Tag Archives: Short Story

Short Story Day 2 – Heat

Posted on by Bill Chance

2. – Heat
Joyce Carol Oates
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/heat.html

Ok, now for something completely different. We swerve away from the careful, slightly arcane prose of W. Somerset Maugham to the modern, spare, gut-wrenching writing of Joyce Carol Oates.

I have read a lot of her stories over the years. As a matter of fact, I’m working through a massive tome (well, it would be massive if it wasn’t stored as a collection of electrons in my Kindle) of her collected works… spanning more than four decades of her prodigious output.

One of her best is the classic, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been – which I re-read a week ago, read carefully, trying to fully understand the implications and observations of that frightening tale of adolescence and loss of innocence.

Heat is a very short, odd story. On the surface it is a horror story – the tale of the murder of twin girls, little more than children. It is more than this salacious collection of lurid facts, however.

The story is told from the point of view of another girl, a friend of the murdered twins. It is told in a simple, yet disjointed style. At first, it seems like a mannered, but straightforward telling of a horrific incident in the narrator’s youth.

If you pay close attention, however, the narrator begins including details that there is no way she could possibly know about. You can’t help but think, “Was she there? Did she see something? Was she involved in some way?” Of course she wasn’t… the reader knows this – but you can’t help but think.

Then there is the connection with the narrator’s adult life – her passions and destructive behavior. What is the relationship between these passages and the deaths of her twin friends from her childhood? Is she a reliable narrator? Why is she telling us all this?

The final line of the story seems to provide an answer – if not a complete and not a fully understandable one.

Now, if W. Somerset Maugham in his story seemed to hint at a second world, a world of chaos and primitive passions, one that civilized men almost always lack the courage to embrace – here we have Joyce Carol Oates completely tearing the tissue-like barrier between the two completely away – leaving the frightening reality that lies just beyond our everyday thoughts and actions completely exposed. It sits there bleeding and pulsing like a disembodied heart – and she enjoins us to look at it and acknowledge its existence through her fiction.

Or at least I think so.

Behind the icehouse in his car I’d think of Rhea and Rhoda and what happened that day upstairs in Roger Whipple’s room. And the funeral parlor with the twins like dolls laid out and their eyes like dolls’ eyes too that shut when you tilt them back. One night when I wasn’t asleep but wasn’t awake either I saw my parents standing in the doorway of my bedroom watching me and I knew their thoughts, how they were thinking of Rhea and Rhoda and of me their daughter wondering how they could keep me from harm, and there was no clear answer.
—-Joyce Carol Oates, Heat

What I learned this week, December 21, 2012

Posted on by Bill Chance

Read a harrowing short story in a collection by Joyce Carol Oates the other night. It was literary in structure and style, but a crime thriller in effect. If I could, this is what I would write.

Spider Boy – from the New Yorker

High Lonesome, a great collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates

High Lonesome, a great collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates

This is from the Deep Ellum Brewing Company’s first anniversary party. Candy and I are in there, but you have to look quick.

Deep Ellum Brewing Company's Lineup

Deep Ellum Brewing Company’s Lineup

I feel like such a nerd, commuting to work on a bicycle. At least I’m not the only one.

LeBron James says he bikes to most Heat home games to stay in shape

Ever since seeing the wonderful movie Tampopo, I’ve been bummed that Dallas has a lack of places to get decent Ramen. Finally, that seems to be coming to an end.
Dallas to Finally Get a Dedicated Ramen Spot

Even better, the place seems to be a product of the couple that did the cool Wicked Po’ Boys place here in Richardson.

Sunday Snippet – New Orleans Writing Marathon

Posted on by Bill Chance

On the morning after Halloween Candy went down to the restaurant in the St. Vincent’s Guest House for breakfast and when I joined her she introduced me to someone she had met at the counter. It was Brant Osborn, an English Teacher from Slidell.

He was at St. Vincent’s for a Writing Marathon organized and sponsored by the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project. The idea was that a group of about twenty writers would break into groups, either stay at the guest house or walk around the Lower Garden District for the day, stopping and writing as the mood struck them. Periodically, folks would read what they had written – hopefully providing ideas, inspiration and motivation for each other.

He asked me if I wanted to go.

I ran up to my room and grabbed my Moleskine and Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen.

The entire group (mostly English teachers and a few intruders like myself) started in the common room at the guest house, wrote a little and then we took off. There were five of us in my group, myself, Richard Louth (the organizer of the writing marathons), George, and Roman.

We walked down Magazine street, hitting a coffee shop, then po-boys for lunch, a side trip to a park, and then a beer at a table outside a neighborhood bar. We’d write and read at each stop. At the end we met back at St. Vincent’s for a celebration and reading, until darkness fell completely.

Most folks wrote little essays or short works inspired by St. Vincent’s, the history of New Orleans, or the other folks in the writing group. I, as is my wont, struggled to squeeze out some fiction. I didn’t have any of my writing prompt or idea collections with me. The only things I had was the inspiration of the St. Vincent’s hostel, some bits of story the other guys would tell, and a quote from a singer on Frenchman Street the night before, “Folks from small towns get arrested in the big city, folks from the big city get arrested in small towns.”

So I spent a whole day walking around Magazine Street in New Orleans with a group of like-minded folks, writing and reading. It was, for me, a perfect day. I want to publicly thank Richard Louth for putting together this program and for Brant Osborn for inviting me.

It was so much fun that now I want to do a writing marathon in Dallas. I’ve been thinking about it and am putting together a page on my blog to organize my thoughts. Go over to that page and take a look, feel free to leave comments or suggestions. The more the merrier.

So what did I write? Here it is, copied pretty much verbatim from my Moleskine. It’s about a third of a short story… and I’m working on where to take it from here.

Parasol

Chapter 1 Svetlana (I)

Svetlana dragged her backpack up the rickety wooden stairs through a heavy wrought iron gate. A fat man with an eyepatch sat behind a tall desk with paint peeling off the front.

She worried about her English – she had studied for over a decade and always dreamed of this – but now was the first time she actually spoke a complete sentence. She could feel her accent rolling in her mouth like a hot walnut.

The man with the eyepatch didn’t even look up. He flipped a set of keys in front of Svetlana and handed her a half-sheet of paper – cut unevenly with a set of numbered rules. It was handtyped and xeroxed, with a tattoo of hand-written corrections. The top line said, “Rules are non-negotiable – you will be thrown out of the hostel.

The one-eyed man finally spoke, still without looking up. “Down that hall – men on the left, you are on the right.”

Svetlana dragged her pack down the hall. The thin, worn carpet and painted walls were stained with water leaking from somewhere above. Strangely, the passage was lined with fine bronze sculptures of nude men and women – out of place in the worn and tattered building.

She reached the women’s dormitory and pushed the door open.

