tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84000972024-03-15T20:09:35.096-05:00At Home in BlufftonI've realized: I write to be somewhere other than where I am. Over the years, I've found my favorite non-where to be is Bluffton, a little town in the Driftless Zone of the Upper Midwest. Whenever I'm here, I'm there. Come visit.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.comBlogger126125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-75112186501844769852014-01-21T11:22:00.001-06:002014-01-21T11:22:24.644-06:00For BFS Award Consideration: "Jars" from CANOPIC JARS: TALES OF MUMMIES AND MUMMIFICATION<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
JARS</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
by</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
Lawrence Santoro</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
Published in <b><i>"Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification"</i></b></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<b>Great Old Ones Publishing</b>, November, 2013</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mBDq8Ff-zMc/Ut6sj6EMptI/AAAAAAAAAtE/pFb2VcT2zQw/s1600/Jars.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mBDq8Ff-zMc/Ut6sj6EMptI/AAAAAAAAAtE/pFb2VcT2zQw/s1600/Jars.jpeg" /></a></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-left: 36px;">
"They are lean and athirst!" he shrieked... "All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment, I cannot be certain."</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-left: 36px; text-indent: 36px;">
—Frank Belknap Long, "The Hounds of Tindalos"</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
This began in circumstances ordinary for 1945: a boy and his mother leave home, travel north to be with a wounded soldier, their father and husband. Ordinary. But when the end comes, I will not have prepared you for the rest.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
A cab brought us from the railroad station. The driver squinted in the dark and through the rain for the address mother gave. When we got there, the man said, “Why didn’t you just say it was the Cornelius?” He sounded annoyed, barely helped with our luggage, most of our summer things. <i>Yankees</i>, I thought to myself.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The house stood apart. There were others on the block but our rented place stood alone, taller, deeper. “Row homes,” mother called those others, first I’d heard the term.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Inside, she and I stood dripping just beyond the vestibule. The place stank. <i>What houses are like in the north</i>, I figured.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Stale air,” mother draped her arm over my shoulder. “We shall air it out.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I called, “hello,” to the empty rooms and the house welcomed us with an echo that was nothing I’d said. Later, there was singing somewhere far away, high-pitched voices and low drones like sacred harp back home but singing words I did not know. Still, they sounded like home and I cried.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
When our things arrived, the house swallowed them. Our rugs were islands, our chairs, tables and lamps huddled on their shores surrounded by splinters and varnish.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I exaggerate.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I should tell you about Terry. He could not fly, he did not jump. He was an ordinary, skinny, blonde kid. Not a bad guy, he just did what people he clapped onto wanted from him. When he hung around with “Bluto” down the way, whom I will mention only here, Terry was forever in Dutch.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“What Bluto expected,” Leslie told me.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Terry was not a smart kid but, like Grampa used to say, “some people just know which way the wind is going.” Maybe that was the problem.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I met Terry right after I met Leslie and I met her on the day mother made me go to Fifth and Hawk elementary where I told everyone I was temporary and would be heading south soon as daddy got better. Daddy was in the big hospital in town, a special place. Burns from the war in the Pacific. He was a pilot.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
My first day, Leslie walked me home. She’d run ahead then skip backwards to talk. She knew where I lived. See, while I had noticed no one, everyone had noticed us. Course they did. We were new, the ones in the big place, the Cornelius.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie followed me onto the porch, still talking. She petted the woodwork. She watched the carpenter bees buzz the porch ceiling and not land anywhere. She kept trying to look in the window.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“What’s it like? Living in the gods’ house?” she said. I had no idea what she meant. “Living under the Mark?” Again, no idea.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
She ran backwards to the sidewalk and pointed to just below where Tudor half-beam wood began at the third floor. A flat stone, about a foot on a side, was let into the brick. I had noticed, figured it was something Yankee houses had.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Doc Cornelius put it there. Before my time, back when dad was a kid. One day Doc got out on the porch roof, right there, put up a ladder, measured, chopped out some bricks and cemented that thing in. The Mark. Something he found out there in the world. An expedition. Said it would bring the gods. What people said he said.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“God?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Gods. The gods.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I squinted. There was a head with horns cut in the stone. Too many horns or too many arms, more arms than any animal I knew and I knew octopuses. We starred at it until afternoon heat began to make the head and arms wiggle. When I’d had enough, she was still looking.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Yep. It moves now,” Leslie said. Then she ran down the block to her place.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Mother asked why didn’t I invite my little friend in? I said, “Well, I guess I will.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Her first visit, Leslie could not stop touching and looking. And talking. She talked a streak about the house and Doctor Cornelius and the things he did.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Cornelius was sta-range?” she wiggled her fingers and drew out the word. “Here is one of the best hospitals in the world. Right here…” She spun ‘round to take in the whole town, “…and Cornelius would not doctor there, nuh-uh. He saw people here,” she spun ‘round again. “Down there.” She pointed to the floor.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“The basement?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“‘S’what they say.” She was amazed at my ignorance. “Cornelius dug things up in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ultimate Thule. Went with Byrd to Little America—that’s the South Pole—chopped his way through the Darien Gap! He was a medicine doctor but he was a doctor of other things too. Things from old books. There any old books here?” I shook my head. “Well, he went on trips to find more books and maps and things.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Maps?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Not like from the Esso station. Museum maps, old books maps, maps dead people pass down in families from time immemorial. That’s a long time. He kept them up there.” She pointed to the ceiling.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Up?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“In your attic. With his books and his things.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“How do you…?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“ ‘S’what people say!”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We went from room to room. Leslie looked on tip-toe or squatted down and looked under. “He had things. People say.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“You keep saying, ‘things,’” I got in edgewise.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Things like the Mark stone and more. People say he found lost Atlantis. That’s at the bottom of the sea. The Atlantic Sea I guess but some say it’s somewhere in the Greek Sea or the Arctic Sea. Imagine the things he could’ve brought from Atlantis? Right into your house. You know Atlantis, right? That’s the Ante…”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Antediluvian continent. I know that much.” And I did. Antediluvian times were the old olden times, times before Noah’s flood, before God and everything.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
She stopped talking and looked at me. “Antediluvian, indeed. People say he found relics and remains.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“What people?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“People. They say he found relics, remains of the great old ones. The ones who came before real people got created. Things! What’s in the attic now?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Nothing,” I said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“No books, no maps?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Just grandparent’s stuff, silver cups from…”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Of course we went to look. She talked and talked and ran her hands over the flowered wallpaper in the side hallway and up the stairs. At the top of the steps, the air was gray and dusty.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“You get splinters going barefoot here?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“I don’t go barefoot. I almost don’t come up here ever.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Huh.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Well huh, right back,” I said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The attic light bulbs had clear glass with little tips on the ends. Right away he saw those things, Terry called them “titty-bulbs.” The light they threw was hard. But I will not get ahead.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The few boxes we’d put up there were shoved into the middle of the room. Last I’d been there they were to the side under one of the angles of the roof. Or maybe not. I don’t want to make things up.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
By the time Leslie’d gone through grampaw’s skeet shooting cups and such, mother called dinner and did my little friend want to stay?</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Can I use your phone?” she yelled and was already half-way downstairs, hands trailing the flowers on the wall.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“But I’d love nothing more!” She almost cried into the phone, “Please.” Finally she hung up and said, “I can’t.” On her way out she turned to mother like she’d forgotten something. “Thank you so much I can’t tonight and maybe could I have a raincheck?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Why, of course,” mother said. Leslie was gone and the house was quiet.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I’ll get to Terry in a bit. That night, another sound began. The sound was in the hallway wall or maybe in the stairway to the attic. I heard it half the house away. This wasn’t singing like before. First, I thought it was a cricket. A cricket’s a hard little bug rubbing itself. But in the dark, this became less and less cricket-like and more and more like stretched skin might moan forth if bowed upon. Never heard the like. I followed. The noise stopped in the side hallway to the attic. The big flowers were gray and black in the dark. I put my ear to them and felt their soft roughness. Underneath was that one-string fiddle, faint beneath the flowers and plaster. Then the sound was inside me, inside my head.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Of course it was not. The sound was in the wall, in the stairway wall. I stood alone in the dark, a big space for my barefoot self to fill. Then–I don’t know why–my mind went to that Mark, the stone in the bricks just above mother’s bedroom window. The thing moved. I could not see it, but I felt the horns, arms or whatever they were writhing round that head and turning, turning inward, reaching inside and for us.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Then the sound was gone and I had a splinter in my foot, the which I pulled out in daylight digging with a needle, pulling with the tweezers.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie and I began sharing nickel pops at Engquist’s Drug Store after school; did that pretty much right off. Terry joined us. Then he started walking home and going with us to the Saturday matinees downtown. Then that was us.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Terrence Adolphus to name him fully, got bad grades. He lied. We knew that. I knew because he was a bad liar. Leslie knew because she’d known Terry forever and knew what was so and what wasn’t. He stole things—from our house now and then, but always gave them back a day or so after. He stole a funnybook from Enquist’s, a Classics Comic Leslie and I wanted and couldn’t afford. We yelled at him. Then all three of us sat and read it in the shade of our house. “The Mysterious Island.” Very good. Terry let Leslie keep it. He would have gotten a licking he brought it home. His old man—what Terry called his daddy—gave out lickings (“Beats the snuff out of him,” Leslie said) for everything, things, if I had done them, mother would have just looked disappointed about. After one visit to Terry’s place, I never went back. He got a licking. The Old Man heard him cuss or maybe because he’d brought us there, but he got a licking like one I’d never had; got it as though we weren’t even there. Probably got one later for coming home with band-aids on, I don’t know. That was Terry and he started the real troubles at the Cornelius, but maybe that wasn’t his fault.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The House? There were still smells. Stale air? Mother was mostly right. We aired out the place and most of it went. Not all. Something alive-smelling remained. Probably from the basement.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We still had echoes and noises at night. “Old houses have old sounds,” mother said and put her arm over my shoulder. No idea what that meant but it made it better.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Sounds in the walls? I pretty much convinced myself of mice, bugs and such. But the echoes never went away. Every night-sound in that big old place brought its whole family of cricks and answering cracks with it, like some small and hard-footed thing was wandering.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie and Terry liked the attic, two big rooms and a hallway. The front room looked through a maple onto the street, the other looked down on the two-storey ‘row homes’ that filled the rest of our block. The only things we put up there were the gramparents’ things I mentioned and some board games.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The attic’s smell was sweet and thick.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Flour paste and horsehair,” mother said after one sniff, “flour wallpaper paste and hair-plaster that lies beneath.” The paper was rough and smooth. The big green and red flowers Leslie loved running her hands over, felt alive under my hand.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Huh,” Terry said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Old ways of making things,<i> cher</i>,” mother said. “Open the windows, young sirs and madam, the odor will depart.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We opened them. The smell departed. Her arm on my shoulder cured my worries and embarrassed me in front of Leslie and Terry.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The basement really stank. Not like anywhere else I knew except the hospital where daddy lay, a place full of rotting limbs. Those stinks were alive.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Why…coal dust,” mother suggested. I knew coal to be long-a-gone ferns and dinosaur bodies squeezed into to black rocks. Daddy told me when I was young. So I credited mother’s assessment. Coal dust it was. Mother had ways of removing the dark from the world.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Apart from that, the cellar was jim-dandy, wide and deep as the whole house. Bigger, I thought. And three bulbs to light it all; each hung from a cord with a pull chain that dangled at tip-toe height. First time down there, Terry ran the length, leaped and swatted all three bulbs, set them to swinging. Shadows came dipped and spun, light and dark traded places, back and forth alive, each changing for the other. I didn’t like that.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The smell up where we lived had mostly departed but that living odor lingered below even when the outside hatch was opened to fresh the air when we played submarine, rocket, or bomber plane down there.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Coal dust,” I insisted, defending my mother’s honor.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie sniffed. “Cockroach,” she said, “maybe rat. Probably Cornelius’s patient’s bodies.” She laughed.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Terry, who loved rumor, laughed. It was at the back of the basement, past the last bulb, where I was later found hugging the “crate of gut-jars” as Leslie called them, but I will not get ahead.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
School eased us into October, then November. Leslie, Terry and I went to the Saturday matinees. We improved the movies on our way home. Terry liked playing bad guys but was too nice for it. Leslie would not be the girl. None of us liked girl parts, anyway, so she was mostly the buddy who dies.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Four blocks shy of home, was the bridge that carried our street over the railroad yards. We hung over the cement balustrade to spit into the locomotive’s smokestacks. That was good and we came up sooty and smoked.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
On our side of the bridge was a little triangle park. The park was thick with trees and tall grass and had a canon from the War of Northern Aggression. We frequently stopped there and used it for our improvements.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
When we got home, we went to the attic and read aloud from “Tarzan” and such or played Monopoly, Parcheesi, or Mr. Ree. Terry found the hidden closet up there pretty soon after autumn had shortened our after-matinee time outside.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The door looked just like the wall with flowers and baseboard. But looking close, there was a thin line, a break that rose from the floor to about four feet, then over, then down. Right off, Terry started working to get it open. Why? Have to ask him, and you can’t. He worked on that for I don’t know, sliding the blade of his Barlow knife into the crack and working it up and down. He was devoted, as mother might have said. Finally, he stopped playing Monopoly and just worked. We called him back for his turns and at first he came, then he stopped.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“What is wrong with you, Terrance?” Leslie yelled.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Get this Goddamn thing open,” he yelled back.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Why!” she shouted.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“It’s a goddamned door and goddamned doors should open.” There were other words, lots of cussing.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The hours he spent after-school and after-matinees cutting at whatever held the panel closed and the “bastard,” remained steadfast. I bet Terry had never worked so determined on anything in his life. He’d get it almost open, fingers halfway in, then it would slip and snap shut. He’d cuss and be back at it.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
November. Leslie and I were settled into evening gloom, scaring each other reading A. Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World.” Terry worked.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Goddamned cursing,” Leslie said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Son-of-a-bitch,” I said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We’d just finished the chapter, “To-Morrow We Disappear into the Unknown” when Terry, on his knees, shouted “Jes-us Fuckin’ Christ!” He’d gotten his fingers inside the panel. “Have the Goddamned thing. I got it. Now I got it.” The door and its flowers creaked and cracked.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“You’re fixin’ to break something,” I said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“I’m okay. Sum-bitch…”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Don’t give a fig about you, you’re fixing to break the damn wall.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Then he stopped shaking with effort. The door stopped cracking and creaking, as though they’d come to an agreement. Suddenly Terry’s right arm—he was a south-paw—slid to the elbow into whatever was on the other side of that panel. At the same time, the titty-bulbs in our room and the hallway went out. All the lights in the attic so far as I could see, maybe all the lights in the house went out. With the dark came autumn shadow from the street. I saw Terry’s shape, and that not so well. He looked to be hugging the panel, his ear against the door, his head turned so I saw nothing of his face. But he spoke and he spoke in whispers; not the usual Goddamn sum-bitches, now there was a smooth flow of whispered nonsense. Down home we’d call it ‘speaking in tongues.’ But this was quiet, personal.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“You all right?” Leslie’s spoke over my shoulder.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
First, there was Terry’s quiet voice; then there was another, another voice, another presence in the shadows with us. I may be wrong when I say voice. But someone was there who wasn’t us. And, this may not make sense, but a darkness lay between Terry and me. Between where he was and where Leslie and I stood, a great gulf was fixed, as they say.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie pushed the light button on and off. I jiggled the titty-bulb in its socket. But that was us. And there was the other place where Terry and that other someone were.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Then the darkness between went away. Lights came on – all over the world for all I knew. The windows were black mirrors and Terry, Leslie and I were alone.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Terry’s arm slipped slowly from that little closet, like someone disarming a bomb in a movie. I expected horror and there was some blood, but nothing more than might happen to any boy on any day of work or play. For a moment, the skin of his hand and arm was bone-white and runneled, like he’d been too long in water. He held the edge of the panel with his fingertips.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Terry,” Leslie said, “your hand.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Hell with it. I gave it. Almost. Shit. We got to find them jars. They’re in there, somewhere. Jars of guts, then the gods.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The panel slipped from his fingers and slammed shut. Could have heard it all over the house. Mother was at the hospital, though.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Guess not.” Terry whimpered with a sigh. Forgive me for it but I was thinking, ‘That is Terry, <i>almost</i> but <i>not quite</i>, never all the way.’ And whatever eluded him was always the goddamned importantest thing in all the wide world.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“I wanted? Maybe something. Shit, you know?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Sure,” I said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie steered Terry downstairs to the bathroom and ran cold water on his hand. With the blood washed away, the damage was as I said, nothing that didn’t happen to a boy every day. The dead whiteness of the flesh, the wrinkles, that was almost gone.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“You’ve been bit; bit by something with tiny teeth. Something bite you? And who were you talking to? I could not understand a word, Terrance.” Leslie talked until the cold water stopped the blood. Terry dried his hands with toilet paper and she stuck three, four Band-Aids where he still oozed but that was that.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Terry shook his head and had no goddamn idea what the hell.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Yeah, a goddamn bite,” he said, “you got something in there that tasted me.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
