Charles Martin's Blog, page 37
May 28, 2014
OKC Arts Scene: Modern Dance Matters
Kinetic
7:30 pm Friday, May 30 and Saturday, May 31
2 pm Sunday, June 1
Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center
3000 General Pershing Blvd in Oklahoma City
Modern dance is intimidating. It’s okay if that’s where you’re coming from, it really is. I understand and empathize, but give me a moment to break down why, if you’ve never attended a modern dance recital, Perpetual Motion is the troupe for you.
Perpetual Motion is an institution.
There are many amazing success stories within our metro, but that Perpetual Motion has endured for twelve years is among the most astonishing and inspiring. This troupe produces work with a depth, daring, and execution that draws the admiration of dance communities from the nation’s largest artistic hubs. And it exists inside Oklahoma. This group of dancers and choreographers are creating art at a very high level, and have been for over a decade with a fraction of the funding of their peers. They survive and thrive in Oklahoma because their will is so strong. If that doesn’t pique your interest, then there’s also this:
Modern dance is way more accessible than you think it is.
I took my thirteen year old to a performance and he loved it. Bear in mind that, though I love my kid to death, he is as ADD as any other thirteen-year-old in the world and will not sit through a performance of anything that can’t hold his attention. Modern dance is engaging and fun, or at least it is when it is done right.
One of my early impressions of modern dance came from The Big Lebowski when Lebowski begrudgingly attends his landlord’s baffling and sparsely attended performance. I imagine that’s generally how most of the uninitiated perceive modern dance. Weird, distancing, and difficult.
But when modern dance works, the performances are a short and intense sensory delight. Good art should not have to be endured. It should delicately balance between decadent and substantive satisfaction, leaving the viewer spiritually fulfilled. I’ve never left a Perpetual Motion performance hungry and I am sure you won’t either.
Modern dance is not meant to be understood, only felt.
Artistic Director Michelle Moeller likened Perpetual Motion to abstract art, perhaps the most helpful advice anyone has ever given me in the appreciation of modern dance. It released me from my habit of obsessively dissecting the minutiae of the performance, as I might with a novel or a movie. Like music, modern dance is best embraced viscerally.
Perpetual Motion does deal with heavy ideas in their performances, but it’s an emotional exploration that Moeller admitted is often only clear once the piece has been completed.
It is a purging. It is an all-consuming cry whose purpose only reveals itself once the tears have all dried. So, to watch modern dance is to watch an artist digging into themselves. We are watching process, not product, and it is thrilling and so very raw.
I adore Kim Kieffer.
I’d admired her gorgeous aerial work long before I knew her as a person. When she is aloft, spinning and soaring from satin drapes with the grace and nobility of a swift, you get the sense that she should never touch land again. She should soar beyond the reach of the Earth’s choppy waters, untouched by base humanity, above us all, where she belongs. And this is what modern dance and art in general should do: invite us to invest. I am invested in Perpetual Motion. If you have time this weekend to check out Kinetic, I bet you’ll become invested, too.
In The Town Where All Things Are Possible: Part 16
Need To Catch Up?
In The Town Where All Things Are Possible, Alexandria wilted against the cold steel of a glowing streetlight, her hands still bound tightly, her body consumed with a cruel and unyielding thirst. Her eyes scaled the tall hill leading to the lonely office with the lonely light burning deep into the night. The penguins squawked and fluttered around her, nudging Alexandria with their beaks, pressing her to move forward.
Tessa stood up from the shadows of her garden, pulled the gloves from her hands and hurried through the front gate. She wrapped her arms around Alexandria and led her toward the small house. Tessa’s good eye scanned the shadows around the intersection while the penguins flanked the two women like sentries. As they passed through the front gate, Alexandria thought she heard Tessa whispering, the woman’s good eye facing away toward the rows of potted plants and flower beds. Alexandria couldn’t make out any of Tessa’s words, but could tell they were not meant for her ears anyway. As soon as the women passed Tessa’s threshold, the penguins pushed the door closed behind the women, then waddled quickly through the garden and toward their own home.
Alexandria fell back into an ornate chair with high arm rests and finely chiseled designs that webbed across the aged cherry wood. Her eyes quickly fell on a set of knives resting on the counter of a modest kitchenette, but jerked away when Tessa turned from the front window to face her.
