The Feast of the Phoenix

I decided it was time to make a habit of participating in Chuck Wendig’s weekly flash fiction prompts: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/06/21/flash-fiction-challenge-another-roll-of-the-dice/

I rolled the dice, and chance decreed that I must write a sword and sorcery conspiracy thriller containing a mythological bird and a massive feast. One hasty typing session and one hastier rewrite later, I ended up with this:

The Feast of the Phoenix

Brann muttered a curse and sheathed his sword. Two feet of keen steel, currently the only thing he could trust.

He’d thought he could trust Marcus, but his old friend had revealed himself to be one of them, the captain’s oath to his lord superceded by darker oaths to the secretive Brotherhood. Marcus’ blood stained a corner of Brann’s cloak now, and he just hoped no one would notice. Marcus’ body was hidden in a chest, and would not be found until after it was all over, one way or the other. Having failed in his last attempt to find an ally, Brann would finish this alone.

He’d managed to slip into Duke Aggravan’s keep, for despite the guards and the price on his head, the rangy scout still possessed an intimate knowledge of the hidden corridors of his liege’s fortress, and the agility and strong climbing grip earned on the cliffs and tall pines of his homeland. The Brotherhood had falsely branded him a traitor, engineered his downfall exquisitely, made him an outcast hated even by his brothers in the Duke’s service, but Brann still had his own strength and cunning and will, and the Black Dog of the Duke’s Guard was used to relying on himself alone.

In the great hall, the feast had begun. Duke Aggravan’s fiftieth birthday celebration was nearing its climax, and when it did, the Phoenix Brotherhood would strike.

Brann stayed in the shadows, but made a point of not moving furtively. If seen, he intended his stance and posture to send a message that he belonged where he was. He’d found that among civilized men indoors, that approach served better than stealth.

The kitchen. Three massive fireplaces were manned by spitboys and apprentice cooks, and the three roast boars looked almost done. The pies and small fowls were being served now, carried by a seemingly endless stream of servants in the Duke’s formal livery. The hot air here was crammed with the noise of crackling flames and hissing juices, bubbling soup, clattering dishes, shouted orders and furious curses from the head cook, whose nerves were frayed. No one here had time to think about anything other than the task at hand, and Brann slid through the clangor without attracting a second glance.

He had been cast out of this castle, the badges of rank stripped from his armor, the armor itself stripped from his back, his back marked with fifty and five lashes. He’d borne the shame as stoically as he bore the pain, and in the thieves’ quarter of the city he’d visited the old haunts, sought out the cutpurses, fences, pimps and sellswords he’d known of old, the comrades of his younger days when the wild young savage had first come down from the mountains and lived among the civilized as a thief and mercenary.

Brann had risen in the world since then, but the Black Dog’s reputation had not been forgotten by the scum of the city, and those who needed a reminder got one: iron-strong fingers on their mouths and throats, gripping them from behind in dark alleys when they least expected it. He’d followed the trail to Crespus the Turtle.

The Turtle hadn’t wanted to talk, but after his bodyguard fell with a split skull, the bloated old thief-master found himself without an option. Brann had to cut off three fingers before Crespus began to fear him more than he feared the Brotherhood, but in the end the Turtle revealed all he knew.

Brann had been an obstacle to their plans; the incorruptably loyal barbarian who cut off any hand that offered him a bribe and nailed it to the gate of the keep. They knew they couldn’t sway him, so they removed him. The Phoenix Brotherhood had the wealth and secrets to bribe or blackmail almost any other man in the Duchy, and so witnesses materialized swearing by their lives, evidence was planted by trustworthy men, and a Priest of Mihrazar had risked damnation eternal by perjuring himself when asked to scry for Brann’s guilt or innocence.

A neat job, and all just part of the foundation laid for tonight’s work. They meant to see Aggravar die this day, and with his death fuel the final spell that would unleash their god upon the world. Crespus hadn’t been supposed to know that, but he’d been bold enough to spy on his masters, and had learned thattonight’s murder was meant to break the chains that bound the Phoenix. The Fire Bird would rise again, and the cities of the world would burn.

The great hall.

Aggravan sat in his throne at the table’s head, a circlet of silver and opal on his head, bearing around his neck the gold torq that was his badge of rank. The long table was lined on either side with the knights and ladies of his court, their feasting accompanied by the music of a sextet of minstrels in the gallery overlooking the hall. The twenty best and most trusted men of the Duke’s guard stood in full dress armor along the walls. Once Brann would have had a place of honor among them. Now he had the sword at his belt and the fury in his heart.

That was all he’d need.

The fully-feathered roast peacock was served. That was the signal.

The two guards standing directly behind the Duke Had their hands on their sword hilts, loosening the blades in their scabbards.

Brann was in motion. He cast aside his cloak and had his sword in his hand by the time he reached the table, and he shoved the peacock to the floor with a mighty kick.

The traitor guards were moving, coming at him. He leapt at them, dodging their strokes and burying his short blade in one of their necks.

As lifeblood sprayed across Brann’s face, the other was moving to complete his assigned task. Duke Aggravan had turned to watch Brann’s charge, however, and so the attacked didn’t come upon him from behind as planned.