”S’what I said,” she said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Probably splinters, Leslie! Anyway, you’ll keep the hand.” Visiting daddy I’d seen people didn’t keep hands and other parts. I loved daddy but did not like to visit that place. They did not like me being there, either.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 36px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I am now at the kernel of this. After being ‘tasted’ Terry was different. We played, still went to the matinees and improved them coming home, but Terry was more grown up. Mother said. I thought he was just queer. Leslie said he listened more.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Not to us,” I said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Okay, I have avoided this, this strange, impossible part. I’m not pulling your leg though. Here. The kernel. The horror.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We were coming up from town. Late November. A wonderful day, chilly but warm enough to stay outdoors until darkness came. Darkness was coming. Leslie and I were riding the canon—something we’d seen in a movie. Terry wasn’t on the gun with us. He was walking around the little park watching the sky.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“I wonder,” he said, “what’ll they give back?” </div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Huh?” we said. He’d been queer all day.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“I fed them. Gave them up, gave them me.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Queer,” Leslie said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Time you noticed,” I said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We’d rutched almost to the muzzle of the canon when Leslie screamed. I thought she was fixing to fall and, since we were making like the barrel was pointed over a cliff, I turned to save her life. She wasn’t falling. She was staring, eyes-wide. The sun had just set and shadows were coming for us, crawling from under the trees by the west. There were lots of trees and wind enough to make the autumn grass whisper.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Terry stood on the bridge balustrade. He often threatened to walk the bridge’s narrow ledge, a good thirty-foot drop to the tracks. Leslie always talked him out of it. There he was standing on that cement rail, his back to us and I don’t know if he heard Leslie’s scream or not. I didn’t peep for fear he’d lose his balance. When Leslie drew breath to shout again, I turned to hush her and we both fell off the canon. Not hundreds of feet to the rocks, just three, four to the grass. For half a second she gave me mad-eyes then her face got bigger. I turned.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I know what I want to say: from where he stood, Terry just seemed to float on smoke or steam that huffed around him from a passing train. I want to say that but, no. He was lifted, borne aloft on swirls of spark and soot. He was awash but not in train smoke. There was something—that dark something I saw when the panel had held him in its mouth, when he spoke in private tongues to the darkness. That something held him now.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We called. I think he did not hear. Leslie ran toward. I followed. Terry was still awash, lifted above and beyond our reach, over the tracks. He looked not at us but somewhere else, I don’t know where, but not at us. The long arms of darkness wrapped him. They were alive. Sparks—what I thought were sparks—swirled and crackled like Christmas tinsel on the Lionel tracks. And there was a smell, that alive stink of something that had rotted its way from another world into ours, the stench of something from beyond and long ago. This was the full-out reek that lay under what the Cornelius sometimes fed us until mother made it depart through open windows.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Terry dissolved into the arms and the sparks. Leslie reached for him and failed. She began to climb onto the railing. I dragged her off. We argued, sure, but I was proud of her that she tried, and disgusted with myself that I hadn’t.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
In a moment, the arms, the sparks and Terry whisked away, a meteor trail up the sky toward our house.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We ran. The Cornelius was just a half-mile but I’d never run that far, so fast. What was I going to do? Tell mother? What else does a kid do? The long wall of row homes passed in slow motion, our breath and legs held and slowed us. Ahead, where Terry and whatever it was had gone, time ran regular. Our feet were lead, our chests filled with sand and cement. When we reached the Cornelius we died for breath.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The Cornelius was utterly black. We breathed.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Your mom? Not in?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Hospital,” I remembered, “daddy…”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Then us…?”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Us.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“We’re it. The rescue.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I never liked the house. That evening, it did not like me. Silly. Not the house, no. Houses do not like or not. They are. But something was there that wore the house, and that did not like me. Us. Leslie and I leaned on our knees and breathed and breathed and did not pass out.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Look.” She pointed.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The streetlight on the corner was out and the house showed little more than angles, black brick and gray wood. Still…a thing moved across the face of the Cornelius. A moth flickering on the screen is something like it. The whole rest of the block was dead. If not dead, then sleeping, silent, except for the flap of that growing many-limbed thing that was trying to enter our world from the Mark. I do not mean to be dramatic. I have tried not to be, but that is what it seemed. This thing rose and fell back, rose again, stretched, beat itself against the dormer above or strained down to where it rattled mother’s bedroom window. It was smoke learning to have muscle and teeth.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Terry’s in there,” Leslie said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I knew that he was. I just did not want to go in.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We went in. No lights, nothing worked. We ran upstairs into a darker place, down the side hallway, darker still, then climbed the attic steps. We climbed into a downpour of stench, a breath from some Cornelius place where his maps and books had taken him, maps and books that had been part of this house and had lived in these rooms. The thoughts ran through me. How? I do not know. The light ahead was not the hard-edged brightness of titty-bulbs but soft and smoky, a curling light that threw gray shadows. There were voices in that light, far-off but clear and foreign. The walls hummed with them, those flesh-strung violins sang. The sacred harp in tongues, fed our ears.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
In the front room, the little closet stood open, a gap in the wall’s black and gray flowers. Something moved inside, a thing our size that crawled away from us.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie called but Terry did not respond. She dove.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I hesitated. Something urged me stay. The cricket in the wall, I now guess. I pictured Jiminy Cricket. Jiminy Cricket was in my hand, small with long antennae. He said, “stay.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
No. I gripped him hard and followed.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The door closed behind us.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I’m older now. I didn’t then know what being a child in the womb was like. I still do not, I suppose, but I do know now that at our beginning we are alive in the body of another, close and embraced by wetness and meat; outside is an alien world, untouched but at-hand.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
That experience is probably kin to what Leslie and I felt crawling in that darkness, incomprehensible sound surrounding us. I also know that at our end, the earth will enwrap and hold us forever. A baby has no sense of beginnings or endings or of the world and I suppose a corpse hasn’t, either. We did. We knew we were inside a place both alive and utterly alien. The house? No. Was it a creature, one of Cornelius’s “old gods”? I do not know.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Jiminy Cricket wiggled in my hand. We crawled, we walked, we ran. Light of a sort aimed us. We moved through rooms—or caverns—walls like slabs of meat rose around us, stars aloft and distant above. We kept on. Winds came. Icy arctic night roared from a side space. We went on, following Terry. From another side, a fetid corruption strangled me, heaving screaming jungle birthsoup belched on me, then vanished. We followed Terry. He’d been invited. We’d not. </div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Jiminy buzzed reminders to my hand. “Not wanted (“needed,” “fit,” “required”),” it sang. His antennae augured their way out of my clenched fist. I called to Leslie but she would not stop. We kept on. Places passed on either side, a black depth of water, living lights moving in it. Sometimes the way narrowed to a few inches and thousand foot drops gave way to either side of our running feet. And always and ever, alien winds arose from here and there. The smell was what a spider looks like.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Hours and miles later, the way ended. Ahead, Terry knelt by a pit. A greasy light arose around him. Terry reached into the light and, one after another, withdrew a series of glowing jars.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie and I had stopped. I could barely move or breathe, but we stopped, how to explain this? We stopped because Terry seemed to know what he was doing. This not very smart boy had gathered around him a half-dozen of these jars. Various colors played over him, colors I knew and others I had no name for. Quickly, he opened one jar, put it down, reached, opened another, placed it at what seemed a measured distance from the first.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
So it went, a pattern being made, colors and life oozing from the open jars.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“What in the hell…” Leslie said.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Jiminy squirmed and screamed.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Jars of,” Terry said. He didn’t look but he was speaking to us. He continued to work. “Hearts, lungs, parts there ain’t no names for. God-parts, waiting.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Leave now,” Terry said, “we have it to do.” Jiminy said, both of them said. “Leave now and the gods will be reborn. They have lain await here in parts and in many places. They begin again. Here the world begins. Anew.”</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Jiminy gave me a jab. I opened my hand.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“Hell!” Leslie said, seeing the thing for the first time.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I don’t know, grabbing him had seemed natural. I’d loved his movie and he was a good little fellow.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
“What the hell?” Leslie screamed.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Jiminy’s tail fired like a glow-worm. The air lit. Every mote in the world glowed. The Jiminy bug spread wings and flew.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Why? I don’t know why I knew but I did know Jiminy was not Jiminy Cricket but something from Doc Cornelius’s dreams. The bug’s right name popped into my head but I have long forgotten it. I knew, too, that Jiminy must not get to those jars of lungs and parts and...</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
…and, well, I knew things and among the things I knew, I knew I couldn’t let that little bug go. I grabbed him.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The which did not stop him. He flew higher and higher, me with him, holding him.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Now, I was not a heavy boy but I should have been more than a cricket-sized bug could haul aloft.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie called. Her voice and she were dwindling, below. Jiminy screamed in the tongue of the old gods. From below, Terry looked up. His face was as full of ancient hate as the “old man’s” had been that one time I saw him reach for his son and beat him out a licking.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
How high? Don’t know. What was I doing? Don’t know. Light and smell oozed from the jars Terry had opened. In them life crawled, craving substance and bawling like babies. I knew (How? Don’t know…) that if the parts managed to gather and touch, the critter fluttering from the Mark would be with us in the world. And I knew that would be a very bad thing.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Then I fell.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Did I let go? Don’t know. From how high? Don’t know. A long drop, sure. Not as far as daddy falling from the sky in the Pacific but the light, colors, the jars, the pit rushed toward me and then I was in it all and overwhelmed.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 36px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Terry’s mom and old man were dead. Terry killed them the night before, killed the old man first, sleeping. A butcher knife. Many times. His mother fought but she was very small and he killed her too.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
They found Terry on the tracks below the bridge. People said he’d jumped. A train had run over his body but he’d probably been dead before.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
I woke, Leslie screaming and shaking me. She’d found me at the far end of the cellar. The lights were on and swinging and I was hugging a box of jars. Looked like old preserves in Ball Jars. But I did not look closer.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
How’d I get there? You know by now.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie verified everything I remembered: following Terry, the thing from the Mark, the opening in the attic, the trip through…?</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
What? Through to the pit. She watched me fly, she said, she saw me drop from on high. Then light like the sun and she awoke in the basement. I was a mess. We never told mother.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Leslie and I watched the Mark that night before we knew about Terry and his parents. After we knew, we watched the Mark for days in the cold winter sun. It did not wiggle.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
My daddy passed soon thereafter, a war hero. Everyone was sad. And so soon after the shock about the Adolphus family, a whole family done in like/that!</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
We were sad, Leslie and I. I still am. But daddy could not have been whole again, and like I said, Terry wasn’t a bad guy, just someone who knew which way the wind was going. Sad, but I rushed to help mother pack the place because we were going home woth daddy.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
When we left, I wondered what to do with those jars I woke up hugging. I would not open them even to flush or burn them or whatever. The box was almost full. Just a half dozen missing.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
Sometimes I wonder about Doc Cornelius. What happened to him? To his patients, the ones he saw in the basement, to his books and maps, his ‘things’?</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-indent: 36px;">
The jars? I left the decision to Leslie. I still miss her and sometimes wonder.</div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 36px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; text-align: center;">
--END--</div>
<br />
<div style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12px; min-height: 15px; text-indent: 36px;">
<br /></div>
Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-42747294495241439972014-01-12T11:33:00.002-06:002014-01-21T11:07:46.322-06:00For BFS Award Consideration: "Instructions on the Use of the M-57 Clacker"<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>INSTRUCTIONS ON THE USE OF THE M-57
CLACKER</b></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">by<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lawrence Santoro</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Published in "Fear the Reaper," October 2013, Crystal Lake Publishing</i></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">“She was among the recent dead, and walked haltingly from
her wound.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;">-- Ovid,</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 18.0pt;"> “The
Metamorphosis” Book X</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“So, you kill anybody?” Arinello said. No
one else had asked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi had put a million rounds into the
dark. Careful three-round bumps or Mad-Minutes on full-auto, a thousand
year-old wall between him and Charles, the stink of nitro coating his throat,
muzzle-flashes right, left, forward, above, like stars.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Probably,” he said. “Why?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Just wondering’s all. You was scared?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The ceiling at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s Fishtown Bar-Liquors-Beer </i>was still pressed tin. O’Dwyer
was dead, old age, cancer, something, but his ceiling? That was the same, sure-sure.
Libassi’s eyes wandered. He read the tin landscape cold, like a field map of the
Highlands. “Scared? Fuck yeah.” Then, “Okay no. Well at first, then it goes
inside. Then, ‘I see the light,’ clack-clack,” Libassi said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Fuck, I know you, Libassi. Scared
shitless! What’s that? Clack-clack?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Something. You want stories? ‘A Grunt’s
Tale, or What the Fuck?’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Like Sister Magdalene reading, what was
it? ‘The Red Badge of Who Gives a Shit!’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The laughs died.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“How old you think Nam is? Country not
the war?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Dunno.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“A thousand years.” He stopped for the
memory. “‘Place is the clit of the South China Sea.’ Soc said that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Look at a map.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Soc?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Socrates. Socrates is a dead nickname. Words
for everything that guy had. What’d he say <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">jungle</i>
was?” Took a second. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fecund!</i>” The
word popped out of memory. “Yeah, ‘fecund.’ Should hear what he called malaria
and shit.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The laughs died again but Soc was in his
head now, whispering smells, tastes. “’Jungle’s the cunt of the world.’ Soc
said. ‘War inhales us and the forest spits out death, rot, life; it is all the
same. The end. Amen.’” Libassi turned to Arinello. “That’s Soc. Dead now, sure-sure.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“A thousand years?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Them villes, yeah. Grass huts, ‘imagine.’
Not stone like Italy and the Greeks. A thousand at least, the butterbar said.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Butter?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Butterbar. Yeah. Second lieutenant. We
come out of the forest. A dog’s barking down in the ville, always a dog’s
barking. The path leads down into whatever it was called. ‘Imagine,’ LT said.
‘Huts lasting a thousand years.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Then an RPG comes smoking out of that
shithole, pins the man to a tree and…” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Jesus.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“…dog’s still barking. But LT’s greased.
Quickly dead. Anyway, the round never detonated, Chicom shit, so I’m okay. But LT’s
guts leave a trail from where we stand back to the fecund forest.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then memory. There in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s Fishtown</i> Libassi remembered: out
of that ville had come the thing, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
dark</i> he called it. Nothing else to call it. He saw it there for the first
time, he and another cherry; a crawling blackness… That’s all he remembered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What happened?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“After.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“After? After, we Zippo’d the place. A
thousand years those huts keep the jungle back.” His memory was alive in smell,
taste, sound. “A couple Zippos and... Yeah, guess I got some then. The dog
anyway.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Fuck. Gotta make ‘em pay for it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The dark—which did not care who was who
or what side had to pay—had a time that day. After? After, it left for a time
and for a time Libassi was good. Afraid? There was a<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> respite</i>, Soc’s word. That was before the tower.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The corner of Libassi’s eye caught a
ripple, a twitch on the far side of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s</i>
American Shuffleboard. Might have been his eye, might have been the beer. He almost
turned, but didn’t. There was nobody, but there’d been a ripple. “What the
hell?” he said to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s</i> ceiling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi turned to Arinello. Bobby A. Remember?
