Madrigal of the Everett Clan

This might offend the residents of Washington, Indiana, or those whom the description matches. This is a ballad or an epic of an ironic nature, given the lack of travel in the story, and the drama coming purely from the friction of the huge Everett clan, from which the narrator has found himself estranged in a city full of his family. Somewhat inspired by The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

The city of Washington, Indiana lurks like a hunchbacked stepchild in the corner of the state. Taking the two lane highway into the loose collection of dirty, rundown houses and a few dying businesses perched on the edges of cracked and eroded parking lots haunted by starveling cats feels akin to suffocation. The town has two restaurants to speak of: one is a family pizzeria that stays afloat through monopoly and the popularity of pizza, and the other is a breakfast joint that exists in a perpetual haze of airborne grease. The only thing the twisted and forgotten town has to offer is the single two story motel, designed to look like Mount Vernon or the White House.

            It is here that I will watch my grandfather’s corpse get carefully boxed up and dropped into the earth. It is here that my mother, recently divorced, harrowed by stress, and seeking the comforts her girlhood offered her, will happily inform us we are going to live with our great aunt Samantha. It is here that I will wage my war against my future.

            I’ve never met my aunt Samantha Everett before today. She is wrinkled, sort of brown from her Indian mother, and hates the clan she has adopted as a survival tactic. The Everett clan is a sprawling mass of relationships, feuds, old grudges, dying relatives, squabbling children, land disputes, marriage disputes, ancient debts, more ancient relatives, dementia, cancer, heart disease, dissension, sedition, and death, carefully knotted through southern Indiana and burled in places where the history is so marinated into the land and culture they may as well have rights of nobility, replete with the noble obligation.

            Until today, the only things I’ve seen of Washington are all I’ve needed to see: the inside of the insipid Mount Vernon motel, where they keep cheap bottles of tainted water and an out-of-date collection of apple juice in the mini-fridge; the inside of the Gruccio Family Pizzeria, run by the decidedly not Gruccio Alsop family; the inside of two of the town’s three funeral homes, in which I wandered freely, seeking food and respite from the hordes of family I didn’t know and hunted by my haggard mother.

Custodiet Ipsos Custodes

            Paranormal, probably a short story. The main character finally falls in love with a girl, the first person that knows about his compulsion. One day, he receives a premonition that she is going to kill someone. The story hinges on his decision of whether or not to kill her. 

           The first round took the priest high in the chest, severing his aorta and sending a long spray of blood against the brick wall. I racked the bolt and aimed down the scope. His t-shirt soaked with wine-dark arterial blood as he staggered back. The groceries he was carrying smashed against the ground.

            I guess this is the part where I have to say that he was raping choirboys or trafficking cocaine. He wasn’t. He didn’t have any prior arrests. He didn’t have any prior crimes. He entered the clergy at fifteen in a Catholic school, trained for years.

            He was leaning against the wall then. His mouth was moving. Sacrements, perhaps. His own last rites. Can priests do that? Administer their own last rites?

            I squeezed the trigger again and his brains evacuated.

           

           

            You know how detectives will show up to a crime scene, do the dirty work, find the bad guy, and put him in jail? Then sometimes there’s vigilantes, who hunt people down that have slipped through the cracks. Well, I’m a little different.

            I see things before they happen. Not things. Crimes. Murders, specifically. It is always a one hundred percent chance that it will happen. This started when I was thirteen.

            The first one was my neighbor. She was older, maybe fifty. Sexy, for an older lady. She asked me to water her garden. Standing in the heat, hose gripped in my right hand, I had a sudden vision. I watched her in my mind’s eye as she straddled a man in her bed and wrapped a curtain cord around his neck. I chalked it up to hormonal fantasy. Two weeks later, she drove away in the back of a squad car; past the ambulance where paramedics loaded a faceless corpse on a gurney.

            The second time it happened, I tried to stop the murder. A neighborhood kid, maybe two years older. He went by the name of Chow, good kid. I saw him in that vision swinging a bicycle chain, leaving little chubby Danny Goodwin bleeding in the arroyo in our neighborhood          .

I walked Danny home every single day for two months. He didn’t understand why I carried a butterfly knife with me. My appendix ruptured one day and I went to the hospital. I saw Danny Goodwin’s body from a helicopter shot on the evening news.

The murders are unstoppable. They find a way, like weeds growing through a sidewalk. When I get the vision, it’s only a matter of time before every clue in the vision lines up like lock tumblers and the victim dies. There’s no way to stop it, so I kill the killer before he kills someone innocent.

