Kitten Fangs: A Tale of Cats, Chocolate, and Disgustingly Lurid Vampire Romance (part I: The Beginning)

<<<Chapter 1

“How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real?”
— Jaden Smith

Chapter 2:  Dog of War, Dog of Love, Cats of Chocolate

They left the restaurant saturated in chocolate, dripping wet with it. Melantha wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but it had been a mess. The manager’s unkind demeanor, if not his spoken words, had left no doubt that they were both permanently banned from the Golden Corral. It reminded Melantha so much of the time that she had been stranded on a desert island with only a shipping crate of machine grease and a hormone-crazed sea captain.

“Oh, Salvador . . . I just realized,” Melantha gasped. She wiped some of the chocolate from her face and flicked it at the ground. It lay there like chocolate, fiercely unmoving and defiant in its inanimateness.

“What?” Salvador stared at the horizon with fierce intensity. The sun had not yet set, and so he grew a full mustache, as all vampires do when exposed to the full light of day. Melantha recoiled in horror. She did not like men with body hair. They reminded her too much of sea captains and lumberjacks, of which she had had her fill.

“For me, being banned from the Golden Corral is not such a big deal. I suppose that I will miss out on the senior citizen discount when I turn sixty-five, but my life is short. You — ”

“Yes, first decades shall pass and then centuries, nations will rise and crumble, but still I will not be allowed in the Golden Corral. It is worse than you can imagine though. The manager had specified that he meant every location, not just this one.”

“You could change your identity!”

“A vampire may change his name, but he can never change his identity. The children of these waitresses, and their children’s children, will see me and know that I am banned. Just as a vampire must be invited into a private residence, the rebuke of a manager or assistant manager is enough to bar us entry into a commercial venue. Now, I am stuck frequenting the Cracker Barrel.” Salvador began to lick his chocolate drenched cat clean, grooming it and basking in the energy of its love.

“You still have me,” Melantha reminded him.

“That would be more meaningful if you owned a chocolate fountain, or at least a serviceable fondue pot.”

Little did he know that Melantha had both things stored away at her efficiency apartment. She had been an avid student of the supernatural all her life and knew all of the lore concerning vampires and other mythological creatures. She had anticipated everything about him. “How about we go back to my place? We can clean up and maybe watch Lethal Weapon.”

“Which one?” Salvador asked, suddenly alert. His eyes blazed with intensity as though he had captured the last dying rays of the sun inside of his head and now shot them back at her as figurative light without any of the associated heat or radiance.

“Doesn’t matter. I own them all.”

“You are a very special woman, Melantha Nightshade. This . . . I had not expected –”

Suddenly, they were interrupted when a handsome man stepped suddenly out of the driver’s side door of his landscaping truck. He was shirtless and wearing cutoff jeans that exposed the very bottoms of his firm buttocks. He ran his teak colored fingers through his inky black hair and flashed them a pearlescent smile. Salvador’s cat hissed and arched its back. It was all so very sudden.

“Hello,” the man said, “I am Doctor Esteban Rodriguez, a landscaper by day and world renowned rheumatologist by night. I was just on my way home to change clothes when I saw the two of you and thought to volunteer a hose. However, seeing you up close, I fear that there is more to you than meets the eye.”

“Yes, werewolf, the chocolate masked my vampiric odor, but I am Prince Salvador Poshbennet IV, vampire by day and by night, whose soul occupation is the drinking of blood, eating of chocolate, and petting of cats.” Salvador bared his fangs and made a clawing motion with his free hand that was unmistakably hostile.

“But who is this then?” With a flourish, Doctor Esteban indicated Melantha. He smiled, and it was as though Melantha had known him all of her life . . . or perhaps she had known him in a different life. There was someone very much like him many centuries ago when she had been reincarnated as a parrot, named Ramsey, who had loved and been loved by a kindhearted lemur, named Scott.

Melantha didn’t know what to say, what to think. Here was a real, live werewolf just like the ones that she had read about in physical, digital, and astral books. Werewolves hated vampires because of their affinity for cats, and vampires hated werewolves for their love of garlic and distaste for chocolate. How ironic, Melantha thought, that garlic was harmful for both vampires and cats, while chocolate was poisonous to werewolves and other canines. Perhaps this would be pertinent some time in the future.

