* * *

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

 One of those ‘milk cows’ alluded to in my last post comes around every Spring in my backyard – bringing the garden back to life.

My garden came into being around 15 years ago in a squared off space in the yard that had contained my son’s swing set, which he’d grown out of. Over the years I’ve regularly tweaked various elements of it as need or esthetics called for it; changing the pavers, the pots, the plants, the trellises, bird feeders, the furniture, etc. Its constant evolution created marvelous opportunities for art, from straight noir photography to abstract. In a way, it’s a work of art in and of itself that continually draws my attention. Since this year’s maintenance was particularly heavy and time consuming, thus cutting into my time for creating new photo art and prose, it seemed apropos to feature some of the work that the garden has inspired over the years. Here are 25 works, in no particular order, that reveal the garden and the world around it in its glory.

Some of them are quite obscure – it’s amazing what hides deep in my portfolio.

- CH

Given my recent emphasis on portraits, and given my current lull (see below), it seemed appropriate to offer a synopsis of my work in this medium. These 20 works run from film to early digital to recent noir and abstract. They chronicle where I’ve been and where I’m at.

* * *

No new prose for this blog, and as far as that goes, no new photo art, either. No new nothin’. This is not so much a sabbatical as an interruption by life, which, sometimes, demands its priority.

Funny thing about the creative process; it wants to think of itself as a milk cow constantly in need of milking. As it happens, life is filled with milk cows. And they’re all jealous of each other. And they cry in the night begging for release.

OK … that’s a little over dramatic. But you get the idea, yes?

​- 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 …

* * *

Late Summer Eggs

“Yeah,” the manager told him, “We’re not doing that anymore.”

The farmer looked at him like the sky had fallen. “Since when?”

“Since now. Also, you’ll note our pricings have changed,” the manager pointed to the big board.

The farmer gripped his clipboard with his perfectly filled out forms on it, pen at the top if he needed to add or change anything. In his truck outside were 24 dozen eggs carefully collected that morning by his family from their 350 layers. The big board listed the price per egg at one-third less than they had been three days ago. The manager of the co-op watched him, half on edge as if expecting another argument and half weary from already having had too many.

The farmer said, “These eggs are from free-range, hormone and antibiotic free layers fed verified and expensive non-GMO grains, and the eggs themselves go into containers with my family’s picture on it that enables the stores that sell them in their organic sections and correctly identify where the eggs came from and who humanely raised and cared for the chickens as an American farming family.”

“Yes, well, you know the co-op has been sold and the new corporate guys don’t do things that way. Everybody’s eggs go into the same inventory and generic containers and they’re able to sell more of them for much less,” the manager said, practiced.

“Everybody,” the farmer was nearly shouting, “includes the big corporate farms that can afford to sell for much less!”

The manager said patiently, clearly tired of being patient, “Consumers just didn’t go for the higher-priced, family-farm eggs; they’d rather buy a cheap egg marked ‘organic’ even if in the back of their minds they know the ‘organic’ part is bullshit. After all, the co-op was sold because it was losing money.”

The farmer stared at him. The manager asked, “Still want to sell your eggs?”

“What choice do I have?” The farmer would have to arrange a new delivery schedule with a different co-op, if he could find one, likely much farther away, and he hadn’t done that. The hand holding the clipboard fell to his side. “So you don’t need my forms?”

“There’s another form, now, that my people fill out just to get an accurate count and we give you a copy,” the manager said. “With a check, of course.”

Uh-huh, the farmer thought, a check for a lot less.

He watched the workers carefully unload and verify the number of eggs, impassive faces that were aware and sympathetic of the trauma farmers like he faced, but who had seen much worse. Had been driven to cross deserts and endure prejudice and work at the lowest end of the food chain because things where they started were even worse. He preferred not to think about that.

