Cadence Skye Harrison has Texas roots dating back six generations. She currently resides in Corpus Christi. She is an avid lover of Mother Nature, yoga, coffee, and kindness.
There are no obscurities when it comes to grief.
It is simply a part of you.
It’s the pit of a stone fruit, lying in the center of your perfect peach.
It’s the light leaking out from a break in a cloud,
causing shadows to dance on your brightest moments.
It’s the aging of your hands,
worn and weary,
with the creases growing more evident as the years pass,
reaching for that peach – that tender, ripe peach – wishing
they could share it with you over a bowl of Blue Bell.
It’s their soft leather chair,
mahogany, and impressed with the memory of their seat,
remaining empty on Christmas Day.
It’s celebrating their would-be birthdays on a cedar plank deck
built inches above the Gulf,
with no one there to blow out the candles,
besides the brackish bay breeze.
It’s finding old photos
and wanting to share them with the world,
because then – maybe – it would stand as a testament
of their life’s meaning.
Maybe.
But it will never suffice for feeling their laughter
fill an entire room,
or picking Fredericksburg peaches
together
on the side of the road,
or having them walk you down the aisle,
all dressed in white,
on your wedding day.
No, there are no obscurities
when it comes to grief;
it is simply a part of you.
Heal me beneath the moon and the sea.
May the crashing waves devour my fears
and wrap me in a cocoon of the unknown,
spun like a dreidel of silk and sound
as harmonies of locusts lull this loud dream.
Blood orange moon, mother moon, longest of the century,
gleam unto my bare breasts that have changed shape
in aging and nourishing of my sweet babe;
see me for not the hundreds of versions there are that exist of me within each stranger,
but for who I am. Who I am.
A wandress shifting shadows,
morphing under the wings of sky,
soles of my feet calloused from kissing the red Texas dirt,
pulling the earth toward me as if it were an Afghan in the dead of winter’s night.
An Afghan knitted by the hands of my great grandmother who lived through The Great Depression,
starved through poverty, hunger knowing no race.
She praised her God on a day when she had animal fat to cook in her beans,
trekked across dry desert, cactus country, shielding her cooing infant from the blistering sun,
all to give me this life. This life.
With only the fire cracking and smoldering mesquite branches to warm my bones.
I sharply inhale this vision, and exhale the realization of permanence:
because of her, and the bloodline coming before me,
because of these ancestors who fought for this life,
healing under this moon,
because of them, I am eternal.
as my twenty-seventh lap around the great star comes to a close, i am humbled by the beauty earth holds, gentle and cosmic in the palm of my hands; by the fragility of existence in this form, fleeting and weightless; by the binding force of love that resides within each of us, waiting to be awoken; and within all the dreams sung by the hum that my bleeding heart beats i welcome peace and stillness, yet remain open and willing for my soul to be stirred, never shying or shielding from the rain but allowing it to wash over my bones, and flesh, and eyes to pour out the hundreds of paths i chose not to walk, and breathe into the one i plucked, the fruit of what is. this path i’ll water and wander for all of my years to come, for i’ve only just begun the story that has yet to be spun.
Baby Bloomer
Once a speck of stardust, then a sprouting seed,
blooming from the verdant, velvet covered leaves.
Your size a Meyer Lemon, canary and so sweet,
your skin the perfect hue, heart a steady beat.
Gentle in this iris, curled up serenely,
your rosy cheeks and chin, drawn down to your knees.
The beauty of becoming: budding, bittersweet,
eclipsing space and time, when our eyes finally meet.
Petals lending warmth, awaiting your first breath,
an act that will transcend, even my own death.
Cameron Hoormann grew up in South Carolina but now resides in Corpus Christi, TX. He feels at home in the cobwebbed corners of the gothic castles in his mind.
My dad’s favorite holiday was Halloween, which was strange because he didn’t seem like the type. For eleven months out of the year, he was a total cotton puff. He’d scream when he saw a spider in the house, but starting on October 1st, he was all about witches and goblins. I can still remember my dad sitting at the table year after year with many stout pumpkins in front of him. He’d saw off the tops and scoop out the wet insides and throw the slop on old newspapers. He’d take his long pumpkin-carving knife and cut out the traditional triangle eyes, noses, and the jigsaw grins. Dad put thick white candles inside each jack-o-lantern, and the cold wind outside made the crude faces shiver in the shadows.
Every year, we had the best-decorated house on the block. With so many ornaments about and orange lights strung up the yard, it was more extravagant and grand than the same old artificial tree he put up each Christmas. Dad took me trick or treating every year, and he always wore the same old boogeyman mask. A cheap, plastic thing that couldn’t have cost more than $5 at the drugstore. It had one of those little strings on the back, and dad had to tape it back on a few times. The mask was green and had a bulbous nose; thick black eyebrows were painted on above two little eye holes and the mouth was a red frown.
Dad loved Halloween so much that I couldn’t help but love it, too. He made it so much fun. We’d come home after trick or treating, and he would let me stay up late, and together we’d eat candy and watch monster movies on the couch. I’d pass out from too much candy, and he’d carry me to my room, and I would wake up the next morning still in my costume. The day after Halloween dad would take down all the decorations and pack them away until next year, and he would return to his cotton puff way.
Dad would be distant, too, even around Christmas. He would put on a smile and go through the motions, but I could see in his eyes he had lost his light. His step was a little slower, and his voice was a little softer. It felt like I only had my dad for one month a year, and after so many years of this, I grew to resent him for it. I was born just ten days before Halloween, and the day I turned 11, I told my dad I didn’t want to go trick or treating anymore.
My dad just looked at me at first, speechless and stone faced. We were sitting at the table and he was carving another jack o lantern. He put his knife down and said, “But why, son? You love trick or treating.”
“My friends are gonna play video games all night, and since it’s a Friday, I wanna spend the night there.”
Dad’s eyes started to get wet, and he was doing that familiar whimpering he would do when he was about to cry. Finally, he muttered, “Ok, son. You don’t have to.” He put his face in his hands which were stained orange from the pumpkin guts; pumpkin seeds were stuck to his knuckles. Even though I had come to hate Halloween I hated even more seeing him so upset. This was the only time of the year he ever felt happy, and I didn’t want to take it away from him. Later that night, I told him I could play with my friends on another night and I would go trick-or-treating with him.
On the evening of Halloween, I put on the scarecrow costume my dad got me. He put on that green boogeyman mask, and we walked past all the jack-o-lanterns in our yard and crept down the street, going door to door, my bag filling with candy and my dad right behind me. My dad was so excited, and I couldn’t help but feel happy for him. We had started early, even before the sun went down. We hit every house on our street and then we went to the next street, and cleared it just the same. Then we went to the next street over, and by the time the sun had died and the moon had been resurrected, we had covered the whole block, and my bag was full with candy, but my dad said we should keep going. I told him my bag was heavy but he said from behind that thin mask in a breathy voice, “Ha ha, don’t worry, I brought another.” He took my full bag and gave me an empty one.
“I’m tired,” I said. “My feet hurt.”
“Oh, come on, it’s not so bad. Don’t you wanna be the kid with the most candy?”
“How much longer?”
Dad stared at me through the little eye holes. Shadows covered the mask, so I couldn’t see his eyes; only saw those little holes and the bulbous nose and the thick black brows and the red frown. He crouched and came to me face to face and grabbed me by the shoulder.
“Now look, you’ve been acting like a little brat all night. I brought you out here to have a good time, and you’re just pissing it away! I’m sick of it. You are going to stop all this whining and act like you’re supposed to.”
He didn’t give me a chance to respond. He pushed me forward, still clutching my shoulder, and we marched to the next house, where he angrily rapped upon the door. The door opened, and there stood an old man.
“Sorry, folks, we’re all out of candy,” he said with a smile. “I forgot to turn off the porch light. You folks have a good night.”
He started to close the door, but dad put his hand up and kept it open.
“It’s bad luck not to give a trick-or-treater candy, don’t you know?”
“Well, at my age, you don’t have much use for luck. Everyday my back hurts, but what can you do? That’s why you should stay young, little scarecrow.” He smiled at me. “Now, if you’ll let go of the door I’d like to go to bed.” Dad slowly let his hand fall, and the door was shut. We heard the deadbolt latch.
We walked off the man’s porch and stood in the beam of a streetlight on the sidewalk. My dad looked up and down the street for more houses, but there weren’t any other trick-or-treaters out, and the houses were all dark with the lights turned off.
“Dad, can we go?”
Dad looked at me, then down the street, and finally, his head slumped forward to the ground.
“Ok,” he said, defeated. He took the mask off and held it in his hands. Suddenly, he threw it at the old man’s house, but the pathetic thing didn’t make it far and fell face down in the grass.
We got home, and dad went to the couch with the full candy bag and turned on the TV to the monster movie channel and said, “Take a seat, sport.”
“Nah, I’m gonna go to sleep.”
I left dad sitting in the glow of the TV and went upstairs. I took off my costume and lay down in bed. I fell asleep to the sound of old monsters moaning and candy wrappers rustling. Dad took the Halloween decorations down the next day and never put them back up; he packed them away in cardboard boxes in the corner of the garage and left them to rot. My dad took great care of me for all my life, but I never saw him truly happy ever again.
It was sundown and the desert sand was the color of blood. Cliffton Barnes was fleeing on foot from the vengeful posse who were chasing him through the desert. He had run his horse to death the previous day. He was wanted for the murder of Jessica Smithwick. Above his head two vultures were circling the sky, waiting for the dead man walking to walk no more. The rising pale moon behind him looked like a tombstone and the man in the moon winked at Cliffton and welcomed him to his new home. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the charge of men on horses gaining on him.
He kept running, short of breath and with trembling legs, and his mind was only on one thing. Jessica Smithwick with her green eyes and matching green dress. How those eyes turned black when he took her life. Her rosy face had turned as pale as the moon and her sweet voice was replaced with a gurgling, choking sob. Of all the things he had done, that was one he wished he hadn’t done.
Now, he saw her ahead of him in the desert, dancing on the sand. She was happy again. But then she saw him, and she screamed. He reached out to her and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sor-”, and he was cut off as he tripped over a rock and hit the ground.
He turned over and saw the death circle of vultures above him, and now he could hear the low thunder of charging hooves coming to drag him back to the hangman. Cliffton had been running from the law ever since he shot his first pistol when he was 14 years old. He used guns and knives to make his way in the world and laughed at lawmen and gunslingers alike who tried to take him down. Now here he was, cornered like a wild dog, about to be put down. He started crying. This was the end. No chance to make amends. Jessica Smithwick asked, “Why?”
A gust of wind blasted him with sand. “Stop that,” another voice said, not Jessica’s. This one was harsh and mean. Cliffton opened his eyes and saw a brown and white horse standing over him. Brown like the sand, and white like the moon. Cliffton yelped and tried to get to his feet but stumbled on weak legs and fell back down.
There was only one horse there, no rider in sight. One of the posse’s, no doubt. Got away from the rider. They were getting closer. “Get on,” the voice said.
Cliffton looked for who made the noise. He drew his pistol and was ready to die in a fire of bullets, the way he always thought he would die. “Who said that?” He scanned all around but saw no one. He could feel the scratchy rope around his neck already, the sudden drop through the trap door, and the quick jerk that would break his neck or strangle him to death.
The strange voice again. “You heard what I said; now get on!”
Cliffton turned back to the horse without a rider.
For the first time, he watched the horse speak. “Look, pal, you got two options, giddy up or die in the desert!” The horse’s mouth moved with every word, and there wasn’t a soul around. The heat and the exhaustion must have fried Cliffton’s brain. Maybe this was the ghost of his dead horse, come to trample him to death. But this couldn’t be his old horse. It bore a passing resemblance, but there was a dark aura around this beast.
“What kind of horse talks?”
“The smart kind, stupid, now get on and keep your mouth shut!”
Cliffton was unsure of what to do, but if he hesitated any longer, he’d be strung up at sun up. The sun was setting, and the sound of charging hooves and firing pistols scared him. He didn’t want to die this way. He wanted another chance to go straight. To start over. He climbed onto the horse that had no saddle, gripped the black mane, and the horse raced off west, carried on the wind, bound for the unknown.
They sped away, and the posse in the east faded, quieted, and were gone. The horse carried on at this impossible speed, and Cliffton had to hold tight and lean forward to stay ahorse. Every lightning-bolt stride of the horse’s powerful legs threatened to throw him off. The horse smelled rotten, and its hide was hot. The beast ran like hellfire shot straight from the devil’s pistol. The moon had risen and the sun had died and the world was dark. Through the dark they went until the horse slowed, stopped, and said, “We’ll rest here. Now get off.”
Cliffton jumped down off the horse and tried to gauge his location, but he was lost. It was as if the horse had carried him to the end of the world, and now this abomination was his only friend. “What are you?”
The horse whickered and said, “I’m just like you.”
That made Cliffton flinch. “What do you mean?”
“You’re Cliffton Barnes, ain’t ya?”
“How do you know my name?”
“I’ve seen your wanted poster hung up next to mine.”
“What?”
“I ain’t really a horse. I’m a man like you.”
Cliffton shook his head and figured he must be back in that part of the desert where the posse had him dead to rights. Maybe they decided to forgo the noose, and they shot him in the gut a dozen times over, and now he was having a dying dream of a talking horse while the vultures picked his bones clean. If he could have done things differently, he would take it all back. Every bullet, every kill. He looked at the beast that glowed in the moonlight. This demon had carried him through the gates of Hell on blazing hooves. For Jessica, he thought he deserved it.
“Go ahead and rest,” the horse said. “We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
“Please go away,” said Cliffton. “Just let me die.”
The horse laughed, a cruel sound that only a human could make. The horse got on its side and closed its eyes. Cliffton lay on the cold, hard ground and stared at the tombstone moon and wished it would just fall to the earth and crush him and this horse and the entire world. Closing his eyes, he saw Jessica Smithwick, dancing and laughing in her green dress. He opened his eyes and stared at the distant stars, too far away to help him. Finally, he passed out, and the darkness wrapped him like a second skin.
One long nightmare repeated itself.
A hard hoof in his shoulder woke him. “Get up,” said the horse.
Cliffton jerked awake and stood up. The surrounding desert was empty, save for themselves. “Where are we?”
“The land of salvation.”
“Why did you help me?”
“Because you’re the type of ornery cuss I need; Cliffton Barnes, killer, robber, rustler.” The horse listed off Cliffton’s crimes like they were awards. It was true, though. Cliffton’s gun was quick and sure. But he didn’t kill Jessica with a gun. It wasn’t over a card game or during a hold up. “I was lucky when I saw you. Best thing that’s happened to me these past few days. Here I was running through the desert like something was calling me and then I see you, Cliffton Barnes, running from the law. What did ya do this time? Shoot the sheriff?”
“No.”
“Well, I hope you still have some bullets in that gun. There are two men I want dead. I need you to help me. You do that, it’ll pay you nicely.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere with you.”
“Is that the thanks I get for saving your life? I seem to remember you crying in the desert with a noose practically around your neck. You wanna run off now? You think you could outrun me?”
Cliffton placed his hand on the iron at his right side.
“Don't bother," said the horse. "You have no idea where you're at, and you'll die before you find water. I can take you to town."
The wind groaned, and the horse's mane shivered. Cliffton had never had a problem drawing his iron before, but now, in these unknown lands, dealing with such an ugly beast, he was too nervous to try it. Cliffton looked around and saw dead cactuses throwing cursing arms toward the sun. No sign of water. Animal carcasses were picked clean and scattered about.
"What's in it for me?"
"Gold."
Gold could give Cliffton a second chance. With enough money, he could go far away. He could live an honest life. But could he live with himself? Jessica Smithwick laughed in his ear. Cliffton took his hand off his pistol and let it drop to his side.
"Smart," said the horse. "Now, let's go."
"Where is the gold?"
"I'll tell you after you help me."
"How do I know you're not lying?"
"You don't. But you're a man with few options. Say no, it won't stop me. I'll get someone else to do it. And I'll leave you here until the sand blows over and buries you six feet deep."
Cliffton was tired of killing and running, but if there was a reward in it, a chance to start over, he decided just one last hit would be worth it. He had killed for money before, but this would be the last time. He'd never kill or steal again. He climbed onto the horse, and they flashed away. For miles, they raced until the horse slowed at a sign that read HOT ROCKS, and a crummy town lay just ahead. They had ridden silently the whole way, but now the horse gave orders.
"Pay attention. We're gonna go into town and you're gonna sit at the bar. A man named Fredericks should be in there. He's a sorry-looking son of a bitch with a red mustache."
Coming into town and trodding through the streets, they arrived at the bar. Cliffton led the horse to the post but without any reins, there was nothing to tie it down. The horse parked itself against the post as any normal horse would and whispered, "Bring Fredericks outside."
Cliffton pushed the swinging doors open and walked to the bar. A smoke and a drink were just what he needed. He lay a silver piece down, and the bartender handed him a cold mug of beer and a shot of whiskey. Cliffton asked the man next to him for a smoke, and the man happily obliged. Taking it from him, Cliffton saw that the man had a large red mustache.
"There you go, friend," the man said.
"Thanks," said Cliffton. He lit his smoke and took a deep drag. Before he could take a drink of beer, he heard the horse whinny outside. He ignored the noise and took a big swallow of beer and then knocked back the shot of whiskey.
"What's your name, friend," Cliffton asked.
"Ben Fredericks. And who are you?"
"Just a stranger passing through."
"Well, here's to ya, stranger," Fredericks lifted his mug in cheer, and Cliffton clinked his in return.
"It's good to have friends, you know," said Fredericks. He was heavy drunk and leaning into Cliffton. "You never know when you might need one to help ya when you're down and out. Drink up, friend. It could be your last."
The horse was stamping and crying outside.
"Mister, I think your horse needs tending to," said the bartender.
Cliffton finished his cigarette and said, "Yeah." He ground out the cigarette into the ashtray and watched the cherry flame die.
"What's wrong with your horse, friend?" Fredericks put his hand on Cliffton's shoulder. "I love horses. I know how they think. It's like I can talk to them." He got off his stool and headed outside. Cliffton finished his beer in one large gulp and followed.
Fredericks had his hand on the horse's face, petting it gently. "There, there," said Fredericks. "It's ok. He's a beautiful animal. Good breed." He ran his hand across the flank of the beast's belly. "I'd purchase him from you right now! But I spent it all on whiskey, hahaha!" He turned and stood facing Cliffton. "Yes, sir, mighty fine animal you have here. You ride him without a saddle?"