The Chosen Two

I wanted to write the most cliché fantasy story possible as a writing exercise. The characters felt like they caught on a paragraph in. This actually has potential. 

            “The Vyrax have infiltrated four outposts at our southern border, my King.”

            The only sound in the room was the king’s heavy breathing and the sound of rattling swords here and there and the odd spell getting shot off in the wizard’s tower on the far side of the castle. The messenger stood for a moment before the mad king, waiting for his response. The throne room stood deathly silent, like a crypt or a church or a brothel on a Sunday.

            “How many knights remain in my employ?” The king rasped.

            “Only three, your highness,” the master at arms said. “Silver, Rhesus, and Mander.”

            “The rest?”

            The master-at-arms was quiet. “You had them executed for treason.”

            “I did no such thing!” The king leaped to his feet, face purple.

            “You said they were conspiring with the wizards to tame dragons and lay waste to your kingdom.”

            “That’s an absurd impossibility.” The king sat back down.

            “That’s what Vargas said when you had him executed.” The master-at-arms felt a little peevish. This was the third time someone—

            Without warning, there was a flash of light and the king’s head detonated, splattering gore across the throne room. The haggard courtiers, who had seen some pretty terrible things recently, reacted with amusement and boredom.

            “Well, this doesn’t solve our endemic problems,” the messenger said hesitantly.

            “Shut up, this isn’t all bad.” The Vizier was cleaning his nails, which were long and yellow and probably couldn’t be cleaned.

            “You shut up, you’re probably behind his assassination.”

            “I can’t do magic, you git.” The Vizier stood in a grand flourish of dark robes.

            “As if,” the master-at-arms scoffed, then suddenly looked terrified.

            “Well, we have only one choice for king.”

            “The chosen one!” The messenger looked proud.

            “Of course, the chosen one.” The master-at-arms was carefully trying to camouflage himself against a giant brocade tapestry with a female courtier’s wimple.

            “But there is a major problem,” the Vizier sneered. He really didn’t need to sneer, he thought. There’s really no major point in the character development to be sneering all the time. Perhaps he could smile next time? Wait, teeth. Sharp, rotten teeth are such a hassle to maintain. He satisfied himself by winking, which still felt predatory. “There are two possible chosen ones.”

            “Chosen two.”

            They all looked at who spoke. The Grand Wizard was mostly senile. He was thirty-two and had set off too many spells next to his head. Something about the thaumatic energy had melted something important in there. They didn’t know what, don’t ask. They aren’t brain surgeons; bones of Christ you’re inquisitive. Read the book. He spent most of his time rolling his wheelchair down spiral staircases on accident and telling people his name was Toe, so that’s what they called him.

            “Chosen two?”

            “We must send them on a quest. Possibly together.”

            The Vizier, master-at-arms, and messenger glanced at each other, questioning his sudden lucidity.

            “A quest?”

            “If they can stop the Vyrax threat, then we will have a real winner.”

            “Wait, won’t we have to have two kings if they stop it together?” The master-at-arms was having trouble processing all this. He glanced at the steaming stump of the king’s neck.

            “We could vote…” the messenger suggested.

            “Democracy.” The Vizier shuddered.

            “But then we wouldn’t have the benefit of a fantasy buddy-comedy,” Toe said.

            “Who are the chosen two?” the messenger asked.

            “The first is Mander, the knight.” The throne room visibly relaxed. Mander was sexy, strong, capable, well-rounded.

            “The second?” The Vizier was leaning forward.

            “His name is Jack the Petard.”

            “Jack the Retard?”

            “The Petard,” Toe said forcefully.

            “He blows stuff up,” the master-at-arms said, checking the king’s wrist for a pulse.

            “Well, why bother with the quest then?” the messenger asked. “Mander is our man.”

            “Rules are rules,” Toe said, before emitting a streamer of drool and lapsing back into silence.

            “Well,” sighed the Vizier. “Those Vyrax aren’t going to vanquish themselves.”

Cilantro and Highway Robbery in the Form of Avocados

This is a somewhat mocking and satirical take on second person, post-modern and nihilistic novels about life and philosophy and masturbatory self-deprecation. It'll probably never go anywhere but is darkly funny and in way, kind of emotional. I'm in the throes of applying to grad school and this might get farther than what I'm submitting. Who knows?

