Sunday, July 8th, 2007
I love Dave Zeltserman.
I mean, not in a carnal let me take your clothes off kind of way. (Although, to be honest, I’ve never met him but I’ve seen his picture and he’s a decent looking hombre)
What I mean is, he and I are spiritually connected when it comes to short fiction. I like most of what he’s written and ditto him with my stuff. We both tend toward the darker end of the spectrum; places where everyone is in it up to their necks.
What I like to tell readers is that I like fiction that’s like Shakespeare: where everyone is all good and everyone is all bad and damn near everyone ends up dead…
…or at least maimed.
Short fiction is one my great loves (along with my wife, my dogs, my music, and my first real girlfriend my freshman year in high school) and the markets for mean, tough, gritty short fiction are few and far between. Actually, they’ve been drying up since Edgar Poe’s day. There are a couple pieces of his published ‘marginalia’ where he bemoans the lack of short story markets.
So it’s great that there is this editor who likes what I send. He hasn’t bought everything, and he had a couple problems with the piece I just sent him so it’s not like he’s a guaranteed sale or anything, but he’s certainly a guaranteed submission and a guaranteed sympathetic read. I’ll take two out of three every damned time.
So he asked me to submit a story and I said yes, thinking it was time to do another con/scam story. I love those and haven’t done one in while. So I thought and thought and then thought some more and couldn’t come up with dick.
Then I trolled the ‘net, the FBI database and Rat Dog’s place and some of my crime CD-Roms and all kinds of crap and still nothing.
Until I found the obits.
And not the obits you remember where bad guys scan obits for visitation times and hit the residences at those times. No, this is scan the obits and then make a COD delivery to the bereaved.
What? Wow. That’s horrible. That’s barbaric and cruel and all the rest.
And, pervert that I am, I thought it was cool.
So that’s the story I wrote. A guy tapping into a loved one’s grief in order to crab up a few bucks.
Hehehe, that’s sick enough to be interesting. What kind of person would do that? What happens to the person who pays the COD and they open a box full of rocks or shredded newspaper or whatever? I mean, the possibilities are endless!
So this is all by way of saying I sold a story today and I’ve been putting some good miles on the new novel and I’m writing every. single. damned. day.
Maybe, for the first time in a year or better, I’m actually back to normal.
(yeah yeah, keep your smart comments to yourself)
I’m sleeping pretty well, getting lots of exercise, enjoying my job again, writing. All is good.
And I went to the doctor two weeks ago and for the first time in almost exactly two years: everything was average. All the tests and counts and analysis and all the rest were absolutely, boringly, normal and average.
Whew.
Lastly, go check out HardluckStories.com. Not for anything I wrote, but for the magazine in general.
It rocks the bone.
Posted in All Things Literary | 2 Comments »
Sunday, July 8th, 2007
It was a scary call.
“People are people trying to get in my house,” the woman told dispatch.
Dispatch gave me the address and cranked up my poor old 2001 Impala. I had to, I felt like, because it was an elderly woman and someone was trying to get in her house.
Dispatch called back. “30?”
“Go ahead.”
“She said there are people in her house. Trying to get in and also in.”
I pressed the car a bit faster.
“They’re by her bed. They’re trying to set her on fire.”
Oh, my Holy God.
I cranked the hell outta that damned car, teed it up way past what the administration probably thought prudent.
And I don’t care how fast that car was going, it wasn’t fast enough. The flashing lights were flashing enough and the siren damned sure wasn’t loud enough. Nothing short of Scotty’s transporter on the Enterprise was going to be enough.
When I got there – and it seemed like hours later – I parked down the lane from the isolated farmhouse and approached as quietly as I could.
I heard nothing. No screams. No pleas. No flames. Nothing.
And standing on the front porch: her husband.
I went in, introduced myself, and went straight to the woman. She was bedridden, cancer eating away her skull from the inside out. She had a patch over her left eye, along with some staples or stitches or something. That eye was milky and clouded and moving of its own accord rather than in sync with the right eye.
“Ma’am?”
I thought she was going to cry. “I’m so ashamed. I can’t believe I did that.”
“Did what, ma’am?”
“Called you.”
“Well, there was someone in your house. You should have called.”
Her husband shook his head. He’d told me that he’d been at the store getting some things. He got back and she was hysterical. He’d found no one in the house and when I asked if she wanted me to check, she said no.
“See, it’s those pills.”
“What pills?”
“Well, my home nurse told me they might give me hallucinations, but I didn’t believe her. I took two before she left, but it still hurt so I took another one. Those men trying to set me on fire were as real as you are standing there.”
“What kind of pills, ma’am?” I asked.
“Vicodin,” she said, a tiny grin playing at the corners of her mouth.
“Ah,” I said. “Yep, those’ll play with you.”
“Have you had them?”
“No, ma’am, but my wife took some once. Gave her hallucinations so bad she thought I was good-looking AND rich.”
The woman laughed so hard I thought blood and pus and God knows what all else would start leaking from the cut above her eye. Just the thought of that scared me half to damn death.
Her good eye rolled around and caught me. “I’m really sorry, I should have known they were playing with me.”
“Well, you call anytime, whether you think it’s real or not.”
Then we were done. I asked the husband one last time if he wanted me to check out the house.
“No, we’re fine.”
No, they weren’t. She is in a hospital bed in the living room, a bandage around most of her head, a wound over her left eye that probably leaks fluid, that same eye completely useless. A small house that once have been mighty fine, but was no just forgotten and left to rot. Not much food that I saw, sad and tired clothes, a truck with more rust than an abandoned Indiana steel mill.
They were not fine, and there was noting I could do for them. My job, that day, was to solve their problem…that day. Short term. There was nothing long term I could offer.
For all I know, sitting here on July 8, she might already be dead. I’ve not kept up with her and in fact, can’t even remember her name. I just remember how embarrassed she was to have to call me, how she almost tossed some tears because she was so embarrassed.
Posted in CopStories | No Comments »