The horse turned as quick as a hiccup and kicked Fredericks in the head with one of its back hooves. The horse turned around and trampled Fredericks' body, breaking bones and crushing organs under powerful legs and stamping feet. The horse blew and snorted and its eyes rolled white with insanity. Fredericks was pummeled into the ground, a shallow burial. People on the street were screaming, and men from the bar ran outside, but no one dared to stop the horse's dance. Finally, the stampede broke, and the ugly beast ran off down the street, kicking and neighing.
At first, everyone held their breath, now that it was over. But soon the voices were collected, questions were asked, and fingers were pointed.
"It was him," someone shouted.
One man pulled his pistol. Cliffton pulled his. The two of them held each other in the sights of their barrels, and no one breathed.
The horse came running around the back, and Cliffton ran to it and leaped across the side, and the horse dashed away. Cliffton sat himself upright on the horse and held onto the black mane. Guns fired, and bullets whizzed by his head, but none hit their target. The horse caught the wind, and in a flash, they were gone.
***
It was night, and they were around a campfire, Cliffton sitting in the sand and the horse standing. They each looked into the flames. The horse's black eyes were filled with fire. The tombstone moon was now full, two halves making one whole. The horse told him they had one more man to kill.
"Who are these men," he asked the horse.
"Fredericks, me, and this man Cooper turned over a coach that held a box of gold. We took it to our hideout. There, we talked about splitting it up, but we...disagreed. Cooper tried to take more than his share, and I shot that bastard. I took the box and split, but Fredericks caught up to me. Shot me in the back. Shot me while I was riding my horse. He told me Cooper was still alive and was gonna get his share. If that son of a bitch is alive, then he's for sure in our hideout still, lying in bed with a bullet in his gut. I should have shot him twice. Fredericks aimed his gun at my head and pulled the trigger.
But I didn't die. I opened my eyes, and I was in a cave. It was dark. Couldn't see anything in front of me. I walked forward until I saw a little light at the end. I kept walking, and the light got bigger, so I started running. It got so big and then just exploded. When I opened my eyes again, I was like this. I've been running for days."
"What are you going to do after we kill this man?"
"I don't know. But I can't let that son of a bitch live," said the talking horse about the dying man. The absurdity of it all.
"I don't think killing that man is going to do you any good. Why bother with it? You say he's already dying. You can just go on. You've got a second chance at living.”
"You think I wanna live this way? Killing him is all I got left."
Cliffton just wanted the gold and to be done with it. If he had to put one more bastard out of his misery, he would do it. Then, he would try to live it straight.
"Only thing is, this time, you'll have to kill him," said the horse.
"Why me," asked Cliffton.
"He'll be in the loft, most likely, up a ladder."
"And where's the gold?"
"His share will be there. Fredericks and him were friends. He would have left it with Cooper where he could see it. Fredericks would have been looking out for him until he got better."
"Then let's go." Cliffton was done waiting. He was sick to his stomach from all of this but was ready to do whatever he had to. Cliffton kicked sand into the midnight fire and choked the flame to death. He climbed on top of the horse, and they took off.
The hideout was a little push-over shack with two stories. The blowing wind could have knocked it down at any moment. No light came from inside so the man Cooper must be sleeping, if he was there at all. He pushed on the door, but it was locked, so the horse kicked the door with its back hooves and knocked it off the hinges. Cliffton shoved the door, and it hit the ground. Dark inside. Not a sound. The horse walked into the house and sniffed around and searched the first floor. A table, a stove, three chairs, a bag of coffee, a stash of ammo, but not Cooper. "He's up there. I smell him.”
A ladder carried up to a second-story loft, a small landing with a window. Cliffton climbed up the rungs, and he saw a man sleeping in a cot draped in the moonlight that came through the window. Sleep brought him no relief, as his face was covered with sweat, and it held a twisted grimace. To Cliffton, it looked like he was having a nightmare. Next to his cot was a bedpan, wadded-up bandages, and bottles of whiskey. And the box of gold.
It was open, a few pieces were on the floor, and a few on the bed. Gold coins scattered like rocks in the unsympathetic desert. The dying man clutched his gut, not the gold.
"What's taking so long? Did you do it?" The horse was getting impatient.
This man was defenseless. A pillow over his face would get the job done. So sad and weak, Cliffton wondered what the dying man's final thoughts were. Was he sorry he lived the life of the outlaw?
Cliffton climbed down the ladder and landed on the floor with the gold box in his left hand. The horse asked, "Is it done?"
Cliffton threw the money box at the horse's head and drew his pistol, but he was not quick enough. The horse reared and kicked Cliffton in the chest, and he hit the hardwood floor and looked up at the rearing horse, ready to pummel him like he did Fredericks, but his pistol came back quick and true, and he emptied all the cylinders into the beast's belly. The horse came down and collapsed onto Cliffton. The massive beast pinned him to the ground. The horse tried to move on no fuel other than hate, but it could only flail like a dying animal does. Heavy breaths came from the snout, and the tail flipped and flopped, but the blood ran free, and the breathing slowed, and the tail waved no more.
Cliffton lay in a pool of warm blood. He was wheezing, a broken bone had pierced his lung. He had run away from the noose, but his breath would still be taken from him. Like how he had strangled Jessica Smithwick. She loved another man, and he couldn't forgive her for it. But then he couldn't forgive himself after what he did to her.
Of all the bad things he had done only for this one did he ask for forgiveness. He didn't regret killing the man up the ladder. He was in pain. He had it coming. Take your pick. But Cliffton wanted it to be a mercy. A guilty mind is more painful than any bullet wound.
The three of them lay dead and guilty. Their bodies were found and buried. The horse was interred without any gravemarker, but the two men had modest stones listing their name and year of death. All the gold pieces were collected and taken by some nosy wanderer who had no qualms about robbing the dead. Cliffton's final moments were short, stabbing breaths under the weight of all the ugliness and sin he had ever trespassed. Jessica spun and danced in her green dress until Cliffton's eyes closed forever.
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Carter Little is an avid horror fan who grew up in Colorado. After living in Corpus Christi, he returned to Colorado.
A tremendous flag wove exuberantly. Illuminated by the many potently bright spotlights aimed, not at it, but the woman who stood on the edge of the bridge below it. She stood there, dressed in a dark green dress that contrasted against her dark brown skin in the terribly powerful lights that were shining down from below her. She heard them screeching, cawing, some sort of electronic voice whose sharp edges angered her and cut into her like the hot razor winds that blew her long black hair this way and that. Perspiration beaded across her face and on her arms and dark circles had gathered around under her bosom and arms. She had been up there for some time. So it goes. The sweet grasp of death is instantaneous. The journey to the bridge takes a lifetime.
A couple walking their dog had noticed her first. Though they didn’t do anything, granted and in their defense, they didn’t identify her as an individual who was in crisis. She looked to them like any other woman with a listless look on her face. It’s true, she could have been only just worried of mundane reparable things that we all get frustrated over and end up resolving in our own right. She could have been sad, a victim of mistreatment or abuse–a cookie cut printout of the average battered woman. She could have been depressed, afflicted by the natural order of the modern world and its chemical influences. She could have been under any form of duress, and they thought that she probably was. However, they didn’t think she was in an immediate crisis and thus continued on their way.
It was some while before she was noticed again. Too, it was some while before another soul wandered near her. This soul, a wild spirited anxious young girl who in her most angsty moments chose to wander to release her fears and woes walked past the beautiful woman in a green dress who had mounted the railing at the break of the fence. Her delicate yet full and potent frame hung dangerously over the ledge as she stared downward onto the darkening streets below her. The young girl, in her fright at seeing someone in so precarious a situation stopped dead in her tracks and tried to make as little noise as possible so as not to scare the scene in front of her into action. Tightness gripped her chest as her mind raced with all of her options. She opted against calling out to the woman, trying to reason with her. It was only the day before she had put herself in a similar situation with a razor blade–cowardice being the reason she still walked.
It was a very short time after that that a vehicle passed by coming the opposite direction of the girl with dyed hair who hid her face from the world by means of a hoodie jacket. This motorist observed the woman in green, her skin barely shimmering in the heat and light of the late evening. At first the motorist didn’t register to the actions of the woman on the bridge. At first, they didn’t react. The individual in the driver’s seat just happened to be an off-duty police officer. And when the sobering devastation that accompanied the realization She’s going to kill herself sent their finely-honed crisis response mechanism into action, they picked up their cellphone and dialed 911. This paid duty-bound Samaritan, feeling as though they’d achieved their civic duty continued on their journey as uniformed officers arrived on the scene of the woman who had perilously placed herself on the railing of the massive bridge that overlooked Corpus Christi. Black and white vehicles with flashing red, white, and blue lights directed traffic a hundred yards from the subject of the crisis, and lights flashed below. More reds and blues, and a couple of large spotlights that had centered their bright beams onto her as the sun disappeared beneath the ocean. A young officer, his name was Anthony Garcia, had been the very first to respond to the scene. He attempted to reach out to the woman, to calm her down and coax her from the ledge. It had been in vain however. He tried first to communicate with her in English, and he quickly realized she didn’t speak any at all. He began trying to converse with her in Spanish, to get her name. Her situation, ask her if she had any family. Another officer arrived on the scene and immediately called for additional backup as she too tried to coax the woman in crisis down from the ledge. They tried tirelessly to get her to respond, to get her to remove herself from danger so they could get her somewhere safe. There was nothing they could do however, and when they tried to get close to her to attempt a safe takedown, the woman had reached into the open back of the green dress and pulled out a gun which she started brandishing to the police who were on the bridge behind her.
“My Love My Love I must be with him!” She screamed over and over again. They asked her each time who her love was, what his name was, and finally she revealed his name.
“Emmanuel!” She cried bitterly into the whipping wind that blustered her long black hair all around her face in a typhoon of fury and ferocity. She screamed his name over and over again as she sobbed. Her chest heaved as she finally grew silent and she dropped the small pistol to her side. The police thinking she’d given up began to advance; then she looked back.
Anthony could see the terrible darkness that surrounded the woman as she glared deep into his soul leaving it burnt and caked in the horrid excrement that’s left behind at the sight of real pain and unadulterated fury–of unending lamenting sadness. He was stricken, and stopped in his tracks. All three of the officers who’d made it their duty to grab her from the ledge, all of them seemed to stop at the sight of the darkness that surrounded that woman’s face.
Then she fell. It all happened so fast, Anthony wasn’t even sure it had. He watched her adjust her weight, and watched as her head slipped below the threshold of the horizon of the bridge’s ledge. He watched as the space in front of him vacated leaving the vacuum of a woman scorned, only a cloud of sadness in her wake. Then the three officers ran to the edge to watch, as is the way of the macabre and the human fascination with it, as she plummeted to her death. There they saw her in the air, floating as it were, or as it seemed at least. Her green dress billowing around her, her black hair whipping with the wind seeming to stick straight up behind her like the exhaust out of a plane or rocket. Her face was obscured by the long black strands once again, and Anthony could no longer see into those deep brown eyes that had startled him so just seconds before. And with that, mere seconds, the whole thing was done. She had hit the dirt far below in a small cloud and the three officers who stood watching from above observed as emergency services began to converge on the spot where she had landed.
Anthony got into his patrol car and flipped around orienting himself in the direction of the bridges exit which spat out very nearby the awful scene he was absolutely sure awaited him below. He drove with purpose and arrived very quickly to the crash site. There was a frenzy on the ground, frantic police officers and paramedics were darting this way and that. Anthony joined in the fray trying to figure out what the chaos was caused by. He caught snippets of yelled conversations over the cacophony of voices.
“Gone!?”
“She’s Disappeared?!”
“Make sure we’re looking in the right place!”
Anthony knew they were though. Anthony had watched as the plume of dust had risen from right in front of where he now stood. He knew it was the correct place. He knew because he had watched. And right there, in the center of a depression in the earth was something that made his heart grow cold and sent a horrendous shiver down his spine. Never before had he felt such immense terror than when he stared down at that small torn scrap of green cloth.
The same green cloth as the dress had been made of.
By Carter Little August 12th2023
“He’s confessing to more?” A dumbfounded expression struck Detective Gitch. Gitch because Gitchorovskiye is too hard to say in the field. Not twenty minutes before Gitch was thinking how happy he was everyone called him by a shortened name, because if Williams had to spell out the full thing before saying duck he probably wouldn’t have in time, and he’d be six feet under with nobody to cry over his grave. Him ducking down, dodging the bullet, that turned the tide of the battle and because of it Gitch and Williams were able to rush him from either side. Come to think of it Gitch knew the perp could’ve shot again. He had ample opportunity and a nearly full clip. Why he hadn’t had haunted the seemingly endless drive back to the station. When asked about it, why this why that. All the guy would say was the cat made him stop. Told him to preserve his own life, suicide by cop is no way to go out.
Well, apparently, now that cat was telling him to confess to a long string of unconnected murders across thirteen states. That fucking cat. Its eyes. They were creepy. Most cats are sweet enough. Loveable even. Some give more regard to their position than to who’s around them. Then still, there are others, so aloof you couldn’t tell there was anything behind the eyes. This one, this feline. A beautiful example of a black shorthair with velvet fur that shines like it should reflect as clearly as a mirror, but all you see is the dark, empty void. It has eyes like yellow dinner plates that follow you with intelligence far beyond reason. That look. That look he knew, but only from humans. The cold calculated stare of a serial murderer. He’d never seen anything like it in an animal, couldn’t have dreamed of anything like it in an animal. Standing there with a dumbfounded expression on his face, thinking about it made him feel nearly as insane as he thought the cat may be. But an insane cat? Anthropomorphizing pets wasn’t his every day. He didn’t have any himself, no time with the work and such. Crime never sleeps and all that.
“Let me talk to him. Have you advised him of his rights? I’d have expected the first thing this dirtbag would do would be lawyer up.”
“He’s been fully advised. Expressly said he didn’t want one. Said there wouldn’t be any use because we already have too much on him.” Williams said confidently, even though Gitch was sure he wasn’t as confident as he was trying to appear.
“You’re damn right we do,” Gitch said feigning the same confidence. He knew as well as Williams that all the hard evidence they had was a witness with a hard-on for the guy who’d fingered him out of spite because of some bullshit he’d left on his lawn. But now, to confess. He must think they had the whole gambit. Fingerprints, DNA, a godamn photograph of him at the crime scene stringin’ the guy up on the flagpole. That’s how he did it. To the fucking school’s flagpole. Brought the body out in the middle of the night. It’d already been drained of blood. Slaughtered like an animal. Then he roped it up and drug it up and flew the nude pasty salesman up for the world to see. The entire murder made no sense, no reason behind any aspect of it, and Gitch would’ve been as stumped as a cut-down tree if it hadn’t been for that nosy neighbor who swore he hadn’t been home the night of the murder, and that he was always home on Wednesday nights because that was his poker night with his guys, which he also neglected that evening according to her. It was all ridiculously suppositional, but it was all they had to go on. Now, they had him at the very least on attempted assault with a deadly weapon since he did shoot at Gitch, but it sounded like there was more to the story than even he’d anticipated. A murderous cat, what preposterousness.
ii
“My partner tells me you’ve admitted to the murder of Ronald Jensen. That’s serious business. You also shot at me. That’s even more serious business. Now you’re telling me there are twelve other bodies in twelve other states. All killed in different ways?”
“That’s his cycle! He was finished with me, see, and I didn’t know what he was going to do. Not after everything we’ve done together over the years! I figured when he said he was done with me he was going to string me up like that poor traveling salesman. He had told me, ‘If you don’t have your poker game tonight that nosy bitch across the way will call the police. She’s on to you. Don’t be a buffoon.’ It told me just like that, I swear! So, I got an idea in my head, because I was worried about what it was going to do to me when it was all over, and I didn’t have my poker game, so that bitch would call the police. Good enough she did, and now I just want to live the rest of my days out behind bars where I can never see another cat again in my life! And IT can’t get to me.”
Gitch eyed him. He’d never heard such an absurdly ridiculously unnecessarily played-out story from a desperate man trying to save his own hide. Especially told with perfect truth and clarity. He knew the fucker wasn’t lying. And hated him for it. The difference was this guy wasn’t trying to get out of trouble. He was trying to get as much time as possible.
“You’re trying to tell me,” he began slowly, “that over the course of some number of years.”
“Thirteen,” the handcuffed man said quickly interrupting the detective,
“Thirteen years. This cat, the same one we have in the other room, waiting on animal control to come and pick up and haul off at your request because you couldn’t imagine anything happening to your sweet pet. Those were your words, weren’t they? Your sweet pet?”
“That’s what he forces me to say! I just follow orders, I’m terrified of that cat, I have no idea what it’s capable of. And it gets in my head. I don’t want to do what it tells me to… I just have to!”
“Yes of course you have to. This cat that you have to obey has guided you around the country for the past thirteen years, murdering innocent people.”
“Some weren’t so innocent,” the man said flatly.
“What the fuck do you mean by that.” Gitch snarled back at him.
“Well, there was this one man. He was a rapist. I caught him in the act one night, saved the girl he was… well… uh…”
“Go on.”
“And it was great! I felt like a godamn superhero. His blood on my hands, it was like the warm righteous feeling you get when you pray real hard for real long. Like I was doing some sort of divine work.”
“But they weren’t all bad men.”
The eyes of the perpetrator fell to the cold steel table. Gitch could see himself in the reflection of those eyes, and his unamused face. This sort of thing should shock someone, when had he become so jaded?
“No. They weren’t all bad. Some were innocent,” the man said slowly.
“I’m going to need you to tell me about all thirteen. Speak as clearly as you can into this microphone.”
iii
“You’re here to put me into that box. Aren’t you?”
A voice. From fucking nowhere. Like if God decided to speak to you all of the sudden. Clear as day, bright as a bell. Strong, European but implacable in origin. The kind of voice that was listened to when it spoke, given attention even if it wasn’t consented of. Never had Gitch heard anything like it in his life. Never had he wanted to, because that cold calculated voice chilled his blood and forced goose pimples to erupt over every square inch of his body.
“The fuck? Did you just say something?”
The taste of vomit was still strong on his tongue and the bitter scent of it wafted up into his nose when he opened his mouth to speak. As soon as Gitch thought he’d become the jaded example of a perfect cop something came along to turn his stomach inside out with some profound human horror that he couldn’t handle. It proved to him his humanity. Proved to him he wasn’t like they were. That he’d never become like them.
“I was listening. I know you’ve heard of my work. Admired it even. That’s why you couldn’t keep from regurgitating. Beauty comes in many forms, sometimes something is so ghastly we just can’t keep it down. I should know, I’m a cat. Have you ever smelled Perfume? Gah. The first time I smelled it I hurled. But it was beautiful still. The mix of scents so artfully articulated. It is in the eye of the beholder, and I know you can see the beauty in my work even with your mouthful of the flavor of your innards dancing around with that salmon salad you had for lunch.”
