Last of the automotive works for a while. As it happens, when this piece was finished I realized it’s my 50th work of the year. Didn’t plan it that way. Serendipity?

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

A Soldier Enters

It floated as if on currents, nudging this way, nudging that way according to an innate sense of tactical movement, a soldier, looking for an opening. If it found one it would attack. If not it would die in the attempt, falling to the ground. It would take no pleasure in attacking. It would experience no remorse in dying. It would simply be. It would function as ascribed. The currents jostled sharply, then slackened and became static. It began to sense vibrations. Those vibrations signaled It was close, and it began looking for weaknesses to exploit. Had it cared, which it didn’t, it would have identified those vibrations as ‘sound’. Had it listened, which he couldn’t, it would have heard …

“Human beings are allowed to exist only in so far as Nature allows it,” a bespeckled, learned man in the video said as an attractive woman interviewing him nodded and seemed to encourage him to continue, which he had no qualms about doing. “Most of the cells in your body are not human cells – they’re a range of bacteria and viruses living in a symbiotic relationship with us. Some are bad, some are good. We can only digest food because of the non-human cells in our guts. We can only breath because the cells in our lungs facilitate oxygen retrieval. Anything that attacks those cells, be that anything naturally occurring or something we’ve done to ourselves, also attacks our own survival. Covid-19 is one of those anythings.”

They were in the parking lot, visitors not allowed inside the hospital due to that same Covid-19, watching on a tablet. The guy in the faded cap watching from the backseat over the shoulder of the guy holding the tablet said, “What a bunch of shit.” The only other person in the car, the woman in the front passenger seat, looked back at him annoyed. “All these doctors and scientists are idiots,” he sneered.

Tablet guy said, “Will you please be quiet, I’m trying to listen.”

The interviewer on the video asked, “You suggest in your paper that Covid-19 is related in part to climate change.”

“Well, climate change, pollution, ozone depletion, population expansion, other things to which humans are contributing, if not causing. Remember, complex organisms like animals and humans are something of an anomaly on a planet bathed in bacteria, viruses, molds and so forth. They are the dominate life forms whether we care to acknowledge it or not. As ecosystems are stressed, those life forms will take corrective measures to protect themselves. Covid-19, whether it jumped from animals to humans or escaped from a lab … “

“Didn’t escape, was deliberately released by the Chinese,” stated faded cap guy.

“Quiet!”

“… is irrelevant – it would have found a way to get to us one way or another. As far as the viruses are concerned, we’re the thing that shouldn’t be here.”

The faded cap guy said, “It’s all a damn hoax!” Tablet guy paused the video, sensing that this might go on a while. “Ain’t no worse than the flu, they’re just blowing it out of proportion to make us all go socialist!”

The woman in front turned towards him now, anger flashing, said, “Your sister is dying in that hospital from that hoax, and I will add, dying from something a vaccine would probably have protected her from, a vaccine that you encouraged her not to get!”

“That vaccine ain’t been tested right!”

“Upwards of a million people are dead! This is nothing like the flu!”

“I didn’t get the vaccine and I ain’t got it!”

“You haven’t had it yet!”

Faded cap guy sucked in air, about to call the woman a damn liberal, and as he did the soldier followed the currents, got past the windpipe, into the lungs. And he began his attack.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Arc Of The Sting

He could look at the arc of the fishing line a couple ways.

The first way was that if he did it right his dad wouldn’t yell at him or slap him. Cursing would happen anyway because that’s what his dad did, but if he cast the line correctly, if the lure, sinker and float splashed perfectly into the water just right over there, near the half-submerged stump on the mossy bank of their little pond back in the timber, if it went down straight, then the big catfish known to lurk there in the depths might rise up, and might strike, and might finally be caught, and then, oh, his daddy would be so happy! He’d still be pissed he hadn’t caught it himself, but happy his dumb ass son finally did something right. Oh, that would feel so good! Oh, for his daddy to praise him, just once! They could carry it back to their tiny house with the leaky roof and the siding falling off, and mama would smile weakly, the big dark circles under her eyes brightening just a bit, and she would clean it and throw the guts out back for the scraggly scavengers and fry it up with some onions while his little brothers looked on and everybody would get a taste. Dad would get half of it, but he’d let everybody have a bite. And so he did it just like his dad showed him. He shifted his weight to his front foot as he flicked the light rod forward, stopping the rod at a perfect 45 degrees at a speed that would launch the lure, fishing line clicking smoothly off the casting reel until he stopped it at the perfect moment, and it would arc accurately to that spot where the catfish may rise. His dad said, “That big bastard is right there, god damn it!” as a cigarette hung between his lips and his can of beer hung between his fingers. “Not so hard, damn it!” he barked. “You lose another lure, I swear to god I’ll slap you even harder this time!” So he would tell his dad, “Yes, daddy, I’ll do my very best,” and his dad would say, “Shit, kid, try to do better than that.” So, he would try. Every time, he would try. That was the first way to look at it.

The second way to look at it was to fuck his dad, which he could do, now, in retrospect, and in that case the arc of the line was not about his dad not hitting him, it was about the art, the beauty, the grace of the perfect cast. The harmony of ball-bearings in the spinning wheel clicking as the line pulled free, with the melody of singing birds and the light wind moving through the tall oaks that shaded the pond. Sunlight waltzing with tree branches and green leaves as it sparkled on the water. A gentle splash as the lure landed, concentric circles drifting from it across the pond. Then the slow reel-in, the ball-bearings clicking with more leisure, as he brought the lure back, lifted it from the greenish water, then reset himself, braced and cocked his arm and angled the rod and let fly once more, an artist perfecting his brush strokes, a morning painting a masterpiece. That way, the second way, was how he chose to look at it. But the first way never quite stopped stinging his cheek.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Crack In The Grey

The cold, North Atlantic spray off the bow of U-642 stung its Captain on his cheeks above his beard as he leaned forward in the conning tower, peering at the sky through binoculars. He was joined by three officers, each scanning a quadrant of the grey sky for British aircraft which, if it spotted them before they could dive, would destroy them with one well-placed bomb, or steer destroyers that could drive them underwater with depth charges until they suffocated.

The U-boat chopped awkwardly through the water at roughly half its usual surface speed. It had been a costly cruise. Two of the officers with the Captain were replacements for men killed and wounded. Three times they had been driven down and depth charged. Once they had nearly suffocated, going so deep bolts had sprung like bullets all over the boat. Each time they’d just managed to crawl away, if not to safety, at least away from immanent death. Twice they’d been strafed by aircraft before they could submerge. They’d buried two men at sea and were nursing three more who could yet die, leaked like a sieve and one of the propellers was shot, along with their nerves.

Nonetheless, they had killed. They had sunk at least two merchant vessels, and there were suspicions of a third. The first time they’d been driven down it’d been just a single destroyer chasing them, and they’d managed to get to periscope depth and get him with a stern tube torpedo. They’d finished off their second merchant ship, burning and abandoned by the fleet, believing its crew had been evacuated, only to see them leaping into the icy water after the final torpedo hit, swimming towards them, pleading, begging for rescue as the U-boat coldly backed away.

