{Today’s special Halloween story is based largely on a comic my brother and I tried to put together when I was 12 and he was 7. It violates at least a dozen copyrighs, but hey! It’s a holiday, right? Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find the concept art, but maybe it’ll turn up later.}

The ten of them were gathered in the living room, telling spooky stories, when someone had the bright idea to pop in a horror movie. Only then, they started arguing over which one to watch, and ended up splitting into three groups watching three movies on three TVs in three rooms, one watching Jason Goes to Hell, one watching Halloween, and one watching Freddy’s New Nightmare. That Halloween was a dark and stormy one, and a freak lightning bolt hit the house, flashing through the electric lines in an instant. The televisions went blank, and then they began to play again, only this time missing their horrible stars. They met back in the living room, trying to figure out what happened, when the monster emerged from the kitchen.

It was over seven feet tall, and stocky, like Jason, wearing his mask and walking with his lumbering stride. He wore Michael Myers’ familiar blue outfit, with his famous butcher knife clutched in one hand, stringy mask hair frayed out from behind the hockey mask, and poking out from under Freddy’s hat. His other hand was bearing Freddy’s glove, knives clinking together as he walked towards them. Worst of all, though, was Freddy’s voice, which mocked and abused them as the hideous thing ran them down, backing them into a corner. Then the knife and the glove rose and fell and rose again, and here one girl tried to escape and was impaled by a flying machete that had been strapped to the monster’s back. After he was done, the room was awash in blood. Then the doorbell rang, and muffled cries of “Trick or Treat” emanated from beyond. The monster paused, looked at the bloodbath. Then he dropped the knife and took the glove off, and picked up the bowl of candy. He went and answered the door.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

I'm a little late in posting this, but here's the article I wrote on seasonal Halloween stores for last week's District. It's the littlest editing that's been done on a piece of mine there, which I'm taking as a good sign. Should have big things to report on this front, provided the flow of communication opens up a little. Ahem. Also, check out their fancy new site, designed by the way-too-talented friend of the blog, Jeff Gould.

Labels: Generalness

You might not have seen it, on the wall just above the window; it was just a small crack. But I saw it. I have good eyes. I called the landlord about it, but when I told him it was only an inch long, he told me to get bent. He would rather ravish Mrs. Kensington than do his job. He is a dirty, dirty man. The next morning the crack got longer, by double. It was like the Poe story I read in primary school, “The House of Usher.” Except that was about a mansion, and I live in a tenement. I spent so much time keeping the inside nice, but now it was trying to become the outside. It wanted to match.

Every day it kept getting bigger and wider. Inside the crack it was just black, there was nothing on the other side. I tried to call the landlord after it reached down to the window, but the phone was dead. I got the gooseflesh for some reason, but I didn’t pay it mind. The next day the crack had widened, and my wall was crumbling away all along it. At the back of the blackness, there was a little bit of light. It was pulsing. I started to get scared, and I ran for the door, but it was locked and I couldn’t get out.

So I went back and I sat and watched the light. The blackness got bigger and wider as the wall fell apart, and that glow just kept getting closer and closer. The ceiling is sagging now, it’s on my shoulders, and it’s telling me to stop writing. The crack is a crater now, and the whole wall, the whole window is gone. Now there is nothing but the blackness. Nothing but the glow.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

I was walking down the cracked alley behind my apartment building, checking out the cars to see if there was anything worth lifting. I was humming the Green Day song, the one about the cracked alley, when I saw the green SUV. It had one of those huge In Memoriam stickers on the back, which normally wouldn’t catch my attention. They’re not that unusual where I live. This one read: Mark Gonzalez, June 2 1981-October 30 2007. My name is Mark Gonzalez. I was born June 2, 1981. Today is October 29 2007. I waited for the owner of the car for years and years and they never came but the car disappeared.

***

My mother called me crying, and I couldn’t get her to tell me why. She just kept saying “Gone gone gone gone gone” over and over until the tears choked the words away and she just sobbed at 2am and wouldn’t tell me why. I think I might be dead.

***

I poured the last of the milk out, and saw that it expires on June 2. That’s 8 months away.

***

I checked the obituaries and I’m not there. Something is at the corner of my vision, all day long, a black spot that’s getting bigger, a black spot getting blacker all the time. I think I might be dying. What’s wrong with me?

***

The walls are getting bigger and the ceiling is getting smaller. Nothing makes sense. Everything is ending, and nobody knows me.

***

My name is on the gravestone. It won’t come off.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

At first when you pull into town, your fan belt hanging on by a thread, it looks just like any other small town in middle America. It’s dark, because the cloud cover is thick and there aren’t any streetlights. You coast your car into the three-room motel’s gravel parking lot and park it, hoping there’s a good mechanic you can find after you get some sleep. It’s after eleven o’clock at night, and you’d been fearing you wouldn’t come across another town on the 40 that night. You didn’t want to sleep in your car on the side of the highway, because it was so dark out there.

