daughters of catastrophe

Happy Valentine's Day - an excerpt

2012-02-14T09:25:00.000-08:00

Beverly lied. She told her mother she was going with Marietta and Ethel to see a movie. They did this every so often. Either they walked to the movie theater in Kelso or begged a ride from Aunt Constance and went to the Longview Theater, which was much nicer.

Today Beverly explained that they were planning to have lunch and see The Way We Were, which seemed safe enough to Mrs. Sherman until she heard from a friend that it was pro-Communism. Beverly swore to her mother that they would see Paper Moon instead, and that she wasn't going to see The Exorcist with Constance as a chaperone. She swore on a bible at Mrs. Sherman's insistence and in imitation of her gravely dramatic expression.

Lunch and a movie would be about three hours. That would be enough time, by Beverly's estimation. She didn't know for sure. She had never done this before, snuck off to the woods with a boy she liked.

He was new in town. His name was Oliver, a very odd name for a boy in Skillute. It sounded uppity. That was the first thing Beverly had noticed, right after she noticed Oliver's shaggy brown hair. He had the kind of hair that would make Beverly's father ask, in his bear-like, old-fashioned way, if he was a boy or a girl. Beverly was dreading this pathetic joke so much, she was afraid to invite Oliver to her house. She was also afraid that Oliver would find her home small, overcrowded, and tacky. He would see her mother's collections: a cluster of dolphin-shaped Avon bottles in the bathroom, a pile of ceramic poodles on a shelf in the hall, and the Robert Goulet albums next to the RCA stereo in the living room.

As far as Beverly was concerned Oliver had every right to be uppity. His family came from back east, as far away as New York and New England. That was almost as good as being from Europe. His mother was a Daughter of the American Revolution, a fact that Beverly found impressive. Her mother didn't know what D.A.R. stood for, and her ignorance further convinced Beverly that it must be very high toned. What her mother knew was how much property cost. She estimated at a glance that Oliver's parents occupied the most expensive house in Skillute.

"Rolling in it," Mrs. Sherman had said more than once. "That's what they are. Look at the marble lions next to their front gate. That house looks like a library, or a courthouse!"

Oliver had already completed the books on the current list at school. He seemed bored in class. He would often get a dreamy, faraway look as though he knew a much more interesting place, where he'd like to be.

Beverly's mother said she had been "itching for trouble" for a long time, ever since she turned fourteen. Beverly wasn't sure what that meant. The way she saw things, she was simply on the alert for the unusual. She bought clothes without her mother's advice, and paid Ethel's aunt to alter them for her. Ever since the Christmas when she caught her mother sewing fake Casual Corner labels into her school dresses Beverly had known that the adult world was treacherous and not very bright. Women with children were the biggest liars of all.

She wanted authentic, unique things, or nothing. She was finding that the more outlandish something seemed to the people she knew the more likely it proved to be valuable. Like caviar and fondue. Her father had never heard of fondue. He thought it was a country near Sweden. Beverly found his ignorance shocking, especially since he had served in the Navy during a world war. How could he travel all the way around the world and learn nothing?

This year, to top off the list of things that disgusted Beverly, all the boys in her class were learning to spit. It was their favorite pastime, spitting. She couldn't imagine ever being in love with or married to one of these lumbering, tongue-tied, saliva- and tobacco-spewing boys.

Oliver always nodded and watched her expression closely when she talked. He was the only boy at school who did this. The others grunted and looked past her like they were waiting for someone else to show up. They only looked at her when she walked away.

Beverly longed for a boy to fall in love with her, a boy or a man, someone who wasn't a singer or a character on a TV show. She wondered what it meant to be swept away. She had seen movies where men swept women up in their arms, but that looked made-up.

She couldn't get advice from her friends. They knew nothing about seduction. Ethel still had posters of David Soul and Michael Parks in her bedroom, and she lit candles and looked up at them like a little girl. Marietta was more grownup but in a watchful, silent way that sometimes gave Beverly a chill.

Nowadays Marietta's aunt kept her out of school whenever she felt like it. She used the girl as an assistant but didn't pay her much. The only money Marietta was allowed were tips for providing gullible people with what Delphine Dodd called her intuitions.

Of the three, Beverly decided, Ethel was the lucky one, despite her immaturity. Since her crazy mom and dad had died in a fire that almost killed Ethel too, she had been living with her dad's sister. Constance Burney ran a tailor shop in their home. She was quiet and patient, bland in her views, a teetotaler and a Republican. She never discussed politics or religion with anyone, because she said these subjects were in poor taste. She taught Ethel to sew, a trade she could use anywhere. Aunt Constance was even saving up to send her to the community college for a year of fashion and costume design. After that Ethel could probably get a job in Vancouver or Portland. She could leave Skillute if she wanted to.

Beverly sighed. She had often dreamed of her meddling, messy family going up in smoke. When she was nine years old she had written a solemn story about a nine-year-old who murdered her dull parents and loudmouthed siblings and burned their bodies in the fireplace. The heroine had eaten dainty cucumber sandwiches from a silver tray while the considerable layers of fat crackled and sizzled in the glinting fire.

She practiced a bereaved expression, just in case. She could see the black silk dress and hat she would wear to the funeral, both designed by a famous French woman. Beverly's teacher pronounced the woman's name "Shah-NEL." Beverly's mother mispronounced it "Channel." Beverly had seen the perfect black dress in a magazine next to a monthly column by Mademoiselle Chanel, who was a genius on the subject of what women ought to wear. One rule of thumb was to make sure your hemline wasn't too trendy. It was supposed to match your age. Mademoiselle Chanel said: If a man laughs when he sees a woman climbing out of a car, her skirt is too short.

Oliver held out his hand to help Beverly. They followed the ivy-covered incline and walked for a quarter of a mile until they reached a patch of cedars. The woods here were spotty, strewn with weeds and dead branches, dotted with the brittle spines of devil's club, the shrubs starting to die off.

Only a year earlier one of the big companies had come through and pulled out most of the Doug fir for timber. Now it was nothing like the place Beverly remembered. Only a slim ring of fir and cedar leaned rakishly between busy residential roads and the freeway. She recalled the silence of the place, above all. It wasn't silent here. The traffic sounds were softened but not shut out.

"Here we are," said Beverly, looking forlornly at their destination.

She felt sweaty. She brushed away the perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand. She had once seen an actress on Here Come the Brides do this and she still thought it was a very feminine thing to do. She wished she had worn lace gloves.

"So this is the spot?" Oliver asked, grinning. He stood with his arms crossed and looked around at the forest, then back at Beverly.

"I think so."

"You and your friends used to play here when you were little?"

"Not exactly," said Beverly. "We kind of took an oath."

"Really?" Oliver smiled.

Now it all seemed ridiculous. How many years had it been since she had seen this place? She wasn't sure. It might have been two or three years, but it seemed like more. She remembered the fire, and saying some words they had memorized. She remembered the lipstick and the white shoestring she had stolen from her mother that day, and running from the fire.

"Do your mom and dad have hair like yours?" She asked, anxious to change the subject.

"I guess so," he told her.

"What does that mean? You know what their hair looks like."

"Not really," he said. "I'm adopted, so, you know?"

She had never met anyone who was adopted. Orphaned or abandoned to relatives, yes, but adopted by another family? That was a story she had only seen on TV, along with babies left on doorsteps or deserted and raised by wolves in the wild. She felt an overwhelming pity for Oliver that made her want to kiss him.

"That's so sad," she told him.

"Why?" He asked. "My parents are okay. My dad's rich."

"But your real mother gave you away."

Beverly winced. She hadn't meant to say this so bluntly.

"Please," said Oliver. "She was probably a junkie, or some other type of criminal. We don't talk about it. Anyway, I got lucky, believe me."

Beverly sensed the weekend traffic on the main road flashing beyond the fringe of cedars to her right: A quick, bright light in her peripheral vision.

A memory flooded her senses. She inhaled the fragrance of cedar. Underfoot she now saw the remains of wood shingles. Some of them were smashed to bits. She smelled smoke, turned, and flinched when she saw Oliver.

"Hey!" He said. "Everything okay?"

She stepped closer, placed one hand on his chest and kissed him. He laughed.

"What?" She asked.

"That's, um," he shook his head.

"Yes?"

"Did you know you were standing on one foot when you did that?"

Against all of her will, her face flushed hot pink. She had only kissed mirrors and pillows and a few doors and the back of her hand. She had kissed these objects the way she imagined romantic kisses. Now with a flash of self-loathing she realized her pose was ridiculous.

"I didn't mean it like that," Oliver told her. "It was kind of cute."

She wanted to retch.

"Very cute," he said. "It's all right."

He kissed her. His lips were dry and his breath smelled like grape bubble gum. She was about to tell him that she was joking before, but he kissed her again. This time she felt his tongue, warm and slippery, gliding between her lips. His tongue wiggled against the roof of her mouth.

He put his arms around her and pulled her close. She felt a tingling in her chest and between her legs. It crossed her mind that she might be starting her period, and she blushed again. Before she could decide what to do Oliver pressed against her and gently guided her to the ground. He lay on top of her. His sweat smelled clean like salt water.

She didn't like having her dress bunched up around her hips. Or his wet tongue stuck inside her left ear. She forgot these annoyances when he licked the palm of his hand and reached inside her panties.

"Uh!"

"It's okay," Oliver whispered in her still-wet ear.

It wasn't okay. He was slathering her, down there, with his spit, with the saliva and mucous from his mouth. So this was the part of lovemaking they left out of TV shows, the part no one was allowed to see. Whatever it was, Beverly didn't care for it, but she was too mortified to say anything until she felt Oliver's flesh as he shoved his way inside her. This burned so much that she almost cried out, but she was afraid to scream or cry. She was afraid that if she started screaming Oliver wouldn't stop. Then what could she do? At the same time she was afraid he would laugh at how pathetic and ignorant she was. He would tell everyone at school that she had never even kissed a boy before.

So she clenched her teeth and closed her eyes. She concentrated all of her strength on the darkness behind her eyelids; the quiet darkness where Oliver's grunting didn't nauseate her and the perspiration from his neck didn't swipe across her chin every time he heaved his body against hers.

A few minutes later Beverly sat up. She was sitting on the ground looking up at the trees. Oliver gave her a peck on the cheek. Then he put his hand on top of her head and stroked her hair. He smiled. In the next moment he was trudging away, taking the path they had used to reach this pitiful, balding patch of woods.

She didn't watch him go. She smoothed her dress and took a compact out of her purse. In the mirror she saw that the thin layer of lipstick she had applied that afternoon was smeared on one side.

She was sore and she didn't want to move. Her mother would worry if she didn't come back soon. She had to get home before anyone came looking for her.

She forced herself to stand, then to walk on legs that felt like they had springs instead of bones. She smoothed her hair and her dress again and took a few more steps, watching the ground to avoid stumbling. She saw a stone sticking out of the ground and stooped to pick it up, just to see if it hurt to do so.

Her fingers grasped the stone, which now appeared to be a shell. Only when Beverly held the object closer and turned it over did she realized that it was a jawbone, darkened by fire or paint. Tiny and delicate, it was also unmistakably human, with a crooked row of teeth small enough to belong to a child.

She stood in the dappled light, gazing at the strange memento. Slate in color, it was so smooth and clean it looked as though it had been polished. She gently wrapped the jawbone in a linen handkerchief and placed it inside her purse next to her compact.

Continued...

Free Ebook Today

2012-02-03T01:05:00.000-08:00

For the next 24 hours the digital edition of Knock Knock is available for FREE.

"Beautifully written and relentlessly suspenseful, it's a great book to curl up with on a cold winter's night. Just be sure to keep the doors locked and all the lights on!" - Lucy Taylor, The Silence Between the Screams

"With her distinct voice, Miskowski takes you deep into the back woods of America, where shadows chase you and people do the unthinkable." - Angel Leigh McCoy, Wily Writers

Cover design and illustration by Russell Dickerson.

A sample from my story in DETRITUS

2012-02-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

The Highest and the Sweetest
by S.P. Miskowski

I started out as one of the babysitters on the day shift. I'm still a babysitter, but I have another career now, too. I'll tell you about my new job in a minute.

I guess I applied about ten times before I got an interview. There's a long line of women that want to do what I'm doing. Women come from all over the country to apply. A few men apply, too, but Quartz only hires women. We've got the natural instinct.

"I feel like this is the work I was born to do."

That's what I told Quartz during the interview. And in a way it's true. I was born to do what I'm doing. You could say it's more of a calling than a job. You could say it's my destiny.

My daddy was sick for a long time before he died. I took care of him night and day. Then when he passed it seemed like all I did was wait for a sign. I kept looking, on every channel. Almost a year passed.

One day when I was packing up some old clothes for the Salvation Army I found a box full of shoes in the back of a closet. One corner of the box had been eaten away. Inside I found a mouse, little brown thing, with six babies. Well, here was a tiny miracle where you would never have expected it.

I cleaned out my sewing basket and then I filled it with some of the clothes I had gathered up for charity. I spent hours finding the warmest spot for the basket, right in the middle of the living room. When everything was just right, I lifted the mouse babies and their mama and put them in their new home.

It must have been a couple of hours later while I was watching "Kate Plus 8" that I heard a sound I'll never forget. Like a squeal, but crazy, with all these scratching noises. That's what I can't get out of my head: the scratching — and chewing.

I jumped up from the couch and pulled back the towel I had draped over my sewing basket. It was the most terrible thing I'd ever seen. That mama mouse had gone insane, somehow, and she was eating those babies! She had killed four already, and the clothes I had used to build her nest were soaked in blood.

I felt like I was choking, like something had hold of my heart and was crushing it. The sight of those tiny naked bodies twitching while their mama, the one who gave them passage into this world, tore their flesh away with her sharp, little teeth! I slammed the remote control down, one time, two times, one last time. Then she stopped moving.

The last two lived another day and a half. I tried every food and every kind of soup. I tried milk and bread. They just lay there, with their hearts beating away and their breathing was fast and shallow. Finally, they died. Their mama didn't give them the love they needed, and they died. It was an awful thing to see, but I learned what I needed to learn.

So the first time I saw Quartz on TV was a revelation and a confirmation, to me. I've prayed all of my life. Every day I've spoken to God and asked what I should do to make my life serve a purpose.

The day I saw Quartz on the TV screen, God reached down and touched me, and I knew why. For the first time, I knew what I was meant to do. I was born to take care of these babies…

You can read the rest of "The Highest and the Sweetest" in DETRITUS an anthology.

Detritus - a new horror anthology

2012-01-24T16:40:00.000-08:00

DETRITUS is now available from Omnium Gatherum.

"The impulse to collect springs from deep within the human psyche. Squirrels gather acorns, rats collect shiny things, but only humans assign meaning to the objects they collect.

Detritus is a collection of stories about the impulse to collect, preserve, and display gone horribly wrong."

Detritus Anthology Contributors

Brent Kelly: Ride
Edmund Colell: Shrieking Gauze
Jeremy Shipp: Chewed up
Kealan Patrick Burke: The Room Beneath the Stairs
Lee Widener: Let Them Into Your Heart
L.S. Murphy: The Tick-Tock Heart
Louise Bohmer: Armoire
Mary Borsellino: Shots and Cuts
Michael Colangelo: Arkitektur
Michael Montoure: Heroes and Villains
Neil Davies: Candy Lady
Opal Edgar: Crawling Insect Life
Pete Clark: In His Own Graven Image
Phil Hickes: Mrs. Grainger's Animal Emporium
S.P. Miskowski: The Highest and the Sweetest

Knock Knock is Published Today!

2011-12-20T15:34:00.000-08:00

I am delighted to announce the publication of my supernatural horror novel Knock Knock by Omnium Gatherum. This is a wonderful day. Help me celebrate by taking a look at the book. Try a sample. If you're looking for a spooky good read on a long winter's night, this might be the novel for you.

Happy holidays!

S.P.

(Book cover design and illustration by Russell Dickerson.)

She Never Slept reviews KNOCK KNOCK

2011-10-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

Today the first extensive review of Knock Knock appeared at She Never Slept. Thanks to SNS and to reviewer Sean Levin for a close read and a generous review.

"Knock Knock is a well-crafted, understated novel that manages to combine the elements of supernatural horror and the stresses of growing up brilliantly. Miskowski’s writing is almost Lovecraftian in the sense that her dark forces are unseen, but nevertheless quite powerful and frightening."

Read on.

Knock Knock: On a Long Winter's Night

2011-08-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

My supernatural horror novel Knock Knock began a few years ago on a long and sleepless winter's night. We were visiting family in a small town in Washington State. We stayed with my husband's grandmother Karolee, a woman of infinite wit and practicality. Before we finally stopped gossiping and went to bed, she reminded us not to worry if we heard gunfire in the middle of the night.

"Those boys were shooting, one night, up the road."

"Why?"

"Oh," she said. "The heck if I know. I bet they didn't know why."

Late that night, while Karolee slept in her room at the other end of the house and my husband slept soundly beside me, I had insomnia. I could hear every settling wooden beam, each acquiescent grunt of plumbing, but especially the shrubbery that kept scratching the wall outside.

Beyond the bedroom window lay woods, the quiet road, the ink-black darkness I recalled from childhood visits to my aunts and uncles in rural Georgia. Those tales of rivalries, bodies found in abandoned wells, old friends who decided to murder one another, moonshine-running cousins pursued by demons through the Blue Ridge Mountains. If you drew a curtain indoors at night and looked out, the sky was so black you could see only your reflection in the window.

