http://www.platterland.com/blog/ Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known... creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ robhunter@platterland.com Short Stories, Literature, Fantasy, Speculative, Speculative Fiction, Slipsream, Magical Realism, Bizarro, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Fiction, Rob Hunter Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known...

A writer’s catchall and armamentarium of lost words―a cellar, if you will, stocked with last year’s sweet potatoes and next year’s onions plus a hopeful phrase or two.

http://platterland.com/mobile/images/mobile_frog.png http://platterland.com/blog/ "A lone passenger pigeon, stuffed, returned this (2010) year to Waukesha, Wisconsin, a town where I went to high school oh, so many years ago. Was she an analog for the buffalo hunters with their stacks of skulls set to bleach on the prairies? Also―a brief from Aldo Leopold. Let’s see how they come together along with―John Herald, angular and introspective, a singer and guitarist, and Martha, another wild bird, likewise gone extinct." http://platterland.com/blog/passengerpigeon.shtml "Aldo as in Aldo Leopold, naturalist who celebrated the forgotten places where small animals lived their lives. And the small scampering things—Limbaughs and the Becks, the Pat Robertsons—that country wives use to frighten children with in the 21st Century. Here there be bimbos." http://platterland.com/blog/aldo.shtml "I'm most shocked... that my stepfather's ancient and cancerous bones should have been passed off as healthy tissue to innocent patients..." http://platterland.com/blog/alistaircooke.shtml The actor looked up, as if for approval. "I wonder what the hell that was all about," Basil Rathbone said. Well into his seventies his voice had the ring of authority. He kept supple practicing fencing moves in Central Park; it was just that cold reads were not his cup of chamomile. The program being recorded was Beyond the Green Door, a radio series written?mostly?by Robert Sheckley. http://platterland.com/blog/basilrathbone.shtml You won't have to wear a funny hat, learn a secret handshake or send away for your very own Fortean decoder ring; Charles H. Fort isn’t selling anything. http://platterland.com/blog/howcome.shtml Duct Tape References in the New Testament, Duct tape as a Cure for Warts, Paralytic Shellfish Toxins, Red Green in Narnia, Prom Gowns and the Maine Marine Patrol. Betcha don’t see a blog entry like that every day. OK, every other day. http://platterland.com/blog/ducttape.shtml If you accepted as an operating premise that anything west of the Hudson was camping out, the RealLemon Red Margolis concocted his whiskey sours with had made it in stages from the Caribbean to Jersey and thence Manhattan by a kind of reverse osmosis. Food and drink arrived via pipeline under the Hudson River, said pipeline placed there that we might thrive. http://platterland.com/blog/hippopotamus.shtml "If we wanted animals in suits we’d be doing Wind in the Willows." Sigh! http://platterland.com/blog/mehitabel.shtml When I was a kid, I recall standing in line at the corner newsstand (Elroy Keller’s drug store on Center St. in Milwaukee, WI) waiting for the truck to arrive, chuck its wired-together bundles of the latest pulps, and speed thence to the distant suburbs where legions of kids like me waited hopefully. OK, the ladies on the shiny covers didn’t wear much in the way of clothes, heady stuff for a 7th grader. This was the 40s, remember? Get a life. http://platterland.com/blog/pulps.shtml The day the Illuminati—secret, sinister—reentered my life Harold Junior pulled up in his rusted-out Lincoln Continental as I was checking my mail. Harold's huge domestic battle cruiser had been bought cheap and came with a titanic appetite for gas and oil. But it never had to go far, only start; it plowed through drifts that would stall a Jeep. http://platterland.com/blog/illuminati.shtml When at seventeen I started with the railroad, the second floor of the depot was a welcome hideout when the snows pounded in, driven down from Duluth or over from Michigan 90 miles across the frozen lake. http://platterland.com/blog/milwaukeeroad.shtml John Gould’s town was full of what he calls “characters,” people who had lived varied and interesting lives and had lots of knowledge to pass on and