Under Reconstruction after Surgery

Writers' Question of the Week: Do writers make good patients?

Ginger DeadMan excerpt by Logan Zachary

GingerDead Man

Bold Stroke Books (January 15, 2015)

• eMail:bookshop@boldstrokesbooks.com 
• Phone: (877) BOLD-711

Excerpt:

Chapter 1                                                                                                                              “Stacey, I’m going to run across the street and see if Brian Greenway has our order ready for the Thanksgiving dinner.” Paavo Wolfe poked his blond head into his best friend’s store. “Did you want to come with me?” He stepped inside the door of Lotions and Potions, which specialized in herbal remedies, skin care, massages, and all other areas of holistic health care.

            “Is that your subtle way to of asking me to help you carry all the rolls, bread, and stuff back to your store?” Stacey Laitenin asked, grabbing her jacket and purse.

“Is it working?” Paavo puckered up as she met him at the door.

“Since I was the one who asked you to help me feed the homeless, I guess I should come along and help you carry our order of rolls for the Thanksgiving Day meal.”

“Cool.” Paavo kissed her.

“Ben,” Stacey called over her shoulder to Ben Pumala as he was changing the sheets on his massage table, “I’m heading across the street to Icing on the Lake, did you need anything?”

 “No,” Ben said as he smoothed out the white cotton sheet over the table.

“We should be back in fifteen minutes in case anyone calls or needs me.” The overcast November afternoon had been slow, so she doubted it, but at least Ben knew where she was and that she had left him alone in the store.

Light snow fell from the sky as the cold breeze blew across Lake Superior. Icing on the Lake, the “Northland’s Superior Bakery,” was directly across London Road from their strip mall. We’re Wolfe’s Books and Lotions and Potions stood side by side in the center of the complex. Paavo’s bookstore dealt in horror books and movies. He sold nightmares. Everything from action figures to movie posters, any Blu-ray, DVD, or VHS, and every collectible a horror fan could ever want or need.

Despite the cold breeze off Lake Superior, the scent of fresh baking bread hung in the air all day and all night. Many neighbors complained about the smell, since it made everyone hungry.

Stacey locked elbows with Paavo as they crossed the street. The gloomy weather had driven many of their shoppers away, along with all the stress of getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday later in the week. The excitement of the Halloween film festival and the “werewolf” attacks on London Road were resolved, and their businesses had finally returned to normal.

The best friends pushed the bakery’s heavy glass door open, and the brass bell jingled, welcoming them in. A smoky haze filled the air in Icing on the Lake. “Brian, did you burn a batch of bread?” Stacey called.

No answer.

She looked at Paavo and released his elbow. “Could he have run to the grocery store for something, and it took him longer than he expected?” Paavo read concern in her face as they walked back toward the kitchen.

Suddenly, the fire alarm started its high-pitched shrill, and the warning lights strobed across the brick walls.

“We should get that batch out of the oven before Brian has smoke damage or a fire starts.” Stacey headed around the front counter to where the kitchen was. Large metal baking ovens lined the walls. She waited a second for Paavo, then waved him in. “Hurry up.”

Paavo quickly followed Stacey into the back of the bakery. The back door stood wide open as a cold breeze blew in off the lake, swirling the smoke that came from the ovens.

Stacey grabbed two hot pads and threw a pair at Paavo. She opened one oven and started pulling out a huge sheet of rolls. “Brian owes us big time for saving his buns.”

“He does have the cutest, tight buns.” Paavo slipped his hands into the oversized mitts and headed to the badly smoking oven on the opposite wall. He inhaled, crunching up his nose. “This one smells really bad.” He pulled the oven door open and froze.

Paavo couldn’t understand what he was seeing until the lake breeze blew into the oven and cleared out some of the smoke. The gust of wind added oxygen to the smoldering form, and the blackened shape burst into flames. That’s when he saw it was the burning body of Brian Greenway.

“Stacey!” Paavo yelled.

Holding another heavy sheet of bread, Stacey turned to see what was wrong. When she saw Brian’s burning form, she dropped  it. Loaves and buns rolled in all directions as she jumped away from the hot pan, which hit the floor and echoed through the kitchen. “Close the door,” she said.

