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Storytelling
Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction,
and Essays
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I have to tell you this, but it needs to
stay our secret; a whisper from me to you. The ghost stories and fairy
tales that I write in the early morning hours, before the sun is even up
in the sky - those are my true love, no contest.
Here's how I see it: as far back in human
history as you want to look, there were always storytellers. Late in the
evening, when everyone would gather around the fire for warmth and food,
they would tell the tales, make the myths, enchant with rhyme.
If they were worth their salt, the people would
still be spellbound long after the skies went dark.
So one could say that storytelling is every bit as
respectable a way of making one's living as any of the world's other oldest
professions. At the very least, it makes me happy.
* *
*
People sometimes ask me, "Where's
the novel?" Insidious question, that. Truly evil. The novel will come in
time. While you wait, you are welcome to read my personal favorite of
all my short stories,
Fairest,
which was originally published in All Hallows: Journal of the Ghost
Story Society and was also selected as an honorable mention in The
Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2006.
A few assorted samples
of my stories and essays
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The
Immunologist’s Response
Rain, though promised, never fell.
So, there being no getting rid of it,
I worked the pollen into the lesson plans, imaging it under the electron
microscope. “The misery lies in how we individually respond to what is all
around us.” One student snapped his fingers, looking for a metaphor. “Snot globs
of fishhooks,” I said. That’s as poetic as I get with undergraduates. Besides,
that’s exactly what it feels like in the eyes. Every dry and swollen
spider-scratch from my tear ducts on in will testify. Yet some may swim in it,
unharmed.
One good storm would wash it from the
sky. Slipstreams of yellow darting through puddles would be beauty untold of in
any poetry yet written, right about now. One day I’m escaping this malignant
season of swollen eyes and sneezing, even if that means Siberia. The idea of far
away winter winds feels soothing, pleasant. Siberia’s university towns might
suit an expatriate professor well, women clutching textbooks to their sweaters
and seeking warmth where they can find it. A place to make peace, rediscover
grace in nature, scatter bread to the migrating flocks. The very name, Siberia,
promises distance, escape.
I surprised people by staying in
Charleston after Katie, but I had nothing else. Some supposed I would return to
my people in Vermont. But they’re not mine, not really. Dad and I talk, we don’t
fight, but after an hour he’s ready to get back to the game on TV. Gladys, now
living with him, sees my Ph.D., expects money. I help out when I can, but it is
just too different, uncomfortable. All I ever had was Katie. This was her town.
You spend your whole life searching for one thing that is truly yours, that
makes you feel you have found the home you never had, but there is no guarantee
you’ll be allowed to keep it.
You understand breast cancer will be
terrible. You imagine chemotherapy or her wearing one of those pretty scarves
wrapped around her head and kissing her and telling her she is still so
beautiful. But all this you envision in the context of her, of her continuing,
never expecting how sudden the end will be.
“It’s an aggressive cancer,” they
tell you. “Sometimes.”
I’ve done my best to swim in it
unharmed.
I laugh easily, always. Break up the
tension with a joke or a quick play on words. And when I have to, when the words
fail, I wander behind the research building where I’ve discovered a row of trees
yielding Japanese plums. It’s a good place despite the fine dusting of pollen.
Sometimes it’s just easier to tell yourself that seasonal allergies are what you
need to escape, what makes you want to run. Other days all I really want is this
quiet place where I can gather fruit, just enough for here and now, and dream of
rain. Where I close my eyes and think of far away.
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Take Your
Burden to the Lord and Leave it There
The fertile basin of el Rio de los
Brazos de Dios just before the breaking of an East Texas thunderstorm:
strokes of ash-pink gouache on a sun-warped cardboard ground. Willie Johnson,
just turned seven years of age, sat outside the church holding an old cigar box,
stringing it into a rough guitar.
The late afternoon passed by.
He waited for his father, fiddling
with the toy guitar, eyeing the gathering storm, unsure of what he would tell
his father about his stepmother and what he saw her do with that other man in
their bed.
“Boy,” she said to him later, her
voice shredded and high, uneven, “You get out here, boy, you he’p me with this
washing.” Pain stabbed at her whenever she breathed too deep or turned. Her ribs
were bruised as was her belly and back. Nobody would’ve known nothing, weren’t
for that boy. Weren’t for that telling boy, she wouldn’t of got beat.