lots of stories to tell. There were men whose fathers had skippered in the China trade, men who were farmers and millworkers and storekeepers. http://platterland.com/blog/hounddog.shtml A disc jockey’s life is a permanent disconnect—imagining an audience while staring ahead and counting the holes in the same Celotex wall tile over and over. The resulting numbers were always the same. We were flat, dreaming of a world where we could be round. http://platterland.com/blog/nooz.shtml A proper respect for the Old Religion does not necessarily mean getting naked and dancing widdershins in a glade come Mid-summer’s Eve, although this is nice—getting naked encourages networking and, for the timid but buff, is a great way to meet and mingle. http://platterland.com/blog/orangevirgin.shtml "If somebody bites you on the ass it means they are thinking of you, too, dear Libby. Eventually the Earth will fall into the sun," says The Thin Man. http://platterland.com/blog/williampowell.shtml A storefront nun confronted the contents of her tambourine. Empty. No, wait... a dull clatter on the drumhead. A nickel. Sister Elspeth Joyful frowned. http://platterland.com/blog/judgecrater.shtml Judge Joseph Force Crater ran hand over his barbered, slicked and brilliantined hair. “My haberdashery, it is off?—a giveaway in the newly dead, but I have had much practice. I wear a celluloid collar, that is enough for most doubters. Many have heard of me. My deeds are legend." http://platterland.com/blog/judgecrater_pt2.shtml She lured me to my death. Dear Necrophilia Jones—she was such a cozy little piece. I was smitten; what could I do but follow the call of the glands. I allowed myself to be murdered. http://platterland.com/blog/judgecrater_pt3.shtml The banjo has every musical characteristic of the grand cathedral pipe organ—with the possible exceptions of size, volume, timbre, and sustain. On the plus side, the banjo is portable. http://platterland.com/blog/banjo.shtml Science was constantly improving our lives. Television and the atomic bomb were just over the horizon, but we had Color-Qwik Bags right now! These bags were a transparent plastic (Low Density Polyethylene) that arrived on the home front near the war’s end. The government had experimented with the plastic for sealing emergency rations for front line troops. No one died directly from food poisoning, so the bags were deemed acceptable for civilian use. http://platterland.com/blog/looselips.shtml Someday. Someday, Harry told himself, someday I will play at a bar I can afford to drink in. http://platterland.com/blog/mudman.shtml Nunzio Calabrese did not think of himself as a bad person. He loved his mother, most black people because the insides of their mouths were so pink, and his pigeons. He flew his pigeons from a rooftop. http://platterland.com/blog/mooses.shtml The baby was named Oversight. Sophie Rae Shufflebeam picked her up from a dumpster behind the Pick ‘N’ Pay. She had been shopping for olives. http://platterland.com/blog/zeitgeist.shtml The single rose in the bud vase made everything else look incredibly tacky. We were having a celebrity visitor. We always had celebrity visitors, why the special effort? John Malkovich, Meryl Streep, Keir Dullea and Kelly McGillis didn't rate this treatment. They had put up with the accumulated crud just like we did. http://platterland.com/blog/claudettecolbert.shtml Dave Van Ronk kept a walkup on MacDougal Street where he and a circle of cronies played cards. In those days he didn't like Bob Dylan; Dylan cheated at Gin Rummy. I would have cheated too, but no one asked me to sit in. http://platterland.com/blog/3000beatniks.shtml Ivor McMuckle, a song plugger, has been summoned to Hyperion II, planet of the Last Diaspora, where all faiths mingle in a shared state of abject poverty. He sells off shares in excess of 120 percent of a bad, really bad, pop tune. Final judgment devolves upon a Higher Power, said Higher Power being among the company of the conned. http://platterland.com/blog/mcmuckle.shtml What did they think, these traversers of the subetheric void, when they clicked on the blog expecting to find an upward-bound entreaty for straight balls and slick alleys? And why a pre-chucking prayer anyway? Well, the prayer is uttered by Divine Artemis, candlepin ace of the Olympian pantheon, who is in Taunton, Mass. for a