Jeremy Thompson's Blog, page 2
September 20, 2024
Cancel Toby Chalmers!: Chapters 1-3
Well, since my novelette Cancel Toby Chalmers! (copyright me, now) has been sitting around, completed, for nearly 16 months, I’ve decided to share it for free, until it’s later released as part of a Toby Chalmers collection.
Here are the first three chapters.
Chapter 1
Upon being introduced to new acquaintances, Joseph McCarthy Jr., more often than not, issued the disclaimer, “Don’t worry, my dad wasn’t that Joseph McCarthy. He was liberal to the bone, just like me. He even shook Nelson Mandela’s hand once.”
Askance glances this earned him; few recognized his references. Reluctantly meeting the unsettlingly fervent eyes within Joe’s poached egg countenance, people said, “Oh, uh, nice to meetcha,” and other utterances of that ilk.
Those unfortunate enough to remain within range of the man’s self-satisfied aura would then hear him ask, “So, what do you do?” Preempting their every reply, Joe’d strike his most heroic, fists-to-hips pose and intone, “Me, I’m Transylvoria’s Editor-in-Chief.”
“The horror literature fan magazine?” his current chinwag partner asked. “Didn’t one of your writers get busted for diddlin’ kids or some shit?”
“Oh, we fired that guy months ago. No one really liked him anyway.”
“Huh. Well, here’s your pizza. That’ll be twenty bucks even.”
Cool, the delivery guy respects me so much that he doesn’t want a tip, Joe assumed, sliding a Jackson portrait from his wallet. He tucked it into the collar of his visitor’s Italian flag-striped shirt, grabbed the pizza box from his hands, and slammed the door.
“Uncle Jojo’s got lunch!” he shouted toward the living room. “Extra sardines, just how we like it!”
He retrieved a pair of plates from the cupboard and topped each with three slices. His mouth watered; his stomach rumbled anticipatorily. To the glass-and-chrome dining table he carried the pizza, then a couple of sodas in Jordan Peele-faced mugs.
“Shadrach, get in here!” he shouted, seating himself. “Don’t be a cold fish! Don’t eat one, either.” He washed a chomp down with a hearty swig of Pepsi, as his eight-year-old nephew entered the kitchen.
“Nobody calls me by my full name, Uncle Jojo,” the boy said, climbing onto a stool.
“Nobody plus one,” Joe countered.
Prepubertal hypertrichosis had gifted the boy with a fringe of dark facial hair, just like Joe’s. In fact, the two looked so much alike, many folks assumed that Joe had impregnated his single mother sister to spawn the little bastard. Joe was pretty sure he’d pulled out that one time, though.
“Hey, what happened to your TRANSYLVORIA PRIDE shirt? That cool one I gave you, with the rainbow with fangs? You were wearin’ it this morning.”
Ignoring the question, Shadrach selected a pizza slice and conspicuously began to consume it.
“I’m waiting, young man.”
Shadrach shrugged and said, “It got dirty, so I changed into this one.”
“Dirty? You haven’t set a foot outdoors all weekend.”
“I spilled somethin’ on it.” Now Shadrach wouldn’t meet Joe’s gaze.
“Listen, little buddy, I can tell when you’re lying. And while your mama’s in rehab, I’m the one lookin’ after you. There’ll be no lies in this house. Not now, not ever. Again, I’m asking what happened to your TRANSYLVORIA PRIDE shirt?”
“I took it off.”
“But why ever would you do such a silly thing?”
“I don’t like it.”
“But I approved the design personally. Aren’t you proud of Transylvoria? Aren’t you proud of the 2SLGBTQI+ community? They’ve come so far over the years.”
“I’m a straight white boy, Uncle Jojo. When I wear that shirt, people think I wanna kiss dudes. Hal pinched my wiener at school. I didn’t like it.”
“Oh, Shadrach, Shadrach, Shadrach. First of all, what have I told you about calling yourself ‘white’? Caucasians should refer to themselves as ‘racially challenged’ until we’ve destroyed, then atoned for, white supremacy. And if showing solidarity with marginalized groups makes you a target for the ignorant, then be a proud target.”
“But Hal is gay. Why are you calling him ignorant?”
“That’s not…you’ve got a long way to go intellectually, I’m afraid.”
Chapter 2
For years, Toby Chalmers had been plagued by a recurrent dream scenario, wherein he wandered the grounds of an institution that incorporated architecture from every school he’d ever attended—pre-, elementary, middle, high, and even the community college he’d dropped out of. Seeking a math class whose location he’d forgotten, aware that an accumulation of absences made a failing grade likely, he encountered classmates from the past, some of whom were now dead in the real world.
Subsequent awakenings had seen his stomach dread-weighted. How will I explain an F to my parents? he’d wondered, until he reclaimed his place in the linear timestream and realized, Oh, that’s right, I live alone now and my school days are long behind me.
His latest slumber, however (described in slang that’ll likely be outdated by the time this book sees print), hit different. Finally, he found himself seated in the long-sought math class, surrounded by middle schoolers he’d once known, along with a few strangers. Four kids shared each table. Across from Toby was a goth chick he’d once had a crush on: a blonde who’d dressed in the same Victorian mourning dress every day and always smelled of mothballs. In the real world, he’d never spoken so much as a syllable to her. As a matter of fact, before alcoholism seized him in the ninth grade, he’d possessed scant social skills, had spent his free moments alone, reading or watching horror.
The blonde had never spoken to him either, but she did now, in his dream. “Don’t you have your homework?” she asked, tapping her finger upon a sheet of solved equations. Their two other tablemates, a snickering pair of future date rapists, had sheets of their own, ready for grading.
“Uh…I think so. Let me check.” Toby’s old, green JanSport backpack—with its logo torn off, just like he remembered—rested on the floor, beside his left foot. Within it, he discovered not the expected books and binders, but a churning mass of grey rodents. Aware of his scrutiny, they stared and hissed.
Unable to stifle his gasp, Toby inflamed the blonde’s curiosity. “What’s the matter?” she asked, peeking under the table. “Oh, wow, you’d better hide those before you get expelled.”
Their other two tablemates had themselves a look and began giggling. “What’re those for, Toby?” they uttered in unison. “Gonna stick ’em up your ass?”
Ignoring their jibes, Toby eye-swept the room, sliding his gaze athwart whiteboard and posters, students and negative space. His focus soon settled upon the leftward storage drawers, wherein slept calculators, pencils, protractors and worksheets.
The teacher had yet to arrive. Indeed, Toby had time to lug his backpack thereabouts and dump its contents into a drawer. Closing it, glad that no one but his tablemates had paid any attention to him, he then returned to his chair.
Next came a time jump. Many months must’ve passed, because the rats had multiplied exponentially, and now poured from all corners of the campus. Students stumbled about, shrieking, with rodents nibbling at their clothes and pawing at their hair, as Toby wandered the premises, untouched. Seeing terror-warped faces, he wondered if he should feel pity, or guilt, or anything at all, really. Instead, he tried to recall the location of his math classroom.
Another time jump restored normalcy to the institution. Unhurriedly, students and teachers made their way toward their day’s lessons. No longer did Toby recognize a single presence around him. Wondering if he’d ever graduate, if he’d ever make his parents proud, he approached a popular, dark-haired girl whose vulpine voluptuousness diminished those surrounding her.
“Excuse me,” Toby said, “but I seem to be lost here.”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it,” the girl answered, “considering you died all those years ago.”
“Died?”
“Sure did. You’re a legend around these parts now. The Rat King, they call you. All those rodents you set loose here…they had to shut this place down for months.”
Only then did Toby glance down at his body, to see that it was composed not of flesh, but of dozens of grey, squeaking rats, all connected at their tails. “Oh,” he just managed to utter, as his dream dissolved around him.
Within far less interesting flesh, he awakened. His lower back ached, as per usual. Rather than lurch right to the bathroom, as his biology demanded, he chose to remain yet recumbent, reflecting on his phantasmagoria while its edges remained solid in his mind.
Finally, my recurrent dream reached a terminus, he thought. Such a bizarre sense of closure. I’ll probably never again return to those surroundings, never again visit all of those lost-to-time faces. The dead and the dead-to-me, friends and enemies, now nonentities. Should I be melancholic or grateful?
After all of these years, a resolution to my math classroom dilemma. Is my subconscious trying to tell me something? Does it sense dark times impending? It’s been quite some time since my fiction landed me in any trouble. What madness now awaits me?
Chapter 3
When ejaculating his biography to all those within earshot, Joseph McCarthy Jr. would generally say something along the lines of, “After earning my journalism degree from Cameron University, I spent six years reviewing folk music for The Jingle-Jangle Gazette before they elevated me to editor. That lasted for a few years before I decided to fully embrace my love of horror literature. I’ve now been Editor-in-Chief at not one, but two magazines devoted to it.”
The veracity of that last sentence was a bit iffy, however. True, Joe had held that position at both Draculiterary and Transylvoria, but he left out the fact that Transylvoria was just Draculiterary retitled, with the numbering continued.
Over his head honcho tenure, Joe had fired the magazine’s every straight, cisgender white man and replaced them with minorities who didn’t mind being marketed as such in their bylines. “We’re changing our name to Transylvoria to reflect our new policy of inclusivity,” he’d trumpeted. “For far too long, racially challenged, cisgender, penis-having breeders have limited this magazine’s purview. Our new day starts right now, with this issue!” An adulatory echo chamber of social media randos then washed over him. He’d masturbated for hours, ogling himself in the mirror.
“Aside from Stephen King, no more cisgender, male, racially challenged, straight authors will be reviewed here,” he told each new hire. “They’re a link to a racist time in history that our bright, shiny future will pave over.”
Sure, the old guard had raised a fuss, claiming that they’d developed their writing skills over decades and deserved the same regard as the new jacks. All had been shamed on social media by Joe and his acolytes, until the old guard’s publishers had seen no choice but to take those authors’ books out of print and issue press releases announcing their commitment to inclusivity. Suicides had been celebrated in Transylvoria. “So long, massa!” was the slogan used for each incident.
When some of the now-shunned writers revealed that they truly were bigots, calling black authors “illiterate charity cases” and trans authors “even uglier than their purple prose,” those men were labeled the typical, non-Stephen King, cisgender, straight, racially challenged, male author by much of the media. “They want to enslave us all and force us to write Donald Trump fan fiction!” certain diverse, much reposted authors claimed.
Riding this revolutionary wave, denouncing his own race at every opportunity, Joseph McCarthy Jr. gained more and more influence on horror literature. An early proponent of content warnings, he demanded that every published author spoil their entire plot at the start of each story, so that nobody ever be triggered when reading it. “Entitled monsters,” he’d labeled those who’d failed to comply, just as long as they were cisgender, straight, racially challenged, and male. So, too, had his magazine and he assisted in the efforts to change H.P. Lovecraft’s surname to Hatecraft in his fiction’s every reprint. “Bigots don’t get to decide their legacies, we do!” he’d decreed.
Every cisgender, straight, racially challenged male who spoke out against Joe was labeled a Nazi by the man, then his followers. Even their most innocuous social media posts were twisted into hate speech. Top names in the industry denounced them, receiving glowing Transylvoria reviews in exchange.
I’ve gained so much power over horror lit, Joe often thought, when he had time to himself, so why doesn’t my own nephew bow to my wisdom?
* * *
Contemplating the nominees for Transylvoria’s upcoming Vampclusivity Awards—an online ceremony he’d host, as per usual—Joe strode into his living room. Framed signature sheets from books he would never read lined the walls. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to draw the eye, save for a large 4K television perched on a tobacco-shaded stand, facing an autumn-colored velour sofa that seemed half-alive.
Shadrach had never liked that sofa. “It smells funny,” he’d said, “and the cushions are covered with crusty stains. I think mice might be livin’ in it, too.” Rather than sit upon it as he watched TV, he chose to lay on his belly, on the carpet, propped up on his elbows, resting his chin on his palms, bending his neck in a way that looked excruciatingly painful to Joe. Such was the pose that Joe found him in on this day.
A young African American rhymed and cavorted across the TV screen, instructing a group of enthusiastic peers in the art of The Urkel Dance. Red suspenders kept his pants hefted nearly to his chest. Straps kept his glasses from sliding off of his head.
Infuriated, Joe snatched the remote control from his nephew and powered off the TV. “Family Matters!” he shouted. “You know how I feel about Steve Urkel!”
Pouting, Shadrach climbed to his feet and said, “Steve Urkel’s funny as heck, Uncle Jojo. My mom let me watch him all the time.”
Clenching his fists, Joe responded, “Your mama was a bad influence. That’s why she’s in rehab. I’ve told you time and time again that it’s never okay for a racially challenged person to laugh at a black one.”
“But he’s supposed to be laughed at. That’s why they made him funny.”
“We can only laugh with African Americans when they’re making fun of the racially challenged. We can never, never, never laugh at them. Minstrel shows were supposed to be funny, too, once. How would you feel if I put on blackface make-up right now and started performing ‘Jump Jim Crow’ for you?”
“Uh…what?”
“That’s it, young man, I’ve had enough of your ignorance! If your school isn’t gonna teach you about racial tolerance, then I will!”
Here are the first three chapters.