Alone with my thoughts, I wondered: What of this life in the deep, dark woods, where the male neighbors let off steam with beer and rifles and ammo? Where does a woman fit into this place, and what are her thoughts late at night? This wasn't a foreign world. It was my background and my husband's, one of the things we have in common. I could have married a guy with a pickup truck and a gun rack. Easily. And I wondered what my craving for life outside of that world would drive me to do.

I wrote all night. Characters came into being, and their desires intersected and became the first inkling of plot. Some of the characters were observed and some spoke for themselves, at first. It would take an effort to make them fit into one coherent narrative. Naturally, I observed all of these mechanics after the fact. That night I simply wrote everything that occurred to me.

Some weeks later, back in our Seattle apartment with cats and microbrews and takeout food, we watched a Thai film based on a centuries-old legend: A young bride is left at home by her beloved husband, who is recruited and sent into battle. The bride is inconsolable. She feels desperately lonely, living in a village of strangers with no allies, and she is pregnant. Her yearning is so great that it consumes her.

At last the husband is injured and is sent home. He returns to his wife, who has given birth. They live happily ever after--until their neighbors, who keep avoiding the young bride, tell the husband that his wife and baby are dead, that they died during childbirth, and he must look at his wife from outside their home to see what she really is.

If you like ghost stories, you see the appeal of this disturbing legend. It has served as the basis for dozens of stories and films.

I began incorporating a modern version of the tale into my story of longing and grief. Eventually I allowed it to change shape and meld with other elements of my novel. Yet the tale's illusions and the pernicious spirit that will not let go of what it desires, even in death, informed every aspect of Knock Knock. The book follows several women as they try to invent satisfying adult lives, despite the neglect and violence in their childhood and in the world around them.

For a long time I kept trying to marry this story to an odd fact about the place where my husband grew up. For decades no female children were born there, all the women were old or had married into the families on the all-male road. I did eventually build this into Knock Knock but not to the extent I originally intended.

Many drafts have taken shape and have been built up, pared down, and then reshaped. Many new and creepy ideas have found their way to this town that was, in early drafts, called Baldwin. It is now Skillute, Washington: a dying forest, and home to the discontented women of Knock Knock.

Welcome.

Knock Knock - Chapter One

2011-08-10T13:06:00.000-07:00

The Girls

At first the spell was nothing but a game designed by little girls. As far as they knew, it was only of interest to the three of them. They never imagined what they did that afternoon would matter to anyone else.

For most grownups in Skillute, Washington in the late 1960s few events rose in significance above the routine of work, Sunday worship, and the weekend six-pack. The prospect of someday joining this world of quietly unhappy adults made the three girls long for useless adventures.

They were awkward, slender, average height, age eleven to eleven and a half. They came up with the idea to swear an oath against having babies after another girl, whose mother was overdue with twins, whispered a few mortifying details of the pregnancy while they slouched in the darkened back row of their classroom during a hygiene film.

"For two whole weeks Mama hasn't moved off of the couch. Just sits there all day breathing."

The girl affected a ragged intake of breath.

"Grandma brings her ice chips soaked in Budweiser."

"Why?" Ethel asked.

The storyteller was poor, her green-plaid cotton dress threadbare at the collar and cuffs. After each question she grinned before doling out another bit of knowledge, savoring the discomfort of her audience.

"That's to stop the pain when Mama's gums bleed. They get so raw they break open and her mouth fills up with blood. Then she's got to spit into a cup."

"Sick," Beverly whispered.

"All she does is cry and tell Grandma these twin babies are a curse, and if she could she would cut that man from Wenatchee."

The girl wrinkled her nose. She held her hands up in a loose circle around her neck.

"Mama's ankles are this big around. She can't sleep at night, and she can't wear shoes because her feet are all swollen up."

Mrs. Coffey shushed the class from her dim corner at the front of the room, near the chalkboard. A few silhouettes moved restlessly in the flickering light. The girls ducked lower in their seats.

"Her hair kept falling out of her head until she was bald except for one patch on the side."

"Did it grow back?" Beverly asked.

"Yeah," said the girl. "But now there's hair on her stomach, too, like the fur on a dog's belly."

"No!" Ethel said.

The girl nodded: It was true.

"Grandma shaves it off, but it grows back thicker every time."

"I've never heard of that," Beverly said.

"Doctor says it's pretty common," the girl informed them.

Now Ethel and Beverly turned to Marietta, whose aunt was a midwife and a fortune-teller. They waited while Marietta made up her mind to speak.

"Some pregnant women grow hair in places they didn't have it before," she said solemnly. "That's true."

A shiver ran through the group. All turned their attention to the film screen at the front of the room, where a young woman with pigtails was demonstrating the proper way for a lady to wash her hands in a public bathroom.

The conversation had its effect on all three girls. Later that day, during lunch break, Beverly announced:

"I'm not ever going to have fur on my stomach. That's not even human."

She sniffed disdainfully and picked at her bracelet, turning over each miniature charm until all the painted shamrocks faced outward. The bracelet accentuated a single stroke of pink polish dabbed on each of her nails.

"We're doomed," said Ethel.

All three girls looked down at their untouched sandwiches on the cafeteria table: Egg salad, peanut butter with grape jelly, liverwurst. Knowing what they knew about the world and what it held in store for them had ruined their appetite. They could only sigh and stare at the food with jaded smiles. They were considering never eating again.

"I'm telling you both right now: I won't let my ankles get bigger around than my whole neck!" Beverly said. "That's never going to happen. Never."

Her determination inspired the others. They nodded and, just like that, it was decided.

"How can we make sure we won't have babies?" Ethel asked.

Both girls turned once more to Marietta. Her seriousness, her violet eyes and the lank, black hair framing her face gave her a dramatic air that would have prompted teasing if most of her classmates weren't afraid of her.

"We could have an accident," she said.

"What kind of accident?" Ethel asked.

"No," Beverly interrupted. "I'm not doing that. Come on, Marietta, doesn't your aunt know something we can take, or do? Something that doesn't hurt."

"Maybe there's a way," she said. "Sometimes women ask my aunt for a remedy. That's after the fact, though. This is different. I'll have to look it up in the spell book when she's out of the house."

The other two exchanged a sly look. Marietta went on:

"We can swear an oath. If we use the right spell, it might work."

"Might?" Beverly said.

"It's my aunt that's got the healing power."

"Well, that's no good," said Beverly. "She won't help us."

"If we all say the oath and if we use blood, it could work."

"Blood?"

"A spell is the most powerful when it uses the woman's blood," said Marietta.

"She means from your period," Beverly explained to Ethel.

"I know that," said Ethel. She paused and then admitted: "I don't have any."

"I don't either," said Beverly. "And Marietta?"

Marietta shook her head. No. Not yet.

"But that's the point," Beverly said. "We have to take the oath before this thing gets us."

"You're right," said Ethel. "Once we start to bleed, we can have a baby any time. Then we might as well be dead."

They were silent for a moment.

"What can we do?" Ethel asked again.

"Well," Beverly began. "What if we cut our fingers for blood, and say the oath somewhere that's got its own power, a secret place?"

"In the woods?"

"That's all I can think of," said Beverly.

Ethel looked away.

"Don't be a sissy," Beverly told her. "Miss Knocks is just a fairy tale. If the place has any power it's only because people believe it. You don't believe in a fairy tale, do you?"

"No."

"Then it can't hurt you. On the other hand, if you swear an oath and you believe it, maybe it comes true."

"You think so?" Ethel said.

"Why not?" Beverly said. "It's the power of positive thinking."

Marietta considered this and said: "I'll look up the spell as soon as I can."

The kids outside this tiny social circle considered Marietta strange, if not dangerous, and they kept their distance. Her mother was long gone. Nobody could say where. The girl never knew her. Her aunt was Delphine Dodd and they lived in a bungalow near the railroad tracks.

Delphine was old, thin as a spindle, with black eyes that sparkled like obsidian. Her house reeked of weeds and incense.

Local women paid Delphine for potions, herbal remedies, and spells. They also asked her to tell the future. Women found their way to Delphine if their family doctors were too expensive or too likely to say no to what they wanted.

Most of Delphine's remedies were cheap. Sometimes they were unnecessary. The ailments women brought to her door varied, but only a few of them were actually sick. Some of them felt they had married badly and they were too ashamed to go back to their families. Others worried that they were too old or ugly, and would never be loved by anyone. Some of the women married men who beat them or cheated on them. After having a sympathetic older woman dote on them for a few hours with hot tea and incantations and the fragrance of rose-scented candles, most of the heartsick women felt better. Naturally Delphine had a good number of regular clients.

The herbal recipes and charms came to Delphine through a long line of midwives. She had practiced these arts since she was a child, even younger than her niece. She could offer any one of hundreds of spells from longevity to fertility, spiritual cleansing, enhanced memory, and more restful sleep. Each spell was accompanied by an herbal formula.

Readings were a different matter. Delphine didn't charge people money to tell their fortune, she said, because that would be the wrong thing to do. Her clients gave her tokens of appreciation. Her predictions only came true about half the time, yet she had a reputation for being reliable. The women who consulted her tended to believe what came true and forget the rest.

Marietta inspired gossip at school with her stark appearance and because people wondered how much of her aunt's gift she inherited. It was rumored that Delphine used the girl as an assistant in even the most delicate procedures, but no one ever confirmed this by admitting they had consulted the midwife to end a pregnancy. Whether it was true or not, grownups regarded young Marietta with wariness and children were careful not to insult her to her face.

One story at school was that the weird girl with lavender eyes had made a grease fire break out at Jessup's Diner just by staring at the kitchen door. On another occasion she had blinked at a passing lumber truck and its load of maple logs had come tumbling down onto the road.

By fourth grade no one spoke to Marietta except Ethel and Beverly. Being friends with her was the most mysterious part of their lives, the only thrilling and spooky thing they knew aside from Dark Shadows. They swooned at the prospect of anything different, even frightening, if it seemed glamorous. They wanted to be part of something darkly romantic and beautiful. Barring that, something peculiar would do. Marietta and her strange pedigree would do.

Beverly was soft looking and perfectly groomed, but not truly pretty. Her nose was a bit too long and her lips were a bit too thin. She sensed that she would never be naturally feminine, and she was learning to be content with excellent posture and an enviable wardrobe. She spent a lot of time choosing and matching accessories. She coveted nice dresses and trinkets. She was becoming a snob about it. She would soon be mortified to discover that her mother was secretly stitching Casual Corner store labels into her blouses and dresses, each piece of clothing home-sewn according to a McCall's pattern.

Ethel's appearance was only mentioned when she was compared to her mother, and then people sighed and said it was a shame. Too bad, they said, she didn't have her mother's pale blue eyes or honey-colored hair. Too bad she didn't stand up straight. Too bad she dragged her feet when she walked. Too bad her fine-looking mama Shirley was mostly known for the men she drank with, loggers and timber buyers and passing salesmen. She wasn't picky about the men or the booze, and it was commonly assumed that her husband wasn't Ethel's real father.

The second bell rang. A few students loitered in the cafeteria. The girls scooped up their uneaten sandwiches and headed for the double doors. As each passed, she tossed the dreaded lunch into an aluminum trashcan and turned away with a mournful expression.

Marietta was as good as her word. By mid-week she had secured the information they needed.

That Friday after school they crossed the deserted kickball field in single file. They clambered up a wide incline clotted with ground ivy and then hurried on. They had to hike for a quarter of a mile, slightly more uphill and slow going across the darkening floor of the forest.

Finally they reached a stand of old growth where they could no longer see the outer edge of the woods. They couldn't hear the intermittent traffic that led north to the freeway. There wasn't even a thin break in the encircling Douglas fir and red cedar. The bracken was heavy here. They picked their way carefully through nettles and twigs to a small clearing and looked up at the motley ceiling.

All around lay a quiet part of the forest the girls had never seen before. They had only heard of it as the background to fairy tales about Miss Knocks. People said she walked here late at night. Miss Knocks with her long arms reaching up into the trees to pull children down to the ground. Miss Knocks chasing kids out of the woods, scooping them up in a pillowcase and hauling them away into the night. She was part of the folklore everyone in Skillute knew. Part myth, part fireside tale, Miss Knocks kept children wondering and watching shadows, at least until second or third grade.

The girls claimed they were too grownup for these tales. Yet they had chosen this location for its promise of dark magic and secrecy. Now in the shadows of the forest they suddenly felt the restless stirrings of fear. They were too stubborn to say so, but they were anxious to be finished and on their way home.

It was mid-October. The forest was several degrees cooler than the outer world. The girls began buttoning their bulky sweaters by the time they had settled on the exact spot.

"I'm cold," Beverly grumbled. "How long will this take?"

She pulled a white beret out of her sweater pocket, put it on her head and tweaked it to one side.

"Let's get started," Ethel said.

"Did everyone bring a piece of string?" Marietta asked.

They opened change purses and lunchboxes and scrambled in pockets. Finally each girl produced a string.

"Come on, let's say the oath," said Beverly.

"Does your string come from something that belongs to you and only to you?" Marietta asked them.

"Yes," said Ethel.

"It has to belong to you, for the spell to work," said Marietta.

"Of course it's mine," said Beverly. "It's a shoestring from my old sneakers. I don't wear them any more. Does that matter?"

"No," said Marietta. "It can be something old. But why is it so clean and white?"

"I washed it," Beverly said and made a "tsk" sound with her tongue.

"Why?" Ethel asked.

"I'm not taking an oath on a dirty old shoestring."

"What's yours?" Marietta asked Ethel.

"It's a strand of rickrack from one of my dresses. Doesn't fit any more, so I pulled this off the hem."

"Good," said Marietta. "That's good. My string is a silk ribbon."

She held up the black silk for them to see.

"That's pretty," said Beverly. "Are you sure you want to waste that?"

"If the spell works, it isn't wasted."

"Okay. Okay. Can we start? I'm freezing! Can't we hurry up?"

Beverly stamped her feet in place.

"You've got to do this right, or it won't work," Marietta reminded her.

"Probably won't work anyway," Beverly said. "If I have to stand out here in the woods for a while, we have to have a fire. It's too cold. My knees are bumping together!"

They agreed to light a small fire to get them through the ceremony. The sky had darkened steadily. Now it verged on a downpour. But in this patch of the woods the trees had been untouched for more than a century. They bowed in and laced overhead. There wasn't a sliver of pure sky between the branches undulating, entwined above.

Ethel crouched to clear a spot in the dirt. She pushed back fallen leaves, and made a face when she accidentally scooped up a banana slug. She scraped her hand clean on a moss-covered trunk then picked the stray dots of moss from her palm.

"Hurry up," said Beverly. "What should we set on fire?"

Ethel sighed and shook her head. Beverly always had the grand ideas. Then Ethel and Marietta had to figure out how to make them work.

"Well?" Beverly asked. She was wearing a layer of lipstick she had surreptitiously applied after school. That morning she had swiped the tube of Coral Pink from her mother's pocketbook.

"Okay," said Ethel. "Over there's a pile of wood chips."

Ethel had spied a fallen branch lying atop and partly concealing a nest of cedar shingles. She hopped over the broken logs and helped herself to three shingles that seemed intact. She had to shake off dirt and beetles. Then she slapped away a bit of moss stuck along the edge and placed the shingles in a rough triangle in the space she had cleared. She was about to start rubbing sticks together when Beverly reached into her pocketbook and produced a Zippo lighter.

"Where did you get that?" Ethel asked.

"None of your business," said Beverly.

The girls crouched, and Beverly popped the lid on the Zippo. She flicked the thumbwheel and held the flame against the corner of the cedar shingles. Once the flame took to the edges the girls leaned in and blew on the shingles to keep them going. At last the girls stood and gathered around the meager fire.

"Now what?" Beverly asked.

"Now take this pin," said Marietta.

She held a straight pin between two fingers, pinching it carefully to avoid being burned, and barely touched it to the fire. Then she stood and pricked her index finger with it.

Ethel and Beverly winced at the sight of red-black blood forming a liquid pearl on the tip of Marietta's finger. Before they could say anything she ran her finger along the black silk ribbon. After the ribbon absorbed the drop of blood she handed the pin to Beverly, who drew a sharp breath and pricked her own finger, then touched the shoestring with it. Ethel did the same with her piece of rickrack.

"Do as I do," said Marietta.

She took the black ribbon now and tied two knots in it. Then she crouched and dug a fistful of dirt from the ground, placed the ribbon in the hole she had made and covered it with the dirt. Beverly, who was still shivering from the cold, quickly tied a single knot and buried the shoestring.

"How many knots did you make?" Marietta asked her.

"What difference does it make? A knot is a knot, right?"

Ethel considered this. Then she tied four knots in the rickrack and buried it. When she finished the other two were staring at her.

"Might as well be safe," she said.

"Why?" Beverly said. "You think a squirrel might dig up your rickrack and untie it?"

"You shouldn't make fun of the spell," said Marietta.

"You should hurry up," said Beverly. "Say the oath and let's get out of here."

In turn each repeated the oath they had spent most of the week writing:

"On my soul and by the name of Miss Knocks in the heart of these woods, I swear to never let another one such as myself issue forth from the sacred temple of my body."

Each girl, in turn, grinned at this bit. They were a little embarrassed by the word "body" in relation to themselves, but they were also proud of the time they'd spent writing the oath. They had stolen phrases from TV shows and from books at the school library, combining them into a speech that was impressively solemn when spoken on a cold afternoon in the gloomy woods.

"By all that is sacred to me, I will keep this vow until my whole life is over and done."

