Tales of Whoa

Barbed Wire Fence (excerpt from a work in progress)

2012-02-21T18:08:00.000-08:00

Below is the first bit of my work-in-progress, a post-apocalyptic novel tentatively titled Barbed Wire Fence. I would love comments/feedback!

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Hannah Sundgren was only a mile from the encampment when she knew she’d never make it back.

She’d slipped away from the others early; the eastern horizon was just beginning to glow, birds to sing. She got up quietly, padding barefoot across the big main hall, and closed the front door gently, holding the handle to avoid the echoing click that would alert someone to her escape. Only once outside did she stop to pull on her shoes and lace them, and then she walked off quickly, quietly, more afraid of being seen from one of the many windows than she was of the diffuse, pervasive threat that all of them lived under.

She had been only thirteen years old when the epidemics came, taking both of her parents, her older brother and younger sister, and leaving behind only a handful of stunned survivors in the little upstate New York village where she’d lived all her life. The following winter claimed three of those survivors, from a combination of hunger, cold, and despair. When the spring thaw came, and she and two others ventured out of the house they’d chosen for their home because of the presence of a wood stove and a huge supply of firewood, they came across others. Within a year there was a group of nearly a hundred, who’d joined up in ones and twos from nearby villages and farms, many of whom had spent the winter wondering if they were the only people left alive in the world. Several had wept uncontrollably when they found the encampment. Their little group was still growing ten years later, albeit more slowly now; the most recent addition, a woman who had walked all the way from the shores of Lake Ontario in search of other survivors, had only arrived the previous week.

The walk down to the lake was quiet, the sweet June breeze brushing her hair, and most of all, she was alone. Blissfully, wonderfully, and completely alone. A small smile played about her lips as she walked, and she felt the tension drain from her body.

The old, broken-surfaced road turned and dipped, and ahead of her she saw Carlisle Lake, its surface smooth under the orange sun. She broke into a run, glorying in the feeling of the air in her face, the warm light on her skin – and no one there to watch her.

She zigzagged through the trees at the lake’s edge, and then stopped only long enough to strip off her clothes, and dove into the cold, clear water. Afterwards she let the air dry her on a large, flat rock, feeling the tickle as the water droplets diminished to nothing, her muscles warming through as the sun rose higher in the sky.

It was probably an hour later that she got up, dressed, and started the long, uphill walk back to the encampment. She knew she’d have some explaining to do – might even face public censure – but it was worth it, just to get away for a little, to have some privacy.

They’d been doing so well, considering; banding together after the epidemic roared through, a little intrepid group of survivors, held together despite differences in background and attitude by a common desire to survive. Hannah had spent the first year mired in grief over the loss of her family, friends, and way of life, but when spring came, and the first anniversary of the horrific month of the plague, she felt that far from reliving it, she was ready to move on, ready to try to rebuild a future in this strange new world.

But then, the disappearances began, and the landscape shifted again, into a new and darker geometry.

Hannah was about halfway back to the encampment when she felt the first flutter of fear up her back. Had it really been this silent on the way down? She remembered birds calling – the buzzing of insects in the grass – all of the natural noises that are so ubiquitous that they are barely acknowledged. Now, all she heard was the breeze, rustling the leaves on the trees.

Hannah sped up her walking a little, looking around her. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It looked like she remembered it from other trips to the lake, always taken in groups of three or more. It was the encampment’s strictest rule. And, perhaps because of it, they hadn’t lost anyone in six years. No one, for any reason, is ever to be out of sight of at least two others – never, not to go to the bathroom, not to make love, never.

And now here Hannah was, walking back toward the encampment all alone, her hair still damp from her morning’s swim, a stitch beginning in her side as she ignored the sense of panic rising in her belly.

It’ll be okay, she thought. It’s broad daylight. There’s nothing around that’s dangerous. Nothing…

And that was just it; there was nothing. The silence was becoming oppressive. A dead leaf, blown on the breeze, tumbled across the ruined road, and she jumped, her heart skittering unevenly for several minutes afterwards. An abandoned house – one of hundreds of thousands of empty houses in this lonely, depopulated world – seemed to glare at her, its broken-windowed gaze full of malign intent. She forced herself not to look.

The road gave a sweeping curve to the left and began to level out; only an easy mile to go. Over the top of the hill, past the rock outcropping, and through an open glade of maple trees, and she’d see the long, low buildings that had once been Guildford High School spreading out in front of her. Her home for the past ten years, her home for the foreseeable future.

She sped up a little, panting with the exertion, all of the coolness and sweetness of her swim lost in a sheen of sweat. She crested the hill; the rock outcropping was right in front of her. It was…

Hannah stopped, staring. Like an optical illusion suddenly resolving, the scene in front of her shifted, but made less sense than it had before. Because the rock outcropping hadn’t been there on the way down. Her conscious mind shouted at her, That’s impossible, it must have been there, you just didn’t notice it, but at the same time she knew. Where the low lump of gray stone stood had before been an expanse of grassy field.

And that was when she knew she would never get back to the encampment.

It was curious how little that realization affected her emotions. A spinning ribbon of thoughts slid through her mind; It was my turn to cook tonight, and now someone else will have to fill in. I should have taken Vince up on it when he asked me if I wanted to sleep with him last week; now I’ll never get to. I wonder what they’ll do with my things? I wonder…

She started to walk again, slowly, keeping her eyes on the rock the whole time. It looked like slate, angling its way up out of the ground, one edge encrusted with lichen and moss. Bits of it had crumbled away and lay in fragments among the tufts of grass at its base. It looked ordinary, solid, real.

But it wasn’t. She was certain of that.

“Whatever you are,” she said to the rock, “I know you’re not a rock. And I know you’re probably going to kill me. But what I want to know is, why? We’ve been through enough, we humans. Why are you doing this?”

It didn’t answer.

She was twenty feet from it, then fifteen, then ten. Tears were running down her face, but she was unaware of them.

“I won’t run. I know it won’t do any good. But before you kill me, just tell me why.”

Hannah was right before the rock outcropping. She reached out one hand, her fingertips brushed its cool, rough surface, and she had to stop a relieved laugh from bubbling up in her. It’s just a rock! It’s just a rock after all!

She turned away from it, her heart beating a little staccato rhythm as the adrenaline poured into her blood – and that was when the rock tilted upward, its shape changing with the suddenness of a trap springing.

Hannah did not have a chance to scream.

A Cup of Tea

2012-02-18T05:58:00.000-08:00

Flash fiction - about an unsettling visit to a mental institution.

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I spoke to Nannie Mae only once after she was sent to the institution. It was in January, I remember, the weather was bitter cold. I didn't want to go, but she was my aunt, my mother's oldest sister, and I felt I should. Three years were enough to bring me to a place where I thought I should confront this broken piece of my family's past, however painful that confrontation might be.

I don't know what I expected -- people in straitjackets, drawing with crayons clenched in their teeth, making wild purple swoops on pieces of butcher paper. Inmates laughing wildly, their eyes wide and white. The sounds of screams bouncing off metal walls.

There were no straitjackets, no shrieking and moaning. It was a quiet place; the dust hung motionless in the beams of light coming in through the windows, so that the light itself seemed not to be moving, to be something solid that you could pick up and move when you were done with it. Oh, you knew that the quiet was an illusion; the security was there, and an outburst would have brought them running. You could see it in the guarded expressions, in their careful, controlled movements. It was the tense silence of the coiled mainspring of an overwound clock. Hold your breath, let the silence continue. Don't disturb the people. Don't disturb the dust.

Nannie Mae looked up when I came to her, where she sat wearing a house dress with little blue flowers. Her eyes fluttered over me, vague passes over my face like the brush of a light breeze, there and then gone, never resting in one spot for long. She smiled a little.

"John?"

"Hi, Aunt Nan," I said.

Her hands made a restless, fluttering movement, like her eyes. "It's sweet of you to visit."

"I wanted to see how you were doing."

"I'm well, well enough. They treat me nicely here. For the most part."

"Is there anything you need?" I asked, not knowing what to say, wanting to fill the silence. I didn't know if I could bring her things, anyway, or if that was against the rules. I suspected that this place had lots of rules.

"Tea," she said. "I'd like a cup of tea. Two sugars, no lemon, like I like it."

"Oh, okay. I was more thinking of things like books, or music, or something. But I'll see if I can find someone who can get you a cup of tea."

She smiled, and some of the tenseness went out of her; I could see what she had been during my childhood, the eccentric maiden aunt who played the piano, who was just a little bit different -- not insane. Not yet. Not yet the person who would eventually, by order of the court, be committed to this place for the rest of her life.

"John, dear," she said. "How is Adelaide? I do miss her. Would she come see me some time, do you think?"

I looked at her, searching for some sign that she was kidding, that she knew that what she was saying wasn't possible, but her vague, watery blue eyes just kept up their ceaseless, restless movement, never giving me a window by which to see into her thoughts.

"Aunt Nan, mom's dead. She died three years ago. Don't you remember?"

There was no shock of sudden recollection; the truth and her version of it melted into each other seamlessly. "Oh, of course, that's right. And your father? How is he?"

"He's managing. Bonnie and I visit him a lot."

"A good man, your father. I'm glad. But, John, there's just..." A frown wrinkled her forehead, and I thought that perhaps there might be more, that she could find something in her memories of the real world that she could catch a hook into, and let it pull her along, pull her out of this dusty half light into the full light of day. The harsh, unyielding light that shows us everything, whether we want to see it or not.

Her frown deepened, and her mouth opened a little, her eyes focusing on some distant point for a moment, then came back to my face.

"I never got my tea, you know," she said, raising one hand and then letting it fall back into her lap.

I made an excuse to leave, saying I had an appointment, I couldn't stay long. She said okay, that was all right. Nothing seemed to register much with her, or at least not for very long. So I made my lame excuses and left, eager to get back to the free air and the free light. But as I left, I asked the attendant to bring her a cup of tea.

Two sugars, no lemon.

Five Words

2012-02-11T03:45:00.000-08:00

A new piece of flash fiction, about a guy with a secret.

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I should have known better, I suppose. All of those years of caution, and then in one moment I said one sentence, spoken out of the sheer exhaustion of always having to hide. Afterwards I stood there, mouth hanging open a little, breathing hard, looking at their appalled faces. And I imagined sounds -- the sound of a boulder crashing downhill, the noise of walls collapsing, of a stone edifice sliding into ruin.

It began in high school. Everything about me was a practiced game. I was a strong guy, on the wrestling team, and made my way through classes by flashing a handsome smile, being polite, and always asking for help. I found out a profound truth; no one wants to fail a really nice guy. I played that card every day, and in four years I was wearing the blue robes and the funny hat, shaking hands with the principal as he handed me the piece of paper that said that the high school had done the best they could with me.

I never really planned on college, but my wrestling coach pushed for it. Pushed hard. I just smiled and hoped he'd forget about it. He didn't, and a scout he'd invited saw me at a match. I had a wrestling scholarship before it really registered with me what had happened.

I was afraid, but I shouldn't have been. The state college I attended wasn't so much different than my high school experience, and I found that a friendly smile went just as far there. I got a succession of Cs and Ds -- passing, enough to keep me moving through the ranks just as I had in high school. I declared a business major, graduated again, and within three weeks had gotten a job as a junior manager in a marketing firm.

You push a heavy weight up a hill, knowing that at some point it will get too steep, the weight will turn beneath your hands and begin to bounce back downward, very likely crushing you in the process. But you keep pushing because it's what you've always done. Or maybe that's not the right image; it's like walls, walls that have been built to fit whatever people believe you to be. It may well be that the strongest force in the world is the force of other people's expectations. It builds a structure around you, people add stones and joists and bricks, as they think they've figured out who you are, what you are, where you're going. The longer you let it go on, the more difficult it is to alter it, and eventually the only way to alter it is to destroy it completely.

I rose through the ranks, still smiling, shaking hands, warm, friendly, the model of the honest, hard-working guy who always did what was needed. But the secret -- it was still that boulder ahead of me, threatening to go out of control; still the flaw in the foundation that would bring the entire building down.

I made senior manager today.

At the celebration there was cake, punch, gifts. The president of the company was there. I was presented with a book of business wisdom -- that's what the president told me, as he handed it to me, saying with a grin that I hardly needed it. But then he turned to the crowd, all holding their plates of cake and punch cups, and said, "I think no better description of your contribution to the company could be stated than the passage I've marked on page 79. Would you do us the honor of reading it to us?"

And I stood there. A moment passed, and stretched out to the breaking point. I looked at the bright expectation in their faces, and the weight of it all became insupportable. At that moment I knew that the boulder had slipped loose, the walls had begun to crumble.

And I turned to the crowd, and I said, "I can't. I can't read."

First draft done, "Poison the Well"

2012-02-01T16:07:00.000-08:00

Well, I am done with another first draft, this time of a murder mystery called Poison the Well. It's the first mystery I've attempted; it's a genre I've loved since I was twelve, when my mom gave me a copy of Agatha Christie's amazing And Then There Were None for my birthday. I've been hooked on mysteries ever since, and have read probably 80% of Christie's humongous oeuvre, as well as most of Dorothy Sayers, Ellis Peters, and a handful of others.

It's an interesting genre to write in. I found that the most difficult thing (and the jury's still not in with a verdict as to whether I succeeded) was giving enough clues regarding whodunit that the reader won't get to the end and say, "Wow. That was cheap. I never even had a chance to figure that out," while not making the clues so blatant that the reader figures it out on page 12. Given that I knew whodunit from page 1, I felt like every clue screamed, "HEY! READER! NOTICE THIS! IT'S IMPORTANT!" The only person who, thus far, has read it from beginning to end didn't figure it out, and (interestingly) had devised a rather plausible alternate solution -- but she did say, when she got to the end, that she thought my solution was pretty good. I currently have two other folks (one being my long-suffering cousin Carla, who has been beta reader on just about everything I've written; the other is my wife) taking a look at it, and we'll see what they think.

Despite the fact that my writing is fairly plot-driven, the most important thing to me is the characters, and here I had an assemblage of detectives who were just plain fun to write about. The context is that a seemingly unsolvable murder has been taken on by a private detective agency, run by the elegant, silver-haired Parsifal Snowe. The twist? The detectives are all psychics, and use their various talents to obtain information about the suspects and the murder victim (whose identity is a mystery through most of the book). We have efficient, brusque Bethany Hale, who has precognitive dreams; gentle, hesitant family man Troy Seligman, who can perform astral projection; the swaggering womanizer, Seth Augustine, who is a psychometer -- someone who can pick up emotional signatures from objects; the odd, mysterious telepath, Callista Lee; and the stammering introvert, Jeff Kolnikoff, who is telekinetic. I can say without hesitation that they were some of the most entertaining characters that I've ever written about, and my friend who read the manuscript is already trying to nudge me into turning it into a series.

So, now I'm into edit mode, which I'm guessing will take me a couple of months to get through, and then there will be the edits from my beta readers -- Carla, my wife, and one or two other folks with sharp eyes that owe me a favor. But I hope by May or so to have my next book out -- if you'd like to put your mind to solving a murder for which (1) no one seems to know who the victim is, (2) no one has an apparent motive, and (3) over two hundred people had opportunity. How could such a thing happen? You'll just need to wait... and read Poison the Well.

Book Review: Away With The Fairies

2012-01-22T03:41:00.000-08:00

It is regrettably seldom that I don't want a book to end, and that was certainly the case with my most recent read, Away With the Fairies by Vivienne Tuffnell. I was a little skeptical at first, not because of any concern over the skill of the author -- that was obvious from the first paragraph -- but because the main character, a new mother married to an Anglican minister, seemed so different from the kind of character I typically relate to that I was afraid that I wasn't going to be able to connect to the story.

I needn't have worried. Isobel Trelawny, the ex-rebel-child artist, now a settled mother of two, is a dynamic, funny, endearing character, and her story is engaging. At the beginning, she is trying to cope with the difficult, but ordinary -- balancing a family and a career, dealing with the stresses of her husband's job pushing her into conforming to a set of norms she's not comfortable with, trying to find time to keep her marriage vital. She also is struggling with bigger issues -- reconciling herself to the recent deaths of both of her parents. But all of that is swamped -- or, in many ways, coalesced -- by events that she is about to experience that are very far from the realm of the ordinary.

Her minister husband, Mickey, suggests one day that what she needs is a retreat -- a place she can go to work on her art, away from the children and the distractions. It will, he says, also be a place to go on holidays, and a retirement home one day. But the house they choose has some surprises in store, and it would be unfair of me to give away any more of the plot!

Tuffnell has a deft hand with characterization -- even the minor characters are clearly drawn, their voices sure. Isobel's friend Chloe, and her obnoxious neo-pagan neighbor Maggie Broadbent, are especially well done. (I swear, I've seen Maggie at a Renaissance faire somewhere...) Isobel's interactions with her husband and children are tender and funny, and within a very few pages we are soundly on her side, and we continue to root for her every inch of the way.

Away With the Fairies makes for a sweet read... I didn't hesitate to give it a five-star review on Amazon, and I hope you'll give it a try, too!

A happy update

2012-01-08T05:17:00.000-08:00

To all of you who have been following the frustrating saga of my difficulties with formatting, I'm happy to report that due to a late-night breakthrough by my lovely wife, I've now been able to get past the file conversion hell I've been in for the past ten days. All of my e-books are now formatted, uploaded, and available on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The whole thing, though, still has me shaking my head a little, because I still don't fully understand (1) what went wrong, nor (2) why what we did yesterday fixed it. Being a scientist by training, and a rationalist by inclination, I always want to see not only that things work, but why they work -- and here, I really don't have any clue. All of this just proves to me, once again, that technology is a little beyond me.

Oh, well. As long as I'm back in the game, I really can't see myself fretting about it. But for those of you who were waiting to get one of my books on the Kindle you got for Christmas -- they're ready for your enjoyment!

Boldly going backwards

2012-01-06T05:30:00.000-08:00

This week has been a rough one. I'm trying to recover, thus far with only partial success, but maybe I'll be able to see my way out of this at some point.

It started last week, when I noticed that most of the indie e-books I've been reading (many of which have been wonderful) had an "About the Author" page at the end. I thought this would be a nice idea, so I wrote something up, and went back to my manuscripts and appended it to each of them. I then went through and reformatted and reconverted them, to upload them to Amazon.

The conversion process completely wrecked the formatting. On all of them. I went from having basically presentable (if not, perhaps, professional) presentations of my work, to something that looked like it had been formatted by a fourth grader.

So, I started trying to figure out what went wrong. Evidently, the conversion software had changed since my first upload; there was some incompatibility happening that hadn't happened the first time. Upon querying some author friends, I found that Amazon is now only able to upload files in .mobi format (mine were being converted to .epub).

So I tried to use my conversion software (Calibre) to convert my files to .mobi. This resulted in (I am not making this up) a document that had every word deleted, except any words in italics. At first, it took me a while to figure out what I was looking at -- but finally, I said, "Good lord. There are only about five words left per chapter... and the only words left are italicized." How, exactly, the program did this, is beyond me.

To make a long story short, I have (to date) downloaded four different conversion programs. None of them have worked. I have tried converting from .epub, .html, and .rtf files. All have resulted in some form of screwed up formatting -- certainly nothing that would be adequate for publication. Between myself, and three other people who've tried to make this work, I've spent over ten hours trying to convert a single file -- with zero success.

Result: I've taken all of my e-books offline, indefinitely. And this means I've had to undo all of the marketing stuff I had in place -- webpages, links, and my page on the Independent Authors' Network -- because now none of the links work.

To say that all of this has been disheartening is a vast understatement. It has completely taken the wind out of my sails. I haven't written at all since this began, except to keep up with my blog Skeptophilia -- every time I sit down at the computer, all I can think of is, "What's the point?" Now, it's not that I really think that there's no point to writing if I can't publish it; it's more that the collapse of what I'd tried to put together has demoralized me to the extent that for the moment, I haven't been able to get past it.

I've had some offers of help, and a couple of people who've said, "Please don't give up! I love your writing!" Also, a very kind woman who belongs to the PubWrite network, and whose specialty is getting manuscripts ready for e-publication, offered to do a couple of them for free. (Her ordinary rate is $50 per manuscript.) It's a tempting offer, but I demurred, at least for the time being -- part of it is stupid pride ("I want to do it myself!") and a resistance to becoming a charity case, and part of it is that given that I currently have thirteen manuscripts on offer, I would still have to pay over $500 to get them all back together. And given that all told, I made a grand total of about $30 last year from my fiction, it seems like a lot of money to put into an enterprise that seems to be going nowhere fast anyway.

I've spent most of the week in the Slough of Despond, indulging in a lot of not very becoming Feeling Sorry For Myself. But now that the initial punch in the gut has worn off, the question is how to proceed. I'm trying to determine if I really can afford to invest a lot of money into what was supposed to be a Do-It-Yourself project, and how I might wheedle my wife into supporting that decision (compounded by the fact that she just told me last week that as of the first of the year, we'd set aside enough money to carry us through the summer months, when I have no income). The only alternative at the moment seems to be giving up, and as alternatives go, that one kind of sucks.

Right as all this was going down, I posted as my Facebook status a line I'd stolen from the funny sendup of motivational posters, Despair.com -- "Winners never quit, and quitters never win; but if you never win and you never quit, you're a moron." And one of my writer friends responded, "Better to be a moron and eventually succeed than a quitter and become a sure-enough failure. Soldier through and never give up." Which is certainly good advice, even if at the moment I don't know how to put it into practice.

A Clockwork Mouse

2011-12-31T05:32:00.000-08:00

A dark short story about a very angry ten-year-old boy and an antique wind-up mouse.

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A Clockwork Mouse

Jacob Clay was already in a black mood when he got sent to his room by his grandmother early one Saturday morning.

It had been raining for four days straight. Under other circumstances, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Had it been summer, rain was just an invitation to run around in the back yard wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, pretending to be stranded on a jungle island, fighting off wild animals, dragons, or cannibals, or possibly all three. But the windy chill of October had settled in, and getting soaking wet when it was forty degrees outside wasn’t appealing. Inside, there was only so much time you could spend reading and playing with toys, many of which had outlasted his interest in them. So he had amused himself for a while messing with his grandmother’s stuff.

This was always dangerous ground. Grandma Connie was a stern woman with slim patience for children. She could tell a mean ghost story, when she was in the mood, but she was not someone who simply enjoyed kids being kids. So when she found Jacob in the living room, playing Jungle Adventure with her collectable porcelain animal statues, and discovered that he had already chipped the unicorn’s horn, she promptly sent him to his room with an adjuration to “Stay there until you learn how to respect others’ property.”

Jacob stomped up the stairs, his face set in a twist of irritation, and plunked himself down on his bed and looked around. There was even less to do here; if he was at loose ends in the whole house, what did Grandma Connie expect him to do when he was confined in his room?

He tried, for about five minutes, to look through one of his books on dinosaurs. Then he dropped that on the floor, and pulled out a box with a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of a puppy on the front. He knew that that one had a piece missing – one of the puppy’s ears – and he shoved the box under his bed with his foot. Then he sighed, listening to the rain slashing against the window.

After a moment, he stood up, went to his door, and opened it, and listened carefully. Grandma Connie was down in the kitchen, it sounded like – probably baking. Whatever else you could say about Grandma Connie, her cookies, pies, and cakes were first-class. He heard the clink of measuring cups, and then a drawer opened, and then closed.

Jacob eyed the stairs at the end of the hall. One set led down, back into the living room, where he was certain to get caught if he was heard.

The other set led up to the attic.

It had been a while since he’d been in the attic. It wasn’t off-limits, not explicitly, but the one time he’d gone up there alone, his grandmother had said, “What were you doing up there? Cobwebs and old books and spiders and god-alone-knows-what up there. Nothing to interest a ten-year-old boy.”

She was sorely misjudging what would be of interest to a ten-year-old boy, of course; just the fact that it was mysterious, dimly lit, and smelled like dust and antiquity made it attractive. So did the fact that Grandma Connie obviously didn’t want him to go up there. What, exactly, was she hiding?

Jacob peered down the hallway. There was no reason he’d get caught, if he was careful. He knew from experience that once he was banished to his room, he was effectively forgotten, at least until lunchtime or dinnertime came. He tiptoed down the hall, and then looked up the stairs to the landing.

The stairs were wooden, and creaked; and he hadn’t been up them enough to know which ones were the noisiest. But at that moment, Grandma Connie turned on a blender in the kitchen, and Jacob seized the moment and sprinted up the stairs to the landing, then turned and went up the last set to the closed attic door.

He reached out and turned the doorknob handle, and pulled the door open at the same moment that the noise of the blender ceased. The door hinges made an alarming groaning noise, and he froze, listening for the noise of footsteps. When, after a moment, there was no sound of pursuit, he walked into the attic.

The floorboards squeaked softly under his light tread, as he walked around looking at the bookshelves. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of books up here; a twenty-volume set called History of the World, a set of gardening encyclopedias that looked like they might be antiques, some books written in French and Spanish and Dutch and Swedish. Jacob had heard Grandma Connie talking about her husband, Jacob’s grandfather, whom he had never met – Grandpa Charles had been a language professor, “fluent in everything,” his mother had once told him, but had died of a heart attack twelve years ago in his classroom. Jacob wished he’d known him. He sounded interesting.

Further along were rows and stacks of boxes. Some of them sounded boring – “Linens.” “Christmas Decorations.” “China.” But then he happened upon one that said, “Toys – Jamie.”

Jamie? Who was Jamie? The box was taped shut with strapping tape that was peeling and yellow with age, and the adhesive was mostly crumbly, and bits of it clung to the fingertips like damp flour. He moved some other boxes aside, and pulled it out into the center of the floor, and then pulled the remains of the tape away and opened the flap.

The items inside were old; Jacob knew that immediately. There were stuffed animals, but not the shiny plush of the ones he’d only recently outgrown; these were made of cloth, with button eyes and noses of felt, and when he picked one up, it was heavy and a little stiff, like it was stuffed with sawdust. There was a game called “Bagatelle,” which had steel balls in a glass-topped wooden maze – the aim, it seemed, was to move the balls around and drop them down holes. There was a Lionel metal train that looked like it had seen hard service – its paint was chipped and worn, and the one of the cars was missing the hook to connect it to the next one. Jacob set all of these aside.

In the bottom of the box was a mouse. At first, Jacob thought it was a real mouse, and he felt a little flutter of fear; but very quickly he realized his mistake. The mouse wasn’t very lifelike. It was small, and white, but made of smooth metal, with painted-on eyes and whiskers. It had wheels instead of feet, and a hole in its back for a key. It, too, was well-worn; one of the wheels was a little crooked.

He picked it up, and all of a sudden, all of the angry feelings that had been building in the last weeks coalesced into one furious, needle-sharp thought; here he was, stuck with his grandmother because his parents Needed Time To Talk About Their Relationship, and anyway they had to work during the day, and Grandma Connie didn’t even want him around, and now he was stuck with rummaging around in some old junk in the attic to entertain himself.

Bitterly, he tipped the box, and heard a low thunk. He looked in, and saw what it was; the clockwork mouse’s key. He took it out, fit the key into the hole, and wound it up, then set the mouse on the floor. It began to scoot around in circles, making rhythmic squeaking noises that actually did sound fairly mouse-like. Something about the way it moved made all the frustrated rage in him bubble to the surface – the mouse seemed to be carving a circular hole in the wood plank floor, a hole in which to pour all of his anger. He felt its creaky little voice say, a voice only he could hear, Give me your fury, and I will make something of it.

“I hate this,” Jacob said, watching the mouse scurrying in its pointless loops. “I hate everyone. I hate them all, and I especially hate Grandma Connie. I wish she’d fall down and break her leg.”

There was a sudden shout and a crash from downstairs, and Jacob looked up, his heart thudding in his chest, as the mouse wound down and stopped moving.

Jacob’s mom came home from work just as the paramedics were lifting Grandma Connie into the back of the ambulance. One of the paramedics asked Jacob’s mom if they wanted to ride in the back of the ambulance to the hospital, which sounded to Jacob like it would be fun; but Grandma Connie said, her voice thin with pain, “No, Eva, can you just clean up the kitchen? I don’t want…” She glanced at Jacob, and Jacob knew she meant, “I don’t want him bothering me when I have a broken leg.” Then Grandma Connie looked at Jacob’s mom and said, “You can come down later.”

So Jacob’s mom brought him back inside, and gave him a big hug through her tears and told him what a brave, smart boy he was, that he remembered how to call 911 and kept his head and took care of Grandma Connie. Then she looked around her at the kitchen, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and said, “Well. We better get this cleaned up, and then we’ll go down to the hospital and see how Grandma is doing.”