Paavo jumped forward and slammed the door shut. He looked for the controls, trying to  figure out how to turn it off.

“We can’t leave him in there.” Stacey stood next to him. Finding the oven controls on her side, she turned it off. She opened the door, and the oxygen restarted the fire again.

“What choice do we have?” Paavo asked, pushing the door closed. “We’re too late.”

“A fire extinguisher?” She pointed at the red one on the brick wall, but didn’t move to get it.

“Should we even take him out of there?” Paavo pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket and hit 911.

“Yes. We have to. Why would you ask that?” She clutched his arm.

“Because there’s no way he could have crawled into that oven or fallen in. It’s too high.”

“What are you saying? Murder?” Stacey asked.

“Yes, but who would want to bake the baker?”

Writers' Question of the Week: Do you outline your next chapter before writing it?

under
reconstruction

Jack in the Green short story excerpt by J L Morrow

Stranded in a remote country village in 1920s England by his car breaking down, shy young Arthur finds himself drawn to the rough mechanic who comes to his aid, Bob Goodman. Forced to stay until the May Day holiday is over, Arthur makes the best of it, enjoying the village procession and fete.

But the villagers seem to know more about him than they should, and there’s a second, darker, May celebration that starts when the sun’s gone down. In the drunken revelry that follows, Arthur is whisked off in a wild dance by Goodman, who plays the part of Jack in the Green, the spirit of the greenwood.

Dancing turns to loving, but is everything what it seems? And is one night all Arthur can have?

Note: this short story (approx. 7,500 words) was previously published as The Green Man.

Excerpt:

The Morris men were no longer in their gleaming white shirtsleeves; to a man they had blacked their faces and donned their ragged coats, and the bells were silenced. The clash of their staves together now seemed to Arthur sinister, almost threatening. He shivered in the cool of the evening.

“I thought only one of the men was to have a coat of rags—their, ah, wardrobe master, or whatever they term him?” Arthur ventured to Mrs Ives, who stood proudly by his side as her husband and daughter processed past.

“That may be how they do things in some parts,” she told him with a sniff, “but it’s not the way of things here. You ask Bob Goodman, he’ll set you straight.”

And then, as if to speak his name were to conjure him forth, Jack in the Green himself came whirling into their midst. No longer a stately observer, now he seemed determined either to lead the dance, or to subvert it. Arthur stared as the giant figure flung itself about as if the great costume were merely a featherweight. There were cries of “Jack! Jack!” and other calls that Arthur didn’t understand.

“Where’s Robin?” a swarthy fellow by Arthur’s side shouted out across the revellers, his call almost deafening in Arthur’s ear.

“A bowshot hence in Inglewood!” came a reply from the other side of the lane, with the curious ring of an oft-repeated ritual.

“And the maid?” came the ear-splitting riposte. Arthur braced himself for another cry.

The dancers stopped.

The sudden stillness was almost as confusing to Arthur’s senses as the constant, whirling motion had been. Slowly, stealthily it seemed, Jack in the Green crept nearer to where Arthur stood—if such a monstrous being could be said in any sense to creep.

Even the evening breeze that had whispered its way down Arthur’s collar earlier seemed to be waiting, breath caught, for the answer.

“Who knows?” came Bob Goodman’s voice, soft but clear in the silence, sending a not unpleasant tingle down Arthur’s spine.

“An’ who the hell cares?” roared a Morris man, and amidst loud laughter and renewed beating of the staves, Arthur found himself seized by the hands and swung into the melee. Scrabbling not to lose his footing and fall, Arthur let the Morris men pull him along, turning him until he was dizzy, now pulling him into the fray until he feared he’d be injured by those great cudgels they wielded, now pushing him back out until his cheek rasped against twiggy foliage as Jack in the Green saved him from the ignominy of a fall.

Arthur’s head was reeling by the time they reached the green and the great bonfire set up there. The Morris men let out a great cry and began to dance around its flickering light. Arthur, it seemed, had been entirely forgot.

