How many doughboys had Markus saved by dying in their place? How many Kansas City residents had Mom saved by subjecting herself to a lethal version of The Wizard of Oz? His mother was a hero many times over, most recently for saving Joe and Sharon from the knife-wielding skinhead. By dying, she’d altered reality into a shape in which they all could live. He now understood her maudlinism—“You’re still my baby; everything you do is precious to me”—because he now appreciated how precious life was, how unique, how easily ripped away. And Mom had understood that better than anybody. It was just unfortunate that with her senility, she’d been unable to explain that because she was dying, the mantle was passing down to him.
All of it, a nice story—that is, if he was sane and not imagining this. And that was the only question remaining.
Joe blew the baby a kiss, and then settled in to see what would happen on this flight. He looked out the window at the graying sky.
Story Notes
Picture Perfect
(First published in Terrible Beauty, Fearful Symmetry, DarkHart Press. March 2010.)
This is one of the very few happier selections in this collection. Again, I’m sorry for that. But I hope you laughed as hard at Raquel Domina as I did.
I researched the modeling industry as well as I could, but I’m sure some details are wrong. So I’m sorry for that, too. The devil is certainly in the details—and when reading this, I’m sure you’ll agree that one blemish on an otherwise perfect face can distract from the whole picture. (It must be hell to be a model.)
One more thing. I ordered the stories in this book to tell their own, thematic supra-story. Here we are in the first “romantic” scene, you and I, looking at each other from afar, maybe noticing some flaws. Wanna go out?
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Muralistic
(First published in Eulogies II: Tales from the Cellar, HW Press. July 2013.)
Thank God, we skipped right over the mushy parts of love and went straight to romantic dissolution.
In case you missed it, the title is a play on the word “moralistic,” because when it comes to marital infidelity, I’m a bit of a prude. As I described in the Foreword, my life has been repeatedly touched by this special pain. When my father, after thirty years of marriage, deserted my mother for a younger, married woman he met at aerobics class, I was living at home. So I was there for all of the raw, emotional desolation Mom suffered as a result. I still don’t speak to Dad. When I met my future wife, she was dealing with the same type of fallout from her first marriage. Even now, I believe her emotional scars tingle. So, years later, when our close friend’s marriage imploded from adultery and she needed someplace to live during the immediate aftermath, we didn’t hesitate. It was during this last episode that I wrote “Muralistic.”
The story’s other creative seed was the mural in the children’s play area at my local library. The cow by the fence is exactly as I described it. We even have the creepy man with the laptop. I’m afraid to peek at his screen.
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At Death We’ll Not Part
(First published in The Black Abyss magazine. Sept. 1998.)
Continuing on our thematic tour of romance, here we are at post-relationship guilt and pining for the past. Isn’t this fun? Yes, you can tell the 1990s were so full of happiness for me.
Actually, this tale, the oldest in the book, isn’t a commentary on love so much as one about sanity, a theme I’ve revisited in other works. That’s because I’m a bit crazy—and I say that without irony, as there have been times when I’ve struggled with depression and mania. That part about what it’s like inside of a hospital psychiatric ward and the subsequent sessions with a shrink? It’s autobiography from half a lifetime ago. These days, I’m unmedicated, and I think I do a decent job controlling my head through exercise, stress management, and the self-psychoanalysis of writing.
This story’s other inspiration was a real-life funeral home and crematory in my college alma mater town of Harrisonburg, Virginia. I had to write a short story for my creative writing class at JMU, and, good little researcher that I was, I toured the local funeral home. They didn’t let me into the prep room—it was “occupied”—but I did find such gems as the Cremationist magazine and that real-life ad for the cremains processor.
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Springs Eternal
(First published in Legends of the Mountain State, Vol. 3, Woodland Press. Oct. 2009.)
The thematic tour of romantic dissolution continues through the stages of grief. This one is denial.
When Michael Knost asked me to contribute to his new anthology of West Virginia-inspired stories, he assigned me the topic of Old Sweet Springs in Monroe County. To research it, Deena and I took a road trip with Elizabeth Massie and Cortney Skinner. Beth’s assignment was Cabin Thirteen in Babcock State Park, the site of an infamous murder, and we visited there, too. The weather on our trip was just as freezing as I described in the story.
The ruined bathhouse and stately old hotel, also, were as I described them. I was particularly struck by the bathhouse, with its murky waters. How deep did it go? Was someone or something down there, watching us? It was much too cold for me to dip a hand in. Just as well.
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Cocktail Party of the Dead
(First published as a bonus supplement to the hardcover edition of No Outlet, Thunderstorm Books. September 2012.)
And now, finally, the romantic relationship is dead. All that’s left is to grieve—or, maybe, to relive it.
An untitled painting by Philip Geiger, reprinted here with his permission, inspired this story. It was hanging at the local Beverley Street Studio School in Staunton as part of an exhibit called “Art and Writing: A Creative Encounter.” Geiger and others had contributed various paintings and sculptures, and a group of writers had penned pieces inspired by those works. I wasn’t among that group, but it was a cool enough of an idea that I wanted to try anyway, on my own.