“Water,” Alexandria murmured. Tessa crossed to the faucet, filling a hand-molded clay cup with swirls of glimmering purple and emerald-green sweeping along the outside.
Alexandria studied the binds on her wrists briefly, then scanned the small home. Tiny paintings tiled the walls, consisting of a wide spectrum of mediums and styles, some dark and somber, others vibrant and bright or lush and garish. Figurative, surrealist, abstract, narrative, pop art, all organized in subtle patterns of base colors so nothing seemed cluttered or in disarray. A small bed rested, unassuming, in the corner next to a towering wardrobe, both with the tiny imperfections that marked the skilled hands of a labored carpenter rather than a soulless machine.
Tessa pressed the cup into Alexandria’s bound hands and Alexandria immediately brought the water to her lips, drinking in gulps as Tessa began picking at the hard knot in the rope. After draining the cup, she handed it back to Tessa. Tessa turned to refill it.
“Alexandria!” a voice called from the front yard.
Alexandria’s face paled. Her hands began jerking at the binds, trying to free themselves. Alexandria stood, but Tessa placed a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s Gerald,” Tessa whispered calmly.
Tessa returned her focus to the knot, fingering the rope until it finally loosened and unraveled. Alexandria swept the rope off her wrists as Tessa opened the front door. Gerald stood just outside the front gate. Alexandria circled behind Tessa, carefully removing a knife from the wooden holder and hiding it behind her back. The molded, wooden grip felt welcome in her hand. There was weight to the blade that appealed to Alexandria’s fear and emerging predatory hunger. Her imagination worked righteous and bloody.
“Come in, Gerald,” Tessa called.
Gerald looked across the front yard, unsure.
“Stop being an idiot and come in,” Tessa snapped.
Gerald hurried across the front yard, his eyes sweeping the ground as if looking for poisonous snakes. He leapt through the open door and smiled proudly. He smoothed out his beard and adjusted the collar of his cheap, over-worn tweed jacket. He looked to Alexandria, noticing the purple and red bruise over her temple. His smile faded.
“What happened?” Gerald asked. “We’ve been looking for you all afternoon.”
“She was taken,” Tessa answered, stepping close to Alexandria. She brushed hair away from the bruise so Tessa could examine it with her good eye.
“By who?” Gerald stammered, but Alexandria noted how the question wasn’t entirely a question.
Tessa didn’t answer, but instead returned to the faucet. She took a towel from a nearby hook, ran warm water over it, then opened a cupboard to retrieve an ointment.
“Who is he?” Alexandria asked Gerald.
Gerald’s averted his eyes. Alexandria turned to Tessa, seeing only the side of her face hidden behind the clockwork gears.
“Who is he?” she repeated, her voice cold and insistent, her grip tightening on the knife hidden behind her back.
“The Man Who Holds The Town Together,” Tessa answered, tilting her head to meet Alexandria’s gaze.
“He’s dead,” Gerald answered, unconvinced. “They told us he was dead.”
“They were wrong,” Tessa answered.
“You don’t mean Jeffrey?” Alexandria asked and the two froze at the name.
“Please, don’t use his real name,” Tessa managed. “And no, this is the Man who came before.”
“The Man who killed his wife?” Alexandria furthered.
Tessa turned away. Alexandria looked to Gerald, whose eyes still rested on the ground.
“Yes,” Gerald relented.
“And now he wants to kill me?” Alexandria asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “And you just let this man exist underneath your town, like a living curse?”
“They told us he was dead,” Gerald whispered.
Alexandria pushed past Gerald and stormed to the front door. She paused, her hand on the doorknob. She turned back to Tessa.
“What happened to your eye?” she asked.
Tessa kept her back to Alexandria.
“It died long ago,” Tessa answered. Gerald discreetly cleared away his tears.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” Alexandria asked. “And no one did anything about it because he holds this town together, this perfect little town?”
“They told us he was dead,” Gerald echoed.
“Who told you that?” Alexandria snapped, but received no answer. “So, now that you know that they lied and he is alive, what are we going to do about it?”
The pair finally looked to one another, but neither addressed the question.
Alexandria threw open the door and looked out into the night, then up the hill to the Man’s office. A shadow passed across the lone window.
“Will he be a coward too?” Alexandria asked, her eyes fixed on the hill.
“No,” Tessa answered. “But he is trapped. We are all trapped by the town. It gives us happiness, and happiness is fear, and fear is something we cannot escape.”