Ethel was the last of the three to repeat the vow. Despite the density of the canopy overhead one raindrop fell through, cold, plump, and glistening, onto her face as she began. It quivered there, broke, and ran down. She looked up with a grimace. The raindrop coursed the length of her neck and dribbled inside her cotton dress. High in the trees there was a pattering rain, but it would take time to soak through the canopy.

Marietta broke the circle, jumped and turned around. She looked over her shoulder and stared off into the shadows.

"What?" Beverly asked. "What happened?"

"Did you see it?"

"See what?"

The other two stared at Marietta. Beyond the dark layer of leaves, above the branches and debris swaying over them, the blackened clouds moved and thunder rolled in. The clouds seemed to jostle and murmur overhead. Beverly's voice broke through the rumbling sound:

"Fire!"

Several leaves had blown flat against the small arch of cedar shingles and stuck there. Catching the flame and then dislodging, the leaves tumbled across the forest floor, conjuring a thin corridor of smoke as they rolled. The girls stamped their feet at the leaves outside the circle, but it only stirred up more smoke.

"We can't put it out!" Ethel screamed.

A clap of thunder made all of them jump.

"The rain can put it out," Beverly said. "I don't care. Let's go!"

"Rain's not even touching the ground here," Marietta said.

Beverly wasn't listening. She turned away from the other two.

"I'm late for supper! Let's go!" She yelled.

She leapt free of the encircling smoke and darted off through the woods, back the way they had come. Ethel and Marietta went on stamping at the dirt and leaves, burying the shingles with a shallow pile of dirt. They kept scratching their ankles and calves on stray nettles as they worked. The smoke rolled up around them, making it hard to breathe.

Ethel peeled off her sweater and began swatting the ground with it. She took a step following the flames, and another step. Bundling her pitifully charred sweater, she pressed it against a clot of weeds at the base of a cedar and held it there while smoke rolled out underneath. When it seemed that the fire was extinguished she lifted the sweater. Something on the ground caught her attention, and she poked at it with a twig. Then she let out a cry.

Marietta crowded next to her and peered over her shoulder. Both girls gazed down at what was unmistakably a slender, blackened jawbone protruding from the earth in the spot where Ethel had chased the fire. Like tiny hematite chips several crooked, human teeth jutted from the bone. Neither Ethel nor Marietta moved.

Finally Ethel said:

"Who do you think it belonged to?"

Marietta shook her head.

"I don't know," she said. "Could be really old. Maybe there was a cemetery here, or a logging camp. Or it might be a Cowlitz relic."

"Should we take it?" Ethel asked.

Marietta shook her head. She pushed some leaves and dirt over the jawbone and patted them into place.

"No. Whatever was buried here ought to stay put," she said. "Leave it alone."

Ethel hesitated.

"It's a bad sign, Ethel. Leave it alone."

The smoke was rising once more and shifting in the air around them. Smoke shimmied out of the leaves under their feet. Everything seemed to be moving at once. Every scrap of the forest shuddered. More leaves were starting to smolder. A spark shot up from the cedar shingles and Ethel screamed:

"We have to go!"

They ran, with thin fingers of smoke winding upward in the woods behind them. They tore through ferns and shrubs that cut their legs. Back through the fir trees and undergrowth, across the leafy floor grasping at their ankles, down the ivy-covered incline. Marietta slipped and fell on her backside. Ethel scooped her up under both arms and pulled her the rest of the way. They hit the kickball field running.

"I have to go home! My aunt's going to be mad if she finds out!" Marietta shouted.

Then she took off and left Ethel standing on the muddy field. The sky split open, tearing like a sheet, letting the rain down. Ahead of Ethel, across the field, Marietta turned and called to her through the torrent. Ethel couldn't hear the words. She could only see Marietta's mouth gaping.

Ethel looked down at her mud-spattered dress and the charred sweater hanging, sodden and ruined, from her right hand. Marietta shouted again. This time her high, keening voice cut right across the field:

"Don't tell anyone!"

Marietta turned away and Ethel took off running. All the way home she practiced what she would say if her mother questioned her about a fire in the woods:

"Must have been lightning split a tree, but I wasn't there, so I don't know."

(To continue, you can buy the novel in a paperback edition published by Omnium Gatherum. Something evil has come home.)

Knock Knock

2011-08-02T23:19:00.000-07:00

My supernatural horror novel Knock Knock is now available for Kindle:

With cover design and illustration by Russell Dickerson.

At the center of this novel-length fable are Ethel, Beverly, and Marietta, best friends stuck in the backwater of Skillute, Washington. Their neighbors and families are petty or poor or both; but when these townies warn the girls not to wander into Skillute's dense forest, they mean it. Something evil lurks there. The girls are not convinced. They wander into the woods, and their mistake unleashes a malignant spirit that terrorizes Skillute for the next fifty years.

Something evil has come home.

Knock Knock

The Kindle edition is $3.99. You can read a sample for free, then buy the book if you like it. Guaranteed to cost at least one night of sleep. Happy horrors.

Red Poppies: 7 Tales of Envy & Revenge

2011-07-26T15:50:00.000-07:00

Here's some good news.

Although the print edition of Red Poppies: Tales of Envy and Revenge is no longer available, as of today the book is on offer in digital form.

Red Poppies: 7 Tales of Envy & Revenge is a Kindle ebook. This is an expanded edition with two additional stories, on sale for $2.99. You can order a free sample of the book before buying. You can also lend the collection to a friend.

"Reading these stories is like watching electric eels from not too safe a distance." --J. Amador, theater critic for Seattlest

"If you like creepy, suspenseful stories, you'll love this collection." --Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch

If you like the book, please pass the word along. Feel free to comment on the stories, here at Daughters of Catastrophe.

Thanks for reading!

S.P.

THE RED ROOM's Exquisite Horrors

2011-05-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

Today, while I was wishing John Paulsen a happy birthday, a flood of memories came to me. John (who stars in SJ Chiro's and Keri Healey's film Howard From Ohio at SIFF) played the gentleman caller victimized by the crazed, middle-aged daughters of serial killer Ruth Parker in my play "The Red Room." Directed by Leslie "Take No Prisoners" Swackhamer with a set designed by genius Etta Lilienthal, this show was truly haunting.

I still meet people who saw the production, who say they sometimes have nightmares set in the Parker house. I recall every moment of the show so vividly:

The clear plastic draped like sheets on a clothes line reflected and distorted the faces of the women. An antique dentist's chair with leather and metal restraints waited like a recently cleaned shotgun, center stage. The crunch of the shovel in the orchard's dirt was as chilling as the violence that preceded it. The poetic language of certain ritualized scenes mitigated the horrific actions of the characters. People found these actions abhorrent, but they couldn't look away.

This was a show that unintentionally divided the audience. Women thanked me for putting powerful (if also demented) female characters on stage in all their sickening glory. They said the play was exhilarating and cathartic. They loved the scent of the black earth in the burial ground on stage, and the ominous humming of the bees.

Quite a few men who emerged from the theater after the final horror looked at me as if they'd been gob-smacked. Some of these guys mumbled things like "gee it's dark in there" as they stumbled toward the exit. The play was never meant to have this effect. I concluded that it's simply that strange--still--for men to see strong women committing horrible acts in performance. We live in such a state of denial about the human soul and its twisted desires. We live so nicely. But the stage is not about making nice. If it were, it would be a waste of time.

Only John Paulsen, a wonderful actor I've admired for years, had the nerve to go to this dark place with a cast of brilliant, wild women including Morgan Rowe and Beth Peterson. The world they inhabited was disturbing, to say the least. They made it compelling. I am forever grateful to them for understanding "The Red Room," for taking its terrible themes to heart, and for lending themselves to it without reservation.

Tree of Eyes

2011-04-26T14:41:00.000-07:00

Tragic Life Stories by Steve Duffy

2011-04-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

Certain names in a horror anthology’s table of contents will automatically compel me to buy the book. Steve Duffy is one of those names. His modern tales of horror, with their sardonic observations on the foibles of human nature as it traipses through the 21st century, are a must-read.

So when Ash-Tree Press announced the publication of Tragic Life Stories, a collection of nine recent Duffy short stories, I had to have a copy. Now that I have read it, I have made a decision: No one other than my husband gets to borrow it. No one else can even look at it, because it’s my cherished copy. If that makes me selfish, big deal.

Tell you what. I’ll share a little of it with you, here in this post. Then you can go buy your own copy.

In her introduction Barbara Roden notes the shift that occurred when the author of the book decided to move from his early career ghost stories, which resided in the world of M.R. James’ antiquarian books and fireside chats among gentlemen of letters, to tales of terror set in a world quite recognizable to today’s reader. This choice, combined with an astonishing ear for common speech and a fascination with what makes people do what they do, is a defining characteristic of Duffy’s recent writing. The eeriness of his prose is often achieved by introducing something weird but entirely plausible in a situation that is mundane and familiar.

We have been to these places, lived in these shabby yet comfortable apartments and houses, observed the odd behavior of a neighbor or a stranger and said, “Hm. I wonder what that’s all about.” Finding out what that’s all about is central to Duffy’s fiction and that is why, when it hits home, it stays with you.

The title story begins with a writer, Dan, perusing the shelves of a local bookstore. Emotionally stunned following the loss of a significant relationship and the cancellation of a book contract, Dan is engaging in that most human and despicable habit of the unhappy writer. He is trashing the published work of other authors. As he moves from a spiteful summation of the popular titles in his genre, fantasy, to the non-fiction section, his angry wit sharpens. Most of the non-fiction takes the form of what Dan calls “tragic life stories.” These are the drug and rehab and dysfunctional family memoirs that have proliferated over the past two decades and have won a multitude of readers who like to wallow in another person’s sorrow.

While grinding his teeth Dan meets a woman of apparently boundless compassion, who shows great interest in him and his writing. She also loves “tragic life stories.” Given the popularity of such memoirs, his current state of mind, and his attraction to this new, possibly romantic interest, it seems natural enough that Dan goes home and promptly begins writing such a memoir from the point of view of a horribly misused boy. From this point on, Dan is living a lie. But the power of his imagination may be greater than he thinks... read more

2011-02-07T01:20:00.001-08:00

2011-02-07T01:19:00.000-08:00

Cosmic Rationale - an excerpt

2011-01-28T15:22:00.000-08:00

Here is a tiny excerpt from the middle of my story "Cosmic Rationale" which appears in WORDS TO MUSIC, a new short story anthology written by 40 authors from 12 countries. Inspired by the Billy Joel song "Pressure," my story portrays one evening in the life of a man looking for someone to blame.

...Which brought Ed, as usual, to the subject of Agnes Gottschalk. Named for one of her three maiden aunts. Deceptively slender, striding around the office on beanstalk legs, no stockings, blocky shoes. She got away with wearing ugly, oversized dresses because she had a smoky beauty that was rare in someone so young. Brains, too. So said the president of the company, who was a douche.

Agnes the Princess was top of her class at some Ivy League school, the most likely to be somebody, etc. And she was Ed's boss for the foreseeable future.

Christ. Ed had been under her foot for so long, sweating this useless report. Why, he wondered, would they compare marketing tools for three ad campaigns when all of them had failed? Agnes was probably setting him up. That must be it. This waif with her old lady eyeglasses squinting at Ed, staring at him like a kiwi she might buy if the seller knocked five cents off the price.

For weeks he had tried not to think of Agnes as a girl. He knew he was supposed to think of her as a woman. No, not that either. Actually he was supposed to see her as his "team leader." But how could he do that? It was enough, Ed decided, that he saw her as a powerful albeit naïve and loudmouthed but otherwise-under-different-circumstances-highly-fuckable girl.

She was a powerful child, this Agnes named for a maiden aunt. She was his boss, his superior, the person who told him what time to show up (earlier) and how long to take for his lunch (less than he took) and who wore granny clothes to torment the male staff (in every sense of those words). She might think otherwise, but in fact she was only successful because she was a girl.

He smiled at her tart, maddening jokes without understanding them. He held the elevator for her. He picked up coffee she forgot to pay for. He nodded approval during her bubbly, interminable updates at team meetings. Even this had backfired on him.

"What's so funny about Haitian relief, Ed?"

That was yesterday. Agnes had finished up a speech about something. Ed's brain was on fire and he only heard snippets. It was something about people on the ground and an indigenous culture. He missed the context and assumed she was talking about one of the insipid games she played online. He had nodded and chuckled at the last bit: "Haitian relief."

"This is a terrible situation," Agnes said. There might have been real tears in her eyes. Everyone glared at Ed the hater. He was the whitest and oldest man in the room. Then, as Agnes wiped her eyes, two of her associates moved in close to comfort her, because she was just so nice, so fucking nice...

So You Want to Write a Novel

2010-11-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

gutter & clouds

2010-11-08T16:43:00.000-08:00

The idea that won't be quiet...

2010-09-23T22:14:00.000-07:00

At the Live Girls! Theater site, I write about the creative process behind a new theater project. Take a look.

The idea that won't be quiet

Catch That Book Radio - Red Poppies Interview

2010-04-16T11:36:00.000-07:00

I had a great time chatting with Traci Green at Catch That Book Radio on Wednesday. We talked about my collection of short stories, and about our shared love for horror fiction and films.

You can listen to the podcast any time.

Suburban Banal - flash fiction

2010-02-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

When Daisy and I were kids, our cousin Carol came to live with us. In thrift shop dresses, with plastic shoes and a crooked clip in her hair, she said nothing, ate little, moved in a kind of shuffle.

We didn't like her. Mother didn't like her, and when Carol left vegetables on her plate or closed a door too loudly or failed to say "please" and "thank you" Mother instructed Dad to punish her. Until Carol came to live with us, we didn't know the word "punish."

"There's something wrong with her," Mother told Dad each time. "She's got something bad in her, just like your sister had."

Carol was told first to remove her panties and leave them on a chair outside the den, where Dad waited. Once the door to the den was closed and locked the world was silent for a time--then the whistle of leather in the air, and the clack of a belt buckle hitting--something. Soon the screams would come, and the voice of Carol--the only time we ever heard her voice--begging.

Daisy and I would sit on the floor in our room, quietly building the next Barbie house. With a solemn sigh, Daisy might offer a new piece of colored cardboard to bend into a miniature sofa. Or she might carefully cut a square of pink cotton and say:

"This would make a pretty curtain for the kitchen window."

Devil's Club

2010-02-16T15:07:00.000-08:00

Along this part of the road, a quarter mile from the nearest neighbor, Douglas fir grew in abundance and the broken asphalt gave way in stages to gravel and dirt. There was alder springing up in the gullies, and Western hemlock scattered at the outskirts of the forest.

This was where the boy and his schoolmates were never supposed to go. Only the poorest families lived beyond the junction, where the road split and one branch ran downhill to this place, the corner of nowhere. Everyone said this was where kids from the trailer parks laid traps year-round. They killed almost anything unlucky enough to cross their path. The boy's father said that killing animals out of season and without a license was a sin. Something terrible would happen to those boys one day, he said...

Read the entire story at The Absent Willow Review.

RED POPPIES reviewed at Booksquawk

2010-02-09T09:24:00.000-08:00

Today Kate Kasserman (author of Independence) reviews Red Poppies: Tales of Envy and Revenge at Booksquawk. Here's an excerpt from the review:

"Miskowski shows a sniper’s aim in characterization and dialogue, zeroing in on the most (heh, often hilariously) damning statements and internal observations by the characters in all their perverted, self-justifying, hypocritical, disastrous splendor."

Flash fiction: "Flour"

2010-02-02T19:04:00.000-08:00

Hannah's homemade dress gave her away. Store-bought meant your parents didn't need ration tickets, or the mortifying bus rides into town and back, hauling the household flour. Avoiding the pitying smiles of grownups.

A big-eared boy sitting on the other side of the aisle--a slap print fresh pink across his neck and scalp--turned to Hannah, grinned and asked:

"Will your momma sew you a new dress when that's empty?"

He nodded at the sack of flour on the floor, not concealed by Hannah's skinny ankles and scuffed Mary Janes. He laughed.

Hannah held his gaze for a second, then two. Her hands were frozen against the dyed-blue folds of her flour sack dress. She would have evaporated, if she could.

The boy wiggled his bare toes, then hopped up and down in his seat, bouncing the threadbare cushions. He stared at her and laughed again.

Hannah's jaw dropped one inch. She was a girl who practiced to perfection everything she undertook. She let out a shriek. High. Piercing. Loud. Long.

The boy clapped his hands over his ears and screamed. Up front, the bus driver eased on the brakes to make sure the noise wasn't mechanical.

Hannah stopped shrieking at once. She smoothed her dress until the soft curves of blue cotton lay as smoothly against her legs as silk.

Flash fiction: "How We Are"

2010-01-08T17:29:00.000-08:00

I don't know how it came up. Tequila? Whiskey? In our family it was always one or the other.

We were sitting on the patio. Late in the day, a hot wind kept whipping tiny dust devils in the dry corners of my aunt's back yard.

I mentioned her two unemployed sons--"the boys"--and asked how they were doing. We called them "the boys" from birth to middle age. Hefty, mean boys who smoked and stole ammo from my dad's gun cabinet.

I said: "Maybe you don’t remember it."

She pretended not to hear this and handed me another drink. Whiskey, or tequila.

Three drinks on, I recalled how "the boys" when they were teenagers used to drive their $400 truck around the neighborhood, grabbing stray and perambulating pets for Saturday morning target-practice in the desert.

I mentioned this, too. My aunt chuckled and walked away as if I'd told her a stupid variation on an old joke.

That's how we are. No hope for the loser who admits feelings for a dog. We would laugh such a soft-hearted bastard right down, and shoot the dog to prove we're not suckers.

That's how we are.