But mostly, a dozen times as they approached targets, they were chased away. The British had stopped making mistakes. That was the bad news; the good news was that the cruise was almost over. They would make La Rochelle in less than a day.

The Captain braced his arms against the conning tower in an attempt to steady his shaking hands; shaking almost too badly to see through the binoculars. He’d hoped to become an artist as a young man; his Kaiserliche, later Kriegsmarine, father wouldn’t hear of it. He’d wanted to learn oil painting and listen to Mozart. His father made him learn drafting and forced him to listen to Wagner. He was drawn to beauty, gardens, and horses. His father taught him to kill and field dress game and enrolled him in officer training school. He made him forget how to hold a brush but proficient in firing a gun. Any gun. Lots of guns. Head shots, always. Don Giovanni overwritten by operatic cries of men he killed. Those cries in his ears, those artistic visions of bodies blown into the air by exploding torpedoes, then something on the horizon caught his attention. He focused the binoculars, steadied his gaze…

Dolphins. What was that; three? Four? No, six! They seemed to reveal themselves just as the grey sky cracked, allowing rays of golden sun to stream through. So graceful they were! So beautiful and peaceful; he couldn’t help but to stare. They seemed ethereal, existing on some separate plane. Were they remotely aware of Humans? Had they seen them blowing themselves to bits? Even if they had, did they care? The presence of the Captain’s U-Boat a quarter mile off, plowing through the water like an alien monster, didn’t seem to faze them, didn’t seem to bother them, didn’t alter their course. He found his imagination flying along with them, away from the affairs of men, away from the war.

And because he was away, he didn’t see the warplanes, three of them, drop in neat formation from the grey, their bombs ready, and their machine guns already opening up.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

The Desairologist’s Gift

The call disrupted the delicate process of lightly brushing just a tiny amount of mascara to the eye lashes of the corpse, so he let it go to voice mail. He would call her back shortly. But she called again only seconds later which she never did, which suggested a sense of urgency, which she never had. ‘Okay’, he thought, and put down his tools, which he hated to do. The left eye was more or less finished, but not the right. The interruption risked an ever so slight variance between the two. Not acceptable to an artist.

He answered, “Hi, what’s up?”

“You have to come over here.” Her voice was trembling madly. She was perhaps the calmest, least flappable person he knew, so this was disconcerting.

He put as much quiet empathy as he could into his voice. “What’s going on, my friend?”

“Just get over here,” she said, tears behind her breaking voice. “Please. Right now. I need you.”

“Okay, sure; no prob. I’ll come right over.”

“Thanks,” she said, only marginal relief in her voice.

He’d always felt great affection for his friend, though they’d never dated or shared that level of physical intimacy. Part of him wanted to; but the other part so needed the intellectual intimacy they shared he feared diluting it with lust. So they’d kept it platonic, and they’d leaned on each other through so many ordeals. They were both licensed as a special kind of cosmetologist known as desairologists; that is, they were employed by mortuaries to perform cosmetic services on dead people.

But they shared another gift. Only handful of people had it. They were intensely secretive about it. They could touch a corpse and know if that person had fulfilled their purpose in life.

He gently took between his hands the face of the dead woman lying on the table, “I’ll be back with you shortly, dear,” he said. “Everything will be fine.” He could sense, through his fingertips, an electric pleasure of her life well lived; a mother, a businesswoman, an avid gardener; only a propensity towards introversion had interfered with friendships and empathy. But that was okay; nobody got everything right. Ordinary purposes of an ordinary life. It all shot into him in an instantaneous rush, a lifetime pulsing through him like a drug.

As he drove across town towards his friend he thought of the first time he’d become aware of his gift. His uncle’s funeral, just fifteen-years-old, he’d reached out and touched his uncle’s cold hand as he lay in his coffin and felt that instantaneous rush, only that time the electricity was painful. His uncle had drunk away his opportunities as a father, worked jobs he’d hated and never cultivated his purpose as an artist, a woodworker who could take a chunk of a fallen tree and sculpt it into something magical. And he had let that purpose lay fallow. It stung with a bitterness he could actually taste. It was three years before he touched another corpse, at another funeral, this time another uncle, only the rush he got then was intoxicatingly pleasant. That uncle had been a teacher and a listener and had led such an open and gentle life its afterglow spread through him like a warm bath. He’d gravitated, then, as did nearly everyone with the gift, towards the mortuary sciences, but especially desairology as it was the most personal, and the most artistic.

He found his friend sitting on the steps of the funeral home porch, an older, Victorian style building with majestic trees in front. Mascara streaked her face, and she ran to him and threw her arms around his neck, tight. ‘Well’, he thought, ‘this is different’. They stood and hugged each other for some time; she was trembling but couldn’t seem to cry or had already cried herself out. “What is it, what’s happened?” he gently asked.

She finally broke away. “In there,” she said, but wouldn’t make eye contact. “She was indigent.”

He’d worked at the funeral home himself many times and knew where to go, downstairs, where the chemical smells lived. She was laid out on the metal table, simply dressed in clothes he knew had probably come from shelter donations. Likely older than she looked, she looked roughly mid-fifties. He went to the paperwork first; it put her at just over forty. No known family or children, though the body indicated she had given birth at some point in her life, and probably not that long ago. She’d been found dead in an alley, likely been there for a day before she was noticed. The coroner had found nothing to indicate it was other than natural causes, no trauma to the body. Bloodwork had ruled out drug overdose, though needle marks up her arm verified she’d been a user once. Bloodwork also revealed significant liver and heart abnormalities. Malnourished, alone and ‘rode hard’, she had simply died. He approached her and placed the fingertips of both hands gently against her face.

The jolt violently knocked him backwards like a gunshot, slammed him against a metal cabinet and onto the floor, his body wrenched tight by a seizure that seemed to cramp every muscle. His head screamed with agonizing pain. In an instant he was shot with a slaughterhouse of death, searing firestorms, souls violently ripped apart. Emotional rape by something that could only be described as satanic. It all shot through him in a few seconds, but he lay shuddering for many minutes. When he finally looked around the room was as placid as when he’d entered; the woman lay motionless. Dead. He crawled more than walked from the room, used the walls of the hallway to push his way to his feet.

His friend was waiting outside. Their eyes bore straight into each other, and they held the stare. “I hoped you’d have seen something different,” she whispered.

“My god,” was all he could mutter, “My holy god.” They embraced each other tight once more as though a single being trying to envelop itself in a protective shell. Only they knew. In all the world, only the two of them.

“What are we going to do,” she asked.

“What can we do?”

“We have to find the child.”

“We can’t read the living.”

“We have to try.”

“We can only see the story when it’s finished,” he said. “There are no records. We don’t know how old, boy or girl; what would we even do if we found the child?”

She pulled away enough for their eyes to come back together. “We have to try,” she pleaded.

In days, the woman’s body would be buried in a pauper’s grave, likely not even a marker. No one knew her name. No one would mourn her. But she had done all she could do. She had fulfilled her purpose. She had birthed the Antichrist.

- CH

'January'

Yeah, I know – blogs have gotten slightly sparse, of late. Unfortunately, the sufficient blocks of time I need to create art or write prose have seemed to evaporate. Too many things dragging away my attention.
 