A quick feeling of panic rose in her throat as she looked down the center of a double row of bunk beds constructed of two by four beams nailed in a grid. In the Ukraine, she had her own wing with a personal servant. She had never slept in a room shared with strangers.

Chapter 2, Russell (I)

Russell never thought, never in a million years, that he could be thrown in jail for pissing on the side of a building. At home, you can pee wherever you want – it is a God-given right. He was no more than a block down the street from the bar when he realized he had forgotten to use the bathroom before he left. There was an unlit alley and he ducked in. He was admiring the patterns of oblique shadow the streetlights made on the rough brick when he noticed the blue and red flashing lights mixed in with the yellowish streetlight.

Just when he broke out into a grin at the interplay of colors and shapes he felt a rough hand on his shoulder.

Russell jumped a bit at the voice yelling in his ear, “Well, now, look who’s going to jail tonight.”

His arms were pulled back and he felt the cold steel click around his wrists.

“Shit, son, you ain’t even zipped up,” the unseen voice said. “Now, don’t you piss on me or I’ll crack your damn head.”

He felt his hands released and as soon as he brought them forward and fixed his pants he was shoved forward. His hand came up to catch himself from falling, his palms against the uneven wall. Boots pushed his feet apart.

Strong hands moved down his sides and between his legs, and finally slid his wallet out of his back pocket.

Chapter 3 Svetlana (II)

She looked down the room and saw a woman with spiked hair and a piercing through the side of her nose rummaging through a pile of plastic grocery sacks. She looked up. Svetlana thought she saw a tiny colorful flickering on the woman’s face.

“Which bed should I take?” Svetlana asked. The woman looked at her for what seemed like a long time then gestured at a lower bunk three beds down from where she was crouched.

“This one honey, it’s right under mine. Throw your pack on the bunk, but don’t leave it there when you’re gone. They got too many thieves ’round here.”

The woman glanced down at the bags at her feet and Svetlana saw a guilty look flash over her face. It didn’t stay there long. Svetlana threw her pack onto the lower bunk the woman had gestured at and then stood at the foot of the bed, stiffly, waiting to see what would happen next.

For most of her life Svetlana had dreamed of this moment – she had escaped. She was halfway around the world, but this was no dream. She realized, for the first time, that she had not actually thought past this very second, and was at a complete loss of what to do now. The panic rose and settled like a hard knot in her chest. She felt paralyzed – her mind blank. She stared at the woman, afraid the two of them would be standing like that forever.

The woman broke the impasse by moving quickly toward her – almost at a run – turning at the last instant in front of the flinching Svetlana and jumping up onto the top bunk. The woman was so close to Svetlana that she could see that her nose piercing was a tiny skull. Inside, a small LED was blinking – making the skull’s eyes flash bright red.

“You’re not from around here, are ya,” the woman said.

“No, the Ukraine. Is my accent that bad?”

“Nah, everybody’s got an accent here.”

“Your nose piercing?”

“Oh yeah, cool, huh. I make these and sell ’em on the corner. People love ’em. Changing the battery’s a bitch though. You want one? I’ll give you a discount.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have a piercing there.”

“Oh, no problema,” the woman said, fingering a large safety pin laced into a leather bracelet on her wrist. “Don’t have to go through your nose anyway. I’ve got a double skull – red and blue – can put that one through a nipple.”

Svetlana started to shake a little, and the knot under her breastbone grew and hardened.

“Not now, I’m sorry. Just off the plane and I’m still,… what do you say? Still on Ukraine time?”

‘Jetlagged.”

“Jet – Lagged,” Svetlana repeated slowly.

“Shit Ukraine,” the woman said, “I’m Joanna.”

“Svetlana.”

“OK Ukraine, whatever. You look like you need a beer. Grab your bag, let’s go.”

Chapter 4 Russell (II)

The concrete pallet had no mattress and the jailhouse orange coveralls were thin so Russell wasn’t really asleep when the noise outside the cell snapped his eyes open. Two huge deputies were dragging a man down the corridor towards the cell. He was wearing a once-whitish suite, covered in thin blue lines – now stained with blood and at least one other substance. The man looked exhausted and one eye was swollen almost shut but he still heaved and wiggled against the thick arms that restrained him.

The two deputies tossed him against a wall where he gathered himself erect and began the useless task of trying to smooth the countless deep wrinkles out of his suit. One deputy turned and began to work the lock on the cell door while the other kept facing the man in the suit.

“Gentlemen, “ the man in the suit began to talk in a surprisingly clear, steady, and controlled voice. “I do not stand to be treated like this. You should know that, not only am I an attorney, I am a member of the New York bar.”

The guard facing the man did not say a thing but gave a sharp shrug of his shoulder and a heavy telescoping rod shot down from his hand about the length of his forearm. At the end of the rod was a small but mean looking black sphere.

The man in the suit said, “Ahhhh,” but before a complete word could form the guard raised the extended truncheon and began wailing away at the man in the suit. His arm moved like a piston while the rod whistled through the air landing on the man with a sickening wet thud. Russell noticed the man had the presence of mind to cover his good eye with both hands and to turn and curl to present the smallest target. Russell had the feeling that this wasn’t the first time he had been beaten.

Russell guessed than swinging a heavy club like that was hard work and within a minute the guard stopped, bent over with his hands on his knees and breathing hard. He caught his breath and asked his partner, “Do you want a go at him, Hubert?”

“Naw, I got my licks in when we picked him up. I got a bottle in my locker, lets drop him here and grab a quick snort.”

They grabbed the man and attempted to throw him into the cell but somehow, he resisted enough to stand and walk through the cell door on his own volition. It shut with a metal clang and the two guards left without a backwards glance.

“They didn’t put you in a jail jumpsuit,” Russell said.

“No they did not,” the man said with a bit of pride in his voice, “That, my friend, is the source of the disagreement I had with those two apes back there. As you see, I’m still wearing my seersucker, and that I won that argument.”

Russell thought that was a definition of the word, “won,” that he had not ever heard before.

“How did you get here from New York?”

“Oh, I’m not really from New York. I was born and raised less than three miles from this very hoosegow. I only said I was from New York to impress those dimwitted thugs back there.”

“Now,” Russell said, “I’m just a country kid, but if I sat up all night thinking of saying something that would guarantee I got a bad beating in here, I don’t think I could do any better than telling them I was a New York lawyer.”

The man went on as if Russell hadn’t said a thing. “Now friend, I am an attorney… or at least I was. The state bar did not take too kindly… and over-reacted to – a trivial incident involving a real estate loan and the District Attorney’s niece. My present plans, however, do include, when they come to fruition, the reinstatement of my lawyerly license.”

“I don’t see how getting beat up in jail is going to help you get your license back,” Russell said. “Oh, and I’m Russell and I guess I’m pleased to meet you.”