Small Man Syndrome

2009-11-13T05:57:00.000-08:00

Of course Fred, her fiancé suggested driving her to work for a few days. But that seemed silly. Besides, Chickie knew Fred was there if she needed him. He was working, but if she sent him a text message he could call somebody who could reach Chickie in five minutes: a loyal friend, who wouldn't hesitate to crush the guy like a soda can. So that was good.

As an added safety measure the office manager gave Chickie a one-month permit to the underground parking lot. These were like platinum, the office manager informed her. Ever since the lot had been reduced to make way for the condos next door, only twelve people in admin were allowed underground permits.

The agency had one guest space, and Chickie could use it for a while. Most of the employees had no idea the agency owned these spaces. And none of the temps knew there was underground parking available. So that was good, too.

Also, everyone was on her side, even the bitchy secretary down the hall, who had never been nice to Chickie before this. Even she, Desiree, with her inappropriate cleavage, had to admit: The guy was out of line, over the top, way past any acceptable level of public expression, and it was not Chickie's fault in any way.

They were all on her side. She felt pretty good about that.

There was one thing Chickie had noticed about the guy right away: He was a good two inches shorter than she was. This was the kind of thing her manager called "a contributing factor." According to Chickie, a contributing factor was nothing but a potential loophole people tried when they didn't want to accept responsibility.

Chickie had heard about—and thought she might have seen a magazine article or an episode of Oprah about—something called Small Man Syndrome. Apparently, men who felt inadequately short or small were prone to hold their stature against the world. This made them angry and resentful, and ready to blow up at anyone who reminded them of their inferiority.

It made sense, when Chickie thought about it. After all, hadn't she chosen her fiancé, Fred in part for his physical strength? Fred's square jaw, his take-charge attitude—she had absolutely no doubt about Fred's masculinity from the start. And that was saying a lot nowadays, as Chickie's mother liked to remind her. Especially since Chickie lived so close to Seattle, which wasn't yet the capital of homosexual life in America but was surely in the top three or four cities, nationwide. And that was a fact based on a real statistic she'd heard about—not just an opinion.

In her line of work—placing temporary employees—Chickie had to be sure she was dealing with facts and not opinions, and this is why she relied on her Ten-Point Checklist. If she let them, the hundreds of temps Chickie had to cope with every day would overwhelm her with how they felt about the awful situations they'd gotten themselves into.

Thanks to Chickie's Ten-Point Checklist, all the heated emotions and personal complications of these people could be reduced to a series of "yes" or "no" answers on a single sheet of paper. She had worked out the system during a vacation on Maui that she described to her manager as "brutal, but really, really worth it."

As always, Chickie started with the Golden Rule. She asked herself what most people—given their nature—would try to pull over on her, and whether that was how she felt she deserved to be treated. In most cases, she had to say, honestly and without any prejudice, that she did not deserve to be treated the way these people would probably treat her. This knowledge allowed her to be as firm as she needed to be with people like the guy with Small Man Syndrome.

She had to have this armor, because her first impulse was to be too charitable, too nice. Her fiancé, Fred had urged her to carry a weapon, but Chickie felt, in a fundamental way, this would be a betrayal of her faith in the Lord's ability to protect her.

"I'd feel better if you had the Lord and a .38 on your side, baby," Fred told her. "I can show you what you need to know. We'll hit the firing range any time you want. You can be my guest."

Fred was so sweet, so protective of Chickie. Best of all, she knew he loved her because she was good. He wanted to keep her safe from all the people who would try and take advantage of her nature, and Chickie loved him for it. He was a man after her father's heart, a man with a spotless reputation and a pension plan—nothing like the drifters and losers she had to deal with every day.

Chickie ran a fingertip across the glass surface that covered her desktop. She washed the glass down with Lysol once a day. The paperwork handed in to her by temps—who knew where those cards and forms and applications traveled before they came back to her? They all ended up on Chickie's desk, and the only way to combat the bacteria that traveled with them was to keep the sheet of glass clean—not sterile, of course, that was too much to hope for.

A better agency would have a better cleaning service, of course, and Chickie wouldn't have to wash her own desk every day, but she accepted this burden. The agency was a necessary stepping-stone. Chickie had big plans for the next few years. She was going to build up a sterling resume, then take time off to have two children and get them started in pre-school, then return to her career part-time. Just thinking about it made her giddy. It was a challenge to stay focused on the dumb things people said to her all day, when she wanted to be thinking about her life and how great it was going to be.

The guy sneezed. That was how it started, in the most repulsively common way.

The guy with the Small Man Syndrome had come to her office with a complaint. His hours had been changed. His hours had been scheduled, he said, when he signed his contract, weeks ago. Now the manager at the site where the guy was assigned had decided to change everything. The guy couldn't be expected to change his routine on a whim. Also: the bus he was taking stopped running thirty-five minutes before he would be getting off work…

On and on he whined, until Chickie asked to see his new schedule. He gave her a piece of paper that felt damp and went limp in her hand. She unfolded it, thinking of soft creatures gliding restlessly across the ocean floor. She scanned the page and compared the notations. The difference was a matter of forty-five minutes, three days a week. It was ridiculous!

Here she was, sometimes ten or eleven hours a day, and another hour at home after supper, always working her tail off, and some people were so ungrateful. They acted like they should have any assignment they wanted. They never said thank you. All she ever heard were petty gripes from people who ought to be raising their voices to the Lord to say hallelujah for a job—any job—in this day and age.

Chickie's eyes were the color of nickels, beneath a shock of white blonde hair. When she was flustered or embarrassed, her skin flushed purple and she brushed a strand of gleaming white hair away from her cheek.

The first thing Fred had asked her, on their first date, was whether or not she had a natural "tuft." She didn't know what he meant. When he explained, her face burned with embarrassment but also with excitement. She had felt her whole body flush, and she'd had to catch her breath. She couldn't wait to see Fred again after that.

Their second date was at the Four Seasons, and Fred spared no expense in his effort to, as he put it, "bring her around." It turned out that she liked being brought around by Fred, whose curiosity was both satisfied and titillated by the discovery that she was a natural and a virgin. On their third date, they picked out the engagement ring.

The sapphire stones flashed when Chickie wiggled her fingers.

"I'm sure your manager can accommodate your needs," Chickie said to the guy with the Small Man Syndrome. "If you make your needs known. Have you done that yet?"

Chickie had ventured back to this conversation several times, and she could not find one thing wrong with it. There wasn't any action on her part that justified the man's reaction to her advice. She was absolutely certain that she had not—as the guy alleged, although it was no crime and there was no rule against it—glanced at her watch while addressing his "issue."

"Have you got a date tonight?" The guy growled.

Chickie looked up and then decided she had misheard him.

"Excuse me?"

"You keep looking at your watch," the guy said. "Nice watch!"

Before he could say another word, the guy erupted in a gigantic sneeze, spraying her glass desktop with beads of saliva mixed with mucus. In the center lay one large, yellowish lump, glistening like a slug.

Chickie had taken an intensive workshop on interviewing techniques, and over the next three seconds her mind plowed hard through the sawdust of memory to find an appropriate response. Before she found it, the guy sprang up out of his chair and shouted:

"It's a normal fucking thing! You don't have to look at me like I just killed your mother!"

Chickie forced the look of revulsion from her face, but it took some effort. She felt her cheeks flush. She couldn't help it. She was angry. Now it would be hard to calm back down to a thoroughly professional manner. She tried. She focused on it. But it was so difficult.

Then she stopped herself, and she simply imagined what she always imagined, whenever she found herself distraught over the behavior of some stranger—cutting in line at the espresso bar, or taking four times as many packets of sweetener as anyone needs for one coffee...

She imagined Fred taking the person—in this case, the guy with Small Man Syndrome—and twisting his fat arms until they broke, then taking hold of the man's head and yanking it back and around, until his body gave way and cracked in half, like the handle of a wooden spoon or like a thick pencil snapping in the middle…

It didn't work, this time. Chickie took a clean, quick breath and shouted at the guy:

"You can go ahead and act like that! Like an animal!"

She heard her voice climbing to a shriek.

"But you can't hide your face from our Lord! He knows all about you! Yes, He does!"

She was shocked and speechless, when the guy kicked his chair against the wall on his way out of her office.

Chickie reported the incident to her manager, who insisted that she take a day off. She couldn't understand that. She told her boss she felt fine. And it was true. She'd never felt better. Especially when she was told that the guy with Small Man Syndrome had been let go, and would never work for the agency again.

She was amazed, two days later, when she heard that the guy had come back, followed a repair man down the hall past reception, and trashed her office—knocked her pictures off the wall, broke the lamps and chairs. The only thing he didn't damage further was the glass desktop. Fred said she was lucky the guy didn't defecate on it.

When he said that, over the phone—"defecate"—Chickie shuddered with what she thought was disgust until she felt the warm swelling of her labia and rushed to the bathroom. There, she put her fingers inside her panties and found that she was wet.

For the next few days, Chickie tried to work as though nothing unusual had occurred. But when she tried to concentrate on the forms and regulations, codes and customs of her trade, she found herself wandering to a damp corner of her mind, one (disturbingly enough) first awakened by her fiancé, Fred.

While curled up in Fred's arms, Chickie had a terrible dream in which the guy with Small Man Syndrome chased her through the streets of Seattle at night. She was barefoot and wearing nothing but the silk, turquoise robe that Fred had given her on her birthday. Her skin felt damp from rain or maybe because she was running, and the guy was following her in a truck, running over sidewalks and shouting… Chickie woke up and rolled over onto Fred, who pulled her hips down toward him.

After a few days, she got the hang of the sharp turn she had to make to escape the underground parking gate without scratching the paint on her Mini Cooper. It was tight, so tight she considered parking above ground and tossing caution to the wind. But then she thought of Fred's warnings. He loved her so much that she owed it to him to take care of herself.

So she stuck to the plan, until the day she hit the gas to clear the electric gate in time, and shot out into the middle of the exit lane—where she had to slam on the brakes because traffic was so heavy she couldn't exit. She waited, but couldn't find a break. She was stuck there in a spot where nothing moved, with everything moving around her. And suddenly, there he was:

Rushing toward her, arms outstretched, shouting about all she had done to him and his life and his something because of the something-something…

"For crying out loud," she told the police officers, later.

What would they have done, or what would their wives and girlfriends have done? She felt, deep in her heart, that her very existence was in jeopardy!

The guy might not have struck her car, but one of his hands did touch the door, some part of the door—she heard it, even if there wasn't a dent—and then the window, although it didn't crack. Then the car was reversing, and Chickie felt the flush—the heat rising in her cheeks and across her chest and in her groin—bursting with indignation. Surely it was righteous indignation, if it was anything. But she didn't tell the police that part of the story.

When the car lurched forward again, the guy with Small Man Syndrome rolled upward into the air with his arms and legs outstretched, almost as if he had been scooped up and tossed against heaven, by the hand of God. He rolled up, up, up toward the sky, and then he fell, hard, onto the asphalt. The only sound Chickie heard was the thump of his body. Then she felt the car bounce, although she didn't remember changing gears.

She remembered that sound and the sensation of a horse bucking beneath her. But, honestly, no matter how gently the officers asked her, and no matter how they phrased the question, she couldn't recall how many times.

"Small Man Syndrome" is a short story by S.P. Miskowski

Rock/Paper/Scissors: a series of Facebook fictionettes*

2009-10-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

1
Douglas always fell in love with women from the Midwest. "Plain talkers," he told himself. "Or ones who don't talk at all." Aside from being plain talkers, they also stayed put. Douglas had never met one of them, never heard from them offline, although he thought about what he might say, if it happened. Two days after his forty-second birthday, Douglas received the first postcard he had seen in years--a tiny miracle.

2
Her name was Barbette. At least, that was the name signed in red ink across the postcard. Douglas gripped the picture between thumb and forefinger and stared down at the woman with the creamy skin, and hair the color of sunlit wheat. She posed in the driver's seat of a luxurious car--Douglas didn't recognize the make or model--with her legs resting on the steering wheel and a flimsy silk skirt drawn up over her hips.

3
Sweltering. The blond was so crazy. Twice a week she strolled into the P.O. wearing cut-offs and a t-shirt. And she mailed a batch of postcards--pictures of her daughter. Troy stamped each card of the soft-focus, housewife porn. Pretty creepy, though, mailing shots of her daughter to guys in California… Then Troy realized the blond was the girl, about fifteen years, twenty pounds and twelve thousand Bloody Marys ago.

4
The twins were fighting in the back seat of the beat-up Civic, all the way home. Barbara didn't care. She was thinking of herself as Barbette, the way she'd been signing postcards for the past month. Nothing to look at: Roads, fields, tractors. She'd rather be in her head, humming tunes from that ballet she liked. "You two shut up now or I'll leave you right here," she told the twins, and laughed. Swan Lakes. Pretty!

5
1) Pretty. The blond was so young and so pretty--her legs in the air like a ballerina. 2) She didn't come to his house. 3) She wasn't asking for money. Maybe she wouldn't ask. She was a good girl. He could see it in her face, in the tender lines of her body against the firm flesh of the car seat. She looked clean and sweet and quiet. Douglas pulled on his frayed, green cardigan and stuffed the postcard in his pocket.

6
August. Millie. Brunette. "Buckteeth." So she said when they first met. She kept holding the back of her hand across her lips, to hide her front teeth. Where did "buck" come from? Why "buck?" Douglas couldn't see her buckteeth, not for the longest time. She hid her smile from him. She wore a necklace of glittering stones. She drank gin through a straw from a special, little glass. Small fingers, slender toes: Millie.

7
The twins were frying red grapes in a skillet. The kid across the street had told them, that's how to make raisins. They didn't especially like raisins, but they wanted very much to make a change take place before their eyes. Jenny watched Jackie pushing the grapes around with a broken spatula. They leaned in closer, skinny seven year olds, arms almost touching, with a look of high seriousness on their angular faces.

8
By the time the twins helped Barbette smash the pillows, towels, and sheets into the trunk of the Civic and they hit the road, Jenny had a temporary eye patch and Jackie wore a 4-inch square Band-Aid, across the burn from an exploding grape. They were understandably sullen for most of the drive. Boundless fields and back-arching skies were wasted on them. So Barbette sang to herself all the way to Tustin, California.

9
The P.O. was busy all week. By the time Troy noticed the blond was gone, she was long gone. First she missed her Wednesday pickup, then Saturday, then Wednesday again. No forwarding address, but the box was paid for another month. Only one letter arrived after the blond took off. Faint handwriting on the envelope. Troy thought the delicate hand belonged to a woman. But it was from a guy named Douglas Plate in Tustin.

10
While Barbette drove west and sang off-key, Jenny and Jackie killed time in the back seat. The desert freeway inspired them to create the life story of their mother. Not Barbette. Not even Barbara, her real name. Their true mother was a tall, pretty, tragically dead lady from India, Norway and England. She had expired suddenly from falling downstairs, and the twins were traveling west to inherit their family fortune.

11
Troy chewed on the cheeseburger, at a careful angle above the coffee table, elbows out, trying not to drip on Douglas Plate's letter. An episode of Top Chef taunted Troy with Chateaubriand. He took a ravenous bite of beef patty. Any way he looked at it, the letter was a warning--to old Barb, or young Barbette or whatever she was passing herself off as. Polite. But the guy didn't want her to visit him. That was clear.

12
November. Not last year. Daphne. Quaker? Mormon? Douglas had his doubts: Daphne's long neck was encircled by a tattoo of vines and symbols. She came to his door selling magazines. They always came looking for him. She was a Virgo and a truth seeker, she said. Flirting. Lips. She asked his age, and told him he had the power to do anything he really wanted. When they met, she was a vegetarian. Her mood ring was yellow.

13
"You better do as your dad says." Barbette glanced in the rearview mirror. The twins looked up. Jackie said: "What's his name?" "Mr. Plate." "Do we call him mister or dad?" "Be quiet 'til he tells you what to call him. I'll be back in a few days, at the most, to pick you up." Jenny asked: "Are you going off to marry the guy from TV?" Barbette shook her head. They were slow, and plain, both girls. It wasn't her fault.

14
February. Three years ago. Caroline. Wore a wig, but Douglas wouldn't have guessed if it hadn't slid off her head while he was cutting her throat. It was a shame. She seemed like a nice lady until she started talking. Douglas couldn't understand why they kept coming to his house, the talking women. He didn't ask them to. He felt safer online, at least before the blond. Now here she was, walking across his front yard.

15
Barbette held a pair of cuticle scissors in one hand, just in case. Some guys seemed easy to handle and then turned funny on her. Once she had to stab a drunk with the scissors, and right up to that moment she would have said he was the nicest guy in the world. This one was lonely. He wouldn't mind having the twins for company for a while. Once she was married she would be rich, and she would come back for the girls.

16
Through the back window of the car, the twins watched her cross the dirt yard. Mr. Plate's house was small and painted cake yellow. The door opened and Barbette went inside. Killing time, the twins began to play rock/paper/scissors. Startled by a shout, they looked up. But all they could see was the dry scrub, tall fences, gravel drive. High up in the sky two sparrows circled--calling crazily--and flew away together.

Images & text copyright©2009 S.P. Miskowski
*Each FB fictionette or installment contains the maximum number of characters allowed in a status update in Spring 2009.

Bookstore Mommy: A Fictionette

2009-09-28T16:53:00.000-07:00

A few of us spotted her right away, knew her by the barely visible twist at the corner of her lips.

She strode between aisles of books without looking or seeming to see: Science, History, Cooking, Gardening were wasted as she made her way toward her husband, slender cord of man smiling like a martyr at the back of the store.