The little step-stool that Grandma Connie used to reach high shelves lay on its side, and a glass mixing bowl was in sharp, multicolored fragments all over the linoleum. Another bowl, with eggs and milk and cream and molasses, sat forlornly on the counter. Jacob’s mom got a broom, and told Jacob to go put on shoes so his feet wouldn’t get cut. Then they cleaned up the kitchen. Jacob had a momentary hope that his mom would finish making whatever it was that Grandma Connie had been working on, but she upturned the mixing bowl with the eggs and everything over the sink, and ran some water into it, and then said, “I need to call your aunt and uncle and let them know what happened.”

Jacob went back upstairs, and heard just the beginning of the conversation, “Hi, Susan? It’s Eva. I’m just calling to let you know there’s been an accident. Mom fell in her kitchen… yes, she’s going to be fine, but she broke her leg. She’s been taken to St. Stephen’s. We’ll be going down soon… Jacob was home, he called 911… yes, he is…”

The voices faded as he walked back up to the attic. The door was still standing open; he saw his footprints on the dusty floor, the barefoot impression of toes, sole, heel, leading along the bookshelves and then to the box of toys, which still lay scattered on the floor. He looked down at the clockwork mouse, still now, its painted eyes staring up at him.

He looked at it for a long time, without moving. The key still protruded from its back, and he could just see beneath it the misaligned wheels that had sent it in wild circles earlier. He reached down, and picked it up, held it in his hand.

“What else can you do?” he asked it solemnly.

It didn’t answer.

“Jacob!” he heard his mom’s voice calling from downstairs. “Let’s go. We need to go to the hospital, and see how Grandma is doing.”

“Coming!” he shouted, but never took his eyes off the mouse.

Then he thought of the way the weekend was being eaten up – his grandmother ruining the morning by sending him to his room, and now he was going to have to spend the afternoon at the hospital. He’d been to the hospital before, when his Great-Aunt Judith had been dying of liver cancer, and mostly what he remembered was the smell of antiseptic and the color white and the boredom, great crashing hours of boredom, sitting still and waiting for it all to be over so he could go home. And now, his precious weekend was being taken again, and looming on the horizon of Monday morning was the bulky frame of Mrs. Marshall, his fourth grade teacher, whom he and his classmates couldn’t stand. Mrs. Marshall seemed to leer at him, waiting, waiting for him to leave the attic so she could confine him to his seat and make him multiply and add and read stupid stories about the Pilgrims and write down answers on worksheets.

“Jacob!” his mother called again.

Jacob quickly wound up the mouse, and said, “I hope Mrs. Marshall gets really sick.” Then he set down the mouse on the floor, and let it run its squeaky circles by itself. He ran downstairs to his bedroom, and was just putting on his jacket when his mother came up to see what was keeping him.

Mrs. Marshall did not show up to school Monday. The sub, Miss McLaughlin, let them have free read for as long as they wanted to, brought her guitar and sang songs with them, and art class ran a half-hour over into math before she realized what had happened.

When Mrs. Marshall still hadn’t returned by Thursday, the principal, Mrs. Stefanovic, came into the class with a grave expression and said that Mrs. Marshall was in the hospital with pneumonia, and probably wouldn’t be back for a while, but not to worry because she was already improving. The children, Mrs. Stefanovic said, could help her get better by spending art class designing a big card to send to Mrs. Marshall in the hospital. Miss McLaughlin said they’d be happy to.

Jacob walked home that day, thinking about how he would destroy the clockwork mouse when he got home.

I can bury it in the back yard, he thought. It’ll rust and the wheels will stick and even if someone finds it, it won’t run. Then he thought about taking a hammer to it, watching the frame dent, the eyes skew, as the springs and gear wheels that drove its axles came flying out. It’ll never run again, he thought. It’ll never hurt anyone again.

Then, another thought came to him: What if the mouse won’t let you destroy it? What if it tries to kill you?

But this was such an awful idea that he started to repeat to himself the mantra he always used when he’d been scared at night when he was little – not real, not real, none of that scary stuff is real. And by the time he got home, he had convinced himself. None of it was real. He hadn’t caused Grandma Connie’s accident; he hadn’t caused Mrs. Marshall’s pneumonia. There was no need to break the mouse, any more than destroying his book Ten Terrifying Ghost Stories would have made any difference to what he dreamed at night, alone in the dark.

Grandma Connie came home from the hospital three days after her fall; she’d had surgery to pin her leg bone where it was broken, and Jacob’s mom had said, “Falls at that age are never easy to heal from.” Grandma Connie was sterner and crankier than ever, and Jacob seemed to spend most of the time he wasn’t at school getting her tea, glasses of water, toast with butter, and turning the television off or on, turning the volume up or down. When Jacob’s mom came over to have dinner with them, which she did every three evenings or so, she never stayed long.

Jacob didn’t mention about Mrs. Marshall being sick.

Friday night, Jacob’s mom came for dinner, and after cleaning up the dinner dishes and helping Grandma Connie to her recliner, she took Jacob aside.

“Jacob, honey,” she began, and then stopped.

Jacob tensed. His mother never called him “honey” unless it was bad news; she’d called him that when his other grandmother, Grandma Abigail, had died; she’d called him that when she’d told him he was going to live with his grandmother while she and Jacob’s dad Worked On Their Relationship.

“What, mom?” Jacob said, his voice shaking a little.

“Your dad and I… we’ve decided it’s for the best for everyone if, well, if we live apart. Your dad… he’s been seeing someone. Her name is Cecile, and he’s going away to live with her. He’s moving to Baltimore.”

“He just left me?” Jacob said, his voice coming out a squeak, like the wheels of the clockwork mouse. “Will I… will I get to see him?”

“Yes, of course. When he’s moved in and settled. He left this morning, and we’ll… you’ll… go and visit him soon.” She tried to smile, and failed. “But it means that you will come back to live with me again. I know you’ll miss your Grandma Connie, but…”

Jacob jumped up, ran out of the room, ignored his mother’s cry of, “Jacob, honey, wait…”, ignored his grandmother’s annoyed exclamation as he ran through the living room, passed the cabinet with the porcelain animal statues, and up the stairs. He didn’t pause by his bedroom door, but continued up to the attic, slamming the door behind him, pulling the chain that turned on the single light bulb hanging by a cord from the ceiling, setting it swinging, making crazy rocking shadows move across the walls and floor.

The clockwork mouse was still where it had run down from the last time; no one had been up here since. Breathing hard, his face pinched with anger, Jacob grabbed the mouse, and wound it up. He hadn’t even set it down before he snarled, “I hope my dad gets in a car crash on his way to Baltimore and has to stay in the hospital for five years.”

The mouse’s wheels had only begun squeaking before Jacob’s mom appeared in the attic door, and she said, gently, “Jacob, honey, come downstairs. We need to talk. It’s going to be okay.”

Jacob stood, hearing the clockwork mouse skittering over the floorboards behind him, and went to her, thinking bleakly, She’s lying to me, and she knows she’s lying. It will never be okay.

When the call came the next morning, Jacob wasn’t really surprised.

He was up in his room, still in his pajamas, playing with his old GameBoy. He tensed when the phone rang, and listened – and he heard his mom say, “Oh, god, oh, no,” and start crying.

Her appearance at his door ten minutes later, with a tremulous, “Jacob, honey, there’s been an accident,” was met with a blank stare. He already knew what she was going to say.

After that, it took hours before he had time to escape, unnoticed, to the attic. Family and friends came over, everyone wanted to talk to him and comfort him and reassure him. Even Grandma Connie tried to be nice to him, offering to read him a story. But eventually he was able to get away, and he padded barefoot up to the attic, crossed the floor to where the toy box was.

The clockwork mouse still sat there, its emotionless eyes looking up at him.

“You did all this,” he said to the mouse.

The mouse said nothing, just kept staring at him.

He picked up the key, and wound it three times, feeling the springs tense as they coiled inside the metal body. Jacob looked at the mouse, and said, “I wish everything bad that has happened would be gone. Grandma Connie’s broken leg, Mrs. Marshall’s pneumonia, and my dad… being in a coma.” His voice broke a little on the last one, but he was able to finish the sentence, and he set the mouse down, and listened to its little squeaks as the mechanism inside it propelled it around on the floor.

He watched it until it stopped moving, and he stood completely still for a while. Surely, soon there would be some kind of shout from Grandma Connie that her leg was miraculously healed, the phone ringing that his father was awake and was going to be okay?

Nothing happened.

It didn’t work, he thought, alarm rising in him. It didn’t work. Maybe it can only do bad things.

“You did all this,” he said again, anger rising in his voice. He picked the mouse up, held it close to his face, and a thought came, seeming to come from outside him: No. You did. You did all this. Your anger. Your rage. You. Not me. And once done, things cannot be undone. You chose, and that is all.

“No,” Jacob said. “It was you. Why? Why did you do it?”

He looked into the mouse’s eyes, searching for some sign of life, some sign of recognition that he existed; but its expression was as lifeless as ever.

I am only guilty as a knife used to slay a man is guilty. I was only the tool that you used.

“Who was Jamie? Did he turn you evil?”

I do not remember him. If I was simply a child’s toy once, that is done now.

“I’ll destroy you,” he whispered to it.

It won’t change anything. You will still have done what you have done, even if the tool you used is broken.

Jacob fell to his knees. A pair of tears slid down his cheeks, unnoticed. He said to the mouse, “What can I do?”

Nothing. It is too late.

Jacob inserted the key into the mouse’s back. As he wound it up, he heard his mother call to him, “Jacob, honey, where are you?”

He shouted, automatically, “Coming, mom,” and continued to wind.

Too late. I have done what I have done, and it is too late. Too late for Grandma Connie, too late for Mrs. Marshall, too late for my dad. And too late for me.

The springs reached full tension. He set the mouse down, and said, “I wish I was dead.”

The mouse started its chittering run, and Jacob felt a sensation of being lifted; he was on his feet, turning toward the stairs. And he thought, It was lying. The mouse was lying. It’s not just a tool; it’s evil.

He felt his legs being forced to move. A part of his brain shouted, Stop! Stop! but his body wouldn’t obey; it was a monumental effort to resist it, but he was able to turn and snatch the clockwork mouse up from the floor. He felt its wheels turning frantically, their vibrations tickling his palm, and that was all his conscious will could do; his feet began to move, walking, then running, toward the top of the stairs, not pausing as the precipice approached.

He saw the open door, and outside it the narrow staircase, rush toward him; and with a last desperate shout he hurled the clockwork mouse against the wall. He heard it strike the metal hinge of the door frame, and saw it explode – wheels, cogs, and springs flying into the air about him. The desperate force pushing him stopped suddenly. His frame relaxed, and a smile crossed Jacob’s face, but his momentum shot him forward like an arrow from a bow. His body, as graceful as a high diver, flung forward into the air, and he fell headlong down the stairs.

The Germ Theory of Disease

2011-12-28T05:07:00.000-08:00

A different take on werewolves in the state of Washington.

************************

The Germ Theory of Disease

Olivia Tanner realized it wasn’t going to be an ordinary ride home from work when a middle-aged businessman turned into a werewolf on the #217 bus from downtown Seattle to Bellevue.

It was very late at night, one of the last bus runs of the evening, and there weren’t many people aboard – just herself, a nice-looking, well-built blond guy in jeans and a sweatshirt sitting across from her reading a Stephen King novel, a sleeping teenager in the back row, and one or two others. Near the front was a suit-clad, overweight businessman, his balding head sporting a rather pathetic attempt at a combover. He had a briefcase sitting on the seat next to him, and was looking at some papers in a manila folder. There was no conversation, just the swish of the traffic, the whining of the bus engine, and the occasional burst of static and unintelligible talk from the bus driver’s intercom.

They were on the middle of the I-90 bridge when it happened. Olivia later reflected that this was an atrocious place for a werewolf to appear suddenly. Even if the bus had stopped, there was nowhere useful to run, and given that it was night the choices would have boiled down to being eaten by the werewolf or getting run over by a car.

She was staring out of the window into the darkness, thinking about how glad she’d be to get back to her apartment and her bed – when she heard a noise, like someone tearing a bedsheet. She looked around, wondering what had happened, and that’s when she saw it. Standing up from the seat where the businessman had been seated was a creature that was unmistakably a werewolf. Its forehead was sloping, with dark, almond-shaped eyes and bristling brows. It had a long, tapered snout, and as she stared at it, one side of the muzzle lifted, revealing a sharp yellow canine tooth. Pointed ears, rimmed with coarse hair, stood up from the side of its head. It gave a low snarl, and turned toward her. Their eyes met, and the creature’s eyes narrowed. As it turned, she saw that its body was still basically human, but muscled like no one she’d ever seen. It was naked, its chest and back hairy, and was prodigiously male. One hand came out – its nails were long, pointed claws, like an eagle’s talons – and it grasped the seat, steadying itself. She heard the little popping sound as its hand closed on the headrest and the claws punctured the plastic lining. Muscles in its abdomen and legs stood out, tensing, as it readied itself to jump at her.

Through all of this, Olivia sat completely still, transfixed, like a mouse mesmerized by a snake. She shrank back, never taking her eyes off the werewolf, and tried to push her body backwards against the seat. A whimpering noise came from her open mouth, but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream, couldn’t do anything but sit and wait for the thing to spring.

Then she caught a second movement, from the blond man across the aisle, and she turned to see him rise from his seat. But it wasn’t him – was it? The man who now stood next to her, also mother-naked, muscles rippling, his face shining in its own light, had wings. And a sword. The sword was glowing so brightly in the dimly lit bus that Olivia could hardly look at it. The wings, huge, feathered wings, speckled brown like a hawk’s, arose from broad shoulders. His eyes were fixed on the werewolf; and the werewolf swiveled its horrid head away from Olivia, and looked at the angelic figure standing in the aisle. It gave a rough, angry growl, almost like a cough, and leapt at the winged man.

As the werewolf passed Olivia, it made a sweeping pass at her face with one clawed hand; she ducked, and felt the wind as it missed her by inches. The winged man brought up his sword, and there was a swish and a thud, and the werewolf’s head flew backwards, landed in the aisle, and rolled under a seat. Dark blood gouted up from the severed neck. The werewolf’s clawed hands rose for a moment, as if to investigate this strange condition of being headless; then it realized it was dead, and tumbled forward with a crash.

The angel figure let his sword drop to his side. His other hand came up, and smoothed back his blond hair. Olivia just stared, her eyes perfect circles of terror. The man looked down at himself, seemed to realize that he was being watched by a strange woman while wearing nothing but an embarrassed smile. He shrugged, and said, “Oops.” Then he sat down in the seat, his wings giving a little rustling sound as they folded inward, and he once again became the tall, lean man with the Stephen King book, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. He looked over at her, smiled and shrugged again. Olivia looked at the floor. The body of the werewolf was gone; once more the businessman was sitting in his seat, his balding head shining a little in the light from the overhead fluorescents. He seemed to be feeling ill; he was sweating, and as she watched, he passed a hand across his face, and coughed.

There were still puncture marks in the seat headrest two rows up.

She looked back at the blond man, opened her mouth, and tried to think of something to say. Nothing came out.

“Hey,” he finally said. “You want to go to the Starbucks in Eastgate and talk?”

Olivia just nodded. Afterwards, she was never sure why she acquiesced, but at the time, it seemed like the only possible thing to do.

The blond man, whose name was Nathan Hendrickson, sat across from Olivia in the Starbucks, drinking a mocha cappuccino with extra whipped cream and cinnamon sprinkles. A raspberry danish, so far untouched, sat on a plate in front of him. At first they just engaged in small talk – Nathan said that he worked as a manager at Chili’s downtown, and Olivia responded that she was a clerk in a clothing store. Both of them lived in Bellevue, took the bus because they hated the traffic, and had a serious sweet tooth.

“But…” Olivia began, setting down her cup of vanilla chai and trying to think of how to phrase the question.

“What the fuck just happened on the bus?” Nathan said, in a conversational voice.

“Yeah,” Olivia said with some feeling.

Nathan took a bite of his raspberry danish. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“I thought it would be. But you’re the one who suggested we come here. I figured you wanted to explain it.”

“Well, let me just say this; check out the obituary columns in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tomorrow. The following day, at the latest.”

“Looking for who?”

“The bald guy. He’ll be dead in twenty-four hours.”

Olivia frowned, looked down, shook her head. “Can you just tell me what happened? It looked to me like you saved my life. But… Jesus. You had wings. And no clothes on.”

Nathan blushed. “Yeah, sorry about that. It just happens. I can’t take my clothes with me.”

“It’s okay. I mean, you…” She stopped. She’d been about to say, “You look just fine naked,” but decided that wasn’t something you said to someone you’d just met a half-hour ago, even if that person had just saved you from being ripped limb from limb by a werewolf.

“The issue is,” Nathan said, “you weren’t supposed to see all that. Most people can’t. Didn’t it strike you as a little weird that no one else said anything, screamed, nothing? The kid in the back didn’t even wake up. The bus driver didn’t slam on the brakes.”

“Of course,” Olivia said, but truthfully, it hadn’t really registered with her until that moment.

“Most people can’t see these… events. When they happen. Which isn’t often.”

“So…that bald dude wasn’t really a werewolf?”

“Well, he was. But not what you probably think of when you think of the word ‘werewolf.’ You know, some dude who turns into a wolf at the full moon, rips people up, and so on.”

“What is it, then?”

“Well, you know about the germ theory of disease, right?”

“It’s a theory?” Olivia said. “I thought it was true.”

Nathan smiled. “Well, back in the 19^th century, it was just a theory. People had this idea that these little things, these blobs you can only see under a microscope, caused things like scarlet fever and cholera and diphtheria. Other people said, ‘Bullshit. Little things like that, causing people to cough their lungs up? Ridiculous.’ There was one Scottish doctor who was so contemptuous of the germ theory of disease that he used to sharpen his scalpel on the sole of his boot before surgery.”

“He must have had a hell of a lot of malpractice insurance.”

“No such thing, in those days. But the point is, what you can’t see can kill you. It just took a while for them to figure it out.”

“And this werewolf thing I saw…” Olivia stopped, ending with an implied question mark.

“It’s a disease of the mind. A fatal one, sadly. When you’re infected, your spirit becomes the beast that you saw. It’s transmitted by… well, I guess you could call it psychic bites.”

“Sort of like rabies.”

“Sort of. If that guy’s werewolf had bitten you, or scratched you, you’d have turned as well. But I killed it before it could.”

“And now he’s going to die?”

Nathan nodded, looked down. “Yes. You can’t live without your spirit, or at least not very long. The werewolf is a diseased spirit, but you still die if it’s killed. Even though it’s diseased, it’s somehow keeping you alive. Without it, you die.” He paused, then said, “It’s like with heart disease. Heart disease can kill you, but taking out your heart would kill you a lot faster.” His face became serious. “The difference is, heart disease doesn’t try to jump to innocent people around you.”

“So the bald guy…” Again she trailed off.

“Will be found dead. Soon. It’ll probably look like he just had a heart attack or stroke. His death will be attributed to natural causes. But it’s one less werewolf out there, biting people and spreading the infection.”

“What would it have been like if I’d been bitten?”

Nathan’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know. It’s weird. You could see it, and you could see me… or at least me as I, um… really am. Most people can’t. Most people… if they’re bitten, they just have a sudden twinge – a pang of pain, it feels like a pulled muscle or a sore joint. But then within two weeks, they turn, and they’re out there biting others and spreading the infection, without knowing it.” He paused. “How it would have been for you, I don’t know, given that you would have seen what the werewolf was really doing.”

Olivia didn’t answer for a moment.

“That’s horrifying,” she finally said.

“Yes. That’s why I try to stop as many infected people as I can, before they can infect others.”

“They have no idea they’re doing it?”

“Not consciously. But it does change their behavior, just like the rabies virus does. Did you know that the rabies virus makes carnivores more aggressive, and herbivores more docile? The virus does what it takes to spread – making a raccoon bite, or making a deer stand still and let itself be bitten – both of them serve to spread the virus to a new host. In the case of this one, the person who’s been turned becomes more social. They want to be around people. They actually feel fit and energetic; their personalities become forward, pushy, extroverted. You find a lot of ‘em in bars, dance clubs, at athletic events. Eventually, they die – but it can take a year or two, and by that time they’ve usually infected hundreds of others.”

Olivia shuddered.

“And you?” she said. “What are you? Some kind of guardian angel, or something?”

Nathan laughed. “An angel? Hardly.”

“You have wings.”

“Yeah. So do sparrows. That doesn’t make them angels.”

“Okay, if you’re not an angel, what are you?”

He grinned. “I work for the Invisible Animal Control Department. Or the Center for Psychic Disease Control. However you want to look at it.”

“So… you’re, like, the Naked Winged Werewolf Avenger, or something?”

“I like that. Can I use it?”

Olivia just stared at him for a moment. “Look,” she finally said. “Be straight with me. Am I losing my mind? Because if I am… fuck. I just want to know, okay?”

“You’re not losing your mind. What you saw was my spirit standing up and challenging the bald man’s werewolf spirit. That’s why we were…. um, you know. Naked. No clothes allowed in the spirit world.” He brightened. “Your spirit is naked, too, you know.”

“I’ve never seen it,” Olivia said, dryly.

“Yeah, that’s a puzzler,” Nathan said. “You weren’t supposed to see what you saw, and I honestly have no idea why you did. But you’re not crazy. You saw what was really happening; it was the other people on the bus that didn’t. All they would have seen is me and the bald dude, sitting there minding our own business. No one else saw anything.”

“Including that sword of yours cutting the werewolf’s head off?”

“Yup.” He grinned. “And by the way, that sword only hurts werewolves. No worries about my being armed and dangerous.”

Olivia rolled her eyes a little. “Trust me, at the moment that’s the least of my worries.”

Nathan just grinned at her.

“Now what do I do?” she asked. “I mean, assuming that I actually believe all of this.” And she suddenly realized that she did believe it. There was no disputing what she’d seen; and Nathan’s explanation made as much sense as any other she could come up with.

“I guess, we just finish our coffee and pastries, and we both go home.”

“And tomorrow, I just go to work, and you go back to… werewolf hunting?”

“I have to work, too. Werewolf hunting doesn’t pay my rent.”

“Oh.” She looked up at him. “How do I avoid getting bitten? I mean, you’re not going to be there next time, probably.”

“Given that you can see them, you’ll at least have more of an advantage than other people. But honestly, not that many people are werewolves. I kill maybe three, four a month. Five in a good month. And that’s with going out to look for them, hanging out in werewolf-friendly places. I get at least one a month right in Chili’s.”

“Convenient for you,” Olivia said.

Nathan nodded. “Yup. But you shouldn’t worry. Your likelihood of getting bitten, even if you couldn’t see them, is pretty small.”

She looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “Any chance I could take out some extra insurance?” she said. “You want to have dinner together some time?”

Nathan gave her a dazzling smile. “Sure. I’m free tomorrow evening, in fact. How about that new Japanese restaurant up in the University District? I’ve been wanting to try it.”

“Sure.”

Nathan stood, and then went over, and gave her a light kiss on the mouth. Olivia felt a tingling sensation, like a static shock.

“You’re pretty forward yourself,” she said, but smiled up at him.

“Can’t let the werewolves have all the fun,” he said.

Olivia found the bald man’s obituary in the Post-Intelligencer two days later.

It read:

MARTIN

Douglas J. Martin, 47, of Bellevue, died suddenly Tuesday morning. He was a valued employee of Rush Life Insurance Agency of Seattle, where he had worked for fourteen years. He was a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1985. He was awarded an MBA in finance from the University of Washington in 1990. Martin’s passing is mourned by a brother, Thomas, of Tacoma, and a sister, Mary McWilliams, of Tukwila. He was preceded in death by his parents, Nelson and Denise (Trudell) Martin.

Olivia looked down at the photograph of the suit-clad man, with his neat wire-framed glasses and his combover, and a shiver ran through her frame. She remembered the rippling muscles and yellow fangs of the werewolf he’d become, and thought, He could have gotten me. If he had, in a week or two I’d be out partying at bars, looking for victims. And then she thought: Or, maybe I am just losing my mind. Those two possibilities seem equally likely at the moment.

One date with Nathan became two, then three, and pretty soon Olivia’s roommate, Andrea, was asking when she’d get to meet this blond god that Olivia was so taken with.

“Soon,” Olivia said. “I’ll have him over here for dinner some time. Once we run out of new restaurants to try.”

“That could take years,” Andrea said. Then she wiggled her eyebrows. “Maybe you’ll be having him come over for, you know. Other reasons. At some point.”

“Maybe at some point,” Olivia said.

“You certainly have been seeing him a lot,” Andrea said. “When have you been one to run off after the night life? I always thought of you as being more of the come home early, cuddle up with a nice book type.”

Olivia shrugged. “I’m just having fun, that’s all. Are you jealous?”

“Yeah. A little. And if he turns out to be as gorgeous as you say, I’m going to be a lot jealous.”

A little under three weeks later, she woke up on a Saturday morning with a sudden, stabbing pain, right behind both shoulder blades. She yelped a little, and reached back; but the pain was gone, as instantaneously as it had occurred, and after lying still for a moment, she wasn’t completely convinced that it’d been real, that she hadn’t dreamed it.

She tried to relax, to go back to sleep, but she felt restless, with a fiery energy that was completely unlike her usual reluctance to get up on her days off. Finally, she stretched, yawning, and went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.

As she was drying herself off, there it was, that jolt of pain again; and once more she slid her hands over her bare shoulders. Her skin felt normal, smooth, unmarked, and she massaged her shoulder muscles a little – but honestly, there was no reason to. She felt fine. Better than fine, actually. She felt wonderful. But why did she keep feeling that sudden twinge?

She glanced in the mirror. And just for a moment – in a flash nearly as quick as the pain had been – she saw a reflection of herself, her face shining from its own light, and behind her a pair of long, tapered wings, streaked like a falcon’s. She gasped, and looked again – and she was back to being herself, just regular Olivia. The whole thing had taken less than a second. She reached back, feeling behind her, but there was nothing there.

She leaned toward the mirror, mouth hanging open a little, and her image blurred, and there were the wings again, as if her body had hung back just for a little, had taken a while to catch up. Then there was a shimmer as she became an ordinary human again. Every time she moved, there was a quick image of a naked, shining, winged woman, who was clearly herself and yet so obviously not – and then like an image coming into focus, the vision would go away, and all she’d see was her own familiar form.

And that was when she remembered their first kiss, when she’d felt an electric zing as their lips touched.

Heart pounding, she turned off the shower, pulled on her bathrobe, and went into her bedroom, and picked up her cellphone and dialed it.

“Hello?” said a sleepy voice.

“Nathan,” she said. “Goddamnit, I’ve… did you know you were contagious?”

He sounded genuinely mystified. “I am?”

“Nathan, I’ve got wings.”

“You do? How’s that possible?”

“Well, I think you’re the one who can tell me that,” Olivia said, her voice indignant. “You’ve infected me. With, I don’t know, Contagious Naked Winged Werewolf Avenger disease, or something.”

“I didn’t know it was contagious.” He paused. “Look, I’m sorry. You already could see the werewolf, three weeks ago; maybe you were already infected somehow.”

“I don’t think so,” Olivia said. “I’m sure that this came from you.”

“Sorry,” he said again.

“Look, I’m not mad at you. It’s more that I’d at least have liked to have had a choice in the matter.”

“Germs don’t ask you if you want to be infected,” Nathan said. “Remember the Germ Theory of Disease?”

Olivia felt her wings flex, rustle quietly, and then with a shiver she sensed her newly winged spirit reintegrating with her body. Really, she felt remarkably well. Well enough to fly. Maybe well enough to hunt werewolves.

“Well,” she admitted, “I guess you have a point.”

“I gotta say,” Nathan said, his voice rising with excitement, “it’s kinda cool. Don’t you think this could be fun?”

“Fun,” she said, and was silent for a moment. Then something in her seemed to shift, and she hoped it wasn’t just the wings. “Okay, fine,” she said. “What the hell. You know where I can get a sword?”

Summer's End

2011-12-17T03:51:00.000-08:00

A short story about a synesthete taking a bicycle ride into town.

******************************

Summer’s End

Days are dwindling

Nights are growing

Leaves are turning, dying, falling

Colin Hayes woke up with the song in his head, and afterwards he realized that it probably explained why he thought of going to Zoe’s house in the first place. The old melancholy Cailey Stephens song had appeared from nowhere, in the way that old melancholy songs do, flitting just on the edge of consciousness. As he opened his last box of cereal and poured some into a bowl, he was humming it, a little off key, not even fully aware; as he sat at the table, eating it in dry mouthfuls, it was still there, the dark, minor key keyboard riffs fluttering around inside his skull.