The man seemed to think for a minute before giving up his name. “Jameson P. Samuel, at your service, but you can call me Jim.”

Chapter 5 Svetlana (III)

Joana ordered, “Two beers, whatever IPA you’ve got on tap please, and a coffee.”

“”What coffee you want?” the Bartender/Barista asked.

“I like my coffee like I like my women, dark, bitter, and Nicaraguan.” Joana turned to Svetlana, “No offense intended, Ukraine.”

Svetlana had no idea how to react to this but luckily one of her English lessons had covered what to say when someone said, “No offense.”

“None taken,” she replied.

The two women grabbed their drinks and settled into a booth at the end of the bar. Svetlana noticed everyone staring at someone in the booth across from them. She followed their gaze and saw a man in a stained white suit that looked like it had been slept in for a week. Half his face was swollen terribly. He was sipping a Bloody Mary with the paper umbrella stills ticking out of it and was talking loudly to a young man with ruffled hair – nursing a coffee in a foam cup.

Sunday Snippet – Benjamin

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’m doing more editing now than writing. The worst part of editing is trying to decide if something you wrote some time ago is worth rescuing… or finishing… or should be plopped in the digital dumper.

Here’s a piece of text that I was enthusiastic about when I wrote it… but now, not so much.

I don’t know, there might be something here or there might not.

Benjamin

With a resigned expression and a clumsy attempt at a dramatic flourish, Beauregard Evans slapped a crisp new bill down on the linoleum table. The small motley group that had gathered around leaned over for a good look. There was a collective sigh followed by a sucking in of breath as the implications began to sink in. Sam pushed between Sally Pumpernickel and Joshua Jones to get a better view of the fat aging hairy hippy, Beauregard, leaning over the table so far his belly pushed out under his dirty tie died T-shirt onto the table, almost touching the bill itself.

“Benjamin,” Sam mumbled to himself.

“A brand spankin’ new one hundred dolla bill,” Beauregard began his spiel, “Raught ‘dere. It goes to the first one to try the thing out. I needs ah test pilot. I need someone with the balls to ride da wild horse. Come on ya pussies! Who’s gonna give ‘er a shot.”

“Man, a hundred dollars won’t buy enough beer to wipe the horror of ridin’ that thing out ‘yer brain, that’s for sure,” said Jimbo. He stood off to the side, smelling of grease and ozone, still wearing his thick leather gloves, his welding helmet tipped up on top of his head, like some sort of degenerate knight, resting after a joust that had gone terrible bad.

Sally Pumpernickel said, “Well a hundred dollars will buy something more powerful than a sinkful of that cheap horse piss you call beer… that’s for sure too.” She blurted out a dizzy giggle at the thought of whatever she could plunk the c-note down on. She wriggled a bit as she imagined it hitting her bloodstream.

Sam broke away from the others as they were beginning to get restless, churning and murmuring, and crossed the room to the open porch, feeling the rough floorboards give with an aching creak as he walked. He looked out over the porch to the slopes beyond. Bits of the morning mist was still tumbling down the mountain, giving the park a surreal, blurred look. But the mist couldn’t hide it – there it was, blue as blue could be… right in front of his nose. The bright artificial blue of fresh paint, still giving off the soybean and solvent smell of drying enamel – the brushes tilted up from drying pools of leftover paint at the bottom of the abandoned open cans.

It was basically a huge iron tube, running down the side of the mountain. A sluice gate had been installed at the top, diverting a strong stream of the ice-cold water from the high spring-fed pool they called “The Dragon’s Cave” into the top of the steep metal pipe.

Sam tried to think it through. Really it was only an enclosed water ride, nothing much more. They had a half dozen just like it already. Jimbo and his crew had taught themselves how to weld the surplus plate steel, boiler iron, and ancient drill pipe they had scrapped and salvaged together into twisting and turning water-courses. The drunk, high, and poverty-stricken customers that on hot summer weekends enjoyed the cut-rate aqueous entertainment the park offered would throw themselves with abandon into the dark sewers – the longer, faster, twistier, scarier… the better.

The most popular enclosed slide was a real piece of work called, “The Devil’s Backbone.” It ended right behind the crude cabin that served as a workshop. The crew liked to hang out on the porch, drink, pass the bong and watch the customers tumble into the pool at the end of the ride. A particularly violent and unexpected isosceles twist right at the end tended to yank suit bottoms down and dislodge all but the most tightly secured bikini tops. It was great. Everybody, even the customers… especially the customers… loved it.

It had taken Jimbo a year to get the proper hang of the welding, and a lot of customers had been sent down the mountain to the emergency room while he was learning. He had been showing signs of mellowing… but now, this.

They had not named the new ride, the one that Sam was staring at, the one they were offering all the cash for the first one stupid and desperate enough to leap into. It was so simple. A simple tube running straight down the mountain at a very steep angle for about three hundred feet. It needed the run, it needed the speed, for at the bottom was a simple, elegant, round loop in the tube, shooting up about thirty feet in the air before looping back down and discharging into a generous pool at the bottom.

“Are you thinking about taking that thing?” asked Joshua Jones. He and Sally had followed Sam out on to the porch and leaned on the railing beside him.

“Yup.”

“You know what happened to the test dummies that the ran down there?”

“Yup.”

Jimbo had gone into Trinidad for a salvage sale at the “Platform Fashion Boutique” bankruptcy and bought their entire stock of realistic mannequins to use in testing out new rides. The water would wash them out of the bottom of the looping tube with their arms and legs detached, their necks bent at unnatural angles.

“Not a good test,” Beauregard Evans had said. “Those dummies don’t have no brains, no muscles, no reflexes. A human bean can wiggle through no problema. We’ll grease ’em up with Crisco to get em over the hump and make sure they keep their arms crossed over their chests.”

Now Sam, Joshua, and Sally leaned on the rail, looked at the tube, and thought of the crisp currency on the table and on the pieces of old mannequin stacked up behind some bushes.

“You still thinkin’?” Joshua asked Sam again.

“Yup.”

“You’ll never ride that thing,” Sally Pumpernickel said. “You don’t have the guts.”

Sam let out a sigh. No use thinking any more; now he had no choice. There was no way he could live the rest of his years… no matter how short, with Sally Pumpernickel thinking and saying he was a chicken. He pushed away from the railing, turned and walked briskly into the maintenance shed. He had to push the crowd aside – but he didn’t have to say anything – just reach out onto the table and snatch up the hundred dollar bill.

Sunday Snippet – The Revenge of the “Blank Claveringi”

Posted on by Bill Chance

Yesterday, I wrote about my quest to find a short story that I remembered from my childhood about a scientist eaten by a giant snail. It turned out to be a story called The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith. I found two versions of the story, one, in a 1967 edition of The Saturday Evening Post and another in a plethora of horror short story anthologies.