Chapter 1
Upon being introduced to new acquaintances, Joseph McCarthy Jr., more often than not, issued the disclaimer, “Don’t worry, my dad wasn’t that Joseph McCarthy. He was liberal to the bone, just like me. He even shook Nelson Mandela’s hand once.”
Askance glances this earned him; few recognized his references. Reluctantly meeting the unsettlingly fervent eyes within Joe’s poached egg countenance, people said, “Oh, uh, nice to meetcha,” and other utterances of that ilk.
Those unfortunate enough to remain within range of the man’s self-satisfied aura would then hear him ask, “So, what do you do?” Preempting their every reply, Joe’d strike his most heroic, fists-to-hips pose and intone, “Me, I’m Transylvoria’s Editor-in-Chief.”
“The horror literature fan magazine?” his current chinwag partner asked. “Didn’t one of your writers get busted for diddlin’ kids or some shit?”
“Oh, we fired that guy months ago. No one really liked him anyway.”
“Huh. Well, here’s your pizza. That’ll be twenty bucks even.”
Cool, the delivery guy respects me so much that he doesn’t want a tip, Joe assumed, sliding a Jackson portrait from his wallet. He tucked it into the collar of his visitor’s Italian flag-striped shirt, grabbed the pizza box from his hands, and slammed the door.
“Uncle Jojo’s got lunch!” he shouted toward the living room. “Extra sardines, just how we like it!”
He retrieved a pair of plates from the cupboard and topped each with three slices. His mouth watered; his stomach rumbled anticipatorily. To the glass-and-chrome dining table he carried the pizza, then a couple of sodas in Jordan Peele-faced mugs.
“Shadrach, get in here!” he shouted, seating himself. “Don’t be a cold fish! Don’t eat one, either.” He washed a chomp down with a hearty swig of Pepsi, as his eight-year-old nephew entered the kitchen.
“Nobody calls me by my full name, Uncle Jojo,” the boy said, climbing onto a stool.
“Nobody plus one,” Joe countered.
Prepubertal hypertrichosis had gifted the boy with a fringe of dark facial hair, just like Joe’s. In fact, the two looked so much alike, many folks assumed that Joe had impregnated his single mother sister to spawn the little bastard. Joe was pretty sure he’d pulled out that one time, though.
“Hey, what happened to your TRANSYLVORIA PRIDE shirt? That cool one I gave you, with the rainbow with fangs? You were wearin’ it this morning.”
Ignoring the question, Shadrach selected a pizza slice and conspicuously began to consume it.
“I’m waiting, young man.”
Shadrach shrugged and said, “It got dirty, so I changed into this one.”
“Dirty? You haven’t set a foot outdoors all weekend.”
“I spilled somethin’ on it.” Now Shadrach wouldn’t meet Joe’s gaze.
“Listen, little buddy, I can tell when you’re lying. And while your mama’s in rehab, I’m the one lookin’ after you. There’ll be no lies in this house. Not now, not ever. Again, I’m asking what happened to your TRANSYLVORIA PRIDE shirt?”
“I took it off.”
“But why ever would you do such a silly thing?”
“I don’t like it.”
“But I approved the design personally. Aren’t you proud of Transylvoria? Aren’t you proud of the 2SLGBTQI+ community? They’ve come so far over the years.”
“I’m a straight white boy, Uncle Jojo. When I wear that shirt, people think I wanna kiss dudes. Hal pinched my wiener at school. I didn’t like it.”
“Oh, Shadrach, Shadrach, Shadrach. First of all, what have I told you about calling yourself ‘white’? Caucasians should refer to themselves as ‘racially challenged’ until we’ve destroyed, then atoned for, white supremacy. And if showing solidarity with marginalized groups makes you a target for the ignorant, then be a proud target.”
“But Hal is gay. Why are you calling him ignorant?”
“That’s not…you’ve got a long way to go intellectually, I’m afraid.”
Chapter 2
For years, Toby Chalmers had been plagued by a recurrent dream scenario, wherein he wandered the grounds of an institution that incorporated architecture from every school he’d ever attended—pre-, elementary, middle, high, and even the community college he’d dropped out of. Seeking a math class whose location he’d forgotten, aware that an accumulation of absences made a failing grade likely, he encountered classmates from the past, some of whom were now dead in the real world.
Subsequent awakenings had seen his stomach dread-weighted. How will I explain an F to my parents? he’d wondered, until he reclaimed his place in the linear timestream and realized, Oh, that’s right, I live alone now and my school days are long behind me.
His latest slumber, however (described in slang that’ll likely be outdated by the time this book sees print), hit different. Finally, he found himself seated in the long-sought math class, surrounded by middle schoolers he’d once known, along with a few strangers. Four kids shared each table. Across from Toby was a goth chick he’d once had a crush on: a blonde who’d dressed in the same Victorian mourning dress every day and always smelled of mothballs. In the real world, he’d never spoken so much as a syllable to her. As a matter of fact, before alcoholism seized him in the ninth grade, he’d possessed scant social skills, had spent his free moments alone, reading or watching horror.
The blonde had never spoken to him either, but she did now, in his dream. “Don’t you have your homework?” she asked, tapping her finger upon a sheet of solved equations. Their two other tablemates, a snickering pair of future date rapists, had sheets of their own, ready for grading.
“Uh…I think so. Let me check.” Toby’s old, green JanSport backpack—with its logo torn off, just like he remembered—rested on the floor, beside his left foot. Within it, he discovered not the expected books and binders, but a churning mass of grey rodents. Aware of his scrutiny, they stared and hissed.
Unable to stifle his gasp, Toby inflamed the blonde’s curiosity. “What’s the matter?” she asked, peeking under the table. “Oh, wow, you’d better hide those before you get expelled.”
Their other two tablemates had themselves a look and began giggling. “What’re those for, Toby?” they uttered in unison. “Gonna stick ’em up your ass?”
Ignoring their jibes, Toby eye-swept the room, sliding his gaze athwart whiteboard and posters, students and negative space. His focus soon settled upon the leftward storage drawers, wherein slept calculators, pencils, protractors and worksheets.
The teacher had yet to arrive. Indeed, Toby had time to lug his backpack thereabouts and dump its contents into a drawer. Closing it, glad that no one but his tablemates had paid any attention to him, he then returned to his chair.
Next came a time jump. Many months must’ve passed, because the rats had multiplied exponentially, and now poured from all corners of the campus. Students stumbled about, shrieking, with rodents nibbling at their clothes and pawing at their hair, as Toby wandered the premises, untouched. Seeing terror-warped faces, he wondered if he should feel pity, or guilt, or anything at all, really. Instead, he tried to recall the location of his math classroom.
Another time jump restored normalcy to the institution. Unhurriedly, students and teachers made their way toward their day’s lessons. No longer did Toby recognize a single presence around him. Wondering if he’d ever graduate, if he’d ever make his parents proud, he approached a popular, dark-haired girl whose vulpine voluptuousness diminished those surrounding her.
“Excuse me,” Toby said, “but I seem to be lost here.”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it,” the girl answered, “considering you died all those years ago.”
“Died?”
“Sure did. You’re a legend around these parts now. The Rat King, they call you. All those rodents you set loose here…they had to shut this place down for months.”
Only then did Toby glance down at his body, to see that it was composed not of flesh, but of dozens of grey, squeaking rats, all connected at their tails. “Oh,” he just managed to utter, as his dream dissolved around him.
Within far less interesting flesh, he awakened. His lower back ached, as per usual. Rather than lurch right to the bathroom, as his biology demanded, he chose to remain yet recumbent, reflecting on his phantasmagoria while its edges remained solid in his mind.
Finally, my recurrent dream reached a terminus, he thought. Such a bizarre sense of closure. I’ll probably never again return to those surroundings, never again visit all of those lost-to-time faces. The dead and the dead-to-me, friends and enemies, now nonentities. Should I be melancholic or grateful?
After all of these years, a resolution to my math classroom dilemma. Is my subconscious trying to tell me something? Does it sense dark times impending? It’s been quite some time since my fiction landed me in any trouble. What madness now awaits me?
Chapter 3
When ejaculating his biography to all those within earshot, Joseph McCarthy Jr. would generally say something along the lines of, “After earning my journalism degree from Cameron University, I spent six years reviewing folk music for The Jingle-Jangle Gazette before they elevated me to editor. That lasted for a few years before I decided to fully embrace my love of horror literature. I’ve now been Editor-in-Chief at not one, but two magazines devoted to it.”
The veracity of that last sentence was a bit iffy, however. True, Joe had held that position at both Draculiterary and Transylvoria, but he left out the fact that Transylvoria was just Draculiterary retitled, with the numbering continued.
Over his head honcho tenure, Joe had fired the magazine’s every straight, cisgender white man and replaced them with minorities who didn’t mind being marketed as such in their bylines. “We’re changing our name to Transylvoria to reflect our new policy of inclusivity,” he’d trumpeted. “For far too long, racially challenged, cisgender, penis-having breeders have limited this magazine’s purview. Our new day starts right now, with this issue!” An adulatory echo chamber of social media randos then washed over him. He’d masturbated for hours, ogling himself in the mirror.
“Aside from Stephen King, no more cisgender, male, racially challenged, straight authors will be reviewed here,” he told each new hire. “They’re a link to a racist time in history that our bright, shiny future will pave over.”
Sure, the old guard had raised a fuss, claiming that they’d developed their writing skills over decades and deserved the same regard as the new jacks. All had been shamed on social media by Joe and his acolytes, until the old guard’s publishers had seen no choice but to take those authors’ books out of print and issue press releases announcing their commitment to inclusivity. Suicides had been celebrated in Transylvoria. “So long, massa!” was the slogan used for each incident.
When some of the now-shunned writers revealed that they truly were bigots, calling black authors “illiterate charity cases” and trans authors “even uglier than their purple prose,” those men were labeled the typical, non-Stephen King, cisgender, straight, racially challenged, male author by much of the media. “They want to enslave us all and force us to write Donald Trump fan fiction!” certain diverse, much reposted authors claimed.
Riding this revolutionary wave, denouncing his own race at every opportunity, Joseph McCarthy Jr. gained more and more influence on horror literature. An early proponent of content warnings, he demanded that every published author spoil their entire plot at the start of each story, so that nobody ever be triggered when reading it. “Entitled monsters,” he’d labeled those who’d failed to comply, just as long as they were cisgender, straight, racially challenged, and male. So, too, had his magazine and he assisted in the efforts to change H.P. Lovecraft’s surname to Hatecraft in his fiction’s every reprint. “Bigots don’t get to decide their legacies, we do!” he’d decreed.
Every cisgender, straight, racially challenged male who spoke out against Joe was labeled a Nazi by the man, then his followers. Even their most innocuous social media posts were twisted into hate speech. Top names in the industry denounced them, receiving glowing Transylvoria reviews in exchange.
I’ve gained so much power over horror lit, Joe often thought, when he had time to himself, so why doesn’t my own nephew bow to my wisdom?
* * *
Contemplating the nominees for Transylvoria’s upcoming Vampclusivity Awards—an online ceremony he’d host, as per usual—Joe strode into his living room. Framed signature sheets from books he would never read lined the walls. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to draw the eye, save for a large 4K television perched on a tobacco-shaded stand, facing an autumn-colored velour sofa that seemed half-alive.
Shadrach had never liked that sofa. “It smells funny,” he’d said, “and the cushions are covered with crusty stains. I think mice might be livin’ in it, too.” Rather than sit upon it as he watched TV, he chose to lay on his belly, on the carpet, propped up on his elbows, resting his chin on his palms, bending his neck in a way that looked excruciatingly painful to Joe. Such was the pose that Joe found him in on this day.
A young African American rhymed and cavorted across the TV screen, instructing a group of enthusiastic peers in the art of The Urkel Dance. Red suspenders kept his pants hefted nearly to his chest. Straps kept his glasses from sliding off of his head.
Infuriated, Joe snatched the remote control from his nephew and powered off the TV. “Family Matters!” he shouted. “You know how I feel about Steve Urkel!”
Pouting, Shadrach climbed to his feet and said, “Steve Urkel’s funny as heck, Uncle Jojo. My mom let me watch him all the time.”
Clenching his fists, Joe responded, “Your mama was a bad influence. That’s why she’s in rehab. I’ve told you time and time again that it’s never okay for a racially challenged person to laugh at a black one.”
“But he’s supposed to be laughed at. That’s why they made him funny.”
“We can only laugh with African Americans when they’re making fun of the racially challenged. We can never, never, never laugh at them. Minstrel shows were supposed to be funny, too, once. How would you feel if I put on blackface make-up right now and started performing ‘Jump Jim Crow’ for you?”
“Uh…what?”
“That’s it, young man, I’ve had enough of your ignorance! If your school isn’t gonna teach you about racial tolerance, then I will!”
July 4, 2024
Vortex Era: Free Kindle Edition!
The Kindle edition of my novel Vortex Era is free for five days, starting today. Grab a copy, if you wish.
https://a.co/d/iVOdX9t
VORTEX ERA
San Clemente State’s fall semester begins as semesters generally do, with a flurry of classes, drunken antics, and hook-ups. But oddness soon arrives.
A student disappears. Her professor’s past life begins visiting him. On strangers and acquaintances, scaled and crystalline skin can be glimpsed beneath their flesh costuming.
