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Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 38
August 28, 2012
An Apartment Filled With Books
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Thanks to everybody who bought all my damned books! I still didn’t get to go over to the local bookstore, but that’s OK. So, here’s round two- probably the last I’ll send out personally of this book. If you’d like one, hit me up. I’ll ship
it to you on the cheap.I’m selling them for $15 shipping included in that. You can pay through paypal if you would like, and I’ll sign it if you would like that.Also, looking for review considerations from my writer friends out there. Know a good website that might have a reviewer who’d like to take a stab at this? Please let me know. I’ve submitted to about 6 review sites, but would like some more.
Thanks so much, as always.
Bud
August 27, 2012
Some Piano in the Darkness
Somebody in the building played piano. I heard them every night as I came walked up the stairs, but never could figure out who it was. Little trickles of notes echoing through the stairwell, down the hallways. I would take the gentlest steps in my shoes so that I could trace it better but I traced absolutely nothing. Sometimes, I would stand there, hold my breath and listen close, it was coming from above. That much was certain.
A few notes, strung together. Then, a wall of silence.
I didn’t stage a large investigation, or put my ear to each door as I came to it. Other tenants were not interrogated- it was just sometimes, a mystery, that maybe I preferred to leave open. As I came home, in from the heat or the cold, I would hear those little notes and I would wonder…is that a beautiful naked woman playing the piano in my building?
What door was she behind? Would she be receptive if I bought myself a trumpet or saxophone or stand up bass? Or I join in? Should I just start knocking?
Inevitably the closer I listened, the sooner the piano would stop. I took my keys out of my pocket went into the cage that was my rented room. The standard modern stockade against the elements. I cooked some meat in a pan on the stove and sat down beside the window, looking up at the crack on the ceiling as the radiators hissed.
TV. Radio. A well stocked shelf of liquor and a cabinet ravaged by mice who’ve consumed the oatmeal and pasta and rice and crackers and extra toilet paper for their nests.
I don’t own a gun. I keep a baseball bat beside my bed in hopes that when the killers come to get me, they will kindly come in through the front door and not the window to my bedroom. As chances have it I will hear them coming down the hallway but will not hear them through the window, as I sleep on my good ear.
The other is deaf.
That adds to my confusion with the piano. The ghost notes on summer nights. I can hear them, but I can’t tell what direction they are really coming from.
Lying in bed and hearing the slow drip of piano keys in the darkness. Are you real, and are you playing my song?
A few non linear fragments at a time? Not really melodic. Not really tied together. Perhaps that’s what really kept me thinking about it.
It didn’t help me sleep at all.
Then, I did find out.
This winter, the music stopped. No one played me anything and I thought for sure that my beautiful naked woman at the piano had gone off to greener pastures.
In spring, I walking into the building and a man said, “Sir, please wait one moment, we’re using the stairs…”
Here come two men, holding up the bottom of a small upright piano, descending down the stairs backwards. They were telling the men in the front of the piano, “Take it easy…”
“Easy…”
“Slow down…”
When they got to ground level I stood there looking at them and they all looked at me.
“Where did that piano come from?”
“Upstairs.”
“I can see that.”
“Nobody ever has a piano on the ground floor.” One of the men said.
“What apartment?”
“20.”
The one above me. Then Mr. King came down carrying a cardboard box and a bowling ball bag. He said hello.
“I’m moving.” He said.
“Oh, who plays the piano?”
“Nobody plays the piano.” He said. “I just have it.”
“You never did?”
“No.” He said.
“I used to hear it. I used to hear it all the time.”
“You heard Annie.”
“Annie?”
“I kept it by the window. She used to sleep on it, on top. Then she would walk down and follow the birds on the fire escape and she’d step on the keys. She was a good cat and now she’s in cat heaven.”
“Your cat?”
“My cat.” He said. Then he walked out of the building with the piano movers and I was left alone in front of the mailboxes.
You never know what exists and who will let you know about it.
August 26, 2012
The Sword
http://www.drunkmonkeys.onimpression....
