Murderous Practice

I'm currently reading Stephen King's enjoyable and instructive nonfiction work "On Writing." In one chapter, he assigns some "homework," which involves writing a short narrative outline of a story starting with a simple premise: an estranged wife beats-up or murders her husband. Here's my assignment, turned in on time.

Gabriela and Mark met at the Halloween party with the best reputation on campus, which was thrown by the nerdiest frat on campus. She dressed up as a sexy angel. He was Batman. Her remarkable cleavage and well defined hips lead him to pursue her relentlessly after that, and she only relented when she learned of his father’a status as a wealthy movie producer.

They go on a few dates, and he is awkward but charming, and certainly generous. He takes her to the finest restaurants in Los Angeles, gets them backstage passes to pop music concerts, and they go to Hollywood parties. One memorable evening, she gets to meet Robert Pattinson and Anderson Cooper at the same party. All the while she plays along, cautiously avoiding a serious physical relationship while enjoying the rarefied air, despite having little or no feelings for Mark.

Bleeding Heart

Lyrics by Elmore James, as performed by Jimi Hendrix. A new music video of this song can be viewed here on YouTube.


The bar, by Queens standards anyways, hardly stood out. Estimable attempts at sleek post-modern décor filled the space to the limit, thrashing any sense of minimalism originally intended by the designers of the individual lucite-and-vinyl barstools or bleach-white booths. But none of the guests seemed to care; eight dollar Heinekens taste the same here as in the hippest hipster stop in Brooklyn.

James - as he now fancied himself - gazed through his preposterously new horn-rimmed glasses clear past all the other patrons. He scratched at his nascent beard and squinted to read the teeny score box on the screen across the room. It was bad news:

NYK 108

SAC 112 F

Knicks loose again, surprise surprise. And to the Kings no less. Bleh. He took a hard swig and finished the first of several whiskey and rocks of the evening. He swiveled around and neatly released the tumbler onto the bar, which would have made a pleasing clinkthud sound if some miserable wretch hadn’t been belting out karaoke at the top of her lungs at that particular moment. She held his attention for a moment, amusingly drunk for this early in the evening but lacking any other sort of appeal. In particular her choice of music ruffled his sensibilities; even if chosen out of irony, Journey is inexcusable at this point.

“Hey buddy, you having some fun?” Matt slapped his back harder than he meant to and yelled directly into his friend’s cochlea. James raised his eyebrows and pulled his cheeks up, screwing his scrabbled features into a very poor poker face. “Aw man, don’t be like that! Look at these chicks! If Christina weren’t around I’d totally hit like half of them!”

“How very Chris Brown of you Matt,” he deadpanned back, then turned to gesticulate wildly in the direction of the overworked and under-clothed bartender for another round.

“Ha, ha, smartass,” he droned, adding a jovial punch at the shoulder. James managed to procure a refill before turning back to his pal.

“You know wha- -eans -eft -lone?” James’ depressive voice didn’t carry enough punch to outmatch the dreadful karaoke, now a heartfelt love ballad to ganja perpetuated by a dreadlocked Caucasian (via Bob Marley).

“What?!” Matt screamed for his friend to repeat.

“Do know what it means to be left alone?!” he screamed, his reddening cheeks hidden behind a wall of chestnut bristles. “My little girl left me,” he muttered to himself, eyes watering.

Recovering the Satellites

As this is a little longer than some of my previous shorts (and because now I know how to do this kind of thing!), you can download a PDF of this story for easier reading instead. Click here to download the PDF.

“Recovering the Satellites” by Counting Crows

For Joshua, mornings were certainly the worst. Some days he just lay in bed, often for hours on end if necessary, waiting until light finally crept its way through the slits between his yellowed bedroom curtains. During one of those dark pre-dawns, he half-dreamt he was caught in an endless cycling freefall from the ceiling to the bed. Other times he saw people’s faces in the blinking smoke alarm above, people from his past arcing across the room as his vision crossed and rolled uncontrollably. And always, he struggled bravely against his bladder’s false sense of need. It was a fantastic exercise in willpower, the theme for seemingly all of his endeavors these days.

