.
Tim hated that part of his job; hated sitting there and watching the
struggle for control in the faces of people confronted with sudden
unemployment. Not all of them were successful in keeping control either–
that was the worst of it. There really is something to the old adage about
hating to see a grown man cry. Or a grown woman for that matter.
This morning a meeting had been scheduled with the newly named
CEO, John Bowman, who had pledged to stockholders that he would turn
the company around. He was meeting with all departments, starting with
human resources, to get feedback (or so his memo said) and ideas on how
to do what he had promised the board and the major investors. Tim, like
everyone else who had gotten the memo, knew the meeting would be more
of a show than a serious attempt to seek out and consider the opinions of
the lower echelon of corporate employees and certainly not Human
Resources which Bowman stilled called, “Personnel.” Whenever the brain
trust at Data Tech felt it was time to boost morale (usually just before
another layoff), or impress stockholders with action instead of words, they
conducted such meetings. Trimmed to the bare essentials, Tim's
department now consisted of seven people, two of whom were secretaries.
They were responsible for all corporate and middle management wage
compensation, benefit analysis and adjustment in keeping with the average
standards of the computer industry.
Tim's mind drifted during Bowman's opening statement. He started
daydreaming about golfing and began working on his chip shot in his mind.
Bowman shouting and banging on the conference table suddenly brought
him out of his reverie.
"I'm serious! This is no morale boosting BS this time! I really believe
that the answers to this company's problems lie with you, the heart of this
place, its employees. We've got a great product, an excellent
manufacturing process, a top-notch sales team. So what's wrong? I want to
know!" Bowman emphasized the last word by pounding his fist on the table.
The room remained silent. Tim and the other members of his
department, including the director, sat staring at the mahogany tabletop in
uncomfortable quietude.
Suddenly, softly, a woman's voice broke the silence: "The goddamn
golden handshakes and gilded parachutes are what's killing us. We’ve had
five CEOs and twelve vice-presidents retire since our founding fifteen years
ago. Every one of them has taken a big bite out of this company with their
golden packages. Combined, they're costing us close to ten million a year.
Without that payout, we would've shown a profit instead of a loss last
quarter."
Everyone in the room, especially the new CEO, Bowman, looked
stunned. Schaeffer, Tim’s department director, glanced at his two female
managers, wondering which of them had had the balls to speak up and say
what everyone knew to be the truth—that special exit packages for CEOs,
called “golden parachutes” and “gilded handshakes” that rewarded them
handsomely for leaving the business when they became a detriment to the
corporation, were a drain on the company. It was well-known in Tim's
department, which handled these packages, that Bowman had received the
richest gilded deal yet offered by Data Tech.
"Who said that?" Bowman asked, his voice stern. "It sounded like a
woman!"
 Gail O'Reilly, a ravishing redhead and fellow HR manager sitting next
to Tim, shot him a hard look, took a deep breath, cleared her throat, and
said, "I did, sir," her voice a little unsteady.
"I thought it came from your direction!" Bowman said and fixed his
hard, blue-eyed gaze upon her. "You've got guts, Miz O'Reilly. It took a lot
of guts to say that. I'd like to see a full report with numbers to back it up on
my desk by tomorrow morning." Bowman let his eyes linger on her a
moment before slapping his briefcase shut and walking out of the room.
No one seemed able to move. They were paralyzed, collectively
holding their breath as if waiting for the other shoe to fall and for Bowman
to storm back in and give Ravishing O'Reilly the boot, and maybe the rest
of them with her for good measure. That didn't happen. The paralysis of
disbelief broke, and Gail O'Reilly became the instant darling of the
department. The others thronged about her and showered her with
adulation. The department director even invited her to lunch, on him.
Tim remained in the conference room after the others had trailed off
after Gail and the director. He remained sitting partly because he felt a little
dizzy, and partly because he couldn't believe what had just happened.
Ellen was right! My nose just spoke! My nose just told the new CEO
that the benefit package he's getting is one of the major reasons the
company is failing! My nose almost just got me fired!
What the fuck is going on?
It had all happened so quickly; Tim had to replay it slowly in his mind
to understand it. Like everyone else in his department, he knew that what
his nose had expressed was certainly true, and though he never would've
said it out loud and risked his job, he had been, nevertheless, thinking it
when during an exhalation of a deep breath, he had heard a soft but clear
woman's voice speak that plain truth … from his frigging nose!
Thank God Gail O'Reilly was such a quick thinker and daring enough
to take a chance. By the look she had given him on her way out of the
room, though, she obviously knew where the voice had come from. For
whatever reason, she had decided to take him off the hook. And it looked
like it was all going to work out and pay off to her advantage.
Figures! Story of my life!
 Tim passed up an offer to go to lunch with one of the managers from
the finance department and remained in his office, mulling over the strange
occurrence. He experimented several times with consciously trying to
speak through his nose, or to make the near-constant nasal whistling he
generally experienced just breathing, into sounds like words. He succeeded
only in blowing mucilage all over the covers of several manila file folders on
his desk.
Around three o'clock that afternoon, after a two and a half hour lunch
with the department director (an office record), Gail O'Reilly sauntered into
Tim's office and closed the door behind her. Her face was flushed and her
eyelids a little droopy, giving Tim the impression that lunch with the director
had been mostly liquid. Further proof came when she sat on the edge of his
desk – her skirt hiked up with the effort, giving him a tantalizing glimpse of
an exquisitely smooth inner thigh – and leaned over, excluding gin fumes
and the slightly sweaty scent of Anne Klein perfume.
"I'd like to know two things," she said in a husky voice he’d never
heard her use in the office, but which he could easily imagine hearing
whispered in his ear in a dark bedroom.
"First, I want to know how you did that. Are you some kind of
ventriloquist? I didn't see your lips move, but your nostrils were twitching
like crazy!" She giggled and said, "You looked like Elizabeth Montgomery in
Bewitched … or a rabbit in heat," she added after a slight hesitation and
giggled again, an incredibly sexy sound to Tim. "And second, I'd like to
know why you did it! Were you trying to get me fired, or what?" She fixed
him with those beautiful emerald green eyes that were slightly unfocused
from the effect of the gin.
Hearing her voice and smelling her scent; looking into those
incredible eyes, turned Tim on to the point that he had to look away, afraid
she would see his desire leering out at her. His gaze fell on her exposed
thigh, so porcelain white it nearly glowed, and he squirmed uncomfortably
in his chair, suddenly unable to think straight or even remember what it was
she had just asked him.
"Oh, come on. I'm not angry. Really. I would have been, but I think
you actually did me a favor!" She leaned toward him and her blouse fell
open just enough to expose skin above her breasts that was just as
alabaster as the flesh of her thighs. “So tell me.”
Her scent grew stronger the closer she got; permeating his olfactory
sense. His throat dried up. He tried to clear it, but it was useless; he
couldn't think of anything to say.
Suddenly, however, as if overcome with an attack of facial tics, he felt
his nostrils twitch as Gail had described, and he heard a voice, a man's this
time, speak from his nose.
"First, you tell me why you owned up to it, Sweetheart," his proboscis
suavely said.
Gail gaped wide-eyed at him and laughed breathlessly. "That's
fucking amazing! I can't believe it! You're really good! You do any other
voices? Can you do anyone famous?"
To his amazement, Tim mutely witnessed his nose impersonate
Marilyn Monroe perfectly. Gail found it hilarious and laughed so hard she
nearly fell off the edge of the desk and practically into Tim’s lap. Her skirt
rode up around her panties giving him a glimpse of heaven before she
stepped away and composed herself.
Once again, she turned the bright spotlights of those eyes upon Tim,
smiled, and said, "You still haven't answered my question."
All rational thought had been driven from Tim's mind, but his nose
was right on the ball. "You haven't answered mine yet, either.”
"I asked you first." Gail answered with another little giggle.
"I see," Tim's nose shot right back, so smoothly. "Sort of like, you
show me yours and I’ll show you mine?" The sexual implication was explicit
in his tone.
A slow smile spread across Gail's puffy, cupid lips. "Yeah, sort of,"
she said, huskily.
Tim couldn't believe what came out of his nose next.
"Maybe this isn't the right place to be showing each other our goods,
so to speak. Why don’t we go out for a drink after work?" To his
amazement, Gail agreed!
That didn’t just happen, he thought after she was gone. The Gail
O'Reilly's of the world didn't hit on the Tim Rosenbaum’s, even if the latter
could emit sexy voices from his nasal passages! It’s not that he thought of
himself as ugly, but he also knew he was far from handsome. His eyes
were too close together, his nose too long, and he had an under bite. His
shoulders were rounded, his arms flabby, and he had quite a few beers
invested in his growing pot belly.
This just can't be happening, he thought, and did something he had
always believed only people in stories did – he pinched himself to see if he
was awake. Having proven the latter, he saw only one other explanation for
what was going on.
I'm going insane!
Though it was far from a pleasant thought, it was, at least, an
explanation, and his mind latched onto it with paranoid certainty.
The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully, if extremely slowly. He
tried immersing himself in his work to forget what had happened, but he
repeatedly found himself absentmindedly breathing laboriously through his
nose and straining to hear any hint of articulation in the whistling and
buzzing that squeaked from his partially blocked nasal passages. When he
wasn't occupied thusly, he thought of Gail O'Reilly's lace-covered buttocks,
and the promise it held. Such thoughts, however, brought immediate guilt
and images of Ellen to mind, and Tim, in a cold sweat, quickly pushed them
away.
Quitting time found him on his way to Gail's office to tell her he
couldn't go out for a drink with her, but he found it locked and the lights out.
Despite the fact that he had been about to beg off their date, he was
disappointed. He told himself it was what he should have expected; there
was no way she would go out with him. She was just being nice when she
had accepted his offer. Her ducking out early to avoid him was consistent
with past experience and his image of himself, and how, he knew, the Gail
O'Reilly's of the world viewed and treated average guys like him.
On the way home, with the radio blasting, he managed to put the
strange day into a perspective that made him feel a little less crazy. By the
time he reached home and pulled in the driveway, he had nearly convinced
himself that what had happened had just been a weird fluke phenomena
that couldn't possibly repeat itself.
Several times during dinner he thought of telling Ellen about what had
happened at work, but the image of Gail O'Reilly's incredible butt brought
on too much guilt about what he (but it wasn't him, it was his nose, dammit,
and didn't that sound ridiculous?) had been planning to do. Ellen could read
him like a book, so rather than risk displaying his guilty conscience, he
once again pushed the day’s events from his mind.
After a few more beers than usual, he slept deeply that night,
unaware of any dreams or nasal voices.
His wife, Ellen, wasn't so lucky.
She woke at 2:00 a.m. to the sound of her name being called. The
wave of humidity still smothered the area, and Tim was sleeping on the
porch again. A chill wave passed over her skin as Ellen suddenly knew that
the voice calling her was coming from Tim's nose.
"Ellen."
It was the same woman's voice that she had heard screaming and
then laughing at her the night before.
"Ellen."
There was no mistaking it. Ellen could hear her name clearly, spoken
with just the right tone of insistence, urging her to answer.
"Ellen?"
She got out of bed, not bothering to pull her shirt down over her
exposed fanny.
"Ellen?"
The voice sounded slightly different each time it called her name –
just enough so to keep her attention. She found it to be an alluring voice,
the kind anyone would follow if they heard it calling.
"Ellen."
And she did.
The voice changed again and said her name, “Ellen!” in a tone of
greeting as she reached the porch door. It then sounded smug, self-
confident and self-satisfied; silently laughing; so sure of its ability to draw
her in and of her inability to resist.
“Ell-llen!”
To Ellen it sounded like the voice of a complete bitch.
What am I thinking? she wondered in panic.
"Tim?" she called to break the moment and chase the crazy thoughts
away.
 Tim snorted once, then his usual droning snore, deep and grating,
came from him for a few seconds until he rolled over. Silence followed.
Ellen sighed. She told herself she must have been half-asleep and
dreaming.
It had to be that!
She began to feel like a complete fool thinking that Tim's nose had
been calling to her! She shook her head and turned to go back to bed.
"You should see the babe that old Timmy-boy is scoping out at work,
Ellen!"
She felt her stomach drop to her knees. This can't be happening! I
have to be dreaming! I cannot have heard what I think I just heard!
"She's a redhead – a natural, too, I bet. Tim had a chance to find out
after work today, but … Well, I'm sure, you know, tomorrow he will. She's
hot for him. When he’s late getting home, you'll know why."
The color drained from Ellen's face, and she had to lean against the
door jamb.
Tim's nose laughed at her.
"Tim?" Ellen loudly called, her voice trembling.
"Tim's asleep right now, but ask him in the morning who Gail O'Reilly
is and watch his reaction. You wouldn't believe how hot they are for each
other!”
"Tim?" Ellen called again, weakly this time. She closed her eyes, not
wanting to hear the voice go on. She didn't. Tim rolled onto his back and
began to snore again loudly in his usual manner.
Dazed, Ellen returned to bed but sleep was a long time coming.
When it finally did arrive, it came filled with echoes of the nasal voice
calling her name and taunting her.

In the morning, the whole thing seemed so unreal that she decided it
had to have been a dream. She resolved to forget it and not make a fool of
herself by telling Tim, which was why she was so surprised to hear herself
blurt out: "Tell me, Tim, who’s Gail O’Reilly?"
 Her surprise was nothing compared to Tim's. He had never been able
to lie well or hide his emotions, and this time proved no different.
"What?" he asked, his voice cracking. He immediately cleared his
throat, paled, then blushed a deep crimson. He couldn't look his wife in the
eye.
"Gail O'Reilly!" Ellen quite slowly repeated. She felt a mixture of
disbelief—with the fact that she had actually followed the advice of her
husband's nose, for crying out loud—and anger equally at Tim because his
nose had apparently been telling her the truth! Tim's guilty visage was open
confirmation.
"She's, um, just someone I work with." Tim coughed and sputtered,
trying to recover and hide his embarrassment by pretending to have
swallowed the wrong way. "Why?"
Now it was Ellen's turn to do some fast thinking. "Oh, when I got up to
go to the bathroom you were talking in your sleep, and you mentioned her
name a couple of times."
"Um, yeah. We're working on a new survey together. She's a class A
bitch, though. Which reminds me, I have an early meeting with her." Tim
spoke quickly, stood, grabbed his coat, and pecked Ellen on the cheek as
he headed for the door, exiting before she could question him any further.

"Tim, have you heard?" Henry Dunn, his friend from Finance, asked
before Tim could even get to his cubicle. Dunn was the office gossip and as
bad as an old woman with too much time on her hands. Tim pushed past
him, muttering that he was too busy for Dunn’s news today. Not one to be
put off so easily, especially when he felt he had a particularly juicy bit of
information, Dunn followed and told him anyway.
"Gail O'Reilly got canned."
That brought Tim up short. "What?" he asked, turning to Henry.
"Yes!" Dunn beamed, pleased to have impressed Tim so. "She got
called up to Bowman's office just before quitting time last night. Security
escorted her out from there; didn't even let her take her personal stuff.
They cleaned out her desk and office files before we got in this morning. It
was her big mouth that did it! How could she have been so stupid to tell
Bowman his package was dragging the company under? Even if it is true! I
bet she has trouble landing another job, too. No CEO wants a manager
under them who's going to say what she said."
Henry rambled on, but Tim had stopped listening. They were outside
his small cubicle, and he went in and sat in front of his computer. As Henry
gave his own opinion of Gail O’Reilly, Tim caught his reflection in the
computer screen. He stared at his face and thought: My nose got Gail fired.
He sighed and thought he heard a faint, sniggering chuckle come from his
offending feature.
"What's wrong?" Henry asked him. "You look so pale, and your
nostrils are twitching like crazy."
"Nothing," Tim said quickly. “Thanks for the heads-up, Henry.” He
turned his back to Dunn and his friend took the hint.
“Uh, sure. No probs,” he mumbled and went off to play town crier
where he’d be more appreciated.

All morning the department was a-buzz with the news of Gail
O'Reilly's abrupt departure. Though no official word had come down about
her leaving, and the HR director, Joe Schafer, kept mum and secluded in
his office, Henry Dunn and the others were certain Gail had been canned
because of her comments to CEO Bowman the day before. Tim followed
the director’s tack and tried to barricade himself behind his work and
remain in his office to avoid having to speak with any of the others. At
lunch, he slipped out, via the fire escape, aiming to have a hamburger and
a couple of quick beers at a local sports bar he knew none of the others
would ever go to. He didn't get there, however, for waiting by his car was
Gail O'Reilly.
"I just wanted to thank you," she said, leaning against the driver's
door of his automobile.
The expression on her face didn't look to Tim like one of gratitude.
"At least, that's what I've been telling myself," she went on, moving
toward him.
 Tim had stopped by the rear fender and now backed away slowly, as
if confronting a deadly animal that could pounce at any quick movement or
show of fear.
"I mean, even though you cost me my job, and maybe even my
career, I keep telling myself I should be thankful because why would I want
to work for a place that hires people the likes of you – a spineless, gutless,
wimp, who's more suited to a circus sideshow! You have achieved a new
low in the annals of backstabbing. So, I've been telling myself it’s for the
best; you did me a favor. Now I don't have to work with sleaze-bags like
you. So I decided I should thank you, and I will, with this –"
She closed the ground between them in three quick strides, grabbed
Tim by the shoulders, and planted her right knee firmly and forcefully into
his crotch. His breath when out of him with an airy gasp. He doubled over
and sank to the blacktop.
"Now you have a faint idea of how I felt when Bowman sacked me
because of your cute ventriloquist’s trick," Gail said vehemently and stalked
off.
Tim spent the rest of his lunch break curled up in the backseat of his
car, gently massaging his throbbing testicles in his cupped hands and
trying to keep from vomiting. He walked to his office like a man who has
spent too much time on a horse and though he got a few strange looks
from his coworkers, they were all still too preoccupied with the news of
Gail's dismissal to bother much with him.
The afternoon dragged horribly and no matter how hard he tried to
work and forget the incident with Gail, the ache in his groin wouldn't let him.
He decided the best thing to do would be to sneak out early, go home, and
soak his hurting gonads in a hot tub while getting amnesia-inducingly
drunk. Ellen wouldn't be home from her job until five, giving him plenty of
time.
It was, however, not to be. A memo came down from the vice
president’s office that it was CEO Bowman's birthday and an informal
gathering would take place in the corporate lounge at 4:30 PM. Though the
memo did not state that attendance was mandatory, Tim knew it would be
monitored very carefully. His plan to leave early was out of the question. He
couldn't take the chance of being missed if he didn't want to end up like
Gail O'Reilly.