Gitch couldn’t deny any longer. The cat’s ears even twitched as he accentuated words. His head moved, it had body language. Voices in his head were the last thing he needed today. He had a fuckload of phone calls to make now because of this asshole and his godamn cat. And now he swore he just heard the thing’s voice in his head. But that’s not possible, a cat talking about the beauty of murder and a distaste for perfume. A cat talking isn’t possible at all! Telepathically or otherwise. Where was he at? In some ridiculous 70’s science fiction flick with a mind-controlling murderous feline?
“You really can hear me. And I can hear you. More than hear you, I can read your memories. I know you got your first bike when you were seven years old. I know you don’t like my kind very much because the neighborhood cat once scratched you to smithereens and your mother made quite the scene about approaching wild animals and trying to drag them home. I also know your first sexual conquest in your teens was a fallacy, and shortly after you redeemed yourself with another girl only to jump from female to female in an effort to assert the dominance you lost on your first altercation with the fairer sex.”
“The fuck did you know that”
“I told you Don, I can read your thoughts. And see your memories.”
“There’s no way this is real. I’ve just had a mental break. I think I’m going to take a vacation.”
He said the words out loud, louder than he wanted to. Because he wanted them to be real. He wanted to be accurate when he said he was having a spot of psychosis, and it would pass. He’d seen one too many dead bodies was all, and soon he’d be fine again.
“Hush. You’re going to draw attention to yourself, and I’m not finished with our conversation. Of course, I can read your thoughts. There’s no need to speak out loud. I certainly can’t. Though I know and understand your language; I’m still a cat.”
The feline opened its mouth and let out a polite and sweet, yet somehow still blood-curdling; Meow.
“You gotta be fucking joking me” Gitch started frantically looking around the room. There had to be something to explain this bullshit. Some sort of device, like a speaker or an electrical apparatus. Something sci-fi and weird that he didn’t know about must be beaming this voice into his head.
“There’s no device Don. I really truly can speak. I’ve chosen to speak to you because I believe your position could be advantageous. You see, my last caretaker. As I choose to call you folks since, seeing as I don’t have opposable thumbs and rodents are less plentiful than they used to be, need someone to operate this modern food system and procure those cans with your modern money. I was finished with him, as I have been before. My cycle is thirteen. He already told you that. I heard him think it. I heard your entire conversation in the other room. Every sordid detail he decided to tell you. What he didn’t tell you was Why. Simply because I never told him. He was somewhat of a simpleton to me. Easy to control, easy to manipulate. You should have seen how excited he got when I first started talking to him. He jumped straight over the crazy train and went right to believing I was some sort of God. Then our work began.”
By this point Gitch had stopped searching for a device and was beginning to warm up to the idea that this insanity may be in fact reality. He stared hard at the black cat who had positioned itself in such a way to present intelligence and dignity. Right on the edge of the table; proper and astute. He even seemed to throw his head back in feigned laughter as he spoke about how amazed his last caretaker was when meeting him the first time.
What did the cat want? That was Gitch’s burning question. Why him, right then?
“Their work?” Gitch thought to himself.
“Yes, our work.” The voice of the cat responded in his head almost instantaneously.
“I’ve been ‘employing’ humans for the work that I’ve been doing for millennia. You see, I’m from a very ancient breed of cat. One from Egypt. Specifically, the court of Ramses the III. I’m sure you’ve heard of his legend. Supposed to have been immortal? And so, he was. And so, he gifted the curse of immortality to all who he wished. Upon whimsy he would curse legions of men and women, children and their pets. They made him immortal armies that could never die. Terrible tragedies occurred, but I was one of the fortunate. For I accepted my gift with fervor and read and educated myself over time.
I concentrated specifically on the crimes that people perpetrate. The torture they exact on cats, and dogs, other animals, and each other. Anyone with half a mind could see it can never be stopped. But some things can be avenged. Others can be made examples of, so their progeny don’t make the same mistakes. I’ve been doing it so long, I’ll admit, some of the killing is for the sheer fun of it. I am a cat after all. Nature’s most perfect killing machine.”
“You’re a monster.”
“I very well may be. By all reasonable definition. Something that hides in the shadows in wait, only to pounce at the last moment. Some evil being that kills and tortures. This is irrelevant, for those definitions are modern in effect. Entire throes of history are littered with the murder of innocents by people who would be considered far from monsters. This you must agree with me. Even in this country, there’s a whole day to celebrate a man who murdered, and raped, and tortured–all in the name of progress. He’s no monster. He was merely a product of his time. And so am I. Merely a product of my time. And I invite you into my world. I ask you to join me on my quest. Help me make the world a better place, or at least… Have a little fun along the way.”
The cat bobbed its head and caught the light. Its huge green eyes seemed to glint, and then one of them closed as the cat winked at him slyly.
“I’m not going anywhere with you. You’re going to the fucking pound.”
“You really should stop swearing, it’s bad for the brain. I was hoping you’d see things my way, but I see we only have a short period before we’re disturbed. Possibly after being under my control for a time, you’ll begin to see more clearly than the cretin the other room. Plus, you’ll only have me for thirteen years. I’m not permanent. There will come a time when I’ll be finished with you, too. Hopefully, you’ll be smart enough to keep yourself out of trouble.”
iiii
“You know. I think I’m going to take the little guy home with me.”
Williams looked at Gitch like he was nuttier than a loaf of banana bread.
“You’re seriously going to take that cat home with you?”
“Yep, I think I am. He’s certainly not going to be able to.” Gitch pointed at the perp in the interrogation room.
“With all the hours you work. How the fuck are you going to feed it?”
“I figure he might come with me once in a while. Seems to have taken a liking to me.” Gitch commanded the black feline off his shoulder and down onto his desk.
“See, smarter than a dog.”
Published by Black Cat Books 2023
Copyright Pending
All rights reserved by Carter M. Little
Reproduction during Copyright pending period is ill advised and just totally not cool. So, don’t steal!
The Shadow
He noticed it only subtly at first. Maybe he’d move his arm, or one of his fingers, and it wouldn’t follow. It wouldn’t keep up. He’d move his head, and of course, in the act of moving his head, be unable to track the movement of his shadow but he knew it didn’t move at the same rate he did. It moved a little slower. Because it had to mimic. God forbid he ever found out where the thing came from. Damn him if he ever did find out. Because it was just there. Not one day, then the next. The next it was there. Whatever IT was. Or is. He’ll never find out now, because it got him. Just like it gets all the rest.
The day was shiny, blue, reminiscent of every other gorgeous sunny day that anyone’s ever had anywhere. A jogger with his dog had stopped for the dog to expel and graze for a moment, and the canine looked up at our friend, the subject of our story who may remain nameless, as his name is irrelevant to the story, because it’s happened over and over again and I can guarantee you my friend, it may happen again and you aren’t safe if you think it could never happen to you. Well this nameless individual, whose name was actually Timothy Werner, corny name, right? Decided later on that this dog looking up at him wasn’t the thing that caused it to follow him. Because he had continued on past that jogger in that park down the path where he was headed just to walk. He wanted to clear his head, and the day was gorgeous like I’ve said before. He was enjoying his walk, and never did really notice that the dog had looked up at him until he gruelingly played that day over and over in his head for some sort of answer, some sort of clue. As he stepped on the blacktop his shadow acted just like a shadow should, based on the scientific principles that rule and govern the presence of light and the interruption of photons. Acted just like a shadow needs to so one can believe reality is truly governed by a set of invisible unwritten laws that act in the infinitesimal omnipotence of a true law. And his shadow went bobbing along as he strutted down that path towards the few trees the park offered as shade. Usually nestled in this shade was the wild human that inhabits every municipality that’s ever hosted an economic hierarchy. Today the bottom echelons of this omniscient class were elsewhere, and the thicket of trees was vacant. Our friend, Timothy, decided he’d like to sit under one of those trees. Something he thought on par with a connection with nature, or at least one he could fathom with his citified concrete jungle upbringing. His mother panthered around every high-end store she could find, and his father crossed the rugged terrain in a black automobile fit to kill worth as much as most people’s homes. He’d tasted their luxury, and wasn’t doing too badly himself in his own career, which isn’t relevant to the story. The relevance lies back with that tree he decided to sit under. Which was the only strange thing he could remember doing that day. So, there he sat, under that tree. On top of a board left there as a seat from one of the feral humans that normally occupied the space under that tree which he currently inhabited. He sat there for a short while and watched as the sun moved slowly in the sky and his shadow moved with it. He remembered in that moment, later on as he wasn’t necessarily conscious of his immediate wandering thoughts, that he watched his shadow and became fascinated with it. He watched as the sun moved above him and the shadow moved over each blade of grass, one at a time, slowly scraping across the slightly rough slightly furry blades. It was mesmerizing, until he noticed one of the ruffians was encroaching and he figured he’d better make a quick escape.
` So that’s all it was. He sat under a tree and ended up with it following him. In the throes of his later madness he played the day over and over again in his head, like I said before, trying to figure something out that would explain how him sitting under that tree, right then, right there. Just existing in that space, that place in time. Just existing gifted him the consequences that he was currently dealing with. He had no Idea what was on the other side of that board, or what was beneath it. He had no idea what extracurricular activities the feral humans were involved in. All he did know, the only thing he could figure out, was that was the only obscure out of the ordinary thing he’d done that day. And it was the next day when the insanity began. Although he hadn’t realized it. Much like the dog’s gaze bending upwards towards him as he walked headfirst into his fate, the first subtle signs were so subtle he didn’t notice them for what they were immediately and it was only after recollecting those days that led up to his madness that he realized his shadow had become more solid. It was a subtle thing, and it was still disappearing. Acting and behaving just like it should. He didn’t notice, as he stood there at the gas pump, that his arm that splashed across the ground painted of black silhouette didn’t retract when he moved the arm above it and shoved the nozzle of the fueler into his tank. He was too busy staring across the fuel kiosk at the ragged broken-down truck that housed a down on their luck couple who were having a quiet argument in the privacy of that truck. The thought sauntered across his mind’s eye that he shouldn’t have stopped here–that he’d have had plenty enough gas to get back into a better neighborhood. He was so fixated on this couple and the potential danger of his surroundings that he completely ignored the fact that arm strewn across the ground didn’t move until he grasped the completed fueling nozzle and placed it back on its rest. It retracted just like a shadow should, and he looked at bright expansive daylight lit concrete where the rubber of the soles of his shoes and of his tires both hit the pavement connecting their greater forms to the lesser silhouette of their shadows. He observed the elongated and nearly comical effect the late afternoon sun had on the car beside him, the effect it had on the cars shadow. It looked to him as though the car were made of many great mountains and his own, strewn across the parking lot in tandem with the cars, looked like a great island attached to a long slender peninsula. It was then that he noticed his own shadow seemed a trifle darker than that of his vehicles. This wasn’t something he noticed immediately either. His subconscious picked up on it, and he even said to himself absentmindedly “Oh my shadow seems darker, it must be the way I’m standing” and never gave it a second thought as he pulled the car door open glad to be rid of the sound of blustering romance.
The next time his shadow misbehaved was slightly less subtle. Or maybe it wasn’t. After wracking his brain for any remanence of a memory after the darkened shadow and the arm that didn’t move that he didn’t see, that only you the reader know about, he couldn’t find a single one in the latter periods of his madness. Only you the reader will know, as I tell you now, that the disease that plagued our subject, our friend. This individual whose life we are peering into, progressed slowly. It permeated only the absent of his mind, the very deepest recesses and corners and never allowed itself to be observed, until it wanted to of course. I could tell you of each of the other times the shadow didn’t move, or how it began to like to stay in a singular position at certain times, for as long as it could before it inevitably had to disappear before it was discovered. A disembodied shadow, could you imagine? Anyone who saw that would scream. Or laugh, or both. Or freeze. Really there’s no telling. Our guy, the guy we’ve been talking about, the first time he saw it he wanted to do both. He wanted to laugh because he thought it was a prank. Of course he did, anyone in their right mind would think it was a prank. A floating shadow, come on. Seriously? Could you imagine? But that faded quickly as he looked around and realized there was nothing there to cast the shadow. No major light source. He was looking at a shadow in a softly lit room staring down at him from the wall while he lay on his bed.
Staring might be the wrong word to use, because of course the thing had no eyes. Glaring might be a better choice. Because the terror that ensued as our guy, this individual the story is about, realized there was nothing to cast the shadow and no earthly way for the thing to reasonably exist he let out a little shriek and instinctively turned the three-power lightbulb–which he’d always preferred over a conventional bulb–up to the highest notch blanketing the room in heavy comforting light. He wasn’t exactly sure when the shadow had receded, or where it had gone. It seemed benign enough, the interaction. And it was easy for him to resign the experience to a combined lack of overwork and sleep deprivation as he’d been stressed out at his job that, while probably interesting to him, isn’t very important to the telling of this story. This rationalization he chose to employ comforted him and removed his worries about the terror that had suddenly gripped his kidneys and tightened his chest, and gave him finally enough comfort to find sleeps embrace, but not without the typical deluge of unrelenting thoughts that now included every so often the terrifying presence of this obscure shadow of his own creation that had cast itself in an ungodly and physically impossible manner.
Thoughts of the strange occurrence with the shadow followed him into the next day, and at every turn he followed his silhouette as it painted itself across many canvases. Once the coffee counter where he followed the exact path of his arm as it carried the decanter across that counter and poured the dark liquid–which also cast a shadow–into an awaiting cup. The next was at his desk, and the thought of the former night’s incident had flashed harrowingly through his mind, and he watched, as the papers he held in his hand that he intended to file scattered flutteringly towards the ground casting many different shadows, and he caught sight of his own. It was a puny thing. Nothing more than a large splotch on his chair as the office lights that were to cast a shadow were directly above him. It didn’t seem very supernatural. It certainly didn’t menace him or show any signs of dementia or malice. It just looked like a shadow. And our subject felt silly for feeling the fear he did at that time. Sitting on top of a benign splotch of darkness he shook his head and picked up his papers and went back to concentrating on his menial proletarian existence.
And he was successful. He successfully concentrated on the mundanity and civility of the office he worked at surrounded by the other smartly dressed, crisp young professionals who he couldn’t imagine having the same kinds of problems that he did with love and life and women. Married men who cared and loved and were loved. Somehow, he was able to convince himself these people who surrounded him were of that plane, the plane of happy living and joy. The plane of exuberance and elation. It’s a shame he wasn’t able to apply the same denial into ignoring that terrible feeling of being followed that seemed to strike him every time he was walking somewhere alone. He never felt it when someone else was around. Then again, why should he? If someone werearound why would you get the funny feeling something was following you. You only get that feeling when you’re alone. Something he quickly realized was a luxury he was no longer allowed. To be alone.
It was the worst in his home. A feeling of being followed can also be interpreted as a healthy sense of self-preservation that’s a crucial aspect of the human condition. The necessity for that primal urge ends at the threshold of a locked door, or it should at least. One would only be so safe to assume that once they put themselves behind a locked door whatever’s there behind that door along with them would be removed from whatever’s on the other side, and if there were something maleficent on the far side of the door the individual on the locked side of the door would be safe from that evil that floated on the opposite side of the door. Thoughts like these of rationalizations and reasonings, bargaining with himself. I’m crazy! No I can’t be crazy! I swear someone’s here with me!
He’d have these thoughts, rationalize with himself. Argue with himself, and finally submit to his own needs and search his apartment again for the umpteenth time for some trace of someone. Someone or something that would explain the maddening feeling of being watched and followed. Subconsciously he knew, he knew what was really there. Subconsciously he was fully aware of his shadow and the fact that it followed him everywhere. Subconsciously he knew the shadow had stopped growing and receding like a shadow is supposed to. He knew all of these things, but he denied them for as long as he was able to. Denied them until the denial became his reality and when his paradigm shifted suddenly his psyche couldn’t handle the strain. When he finally came to the realization that his shadow was solid. That it was just there, and it would always be there, glaring at him. Staring. Mocking him. He couldn’t handle his unwanted company and he began trying to sever ties with his shadow but nothing worked. How can you cut off what isn’t actually attached?
Darkness was his answer. He knew it would come for him eventually, he knew it would do something. He knew it would try. Try Something. What something was he didn’t want to find out. And so, he sequestered himself into darkness. A modern hermit stuck in the darkness of his own mind. He walled himself up in that apartment where he’d lived so benignly for so long. Sitting in the darkness both metaphorical and physical so his shadow could not exist for fear of what it may do. He sat that way, as his apartment grew filthy and infested, as he chose to see nothing and wouldn’t brighten the space for any reason whatsoever. Nobody came, nobody questioned his disappearance until the smell became unbearable and the neighbors called the police. Thinking him dead and decomposing they had the landlord open the door.
There they found him sitting in a circle of his own waste muttering “NO LEAVE ME ALONE YOU’RE GOING TO LET IT OUT” He said these words over and over again in rapid succession as the police tried to reason with him. Then he raised the weight he’d had that had anchored him to reality. The only thing in his possession that he thought might be able to stop the beast if it ever truly escaped.
He heard them scream, and he heard the blasts of several rounds of gunfire and felt the fiery sear of his retribution tear through his emaciated body as he fell.
Perhaps they set him free.
Cary W. Tucker is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® who works as a paraplanner when he is not engaged in creative writing. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Find him on Linked-In
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carywtucker/
Though all the Sirens used to be
Attendants of Persephone
And where Demeter's daughter bound
Gardenias sprang up from the ground,
But then of all the nymphs alone
Had gentle Pediada shone
As one who loves to nip and wear
The fragrant flowers in her hair.
Such fine perfume did Pyrgos sense
And follow over fold and fence
Until he reached the hidden glade
Where lovely Pediada played.
He watched her bright, white blossoms raise—
A snip to star and more to blaze—
And once a garland graced her mane,
Go galloping along the lane.
Her graceful movements and her smile
The shepherd stayed to watch a while.
Just briefly did he meet her eye,
For ere he chanced to wave goodbye,
A centaur cantered 'cross the lea
And carried the fair nymph away.
So, lacking Heracles' great bow,
He was resigned to let her go.
Long months did Pyrgos search in vain
For both the goddess and her train.
In grief, he walked along the beach
With Pediada out of reach
But swiftly turned to fetch his fid,
For something he caught sight of did
His hope in finding her restore:
Gardenia blossoms washed ashore.
Against the current, quick he sailed
That Pediada might be hailed,
For Pyrgos knew the eddies well
And piloted as if by spell.
He traced through waters rough and vile
Back to the Anthemoessa isle,
And as he leapt out like a fox,
His dinghy dashed against the rocks.
Not far above the ocean brine,
The bitter Sirens stood in line.
Intent on turning rotten deeds,
They cursed the pomegranate seeds
And prayed for metamorphosis
In voices sour with emphasis,
From Naiad to foul, feathered form,
To slay men like a scalding storm.