            It is at moments like these where you find yourself amazed at your nihilistic existence, brought to tears by the sight of an earring back on your counter as you stand on a kitchen chair, pissing into your sink while the pest control guy blows up your upstairs bathroom. You didn’t fall in love with her until after she left, and she didn’t accept that love until she no longer wanted it. Specificity, you tell yourself. Specificity is what your life needs, not more of this ridiculous and unfocused existing you do an awful lot of.

            You bought yourself a cactus after she left. You named it too, but you forgot the name on three consecutive days of blind stupor courtesy of Ketel One and just called it Plant. It sat on your dresser and looked vaguely disapproving, if plants could look disapproving, and you remembered the Dmitri Martin bit about being less nurturing than a desert and tried to water the thing.

            You remember your mother, the poor fragile thing, throwing caution to the wind when she screamed at you. You told her you wanted to be a concert pianist, she said you might as well be a crack addict. “It’ll only be a matter of days,” she had muttered angrily at you, scrubbing her hands with surgical precision in a kitchen sink filled with tepid, chalkboard colored water. “It’ll only be a matter of days and you’ll be rolling bums for eight balls and stealing comforters out of Laundromats for warmth on the streets of Seattle.”

            “Why Seattle?” you always asked. She never answered. In her mind, Seattle may as well have been the world capital of squalor, the Timbuktu of downtrodden vagrants.

            She’d never been to Seattle but her uncle had choked to death on his own vomit outside Spokane in a heroin fugue after failing to sell even a single set of cutlery to an urban center of three million and a handful which I supposed in her mind was evidence enough for the validity of her prejudice. “You’ll be murmuring to yourself in the second person,” she said, “you’ll be fantasizing about strangling Anglican priests and trying to make some sense of life you’re Kierkegaard or Marx.”

            The closest my mother ever came to swearing was when she screamed tamales, very loudly and very seriously. The bus had broken down and she was on her way to an interview for a job putting stickers that said “grown in the USA” on oranges coming off Barbadian freighters. You were small and easily frightened and the word burned into your memories because in your New Jersey upbringing you hadn’t ever heard of a tamale and the first time you saw a roach coach helmed by a Mexican man named Salvador called “The Tamale Town” you sniggered to yourself in a worldly way.

            She choked back tears when you left and instead handed you a bundle of what turned out to be two hundred and forty-seven dollars in crumpled fives and ones and a hallmark card with a kitten on it that said “You’re a failure” and on the inside it said “Just Kitten” and she had written her name in careful, tight script. No “love”, no “best wishes” just “Just Kitten” and then “Elaine.” You pinned that card up on the mottled and broken wall when you reached Atlanta and cried so hard your throat hurt and your stomach roiled and then the first thing you did when you left your rank and musty room was to use some of that two hundred some-odd to buy a loaf of bread and some hard salami at a price your mother would have called piracy.

            

The Butcher and the Alchemist

       This is a little something I'm working on. The endgame is to get this particular piece published; where it finds a home I am less than picky about, save for the twin qualities of being in print and getting a little something for it. I am not sure where this is going, but the style reminded me half of a Xanth novel (By the peerless Piers Anthony) and half of The Witcher series (written by Andrzej Sapkowski). Wherever this leads, I like the two main characters and there is enough chemistry there to carry a short story.

           The Alchemist was known as Rah Gaffer Gospode, to some, but to most he went only by “Frith,” for reasons long since forgotten. The “Rah” was a sign of nobility, but he didn’t seem to have a family, or much of anything else, really. He drifted through the forest, mostly alone, occasionally popping into a town to buy or sell a few trifles. Sometimes strange fungi that seemed to twist towards the moon or little glass bulbs filled with blue liquid appeared in the markets after he had gone, but few could say whether he had brought them or not. He was a tallish, strangeish fellow with eyes that shifted color with the phases of the moon and a strong, angular jaw like a stone in a stream.

            He carried a bamboo pack tight-bound with iron bands and locked with two brass padlocks that clinked when he walked. A sword as long as a short man’s leg hung in a scabbard from the side of his pack, a long blue tassel affixed to the hilt. In winter he grew a beard, knotted and black and rambunctious like a briar thicket. Sometimes he did small favors for people in the town of Silverbone, blessing a gate so it never rusted, or creating some elixir that swelled pumpkins three times their normal size until they looked like fat orange sows in their furrows in back gardens. He never slept in a normal house, only in barns or hedgerows  or propped in the crook of a leaning tree eight paces from the road. He spoke little but smiled brightly and often, even if that smile was a touch too wide and a hair too sharp at times.