Two children traveled in her wake, one mewling for a missing bottle, one skipping. For the skipping one, this was an occasion struck with delight--unknown adventure in a store filled with strange books--on an ochre day in November.
The dumb sky held back, gray sheets lowering and rising by minute degrees.

The wife's body swayed in layers of old and new garments, some threadbare, some expensive. Making her steady way she cast a pall, and we turned away as one—book lovers who quarreled with no one—inclining to the latest obsessions in our hands. We flattened against shelves and tried to blend with book spines.

The husband's face only fell for an instant. In an act of will we recognized from paintings of saints, he greeted her. But his eyes wandered over us. In his greeting he seemed to come away from himself. Or that's how he wanted to seem.

"Honey, look what I found..."

But she had come to deposit children and had no time for books. She might have wanted to want, but that was years and children and layers of clothing in the past. Her husband's nasal seeking of approval in front of strangers must have caused the blood to pound in her ears.

The baby mewled as if it had mewled all day. It had no words yet. Its face was drawn into a mask of desires. Its mother was immune to it now. Her face was an implacably closed gate w/ one warning: Keep Out.

The skipping child came to her dancing a jig in his mysterious book-besotted delight, and grazed the checkout stand with his left left. Some highly unbreakable two-dollar toy hit the floor with a plastic crack.

The hand clasping a buttery, giant purse tucked it beneath the opposite arm. The other hand, un-manicured and unkempt, jerked the child to her, mid-step. Her body clutched him like a giant oven mitt and she slapped his body—two, four, five times.

For five seconds all of us were quick, as one—eyes and ears drawn. By scent we agreed that the next camp, huddle of humans down the road, must be roasting meat over an open flame. We sniffed the smoky trails. Alive and dreaming, we dug our fingernails in and drew her into a thousand parts.

Memory lashed every one.

"Go see how much this costs." Pale and ginger-haired, seven and five—we were sent to find the store manager and bargain, as if the Big Apple grocery were an open bazaar.

"Momma wants to know…"

Even pale and foolish in our secondhand summer clothes, we were more social, able, and deft. How slowly she counted change! Every step was an expedition that needed exhaustive planning.

We orbited her billowing rage. Whatever scarred ruins she concealed, we only saw the shape of her shifting in air.

In the bookstore, our nimble fingers sought the dough of a stranger's skin and we prised the woman apart and tasted--flat--bread--salt--darkened underbelly of a dead girl mummified in her winter clothing and still not warm enough.

Shared delusion. Heroics. Book readers. We did nothing.

Stiff as worried cranes in water, waiting to see if the ripple spells danger, we blinked and looked away.

Idiot Boy

2009-09-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

I first realized Carol DeBernier is a compulsive liar the day she walked over to our house bearing a fruitcake aloft, like it was a national treasure and said, "I just love your little brother Leon. He's the creative type, and that's where the genius of a family lies—in its creative types."

Carol DeBernier's a two-faced out-and-out phony. No doubt about it. Nobody "just loves" my brother. He's an idiot. He's the reason my mother and my sister and I live out here, six miles east of Nowhere, Nevada.

For a while there the dust settled, and I thought maybe things had gotten as bad as they were going to get. But I was wrong. Now, we steal electricity.

This afternoon, Leon ran the big orange extension cord across the back yard, around the fence, over the next-door neighbor's patio, and into his kitchen.

The guy is out of town for six weeks. Won't he be surprised when he reads the next electric bill?

Leon said, "You wouldn't believe how many people leave their electricity on, even if they go away for a long time!"

I said, "Yeah, well, everybody leaves their electricity on. For one thing, their refrigerators and freezers would go off and everything would melt if they turned it off. Right?"

He just looked at me.

I said, "Don't you think somebody will notice a bright orange cord running all the way from our house to the next?"

He just kept looking at me. Then he got in the truck and drove off.

Can you believe my stupid brother? Leon broke the lock on some guy's back door and, basically, stole his juice.

"I mean it!" Carol DeBernier used to chirp at my sister and me. "I really love your brother Leon. What an imagination!" And our mother just ate it up.

Idiot Boy. What's to love?

Nothing he did back home ever worked out. He was flunking out of high school by the end of his sophomore year. He only went to class two or three times a week.

So Mother said, "You could get Leon a part-time job at that copy center."

I don't know what she thinks, sometimes. I'd only been working there seven months, and I definitely wasn't one of the candidates for the management program, so what made her think I had any clout?

It turned out that Judy, the night manager, was looking for a kid, a student, to work cheap: Idiot Boy's luck.

Imagine my surprise when Judy shows up on my shift a week after Leon starts, and pulls me aside and shows me a piece of paper.

"I found this on one of the copiers after Leon went home last night, and I thought you should know first," she said. And she gave me that Christian look—the pity pout?

"I'm not sure, I mean, I wouldn't know, but it seems to be a list of several types of marijuana, with prices marked on the right hand side. See?"

And sure enough, right there in black and white, Leon had photocopied a price list for "Thai," "Hawaiian," and something he called "Local Boy."

Judy shook her head and walked away. The next day I was let go, and the regional manager said she would forget the whole thing but she couldn't have us work there any more.

Later, when Leon grew pot in Mother's planter in the front yard, no one noticed except Carol DeBernier. And she marched right over and told Mother she didn't see why a young person shouldn't try different things. She said Leon was the creative type, and so he probably needed more freedom than the average person. And she looked right at my sister Amy and me when she said that. Oh, she said, if only Leon could figure out what he was good at, and make money doing whatever that might be, he would be just fine.

Well. Thank you, Carol DeBernier! Wouldn't we all like to make money doing what we want to do? I know I would like to make a living turning the garden hose on people who don't mind their own goddamn business. But, there you go. Most people don't get what they want.

At the moment Amy and I work for an international company, based in Las Vegas. Four days a week we go into an air-conditioned room in a trailer, where six of us—all women, of course, because men won't do this job without bitching all day about how much more money they could make somewhere else, and what they'll do when they get out of this stupid place, blah, blah, blah. The six of us go and sit in a circle at a big table. Then we sort through a pile of plastic hairclips we get from a factory in Mexico, and we put them on little cards, and put the cards into decorator boxes to be shipped out all over the country.

We found out last week we're not getting a raise for at least another year. Well, no wonder the company's in trouble. The hair clips are not that pretty. And I don't know what they're thinking, buying this junk, sending it up here to be put onto cards, and then shipping it somewhere else. And the sticker printed on the back says, "Made in America." It doesn't make any sense to me. But, hey, I don't have a business degree, or I guess I wouldn't be sticking hairclips on cards for a living, would I?

And if we didn't have Leon for an idiot brother, we wouldn't live in this bungalow in the middle of Hell, Nevada. Last week the temperature hit 117 degrees. I don't know, but it seems like that's hot enough to cook some brain cells. I know I feel stupider the longer we stay here. I hate this desert. Who ever had the idea to build a whole state out here?

Amy doesn't mind the desert as much as I do. Or, if she does, she's too nice to say so. She's always been the polite one in our family. Amy is a licensed massage therapist. But, as you might expect, therapeutic massage isn't the kind that's in demand out this way. Amy's potential clients always wanted their massage "finished off." So after a few months of arguing with angry men in cowboy boots, and with no repeat customers in sight, Amy took a job at the hairclip company where I was already working.

At least it's a job. At least Amy and I don't mind working for a living.

Nobody ever told Leon he had to get a job. We never told him he had to do anything. That's part of the trouble. And Mother was always so careful with him when he was a baby! Oh, she treated Leon like he was made of gold. And he acted like he was made of gold. Only, he wasn't. He was a big fat baby with squinty little eyes and a stupid expression on his face. You know how some babies look when they're farting or pooping in their pants? Leon looked like that all the time.

Last year, we finally sent Leon out here to Nevada, to study electronics at the Dixon Academy. Leon first heard about it on TV. He watched a lot of TV after he got fired for photocopying that marijuana price list.

Mother never exactly understood what the whole photocopy thing was about. She grounded him. Can you believe it? Idiot Boy stole copies, and they were copies of his drug list. That was his ingenious double crime. And what did he have to do to make up for it? Stay home and eat snacks.

That's where he was when he got the idea to buy pornography off the Internet and re-sell it at a mark-up, to his friends who didn't have computers. What do you think Idiot Boy got for that one? A slap on the wrist and more time at home!

I told him, "Probation isn't the same thing as house arrest—you dummy. Why don't you go for a walk sometime?" And he looked at me with his big dopey eyes.

"I'm not sure that's true," he said. "Maybe you should look it up."

What did I expect? He was Mother's menopause baby. I told her to get him tested when he was in the second grade. She did, and the doctors told her: "Slow metabolism, but nothing unusual."

For years, Mother told all of her friends and relatives: "He's got a slow metabolism, but that's nothing unusual." And she went on coddling him, listening to his stupid ideas. She let him take apart every appliance in the house to find out how it operated. Only he could never put anything back together.

But Mother didn't question Leon's intelligence, even when she was elbow-deep in broken toasters and clock radios. She let him have anything he wanted.

So we took out a loan and sent him where he wanted to go when his probation ended. By then I was working at Xerox, and I had a pretty good chance at the management program there.

We put Leon on a plane and sent him to the Dixon Academy of Technology, in the beautiful Nevada desert. That's where he had decided he would start a brand new life in electronic engineering.

For some reason—I guess the tuition—the school overlooked the fact that Leon had failed science for two years running in high school. Leon told the Academy's President that he was "ready to learn."

And Mother believed him. She was still mailing Leon a monthly allowance when I took the checkbook away from her.

That happened right after we got a call from the cops.

Leon was caught stealing the plumbing and fixtures from a vacant house. He told the police he was doing a favor for the guy who used to own the house. The guy had sold the property but he forgot some stuff he needed, and he asked Leon to help him out for a hundred bucks.

Nobody believed Leon at first. But the police checked out the story. Then they uncovered this racket the guy was pulling all over the Southwest. He'd buy a house and fix it up, sell it for a profit, then steal back all the fixtures right before the new owner moved in. The guy went to prison, and Leon got probation again. Only, he can't leave the state. So guess who got to move out here to support the Idiot Boy?

Can you believe how lucky some incredibly dumb people are? Why is that? Why does Leon walk through life like an animal—like a big circus bear with two days' growth on his goofy face—planting pot in the front yard, stealing pipes and doorknobs as a favor to a complete stranger?

I can see him right now. I'm looking out the patio window at Leon. He's frowning, leaning down low to the ground, pulling the extension cord tighter.

He went to the store. And now he's got at least 20 brown cardboard boxes flattened out in a pile. He's going to lay those boxes out, end against end, all the way across our dirt yard, to cover the orange extension cord.

Mother stands next to me at the patio window, watching her stupid son.

"Now, this is where all that electronics training will come in handy," she says, because she doesn't even know that Leon flunked out of the Dixon Academy after two weeks.

Leon will be outside all night, carefully laying down the flattened boxes. He is dead certain no one will be able to tell those boxes from the dirt. In Leon's mind, he is the genius of the family. In his mind, he is working on a foolproof master plan. In his mind, the only possible result of all this will be free electricity.

by S.P. Miskowski - "Idiot Boy" is available under a Creative Commons license. The story first appeared at Identity Theory, and was subsequently published in the collection Red Poppies: Tales of Envy and Revenge.

Idiot Boy by S.P. Miskowski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.amazon.com.

FUR

2009-09-23T13:36:00.001-07:00

Fleas were the part of her job she hated. But Mary accepted the fleas, as she accepted many things nowadays, with a shrug: A necessary evil, what could be done about it? Fleas occupied the fur on so many of the dogs she groomed, the fat, lazy dogs of clients who paid extra for bows, extra for bells and silk ribbons. Cheap trinkets.

Mary knew that the really wealthy pet owners took their dogs to the Kennel Spa down the street. At the spa, they paid hundreds of dollars so their canine children could sit in a sauna or get a massage.

"Stupid," Mary's mother said whenever the subject came up. "What dog needs a facial? I need a facial."

"They don't do facials, Mom," Mary told her a hundred times. "It's a mineral pack, makes the coat shiny." But her mother wouldn't listen.

"Kennel Spa," she said. "It's a stupid idea, but it makes money. You should work there. Nobody goes for just grooming any more."

"Our clients do," Mary said. "Not everybody has a million dollars in the bank, Mom."

"We sure don't," her mother said. She always complained at the breakfast table. "Your dogs have got fleas. Why? I don't think Kennel Spa dogs have fleas." She poured Mary's coffee.

"Dogs with fleas. It's a shame."

Over the past three years Mary's mother had become the background noise to her life, a steady cadence like the radio. Mary dressed by it, brushed her hair by it, said goodbye and caught the bus from Phoenix to Scottsdale.

Brenda was already there. She opened the shop every morning, because she owned it. She had worked here all her life, and she inherited the shop when her mother died.

No matter how early Mary arrived Brenda was there, wearing a frosted wig and several pieces of turquoise jewelry, blue jeans and a ratty T-shirt. Brenda always started the day wearing mules or sandals, and ended up working barefoot. Mary wondered how she could stand the feel of animal hair sticking to her feet, but Brenda never noticed.

Mary thought about the fleas while she combed the silky coat of a Pomeranian notorious for his sharp little dangerous teeth. She had his mouth strapped shut with a muzzle and she worked steadily until the dog dropped a turd on the white Formica table.

"Bad!" Then Mary put her hands on either side of him and spoke firmly, and he snarled up at her through the muzzle.

"Yeah, I know," she told the Pomeranian. "You'll kill me as soon as you get the chance, right?"

She had never struck a dog, but she had seen Brenda lose her temper and give a little one-finger thump to the noses of dogs that gave her trouble. Brenda always had trouble with the Schnauzers. She said they reminded her too much of her ex-husband.

Mary finished brushing the Pomeranian and returned him to his cage. Then she prepared to shampoo and blow-dry a poodle whose name she could never pronounce, so she called him Foo-Foo. That's when she noticed the flea on her arm. It jumped and tumbled on her skin. She slapped it away. But she kept thinking about it: the thin line between the dogs and herself, and how the fleas seemed happy with both.

Fleas came with the job, although Mary and Brenda took pains to introduce their new clients to a reliable topical treatment. Some clients were grateful and some were not, like the over-exercised Barth woman, the one who wore real furs and fake jewelry. Mary's husband had once given her a jacket made of rabbit fur, but she never wore it because people gave her dirty looks. She never wore jewelry either, but she could tell at a glance the big baubles on Mrs. Barth were cheap imitation.

Mrs. Barth's Chihuahua was named James but she called him Jimmy, and she strapped him into a custom-made car seat and took him wherever she went. In his brightly decorated car seat, Jimmy sat quietly watching traffic, like an emaciated baby.

The smell was part of the job, too: a wet, beauty shop aroma. Soap couldn't touch it. Worse, it was a dog hair smell. Mary's mother complained about it, and they sprayed the house every day with a spring bouquet room freshener, but it came back. Not at once but gradually. It lingered between the couch cushions until someone sat down and—whoosh—the dog hair smell would come up and surround the surprised guest like an invisible cloud.

"If that Jimmy squirms around when I clip his claws today, I'm gonna chop his tail off and tell Mrs. Barth one of the dogs bit it," Brenda said over coffee, stacking her feet one on top of the other on the rim of a wastebasket and leaning back in her chair. Then she laughed at herself.

"I need a vacation," she said.

It was the Christmas season. In Phoenix, that meant Styrofoam Santas wearing sombreros perched merrily on the streetlights, and the temperature dropping to fifty-five degrees. The weather was perfect for shopping. Tourist season was in full swing. On the freeway people drove like demons looking for an exit from hell.

When the last client picked up the last dog at the end of the day, Brenda let out a sigh of hallelujah and flipped over the "Closed" sign on the front door.

Brenda and Mary sat in the cramped waiting area, watching traffic and sipping a final cup of coffee.

"I told you and told you, he's all right," Brenda said. "Why would I set you up a date with a rapist or a psycho or something?"

"Why did you set me up at all?" Mary asked. "I don't need a date. I'm happy."

"In a five-room house, with nobody except your mother?" Brenda made a face. "Is that all you want for yourself?"

Mary didn't like to talk about her future. Life was hard enough when all she did was go day by day. It wasn't always so. During the years of her marriage to Johnny, Mary thought about the future all the time. She had plans, but she couldn't explain them, especially to her husband. He was only interested in what Mary wore and how she looked in it.

"What do you want?" Brenda asked.

"I don't know," Mary said. "But I don't want another husband telling me what to do, and how to do this and that and everything."

"Then dumping you for a younger woman," Brenda reminded her. This was the real dividing line between the two women. Brenda never treated Mary like an employee, more like a partner. They split the clients and tips. But Mary's husband had left her in the middle of the night after he fell in love with a 21-year-old cashier at their neighborhood 7-Eleven, while Brenda had the good sense to throw her husband out of the house for gambling. It was a difference that gave Brenda free rein to offer unsolicited advice.

"You should've taken his .38 down to that motel and shot both of them in the butt," she told Mary at least once a week. "Then you'd feel better about it."

"Yeah, yeah," Mary said. "Good riddance, okay?"

"Fine, okay," said Brenda. She scratched her leg. "I hate the winter, man, I get this dry skin."

Brenda turned her attention back to the traffic beyond the shop window.

"Anyway, he thinks he's picking you up at eight o'clock. So just meet him at the door and say you've got the flu or you hate men or whatever," she said.

First thing when she got home, Mary took a warm bath. In the tub she ran through the scene in her mind, how it would look and sound if her mother said to this guy Brenda had set her up with:

"No, my daughter isn't well. She grooms dogs and one of the dogs bit her so she can't go out with you. Sorry."