Whereas the nymphs now granted wings
Would lure him as a temptress sings,
To such sounds he could not succumb
Since Pyrgos was both deaf and dumb,
But Pediada, yet unchanged,
Looked on from where the Sirens ranged.
Ensuring she would understand,
He wrote his plea upon the sand:
Think not that I would you forsake
As Hades did your mistress take;
See though I can not speak or hear,
Yet many mortals hold me dear.
You are too sweet to lure and slay,
And I have traveled all this way
To help you in escaping from
The monster that you might become.
Then tears of joy came to her eyes
On reading words so kind and wise,
And rather than give in to hate,
She found the strength to choose her fate.
She left the tarnished birds of prey
And walking to where Pyrgos lay,
Bestowed a kiss upon his cheek,
And Pyrgos suddenly could speak!
Together fast they turned to flee
And dived into the open sea,
But as they tried to swim away
The Sirens wailed out in dismay.
Still, Pediada was not swayed
And could continue unafraid,
But Pyrgos paused in utter fear:
The Sirens' song he now could hear!
Thus, Pediada swam along,
And raised her joyous voice in song.
As Orpheus before the mast,
She sang 'til they were safely past,
But even with the Sirens gone,
Cold hours threatened ere warm dawn:
Though land was not so far away,
Sheer cliffs stretched out beyond the bay.
While daunted by the walls of stone,
The couple had not been alone,
For moonlight split the ocean shield—
An argent pale on sable field—
And smiling on the forlorn pair,
Selene drew in the tidal air.
As soon the waters quickly rose,
They crawled on shore to find repose.
With peaceful sleep, they both awoke,
But Pyrgos first arose and spoke:
"The time has come for me to go.
Such is immortal life, I know
No nymph can love a man who fears
The clip of Atropos' sharp shears;
Nevertheless, I was so glad
To comfort you when times were bad.
"Your gratitude has lifted me
More than the moon just raised the sea.
If you should need a friend to find,
I will be sailing right behind."
Then, heading towards the distant dock,
Off Pyrgos went to tend his flock,
But she sat on the coastal shelf
And wrote of Pyrgos and herself.
Once Pediada's ode was done,
She praised the sister of the sun
By donning dress inspired by
The shining orb of midnight sky
And teaching local youth to sing—
Her lyrics through the hills did ring—
And so she grew to great renown,
The Siren in the silver gown.
I met an elf named Fogelnacht who stalked the woods
Alone at night
With silver hair, a mithril sword, and hooded cloak—
A ranger knight.
He would keep so still, keep so still,
But then suddenly he flew.
I saw him in the trees beyond the castle wall
Outside of town.
He looked upon me with his owlish eyes of age
And swooped right down.
He took my hand, took my hand,
Lead me off the forest path.
O Falel Fogelnacht,
O Falel Fogelnacht,
O Falel Fogelnacht,
Fly!
He said his name was Fogelnacht the woodland elf,
Or just Falel.
He grabbed his bow, let fly a shaft, and slayed a beast;
He shot so well.
He soon lit a fire, lit a fire,
Cooked and told me his dark tale.
"A jealous prince once set all of these woods ablaze
To capture me.
The smoke brought tears for years whereas my horse and I
Had tried to flee.
My horse coughed and died, coughed and died;
I escaped to hide in caves."
O Falel Fogelnacht,
O Falel Fogelnacht,
O Falel Fogelnacht,
Fly!
"The prince had tried to woo a rich and lovely lass,
But she loved me.
So in a rage, he stabbed the king with arrow shafts
He stole from me.
The prince had me framed, had me framed,
Now he sits upon the throne."
"Although the queen has turned her love away from me,
Her fate is sealed.
Now as the forest has recovered from the blaze,
My heart has healed.
I must fly away, fly away."
Then as the fire died, I ate and sighed and said:
O Falel Fogelnacht,
O Falel Fogelnacht,
O Falel Fogelnacht,
Fly!
- Cary W. Tucker © 2003
I was weary from the battle,
And I sunk into the saddle,
As I rode out from the highland
T’wards the overclouded island.
‘Midst the clamor and the ringing,
I had heard the lovely singing
By a queen of graceful motion
Who now lead me near the ocean.
Then stepping down, she smiled at me
And turned to hail the misty sea;
She called out in her gypsy song,
And answer came to us ere long:
Propelled by neither sail nor oar,
A faery barge approached the shore,
And on the deck, another queen
Was standing steadfast and serene.
So leaving her horse by the pier
And moving to quiet my fear,
The queen of the song took my hand
And walked off the troublesome land.
As soon as I shuffled aboard,
The boat turned aweather and soared,
And cutting through fog for a while,
We came to the Avalon isle.
The cove was such a joy to see
As blue fish sailed o’er the clear sea,
Red dragons basked on rocky banks,
And trees arrayed in iron ranks.
I walked on past each guarded post
Out to the castle on the coast.
In the high room, I came to rest;
There, a third queen would end my quest.
She clapped her hands and through the halls,
Music and warmth spread from the walls;
As tongues of fire danced at my feet,
My wounds were healed by mystic heat.
Then turning east, I cast my eyes,
And strove to scan the cloudless skies:
Like rising crest of golden crown,
A new sun touched the angel town.
We met in the woods by the pines and the willows,
Though she was a faerie at home in the forest,
And I was a tailor escaped from the city.
From above in the canopy branches, I heard
The aeolian whistle of gossamer wings
And the resonant echoes of magical song,
But I understood not a word of her lyrics
Throughout her descent on the melody rainbow
To gracefully land in the meadow before me.
Hearing only the rustle and creak of the oaks
And the beat of my rapidly vibrating heart
Which was calmed by her smile and comforting touch,
I mirrored the sway of her hands on my shoulders
And danced in embrace to the cadence of nature –
Our dialogue made through the language of movement
Catie Barber graduated from Richard King High School in 1996 as Catie Vasquez before moving to Austin to raise her family in 2003. There, she homeschooled her four children until the sudden death of her 10-year-old son, Christian. For the past eight years, she’s worked for The Princeton Review in various roles, the most recent as Market Director. In her free time, Catie enjoys navigating life as an older parent to a 4-month-old infant and two teenagers, and she loves to paint along to Bob Ross episodes with her husband.
The message said
Your daughter has been found dead
With a bag of cocaine located next to her
Please give us a call
To identify her body
My fear response has never been to
Fight or run
It has always been the absolute and abrupt
Board-stiff lack of movement
I said no
Over and over
Like a chant to bring back the dead
Or travel through time
Though the words were muddied
By dry tears
Choking my throat
As they clawed their way out
My husband stirred
Shook me
Asked what was wrong
I didn’t move
I read the words over and over
White letters cast out from a green thought bubble
Such a common morning task
To check one’s phone
We had no conversation of substance
For more than a year and a half
Before these letters introduced themselves
To my eyes
Sunk my heart
Into my bowels
The freeze thawed from my body
The shaking and shrieking
Took over
And I felt my husband’s hands around my pregnant waist
His sobs pushing deeply into my back
I wondered silently
How I would live through this again
Her voice on the other end
A soft and scratchy
Hello
Brought my tears to the front
Poured out of my body
Straight from my heart
That was almost crushed from the reality
Of what I read
The sounds that came from my mouth
Made no sense
But the message wasn’t reality
Like a police officer texting wasn’t a reality
At my most vulnerable
She told me she loved me
Over and over
And apologized for some stranger’s terrible prank
That felt very much like it was scripted for me
And this isn’t diminished
Even slightly
By her message twelve hours later
Telling me that the phone call I made to her
Was inappropriate
And that I should not expect emotional support
From her
Because I am an adult
And it isn’t her job
Charles's poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction have been published in a variety of reviews and anthologized in a number of books, and he has written two plays and a novel, CHAGFORD REVISITED. See his website. Read a longer bio at the end of this section.
Prologue: The Retriever
The large, black retriever bounded through the streets of Old Town, its nose raised. It stopped behind the baker's shop and sniffed.
The baker, a jolly man of about thirty-five, stepped into the back alley. He was fanning himself comically, as if he wanted the world to know how really hot he was. He leaned against the cool stone of the building behind him and breathed deeply.
He noticed the dog.
"You're back again?" He pointed, scolding, "Don't be coming here every night, expecting something."
The dog set, wagging its tail, staring longingly up at the baker.
"Who are you talking to?" called a female voice. A black-haired woman of about 30 stepped into the alley, wiping flour food in hands on her apron. "Oh, it's you Lucky!" She smiled at the dog. "Let me get you something."
"If you feed him, he'll keep coming back," the baker called as his wife went inside. He looked balefully at the retriever, “Don't you get used to this."
The dog continued wagging his tail.
"Well, all right, then," said the baker, letting out a sigh of exasperation that didn't sound all that sincere. "Come here then." The dog his wife called Lucky came over and let the baker scratch him behind the ears. Lucky closed eyes and whimpered blissfully. The baker kept this up until his wife returned.
"This is all we've got," she said. "I'm afraid they're a little bit burned, which is why they're left. We usually run out of meat pies. Today is your lucky day." She laughed. "That's funny. Lucky is lucky!" She held out a slightly blackened meat pie.
"It's not like he can understand you, Beth."
The dog gently took the meat pie from the woman's hand, and then bolted it down. Satisfied, he nuzzled the woman's side, and trotted off down the alley.
"Damn that dog" growled the baker, affectionately.
Two children, a boy and a girl about three and four, were playing in the market one lane over. They trailed behind their harried mother, who'd brought them along while she tried to buy vegetables for that night's meal. The children had brought a ball along and were tossing it back and forth.
"Look how far I can throw it!" called the tow-headed boy, and threw the ball over his sister's head and into the street.
"I get it," squealed the little girl excitedly, running after it.
A carriage, driven by a coachman who'd just been chewed out by his employer, came around the corner a little too quickly. The horrified driver just had time to see a red-headed little girl dart out into the street after a ball right in front of his horses. He pulled back on his reins, desperately. He knew he could never stop in time.
A large black dog came out of nowhere, placing his side on the little girl and herding her back out of the way and clear of the horse. The carriage came to a stop a few yards past. The driver turned around to see what happened to the little girl, just in time to see the dog carrying the ball between its teeth and dropping it at her the feet.
She picked it up, and then look at her hands. "Sticky!" she complained, then ran back to her brother. The dog trotted off.
The coachman said a silent prayer thanks.
Later, a heavily built man wearing the apron of a hod carrier stumbled out of an inn. He staggered around, peering myopically. He didn't know where to go. He looked around insensible.
A large black dog came up to him and gently grabbed is apron, tugging on it.
"What?" grumbled the man. He aimed a kick at the dog, who easily avoided it.
The man barely caught himself before falling. The dog stayed out of reach.
The hod carrier stared at the dog for perhaps a minute, and then said, “I know you. I see you around our house. Are you trying to tell me how to get home?"
A bark.
"Of course you can't answer," He stood there, swaying, then turned toward the dog and said, "Don't tell my wife, but I don't remember the way home."
Cautiously, the dog came forward, and gave the apron another careful tug. This time the man murmured, "All right, all right, I'm coming."
The dog led the man home.
Toward midnight, when the streets of Old Town were mostly clear, the dog trotted up to the fence of a monastery. He located a hole, scrambled underneath, and ran through the yard, sniffing to make sure things were in good order. He went to the corner of the building, raised his right rear leg, and urinated. He surveyed the yard one more time, then trotted over to a barrel that was set under a window. He scrambled up on the barrel, nudged a shutter open, and leapt into the room.
Inside it was dim, but he could see clearly by the moonlight streaming in through the window.
A robe lay on the floor, and he nuzzled into the bottom opening of it. Once he crawled inside, he took a deep breath and began to change. After a few minutes, a tall, muscular, dark-haired man clad in a priest's robes stood where the dog had been.
A knock came at the door.
"I'll be there in a moment," said the tall man grabbing an unlit candle, stepping to the door, and opening it.
"So you're back, Brother Phyllyp," said an older priest, thin, wispy hair, pale skin, and ready smile visible from the light of the taper he was holding.
Phyllyp took a moment to touch the candle he was holding against flame on the father's taper, lighting it. "Right on time, Father Hubert."
Phyllyp waved the older man to the simple wooden chair, and sat on the bed himself. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a small chest where Phyllyp kept his robes and the very few personal items he owned. A book lay on the chest.
Hubert looked at the bare walls. The only decoration was an icon of the Saint Cuthbert, their Order's founder, who is always depicted ministering to the poor.
"Are you sure you don't want more on here," asked Hubert. "Even the novice's cells have a little more-- personality. Don't you want a plant, or something?"
Phyllyp shook his head. "No thank you." It was a discussion they had had many times before, Hubert's way of making small talk before they got down to business. Before he'd joined the order, Phyllyp once had a great many things, and learning to do without them had been a barrier to his spiritual progress. He didn't want to start accumulating objects again.
"Anything unusual among the flock tonight?" asked Father Hubert, the head of the order of Saint Cuthbert, and the person in charge of the monastery where they both lived.
"Not much. Arnold and Beth Baker are still both generous to a fault, Nelly Larson needs to keep a better eye on her children. Sam Waterston is in his cups again."
"Poor man. He hasn't been the same since his daughter drowned."
"I know," said Phyllyp. "Perhaps you could find an excuse to call on him and talk a bit."
"I will." Hubert waited a bit longer. When Phyllyp didn't add any more, the old man said, "Well, it's late. These old bones best be going to bed."
He stood slowy, with a grunt,.
Phyllyp rose with him.
"Does this ever bother you?" asked Hubert.
"What?"
"This-- I don't want to call it spying. This... Checking up on the flock in, another form."
"No," said Phyllyp. I didn't ask to be born a Warg, Many wouldn't welcome a shapeshifter, particularly in some orders of the church. But you know who I am, and you taught me being able to change forms is just the way God made me. You know I'm not evil, and you helped me to see that it's a gift. It's a gift I choose to put into the service of the church." Phyllyp shrugged, a bit uncomfortable at talking so personally. He always found doing better than talking, and the hard, physical but meaningful work at the monastery suited him well.
Hubert nodded. "I'm glad, but I did want to ask." He hesitated again, started to ask something, then stopped.
"What is it, Father?"
"I have always wanted to ask, you something, but I figured it was none of my business."
"I don't have any secrets from you, Father Hubert. Ask what you will."
"Is that why you came here? Did your family not want you? Because of your... Talent.""
"No, my parents were actually quite understanding." He chuckled. "I think my father was actually pleased that my animal form was a hunting dog." He smiled at the memory, then turned his attention back to Hubert. "No, I didn't come to the church to hide what I was, or because I was kicked out of somewhere else. I'm lucky that way." He gestured to the chair, and Hubert sat back down.
"My family was typical, at least typical of our class. Two older brothers--the oldest is going to inherit everything, and the second is being trained to be ready in case something happened to the oldest. No place for me there. Here, I'm me. I have a place. There, I'm not even the spare. Oldest brother is there, number two is the spare, and there, I'm the spare to the spare to the heir. I wanted to do something useful with my life." Phyllyp shrugged.
Hubert chuckled again, rising with another grunt. "The spare to the spare to the heir! I like that." He smiled up at younger man, patted his shoulder, and said, "Rest well, my son."
Phyllyp closed the door quietly behind the old man, gazing fondly after him. He blew out the candle and lay down. He debated whether or not to get up and get a blanket, and decided against it. He loved the cool early fall. Within a minute, he was fast asleep.
The Cook
This new novice will be trouble,Phyllyp thought at breakfast.
“Make way for your betters,” said a lanky young man shouldering his way through the line of brothers waiting for Phyllyp to serve bowls of boiled grains. Some of the brothers looked irritated. Most didn’t respond or stepped aside.
The novice got to the front of the line, grabbed a bowl, and thrust it out.
Phyllyp ignored it and reached for the bowl held by the next man in line. “And how are you this morning, Brother Ewan?”
“Still on top of the grass, not below it,” Ewan said. He was an older brother; what hair he had left was white and whispy.
Phyllyp spooned a generous serving into Ewan's bowl, then turned to the next man. “Brother Willem, what’s on your mind today?”
Willem held out his bowl and groused, “I’m thinking you’re too blessed cheerful in the morning!”
Phyllyp chuckled.
The novice slapped the bowl out of Willem’s hand. It fell to the floor, oats splashing on the hem of the young man’s own robe. He glanced at the stain, looking angrier still.
Several of the brothers turned toward Phyllip. One or two looked eager, expecting some reaction.
“You will serve me,” the novice demanded, shaking his bowl.
Phyllyp studied the bowl, took a deep breath, then looked up. “I feed people in the order they arrive. You’ll get fed when everyone else here has been served. If there’s enough, because you just wasted Willem’s portion.”
Rage filled the novice’s face. “Do you know who I am?”
“The newest trainee,” said Pyllyp. He was tempted to say something more, but thought better of it.
“I am Lord Ferren, youngest son of the Duke of Brownlee, and a noble of your kingdom of Karys. If you don’t serve me . . .”
“None of that means anything in here, Lad,” said Brother Dyrk as Phyllyp filled his bowl. “You put all that aside to enter these walls.”
Ferren looked around with a sneer—he wasn’t impressed by "these walls," which were made from ancient, homemade straw bricks. “I’m still of higher birth than any of you,” he said. “I didn’t ask to be here.”
“No one is keeping you,” said Brother Willem.
Ferren’s sneer remained as he muttered, “I have to stay here.”
“Give him my portion,” said a large, booming voice. Father Hubert, the Leader of the Order, stepped to the front. “You’ll be cleaning that up,” he said in a stern voice, “but if you’re so hungry you have to act like a child to get food, we won’t make you wait any longer.”
Hubert handed his bowl to Phyllyp, who spooned a smallish portion of boiled grain into it and handed it to Ferren. The young lordling looked unsure what to do, then shuffled to sit at the head of one of the tables.
Phyllyp served the others quickly. He noticed htat one sat at the table with Ferren. After everyone was served, he spooned himself the last of the oats—a nearly full portion, and sat with his brothers. Ewan passed him a mug of cider with a wink.
Conversation was lively—the Order of Cuthbert wasn’t one of the Silent Brotherhoods—and morning meals were usually full of the good natured banter that happened when a group of men share a roof. Talk about the day’s work ahead, ribbing, and the occasional mildly ribald remark that Father Huber very made a point of not hearing.
Phyllyp looked over at Ferren, who was picking at his food morosely. He looked lonely.
“What’s the news from the outside,” Phyllyp called to the newcomer.
“What?” Ferren snapped.
Try to be patient, Phyllyp thought. “The news from the outside,” he repeated. “What’s going on in the world? We don’t always hear much in here.”