Arinello, Bob whose fucked up ball-playing high school knee kept him out of the
war? Ran numbers for some people? Nothing big. That was then. Now? Well, now the
State is writing policy so what’s Arinello doing?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You know, working. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arinello’s and Son Auto Body.</i> Arinello rubbed the black lines in
his knuckles. “Least I got a trade, huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi pulled his head away from the
dark. “Me too.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Couple-a lucky fucks we are, huh?” He
called to the bar, “Yo-there!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The bar was a lady. O’Dwyer’s daughter. A
little older, still… She came in slow motion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Hey, fix my friend, here. He’s just
back,” Arinello said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Say, what’s
this? Place is dead. Used to be something.” No answer. “Just back from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nam,</i> my friend here.” Maybe she hadn’t
heard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Her eyes stayed rigid in her skull. The
skull turned to Libassi. “That right?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah,” he said. “You can tell?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“No.” Behind him, the shuffleboard went <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dong-ding, dong-ding</i>. “Can I get you?”
she said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Schaefer.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">She went. Libassi could have sworn she
sniffed and curled her lip.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Smells it on me, though.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“So you got a? What is it? Trade you
say?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Oh, I wade nose-deep in shit without puking,
stand stick-fucking-still till hell freezes. Won’t scratch, sneeze, fart or
drop dead till told. We’re all meat for the market is what Soc said. Being
‘sardonic’ he said, ‘The end. Amen,’ he said. He said that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Soc got shot?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“No. Mosquito. Anophol-something. Bites
and down you go. Malaria. Gets better, then comes back. Fifty years, maybe. You
carry it. Then, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">snap</i>, you’re dead.
Soc didn’t wait.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dong-dong,
dong dong.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A wet Pilsner touched Libassi’s fingers. The
bar waited, her eyes on him. “Schaefer,” she said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello slapped a buck on the bar. “Chrissake.
Guy’s been over there killing for America.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“A dog, anyway,” Libassi said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I’ll bring change.” She waved the single
as she walked. She walked nice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Fuck,” Arinello said to her back. “Keep
it,” he called.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi thoughts ran: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Army, trade, eighteen months. Happy to
separate out?<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yeah.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Good
to be back in the world?<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fuck
yeah!<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">You
still you?</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He thought so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“So you got it, Malaria?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah. And I burn shit, a valued trade. You
and your buddy, both fuckups, are assigned to latrine police; you pull out the honey
drums, pour in the magic, light it up, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">poof</i>.
Long burn.” His next breath caught a whiff from memory, the sense, separated
but still in Nam: burning shit that he and…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fuck.
What’s-his-name? Colored guy?</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">
He knew it but the name was locked in the memory still in-country.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; tab-stops: 103.5pt; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">…they breathed, a stink like no thing in
the world but itself—solid black that unspooled from the drums of burning…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">…shit. Yeah, but in the field what was shit?
C-rats, pressed-meats, eggs-n-ham Spam-I-Am, stuff called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spaghetti </i>heated with C-4, instant coffee, mouth-mixed and
swallowed with spit, tinned pound cake, beans, crackers, Vienna wieners, peanut
butter, salt tabs, malaria pills—keep the shakes down—pizza, choppered in with
beer and Beam and the rest. That was shit. And shit was the stuff they squeezed
from the world, things swallowed, shot, smoked, chewed or shoved to keep
hopping. They burned all that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Slopes loved our shit, Bob. American
shit is fertilizer supreme, worth a fortune, ‘Numbah-one.’ ‘Eat so good,
America, you shit numbah-one. You give, yes?’ ‘Give, Charlie? Fuck no, I
sell!’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Sell?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“G.I. shit brings <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bookoo</i> bucks. But no, we stir in some diesel, light a TP-Stick and
up it goes. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Whoof</i>. ‘Deny the enemy
that vital resource, son,’ commander says. ‘No fortune for you, G.I.,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the end.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amen.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi snorted, sucked a breath and he
was back in O’Dwyer’s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“State fucking lottery,” Arinello said.
“You believe that shit? Somefuckinbody’s getting rich. You know someone’s
getting rich.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Always somebody getting rich that ain’t
you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Fucking lottery,” Arinello said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ding.
Dong. Donk</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">, the
shuffleboard said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Elephant grass,” came into Libassi’s
head.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“’Grass, sharp like a sweet soft razor,
two-mans high!’” The colored guy called it, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘Grass
two-mans high cuts like a Satiday-night nigger.’</i>”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The picture sharpened: the Huey’s
downwash, grass waves rolling out from their center. Libassi leaned to
Arinello, “Elephant grass makes pretty waves.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Down the shore. Now you’re talking,”
Arinello said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“No. Grass waves. Looking down, from the
chopper when you’re dead. Elephant grass rolls away forever.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Dead?” Arinello said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Swirls, like that ‘Starry Night’ the painter
made, one with the ear.” He leaned closer. “But what’s in that grass? Oh,
Arinello, Bob, you do not want to know what’s in that grass.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“When you’re dead?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Everybody dies, least once. Bullet,
malaria, grenade.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You gonna say?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah. I died.” Even the t.v. shut up. “You
want to know?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“War stories? I’m hanging with my old man
now.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi locked an eye on Arinello. “Lemme
show you.” Libassi opened both eyes. Arinello fell into them. The story was
this, and it was true, a war story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Base Camp was a jerky square a couple
hundred meters on a side. Someone shaved the top off a mountain, people who’d
been before and now were gone. They’d made a place. The place was Fire Support
Base Jenny. Who was Jenny? Who cared? Jenny was permanent, as permanent gets in
a war, a mountaintop with men, tents, latrines, dugouts and four howitzers. Looking
out from Jenny, Libassi saw a line of jungle-clad peaks and valleys. On the
field map, neat north-south contours, but from the bagged perimeter above the
forest, the lines of hills folded, merged, separated and faded into the mist. Air
was mostly water so there was always mist. Daytime.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nights? Nothing. Overhead was sharp, hard.
A black that rose from the forest and went everywhere Jenny wasn’t. Up in Jenny
you were safe, more or less. Go down to the forest, though, you were in the
House of Charles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And they would keep ordering you down,
captain to the LT, LT to the sarge, then sarge says to you and the map, ‘Patrol
that there river trail, Fox one-niner to Lima eight.’ And down you went, got a
little <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bok-bok</i> with Charlie. Kill-and-count.
That simple. Really. Stay on Jenny and all was fine. Burn shit when it was your
turn (or because you’d fucked up again). Not bad duty considering. “Burn time, get
short. Now and occasionally the Shithook comes…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Shithook?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Chinook. Big chopper, okay? Shithook
comes out of heaven with pizza, beer, porn, smokes, mail, rations, ammo, new
guys. Weed too, I figure.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Army sent weed?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Who else? So. Stay on your mountain, smoke,
drink, jerk off, burn shit, turn on, get short, go home. But no, they keep
sending you down to the dark.” He smacked the empty Pilsner on the bar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Well, you made it.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah. Now and occasionally you pull
guard duty. You get your chicken plate on, climb your tower—there are four—you watch,
listen, sniff the air for Charles because Charles is a stealthy little fuck.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Charles’s the Viet Cong.” Arinello spoke
for the bar to hear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah. Viet Cong. V.C. Victor Charlie. Charles
owned the forest below. Trouble is, on a mountaintop you’re surrounded by ‘below.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You said.” Arinello called to the bar. The
bar delivered. “Go on.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“So now and then Charles gets his hands on
heavier stuff than AKs. RPGs, mortars, little field howitzers they drag around
on bike wheels, you know?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah-yeah.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“So, my turn in the tower. Nightwatch. I
climb. Not alone. This other guy has some bodacious weed he wants to blow with
someone who ain’t letting everyone in on he’s got it, and that’s me. He brings
his shotgun and we are up there bonging with the 12-gauge and it is quiet. Dark.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Dark’s regular. And quiet?” Libassi
listened in his head. “You don’t know how many kinds of quiet there are in the
boonies.” Libassi knew a thousand shades of silence, the kinds of nothing the
war had to offer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What he knew, he
couldn’t tell. “Anyway, we’re fucked up. Somewhat. Don’t get the idea that
what’s coming is because of fuckedupness, no-no. Fucked up’s regular too. Anyway.
Night’s everywhere, then my buddy, can’t fucking remember his name, colored guy
from I don’t remember…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Buddy’s a nigger?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Buddy’s a nigger. From Boston someplace.
He smiles. Why? I don’t know because next thing, he points to the black below
our position. I look and down there?” Libassi looked in his head. “There is
something. First I think the malaria’s coming out again. Like it does, dreams…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What is it?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Arinello, Bob, my buddy and me, we are both
of us fuckups, two guys who should never be in a tower together, people sleeping
under our care. We look and I don’t know, there’s something not night, not
animals, it’s not Charlie creeping, it ain’t my malaria. I am with my mouth
hanging open. The nameless nigger’s still smiling. We’re like boy and girl,
heads together, looking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“The silence—this silence—is the kind
that every bug, breeze, everything down there humping, hunting, being killed,
suddenly shuts the fuck up over. Freezes. Scared. Tigers, snakes, roaches big
as that go numb. Numb because something is among them. Something the fecund
forest don’t know, don’t want to know. And the something’s moving. Got a
purpose and nothing knows what is that purpose.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello blinked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Anyway, it moves. Bottom of our mountain,
across the stream we can’t see except now and then starlight winks on water, it’s
down there, okay? Rolling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi had never spoken it. There was no
Army word, no Soc word. “It’s a blackness with arms, or like arms, fingers. Fingers
like smoke but not. They reach, touch. Like bug feelers. The trees wrinkle,
move aside, no noise, nothing, they just part, like they want nothing to do
with this whatever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“My buddy’s still smiling. ‘We got LURPS
out?’ he says. Teeth leave white trails.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Lurps?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Long-range patrol. ‘No, we’re buttoned
up,’ I tell him. Then, he wants a closer look I guess. He leans over the rail. I
do too ‘cause were sort of connected. So. The thing below. Maybe it sees us
then, ‘cause, right then, it stops.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I feel it stop, feel it look. Looks up
at us. Looks up at me. And it knows about me. Everything down inside. Anyway,
it’s fixed. It’s now ours, or I am its. But it is the thing was in that ville
when LT got pinned. The dark.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“‘For me?’ colored guy whispers, ‘Is it?
Is it for me?’ Still grinning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“’Ain’t me,’ I say. Now fucked if I know
how, but I know it is for me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Weed’s forgotten. We’re looking. Can’t see,
looking at. Corner of the eye is how. Thing crosses the stream. No splash. Water
flows around. hssshhh… Trees, this side of the river?” How to say this?” They
step aside, quiet, polite. Let whatever pass. At the bottom, bottom of the hill
below our position, we can’t see for the trees, but the trees wrinkle; they move
so easy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“’We sound alert?’ my buddy asks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Now, I want to, I want sirens, lights, want
to burn the forest, Mad-Minute the fucker. But, this is not Charlie and the
first shirt gets a flaming asshole, his sleep is disrupted. That gets you
volunteered. So, I shake my head and watch the dark come up our mountain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Buddy’s not smiling now. And, now it’s
closing, I smell... I don’t know. Well, I do know.” Libassi blinked Arinello
out of his eyes. “You don’t know how death smells. You had a different knee,
you’d know. Bodies out there’re mostly Charlies, but sometimes there’s a G.I.,
and we bring back our own. Try to. And a body in the jungle…” Libassi had to
think. “After a couple days, skin slips off the bone, the thing rolls out of
your hands and you’re holding slabs of black fat. There’s that. And shit. You
shit when you die, so there’s days-old whatever the forest didn’t eat. Anyway,
a body, dead, is rotted meat, shit, piss and more. Okay?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello starred.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I smell that and the air. The air
carries wet stink from a hundred miles of jungle. And sweat—panic sweat—I taste
it. Stink and the taste of stink, it’s in the air.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He thought about that. “No. It’s in me. Okay? It’s me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ding.
Dock. Clack.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> The
shuffleboard clacked in the dark by the Ladies’ room.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi shut up. This is Philly, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s</i> same-old. There’s tin above, a
good-looking woman ignoring him, as she should, end of the bar. Still. The silence—the
silence of that night in the tower—that silence, that smell and the dark were
in him now. Memory? No-no.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello raised his arm for another
round. Libassi dragged it down like there were tracers in the air. “No. See,
the dark was everything; fed us sight, hearing, taste, smell, all of it. It’s just
that what it gave was nothing. Zero. Get it?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was jungle, there was movement and stink but the dark
at the center was nothing. And it fed us the nothing.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Touch?” Arinello whispered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?” Libassi said, then, “No! Not
touch, not yet. So, long story short, we watch. Two dumbfucks, ripped to the
tits, watch this thing flow, roll, finger its way up the mountain. Takes, I
don’t know, ten minutes. Took us longer going down, but call it ten. Thing’s
below our twelve o’clock now, and now I hear. A little something, but something
touches.” Libassi’s fingernails scraped the bar. “Touches our tower. Tower will
not step aside; tower’s not trees, animals. It’s a fucking dead tower someone
built and it won’t let the dark go by. Anyway, I’m there. Tower vibrates. Gentle,
creak, crackle, crack. Tower rattles, we shake, the stink is heavy.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi took a breath. “And we fucked up.
I know because I suddenly remember we’re soldiers. And that thing is coming. We
should shoot, hit sirens, lights. We don’t. Whatever the dark is, we fucked up
and people are going to be dead because. Us, too.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi closed his eyes. The stink came full-bore,
filled his nose. With the smell came the heat, the wet, the sound of that long
silence, that once and once-only silence that comes just before you’re dead,
and you see it and taste your fear of it; that something he knew he’d taste
only once again, and after that he’d never taste anything ever.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Shuffleboard clacked. Three times.
Hard. Sharp. Then a fuck-empty silence. He didn’t look. “Not me,” he said to
the dark.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello looked like every cherry new in-country.
He stared at the old guy, nine months and a thousand years older than he’d ever
be. He looked and waited for the word, word of the way, word of the worst and word
about the easy way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi wouldn’t give it. Fucked if he
knew himself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What happened?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Memory of night, heat, the silence that
was the dark’s, the complete fucking nothing that slithered up their mountain
and the war-stink it shoved into him, the safe reek of Jenny, which was cosmoline
and diesel, armpit and after-shave, mud and SOS bubbling on the stove—and the
far end of SOS, the meat-eater shit that uncoiled to heaven on solid rolls of
black smoke, those and the other friendly stenches put out by the Army and its
men, that and the death-reek of the forest. Then memory of a flicker that lit
the air a million miles away; brief lightning in a cloud full of shadow and
rain, a misty ripple on the edge of the world. Libassi had wanted rain. He knew
when it came the rain would be only a little wetter than the air, but he wanted
it, and yes, he knew something bad had advanced on his position and was about
to over…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then memory of the yellow light that
killed him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then space. No memory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What happened?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Like/that Libassi was back in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer</i>’s. Arinello was just Arinello
and Libassi finished the story he should not have started.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“A mortar. Chinese
shit. This’n worked. There’s yellow light. I guess there was noise; I’m
squeezed by a bear, gorilla, some fucking thing, and that was that. My post
abandoned me. Ha.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A war story. A quick easy lie.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello laughed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Then I wake. Only not like coming up
from a dream. It’s like/that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Like what?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“It’s later. Someone kicks me. My chin. I’m
bagged, being processed with other dumbshit dead guys. I’m lying next to other
bundles of meat. I’m screaming. My mouth is blood and teeth. Rain’s filling my
mouth. Thunder, lightning and something’s jammed up my gums. The son-of-a-bitch
who kicked me’s on his ass, screaming into the sky too. I’m sitting up, trying
to, and I’m trying to pull out…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi dropped his top plate, pulled out
the bottom one to show Arinello the fucked-upness of his mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I pull my tags out of my fucking fucked-up
gums. Fucking guy believed that shit.” Air lisped through the gaps where his
teeth weren’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello squinted at Libassi’s mouth. “Fuck.
Like somebody curbed you, man.” Libassi remembered he and Arinello curbing that
Irish what’s-his-name, the prick Stinson and his brother, back when, before.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The shuffleboard clack, clack, clacked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“I said fucking guy believed that shit
about the notch on the dog tags. Fucking new guy just out of charm school. Ought
to be field-stripping butts and burning shit, but he’s in a firefight with
nobody to kill except each other, and now he’s detailed securing bodies, mine,
because I’m dead and my buddy, who I can’t remember his name, and three or four
other guys who are well and truly dead, dead because, well, they are, call it enemy
action, friendly-fire or what the fuck, they’re dead. I’m one of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Tower’s through the grinder. Seen it
next day. Me and the colored guy were in the wreckage. Both dead. Should have
been, anyway. The nigger, my buddy, he’s all…” Libassi didn’t want to say, “…splinters
and meat,” he said, “you know?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Spiedini!” Arinello laughed through his
nose. “Eggplant kabob!” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Yeah. I’m one of them kabobs.” Libassi
rubbed his arm. Pieces were still working their way out from down deep. “So, spiedini.