In lieu of that, this is a work from about six months ago titled ‘January’ that just last week received a First Place Ribbon in the Photo Art category of a new Capital Arts exhibit. I was also the featured speaker at the reception for that exhibit, and I spoke on the struggle of photo artists that their work becomes accepted by the traditional arts community. I’m always grateful for any acknowledgement I’m granted, so I beg you not to read the following comments as a complaint. But there’s an irony in my own words at this reception. I submitted four works to the exhibit: this work and another ribboned. Both were inkjet prints of very gently applied techniques. The two that did not ribbon were both expensive metal prints of increasingly sophisticated abstraction.
 
This is a terribly important exhibition for this community; it represents an acknowledgement by the traditional arts community that something important and vital is happening in the art world with photo and digital arts, and that local artists are working to contribute their voice. The recognition of my work is very humbling. But there’s also the hint that photo art, applied in full force, still boggles minds.
 
But then, abstract art in general still boggles minds. So why should photo art be any different.
 
… just for jollies, below is one of the abstract works that did not ribbon …
 
- CH

​

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

When Art Creates A World

The knock, softly, came late, pushing 3 a.m., but not too late and not too soft for The Artist, still at his easel as he usually was this time of night. He cocked his head, not entirely sure, then thought ‘no, it was a knock, alright’, crossed to the door, opened it, and there stood The Dealer.

They beheld each other for a moment before The Artist said, “Well, praise Jesus! Come to gander at the mad man?”

The Dealer replied with a weak smile.

“They’re all still saying that, right? They’re saying, ‘That guy up there – he’s looney! Stay away from that nutburger; we certainly do’! And, you know of course, they do! Nobody comes near me!”

“May I …"

“But then you said that yourself! You said, ‘he’s gone crazy – he’ll never last as an artist now! Not painting that shite’! And yet, here you are. Oh my god, here I am! I’m still here! How can it be…"

“Please,” the dealer held a hand up, “Please may I come in?”

The Artist swung the door wide, made a sweeping gesture inviting The Dealer over the threshold, then closed the door softly once he was. The dim room, lit only by a few candles and one small oil lamp close to the easel, was crowded with paintings and sketchpads leaning against the walls. The Dealer noted most of them contained the same elements as the work he was there to see, though of lesser degrees. As he turned he felt and heard his boots scrap against the dirt on the wood floor. A narrow bed sat unmade in the corner, a small pile of disheveled and likely filthy clothes lay next to it.

“Your bed remains empty, my friend,” The Dealer noted.

The Artist giggled. “She left,” he said. “They all left after I painted it.”

“Do you blame them?”

“Yes,” The Artist said, his eyes blazing at The Dealer, who had to look away to the window. The cobblestone Paris street loomed two floors below, lit by only an occasional lamp, dark and scented by human waste and poverty.

“I’ve come from Gertrude’s,” The Dealer said.

“I suppose a number of my old friends were there.”

“Just so.”

“I’m surprised you would climb up here on such a night.”

“The rain now is mostly just a little drizzle now again. No worries.”

“So then, pray tell; what did my old friends sent you up here to find out?”

The Dealer looked to the painting on the easel; again, those same elements. Hard angles, multiple perspectives of the same subject jammed against each other, primitive expressions rendered in simple lines. All the same mistakes. “It was less your old friends than me, wanted to see you.”

“Wanted to see if I was still nuts?”

“I wanted to see if you were pursuing the same course in your work.”

“And as you can see…”

“…you certainly are,” The Dealer noted, still looking around, not seeing the work itself. The Artist sensed what he was looking for, went to a corner, pulled it from behind a blank canvas. He propped it against the wall closer to the lamp, where The Dealer could see it, silently, absorbing it, his expression of quiet antipathy not changing greatly. “So nothing has changed.”

The artist giggled slightly once more, shaking his head. “Why don’t you look again?”

The Dealer did. “Yes, I have been.”

“No, you have not,” The Artist said calmly. “True most of my old friends have abandoned me. My woman, she’s found another artist to bleed dry, I understand. But there has been a steady stream of people come through here. Most of them, like you” he patted The Dealer twice on the back, “Just don’t get it. But some of them do. Some of them,” he took The Dealer by the shoulders and turned him to face him, “Leave here with it engrained on them,” The Artist arched his eyes wide, exaggerating, “Like a virus.”

“My friend …” The Dealer tried.

“And I know you have seen this work, little pieces of it, outside this room, growing in corners and shadows as your own brain incubates it.”

“My friend, this work is so ugly.”

“My friend, this work is so enlightening,” The artist insisted. “It has revealed new dimensions creeping now into our own staid lives.

“You think nothing has changed? Everything has changed. People just don’t know it yet. You don’t know it yet.”

The Dealer looked sadly at the artist, his mouth gaping. He looked back to the painting, the five nude women posing, absent expressions caring little what consequences they effected, its dull, earth-tone colors and crazy angles. What madman would put this down and call it ‘Art’? What manner of world would this ‘Art’ create? He broke away, could not face The Artist, and moved quickly to the door. “I cannot help you,” he said. “Your painting shall stay in its corner.”

But as he turned the doorknob and stepped into the hall he felt a degree of disorientation, an impression that the world was not solid, that it was morphing, that it was becoming something else, that reality was an illusion. It only lasted a second, but it stuck to him walking home over the dark streets, the cobblestones damp from the rain, the sounds of the city losing distinction and coagulating in moans, the smells, a taste in his mouth like yesterday’s milk. like old wine. He willed his mind, as he walked, to unsee, to unfeel, to unthink, to leave the painting hidden in a corner behind a closed door.

Seven years later The Artist’s work, ‘The Young Ladies Of Avignon’, hung in the Louvre. And nothing was ever the same.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Scheduled

The first time I woke I was already violently gasping for air and convulsing, sucking wildly for enough oxygen to go on living, every muscle in my body trying to thrash about but tightly restrained from doing so; likely pulled a bunch of crap in that process but I’ve been too out of it to tell. Four guys in light blue smocks and masks were putzing about the gleaming, sterile room while I went through that and not paying much attention to me, though one of them said, “The subject seems to be suffering.” ‘Suffering’ – right.

“No he’s not,” another guy said. “The guy doesn’t know what planet he’s on. Stick a sedative in him.”

And he did. Oh, actually, I think it was a she.

The second time I woke I was conscious a split second before I began gasping, convulsing, thrashing and convinced I was suffocating. No, was being suffocated. Same four guys – at least I think they were the same four – oh, yeah, one of them was a girl – putzed about and one, the same one who’d said I wasn’t suffering before, said, “Second attempt clearly less effective – subject has already begun to build an immunity to the serum.”

“Rats did the same thing,” another said.

“Yeah, if the shoe fits,” said the first. “Sedation please.

I tried to shake my head; tried to say, “No! No!” which mostly just came out as a couple croaks.

“Subject is trying to communicate.”

First guy came over and looked at me. “Hmmmmmmm,” he said. “That’s different. Sedate him anyway.”

And one of them did.

The third time I woke up nothing much was happening. There was a bunch of tubes in me and just the one guy – oh, turned out to be the girl – in there with me, putzing and laying stuff out on trays. ‘Course I was still tied down tight as a baseball or I’d a jumped up, so I just said hoarsely, “Hey.”