I could not get the tale out of my noggin’ so I realized that I had no choice for my Sunday Snippet entry other than to write a sequel. So, I give you the first rough draft of the first scene in my homage to Patricia Highsmith and her tale of ravenous snails the size of Volkswagens.

Since I read two versions of the story, I tried to craft my sequel so that it would fit either one – though I had the Saturday Evening Post version in my head. I put in enough backstory that you can read mine without knowing the Highsmith version – though of course, mine will contain many spoilers if you read it first. Sorry. If you want, go to your library and read the Highsmith story first. It’s worth it. You can find it anthologized in a number of books.

I left the story so I can continue on with more if I get the druthers. My idea for the next scene would take place a few years later on the I10 bridge over the Atchafalaya Swamp in Louisiana.

I’ll leave the action there to your imagination.

The Revenge of the “Blank Claveringi”

Doctor William Stead braced himself as he thrust his hands into the thick rubber gauntlets of the glove box. He did not have any dexterity to spare as he used forceps to pull the yielding bodies of six Zebra Snails out of their shells and snip off samples with a tiny pair of scissors. He was seventy five years old, felt even older, and the gloves made his work that much more difficult. Still, his license to work with invasive species carefully stipulated that he work under strict procedures to keep any of his subjects from escaping into the wild.

After collecting enough sample material he transferred the bits of brownish gray tissue into a small mortar, added a few drops of solvent from a pipette and began to grind the sample into a paste. Almost immediately his hands began to cramp and he set his work down and pulled out of the glove box to massage his fingers. He wished he had an assistant to help but he didn’t trust anyone with some of the work he was doing.

Stead was the most celebrated expert in malacology, with his expertise in snails. He had spent a third of his life looking for the giant snails of Kuva Island in the isolated Matusas group west of Hawaii. The natives there told of legends of enormous man-eating mollusks that once lived on Kuva until brave warriors had fought to exterminate them. Decades of futility had made him the laughing stock of the small community of scientists that shared his field of expertise.

Then, suddenly, and unexpectedly, Stead had been vindicated with the discovery of the species Carnivorous Steadi, the giant snail of Kuva. He was filled with pride when the snails were named after him. Two full-grown specimens had been discovered, one alive and one dead, along with a large group of smaller, immature specimens. The snails were monsters, with shells fifteen feet across and bodies twice as long.

The snails were omnivorous. At that size, the natives’ claims that they were man-eaters certainly could be right, although they could not move more than twenty feet in a minute. Doctor Stead was starting to put the plans that he had dreamed of for a quarter century into motion, building a massive, stout crate to bring the giant specimen back to the mainland for study, when the military stepped in and halted his work.

The public story was that the Matusas had been contaminated by a secret, early atomic bomb experiment and that had caused the strange mutations in the snail population. The natives were forcibly relocated and the entire area quarantined.

Stead, of course, knew this to be poppycock, and was quiet only under severe threats from some very powerful people. His research was taken from him and he was dragged back to the mainland. To further insure his silence, he was reimbursed to a generous degree, enough to establish his present laboratory in his original hometown of Kittanning, perched directly on the Allegheny river. He was even given a sizable grant to continue his research into mutations in the snail population. The government was sure he would be quiet and cooperative, laboring away in obscurity during the last few years of his life.

What the military and the government did not know is that Stead had managed in the short time that he was able to study the Carnivorous Steadi, the giant man-eating snails of Kuva, to learn the secrets of the mollusks’ complex and unique reproductive cycle. In addition, he had managed to secret a small vial containing several dozen fertilized eggs, each no bigger than a grain of rice, onto his person and brought them to this very laboratory on the banks of the Allegheny.

Stead had hatched these eggs and was studying the small larval form of the giant snails. These were voracious shell-less tiny forms of the species, able to thrive on land and in fresh water, eat both plant matter and animal flesh, and seemed to be able to reproduce on their own. Stead had always wondered why he had never been able to find any of the giant snails on the small almost featureless Kuva island for decades – then, after he had given up looking for two years, the massive mollusks suddenly made an appearance. There seemed to be a trigger that would cause these small leech-like larvae to suddenly metamorphose into the giant form, growing quickly to a gigantic size in a surprisingly short time.

He wasn’t sure exactly what circumstances would cause this dramatic change, but he was beginning to suspect it was a combination of brackish water and warm temperatures. It was this ability to hide as a tiny form for long periods of time, even decades, and then reappear as the monstrous form that had made survival of the species possible. The natives of the islands had many legends about heroic expeditions to exterminate the snails. That was also how they had managed to elude him for so long.

The doctor turned back to his work, using the thick gloves to apply small patches of the material he had prepared to long strips of electrophoresis gel and then clamp electrodes to the end of each strip. He had begun to suspect that the Carnivorous Steadi were able to interbreed with other local species of snails. Would these hybrids be able to grow under the proper conditions? If so, to what size? Stead knew it was vitally important to find out.

As this stage of his work neared completion, he heard the insistent buzzer at the door. “Just a minute,” he said as he withdrew from the glove box, assuming it was another routine delivery of equipment. He was surprised when he opened the door to see a strong-looking young woman enter the laboratory with long, firm strides.

“Doctor William Stead?” she asked with the attitude of someone that already knew the answer.

“Yes,” said Stead. He was sure he had never met her although something about the structure of her face looked familiar.

“Doctor, my name is Wanda Clavering. I believe you were the last person to see my father, Avery, alive.”

Stead stood in front of the woman stunned, until with a great effort he regained his composure and said simply, “I am so sorry for your loss.”

“You know that he left me and my mother waiting in Hawaii while he went off to visit you and to look for those horrible giant snails don’t you. We were stranded there for months before we were able to find out what had happened. My mother has never recovered from the shock and it has fallen on my shoulders to find out the truth about what happened out there.”

“Well, again I am so sorry. Your father came to see me in the Matusas Islands and I warned him of the expedition to Kuva. I did my best to discourage him from making the trip. He was an inexperienced sailor and must have fallen overboard as his boat was found drifting and abandoned. It was the height of irony when I traveled to Kuva to insure he wasn’t there that I finally discovered the creatures that I had so long sought after.”

“He was looking for them too.”

“Yes, but he was only a neophyte. Again, I feel terrible for your loss, but he was new to the quest, while I had been working for decades.”

The young woman turned away, opened her purse, and seemed to clutch a tiny object in her palm. Her jaw was set and she seemed to be trembling slightly, with rage or sadness… Stead couldn’t tell.

“Doctor Stead, do you know a Lieutenant Barnes?”

Now it was Stead’s turn to seethe. “Yes, I know him. He’s that upstart that the military sent out into the Pacific to take over my studies. He is an usurper.”

“I was able to meet with him and he was able to impart some information to me about my father,” Wanda Clavering said.