So this fucking doofus does my buddy then same to me, yanks my tags, sticks the
notch between my front teeth and kicks a field goal on my chin. Wham. Minnesota
farm fuck, Stateside fat still on him. Someone told him that’s what to do, said,
‘jam the dead guy’s tags up the gums, then kick it home. You will keep them tags
and dead guys together till they get to Graves Registration, stateside, young
trooper!’ He believed that shit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“So, I’m dead, bagged, and this mother
jerks me from Jesus, ha!” He smiled wide at Arinello.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The shuffleboard’s C<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lack Clack Clack</i> shot up Arinello’s backbone. “Hey, that? What’s
that?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Playing with itself?” Arinello hooked a
thumb at the shuffleboard and did not look into Libassi’s holey mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The look on O’Dwyer’s daughter reminded
Libassi his plates were still out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Click,
clack.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> The partials went
back. Libassi, as he ever was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He had to say something else, something
to finish that night. “Yeah. Chinese mortar shell that worked.” Libassi
finished the warm beer. Miss O’Dwyer brought a cold one and a whisky, Irish. She
was all tits and sweat, fucking gorgeous. Buttons holding where cloth parted. How
long was it? Got him some boom-boom back there, sure-sure but the women? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Little-girl womens, womens like little boys</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“On the house,” she said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“C’mon, down that,” Arinello said, “place’s
dead.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">While Libassi thought of other things,
Arinello drank the Irish. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi leaned toward Arinello’s ear. “Buddy,
there’s a shitload more.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What?” Arinello said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Never stand in front of your own
Claymore, for instance.” Libassi downed the beer, picked up his empty Irish,
shook his head at Arinello and smiled at Miss O’Dwyer. She brought another.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The year faded in, shadow and noise: his buddy’s
name, the empty place in that night, more, all on the tip, almost there. What
had come out of the forest and up the mountain, what had dropped their tower,
what had been alive in the bright yellow burst in his head, what was the dark, what
stank inside him. What had made that other guy, another blank where a name
should be, what had made him do that? “Clack, clack, clack.” Libassi said.
Memory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He tells this one: “We’re both cherries,
same arrival, same DEROS. Both Zippoed the ville that day. But that guy. Stands
in front of his own claymore and clack-clack-clack.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">No face, no name yet, just the pink ooze
of brain froth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Talk,” Arinello said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Some guys want it,” Libassi said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Shit, I want it,” Arinello, looking at
O’Dwyer’s ass.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Nah,” Libassi said. Should he say? Death
wasn’t just out there. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It’s in you, death
is.</i> He’d learned. Soon after being dropped into Jenny, that fact came around
and introduced itself. That day at the ville, they both saw the dark, both
looked in its face. Maybe it had been just for the other cherry, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what’s-his-name, brain oozing?</i> They choppered
in together, both clean and scared.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Trembly.” Libassi said, a load off.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?” Arinello said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Guy fragged himself, his own Claymore.
Trembly.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“We cocked an ambush. Platoon makes a
tactical adjustment left, defilade from cover. But Trembly, he stands, walks
forward, and right. Looks at me, ‘See the light, see the light, see the light,’
hits the clacker. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Clack, clack, clack.</i>
Boom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“‘New guy panicked,’ Sarge says. Fucking
lifer never even knew Trembly’s name. ‘Panic’ll get you dead,’ Sarge says. He’s
sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s got Trembly for
audio-visual whatchcallit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello’s face says, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘what the fuck?’</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“To blow a Claymore you got a clacker.
Detonator. Generates a current. You hit the clacker switch. Hard. Three, four
hits. You’re trained; see a little flash in the tester.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘I see the light, see the light,’ you
say. Wait. The enemy crosses the zone, you do it fast, hard.” He demonstrated on
the bar. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.</i> “Then boom;
supersonic pinballs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Trembly didn’t panic. He stood, walked. Looked.
Clack, clack, saw the light like he was taught. Pinball riot. He let the dark
out of him. Holes everywhere and out Trembly oozed, guts, brains—what brains there
was; dumb as scum, Trembly. A cherry who couldn’t hack it. I was cherry then,
too. Not after that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“So the year goes. Other guys buy it. Hard,
sharp guys. I’m a fuckup but alive. I’m in the tower with that colored guy. Something
blew us up. A mortar, sure-sure. There was a firefight over our dead bodies. Then
the FNG kicks me in the face and I’m alive again. The end. Amen.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Alive. No front teeth. The Army fixed
that, Choppered Libassi out of the highlands and over the grasslands. Looking
down, while dead, he saw what was in the elephant as the waves rolled and the
grass flattened then rebounded. Then he was fixed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wasn’t like playing war down the alley…<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Patch-patch...</i> Not that easy but…<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And the Army’s teeth slipped around his
mouth—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Click, clack—</i>rattled against
his for-real bone-teeth. They got most of the tower out of him. Some was still
working its way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“You get disability? I would. Stick it to
the…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello sounded like Libassi’s old man; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gu’ment took eighteen months of your life. For
what? Get your disability, for Chrissake.</i> Like Pop’s, Arinello’s grousing was
a kind of silence. The silence got bigger. It filled Libassi. Then it filled
the bar.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Behind him, the dark moved, a shuffle, a
ripple.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi kicked the stool jumping to his
feet. The dark flowed, reached for the light in him. Libassi grabbed the bar,
held on, did not turn, would not turn. In back, tables, chairs parted quietly,
the shuffleboard held fast. He would not look. Not now, not ever. “Never fucking
look. See?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?” Arinello leaned aside.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Got a leg cramp,” Libassi said. “Ain’t
going to look, though.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?” Arinello said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Colored guy looked. ‘For me?’ he says. ‘Fuck’d
if I know,’ I said. ‘It ain’t me.’ You gotta know that much. Guess Trembly
learned that. Back at the ville. Too late.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi stretched his leg like he
believed in the cramp.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The bar darkened. The American Shuffleboard
whimpered in clacks, the dark advanced. Overhead, the tin ceiling traced a
route: grid reference A to grid reference B. From somewhere to them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Was it him?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Gotta pee,” Libassi said, more plea than
statement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello was still talking. The crapper
was to the rear, past the Shuffleboard. A minute ago pissing was a suggestion,
now it was an order. His bladder climbed his spine and throttled his brain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Gotta see a man.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Want me to hold it?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi backed two steps. Wrong. All
wrong. Beer cases were stacked like sandbags along the wall. The ceiling fans trailed
ropes of greasy dust and liana shadow. The piss-shivers hit hard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another backward step and he was in the
line of march. Behind him was the forest. No looking but it was there, old,
familiar, and fecund. Arinello and O’Dwyer were on slack. The shuffleboard
whispered in the moving dark: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Clack. Clack…</i>
Hit the dirt? Nah. Trembly was long ago, far away. Libassi was in the world,
Philly, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s Fishtown</i> with
his buddy, what’s-his-name?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Washington,” he said. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My shit-burning bud. Forget Washington? Fuck
me!</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">With the dead named, the shadows advanced
in strength. They rolled over the redoubts. Ropy black fingers curled over edges,
pulling smoke-black bodies along. In mass they darkened the space. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the front, from behind, from the
T.V, through the windows and over the beer cases, they advanced across the
walls, floor, they drew across the tin map of the ceiling. The shadows moved
fast: fans, chairs, tables, shuffleboard, Libassi’s shadow—for Holy fuck, his
own shadow—separated, flowed, merged with the others. Stealthy, like Charles. Where
there’d been light was now nothing. The nothing gathered substance. Coiled
smoke writhing. It wanted. Not him. It was not for him but it wanted something
living.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Ain’t for me,” He stood alone. “You
can’t see it, it can’t get you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Huh?” Arinello said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“What?” Gorgeous looked down from the news.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">He was out of the bar running. The street
washed him, he drew its light. At the corner where a dead three-flat sagged
into shadows, he hung hog. Finally. Shivers poured out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Night was hazy, hot and humid. Philly
normal. Center City was a wet glow above the low buildings of Fishtown. When he
was a kid he thought the city was on fire. Every night. Libassi sucked air. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s</i> stood alone on its block, the
last tooth in a wino’s mouth. The ground was wet. Busted glass kicked back
sparks. No cars, no people, distant sirens. In the far distance: shots, running
shots and shot echoes. Philly night.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi tucked and zipped, set a pace. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Where’s everybody?</i> ‘Where all the mens?’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">…mens</i>?’
Echo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“…the hell, Libassi?” Arinello. Another
echo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Don’t follow, Arinello. It ain’t for me.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello barely kept pace. Not the running
back he’d been two years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When
the two of them and DiNardo and Chiarelli, those guys, the four of them, back
when they made the Fishtown Irish pay for it, wasn’t that something? Fucking
Stinson! Mouth on the curb, heel to the back of the head and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">boom.</i> Right here. This street. Over
there… The cement could still have teeth in it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Now he was a long way from Ninth and Passyunk,
the two of them alone in Fishtown. Libassi kept pace. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s</i> merged with all the bricks of Philly. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fuck O’Dwyer. Fuck O’Dwyer’s girl, Jenny’s
her name?</i> Back there was the stink, the shadows. Not for him. He was not
going into it, the dark.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi sucked air. He was what? Two weeks
back in the World? Already dragging home-pounds, his legs ached, he had to
breathe too much, but he was still going. Arinello? Forget it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Maybe
the Army done my ass some good.</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">
“Ha.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">His laugh cracked back from brick and concrete.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Double-time now. The street grew darker,
narrower. Silence oozed around him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello stopped.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi broke pace. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let your buddy catch up</i>, something said. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We been here a thousand times, him and me.</i> Libassi knew the
pavement cracks, the broken curbs, boarded storefronts, busted stoops. He and
the others lived and fought here. Kicked the shit out of the Irish, had the
shit pounded out of their Dago asses. A thousand times but different, now. The
corner of the eye: the shadows from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O’Dwyer’s</i>
paced them. Silent, wriggling fuckers, they raced along the pavement, walls. Alive,
they flanked him, hissed like the ocean that licked the sand down the shore. Larger
shadows peeled off the buildings. Brick shadows, stucco and tin shadows from
cornices, rusted, dripping darkness eased off whatever bits of the world he
passed. They rendezvoused as they advanced. Behind, they surrounded Arinello. Arinello
was the scream back there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This was the memory: Libassi and
Washington in the tower. Below, from a billion smelly births and deaths came
the dark whose silence was more complete than Charles ever was. The dark looked
up. The eyes at the top of the tower, his eyes, drew the dark. Not for him, no,
no. He was only the light. The dark flowed upward, the trees below the perimeter
leaned aside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dark topped the
rise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Washington pressed against him.
Washington didn’t know what the fuck. It did not matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi shut his eyes. He knew not to
look. How? Who the fuck knew? He saw with Washington’s eyes, felt the scream in
Washington’s throat. The dark rippled faster than he could imagine. With it
came the fecund jungle, the being and death of a billion lives filled his head.
Trembly, a time ago, saw the dark, his own dark. Instructed on the use of the
M-57, Trembly did his job. ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I see the
light, see the light. clack, clack, clack</i>. And the dark oozed from him like
malarial sweat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Libassi filled sucked light but could
not, would not give himself to death. Afraid? Fuck yeah. Scared shitless. Then
the world and Washington shredded, filled with splinters, fell. He was alive. Washington
wasn’t.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Soft yellow from the street’s one working
streetlamp washed Libassi. He drew it in. Felt the world darken. Fucked if he
wasn’t the bringer of the dark, the caster of shadows.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Imagination? A way of seeing, sure-sure. He
wouldn’t remember. Who can go through life knowing the dark is in you like shakes
and sweats? Not him. Not till the next time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Arinello, this is your day.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The forest, he was the forest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fecund smell of life and the
fruitfulness of death were his. Libassi knows that, of that time and place, the
dark is the one love he will ever know in his whole fucking life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arinello’s scream flailed, brick wall to
brick wall, down the Fishtown street. Then silence—that silence—the one he
believed was the death he heard just once before, before all things ended. The
silence crawled back in him and settled to wait with the dark.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">As he forgot it all, Libassi wondered
what it was his buddy’d heard, what he’d seen that came for him. There was a
word. Damn if he remembered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The end. Amen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>
<w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>
<w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/>
<w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/>
</w:Compatibility>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276">
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">END</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-80d89BU8CLM/UtLUsDjrZyI/AAAAAAAAAs0/5Vcu_diTlaM/s1600/pr_claymore_M57.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-80d89BU8CLM/UtLUsDjrZyI/AAAAAAAAAs0/5Vcu_diTlaM/s1600/pr_claymore_M57.jpg" height="270" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-91021965628801137772013-12-22T14:34:00.001-06:002013-12-22T14:34:15.740-06:00In accordance with the Bram Stoker Award® guidelines...This was a decent year. Published more things than usual. Tales to Terrify is doing well. I'm about to pull the ripcord on the day job and possibly move to a small New England town, get a dog and get back to writing full time. So, maybe, next year will be better.<br />
<br />
I would love to offer all members of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) the opportunity to read two of the stories I sold -- this for their consideration for the Bram Stoker Award in Short Fiction.<br />
<br />
One is "Instructions on the Use of the M-57 Clacker," published in October, 2013, in the anthology "Fear the Reaper," edited by Joe Mynhardt for Crystal Lake Publishing.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lINUIrLxAWA/UrdJaFruhuI/AAAAAAAAAsc/31UhCOH8nZc/s1600/Fear+the+Reaper.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lINUIrLxAWA/UrdJaFruhuI/AAAAAAAAAsc/31UhCOH8nZc/s320/Fear+the+Reaper.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
The second is "Jars" which appeared in "Canopic Jars: Tales of Mummies and Mummification," edited by Gregory L. Norris for Great Old Ones Publishing.<br />
<br />
"Instructions on the Use…." is a Vietnam war tale in which the darkness of war follows a young soldier home.<br />
<br />
In "Jars" three children come into contact with a horror they cannot understand or see but which fills their lives with an ancient darkness.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YweZSwxu7_k/UrdJiAbjjBI/AAAAAAAAAsk/-E60kH29_QI/s1600/Canopic+Jars.front.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YweZSwxu7_k/UrdJiAbjjBI/AAAAAAAAAsk/-E60kH29_QI/s320/Canopic+Jars.front.jpg" width="221" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
If you're a member of HWA and have an interest in reading either or both of these stories, drop me a note at: larry@larrysantoro.com<br />
<br />
Of course you could buy the books. There are treats aplenty in there for all of you.<br />
<br />
And stop by http://talestoterrify.com/ and have a listen.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-34563410210377732082013-10-24T23:21:00.001-05:002013-10-25T15:51:40.094-05:00The First 480 Words of My Story in BEAT THE REAPER<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves>false</w:TrackMoves>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridHorizontalSpacing>
<w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>18 pt</w:DrawingGridVerticalSpacing>
<w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:DontAutofitConstrainedTables/>
<w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/>
</w:Compatibility>
</w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="276">
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]-->
<!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}
</style>
<![endif]-->
<!--StartFragment-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The First 480 Words of</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><b style="font-style: italic;">INSTRUCTIONS ON THE USE OF THE M-57 CLACKER</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">from </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; text-indent: 0.5in;">BEAT THE REAPER</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_iMRnG_KcDY/UmnxbVAN1cI/AAAAAAAAAsA/85zyz8KjNMQ/s1600/pr_claymore_M57.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="337" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_iMRnG_KcDY/UmnxbVAN1cI/AAAAAAAAAsA/85zyz8KjNMQ/s400/pr_claymore_M57.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“So,
you kill anybody?” Arinello said. No one else had asked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Libassi
had put a million rounds into the dark. Careful three-round bumps or Mad-Minutes
on full-auto, a thousand year-old wall between him and Charles, the stink of
nitro coating his throat, muzzle-flashes right, left, forward, above, like
stars.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Probably,”
he said. “Why?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Just
wondering’s all. You was scared?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
ceiling at <i>O’Dwyer’s Fishtown Bar-Liquors-Beer
</i>was still pressed tin. O’Dwyer was dead, old age, cancer, something, but
his ceiling? That was the same, sure-sure. Libassi’s eyes wandered. He read the
tin landscape cold, like a field map of the Highlands. “Scared? Fuck yeah.”