Satyrs, Arthur thought. They’re like satyrs, revelling in Arcadia.

The young women of the village were there already, bare of foot and loose of hair, waiting to welcome their queen to her own bacchanal. Arthur caught one last glimpse of Lily’s face, shining in the firelight, and then she was gone with her sisters to who knew where.

“Watching the women? Now, we both know that’s not your usual pursuit, my fair young lad.”

Goodman.

He had divested himself of his leafy encumbrance, yet the outlandish guise appeared to have left a lasting mark upon his character. There was no sign, now, of the respectful tradesman. He spoke to Arthur as to an equal.

Or at least, Arthur hoped that he did.

The breeze had picked up once more. Arthur shivered.

“If you’re wanting to get warm, my lad, it seems to me you should be getting closer to the fire,” Goodman said softly. “Or, as might be, farther away.”

Arthur swallowed, and started as a calloused hand grasped his own and pulled it up to roughened lips. He could feel the stubble that always darkened Goodman’s jaw rasp against his knuckles as black eyes looked deep inside him.

Click to purchase from JMS Books May 3rd  and Amazon  and other retail sites 10^th May

Lola Dances excerpt by Victor J Banis

Lola Dances excerpt from the bestselling author of 'Longhorns' Victor J. Banis. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic and often bawdy, Lola Dances ranges from the 1850 slums of the Bowery to the mining camps of California and Montana, to the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Little Terry Murphy, pretty and effeminate, dreams of becoming a dancer. Raped by a drunken profligate and threatened with prison, Terry flees the Bowery and finds himself in the rugged settlement of Alder Gulch, where he stands out like a sore thumb among the camp's macho inhabitants--until the day he puts on a dress and dances for the unsuspecting miners as beautiful Lola Valdez--and wins fame, fortune and, ultimately, love

Excerpt:

Terry comes to Alder Gulch

Terry felt like he had been lifted up into the air, as if in a tornado, and set down in another world altogether.

It had taken them most of a year to get here—by train and by riverboat, and traveling for a time with a wagon train of Mormons. They’d gone first to California, but the mine fields there were already overrun with thousands of others who’d heard the same stories Brian had heard, of gold for the picking up of it—stories they had quickly learned had been greatly exaggerated. There was gold, to be sure, but coaxing it out of the ground and the creeks took work, hard work, and lots of it.

In any case, all of the likely spots there had already been claimed, and the claims closely guarded by suspicious, quick to shoot miners who kept an especially close eye on any newcomers. Gunfire was not an uncommon sound, and new graves were not an unusual sight.

They had no sooner arrived there, though, than news had come of a rich strike here, at Alder Gulch, and Brian had spent most of the money he had left to buy them a bullock cart and a horse,  and they had lit out the same night they got the news.

Terry had turned eighteen on the long journey, somewhere close to Salt Lake City, but he felt as if he had aged decades. Already his life in the Bowery seemed as if it had happened to someone else, or in another lifetime.

Brian had quickly built them a rough log cabin, with a hard packed dirt floor, a whisky barrel for its chimney and flour sacks for windows. The roof of woven willow saplings leaked endlessly, so that in a heavy rain, the dirt floor turned to mud. It was as good as most of the miners had, better than the lean-tos and wickiups many of them lived in, but the cabin was tiny—a single room, most of that taken up with stove and table, and one bed along the other wall, a straw-stuffed pallet that they slept in together. There was hardly enough room in the rest of the

cabin for the two of them to move around in it when they were both there, let alone space to do a jeté.

By the time they had arrived at Alder Gulch, the best claims here had been taken as well, but Brian had quickly found a job working for the Simmons brothers, who had better than a half a dozen claims of their own staked and were generally regarded as the richest men in the camp. They paid Brian a hundred dollars a week. Back in the Bowery, that would have been a fortune, but here a man could spend that much to rent a cabin if he hadn’t the mind or the time to build his own.

Brian got a tenth of whatever dust he found for them as well, and he got to stand right there and watch as they weighed it, so there was no cheating in the payment of it. Already, he had a nice little pouch of dust buried in the dirt under their bed.