On rare mornings - like today for example - he forced himself upright to get the blood moving a little, so as to initiate the skipping of the nasty tedium altogether. It took a few moments for the cobwebs to part, moments he wanly endured. His breath blurted out in wheezy bursts, mercifully clear of the cursed rattling for now. Thought it had been an impressively stifling evening in the valley following the yesterdays’ triple-digit August afternoon, he left the A.C. quiescent overnight. The searing dry air drew buckets of sweat out of him, but also performed miracles on his wretched lungs.

He slid his legs off the bed, testing his limp feet on the cold hardwood. He found a little stiffness in the knees and some pain at the mounds of his outer toes when he applied pressure, but no more. Better than usual. With a grunt he lurched to his full height before bending forward to spare his protesting back. A flash of pain spiked near his right kidney, earning another grunt. He felt for the source with a knuckle, but thankfully it dissipated quickly. What I need right now is a drink.

He cursed the thought and reached for his notebook and pencil on the nightstand. Six AM today, not exactly a new record. He stared longingly at the entry for July 16th, the outlier. Somehow he had made it past lunch without so much as an inkling of the stuff. He winced a smile through the pain to remember that day, one of the very few successes of late. Bill had actually called back for seconds, the first one do to so. That day he actually felt like he was on the right track.

After replacing the pad and pencil to their usual positions, Joshua shuffled over to the cramped bathroom and tried his best to avoid looking at his wrinkled old face in the mirror while he performed his morning rituals. Piss. Fist-full of pills. Gulp of water. Shower. Shave. Another fist-full of pills. Gulp of water. Etc.

Copper and Stone

I started this story out intending it to be another "song" short, but it morphed into something else. I have some ideas for extending it to a novella or something, but for now here's a "prologue" style passage:

Harrick gazed down over the valley, seeing only thick haze where he knew his wife and home rested below. The fog usually burned off by midday this time of year, but Harrick didn’t know that yet. He muttered a curse to the gods for his poor luck and retreated into his recently acquired hovel. He cursed again to look at the place, a ramshackle hut with naught but three mudbrick walls and a thatched roof. The hardpack dirt floor didn’t inspire much confidence either.

Seeing little in the valley but fog, Harrick’s eyes turned to trace the rectangular outline of the low stone fence surrounding his new domain. With minor repairs it would serve nicely as a pasture for his town’s herd of scraggly goats. The more daunting challenge would be to provide an acceptable domicile for Lysara and the little ones. For now, the only structure on the large grassy expanse - heretofore to be called Harrickstead, he decided  - would have to do for him and the wiry dusty-blonde boy sleeping in the corner.

Cosmic Love

This is the continuation of “The Wind Cries Mary”, a short story you can find here. This part is inspired by the song “Cosmic Love” by Florence + The Machine.

            The eerily vacant streets marched past one by one as Mary guided their car east towards her father’s house. That had been an easy decision, hardly a decision at all actually. At mom’s there would be too many questions. Every so often she’d glance into the mirror and catch a quick glimpse of her reflection, her eyes flitting away when she saw the hardened look of determination still clutching to her flushed cheeks.

            At this hour, only the occasional traffic light impeded her progress. Eventually she made it onto the interstate, joining the sparse group of travelers headed for JFK and graveyard shifters skittering to work. The trip out to Islip usually took forever, but this night she managed to arrive so fast she never got around to turning on the radio. She parked on the driveway behind Judy’s latest BMW truck and sat motionless, wondering which one of them would freak out more at her unannounced 5am visit: her father or her father’s trophy.