August 25, 2012
Book Giveaway for my book of short stories ‘Or Something Like That’
Hey, just wanted to mention, I’m doing a book giveaway for my recently released short story collection Or Something Like That
If you are a member of Goodreads, you could click the link below and enter into the giveaway to get a free book sent in the mail personally from yours truly. Or if you think that’s a bunch of bogus hokey, you could just leave a comment in the comment section below.
Lemme know.
To enter click
Here
Getting Down to the Heavy Work
Friday, on my way home, I got a phone call saying that I wouldn't be needed back at work until the following Thursday. Some components being shipped from overseas, delayed in transit.
Fucking sweet.
That means I get three work days to dedicate to editing my new novel, Patient. It's one thing to come home after work and mess around with some edits for an hour or two before I've got to cook dinner. Actually having an entire block of eight hours plus strung together for multiple days is a godsend.
It makes me wonder why everybody on unemployment is writing a novel right now. I know, when I was unemployed in 2007, I had a swell time getting paid to write my novel Tollbooth.
That's my other news, Tollbooth is being professionally edited and will finally be released in the winter. So, I'm excited about that.
Tollbooth is a novel about guy who is driven crazy from the daily torture of collecting rolls in a NJ parkway tollbooth. He has somewhat of a mental snap and starts chasing around a young college girl, becomes involved with an anarchistic kid who has strange plots and motives.
This fall will be beautiful.
Or Something Like That
August 24, 2012
The Sword
There’s a lot of short stories that I write that seem to float around in limbo for a long time. They are being considered for publication by differnet magazines and websites and so, I refrain from posting them on my blog here for the most part out of respect for the people that are considering them for publication.
Today, my story “The Sword” is being featured at the website Drunk Monkeys
http://www.drunkmonkeys.onimpression.com/featured/the-sword-by-bud-smith/
Check it out, let me know what you think. It’s about a man who finds a magic sword in a lake and sells it on Ebay instead of using it for it’s true purpose.
Also, thanks to everyone who bought a copy of my collection of short stories. Mucho Gracias, amigos. Thanks so much for reviewing what you’ve read also.
August 22, 2012
Not an Accident
real love is a car crash
that you survive
whether the airbags deploy
whether you go through the windshield
whether you explode on impact
I feel everything stop
and I go out on the pavement
watch the emergency crews
cut the roof of the car off
with a K-10 saw
they peel back the sheet metal
as if it was a can of tuna fish
and they were in the mood for a sandwich
when they look inside
and see us all torn apart
and crushed in odd ways
will it be odd
for them to note
we’re still holding hands?
August 21, 2012
They Will Tear You Apart
The basement was cold. Carry sat on the edge of my bed, her head in her hands. I just stared at my bedroom wall which was covered in posters, Polaroid photos, random things from magazines. There wasn’t a single inch of exposed wall.
I stared at the Clockwork Orange poster and thought about the knife that Alex held. I imagined it being used to cut out the thing that might be inside her. That’s all I saw whenever I looked anywhere. Things that related to our catastrophe.
“Fifteen days.” she said.
“I know.”
“Fifteen days late.”
She wasn’t crying, but it was coming. It hadn’t happened yet, but it would eventually. Some emotion would come. It worried me how made of stone she seemed. Stone cracks.
Upstairs I could hear my parents walking around. A door closed, the TV turned up louder. They were watching the weeks X-files recorded on VHS. I could tell from the theme song.
Beside us, my digital clock started to buzz. We’d programmed it to go off at 9:45 because her parents demanded she be home by 10pm on a school night.
Most of the time we lost track of time because we were fucking.
Now she was sixteen, half a month late with her period. There was no way to lose track of time now. Each minute was accounted for, documented in a logbook, studied under a microscope for the slightest inference that blood would appear and save both our lives.
“We have to go.”
Her father was a firefighter. I could visualize it clearly. Him putting an ax through my abdomen. Then he would pour fuel over me. Light me up. They liked that, the firefighters. Firebugs they are, at heart.
Her mother would be watching all of this, praying to the Lord to let me survive the fire, so that I could suffer forever, dunked into brine tanks. She’d do the dunking herself, all the while muttering prayers. My body one scar that would never touch let alone be touched by another girl again.
Carry stood up. She put her puffy pink coat on, didn’t say a word as we walked out the back door and across the frozen yard.
The chain link gate had bonded to the ground and we could barely get it open.