Ferren scowled as if he was going to say something insulting, but seemed to think better of it. “The war’s not going well,” he finally said.
That stopped conversation. A chorus of mutters came from the assembled brothers.
“What?”
“No!”
“Have the enemy crossed the border?”
“I don’t know everything,” Ferren went on, his face relaxing, pleased to be the center of attention. “I know that the Mazar and Kozak have signed an alliance, and . . .”
“No!”
“They’ll invade, sure!”
“Will anyone be safe?”
Mazar was to the east of Karys; Kozak to the north. Karys wasn’t on friendly terms with either, but had survived by pitting one another. An alliance between the two meant trouble.
“The Kozak invaded. King Athelwulf, Prince Egbert, and Prince Athelbert rode out to meet them, and . . . “
“And what, lad?” Willem demanded.
Ferren looked suddenly embarrassed. “And that’s all I know. When the King sent out the call for men, my father gathered up my older brothers, rounded up about thirty horsemen and about seventy foot soldiers and went to Northern Province. He . . .” The young man looked down into his barely eaten food. “He left me behind. Made me stay here. Said I’d be safe.”
“Duke Brownlee is a wise man,” said Willem. “He’s doing his duty to the king, but he sent you here to protect his line. One of his sons needs to stay safe in case. . . “ He trailed off, seeming to realize he’d been tactless.
“You can say it,” said Ferren. “In case he gets killed.” He looked around, defiant. “I wanted to fight!” he said, a bit too loudly.
Phyllyp nodded. “It’s hard, being left behind, when everyone else goes off. But you’re doing your part, too.”
“What would you know about it?” snapped Ferren.
Several of the brothers looked at Phyllyp, expectantly.
But his mind wasn’t on Ferren. “That’s probably why the shipments of oats haven’t been coming in regularly,” he said. “Most of the country’s grain is grown in the Northern Province.”
Father Hubert nodded, saying “And Northern Province borders Kozak.” He paused, then spoke to the whole group. “Looks like we better be careful with our stores, lads.”
Ewan stood and proclaimed, “Looks like we’d better do double work in the garden. It may be all that’s feeding us soon.”
Nods and grumbles about “damned turnips” greeted Ewan’s declaration, but no one disagreed. The brothers rose and left, wiping bowls and stacking cups on a table near the door as they left.
Ferren stayed at the table.
“Best finish your breakfast and clean that mess up,” Phyllyp said, picking up the pot he’d cooked the oats in.
“You can’t make me,” said Ferren.
“I’m not going to try,” said Phyllyp, scraping with a wooden spook at the browned oats stuck to the side of the pot..
“I didn’t think so.” Ferren’s sneer was back.
Phyllyp stopped, set the bowl down, and turned back.
His voice was still mild, but forceful. “I’m only going to say this once. Everyone in this world has a duty. I’m a cook. It’s my duty to keep the brothers fed. It’s Father Hubert’s duty to keep the Order of Saint Cuthbert running. It’s Brother Ewan’s duty to make sure we grow enough food to feed ourselves and, if we can, some of the poor who come to us.”
“Menial stuff. Servant stuff,” Ferren said. “That’s not my duty.”
“Your duty—to your family and to your King—is to make sure the Brownlee line survives. Why did you say your father put you in here?”
Ferren looked confused. “To keep me safe,” he repeated.
“Right. In case you haven’t figured it out, the Order of St. Cuthbert is the only sect in Karys that’s is also recognized by the Kozak.” He paused, hoping the younger man would make the connection himself.
“So?” Clearly, Ferren still didn’t see.
“So if the Kozak army gets this far, they’ll enter the monastery—they might even take things from us—but they wont’ hurt anyone they think is a priest or a brother. So you have to become a brother, at least for a while. You have to talk like one, dress like one, and act like one. If you keep acting like a spoiled nobleman and the Kozak come . . .”
“They’ll know I’m a man of rank, and they’ll . . . “
“Capture you. Kill you. Ransom you. Torture you. I don’t know what, but you won’t like it.”
“So it’s my duty do become a brother? To labor? To keep myself safe?” Ferren seemed to nearly understand.
“Yes. It’s clearly why your father sent you here. It’s your duty to survive. If your father and brothers are killed and then you die here, your whole line dies out. Who will oversee your lands? Your people?”
Ferren sat, stunned, clearly taking in what Phyllyp was saying. “Myduty,” he finally muttered. Slowly, he rose, looking at the mess on the floor. “I better clean up this mess, then.”
“You’d best,” Phyllyp said, turning to leave again.
“Wait a minute, Brother,” said Phyllyp.
“What? I have work to do.”
“I don’t know what to do. I’ve never cleaned up anything in my life . . .”
Phyllyp was dozing comfortably in his room, having nodded off in his chair
A knock came on the door of the cell.
Phyllyp started awake. “What is it?”
“It’s Father Hubert.”
That didn’t answer my question, thought Phyllyp, a bit grumpily. But when the Head of the Order visited your room . . . . “Come in.”
Phyllyp rose, offered the chair to his visitor, and sat on his cot.
“Sorry to bother you so late,” began Hubert, gazing at the single dim candle.
“No matter. I know you wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important.”
Hubert nodded. “What do you think of our new initiate?”
“Ferren?”
“Do we have any other new initiates?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Father. You are the Head of the Order. Wise, calm, holy…”
“You’re pretty sarcastic yourself, seems to me,” groused Hubert.
“I’m a cook. It’s part of my charm.”
“You’re avoiding the question, too.”
Phyllyp nodded. “Yes.” He studied his cuticles as thought for a second, then began, “I was going to say ‘I don’t think much of him,’ but I don’t want to be unfair. He just got here, and his whole world has been turned upside down. He’s never had to work with his hands in his life.” Phyllyp shrugged.
“But knocking Willem’s food out of his hands? Being disrespectful to . . . to pretty much everyone.” Father Hubert's expression was exasperated.
“He made quite a scene,” Phyllyp said. “But he did listen about duty, and he did finally clean up his mess.”
“And this evening, he tried to get one of the other novices to make up his bed for him. He’s treating all of the younger ones like servants.”
“Did they do what he said?”
“Of course not,” Hubert said with a chuckle. “He’s in his cell, sulking.”
Phyllyp looked at the lone candle in the room, staring at it for a while. “I bet the lads are pretty sick of him.”
“Three of them, including Ewan, have come to me and said he ought to be turned out.”
“Maybe he should be." He sat for a moment, considering, then continued, "But it’s his first day. At least he should be given a chance to mend his ways.”
“Do you think the other brothers will put up for him that long?”
Phyllyp scratched his nose, thinking. “They will if you let them know he’s been given a trial time. That’s he’s gone if he doesn’t shape up.”
“That’s what I thought.” Father Hubert grunted and got to his feet. “M’bones are getting old.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Give him a week,” Hubert said.
Phyllyp rose and walked the older man to the door. “If that’s what you were planning already, why did you come by and talk to me about it?”
“You’re the cook,” he said. “Men talk in front of you all the time. Figures you’d have some idea how they think.”
As Phyllyp closed the door, he wondered whether Father Hubert had meant his statement as a compliment or not.
Brother Ewan was red-faced with irritation. “You’re supposed ta dig a little hole, put two seeds in in, fill the hole up, and then plant the next seed a hand’s width away from the first hole,” he scolded. He turned, rather dramatically, in Phyllyp’s opinion, looked up at the heavens, and said “St. Cuthbert save me!” and stalked off.
Ferren’s face darkened, and he looked after Ewan angrily. Noticing Phyllyp nearby, he seethed, “He said ‘Plant these seeds a hand width apart.’ So I did. He said, ‘Plant two at a time.’ That’s exactly what I did.” He waved his seed bag in the direction Ewan had gone. Now he tells me I should dig a hole. After I’m finished.”
Phyllyp looked at Ferren’s handiwork.
He’d dug two crooked but serviceable furrows for planting and made smooth, rounded barrows. Each was about twenty feet long. Every four inches or so, two white seeds rested on top of the ground. It was all Phyllyp could do not to laugh.
“Let me show you a simple trick,” Phyllyp said. He knelt down at the end of one row, touched his index finger to the seeds, poked them down into the ground, and then covered the hole he’d poked’.
“I can do that,” Ferren said, and then set himself to poking seeds into the soil.
Phyllyp headed to the well, where he’d been headed in the first place before Ferrren’s antics ha distracted him. He chuckled to himself, quietly, so the young man wouldn’t hear. At least he’s trying, he thought. And he didn’t snap back at Ewan, even though he wanted to.
Ferren had proven incompetent at every task he’d been set. When he mopped floors, they wound up more dirty than when he’d begun. When he’d been sent to help Phyllyp in the kitchen, the whole Brotherhood had gone en masse to Brother Hubert’s office to complain.
The boy wasn’t even fit to shovel manure. Whe he’d go to the barn or the stables, he’d get kicked by one of the milk cows or by Sharon, the useless old nag they kept around because none of the brothers had the heart to kill her.
Phyllyp drew his water and headed back toward the kitchen. On the way, he glanced back at Ferren, still carefully poking holes in the ground, clearly concentrating.
Maybe he’ll work out after all,he thought.
“There’s so many of them,” Ferren muttered, sweat running down his brow as he carried in a basket of gourds from “his” garden. He looked worried.
A little boy, wearing clothing little better than rags, followed him in. He was carrying one gourd in both hands, staggering.
“Here,” the little boy said brightly, trying to lift the gourd.
“Let me help you with that,” said Ferren, grabbing the vegetable from the boy and putting it in his own basket.
“I carried it from the garden all by myself.” The little boy beamed, proudly.
“That you did, little man,” said Ferren. Then, he ruffled the boy’s filthy hair and said, “Why don’t you go back to the garden? Can you make me a big pile of dirt? Put it by the fence at the end of the row of gourds?”
The boy looked suspiciously at Ferren. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
Raising one hand, Ferren said, “No, no. I’m going to plant some melons, and you have to plant melon seeds in a mound of soil.”
The boy beamed. “I’ll make you the biggest pile of dirt you’ve ever seen. I’ll make you a mountain!”
Ferren looked fondly after the boy, then saw Phyllyp looking at him. He suddenly looked defensive. “What?”
“You said ‘There’s so many of them.’ I thought you were talking about gourds,” said Phyllyp, looking at the basket.
“I’m not talking about gourds,” Ferren said. “Farmers. Villagers. Coming in from the North.” He paused, looking in the direction the boy had gone. "Children without mothers.”
“Oh,” said Phyllyp, nodding understanding. “How many came in today?”
“Only five, today. A family from near Huntsmark. Or what was left of them,” said Ferren, as he began lifting gourds out of the basket and carefully setting them down on Phyllyp’s work table. “But we’ve already taken in . . . how many? Twenty-five?”
“More like thirty-five,” Phyllyp nodded, putting down the knife he’d been using to chop greens with and looking over vegetables, grain, and the pitiful bit of meat he had cut up for tonight’s soup. “I guess we’ll have enough, but I’m going to have to add a wee bit more water.”
Phyllyp was secretly pleased with how careful the younger man was being with the produce he’d grown. The first time he’d made a delivery from the garden to the kitchen, he’d just dumped its contents, bruising half of the gourds so badly parts weren’t edible. But from the moment the first seed Ferren had planted began to sprout, he’d taken an almost parental interest in everything he’d grown. He hadn’t developed a sunny disposition, but he’d won the grudging respect of the curmudgeonly Ewan, who’d said “A green thumb. The one has a real green thumb!” High praise in Ewan’s world.
This kindness toward the boy was something new.
“What will they do?” asked Ferren. He’d stopped unloading the basket and was eyeing one of the gourds, carefully.
“We’ll find a way to feed them,” Phyllyp said, going back to chopping carrots. “We always do.”
He tried to put conviction behind the words, trying to ignore the fact that he’d opened the last sack of grain that morning.
“I’m not worried about feeding them. But they lost their lands. Their animals. Everyone I talked to lost someone—a father, a mother, a brother, a child. I know we’ll keep them alive—it’s what the Order of St. Cuthbert does. But what will they do?”
“War’s a terrible thing, lad,” said Phyllyp. “The kings start them, but it’s usually the soldiers farmers and the villagers who suffer the most.”
Ferren lowered the basket to the floor and sat in a nearby chair, looking at something only he could see. “Before I came here, I never thought about where a gourd or the lamb I ate came from.”
“You were young,” said Phyllyp. In the town, he thought wrly to himself, it’s the bartender everyone tells their troubles to. In the monastery, it’s the cook.
“Yes, I was. But I was selfish. My father made sure my older brothers went out to the farms—they were always talking about crops and cows and how much there would be for the winter. I never paid any attention.”
Phyllyp decided he might as well work while Ferren talked, so he sat down nearby and started slicing gourds in half.
“What about that boy?” Phyllyp asked, scooping the meat out of the skin and putting it in a bowl.
“Name’s Ian. Came in from Northern province last week. Couldn’t find his parents. An old woman who used to live near him brought him with her.”
“Poor lad,” said Phyllyp. “Parents are probably dead.” He reached for another gourd.
“Be sure to save the seeds,” Ferren said, then caught himself. “Sorry. You know your job better than I do.”
“No—it’s good. I’ve never met a good gardener who didn’t chase seeds.”
Ferren smiled briefly at the implied compliment. Then, he turned serious. “Ian was fithy. Dirty. Wearing nothing but rags. But he wanted to help, and he’s curious about everything, and he smiles, and plays . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Children are remarkable,” Phyllyp said. “If he lives, that boy will be fine.”
“If he lives?” Ferren looked stunned.
“War is coming. Children get hurt in wars. Or he might get sick. He might starve.”
“I won’t let that happen,” Ferren said firmly. “I’ll . . . protect him. He’s under my protection.” His face was determined.
“Good and admirable. I believe you’ll do your best.”
“Do you doubt me?” Ferren looked mildly offended.
“Not at all,” Phyllyp said. “You’re doing what a good nobleman should. Protecting people their people, trying to make sure they have what they need.”
Ferren relaxed slightly, then said, “But?”
“But no man controls fate. Not even a king. You can’t halt the Kozak army with a wish, and you can’t banish disease, and you can’t prevent famine. Both you and little Ian could die tomorrow. You’d do everything you could to save him—I believe that—but …”
“That’s true,” said Ferren, looking melancholy.
“That’s trouble for another day,” said Phyllyp. “You’ll do your best. If all goes well, that boy will grow up, and you’ll grow old.” He stopped. “And the Brothers will have my head if their dinner isn’t ready.”
Ferren rose to go. “Thank you.” He let the basket dangle from his hand.
“What for?”
“Nothing.” He turned to go.
Phyllyp called after him. “You’re welcome.
That evening at dinner, they heard distant booms.
“Is that thunder?” asked one of the mothers, who kept a gentling hand on her startled young daughter.
The dining hall had grown crowded with all the people the monastery had taken in. Most were sleeping in the stable, and Father Hubert had arranged for as many as could fit to sleep in the chapel after evening services were done.
“Naw,” said one of the old men. “I've heard the Kozak have some sort of powder that explodes."
"It's thunder," said another of the mothers.
“They must be close,” said Father Hubert quietly, so only the brothers sitting nearby could hear. “We need to think about moving these people somewhere where it’s safer.”
“Where’s ‘safe?’ asked Willem.
“I don’t know, Brother.”
Young Albrich, who was on door guard, came into the dining hall, looked around, and walked over to Father Hubert. All eyes were on him. “The Army’s here.”
“Whose army?” whispered Hubert.
“Our army.”
“I was afraid it was the Kozak,” said the old man, looking relieved.
“They want the cook,” said Albrich.
“What?” Ferren said wildly.
Dread filled Phyllyp—dread that a day he’d prayed would never come was here.
Father Hubert looked over to Phyllyp. “I’m sorry, son. Truly, I’m sorry.”
Phyllyp nodded, set down the serving bowl he was heading, and started to leave. Then, he stopped himself and said, “Brothers. I don’t know what to say. May your lives be richly blessed. Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
“Make sure you learn to cook before you come back,” said Willem.
That got a few chuckles.
Ferren looked frantic. “Where are you going? Why does the army want you? What’s happening?”
Father Hubert put a hand on the young man’s arm. “Remember, we each have our duty.”
“We shouldn’t hand him over,” said Ferren. “We should hide him. Protect him.”
The refugees looked scared, not knowing what was going on. Most of the brothers looked sympathetic, regretful.
Phyllyp spoke. “I can’t hide from this, I’m afraid.” He shook his head.
A middle aged man, wearing half armor with a bear blazoned on the front, strode in. “Which of you is Phyllyp.”
“I am.”
The armored man dropped to his knee and said, “Your majesty, I . . .”
Bedlam broke out. The brothers all started speaking suddenly. Cries of dismay came from the refugees. Father Hubert raised his arm, trying to calm everyone.
“Rise,” said Phyllyp, in a voice they’d never heard before. The crowd quieted.
The messenger stood. “I am Sir Dalton. I was with your father when he . . .”
“Details later. My father has died. My brothers? “
Dalton lowered his head. “Both of them perished as well.”
Phyllyp felt stunned, like he'd been punched. First, he felt grief at his father’s death, and his brothers’. He’d been known they would be in danger—Athelwulf wasn’t the kind to stay in safe behind the lines and send men to their deaths, and his older brothers had taken after their father. He’d tried to prepare himself, but, he realized, he hadn’t. He felt the beginnings of tears he knew he couldn’t shed yet.
“Your majesty?” sputtered Ferren. “You’re the cook!”
“Let’s hope he makes a better king than he does a cook,” snapped Williem. Then, the man realized what he’d just said, and started, “ Uh, beg pardon, Phyllyp, um . . sir . . . um. . . your.”
Phyllyp cut him off. “Peace, Brother Williem. You seem to eat a lot of my terrible cooking, though.” He stopped. His mind was racing. As a third son, he’d never even thought about becoming king, hadn’t planned for it, hadn’t hoped for it, hadn’t wanted it. All he’d ever wanted was to live a quiet life away from the court, away from intrigue, away from Armies. Where he could do something useful, and not be given things because of his family's rank. His warrior father balked had respected his youngest son's desire to find his own place. It helped that he’d had enough sons that his succession seemed assured, and he’d been willing to let Phyllyp retire to the monastery.
What am I going to do?
He found his answer in what he’d told Ferren more than once--all of us have a duty.
“Then we’d best begin,” Phyllyp said.
Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. I drew my curtains closed, unable to enjoy the pretty clouds. I lay back down.
I had come to dread them.
Purple clouds have become a harbinger of doom, a sign that trouble was on the way.
They meant my father was coming.
Every single night. Purple clouds. Blushing sky. My father’s visits. Every friggin’ night.
