Umbrella Stab

He stole his mother's face one day,
Went all cramping dogma in the streets.
Dance delirious, demonic sonic,
Can you conjure a better way to pray?

 THE FLICKER

“The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”

~Ingmar Bergman

     Deadness of mind settled in. Though sleepy and still hungry after eating rock hard bread, I kept watch. Those two idiots were with me, but they were loyal idiots, at least for now.

     I don’t recall how many days, months, had passed, since the Flicker. But I know it was cold and now the days are longer, and warmer. The sun angle moved up a whole hand in the sky. Still at night we kept a fire, not to keep anything out... but to remind us we were still alive, and needed a reminder of something warm and inviting and comforting in this world. 

     I met these dolts well over a month ago. I think they’re brothers. They don’t talk much anyways. One is taller than the other, more oafish. The smaller one has lizard-prick eyes. I can’t decide which one I hate more. They won’t leave though. They’re constantly fighting over the scarce bits of food we manage to track or find. .A few hours before dawn, I laid in my bedding, stirring a stick in the mud. The rain had stopped, but I was still soaked. Not shivering, but damp and uncomfortable as all hell. Both the idiot brothers were snoring. I had spent the last thirty minutes thinking of ways I would murder them, each one more bloody and depraved. A log smashing their faces into bloodblack mulch. Tying them up and stabbing them over and over with shoddy rusty long knife I kept in my rucksack. But nah, they were safe for now. Just pesky little fantasies to fight off the boredom of the night. Couple of fucking idiots; will probably kill each other before I ever get up the guts to do it.

     The Flicker happened and nothing was ever the same. Layers of time were eaten off like burnt skin, down to a bloody bone no one, including myself, recognized. If I had a dream of from before, it was in hot bright glimmers of barely connected imagery. A fully intact gable of a house with black windows, a hawk flying deep into the sun with a carcass of an animal in its mouth, a fragment, like stone painting, of a face once presumably familiar. A mother, a sister, a daughter?  Did we live in the house? Nothing would ever come together as a cogent memory of the past. 

     I threw another rock at the big idiot-- we’ll call him Oaf from now on, and the other one Gecko-- and this time I squarely hit him on the nose. He popped awake and looked around him in a frantic manner, expected full on assault. I laughed. He stared red-nosed at me and shouted: “hey, what the fuck. Why you did that?” Then he slumped and looked hurt. What a melodramatic douche. 

     “Time to take over watch. I want some sleep.” 

     “Okay. Any bread?”

     “Nah, I ate it all. Go chase a mouse or something.”

     I wasn’t joking.. he really enjoyed doing that. The other guy, Gecko, was tossing and turning now, apparently having a nightmare. I wondered what kind of stupid ass dreams he had. He was only a tiny bit smarter than his brother, but infinitely more slimey. I imagined his dreams went something like this: a snowball rolling downhill, becoming a massive white planet plummeting into infinite space, a cat he tried to fuck, then breaking its neck and eating it raw, then black snake vision through a steaming swamp, eyes rolling like lottery balls, slithering in and out of black wet branches, his prey not a rat or rabbit, but a small child wandering alone in the dark and the dank...

     The fire was down to just embers now, and lightning went off in the distance, each time lighting up a row of naked trees. Still mostly Winter yet. Does Spring even come anymore? I huddled in my bedding and pretended to be asleep. Every few moments I would slowly draw my eyes open and either look at Oaf sitting calmly staring off into idiot space, or watch the lightning engage with a sky I couldn’t quite connect to, as if it truly was another dimension and no long apart of my own. The wind kicked up a rustle, and distance branches cracked and swayed in the darkest of dark...

     The black windows were reflecting orange globes now, maybe streetlights, maybe just reflections of the low angle sun, then pulse and fade, filling up the entire glass and puffing out, then in, over and over and faster and faster, like the fucking entire house was breathing! then a sullen sidewalk fading into fog, the visible patchwork of soft yellow street light, the flickering of leaves unseen.. now a man coming into and out of focus, wearing a full white robe showing only the hint of slint black eyes, and gnarled toes split by sandles. He was coming closer, almost up to me now, raising his white robed arms at me, not aggressive, but not friendly either. I ran between houses, hurdled iron and steel fences, enraged a barking dog, or mewing cat. Looking back every now and then to see if the white robed man was following me. Finally, out of breath and bent over, I slinked quietly into a shed at the back of a dark yard. My breath was visible and I could hear the thundering of my heart inside my ears, and brain... Then turned and saw the white robed man was inside already, staring deep into me. I was screaming, what do you want, what do you want, over and over, while his penetrating stare caused my entire body to vibrate... what did you do, what did you do, whay did you do!

