Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known...
Welcome to the audio downloads index for onetinleg.com. Feel free to copy the tales as much as you want; pass ’em around. All I ask is that you don’t alter a story or sell it. If you like what you hear, drop some spare change in the tips jar—that’s the PayPal link over to the left. Don’t be shy, now. And if you are further inspired to help defray the cost of keeping aloft a website that gives stuff away—buy a book; it’s as easy as that. Click the “buy a book” link on your left, and you’ll be directed to the latest items in my inventory, and thanks for listening.Saint Velcro™ and the Swan
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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| download (ogg vorbis)Blue (as in an Early Frost)―the 4th tale of the Libby the Quilter quintet
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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(broadband) | download (ogg vorbis)Grasshopper Dreams―the 5th tale of the Libby the Quilter quintet
“Oh, the poor, dear man,” said Dicey Pease. As they undid the corpse’s nightshirt, a smell issued forth. Noses were crinkled, then relaxed. “The Milos,” said Libby’s mother. Pansy Graham’s sanitary habits had been well-defined. In death as in life he was preceded by a not unpleasant smell which Dicey identified as the yellow bar soap provided by the Daughters of Milo.
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| download (ogg vorbis)The Queen’s Head
The heart-breaking beauty—the original of the flesh and blood face with the moondrop eyes—resided, a carved and painted sandstone effigy, in the Bureau of Antiquities, the face of an ancient queen. The Sender of Dreams had sent him either a true dream or a false dream. It was for him to find out which.
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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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(broadband)The Beewolf
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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| download (broadband)The Diplodocus Effect
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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| download (broadband)The Tirewoman Gabriel
Twice a year and regular as clockwork, when Barbara’s School of the Dance trots in the latest corps of majorettes and ballerinas, the classic backdrop―Mediterranean hillsides with Raphaelite shepherds and shepherdesses discreetly about their distant businesses―was always requested. In addition to shepherdesses on their backs in the grass under fluffy clouds, there is a backdrop of a convent garden at dusk. Giant bumblebees prowl thick wisteria, vines knot to frame a lovers’ bower. Before the foreground, hogging the floor, lies a toppled faun, his lips curled in a sneer of passion. I could not bear to throw the stuff out. Some day someone would want to be immortalized with a leering, panting satyr.
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| download (broadband)Cherokee Purple
Thelma Wagstaff blew herself away as she sat on her high red upholstered stool supervising the cash box at the White Street Billiards and Snooker. Thelma hit the floor like she had fallen out of an airplane, no parachute, and her pistol went bouncing toward Ed Seitz and me. Ed and I were absorbed in the cushion shot he was negotiating. We did not look up; there was a fiver riding on Ed’s shot.
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(broadband) | download (ogg vorbis)The Moose in the Noösphere
The man, an Algonquian, met the moose head on on a springy forest trail. The moose had come that day to drop his antlers and wanted to be alone. It had been an open winter, roots and lichens dying off for lack of snow cover. With bad foraging the moose was tired and irritable. 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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(broadband)The Last Teddy Bear
“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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| download (broadband)The Francher
An odor of mint attracted the francher to an unpromising patch of brown scrub. It spread its fetlocks, a legacy of embedded Przewalski horse genes, 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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| download (broadband)The Year They Invented Frozen Lemonade
“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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(broadband)Scope Virgin
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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| download (broadband)The Song of the Rice Barge Coolie
“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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vorbis)The Runaway Bungalow
“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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(broadband)E Pluribus Human
“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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| download (broadband)A Pass on the Tabouli
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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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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| | download (ogg vorbis)The Death of James A. Garfield
Did I tell you I went to James A. Garfield Elementary? Probably not. We had cheerleaders and a losing basketball team for them to cheer for—Bobo skewatten-daddle, get it right! James A. Garfield gonna win tonite! I missed out on World War Two because I was pigeon-toed. School spirit saw to it that I was more or less informed about the late president.
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(broadband)I Want to Share Your Wheat
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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(broadband)The Perfect Homburg
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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| download (broadband)The Ninepatch Variation
Libby Pease remembers her girlhood as a litany of lost callers. Now a visitor: William Powell has misplaced Myrna Loy.
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The Red Sneaker Zones
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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| download (broadband)Chimaera Constant
“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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| download (broadband)Klein, the Clone
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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| download (broadband)The Prophet Harry (from The Return of the Orange Virgin)
The smell of fresh cut grass with the roar of a two stroke engine said Harry was doing the library lawn. He must have been at it for hours and that meant he was drinking. Riding circles and massaging the turf till the beer or the gas gave out.
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| download (broadband)A Special Providence
“I thought there was a special providence that looked out after these things,” said Gerry. A ten-dollar jackpot dropped into the takeout drawer. “There is,” said a voice. “And don’t whack the machine—the lottery corporation doesn’t favor muscleheads abusing church property.”
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Tomcat
His great green eyes invited her to share a secret knowledge, intimating she was trusted, but not yet ready for a full revelation. Her species would have to mature.
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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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(broadband)Facelift
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
complete audiobook on iTunes)A tale of the Fata Morgana, Lady of the Wild Things―first published online as monthly installments over three years, now rewritten and available here (Platterland—Nine Stories and a Novella, the trade paperback print version. Also Kindle (Mobipocket), Adobe .pdf and m4b audiobook compilations.
Lost in Willipaq―Lovers, Losers, and Part-time Demons
Willipaq, the first book: forays into the fantastic―sixteen tales plus a novella.
Platterland―Nine Stories and a Novella
Willipaq, the second book: new stories, fresh forays into the fantastic―plus The Return of the Orange Virgin.
A Brief History of the Author―the thumbnail bio
coming attractions (new stuff, etc.)
Blue (as in an Early Frost)Libby raises her arm to see if she is in the picture. There. She waves. She stands very still, then waves again. The pendulum’s sweep gives the appearance of animation; her face swells and shrinks. “Hello.” She waves again, crosses her wrists at her throat, then stands very still. She stares intently at herself as she swings past, a miniature trapeze artist suspended in brass, a fly in amber.
Grasshopper Dreams
the 5th and final installment of the Libby the Quilter quintet, still in transit. Look for it in 2012.
St. Velcro™ and the Swan
The life and loves of the catalog logo for a liturgical raiment consortium, Bold Christian Clothing: ‘Saint Velcro™, Sinner and Saved.’ It was a T-shirt. ‘Saved’ was on the back.
The Queen’s Head
They sat, policeman and Queen: she, a head atop a fluted sandstone pilaster, a radiant face. He leaned forward to close the gap between them. At a table spread with oiled silk slick and shiny they drank brandy poured by the wife of this house of high dormers—fruit brandy from a lead flask crystallized by moisture and age and air. The Queen, a carved and painted sandstone effigy in the Bureau of Antiquities, lifted and poured a thin amber stream. The Inspector did not ask how she could speak, sit with him and without hands manipulate the flask.
“We deaden our minds so our souls may flow together. We here await the silent strike of a flight of arrows,” said the Queen’s head.
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