T.C. Boyle

“I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun, or to be subversive or to get turned on to something. It's just like doing math at school. I mean, how often do we sit down and do trigonometry for fun, to relax. I've thought about this, the domination of the literary arts by theory over the past 25 years -- which I detest -- and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterisation, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level -- moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it."

And Now For Something Entirely Different...

Well shit.  Things have slowed down pretty good and I've got more time on my hands to actually get a bit of writing done.  However, I'm not back in the swing of things just yet.  The brain's like a muscle and all that jazz.  The fiction-writing portion of my brain has gotten a bit flabby of late, but I don't wanna keep neglecting this blog so it's time for an experiment...or a compromise if we're being accurate.  I've got a part of story that I'm satisfied with.  I like the story idea, I like the portion that I've written out, and I'm gonna post it and pretend that I've got enough followers to actually get some feedback on it in hopes of spurring me forward and toning my brain back up.  If any of you ladies and gentlemen care to feed my delusions then please lemme know whatcha think of this introductory excerpt and this experiment as well.  If this little experiment actually pans out (and who the hell actually expects that it will?) I'll prolly give this another shot--and even if I don't get any feedback I'll prolly still do this again if it tickles me right.

Soul Food (excerpt)

The sin-eater was tall, almost a head taller than anyone else in the room, and a malnourished-looking skinny.  His biceps and triceps were thin slivers of overly tenderized skirt steak glued to either side of his humerus.  A cheap fleece-lined hunting jacket hung across his too-thin shoulders.  It was probably green, but filth and exposure had rendered it a vague shade of dark something and gray-nothing bits of stuffing poked through the various slits and holes.  Underneath the jacket was a white t-shirt with a capital ‘A’ on it that could have been the anarchy symbol or a poorly drawn pentagram or even the beginnings of a mediocre attempt at Aerosmith’s logo.  His jeans were in shambles, worn through in multiple places and so thoroughly caked with dirt as to look like they had been brought straight from the sweatshop pre-dirtied.  His boots were almost entirely covered in various dark shades of duct tape.  Creased, dirty, and sun-baked, his face matched his clothes.  His crooked nose was too flat, his cheekbones pressed against his skin too hard, and his chin came to a point.  His eyes were small and dark and hid beneath heavy brows and his hair stopped at his jaw line as if raggedly sheared by the sharp edge kept by his jawbone.  He leaned against the wall and flurries of dust shotgunned off.

“Hi.”

Half the room started checking their shoelaces and the other half checked the wallpaper for tears.  One person made eye contact and offered a nod and a strained facsimile of a smile in return.  Mary Whitaker was the stout head of the Whitaker family and was determined not to show superstitious fear in front of anyone.  She was not so determined, however, that she would offer the sin-eater a handshake.  Whereas the sin-eater could have been hung up on a wooden post in a cornfield, Mary Whitaker could have been rolled down the hallway like Violet Beauregard—if the roller was willing to lose the hands with which they rolled and then be strangled with them.  

Curio

1921 British Sixpence. 

Lucky.

The coin was maybe a little smaller than a nickel; tarnish creeping across the silver like pond scum.  A gentlemanly looking man with a short, tightly-combed haircut and a thick mustache looked left across the coin.  The coin sat nestled on a stained purple cushion.  The handwritten tag leaned against the cushion.

“Brian May uses coins like that to play guitar with instead of a pick.”

Jun turned.  Three glass display cases, each staggered slightly, and a bookshelf that obscured half of the front desk were between him and the stooped old man behind the desk, but the man seemed to know where Jun was despite the view.  His voice was accented, something coarse and throaty.  Jun guessed it was German but the subtleties of distinguishing foreign accents had always been lost on him.  The man’s accent could have been Pakistani for all he knew.

“Who’s Brian May?”

“He was Queen’s guitarist.”

“Isn’t Queen still around?”

The old man snorted softly.  “I guess so.  Technically.  It just isn’t the same without Freddie Mercury’s voice.  It’s like taking a man’s hand and sewing on a different one.  Is he still the same whole?”

“I guess.”

He snorted again.  Jun moved on, his gaze falling on an octagonal display case to his right.  Inside the case was a small, square platform made of dark wood.  Atop the platform rested a clean white handkerchief, folded neatly into a square slightly larger than Jun’s palm.

Pocket full of sunshine.

Guaranteed to brighten the darkest of days.