May 26, 2014
May 23, 2014
World Premiere of Trigger, co-written by Charles Martin!
Oklahoma Filmmakers And The Man Behind The Beginning Of The End.
Debut Screening of Trigger
8 pm, Saturday, June 28
The Parish
1757 NW 16 Street in Oklahoma City
$5, free Titswiggle Beer
To save his family, a man might have to destroy his country.
Directed by Dallos Paz and James Paulsgrove (A Destructive Manner) and starring (Tarsus), Trigger follows the mental collapse of Buddy, a combat veteran who falls in with a subversive, criminal organization in a desperate bid to provide for his ex-wife and the son he hasn’t seen in a year. As Buddy teeters on the edge of emotional collapse, his partner, played by Ashley Primm, must hold the man together long enough to complete one last, horrifying job.
Produced by Fall Films, one of the most active film companies in the region, Trigger features (Judges Creed) as the physical abuse counselor trying to guide the dead-beat dad back onto the right side of the law while Phillip Paz (Mickey and Me) is a detective exploring Buddy’s connection to a shadowy criminal mastermind, known only as “Mother.”
Trigger was shot entirely within the Oklahoma City metro area and c0-written by Paulsgrove and Charles Martin (The Wonderboy Serials, Deviants, and the dominant hand.)
Hunger Dames
Illustration by Justin Buschardt, justinbuschardt.com
The set is a “Spaceship Train” stopped in the jungle.
Cardboard props of foliage from different parts of the world lean against studio-light poles. Some of the leaves are bent at the corners.
Two sexy women vacillate between standing and leaning, both wearing torn camo bikinis near a fake coconut tree. They eat bananas and touch themselves.
One is a beautiful brunette with almond eyes and milky white skin. The other is a black goddess with an afro and huge tits.
The white girl has a thick Brooklyn accent and stretches a string of gum from her mouth around her index finger. She forcefully exclaims, “Oh gawd, these games are making me so hungry!”
The interruption to silence clearly frightens the second woman, even though she knew the line was coming. She jumps slightly and then shivers.
Before the white girl has completed the startling utterance, a dirty-blonde, shaggy stoner-looking guy with a “bob” haircut stumbles into the room, loosely holding a pizza box. He knocks over a fake tropical bush and loudly inquires, “Uh, did somebody order the pizza?”
Just then, smoke from dry-ice fills the room and the black woman says, “Oh Lawd, it’s that mist that kills people. Once agaaaaiin it strikes. What’s it we’z supposed ta do?”
Twelve silent seconds pass and a man in a crotchless baboon costume leaps into the open. “It’s one ‘a ‘dem killa monkeys!” the women yelp together.
Baboon Man lifts his mask to reveal he is actually “The Game Master.” But he doesn’t look like Philip Seymour Hoffman because Hoffman was a great artist and I don’t feel like making a joke about him. (Really, it’ll be a while until we get another one of those.)
Baboon Man takes an uncomfortable amount of time to remove a giant remote from his costume, then pushes a big red button on it to “Turn off the mist.”
The game master states, “Man, I’m, like, so hungry with all these games cuz the only fog/mist I make is from marijuana.”
All 4 actors pull out huge joints and start puffing.
A mechanical “click” is heard as the dry-ice machine is switched back on.
The pizza guy pulls out his dick and begins to masturbate as the women drop to their knees and give orgasm to each other.
Not clumsy like men, they move slowly, delicately over one another, exercising gentle touches of intent – caresses which playfully articulate the art of sensitive knowing.
They are idiots but they both have enough sense to know that they will make these prosaic men with huge dinguses cum easily; however, there is a susurrus of subtle, vibrant energy afloat whispering that if they can orgasm one another, they have done something special and powerfully Babylonian, like masters of a super hard video game where you smash your controller all the time cuz it’s real f’ing hard, ejaculatory Rubix Cubes.
Breasts touch and the eye contact is so sexy and elegant that Baboon-Man prematurely finishes by the Funky Monkey Toucan Tree that was once in a children’s puppet show (and likely will still go on to be). A mustache is slapped onto a shorter stand-in and he enters to conclude the scene.