Geiger’s painting shows three men standing in the foyer of an old house. They’re holding dishes and wine glasses, as if they’re at a cocktail party. What struck me as odd—and I don’t know if that was his intent—was that the man nearest the camera doesn’t have anything on his plate. The men in the background stare off to the right, smiling at the empty spaces next to them. Each appears to be in a separate conversation with thin air. It’s an otherwise happy painting, with sunshine glowing on polished wooden floors, but these subtleties creeped me out.
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Life Insurance
(First published on Deena Warner’s website to complement her annual collectible Halloween card, and concurrently as a one-copy limited edition hardcover. October 31, 2005.)
Just after we moved into our new house in Staunton, Virginia, Deena and I took a walk around the neighborhood. Down the street stood a quaint, two-story home painted an arresting shade of aquamarine. Deena was already at work on the latest edition of her annual collectible Halloween card, and for its fifth anniversary she wanted to do something special. She started with the image of that aquamarine house, drawn in pastels. And then—and this is one of things I love about her—she threw in something bizarre: a giant pumpkin bursting out of the house’s center. The force of the pumpkin’s growth flings the walls aside like cheap wrapping paper. Her drawing is reprinted here.
Deena showed me the idea. “I want you to write a story about my picture. The card will have a link to it on my website. I’ll also put it into a signed book that I’ll hand-make and give away in a raffle.”
Accepting the challenge, I studied the picture carefully. My eye first went to the boy standing with his bike in the lower righthand corner. Deena had written a line for him that she wanted me to use. It appeared as a caption inside the card: “Halloween sure is big around here.”
Despite the dark humor, something struck me as tragic about the scene. I couldn’t look away from the mother comforting her small children in the foreground. Were they bystan
ders? No, I decided. They lived there. And this was just as bad for them as a house fire.
Hurricane Katrina had just happened, and tales of New Orleans’s devastation filled the news. Now there was a group of people who understood that mother’s pain, I realized.
From there, the story fell into place. I want to smack that brat on the bike now.
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Cat’s Cradle
(First published on the Horror Drive-In website. May 2010.)
After romance comes babies, so that’s why the section about parenting begins with a story of pregnancy.
Trying to become a dad—and eventually becoming a dad—screwed with my head quite a lot, as you can guess. Witness my apocalyptic third novel, Blood Born, about roving bigfoot creatures who rape and impregnate women throughout the Washington, DC, area.
Aside from the inevitable will-I-be-a-shithead-father-like-my-dad angst, I suffered from all kinds of weird fears during Deena’s pregnancy with our first son. After all, staying pregnant wasn’t a guarantee for us. After four miscarriages, an emotional punch-drunkenness sets in that’s hard to shake.
But this was the one. We’d made it past the first trimester, and he was on the way. Time to settle on a name. Should we go with “Joe,” our placeholder name? Joe had the beauty that if it was a boy, it could be spelled J-O-E, but if a girl, then J-O.
That’s when my emotions began shifting about our cats. We had three at the time: an old, Maine coon female named Scotch and two younger, male shorthairs, Moody and Percy. They were every bit our children as we imagined our real children would be, but it wasn’t long before I began regarding them more as animals than people. Other pet owners feel differently, of course, but for me, a human baby trumps everything else.
In any case, two things about our cats particularly bothered me during Deena’s pregnancy. The first was how I’d roll over in the morning to find Moody sleeping cheek-to-cheek with her, one foreleg draped across her throat. He’d be staring at me, as if saying, She’s mine.
The other thing was when Percy one day climbed on top of Deena’s bulging belly and scratched her. Deena captured this image in her illustration (reprinted here), which ran with the story’s publication on the Horror Drive-In website. When I saw that scratch, of course my mind went to the worst-case scenario, imagining how Percy might tear our child right out of the womb, or at least infect it with something in utero. Not so out of the question, really. Percy was a killer by then. He started that summer with a cricket, bringing it in through the cat door from outside. The next day, he brought in a mouse. The day after that, a bunny rabbit, maimed but still alive. It screamed and bled to death on the hardwood floor under our dining room table. The day after that, an entire family of bunny rabbits, one shrieking animal at a time. And the day after that, a goddamn bat with a one-foot wingspan. He let that one go in our bedroom. Squirrels and birds took a while longer, but he was soon dragging those inside, too. Eventually, I swear to God, I saw him sizing up a deer that ventured into our back yard. Deena and I joked, nervously, that one day we’d find the corpse of a neighbor’s child half-stuffed through the cat door.
We didn’t keep Percy much longer.
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Second Wind
(First published on the Horror World website. August 2012.)
Yes, let’s torture ourselves with one more tale of a pregnancy gone wrong, shall we? At least that’s what I was still recovering from, on some level, shortly after my first son’s birth, which went without a hitch. (My second son’s birth… well, that’s another story.)
