It had been, by the saint’s count, a thousand years or more since the last tour passed through—Attila and his Hunnic Horde, their hardy ponies pulling an endless cavalcade of Airstream trailers that stretched to the sunrise. "I’m a martyr,"
said the saint. "Martyrs don’t shoot back. "
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The closed library smells of cluster flies, old
books, hardly strange in a library, and an indefinable something―funerary
linen from some millennial boneyard, perhaps. Elizabeth Profitt Pease
strains to open the window. Shut. Tight. “What have I done for myself
lately?” Libby Pease asks no one in particular. “Not much,” she answers,
“have I?” Libby regards the pottery jar that contains her father’s ashes.
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Capt. Futvoye Halfnight, D.D.S, popped his dropped
eye into its socket. "Ahh." What he saw ahead was not reassuring. "Ohh..."
A great gnarly man was leaning against a tree and staring at him. He
was naked but for the skin of a tiger which he wore nonchalantly over
one shoulder. "You pilgrims should carry rearview mirrors. You leave
an inventory of lost lesions and dropped appendages all over the landscape,"
said the man.
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A woman popped out of thin air beside me. She was
swinging a serious looking cavalry saber; she gave me the once-over
and attacked. I ducked. Her pale gray eyes grew huge. "Oh, terribly
sorry, old chap. I thought you were someone else," she said. "Are you
still alive?" I said yes. "I say, good fun, what?" she remarked. A bullet
zinged past and we dived under the desk.
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Calumet City, Illinois is the fallen sister of Hammond,
Indiana. That the Calumet River had once caught fire was legend among
the guys at the Antlers bar. The two towns straddled the state line.
Calumet City was blue neon beer joints with electric country bands;
all the bars had strippers. This particular bar was called the Calypso.
The same woman as last time twitched above the bar, partaking of a private
epiphany two feet from the end of her nose.
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Appearances count for a lot in rural Maine; every
soul is a member of some church, high, low, Pentecostal or other. Check
one please. It was not thought overly strange when Harry Profitt Pease
took to wearing an aluminum foil hat to confuse space aliens, nor when
he was observed in conversation with the black and white spotted pig
that followed him around. He had been, after all, the star center on
that state championship team.
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“I am Joseph Force Crater; I am a judge of the New
York State Supreme Court. I am not the Adversary. Your chastity is safe
with me; I am a Democrat.”
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A tall insect with feathery antennae and a nervous
tic paused before the mirror of a machine plastered with multicolored
blurbs announcing it as a dispenser of a popular brand of chewing gum.
The walking nightmare spoke to his human companion. "Harry, you wait
with the bags, there’s a good fellow." Evenly modulated tones carried
the force of a command.
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I covered my eyes. The face on the phone was cloaked
in a halo of light, an iridescent gold and blue lapis mosaic. "You are
very bright," I said. "Transcendence. You’ll get used to it," said Teaberry Balcom. "I have taken this appearance lest you be stricken blind by my radiance." "Hold on a minute. You're pretty much like a god, right? Then how come you have to use FedEx to deliver your miracles?" "Competitive bidding."
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"She’ll be back healthy as a horse and rosy as a
pippin." Sylvia really says this. She means my wife. Horses and apples
speak of health. Sylvia’s veiled promise and Helen’s distant death are
not to be spoken of. "...and there are these injections I hear about..."
She means antibiotics. Streptomycin and mountain air. If Helen were
tubercular and gone for the cure, they would have had her back in six
months.
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Thelma hit the floor like she had fallen out of
an airplane, no parachute, and her pistol went bouncing toward Ed Seitz
and me. The gun’s muffled report reverberated, echoes crossing echoes
like a dispatcher’s call in a marble train station. In South Carolina
local distances were told off with the high school football field in
mind. A motivated linebacker could get you from the pool hall to the
graveyard in five minutes.
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The moose had dropped antlers before and anticipated
the loss with regret. His antlers amplified the fall of snow, the separation
of a dry leaf from its stem, the impact of a pine needle on the padded
forest floor. To go antlerless was to imitate the solitude of starvation
and withdraw into himself as into a heavy, windless snowfall.
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"Where is the bear when the bear is not where the
bear should be?" asked Frankie Jelinek's husband with sweet reasonableness.
"Ever think about that?" "No," said Frankie, "I don't. Wherever teddy
bears go. Maybe a picnic." Steve gave his wife a sleepy kiss and rolled
over. Supernatural phenomena were not in the baby care books. Yet...
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An odor of mint attracted the francher to an unpromising
patch of brown scrub. It spread its fetlocks and arched its neck down
to feed. It munched contentedly for some minutes then collapsed. The
francher's nostrils flared as it gulped at the thin unsatisfying air.
Wide speckled eyes bulged; oval pupils stared. An Andean vulture circled
closer.