You get a room from the oddly pale owner of the motel, and decide to go to the town bar to unwind from a stressful night of coaxing an uncooperative car into functionality. After an hour of yakking with the locals and making small talk with the disinterested bartender, you head out. You’re a little concerned about the skin color of the town’s pallid residents, but after all the day’s hassle, you’re excited to read for a few hours and then sleep in. But then the clouds part.

Within seconds, the town’s main road is lined with wolves, walking on their hind legs, human sized. You glance up at the full, bright moon, and by the time you glance back down, they’re within feet of you. You’ve seen enough movies to know how this ends, and a kind of calm comes over you. You don’t even try to run. Fortunately, you don’t have anything to worry about anymore. You’ve been picked clean.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

They were in a hardshell convertible with the top up, at the very edge of Lookout Point. She’d been waiting since tenth grade for Todd to take her up there, but now that he had, it felt wrong. The air was too heavy, and she was having trouble breathing. The lights of the small town below swum in and out. She worried about passing out. Todd was great, but she didn’t want to be here. She told him so. He disagreed.

“Aw, Cindy, come on, we don’t have to do nothin’, let’s just sit and listen to the radio for a while, alright? Then if you want, I can drive you home.”

He snapped the dial on, hoping for something sweet and slow and soothing. Instead, they caught the last half of a breaking news report. “Repeat: The Hollow Hook Killer has escaped from jail, and his whereabouts are currently unknown. Residents are advised to stay indoors and call police if they see anything out of the ordinary.”

Cindy started shaking. “Todd, please, take me home. He could be out here.”

Todd snorted. “Come on, Cindy, the Hook will head straight into town if he’s really out, he won’t waste any time up here. You’re safer here with me, trust me.”

Just then, a tooth-grating scratch, like metal on metal, came from Cindy’s door. She screamed and slammed the lock down. “Todd, take me HOME!”

“Jesus, calm down,” he said, starting the car. He backed down the dirt road until he could turn around and head home. He dropped her off at her house, and when she got out and slammed the door, she screamed again, and started crying. Stuck into the door was an old, rusty hook. Todd took her inside and calmed her down, explained things to her parents, and called the police. Before he drove home, he checked the backseat, nervously, to make sure no one was hiding there. But he should have checked the trunk.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

So a few months back (it was actually just before we got married), I had my first short story published by a publication I didn't work for. The name of the lit journal is Verdad, and it's a twice annual collection put together by English students at LBCC. It's young, and obviously not the New Yorker, but this marks the first time total strangers read something of mine and determined it worth their money to publish, so I'm very excited.

The story is the first in a collection of Long Beach stories I wrote as a very young, very naive college student...I guess I should say that I was even younger and more naive than I am now. In any event, I was 18. It is neither autobiographical, nor my finest work, but I'm proud as hell that it's been published.

For the record, it's a great publication with some very cool other stuff on their site. Here's the link to their website, and to just my story. It'll also be linked on the sidebar for a while.

Labels: Generalness

The man in the front pew’s eyes snapped open, and he realized he’d been dozing mid-sermon. The reverend was preaching about hellfire and boiling flesh, and the man looked around without turning his head. He remembered this church: it was the one his grandparents used to take him to when he was a boy. He hadn’t been here in two decades. He hadn’t been to church at all in fifteen years. His gaze came to rest on the couple sitting to his left, realizing with a gasp that it was his Grampa and Nan. They had died long ago. “Nan?” he whispered.

His grandmother turned to look at him, her once-puffy face sagging. She had no eyes, and as he watched, chunks of skin fell and landed on her polyester jacket. The man recoiled, jumping backwards and almost falling on top of his best friend from high school, who’d died in a car wreck in 11th grade. He stood and spun: the church’s quaint wooden benches were filled with the dead, some missing limbs and eyes. The reverend raised his voice, shouting incoherent gibberish now. His flock’s teeth chattered, a bony, rattling applause. He turned to the reverend, but couldn’t see him through the flames of the pulpit, which was going up like tinder.

The flowers on the walls of the church burst into flames, sending embers and petals across the crowd, who clacked all the louder at the display. They rose as one, and the man took flight, knocking down his grandparents and fleeing up the aisle. Bony hands and twisted, arthritic fingers clawed at his shirt and arms, but he was going to make it, he was going to––no. His dog, his pup from when he was just a boy, was biting his pant leg, and he was slowing, and then he was tripping. The congregation raised him on their thin arms, and restored him to his seat in the front row. His Nan and his old friend patted his legs, and fixed him with their empty smiles. He was sweating. The reverend stepped from behind his pulpit and stared at him, brows knit in disapproval. Then he raised his arms, and the fellowship chattered their praise. The man closed his eyes again.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

In a word: more. I took some time off of this blog (for anything other than stories), for several reasons, three-fifths of which were that I was too busy, and two-fifths of which were that after all the wedding preparation and celebration, I got really sick of myself and wanted to just write stories for a while.