She looked up, blinked, put something down, left. Came back with the first guy who’d said I wasn’t suffering. He just looked at me. After a few seconds, I said, “Want to let me the hell off this; I’m suffering.”

He said, “No. The court ordered full restraints through this process, and I’d insist on that anyway. How much do you remember? Do you remember being brought here? Do you remember your name?”

My head was actually clearing by that point. I told him, “Don’t be an ass,” and said my name. By then the other members of the team had come in and they were all standing around the table listening to me. I love it when people listen to me.

“How did you get here?” they asked again.

“In the back of one of those big, armored police transports, cuffed and chained, with an armored-up guy holding a big-ass bat at the ready and giving me the stink-eye.”

“What happened before that?”

“Before that I had to listen to that shit-for-brains judge, whom I recall cussing out.”

First guy nodded. “Yeah, that you did, right after he judged you as criminally insane.” He gestured to the others, and they all moved away and began a low conversation they didn’t think I could hear; started going on about that serum-shit and using expressions like ‘full memory retention’ and ‘light suspended state’ and ‘nature of the subject’s psyche and crap like that.

I shouted, “It was not criminal, and I am not insane! All those people were on the schedule to die, and several had been sliding. I was doing what I was supposed to do!” Shouted it just like I had in court, where everyone had also ignored me. “Look,” I tried again, “Whatever this is, it’s not on the schedule!”

They talked a little more, went about collecting vials of shit from which they extracted measured amounts of into several syringes, and came towards me. First guy held his hand up, stopping them. He said, “We’ve been put in charge of the schedule.”

I sneered, “Hell you have! What are you doing to me?!”

First guy had taken hold of his mask but didn’t pull it over his mouth yet. “We can’t send humans into deep space without perfecting stasis-sleep, or our astronauts will not survive. And we can’t perfect stasis-sleep without human trials. I’m sorry, but this is what your conviction has wrought.” Then he pulled his mask over his mouth, as did the others, and he said to them, “Please proceed,” and stepped out of their way. They moved towards me. Crazy thing was, I didn’t truly start to feel helpless until I looked into the eyes of the woman and recognized that she was on my schedule.

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Summoning The Raptor

“You know I’m a witch, yes?”

The question took the young woman by surprise. She blinked a couple times. Then said. “You are my queen.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” the Queen thrust her tight jaw out. “Maybe I’m a witch-queen. My husband, my liege and lord The King, he says I’m a witch, which is why I’m locked up in this place, thus allowing us to have this pleasant conversation. Perhaps," she sneered, "I shall turn you and your pretty young face into a newt.”

The young woman gathered herself quickly, scanning her dark eyes over the Queen’s slight and slightly trembling frame, then allowed those eyes to scan the full room, its high ceiling and long drapes and framed art, the afternoon sun slanting through an open window. She allowed a number of seconds to pass, said, “Your grace, this is a twenty-five-room castle on an island surrounded by a peaceful lake on a 5,000-acre estate. When I am condemned to the Tower I hope my cell opens so expansively.”

The Queen frowned hard at the impertinence, narrowed her eyes, and glared at the young woman. “The King has sent you to torment me.” The five other handmaids present, all spies for the King, had braced and averted their eyes for the explosion surely to come, and they were glad for it – the young woman had just arrived, better appointed than themselves and accessorized with an air of primacy. They judged it not too early to begin hating her.

The young woman took a half step closer, too close for the Queen’s fury, then said quietly so only the Queen could hear, “Your grace, I come at the bequest of your father.”

The Queen’s narrowed eyes widened, and her mouth gaped. The handmaids were gob smocked at the intimacy by which young woman had approached, but hadn’t heard the words. Half a minute passed before the Queen, not bothering to look towards them, said, “Leave us.” And they did, confused and unsure what to report.

The Queen looked away, stepped towards the window. “Is my father displeased with me?” she asked. Her father was the king of Charleon. Her husband was the king of Abionary. Her marriage was supposed to bring peace between the realms. Problem was, her husband was slightly, well, nuts. She looked at the young woman, really looked at her eyes, seeing her. “Is he?”

“Not at all, your grace. He sends you all his love and his reassurance that he is with you.”

The Queen exhaled. “I am facing a witch’s death at the stake, and I am more afraid of my father’s disdain,” she half sobbed.

“You will not be executed,” the young woman told her, “You will not even face trial. If you were found guilty, there would be war with Charleon, and your husband, the King of Abionary, cannot afford it and does not have the support to effect it, let alone win it or even so much as cross the narrow Gray Water. If you were to be acquitted, your husband would lose the wealth and holdings tied, by marriage, through you, as those things would return to you. By simply holding you here, he may retain that wealth and those holdings while not quite bringing your father’s full wrath.”

“But witchcraft?” the older woman shook her head.

The younger one told her, “Not an uncommon thing; your father has himself accused a few opponents of the same thing as a means of freezing their effectiveness. You’d be surprised how many people believe it.”

“My husband sees me as an opponent?”

“Your husband,” she said, “As you have well discerned, it a dingbat. There are many who would see him deposed in favor of the Prince, whom, because of his age, they feel they can manipulate. And the King feels, because of your friendship with Lord Simones, that you are among those persons who would bring him low.”

“The Prince,” the older woman closed her eyes, “My son …”

“The Prince is safe. Your husband cannot harm him,” the young woman smiled. “Your father has many friends in Abionary, and they have already put plans in motion. Be patient, your grace.”

The Queen looked at her warmly, her eyes glistening with emotion, asked in a voice filled with hope, “Are you here to be my friend?” as though such a thing would be the most precious thing in the world.

The young woman smiled, stepped closer, held her arm out the window. “That, and to protect you.”

“How will you do that?”

“Because your father knows that you are not a witch,” the young woman said, and in the next seconds a large black raptor descended from the sky, landing on her bare arm without its sharp claws leaving so much as a scratch. Its ethereal, golden eyes bore into the Queen, and it uttered a low, unearthly whine. “But he knows I am.”

- CH

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

For Real

There was a porch that sagged a bit in the center along the front of a modest old farmhouse down a quarter mile dirt lane that came through a cospe of oaks off a gravel road that stretched three miles back to a county blacktop, four miles from where it intersected from the two-lane state highway. And a narrow sidewalk made of twelve-inch concrete pavers had sunk deeper halfway along their path around to a screened-in back porch from which he emerged in the early morning carrying a metal thermos of coffee and a small basket with two apple cinnamon muffins fresh from the oven. Across the back yard and its slight depression back up to the timber where his worn path led another 30 yards up a slight rise and then down the other side to his little wooden Adirondack chairs arranged around a firebox. That he’d situated more than one chair in a place only he knew about, back in the woods behind a house where only he came, miles from a little town forgotten by the world, had not been an inconsistent decision. He would sit there in the morning, having escaped his agents and his commitments and come to an isolation where he could work and dream. And someday, so would she.