The Duke was surprised, and unarmed, but he was still hale and vigorous, with a fighting man’s ingrained reflexes. What would have been a killing stroke was deflected by the Duke’s table knife and the assassin’s sword cut him across the arm rather than through the throat.

Then Brann was upon the assassin. He thrust his sword into the man’s right elbow, into the joint of the armor, scraping bone. Then as the man screamed Brann tore his helm off, gripped his head in both hands, and twisted. There was a snapping, and a tearing, and still Brann twisted, until the thrashing corpse was still.

“My lord,” he said at last. “I am glad to see you well.”

END

Evil Dead Is Awesome

I was initially skeptical at best about the idea of remaking one of the best horror b-movies ever filmed, especially since so much of what’s great about the original revolves around the unique sensibilities of its director and star. As it turns out though, the new film is superb, inspired by the original but very much its own thing, a very different and much more brutal beast.

This is the most exhilarating horror movie I’ve seen since Cabin In the Woods, the most brutally gruesome gorefest I’ve seen on the big screen since maybe Hostel, and the first straight horror movie I’ve seen in a long time that really surprised me. Evil Dead lovingly reconstructs what Cabin In the Woods deconstructed, and the stitched-together reanimated corpse of that autopsied revenant is as scary and gross as you’d imagine it could be, even if I couldn’t watch the Eric-Stoltz-looking dude examing the forbidden book without thinking of Fran Kranz desperately telling everyone to not read the Latin. This is a no-holds-barred old-school spam-in-a-cabin picture that, like its namesake, actually delivers all the thrills and chills all those drive-in trailers promised.

Unlike its namesake, however, there is no sense of humor or gleam in the eye as it goes about its bloody business (barring maybe a couple of clever winks to the original). A lot of people forget that Raimi, Tapert, and Campbell were primarily comic filmmakers before they set out to make a horror picture for their first feature, and ardent disciples of the Three Stooges, as their use of the “fake shemp” label implies (and that term does appear in the credits of this new film, warming my heart). By The Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn they were going all-out Looney Tunes zany, but even in the first one there’s an element of madcap comic energy. The guys making Evil Dead are horror fans inspired by a horror film, and the wackiness is gone. The energy is still there, but it’s all channeled into darker avenues.

Just about every awful thing that can be done to a human body gets done in this film, and done on the screen. There’s tongue stuff, eyeball stuff, limbs coming off in all kinds of rough ways, blunt trauma, fire, water, tree-rape, chunky blood-vomit, nail-gunning, and what kind of an Evil Dead movie would it be without that trusty sawed-off shotgun and chainsaw? There is a spectacular amount of blood onscreen, more than you’d think would fit inside these five peoples’ bodies by a long sight.

There’s more to this than gore, though. Part of the genius of The Evil Dead is that it extracted and combined the active ingredients of The Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist into a single high-intensity dose. It’s not just that people get torn up, it’s that something gets inside them, and then makes them tear themselves and their friends apart. Possession, damnation, friends trying to rip your face off, having to take a shotgun to your girlfriend, and ruthless flesh-bound killing machines that just will not lay down and die.  These five people are trapped in the worst kind of hell, where something is taking them over and driving them to do horrible, horrible things to each other. And it’s even more intense here because these guys aren’t just out for a nice vacation in an old abandoned cabin in the woods. They’re here because this is their last-ditch attempt to get our leading man’s sister to kick heroin, out where she’ll have no choice but to go cold turkey. No matter what agonizing contortions her body goes through, no matter what terrible hallucinations she suffers, no matter what insane lies she tells to convince them otherwise, they’re going to keep her here until the junk is out of her system.

You can imagine how much worse that makes things.

This is a lean, unapolagetic, brutally bloody scare machine, and it delivers the red meat with a ferocious vengeance, if you have the stomach for it. The rusted-out hulk of the familiar Oldsmobile outside the very familiar cabin (It’s still the same layout as featured in the originals, and in Cabin In the Woods, meaning by this point I’m more familiar with this piece of real estate than I am with some actual houses I’ve lived in) and the fact that they provide a satisfactory answer to the troubling question “why don’t they just burn that goddamned book?” that inevitably crosses the mind as soon as they stumble across it, well, those are just the cherries on top.

Speaking of which, fans will want to stick around through the credits, just because.

 

He Is Risen

Rise up! There is no darkness that can endure the light of joy! There is no grief that can endure forever! We are renewed, the world is renewed, and there is light and warmth around us! We are all of us Children of God, and if we feel sorrow or pain or loss, we may know that our Father is no stranger to these things either, for that is the lesson of Good Friday. Today is the fulfillment, the payoff, and today our wounds are healed!

By the risen Christ, rejoice! Go forth, sons and daughters of the light, and wherever you find sadness, bring joy!

Die Hard V Is Absolutely Terrible

It’s really, really tempting to start by saying that the only reason A Good Day to Die Hard isn’t the worst Die Hard movie ever made is that it’s not a real Die Hard movie. I’m resisting that temptation, because if an action movie with “die hard” in the title and Bruce Willis as John McClane isn’t a Die Hard movie, we have to have a serious talk about how and when to renounce heretical non-canonical installments in an action franchise, and that’s inherently silly.