“Zoe,” he said aloud, the idea coming suddenly as he was washing up his bowl. “I should go see if Zoe’s home. I haven’t been there in years. I haven’t even thought about her in months.”

He got together a few things in his backpack, then closed and locked the front door of the little house he rented from Mrs. Debarra and walked out into the cool September morning. I don’t know why I bother locking, he thought, as he walked down the sidewalk, the air smelling clean and fresh after the previous day’s rain. There was hint of the smell of dying leaves; a brown smell, a curled and crisped smell, like butterscotch, like overdone toast. I haven’t had toast in a long time, he thought. Maybe I should figure out if I can make some toast when I get back.

He passed the sleeping bulk of his gray Toyota Celica, running his fingers along its dusty surface. His bicycle was in its customary location, leaning against the wall, and he checked the air pressure in the tires. It was fine – they were holding air since he’d replaced the tubes three weeks ago with ones he’d gotten from the bike shop down the road. He donned his helmet, and swung a leg over the seat, and with a push on one of the pedals he coasted out of the garage and onto the rough gravel of the driveway.

The rolling hills of upstate New York slid past, and the wind in his face carried smells that flowed over him and away. Colin sometimes wondered if he could have cycled the thirty miles into town by his sense of smell alone, done it blindfolded, the colors in the air guiding him and showing him the way. The acrid, but not unpleasant, gray-green smell of the cattle up at Carroll’s farm. The cool, bright blue smell of the woods near Corley’s Crossing. The placid smell, deep green like bottle glass, of the stream that bubbled its way under Tucker’s Bridge. He saw the sheep up on the hill just past the stream, and they turned their long, foolish faces toward him, baaaing plaintively. The sheep didn’t have much of a smell, not at this distance, and Colin wondered how much longer they’d be there, now that winter was coming.

The road into town wound its way down from the hills, up and down but always further down than the next hill was up, and so descended into the valley. The sun had risen above the treetops by then, and Colin stopped momentarily to pull off his shirt and stuff it into his backpack, enjoying the feeling of the fresh air and sunshine on his skin. Maybe the pond near his house was still warm enough to go for a swim that afternoon; he’d have to see when he got back.

My heart is empty, calling your name

A bell ringing in the open sky

It was nearly noon when he passed the vague boundary between the open farmland and hills, and the treed streets of the north end of town; houses began to pass by him with more frequency, and he saw a sign that said “M. C. Petrie Elementary School” with an arrow pointing off to the left, where a low brick building stood partially hidden in a maple grove. The monkeybars and teeter-totters were empty at the moment, but Colin remembered the smells, the overwhelming smells, of paste and fingerpaints and modeling clay and the teacher’s perfume and the peculiar, beige-tinged scent of textbooks, and his mind was carried back to when he’d been that age, it was what? Almost thirty years ago? It hardly seemed possible.

The school flew past as he coasted easily downhill, and he maneuvered around a truck that someone had left parked crooked, its tailgate hanging open, halfway out into the road. Inconsiderate, that sort of thing. Colin looked around for the truck’s owner, but his momentary thought that he’d like to tell him to move his damn truck, someone could get in a serious accident, slipped past as the truck disappeared behind him. He passed a street sign – Torrance Road – and thought briefly about heading up that way, and seeing if his parents were home. He was fairly certain they wouldn’t be, but he felt a twinge of guilt at riding on past, not even heading by and seeing if his dad was out mowing the lawn, or his mom doing the final garden cleanup before the hard freeze that was certain to come in the next few weeks.

South of Torrance Road was a row of auto dealerships and car repair shops, and the faint, burnt-orange scent of motor oil clung like a low fog around them. Colin wrinkled his nose. He’d always hated that smell; it reminded him of his uncle, who was a mechanic and a bully, and whose hands always had faint dark lines where the soap couldn’t reach. That smell always came with him, and Colin was glad that he hadn’t seen his uncle in a long time. It was okay, that was okay with him, even if now Colin was as big as his uncle and unlikely to have his shoulder pinched or the back of his head slapped for saying something stupid.

Zoe lived up on the west side of town, in a neat little subdivision near the high school. It was her parents’ house; she’d gone to college to study architecture, but when the economy went south and the job market dried up, she’d come back home. There’d been phone conversations – several of them – but they’d never progressed past, “How are you?” and “I’m fine” and “How are your parents doing?” and “They’re fine.” Colin had always intended to ask her out, see if she’d like to see a movie, maybe get dinner at the little Greek place on College Avenue, but his nerve had always failed him. He pictured himself, suavely asking her to go out, then taking her out to a club afterwards for drinks and dancing. Maybe bringing her back to his place after that (thirty miles out in the middle of nowhere, he thought, why would she want to go all the way out to your place?). Then the thought that maybe she would ask him over to her place, maybe her parents would be away for the evening, maybe they could snuggle on the couch or even make out a little. The daydream always stopped there; he wanted her, to feel her warm, tanned skin press against his, but it seemed too much to think about to consider that he could ever have made love to her. He contented himself with the daydream of sitting on her parents’ couch, pressed together, her dark hair fanned out across his shoulder, holding her while she dozed.

You will not answer, for you have gone

Following the birds to other lands

But still I seek you, still I want you

Still I need to see your face again

Zoe’s parents’ house was a tidy little Cape Cod on Carson Street, its front only set ten feet back from the maple-lined sidewalk. Colin turned on Duvall Street, then took a right on Carson, and coasted the rest of the way to the fourth house on the left. The neighborhood was quiet, a breeze rustling in the orange-streaked leaves of the trees, bringing that brown butterscotch scent of autumn to his nostrils. Colin stopped, looking up at the house, and then leaned his bicycle against the nearest tree. He reached into his backpack, and pulled out his shirt – somewhat rumpled from being balled up for the past two hours – and shrugged it on, tugging the bottom into place and hoping that he didn’t smell sweaty. He didn’t think he did, but he also had heard you don’t always smell your own sweat, so he wasn’t really sure. He’d run out of deodorant – and in any case the smell of anything but the unscented, hypoallergenic types was so strong that he couldn’t bear to use them. The few times he had done so he got flashes of red and orange, sharp, hard-edged smells, from his own body, and it was so distracting that at the first chance he could he’d rushed home, stripped naked, gone to the shower, and scrubbed his skin until it was almost raw.

He walked up the sidewalk to Zoe’s front steps, and climbed them to the front door, and knocked.

I close my eyes and I can see you

Feel your touch, feel your kiss

But then you turn and walk away

I open my eyes, and then you’re gone

No one answered his knock.

It was possible, of course, that they were just out. Colin thought that, standing there. They’re just out. They’re just away. He knocked again, waiting for the sound of footsteps, then looked up and down the street. A deer came out of the neighbor’s yard, regarding him with wary liquid eyes, and then turned away and began to munch on the overgrown twigs of a rhododendron bush. Colin looked down the steps at the little front garden, that Zoe’s mother had so meticulously maintained. Goldenrod and asters and witch grass grew up through the dying leaves of the peonies and sea holly and black-eyed susans. She’d better do some weeding soon, Colin thought, before the ground freezes. It’ll be too late, then, until next spring.

He turned the handle of the door, and to his surprise, it opened, and he walked onto the front porch, his footsteps clunking hollowly on the wood planks. The door of the house stood a little ajar, as if Zoe or her mom or dad had just come through it, off to check the mail or walk the dog or chat with the neighbor. Colin pushed it open, calling, “Hello?”

The house was a confusion of smells; old, very old, traces of the smells of cooking, gray with age; and a nearer, dark purple smell, hanging in the air like smoke. A heavy smell, cloying, like dying lilacs.

I dreamed of you, I dreamed you near

I dreamed you lying next to me

I dreamed you take your hand in mine

Lead me to where you’ve gone

It wasn’t until he entered the living room that he understood; or maybe he had understood, weeks, months, a year earlier, and just couldn’t bring himself to believe it. She was lying on the sofa, one hand curled under her head, brown hair fanned out across the pillow. There wasn’t much left but bones, not really; and the smell that was left wasn’t unpleasant, just dark, dark purple like stormclouds. It would have been worse had he come sooner, that he knew; then it would have smelled black, black like the death it was, black like the death that had taken them all – all but him. Maybe there were others, but if so, he hadn’t seen them, hadn’t seen another human being for over a year, from the time the epidemic had roared through, leaving only him. Only him, and the crumbling remains of the world, breaking up and falling like the leaves in autumn.

The world’s grown cold since last we met

There’s nothing left for me here,

There’s none to dry the tears I’ve wept

There’s none to draw me near

You will not answer, for you have gone

Following the birds to other lands

But still I seek you, still I want you

Still I need to see your face again

Book Review: Touched

2011-11-23T08:58:00.000-08:00

Because of my thus-far questionably successful attempts to market my writing, I've joined several online networking sites, including Twitter. One very positive side of all of this shameless self-promotion has been meeting a number of highly talented fellow writers, and getting an opportunity to read their work (which otherwise I probably never would have found).

A. J. Aalto stands out amongst these new e-friends as one of the funniest, quickest, and most creative people in the Twitterverse. I have long since learned not to drink anything while reading her tweets, as I have on more than one occasion almost splattered the computer screen with coffee because of something hilarious she's posted. So when I got my first e-reader, her book Touched was one of the first three I downloaded.

Touched (available at Amazon here) is the story of Marnie Baranuik, the rather manic psychic detective whose skills are enhanced through her relationship with Guy Harrick "Harry" von Dreppenstedt, who also happens to be a 435-year-old vampire (excuse me, "revenant" -- the undead resent being referred to by the v-word, and the last thing you want is a pissed-off revenant gunning for your sorry ass). At the beginning of the book, Marnie has given up detecting for good and all, having had a rather painful experience during her last bout -- painful in both the literal and figurative sense, because of a gunshot wound and a passionate but brief relationship with Mark Batten, a fellow detective and fervent revenant-hater. But circumstances are not going to allow Marnie to remain in early retirement for long, and those circumstances include bringing Batten back into all-too-close proximity.

What happens next would be spoiled by my giving any further details, but it is by turns screamingly funny, devastatingly ghastly (let's just say that the phrase "ghoul slime on the carpet" is one I never want to have to think about again), and all the way through a riproaring thriller. But what sets this book apart from others in its genre is the characters; all too often, characters in paranormal thrillers are effectively interchangeable, and nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to Touched. From Marnie's frenetic and self-deprecating sardonic wit, to Harry's silk-over-a-sword-edge cordiality, to Batten's tough guy bluster, each of the characters rings as true as sterling. We wouldn't even need "... said Marnie," "... said Harry," and so on to know who's talking. And this extends even to the minor characters -- the occult-store owner Ruby Valli and the psychic detective wannabee Danika Sherlock are also brilliantly drawn.

But enough of that. Do yourself a favor and download Touched, but make sure you have enough time set aside over the next couple of weeks, because you won't want to put it down.

Timestamp

2011-11-21T16:54:00.000-08:00

As weird as it sounds, the first scene from this short story actually happened to me -- only not on the day before Thanksgiving, but on Halloween. As for the rest of it, I have to hope it remains in the realm of fiction.

************************

Timestamp

If the woman with the camera had arrived five minutes earlier, Alex Quinn might have had a witness to what she did. On the other hand, it may be that she wouldn’t have done it if someone else had been watching; there is no way to know.

It was nine o’clock at night on a Wednesday, and Alex was working out at Marshall’s 24 Hour Fitness Center. Weekday nights were usually quiet, and tonight was quieter than most, probably because it was the day before Thanksgiving and people were occupied with food preparation, guests, and travel. The day after Thanksgiving, of course, the gym would probably be so packed there wouldn’t be an open machine.

The only other person in the gym at nine o’clock that night was a young woman in Lycra shorts and a form-fitting top that left no curve unaccented, but she had finished her workout. As Alex watched, she packed up her sports bag and left, leaving Alex by himself in an empty gym with twenty minutes’ worth of lifting still left to do. He was sitting on the bench press machine, hands loosely gripping the handles, as the glass-fronted door closed behind the Lycra shorts woman. A moment later, headlights glared momentarily through the windows as she backed out of her parking space and then drove off into the night.

Alex looked around him. TV screens set on Fox News, the History Channel, Syfy, and HBO flickered their silent images into the room. After a moment’s quiet, the Stone Temple Pilots’ slamming guitar riffs blared from Alex’s iPod, and he started his third set of bench presses.

He was on his sixth press when a pair of headlights swung toward the front windows, their beams momentarily blinding even in the brightly-lit gym interior. The lights switched off, and a moment later, the car door opened.

Another sucker trying to gain some traction before losing it all by eating too much turkey with mashed potatoes tomorrow, he thought with a grin, and wondered if it was anyone he knew. He didn’t mind working out alone, but a friend certainly made the time pass faster.

But no, it wasn’t a friend; in fact, no one he’d ever seen. It was a middle-aged woman, with graying curly hair and glasses, and a round, unremarkable face. She was the sort of person you could pass a hundred times in the grocery store and still not remember; a person whose only outstanding characteristic was an amazing averageness. She wasn’t dressed to exercise – she was wearing a light-colored dress and blouse, and had a patterned scarf around her neck.

She looked into the gym for a moment, shading her eyes with her hand.

Looking for someone, Alex thought. It’s against gym rules to let anyone in, though; if she doesn’t have her own card key, she’s out of luck.

And then the woman noticed him. Their eyes met for a moment. Then she fumbled in her purse, and brought out a camera, aimed it through the window, and took Alex’s picture.

The flash was sudden and unexpected, and almost physically painful; Alex gave a little yelp, and was standing up before he realized what had happened. The woman gave him an odd, pitying look, and turned and walked back toward her car.

“What the fuck?” Alex said, and walked toward the door; but he realized that his card key was in his jeans pocket in the men’s locker room, and if he went outside to confront the woman, he’d be locked out, without even his car keys and wallet. And now the woman was turning her headlights back on, putting the car in reverse, and pulling out of the parking lot.

It’s a blue Honda, with California plates. License plate number TF… shit! The car quickly moved away, and the reflected glare from the inside of the window prevented him from getting the whole number. What he’d have been able to do with it in any case, he didn’t know.

Alex stared, watching her tail lights diminish as she drove off down the street.

Okay, that was seriously creepy, he thought.

Why would some strange woman take his photograph? He was an average guy, not bad looking but certainly not the type who would ever get asked to model shirtless for Abercrombie & Fitch. Was the woman just taking a photograph of the gym? Maybe someone who had just moved (from California, he thought, The plates were California) and was going to go home and tell her husband, “Look, honey, there’s this nice little fitness center on Terrell Street, maybe we should join?” And then she’d show him the photograph she’d taken, and he’d say, “It looks like a nice place, let’s join it!”

Alex swallowed. No way. She wasn’t taking a photograph of the gym, she was taking a photograph of me. He remembered the intent, focused look in her eyes – sizing him up – then the sharp explosion of the flash, and the sad little glance afterwards. No, she’d taken his photograph, not the gym’s. However bizarre it seemed, there was no doubt. The gym was incidental.

Alex finished his workout, showered, and changed into his regular clothes, trying to think about ordinary things – the drive to Rochester tomorrow to stay with his parents for the holiday, a date with his new girlfriend this weekend – but his mind kept wandering back to the woman with the camera. He half expected to see her waiting for him in the parking lot when he left – but the lot was empty, the streetlights casting their bleak yellow light over the rectangle of asphalt. He drove back to his apartment, picturing her going back home, printing out his photograph, and adding it to an album with hundreds of other images of people. Taken without their permission, many perhaps taken without their knowledge. In his mind, the woman flipped the pages, the traces of an evil smile on her lips…

“Stop it,” he said, as he pulled into the parking lot of his apartment building. “She was just a nut. Forget about it.”

And he probably would have, had he not seen her the following week, taking someone else’s photograph.

It was one of those strange coincidences that the spiritually-minded like to believe Means Something. In a town the size of Colville, the chances of running into the same person by chance twice in a span of five days was vanishingly small, but when Alex saw her the Monday after Thanksgiving, he recognized her immediately despite her ordinariness. She was sitting on a bench in front of Home Brew Coffee Shop, where Alex had stopped for a cappuccino and a cinnamon roll on his way to work. In the daylight she looked younger; her hair darker, glossier, her skin pinker than it had appeared in the fluorescent glare of the gym lights. But he would have known who it was even had she not reached in her purse, pulled out a little black camera, and snapped a picture of a teenage girl who was walking on the opposite side of the road.

The girl jerked a little, and looked around; she sensed something, but wasn’t able to figure out what it was, because the woman had already put her camera back in her purse. She couldn’t have heard the camera shutter from that far away, and even if the flash had tripped in the bright morning sunshine, it wouldn’t have been noticeable. The girl brushed her hair back with one hand, and kept walking. The woman stood up, picked up her purse, straightened her blouse, and began to walk away.

Alex shouted, “Hey! Wait!” and ran toward the woman. She gave a half turn, and sped up, but didn’t break into a run, simply looked around nervously.

“Hey! You!” Alex shouted, and within a moment had caught up to her. Several people had turned to look at them, faces frowning, wondering whether they were about to witness an assault.

The woman seemed to realize that she couldn’t outrun Alex, and stopped, her eyes flickering nervously up the street as if trying to determine if there was some way she could get away from him. But he was in front of her, blocking her way, and she gave a feeble little smile.

“You,” Alex said, breathlessly. “You’re the one who took my picture. At the gym, on Terrell Street. Last week.”

“I… I don’t think…” the woman said. “I think you must be mistaken.”

“I’m not mistaken,” Alex said. “I just saw you do it again. You took a picture of that girl…” He looked away, up the street, but the teenage girl was gone now, and when he turned back to the woman, she smiled.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. She reached into her purse, and pulled out a cellphone. “I was just checking my text messages. I wasn’t taking pictures.”

“You’re lying,” Alex said.

The woman’s smile faltered a little. “I don’t need to argue with you about this,” she said.

“Yes, yes you do!” Alex shouted. “Why did you take my picture? Don’t lie to me. I know it was you. And you weren’t checking your texts, you took that girl’s picture, too.” He modulated his voice with an effort, and said, “Look. All I want to know is why. I’m not going to get mad, or make a scene, or anything.” He looked around, saw the faces of people still staring at them, uncertain as to whether or not to intervene. “At least no more of a scene than I’ve already made. Just tell me why. That’s all I’m asking. I have a right to know.”

She didn’t answer for a moment, and then seemed to come to some sort of a decision. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “If you want to know, come with me.”

“Where?”

“To my motel room. I’m staying at the Super 8.”

“How long will this take?” Alex looked at his watch.

She turned, and gave him a quizzical smile. “As long as you want it to. You’re the one who wanted an answer.”

“Okay. I’ll just have to be late for work.” He walked off after her, and saw ahead of them, parked along the road, the blue Honda with California plates he’d seen the previous week at the gym. She gestured to it, and he got in, only then thinking, What if she’s some kind of nut? Maybe she has a gun, and she’s going to take me out into the middle of nowhere and kill me. Maybe I’ll never be seen again.

But the woman showed no sign of incipient violent psychosis, and simply drove off toward the south end of Colville, where the Super 8 Motel sat among a maze of grocery stores, auto dealerships, and fast food joints. After driving for five minutes, she said, “How did you find me?”

“Entirely by accident.”

She smiled. “I guess it was bound to happen, sooner or later. I guess I got careless.”

“Careless?”

“Taking your picture in the gym, while you were facing the window. I used to be more careful – never take a photograph when the person is watching, or when someone else is there and paying attention.”

“Why?” Alex said.

“You’ll see.”

She pulled her car into the motel parking lot, and got out, and Alex followed her through the lobby, and up the stairs to the second floor. She got out a card key and let herself into room 213, and Alex entered to find the usual look of an occupied room – an open suitcase containing clothes in various states of neatness, a novel with a bookmark on the dresser, an open box of granola bars on the little round table near the window.

Sitting on the bed was a blue binder, so full that it didn’t close completely. She picked it up, and went to sit down at the table, and said, “Come look.”

He sat down, and she set the binder on the table and opened it to a random spot. It was a page, in a clear protective sleeve; a print of a photograph of a woman of perhaps thirty, getting on a city bus. There was nothing special about the photograph; it was neither interesting nor composed well. In fact, it seemed entirely ordinary. A timestamp on the bottom said, “06/28/97.”

She flipped the page. The next one was a boy of about seven, swinging on a swingset in a playground. Then a shirtless male jogger. Then a woman sleeping on a beach towel at the ocean. Page after page, hundreds of them, all ordinary people doing ordinary things – just as he’d pictured on the way home from the gym.

“Why?” Alex said.

The woman looked up at him, an apologetic smile on her face. “My camera,” she said. “It isn’t… ordinary.”

“So?”

“It takes time.”

“To develop, you mean? It’s not digital?”

“No. Not like that. I mean it takes time. Steals it.”

“How can you steal time?”

She shrugged. “It just does. I don’t know how. I got it when I was traveling – I bought it from a woman in Las Cruces, New Mexico about fifteen years ago. She said she had used it enough, didn’t need it any more.”

Alex tried to stop a rising sense of horror. “Used it for what?”

Her shy smile widened. “To take photographs of people. To take a year of their life, of course.”

“What?” Alex said, in a strangled voice.

“Each time I take a person’s picture with the camera, it takes a year from their life span, and adds it to mine. The woman in New Mexico never printed out the photographs; I don’t think she wanted to remember the people she took from. I thought it was the least I could do. It makes what they gave me more real, more personal.” She rifled through the pages, smiling fondly.

“How… how could that be?” Part of his brain was thinking, This is impossible... But he remembered the sharp, electric jolt of pain when the flash went off, and the way the teenage girl's body had jerked when her picture was taken. And suddenly, he was absolutely convinced that the woman was telling the truth; the sizzle of pain he'd felt was the cutting away of a year of his life.

“I told you," the woman said. "I don’t know how it works. All I know is that when I take a photograph, I get younger. I can feel it.”

“But that’s…” He swallowed. “That’s horrible.”

“You’re the first person who’s ever caught me, you know. I never should have taken your photograph, when you were facing the window. Like I said, I got careless. And the others… well, if they never know, what harm done? An eight-year old boy who would have lived to 83 will now die at age 82. To his family and friends, he will just have died of old age, heart attack, stroke, whatever – lived to a ripe old age. The woman who would have died tragically of cancer at 45 will now die at 44. It will still be heartbreaking. No real change.”

“How can you call taking a year from their lives no real change?”

“Because they never know. They never know what they lost. They never know what I took from them. How can it really be stealing if no one ever knows?” Her smile faded a little. “No one but you, of course.”

“You… you took a year from my life.” His stomach was churning; he felt like he was going to be sick. “When will I die?”

The woman laughed. “I have no idea. As far as I know, you could live to 110.”

“109, now,” Alex said.

“I suppose,” the woman said. “Or you could die tomorrow. I don’t know when anyone is going to die. Only that it will be a year before they would have.”

“You need to give it back.”

“How?”

“Let me take your picture. You need to give me my year back.”

“No,” she said. “I can’t let you touch my camera.”

Alex stood up suddenly. “I’ll get it back one way or the other.”

The woman smiled beneficently up at him. “Will you? I left my purse in my car, and locked the car behind me, when we came up here. If you go back down and try to take the camera, or my purse, by force, I will call the police on my cellphone, and you’ll be arrested for robbery. I think you can see that any assault you have planned here, in my room, will only land you in jail, and will not, in the end, get for you what you want.” She shrugged. “I encourage you to try, though, if it would make you happy. I won’t fight back. And you can’t kill me; I still have hundreds of years of life left.”

Alex looked at her face, her plain, implacable, ageless face, and thought briefly, I’ve never struck anyone in anger. I could hit her, maybe knock her out; take her car keys, get the camera.

And then what? Then be tempted to do the same thing, to go and find other people to steal time from? To extend life simply because quantity was the most important thing?

They stared at each other for nearly a minute – Alex’s face twisted with anger and impotent rage, and the woman’s face bland and unassailable – and finally Alex said, “You win.”

She looked surprised. “I didn’t expect you to give up so easily.”

“What can I do? It’s done.”

The woman relaxed. “Exactly.”

“I don’t expect you’ll be giving me a ride back.”

She turned her hands palm upward. “Under the circumstances… Could I really trust you not to try to take the camera while I’m driving?”

Alex smiled. “Probably not.” He walked to the door. “I guess I’m on my own for getting back to work?”

“Sorry. And I think I’ll at least walk you down, see you off… you know, just to make sure you don’t try to get into my car.”

“You’ve got the key.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

They walked together without speaking, down the stairs, across the lobby, and out into the brightly-lit parking lot, underneath a sun that Alex would enjoy for one fewer years than he should have, and she would be, what? Effectively immortal? Picking up a year here, a year there, from unsuspecting people who never knew what they lost, never got to experience twelve extra months of the companionship of friends, the devotion of children and grandchildren, the embrace of a lover?

The woman paused by her car, watched Alex walk further on along the sidewalk toward Day Street and the three-mile walk to work. And she had taken the key out of her pocket, to retrieve her purse and camera, when Alex leaned over, grabbed one of the large decorative stones from the curbside garden, and hurled it at the car, thinking, Jesus, these things weigh more than I realized! Thank god I’ve been lifting weights…

The car rocked on its suspension as the front passenger side window shattered, and Alex dove through the hole, feeling his shirt catch and tear on the shards of glass, not caring as they cut gouges in the skin on his belly. The woman shrieked and tried to ram her key home into the lock on the driver’s side, but Alex was quicker, and had her purse – and the little black camera – in his hand before she could get the door unlocked.

“No!” the woman shrieked. “Don’t take it! Please!”

“Why not?” Alex asked, holding the camera aloft and circling the car as she tried to follow him around, tried desperately to get closer. “Give it back to you so you can continue to steal people’s lives?”

“You don’t know how to use it,” she snarled.

“I don’t want to use it,” Alex said. “I’m not afraid to die.”

“You don’t understand!” she said, through furious, clenched teeth. “I saw my father die. I will not go through that. Not if I can stop it.”

“You can’t stop it,” Alex said. “You can put it off. But not stop it. And no more. Not while you live like a parasite, sucking the life blood of total strangers.” And he drew his arm back, and with all his might, he hurled the camera against the pavement.

There was the sound of shattering glass, and the black eye of the lens broke right down the middle, the plastic housing cracking into shards. Alex smelled sulfur – just for a moment, and then it was gone. The woman ran to the camera, fell to her knees, picking up the pieces, and holding them up toward him in hands bleeding from where the raw edges of the plastic, glass, and metal had cut her.

“You won’t get your year back from doing this,” she hissed.

“I don’t want the fucking year,” Alex said, panting. “I’m happy with what I have.”

He turned to walk away, and as he got to the corner, he heard the sirens; someone had called the police. They tore past him as he walked down the sidewalk, away from the woman and the wreckage she had made, and he thought, I will not run. Maybe she’s right, and maybe she’s wrong; maybe when the camera broke, it erased all of those stolen years. But whether it did or not, I will not run.

Whatever happens, let it happen in its own time.

Poison the Well (excerpt from a work in progress)

2011-11-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

Here's the first bit of my latest work-in-progress, a paranormal murder mystery called Poison the Well. I'm using NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) as an excuse to get a big chunk of it done... so far, so good, I've written a bit over 15,000 words in six days. Here's to keeping up that momentum.

****************************

“There he is.”

Bethany Hale’s voice, although quiet, somehow had the ability to be heard over the noise of a busy night in Arcangeli’s. The silver-haired man across from her, dressed in an immaculate, perfectly tailored Armani suit, nodded at her, and made a little gesture with the balloon glass of cognac he held in his left hand.

“You should go to him, then?”

“No,” Bethany said. “Just watch.”

The man they were observing had just entered the restaurant, and stood for a moment in the doorway. After giving a rather imperious look around the room, he went to the bar and sat down, a confident half-smile on his face. He was wearing an expensive-looking pale green shirt with a sport jacket, but its cut accentuated, rather than hiding, the body it covered. Even with the fabric in the way, Bethany got a sense of the muscles rippling underneath, and wondered how many hours a week he spent in the gym. When he turned his head she saw an angular face, jaw darkened with five-o’clock shadow, and the smooth tan suggested that he spent a great deal of time in the sun. His hair was black, and gave the appearance of being carelessly brushed, but Bethany suspected that every strand was exactly where he’d intended it to be.