As he drove home he crunched the numbers. One-third less per egg meant his family needed one-third more layers to make up the difference, but more layers meant more overhead, so realistically they would have to double their chickens. To accommodate that they would also need larger facilities, which meant their debt structure would also increase if they could get the bank to go along with it, which meant they would need even more chickens. By then, the operation’s size would surpass his family’s ability to run it, so they would need to hire people. And so on.

He drove home through a canyon of corn fields, so tall and majestic in the late summer sun the road seemed to have cowered. He recalled the offers they’d received to sell out to the corporate interests; sell the land and everything. Be allowed to live there but to no longer be a family farm, just a family of agricultural workers conducting industrialized food production. He thought of the politicians seductively calling for a return to an earlier America even as they facilitated exactly what was happening, and his neighbors would vote for them, and it would happen even faster. He thought, as he drove home and as the corn canyon walls seemed to squeeze the road into an even narrower straight line, straight and flat through a landscape both familiar and alien, that he’d been on this course all his life, squeezed between forces out of his control, no room to turn around even if he could, only the occasional unattractive crossroad. No choice but to keep moving, stay the course, and find himself once more with his family, on land his ancestors had farmed for a century and a half. They would kick the dirt and maybe even curse, but they would come up with a plan to keep their world together. But, the despondent mood he was in, he knew it wouldn’t work. Whatever band-aid they came up with now, the glacier would keep melting, a little bit more every year. And he believed in his heart the life his grandfather knew, the life his father sort of knew and raised him to embrace, would, eventually, during his lifetime or his sons’, vanish.

He also knew the road itself would not stop; something would come next. They would keep moving. But he was so in love with what they had already passed.
 
- 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 …

* * *

Crossroads

The older man touched the younger one on the shoulder and shook him just slightly, just enough to bring him out of a shallow dream, just enough that his eyes jerked open. He said to him, “You wants to learn the guitar or not?”

The younger one nodded a couple times, wide-eyed.

“C’mon, then,” the older man told him, “It’s almost Midnight.”

They crept lightly from the shack, guitars strapped to their backs, past five sharecroppers in two rooms, sacked out, breathing deeply, or snoring softly, except one. Young Loretha, the one the younger man was wooing against her mama’s wishes, awake in the corner, watched them leave, the whites of her eyes seeming to glow in the dark, the younger man looking back at her, feeling guilty, but not stopping. There would be no stopping. Could be no stopping. By then, his determination had joined his consciousness awake. He would not be denied what he wanted, even by a woman.

They walked the dirt path between the half dozen other shacks, only a crescent moon and the stars to light their way. Past the shacks a few yards it crossed with another dirt path; straight ahead went to the fields, right went to the plantation houses. They went left, into the woods.

Left, fifty yards or so, to the cemetery.

The older man paused at the big oak tree that marked the entry into the little plot, listening intently. Not a sound. Even the insects were reverent. “Right Midnight,” he said. “Perfect”. Old and new tombstones sprinkled over the plot in only vaguely organized rows, some catching bits of starlight in their flakes and ridges, some so dim they looked like holes in the ground. The older man smiled back at the younger one, his white teeth bright against the dark. “Now the haints be comin’ out.” He moved between the stones and chose a couple way to the back, low for sitting, where they could face each other. They unslung their guitars, cradled them, strumming, and tuning with delicate caresses. The older man said, “This ain’t no devil stuff we’re doin’.”

The younger man said, “I know.”

“Listen to how quiet it is.”

The younger man nodded, large, trusting eyes.

“We tries to practice anywheres else, people come bothering us, sayin’ ‘play us this, play us that’. Ain’t no one gwon bother with us here.”

The younger man said, “I cain’t hardly see what I’m doin’.”

“Ain’t s’pose to see, that’s part of what I be teaching you. Got to feel that guitar like it’s part of y’all. Got to hear what your fingers touch.”

The younger man nodded. This was why he liked the older man and why, as he had drifted like dandelion into him, he clung to him now like burr against his pants cuffs. The older man was the best guitar player he had ever heard, shockingly better than he was and he had thought he was good. He would suck up everything he could learn from him like a kitten lapping milk. Everything the older man told him was like a language he knew but couldn’t quite access himself. A key to a universe within.

