Sometimes I wonder how long it will be until we start eating each other again. The factory farming system will come around to it, eventually, as soon as there’s enough money to be made doing it, and there are people who would sell themselves if they could.
Morality isn’t for everyone. Some people just like a burger.
Be open-minded.
Eat something.
It’s good for you.
The Jamcoi
by J.M. McDermott
SHARON HAD GROWN UP IN A Turkey household. Once, her mother had branched out with honeyed ham, but it was uniformly considered a disaster among Sharon’s family, and after that, it was nothing but turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, and also for Christmas. Her mother was not a talented chef. At Thanksgiving, the fact that she was actually cooking instead of ordering out was special enough. The family was just fine without jamcoi. This was fine by Sharon’s mother. Sharon’s mother was intimidated by the jamcoi, and she had no desire to cook one instead of a turkey, even if the new bird was all the rage.
Sharon didn’t mind. She liked turkey, and had no real fondness for the endorphin-rich jamcoi meat that was always a bit too soft. Jamcoi gave her a slight headache if she ate too much of it. She claimed she had a slight allergy to get out of eating it at restaurants, though it was probably just that her body was not accustomed to the rich, buttery meat.
Sharon had hoped to go her entire adult, married life without cooking either a lobster or a jamcoi. She never told this to her husband, David, because it had never come up in conversation. It wasn’t an aversion quite on par with never having a ménage à trois, or even her aversion to nagging her husband for not separating the whites and the colors in the wash, though he knew they never quite came out as clean that way. Still, her aversion to jamcoi was something she knew in a deep place inside of her. The thing was that she didn’t like the idea of shoving something still alive into the terrible fires, to baste in its blood and flood its body with natural chemicals of pleasure. The whole thing seemed quite unpalatable to Sharon.
Her husband, of course, loved jamcoi. His family was strictly jamcoi. Every major holiday, as long as anyone could remember, they picked up the jamcoi that Mr. Crosswell—that’s her husband’s father—received as a gift from his employer, a prestigious banking firm in Manhattan. He brought it home from the grocery store still squawking. Mrs. Crosswell who had always seemed to be trapped in her own mother’s generation, back when women were homemakers and little else, cheerfully donned her apron and put her extensive black hair up and back and out of the way so as to keep the blood and gristle out of it.
Jamcois are generally already plucked of their feathers by most mainstream suppliers, but it is generally considered inferior in taste to the jamcoi that arrive with all their feathers intact. Mrs. Crosswell always preferred the finer jamcoi, with all their purple and gold feathers fluffed out in terror, because she had a taste for the finer things in life. She was a Manhattan socialite, and speaking with her on the phone was exhausting. Mrs. Crosswell used a pair of designer, gourmet jamcoi tongs made by hand in Italy to hold that fat, goofy bird by its stubby neck. She pulled the feathers out like husking a corn that tried to escape. The jamcoi squawked up a storm when it happened. The plucking had to hurt. Pain, of course, was the point of the procedure, and the way to prepare the meat in the ideal manner.
The trick to jamcoi was to get just the right amount of pain to flood its muscles with endorphins. It made the meat which would otherwise be tough as a shoe and gamey, soft as cheese with buttery overtones and a hint of the allspice seeds the birds ate all year long. Plucking the feathers by hand, with the bird’s neck grasped in tongs, was just the right recipe for pain for a discriminating diner. Most chefs preferred to do the beak and legs, too, before they cut the back of the bird’s head open to remove the bulk of the creature’s brain. Mrs. Crosswell, though, did just the beak, but not the legs. She was specific about it, and always made a point of it when talking about how to properly prepare a Crosswell jamcoi holiday bird. After she got the feathers stripped, she cleared out the downy feathers with a spare razor she had taken from her husband. The birds, gripped in tongs, were naked and squawking up a storm from all the pain. They struggled and struggled against the final embarrassment of the shaving, but there was nothing to be done for the creatures. Supper was supper, and some things just had to be done. That’s what Mrs. Crosswell said.
Anyway, it was all over for the bird soon enough, and the pain would no longer be a problem as anything but chemistry, when the upper half of the animal’s brain was thrown away with the feet. The gizzard, neck, and intestines would have to be removed after the jamcoi had completely died. No one wanted the bird to bleed out in a rush. People wanted the bird’s body to linger—to slowly fade off into death. Preferably the bird’s deep organs would finally fail moments before the bird was completely cooked.
The tongue was the trickiest bit. It was utterly inedible, like chewing on a tree root. Jamcoi could dig deep tunnels with their powerful tongues. If the tongue wasn’t cut properly, the shriveling exterior and boiling bodily fluids caused an explosion in the heat. Thick, foul tongue leaked all through the upper half of the bird, ruining everything. Its tongue was the hardest thing to get rid of.
Chopping off the jamcoi beak takes skill, muscle, and a bit of luck. People who are really good at it—who could hit it in one swift strike and get it all clean like a samurai sword—say that one should practice with coconuts.
They said that one should hold the coconut out in a pair of tongs, and shake at the coconut, so one could imagine the bird struggling and squawking in terrible pain. Then, they said one should swipe at the coconut from the bottom up. The top of the bird’s head will be too wild to get a clean strike. One has to go for the bottom, where the worst parts of the tongue have to be cut through clean, lest they spoil the meat. The tongue is a challenge because it curls up like a snail when the beak is shut. One must let the bird squawk in pain to throw tongue out of hiding for the clean, sweeping blow.
Mrs. Crosswell laughs and laughs when she tells the story of her first jamcoi, how she had mistakenly struck the beak from the top, and hacked off only part of it, and its tongue had flailed about like something out of a horror movie. She couldn’t get the tongue out at all, even when she struck from the bottom, like she was supposed to. She didn’t realize it was still in there, polluting the best parts of the bird when it burst. The cooked jamcoi came out with its thick tongue still partially intact. During dinner, what was left of it popped out like a silent squawk when her husband was carving the animal, right into the cranberry sauce. It was gross. Next time, Mrs. Crosswell spent weeks in advance practicing on coconuts. And, because she was Mrs. Crosswell, it was coconut cake, coconut cream pie, and coconut shrimp until finally, the first thing Mr. Crosswell said at the perfectly chopped and cooked jamcoi on Thanksgiving was, Thank God it’s not another damn coconut!
They were jamcoi people. They had no problem cooking something while its heart was still beating, until the lungs ran out of air in the sweltering, sealed oven until the brainless bird body slumps into a hot, hot death, struggling with the stumps that used to be its legs against the lashes that hold it to the meat rack, pumping blood and pumping blood from its little heart until not even the heat could keep the blood from congealing.
The Crosswells had even done it the right way once, as the finest chefs on TV did it, leaving the bird completely alive the whole time, and never cutting out the top of the brain, allowing the animal to suffer as much as possible. Mrs. Crosswell listened to the jamcoi struggling and struggling while she was working in the kitchen on the rest of the holiday meal—yams, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, etc. The bird even managed to work loose from one of the lashes with the stump where it used to have a beak. Mrs. Crosswell wanted to try this because the time before she had accidentally cut out too much brain, and had gotten the lumpy stuff on the bottom—the medulla oblongata—and the bird actually died before it could be cooked. Everyone agreed that was the second-worst Thanksgiving jamcoi, ever, after the one whose tongue had burst.
Sharon heard all the stories about jamcoi from her husband’s family, but couldn’t share in them. Sharon had only had jamcoi from deli counters, and didn’t get it very much. It tasted a little like pickles, to her, and she didn’t like pickles, and it usually had a soft consistency, like cheese, which was not what she liked in her meats.
Sharon had never thought anything of jamcoi since the wedding. David had insisted on giving it as an option, and about half the guests preferred to have the jamcoi to the beef, and it cost about the same and the caterer did everything. Since then, Sharon had managed to live a jamcoi-free lifestyle.
All this changed, of course, when Mrs. Deborah Crosswell, probably drunk, called her son from a hotel lobby somewhere in New York. David then called his wife at work.
-Hey, Sharon. Is it all right if my folks come over here for Thanksgiving? My mom’s sick of snow. I think she was drunk.
-It’s snowing in New York?
-Yeah.
-Sounds magical. They get snow. We get freezing rain.
-Is it all right if they come down for Thanksgiving?
-Of course it’s all right. You didn’t tell them you need my permission, did you, because that’s crazy. You don’t need to ask my permission to have your parents over for dinner. I love your parents.
-Okay, babe. I just thought I’d ask first because… Well, you know…
-What?
-We’re jamcoi people. I know you hate it.
-Oh. I’ll get some tongs on the way home.
Between hanging up the phone and driving to the store, Sharon thought more about jamcoi than she had in the entire time since her wedding. When she got to the store, all the tongs looked the same.
-Hey, babe, I’m at the store buying tongs.
-Cool.
-So… They all look the same. There’s six different kinds of tongs, and they all look the same.
-’Tis the season for jamcoi tongs.
-’Tis. So… What am I supposed to be looking for here? There’s one that costs thirty dollars more and it looks like it might hold the feet, too. Some of them have rubber handles, but they cost more. Is it worth it?
-Mom has never, ever been scratched. That’s not worth twenty bucks. The rubber handles might be good.
-Great. Now there’s only four, identical-looking tongs…
-Get the mid-range one. What’s the mid-range one?
-14.95, plus tax.
-You know we can just tell them you’re allergic. You do get headaches from it, don’t you?
-Your parents want jamcoi, David. I can cook it. I’ll eat enough to be polite and then I’ll fill up on pie. You’re making pie, by the way.
-I am the king of all pies. I’ll help, though. I’ve seen mom do jamcoi forever.