The man was sitting on a bar stool, leaning to the side with leonine indolence, elbow on the bar. He spoke a few words to the bartender, and a moment later had a drink in front of him – it looked like a gin and tonic, or something else clear with a wedge of lime in it. He took a sip from his drink, and made a comment to the woman who was sitting next to him, who half turned toward him with a faint smile.

She was elegantly, but simply dressed, with a close-fitting garment of a watery silver, cut modestly but deeply enough to be alluring. A necklace with a white stone, perhaps an opal, lay against her skin, and caught the light when she moved.

They spoke in quick sentences; it was clear, even from across the room, that they were strangers. Something about her reserve made it obvious. But she was friendly, smiling, and then laughed at something he said, looking down immediately afterward and lifting her glass of white wine as if to say, “I’ll drink to that.”

Bethany, watching them from across the room, cleared her throat, fidgeted with her silverware.

“What are you waiting to observe, Ms. Hale?” her companion said.

The man at the bar said something to the woman next to him, reached out and touched her necklace, and Bethany tensed, and said, “Now. Watch.”

The silver-haired gentleman half-turned toward the bar, seeming slightly embarrassed to be so blatantly watching the couple at the bar. Bethany, however, had no such compunctions, and kept her eyes fixed on the man in the green shirt. He lifted the opal from the woman’s neck, and held it briefly, and said something. The woman smiled, and reached up, touching the stone herself as it lay against his fingers.

The man smiled, and let the necklace drop gently. The conversation between he and the woman next to him continued for a few moments, but then she finished her wine, set the glass on the bar, and after a quick word to the man and the bartender, picked up her purse and left.

“Fascinating,” Bethany said.

“You’ll go to him, then?” her companion responded.

Bethany nodded, and her lips compressed into a thin line. “Yes,” she said, but privately thought, And if he tries to touch my necklace, I’m going to slap the hell out of him.

She made her way across the room, and up to the now empty seat at the bar. The man turned a little toward her, and nodded, and said, “Evening.”

Bethany gave a chilly little smile, and said, “Would you mind very much coming over to my table? I and a business associate have a proposal that you may be interested in.”

The man’s eyebrows went up, and he gave her an amused grin. “Now there’s a pickup line I’ve never heard.”

Only one of Bethany’s eyebrows went up, a fraction of an inch, and she said, “It’s not a pickup line.” And she thought, Maybe I’ll slap him anyway, just to be on the safe side.

“Oh?” the man said. “And how do you know what sort of business I’m in? Maybe I’m a stockbroker, maybe I’m a used car salesman, and as far as I know I’ve never seen you in my life, so unless your business is professional stalker, you have no way of knowing what my talents are.”

“Let’s just take as a working model that we believe you might be interested to hear what we have to say. Then you respond, ‘Okay,’ and follow me across the room, and we can tell you about it, rather than wasting our time speculating.” Bethany’s voice, always level and no-nonsense, took on that almost clinical tone that she seemed unable to prevent when speaking to someone she instinctively disliked.

The man, far from put off by her iciness, simply smiled again, and said, “All right, you win.” He stood, tossed a ten-dollar bill on the bar, picked up his drink, and followed Bethany across the room.

Bethany gestured at her silver-haired dining companion, and said, “Allow me to introduce Mr. Parsifal Snowe.”

Mr. Snowe stood up, held out a neatly manicured hand, which the younger man took in a firm handshake. “Seth Augustine,” he said.

“A pleasure,” Mr. Snowe said.

“Likewise.” Seth turned toward Bethany. “I’m told you have some sort of business proposal to make to me. Correct, Ms…?” He gave his crooked half-smile again.

“Hale,” Bethany said. “Bethany Hale.”

“Ms. Hale,” Seth said. “Nice to meet you, as well.”

Bethany didn’t respond, but merely sat down, waiting for Mr. Snowe to speak.

“Please, Mr. Augustine,” Mr. Snowe said, and gestured to a chair.

Seth sat, and leaned forward, his dark eyes full of curiosity. If he is in the least ill at ease, Bethany thought, he hides it well.

“Ms. Hale and I are colleagues,” Mr. Snowe said. “We are two members of a private detective agency.”

Seth smiled, and turned his hands palm upwards. “I’m not a detective, Mr. Snowe.”

“We know that. However, you do have a talent that we might be able to find a use for.”

“My only training is in finance,” Seth said. “Somehow, I doubt you’re looking for someone to set up IRA plans for your employees.”

Mr. Snowe smiled blandly. “No, you’re quite correct about that. We’re referring to another talent of yours.”

“You’re a psychometer,” Bethany said.

Seth turned toward her. “I’ve never heard it called that.”

“You know the term, though?”

Seth shrugged. “I can guess what it means.”

“You pick up information from objects.”

“Yes. It’s useful.”

“Such as when you want to know if a woman is interested in you.”

He grinned. “Sure, why not?”

Bethany bristled. “A bit of an unfair advantage, don’t you think?”

“Why? Women complain about men making unwanted passes at them. If I can find out ahead of time if she’s ready and willing, it saves the woman in question the discomfort of having someone she’s not interested in coming on to her, and saves me the frustration of spending an entire evening pursuing someone for no… payoff later.” One eyebrow went up. “Of course, in your case, I hardly need to pick up your wine glass to find out that you pack pepper spray.”

Hound's Tooth

2011-10-31T08:42:00.000-07:00

A new piece of flash fiction. The prompts: (1) a photograph of railroad tracks leading toward a mountain; (2) has to contain the phrase "I didn't see this coming;" and (3) must include a reference to the extinct dog species Borophagus, which apparently looked a little like a hyena on steroids. Maximum 500 words.

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Hound's Tooth

The tracks led straight into the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, through dynamited rock cuts. Soon they would curve into the sky, following the ridge, before plunging into the valley that held Frame Strike Mine.

Frame Strike dated from Gold Rush days, now forty years past, and in any case Carlson wasn’t interested in gold. Frame Strike hadn’t brought up much gold – some silver, more copper, but copper was plentiful in Arizona and didn’t pay for keeping miners busy. The mine closed, the valley abandoned – until Heinrich Jaeger found Miocene fossils scattered in the limestone outcroppings like raisins in fruitcake.

Carlson felt the engine straining as the ascent began, and looked down into his hand at the shiny enamel surface of a tooth. Borophagus – the bone-crushing canid predator that lived here ten million years ago. A young paleontologist seeking a research project could do worse than a rich, unstudied deposit of mammalian fossils.

Carlson spent the next hour studying Jaeger’s letters, reading their stilted, precise English. “Assemblages nearly intact, close to surface… Remarkable preservation… minimal degradation from weathering.” When the train squealed to a halt at the station in the old miners’ village, Carlson was the only one who got out.

Camp conditions were primitive. Jaeger lived in a tent, its space more devoted to books than comfort. He seemed hesitant to talk to Carlson – odd, considering the pages of correspondence they’d had over the preceding months.

“Superstitious Mexicans and Indians,” Jaeger scoffed, when Carlson asked him about the work crews. “As likely to feign illness as do a day’s labor. Afraid of the dark, most of them.”

“You have them in the mine?”

“The richest fossil layers are there. Why not use what has already been uncovered for us?”

“Can I see the dig?”

Jaeger shrugged. “Come. It is a short walk.”

It was dusk when they got to the mouth of the mine, yawning black and empty, darkly beckoning.

“Have the workmen quit for the night?”

Jaeger frowned. “Three men were here earlier, their shift ends at nightfall.” He walked to the cave mouth, where a lantern hung, glimmering in the half-light, lifted it, called into the blackness.

“Come up! You must meet Dr. Carlson…” He paused, and his breath caught, as if he’d gagged.

“What is it, Jaeger?” Carlson said, and stepped to his side.

“I didn’t… I swear, you must believe me… I didn’t see this coming,” It sounded like a plea.

The bodies of three workmen lay fallen on the floor of the cave, near the mine shaft. Their throats were torn out, arms and legs gnawed on, bellies ripped open. The nearest lay awkwardly, like a damaged doll, his femur neatly bitten in half. His unseeing eyes stared at the two scientists.

Carlson rounded on Jaeger. “The teeth… bones… they’re not fossils, are they?”

Jaeger swallowed. “How could I have known?”

The only response came from deep in the cave, where a guttural growl gave them all the answer they needed.

Bad Blood

2011-10-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

Be careful who you piss off.

******************************

Bad Blood

Melba Crane looked up as Dr. Carlisle entered the room. She smiled, revealing a row of white and undoubtedly false teeth, and said, “Hello, doctor! I don’t think we’ve met yet. How are you today?”

Dorian Carlisle looked at his new patient. She was tiny, frail-looking, with carefully-styled curly hair of a pure snowy white, and eyes the color of faded cornflowers. “I’m fine, Mrs. Crane,” he said. “I’m Dr. Carlisle – I’m looking after Dr. Kelly’s patients while he’s on vacation.”

Mrs. Crane nodded. “My, you look so young,” she said. “It’s hard to believe you’re a doctor.” She laughed a little. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me.”

“Not at all,” Dr. Carlisle said, lifting one of Mrs. Crane’s delicate wrists and feeling gently for a pulse. “I take it as a compliment.”

“It will be even more of a compliment when you’re my age,” Mrs. Crane said. “I just turned 87 three weeks ago.”

“Well, happy belated birthday,” Dr. Carlisle said. “I hear you had kind of a rough night last night.”

Mrs. Crane gave a little tsk and a dismissive gesture of her hand. “Just a few palpitations, that’s all,” she said. “Nothing this old heart of mine hasn’t seen a hundred times before.”

“Still, let’s give a listen,” Dr. Carlisle said, and pressed his stethoscope to her chest. Other than a slight heart murmur, the beat sounded steady and strong – remarkable for someone her age.

“How long will Dr. Kelly be away?” Mrs. Crane asked, as Dr. Carlisle continued his examination.

“Two weeks. He and his family went to Hawaii.”

“Oh, Hawaii, how lovely,” Mrs. Crane said. “Such a nice man, and with a beautiful wife and two wonderful children. He’s shown me pictures.”

Dr. Carlisle nodded. “They’re nice folks.” He pointed to a small framed photograph of a somewhat younger Mrs. Crane with a tall, well-built man, who appeared to be about thirty. The man was darkly good looking, with a short, clipped beard and angular features. He wore a confident smile, and stood behind Mrs. Crane, who was seated, her legs primly crossed at the ankle. The man had his hand on her shoulder.

“Your son?” Dr. Carlisle asked.

Mrs. Crane nodded, and smiled fondly. “Yes, that’s Derek,” she said. “My only son.”

“Do you get to see him often?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He visits me every day, especially now that I’m here in the nursing home.” She paused, and sighed a little. “His father was Satan, you know.”

Dr. Carlisle froze, and he just stared at her. She didn’t react, just maintained her gentle little smile, her blue eyes regarding him with grandmotherly fondness. He thought, I just misheard her. What did she say? His father was a saint. His father liked satin. His father was named Stan. His father looked like Santa. But each of those collided with his memory, which stubbornly clung to what it had first heard. Finally, he just said, “I beg your pardon?”

“Satan,” Mrs. Crane said, her voice still mild and bland. “That’s Derek’s father. Lucifer. He used to visit, too, quite often, when Derek was little, but I expect he has other concerns these days.” She giggled a little, and said, “And I’m sure he’s had dalliances with other ladies since my time. Quite a charmer, you know, whatever else you might say about him.”

“Oh,” Dr. Carlisle said, a little thinly. “That’s interesting.”

“Well, of course,” Mrs. Crane continued, “you couldn’t ask him to be faithful. He isn’t that type. I did have to put up with a great deal of disapproval from people who thought it was immoral that I had a child out of wedlock. But after all,” she said, and gave a little titter, “what else could they have expected? He’s Satan, after all.”

Dr. Carlisle cleared his throat. “Yes, well, Mrs. Crane, I have to finish my examination of you, and see a couple of other patients this morning, so…” He trailed off.

Mrs. Crane gave her little wave of the hand again. “Oh, of course, doctor. I’m just being a garrulous old woman, going on like that. I’m sorry I’ve kept you.”

“It’s no problem, really,” Dr. Carlisle said. “And I wouldn’t worry about the palpitations – usually they’re not an indication of anything serious, especially if they don’t last long, as in your case. Your blood pressure is fine, and your last blood work was normal, so I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“I tried to tell the nurse that,” she said. “But she insisted that I see the doctor this morning. I’m sorry I’m keeping you away from patients who need your help more than I do.”

“No worries, Mrs. Crane,” Dr. Carlisle said, hanging his stethoscope around his neck. “Take care, and have a nice day.”

“You too, doctor,” Mrs. Crane said. “It’s been lovely talking to you.”

Dr. Carlisle opened the door, and exited into the hall, feeling a bit dazed.

He stood for a moment, frowning slightly, and then seemed to come to a decision. He walked off down the hall toward the nurses’ station, and set his clipboard on the counter, and leaned against it.

“Excuse me, nurse…?” he said, smiling. “I’m covering for Dr. Kelly this week and next. I’m Dr. Carlisle – my office is up at Colville General.”

The nurse, a slim, middle-aged woman with gold-rimmed glasses and short salt-and-pepper hair, gave him a hand. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “Dana Treadwell. If there’s anything I can do…”

“Well, actually,” Dr. Carlisle said, “I do have a question. About Mrs. Crane, in 214.”

Dana smiled. “She’s an interesting case,” she said.

Dr. Carlisle nodded. “That’s my impression. She’s here because of advanced osteoporosis, but is there anything else that you can tell me that might be helpful?”

“Has periodic mild cardiac arrhythmia,” Dana said. “She had a full cardio workup about six months ago, showed nothing serious of note. Some tendency to elevated blood pressure, but nothing that medication can’t keep in check.” She paused, gave Dr. Carlisle a speculative look. “Some signs of mild dementia.”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you about. Is she… delusional?”

“That depends on what you mean,” Dana said. “Mentally, I hope I’m as with it when I’m 87. But she is prone to… flights of fancy. Particularly about her past.”

Dr. Carlisle didn’t answer for a moment. Should I mention the whole Satan thing? he thought, and decided against it. “She does seem to like telling stories,” he finally said.

“That she does,” Dana said.

The following day, Dr. Carlisle was making his rounds, and passed Mrs. Crane’s room, and heard a male voice. Curiosity did battle with reluctance to talk to her again, and curiosity won. He stepped into the room.

Mrs. Crane looked up from a conversation she was having with a man who was seated at the edge of the bed, gently holding her hand. When the man turned toward him, Dr. Carlisle immediately recognized him as the man in the photograph – noticeably older, perhaps in his mid to late fifties, but clearly the same person. He still had the same carefully-maintained short beard, the same dark handsomeness, the same sense of strength, energy, presence.

“Oh, doctor, I’m so glad you’ve stopped by!” Mrs. Crane said. “This is my son, Derek.”

“Dorian Carlisle,” Dr. Carlisle said. “Nice to meet you. I’m going to be your mother’s doctor for the next two weeks, until Dr. Kelly returns.”

Derek got up and extended a hand. “Derek Crane,” he said, and they clasped hands. Derek’s hand jerked a little, and a quick flinch crossed his face.

“Sorry,” Dr. Carlisle said, almost reflexively.

“It’s nothing,” Derek said. “Three weeks ago, I hurt my hand doing some home renovations. I guess it’s still not completely healed.”

“I didn’t mean to…” Dr. Carlisle started, but Derek cut him off.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Mom has been telling me about your visit yesterday. It sounds like she talked your ear off.”

Dr. Carlisle smiled. “Not at all. It was a pleasure. I’d much rather chat with my patients and get to know them a little – otherwise, all too easily this job starts being about symptoms and treatments, and stops being about people.”

Mrs. Crane beamed at them. “Well, it’s so nice of you to take time from your busy schedule to stop in,” she said. “I haven’t had any more palpitations.”

“That’s good,” Dr. Carlisle said. “I just wanted to see how you were doing. Nice to meet you, Derek.”

“Likewise,” Derek said, and smiled a little.

Was there something – tense? speculative? about the smile? Don’t be ridiculous, Dr. Carlisle thought. His mother just primed me to be wary of him because she’s delusional.

Dr. Carlisle exited the room, and then stopped suddenly, his face registering shock. He looked down at his hands. On his right ring finger he wore his high school class ring, from St. Thomas More Catholic Academy. He raised the ring to his eye, and saw, on each side of the blue stone in the setting, a tiny engraved cross.

That night, Dr. Carlisle told his girlfriend about Mrs. Crane over dinner.

“Now I want to meet this lady,” Nicole said, grinning.

“Can’t do that,” he said. “I can’t even tell you her name. Privacy laws, and all that. I probably shouldn’t have even told you as much as I did.”

“Well, it’s not like I’m going to go and tell anyone,” she replied. “And I have to hear about your job. It’s a big part of your life.”

He took a sip of wine. “And this one was just so out of left field. I’ve dealt with people with dementia before; but they always show some kind of across-the-board disturbance in their behavior. This was like, one thing. In other respects, she seems so normal.”

“You didn’t talk to her that long,” Nicole said.

“No,” he admitted. “But you learn to recognize dementia when you see it. There was something about the way she looked at you – you could tell that her brain was just fine.”

Nicole raised an eyebrow. “So, you think she really did have a fling with Satan?”

He scowled. “No, of course not. But I think she believes it. But then…” he trailed off.

“But then what?”

“Her son jumped when I shook his hand, like he’d been shocked, or something. Then he made some excuse about how he’d hurt his hand a couple of weeks ago. But I noticed afterwards – I was wearing my high school ring. It’s got crosses engraved on it. And it was probably blessed by the bishop.”

“You’re kidding me, right? I thought you’d given up all of that religious stuff when you moved out of your parents’ house.”

“I did.”

“Maybe you didn’t,” she said.

“All I’m saying is that it was weird.”

“And you’re acting pretty weird, yourself.”

“I just wonder if it might not be possible to test it. See if maybe she’s telling the truth.”

“You do believe her! Dorian, you’re losing it. Satan? You think she screwed Satan?”

He sat back in his chair. “I dunno,” he finally said. “All I can say is, she believes it enough that it made me wonder.”

The next day, other than a quick walk down the hall in the early morning hours, Dr. Carlisle avoided that wing of the nursing home until after lunch. When he finally went down the hallway toward room 214, he found that his heart was pounding. But he was stopped in the hall before he got to Mrs. Crane’s room by the nurse he’d spoken to two days earlier, Dana Treadwell.

“You missed some excitement,” Dana said.

“What happened?”

“A bad spill. Broken leg, possible fractured pelvis.”

Dr. Carlisle swallowed. “Which one of the patients?”

“Not a patient,” Dana said. “Mrs. Crane’s son. Slipped on wet tile right outside his mother’s room, and fell. Hard to believe you could be so badly hurt from a fall. They brought him to the Colville General – I heard he’s still in surgery.”

“That’s too bad,” he said, trying to keep his voice level.

“Mrs. Crane was really upset.”

“I’m sure,” Dr. Carlisle said.

Dana seemed to pick up the odd tone in his voice. She raised one eyebrow, and said, “Yeah. She was completely distraught.”

“Really?”

Dana nodded. “Especially after her ex-husband came by. We finally had to give her a sedative.”

Dr. Carlisle tried to think of something to say, and finally just choked out, “That’s too bad,” and turned away, hoping that Dana wouldn’t notice the ghastly expression on his face. He stuck his hand in his lab jacket pocket, and fingered the small glass bottle, now empty, that he’d filled early that morning at the font in the nursing home’s chapel.

“Oh, and Dr. Carlisle?” Dana said, and he turned.

“You might want to know that before we finally got her to go to sleep, your name came up.”

“Me?” Dr. Carlisle squeaked. “What did she say?”

“Something about your ‘needing an ocean of holy water.’ You might want to let Dr. Bennett handle her case from now on.” She smiled. “Just a suggestion.”

Xenophobia

2011-10-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

I just entered a flash fiction contest with the following piece. There were four rules: (1) maximum of 200 words; (2) the title had to start with the letter 'x'; (3) it had to contain the phrase "nothing left to" somewhere; and (4) it had to have some connection to a photograph of a flooded city street. The rather outré story that follows is what resulted.

****************************

Xenophobia

Nothing left to do. I finished sandbagging today. I can’t get out. The highway’s submerged except for a “No U-turn” sign, sticking above the water as if there were cars to warn.

It’s still raining.

They’ve tracked me for years, since the scuba diving trip in Belize. They almost got me that day, but I made it to shore, turned and looked – and saw fifty pairs of eyes, half-hidden in the surf, saying: Don’t think you’ve escaped. You haven’t.

I’ve seen them many times since. I thought it was only oceans, until I saw one watching me from a river as I crossed a bridge. It was submerged like a crocodile, only its unblinking eyes and the top of its head visible, long hair swirling in the current. I kept walking, didn’t look back. Don’t let them know you’re afraid.

I thought I was safe, a thousand miles from the ocean, no rivers, lakes, ponds nearby. But now water is seeping through the sandbags, lapping against my door.

I sit, shotgun across my lap, as night falls. Their eyes reflect the streetlight’s glow. There must be a hundred of them out there, waiting until the water comes in.

I’m ready for them.

"Signal to Noise" - six days till release!

2011-10-09T06:32:00.000-07:00

What if you knew the truth, but no one believed you?

What if you hardly believed it yourself?

This is the predicament that biologist Tyler Vaughan finds himself in when people start vanishing from the little town of Crooked Creek, Oregon. In the course of his research, Tyler has inadvertently captured on one of his thermal-imaging remote cameras a photograph of a creature known as Slender Man -- a faceless humanoid with long, thin arms and legs, whose presence is always associated with abductions, especially of children.

The problem is, who will believe him? The Crooked Creek Chief of Police Dale Blodgett (short for "Wensleydale" -- his parents were fans of Wallace & Gromit) certainly has no reason to, especially when the missing people return, apparently unscathed, and claiming to have no memory of what happened during their absence. Chief of Police Blodgett figures that if they're home, safe and sound, there's no reason to investigate further.

Tyler has one person in his corner, however -- flower child and organic herbal tea maker Rainey Carrington, who realizes that the abducted children may not have returned as safe and sound as they seem to be. Plus, she's got a serious crush on Tyler. Together, can they put together the pieces of what's happening in Crooked Creek, and stop it... before one of them disappears, too?

Signal to Noise will be available for purchase from Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes & Noble (Nook) for $3.99, on Saturday, October 15.

Walking Alone

2011-10-07T03:08:00.000-07:00

A little poem about a rainy night walk.

*********************

Walking Alone

Puddles of spilled light shimmer on the pavement.
I pass a streetlight. My shadow rotates beneath my feet,
Stretches out in front of me,
Black on silver.
Rainwater snickers and chuckles its way down the gutter
Then tumbles into the storm drain.
Branches drip, drizzle hisses on concrete;
A car swishes past, hurrying to get itself to its garage and its owner to bed,
Leaving me alone with the rain and the darkness --
Time counted not in minutes but in strides,
Each one closer to home.

Cover art - "Signal to Noise"

2011-10-02T07:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a proof of my cover art for my upcoming novel release (due out in two weeks!) - "Signal to Noise." I'd love some feedback! Any suggestions for changes? Or would you take one look at this, and say, "Hell, yeah, I'd read that!"?

The Sugar Mill

2011-10-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

A new short story, set in a place I know and love... and will never look at in the same way again.

*******************************

The Sugar Mill

Todd Blackwood took a drink from his pint of beer, and looked down the length of the bar. He gave a wink at Fernando, the bartender, and jerked his head toward his twin brother, Keith, who was hitting on one of the waitresses with a cheerful lack of subtlety.

“Your brother like the ladies, I see,” Fernando said, polishing a glass with a towel and then turning it upside down on a rack. “Bet you do, too.”

Todd grinned and said, “When I get a chance to make a move before Keith does.”

Fernando laughed, and said, “He not gonna have much luck with Maria, I don’t think. She like to tease, nothing much more.” He leaned on the bar. “What bring you two to Lamanai?”

Todd thought for a moment. That was a hard question to answer. They hadn’t meant to end up here, at Lamanai Outpost, an out-of-the-way corner of Orange Walk District in Belize. Lamanai was mostly frequented by birdwatchers and archaeologists, and Todd and Keith were neither. They were identical twins, and had graduated from different colleges on the same date earlier that year – Todd from Cornell, majoring in political science, and Keith from the University of Virginia, majoring in economics. Neither one had any job prospects after graduation, nor any particular plans to continue into graduate school, and one night shortly after graduation they had come up with the idea of traveling down to Central America, together. It seemed a great deal more pleasant that facing the task of job hunting. So they’d packed up a few belongings and left, making their way through Mexico, and then into Guatemala, and finally to Belize, seeing some of the sights, partying whenever they could, and making the acquaintance of as many dark-eyed young women along the way as they could manage.

Todd looked up at Fernando, and gestured around him to the bar, with its bamboo thatch, its slowly revolving ceiling fans, and its wooden railings overlooking the lake, hardly visible in the twilight. “It’s a great place,” he said. “A lake to swim in, hammocks, and cold beer. What else do you need?”

Fernando laughed, revealing a row of perfect white teeth set off by skin the color of café au lait. “Look like your brother need something he not gonna be getting tonight,” he said with a chuckle, as Keith walked up.

“No luck?” Todd said, and Keith shook his head, a little sheepishly. Fernando pulled another pint and set it in front of him.

“I told you,” Fernando said.

Keith shrugged. “Still gotta try,” he said.

“Damn, you two look exactly alike,” Fernando said, shaking his head. “I never seen two twins so much alike. How your mother even tell you apart?”

Keith grinned. “Even she gets confused, sometimes.”

“We’ve got different tattoos,” Todd said. “I check mine in the mirror every morning, just to make sure I know which brother I am.”

Fernando laughed, and said, “Tattoos? Let’s see.”

Both the brothers turned, and pulled their shirts up to their shoulders – their movements so similar that it seemed that they had to be one person and his reflection. But on Todd’s shoulder was a red and orange stylized dog, its tail twisted into an elaborate knot; across Keith’s back was a Celtic eagle, green and gold.

“Nice,” Fernando said. “So your mother wants to be sure, she just tell you to take your shirt off.”

Todd and Keith both laughed, and tugged their t-shirts back into place.

“You gone up to see the Mayan ruins?” Fernando asked.

“Yeah,” Todd said. “We saw the Jaguar Temple yesterday. Very cool. Any other places we should go?”

“Oh, there’s lots of places. All kind of ruins around here, very old.”

“We haven’t been out to see that place that archaeologist told us about,” Keith said. “That old sugar mill. He said it was an easy walk from here.”

Fernando’s eyebrows went up, and his perpetual smile suddenly evaporated. “That place?” he said. “Why you wanna go there?”

Keith shrugged. “It sounded interesting. The archaeologist guy said so.”

“You talking about Dr. van Fleet?”

Keith nodded.

“Don’t listen to him,” Fernando said, his dark eyes narrowing in a scowl. “He don’t know a damn thing.”

Todd looked at the bartender, and thought, Wow, what’s up with Fernando? Sounds like we touched a nerve. “He seemed like he knew a lot about the history of this place, and all,” Todd said.

“Just what’s in books,” Fernando said, his voice scornful. “He tells all the tourists about how old all the walls and statues and pyramids are, and when the Maya were doing what. But he don’t know, not really. Not what matters.” Fernando gave a little snort. “It keep him safe, all that book learning. At least it does that much.”

“Safe from what?” Todd asked.

Fernando leaned on the counter. “That sugar mill,” he said, his voice lowering almost to a whisper, “it’s a bad place. No one who lives here go there at all. Only reason there’s still a trail is because of Dr. van Fleet and people like him. They keep safe with their dates and facts and history and all, but that don’t mean anyone else would be safe. You stay away from that place.”

“What do you know about it?” Keith asked.

“Why you wanna know?”

Keith shrugged. “Just curious.”

Fernando looked at him appraisingly, and finally said, with some reluctance, “It’s not old. Least, not old like the pyramids are. Some Englishmen built it, back about 150 years ago. They wanted to grow sugar cane here. But the jungle’s no good for sugar cane, and other places grew it better. But that’s not the real reason they abandoned it – Englishmen, they don’t give up a place just because it’s a bad idea.”

He stopped for a moment, and both brothers looked at him, waiting for him to continue.