            As a concession, she walked around the house to the backyard to wait for them to at least wake up on their own. The snow here hadn’t yet accumulated, so the side-yard fence swung open easily enough, groaning meagerly in rusty middle age. It was still bitterly cold, though the air was far less biting than it had been in Queens. Plus, her fashionable winter garb - red pea coat, black leather gloves, Burberry scarf, and purple knit beanie - kept her warm enough. She found a surprisingly clean and dry Adirondack chair on the back porch and settled in, the familiar yet odd angles providing a sense of comfort. Despite the lack of padding.

Coriolis: Waking the Dark - Prologue

For about a year, I've been putting together ideas and draft chapters for the first book in a series of science fiction novels. This week's blog entry is the prologue. What do you think? Would you want to read more?

Prologue: The Arrival

Nerio Space Station, Low Earth Orbit

            It didn't look like much, she had to admit. If da Vinci had cobbled together a spacecraft out of scraps from a twentieth-century junkyard, it might look a bit like the Javelin. But still, it was something entirely different from the repeated string of faceless freighters she typically wrangled in, and thus a welcome change. The steel-framed fuselage was littered with solar panels, each slowly craning for sunlight as the ship arced towards her at a ponderous pace. The solar panels reminded her of time-lapse videos of flowers blooming, gracefully yearning for light.

            “Hey Valerie, can you see it yet?” asked her co-pilot Erica Taskin. It was silly calling them pilots Valerie thought, her mind wandering off task. From her frame of reference they never actually flew anywhere. People on the ground might have a different perspective of course, but -

            “HEY! VALERIE!” Erica tried a little louder this time, the increase in volume nearly maxing out Valerie's earpiece.

            “Yeah, I see it. It's too junky-looking to be a freighter, it must be the Javelin.” And her tabloid-happy captain. There was a little extra edge to her voice when Valerie spoke the name of the incoming ship. This was not lost on Erica.

            “So I can't tell, do you hate him or have a thing for him? It has to be one or the other.”

            “Shhhhh! C'mon Erica we've got work to do. You see him out your porthole yet?”

            “Him? You know it's bad luck to refer to a ship with a masculine pronoun. But yes, I see her arriving right now.”

Tonight, Tonight

Based on the song "Tonight, Tonight" 

Lyrics by Billy Corgan, performed by Smashing Pumpkins
Music video on Youtube: click here

            Karen clutched her seatbelt and pressed hard against the back of the passenger seat. She tried her best to play it cool, but if Billy decided to look over he’d see the terror painted all over her face. Luckily, he kept his eyes on the road.

            “Are you sure I should be doing this?” she asked as calm as she could manage.

            For a while he didn’t respond, focusing more on the clutch than his passenger. When he’d gotten in front of an odiously languid truck, he turned his attention back to the confused young brunette.

            “Tonight’s the night Care’,” he blurted out eventually, his usual flatly unwavering confidence in full form. “You’re going to go in there and do whatever it takes.”

            The thrumming lights of posh North Side high-rises whizzed by on their left, the sun approaching the velvety blue horizon of Lake Michigan on their right. It was a gorgeous clear evening despite the subfreezing temperatures. This was one of those moments where it seemed crazy that people chose to live anywhere else.

It had been one of those crisp, windy afternoons at her mom’s place near Wrigleyville. The new boyfriend Rick had essentially kicked her out of the apartment just as the gusts coming off the lake were really getting going. The double-paned bay windows in the semi-circular living room rattled and groaned in defiance; but they held, keeping the brownstone cozy and warm. Despite this stalwart effort, mom apparently couldn’t go another hour without her favorite tea, which they only sold at the Chinese market. And of course if he drove he’d lose his primo parking spot.

            “Can I tell you what Rick did today?” It was a rhetorical question, of course, so she continued immediately. “He sends me out to get this special fucking tea for my mom from this Chinese market on Belmont that’s like a twenty minute walk each way.”

            “That sucks.”

