J.M.Lamoreux's BLOG

What I Want to Know

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:44:00 PST

Often we find that Fate

Has left us in unhappy places.

When you look around your home

You see the hard signs of poverty and despair.

I want to know

At what moment

The Golden Child inside us all

Will rise from the gleaming center of your fearless heart

And you will get up

And tend to the children?

I want to know what you do

The moments when you weep into your hands

As the lights flicker in your home and then go off.

When will that angel rise up

From inside you

And let that house be filled

With mercy, forgiveness and love

To light the dark places?

I want to know

When the bills come and you have to decide that day

Who goes without or who gets lunch and who doesn’t

When you hug your family

They will understand in an instant

That you love them with every fiber

Of who you are

Now and always.

I want to know when they come to

Lock the door on your home in foreclosure,

At what point you hug your children

And turn with a resolute eye

To the place where the sun rises

Every day you have people to love

And love you back

And you go on.

Poverty and homelessness

Is easy to fall into.

Fate is not fair, and neat and gentle.

Having nothing can be a gift sometimes, one that calls to your Greater Self

And gives you hope where no hope could ever be,

And strength when you feel you have nothing left to give.

When the children have no one left to turn to

Is it you who in the midst of disaster

Gives them a safe place to stand

Even if it’s only within

The warm circumference of your arms?

The walls can be bare,

The food locker too sparse to support most families

But what I want to know,

What we all need to know is,

Are you loved,

And if you are

Can you feel its power?

Jim Lamoreux.

The Horned God

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 16:11:02 PDT

The city is upon me

Like a bacteria, it makes the skies

Dull and full of greasy black smoke.

The freeways hiss with angry metal bugs,

Buzzing around sunny insect trails.

In my “box”

I stare for hours at the boundaries

Of where I am pinned, labeled and displayed.

People rustle papers at me

Like they are warding off demons.

The desk copiers blink and whirr.

The water cooler gargles the morning talk.

The coffee maker

Competes with the bathroom

For the rankest odor of the morning

In this cubicle

I wear a tie

And a false face

A grinning porcelain

That I switch successfully from happy to sad

Until someone notices I did it at the wrong time.

I am powerless here

I am hapless and worthless here.

Women laugh at how handily I am castrated

In the dull glow of the office lights

My bloodied hands

Juggling the stained knife.

There is some secret place I will go today,

And like a wolf kicks at the dirt

I will obscure the rancid city scent

From my flared nostrils.

I pull the phone plug from the wall

And toss papers onto the floor,

Sprint to the parking lot,

Hop into my car,

And join the herd of metal bugs

In their predictable journeys

But this time the grill of my car shines

With the beckoning glint of a western sun.

How far is it to the Sierras

Out from under the oppressive haze of Reno?

Not far.

It doesn’t take long

To find a loggers path

The rocks thumping like trolls

On the undercarriage of my car.

How long does it take to drive

Where there are no dirt roads

Or Forester’s stations

Or tired little camps

Full of numbed vacationers?

It’s hard to control the wheel here

And the path pitches and yaws like the ocean

But I am hungry for silence

And dead logs, and rotting pine needles,

And the carcass of a rabbit or squirrel.

Soon the car centers on the spine

Of a lump of granite.

I shut off the engine

Get out, and walk towards where the sun

Reaches golden hands through the tops

Of dark trees.

Here a bird calls, there a bush rustles.

The sun slides down the dark shanks of ancient pines

A somber, rich and bloody yellow.

I go forward

I go deeply

Forward

My tie dangles from a pine limb

My shirt makes a white patch

On a rotting trunk,

My pants nestle in rotting pine needles

With my shoes and socks

And as I descend into the forest noises

And the sun extinguishes itself in the darkening horizon

I find a stump that has rotted out

To make a perfect throne.

I sit naked

In the center of all this wildness

Under shimmering stars

And a sickly moon.

And hear the drummers

Circling my sacred power

And the naked maidens

Dancing, their small feet making the forest floor

Pop and crack.

There are sacrifices,

The smell of burning flesh and herbs

The rustle of leafy crowns

The murmur of archaic chants.

Flutes and ram horns

Rattles and clapping hands

They circle and move

Like stealthy ghosts in the dull, silver glow

Of an ancient moon. The wind touches

Like a woman’s fingers, the damp fur on my legs

And invisible lips

Kiss the cloven bone of my hooves.

And when I move my head

I can feel the threatening weight

Of the horns of Baphomet

Held erect by the neck of a bull

And open my mouth

And let the animals out of my heart

To growl and spit and tear

At this feckless, unsuspecting world

Camped on the periphery of my rigid, regal,

Ageless power.

The dancers stop

And nothing stirs now

In the great and ancient forest

The beating heart of this other world

Thumps defiantly,

Distant and mysterious

To timid, modern men.

By J.M.Lamoreux.

Very Special Arts and "The Healing Circle."

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:46:44 PDT

Today I learned that the Very Special Arts magazine has put my web site in this month's publication. The reason this is important is because ALL money made from my Cafepress web site goes to the Very Special Arts program of Nevada. This is a program that helps adults and children who for various reasons may not have access to the arts. Again, all proceeds from my web site go to this program. If you purchase anything, it goes to the VSA to help adults and children participate in the arts at all levels.

Items on my Cafepress web page include but are not limited to...

1. With the help of MP3 technology, I have created a CD that utilizes binaural sound as well as guided imagery to help people overcome emotional bottle necks. It is titled "The Yellow Kite," in the "Dream Whisperer" series. There is a sample file you can listen to at this URL. All proceeds go to the Nevada VSA.

http://www.cafepress.com/jmlpodcast.87337549

2. Along with that I have added "Healing Circle" items to this same Cafepress account. This includes the symbol of "The Healing Circle" on mugs, shirts, jewelry boxes, coasters, buttons, and other items priced for all pocketbooks. To me, anything I can get the symbol of the healing hands on imbues that thing with healing energy.

This is a URL to a JPG of the symbol. I use it as my wall paper on the computer.
http://www.jmlamoreux.com/mandala.jpg

Various uses of the symbol are as follows:

Poster:
http://www.cafepress.com/jmlpodcast.108642777

Grocery Shopping Bag:
http://www.cafepress.com/jmlpodcast.45616497

Mug:
http://www.cafepress.com/jmlpodcast.46449180

And there's more. Browse my Cafepress page:
http://www.cafepress.com/jmlpodcast/

This is the mission statement of the organization you will be contributing to.

The VSA Mission Statement. . . . .
The mission of VSA arts of Nevada is to provide quality programs throughout the state of Nevada integrating all the arts into the lives and education of children, youth, and adults, especially those who are disadvantaged or have a disability.

Quality experiences in the arts, designed to engage participants in the development of artistic skills and expressions, are the foundation of the VSA arts of Nevada program.

The arts, as a part of education, leisure and recreation, provide a viable, effective way of teaching special skills to individuals with disabilities. It can be a chance to succeed, a chance to build self-control and self-esteem, and a chance to focus on ability rather than disability.

The arts can serve as an important link for individuals with disabilities to experience the expressive, aesthetic and therapeutic elements within themselves and others through their capacity to create.

http://www.vsanevada.org/mission.html

Review of Poem "It Is Done With Them."

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:42:07 PDT

(snip)
Jim Lamoreux’s poem “It Is Done With Them” offers an understanding of nature’s ability to shatter hope through his recounting of the westward trail taken by so many pioneers, and lives lost in the pursuit of dreams. (end snip)

Tha above is from a review of "The Meadow" literary magazine in "NewPages.com". URL is here: http://www.newpages.com/magazinestand/litmags/default.htm

The Meadow magazine in PDF is here, just click the "current issue" URL. http://www.tmcc.edu/meadow/

BuzzNet Tags: Poetry, magazine, west

The Bridge

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:30:22 PDT

They had removed a stump,

And the crew stood around admiring their work.

Above them the sky rusted,

And the sun melted behind the tops of trees.

Then the clouds grew red like a furnace

Inside when the logs burned

And the fire roared in the rough metal belly.

Through the Aspen trees Melvin saw again

The creek, that meandered to his farm house veering thirty feet away

And then down into the valley off towards the sea

And places that embraced Americas water ways

One by one.

He walked over the high back rocks

From the long, dirty field

Often stumbling in the cold water.

“I need to build a bridge here,”

He told the wild birds.

At nigh while the winds

Touched and nudged at the shingles

Of his home, he lay in the darkness

With his wife Emile

And they both rested in the space between them,

And they both felt the distance

Like a long breath of exhaustion,

Or a trip on which only one will go.

He felt the emptiness

But as a farmer he had no language,

No skill to know a woman’s heart or make words

That would soften it

Or make the road less bumpy

From utterance to utterance.

Often his voice was weary from the field.

All day with a coarse and willful crew

Dulled his edges and often he simply slept

In his large lounge chair from fatigue

Fallen asleep amidst dreams

Of water and high corn

And stalks making a rushing sound

Touched by warm southern winds.

In the morning

He would wake to the smell of hot coffee.

The days moved in a cycle

From sun up to sun down.

The silence at night rushed across

The corn fields of his soul.

One night it started a fire there

That lit the sky of his mind and it was

In the smoking, roaring conflagration of this idea that the bridge

Emerged like a growing thought.

The next day

He hired carpenters and engineers

And went with his crew to get the wood.

The bridge would be canopied, and there would be places

Where you could sit and admire the creek.

The work progressed

The supports went in, the road bed

The super and sub structures.

He was proud of this bridge

Even though it supported no major thoroughfare

And brought him not one dime of money.

Emile hated the bridge.

There was so much to be done around the farm

So much equipment to maintain, the water sluices improved,

The tanks welded in places

And all this went by the way side.

The roof of the bridge canopy

Sported a fine brass rooster weathervane.

All the neighbors came to see the bridge.

The sun rose and set over its dark shingles

And the brass rooster spun with the wild winds that blew

Across the corn fields.

But the darkness between Emile and Melvin,

Quickened and turned a dour shade over their lives.

One morning Melvin sat down

To his coffee,

And said,

“I know you hate the bridge.”

“I do,” Emile said. “It cost too much.”

Melvin put down the coffee and walked out

The screen door to tend to his fields, his crew was already

Working in the hot sun,

Working the corn that hissed and crackled

In a rush like a thousand voices.

He had to be clearer.

That night in the barn as carefully as he could

On one of the left over boards

Melvin found the words to say what was in his heart

And carved them there.

Melvin took Emile to town the next day

And they were both in the cart

And she knew she was going to have to pass

Over that bridge again

And that made her angry.

So the trip up to the bridge was bitter and sullen.

But as they neared the thing

Her eyes caught the shape of something new

Under the brass weathervane.

“Pull up” she said.

“Now stop,” she said.

The wood sign read.

“Dedicated to the love of my life,

Emile Johnson.”

Melvin sat in the wagon seat

And looked out over the corn field

Waiting for her to say “Let’s go.”

She did,

As she slipped her hand into his

And smiled all the way to town.

By J.M.Lamoreux

Posters of "The Mother."

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 07:09:59 PDT

Today I got posters from Cafepress on "The Mother." This is a piece that got a lot of attention at my artist reception. It is an illustration for an allegorical story that I wrote for class. Later, it was changed into poem format. There is something about this painting that seems to draw some people. I need to explore this and see if I can expand on this interest.

In the mean time "Patient 444 and Other Short Stories" is illustrated. Many of the illustrations are offered in color on Cafepress on coffee mugs and tote bags etc..

Be sure to visit my web site and look at this large collection of items on the Cafepress link. My web site is at www.jlamoreux.com.

BuzzNet Tags: illlustration, Cafrepress, Lamoreux, painting

My Personal Section On The VSA Nevada Web Site

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 08:35:11 PDT

I have a section on the VSA Nevada web site that I'd like you to explore. The URL is at:

http://www.vsanevada.org/jmlamoreux.htm

In it you can learn about my art work with samples to observe. I'm very proud of my contributions to this project.

The VSA Nevada is dedicated to do the following in this quote:

"The mission of VSA arts of Nevada is to provide quality programs throughout the state of Nevada integrating all the arts into the lives and education of children, youth, and adults, especially those who are disadvantaged or have a disability.'

"Quality experiences in the arts, designed to engage participants in the development of artistic skills and expressions, are the foundation of the VSA arts of Nevada program.'

"The arts, as a part of education, leisure and recreation, provide a viable, effective way of teaching special skills to individuals with disabilities. It can be a chance to succeed, a chance to build self-control and self-esteem, and a chance to focus on ability rather than disability.'

"The arts can serve as an important link for individuals with disabilities to experience the expressive, aesthetic and therapeutic elements within themselves and others through their capacity to create."

Please visit my web site at www.jlamoreux.com. There is more information about me and my contribution to the Nevada VSA project there. And visit my art gallery on line :http://www.jmlamoreux.com/gallery/jmlgallery.htm

Technorati Tags: arts, srt, artists, disability, disadvantaged

Short Story "Money" Accepted by "The Harrow"

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:46:26 PDT

Yesterday I was notified by Michael Colangelo at "The Harrow" magazine that my short story "Money was accepted. This is a great achievement for me having a piece snatched up by a magazine outside the award winning college Art and Literary magazine "The Meadow," where I have been generously published so far. "Money" is described more like a crime story than "horror" and yet they thought enough of the writing to give it a try. This is exceptional.

I wanted to add that my book "Patient 444 and Other Short Stories" is available on Amazon, Waldenbooks, Borders and Barnes and Nobles. This new short story will be out in December of this year. "Money" will be in "The Harrow" along with quite a few high grade horror tales. I am getting around and it is exciting.

I am also in the process of writing another short story more along the line of what "The Harrow" publishes titled tentatively "Bird." This is about shaman's and warnings from the grave and a knock-out ending I'm sure you'll appreciate.

Please visit my web site at www.jlamoreux.com to get a free copy of the first story in "Patient 444 and other Short Stories." If you buy the whole book All proceeds for this it go to help the Very Special Arts of Nevada.

Technorati Tags: Amamazon, Barnes and Nobles, Waldenbooks, Borders, writers, magazine, The Harrow

Free E-books

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 08:14:55 PDT

I have written five books now and each one has been a challenge. Currently on my web site I offer three e-books for free. These are to give you a taste of my writing style. If you would like to download these PDF's then please go to this URL.

http://www.jmlamoreux.com/one.htm

Scroll down past the Cafepress sign and the free e-books are there. Please also be sure to book mark my web site. I'll try to keep it updated as often as possible.