A popular fraternity conceals a dark secret: a sporadically-manifesting, flesh-warping vortex operating behind their property, which feeds off of extreme emotions to generate a galaxy-spanning passageway.
The machinations of a mythical civilization are at work, designed to facilitate the return of an eons-lost continent, at the expense of all others. Will SCSU’s current semester be its last?
https://a.co/d/iVOdX9t
VORTEX ERA
San Clemente State’s fall semester begins as semesters generally do, with a flurry of classes, drunken antics, and hook-ups. But oddness soon arrives.
A student disappears. Her professor’s past life begins visiting him. On strangers and acquaintances, scaled and crystalline skin can be glimpsed beneath their flesh costuming.
A popular fraternity conceals a dark secret: a sporadically-manifesting, flesh-warping vortex operating behind their property, which feeds off of extreme emotions to generate a galaxy-spanning passageway.
The machinations of a mythical civilization are at work, designed to facilitate the return of an eons-lost continent, at the expense of all others. Will SCSU’s current semester be its last?
June 16, 2024
Vortex Era
After much revision, Jeremy Thompson’s long-unpublished first novel has finally seen the light of day. Now, you are discordially invited to enter the:
VORTEX ERA
San Clemente State’s fall semester begins as semesters generally do, with a flurry of classes, drunken antics, and hook-ups. But oddness soon arrives.
A student disappears. Her professor’s past life begins visiting him. On strangers and acquaintances, scaled and crystalline skin can be glimpsed beneath their flesh costuming.
A popular fraternity conceals a dark secret: a sporadically-manifesting, flesh-warping vortex operating behind their property, which feeds off of extreme emotions to generate a galaxy-spanning passageway.
The machinations of a mythical civilization are at work, designed to facilitate the return of an eons-lost continent, at the expense of all others. Will SCSU’s current semester be its last?
Available in Kindle, paperback and hardcover editions.
https://a.co/d/iVOdX9t
April 19, 2024
The Liturgy of the Piecemeal
Well, since it didn’t make it into Cosmic Horror Monthly’s Thomas Ligotti tribute issue, and I’ve nowhere else to send the thing, here’s my all-new story “The Liturgy of the Piecemeal” (© me, now), free to read.
The Liturgy of the Piecemeal
by Jeremy Thompson
Within our new house, so different from the series of drab, dismal locales we’d inhabited prior to my father’s new vocation, shadows dissolved in the floodlights that seemingly shined from all angles. Therein, flights of fancy often seized me, as if I was beholden to celestial stagecraft, and performing daily routines for invisible overseers as they learned how to be human. I slept with the lights on and only ventured outdoors when the sun shone, so as to bathe in the vibrancy of a neighborhood that always seemed freshly washed.
“If only your mom had lived to see this,” my father oft pronounced, at mealtimes. “Both of us well fed now…even pudgy. Our house clean as can be. If only she hadn’t wasted away before I made good.”
Indeed, had we been particularly pious, my father and I might’ve viewed his new vocation as something heaven-sent. Our lean years, and all of the gastrointestinal abnormalities they’d wrought, were over. Warmth and energy hitherto unknown now galvanized us. Comfort shows and pop earworms rendered suicidal ideations distant memories. School was out for the summer; all of my peers were forgotten. A bland sort of euphoria defined my waking hours, so that I might’ve been blissfully living the same day over and over.
* * *
Indeed, only in dreams could my positive mindset unravel. Within the abnormal architecture of slumber, you see, there awaited a maternal figure, whose ever-shifting contours—often half-seen, enshadowed—somehow amalgamated every bit of distress I’d endured while watching chronic illness claim my own mom.
The emotional outbursts, the insistently hollered gibberish, and, worst of all, the myoclonus that left my mother twitching like an old stop motion puppet were embodied in a crone who pursued me through all of the impoverished homes our family once knew.
Attempting to impart ghastly endearments, jerking her arms this way and that way, she befouled my dreamscapes each night, ululating through the witching hour and beyond it. Sometimes she’d wet herself while pursuing me, as if her threadbare gown hadn’t already suffered enough indignities. Sometimes she’d brandish a mélange of ramen, cocktail sausages, and brown apple slices she’d mashed together, imploring me to consume it. Sometimes she’d corner me in a garage or attic and administer a series of slaps to my person, attempting to hug me.
Varicose veins conferred colorful arabesques to what I could see of her limbs. Her eyes were sunken so far into her drawn, inexpressive face that she might’ve been peering through a mask depicting an idiot martyr.
I’d fulfilled my every filial responsibility for my living mom dutifully, spoon-fed her what meals we could afford and cleaned her bedpan when my dad was elsewhere. I even held her hand as she passed, that terrible Easter Sunday in my parents’ miasmic bedroom, swallowing down every sob that upsurged through my glottis until the void that awaits us all claimed her. But no creature of rationality could love and succor this hideous parody of my mother, this travesty spat from no earthly womb.
Perspiration-sodden sheets met my every awakening. Only the bright, sane confines of my new bedroom—with its shelves full of superhero trade paperbacks and action figures—and the wider context thereby represented, could mitigate my jackhammering heart.
* * *
As I possessed neither the need nor the desire for even the façade of friendship, and youth sports had never intrigued me in the slightest, my father decided that I’d spend a portion of my vacation accompanying him as he worked. So, even as the awakening sun spewed colors across the horizon, I was utilizing toilet and shower, then consuming a quick breakfast, so as to claim the passenger seat of my father’s Chrysler Pacifica at the time appointed.
Swaddled in comfortable silence, we’d motor to a distribution point, where Dad collected the day’s bundle: dozens of envelopes, their addresses ever-changing. When questioned by me in regard to the envelopes’ contents, he responded with two words: “Curated lists.” No further expounding could I coax from him.
Athwart our city we then traveled, never exceeding speed limits, from apartment complexes to cul-de-sacs, from strip mall stores to office buildings. Lingering in the minivan as Dad visited the envelopes’ recipients, I missed most of the face-to-face interactions that defined the man’s days. Occasionally, though, when one doorstep or another was near enough to the curb we’d parked at, I’d witness a perplexing exchange.
As if they’d been swallowed by a melodrama-laden script they’d never escape from, the same scenario repeated itself ad nauseum for Dad and a series of interchangeable personages. Metronomic knocking would be answered by cautious optimism. My father would hand over the recipient’s envelope and patiently wait, with ramrod-straight posture, as they removed their curated list from that envelope and perused it.
Suddenly, the recipient would slump, reflexively tossing out their free hand to grip the doorjamb, to avoid toppling. Complicated emotions would swim across their face, then they’d recover their bearing and reach into a pocket or purse for some cash to pay Dad with. Through replicated good cheer, they’d speak words that evaporated before reaching me, then close their door.
Jauntily whistling, nimble-footed, my father would return to the Chrysler. Therein, he’d voice one of his three favorite utterances: “Let’s see who we’ll be visitin’ next” or “My growlin’ stomach says it’s time for some Mickey D’s” or “Well, that’s the last of ’em. Looks like we’re done for the day.”
Oh, how elation would seize me at the end of his shift. Watching all of the city’s comfortably bland angles and even blander inhabitants slide across my sightline as we cruised back to our new house, I marveled that I could stream music and watch television until dinner, then do more of the same before bedtime. Thinking of my unconscious hours for a moment, I’d shudder at recollected nightmares, then shake them from my thoughts, assuring myself that my head wouldn’t meet a pillow for five or six hours yet.
* * *
Why even bother to sleep? I wondered one night, resolving to make it to morning without closing my eyes for longer than a blinkspan. With the aid of much soda, I accomplished my goal. No sweat-sodden sheets for me that morning. The day seemed more cheerful than ever.
I actually managed to make it through two more nights slumberless, though my daytime cogitation grew slower and I nearly drifted off in the car a few times. Savagely, I pinched my arms to remain in the waking world, well aware that the Sandman wouldn’t be resisted for much longer.
Dinnertime arrived and my father confronted me. As I heartily dug into the lasagna he’d prepared, to escape from the festering wound imagery it evoked, from across the kitchen table, he seized me with his gaze, even as his criticisms bombarded me.
“Your eyes are quite crimson,” he said, “and swollen beneath, too. You didn’t respond to half of the things I said to you today. You seem…I don’t know, depressed or something. Have you been crying overmuch? Is there somethin’ I can do for you? If you’ve some sort of mood disorder, we can get you counseling and medication. Just talk to me, Son.”
Though I’d hesitated to describe my nightmares to my father, lest they unravel his zeal for living and replace it with widower’s guilt, I now saw no other option but to describe that ghastly parody of my mother who’d soured my witching hours, who’d sculpted herself from bad memory fermentation so as to invade my dreams. My left eye twitched as I talked. Restlessly, my hands crawled in my lap.
After I’d finished spilling forth a torrent of terror and self-pity, before my father could do more than furrow his forehead, seeking palliative speech, there was a knock at the door.
Relieved, Dad said, “We’ve got a visitor. Imagine that.” Up he surged from the table, to whistle as he exited the kitchen. Methodically consuming what remained of my meal, I heard creaking hinges. Indistinct was my father’s voice, conversing with another even less defined. Then I heard the door close and Dad returned to the kitchen.
“What’s that in your hand?” I asked him.
He opened his mouth for a moment and it seemed that words wouldn’t emerge. Then he cleared his throat and uttered, “A curated list. Ya know, I’ve never been on the receiving end of one before.”
At that moment, he hardly seemed to inhabit his body. He stared down at his hand, and the sheet of paper it clutched, as if he was but a newborn, and concepts such as language and solidity hadn’t yet breached his cognizance.
“Well, what’s it say?” I asked, feeling tension building in my chest.
“Materials…inconsistencies,” he muttered. “I…have to be going.”
With that, Dad departed, permitting the curated list to flutter from his fingers like an autumn-swept leaf. When I heard the door lock behind him, I hurried over to that sheet of paper and swept it into my grip. Raising it to my eyes, I could squint no sense from it.
Rather than words and numbers, as I’d expected, I beheld what seemed a black and white photograph of swarming insects, xeroxed over and over until genera were mere suggestions. Beads of sweat burst from my forehead. Lights brightened all around me. The ink began to crawl in all directions, even off of the page. I heard a droning and the world fell away from me.
* * *
The next thing that I knew, Dad was shaking me awake. “Climb up offa those kitchen tiles,” he said. “Wipe the drool from your face. I wouldn’t have let you sleep there all night, but I was worried that you wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep if I moved ya. Anyway, your color’s much better and your eyes aren’t so strained. Hit the bathroom while I fix us some eggs. Over easy sounds good, yeah?”
“Uh, sure,” I responded. “Hey, Dad, what happened to that piece of paper?”
“I needed it for reference. Don’t worry about it.”
“Reference? But the thing made no sense.”
“It wasn’t curated for you, that’s why. Now ándale, ándale! Don’t make us late.”
Thusly spurred, I forgot to question the man about his prior night whereabouts.
* * *
As per usual, I accompanied Dad on his deliveries. But disquiet and intrigue now entered the equation. Staring at the bundle of envelopes the distribution center had furnished, I wondered at their contents. Were I to tear all of them open and arrange ’em before me, would I see nothing but insect shapes? Would I again fall unconscious? And how would I react to seeing my own name on such an envelope, if such an occasion ever arrived? What horrible understanding would its curated list grant me?
* * *
No longer would I attempt to elude slumber, I decided, meeting that night and three successive ones with renewed fortitude. And when I awakened from the crone’s noxious caresses, sweat-sheened and gasping, every morning, I manifested a grin, to better spite her, and leapt into the day.
Then came a night when, just as I crawled beneath the covers and resigned myself to hollow terror, my father entered the room, lugging a remarkable creation.
“I suppose you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doin’ in the garage these past nights,” he said, though, in truth, I’d spared no thoughts for him whatsoever once bedtime grew imminent. Still, I nodded, which decorum seemed to dictate, never sliding my gaze from that which he clutched.
“I sculpted her out of fresh-cut willow rods,” he explained, “and garden wire, of course, and raven feathers for the hair. Remember these clothes that she’s wearin’? They belonged to your mom. So did all of this pretty jewelry. Pretty impressive, don’t ya think?”
Staring at the sculpture’s vague, ethereal features, so flowingly interwoven, I felt as if Mother Nature herself had crafted a mannequin to bedevil me. Again, I nodded.
“I gave her the same proportions that your mom possessed, back when she was at her healthiest. All in all, she’ll be perfect for the task at hand.”
“Task? What task?”
“She’ll be sleepin’ with you from now on. Utilizing dreamcatcheresque principles, she’ll swallow your nightmares every night, until none are left within ya.”
I tried then to explain to my dad that my traumatic dreamscapes seemed not to arise from within me, but to flow into me from a churning darkness nigh infinite, a primeval cosmos whose constellations swallowed light. “Even if this thing does what you say, it’ll never manage to contain it all,” I protested.
“Just try it for a coupla weeks. We’ll see how you feel then.” With that, he laid the sculpture next to me on the bed, affectionately squeezed my shoulder, and left me to my nightmare.