In the comings weeks you can look forward to lots of links to things I've been doing at other websites and publications, as well as book and movie musings. In addition, I'm officially in Halloween countdown mode, which means the stories between now and next Wednesday will all be spooky stories of various severity, starting with today's stories about cowboys and zombies. I've added "Halloween" as a label, if you want to easily bring up all the October-special stories on the blog. Anyway: Be seein' you 'round, pardners.

Labels: Generalness, Halloween, Mission Statement

It’s a tourist trap ghost town now, but in its time Bodie was home to some of the Southwest’s most infamous cheaters, looters and shooters, so when Sheriff Wyrick got word of the dead coming back to life, he knew there was one place he could make a difference, even if there wasn’t no other. He arrived just before daybreak, bearing only his pa’s 12-guage, two standard issue Walther 99s, and a deputy who had a penchant for extracurricular activities. The trunk of his cruiser was filled with ammo.

He got to the end of Bodie’s Main Street, in front of the Town Hall, and pulled his car sideways. He and the deputy stepped behind it, leveling their weapons on the hood and the trunk, the muzzles pointed towards the cemetery at the end of the street. Behind them in the Town Hall, five grinning animatronics watched them with ceramic eyes. Down the dirt road, the first clawed hands were breaking soil, pushing skyward like they were reaching for it. “Why you reckon they’re comin’ back, Wyrick?” asked the deputy. “They miss the good life?”

“Heard on the television that some folk think Hell’s full up and Heaven’s closed its gate for good, boy.”

The deputy paused. “Then what the hell are we s’posed to do with ‘em?”

Wyrick grunted. “Same thing my mama always told me to do when somethin’ was where it didn’t belong. We’re gonna put ‘em back, full or no.”

Several of the chalk-faced zombies had made it all the way out of the grave now, and were ambling down the street towards them in their boots and patched jeans. The deputy started to shake a little. “Easy now,” the Sheriff told him. “Wait for ‘em to get a little closer, now. Don’t get jumpy. Just pop ‘em in the head like I told you, and we’ll be fine.”

“Sheriff, I don’t really know if this is a good idea, me bein’ here. I gotta be honest, I ain’t never done anythin’ like this before.”

“Ah boy, don’t you worry about that none.” The first wave of them was only thirty yards away or so, and Wyrick raised the gauge and let loose a round at the closest of them. “The only thing that matters is what you do next.”

Labels: Halloween, Stories

Right now, around the corner from the street where I used to live, an old woman is standing on the asphalt, holding a woven and green rubber water hose. She is short, and bleary eyed, with shoulder length, flat hair, that has long since lost its color. She has also lost her color, and her skin looks like an overcast desert sky, the result of a lifetime spent smoking. Her thumb is covering a majority of the hose’s metal-rimmed opening, thus increasing the pressure on the rest of the flow. She’s using this increased stream to blow dirt out of the gutter in front of her house. This is what she does. Sometimes, after a bad night, she’ll wash the street in front as well, sometimes all the way down the block, just hosing and hosing and hosing.

Given the drought we’ve been experiencing, this irritates a lot of her neighbors. Once, one of them approached her, after she’d spent over an hour out there, and asked her why she was wasting so much water. “The dirt,” she said, cigarette dangling from her lip, ashing on her grey sweatshirt. “I hate the dirt.”

Now, as the sky ashes on her house and the street in front, as it ashes on her hair and rains it on her car, she is out there still, trying to clean it all off. She taught me so much. And I’ve never spoken to her. But I know she is there, alone, grey against grey, pouring and pouring water onto blacktop that won’t take it, washing away dirt that is still falling.

Labels: Stories

It’s been seared away, its dried and wrinkled stalks burnt to nothingness. The soil is heavy with ash, wet with the residue left by the blaze. And below, below, below, what is left is germinating.

Labels: Stories

Every night, before the old man kissed the old woman on the top of her fuzzy grey head and whispered goodnight into the lace collar of her nightgown, they would kneel in front of the window and wish to the stars with all of the might they could muster.

They wished for rain in the dry season and sunshine in the growing season and they remembered the friends who had moved on, whether down the road or down in the ground or out of the peaceful mountain community altogether. They wished to die holding hands, smiling after 60 years of good, steady, hard-working marriage. But, most of all, they wished for a beautiful daughter to keep them company in their twilight years, to cook them food and bring them blankets and to think of them fondly from time to time after they’d gone.

And every morning the old man would leave the house whistling and the old woman would wave as he went. And they’d spend the hours till lunchtime searching. She’d peek into every flowerbud and he’d evaluate every sparrow’s nest. He’d be careful as he walked among toadstools, and she’d prepare for a surprise as she turned over the teacups one by one. Then he’d come home and they’d share bread and cheese and a little milk and they’d smile and shake their heads and say no, dear, nothing yet. But they both knew that if they were very vigilant and very, very pitiful yet generous and pure in spirit, one day they would come across a tiny girl child, just small enough to fit nicely in a thimble.