“Well, I’ll just be on my way then to change into my scrubs, and hopefully our paths will never cross again, vampire. But young lady, I would like it very much if we could meet again. I treat lupus patients at the Adolphus Clinic, and my Full Moon landscaping business is likewise werewolf-themed, although people don’t get the irony in either instance because my true nature is so secret. Hit me up on the Facebook.”

He did not wait for a reply. With a brief flourish of his middle finger at Salvador, who responded in kind, Doctor Esteban got back in his pickup truck and took off into the early evening. Even though he was gone, the impression that he had left on Melantha would remain all of her life. Her heart beat with such intensity that she questioned the wisdom of her high sugar, high calorie diet. But what choice did she have in food or in love? She was American, where both were saccharine sweet.

“That guy,” Salvador snorted, “Yeeesh. Am I right?”

“Huh?” Melantha’s thoughts were traveling forty-miles-an-hour down Lincoln street in the passenger seat of a werewolf’s pickup truck. Suddenly, Salvador only seemed half as interesting, although he remained fascinating enough that she was emotionally torn between the two men. Melantha could only hope that she didn’t meet Frankenstein’s monster or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or her dating life would be too difficult to bear.

The sun had not quite set, but close enough — whatever– Salvador’s mustache detached from his face and flew away like the mythical pennangalan, save that it was facial hair and not a human head. It would spend the night tormenting some prepubescent kid. With the mustache gone, Melantha’s immediate choice was simple.

“So . . . about that Lethal Weapon DVD. I’m thinking marathon?”

“You can bet . . . your life!” Salvador laughed. He continued laughing for an uncomfortably long amount of time. “But first you must invite me in . . . to your life.”

Chapter 3 >>>

Kitten Fangs: A Tale of Cats, Chocolate, and Disgustingly Lurid Vampire Romance (part I: The Beginning)

Chapter 1:  Fountains of Frail Mortality

 “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes,
blood coming out of her whatever.”
— Donald Trump

Salvador was like an unfinished marble statue. His deific body was perfectly contoured, and from his pouting lips to his enormous schlong straining the seam of his pleather pants, all of the parts were accounted for. But the artist had forgotten to gift his creation with a ready smile or a playful twinkle in his eye. Salvador’s constant expression was that of a man watching the world burn to ash, and he was powerless to stop it. He sat in a high-backed chair, stroking the back of a Siamese cat while eating a chocolate rose.

“What . . . what are you doing?” Melantha asked as she stroked her flowing black hair. She shivered. The room was colder than the love burning in her heart. Not even the elegant dress of red chiffon and black polyester that she had bought on clearance at Hot Topic especially for the occasion was proof against the chill. It really was very cold. Her rubicund nipples were hard as erotic beetles. She made a mental note to ask if the furnace was broken. Her cousin was a repairman.

“I am petting this cat. Their love is what gives us vampires our energy,” he replied, “and eating this chocolate . . . it reminds me of days long gone, long ago, far away, back when I was still a mortal.”

Melantha’s heart was pounding. She was entranced by his glacial blue eyes. Those twin crystal pools gave no hint of the pollution lurking in his vampiric soul. But that depravity hardly mattered to Melantha. She would have welcomed his pollution spurting out from his soul and inside of her, the warmth of it, its saltiness like industrial waste spilled into the ocean of her being.

“May I pet it?”

“No! It is mine.” He paused to regard her, and his tongue flitted across his lips that still pouted at her like the figurative lips of a duck. “I am . . . sorry. I spoke harshly. It is just that to a vampire, a cat is like — ”

“Love?” Melantha asked. She had over a dozen cats at home and well understood the importance of feline love and companionship. It would be time to feed them soon and change their litter boxes. She had considered switching over to canned food from solid, but the price was just too great — far too great.

“Perhaps. Vampires do not feel love. We only understand it in the context of petting cats, eating chocolate, and maybe we feel an inkling of it when reading Amish romance novels. But what would a woman like you know of such things?”

More than you might think, Melantha thought, coyly. Unlike other people, she often thought clever things. She was amazed how well their blind-date was going. The last time that her mother had tried to set her up with someone, he hadn’t liked cats at all.

“And what would you like to order, hon?” the waitress asked.

Salvador chuckled. “I will be having the buffet.” He looked lustily toward the chocolate fountain towering above the sneeze guards.

“Okay, and that comes with a soft drink.” The waitress’ eyes narrowed as she noticed his cat. “You can’t have that animal in here, hon. It’s against policy.”