* * *
Piles of paving stone fragments—across which scores of green, plastic army soldiers were posed in a bloodless war tableau—composed the sole ornamentation of an otherwise unadorned basement. Behind the largest of these piles I crouched, precariously exposed to she who convulsed her way down the staircase, snatching zilch strands from the air. Ululating a nonsense song within which ador and agony anti-harmonized, she locked eyes with me and leapt down the last four steps.
She scratched her arms to feel something, and then studied her own blood rills. A strip of flesh had lodged beneath one of her fingernails; she slurped it down inexpressively. Bizarrely, the crone frolicked, as if to entice me into a game.
Caverns opened in the walls, behind which deafening respiration sounded. Perhaps the house had gained personification, so as to die all the quicker.
Opening my mouth to scream for assistance, I was shocked to hear my own larynx spewing forth nonsense syllables. I began to roll across the begrimed floor, spasming uncontrollably, as the hideous parody of my mother drew nearer and nearer.
Awakening, I found that my father’s willow rod-and-wire sculpture had somehow wrapped its arms around me. Its forehead was pressed against mine, as if attempting a thought transfer.
Pushing the sculpture away from me in revulsion, I saw that its forehead was no longer willow at all. Somehow, the space between its eye hollows and hair feathers had become the same sort of granite as the paving stones from my dream.
Later, over a lunch of Big Macs and milkshake-dipped fries, I raised the issue with my father, describing the state in which I’d awakened and the change wrought in his sculpture.
“I told you that the thing would work,” he said. “Soon you’ll be entirely free of your nightmares. What more proof do you need?”
* * *
Subsequent nights returned me to the realms of the crone, those amalgamations of my family’s past homes, wherein shadows now sprouted from nothing tangible and walls churned like mist. Awakening, I always discovered that a piece of the oneiric site I’d last visited had traveled into the waking world, to sprout from my father’s sculpture.
The mouth bestowing a blasphemous, frozen kiss upon me one morning had grown white picket lips. Dingy wainscotting and crown molding soon encased its limbs, armorlike. Fingernails and toenails composed of pieces our old mobile home’s aluminum panels then appeared, as did shower tile eyes and teeth made from copper door hinges. Are these changes only exterior, I wondered, or would an autopsy reveal a sink pipe trachea and tarpaper epithelia?
Discussing each fresh mutation with my father as he motored us from one delivery to another, I was maddened by his sanguinity. Eventually, I shouted, accusing him of making the alterations himself.
He just grinned at me and repeated, “I told you that the thing would work.”
* * *
But with the passage of time, the nightmares were undiminished. Though little of the sculpture’s willow rods remained visible, as fragments of half-remembered carpets, shingles and drapery, and even home appliances, emerged to supplant them, the crone continued to visit me, no less frightening than before. She crawled across the ceiling, she burst out from the refrigerator, she buried her face between couch cushions and defecated explosively, always jerking about like a stop motion puppet. Mimicking maternal ministrations, she slapped, kicked and bit me.
My dream self was unable to fight her off. But I could at least vent my terror-rage on my father’s morphing sculpture.
* * *
Having decided on a course of action, I feigned sickness one morning: “I’ve got the flu, Dad. You’ll have to make your rounds alone today, so I can stay home and rest.”
“Well, make sure to drink lots of orange juice while I’m gone. Tonight, I’ll make chicken soup for dinner. We’ll have you feelin’ like your old self again in no time.”
Once he’d driven away, I launched myself into my task: the sculpture’s irrevocable destruction. Dragging the horrible thing onto our back patio, I then drenched it in lighter fluid and set it ablaze. For hours it burned, gesticulating this way and that way, blackening, sending smoke to the horizon.
But the longer that I observed it, the less smokish that fire-belched suspension seemed. Eventually, it appeared as if xeroxed insects, two-dimensional pixel pests, swarmed out of the sculpture as it slowly collapsed on itself, and skittered their way across the sky. Though I pressed my hands over my ears, their droning devoured my thoughts. I shrieked for help, but couldn’t even hear my own sonance.
* * *
I must’ve passed out for a while, because when I returned to my senses, the sculpture was entirely burnt away. Only a few scorch marks on the patio indicated that it had ever existed.
I stumbled indoors and awaited my father’s return. That moment never arrived. I dialed his cellphone, but it only rang and rang. I texted him and felt as if I’d done nothing.
There was a knock at the door, dragging me thereabouts. Turning and tugging the knob unveiled no visitor, however, just a highly charged absence that seemed to mock me. The sun and moon were both out, I realized, though it was difficult to discern one from the other, as each now seemed a suppurating wound in a sky that had grown flesh.
The ranch-style houses across the street had shed all of their stolid angles, twisting Dutch doors and eaves into abstract filigrees that undulated in my direction in such a way as to inspire nausea. Through now trapezoidal windows, I saw my neighbors dissolving in what seemed gastric juices. Waving at me as if to say, “Check out my solubility,” they shed their corporealities with nary a wince.
When the slabs of the sidewalk began to upthrust themselves fanglike, I slammed the door closed. My stomach growled and I wondered how long it had been since I’d last eaten. I’d read of people in the final stages of starvation hallucinating madly. Perhaps the world would return to normal with some leftover egg salad.
Consuming victuals that I hardly tasted, I filled my stomach until it hurt. But when I peeked back outdoors, everything remained as it had been. Clouds flowed like Mathmos wax. Grass blades slithered out of the soil and amalgamated into crashing waves. Bodysurfing them was a revolving jumble of twitching physicality: the crone!
A notion then seized me: By burning my father’s sculpture, and the bits of nightmare it had caged, I’d unleashed a pernicious unreality upon my environs, an infection now running rampant. Only by constructing a sculpture of my own, in a dream, could I reverse the marauding warpage and draw it back into my head.
Barricading myself in my bedroom with the aid of my desk and dresser, I sought slumber, though nails raked my windows and fists battered my door. Ignoring disquieting vocalizations, I tallied theoretical sheep.
Hours upon hours passed. Eventually, I slept.
* * *
From air that has never seemed thinner, as if spat from some bygone reflection, he appears: an idealized version of my younger self. Initially, he mistakes me for our father, until I point out our matching cheek moles and amoebic thigh birthmarks.
Adrift in the shell of rotted timbers and moldering carpet that serves as her bedroom, Mother wails gibberish, which carries through the wall as if no impediment exists between us. I can practically see her: hardly more than a self-soiling skeleton, slowly dying for decades, jigging all the while.
Startled, my young visitor gasps, “The crone. She’s followed me back into my dreams.”
“Don’t call our mother that,” I say. “She can’t help being what she is.”
“Mom died last April,” he insists. “Then things got better for Dad and me. He landed a new job in a bright, beautiful city. We got a house there and live comfortably.”
“If only that were true, little buddy,” I say, resting a hand on his shoulder, in my own bedroom, through which stars can be glimpsed through a ceiling aperture that widens with each rainfall. Is it the draft that flows through that hole that conjures my goosebumps, or simply my circumstances? “But Dad killed himself when I was your age, blew his skull apart with a shotgun on Easter Sunday. I found Mom cannibalizing his brain clumps and had to bury his body myself, secretly. The life that you’re describing is the fantasy I retreated into for a while before my sanity returned…and I located Mom and myself this shithole to live in. We’ve been here for two, maybe three decades now. I do odd jobs for cash and no longer dream of a good life.”
“I’m not a fantasy,” my visitor insists. “You’re just another nightmare creation. Why else would you be wearing that?”
“This?” I run my hands over my makeshift tunic, which I’d sculpted out of the willow rods, garden wire, and raven feathers I’d found sprouting from all of our past homes, which I’d visited after receiving a curated list in the mail, sender unknown. My father’s graduation and wedding rings are part of it, too. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You have to claim the escaped nightmares,” my visitor insists. “All of them, all at once. My world’s falling apart. I can’t take it anymore.”
Have reality and unreality bled into one another, so as to be distilled into something new entirely? Which of us owns their veracity, my idealized child self or this disheveled wretch I’ve devolved into? If I fall asleep, or if he awakens, what happens to the other and the world they believe to be theirs?
Thump, thump, thump. Mother has climbed out of bed and now hurls herself against my locked door. Soon, she’ll be bleeding again, her countenance all in tatters.
Staring into the imploring eyes of my desperate visitor, I say, “Even if I agreed to take possession of your escaped nightmares, how might such an act be accomplished? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“I’ll show you,” he insists, brightening at the prospect.
He takes my hand and the darkness gains respiration, wheezing all around us. Swarming out of the shadows, poorly xeroxed insects skitter across the walls, then metamorphose into organisms more abstract. A specter-laden suppuration oozes in through the ceiling aperture.
My idealized child self has but a moment to thank me before the alterations and inconsistencies accelerate. Then all questions and answers are rendered irrelevant.
http://www.amazon.com/author/jeremyth...
The Liturgy of the Piecemeal
by Jeremy Thompson
Within our new house, so different from the series of drab, dismal locales we’d inhabited prior to my father’s new vocation, shadows dissolved in the floodlights that seemingly shined from all angles. Therein, flights of fancy often seized me, as if I was beholden to celestial stagecraft, and performing daily routines for invisible overseers as they learned how to be human. I slept with the lights on and only ventured outdoors when the sun shone, so as to bathe in the vibrancy of a neighborhood that always seemed freshly washed.
“If only your mom had lived to see this,” my father oft pronounced, at mealtimes. “Both of us well fed now…even pudgy. Our house clean as can be. If only she hadn’t wasted away before I made good.”
Indeed, had we been particularly pious, my father and I might’ve viewed his new vocation as something heaven-sent. Our lean years, and all of the gastrointestinal abnormalities they’d wrought, were over. Warmth and energy hitherto unknown now galvanized us. Comfort shows and pop earworms rendered suicidal ideations distant memories. School was out for the summer; all of my peers were forgotten. A bland sort of euphoria defined my waking hours, so that I might’ve been blissfully living the same day over and over.
* * *
Indeed, only in dreams could my positive mindset unravel. Within the abnormal architecture of slumber, you see, there awaited a maternal figure, whose ever-shifting contours—often half-seen, enshadowed—somehow amalgamated every bit of distress I’d endured while watching chronic illness claim my own mom.
The emotional outbursts, the insistently hollered gibberish, and, worst of all, the myoclonus that left my mother twitching like an old stop motion puppet were embodied in a crone who pursued me through all of the impoverished homes our family once knew.
Attempting to impart ghastly endearments, jerking her arms this way and that way, she befouled my dreamscapes each night, ululating through the witching hour and beyond it. Sometimes she’d wet herself while pursuing me, as if her threadbare gown hadn’t already suffered enough indignities. Sometimes she’d brandish a mélange of ramen, cocktail sausages, and brown apple slices she’d mashed together, imploring me to consume it. Sometimes she’d corner me in a garage or attic and administer a series of slaps to my person, attempting to hug me.
Varicose veins conferred colorful arabesques to what I could see of her limbs. Her eyes were sunken so far into her drawn, inexpressive face that she might’ve been peering through a mask depicting an idiot martyr.
I’d fulfilled my every filial responsibility for my living mom dutifully, spoon-fed her what meals we could afford and cleaned her bedpan when my dad was elsewhere. I even held her hand as she passed, that terrible Easter Sunday in my parents’ miasmic bedroom, swallowing down every sob that upsurged through my glottis until the void that awaits us all claimed her. But no creature of rationality could love and succor this hideous parody of my mother, this travesty spat from no earthly womb.
Perspiration-sodden sheets met my every awakening. Only the bright, sane confines of my new bedroom—with its shelves full of superhero trade paperbacks and action figures—and the wider context thereby represented, could mitigate my jackhammering heart.
* * *
As I possessed neither the need nor the desire for even the façade of friendship, and youth sports had never intrigued me in the slightest, my father decided that I’d spend a portion of my vacation accompanying him as he worked. So, even as the awakening sun spewed colors across the horizon, I was utilizing toilet and shower, then consuming a quick breakfast, so as to claim the passenger seat of my father’s Chrysler Pacifica at the time appointed.
Swaddled in comfortable silence, we’d motor to a distribution point, where Dad collected the day’s bundle: dozens of envelopes, their addresses ever-changing. When questioned by me in regard to the envelopes’ contents, he responded with two words: “Curated lists.” No further expounding could I coax from him.
Athwart our city we then traveled, never exceeding speed limits, from apartment complexes to cul-de-sacs, from strip mall stores to office buildings. Lingering in the minivan as Dad visited the envelopes’ recipients, I missed most of the face-to-face interactions that defined the man’s days. Occasionally, though, when one doorstep or another was near enough to the curb we’d parked at, I’d witness a perplexing exchange.
As if they’d been swallowed by a melodrama-laden script they’d never escape from, the same scenario repeated itself ad nauseum for Dad and a series of interchangeable personages. Metronomic knocking would be answered by cautious optimism. My father would hand over the recipient’s envelope and patiently wait, with ramrod-straight posture, as they removed their curated list from that envelope and perused it.
Suddenly, the recipient would slump, reflexively tossing out their free hand to grip the doorjamb, to avoid toppling. Complicated emotions would swim across their face, then they’d recover their bearing and reach into a pocket or purse for some cash to pay Dad with. Through replicated good cheer, they’d speak words that evaporated before reaching me, then close their door.