Fernando looked down, swabbed the bar with his towel, and then seemed to come to a decision. “They built the mill on a bad place,” he said finally. “I don’t know how else to say it. The Maya knew about that place – they wouldn’t go near it. Something is there, where the sugar mill is. You go there – you get changed. Everything changes. It reaches in and rips out a piece of you, rips it out so complete you don’t even know it’s gone. It reaches back into your past, changes everything. The man who built that thing, he found out it was a bad place – he went out there by himself one night, after he knew the sugar cane wouldn’t grow and his business was failing – and when he came back, he just went crazy. He wouldn’t talk about what happened, he just yelled, ‘It’s gone, it’s gone,’ over and over, and finally they took him away and I guess he went back to England. I never heard what happened to him in the end. But the mill shut down – none of the natives would work there right from the start, and after what happened to that Englishman, the rest of the English decided that maybe they shouldn’t go there, either. And now big parts of it have fallen in. Brick walls, they don’t last in the jungle. The vines are pulling it down. Big metal gear wheels stick up through where the roof used to be, and black holes for windows.”

“You’ve been there, then?” Keith asked, and took a drink from his pint.

Fernando looked at him, his lips narrowing into a thin line. “Yeah,” he said. “Once. Only once. When I was twelve. I went out there because my cousin dared me to. I could feel the place reaching out toward me, and I ran back home as fast as I could. I was sick for a week afterwards.”

“But it didn’t actually do anything to you,” Keith said.

“No,” Fernando admitted. “But it wanted to.” He shook his head. “You’re nice boys, I know that. Stay here, have some drinks, find some girls to party with, go swimming. Stay away from that place.”

“Maybe you could put in a good word for me with Maria,” Keith said, grinning.

Fernando looked at him in silence for a moment, and then his tense face relaxed into a smile. “Hey, man, I been trying myself for two years,” he said. “I think far as that goes, you’re on your own.”

Todd was dozing in one of the outpost’s many hammocks the next afternoon when Keith came up, wearing swim trunks, water darkening his blond hair and beading on his tanned shoulders. He gave a push on the hammock. “Hey, Todd, get your lazy ass up,” he said. “You gonna sleep the day away?”

Todd yawned and stretched, and regarded his brother with a scowl. “I don’t feel like swimming,” he said.

“I’m not talking about swimming,” he said. “I just did that. You want to walk up to the sugar mill?”

Todd’s eyebrows went up. “After what Fernando told us?”

“You’re serious? You believed all that?”

Todd shrugged. “Well, Fernando did.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s all true,” Keith said. “I want to see it for myself.”

“You think we can find it?”

“You heard Van Fleet,” Keith said. “He said it was down that little trail right off the main road to the village.” He grinned. “You’re scared. Look at you. No wonder you never can get any women.”

There followed about five minutes of shoving that finally turned into a wrestling match, and Todd found himself pinned down on the leaf-strewn ground with his brother smiling down into his face.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll let you up if you’ll either agree to go with me to the sugar mill, or else you have to say, ‘Todd Blackwood is a scared little girl.’”

“Fuck you, Keith,” Todd said, and struggled to get his arms free.

“Try again, bro,” he said. “Todd Blackwood is a scared little girl.”

“Dammit,” Todd said. “All right, whatever. I’ll go with you.” Keith cackled and swung himself up off his brother, and Todd got up, brushing the dirt and leaves from his back. “I’m not scared,” he added.

“Good,” Keith said. “Neither am I. I’m gonna go grab my camera, and we can head out.”

The dirt road from the outpost ran straight through a cut in the jungle to a little village three miles distant, but before the village was the trailhead that Dr. van Fleet had pointed out to them earlier. It was barely wide enough for two to walk side-by-side, and Keith went ahead, Todd following. A mosquito whined in Todd’s ear, and he slapped it away, regretting his decision not to put on a shirt before leaving the outpost. Underneath the eaves of the jungle it was as dim as evening; trailing vines hung down, brushing their faces as they walked, and they had to step over huge, twisted roots that crossed the trail, curling along the ground like giant gray snakes. Bird calls were everywhere, and in the distance they could hear the rough growl of a howler monkey.

“How far down this trail is it?” Todd asked, after they’d been walking for twenty minutes.

“Van Fleet said it wasn’t much more than a mile or so,” Keith said. “It can’t be too much further.”

They came on it suddenly; around a bend in the trail, and there was a change in the light – part of the canopy was thinner, and the illumination went from late evening to dusk. In front of them was a dilapidated red brick building, with gaping, arched windows opening onto blackness. Vines crawled up the sides, and had in places brought down the walls; piles of rotting bricks lay at the foot of the building. A great rusted metal gear wheel, of uncertain purpose, protruded through the vegetation.

“Wow,” Todd said.

“It’s awesome,” Keith said. “And it hasn’t stolen our souls yet,” he added cheerfully. “I told you all that stuff Fernando said was superstitious bullshit.” He lifted his camera, and took several pictures of it.

“Okay, so we saw it,” Todd said. “Let’s go back. It’s hot and sticky in here, I think I want to go swimming.”

“You just want to go back because you’re a chickenshit,” Keith said, laughing. He looked up at the sugar mill. “I want to climb up onto the top.”

“Are you kidding?” Todd said. “That wall looks like it’s ready to collapse.”

“It’s not gonna collapse,” Keith said. “Here, hold my camera.” He went up to the base of the wall, and reached up tentatively. “I could climb this. It’s no worse than that rock climbing I did last summer in the ‘Gunks.”

Todd watched his brother, trying to quell a rising sense of panic. He didn’t want to object any further; he’d been stung by the accusation of cowardice. Todd had always felt himself to be a step behind Keith in taking risks, whether it was physical or emotional ones. He was half envious watching his brother, lean muscles standing out in his bronzed back as he scaled the wall, the green and gold eagle flexing as he moved his shoulders, reaching for ever higher places to grasp.

And he finally made it to the top of the broken wall, and with one final heave pulled himself astride of it, then clambered up.

It’s coming. It’s there, waiting to grab him.

The thought came suddenly, seemingly from outside his mind, and Todd was seized with such a balls-clenching sense of terror that he was rooted to the spot, watching his brother standing, laughing on top the wall, both fists clenched in the air in a victory salute.

“C’mon, Keith, get down,” Todd said, trying to hide the desperation in his voice.

Last chance. Get out of here.

“Not until you take my picture,” Keith said, grinning.

Todd lifted the camera, zoomed in, centered it on his brother, and the shutter gave a little click as he pressed the button.

“Okay, I took a picture. C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

Keith, with one lithe, agile movement, leaned over and grabbed the top of the wall, and then swung his body down – inside the building.

“Dammit, Keith!” Todd said. “We need to get out of here!”

“I’m coming,” came Keith’s voice, a little muffled. “I just want to take a look inside. There’s got to be a way to get out from the inside.”

Todd ran up to the wall, but bottom edge of the lowest window was five feet above his head. “Keith! You don’t know what’s in there!”

Keith laughed, his voice coming from a little lower. “Just a bunch of dead leaves and branches and shit,” he said. “And it looks like there’s a door or something at the back. Just a minute, I’m almost down.” There was a crunch as Keith’s feet landed on the leaf litter inside the building, and then silence.

“Keith?” Todd said, after a minute had passed.

Too late, you had your chance.

“Keith! Goddammit!” Todd ran around to the back of the sugar mill, looking for the door that Keith had seen – and saw only a pile of rubble. The back of the building had collapsed almost completely, and Todd scrambled over the crumbled bricks, until he stood on top, looking down into what had been the interior of the building – and saw no one.

“Keith!” Todd shrieked, startling a bird that flew away out of the brickwork with a squawk. Other than that, the only sound was a small noise, thin as a knife blade, that might have been laughter.

That night, back in the outpost, Todd sat in the bar, working on his third vodka and orange juice. He sat at a table in the corner, staring vacantly at the wall, and when Maria came over and tried to strike up a conversation with him, he just stared at her, his gray eyes wide and empty, and finally she gave a shudder and turned away.

Fernando came over, and said, “You drinking a lot tonight. Struck out with the ladies?”

Todd shook his head, and said, “It isn’t that.”

“You look like you got some bad news.” The bartender sat down on a stool across from Todd.

Todd looked down, and didn’t answer for a long time. “I have a brother,” he said, finally.

“Oh, yeah?” Fernando said.

“His name’s Keith. He’s my identical twin.”

“Seriously? I always thought it’d be weird, having a twin.”

Todd shook his head. “No. It’s just the way it is.” He looked up at Fernando, a strange glint in his eye. “Problem is, my mom has never heard of him. I called her up this afternoon, called her collect from the phone in the outpost.”

Fernando gave him a little smile, a look of You’re kidding, right? “Yeah? She must be surprised she got a son she don’t know about.”

Todd didn’t answer. He pulled out a camera that had the initials “TB” scratched into the plastic housing. He pushed a few buttons, called up a series of photographs, and scrolled down to one of them – a zoomed shot of the top of the wall of the sugar mill, the center of the frame showing nothing but empty sky and a bit of the jungle canopy.

“You know where this is?” Todd said, showing it to Fernando.

Fernando looked at it, and a visible shiver ran through him. “You went out to that damn place?” he said. “I told you not to.”

Todd said, “I know.”

“No wonder you drinking tonight,” Fernando said. “Well, at least you came back safe. I can’t believe you went out there alone.”

Todd looked up toward Fernando, but his were eyes focused on a point far distant. “Yeah,” he finally said. “Neither can I.”

Sonata for Ghost Violin

2011-09-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

A piece of flash fiction to think about next time you have a song stuck in your head.

****************************

Luke Reilly was fifteen the first time he heard the music.

He was sitting in his high school biology class, and at first he thought that he was hearing the band playing in the music room down the hall. It didn’t sound like band music, though; he could hear a piano, and what sounded like a violin, playing some complex piece in a minor key. It also sounded far more polished than the high school band ever sounded.

He looked around. Mr. Dennis, the biology teacher, was droning on about genes and Punnett squares as if they were the most interesting thing ever, and if he heard the music, he was ignoring it. Luke glanced at his classmates, whose faces registered a spectrum of emotion from boredom to interest. No one had that odd little frown that seems universal when someone hears something incongruous, and so Luke simply tuned it out and tried to return his attention to Mr. Dennis’ lecture.

The music faded out a little toward the end of the period, and if it was present at all during lunch he couldn’t hear it for the noise in the cafeteria. It came back during seventh period English, and he asked the girl sitting next to him if she knew where the music was coming from. The English wing was on the other side of the school from the band room, so even if the band was playing, it wasn’t likely they could be heard from that far away.

The girl gave him a quizzical look, and said, “What music?”

Luke said, “I thought I heard some music playing,” and then smiled and shrugged it off. My imagination is getting the better of me, he thought.

He heard it again that evening, during dinner, and was on the verge of asking his dad whether he’d left the television on when he recognized it as the same odd, dark melody he’d heard earlier. He started paying more attention to it; he could hear the violin, weaving in and out of the piano’s steady, shimmering undercurrent of sound. It faded a little, as he listened; came back again for about five minutes; and then fell silent just as the family got up from the table and began bringing plates into the kitchen to be washed.

In the weeks that followed, Luke found the music coming back again and again. It was always the same piece. It faded at different points, picked up at different points, but it never changed to a different melody. He never heard the beginning of it, and he never heard it end; it just played for a while, and then drifted away, as if he were walking past a concert hall and hearing fragments of their performance, but no complete piece.

For the first few months, he listened for it more or less constantly, and sometimes he found himself tensed, trying to force his ears to pick up the sounds of the musical instruments against the backdrop of whatever ambient noise was present. But it never came when called. It was either there, or else it wasn’t. It didn’t seem to matter where he was, what he was doing, or who he was with. Finally, he just accepted it, and stopped thinking much about it. He heard it playing when he was eighteen and was in the process of happily losing his virginity to Kelly Trent on the rug in front of a fireplace in her parents’ living room, and afterwards he thought, “At least they could have played the Hallelujah Chorus for me, or something.” The fact that he could joke about it – to himself, at least – is an indication of how ordinary it had come to seem to him.

Still, he never told anyone about it. When he married, at age 23, the music was playing during his wedding ceremony, the minor key counterpoint jarring against the organist’s strident pounding out of the Wedding March. He heard it off and on during the following ten years, sometimes several times in one day, sometimes only little snatches of it interspersed by weeks of silence.

It was there – or it wasn’t. And that was that. A sonata for ghost violin and spectral piano.

When he was 36 years old, and a rising star in the real estate business, a father of three children, he began to notice that the music was getting louder. He still was able to tune it out most of the time– except for at night, when he found that it was keeping him awake. He would lie awake for hours, there in the dark with Connie sleeping next to him, with the music that only he could hear whirling around him. This was the point that he began to wonder if he should tell someone about it – Connie, perhaps, or maybe even a therapist.

What will I tell them? he thought, one morning at 2:30 AM, as the violin and piano played a glittering arpeggio of notes. That I hear music that isn’t there? What could they possibly do about that? It’s not like I’m crazy, or anything.

But over the next few weeks, Luke found himself having to ask people to repeat what they’d said. The music was getting loud enough to drown out softer sounds, and after having been asked to repeat something three times, one of his coworkers said, “Reilly, I think it’s time for you to get your ears checked. You’re going deaf, buddy.” But Luke didn’t want to explain, It’s not deafness, I hear just fine. In fact, I can hear so well that I’m hearing things that you can’t.

One June morning in that year, after yet another sleepless night, he couldn’t bear it any more.

He left home that morning, kissed Connie goodbye, and once he got to his car, he called into the office and said that he was sick, that he wouldn’t be in to work that day. He had no idea who in the office he was talking to, or what they’d said in response. The piano and violin were jangling painfully in his skull, drowning out all the other sounds in the world; when he was passed by an 18-wheeler, its compression brakes growling, he was barely aware of it. He left the main highway, took a road up into the hills, to a nature preserve twenty miles out of town.

To where there was silence.

But, of course, there wasn’t silence there; the quiet of the park just made the percussion of the piano hammers on the strings sound louder, the drawing of the bow across the violin seeming to play its notes by vibrating his backbone in resonance. He left his car, stumbling up a trail into the trees, his hands clamped over his ears – not that it helped.

Crescendo. Luke fell against a dark, damp tree trunk, not able to hear himself screaming in pain, and the bark of the tree tore skin from his back as he slithered to a sitting position. He looked frantically around, hoping for some obvious way to kill himself – a cliff to jump from, a lake to drown himself in – but all was peaceful and safe, and quiet to everyone but him.

He unclamped his hands from the side of his head, looking with horror at the blood that had flowed from his ears, staining his palms crimson. His eyes rolled upwards as he lost consciousness.

The music was still whirling around him when he opened his eyes. Unfamiliar faces looked down on him – men and women in fancy dress. Overhead was a chandelier, and a turn of his head showed tables with food, immaculately-dressed waiters dispensing wine, unperturbed by the fact that one of the guests had fainted.

“Honey,” a woman said, fanning his face, a worried crease on her forehead. Dangling emerald earrings swung from her earlobes, catching the light in flashes. “George. Are you okay? We were dancing, and you just collapsed.”

“George?” he said, his voice sounding foreign, alien, in his ears. Still, the music swirled in the air, the same familiar pairing of violin and piano he had known for the past twenty years. But at least it was at a comfortable volume now. He struggled to sit up.

“No, George, wait, we’ve called the paramedics,” the woman said. “Just stay lying down. You’ll be fine.”

“My name’s not George,” he said. “It’s Luke. Luke Reilly. Who are you?"

The woman gave a frightened glance at the people who were standing near her, and then looked down at him and tried to smile. “I’m Marie. Your wife. Marie.” She stroked his face. “You’ve been unconscious for about five minutes. But don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”

And as he looked up, from one strange, unknown face to another, the music finally ended.

Cat's Eyes

2011-09-16T17:33:00.000-07:00

This piece of flash fiction was inspired by something that actually happened to my friend, the talented writer and musician Martha Carpenter, so this piece is dedicated to her... with the hopes that nothing like it ever happens to her again.

******************************************

Cori turned the corner onto Waltham Street and stopped for a moment, looking up the steep hill to where there was a sprinkling of lights – the college, her dorm, and bed. It had been a long, exhausting, but exhilarating evening – dinner with five friends at Borley’s, which had the best burgers in Colville, and then an evening spent swing dancing. The dance didn’t end until midnight, and when the doors of the Colville Community Center opened to spill out light and laughing, talking people into the night, Cori said her goodbyes and declined offers of a ride. She was hot and sweaty and the night air was cool and inviting, and she’d always liked walking.

She followed Waltham for three blocks, and then turned onto Marsh Street. Marsh skirted Catanic Creek, tumbling and bubbling downhill in its rocky course, but her feet carried her the opposite way, up a punishingly steep hill lined with old shop fronts.

She stopped for a moment in front of Ballechin’s Used Books. Its windows were dark, but she pressed her nose against the glass. Old books were a passion, and her choice of English Literature as a major was in part driven by a yearning to be surrounded by them. Leather bindings had magic, and crackling, yellowed pages, and that dusty, old-book smell that wasn’t quite like any other smell in the world. This bookstore had tens of thousands of titles, and in the light from the streetlight, Cori could just barely make out the metal shelves receding backwards into the shadowy interior.

She turned away with a sigh. A trip to Ballechin’s would have to wait until she had more money, and also, of course, until it was open.

She had walked another block when she saw, in the harsh yellow glare, a figure approaching her, coming down Marsh Street on the same side of the road. Cori was a confident walker, but like most women, she was never free from the lurking worry of being the victim of violence. Her heart gave a quick little gallop, but then she saw with relief that the person approaching her wasn’t male (one thing checked off the fear inventory), seemed smaller than Cori was (a second thing checked off), and was walking with the hesitant, shuffling gait of the elderly (fear inventory completed, signed, and filed away). Cori gave a little shiver as the last of the panic left her body.

As the woman approached, she saw that she was dressed in a dark, full-length coat, and was wearing a scarf tied over her head. This seemed odd, for a mild night in September, but older people frequently felt the cold more keenly than the young, and as the distance between them shortened, Cori smiled a little at the memory of her own grandmother, who surreptitiously turned up the thermostat whenever she came to visit and she thought no one was looking.

Thirty feet, twenty, ten. The woman’s face was in deep shadow, but Cori saw she was smaller even than she’d thought at first, barely five feet tall, and hunched over. Cori felt a sudden desire to see the woman’s face.

Why? she thought. She’s probably just some poor old crazy cat woman, out walking to the Seven-Eleven to get some canned food for her twenty-eight cats. The image, which she had thought at first was funny, suddenly struck her as terrifying, and she thought, No, I don’t want to see her face. I don’t want to see it at all. I don’t…

They passed close, almost brushing elbows. Cori would have had to step into the street to be any further away from her. And as they passed, the woman looked up at Cori, and Cori found that she had to turn toward her. Her head moved as if it were being pulled by a string. Unwillingly, Cori looked down at the woman, and for a moment, their eyes met.

The woman had cat’s eyes.

Her lined face was heavily made up, and around her eyes was eye shadow and liner, drawing the shape of her eyes into an almond, feline slant. The irises were dark, so dark that they looked all pupil. She looked straight into Cori’s eyes, unblinking, and with an expression of such malignity that it was almost non-human.

Cori gasped, and with an effort continued her forward motion, taking another stumbling step and nearly colliding with the lamp post. The gaze broke, and Cori’s head snapped around forward. She continued her walk uphill with a jittering, uneven gait, her heart hammering in her chest.

That woman just stole my soul.

The thought came to her so suddenly that it seemed to come from outside her, in a voice not hers. Her breath was coming in whistly gasps, and she kept herself from looking back only by main force of will.

She couldn’t help herself; she slowed her step, turned to look. Part of her felt terrified that she’d turn, and the old woman would be right there behind her, staring up at her with those baleful cat’s eyes.

But she wasn’t. The old woman had evidently continued her walk downhill, and her stooped back, swathed in its dark coat, was all she could see in the distance.

She’s not following me. She got my soul, and now she’s taking it away. She has no use for my body.

Cori’s foot struck a steel grate in the sidewalk with a loud thunk.

And the old woman stopped, then slowly turned. From fifty feet away, Cori could feel the intensity of those eyes, staring right at her. That was when Cori’s nerve broke, and she began to run uphill, her breath coming in tight, desperate whimpers. She only halted when there was a stitch in her side so painful that she couldn’t continue.

She fell, gasping, against the front wall of another old, dilapidated store, and for a few minutes she stood there, breathing hard, trying to massage her side to get the spasm to loosen up. She turned and looked through the window of the store front, and saw, sitting in the window, the face of a porcelain doll. She’d noticed this store before – it sold antique dolls to collectors. The doll in the window was dressed in vintage clothes, and had dark, curly hair. Its expressionless face stared at Cori blankly.

Cori lifted her eyes, and caught sight of her own reflection in the window, lit by the glare from the street lights.

She, too, was a doll. A lifelike, beautiful doll, wavy blond hair in a stylish cut around her face, her skin perfect and blemish free, every feature carved so as to be indistinguishable from the real thing. She raised a hand to her face, touched her cheek, watched her mouth pull back into a horrified grimace, and then looked into her own eyes.

Her own blank, empty eyes.

With a cry of anguish, she turned away from the window, and looked down the hill toward the corner of Marsh and Waltham - but the old woman had already vanished from sight.

Shapeshifter

2011-09-12T02:48:00.000-07:00

A poem I wrote about one of the most amoral people I've ever met.

***************************

Shapeshifter

Look at him from one angle; he seems bigger.
From another his cleverness glitters like cut crystal.
One face shows righteous outrage at ill-treatment;
Then with no trace of irony another face boasts, laughing, about how
He hoodwinked someone foolish enough to trust him.

Anger in him sizzles like an electric arc.
Look once, twice; it's gone. Nothing but charm remains.
He hands you a black and bitter drink, eyes dark with hatred;
A moment later, the eyes fill with innocent bewilderment when you refuse to swallow it.
His words soothe, stroke; misdirect; wound.
He speaks sharp-edged contempt
Through a polished smile.

Hold a mirror up to him;
One image. But a different one
For every person he meets
And a different one each time you meet him.

He slips, he slides, he dances, he weaves and dodges;
No trap can hold him. Pin him down, he oozes away,
Turns, and smiles at you, eyes flashing triumph;
Unassailable. You cannot win, and he knows it.

Vegetation

2011-09-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

It's ragweed season. Here's a piece of flash fiction to think about, the next time you sneeze.

****************************

Captain Tarkonen stood in front of the closed hatch, facing the five members of the away team.

“Remember our briefing,” she said, her gray eyes holding the gaze of each of her five crew members in turn. “There seems to be no animal life on this planet. This is no excuse for a lack of caution. We know the air is breathable, and there is nothing out there that is an apparent threat. The emphasis is on the word apparent. You are on an alien world, and everything you touch – no matter how innocuous – should be looked upon as a potential danger.” She paused, raising an eyebrow. “Are there any questions?”

No one spoke. The exobotanist, Latimer, moved his feet in barely-restrained nervous excitement, pawing the ground like a colt.

Tarkonen allowed herself a small smile. “I know, Latimer, I know. Plants. Lots of them. But if you can refrain from having multiple orgasms until you’re alone in your lab later, we’d all be most grateful.”

There was a ripple of laughter, and some of the tension dissipated. Tarkonen turned, and pressed the button for the hatch.

“Then, ladies and gentlemen… welcome to Delta Cygni V.”

The light that came in through the open hatchway was dim, and the air humid and fragrant with a spicy sweetness that none of the six could name. It was warm, welcoming. Any thoughts of danger that were instilled by Tarkonen’s warnings evaporated immediately as they stepped out into the woodland, took in the colors, textures, aromas.

But no sounds. It was a silent world. Tarkonen, looking around her and trying not to allow her natural wariness to drown in the wonder of an alien forest, noticed it immediately. Anywhere on Earth, such a woodland would be a symphony of noises – birdsong, insects buzzing, small movements of animals in the underbrush. Here, it was as quiet as a cathedral.

It’s not the Earth, she thought. You shouldn’t expect it to be. You've been on enough alien worlds that you should have learned that by now.

Latimer, the exobotanist, went from one plant to another, murmuring, “It’s a little like a Curcuma or Alpinia – something from the Zingiberaceae – but it’s got woody stems. Parallel evolution. And this has nuts in shells, like a Carya – but they’re in threes…” He stopped suddenly, jerked his hand back, and put his lips to the back of his wrist.

Markland, the geologist, said, “What’s wrong?”

Latimer looked up sheepishly. “Thorns,” he said. “Should have expected it.”

Markland laughed. “That’s why I stick to rocks.”

The preliminary exploration lasted for two hours. They found flowers in a dazzling array of colors. There was fruit hanging in clusters – samples would tell if it was edible, but for now, it was just collected and bagged for lab analysis. Everything was photographed, sampled, tagged.

As they returned to the ship, Mzenga, the barrel-chested chief of security, said, “We need more expeditions like this. I could get into defending people from a bunch of vegetation.”

Tarkonen smiled as she mounted the ladder back to the hatch of the landing shuttle. “We’d have to discuss your salary, if your job was that easy.”

Behind her, Markland sneezed. Tarkonen turned. “Cold, Lieutenant?”

Markland shook her head. “Just allergies, Captain,” she said. “I’ll get Dr. Dietz to give me a booster if it doesn’t clear up once we’re indoors.”

Latimer and Markland were the last to finish dinner, and lingered briefly over a celebratory glass of wine, traditional after an initial expedition on a new world. He absently scratched the back of his wrist.

“I’ve been wondering,” Markland said. “Don’t you think it’s kind of weird, all the flowers and fruit and so on?”

“Why is it weird?” Latimer said.

“You’re the botanist,” she responded. “You don’t see anything strange about it?”

Latimer shrugged. “It’s awesome, not strange,” he said. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime. I could spend twenty years just cataloguing all the species here.”

Markland shook her head. “Why do plants make flowers and fruits?”

“Pollination and seed dispersal,” Latimer said. “Because…” He stopped, set down his wine glass. “Oh.”

“Yeah. No animals. Why would plants waste their time with fruits and flowers when there are no animals to attract in to pollinate the flowers and disperse the seeds?”

"I was so excited by all of the diversity, that never even occurred to me." He looked at Markland, a little uncertainly. "There's got to be another reason, then."

"I can think of one other," Markland said. "Why else do organisms lure in other organisms?"

Latimer frowned, and then his eyes widened in horror. “And…” He looked at the back of his wrist, where a rough, inflamed spot had begun, around the site where he’d been poked by a thorn. “Why make thorns? As a defense against what?” He pushed his chair back, and it squeaked on the tiled floor. “I’ll be in my lab,” he said, his voice thin.

“What do you mean, Latimer’s missing?” Tarkonen said.

“He’s not in his lab, Captain,” Markland said. “And I checked in with Mzenga. The computer shows that no one has activated the hatch since we came in yesterday evening.”

“He’s got to be on the ship, then,” Tarkonen said, and sneezed.

Markland looked at her, and only then did Tarkonen notice that Markland’s eyes were watery and red, and her nose seemed runny.

“Two more things, Captain,” Markland said. “First, the exobotany lab is full of plants. There are thorny vines all over the lab stool and the table where Latimer puts his samples.” She hesitated. “The cluster of vines on the lab stool are twisted together, and the shape looks a little like a human body.”

Tarkonen swallowed. “So you think that…”

Markland shook her head. “No. I know. Dr. Dietz did a scan of my lungs this morning.” The geologist held up a translucent sheet, showing the outline of her own lungs, bronchi, trachea. They were shadowed with a network of fine filaments, that looked alarmingly like… roots.

“Dear god,” Tarkonen said. “Pollen.”

Conversation Within Four White Walls

2011-09-01T17:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote this poem after the death of my grandmother, at the age of 93, in a nursing home. I still miss her.

*******************************

Here, I brought you some good soup today

       Please Marguerite I want to go home
             Take me home

Just try to eat a little of it; you need to eat well if you’re going to get better

       Oh Marguerite bring me home
             I hate it here
                   Take me home

Bertie are you all right
You don’t look well

       I’d be well if
             I could leave this place
                   Take me home

I’m calling the nurse
Your face... too pale

       I hate this place
             Hate it hate
                   The four white walls that smell of antiseptic
                         It’s so cold so cold
                             Take me home

Nurse... help... help me...
Help us... get a doctor

                   If I were home I’d be sitting
             By the lake in the sunshine
       We could watch the herons and geese and talk as we used to,
Not like here where the words slither and mumble from
My dying tongue, numbed so it might not express
The pain, and fall on your ears numbed so that you are shielded from hearing it
We could walk down by the edge where the reeds grow in the shallows
Even dive into the cool depths, in the water where all are children and equals
And things be as they were, not like this no never
And we would never have to cage our goodbye inside four white walls

Signal to Noise (an excerpt of a work in progress)

2011-08-31T08:33:00.000-07:00

I've finished the first draft of my current novel, Signal to Noise, which I hope to release by October 1. Here's an excerpt from the middle of the story - involving the Chief of Police, Dale Blodgett, and the hapless zoologist Tyler Vaughan, who have found themselves investigating a series of disappearances in the little town of Crooked Creek, Oregon.