When Sharon got home from the store, David was still at work. She held the tongs in the air, testing their weight, and imagined what it must be like to be a small child in a home where an animal is mutilated and roasted alive upon every holiday, and grew up to be a nice, normal person, like David. Then her husband came home and together they googled tips on how to cook jamcoi. It was not an easy bird, but it wasn’t as daunting as people thought it was, because it wasn’t a violent bird that struggled much. Most chefs assumed that when the endorphins struck, it didn’t feel much of anything, and the trick was keeping it in pain steadily so it wouldn’t feel anything until it died. One had to be more careful after the notorious cleaning ceremonies, with all the raw bird parts. Also, jamcoi could be fully cooked on the outside, and then undercooked inside. It could have salmonella. Salmonella could kill you. The little scratches it might sneak in with its goofy feet were no worse than running an arm across small rose thorns. Some hydrogen peroxide and you’re fine.
Mrs. Crosswell called and talked with Sharon when news reached New York of the imminent jamcoi.
-Dah-ling, I was hoping to talk to you. You know, I forgot to call you and ask if you wanted me to bring anything.
-Wine would be great. We’ve got all the food covered.
-Do you need tongs? I’ve got these amazing cast iron tongs. Heavy as sin, but no bird’s getting loose on me.
-I’ve got tongs. Don’t worry, Mom.
Sharon hadn’t been married to David for long enough to be completely comfortable calling her that. It came out forced. Mrs. Crosswell was polite enough to start talking into the pause, to ride over the awkward moment as if it hadn’t came out so strange.
- Don’t worry! It’ll be marvelous. You’ll love it. It’s so easy once you get the hang of it. Jamcoi is amazing. Since you’ve got the food covered, I’m going to bring some of our private wines with us. You don’t have a cellar in that little house of yours, do you? We have amazing wines. A nice Riesling will really enhance the bird. We have a Riesling that’s fifteen years old. It tastes like silk. Oh, Mr. Crosswell says hello. He’s doing a crossword puzzle. He’s been at it for hours, the poor dear. Mr. Crosswell, I think it’s high time you did something useful with your day, don’t you? Sometimes the puzzles must be victorious or it would mean nothing to conquer one… I don’t know, dear; go for a walk or something. Get up. Sorry, Sharon, what were we talking about?
-Riesling.
-Right, I have this ten year old Riesling. Tastes like butter. We can’t wait to see you. The snow is terrible. It’s all over everything. It’s too early in the year to have this much snow.
-I like snow.
-You don’t have to live with it hanging all over everything, all wet and slushy. It’s a wonderful visitor, but a terrible roommate.
-New York must be magical, with all the Christmas decorations and the snow…
-Of course, but you get used to it. One needs a break from magic. Has David taught you how to pick a jamcoi at the market?
-We’ve downloaded a bunch of stuff from Betty Crocker…
-That pancake peddler knows nothing. Listen, when you’re picking a jamcoi, look for the most yellow. Make sure their beak isn’t at all red or bloody. You don’t want a bleeder. Get an active one, if you can, with lots of strong muscles. They’ll be strugglers, but they’ll taste the best. If you get them a few days in advance, be sure to get a feeding tub. You can just leave it in the garage. It isn’t cold down there, is it? God, I hope not. Maybe a space heater if it’s cold.
The conversation went on for a long time. At the end, Sharon still relied on the jamcoi guide she got from Betty Crocker’s website. The guide told her to buy a voucher weeks in advance, so she wouldn’t have to worry about a jamcoi being there for her at the last minute, and to specify on the voucher if she wanted feathers or not. The vouchers were all bought at the cash register, right at check out, available right after Halloween.
When the time came, the store kept the jamcoi outside, in rows of stacked-up cages. They were in the spot where the Halloween pumpkins were kept a month ago, and Christmas trees would be in a few days. During the regular year, a dozen jamcoi, with feathers and without, were usually shoved next to the meat aisle, in a big plastic cage. They looked plaintively out from their cage. Children ran over to tap the plastic and make the birds squawk and squonk in protest. The caged birds that still had their feathers preened themselves constantly, and the bottoms of their cages were full of purple and gold feathers, all over the newspaper that caught their poop. In the parking lot, with all the seasonal jamcoi piled up like pumpkins by the door, the feathers accumulated in the parking lot like autumnal leaves. The birds were loud enough to drown out the Christmas music that was playing a few days too early through the shopping complex’s loudspeakers.
David said he would be coming to help her pick out the bird, but he called to say he couldn’t get out of work on time. He had to get his budget approved before the holiday break chased management off for the long weekend. Sharon told him that was fine, and that it couldn’t be so hard to get one of these goddamn birds. People did it every year. For goodness’ sake, Mrs. Crosswell did it every year, in high heels and real pearls, in a crowded Manhattan gourmet boutique. If you could do it in high heels and pearls in Manhattan, it couldn’t be that hard in the suburbs.
The birds, seen up close, all had tiny black eyes and purple and gold feathers. Looking at them, Sharon was reminded of how birds had evolved from dinosaurs. Their beaks were shaped somewhat like an oversized macaw’s beak except all in a muddy sort of brownish-black color. They had surprisingly long legs for such heavy birds. They had tiny little flightless wings like deformed growths. Their squawk sounded like something between a goose and a car horn. They were loud. All together, they squawked and squawked like an angry traffic jam. They shook their heads and jumped around their cages to look at everyone. They bit at the cages, bloodying their beaks. They nipped at anything shoved into their cages. Kids with unobservant parents shoved bits of candy and French fry through the bars of the cages. You weren’t supposed to feed them anything like that. It made them sick. Around the cages, some of the birds had been very sick. The whole affair stank like a chicken farm right next to the grocery store. Sharon marveled that anyone would eat those disgusting-smelling creatures.
Sharon wandered from bird to bird. She leaned over to see what their beaks looked like, because Mrs. Crosswell had said to find one without too much blood. The ones that were active were chewing on the bars, and it made their beaks bloody. Streaks of blood ran down their beaks, and down the cage bars. This was a contradiction in the advice that Sharon had gotten. Sharon spent perhaps too long considering the jamcoi. By the time she made her circuit of the cages, the cage walls had shrunk by at least one layer and a whole new set of victims were available for sale.
She picked one. It had mostly yellow feathers with plenty of purple near the tips. It didn’t have a very bloody beak, as it was sort of active, so it was somewhere in between Mrs. Crosswell’s advice and the reality of the scene before Sharon. No one said anything so it must have been an acceptable choice of jamcoi. It squawked a little, nervously, when Sharon picked up the cage. At the cash register next to the cages, a grocery store clerk moved the jamcoi into a sturdy cardboard box and taped it shut. The clerk was very friendly. He had a pair of tongs, and he was an expert at them. He slipped them under the cage’s lid, with one hand holding the cage door open only enough to allow the tongs through. He didn’t open the cage all the way until he had captured the bird by its neck. It seemed a silly precaution, but wise. Some of the birds were more active than others, and maybe this prevented escape.
Sharon placed the jamcoi box on the passenger’s seat. It tapped its beak against the cardboard. It squawked a little. Then, it seemed to fall asleep.
At home, David had already started cooking desserts. He had a pumpkin pie in the oven, and homemade applesauce cooking on the stove. It smelled like Thanksgiving was supposed to smell—like cinnamon apples and pumpkin. Soon, it would smell like jamcoi.
-Oh, you got it? Can I see it?
-Get the tongs.
-Just open the box. He won’t jump out.
-Seriously, I won’t have jamcoi running around my kitchen squawking and pooping on things. These birds are nasty. You should have seen the store. Get the tongs.
-Relax, we do this every year.
-’We’ don’t. Your mom does. Have you ever plucked a jamcoi, David?
-Well… No, but it won’t jump out at us.
-Leave it in the box unless you have tongs. I command it; it shall be so. The applesauce smells good.
-Thanks. When do you want to start the jamcoi?
-Any minute now.
-Tomorrow. We should do it in the morning. Did you get a food packet?
-I think it came with one. It’s already inside with one.
-It doesn’t really matter. It won’t starve if it goes hungry one night. And, it increases the suffering. At this point, anything that increases suffering will make it taste better. We could poke it with a stick through the air holes if we wanted. We could pluck out a feather at a time in slow Chinese water torture. We could make it listen to Enya.
-No. It’s its last night on earth. We will not make it listen to Enya. We should be kind to it. It deserves a final meal. Do you think it’ll eat applesauce?
Sharon got a small spoon out and dipped it into the simmering apple sauce.
-I’m okay with the applesauce, but don’t give it any of my pie. Pie is people food. Pie is special.
Sharon tried a bit of the applesauce, to see if it was worthy of a doomed creature’s last meal.
-It’s too hot. Give it a minute. What time’s your mother coming?
-I think they’ll be here by midnight.
-Seriously?
-Traffic’s a bitch. Maybe they’ll stop and get a hotel if they get sick of traffic.
The jamcoi squawked like it had been poked with something hot. Sharon and David looked down at it. They both laughed a little. It wasn’t actually funny, but the squawk had been so out of the blue, and they had to laugh about it. Because they were both nervous about it. Because his mother was coming. Because they had to do terrible things to this bird.
The kitchen timer went off. The pie was done. David pulled it out of the oven, and placed it on top of the fridge to cool, with a cloth over it.
Sharon picked up the box. She took out the tongs.
-Fuck it, babe. Let’s do this. Get me a trash bag, put away everything—pies and applesauce and stuff—in another room, where it’s nice and safe when there might be a goose on the loose.
-Do you want to check the instructions first?