            “Wait wait, no it gets way worse!” Karen interjects excitedly, as if her odious suffering were a source of tremendous joy. “So I storm out of the apartment, of course forgetting my scarf. And it’s like INSANE cold, especially with the wind. Anyways, I walk all the way there, buy the stupid tea, and walk all the way back freezing my butt off. And guess what?”

Technotheology

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." 

The 'Third Law' of Arthur C. Clarke

You may have missed it, but some time between the death of the 8-track and breakfast this morning technology blew past what anyone could reasonably understand. Up until that undefinable point, advancement came - at its fastest - as a swift trot. By reading magazines like "Popular Science" and "PC Magazine" or blogs like Engadget.com and Gizmodo.com, an educated geeky person could actually follow the threads of progress as they wove together to create incredible new stuff. Now progress races by at Mach speeds and no one knows how to even try to keep pace. 

As a curious kid growing up in the 80's and 90's, I could pretty much understand anything by reviewing my copy of The Way Things Work. Records had little grooves (you could almost see them if you squinted hard enough!) that bounced a needle that vibrated out your parents' unfunny comedy records. Compact discs were essentially the same thing with a laser instead of a needle, and they had MC Hammer songs on them. I could open up a computer case and poke around at the processor, the memory, and the sound board. I'm not claiming that twelve-year-old me actually knew how a Pentium worked, but I could see how the function of individual components came together to create a multi-faceted user experience. I could see the trees and the forest interchangeably. 

Even the first few iterations of the iPod and other MP3 players were knowable. Somebody just stuck a laptop hard drive in a plastic case with a graphing calculator screen and installed a rudimentary operating system on it. It was a brilliant adaptation (and shrinking-down) of existing technology to provide revolutionary access to a personal library of music. But if you had lived through the early years of the personal computer and paid attention to the shelves at CompUSA, the iPod wasn't particularly magical.

The other night, my wife and I were having a quiet weekday dinner and I wanted to spruce things up a bit. Knowing her love of over-the-top 80's music, I opened Spotify on our iPad and fired up a Wilson Philips tune (thank you 'Bridesmaids'). The amount of time between having the idea and steely-eyed lip-synching into into my fork was about fifteen seconds. 

The Wind Cries Mary

Quick preface: The characters in this story are completely fictional. Specifically, the "Mary" in this story bears no resemblance to wonderful wife Mary who is the best! Thanks for visiting and enjoy!

            I probably should have at least thrown on a pair of real pants. Or maybe a jacket. Come to think of it, one of those polar-explorer parkas would have been great. Pajamas and nor’easters, it turns out, aren’t a great mix. As it stands, the stiff pre-dawn air is tearing through me like fire through newspaper. Or whatever the exact opposite of that would be.

            Mary doesn’t seem to mind, cozily prepared with a red pea coat and Burberry scarf (a Christmas gift from me of course). I’m just standing there frozen - watching as she clumsily picks her way across the street. She’s left deep trudge marks in the un-plowed snowdrifts, her fashionably absurd sheepskin boots compressing the snow. The boots she got herself.

            She drives away in the car we leased together last year leaving me standing here like an idiot. Luckily, this part of the Brooklyn actually does sleep eventually so the jokers on our block who would usually be lolling around are snoring their lives away at present. A vicious blast of wind crashes against my exposed arms and face with malicious intent, reminding me to get my stunned ass back inside. For a frightening moment I can’t recall the code to get into the building and a wave of panic piles onto my already confused systems. Suddenly my mnemonic kicks in (Mantle-Mantle-Namath for 7-7-1-2) and I punch the keys quickly.

            Inside it’s warmer, but not enough that it matters. The floor in particular remains a frigid enemy. The elevator’s been on the fritz lately, so I begin my ascent up the stairs, the hard wood caustically devoid of carpet. The cheap scent of motel-caliber cleaning solution pervades the shabby furniture and dull brass rows of mailboxes in the over-lit lobby. I’ve always hated this fucking building.