The coffee was heavy with cream and sugar and chocolate and his friends teased him it was less coffee than desert but it made him happy. He kept old newspaper with kindling along with heavier chunks of fallen tree limbs in a box close by and they ignited easily and soon his fire danced happy, though a chunk in the middle seemed too green and merely smoked stubbornly. He broke off a piece of sugary muffin; it melted in his mouth. Both muffins had fallen in the center, but he’d gotten good at mixing the ingredients and adding extra apple chunks, baking them up first thing out of bed in his robe and slippers, just like he’d gotten good at producing art, commercial and fine, for so many buyers. Just like he’d gotten good at the politic which cultivated the galleries and the magazines and the patrons that propagated his income. Just as he could open an imaginative vein from somewhere within himself and know, just know, how to create a work of art, the colors and textures or lack thereof, the unique perspective it needed, the vision that would pull each viewer away from their static and preconceived realities. And could do it again and again and again and always do it while working around the numb spot at the center of himself where he just couldn’t go.

She had gone so long ago, so far back in time, back at his beginning. He could only do what he could do because she had made him see where to find it. And then she was gone. And he had fallen, then climbed out, and climbed the ladder. And now he came back here and walked the path from the farmhouse to the little depression in the trees under the cool protection of constant shade engulfed by birdsong with his coffee and his muffin and the little fire he’d built dancing and sometimes, sometimes, he’d see her there, sitting in the other chair that no one else could ever sit in, sitting there as material as the fire, sitting there looking at him, smiling at him, stroking, not necessarily gently, that numb spot he was afraid to go to alone. And he wondered how he would actually feel if she came for real.

- CH

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Gotta Go

The hike in through the wilderness took most of two days.

Had they gotten him any closer they risked other Sovereigns alerting the Subject to his presence. They identified a convenience store in a blip of a town right at the edge of the wilderness area he needed to traverse as the closest they were likely to get. They rolled up at 6a in a Chevy Suburban with six guys, one with his head down and not visible, all identically dressed and fully geared up. They all got out and began milling around the convenience store, looking like they were just sightseeing and gabbing. It was a short thirty meters behind the store to the thick trees, no clear sight lines to homes or businesses, and the sun was still low. Once he got into the trees, the other five jovially got back into the Suburban and drove off.

He was alone, and so being, harder to spot. He had grown up not far away and was an avid outdoorsman, had spent an obscene amount of time hiking these same woods, and had served two tours overseas before joining law enforcement. He was dressed head to toe in wool and fleece and wore tactical boots – everything designed for quiet movement. He carried one liter of water and water purification tabs, and MRE’s that did not require cooking. He would start no fires, maintain radio silence, and not say a word, even a whisper as he moved. Complete, total stealth.

His first problem would be the small, shallow rivers. They would be easy to cross, but they also tended to attract fishermen and floaters. He got to the first at mid-day; in the bright light he would be clearly visible to anyone who saw him. He moved through the trees as close to the bank as he dare, knelt, and waited. And listened. He had chosen a particular narrow bend in the river. The advantage was that sight lines were limited. The disadvantage was that something might come around that bend while he was exposed. But floaters tended to be loud, often drunk, and would only come from one direction. Fishermen made noises as they cast their lines, but, by now, middle of the day, fish would have stopped biting and the fishermen would have gone home. Probably would have gone home. After several minutes with no hint of human presence he moved quickly across, water only as high as his knees, splashing as little as possible, into the trees on the opposite bank.

Now he shifted direction. He was aiming for a similar bend of the second river. He arrived just before sunset. This location had a couple other problems. The opposite bank sandwiched a wide rocky bank between the river and a high bluff. Climbing that bluff would be problematic, but to get around it he would have to move a quarter mile along the river, completely visible. It was unpopulated national forest land, but there might be someone there they didn’t know about. Again, the strategy was to listen, and wait. It wasn’t dark enough yet anyway, so he had an MRE, replenished and purified his water, and took a short nap. He woke easily under a crescent moon far off on the horizon. No human sounds. He crossed the cool, shallow water uneventfully and turned left, moving quiet as an animal along the bank, watching the opposite side carefully. Then he was back in the trees. He found a congenial spot against an enormous oak tree, leaned back against it and closed his eyes.

He awoke at sunrise. From his position he could move towards a rise just behind the Subject’s compound. He’d needed to sleep, but he’d also wanted to make this approach in daylight so he could stealthily see where he was stepping. He knew if he startled any animals in the night the commotion, even from miles away, could alert the Subject to his approach. He had another MRE for breakfast, then began carefully picked his way through the trees. Two more hours, he came to the rise he was looking for, and a half hour later he was on his belly, looking down at the compound 50 meters off.

He carried an M-15 11.5” tactical rifle and an M9 Beretta. He didn’t intend to use either. He also carried a Spyderco Yojimbo 2 tactical knife if the situation became especially gruesome, but he didn’t intend for that to happen either. His greatest weapon, he felt, was something the Subject had himself.

From his perch he reconned the compound for the next three hours. He confirmed that the Subject was alone, except for the girl – a fifteen-year-old he claimed was his wife. He confirmed the Subject had a bird’s eye view of the ground approaching the compound, but this little rise fell into a slice behind a corner of the cabin the Subject had to go out of his way to see. And confirmed his point of assault was still there, less than 20 meters away. He watched the Subject’s movements, timed them, and at the appropriate moment, slid quietly off the rise, crawled over the ground, made sure he kept his objective between himself and the cabin.

Then he slipped inside the outhouse.

Sure enough, almost to the expected second, the Subject and his defective bladder schlepped through the back yard and entered the outhouse, at which point the officer placed the nozzle of his M9 Beretta on his forehead. “Don’t”, he said. The Subject froze, his hands at his crouch in the process of unzipping, and the officer kicked his legs out from under him. It took less than two seconds to holster the Beretta, whip out a zipcuff, restrain his hands behind his back, then three more seconds and another zipcuff to get the feet as he lay on the floor of the outhouse.

“Hi, there, Dwaine, how’s the wife?”

“Fuck me!” Dwaine, the Subject, said.
 
“Oh, by the way, United States Marshall, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent.”

“You can’t do this! She’s my wife!”

“She’s fifteen.”

“I have her mother’s permission!”

“Not according to her mother. You suppose we should ask her father?”

“You won’t find him!”

“Yeah, well, we thought we’d have a look around while we’re here and see if he, or a piece of him, might maybe turn up, whadya say?”

“Eat shit!”

“Uh-huh.”

“Eat shit and die!”

“You go ahead.”

“Get me up – I gotta go!”

“You’re in the outhouse; just go right there.”

“On the floor? With my pants on? I don’t want to lay in my own pee!”

“Times are tough,” the officer said and stepped out, withdrawing the radio from his vest and switching it on. He could see the girl standing in the window, mouth agape, looking like she’d already been through a war. He could only imagine. “He’s in restraint,” he told them when they answered. “C’mon in.”

“That’s affirmative, on our way,” they answered back.

“God damn, I’m gonna pee!” Dwaine moaned.

- CH

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

Cockpit

“Where’d you leave it?” the pilot asked the co-pilot. “Your letter home – where’d you leave it?”

“On my bunk. Two letters; one to my folks and one to my wife. Where’d you leave yours?”

The pilot said, “In my footlocker. Just the one. To a friend.” That they had composed ‘goodbye’ letters home prior to the mission was unusual, but most of the men in the air that night had done it. This time, they knew they were going to die.