So let’s start with this: A Good Day to Die Hard is the worst Die Hard movie ever made. By a wide margin. (Fun fact: I just had to look up the title of this movie on Wikipedia because I’ve just been referring to it as Die Even Harder Than Previously).

Here’s how the franchise breaks down: you have one great movie, two decent ones (you can tell watchable Die Hard movies by the fact that their titles make sense: Die Harder is all about repeating the first movie but bigger and louder, and With A Vengeance is about vengeance, but can anyone explain why the fourth one is called Live Free or Die Hard?), and then some total bullshit (someone needs to be punched in the face for even thinking it would be OK to release a PG-13 Die Hard movie). You don’t need me to tell you why the original Die Hard is so great, because you’re on the internet, with cracked.com over here and the-isb.com over there, where you can read thousands of words detailing why it’s so great. I’m going to tell you anyway, though, because I do what I want.

Die Hard is a masterpiece of narrative craftsmanship. A Swiss watch made out of ass-kicking and explosions. It is one of the most immaculately constructed scripts in history, and there is not a wasted word or image from beginning to end. John McClane is one of the greatest action heroes ever, Hans Gruber is hands down the single best action movie villain of all time, and every single member of the supporting cast is a memorable, sharply defined character with a clear role to play in the ferocious drama the film enacts. I’m counting the location as one of those characters, because Nakatomi Plaza is a clearly defined and vividly drawn setting that defines the action taking place inside its walls. Most of the movie is a chess game between two dramatically different men, and the players, pieces and board are introduced to us clearly and efficiently. At every moment the stakes are clear and constantly escalating, we always know where the hero and villain are in relation to each other in their cat and mouse game, and everyone’s motivation (with one exception) is always clear. It’s a rare scene that doesn’t have at least two layers of significance to it, as plot, theme and characterization are packed into every frame of the film. John McClane is a very tough, very skilled, and very lucky man, but his human frailties (both physical and emotional) are what define the movie, and there’s never a time when he’s anything other than tired and desperate (even before Gruber’s men seize the tower, he’s worn out from an agonizing plane ride and taking a desperate shot at fixing his broken family).

Everything that Die Hard is, A Good Day to Die Hard is not.

After four successive sequels, everything human about John McClane has been stripped away, until all that’s left is the cast-iron and granite of an Action Hero. No more physical frailty. No more emotional vulnerability. John McClane: Franchise Star feels neither pain nor fatigue even when enduring impacts that would kill mere mortals, and the only emotions he feels are crankiness and sarcasm. And sarcasm isn’t even an emotion. He’s also passed these traits on to his son, John McClane Jr., who is essentially a tougher and less-amnesia-ridden Jason Bourne. Al Leong emoted more in the scene in Die Hard where he ate that candy bar than Jai Courtney does in this whole movie. There was a scene where young Jack McClane had a piece of rebar stuck in his side, and I didn’t even realize it until they pull it out at the end of the scene, because both McClanes are carrying on a conversation exactly like two people who didn’t have a piece of rebar stuck in either of their torsos. It was surreal.

Where the original film is a model of precision and clarity, this thing is a shambling half-baked mess, starting with an incoherent prologue and continuing through the most half-assed “why is this character even in Russia?” scene imaginable (“John, your son who you haven’t kept track of for years but suddenly decided to look up is in Russia, and he’s on trial for a bunch of stuff in a couple of days.” “Well, shit. Guess I better go over and…do stuff?”). They could have replaced it with a title screen that said “And so John McClane was in Russia for some reason.” Considering how surprised McClane acts when he first encounters his son, that might even have made more sense, and I would bet they at least toyed with that idea while writing the thing. McClane then literally wanders into a CIA extraction like Mr. Magoo (SPOILERS: turns out his son’s trial was part of a hugely elaborate and deeply stupid CIA extraction scheme to grab an informant, and McClane blows the whole thing when he walks up to his son’s getaway vehicle and starts lecturing him). The resulting freeway chase scene crams a lot more cars and real estate in than the scene from The Matrix Reloaded, but somehow manages to be deathly dull in spite of that, and if this were real life rather than an action movie that had transcended the self-parody event horizon, John McClane would be personally responsible for several innocent dead commuters.

So John McClane has wandered into a James Bond movie and is trying to heal the rift between him and his son, which is complicated both by their complete lack of emotion and the way bad guys keep showing up out of nowhere to shoot around them. There are double crosses, triple crosses, constant submachine gun fire, and explosions and breaking glass all over the place None of it does anything but cosmetic damage to the McClanes, including that thumb-sized hunk of rebar that was the sole consequence of their plummeting about a dozen stories. Filling a room with broken glass that doesn’t hurt John McClane seems downright perverse.

There are crosses, double- and triple-crosses, Chernobyl’s involved because of course it is, and Bruce Willis lets out a contractually-obligated-sounding “yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” before doing some green screen work that makes his Sin City stuff look like The Bicycle Thief. None of it makes much sense, and none of it matters because there are no stakes whatsoever.