And then, after 60 years of good, steady, hard-working marriage, the adventure would really begin.

Labels: Stories

I was driving home the other day, radio on, stuck in traffic, screaming along to the music. The other day was a Friday, so it was the fifth day in a row that I was commuting. I, uh, I snapped a little bit. It’s hard not to, on a Friday, the Friday before a three day weekend, with so much freedom just waiting, right in front of me. I swerved off the freeway, without even checking my blind spot, and I headed straight for the mountains. But as soon as the peaks came into view, this complete and total calm came over me. I stopped singing, and I started listening to the lyrics. I stopped commuting, and I took the scenic route home.

Labels: Stories

Humans have always thought of planets as big, spherical rocks. This isn’t true. Planets are living beings, who measure their days in our eons. Most of them are solitary, preferring to spend eternity tracing the same lonely circles in the blackness of space. But they have their own personalities, and preferences, and tendencies. And our planet, our true mother? The loneliness and emptiness didn’t suit her. She was a warm planet, not hot-tempered, rather she was genial and playful. But the planets around her were furious and impossible to deal with, or they were frigid and cruel. And the little Earth couldn’t take it. At first she tried to deal with it by creating wondrous beings to play with, and to watch. Dinosaurs, underwater monsters, soon she teemed with fantastical things. But watching got boring, and so she tried to talk to her creatures. But every time she tried to, she spoke so slowly that whatever she was talking to would die before she could say anything. She got so lonely, it was worse than before. So she wiped the slate clean, and she started over, creating new life with a new meaning. She did it because she was suicidal, because she no longer wanted to exist. Given what she’s birthed into the universe, how could there be any doubt?

Labels: Stories

On October 16, 2007, Stephen Colbert announced he was running for president of the United States of America…but only in South Carolina. On January 29, 2008, he wins the South Carolinian primary…for both the Democratic and Republican tickets. Expressing mild surprise at the victory, Colbert decides to run in every state, for both parties. On August 28th of that year, the Democratic party declares him their candidate for the upcoming presidential elections. Reluctantly, and with some confusion, the Republicans do the same thing a week and a half later, on September 4th. Exactly two months later, he wins the national presidential election, running on both tickets, with ex-candidate Mike Huckabee as his running mate.

He wins by the largest margin in United States electoral history, taking every state but Alaska. On January 29th, 2007, Stephen Tyrone Colbert is sworn in as the forty-fourth President of the United States. At his swearing in he makes a joke about what a huge step forward his election is for America, brave as they were to elect a white male Christian as their leader. Within a year, Satire is a respected major at every college in the country. Within two years our relations with every foreign country has improved markedly, and our military has been scaled back, the money saved going to bring our education system to its former state of glory, on par with the rest of the civilized world. By the end of his first term, he’s fixed Social Security and ended homelessness. By the end of his second term, the country has been renamed the United Stephens of Colbertica, the suicide rate has dropped to next to nothing, the minimum wage has been raised to a living wage, and all forms of prejudice have been virtually eradicated.

In the eight years that he is President, ninety eight unsuccessful attempts on his life are made, most of them funded by the country’s largest corporations and special interest groups, whose long-standing hold on the government has been eliminated. President Colbert’s Congress is turned over, a fourth of its members forced to resign after his investigative groups exposed their corruption. Washington is reclaimed by the people, the country given back to its citizens. But, mysteriously, all the bears are killed.

Labels: Stories

Not-so-little 11-year old Maddy Mayley clutched her blanket tight. Earlier that night, her father had told her an ill-advised story to try and get her to give up her teddy bear, because he thought she was too old for it now. He’d told her that all teddy bears really were as alive as she’d always imagined, but that their life expectancy was much lower than that of their owners. He told her that her teddy she’d had since she was three had died three years ago, and that she’d been sleeping with a corpse since then. Crying, when she’d gone to her room to perform her ablutions and go to sleep, she picked up her teddy between her pointer and her thumb, and put him in the closet. She was disgusted and ashamed.

Eventually sleep came, but it wasn’t long before she was awakened by the soft drag of a large sheet of fabric across the shaggy carpet. Shaking, she looked over the edge of the bed. “Teddy?” she whispered. But she couldn’t pick out her teddy from the masses of shambling bears that covered the floor of her room. They surrounded her bed, ringing her in, and though they were all only ankle-height to her, she was scared stiff, and frozen in place. The back half moved slowly away, thronging through her cracked door, hobbling on torn limbs towards her father’s room, the hall nightlight glinting off their black eyes, some of them hanging down towards their arms, hanging by the thin fibrous threads.