Technorati Tags: free, books, PDF, writing, Cafepress, updated

Support Very Special Arts of Nevada.

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 07:01:25 PDT

BuzzNet Tags: arts, charity, theatre arts, artists, writers, musicians, disabled, Cafepress

This morning I am waking up from a long weekend and thought I'd jot down a few notes here. I wanted to let people know that all proceeds on my Cafepress web site go to the Very Special Arts charity program of Nevada. If you can browse by there and look around I hope you find some article or book that interests you. This goes to support disabled artists, writers, musicians, theatre arts an many other fields of creative expression.

Please visit my web site at www.jmlamoreux.com for more information about this project.

Testing a new Blogger tool.

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 07:40:16 PDT

This is a test of a new blogger tool.

I am checking for how well this works. It is free and it works in a wysiwyg format.

Prayer

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 10:33:15 PDT

Prayer.

Heavenly Father, Great Mother
You are our perfection,
The sun rises and falls in your hands
You are the beginning
And you are the end of all things.

Our praise this day and every day
Comes from our open hearts
That reach for you like flowers reach for the sun.

You are what we yearn for,
What we ache for
What we desire in the deepest caverns
Of our lives.

You walk before us
And clear us a path thought our sorrow.
You walk behind us
And lift us when we fall.

You speak with us as angels in the small hours
Of the morning, when our fears and hopes
Won't let us sleep.
You comfort us,
A hand upon our own trembling hand.

We reach for you in our daily lives
We hold your power inside us, and we are illuminated
And nurtured,
Even in the belly of the darkest night.
Your love is infinite,
Your patience is infinite,
When all else turn away
You are still standing there.

My heart
Is open
And blossoms under your gentle care.
I have hope, I have courage, I have the treasures of the world
While I stand in the center of your awareness
And your power.

Bless us please,
With the knowledge of your deepest thoughts
And keep us in your great arms
As we sleep safe under raging stars.

And let us love you
With our fallible, imperfect
But persistently honest
Human love.

J.M.Lamoreux.

The Open Heart.

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 08:39:22 PDT

The Open Heart.

War, in a house or in a battle field
Closes the heart and seals away our deepest self.
Heroes find the path to where (even in the face
Of pain and terror,)
They allow the heart to reveal itself to the world
And get up,

And dance
When the piper plays
And the drums beat.

We were born to be wild things
Exploring the world, discovering through mistakes
Not being beaten down by them.
We laughed and ran through fields as children
But as adults we close the doors and windows
To keep out the echoes of that laughter
From our shrunken worlds.

The open heart bears pain
It suffers, it aches.
It also is the door to joy.
It is the seed by which love blossoms,
It is the perfect place
For people to shed their false faces
And step into a circle
As one.

I have an open heart.
I think fear of my mortality opened those doors
And let sun into all its chambers.

It hurts,
But it also allows me to feel
Beauty at a depth I've never felt before,
Faith with a power I've never wielded before,
And hope with a persistence I never knew
Hope could ever obtain.

My open heart weeps,
My open heart laughs,
My open heart knows mercy, compassion,
Hope and love,

And I wonder why all those years
I never seem to understand
That to heal and deal with the darkness

You have to open something
To the light.

Beacon

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 11:09:04 PDT

This is a reading of the poem "Beacon"
On Youtube.

I don't know why the storm
Brought me to this angry place
So late at night.

I was standing on Hales Beach
And I recall in a blustery haze
That the world became
This foaming, roaring thing
Reaching for my ankles,
Crawling towards my soul.
The stars perforated the sky
Stained with scudding clouds
The moon
Made a holy golden path
That bobbed and rocked
Off into the horizon.

I thought back
To a sunny day where
I stood there in my bare feet
Remembering moving along the rocks
With my mother and sister
So many decades ago
Looking for star fish and little crabs.

And in a single moment
My heart reached across that barrier of time
In one breath
And I knew mother was gone,
And gone forever.
The ache in my heart
Reached through my feet
And disturbed the bubbling sand crabs below.

And I wept into the wind
Stirring into a frenzy the wild caps
Of the heartless Pacific.

It was at that moment
That Ginny handed me my soaked shoes.
I brushed them away and held her
As the sea exhaled and inhaled like lions
Roaring at the grinning face of the moon.

I wept into her wet hair
My knees buckling
The sorrow traversing all the years of my life
And pounding on the rocks of this moment.
And she braced herself against it
And held me up in the fierce winds
That traveled across the stormy caps of waves
And poured into the sinking hull of my shipwrecked heart.

We walked in the sand, the salt water
Sprinkling the air that buffeted our linked bodies.

"I miss her," I said.

Ginny laid me on a sandy blanket
And held me as the clouds collected
Around a surprised moon.
Lightening licked
At the dark waters.

The beach was deserted.
Her mouth found mine, cold and smelling of the sea
Salty with tears and ocean water
Her hands opened my soaked shirt
And she kissed my broken heart.

She drew me away from the darkness
In that water, and with her hands
Dragged me towards Life
On that sandy blanket
Under a steely sky.

She did it all,
I was a proto-human
Her Frankenstein raised from the dead
With lightening and Life Force
And we were Adam and Eve
Naked with God pointing his accusing finger
An angel driving us from the roaring Garden
And I was above her
Arched like a silver bow
The arrow poised to reach some
Penetrable, cloying place of power.

And then the sea
Rose like a wild
And windy animal
And Ginny took it all,
Her hips and pelvis reaching
Like hands
To take it all.

Later, laying on her naked chest
Slick with rain
Through my salty, wind-blurred eyes
I could see the Point Constance Light House.

Ginny looked up at me
Uncertain if she had rescued her drowning sailor
Waiting for me to take a breath
And exhale the cold water
And at that moment I saw
The beacon
That would always bring me home.

By J.M.Lamoreux

La Amistad

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 08:35:51 PDT

"Give Us free!"
Inspired by the story of
the slave ship Amistad (Friendship)

There was a Mende man
Who threw a stone
And a lion fell.
He threw the stone
Because there was nothing else to do
The lion had to be stopped.

He was afraid,
But he threw the stone
And by some miracle that lion
Fell to the brown African earth
And he saved his village.

His name was Sengbe.

Years later
He would be pulling a nail from the wet wood
Of a beam in the Amistad.
He would rise up
And overthrow his captors.

The man who killed a lion
With a stone
Was a slave purchased for $450.00
But he rose up from the dark holds of the Amistad
And reclaimed his life from his captors.

Sengbe took the Amistad
And set sail for Africa,
But ended up captured again
Put in chains and on trial.
And for two years
Fought in the American courts
For his freedom.

Time and again
He fought that lion with a stone.
From court to court, appeal after appeal
The lion came
And the village trembled
But Sengbe
Stood firm in that field
There in the sun
The lion's hungry eyes
Fixed on his own
The weight of that stone
In his hand.

At Hartford Connecticut, on November 19, 1839
In a US District Court
Sengbe faced America
And on January 13, 1840, Judge Judson
Ruled that Sengbe and his people had been kidnapped
And should be returned to their home in Africa.
During this time
The Amistad people learned the story
Of the great man who
Was always followed by the sun,
Who healed the sick
And held the children.

He too found a lion of repression
And slavery in the land
And killed it with the stone
That rolled away from his tomb
The day he rose from his death.

"Give us Free," Sengbe said
Holding his manacled hands up to the sun
That drifted in a smoky bar from a court room window.

"Give us free!"

Former president John Quincy Adams
Who co-defended them in the US Supreme Court said.
"What can I do for the cause of God and man,
For the progress of human emancipation,
For the suppression of the African slave-trade?
Yet my conscience presses me on;
Let me but die upon the breach."

On February 24th "Old Man Eloquent"
Reached into the heart of an African,
Heard his story,
And learned the secret of honoring who you are.
Calling on our "elders" like Jefferson and Washington
To show Spain that our courts were not the playthings of children
As they were in the land of the fourteen year old queen
Demanding her slaves
With the stamp of her tiny foot.

"Give us free!"

We are not free, if any part of this democracy
Is enslaved. We are not free, if all are not free.

"Give us free!"

If we can't grasp that simple fundamental of American tradition,
Then we have failed to grasp democracy.

We have lost the thread of our story
And have misunderstood the purpose
Of why we began as we did
And who we are now.

The Mende African
Told Adams that when we are afraid
When we are in trouble,
We must call on our ancestors
To bring us the wisdom we need
To solve the problem.

"We are here
Because they lived.
When we call them
They will always come,"
He said.

They must come.

In the court room
In a language he barely knew
The Mende African, Sengbe
Spoke to the very fundamentals of what this country rose from
And became, through strife, pain and tears.

In that court room
After the decision to free the Africans
When John Quincy Adams was asked by the man
Who threw the stone
That killed the lion
What he said to those sullen faces in those straight backed seats
Many of them slave owners.

Adams said,

"Your words."

By J.M.Lamoreux

It is Done With Them.

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:00:06 PST

It is Done With Them.

“Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld.”

From John Muir, “The Mountains of California .”

Decades after

Emigrants died at Donner Lake

The wind moves like a dancing calf

In a field in Verdi.

It kicks and prances in the dust

(That could have been a wagon trail)

Under gathering clouds.

The "Snowy Range”

Must have looked formidable to them, these people

Who had followed the Humbolt

To this bitter place.

The wind

In the field in Verdi

Could have blown on the canvass of their wagons

It could have tousled the hair of the women and children

It could have made scarves dance around

The necks of the men

As they looked up the mouth

Of that winding pass

Wondering if the wagons could make it.

Today SUV’s and campers

Amble in the sun

Up that winding route to Truckee

Light flashing on tinted glass

And polished metal,

But the Donner Party would have heard

The muted grunt

Of oxen only

And the constant knock of wheels

On rocks and dirt.

The crest of these mountains

That they faced

Runs along the eastern edge of the range.

Rivers spilling west drain into the Pacific.

Rivers tumbling east

Are caught in the Great Basin and go nowhere.

They had no idea

That winter would witch them

Into such a world of ice and horror.

They followed the Truckee

Into a gathering storm

The clouds high

And cold,

And over half died there.

What did they see

Preserved beyond that frozen place?

What vision still beckoned, what idea

Haunted them by the sputtering fires,

Huddled under the trees at Donner Lake,

What did their tired red eyes imagine

In the cold waters of Alder Creek?

As winter

Brushed the life from them

And necessity moved their flesh

From bone to pot,

Did the clouds part and snow

Drift down glittering in the light one day

And was that vision still there

Like a rag tattered with grease and blood?

Once past those peaks

The land takes a brisk descent

And spills towards the Pacific.

Could they smell the ocean

Or hear sea birds

Under their poor canopies

Groaning with the weight of snow?

What did they see

The moment they put human flesh to teeth

As winter choked the pass

And their mouths filled with

The bitter taste

Of utter failure?

In a field

Where their wagons must have turned

To challenge the merciless Sierra Nevada

The wind

Like a cavorting calf

Sweeps the Emigrants’ path clear once more

As if Nature is saying,

It is done with them.

Healing Circle Podcast

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:09:01 PDT

The J.M.Lamoreux Publications web site also hosts “The Healing Circle.” In this podcast Jim talks about the Circle, how it was created, how it works, how you join. Please click the bottom URL for the RSS feed for this month’s podcast about “The Healing Circle.”

http://www.jmlamoreux.com/podcst/podcastcircle2006.mp3

October Podcast for J.M.Lamoreux

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 07:35:47 PDT

New Podcast for October

This is the J.M.Lamoreux podcast for October. I’m just getting warmed up. Hopefully there will be more to come. I’m going to try to podcast my blog. In it I talk about my book “Patient 44 and Other Short Stories,” and other things occurring in my part of the world.

Go here for the podcast:
http://www.jmlamoreux.com/podcst/podcast1092006.mp3

Neighbors

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 13:03:54 PDT

“Neighbors,”by J.M.Lamoreux

Look at how we live. You can peer down at neighborhoods from the sky and realize how predictable we are, can’t you? Look at those houses all tight and nice in a row moving up and down the tentacles of streets making dusty arteries to and from the personal business of people, many of them strangers to each other, all of them neighbors. How closely do we really pay attention to the person next door?

Here and there we wake from our trance and wave as we stoop to pick up a paper, or rush to run kids off the lawn or curse that broken sprinkler. All these things are tightly knitted into a fabric we take for granted, strapping it on every day as we turn the key in the ignition and drive to places where we pay for it all.  A neighborhood is also the place where murder can occur, and often does as the local police blotters will attest to if you’re curious. Neighborhoods are a mixing pot for just about everything good or bad.

Everyone had their own fraction of an acre on Lawler Street. They picked, poked and prodded at it and teased up their little yards. Often their efforts were rewarded with smiles and nods from people walking their dogs; sometimes the passing judgment was made with a cigarette butt or candy bar wrapper. This is where all of them came and went, where doors opened and closed, beds thumped against the wall late at night, lights went on in bathrooms all up and down the street as the sun crawled up the telephone wires to meet the day.

Mrs. McIntyre had lived on Lawler Street since 1995. Her roses had bobbed and sighed from the same white fence for many years. At 5:00 AM her screen door would open and Ritzy would charge across the yard, jump the small garden rocks and proceed to shit on any moist and dew soaked lawn he could find, other than Mrs. McIntyre’s. You can almost see it now can’t you, the little doggy fur-ball yapping and snarling, pausing and then making a tripod on the lawn as its little intestines struggle to void themselves on the sparkling grass blades?

Sometimes he would be sprayed with a garden hose, other times he took a meaty newspaper to the hind flanks. But he was never deterred. Mrs. McIntyre seemed to never understand the rage her little dog provoked among her neighbors.  Maybe she thought that her longevity had provided her the right to let her dog use everyone yard as its personal toilet? She was challenged on this point many times. But it didn’t seem like anyone was getting through.

Picture this if you will, this spreading, smoldering resentment against this old woman smelling of stale perfume and dry apricots oblivious to the anger poisoning this otherwise peaceful neighborhood. As you watch from high above on the telephone wires with the crows this little dog is spreading malaise all over the place like a furry bumblebee−with his tiny turds−and it seems everyone is powerless to stop it.