He thought about home now – he’d been avoiding it, but, hell, there was nothing else to do besides stare out at the darkness. His daddy back in the Ozarks had been against his enlisting to fight what he considered someone else’s war. He’d tried to explain that if he didn’t enlist he’d be drafted, and his daddy said he could go hide in the woods. Rattled off names of guys who left for the last war and came back ‘odd’ or dead or opted just to not come home. Couldn’t abide it, his daddy told him. But he went anyway. Went because he’d wanted to fly and had heard of this thing called the ‘air corps’. Went through all the training and all the trials. Got to fly and he was good at it. Even met his wife in the process, a woman his daddy hadn’t met, and he was certain wouldn’t abide. And now he was going to be killed. Shot down over Tokyo and go crashing into the hard rocks on the ground and broken into thousands of pieces. He knew it. They all knew it. He glanced over at his pilot. He was more of a hard city-type; Chicago, he’d told him. He often asked the co-pilot, almost wistfully, about his family, as though their existence were a pleasant fantasy. The pilot stared straight ahead, straight into the darkness of the future. The co-pilot checked his watch; six hours they’d been in the turbulent air. In a little less than one more, he thought, he would be dead.

The men of the XXI Bomber Command flew formations of the B-29 Superfortress out of the northern Marianna Islands towards the Empire of Japan. They were trained in high-altitude daylight precision bombing, the goal of which was to knock out the industrial infrastructure supporting the enemy’s ability to wage war while minimizing civilian casualties. They took immense pride in their ability to accomplish their missions effectively, even surgically. They were knights, and they would return chivalry to war.

Unfortunately, they usually missed.

Because they usually missed, they got a new general. And he came in with insane notions.

They flew during the daylight so they could see the target. Cloud cover meant they could almost never see the target.

They flew at 20,000 feet or higher, so they’d be above anti-aircraft fire. High altitude anti-aircraft guns found them anyway.

From at least 20,000 feet the bombs almost never dropped on a straight trajectory towards their targets. Winds had affected them over Europe, and now it turned out Japan had this thing they’d never heard of called ‘The Jet Stream’, so not only were their bombs missing, they were missing wildly.

Their top-secret bomb sights that worked so brilliantly in perfect conditions, that bombardiers had sworn to protect with their lives, that they claimed could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel, were terribly flawed in combat conditions in which nothing was ever perfect. Every effort to be precise, failed.

So, this general concluded, stop trying to precise, stop flying during the day when the enemy can see you, stop flying so high.

Stop trying to be chivalrous and just kill the bastards. Carpet bombing. And in cities, where carpet bombing would yield the most destruction and kill the most human beings. It went against everything they had learned, everything they believed. It made them killers, as though they had never left the ground.

The orders came for 346 B-29’s to take off beginning at 5:35 p.m. on March 9. A Friday. Right at happy hour. It would take fifteen minutes short of three hours for them all to get into the air, or just about the time happy hour gives way to full priced drinks. They would not fly in formation because, at night, they couldn’t see each other to stay in formation anyway. They would also not expend the gasoline needed to stay information, so they could load up on more bombs. Since they didn’t expect enemy fighters, they removed all the big defensive machine guns, except the one in the tail. Less weight meant they could carry even more bombs, and that was important, because they had something new. Something special.

The Americans had invented Napalm. They would burn Tokyo to cinders.

“Ok”, the pilot said when the navigator announced they were ten minutes out. “We’re dropping to 5,000 feet.”

The co-pilot sucked in a breath in spite of himself. Five-thousand measly feet! The general’s own planners feared casualty rates as high as 70 percent. The co-pilot ran the calculation in his head – that was 242 planes!

The city began to emerge ahead – a burning ‘X’. Pathfinders ahead of them had made their runs at right angles, creating a burning ‘X’ inside a four-by-three-mile square populated by 1.1 million working class people and artisans living on straw mats in wooden homes under paper roofs; one of the most densely populated and combustible places on the planet. The rest of the crews were told to aim their bombs for that ‘X’. By the time the co-pilot beheld the scene much of the ‘X’ had filled in with flame; a firestorm with its own weather pattern.

“Christ almighty,” the pilot muttered at the sight, and turned control over to the bombardier. What anti-aircraft fire there was came in either too low to hit the B-29’s or too high, and many anti-aircraft stations had already been engulfed by the flames. There were no night fighters. There was no opposition. It was just them, a million artists below, and roughly one-thousand-eight-hundred tons of napalm.

“He was right,” the co-pilot shuttered in amazement, “That crazy-ass general was right!”

“What the hell is that smell?” the bombardier cracked through the intercom.

The two men in the cockpit started sniffing; the smell, whatever it was, was permeating upward. “What the world is that stink,” the co-pilot muttered. “Crap, it’s getting worse.”

“Bombs away,” the bombardier came back. “Geez, that’s awful! Smells like some kind of burning, rancid ham.”

“Put your masks on!” the pilot shouted. “I know what that is! Put your damn oxygen masks on right now so you won’t smell it!”

They all did as they were told. The co-pilot finally broke the silence. “Are you going to tell us?”

The pilot hesitated. “People,” he said. “Burning hair and skin and human meat.”

The co-pilot wished he hadn’t asked. He hoped he wouldn’t get sick in his mask.

“Navigator, give us a course home,” the pilot said, then began moving the huge beast of an airplane in that direction when he had one.

“Well,” the bombardier cackled again, “At least we’re not dying today, after all.”

The co-pilot caught the pilot’s disturbed expression. He thought of their hours of discussion of art and literature and music and philosophy over the hours and hours they’d spent in the cockpit together. And he wondered if, in fact, on this long night, a little of them had not, indeed, died.

- CH

* * *

NOTE: I’ve blown my thousand-word limit by a couple-three hundred, but I didn’t want to minimize the story. Daylight precision bombing was cooked up by a bunch of guys on an airfield out of mind of their superiors in the 1930’s. It wasn’t that it was wrong; it was that the technology to make it work did not exist yet. The firebombing of Tokyo killed over 100,000 people outright and left another million homeless and is regarded as the single most destructive air attack in human history. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed about 75,000 (although tens of thousands more would perish later from the effects of radiation) and destroyed about one-quarter the territory. But there was only one more atomic bomb. After the Tokyo firebombing in March, dozens of fire bombings were conducted on Japanese cities over the next four months, napalm being considerably cheaper than plutonium. Over a million Japanese were killed by these many attacks. Firebombing was justified as a means of shortening the war by making it so horrific it could not be continued. Kill more people now so that even more don’t die later. Today, the morals of this thinking are very appropriately questioned, but the stark reality it that it worked. The crazy-ass general who came up with it thought the atomic attacks were superfluous – he thought his bombers had already done the job. Today in Japan, only a couple small memorials exist to the victims of the attacks. There is some speculation that a few influential Japanese would prefer greater attention be paid to the atomic attacks because it paints Japan as the victim, rather than draw attention to the horror of carpet-bombing cities because, as it turns out, a decade earlier in China they had invented it themselves.