Throughout this whole shambling mess of meaningless crap, Bruce Willis looks, acts, and sounds like a cantankerous invulnerable grandpa. There’s a scene where his son is driving them to the scene of the next shootout, and every second they were in that car was a second I expected him to start angrily demanding that they stop at a Cracker Barrel because he was hungry and needed to take his meds. John McClane is no longer tired, afraid, stressed, or battered; he’s just pissed off about these kids today with their hippity-hop music and their baggy pants.

If I had paid money to see this embarrassment, I’d be angry. As it stands I got paid to see it, at what works out to double my hourly salary and with free gourmet food thrown in, and I still feel cheated. The movie ends with a title card telling you how many jobs the production created, which I think was necessary because the filmmakers realized that at that point audiences would be demanding to know what the point of all this was. It was a lot of jobs, but I still feel like everyone would have been better off it they’d just re-released Die Hard.

They Linger Still

“Another homicide coming in.”

Ann Stilson poured herself a cup of coffee from the big 30-cup urn next to the sink, and stirred in a packet of the depressingly bad non-dairy creamer. Another homicide to handle tonight and all she wanted to do was go home. Go home, kick her shoes off, watch the Daily Show and sleep in till eleven. That sounded fantastic, but instead she was now officially 15 minutes past the end of her shift with one more dead man to deal with before she could start her weekend.

She was in her department’s part of the morgue, a bleakly antiseptic low-ceilinged room that was all white tile and fluorescent light, although it was homier here than it was down the hall in the part of the morgue where they stored and cut the meat. A coffee maker, two sofas, wobbly coffee table, one derelict armchair, a refrigerator; not much, but better than stainless steel autopsy tables. Then there were the half-dozen Bottle Trees lining the wall. Tall racks holding the sleek Klein Bottles that contained the patients. She didn’t really understand how the Bottles worked, although she knew their properties as single-sided edgeless containers played a role in containing ectoplasm. She didn’t know many details about what the pathologists did with the bodies either, or what the cops did with the crime scenes, and didn’t worry too much about it.

Her job was all about dealing with the patients after they came out of the bottle.

A paramedic she didn’t know brought the patient in and got her signature for him.

“How was he?” she asked as she initialed his receipt.

“Not great. Freaking out, screaming at the ambulance, rattling the windows, usual stuff. Kept trying to follow the body while we loaded it up. I don’t think he was a really together guy even when he was alive. His medical records say we had him in the emergency room once for a heroin overdose.” The paramedic shrugged as he handed her the carbon sheet of her copy.

“How’d he go?”

“Shotgun, looks like. Someone kicked in the door of his apartment and just blew him away.”

“Ugh.”

“Yeah. He was pretty traumatized about it. All we could do to get him into the Bottle. Can I get that pen back from you? Thanks. Detective Meyer’s going to be coming by to check him in an hour or two, or whenever he finishes with the scene. You have fun with him.”

“Thanks,” Ann said, picking up the bottle. The paramedic took his clipboard and left.

Most people, at least the ones living in well-off first-world countries, don’t get to see many Shades in bad conditions. Polite society keeps death at a distance, uses hospices and funeral parlors and kind-eyed clergymen to keep an arm’s length away from inevitable. They see spectral grandmothers quietly watching christenings and graduations, peaceful ghosts pacing their familiar halls, maybe the occasional merry soul dancing at their own wake.

It’s left to society’s cleaning crew, the cops and ambulance jockeys and hospital staff, to deal with the real ugliness of passing. Dying tranquilly in a nursing home bed is one thing, but dying with a shotgun load of metal pellets in your chest, that brings out the worst in people.

That’s what Ann was thinking to herself as she finished her coffee, delaying the inevitable for a minute before opening the Bottle and introducing herself to her patient. Arnold Roberts was his name, according to the tag on the Bottle.

He poured out like smoke when she unstoppered it, colorless and rippling as he took form. Medium height, slight build with pipe cleaner limbs and a face too big for his head framed by long stringy hair.

“Mr. Roberts? Arnold? My name’s Ann, and it’s nice to meet you. I’m here to help y–”

He started screaming. It went on for a while.

Ann poured herself another cup of coffee. This was pretty routine, and usually the best thing to do was wait for them to tire themselves out. A few minutes went by and she was feeling the beginnings of a headache around her temples, but at last he stopped.

“Hello, Arnold. I’m Ann, Ann Stilson. You’re in a safe place and I’m here to help you. Would you like to sit down?” She herself sat down on the old couch opposite the Shade. The edges of his shape were less distinct, his form paler. He didn’t seem to be a very strong Shade and his fit had taken it out of him. She gently smiled at him, and after a minute or so he drifted over and sat down on the other couch.

“Do you understand where you are, Arnold? Or what’s happened to you?”

No answer. His eyes were wide, and he wasn’t quite aligned with the couch, resting about an inch above the cushion. She knew this meant he was still very nervous.