It was ridiculous, and guaranteed to make both her mother and the guy feel stupid. There was no way out. She had to go.

At eight o'clock Mary sat in the living room under the smiles of three saints framed in gold. She was bathed in light from the miniature Christmas tree and surrounded by the smell of dog hair. She wore the only dress she owned that could be called nondescript—a brown cotton shift with a tan Peter Pan collar and sleeves that were added on by her mother to turn a spring outfit into winter.

At eight-ten Mary turned off the Christmas lights and decided to go to bed. The doorbell rang.

She told herself she had not anticipated anything. She had, in fact, made a firm resolution not to expect one single thing. It was a habit that kept her fear low to the ground and manageable. But when she opened the door and saw her date she felt her jaw muscles tighten.

He wore a brown suit—the same shade of brown Mary was wearing. The carnation in his lapel was already wilting. She noticed it was an unnatural yellow, probably over-dyed.

Otherwise, he was the most handsome man she had ever seen. At least, he had the most handsome head she had ever seen. A romantic, poetic head with large, dark eyes and thick, black hair and a lower lip that made her own lips move involuntarily as if she had something on the tip of her tongue. A gorgeous, glamorous head—attached to a square solid frame with a beer belly. He looked to be about 5' 3", which was a good three inches shorter than Mary.

She tried to shake the idea, but there was no doubt in her mind: He had a body that wanted to be under someone else's head. A bald butcher's head.

"Hello. You must be Mary," he said, and his voice was so deep and artificial it seemed to be traveling through a giant megaphone to Mary's ears. She imagined him practicing his deep voice in front of a mirror.

"Hello," she said. "Do you have a car?"

She would go. She would go with him and call it a date. Fine. She could do that, but she would not invite him in and let him judge her and her mother because they lived in a house that reeked of dog hair. He was okay; but he wasn't perfect, and she wouldn't stand for any judgment. She made up her mind. She didn't want to know his opinion of her.

"My name is John, you can call me Johnny," he said as soon as they were seated in his weather-beaten Plymouth Fury.

"Thanks. Okay," Mary said. She stared out the window at the night full of palm trees and wondered if she would end the evening by screaming out loud. She knew Brenda wasn't malicious enough to set her up on purpose with a guy named Johnny, so she figured Brenda didn't know him as well as she pretended.

"My ex-husband was named Johnny," Mary said flatly. "Do you have another nickname?"

"Oh," he said. "Not really. Sorry about that."

They cruised along in silence for a while. Then Johnny took another stab at conversation.

"Brenda tells me you two work together," he said, stopping at a light.

On the corner a grizzled old man was fighting with a bulldog for a scrap of what appeared to be carpet. The light changed before Mary answered.

"We groom dogs," she said.

"Hey, that must be interesting." Johnny replied. His eyes were fixed on the old man and bulldog in the rear view mirror.

"Why?" Mary asked.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "I thought, you know, you probably learn a lot about people--uh, people with dogs."

Mary stared out the window.

"See, I work at the zoo," he explained. "You'd be surprised how much you can learn about an individual from the animal he spends the most time watching."

"At the zoo?" Mary pictured this dark-haired beer-bellied man shoveling scat out of wire cages.

"Yeah. Like--the people who are attracted to the big cats? Usually middle-aged men starting to put on weight. They like the tigers, the leopards."

"Chubby men like big cats?" Mary asked. She tried not to look at his belly.

"And the fat women, they always go for the exotic birds," Johnny said as they came to a stop at a Sonic Drive-In.

"Birds, huh?" Mary said. "How about that."

They studied the menu for a minute and then Johnny asked what she wanted.

"Oh, I don't know," said Mary. "A milkshake—no, wait, a diet soda. And French fries."

Johnny ordered for both of them and if he gave the waitress the once-over, Mary didn't catch him at it. The skinny high school girl in a tight uniform had taken a good leisurely look at Johnny, though. Mary thought it was only natural. Judging by his head and shoulders, he was quite a catch. Then a mean thought crossed her mind.

"Do you eat at the drive-in a lot?" she asked.

"Not really," he said. "Why?"

"Just curious," Mary said. Now she was sorry she'd thought of him taking all his meals in his car, so he wouldn't have to stand up and reveal his body.

"So every person likes a different animal, huh?" She tried to sound interested.

"Yeah," he said. "It's pretty funny to watch. They don't even know it."

"I don't like dogs," Mary told him.

The night sky was etched with clouds.

"I brush their hair and give them a bath because somebody pays me to do it," she said.

"What kind of animals do you like?"

"None," Mary said honestly. "I don't like animals very much."

"So, how did you decide on a job like that?" Johnny asked.

"I knew Brenda for a long time. I needed a job, and she taught me." She didn't want to talk about dogs and she didn't want to talk about herself.

Across the street a man and woman were walking toward a gas station. The man followed the woman, reaching his hand out to try and touch her. The woman pushed his hand back, but she didn't run away.

"Brenda hates dogs," Johnny said. "She likes reptiles." He laughed. "They don't have to be groomed."

Mary had to laugh, thinking of Brenda trying to unsnarl the nappy curls on a terrier's back. First the dog would bare its teeth and growl. Then Brenda would bare her teeth and growl, then the dog, then Brenda.

"But most women don't like the snakes and lizards," Johnny said. "They like the animals with fur. Something about it."

"Yeah, they probably imagine themselves wearing it," Mary said.

Johnny seemed confused by this. He took the tray from the girl in the Sonic uniform, and handed Mary her soda and fries. He ate his cheeseburger and onion rings like a starving man, without stopping to talk.

Halfway through her fries, Mary noticed the familiar tingling sensation on her forearm. Anyone else might have mistaken it for a stray hair, or a grain of salt. Instantly, Mary recognized the minute crawling of a flea on her skin. She turned and brushed it off quickly before Johnny knew something was up.

They heard raised voices outside. The man and woman across the street were shouting at one another.

"Want to see something?" Johnny asked. The expectant smile made him seem naïve for a moment.

"What is it?" Mary didn't want to see anything. But Johnny was reaching around the seat, fumbling with paper and boxes on the floor behind him. He found a hand-sized gold box and offered it to Mary.

"Open it," he said.

Mary accepted the box, unable to refuse with a mouthful of French fries. She nodded thanks and opened the gold box. Inside she found a piece of what seemed to be fur—only a scrap, but it was black and glossy like mink. She ran her hand over it several times until it lost its coolness and began to take on the warmth of her fingers.

When she looked up, Johnny was watching her. Their eyes met for a second, just a flicker, but her face flushed red. The car seemed to close in on her. The dark, the night, kept her there, trapped with him. She was excited, and infuriated by the knowledge that she couldn't leave. It was too far to walk home, now. She was stuck with him.

"What is this?" Mary asked, holding up the scrap of dark fur.

"It's from one of the black bears. He died a few months ago. Beautiful, isn't it?" He was staring at her, making her blush more deeply.

"It's a pretty color," she said. "What's it for? Small piece like this, you couldn't even make a collar out of it."

As soon as she said it she felt sorry. Johnny looked at the fur, then at Mary.

"I'm really tired tonight for some reason," she said. She closed the box and handed it back to Johnny. Reluctantly, he returned it to the floor behind his seat.

"Hard day at work?" He asked, smiling.

"Just tired."

"Well, I wanted to show you one more thing on the way home," he said. He tossed their trash into the can beside the car, dropped the tray in its rack, and started the car.

They drove in silence again. Mary didn't look at Johnny. She hoped he couldn't tell that she was grinding her teeth.

There was nothing, really, wrong with this man. And she kept reminding herself there was nothing wrong with her. But it was an unusual moment when her ex-husband's voice didn't play in the back of her head, telling her she was getting fat, she should never wear shorts at her age, she ought to think about having her nose fixed, maybe she should see other men to get some more experience, it might help their marriage, he wasn't going to stop flirting with other women as long as they found him attractive, and on and on.

It was a marriage her mother disapproved of, from the beginning. So it was all the more humiliating when Mary had to ask her mother if she could come home because she could only afford to pay a few hundred dollars a month for rent. The rest had gone to creditors and lawyers.

Mary's mother reminded her, every day, that she would never get another job and make more money unless she went back to school. She would have gone to school a few years earlier, but now the idea of sitting in a desk in a classroom with a bunch of people ten or fifteen years her junior made her feel like crying. She often told herself that she was in a transition, and she needed to let things rest for a while. She would figure out what she wanted to do next, but now she was tired and she needed to coast and not feel anything, for anybody, just for a while.

On the west side of Central Avenue Johnny turned south down an alley, then right into a large cul-de-sac and ended up in front of "the most decorated house in Phoenix." A sign proclaimed this triumph and the name of the newspaper running the annual contest, but it was barely visible in the glare.

There wasn't an inch of the dirt lawn that didn't pulse with Christmas lights. The roof was covered in bright white fake snow, with a giant plastic Santa riding his sleigh pulled by reindeer. A life-sized plaster Mary and Joseph and the Magi smiled from both sides of a wishing well in the yard, where pilgrims were encouraged to make a donation toward the electric bill.

On the roof a neon sign flashed: "Have." Then darkness. "A." Darkness. "Merry." Darkness. "One!"

"That's pretty," Johnny said as they huddled in the car and gazed out through the crowd of people who had come to see the house lit up at night.

"What do they come here for?" Mary asked, watching the crowd watch the house.

"To see something they can't see anywhere else, maybe."

Mary studied the scene. She tried to understand what the fuss was about.

"It's a waste of money," she said, finally. There was nothing else she could offer.

Johnny started the engine and slowly pulled away from the curb, watching the Christmas lights in his rearview mirror, all the way to the corner.

"Look!" He said when they turned down the next street. "You can still see the glow, over the rooftops!"

Mary pretended to look.

"Wow," she said and stifled a yawn.

They said nothing on the way home. Johnny drove a little over the speed limit, and Mary watched the street lamps flash by, dressed up in their sombrero-and-poncho-clad Santa Clauses.

At her house, Mary said thank you and good night in the car, explaining that Johnny didn't have to see her to the door, her mother was asleep, and the neighbors liked quiet. He said nothing about the piece of fur in its box, and she wondered if he had meant to offer it to her as a gift. Maybe she had misunderstood and embarrassed him.

Mary couldn't get over the feeling that she was crawling with fleas, that they were taking over her body and her mother's house. She wondered if Johnny would find any fleas in his car on the way home, and forever think of fleas when he thought of her, if he ever did.

She waved goodbye and unlocked her front door. She turned off the porch light before he drove away. She let out a ragged sigh now that she could go to bed and not have to talk to the stranger with the beautiful head stuck on the wrong body.

In the next room her mother was snoring lightly in the dark.

Mary opened the door to her own small room. She sat on the narrow bed but she wasn't sleepy any more. Outside a tepid breeze ruffled the palm trees and a dog barked.

Mary opened the closet as quietly as she could. She found the bundle of plastic wrapping by touch and pulled it out. Then she stripped the rabbit fur jacket of its plastic cover and put it on over her brown shift. The jacket lay heavily against her skin. Feeling its weight and the stifling warmth enfolding her, she clung to it with both hands, lay down on her bed, and closed her eyes to shut out the night.

Copyright © S.P. Miskowski. "Fur" first appeared in Fine Madness.

Red Poppies: Tales of Envy and Revenge

2009-07-24T10:48:00.000-07:00

Now I have an author's profile page at Amazon. Hooray!

You can buy Red Poppies: Tales of Envy and Revenge online at Powell's Books, Elliott Bay Book Co, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. The book is distributed by BookPeople.

Here's what my fellow writers at authonomy had to say about the title story when it was posted:

"This is mesmerizing."

"Darkly witty and incisive portrayal of obsessive, destructive relationships."

"This stuff is off the chain. The narrative voice is just brilliant."

"A story David Lynch would love. It was wickedly entertaining throughout."

"Chilling. In a such a simple, straightforward way."

Buy your copy today, and let me know what you think.

Doctrine vs Faith: Jimmy Carter's Choice

2009-07-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

"The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter." -- Jimmy Carter, The Observer

Creepy Babies

2009-07-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

Want to see something incredibly creepy, which is also harmless?

These babies make me shake my head and blurt out: "No. Dear lord, no!"

My husband pointed out that one's reaction depends on one's tolerance for human verisimilitude as described in the Uncanny Valley hypothesis.

This baby doll loving thing is a fascination that doesn't hurt anyone. And that's saying a lot, these days. So, I'm trying not to judge. Not judging. Refraining from passing judgment.

But...

It's BREATHING. Run!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Kelso

2009-07-06T01:42:00.000-07:00

Public Domain Art 062309: La Petite Barque by Emile Friant

2009-06-23T18:16:00.001-07:00

Red Poppies: Tales of Envy and Revenge

2009-06-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the London Arts Council for sponsoring this project, allowing New Generation Publishing to produce a whole slew of titles on demand, including my collection of stories.

Seattle 05 2009

2009-05-19T01:01:00.000-07:00

The living room & the barefoot contessa (w/spoilers)

2009-04-10T13:28:00.001-07:00

I'm going to post here from now on--however long that lasts. This is the blog where I feel comfortable and in my own voice more often than not. DoC is my living room.

Slippers on,
because I am
gauche
suburban even in the city.

Today I reread Suzanne's wonderful prose. Great wit. I love it. And I should be writing to her right now, or following up on some research about my mom's benefits, or talking with my mom on the phone, or reading more of Michelle's work, which is a pleasure, or I should be writing a new post for Shock Room before its loyal readers give up...

There are so many things I ought to be doing. Learning Spanish. Exercising.

So what am I doing watching The Barefoot Contessa on TCM?

It is love. Love makes me forget myself, you see. And how can anyone look at Ava Gardner in all her splendor in 1954, and not fall in love?

In fact 1954 itself is a glorious moment on screen. The cars are American and swanky as hell. The men and women smoke like grownups and wear fur pelts for glamour. Gardner has a dreadful, half-invested accent, but it only enhances one's awareness of her profound beauty.

Rossano Brazzi delights me with his contempt for the English language. How famous was he, with South Pacific, and that Katherine Hepburn movie about the woman on holiday in Venice, and wasn't he the sexy European dude in that girls-like-to-travel-too film Three Coins in a Fountain? So Hollywood producers must have put a lot of pressure on him. Yet his English never improved--because it didn't have to. He was that handsome.

The film is preposterous and awful, with maudlin, instructive and too wise narration. But the Technicolor is astonishing, thick and saturated. Watching the palette shift from one static, talkity-talk scene to the next, I feel medicated by the cobalt and dove gray, the emerald and scarlet, the charcoal suits of the men setting off the satin drapery of Gardner's gowns.

It's a crazy-assed Hollywood story about a woman who is discovered and who becomes an internationally recognized movie star, but who retains her true nature--which is miraculously pure and real...

See, she marries well and she ends up being a contessa. But she likes to be barefoot. She's so real.

Humphrey Bogart looks like he's counting the money in his wallet between scenes.

"I hate shoes." -- The Barefoot Contessa

Oh dear. Brazzi has a monologue. It's faux philosophy. Violin music is playing. Brazzi says read this medical document, and since it's in Italian he tells the Contessa that it says, basically, he was injured in the war. Injured a lot. In fact, this honeymoon thing isn't going to work.

Gosh.

But guess what? The Contessa is telling Bogart she got pregnant by somebody who works for her, and she's keeping the baby. Wow, this contessa is a complicated gal.

This movie must be four hours long.

Bang! Bang!

Not telling.

My favorite new story

2009-02-11T18:02:00.000-08:00

My friend Angel sent out this video link. If only I could tell a story like this!

SPF #3: Apply Liberally

2009-02-04T18:33:00.000-08:00

"my new friends (are so much better than you)" will be included in

SPF ( Solo Performance Festival)

SPF is Seattle's Annual International Solo Performance Festival. SPF is dedicated to presenting fearless, cutting-edge, diverse performances by solo theatre artists. It was founded in 2007 and is now gearing up for it's third festival. SPF happens annually in March at Theatre Off Jackson.

2007--SPF#1: No Protection
2008--SPF#2: Sweatproof
2009--SPF#3: Apply Liberally

SPF # 3: Apply Liberally will feature a mix of original solo one-act plays by local and international artists, as well as one evening of short solo performances by emerging and established Seattle artists. As well as two nights of BOYLESQUE and two nights of stand up comedy.

SPF Alumni include: Jonah Von Spreeken, Mark Boeker, Keith Hitchcock, Mary Purdy, Charles Leggett, Suzanne Morrison, Michelle Todd, Andrew Conner, Jennifer Jasper, Mark Siano, Troy Mink, Becky Poole, K. Brian Neel, Jenna Bean Veatch, Seth Rosenbloom

Theatre Off Jackson
409 7th Ave. S

SPF # 3: Apply Liberally!

Wednesday and Thursday March 5 and 6 at 8pm:
Shorties: an evening of short solo performance featuring Keira McDonald, Jonah Von Spreeken, CHristopher Bange, Johanna Buccola, Emmett Montgomery, Dartanion London, Mara Siciliano, Jenna Bean Veatch and Carlee McManus

Fri/Sat March 6,7 at 8pm:
7 Sins by James Judd

Fri/Sat March 6,7 at 10pm:
Master Bates Burlesque presents BOYLESQUE! Curated by Waxie Moon

Thurs/Fri/Sat. March 12,13,14 at 8pm:
my new friends (are so much better than you)
written by S.P. Miskowski and performed by Morgan Rowe

Fri/Sat March 13/14 at 10pm:
Stand up Komedy with The People's Republic of Komedy

Thurs/Fri/Sat March 19,20,21
"The Medicine Show" TBA by Chris Bange
"Fall Fair" by Jason MacDonald

Even clown trains get derailed

2009-01-23T13:19:00.000-08:00

My husband sent me this link to a site featuring abandoned amusement parks in Asia. Spooky and beautiful!