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …
 
* * *
 
Walking The Black Dog
or
A Shih Tzu Dies

It was the day he changed the world. He said, “I’m going to walk the Black Dog,” to his cantankerous wife of fourteen years who just sort of nodded at him and muttered ‘that’s nice’ or some such thing and clearly didn’t care. Her soaps were on. She’d already scolded him twice for trying to make conversation when she was trying to watch. And they didn’t have a black dog; they had a spoiled Shih Tzu that lived on his wife’s boney lap, and he thought it was a yapping, nipping little monster. ‘Black Dog’, they both knew, was his euphemism, borrowed from Churchill, for depression. And he had to get out of there.

He was not a happy person. He was disappointed in himself. He was not the intellect he wanted to be. He was not professionally successful. He didn’t feel he was necessarily more than mediocre at anything. He wouldn’t have cared about that had his marriage the emotional intimacy to balance it, but his wife appeared to want to live in her own world, separated from her own disenchantments by a protective bubble. It seemed to him she only deigned to accept his touch when she was either too desperate for it herself to care or too apathetic to push it away. They had no children, no shared interests anymore, he had no career, no hobbies, no intimacies, no enthusiasms, no faith, no joy.

His life, as far as he knew, had no purpose. He was wrong.

The Black Dog pulled him downtown. He strolled the sidewalks past the shops and the restaurants and between the bustling gatherings of happy people with his head down and his hands in his pockets and a dark cloud over his head and the Black Dog wobbled him this way and then that way and then bumped him into a guy. That’s all he did; slightly bump against a guy. Not violently in anyway, just a bump that altered the guy’s course ever so slightly.

Everything he had ever done or had ever happened to him, all his discontent and disillusions, led to that moment.

The guy looked back over his shoulder at him but thought nothing more of it. It was inconsequential, so far as he knew. But in the process of swinging his head back in a forward direction, the guy’s eyes were cast along a passage between buildings where artists were sitting cross-legged sketching and talking and something about it made him think of something. It made him think of THE THING. And THE THING stayed on his mind. And a week later he mentioned THE THING to a friend, a writer in his spare time. Two years later the writer remembered THE THING and included it in a story. Four years after that the story was published in a collection of his smaller works. Two decades later a graduate assistant assigned the story to her writing class. THE THING in the story jumped out to one of the students who internalized it, and then, throughout a very dynamic life, made THE THING real.

It changed everything. The world became a different, better place.

The Black Dog pulled him into a clear path along the sidewalk and seemed to look back at him and smile. As his subsequent life changed, he would interpret it as simply having gotten so low he could no longer be hurt or disappointed by anything. His expectations of each moment had evaporated. His wife softened, having determined the solution to her own unhappiness lie in a better relationship with her husband. They rediscovered intimacy. His job became less onerous. He realized he enjoyed working a small garden and loved puttering around the house.

The Shih Tzu died.

Although perhaps never overjoyed with the course of his life, he became warmly content. The Black Dog for the most part remained on its blanket in the corner, watching him with kind, chocolate eyes, and he found its presence there oddly comforting. His life floated along.

He never had the most remote idea what he had accomplished.

- CH

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

The Tousled Dress

He was certain he would kill them this time. Or maybe he wasn’t sure; they should be dead already. He was confused. Mostly, the thing he felt was confusion. He looked down on them from the fourth-floor attic window of the big mansion, about a dozen of them, with A Guy at the front who seemed to be doing all the talking, gesturing and pointing to the mansion behind him, the group listening intently and looking all about. Some of them looked to his window. He flipped them off. He doubted they could see him, they never seemed to. There was that one time, though, a man’s mouth fell open and he pointed and everybody looked and a bunch of people seemed to gasp and even The Guy doing all the talking went wide eyed, then the sun came from behind a cloud and they all relaxed. Must have been the lighting.

He turned to his room with its sloping ceilings. Nothing was as it should be. So much was different, kept becoming different, things added and taken away and only vaguely the way he and Maribeth had found it. He tried not to think about it because he knew the group below was now moving into the mansion and would soon be climbing the stairs and he intended to be ready for them this time. They would climb the big staircase and stop on the second-floor landing and listen to The Guy. Then they would climb to the third-floor landing and stop and listen again to The Guy. Then they would move down the hall to a smaller staircase behind a door that took a key to open, and they would have to come up single file to the narrow hallway outside his room. Down in the mansion’s library, the Professor hated gatherings and hated entertaining and hated people in general so this must be driving him crazy. In his mind, he could hear the old man cursing and ranting somewhere below as the group made its way through his beloved home, interrupting his precious solitude, disrupting his quite contemplation, coming near his cherished daughter.

Just like that, Maribeth was back in his head. She came out to the back porch that day as he worked the adjacent flower bed under a golden morning sun. “Aren’t you working hard,” she said, that coy, sly smile on her face that she had used on him before.

“Ma’am,” he said tensely, tried not to stare at her in that flimsy white dress that the breeze tousled, and failed.

“So formal,” she teased.

He lowered his voice, said, “Miss Maribeth I have to get these flower beds in shape; your father will be watching”.

“My father is engrossed in his research, in his library, on the other side of the house. He wouldn’t hear a bomb go off.”

He put his garden trowel down; closed his eyes so he couldn’t see her giving him ‘the look’. “Miss Maribeth, please,” he said just above a whisper, aroused despite himself. He remembered The Professor warning him when he was hired, ‘don’t you dare go near my daughter – she’s all I have left and if you go near her, even look at her, there’ll be hell to pay’. He knew she was only using him as her steely dan; he would never be more to her than a hired man servicing her libido as though it were a plant what roots needed stimulating. “Please,” he whispered again, “I just can’t”.

“Yes, you can,” she smiled, held her hand out to him. “C’mon. I need help in the attic.”

And again, just like that, he went from his knees in the flower bed to his knees in the attic, her hands on the back of his head, an inescapable force pulling him in, when The Professor burst in holding something, a tool, a weapon, over his head and screaming, “You bastard!”

“Daddy, no!” Maribeth screamed, but the weapon, maybe a hatchet, maybe a cleaver, was already rapidly on the way down, her hands now inadvertently holding his head in the perfect position.

He squeezed his eyes closed, grimaced tried to push it all from his mind. Then they were there in the hallway, the door to the attic removed and the doorway widened, a heavy, velvet covered red rope stretched across the opening. He clenched his fists and screaming madly rushed The Guy at the front of the group.

And went right through him.

He pushed into the group itself, his fists swinging wildly. Nothing struck home. Nothing connected. He tried to slam the other narrow doors off the hallway; pulled at them, pounded them, howled in rage. Felt utterly ignored and helpless.

“Ooooooo, I just felt something cold!” a girl in the group said.

“I feel a presence every time I come up here”, The Guy said.

“A stale brush of air,” an older guy said with a titillated smile.

“Listen to the way the house moans here!”

“Hey, did that doorknob just rattle?”

And just like that, once more, they were gone, and he was back in his attic room. People mulled about the lawn below, talking, laughing, enjoying their lives as he glowered from his window. Desperate and anguished and overwhelmed with confusion by the strange sign in the front yard, ‘Dr. Davis Glenmore Mansion; Ghost Tours Daily’.

- CH

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

By Sunset

Chronology haunted him.