As this happens, the white girl looks at the surfer pizza guy and whines, “Me’ me me so HUNGRY…” He walks over and expresses his balls in the open mouth of the luxurious brunette. She swallows his semen, looks at the camera with a smile and exclaims, “Yowzas, youz guyz: these really a’ (are) the hunga’ games.” She winks at the camera and then continues winking several more times in rhythm until the director realizes he will have to ask her to stop winking. He simply never thought he’d ever have to tell anyone to stop winking. He thinks of his college degree. Then of his wife and son. The tag itching him in his sweater. He sighs, gets it together and approaches to tastefully request that she cease winking.
Baboon-man stand-in begins making Dionysian sex with both of the seductresses in several creative, ayurvedic postures while singing, “Go Hunger! Go Games! Games, Go Hunger, Go Hunger Games, Go! Go, Hunger, Go Hunger Games, Go!”
The gorgeous black girl exclaims, “Youz betta’ mark me with dat stuff in a hot minute, boyeee!” Baboon-man stand-in game-master abides, spraying his cosmic life seed on their backs and hair.
The glowing, rough yet somehow sumptuous white girl looks at the camera while slowly rubbing some of the fluid on her body circularly with her fingers, “Wow, I shore am happy we made those alliances. Fa’ (for) games!”
She winks and then starts to do it many more times, but the director looks at her discouragingly. He is tired of all of the pornos and The Hunger Games and embarrassed.
He drives home carefully that evening, listening to Beethoven & contemplating how he needs to spend more time with his family. He passes oak trees and nice houses along winding bends. Both are partially reflected on the waxed exterior of his Lexus.
Upon arriving home, he finds a note in the kitchen explaining that his wife and son went to see the new Hunger Games movie.
He takes a long bath.
May 22, 2014
In The Town Where All Things Are Possible: Part 15
Need To Catch Up?
In The Town Where All Things Are Possible, Alexandria’s mind was a thumping sickness of pain. She knew that she was walking. She knew that the strings of light she saw were from the outside world filtering through the burlap sack. She knew that her hands were bound.
Beyond that, she had no sense of time, no sense of place, and only a vague idea of how long she had been conscious. The slivers of light reached for her from above. Static, fixed. As she passed them, the light faded almost to complete darkness until the next light surfaced ahead. Stale, cold air reeked of mildewed concrete.
She’d been following the stranger’s footsteps thoughtlessly, as if sleepwalking.
She stopped and considered running. The bindings on her wrists snapped tight and jerked her forward. She stumbled, almost fell, but kept her feet underneath her.
She was not being marched to an execution, she decided. The stranger was keeping her alive, but moving her. She had time to formulate a plan. Any plan. It did not need to be a good plan, but she knew she needed to act.
She heard his footsteps move from concrete to rickety metal. He stopped and so did she. She heard a loud screech and the heavy clank of a latch releasing. A door squealed open. A rush of light and fragrant air swept across Alexandria.
Is it time to run?
Scorching bursts of adrenaline pumped through her heart. Her muscles tensed and coiled. She remembered the binds, the sagging weight of the rope held by the stranger. She could run, but it would do no good. Not yet.
The rope tugged and she followed. Her foot caught some object and she fell forward, catching herself against metal stairs. Wind soaked into the burlap sack. Tall grass rustled nearby. Led by the rope, she climbed the stairs on all fours until she found a steel doorframe. She stood, steadied, then walked toward the fresh air. More stairs, now concrete, then grass. She felt wild flowers kissing her ankles. The rope fell to the ground.
“You have until tomorrow,” the stranger growled, the silhouette of his face visible through the sack.
The silhouette disappeared. The stranger’s footsteps retreated through the grass. The heavy door swung and slammed.
Alexandria yanked the sack off her head, her eyes burning from the intense sunlight.
She spun, looking for the stranger. She only found an empty field rolling toward the sunset before falling off into the distant ocean. Behind her, a rusted steel door was embedded into a small hill that hid the entrance to the underground complex.
She fled, sprinting at her full might for only a hundred yards before dehydration caught her. She gasped, her mouth dry, her heart thumping, her vision darkening. She slowed to a walk and searched the fields. No sight of the stranger. She looked further into the distance, searching for The Town Where All Things Are Possible. She did not see any houses or shops, or even the hill where the Man Who Held The Town Together would be sorting his little cards. But she did see the sea, so she veered toward the coastline.
Alexandria thought of the card that fell through God’s Blowhole. That was what changed the stranger’s mind, she was certain.