The corporate lounge was on the top floor of the Data Tech building
and was referred to as, "The Penthouse," by most of the corporate
employees. Though it was called the corporate lounge, and nearly
everyone in the building (which was Data Tech’s corporate headquarters)
had a job that was considered to be at the corporate level, only the CEO
and his bevy of vice presidents (one for each department) were allowed
regular access to it. It was Data Tech’s equivalent to the executive
washroom. Tim had been in the lounge only once before, not that long ago,
when the last CEO, John O'Casey, had announced that he was stepping
down to allow new blood, Bowman, to reinvigorate Data Tech. There had
been an open bar, and he had got blind drunk on free booze. The next day
he had barely remembered the party, much less the decor of the lounge.
Entering it again for only the second time in his four years at the company,
he was struck by how rich it looked, like something you'd see in a movie
stars home on, Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.
The walls, the floor, even the ceiling, were a lustrous, highly polished
mahogany. The latter was a jigsaw puzzle of beams and panels intricately
carved in the Oriental style. A Persian rug of the most vibrant hue of gold
he had ever seen covered part of the floor but did not take away from the
incredibly deep sheen of the wood under and around it. It was so lustrous it
made Tim want to tiptoe on it for fear of cracking its glass-like surface. The
paneled walls were no less beautiful, but plainer than the ceiling and less
polished than the floor. This was made up for by several outstanding
paintings ranging in style from Abstract Impressionism to Pointillism, and
which appeared to be originals by some very famous artists. The final touch
in the room was the furniture; plush gold velvet with thick cushions and
ornately carved armrests that reflected the ceiling’s woodwork, and placed
artfully, yet strategically it seemed to Tim, around the room.
Tim stood and marveled at the setting as he sipped an ice cold
Heineken. He stayed close to the bar, afraid to sit on any of the furniture, or
step on the rug, and risk spilling his beer on anything. At first, he had
planned only to have a couple of drinks, extend birthday wishes to Bowman
(to be certain his presence was duly noted) and head home for that hot
bath. As time wore on, however, and he had a few more beers, the ache in
his cojones began to fade, and he started to enjoy himself. He even
managed to put his weird talking nose and the unpleasantness with Gail
out of his mind for a short time.
A large cake, brimming with flaming candles and decorated to look
like Data Tech's latest tablet, the ‘Tech Deck,’ was wheeled into the lounge
and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to CEO Bowman. He blew out the
candles and thanked everyone, then launched into a speech about how
Data Tech was on the verge of turning itself around and would be
successful, thanks to the efforts of its loyal employees, the people in the
room. He congratulated them for not being afraid to face the facts when it
came to layoffs and thanked them for their spirit in tackling the company's
problems with zeal.
Everyone dutifully applaud and there were even shouts of, "Here!
Here!"
Tim was standing next to Jane Dupree, Gail O'Reilly's secretary and
best friend in the Human Resources office. She was swaying a little more
than slightly and looked to be about three sheets to the wind. When
Bowman mentioned facing facts and tackling the company's problems, she
let out with a loud, “Bullshit!” and slammed her glass down on a small table
that was so highly polished it was like looking into a deep, dark, yet crystal
clear pool. The base of her glass gouged the wood, marring the surface
forever, and causing Tim to wince.
"That's it!" Jane slurred a little too loudly. "I've had just about
enough."
Staggering forward, she pushed through several rows of suits to
reach Bowman who was busily shaking congratulatory hands and enjoying
being generally sucked up to by his employees. Jane grabbed the big boss
by the arm and actually spun him around to face her.
"You're so goddamned willing to face the facts, huh? What about Gail
O'Reilly? Why did you fire her for just telling the simple truth?" Jane asked
in a loud voice. The room became suddenly and completely quiet.
 "I'm sorry," Bowman said, cool as the proverbial salad vegetable but
eyes flashing fire and danger. "I don't believe we've met."
The brown-nosers surrounding him took an unconscious, unified step
backward at the anger they saw simmering in their boss’s orbs.
"Never mind my goddamned name!" Jane plowed on. "I want to know
why you fired Gail-fucking-O'Reilly for speaking the truth! And that truth
being namely that you and these other sons-a-bitches" – she made a wild
gesture with her arm to indicate the VPs hovering nearby – "are bleeding
this company dry with your damned special incentives and golden showers
and .. whatever!"
There was a smattering of laughter that quickly dies as all eyes
turned to Bowman. It seemed to Tim that several of the VPs Jane had
indicated, along with the CEO, actually appeared ready to pounce on her
and even do violence to shut her up should Bowman but give the word.
Realizing this was all his fault (his and his damn nose) Tim pushed forward
in a vain attempt to rescue Jane with the vague and ridiculous idea that he
could somehow get her out of there before Bowman's wrath was let loose
on her in all its fury.
When Bowman spoke, however, his voice was surprisingly gentle; the
voice of an adult calmly speaking and explaining something to a child in the
midst of a temper tantrum. Tim noted, however, that Bowman's eyes
remained cold.
"My dear, I think you are mistaken. Miz O'Reilly has not been fired.
Quite the contrary. She has received an excellent offer from one of our
competitors and found it too good to pass up. I offered to match it, but, in
her words, she was ready to move on."
By this time, Tim was standing directly behind Bowman, looking over
the CEO’s shoulder at Jane Dupree. Jane had an uncertain look on her
face now, as if realizing that maybe she had just made the biggest boo-boo
of her career. Her mouth opened and closed several times as she groped
for something to say but found nothing.
It was Tim's nose that finally came to her rescue as, in a loud, strong
male voice, it started singing, to the tune of Auld Lang Syne:
 "For all we know it may be so,
But it sounds so goddamned queer!
We hate to doubt your honesty,
But your bullshit won't fly here!"

Tim pulled his car into the driveway, shut off the motor, and sat
listening to the engine ticking as it cooled. He still couldn't believe what had
happened. He was like a man who had witnessed a great disaster and
seen many people violently killed.
He was a man in shock.
All the way home he had driven in a mental fog; the events of the
past couple days lurching out at him like specters or monsters in a weird
House of Horrors carnival ride. The most recent horror, the party in the
corporate lounge, kept swimming around and around, circling him like
some great white shark and replaying itself at fast speed like a wacky old
Mack Sennett silent comedy, then again in slow motion, complete with
drawn out, elongated sounds and voices.
During the slow motion sequences he became aware that he had
thought to stifle the voice coming from his nose and had wanted to block it
and shut it up when it’d begun singing its reproach to Bowman's lies. The
problem, however, was he couldn't be sure that he actually had tried. The
thought wouldn't go away that if he had been able to stop his nose from
getting him fired, he certainly would've done it, wouldn't he? And since he
hadn't stopped it, that meant he had been unable to and had absolutely no
control over when his nose chose to speak, or what it chose to say.
He looked up and saw Ellen peering out the kitchen window at him.
He sighed. It was time to go in and face the music. Time to tell her he had
been fired (because my nose called the new boss a liar, Dear, in song no
less). The image of Bowman’s rage—his cool finally heated to the boiling
point, spittle flying from his mouth as he ordered Tim from the lounge and
the building forever—brought a chill to Tim's neck.
Fired. Canned. Sacked!
 It still hadn't sunk in completely. Faced with the task of telling Ellen,
however, it finally began to hit him. As it did, a dark, raw gash of
uncertainty, fear, and anxiety opened up deep within him. With a great deal
of effort, he quelled the feelings and forced himself out of the car. Now that
he was there, he determined the best way to do it was to go right in and tell
Ellen the whole weird story and just get it over with. Unfortunately, like
everything else in his life lately, it would not be that easy.
Ellen had something to get off her chest, as well. "Tim, I want to know
what the hell is going on!" she demanded in a loud, on-the-verge-of-tears
voice the minute he walked through the door.
Tim, who had been working over in his mind how to best word the
news of his firing, was caught completely off guard. At first he thought she
already knew he had been canned – someone from the office (probably big
mouthed Henry Dunn) must've called and let the cat out of the bag – but
when he saw her tear-stained face, puffy eyes, and trembling hands he
knew she had to be talking about something else. Ellen would take the
news of his firing hard, but he didn't think she would get hysterical over it,
as she now appeared to be on the verge at the moment.
"What – what's wrong?" he stammered.
"Oh God!" Ellen screamed with such force Tim flinched. She
slammed both her hands, palms flat, on the kitchen table. The sound they
made was a painful splat! "Don't do that anymore, Tim!" she growled
through teeth clenched from the hurt in her palms as much as from anger.
"Don't give me any more of your innocent routine, okay? I've had it with
your bullshit! I want to know why you are doing this to me!"
Tim's mind raced. All thoughts of being fired and how he had been
going to tell Ellen were momentarily pushed aside as he tried to think what
it was he must've done to make her so angry. In the seven years of their
marriage, and the four before that when they had been going steady, then
were engaged, he had seen her this angry only once – the time she had
thought he was cheating on her with the barmaid at the local tavern. She
appeared even angrier than that now; so angry, in fact, Tim could imagine if
her body had been inherently capable of producing steam, it would have
been whistling from his wife’s ears like some cartoon character.
 Tim couldn't think; couldn’t answer. He was flabbergasted. His mind
had been dealt too many shocks in the past forty-eight hours to think
clearly at this crucial moment.
"I… I…" he stuttered, staring into Ellen's eyes, which looked hungry
for him to say the wrong thing. He went fishing instead. "I don't know where
to start," he meekly said, hoping it would lead her to give him some clue
without ticking her off further.
"Why don't you start with Gail O'Reilly? Then you can tell me why you
lied to me about that barmaid, too! Then maybe you can explain why
you've suddenly decided to tell me all this but had to do it over the phone
while disguising your voice with that ridiculous… nose thing that you do!"
Tim was pole-axed. "What?" he mumbled.
"That's it!" Ellen screamed, her hungry eyes finally satisfied. She
stood and stomped out of the kitchen, rattling the dishes in the cupboards
as she went. A few moments later she returned from their bedroom at the
end of the hall with a suitcase in each hand and announced she was
leaving to stay with her sister. She pushed Tim out of the way with one of
the bags as she went by him and out the back door.
Knocked aside, Tim hit the wall and remained there as though it were
made of Velcro. A moment after the kitchen door slammed on Ellen's
departure, he slid slowly to the floor, drew his knees in, and wrapped his
arms around them until he was sitting in a fetal position.
There he stayed for hours.

The next two days were like a series of still-shots, as sometimes seen
in movies and called a montage. There was lots of music (he kept the radio
on the Rock & Roll Airforce twenty-four/seven) lots of blackouts (he drank
constantly) which caused many abrupt scene changes. He spent most of
the time drunk, except for when he passed out. He drank at home until he’d
gone through two six-packs of Heineken, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and half
a bottle of amaretto and tequila each, which constituted all the liquor in the
house.
 When inebriation as a means of escape became impossible at home,
he went out on day three and stopped at the first bar he came to, a little
hovel by the name of, The Log Cabin. The interior was dark and dirty and
the air was heavy with the smell of stale beer, sweat, and other bodily
emanations. He sat on the first empty barstool he staggered into and
ordered a Jack Daniels and Budweiser boilermaker.
He was halfway through his third mug of beer with a shot of bourbon
dropped into it, and a quarter of the way to getting as drunk as he wanted
to, when his nose came to life again and decided to go on the offensive –
and offensive it was to be sure. In a loud, drunkard’s voice his proboscis
began berating women in the most vulgar and disparaging terms possible,
interspersing the monolog with crude jokes like: "Why do women have two
holes between their legs? It's so you can carry them like a six-pack!"
At the other end of the bar sat a large, muscular, greasy looking long-
haired biker type wearing a leather motorcycle jacket with the sleeves cut
off, revealing tattoos on his massive upper arms. They read: Mother, and,
Born to Die! He sat with a woman who had Medusa hair, wild eye makeup,
and was also decked out in leather complete with a leather and chrome
spiked collar around her neck.
"Hey! Pal! You want to knock that shit off in front of my lady?" the
brute yelled at Tim.
"Oh," Tim's nose sneered, "is that what you call it?"
"You some kind of smart-ass?" the biker said, rising menacingly from
his stool. His girlfriend looked at Tim as if he were an inconsequential bug
about to be squashed.
Tim's nose was undaunted, and he found himself helpless to do
anything against it.
"Listen gruesome, if I want any shit from you, I'll just whistle and you
come sliding in!" His nose laughed wildly and continued. "No wait! Even
better! If I want any shit from you, I'll just squeeze your head!"
"Kill him, Ray," the biker's girlfriend spoke up, her voice a dull
monotone, her face impassive.
Tim's nose turned its ire on the biker’s woman. "And if I want any lip
from you, Bee-atch, I'll scrape it off my zipper!"
 "Now you're really asking for it, Pal! How would you like a punch in
the fucking nose?" the biker growled, his gigantic fists clenching and
unclenching as he dismounted his bar stool and approached Tim.
Tim sensed a chance and managed to speak with his own voice just
long enough to plead: "Yes! Do it! Please!"
The last thing he saw before he woke in the gutter outside the
barroom was the biker's big knuckled fist heading right for his face. But
even getting beat up didn't go right. Instead of making good on his offer,
the biker missed Tim's nose completely and plastered his left eye instead!
Now, he crawled from the gutter to his car and drove to a package
store where he stocked up on booze (his nose singing, "Ave Maria" off key
all the while) so he could continue escaping the weirdness of his life in the
privacy and safety of his own home.

The next morning found him passed out on the living room rug. A
loud, persistent knock on the front door brought him out of his stupor. The
banging on the door was surpassed only by the pain in his swollen
throbbing left eye and the hangover banging away inside his skull. He
couldn't stand without feeling as though his head was going to roll right off
his shoulders, so he crawled to the door and fumbled it open while still on
his knees. With his injured eye blurring his vision he had to squint through
the flooding light to see it was his best friend, John, who was married to
Ellen's best friend, Liza. Tim grunted a greeting and crawled back to the
couch.
"Oh man! You look like shit! What the hell have you been doing? Who
gave you the shiner?" John asked, his face a model of surprise. “Was it
Ellen?”
Tim could not verbally answer his questions. Instead, he shook his
head slowly, trying to avoid pain, and waved his arms at John in a gesture
that said: Don't ask! You don’t want to know!
"I just dropped Liza over at Ellen's sister's house. Ellen’s there and
she told me some pretty weird shit; is it true? Did you really tell her all that
stuff? If you did, man, you must've flipped. That's what she thinks, anyway.
She thinks you’re having a nervous breakdown or something." John
grinned. “So are you?"
No, but I am having a nasal breakdown, Tim thought and giggled
silently. He said nothing, though; jokes would only make it worse. He pulled
himself to a sitting position against the couch and cleared the cotton from
his mouth enough to ask:
"What did Ellen say?”
"Oh man! What didn't she say! Whatever got into you to tell her about
all that shit you've been doing? And what's all this weird shit about you
being a ventriloquist and talking through your fucking nose? If she hadn’t
been so upset I would have thought she was fucking around."
Tim ignored John's questions, which was always easy to do with
John since he didn't seem to care about the answers anyway, and
repeated his own interrogative.
"What did Ellen say, John?"
"Christ! I just can't believe you told her all that shit!"
"John!" Tim said as loudly as his aching head would allow. "Just-tell-
me-what-the-fuck-she-said,” he added, through clenched teeth.
"Oh man! She said you called her and disguised your voice, through
your nose somehow—how’d you do that anyway? Okay, okay, I’ll tell ya!
Keep your shirt on. She also said you told her about some hot babe at your
work that you’re screwing, and how you cheated on her with Brenda down
at the pub a couple years ago when she went out of town to visit her
grandmother? Is that true?” John didn’t wait for a reply. “She says you also
told her about Tommy Dion’s stag party and how his brother got those
three hookers from Boston to turn tricks and give half their proceeds to
Tommy? You told her you spent a hundred bucks on a blow job because,
as you told everyone within hearing distance, Ellen was a tight ass cunt
who wouldn't give head?”
Tim groaned painfully.
John shook his head. "No shit, huh? You were super crocked when
you did this, right? You had to be. That's what I told Ellen. You had to be
gonzo drunk, that's what I told her."
Tim moaned. "Is that it? Did I say anything else?"
 "You don't remember?" John gave him another look. "Are you
serious? You really don't remember? Ellen said you would say that, and I
told her that if you were that drunk then maybe you wouldn't remember."
"Never mind," Tim said and struggled to his feet. "I don't want to hear
anymore. I can't hear anymore."
"I know, man, but you asked, and there’s a lot more! You told her
stuff about past girlfriends, what you really think of her family, how her ass
has gone flabby…."
That was the last thing Tim heard from John. Staggering to his feet as
quickly as he could, he stumbled to the bathroom, slammed the door
behind him, and collapsed to his knees in front of the bowl. He wrapped his
arms around the commode and emptied his stomach and then some. By
the time he came out, John had left. He found a note on the kitchen table
telling him to call John later at home.
Tim did call, hoping John might mediate between him and Ellen, but
John's wife answered. Tim sat mute in dull horror, unable to move or react,
as his nose told his best friend's wife all about John's many indiscretions
and adulteries. A half hour later, John showed up at Tim's front door again,
punched him in the right eye, giving him a shiner to match the left, and
stormed off announcing their friendship was over.
Tim got so ripping drunk after that he neither knew, nor cared, if his
nose made any more nasty phone calls.
The next morning, he woke hungry for the first time in days, and
remembered it had been that long since he had had anything decent to eat.
He searched the kitchen for food, discovering only a box of Ritz crackers in
the cabinet and some rubbery processed American cheese in the fridge.
Obviously, Ellen had not bothered to do any shopping before she had left
him.
He decided to go to the local grocery store, stock up on junk food and
pick up another couple cases of beer. He knew he should be thinking about
sobering up enough to do something about putting his life and marriage
back together, even if it meant going to a shrink about his talking nose, but
he couldn't bring himself to even try. Something had snapped inside Tim;
shorted out and melted away. The shock of having his life falling apart,
under his very nose, so to speak, was too much for him.
 For now, at least, all he wanted was the continued solace of
inebriated escape.