Each day he woke up alone, save for his dog. His first checklist was how soon he opened the second checklist. The second checklist was saying good morning to his smart speaker – when he did, it announced the time. The third checklist was all about the routine of taking out and feeding his dog. Were he half through that process before he thought to say good morning to his smart speaker he would recognize that he had failed steps one and two. If indeed he had appropriately said good morning to his smart speaker, he then must remember to ask it the correct time again when he finished with the dog. The time lapse day to day was important. During the dog routine, he would check the order in which he did things like opening the food container, picking up the food dish, filling the water bowl, walking the right direction around the yard, etc.; had he done them in the right order? Had he forgotten to track the order? Then, breakfast. He might choose to prepare any number of things, each of which had its own checklist, but coffee and meds should come first. Any step taken before the coffee failed the checklist. Did he prepare his breakfast in the right order? Did something get done before it should have? Did he forget an ingredient? Did he forget one of his meds? Did he constantly drop utensils during the preparation process, and if he did, did that make him angry, and if it made him angry did he curse? Did he prepare something then realize he’d actually intended to cook something else?

Did he ask his smart speaker for the time? How much time had lapsed?

Somehow, his tablet’s news feed required no checklist. He assumed that was because he had laid out each app in the correct order on the home screen and didn’t have to remember. That is, with the exception of the obituaries in the digital edition of the local paper. Did he remember to look at the obituaries?

On this occasion, he did. Among the names and pictures were two he recognized, guys he’d worked with decades before. The first was two years older than he and died four days ago, and the second was two years younger and died two days ago. The newspaper published the full obituary for the first, and a partial with a promise the full obituary for the second would follow in two days. He didn’t have any real feelings for either of them and hadn’t known them well or worked closely with them. They were both around his age. And they were dead. Both were dead “at home following a brief illness”.

This was not chronological. They had failed their checklists.

In the old days, he believed, a couple centuries ago and more, it was common to wake up healthy in the bright morning and contract something hideous and be dead before the sun set. Modern days, that just didn’t happen, save for accidents, which were different. Modern days, people knew months, sometimes even years before the thing that would kill them actually did, and they knew exactly what it would be. They’d pop, just as he did, a score of medicines and supplements each day to successfully keep their chronography moving, never any telling when it would end, but when it did there would be nothing ‘brief’ about it. Why did chronologies fail to follow their checklists? Why did the elapsed time he tracked vary so widely from day to day, checklist to checklist? Why had it become so hard to do things in the correct order? What was happening when his elapsed times stretched too long?

He asked his smart speaker for the time. He noted how much of it had elapsed in the time he had been thinking. It was more than he thought it should be. It was often more than he thought it should be. If time itself were not the problem, he concluded, then it must be his perception of it. His vision had long been subject to myopia. His hearing wasn’t what it once was. The passage of time, he thought, must be a sensory perception, and his must be waning. He was losing track of his checklists. He might be dead by sunset.

He asked his smart speaker, “How much time have I got,” and he waited for an answer …

- CH

The cars are coming. So shoot me.

I love automotive art, but I’ve tended to shy away from it because it feels like no one else does. The florals always seem to get a positive response whether I succeed or not; another reason I’ve concluded that florals are cheating. The architectural work and cityscapes, the abstracts, the still lives, the noirs – all of them have their adherents. But the automotive art, even the works I’ve been particularly fond of, seem to just sit there. That said, and as I think these blogs have established, I’ve fairly stopped caring what anybody thinks. Not for nothing are we DamnPhotoArtist.

* * *

BTW: The photo art and prose included in any given post are separate creations having nothing to do with each other. Duality and such …

* * *

The Subject Of Discussion

She knew what he was going to say before the thought traveled the entire distance from his brain to his mouth. She knew it was coming, really, even before she finished the sentence that precipitated it, which she was already kicking herself for saying. “What the hell do you mean, ‘phantom limb’?,” he demanded, “What the hell is that?!”

‘Crap’, she thought, looked with tired eyes through the side window at the golden landscape quickly sliding by in the late afternoon, late summer sun. “It doesn’t really mean anything,” she tried to say, knowing full well that wasn’t going to cut it.

“The hell it doesn’t!” he barked, not taking his eyes off the windshield in front of him. “What did you mean?!”

She squeezed her eyes closed as she looked out the window, worked hard not to shake her head. God, she was so tired after three straight nights that were less college reunion than an exhumation of dead emotions, right in the middle of which the subject of their discussion had walked in, big fraking smile on his face.

“I don’t have any feelings for him anymore, OK?”

“Then why didn’t you just say that? Why mess with this ‘phantom limb’ garbage.”

She was so angry with herself for opening her mouth; so annoyed with her husband for lacking the emotional sophistication to analyze the analogy. “Look, I can’t change the fact that we dated once,” she said.

“Dated, hell, you did a lot more than that!”

That’s four ‘hells’ in five sentences she thought, which returned her again to her husband’s simpleness; his inability to deal with complex situations. It crossed her mind how attractive that had once been.

“Do you still have feelings for him, or not?” her husband demanded.

“I dumped him for you, didn’t I? How can you even ask me that?”

“I can ask that because you never really let go of him, even after you moved in with me, and he always seemed to be around.”

“Well, we have a lot of the same friends.”

“Why couldn’t you have told him to ‘piss off’?”

“He never bothered me, after a certain point, he just left me to you. He couldn’t just vanish into thin air; we all ran in the same circles.”

“Tell me what you meant when you said, ‘he’s like a phantom limb to me now’!”

She sighed; watched the landscape receding in their wake not nearly fast enough to get her out of this conversation. “You know. When a person has a limb amputated, there are still synopses for it in their brain. They still have a memory of it after it’s gone.” But even that undersold it. She’d been so licentious of her husband’s physicality when he entered her orbit that she’d dropped everything, started sleeping with him even while still involved. He was like candy to her – strong and tough, straight talking, hard and primal sex again and again and again like nothing else mattered. Nearly ten years into it now and his world was still straight forward and primal, black and white, lacking subtlety or elegance of any kind.

He asked, sounding small, “He was like cutting a limb off? You’re not whole without him?”

Oh, good god damn, she thought, but she reached across and touched him, softened her voice, “I left him for you. I love you, and always will. I barely remember him at all. If he hadn’t shown up this weekend I never would have thought about him.” And that seemed to settle her husband, who was just as tired as she was, down a bit.

But even as she said it she pictured her old lover across the wide reception room, nursing an 18-year-old scotch, neat. Successfully happy and conversing easily with the rest of her old friends, his wife, elegant and modern, next to him. She knew they were discussing the latest independent films and books and discoveries and ideas. They traveled for museums and culture. They were writers and artists and scientists and explorers, and they would spend days subtly, delicately, incrementally progressing into ecstasy. All of that was closed to her. She had walked away from it in a messy, emotional break that had lingered before melting. Now, she would spend another couple hours riding in near silence because they had nothing much to talk about, have a couple beers at home in front of TV sports, then spend, at best, ten minutes slamming out an orgasm that may or may not facilitate sleep. She looked in the side mirror at the road behind and a far horizon where the sun hovered, brilliant and hot, as they drove into night.

- CH