            Bufo DeLivre, the butcher, was completely different. Short and fat in the strong, sturdy manner of a boar or bulldog, he was loud and as often jovial as he was enraged, and he had thick brown arms like summer hams that he swung in great arcs when he talked. A broad cleaver swung on a leather thong at his belt, the handle polished from three generations of DeLivre hands. He swore it could slash a maple leaf as it fell but chop through a steer’s neck with one blow. No one ever saw him use it. No one ever saw him work, honestly. He sat in front of his shop and shouted orders through the open door at his niece or the orphan boy who was madly in love with his niece and did all the work she was supposed to. Bufo and Frith got along in the bickeringly friendly way fast friends did, with Bufo roaring insults between laughs punctuated by Frith’s quiet, sharp retorts and flashing smile.

            

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Hungry Jack and Montezuma

                Lee felt the familiar feeling come over him again: the raw, shaky panic that rumbled low in his chest and made his stomach roil. Outside the cell, the caravan was rolling up the gates. Hungry Jack’s armored trucks, salvaged from a forgotten Loomis motor pool and splashed with a crude red crown on their bulldog hoods, idled outside the steel rolling gates. Lee stood and watched out the reinforced chicken wire window as the black flagship armored truck started forward once the gates had opened, followed by the next three.

                Hungry Jack would eat now, Lee thought. Then he and his men would summon the women, spread the wealth they had torn from the dead fists of vagrants, gypsies, tribalists and the homesteaders that stubbornly attempted to carve a home from the thick jungle that boiled from the superrich soil. After that, well, Jack would sate his lusts with his favorite concubines and then call—

                There was the sound of a steel lock sliding back, and the door swung open. Two soldiers stood there, heads wrapped in the damp white headscarves that kept them cool in the unrelenting tropical heat. One carried a machete, the other one of the precious shotguns.

                “Up, you.” One of them roughly grabbed Lee by the arm and hauled him to his feet. The one with the shotgun stayed in the hall. Lee was frog marched out into the dilapidated passageway. Hot sunlight tore through holes in the plaster walls, throwing shards of light on the slick, mossy tiles of the ancient mental hospital. Through these holes creeping vines the thickness of a strong man’s bicep snaked, spreading their roots on the eternally damp surfaces. Through the holes in the walls Lee could see the climbing baobabs with dark fortresses of roots, colossal kapoks and abiu trees with swollen yellow fruits like warning buoys.

                The double doors to what had once been the chief administrator’s personal quarters were thrown open and Lee was shoved forward onto the moldering carpet. Hungry Jack sat on his makeshift dais, four of the largest desks in the building had been pushed together in the cathedral-ceilinged room. Four oriental rugs and a huge papasan chair had been sat atop this, and behind it all a brightly colored, hand-carved wall of wood was nailed to the desks, creating a sort of throne. Two of the concubines lounged at his feet, wearing only long beaded loincloths about their waists. They gazed at Lee with hooded eyes, slight smiles. 

                Hungry Jack claimed to be as old as the Cataclysm. Few believed him, as it would have made him a hundred and fifty years old, but others claimed the Cataclysm had changed more than the atmosphere and the soil. He had no memory of the time before the Cataclysm, Jack claimed. He had been sent to earth as a child of the sun, a god. He had no name and no occupation, but awoke in a factory of some sort. The story, as he told it, was of him standing and seeing a sign before him of his name and his purpose. He had torn down the sign and taken a vehicle, driving until it would not go any further. He wandered, clutching only his banner and a monkey wrench until he reached a small tribe wandering the grasslands that were swiftly turning to jungle. He had taken control, founded his empire in the mental hospital, and put up his banner, his mantra, in the throne room in which he now sat.

                The banner behind Jack said “Hungry Jack: Everybody’s happy when it’s Hungry Jack.”

                “So this is the assassin.” Jack’s eyes were devastatingly lifeless, the blue of a strangled man’s face or a vein under the surface of the skin. His face was dark from the sun, his hair was an unnatural white that stood up in every direction, a strange disconnect with his otherwise youthful appearance. His body rippled with muscle, wearing only military style cargo shorts in camouflage and swimming shoes. Across his chest was a tattooed jolly roger, and dozens of crosses decorated his arms. Each one of those stood for a man he had killed. He lounged in the throne, smiling.