It's A Real Book!

https://www.createspace.com/3868532

I'm a published author now.  Yay for me.  I usually only post stories here, but I thought I would take the time to point out that I took 100 stories and turned them into a physical object.  I'm like magic, or some sufficiently advanced technology.

Available via CreateSpace eStore now, and Amazon.com/Amazon.com UK in 5-7 business days from now (10/17/12).

Happy Halloween, and watch your back.

Face in the Crowd

I saw a woman the other day, and I'll never forget her.  She wasn't particularly pretty or anything like that.

I was putting groceries in the trunk of my car when I looked up and saw her, sitting in the back seat of a car, some feet away.  There was a man outside the car, talking on his phone, but I was too far to hear him.  She mouthed something but I couldn't tell what she had said.  Not then, at least.

It wasn't until I got home, put away my purchases, and turned on the television that my heart sank.

There, on the local news, was the story of a kidnapped woman.  She was the woman in the car that I had seen.  Thinking back to her I realized what it was she had tried to say:

"Help me."

Clenched and Sweating

Joey clenched his teeth hard as the railing next to him shook with the force of his grip. He envisioned his mother warning him about doing that. Sweat cascaded down his tanned face, intermingling with locks of his long black hair. His striking blue eyes were bloodshot as he prepared himself for the fight of his life. He didn't want to be in the arena, with the expectations it placed upon him, but he was there. He knew what he had to do to relieve the curse placed upon him by that gypsy. He had to shit, and shit bad.

Carpet-Maker

Why am I here, and where is here? Eric thought to himself.  He had awoken to find himself nestled between and covered by several ruptured bags of trash, their dark emerald hues glistening with the morning dew.  The whole alley smelled of that particular odor one comes across when many different horrible scents commingle and merge to form a single, inscrutable foul stench.

He couldn’t be sure if he was what reeked of urine, as a considerable portion of what he could see was covered in various forms of human waste.  Human waste, and dew in various patterns on the ground, all covering what looked to be carpet.  He found the notion of a carpeted alley to be odd, but since he had spent a good many years homeless, he had seen stranger ways for people to bring what little comforts of home to wherever they lived.

As he scanned the area, he noticed a good many of the bags were filled with what looked like ground meats in various stages of decay.  He decided it was remarkable, because from what he could see there was a definite lack of trash, aside from the oozing bags of meat, rolls of carpet, and the occasional items of discarded food lying around.

A wind picked up and blew an even fouler scent from further down the alley, toward a tall, dark pile in a corner against a taller wall where the alley terminated.  It smelled strongly of rot and fungus, which stood out against the ambient stench of the whole area.

He tried to stand up, but noticed he was incapable of moving outside of rolling from side to side.  Attributing this to the mound of trash bags on top of him, he tried to move them away.  It was then that he noticed he was unable to move his arms, let alone feel them.

He looked down at his legs, something that he had previously never thought was necessary, and saw that his entire body was covered in one of the green trash bags.  He tried to scream for help, but all he could muster was a hoarse grunt.  He tried rolling out but he seemed reasonably affixed to the ground.  It was about that time that he heard a rustling sound from further up the alley.

The harder he struggled, the faster and closer the rustling got until the source of the sound stepped out from the shadows of the alley.  A fat, squat man with glasses stepped forward and took a closer look at Eric, who was struggling fiercely.  His shirt had an odd pattern, and he was almost bald, with his head and arms covered in only a scant few hairs.

“My oh my.  It looks like you are awake.  That’s unfortunate.  Another homeless person wandered into Tengenaria’s alley.  I do so love feeding them, but they always get too close and I just can’t help myself,” the man said, giggling with excitement at the sight of Eric’s far more frantic motions.

The man dropped to his hands and legs and began to eat from one of the ruptured bags, gulping and slurping loudly all the while.  Eric stared at him with all the look of disgust and horror he could muster.