Salvador looked deeply into her eyes. “It is a service animal . . . and I would like a cherry cola.”

“Okay,” the waitress replied in a dazed tone, “and you?”

Melantha hesitated. She didn’t know whether to order a bloody steak or the salad. Which would impress him more? She checked her purse to make sure that she had remembered her coupon for twenty-percent off their total order.

She hadn’t, but Salvador seemed like a classy guy. It was unlikely that they would be going Dutch. Melantha tightened the laces of her bodice, a bad habit that she had picked up many years ago during her time stranded in a mountain cabin with a lusty, muscular lumberjack.

“I’ll . . . also have the buffet, and a coffee.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back with your drinks and your rolls. You two go ahead and help yourselves. The plates are right over there by the chocolate fountain.” With that, the waitress departed, tapping discordant rhythms with pencil and pad.

Melantha was glad that such an inane creature wouldn’t be their first shared victim. She was certain that Salvador would ask her to share his dark gift. How could he not? Even though they had just met, Melantha felt a kinship that could only signal them having known each other in a past life. Most likely, this was by way of her previous incarnation as a fiesty, red-headed 13th century dog groomer, Tangwystyl Mac Giolla Phadraig, who had been horribly scarred by smallpox as a child, suffered terribly her whole life from palsy, and died at twenty-eight of a broken heart.

“By the chocolate fountain . . . yes, the chocolate fountain.” Salvador eyed it with centuries of yearning.

“You must really like chocolate,” Melantha said. With Salvador, she was living today like it was yesterday, even though yesterday had already come to pass. He felt that familiar. She brushed her hand against his, and he didn’t flinch or anything.

“It is the only precarious link that binds me to the last vestiges of my frail mortality. It is the fetid blood of gods and the Old Ones. I will drink deeply of its splendor.”

“Cool.”

Chapter 2 >>>

Real Men Don’t Cry, They Vomit

I sent out a couple short stories today, which was gut-wrenching for a couple of reasons. “Walking In Another Man’s . . .” is thinly-veiled as fiction. It is about my father and the experience of visiting someone with Alzheimer’s. I guess that it is also about shoes, because . . . wait for it . . . the title is both literal and figurative. *gasp* Well, write what you know.

All cards should be this honest.

Glitter was forbidden in our household back when our daughter was trached. Small particles like that could invade her stoma and damage her airway. So, of course, my wife’s family sends cards festooned with the stuff. My other story, “Get Well Soon,” is based on that, the sheer isolation of holding a greeting card that looks like it says one thing but is really conveying, “We have no idea what you are going through. We never will. It’s quite possible that we don’t even care at all.” Come to think of it, I should put that card into production.

Obviously, they were tough stories to tackle because . . .  all of these emotions . . . BLECH! If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Lenny and the Squigtones, it’s that real men don’t cry, they vomit. No, the hard part — the reeeaaallly hard part — was submitting them to the big guys, the magazines that can launch a writer’s career. It’s a hard combo, because finalizing these scoured me out, and I’m not eager to have that space filled with rejection letters. This is some of my best though.

I’ve noticed that my fiction has become very short, pared down to its essential elements. A lot of what I’m writing is coming out at less than two-thousand words, which is a big departure from ten-years-ago, where everything leaned toward novelette length. I think that started with “Get Well Soon.” I was reading it to my mother, and it had a much longer premise that devolved into gruesome horror. I hadn’t finished it though, and when I hit the point where the story presently ends, we both agreed that nothing more was needed. That was the whole of the story, and anything else would detract from it. It’s a lesson that I pass on whenever I teach about writing. Brevity. Wish I could nail that in a blog post.

In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King

“I opened up to a therapist just once. I was a kid. I got into a fight. The doctor asked me question after question, got me so scrambled up. Next thing I know, I was shanghaied upstate to a nitwit school.”
— Frank Reynolds, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

I sent off another four poems today. The experience was somewhat uncomfortable, because the publication was soliciting works for an issue themed around mentally ill authors. Ostensibly, this is to raise awareness and counter social stigmas, but it is kind of like holding a typing contest to raise awareness of carpal tunnel syndrome. Mental illness is the norm for creative types, which is doubly true for poets. There is even a term for this phenomenon, the Sylvia Plath effect. A collection of poems by the mentally ill will therefore read very much like any other chapbook — or should, at least.