“He must have been infatuated with you to give up any information,” Stead replied. “I found him to be very stingy with the facts.”

“I assure you his only motivation was to set the record straight, no matter what you may think.”

“The record?”

“Yes, your story, Doctor Stead, is well known, but Lieutenant Barnes had educated me to the existence of some serious inconsistencies in that tale,” said Wanda.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“First of all, I’m sure you are aware that one of the two giant snails on Kuva was already dead when you and the natives arrived in the catamaran canoe. The natives have testified that it had been done in with a crude wooden spear.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“It means that my father was alive on Kuva when you reached it and you fed him to the snail to take the glory of discovery for yourself. You have said that you had been searching for decades while he was only a mere neophyte. That must have driven you mad.”

“A mollusk with a stick in it does not convict me of that crime, my dear.”

Wanda continued on as if Stead had not spoken. “You know that after a terrible accident that cost the life of three soldiers, eaten in their sleep, that the second snail was put to death.”

“No, I did not know that. It doesn’t surprise me, though, those military buffoons would be ones to be surprised by something as slothful as a snail.”

“After the specimen was dispatched,” Wanda said, “A complete autopsy was done. Inside the snail’s digestive tract… this was found.”

Wanda Clavering extended her palm and exposed the item she had picked out of her purse. It was a simple gold band.

“My father’s wedding ring.”

Doctor William Stead exploded. “Your father was an imbecile. He did not even understand that the snails would eat through the mooring ropes of his sailboat. The minute I saw the boat adrift and examined the ends of the anchor lines I knew they had been chewed through by mollusk teeth – enormous ones. He told me he thought of the snails as Blank Claveringi with his name as the species and an unknown genus. Snail food was too good an end for him, believe me. It was an undeserved honor to be devoured by the glorious  Carnivorous Steadi.”

Wanda Clavering let out a horrendous scream and moved forward as if to strike the frail old man. Stead knew he could not stand up to her youth and fury and turned to flee out the door of the laboratory. As he moved through the opening, he turned and saw Wanda looking about for a weapon. Her eyes fell on a heavy glass cylinder containing a mass of green plant matter with a thick lid clamped shut. Stead recognized this as a container with maybe twenty of the precious immature giant snail larvae within.

He paused in his flight right outside the door, standing on the little strip of concrete that ran along the bank of the river.

“No! Not that!” he shouted to no avail as Wanda Clavering threw the container with all her might and it struck Stead on the head with a sickening thunk. Dazed, he turned and fell to the ground amongst the shattered glass shards of the container, which had fallen and broke open on the concrete after cracking his skull.

Stead could not move, paralyzed by the head wound, but could see the steady stream of blood pouring out onto the ground. Greedily lapping at the blood were the larvae, freed of their glass prison and eager to eat something other than the sprigs and leaves that Stead would drop into the jar.

He realized that his left arm was still moving under his control. In the periphery of his vision he saw that Wanda Clavering had found a heavy shovel leaning against the wall of the laboratory and was quickly walking over with the obvious intent of avenging her father. Stead used his last ounce of strength to sweep as many of the larvae as he could off the grass. Some bit his arm and held on but he saw a few slide down the bank and squirm, flipping into the quickly moving stream of the Allegheny river.

“Swim, swim, my children, swim fast and far, swim to the sea,” Doctor William Stead mumbled as Wanda Clavering brought the blade of the shovel down on the back of his neck.

The Quest for the “Blank Claveringi”

Posted on by Bill Chance

Illustration by Jean L. Huens for the Saturday Evening Post. Done for the short story “The Snails,” by Patricia Highsmith.

A while back, viewing a hyper-realistic sculpture of hundreds of snails climbing a beer stein to their doom jarred loose an ancient flake of memory from the cobwebby and calcified ruins inside my skull. It was a memory of a short story from my childhood. It’s funny how strangely strong, yet distorted, these moth-eaten impressions can be. I remembered a story about a man on an island looking for giant man-eating snails and coming to a bad end.

Little bits, which may or may not be accurate… I remembered reading it in a magazine; I remembered an illustration showing the snail; I remembered a long, slow battle to the death between the man and the snail. Oh, I did remember being shocked at the ending. I think the story was written in the first person and I was confused at the death of the protagonist… who was telling the tale?

Now that the memory was jarred loose, it had to be teased out or it would drive me nuts. So, off to the Internet. It didn’t take too many crude search queries to quickly realize that many people had been looking for this same story. It didn’t take much more work to find the name of the story, “The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi.’”

I was surprised to read that the story was by Patricia Highsmith, the Forth-Worth born (though she fled quite effectively to Europe) author of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Strangers on a Train.” The author had a particular affection for snails – from the book Snail, by Peter Williams:

So attached was the author Patricia Highsmith to snails that they became her constant travelling companions. Secreted in a large handbag or, in the case of travel abroad, carefully positioned under each breast, they provided her with comfort and companionship in what she perceived to be a hostile world.

The story was included in an Alfred Hitchcock collection of tales for youngsters, “Alfred Hitchock’s Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense.” That must have been where I read it, not in a magazine. The only problem is that the book seems to have first come out in 1973 and I felt like I was younger than that when I read it. But again, memories are funny, I must have got it wrong.

A quick check of the Richardson Library’s website and I found the book. So I went down there, grabbed it off of the shelves (It was odd looking for the book in the children’s section – it was such a horrific story) and I sat down and read it.

That was the story from my childhood. Of course, a lot of it I didn’t remember, but there can’t be too many tales set on an island with a scientist fleeing from a man-eating snail. If you wonder about the title – “The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi,’” the protagonist, Avery Clavering, is fantasizing about getting the new species of giant snail, about the size of a Volkswagen, named after him… though he can’t decide on the genus (thus the “Blank”).

I was wrong about the story being in first person. It is told from the protagonist’s point of view and does go inside his head – that must have been what threw me. The horror of the story is real – the snail is slow, of course, but relentless. The hero can walk faster than the snail, but the island is small and the thing will eventually catch up. He has to sleep sometime.

I enjoyed the story and made a note of reading some more Highsmith. Looking in the front of the book, I discovered that the story was part of a collection called, “The Snail-Watcher and other stories.” The library had that one too, and I checked it out. That collection has at least two horrific snail-related tales… I guess the woman did have a thing for slimy mollusks.

In the front of that collection I found another clue – it said, ““The Quest for the ‘Blank Claveringi’” originally appeared in slightly altered form in The Saturday Evening Post, as “The Snails.”

Back to the Internet. A little searching found that the story was in the June 17, 1967 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. I would have been ten years old then… and that felt about right. I checked the library archive, and they had the 1967 ‘Post in bound form in the archives. The woman at the information desk didn’t seem to understand what I wanted (“Yes, we have magazines… 1967?”) but eventually I was able to get her to go back and retrieve the volume for me. I had to sign a form and give up something (my library card) as collateral to get the tome, and I did.