If you’ve read the previous story notes, you know by now why I remain hung-up on the topic of marital infidelity. Of all the stories in which I’ve mulled it over, I believe this one does it the best. The things Wendy says about forgiveness as she rides piggyback on Clay summarize my feelings toward my father perfectly.
The other big inspiration for this story was my recent interest in jogging. My hilly neighborhood here in Staunton has a few convenient circuits between 0.4 and 1.5 miles, and when I want, I can string them together to prepare for a 5K. Breathing in for two paces and out for two paces is about the extent of my runner’s knowledge.
Michael Heath Pecorino is a friend and comic book artist who surprised me with an adaptation, reprinted here with his permission, as a birthday present.
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With the Eyes of God
(First published on the Horror World website. May 2005.)
I see now (get it, “see”?) that this story addresses an important part of parenthood: worrying about what the child will become. This starts before the child is born and never stops. And the story asks what you would do if you were prescient or deluded enough to believe your newborn was destined to become the next Hitler. I would probably wuss out, figuring that being a precognitive judge and executioner wasn’t my job.
The story could as easily have fit into the “Looking Forward” section. As I said in the non-fiction column that originally ran on Horror World to accompany it, “What I think this one shows is that I brood too much about my life: where I’ve been and where I’m headed.” No shit, really?
Here’s a small confession. Soon after the birth of each of my sons, I gently pressed my eye against theirs, just as described in this story. Nothing happened, of course, except that I felt silly.
Oh, and a week later, my eye changed color.
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Maybe Monitored
(First published on the Dark Fiction Spotlight website. January 2011.)
Our thematic story progression continues: after the baby is born and you start worrying about its future, you settle into the harsh realities of work-life balance and how to operate those annoying baby monitors.
I find it incredible now, looking back, how many baby surveillance systems we used when our first son was born. We received three of them as gifts, so we thought we might as well use them all. One audio monitor went from Owen’s bedroom to our master bedroom although his crib sat directly on the other side of the wall. Another combination audio-video monitor with a night vision camera transmitted wirelessly to a black-and-white TV I inserted into my home office’s desk hutch. I could work there at night and glance up at the screen like a security guard. A third monitor went from his bedroom to Deena’s home office. This one came with a pressure-sensitive mat you could place beneath the child’s mattress. Whenever he breathed, the mat detected the gentle expansion of his lungs and caused a column of runway lights to dance up and down on the receiver. We declined to keep the mat plugged in, reasoning that things were getting excessive. (Ya think?)
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It’s Just Business
(First published in Slices of Flesh, Dark Moon Books. March 2012.)
After the baby monitor stage, your little tyke starts running around the house, chanting, “Pee pee poop head!” It’s time to take him to the playground and fill up the hours until bedtime.
The setup of this story actually happened to me. There’s a “tot lot” playground at the local park, filled with swings and slides and a jungle gym shaped like a train. One morning, I was playing there with my one-year-old when I noticed a muscular, tattooed guy leaning against his vehicle and watching us. I felt like a field mouse being assessed by a hawk. As a martial arts enthusiast, I’m all about “situational awareness” and steering clear of questionable circumstances before they become dangerous, so I wondered if I should just scoop Owen up and leave.
I turned to give him another push on the swing. When I glanced back at the tattooed guy, he was gone.
I found the man over by the slides, smiling, arms open to catch the toddler sliding down to him. Oh. He was just another dad.
But it caused me to reflect on how much we judge others based on their appearances. Tattoos, muscles, and a predatory stare combined to set off mental alarms and paternal instinct. But seeing him playing with his own child completely redefined him. I concentrated on that mental reversal as I wrote.
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The Three Golden Eggs
(First published on MatthewWarner.com. June 8, 2012.)
The reprinted blog entry preceding the story makes additional story notes here unnecessary. I included the story in this collection because, after all the tales of angst, you deserved to read something lighthearted. Raising a child isn’t so bad, really.
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And That’s When the Bathroom Exploded
(First published on the Horrorfind Fiction website. October 2001.)
The bathroom seems like the right topic for an “Intermission” section. Wouldn’t you agree?
At the time I wrote it, I was living with my Japanese-American girlfriend in a Northern Virginia condo. (Yes, we capitalize the “Northern” in those parts.) Her mother was the one who introduced me to the bizarre superstitions about beans and doorways. The mom also spoke in heavily accented English, substituting Hs for Fs, just like Kan.
A bit of trivia: Kan returned in my novel Blood Born as a nail salon owner after his newsstand went belly up during the post-9/11 shutdown of National Airport.
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Backwards Man
(First published in Dark Discoveries magazine. November 2005.)
Aside from the ungrammatical “s” on the end of “backward” (because I now know we should use “backward” here in America), this story is notable for its being another venting exercise about the Japanese-American girlfriend mentioned above. Except for the paint on the window, our relationship went south for the same reasons as the narrator’s. Coming home to an empty bed and an apartment devoid of furniture save for a lawn chair and a piano took its psychological toll. I got mighty damn tired of hearing the platitude “everything happens for a reason.” This story was my answer to it.
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