Signal to Noise will be available as an e-book from Amazon (Kindle) and Barnes&Noble (Nook).

***************

Dale left Dorrie’s Bar and Grill a little before seven-thirty, and drove off in the dusk up toward the shadowy bulk of the Three Sisters. By the time he got to Tyler’s trailer, the light was fading fast. He pulled into the weed-overgrown gravel driveway and crunched to a stop, and then sat there for a moment, looking at the light streaming out from inside.

A hand pushed aside curtains, and Tyler’s face appeared in the window, and then disappeared. A moment later, as Dale was climbing out of his car, the front door opened, and a wiry-haired mutt the size of a calf came bounding down the front steps and out into the yard. Two enormous paws were planted in the middle of his chest, and Dale, despite his weight, went over backwards like a bowling pin, right through the still-open car door, smacking the back of his head on the roof on the way down. He heard Tyler calling, frantically, “Goddammit, Ahab! Bad dog! You’re not supposed to assault a police officer!”

Dale felt the pressure on his chest suddenly lessen, and sat up, wiping the dog slobber off his face with one hand and rubbing the back of his head with the other. Tyler had Ahab by the collar and had dragged him a little way off. Tyler was leaning over, yelling right into Ahab’s face, “One of these days, you’re really going to hurt someone! You are such a big oaf!” The dog, Dale observed, was still wagging happily. “Now, sit!” Tyler yelled, and Ahab sat, his tail sweeping the ground with unabated good cheer.

“Jesus, Dale, I’m sorry,” Tyler said, coming over and helping Dale to his feet. “He’s not dangerous, he’s just dumb.”

“No harm,” Dale said. “I’m okay.”

“What brings you here tonight?”

“I just thought it might be smart to keep an eye on you, after what happened to Rainey. Judy Kahn told me you have the last copy of the photograph from your camera – I don’t want you to disappear because of it.”

Tyler patted the pocket of his jeans. “On a flash drive, right here,” he said. “I’m not taking any chances.”

“It’s not smart to carry it around everywhere,” Dale warned. “If you disappear, so does it.”

“I’m not going to disappear,” Tyler said. “You don't have to worry about me."

"Judy told me that your computer reappeared.”

“That was just bizarre,” Tyler said. “I still haven’t figured that part out. Why would Slender Man return my computer?”

“I have no idea,” Dale said. “Unless he was just being considerate, it’s hard to explain.”

“So, is that why you came by to see me? Because if so, I have to tell you that don’t know anything more now than I did this afternoon.”

“No, it’s not that.” Dale gave Tyler a thoughtful look. “Judy told me she thought you were likely to go charging in and try to rescue Rainey.”

“She told you that?”

“Yeah.”

Tyler considered. “Honestly, I probably would, if I knew where to charge in to.”

“That’s what Judy said.”

“I’ve been pondering all day if there’s a way to figure out where she’s being held. I don’t have any clue.”

“Good, and I plan on keeping it that way.”

Tyler’s eyebrows went up. “You have an idea about where she is?”

Dale scowled. “I am not gonna tell you.”

“You do know!” Tyler said triumphantly.

“How do you know that?”

“Well, otherwise, why would you have said that you’re not gonna tell me where to go?”

“Look, Tyler,” Dale said, in an exasperated tone of voice, “you just sit tight here. Play with your dog, watch a movie, then go to bed. Put that flash drive somewhere safe. Don’t forget to lock your doors. You’re not gonna play detective, not on my watch.”

“But Dale, Rainey’s…”

Dale held up a hand. “No.”

Tyler looked deflated, and said, “All right. I’ll chill.”

And Dale thought, Man, he IS like a golden lab.

After leaving Tyler’s, Dale drove back down to the village, and did a slow circuit of the streets. He deliberately drove past Kevin Torgeson’s house, then Kathleen Standish’s, then Phil Collette’s. All of the houses were lit from within, but showed no particular sign of activity. At around nine-thirty he decided to make one more pass by Tyler’s house, and as he drove up he was relieved to see Tyler’s rusty blue Civic still parked next to the trailer, and the living room light still on.

Awesome. He’s still here. I’m gonna check in with him, then maybe give a quick run up to the Three Sisters Lodge, although what the hell I’ll say to Maureen if I see her, I don’t know. Then I’m gonna go home and go to bed – he’ll have to look after himself for the rest of the evening.

Dale got out of his car, and walked up the steps to the door, and knocked.

There were three deep-throated woofs from the other side, then silence.

No one answered the door, so he knocked again. This elicited a prolonged volley of barking, but no human sounds at all.

Frowning, Dale reached down and twisted the door handle. It was unlocked. This time, he was ready for the canine assault, and he opened the door and quickly stepped aside. Ahab launched himself out, barking merrily, and ambled about the front yard for a while. He finally came up to Dale, sniffed his pant leg in an experimental fashion, and then wagged. Dale reached down and scratched him behind the ears.

“Tyler, you home?” Dale called, and then stepped inside.

There wasn’t much to the trailer – a living room, disorderly and cluttered with books and papers, a little bedroom, and an even smaller kitchen, where the remnants of several previous meals still sat in the sink. Ahab walked up to the bin of dog food, and looked from it to Dale with hope in his eyes.

Dale ignored the attempted canine telepathy. He gave one more call.

“Tyler, you here?”

No one answered. Nothing in the trailer looked amiss – but Tyler Vaughan was gone.

Trajectory

2011-08-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

A dark poem for a dark, windy day.

*******************

Trajectory

When I was ten I killed a sparrow.
A single well-aimed rock from a slingshot
Follows its smooth, deadly arc, cleaves the air,
And the bird tumbles to the earth, stunned and dying.
I go to it, kneel on the damp ground near where it fell,
And watch it flex its crisp wings as the world around it fades.
I try to say I didn't mean to -
I wasn't trying to kill -
But there is no reproach in its dimming gaze,
Only a kind of dull acknowledgement that the world is so made
That such a thing can happen.
No explanation is demanded; none is given.
It is only we who seem to need reasons;
Some justification to explain life's trajectory, downward into night.

Landscape

2011-08-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

My wife is an artist. Her pieces are micrography -- the lines in her drawings aren't lines at all, but very, very tiny (but legible!) writing. (Check out her website if you want to be amazed!) Recently she participated in a project that had as its theme "Imaginary Lands" -- so she created a beautiful piece which was a detailed map of a fictional country. She asked me to write the text for the piece -- the following poem was the result.

**********************

Landscape

Snow falls on the high mountain
That the men below call Carthain; in my language
That no men know
The mountain has no name,
No words; only the silent speech of peaks and ridges
Where the rocky bones stick through the skin,
Where no soft soil sits, no grass grows.
The ice in layers lies for centuries, building up
Like the rings of trees, each line marking a year,
Until weighted, it flows, carrying it downward,
Carving out valleys. You follow it.

In the summer the valleys fill with light,
And hold it where the wind cannot reach;
And the edges of the glaciers melt,
Streams tumbling between the stones, all blue and white,
Finding the fastest way downhill.
Little flowers bloom where the water touches,
Quickly when the ground warms; for in only a few weeks
The snow will fall again, and the valleys will once more
Know only cold and wind and silence.
You leave before the flowers fall.

The streams join. Water pours off the mountain face,
Rushing downward. Grasses and small flowers give way
To wind-writhen firs, then dark forests. Elk graze there,
Raising their long, foolish faces to watch as you descend, following the river downward.
Small birds sing high in the branches. Men come here sometimes,
Hunters, taking the elk if they can, to have food for the winter;
For you are still high up, halfway between the mountain’s top and the sea,
And the winters here are long and bitter. Further down,
Little towns cling to the river’s edge, no more than huts and barns
And a few dirt roads. People give them names; that is what people do.
Mill Falls, Moor’s Edge, Black Ridge. You pass them and drop.

Where the river joins another, then bends to the south,
There a city lies. Its people call it Torlessit, which meant something
Once, and now none can remember what. Ox-carts draw wood through the rutted streets.
The smithies ring with hammers. Draft horses pull plows,
The points gouging grooves in the soil, turning up rocks that a thousand years ago
Were part of the mountain. Here crops will grow, but winter still comes early,
And the river will freeze in January so that the wolves can cross.
Then the men of Torlessit bring their sheep into the barns
And their children into their houses,
And count the weeks until spring comes.

And when it does, the ice will thaw, and the river will roll once more
Down the hills, past fertile fields, through glades with maple and oak
Past other cities, past stone castles and tall cathedrals;
Warming and slowing as it goes. It carries you along, no longer tumbling,
But gliding soundlessly in its course.

Broad farms lie here. Wide fields roll away into the hazy distance.
The summer heat rises from the land, sweat drips from faces tanned
Like leather.
At the height of the day, nothing moves; a fly buzzes, then is silent.
But the silence here is not as the mountain’s silence.
There all is emptiness; here even the air is full and heavy and humid.
The river moves on, between cottonwoods and willows,
Who drop their yellowed leaves, to float along like fallen flakes of sunlight.

The trees rise, close in. Shadows deepen.
Tendrils of mist curl up from the water’s surface.
Bare trunks reach high, to a canopy shut like a roof.
Downward hang bright flowers and dangling vines,
Hairy and furred with moss.
Birds and butterflies dart jewel-like, just out of reach,
As you slip along, following. The water here is caramel-brown,
The air redolent with spice and honey. In the forests
The people reach up and take the bounty offered them.
No need for barns and ox-carts and plows,
No need to till;
But only to give thanks for the fruit and fish and the dappled sunlight on naked skin.

The river here is languid, in no rush to finish its journey,
But the end comes eventually;
There is a heavy thunder, distant at first,
Then closer; salt in the air, the cry of sea-birds. The brown river
Enters the green sea, flowing together, mingling like lovers in a perpetual embrace.

Book Review: Gabriel's Redemption

2011-08-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

I'm not normally a fan of space epics, nor military fiction. It was therefore with some hesitancy that I began reading Steve Umstead's first novel, Gabriel's Redemption. (Available here.)

My reluctance was unfounded, and I discovered that pretty much right from page 1. Umstead has created here a tight, self-consistent universe -- the story, set in the year 2179, comes complete with a history of the previous 170-some-odd years. The background and historical events weave themselves seamlessly into the plot, and he thus avoids the pitfall that traps a lot of writers in this genre -- the need to have someone around asking clumsy questions so that the relevant parts of the backstory can come out. Everything we need to know -- the colonization of Mars, discovery of wormholes (and their subsequent use in space travel), the Shanghai meteorite collision -- comes up naturally, and as we learn about the history, we move nicely in the present.

The story itself revolves around the disgraced military officer Evan Gabriel, who has been given a one-time-only-special-offer to redeem himself by breaking up an illicit drug ring on another planet. To give away any more of the plot details would be unforgivable, so I will only say that if you think that this story is going to be a tidy, straight-line journey from point A to point B, you are mistaken. As someone who considers himself a specialist in plot twists, I have to doff my hat to Umstead for catching me completely off guard not once, nor twice, but three times.

My only criticism of Gabriel's Redemption is pacing -- it moves really quickly. I wanted to know the characters more deeply than I did by the end. You spend the majority of the story in Gabriel's head, which is fine, but I wanted to find out more about the other crew members -- learn some of their quirks, watch them interact, hear them talking about matters other than plot points. There was some of that, but only teasers -- we find out that St. Laurent wants to quit the military after this mission and run a vineyard, that Takahashi gets terrible motion sickness, that Jimenez plays the guitar. A little more time in developing these characters would have made us even more invested in their survival, and the success of their mission.

Even so, I really enjoyed this book. If you are a fan of military science fiction, you should definitely put it on your list. If not -- give it a look anyhow. It's a quick, fast-paced, and engaging read, and a hell of a first novel from an author we're sure to hear more about.

Nocturne for Mrs. Scott

2011-08-14T06:13:00.000-07:00

My great-great grandmother, Harriet (Kent) Scott, committed suicide. No one in my family knew about this until I happened upon a newspaper clipping from the late 19th century -- an obituary describing how she had become despondent over taking care of her bedridden husband, who suffered from "shaking palsy" (Parkinson's disease) and had poisoned herself. The clipping said she was a "fine woman" who had "suffered greatly and finally had a mental collapse."

Her husband only outlived her by two months.

Back then, a suicide in a family was shameful -- her granddaughter, who was my grandmother, knew nothing about the tragedy. I found it an incredibly sad story, and was inspired to write the following poem.

******************************

Nocturne for Mrs. Scott

Her husband watches her from the bed they share,
Watery eyes following her deft movements,
The cleaning and tidying, done with no conscious thought.
Take his empty water glass, put away the medicine the doctor left.
Straighten the lace on the bedside table, pull back the curtains.
She will not meet his eyes.
Her mind is caught in a web of remembering,
Trapped like a dying moth waiting for the sting, the poison, and oblivion.

She sees a time when this weak and withered man
Whose thin limbs and creaking voice she despises,
Was a laughing farm boy with chestnut hair and powerful arms,
And she remembers the chase, and wanting to be caught,
His arm looping around her waist,
Catching her up, twirling, spinning, kissing,
And falling to the ground together.

She despises him more because it wasn't always as it is now,
The dying old man fading and failing on the linen sheets,
Leaving her still in the midst of her strength,
Still in the depth of her own needs.

There is a brown glass bottle in the cabinet, near his medicine.
The paper label is gashed with crimson lettering.
Each time she pours the medicine, thick and dark, into a cup for him to drink from,
Her eyes brush across the label with a touch like snow on bare skin,
And she wonders how long it would take, and how she would feel, free.
Then she sees the laughing boy he once was,
And she leans against the counter
And weeps for her own weakness and wickedness and foolishness.

One summer morning, after the cleaning and tidying and straightening and pulling back of curtains,
The brown glass bottle with the crimson lettering
Fell from her numb fingers to shatter on the tile floor of the kitchen,
A trickle of dark fluid staining the jagged fragments.
And upstairs, the creaking voice, weak from need, weak from not wanting to need,
Still calls for her.

Fighting invisibility

2011-08-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

I'm having one of those days where I feel like to be an aspiring writer is to be doomed to failure. (And to anyone who replies with a Yoda-like, "There is no aspiring, you are a writer!" you may want to be warned that in the mood I'm in, you're very likely to be given a recommendation for a diverting, but probably anatomically impossible, solo activity.)

The problem is how to become visible. The much-touted e-book market, which takes away the roadblocks of finding agents and publishers, fails on the level that those roadblocks kept out a lot of writers whose work was simply not ready for publication. Now, anyone with a computer and a modicum of technical ability can upload something to the big e-book sellers. So instead of having your query letters swimming in a sea of millions, your e-books are swimming in a sea of millions. How do you get seen?

Well, I'd like to say I have the answers, but I'm still trying to figure all of this out myself. In the interest of honesty, I have to say that my sales record thus far at Amazon and Barnes&Noble does not give me much confidence in my likelihood of retiring early. Now, that's not to say that I'm giving up, or am sorry that I took this route; as I've commented before, I've had thirty or so more people read my work than I would have if it had remained sitting in my desk, so what have I lost?

Nothing, of course. And I have along the way gleaned a few lessons from my experience and the experience of others, and that's all to the good. If you are a writer, here are a few things to keep in mind from one who, like you, is fighting invisibility.

1) Make sure your manuscript is really ready. Get people to read it, and not just your parents and your significant other. Find someone with a keen eye who isn't afraid to tell you what, and where, the problems are, and when they tell you, listen. And, for cryin' out loud, be careful about grammar and spelling. I still remember getting a link from a writing hopeful (with a plaintive request to repost it), and when I looked at his online excerpt, he'd misspelled the word "fluorescent" in the first line. Use your spellchecker, and ask said keen-eyed friend to look for words that the spellchecker would miss -- than/then, their/there, too/to, etc. It's not that we don't all sometimes make those simple types of errors, but that's one negative impression you can easily avoid making.

2) Network. Word of mouth is incredibly important; if you're going the agentless route, it's the only game in town. An excellent way to start: join Twitter, and then look for other writers. Follow their blogs, be generous with your responses to their work, and be free with your "retweets." However, be careful of overusing posts on sites like Facebook. The intent of Twitter is to link people with common interests, who presumably are expecting you to be promoting your work just as they do theirs. Facebook is a different entity, and your family, friends, and coworkers will probably be understandably annoyed if every time they get online they're inundated with sales pitches.

3) Keep writing. I had to be reminded of this one just today. My almost-completed work-in-progress, Signal to Noise, is at the stage of waiting for feedback from a few of my above-mentioned keen-eyed readers, and so I've spent the last couple of weeks not writing much except on my blogs. The result: a bad case of post-partum depression. The best way to become a writer is to write. Write daily, and don't let the mechanics of sales and promotion ruin the experience of writing for you. (Feel free to remind me of this one the next time you see me weeping despondently into my beer over my week's sales figures.)

4) Try some new angles. I mostly write novel and novella-length stories, and have had fun lately entering flash fiction contests. It's a tremendous challenge, when you're used to having 250+ pages to work with, to tell a story in a hundred words! Break out of your mold; it can be rejuvenating. Try poetry. Try a different genre. Try using an unfamiliar point-of-view. Frustration can come out of stagnation.

Mostly, just keep at it -- writing, promotion, and all. It sounds trite to say that victory goes to the persistent, but so often that seems to be the case. Work to perfect your craft, have fun, find some like-minded people to connect with, and then go for it. Truly, what do you have to lose?

Fiction writing as an act of public nudity

2011-08-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

A writer friend and I have been in an interesting dialogue about the private (and public) side of writing.

The topic arose because she's just finished the first draft of a wonderful novel, a coming-of-age story about a girl making the transition between high school and college. Knowing my friend as well as I do, it is easy to see that she shares some personality traits with her main character. My friend worries that if people read her novel -- which I hope they will, some day -- readers will become convinced that the story is, at least on some level, autobiographical, and will judge her based on the actions of the character she created.

My reply was that there will be this label that says "Fiction" on the spine of the book, so anyone who doesn't notice that or doesn't know the definition of the word deserves everything they get. But on a deeper level, her question is a profound one. Because in some sense, all fiction writing is autobiographical, isn't it?

I can say, without exception, that every protagonist I've ever written -- and more than one of the antagonists and minor characters -- is, in a way, me. You can't write what you don't know, and that extends just as much to characters as it does to setting, time period, and plot. None of them are intended to actually be me, of course; all of them have traits, quirks, and personal history that is different from my own. But in a very real sense, if you want to find out who I am, read my fiction.

This gives a serious spin to my friend's question, because to be read means to be known, on a fundamental level. It's a scary proposition. I've already closed my eyes and leapt off that high diving board by publishing my novels in e-book format on Amazon and Barnes&Noble. But truly, it still terrifies me in a lot of ways, and it's not just getting the "your writing sucks" reviews that all authors dread; part of it comes from the fact of exposing your soul in public. There's something about having people read your work that's a little like walking out into the middle of the road, bare-ass naked.

And there's no doubt that it can backfire sometimes. I still recall, with some pain, when I let a (former) friend read the first three chapters of a work-in-progress, and her critique began with a smirk: "What's wrong with this story is like a system error on a computer; it's a problem that makes the whole thing crash." How that was supposed to be helpful, I don't know, and in fact with the perspective of time (this incident happened about fifteen years ago) I now find myself wondering whether it was supposed to be helpful. The critic in question was herself an off-again-on-again writer who had never completed a manuscript, and I suspect that the viciousness of the critique had at least something to do with jealousy. At the time, however, her response so derailed my confidence that it was years before I actually picked up (and eventually completed) that novel. (If you're curious, the novel is The Hand of the Hunter -- which is still one of my personal favorites of the stories I've written.)

So, in a way, all writing is personal, and all writers have a narcissistic streak. We wouldn't write about something we didn't care about; our personalities shape our stories, and therefore our stories are reflections of who we are as people. It is an act of bravery to put what we create out on public display, whether that display is on the level of sending it out to a few friends or publishing it for international purchase. We are actually selling little portraits of our own spirits, and hoping and praying that the ones who look at them won't say, "Wow, what an ugly little picture that is."

Greenland Colony 1375

2011-08-05T04:43:00.000-07:00

When the Little Ice Age began, back in the 14th century, it closed off shipping routes in the North Atlantic, and the villages in Greenland that had been settled back in the 11th century were suddenly cut off. Gradually, the villagers died out, from the effects of the cold, isolation, and decreasing food supplies, and by 1400 they were nothing but empty ruins. When I read about this, I thought: what would it have been like to be the last one left alive? The question generated this poem.

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Greenland Colony 1375

He goes down to the sea each day and walks the shore.
Each day the gray sea ice is closer, and fewer gulls come.
He wanders up toward the village, past the empty and ruined rectory.
The churchyard behind it has stone cairns. His wife lies beneath one,
And there is one for Thórvald, his son,
Though Thórvald's bones do not rest there; he and three others
Were gathered ten years ago in the sea's net
And came not home.

Since building his son's cairn,
He had buried one by one the last four villagers.
Each time he prayed in the in the stone church on Sunday
That he would be next,
And not left alone to watch the ice closing in.

In his father's time ships had come. The last one came
Fifty years ago.
Storms and ice made it easy for captains to forget
The village existed. For a time he prayed each Sunday
For a ship to come and take him to Iceland or Norway or anywhere.
None came. Ship-prayers died with the last villager,
Three years ago. He still prayed in the stone church on Sunday,
For other things; until last winter,
When the church roof collapsed in a storm.
The next Sunday he stayed home and prayed for other things there.

Now even the gulls are going,
Riding the thin winds to other shores. Soon they will all be gone.
He will walk the shore, looking out to sea for ships that will never come,
And see only the gray sea ice, closer each day.

Silence Descending

2011-08-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

I was on my way to the store this weekend when suddenly my car radio went silent. I turned it off, and then back on, and it started working again, but not before I had a moment's thought of What if it's not the radio that's malfunctioning, but the entire world? (Yes, I do think that way sometimes.) The question inspired the following piece of flash fiction.

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The first hint Trevor Williamson had that something was wrong was when his car radio stopped working.

He was on his way to the grocery store when it happened. "Going to the grocery store" was a significant excursion for him; he lived in a two hundred year old farmhouse out in the hill country of southwestern Pennsylvania, and a trip into the nearest village (a little hole-in-the-road called Wind Ridge) meant a sixty-mile round trip. Trevor loved the solitude - he was a writer, and the tranquility was conducive to his art. The country life did have its downsides, however, and the long drive to get anywhere was definitely one of them.

He was only about a third of the way there when his satellite radio suddenly went quiet, right in the middle of Adele's cut-crystal voice wailing on "Rolling in the Deep." At first, he didn't react. Out in the hills, sometimes the satellite signal got lost for a moment.

Trevor waited for a moment. Nothing happened.

He switched to another station; silence. Then he switched from satellite radio to the ordinary FM station. There, all he got was static.

"Shit," Trevor said, under his breath, and turned the radio off. Music was a necessary companion on the infrequent, but long, drives into town. He'd need to get the radio fixed or replaced, which would mean yet another drive, this time all the way to Waynesburg.

He was nearing Wind Ridge when he noticed a second odd thing; since shortly after leaving home, he had not passed a single other car coming in the opposite direction. The realization came slowly; first, a thought of, wow, the roads are quiet today. Then, I haven't seen another car for the last five miles. Then, with increasing desperation, he started looking for them; each crest of a hill, waiting to see a flicker of movement in the distance, that would finally resolve into the familiar shape of a car.

None came.

The feelings of unease deepened into fear as he approached the village. While not a booming metropolis, Wind Ridge was a busy little place -- it was near enough to Waynesburg that a lot of people lived in the village and commuted into Waynesburg for work. On a Thursday morning, there should be cars, people, noise.

The streets were empty. The sidewalks were empty. The parking lot of the A-Number-One Groceries was empty. Feeling dazed, Trevor pulled his car into a parking space, turned off the motor, and opened the door. The silence was frightful; even out where he lived, there never was a complete absence of human noise. Now, there was nothing; no hums of motors, growls of airplanes overhead, buzzing of electrical contacts in the transformers.

He got out, and slowly approached the store front. The lights in the little grocery store were off, and the automatic door didn't move as Trevor stepped in front of it. He reached out and pushed the door, and it easily slid back, giving a dull thunk as it hit the end of the rollers.

"Hello?" Trevor said, and his voice sounded impossibly loud in his own ears.

He stood in the threshold, looking into the shadowed interior of the store, and suddenly his nerve broke. He backed up, and then ran out into the parking lot, looking around him wildly.

"Where is everyone?" he shouted up into the empty sky.

The sky had no answer.

Working title: Working with titles

2011-07-29T06:09:00.000-07:00

An author friend of mine recently posted a dilemma; she had come up with a killer title for her work-in-progress only to find out that another author had grabbed it first. What to do?

Well, except for very famous, high monetary-value stories -- such as the ones owned by the Mouse Who Shall Not Be Named -- few titles are actually trademarked, which means that legally, you can publish a book under a title that's already been used. In terms of common courtesy, however, the best answer comes from Wile E. Coyote: "Back to the old fiasco hatchery."

Myself, I think titles are critical. They're one of the first things a potential reader sees (the first is most likely the cover illustration). I find it intriguing to consider what people choose for titles, especially in cases where the choice is highly un-memorable. Consider the formulaic approach, used most commonly in spaceship-and-alien science fiction: "The" + "alien sounding word" + one of the following words: "Maneuver, Gambit, Strategy, Solution, Encounter, Factor, Machine, Incident, Syndrome." Remembering the requirement for alien names that I described in my last post, an excellent example of this sort of title would be "The Sqr'll'nutz Factor."

The problem is, it's also a title which is so ridiculously uncreative that it will promptly blend in with all of the other Encounters and Gambits and Maneuvers you've read about, and as a writer, that's definitely not the impression you want to create. Memorable titles are short, pithy, and intriguing. I tend to like metaphorical titles -- ones which provoke curiosity ("What on earth could that be referring to?") coupled with an "Aha!" moment when you read the story and actually figure it out.

As some examples, here are some of my favorite titles I've run across:

All Hallow's Eve (Charles Williams)
A Murder is Announced (Agatha Christie)
The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula LeGuin)
The Eyes of the Amaryllis (Natalie Babbitt)
Among the Dolls (William Sleator)
Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer) - and interestingly, I didn't particularly like this book.
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (John Berendt)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)
The Stupidest Angel (Christopher Moore)
Going Postal (Terry Pratchett)
Wolves in the Walls (Neil Gaiman)

And a few that I think are terrible:

O, Whistle and I'll Come To You, My Lad (M. R. James) - a brilliant, and terrifying, short story with a title that's way too long and cumbersome.
A Wind in the Door (Madeleine l'Engle) - an intriguing title, but what the hell is the relevance? At the end of the story, a door blows shut, for no apparent reason, and we're supposed to raise an eyebrow and say, "Ahhhh, now I see?"
Brandy of the Damned (Colin Wilson) - oh, come on. I doubt the damned will get brandy, frankly.
Postern of Fate (Agatha Christie) - my opinion may be colored by the fact that I think this is far and away the worst book she ever wrote -- rambling, incoherent, with long passages of supposed-to-be-witty repartee, and after reading it I still have no clue why the title is relevant to the plot.
The Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Christopher Moore) - okay, I know Moore was trying to give it a campy title, and it's actually an awesome book - but the title is just goofy.

So, anyway, that gives you an idea of what I shoot for, with titles. Here are the titles of my published work, all available at Amazon and Barnes&Noble (c'mon, allow me my moment of shameless self-promotion). I'll leave it to you to decide if my titles are intriguing or dreadful.

Canaries
Kári the Lucky
Periphery
The Hand of the Hunter
We All Fall Down
The Conduit
Convection
Adam's Fall
Shadowboxing
Behind the Frame
House of Mirrors

The name game

2011-07-21T05:48:00.000-07:00

I was asked recently how I choose names for my characters. It's an interesting question, and one for which I have no ready answer. Most of the time, characters in my stories seem to come with their names pre-assigned. I know that's not literally true -- but that's what it feels like. The main character of my work-in-progress, Signal to Noise, is named Tyler Vaughan. Why? Beats me. That's just who he is. It's hard for me to imagine Tyler with any other name.