Willie measured out his steps, paced
them to some hymns he kept inside, as he made his way to her. Daddy had already
gone off to work the brickyard.
Willie didn’t want the brickyard. He
wanted to be a ‘beecher up on the pu’pit,’ leading the church, that’s how he
phrased it. He stood in the doorway, backlit by the morning sun, and saw her
eyes as slits in swollen lumps. “Ma’am,” he said, hands closed behind him,
tapping on his own bottom. His legs shook.
“Boy,” she said. She closed her fist
around a handful of lye in the heavy oak tub beside her. It stung like fire
wherever her palm was cut or scraped and moist. She bit her teeth into the
inside of her cheeks to keep her voice steady, and then she finished what she
had to say. “Boy, you ain’t never gonna tell nobody what you seen happen no
more.”
She threw the lye into his wide
staring eyes.
Historians of music tend to be
consistent on the basic points. Willie Johnson was blinded by his stepmother
after he told his father of her infidelity and lye was her weapon of choice. I
took creative license with what words may have been spoken, God in His Heaven
being the only enduring witness to them. He really did sit outside churches
crafting guitars from whatever he could find when he was a child, waiting for
his father to finish his work in the brickyard, or at least that’s how he told
the story later.
All of our childhood memories take on
the stuff of myth eventually, become explanatory stories for who we later
become. It’s the Western way.
On December 3, 1927, Willie Johnson
recorded six songs, including the masterpiece, Dark was the Night, Cold was
the Ground, for the Columbia Phonograph Company. A descending growl of
thunder in his humming is answered by the haunting slide of his pocket knife
along the strings of his guitar.
Johnson played four recording
sessions for Columbia between December 1927 and April 1930. Anger and the
imminence of God’s kingdom dominate the lyrics he sang. He sang of the First
World War, the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-19, and great floods – floods inspired
as much by his native Brazos de Dios as well as the Biblical account of
Noah. In God Moves on the Water, Johnson tells of the 1912 sinking of the
Titanic in powerfully symbolic verse.
Rain and water cleanse, recall the
blood of Christ.
Approximately thirty songs were
preserved from the sessions. It was the custom of the major recording studios of
the day to extract the best songs of the “race artists” of the South and then to
release the musicians with token compensation and no contractual claim to
royalties.
Gold, lit with the flames of seven
lamps of oil, between two olive trees in a dry land of stone and dust, recalls
the East Texas landscape that Willie knew. In the Good Book, Joshua stood before
the Lord in filthy garments while Satan spat out accusations against him.
But Joshua’s humiliation and sin are
washed away by the Lord who promises, and I will remove the guilt of this
land in a single day.
Willie Johnson taught himself to play
the songs he heard on the streets of Hearne, Texas. A tin cup at the top of his
guitar, he would fill the street corners with music. He was playing the
traditional hymn, If I Had My Way, I’d Tear the Building Down, when a
woman named Angeline walked up behind him and began to sing the responses.
Later, she invited him to her house.
She had a piano as well as gumbo and crab to eat.
“We ought to marry,” Willie told her.
They did.
Willie and Angeline lived in Beaumont
through the Great Depression and Second World War. They sang for Mt. Olive
Baptist Church and on the streets. Willie continued his mission as ‘beecher on
the pu’pit’ throughout his life. His pulpit was often a street corner and his
lectern his guitar.
In 1945, their house burned to the
ground. It was a time of poverty in Beaumont and they had nowhere else to go. He
took sick as the rains came in and Angeline made him a bed as best she could,
out of newspapers, in the charred remains of their home. She tried to keep him
dry but he contracted pneumonia even so.
She took him to the hospital even
though she knew they would deny him admission as he was both colored and blind.
After they did so, she brought him
back to their ruins and the wet newspaper. She laid him down there and she
stayed beside him.
Sometime in the night, his lungs
filled with fluid and he died.
The Voyager spacecraft, launched in
1977, carry Willie Johnson’s song, Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground,
on their Golden Records, along with works by the likes of Bach and Beethoven.