She reached the cliffs and looked toward the ocean far below. The waters were choppy, crashing into the walls like an irritable mob. There she saw the family of penguins. The youngest saw her first and squawked at the parents. They all looked up to the pitiful sight of Alexandria. She felt shame. Shame and hatred. Hatred for the stranger that made her feel weak. Hatred for the Town and all its mysteries. Hatred for the Man who did not save her. And hatred for herself. Most of all, for herself.
Could I kill him? she asked, thinking of the stranger hidden away underneath the Town Where All Things Are Possible. It is possible.
The suggestion startled her. The allure of it. It rolled in her mind deliciously, the rage tasting so much better than fear.
Alexandria watched the penguins hobble up a pathway toward her. They would escort her to safety.
Yes, that is the sensible thing to do. Run. Find another life. Just like before.
Yet the desire for vengeance lurked. Waited. Something terrible had awoken.
May 15, 2014
May 14, 2014
In The Town Where All Things Are Possible: Part 14
Need To Catch Up?
In The Town Where All Things Are Possible, his voice sounded like flint striking stone. Damaged, coarse, dangerous and searing hot.
“I was released when I was replaced. That is the only way the Town will let you go, by death or redundancy. Ever since, I’ve wandered this world, witnessing tragedy, famine, heartbreak, the horrors of reality that exist in all corners of this planet aside from this one little town.”
Staring into the blackness of the burlap sack covering her head, Alexandria didn’t dare speak. She breathed in its musty, salty stench. It struck her that this sack might have covered another’s head. Her skin might be touching their death.
“And I came back for you,” he continued. “I can feel the women crash into this town like the ripples in a pond, spreading for as far as they need to in order to find me. I return because this town must be protected from love.”
The binds rubbed her wrists raw. She adjusted in the flimsy chair and it sighed labored squeaks from every weary joint. A crisp, moist breeze swirled past her, the wind humming in a low key like a breath blown over an empty bottle. She could sense the space was confined. A small stream of water passed by the souls of her shoes.
“You understand what is here, why the Town must be protected?”
His voice echoed, finding distant walls off which to bounce. The air grew colder with every minute. Her nervous breath misted inside the hood.
“Yes,” Alexandria gasped once she realized he was waiting for her answer.
“Good, good. I know how this must look. I have known many killers. Haters of women. Predators. I am not one of these men. You don’t believe me, but I am a good man. I adore women. I revel in their difficult eccentricities, the eternal riddle of the feminine body, the unsolvable equation of love. I could love you.”
And she felt his face close. Faint, sour whiskey permeated the sack as his words blew through the fabric.
“I had a woman. Like you to him. A singular woman, the sort that we are promised as children by our adoring mothers, like a birthright. Finding her was like finding my homeland. But great men lose great loves. We are still human, and there is only so much that any one person can hold on to.”
He moved away, his feet splashing in the shallow water, his voice echoing again.
“And he cannot hold on to you while fulfilling his duty to this town. It will be too much. This town is better than you. This town existed and endured many terrible things, and this little fling of yours will be no different. He will endure your loss.”
His voice was close again.
“He will, one day, remember your death as little more than a mild disappointment. I am saving him from you. I am saving the entire town from you.”
The burlap sack swept off her head and moonlight found Alexandria’s blurry eyes. They were inside a tall drainage pipe. It fed into a second pipe where moonlight poured down into the depths. The stream ran over the edge, but she could not hear it splashing into any underground reservoir. It simply fed and faded away.
From where Alexandria sat, she could not quite see the sky.
“God’s Blowhole,” the man muttered, just behind Alexandria.
“Please,” Alexandria began, turning her head to find the man. “I will do anything…”
“Turn back around!”
She jerked her head forward, eyes ahead, not looking into the chasm before her.
“Don’t bother screaming,” the man said. “I will kick you in one way or another. No one can reach us here, no one can save you.”
She felt his hand grip the chair behind her and push, slowly tilting the chair forward so she could see more of the drop.
“You will fall, fall, fall, fall until the Earth’s core burns your skin, swallows the air and suffocates you. Your body will roast. A terrible way to die, and I will throw your lover in with you if you so much as whisper for help.”
“I’m sorry that I looked at the card,” Alexandria cried. “I’m sorry that you …”
He jerked her forward. She screamed briefly, but stifled her voice. She peered down into the darkness. A vague warmth drifted up to greet her.