The grocery store was a medium-sized building – not quite a mom-

and-pop store, but not a supermarket either. It was owned and run by a pair
of Korean brothers who could usually be seen working the small deli
counter at the rear of the place. Tim grabbed a shopping cart and pushed it
ahead of him, ignorant of the stares he drew.
He was in the act of tossing several bags of potato and nacho chips
into his cart when he finally noticed the strange looks he was getting from
the store workers and other customers. He checked his fly—no problem
there—and felt the seat of his pants for a split seam but found none. As he
turned this way and that, checking himself for the obvious flaws people
stare at, he caught his reflection in the glass door of the dairy case across
the aisle from him.
For a moment he was so completely shocked that his mouth actually
dropped open in dumb amazement. He stared at himself in much the same
way others were staring at him. At first he didn't even realize he was
looking at his own reflection. Recognition dawned slowly, and he walked
toward the glass.
His hair was in wild disarray, matted down on the left side, reaching
for the ceiling in a multitude of twisted knots and tangled spikes and spirals
on the right and in the back. Both his eyes were surrounded by dark purple
bruises, giving him the appearance of some strange mutation between a
raccoon and a man. His beard had grown out unevenly and patchy and
contained what looked like clumps of dried vomit stuck to the chin hairs.
But the worst thing of all was his nose.
Anyone else, especially anyone unfamiliar with his features, might not
have noticed, but it stuck out like a neon sign to Tim.
His nose had grown!
And it wasn't just swollen from the blows his face had received, it had
actually gotten larger! The nostrils were wider, the bridge broader, the tip
Pinocchio-ishly longer. Tim opened his mouth to gasp, but only a strangled,
pathetic whimpering came out. It was immediately followed by shrill,
mocking, nasal laughter from his twitching nostrils.
In horror, Tim grabbed his cart and fled. His first impulse was to just
leave everything and get the hell out of the store and away from the eyes
that stared at him as though he were some sideshow freak. He didn’t blame
them; that's certainly what he felt like! For one pathetically amusing
moment he even pictured himself running off to join the circus—he could
even imagine the hawker’s sign: Timbo And His Amazing Talking Nose!
Humor was a feeble defense. He’d lost all desire to fight his rebel
proboscis; he just wanted to hide; crawl into a deep dark hole, preferably
the kind afforded by constant intoxication, and hide for the rest of his life.
Only the thought that if he didn’t get more booze now he’d have to come
back again later, kept him from leaving the store. For alcohol, the grocery
store was only allowed to sell beer and wine, so Tim decided to
concentrate on stocking up on those and forget the groceries—there was
always take-out and delivery.
Nearly running, he pushed the cart around the corner of the aisle and
struck a stand with a display of fig bars on sale, stacked on it in a pyramid.
The pile collapsed, cascading cookie packages to the floor. In his haste to
get his booze and get out of there, Tim ran over several packages with his
cart. An elderly woman grimaced severely at him when he didn't stop and
pick up his mess, and as he hurried away he heard his nose call back: "Hey
lady! Is that your natural face or did it freeze that way while you were
having gas pains?"
Tim did not pause to see the look of indignation and insult that
replaced the reprimand on the old woman's face. He pushed on to the
refrigerator cooler that lined the back wall of the store. He went by two
women who appeared to be shopping together. He had passed them
before in an earlier aisle and had overheard their conversation, which
seemed to be a pretty degrading discussion of men. As he went by them
again, he heard one of the women remark, "All men are dogs. Just dogs!"
Without any say in the matter, and with no apparent control over his
own body, Tim stopped in front of them. He felt his nostrils flare and begin
twitching and could swear that he could feel his damn nose growing as it
spoke up.
 "Did you say dogs, Butch?" his nose asked the woman who had
spoken. "You should know. When you were born, you put the can in
canine! You put the ugh in ugly!"
Just as abruptly, Tim felt his legs released from whatever hold his
rebellious proboscis had had on them, and he was back in control.
Embarrassed, and without a second glance at the shocked women, he
dashed away.
"Get out of the way, Tuscaloosa!" his nose yelled at a large woman
blocking the aisle a few yards on. "Haven't you ever heard the word diet?
Haven't you ever heard the term wire my jaw shut? Move it, blimpo! There's
a weight limit on how much this floor will hold and you’re way over it!"
The woman shrieked and nearly fainted with embarrassment, but Tim
did not stop.
He ran.
As if from far away he heard his nose, like some heckled comedian,
tossing out insults at people he passed or saw: "Hey Mister, is that a pimple
on your neck or is it your head? Hey Lady, when you go into a public
restroom, do people try to put quarters in your ear and shit in your mouth?"
At last Tim reached the beer and wine section. Barely checking prices
or brands, he just began stacking into the cart whatever his hands could
reach first. As he precariously balanced the last bottle, a quart of MD 20/20,
on top of several cases of Genesee Cream Ale, a tap on his shoulder
almost made him knock the whole unsteady pile shatteringly to the floor.
The store manager, a balding, mustachioed, round-shouldered man
of about fifty stood behind him. Just beyond, all the shoppers Tim’s nose
had accosted and insulted hovered in a half-circle like a mob waiting for a
reason to riot.
"I'm sorry, Sir, but I'll have to ask you to leave the store," the manager
said nervously. He was a gentle man and felt himself to be grossly
underpaid to have to deal with this. On top of it all, Tim looked batty to him
– loony, off the deep end, playing with half a deck, an escapee from the
funny farm, and so many more euphemisms that he could think of for just
plain insane.
"What?" Tim mumbled, more from reflex than any lack of hearing.
 "I'm sorry, but we can't have people acting this way in our store. It is
bad for business. Besides," the manager cast a doubtful gaze upon Tim's
carriage full of booze, "you look as if you’ve had plenty to drink today
already. We have a policy of not selling liquor to inebriated customers.
Liability, you know, not to mention that it is also against the law."
Tim wanted to respond calmly and rationally and protest that he
wasn't drunk. He wanted to apologize to all the angry people he had
insulted and who had complained to this store manager, but the only voice
from him was the one from his obnoxious proboscis.
"And who the hell are you, Pal?" his nose loudly asked, its tone
threatening.
"I … I'm the store manager, Mister Hinchey," the manager blurted
out, eyes wide, wondering if this derelict’s insanity was catching because
he thought the guy’s nose had just spoken; he had seen the nostrils move
like lips on tiny mouths forming the words!
"Oh! Store manager!" Tim's nose said, sarcastically.
Mister Hinchey became certain that he was indeed losing his own
marbles as well when he stared at the flaring, twitching, speaking nostrils.
"I bet you think that makes you some kind of hot shit, doesn't it,
Mister Dinky? Well you know what? You ain't no hot shit, Dinky, you're just
a cold fart warmed over, sunny-side down!"
Poor Mister Hinchey flinched and took a step back with every abusive
word Tim's nose hurled at him. Tim felt sorry for the guy but could do
nothing to stop the verbal venom spewing from his nostrils.
It took a can of Franco-American (uh-oh) Spaghetti-O’s to do that.
Thrown by the large woman his nose had insulted, the can struck him
between the eyes and knocked him staggering back into his shopping cart.
Several wine bottles and two six-packs of beer crashed to the floor. The
wine bottles shattered and several of the beer cans started hissing and
spraying foam.
A trickle of blood ran into Tim's blackened, bloodshot right eye and an
explosion of pain rocked his senses. His vision blurred, his ears rang, and
his face burned and then went numb. He could taste blood in the back of
his throat and on his lips as it dribbled from his suddenly silent nose.
 A glass jar of Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn slammed
into his right shoulder, bounced off, and shattered on the floor at his feet,
spilling popcorn kernels, as slippery as ball-bearings, everywhere.
Store Manager Hinchey, who had been moving rapidly backwards to
get out of the line of fire, lost his footing on the rolling kernels and fell hard
on his ass, sitting upright, legs spread-eagle.
Before Tim's vision could clear, or he could react, more objects,
blurry now, came sailing through the air at him. A two liter bottle of Coca-
Cola somersaulted end over and smacked into his forehead dead center.
Its plastic seams split and soda erupted from it in a fizzing, foaming wave
over his face. A bottle of A1 Steak Sauce split both his lips and loosened
his top front teeth. A half-gallon carton of Hood’s milk struck him square in
the offending feature responsible for all his woes. The carton broke open
on impact, drenching his head and shoulders with homogenized,
pasteurized, vitamin D enriched, cow mucus.
A can of Chock Full ‘O Nuts (the heavenly coffee) drove him to his
knees. A bottle of Heinz 57 to the right side of his face put him on the floor.
Tim tried to roll into a ball as more consumer goods rained down upon him.
It all absurdly reminded him of a Bible scene and for a fleeting instant he
half-expected Mister Hinchey to come to his rescue and stop the stoning
with: "Let he among you who has not sinned cast the first can of Chicken of
the Sea!"
Poor Mister Hinchey, however, was long gone. Crawling over the
slippery kernels until he had been able to get to his feet, he had run to the
deli counter to get the storeowners. One of the Korean brothers ran up
now, loudly shouting at the shoppers to stop throwing unpaid merchandise
at Tim, and they did, albeit slowly at first. They dispersed with somewhat
embarrassed, yet smugly satisfied, glances at each other and the crumpled
form of Tim lying in a puddle of milk and soda.
The owner and Mister Hinchey helped Tim to his feet before he threw
them off and ran, dripping milky blood behind him, out of the store.
 He unlocked the back door to his house and stumbled into the dark
kitchen. His left hip struck the edge of the counter, and he went down on
his side, gasping. The gasps quickly turned into loud sobs.
"Why me?" he wailed in the darkness. He waited for his nose to make
some smart-ass reply, but it remained silent, swollen from the blows it had
taken. Possibly broken. Though it hurt like hell, Tim was glad. In fact, the
pain was easy to take if his schnoz suffered as well. Yet, the more he
thought about it, the more he thought the pain he felt just wasn’t quite good
enough.
He sat on the kitchen floor, blood oozing from both nostrils and
running into his mouth, his mind churning with the cursed series of events
that had brought him to this sorry state and wondered why this had
happened to him. Maybe tiny aliens had set up a base inside his nose?
Maybe his nose was a psychic transmitter receiving messages from the
Great Beyond? Maybe he was crazy and doing the whole thing himself and
didn't even know it? Like a split personality! Only the other side of him
wasn't a person, it was a nose!
He knew it didn't make any sense. He didn't care anymore. He just
wanted it to end. He was beyond hoping or caring that he might get his old
life back, or that Ellen would return, or that he could get another job
somewhere. He no longer cared what happened.
He just wanted the nasal nightmare to be over.
Slowly, like headlights emerging from a dense fog, an idea came to
Tim. Oddly enough, it was inspired by the stoning incident in the market
that had got him thinking of the Bible. What was it that the Good Book
said? he thought as he struggled to his feet and headed for the hallway. "If
thine eye offend thee…," he said in a soft voice.
He put the hallway light on and went to the closet halfway down. He
pulled the door open and removed the winter coats hanging in plastic bags
and threw them on the floor. He stepped inside and began searching the
shelves that lined the back wall. He tossed stuff carelessly over his
shoulders as he searched. Finally, with a grunting chuckle of satisfaction,
he found what he’d been looking for. Holding it with both hands, he went
into the bathroom.
 He turned on the lights over the medicine cabinet and stared at his
reflection in the mirror on the cabinet door. Milk and blood had dried in his
hair, leaving it matted. The milk was starting to go rancid and stink, but Tim
didn't care. His face was a collage of welts and dark, getting darker,
bruises, but all he could look at was his nose.
It had grown larger still. It had swollen; some from the blows it had
received, but also it appeared to have kept growing on its own. It now
threatened to overthrow his entire face. Tim, however, was not going to let
it get that far. He would see to that right then and there.
He held up the object he had found in the hallway closet. The light
gleamed on the stainless steel blades of a pair of wallpaper shears. The
cutting blades were more than a foot long and honed razor-sharp to be able
to make fine, accurate cuts in heavy, thick and often gluey, wet wallpaper.
Tim had bought the scissors when Ellen and he had decided to re-paper all
the rooms in the house themselves last year.
"What the hell are you doing?" his nose finally spoke up; its voice
nervous and stuffy from the dried blood clotting the nasal passages. His
nose spit out hard scabs; two from each nostril.
Tim just smiled and grasped the shears tighter.
"Hey! Hey! You can't do this! What are you, crazy?" the nose said, its
voice panicky.
Tim just smiled some more and nodded. He brought the heavy-duty
shears to his face and snuggled the V of the cutting blades right up against
the bottom of his nose.
"Cut it out! No, wait! I mean don't cut it out! Wait a minute! Be
reasonable! Isn't this like cutting your nose off to spite your face?" the nose
frantically asked.
"Yeah," Tim said after a moment's thought, "I guess you could say
that."
He began working the scissors. As blood flew, his nose screamed in
dying agony. Tim screamed, as well, but thought he was laughing.
And he kept on laughing … and laughing….

X0X0
***New York City
I went to New York City
And found the streets were haunted.
The people staggered.
The people were lost.
Doom was following
The vermin on the carcass.
The shadows of the structures
Fell upon phantom streets,

“City(cemetery)scape” (mixed-media on canvas) 2016

Crushed the wandering feet;
Death was waiting in the alleys.
Kiss me, kill me; water the tar with blood.
Nothing grows.
The people have left.
The people are gone.
Doom has swallowed
The vermin on the carcass.
(The next story is the first professional quality short story I’d ever
written. It was also my first autobiographical story recounting a true
incident in my life. It’s not a horror story, nor is it a funny story, but it
is an odd story for me in that it has no elements of the supernatural,
sci-fi, or horror in it. It is one of my favorites and has never seen
publication. Now it has. I hope you enjoy it.)

A WAKE

My brother and I were getting dressed when my mother came in. She
stood in the doorway of our room and picked a piece of lint off her black
knit blouse. A small, wide woman with the strength of an armored car and
the gentleness of a falling snowflake, her eyes were bright red from crying.
Her large, Roman nose looked sore and puffy from too much wiping.
Calling me to her suddenly, she started to re-tie my necktie and speak to
me in a low voice that was on the edge of cracking at any minute.
"Daniel, you'll be meeting your poppanonna, Luigi, today. I want you
and your brother to just shake his hand, nothing else. He's got no right
coming to your Aunt Lucy's wake when he never gave a damn about her
when she was alive."
"Poppanonna?" I questioned. "What's that?"
"Never you mind," Mother snapped. "Just do like I say, 'capeesh?"
I nodded even though I really didn't understand.
"He's your mother's father," my father said from the doorway where
he had been quietly watching. "Poppanonna’s Italian for grandfather."
"Grandfather?" I stumbled over comprehension. "I thought we didn't
have any grandparents. I thought they all died before we were born."
"As far as I'm concerned he is dead!" my mother said, her voice flat
and mean – a tone I had never heard from her before. "Now you just mind
me and remember."
"Why?" I questioned.
"Why what?" she snapped.
"Why… why did you tell us he was dead?"
Mama looked at me with pity and tears in her eyes. "Because your
poppanonna is a bastard and always was!" she whispered vehemently.
 "But how?" I asked, thirsty for details. "Why –"
Mama interrupted: "Because I said so! Isn't that enough?" Tears
sprang to her eyes and flowed down her cheeks as she spoke.
"No! That's no reason," I argued.
My mother sighed and it became a deep, hitching sob. Tears ran into
the corners of her mouth. "Because he killed your nonna, my poor mother. I
can never forgive him for that," she blubbered.
"How? How did he kill her, Mom? Did he murder her?"
"No. There are other, more terrible ways of killing someone," she said
and took out a small handkerchief to wipe her nose and eyes. "He killed her
with neglect."
"But how?" I insisted.
"Never you mind how. Get!"
"All right guys, listen to your mother,” my father spoke up. “It's getting
late. It's time to go, and Aunt Lucy is waiting."

