Steve B. Howard's Blog, page 167
July 13, 2015
Some new work some old work by fellow author Stephen Vollmer!
A free short story and link to his novel by fellow author Stephen Vollmer.
Please check them out. Some good writing here!
Originally posted on stephenvollmer:
Hi folks. I put up a freebie on Smashwords:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/554012
Please check it out and give a review!
Also, my novel Sleazy Street is up (less than gentle reminder).
You can download the first 20% free. Maybe you’ll like it enough to buy the package!
It’s pretty gritty though. Be warned!
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/548626
July 7, 2015
Half Hearted
This is a short memoir I published back in 2007, I think in http://www.peglegpublishing.com/glassfire.htm
Copyright © 2015 Steve Howard
Half Hearted
Roughly fifteen miles into the trip, heading towards the backside of Seattle, he said, “Take 509, it’ll be faster,” and maybe it was. I liked dropping down off the hill on the north end of Burien. The dark shadowy greens of the Douglas Firs lined the freeway here going into the city. I could see the changes of spring began to green the banks of sluggish Duwamish as it slid quietly into the Puget Sound.
On our way to the bus station I thought about his apology, whether it was sincere or not or whether embarrassment made him regret asking me for the money. Because the answer didn’t really matter or because it probably wouldn’t make a difference, I tried to let it go, but couldn’t.
I wanted to tell him that he was my older brother, that the three hundred dollars was incidental, but I didn’t. I gripped the steering wheel like a wounded Neanderthal, barely grunting in response to his apology. He asked me if I wanted him to send the money when he had it. I just downshifted his question away into the background, pretending to concentrate on my driving.
“Maybe I could mail it to you.”
“Yeah,” I answered, not expecting to hear from him again.
I turned onto 4th Avenue and drove past the rubble of the Kingdome thinking about how it hadn’t been blown up like the media had told the story, but instead had imploded and collapsed in on itself when the structural supports detonated. I thought about the tons of concrete, steel, and plastic coming down. The pile of disregarded waste material sat in the parking lot waiting to be hauled off somewhere out of sight. All the emotions that ricocheted off those walls from players and fans were lying in that pile too, waiting to be dumped so they could rot away with the concrete and steel. The structure of the building lay strewn across the North parking lot like the entrails of a gutted Grey Whale.
I’d been there once or twice with him as a kid, a Seahawks game and Sesame Street on Ice, I think. At that time he was simply my older brother. He knew about football; he knew about fishing; he had all his funny voices to make me laugh. What I didn’t know was that around the same time he was also learning about marijuana, a knowledge that in three short years would deepen into an addiction to crack cocaine, alcohol, and cigarettes.
“What will you do when you get to New Orleans?” I asked.
“I dunno, I think I can work. Maybe on a fishing boat with my friend. I’ll send you the money when I have it. It might take a little while, but I’ll get it to you.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. After we crossed James Street the sunlight temporarily went to shadows as we passed between the tall buildings. The annoyed sounds of the city drifted in through our open windows. Even with the temporary shade of the buildings heat still found its way into the compact car. Occasionally I could see the asphalt shimmering off the in the distance, seemingly a small oasis, but at the point where it seemed close enough to enjoy the moisture it evaporated back into the asphalt.
He had his bus ticket, a greasy duffle bag stuffed with everything he owned, mostly dirty clothes and a book or two. My sister had made a sack lunch for him. His car, which had been his home several weeks, dead now on the side of the road, sat forty miles east of Portland, but it didn’t matter since it had never been registered in his name anyway. He was starting out with almost nothing.
His life was mostly a mystery too me. Occasionally little tidbits about him would filter down to me from my sister or mom telling me all about his three marriages and subsequent divorces, his continuing problems with alcohol and crack cocaine, and his seemingly permanent financial troubles.
A few years ago I learned of his latest set of troubles involving an affair with his sixteen year old baby sitter. My mother called to let me know that he had fled to Idaho from Eastern Washington in the dead of winter with the baby sitter, his five-year-old son, no car, and no money. There had been another phone call. Another apology, this time to my father, and a few hundred dollars wired to his latest crisis.
One year later my mother, sister, and I wait in a cage-like visiting area of a low security correctional facility somewhere near Port Angeles. My brother appears, tall, a little thinner, unshaven, in an orange jumpsuit. Again, there is an apology and a request for me to thank my father for helping him out. I felt sorry for him and tried to think of something encouraging or comforting to say, but couldn’t find the words beyond, “Hang in there, everything will work out somehow.”