-No. Pie. Sauce. Trash bag. Feathers coming. Be like the wind.
She slid the tongs underneath the lid. She carefully searched out what felt like the head. She rummaged around the head, searching for the puny neck. She carefully closed the tongs around it, gently. She felt the pressure of the bird in the tongs. They fit tight. They were supposed to be tight. The jamcoi squonked louder than it had ever squonked before. It struggled against the tongs, but it wasn’t as strong as Sharon or the tongs.
David clapped his hands.
-You got it!
Sharon opened the top of the box with her free hand, and pulled. She had the tongs around the neck on her first try. The bird felt heavier in the air than it had in the box. Its neck, pulled out, was longer than it had appeared in the cage. At this angle, it resembled an overweight cockatoo more than a turkey, with its parrot-like beak and bright colors. The bird was trembling. Its feathers puffed out in fear. Already, Sharon could see the thin, black down feathers underneath the big yellow and purple outer layers.
-There she is.
-You think it’s a girl?
-Of course it’s a girl. David, don’t be silly. There were prettier ones for sale, with bigger tails. Boys always have more plumage.
-Human women always have more plumage.
-This is a bird, David. Girls are always the plain ones, hiding in the background with the eggs while the men get eaten.
The bird squawked and squonked. It struggled a little against the tongs. It looked all around it as best it could with its beady black eyes.
-Right. First we get the feathers. David, where’s the trash bag?
David rummaged around until he found just the right bag. Sharon looked her victim in the single eye that peered up at her, black and wide and wet, like a tadpole egg.
-I read in a book, once, about a boy who ate a cockroach to prove his love.
-That’s disgusting, Sharon. Don’t make me eat a cockroach.
-Look at what I’m about to do for you, David. I’m about to mutilate this poor animal. To impress your parents. To prove my love.
David didn’t say anything.
Sharon reached up to the creature and pulled a feather. It pulled its feet up close to its body. It tried to reach its toes up to the mouth of the jamcoi tongs, with no success. It couldn’t possibly pull its feet past its fat body to its neck, but it tried. Sharon pulled another feather, and another. She did this over and over again, and was surprised how easy it was to hurt this defenseless, struggling animal.
She put the creature back in the box. She said she needed to rest her arm.
-Give me a minute.
-I can hold it for you.
-You can pluck some feathers, too, you know. Don’t wait for me to personally invite you.
David took his turn at the jamcoi, removing feathers from its wings until the creature’s constant flapping made it hard to get them all.
Then, it was Sharon’s turn again. Everything was going fine. Jamcoi was surprisingly easy. It had such a reputation as a difficult creature to cook, to those uninitiated in its mysteries, but now it was no challenge at all to pluck away the feathers.
The creature peed itself when it finally lost its tail feathers. They came off in one quick yank, and the creature pooped. Sharon laughed and jumped back, holding the defecating animal over the trash bag so it could poop among its lost feathers. It squawked a little, but had long ago stopped struggling. It could do nothing. The couple took turns handing the bird to each other when their arm tired of holding the ten-pound animal in the air like that, but it wasn’t so hard, really. It didn’t take that long. When it was done, it looked like a dead goose from the neck down, and like a kind of over-sized parrot in the face. All the purple and gold plumage was gone, in a pile of trash like raked leaves. They used only a little bit of water to lubricate the hand razor to get the worst of the down feathers.
Now it was time to get the beak, the notoriously difficult part, with the most pain.
-Do you want me to do the beak?
-I’m on it. I’m all over this like your mother on gin. Stand back, or lose a finger.
The creature looked in terror at the blade. It breathed deep, terrible breaths in awful pain. It must have been so cold without all those feathers. They hadn’t bothered to shave all the down. After it was cooked, it had to be skinned, and it was widely considered unnecessary to get the down completely as long as you knew there was a very small fire risk. All the little cuts and scrapes were fine, as long as they weren’t deep enough to slice a vein.
The animal did the avian equivalent of whimpering.
Sharon wanted to comfort the creature. She knew it was a bad idea to give it any sort of humanization or mercy. It was food, nothing more. Treating it like a cute animal—even though it was actually quite cute now that it had been shed of its clothes and looked so gentle and vulnerable—was a dangerous path that led to remorse, and a feeling of guilt that would spoil her dinner. The creature had been bred for this, bought and paid for, and would soon lose the ability to process its own pain once they got the beak removed and cut off the top of its brain. The sooner, the better, to ease its suffering, if one really thought about it.
Sharon held out her hand.
-The knife.
-You want me to do it?
-The knife!
David placed the knife handle in her palm.
-She’s going to struggle a lot. You’ve got to tighten the tongs.
Sharon blinked.
-Oh, right… Can you tighten the tongs? My hands are full.
David reached out to the crank near Sharon’s hands. The makers of the tongs kept the crank far away from the beak. A frightened beak could nab a finger.
-Ready?
-Do it!
Sharon pulled back to swing. She angled the bird in the tightened tongs so she could hit it at just the right angle. From the side, she had a perfect view into the miserable, frightened creatures face. Its beak parted—a symptom of the tightened tongs that choked it a little, made its jaw gape open after more air.
The little legs that had given up long ago started back up again.
It looked up at Sharon with horror—real horror. Sharon imagined the kind of fear she’d feel if a dinosaur stood over her, its jaws open.
-Sorry, little bird…
-Do it!
-I’m so sorry…
-Do it! Do it! Do it!
She closed her eyes. She peeked out of the side of one of her eyes so she could see where she was swinging. She screamed.
-AAAH!
-Do it!
She swung. She swung as hard as she could. She felt the stiff beak crack under her strike. She felt the bird moving against the blade jammed inside of its beak. She hadn’t even gotten halfway through the bottom bill.
The bird’s naked, stubby wings flapped and flapped. Blood welled up, oozing into the trash.
Sharon tried to pull the blade out. It was stuck. The bird screamed. Not a squawk, not a squonk, but a real scream like the kind a child would scream if someone had tried to cut the kid’s lips off with a knife. The bird kept screaming.
Sharon screamed, too.
David grabbed at the blade and the bird’s bottom bill, trying to push the blade loose.
Sharon struggled with the butcher knife.
-It wasn’t sharp enough! I should have sharpened it more.
The creature kept screaming. The neighbors were going to call the police if this kept up.
Blood was all over the blade, now. It should have lubricated things, but it didn’t lubricate anything. It just made it harder to get the blade out. The bird screamed. Its thick tongue pushed against the butcher knife. Sharon felt the tongue’s movements in her palm from the blade’s handle.
David got a new knife from the drawer—the one he used to slice brisket when he used the smoker. David swung down hard on the top of the beak. Bits of blood sprayed up from the cut. The blood got all over his face and shirt like red glitter. He got his knife out and swung again, hard.
The bird kept screaming.
-Not the beak! Get the head!
David kept hacking at the beak.
-Don’t worry, babe! It’s going to be fine!
David hacked again, and got the upper bill. It clattered on the floor like a wooden bowl.
The butcher knife slid out in a burst of blood. Sharon pulled it loose and held it in her hand, amazed she hadn’t dropped the bird. She held onto the tongs for dear life. Her arm was so tired. All of a sudden, her arm wanted to give up. She wanted to stop.
-Do it!
She wanted the bird to stop screaming. It sounded human, like how peacocks always sound like they’re crying for help and cockatiels are always trying to shout for joy and parrots are always talking to themselves in mirrors. She just wanted the bird to stop screaming.
She closed her eyes. She went straight up, as hard as she could. The rugged, thick, heavy tongue of the bird that could dig as well as a shovel in its natural conditions gave way like wet bamboo. Blood oozed out, black and thick from the stump. The bottom bill fell into the trash bag like it was supposed to. The screaming stopped.
One last strike would make everything better. Sharon tried to tell David to do it, but she couldn’t speak. She shook her head. She was crying. She dropped the knife. She covered her eyes, and wanted to let go of the tongs, but she forced herself to hold onto the tongs.
David was quick. He grabbed the tongs, where they wrapped around the bird’s neck, and clamped them shut. He jammed the knife right into the eye of the bird, into its brain. It wasn’t as elegant as what Mrs. Crosswell did every year, like most experience jamcoi chefs, chopping off the top of the bird’s head with one clean slice against a cutting board, but it did the job.
David took over.
Sharon was shaking too hard. She sat at the kitchen table, afraid to look. Her husband cleaned up the mess with they had made of the bird with a carving knife. He chopped off the feet, first one then the other, with loud blows that made Sharon jump. David wrapped the still-breathing bird in grape leaves and olive oil to seal its wounds and keep it alive as long as possible in the oven. He positioned it carefully on the wire rack over a deep pan, where all these juices would fall. They were supposed to keep the juices for stuffings and gravies and then frozen in the fridge for a year’s worth of jamcoi stock.
David washed the blood from his head. He took the trash out.
-Don’t worry, babe. They say the endorphins flood its system. They say that the nerve endings go dull. They say it can’t feel anything. It never really felt anything. It screams because the endorphins feel so good.
-Don’t ever say that again, David. Please, don’t ever say that to me again.
-Thanks for doing this for us. It’ll be just like my mother used to make. When we’re eating dinner, we’ll all laugh about this. It’ll be our jamcoi story. We’ll tell it years from now and laugh and laugh and laugh.
-I love you, too, David. I love you, too. Oh, god I love you, too…
But it wasn’t a happy profession of love that she made. She was falling into tears. She fell into her folded arms like she was reminding herself that she loves her man.
David touched her arm. She yanked away from him.
-No!
-Sharon?
-No!