Lie to Me, Lie to Me!

2008-12-24T12:37:00.000-08:00

Over at HuffPo legal analyst Sunny Hostin offers readers an article on Ponzi Schemes and How to Spot Them. The article spells out in a straightforward and accessible manner how Ponzi or pyramid schemes work. Hostin describes the red flags that ought to have alerted investors prior to the discovery that Bernard Madoff perpetrated a $50 billion fraud, which is still affecting financial institutions worldwide.

What Ms. Hostin's article doesn't say is that knowing how such a scam works will not stop it now or in the future. A pyramid scheme--in which early investors are paid ridiculously high returns at the expense of new investors, until new investors can no longer be found and the whole system collapses--relies on more than a set of fake records. The premise succeeds on the charm and attractiveness of the con artist at the helm, and on the greed of his investors. In short, it can never be spotted in advance by the people who will be taken in, because they are people who want to be taken in and the scheme is designed and decorated to look like the things they already believe in.

Most people want more money than we deserve, and the attention and flattery of someone delightful. The means used to con people is built into human nature. We are shallow. We will always choose the svelte over the tubby, the successful over the struggling, the sleek over the meek, and the photogenic over the good. And as long as we do, we will be cheated and lied to.

Karolee

2008-12-14T15:13:00.000-08:00

All memories of you bring joy.

Why Can't Oprah Love Me When I'm Fat?

2008-12-09T22:43:00.000-08:00

My holiday wish came true. Oprah got fat again.

Is that mean? Well, hang on. Sometimes I am fat and sometimes I am not. Most Americans live in the not fat-fat-not fat zone with me.

I know the reasons why I get fat: eating and drinking and sitting around. And I know what makes me thin: going hungry and forcing myself to do boring things over and over and over. Naturally enough, I spend a little more time fat than not fat, each year. But you want to know something? I don't care.

If you take how much I don't care about my weight, and quadruple that, and then multiply that by a hundred--that is how much I don't care about Oprah Winfrey's weight. And I like her. I have always liked her. I have even worried about her, and I have wished her well and I have wished she would come to my town for a visit. But I don't care what size dress Oprah wears, and I don't care how much she weighs.

Considering how little I care about Oprah's weight, I sure hear a lot about it in a timely manner. For example, I know the instant she discovers a new miracle diet. This year it was acai berries. Haven't heard of them? Nobody has, until Oprah says they flush all the toxins out of you. By toxins, she means: fat. That's right. You can drink a berry tea and forget about exercise. Forget about how much money celebrities spend on spa treatments and surgery to "supplement" their diets. No, the key is the acai berry. As long as you drink that juice, you're going to flush out all the fat that is hiding in every nook and cranny of your long-suffering body. You're going to be taut, tan, even tall.

Acai berry! Acai berry! Shouted the Facebook ads. Every time I navigated to another page, the acai fucking berries followed. Pop-up: Look at the abs I got from acai!

I tried answering the drop-down menu questions: why I dislike this ad. Uh. Irrelevant. Because I don't diet. Boring. Ditto. Misleading. Because I don't believe you for a second. Offensive. Because why do you want me to lose weight, anyway? You don't even know me.

But now Oprah has thrown herself on the broken diet sofa to weep inconsolably: "I am embarrassed. I am mad at myself."

Let me be the first, or more likely the four millionth, to say, Oprah: I don't friggin' care. I like you, and I don't care what size you are. Two? Great. Twenty? Great.

If only my unconditional love were requited, Oprah. Alas, I see you do not love me as I am when I am fat. I see it in the way you insist that I join you every time you decide to mercilessly pummel your poor body into a new shape. I see it in the dozens of ads on which your name appears: Oprah. Lose weight. Acai.

Why can't you stick with one diet and exercise program, Oprah? And why do you make me watch each new regimen as you contort your personal life and relationships to accommodate it? Is it not easier to shovel ourselves into dresses two sizes too small? Is it not easier still for a woman of wealth such as yours, to simply buy a bigger dress until the donuts wear off? Or do what the simple folk do, Oprah: Let out the seams! Let out the seams!

There is something still wrong, in the heart of all that self-actualization and fresh starting, isn't there? Perhaps something innately human, that will not go away, regardless of the power of the flush.

So, Oprah, let me say: Welcome back to my size. Welcome to being a person. Please stop asking me to go on a diet with you, or run around outside in bad weather. Please stop giving those self-hating interviews, and learn to love me as fat as I am. Then you might, just might, learn to love yourself a little bit, too.

Whitey Christmas

2008-12-09T19:11:00.000-08:00

Oh, thank the stars and sweet Jesus! The Swiss Colony Catalog is here! Now my holiday shopping will be a breeze, and I can "buy now, pay later" because my credit is pre-approved!

The sticker on the front warns me that this is my Final Catalog, because the Swiss Colony people won't bother me with "unwanted catalogs." I'm not sure what that means, because I don't recall asking them for this catalog. But, you know what? Sometimes unspoken prayers are answered, aren't they? Right? Am I right?

So, let's go shopping!

First of all, I am definitely signing up for the FREE chocolate covered macadamia nuts that come with ANY purchase. I want those nuts. In fact, I don't know if I can wait for them to come in the mail. I might have to go shopping at QFC... I'm looking at the photo of the nuts, peeking out from under the half-opened lid of a gold painted metal tin framed by holly branches. Those nuts are so chocolate-y, they practically glow. The light dances off them in such a beguiling way, it's like they're winking at me. These nuts are so coy. They know they want to be mine.

Reluctantly, I turn the page on the luscious nuts and take a look inside the catalog.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Winter wonderland, you are everything I've dreamed of!

Right here, on the first page, Swiss Colony has written me a check for $400. Now that's what I call Christmas cheer. Who says people are greedy and mean? I don't, because they're not. They're nice and they like me and they sent me $400 in a catalog. Oh, but when I look closer I see that the money has to be spent on stuff in the catalog. And there's another picture of the choco-macadamia nuts. I have to keep going.

Oh, candy with sprinkles, and glaze, and…family! There they are, smiling in the snow, carrying home the tree they chopped down in what looks like a national park…no, that can't be! It must be a tree store made up to look like a forest. Sure. And the jolly family, mom and dad and sister and brother, are all white like me. In fact, everyone in the Swiss Colony Catalog is white like me. I guess the Swiss Colony folks know what white people like. According to the catalog, white people like cheese. And candy, and fruitcake. And white people like so many other things…

Velour lounge sets. Inspirational cuff watches. Dragonfly accessories. "Midnight Elegance" gloves with fake fur trim at the wrists. Musical kitten fountains and sleeping kitten fleece throws. 12-feature pocket tools, because "he can't go camping without a good knife," and actual Swiss Army knives are really expensive, and besides, this tool set is made of "rugged metal." Electronic bibles, featuring "both Old and New Testament…with bookmarks, note taking, verse linking, and enhanced search." Wow! My little nephew will be the envy of his rowing team at camp next year!

And that's not all.

Presidential knife sets celebrating our "5 greatest Presidents!" (Want to guess? Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. Their portraits are painted right on the handles. Not sure how that Commie FDR slipped in there, but oh well.) Military mascot pocket watches…

Hmm. The "American Glory" fiber optic globe carries this description: "Fiercely protective (just like someone you know?), this detailed American eagle watches over a brilliant fiber optic globe."

Just like someone you know… I don't get it. Maybe they mean Brandon, whose name is stitched on the personalized TV blanket with a pouch on the back, to tuck his feet into. Brandon's feet are tucked in and he's comfy as a king in his favorite TV chair. He's holding a beer and smiling in a way that's kind of cute and kind of demented. I think Brandon's done something bad. Something he doesn't want the Swiss Colony people to know about.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. I just found the perfect gift. The one I want. And if anyone out there wants to make a middle aged white woman really, really happy, they can buy it for me. No, not the blanket-holding snowman. Although that is nice.

The best item in the whole catalog is the (soon to be mine) John Deere™ Pocket Watch. OMG, it has a picture of a tractor on the spring activated lid, and when it opens the lucky owner is "greeted with the signature sound of a John Deere original Model 40 tractor—there's even a tractor-shaped second hand that rides around the dial."

Okay, they can keep the "multimedia sweater" and the "outback rod and reel combo." They can even keep the chocolate covered macadamia nuts. I have to have that tractor pocket watch. I need one. I'm always five minutes late, wherever I go.

I've been meaning to buy a timepiece to replace my Batman watch, and here it is! I have to have that watch. I can't go on without it. I know I'll dream about it tonight. And I am sure someone will send me one for Christmas.

Oh, I'm so glad Swiss Colony found me. This is going to be the best Christmas ever!

"Whitey Christmas" originally appeared on the blog Hick with a Master's Degree on Friday, November 9, 2007.

Mike Daisey's latest show is a smash hit

2008-11-01T20:20:00.000-07:00

If You See Something Say Something
Created and Performed by MIKE DAISEY
Directed by JEAN-MICHELE GREGORY
Running Off-Broadway at
The Public Theater
Until November 30th

"Ambitious, persuasive and provocative—Mr. Daisey is as much a performer as a raconteur. Funny, shrewd and continually absorbing."
NEW YORK TIMES

"Once again, Mike Daisey has proven himself that rare theatrical creature: an entertaining performer with something valuable to say. A gripping, vital story."
VARIETY

"Mesmerizing and raucous—a funhouse ride worthy of Dr. Strangelove."
BLOOMBERG NEWS

"Masterful command—he is all-powerful for 100 minutes. When he wants you to laugh, you laugh; when he wants you to think, you think. He doesn’t draw you into the stories he tells—not exactly. Rather, he shows how, perhaps unawares, you have been part of them all along."
TIME OUT NEW YORK

"Highly entertaining—freewheeling, free-associative, and thought-provoking."
NEW YORK POST

"Daisey is a hellish bad boy—entertaining and disturbing—a sharply humorous commentary on our troubled times."
THE STAR-LEDGER

"Breathtaking—one of the most important shows of the year, if not the most important. Daisey's dazzling new monologue is one of the most exciting evenings of theatre one can have right now."
NYTHEATRE.COM

"There is nothing minimalist about this monologist—if Lenny Bruce was embodied by Zero Mostel and played by Louis Armstrong, the result would closely resemble Mike Daisey."
BROADWAY WORLD

"He's a crazy-good storyteller—an impressively researched, artfully constructed show."
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"A provocative and entertaining examination of post-9/11 America, and the language of security that defines it."
THEATERMANIA

"He's accomplished that rarest of feats: mixing rage and a revolutionary spirit with a well-grounded intelligence and an ability to promote discussion, maybe even solid change."
BLOGCRITICS

"Daisey distills vast sources of disparate knowledge, delivered with scathing anger, humor and a sort of gentle wisdom. He's the History Channel, the best of public radio, and the most entertaining guy at the bar—but much, much better."
METRO NY

"A tremendous storyteller and rabble-rouser, his insight and charisma shine through--this piece brings him into the realm of truly amazing theater."
OBSCENE JESTER

"Daisey offers you few opportunities to wrap yourself in the deceptive idea that all this couldn’t happen here or now - because it already has. He convinces you of the depths of our current mess, and what’s needed to help us survive it: information."
TALKIN' BROADWAY

"A blazing verbal facility and acute political intelligence—alternately amusing and disturbing."
BACKSTAGE

"Never any less than fascinating: cutting, humorous, and immensely provocative."
AMERICAN THEATER WEB

OCT 31 - NOV 15

2008-10-29T16:37:00.000-07:00

a resident artist project
Open Heart Productions
in association with New City Theater
presents

my new friends (are so much better than you)

written by S.P. Miskowski
performed by Morgan Rowe

Shoebox Performance Space
1404 18th Avenue (at 18th Ave and Union)

A teenage girl joins a social network, seeking the popularity that eludes her at school. The girl's mother struggles to find happiness with a family and a career she didn't choose. Meanwhile a family friend discovers that she can be anyone she wants to be online.

Tickets $10
http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/47169

Friday Nov 7 - 8 PM
Saturday Nov 8 - 8 PM

Friday Nov 14 - 8 PM
Saturday Nov 15 - 8 PM

Comments posted by audience members on the Seattle Weekly event page:

"Hey: Do yourself a favor and go see this gem. Sounds a little heavy, but it really is NOT a downer of an evening. The writing and the performance are both crisp and electric. If you go with a friend, expect to talk about it for hours."

"I was very moved by "My New Friends are So Much Better than You" which I saw on Tuesday. The actress, Morgan Rowe, embodied the parts so beautifully and she managed to inhabit each character almost instantly as she moved from one part of the stage to the other. The script was funny and insightful and managed to blur the lines of "right" and "wrong" well enough to leave me thinking about it days later. And that's what good art is supposed to do, right?"

"Make plans to have a cup of coffee after this show because you will want to discuss this provocative new piece and the brilliant performance by Morgan Rowe."

David Foster Wallace - R.I.P.

2008-09-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

photo by Marion Ettlinger

Travel Monkeys

2008-08-21T14:47:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite blogs is Travel Monkeys. Any time I feel blue or tired or stupid or just weary of being me, I go to this blog and read about the latest adventures of Jean-Michele and Mike. Between the witty prose and the delightful photos, it's the next best thing to being there.

Nexus Project opens this weekend

2008-08-16T09:18:00.000-07:00

The shows on August 16th and 17th are FREE. Don't miss this show, if you live in Seattle.

Next Stage
1634 - 11th Avenue on Capitol Hill
206-322-7030

Nexus Project
a ten-minute play festival

featuring the writing of

Scot Augustson
Lenore Bensinger
Mike Daisey
Ki Gottberg
Elizabeth Heffron
Marc "Waxie Moon" Kenison
Marya Sea Kaminski
John Longenbaugh
Joy McCullough-Carranza
S.P. Miskowski
Paul Mullin
Stephanie Timm

directed by

Valerie Burlingame
Susanna Burney
Amy Boyce Holtcamp
Mayra Sea Kaminski
David Quicksall
Katjana Vadeboncoeur
Mark Jared Zufelt

August 16-17, 21-24, 28-31; Sept 4-7

Each ten-minute play was inspired by a local charity organization. The audience will vote for their favorite play, and the prize goes to the organization that inspired that play. What could be better than that?

Go to the Nexus Project! Marvel at the wondrous talents of the designers, technicians, directors, actors, and writers who collaborated on this community-based theater experience! Vote for your favorite play! Help a local charity without even leaving your incredibly comfortable theater seat!

Thank you.

Molly plays Toxic on ukelele

2008-08-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

This video has been around for a while, but I am posting it anyway because I like it so much. This is, of course, Molly a.k.a. sweetafton23 and she's wonderful.

Thank you, Molly.

Say It Ain't So, Tinkerbell!

2008-08-15T13:30:00.000-07:00

My husband just sent me a link to this article about a labor dispute at Disneyland, and I have to second his amazement that the Associated Press managed to get this photo out of the park.

According to the AP:

ANAHEIM, California (AP) -- Cinderella, Snow White, Tinkerbell and other fictional fixtures of modern-day childhood were handcuffed, frisked and loaded into police vans Thursday at the culmination of a labor protest that brought a touch of reality to the Happiest Place on Earth.

Read on...

Nexus Project & my play

2008-08-07T12:14:00.000-07:00

A few months ago the wonderful people at Next Stage invited me to participate in their 10-minute play festival, called the Nexus Project. Each playwright was asked to create a new script inspired by a Seattle charity. The audience votes for their favorite play, and the play with the most votes wins a prize for the organization that inspired it. Great idea, right?

So I chose my charity organization--REAL CHANGE--and I wrote my play. It's a spooky tale about the old Seattle and the new Seattle unexpectedly crossing paths.

While living in the Emerald City for the past 20 years, I had many opportunities to reflect on its changing landscape and attitudes. One of the most striking images I've encountered in recent years was a photo of a house, owned for decades by a Ballard resident named Edith Macefield, crowded by massive construction on all sides, right up to the exact limit of the property lines. The development was legal, of course. But it was also incredibly rude. The developer's disregard for the home owner's quality of life was obvious, even flaunted.

Next door to my old apartment on Capitol Hill a developer has built eight town homes. Over the course of the past year I've gotten to know a couple of the people who live there, and recently I learned that they are being compensated for an even newer development. It seems the light rail tunnel will be dug directly under their new homes, and may not be completed until 2012.

That got me thinking again about who really owns what, and for how long, and in what form.

This, in turn, reminds me of a grainy photo of Chief Seattle's daughter Princess Angeline, living in her waterfront cabin on Western Avenue. And that makes me wonder just where the soul of this strange city resides.

So I wrote my play. The title is "w/ original features" and it will be part of the Nexus Project this month. Check the schedule for performance times, and be sure to vote for your favorite play. Mine is directed by the brilliant Susanna Burney, so it should be fun. It's also kind of scary. I hope the audience gets a kick out of it, and maybe loses a tiny bit of sleep that night...

2008-07-01T20:33:00.001-07:00

Submissive vs. Pride Dog

2008-06-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

Homeless Santa Claus will work for cookies & ornaments

2008-06-27T11:59:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard, the North Pole will be ice cap-free by early September, for the first time in at least 20,000 years.