“You’re in the hospital, Arnold. There’s not really a gentle way to say this, but you’ve passed on.” immediately he shimmered, shaping momentarily losing definition. It was an act of will to maintain his shape, no matter how minor. “We’re in the morgue now, and I’m a counselor, the person who’s here to help you with your transition. I understand how hard this is for you to deal with, so we’ll take our time, all right?”

“Oh god, I’m dead. I’m really dead.”

Like all Shades, his voice sounded flat, hollow, mechanical. They vibrated the air through force of will, the same way they reflected light, and the result sounded utterly unnatural to anyone used to the sound of speech produced by biological machines. Words formed without lungs, lips, tongues or teeth, the speech of the dead sounded like an imitation of text-to-speech software relayed through a cheap speaker. Most people found it unsettling, but Ann was used to it.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Really dead. Jesus, I’m dead.”

“It’s OK, Arnold. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed by it, believe me, but you’re still here, and we can help you move on, get past this, to–”

“Get past this? I’m dead!”

“Yes, you are. But death isn’t the end, Arnold, and you have me to help you with what comes next.”

“What is that? What does come next? I have no body, no pulse, I’m…I’m not even sitting on this couch!”

“It’s all right, Arnold. It’ll come in time. As for what comes next, a lot of that will be up to you. But for right now, we want to help you find your feet, so to speak. You’ve just been through a seriously traumatic event–

“Yeah, no kidding! I saw them put me in a body bag!”

“And that’s got to be hard to deal with. But my job is helping people deal with things like that, and I’ve been doing my job for a long time and am pretty good at it. For right now, let’s not worry about what happened. Let’s start with who you are, learning about your identity as a person.”

“What, are you kidding? Is this some Dr. Phil crap?”

“I’m going to be working with you for a while, Arnold, and I’ll need to get to know you. But more than that, your existence after death is defined by your self-image, by who you believe and know yourself to be. You’ll be stronger, more clearly defined, if you have a more conscious awareness of who you are to yourself. Does that make sense?”

“Uh. Sure.”

“So tell me about yourself, Arnold. Introduce yourself to me.”

“Man this is like a meeting. ‘Hi, I’m Arnold, and I’m dead.’ Do I get a chip after I’ve been dead a month? Never mind. OK, so you know my name, I guess if we’re in the hospital you’ve got my medical records so you know I’ve had trouble with drugs, I guess. I’ve been clean for a month though, was turning it around. Guess that turned out to be a waste of time, huh?”

“Time spent improving your life’s never wasted, even now. If you’ve been successfully fighting your addiction, your mind and will are going to be better prepared for this stage of your existence.”

“Healthier afterlife, huh? Awesome. I get to be a better ghost, hooray me.”

Privately, Ann was glad he hadn’t been in a drugged state when he died. Chemically altered minds tended to be even worse at handling the transition than usual. She had a long scar on her left arm from a Shade who’d died from too much meth. He’d about torn the whole room apart, a screaming twitching poltergeist. That was when they’d bolted the furniture to the floor.

“You get to be a better you. Don’t worry right now about being a Shade, just think about being Arnold Roberts. Can you tell me about your history?”

It was Ann’s preferred practice with homicides, to start them off with open-ended questions and let them explore their own sense of self some at the outset. They’d talk about what they were comfortable with, she’d get a picture of who they were, and then they’d be ready to move into the more specific targeted questions of the standard assessment. She’d found that most violently transitioned Shades didn’t do well if you started asking them about specifics immediately, and they didn’t like feeling like they were working from a scripted questionnaire. It made some of them angry, some of them just panicked or froze up, some came apart entirely under the stress of having to think too concretely too soon.

So Arnold talked, he rambled, and she interjected now and then to keep him from derailing onto overly negative tracks but mostly gave him his head and let him talk about himself, making notes occasionally but primarily just focusing on general impressions. He was smart, not very introspective, avoided talking much about what she guessed was a traumatic childhood, and was probably not being honest with her or with himself about how recovered from his addictions he’d been.

After about 40 minutes he was calmer, more focused, more physically concrete in appearance, and better aligned with his surroundings, which meant he appeared to actually be sitting on the couch now instead of floating a little above it. There even began to be a slight olfactory component in his manifestation, a combination of cigarette smoke and cheap incense that wasn’t pleasant, but was a good sign that he was starting to feel much more together. As with the way Shades looked and sounded, their smells were inhuman and artificial, but for counselors they were almost always welcome, since a Shade who manifested a scent was in pretty stable condition.

That was good, because that was when the door buzzed. The detective.

“That’s a police officer, Arnold. They’re investigating your death. Do you feel ready to discuss it with them?”

“Um. Wow. Question I never thought I’d be hearing. Pretty weird, right? Nah, I mean I guess you have to say that all the time, this is normal for you.”

“I totally understand your being nervous. You’re doing really well, though, I mean that, and we want to make sure your passing is resolved.”

“You mean you want to catch my murderer. OK.”

Ann opened the door. The detective was a heavyset man, broad-shouldered, medium height, hair blond turned gray and receding from his wide forehead. He wore a cheap suit with no tie, and had his shield hanging from a chain around his neck.