He eased her back until the chair was resting on all four legs. She wanted to see his face, but didn’t dare look his direction.
“Soon,” he said, but she could not guess what he meant. His footsteps led away, back into the drainage pipe. She was left alone.
In the long minutes that passed, she measured her breath and thought of The Man Who Held The Town Together. He would not be searching for her. No one would. They would assume that she’d gone to her shop, slept in her lonely space, and would rise and open the store in the morning. If she did not, they might think she’d left the town and returned home, unable to handle the town’s oddities. She searched for hope, but she could no more find traces of it than she could find light in the abyss of God’s Blowhole.
It would soon be her grave.
She held her tears back, a pride growing within her as she accepted her fate and determined that she would retain dignity as best she could.
His footsteps returned, splashing through the water.
Another sound, from above in God’s Blowhole. A paper falling, flittering, scraping the walls as it tumbled. His form reached past her, she glimpsed only a bit of his pale face as his hand reached out into the pipe and caught a notecard. One of The Man’s notecards.
He flipped it around to read it. A single grunt and the man tossed the card back into God’s Blowhole so it could tumble down, down, down. It never seemed to reach bottom.
And he kicked her forward. The chair tumbled over the edge. A scream choked in her throat.
Her descent quickly ended with the crack of a rope. The chair swung and crashed against the cement face of God’s Blowhole. Her body dangled from the bindings of the chair. Her breaths exhaled in hard, panicked lumps as she stared down into the chasm, trying not to scream. She craned her head around, peering briefly up into the sky. She believed she could make out the shadow of a distant head looking back down into the pipe. She hoped the Man could see her. She reached for him in her mind.
Her straining neck relented and her head wilted back down to face the abyss below her. Her wrists felt moments from snapping from the strain, her shoulder tendons tearing strand by strand.
“Only one card,” her captor growled low. “Only one card. So much need, so much suffering and only one card. This is what you have done to this town.”
The chair lifted a few inches as she heard her captor grunt. Another few inches and it scraped against the concrete. Slowly she ascended, each lift straining her joints, the flimsy chair groaning. Tears dripped from her eyes, plummeting into the dark. She reached the drainage pipe and the chair rocked over its edge until she lay on her side. The stream of water poured around Alexandria, her feet still dangling over into God’s Blowhole.
“An entire night wasted on one card,” he sneered into her ear. “Wasted on you!”
A heavy blow crashed into her temple. With her last conscious thought, she accepted her death.
But The Town was not yet done with her.
May 13, 2014
August 11, 2013
This Week in Word of the Day – 08/11/13
hyperhidrosis \hahy-per-hi-DROH-sis\, noun:
abnormally excessive sweating.
Dentistry was not a wise professional choice for a man that suffered so tragically with hyperhidrosis. Despite liberal applications of industrial strength deodorant, the poor dentist simply couldn’t get out ahead of his perspiration problems and his clinic quickly folded.
Distraught and heartbroken, the dentist moved into the veterinarian field where the patients lacked the ability to complain of his foul odor and unsightly pit stains, yet the sight of inhumane canines and molars never fulfilled the man.
On a whim, the dentist asked a mortician about dental care for the deceased. Though there was little need for cavity repair and root canals, the mortician told the dentist that developing a pleasant, comfortable smile for the corpse was a hot, new trend among funeral homes. Yet, preparing the teeth was a vexing problem for which mortuary school left them completely ill-equipped and most resorted to White Out.
Here is where the poor dentist found his calling and it is also within the mortuary dental sciences where he discovered his one and only true love and greatest competitor, Mary Belle Worthington — also known as the Matisse of Corpse Beautification.
eyetooth \AHY-tooth\, noun:
1. Dentistry. a canine tooth of the upper jaw: so named from its position under the eye.
idiom:
1. cut one’s eyeteeth, a. to gain sophistication or experience; become worldly-wise. b. Also, cut one’s eyeteeth on. to be initiated or gain one’s first experience in (a career, hobby, skill, etc.).
2. give one’s eyeteeth, to give something one considers very precious, usually in exchange for an object or situation one desires: She would give her eyeteeth for that job.
Yanking out the eyeteeth as a preventative measure for witchcraft began like all other customs in the sad, little town — at the behest of a charismatic, and quite insane, town elder.
