Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

A puff piece, that’s all. “Last person born in the 1880’s still kicking.” Ought to entice a few readers, young turks who could barely comprehend someone born in the 1980’s, let alone 100 years prior.

But Agnes Ethel Wilson, age 116, had other ideas.

“Another newspaperman,” she said.

Rigby was taken aback, as the woman’s eyes were visibly clouded with cataracts, and he was wearing very casual clothes. “How did you know that?” he asked.

“When you been around as long as I have, you learn lots of things. Sound of a newsman’s footsteps ain’t the same as the sound of a milkman’s.”

“I…I suppose…” Rigby murmured, astonished.

“Ha!” Agnes croaked. “I’s just teasing with you, son. Orderly said you was coming.”

“Ha! Nonsense,” Shelly laughed. “Let me tell you something: I can understand people who were raised on it believing in that Chinese astrology crap, but there’s only one reason anyone without a epicanthus would buy into it. Tell me, Coop, what year were you born in?”

“1984. Year of the Tiger.”

“I thought so,” Shelly said. “People with good animals are always all about Chinese astrology. I was born in 1983, Year of the Pig. Oh, you Tigers and Dragons talk a good game about the pig standing for ‘honesty, passion, intelligence,” but if you were born in the Year of the Rooster you’d be crowing a different tune.”

This post is part of the September 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is to respond to a picture.

Picture: Nighthawks (1942) by Edward Hopper

“So, is this the lady in red you were telling me about?” he said. “The one who wanted that book of yours, and the one who—might I add—I encouraged you to contact about it?”

“Allison Flint,” she said, extending her hand.

“Charlie Bulforth.” Charlie grasped and shook it. “Flint, huh?” he chortled. “Not likely. I know a Durant when I see one. We’ve still got some of the old posters in the station…the ones your dad put out when you ran away a few years back, remember?”

“I was fifteen,” Allison said coldly. “Hardly a few years ago.”

“Fair enough,” Charlie said, shoveling a forkful of pie into his maw. “I know you think you’re being clever with that alias, ma’am, but it doesn’t do any good. I hear society folks talking all the time about how scandalous it is that Mr. Durant’s only daughter’s gone over to the reds.”

“I see,” Allison said. “Do they also talk about how scandalous it was when your and your friends broke up our march the other year with clubs? I seem to remember you alternating between using your bullhorn to shout and to batter unarmed marchers.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
BigWords
robeiae
pezie
Ralph Pines
Cath
AbielleRose
Darkshore
dolores haze
Alynza
pyrosama

The music was still there, the bright jazz issuing forth from Cecil’s coronet.

But he found himself remembering less and less of each performance, though the raw spots on his hands were a testament that they’d happened. Between the dressing room–and all the pills, poweders, syringes, and smokes it contained–and the curtain, everything was, well, a blur.

Not only that, though. The music itself seemed to be different. Cecil had spoken with the audience, and they assured him that his playing was the same or better than ever. But what little he could remember of the performances wasn’t dizzying or joyful. No, something harsh and dissonant, straight out of Leo Ornstein, had crept into Cecil’s music.

And he was the only one who could hear it.

Easy money.

An artillery shell slammed into one of the adobe buildings across the compound. The defenders within, who had been returning fire with small arms, went out as a fine mist.

Easy money. That’s what Campbell had said.

The first line of skirmishers arrived, disembarking from a BMP. Most of them were killed or wounded, but there was far less, and far less accurate, fire from the rebel positions than there had been moments ago.

Easy money. A tottering autocratic regime, enthusiastic rebels rising up all over the country. Only a few firefights and then cash and poontang from grateful locals.

A second BMP–or, rather, a Chinese-made copy bought and paid for not three weeks ago–disgorged its squad. Bull raked them with heavy machine gun fire, but these weren’t the militia they’d fought earlier. They were disciplined, organized, took cover, laid suppressing fire. Polymer helmets, gas masks, and Chinese kevlar.

Easy money.