There was no heat in my car. I’d just gotten my license and I couldn’t be picky. The thing had come out of the junkyard. A different engine transplanted inside. I was lucky I had anything at all to get back and forth to see her. We drove in silence even though the cassette deck in my car was the most important thing that we both had in the world.
I’d put the tape deck in before I’d even transplanted the engine.
I looked over at her side profile.
A cheek of acne and long straight blonde hair striped with a patch of green dye. She smelled like baby powder. She had an earring with a fairy on it. Her favorite song was “Love Will Tear Us Apart” she smoked cloves. She had mentioned that an abortion wasn’t an option. That she would have to kill herself.
I hadn’t said anything.
After that threat a silence crept through the telephone line as she held her breath. In the background I could hear her mother’s beagle howling to be let outside to run around the yard.
Now she shuddered in her heavy pink coat that wasn’t warm enough.
“Not too much farther.” I said.
We crossed out of my town and into the one between ours. I liked dating girls that went to different high schools. perhaps it says something about my comfort with alienation. I didn’t want anything to do with the kids in my class. Didn’t want to talk to them. Didn’t want to drink with them. Didn’t even want to fuck them.
Ahead in the road, there was something lying down. I didn’t see it until I got too close. Too busy looking at the side of her face. She was completely numb. Borderline unresponsive.
She was looking at the road, hypnotized, thinking about her fate and she suddenly yelled, “What’s that?”
It was too late.
Just then, the head lifted up and I realized too late that it was deer. Little eyes reflecting. A small skull. Perhaps a baby deer. Someone had already hit it. It wasn’t dead. Just wounded. Laying there twitching on the black asphalt.
Then I ran it over.
It was dead then.
As we drove the rest of the way down the two lane road, she was heaving and crying and wailing and punching me.
“You killed it! You killed it! You Fuck!”
What could I have done?
When we got to her driveway she opened the door and sprinted out across the frozen gravel.
I put the car in reverse, pulled out.
By the time I got home the animal’s remains reeked underneath the car. Melting on the bottom of the exhaust. The skin and hair and viscera cooking. Burning. It was the worst thing I’ve ever smelled in my life. Even though it was freezing, I drove with the window down, my teeth chattering. Coughing and gagging.
In my driveway, I jacked the car up. Got a light from the garage and began to scrape the guts and chunks of animal off the undercarriage of the car.
I felt sick to my stomach, thinking about how the doctor would scrape her, in her, up inside- and pull the animal out of her.
I got a stick and pulled a chunk off, it slapped into the driveway.
It started to sleet. I went inside and sat there with my sour stomach and my fear.
Near dawn, the phone rang once. That was our cue. our way of communicating at our patents houses. No more than one ring and then I would call her back on her private line in her bedroom.
“It happened.” She said.
“Really?”
“I got my period.”
I was so happy I began to weep. I set down the phone. I ripped every single poster and photo off my wall. I burnt them in a pit in the backyard. Because that’s how you start over. When everything is overbearing. You clear the wall and you leaf through new magazines. Searching.
Always searching.
August 17, 2012
You Do Great Good
you make it diffulcult
because you always come in
right as I’m about to fall asleep
and you kiss
between my shoulder blades
until I’m hard
and wide awake
and all wound up
you do great good.
you flip the record over,
rescue the needle from the hissing
popping netherworld
place it in the groove again.
you keep me close
like a balloon without a string
used as a bible to stop a bullet
held, protecting your heart
clamped by your thin wristed arms
covered in near invisible fuzz
you’re suitcase is packed
and you’re always leaving me
but as soon as you arrive
you’re on the line
inviting me to the water
to watch the lightning strike
way out there
on the foamed tips of waves
and so- of course, I come
August 15, 2012
‘Or Something Like That Final’ Proofs Arrive
A box of books arrived today. The final proofs. In my opinion, they look outta sight! Couldn’t be happier.
For those of you who like short stories, this collection is one that I gathered from 40 of my favorite shorts that I had written up until the start of this year.
I have a limited supply of these suckers. Anyone interested in a copy, I am selling these cheaper than online. Contact me at budsmithwrites@gmail.com or twitter me at @bud_smith.
Thanks
Bud Smith
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