Over the centuries, the townspeople collected brutal, bizarre, and ineffective traditions like most cultures collect sports stars. For 152 years, the town drowned every 73rd child, believing it to be the Antichrist. For 86 years, all cats with black fur, but a white tail were forced to wear satin mittens to prevent them from waking the dead. For 327 years, when a game of chess ended in a stalemate, both players were forcibly shaved bald just to show that quitting was not an acceptable solution to any problem. For thirteen months, when a husband was found in the bed of another woman, he was forced to wear only a diaper for two weeks. For the entire life of the town, a group of children acted out a volcanic disaster on the outskirts of town every night to prevent an eruption, despite the complete absence of volcanoes in their part of the country.
Needless to say, the tourism industry was the town’s chief economy.
holograph \HOL-uh-graf, -grahf, HOH-luh-\, adjective:
1. wholly written by the person in whose name it appears: a holograph letter.
noun:
1. a holograph writing, as a deed, will, or letter.
William never considered that Jesus of Nazareth was literate until the moment he was told of the letters buried deep within the Holy See of Vatican City.
The middle-aged cardinal from Ireland was in line to take over the Vatican’s secret archive, including the earliest church writings. He was first told of the side room hidden behind a book cabinet as a place to be ignored.
“Merely a safe room to hide the most valuable documents should the worst come about,” his mentor advised him, yet never told him how to open the room.
William never thought much about it, but as his mentor’s failing health worsened and bouts of pneumonia brought the mentor to the edge of death, word came down from the archbishop that William’s time had come.
William sat in the archival office as he tried not to listen to his mentor protesting vigilantly against William’s exposure to whatever was hidden in the secret room.
At first, letters from the Savior took on a similar appeal as any sliver of writing from an historic figure. The significance was not lost on William, but he did not anticipate reading anything truly moving or disturbing. More likely correspondence with the apostles or perhaps his mother.
But the way William’s mentor fought to keep William out of the room was both troubling and insulting.
“I am not a child with a fragile faith,” William thought, growing more agitated by the moment.
The office door swung wide and banged against a book case, startling William. The mentor said nothing, only glared.
William stood, turning his eyes from the mentor to the archbishop standing behind him.
“Congratulations,” the archbishop said with a smile. “Only 203 human beings have seen what you are about to hold in your hands.”
The archbishop nodded to his advisers and the group shuffled out of the archive.
The mentor huffed, then turned away from William. They walked silently to the secret entrance of the room.
“Pay attention,” the mentor grunted. “I will show you how to open the door once only.”
William nodded and watched the old man’s hands. The mentor brushed his fingers along the spines of ancient books on thirteenth century church doctrine.
The mentor sighed and glanced back at William.
“Steel yourself,” the mentor whispered. “You will regret this day for the rest of your life.”
waif \weyf\, noun:
1. a person, especially a child, who has no home or friends.
2. something found, especially a stray animal, whose owner is not known.
3. a stray item or article: to gather waifs of gossip.
4. Nautical. waft.
The waif found solace in dead things. Spiders, mice, pigeons, flies, anything that lacked the ability to abandon him. He learned early on that time removed the dead piece by piece, but with furry things, there remained a skeleton.
And these became his friends.
Sewer workers would stumble upon the boy’s piles of bones from time to time, left out in rays of sunlight breaking into the subterranean world. The sewer workers, not realizing the bones were bleaching, would instead whisper about some mysterious beast roaming the underworld.
A decade went by with the waif never glimpsing another human being, but collecting bones of all manner of animals that either lived and died in the sewer or were tossed in for easy disposal.
When the waif, now a full-grown and lonely man, did finally come across one of his own kind, it was a thin and cold Hispanic woman. Young, beautiful, dead. The man had perfected the method of using the microbial life of the sewer to strip the flesh, but preserve the bone. The skeleton was perfect and baked in the summer sun to a gleaming white.
He made the woman his queen, sitting aloft a throne constructed from all of the world’s creatures. The man spoke to her in a language of his own devising, shared stories of his long, productive days, and sat meals out for her that she could never eat.
As the man laid to sleep in their bedroom chamber, moonlight stretching a silver finger through a vent to brush light against his queen’s visage, he prayed to the God he remembered from his early days above ground. He asked the God to give his Queen life, a voice, even just a turn of the head. The God felt for the man, granting his desperate wish, and humanity entered its final nightmare.
finagle \fi-NEY-guhl\, verb:
1. to trick, swindle, or cheat (a person) (often followed by out of): He finagled the backers out of a fortune.