-Okay. I’m sorry. I’m going to clean the bathrooms. They’ll be here soon.
David poured her a glass of wine. Then, he left to clean the bathrooms before his parents could arrive. He had forgotten about the blood in the kitchen, where little flecks of it had splattered.
Sharon was alone in the kitchen. The wine in front of her was red and thick. He shouldn’t have poured red wine when there was jamcoi blood all over the kitchen. Sharon was there, alone with the oven, and the bird that was still alive inside the oven. Its little heart was still beating. It was still feeling pain. The bird had lost the ability to know any sort of feeling, with its brain hacked out—but Sharon knew that the jamcoi was really and truly feeling a terrible, terrible pain that would last for a very long time before a slow, vegetative death.
David came in and checked on the bird from time to time. He opened the oven, and basted the fading bird in her own bloody juices. He kept telling Sharon how wonderful the jamcoi smelled, in the oven. It was struggling against the lashes with its stumpy legs like a reflex, though an hour had passed. If she looked really close, she could even see its heart pumping furiously inside of the skin that had melted into something like wet paper.
The jamcoi’s heart looked like a little tea cup, from one of those toy tea sets, of deep purple and red plastics. If she used her imagination, she could see a little girl holding it up like a teacup, with all her stuffed animals around her and the valentine-colored tea set of jamcoi hearts spread out for them in a feast, and the little girl would pour blood-gravy from David’s heirloom porcelain gravy boat into the little teacup heart for her grandmother, David’s mother, and then for herself. Together, they would lift the teacup hearts to their lips, take a sip and smile. The little imaginary girl was so cute with the gravy smear over her little lip, like a strawberry milk mustache.
They sell little stuffed jamcois at toy stores. Some people like jamcoi so much they eat them year round. Some people have jamcoi decorations for their seasonal gatherings, with jamcoi serving platters and jamcoi painted on porcelain plates.
Sharon knew she’d have to do this again, with another jamcoi. Maybe not next year, but maybe the year after and maybe the year after that.
She was alone with it, in the kitchen, and she pressed her ear against the hot over door to see if she could hear any sound—any sign of life.
J.M. McDermott graduated
from the University of Houston in 2002 with a BA in Creative Writing.
He resides in Decatur, Georgia with an assortment of empty coffee cups,
overflowing bookshelves, and crazy schemes. He is author of the Dogsland
Trilogy from Nightshade Presswith the first book, Never Knew Another, released in 2011. In 2010, Apex Publications reprinted his genre-bending and Crawford Award-nominated fantasy novel Last Dragon. Visit J.M. on the web at http://jmmcdermott.blogspot.com/.
Huddled beneath the kitchen table, knees drawn to his
chest, he crouches with hands balled into fists, jammed against his ears,
kneading them as if he might cut off the screams by grinding cartilage and
flesh to a pulp. It doesn’t work; the screams come through just fine.
He keeps his eyes open, doesn’t seem to be able to
close them, even to blink. Which is too bad, because he’d give anything to shut
out what he’s seeing. At nine, he’s too young to make useless bargains with
God–If you take away the cancer I swear
I’ll be faithful to my wife, I really mean it this time–and he’s too old to
think he can make it never-was merely by wishing hard, hard, hard! All he’s got
are those fists of his, grinding, grinding. . . .
A woman falls to the kitchen floor with a wet smack.
Her face is turned toward him, and like his, her eyes are wide open. The
difference is she’s never going to close hers again, not on her own. An image
flashes through his mind, a composite drawn from hundreds of movies and TV
shows: a hand (sometimes belonging to a cop, sometimes a coroner) passing over
the open-eyed face of an actor pretending to be dead. The fingers are straight,
and there is no obvious contact between the hand and the mock-corpse’s face.
Yet when the hand has finished its pass, the eyes are closed, almost as if it
were some sort of magic trick. The boy wonders if he were to reach out and pass
his hand an inch or so over the woman’s face, if her eyes–those terrible, empty
eyes–would close. He doubts it. Life is never as good as TV.
The front of the woman’s flower-print sundress is
covered with blood, so much and so thick that it’s almost black. The dress
itself is shredded, and he realizes that what he first took to be blood on the
fabric is really gore smeared on her flesh. He stares at something round with a
little nub in the middle, and he understands that he’s looking at his first
naked breast. At least, the first he’s ever seen outside the pages of a
purloined Playboy. It looks so much different than the pictures he’s seen; it
sags a bit, for one thing. And of course, it’s slick with blood. Miss June
after she’s been through a meat grinder.
Someone else is screaming now. Or maybe the screaming
has taken up residence inside his skull despite his efforts to keep it out, and
it’s echoing in there, bouncing around, becoming louder and shriller with each
pass, and soon it’ll get so loud that his head can’t possibly contain it
anymore and it’ll explode, splattering the underside of the table with blood,
bone, and brain.
He wants to look to see who else is screaming, but he
can’t move (besides his fists, of course; those he can move just fine, still
grinding, grinding), not even to turn his head, so he keeps staring at the dead
woman’s face–name, name, name, he knows her name, knows who she is, but he
can’t–and he watches as a pool of dark blood spreads out from beneath her, the
leading edge of it sliding toward him slowly, as if he were sitting on a beach
watching a crimson tide come in.
Gotta move. If he doesn’t, the blood will reach his
sneakers within seconds, stain them, and his mother–that isn’t his mother on the floor, staring, mouth gaping open like a
dead fish, it isn’t!–will get mad at him for getting them dirty. She just
bought them last week. But if he moves, he’ll draw attention to himself, and
that would be a Very Bad Thing, because . . . because . . . he’s not sure why,
really. Just because.
So when the blood touches his sneakers, his legs
tense, but he doesn’t move, and when it rolls on, touching the bottom of his
shorts, starting to soak through at once, warm as fire against his skin, he
grits his teeth and a soft keening sound starts deep in his throat, but he
doesn’t move, doesn’t dare. Only now he’s punching his ears with fast jabs,
left-right, left-right, left-right, and his head starts to ring, but it’s not
loud enough to cover the screams, not nearly.
A shuffle of feet, and the table gives a jump. The
sound startles him, breaks his paralysis, at least for a second, and he’s able
to turn his head, sees a pair of hairy legs, men’s legs, feet in brown leather
sandals. There’s blood on those legs, streaks and splatters, though they seem
to be undamaged. Dripped from above, the boy thinks, the observation as cool and
rational as any made by the cops in the TV shows he likes: Starsky and Hutch, Baretta, The Streets of San Francisco, and the
coolest of all, Hawaii Five-Oh.
Drums, that wave, Jack Lord’s hair.
There’s another pair of legs beyond the hairy ones;
these are covered by blood-dotted khaki slacks, feet encased in
crimson-speckled black shoes. Under those shoes are red smears, and the boy
wonders how either of these men have managed to maintain their footing with so
much blood all over.
He hears the sound of what he guesses is a knife
plunging into flesh–chuk, chuk, chuk–but it’s a terribly ordinary sound, like
when his mother slices a cantaloupe (though he can’t see it from here, he knows
there’s one on the counter, mother bought it before they left home, they were
going to have it for supper, but he knows they aren’t going to have it now, no
one’s going to have an appetite after this).
Chuk-chuk-chuk.
Those hairy legs buckle, the sandaled feet slip out
from under them, and the man crashes to the floor, causing the table to slide
back a couple of inches. He falls next to the wide-eyed woman, a hairy arm
draped across her leg, almost as if he were purposefully posing for the crime
scene photos to come. His blood pools, runs, mingles with the woman’s. The boy
experiences an urge to reach out and try to separate the blood, smear it apart,
because if it gets all mixed up there’s no way
anyone’ll be able to tell whose is whose, and then how will the doctors be able
to put it back? But he doesn’t move, keeps pounding his ears until he realizes
something.
The screaming has ended.
He stops hitting himself, draws his fists away from
red, raw ears. Listens through the ringing, hears harsh breathing, tired but
excited. Looks at the khaki legs still upright, standing patiently. A hand
hangs next to the right leg; it’s holding a wicked-looking hunting knife, metal
coated with wet red.
“Come on out, Scotty.” This is breathed more than
said, the words drifting forth when the speaker exhales. The boy tries to place
the voice, almost can, but fails.
A pause, and he senses a smile accompanying the next
words.
“It’s your turn.”
The boy sighs, closes his eyes (since he still can)
and waits for the hands to reach for him.
Scott Raymond took a draw on his cigarette and let
the smoke drift out of his mouth of its own accord. He cracked the car window
so the smoke wouldn’t obscure his view of the apartment building, and more
specifically, the entrance. The radio was on–the cassette player didn’t work
and he couldn’t afford a car with a CD player–tuned to an oldies station,
though the songs they played didn’t seem all that old to him. Mostly seventies
and eighties stuff, with a bit of early nineties thrown in for the hell of it.
A song by Soft Cell was playing, “Tainted Love,” the one that had a series of
tones that sounded like the beeping of a medical monitor. It felt almost as if
the radio were keeping track of his pulse, making sure he stayed calm.
Oh, he was calm, all right. Relaxed. Just fucking great. Least, he would be if Gayle would deign
to make an appearance sometime this century, the goddamned bitch.
Easy, boy.
Don’t want to get the radio all worked up, do we? He took another drag on
his cigarette and pretended not to notice his hand was trembling. It had been
three weeks since he’d seen her last, almost twice that since she’d let him see
their son. He’d talked to David on the phone a couple times–How you doing, are you eating enough, we’ll
go to a Reds game this summer, how’s that sound?–but it wasn’t the same as
being able to see him, stand close enough to touch him, to smell the lingering
odor of Doritos and Ho-Hos on his breath, a scent finer than any rose.