“Ms. Stilson? I’m Detective Meyer, homicide. If your patient’s up to it, I’d like to get his statement, anything he remembers about it.”

“Come in, Detective. Coffee?”

“Sure.” He sat down on the couch opposite the Shade while Ann went to the coffee machine.

“Mr. Roberts, I’m Detective Meyer, and I’ve been working on your case. I’m going to ask you a few questions. If you can’t remember, don’t worry about it; I’m sure Ms. Stilson’s told you that with a traumatic, er, passing, your memory’s likely to be a little scrambled. Totally fine, we work with what we’ve got. Ah, thanks,” he said, taking the Styrofoam cup Ann handed to him. She sat down on the couch next to Arnold.

“So, Mr. Roberts, do you remember anything about today?”

“Um. It’s kind of…I think I remember things but it’s like something painted on glass and then shattered, you know? A lot of pieces and I don’t know how they fit. Does that make sense?”

“Absolutely. I hear that a lot, totally normal. So, do you remember getting up this morning?”

Do you remember around what time you got up? Do you remember what you had for breakfast? Are there any faces you remember? What about last night? Do you remember talking to anyone? Shades’ memories of their passing tended to be kaleidoscopic, and the more abrupt or traumatic the death, the worse the fragmentation, so it was no good asking things like “who kicked open your door at approximately 11:30 AM and blasted you in the chest with a shotgun?” The police had learned to approach these things laterally, getting the stained-glass shards of dead men’s memories and adding them to the other puzzle pieces they had to work with. Ann had heard it all before, of course, more times than she could count and then some, and she didn’t listen anymore to the content of the questions or the answers. Instead she watched her patient, listening intently to his intonation, observing the coherence of his outline and integrity of his features. Arnold was apparently doing well, but murder victims could be like Mt. St. Helen’s, and it was vital to catch the warning signs before they blew their tops. The furniture was bolted down and the detective would have checked his gun at the morgue door as per policy, but she could easily see him getting strangled with that badge chain if Arnold were to go poltergeist. It had only happened a few times in this morgue, and none of those had been fatal, but worldwide there had been eleven investigators or mortuary workers killed by homicide victims in the past year. That was the kind of statistic that encouraged attention to detail.

Arnold was continuing to do well as Meyer picked at the minutiae of his life. He was composed, free and forthcoming with the details he could remember, not stressing out about the things he couldn’t. It was going smoothly.

Then the detective asked about romantic or sexual partners, and things changed fast.

For just a minute Arnold seemed to be thinking about it deeply, a thoughtful frown on his face. Then for a second his expression changed to one of epiphany, then one of anger, then it blurred out altogether as he started losing control.

“MONICAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” the Shade wailed suddenly, rising up from the couch as a vaguely man-shaped pillar of roiling smoke.

“Shit!” Ann hissed between her teeth.

The detective stood rapidly, dropping his notebook and reaching for the holster he’d apparently forgotten was empty.

There was a WHUMP! of compressed air and the detective was thrown up and backwards to bounce off the tiled wall.

Ann was already moving, as calmly and smoothly as she could towards the Bottle.

“THAT BITCH!” screamed the Shade. “THAT BITCH AND CHARLIE!”

There was another rush of air and the cop was thrown again, this time forward into the couch, which was a mercy.

“THEY SET ME UP!”

Ann had the Bottle, and was moving to the Shade, doing her best to maintain a stillness, to avoid drawing his attention.

She activated the Bottle just as he began to marshal another telekinetic blow, siphoning him into the container.

She tried to do it gently, tried to keep from tearing him apart, but he wasn’t making it easy. He was screaming again, magazines from the coffee table where rising in a whirlwind behind him, and the bolted furniture was rattling. Then, screaming still, he was drawn into edgeless mouth of the Bottle, and she sealed it shut.

“Well, that’s back to square one. If I were you, I’d start looking for this Charlie guy.”

Meyer picked himself up off the floor, wincing as he rubbed the back of his head. “I think I know where to start looking. Think his murderer getting caught will help him move on?”

“You never know. I’ll worry about it tomorrow. I’m going home, and you should go upstairs and get that looked at.”

The detective picked up his notebook and stuck into his pocket, and Ann took the sealed Bottle and hung it on the tree.

The smoky ectoplasm swirled inside the bottle as she turned out the lights and closed the door.

Memory Lane

Reading my old drafts is like stepping back in time.  Specifically, back to around 2006-2007, when I was a lazy college kid just figuring out that his life plan needed to be drastically reworked and not having any idea of how to do that.  I had left high school planning to become a well-educated cop, and I was three and a half years into getting my BS in Criminal Justice before I realized how bad an idea that would be for me personally (if I had become a cop, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that I would have become a completely intolerable asshole by this point, and possibly an Objectivist).  I had delivered pizzas, written movie reviews for the school paper for Taco Bell money, and done some amateur theater.  At this point I was in no way prepared for life, and while I knew I liked writing and seemed to be good at it, my portfolio consisted of two mediocre short stories, a couple of well-received pieces of Batman fan fiction, and a Dirty Harry / Highlander crossover story that was frankly awesome.  The fan fiction is still be on the web somewhere, but I’m sure not going to tell you where to look for it.