“Now play me something,” the older man said, and the younger one began strumming the Blind Lemon Jefferson song Loretha liked; he only needed to hear a tune once and he could recreate it on guitar. The older man taught him to apply a damping effect on the bass strings to create a rhythm. He showed him how a piano turnaround at the end of a normal twelve bars of music sounded more polished than simply returning to the starting chord of the standard twelve bars. He taught him to tune his guitar one fret lower when using open tuning, and to tune the second fret to match his singing voice. He taught him a high-note triplet riff to increase the drama in boogie patterns. A special trick: he showed him how to tune his low strings lower and his high strings higher, creating chords no one else had heard before. He showed him how to play bass, melody, and chords all at the same time making it sound as though two musicians and two guitars were playing. Tuning strategies and fingering techniques that enabled him to play the guitar like playing a piano, a skill so many guitarists had tried and failed to master. The guitar began to feel like a new creature completely in his power, and himself like a new man imbued with infinite control. Hours past, and as they grew weary the older man, looking approvingly, said, “Now all you be needing is more of this cemetery practice. That, and a little more confidence.”

They left the plot before the sun could rise, in the darkest part of the night, the haints whispering with the wind in the trees. “You head back near Memphis to that juke you play at, to those old musicians called you ‘kid’, think what they say now,” The older man said.

“I suspect they will say,” the younger man smiled, “They will say I met the Devil at the Crossroads.”

They moved along the dirt path a minute in silence, barely able to see through the darkness. The older man asked, “But you didn’t see no Devil, did you?”

The young man said, “Nope.”

“But you did pass a crossroads of sorts tonight, and they’s be too afraid to go near it,” the older man chuckled. “You just let ‘em think it.”

- 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 …

* * *

Custodial Arts

“Morning, lover,” she said right in his face as he cracked, with great difficulty and an aching head, eyelids open. It took him a few seconds, but only a few, to remember her huge brown eyes. Kissing in the parking lot outside the bar. Then … what had happened? She pulled away now, smirking. She was still wearing the light lemon chiffon top he remembered. She stood, said, “I’m going to go slip into something more appropriate.” And when he tried to answer her he realized he couldn’t.

He took a deep breath trying to wake up.. His mouth felt as dry as sandpaper. He coughed a little; moaned a little. Opened his mouth and then understood – he was gagged. He tried to reach to his face and discovered his arms were tied stretched out along the chair to which he was tightly bound. He tried to call out, terror rising, breaths coming faster. Where the hell was he? Looked and smelled like a dim, musty basement. Minutes passed before he heard sounds, a creaky wheel, and she came around the dark corner looking quite different, hair tightly pulled back, face colorless, pushing a janitor’s cart and wearing work clothes. “Hi, lover,” she smiled.

He tried to scream through his gag, yanked uselessly at his bounds. “Oh, you might as well settle in. We’ve got work to do!”

He whimpered. His eyes pleading with her.

“What’s that?” she asked. “Well, of course I look different! I can’t have the kids seeing me in those clothes with all that makeup on. What would they think! Silly!

“I’m the custodian, you know, at St. Canisius Elementary School.”

His eyes went wide at her.

“Uh-huh,” she said, “That one. The very one.

“You know, not so long ago, we had to close for a while. Before we reopened, I had to go in and clean it. Let me tell you, after being closed for a couple months that place was dirty! Oh my! I like to use this cleaner here on the floor and walls,” she picked up a gallon jug filled with pink liquid, “Because it gets the dirt up but it’s mild and smells pleasant.” She unscrewed the cap and held it under his nose; it had a kind of vanilla lavender scent. “Of course, the school was so dirty I had to go over the floors three times before I was satisfied. But then, you know, I came to the places where the blood had pooled.”

His rapid breathing had slowed, now, to almost nothing.