Mrs. McEntyre was not as you would say a “caregiver.” Mr. McIntyre lay naked under the sheets in his bed trying to breathe through green oxygen tubes most of the day. He had succumbed to jet fuel poisoning at the engine manufacturing plant. She brought him tea with oatmeal and would spoon feed him like a large, wrinkled baby. Then she’d leave him to the heat and silence while she watched the Soaps twenty to thirty steps away in the TV area. There she would coo and scowl at the TV as its plastic life flickered across her red eyes. Outside Ritzy would be asleep under the tall junipers, his puffy tail taunting the sun.

How do you know when you’ve had enough? Manuel Esqueva was trying to be a good neighbor. He exercised restraint with the little dog. He would dutifully head out across his green lawn with a black shovel and scoop the tiny turds up and bury them in the Jalapeno garden.  His wife had died last summer. She was the one who knew English best and without her Manuel was lost. He stopped driving to the store; he attempted to wash large sheets in the small washer and dryer. He was a stranger in a strange land.  “El dios bendice los estados unidos.”

So now you see how the dynamics of this story is evolving. Lawler Street is set up like any other neighborhood all across the United States. Here a house, there a fence, then another house. The yards cut and splice themselves together up and down the street, some well trimmed, others a weed garden. And all the while the furry bumblebee and its unsuspecting mistress have no idea how powerful the rage is mounting. How could they know, where were the indications? When does the “annoying” traipse menacingly over into the “homicidal?” At what point does that button get pushed?

“I’m sorry my dog shit in your yard” the apology would go. Nod and smile embarrassed but never once pick up a shovel and cure the offending stain. On and on the drama goes and people just shrug and talk trash about what they’d do to “that little bastard” if they ever got him alone. Some of the impromptu revenge scenarios were funny, some cruel. But for the most part it was just talk. Everyone was just talking…that’s all.

Ultimately we come to the day when the talk suddenly got serious. It was what we call the “fateful day.” It was a day with a big yellow sun in the sky and flocks of crows bouncing on telephone wires looking with shiny black eyes down on Manuel’s driveway. His brother-in-law had called early that morning and asked if he could go through his sister’s clothes again this Sunday. He was looking for a broach his mother had asked about at the supper table last night.  And so Manuel had walked out into the garage already collecting the days’ heat and started the car to move it away from the clothes boxes.

He missed his wife. He missed talking to her in the evenings on the porch, the tea clinking in iced glasses. He missed her smell. He missed her voice. He missed her sex. He engaged the gears of the transmission and glanced into the rear view. His eyes fixed on the ball of fur forty feet to his rear licking itself. Not five feet away he saw the brown humped back of a tiny turd resting in his freshly mowed lawn. Something snapped.

Manuel gunned the engine and with no thought of the consequences slipped into reverse and spun the tires. The little dog had no time to react. There was a small “thump” off of the tire and he tumbled in a fur-ball across the yard and then sprawled out settling into eternal sleep like a fuzzy little flower, twitched a little, then collapsed into the grass, his bloody tongue lolling at the green blades. Manuel got out of the car as Mrs. McIntyre dropped the garden hose and came screeching around the white fence to throw herself on the dead Ritzy. No one else was home and heard or saw anything. It was just Manuel, Mrs. McEntyre and a dead Ritzy. Time was trapped in the rays of the sun and the hot air like a white bug in a spider’s web.

Manuel stood on the driveway, a smear of dark blood streaking at an angle across the cement to the place where Mrs. McIntyre pawed at Ritzy’s bloody hair.  She stopped petting the dog and sat up, her eyes fixed on Manuel’s.

“You did this on purpose you damn Wetback,” she snarled. “You killed my dog!” She was right, both times unfortunately.

She struggled to her feet, her eyes never leaving Manuel’s. She rose up from the grass, dog’s blood smearing the flower patterns of her summer dress.  Her bony frame seemed to move towards him in a series of weird, mechanical robotics. Her eyes were brim full of blue hatred. Her yellow teeth chattered in her wrinkled mouth from rage. Manuel saw the Devil rise up in her tissues and animate her old body with waves and waves of beet red white woman’s angry bald faced, ass kicking righteousness.

“I knew I should have called Immigration on you months ago,” she hissed as she struggled towards the shaking Manuel. He was wondering what he had woken. It was like when he had troubled a snake’s lair on sunny day in Mexico and a rattler had chased him for a quarter mile before slithering into some cactus. This was something truly evil coming towards him now and he felt his heart racing in his chest.  The snake in the pink summer hat was advancing quickly, its bony arms flailing the hot summer air. Manuel staggered backwards spinning a wooden lawn chair onto the porch to make way for a quick retreat. He inched along his car burning his palms on the already hot metal.

She was not stopping. The air was blue with curses and agitated with bony, swinging fists. One came down on his passenger side rear view shattering its mirror. He danced backwards among the trash cans and around the side of the building. She followed him, cursing all the way. He saw the old snake coiling and undulating, raising herself to strike and that’s when his hands reached for the shovel. The black metal scoop came down in a hard and fast arch and made a sonorous sort of “bong,” off of the woman’s skull. Her blue eyes rolled up inside her head, her teeth ceased to chatter, and she collapsed in front of him like a sack of potatoes.

The silence afterwards drifted upwards into the hot face of the sun. Clocks stopped. He felt the red blood cells in his veins seize. His lungs contracted with panic and heat. He rushed over to the old snake and held her head in his large hands. She stared in the bright yellow eye of the sun and didn’t blink.

“Ah mi Dios. ¿Qué acontecerá a mí?”

What would he do now? Who could he tell? He had killed the old woman with a shovel. The “Policia” wouldn’t understand his broken English. Where was his wife when he needed her? He patted the old woman’s face. Blood from her head wound spattered on her cheek. He took off the pink hat and felt a dollar size plate of her skull shift under his bloody palm. There was no putting the old woman back together again, or her dog.

What would you do in his place? His neighbor was in his yard, her skull broken by his shovel. Mercifully no one saw. Cars passed by the house but the stucco walls blocked them enough that the drivers didn’t seem to notice anything.  Manuel lifted the old woman and carried her to his back porch. He sat her in a rusted lounge chair like a rubber store mannequin and she seemed to disassemble into the fabric. Her skin was dry and like the leather of old saddles. She had pissed herself. This was awful. He sank under a sense of having done the most terrible thing he could have done in all his life. He had to hide it somehow. It had to go away. He couldn’t live another second with this evil on his porch, this human tragedy, this huge white mistake.  And then there was the damn dog.

Manuel retrieved the Devil Dog and stuffed him into a black garbage bag from the kitchen. Then he rushed back out to the driveway and quickly washed down the dog blood on the cement and the grass. The jet of water disturbed a veil of flies. As neighbors three doors down passed by in their station wagon they waved, and he waved back hoping his smile didn’t look too creepy.  The dog was easy to take care of. The woman would be another matter.

What would he say at confession? Forgive me for killing an old woman whose dog shit on my yard? What would he tell her kids when they came over to see their mother next door? What would he tell the old man? He looked at her face as the flies licked lazily at her blood and tried to erase her dead eyes from his mind. Why couldn’t he take the morning back? He would gladly let that dog shit all over his yard forever just to take one minute of this day back.

He couldn’t call the police. Here he was with a bloody shovel and a dead white woman and no excuses. He only had a green card. There goes his citizenship. How would he live with himself now? He could see his arm waive as the woman’s children came up the dry walk surrounded by her dead, un-watered flowers. “Where did all these newspapers come from,” the daughter would say. He could hear the scream of anguish in his mind when they found her, and dropped to his knees on the warm grass.  He crossed himself and felt faint.

The old Gringa had to disappear. She had to go away. It would be like she never existed. That was the only solution. He rose up like brown smoke from the grass and turned to the corpse in the lawn chair. He dragged her and the chair into the garage. He needed a cervesa. There is no need to do anything without a cervesa. It always turned out wrong without one. Inside the refrigerator hummed and throttled on the freezer cycle. He opened it up and cool mist seeped out and searched along on the hot air for something. The cervesa was very chill, and tasted bitter on his tongue. He drank the whole thing and then got another. In the kitchen sink, dishes baked in their own grease. Flies left dark spots on the windows. He missed his wife.

What are you going to do with the old Gringa, Carone? He went back out into the garage. There was a tree saw, a gas hedger, an axe. To make the old Gringa disappear he would have to carve her up like a deer. That was the only way. He selected the tree saw and knelt over her. He would need to strip her; he couldn’t cut through all that material. He swallowed his rising gorge. This was going to be “muy feo.”

He took off her blouse and dress, then trying to avert his eyes he turned her over and removed her bra. Her flesh was like raw leather speckled with herd after herd of dark moles and age spots. She smelled of talcum and piss. He removed her dress, her shoes and support stockings. There she was now on the garage floor like a used up child drying out like a large white Jalapeno.  He removed his shirt and put shop coveralls on, then held the tree limb blade over her right elbow. He would remove things down to the trunk. He drew back the blade and made it lightly skim over her wrinkled skin. The saw teeth bit and blood came.

“What do you think you’re doing you lousy Wet Back?’ she hollered into the cool cement. “Ahhh,” she added, “He’s trying to rape me!”

She rolled back and forth on the cement like a large white bug. He screamed and struggled backwards falling against the washing machine. She tried to roll her shoulder to get up, threatening him all the time.  The snake was alive and after his soul again. He crossed himself and crawled along the washer and dryer to where a pick axe hung between two nails. He lifted it from the wall and turned to the snake with his weapon raised high in the air.

“Muéralo Diablo!”

It came down in an arch and hit her knee. She screeched like a tea pot so loudly he thought he felt the tool rack shake. She was up and swinging even on that sagging knee. He screamed in terror dropping the pick axe and fumbling for a screw driver. Gripping the handle of the biggest one he could find he swung it at her wildly. She fended him off and grabbed his brown hand and sank her teeth into the flesh.  He screamed and pushed her backwards, she struggled in the air for a moment like some giant white Mantis, then fell, sliding across the garage floor and hitting her head on a cement utility sink footing. The already broken skull bone finally gave up and settled into her brain like a plastic spoon in melting ice cream.

Her eyes once again rolled back into her head and she looked as though she had finally breathed her last. He crossed himself and fell on her now with the tree limb cutter.

Hours later he opened the garage door, backed the car out and washed the blood off the floor through the back door. Everything smelled wet. He was surrounded by black garbage bags, neatly bound in silver duct tape. Now what did he do? This wasn’t good. Anyone could find these bags and trace them back to him. He wasn’t done yet. He felt the Devil laughing at him from the darkness of the garage as he closed the large door.

He whipped out his cell phone and called that pinche cousin in Lakewood. That donkey owed him a favor for letting him use the car to make a run to Mexico last summer. Pinche Alvarez would have to bring over that wood chipper tonight…”y rapidamente.”

Two hours later the wood chipper arrived, Alvarez had a cervesa and one for the road, and as his tail lights bounced out the driveway on the way back to Lakewood, Manuel got to work quickly to finish before 9:00 so that no one would call the police for the noise.

No one called. “Dé gracias a Dios.” The little dog went into the wood chipper as an after thought.

In the morning as the police were arriving next door and it seemed the whole neighborhood was awake and gathering in front of the old Gringa’s house, Manuel was washing out the wood chipper.  Now everything was in two bags all mixed in with branches from the peach tree he trimmed down a week ago. Everything was nice and mulched and ready for a trash run. Pinche Alvarez could take the bags to the dump when he took back the chipper.

The red and blue lights from the three cop cars whirled around touching and coloring everything in the neighborhood caught in the dissolving morning shadow. The old Gringa’s daughter wept loudly in the driveway. Neighbors talked amongst themselves in clusters. A detective even asked Manuel if he had seen anything.  “No, hice no,” he said to the police interpreter.  He had no idea where the old Gringa was, or her dog.

Later, Manuel burned the old Gringa’s clothes including the pink hat. No one thought it was strange that he didn’t burn his leaves too. The ambulance came for the old man and carted him off. They took those big green oxygen tanks with him. Manuel went to the refrigerator and got a cold cervesa. He walked to the porch where he and his wife had spent so much time, and sat down in his wicker chair. He put his feet up on the low porch railing. As he raised the cervesa to his lips he saw something on the lawn. He got up and stepped down the porch and over to it. He knelt and picked it up. It was a red collar with a medal marked “Ritzy” attached to it.

“What an old pain in the ass!” Bob Forrester said from the end of his driveway. “Do you have any idea where the old broad went Manuel?’

Manual slipped the collar into his pocket and shrugged his shoulders. “Yo no hablo ingles,” he told his neighbor.

“Well wherever she is I hope she took that goddamn dog with her,” Forrester said as he turned to walk back up his driveway.  Manuel saluted Forrester’s back with his cervesa and then went to his own porch.

It was dark and the crickets were chirping as pinche Alvarez drove up with his truck a day later and loaded the bags in the bed while hooking up the chipper to the tow hitch.  “Damn eseh, did you shit in these bags,” he said, wrinkling his nose as he slung them into the truck bed. Hours later he was on his way to the dump and Manuel was watching the moths flutter around the porch light.

He would wash the shovel soon enough. He wouldn’t need it for the dog shit any more.

He went to bed hours later with this terrible feeling that he had done something very wrong again. The teeth marks on his hand had grown an angry red from infection. What if somebody asked him about them? Did the detectives see? He thought he hid his hand pretty well in the interview. Maybe not well enough. Any minute someone would come and accuse him of killing the old Gringa and they would be right. He sat on the bed curled around a pillow under a crucifix on the wall. Who could forgive him of what he had done? Only the Devil.

He looked at the picture of his wife smiling at him from the bed stand under the glow of the lamp−and then tried to sleep.  After a little while, he turned off the lights and lay there in the darkness. Outside in an unmarked car two detectives smoked and watched Manuel’s house until the lights went off in the bedroom, and then they slowly drove away.

Late For Work

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 07:56:55 PDT

Late For Work, an Allegory

Morning came to Axle’s window. The glass was obscured with filth and Morning just stood there looking in, unable to see anything inside. All around the city hummed, hissed and beeped. Outside Axle’s apartment the World walked about with heavy feet, it brushed its teeth, it combed its hair. The World sat down to the kitchen table and poured its coffee and got ready to begin the day. Axel watched the World from his bed, the sheets so unwashed they were like crepe. Axel had to get in gear or be late for work.