Perhaps I should explain. My father is dead—he died about a year ago. At first, everything was, well, not fine—you don’t feel “fine” because your father died—but things were normal, in the sense that my family and I were grieving—tears, fond memories, missing him. You know—the way normal people feel when someone they love dies.
KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!—there came a knocking on my bedroom door. Then, a voice said, “Mark me!”
“Pop,” I hissed. “Be quiet. I’m coming.” I felt silly—Diana, my wife, can’t hear my father. Apparently, I’m the only one who can. But he bangs on our bedroom door every night, and every night, I’m afraid he’s gonna wake her up.
I got out of bed and shuffled quickly to the door.
“Pop,” I started to say, but then I tripped and fell into the laundry basket.
“YELP!” Daisy the beagle, who’d been peacefully sleeping between the bed and the doorway, didn’t seem to be hurt, but I’d scared the hell out of her.
“My hour is almost come…” Pop continued, trying unsuccessfully to speak in a creepy voice.
I left the room, closed the door, and confronted him in the dining room. “Pop, I know. ‘Sulfrous and tormenting flames,’ blah, blah, blah.”
“You don’t like Hamlet?” he asked.
“Not when you quote it every single night,” I said. “At midnight.” I walked right through him (on purpose, because he hates that), went into the living room, and sat down in a chair.
“I failed raising you,” he said, sinking dejectedly into the chair next to mine. “No appreciation of culture. I bet you haven’t even noticed the purple clouds are a reference to ‘The Raven.’”
“Nope,” I said, reaching down into the cabinet between our chairs and pulling out a bottle of Scotch and two shot glasses.
“See, in ‘The Raven,’ the narrator’s bedchamber had curtains made of purple silk,” Pop continued.
“I don’t care.” I poured myself a shot of Scotch.
“So I made the clouds purple because….”
“If you keep talking, I’m not going to pour you any of this,” I said, gesturing with the bottle. Of course, he can’t drink, being a spirit and all, but he says he can still smell. He appreciates it when I pour a shot for him.
“You are a horrible, undutiful son,” he sniffed. But he stopped trying to talk about Poe and the Raven. “Is that Highland Park?” he asked, looing suddenly cheerful.
“Yes,” I said. “Diana got it for me special, for my birthday.” I picked up my glass, taking a small sip, letting the rich flavor roll around my tongue.
“When’s your birthday?”
“Today,” I said, giving him a baleful look. He’d never remembered even when he’d been alive.
“Hey,” he said defensively. “Time functions differently in the spiritual realm.”
“Shenanigans. I call shenanigans. I don’t believe you.”
He bent over, took a long sniff of Scotch vaper, pointedly not responding. I let it go.
Finally, he said, “So, how’s Diana? The boys?”
“The same as they were last night, Pop.”
“Oh,” he said. “I guess so. Then he was silent.
I just waited. Pop came for the same reason every night. And it’s not to check on his daughter-in-law and his grandkids, whom, to be fair, he doted on when he was alive. And it sure wasn’t to check on the wellbeing of his only son. Me.
That’s not how haunting works. No, ghosts haunt people because they have unfinished business with the living. That’s me. Pop haunts me because he extracted a solemn promise from me on his deathbed, and, as far as he’s concerned, I haven’t delivered on the promise.
“Have you heard anything?” he finally asked.
“I’m surprised it took you this long to ask.”
He looked offended. “That’s not the only reason I come,” he said. “I care about my grandsons. I love my daughter-in-law. And you did promise….”
It was a promise I had regretted making every single night.
“The Promise” isn’t want you think. It’s not about vengeance, or telling somebody he loved them, or a secret treasure to make sure my three boys had money for college. Nope, it’s about a book manuscript.
Yep, the deathbed promise he extracted from me was to get his book manuscript published. It had been his life’s work, his dream.
“Pop,” I said, compassion cutting through my irritation. “Yes, there’s news.”
He sat upright in his chair. In case you’re wondering what ghosts look like, he looks pretty much the same as he did when he was alive. At least that’s the case for “manifestations,” the technical term for a personal haunting—when someone from your past keeps appearing to you.
Yes, I looked it up on Wikipedia.
“There is? When are they going to publish?”
He looked so eager, so hopeful…as sleep-deprived and irritated as I was, I felt bad.
“It’s not good news.”
My father’s manuscript wasn’t some literary tome—a genius novel or a collection of poems. After he’d died, he’d told me he’d met both John Kennedy Toole and Emily Dickinson, and that they were both very positive about how well received their posthumous works had been. Nor was his book on a nonfiction topic that might gather interest—not a book on birds or woodworking or winemaking.
No, the title of my father’s magnum opus was The Hitherto Unnoticed Influence of Aramaic Linguistic Structure on the Development of Early Christianity in Syriac Cultures. Try finding a publisher who’d even lookat a manuscript with that title.
“What did they say? Did they want a rewrite?”
“They’re not going to request rewrites from a dead author, Pop.”
“That’s true. But you could say you understand the project and tell them you’d be willing to do any necessary revision.”
“They have to want to publish the book in the first place.”
Pop sagged. “They didn’t care at all?”
“They said ‘While the scholarship is insightful, the small market for a specialized work such as this isn’t large enough to justify the expense of publication.”
He was silent for a while—something he never was when he was alive. Then he looked at me, a pained expression in his blue eyes—eyes the same color of gunmetal blue that mine are. “So I guess that’s it.”
As gently as I could, I said, “That was the last press that publishes books on Early Christianity.”
“I don’t understand. My students always said the subject was fascinating. Said ‘it sounds boring at first, but when you get into it, it’s interesting.’”
I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry.” It sounded lame even as I said it.
“I guess my ideas won’t live on. They’ll be forgotten,” he said.
“Pop, we remember you. We love you. As long as any of us draws breath, you won’t be forgotten. Diana puts your picture up on the family ofrenda. She even leaves whiskey and pan dulce out for you.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
Now I felt hurt. Not remembering my birthday was one thing. Not caring that I loved him and remembered him was ….
“I don’t mean it like that. You, your family, your mother….they mean the world to me. But I’m talking about my professional life, my work, the things I spent hours working on during the workday.” He looked at me, making eye contact. “You want to think the work you did matters.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“Well,” he went on. “I can’t fault you. You got off to a slow start, but I have to admit that you’ve done everything you can to get my book published.”
I tried to ignore the crack about the “slow start.” Apparently, he’d expected me to start sending out manuscripts the afternoon I got home from his funeral. I was still pretty deep in grief when he’d started haunting me, three months to the day after his death. “I really did try, Pop.”
He stood up, crossed to me, and put a hand on my shoulder. Of course I couldn’t feel anything, but I appreciated the gesture. “Thank you, son. Thank you for trying.”
He turned and started walking to the door.
“Pop, they did say ‘the scholarship is insightful.’”
He turned back, a sad smile on his face. “That’s editor-speak for ‘I’m not interested but I’m trying to be kind about it.’” Then, he said, “Good bye, son.”
“Bye, Pop.”
I watched him go. He never opens the door and leaves; he toddles over to the front door and just…dissipates.
He was starting to dissolve into mist when I said “WAIT!”
Resolving into a more solid form, he turned back and said, “Yes?”
“The whole time you’ve been haunting me...nearly a year…you’ve never once said ‘good bye.’ You’ve said, ‘Keep trying’ or ‘Don’t be lazy’ or you’ve tried to dictate snarky replies to editors who rejected your book. But not once, have you ever said ‘Good bye.”
He shrugged. “I have to let go.” Then, more gently, he said “I probably shouldn’t have made you promise in the first place. If I had pushed myself a little harder, been a little more focused, I would have sent the book out myself. Maybe if I’d been alive, it would have been harder to reject it.”
“So that’s it?”
“Yes,” he said, coming back over to me. He cupped my cheek in his ghostly hand. I wanted to believe I felt his caress, but I didn’t. “You really have been a good son.”
“No,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. Sure, I was irritated that he woke me every night. I’d come to hate the color purple, especially in clouds, even though it had been my favorite color my whole life. I’d bitched about the time and energy it took to format his manuscript so it looked like a book, to find potential publishers, to send out queries and sample book chapters. I’d hated telling him when I got bad news.
But I also got to spend a part of every night with my father, a man I loved even if he drove me crazy half the time. In the midst of my grief, I’d gotten my father back.
And now, he was leaving, this time for good.
“No, what, son?”
“We haven’t tried foreign publishers,” I blurted out. “What about some in the Middle East? Where they still speak Aramaic?”
He shook his head sadly. “I think you’ve tried hard enough, son. Time to let go. Time for you to get a good night’s sleep.”
“But Pop,” I said, trying to clutch his arm so he wouldn’t go. Of course I went right through him when I tried to grab him.
“Please stop doing that,” he said, “It tickles.”
“German!” I blurted out.
That stopped him. “What?”
“German. A lot of the scholarship on your subject is in German. Maybe we could get your book translated into German.”
He threw his hands up, his ‘surprised’ look when he was still alive. “German? I was at a conference once and met a man named Kirchdorrfer. Said he was interested in my ideas. Maybe he’s still alive.”
“I can find out,” I said. “I’ll find him on the internet. And I’ll look for a translator, too.”
He looked at me for a long time, an odd smile on his face. “Thank you, son.”
I wanted to be casual but was choking back tears when I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
He nodded. “Tomorrow, then.” He took a step, and said, “And one more thing. Tell Diana I appreciate the empanadashe puts on the ofrenda for me. But tell her I really don’t like pineapple. Tell her I prefer pumpkin.”
Then he slowly dissipated into a purple mist and was gone. I went over and peeked out the window, looking up at the purple clouds and the blushing sky.
I’ll see you tomorrow, Pop, I thought, went back into our room, and slipped into bed beside my still-sleeping wife.
Thirty-three thousand tons of steel,
She slogged through the gray seas,
Like an arthritic aunt,
Determined to cross the street without help,
Graceless but reliable.
When Uncle Sam invited her to the dance,
The dance called World War II,
She was not his favorite niece,
He told her to dress,
So she could take care of sea planes.
She stumped gracelessly across the Pacific,
To Japan,
Where out-of-ammo pilots aimed planes
At her thick hull.
She wasn’t pretty,
But she was tough,
Shrugging off attacks,
Giving better than she took.
She sank sixteen enemy ships,
Put thirty more out of action,
Shooting enemy aircraft out of the sky
While performing more than 400 rescue missions.
Like sailors, Ships get medals—
She was awarded two,
And the admiral made her
His flagship.
All she wanted to do
Was make her Uncle Sam proud.
But was obsolete before she got home from the dance.
But her Uncle Sam was a thrifty fellow,
Figured she’d gotten all gussied up
Why not invite her to a different ball?
“It’s an honor,”
He whispered in her ear,
“You’ll be a test platform.
We’ll put new weapons systems on you,
To see if they work.
You’ll be the first to try everything.”
She didn’t quite trust,
The lascivious, tempting sound
Of Uncle’s voice,
Gamely, though, she agreed.
Her sailors kneeled worshipfully on her decks,
Holystoning each teak plank,
Polishing her brass,
Painting her deck,
And she hoped that,
Just once, she would be
The belle of the ball,
When they ripped wood off her fantail she cried,
Blushing when they bared her bare steel bottom
For all the world to see.
She howled when they cut a huge hole
On her fantail
Plunging a missile magazine into her depths,
Leaving a launcher sticking up out of her bottom.
It was embarrassing.
None of her ship friends even knew what it was.
The first missile
Made her decks burn like no ships’ decks
Had been burned before.
She hadn’t been built to take this kind of abuse,
But the same hull and decks
That shrugged off Japanese zeros
Took it,
Because she wanted to make her Uncle Sam proud.
But, quietly,
She cried at the burns,
On her beautiful teak decks.
Her Uncle had other concerns, though,
The Soviets were putting things up in the sky,
Out in space,
And the Navy had to track them,
So he added three more decks
To her already top heavy frame,
Looking like a short, heavy woman
Forced to teeter about on six inch heels.
Decades came and went,
But she was always game,
They cut out launchers,
Added others launchers,
More radar.
One day,
Uncle Sam called her up,
She could hear tears of joy
In his voice.
“The Cold War is won!”
He breathed excitedly,
“We command the seas.”
Then, an embarrassed cough,
“Um, and we don’t need you anymore.”
She wanted to plead,
Promise to be useful,
But he had already hung up.
She was the oldest line ship in commission,
For more than forty years,
She’d taken everything they’d thrown at her,
Dive bombers, enemy ships,
Missile platforms, radar—
And now they were done.
All that is left of her now,
Is a plaque and a ship’s bell.
The steel melted down now for other things—
Maybe a girder on an overpass,
The steel in a building,
Maybe a playground Jungle Jim,
Or maybe the razor blade you shaved with yesterday.
Her eternal reward
For forty-five years
Of faithful service
To her Uncle Sam.
The Gods of the North warn
Hell is a hot place.
Do bad, and you will burn,
Smelling brimstone in a fiery pit
Forever.
South Texas sun blazes like an angry god,
Sweat runs rivers down my back,
My pale skin burns, red, so I must hide from the Sun,
Shield myself from the wrath of Thor
With sun hats, and sunblock,
While he burns my plants,
Evaporates lakes and rivers,
And slays even the toad
Crossing the parking lot,
Who dies, then swells up,
A grotesque balloon blistering on asphalt
This is summer.
Gods of the South snicker at the North,
Bask in the heat of Thor’s wrath,
And warn,
Do bad and you will freeze,
In a dark cold place,
Forgotten.
Old Sol, the Sun, has grown weak
Forgetting Chicago in January.
I must work outside,
Stand in waist high snow,
Try to use a metal wrench
When it’s twenty below zero.
The wind shoots down from the North,
Knifing my heart through the long underwear,
And heavy jacket. My hands, numb, can’t work
With gloves on,
But can’t work when they are frozen.
This is winter,
Quetzalcoatl’s anger is everywhere,
Inescapable.
My southern bones fear Aztecs
More than Vikings,
Can always take clothes off,
But can’t put on enough to keep warm.
If I have to choose hell, I’d rather be Aztec than Viking,
Would rather burn than freeze.
Copyright Charlesa Etheridge
Pink granite swells billow
From the barge dock to the distant island
Crimson sun slowly melts on the horizon
Perfect stillness on the water
Socially distanced fishermen
Sit on the barge dock
Still, but charged
Ready to pounce
If a fish bites
Mosquitos are biting
Fish are not
A perfect, still tableau
The only motion
A dark haired girl
Maybe four
Twirling happily by herself
Singing sweetly in Spanish
Her small sweet song providing
Just the right compliment
To the stillness
Peace is punctured
By a red Chevy Avalanche
Barreling down the barge dock
Poorly muffled engine
Drowning out all other sound
A whoop from the driver’s window
Truck cuts its wheels
Tires spin on the concrete
Testosterone machine
Cuts circles, marring the dock
Spinning, smoking tires
Blackening the air
Replacing the salt-scented air
With eau de burning rubber
PIeasant smells, pleasant sounds
Gone
Driver loses control for a second
Truck lurches straight at the little girl
Her song stopped
Wheels catch at the last second
Barely missing the songstress
By a yard
Driver never sees her
Just keeps spinning his tires and whooping
Angry the father of the girl yells
He and another man
Stride angrily toward the truck
Driver notices, and leaves
After a minute or two
The sound is gone
But the smoke remains
The moment is broken
The sea is still pink granite
The sun a dissolving crimson disk
Fishermen still fish
But the tiny songstress sings no more
Comino, Chili, Salt, Pepper, Garlic Powder
The Five Pillars of Wisdom
The Pentateuch,
The Torah of South Texas Cuisine.
Comino, rich, dark brown,
Called “cumin” by some,
Brings the heat,
Opens the airways.
Chili, the deep warm red,
Adds spice,
Which is not the same
As heat.
Salt, the Biblical spice,
The covenant of friendship,
Helps the tongue tell
One flavor from another.
Pepper, glorious in blackness,
Adds depth,
Makes flavors sharper--
Use it sparingly.
Garlic, faintly yellow granules,
Opens flavors up,
Spreads more evenly through food
Than its fresh cousin.
This sacred five,
This holy quinity,
The five-fold ministry,
The building blocks of life.
Together they manifest
Tantalizing tacos,
Fabulous fideo,
Pleasing picadillo,
Glorious guisada,
The list goes on,
Arroz, elote,
Carne al pastor…
The only debate,
How much of each to use,
Family secrets,
Or hand-written recipes
Abuela’s cookbook
A sacred trust.
My theory:
You can’t use too much comino.
My oldest son says
“You add comino until
Your ancestors rise from the grave and say,
‘Ja, mijo. Basta,
‘That’s enough son.’”
And then you add
A couple of shakes
More.
If your wife enters the house,
And can’t smell comino
When the door opens,
You didn’t use enough.
Our faith
Welcomes impure thought;
Divergence from the path of righteousness,
Yields delicious deviations.
Want to entertain heresy?
Remove the comino,
Add onion powder
And you have brisket rub.
Want to stay sacred
But veer away from doctrine,
Creating an apocrypha,
Still holy, but not quite pure?
Remove the chili
Add tempting turmeric
And a bit of oregano,
And you have sazon.
I share the Gospel with you
In all its glory,
Go forth,
Spread the Good News:
Chili, Salt, Pepper, Garlic Powder,
And comino,
Blessed be
Comino’s holy name.
I call her up.
“Put on your dress and shoes.”
“I can’t,” she says. “Prom is cancelled.”
“I know. We’re going to have to Social Distance.”
“But I worked extra hours to buy a tux
And you and your Mom spent weeks finding that dress
And it’s prom night. We’re going to dress up
Even if it’s cancelled.”
“Let me ask my mom.”
The next voice is not friendly.
“Dylan,” her mom says, “I thought you had more sense.
I thought I could trust you.”
“You can, Mrs. Wilson.
We’ll dress up
Stay six feet apart
Stay on the front porch.”
Ominous silence on the other end
“Okay,” her mom says
But I’m going to keep my eye on you.”
As if she wouldn’t have even anyway.
I need Dad’s help putting on a tux
There’s this weird elastic thing
Called a “cummerbund”
And he has to tie my tie.
I use a red bandana
As a facemask,
Looking like a bandido
Taking health precautions.
Mom cries,
Takes a lot of pictures,
Says, “You look so handsome.”
I shrug, embarrassed
On impulse, I go into Mom’s cabinet,
Grab a Mason jar,
Fill it half full with water,
Fill the other half with wildflowers from the garden
And drive to her house.