Art by Wesley Willis

The obvious concern is that the run-of-the-mill stuff by poets with genuine disorders will be overshadowed by bombastic ‘crazy person writing’ penned by people with a bad case of the Mondays who identify with mental illness as an alternative to having actual talent. You see a lot of that when searching for outsider art on eBay, where being ‘outside of the artistic establishment’ is all too often equated with a suburban artist’s quirky inability to paint at a Kindergarten level. There is an authentic degree of schizophrenic near-incoherence that qualifies as the outsider work of the deeply disturbed, but artists like these have a difficult time connecting with mainstream audiences, whose threshold for art appreciation of this sort frequently borders on mere freak show voyeurism. Seriously, how many Wesley Willis albums do you own?

Mostly, it feels strange to use my disorder as an identifier in this way, seeing as how writing is what makes me feel perfectly normal.

“One Day, He Defecated Himself”: Medical Poetry, Alcohol, and My College Experience

Inflammation of the foreskin
Reminds me of your smile
— Monty Python, “Medical Love Song”

Sent out a batch of four medically-themed poems about a quack doctor, two flavors of death, and a spiteful Last Will and Testament. The hardest part of the submission was having to write something about myself a little more personal than the conventionally skimpy cover letter of “I am author. Wrote stuff. Attached is thing.” My first dozen attempts were weepy little bios that weren’t nearly evocative enough without the accompanying mp3 recording of the world’s smallest violin. Yes, yes, my poems are sad, and coincidentally enough sad things happened in my own life. I was at risk of being mistaken for a teenage girl.

I don’t care if you have tenure. Either it’s those size nines or your pretentious aphorisms, but something smells like horseshit.

Then I realized that poetry is the dreaded phone call at four o’clock in the morning. “Hey, mom . . . I’m drunk, and I just wrote this poem . . . about feelings.” People drink so they don’t have to write poetry, but then the words fall into place while washing dishes. I worked out a bio that reflected how The Dead Poets Society was so very unlike my own college experiences with poetry. You see, online student reviews about the professor who most inspired me include gems like, “Rude, messy, vulgar, egotistical and disorganized” and “This guy is insane. One day he defecated himself.” Screw Robin Williams! That’s my real-life hero, the professor who inspired me most to write, and whom I admire to this very day . I have never received a higher accolade than his grade of “Fucking Awesome” on one of my papers.

The Scream Behind the Throbbing Heart

I’ve sent out a very short story, The Scream Behind the Throbbing Heart, about the impulse to touch, travel between dimensions, and the reason we see familiar patterns in everyday objects. If nothing else, it gave my wife a nightmare. Score!

While I was formatting it, I had one of those A-Ha moments, when I realized that Steve Barron had set the gold standard for tales of interdimensional travel with his music video for the song, Take on Me. It is the story of a rotoscoped race car driver who meets a nice young woman and ends his day in her bedroom — after traveling between dimensions and fighting two men with a pipe wrench!

It doesn’t get better than that.

Okay, maybe it does, but not by much. Although some might see it as a low bar for entry, Take on Me lays out the formula for a here and back again journey between parallel worlds in a scant 3 minutes and 47 seconds. In fact, fans of the popular television show, Stranger Things, are bound to see parallels. Then again, as fantastic as the show is, it is about as original as decoupage, so finding commonalities isn’t exactly a stretch. How so? *spoiler alert*

The Magic Pane is the window between the normal and the abnormal. The protagonist lives in our world but is pulled across to a parallel one by an extradimensional force. In the music video, the magic pane is a comic book. The frames come alive, and a hand reaches through to accept the heroine into an alternate world of rotoscope animation. Much like Take on Me, everything in Stranger Things is super ’80s, but Will Byers transitions into the Upside-Down by way of a far more sinister entity. The story becomes a rescue arc.

The Rift demonstrates that the magic pane can be both created and destroyed. While one rift consumes the character’s initial point of entry, the opening of another rift generates a new, often temporary, means of escape. In Take on Me, the antagonists shatter the magic pane that exists in the rotoscope world. The hero manages to open a temporary rift that allows the heroine to return home, and she in turn flattens out the crumpled and discarded comic that allows him to follow her. In Stranger Things, the scientists done gone and messed up again, just like they did in The Mist and opened a gateway to the opening credits for Tales from the Darkside. There are many rifts in the show, but this gateway ultimately provides the avenue for Will’s rescue.