“Actually, it was the police who told me the only way to get up the blood and brains and tiny skull fragments was a mixture of bleach with hydrogen peroxide. They even gave me a sheet of paper with the exact formula on it,” she held up another gallon jug, this one filled with a blue liquid. “This formula right here. It’s much harsher.” She unscrewed the cap, brought it to his nose, and the stench nearly knocked him unconscious. The vapors seemed to invade every nook of his sinuses. He closed his eyes tightly as they burned. “See?” She took the jug away, placed it carefully back on her cart. Then she sat carefully on his lap, arms around his neck, nose almost touching his.

“I tried just using the mop, lover,” she said softly. “Tried a couple times but it just wasn’t coming up. Even with that nasty smelling stuff I had to get onto my hands and knees and scrub for all I was worth. They said I got it all. Everybody was complementary and thanked me for working so hard.” Her voice was almost whispering now. “Thing is, I still kept seeing blood everywhere. Every time I came around a corner I thought I saw another stain. Every time I closed my eyes. Every single time I tried to sleep; I’d see it. The stains were everywhere. Freaked me out!”

She slid from his lap, went to the cart. “After a while, they sent me to a nice hospital they said would help me remove all the stains. After a few months I told everybody it had, but I lied. I kept thinking, ‘what is causing these stains?’ Well, on the surface, of course, the guns. But the guns didn’t walk in there on their own, did they? It was that guy who brought in a duffle bag of them and started pulling the triggers. But the police killed him, right? That should have taken care of the stains, right? But it didn’t. So then I thought, ‘where did the guy, who was clearly unstable, get the guns?’”

She gasped, smiled broadly at him. “It was you! You’re the guy who sponsored that big gun show and fixed it so nobody had to follow basic background checks or laws of any kind when people bought and sold guns and that’s where all this guy’s weapons came from! You’re the stain!”

She turned to the cart and opened a small black case. “Well, you and I both know, I could scrub you with this blue stuff all day long and it would probably sting like hell, but it won’t change anything. Humans aren’t like tile floors; every surface requires a different technique.” From the black case she retrieved a syringe and a needle. She screwed the needle into the syringe, dipped the tip into the blue solution. “Thing is, lover, before I applied myself to the custodial arts, I was studying to be a nurse. Yes, I had some of the same issues with the sight of blood, so it became clear that advocation wasn’t for me. But as it happened,” she turned to him, holding the filled syringe in the air, drop of liquid clinging to the tip of the needle, “I knew how to hit a vein.

“I believe this will do the trick.”

- 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 Pie Hour

Three A.M. hour was her most serene. Not a lot of traffic and pretty much the same people came in regular; couple of sheriff’s deputies and a highway patrolman, truckers or travelers off the adjacent state highway who were trying to avoid the interstate or get to it, a few locals who just seemed regularly up at that hour. But this guy was different.

He came in wearing a big Aussie style cowboy hat and a wide grin, twinkling eyes that pierced right through her. He stepped up and sat at the counter, paying no mind to anyone else, and said happily, “Hey there.” Only a half dozen people were scattered across the diner and all of them looked up at him. The patrolman and the deputy seated together over coffee and pie checked him against the list of suspicions in their head. But nobody took the wide-eyed interest the Old Man did.

She picked up the coffee carafe and a cup and saucer and stepped towards him. “Hi,” she said.

“You read my mind,” he said, nodding at the coffee as she sat the cup down and poured into it.

“Not hard to do,” she said, pleasant but not too friendly.

He sipped. “You make it good and strong,” he approved.

“The owner’s idea,” she smiled, though she was the one that made it that way. She made it almost twice as strong as he’d taught her to when she started a dozen years ago. “Cream or sugar?”

“You read my mind again,” he beamed and called her by her first name, which she guessed he’d read on her name tag.

“Anything to eat?” Kid back by the griddle, only other employee, was paying attention as he scraped off a cheeseburger.

“Got pie?” he asked.