Jauntily whistling, nimble-footed, my father would return to the Chrysler. Therein, he’d voice one of his three favorite utterances: “Let’s see who we’ll be visitin’ next” or “My growlin’ stomach says it’s time for some Mickey D’s” or “Well, that’s the last of ’em. Looks like we’re done for the day.”
Oh, how elation would seize me at the end of his shift. Watching all of the city’s comfortably bland angles and even blander inhabitants slide across my sightline as we cruised back to our new house, I marveled that I could stream music and watch television until dinner, then do more of the same before bedtime. Thinking of my unconscious hours for a moment, I’d shudder at recollected nightmares, then shake them from my thoughts, assuring myself that my head wouldn’t meet a pillow for five or six hours yet.
* * *
Why even bother to sleep? I wondered one night, resolving to make it to morning without closing my eyes for longer than a blinkspan. With the aid of much soda, I accomplished my goal. No sweat-sodden sheets for me that morning. The day seemed more cheerful than ever.
I actually managed to make it through two more nights slumberless, though my daytime cogitation grew slower and I nearly drifted off in the car a few times. Savagely, I pinched my arms to remain in the waking world, well aware that the Sandman wouldn’t be resisted for much longer.
Dinnertime arrived and my father confronted me. As I heartily dug into the lasagna he’d prepared, to escape from the festering wound imagery it evoked, from across the kitchen table, he seized me with his gaze, even as his criticisms bombarded me.
“Your eyes are quite crimson,” he said, “and swollen beneath, too. You didn’t respond to half of the things I said to you today. You seem…I don’t know, depressed or something. Have you been crying overmuch? Is there somethin’ I can do for you? If you’ve some sort of mood disorder, we can get you counseling and medication. Just talk to me, Son.”
Though I’d hesitated to describe my nightmares to my father, lest they unravel his zeal for living and replace it with widower’s guilt, I now saw no other option but to describe that ghastly parody of my mother who’d soured my witching hours, who’d sculpted herself from bad memory fermentation so as to invade my dreams. My left eye twitched as I talked. Restlessly, my hands crawled in my lap.
After I’d finished spilling forth a torrent of terror and self-pity, before my father could do more than furrow his forehead, seeking palliative speech, there was a knock at the door.
Relieved, Dad said, “We’ve got a visitor. Imagine that.” Up he surged from the table, to whistle as he exited the kitchen. Methodically consuming what remained of my meal, I heard creaking hinges. Indistinct was my father’s voice, conversing with another even less defined. Then I heard the door close and Dad returned to the kitchen.
“What’s that in your hand?” I asked him.
He opened his mouth for a moment and it seemed that words wouldn’t emerge. Then he cleared his throat and uttered, “A curated list. Ya know, I’ve never been on the receiving end of one before.”
At that moment, he hardly seemed to inhabit his body. He stared down at his hand, and the sheet of paper it clutched, as if he was but a newborn, and concepts such as language and solidity hadn’t yet breached his cognizance.
“Well, what’s it say?” I asked, feeling tension building in my chest.
“Materials…inconsistencies,” he muttered. “I…have to be going.”
With that, Dad departed, permitting the curated list to flutter from his fingers like an autumn-swept leaf. When I heard the door lock behind him, I hurried over to that sheet of paper and swept it into my grip. Raising it to my eyes, I could squint no sense from it.
Rather than words and numbers, as I’d expected, I beheld what seemed a black and white photograph of swarming insects, xeroxed over and over until genera were mere suggestions. Beads of sweat burst from my forehead. Lights brightened all around me. The ink began to crawl in all directions, even off of the page. I heard a droning and the world fell away from me.
* * *
The next thing that I knew, Dad was shaking me awake. “Climb up offa those kitchen tiles,” he said. “Wipe the drool from your face. I wouldn’t have let you sleep there all night, but I was worried that you wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep if I moved ya. Anyway, your color’s much better and your eyes aren’t so strained. Hit the bathroom while I fix us some eggs. Over easy sounds good, yeah?”
“Uh, sure,” I responded. “Hey, Dad, what happened to that piece of paper?”
“I needed it for reference. Don’t worry about it.”
“Reference? But the thing made no sense.”
“It wasn’t curated for you, that’s why. Now ándale, ándale! Don’t make us late.”
Thusly spurred, I forgot to question the man about his prior night whereabouts.
* * *
As per usual, I accompanied Dad on his deliveries. But disquiet and intrigue now entered the equation. Staring at the bundle of envelopes the distribution center had furnished, I wondered at their contents. Were I to tear all of them open and arrange ’em before me, would I see nothing but insect shapes? Would I again fall unconscious? And how would I react to seeing my own name on such an envelope, if such an occasion ever arrived? What horrible understanding would its curated list grant me?
* * *
No longer would I attempt to elude slumber, I decided, meeting that night and three successive ones with renewed fortitude. And when I awakened from the crone’s noxious caresses, sweat-sheened and gasping, every morning, I manifested a grin, to better spite her, and leapt into the day.
Then came a night when, just as I crawled beneath the covers and resigned myself to hollow terror, my father entered the room, lugging a remarkable creation.
“I suppose you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doin’ in the garage these past nights,” he said, though, in truth, I’d spared no thoughts for him whatsoever once bedtime grew imminent. Still, I nodded, which decorum seemed to dictate, never sliding my gaze from that which he clutched.
“I sculpted her out of fresh-cut willow rods,” he explained, “and garden wire, of course, and raven feathers for the hair. Remember these clothes that she’s wearin’? They belonged to your mom. So did all of this pretty jewelry. Pretty impressive, don’t ya think?”
Staring at the sculpture’s vague, ethereal features, so flowingly interwoven, I felt as if Mother Nature herself had crafted a mannequin to bedevil me. Again, I nodded.
“I gave her the same proportions that your mom possessed, back when she was at her healthiest. All in all, she’ll be perfect for the task at hand.”
“Task? What task?”
“She’ll be sleepin’ with you from now on. Utilizing dreamcatcheresque principles, she’ll swallow your nightmares every night, until none are left within ya.”
I tried then to explain to my dad that my traumatic dreamscapes seemed not to arise from within me, but to flow into me from a churning darkness nigh infinite, a primeval cosmos whose constellations swallowed light. “Even if this thing does what you say, it’ll never manage to contain it all,” I protested.
“Just try it for a coupla weeks. We’ll see how you feel then.” With that, he laid the sculpture next to me on the bed, affectionately squeezed my shoulder, and left me to my nightmare.
* * *
Piles of paving stone fragments—across which scores of green, plastic army soldiers were posed in a bloodless war tableau—composed the sole ornamentation of an otherwise unadorned basement. Behind the largest of these piles I crouched, precariously exposed to she who convulsed her way down the staircase, snatching zilch strands from the air. Ululating a nonsense song within which ador and agony anti-harmonized, she locked eyes with me and leapt down the last four steps.
She scratched her arms to feel something, and then studied her own blood rills. A strip of flesh had lodged beneath one of her fingernails; she slurped it down inexpressively. Bizarrely, the crone frolicked, as if to entice me into a game.
Caverns opened in the walls, behind which deafening respiration sounded. Perhaps the house had gained personification, so as to die all the quicker.
Opening my mouth to scream for assistance, I was shocked to hear my own larynx spewing forth nonsense syllables. I began to roll across the begrimed floor, spasming uncontrollably, as the hideous parody of my mother drew nearer and nearer.
Awakening, I found that my father’s willow rod-and-wire sculpture had somehow wrapped its arms around me. Its forehead was pressed against mine, as if attempting a thought transfer.
Pushing the sculpture away from me in revulsion, I saw that its forehead was no longer willow at all. Somehow, the space between its eye hollows and hair feathers had become the same sort of granite as the paving stones from my dream.
Later, over a lunch of Big Macs and milkshake-dipped fries, I raised the issue with my father, describing the state in which I’d awakened and the change wrought in his sculpture.
“I told you that the thing would work,” he said. “Soon you’ll be entirely free of your nightmares. What more proof do you need?”
* * *
Subsequent nights returned me to the realms of the crone, those amalgamations of my family’s past homes, wherein shadows now sprouted from nothing tangible and walls churned like mist. Awakening, I always discovered that a piece of the oneiric site I’d last visited had traveled into the waking world, to sprout from my father’s sculpture.
The mouth bestowing a blasphemous, frozen kiss upon me one morning had grown white picket lips. Dingy wainscotting and crown molding soon encased its limbs, armorlike. Fingernails and toenails composed of pieces our old mobile home’s aluminum panels then appeared, as did shower tile eyes and teeth made from copper door hinges. Are these changes only exterior, I wondered, or would an autopsy reveal a sink pipe trachea and tarpaper epithelia?
Discussing each fresh mutation with my father as he motored us from one delivery to another, I was maddened by his sanguinity. Eventually, I shouted, accusing him of making the alterations himself.
He just grinned at me and repeated, “I told you that the thing would work.”
* * *
But with the passage of time, the nightmares were undiminished. Though little of the sculpture’s willow rods remained visible, as fragments of half-remembered carpets, shingles and drapery, and even home appliances, emerged to supplant them, the crone continued to visit me, no less frightening than before. She crawled across the ceiling, she burst out from the refrigerator, she buried her face between couch cushions and defecated explosively, always jerking about like a stop motion puppet. Mimicking maternal ministrations, she slapped, kicked and bit me.
My dream self was unable to fight her off. But I could at least vent my terror-rage on my father’s morphing sculpture.
* * *
Having decided on a course of action, I feigned sickness one morning: “I’ve got the flu, Dad. You’ll have to make your rounds alone today, so I can stay home and rest.”
“Well, make sure to drink lots of orange juice while I’m gone. Tonight, I’ll make chicken soup for dinner. We’ll have you feelin’ like your old self again in no time.”
Once he’d driven away, I launched myself into my task: the sculpture’s irrevocable destruction. Dragging the horrible thing onto our back patio, I then drenched it in lighter fluid and set it ablaze. For hours it burned, gesticulating this way and that way, blackening, sending smoke to the horizon.
But the longer that I observed it, the less smokish that fire-belched suspension seemed. Eventually, it appeared as if xeroxed insects, two-dimensional pixel pests, swarmed out of the sculpture as it slowly collapsed on itself, and skittered their way across the sky. Though I pressed my hands over my ears, their droning devoured my thoughts. I shrieked for help, but couldn’t even hear my own sonance.
* * *
I must’ve passed out for a while, because when I returned to my senses, the sculpture was entirely burnt away. Only a few scorch marks on the patio indicated that it had ever existed.
I stumbled indoors and awaited my father’s return. That moment never arrived. I dialed his cellphone, but it only rang and rang. I texted him and felt as if I’d done nothing.
There was a knock at the door, dragging me thereabouts. Turning and tugging the knob unveiled no visitor, however, just a highly charged absence that seemed to mock me. The sun and moon were both out, I realized, though it was difficult to discern one from the other, as each now seemed a suppurating wound in a sky that had grown flesh.
The ranch-style houses across the street had shed all of their stolid angles, twisting Dutch doors and eaves into abstract filigrees that undulated in my direction in such a way as to inspire nausea. Through now trapezoidal windows, I saw my neighbors dissolving in what seemed gastric juices. Waving at me as if to say, “Check out my solubility,” they shed their corporealities with nary a wince.
When the slabs of the sidewalk began to upthrust themselves fanglike, I slammed the door closed. My stomach growled and I wondered how long it had been since I’d last eaten. I’d read of people in the final stages of starvation hallucinating madly. Perhaps the world would return to normal with some leftover egg salad.
Consuming victuals that I hardly tasted, I filled my stomach until it hurt. But when I peeked back outdoors, everything remained as it had been. Clouds flowed like Mathmos wax. Grass blades slithered out of the soil and amalgamated into crashing waves. Bodysurfing them was a revolving jumble of twitching physicality: the crone!
A notion then seized me: By burning my father’s sculpture, and the bits of nightmare it had caged, I’d unleashed a pernicious unreality upon my environs, an infection now running rampant. Only by constructing a sculpture of my own, in a dream, could I reverse the marauding warpage and draw it back into my head.
Barricading myself in my bedroom with the aid of my desk and dresser, I sought slumber, though nails raked my windows and fists battered my door. Ignoring disquieting vocalizations, I tallied theoretical sheep.
Hours upon hours passed. Eventually, I slept.
* * *
From air that has never seemed thinner, as if spat from some bygone reflection, he appears: an idealized version of my younger self. Initially, he mistakes me for our father, until I point out our matching cheek moles and amoebic thigh birthmarks.
Adrift in the shell of rotted timbers and moldering carpet that serves as her bedroom, Mother wails gibberish, which carries through the wall as if no impediment exists between us. I can practically see her: hardly more than a self-soiling skeleton, slowly dying for decades, jigging all the while.
Startled, my young visitor gasps, “The crone. She’s followed me back into my dreams.”
“Don’t call our mother that,” I say. “She can’t help being what she is.”
“Mom died last April,” he insists. “Then things got better for Dad and me. He landed a new job in a bright, beautiful city. We got a house there and live comfortably.”