“Oh,” the man said, taking note of his guest’s somewhat-apparent look of displeasure.  “Don’t worry your pretty little head about any of this.  I mean, really.  It’s going to pop off eventually.  I wouldn’t worry about it though.  But of course I wouldn’t.  That’s just me, though.  I’m really looking forward to when you are ripe.

With that said, the man went back to eating the meat-slime from inside the dark emerald green bag, its dew glistening in the morning light.  Eric looked around as much as he could before his vision faded and thought to himself, why am I here, and where is here?

Dial Tone

“Hello?” answered David, picking up the kitchen phone.  He put his finger in one ear to try to drown out the clinking of silverware and dishes coming from the living room.

“Father, I just want you to listen,” the man on the line said calmly.  David could hear the faint nervous crinkling of paper.

“Father, I am sorry for everything I ever did and said, and I’m sorry that I’m not everything you wanted to me to be.  I tried to make you proud, but nothing I did seemed to make you happy.  Please, just tell me you love me and I’m not a bad person.  That’s all I want to hear from you.  If you can’t tell me that, then I understand and will never bother you again.”

“Look, kid.  I don’t know who you are, and I damn sure don’t have a son,” said David, hanging up the phone in disgust.

Sighing, David made his way to the dinner table.  “Who was that?” asked his wife as she scooped some mashed potatoes out of a serving bowl.

David shrugged and said, “I don’t know.  It was a wrong number.”

Epiphany of the Spheres

I just had an epiphany and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever come to understand.

I have always had trouble wrapping my mind around how big the universe could possibly be and how small we are.

Then I though about Carl Sagan's statement of how we are a "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam" and I realized something while looking at dust floating in a ray of sun.

If you think about it, on one of those specks of dust, there are probably hundreds of smaller bits of microscopic dust that comprise the single mote.  On any given microdust bits, there are atoms that make it up, and on any given atom, there are electrons orbiting a nucleus.  We are an electron, orbiting a nucleus, on one of many microdust bits, and that one mote of dust is out galaxy.

Then I looked around, and I could only see so much dust.  All the dust I could see in that one room...that is as much of the galaxy as we can see. 

Now, if you think about it, there is dust in all the houses in the world, and all around us.  Each mote of dust is a galaxy, and all the dust on this planet is about the size of the universe.  We're just a single electron on a single molecule of one of those motes.

Head Trauma

I must have been babbling incoherently at the hospital, because when I asked the doctors how my husband was, the only response I got was confused looks.  To be fair, though, I was just in a serious wreck.  I don’t remember anything they said to me while I was in the hospital.  Everything was just a blur.

What I do remember is getting home.  My husband took extra good care of me since my leg was broken.  I didn’t want him working too hard, because he had a head injury.  I knew he did because nothing he said was coherent in the least.  He made gestures, though, that made his intentions clear.  Some of the best ones were a bowl and churning spoon for food, drinking motion to ask if I was thirsty, and a toilet flushing gesture to ask if I needed to use the bathroom.

As the weeks passed, he began to regain his coherence, and he was starting to understand what I was saying to him.  After about four months, everything was back to normal.  Well, almost.

Everything would have been well and good if that man had never spoken to me about my bedridden state.  He told me that he was worried after the first few weeks when I was still babbling incoherently.

Gallbladder

“Don’t worry, Dad.  You’ll be home soon enough.  Then you can lie down in your bed.  It’ll be more comfortable than this old car, for sure,” said Jeremy, who kept glancing over at his father in the seat next to him.  His father was shifting around uncomfortably in his seat.  The two were coming home from the hospital following his father’s successful gallbladder surgery.  Jeremy was happy to hear his father did well.

“See?” asked Jeremy with a smile as the car pulled into his father’s driveway.  “Told you it wasn’t going to be that long.  Let’s get you into the house.”