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Winter
(Adapted from a traditional Russian fairy tale)
Long ago, in a cold and distant land, a young man who had not yet found his
place in the world caught sight of a maiden, watching him from afar. Her cheeks
and lips were splashes of rose on cream, her hair in curls to her shoulders.
Her eyes were pale, barely blue, like water caught in ice. He would think of
those eyes in his final years of life, seven-tenths of a century later, in the
days when the warmth of the fire ran through him without warming, when his own
eyes and ears ceased to recognize the world around him, when his body grew too
frail and slow to continue.
Even then, her eyes returned to him in dreams.
They fell in love, you see, in a harsh place of spruce, fir, and lichens.
She left him in the early morning hours and returned each evening. In the harsh
light of the day, while he did his work, she would rush to the frost-smooth arms
of her mother. Her mother would kiss her, icicles glistening beneath her lips,
and brush back her daughter’s long dark hair. The soothing rush of Northern wind
caressed the girl with each word her mother spoke.
She told her mother of her love for the man and her mother warned her in return
of the price to be paid. But children do not listen, we all know. In matters of
love, they doubly do not listen, we all know.
Every night she returned to him and each day, to her mother, pleading.
Eventually, she was allowed to have her way.
“Here’s where I’ll place it, where it should be,” her mother said, a snowy
finger pressed against the girl’s breast. A light pulsed, golden, then orange
and red, and sank inside of her. “It’s a heart, what they have.”
“Thank you,” the Snow Maiden said.
That night she was with him, in full, and he, in her.
But when morning came, the warmth of her heart had softened most of her away, as
her mother warned. It did not, in truth, take long. Beside him, while he watched
(and while she still could see him in return), she returned to water.
Water, as we know, is where all life begins.
At ninety years of age, the boy’s life ended. Some say she met him where he
went. I couldn’t say.
The grave is not so easy a pool to see to the bottom of, after all.
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Ogre
(Adapted from a traditional Polish
folk tale)
Weary from his travels in the
mountains, a man sought refuge in a dark castle. The rains had arrived and
already the sky was lost in a rancid mottled smear of grey and violet.
“You are fortunate,” the lord of the
castle said to him. ‘When the rain comes down this long and hard, it is not easy
to walk these paths.”
“Not easy in good weather,” the
traveler replied. He was taken aback by the sheer size of his host, tall and as
broad of shoulder as two large men combined. Were it not for the precise cut and
obvious expense of his clothing, to say nothing of his home, which was filled
with the stuff of old money - heirlooms, art, and exquisite furnishings – the
traveler might have rather risked the rain.
He was given towels and dry clothing
and brought to a room warmed by a vast fireplace. Here, his host provided him
with wine and a heavy tray of bread, cheese, and meat.
It was a trophy room of sorts, the
severed heads of beasts on plaques along the stone walls and a silent array of
combat helmets, some exotic, others more recognizable, along the mantle. There
were swords and spears and shields, polished and displayed with such care that
the traveler whistled out the words, “A curator of antiquities, that’s what you
are.”
His host laughed. Nothing so noble,
he assured the traveler. He was a retired military officer with the means to
nurture his interests. That was all.
“Even so,” the traveler said. He told
his host of his own work, traveling from place to place and collecting the
stories, rhymes, and songs of the people. He would occasionally lecture at
universities and had published several anthologies.
Many had dismissed his mission as a
kind of idleness, but this host nodded in understanding. “Without stories,” he
said, “man would not know what he saw reflected in the mirror.”
The traveler smiled. The thunder and
rush of rain outside felt long away. He did not, for a reason he could not
exactly articulate to himself, tell his host of the precise reason he had
ventured into the forbidding mountains of this region: The dark tale of a man
who dined on other men, whose hunger even led him, one winter, to sup on the
bones of his own wife and children.
“Let me show you something,” the
giant aristocrat said. He uncurled an ancient, sun-faded map of a vast landscape
across the hardwood table in one corner of the room, lit the lamps in sconces
nearby to aid the traveler’s eyes.
Curious, the traveler wandered over.
The map described mountains and valleys, wide, flowing rivers, fertile plains,
and dread forests and spoke as well of many things both above and below the
surface. In the legend, the traveler saw only one word: Homem.