“Pie’s our main thing,” she said, and she wasn’t exaggerating. The menu shrank to cheeseburgers, fries, a few other sandwiches overnight, but it was usually pie people wanted. The owner always ordered three fresh ones be brought in late evening by the Mennonite lady who baked them: two fruit and one cream pie.

“God peach?”

“Just sold the last one,” she said, and a little higher came the chin of the Old Man, alone in a booth against the big windows, who’d bit into the last slice just minutes earlier.

“Well, heck fire.”

“Got strawberry and banana cream.”

“We’ll make do with strawberry, then.”

The Old Man, she noticed, hadn’t stopped watching them. He always seemed to study people when they came in, but as she moved to the glass case and carefully removed a slice from its round pan onto a plate it occurred to her how uncharacteristically alert his attention was. The Old Man had started showing up, oh, four or five years ago, she thought. Nearly every night, somewhere between 2:45 and 3:30 he’d show, walking down from the ramshackle houses on the rise back behind the diner. Couldn’t sleep, he’d told her once. Never seemed to want to talk to anybody; sat and sipped coffee and picked at a pie until close to 5a before stiffly making his way back up the rise.

“Haven’t seen you around before,” she said to the guy. It was by experience she’d learned not to ask questions like ‘where are you from’ or ‘where you headed’ because people sometimes just turned evasive. Statements were more benign. If people wanted to volunteer information after that it usually flowed freely.

But he said, “Really? Thought you might have seen me by now. I’ve been around,” he grinned as he forked the tip from the slice of pie into his mouth. “Mmmmmmm! Darn good!”

That told her nothing. She left him alone as he ate. Noticed that the patrolman wasn’t particularly interested, and he and the deputy were just shootin’ the bull now. The trucker clearly needed more coffee and she picked up the carafe and went to fill his cup. One of the three travelers needed a refill too. By the time she got back behind the counter the guy was finishing his pie and gulping the rest of his coffee.

“Hit the spot, perfect!” he declared as he swept a napkin across his mouth. She smiled at him. He said, “Shame I hadn’t time to get here before.”

“Well,” she said, “You know where to find us now. We’re always open.”

“Well, sure!” he said, and she thought he started to say something else, but stopped himself. He seemed to pause, tossed a few bills onto the counter, then got up from his stool and turned to the Old Man as though he’d known he was there all along. “You ready, my friend?”

The Old Man didn’t seem the least bit surprised. She was, and her mouth came open a little. The Old Man said, “I’ve been ready.”

“Let’s hit it, then,” the guy said.

The Old Man awkwardly pulled himself out of his booth, his back not quite straightening up and his knees not quite bending as they should, nor bearing the weight of his long life as he tried to move through just a little more of it. The guy very tenderly took one of his elbows and helped him, a gentle picture of care. As they moved slowly out the door, the guy smiled back at her and said, “Thanks! Be seeing you!”

She’d started to nod, but they were gone by then. She watched through the window as they moved behind the parked semi, then disappeared. And never returned.
 
- 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 …

* * *

Torment

The meeting so annoyingly interrupted was penultimate to the release of the wildly anticipated new product certain to make them both renowned and rich. Surely among the most important events in modern history. Every painstaking attention to detail had to be perfect prior to release. The team huddled together, he right in the middle of it, concentrating so hard under the florescent lights and on such little sleep he had a headache, which he ignored. Now this! Right at a critical point! His secretary tried to be discreet as she cracked the door and silently extended her right hand with the pinky and thumb out to indicate a phone call, but once she got his attention she got everybody else’s along with it.

“Take a message,” he told her.

“It’s an emergency,” she said sternly, forcefully, almost as an order, reflecting the company’s philosophy that ‘secretaries rule the world’ and hired only those capable of taking charge.

He sighed. Somebody said, “We need a break anyway.”

“Some of this will take until tomorrow at least,” somebody else said.

He signed again. “Fine,” then, because he was team leader, “We’ll reconvene at eight-thirty tomorrow.” As they filed out he gave his secretary the ‘what-the-hell’ look, to which she gave him the ‘pull-your-head-out-of-your-ass’ look back.