As he wheeled his father into the house, his mother appeared and waved a wooden spoon at her husband.  “I told you all those cheeseburgers would do you no good,” she said, scolding him for his diet.

“Woman,” he groaned.  “I told you I had to eat my own burgers.  I ran the joint.  It would have looked bad otherwise.”

“Whatever,” she replied.  “Oh, and Jeremy, honey.  Someone from the hospital keeps calling.  You know I don’t answer calls from the hospital, not after what happened there the last time I went there.”

She was referring to her visit to the hospital the previous year.  While she was there, she caught a cold from someone in the waiting room.  It was just something she never got over.

“Well if they call again, I’ll answer,” answered Jeremy.  “I just have to put Dad in the bed.  Did they leave any messages?”

“Oh, no.  They only called three times, but they never let it go to the answering machine.”

Jeremy shrugged and helped his father into the bed.  It wasn’t long after that the phone rang again.  Jeremy sighed and picked up the phone.

“Hello?  Mr. Evans?” asked Jeremy’s father’s doctor.

“Yes, doctor?”

“Oh, good.  Did you make it home okay?”

“Yes, and he’s resting just fine.”

“Ah, about that.  The staff and I were concerned when we saw you leaving.  Are you sure everything is okay?  I know that your mother was hard to deal, but your father must be something else.”

“Oh, I’m fine and so are they.  We just don’t care for the hospital is all, so that’s why we might have seemed a bit edgy about the whole ordeal.  Dad can be grumpy, but he’ll calm down when he gets to feeling better.  Thank you for checking up on us, though,” said Jeremy, hanging up before the doctor could respond.

“What did they want sweetie?” his mother asked from the other room.

“Oh, it was just Dad’s doctor calling to check up on us.  Nothing to worry about.

At the hospital, the doctor sighed as he hung up the phone.  “Nurse, do you have the number for Jeremy’s therapist still?”

“Yes sir, why?”

“Well, staff said he was wheeling an empty wheelchair out of the building, and he never got over his mother dying from her pneumonia.  I don’t think he took his father’s death today any better.”

Cheeky

My aunt Silvia loved pinching my cheeks every time she saw me.  She called herself the best aunt I had because she was going to make my cheeks nice and strong.

I tell you, she had problems.  For twenty-five years, that woman pinched my cheeks as hard as she could.  If—and when—I screamed for her to stop, she would laugh and pinch even harder after stopping just long enough to tease me with relief.  She would always tell me she didn’t know when to stop.  I honestly think she believed that was a valid excuse for any and everything.

She had the nastiest habit of licking the serving utensils.  She, not one for just settling for mildly obnoxious, would coat the spoons she licked with a thick layer of saliva.  Again, she would claim not to know when to stop.

If she wasn’t trying to rip my face off or orally violating the silverware, she was drumming her long nails on any surface she could (literally) get her hands on.  If she were going to be the best aunt I had, it would have to be the best at annoying every living creature.

I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her when she woke up, bound with rope and held inches away from a large nest of fire ants.  Well, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, as I always imagined someone would become fed up with her enough to want to torture her.

It didn’t come as a surprise to me, and frankly that’s because I was the one holding her ratty head above the ant bed, while my parents looked on.  They reflexively rubbed their cheeks as her very presence evoked painful memories embedded deeply in the cells of their cheeks.

It also wasn’t a surprise that her cheeks had been painstakingly grated off with the fine side of a cheese grater.  Grated cheek goes well with sliced tongue, which is best served cold, of course.  It would have to be fed to her, because my mother personally removed Silvia’s fingers by inserting each hand into a blender.  It was the only thing in our house that could drown out that drumming sound.

I saw Silvia look toward me, and it almost sounded like she was asking me not to shove her bloody face into the mound of furious fire ants.  I smiled, feeling merciful, and pulled her back away from the ants.  She seemed to have learned her lesson by the feeble attempts she was making to apologize.

I brought her face close to mine, so I could tell her I was sorry too.