Jun stared at the little white tag and made a face.  What shit.  He let his eyes wander about the store looking for his next stop when the glass display case with the ridiculous little handkerchief caught his eye again.  Brow furrowed, mouth set in a tight line, Jun stared at the display case half expecting to see some faint luminescence emanating from the pristine white cloth.  When no such display was made, Jun rolled his eyes.  What shit.  The next display case over was empty.  No trinket, no pedestal or cushion, and no handwritten tag.  Next to the empty display case was a small end table.  It looked like the same wood as the bottoms of the display cases and the little pedestal underneath the handkerchief, but where those had a rough, more natural finish the end table was polished to a mirrored sheen.  The dark whorls in the wood seemed to descend for miles, far deeper than the underside of the table, past the little curio shop’s dusty floor and into the rocky exterior of the Earth’s crust.  Jun wondered for a moment if the whorls ever ended.  Maybe there was a matching table with matching whorls on the exact other side of the Earth.  Maybe someone was standing over that table and peering into the depths, wondering about the exact other side of the Earth.  He stared at the end table for nearly a full minute before noticing that something was resting atop the table.  It was a gardening trowel with a contoured orange handle made of plastic and a six inch blade that was white where it was not so worn that the metal underneath shown through.  A white tag rested flat against the table and read simply:

Garden trowel.

Jun picked up the little white tag, running his thumb over the front.  The card was oddly textured, like miniscule paper pebbles were imbedded just below the surface.  He flipped it over.  There was no writing on the back.  Garden trowel.  No descriptions, no clever phrases, no childish imaginings; just “garden trowel”.  Jun set the card back down and stared at the trowel.  Something had to be special about it, something made it worthwhile for the stooped old man at the front desk to have bought it and put it on display.  Jun looked left and, sure that the old man could not possibly see him through all the displays and shelves, ran a finger over edge of the trowel.  It was cool to the touch without being cold and the edge was so dull it was almost flat.  His finger wandered further up the trowel.  The grooved side of the handle was worn smooth like a well-used basketball, devoid of any grip.  Light flickered off the blade of the trowel giving off a gray-blue reflection, contrasting with the pale yellow of the lamps placed sparingly across the shop.  Jun blinked.  The blade seemed to be reflecting that cloudy blue in a pattern.  Every few seconds a flash of slate light rolled across blade before it descended back into darkness.  A soft crunch accompanied the next shift from light to dark, like metal cutting through soft soil.  Jun pulled his hand back as if the gardening tool had become a snake, rearing back and ready to strike.

There was no second crunch.  The shifts from light to dark stopped.  Jun was once again staring at a “Garden trowel.”

Jun ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and swallowed hard, Adam’s apple jerking with the strain.  His heart tripped over itself, stumbling drunkenly around his chest cavity and a cold, tingling buzz filled him to the point of overflow.  Jun opened and closed his hands.  The cold made his fingers feel brittle and stiff.  His eyes flicked around the shop looking for lights that would reflect blue or a rocking chair rolling over a dead leaf that blew in off the street, but the shop had no overhead lighting and the lamps scattered around the room all gave off a dull yellow light.  There were no rocking chairs and the floor was immaculate.  He ran a hand over his jaw and cheek.  He had shaved this morning and there was not enough stubble to give the gesture any real feel, but it had always seemed like a thing men did when they wanted to look more tired than scared in the face of the unusual.  Some part of Jun’s mind was screaming at him, but the thought was distant and muffled like someone buried alive and crying out for help.  It was the part of him that had secretly believed in Santa Clause until he was twelve; the part that had been unable to resist a trip into the little curio shop.  It was the part of Jun that he had learned was better left ignored.  Jun snorted, rolled his eyes with the kind of melodrama that only a high school student can manage, and gripped the trowel’s handle firmly. 

Light rolled across the blade briefly; a cloudy day reflected in the curve of the trowel.  Light to dark, light to dark.  The crunch of earth and the wet, stifling heat of summer replaced the still coolness of the shop.  Crunch.  Crunch.  Crunch.  Jun licked his lips and tasted salt. 

He was starting a garden.  He had known from the moment he had moved into this house that the western side of the house would be the perfect place for a small garden and now that the unending showers of spring had past, he could finally start.  Crunch.  Crunch.  Crunch.  The trowel bit into the earth, carving out a bed for the new, nutrient-enriched soil that would usher Jun’s garden into the world.  Then the ground gave way and he saw a small tunnel running beneath his garden to-be.  He sighed and wondered how one went about humanely chasing away whatever was living in his garden.  Not willing to cave the tunnel in and unsure of how to continue otherwise, Jun sat back on his heels and stared into the hole.