That said, I do believe that character names are pretty important. There's no way that the antagonist of C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader could have been quite as weaselly as he was had he not been named Eustace Clarence Scrubb. Interesting, though, that when his character "reformed" -- and you may recall that he was the protagonist of The Silver Chair, and did quite a commendable job as the good guy -- they started calling him "Scrubb" instead of "Eustace." "Scrubb," while not a last name I would choose, sounds kind of gruff and hale-fellow-well-met, as opposed to "Eustace," which it's hard to say without whining. (My apologies to any Eustaces in the studio audience.)

Naming conventions in different genres can sometimes engender unintentional humor. Character names in space-epic type science fiction often contain unpronounceable combinations of consonants, and usually involve apostrophes. "Ah, my arch-enemy, G'filte of M'nshvitz Five! It is I, your nemesis, Sh'l'mil of Oy'g'valt!" Sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels usually rely more on accents, and quasi-Celtic sounding names: "And then, Lünàavórne drew out the Sacred Sword Gínsü and raised it aloft, praying to Alávúnìël, the God of Random Diacritical Marks."

And then there's romance novels, in which the guys usually have strong names with blatant sexual overtones, such as "Dirk Hardbody," and the women have names that sound like they were dreamed up by a 17th century English lord, on acid. A former member of a writers' group I belonged to was writing a contemporary romance, and her heroine was named, and I am not making this up, "Royalle de Tremontaine."

So, you can see that you can go a little off the deep end, character-name-wise. I tend to keep it simple, unless I'm deliberately shooting for humorous effect. It helps that I'm a teacher, and each year I have about a hundred new sources for names. (And if you take a look at some of the names of the villains in my novels, it might narrow down the guesses as to which students I disliked the most... heh-heh-heh.)

In any case, this is probably not much help, if you're struggling with name choices. So here are a few more down-to-earth recommendations:

Think about what your character's personality is like, and choose accordingly. First impressions in novels are often formed on the basis of the character's name. Your readers will respond differently to a Ryan than they will to an Elmer - as unfair as that may seem to the Elmers of the world.

Don't go overboard, even if you're writing genre fiction. The point is to keep your readers immersed in your story, not to have them read the name and snicker -- if that happens, they've been jerked out of the world you're trying to create. Follow the conventions of the genre, but don't overstep the line, or you'll end up in inadvertent self-parody.

That said, make your names memorable. You want people to think about your characters even when they're not reading your book. Think about some of the most-recognized character names out there -- Bilbo Baggins, Ebenezer Scrooge, Scarlett O'Hara, Hercule Poirot, Elinor Dashwood, Inigo Montoya, Atticus Finch, Sherlock Holmes, Luke Skywalker... each one of those has something a little different about it that makes it stand out, but is not so odd that it seems ridiculous. (Contrast that to the protagonist of one of my all-time favorite books, Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven. His name is George Orr, but that is such an unmemorable name that despite having read the book several times, I had to look it up just now because I couldn't remember it.)

So give it some thought. Think about people you know, look in telephone directories and baby name books, and be creative. Your characters deserve to have names that match their personalities -- don't underestimate the power that a wonderful, or abysmal, name choice will have on your readers' impressions of your story.

The Deep Places

2011-07-10T06:00:00.000-07:00

"The Deep Places" is a piece of flash fiction I wrote when I was asked to be a guest blogger on Violeta Nedkova's wonderful blog, LynMidnight, which you should all take a look at (and follow). If it seems a little Lovecraftian, that's no accident.

********************************

There was a storm coming. The seawater had turned a steely gray, a dangerous color. The runnels of foam dragged at Lee’s bare feet, tugging him toward the surf. He turned and looked outward, toward the horizon, as a violent wave dashed itself to pieces, and he tasted salt.

This was where it had happened, a year ago. Whatever it was that actually had happened. All Lee knew was that Jane had vanished, without a word to him, no clue as to why. She was just there one day, missing the next. Her clothes were found, neatly folded on a piece of driftwood, as if she’d stripped and just… swam away.

Nothing in her actions during the weeks preceding her disappearance had seemed odd; her wry smile, her habit of brushing back a lock of dark hair from her forehead, her kind touch, all were just as usual. Even in the days that followed, when mourning spouses think thoughts of “If only I’d paid more attention at the time…”, there were no clues to be found in memory. Lee puzzled over everything, what she had said and done, places she’d gone, overheard scraps of telephone conversations. There was nothing, not the least hint of what was to come. Her disappearance was like a subtraction; she simply wasn’t there any more.

The police suspected foul play, of course, but nothing about that made sense; why would a murderer strip his victim and leave the clothes behind in a trim stack? The Coast Guard was called in, divers searched likely spots in the bay, but no trace of her was found except for the t-shirt, shorts, and underwear, placed on a log beyond the reach of the waves, as if she had thought, I won’t need these any more, but no sense ruining them. Lee realized with dull surprise that the police were probably investigating him, seeing if there was any reason why he’d wanted Jane dead. But when no body turned up, and it became clear that he was what he seemed to be – a spouse devastated by his wife’s presumed death – they gave up and moved on to more straightforward cases.

Five weeks after Jane’s disappearance, the dreams started.

Lee had gone to Colorado, far away from the ocean, to get away from the hateful, incessant pounding of the waves. Deprived of their reality, they invaded his sleep, and he woke up tasting salt and still feeling the water coursing over his body, seeing Jane swimming, her naked body, so familiar, now subtly… changed. He awoke desperately, terrifyingly aroused, needing her, but full wakefulness just brought him back to the empty bed in a motel in the Colorado Rockies, the bedsheets tangled around his legs.

So he had come back. His return felt inevitable. And now he stood there, the storm coming in, with the seawater curling around his ankles. The wind ruffled his hair; thunder growled in the distance. He pulled his shirt off, tossed it to the sand; no neat folding for him. He unsnapped his shorts, pulled them and his boxers off together, threw them aside, and strode forward into the water. He remembered what she’d said to him, in the dream: it will feel cold at first, but not for long.

Lee plunged headfirst in, and the ocean received him like a lover.

Come in, the water's fine!

2011-07-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

I've been neglectful about updating my blog in the last week, but I have an excuse: I'm at summer camp.

Not actual, literal camp, but Camp NaNoWriMo, a worldwide collection of crazy writers who believe that they have what it takes to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. It's not too late to sign up; they're going to run it again in August, so if you think you can write an average of a little over 1600 words a day every day for a month, then check it out.

It's July 5, and so far, so good. My target at the moment is 8,100 words, and I just clocked in at 8,156. I decided to work on my pre-existing work in progress, a (hopefully) humorous science fiction novel called Signal to Noise that I excerpted here a couple of weeks ago. I'm playing fair, however, and reset the word count to zero on July 1, so that nothing I'd written prior to that date counted. I hope I can keep it up -- this is proving to be a much more difficult story to write than my previous NaNoWriMo novel, Adam's Fall, which for some reason just flowed.

Part of the difficulty is that Adam's Fall only had one point-of-view character, whereas Signal to Noise has three -- Tyler Vaughan, the rather hapless zoologist whose discovery of some odd photos on one of his remote-sensing cameras launches the whole adventure; Rainey Carrington, a sweet, intuitive ex-flower-child, herbal tea maker, and Tyler's eventual romantic interest; and Dale (short for "Wensleydale" -- his parents liked Wallace and Gromit) Blodgett, the village Chief of Police, who is a decent enough guy but would really rather not deal with alien abductions, thank you very much. I like all three of the point-of-view characters, but each one presents different difficulties -- it takes me a while to shift into their brains when the point-of-view changes, and that by itself slows me down a good bit. I find Tyler the easiest to write, probably because he's the one who is the most like me. I just have to think, "What would I do in this situation?" and shazam, that's what Tyler does.

So, anyhow, I'll try to get on here and update my progress every so often, but postings may be a little sparse in the next three weeks. If all goes well, however, I should be close to finishing Signal to Noise by the end of July, and can devote August to editing. (Joy. My favorite thing to do.) But maybe, by the start of school, I'll have the whole thing done... which will be awfully nice.

Then, on to the next project -- because the regular NaNoWriMo is in November. If I'm crazy enough to do it all again...

Flash in the pan

2011-06-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

Recently I've done a bit of writing of flash fiction -- pieces of under 800 words (sometimes a lot shorter) that still tell, or at least imply, a complete story. It's an interesting exercise to see if you can convey a whole setting and plot in such a constrained length, but the challenge is a lot of fun. I'll leave you to decide if I succeeded -- below are five pieces of flash fiction I wrote, along with the prompt (or instructions) that initiated them.

*********************************

#1. Prompt: We are not alone; length limit = 200 words

Skee (short for Pesky, a nickname she’d been given by her brother when she was three) sat on the front lawn, looking up at the stars. She’d only recently been allowed to do this by her parents, but now, with her mom and dad splitting up, her dad moving to Tucson, she doubted they’d have noticed her absence in any case.

I’m all alone, she thought, without any particular feeling of anger or sadness over it. It simply was. Alone. Everyone else has their stuff to do, and I could fall off the world and no one would notice.

The cool, humid night air brushed her face, and she lay back, and stuck her feet in the air. The stars glittered between her toes. She thought: If I fell upward, I’d fall forever. And it would just be me and the stars, falling together, nothing to stop us.

Together with the stars; so not alone. A mosquito whined by her ear, and she slapped it away, and thought: I may be alone here, but I’ll always have the stars. Nothing can change that.

And she got up, and walked back toward her house, smiling for the first time in weeks.

********************************
#2. Prompt: a death scene; length limit = 800 words

“So, there’s nothing that can be done?”

“No, Paul. An hour. Maybe less. Whenever they decide.”

“And you’re sure that Catherine got over the border?”

“Yes. Safely away.”

“Thank god.”

The guard nodded. “I can’t talk longer. They’ll suspect. I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry.”

“You did all you could.”

The door closed, and Paul heard the snick of a lock turning.

He closed his eyes. Catherine was away, along with the two rebel fighters that had been assigned to her. It only remained to him to face what was left. Only an hour more; maybe less.

It was less. A dirty-faced guard was the one who came for him; he grabbed Paul’s arm, as if he couldn’t have walked unassisted, and dragged him from the cell and into the courtyard.

He knew what he’d see, but it still was a shock. He thought: this is it. Mortality. I knew I’d die someday, but today is it. You never think of it that way, that some day will be your day to die, as certain as the Earth spinning around the sun. And now, here it is, like an old enemy you thought you’d never see again.
In this case, in the form of a wooden block, and a hooded man with an axe.

I will not faint, he thought, willing his knees not to buckle. I will be steadfast. Catherine would want me… Catherine would want… He swallowed, forcing the tears back, listening to a disembodied voice say, “For the crime of high treason, for aiding and abetting the rebels against the realm, Paul de Lyons is hereby sentenced to death. Does the condemned have any last words?”

He shook his head, trying to look defiant. Two guards came to him, pulled his shirt roughly over his head, forced him to the block. He felt hands on his bare shoulders pressing him downward until his cheek touched the rough, splintered surface.

And he thought: I am just one man, facing death, as countless others have before me. This death is neither more, nor less, than what any other has endured. I will not fear.

And to his astonishment, he found that his fear had evaporated. He thought: not an old enemy; an old friend! And he smiled, as the moment stretched out, and like the breaking of a string, fell forward into eternity.

**************************************
#3. Prompt: True love's first kiss; length limit = 500 words

Cam reached up, and felt his cheek. All he could think was: that didn’t hurt as much as I thought it was going to. He’d watched the boy’s fist moving toward his face with a kind of disbelief, a thought of: I’m about to get punched. This is really gonna hurt. And then it was over, and he was sitting on his ass on the ground, and the boy was stalking off, chuckling under his breath and massaging his knuckles.

Cam got up, brushed the dirt and grass clippings off his shorts, and stood there, thinking with dazed astonishment: Jesus. I just got punched in the face. And that was when he noticed that Annie was still standing there, watching him. That she hadn’t run away as soon as the bully’s back was turned was weird enough; but then, she dashed the tears from her cheek with the back of one hand, and came up to Cam. He felt her lips against his, the warmth of the kiss sending a rush down to the tips of his toes. Then she stepped back, and said, “Thanks. You were awesome.” Her white teeth flashed out at him, and she started to walk away, but then turned, and held out a hand. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

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#4. Prompt: must include the words capitulate, flame, tool, torrent, web, kiss, passive, river, receptive, frigid, action, surge; length limit = 800 words

Eric lay with his bare belly pressed against the warm rock, letting his hand dangle downward into the frigid rush of water tumbling by. In the two weeks he’d been up here in the High Cascades, the sun had colored his back and arms a golden brown, and there were white sun-streaks bleached into his hair; an unusual run of luck in a place where the weather could turn to chill drizzle even in August.

He thought: Water is the earth’s blood, and the rivers its arteries and veins. They connect in a web across the whole planet. Action and reaction; if the floods surge in Vietnam, it affects the creeks in Oregon.

Carrie was gone, off into the Peace Corps. She was probably in Hanoi or Ho Chih Minh City right now, being trained before heading off to the village where she’d spend the next two years. A flame of resentment rose in Eric, and he forced it down. There’d been nothing he could have done; he’d had to capitulate, let her go. Their relationship had begun in passion, in camping trips where they made love under the stars and swam naked in little lakes, the waters receptive and clear. It ended with a passive acceptance, without even a kiss goodbye, and now Eric lay, looking into the foaming torrent, trying to create an understanding of what had happened and without the tool to craft it.

His hand caressed the surface of the water, as it had once caressed her skin, and he found himself crying, the tears dropping into the river and being carried away, down to the ocean. He thought: to Vietnam. When she steps into a stream there, my tears will be part of it. Our connection hasn’t broken, only become invisible, inaudible. He could grieve the fact that it wasn’t the same, but nothing on earth could break the bond, as long as rivers coursed and blood flowed, and tears fell.

*****************************************
#5. Prompt: playing with time; length limit = 500 words

“So, how did you know to pull me back to the present just before the spear hit me?” Darren asked.

“We didn’t,” Fischer said. “We let the computer handle that.”

“And the computer always gets you out just in time?”

“Absolutely. Lightning-fast processor. Cutting-edge technology.”

“Well, there was Petrillo,” Maggie said.

“Oh, yeah,” Fischer said. “I’d forgotten about Petrillo.”

“Petrillo?” Darren said. “Who is Petrillo? What happened to Petrillo?”

“Well…” Fischer said, seeming a little reluctant to discuss the topic. “Petrillo was a guy who worked on our staff. He was a bit of a thrill-seeker.”

“Morbid type, if you ask me,” Maggie interjected, her round face radiating disapproval.

“He wanted to take a vacation back to the 18th century, and experience the French Revolution first-hand.” Fischer paused. “He got his wish, I guess.”

“He died?” Darren said. “I thought you said your computer always kept track of where you were, and could pull you back to the present if there was any danger!”

“Oh, he came back to the present,” Maggie said. “Just in two separate chunks, as it were.”

“Took forever to get the stain out of the carpet,” Fischer said.

Adam's Fall - an excerpt

2011-06-25T11:07:00.000-07:00

What would you do if you found a mute, terrified teenage boy, dressed in rags, shivering in a graveyard?

He has no way to communicate with you; you have no way to know if anything you say is understood. Would you take him in, feed him, clothe him, call the authorities, or just walk by and pretend that it is someone else's problem?

Adam's Fall is a novel about the rarest kind of love; love that gives, risks everything, and expects nothing in return. Ultimately, it is about how love can change everything -- even the course of history.

Adam's Fall is available as an e-book from Amazon and Barnes&Noble.

Excerpted below is the first part of chapter one.

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November 1870

The Reverend Henry Caldwell Skelton, Vicar of Lisby, held his lantern up, pulled his woolen greatcoat tighter, and shivered. The wind, which he was convinced had originated in the arctic wasteland and had an actual malign, intelligent will, scorned his efforts, finding any tiny gap to slip the knife in, till the good clergyman’s long thin bones were chilled right through.

This is Mrs. Thornley’s fault, Mr. Skelton thought, indulging himself in an uncharacteristic lapse from charity. This is the third time she’s sent for me because she was convinced her husband was dying, and each time it’s turned out to be dyspepsia. The old man will probably outlive me, at this rate, because I’m going to die of a fever from being out in this weather.

As if the elements had heard his thoughts, Mr. Skelton felt the sudden sting of a thin drizzle strike his face. He winced, and gave a rueful glance up at the dark night sky.

Keep me safe, Lord, even if you can’t keep me warm, he thought, trying to shift his mind into a more pious and compassionate track. And at least there’ll be a fire and a nice warming glass of brandy at the end of the road.
That seemed a cheering thought, and Mr. Skelton quickened his pace, his boots now landing with an occasional splash as his feet found the unseen puddles that were beginning to form on the road to the vicarage.

The little circle of light from Mr. Skelton’s lantern seemed powerless to do more than to keep him from falling into the ditch; it illuminated nothing more than the bit of road immediately in front of him. He knew this stretch of road well (Thanks to Mrs. Thornley, he thought, and then banished further recriminations against her from his mind as yet another sin against proper charity), and he pictured the fields, copses, thickets, and occasional farmhouses he was passing on the way home. In the day it would have seemed friendly and familiar, even though this was November in the British Midlands, and the fog and drizzle were chilly and incessant. But nighttime erases your knowledge of a place. Everything dissolves into a blank, uniform mystery. It is no wonder, thought Mr. Skelton, that the men of old were afraid of the dark, and thought that was when spirits walked.

The road turned a little to the left, and Mr. Skelton lifted his lantern higher; he was further along than he’d thought. He must be passing through Elton Wood, and soon there would be the little cemetery where the dear departed souls of Lisby had been buried for centuries. Then a little rise, over a hilltop, and (had it been daytime) he’d see the spire of the church in the distance, and just beyond that, home.

He had just come out from under the eaves of the trees of Elton Wood when the rain stopped. No matter; he was damp through already, it was too late. As if to make up for it, the wind picked up, and he saw flickers of starlight as the clouds were torn asunder, and once, a glimpse of the crescent moon. Very close, now; he must be nearing the cemetery. He smiled a little, even though his teeth were chattering.

And that’s when he heard the noise.

It was a thin, low moaning, like an animal in pain. Mr. Skelton was not a superstitious man; he held a Doctorate in Divinity from Oxford, and prided himself on having risen above the simple peasant beliefs of his origins (his family hailed from the wilds of north Yorkshire, something he didn’t tend to mention to his parishioners, most of whom were of staid Midlands stock and tended to think of Yorkshire as a frozen wasteland inhabited by savages). But there – at that time, alone, in a cemetery, at night – it is doubtful that anyone would have been steady enough of mind not to have their skin prickle, and their heart pound.

It came again. A breathy, despairing moan, from somewhere off to his left.

Animal? thought Mr. Skelton. It must be an animal. And he was immediately ashamed of himself, as he realized that his conviction that it was an animal was because if it were, he would be under no obligation to investigate. Whereas, if it were a human… well, his duty was clear. The Lord Jesus himself had praised the Good Samaritan, who stopped to care for the man who had been injured by highwaymen.

Mr. Skelton stopped walking.

“Hello?” he said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.

No response but the wind.

“Is there someone there?” he said.

Then, there was another quiet moan, again coming from somewhere to the left of the road. It wasn’t loud, but it sounded like the noise made by someone or something in the last extremities of terror or pain. And then, the moan was followed by a cough – a cough that was clearly human.

Mr. Skelton gave the matter no further thought, but turned and walked off the road and into the cemetery. Afterwards, he reflected that that single act was the bravest thing he had ever done.

There were half-seen glimpses of marble headstones, carved urns, statues of praying angels made spectral in the wavering lantern light. The Lord is my shepherd, he thought, and even his thoughts sounded tremulous. I shall not want… He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters… He restoreth my soul…

“Where are you?” he said, keeping his voice steady with an effort. “Do you need help?”

Another moan answered him. Close; perhaps twenty feet to his right. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, but he turned in that direction and walked resolutely forward.

There was a sudden noise of someone scrambling, followed by another moan and the sound of rapid breathing, this time so close that Mr. Skelton jumped back inadvertently. “Lord protect me,” he said in a whisper, and held up his lantern. “If you need help,” he said, in a louder voice, “I’ll try to help you, but you must let me know where you are.”

There was a quiet noise of movement, and Mr. Skelton took a slow step in that direction, and then the lantern light illuminated a face.

It was the face of a boy of about sixteen years. His face seemed all eyes – Mr. Skelton had never seen anyone who looked so terrified. His dark, overlong hair clung to his scalp in curling, wet ribbons. His skin was so white as to seem transparent in the yellow glow. Ragged clothing, torn and filthy, hung from his body. He was barefoot.

Mr. Skelton gave a great, deep breath, and felt relief wash through his body. All of the demons and ghosts, and the more prosaic fears of robbers and murderers, vanished in a flood of compassion. He knelt down on the wet grass, and set his lantern down on a gravestone.

“Child, how can you be out here in this weather?” he said, and immediately realized that it was a ridiculous question; if he was out here, it was because he had nowhere else to go.

“What is your name?” Mr. Skelton asked, but the boy just stared at him.

“Where is your home?”

The huge, dark eyes continued to stare. There was no sound but the boy’s breathing, and the chattering of his teeth.

“We must get you somewhere warm,” Mr. Skelton said. “You’ll catch your death out here. If you haven’t already.” He stood up suddenly, and the boy recoiled, a thin whine coming from his lips. He scuttled backwards, like a crab, his thin hands feeling blindly behind him, finally stopping only when he bumped into the headstone of a grave.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Mr. Skelton said, gently. “You needn’t be afraid.” He held out one hand to the boy.

The boy looked at Mr. Skelton’s hand, as if unsure of what it was. Then he looked up at his face, his staring eyes locked on Mr. Skelton’s. Mr. Skelton had the eerie feeling that his thoughts were being read, but he pushed it out of his mind; the boy was simply frightened, and cold, and exhausted; perhaps also feeble-minded. The job now was to get him somewhere warm, feed him, let him sleep.

And some of the terror did leave the boy’s expression. His face relaxed a little, and tears welled up in his eyes.

“Come on, then,” Mr. Skelton said, still with his hand out.

And the boy reached out, and put his ice-cold hand into Mr. Skelton’s marginally warmer one, and stood up.

Mr. Skelton picked up the lantern and began to walk back toward the road, giving a gentle pull on the boy’s hand. The cold hand tightened on Mr. Skelton’s in a viselike grip – Mr. Skelton half turned, amazed at his strength, and once again feeling the folk tales of his youth bubble up to the surface (I’ll look back, and he’ll have turned into a demon) but the boy’s white face and wide, tragic eyes simply looked at him with a desperate expression.

He just doesn’t want to let me go, he thought. I wonder how long it’s been since anyone has been kind to him?

“We’ll get you somewhere nice and warm, and get you some food,” Mr. Skelton said. “Mrs. Dawlish will have a pot of soup on, and will have tended the fire. Won’t that be lovely?”

Signal to Noise - an excerpt from a work-in-progress

2011-06-23T04:33:00.000-07:00

What if you were a reputable scientist, a skeptic about all things paranormal, and you suddenly had evidence of something that was beyond the boundaries of science as we know it? Would you believe it?

Would you even recognize it when it was in your hands?

Tyler Vaughan, the main character in my work-in-progress, Signal to Noise, is faced with a dilemma -- take seriously a situation that is putting the citizens of Crooked Creek, Oregon in mortal danger, or ignore the evidence he's got in order to protect his reputation as a scientist. But when the girl he's fallen for disappears, the choice becomes obvious.

Below is the beginning of chapter one of Signal to Noise, which I am currently hard at work on, and hope to have completed by the end of the summer.

**********************************

“Dear Professor Vaughan:

“I can’t TELL YOU how excited I am to finally write to you. I have studied your work EXTENSIVELY and I finally felt like I was ready to take the plunge and contact you. I admire all you’ve done to bring the field of cryptozoology into its own as a SCIENCE, which is where it SHOULD BE, not relegated to the BASEMENT which is where many unbelievers want to put it. I’m sure that you are aware of the many who criticize you and your efforts, but you should continue to FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT.

“Toward that end, I would like to offer you my assistance. I feel that with my expertise in psychic contact, and your knowledge of zoology and animal behavior, we could team up to track down Bigfoot ONCE AND FOR ALL. I am prepared to come to Oregon as soon as I receive your HOPEFULLY positive reply…”

Tyler Vaughan sighed heavily, dropped the letter into the recycle bin, and opened up the next letter in the stack.

“Dear Tyler,

“I hope you don’t mind my calling you by your first name, but I feel like I know you already. I saw your interview on Good Morning, America, and just watching you talking about working in the field, and imagining you out there in the wilderness, sleeping alone in a tent, got me so hot. You are the most gorgeous man I have ever seen, and I can’t sleep at night because I’m thinking about what I’d like to do to you. What I’d start with is that I’d unbutton your shirt…”

Tyler rubbed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was only nine in the morning, and he could already feel a headache coming on. It always happened whenever he started going through correspondence, which he had had to do at least three times a week since the ill-advised interview on Good Morning, America four months ago. He’d thought that the volume of correspondence would decrease, but it hadn’t – not since a clip of his interview had found its way onto YouTube and had gotten more than 100,000 hits. He got an average of a hundred letters a day, and three times that many emails. It was either go through them one at a time, or else simply trash them all unopened and risk discarding something important – a bill, a letter from his mother, or, god forbid, an opportunity for grant money. He sighed again, and opened the next letter in the stack. There was no salutation; it just jumped right in.

“You call yourself a scientist. Well your not. Your just a fraud and a phonie. I heard what you said on the Good Morning show about how their could be bigfoots and that kind of thing, and how we evolved from monkies and these bigfoots could be like our cousins and stuff. Well my opinion is if we evolved from monkies why are their still monkies? Can’t answer that, can you, Mr. Smart Scientist? And how did the bigfoots and all survive the Flood? I never saw that Noah went and got any bigfoots, their isn’t any mention of them in the Bible and that’s my science. I’m sending a copy of this letter to my congressman because I know you scientists get you’re money from TAX PAYERS LIKE ME and I’m sick of it…”

Tyler added this one to the growing pile of letters in the recycle bin.

At the time, it had seemed like a good idea. Even Joe had said so, and Joe DiStefano, the director of the Cascadia Zoological Research Station, was one of the most cautious men Tyler knew. It seemed foolproof – a quick interview on a nationwide television program, an opportunity to get some publicity for his work, which was monitoring mammal populations in logged areas in the Cascades. A chance to highlight the effects of the logging industry on nature, to talk about Minimum Dynamic Areas and Migration Corridors and Keystone Species and How Logging Roads Generate The Edge Effect. A chance to be a combination of Mark Trail and Steve Irwin, with a touch of Jane Goodall thrown in for good measure.

And the whole thing had gone south the moment Robin Roberts asked him, a smile in her voice, if he’d ever seen Bigfoot while on his long, lonely campouts in the Oregon wilderness.

“Not yet,” Tyler had said.

“You expect to, then?” Robin responded, one stylishly plucked eyebrow rising.

“I don’t know,” Tyler said. “As a scientist, I can’t definitively say that they don’t exist. The Cascades represent thousands of square miles of heavily forested land. We can’t rule out the possibility that a large, intelligent, presumably wary primate, some evolutionary distant relative of humanity, could be there somewhere, and we might still have no hard evidence. We discover new species every year, after all.”

In retrospect, Tyler thought, he should have seen what was happening, and diverted the conversation back onto Minimum Dynamic Areas and the rest of it. At the time, though, being in the spotlight was a little like the couple of times in college that he’d tried drugs. It was disorienting, dazzling, and made him feel like he was in complete control while simultaneously causing him to feel like he was holding the steering wheel of an out-of-control car.

Robin laughed, and said, “That’s true, of course. You never know what scientists like yourself are going to come up with next. Well, I’m hoping that if your research ever turns up proof of Bigfoot’s existence, you’ll come back on Good Morning, America and tell us about it. But I’ve seen some of the photographs and video footage people have taken, and I don’t think I’d want to camp out there by myself…”

And that was all it took. In under thirty seconds, Tyler had gone from up-and-coming zoologist, out risking life and limb to preserve our wildlife, to a wacko crank who believed in Bigfoot and god alone knew what else.

Of course, it was a forlorn hope that news of his interview wouldn’t get to the peer-reviewed world of grant providers. The “grant denied” letters always came with a good reason; the high degree of competition for funds, problems with his proposed budget, the difficulty of supporting a study that had no clearly defined outcome. It all sounded reasonable, but Tyler knew, and his boss Joe knew, that the interview had played its insidious role. For now, Joe was keeping him on at the research station, but Tyler felt that it was only be a matter of time before Joe would realize what a liability Tyler’s name had become, and then it would be off to try to find another job. And with that interview hanging around his neck like a millstone, what lab in the world would hire him?