He looked at the door to building 203. He knew he had
the right place; her Taurus was parked just a few spaces down from him. He
scowled, focusing all his willpower on the door, as if he hoped to force it
open through sheer mental effort. And then, sonofabitch, it did open, and out walked Gayle carrying
a plastic laundry basket full of clothes, and David behind, lugging a blue laundry
bag. Scott’s breath caught in his throat at the sight of them, and he felt his
sinuses go hot and moist, his eyes begin to tear up.
Keep it
together, man. You might not get a second chance at this.
He opened the car door, stepped out of his Subaru and
into the slight chill of an early April afternoon. He closed the door and let
his cigarette drop to the ground. Gayle hated the things, and he didn’t want
her to see him with one in his hand. He crushed the cig out with a quick step
and twist of his foot, then hurried toward his wife and child, only barely
managing to keep himself from running.
David saw him first. T-shirt, jeans, running shoes.
Thin and tall like his father, unkempt brown hair that refused to stay combed,
like his mother’s. Blue eyes from somewhere back in his genetic ancestry. Sky
blue, ocean blue, break-your-goddamned heart blue. Those eyes widened in what
Scott hoped was surprise, and then David grinned. “Dad!” But he didn’t drop the
laundry bag, didn’t come running over to give his old man a hug. No biggie,
Scott told himself. The boy was ten, too big for hugs. He understood, but that
didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like. . . like a hunting knife in the heart.
Gayle turned her head, saw him, but aside from a
flicker of something in her eyes, a flicker that was gone before he could name
it, her expression remained neutral. Not the best of signs, but at least she
wasn’t yelling at him. Not yet, anyway.
That ratty brown hair: he knew its scent, texture,
taste. Mud-brown eyes she insisted were really hazel. Full lips, and oh Jesus
what he could remember about them. She wore an oversized grey Ohio State
sweatshirt to conceal the fact she was ten pounds overweight, but she wasn’t
fooling anybody; you could tell by her round cheeks. He didn’t care. She looked
damned good to him, always had.
“Hi.” He continued toward them, smiling, hands in the
pockets of his jeans. He wanted to look as non-threatening as possible. He
stopped, making sure to keep six feet between them. Out of arm’s reach.
“What do you want?” Gayle said. No Hello, it’s good to see you, we’ve missed
you, David especially. Not that he’d really expected any of that. Still, it
would’ve been nice.
He shrugged, still making sure to keep his hands in
his pockets. “Just to say hi.” For the last several days he had mentally
rehearsed what he would say once he saw them, but now that he was here, he
couldn’t think of anything. All he could think to do was look at them and hope
they sensed the love he was broadcasting.
“You already said that.”
Scott smiled. “I guess I did.” He turned to David.
“How do you like your new place?”
Now it was the boy’s turn to shrug, and from the
corner of his eye, Scott saw his wife scowl. The gesture must’ve looked a
little too much like his father’s for her comfort.
“It’s all right. My room’s smaller than back home,
and I don’t have a good view out my window, just the parking lot.”
Scott glanced at the building, saw four windows, two
lower, two upper. David’s was one of those.
“I’ve told you before, hon, this is our home now.” A
hint of irritation on is, but
otherwise Gayle managed to keep her tone even. Scott knew she had seen him look
at the building, knew she probably didn’t like the idea of his knowing too much
about where they lived.
David let the duffel bag touch to the ground and
studied his Nikes. “I liked the house better.” Almost too soft to hear.
Gayle gave Scott a look that said, See what you started? “I liked the house
too, sweetie, but we don’t live there anymore. We sold it. You and I live here,
and Daddy lives in an apartment in Cedar Hill.”
“Actually, I don’t. Not anymore.” This wasn’t the way
he wanted to tell them; it would’ve been so much better to make some small talk
first. But now that he’d started, he couldn’t turn back. “I just moved into a
place on the other side of town. Not as nice as this,” he took a hand out of
his pocket and gestured at their building, “but it’s not bad.”
David looked up from his shoes and grinned. “Really?
That’s great!”
From the way Gayle’s eyes narrowed, it was obvious what
she thought about it. “We had an understanding.”
He took a deep breath, stalling for time to think of
a way to phrase his explanation that would mollify her. It was so much easier
when he was writing; there was time to think, time to reword, rework. Never in
real life. The air smelled of cut grass and chlorine from the pool over by the
rental office. Birds sang, calling to potential mates. He wished he could
remember whatever song he had sung that had attracted Gayle to him in the first
place. He’d sing it at the top of his lungs, if he could.
“We did. But I just . . . wanted to be closer to you
both. In case you needed anything. I know we’ve had some troubles –” Yelling obscenities, fingers pressing the
soft flesh of upper arms, leaning forward, thinking how easy it would be to
fasten his teeth onto her nose and just riiiiip “– but that doesn’t mean I
don’t still have a responsibility toward my wife and son. Besides, you said you
were willing to try to work things out.”
“I said I’d think about it.” Her voice was cold now,
and he knew that if David weren’t here, she’d tell him to fuck off.
“Okay, but how can we do anything if we live an hour
and a half apart? Besides, a dad should at least live in the same town as his
son.” He looked at David. “Right?”
David nodded, smiled, but in his eyes Scott saw he
was remembering the yelling and the grabbing. Scott looked away, ashamed. If he
didn’t love them both so much, need
them so, he wouldn’t have been able to face them.
There was another reason he had moved to Ash Creek,
one that had nothing to do with either of them, but he wasn’t about to mention
it, not now, not with how Gayle felt about his work, how she blamed it for . .
. the bad days.
“Look, Scott, we really need to get going. We’ve got
clothes to wash, and the laundry room is always busy, so we’re heading off to a
Laundromat.” David looked up at her. “And we don’t need any help,” she hastened to add.
Scott nodded. “Sure. Maybe we can get together for
dinner sometime? My treat? You know, just so we can . . . be together for a
while?”
Gayle looked at him for a moment, then set her basket
down on the sidewalk. She fished her keys out of her jeans and handed them to
David. “Go get in the car, honey. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“But, Mom. . .”
“Go on.” Gentle, but firm.
David made a face, but he did as his mother said. On
the way to the Taurus, he turned, waved once at Scott, then kept going.
Scott turned to Gayle. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t
call, but –”
She took a step toward him, then stopped as if she
were afraid to get too close. “I told you I needed to be alone for a while so I
could have some time to think, and I meant it. Alone. Without you. Get it?” She glanced at David, who had climbed
in the Taurus and was sitting on the passenger side, watching them. “And he
needs time, too. He doesn’t talk about it much, but I know it’s eating at him.
I need him to talk to me, I need find out just how badly he’s hurt inside.”
Scott could barely hold back the tears now, but he
had to. Gayle hated it when he cried, accused him of using tears as
manipulation. “I’m so sorry. If I could take back –”
“But you can’t, so don’t even bother to say it.” She
paused, took a breath. “If I have to get a lawyer and take out a restraining
order on you, I will. If that’s what it’ll take to keep you the hell away from
us, I’ll do it, and don’t think I won’t.”
She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself
as much as him, but he knew better than to say it. “I understand. But can I at
least call soon, just to see how you’re doing?”
“You saw us today; we’re doing fine. There’s no need
to call.” She picked up her laundry basket and walked to her car without giving
him a backward glance. Scott watched as she got in, started the Taurus and
drove out of the lot. David watched him without expression, and when Scott
waved, he started to hold up his hand, but then he stopped, as if thinking
better of it, and turned and looked forward. Scott was still standing on the
sidewalk when they pulled onto the street and drove off.
“Well,” he said softly to himself, “that didn’t go so
well.” He started back to his car. He needed a cigarette, and more, he needed
something to take his mind off Gayle and David and the complete cock-up he’d
made of his marriage. And he knew just the thing: her name was Miranda Tanner.
She was the other reason Scott had moved to Ash Creek, Ohio. Maybe, in the end,
the real reason.
He got in his car, lit a cigarette, started the
engine, and backed out of his parking space. It was time to make Ms. Tanner’s
acquaintance.
Tim Waggoner’s novels include the Nekropolis series of urban fantasies
and the Ghost Trackers series written in collaboration with Jason Hawes
and Grant Wilson of the Ghost Hunters television show. In total, he’s
published over twenty novels and two short story collections, and his
articles on writing have appeared in Writer’s Digest and Writers’
Journal, among other publications. He teaches creative writing at
Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s Master of Fine
Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program. Visit him on the web at www.timwaggoner.com.
Eight years ago I wrote a non-fiction book entitled Fear in a Handful of Dust: Horror As a Way of Life.
It was, at the time, the best I could make it. Upon its release it
received a lot of very kind reviews and was later honored with a Bram
Stoker Award nomination from the Horror Writers Association. Since
then, it has gone out of print, the rights have reverted back to me, and
if you want a copy you can easily find one at any number of on-line
booksellers (used and otherwise) – but be careful: some of them are
charging outrageous amounts. Believe me when I tell you, do not pay more than the original cover price of $40.00. Never say I offered no help during these uncertain economic times.
Ahem.
I was not then, nor am I now, completely happy with the way Fear…
turned out. It’s not just the formatting mistakes and typos that were
in that edition (though rest assured I did not do the Happy Dance about
those), but I always felt as if the book had come this close to
its goal and my intention only to run out of steam in the home stretch.
There are few worse feelings in a writer’s professional career than to
realize that you’ve loosed a piece on the world that, in some ways, was
either not yet ready to be written, or was ready to be written … just not by you, not as you were then, with your limited emotional inner-vocabulary.