“When I’ve got enough, we’ll set out on our own,” he said. “I didn’t come all this way to work for someone else, even if the Simmons brothers are good men to work for. They’re fair, at least, which is more than could be said for some in this town. But it’s still just kissing ass, ain’t it?”

To Terry’s undying shame and regret, though, Brian seemed to have accepted in his own mind that what had happened back in New York had been Terry’s fault and not something odious that had been done to him by a drunken profligate. Once or twice, Terry had tried to talk to him about it, to make Brian understand his innocence, but Brian had made it clear he wasn’t interested in hearing Terry’s version of things.

“It’s not gonna change anything anyway,” was his final word on the subject. “Van Arndst is lower than a snake’s belly, that’s true enough, but you were his woman, weren’t you? That’s how anybody would see it, if they knew. How you went about getting his pecker up your ass don’t make much difference. It was there, is all that matters. You’re as much to blame as he was, the way I look at it.”

Which was how it was left between them. The best Terry could do was to try to make himself at home in Alder Gulch— but, he had doubts that he would ever really be able to feel that way about this foreign setting in which he now found himself. He wondered, was this where his omen and portents had been leading him all this time?

At first, when they had set out, he had felt a genuine sense of excitement. Maybe this journey was the one for which he had waited and watched, the one that would carry him safely and cleanly to the future he had imagined. Maybe at last he would arrive at that walled city of his dream.

But, surely, this Alder Gulch was not that future. He could see, when he strolled about the town, that the setting must have once been beautiful. Surely, not long before, there had been a carpet of pine needles beneath the towering fir trees and the abundant alders. The creek that came down from the mountains was tawny and sparkled in the sunlight, like jewels where it cascaded over the rocks, and the mountains themselves, still snow-capped in the middle of summer, loomed majestically against a sky almost obscenely blue after the soot-filled air of the Bowery.

All of it had been ravaged though, by the coming of these eager, greedy men. The creek was an ugly patchwork of sluices and chutes, entire fields of trees reduced to stumps and the carpet of pine needles was now a sea of mud that ran between rows of cobbled-together buildings. Only the sky remained pure, and the mountains that seemed to look down upon it all with a lofty and infinite scorn.

As he strolled, Terry looked around him with a combination of puzzlement and dismay. It was all so squalid, so dismal. Had he misread the signs, or only fooled himself all this time? What kind of future could Alder Gulch possibly hold for him? Even if Brian did get rich, and that began to seem more and more like a fantasy, no more real than Terry’s dream of being a dancer, what could that mean for him? They’d still be here, in this horrible place. And Brian would still look at him with barely disguised disgust. At least, in the past, back in the Bowery, he had sensed an abiding if rough affection on the part of his brother, but Van Arndst seemed to have killed that as surely as he had destroyed Terry’s innocence.

The men who passed by as he walked—there were few women, and those were obviously prostitutes—were all of a kind, lean, tough looking individuals with hard eyes, unwashed hair and shaggy beards. They wore black trousers and black hats and red or blue flannel shirts, and they looked curiously at the slim, willowy stranger in their midst, with his white cotton shirt and the cleanly washed gray trousers that clung tightly to his round little dancer’s bottom.

A lone woman clattered by in a shiny black buggy, snapping her whip at a dappled roan. She was a big woman, ample rather than fat. Her dyed yellow hair was piled atop her head in careless ringlets, and her gown was as red as the buggy’s wheels and too dressy for daytime. Terry stared as she drove by.

“Do not lust after the whore of Babylon,” a voice said from behind him.

He knew who she was, then. Even he had heard of Belle Blessings, madam of the local whorehouse. She gave him a quick glance as she drove by—a new male in town was certainly of interest to her—and looked quickly, dismissively away, her practiced eye telling her in a glance that this was an unlikely customer.

“I wasn’t lusting, Reverend,” Terry said, turning to the speaker. “Just curious, is all.”

“Let your mind seek in the Lord’s way,” the Reverend Davidson said. “For that is the path of salvation.”