“If only that were true, little buddy,” I say, resting a hand on his shoulder, in my own bedroom, through which stars can be glimpsed through a ceiling aperture that widens with each rainfall. Is it the draft that flows through that hole that conjures my goosebumps, or simply my circumstances? “But Dad killed himself when I was your age, blew his skull apart with a shotgun on Easter Sunday. I found Mom cannibalizing his brain clumps and had to bury his body myself, secretly. The life that you’re describing is the fantasy I retreated into for a while before my sanity returned…and I located Mom and myself this shithole to live in. We’ve been here for two, maybe three decades now. I do odd jobs for cash and no longer dream of a good life.”
“I’m not a fantasy,” my visitor insists. “You’re just another nightmare creation. Why else would you be wearing that?”
“This?” I run my hands over my makeshift tunic, which I’d sculpted out of the willow rods, garden wire, and raven feathers I’d found sprouting from all of our past homes, which I’d visited after receiving a curated list in the mail, sender unknown. My father’s graduation and wedding rings are part of it, too. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You have to claim the escaped nightmares,” my visitor insists. “All of them, all at once. My world’s falling apart. I can’t take it anymore.”
Have reality and unreality bled into one another, so as to be distilled into something new entirely? Which of us owns their veracity, my idealized child self or this disheveled wretch I’ve devolved into? If I fall asleep, or if he awakens, what happens to the other and the world they believe to be theirs?
Thump, thump, thump. Mother has climbed out of bed and now hurls herself against my locked door. Soon, she’ll be bleeding again, her countenance all in tatters.
Staring into the imploring eyes of my desperate visitor, I say, “Even if I agreed to take possession of your escaped nightmares, how might such an act be accomplished? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“I’ll show you,” he insists, brightening at the prospect.
He takes my hand and the darkness gains respiration, wheezing all around us. Swarming out of the shadows, poorly xeroxed insects skitter across the walls, then metamorphose into organisms more abstract. A specter-laden suppuration oozes in through the ceiling aperture.
My idealized child self has but a moment to thank me before the alterations and inconsistencies accelerate. Then all questions and answers are rendered irrelevant.
http://www.amazon.com/author/jeremyth...
October 31, 2023
Bayou Ma’am
Happy Halloween, people. Here’s an all-new short story (© me, now), free to read.
Bayou Ma’am
by Jeremy Thompson
“Those bitches!” Claude exclaims. “Those lyin’, stinkin’, blue ballin’ whores! Makin’ us the butts of their jokes! Gettin’ us laughed at by everyone! We oughta find ’em and stomp their fuckin’ skulls in!”
“And how would we even do that?” I respond, focusin’ on my composure, compactin’ the shame and heartbreak I now feel into a teeny, tiny ball that I’ll soon entomb in my mind’s deeper recesses. “They said they’re flyin’ back to New York City tonight, to that precious little SoHo loft they wouldn’t stop braggin’ about. They wouldn’t have done what they did if they thought we might see ’em again.”
Andre says nothin’, unable to take his eyes from the iPhone he manipulates, alternatin’ between the Instagram profiles of two hipster sisters, to better appraise our debasement.
#bayoumen is the hashtag they affixed to photos they’d taken with us just a coupla hours prior, at the one bar this town possesses, which we fellas have yet to leave. They’d flirted and led us on, allowin’ me to buy ’em drink after drink and believe that maybe, just maybe, one or more of us would be blessed with a bit of rich girl pussy for a few minutes…or twenty. They’ve got relatives in the area, they claimed, and had just attended one’s funeral. Some black sheep aunt of theirs. A real nobody.
Finally, Andre breaks his silence. “Look at this, right here. They used some kinda special effect to give me yellow snaggleteeth. I go to the dentist religiously. Look at these veneers.”
Barin’ his teeth, he reveals a mouthful of perfect, blindin’-white dental porcelain.
“Yeah, and they made Claude’s eyes way closer together than they really are and gave ’im a unibrow,” I say. “And they gave me a neckbeard and a fiddle. Look pretty real, don’t they?”
“Look at all the likes they’re gettin’. Thousands already. Everyone’s crackin’ jokes on us, callin’ us inbreds and Victor Crowleys, whatever that means. Look, that bitch Marissa just replied to someone’s comment. ‘Those bayou gumps were so cringe, we’re lucky we didn’t end up in their gumbo,’ she wrote. Fuck this. I’mma give ’er a piece of my mind.” A few minutes later, after much furious typin’, Andre adds, “Well, now she’s blocked me. Probably never woulda told us their real names if they knew that we’re on social media.”
Indeed, outlanders often make offensive assumptions when learnin’ of our bayou lifestyles. Hearin’ of our tarpaper shacks, they assume that we do naught but wallow in our own filth every day and smoke pounds of meth. Earnin’ a livin’ catchin’ shrimps, crabs, and crawfishes doesn’t appeal to ’em. They’d rather work indoors, if they even work at all. Solitude brings ’em no peace whatsoever. They care nothin’ for lullabies sung by frogs and crickets. Ya know, maybe they’re soulless.
I wave the bartender over and pay our tab. Nearly three days’ earnings down the drain. “Let’s get outta here, fellas,” I say. “It’s time for somethin’ stronger. There’s blueberry moonshine I’ve been savin’ at my place. It’ll drown our sorrows in no time.”
“Your place, huh,” says Claude. “We ain’t partied there in a minute.”
* * *
The roar of my airboat’s engine—as I navigate brackish water, ever grippin’ the control lever, passin’ between Spanish moss-bedecked cypresses that loom impassively, fog-rooted—makes conversation a chore. Still, seated before me, Andre and Claude shout back and forth.
“Bayou men aren’t fuckin’ rapists!” hollers Claude. “We’re not cannibals neither! I can whip up a crawfish boil better than anything those stuck-up cunts’ve ever tasted!”
“Damn straight!” responds Andre. “Bayou men are hard-workin’, God-fearin’, free folk! If they should be scared of anyone around these parts, it’s Bayou Ma’am!”
“Bayou Ma’am?!” I shout, as if that moniker is new to my ears. “Who the hell’s that…some kinda hooker?!”
“Hooker, nah!” attests Claude. “She’s a…whaddaya call it…hybrid! Half human, half alligator, mean as Satan his own self!”
“I heard that a gator was attackin’ a woman one night!” adds Andre. “Then a flyin’ saucer swooped down from the sky and grabbed ’em both wit’ its tractor beam! Somehow, the beam melded the gator and his meal together all grotesque-like! The aliens saw what they’d done and wanted none of it, so they abandoned Bayou Ma’am and flew elsewhere!”
“I heard toxic chemicals got spilt somewhere around here and some poor teenager swam right through ’em!” Claude contests. “She was pregnant at the time! A few months later, Bayou Ma’am chewed her way right on outta her!”
“Damn, that’s fucked up!” I shout, well aware of the grim reality lurkin’ behind their tall tales.
* * *
Bayou Ma’am is my cousin, you see. As a matter of fact, she was born just seven months after I was, in a shack half a mile down the river from mine. Her mom, my Aunt Emma, died in childbirth—couldn’t stop bleedin’, I heard. Maybe if they’d visited an obstetrician, things would’ve gone otherwise.
My aunt and uncle were reclusive sorts, and no one but them and my parents had known of her pregnancy. There aren’t many residences this far from town, and none are close together. It’s easy to disappear from the world, to eschew supermarkets and restaurants and consume local wildlife exclusively. Uncle Enoch buried Aunt Emma in a private ceremony and kept their daughter’s existence a secret from everyone but my mom and dad. Even I didn’t meet her until we were both four.
One day, a pair of strangers shuffled into my shack—which, of course, belonged to my parents in those days, up ’til they moved to Juneau, Alaska when I was sixteen, for no good reason I could see.
“This is your Uncle Enoch,” my dad told me, indicatin’ a goateed, scrawny scowler. “And that’s his daughter, your cousin Lea.”
Though itchy and bedraggled, though dressed in one of Uncle Enoch’s old t-shirts that had been refashioned into a crude dress, Lea sure was a cutie. Her eyes were the best shade of sky blue I’ve ever seen and her hair was all golden ringlets. Shyly, she waved to me with the hand she wasn’t usin’ to scratch her neck.
The two of ’em soon became our regular visitors. I never took to my perpetually pinch-faced Uncle Enoch, with his persecution complex and conspiracy theories shapin’ his every voiced syllable. Lea, on the other hand, I couldn’t help but be charmed by. She had such a sunny disposition, such full-hearted character, that I was always carried away by the games her inquisitive, inventive mind conjured. Leavin’ our parents to their serious, sunless discussions, we hurled ourselves into the vibrant outdoors and surrendered to our impish natures.
“I’m a hawk, you’re a squirrel!” declared Lea. Outstretchin’ her arms, she voiced ear-shreddin’ screeches, and chased me around ’til we both collapsed, gigglin’. “Whoever collects the most spider lilies wins!” she next decided. “The loser becomes a spider! A great, big, gooey one! Yuck!”
We skipped stones and spied on animals, learned to dance, cartwheel and swim. We played hide-and-seek often, with whichever one of us was “it” allowed to forfeit the game by whistlin’ a special tune we’d improvised. It was durin’ one such game that Lea made a friend.
“I’m comin’ to get you!” I shouted, after closin’ my eyes and countin’ to fifty. Our environs bein’ so rich in hiding spots, expectin’ a lengthy hunt, I was most disappointed to find my cousin within just a few minutes. There she was, at the river’s edge. Behind her, towerin’ cypress trees seemed to sprout from their inverted, ripplin’ doppelgangers. So, too, did Lea seem unnaturally bound to her watery reflection, until I stepped a bit closer and exclaimed, “Get away from there, quickly! That’s a gator you’re pettin’!”
Indeed, we’d both been warned, many times, to avoid the bayou’s more dangerous critters. Black bears and bobcats were said to roam about these parts, though we’d seen neither hide nor hair of ’em. Snakes flitted about the periphery, never lingerin’ long in our sights. We’d seen plenty of gators swimmin’ and lazin’ about, though. As long as we kept our distance and avoided feedin’ ’em, they’d leave us alone, we’d been told.
“Oh, it’s just a little one!” Lea argued, scoopin’ the creature into her arms and plantin’ a smooch on his head. “A cutie-patootie, friendly boy. I’m gonna call ’im Mr. Kissy Kiss.”
I studied the fella. Nearly a foot in length, he was armored in scales, dark with yellow stripes. Fascinated by his eyes, with their vertical pupils and autumn-shaded irises, I stepped a bit closer. Mr. Kissy Kiss’ mouth opened and closed, displayin’ dozens of pointy teeth, as Lea stroked him.
“Well, I guess he does seem kinda nice,” I admitted. “I wonder where his parents are.”
“Maybe his mommy and daddy went to heaven, and are singin’ with the angels,” said Lea.
“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” I mockingly singsonged.
Suddenly, a strident shout met our ears: my mother callin’ us in for lunch. Carefully, Lea deposited Mr. Kissy Kiss onto the shoreline. He then crawled into the water—never to return, I assumed.
Boy, was I wrong. A few days later, I found Lea again riverside, feedin’ the little gator a dozen snails she’d collected—crunch, crunch, crunch. A week after that, he strutted up to my cousin with a bouquet of purple petunias in his clenched teeth.
“Ooh, are these for me?” Lea cooed, retrievin’ the flowers and tuckin’ one behind her ear. “I love you so much, little dearie,” she added, strokin’ her beloved until his tail began waggin’.
Their visits continued for a coupla months, until mean ol’ Uncle Enoch caught us at the riverside as we attempted to teach Mr. Kissy Kiss to fetch. Oh, how the man pitched a fit then.
“No daughter of mine’ll be gator meat!” he shouted. “Sure, he’s nice enough now, but these bastards grow a foot every year! By the time he’s eleven feet long and weighs half a ton, you’re be nothin’ but a big mound of shit he left behind.” Seizing Lea by the arm, my uncle then dragged her away.
When next we did meet, a few days later, my cousin wasted no time in leadin’ me back to the riverside. “Where are you, Mr. Kissy Kiss?” she wailed, until the little gator swam from the shadows to greet her. Sweepin’ him into her arms, she said. “Let’s run away together, right this minute, so that we’ll never be apart.”
“Oh, that’s not such a great idea,” a buzzin’ voice contested. “Little girls go missin’ all the time and their fates are far from enviable.”
“Who said that?” I demanded, draggin’ my gaze all ’cross the bayou.
“’Tis I, Lord Mosquito,” was the answer that accompanied the alightin’ of the largest bloodsucker I’ve ever seen. Its legs were longer than my arms were back then. Iridescent were its cerulean scales, glimmerin’ in the sun.
“Mosquitos don’t talk,” I protested.
“They do when they were the Muck Witch’s familiar. Now she’s dead and I’m free to fly where I might.”
“I ain’t never hearda no Muck Witch.”
“And she never heard of you. That’s the way of southern recluses. Still, such is the great woman’s power that she grants wishes even now, from the other side of death. The Muck Witch’ll ensure that you never part with your precious pet, little Lea, just so long as you follow me to her grave and ask her with proper courtesy.”
Well, I’d been warned about witches and the deceitfulness of their favors, so I attempted to drag Lea back to my shack, away from the bizarre insect. But the girl fought me most ferociously, clawin’ flesh from my face, so I ran for my parents and uncle instead.
By the time the four of us returned to the riverside, neither girl nor gator nor mosquito could be sighted. We searched the bayou for hours, shriekin’ Lea’s name, to no avail.