Then, “Okay no. Well at first, then it goes inside. Then, ‘I see the light,’
clack-clack<span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:joe" datetime="2013-07-18T16:30">.</ins></span>”
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Fuck,
I know you, Libassi. Scared shitless! What’s that? Clack-clack?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Something.
You want stories? ‘A Grunt’s Tale, or What the Fuck?’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Like
Sister Magdalene reading, what was it? ‘The Red Badge of Who Gives a Shit!’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
laughs died.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“How
old you think Nam is? Country not the war?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Libassi
shrugged.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“A
thousand years.” Arinello stopped for the memory. “‘Place is the clit of the
South China Sea.’ Soc said that.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Look
at a map.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Soc?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Socrates.
Socrates is a dead nickname. Words for everything that guy had. What’d he say <i>jungle</i> was?” Took a second. “<i>Fecund!</i>” The word popped out of memory.
“Yeah, ‘fecund.’ Should hear what he called malaria and shit.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
laughs died again but Soc was in his head now, whispering smells, tastes. “‘Jungle’s
the cunt of the world.’ Soc said. ‘War inhales us and the forest spits out death,
rot, life; it is all the same. The end. Amen.’” Libassi turned to Arinello. “That’s
Soc. Dead now, sure-sure.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“A
thousand years?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Them
villes, yeah. Grass huts, ‘imagine.’ Not stone like Italy and the Greeks. A
thousand at least, the butterbar said.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Butter?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Butterbar.
Yeah. Second lieutenant. We come out of the forest. A dog’s barking down in the
ville, always a dog’s barking. The path leads down into whatever it was called.
‘Imagine,’ LT said. ‘Huts lasting a thousand years.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Then
an RPG comes smoking out of that shithole, pins the man to a tree and…” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Jesus.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“…<span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:joe" datetime="2013-07-18T16:42"> </ins></span>dog’s
still barking. But LT’s greased. Quickly dead. Anyway, the round never
detonated, Chicom shit, so I’m okay. But LT’s guts leave a trail from where we
stand back to the fecund forest.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Then
memory. There in <i>O’Dwyer’s Fishtown</i> Libassi
remembered: out of that ville had come the thing, <i>the dark</i> he called it. Nothing else to call it. He saw it there for
the first time, he and another cherry; a crawling blackness… That’s all he
remembered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“What
happened?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Huh?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“After.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“After?
After, we Zippo’d the place. A thousand years those huts keep the jungle back.”
His memory was alive in smell, taste, sound. “A couple Zippos and... Yeah, guess
I got some then. The dog anyway.”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qM_CqUeQoA0/UmrZci-QvbI/AAAAAAAAAsM/2ShOc-5A0ck/s1600/Guard+Tower.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qM_CqUeQoA0/UmrZci-QvbI/AAAAAAAAAsM/2ShOc-5A0ck/s640/Guard+Tower.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-81682172715518145882013-10-24T09:05:00.002-05:002013-10-24T09:07:01.166-05:00Fear the Reaper now availableI've been celebrating during this October Season. I sold three stories to three anthologies.<br />
<br />
The first, "Fear the Reaper," has just gone live on Amazon. It is a big, generous book, 402 pages written on by twenty-two of the best horror writers around. Go to Amazon, put in "Fear the Reaper" and you'll have the full ToC and a preview of what's in it.<br />
<br />
My story, "Instructions on the Use of the M-57 Clacker" is a Vietnam War tale about the horrors of war that follow us home.<br />
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-o5yjySFgNMw/UmkoNR0EO2I/AAAAAAAAAr0/LBeYhGpvZj4/s1600/FTR2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-o5yjySFgNMw/UmkoNR0EO2I/AAAAAAAAAr0/LBeYhGpvZj4/s640/FTR2.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Fear the Reaper</i></b> from Silver Lake Publications, 402 pages, $14.99 print, $4.99 ebook.<br />
<br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-81076130414844746512013-06-28T17:42:00.001-05:002013-06-28T17:42:26.884-05:00<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Pssst... looking for some eldritch horror for the weekend? </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Just up: </span><a href="http://dreamquarry.net/" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://dreamquarry.net/</a><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #37404e; font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-di37ZjNbp5I/Uc4PLo_I4kI/AAAAAAAAArg/bljP1cyG5e8/s1022/Ghast.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-di37ZjNbp5I/Uc4PLo_I4kI/AAAAAAAAArg/bljP1cyG5e8/s320/Ghast.jpg" width="281" /></a></div>
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">What's "The Dream Quarry?" Go find out. By the way, below? That's a ghast. He and his buddies have a part in my Dream Quarry story, "God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him." That's the stand-alone story that eventually found its way into my novel, "Just North of Nowhere," and which, as it was originally published</span><span style="color: #37404e; font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"> in the Lovecraftian anthology, "Cthulhu and the Co-Eds, Kids and Squids," became my first Bram Stoker-nominated story.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #37404e; font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #37404e; font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">That was in 2000 or so. Looking back at the thing when I was about to send it to Alex, I only vaguely remember writing it. Well, I hope you enjoy it.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Okay, here's what the publisher -- Alexei Collier -- says about The Dream Quarry:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">What is it?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">The Dream Quarry is now and will be a series of online anthologies, collections of fiction written to a theme or subject. Most material will have a weird bent.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">So where are the stories?</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Volume 1 is now up. (</span><a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdreamquarry.net%2F&h=wAQFp2sDY&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://dreamquarry.net/</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">) The next volume is still being quarried from the raw strata of the collective unconscious. When the stories are ready, they will be brought into the collective consciousness which we call the internet.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br />Are you accepting submissions?<br /><br />Submissions are currently closed to the general public. This may change in the near future.<br /><br />Who is responsible for this abomination?</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br />The Dream Quarry is curated by Alexei Collier, author and speculative fiction enthusiast.</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Well, I already told you that.</span>Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-23935946800618444822013-06-15T12:35:00.001-05:002013-06-15T12:35:49.925-05:00Synthetic Voices's Review of Tales to Terrify and "Little Girl Down the Way"<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #37404e; font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">FYI</span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K32rgFgP4EU/Ubyl0r3_GaI/AAAAAAAAArQ/E_nvGYuFpeA/s1600/05nighto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-K32rgFgP4EU/Ubyl0r3_GaI/AAAAAAAAArQ/E_nvGYuFpeA/s320/05nighto.jpg" width="269" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #37404e; font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">From: James Rogers</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Date: June 14, 2013, 9:51:14 AM CDT</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">To: talestoterrify@gmail.com</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Subject: Synthetic Voices Feature - May 2013</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Dear Intrepid Editors over at Tales to Terrify,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">I wanted to let you know that "Little Girl Down the Way" was featured on the May 2013 episode of Synthetic Voices (<a href="http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscienceismagic.com%2F%3Fp%3D1456&h=GAQH8ync3&s=1" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://scienceismagic.com/?p=1456</a>). The Bram Stoker nominees you had recorded were also featured on the show. Just thought you'd like to know!<br /><br /><b>What is Synthetic Voices? Why, it's a speculative audio fiction podcast, of the aggregation/news variety. For over a year, I have been listening to almost ALL of the podcasted fiction produced on the web and narrowing down a few stories to share each month with my readers and listeners. Here in Maryland, we also conduct a monthly discussion a few weeks after the podcast has gone out.</b><br /><br />If you'd like to know more about Synthetic Voices, you can visit scienceismagic.com or drop me a line at magicscientist@gmail.com.<br /><br />Keep up the good work!<br /><br />-Jimmy Rogers<br />Synthetic Voices, Writer and Producer<br />scienceismagic.com</span><br />
<span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Jimmy sent me a note about Synthetic Voices's take on "Little Girl Down the Way." You can listen at: </span><a href="http://scienceismagic.com/?p=1456" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://scienceismagic.com/?p=1456</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"> or read Jimmy Rogers's comments, below.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">*A Dark, Powerful Story*</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">This story needs its own </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #37404e; display: inline; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">feature section. Reader beware.<br /><br />“Little Girl Down the Way” by Lawrence Santoro<br />Tales to Terrify Ep. 70<br />~30 mins<br /><br />– Rather than “sum up” this story as I do with so many others, I’d like to share how this one made me feel. It is dark and frightening, and it is read expertly by the author, Lawrence Santoro. His reading sent shivers down my spine, but also made me feel an intense feeling of discomfort and vulnerability. A strong warning, the text essentially describes an unfathomable level of child abuse. Normally I toss out such stories as fast as I can, especially in the horror genre, where they are far too plentiful, but this one drew me in and earned, I think, the discomfort it caused. I won’t say I even LIKE this story, but I definitely recommend it to people who can stomach the subject matter.<br /><br />Also, I strongly recommend listening to Santoro’s own thoughts on the story, which frankly provide about half of the reasons to listen at all. For those who think about horror, this one will set your mind working.</span>Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-66943877438285621302013-05-30T10:37:00.001-05:002013-05-30T10:37:29.689-05:00This Week on Tales to Terrify<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QhRlO__8Qi4/UadwfShTo0I/AAAAAAAAAq0/K4iD3sbcVMw/s1600/Girl+with+Wings.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QhRlO__8Qi4/UadwfShTo0I/AAAAAAAAAq0/K4iD3sbcVMw/s320/Girl+with+Wings.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Coming up, on Tales to Terrify, we'll have our annual shows that feature all of the stories nominated for the year's Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction. This week, we'll have tales by Lucy A. Snyder and Weston Ochse. Of course you'll be there. </span><a href="http://talestoterrify.com/" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://talestoterrify.com/</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"> That's this Friday. Bring a friend.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Of course, you can also go to the archive and listen to any of the 73 shows we've done since we began in January of 2012. That includes last week's Stoker show that included stories by Joe McKinney, Bruce Boston and John Palisano.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: lucida grande, tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 17px;">See you in the Nook... And best wishes to all in NOLA.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-173PI7B7L5s/UadwoZVolvI/AAAAAAAAAq8/VT1-lOi9g40/s1600/BramStoker+Award-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-173PI7B7L5s/UadwoZVolvI/AAAAAAAAAq8/VT1-lOi9g40/s320/BramStoker+Award-1.jpg" width="187" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></div>
Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-44314679523029627602013-05-08T00:39:00.002-05:002013-05-08T00:45:02.633-05:00"Little Girl Down the Way" on Tales to Terrify<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--0V0N5hZm9U/UYnkvDsxK8I/AAAAAAAAApE/r9_532kW71E/s1600/Dead_child_by_Trixis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--0V0N5hZm9U/UYnkvDsxK8I/AAAAAAAAApE/r9_532kW71E/s320/Dead_child_by_Trixis.jpg" width="224" /></a>For those of you who remember it, my story, "Little Girl Down the Way" will be the Mothers Day podcast on this week's <a href="http://talestoterrify.com/">Tales to Terrify</a><br />
<br />
Also, beginning this week, author and ghost hunter Sylvia Shults<br />
takes us on a guided tour of one of the most haunted places in America, the Peoria State Hospital.<br />
<br />
That's this Friday, May 10. http://talestoterrify.com/ <br />
<br />
Warning: "Little Girl..." is a brutal story. Come with a friend.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-86457224925764170922013-04-14T14:17:00.001-05:002013-04-14T14:17:36.176-05:00<br />
<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,0,0" height="140" width="150"></p>
<p>
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"/></p>
<p>
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><param name="movie" value="http://embed.magnatune.com/img/magnatune_player_embedded.swf?playlist_url=http://embed.magnatune.com/artists/albums/vate-umbra/hifi.xspf&autoload=true&autoplay=true&playlist_title=Umbra%20%3A%20Vate"/></p>
<p>
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><param name="quality" value="high"/></p>
<p>
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><param name="bgcolor" value="#E6E6E6"/></p>
<p>
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span><embed src="http://embed.magnatune.com/img/magnatune_player_embedded.swf?playlist_url=http://embed.magnatune.com/artists/albums/vate-umbra/hifi.xspf&autoload=true&autoplay=true&playlist_title=Umbra%20%3A%20Vate" quality="high" bgcolor="#E6E6E6" name="xspf_player" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="center" height="140" width="150"> </p>
<p>
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span></embed></p>
<p>
</object><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana, Arial, utopia, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><a href="http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/vate-umbra"><b>Umbra</b></a> by <a href="http://magnatune.com/artists/vate"><b>Vate</b></a><br />
<br />
Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-11327343734585568662013-03-26T10:50:00.000-05:002013-03-26T10:50:01.304-05:00Rick Hautala<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Last week, horror writer Rick Hautala died. The note below is excerpted from a message Rick's friend and sometime collaborator, Christopher Golden, circulated in the writing community. </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">If you'd like to help Holly, here's the key information: You can PayPal directly to Holly at holly_newstein@hotmail.com</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 2013</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">If You Want to Help Holly Newstein Hautala</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Dear friends, I don’t have the words to put Rick Hautala’s death in any form of context. His wife, Holly, told me this morning that it’s blown a crater in her life, and that’s as good an image as any I could imagine.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">...</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">The life of a freelance writer is often one lived on the fringes of financial ruin, and Rick struggled mightily to stay afloat in recent years. Just within the last couple of months, that struggle became difficult enough that he could not afford to continue paying his life insurance bill, and allowed it to lapse. Though he could never have foreseen it, the timing, of course, could not have been worse. Then, just this morning, Holly discovered that the social security benefits she might hope to receive as Rick’s widow are not available to her until she turns sixty, three years from now. Efforts are under way on projects that we hope will earn some money for Rick’s estate, but meanwhile there are costs involved with his death to consider, and then, for Holly, the struggle will continue. If you’d like to help, any donation would be appreciated. You can PayPal directly to Holly at holly_newstein@hotmail.com. Thank you so much for your time.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u5h4XdKtrcA/UVHDQQDQcaI/AAAAAAAAAow/PkQBUNk2kss/s1600/rick.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-u5h4XdKtrcA/UVHDQQDQcaI/AAAAAAAAAow/PkQBUNk2kss/s320/rick.jpg" width="261" /></a></div>
<br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Christopher Golden</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">POSTED BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN AT 9:28 AM</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;">Another thing I suggest: Go to Amazon -- or wherever you buy your books -- and buy Rick's books. He was prolific. Thirty novels, a hundred or so stories. And, if you like horror, they are truly worth it. He was a great writer.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left;" /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=rick+hautala" rel="nofollow nofollow" style="background-color: white; color: #3b5998; cursor: pointer; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/s/<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-ali<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>as%3Ddigital-text&field-keywor<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break" style="display: inline-block;"></span>ds=rick+hautala</a>Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-90266987870655745772012-12-12T11:43:00.001-06:002012-12-12T11:43:45.212-06:00"A Word from the World"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Sm5S_gQOycU/UMjBf4x1feI/AAAAAAAAAnw/kQDYBXKfYG8/s1600/SnowDigging.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Sm5S_gQOycU/UMjBf4x1feI/AAAAAAAAAnw/kQDYBXKfYG8/s400/SnowDigging.jpg" /></a></div>
I wrote this story years and years ago. Then it was part of a novel that drifted away. It was published in an anthology called "Winter Tales" in more or less the same form as you have it here. I posted it a year ago but I wanted to put it back up because I have a lot of affection for it and I recently aired my reading of the story on episode 49 of "Tales to Terrify." Except for my father not being killed in World War II, it's almost autobiographical. Here it is. It's called...
A WORD FROM THE WORLD
The snow had started the day before. The sun was bright in a clear sky and it snowed! Each flake caught the sun. Sparkles swam in the air living along the wind. People passing on Cottage Street looked up to the clear air to let the cold colors hit them in the eye, or on the glasses. They smiled, admiring their shadows as they walked and the sunny, sunny snowstorm falling around them.
A genuine curiosity, Pop-pop called it.
Soon, though, the sky became gray and the snow continued into the dark. This was more like it. All that blew and rolled down streets, all the things that stood at corners, squatted in the back alley or at the bottom of the yard were, first, stopped, then pinned to the ground by the falling snow, then covered into smooth lumps.