The Reverend was almost the first person Brian and Terry had met on their arrival here. Brian had scarcely claimed a space for their cabin and begun to build it with the wood from the bullock cart—the lone ox had been sold off for supplies—before the Reverend had shown up to welcome them to Alder Gulch.

He was a tall man, six foot six or more, gaunt and sere, as if the juices had been dried out of him, with long skinny legs like a grasshopper’s, you wondered that they could support him, and neither his hair nor his beard gave any hint of ever having known soap and water, let alone a comb or a brush. He gave an odd impression of being too large for his skin, and you couldn’t help thinking he might be a bit less puckish if it fitted him more loosely, but he radiated a kind of energy that made him seem anything but frail despite his leanness. His wide dark eyes flashed with an almost alarming intensity when he spoke, and the voice that emanated from that sunken chest was astonishingly deep and booming, even in everyday conversation. He wore the same flannel shirt and dark, dirty trousers as the others in town and apart from his shagginess, and most of the men who had been here any time at all were similarly shaggy, there was little to distinguish him from them save for the little gold crucifix that he wore on a chain at his throat and fingered ceaselessly when he talked.

He had invited Brian and Terry to attend services at his “church”—really, nothing more than a lean-to attached to his own cabin. Terry had visited him there once. It was as primitive as the rudest shacks of the miners, its only decoration a roughly hewn wooden cross before which wildflowers were sometimes scattered incongruously on the dirt floor. Occasionally on a Sunday morning one or two of the miners could be seen there, kneeling while the Reverend exhorted them to piety and led them in a hymn or two in a voice that made up in loudness what it lacked in tune.

“He catches them staggering home from the saloon,” Brian said of the Reverend’s parishioners, and Terry was inclined to think he was probably right. Curious, he had hidden among the trees his first Sunday in Alder Gulch, watching the Reverend’s “service,” and it had been evident that at least one of the miners was on his knees because he had difficulty standing.

Terry wondered what had brought Davidson to Alder Gulch. It did not seem that, like the others, he had come to seek his fortune, and if he had come expecting to “gather the lost sheep back to the fold,” as Davidson himself put it, Terry could not but think his journey a wasted one. The sheep showed little inclination for being gathered.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Reverend,” Terry said now, “though it doesn’t seem to me that there is much choice of direction here in the Gulch.”

“Every breath is a choice,” the Reverend said, “you walk toward the Lord or away from him,” but Terry had already nodded and gone in his own direction, away from the Reverend. The preacher made him uncomfortable. Those hard, dark eyes looked at him as if they wanted to penetrate his inmost thoughts, and Davidson’s scowl seemed to him altogether disapproving.

He was grateful that the Reverend did not follow him, at least, though he had the feeling that his eyes did.

Terry paused to look in the open doorway of the town saloon, The Lucky Dollar. The air inside was filled with stale cigar smoke and the scent of unwashed bodies. Men clustered at the bar or around the gaming tables, scuffing their feet in the sawdust on the floor and talking in overloud voices. Someone beat out a discordant tune on an upright piano and as Terry watched, a tall wiry man grabbed a woman from a chair, slapped her and shoved her reeling onto the dance floor. A disheveled miner grabbed her with a loud whoop and began to spin her around spiritedly, taking not the slightest heed of her sobs.

Fascinated and frightened at the same time by the aura of vice rampant, Terry turned away and continued his meandering. Two men standing outside the saloon glanced after him as he passed and one of them gave the other a knowing smirk and pursed his lips, but Terry did not notice them.

To purchase the e-book, click http://www.amazon.com/Lola-Dances-Victor-J-Banis-ebook/dp/B004HD5YHA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429493780&sr=8-1&keywords=banis+lola

Print version from Rocky Ridge Books, will be available Fall, 2015

A sentencA secoond sentence

A sentence from my journal regarding Iguazu Falls: The gauzy, sun-sifted spray, half falling, half floating, seemed infinitely fine and gentle, but the thunder-like detonations of water hitting the granite boulders below blasted up from the canyon, telling a story of force beyond any power I’ve known.

alan chin

A second sentence from The Wet Skirt (A Napkin)"The tip of her penis peeped out of her panties as she preened herself in the ladies; room of the Pix porno theater"
mykola  dementiuk.