It was really cool to sit down at a library study station and look through a set of forty-five year old magazines. The ads, the photographs, the illustrations…. pretty damn cool.

I found the story, with an excellent illustration by Jean-Louis Huens. In the white space above the title, someone had written in pencil, “This is what I wanted you to read.” So, I am not the only person on a quest for this story, not even the only one to end up in the archives of the Richardson Public Library.

I took a photo of the illustration with my phone and then sat there and read the story again. Since I had cruised through the Alfred Hitchcock version only a few minutes before, I immediately began to notice differences in the text. At first they seemed minor, only polishings, or rearrangements of phrases. But as I neared the end, the story veered and suddenly it was a completely different tale altogether.

This was probably the version I had read as a ten-year-old child. I seemed to remember another person on the island, and that was only true on the Saturday Evening Post Version. Though the only real significant difference between the two is in the last handful of paragraphs, the thrust of the two plots diverged completely. While the Hitchcock version was an existential tale of the futility of man against the inexorable power of nature, the second was a revenge tale of murder and madness.

I really don’t know why the story was rewritten so savagely, though I think I did like the Hitchcock version (which I assume is the revised tale) a tiny bit better.

At any rate, I checked out two of her books of short stories – The Snail-Watcher and other stories, and Little Tales of Misogyny (a slim volume of very short works about very bad people). I really should not read this kind of stuff. What I am reading is a very strong influence on what I am writing and these stories play into my natural tenancies toward repulsive scribbling.

But it is what it is. As a matter of fact… I have to write something tomorrow for my Sunday Snippets…. Maybe something about giant Volkswagen-sized man-eating snails…. maybe a sequel. What would happen if someone brought a snail back to the mainland?

Snails can reproduce frighteningly fast under the right conditions, you know.

Sunday Snippet – The Revenge of the “Blank Claveringi”

Sunday Snippet – Punch Card (How I Met Your Grandmother)

Posted on by Bill Chance

I had a writing teacher once that said that ideas were swimming through the air all around us and if you didn’t catch one as it went by, someone else would.

This morning, I caught an idea for a short story and wrote down an outline before I went out for a bicycle ride. There are four scenes, spread out over, say, forty years. The working title for the story is Punch Card (How I Met Your Grandmother).

Here’s the second scene, which takes place in the past (maybe 1975 or so). I’ll write the other three scenes over the next few days – hopefully to take to my writing group. If you want a copy of the first draft when I finish it, send me an email at bill*chance99@gmail.com – except put a period where the asterisk is and the number 57 where the 99 is (take that spammers).

I hated the punch card machine more than anything I had ever hated before. I was a junior, majoring in comparative literature and since I wasn’t in the computer science department I could only use the computer lab after ten in the evening. The giant computer itself took up half of the bottom floor of the building – but nobody was ever allowed to go or even see in there. The other half was filled with a filthy snack bar, lined with rusty autobots that spat out moldy candy bars and bags of stale off-brand potato chips – and a series of dingy rooms filled with hundreds of punch card machines.

I had taken an elective class in Fortran programming because I thought that computers were the future and I was worried about paying rent after graduation. Writing the assigned programs was easy – find the sides and angles of a right triangle, the day of a date, or draw a series of boxes. I could write the code, but I couldn’t punch the cards.

My homework problems had to be punched onto these beige cards – rectangular with one corner cut off. I had to buy a case of the damn things at the beginning of the semester. I couldn’t imagine using all those cards. I didn’t know. Three months later, I had to buy another half-box from some kid in my dorm. I was always a terrible typist and would get nervous, freeze up and hit the wrong letter.

This was worse than a typewriter. You would load a stack of cards into the machine and then it would warm up and start to hum. The heat would rise and the ozone would burn your nose. The keys were big and yellow and had to be shoved hard before the machine would roar and then… “Blam!” it would whack a little tiny rectangle out of the card. A paper flake would fly through the air to join the thick layer of cardstock confetti coating the floor and, magic, a corresponding hole would appear in the card itself.

With the punchcard machine a mistake was a disaster. I never could see that I’d missed a key. Sure, the code printed out along the top of the card but they never put new ribbons in the machines and it was always too faint for me to read. When I had my stack of cards all finished I’d take them into the computer room, wrap them with a rubber band, and shove them through this little wooden door in the wall where they would fall down a chute. You never could even see what was on the other side.

Then it was time to wait. Wait for hours. I’d spend all night there, waiting for my program to run. Then, my output would drop down another, bigger, chute into a pile. Every time an output would drop, all the kids waiting would run in and see if it was theirs. It was horrible.

You see, if your program ran correctly you’d get a few sheets of paper with the code and the answer printed on it but I never did. I’d find my cards still rubberbanded together and clipped to a huge stack of pinfeed folded green and white striped paper. On the top would be a handwritten note that would say something like, “Core Dump, you loser!”

Whenever you made a mistake, even a tiny one, the core would dump and the computer would print out hundreds of pages of gibberish. You were supposed to carefully peruse the printouts and find your error in there somewhere but nobody had time for that. You’d throw the printout in this huge wooden bin, scratch your head, and start looking for your mistake. I have no idea why they wasted all that paper.

Sometimes it would be a mistake in my work, but usually it was a typo in my card punching. I figured out that the little holes corresponded to letters, numbers, or symbols and I punched out a card with everything on it, in order, and I would have to slide the thing slowly over every card I had punched to try and find the mistake.

It was horrible. I would be so tired, my eyes swimming, sitting at that huge punch machine, trying to type. I’d make a mistake and throw the card onto the overflowing trash bins and start again. Even when I made it through a card, I’d be terrified I had made an unknown error and would generate another core dump. It was killing me… but I had nowhere else to go.

Our instructor was always harping on us to put in comment cards. These were punch cards marked in a certain way that they didn’t make the computer do anything, but simply left comments. You were supposed to leave comments about what your code was supposed to be doing or what your variable represented or why you decided to do something the way you did. It was a pain in the ass and I never did it until the teacher started marking my grade down because I had insufficient comments in my code.

So I started putting the comments in, though I never commented on the code. I figured he didn’t really look through everybody’s work for these things and only took the computer’s count of how many comments were in here. Sometimes I’d just gripe… like, “Fortran really sucks,” or “This is too hard,” or “It’s way too late at night to be doing this.”

This got to be pretty boring pretty fast so I switched to some of my favorite Shakespeare Quotes, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport” or “There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting,” or “I am not bound to please thee with my answer.” I might make some mistakes punching the comments… but who cared? They would still go through as comments and you could still read them.