Wow. We are talented, eh?

arty blog

2008-06-20T22:32:00.000-07:00

My last post was so artistically inclined, I think I should write a few unliterary posts to strike a balance. Yet, still on the writing subject, I'm happy I re-located Joe Boling's review of the Daughters of Catastrophe staged reading, and added an excerpt to the blurbs (on your right & scroll down).

Of all the ways people have described my work, Joe's line about yelling women pleases me most.

Got a rejection note from Weird Tales, which left everyone at my house flabbergasted. I don't know. If they don't want my story, they can't be all that weird. I'll take another stab at it once I finish reading the Stefan Grabinski collection Dark Domain.

OK. All I'm thinking about--besides helping Stuart canvas our part of the precinct for unregistered voters--is writing. And weirdness. How I have only scratched the surface, so far. I realize how intently I have studied being normal, to no avail.

this restless watching

2008-06-18T14:58:00.000-07:00

"I've never been a text person." -- Passenger, Seattle Metro Bus

we're one of the manically multiplying societies
of self-conscious (if conscientious) observers
creeping our way across continents
clogging roads
bobbing on waves
flapping our unflappable wings
at smaller creatures
& always wondering if anyone
notices our specialness

our journals are multicolored and come with perfume folded in
pretty pretty pretty pretty

how weird are we
how would we know

like monsters or actually monsters
stumble-bumming along
looking for friends
by which we mean
those who
resemble admire accept endorse
or otherwise
lick us like mirrors

multilingual people mock us
our obsession w/ no lingo
except our own & even that
strained reduced
to the few symbols needed to say
the few things we say:

BRB
SYS
WTF

we don't have time to learn
a goddamn foreign language
however useful or beautiful
we have to relearn ours
every three years

2008-06-13T22:11:00.001-07:00

14/48 Wins Mayor's Award

2008-06-12T10:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes good things happen to good people.

Last year I was invited to attend the Seattle Mayor's Arts Awards ceremony. My friend Deb and I had a great time there, and we were quite impressed by the quality of the artistic work recognized. But we both wanted to see more theater represented on the list. So, this year I decided to nominate 14/48 the world's quickest theater festival.

Twice a year these folks bring together artists from all over the city to make theater for two incredible weekends. When you take part in 14/48 you meet fellow artists with whom you might never otherwise cross paths. It is an exciting and inspiring event that all theater lovers in Seattle should attend.

Well, guess what? When it came time to send in my nomination form, I found that a bunch of other artists were nominating 14/48 as well. If you know the people who run 14/48 you will understand why they command that degree of love and respect.

Somebody at the Mayor's Office was listening, because 14/48 won! They will be the recipient of an award that recognizes their enormous contribution to the city and to the community of theater artists.

Yes! Yes! Doing a little dance, now... Yes!

The next 14/48 is in July. You can make a contribution here. Buy your tickets in advance, because this is going to be a big one.

Photo by David Baum, borrowed from 14/48.

2008-06-08T19:10:00.000-07:00

2008-06-08T19:09:00.000-07:00

2008-05-18T09:51:00.001-07:00

2008-05-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart in rare form re: WV

2008-05-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

Coolest place on earth

2008-05-09T19:49:00.000-07:00

I'm turning it over to kroger

2008-05-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

One of their Consumer Affairs reps wrote back to say they would look into the matter. So I'm leaving it at that. Today I shopped at Trader Joe's.

QFC is trying to kill us

2008-05-05T20:52:00.001-07:00

When the Safeway store left my neighborhood, we were stuck with QFC (owned by Kroger) as our nearest, most convenient grocer. When stocking up on essentials, we go to Trader Joe's. But for those little side trips, we would drop in at QFC.

Then their prices went up--and up--and up, and this was before the current increases. They just charged more for everything, more than the other grocers. Not for any special service or products, but just because they're snooty.

Then they started pushing their automated checkers. Since the products were not that good or unusual, and the prices were too high, the reasons I kept going to QFC were convenience and because I liked the people who worked the checkout stands. They can't say so but it's obvious they're getting screwed by management. The automated checkers on both floors have replaced some of the shifts. Most of the time the only option upstairs is the automated line. Try getting through that in a hurry if you have produce to match up to their squirrelly, incomplete organic and non-organic produce charts.

Now comes the final straw. I always check sell-by dates, and only buy products well within the limit. I have bought products at QFC and found they had already gone bad, but I thought these were isolated incidents--maybe the people packaging the products made a mistake. Today, however, I bought two products marked fresh and (as usual) well within their sell-by dates, which turned out to be rancid when I opened them. One was a package of shrimp and one was a bottle of juice. Both marked fresh, both completely rotten.

So now it's time for me to get my big butt in action and start walking to the nearest non-Kroger store. Even if it's a hike, it will be worth it to find food that won't kill me.

2008-05-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Molly and her astronaut tribute

2008-04-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

American Theater, DIY, & Me

2008-04-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

This week Mike Daisey talked with Gothamist about his latest show, How Theater Failed America. The monologue has touched off a great discussion across the country regarding the purpose and the reality of regional theater. Some feelings have been bruised, but this discussion has been a long time coming and it's vital.

My view: It's about time for artists to take a hard look at their values, their options, and their lives and start thinking of ways to create and present live performance without depending on regional theaters. The regional theater model has been a complete disaster because no one has stuck to its principles, so maybe we ought to accept what theater is, what it isn't, and what we can make it. One way to do more than just survive is to recommit ourselves to a model much older than the regional theater (which came into being in this country only about forty years ago).

The old way? DO IT YOURSELF.

As an artist:

1. Got a basement, a living room, or a garage? Congratulations. You are a theater owner.

2. Create the work you believe in. Don't bother sending it to someone else to consider, unless you know a small company willing to take risks. Get together with other artists who share your passion and dedication. If you have the skills to write and perform the show, do so.

3. Charge an amount that you know people in your neighborhood can afford and will be willing to spend on an unknown project. Use the money to pay for your expenses, and pay the artists. You'll have to buy a business license, short-term insurance, and pay taxes on your ticket sales, but this is actually easier than you think.

4. Stick with fellow artists who get your ideas, and try to remain loyal to one another. You are the only people you can count on. Don't exhaust yourself making the rounds with people who are not going to hire you. Hire yourself.

As a theatergoer:

1. If you see that your local big-budget theaters are not producing shows that interest you, call them and tell them why you are not buying tickets to their shows. Better yet, write a letter to the Artistic Director and the Managing Director.

2. Find out what percentage of the artists employed there are from your community. If the theater is not employing local artists, ask why not.

3. Whether you buy a ticket or not, you are paying for any theater company that receives grants and public funding, so tell these folks what you want to see, and how much you're willing to pay for it.

Plenty of people in theater will tell you the DIY approach is silly and won't make you rich. Ask them if they are rich. Ask them if their house or car is paid off. Ask them if they have health insurance. Ask them if they're offering you a job when they mock your plan to bypass their theater.

None of this DIY stuff is from Daisey's monologue. I don't want to put words in his mouth, especially since he is so eloquent.

This is what I have come to realize after twenty years in theater: You won't get anything from regional theaters, other than a come-on and (at best) a staged reading. So while you have the joy and enthusiasm for this art form, just go for it.

shock room: meow

2008-04-10T20:23:00.001-07:00

For some reason I got the idea to photograph my cat watching a film I plan to review. Don't ask… So I was shooting away, and my cat, Bayliss, was mellow about the whole thing. Only it took about fourteen shots instead of one, to electronically capture one image my eye had seen earlier.

Suddenly I became aware of the Obama '08 poster in my window. The blinds here and across the street were open, and I thought how funny it would be to look across the street and see me, Obama booster in baggy pajamas, taking pictures of my cat while he watched Hood of Horror.

"Liberals."

Red Poppies

2008-04-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

If you own a Kindle and you like short fiction, you might be interested in my new collection of stories:

Red Poppies
3 Tales of Envy & Revenge
S. P. Miskowski

These are contemporary stories with female protagonists, set in a fictitious yet strangely familiar Pacific Northwest city.

"A Personal Recommendation" is a coveted career boost and a jest offered by a professor and then taken to heart by a student who will do anything to complete her education.

"All We Need From You" details the comic agony of a failed writer tempted by a chance at creative plagiarism.

"Red Poppies" are for a nasty kind of remembrance in the twisted tale of a house cleaner with no ambition, employed and befriended by an unhappy trophy wife.

Read a few excerpts.

Improv Everywhere

2008-04-01T23:37:00.001-07:00

Twice Sold Tales moves to Harvard & Denny

2008-03-23T18:57:00.000-07:00

If you live on Capitol Hill in Seattle and you read books, you're probably sad to see Twice Sold Tales moving out of the home they've occupied for so long. But don't despair, because they're not leaving the hill.
Their new home is at Harvard and Denny, and to lighten the load they have been running a HUGE sale. If you'd like to help by taking some wonderful books off their hands for a small fraction of the original price, get over to 905 E. John Street (corner of Broadway and John) while stock lasts. Then be sure to shop at the new location at Harvard and Denny the end of this month.

2008-03-23T15:00:00.001-07:00

Pink Riot

2008-03-22T15:38:00.001-07:00

Margaret Seltzer's fake memoir

2008-03-21T09:47:00.000-07:00

Wow. More phony memoirs. Two years ago James Frey tearfully begged forgiveness from Oprah Winfrey, after her book club helped launch his hugely successful memoir of incarceration and addiction--a tale of redemption which turned out to be a fraud. Now comes a trio of fabulists:

Ishmael Beah, who wrote a book about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone

"Holocaust survivor" Misha Defonseca

Margaret B. Jones, who turns out to be Margaret Seltzer, who did not have the experiences she described in her gang memoir

The third member of this liars' club happens to have pulled the wool over the eyes of my friend and fellow writer Inga Muscio.

In an Entertainment Weekly interview and on her own blog, Inga tells what it's like to be duped by a writer whose work she liked and tried to help.

I don't know about you, but I am absolutely fascinated with compulsive liars. I've known a few, and I have read about others. I am blown away by the audacity of a person who would fake a life story. I've taken a few acting classes over the years--enough to know I have no talent, but also that I lack the basic desire to be someone else, even for a short time. I stand in awe of anyone who can adopt a whole way of being, and commit to it long-term.

My current favorite fabulist is Tania Head, the woman who lied about being a 9/11 survivor. She didn't write a book, but she probably would have eventually, if she had not been outed by a family she knew in Barcelona. By then, Ms. Head had become a respected spokesperson, raising money and awareness, and meeting famous politicians and celebrities who lavished praise on her for her courage. But, as it became apparent when the family in Barcelona came forward, Head had invented her entire story--about being in one of the towers, about the death of her fiance, about the firefighter who had saved her life...

One thing we all hate to admit is this: People are so mysterious, we barely know our own hearts, let alone the hearts and minds of other human beings. Most of the time we are going on pure faith, and we're open to being conned to the extent that we believe in and accept life. The more compassionate and empathetic we are, the closer we get to where a con artist or compulsive liar needs for us to be.

2008-03-20T23:10:00.002-07:00

2008-03-20T23:10:00.001-07:00

2008-03-20T23:09:00.001-07:00

CJH near Hanalei

2008-03-20T22:48:00.001-07:00

another red car mystery

2008-03-20T22:47:00.001-07:00

2008-03-20T21:47:00.001-07:00

2008-03-20T20:39:00.001-07:00

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

2008-03-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

Whether or not you are Irish, celebrate our day by seeing Martin McDonagh's first feature-length film In Bruges (pronounced "in broozh;" now go impress your friends with how internationally cool you are).

McDonagh is famous for his scathingly brilliant and funny plays, including The Lieutenant of Inishmore and The Pillowman. He won a much deserved Academy Award for his first short film, Six Shooter. And In Bruges is every bit as wonderful.

If you love wit and a great story, treat yourself to In Bruges.

2008-03-16T23:35:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday to Pirate Sabrina

2008-03-08T22:20:00.001-08:00

It happened again

2008-03-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

Cory and I saw one minute of Boogie Nights on cable and we could not look away. We've seen it several times. But every time we see a clip, we end up watching the film to the end. What a great film. Just beautiful.

30 Days of Night

2008-03-06T15:34:00.000-08:00

This morning I posted a review of 30 Days of Night (2007) at SHOCK ROOM. Take a look. Then be sure to read the interview with Simon Rumley, whose film The Living and the Dead (2006) will be released on DVD later this month.

Have a spooky day.

Perspective

2008-03-04T19:39:00.000-08:00

This is fun. You'll see the earth first. Then wait...

a man & a table & a glass of water

2008-03-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

All of my prejudices traveled with me on the night I went to see Mike Daisey perform his monologue "How Theater Failed America." But I wasn’t concerned. My prejudices fit nicely into a miniscule leopard-print handbag. If I wear matching shoes, no one notices.

How startling, then, as I sat there in the darkened theater, to hear Mike Daisey speak directly to me and describe all the contents of my swanky handbag with deadly accuracy! What the hell was this conjuring act?

Then I heard someone I knew, in the row behind me, whisper to her friend that Daisey can create a world on stage with just himself, a table, and a glass of water. I realized I wasn't alone but sitting among dozens of other people, many of them artists I knew and loved. Daisey's talent includes the ability to make it seem that you are alone with him, on a fogbound road in Maine, and he is telling a story just for you, about a different night, long ago, on a fogbound road…

The story is everything in Daisey's work. He is a master storyteller, a lover of the tale both tall and short. Although politics inform his work, he doesn’t sacrifice a good story for the sake of the political or the sentimental, an agenda or an effect.

Today this is a minor miracle. Over the past seven years, many of us who made a habit of keeping our political views in the voting booth have been forced by outrage and conscience to step up and speak out. Or shriek out. Mike Daisey speaks, but in a voice more subtle and nuanced than most, and with a mind to what is essentially human in every situation, at every moment in history.

This is why his stories strike such deep chords and resonate for such a long time. They may contain political truths, but first and foremost they contain human truths. There has never been a time in this society when we needed to hear these truths more.

Without such art we have nothing upon which to project our deepest, inexpressible, perhaps unspeakable nature, and nothing against which to measure and disarm it. In the absence of art, the ever-present but suppressed turmoil of human life goes unaddressed and becomes toxic. You can hide it in a leopard-print handbag, but you can't make it go away. Only the words of a real artist can do that.

At a time when the shared or common experience is not openly held in high esteem, here is a real artist who recognizes the public hunger to know that we are all made of the same stuff, and that although some of that stuff is completely insane, it isn't all bad.

"Schadendouche"

2008-02-29T21:02:00.001-08:00

Just hanging around the house, taking a few informal pix of yourself? Maybe you'll turn up in someone else's online photo album. This is one of my favorite stories right now. It is posted at Boing Boing. And it links to another pretty hilarious story.

I cannot take credit for today's post title. If you read these stories you will see who came up with the perfectly apt term.

Suffering Succotash!

2008-02-28T12:36:00.001-08:00

Up to this point I have given full credit to Nina Garcia and Michael Kors for their fashion wisdom on Project Runway. I even accepted their decision to let Kit go and allow "Cry Me a River" Ricky to stay. But last night's outcome left me and my fashion friends seething! Of course the most likely ultimate winner will be Christian or Jillian. They're both brilliant at design and craftsmanship. The lining in the jacket Jillian made for the "Art" challenge, alone, should have won an award.

But how in the world could these seasoned pros choose Rami over Chris??????? It is not possible. Chris has grown and has pushed himself to move beyond costume--and he has succeeded. Can YOU make a gorgeous dress that fits and moves perfectly, using safety pins? Or human hair? Who would even think of such a thing? Chris. Not Rami. Chris.

Rami is a woman-draper. He can drape better than anyone. He proves it every week by draping his model--every week--no matter what the challenge is. So, for the competition to make the final three at Fashion Week, Rami creates two OK dresses, one unflattering one, and a truly hideous puffy coat with a quilted belt, and Nina and Michael gush with pride just because he took their advice--for once--and didn't drape!

Ridiculous and unbelievable. I am disappointed as hell. The three looks Chris presented were dark and glamorous and sexy, beautifully made, and fringed with human hair. As Christian would say: "Fierce!"

The worst thing about this is: Now we don't get to see the rest of Chris' collection. I so wanted to see those crimson dresses and jackets on the runway!

Fine. Whatever. See if I ever buy another Little Black Book of Style from Miss Nina Garcia!

2008-02-26T20:33:00.001-08:00

Lolcats.com Video

2008-02-21T21:57:00.000-08:00

This is just so good...

2008-02-21T11:00:00.000-08:00

Guess who!

2008-02-11T20:02:00.001-08:00

How Theater Failed America

2008-02-10T14:38:00.001-08:00

The final performance of Mike Daisey's new show has sold out, but you can read an interview with Daisey at the link above. I'll write about this marvelous piece in another post. For now, all I can say is that it did more for me as an artist than anything I've seen in years.

This is artistry, compassionate and smart and whole-hearted. Daisey and his director Jean-Michele Gregory offer us a night of soul-searching questions about the nature and value of art, without one didactic moment. It's a healing experience without any woo-woo. It's something every American artist--and everyone who likes or loves theater--ought to see at least once.

Scholastic Book Club Nostalgia

2008-02-07T13:18:00.000-08:00

Picked this up at Boing Boing today. The style of these covers has the ability to transport, no? Reading, recess and lunch were my reasons for going to school.

It was always thrilling to order books in class. Paperbacks ordered via elementary school were the first new books I owned. I had traded titles at a secondhand store, or checked them out of the library. And I had a few hand-me-down paperbacks and children's stories. But that was it.

Being able to own my own books, and to know that I could dive into their worlds and live there as long as I wanted, as many times as I liked--that was luxurious.