Midwife in the Tire Swing
Print version coming summer 2020 (shown—ePub and Kindle cover)
Lucian Hobart, known as Lucy, age 92, tends sixteen mousetraps—they hang on strings from the handgrips of a high-tech walker his grandson’s shop class built for him. Sarah Drye, an estranged daughter, has decided it is high time her father died; she will move in to help: “I am a Death-Doula, a midwife of sorts. I help you to die. The Death-Doula assembles meaningful things—art, music, poetry—from your life. You help her. You decorate, hand paint your coffin. Cardboard is preferred, biodegradable.”
In the house Cat, Lucy’s wife, smiles—she has nowhere to go, really. Misty twilight murmurings from the always-on bedroom television tell her of baseball and Olympic rowing, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. It is enough. Caught between despair and boredom, she opts for joy.
Lucy’s pursuit of the kernel of his being takes him to Brooklyn barrios, 18th century Devonshire, New York City for the assassination of a corrupted judge, to Midlothian, Ohio and his mislaid love, and to the Super Stud Ranch, an all-male brothel in Reno, where Ian Emory Hobart, a grandson, is the featured gigolo.
— Midwife in the Tire Swing
Platterland
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Lechery, debauchery, total annihilation—the usual stuff as two prime movers contend for power. Not power to do anything in particular—threaten, coerce, destroy: illuminate a city, tighten the skeins of a siege engine, or wind up the bowels of a child’s clockwork toy—just power to have around. Just in case. Just the familiar, reassuring bulge of potential, there to quiet unease was not much to ask. But who to ask?
— The Return of the Orange Virgin from Platterland
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.
— Mark Twain in Milan from Platterland
Lost in Willipaq
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Our mother was called to claim her husband’s bodiless head. She picked out a handsome stone of speckled gray Vermont granite for the resting place of what was left of her late husband. “Lost in Willipaq,” read the stone. Willipaq was the name of the small Maine town where David, our father, died. There was a mix-up and our father’s body had been cremated by mistake. They still had the head however, neatly tagged and in a box.
— Klein, the Clone from Lost in Willipaq
Magnetic Betty
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has big trouble. Her omelet pan has run off to Australia. “Oh... brollyflogger,” says Betty. “Language, Betty. Language,” says Mrs. Kunkle, Betty’s mom. Magnetic Betty, an eight-year-old Brownie Scout, marshals the Browntown Ocelots to save the world, Santa Claus, and Christmas as we know it, assisted by Walt and Madge, her bewildered parents, along with Dolby Jenks, World’s Number One Champion Detective, and P. I. Kunkle, the famous composer who leads the Browntown Pep Band. (with 11 original illustrations by Maine artist Lee Suta)
The Quilter Who Went to Hell
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Libby Pease is my favorite person out of all of Willipaq County—an evocation of the usually broke and always hopeful denizens of, perhaps, Washington County, Maine—living free and wild in their very own Yoknapatawpha.
An old maid, a dead Indian who is also a spirit-priest, eyeballs in a teacup, and ghosts of the long-gone can be found in “Chimaera Constant” by Rob Hunter. Hunter fulfills the “weird” expectation with these. Readers are kept groping at the edges, searching for elusive meaning in a shifting landscape of memories and present events until it’s hard to tell which is real and which is memory. It is a pleasant confusion, and I didn’t really want to be unconfused. Hunter mesmerizes by his word choice, using combinations that hide as well as reveal. It’s an aesthetic that is essential to stories like these, where understanding isn’t all that important.
— Rochita Loenen-Ruiz in the Fix November, 2008
If having the author murmur in your ear is your idea of the total reading experience, you are invited to browse onetinleg.com’s audio offerings. These MP3 downloads are released under a Creative Commons license. They’re free.
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