“There’s a problem with your father,” she told him. “Line three.”

It was that nurse at the assisted living facility again. Had to admit she sounded more frantic than usual. “Okay, I’ll be right over.”

The nice thing about driving at this time of day was that traffic was lighter. The bad thing, he cursed, is that what traffic was out was slower. Much slower. He weaved and diced his German sports sedan in and out and between the other vehicles like a bat shooting itself at insects and made the trip in 35 minutes. He found his dad poised in front of his easel, brush in hand, glaring at a painting already judiciously illustrated. The nurse pulled him back up the hall.

“He’s been like that for three days,” she said. “He hasn’t eaten, hasn’t slept, or if he has he did it standing up. This morning we found he had soiled himself and he fought and cussed us as we got him changed and cleaned up.”

“He’s just been standing there like that?”

“Once in a while he seems to dab at something, but, yeah, just like that.”

He went slowly into his dad’s room and around where he could see him. Still took several seconds before his dad noticed him, and when he did he said in his most annoyed tone, “Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ, they called your ass, didn’t they?”

“Uh-huh. They’re worried.”

“They’re mother hens! I haven’t been working that long.”

“You’ve been here for three days, and you haven’t eaten, and you haven’t slept, and this morning you shit your pants.”

He looked directly at his son for the first time, a little disbelieving but acknowledging it was probably true. The nurse appeared in the doorway, holding a food tray. “Well, good god damn it!” he said angrily, wiped his brush and put it and his palette down and moved stiffly towards the little table next to the window. “Bring it here, then,” he barked at the nurse and she placed the tray in front of him. It looked like chicken noodle soup, a cheese sandwich, and orange Jell-o. “Jesus,” his dad shook his head at it. “I’d like to order crawfish etouffee with key lime pie instead.”

The nurse said, “We don’t serve that.” Then added, “And you know it.”

“Get the hell out of here and let me eat.”

He sat down opposite his dad and told the nurse, “I’ll stay with him for a while,” so she’d leave them.

“God damned interruptions,” his dad cursed, but picked up the spoon and slurped the soup.

“Yeah,” he said, “Speaking of interruptions, I didn’t exactly have time for this. I’m in the middle of creating something new myself. Something important. Something that will matter to a lot of people.”

His dad snorted. “Will it be obsolete by this time next year?”

He thought of the ‘update’ planning meetings already on his calendar to follow the launch. Shoot, he thought, it will be obsolete in three months and updates would start rolling out a couple months after that. “Maybe,” he hedged.

His dad, ladling the soup down rather rapidly now, pointed at the painting with his spoon,. “That won’t be,” he said.

The painting seemed to be an abstract portrait of a woman; he didn’t recognize the subject. The paint flowed in long, vibrant ribbons from the top. His dad had used long, thick brush strokes to apply the paint; the texture broke the illusion that it had been pulled down by gravity. Instead, it almost looked like it had been applied by a shotgun, then smeared or allowed to drip. Vibrant colors edged in contrasting pastels. He had to admit, he found it compelling.

His dad said with his mouth full, “People will be studying my art long after that ‘product’ of yours has been replaced ten times over, so don’t talk to me about interruptions.” By now the soup was gone and he had moved on to the sandwich. “I guess I was hungrier than I thought.”

He asked his dad, “What do you call this painting?”

His dad replied, “Torment.” Then added, “I may change it to ‘Annoyance’.” Finally he gulped up the Jell-o and looked at the tray as if surveying for another morsel. For the first time, his dad looked tired to him, his concentration broken.

“Why don’t you lay down for a minute.”

His dad nodded and lay awkwardly on the bed. He covered him with a blanket. “Just for a bit,” his dad said, but in short order he had fallen fast asleep.

He sat with him for another 20 minutes before rising and moving towards the door, pausing to study the painting again. He found himself hoping his dad could finish it.

- CH