Now, at the streetlight at Madison Street the low hum of the engine fan broke our silence. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to ask him how he had come to this point in his life and how I could help him, but I didn’t.
“Do you ever think about dad?”
“My dad or yours?”
“My dad. Both, yours or mine.”
He shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t really think about them. I don’t really know them. Not like you knew your dad. I wasn’t that close to either of them.”
I turned right onto Madison trying to get to 6th avenue and swore as I missed the turn. Now we were heading in the wrong direction. The road was curving back to the south out of the heart of the city and away from the bus station.
“I think I missed the turn, we’re heading in the wrong direction.”
“Just hang a left on 8th and follow it down until you hit Pike.”
At 8th I made a left and followed it North to Pike. I tried to remember what his dad looked like. I’d had only seen him a few times, once when we made a trip to Billings Montana to drop my brother and sister off for the summer and another time when he’d been in Seattle for a convention.
I do remember my mother saying onetime, “He looks just like his dad.” Pictures, for Christmas, I think. It wasn’t the words she used; I was too young to understand the implications associated with “just like his father,” but the flat look and soft resentful tone in her voice stayed with me until I was old enough to understand their meaning. I used to get mad when I was a kid if anyone called him my half brother. “He’s my real brother,” I would insist. The muddiness of different fathers, multiple divorces, and the fact that his last name began with an L and mine with an H had not complicated the simple idea of brothers for me yet. My brother was my brother. At that age I didn’t understand the difference a father can make or the effect the image of an ex-husband on the face of a child can have on a mother’s emotions.
“You can drop me off here. Then you can get back on the freeway without going through downtown again.”
I let him off at a dirty curb on 8th and Pike three blocks from the bus station. We said goodbye and I gave him a couple of bucks for emergencies. I looked for him in the rearview mirror as I pulled away from the curb, but didn’t see him. He’d already crossed the street and disappeared in the crowd.
Back on I-5 heading south towards Auburn I pass the 4th Street exit and out of habit look for the Kingdome. Only the new black steel curvature of Safeco Field is visible, still alien to me against the backdrop of the Seattle waterfront.
I search for a sense of connection or even a feeling of loss, but can’t say for certain anything is really there. Instead, a memory from Sesame Street on Ice comes back. It has just ended. The crowd is slowly filing out of the Kingdome and following the long winding corridors down to the parking lot. I’m asking questions about Big Bird. My brother squawks out a perfect imitation of Donald Duck. I turn to him and say, “Donald Duck’s not part of Big Bird’s family.”
On my right I can just make out the top of the rubble from the Kingdome. It looks so different torn apart like that.
July 4, 2015
Rice Age
A short poem written while on a train in Gifu, Japan a few years ago.
Rice Age
At Hime station only the elderly
board the JR trains.
Youth has abandoned the
toil of the rice fields for the glitter
of Tokyo streets.
They ride the train into an autumn
sunset comparing in whispers
how much their hands resemble
the gnarled branches of the passing
cypress trees.
Cradled in the hum of Sunday trains
they dream in colors denied in
waking hours by cataracts and glaucoma.
Bright leaves continue to fall in memory.
Only the red shift of August 6th still attaches
itself to tired retinas.
A Dating Service for Schizophrenics
There used to be a lady in Bellingham when I went to college at Western who would walk around town arguing with herself. Sometimes when I was fly fishing in the bay near the railroad tracks she would walk past. She would always say “hello”, so she must have been aware of what was going on around her, but then she’d go right back to her argument with the voices in her head. Thought of her today for some reason and jotted down this short poem.
A Dating Service for Schizophrenics
I decided the voices in my
head were just lonely,
aching for another with
multiply tongues and phrases
spinning through the neurological
mist. So they all got Tinder memberships
And kaleidoscopic Facebook pages
Where they can friend and unfriend
All they dramas they stir up in that
Bazaar conference call in my head. I won’t sign them up for Twitter though,
They’ve already spent way too much time twittering
On bridge ledges and on train tracks late at night
When too many of them have decided it’s time to end call.
July 1, 2015
Retire Him: some very short flash fiction
Retire Him
Ji Ji sighs, “I should have done it.”
Ba Ba says, “ You coward. You’d never do it.”
Ji Ji growls, “I’m no coward. My ancestors were samurai!”
The 5:15 roars towards them. Ji Ji screams,
“Banzai!” and lives exactly 1.2 seconds longer.
Ba Ba keeps a still face only smiling briefly
when the first pension check arrives in the mail.