Like it was yesterday, I remember the day when I picked up my output and, sure enough, there was the big thick stack of folded paper, another core dump, but instead of a handwritten note, there was a punched card on top of my stack. It was different in that it had been done on a machine that had a fresh ribbon in it and across the top, in crisp, clear, printing, it said, “Funny Comments Ronald. You’re getting close. Ck crd 7 error in do loop – Christine.”

And sure enough, in my seventh card I had hit a capital letter “Z” instead of a number “2.” I never would have seen that.

So I redoubled my efforts at witty, humorous, and obscure quotations for my comment cards. I was reading this huge crazy new book called Gravity’s Rainbow and one day I quoted from it. Stuff like, “You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.” or “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers,” or “Danger’s over, Banana Breakfast is saved.”

My program ran that time and the card on top said, “A screaming comes across the sky – Christine,” which made me so happy I didn’t stop smiling for a day.

The next program, I added a comment card that said, “Christine, I can’t see you – Ronald.”

And it came back with, “I know, but I can see you. I think you’re cute – Christine.”

So I thought about it and worked up my courage. At the end of a program that I larded with my best quotes from the composition book I carried with me and scribbled in all the time… my commonplace book, I finished with a card that said “Christine, I want to meet you – Ronald.”

All that night I was the first to fight their way in to grab any program that slid down the chute, only to be disappointed again and again as other student’s projects ran before mine. Finally, as the sky was beginning to turn a light pink in the west, my program dropped. On top was a card. I ran back to my dorm room to read it, not daring to look at it anywhere in public.

It said, “Love to Ronald. Snarky’s at six, on Thursday. Don’t be late – Christine.”

Snarky’s was a little chain restaurant off campus not far from the computer building. My heart almost beat out of my chest. Thursday was going to take a long time to get there.

Sunday Snippet – Night Guitar (opening scene)

Posted on by Bill Chance

This week’s snippet is the first scene from the worst short story I’ve written in the last few years. It’s so bad I should simply delete the files and get on with my life, such as it is, but I haven’t done that yet. The mere existence of that pile of silly randomness bugs me like a hangnail and I can’t help but pick at it. I’ve taken it apart and am editing some of the parts that might work sometime and trying to create a creaking framework to hang everything on.

And because I am just too damn tired to come up with anything worthwhile this evening I give you what I’ve written for a opening scene so I can humiliate myself and you can wallow in some shallow schadenfreude before you click away.

Night Guitar

Copernicus Mayhem was the lead singer and guitar player of the band Sweetmeat Valentine. He made damn sure nobody called him anything else. The name his parents had chosen for him was Doug Chandler. But nobody called him that. Not any more.

“Oh, come on Copernicus, please, pretty please, let’s go. I wanna go,” said Serena Twist. She was his West Coast girlfriend, and that was where they were, so she was his girlfriend.

“Oh, babe, I’m beat. This is the first three days off I’ve had in a month. Let’s stay here, the suite’s big and nice, hit some weed, soak in the tub.”

“Hit some weed and soak in the tub? That’s all you wanna do. I’m bored. I’m bored. Let’s go.” Serena had switched her voice into her high sniveling mode – like fingernails on chalkboard. Copernicus knew that he would be giving in, but he wanted to hold out for a minute or two. Have to keep up appearances. He had a sliver of pride left – or he hoped he did.

“What kind of stupid concert is this anyway?” Copernicus asked without any intention of listening to the answer.

“It’s classy. It’s classical. This composer, Tyrone Page, has done a new symphony. It’s never been performed before. You’ve been invited and I want to go. It’s a humongous honor.”

Copernicus had heard of Tyrone Page though he had never actually heard his work. Page was a mystery, an enigma, nobody knew who or where he was.

The scores of Page’s works arrived on the desks of famous conductors at random intervals. Copernicus wondered why he had never heard anything written by the infamous mystery composer… then he remembered. Page never allowed his stuff to be recorded. It had to be heard live. And though the composer was hidden, his lawyers weren’t. Nobody dared put the sound down on tape, or disk, or anything else.

Copernicus was interested. Now, he actually wanted to go; intrigued. It had been a long time since he had felt intrigued.

“Ok, ok, If you want this thing so much, I’ll go,” Copernicus said. “But I want you to call Skinner and make the transportation arrangements. I want a stretch this time, no van. And I want some weed in the car and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. And plenty of ice.”

“Sure honey, I’ll set it up. Thank you, Thank you.” Serena seemed truly grateful.

“Yeah, you do that. And Serena? I’m gonna be hungry when we get back. I want some good room service this time. Not that usual stale crap. Oh, and please change. If this is a big deal like you say, I want you to wear something… something shiny.”

Sunday Snippet – The Red Tail

Posted on by Bill Chance

A quick first draft I hammered out on a break from work. There may be something here, but I’m not sure what.

Walter ran through the corn. It was higher than his head and he knew he was invisible. The stalks stood thick, but there was room to run between the rows. He realized he still had the gun in his hand and that it was slowing him down, affecting his gait. He raised the gun to his face and realized that it was giving off a burned smell and that the barrel was hot.

He threw the gun away into the corn.

He wanted to start running again, but Walter had lost his way. The high corn hid him but made it impossible to see where he was going. The noon sun was directly overhead and he realized he didn’t even know what direction he had come from.

So he just ran.

When he was a child, Walter Skopsky’s father gave him a gift. He didn’t know it at the time but that moment was to shape the rest of his life. His father was a struggling alcoholic insurance underwriter and was hunched over his desk balancing the family’s meager bank accounts late one evening – trying to finish so he could reach for his second bottle. Walter was out of paper for his school work and was pestering his father for a sheet or two when the old man reached into a drawer and fell upon a pad of graph paper. He threw it and told his son to leave him alone for the rest of the night.

Walter still remembers the cool, green color of the pad, the thick blue and fine red lines crisscrossing in a grid of such heavenly precision – the repeating pattern of the axis implying an infinite steadiness and surety reaching out past the edges of the sheets into infinity to the left and right, back from the past and forward into the future.

It was the most beautiful thing Walter had ever seen.

A shy, nervous, and delicate boy, Walter took refuge in his graph paper. Once he committed something to the Cartesian Predictability on the single plane he felt he had the world under his control.

He was terrified of the long drives his family would take every holiday to West Virgina – to spend time with his mother’s large, diffuse and complex, intertwined family. The visit was a blur of loud and unpleasant confusion to Walter, but the drive up there and back was horrifying. Walter did not have access to accurate statistics on driving fatalities, but he watched the evening news and read the paper. He knew that a lot of people were meeting a gruesome end on the roads. Walter made guesses as to the percentages of deaths per thousand miles of driving and would graph the family voyage along with his estimate of his odds of dying in a fiery crash.

During the trip he would look from the back seat of the car over his father’s shoulder at the odometer and would then retreat and mark their progress on his graph and reduce his estimate of fatality until, pulling into the weed-infested gravel driveway of his aunt’s doublewide, the two lines would move to zero and he could breath easier until it was time for the trip back.