Axel looked hard at the windows of his bedroom. He saw the light fingering the window glass like brilliant butterflies. He blinked them away. Focusing beyond the glass through the dirt and dust, he vaguely saw the city reach out a steak knife, trying to carve up the minutes of the day for everyone, serving it to them like a smothering, over bearing Mother. Axel was still in bed. He raised himself from the sheets, stood up and strolled naked across the floor like a drunken surveyor, marking out the distance with shaky strides. It was a short few steps from the bed to the bathroom. Above him, as he sat on the toilet, a single bulb whined. A moment later last night’s dinner spun down the pipes and out to sea. This was a good beginning.

He wiped, stood up from the toilet, and looked weakly into the glass of the mirror. His face was gang-beaten by Time, what used to look like the familiar child in the family photo book now appeared swollen and abused like a roughed up Potato Head. The dark jaw erupted in stubble as if his lower face had been swarmed by tiny black ants. It was painful to look at himself. The pain felt like a toothache that settled like a cat with long claws on the top of his brain, trapped in the dome of the skull’s brain pan, purring and kneading the red tissue with long, pin sharp nails.

He stabbed at his teeth with a stiff toothbrush. Outside a dog urinated on the tires of his car. His garbage can sat in the driveway erupting with TV dinners. The sun crawled weakly up the dome of the sky, shadows spreading like spilled ink on the park grass and sidewalks. Axel was going to be late for work.

He stopped brushing his teeth and looked down into the bowl of the bathroom sink, and saw a tooth. He thought at first that it might be popcorn. He fingered it curiously. It was a tooth. On the sink porcelain the tooth was surrounded by a swirl of gray hair. It was just a skiff of hair, but it was enough to make him pause. He was balder in the mirror today. The angry bathroom light bulb reflected a hard white shine on the dome of his head. He stood at the sink like a speaker at a lectern.

Something fell to the floor with a small thud.

It tumbled behind the toilet. The cold from the bathroom tile crawled up the muscles in his legs from the bottom of his feet. He noticed in the mirror that an ear was missing. He wiggled his toes and something snapped softy, and rolled away.  It was getting late. He had to focus. No time to be chasing things on the floor. The sun straddled his apartment and made the tarred roofing waffle with heat. Cats left the rooftop for cooler napping places and birds huddled under leaves and awnings to shield their dusty feathers from the hot fingers of the sun. Damn! He had to find that ear. He crawled around until he found the toe that had come away instead and rolled behind the toilet. It crumbled in his hand. He was definitely late now. No time for this crap.

All over the World the work-day was in full swing. In an office far away a water bottle in a lobby somewhere made an oily gulping sound as someone poured themselves a drink. The city water was too full of bugs to want to drink it. In his apartment though, Axel dealt handily with the bugs. Everything always smelled of Raid. Now his knee was numb. The bones ratcheted around in the socket when he turned to face the toilet again. How was he ever going to get to work like this?

He glared at the mirror of the medicine chest. He scratched his right breast crowned by a hard, berry colored nipple, and something popped softly, spun downward and made a plunking sound in the toilet. He pivoted on one foot to look, and felt the ankle powder under the skin and collapse like a mound of stiff sand. He needed to go to the kitchen. His foot dragged along on the tile floor of the bathroom dissolving into it as he reached for the knob of the door to steady himself. His boss was going to be pissed.

On the TV news in Axle’s apartment the broadcaster wondered out loud if Iraq would ever become a sovereign nation. Then a smiling man burst down a mountain road in an SUV while his vehicle changed shape and color all the way down, like a chameleon on crack. TV would help Axel concentrate on getting to work. He shuffled to the kitchen, but on the linoleum halfway there the joint in his hip made a soft popping sound and his leg shot to the left as he grabbed at it like a man fumbling for a dropped crutch. He let it go. Dammit he was late. He filled the coffee maker with grounds hopping around in the kitchen on one leg. Then he went to the sink to get water.

He felt the temperature of the flow from the tap with his finger for no reason, and looked out across the driveway to the street beyond. People walked back and forth like cardboard targets. He thought briefly that perhaps he was looking at a personal shooting gallery; back and forth the cardboard caricatures of human beings ratcheted, and if he could hit one or two what would he win? Then again what would he hit them with, a dirty look? He glanced down and saw the water had dissolved his forefinger and carved a groove in the two fingers below it. He was holding the water receptacle around the bottom of the plastic handle with his pinky. He carefully placed it in the coffee maker, flipped it on with what was left of his finger and waited for the coffee to perk.

He sat down feeling the vinyl seat of his dining room chair on his bare ass. He absently kneaded his genitals waiting for the coffee. There had been a time that doing this would have evolved into several hours of enthusiastic impromptu happy masturbation. This time he sighed as his scrotum came away in his hand. He held it up for a few minutes feeling its weight. He thought of things that he had held before that weighed the same as his scrotum. He bounced it all in his hand a little, the penis slipping through his missing upper fingers and dropping to the floor to explode in a small cloud of dust. The coffee bubbled and croaked in the pot. He set his balls on the table carefully, whining a little as they rolled off onto the floor and under his TV chair.

He would be fired today for not showing up for work. What excuse could he give? Should he call in sick? Outside, in offices all over the World people moved back and forth between cubicles focused on the task for the day. On their desks were pictures of their families. Eighty percent of their time was spent in that cubicle. He saw them dissolving in each little space like snails hit with salt, hissing and bubbling, their work place noisily becoming a damp, empty shell. He sighed and tried to handle the sugar with missing fingers. Instead he spilled it on the surface of the dining room table and floor. No sugar today.

The coffee had finally perked. He stood on one leg to pour it, and winced a little as the skin of his ass remained on the chair dissolving into a dust doughnut. He hopped to the counter, poured the coffee with his good hand and tried to sip it. He felt the steam dissolve his upper lip. Air blew across his exposed teeth and gums. Determined, he tried again, the coffee burning his inner mouth. He mumbled his anger at the staring sink erupting with unwashed dishes. He had to call in to the boss. He was sure he would be fired this time.

The work day wore on. The sun moved behind the tall office buildings. Clouds puffed and blew about windy skyscraper tops while birds drifted in the air around them. Inside, people mapped out the minutes of their lives from job to job. Here and there a personal touch or two bled into the fabric of the workday. It was like a stain on someone’s underwear. It was accidental humanity.

He stood on one leg in the middle of his apartment. The TV complained about high gas prices. Osama bin Ladin bitched again about how America misunderstood him. The World dragged itself into the afternoon like a struggling dung beetle pushing its own waste uphill. He tried to pick up the phone but his remaining fingers snapped off his palm from the pressure. They flopped onto the top of the phone table, one falling on the floor behind it. He would explain his lateness to his boss, as soon as he figured out how to dial the phone.

Then again, where was he going today really? He hopped to his recliner and sat down heavily. He pushed back to raise the foot rest and felt his arms pop from the elbows and roll into his lap. He cried. The fingers left on the phone table dissolved like sand. The leg on the floor disintegrated and blew around in a breeze from the kitchen window. Outside someone yelled obscenities at a cabdriver. People were closing their briefcases and shutting down their office computers all over the World. It was quitting time. The sun ducked shyly behind the trees of the city park. Homeless people stirred.

He sat in his chair feeling his chest dissolve into the slick vinyl fabric. He sobbed. His pelvis softened in the seat and collapsed into the wooden frame and metal springs of the chair. In the gathering darkness a little while later his eyes stared sadly out of the ball of dust that had become his head, and then imploded and blew away with his skull.

It was “after work hour.” The streets were haunted now with people trying to have a “kick-ass Friday night.” They migrated to the bars like angry moths. In the dark booths at the strip clubs men talked too loudly and women painted themselves too thickly with the colors of war between the sexes. Urine misted off walls in alleys. Dumpsters echoed the stomach churning growl of dry heaves. At restaurants secretaries argued the drama of that week snitching on each other as if it mattered to anyone but them.

A man somewhere tried to touch his Girl Friday’s shoulder explaining that he couldn’t divorce his wife of 15 years just yet. Be patient baby. She shrunk from his fingers. Days ago she threw herself at him with a kind of abandon she hadn’t felt since high school. All that didn’t matter now. She had become a thing, like the stapler or the letter opener. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what to say. She stared at the gathering night sky and the bright, burning stars blossoming on an inky blue atmospheric dome. Her eyes ached with a pain that gripped her lungs and made it hard to take a breath.  It was lousy to be a thing.

The workplace was like a Petri dish, the relationships evolving like bacteria. It felt like slavery, and yet everyone had their own radio, CD players, wide-screen TV’s and SUV’s. They had all become affluent slaves. But they still kept burning themselves on that bug light, the one that entices them to be scorched by their pain even though they should know better than to keep going there. The streets settled into the deepest part of the night bordering on the onset of morning. Time passed like the inner spindly intricacies of a spider building a web.

Somewhere someone was murdered and disposed of in a cold river. Somewhere else someone had fevered sex on cool, clean bed sheets. A baby cried in a crib. A dog whimpered in its dreams. Buses and trains moved to and fro across the great, pulsing network of life that feeds and nurtures every city. And yet what had to be the fate of human beings that tried to live in accordance with the rules of steel, concrete, Xerox and fax machines? What did exposure to all this finally make them become?

The TV announcer on Axle’s Television said there was no relief in sight for the gas price disaster bringing this nation to its knees. Next door the music of an all night party thumped and shouted against the adjoining walls to Axle’s apartment. A woman whooped wildly somewhere, a live rock band played in a garage several blocks away, until police showed up. The World staggered on its own great feet into another relentless cycle of day and night around Axle’s dry little apartment in the middle of Everything, Everywhere.

The wind blew softly through the screen of the kitchen window. In the early morning darkness the TV cast the living room in a blue glow. Cats moved along the wood fence outside, their shadows creeping across the wide face of the waning moon.  They blocked the light that powdered the reclining chair in a hoary whiteness, their dark twins padding across the stuffed fabric in smoky duplication.

In the frame of that light a beating heart dissolved into the springs, wood and cushions of the powder blue recliner.  In a few hours the clock radio would go on and the day would begin.

But Axel, he would be late for work.

Red Tooth (chapter 1)

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 12:44:13 PST

Prologue:

The rabbit had been attacked as the large diamond back had made its way to the shaded place under the railroad tracks of the trestle. The snake moved fast and the rabbit made a series of bad moves and boxed itself in, its back against granite rocks supporting one end of the bridge.  Diamond backs usually eat rodents and have been known to dine on carrion when hungry. This one was about 37 inches long. She was around 15 years old, was hungry and wanted that rabbit.

This rattlesnake could lift itself around twenty inches off the ground to strike. It knew it had its prey cornered. The shadow of the raised head waved across the panting hide of the terrified rabbit.  The snake was targeting the dusty fur of its prey just behind the ears. As it prepared to strike, a cloud of dust drifted upwards from the dirt behind it and a boy’s hand darted out grabbing the scaly tissue right behind the poison glands of the rattler. The snake went ballistic and tried to coil around the boy’s tanned arm, hissing, venom spilling from hollow fangs.

The boy pressed the head against a vandalized petroglyph on the granite rocks and crushed it quickly with a large stone. The small brains and skull smeared the hot rock surface as the snake kept coiling and uncoiling. The boy waited for the thing to die properly, its blood smeared across the concentrically expanding circles of the Ghost dancer petroglyph ruined with purple spray paint. Once it had died he turned it around and took out his greasy hunting knife from the black scabbard on his belt and cut the snake from the head and across the belly to where white meets black. Cutting the meat at the base of the tail he peeled it away from the hide.

The head had been crushed but he knew enough to not handle it. The poison could still kill him. He chopped the meat into three inch pieces and ate it raw. Rattlesnake meat doesn’t taste “like chicken.” It’s stringy and tastes more like Cornish Hen or pork. He had not eaten for two days and anything was good to him at that moment. The blood and tissue of the snake smeared his dirty fingers and hands and darkened the area around his mouth.  The desert dirt made him look like some subhuman creature emerged from a prehistoric hiding place in hopes of avoiding the steamy breath and long fangs of the Saber Tooth to score a modest meal.

The rabbit, spared death in the belly of the diamond back watched the boy wipe his hands on his filthy pants and turn towards the valley that loped into the dirt roads bounded by rusted barbed wire. The rabbit flitted off through the dry mesquite. The sun was high and hot as the boy shuffled his dirty tennis shoes through the dust, and it caused distant things to ripple and wave with the heat. The temperature was hovering around 110 when he finally arrived at the main gate of his father’s cattle ranch. He paused as his hand unconsciously touched at the belt marks on his sparse ribs. He padded his way up the dirt road to the house, hoping his father was gone and he could find something to eat or at least wash the dust down.  To him, this road lined with rusted barbed wire was the road to Hell.

In This Place There Be Monsters:
Many years ago it is said that the Nevada Desert was the home of great, oceanic monsters. They moved to and fro meeting in relentless feeding frenzies gouging flesh from hapless victims in bloody prehistoric waters. It is fitting that these monsters once prowled these ancient oceans. The desert feels like a place that would host them nicely. It  is a cauldron of heated hunger, things killing and eating under the relentless sun in summer, and then trying to hide themselves from winter snows at higher elevations. The food chain steams and ripples in the hot noon day sun.
The “Great Basin” confederation is defined as a contiguous watershed. It sits between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada’s like a scar. It has no natural outlet to the sea and covers most of the state, half of Utah and parts of California, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. Lake Lahontan extending in prehistory across much of Northern Nevada left us the Carson Sink, Humbolt Sink and Walker and Pyramid Lake. All that is left of the monsters that lurked in the depths of its ancient seas are bones on display in the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park.
The land can be harsh. The heat must have driven early settlers mad at times. The cool winds from the great seas that ebbed and flowed under a prehistoric moon had long fled the parched earth. But sometimes relief can come. Rain has fed the playas that wet the land and then dried up almost overnight but somehow, that was enough for life. Water was always a prime commodity. It could be that in generations to come seismic events could once again make the valley a teeming ocean full of toothy killing machines. If there was ever a fitting place for something beastly and ravenous to be born in, it would be the Nevada desert.
It is this cauldron of dust, rain, and snow that a tortured life came to be, the son of Alex Kehoe and Justine Hallweather. It would be Ethan Kehoe, who would stalk the trucker’s long-haul routes of the west coast for years in various hijacked semis, littering the silence of the desert with his cold blue mannequins, homely decorations for the dry, bitter desert dust. This is his story told as best as it can be told, the story of “Red Tooth.”