Philip Jackson + Pipe Wrench = Badass

The Pipe Wrench Fight is when an otherworldly power is turned against itself, resulting in the destruction of the antagonist. It’s not unlike fighting fire with fire, or chainsaw with chainsaw. The music video’s antagonists are a couple of competing race car drivers armed with pipe wrenches. When it comes time for the hero to face them — surprise! He has a pipe wrench of his own. In Stranger Things, the protagonists ally with a preteen Sinead O’Connor version of Charlie from Firestarter, who possess tremendous psychokinetic abilities that link her to the Upside-Down. She is the pipe wrench, the tool that the true companions use to rescue their friend and that is also unleashed against the antagonist in the final confrontation.

Philip Jackson – Pipe Wrench = Inspector Japp from Agatha Christie’s Poirot

 

And hey, if you want to see how Take on Me ends, A-ha wraps up the story at the beginning of their video for The Sun Always Shines on Tv.

 

Sandwichsmith: McDonald’s Artisan Grilled Chicken Sandwich

No McDonald’s sandwich is ever worth five-dollars, but I had a coupon. I’ll buy just about anything if it’s on sale. Guess what! No two McDonald’s sandwiches are ever worth five-dollars.

The Sandwichsmith was a vital component of Pre-industrial society.

It was the name of the sandwich that puzzled me, the “Artisan Grilled Chicken Sandwich.” Artisan? Does that mean that only the manager handles my sandwich ingredients?

“How is this artisanal?!” I asked in a confrontational tone that demands speedy service, demonstrates my masculinity, and ensures that nobody spits in my food. I know this works, because everyone does it. Behaving this way can’t just signify an infantile temper tantrum solely intended to get free food and dehumanize the employees.

“Let me show you,” the manager said. She led me to a backroom where a wizened old man sat on an antique stool before a rickety workbench. “This is Alphonse Schlemiel. He handcrafts all of our artisan sandwiches.”

Ken sculpts the bun.

“Wackelpudding,” he said by way of introduction.

The old man hammered a chisel against a solid block of frozen chicken breasts. He worked swiftly, like an ice sculptor, until a single white meat breast with rib meat fell away from the conglomerated mass. He then flipped down a magnifying lens from the complicated headset (any steampunk’s wet dream) that he wore and set to work with a much finer chisel, removing various tumors and imperfections.

“Zere ve go. Perfektion,” Alphonse said. He delicately placed the chicken in a gold-plated George Foreman grill, sprinkled some turmeric on it, and then set to work preparing the bun and condiments. “I am a god — nein, I am der Gott des Huhns! Such power . . . mein schwanz verhartet.”

Steve works the color injector, adding 10mg of natural coloring.

The man enjoyed his work. I watched as he used a set of silver tongs to lift a slice of lettuce from a box labelled, “WARNING:  Artisanal Lettuce. Do not mix with shredded iceberg lettuce. Anoint with vinaigrette before serving.”

“Our tomatoes,” the manager explained, “are from the local farmer’s market.”

“What about the buns?”

“They are artisanally baked in an artisanal factory by a team of artisans manning artisanal machinery built by artisan children in China. Artisan.”

“Wow, I have to admit that I was wrong about this sandwich,” I said to myself — not out loud, but like Daniel Stern narrating the Wonder Years. Nobody could hear me. Nobody. I laughed about that, out loud, and the manager shot me a quizzical look, as though she suspected that I’d had an epiphany. It hurt my feelings to think that she was laughing at me, rather than with me, internally.

I left. Went home. Disco dance, fun time! Too bad the sandwich tasted so awful.

The End . . . or is it?

Stephen King, Social Awkwardness, and the Horror of Prejudice

Let’s just get this out of the way. Stephen King is more successful and prolific than I’ll ever be. His work welcomes critique, but nobody can say that he isn’t an author and that he doesn’t deserve recognition for his work. Anyone who doubts his devotion to the craft need only pick up a copy of “On Writing.” King didn’t piss his name in the snow like any number of published authors who are fads today and forgotten tomorrow. King’s name is etched in stone as part of the American landscape. That said . . .

Boo! Social awkwardness! Booooo!