My aunt, Lucia Maria Zichello, was an immense and jolly woman.

Notorious among her nieces and nephews for her crushing bear hugs,
whenever Aunt Lucy greeted me it felt as though she were trying to
squeeze the love, and life I often thought, out of me. She was my mother's
baby sister, and her best friend. One day, while carrying the laundry out to
the backyard to hang on the line, she stumbled and fell down a short flight
of three or four stairs. It was enough to break both her ankles. The doctor
said it was minor, and that she would be up and around in a few weeks.
Aunt Lucy never got up again.
A massive blood clot formed in one ankle and went straight to her
heart. She was the first person I'd ever known, ever been close to, who had
died. For the first time in my life there was suddenly an empty spot where
someone should've been. And, for the first time, I was seeing a side of my
mother I had never known.
 I stood immobile, holding my little brother’s hand and watching the
solemn, blotchy red faces pass by uttering words of condolence and pity
and giving nods of sympathy.
My father nudged me. "Here comes your Uncle Sal and
Poppanonna," he said.
My little brother’s hand tightened in mine. "I'm scared," he whispered.
"It’s all right," I said trying to be brave. I looked around for my mother
and saw her near the doorway, greeting people, yet watching us.
Uncle Sal came over with a small shriveled man in tow. He was
stoop-shouldered, causing his long white hair to fall into his eyes. He
moved stiffly on legs that didn't seem to want to bend, and his feet shuffled
over the oriental carpet in tiny steps. Uncle Sal spoke to him in Italian,
saying my name and my brother’s. The old man took my hand in both of
his, leaned forward, and peered at me through blue, cloudy eyes. I could
see tears forming in their corners.
"Hello Poppanonna," I said with a slight trembling in my voice.
With a nod of approval, he turned toward my father and Uncle Sal,
said something in Italian, and hugged me. As he wiped tears from his eyes,
he turned and embraced my little brother as well.
I glanced at my mother, our eyes met, and quickly, she looked away.
Uncle Sal leaned over and told me, "Pa says you have Nonna's
eyes."

The house was full of people: uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends of
the family filled nearly every downstairs room. All were directed to the
kitchen to have something to eat. The table there was brimming with
platters of cold cuts, three huge bowls of meatballs in sauce, two pans of
lasagna, and a massive mound of hot peppers and sausage in a large bowl
waiting to be piled between thick slices of rich, warm Italian bread. My
mother stood next to the feast, handing out paper plates, napkins, and
plastic ware, and thanking everyone for coming. She constantly
encouraged people to, “Manga!” – Eat!
 I was busy at the other end of the kitchen table handing out paper
cups to anyone who wanted coffee. Behind me, at the counter between the
sink and the pantry, my father tended bar, making the drinks strong and
tall. Suddenly my mother gasped, looked at my father, then back toward
the front door. I leaned past a couple of people and saw my Uncle Sal
coming in the door … and on his arm was Poppanonna.
"What's he doing here?" my mother hissed at my father.
He pulled her into the pantry. I followed and peeked around the
corner of the door. My father had his hands on Mom’s shoulders. Her face
was red, and her lips were whitely compressed in anger.
"Sal's got no right bringing him here!" she spat out the words. They
were filled with anger.
"Now, now, it's okay," my father soothed. "What's he going to do, tell
his own father he's not welcome? Lucy was his daughter remember, and
your brother Sal has kept in touch with your father. He doesn't see him the
same way you do."
"Then let Sal take him to his house! I don't want that … that murderer
in my house!" Mom's voice cracked on, murderer, and she sobbed out the
last few words. She put her head on my father's shoulder, and her eyes fell
on me peeking around the corner.
"Randy!" she said harshly, but wearily. "Go and make sure everyone
has enough to eat and keep your eye on your brother." As I turned to go I
heard her speak again to my father.
"Tell my brother Sal that I want to talk to him," she said.

Everyone was eating. People stood or sat wherever there was room,
and balanced glasses and plates bulging with food. If anyone was going
hungry it was their own fault. I checked the kitchen table; more than fifty
people had eaten and there was enough left for fifty more. My mother was
a typical Italian—giving, generous, and of the belief that it was a sin not to
provide guests with enough food to last the winter. She prided herself on
her hospitality and had always welcomed anyone and everyone into our
home. Until that day I would've thought my mother was incapable of hating
anyone the way she seemed to hate her own father, Poppanonna.
I went into the living room. Excusing myself as I squeezed between
people, I cross the room to where Uncle Sal and Poppanonna sat on the
couch. My father was right behind me, and leaned and spoke quietly to
Uncle Sal. He then turned to me and said, "Sit with Poppanonna. Get him
something to drink and eat if he wants." He looked at Poppanonna. "Okay
Pa? Randy here will stay with you while I talk to Sal for a minute." Without
waiting for an answer he maneuvered Uncle Sal out of the living room and
through the kitchen.
Poppanonna looked at me through his milky, sky blue eyes and
smiled. He patted the sofa seat next to him. Cautiously, I sat at the edge of
the couch. He continued to smile, nod, and wink.
"Da last-a time I see you, was-a when-a you was a-bambino. A little-a
baby. I sneak inna da hospital to get-a look atta you. You mama, she no
know about it. I go again whenna you liddle-a brudder was-a born."
I grinned and sat back a little more. His smile broadened.
"I didn't know you could speak English," I said timidly. He chuckled. It
was a warm sound.
"I speak-a da some. I know winna no prize dat's-a for sure. Do you
speak-a de Sicilian?" he asked.
"No."
"What? You mama no teach-a you da mudder tongue? What's-a-
matter for her?" He seemed genuinely distressed and puzzled.
I looked around at the people eating and talking in hushed voices. I
didn't know what to say, so offered," Would you like something to eat or
drink?"
"Si. T’ank-a you berry much."
"What would you like?"
He thought for a moment, then leaned forward and crooked a finger
at me to lean close, too. I did, and he whispered conspiratorially in my ear.
"You papa gotta any da anisette inna da house?" He pronounced
‘anisette’ with a ‘z’.
I nodded.
"I'd like-a nice-a glass-a dat iffa you no get inna da trouble."
 I shook my head, jumped from the couch, and made my way to the
kitchen. The second helpers were milling about the kitchen table now – the
enormously fat cousins who, whenever I saw them, seemed to do nothing
but constantly eat. I pushed through and by them and went to the counter
by the pantry to the makeshift bar. From around the corner I could hear
familiar voices arguing. Quietly, I crept to the doorway and listened.
"You were only seven years old at the time, Sal, no older than my
youngest," my mother was saying. "You don't know what happened." Her
voice was raspy and rough as if she had been crying a great deal.
"Then tell me. Tell me!" Uncle Saul demanded.
"I told you already! He let mama die!"
"But Rosie, she had cancer for Christ's sake. Pa couldn't do anything
about that!"
"That's not true, Sal. I know, so don't say that."
"What do you know that I don't? What?"
My mother hesitated then made up her mind. "When Mama was in
the hospital, I was the only one old enough to get in to see her. The doctors
told me, me and Pa, that Mom's cancer was operable. A simple
hysterectomy, that's all it would've taken, and she could've lived. But Pa
wouldn't let them do it. He said no! He was too cheap or … I don’t know
what, but he wouldn't let them save her life! He might as well of stuck a
knife in her heart – it was the same damn thing!"
I backed away from the door. I hadn’t understood everything my
mother had said, but I’d got the overall meaning. For the first time in my life
that I could ever remember, I didn't believe my mother! For the first time in
my entire experience, I thought she was lying. I found myself thinking that
this woman that I had always believed and trusted – the woman I could go
to whenever I wanted the real truth about anything – my mother the
paragon of honesty, was a liar. It had to be so! I couldn't figure it any other
way, for in the living room sat a shriveled, sweet old man that I instinctively
knew could never purposefully hurt anyone, or be mean.
I pulled a chair to the counter and climbed on it. I filled a drinking
glass halfway with clear, thick, syrupy anisette. When I brought it to
Poppanonna he chuckled and stroked my head.
 "Oh, you bring-a me too much," he said. "I gotta ‘nough-a here to
getta tenna men drunk."
I offered to bring it back, but he said no and assured me it was all
right. I sat next to him on the couch and watched him sip his drink. Several
cousins and friends of my parents came over and said hello to Poppanonna
and shook his hand, but they all seemed wary of him. With a hot flash of
anger I realized it was probably due to my mother. I wondered how many
people she had told about her murderous father and the death of her poor
mama.
Suddenly I felt very angry with, and ashamed of, my mother.
"Would you like to see my garden, Poppanonna?" I asked to get him
away from the staring eyes and hushed whispers behind his back.
"Sure. Alla-right. I'd like-a dat."

I led Poppanonna through the house to the back door. He moved

slowly, his feet shuffling softly as I clasped his wrinkled but soft hand. I held
the door open until he was outside, then let it close and took his hand
again.
"Mom helped me plant it," I told him as I led him across the yard.
He nodded, but kept his eyes on the ground in front of him. The lawn
was very bumpy, and he stepped carefully as if afraid of falling. I gripped
his hand tighter and took his forearm with my other hand to steady him. He
smiled at me and winked from under the fall of snow-white hair hanging
over his forehead.
“Cuonsa bella di fio mio," he softly said.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means you're a beautiful boy."
I must've looked uncomfortable for he laughed outright. It was deep,
husky and almost musical. I imagined it was how Santa Claus would laugh
and sound.
"This is it!" I proudly proclaimed, as we reached my garden. "This row
is radishes and this one is cucumbers. All the rest there are tomatoes. At
the end are the zucchini and peppers."
 "You did a very fine-a job," Poppanonna said, nodding. "Multi-beni."
He looked at me curiously. "You know whatta dat means?" I shook my
head, no. "It mean-a berry, berry good. It meana you didda somethin’-a
berry good. It look-a to me like-a you gotta da green thumb." He patted my
head.
"I wish I could speak Italian. Will you teach me, Poppanonna?" I
asked.
He smiled at me, but it was a sad, far away smile. I noticed his eyes
had become shiny with tears.
"I'd like-a dat very much," he said softly.
I couldn't help the tears that sprang to my own eyes, or the
overwhelming desire I suddenly had to make my sad old Poppanonna
happy.
"My dad said you said I have Nonna’s eyes."
A bright grin broke over his face, and he caressed my head. "Si. You
look-a just-a like her. You gotta da same eyes. She was-a berry bootiful."
"What happened to her, Poppanonna?" I asked cautiously, and
hesitated before adding, "How did she die?"
The old man eased himself onto a low wall that ran past my garden
and separated our yard from a field that was part of a farm down the road.
He sat on the stone and placed his hands on his knees. "Your mama was a
just-a young-a girl den. She was on-a-ly seven-a-teen. I know she allaways
blame-a me for-a you Nonna's death. A young-a girl-a dat age; she need-a
her mama.
"You Nonna, she was-a berry sick. Some-a-times when-a da woman
has a lotta trouble havin-a bambinos, things canna go bad … inside. The
doctors, they say they could-a fix-a dis, but then-a Nonna, she notta be
able to have-a anymore-a da bambino's. Well, you Nonna, she was a
gooda Cat’lic girl. She say to me, ‘Luigi, I no have-a da operation. You tella
da doctors no. If I canna no have-a da chill-a-dren den I no wanna be
operated on. I can no have-a no more bambinos den dat-a mean I'm-a no
woman no more. Iffa God wanna-a me to live, he letta me go on-a bein’ a
woman. If he wanna me to die, denna it's-a my time to go anna I don’t
wanna no doctors messin’ it up." Poppanonna’s voice fell to a whisper. "Da
Italian women were like-a dat in those days," he said, his words heavy and
husky with sorrow. Tears spilled down his cheeks and into the corners of
his sad smile.
"You Nonna, she make-a me tell-a da doctors no, anna you mama,
she no understand, anna she never forgive-a me." He caressed my face
gently then pulled me to him.
As I hugged him I saw, over his shoulder, my mother standing about
ten yards away, watching. She was crying and from the look on her face I
knew she had been listening to us for long enough. Through my own
freshly flowing tears, I smiled and waved at her, motioning for her to come
over.
She hesitated and looked at me for a long moment. Slowly, sadly,
she shook her head and turned away.

X0X0
***Random Thoughts

Why is no one saved?

Why so much ugly humanity?
99.4% communicability and mortality.
The flipside of Baby Can You Dig?
Was Pocket Savior.
Foreshadowing is a T-shirt proclaiming,
"Jesus is coming and he is pissed" and
64 has a way of forgetting what 21 was like.
And 96 wishes it could 69.

*****

“Phantom of the Abstract” (acrylic on wood panel) 2017

This next piece was written for the Horror Writers of America’s, Freak
Show anthology, edited by an author I admire a great deal, F. Paul
Wilson (best known for, The Keep). This was a different short story
collection in that the contributors had a story line to follow and each
author wrote a chapter in that story line. Each chapter took place in
an author’s home state as the carnival (the freak show) travelled
around the country. The title of my chapter was, “Quarry,
Massachusetts,” which has been the site of a few of my novels and
stories and is based on the city of Fitchburg where I grew up.

MOTHER GOOSE

Please don't take him!

They take him anyway, and with him, her dignity, leaving her crying
and begging on her knees. Webbed hands clasped in rigid-fingered prayer,
she throws herself at their feet. Tears roll down her beak as she pleads
with all her heart and soul.
Don't take my baby!
They don't listen. They don't care.
In her recurring dream, the last thing Mother Goose sees before
hyperventilating is her son’s beautiful face as her father bends over to kiss
his grandson goodbye. He slips something inside the baby’s blanket as he
hands him over to the social worker and that bitch, Mrs. Butterman, then he
turns and says, "What goes around, comes around, Em."
As they leave with her baby, she's never sure who screams first, her
or her dream baby, but scream they do, and the screaming usually wakes
Mother Goose.
But not tonight.
Tonight, when her father turns, it's not her father at all. Tonight, it's
Ozymandias Prather.
"What goes around, comes around, Em," he says, but the words do
not fit the movement of his lips. Unlike her father, Ozymandias slips
something into her left hand instead of under the baby’s blanket.
 Mother Goose woke sitting up in bed, looking out the tiny window as
though she had been that way for a while. It was a dream, she told herself.
Her clenched left hand opened to reveal a crumpled piece of paper. Her
webbed fingers trembling, Mother Goose unfolded and read it by the faint
light coming in the tiny trailer window:

62 Warren Rd., Quarry, MA.

It was Ozymandias Prather's handwriting.