Alex Kehoe had herded cattle since he was a little boy riding with his father up and down the west coast to meat processing places, the cattle bawling and shuffling in the herds driven from station to station. He remembered loading the stock on trains that would take them to the packers centered on the rails. No one killed the heifers then.
He recalled seeing refrigerator cars loaded with the carcasses of beef with boxes of ham, bacon, and lamb butchered animals wrapped in cheese cloth, and veal with the hide still on. He learned to understand the bovine consciousness as he led them to their death and often would look into their eyes as they were herded into the processing pens. He always saw nothing there, no fear, no hopelessness, no anxiety, nothing.
Cattle have panoramic vision. They can see all around themselves without turning their head. The cattle in this load today moved deliberately past pressure treated posts towards the “squeeze,” a device that squeezes the cattle and calms them for shots, vet examinations and such. Cattle follow the leader. This is why the single file chute should be anywhere from 30 to 50 feet. If you isolate them, cattle can become distressed. If one balks you need to release it from that group, and put it with the next one. Kehoe was careful with the stock. Very few made it to “the knocker” with injuries.
There had to be no sudden changes in lighting, floor level or texture. Cattle have a tendency to move towards the light. At night a frosted light bulb can guide them where you want them to go. But cattle will balk if they are headed directly into the sun. Kehoe was aware of this and built his loading chutes and squeeze pointing south to manage the sun angle.
Once the cattle were delivered to the Ormsby Meat Packing Plant they faced the knocker. They would come there fat and awkward in their gate. Their fate would be sealed by the words “This pen is ready.” At the plant they would be put in a holding place and await their turn. When the time came they would go through the blue door. No one can go in there but slaughter house personnel.
The animal’s go in single file and pass over a bar, their legs on both sides. The floor drops away and they’re carried along on a bar. They pass through a station where a man stands on a catwalk. He’s holding the “stunner.” It’s pneumatic. This shoots a bolt about the size and length of a large pencil into the cattle’s brain, between the eyes.
Chains are attached to its rear legs, and the animal is lifted. It is carried along by an overhead trolley to another station where a man sticks a long knife into its aorta to finish the kill. From there the cattle gets cleaned up, gutted, the hide removed…all the while trying to keep the shit the animals have lived their whole life from infecting the meat. This happens at 300, to 400 cattle an hour.
Alex Kehoe had seen the cattle go into the slaughter house one way and come out another many times. Before heading home he would sit in the cab of his Freightliner semi and listen to country and western music while sipping hot coffee, and then fire up the truck and return to his ranch in Snake Valley Nevada. The ride was long and he always had plenty of time to think. Mostly it was about Justine Hallweather. Beside him in the cab of the truck his son Ethan sat on the warm seat picking desert dust out of his nose and carving on a cut-off broom stick.  He was trying to shape the head of a horse.
As Alex double clutched is way down 395 he thought about the blond woman in the kitchen of his ranch house. Once he had to call Child Welfare on her for locking Ethan in a closet the week he had to make a haul to California. Ethan had bruises and had lost about ten pounds. He screamed when Alex opened the door of the closet and came out swinging. Alex had to knock him out with the leg of a broken chair. Now the boy rode with him.
When he arrived at the ranch and got out of the truck cab to investigate the open door of the trailer he discovered Justine with a guy in a red baseball cap. They were humped over a dirty mattress and she was moaning as he hammered her from behind like a red capped woodpecker. Alex let them finish and then he strolled back to the house to get his shot gun.
Ethan watched this still sitting in the truck cab. He had stopped whittling and was watching his dad now trying to look over the large steering wheel above the dirty tachometer.  Alex came back out of the house and from the driveway fired two shots into the trailer. Birds blew out of the rafters of the barn in a small storm of feathered bodies at the shot gun blasts and spun shrilling like banshees into the hot desert sun. Ethan hopped on the warm seat material, startled and thrilled by the noise at the same time. The guy in the red baseball cap came out struggling to get his pants up while Justine howled with laughter.
She was laughing hysterically. Snot blew out of her nose as she tried to tuck a tit back into her bra. She was naked from the waist down and stood in the door of the trailer trembling with laughter while she was trying to dress herself.
“Get out here,” Alex said gesturing with the barrel of the shot gun.
She did what he said for once.
Ethan braced himself on the steering wheel raising himself up watching the drama unraveling in the dirt driveway below him. No one seemed to notice he was even there.
“You came back sooner than I expected,” she giggled. “I just needed a little money. You don’t leave me shit to live on around here.”
Alex used the shotgun to gesture what he meant when he said. “Kneel right here.”
The barrel dipped at a place a foot or two in front of him. Still smiling but not giggling any more Justine complied, licking her tongue across her lips as she did it. She winked at him.
She was drunk.
He raised the shotgun holding it like it was his sex organ and gestured to her with a nod. She waddled closer on her knees and looked at him, squinting her eyes at the sun that tried to peek past his left ear.
“Do it,” he ordered. There was no anger in his voice which made him all the more frightening.
She hovered her mouth around the hot metallic exit of the shotgun barrel. He could see her teeth fillings it was so wide. She coughed from the dust. He drew back the hammer on the shotgun. It made a slick, ratcheting noise.
“I told you if I ever seen you trying to fuck the neighbors again I’d shoot you didn’t I?” She wasn’t smiling or laughing now. She nodded as best she could without letting the hot metal scorch her lips.
“I want to see what it’s like for a human head to bust like a pumpkin, and today you just gave me an excuse.”
Ethan could feel his heart beating in his chest. His hands were burning on the part of the steering wheel still in the sun but he couldn’t tear himself away from what was happening there in the driveway. Was he going to kill her? What did a head look like exploded like a pumpkin anyway? He was riveted to the scene before him, the pain in his hands almost unnoticed. He was frozen to the moment, fear and a creeping sense of dark delight washing over his senses.  Would that bitch get hers today?  He wasn’t moving from this place, he wanted to see this and not miss a minute of it.
She tried to move her knees in the sand to avoid a burn. Her hands were resting on her breasts and she was sobering up quickly. She moved her head away from the barrel and looked away from the sun emerging over the crown of his wind blown hair.
“Come on Alex this ain’t sexy any more,” she said.
He pushed the metal of the muzzle against the area over her right ear and made it hurt. She let out a squeal but didn’t move. Her left hand threatened to brush the barrel away but it remained suspended frozen inches from its target.
“Let me up you asshole,” she said through clenched teeth.
“All I got to do is blow your brains across this drive, hang you up and take you apart with my cattle knives and no one would miss your sorry ass.”
She said nothing in response, just wiggled.
“Yes!” Ethan hissed from his position in the cab. “Oh yes!” His back and thighs tensed.
A dog barked in a stockyard in the distance. A zephyr danced a cloud of sand around the driveway tugging at their hair and clothes damp with sweat. Alex’s finger tensed around the trigger of the shotgun. He was looking down the shiny barrel to where the muzzle had secreted itself in her wet blond hair. He watched sweat trickle from her hair line and down her white neck. It was starting to blush with the sun. His finger tensed a little more.
“Let me up you sonofabitch,” she growled and tried to rise to her feet but he kept her pinned there with the tube of the shotgun barrel.
This was the moment Alex had ached for those long hours in his semi, the cattle bawling in the trailer behind him, their urine sloshing out at every turn. He had visualized in his mind her death, her lengthy dismemberment, his triumph over her nasty, dirty ass. He had thought of each step in her demise, the “stunning,” then the gutting, the skinning and the dissection and maybe he would eat something, anything…to make it final, to seal it with some sort of primitive gesture of total control over her.
“Come on Alex, let’s go inside,” she said, sober now and a little scared. She tried to get up and he forced her back down again, the muzzle of the gun bruising the scalp over her ear. “Ow,” she said weakly.
The she heard the sharp click of the hammer and felt the gun barrel butt against her head as he squeezed the trigger. She gasped for breath.
“You bastard, you would have killed me just then.”
“Get in the house and fix me some lunch and if I catch you spitting in anything I’ll beat the shit out of you again.” Alex cuffed her across the head sending up a lazy, wet tuft of hair flipping on her damp scalp.
She got up giggling now and ran into the house slamming the door behind her. Alex stood in the driveway drenched in sweat feeling the weight of the shotgun in his right hand. He raised it and ejected two spent shells. They tumbled into the dry sand. Stiffly, he walked towards the house, his eyes fixed on the dirty front door.
Ethan could feel the sun from the hot steering wheel now. He sucked in breath from the pain shaking his fanned fingers. His eyes were glazed a little, not so much from the sun and heat but what had charged all his senses seconds ago, and made him hungry for what he felt now in the pit of his stomach, and the chambers of his quickly beating heart.
He climbed out of the truck cab almost tumbling into the dry earth below. He moved towards the spent red shells. He grabbed them up and fled into the barn where he sat behind a hay bale and chewed on the red plastic, hungry for something that he knew would never fill the pit of his stomach or his heart. But he wanted it any way. From the house he could hear shouting and dishes breaking. He chewed the red plastic tasting the spent powder, and his gums bled. As he stared into the sun spilling in a sliver flash of light from behind a broken set of roofing boards the blood made his incisors first pink, and then red.

Coretta

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 08:20:25 PST

CORETTA

We shall overcome.

She sat in the pew holding her child
A black veil over her face
A black veil over the world
A shadow over all things fallen
In the noon day sun
Amongst the sullen rubble
Of our metastasized and persistent tunnel vision.

We shall overcome.

How can we overcome what we can't see?

We shall overcome, some day.

What day is it that we realize
Our real war is not with foreigners or each other,
Our real war is on illness and poverty,
The natural ambitions and worldly goals
Of "One Nation Under God?"

This was the message King gave from the Riverside Church
One year to the day of his assassination.

Oh, deep in my heart,
I do believe
We shall overcome, some day.

She was studying voice at the
New England Conservatory of Music
When a friend introduced her to
Martin Luther King,
A young Baptist minister
Working on a Ph.D. at Boston University.

She was learning to sing,
When she met the man that would reshape her life
As well as the lives of all Americans
From the tight, humped demeanor of bitter prejudice
To the Godly strains of human empathy
And real American justice.

We'll walk hand in hand,
We'll walk hand in hand,
We'll walk hand in hand, some day.

A short while after her husband was murdered
She was walking down a street with mourners
Staring straight ahead, no tears shed,
Looking far away into her husband's dream

Distant, in a shining future place somewhere
Beyond indifference and bias

And lingering, bitter hatred.

We are not afraid,
We are not afraid,
We are not afraid, TODAY

Oh, deep in my heart,

I always knew,
We shall overcome, some day.

The eternal flame burns on the grave sites
Of those who would have taught us well
Had we been able to merge from our caves
To bask in their greater vision

Of a world built
Not so much on the principles of mercy and justice
But the survival of the Human Race
Through cooperation and good will
Not avarice, greed and chronic selfishness.

We ARE afraid
Too afraid to be who we say we are
To afraid to be worthy of democracy
That extols the reality of freedom
Not merely mocks it,

For now.

Let your stoic face
Never fade from our memories
Or our hope.

Good night Coretta.
God bless your brave and righteous heart.

The Lonliest Road (Rough 1)

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 10:47:38 PST

THE LONELIEST ROAD
by J.M. Lamoreux

She discovered something on the sill of the window she was sitting next to. She was eyeing it and caught herself making up explanations of how it got there, what it was, who put it there. The coffee lingered on her teeth and tongue. She licked her lips and tasted strawberry lip-gloss. Her eyes fixed on the red glow of heat within the ash tower of the Marlboro poised between two fingers like an erotic toy. Outside truckers came and went, the harsh Nevada sun darkening their faces, necks and arms.

But that sun was settling now behind the Sierras and one by one those same truckers became ghosts. Ghosts moved about the gas pumps and the asphalt with red, glowing worms poised on bones between thin lips. One of the ghosts would turn and look at her, eyes hidden by mirrored shades, probing the glass of the window between them, looking for her she thought, but instead seeing his reflection and the reddening sky behind him.

She glimpsed her own cigarette hissing at the bottom of an almost empty water glass. A stain tamped out the red fire and claimed parts of the paper shaft. The thing hissed, coughed up smoke and died. She dug the tab out of the tumble of want ads at her table, scoured the curled writing of the server and locked on the sum. The she dug through her purse for the money, found it, gathered herself and rose to pay for her meal at the cash register. In the distance, the sun was leaving the sky, the fierce redness blending now into inky blue, and out of the flesh of it began the first, tentative flicker of stars. To replace the face of the sun, a leering moon rose to take its turn staring at the world.

The moon shone in the windshields of the rows and rows of trucks glistening under the neon lamps. Across the parking lot a hotel blinked room windows at her, warm with the inviting amber light of occupation. In those rooms people were bedding down for the night. They'd arrived at their destination. Here and there the debris of their traveling lives was draped over chairs, crowned beds, floors. Belly’s full, they flicked on the T.V. and allowed their lives to settle around the jittery blue light. She watched this happening behind those warm windows. Her hand pressed the button and the car beeped, locks popping up to greet her with an absurd erection of plastic and metal.

As she sat in the seat her eyes scanned the lights of the city as they tried to pin back the darkness wherever they could. It was a battle between neon and being able to see. The lights drug you towards all sorts of needs, all sorts of desires. The key turned. The engine sputtered into life and began to vibrate, the reliable engineering of the mechanisms inside doing what they're supposed to, reassuring her hands as she felt the engine through the steering wheel. She navigated her way out of the parking lot, her eyes catching the orange light shaped like a person in a seat belt. She snapped herself in. The light went away. She navigated to a Freeway on-ramp with an arrow pointed north on 395. She made the cusp and blended with the six o'clock traffic flow.

Miles away another scene unraveled in the desert. A man stood among the desert flora. In the distance he sensed coyotes. Now and then their eyes caught the light from his headlamps and floated there in the bushes, hungry and stupid. He was taking a piss, the yellow stream snaking and coiling and dragging a yellow finger through the dust. He was humming a Beatles song "Love Me Do" and grunted when the stream stopped. The red eyes of the coyotes bobbed in disembodied fashion among the sage brush. They were attracted to something in a culvert about twenty feet from the running engine of the truck. Dust and bugs spun and played around in the dissolving beams of the lights. The night was punctuated with the predatory sound of a closing zipper. The coyotes were repelled by something in that sound and danced back into the darkness wary and afraid.