It snowed all through supper and after. It snowed through the radio and Pop-pop's reading. It snowed even harder when I went to bed. All night, I'd wake and go to the window to wish for more; I pressed my face against the cold glass to peer at the sky above the eaves. I wanted there to be more snow in it. And there was. The sky was black but the air was lit by the streetlight at the end of the alley. Pieces of white day fell through the night and brushed little whiskers against the glass. I thought the wet chill would crack my cheek when I smiled.
In the morning the world was new. Yesterday's lumps were smooth and the spaces between them were even and white. In the yard, the snow had rolled in on waves of wind from over the far fence and dropped quietly and deeply. It filled the space from the back of the house to the alley, then buried the fence and the alley. Then it buried the Erby's fence across the way; then buried their yard, too. Then everything was all the same.
When the wind blew hard enough to make the electric pole by the corner sway and the wires clack and chatter their icy silver loads that had been building through the storm, Pop-pop looked up and down the alley. He shook his head. "We'd best stay in," he said. "All of us." Falling wires, he said. Careful, he said. Electrocution, he said.
Nanna looked into the pantry and shook her head. "The food'll never last," she said.
When the wind howled, the snow rose alive, spinning, and the world went white. So big a thing as Mount Amos disappeared. So too, did Aunt and Uncle Erby's house across the alley. Our yard began, now, at the back door and went on forever, around other houses and on forever. The world was just our place, just our house and the sweetly shaped mounds of snow stretching forever. A few black lines crossed above, or rose from it. A pole down the way. The very tips of the back fence, dead black morning glory vines still hanging in tatters from summer. Then nothing. The end of the world. Our place only.
I said once that by the time the telegram came, I already knew. Here's what happened.
It was in that snow. Mother and I were on the front porch. A trolley passed the house and rumbled slowly, slipping, wheels spinning uphill toward the end of town. A man came up the sidewalk. Through the snow I heard him whistling Rum and Coca-Cola. I laughed. Snow was blowing in front, behind, around him. It was climbing his legs and wrapping his face. It looked as if you could see right through him, as though pieces of him were being carved away by the wind. He looked alive inside with snow.
I laughed some more. He heard me laugh and looked up. He saw me on the porch with Mother. He looked at the door behind me then at the envelope in his hand. I laughed and he had seen us. Mother was tucking me, buttoning my face into the wool snow suit, already wet from the blowing snow. I laughed and she turned to see. She saw the man coming and stopped, her fingers stopped on the button at my mouth. I could smell cold, wet wool and my mother's warm skin, cold cream smooth and fragrant from morning's dishes.
The street was empty. The hill was white all the way to where it disappeared. Black sticks stuck out, here, there: Trees. A fence. Phone poles. The trolley tracks were black lines along the way, then they glazed over white, then vanished. The wind howled and for a minute the street faded into white, then vanished, too. The man disappeared with the rest of the world. The world was our porch and Mother frozen at my mouth and I thought, "Good. He's gone. Daddy'll be alright." Then the wind dropped its voice, and the man stepped onto our porch and shook his hat like a dog.
There was nothing to it at all. He wiped his glasses with his finger like a windshield wiper. They fogged up again and he took them off and squinted at the paper.
"Mrs. Er-ness-toe De Angel...?"
Mother nodded. "DeAngelo, yes.††Ernest. It's just Ernie. His name is. Yes. Ernesto. But he's just Ernie."
He brushed the snow off the envelope, gently. He was so gentle; she reached for it, took it, held it, turned it over in her hands. He said, "sign here," and gave her a book and a pen. It wouldn't write.
"Sorry," she said. He took back the pen and blew on it, then rolled it between his two hands, shook it. A big splat of blue plopped onto the snow on the porch. "Sorry," he said. She said, "That's alright." and wrote in the man's book. She put the cap back on the pen and handed it to him, said, "I'll have to get you some money..." and he, "That's okay, Mrs. ma'am. That's okay. I don't need any. I don't usually get." Then he was gone toward town. Another blast of wind rolled the snow, but I could still see him. In a second, the trolley loomed down the hill. It slid on the rails. Sparks showered into the snow from the line above. It stopped. Silent for a moment. It was the only thing we could see in the world. And the man. The trolley and the man. The man got into the trolley. The bell clanged and sounded very close in the wooly snow and the silence. The sweep of the wind went with it, somehow. The trolley growled its sandy wheels against the tracks and disappeared toward town.
Mother held the envelope. I had been forgotten. The wooly button at my mouth was still loose. The envelope was very small.
I knew it meant that daddy wouldn't be home; that he was going to stay at the Pacific Theater. Until the next show. Or the next one. Can you imagine that? That he'd stay away for a long, long time and that I'd be an orphan, now. I didn't want people to look at me right then. I didn't want them to talk to me. All I knew was the backyard was filled with snow taller than me.
I followed her into the house. I was a ghost. Invisible, I could make noises but not lift things, not change things. I could only be what had already been.
No one spoke. Mother stood in the living room and looked at the envelope. It dripped. Nanna came down from upstairs and stopped on the steps to look. Pop-pop came in from the kitchen and looked. I continued on through the house. No one noticed. To the kitchen. There were voices, distant, behind me. I went out back. I was ready for the snow, for the day. The whole expanse of the yard was at my feet. The snow drifted in curving hills to the second floor of Uncle Erby's place. Maggie the dog, looked out an upper window at me. Her tongue on the glass made clear places in the breath haze that bloomed around her nose and muzzle.
The snow started at my feet. I could tunnel through the world, I thought. A tunnel could go anywhere. Everywhere. It would be very cold under the snow, but maybe not too dark. Snow was white.
I dragged open the door to the back porch toilet, the kaibo Pop-pop called it. It was now just a storage place for garden things, junk, old spiders and must, things forgotten. My summer shovel and pail. Too small to dig a tunnel through the world. I tossed them aside. I found Nanna's garden spade. Too long. Too heavy. Pop-pop's cinder shovel was just my size. He used it to fill gunny sacks with furnace ashes. These he kept in the trunk of the LaSalle for winter weight, for traction. The shovel was short. Light. It had a pointed blade. I could dig anywhere with it. A good tool is the first part of a good job, Daddy'd said.
I scooped as I waded down the steps. I tossed, packed, shoved and soon was at the bottom of the porch stairs. The snow rose over my head. I was surrounded by whiteness and was dripping hot already. Sweat tickled down my back and became cold on my skin. I pushed my mittens into the snow in front. It gave way. I leaned into it and fell, slowly, gently carried to the ground. I scooped shovelsful behind me. Soon I was on my knees and burrowing like a groundhog on my way. I shoved the cold, packed whiteness aside, pressing it against the walls of my tunnel. Forcing my way into the heart of winter. It was bright day.
I realized soon how large the world was. I had no idea before. I scooped and scraped, patted and pressed the sides of the tunnel, the roof, smoothed it all, made it nice. Kept going. The sun was far away, on the other side of the snow roof. Out there.
Faint light seeped from where I had begun at the porch, down to where I dug. It darkened as I scooped. I wished I had brought daddy's nightcrawler lantern. I could see it under his bench in the basement. I could see it in the cardboard box, a rag covering most of it. I could see its little clear dome and shiny handle, its flat metal base. I could feel its weight, carrying it. In the darkening snow tunnel, I could almost see the rings of light it made on the tree leaves overhead, could almost hear daddy talking about the fishing we'd have with this beauty that he dangled in my nose before dropping it wriggling into the pail, laughing. Mosquitos and other sweaty summer bugs sang in my ears, climbed in the light against the leaves. The fat worm wriggled into the dirt in the pail and was gone.
The lamp was back there, a world away. In the basement, under the place where people talked.
My breath was just dull gray, now, not silver bright anymore. I wondered how far I'd come. Nowhere near the other side of the world, I knew that. I didn't think I was even at the end of the yard. I tucked my knees to my chin and scooted 'round to lean against the tunnel wall and breathe. The Erby house was ahead. I'd have to get around it. That was first. Then around their garage. Then through Pan's Park. Then up the mountain. After the mountain was the other side, down to Carsonia. A long way from there was Philly. After that, I wasn't sure. I knew that the Pacific Theater started somewhere after Philly. Daddy had gone first to Philly. Then somewhere else.
If I could only remember what Daddy had said. About everything. I could find him, if I could remember. I knew that. Everything that Daddy had said was important, now. Was clues. I had to remember to not get confused with other things. Things I made up, things other people told me. If I could remember it all, I could get to him and we could watch Gone With the Wind together at the Pacific Theater, then come home. Maybe get some ice cream first at Rexall, some hot chocolate. Then we'd come home. I was really mad. Just like daddy got sometimes at me. I was really mad!
When I punched the sides of the tunnel, the wall gave way a little. I punched it again, then I scooped. I widened the scoop. I scraped above, dug below. Soon there was a side passage going a different way. It pointed toward 18th Street. I knew that. The world was so large. I could avoid the Erby house, go around it, then up, up, up the mountain. I started deepening this new route. It was very, very dark in a very short time. Black. I had to back out to where I had branched off. Maybe the other way. I dug for another few minutes until it got too dark in that way and returned to the main shaft.
A curve? Maybe the light would follow a gentle bend? It seemed right and I started to angle left, making the main route to the world into a long gentle arc. Soon it was dark again and I just wanted to stretch out and rest. I was going to need light. I scooped out a little room in the snow, enough space for me to just stretch out. I lay flat on my back. Looked up. If I closed my eyes and pressed against them with my mittens, it was a different dark than if I kept them open. I liked that. It was so quiet out here in the world. The snow was just a few inches above my face. I reached up and smoothed it. Smoothed it flat. Smoothed it hard like a well-packed snowball. It was warmer in there than it was on the outside where wind blew and the cold tried to suck the air out of my chest. There was no wind and the tips of my ears were hot. My fingers were wrinkled. It was warm. I made a little place to lean. It fit me well and was so comfortable. I scraped the ceiling. Some snow fell in my face. It tasted good. Almost sweet. It melted in my mouth and trickled down my throat. It melted on my nose and ran down my neck.
How long would the snow last? How long until it went away and the whole earth would be hard and confusing again with too many roads everywhere and not enough ways to get there? Snow always lasted a long time, but never long enough. I couldn't really rest if I was going to tunnel to the Pacific to find Daddy. I started again. Didn't think, just started into the darkness.
That is what I'm doing, I said. I'm digging to find Daddy at the Pacific Theater and watch Gone With the Wind with him, Sock, the Morons, the First Shirt and all the guys from basic training and his letters. We'd all be together. Maybe I'd need an airplane to fly over the boot camp, to fly over England where the drooling British lived in darkness, and to get to the Pacific Theater where they were all watching Gone With the Wind. I knew it was a long way to travel. But all the world was covered in snow. I was certain of that and that meant that I could get there from here. I'd dig under boot camp, under the British. Then I'll bring him home and we can all go to Carsonia Park and this time, THIS time, I will, I will ride Blitzen the Roller Coaster and maybe I'll even stand and not worry about the "Don't Stand" sign. I'll forget about rats and dirty feet. We'll go to the shooting gallery and shoot the bear together and win big rabbits and give them to Mother. I won't loose my shirt, I won't loose my head.
I was digging in the dark as I was thinking. It was pitch black. I couldn't see anything. I could just feel the snow, the cool snow giving way and being left behind. I hit something. It was hard. It was not ground, not snow. I scraped away around it. It was wood. I could feel it. Wood. It was smooth. I recognized its feel. It was an edge, the edge of my sandbox. I had dug to the sandbox. I was only to the sandbox. On it, had I been able to see, would be puppies playing with butterflies. A boy and a girl digging in the sand by a beach. Waves would be rolling, painted on the wood of my sandbox. I was only to the box and days must have gone by since I started. I scooped around the edge of the box, opened up the tunnel to another direction. I was angry, yelling, was only to the sandbox. I stopped and leaned against the wood. It felt warm. Summer was still in it. The plywood top covered the sand. The sand was summer. It was still there. Still in the box under the snow with me. It was summer and back when I had a daddy.
I could hear my breath coming in and going out. I couldn't see it. Soon I got quieter. It was warmer. I heard nothing. No breathing. No. No wind. Nothing at all. Not Carsonia. Just the distant voices of memory.
My tunnel dropped away; it fell behind me. I was lifted from the world into a swirl of snow and the blasts of wind; there were arms all around me. There were legs and chests, Pop-pop's jowls and Mother. Her hands took me. Hands carried me to the house. It was hot. I was laid on the table. The light was overhead. Bright. I felt hands reaching, opening my snowsuit, hands reaching into the wet wool and drawing me out, peeling my clothes away. Then, I was bare and was being carried up the steps. Water was running in the tub. Mother's hands rubbed me. Nanna's voice said rub him with a terrycloth towel. Rub him and here, make him drink this shot of liquor. And burning hot, it went down my throat and sat warm in my stomach. I wanted to and I did throw up. Then I went into the hot, hot water and everything was steam, and water lapping in my ears. And there were tears.
Later, Mother told me, in bed, that Daddy was lost in action in the Pacific Theater. I knew that. But I listened to her anyway.
I wondered for days after if I had died. Of course I had not. Dr. Kotzen said I was fine. Pop-pop looked for his shovel for a long time. I kept thinking it was in the Pacific. When the snow was gone, there it was.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-60666611785182761932012-10-25T10:38:00.001-05:002012-10-25T12:00:03.074-05:00"Tale-Telling"Were you read-to when you were a tot? Do you remember getting something from a story the adults never dreamed was in there?
Harry Markov, my co-editor at Tales to Terrify, has set up a blog tour that will take us through Halloween. The goal of this 'tour' is to introduce people to "Tales to Terrify" AND to sell copies of the book...THE Book, "Tales to Terrify, Volume 1" -- the which is due out on -- you got it -- Halloween.
Take a look...Here's the most recent blog: http://sqt-fantasy-sci-fi-girl.blogspot.com/2012/10/tale-telling-by-lawrence-santoro-tales.html
And here is my tale...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GOJa_JCRyFs/UIlcryOpI4I/AAAAAAAAAlU/KCLnSWS8tjY/s1600/monsterinsky.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GOJa_JCRyFs/UIlcryOpI4I/AAAAAAAAAlU/KCLnSWS8tjY/s400/monsterinsky.jpg" /></a></div>
TALE-TELLING
If you’re a listener to Tales to Terrify on the District of Wonders Network, you’ve heard the first part of this story. My grandfather, Pop-pop, read to me when I was a kid; he perched me on his lap and read stories, poems, whatever. Not kid stuff, he was a high-octane reader of dark things, things by Lord Byron, Stevenson, the occasional Lovecraft piece, others. He was particularly fond of Poe and, until I learned better, poetry was so-called because those rhyming tales were written by Edgar Allan Poe.
Earlier though—and this may have been the first tale he told to me—he read, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” “Listen, my children and you shall hear/Of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere…” that one?
Longfellow’s simple patriotic piece scared the pants off me and did so not only as it was being told, but the images it raised followed me into sleep and into the morning and through the light of day.
Take a look. Imagine this, steeped in a three-year-old’s ignorance, about our hero’s friend who…
“…climbed the tower of the Old North Church
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the somber rafters, that ‘round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,
--By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all…”
“Stealthy tread…belfry chamber…somber rafters…trembling ladder…moonlight flowing over all.” Imagine this as read by an old man whose glasses glowed in the porch light as crickets chirped their metallic calls and perhaps some lightning, which may have flickered over the mountain; not even to mention, the muffled oars as Paul Revere rows past the British ship in the harbor—“a phantom ship…a huge black hulk magnified/by its own reflection in the tide,” and other things of dark and night…
Well, in my head, the British are not just soldiers of a king; to three year-old me they are that which IS the darkness, creatures who swarm like shadows from this vast black hulk in the bay and march with ominous tread across the world.
As pictured, they bigger than Pop-pop or daddy, larger even than uncle Jim. They were hulking shadow with fangs and a stench of rotted meat (why that? I don’t know but once, I smelled some hamburger that had gone off in the back of our fridge and made a stink as rotten as any monster, so…). And, they grunted in the thousands as they trod the streets of the town. Our town. Of course.
In the poem, Revere rides the night, rouses the country folk and the story is over and I’m put to sleep. And still, I hear the tread of the British and see the sparks struck as Revere’s horse flies before the wind into the countryside to wake every Middlesex, village and farm and I know those sparks will breed a fire that will burn to light the night and then…
…and then I’d sleep. And sleep embraced my fears, drew them closer, turned them to dreams from which day delivered me. And even then, I’d hurry past the side hall outside my room, the dark passage that led to the darker attic where I knew they waited, those British did. And, most important, were kept in place because I knew them there. Ha!