She is standing on the porch,
My heart stops
She is more beautiful than I could have imagined
Standing in a dress of some blue-green color
Short in the front, but not too short,
Touching the ground in the back,
Shoulders bare
She looks like a princess
In those Disney movies she loves
Only she’s real,
And only six feet away
Somehow, she’s found a face mask
That matches her dress
And strappy heels,
Her green eyes twinkle
I ache to close the distance
But I can’t
So I set the Mason jar full of flowers
On the porch
Her mother, plastic gloved,
Gives the jar the once over
With Clorox wipes
And brushes away a tear
I step to one side of the porch,
Take out on my phone
Turn on Spotify
“May I have this dance?”
Cheeks raised behind the mask,
She says, “Yes”
Going to the other side of the porch
And we dance
And we twirl
And we laugh
And I don’t care
That prom was cancelled.
In my mind
We dance arm in arm
All night
Without masks.
Self-proclaimed desert rat Chuck Etheridge was raised in El Paso, Texas. After a stint in the
US Navy keeping the coast of Southern California safe from the threat of enemy invasion, he
attended the University of Texas at El Paso and Texas Christian University. In addition to his
time in the service, he has worked as an actor, a convenience store clerk, a Rent-a-Poet, and a
catalog copy writer before finding respectable employment as an English teacher, first at
McMurry University and, later, at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. His poetry, fiction, and
creative non-fiction have been published in a variety of reviews and anthologized in a number of
books, and he has written two plays that have been produced. His first two novels, Border
Canto and The Desert After Rain, were published by Fine Tooth Press. His comic
novel Chagford Revisited recently appeared in the UK and is available in the States on Amazon.
His most recent work has appeared in Corpus Christi Writers, Switchgrass Review, and Level
Land: Poems for and About the I35 Corridor.. See his website.
Chelsea Brotherton studied English writing at Texas A&M University- Corpus Christi. She won the 1st place undergraduate creative writing 2019 Haas English Writing Awards for a small collection of poetry. A Houston native, she is and enthusiastic Corpus Christi transplant.
Here’s to you, and trying to forget
My father, who art in nowhere.
Your face, barely seen, burns in memory,
Damned be your name.
My father who art in nowhere,
Would you know your children’s faces?
Damned be their names.
Yours was mine, but erased from me.
Do you know your children’s faces?
Have they been hidden from your kingdom?
You were mine, and erased yourself-
May your hell be as it is in my earth.
I try to hide you as I forge my kingdom,
But daily your ghost creeps back to me.
May your hell be as it is in my nightmares,
Your ghouls the faces of your forgotten children.
Your ghost creeps back to me,
And I cannot forgive your trespasses.
The faces of your forgotten children,
I imagine them happy in your absence.
I cannot forgive your trespasses, oh father.
Abandonment is an ever-weeping wound.
I imagine myself happy in your absence,
And in moments of temptation, I let myself.
Abandonment is an ever-creeping wound,
Climbing spine and occasionally finding brain.
In moments of temptation I let myself
Be delivered from your evil.
Here’s to you, and trying to forget
Your face, barely seen, burns in memory.
I relapsed today
into my old ways.
It’s been five months
since I left this pit-
I was conditioned to ignore
His words, convinced of their emptiness-
Leaving me just as empty.
I would be more
To make up for him. I was sure
If I could make the right meal
Or speak gently enough
Or wear something sexier
That he would be happy
Enough to treat me like it.
I’m not sure what made me walk away,
But I’ve spent five months trying
To figure out what I’m worth
In my independence, my singularity.
I have been failing, pining
After sweet words and squeezed thighs.
But today it happened, a shame
I thought I had forgotten.
Like when I brought Peter home from the shelter,
The way he auto-cowered at the mere flinch
Of a finger- he still does this sometimes,
A reflex.
And today your words burrowed
Through my ears, banging around pinball
Style, knocking my stomach over,
Punching holes in my brain.
“Another bitch that cares
about nothing but herself”
“Fuckin cunt”
“I hate all you whores”
And my reply?
I was my dog, cowering in a corner.
“I’m sorry”
And I am sorry
For you, but it’s not my damn job.
Mostly, I’m sorry for myself.
And I’m writing this down
As a reminder, that the next time a man calls
Me a cunt on a second date
(or a 400th)
To say “I’m sorry”
But to follow it with
“But you can fuck right off.”
Christian Garduno’s work can be read in over 100 literary magazines. More about Christian at the end of this section.
Clenching his teeth
Montana Jake took an uppercut swing
and nailed The Trapper squarely
The Preacher tried to intervene
as he believed in peace + love between his brethren
but The Preacher quickly jumped a few paces back
when he saw the look in Montana Jake’s eyes--
it was a look of altogether rage splashed with
a helping of righteousness
The Preacher duly departed with the words:
See y’all on Sunday!!
Irritated, Montana Jake continued with a solid
left cross and when The Trapper whimpered
Montana Jake knew that it was all over
not one to kick someone when he knew they were beat
Montana Jake spat on the ground and said without disgust
yet more matter of factly: I knew you was a tramp thief!!
The Trapper knew the beaver colonies well enough
and some say he got what he deserved
others said they wouldn’t want to be around when
The Trapper came for his revenge
still others said he should have just finished off The Trapper
That evening by his fire
Montana Jake realized how close he was to being overcome
by the poison vehemence that swells up in his fists
he thought to himself that he was lucky
he didn’t have to face The Judge today
or pick up his pack and make a run for it again
Montana Jake wasn’t sure how many more fresh starts he had in him
One thing was certain
he would have to stay up til dawn
just to make sure The Trapper didn’t try anything clever
Montana Jake sharpened his axe thinking things over in his mind
After a long while without making a sound
Montana Jake decided he would get himself a dog
or rather, a puppy
that way he could train it to swim and catch fish
Montana Jake knew a Ute woman who could find him the right one
and figured he could barter a few beaver skins and a pouch of tobacco
Her name was Birdwhistle
she kept many animals and knew the names of all the trees in the land
when Montana Jake was bitten by a snake last autumn
Birdwhistle nursed him and soothed the bite with her own saliva
he made up his mind right then he would name the pup Birdy in her honor
I sat all day on my ergonomically-correct office chair in my corner office, ignored all janitors and groundskeepers on the way to my bad-ass leased car in the parking lot, bought some gas pilfered all the way from God only knows where, and made it home by 5:45.
Time to let the wifey cook dinner from scratch, turn up the game while she checks the kiddos’ homework, does all of everyone’s laundry, folds it, irons it, puts it away—in between, I ask her if she can grab my charger—bathes the children, gets their day ready for tomorrow. Then, when she finally hits the couch, I have her ask me about my day. Well, really, I just Googled stuff all day, went over the Thompson account with Williams, but by then, we had to cut it short because it was lunchtime, which the company paid for, naturally. Came back to the office, talked about the game with Anderson until it was break-time, grabbed some free coffee from the break room, mentioned to Amanda in Accounting that her Pilates is certainly paying off (Mmmmm) and if she could add me on FB (the OTHER account I have on the down low).
Finally, it was time for me to shove random papers into my briefcase (I don’t even know whats in there LOL). By the time I hit the elevators (entirely oblivious to the cleaning crew coming in to wash the toilets, sweep the carpeting, wipe down the elevators, toss out the stale coffee, prep the filter for the morning, etc.) I saw Jameson, and I owed him one, so I broke out the company card and we tied on a quick-double shot at Nippley’s. While talking about how plump that waitress’s tush is and how one day—one fine day—he’s gonna ask her out and hit that, I slam my drink and I says to him- No way, man, dream on; he laughs even harder, saying: When I brutalize them cheeks, I’m gonna send you a selfie of me hitting that fo’ sho’!!!
Whew, I laughed all the way across the freeway, all the way to my off-ramp, all the way down the street (where I saw some sad sap waiting for public transportation, so I splashed him), and just before I hit the corner, I slapped that garage door opener, slid the SUV right into my space, left my briefcase—I never need that damn thing—and as I turned the key into my extravagant home, I thought—Whew!! Man, that Jameson is one funny-ass dude!!!!
I was on the house-phone in the kitchen
you were looking out over the Mendenhall Glacier
watching three bear-cubs romping below
seems like you said that for an hour
It'd be a good time for you to swim back to shore for sure
I got your telegram last week, I keep it hidden away in my composition book
Giovanni’s back along the coast
read the rest in Corpus Christi Writers 2022
I like this song because you like this song
why is that so wrong
I like who likes me
is that wrong
So go ahead, pull the pin
& let’s begin again
falling back half-asleep to the black & white
Liz Taylor movie on cable TV
I call all the dreams you save
one mass grave
Eyes half-closed
and I can’t tell if it’s you
or the hydroponic THC
You crook your index
and I’m at your feet
you blow an eyelash
and I’m on the floor
There go the wolves
here come the buzzards
make sure to tell the ravens
my heart is left of center
All songs are sad when you’re in love
who would want it any other way?
He still sings in the shower-
like who does that anymore??
and why do you sing in that faux British accent?
makes no sense whatsoever
and why do you cry when you play Willie Nelson records?
I swear, you are so weird
You read too much Plath, you know
She can really get to you
She’ll lead you down a life of Sundays
All love is doomed, it’s primordial.
The story begins and ends in the graveyard
which I knew at the time…
I even thought about that after my first Bloody Mary
such irony at 38,000 feet above the earth.…
not exactly a time to lose your marbles.....
praying to keep from looking out the window, out over the clouds, what agony
crying for mother, swearing my full name, every iota devoted to landing
clenching the armrests in gasps
Touchdown and I couldn’t jump off that plane quick enough
a lay-over margarita, and I spilled it magnificently
meeting Emily by chance, sunfalling by enormous glass windows
exchanging books, numbers & looks
Holding court in a mansion, stepway to the hot tub & shower
pool table inside, fire place outside
blowing speakers and neighbors away, 91.1 FM Berkeley radio-
props, man, props
vikings and raiders
getting lost in The Old City
free BART weekend
La Val's has closed
N Judah all the way down
the Spunset, Funston, Great Expectations
She’s a sailor
guided by brittle stars
and the chorus of waves
sailing on the banks beyond
the barking sands
She is underway
forever skimming
over mountains of ocean-
At the helm of her own soul
anchored only to Heaven itself
Counting every wave on the Ganges
every tomb is another womb
and every time you're checking out
another soul is perfectly checking in-
it's just the rooms we rent...
Find me some buds before too long in the afternoon,
anywhere you are can make a mighty fine saloon,
when the beach is your backyard,
you don’t have to look very hard,
so give me a flash, let’s make a splash,
Gulf of Mexico’s always got plenty of room
read the rest in Corpus Christi Writers 2019
Christian Garduno’s work can be read in over 100 literary magazines. He is the recipient of the 2019 national Willie Morris Award for Southern Poetry, a Finalist in the 2020-2021 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Writing Contest, and a Finalist in the 2021 Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize. He lives and writes along the South Texas coast with his wonderful wife Nahemie and young son Dylan.
Masha wanted to be cosmonaut
she wanted to fly far, far away
just her and Dmitri
and wave farewell to all the Field-Marshals
but now she’s stuck missing something inside that she never ever had
Dmitri, he is, how do you say--
expert with electronics
Masha was scared to death of the GULAGS
one night they take you away and in the morning, you never existed
she prayed for her and Dmitri, that they would make it out
and then she prayed if they couldn’t make it out together
then at least he would make it out
Dmitri, he would remember me
even after everyone else forgot
Masha often thinks of memories that are not her own
like a library book on loan
but it’s not entirely her own fault
she can’t risk looking back and turning into a pillar of salt
Dmitri, meet me in my dreams, we can still fly away
Christian Garduno’s work can be read in over 100 literary magazines. He is the recipient of the 2019 national Willie Morris Award for Southern Poetry, a Finalist in the 2020-2021 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Writing Contest, and a Finalist in the 2021 Julia Darling Memorial Poetry Prize. He lives and writes along the South Texas coast with his wonderful wife Nahemie and young son Dylan.
(originally published in Syncopation Literary Journal, Nov 2022)
I’m pretty sure this was all your idea-
you were beaming with pride over it
when you thought of it
back in June
you were like- let’s go to your brother’s in Virginia for the holidays, dear
and without looking, I said- do you know what all that would entail?
I mean, I’m not saying I wouldn’t wanna see the fam and all, but damn
You were wiping down the counter, your left shoulder slightly up-
It would be nice- a little road trip, asking directions lol,
and anyways, it’ll be a quaint quiet white little Christmas…
the…left a gap in the conversation I knew better not to even touch
You pursed your lips- well, the thing is, I’ve already been saving up
and requested the time off work, and I emailed him last week saying we’d be there
everything’s been settled, but there’s just one little caveat, my love
I exhaled- and what would that be?
You started a pot of coffee- it’s just that we all kind of came to the consensus
that it would be better if you didn’t play any Dylan this year, that’s all
we all know how much he means to you, but it really isn’t holiday music, is it?
I inhaled- how about for Christmas, I give you all the gift of getting Dylan?
You started wiping down the same counter you wiped down before-
Darling, read the room a little, you know? How about Janey Mitchell? Everyone likes her, right? Why don’t you make one of your little playlists with her music? Do you want milk in your coffee tonight? I know it’s been giving you gas lately
Exasperated, I said- just sugar and who the hell is Janey Mitchell? Did you mean Joni Mitchell? Wow, way off!
You combed your hair behind you ear with your hand- Oh, honey bear, don’t be so upset, you know who I meant- I really like that one she sings about California, so soothing, she’s like “I love California!”
I took the coffee- that’s not even how that song goes, and my playlists are CURATED, and what do you mean caveat? How many people have signed on to this?
You looked over your cup- Well, I wouldn’t want to say everyone, but everyone
I put my cup down on the coaster- Everyone?!
You looked me in the eye- well, not everyone, I guess the cats might like it, I dunno, look, my love, we just all remember that Fourth of July weekend when you did like an 80-hour non-stop commercial-free Dylan deep dive and well, I’m just gonna say it, sweetheart, I don’t think he can sing very well, that’s all, I suppose if he sprinted for some vocal lessons and found his range, he could be alright…
The…left a distance between us
Your eyes widened- No! Don’t do it!
My chin was raised in defiance- I grabbed my laptop and made a playlist right then and there: BOB DYLAN @ XMAS @ VIRGINIA and I emailed it to the coalition
We did take a road trip that holiday season, we did have to ask for directions, the snow was falling in Virginia and best thrill of the entire year was when we walked into my brother’s warm house and I yelled out-
Alexa, play BOB DYLAN @ XMAS @ VIRGINIA and she said ‘ok now playing’
Christopher Ashworth is a senior at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and is pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Geology. He has always enjoyed the Arts. His current artist expressions are poetry and prose.
I am broken
And I refuse to believe that
Someone loves me
I can see how this could be confusing, but
A broken heart can be healed
Is pure fiction
There isn’t a fish for me
Once I am old and wise, I’ll tell you that
I’ve got my own back because
Selfishness
Takes precedence over
Selflessness
Hear me out:
Once upon a time
Someone broke my heart
I remembered
Keep my head up because
My father says
Crying makes you weak
My ex says
Love comes and goes
I cannot say for certain
Love finds its way
After awhile
Hope is lost and
No longer will I sit here and act like
I know what I am doing and
It will eventually show that
I do not put forth effort
And do not assume that
I know what I am
Clara Tamez was born in Corpus Christi. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of the Incarnate Word in English and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Kingston University London. More about Clara at the end of this section.
“Would you still love me if I didn’t have teeth?”
“Did you wake up with them gone or did you get into an accident?” Jaydon’s voice sounds a little hollow as it always does over the prison phone line. “Or were you born without them somehow?” He laughs and I imagine the curl of his lips as he pictures a me with no teeth or the laugh I would have gotten if I told him I had no hair, or had been magically transformed into a chicken. I loved the laugh I would have gotten with that one.
“All of the above. Start with me waking up without them.”
“It would be freaky. I’d be more worried about the trauma inflicted on you, waking up with puddles of teeth in your lap.”
“Hah! I imagined they just disappeared. Now what if I got into an accident and they all fell out?”
“That’d be some accident.”
Questions that used to be for fun are now a welcome, necessary distraction for both of us. I give him scenarios and he goes through as many as he can in fifteen minutes. Sometimes, we get thirty, if no other inmates are waiting.
These calls are a lot better than they used to be. The first one was: “Luna, you need to help my mom with Ada.”
I didn’t want to at first. That was what he did, and he would continue doing it. Until I heard the bail amount. Then, I marched right up to Raul and demanded he make me full-time. I don’t think he knew why I asked, or cared, just assumed I was desperate to save up for college.
I press the phone into my shoulder. “Ada, finish your applesauce, please. I’ll be right back.”
At the dining table, Ada nods. She moves her spoon as if it’s heavy. Her face is the unusual one compared to her siblings. Jaydon’s skin is deep brown, and when he stands in the sun he glows. Ada’s skin is the color of sand, barely darkening at her forehead. Where his nose widens, hers turns up. The only thing similar is the brow. Heavy lids that blink only when they need to and eyelashes so long they curl into the eye, like yesterday; I held her while she cried and I flicked one out with my fingernail.
I step into my room and the door creaks when it closes.
“You know how old people have sets of fake teeth? Guess we’d have to get you some,” he continues.
“Mmm. But would you still love me?”
“Yeah. What about you, would you love me?”
A pause. “Yes.”
After that, it’s silent for a while.
I run my tongue around my whole mouth. When I was younger, I feared that thinking or saying something over and over would make it come true. If I thought about the devil long enough, he would appear in my room. But none of us can ever predict reality. I couldn’t have.
The prison ends the call abruptly as it often does, without even a chance for a goodby.
Thirty minutes later, I walk back to the kitchen and grab my lunch box. I peek at the inside and take out a half-eaten granola bar and crumpled napkins. A big stain ruins the bottom from my last day of school. Instead of eating at the cafeteria, all us seniors went to the McDonald’s on the corner and signed each other’s yearbooks with greasy French-fry fingers and hearts and promises to keep in touch. The full thermos of soup jostled around and spilled.
The refrigerator has leftovers neither me nor Mom want. It wasn’t very good to begin with since I don’t know how to cook. The microwave at work only functions at half power but it’ll have to do today. I grab a baked chicken leg.
Behind the refrigerator door, Ada’s bowl is empty and her spoon rests next to it, licked cleanly.
“Ada? Are you in the bathroom, sweetheart?” Silence. I zip up my lunch box.
“Ada?” The bathroom is empty. “I know you can hear me. Are we playing hide and seek?”
She’s almost three but she doesn’t say much. Definitely doesn’t ask, “Why is the sky blue?” like what I read online that kids might start asking at this age. Maybe we both fear the day she does, since I won’t know what to tell her, what would be appropriate to introduce.
“Oh! There you are.”
She’s standing in the doorway to my bedroom looking in. She could be looking at a number of things: my old pink dollhouse now crammed full of books, old knickknacks I can’t let go of like a robotic dog that moves its head side to side when you press a button. She turns my way and widens her eyes.