As I climb the five flights of merciless goddamned iceblocks of stairs, I’m replaying the last couple hours in my head to try and convince myself that it hasn’t happened. Funny how we do that when something shitty happens. I guess it’s the first stage of grief right? Anyways, I get to the part about how we rushed into things and got married before we had really figured ourselves out as individuals when I realize there’s no stairs left. Now is probably not the best time to visit our - I mean my - buddy Arturo in #904, so I head back down a few flights.

It sort of looks like the place has been robbed (the door was unlocked after all), but it doesn’t strike me as odd; this is what it normally looks like. After a year of marriage and six more months living together, I guess neither of us figured out that the other wasn’t about to spontaneously acquire obsessive-compulsive tendencies and clean the place up. Wrong again. Maybe that’s a sign.

A quick glance at my alarm clock hits me like an executioner’s axe: 3:46am. My usual 7am wake-up isn’t going to cut it with the car gone. I can’t believe she took the damned car. I figure I’ll have to walk to the subway then ride in, hopefully catching an A train. If I miss that I’ll just call in sick, the C takes for-fucking-ever. I haven’t been able to think straight in hours, ever since my new nemesis dropped that sack of bricks directly on my forehead, but for some reason I can remember the train schedule. Good times!

Screw it, it’s not like I’m going sleep anyways. I give up on trying to set my alarm and head back out into the living room. I flip on the TV and start brewing a pot of coffee. I’m making too much of course, I’m fairly accustomed to our usual two cups each routine and too lazy and stupefied to compute the proper amounts of grounds and water for the right amount. I just stand there while it brews, forgetting the TV is even on.

So why am I now a soon to be divorcé at the ripe young age of 24 you ask? At this point you are better off talking to Mary. Here are her original words, as near as I can remember them (her words appear in quotes. My attempt to translate these astonishingly vague quips into human are in italics):

Texas Flood

NOTE: This is the first in a series of short stories loosely inspired by song lyrics.

Lyrics by Larry Davis and Joseph Scott
Iconically performed by Stevie Ray Vaughan

Calling what I woke up with this morning a 'hangover' would be a massive disservice to the preceding night. Anyways the first thing I noticed when I rolled over was my dry tongue, stuffing my mouth like Thanksgiving leftovers in the fridge. The next thing I noticed - which was probably more like ninety minutes later, but you get the idea – was that I was alone. Then I desperately had to piss, but you probably don't want to hear about that. A tiny sliver of piercing sunlight peeked through the cheap vanilla window shade with careless malice. The clock blinked 12:00am, but that's obviously way way off.

When it became clear that nothing remotely warm was going to come through the faucet any time soon, I splashed some icy water on my face stared at myself through the grimy mirror for a second. I'm really looking like shit these days. Too many nights on the road will do that. No one in the crowd seems to mind though. They show up, they holler, they party. Everyone has a good time and nobody bothers to say “Hey Stevie, you look like crap. Clean your ass up!” Honestly, Jimmy is probably the only cat with the balls to come out and say it, but that dude looks even worse than I do.

My motel room was one of those second-story jobs, with the little walkway that's actually a hall creating a communal balcony for all the rooms to share. I grab a crusty old pack of Camels and head out to wake myself up with some air and some rays and some nicotine, barely bothering to toss on a t-shirt and a wrecked pair of blue jeans. My boots feel tight for some reason, like the snake decided to go on a diet, but I cram them on anyways.

I half expected to see someone I knew out there. Someone from one of the other bands or at least a roadie or two. But there's nobody. It's totally empty, of people at least. It takes a moment for what I'm looking at to sink in. The parking lot below is an absolute mess. He didn’t remember there being a lake at this motel when he arrived, but now they had one. The cars are tossed around like some kid got sick of playing and left all his toys out. The van is stewing in a like a foot of water. Just sitting there! At least it's right-side-up, which is more than he could say for a red pickup lying dead on its side in the middle of the lot.