2. to get or achieve (something) by guile, trickery, or manipulation: to finagle an assignment to the Membership Committee.
3. to practice deception or fraud; scheme.
Lindy got it into her head at the beginning of her eighth grade year that she would finagle a date out of Roger Oscarson by the end of the semester. It might seem unreasonable for a mousy and bookish teacher’s pet to land the most popular boy in school, but here is what you need to know about Lindy:
1. At three years old, she successfully framed her older sister for petty theft at a shopping mall as revenge for hogging the television the night before.
2. At seven, she organized a successful coup at a bible camp in eastern Oklahoma so overwhelming that all teenagers and adults were forcibly exiled. Thirty-two law enforcement officials were rushed in to secure the perimeter while the governor negotiated with Lindy for a conditional surrender.
3. At nine, she fixed the mayoral race in her bedroom community in exchange for a massive order of Girl Scout cookies.
4. On her twelfth birthday, she hacked into the Presidential agenda to redirect his motorcade from the state capital to her birthday party at the trampoline park.
5. For her thirteenth birthday, she walked the red carpet at the Academy Awards despite not ever appearing, producing, or having the slightest hand in a motion picture. No one caught on she was crashing the party and her image was even featured in the photo spread in Entertainment Weekly.
So, Roger Oscarson was correct to be terrified.
helter-skelter \HEL-ter-SKEL-ter\, adverb:
1. in headlong and disorderly haste: The children ran helter-skelter all over the house.
2. in a haphazard manner; without regard for order: Clothes were scattered helter-skelter about the room.
adjective:
1. carelessly hurried; confused: They ran in a mad, helter-skelter fashion for the exits.
2. disorderly; haphazard: Books and papers were scattered on the desk in a helter-skelter manner.
Randy always believed he would be the one to stop a shooting rampage, never the maniac behind one. That is why he carried his beretta to public events, why he fine-tuned his Muay Thai, why he kept a bullet-proof vest and smoke grenades in his trunk. He was waiting to be a hero.
The fear crept in shortly after the elections. His parents lost their land to the bank. The radio barked about revolution. The pastor railed about “us” and “them”. The news show host started questioning loyalties.
His wife left, like a bird fleeing a coming storm, but she soon came back with the court documentation to prove the house was now hers.
The dreams were different now, the ones when he was half-awake and lucid. Where the faces in the crosshairs were once terrorists and drug dealers, they were now politicians and activist judges. The meaning of “hero” was changing, being mutated by the hate and fear radiating from his heart.
He sought justice on a sweltering summer afternoon. He emerged helter-skelter from his small, mildewed apartment with layers of body armor and ammunition wrapped around him so tight that it was almost impossible to open his car door and lower into the driver’s seat.
He took back roads to the court house to avoid the police and sat in his car for an hour planning his route. He thought nothing of escape. The hurt fell over his future like a dark curtain.
The first shot was in the lobby and spat out from his modified breach gun. It flew high above the young woman’s head and ripped out a chunk of wood paneling and dry wall behind her. He absorbed the jolt of the shotgun, the terrific blast, the chaos of the crowd, the security guards whipping around and fumbling for their sidearms. The hate drained out his pores. A silence spread into its place. The next shot from the breach gun crashed through Randy’s skull, shattering his mind and extinguishing the hurt before it could infect anyone else.
Randy always believed he would be the hero to stop a shooting rampage, and he was right.
kloof \kloof\, noun:
(in South Africa) a deep glen; ravine.
Deep within the rocky kloof that led to the fire pits of Hell, the pilgrims heard God calling desperately. Castaway by the Dark One during the End of Days, God was trapped within the scorched and shattered Earth. The Book said God lost because of His ego. In truth, it was His omnipotence that was his downfall.
“He sees everything, and because of this, He sees nothing,” the Dark One told the media networks following the bloody war.
The pilgrims wept at the mouth of the deep gash cut into the landscape, smelling the sulfur waft up in warm breezes. The snarl-toothed demon with twisted horns sprouting from his head coughed a polite reminder that the line was not getting any shorter. The pilgrims dried their eyes and dropped olive branches down into Hell.
Again, they heard God call to them, voice weakened by the eternal torment. The pilgrims lowered their heads in shame and turned away from their Creator.