“Curious,” he said.
“The mountains seem to be very
different from the ocean floor and the inside of a volcano very different from a
field of sunflowers,” the host said, running a sausage-like finger, fitted with
a chunky ring of gold, across the brittle paper. “Has it never occurred to you,
though, that these are various ways in which parts of the very same essential
nature may be expressed? That raw materials, time, place, and circumstance are
all that separate the forest from the plain?”
The traveler became keenly aware of
his heart beating too loud, too fast. He concealed this by drinking deeply from
his glass of wine.
“The serene, snow-swept peak of the
mountain believes that it could never have been otherwise, that the rotted bog
is what it is and that he himself is something else altogether.”
“You said he.”
“Did I?”
“Yes,” the traveler said. His felt
the room go loose all around him. “I had better sit back down.”
“The wine is strong,” the host said.
That certainly was so.
In the morning, once the sun returned
to make the pools of water on the trails sparkle like magic against the lush
green, the traveler breakfasted with his host and was soon returned on his path
with fresh-baked bread for his journey. As the castle receded into the distance,
a sense that can only be described as a goose stepping on his grave washed over
him.
Within the month, he returned to a
favorite university to lecture.
“The cannibal, it is said, devoured
three dozen men, women, and children in his time, including the members of his
own family,” he said. One student, a bit young, went pale. “That happened
because of an unexpected harsh winter. Now, it happened that one day, as he was
advancing in years, the cannibal was walking along a road and saw a leper curled
up in the dust so that his bare, scabbed toes nearly touched his own chin. He
thought the man dead. But as he began to walk away, he heard a gurgling crackle
that sounded like ‘water.’ He turned and saw the leper sitting up, filthy rags
barely covering him. His face was running with sores.”
The student who had gone pale got up
and left the lecture hall at this point.
“The snow-capped peaks are not all
there is,” the professor said, but the weak-stomached student was too far gone
to hear. He continued with his lecture.
“The cannibal leaned in closer to the
leper and the leper, once more, asked for water. ‘No,’ was the cannibal’s reply.
He turned to go. ‘Again, I beg, water,’ said the leper. ‘Again, I say, no,’
replied the cannibal. He had his hand on his traveling axe by now. The leper
shuffled along behind him, too far gone with sickness to worry about the axe.”
The professor paused here to drink
from his own cup of water.
“The cannibal raised his axe. He who
had dined on the supple flesh of beautiful youth saw nothing in the leper to
whet his appetite, only an annoyance to be rid of. But then, something
unexpected occurred. The leper said, ‘In the name of Mary, I beg you, water.’
Hearing the name of the Queen of Heaven invoked, the cannibal lowered his
weapon. He gazed directly into the soft, blue-blurred orbs that were the leper’s
eyes. Finally, he spoke. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In the name of Mary, I will give you
water.’ He handed the leper the final few drops he had reserved for his journey
home. He did not want it back after those lips had been pressed to it.”
He then dismissed his students.
Decades passed. In the castle, long
away, the great man grew old. Much of his immensity was shed in time, so much so
that a withered, though tall husk of bones and taut skin was all that remained
shivering under fine sheets from distant lands in the cold of the winter nights.
He had long since ceased his rounds
of polishing his trophies of war, ceased his contemplations in the room of three
dozen skeletons, including those of his family. His season was near its close.
Late one night, in utter blackness,
as the wind howled outside the stone and glass and stuff of wealth, his soul
slipped up to his lips along with his final, rattling breath.
A set of scales appeared in the
corner of the room.
A solemn figure stood beside the
scales, placing, one by one, the bones of the dead on one plate. On the other
was dripped the few drops of water that he had, only once, placed in the mouth
of the lowliest of men.
The wisp aglow on the giant’s lips
was a small thing indeed in the dark and the cold and it could do nothing more
than wait to see what the scales would show when they came to rest.
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Hot:
a brief meditation on stories of summer
The Mississippi Delta in August, in Robert Johnson’s day, wasn’t for the faint
of heart. Think of juke joints surrounded by fertile soil lost in a shimmering
haze of summer heat back when air conditioning was nothing more than windows and
doors left open to catch a breeze. The old men in undershirts and work pants
rocked on the porch when it got too hot to be indoors, slapping at a steady buzz
of ‘skeeters.