She had not been dreaming after all.
She got out of bed with care. Though she was only 41, arthritis and
rheumatism, coupled with occasional flare-ups of phlebitis, tortured her
body, making her feel more like 80. She slipped her feet into the pair of
fuzzy pink slippers with the sides cut out to accommodate her wide,
webbed feet, and shuffled through the kitchenette. In just a few steps she
was at the other end of the small trailer, where she found her son Joey's
stowaway bed empty. She raised the greasy, red-checkered curtain on the
window over the dry sink and looked out at the large green army surplus
bus in which her, "children," had sleeping compartments.
One of them must've come and gotten Joey to go get breakfast at the
kitchen truck.
Mother Goose thought about joining them, but her dream – the same
one she'd had every night for the past week – and Ozymandias's visit,
coupled with the thought of the task ahead, left her appetite lost in a sour
stew of anxious apprehension boiling in the bottom of her gut. She needed
a drink, even if it was too early for one. She reached under the dry sink and
let out a cry.
The Dogs got her bottle!
Scrambling to her knees, she looked under the sink for her gin.
Gone!
Mother Goose got to her feet and went to the door. She opened it and
looked out. Standing a short distance away, staring at her trailer as if
waiting for her to show her face, was one of the Beagle Boys. He smiled
and nodded, and Mother Goose got the message: Ozymandias wanted her
sober until after she had brought the Piece to him. She realized she had
been foolish to think she could hide her drinking from the great Oz.
She quickly closed the door. Within a step she was sitting at her
dressing and make-up table. To take her mind off things, she picked up her
brush with the abalone handle and began nervously brushing her long red
hair.
Emily Gibbs had never minded her looks. Being raised in the carney
sideshow life, she’d felt accepted for what she was from the very beginning,
which had given her an inner confidence and strength that had helped her
throughout life. She had not thought of herself as different until she’d begun
doing shows with her father. Then she’d seen the way the rubes looked at
her, and worse; she’d felt their disgust and abhorrence at the mere sight of
her.
From the bridge of her nose up, Emily was normal, even pretty. Her
long hair was a rich red with the thinnest streak of gray in front. She had
large, bright blue, intelligent eyes spaced just far enough apart to bestow a
gentle, innocent look to her deformed visage, and which were capable of
instantly winning the trust of any child. Her nose was long and would've
been noble if it didn't meld with her extended upper jaw, leaving only two,
tiny, teardrop nostrils in the same general position they would be in on a
goose’s upper beak.
Despite her deformities, Emily was lucky—if she’d been born to a
“normal” couple (or what carney folk called, “rubes”) she probably would
have been institutionalized. But her carney parents took one look at her
face, and her webbed fingers and toes, and saw a new act for the
sideshow.
Thus, Mother Goose was born.
Emily finished brushing her red hair and decided not to put on any
makeup. She glanced over her shoulder at the piece of paper she’d left on
her bed. Not for the first time, nor the last, she rued the day she had ever
heard of Ozymandias Prather.
Her parents, Walter and Rita Gibbs, had been good friends with
Ozzie's father, Jacob Prather, in the old days when they had toured with
Tabor and Sons’ Magical Mud Show & Revival as the “Wild Man & Woman
of Borneo” until Rita gave birth to Emily.
 Within a year, Rita Gibbs had a breakdown and killed herself via an
overdose of heroin. Shortly after, Jacob Prather went crazy as well, and
dismantled the Device. Walter took a small piece of it in memory of Rita,
who had spent many hours with the strange thing in the months before her
death. Small and shaped like a pastry French horn, it was usually dull as
stone, but could, at times, glow with an inner light and be sharp as a razor.
Walter raised Emily on his own, and when she met and married Bob
Butterman, he had the Piece put on a gold chain as a wedding present for
her. Walter told her the Piece had power and would someday bring her a
great reward; but her life was proof that that had all been bullshit.
She didn't know what had happened to the Piece over the years.
She'd lost it right around the time James and Joey had been born.
When Ozymandias finally tracked her down and invited her to join his
carnival, Emily had not been surprised when he told her of his search for
the Pieces of the Device, the Coming of the Otherness, and explained that
he knew where her Piece was and that she was the only one who could get
it.
Emily knew this for one reason only: On his deathbed, eaten up with
lung cancer and barely able to talk, her father had told her of the Otherness
and how, someday, the son of Jacob Prather would come looking for her.
He made her promise that when that day came she would follow him and
do whatever he asked of her.
Now that day was finally here.
After securing his promise that her children wouldn't be involved and
would receive safe passage when the Otherness was let loose, Emily had
reluctantly agreed.
After the evening show, as the last of the rubes filed out to their cars,
Emily gathered her children together in the bus for a meeting. Her,
"children," as she fondly referred to them, were a collection of deformed
and normal dwarves and midgets whose abnormalities worked well with the
theme of their attraction: their sideshow tent was called, Mother Goose's
House of Rhymes.
Each of her children represented a particular nursery rhyme by way
of their individual deformity. Don Barlow, a hermaphrodite, played both
Jack and Jill. His lover, Homer Gray, had a deformity of the skull that made
his head overly large and shaped like a pumpkin. He played, Peter-Peter
Pumpkin-Eater. George Lemay, who was all torso – born without arms or
legs – was Humpty Dumpty. John Bean, whose thumbs were the size of
tennis balls, was Little Jack Horner. A married couple, Billy and Betty
Lederman, who were fairly normal looking dwarves, played Jack-Be-Nimble
and Little Miss Muffet. Jack Spratt and his wife were played by Henry
Wallski, who was so skinny he looked like a concentration camp victim, and
his sister, Gerta, who was in the Guiness Book of Records as the world’s
fattest midget. A pair of Siamese twins attached at the hip, Dennis and
David LaRosa, were Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Ginny Dowd, who,
along with Betty Lederman, was Emily's closest friend, was 35 years old
with a one hundred year-old face consisting of a sagging mass of wrinkles.
She played Cross Patch.
Always sitting at Emily's feet, as close to her as he could get, was
little mute Joey. He was the only one of her, "children," who was really her
offspring, and the only one who had not been taken away from her on that
awful day that she dreamt about every night. At five feet tall, Joey was an
inch shorter than Emily. He'd been born severely retarded and had a face –
crossed eyes, bucked teeth, and ears that stuck out – that showed it. He
played Simple Simon in the sideshow and the others all called him Simon.
Emily alone always thought of him as, Joey.
Emily looked them over as they talked amongst themselves. She truly
loved each of them as if they were her real children, even though most
were close to her own age. She knew they didn't belong with Ozymandias
Prather and his strange collection of sinister freaks, but because of her
promise to her father, here they were.
Emily stumbled through excuses as to why she couldn't engage in the
nightly drinking and playing of canasta, and tried to tell them each how
much they meant to her. Though Ozymandias had assured her everything
would be all right once she had contributed her Piece, Emily still had a
terrible sense of foreboding. She realized this meeting was really a
fumbling attempt on her part to say goodbye.
 Later, driving in search of Warren Road, the city of Quarry,
Massachusetts, looked familiar to Emily. She had been in hundreds of
cities just like it all over the country – cities so small that if it weren't for the
industries each was built around, they'd be nothing but large towns.
Quarry appeared to be barely that now. Textile mills and paper
factories along the river that ran through the middle of town all appeared
abandoned. The granite quarry jutting up over the center of town, and from
which the city took its name, was a dark, barren looking, crag overgrown
with shadowy trees and brush.
The house at 62 Warren Rd. was set back from the street a good fifty
yards. It was large and wide, with uneven dimensions and styles ranging
from the excesses of Victorianism, to useless colonial gables everywhere,
to modern glass and steel skyscraper affects in a large glass wall on the
left side of the mansion. At the right front corner, facing the street, a square
tower with a conical roof rose above the top story of the house. The tower
had a single tiny window in it. The outline of the top of the house against
the night sky gave it a castle like appearance.
The front yard was literally a dump, piled six feet high in some areas
with abandoned tires, trashed furniture, and trash bags overflowing with
garbage and junk that people in the neighborhood had dumped there rather
than haul to the city landfill. Even with the eyesore of the front lawn, the
house’s striking presence remained undiminished.
Emily parked where it was darkest and there were no streetlights.
"Where the hell are we?"
Emily jumped at the voice, and looked with astonishment at Joey as if
he had spoken.
"What are you up to, Em?" Ginny Dowd said, poking her wrinkled
visage over the back seat that she had been hiding behind. "I knew your
story about looking up a distant relative was baloney!"
Next to Ginny, Betty Lederman's pixyish face appeared. "Yeah!" she
said firmly in support of Ginny.
"What are you doing here?" Emily asked them. Joey smiled happily
and clapped his hands.
"We asked you first, Em," Ginny countered.
 Emily looked at her two friends and despaired. This is not what she
had wanted. "You have to get out of here!" she shouted at them. "Go back
to the carnival!"
"Fat chance!" Ginny said.
"Yeah!" Betty repeated again.
"You’ve been acting strange this whole tour," Ginny said. "You're in
some kind of trouble with this creepy guy, old Oz aren't you? What is it?
We’re your friends, and we're not leaving, so you might as well tell us
what's going on," Ginny said with a tone of finality that defied argument.
Betty added her own final determined nod.
Pressed for time and secretly glad for the company, Emily gave in.
She explained she was only doing a favor for Ozymandias Prather.
Keeping the facts to a minimum, she told them she was looking for a piece
of jewelry, a family heirloom, that Oz’s father had given to her father, and
which had been lost over the years, but now Oz believed was in this
deserted house.
Though Ginny and Betty exchanged doubtful glances, they didn't
push her for more information. "So let's go get it!" Ginny said.
"Yeah!" said Betty.
As quietly as possible, the four of them departed the van and slid
through a large gap in the old cyclone fence that ran haphazardly around
the place. Emily climbed onto the front porch, motioning for the others to
follow. She checked the front door and found it was locked. She went to
check the windows, and as she did, a shudder, like a minor earth tremor,
rolled through the place. It brought Emily, Jenny, and Betty to a panicked
halt on the porch.
They gasped in unison to see Emily's mute son standing frozen, arms
flung wide, before the now open front door. A faint and eerie half-light crept
out of the house to him, as if in greeting. His mouth worked strenuously,
whipping up a froth that dripped from the corner of his lips and ran to his
chin. There were tears in his eyes.
Emily rushed to him and took him in her arms.
"Joey? Are you okay?"
 He looked at her, blinked dual lines of tears down his cheeks, and
smiled. He looked at the open front door and back at his mother and
nodded excitedly.
"Yes, honey," Emily said softly. "You did a good thing!"

Another shudder moved through the house when Joey stepped

across the threshold. It was softer, more subtle than the first one as it
rippled through the structure, setting the old wood and stone to humming
faintly and buzzing the bottoms of their feet.
"Since when does New England feel like California?" Ginny wise-
cracked.
Is this really worth it?
Mother Goose didn't like the house and its thick darkness. It was
dank, musty, almost heavy and stifling when combined with the moisture-
laden humidity of the August night air. Emily wanted to be back in her
trailer, the shades drawn against prying eyes, her small, battery-operated
fan propped on the shelf above her bed, her bottle of Beefeaters cradled in
her lap, a good book in her hands. But her promise to her father made her
follow Joey into the house.
With the flashlight in her hand, she and Joey started climbing the
stairs to the second floor. The higher they got, the more oppressive the
atmosphere became. Emily had to stop to get a decent breath. She leaned
over the railing to watch Ginny and Betty – who were searching downstairs
by the light of a candle – disappear into a dark hallway. Emily had tried to
describe the Piece to them as best she could remember it.
She was not, however, confident in her memory.
Emily's light fell on Joey, and she was suddenly reminded of his
father. Emily had been 18 when she'd met Big Bob Butterman. He’d been
6-foot-4 and built like a stone wall, but his intelligence was a dwarf
compared to his physique. His eyes crossed terribly and a set of protruding
horse-teeth gave Bob's mental status away at a glance even as his
massive, powerful body brought him respect.
 Emily and her dad had been with Boone's Big Top and Sideshow
Extraordinaire the summer they played Bob's home down of Greendale,
New Hampshire – not too far north of Quarry – for three days. The town
was centrally located to a lot of small towns around it, which made it a
worthwhile spot to stop for more than a one night stand. At the urging of her
father, Emily had started doing the Mother Goose shtick as the middle part
of his act to give his arthritic legs a break.
Big Bob Butterman fell in love with Emily Gibbs the moment he laid
eyes on her. As a child he had loved a book of Mother Goose rhymes his
recently departed grandmother had read to him at bedtime. Since his adult
state of mind had remained more or less that of a child's, Bob had
immediately seen Emily as the living embodiment of something he had
previously thought was make-believe. Bob hung around after each show,
matinee and evening, waiting for Emily. He brought her flowers and candy
and his time-worn nursery book for her to autograph.
Initially, Emily tried to explain to this gentle giant that she really wasn't
Mother Goose, but the realization that if she did, it would break his heart,
kept her from pushing it. For the first time in her life, Emily came to
understand the difference between loneliness and having someone who
loves you to spend the rest of your life with. When the carnival pulled out of
Greendale, heading south to Long Island, Big Bob Butterman went with it,
signing on as a grunt, putting up and taking down canvas and lumber.
Emily and Bob were married in Maryland by a dwarf justice of the
peace her father knew. By the time they reached winter quarters in Florida,
Emily was pregnant. Nine months later, the sight of her twin boys, perfect
and normal-looking in every way right out of her womb, had brought Emily
such tears of joy, relief, and gratitude to God for answering her prayers that
her children not be cursed with her deformities. Emily was in paradise with
James and Joey and could ask for nothing more from life – except maybe a
little more time in paradise.
Six weeks after the twins were born, however, Bob's mother, Barbara
Butterman, an overbearing, domineering, cruel woman, hired detectives
who tracked her son down. When Emily and Bob were wintering in Florida
again, Mrs. Butterman’s lawyers convinced a judge that between her son's
lack of brains and Emily's deformities, not to mention the life they would
subject their children to in a carnival, they were unfit parents. Based on her
son's mental incompetence, Bob's mother had their marriage annulled,
forced Emily to give up the Butterman name, and arranged to take the
children and her son back to New Hampshire with her.
It had been the worst time of Emily’s life.
By then, it had become obvious that the twins were not identical, as
had been thought at birth. Joey was the older of the two by six minutes and
his head never lost its conical shape from passing through Emily’s small
birth canal. His eyes, when opened, were severely crossed and remained
so to this day. He had an obvious overbite portending buck-teeth worse
than his father’s. James, on the other hand was a beautifully perfect little
baby. To Emily he looked like the Ivory Snow baby he was so cherubic and
cute. Emily hadn’t been able to believe that James was hers.
When Barbara Butterman was told by doctors of Joey's retardation,
and that it would be best for all concerned if the boy was institutionalized,
she decided that, instead of her having to pay for that institutionalization,
maybe Emily was fit, after all, to care … for an idiot. A woman of some
wealth and influence (her father had been a US senator) Barbara
Butterman wielded her power to split up the twins and took James, and her
son, Big Bob, and left Emily with Joey and a future full of bitterness and
nightmares.
Emily felt that her life had ended then for all intents and purposes.
So what are you doing here?
Here? … Here, Oz was offering hope; a new beginning, a new world
for people like her. She had no use for the old anymore; everything that
had ever mattered to her had been lost in the old world—shouldn’t she
embrace the Otherness?
Unfortunately, Emily felt quite certain there was nothing for her in
Ozymandias Prather’s world either. If Oz was successful with the Device
and this old world did pass away, shouldn't she pass on with it?
"I should be home with my bottle," she grunted, and looked to see if
Joey had heard her. To her surprise, she was alone. She took the last few
steps to the second floor and played her light around the landing. Where
had Joey gone? It wasn't like him to leave her side like that, especially in a
strange place.
 "Joey?" she called in a whisper and laughed inwardly. She could
barely hear her own voice, how could she expect Joey to?
"Joey!" she called louder. There was no sign of him.
Maybe he saw something shiny – Joey loved shiny things – and
wandered away and got lost. If that were true, he must be terrified, the poor
thing. She bustled down the right side hallway, flashing her light and calling
his name.

Joey.
Mama Goose?
Noise.
Loud.
Hurt.
Roar in years. Pound in head.
Mama Goose?
Dark.
Don't like this.
Joey!
Mama Goose?
A light, silvery green, shining like sun on the ocean.
I've been waiting for you, Joey. So long. Come here, Joey. Come
here. Come. Come to me, Joey. Waiting so long for you. Here. Come now.
Come, Joey, come come come come come to me now!
Joey hears.
Joey obeys.
Shadows and fear.
Follow the light and come to me, Joey. I need you. We need you. We
need you bad.
A door. The silvery green light glows around its edges.
The door opens. Stairs going up up up.
Another door. A room behind it. Filled with the silver and green light.
It is like Christmas.
 A baby's crib. The wall behind it. The light comes from there. Green
glows it.
The wall moves.
Inhale—outhale! Heartbeat!
Out, out! Waiting so long for you, Joey. Let me out, Joey! Let us out!
Out, out, out… Now!
Joey do!
Hands against heartbeat wall. Tear the teddy bear paper away. Tear
the plaster off. Green and silver light glows brighter. Tiny silver eyes
peering through the darkness under the plaster.
Who there?
Come see.

Betty Lederman followed Ginny Dowd into the corridor to the

immediate right of the stairs. It was dark and got darker the farther they
went. Betty kept looking back at the moonlight and the front hall, but all too
soon it was gone, swallowed by shadow. Ginny had the candle and Betty
followed its glow, but before long the darkness became so overwhelming
that she felt her vision blotting out, and she couldn't see the candlelight at
all for long frightening seconds.
"Hold my hand, Ginny." She stretched and found Ginny's hand and
clasped it tightly. It was cold and clammy, but Betty wasn't surprised. Ginny
could talk tough, but she didn't fool Betty. She was scared, and if she was
half as scared as Betty was, then she had to be terrified.
If ever a house looked haunted, it was this one!
As Ginny led her further into deeper darkness, it seemed to Betty that
they had walked an awfully long way without getting anywhere.
"Ginny?" she asked softly. She heard a door close down the hallway
behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw a tiny flame appear, as
if floating in the air. It began moving toward her. Ginny pulled her hard in
the opposite direction.
"Wait, Ginny. What's that light? What's going on?" Betty asked, her
voice going up a register with anxiety.
 Betty heard Ginny’s voice, but she wasn’t answering, she was calling,
“Betty where are you?” and her voice was coming from the end of the
hallway behind Betty, where the light shone!
The hand holding Betty's tightened like a vise as it tugged her away
from Ginny. Betty screamed and tried to pull away at the same time.
"Ginny!"
Another hand closed on Betty’s arm. She screamed again. Over her
shoulder, as she struggled, she saw that her friend’s light was father away
and retreating with every step that she was dragged. The darkness was so
thick it was almost liquid around her. Ginny's light became a mere pinpoint.
"Gi-n-n-n-y!" she screamed frantically. Her voice sounded raspy and
weak, swallowed up by the hungry darkness. Before she could scream
again, something shiny and sharp flashed out of the darkness, sliced into
the side of her neck, and cut off her voice and air.
In the last few bloody seconds of her life, Betty Lederman saw a pair
of shining eyes over her. She recognized the face, but it was the eyes that
held her as she died. They grew larger, and larger until she fell into them.
A bubbling sigh escaped her lips as she succumbed to the eyes and
left her body behind.