King rarely writes horror. Although he sometimes strays into the Lovecraftian territory of unspeakable tentacles, the bulk of his fiction focuses on the outsider, society’s strays that normal folk don’t want to face head-on. His work unsettles because it places his readers face-to-face with the social awkwardness and anxieties that they shy away from in everyday life. The monsters don’t so much creep out from under the bed as they do ooze out from between the wide gaps in social context.

The horror genre is a hard sell in a market saturated with escapism and narcissism thinly veiled as empowerment. People don’t want the “Do you read Sutter Kane?” experience of going irrevocably insane by the eighth chapter of their paperback novel (if only). They generally don’t want to be reminded of their own certain and impending mortality, which is why we all share that inborn relief valve of knowing that we’d all be far more clever and resourceful than the protagonist of any published horror scenario. To this day, most people look forward to the same “pleasurable shudder” as readers in the 19th and late 18th centuries.

King’s strength as an author is that he can so evocatively exorcise his own demons onto the page. He conveys his own phobias and social anxieties openly enough that the actual novel may as well be transparent, because really, you are just looking at his photograph on the dust jacket. What’s truly unsettling though is how the language of anxiety disorders becomes so unspeakably horrific when read by a general audience.

The inherent problem is that King fails to expand his reader’s perception of normality. If anything, he reinforces the sense of unease that people feel when confronting abnormality in real life. Let’s start with an easy parallel. Stephen King wrote Cujo. People read Cujo, and it made them more afraid of dogs on some level. King attached the stigma of danger to something inherently innocent. Now, consider that just about every King book features a human being with a social stigma, be it mental illness, disability, or even the color of their skin. The “horror” element of his books hinges on the reader recoiling from the Other on some level, which is chicken soup for the bigot.

King has a longstanding record of perpetuating the unfortunate tropes of the Magical Negro and the Inspirationally Disadvantaged, which puts him in the same camp as writers of “Amish Romance,” who so ably perpetuate the concept of the Noble Savage in a fresh bonnet. These characterizations become blatantly apparent when they are translated into film. But his stereotypes are often good guys, so that makes it okay, right? It’s not just a novelty that King is penning these quaint modern day minstrel shows, researchers have found that “superhumanization” is a mask for “dehumanization.” Racist whites really do associate blacks with the magical powers that Stephen King writes about. King’s novels feed that myth, just as “The Art of the Deal” feeds the myth that Donald Trump is a good businessman.

Prejudice isn’t just angry and hateful, it is eerie and unsettling. The thoughts and philosophies that drive it are alien to human decency. Working that into a horror novel is reaching for the low hanging fruit. It puts readers in the position of embracing the worst part of themselves to feel safe in confronting the ghost, killer clown, or whatever other placeholder is masquerading as an antagonist. Stephen King has the authority at this point in his career to ask his readers to step outside of themselves and grow as people . . . or maybe he’ll just write more stories about a magical black house maid eating a white man’s ejaculate off the bed sheets so that her kid can have talent.

The Red Leather Jacket Writer: The Storyteller versus the Writer with a Story to Tell

“Why am I on this beach? It’s so hot and sunny! Why am I wearing this jacket, yo?”

I once knew a woman who wanted to write but didn’t know where to begin. I started her off with a brief springboard exercise: Imagine a man on a beach. He is wearing a red leather jacket, like Michael Jackson in Thriller or Brad Pitt in Fight Club. The jacket is worn and cracked — maybe the man is too. Tell me about him.

This blew her mind. “Why would he have a jacket on the beach? Who is he? How did he get there? What’s he doing there?” All reasonable questions but firmly rooted in the reader’s mindset. Our discussion kept circling back to the jacket. “Nobody would wear that to the beach!”

As readers, we are a passive audience who delight in the reveal. We feel confident that every enigma will be explained, whether it is a question of who killed who, will good triumph over evil, or will Bella convert Edward to Mormonism before he takes her vamp-ginity? Guesswork is our pleasure, but it is not our business to generate concrete answers. We need only suspend disbelief.

“Oh no! Now I’m the one stuck wearing a red leather jacket on this beach like I’m in some shitty episode of ‘Lost’ – which is every episode.”

A writer is in possession of all of the facts (or, at least, we have a solemn duty to pretend). We are the historians of our microcosm, and the reader trusts that all of the implicit minutia that never make it to the page remain present and accounted for in our heads. There is a terrific sense of trust inherent in that relationship, even if much of that social contract is institutionalized (because what publisher is going to accept a manuscript that says, “And suddenly, fire rained down from the sky and killed all of everyone’s favorite characters. Eat a dick, fanboyz!”). The writer is tasked with closure, imparting to the reader a complete acceptance of what has happened.