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Errol Flynn, aged 120, has been kept alive with
hormones and organ transplants until 2025 for the last, final, remake
of Kipling's 'Kim.' It will be a musical.
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"I am midtown. Manhattan?" Linda Winkelman speaks
her question out loud in the middle of the rush hour push; no one takes
notice. Linda is standing in the middle of a street. She can not recall
who she is or why she is here. "I remember lemonade," says Linda. Buildings
disappeared, people disappeared. Now it is her turn. Linda Winkelman
was born the year they invented frozen lemonade.
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The woman at the far end of the kaleidoscope had
not been there last week, of this Simon was sure. She was naked or near
enough, thinly dressed in a diaphanous veil. "Holy shit!" Simon Alexander
breathed on the lens and gave it a wipe with his sleeve. "I see that
I have your attention..." said the woman, "...finally."
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The ineffable, unnamable God of Hosts stood with
a burly, bearded personage who held a bar towel draped over one arm,
a symbol of his trade. The golem toyed nervously with an ear. "My people
should quake at My unutterable Name, not fall on their tukhes," God
sighed. The ear came off. "Bim... this is not about you. Try to stay
on topic."
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It was a real nice laying-out—tasteful. Well, maybe
not so much tasteful particularly, but neat. They’d got Ed’s left arm
attached to his head and not his shoulder. And they had the remaining
right arm attached on the left side. To look like them, I supposed.
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"See that, Franklin?" said Eleanor Roosevelt. "That’s
O’Brien." Franklin observed a line of stars on the eastern horizon.
There were four. "Oops, sorry." Eleanor nodded at her new constellation,
O’Brien, and the fourth star blinked out.
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"My sister, is she dead? Go and give her a poke,
would you?" The great white presence that was the Lady Mother of the
Long Walkers indicated the row of captive queens on their dais beneath
her, deferentially lower.
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"Arrgh! See me neck, lad?" The pirate's head hung
at a grotesque angle from where the long executioner's knot had settled
at the base of his skull. Theophrastus Bigelow was a big man—the weight
of his fall through the executioner's trap had broken his neck but had
not killed him immediately. He lifted a ten-kilo strand of gold chains
to reveal his scars. "Admirable, what-oh?" The mark of the hangman was
stamped on Bigelow's throat.
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"YO, BABE!" a man's voice blared at Grenadine McKenzie,
"SURPRISE, YOU'RE PREGNANT." A craggy male face bloomed before her.
The face was a hero's face, Lance Davenport from Rights of Spring. There
was an odor of patchouli.
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Hillary pushed the platter of cookies across the
center line back to Sally’s side. “We went the Lysistrata
route―Aristophanes? Withholding sex, that got their attention. First
we tried threats and confrontations about those things they will
keep on dragging home to bury in the yard―the boys can’t recall
anything of their midnight rambles or so they say. Dear, please
don’t let your mouth hang open like that.”
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Prosper Epilegomenes is a mouse demon in service
to Sminthian Apollo. He blows up a car dealership and kills a troublesome
neighbor.
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Duckpin bowling in Taunton, Massachusetts. A duel
over a magic hat sacred to Artemis, sister of Apollo.
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A barroom in Hell's Kitchen. There is a meatball
buffet and it is always Thursday, August 14th. Artemis, Apollo's sister,
is ahh... difficult.
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Libby Pease remembers her girlhood as a litany of
lost callers. Now a visitor: William Powell has misplaced Myrna Loy.
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Libby Pease accepts having her own personal shaman
as an article of faith, which faith she could not tell. The dead Indian
smells rank, but not unpleasantly so―fresh earth clinging to over-wintering
vegetables, plug-cut tobacco and molasses.
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"Sweet Jesus!" Libby Pease has—for just a moment,
a split second—the queer idea that there is an eyeball in her teacup.
"Uh... hello, eye." The eye does not speak. She takes a swallow of Dr.
Pomeroy's straight from the bottle and shakes her head to clear it.
She squints; the eye in her teacup squints back—it is her mother's eye.
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Twins play which kid's got the papers. Originally
published as The Flags of All Nations Hors D'eouvre Toothpick Caper.
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There was a dead man in the yard this morning. I
checked in my wallet for my latest picture of the front yard. I have
a collection of yard pictures that goes back for years but I usually
carry only one photo at a time. No, he was a new arrival. I called Sheila.
Sheila is my ex-wife.
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Lord Zorgon of Alymeade sighed, a great exhalation
redolent of smoldering carpets. "Where was I? Facelifts, yes. Women,
whatever their ages, never wish for sensible things like orthotics or
a tonsillectomy."
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The stories index |
| Return
of the Orange Virgin |
| About
(acknowledgements) |
|
About the Book |
|
buy the book (Amazon.com) |
|
Contact Rob Hunter |
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