“Teddy?” Maddy whispered again. “Please don’t hurt me. Please?” The zombie bears climbed the sheets, surrounding her, smothering her, surprisingly heavy. As one of them started to wriggle into her mouth, she woke with a start, choking on a mouthful of pillow. She spat it out. She was covered in sweat, and terrified. And she could hear a noise from the closet, from the bottom of the door. It sounded like something was trying to get out.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

Oh my God, you do not understand how excited I am for the new Joel Osteen book, “Become a Better You.” I’ve been wanting to become a better me for sooooo long now, seriously. For like, at least six months. I reserved the book back in April when I found out it was coming out, and I can’t get to the bookstore till Friday, but October 19th has been marked for quite some time, believe me, as The Day I Officially Better Myself! I can assure you, it’s going to be pretty cool. I figure by October 22nd I should have pretty much knocked it out of the park, trust me. I work fast. I just wish that Joel’s book would have come out faster, so I wouldn’t have had to wait so long to be a better me!

Labels: Stories

As loud thumps and a shouted foreign language that sounded like Korean came through his ceiling that night, the young boy wished for the thousandth time that his parents could afford a house. He told them over breakfast the next morning that he’d had trouble sleeping that night because the neighbors were so loud, and his father snorted as usual, turning over another page of his newspaper. Alex, the boy, braced for the speech, and was rewarded for his efforts: “Son, your mother and I are both busy people, and we don’t have time to solve all your problems for you. You’re ten now, and it’s time to start taking some responsibility for yourself. If you have a problem with the upstairs neighbors, you go talk to them, or tell the manager.”

He’d heard and ignored this speech before, but when he started dozing during his math test that day, Alex knew it was time to take his father’s advice. When the bus dropped him off that afternoon, he pushed the button for the 12th floor on his apartment building, instead of the 11th, where he lived. He knocked on the door, hard, trying to summon up a hidden reservoir of courage he knew didn’t exist. What little he may have been able to find dissipated immediately when the door swung open, and Alex found himself face to face with a green, eight-foot tall alien, whose slimy mouth was grinning from one tubular ear to another.

Too scared to scream, Alex just tried to run. He was the fastest kid in his elementary school, and his speed had gotten him away from more than one bully; today, it didn’t matter, as his legs pumped as hard as he could, and he realized he wasn’t going anywhere. Something was freezing him in place. A green tentacle fell on his shoulder and pulled him into the room. The aliens held him for an hour, explaining to him their mission, and all the ways they wanted to improve Alex’s flawed and merciless planet. Then they told him he could join them and save his family, or he could be annihilated with the rest of the building’s inhabitants when their underground spaceship took off in a few weeks.

That night, Alex slept terribly again; his Glornax training started tomorrow after school, and he was terrifically excited.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

Hello Diary, this is Susannah again. Today the sky is very grey and it was dark all day long. I don’t mind it when it is grey, though, I think it is very pretty. It is blue most of the time here, and that is pretty too, but when you see it so many times in a row it doesn’t feel as pretty. So I like the grey sky because I think it is pretty, and because I think it makes the blue sky prettier too. When it is grey I like to sit in my mommy’s car and just stare out the window, thinking. She will look at me and smile, because I think she likes grey skies too, although since she is a meaterologist she says she’s supposed to pretend to hate them

Today I was thinking about the Halloween Parade. Mrs. Linden told us about it at school today, and I got very excited. On Halloween, we get out of school three hours early, so we can all put our costumes on, and march around the playground! Our mommies and daddies are going to come, too, although just my daddy will because my mommy will be busy meatyoliging. I’m going to be a dinosaur! Mommy and Daddy said they’d help with the costume, and Daddy said I’ll be the scariest in the whole parade. I think Halloween is my favorite holiday, but Christmas is very nice. Thanksgiving is good food, but it only lasts a few days, but Halloween candy lasts me a whole month. Oh, I have to go now diary, we’re going to make my horns! I’ll tell you how it comes out later.

{If you'd like more Susannah stories, just search her name in the bar at the top of your browser.}

Labels: Halloween, Stories

Sometimes it’s good to stay up till you’re exhausted every now and then. The doctors don’t approve, of course, but the doctors don’t approve of anything. Because anything could kill you, and once you’re dead, you can’t come in for second opinions and referrals anymore. It’s their job to keep you alive, by keeping you from living. So every year, I try and remember what it was like to be in high school or college, staying up all night, working on a paper, or just talking with my friends until the sun came up, and we realized it was time to go home. But of course, I can’t remember, because that feeling’s not in me anymore. So even though I’ll stay up three, four nights in a row, that familiar warmth isn’t there. Instead I just get strange looks from my kids, and the shakes all alone at four in the morning, huddled over a cup of bad coffee in the third bedroom.

Labels: Stories

When she was a child, her mother had owned a lot of cats. Often, she’d be awakened by them several times a night, pushing against her as they fought each other for position, for her warmth. So last night, when she woke up, it took her a moment to remember that she was 32 now, and her mother, and all her cats, were dead. It took her another moment to realize that someone had filled her comforter with worms, and that they were spilling out of it faster with each passing second.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

Soul mates do exist, actually. That doesn’t mean all their stories have happy endings.

