He’ll find us! she yelps, hopping to keep the swarm of amber ants from devouring her exposed feet. She keeps the binocs glued to her brow with one arm, hugs herself with the other despite the sun.
I know. Shut up, he growls around the wrench in his teeth. The ants dislike the scent of the steely fluid dripping into the warm sand, so leave him alone. Angry clanks and scrapes sound from the undercloak of the aged skimmer. Try it now.
She leans, jabs the starter. The cell whines, wheezes, then roars alive; he scurries out from the undercloak as it billows.
They leap in; salvation lies somewhere ahead.
California, That Might Have Been
There are fifty-eight counties in California, if you can believe it. Each has a rich history… a history that sadly lacks elements of magic and the fantastic. We were tasked with changing that.
I picked San Luis Obispo, and wrote of how it become a county in 1850… with the help of werebears.
The California Cantata anthology is available from Kazka Press, in Kindle or Nook edition. There are six unique stories in this anthology, and thankfully mine is among them. Please enjoy.
Anonymous asked:
"Just wanted to let you know I came across your website a few weeks ago, downloaded Umbril's Tale and finished reading it last night. It was spectacular! Thank you so much! I gave you a 5 star rating on Goodreads (dot com). I hope to read more."
You are the greatest person of all time. I regret only that you are anonymous, so I could thank you by name.
Many thanks for reading, and for the extra goodreads love. I just recently reformatted and touched up “Umbril’s Tale”, and am considering some form of self-publishing for it.
For the curious: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17448239-umbril-s-tale
Dave
Prone on a motel bed, hating it but not enough. Like the increase of mass as its velocity approaches that of light, every finger twitch requires energy enough to have killed something else in the world, and I am not that selfish.
My addiction scrapes through tiny channels, trying to remind me of its past-due feeding, but I ignore it, letting my thighs tense up and my feet shiver. Copper-flavored air rasps through my throat.
Days pass, faded like colored pencils.
I have a dream although my eyelids don’t touch and I can still see the stained grey of the ceiling. A vast flat America unrolls away from me, segmented and patched. Above there is the twisted, looping jet stream of an airliner seeping forward. The universe shudders: a switch, a happening. The plane begins to fall, flocks of birds encircling it like stinging wasps. It falls.
Desires and dreads cannot beat apathy. Guilt weighs like steel.
I must have felt joy, once. Joy reveals regret because it is so fleeting. This is why Heaven is unattainable. It has to be. Permanent joy cannot be. Permanent joy is a perpetual motion engine, and becomes its own plateau. It compares itself to nothing.
Pain, now. Pain is construction.
Gazing between bony feet pointing up like a corpse’s, I decide then: Vegas.
I dropped everything I carried and stood, gazing up at 1307 Whippoorwill Road. There were fifteen more years on it, fifteen stubborn and remorseful years, a sodden two-story mobbed by tall grasses and lived in only by small animals. The country was always wet around here, and the house hadn’t aged well.
I didn’t need the city’s yellow Unsafe sign to tell me our family didn’t live here any more, but I could see the truth of our presence. The patio, empty of chairs. Yellow gingham curtains in the living room window. The screen door, hanging by one hinge, eaten by weather and insects. The wooden ramp for Laura Lee’s wheelchair. Two lines of gravel where a tired Oldsmobile would have parked. I’d been born in the upstairs bedroom, ran down the stairs two at a time, raced cars over the kitchen tiles, built forts of cardboard, watched cartoons on a flickering color television. Fifteen years ago, I left.
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“Ugh, Charlie, can you kill that?” Annette points at the corner halfway up the wall.
“Leave it alone, Annette. Probably a wolf spider. They help keep the house pest-free. They don’t hurt any.” He bobs the packet of tea up and down in his cup, trying to pull strength from it into the hot water. She always wants him to kill spiders.
“Doesn’t look like one,” she grumbles, passing by him in a blur of color and jangling.
He lets the packet slide down to the bottom and slurps carefully, sucking heat from mustache gone grey. He looks over at the fold between the two walls, freezes. A tiny twig of a creature reaches and curles its way upward toward the ceiling.
So stupid. He can pick up spiders and dump them outside; why do silverfish affect him like this? They’re so delicate. They can’t bite. When they’re crushed they become tiny bars of armor and pasty gore.
His hands go slick. There is something in the way it flutters its feathery antennae, tiny legs sprouting like hairs from its body, rippling like centipedes. A memory from bad trips past, when he’d entered a darker himself and was unable to find the exit for a little while. The world had tied him up with gossamer strings and shimmered around him and took his breath and his sight, and things crawled upon him that were just like this silverfish.
He grabs paper towels in his hand, too many, and approaches the wall. His chest begins to tighten.
The oak tree probably doesn’t need me at all; it’s been there for generations. But it’s alone on this plateau, and it’s special. I’ve watered it every few days, laboring under this arid sun with a sloshing bucket in my hands. Today’s the last day. Sam Conrad’s come back to Rainbow Gulch, and Sam Conrad needs to die.
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From Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s “Children of the Sky”:
During the day the mud on their bodies dries and flakes off but leaves a residue of grime on their skin like a darkening mold that might not ever be expunged, just as their own destiny on the streets, which fate has forged, cannot be changed even if they bathe one hundred times a day in the slowly moving river whose dark waters are further darkened by pitch-black oil from some unknown source, carrying with its slowly moving course clutters of plastic refuse or an unidentified human corpse that is ignored by all until it has bloated with rot like a cat’s carcass with its distended belly bobbing on the water, no one knowing who the person might have been or whether he or she had died alone in some unidentified place and had been given no burial nor awarded a ceremony of any kind, even though it’s probably better to die and be freed from the solitude of streets so packed with people that none of the passengers in the passing cars are able to understand even a trifling of the suffering apparent outside, because in doing all they can to eschew such knowledge and free themselves from any kind of curiosity, they prefer not to take notice of the bleakness of poverty that stands right before their eyes with saddened faces, their hands extended toward them with other faces that are similarly obscure, mouthing unknown songs while clapping their hands.