A raspy screech floated out of the hole, almost too faint to hear.  Jun cocked his head to the side.  The screech repeated itself and for a moment Jun was sure he had collapsed the tunnels and trapped something down below.  Jun dug.  Careful never to bury the trowel so deep that he might accidently hurt the trapped animal, Jun started digging out the tunnels.  The screeches grew louder and Jun thought he could hear a scrabbling sound not too far down; claws trying to cut an escape route.  Jun scraped at the edges of the hole, widening it so that whatever was trapped could get out.

Sharp, needle-like pain tore at the back of his hand.  Jun jerked back and bit down a gasp. A bead of blood oozed from a small, shallow groove in his hand.  A small shard of rock stuck out from one end of the cut.  Jun picked the rock out of his hand, set the trowel down, and went to work widening the hole with his hands.  A dozen more stabs of pain stripped flesh from his hands.  Shards of rock the size of his fingernail were lodged deep into the back of his hand and blood was now flowing freely.  Jun scrambled backwards.  Pale, long-fingered hands clawed at the edges of the hole, some still hefting sharpened chunks of rock.  The faces that clambered over the edge of the hole were caricatures of human faces.  Smaller than an infant’s, their flat, wide heads were savagely scarred and sporting overly large mouths filled with splintered, cracked masses of ruined teeth.  Jun screamed.  He screamed and screamed until the humid summer air dissipated and all traces of sunlight withered away.  He screamed and fell backward, knocking a display to the floor.  The glass case shattered and a freckled conch shell skittered across the floor.  Jun screamed and shambled out onto the cobblestone road, clutching at his hands, trying to stem the phantom bleeding.  

1, 2, 3

Somewhere a piano chimed sweetly.

1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3…

A man danced on stage, perfectly in-time with the piano.  He was exquisitely dressed, as was his partner; a corpse he led with aqueous grace despite the dead weight.

1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3…

The spotlight cut out and drowned the stage in darkness.

1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3…

The spotlight flared to life.  The dancer lay on his back, staked to the stage with a metal pipe.  The corpse held the pipe in both hands, posed, hips straddling hips, back arched, head titled upward, face dotted with blood.

1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3…

Two-for Tuesday

Yup, I went with that lame an alliteration.  Deal with it.

So I went back and touched up a story I posted earlier, Salvation.  I always enjoyed the story itself, but there were enough rough edges that I wasn't satisfied.  So I finally went back and sanded it down a bit.  The changes aren't major, but they smooth things out rather well in my opinion.  I'm not gonna re-post the story entirely but I did want to draw attention to it.

I also (more obviously) posted another story.  I like the story a lot, but the title...the title is weak.  It's basically a stand-in that I've yet to find a replacement for.  If any of the three people that ever read this blog have any better ideas I would love to hear them.

An Intruder

I stepped into my kitchen and found a stranger perched atop my counter.  Adrenaline surged.  Fight or flight instincts howled at me to run.  Every muscle in my body contracted.  I froze.  There was a stranger in my kitchen.  The intruder rocked slowly back and slowly forward.  With each movement he drew a kitchen knife across his thigh.  His jeans were ripped and bloodied and beads of blood dripped off the knife he had taken from my kitchen.  Back and forth again.

I needed to move.  I was currently standing between him and the front door.  None of my windows were connected to the fire escape and my apartment was seven stories up.  Doing bodily harm to another human being was a much simpler way to exit a building than jumping out a seventh floor window.  Had I retained the faintest amount of bodily function I would have stepped aside and offered him the door.  Let the police deal with the armed intruder after the fact.

I was less than ten feet from the intruder and I could hear my heartbeat.  I was shaking.  My teeth were chattering.  I had slammed the front door shut when I had come in.  I had jangled my keys from hand to hand and flung my shoes off, but none of this seemed to have registered with the intruder.  Still he sat atop my counter, slowly rocking himself back and forth, knife in hand. 

He resembled a cautionary tale parents use to keep their kids in-line.  “Stay in school or you could end up like this.”  The blue jeans he was wearing were at least a size too big for him.  Splatters of paint, mostly beige and white and that creamy yellow color so many suburbs seem to love, had dried in a pattern that closely resembled a Rorschach.  The knees of both legs were worn through and the skin below was covered in an ugly tangle of thick grime and matted hair.  He had on a dark green hoodie, hood up, which had retained only a ghost of its former color.  It had probably never been a cheery mint but the hoodie’s original color had very likely been a few shades lighter than its present state.  Thick, greasy lengths of hair hung inside the hood framing the frostbitten tip of his nose.  I was very glad that the sleeves swallowed his hands up because I doubted they would have been spared the harshness of winter. 