He turned and walked to a culvert. There in the truck lights he knelt in the sand. By his knee the bruised hand of Sally Morris wore a tiny silver ring on her pinky finger. He took the hand in his own, like a bird that he had rescued from a fall. He put it to his lips and hummed into the cold flesh the song "Beautiful Dreamer.” He laid the hand over a small, delicately formed breast. He stood looking down into the dead eyes of this young woman. His head cocked, like a raptor eyeing the scurrying body of a field mouse. She was staring into the night sky, her eyes looking into Eternity, and he found himself trying to see what she was seeing. He looked, probed the black of the frozen iris. After a few minutes he gave up, grunted to himself and returned to the truck. He hoisted himself into the raised driver's seat, flipped the CB back on and paused to take out and light a cigarette. The engine roared and shook under his supplications as he agitated it into a roaring cacophony of power. His eyes never once flew back to look at the pale white thing he had left naked and dead in that culvert. Instead he wiped sweat away from his head with a wad of T-shirt she'd been wearing only hours ago.

As the headlights scanned the sage brush as the truck hissed and maneuvered in the dust trying to make its way back to the asphalted highway the coyotes hunched and sniffed towards the whiteness in the sand, whose lifeless eyes stared at the stars with a look that would last forever. Soon only the faint shapes of settling dust, the desert air, and the sounds of the night exploring something new that had been tossed to it like some lifeless, horrible gift dominated the murder scene.

Nearing that terrible place but unaware of how close she was to it, the young woman pulled into the deserted campground and was relieved to see rest rooms. She stopped her car just as the headlamps played over the "his and her" symbols. She released the locks while simultaneously unfastening her seat belt. She got out remembering to squeeze the remote lock hearing a "beep.” Then she turned towards the darkness of the rest room. Inside were common smells. She dropped her jeans after securing a wad of toilet paper from a sill and sat. With a sigh, she released everything. Sitting there in the darkness she planned the next ten miles to Susanville. She saw it in her mind's eye. She saw the off-ramps. She saw the next Seven-1 l. She saw the long stretch of mobile homes, the arc lamps toying with all manner of insects. She saw her mother's doublewide and she heard her struggling with the door latch and the slider coming open and that familiar voice saying, "What are you doing here so late?" It was about then that she heard the diesel engine, and saw the lights play across the stall and flash briefly in a mirror.

She got up after wiping herself and collected her jeans. She heard the truck come to a loud and hissing stop and then shut down in noisy increments, then silence. The dragon was at rest. Crickets began to protest the intrusion. She gathered her things and headed out to her car. She squeezed the remote lock when a voice exploded to her left.

"Hey there!"

Her body swung around to face those words. All her attention flooded into each syllable to give it meaning, to weigh it for value, to make out if it was uttered by "friend or foe.” And in a second she had resolved and committed to them in a response.

"You scared me!" "Didn't mean to. Sorry."

Her eyes formed the shape of a man, about six feet tall, short black hair, about 190 pounds. All this was happening in a few brief seconds, not enough to grasp the significance of this meeting, or the awkwardness of the hour and the place, or the danger this all might present. He was smiling she could see, as the likeness of a face began to amass in her field of vision.

"It's dark out here isn't it?" He was still smiling.

"Yes. No city lights."

"Well, I've gotta do my business. Nice to meet you.”

Something traveled across his face at that moment. It was something dark and predatory. She shook it off. It must be the shapes from the truck lights. She was relieved that he was there, and simultaneously relieved that she was going.

"Good night" she said. The car beeped at her. She got in and turned over the engine. Still smiling she backed her car out watching him as he slipped into the men's portion of the rest rooms. As she swung by the truck her open window let in a hint of smell that emanated from the port-holed trailer behind the truck cab. It was the stench of dead animals. She had smelled it before when she had been horseback riding as a kid and stumbled onto some dead cows. It was that same, fetid, furry smell. Only this was laced with another scent that reminded her of the biting odor that used to rise out of the slaughter place on her dad's ranch. Pigs, cows and even an old dog had met their end there. The place was dark with something black and greasy and sad about it, and this smell reminded her of it. The headlights of the car brushed along a road sign that said "65 miles to Susanville.” She merged with the dwindling traffic.

She was thinking about what she was going to tell her mother this time. She had been certain Dave was the guy she'd been looking for all her life, Dave with the tight little athletic butt, Dave with the smile that would melt asphalt. Six months into the relationship he began to show his colors. Now "Dave the Hunk" became "Dave the unemployed, worthless piece of shit.” She cringed as on-coming car lights played across her face. She saw her Mother's "I told you so” look looming over the dashboard. Those first three weeks were a moment out of a Henry Miller novel. This guy was a rabbit. He knew where all her buttons were and never tired of tweaking them, and then the bad news. The warehouse job fizzled. Now he was planted on the couch with a remote going and the smell of beer rising up with the cigarette smoke.

She began to notice the steering was becoming unusually stiff. Not now. She just bought this car. She felt the front left side of it leaning. She had to concentrate. The wheel fought her. She was trying to control the car and navigate to a safe spot along the side of the road. There was an off-ramp looming several minutes away and she fought the car onto it, traveled about fifty feet and swung into a "scenic area" where she stopped in an ugly, crunching, dusty sort of way. She sat for a few minutes in disbelief, and then started trying to imagine where the jack and spare tire were. Hadn't the salesperson shown her these things? Who really pays attention to that? In frustration she pounded on the steering wheel until the horn brought her to her senses.

She got out of the car and angrily stabbed the keys at the trunk lock. It inserted and the truck popped open. She fumbled for the spare tire. It was locked down. She fought the spin cap off and jerked the tire from its lodging and felt the jack and lug wrench break loose too. The lug wrench tumbled out of the trunk as she pulled back and it fell into the dirt. "Shit!" The night sky caught that word and held it. She tried to figure out that damn jack. How do they expect you to change a tire with this thing? In the back of her mind, about fifty feet away, she heard the guttural drone of a diesel engine. Minutes later, headlamps played and probed about in her predicament. Thank God. Help was coming.

The truck meandered like a dragon sizing up its kill, then snaked around her cuddling up to her car like a man cuddles up to his prey at the office, blocking her way to her desk, the next thing out of his mouth is some absurdity he will call flirting. The great lungs of the engine rumbled into silence as the dust settled. She saw him looking at her from the cab. There was no emotion on what she could see of his face. The latch on his door opened and he drifted down to the ground and slithered over to her. She was beginning to wonder if she was lucky or unlucky tonight.

"Problems?" he said stating the obvious and not even twitching.

"Flat tire,” she said.

"No problem. I'll give ya a hand.” He moved close to her, sort of "In your face offensive close.” She could smell burned cigarette in his clothes, perspiration, and oddly enough the slight odor of perfume, not aftershave, perfume. Almost in a trance, like a small animal before a snake, her hands automatically handed the jack to him.

"This will only take a minute,” he said. It angered her how he knew exactly how the jack came apart, hinged under the tire well, lifted the car as he twisted it up, and up. He was still talking to her about changing tires on a semi and how he used to change tires in his dad's garage and how it's always a good idea to figure all this out on a new car before you needed to. The lug-nuts cracked and groaned and came off one by one. The spare tire was jostled on and the lug-nuts returned and tightened. All the while he was talking. No effort. No concerns. She found herself annoyed and grateful at the same time, which made her even more upset.

"There,” he said, "That should get you to a gas station.”

"Thanks.” She was trying to think how she could settle this. "Thank you" was going to have to be enough. She was angry that her first instinct was to go to her purse for money.

"You're welcome," he said. There it was again. A shadow of something dark traveled across what she could see of his eyes. She shivered. He dropped the tire wrench and she leaned over to pick it up and when she raised up she was trying to understand what it was she was looking at. It took her a few moments to put it all together. His right hand was holding something. It was long, silver she thought, and was a tube of some sort. The hair stiffened on the back of her neck. This was bad. It was a large gun pointed right at her head.

"You get to ride in a truck tonight," he said. His face betrayed no expression, no emotion. He stepped to one side; the gun pointed at her belly now, and motioned with his head towards the truck, silent, a shadow waiting to be summoned to life again. "Let's go,” he said to her before she could say anything else. Numb, like a puppet that's just had all its strings cut, she put one foot in front of the other, still holding on to those damn car keys. The door to the cab loomed in front of her. Inside the wires of the CB and GPS dangled from the roof. The light from the dash cast eerie shadows on the seat fabric.

"Why are you doing this?" she managed.

"Why are you asking? Like it matters to you why I'm doing anything?"

He waited as she struggled into the seat and then closed the door and ran around the front of the truck and seated himself beside her, the gun pointing at her face. He slipped the gearshift forward stepping on the clutch and the engine rumbled to life. He flipped the CB switch. She hadn't noticed it until now but that smell was strong in the cab. It was that "dead cow" smell. The cattle trailer behind her looked cold, dark and vacant. Beneath her tennis shoes newspapers and chicken bones rolled awkwardly. The hydraulics of the truck hissed and the thing lurched forward. In the rear view she saw the shadow of her new car drift backwards and away from her, still and dark and empty.

The white line in the middle of the road lapped in fragments along the driver's side of the cab. Now and then the CB would crackle and sputter. Someone had found "Smoky" at some junction somewhere and was sending out a casual alarm. Then someone asked about "that cattle truck.” She was listening and eyeing the barrel of the gun while trying to hear more about this truck. Beneath her feet papers crackled. Someone said the Highway Patrol had been notified about this driver who other truckers had complained about. She couldn't make out the rest. The last thing she heard was another voice asking, "What the hell is wrong with that guy?" A hand shot out and flipped the switch to “off'.”

"What's your name," he said.

"Sarah Winfield."

The road began to unveil flat, sloping plains with the shapes of high mountains in the distance behind them and to her right. Here and there lights from the truck played over barbed wire fences. Signs drifted by, pocked by bullet holes. The moon was wide and full and staring. The lights from a 7-11 danced by, the inside warm and inviting. A single clerk sat watching something by the register. It lit her face a pale blue. In the parking lot a County Sheriff's car was parked by a lit phone booth. The officer inside was dealing as best he could with a large, steamy coffee.

Off in the distance snuggled in a bowl of dust a small town lit the desert like jewels spilled from a box. The truck moved on. The town lights dwindled. Civilization seemed to be swallowed by the night reinserted briefly by the occasional headlights of on-coming traffic now and then. He said nothing.

She let her eyes glance over at him. He was young. Maybe thirty or thirty-five. His hair was short, like a Marine, or a rancher or farmer. His face was chiseled, the lips carved like those of an angel in a graveyard floating dreamily over a mausoleum. His eyes were too dark. When they flashed on her it made her skin crawl. When he had been working the car jack she noticed a tattoo on his right bicep. In the dark, she hadn't been able to make it out. In the dim lights of the cab she saw that it was a large, black spider. The spider seemed to hug the muscle. Where a head should be, she thought she saw a grinning skull.

He wore a black T-shirt with a pocket that was shaped around an open cigarette pack. What looked like "dog tags" hung around his neck and dangled over the place where his heart would be. He was wearing stained and faded jeans with the knees worn through. She saw him finally put the gun in his lap. The brakes on the truck hissed and the cab bucked, his arm worked the gearshift as they turned off the main Highway. Something shapeless, bony and soft at the same time, shifted in the trailer behind them as he made the turn.

They were pointed east now. The road showed no suggestion that anything would ever come out of this place going the other way. Anything that entered was lost forever. To the left, in the moonlight, she saw the ruins of a gas station. Behind it the shells of old cars piled up and stacked like wood. The truck plowed alongside the gas station and then plunged further into the night, dust creating an eerie fog in the headlights. Her stupor began to wear off at this point and she noticed her face was stiff with tension and fright. Her heart was beating in her throat. Something kept whispering under the hum of the engine, "You're going to die.” She noticed that her fingers, interlaced, had dug into places behind her knuckles, which were raw and red now.

A "shack" loomed at the end of a road bracketed with barbed wire fencing. There were several cars to the right and left as they entered a corral. Inside it was littered with an engine, beds and a bicycle with no front wheel. A Coke machine was leaning against what looked like a shed. A satellite dish loomed in the back. The truck bucked and then geared down, the brakes hissing. It moved like a serpent around to the back of the shack and curled there in a cloud of dust drifting like fog in the headlights.

He flashed those dark eyes at her now. If she had ever seen a wolfs’ eyes just as it made that final leap at its prey, hunger in its belly making it crazy, these were those eyes now.

"Don't move" he said and launched himself out of his seat. Before she could collect herself the door to her right barked open and a large hand roughly drug her out. She fell in the dust coughing as large chunks of it filled her mouth and nose. She stood slowly and focused on his large shadow in front of her. It seemed like the next thing that happened came from the sky and focused on her lower lip, jaw and chin. The whole world swirled into that sensation, like dirty water going down a drain. Her feet and legs were sucked up into it too and the dust and dirt rushed up at her, gathered up her thoughts and packed them up into darkness.

In that darkness she saw a swing set. It was rusted and made awful noises as the chains grated on flaking paint and metal. The only sound was that squawking of the swing. She was in the swing, watching the world rock in a lazy arch. The cool chains grasped in her hands she saw the world now, upside down. It rocked with her. She could see a house a few yards from where her reversed world was rocking; a screen door opened and a shadowy figure lurched out, turned awkwardly and saw her, then moved towards her unsteadily.

She reemerged into the real world. Her focus was once again shifted to a dull pain in her lower lip and jaw. She tasted blood. A quick test with a swollen tongue and she knew her lip had been opened. The bastard had hit her. She moved to reclaim the rest of her body only to discover she had been chained to the wall. She sat there in the darkness, the smell of cement and freshly sawed plywood permeating everything. A pounded tin bowl barked on the cement as she disturbed it accidentally with her foot. This was bad. She fought back tears. She began to hyperventilate, building up to a scream. But she cut that short as Heavy Metal music began to pound and drift down to her from some place above like a panting animal. She would discover no friends here.

The chains were shiny and new, secured to leather cuffs reinforced by stainless steel.
The music rose and fell. A door opened and closed somewhere and light and sound burst in on her. All this haloed a dark shape that reached out of nowhere with powerful fingers and grabbed a large hunk of her hair dragging it backwards and lifting her face up to the shadow above her. She smelled that "dead cow" odor again, mixed with the acid odor of stale alcohol, cigarettes and...blood.