duello-to-the-death. The Sister of Apollo, Divine Artemis is a goddess and gets to say what goes; she makes the rules. Her prayer is an invocation of self. Behold! Ecce Bocce: a bowling alley. http://platterland.com/blog/invocation.shtml In the middle of the Twentieth Century mysterious things were still reported in the Southern Highlands. However, in real life, hauntings, hexings and supernatural doings were as strange to the post-bellum South as pit barbecue, Winn-Dixie, Dr. Pepper and Royal Crown Cola were familiar. Well, there was this one item about an exploding deer that got buried in the back pages. http://platterland.com/blog/garfield.shtml The Manticore exuded the odor of rainy childhood afternoons, pious old people and the chemical composition of the afterlife. The creature's eyes flashed lime green highlights, verdigris and gold: a summer housefly buzzing at the window. http://platterland.com/blog/manticore.shtml Everything is wrong. I feel bad for Hubert. He is worrying very much. All stocks are going up except what we have. http://platterland.com/blog/bookworm_diary.shtml Large, pallid bodies lay lifeless in a row. This was not the usual order of things—Housekeeping should have long since cut them up and hauled them away. http://platterland.com/blog/bookworm_umberto.shtml Miguel loved the ripe melon sound made by a human head impacted by a metal softball bat. He had heard it often. Miguel’s favorite bat was spun aluminum anodized blue. http://platterland.com/blog/miguel.shtml The dog, a border collie, was waiting by the parking meter. She was staring at a spot in the sky, somewhere above the heat exchanger on the roof of the Pick N Pay supermarket. She threw back her head for a lonesome shivering howl, a primal coyote crying down blood from the moon. http://platterland.com/blog/meetthemuse.shtml Lucian Hobart, known as Lucy, paused his walker at the edge of the state road—just enough off the asphalt, on the pea-sized gravel of the shoulder—so that if he was hit by a passing car, he could sue and win. http://platterland.com/blog/lucy.shtml It had been, by the saint's count, a thousand years or more since the last tour passed through—Attila and his Hunnic Horde, their hardy ponies pulling an endless cavalcade of Airstream trailers that stretched to the sunrise. "Remember, Pryn―how the horizon tore?" http://platterland.com/blog/velcro.shtml A large rumpled presence, a quondam high school English teacher and playwright, Murray Burnett would break into song as easily as rage when an interview was going well or badly. http://platterland.com/blog/playitsam.shtml The year the monarch butterflies didn't return to Maine, I went home to Brooklyn. “Something in the milkweed,” they said. With a cold winter and no milkweed to browse to keep up their strength on the long flight from Mexico, the butterflies weakened and froze, dying in their millions far from the thoughtless haciendas. Almond eyes pouchy with sleep denied by fever dreams of avarice and the night sweats of free trade, the latafundistas and tin shanty dwellers alike wondered at the deaths, but with never a thought for Maine or for me. A preoccupation with the exigencies of day-to-day survival will do that. Greed will do that. Starvation clears the mind. I was busy, too, and forgot the butterflies. They were, after all, dead. http://platterland.com/blog/sylvester.shtml For a laugh I once brought home a promotional pencil from the radio station. Deejay Name Here was stamped on it. The letters were gold. A sixties style tie-dye pattern made the pencil look like it had been rolled in bubble gum. The station manager had a box of five hundred. The manager used the pencils to demonstrate the transitoriness of human aspiration in general and the life expectancy of Top-40 disc jockeys in particular. http://platterland.com/blog/scrotum.shtml The effort of creating the sound clusters for a fantasy tale, Mark Twain in Milan, a tale of parallel worlds, antique technology and strange happenings in an abandoned subway tunnel—with lovers separated by two hundred years of shimmering parallelisms and Samuel Langhorne Clemens and an eighteenth century mathematician trying to keep themselves warm inside the wallpaper of a Mafia don in 1920s Greenwich Village—had me crying “Uncle.” The Freesound Project to the rescue. http://platterland.com/blog/freesound.shtml en-us