Next story time, I’d ask for the “British one” from Pop-pop. He’d ask, “British? What story’s that?” And I’d say, “Listen my children and you shall hear.” And maybe he’d read it again. And I’d run back to the dark, past the side hall, to meet them, and the other holy terrors of tale-telling, in my dreams again where, again, they were defeated.
Later, of course, the “British” became just people, a disappointment that survived.
Still, to this day, I carry inside me two versions of “the British.” In one, they are just dwellers in a lovely land in which once I lived. The other? You know what they are.
So, thank you Pop-pop. See? It’s not just the story, it’s the story-telling that I hope we bring to “Tales to Terrify.” And I hope you’ll become regular listeners. I hope too you’ll consider picking up a copy of “Tales to Terrify, Volume 1” when it comes out this Halloween.
May they all breed pleasant dreams.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-28659844659714525662012-10-17T15:02:00.002-05:002012-10-18T14:05:49.686-05:00
<b>I NEVER DRESS FOR HALLOWEEN</b>
I haven't dressed for it in damn near half a century. I annoy friends, show up at their costume parties as, "what the hell’s he supposed to be?"
"Ah…a depressed writer?
See? To me, Halloween smells like mothballs.
Every year the first whiff of apple cider or the whisk of dry leaves waded-through or wind-drifted against whatever door I live behind at the time starts it. But in deepest October, parties, leaves and cinnamon-cider aside, I catch a scent of phantom camphor in my life and feel a dry wool ghost brush my bare skin. And there I am: in the attic at 831 North Fourth Street, Reading, Pennsylvania, delving for Halloween.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8i9Xxh62WYA/UH8Oq020XnI/AAAAAAAAAkw/yr5nuyZtjJE/s1600/831N4th.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="230" width="341" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8i9Xxh62WYA/UH8Oq020XnI/AAAAAAAAAkw/yr5nuyZtjJE/s400/831N4th.jpg" /></a></div>
831 was built at the turn of the old century. It’s nothing special. Like most houses in that railroad town, it was red brick with a slate roof. Bigger than most, older than the shotgun row-homes on the half-streets where my friends lived. And 831 had a fake Tudor half-beam attic above the second floor.
It was a scary place in which to be young and invent your world. My best friend, Pete Reinhart lived up the way and across from Charles Evans cemetery. He bragged about guts, living near the dead and all.
Not much to be afraid of. Evans was a rolling green forest, dark mossy trees and brown hills going to seed. It was filled with soot black mausoleums, tall granite memorials and the iron-spiked flags of the war-dead. In summer, Evans was a great place to pack lunch and go read, leaning against cool granite in shaded heat. In winter it had the best sledding hills in the northwest corner of the city.
No, 831 was scarier than Pete’s graveyard neighbor. Our place had a house-long cellar lit by three hanging bulbs with and a wooden coal bin the size of New Jersey at the front. When we moved in, Fall of 1947, 831 had a gas-fired water-heating 'coil'. The thing had to be lit and extinguished manually; turn the cock, listen for the his, strike a spark and hope it didn’t blow.
In the cellar’s near-dark, the coil flickered, hissing just beyond the octopus-arms of the furnace. The damn water heater waited to kill. You never went out–not to a movie, not anywhere—and left the coil on. A constant check went back and forth, mother to daddy, daddy to me, me to Pop-pop, "you turn the coil off?” “Did YOU?” “You turned it off, right?"
The coil--and shining black water bugs, mice, smells of mold and rot and noise s not accounted for, and bad bad darkness, all that was below.
On the living floors, the house whispered constantly. Walking from room to room, boards cracked in places where feet were not. Alone afternoons, distant rooms sighed. Small things chattered in the walls.
Gas jets, capped and dead, covered softly with decades of paint, poked from the same walls where, from time to time, zillion legged critters coiled forth and oozed down to disappear into the baseboards. Hallway chandeliers shivered and clattered in the stillest air. Several parts of the house had external wires ending in big rotary switches that showed bare copper. Daddy always said these circuits were cut from the mains—he did it himself, damn it.
Mother nevertheless always stopped, perked, listened, entering these rooms, alert to faint crackles of electricity from those dead lines.
Finally, daddy ripped the damn things off the walls and plastered the holes. There!
(Halloween, Larry, get back to Halloween)
Halloween began in the attic. The attic was up the stairway at the end of a dark second-floor side-hall, a place dad never re-electrified and which remained, consequently, always in ambient dark. At the top of the attic steps, a wide, mullioned window overlooked our yard, the back alley, the yards of my friends Davey Brown -- a Seventh Day Adventist always somewhat depressed because the world was ending soon -- and Terry Hebhardt -- who did shitty things because he was going to get beat up for something he did or didn’t do, anyway. My world. Beyond, lay the rest of Reading, red brick and slate. A mile further, the town tipped upward till it washed like a breaking wave against the green slopes of Mount Penn.
In October, the mountain was red and yellow.
The steps to the attic were always dusty. The walls of the hallway and stairs were runneled and rough, its wallpaper bearing medieval tapist scenes of stag hounds. Huntsmen on rearing horses, their pikes angled in a forest of passionate tangles, worried a deer. Old stuff, dark with blood.
In the attic, everything creaked. The floor boards were splintery soft woods, ages of dust packed between. With even my modest weight the floors sagged. The ancient cabinets and stored furniture nodded or quivered as I passed. Nail heads squeaked slowly up from the wide floor planks like thunderstorm worms that peered up from damp garden earth. No place for bare feet, our attic.
The front windows overlooking Fourth Street were large and mullioned. The branches of the elm canopy reached from the curb to the windows, their fingers tapped them in the wind. There always was wind and the room always was shaded by branches and gathered dust.
The smaller attic room was darker. It looked across the narrow way between our house and Cliffy Mahler’s. Into Cliffy's bedroom.
This room was filled with time. Stacked trophies of my Pop-pop's long run as a national skeet shooting champion. There were piles of books from his, Nanna’s, Pop-pop’s kidhood. There were my mother’s boxes filled with fading, dying pictures of long dead people and the scent of sachet and newsprint. And there were trunks: steamer trunks of wood and leather panels, brass corners and varnished hardwood ribs. Footlockers with more hinges than necessary, multiple straps and a dozen snaps; there were wooden crates, valises, satchels whose leather was flaking into dust from times before I was born, from the time when my parents had been "on the road!"
Their life on the road was piled in the corner, one box, valise, trunk, and case atop another.
You've come this far with me. There's something you should know. My parents were dancers, members of the Catherine Behney Dance Company. Don’t rack your brains, you've never heard of it before now. Behney’s was one of many companies supported by Franklin D. Roosevelt's Federal Arts Administration projects during the Depression. After the New Deal died, the company became part of a traveling carnival. My father, Rocco Vitorio Santoro, was a guy who slipped away from home at 13 to earn his own damn way in the world. He worked a couple years at Mother Hubbard's Candy Company, 60 miles from home, then got a job driving truck and setting up for the Behney troupe. Trainable, he joined the corps. Eventually, when Behney joined the carnival, he earned a few extra bucks as a wing-walker, days, working with a barnstorming pilot who toured with the show. When someone was injured or too drunk to compete, daddy also filled in as a miniature racecar driver. Just as needed, you know. In addition, he met his future wife, Fern Emma Adams on the road.
Mother was the troupe's prima ballerina. She also was a poet who never wrote, a painter who didn't paint, a runaway rich kid, who fled Princeton and West Point weekends and who had given up on her own schooling a couple weeks shy of the end of her senior year in high school. She was a sweet girl who ran to the road from her mom and dad -- the social crème of Reading and Wyomissing, PA . On that road, she fell in improbable, wonderful, madly focused love with this grade-school dropout son of immigrants who, every couple days, wired himself to the top wing of a Steerman biplane and stood out there for inside loops, outside loops, and
Immelmen turns, who danced some and ate bugs and streaming dirt for the crowd's thrills and the few extra bucks it brought.
On the back-leg of a southern swing into deep Florida, they married in D.C.
The trunks in the attic room at 831 North Fourth were filled with their road years, the parts they brought home when they settled in Reading to become the boring guy,
the pleasant housewife they disguised themselves as for me.
Those trunks were Halloween.
Opening each lid sucked the air of their years on the road from the bottoms, from between folds of cloth, from the sleeves, legs and necks of clothes, costumes and apparatus, jackets, boots, leather helmets, furs and goggles, silks and makeup, hats, feathers, powders, greasepaint and stays, elastic and crinoline, crepe hair and dry sponges, from below it all, from through the fibers, the air ran picking up dust and essence. And through tubes of camphor crystals and deliquescing mothballs the air picked up the scent I knew as Halloween.
Everything from those boxes and trucks scratched my skin, smelled of age and other places and times and covered me completely, hid me perfectly in what they had been. The costumes we put together in the days before Halloween created a high standard of disguise. Nobody, anywhere, knew me. Not at school before unmasking, or in the back alley, when Dave Brown, Terry Hebhardt, Cliffy Mahler, Pete Reinhart, saw and didn't know me until I spoke and then, “Holy Jeeze, Santoro, that you? Christ!”
The costumes also became something else. Something that should have been obvious to me, but wasn't. Was not until I wrote this did I realize: Halloween put me into their skins. My parent's skins. The skin they'd discarded to build me. Who was I? Dressed as a Scotsman, a World War I ace? A harlequin? Was I them? Dad, mother? Christ, no. Just me...but... Hell, no! They were—they are—my parents.
Christ, don't you have to kill them off to become you?
Sure you do. Christ.
When I stopped having to dress for school Halloween parties, what was it, in seventh grade? I never did again. I forgot the stuff that was left in the attic, then I left home and, several years later, moved to England.
Mother and Daddy with another couple, people I didn't know, were killed driving back from Florida when a guy coming the other way had a heart attack at his wheel, died instantly and his car jumped the median and dead-ended into them. Five gone. Like.
That.
I returned for a few months, got rid of the remnants of their lives and went back to England.
And, no, I do not dress for Halloween and still the season smells of mothballs.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L8_lkeU09X4/UH8PsW1Gb5I/AAAAAAAAAk8/OrWJaOJQB8Y/s1600/newbackalley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="339" width="249" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-L8_lkeU09X4/UH8PsW1Gb5I/AAAAAAAAAk8/OrWJaOJQB8Y/s400/newbackalley.jpg" /></a></div>
END
COPYRIGHT © 2012 Lawrence SantoroLarry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-34499880977448744592012-07-27T09:30:00.000-05:002012-07-27T09:36:29.200-05:00"Tales to Terrify" is a Parsec Award Finalist<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wTc_xsX7U9k/UBKlAtGamVI/AAAAAAAAAj4/apD4Rm85QaE/s1600/DoW.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="167" width="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wTc_xsX7U9k/UBKlAtGamVI/AAAAAAAAAj4/apD4Rm85QaE/s400/DoW.jpeg" /></a></div>
I received word this morning that the podcast I've hosted since January 13 of this year, "Tales to Terrify"by name, has been nominated for a Parsec Award.
Thanks go out to the show's producer Tony C. Smith, co-editor Harry Markov, art director Skeet Scienski, and Tim Ward, who put all the information together for the Parsec committee. And of course thanks to the authors and artists without whom I'd just sit at the mic and mumble about my cat.
The Parsec Awards were founded in 2006 by Mur Lafferty, Michael R. Mennenga and Tracy Hickman. They did so to “celebrate Speculative Fiction Podcasting, under the banner of Farpoint Media.”
The shows are nominated by fans and finalists are chosen by a steering committee. That’s where we are now. We finalists are then voted on by an independent panel of judges from outside of podcasting.
When we began after the first of the year, it was us and our big sister, the Hugo Award-winning StarShipSofa.
Now we are four.
The StarShip and Tales to Terrify have been joined by "Protecting Project Pulp" and "Crime City Central," classic adventure and crime fiction respectively. Taken together, we are "The District of Wonders Network." Stop by at http://districtofwonders.com/
So. On to the rest of the day. There is a new show up right now, one I've wanted to do since the beginning, William Hope Hodgson's "A Voice in the Dark."