A few weeks later, after we hadn’t seen the fella for a while, my parents dragged me to my uncle’s shack, so that we might suss out his state of mind and offer him a bit of comfort.
“I found her,” Uncle Enoch attested, usherin’ us into his livin’ room, which was now occupied by a large, transparent tank.
Atop its screen lid, facin’ downward, were dome lamps that emanated heat and UVB lightin’ from their specialized bulbs. Silica sand and rocks spanned its bottom, beneath a bathtub’s wortha water. At one end of the tank, boulders protruded from the agua. Upon ’em rested a terrible figure. If not for the recognizable t-shirt she wore, I’d never have surmised her identity.
“Luh…Lea?” I gasped. “What in the world has become of ya?”
Indeed, though Lea had wished to always be with her beloved gator, I doubt that she’d desired for the creature to be merged with her, to be incorporated into Lea’s very physicality. Patches of scales were distributed here and there across her exposed flesh. Her beautiful blue eyes remained, but her nose and mouth had stretched into an alligator’s wide snout, filled with many conical teeth. And let’s not forget her long, brawny tail.
After our initial shock abated and dozens of unanswerable questions were voiced, my parents took me home. Never again did they return to my uncle’s shack, but a dim sense of familial obligation had me comin’ back every coupla weeks, to feed Lea local muskrats and opossums I’d captured, and help my uncle change her tank’s shitty water.
The years went by, and Lea moved into a succession of larger tanks. Eventually, she grew big enough to wear her mother’s old dresses, seemin’ to favor those with floral patterns.
Finally, just a coupla months ago, I arrived at the shack to find Lea’s tank shattered. Torn clothin’ and scattered bloodstains were all that remained of Uncle Enoch, and my cousin was nowhere to be seen.
Not long after that, the Bayou Ma’am sightings began, which vitalized increasingly outlandish rumors and the occasional drunken search party. Luckily, no one has managed to photograph or film Lea yet, as far as I know.
* * *
At any rate, back in the present, I cut the airboat’s engine, leavin’ us driftin’ along our twilight current. It takes a moment for our arrested momentum to register with Claude and Andre, then both are bellowin’, askin’ me what the fuck’s goin’ on.
Rather than voice bullshit answers, I whistle the special tune my cousin and I improvised all those years ago, again and again, to ensure that I’m heard.
Moments later, Lea bursts up from the water, wearin’ a floral dress that had once been red-with-white-lilies, before the bayou muck spoiled it. In the fadin’ light, blurred by her own velocity, she could be mistaken for a primeval relic, a time-lost dinosaur of a species hitherto unknown. But, as her nickname had been so freshly upon their lips, both of my passengers, nearly synchronized, cry out, “Bayou Ma’am!”
Whatever the fellas might’ve said next is swallowed by their shrieks, as Lea tackles Andre out of his passenger seat while simultaneously swattin’ Claude across the face with her tail. The latter’s nose and mouth implode, spillin’ gore down his shirt.
Attemptin’ to gouge out Lea’s eyes as she and he roll across the deck, Andre instead loses both of his hands to her snappin’ teeth. Blood fountains from his new wrist stumps as he falls unconscious.
Claude tries to dive off the side of my airboat, but Lea’s powerful mouth has already seized him by the leg, its grip nigh unbreakable. She begins shakin’ her head—left to right, right to left—until Claude’s entire right calf muscle is torn away and swallowed.
“Ah, God, that hurts!” he shouts. His eyes meet mine and he begs, “Help me! Kill the bitch!”
“Sorry,” I respond, comfortably perched in the driver seat, an audience of one, watchin’ Lea’s teeth tear through the fella’s arm, as his free hand slaps her snout.
After Lea’s mouth closes around Claude’s skull, my friend’s struggles finally cease. Not much is left of him now. All of his thoughts and feelings have surely evanesced.
Groggily, Andre returns to consciousness, only to find himself helpless as Lea tears away his pants and consumes his right leg, then his left. She takes special delight in dinin’ on his genitals, as is evidenced by her waggin’ tail.
Blood loss carries Claude’s soul away, even as Lea moves onto his abdomen.
* * *
I’ll miss Claude and Andre. Friends aren’t easily attained in the bayou and they were the best ones I’ve ever had. All of the memories we made together will be carried only by me now. When I’m gone, it’ll be as if those events never happened.
Perhaps I should say a prayer as I push what little is left of their corpses into the dark river, but all I can think to say is, “Farewell, cousin,” as Lea swims away, glutted. Does she even care that I sacrificed chummy companionship to help keep her existence unknown?
It’s tough as hell to fight a rumor, but I’m sure gonna try. I’ll say that Claude and Andre hitchhiked to Tijuana, cravin’ a bit of prostituta. No need to further enflame the Bayou Ma’am seekers. If many more of ’em disappear, it’s sure to spell trouble for Lea.
Perhaps my cousin’ll be captured one day, for display or dissection. Or maybe I’ll discover the Muck Witch’s grave and attempt to wish Lea back to normal. Is Lord Mosquito still alive? If so, can it be persuaded to help?
Whatever the case, I wasn’t lyin’ about that blueberry moonshine earlier. Lickety-split, I’ll be drinkin’ my way into slumberland, and therein escape familial obligation for a while.
http://www.amazon.com/author/jeremyth...
Bayou Ma’am
by Jeremy Thompson
“Those bitches!” Claude exclaims. “Those lyin’, stinkin’, blue ballin’ whores! Makin’ us the butts of their jokes! Gettin’ us laughed at by everyone! We oughta find ’em and stomp their fuckin’ skulls in!”
“And how would we even do that?” I respond, focusin’ on my composure, compactin’ the shame and heartbreak I now feel into a teeny, tiny ball that I’ll soon entomb in my mind’s deeper recesses. “They said they’re flyin’ back to New York City tonight, to that precious little SoHo loft they wouldn’t stop braggin’ about. They wouldn’t have done what they did if they thought we might see ’em again.”
Andre says nothin’, unable to take his eyes from the iPhone he manipulates, alternatin’ between the Instagram profiles of two hipster sisters, to better appraise our debasement.
#bayoumen is the hashtag they affixed to photos they’d taken with us just a coupla hours prior, at the one bar this town possesses, which we fellas have yet to leave. They’d flirted and led us on, allowin’ me to buy ’em drink after drink and believe that maybe, just maybe, one or more of us would be blessed with a bit of rich girl pussy for a few minutes…or twenty. They’ve got relatives in the area, they claimed, and had just attended one’s funeral. Some black sheep aunt of theirs. A real nobody.
Finally, Andre breaks his silence. “Look at this, right here. They used some kinda special effect to give me yellow snaggleteeth. I go to the dentist religiously. Look at these veneers.”
Barin’ his teeth, he reveals a mouthful of perfect, blindin’-white dental porcelain.
“Yeah, and they made Claude’s eyes way closer together than they really are and gave ’im a unibrow,” I say. “And they gave me a neckbeard and a fiddle. Look pretty real, don’t they?”
“Look at all the likes they’re gettin’. Thousands already. Everyone’s crackin’ jokes on us, callin’ us inbreds and Victor Crowleys, whatever that means. Look, that bitch Marissa just replied to someone’s comment. ‘Those bayou gumps were so cringe, we’re lucky we didn’t end up in their gumbo,’ she wrote. Fuck this. I’mma give ’er a piece of my mind.” A few minutes later, after much furious typin’, Andre adds, “Well, now she’s blocked me. Probably never woulda told us their real names if they knew that we’re on social media.”
Indeed, outlanders often make offensive assumptions when learnin’ of our bayou lifestyles. Hearin’ of our tarpaper shacks, they assume that we do naught but wallow in our own filth every day and smoke pounds of meth. Earnin’ a livin’ catchin’ shrimps, crabs, and crawfishes doesn’t appeal to ’em. They’d rather work indoors, if they even work at all. Solitude brings ’em no peace whatsoever. They care nothin’ for lullabies sung by frogs and crickets. Ya know, maybe they’re soulless.
I wave the bartender over and pay our tab. Nearly three days’ earnings down the drain. “Let’s get outta here, fellas,” I say. “It’s time for somethin’ stronger. There’s blueberry moonshine I’ve been savin’ at my place. It’ll drown our sorrows in no time.”
“Your place, huh,” says Claude. “We ain’t partied there in a minute.”
* * *
The roar of my airboat’s engine—as I navigate brackish water, ever grippin’ the control lever, passin’ between Spanish moss-bedecked cypresses that loom impassively, fog-rooted—makes conversation a chore. Still, seated before me, Andre and Claude shout back and forth.
“Bayou men aren’t fuckin’ rapists!” hollers Claude. “We’re not cannibals neither! I can whip up a crawfish boil better than anything those stuck-up cunts’ve ever tasted!”
“Damn straight!” responds Andre. “Bayou men are hard-workin’, God-fearin’, free folk! If they should be scared of anyone around these parts, it’s Bayou Ma’am!”
“Bayou Ma’am?!” I shout, as if that moniker is new to my ears. “Who the hell’s that…some kinda hooker?!”
“Hooker, nah!” attests Claude. “She’s a…whaddaya call it…hybrid! Half human, half alligator, mean as Satan his own self!”
“I heard that a gator was attackin’ a woman one night!” adds Andre. “Then a flyin’ saucer swooped down from the sky and grabbed ’em both wit’ its tractor beam! Somehow, the beam melded the gator and his meal together all grotesque-like! The aliens saw what they’d done and wanted none of it, so they abandoned Bayou Ma’am and flew elsewhere!”
“I heard toxic chemicals got spilt somewhere around here and some poor teenager swam right through ’em!” Claude contests. “She was pregnant at the time! A few months later, Bayou Ma’am chewed her way right on outta her!”
“Damn, that’s fucked up!” I shout, well aware of the grim reality lurkin’ behind their tall tales.
* * *
Bayou Ma’am is my cousin, you see. As a matter of fact, she was born just seven months after I was, in a shack half a mile down the river from mine. Her mom, my Aunt Emma, died in childbirth—couldn’t stop bleedin’, I heard. Maybe if they’d visited an obstetrician, things would’ve gone otherwise.
My aunt and uncle were reclusive sorts, and no one but them and my parents had known of her pregnancy. There aren’t many residences this far from town, and none are close together. It’s easy to disappear from the world, to eschew supermarkets and restaurants and consume local wildlife exclusively. Uncle Enoch buried Aunt Emma in a private ceremony and kept their daughter’s existence a secret from everyone but my mom and dad. Even I didn’t meet her until we were both four.
One day, a pair of strangers shuffled into my shack—which, of course, belonged to my parents in those days, up ’til they moved to Juneau, Alaska when I was sixteen, for no good reason I could see.
“This is your Uncle Enoch,” my dad told me, indicatin’ a goateed, scrawny scowler. “And that’s his daughter, your cousin Lea.”
Though itchy and bedraggled, though dressed in one of Uncle Enoch’s old t-shirts that had been refashioned into a crude dress, Lea sure was a cutie. Her eyes were the best shade of sky blue I’ve ever seen and her hair was all golden ringlets. Shyly, she waved to me with the hand she wasn’t usin’ to scratch her neck.
The two of ’em soon became our regular visitors. I never took to my perpetually pinch-faced Uncle Enoch, with his persecution complex and conspiracy theories shapin’ his every voiced syllable. Lea, on the other hand, I couldn’t help but be charmed by. She had such a sunny disposition, such full-hearted character, that I was always carried away by the games her inquisitive, inventive mind conjured. Leavin’ our parents to their serious, sunless discussions, we hurled ourselves into the vibrant outdoors and surrendered to our impish natures.
“I’m a hawk, you’re a squirrel!” declared Lea. Outstretchin’ her arms, she voiced ear-shreddin’ screeches, and chased me around ’til we both collapsed, gigglin’. “Whoever collects the most spider lilies wins!” she next decided. “The loser becomes a spider! A great, big, gooey one! Yuck!”
We skipped stones and spied on animals, learned to dance, cartwheel and swim. We played hide-and-seek often, with whichever one of us was “it” allowed to forfeit the game by whistlin’ a special tune we’d improvised. It was durin’ one such game that Lea made a friend.
“I’m comin’ to get you!” I shouted, after closin’ my eyes and countin’ to fifty. Our environs bein’ so rich in hiding spots, expectin’ a lengthy hunt, I was most disappointed to find my cousin within just a few minutes. There she was, at the river’s edge. Behind her, towerin’ cypress trees seemed to sprout from their inverted, ripplin’ doppelgangers. So, too, did Lea seem unnaturally bound to her watery reflection, until I stepped a bit closer and exclaimed, “Get away from there, quickly! That’s a gator you’re pettin’!”
Indeed, we’d both been warned, many times, to avoid the bayou’s more dangerous critters. Black bears and bobcats were said to roam about these parts, though we’d seen neither hide nor hair of ’em. Snakes flitted about the periphery, never lingerin’ long in our sights. We’d seen plenty of gators swimmin’ and lazin’ about, though. As long as we kept our distance and avoided feedin’ ’em, they’d leave us alone, we’d been told.
“Oh, it’s just a little one!” Lea argued, scoopin’ the creature into her arms and plantin’ a smooch on his head. “A cutie-patootie, friendly boy. I’m gonna call ’im Mr. Kissy Kiss.”