Shawn tossed the manuscript onto his desk. “I’m gonna be honest with you, Marilyn. It’s good, but it’ll never get picked up.”

Marilyn cocked her head and gave her editor the best ‘you’re-making-no-sense’ stare she could muster. “One doesn’t seem to follow from the other, Shawn. If it’s good, it should be able to be picked up, right?”

“Listen,” Shawn sighed, puffing out his cheeks. “There’s exactly two kinds of young adult literature that sell these days. And this isn’t either one of them.”

“It’s unique!” Marilyn protested.

“The publishers are looking for the next Harry Potter, or at least a knockoff good enough to inspire a major motion picture,” Shawn said. “Kids discovering secret powers and fighting evil, preferably with just enough spice so people with public hair might read it as well.”

“But a more realistic…”

“Right, that’s the other kind,” said Shawn. “Hard-hitting novels about kids coming to terms with things. No kid in the universe will ever read it on their own, but it’ll win awards and get assigned as a course reading and maybe even cook up a little sales-boosting controversy.”

“I think that…”

Shawn tapped the manuscript with a bony finger. “This is too in the middle. Realistic kids, underground killer squids, sibling rivalry, multidimensional travel? It’ll never sell.”

“When I played Carnegie Hall in…it must have been 1918 or 1919 or so…the result was a near riot,” Hanna said. She lit a fresh cigarette but didn’t inhale, letting the smoke wreathe her head. “My own composition–very dissonant, very futurist, full of radical tone clusters and other such nonsense. The result was a near riot.”

“They didn’t like it?” Berne asked.

“It was one thing for young turks like Ornstein and Schoenberg and Scriabin to play music like that. But a woman? There was an editorial in the Times the next day saying that I was childishly beating my piano and letting my handlers–my male handlers–transform it into something avant-garde.”

“What did you do?”

“I sent them a copy of one of my sheets with all the music there in full notation. Never did get a response, but I loved the fact that little old me could case such a sensation.”

Bern delicately cleared his throat and swatted away some encroaching smoke. “Why’d you give up performing then?”

“Two things, really,” Hanna sighed. “For one, I grew bored with futurism and dissonance. Experimenting with tonality…now that was enough to get me attacked from all sides. The futurists who’d made me their poster child weren’t happy, and the people I’d irritated in the first place weren’t either.”

“And the second thing?”

“I fell in love.”

Doug had his best ‘manager face’ on. “There aren’t enough orders in the middle of the day to keep everyone busy.”

“I know that.”

“You can’t work nights because of your class schedule this semester. So I need you to do something to pick up the slack.” Doug held out the Pizzazz the Parakeet costume and a sign advertising 6 pizzas for under $6! Pick-up only!

“Look, I appreciate the thought, Doug,” I said gingerly, “but I’d rather be fired than wear that thing in 100-degree heat waving at cars.” It was like being the ultimate pariah–cars virtually swerved into the other lane to avoid having to look at someone in a costume, and people on the sidewalk were about as polite with Pizzazz the Parakeet as they’d be with Hermann Goering.

Worst of all, the bird’s mouth was open, clearly revealing my face to all who cared to look.

“Fine, then, you’re fired,” Doug said. “Clean out your cubby.”

I tried calling his bluff by walking away, hoping to hear his voice from behind me like in the movies.

I made it about five steps.

“All right,” I said, snatching the costume. “I’ll do it.” The specter of unpaid loans, evictions, and–worse–moving back in with my parents were too horrific to ignore.

“Behold, Corisio! Land o’ the fair and strong, city of kings and cradle of emperors! Oh, to gaze upon thee’s to experience the wondrous, rapt’rous joy of an auspicious pigeon’s flight o’er Jove’s thunder’d brow!”

The words were like thick, Bulwer-Lyttonesque dust in Drummond’s mouth. T. Serge Poller may have been a native son; he may have once been considered a luminary of mid 19th century theater; he may even have been on the shortlist for Poet Laureate.