And as the funds dried up, the letters and emails started to pour in. Within a week after the interview clip had hit YouTube, he already had them mentally sorted into categories. These were:

1) Offers of assistance. Never financial, of course, but usually very earnest.

2) Anecdotal reports of evidence for some combination of: Bigfoot, modern dinosaurs, ghosts, vampires, werewolves. These included the letters, not common but usually very long, from people who believed that they were vampires or werewolves. Many of these people had apparently discovered that they were vampires or werewolves after reading Twilight and were eager to come to Oregon to be part of Team Tyler.

3) Proposals of marriage and/or sex, the latter usually very explicitly described. Tyler had been excruciatingly single ever since last year, when his last girlfriend had dumped him for “a man who actually has a career and a salary.” It also helped that her new lover had a BMW and a posh apartment in downtown Portland. Tyler, by comparison, lived in a run-down trailer in the Three Sisters Wilderness Area, drove a Honda Civic that went through a quart of oil every two weeks, and his only permanent companion was a chronically flatulent dog named Ahab that humped everything that would stand still long enough. In his more realistic moments, he understood why Kelly had left him. In his less realistic moments the proposals of sex sounded good, but eventually even those seemed as ridiculous as the missives from people who knew they were vampires because their skin sparkled when they stood in the sun.

4) Hate mail. These usually had the worst spelling and grammar, but they still got under his skin. He couldn’t help the feeling that despite the catastrophic damage he’d done to his own standing as a scientist, he’d done worse damage to the reputation of science itself. Given the percentage of Americans who believed the Earth was 6,000 years old, the last thing scientists needed was Tyler Vaughan making the whole lot of them look like nimrods, spouting off about Bigfoot on national television.

Kári the Lucky (an excerpt)

2011-06-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

Kári Solmundarson was a Hebridean Norseman who left the Hebrides as a teenager, and went to Iceland. Iceland of the 10th century was a violent place, the home of blood feuds, rivalries, and challenges to the death, and Kári was a man of his times -- swayed by passion, loyal to his comrades, ruthless to his enemies. When he arrives in Iceland, he is caught up in the decades-long feud involving his friends, the three sons of Njal Thorgeirsson.

When after a devastating battle, Kári is left the only survivor of the Thorgeirsson clan, he vows revenge on the men who killed his friends, a revenge that spans five countries and twenty years. Ultimately, he finds himself questioning the purpose of it all -- whether pain and suffering are a reasonable tradeoff for honor and saving face.

Kári the Lucky is based on a true story, originally recounted in the Icelandic tale "Njal's Saga." It is a story of intrigue, love, passion, loyalty, and violence, and most importantly, a story of how one man came to question the meaning of good and evil.

Kári the Lucky is available as an e-book from Amazon and Barnes&Noble.

In the following passage, Kári's friends, the three Njálsson brothers (Skarp-Hedin, Helgi, and Grím) have been captured by the Jarl of Orkney, who suspects them of hiding an Icelander he is pursuing. The fugitive, Thrain Sigfússon, is a ne'er-do-well -- but because of a blood feud, the Njálsson brothers had sworn to their father to protect him, and now they are torn between an oath and their own lives, as the Jarl has sentenced the three brothers to death if they don't reveal what they know of Thrain's whereabouts.

*******************************

All through that day, I watched and waited, unable to keep my mind off the Njálssons, still tied up in the Assembly Field, and the fugitive Thrain Sigfússon. My duties that day – helping with loading barrels of salted dried meat and fish into a storehouse for the winter – seemed to pass at a snail’s pace, and my eyes kept straying; first out toward the Njálssons’ ship, at anchor in the harbor, and then up toward the Assembly Field. I wondered if tomorrow there would be only three blood-soaked patches where now my friends were sitting.

The night fell, and I returned to my sleeping quarters, but I could not sleep. I tossed this way and that, and finally rose and dressed. A quiet, amused voice – my comrade Kol – said, “Enjoy her well, Kári, and then maybe when you return you won’t keep me awake with your rolling about.” I suddenly realized that he thought I was going to meet a woman. I managed a forced laugh, and then left, hoping that Kol would not find it strange that I was going to meet a woman while wearing my sword.

All was dark, and the settlement was quiet. I knew that few guards were posted unless there was reason, but I did not wish to be marked by even those few. I walked up past the main cluster of buildings; no sound issued from Jarl Sigurd’s house, for which I was very glad. From there I walked out onto the Assembly Field.

In the light of the sliver moon, all that was visible were vague shapes. I could see the huddled form of the Njálssons, where they sat waiting for execution; and a guard, standing near them, leaning on a spear.

The guard heard my footsteps; even in the dark, I saw him move, catching up his spear and pointing it toward me. “Who is it?” he said, his voice challenging.

“Kári Solmundarson,” I said, trying to make my voice sound authoritative. “The Jarl himself told me to relieve you, as you will be wanted first thing in the morning. You may return to your sleeping quarters for the night.” It did not sound very plausible, but I was not practiced in deceit and could think of nothing better.

The guard sounded wary. “For what purpose does the Jarl want me?”

“I do not know. Ask the Jarl that tomorrow.”

There was a pause. “The Jarl told me that I was to guard the prisoners through the whole night,” he persisted.

I shrugged, although I doubt he saw that in the dark. “Very well. Shall I go now and tell the Jarl then that you are refusing to follow his orders?”

There was another pause, during which the man shifted uneasily from one foot to another. “I will go,” he said, but still did not sound certain. Nevertheless, he walked past me, down the hill toward the settlement.

“Sleep well,” I said to his retreating form. “I envy you your night’s sleep, as I will get none.”

As soon as his footsteps had retreated back toward the settlement, I heard Helgi’s voice saying, “Kári? Is that you?”

“Yes,” I said, and went over to them and cut their bonds with my sword. They stood, rubbing their numb hands and stretching their eased limbs.

“Have they captured Thrain?” whispered Skarp-Hedin.

“Not that I’ve heard,” I answered.

“No thanks to you, Helgi,” Skarp-Hedin said irritably. “With that remark of yours about the water casks, I’m surprised that Thrain isn’t tied up here next to us right now.”

We left the field quietly, skirting the edge of the settlement, and made our way down to the harbor shore. It was a peaceful night, and the waves lapped the shore sleepily. I saw with relief that the skiff was still there, pulled up onto the gravel; we dragged it into the water and cast off toward the waiting ship.

The slap of the oars sounded rhythmically in my ears as we approached the ship. I found myself wondering what I should do. By identifying myself to the guard, I had made myself complicit in the Njálssons’ escape; surely the Jarl would kill me when my part in the deceit was discovered. I had no real desire to go with the brothers to Iceland, but the thought crossed my mind that I did not have many other options.

Helgi and Grím pulled in their oars, and there was a harsh scraping sound as the edge of the skiff rubbed against the side of the ship. Skarp-Hedin reached out and grabbed the gunwale, and we prepared to board.

There was a voice from the ship. “Who is it?”

Without thinking, Helgi looked up and said, “Thrain?” Instantly Skarp-Hedin tackled Helgi and pulled him down into the skiff. It was fortunate that he did so; at the same moment, a dark figure leapt down from the ship into the skiff, and I heard the whistle of a sword pass where Helgi’s head had been only seconds before. I pulled out my own sword as a second man jumped into the skiff.

Brief though it was, that was the most terrifying battle of my life; in a rocking, unsteady boat, in nearly total darkness, and with three of my closest friends beside me. When I struck out I literally could not be sure of who I was striking at. In the end, we killed both of them, but I am not completely certain of who killed them or how. Within minutes, however, both of our attackers had been slain and tossed overboard.

I faulted myself for not realizing that the Jarl would post guards on the Njálssons’ ship, to prevent just such an escape. There was no time for blame, however, and the four of us climbed aboard the ship, pulling the skiff up behind us. Skarp-Hedin had been grazed on the leg by a sword thrust, but it was shallow and he seemed to take no notice of it. The rest of us were all unharmed.

“You know, Kári, that you can’t stay here in Orkney now,” said Skarp-Hedin.

“I suppose not,” I said.

“You will be welcome at our father’s house,” Helgi added. “Come to Iceland with us; or if not, we will bring you wherever you wish. We owe you our lives.”

“You haven’t gotten away with them yet,” I said wryly.

“Where is Thrain?” Skarp-Hedin asked.

“We stowed him in a cask in the hold,” said Helgi, and pulled up the wooden cover over the ship’s hold. He reached down and rolled one of the casks back and forth. “This is the one, but it’s empty.”

“One of Jarl Sigurd’s men told me that they’d opened every cask on the ship, and found nothing,” I said.

Suddenly, there was a rustling sound from underneath the floor planks. I drew my sword again, wondering if there was a third guard in hiding; but in a moment, there was a bump, and Thrain Sigfússon’s head popped out through the trapdoor. We all gaped for a moment, speechless.

“How did you escape the Jarl’s men?” demanded Helgi. “They were right on top of you.”

“I think we should discuss that once we are at sea,” said Grím, and that seemed good sense. We drew up the anchor, and set to the oars with a will; even Thrain did his part. Within less than an hour we were around the headland and out of sight from the settlement.

“Now, Thrain Sigfússon,” said Skarp-Hedin, pulling on the oars with an easy motion of his thickly muscled arms, “How did you escape from the Jarl’s men?”

“I stayed in the cask until I heard the Jarl’s men leave the first time,” said Thrain. “After they left, I assumed that they would not be returning, and I was cramped in the small space; so I got out, and climbed into the end of the hold in the bow. It was narrow, but you had a bundle of wool blankets down there; and there was a piece of loose wood on the floor, so I pulled the blankets around me, and propped up the wood on the other side so it looked as if the hold ended there. When they came back the second time, I was tucked away safe and snug, and they didn’t have any idea of where I was. But then they left two men behind, and until I heard your voices, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was wondering if I might starve down there in the hold.”

“Starvation might have been preferable to what the Jarl would have done to you,” said Helgi.

“Do you think the Jarl will pursue us?” asked Thrain.

“We will have to wait and see,” I said. “It wouldn’t surprise me. Jarl Sigurd is not a man to trifle with.”

We pulled in the oars, and brought up the sail. The wind caught it, and it billowed out before us. Off to Iceland, with all of us; who could have predicted it? I had once more had a sudden change of fortune, from one day to the next. But yet again, the gods had held their hands over me and I had come through without a drop of blood lost.

Giving attention to the bad guys

2011-06-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

One of the problems I find with a lot of writing is that I find the bad guys unbelievable.

Take, for example, the Orcs in The Lord of the Rings. I know I'm stepping on hallowed ground by even suggesting a criticism of Tolkien, but have you ever asked yourself why the Orcs were so pissed off at everyone? Now, I'm not talking about Saruman's Orcs, who were promised rewards; but just your run-of-the-mill, cave-dwelling, dull-witted nose-picker sort of Orc who lived in the Misty Mountains and who presumably didn't give a rat's ass who won the Battle of Helm's Deep. They somehow still hated the Elves and all the rest, just 'cuz.

Well, I'm not buying it.

If you want a story that has some depth to it, which presumably all writers do, you've got to give your antagonist as much depth as your protagonist. To me, the best stories are the ones where you end up feeling some sympathy for the antagonist. You still don't want him/her to win, but you think at the end, "I almost felt sorry, there, when (s)he was ripped apart and eaten by rabid weasels."

Take Darth Vader, for example. How much less powerful would that story have been had you not felt a little sad that he had taken the path he did, when he died in Luke's arms?

A writer I know, who shall remain nameless, suffers from the worst case of One-Dimensional Villain Syndrome I've ever seen. Every story she's ever written has an arrogant, patriarchal, middle-aged white male as the villain. Furthermore, these APMAWMs are always guilty of victimizing and demeaning women, but the women always end up Showing Them A Thing Or Two, leaving the APMAWM in question to retreat in disarray. It's as predictable as clockwork. The result, unfortunately, is that besides the stories appearing completely formulaic, it leaves us wondering about what the APMAWMs do in their spare time, when they're not looking around for women to degrade. Nothing, is my guess, because these dudes seem to have no other characteristics than (1) the required anatomical equipment and ethnic group identification, (2) arrogance, and (3) patriarchiality. They have no other motivation, no other character traits, and (most importantly) no sympathetic characteristics at all.

Note that I am not objecting to this on the grounds of my meeting one, or possibly two, of the above-mentioned characteristics of APMAWMs. I respond with equal eyerolling when I read a story from the 30s or 40s which features the femme fatale stereotype. I want to find out what these women do, when they're not lounging on the tops of barroom pianos smoking cigarettes in long holders, looking for naive young men to lure into fornication. What do they like to eat for dinner? How do they pay the rent? Do they get together with friends to drink coffee and discuss how the fornication went that week? Do they subscribe to Femme Fatale Weekly?

Saying that a character is evil "just because this character is evil" isn't enough. What motivates him/her? Power? Revenge? Lust? Greed? And why has this become a driving motivation? Just as no one is evil "just because," no one becomes evil "just because." Your antagonist(s) need a backstory, a reason for their actions.

And they can't be thoroughly evil. Sauron aside, no one is 100% evil. Even the worst of the worst have some positive traits, and those can be used to set off the bad things they do, to heighten the tragedy of their characters and actions. Maybe your bad guy hates his neighbors, but loves his dog. Maybe she is greedy as King Midas but never forgets to send her mother a gift on her birthday. Maybe he's a thoroughgoing APMAWM but has given everything to the family business, so he can pass it along to his children. And so on.

Life is full of contradictions, and good writing reflects life. Don't forget that this applies to the bad guys as well as the good guys. Make your antagonists as richly three-dimensional as your protagonists, and your stories will gain immensely in depth, interest, and believability.

Gems of dialogue

2011-06-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

It's hard to describe why some particular lines of dialogue are memorable, any more than you could say "wow, those three notes in that symphony are brilliant!" The dialogue itself only shows its excellence in the context that the author has set. Nevertheless, there are passages of dialogue in books and stories that to me still stand out as absolute genius.

It's probably futile to try to explain why these particular passages leaped off the page for me, but I thought it might be a fun exercise to present here a few lines of dialogue that for me exemplify sheer, unadulterated brilliance in writing. Each one of these sent a little shiver up my spine, and I thought: this is perfect. See how many you recognize, and if you recognize them, whether you agree. Feel free to add some of your favorites. If nothing else, we'll all have a list of books to put on our summer reading list.

"Mother was always shoving me out into the world," Meg said. "She'd want me to do this. You know she would. Tell her..." she started, choked, then held up her head and said, "No. Never mind. I'll tell her myself." -- Madeleine l'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

"I am tired," he said. "I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned 'Off' button." -- Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven

"We will have peace, " said Théoden at last thickly and with an effort. Several of the Riders cried out gladly. Théoden held up his hand. "Yes, we will have peace," he said, now in a clear voice, "we will have peace, when you and all of your works have perished -- and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men's hearts. You hold out your hand to me, and I perceive only a finger of the claw of Mordor. Cruel and cold! Even if your war on me was just -- as it was not, for were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired -- even so, what will you say of your torches in Westfold and the children that lie dead there? And they hewed Háma's body before the gates of the Hornburg, after he was dead. When you hang from a gibbet at your window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc. So much for the House of Eorl. A lesser son of great sires am I, but I do not need to lick your fingers. Turn elsewhither. But I fear your voice has lost its charm." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

"You suggested that Hazel should tell them of our adventures, Blackberry, but it didn't go down well, did it? Who wants to hear about brave deeds when he's ashamed of his own, and who likes an open, honest tale from someone he's deceiving? Do you want me to go on? I tell you, every single thing that's happened fits like a bee in a foxglove. And kill them, you say, and help ourselves to the great burrow? We shall help ourselves to a roof of bones, hung with shining wires. Help ourselves to misery and death." -- Richard Adams, Watership Down

"You were awaiting the sound of the seventh trumpet, were you not? Now, listen to what the voice says: Seal what the seven thunders have said and do not write it, take and devour it, it will make bitter your belly but to your lips it will be sweet as honey. You see? Now I seal that which was not to be said, and will take it with me to the grave." -- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

"I believe that I am mad," said Vertue presently. "The world cannot be as it seems to me. If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it; if I can go, then there is nothing to go to."

"Vertue," said John, "give in. For once, yield to desire. Have done with your choosing. Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue. "I must choose because I choose because I choose; and it goes on forever, and in the whole world I cannot find a single reason for rising from this stone." -- C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress

"As for my gravestone? I would like to borrow that great barber-pole from out front of the town shoppe, and have it run at midnight if you happened to drop by my mound to say hello. And there the old barber-pole would be, lit, its bright ribbons twining up out of mystery, turning, and twining away up into further mysteries, forever. And if you come to visit, leave an apple for the ghosts." -- Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

"Yes," she said coldly. "Better that they die here and now, if that's what has to happen, than that they go with you and live. They -- we -- did some lousy things. But the price is much too high." -- Stephen King, Needful Things

Canaries (an excerpt)

2011-06-11T03:51:00.000-07:00

Murray Delafosse thought he had a long, comfortable retirement to look forward to. He and his wife had purchased their retirement home, in a nice suburb of Lafayette, Louisiana, with a well-built house and a tidy yard, in May, and moved in a month later.

On July 1, Murray’s wife announced that she wanted a divorce.

Murray had lived in a predictable world, and he liked it that way. Now, he was facing a future that he had never anticipated, where his carefully laid-out plans were in ruins. Depressed and aimless, he looked around him, and saw no particular reason to do anything but hang around the house and watch television.

Matilda Durieaux, however, has other plans for Murray. With Matilda on Murray’s case, there is no chance of his staying mired in inertia. And she isn’t going to let a little thing like the fact that she’s been dead for sixty years stop her from fixing Murray’s life, whether he wants her to or not.

Canaries is available as an e-book from Amazon and Barnes&Noble.

In the following excerpt from chapter one, Murray is pondering the mysterious noises he heard in his house the previous night, and the fact that a box of books was dumped out on the living room floor -- when no one was in the house but him.

***************************

When it was light out, Murray got up, put on a pot of coffee, showered and dressed. His mind kept turning over the previous night’s events, but without coming to any real resolution. He felt like he did when, a few years ago, his nephew had handed him a Rubik’s Cube. He could see what it was, could understand how the thing moved, but whatever pattern it followed made no sense to him whatsoever. His nephew could solve it in a minute flat; watching the boy’s hands moving, this way and that, he felt that he could just as well be watching a magician. There had to be some sense to it, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what it was.

He spent the morning picking up the spilled books, arranging them on the built-in shelves in the living room, and prying open other boxes of books and arranging those. There were several boxes marked “Louise’s Books,” and those he pushed off into a corner. The rest of the day was much like the previous one; night came, the heat-up of that night’s dinner, the television shows, the rituals of going to bed, and finally lights out.

That night the disturbance came at a little after 1 AM. He woke out of a fairly sound sleep to the thought that there must be a lightning storm occurring, something fairly common during summer in Louisiana. There were repeated, irregular flashes of bright, white light. But as he came to full wakefulness, he realized that first, there was no thunder; and second, and more alarmingly, that the flashes were coming from inside the house.

He got out of bed. His heart was pounding; was it a fire? An electrical short? It was coming from the living room or dining room, he could see that. As he neared the end of the hall, he could tell what it was; someone was flipping the switches of the living room and dining room light fixtures, quickly and in no apparent pattern. He could even hear the clicking of the switches.

He stepped into the living room, and it stopped, and everything went dark.

With a trembling hand, he reached out and switched on the living room lights. He half expected them not to come on, but they did, and the living room lit up brightly.

There was no one there.

This time, it took him several hours to get back to sleep.

The following night, Murray decided to break his routine.

He readied himself for night time as usual, but instead of climbing into bed, he turned out the lights, and tiptoed back down the hall in his pajamas. He walked into the living room, and sat down on the floor in the corner next to and a little behind his recliner. From there, he could see into the dining room, living room, and kitchen. If anything happened that night, he’d be right there.

He dozed uncomfortably, his head lolling forward; every once in a while he’d rouse a little, shift his position slightly, and then doze a little more. The time passed this way, all quiet, Murray sitting on the floor nodding and rousing, until a little after midnight.

It was probably only his proximity, and the fact that he was hardly asleep, that alerted him when it happened; the noise this night was quiet, almost stealthy. A low, grating noise, like something being dragged across a surface.

He was awake instantly, but made no sudden move, tried to remain part of the shadows in the corner where he sat. He looked into the living room; nothing. Likewise, the dining room was empty and dark.

Then he looked into the kitchen.

Standing just inside the kitchen, next to the counter, was a woman. She was glowing faintly with a pale bluish light, but her form was shimmery and insubstantial; he could see the handle of the refrigerator through the folds of her old-fashioned, floor-length dress. Her features were plain, her jaw angular, her nose a little too long to fit her small, birdlike face, and she wore her hair (of uncertain color because it, too, seemed just on the verge of transparency) in a rather unflattering and untidy bun.

A ghost? he thought, frowning. How can this house be haunted? It was built only twenty years ago.

The transparent woman was moving his yellow ceramic sugar bowl along the counter, pushing it in a sort of experimental way, frowning a little, and then pushing it again. Finally, she picked it up, and held it in front of her face, as if considering what to do with it.

Murray was suddenly galvanized. All of the irritation and frustration of the previous week bubbled to the surface. He had moved his residence; his wife of thirty-eight years had left him; and now, now, there was some ghostly woman in his house, disarraying his things and disturbing his night’s sleep.

“Hey!” he said, in a loud voice, still sitting on the floor. “What the hell are you doing in my house?”

The woman gave a little yelp, and dropped the sugar bowl. It struck the floor, cracked in half, and sugar scattered about the kitchen. The transparent woman turned to face Murray, put one hand on her chest, and then reached out with the other and steadied herself against the counter.

“Holy Mother of God,” she said, in a weak voice. “You nearly scared the life out of me.”

The Ensign Moron effect

2011-06-09T05:48:00.000-07:00

For me, the absolute worst reaction a reader of one of my novels could have is to roll his/her eyes.

Fiction is all about creating a world, and by that I am not just referring to science fiction and alien planets. A good writer designs a little universe in which the characters live, and the goal is that the reader will for a while inhabit that universe (and if it really works, the reader continues to revisit that universe mentally even after the book is finished). This means that inside the world of the story, everything needs to be self-consistent. The plot needs to be coherent, any backstory needs to align properly, and -- most importantly -- the characters should act in a way that makes sense, given who they are. (Now, of course, there are times that a character might act illogically -- but his/her illogic should still be consistent with the character's personality. I.e., there should be an underlying logic to the illogic.)

Nothing is so jarring to me as a reader as reading along and suddenly saying, "C'mon, he wouldn't do that." I find that this tendency is especially pronounced in horror and science fiction, largely because the action in those genres often comes from people getting themselves into life-threatening binds. But even though in a horror story, you have to somehow get the main characters into the haunted house (or graveyard or castle of vampires or monster-inhabited cavern), you've got to do it in such a way that it doesn't elicit eye rolls. How many horror movies have you seen in which a couple gets lost in the woods at night, and they hear something, and one of them says, "It could be a monster. Let's search for it. We should split up." And inevitably, the monster picks off one or both of them while they're alone.

Gimme a break. If my wife and I were camping in the woods, and we heard a monster, the last thing I'd want us to do is split up. Given that I'm a great big wuss, I'd probably be clinging so tightly to her that we'd have to be surgically separated after the monster was vanquished. No way would I calmly say, "Let's split up."

I find that even my all-time favorite TV series, The X Files, was guilty of this. How many times did Mulder and Scully split up to search the warehouse for the monster? All the while using only flashlights? Several times I shouted at the TV, "Turn on the lights, for chrissake!" But they never did.

And of course, science fiction is equally bad in this regard, but usually for a different reason -- in much of science fiction, the backstory is so complicated that it's necessary that someone on the spaceship has to act like a complete moron in order for the reader (or watcher) to know what's going on. It leads to scenes like the following:

CAPTAIN: Shields up, Lieutenant! We are entering space controlled by the malevolent Bugwumps of Garbonzo-11.

ENSIGN MORON: But who are the Bugwumps, Captain?

CAPTAIN: The Bugwumps are an evil race of giant robotic cockroach entities who can control the space-time continuum with their thoughts.

ENSIGN MORON: Why are they at war with us, Captain?

CAPTAIN: Well, Ensign, ten years ago, some members of our Federation settled on a planet in a disputed region of space. And the Bugwumps destroyed it. So, now...

And so forth. Remember Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation? Wesley Crusher was basically Ensign Moron. And because of that, we had not only a character who was asking stupid questions, but a captain who had to tolerate his presence on the bridge, instead of saying, "Get off my bridge, you odious little twerp, I've got a job to do," which is what I'd have done, if I were Captain Picard.

The same principles are true, of course, in any genre. It's no coincidence that when someone does something surprising, people say, "Well, that was out of character." Characters in fiction have to obey a certain logic -- even if that logic is, for a time, known only to the author. It's perfectly okay if a character does something seemingly crazy -- as long as, at the end, the reader says, "Oh, okay! Now I see why he did that!" Misdirection is permitted, as is playing your hands close to your chest. But if, at the end, your reader doesn't see the pieces of the puzzle fitting together neatly, something has gone seriously wrong with your characters' motivations, personalities, and interactions. And in my opinion, there is no worse error that an author can make.

Naughty bits

2011-06-07T02:59:00.000-07:00

This morning I was thinking about sex scenes.

Not in that way, so don't get your knickers in a twist. I was wondering about their use in writing, how much is too much, how explicit is too explicit, and so on. Note that I'm excluding, for the purposes of this discussion, outright erotica -- writing that is intended to arouse. But what about ordinary, mainstream prose?

My general attitude is that there's no reason to avoid any mention of sex, out of some sort of left-over mid-Victorian sense of delicacy. Being part of what adults do, it's no more off-limits to write about than anything else that adults do. However, like any other kind of scene we could write about -- be it violence, farce, tragedy, anguish, comedy, or philosophy -- it can be overdone, or done poorly. Given that it's something that most people think about pretty frequently, and have (ahem) strong feelings about, if you do include sex in your writing, you want to get it right. I don't know about you, but there's nothing more cringe-inducing than a badly-written love scene. I don't think it's an accident that there is no contest for the year's worst fight scenes, but there is one for the year's worst sex scenes (to read about last year's winner, go here).

To me, a well-placed (and well-written) love scene works to dial up the tension in a plot. It can act as a point of happy relief when two characters you've been hoping would hook up finally do, or an "oh, no!" moment when two characters whose actions are leading them to disaster, and who should avoid each other like the plague, make it worse. And in my opinion, there's nothing wrong with its being, if not exactly explicit, at least thoroughly described. Like anything we write about, the point is to make the reader feel like (s)he is there, and is on some level experiencing what is happening to the characters. I see no reason why this kind of scene should be any different.

You do have to be cautious about descriptions, here, however. Most of the winners of the worst sex scenes contest won because of, shall we say, bad analogies, usually involving sounds, movements, or body parts. Keep it real. Keep it simple. Avoid purple prose. All of which are rules that could apply to just about any type of writing, but are especially important here. If your intent is to heighten the tension, dramatic and otherwise, it's a little counterproductive to cause your reader to roll his/her eyes, or worse, dissolve into guffaws.

Also, consider whether it's actually important to what's happening in the story. Like anything in writing, love scenes should be used judiciously. A pair of characters who seem to do nothing but to go for rolls in the hay eventually leave the reader thinking, "Don't you ever vacuum the carpet, or mow the lawn, or cook dinner? Or go to work?" Anything that causes that reaction is to be avoided -- the last thing you want is your reader suddenly getting yanked out of the story, and thinking, "Real people don't act this way." At that point, the world of the story has collapsed, perhaps for good.

I've only written two stories with sex scenes. One of them, in Kári the Lucky, was supposed to be tender, to make you feel sorry for the two main characters, a husband and wife who loved each other dearly and who you knew were headed for tragedy. The other, in The Conduit, is supposed to scare the living hell out of you, because the main character is making love to a guy who looks exactly like her husband -- but isn't. I spent a long time writing and rewriting these scenes, because I thought each one was an important juncture in the story, and also because I don't want to win the Worst Sex Scenes Contest of 2011.

However you handle writing about The Deed, it should be done with thought -- and like anything in good writing, considering how it adds to plot and character development. Throwing in a sex scene just to titillate is an insult to the reader. But handled with a deft touch, it can heighten the dramatic tension in a particularly visceral fashion.