Inside, the clink of bottles, ice buckets, and lots of talk; men talking up
women, dancing and God knows what else going on across the floor, bottleneck
guitar. We’ve all heard of Johnson cutting a deal at the crossroads with the
Devil. Nearly seven decades have slipped by since his death in 1938, sufficient
time for a story to fossilize into myth.
How good was Johnson? It’s said that when Keith Richards first heard one of
Johnson’s recordings, he thought it was two men playing guitars simultaneously.
Strychnine and a jealous man are what took him down one summer night outside of
Greenwood. Johnson, renowned for his penchant for other men’s women, was
drinking with fellow blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson when he was offered a
swig from an open bottle. A bad idea, Sonny Boy advised.
Johnson kept his own counsel about what idea was bad, though he may have phrased
that less politely.
Drinking from a whiskey bottle already opened when it was handed to you,
slipping away with ladies met at juke joints, and traveling town to town to play
on street corners and in country shacks for tips. Bad, bad, bad and isn’t it a
shame a man don’t change as often as he should?
The summer sun shining down on the South, green coming up so hard and fast it
wraps around poles and lines, crawls up buildings. The heat and the humidity
feeding vegetation till it wants to burst on, up, and out.
Sultry, that’s the girl in the summer hat on the picnic blanket, her shoulders
slick and freckled, setting out plates. Fried chicken, corn bread, greens, and
sweet tea and, over by the lake, there’s the sound of splashing and carrying on.
Summer’s all about play, about the living being easy, lush with life, like the
salt-slick pools of sweat just makes everything slide a little smoother.
Cranked up high enough, the sun saps away the will to move, leaves the mind
stranded in a strange mirage of daydreams; blanketed, sheltered.
And yet, as expatriate author and composer Paul Bowles reminded us, the sky that
stands between us and the unforgiving darkness is a thin skin indeed, a fragile
shell of soil and atmosphere.
Bowles lived most of his life in Tangier, Morocco and anthologists of American
literature have been slow to forgive him this.
He wrote of the danger of assumption, reminded us that civilization can also be
a thin skin, a fragile shell of protection. His stories spoke of harsh, scorched
lands where professors became playthings for tribes of nomads, where what a
person may claim to be or own is entirely dependent on whether the tip of the
knife is pointed toward or away from the throat, and where the social contract
is continually renegotiated man by man.
Where sudden thunderstorms wash it all clean again, wash it all clean again.
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Cold:
a brief meditation on winter tales
Blind Lemon Jefferson, so the story goes, froze to death in a Chicago snowstorm
late in December 1929. While an argument can be made that a good old American
heart attack was the more likely cause of death, the cold was still there, all
around him, as the legendary blues singer fell.
Call the cold an accomplice in the crime.
A stark image can be painted, mixing myth and metaphor with historical fact, of
this man who would influence so many other musicians sitting alone on the street
in the dead of winter, his body becoming cold and still, lost in a blur of
flurries.
It is said that a sense of serenity and paradoxical soothing warmth settles over
you just before you lose consciousness in extreme cold.
Jefferson’s recordings later influenced artists like B.B. King, Bob Dylan, and
Van Morrison but the man himself was said to be impoverished when he died. That
part of the story is, sad to say, not uncommon.
Cold, in the physical sense, implies slowness, the kinetic energy of the
particles in a system dulled down. We associate winter with hibernation,
slumber, fallow fields, and water stopped in mid-drip along eaves.
Cold gathers us around the crackling fireplace for a good, harrowing yarn. It is
unsurprising that tales of winter harbor ghosts in abundance.
Mary Shelley’s classic of science stirring up the stuff of the grave,
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, was written at Lake Geneva in the year
without a summer, 1816.
The year was so cold that crops failed worldwide. Snow and ice were not uncommon
that summer in Europe and North America. Blame heavy volcanic activity leaving
ash in the atmosphere if a villain needs be blamed or just call it part of the
tail end of the Little Ice Age that helped spur so much migration long ago.
Arctic ice takes the lives of both creator and created. As we all know, that’s
where the story of the monster ends.
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