I studied the fella. Nearly a foot in length, he was armored in scales, dark with yellow stripes. Fascinated by his eyes, with their vertical pupils and autumn-shaded irises, I stepped a bit closer. Mr. Kissy Kiss’ mouth opened and closed, displayin’ dozens of pointy teeth, as Lea stroked him.
“Well, I guess he does seem kinda nice,” I admitted. “I wonder where his parents are.”
“Maybe his mommy and daddy went to heaven, and are singin’ with the angels,” said Lea.
“Maybe, maybe, maybe,” I mockingly singsonged.
Suddenly, a strident shout met our ears: my mother callin’ us in for lunch. Carefully, Lea deposited Mr. Kissy Kiss onto the shoreline. He then crawled into the water—never to return, I assumed.
Boy, was I wrong. A few days later, I found Lea again riverside, feedin’ the little gator a dozen snails she’d collected—crunch, crunch, crunch. A week after that, he strutted up to my cousin with a bouquet of purple petunias in his clenched teeth.
“Ooh, are these for me?” Lea cooed, retrievin’ the flowers and tuckin’ one behind her ear. “I love you so much, little dearie,” she added, strokin’ her beloved until his tail began waggin’.
Their visits continued for a coupla months, until mean ol’ Uncle Enoch caught us at the riverside as we attempted to teach Mr. Kissy Kiss to fetch. Oh, how the man pitched a fit then.
“No daughter of mine’ll be gator meat!” he shouted. “Sure, he’s nice enough now, but these bastards grow a foot every year! By the time he’s eleven feet long and weighs half a ton, you’re be nothin’ but a big mound of shit he left behind.” Seizing Lea by the arm, my uncle then dragged her away.
When next we did meet, a few days later, my cousin wasted no time in leadin’ me back to the riverside. “Where are you, Mr. Kissy Kiss?” she wailed, until the little gator swam from the shadows to greet her. Sweepin’ him into her arms, she said. “Let’s run away together, right this minute, so that we’ll never be apart.”
“Oh, that’s not such a great idea,” a buzzin’ voice contested. “Little girls go missin’ all the time and their fates are far from enviable.”
“Who said that?” I demanded, draggin’ my gaze all ’cross the bayou.
“’Tis I, Lord Mosquito,” was the answer that accompanied the alightin’ of the largest bloodsucker I’ve ever seen. Its legs were longer than my arms were back then. Iridescent were its cerulean scales, glimmerin’ in the sun.
“Mosquitos don’t talk,” I protested.
“They do when they were the Muck Witch’s familiar. Now she’s dead and I’m free to fly where I might.”
“I ain’t never hearda no Muck Witch.”
“And she never heard of you. That’s the way of southern recluses. Still, such is the great woman’s power that she grants wishes even now, from the other side of death. The Muck Witch’ll ensure that you never part with your precious pet, little Lea, just so long as you follow me to her grave and ask her with proper courtesy.”
Well, I’d been warned about witches and the deceitfulness of their favors, so I attempted to drag Lea back to my shack, away from the bizarre insect. But the girl fought me most ferociously, clawin’ flesh from my face, so I ran for my parents and uncle instead.
By the time the four of us returned to the riverside, neither girl nor gator nor mosquito could be sighted. We searched the bayou for hours, shriekin’ Lea’s name, to no avail.
A few weeks later, after we hadn’t seen the fella for a while, my parents dragged me to my uncle’s shack, so that we might suss out his state of mind and offer him a bit of comfort.
“I found her,” Uncle Enoch attested, usherin’ us into his livin’ room, which was now occupied by a large, transparent tank.
Atop its screen lid, facin’ downward, were dome lamps that emanated heat and UVB lightin’ from their specialized bulbs. Silica sand and rocks spanned its bottom, beneath a bathtub’s wortha water. At one end of the tank, boulders protruded from the agua. Upon ’em rested a terrible figure. If not for the recognizable t-shirt she wore, I’d never have surmised her identity.
“Luh…Lea?” I gasped. “What in the world has become of ya?”
Indeed, though Lea had wished to always be with her beloved gator, I doubt that she’d desired for the creature to be merged with her, to be incorporated into Lea’s very physicality. Patches of scales were distributed here and there across her exposed flesh. Her beautiful blue eyes remained, but her nose and mouth had stretched into an alligator’s wide snout, filled with many conical teeth. And let’s not forget her long, brawny tail.
After our initial shock abated and dozens of unanswerable questions were voiced, my parents took me home. Never again did they return to my uncle’s shack, but a dim sense of familial obligation had me comin’ back every coupla weeks, to feed Lea local muskrats and opossums I’d captured, and help my uncle change her tank’s shitty water.
The years went by, and Lea moved into a succession of larger tanks. Eventually, she grew big enough to wear her mother’s old dresses, seemin’ to favor those with floral patterns.
Finally, just a coupla months ago, I arrived at the shack to find Lea’s tank shattered. Torn clothin’ and scattered bloodstains were all that remained of Uncle Enoch, and my cousin was nowhere to be seen.
Not long after that, the Bayou Ma’am sightings began, which vitalized increasingly outlandish rumors and the occasional drunken search party. Luckily, no one has managed to photograph or film Lea yet, as far as I know.
* * *
At any rate, back in the present, I cut the airboat’s engine, leavin’ us driftin’ along our twilight current. It takes a moment for our arrested momentum to register with Claude and Andre, then both are bellowin’, askin’ me what the fuck’s goin’ on.
Rather than voice bullshit answers, I whistle the special tune my cousin and I improvised all those years ago, again and again, to ensure that I’m heard.
Moments later, Lea bursts up from the water, wearin’ a floral dress that had once been red-with-white-lilies, before the bayou muck spoiled it. In the fadin’ light, blurred by her own velocity, she could be mistaken for a primeval relic, a time-lost dinosaur of a species hitherto unknown. But, as her nickname had been so freshly upon their lips, both of my passengers, nearly synchronized, cry out, “Bayou Ma’am!”
Whatever the fellas might’ve said next is swallowed by their shrieks, as Lea tackles Andre out of his passenger seat while simultaneously swattin’ Claude across the face with her tail. The latter’s nose and mouth implode, spillin’ gore down his shirt.
Attemptin’ to gouge out Lea’s eyes as she and he roll across the deck, Andre instead loses both of his hands to her snappin’ teeth. Blood fountains from his new wrist stumps as he falls unconscious.
Claude tries to dive off the side of my airboat, but Lea’s powerful mouth has already seized him by the leg, its grip nigh unbreakable. She begins shakin’ her head—left to right, right to left—until Claude’s entire right calf muscle is torn away and swallowed.
“Ah, God, that hurts!” he shouts. His eyes meet mine and he begs, “Help me! Kill the bitch!”
“Sorry,” I respond, comfortably perched in the driver seat, an audience of one, watchin’ Lea’s teeth tear through the fella’s arm, as his free hand slaps her snout.
After Lea’s mouth closes around Claude’s skull, my friend’s struggles finally cease. Not much is left of him now. All of his thoughts and feelings have surely evanesced.
Groggily, Andre returns to consciousness, only to find himself helpless as Lea tears away his pants and consumes his right leg, then his left. She takes special delight in dinin’ on his genitals, as is evidenced by her waggin’ tail.
Blood loss carries Claude’s soul away, even as Lea moves onto his abdomen.
* * *
I’ll miss Claude and Andre. Friends aren’t easily attained in the bayou and they were the best ones I’ve ever had. All of the memories we made together will be carried only by me now. When I’m gone, it’ll be as if those events never happened.
Perhaps I should say a prayer as I push what little is left of their corpses into the dark river, but all I can think to say is, “Farewell, cousin,” as Lea swims away, glutted. Does she even care that I sacrificed chummy companionship to help keep her existence unknown?
It’s tough as hell to fight a rumor, but I’m sure gonna try. I’ll say that Claude and Andre hitchhiked to Tijuana, cravin’ a bit of prostituta. No need to further enflame the Bayou Ma’am seekers. If many more of ’em disappear, it’s sure to spell trouble for Lea.
Perhaps my cousin’ll be captured one day, for display or dissection. Or maybe I’ll discover the Muck Witch’s grave and attempt to wish Lea back to normal. Is Lord Mosquito still alive? If so, can it be persuaded to help?
Whatever the case, I wasn’t lyin’ about that blueberry moonshine earlier. Lickety-split, I’ll be drinkin’ my way into slumberland, and therein escape familial obligation for a while.
http://www.amazon.com/author/jeremyth...
October 28, 2023
The Toby Chalmers Saga
Quick announcement: Next year, The Evil Cookie Publishing will be releasing The Toby Chalmers Saga, a collection that includes improved edits of both of my previously published Toby Chalmers novellas (Toby Chalmers Commits “Career” Suicide and Toby Chalmers Hits a New Low), plus two all-new Toby Chalmers misadventures.
October 27, 2023
The Phantom Cabinet: Now Audible!
Just in time for Halloween, my novel The Phantom Cabinet is now available as an audiobook, narrated by Sean Walpole!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CLSC...
Product description:
Coming of age amidst Oceanside, California's ghostly pandemonium, Douglas Stanton learns that half of his soul remains trapped in the afterlife. All the while, a porcelain-masked entity, sculpted from history's worst atrocities, strategizes for massive scale bloodletting.
How are The Phantom Cabinet's protagonist and antagonist linked to the missing Space Shuttle Conundrum? And how much havoc can haunted satellites wreak?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CLSC...
Product description:
Coming of age amidst Oceanside, California's ghostly pandemonium, Douglas Stanton learns that half of his soul remains trapped in the afterlife. All the while, a porcelain-masked entity, sculpted from history's worst atrocities, strategizes for massive scale bloodletting.
How are The Phantom Cabinet's protagonist and antagonist linked to the missing Space Shuttle Conundrum? And how much havoc can haunted satellites wreak?
September 1, 2023
Let's Destroy Investutech: Now Audible!
Let’s Destroy Investutech is now available as an audiobook, narrated by Sean Walpole. Check it out.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGY52VB6?...
Synopsis:
Investutech owns our world and others. Their technology fills our hands and heads, shaping our personalities and biology. What’s next for the company? What atrocities do its R&D facilities conceal? And how will the body-hijacking Flux Facers oppose biggest business?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGY52VB6?...
Synopsis:
Investutech owns our world and others. Their technology fills our hands and heads, shaping our personalities and biology. What’s next for the company? What atrocities do its R&D facilities conceal? And how will the body-hijacking Flux Facers oppose biggest business?
August 19, 2023
Sweet Chuckling Morbidity: Free!
My 2018 Kindle collection, Sweet Chuckling Morbidity (which includes my Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Vol. 4 story, “Bloodletting and Intrigue on All Hallows’ Eve”), is free for five days, starting today. Get your copy at:
https://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Chucklin...
Contains:
myNdwOrm (from Journal of Experimental Fiction Volume 73: Offbeat/Quirky)
Dollimination (from DarkFuse Magazine)
In Case You Were Wondering (from DarkFuse Magazine)
Carlianne
Entropy in Blue (from Under the Bed Vol. 3 No. 9)
Stash Reunion
Smells Like Scissors
Percytion
When…
Lionel’s Fanged Chimera
Burst Contact
An Opening (from Shopping List 3)
Our Forecast Reads Stygian (from The New Accelerator)
A Rape Lair Christmas
Hot Slices of Damnation
Bloodletting and Intrigue on All Hallows’ Eve
The Censor
https://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Chucklin...
Contains:
myNdwOrm (from Journal of Experimental Fiction Volume 73: Offbeat/Quirky)
Dollimination (from DarkFuse Magazine)
In Case You Were Wondering (from DarkFuse Magazine)
Carlianne
Entropy in Blue (from Under the Bed Vol. 3 No. 9)
Stash Reunion
Smells Like Scissors
Percytion
When…
Lionel’s Fanged Chimera
Burst Contact
An Opening (from Shopping List 3)
Our Forecast Reads Stygian (from The New Accelerator)
A Rape Lair Christmas
Hot Slices of Damnation
Bloodletting and Intrigue on All Hallows’ Eve
The Censor
June 11, 2023
The Phantom Cabinet: Back in Print!
My 2014 debut novel, The Phantom Cabinet, is back in print, courtesy of The Evil Cookie Publishing. There are paperback and ebook editions now purchasable, and an audiobook is in the works.
https://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Cabine...
Product description:
Coming of age amidst Oceanside, California's ghostly pandemonium, Douglas Stanton learns that half of his soul remains trapped in the afterlife. All the while, a porcelain-masked entity, sculpted from history's worst atrocities, strategizes for massive scale bloodletting.
How are The Phantom Cabinet's protagonist and antagonist linked to the missing Space Shuttle Conundrum? And how much havoc can haunted satellites wreak?
https://www.amazon.com/Phantom-Cabine...
Product description:
Coming of age amidst Oceanside, California's ghostly pandemonium, Douglas Stanton learns that half of his soul remains trapped in the afterlife. All the while, a porcelain-masked entity, sculpted from history's worst atrocities, strategizes for massive scale bloodletting.
How are The Phantom Cabinet's protagonist and antagonist linked to the missing Space Shuttle Conundrum? And how much havoc can haunted satellites wreak?