*Ji Ji and Ba Ba are either childish or disrespectful ways to say old man and old woman in Japanese
June 18, 2015
Excerpt from Things You Ran From, my collection of short stories
I don’t think anyone is reading this blog yet, but here is an excerpt from one of my short story collections in case somebody stumbles on this blog.
Things You Ran From
By Steve Howard
Copywrite 2015 Steve Howard
Crips, Bloods, and All the Colors You Ran Away From
The summer comes, high school ends, but you don’t notice. The flash of a gun, cryptic hand signals exchanged, and the two colors suddenly grab center stage. Red and blue, “Both the color of blood,” you think, “One removed from the body, one not.”
In your little town a teenage boy takes three rounds to the chest and one to the face on an otherwise passive Saturday night. Experts are called in from the Bay Area’s gang cities. “Dead before he hit the ground,” you over hear, and think, “Yeah, and dead before he turned sixteen.” They tell you what to look for and what to look out for, but the violence still comes. You over hear black words and thoughts emerge from your neighbors.
Soon you hear streets like Sycamore and Mahogany, benign names normally, whispered in fear. You hear little voices of the old quietly marking each bloody transgression against the neighborhood.
“Don’t go down there no more, they’ll kill over nothing these days.”
“They sawed the boy’s head off right after they shot him.”
“That’s a bad house, sell crack right on the front door step.”
You watch the safe little 7-11 on the corner close down with ten bullet holes in the window and a dead cashier behind the counter. You hear everyone start talking, talking about shotguns, pistols, and car-jackings, and how not to be a victim. There’s talk about taking back the town and guns come out of the dresser drawer and nightstands. Anger and fear carry words like “niggers” and “wetbacks” deeper into the daily conversations.
You feel something breaking down inside you, something you don’t understand, but you can feel the tension and the fear twisting and tearing your thoughts. People’s faces change — change to threat or non-threat. The blood colors are no longer the only ones to fear. You se T.G.I.W appear tattooed in black on the shoulders of friends you used to understand and now can’t accept.
You lock yourself away in your apartment, ignore the occasional gunshot, and let the anger simmer in what’s left of your middle class memories. But it gets closer; the death of a friend of a friend in the newspaper puts it in your living room.
Then it happens. You’re at a local fast-food joint waiting in line at the drive-through. A man walks along the line of cars waving a pistol demanding money. You see the driver of the brown Ford Bronco two cars ahead aim a sawed-off shotgun. You tear your car out of line and
drive away not wanting to see what happens. That night you lay in bed thinking. You’re on the fringe, neither a color, or a racist, but what a frightening fringe it is.
Late that night you remember the green of Seattle, Eliot Bay, Mt. Rainer, and a lack of fear. The next day after no sleep and without thought you leave town, just throw a few things in the car and drive north leaving all colors and connections behind.
June 11, 2015
Voice Dictation Software
I used this today for the first time. It is free in the Google Store if you have a Chromebook. Not bad. If you type slowly like me you will probably like it.
June 3, 2015
Buy me toys!!
I posted this earlier on Facebook, but I thought it was funny, so I decided to make it my second blog post.
So my four year old son Kai has reached that age
where he wants ever toy he sees on the Internet or TV. I calmly explained to him that as soon as daddy wins the lottery and can afford to buy a second house to store all his new toys in I will happily buy him anything he wants. For some reason the talk didn’t take.
May 30, 2015
Introducing myself
MAY 31, 2015 STEVENBHOWWRITES LEAVE A COMMENT EDIT
Well, this is my blog. I’m a traditionally published and self-published author. I write fiction, creative non-fiction, haibun and occasionally poetry.
I’m currently living in Nagoya, Japan. My day job is as an English teacher. As I mentioned, I have self-published several short story collections as well as publishing short stories, haibun, poetry, and creative non-fiction in literary journals. Here is a short list of those works. I’m also in the process of publishing a novel, a novella, as well as writing another novel.
Coldest Vacationpublished in Voiding the Void
(voidingthevoid.com) 2000;
Transcending published in Oh So Beautiful (ohsobeautiful.com) 2001;
An Emperor’s Request published in South Ocean Review 2002;
Darwinism in Hot Pants published in Flashquake (flashquake.com) 2004;
Aspirations, Obsession, and Disintegration published in Jeopardy 2005;
Summer times a Burning in Japan and The Dead Along the River both published in Nagoya Writes 2006.
“Half Hearted” Glass Fire Magazine 2007(http://www.peglegpublishing.com/glassfire5/glassfire5intro.htm)
Algorithms of a Break up in Boundoff 2008