I still had not managed any movement, but all of the observations told me that the wheels were turning in my head.  I could feel my thoughts trying to gain traction. 

There was blood on my knife (I had come to the conclusion at some point that the knife he was holding was my own) and none of it had dried.

Blood.

One word whispered through my thoughts again and again and again and again.  Blood.  There was blood on the knife in his hands.  Back and forth he rocked, sawing gently through his own thigh.  Thin rivulets of blood ran down his leg, spilled over my counter, and dribbled down to the floor.

I gagged and closed my eyes as tightly as I could manage, telling myself not to throw-up.  I dropped to one knee and still needed to prop myself up with my right hand.  I opened my eyes and the world wobbled like it had drunk far more than was good for it, but if the intruder noticed he paid no mind.  He was managing to stay silently seated through it all.

He seemed so unaware; almost catatonic.  Were it not so impossible, I might have thought he had not noticed me at all.  The commotion I had caused coming through the front door had not stirred him from his reverie, nor had my stumbling about a moment ago.  That fact alone unnerved me more than any other.  There was something wrong with this man.  I was completely sure that he was unbalanced and sooner or later something would set him off.

The intruder continued rocking. 

Back and forth. 

Back and forth.

The knife in his hand rocked with him, no longer able to open any new wounds, just slowly shredding exposed tissue.  Sooner or later he would hit bone.  I wondered if he would keep cutting even then.  I wished I knew how long it would take him to bleed out when he inevitably hit the big artery that ran through each leg.  I wished I knew how long it would take him to hit that artery.

Tears blurred my vision and mucus built up in my nose, I blinked and sniffled.  A cramp in my calf relented.  The return of bodily functions continued with my bladder.  It released.  My entire body was on pins and needles like I had managed to let everything go to sleep at once.  My hand scrambled into my pocket and gripped my phone.  It took three tries for my thumb to actually unlock the phone.  The phone chirped happily; glad to finally be of service.

The intruder turned his head, slowly.  The motion was every bit as trance-like as his rocking.  The frostbite covered far more than just the tip of his nose.  It spread across his face like he was blushing with ice water instead of blood.  His eyes were dark, his pupils pushing the irises into near nonexistence.  He blinked.  Recognition flickered in his eyes and then faded away again like a radio station from one town over.  He drew the knife up to eye-level and stared, turning it over and watching the light play off the blade.  Recognition tuned back in and the intruder buried the knife into his throat.  A sheet of blood poured over his hand and down my counter.  He twisted the knife once and fell from the counter.  Blood pooled around him, expanding in-time to his heart’s inane beating.  The linoleum floor had driven the knife sideways, ripping half his throat out.

I found my voice and screamed until my throat bled.

****

The police lead me out of my apartment and sat me down in the lobby with a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a wool blanket.  Sometime later a young patrolman was brought to me by an older man.  The patrolman apologized awkwardly.  Apparently he had nearly shot me when I had not put my hands on my head as ordered.  I nodded and the older man led the patrolman away.

The older man came back later and introduced himself as the detective in-charge of my situation.  He shook my hand and asked me a few questions.  I must have given him the right answers because he wandered off amiably enough.

Another indiscriminate amount of time later, the detective came back.  I caught his name this time, Detective Riley.  He looked tired and rumpled.  His overcoat still had dark patches on it from the falling snow and his graying hair was not staying parted properly.  He kept rubbing at the stubble on his jaw like he was apologizing for it being there.  He told me that nothing was official, but between the two of us it was looking a lot like a drug-related incident.  This year’s winter was exceptionally harsh and much of the transient population was literally freezing to death in the streets.  This guy had probably taken something—Meth addiction can be nasty—and then gotten himself lost and sought shelter.  He had probably wandered the apartment building until he found an unlocked door and then gone off the deep end.  Riley said he’s seen drugs do all kinds of screwy shit to people’s minds.  The guy had most assuredly been in a haze through all of it.  His hand was warm on my shoulder, even through the blanket.

“I’m sorry about all this, but we are still going to need to take an official statement from you.  Maybe tomorrow we can set something up, give yourself a little time to level out.  And of course the city will offer you counseling if you’d like.”