Two weeks ago, the last time Jaydon was here, we watched a documentary. His surprise that he’d hinted at over text was a bag of microwavable popcorn with extra butter, two hot chocolate packets, and a movie he pirated. We lay perfectly still so my bed wouldn’t creak and every few minutes switched who held the phone so our arms wouldn’t hurt.
I want to study English in college, so the film was about linguists discussing the hardest and least spoken languages in the world. Jaydon fell asleep after thirty minutes, his breath sweet and salty and his head heavy on my shoulder. I was warm off the hot cocoa and with him and that slightly fuzzy film, I felt like I had everything.
One of the languages covered is spoken by the Pirahã people in Brazil. They don’t have words for numbers, colors, or past or future tense. They don’t understand abstract concepts like people leaving and if you can’t see or physically observe something it doesn’t exist.
Jaydon is Ada’s favorite sibling and I keep waiting for her to throw a tantrum or ask where he is. Each time she bites her lip and furrows her brow in some kind of thought, I immediately prepare answers that she could understand—he went away for a while but he’s going to come back. We’re all working really hard on it. None of us like this arrangement any more than you do—but once she’s done thinking all she does is blink. Like now, for her I didn’t exist a few moments before. Every time I enter the room, she looks at me like I’m new.
Clara Tamez was born in Corpus Christi, Texas in 1994. Her love of literature began as a child reading Emily Dickinson’s Poetry for Young People. She has traveled through Greece, Italy, France, Malta, Iceland, Scotland, and England and spent most of her childhood writing songs and filling up sketchbooks. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of the Incarnate Word in English and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Kingston University London. She currently resides in San Antonio, Texas
“That’s nasty,” Margaret said. She had just returned from the showers. She dumped her pajamas and toothbrush on her cot and knelt beside me. “Where is it?”
On the underside of my left arm right above my armpit, what could easily be mistaken for a squirming speck of dirt, was a lone star tick. Two months ago, I would’ve gagged at the sight of this thing with legs burrowing its head inside me, but it was the last day before summer camp ended and I just wanted this one off.
“Jenna, can you hand me the first aid kit?” I asked while experimenting with which ways I could hold my arm without squishing the bug or pushing it in further.
“Sure. You won’t find tweezers in there though.” Jenna shrugged her vest on. “The older girls took them all this morning. Something about doing their eyebrows now so the redness fades away by tonight.”
I rolled my eyes. On the last night, there was always a big dance across the lake. The Boy Scout camp was dirty and the boys there, arrogant. I didn’t understand the overwhelming need to gush or imagine romantic scenarios about them like the older girls did. When they came over for archery practice every Wednesday, they laughed and slapped each other on the arm when girl after girl missed. They were silent when we didn’t.
“Do you want me to dig through their stuff?” Margaret asked, already jumping up. “I bet Christina knows where they are.”
“No, I guess we can just find Liz.”
Jenna held the tent flap open for us and I hopped off the wooden platform first. There weren’t that many mosquitoes, I remember that distinctly. Usually, they climbed all over us but that morning they didn’t bother.
The three of us linked arms and walked into the forest, kicking stones as we went. At the fork in the road, Jenna went left, toward our morning class of Arts and Crafts, and Margaret and I went right. She held my hand as we passed the bathrooms and talked about how they’re probably located that far in the woods to air out all the smell because think about it, have you ever seen anyone clean it? That made me wrinkle my nose. We wound through the trails to the mess hall, the route memorized. If we took a right by the v-shaped tree and continued straight, we would end up by the Trail Stop by the camp entrance. But if we took a left there instead, down that thin, dusty path, it would turn into a longer, sweatier hike to the other side of camp: a hill with looming archery targets.
We were told to always look out for landmarks, so we chose a clump of what looked like poison ivy but wasn’t–they’re not the only leaves of three–next to the bush that on the second week of camp we hid behind wearing white sheets before jumping out and scaring Jenna. That mark, where Jenna jumped and we screamed in laughter, is how we knew we were on the right track.
The smell of fresh javelina poop struck us when we rounded the final bend, warm and stinging. Margaret already whipped out her survival kit, as Liz and the rest of the counselors called it; though I questioned how, if it came to it, we could survive off a whistle, flashlight, a multipurpose tool, and poop bags. I held my nose as she tried to pluck it off the trail.
“Ugh, what did that one eat?” I pretended to gag but it really did smell bad.
Although it smeared and smelled worse when she touched it, she scooped with confidence.
“Children’s hopes and dreams, probably.” She grinned and grabbed my hand again, the bag swinging in her other.
The only other thing we saw on the trail was a forgotten hair tie. I picked it up and handed it to Margaret. She placed it on her wrist like a bracelet.
After all, Girl Scouts always leave a place better than they find it.
Coffee Cat has lived in Corpus Christi all her life and graduated from Texas A & M University as a first generation college student with a Bachelor's degree in English. More at the end of this section.
Tell me what it's like to be alive and not just survive.
Tell me what it’s like to know you’ll always have food at home
And have a home
To call home
Tell me what it’s like to be content.
Tell me what it’s like to drive down a little street
And pull up into a driveway.
Tell me what it’s like to have the keys to a house,
How does it sound when the door unlocks?
Tell me what does it smell like?
Does it smell like the cigarettes and gunpowder from the
Apartments above and below?
Or does it smell like citrus?
Tell me what it’s like to have a yard and a garden.
Tell me what it’s like to have a barbecue in the backyard
That lasts late into the night.
Tell me what it’s like to have a home.
Tell me what it’s like to be alive and not just survive.
And I’ll tell you what it’s like to survive and not be alive.
Poison me with the hope that one day I too can be alive.
When I was a Kid I told myself
I’d never live past 25
Diagnosed with Demons
The prescription was church
I folded the pages of Bibles
Into the shape of pills
Desperate to quell the monster
In my head because
If the bandages from the
Priest’s mouth don’t
Heal your broken mind
It’s your fault
For rejecting the lord
When I was a Kid
I told myself I’d never live past 25
My self-inflicted
Stigmata nothing more than a
Symptom of my failure
I didn’t want to be stitched up
By prayers
But held together by human arms
When I was a Kid I told myself
I’d never live past 25
My blood boiled from
A baptism based on
Biblical Blasphemy of giving my
Life to the lord
What’s the point of being alive if
Your life isn’t yours anyway?
When I was a Kid I told myself
I’d never live past 25
But the other day
I woke up two years past my
Expiration date
Two Degrees and
Not a dime
Not fully alive
But not dead either
Coffee Cat has lived in Corpus Christi all her life and graduated from Texas A & M University as a first generation college student with a Bachelor's degree in English. She currently works as a technical writer. Her novel DON'T DIE is available on Amazon. Summary: Anastasia Adira has read, watched, and heard countless stories with the same trope: do anything for love or save the princess. Two formulas that never seem to get old. As much as he enjoys a good romance, he never thought he’d be a part of one. Galaxia knows love as a word he can’t spell or recognize on the page. All it is, is something his clients say to him after a night of business and nothing more. When the two meet, the real story begins. BUY ON AMAZON
Cynthia Breeding often wonders if she was born in the wrong century. She has a love/hate relationship with technology and has an avid interest in medieval history. Most of her books are historical romances with a bit of paranormal thrown in now and then. She also loves sailing and horseback riding. Cynthia is a well-established romance writer with 49 novels and novellas available.
(Novel Excerpt)
By the devil’s own horns, he hadn’t expected Abigail Clayton to be so beautiful. The information he’d gotten on Sayer’s new bride hadn’t said much. Luke Cameron narrowed his gaze at the woman who’d just stepped off the train. She wore no bonnet and the sun made her golden hair glow like a halo, brightening her eyes to the deep blue of the Pacific. She had the face of an angel, softly rounded with a pert nose. Not that Luke had any experience with angels. Gunslingers rarely did. But…he studied her face again. Her mouth was definitely not angelic. The full lips, right now gathered in a pout, begged to be kissed. He pushed the thought away. He was here to see who would come for her now that Sayer was dead...
Buy Gunslinger on Amazon
21st century history teacher Elizabeth O’Malley wakes up in a Texas barn in 1849 wearing only a black silk negligee. When she’s discovered by Texas Ranger Miguel de Basque, he thinks she’s a prostitute from a Fort Worth brothel…perhaps suffering from amnesia,
given her wild tales of where she’s from.
Elizabeth O’Malley was falling, gliding through mists, hurdling downward, the air getting darker until all was pitch. She reached for something to grab onto, but met only swirling vapors as she spiraled on. A speck of light dawned ahead, silhouetting the shape of a flame-haired woman dressed in white leather. The vision became engulfed in a web of blue and green strands as Elizabeth rushed forward. She put her hands out to brace herself and swept right through the mesh, landing with a solid thump onto a floor, bumping her head in the process.
“Ouch!” Rubbing her forehead, she slowly opened her eyes. She was lying face down in a pile of fresh hay. Her nose twitched. The smell of horses filled her senses. A stable? She must be dreaming, but this felt so real.
Behind her, a horse gently nickered and stamped a hoof. Elizabeth rolled over and sat up in front of a box stall. The dappled gray who looked at her had large intelligent eyes set in a broad forehead and well-placed small ears, cocked forward as he leaned over the half-door to nuzzle her.
Trembling, she stood and stroked his muzzle. The horse felt real, but she often dreamed of horses, or at least she had until sexy men began appearing in her night visions, and she always dreamed in vivid color.
She looked down. She was still wearing the Victoria’s Secret black bra and thong with the chiffon wrap her traitorous fiancé would never see. She certainly did not need to relive finding Edward in bed with a Barbie look-alike. Not that she should have been surprised, she grimly reminded herself. Edward was drop-dead gorgeous and had enough Bad Boy attributes to make him alluring to any female. Better she had found out about his promiscuousness now than later.
Elizabeth fingered the leather strap on her wrist from which a Native American wood-carved fetish dangled. Her history students had given it to her yesterday, before the start of the Chirstmas holidays, along with a beautiful dream-catcher. The kids loved to tease her about her passion for the Old West, but they’d gotten caught up in the era after she’d brought in vintage John Wayne films and Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns. The fetish probably wasn’t the right accessory for her black lace, but she had not wanted to take it off. Just as she started to close the chifforn wrap, not that it covered much, she heard a sound. She whirled around and gasped.
A half-naked Indian teenager stood not two feet away, close enough for her to see a slight bead of sweat on his upper lip. It was uncanny how authentic this dream felt—probably the result of seeing too many of those western films. He wore a breechclout and leather leggings. Colored beads hung around his neck and his bare chest. A hawk feather was braided into his long hair and he had the blackest eyes she had ever seen. He looked like a hungry wolf stalking its prey. Instinctively, she took a step backward.
The Indian took a silent step forward. “I could have counted coup, you know,” he said. “Touched you without your knowing I was here. But I wanted you to know.”
Elizabeth drew another shaky breath and tried to cover herself more fully. Why in the world would she be nearly nude in her own dream? The Indian’s glance traveled from her face to her breasts and a small smile played on his mouth. A hard mouth, thin-lipped and straight-lined. She took another step backward and bumped against the wall of the stall. Trapped. The wall felt real, too. Some dream.
He came closer and reached over to touch her copper hair. “Fire Woman. You must have much magic. Your eyes are the color of our forests—a blessing from the Earth Mother.” He touched the diamond solitaire at her throat with a finger. “A shining star from the heavens. Yes, you have much magic.”
Elizabeth held herself still, hardly breathing. This would be a really, really good time to wake up. “I don’t have magic. Where am I? Who are you?”
Drawing himself up, he said proudly. “I am called Swift Hawk. My father is a Comanche chief.” He twisted a strand of her hair around his finger. “To my people, a woman with flaming hair has much power. Many even fear her.”
She smiled weakly. Good Lord, a Comanche? She had conjured someone from the fiercest of all the Plains Indians to dream of? The finest light cavalry in North America, some said, and the most dangerous fighters. They loved to fight and feared nothing. Well, except maybe a woman with red hair. Feeling ridiculous to be so deep into the dream, she raised her chin.
“Take your hand off me if you don’t want to feel my wrath.”
Swift Hawk laughed and his hand dropped to her shoulder. “I said many fear you, Fire Woman. I do not. I am the son of a chief. I will claim you as my woman and have much honor and power among my father’s people.” He grasped her head in his hands and leaned forward to kiss her. She pushed against him, hard.
“Don’t you want to know where I came from?” she asked, trying to stall him.
He looked surprised. “The Great Spirits sent you. I do not question them.” He glanced down at her breasts again. “I like what they’ve clothed you in, too.” His hand slid down to stroke a breast.
She needed to something to stop this—closing her eyes, she screeched at the top of her lungs.
Suddenly, he was yanked away. Elizabeth felt cool air surrounding her. Slowly, she opened her eyes and then quickly closed them again. She could not have seen what she thought she had. Clearly, her mind was bent on fantasies tonight.
Tentatively, she peered out from behind her tousled hair. The man—her rescuer, she assumed, for the Indian boy was gone—was breathtakingly handsome. Far too good-looking to be real and very much like the delectable man she’d encountered in her sleep a couple of nights ago. She might still be dreaming, but this was much, much better. The stranger’s blackish hair curled just above the collar of the open neck of his shirt and a part of it fell across his forehead, giving him a roguish appearance. She almost reached out to brush it back for him. His eyes were warm brown and deep-set above high cheekbones and a straight nose. He had the most sensuous mouth she had ever seen. Definitely kissable. Well, of course he would. She was dreaming! He was tall, well over six feet with broad shoulders. With the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, she could see tan, well-muscled forearms. Her gaze traveled to his tight fitting jeans and she tried to ignore the bulge lodged there. She focused on his well-developed thighs. Big mistake—better to look down. The boots were hand-tooled. Cowboy boots. Real ones. She really had to stop reading romance novels about the Wild West. Cowboys and Indians. Her students would get a real laugh!
“Who are you and how did you get into my barn?” His voice was deep and resonant and held a note of authority. A man would think twice about crossing him, she thought and almost giggled. She certainly had conjured up her perfect cowboy. And all man. She couldn’t resist extending her dream-fantasy just a little longer…
“Elizabeth O’Malley,” she said and gave her dream man her best smile, the one her best friend, Brooke, said made her look alluring. “And you are one hot fantasy.”
The man blinked and let his gaze travel slowly over her body and back to her face. A corner of his mouth twitched. “Happy to oblige. My name’s Miguel.”
Elizabeth became uncomfortably aware of how much of her body was exposed. She drew her wrap closer which caused her fantasy to grin. It was a lopsided grin, giving him a definite Bad Boy look. Obviously, her dream-mind hadn’t quite learned its lesson about Bad Boys. But it was only a dream—
“How did you get into my barn?” he asked again. “You don’t look like you’re from around here.” His glance lingered on her breasts. “Are you a working girl?"
Working girl? Did he mean prostitute? This dream was taking an ironic direction given the fact at twenty-four she was the oldest virgin she knew. Her fantasy man sounded dangerously real. She could almost feel the heat radiating from him. She crossed her arms over her breasts. “I’m a teacher.”
buy Catch a Dream on Amazon
Excerpt from Bedroom Blarney
Chapter One
“Vodka martini, extra dry. Two olives.”
“Yes, Ma’am. Coming right up.”
As the bartender moved away to get her drink, Eve O’Connor closed her wet umbrella and plopped it alongside her satchel on the empty barstool next to her and pinched the bridge of her nose to relieve tension. TGIF had never sounded so good. Her art classes had been crap today. Not one high school kid had taken notes on value and hue in color and they certainly had not cared about line and space in composition.
Given the array of video games on smart phones and tablets, it was getting harder to get her students interested—let alone keep them interested—in something as mundane as classical art. Little wonder newbie teachers lasted less than two years in many cases. She had even contemplated changing careers herself, but Joe, her worthless ex-husband, had gambled away her savings before she’d caught him and she was still paying off the cost of the divorce. Besides, she had almost ten years invested in Deer Hill High School.
“Why so glum?” a male voice asked behind her. “It is Friday, after all.”
copyright Cynthia Breeding
read more of this story in Corpus Christi Writers 2018: An Anthology.
Most mornings Cytnthia Giery goes out at sunrise to walk with her dog, Sophia
Another gray morning, spent walking under the harbor bridge. I have a weird fascination with the angles of this structure... and found something new to me... the balloons painted on one of the support structures.
I almost skipped going over the bridge, but the fog lifted for a bit. It was so gray and misty, but still a nice walk. Then the fog rolled in again
A cold Saturday morning at Bob Hall Pier - love the blues and oranges. Sophia cutely convinced several walkers to pet her, so it’s a perfect day if you’re a dog.
Took a quick walk at the Corpus Christi Marina and caught a pretty bird right at sunrise. And ... there is just something about the wispy fronds on a palm that make a cool silhouette
Driving home from our morning beach walk - where it was QUITE chilly - BB sized hail. Neato. I guess it’s winter. Took pics of the piles in my backyard. The cat was not impressed and the dog has had enough of the cold for this morning.
Morning walk around the CC Marina — and I just loved this tree. Then we went to the old Oso Pier that has been falling to pieces. Sophia was very interested in SOMETHING under the bridge, but I have no idea what it was.
It was gorgeous at the beach this morning — very little wind — so I was really enjoying the walk. Sophia ran into a big, lab/Golden friend to play with and they were romping like crazy in this cooler weather. HOWEVER, they got a little wilder than they should. Sophia rolled over and then somehow came up wrong. She was limping so our walk ended about half way. Got her into the car, home, fed and now she’s resting. Pretty sure she just twisted wrong but with her back injuries I gotta be extra cautious. Sigh.
Addition: she limped out to the backyard to lay in the sun and finish her chew from yesterday.
Good morning from Bob Hall Pier. There was an odd bank of clouds surrounding the area but it was still a nice, chilly walk. I found 4 complete sand dollars and told a mom with kids where I’d put them. The kids were THRILLED when they “found” the sand dollars. It makes me happy
Merry Christmas from Bob Hall Pier —- it was chilly but oh so pretty
It was FREAKING chilly this morning. The north wind was blowing so hard and the humidity made the chill waaaaay more than I planned for. However, Sophia LOVED the weather. Except when the wind blew her over TWICE while attempting to poo. I laughed because I am a horrid dog mom
Yesterday at Whitecap Beach - it was beautiful. Possibly because I hadn’t been there in so long, but it’s still very pretty. Yes, I get there waaay too early, but the dawg pack has to play. Sophia chased, jumped, rolled and swam with her pack. Life is good
The weather has been incredibly beautiful this week, so, naturally, my favorite place is at the beach. Such a shame to HAVE to walk in this beauty. Sigh ...
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