In China, a man’s wife was giving birth, so he rushed to get home. Because he did so, he forgot to add more lubricant to one of the machines he maintained. Because he did so, that machine miss-wove one out of every 76 pairs of shoe-laces it was producing. Because it did so, a man in New York on his way to the theater stopped to retie his tux shoes, delaying him by seventeen seconds. That meant the cab he should have taken drove by, and he took a different one, driven by a competent driver. He made it to the play on time, met his cousin at Will-Call, and had a pleasant evening. Then he went home to his little Manhattan apartment alone, which is how he lived out the remainder of his life.

What would have happened if he’d gotten in the right cab? The driver, less than a week into his new career, would have made a wrong turn onto a one-way street. Because he did so, it would have taken the man an extra fifteen minutes to get to the beautiful, historic theater. In the marble lobby with the soaring ceilings and the sparkling lighting, he would have had to wait for the first act to end before going in to his seat, and while he waited, he would have made small talk with the stunning brunette who was waiting with him. He would have learned that she was always running late. He would have found this fact endearing, and after fifteen minutes of talking, she in her most expensive dress and he in his sharpest suit, they would have decided to go for ice cream, and ended up talking all night.

They would have joked about whether they could still get along if they weren’t wearing two thousand dollars worth of clothes, and whether they’d still want to talk if they weren’t standing in a beautiful theater. They would have found that yes, they could, and yes, they would. They would never have gone another day for the next 53 years without talking to each other, and they would have loved each other so much, and would have been such close friends, that they would never have wanted to go a day without talking to each other. And, 53 years later, when they were both 84, they would have died in their sleep together, pressed close. That’s how much time together they almost had.

Labels: Stories

Golly gee, those Amberlys are the talk of the town! Always have been, I suppose, ever since the good Rev. Amberly rolled into town with that beautiful, picture-perfect wife of his. He brought the whole town into his parish in just shy of a year, so almost everyone was there when his wife announced (from the pulpit, mind) that she was with child. And what a child it turned out to be, at that! The first child of the celebrated Amberly clan, the boy got all As and never missed a day of anything to sickness his whole life. He’s a State Senator now, the youngest in history. His little sister is at Harvard, his little brother just starting at Yale, and the youngest Amberly, little Stu, is just in fourth grade this year. My boy’s lucky enough to go to school with him, says he’s just smart as a whip crack on a wet back. I keep telling him to get real cozy with that boy, he’s one of the ones who’s getting the truth when their teacher tells ‘em they can be anything they want. No, never hurts to get cozy with a boy like that, I tell my son. Oh, speak of the devil! Pardon, speak of the angels, here’s Mrs. Amberly now, must be coming through to buy her magazines––she usually picks up one of each. It’s no trouble recognizing that car even this far out. She drives a purple minivan, only you can hardly tell it’s purple on account of the whole thing, from back to front, is covered in those Student of the Month stickers. I heard tell she used to wrap one around her muffler, but it kept melting off.

Labels: Stories

He had come to see the jungle, and now he was seeing the jungle. Soaring over the lush jungles of Southeast Asia, they’d experienced spontaneous engine failure. Eventually, word would get back to America that one of their own was lost in the wilderness, and they’d send teams in to retrieve him, but before that he had a week and a half to survive on what he could forage. He was a vegan from Seattle, with long kinky hair, dirty and blonde. Everyone else was dead, lost in the plummeting, twisting steel, or in the resulting fire. One woman he crawled past on his way out of the fuselage was still breathing, both her legs broken beneath the seat that had been in front of her. She was in shock, whimpering in terror and sucking in smoke by the lungful. He had closed his eyes and left her there.

Dazed, he thought maybe it would end up being a good thing. If a plane crashed, no matter how far from civilization, it would bring authorities, so he wasn’t worried about survival yet. He wanted to make the most of his time spent among the green, picking and gathering edible fruits and leaves. He spent his first day tracing ever-widening circles around the wreckage, but failed to find anything to eat. Instead he ate the few packets of peanuts he found around the plane’s remains, sleeping next to a few pieces of debris that still flamed weakly through the night.

The next day he was hungry. He’d made a vow three years ago not to subsist on the life or product of any other living being (plants aside), but it already felt like his stomach was gnawing huge chunks out of itself, growing more and more porous by the moment, leaking what little sustenance he had stored to sustain him into his thinning blood. Wondering if he was bleeding internally, he began to panic, and pray for a rescue team to come and find him. When they did come, 8 days later, they found a man huddled over a banded mongoose, his eyes wild, his fingers covered in dark greasy blood, which ran down his chin, too. They brought him back to the city, but kept their distance in the helicopter. The vegan man had returned to nature.