Somewhere in the intervening six years I guess I became a man, and I’ve definitely grown as a writer, though not as much as I should have if I’d been more diligent this whole time, and it’s fascinating to open up what amounts to a message in a bottle from myself.  The really satisfying thing, though, is looking at this old stuff and realizing that it’s actually good.  Rough, unpolished, sometimes embarrassingly amateurish, but there’s some decent stuff to be polished up and fixed here.

I am looking now at a hardboiled slacker narrative I started writing about ten minutes after the first time I watched Brick.  At the time I was heavily into Kevin Smith as well, so that seeped in along with the first- and second-hand Hammett and Chandler, and there was a fair amount of semi-autobiographical detail there too, stuff like my delivery job, favorite video store, and the tobacco shop I hung out in at the time, and the end result was half of a story about a video store clerk whose murdered roommate and best friend has accidentally dragged him into a Maltese Falconesque MacGuffin hunt that somehow reads like a Big Lebowski pastiche even though it would be at least a year before I watched The Big Lebowski for the first time.  But it’s got some good stuff.  The narration is kind of ridiculous, but it’s snappy, and there are some clever lines scattered throughout, and it’s pretty well paced.  I’m going to finish it now, and when I do I think it’ll be something I can take pride in.

Then next on the docket is what I think has to hold the record as the oldest coherent story idea I haven’t discarded for being embarrassingly stupid (such as my adventure series about a gunslinging badass waging war against the Ku Klux Klan after they take over the country, or the one that was basically Stephen King’s Dark Tower series without coherence or a plot).  I took my first crack at this idea when I was about twelve or thirteen, and then I took  couple of additional swings at it over the years until finally I sat down at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three and began to write the thing out in longhand during my lunch breaks at Wal-Mart (I worked there before their marketing trolls decided they should drop the hyphen).  I had a crisis of faith around that time that kind of mirrored what the protagonist was going through in the story, and hit a point where I could either write a dishonest ending, or a depressing one, and so I left it at that for six years.

I’m ready to finish it now, and finish it optimistically and honestly at the same time, which I guess took a six-year journey from where I was to where I am.  I started it as a middle school kid obsessed with Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, continued it as a directionless college grad dealing with existential angst, and now I’m ready to finish it.  The story of Father MRK-17691, robot missionary.  Fired from orbit onto the surface of a colony world separated from human society and regressed to an iron age culture, he’s a mechanical monk programmed to administer the gospel in hostile environments, and I’ve left him and his questions of faith and personhood hanging unresolved for too long.

Once More Round the Sun

2012 may have been the single worst year of my life.  I lost a lot, I endured a lot of pain, and I’ve come out the other end with scars that’ll last me the rest of my life.

The important thing is that I’ve come out the other end.  I’ve lost friends, lost family, maybe came close to losing my job a time or two, experienced about the most excruciating and inexplicable pain I’ve ever felt, and failed to achieve most of what I meant to achieve but I’m still in the game, and I’m staying in it.

Meant to write a novel.  Damn thing’s still not done.  Meant to sell some stories.  Got a pile of messy unfinished drafts topped with a rejection or two.  Meant to get promoted.  I guess I’m lucky I still have my job.  Meant to put a little money away.  Got the front end of my car busted up some instead.  Meant to start selling some of my work on the Kindle store.  Not quite there yet.  Meant to have a kid.  Fuck you for asking about that.  I spent most of the time from March to around October or so depressed as hell and barely even realizing it because being ground down by life had gotten to be my new normal.

In 2012 I lost.  But I’m not finished yet, and the last year hasn’t all been on one end of the scale.

I’ve made some friends, and gotten to know some friends better.  I wrote a comic book that got published, and you can buy it now.  I met seasoned veteran writers and scholars and talked with them as equals.  I have a cat, and a tattoo, and a library.  I failed in the attempt, but I’ve got most of a novel, and that’s more than I had before.  I’m a better writer now than I was last year, and I’m closer to being a pro.

I’ve got family, I’ve got friends, I’ve got faith, and I know who I am.

Tonight I’m licking my wounds.  Tomorrow I roll up my sleeves.

2013, I will sell fiction.  I will see comics published.  I will finish a novel. I will continue to be a minister, in my own way.  I will tell stories.  I’ll remember who I am, and I won’t be beaten.

I’m going to take this year by the throat.

Advent Calendar Day 24: The Ghost of Tom Joad

So here we are, on the night before the day.  It’s cold, maybe, up in the hills outside of town, and lonely for the handful of roughnecks sitting around a campfire passing a bottle, hoping no sheep stray tonight.  The streets are crowded, the inns are crowded, the bars are going to be crowded too, and tempers fray some and there’s quiet grumbling about invasive bureaucracy out of earshot of any occupying troops, who are doubtless doing their own grumbling about being stuck out here in one of farthest-flung and least-hospitable backwaters in the Empire, far from the sights and sounds and smells of home.  Even a woman about to give birth right there in an innkeeper’s courtyard can’t get a room or a bed on a night like this.  In Bethlehem tonight, everyone is a stranger, even if your bloodline runs right through the great warrior-bard himself, and the descendants of the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah make do with what they have, which is a feeding trough out of the way.  This night, the world isn’t much different than it was in the Hoovervilles John Steinbeck painted in The Grapes of Wrath, and it isn’t much different than it is right now.