Don’t misunderstand; I remain proud of Fear… and will
happily sign it for those who have in the years since gone to the
trouble to track down a copy because they’ve heard such good things
about it. In many ways (which I briefly touched upon in the original
edition) the writing of Fear… saved my sanity and my life. It
reinvigorated my creative drive (which had been all but nonexistent) and
my determination to live the rest of my life as well as I could and
bring no further pain, anxiety, sadness, disappointment, fear, or the
infliction of loneliness into it than I already had – and believe me,
I’ve done more than my share of spreading around the misery as fairly as
I can, especially in my younger days.
In the Introduction to the first collection of Cedar Hill stories, Graveyard People, I wrote, with tongue firmly in cheek, the following words:
“What you now hold in your hands is the first collection … of my Cedar
Hill stories (in) the order in which they appear in the Cedar Hill
Cycle, an ongoing work that will see completion only when I die.”
Somehow I don’t find that quite as funny now as I did then (more on that later).
It occurs to me that this explanation has taken on a far-too-somber
quality far too soon, so instead of carrying on in this
borderline-melancholic tone, I’ll take a breath and continue slouching
toward the point.
Explanation the Second
If you’re like me, you always feel a little apprehension when an
author releases the “preferred version” of a previous book. There are
naturally numerous reasons for this, not the least being that this is
the version of the book that existed before an editor got his or her red pencils on it. It could be that the previous version of the book was
the better version, thanks to a keen editorial eye that caught not only
typos and continuity problems, but was also able to find the excess fat
when the writer became self-indulgent and mercilessly trimmed away
elements that might very well have bored readers to despair. It could
also be that the book was gutted in order to meet an absurd word- or
page-count by a mass-market publisher or, in some cases, because the
fucking font used by said mass-market publisher was set in
stone and the length of the manuscript exceeded the previously-mentioned
acceptable page count because of the required use of said font.
So here you are, looking at an author’s “preferred” version of a book
you purchased, read, and enjoyed years ago (if you hadn’t enjoyed the
original, you wouldn’t be standing there with the new edition in your
hand wondering should I or shouldn’t I). It really is a crap-shoot,
because sometimes the “preferred” editions add depth to the characters
and storyline, fill in little plotholes that you noticed on the way but
decided didn’t really matter, and give the overall narrative a stronger
and more confident cohesiveness that you didn’t even realize had been
missing until now. And sometimes all a “preferred” edition does is dump
in the fertilizer that the original editor worked months to shovel out,
a heavy-duty filter mask covering the nose and mouth at all times.
Examples of “preferred” versions that fit in the category of the former: The Totem, by David Morrell; The Throat, by Peter Straub; Robert Dunbar’s The Pines; and F. Paul Wilson’s Rakoshi (originally published as The Tomb,
the novel that marked the debut of Repairman Jack). For the latter
category (and here’s where I’m going to piss off a lot of folks), I have
one grand example: The Stand: Complete and Uncut by Stephen King. For me, the new material added zilch
to that epic, except for some really grotesque background details about
certain characters that neither humanized them more, nor enriched
relationships, nor did anything to move the story forward; in fact,
sequences in the original version that I’d found terrifying and
exhilarating were now bloated and mind-numbingly repetitive. I had to
force myself to finish it. And King is a writer whose work I usually
greatly respect and admire (I think Pet Sematary will co-exist alongside the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk
until the multiverse implodes and we’re all reduced to the final
vibrations on the unseen strings running through the three sheets of
space and one sheet of time, and don’t even get me started on The Dead Zone, a novel I re-read every year … but already I digress).
It is a few months away from the middle of 2010 as I write this,
which means it is also a few months from my 50th birthday (this said by
the guy who didn’t have a game plan past 40 because he really didn’t
expect to still be here), and the person I am now, like the narrator of The Indifference of Heaven (a.k.a. In Silent Graves),
is coming to grips with the truth of his mortality; it’s no longer some
abstract concept happily pushed back into the fog youthful denial but
an actual figure closing in from the distance, with recognizable
features and questionable breath. So here I am, re-examining the horror
field and the validity of my place in it, and whether or not my overall
body of work has any real worth or purpose. (Hey, I’m almost 50, fer chrissakes! Allow me nine lines of middle-aged crisis morbid musings. Your turn is coming. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.)
Ahem.
I look back on the person I was eight years ago and find that he
embarrasses me. His impatience, his anger, his almost complete
disregard for his own health, his naïveté, and his selfishness; Christ, his selfishness. Yeah, he’d managed to survive some nastiness (okay, okay, a lot
of nastiness) from his childhood, his teenage years, his early adult
life, blah-blah-blah, and he was trying to believe that the worst was
over and he was now firmly walking down the road of health, happiness,
and success. He had no idea that all of the shit that had happened to
him up to that point – or that he’d walked into or caused himself – was
just a warm-up, the comic in baggy pants with a spritzer bottle and
banana-cream pie, the opening act to the final third of his life where
more than a few surprises were waiting up the multiverse’s sleeve, some
of which were going to land on his head like a curse from Heaven.
But I do have at least one thing to thank him for; he had a hand in
helping to get me to the point where I am, at last, ready to write the
book that Fear in a Handful of Dust should have been.
And so …
Explanation the Third
That does not mean that what you’re reading at this moment is the “preferred” version of Fear…
— no; had that been the case, I would have kept the original title and
simply added a “Revised and Expanded” beneath it in smaller letters.
Consider this book to be the equivalent of a variation on a theme. It’s
a bit more orderly, a bit more directly honest, a little less
stream-of-consciousness (but not much), more focused on the writing
process (and the pitfalls that process often presents if one is not
careful), and if you’re expecting to find the entire text of the
original between these covers … sorry, not happening. It has nothing to
do with any esoteric or “artful” (gaaah! – that word!)
pretensions on my part. But it does have everything to do with those of
you who purchased the original edition, and those of you who have
purchased this “…variation on a theme.”
As a reader and lover of limited edition books, nothing makes me want
to grab a rifle and climb a water tower more than shelling out
forty-bucks-plus-shipping for a limited edition, only to see the exact
same book, word-for-word, come out a few years later in a much less
expensive trade paperback edition. (Yes, I still tend to overreact from
time to time). It completely negates the collectability of the
original edition and makes the reader feel like a rube, like he or she
has fallen for the old bait-and-switch.
If you are one who purchased the original edition and may be thinking
that you’ve been had, know this: probably a little more than 40% of
the original text is contained within these pages. What reprinted text
there is has not been altered in any way (with the exception of
correcting typos and errors in grammar and syntax). I think you’re
going to appreciate the new material and having this as a companion
piece to the book you purchased eight years ago.
If you are one who didn’t purchase the original because the
forty-bucks-plus-shipping for the limited edition was way the hell out
of your financial comfort zone, you should find the cover price of this
Apex edition much more agreeable, and you’ll be getting the book that
I’d always intended the original to be. I wanted to make certain that
no one comes away feeling as if they got the bad end of the deal. I
spent a lot of time worrying over this, and I hope you find my solution
to be a fair and equitable one. The book was simply too important for
me to give up on.
Which, finally, leads me to the new title and …
Explanation Next to the Last
As mentioned earlier, the original edition was subtitled Horror as a Way of Life, and it actually came close – this close
– to conveying what I wanted to get across to those folks – readers,
writers, editors, book reviewers – who, in one form or another, seemed
to frequently and loudly bemoan the stale state of the horror field, yet
most, when asked what might be done about it, just cast a downward
glance and shook their heads in bemused resignation. Horror fell into a
sickening rut in the late 80s and early 90s and that’s what lead to its
demise; everybody was writing the same kind of book that was being
written by everybody else, and if someone, through sheer cosmic
accident, happened to produce a piece of work that was original, that
dealt with the terrors within as well as without, that offered
unique situations and fully-developed three-dimensional characters
reacting as real human beings would react when faced with such a
dark challenge, well … there was no dearth of evil-clown artwork that
could be slapped on the cover to make it look like everything
else. (Ask the wonderful, overlooked and underrated writer Joseph Citro
about this, whose handful of excellent novels during this period were
all but treated as afterthoughts – evil clown covers included – and
which are now being reprinted by a first-rate regional publisher,
Hardscrabble Books, in New England, and treated as the works of literary merit
they always were … but the publisher never shies away from mentioning
the more horrific elements to be found between the covers – not one of
which has an evil clown in sight.)
Well, here it is, nine years past the 2001 so daringly
envisioned by the remarkable Arthur C. Clarke, and Horror has been
enjoying something of a renaissance since entering the new century. Oh,
man, it really looked good when the books first started
shipping out of the warehouses around 2002 – 2003. Mass-market
publishers were taking chances with some risky, emotional, challenging,
even experimental and surrealistic material. The subject matter
grappled with in these books – not to mention the skill and manner with
which it was tackled – was for a while awfully exciting. It seemed like
this stuff was so gloriously all over the road, something new and
different every month, nothing predictable or pedestrian – hell, even
some of the covers weren’t what you expected. It was time to
see what the horror-hungry public was now ready to flock to, a public
that had been surviving on expensive limited- and numbered-editions from
a small handful of specialty presses that somehow managed to not lose
their shirts in the interim. For a few years – say, up until 2005 –
2006 – it looked as if Horror was truly going to pull itself by its
bootstraps and start climbing toward a new and higher creative precipice
where it could evolve into what Robert R. McCammon once called “… the supreme mythic literature of our time.” Whoo-hoo! Groovy, even!