<a href="http://talestoterrify.com/"></a>Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-1062832137956609052012-04-05T23:39:00.004-05:002012-04-05T23:46:42.787-05:00Marting Mundt and Lawrence Santoro Together Again At Long Last<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--HrfmNoOhnU/T35z3XgndEI/AAAAAAAAAgc/UbVm5fxGtUU/s1600/Larry_%2526_Marty_final.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 307px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--HrfmNoOhnU/T35z3XgndEI/AAAAAAAAAgc/UbVm5fxGtUU/s400/Larry_%2526_Marty_final.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5728143171102667842" /></a>Time for some self-absorbed chestbeating and unabashed bookselling. Martin Mundt and I are doing a two-hour, round-robin, sudden-death reading here in Chicago. I'll be doing nothing but DRINK FOR THE THIRST TO COME. Well maybe a touch of the new novel, A MISSISSIPPI TRAVELER, OR SAM CLEMENS TRIES THE WATER, just to test-fly it. The poster tells all. If you're in Chicago, I hope you'll stop by. And if you do and you haven't picked up a copy of DRINK... please do and if you do and you like it, please go to Amazon.com and give it a glowing review.<br /><br />I did say please.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rmV7qdB-9JE/T350mQdRlpI/AAAAAAAAAgo/VkIr3ueigaI/s1600/DRINK.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 281px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rmV7qdB-9JE/T350mQdRlpI/AAAAAAAAAgo/VkIr3ueigaI/s400/DRINK.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5728143976663455378" /></a>Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-91807809139890249752012-03-27T08:57:00.005-05:002012-03-27T09:13:18.277-05:00TALES TO TERRIFY 'Casts all 6 Stoker Nominated Short Stories<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uJAtc8B2kDc/T3HJValGfrI/AAAAAAAAAf0/ZqMYw5Cf878/s1600/theuninvited_issue1_page05.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uJAtc8B2kDc/T3HJValGfrI/AAAAAAAAAf0/ZqMYw5Cf878/s400/theuninvited_issue1_page05.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5724577971113983666" /></a>The image is from the publication, "The Uninvited, No. 1" The illustration is for the short story, "Hypergraphia" by Ken Lillie-Paetz, one of this year's nominees for the Horror Writers Association;s Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction.<br /><br />For the past two weeks, the podcast I host, Tales to Terrify, has been 'casting this year's short fiction Stoker nominees. The six stories were...<br /><br />Well you can go to the site and find out yourselves. Listen to them. They were good... We finished up last Friday with Stephen King's "Herman Wouk Is Still Alive."<br /><br />For our effort, we had an item in the News section of Stephen King’s website. The notice says:<br /><br />“Herman Wouk is Still Alive on Tales To Terrify<br /><br />"March 26th, 2012 1:19:36 pm<br /><br />"TalesToTerrify.com has posted a podcast that features readings of several nominees for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction. Lawrence Santoro provides a fantastic reading of Stephen’s Herman Wouk is Still Alive at the 1 hour and 10 minute mark. Enjoy!<br /><br />http://talestoterrify.com/tales-to-terrify-no-10-bram-stoker-awards-special-part-2/<br /><br /> As mentioned, we played ALL of the Bram Stoker nominees in the Superior Achievement in Short Fiction category but there we have it.<br /><br />Hope you'll stop by now and again, and again and again. There are big things coming.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-26113242789651570252012-03-23T16:37:00.015-05:002012-03-23T23:20:15.538-05:00GENE WOLFE AT SANFILIPPO<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OvM8gPcZjvI/T2ztadW0V3I/AAAAAAAAAds/6CAR5ztoPyw/s1600/408446_292506957485254_123502224385729_707290_1831444838_n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 313px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OvM8gPcZjvI/T2ztadW0V3I/AAAAAAAAAds/6CAR5ztoPyw/s400/408446_292506957485254_123502224385729_707290_1831444838_n.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723210265293772658" /></a>We'll start with pictures. There are quite a lot. On Saturday, March 17, 2012, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame gave Gene Wolfe its Fuller Award. The event was held at the Sanfilippo Estate in Barrington, Illinois and drew hundreds of friends, colleagues and fans -- and the lines distinguishing fan from friend from colleague were virtually nonexistent -- from all over the country. Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman...et al.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1SOYoT53a2Q/T2zt5NdtdOI/AAAAAAAAAeE/dUD928LyD8o/s1600/391477_292506934151923_123502224385729_707289_1727026060_n.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 318px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1SOYoT53a2Q/T2zt5NdtdOI/AAAAAAAAAeE/dUD928LyD8o/s400/391477_292506934151923_123502224385729_707289_1727026060_n.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723210793603658978" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PuS370ECCBc/T21IQxrCs9I/AAAAAAAAAe0/L5StltyAYMo/s1600/IMG_3874.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PuS370ECCBc/T21IQxrCs9I/AAAAAAAAAe0/L5StltyAYMo/s400/IMG_3874.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723310154506744786" /></a>Gene's daughter, Teri Goulding pins a rose on her dad...<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HS4ZpVPZpYU/T2zts1qM7qI/AAAAAAAAAd4/XATpu8soDhs/s1600/394389_292507307485219_123502224385729_707304_1984369651_n.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 324px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-HS4ZpVPZpYU/T2zts1qM7qI/AAAAAAAAAd4/XATpu8soDhs/s400/394389_292507307485219_123502224385729_707304_1984369651_n.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723210581055172258" /></a><br /><br />I was asked to adapt one of Gene's stories for performance by a theater company, Terra Mysterium.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-62p8hDull-Y/T21Kngug4eI/AAAAAAAAAfY/gyB7bOgQsDk/s1600/292158_292507040818579_123502224385729_707293_1404690030_n.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 279px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-62p8hDull-Y/T21Kngug4eI/AAAAAAAAAfY/gyB7bOgQsDk/s400/292158_292507040818579_123502224385729_707293_1404690030_n.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723312744118149602" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ra_FLcz5swU/T21JqIGBGSI/AAAAAAAAAfM/2uarboUAAKI/s1600/IMG_3919.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ra_FLcz5swU/T21JqIGBGSI/AAAAAAAAAfM/2uarboUAAKI/s400/IMG_3919.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723311689533823266" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MWgw8GWCDoM/T21JGOGsQjI/AAAAAAAAAfA/JUDA3huEbEw/s1600/IMG_3910.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MWgw8GWCDoM/T21JGOGsQjI/AAAAAAAAAfA/JUDA3huEbEw/s400/IMG_3910.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723311072671973938" /></a><br /><br /><br />Here are just a few pictures from the day.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WQ_YOxgfM6Q/T2zvQdc8n_I/AAAAAAAAAeo/WgaP4nTit34/s1600/Cast.me.Gene.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WQ_YOxgfM6Q/T2zvQdc8n_I/AAAAAAAAAeo/WgaP4nTit34/s400/Cast.me.Gene.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723212292544045042" /></a><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NXciDr8e9qY/T2zu57l8l7I/AAAAAAAAAec/FbtCY9SXoms/s1600/IMG_3880.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NXciDr8e9qY/T2zu57l8l7I/AAAAAAAAAec/FbtCY9SXoms/s400/IMG_3880.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723211905497864114" /></a><br /><br /><br />Jody Lynn Nye toasting Gene...<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ctxCpEDxt_4/T2zuHEfDNzI/AAAAAAAAAeQ/H5F-dbPmjUo/s1600/389175_292507734151843_123502224385729_707320_417832669_n.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ctxCpEDxt_4/T2zuHEfDNzI/AAAAAAAAAeQ/H5F-dbPmjUo/s400/389175_292507734151843_123502224385729_707320_417832669_n.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723211031711528754" /></a>Gene on the Merry-Go-Round...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hGWeuMb75Lk/T21LOzYifZI/AAAAAAAAAfk/30C5bAVrfmQ/s1600/394469_292507647485185_123502224385729_707317_302538004_n.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 337px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hGWeuMb75Lk/T21LOzYifZI/AAAAAAAAAfk/30C5bAVrfmQ/s400/394469_292507647485185_123502224385729_707317_302538004_n.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5723313419141152146" /></a>Yes, there was a carousel in the banquet hall...Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-1863823221308479722012-02-25T00:51:00.005-06:002012-02-25T12:33:33.626-06:00New Anthology: SLICES OF FLESH<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z-BQVaQUVFc/T0iGiYj4g9I/AAAAAAAAAb8/ag2ZaS2l3js/s1600/Slices%2Bof%2BFlesh%2Bcover%2Bart-1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 225px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z-BQVaQUVFc/T0iGiYj4g9I/AAAAAAAAAb8/ag2ZaS2l3js/s400/Slices%2Bof%2BFlesh%2Bcover%2Bart-1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5712964052586103762" /></a><br />I just received my .pdf proof-copy of "Slices of Flesh," a collection of horror flash fiction published by Dark Moon Books. "Slices..." is scheduled for launch at the World Horror Convention, March 29th - April 1, 2012 in Salt Lake City. Cover art is by Mike Mignola (Hellboy) with Dave Stewart doing the color work.<br /><br />I mention this not because I've got a story in it but because I want to pimp the thing to you. The net proceeds from "Slices of Flesh" will go to aid the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, Project Literacy and so forth. The main thrust of it is to help the more than 30 million functionally illiterate American adults to learn to read. You know? Make new readers, keep people from becoming Repu... Well, you know.<br /><br />I'm also posting this information because I'm proud as hell to be nestled in the book with these people...<br />Linda Addison<br />Janice Gable Bashman<br />Erin Bender<br />Laura Benedict<br />Max Booth III<br />Chantal Boudreau<br />Kevin James Breaux<br />Jason V. Brock<br />Reesa Brown<br />Jennifer Brozek<br />Ramsey Campbell<br />Tom Cardamone<br />Stewart Carrick<br />Sierra Christman<br />Simon Clark<br />Sandy DeLuca<br />Christopher DiLeo<br />James Dorr<br />David Dunwoody<br />Ed Erdelac<br />J G Faherty<br />Charlie Fish<br />Fran Friel<br />Sephera Giron<br />Charles Gramlich<br />Amy Grech<br />Eric J. Guignard<br />Bryan Hall<br />Rick Hautala<br />David Hayes<br />Brad Hodson<br />Nancy Holder<br />Del Howison<br />Robert Jackson<br />Lee F Jordan<br />Paul Kane<br />Nate Kenyon<br />Jack Ketchum<br />Nancy Kilpatrick<br />C. W. LaSart<br />Tim Lebbon<br />Adrian Ludens<br />Graham Masterton<br />Araminta Star Matthews<br />Kevin McClintock<br />Joe McKinney<br />Michelle Mellon<br />Lori Michelle<br />William F Nolan<br />Marie O'Regan<br />Michael O’Neal<br />Monica O'Rourke<br />J F Palma<br />Susan Palwick<br />J R Parks<br />R. B. Payne<br />Anne Petty<br />Aaron Polson<br />Lon Prater<br />Timothy Remp<br />Roy Robbins<br />Jacob Ruby<br />Lawrence Santoro<br />J W Schnarr<br />M R Sellars<br />Lorelei Shannon<br />Jeremy Shipp<br />Lance Shoeman<br />Wayne Simmons<br />Marge Simon<br />Douglas Smith<br />D L Snell<br />Simon Strantzas<br />Stan Swanson<br />David Tallerman<br />Richard Thomas<br />Peter Timony<br />Shelley Towne<br />Stephen Volk<br />Jeremy Wagner<br />Matthew Warner<br />Kaaron Warren<br />Lawrence Watt-Evans<br />Fred Wiehe<br />Connie Wilson<br />Jennifer Word<br /><br />Good company, yes? When you can, get this book. It's good reading and your money could help a few people make a better life for themselves and maybe, just maybe it will save the planet. Well...it might!Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-17970679777052395582012-01-13T09:25:00.005-06:002012-01-14T09:07:20.585-06:00Tales to Terrify is now live...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o2kmZecyQ0g/TxGaGOwtZOI/AAAAAAAAATw/Al9b_hM8ZWA/s1600/TTT_square.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o2kmZecyQ0g/TxGaGOwtZOI/AAAAAAAAATw/Al9b_hM8ZWA/s400/TTT_square.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5697504435432678626" /></a>Now I can talk.<br /><br />Beginning today, Friday the 13th, January, 2012, you'll be able to stop by at "Tales to Terrify" and listen to the best in English language horror and dark fantasy. I'll be the weekly host of the show, produced by the Hugo Award-winning StarShipSofa.<br /><br />TTT wil feature new fiction, classic tales, tales from the recent past by masters of the form and by voices that might be new to you. We'll also have reviews, commentary and more. So...drop in some midnight -- or any time -- and listen.<br /><br />If you don't know Marty Mundt who's story, CHAIR, kicks off the site, Marty's a Chicago author, one of the centerpieces of the old Twilight Tales group. CHAIR is typical of Marty's work, a funny, witty, disturbing little piece. This one Reminds me of Voltaire or Swift. But, no, no....it's Mundt.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ybpBwbbQyJw/TxC2YYX5AjI/AAAAAAAAATk/Xg55CE9DlwI/s1600/TTTcover.JAN_.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ybpBwbbQyJw/TxC2YYX5AjI/AAAAAAAAATk/Xg55CE9DlwI/s400/TTTcover.JAN_.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5697254058599449138" /></a>Marty's new novel. "Animated Americans" was recently published by Creeping Hemlock Press and is available on Amazon, B&N and wherever fine electrons congregate. It's also in ink on paper at those same sites.<br /><br />Now go. Listen.<br /><br />We're at http://talestoterrify.com/<br /><br />Oh...the cover art for this month is by Michael Brack (http://michael.brack.free.fr/)<br /><br />Comments to the site can be sent to TalesToTerrify@gmail.com Hope to hear from you.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-11531046281320883762012-01-05T11:28:00.003-06:002012-01-05T11:37:36.133-06:00Root Soup, Winter Soup at Tuesday Funk<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lMNo2MzDpMc?rel=0&hd=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />"Tuesday Funk," is a year+ old writer's reading series. It happens every first Tuesday of every month at the Hopleaf Bar on Clark Street, Chicago. Writer Bill Shunn is the host.<br /><br />This past Tuesday, December 3, 2012, I read my short story "Root Soup, Winter Soup," from DRINK FOR THE THIRST TO COME.<br /><br />By the way, I wasn't nervous. I've got a permanent tremor of the paws.<br /><br />I hope you'll enjoy it.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-1341166987302657242011-12-27T23:58:00.006-06:002011-12-28T00:21:01.790-06:00An Ancient Mariner... Indeed, Mr. Chwedyk.<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lveEpDOI5zo/Tvqyy-djeSI/AAAAAAAAAS0/iS0yH13tfts/s1600/DRINK.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 301px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lveEpDOI5zo/Tvqyy-djeSI/AAAAAAAAAS0/iS0yH13tfts/s400/DRINK.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5691057667966204194" /></a>Since the release earlier this month of "Drink for the Thirst to Come," the collection has been gathering some very nice comments from other writers. I wanted to excerpt and post a few here.<br /><br />"Santoro is a master at the top of his game, believe me!"<br /> --Robert Walker, author of "Shadows in the White City," and "Children of Salem."<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rfrvt4U1rqs/Tvq0T5p-qEI/AAAAAAAAATM/utF_gHQSkkE/s1600/Walker.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 160px; height: 160px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-rfrvt4U1rqs/Tvq0T5p-qEI/AAAAAAAAATM/utF_gHQSkkE/s400/Walker.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5691059333123450946" /></a><br />"Emerging as one of our true worthy successors to Ray Bradbury...Lawrence Santoro captures lightning in a killing jar... Lyrical, horrific, and luminous with dark wonder.”<br /> --Jay Bonansinga, New York Times bestselling co-author of "The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor."<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1pwMoa7VlAY/Tvq0FiU6sPI/AAAAAAAAATA/j2Iu_7LfcxU/s1600/walking%2Bdead.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 300px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1pwMoa7VlAY/Tvq0FiU6sPI/AAAAAAAAATA/j2Iu_7LfcxU/s400/walking%2Bdead.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5691059086342926578" /></a><br /><br />"Lawrence Santoro turns the emotional volume to 11 and cranks it up from there...with a breathless sense of detail and cadence..."<br /> --Richard Chwedyk, Nebula Award-winning author of "Bronte's Egg."<br /><br />Jay's entire comment: “Emerging as one of our true worthy successors to Ray Bradbury, Chicago scribe Lawrence Santoro captures lightning in a killing jar in his new collection DRINK FOR THE THIRST TO COME. Lyrical, horrific, and luminous with dark wonder, Santoro’s tales frame archetypes such as zombies, the apocalypse, the mysteries of space, and good old fashioned monsters with heartbreaking undercurrents of humanity and… well… sadness. Haunting and highly recommended!”<br /><br />Here's what Richard said: “In these stories, Larry Santoro turns the emotional volume to 11 and cranks it up from there. They are set in worlds at once familiar and unique, amusing and horrifying, brought to life with a breathless sense of detail and cadence. The slightest gesture is illuminated with the passionate, unfaltering precision of an Ancient Mariner unfolding his tale, commanding your uncompromised attention.”Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-53376953673163804842011-12-22T22:28:00.009-06:002011-12-22T23:17:21.080-06:00A Question for My ReadersLet me prep you:<br /><br />The expanded, 'author's cut' of my first novel, "Just North of Nowhere" is currently available on Kindle for $4.99. It's a big generous book, a five-star, dark fantasy set in a small town in the upper Midwest and deals with... <br /><br />Well, go have a look. You can go here: http://www.amazon.com/Just-North-of-Nowhere-ebook/dp/B0054HKRC0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324613885&sr=8-1 Or you can just click on the headline, "A Question for My Readers," above.<br />The mood, the atmosphere, the characters are in the Bradbury vein and it's a good read for just about everyone in the family.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JP6B_eUHAh8/TvQD36KiskI/AAAAAAAAASc/G9TQbnMaiys/s1600/NorthNowhere_text.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JP6B_eUHAh8/TvQD36KiskI/AAAAAAAAASc/G9TQbnMaiys/s400/NorthNowhere_text.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5689176488316940866" /></a>The question: it's $4.99. Would you pick it up if it were, say $1.99?<br /><br />Let me know. Stop by my Facebook page, send an email. Call. And, if you like the book, please consider giving it a review.<br /><br />And don't forget "Drink for the Thirst to Come." That's up there, too. <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LgJgBdBiVwU/TvQEcZZlBCI/AAAAAAAAASo/B_OXFAdFVlc/s1600/on%2Bthe%2Bkeys.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LgJgBdBiVwU/TvQEcZZlBCI/AAAAAAAAASo/B_OXFAdFVlc/s400/on%2Bthe%2Bkeys.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5689177115176797218" /></a>Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-71048951484802852062011-12-19T21:55:00.002-06:002011-12-19T21:59:15.603-06:00Now on Kindle...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dDsWx61p9CE/TvAHdWdBhaI/AAAAAAAAASE/z5K2_2G8gUY/s1600/on%2Bthe%2Bkeys.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dDsWx61p9CE/TvAHdWdBhaI/AAAAAAAAASE/z5K2_2G8gUY/s400/on%2Bthe%2Bkeys.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5688054530193851810" /></a>I spoke too soon. I said it would be up soon. "Drink for the Thirst to Come" is now available on Kindle. $2.99. Wow. I'll have to get one, myself. And if you like it, please consider it for a Stoker nod or at least a nice review on Amazon.<br /><br />Well, that's even old news because I did get one myself. Just wanted to look at it there on my screen...savor it...love it with my eyes and fingertips only. And it's easier to read from at signings and such... No really!Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8400097.post-79054953656068248822011-12-16T16:25:00.005-06:002011-12-16T16:32:49.565-06:00It's here...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2ouDZhv3K8s/TuvFy1dtyuI/AAAAAAAAAR0/d58aj4Yi7tY/s1600/on%2Bthe%2Bkeys.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2ouDZhv3K8s/TuvFy1dtyuI/AAAAAAAAAR0/d58aj4Yi7tY/s400/on%2Bthe%2Bkeys.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5686856431621229282" /></a>There it is. One pound of it. 365pages of it. I'm happy. The image should be up on the Amazon site in a few days--along with the option to buy it on Kindle--but here it is.<br /><br />And when you buy it-- and you will--please read it aloud--which you should--and after that, if you like it--which goes without saying--I hope you'll return to Amzon and write a glowing review of it--which will be completely honest--and let me know about it.<br /><br />So enjoy.Larry Santorohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09475600592358477572noreply@blogger.com0