"Do you know where you are?" a voice asked. It was not the voice she remembered. It was different, rich with blood, like it was being squeezed from the vocal chords of a dead man. "You're in Hell," it said, not waiting for an answer. Heavy, intrusive fingers began to unbutton her shirt damp with sweat. They fumbled open the first two and then yanked the others apart.

She heard a button tap on the cement as it spun away from the force of his tugs. Her blouse was open and tucked away from her chest now, large fingers curved around where the bra came together just above her heart. She saw and felt the blade of a knife run its cold, dry dorsal along her flesh. The fabric split apart. The bra fell open and was immediately replaced by two large hands. He smothered her. The heat from his skin was like the heat that rippled off glowing cooking coals. Lips that dragged brittle stubble across her smooth cheek left a residual, bitter smell of stale liquor.

After what seemed like forever, he stood. There was a long time before the first boot kick thudded against her exposed chest. The others came fast and furious behind it. The air was squeezed from her lungs with such force she felt she would never be able to breathe again. When she was finally able to get air she felt the broken ribs and caught herself thinking, "So this is what a broken rib feels like.” Then a hand came out of nowhere and silenced the thinking, leaving only the darkness again that was becoming all too familiar.

She was back on the swing again. This time there was a man in her way. His legs were to either side of hers and he was holding the chains of the swing trying to balance. "You know what I want you little bastard" the shadow slurred. Then a belt buckle came undone making a musical sound as it flopped against a thigh.

She caught herself fluttering upwards, past the peak of the swing, higher than the trees that made a windbreak to the west, beyond the gray shape of the transformer. Higher and higher she rose and then suddenly plunged back into the yard but this time she fluttered into the truck cab and hovered there. It was that bastard, seated in the cab looking away from her. He was trying to raise someone on the CB, turning a dial, drawling into a mike and cursing under his breath. Suddenly her heart caught fire with a fury she strangely relished. A thought formed.

"Hurt him. Hurt him now.”

Energy came to her, energy like a claw, energy that had fingers crooked, nails hungry for flesh. She reached and there was so much energy wafting off her something made him turn and look just before her nails connected with the flesh below his eye and sunk in, cutting through the whiskered dermis, blood rising to fill in the steamy valleys she had created with her rage. His whole body shifted now, his back arched towards the open door and retreat. He propelled himself away from her screaming like a wounded coyote. And he landed heavily, sending a cloud of dust upward, to be sucked away by wind.

When she woke someone had put a blanket over her. The room was dark, but she could smell ... French fries. There was a mound of them in a paper plate next to her foot. She ate them savoring the salt, the crisp, greasy skin. A paper cup of water was near the plate. Above her she heard footsteps, like some giant beast pacing on hardwood floors. She heard the animal shouting, broken glass, the sound of furniture being overturned and then silence. Outside she heard the great, metal lungs of the truck power up, the hydraulics hiss, and the steaming and huffing dragon dwindle into the distance going to some unknown location where devils must meet and plot their evil against the world.

She sat in the darkness hearing her chains rattle on the plywood and wondering if anyone had reported her missing. Surely they were looking for her. How could she let them know where she was? How would they find her here? She tugged at the chains screwed into the plywood. A voice inside her head was saying in counterpoint to the chains slapping against the wood, "You're going to die here.” Outside, coyotes barked at each other, signaling the gathering point of a kill. A slight wind began to churn up from the west and she could hear the faint noise of a wind chime somewhere above her. After a while, fear and pain brought her a fitful sleep. She dreamed.

In her dream she was once again standing in the yard outside her prison. She was looking past a clothesline into a "dark place" where a wooden fence made a corral. She sensed something red, and greasy and evil in that place. Her attention was redirected to a large eucalyptus tree in the corner of the lawn. It had deeply woven roots in the dry ground. The trunk was twisted; the wind made branches weave and nod. Newspapers released from barbed wire roamed the lawn with tumbleweeds. Something drew her to this tree.

Suddenly a small boy appeared to her left, hissed at her like a snake and then took off across a hedge of sage brush like a wild animal. The boy was darker than the rest of the scene in that yard, like he was laden with a poison or something black and corrupted. The focus of her point of view in this dream followed the boy moving quickly in supernatural bounds over the dry sage brush, past the carcasses of dead cattle and prairie critters. On and on she traveled with this black shape that moved more like a rabbit than a human being. It came to a hollow behind a wall of large rocks and stopped at a suspicious mound of dry dirt. It began to dig furiously, dust and rocks going everywhere.

Slowly, its efforts began to reveal the shape of rotten cloth, and flesh that began to form a sculpted hand there in the raw earth. The thing turned and hissed at her, snuffing and worrying the dirt like a dog frantically digging for a bone. Slowly, to her horror, a corpse was revealed. It was the remains of a man, in his sixties she guessed. The rotten cloth of a wool shirt had been curled back to reveal a gray chest that seemed to be carved with thick, vicious cuts from something sharp. As she stared at the cuts they began to form something. The gaping wounds snaked around in the dry flesh trying to spell. The words began to form.

"Little bastard did this.”

She woke to the light of a single bulb from a mechanics’ lamp. As her eyes became more used to the light she could see a figure in a chair anxiously rubbing its hands and glancing at her from time to time. Beyond the figure she could see shapes of gas cans, cages for trapped animals and bricks in the next room.

"I want to go home,” she said from swollen lips. "You need to let me go.”

He seemed to switch on at the sound of her voice excited by a dark fury. He floated over to her, his face inches from her own, his breath foul with some unmentionable rot he'd obviously been chewing on for days. That awful knife waved like the hand of a clock between them.

"Don't speak. I'll kill you if you say any more.”

He rose still glaring at her with those dark eyes. All manner of evil traveled across that gaze and reached into her chest trying to still her heart, squeeze it, stop it right there in its cavity. Her eyes dimmed over, sweat formed on her neck and cheeks and upper lip. Her gaze wove in and out of focus and the darkness engulfed her but not before she caught a glimpse of something on his cheek. What was it? It was something white, squared, streaked with dark places. It moved oddly when he spoke. It was a bandage.

The concrete beneath her felt cold, and clammy. She was laying in the dark. She could hear the rush of inhaled and exhaled air. It was like someone listening to themselves breathe in a mask and aqua-lung. The breathing slowed. Underneath it was a beating heart. It was muffled under the dragging intake and extraction of breath. It all had a mechanical rhythm to it, contained in its own space. She felt a body, it was hers, she could experience the homunculus of herself, the top and bottom of where her mind created the sense of "self'. But something was wrong. Like an astronaut exploring places outside the station, his own breath like an ocean inside his head, she moved from minute to minute exploring the darkness behind her eyes.

At least she thought it was behind her eyes. Here and there small, muddy specks of light shifted, like shadows caught in little patches of wall, showing every movement, every twitch of muscle, every hair, every anomaly of muscular adventure. And like an astronaut, she sensed her body behaving like a cork, bobbing and turning in a sort of unsteady darkness. It hovered over what she thought was the cement floor. It turned and then drifted like a balloon held on a string that was releasing in slow, tidy segments.

Slowly, lighter than air, she felt her self raise about a foot above the floor. She caught herself (or tried to) with a toe, but it passed through the cement like water. All the while, the part that would have come to her aid in waking consciousness, the part that would have not let her rise, the part that would have sent a stream of pain signals and the reality of concrete to her toe ...was silent, unavailable. Slowly, like a human dirigible, she rose to four feet, five feet; she was in line with the top of a shelf now. But curiously enough, she wasn't seeing this; she was sensing it in the darkness.

Like a spilled thing, light began to form, showing shapes, shadows, all lit up from within like an X-ray. Light played over objects, shaping them in a luminous glow. She was at a thirty-degree angle now, spinning like a feather on pond water, slowly, elegantly. Only her mind was acting like a guidance stick pitching and rolling her as it reached for and tried to create space.

She recognized things now. She saw the ropes, the dog leash, the chain saw, the wire clippers, and the gas cans. But they were all lit up with a ghostly incandescence. She thought, "Higher" and like she was handling a hot-air balloon, she rose into what looked like rafters. This was difficult; because where she thought she was going to experience contact (bump something) there was no impact. It never came. So she stopped anticipating it. This allowed her to focus on movement. Like learning to drive the car she began to learn the rules of this new extraordinary place.

She followed the roof beam passing under the hanging electric lamps. Then she turned left, the tool rack and pegboard sliding past her until she was looking at the hallway leading up to the first floor.

"Casper, the friendly ghost, the friendliest ghost I know―"

She rose to the door, caught her breath and thought "beyond" and eased through the varnished wood like a knife through butter.

“―Though children might look at him with fright―"

She was looking at the hallway now. To her left it connected to a bedroom. There were boxes and debris there, jackets, socks, shoes and beyond these a window. The wind caused the blinds to move and do startling things with the light. She spun like a drill and pointed her head to the opposite end of the doorway.

“―The children all love him so."

She was humming "Casper the Friendly Ghost." For some reason, it seemed proper. The living room was beyond. It was small, it had several mirrors, it had photos of ranchers, their wives and kids, it had a large piggy bank with flowers painted on it, and it too was littered with clothes and magazines.

"He always says hello―and he's really glad to meet cha'―"

The hissing noise again, came like some low, reptilian warning, or a small child breathing through a trachea tube. She spun around on herself to be confronted by the dark boy.

"You ain't supposed to be out here," it said. "You supposed to be down there with the rat shit.”

She saw no face, only darkness lightly shaded in the highlights. The boy seemed to be eight or ten, she couldn't tell.

"I'll tell Daddy," it said.

What frightened her most was the voice seemed to come from inside her head. In an instant she was on the porch choked with chairs and other garbage and she was watching a man stagger across the lawn towards a small boy in a swing. The boy stayed in the swing and looked like he was upset, turning away with the desperate look of something trapped.

In the distance, clouds rose from the gray sand. An engine grumbled at the sun. The truck began to hiss and rumble into view. It came down the barbed wire laced road and circled the abandoned stack of car shells and curled up in the shadows under a giant tree, the one she had seen the dark boy come out of in another dream. The truck settled in a roaring cloud of dust that threatened to choke the sky. Then it settled and the door barked open and he got out.

He was holding a rifle, and biting off some chaw. He ripped a piece off and chewed it, scanning the yard like a raptor scanning the ground for stray rodents. He walked around to the other side of the cab and there was a struggle of some sort, the familiar thud of fist on meat, and he came around the front to the cab with yet another prize. This one was in her teens she thought. She was wearing a white T-shirt and Levi shorts. He carried her up the stairs of the porch and stopped beside an old rocker. His eyes moved like snakes and locked on the chunk of space where she thought she had positioned herself undetected. She began to feel terror in her heart again, it dawned on her that here she was, escaped, standing on the porch and he could see her. He could see her and she was trapped and now she would die.

She prepared an explanation that would come before she fainted she hoped, and as she tried to speak it, she saw him move through the door with his victim. She was bruised in the face. He had hit her hard. A million thoughts were running through Sarah's mind, thoughts she found difficult to capture and identify and solidify into something useful. She began to be aware of the impossibility of where she was at the moment, how she got there. Her mind formed the sensations of the reality of her plight, the chains, the cold concrete, the cereal dish, the door opening, and the slap of flesh as it was unceremoniously dropped to the floor, the chains, the bracelets of leather, the door closing, the silence.

In that moment she felt for her own consciousness. She scanned the environment for her own awareness, her own peace. But then the crying began. It started as a distant thing, barely audible. Then it rose into the darkness and became sobs.

"Hello? Is somebody there?" finally tumbled out of the sobs.

"Yes," Sarah mumbled from bruised lips. "I'm here.Who are you?"

"Jennifer Who are you?'

"Sarah Winfield.”

"Oh my God! The papers have your picture all over the place. Everyone is looking for you. He was so nice. He offered to change my tire. I feel so stupid. I should have said no. It was in broad daylight, behind a gas station. I should have said no. I'm going to die here. I should have said no.”

"I've been here two days I think. I'm still alive.”

"The papers said you've been missing two weeks."

Sarah stopped and thought about that. Two weeks, how could that be? Had she been unconscious all that time? They talked some more. Jennifer calmed down a little. They talked about their families then, about their pets and their jobs. They talked until the door to the basement opened and footsteps let them know he was back. Before they could regroup he was standing in the door. He radiated something dark from his skin like a cloud of something tangibly evil.

"Do you like your girlfriend Sarah? She was stupid...just like you. What broad today can't change a tire?"

He knelt next to her and that knife showed up again. She hadn't realized how ugly it was before. It was long, serrated on the spine with sharp, evil looking things that made it look rapacious and hungry, like him. He waved it in front of her like a cobra sways before striking. "Don't like my pig sticker?"

Without warning he dragged the sharp blade over the muscle between her neck and shoulder. The knife cut sharp and blood began to pool and spill onto her blouse. She recoiled around the cut crying out. He whirled to look at Jennifer and spat, "See there, that's what nosy girls get. You don't be nosy or you'll get more of the same.” He turned around and planted a meaty kick in Sarah's solar plexus, she woofed and doubled up with pain. He climbed the stairs and slammed the door behind him howling like a wolf or some kind of beast from Hell. The silence rung with his energy.

"Are you all right?" Jennifer bawled.

"I'm cut you dizzy little bitch,” Sarah said through clenched teeth. Once again the blackness came to claim her consciousness. She sprawled into darkness; the floor against her cheek was the last thing she felt before lapsing into what seemed like endless space.

"Told ya so," the shadow of a boy hissed.

She was back in the hallway now. Everything glittered with a fuzzy resilience. She turned to see a naked man coming at her from the hallway emerging from the bathroom. It was an old man, stubble in the face, his eyes white and luminescent like fish guts on a dark rock. She spun backwards and saw the man dissolve like dark smoke over the throw carpet in the hall. She drifted and spun slowly, like a bubble turning in an oily pirouette. Her turn found her looking at the couch where her captor had drunk himself into a stupor, the TV still on. The Terminator was peeking through a door slightly ajar, "Are you Sarah Connors?" he says in a thick German accent.

There were ashes all over the tabletop, a mirror smeared with trails of Cocaine, candles, black and thick protruding from skulls with the dome of the brainpan removed. Arnold was blasting the wrong Sarah Connors now. She barely had time to scream.