     

     Startled awake, I shivered in the soft rain, dull light from the sunrise had filtered into everything. Both Oaf and Gecko were awake and huddled under a makeshift tarp, both gnawing on a couple of dead rats they had found this morning. Cook them? Nah, why bother. These numbskulls preferred raw meat. The last of the flour to make bread was gone. I guess I’d be eating tiny creatures soon as well, if I didn’t want to starve. 

     “Found us some rats, Guy. There’s another one for you. We likes you. Really.” Oaf, the afterworld’s humanitarian. They both called me Guy, and I never disabused them of that habit. I was almost just--Guy-- to myself at this point. The clouds were dripping gray and low, and now in the drab morning I could just make out the broken and staggered fence of a farm house. As were most in this bleak countryside, it was empty. Some had a few food items left, but mostly the scavenger clans had raided them. We were far out of the city now, and heading up into the mountains. I saw we, because I had intended it only be myself alone, but I had these two clowns now. 

     Gecko said, ‘Why are we going up into the fucking mountains, Guy? You say there’s food and cunt up there?” His mouth was black from rotten teeth and apparently he had found a pouch of chewy tobacco, because diarrhea colored juice was dripping down his chin.

     I just stared at him, and didn’t answer. He’d asked this question a hundred times now. He was obsessed with finding a woman, anything female, and fucking her (of course he never used the proper term for what he wanted to do). Called them all, ‘cunts’. In his reprobate mind there was no delineation between fucking and raping, I guess. I had a sudden thought of shoving a hot red poker up his ass while he was muffled by a dirty dish rag, going deeper and deeper in until his guts were a mangled, half-cooked mess.  

     My initial plan was to just head up into the mountains and find a nice contemplative place to die, but then I had the idea of hording as much as possible and finding a cabin somewhere and wait out the Winter, then in Spring plant a small garden. See if I could survive a Summer, away from the sweltering valley humidity and heat. Then I somehow managed to collect these two leeches, and I figured might as well keep them as long as they were useful. They could help collect food, perhaps ward off a raider or two, keep watch for the larger murderous clans than were wandering about the hinterland as well. But those larger groups of mauraders usually kept around the cities, and the old highways. I never asked, but I was fairly sure these two clunkheads formerly belonged to one of those clans, but were kicked out by them, because they were just too stupid and simple to be a functional part of their group. 

Wandering the Echo City

One-- What The Wind Said

Durga felt her coming on the wind, and if asked to prove her assertion she would smile thinly, mysterious as a smoke-sun horizon, and tell you nothing. She scrambled up the narrow path through laurel thicket and witchgrass, the summer's growth particularly snarling that year, with constant throes of rain and hot sun. She moved swiftly, her dirty skirts snagging often, and if you weren't looking directly in her face, you would think her a young woman the way she moved, yet she was well past seventy. Catching her grim, unbreathing face, the hard lines stacked around her eyes like a relief map of the mountainous land she came from, only then would you notice her age. No one would listen to her warnings; the town hadn't trusted her 'visions' in twenty suns. With her people you could be right 99,999 times out of a hundred thousand, but that one you got wrong would be held against you. Old Pastor Snod and his black-caped brethren didn't help much either.

When she climbed to the crest of the spur ridge, she noticed the wind had switched direction-- she could smell the pine coming up from the cove. Honeysuckle and something sour on top of that too. She had a little shack a little further up

The Quickening

Everything-- our lives, our place in the universe-- hinges on a belief. A belief that we are truly here; that substance equals, well, reality.

Such was the case with poor Janice Weathmeyer, a young pretty woman, twenty-six years old, with wavy locks of brunette hair and large moist-brown eyes, pregnant with her first born child. All was well through the first 6 months, but then a striking abberration appeared in the 7th month. In fact she had to be revived after fainting in the ultrasound room upon getting word of this chilling development. The child was gone. Not dead, not awaiting some sad and tight-lipped stillbirth. But genuinely gone. As in: the womb was empty, sans child.