Leading the way, Ginny held her candle high to illuminate the
hallway. "This place is creepy," she said to Betty. "I bet everyone in this
town thinks it's haunted," she added in a whisper and giggled at herself.
The hallway was narrow and high-ceilinged. The walls were covered
with a faded gold pattern wallpaper that was indiscernible in the shadowy
light of the candle. The floor was carpeted with a braided rug of no
apparent color in the weak illumination. It gave off a pungent, damp, musty
odor capable of clogging the sinuses as badly as spring pollen.
"It stinks in here," Ginny muttered.
"Ginny?" Betty asked behind her. “Hold my hand?”
"Yeah, sure," Ginny said, half turning and taking her friend’s shadowy
outstretched limb, though she found it annoying to have to do so. "Seems
like we should've seen a door by now," Ginny said.
 Betty squeezed her hand uncomfortably. "Ginny?" she said a moment
later.
"What?" Ginny asked, brusquely.
“Never mind,” Betty said softly.
Annoyed Ginny turned away from Betty, disengaging her hand as she
did, and saw a door just ahead.
"Ginny?" Betty called from behind her.
"Come on!" Ginny didn't stop until she got to the door. She grabbed
the doorknob and, with some effort required, pushed it open. Candle held
up in front of her, she entered a large, empty room. Its walls were covered
with mildewed, peeling wallpaper and the floor was warped hardwood. A
few steps into the room, Ginny heard Betty follow her, and the door shut.
"Why did you close the door?" Ginny asked, turning and thrusting the
light in her friend’s direction.
"Never mind," Betty said, from directly behind her.
Ginny whirled. Betty wasn't there.
Ginny spun around again, nearly extinguishing the candle as she
quickly turned, searching for her friend.
She wasn't in the room.
"What the hell?" Ginny whispered. She felt suddenly cold. She went
back to the door to the hallway, opened it, and stepped through, but it
wasn't the hallway that she had just come through – she found herself in
another room!
She struggled to retain her equilibrium and sense of reality. She was
certain she had gone through the correct door. She turned back to it.
It was closed, though she had not closed it, and had not heard it
close.
She opened it.
Her throat went dry as she walked into the room she and Betty had
just been in – now a completely different room.
She turned. The door closed silently behind her again. It looked like
the same door she had just come through –
Oh, what the hell am I thinking? Of course it’s the same door! It has
to be the same door!
 Slowly, she turned the knob and opened it. She held her candle high
and leaned in to illuminate … another room, which she was certain she had
not yet been in.
She glanced over her shoulder.
The room she was in—wasn't the same one she had been in only
moments ago!
Waves of dizziness and nausea swept over her. She felt suddenly
weak.
"Betty!" she called. Her voice sounded small and distant. There was
no answering sound. Trembling and unsteady on her legs, Ginny stepped
through and heard the door click shut behind her.
This is not happening, she numbly told herself, trying to remain calm
and rational but failing. She turned around and faced the door. She took a
step toward it and stumbled over something. She lowered the candle and
looked at the open-throated, blood-befouled body of Betty Lederman lying
at her feet.
"Ginny?" The slit in Betty's throat moved like lips, speaking her name.
Ginny's reflex was to scream as her mind snapped, but she hadn’t
enough breath, and a soundless shriek spilled from her open mouth
instead; like air escaping suddenly from a balloon.
Betty's throat wound spoke again: "Ginny?"
Her vision suddenly dimmed and blurred. It became hard to draw a
breath. She put her hand to her face and felt plastic. A face loomed over
her. She struggled to see it and finally recognized Simple Simon, Emily's
son, Joey. With a jolt of panic, she realized he was holding a clear plastic
bag tightly over her head.
"Ginny?” he said. His newfound ability to speak barely registered in
her air-starved brain, along with the fact that Betty's voice was coming from
his mouth.
"Simon…," Ginny barely gasped, the air in the bag almost gone.
"What—”
"Never mind," Joey cut her off, smiling. He leaned close and his
expanding silver eyes swallowed Ginny.
Her body convulsed several times as she left it.
 "Joey?" Emily called into the darkness of a small room. She had
searched all the other second floor rooms, and this one was the last. She'd
found no sign of Joey. She passed the flashlight beam around the room,
illuminating a couple of broken ladder-backed chairs, but no Joey. As the
light passed the window, Emily caught a flicker of something glowing that
was more than just her flashlight reflected in the broken glass panes.
Flush with the side of the window frame, nestled into a slim crevice in
the wall, she found a thin, leather bound book with Diary printed on the
spine in gold lettering that seemed to glow with a light of its own in the dark.
Her webbed fingers made it difficult, but Emily finally managed to get the
book out and blow the dust from it.
My Diary, it said on the cover in the same glossy imprinted gold
lettering as on the spine. The first few pages were unreadable, the ink
smeared from water damage. Emily was about to tuck the book into her
pocket, to peruse later at her leisure, but legible writing caught her eye on
the fourth page.

The baby comes today! Oh, how I've waited! The woman
at the adoption agency told us the poor thing’s family all
perished in a terrible fire. Now Roger and I shall try to be his
new family.

Emily flipped pages until another entry caught her eye.

Little Roger is perfect! What a joy he is. The only things

he came to us with were a book of nursery rhymes and a
shiny, funny shaped little metal thing, both of which he cried
for terribly. He played with the shiny thing for hours
when we gave it to him, and then fell asleep hugging the
book. Roger is making a mobile to put over the baby's
crib and is going to hang the doodad from it.
 She glanced at the date at the top of the page: April 21, 1998. Less
than a year after the twins had been born and her beautiful baby James
taken away from her. Emily felt an overwhelming urge to put the book back
and just leave the house, but she couldn't go without Joey.
She pushed her forebodings away and started to tuck the diary into
her pocket when the pages of the book seemed to move of themselves,
flipping to another entry about midway through where the frantic scribbling
caught her eye:

The baby won't stop crying. I'm afraid Roger will hurt him
if I leave them alone too long together. The doctor says it
is just colic and he will outgrow it. But I noticed that even
the doctor seems on edge around little Roger and avoids
touching him as much as he possibly can.

Emily tried to close the book again, but the pages rifled as before to
another entry.

I think I am going mad. The baby talks to me in my dreams,

makes me see things, horrible, horrible things. The worst
of the dreams is where Mother Goose, from his book,
chases me, accusing me of stealing something of hers….

Emily's breath left her in a shocked expulsion.

"No. It can't be!" she half whispered. Thoughts of finding Joey
disappeared as she frantically began turning pages, scanning the
increasingly cramped and nearly illegible writing that depicted a family in
severe disintegration. She stopped on an entry scrawled in wobbly, frantic
letters.

Roger is dead and I fear the baby killed him. I found

him in the tower room, lying at the foot of the crib,
the mobile he made for little Roger clutched in his hands.
At the hospital, they said he had a heart attack, but I
know the truth – it was the baby! Now he wants to kill
 me as well. Every night I dream of Mother Goose
chasing me and every night she gets a little faster, a
little closer. I fear what will happen when she catches me.
I must do something before that happens. I must. I must…
Kill little Roger.

"Oh, dear God, no!" Emily gasped.

Did she hurt my baby?
It couldn't be … James … Could it?
What if Bill and his mother were the ones killed in the fire that the
diary mentions? If James alone survived, he would have been put up for
adoption….
Emily's thoughts turned to the tower room. Closing the book, she
tucked it into her dress, successfully this time, and headed for the tower.
Upon achieving the second floor landing again, she noticed a light
coming from an open doorway that led to a narrow flight of stairs going up,
more than likely, to the tower. She began to climb. The eerie, silver
greenish light grew stronger the higher she went.
At the top of the stairs, she found another door. The weird light spilled
from around its edges. Dripping sweat from the exertion, it took Emily
nearly a minute to force the door open. She was immediately engulfed in
eye-watering brilliance.
When she could see again, the first thing that became clear was that
the light appeared to be blasting from behind what looked like an old,
broken-down crib. The second thing she saw was that someone stood near
the crib.
"Joey!" she said with relief.
The third thing she noticed as she crossed the room, were the two
bodies lying on the floor of the one-time nursery.
"We've been waiting for you, Mother Goose," Joey said quietly.
His sudden ability to speak nearly stopped Emily's heart with shock.
But his voice sounded strange, quadraphonic, as if more than one person
were speaking his words, but in different voices and at the same time.
 "Joey, what is this?" Emily managed to get out. Despite the shock of
hearing her formerly mute son speak, her eyes were drawn back to the
figures on the floor.
Through the blood, she recognized the faces of her two best friends.
"Oh my God!"
"It's all right, Mother," Joey softly said, going to her side. "You were
right. They didn't belong with Ozymandias and the rest of us. None of them
do. But soon they will. Batty and Ginny are already safe now, here with us."
His multiple voices echoed faintly in the room.
Was that Ginny's voice she heard as well? And Betty's? Mixed
together and coming out of her mute son’s mouth?
Emily thought she was going to faint, or get sick, or both.
Joey took her arm to steady her, and a sense of calm came over her
as if transfused from him by his mere touch.
"I am here, Mother. Me! James!" Joey said, pushing the crib aside.
There was a large hole in the wall behind the crib, from which the light
shone, revealing a dumbwaiter and laundry chute that had been sealed up
and covered over with plasterboard, which lay in a crumbled pile on the
floor beneath it.
In the dumbwaiter was the dried, shriveled body of a baby.
Joey went to the hole, reached in, and withdrew up the dead infant.
The brilliant, sole light in the room came from the around the infant corpse’s
neckmost familiar to Emily: the Piece her father had given her, and she
thought she had lost. Her dream had been right after all: Her father had
slipped something into James's blanket as they’d taken her son away.
"Yes," Joey said with his many voices as if reading her mind. He
carried the remains of his twin brother over to his mother. "The Piece was
with me all the time. It nurtured my pain and anger and sang to me of
revenge. Aided by it, the power I inherited from you grew, and I learned to
use it to enter and control the minds of others before I was even six months
old.
"I used it to destroy those who had taken me from you! The woman
whose diary I showed you – the woman who adopted me after the
Butterman's all died in a fire that I made Barbara Butterman set – managed
to resist me long enough to drug me and wall me up in there. She blew her
head off with a shotgun afterward to escape having to free me.
"All these years, Mother, I’ve been waiting, feeding on the human
suffering of the homeless who use this house for shelter, growing stronger;
becoming like those who wait in the Otherness for the Device to bring them
over. They were waiting for you to bring Joey to meld with me. Now I can
be free of this place!"
Joey handed the dead baby to Emily. She took it lovingly, tears
running down her beak, and didn't even blink when its head swiveled to
look up at her through eyes glowing with the same light as the Piece; the
same light that blazed in Joey's eyes as he stepped closer and put his
hands around her throat.
"Now we go together into the Otherness," James, Ginny, and Betty
whispered. Emily could clearly hear each of their voices speaking the same
words through her mute son’s mouth, and she finally, completely,
understood exactly what Ozymandias Prather had meant when he’d
guaranteed her children safe passage into the Otherness.

It is the dark, empty time just before dawn when few are up and about
and fewer to see. The sound of the van's engine seems to be muffled by
the hollow hour. As the vehicle moves through the civic center parking lot, it
disturbs none but the leader of the carnival freaks, and he only sits in
darkness and watches as it parks.
The large old bus squeaks slightly as it rocks back and forth with the
motion of Simple Simon's arm raking the nasty edge of the Piece across
the throats of Mother Goose’s sleeping children. The windows of the bus
glow with silvery green light with every passing life. Within twenty minutes it
is over and the bloodied, empty bodies of the nursery rhyme characters are
piled in the back of the van.
With the mummified corpse of his twin brother on the seat next to
him, Simple Simon returns to the house where Mother Goose, Cross Patch,
and Little Miss Muffet lie; their bodies vacant. He carries the rest of Mother
Goose’s children inside, and arranges them nicely around her.
 He drops a match on their clothing and takes a step back as the
flames start. He looks at the fire and concentrates, willing it to grow white-
hot and spread. It obeys. The other bodies in the room are aflame in
seconds. Picking up his twin’s corpse, Simple Simon casts a last look at the
room and waves bye-bye.
The fire burns all night, despite the best efforts of several area fire
departments. It leaves an ash so find it yields nothing even when put
through a sieve.

The sun crowns the horizon, making the gold dome of the abandoned
planetarium glow. The dawn light creeps over the tops of the dark vehicles
lined up in the Civic Center’s vast parking lot. The show is packed up, and
ready to roll.
The growing light catches a tall figure standing opposite a short one
at the rear of the lot and casts their shadows in long grotesque forms.
"We won't be needing the bus anymore," the shorter of the two says.
His words are spoken with many voices, like an unrehearsed chorus. A
light, silver and green with the depth of a thousand precious gems, flashes
between them and illuminates their faces.
"See that used car dealership over there? Clean up the bus and take
it there when the place opens. Sell it, come back here and get the van and
trailer and then catch up with us on the road."
Ozymandias Prather holds the Piece Simple Simon brought him. He
reaches out and pats the dead baby in Simple Simon's arms on the head.
Its eyes shine like twin mirrors reflecting the light of the Piece.
"We will," Mother Goose and her children all agree through Simple
Simon's mouth, whether they want to or not….

X0X0
***Uni-verse

The dark green hills are silent, unlike the sea,

Who kisses the shore upon her knee.
The light begins to fade, letting the darkness free.
The color stops glowing in the sunset’s breeze.
Phantoms dance in the moonlit sky,
Under Lunar the spotlight, the midnight eye.
The stars are all footlights for the stage of the universe:
Listen closely and you may hear—
The song is of eternity;
Singing the silence of the years.
For Everyman it's a solo,
And the lyrics are full of fears.
****

“Cosmic Goddess” (collage on cardboard) 2008

(In a very real way, the following story is MY origin story in that
it relates the events that, I believe, caused me to become a
horror writer. To borrow a term from Moe Howard of the Three
Stooges, my mother was haunted. She was psychic and
displayed a true gift for predicting the future and sensing the
supernatural around her. This tale is the story she told, and
retold, to me, my sister, and my brothers throughout our
childhood. Whenever the power would go out, or we were just
bored with TV, we’d implore her to tell us the story of…)

MA’S GHOST

The following is a true story … Mostly.

It was August 15th, 1960, and for Rose and Butch Dorrs the
house was a dream come true. Situated on a cul-de-sac, last house
on the left, the place was perfect for them and their burgeoning family
of four children – a girl, Lulu, (12 going on 22, Rose would say), and
three boys: Ritchie, 9 and a tormenter of his younger siblings; Willy,
7, a sweet boy; and Danny, 4, the youngest and main target of
Ritchie’s teasing. The Dorrs, hopeful of another one on the way
(Rose was a month late), had decided to sell their old four room
ranch and get a bigger place.
The problem had been affordability, which is why the seven
room Dutch colonial had been such a surprise. They would've
considered the place outside their price range until the real estate
agent told them it was going for practically a song. Rose, the more
skeptical of the two, believed there were no free lunches; that
everything came with a price; while her husband, Butch, believed you
should never look a gift horse in the mouth. Rose’s answer to that
was, if you didn't, how could you know if its teeth were rotting?
Rose had wondered why the place was so cheap, and the real
estate agent had given the reason that the house had been on the
market for a while and the family, which had already moved into a
new house, was desperate to sell. An insightful judge of people, Rose
had felt that the excuse was partially true, but not the complete
reason. Despite her second thoughts, she gave way to her husband's
enthusiasm and they purchased the place.
Now, it was moving day.
Standing and facing the house, Rose took it in and felt a
strange coldness looking at it. She couldn't put her finger on it, but
there was something about the place. Its pair of second floor windows
reminded her of eyes, and they sat over an enclosed porch whose
windows resembled teeth, giving the front of the house the
appearance of a grimacing visage. If she stared at it long enough she
imagined she might even hear the place … breathing.
Pulling herself out of her reverie, Rose went inside and began
directing the movers, Butch's three brothers, where to put furniture.
She sent her own three boys outside to play under the watchful eye
of their sister Lulu, the oldest. It took all morning and a portion of the
afternoon to finish the move.

After assembling the children's beds – two sets of bunk beds for
the boys and a double bed and room of her own for Lulu – Butch and
his youngest brother, Jonny, went out and got pizza and a case of
beer to celebrate. Though there was still a lot to do, Butch and his
brothers called it quits and ate the pizza and drank beer (Butch
declining more than one after a look from Rose reminded him that he
had to go to work later that night) while Rose continued opening
boxes and unpacking their life.
Her brothers-in-law were well on their way to being drunk when
she shooed them out at 8:30. She was only a quarter through the
boxes. Feeling guilty, Butch began to help, but only managed to get
in her way until she told him to go lay down for a little while before he
had to leave for his night shift job at the A&P Foodway Warehouse.
He didn't argue and went into the living room to lay on the couch,
since his and Rose’s bed had not yet been put together– the focus
had been on assembling the boys’ and Lulu's beds before nighttime.
With him working the night shift anyway, they had figured Rose could
sleep on the couch the first night, and they would put the bed
together tomorrow.
Within minutes Butch was snoring despite the racket made by
the children upstairs.

The Dorrs’ previous house had been a four room ranch – living
room, kitchen, and two bedrooms. While she was a child, Lulu hadn't
minded rooming with her younger brothers, but as she arrived at pre-
teen hood, she wanted, and needed, her privacy. The new house had
seven rooms, with three bedrooms, finally giving it to her, and she
took immediate advantage—unpacking her hi-fi and playing her Elvis
records at top volume until Rose has to shout at her to turn it down.
Through it all, Butch slept like the proverbial log.
At 10:20, Rose woke him to get ready for work. She had gotten
the kitchen fairly straightened out by then and was able to make him
three peanut butter sandwiches for his lunch. By 10:45, he was
dressed in his gray coveralls, with the A&P Foodway logo spread
across the back in red and white stitching, and ready to go. He
grabbed his brown lunch bag, gave Rose a kiss on the cheek, and
started for the doorway, where he paused and asked, "Are you going
to be okay alone here?"
"Why wouldn't I?" Rose asked, giving him a look.
"I just thought.… New house and all." Butch shrugged and
grinned.
"Oh, go on. You know me better than that."
Butch smiled. He did know her, and he told himself he had
nothing to worry about.