I’ll just grab my wallet and then — let me at ‘em! Would we see the
resurrection of the traditional ghost story? I wondered. Would the
countless purveyors of so-called psychological horror grow enough of a
spine to move out of the niche created by Thomas Harris and Hannibal
Lector? Would the plethora of second- and third-rate Stephen King
wannabes finally feel that second testicle drop and dare step out of his
(justifiably) massive shadow? Might this next generation of writers
bring with them an aesthetic and intelligence honed by reading of past
masters? Would there at long last be that oh-so-longed-for daring move
into cross-genre work? The editors were swearing that Horror wouldn’t
fall into the same old rut of the late 80s – early 90s. And, much to my
surprise, it didn’t.
It created a completely new rut to fall into.
The rut of the 80s and early 90s was guarded by vampires and psycho killers.
The new rut – and what a roomy, bottomless rut it seems – is guarded by … vampires, psycho killers …
… and zombies.
Lots and lots and lots of zombies, some of which carry the shredded
flesh of Jane Austen in what’s left of their teeth; others are still
chewing on H.G. Welles, or Jules Verne, or .. I’ve lost track. After
the publication of Brian Keene’s Stoker Award-winning The Rising the renewed interest in the undead was fast and furious (and I am not
blaming Brian for this, so no nasty e-mails, please). Yeah, fast and
furious, and a lot of Keene’s imitators produced work that was, at best,
of journeyman quality. Most of it was just awful – no sense of
character, no original plots or plot elements, just face-paced blood and
guts and zombies.
Lots and lots and lots of zombies.
(This is all leading up to my explaining the new title, so stay with me.)
I have grown to hate zombies. For the record, I have written only 3
zombie stories in my career, and one of them – “We Now Pause for Station
Identification” – won the third of my five Bram Stoker Awards.
I love a good zombie story when it’s done well, when it’s in the
hands of someone with skill, wit, intelligence, and the ability to
instill it with more than one level. Anthologies like those edited by
Christopher Golden, Kim Paffenroth, John Joseph Adams, and the Prime
Books anthology Zombies: The Recent Dead, edited by Paula Guran
(which should see release shortly after this book) are excellent
examples. But don’t kid yourselves: the quality of the stories you’ll
find in these collections are the exception, not the norm.
The recent and near-ubiquitous trend of “reimagining” classic works
of literature by adding zombies or vampires or sea monsters or IRS
agents – okay, that last one hasn’t happened yet, but it’s probably
coming soon: Wise Blood-Sucking Vampire IRS Agents – got on my nerves in a hurry. I read Seth Graham-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
and liked it; it was funny enough to hold my interest and showed a lot
of imagination on the author’s part; there were a couple of times where I
could not differentiate his prose from that of the author on whose dead
spine he was doing cartwheels. It was a fun read, but that was all.
Now we’re seeing – from both the major mass-market house as well as the
specialty press – a plethora of “revisionist” classics wherein
characters such as Mr. Darcy or Huck Finn (with Zombie Jim), as well as
others mentioned previously, being picked over the last remains of meat
on a turkey drumstick. At least Graham-Smith demonstrated some craft
in his novel, but the imitators that have followed in its wake are the
equivalent of on-line fan fiction. They’re mostly terrible. The
writers don’t even bother with craft, they simply find sections of the
original text that can be excised so that they can insert their beastie
of choice. In olden days, this would have been called hackwork.
I know an excellent writer currently enjoying a rise in his
popularity who can string together some of the loveliest sentences that
work on both the micro- and macro-writing levels. His prose is
confident, his sense of pacing a wonder to behold, and his
characterization is solid. Problem is, nearly all of his books have
been inspired almost completely by Stephen King’s books. And it shows.
Most of the time said writer is just employing King-like concepts and
tropes as a jumping-off point; the King-like familiarity grabs readers’
attention, pulls them into the novel, and keeps their attention as he
smoothly moves into his own original storyline and fresh ideas. There
is another up-and-coming writer I know who cites horror movies and their
directors as being her major influence. And it shows. She couldn’t
write a good sentence if guns were being held on her family and one of
them killed each time she over-used adjectives. Like the writer
mentioned earlier in this paragraph, you can correctly infer that there
is something missing from their work for me – the same thing I
find that is missing from a majority of new horror being published by
newcomers: the authenticity of an individual literary vision – in
short, too much of it reads like what’s come before, and what’s going to
come after will be just like what came before and what comes after it …
ad nauseam.
I have a theory about this, about why it’s happened before and why it’s happening now.
Too many Horror writers are afraid to bring their own personal
darkness to the surface and use it to instill their work with that
authenticity; it’s just easier to use what’s come before – or elements
of what’s come before – because it’s immediately recognizable by
readers. Vampires. Ghouls. Serial Killers. Science experiments gone
awry … and zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies.
Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates, Poe,
Kelly Link, Caitlin Kiernan, Jonathan Carroll. Names you know, and
whose books you have read. You know what sets them apart? They know
their own darknesses, have come to grips with it, and are now in
control. They also like to mix it up as often as possible; with the
exception of Poe, all of them write or have written some impressive
cross-genre works, works that terrify, frighten, disturb, move, and
chill you because they know the big secret: terror is an extremely intimate
thing, and if that terror feels mass-manufactured, then all is lost.
So they instill their own personal darknesses into their work –
carefully, subtly, quietly, often imperceptibly – so that when the set
pieces come, when all hell breaks loose, they have drawn the reader so
deeply into the narrative that there’s no escape; story and reader have
become one because said reader has been made to feel that the writer has
written this book or story exclusively for them, and they
accept the writer’s individual darkness because it has come through so
well on the page – because the writer, as Yeats so succinctly put it,
had the “reckless courage” to enter into the abyss of him- or herself,
submerged themselves in that abyss until they have gathered the darkness
needed for the work, and then made it back to the surface and to the
keyboard for the most part unharmed.
Each has gone to their darkness and shared it brilliantly on the page.
If only the next generation of horror writers could learn from this.
But most of them aren’t; most of them have no influences that existed
before 1982, and much of their work doesn’t read so much as a horror
novels as they do film or mini-series treatments. They walk nowhere
near the Abyss of the Self where their personal darkness awaits at the
bottom, so they cannot bring that element of authenticity to their work.
But their darkness is still there, waiting.
I see the EXIT door ahead, so …
Explanation the Last
I decided to re-title this book To Each Their Darkness as a
reminder that until you have explored your Abyss and brought back the
materials you need to enrich your work, that missing authenticity will
always be AWOL. And it’s not only your loss, but your readers’ loss, as
well.
Not to mention that of your story or novel.
And all of them deserve better. They deserve to be steps upon which
the horror field can reach that new precipice upon which it comes ever
closer to being the supreme mythic literature of our time.
To Each Their Darkness, then.
I’d like to share some of mine with you. Welcome to my Abyss.
Gary A. Braunbeck
is a prolific author who writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction,
fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. He is the author of 19
books; his fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian,
Russian and German. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in
various publications. Some of his most popular stories are mysteries
that have appeared in the Cat Crimes anthology series.
Gary’s fiction has received several awards, including the Bram Stoker
Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 2003 for “Duty” and
in 2005 for “We Now Pause for Station Identification”; his collection Destinations Unknown won a Stoker in 2006. His novella “Kiss of the Mudman” received the International Horror Guild Award for Long Fiction in 2005.
Apex blog is migrating to another website! While your service won't be interrupted, you'll notice a few changes that I am really excited about:
You'll be able to access author biographies with one click.
You'll be able to effectively search for authors, posts and categories.
You can comment easier and interact more
More Wordpress functionality and less headache for your blog editor (super happy about this)
While you will still have fresh content every week from our contributors, you might be missing some old blog posts in the first month - that's to be expected. I am going to start a scheduled, systematic migration of blog posts over to the new platform. What will be lost, sadly, are the wonderful comments that have been left. This site will be archived, but old posts migrated to the new platform will not have the comments you readers have so thoughtfully left.
I hope you guys are as excited as I am for a new blogging platform with its simple, but sleek, Apex look.
Once a month we will run a variation of this post informing our new readers important stuff they might have missed. For example, did you know we have a pretty active Twitter feed? Yah, we do.
We'll try to run this post on a weekend so that your weekly reading isn't clutter with cold, hard facts.
Apex Publications produces print and digital books of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. They have mostly been novels and collections of late, though we have also done nonfiction, anthologies, and novellas.
1) Any interest in a new Apex T-shirt to wear at conventions this season?
2) Any input on the type of design you would prefer?
3) Any particular color other than black (I prefer dark navy)?
4) Guys' T-shirts are pretty standard. Ladies, what do you prefer? Tank? Certain lady's cut? (I'm showing my male ignorance... that's all I can think of...)
5) Would you be willing to chip in $10 to help offset the costs?
Please respond to jason@apexbookcompany.com or comment below.
This
issue will get under your skin. I didn’t set out to produce a theme
issue, but with two stories featuring tattoos as a central motif, the
urge to pair them together was overwhelming, and I succumbed.
This
month, David J. Schwartz’s “Bear in Contradicting Landscape” and A.C.
Wise’s “My Body, Her Canvas” both use tattoos, but to completely
different ends. Our reprint this month is from the inimitable Maureen
McHugh. “Useless Things” meditates upon creation, humanity, and
parenthood in a post-apocalyptic setting. Carrie L. Vaughn graces us
with her lovely poem “Caverns of Science.”
This month’s nonfiction brings an interview with Lavie Tidhar, who is putting the final editorial touches on the Apex Book of World SF 2.
Alex Bledsoe explains why all those secret societies of vampires and
werewolves wouldn’t work very well, in his essay “No Mortals Allowed.” Our gorgeous cover art this month is by Donato Giancola.