Her obstetrician, Deborah Mintgale, was more than astonished, to say the least. For the fact was, this was no routine pseudocyesis, no, no where near. There seemed to be no evidence of vaginal dilation, or other tell-tale signs, which would signal the woman had given birth to a stillborn in her home and was now only lying about her condition. She had painstakingly recorded the development, via ultrasonography, since Mrs. Weathmeyer came to her one bright afternoon with that smile and hopefulness of a woman who'd just had a positive result on a pregnancy test. All in all the fetus had appeared healthy for the first 6 months. Had her body somehow consumed it as a foodsource? She'd never heard of anything remotely like this. The girl would become world famous for this case, but she was also certain that this would be no consolation to her.

When Janice was released from the hospital, with a month's supply of tranquilizers and no real explanation for why her child was no more, she went home with her husband of only a year and a half and sat mostly in silence by her apartment window. She had picked this particular apartment at Havelock Acres partly, among other things, for its view facing Flagg Mountain, a rather flat forested mesa typical of this part of world. But now the view had an opposite effect on her; it made her feel closed in. Whereas before she had felt as if the window opened out onto a beautiful invigorating vista, now it only re-emphasized her feeling of being trapped. Her husband Jeff brought her cups of green tea and tried to rub her back, but Janice was, he found, quite cruelly unreceptive to any of his soothing advances or remarks.

Eventually, after days of this, and her intense bouts of crying, (which made the silence afterwards even more potent and chilling, and caused their small housedog, Flip, to hide underneath the bed)-- after trying as hard as he could to help his wife through this awful experience, Jeff finally gave up and returned to his job as manager for a Hardware Store. It was one of those medium-sized chains still clinging to life, but year by year, more choked to submission and death by the larger chains. Within two weeks of losing his son, Jeff Weathmeyer was drinking again, harder than ever, and staying out late many nights a week at various Chattanooga bars, soaking in the smokescent (to cover the sweet and sour scent of the string of anonymous hotties gladly accepting all the free shots and pints Jeff Weathmeyer was worth).

But there were moments, in a drunken stupor, he'd shuffle to the bathroom, noticing his wife missing from their bed, and he'd think-- good god, i'll kill my liver before I go mad!-- he heard the coos and occassional cries of an infant, somewhere deep within the apartment. There but not really there. Deeply embedded in another dimension that coincided somehow with their quiet suburban apartment. He would just ignore it and shuffle back to bed, and sink back into that shallow and dream-laden sleep of the alcoholic and the spirit-shattered. Life went on and the cries faded, stopped.

The Quickening

Two months later, late in October-- near the time of her once expected due date-- Janice began to experience a new anxiety. One not of piercing, body-shaking loss but of secretive, growing presence. And it wasn't just her. She noticed a difference in Flip as well. The dog was constantly shaking, terrified, and it was no longer because of her moods. By now Janice had ended most of the worst of her crying jags, and her melancholy had become lighter, more transparent, more like a film over her vision that had the possibility of being wiped away.

For the first month, she had become a bit of a local and internet sensation. Researchers in parapsychology as well as traditional medical researchers were constantly emailling her, wanting her to come to their laboratories (on their expense) to be studied. Thankfully her cell number was private, or she was sure she would have had to change her number. Honestly, she just wanted to move on; and even though she was perplexed herself and knew at some point in her life she'd want an explanation, right now she just wanted to get on with life, try to dust off the cobwebs of her marriage, and possibly, yes, quite possibly, even try to have another child.

But with the coming of the first cold front of the season, Janice began to sense it. It..? At first she thought she had simply caught a stomach bug. She was finally getting her appetite back, and had recently gained 5 pounds. Then one night, alone in the house yet again, a sharp pang-- was that a kick?-- hit her gut. Then several more. She was certain, she felt movement there. She noticed that Flip would not join her on the couch in front of the tv, as usual, to curl up next her feet, or in her lap. And when she tried to pick Flip up, he would growl. She'd drop the dog and he would tear off to hide under some piece of furniture where he whimpered and shuddered for hours.