"Alright you kids! You have been up way past your bedtime!
Quit your fooling around, now, and get your PJs on!"
 "Mom! Richie is being a jerk! He says you put the beds in the
wrong rooms!" Lulu cried as she came to the top of the stairs and
looked down at her mother. Hanging back behind her, Richie
snickered.
"What are you talking about?"
Lulu let out an exasperated, and exaggerated, drama-queen
sigh of frustration. "Why don't you ever listen to me? I tried to tell you
this before! Dad put my bed in the room at the top of the stairs, but
Richie says I’m supposed to be in the back room!"
"Richie!" Rose said, raising her voice just enough to let her son
know she meant business.
Behind Lulu, Richie stopped giggling and stepped into view
next to his sister. "Yeah, Mom?" he asked innocently.
"Don’t ‘yeah Mom’ me! Stop teasing your sister. I told you
already: You boys get the back room; that’s why the bunk beds are in
there and you know it! Lulu gets the room at the top of the stairs, and
your father and I get the master bedroom at the front of the house."
"Sure, Mom. That's what I told Lulu, but she never listens to
me!" Richie said mimicking his sister.
Lulu became incensed. "Oh, you are such an Eddie Haskell!”
As soon as her mother turned away, Lulu added, “Asshole!”
"I heard that, Lu!" Rose cried, whirling about, shocked by her
daughter's language. "You’re lucky your father isn’t home! You know,
you’re not too big for a spanking, so you watch your mouth, young
lady!"
While her daughter stalked off to her room, and Richie, giggling,
went to his, Rose let out a sigh and realized she was just too tired to
do anymore that night. She decided she'd get the kids settled and
then hit the sack herself, that way she could get up early and get a lot
done before Butch even got home.
She gave the kids twenty minutes to follow her instructions
before going up to tuck them in. When she did, Lulu was already in
bed and feigning sleep; something she always did when angry at her
mother. Rose went down the short hallway to the boy's room at the
back of the house and found them each in bed with Richie and Willy
occupying the top bunks, and Danny in the bunk under Willy's. The
last bottom bunk remained unmade but would be filled soon enough if
Rose had any say about it; she’d always wanted five children and five
children was what she would have.
"All right boys. Under the covers. Time for bed." She went to
each, gave kisses on foreheads, and asked if teeth had been
brushed. With yeses and kisses acquired she left, pausing at the top
of the stairs to wonder where her pillows might be – downstairs or in
the master bedroom? The latter was the only upstairs room with a
door, which was now closed. Looking at the closed door, Rose felt a
sense of unease that she could find no cause for, other than the fact
that the door was shut. Shaking the feeling off she told herself the
pillows had to be downstairs and went to find them. Still, she was
relieved when she found them in a box in the dining room.
By eleven-thirty the kids were asleep and Rose was settled on
the couch, which she had made up with sheets and blankets and her
found pillows. The house was quiet. She lay on the sofa, a small lamp
propped on top of an overturned, empty cardboard box next to the
couch, and looked through the S&H Green Stamp catalog for things
she could buy with the five and a half books of stamps she had
saved. By 11:45 she was dozing and the catalog slipped to the floor.
She shut off the light and snuggled down under the covers to sleep.
She woke disoriented, unsure where she was; her new
surroundings unfamiliar and mentally unbalancing. She didn't know
what had woken her at first, but, as she heard it again she quickly
realized it had been a noise—in particular the squeaking of
bedsprings from … overhead?
Rose sat up in the darkness and looked at the ceiling. It took
her a moment to remember the layout of the house and realize the
room over her was the master bedroom. She heard the bedsprings
again; it sounded like someone rolling over and getting out of bed. A
moment later she heard footsteps and followed them from above her,
across the ceiling to the hallway door of the master bedroom. She
distinctly heard the door open, its hinges squeaking followed by the
sound of footsteps in the upstairs hallway.
 Then coming down the stairs.
Still groggy from sleep, Rose thought it had to be one of her
children. Wondering why the hell one of them would be in the master
bedroom, she fumbled for the lamp on the cardboard box next to the
couch, found the switch and turned the light on. She turned,
expecting to see one of the boys—most likely the youngest, Danny—
heading for the bathroom.
But there was no one there. She was alone.
Rose quickly threw back the covers, got off the sofa, and
padded on bare feet across the living room to the kitchen. The only
bathroom in the house was on the first floor, beyond the kitchen and
the small den at the very back of the house, off the short hallway
which led to the back door and yard. At the kitchen doorway, Rose
could see the bathroom door just closing. She heard a click and a
light appeared under the closed door.
Definitely one of the kids.
She went to the kitchen table and sat, waiting for whichever
child it was to come out so she could make sure he or she wasn't
sick. She waited a long time; nearly falling asleep before deciding
something had to be wrong. She got up, went to the bathroom door,
and knocked.
"Who's in there? It's Mom. You okay?" She tried the knob and
found the door locked. She didn't like that; Lulu was the only one who
ever locked the bathroom door—with the boys she was lucky if she
could get them to even close it half the time!
"Lulu? Lulu are you in there? Are you all right?"
What happened next happened so quickly that Rose couldn't be
sure afterwards exactly what had transpired. She heard the door
unlock, and just before it opened, the bathroom light went out,
plummeting her into sudden and complete darkness. Rose felt a rush
of air as the door opened in front of her, then another as someone
brushed by her in the blinding blackness. She reached into the
darkness and asked, "Lulu is that you?"
Her arm found nothing, and she redirected it to seek the
bathroom wall switch. She found it and turned the light back on.
Enough of it spilled into the kitchen to show her there was no one
there … but at that same moment she heard footsteps going up the
stairs in the living room at the front of the house.
Nearly running, Rose dashed through the kitchen, back to the
living room and the stairs. Was that a door she heard close upstairs?
Taking the steps two at a time, she went up to the second floor.
Her eyes adjusted to the faint light, and she could see the master
bedroom door was still closed. Lulu’s door was closed as well.
Rose checked her daughter, who really was sound asleep now,
not faking it. Rose checked the boys next only to find all of them
asleep as well. It appeared none of them had gotten up, either. She
returned to the top of the stairs and stood looking at the closed
master bedroom door. She felt silly, but couldn't bring herself to go
inside and investigate.
She returned downstairs to the living room where she sat on
the couch flipping through any catalogs or magazines she could find
in an attempt to fight sleep until Butch came home. After a while she
returned to the unpacking and continued with that until she heard the
car pull in the driveway.

“Okay, Rosie, slow down and tell me again what happened? It

sounds like you think we had a burglar?” Butch Dorrs sat wearily at
the kitchen table, trying to understand what his wife had been
yammering about from the moment he’d walked through the front
door. Unfortunately, he wasn’t having much success.
“Maybe. I—I don’t know what it was,” Rose exclaimed. “I
thought it was the kids, but they were all asleep.”
“Well, if it wasn’t the kids then you were either dreaming or
someone broke in,” he said with exasperation. He got up and went
around the first floor, checking all the doors and windows. “There’s no
sign of a break-in, Rosie. You sure you didn’t dream it, and you just
think it really happened?”
 Rose bit her tongue—she hated it when Butch patronized her,
but, rather than argue and work herself into a tizzy, she shrugged and
let it drop. She had to admit, her memory of last night was kind of
fuzzy.
She fed her husband breakfast— actually his dinner—of fried
cube steak and eggs with French-fried potatoes and carrots, and
helped him put their bed together in the master bedroom so he could
sleep, and did it all before the kids got up.
She was hesitant when they went into the front bedroom to
assemble the bed, and was glad Butch was with her, though she
never would have told him that. She had to scold herself, however,
when she saw the room was an ordinary bedroom. In fact, it was
quite nice and got all of the morning sun.
She told herself she must have been dreaming.

After the kids got up, had breakfast, and set off to explore the
new neighborhood, with the admonition to keep a watchful eye on
their brother Danny, the youngest, she and Butch spent a couple of
hours on the unpacking; Butch in the basement setting up his tool
bench, Rose arranging and polishing the living room furniture and
arranging the cabinets in the kitchen. Around one o’clock, she made
boiled hot dogs and heated a can of baked beans for lunch and Butch
ate with the kids (something he tried to do, especially in the summer,
since it was hard to see them when he worked the night shift) then
went to bed at two. The kids went back outside and Rose went back
to work.
By three p.m., she felt exhausted from the lack of sleep the
night before. Rather than join Butch and interrupt his sleep, she lay
on the couch, telling herself it was just for a few minutes.

Danny woke her at five, asking what she’d made for dinner.
 “Pig’s feet and dried apples,” she replied automatically, which
always got a laugh, or an exaggerated, “Eww!” from the kids when
she said it. Danny gave her both.
“What time is it?” she asked, thinking aloud.
Six year old Danny ran to the kitchen doorway and looked at
the clock on the stove. “The big hand is on the twelve and the little
hand is on the five,” he reported over his shoulder and added, “Is
supper ready?”
Big hand on the twelve and –
“Five o’clock? Shit,” she exclaimed and earned another giggle
from Danny.
“Don’t you repeat that, Daniel,” she said, getting off the couch.
Hearing his formal name, Danny knew she meant it. He nodded
rapidly.
“Go back out and get your brothers and sister. You’re in for a
treat tonight.”
“Hawkeye Hamburgers and A and W root beer?” Danny cried,
excited.
She nodded. “Tell everyone to get in the car while I get my
purse.’
Danny barreled out of the house, proclaiming the good news at
the top of his lungs:
“He-ey gu-uys! Burgers and fri-ies!”
The kids all loved going to the shaped-like-a-flying-saucer
Hawkeye Hamburger joint—where a cheeseburger and fries cost
fifteen cents, making it a budget favorite of Rose’s as well—and then
taking the food to A&W Root Beers, to get creamy root beer floats in
icy cold, thick take-home glass mugs, served right to their window via
roller-skating car-hops.
By the time the sun had set, they were back home with a sack
of left over burgers and fries for Butch’s lunch, and the kids all hyper-
active on the mix of ice cream and pop. Rose sent them outside to
play some more, and work off the energy, while she tried to make up
for the afternoon she’d wasted (in her eyes) sleeping. So engrossed
did she become, she forgot to call the kids in at nine, their
summertime curfew, and nearly forgot to wake Butch at ten as well.
At ten-fifteen, Lulu came in to use the bathroom and Rose finally
realized the time.
She yelled out the open front door for the boys to come in, and
went upstairs to wake Butch. She stood outside the closed bedroom
door, fist poised to knock, when she heard a low voice that she
thought came from within the room.
“I think I’ll go to bed early. I’m not feeling so hot.”
Rose immediately opened the door without knocking. In the
darkness, she thought she saw Butch sitting up at the edge of the
bed. She felt for the light switch and turned it on.
Butch lay under the covers, in the middle of the Queen-sized
mattress, sound asleep. Otherwise, the room was empty.
Rose looked around for some explanation of what she’d
heard—she was a practical, no nonsense type of woman—and
settled on the open windows. The voice must have been from a
neighbor’s TV and had come through the open window. It made
sense—she’d noticed the same thing earlier, during a quiet moment
when she’d heard the theme song from, “I Love Lucy,” coming from
the neighbor’s television.
She woke Butch, thought about mentioning the voice, and then
thought better of it. While he got ready for work she got the kids to
bed. When he left, he paused at the door, looked at her as if he was
thinking of saying something, but then just gave her his usual kiss
and went.
Alone, the kids in bed and, if not asleep, at least quiet, Rose
looked up the stairway into the darkness at the top, then at the ceiling
above her—the floor of the master bedroom. She shook off a chill,
clucked her tongue chidingly at herself, and tackled the last of the
moving day boxes, which mostly contained the children’s winter
clothing.
By one a.m. she was done, but not tired. Butch had set up the
TV and hooked it up to rabbit ears for the time being—he planned to
connect it to the roof antennae over the weekend—so she turned it
on and settled back on the sofa.
 Nothing but static. She got off the couch and stood in front of
the TV, adjusting the rabbit ears and trying different channels until
she finally managed to get a fuzzy channel four, which appeared to
be showing an old war movie.
She went back to the couch and decided to spend the night
there again; it was a humid evening, and she told herself it would be
cooler. She turned off the light, now on an end table next to the sofa,
and curled up to stare blankly at the black and white moving images.
Despite not feeling tired, she soon fell into a restless sleep.
She woke at three a.m. to the constant, irritating beeeeeeep of
the TV station’s sign-off signal. She threw back the covers, rolled off
the couch, nearly falling to her knees, and staggered to the set to
shut it off. The picture blipped out, plunging the room into darkness.
The bed squeaked in the room above her.
Faintly, she heard feet slapping the wooden floor.
Another bed spring squeaked and the footsteps were crossing
the ceiling, making the floor creak, as they moved toward the upstairs
hallway. Rose looked up, following the sounds, but remained
unmoving, frozen to the spot.
The master bedroom door quietly unlatched and softly whined
open.
Rose held her breath, her eyes fixed on where she knew the
top of the stairs were even if she couldn’t see them.
Footsteps in the darkness.
Descending.
The stairs groaned under the weight.
“Lulu?”
The footsteps did not stop in reaction to her call. They reached
the bottom of the stairs.
“Ritchie?”
And started toward the kitchen.
“Willy? Danny?” Her voice was a near hysterical gasp, and she
felt a scream building in her chest. She forced her fear-frozen limbs to
move and lunged for the lamp, nearly knocking it off the end table in
her panic to turn it on.
 The room filled with light. She whipped about to see—
Nothing.
But the footsteps were in the kitchen now; heading for the
bathroom.
Rose dashed through the dining room, hoping to cutoff the
sounds. As she reached the kitchen entrance to the dining room, she
flipped the wall light switch. The dining room’s small faux-chandelier
cast just enough illumination into the kitchen for her to see …
… nothing again.
This time, however, she heard the footsteps go by as she
stared at the spot where she could hear them, and there was still
nothing there!
A moment later, the bathroom door closed, locked, and the light
shone under it.
Rose went into the back room and turned on its light as well.
She hid behind a tall empty food storage cabinet, where she would
keep her home-canned sauces and tomatoes once they were done,
and waited.
From far away, she thought she heard the sound of someone
retching.
A few minutes later, the toilet flushed.
The light under the bathroom door went out. A half second later
the light in the hallway went out as well, but came back on again by
itself a few seconds later.
It revealed the bathroom door open; the room empty.
And the footsteps were going up the stairs again.
Rose ran as fast as she could possibly run. She dashed
through the kitchen and reached the bottom of the stairs before the
footsteps reached the top. She stared up into empty darkness and hit
the wall switch for the stairway light.
The moment it came on, the light flared intensely bright, nearly
blinding her, and the door to the master bedroom slammed closed
with a loud bang!
 When he got home from work, Butch found Rose sitting at the
kitchen table, chain-smoking, drinking coffee, and nervously biting her
nails. She wouldn’t meet his eyes when he sat across the table from
her.
“What’s the matter, Rosie, the kids give you a bad night?”
She shook her head, took a deep drag and slowly French-
inhaled it, trying to calm herself.
“What’s with smoking my cigarettes? I thought you were gonna
quit in case you’re pregnant.”
“Yeah, well … you know what they say,” Rose breathed,
exhaling and speaking at the same time.
Butch shrugged. “Um, no. What do they say?” He grinned at his
wife, but she did not grin back; didn’t even come close to cracking a
smile. She shook her head, dismissing his quip.
Seeing his gaffe, and misunderstanding the reason for her sour
mood, Butch looked repentant. “Oh … I’m sorry. Did you get your
friend?”
Rose looked confused for a moment, then shook her head. “No,
no, it’s not that…. We have to move.”
Butch did a double take. “What?”
Rose stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray then pushed the
butt-stuffed glass dish away from her. “You heard me. I knew this
place was too good to be true. We have to move.”
Butch shook his head, befuddled. “Why?”
“You’ll laugh at me.”
He grinned, almost laughed, and said, “No, I won’t.”
She looked him right in the eye for the first time since he’d got
home. “If you laugh at me, Butch Dorrs, so help me God I will punch
you right in the mouth,” she said it so calmly, yet so deadly seriously,
that Butch nearly did laugh, but he swallowed it and shook his head.
“I promise.”
She drank her coffee and stared at her hands.
Butch waited, but not for long before saying, “So, why do we
have to move?”
 Rose took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Because this
house is haunted.”