This is where the miracle happens, and that’s not by chance.  No, this universe is a chaotic one as far as anyone can see, unfolding as it seems according to a series of rules we’ve only just begun to try and understand, but by my faith this is also a universe given shape by stories, and this is one of the dramatic climaxes of the story of stories.  If the Storyteller were a hack, this occasion would be marked by explosions and pomp and elephants and circumstance and marble backdrops and excess; a Cecil B. DeMille spectacle.

God knows there’s a time and a place for that kind of thing.  He also knows there’s a time for smaller and more intimate glories.

This story’s climax has a young couple holding their newborn son close.  A handful of ranchers seeing something beyond them, something too wonderful for understanding, in the face of an infant.  A young mother storing these things in her heart.  These are the kinds of moments John Steinbeck had a mastery of, simple joys and simple hardships of simple people.  Like any master, he came close to capturing the fire with which the Almighty imbues the thing itself.

Maybe there’ll come a time when this mother has to weep for this child, when the holders of temporal power become too scared to do anything but rip him open.  Maybe, as she stands there on Skull Hill watching the blood drip from his body and into the dead earth, she thinks back to the night she first held him in her arms.  Likely she doesn’t understand, because how can she, how can anyone?  But she endures, because she’s a tough woman from tough stock, born to toil and hardship, and she knows at least part of how special her boy is.  And three days later, maybe it won’t be that overwhelming a surprise when she sees his tomb standing empty.

Steinbeck surely had the Galilean carpenter and his mother in mind when he wrote Tom Joad and his mother, saying their goodbyes in the California night.

“Then I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there… I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folk eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

Hear the Word of the Lord God, oh Israel, because this promise is made by the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, as well.  So if you want to look for the Nazarene today, if you want to catch a glimpse of the King and Kings, Lord of Lords, Fruit of the Seed of David, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah,then you’d best look for him in places like these, because you’ll find him, with his callused hands and his scarred wrists, standing right beside the ghost of old Tom Joad.

Advent Calendar Day 23: Hark, the Herald Angels Sing

When it comes to proper Christmas music, truth told, I’ve little patience for most of what’s less than a century old.  As Vlad III said, “a house cannot be made livable in a day, and after all how few days go to make a century!”  For a piece of music to become lived-in, for the sound and sense of it to become a part of the landscape, it takes time and weathering.  This one’s at least a couple of centuries old, from Cornwall mainly, and has been shaped and eroded by the passage of time from then and there to here and now.

This weathering can sometimes leach the pith from the meaning of things.  Noel is a word not much used outside this song, and there isn’t much need for it be used, or to trace it back through the French to Latin to find its roots.  Yet the roots are there, as in all things, and the discovery of them is a joy.

Eighteen centuries divide the song from its subject.  Shepherds and star and astrologers are all rolled up in a pretty melody for the King of Israel, but they’re legendary elements, bits of myth shaped to fit the meter and the rhyme scheme.  This song’s depiction of what happened in Bedlam that night likely bears as much of a resemblance to the facts as Le Morte d’Arthur has to the deeds of whatever warchief won the day at Badon Hill.  The deep snow surrounding those Palestinian shepherds is harder for me to believe in than the Incarnation itself.

Legend and myth have their place in the scheme of things along with fact, and the presence of a myth doesn’t negate the fact that may underlie it.  At the root of all these things, we have the birth itself.  The night when something amazing entered the world, subtly at first.

The first Noel.

Advent Calendar Day 22: Fairytale of New York

Probably my absolute favorite Christmas song.  It’s ugly, depressing, and raw, a story about two spectacularly broken addicts who’ve torn their lives apart and have nothing left but each other to cling to, and the hope that maybe things will finally turn around.

It’s also incredibly uplifting, because here’s two spectacularly broken people who’ve still got each other when everything else is gone, and the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.

It’s impossible for me to hear the song and not thing of the tragedy of Kirsty MacColl, who died too soon.  It’s also impossible now for me to hear it and not think of one of the high points of Garth Ennis’ masterpiece, Preacher: in the middle of an epic saga of secret societies, renegade angels, vampires (the vampire Cassidy is pretty blatantly drawn from Shane MacGowan’s blueprint, come to that), invincible killing spirits, and a more forceful call for answers from the Almighty than is found in the book of Job, the real fulcrum of the story is the love between Jesse Custer and Tulip O’Hare.

Is there a moral to this love story?  Maybe that love’s a two-edged sword.  Maybe that if each other’s all we’ve got, we’d best look to it that it’s enough.  Maybe it’s that we’ll never be enough, not without help from outside.  Or maybe, if nothing else, it’s that next year if we’re lucky we’ll get another shot, and we can make the most of it.

I don’t know.  Let Shane and Kirsty speak for themselves, and take what you find.