MGE:
Can you give our readers a bit of background on how you got involved with the
first Dark Faith anthology?
JG:
Maurice Broaddus and I were
at a writers retreat when he first bounced the idea off me.Gary Braunbeck had
introduced us a year or two before, and we had become friends and sounding
boards for each other's work.We talked
about how to approach the subject of belief in genre.How to package and sell it.It was one of those late night conversations
that you don't expect to go anywhere.At
least I didn't.
A
few months later, Maurice and I were having dinner.At this point he'd sold Apex on Dark Faith
but had a three-book deal looming on the horizon.I told him he needed a co-editor, someone to
handle the slush and manage the overall workload.I suggested three or four writers (my name
wasn't among them).A couple weeks
later, Angry Robot signed Maurice to that three book deal and, much to my surprise, he
asked me to edit Dark Faith with him.
MGE: What did you learn from your experience as
co-editor?
JG:
The process of editing an anthology really holds a mirror up to your own work.I defy anyone to put together a pro-rate
anthology and not come out the other side a better writer.It really helps you refine and articulate a
sense of what works (and doesn't work) in short fiction.
MGE: What have you been doing since the release of
the first one?
JG:
Most of the following summer was spent marketing the book and lining up future
projects.Since then I've completed a
young adult science fiction novel that's being shopped, written short stories
for a half dozen markets, and started work on a series of interconnected novellas
that will eventually be packaged as a novel.
MGE: Did you finish up with the first one hoping to
have a second?
JG:
We had a great deal of fun putting the first one together, and we all wanted to
keep pushing the boundaries of genre fiction.Once the reviews started coming in, it seemed inevitable.
MGE: What has been involved in the planning process
for the second Dark Faith anthology so far?
MGE: How did the January reading period come to be?
JG:
On Dark Faith, we accepted submissions for four months.By the time we were done reading, the process
had eaten up five months of our lives.So there was definitely a desire to limit the open submission
workload.We also found that our best
stories came early or late in the process.The middle months yielded a vast wasteland of mediocre fiction.By limiting it to a single month, we hope to
focus on writers actively crafting stories for us.
MGE: Of course readers of the blog that happen to
be writers are going to be hoping you will give them the inside scoop on what
you are looking for (insert guidelines link). Can you share with us a
little about the stories that didn't make it in last time and why?
JG:
Belief doesn't have to be about organized religion, but it's very difficult to
write on the subject without drawing on some unique aspect of your own
experience, faith, or values.The bulk
of the pro-level stories we rejected lacked that unique flavor.They could've been written by any
sufficiently talented writer.The
generic nature of the work kept it from standing out.
We
also had to reject a number of amazing stories due to space constraints.If I was a writer trying to break into this
anthology, I'd go short.That gives us
more room to take a chance on you.We
purchased work from two previously unpublished writers for Dark Faith.Both stories came in under twenty-five
hundred words.
MGE: What would
you like to see represented in submissions this time around that you got too
little of last time? Are you the co-editor that likes talking animals?
JG:
I'd love to see more stories that deal with faith from an African, Asian, Middle
Eastern, or South American world view.I'm also a big believer in interstitial fiction.As for talking animals, I'm the one that tends
to reject those stories.I don't have
anything against them, but they're hard to do well.
MGE: What would you instantly reject from the
slush pile?
JG:
Stories that proselytize or mock the beliefs of others.Go into politics if that's your goal.
JG:
For the most part, the post-submission process is about shaping.You're looking for a sense of synchronicity
or a progression like a great mix tape or album.Maurice and I stand around a big table with
all the shortlisted stories on index cards and start mixing and matching.Some stories fall out of favor because they
simply don't fit with the evolving tone or they too closely mirror another work.Others fit together like the writers traded
notes before sitting down at the keyboard.At this level, most revision requests are minor.Contracts are signed, line edits are
completed, and the table of contents is announced.Then the work of promoting the book begins.
MGE: What other
projects are you involved in, and what are you hoping to work on next year?
JG:
Right now I'm finishing Breaking The World for Apex.The apocalyptic novella follows a group of
teenagers inside the Branch Davidian Compound during the standoff between the
FBI and David Koresh.It's a prequel to
"City of Refuge,"
an alternative history short that first appeared in Apex Magazine #12.
In
the coming months Shroud Magazine will
feature an interview and short story from me."Ghost in the Machine" deals with third-party politics and the
dangers of state sponsored torture.I've
also written "Vampire Nation" for Michael West's Vampires Don't Sparkle!
anthology.
In
2012, I'll be writing two more novellas for the Breaking The World series and doing
some work for hire in the gaming industry.Visit www.jerrygordon.net
for more in the coming months.
---------------
Jerry Gordon is leading at least one
life too many. As a full-time author, grad student, web programmer, and editor,
he lacks the time to write a witty bio, but assures you that if you keep
drinking, he’ll get funnier. In addition to co-editing Dark Faith and Last
Rites, he’s published stories with Apex Magazine, Indie Review, and the
Midnight Diner. He recently finished his first novel, Severed Dreams, and can
be found blurring genre lines at www.jerrygordon.net.
You can learn more about the
interviewer, MG Ellington at her website which appears
to have been under the control of evil, yet thankfully lazy web monkeys since
May.
Patrick Rothfuss is currently hosting a fundraiser for Heifer International, a group whose mission is to end hunger and poverty and care for the earth. This sounds like a great and noble mission to me.
There are a crazy number of high profile editors, agents, and authors offering critiques (including Patrick). Friend of Apex Jennifer Brozek is one of the editors offering a critique, so I want to provide a direct link to her eBay listing.
Go bid. Big high. Bid often. It's for a great cause.
We live in dark times, as most of you are beginning to realize (if you
haven't already). Protests happen each and every day now, across our great country.
Banks take our money, and make it increasingly difficult to survive
financially. Crime seems to get worse nearly everywhere, and safety is not
always assured.
Our bill of rights, sacred to all Americans, is on the verge of being
burned alive. The first amendment is challenged constantly by those who would
rather we not speak. We can now, as American citizens, be detained indefinitely
by our own tax dollars.
As creators, we also run into other, unsettling problems. Our work is
constantly stolen, posted in online pirated libraries for tens of thousands to
download for free. We don't see a dime for any of those, so we can't afford the
rent, food for our children, or even healthcare to keep us alive.
While the joke can be told that we face extinction in 2012 (see the
flick! It has the guy from Cheers!), personal extinction for creators is a very
real thing. Many of us are reaching the point this year of no longer being able
to feed and house our families. In the worst job market since the Great Depression,
we can't even go out and get a job to offset that. We may have to give up the
very thing that makes us who we are.
I see stories about authors who die because they can't afford simple
healthcare. I see
stories of creators whose works are pirated many times over for each they
originally sold. I try
and try to sell art, to get more publishers, to no avail, with time running out
on the unemployment clock.
I'm forced to ask myself why I even bother trying to be an artist.
Theodore Roosevelt once said, "I have never in my life envied a
human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led
difficult lives and led them well."
I've heard it said too that no great thing is easy, and I think that's
what Roosevelt was driving at. Pushing ahead in the most difficult of times, to
persevere in the worst of times, is the only way that we can truly do something
great.
How does that happen? Simple. In my case, being the artist, I just pick
up the brush and go for it. Authors, start typing your sentences. Before long,
you have a paragraph, then a page, a chapter, and before you know it an entire
book. One that's just waiting for me to finish the cover art for.
By creating more and more work, we define ourselves in the face of
adversity. We can say what we want to say, even challenge those who would
rather our bill of rights not exist. We can create works of beauty, works that
challenge the status quo, even works of horror, for those around us to love (or
even hate).
Instead of just ending with that one piece, move onto the next. Don't
wait for the world to find you, demand instead that you are heard with your new
works as well. Create more and more works, push back against the world that
would crush you.
Much of it won't be easy. You might be fighting for every inch that you
gain, only to lose two of them again. Push back, follow through with who you
are and what you want to say. If you are strong enough, and work hard to be
better at what you do every time, you may succeed.
When your calendar ends, your clock times out, be it tomorrow or a
hundred years off, you can still be wallowing in the mud of your dark times.
You can let the world beat you, and give up on all that you dream for.
Or you can look back at your difficult life, your creations, and
realize that you led your life well.
-------------------------
Russell Dickerson been published as an illustrator
since the late 1990's, including work for authors including Brian Keene,
Peter Straub, Joe R. Lansdale, and many others, and continues work with
publishers Cemetery Dance, Dark Regions, Thunderstorm, and others. He
has also had art included in the prestigious Spectrum annual, for the best
in contemporary genre art. Visit his online galleries at www.rhdickerson.com
A woman falls to the kitchen floor with a wet smack.
Her face is turned toward him, and like his, her eyes are wide open. The
difference is she’s never going to close hers again, not on her own. An image
flashes through his mind, a composite drawn from hundreds of movies and TV
shows: a hand (sometimes belonging to a cop, sometimes a coroner) passing over
the open-eyed face of an actor pretending to be dead. The fingers are straight,
and there is no obvious contact between the hand and the mock-corpse’s face.
Yet when the hand has finished its pass, the eyes are closed, almost as if it
were some sort of magic trick. The boy wonders if he were to reach out and pass
his hand an inch or so over the woman’s face, if her eyes–those terrible, empty
eyes–would close. He doubts it. Life is never as good as TV.
r, lit a cigarette, started the
engine, and backed out of his parking space. It was time to make Ms. Tanner’s
acquaintance.
MGE:
Can you give our readers a bit of background on how you got involved with the
first 