Labels: Stories

The sky was green and the grass was a bright blue, and he was breathing in and out of his stomach while his ears threw up his lunch. The whole horizon turned sideways. Then that motherfucker punched him again, and it all went black.

Labels: Stories

A man stands in a cylindrical glass tube. We call the tube the world, or reality, or some other nonsense. When he is born, the tube is empty, except for himself, and the air he’s breathing. Then somebody notices he’s got a wee little dick, and they start telling him what that means. They pour a little bit of bullshit into the tube. Not much at first, it’s just enough to cover his toes. As he gets older, he starts going to school, and they pour gallon after gallon of bullshit into the tube; then, at the end of every day, they spend ten seconds telling him the truth, and they call it literature, or philosophy, or art.

By the time he gets out of school, his tube is half bullshit, half breathable air. The stench is starting to get to him, but he soldiers on, finds himself a job. As he gets older, he notices a sudden increase in the amount of shit in his little world: every day at job, he gets more, driving by churches every day he gets even more, watching television, reading the newspaper, everything. But by now he’s so used to it, he doesn’t mind it. He tells himself he likes it even, starts going to those churches on Sunday, starts believing what he’s seeing on television. And before he knows what’s happening, his tube fills to the top, choking him. So what’s a man to do, if he’s halfway to half-right minded? He starts kicking at that goddamn glass as hard as he can, and he doesn’t stop till he can breathe again.

Labels: Stories

Cindy leaned back in her bus seat and tried to stretch. It was after 10pm, and the bus was sailing along the coast of Oahu. She and her husband had been on a day-long tour of the island, and they were going back to their hotel now, on the North Shore. Staring out the window, she couldn’t believe how dark it was out there. Away from North Shore, away from Waikiki, there were so little lights, so little power. She could barely see off the road for more than a few yards. The bus slowed to make a left turn, away from the coast. As it did, she saw a man, a local she assumed, digging a trench on the side of the road. Looking around the bus, she saw that she was the only one still awake. She raised a hand, hesitantly, waved slightly, then put it around her husband, sleeping in the seat next to her.

***

“Goddamn buses…I’m trying to dig, here. They need this dug, so they can run their goddamn HBO cable to North Shore. Last thing I want is for those fat sons of bitches to get even more television, but I need the money worse than I need ideals right now. Why can’t this country feel good about anything unless it’s built on someone else’s back? Is that the only way to build? My friend who moved to Vegas says it’s even worse there…the rich aren’t comfortable unless they have the poorest close enough to order around. And then they have the nerve to be afraid of us…Fucking. Tourists.”

He wiped his brow, and took a moment to appreciate the sound of the coastal wind giving the monkey pod tree a good shake. Then he put his head down and went back to work.

Labels: Stories

Alex Hudson, Professor Emeritus and preeminent Ivy League scholar at Harvard, is grumpy. “Well, Oprah has picked ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ as her next book club pick. I’ve been trying to get people to read Marquez for thirty years, since before he won the Nobel. He won the Nobel, and it still takes Oprah to pick ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ and ‘Cholera’ to get anyone to read them. And why? I have no idea.

“I’ve spent the last fifty years of my life training to recommend books. I’ve read more than almost anyone alive, but people listen to Oprah. But in this country, we can only listen to one educated professor at a time, and right now it’s Harold Bloom. God forbid we take our literary advice from two professors at the forefront of their field. No, no, no. God forbid. Better we listen to one respected and well-educated man, and one know-nothing day-time talk show host. Christ.”

Labels: Stories

Sonny’s pet porcupine had been bitten by a rabid dog several weeks ago, and had been recovering slowly, but surely, since then. Sonny sprinted home from third grade every afternoon to care for Pokey, his little buddy and his best friend in the world. Finally, the night before Halloween, Pokey was feeling well enough that he could walk a good clip under his own power. Ecstatic, Sonny fitted his little porcupine collar around his neck, and Pokey wiggled his pointy head in obligingly.

The leash felt good in Sonny’s hand; walking Pokey had always been one of his favorite things to do, and he’d missed it dearly. He loved the looks they got, how cute everyone always thought Pokey was, how much his tiniest friend loved all the attention. They went around the block once, and when they got home, Pokey looked up at Sonny, his only friend in the world, and gave him a pitiful look.

“Okay, pal, we don’t have to go in yet,” Sonny said. “Let’s take another lap or two.”

The bully around the corner yelled at him as Sonny went by, but they ignored him, and kept walking happily. Around and around the bock they went, until the sun went down. Even though the street lights on Sonny’s street were mostly obscured by overgrown trees, the light was still good, since there was a full moon that night, bright enough to let them see clearly. But when the moon’s rays touched Pokey, a frightful transformation took place! His quills got longer, and he doubled in size, now nearly reaching Sonny’s knee. And, around the corners of his happy little porcupine smile, two tiny fangs appeared, miniature white triangles set starkly against his brown fur. He snarled with absolute ferocity…then he looked up at Sonny and smiled.