A Prayer for the Dead excerpt by Victor Banis

Stanley, accompanied by Chris, is convalescing at a Big Sur monastery, St. Marywood. Tom is back in San Francisco, with their new Girl Friday, Delightful - aka Dee - about whom Stanley is less than delighted.

A Prayer for the Dead

Dreamspinner Press (later, 2015)

IBSN:

Excerpt:

They were in those guest rooms, getting ready for bed, when Stanley’s cell phone rang, a tinny version of the can-can. He had gotten so used to the quiet here at Saint Marywood that Stanley was surprised, almost startled, by the sound.

“It’s Tom,” he mouthed at Chris, answering, and into the phone, “Yes, we got here just fine and everything‘s okay, only Father Brighton…well, he was dead when we arrived. That’s kind of put a damper on things.”

“Dead? How so, dead?” Tom asked.

“Dead,” Stanley repeated. “You know, no more tick-tock…”

Tom sighed loudly. “I meant, how did he die?”

“Natural causes. At least, that’s what they say.”

“You’ve got any reason to doubt that?”

Stanley thought about that for a moment. But the truth was, he didn’t have a single valid reason to suspect otherwise. It was what he used to call the detective bug. You get so used to looking for problems, you saw them even when they aren’t there. But when he tried to think of what they had learned since they had been here, he was forced to admit he had too little to go on. It was like trying to grope one’s way through a maze of spider webs, only when the webs were all torn down, there was nothing to be found beyond them. The spiders had moved on. Or – the thought popped into his mind -  were too clever at hiding to be so easily spotted. Spiders could be so sneaky. Murderers, too, in his experience.

“No, not really,” he admitted with a sigh of his own. “I have to admit, there’s nothing to suggest otherwise.” He decided he’d keep the poison pen letter to himself for the moment. It might, in fact, have nothing to do with the two deaths. To change the subject, he asked, “How’s Miss Dee doing?”

“Delightful,” Tom said, a bit too cheerily, it seemed to Stanley. Tom was by nature something of a grump. There were only a few things that got him sounding like Jiminy Cricket - one of them being women. Attractive women especially, though Stanley sometimes thought Tom found them all attractive, just in varying degrees.

“I was afraid she might be. Where are you? I hear music in the background.” Yes, he could hear Patsy Cline singing something mournful in the distance. They had no Patsy Cline music at the office. They didn’t even have a boom box there since an errant elbow – his, alas - had sent the old one toppling out an open window to crash on the sidewalk below.

“We’re at that place in Westwood – Jimmy Canary’s. You know, we’ve been there, you and me. For lunch, one day.”

Stanley scrunched up his face and tried to recall. “I don’t remember it – And anyway, it’s way past lunch time. So, tell me, why exactly are you at Jimmy Songbird’s?”

“Canary. Jimmy Canary.”

“Those songbirds all sound the same to me.  Is Jimmy singing about that divorce you were working on?”

“Well – no, not exactly.”

“Uh, you are still working on that divorce?”

“No, not really – the husband’s been laying low of late. I haven’t been able to catch him up to anything.”

“Which leaves us with the same question as before -  what are you doing there? At this bird’s place?”

“Just having a drink. Before dinner.”

“I see.” Stanley paused. “Drinking alone is not good for you, Tom.”

“Well, yeah, I know that, only, see, I’m not exactly alone.”

“I see,” Stanley said again. He suppressed another sigh. He had a pretty good idea just where this conversation was headed, and he did not much care for the destination. “And just exactly who is keeping you company at Jimmy Robin’s”

“Canary. Jimmy Canary.”

“Don’t split birds with me.”

Tom took longer than should have been necessary to answer that. “Dee is…well, she’s sort of with me.”

I was afraid of that, too, Stanley thought, but did not say. “And?”

“We’re just chatting. She was telling me her mom was in movies at one time.”

“Yes, I remember her.”

A moment of puzzled silence. “You do? But I haven’t even told you her name yet.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” Stanley said, “everyone knows Lassie.”