When the pressure and pain got worse she went to see Doctor Mintgale, deciding as well not to mention any of this to Jeff. The doctor shifted some of her appointments so that she could see Janice. The case still loomed heavy in her mind, like some doomed zeppelin, but she had a practice to run so, she too, got on with life.

"Hello, Janice, good to see you," the doctor said, a strained smile on her face. She noticed Janice was wearing a maternity blouse. Uh, oh, I knew it, poor girl has gone bonkers from grief. Her husband was a psychiatrist, so she could possibly keep the case of Janice Weathmeyer in the family.

"I think," Janice hesitated, "Oh god, you're gonna think Im crazy. I think Im still pregnant." Before she could stop herself, she was crying.

Some tests were run and sure enough, Janice's womb was devoid of fetus. Doctor Mintgale tried to console the girl, and suggested it was time for her to see that dreaded someone. But Janice became enraged, was intractably tied to the idea that her womb was not barren. As she left the office, her eyes wild and bloodshot, she said, "It's his ghost then. My son's ghost is in me." This would prove to be the last time she ever saw Janice Weathmeyer.

****

Jeff Weathmeyer was downing his fourth jagermeister shot, and washing out its licoricey venom with a Michelob Lite, when he got a text message on his phone from his wife. All it said was, "Plz Come Home."

"Hey, is that your wife!" the twenty-threeish brunette with a rose tattoo on her left partially exposed breast said. She was so drunk she blurted out, "wife" and was heard above the blaring jukebox now playing, "Werewolves of London." They must play this song 10 times a day. It was a poolhall, after all, and what was a poolhall without the well-played cd soundtrack to "The Color of Money."

The girl was leaning into him, her tobacco breath heavy between them, trying to read his text message. He couldnt decide just then if he would rather reach out and plop the rest of that tattooed dirigible from its haltered moorings or throw a lit butt deep into her cleavage. He chuckled morosely. "Babe, this is private." He was going to follow her to her apartment, which she shared with a stripper who was currently hard at work, and see what happened from there. But his wife never texted him anymore. This was odd. Odd indeed.

"Gotta go." She clinged onto him as he tried to get up and leave. He untangled himself from her as if from a desperate monkey. "Hey Dorene, something's up. Ill catch you later."

The girl slumped back in her seat, and wrenched her lips subtly,"Whatever, John. Thanks for the drinks."

The bartender sighed and smirked; he knew he was in for another long and predictable night.

My Son, My Love, Wherever Did You Go?

On his way home from Delk Monty's Billiards, he tried to call his wife, but recieved no answer. The streets glowed with rain-reflected streetlamps, green to orange. He zoomed through the mostly empty streets, vaguely aware-- as his usual drunk brain was accustomed-- that any quiet, poorly lit lot might harbor a cruiser car, with only it's hushed-orange idle lights on. If he was pulled over, maybe the cop would know of him and his story, and cut him a break.

But he didnt get pulled over, and made it home alright. Havelock Acres was washed in a sick scattered yellow light, surrounded by deep furrows of black. Nothing scared him these days, but he used to experience a brief shudder sometimes coming home late. Because beyond this complex, nestled at the foot of Flagg Mountain, were steep, undeveloped woods all the way to the top. And out there, who knows what lurked.

His apartment was on the third floor and when he got out of his car, he thought he saw the face and upper body of Janice but in a blink nothing remained but the dark shut curtains. No lights were on in the apartment. Had she been she holding something?

When he entered the apartment-- blackness and seething silence like an electric force-- he smelled the stench of rot, rot and blood, with an undernote of milk. Urine-colored light filtered in through the window. He saw her sitting in the dark, on the rocking chair that was her mother's, and her mother's before her. She was rocking slightly. Only slightly.

"Janice, you okay?" He reached for the light switch. Nothing happened. Up down up... same result.

"What happened to the lights? Is the power out? Janice?" She was definitely holding something, perhaps a doll wrapped in a baby's blanket. His son's baby blanket, blue of course, never to be used, or so he thought. --Way to go, asshole, Jeff thought, you've neglected your wife in her time of need, and now she's lost her mind. He then realized it was late in October. He would have been due. --Oh god.. His son would have been born right about now.