“Wow, Pokey! You’re a…a Wereporcupine!”

Pokey gurgled happily. Then his eyes turned dark, and he growled, starting to do his waddle-walk in the direction of the bully’s house.

Sonny grinned, and followed dutifully.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

Cecil B. Bemille, whose extra B stood for B movies, always thought that giant insects were the scariest. Oversized, stuffed spiders and flies terrorizing miniature cities: what could be worse than that? But now, his foot stuck deep in the underground nest of the African driver ant, the biggest and most ferocious ants in the world, he was reconsidering. He could feel the giant soldier ants, over two inches long, making their way up his leg, followed by their smaller drone counterparts. He yanked and yanked and couldn’t get his foot out: he was mired inexorably in the colony, as the ants made their way up.

Amazingly, he hadn’t been bitten more than a few times. But then, one of the giant soldiers came up his shirt collar and lifted its antennae. All the soldiers bit down at once; the pain was excruciating and all-consuming. Bemille was starting to lose his faith that he’d survive this if he just bit his lip hard enough. He could still feel the insects flooding up his hopelessly trapped leg, no matter how many he smashed against his skin. Every inch of his body was being stabbed by miniscule knives, but still, his leg wouldn’t come loose. Still, as the pain overwhelmed him, all Bemille could think about was his films. And he wanted to escape, not because he had anything else to live for at this point, but because he had an idea for a new kind of horror movie, one that would really make them scream.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

He was a legend to them, the greatest cheapskate of all time. He would have won every competition in cheapskate history, but he dropped out after they started charging a fifty cent entrance fee, to offset the cost of the grand prize: a giant binder of double coupons. He didn’t need them anyway: this was a man who would park at a meter and sit in his car, wait for the meter maid to go by, then run into a store and do his business, knowing he had at least twenty minutes till the maid came by again.

This was a man who would peel used stamps off of mail he received, paint over the registered mark, and then reuse them. A man who’d siphoned every drop of gas he’d ever used, and who had exclusively eaten senior early bird specials since he was twenty, donning a wig he made and big glasses he stole to look the part. This was a man with one of the fattest savings accounts you’ll ever see, since he barely spent any money at all. The cost to his love life, however, was astronomical: he made an old women’s wig, but he could never find a woman to wear it to dinner with him at 4 in the afternoon. He had a name ready for the first who would, though: soulmate.

Labels: Stories

Little Timmy’s parents had always told him that they worked the graveyard shift, laughing and winking to each other. But it was not true! No, they were vampires, which, while still associated with graveyards, is an entirely different kind of job entirely. Shortly after his tenth birthday, Little Timmy had a nightmare, and got up to go to the bathroom. He heard the most terrifying screams coming from the basement. He followed the noises backwards to their source: a beautiful young woman strapped to his father’s “work bench” in the middle of the room. His parents were standing over her, bickering over who was getting the first taste the same way he’d heard them bicker over whose turn it was to take the trash out.

Then his mother reared back and struck, sinking her fangs deep into the woman’s neck. She stopped screaming the second her skin was pierced, which was exactly when Little Timmy started. His father whirled on him, and a practically fatherly look of concern passed over his face. He started to move towards his son. Little Timmy had seen enough cartoons to know what to do when a vampire came after you, though, even if he was your father. Turning, he ran back up the stairs as fast as he could, trying to remember what killed vampires. The silver silverware? No… Salt? No… Recalling the movie he’d stayed up late to watch with his parents one night, Little Timmy grabbed some garlic from the counter, and grabbed two knives, holding them like a cross in front of him.

His father cornered him in the kitchen, approached him gingerly, a sad smile on his face. “Sorry son, you weren’t supposed to see that for a few more years yet. It’s okay, though, really it is. Put those down.” Little Timmy’s mother appeared behind her husband. She hadn’t even bothered to wipe the blood off her chin, if you can imagine. Little Timmy, looking left and right and realizing there was no way out, threw the garlic at his father’s face. His old man laughed kindly, and brushed it away. “Come on, now, Timmy. Don’t be a silly little Timmy.” He took his son in his arms, and lowered his teeth just a little. They were going to be a real family, finally.

Labels: Halloween, Stories

My name is Corporal James Bradley, I am an amputee, having lost my left leg just above the knee in Vietnam. You don’t know who I am, because I’m one of the ones that didn’t get to go on television and soak in the appreciative applause of a grateful nation. You didn’t hear about me, because I was one of the 153,000 wounded in that war, and my name is not on a memorial. It would be too big. You called that war a waste then, and you remember it as a waste now: a waste of time and resources, and maybe, occasionally, you stop and think that it was a waste of men, too. But you wanted me to go, America, and so I went.

And now, I lost my leg. I lost my home. I beg you for your spare change, nation, and you do not give it to me. But that’s okay. I can find enough food to feed me, and enough shelter to shelter me. But I wish you would make eye contact with me. I really do.

Labels: Stories