But times change, and Drummon fervently wished as he rehearsed that anyone who ever derided Shakespeare as dry and formal had complimentary tickets to the show.

This post is part of the August 2011 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is “The Continuing Story of a Song” and is best read in order:
Part 1 (orion_mk3)
Part 2 (orion_mk3)
Part 3 (BigWords)
Part 4 (AbielleRose)
Part 5 (Ralph Pines)
Part 6 (hillaryjacques)
Part 7 (Darkshore)
Part 8 (pyrosama)
Part 9 (Diana_Rajchel)
Part 10 (Inkstrokes)
Part 11 (soullesshuman)
Part 12 (Alyzna)
Part 13 (Cath)
Part 14 (dolores haze)
Part 15 (Alpha Echo)
Part 16 (pezie)
Part 17 (orion_mk3)
Part 18 (orion_mk3)
You are here.

Song: “Alice’s Theme” by Danny Elfman

The lead man, dressed in tatterdemalion rags, watched helplessly as his mate—his son—ran a cutlass through the thick of his chest. The laughter stopped only when then men fell to carousing, and another murder or two provoked the darkness to swallow their leader, give him action and agency.

All would be consumed.

“Well, it seems you gave us all quite a scare.”

Greg’s eyes fluttered open with a start. He recognized the plain white walls of the resort infirmary from dragging unruly and punch-drunk revelers there time and again.

Eddie Willow stood grinning over him, flashing those uncanny white teeth of his.

“Aren’t you dead?” It was what Greg had been thinking, but it wasn’t his voice. He glanced over and saw Chris, alive if very much worse for the wear, in the sickbed beside him.

“Dead? That’s a good one, isn’t it?” Willow called over his shoulder, where Spanky was visible, leaning in the door. “No, Greg, the world hasn’t yet cooked up anything to take me down for good, though that kid sure laid me out for a long while.”

“…what?” Greg said.

“Forget about it,” Willow said, waving his hand dismissively. “Suffice it to say that Spanky and I have been around a good long while, and that we’re glad to see you two on the mend after what happened.”

“Oh God,” Chris gasped as images came flooding back to him. The bodies, the waves, the overpowering feeling of death and stench of urine…

“Focus, son.” Willow snapped his fingers in front of Chris’s face. He’d been around many years, and taken many forms, but whether a manager on a tropical island or a lingerie model in Firenze, explanations never ceased to be tiresome. “It’s going to be all right. We had a bit of a scare there, when the lady managed to confuse you into doing her bidding, but you did right by us. Both of you.”

“The girls send their best,” Spanky added. They too, had seen many years and many forms.

“Willow, you’ve always been a cryptic son-of-a-bitch,” Greg said. “But are you honestly going to tell me that bullet-borne fever dream meant anything?”

“No, it meant everything,” Willow said. “The life force of the old one, the seafarer…he was weak, and could barely manage to lure people here to feed him with sorrow. But I shudder to think of what the deep essence could have accomplished with the vainglorious and driven life force of that woman at its heart.”

“It’s all the same to us who it is, but we wont abide the destruction of the only place we have to hang our hat,” said Spanky.

“Clairssa,” Chris said. “I saw her, down there, at the end.”

“I think we both did,” Greg added.

“Yes, I think so,” said Willow. “A very clever move on her mother’s—her real mother’s—part, that. I hope you know that there’s no getting the young one back, not from where she’s gone. It was all we could do to pull you two and your young homicidal friend back from the brink of the other side.

Spanky nodded. “Consider it a thank-you from those who always honor their debts.” He and Willow both turned to leave.

“I don’t understand,” Chris said, with a twinge of despair. “Where has she gone?”

“You heard your friend back there: to rule the seas beyond by the dictates of her heart,” said Willow over his shoulder. “A young, pure, innocent heart like that, one touched equally by love and tragedy? I think we’ll do all right, you two.”

He paused in the doorway as Chris and Greg watched.

“It’ll be an interesting time, but I think we’ll do all right.”