His eyes having adjusted to the darkened room, he could just make out Janice's face and saw that she was naked from the neck to her waist, her breasts ballooning, as if.. --Oh God... she had just recently begun to lactate. Just then she raised the bundle to her chest, and he thought he heard a suckling sound. "He's hungry, Jeffrey. Our son is hungry. Would you like to meet him?" The words came as if from deep space, from everywhere around him rather than the mouth of his wife. His heart was racing now, he could feel it stutter in his throat. "What..." but that was all he could say.

He could definitely hear the suckling sound now. It was a beastly thirst, not human. The smell was of corpses soaked in curdled milk.

"He wants to meet you, Jeffrey. Come hold your son, honey." She rose and was gliding toward him, her arms extended and offering the bundle to him. He could see its eyes. His son's eyes, lambent butterscotch yellow. They were not human eyes.

He turned and sprinted to the front door. As he was turning the knob he felt it. Something heavy landed on his back, attacking, gnawing at his neck. The pain hit him like a board to the head. In between eager gristle-chewing sounds, a maniacal shrieking filled his ears. He fell to his knees, trying to clutch at and remove that feasting, frenzied parasite set upon him by his demented wife. --See, he loves you...

That was when he felt it, that final thing, like a gooey, spongey rope, around his neck. It tightened, and all went yellow to black; the insubstantial, the negation, became real.

http://cinescare.com/index.php?page=stories&family=essays&category=Horror_and_Motherhood&display=231

Crime Blog

Ideas: home invasions.
some other topic ideas: unsolved serial killer cases(most notably LISK, Connecticut River Valley Killer, Zodiac, others), wrongful convictions and the general unwillingness of prosecutors/investigators to realize their mistakes and myopia.

The Wall Before Me

I used to write. But now the wall stops me. The wanting hasn't been snuffed out yet, so there is still that daily anxiety of not writing. I've never finished anything of consequence. Probably never will. I've let my internet and drinking addictions rule and ruin me. The feeling of 'it's too late now' is a never ending hail storm in my brain. All the projects I'll never do, all the subjects I'll never learn, all the people I'll never love... just crushing. Maybe it's more like brushing up against the Cosmic Microwave Background than any actual wall. I feel all the way out at the end and out of time. Buzzing against an impassable Nothingness. The hum and electric field of dying. 

I used to write....

new work excerpt

BALLAD OF HARRY CRUGGS

The waiting began. The ticking internal clock. The merry celebration of seconds.  All wet, flushed and clicking of windshield wipers, vetting out the stream of night. Purple mesh of street lights, like the city was drunk, only you were. And not for the first time either. Oh, Harry Cruggs had his moments. His friends and family (decidedly different class of folk) called him Harr.

Out here he prowled like a crippled night cat encapsulated by steel, glass and rubber, his back brace holding him up, his morphine patch pushing him through fog banks of pain. Not sure what he was looking for. Yet again.

Always the same really. His father Earl Cruggs was a fishing lure craftsman, content to just while away at his craft, selling his wares out of a small low-rent shop in Sweetville, Tennessee. But when he married Gladys, who had better business sense, they managed to build up into a small southern empire, a chain of stores called—Southern Sports Emporium. Then later, just known as Southern Emporium.  But Earl had the ‘thick blood’ bestowed upon him by his mother, Harr’s grandmother, and died of a stroke at forty-nine. Harr had passed that age by a few, but he hadn’t avoided the family’s curse of ‘thick blood’. Stroke and heart attack by forty-five, partial paralysis and bouts of acute agoraphobia. Up until recently he had managed several of his father’s chain of sporting goods stores, but the market was tight and in gobble phase so he sold his majority share for a nice nest egg cushion, and retired to pursue a life of leisure, such as it was with his disabilities.

Tonight he was working on his suppression of fear. A skill he felt most useful. What did Jan Von Don say? “Fast is good, but deceptive is better.” Rectangles of buildings bulked in the distance, all directions, shadows washed away ever second. Stacks of light mounting even further out, sleepy downtown, then dead mountains with sporadic flashing light beyond that, the occasional headlight switchbacking up or down. But his vision focused on the sidewalk splashed with pallid light. Waiting for a figure, a player, some actor, to emerge…