On the coffee table there was a Bong, several packs of Marlboros and a lighter. Sarah looked at the lighter. In the chair next to her unconscious tormentor an old man sat in stained striped boxer shorts. He was wearing only these and socks with holes in the toe and heels. As she looked at him the skin on his chest peeled back to reveal bloody flesh and ribs. The old man didn't notice. He bent over and took a Marlboro and lit it with the lighter. He inhaled. Smoke oozed through the open ribs and drifted into the air lit blue by the TV.

"It was the little bastard there what done this," he said, nodding his head in the direction of the sleeping monster. "Caught me napping, caught me fast asleep and did it to me in my own bed. Took me apart with the little knife.” He nodded at a pocketknife that had been used to cut and shape the Cocaine lines.

"The more I screamed the more the little bastard laughed. No respect for his old man. No respect for anything. No respect for anyone. If it was me, I'd set that bastard afire right now, while he slept.” His fingers flipped the lighter sparking it. "Yes Mam, I'd get him ready for Hell.” As the lighter flashed it lit up her tormentors' face. There was something oddly feral about that face, even in sleep. The old man set the lighter down.

"Why don't you do it," she said. "He killed you didn't he?"

The old man smiled and picked the lighter up again. He held it up to a dangling finger on the couch arm. The nails were filthy with dirt. The finger was attached to a hand, a big hand, bigger than a small dog. The forearm rose in muscled hills to greet a bicep crowned with that spider tattoo on it, waiting to pounce at anything that tried to wake the demon it protected. The old man struck the flint, a flame licked up touching the dirty skin. He held it there for a while and then grunted and sat back in the dirty chair.

"I can't do nothing. He's my boy. It's a bitch isn't it? If I could get my hands around his throat right now I'd choke the life right out of him ...I would. But God has a sense of humor. Don't you think?" He put the lighter there on the coffee table. It sat there between the both of them making a statement all its own.

"I was lonely, since Ma died. I got drunk. I did bad things. But that don't mean I deserve to be whittled on like a damn switch right there in my own bed does it?"

Before her eyes the old man's flesh began to separate and peel away. The skeleton seemed to vibrate in the dark tissue, like it was feeling the agony of being tortured with that knife all over again. He opened his mouth into a great, dark "0" of pain and dissolved into the fabric of the couch like cigarette smoke. She reached for the lighter. Her hand passed through it like a fly passes through moonlight.

Now what? She thought for a moment. "I'm trying too hard." Remember. You need to remember the feel of the surface of a lighter. Remember lighting candles at Dad's sixtieth birthday party. Remember that evening of Michael Bolton and that boy you liked? Remember how the top of the Rhonson flipped back so crisply when you flicked that wheel and the wick lit and you touched the flames to those candles you lit by the hot tub for him? You pressed the wheel once, twice; the spark lit the wick ...fire. Remember?

The lighter on the table wobbled. That's it. Try again. It wobbled a second time. This is it; you're doing this right. The monster stirred and lapsed back into sleep like a lion having nightmares. Please God, let him sleep, let him die; let me do this damn thing. She imagined her hand around the shiny, silver case, she imagined her thumb flicking back the top, and there was a decisive "click.”

It was working. It was working. Damn it, it was WORKING! The wheel was tight. But it needed to be tight to strike the flint, to make the spark. It's working, it’s working, please God it must work. Please. The wheel spun crisply; there was a tantalizing hiss, a spark. Not enough. Again. It has to work now on this turn. Concentrate. Concentrate. A crisp swish, a brittle fizz and YES! I will light that Mother's fire!

She looked around for something to feed the fire. She wanted something liquid, easy to soak into rotting blue jeans. Something was in a jar on the coffee table. Not water. This jerk would not be doing Cocaine with water. This has to be Sterno or Moonshine. This has to burn. She moved her thoughts like an invisible had around the glass. It lifted slightly. Feel its weight. Balance it. That's good, that's good. The glass rose an inch, two inches, level to his chest now. She had to time this just right. She had to make this perfect. YES. NOW!

The glass left from its perch and flew into his chest with a meaty thud. He came up off the couch like a cloud of pure evil just in time to meet up with the flame of the Rhonson. He exploded into an ocean of fire. He flailed at the flames as they began to crawl about in the greasy fabric of his clothes. It blew around in the hair of his arms and climbed onto his shoulders like a pet bird. He fell over the couch and landed heavily on the dirty tile of the kitchen. The fire hung onto his greasy boots like a dog hanging onto the cuff of an intruder.

The fire curled about his face stubble breathing in and out scorching his nose hair and making the air he was snorting hot and angry. The hair on his head burst into flames and caught some dirty rags on fire as he rolled into them screaming like some wild thing pinned on barbed wire trying to get away from the approaching lights of a rancher's truck.

Something caught her attention. It was a sound above her that was like the thumping of shoes kicking at rotten tiles and she realized that she had broken the contact and was suddenly in the basement listening to howls in the room above and frantic screams of a man being burned alive.

"Oh my God what is THAT?" Jennifer yelled. At that moment, the door to the basement flew open and a fiery walking corpse plunged into the room waving a knife blindly at the shadows his boiled eyes could barely see.

He stumbled about catching fire to the rags and papers now. Sarah saw the reflection of the flames lick the surface of the gas cans. "You're coming with me,” he hissed as he pulled the chains that held Sarah out of the wall. "I'm taking you to the butcher's block to die with the other pigs," he said, his scorched flesh now black and smoking, the flames crawling about on his face. They were like glowworms that feed around in the logs of a raging hearth fire. It licked at Sarah's blouse and hair.

She remembered something in Karate. It was karate right? Yes she took that stupid karate class after two girls had been accosted in the parking lot at school. She remembered a rule she learned there the day right before she quit. Use the things own force against itself. Make it help you defeat it. That was the rule. She braced her hands against the crumbling fabric on his shirt just above his heart, grabbed it, feeling her own hands burn as she grasped the fire in her clenched fists, and pulled back―hard.

With a shriek that pierced and bled into the wooden frame of the roof of the basement, he came forward and past her and was trapped in hoses and baling wire. She didn't hesitate and grasped the gas can handle ripping it from its peg, screaming when she felt the weight of gas in it. She spun off the cap and without thinking began to spray him with the gas. If only this crap could come out faster! More! More now! Douche that bastard down! The flames, almost done with him before, were more than happy for the gas and to show their gratitude returned to his flesh to finish the job. When the can emptied Sarah angrily tossed it hard at Jennifer who had maintained a high, baleful shriek throughout the whole event.

"Shut up!"

Sarah grabbed bolt cutters and quickly cut Jennifer's chains. Jennifer ran squealing up the stairs and into the living room where she stood by the smoldering couch and began to scream in earnest. She was still screaming when Sarah burst upstairs, slapped her and drug her into the hot desert air.

"Get in the truck!"

Jennifer preferred to scream some more but Sarah was done with that. She brought a left hook up into Jennifer's jaw, which buckled her knees and sent her staggering back towards the passenger side of the cab. With superhuman strength Sarah hoisted her onto the truck seat and slammed the door almost catching Jennifer's leg. Sarah launched herself into the driver's seat and fumbled at the ignition. She depressed the clutch and turned the key, the engine rumbled into life.

"Jesus can you drive this thing?" Jennifer bawled.

It was at that point that Sarah heard the hissing noise. She looked over her left arm and saw the Monster crawling up the side of the truck like some terrible black lizard. Then she turned to the gearshifts. It looked like there were two.

"Can you drive this thing?"

Just at that moment the Monster lunged through the cab window trying to turn the engine off. Jennifer launched into another fusillade of horrible screams that mixed with Sarah's. The Monster had its charred hands over the switch just as Sarah found the right gear and the truck sprung into life. Down went the clutch again and with sufficient RPM's she had second. She turned her head to see the Monster, face inches from her own, burned and charred the eyes like the guts of fish spilled into a cold blue plate, mumble these words through baked lips.

"I told you Daddy wouldn't like this.” It hissed at her. Its hand was now snaking towards her throat.

She swung the wheel to the left bracing the cab off a large tree. The old bark and dry branches swept him from the crumpled door of the cab sending him spinning into the hot desert air and catching his head between the crux of two tiller blades of a rusting farm machine beheading him and then tossing him into the dirt field as she watched it in the rear view. His body tumbled through the sage brush landing heavily on greasy bike parts and his head rolled out from the grip of the tiller dropping in a cloud of dust into the shaded earth. She turned the wheel again and the tree swept out of view and she was now looking at dirt road behind her in the rearview, dirt road framed with barbed wire fences.

"You didn't tell me you could drive one of these things!"

They made it to the highway and the 7-11 all the way in second gear. Sarah called the police. The ambulance came in about thirty minutes and two rookie officers barreled up the old road with sirens and lights to see if what the girls said was true. Sarah sipped coffee that a clerk had given her. Jennifer was tugging on her oxygen mask and crying. The detectives arrived in another hour and were seen scratching their heads as Sarah was trying to explain where she'd been all this time. They did a lot of erasing.

The coroner came just before nightfall and met ten police units at the ranch. The place was marked off as a crime scene. An hour later two of the Coroner's helpers came up out of the basement looking pale. The student intern walked out to the barbed wire fence and heaved in the sage brush.

"We count about seventy five that we can see, he said.

"Seventy-five what?" the captain barked.

"Seventy five corpses. We think there's more in the dirt. It smells like Death down there in that storage cellar below the kinky basement thing.”

"I didn't smell anything when I was looking at the chains and the kinky crap," the captain said.

"It's walled in with concrete, about three or four feet I'd say.” An officer said.

The pulley grew taught on the crane as the meat hooks drew on something in the bed of the trailer. The trailer danced a little as the weight adjusted, and then sunk slightly as it shifted towards the doors. The motor on the crane groaned. The corpses of twenty-seven cattle were drug into the paths of two waiting bulldozers.

As night began to saturate the sky and stars fill the blackness, the County people were still moving out bodies on large palettes. The last count was one hundred and twenty four. This was the worse case of serial killing in the history of that county. Many of the men and women at the site would talk about what they saw there for years.

No one witnessed the shadow, like a rabbit, blowing across that dry earth, traveling over the rocks and bones that litter the desert. It bounded tirelessly. It traveled many miles deep into the desert silence, deep into the sea of sage brush, deep into that barren, primal, blackness that the heart could get lost in, or the soul. It found what it was looking for eventually.

The shadow sniffed and dug in a bowl of dirt and weeds between a wall of rocks and after a while revealed the hand of a corpse. The night gathered around the exposed hand like it was examining another lifeless, horrible gift that had been tossed to it. And then it shrank back into the sounds, shapes and smells of the desert, content to keep another secret.

Welcome 2006

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:20:10 PST

First podcast of the New Year!

In this show we’ll talk about politics and writing with a discussion about remarks by writer/filmmaker John Pilger. Are we uncontroversial guardians of the gates of literature or are we true to ourselves and step up to the plate to make our case? We also talk a little about the controversial book “Feet to the Fire,” an indictment of contemporary journalism and the news. Are we getting journalistic realty or TV ratings fluff? We also talk about the letter by Sharon Olds sent to Laura Bush deferring a poetry diner banquet. Olds is anti-war apparently. Would you turn down a chance to “break bread” with Laura Bush? And finally, we talk about Bush and the NSA scandal. Is it time to use the “I” word? Apparently the CNN audience thinks so. Is it terrorists we’re seeking to subdue or is it dissent? Let’s talk about this stuff!

Join me as I talk about free speech and what it means to writers who feel the need to speak out about contemporary issues. The podcast runs approximately 30 minutes. Please comment on it at this blog. I want to hear your views. Have a great New Year!

Listen Here

Der Christams Waffenstillstand

jlamoreux@charter.net (J.M.Lamoreux) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:14:23 PST

by J.M.Lamoreux

It was called “The Christmas Truce.”
It is spoken of every year and there are still old men
With fading eyes who remember it.

At a time when modern people,
Unable to learn war’s dark lessons,
Are still tangled up in their cycles of destruction
That always lead to death and heartache,
This story reaches into the heart of the
Christmas Holiday
And brings out of it one single
Shining moment of Peace.

It is a Christmas gift to humanity,
One to last beyond the last drum-stick or stale glass of wine.

It’s told like this:

The British Army
Was manning a line facing the Germans
Running from the Ypres to the
La Bassee Canal.

If you looked long enough
You could see your enemy anywhere from 70
To 30 yards away.

Both sides hunkered down
In freezing weather
Sometimes their trenches collapsed with water
The stench from the dead clung
To everything.

Men called to one another
Across the distance
Sometimes hurling insults,
Sometimes to offer a tacit, local truce.

Packets from home
Began to dribble into the trenches on both sides.
The British got “Princess Mary Boxes,”
A picture card marked with,
“May God protect you andBring you safe home.”

The Germans got meerschaum pipes
And cigars for the NCO’s.
The Belgians and French got gifts too.

In the darkness
A chocolate cake came from the Germans
Asking for a cease fire.
They called for a concert
At 7:20 at night
With candles being placed
On the parapets of trenches.

The British accepted
And sent tobacco back
To the Germans.

At 7:30 heads began to pop upand sing.

Each song was met with applause
From both sides.

The Germans asked the British to join them
With a wry smile the reply was
“We’d rather die than sing German.”
The Germans said.”It would kill us if you did.”

The rain was replaced that night
With clear skies.

Bullets still thudded into the mud in some sectors
But lightly.

In other sectors the silence was amazing
Punctuated with shouts back and forth, singing,
And sharing holiday greetings.

Small Tannenbaums magically sprinkled the
German trenches
And were lit with candles.

The Indian Corps soldiers
Were reminded of the Hindu Festival of Light.

In his entrenched château 27 miles behind the front
With other British brass hats
Sir John French warned of the
Dangers of fraternization.

But on the front lines
The “truce” was tolerated by many of the officers.

Hair cuts were given by German barbers
Songs were sung, rations thrown to one another.
Kick-ball games were played in the mud.
The Medical Corps reported that the British team
Was beaten by the Germans 3-2.

Here and there
Some took the opportunity to
Retrieve their dead.

Captain J.C.Dunn fired three shots and put up a flag
With “Merry Christmas” on it.
The Germans put up a flag with
“Thank You” on theirs.
Everyone bowed and saluted,
Returned to the trenches,
Two shots were fired in the air
And the war was on again.

Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute heilige Paar.
Holder Knab im lockigten Haar,
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!

Sleep in Heavenly Peace.