The kids came running when they heard their mother scream:
“Butch, you son-of-a-bitch! You promised!” and their father laughing.
Though their mother had what her father called, “a sailor’s
vocabulary,” and they were used to her swearing, they had neither
heard her so angry before, nor ever seen her show such fear.
“What’s wrong?” Lulu cried, heading the child-brigade into the
kitchen.
“Why’s Daddy a ‘summer bitch’?” four-year-old Danny blurted
out and got a hard punch in the arm from Ritchie.
Butch looked at his children as they came in and his laughter,
which had been tapering off, erupted again when Danny spoke up.
He roared loudly. Willy and Danny started laughing, too, which only
made Butch laugh more as well.
“Get upstairs!” Rose shouted.
“But I want breakfast!” Lulu said haughtily, as if her parents
arguing was of no concern to her. She went to the cabinet and got a
box of Corn Puffs and a bowl.
“Me, too!” Danny piped up. Ritchie and Willy quipped in, “Me
three!” and, “Me four!”
“Fine! Get yourself cereal then go watch cartoons!” Rose
shouted at her children, then caught herself. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to
yell. Just do like I ask.”
Danny started to say something, but Lulu nudged him this time
and gave him a look that discouraged him. She helped her little
brother get his cereal and even carried it into the living room for him,
along with her own.
By the time Ritchie and Willy joined Lulu and Danny in front of
the TV, Butch’s laughter had petered out.
“I ought to punch you right in the mouth like I said!” Rose spoke
harshly, yet softly.
 “Sorry,” Butch replied, smirking and standing to stretch. “But,
seriously, Ro. You want to move out because the house makes
noises at night?”
“Not just noises!” she hissed, leaning in close to him, her face
inches from his chest, glaring up at him. Rose grabbed the front of his
shirt and pulled him into the back room where, in a half-whisper, half
frantic mumbling and with scared glances toward the bathroom, she
told her husband about what had happened the night before.
He stood there, leaning against the wall, his arms crossed with
one hand covering his mouth, while he listened. When she was done,
he nodded thoughtfully.
She wasn’t fooled.
“Oh, go ahead and laugh!” She turned away. “Laugh all you
want, but I know what I heard and saw,” she said adamantly.
“I thought you didn’t see anything; that was the whole point!”
“Go ahead, make jokes.” She looked him in the eye and glared
at the humorous twinkle she saw there. “This - house - is - haunted!”
Demonstrating a trait her husband attributed to her Italian heritage,
she punctuated each word with a wild wave of her fists in the air;
talking with her hands.
“That’s why we got it so cheap!”
Butch tried to keep from smirking and was about eighty percent
successful. It wasn’t that he was making fun of Rose, he just found
her funny when she got so worked up about something. She was
what his father would have called a, “firecracker,” and Butch wouldn’t
have wanted her any other way, but sometimes she needed to be
brought back to earth.
“Look, Rosie, I’ll prove it to you,” he said, going to the telephone
hanging on the wall. On a shelf next to it lay the phone book. He
opened it to the Yellow Pages, rifled through until he found the right
page, and ran his finger down it until he came to the listing. Replacing
the phone book, he whispered the number to himself as he dialed.
Rose stood a few feet away, facing him, hands on hips,
curiosity stamped on her face.
 “Hello? Mrs. Velardo? It’s Butch Dorrs. Right, we bought the
house on the dead-end road. Listen, I know this is going to sound,
well, strange, and I’m sorry to bother you with it, but, um….” Butch
cleared his throat and seemed suddenly uncertain of how to go on.
After a stern look from Rose he tried.
“As the real-estate agent that represented the sellers, I was
wondering if you could tell me if there is any reason to believe, um …
to believe … the house is … ah … haunted?”
Rose stepped closer; her expression intense as she watched
Butch’s face. He nodded, said, “Uh huh,” a couple of times and cast
furtive side glances at her.
“I see,” he said finally. “Well, yes, I wish you had told us about
that before, but, honestly, it’s not going to change anything. We’re not
superstitious.” He looked Rose in the eye. “And we’re not going
anywhere.”
Before he could finish hanging up the phone, Rose was on him,
pointing a righteous finger at him.
“I told you!” she crowed, still trying to keep her voice down but
not succeeding very well. “What did she say? She told you
something, didn’t she? I knew it!” She looked at him, a triumphant
gleam in her eye.
Butch sat at the kitchen table where he rubbed his beard
stubble and glanced at the cold coffee pot on the stove. “Can I get
some breakfast? A little coffee?” he said, showing a little irritation.
“Of course,” Rose replied, drawing it out and sarcastically half-
bowing to him. She abruptly pulled out the kitchen chair kiddie-corner
to her husband, and sat down. “After you tell me what she said.”
Butch took a deep breath and let it out slowly. From the top
pocket of his warehouse coveralls, he took out a pack of Camel’s and
proceeded to light one up. As he did, he spoke:
“She said she didn’t know anything about the house being
haunted.”
Rose looked disappointed.
Butch paused, took a long drag, and continued, exhaling smoky
words. “But … she did say the previous owner, Bob Harris, died in the
house. Heart attack. That’s why the family wanted to sell—too many
memories, she said.”
Rose looked at him with narrow eyes; an expression he’d seen
many times and which he knew meant, “That’s a crock!”
“How did he die? What room did he die in?” Rose asked, as if
interrogating him.
Butch shrugged. “She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. You heard.”

Until Butch ate lunch with the kids and went to bed around 1:45,
things were tense between him and his wife. Rose continued to
badger her husband, asking questions about the real estate agent
and repeatedly reminding him that she had been right. He grew
aggravated before too long and tersely told her to drop it.
She did, until he retired and the kids were outside playing
kickball at the end of the dead end street. Then, she looked up the
name, Bob Harris, in the phone book. She found it and called the
number, but got a recording informing her that the line was no longer
in service; the number had been changed. When the recorded voice
started spouting the new number, she scrambled for a pencil and
paper, found only the former, and wrote the number on the wall next
to the phone.

“Hello, could I speak to Mrs. Harris?”

“She’s not home.” The voice on the phone sounded like a
young woman, twentyish. “She won’t be home until four-thirty.”
Rose took a guess. “Is this her daughter?”
“Yes, this is Emily. Who’s this?”
On top of the guess Rose decided to take a chance: she told
the girl who she was and, “I bought the house you used to live in.…
Where your father died?” She cringed as she asked the last, waiting
for the girl to … do what? She didn’t know, but what the girl said
came as a shock.
 “Is he haunting you, too?” Emily nearly whispered.
Rose was thunder-struck. She stopped breathing and her throat
got so dry it nearly clamped shut on her. She finally inhaled,
swallowed hard and said, “Yes. I think so.”
“Let me guess,” Emily said. “Every night at three a.m. or so you
hear him get out of bed, walk downstairs to the bathroom, where he
locks the door and turns on the light, then flushes the toilet, turns off
the light and goes back upstairs. Is that about right?”
“Y-yes,” Rose stammered, her shock increased. “How did—?”
“’Cause that’s what he did to us!” Emily blurted out, her voice
emotional. A moment later, she softly added, “That’s what he did the
night he died, too. He woke up at three and told my mom he didn’t
feel good. He went down to the bathroom where he got sick, then he
went back upstairs, lay down again and bam! he had a heart attack.”
A long silence hung between them on the line.
“Listen,” Emily finally broke the quiet, “would you do me a
favor? I’m sorry, but please don’t call back and talk to my mom?
She’s really had a hard time since Dad died, and then having that
happen every night, it was like reliving it over and over. She needs to
forget that.”
“Yes, yes. Of course,” said Rose quickly. “You—you’ve told me
all I need to know. I’m—I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

Rose made sure the kids went to bed early before she woke
Butch for work at nine-fifteen instead of his customary ten. He didn’t
realize it until he sleepily shuffled into the kitchen and saw the stove
clock.
“What the hell, Ro? I coulda got another forty-five minutes!”
“We have to talk about this house,” Rose said quietly, but
adamantly.
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes!” He opened the refrigerator, took out a
yellow plastic pitcher of grape Zarex, and drank from the open spout.
He realized his wife was seriously distracted when she didn’t yell at
him to use a glass.
“Sit down.”
Rose joined him at the table and proceeded to tell him about
her call, and her conversation, with Emily Harris.
Butch sat back, pursed his lips, and let out a long slow sigh
when she finished. He grinned. “Well, at least he seems to be a
friendly ghost.”
“Please don’t make more jokes.”
Rose’s quiet plea wiped the grin from his face.
“Geez, Ro, since when do you even believe in ghosts?”
She looked at him strangely. “I never said I didn’t. I know there
are ghosts. We…we just never talked about it, I guess.”
“No, I guess not,” Butch replied. “I guess it’s not something that
comes up in ordinary conversation much, huh?”
She shrugged.
“So, Ro, listen, I know this has got you spooked—no pun
intended—but honestly, what do you want me to do? Do you really
want to sell this house and move to a smaller one—cuz that’s all we’ll
be able to afford; we got this a lot cheaper than normal—”
“And now we know why!” Rose cut in.
“Yeah, maybe, but … I mean, so what? It’s a good thing if we
did, ain’t it? You and me both know this house shoulda been outta
our price range. We looked at one just like this right around the
corner from here and it was twenty grand more than this. And you
know—I wasn’t just joking before—if old man Harris is haunting the
place, at least he’s not like ghosts in the movies, scaring people and
all.”
“He’s scaring me!” Rose cried.
“Aw, come on, Ro! Please? Think about it?”

She did think about it—constantly. After a week of thoughts,

and nightly sleep-interrupted visits, she was exhausted from lack of
rest. One afternoon, she sat folding laundry, watching, The Mike
Douglas Show, and nodding off. Suddenly she sat bolt upright when
she heard the Philadelphian talk show host say his next guest would
be a psychic expert who called himself a Parapsychologist, and who
investigated hauntings.
In rapt attention she watched as the doctor told how there are
basically two types of ghosts—poltergeists, and the ‘lost’ dearly
departed. He said poltergeists were mischievous ghosts who make
noise and throw things; more likely evil spirits rather than the ghosts
of people. Poltergeists, he said, usually require a rite of religious
exorcism to get rid of them. The other category, the ‘lost’ dearly
departed, he explained, “… are the spirits of departed people who
have become lost and, for whatever reason, have missed the light
that is supposed to take them to the after-life. Most spirits of this kind
don’t even realize they are dead; they just keep repeating the last act
of their lives, over and over, like a broken record.”
Rose couldn’t believe it. That sounded exactly like her ghost.
The children came in just at the commercial break, but the
announcer teased that when the show came back on the expert
would have tips on how to deal with ghosts. Rose sent the kids right
out again so she could devote her full attention to it.
By the time the show was over, Rose knew what she had to do.

That night, she got the kids to bed and Butch off to work as she
always did, acting as if nothing were wrong.
Butch wasn't buying it; he knew her, knew she wouldn't just
drop the whole haunted house thing just because he’d told her to. He
waited for her to bring it up again, right up until it was time to go to
work. Then, pausing at the door, he looked Rose in the eye and
asked her, "Are you okay?"
She nodded and gave him a peck on the cheek.
"You're okay to stay alone?"
 Rose shrugged. "We’ll see." That's all she said. She looked at
her husband, an enigmatic little Mona Lisa grin on her face.
Butch let his gaze linger on her, but she remained unchanged.
Nodding approvingly, he turned and left.
As soon as he was gone, Rose went to work. On the front
porch, in the boy’s toy box, she found just the thing she needed. She
brought it into the kitchen, leaned it against the side of the
refrigerator, and set about brewing a strong pot of coffee. She would
not be woken by the ghost this night.
She sat at the kitchen table, pasting the last of her green
stamps and filling booklet five, until midnight, and then sat looking
through the catalog for something to buy until two-thirty. Pouring
herself the last cup of coffee, the strongest, bottom-of-the-pot and
full-of-caffeine, cup, she took it into the living room with her and
placed it on the end table next to the couch. She placed the thing
she'd got from the porch on the couch as well and stood there looking
at the room and the stairway. With a decisive nod of her head she
went back to the kitchen and dragged one of the captain’s chairs into
the living room where she set it up at the very bottom of the stairway.
If she sat there no one could come down and get by without climbing
over her. From the closet under the stairs, she took out a portable tin
TV tray and set it up next to the captain’s chair. Her coffee mug went
on the tray, the thing from the toy box went in both hands, and she
sat in the chair facing the stairs.
And waited.
From her apron pocket, she took out a wristwatch with a broken
leather strap that had belonged to her mother and which still worked.
She wound it, held it to her ear and, satisfied with it, placed it on the
wooden arm of the captain’s chair where she could see it at a glance.
The last ten minutes – the time between 2:50 and 3:00 a.m.
was the longest span of time Rose thought she had ever, or would
ever, experience. She found herself staring at the watch face,
coaxing the sweeping secondhand to go faster and almost begging
for the ghost to appear.
At 3:01 she got her wish.
 The bed springs squeaked in the upstairs master bedroom,
muffled behind the closed door.
Rose sat up straight.
The bed springs squeaked again followed by footsteps. The
master bedroom door opened. Faint light from the street lamps
outside shone through just enough so that Rose could reaffirm …
nothing there.
She renewed her fierce grip on the thing she’d gotten from
Willy’s toy box on the porch – his official Ted Williams baseball bat.
The footsteps approached the top of the stairs … and then
started down….
Rose stood, pushing the chair back against the wall and
knocking the wristwatch from the arm. She brought the bat up,
holding it at the slender end the way the Splendid Splinter himself
would, ready to swing away.
The footsteps descended closer….
Fear, raw and electric, coursed through Rose’s body, making
her intestines feel liquid, her bladder full, and her legs wanting to flee.
She fought it all.
She held onto the bat as she stepped onto the bottom step and
reached over to turn on the stairway lamp. She and the nothingness
she opposed were bathed in sudden light.
The footsteps stopped.
"YOU HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!" Rose screamed,
brandishing the bat in her shaking hands.
"You don't belong here anymore!" she went on, only slightly
softer, her voice a-tremble.
"You're dead and you don't realize it! Your family has moved
on! But you're scaring me to death! I can't live like this! I've got kids!
You have to find the light and … and … just, just go! Please! Please!"
The last word was nearly a sob from her mouth.
At that moment, something strange happened.
A feeling, a sensation, washed over Rose and filled her with
strong emotion … and that emotion was remorse. She suddenly knew
that the spirit in front of her, the ghost of poor Bob Harris, 66-year-old
recent retiree and heart attack victim who never got to enjoy his
retirement, was terribly sorry for having caused her pain and trouble.
She sensed that he would never bother her again.
The footsteps turned and went up the stairway. The second
floor hallway landing creaked, the master bedroom door swung slowly
closed, and the bed springs squeaked one last time.
Rose dropped the baseball bat and sat on the stairs. She wept,
both hands over her face, elbows on her knees.

X0X0
Post Script: The above is my fictionalized version of a story I
heard throughout my childhood from my mother. Whenever
there was a power failure or a good thunderstorm we would
gather around her and plead for her to tell us the story which we
came to call, "Ma's Ghost." As far as the haunting of our house
goes, however, my mother's confrontation with the spirit of the
previous owner was not the last we heard, or felt, from him.
Not long after the events of this story, my father was hurt
in a warehouse accident that injured his back so severely he
was bedridden for several years. The dining room on the first
floor was set up as his bedroom with a special traction-type
hospital bed, and my mother continued to sleep on the couch in
the living room to be nearby to care for him.
She would never sleep in that master bedroom. Not once in
forty years.
The master bedroom became the property of the oldest
child still living in the house – a sort of reward for putting up
with having to bunk with siblings for so many years. I finally got
the room when I was 13, and experienced a couple of strange
things. For example, I’ve always been an avid reader, and I
would stay up at night reading for hours. In the summertime, I
would sometimes read all night and not realize it until I heard the
birds singing at dawn. Once I moved into the master bedroom,
however, if I tried to stay up reading past 3:00 a.m., the light
would often go out; just automatically shut off. No matter how
many times I turned it back on it would go out again. My dad
said it was a loose connection, but then why, I asked him, did it
only happen after 3:00 a.m.? He didn’t have an answer for that.
Often, when I was in bed getting ready for sleep, I would
have the sensation of the mattress being depressed, as if
someone were sitting on it and getting in the bed. Then I would
hold my breath and I would feel the covers rising and lowering
with the regular rate of someone breathing, lying next to me.
Strangely enough, this never frightened me, and I never felt
afraid of the ghost in the master bedroom.
As if I needed any proof or confirmation of ‘Ma’s Ghost,’
many, many years later I happened to work with Emily Harris
(not her real name). I didn’t know who she was, nor she I, when,
quite serendipitously, we discovered that I had lived in her
childhood house. She confirmed my mother’s story and
remembered her call and telling Mom that she and her mother
had been forced to leave the house because of her father
haunting it with his nightly walks.
I bought my parents’ house many years later, after my
mother had died of cancer there in home hospice care (in the
same bed my father had convalesced in). I did not live in it right
away and rented it out to a friend and his family, as they were
building a new house and needed a place to stay. They had a
three-year-old son who became terrified of going into the
bathroom. He claimed there was a mean old man in there who
wanted to hurt him. But, he also claimed, there was a nice old
lady in the house as well, who protected him from the mean old
man and wouldn't let the man in the bathroom get out and get
him.
I couldn't help but think that nice old lady was my mother.
She loved kids.

X0X0
“Seadawn” (acrylic on canvas) 2017

***"Don't think about it" (an oldsters rap)

There's a question that's been bugging me,
And that is what do all of the people see,
In religion, drugs, money, sex and TV?
Hah! (You can just leave all of the sex to me!)

But it's just that I really want to know,

What is it that makes it all go?
What is behind the scene? Is it fat (phat) or lean?
Smart or dumb, kind or mean?
Because it seems to me, small brained though I be,
That life is torn between the keen and the mean,
And if there is a plan, then, my friend,
It’s a scam!

Because as the years go by,

We all try and try,
Not to think of why,
Why are we here?

Hey! There is something else that I've got to know

And that is where do we all go,
When we're done down here – when we've lived our years?
'Cause I find it hard to believe - all of that stuff -
That we will receive some kind of punishment
If our lives were ill spent.
There are lots of things
That make us act so, and I just got to go,
"Whoa! Where was God, you know?"
If He/She created me then She-He's the same as me,
And she should let me be,
And take me as I am because I am
What I am.

And as the years go by,

We all try and try,
Not to think of why,
Why must we die?

The last thing that I've got to say today

Is this, my message of bliss, to all of you:
The fearful and the tearful, give me an earful
'cause life is good! It's too dear for fear!
 So get off your ass, and make each day last,
Because you never know when
You got to go. You might be facing the end
And then you will see, your own mortality
But where it goes from there is up in the air;
It’s anyone's guess I guess, but in case it is zero
You should act like a hero and make the most of it now; take
the biggest hit…Don’t worry ‘bout shit!

And as the years go by

You should try and try
Not to think of why
Why are we here?

Don't think – just don't think about it!

July 2018
Leominster, Massachusetts