The red jacket dilemma is that we don’t know all of the facts, because our imagination is confined by our limited perspective of the real world. The average person says, “I want to be a writer,” because they have the rights to a particular vignette that exists solely within their own mind’s eye. Maybe it would, though more often it wouldn’t, look good on paper for everyone to see. However, a storyteller becomes a writer as a byproduct of their need for greater perspective. The story changes the storyteller, whose world must perpetually expand to accommodate an experience that is not about “me” but about “us.”

There. No beach. The red leather jacket makes total sense now, right?

The easy path to becoming an author is to pursue the desired outcome and eliminate the extraneous details that get in the way of how the world should be. The red leather jacket doesn’t exist in this person’s narrative, because that just isn’t what the story is about. A storyteller’s narrative takes on a life of its own, leaving the author with the unenviable task of researching evidence in support of the inevitable outcome. The red leather jacket is there, because it came into being. That it is there proves its significance. What does that say about us?

 

[This is a revised version of an article originally posted on the Bedford Writer’s Group blog.]

 

His Accustomed Place: Inspiration from Tobit and the Walls of Nineveh

Does he have no fear? Once before he was hunted, to be executed for this sort of deed, and he ran away; yet here he is again burying the dead! (Tobit 2:8)

Today, I completed His Accustomed Place, a short story about Haman, a beggar who dwells at the periphery of the walls of ancient Nineveh. His daily routine is interrupted when a dead body is nearly dumped on top of him, which leads him to reassess the nature of charity and habit. Let’s hope that it finds a good home as I begin the submission process.

The story was inspired by the Book of Tobit, which was not part of the Hebrew Tanakh but entered Christian scripture by way of the Greek Septuagint. The Protestant Reformation later relegated Tobit to the Apocrypha, but it was among the Deuterocanonical books included in the 1611 King James Bible and retained in contemporary Catholic and Orthodox editions.

It was Esarhaddon’s inscription of “I am mighty, I am omnipotent, I am hero, I am gigantic, I am colossal!” that ultimately won him the Republican nomination.

The Northern Kingdom of Israel had fallen, and Tobit was among those Israelites who were brought in captivity to Nineveh. There, Sennacherib, the King of Assyria, ordered the deaths of many newly arrived Jews and left their bodies in the streets or chucked them over the walls. Tobit persisted in burying his tribesmen even though these charitable acts led to his exile under threat of death. He was eventually forgiven when Esarhaddon became king, but Tobit went right back to unlawfully burying the dead. This is a fragment of the narrative, but it is what engaged my imagination.

Of course, Tobit is being a righteous Jew (and his righteousness is explained in no uncertain terms). The Jewish custom is to bury a body right away, as soon as is possible, so what he does is quite a mitzvah. It is admirable, but I saw a certain gallow’s humor in it. I’m sure that my fascination is rooted in my First World privilege, seeing as how bodies in the street and sanctions on interring enemies of the state feature into only a handful of Disney attractions.

The notion of a corpse being “thrown behind the wall of Nineveh” stuck with me, but the protagonist I envisioned was more along the lines of a disreputable alter ego of Tevye, Sholem Aleichem’s famous character, who was the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof. Tobit is a man whose tribulations cease with a son who marries well and prospers from his inheritance, whereas poor Tevye always finds that “the well runs dry, and all that’s left is a hole in the ground.” I looked more and more to Tevye when I found myself running into rough patches in the narrative, but I’m still in a grimdark state of mind from the novel that I’m working on, so my guy ended up being a leper of questionable moral fiber.

Still, it is intimidating for an outsider to find inspiration in Jewish midrash or Yiddish fiction, as any gentile would be hard-pressed to do justice to Judaism’s rich storytelling tradition. I’d like to think that the roots of my story are adequately planted below the surface of the narrative, but inspiration is a tricky thing. Imitation is inevitable. As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” We all borrow seeds, but a good author must ensure that they grow into something worthwhile, not just a clinging vine dependent on the greatness of what came before.

I owe my wife a hearty “thank you” for helping to shape this story. Let’s hope someone gets to read it published somewhere soon.