I told her I was sorry I didn’t know when to stop.

Irresistible

Jeff cradled his wife’s head in his arms.  It had been weeks since their ship crashed, but it seemed like forever since his wife, Sylvia, had spoken to him.  They got into an argument about how it was all Jeff’s fault that the storm crashed their ship and how he should have listened to her when he told him to steer away from land.

Sometime in the argument, Jeff—out of sheer frustration—pushed his wife.  She landed on a pile of debris, and cried for a while.  She calmed down after a while, but she refused to do so much as acknowledge Jeff’s presence from then on.

 This only furthered Jeff’s animosity toward her.  Though he resented her for ignoring him, he would continue to talk to her, as if she were going to listen to anything he had to say anymore.  He tried to feed her, but she consistently refused anything he offered her.  There was next to nothing on the island, so Jeff had to make due with what he had on hand.

  He still found it in his heart to hold and comfort her.  She was mad at him, but she couldn’t object to his comforting embrace.

Literally.

Out of Mind

If I told anyone that I hear voices in my head, they’d think I was crazy.  I hope no one finds this, because I am just writing this to put into words my feelings.  I read it was good therapy for crazy people, though I really don’t consider myself crazy.

It would be only so bad if there were only voices, though.  At night, the creatures behind them haunt my dreams.  They’re always talking, screaming, yelling.  I can’t sleep now, because if I do, I’ll have to see them.  Hear them louder and clearer than I do when I’m awake.

Some days it’s a struggle to focus on my day-to-day tasks as a phone consultant for a local toy store.  I have trouble in hearing customers sometimes; that’s just how loud the voices get.

There’s Aglagox, the headless teddy bear.  The stump of its neck is one big eye that looks about nervously, and each little furry toe is a mouth that spits a different kind of bee.  He’s the least threatening one in my opinion.

The creature that calls itself Kevalwor is a 16-legged spider with 16 eyes and 16 mouths.  All of its mouths are drooling and slobbering; where a droplet of drool hits a surface, it becomes a swarm of tiny spiders.  It is especially fond of crawling on heads for obvious reasons.  I hate spiders.  Hate.

One of the oddest is Jack.  Jack is a severed head with a spring jutting from the remains of each of its eyeballs.  They honestly look as if they burst outward from within the eyes themselves.  On the end of those eye-springs are crude and ironic boxes.  Their sole purpose in existing seems to be to function as a sick parody of jacks-in-the-box.  It occasionally and unceremoniously will flop its tongue about.  Its tongue is a mass of writhing earthworms, swollen with pus and one will occasionally explode to release a foul-smelling white substance.  It is from this pus-like goop that a misshapen, bloody chicken fetus will emerge only to squawk noisily and in great pain before dying.

As much as I hate spiders, I would gladly wear Kevalwor as a hat if it never meant having to see Olee-o again.  Olee-o is a Rubik’s Cube, though each face of the blocks is a mouth that beckons you to solve it.  It whispers lies and horrible truths, and the only defense against its 3x3x3 gnashing mouths would be to try to solve the puzzle.  That’s its gimmick.  Once you are holding Olee-o, it will begin to eat your hands.  You become so engrossed in trying to solve it that you lose the ability to feel pain.  By the time you have lost your hands, you have undoubtedly gone completely mad.  Olee-o will berate you before attempting it and more so while holding it.  It’s unsolvable, though.  I dreamed so many times that people were tricked by it.  It should be obvious.  No two squares share the same color.  Once Olee-o has taken your hands, the cube breaks apart into a small swarm of gibbering blocks that I have seen strip a body clean far too many times for my own comfort.

Though there are only four entities in my head, they make a horrible amount of noise.  They say different things to different people, but they always say the same thing to me.  They want me to destroy them, I think.  I can’t imagine why these nightmarish creatures would tell me how to get rid of them.  They keep telling me I have to get them out of my head, whatever that means.