As the years went by Walter became increasingly unsatisfied with his simple linear graphs. The world was getting too complicated. That was when, on a whim, he fished the teacher’s guide to a set of standardized progress tests given out to his entire grade level out of a classroom trash can. He slipped the guide into his notebook and surreptitiously sneaked it home like it was a set of state secrets. That night he removed the clear cellophane from the unread thin pamphlet and devoured it cover to cover. There, he discovered, for the first time, the concept of the bell curve.

The simple curve resonated with Walter and he felt, finally, that he had learned a concept that explained the world to him. At first the librarian dismissed him, but he kept bugging the woman until she led him to an introductory statistics textbook that had a long chapter on the normal distribution. The mathematics were above him, but Walter began to understand the curve itself in its graphical form, with the large number of “normal” points arranged around the center and the two, rare, special, “tails” extended out to either side.

Walter copied the curve onto an entire pad of graph paper and then began to fill in the areas with highlight markers, so he could still see the lines underneath. He used the most common yellow markers on the vast territory of the center hump of the curve. The top one percent of the tail, he colored green and the bottom one, he colored red.

He stared at that upper green tail and swore he would always be in there, no matter what it took. If he couldn’t make it there – he would move on. He entered into a long period of studying. He would graph his test scores and his mid-semester and final grades – making sure he was in that top one percent. Anything less would be represented by a big blotch in that vast yellow mediocrity of the curve and Walter would be up late at night, sweating in his bed, and staring at that mark of self shame.

In English class one day, they read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and Walter wrote a long heart-felt essay about how the two roads led to the left and right areas of his beloved bell curve, and the “Road Less Traveled” led to the right-handed, green tail. He even stapled one of his beloved graphs to the back of the paper, carefully labeled with sections of the poem. He let slip a rare grin of self-satisfaction as he handed in his paper, sure that the teacher would be impressed by his understanding of the relationship between statistics and literature.

Walter was mortified when the paper was returned with a “C-” and the notations, “Well written, but does not make sense,” and, “Does not follow instructions.” Tears welled up in his eyes as he made a mark slightly to the left of center in the vast hated yellow land of the bell curve.

He kept staring at that graph… as time and again he kept ending up in that yellow center. It was horribly frustrating and he became more and more discouraged. Walter needed to be there in that green tail – the top one percent. But, try as hard as he could, he kept falling short. Slowly, inevitably, he began to think about the other end of the graph, the red end. The bottom one percent. What would life be like down there?

It was about that time that Walter’s father fell asleep in his car in the garage with the engine running. There was a lot of talk about whether he had done himself in or had simply made another drunken mistake… his last one. Walter didn’t think it made much difference either way.

In the confusion after his father’s death Walter was able to sneak into his parent’s bedroom and find the black plastic case hidden under the shoe stand. Walter’s father had proudly taught his son how to use the snub nose revolver and the two of them had spent some time out in the country, target shooting at whiskey bottles stuck between strands of barbed wire.

The gun was the only possession of his father’s that Walter cared about. He was able to keep it hidden away under his mattress. Nobody ever payed much attention to his room and after his mother disappeared and he was sent to live with his aunt in West Virginia nobody payed any attention to him at all.

Walter had grown into a tall, lanky, quiet youth. He wasn’t too quick, but he was fast, and he had some stamina. At first, he did well in math, which made his teachers like him and the other kids stay even further away.

He was still making his graphs, and his bell curves, but he had stopped coloring in the green tail on the right hand side. His mind began thinking more and more about the red end to the left and began to rejoice as his marks were drifting lower and lower, moving in that direction.

Finally, one summer he decided to take the plunge. He began thinking more and more about a little gas station out on the highway. A dirt road ran to the east from his aunt’s trailer and was separated from the gas station by a wide, flat, corn field. He was tall, fast, and though it was wide he knew he could run across that field in less than five minutes.

A girl from his high school worked out there on the weekends. Her parents owned the place. She was a senior and a cheerleader and everybody knew who she was though Walter was sure she had no idea who he was.

All Walter had to do was wait until the corn had grown higher than his head.

He didn’t know where he was going, but Walter still ran through the corn. His pockets were stuffed with cash which seemed heavier than it should have been.

Walter realized that this must be what it felt like to be down in the red tail of the bell curve. Lost, running, desperate. This wasn’t what he expected but he wasn’t sure if it was what he wanted. He did know that now he was there, down in the red tail, that he was there for good.

Sunday Snippet – Historical Fiction

Posted on by Bill Chance

Today’s bit is from a confused collection of text that I have been working on for a long time. It was intended to be a piece of historical fiction – a form I love to read but have never really had luck writing.

I think I’m going to give up the historical aspects of this story and move it into the present day. That means I can remove everything from the past and tell it as a complete lie. Trying to do proper research and insure historically accurate details and language was more time than I wanted to waste and more energy than I wanted to expend.

The following is the end of what I used to mess with and it will have to go. But I thought I’d let you take a read before I send it up to that great delete key in the sky.

“Up, Up!” For the second time in the last day, someone was shaking me and shouting into my face. “We must go now!” It was my father. He was in such an agitated state I almost didn’t recognize him.

It took me a minute to get my bearings, to remember and start to understand why I was in bed yet still dressed. The clock showed it to be late afternoon. My face ached terribly and I gingerly touched my mouth and cheek, feeling the dried blood, which stained my shirt with an irregular dark streak. Father ignored my awful appearance, threw an old overcoat around my shoulders and dragged me out the front door.

The Beauregards and the Carrolltons were waiting there, on horseback. Carson held the reins of two more steeds, one for me, one for my father. Before we could mount, my father grabbed me roughly by the shoulders and shoved his face inches from mine. His usually deep and reserved eyes were swollen and bulged out, his cheeks red as beets, his hair, once carefully groomed, now dirty and wild. With a disturbed cracking and rising voice that I wouldn’t have believed could have come from that cultivated and meticulous man he screamed into my face.

“Listen! Listen to me. No matter what happens, no matter what they say or what questions they ask… remember, nothing could have been done! It was God’s will… an act of God alone!” “Do you understand.”

He said the last three words not like a question but as a statement of fact. With that I was grabbed roughly and pulled onto a horse and immediately the group rode off along the road. The rain had let up; only a light misting remained of the violent storm. Everyone was silent as we moved along behind the row of cottages. I couldn’t look out at the lake, it was screened from view by the buildings and landscaping, plus I had to pay attention as the horse worked his way through the deeply rutted road, maneuvering around the many small ponds of standing water. Before long we emerged before the bridge over the spillway but instead of crossing it to the dam the others were turning onto the rough path that led away into the woods. I followed.

They all halted and turned, staring out over the lake. I halted my horse and turned also. I’ll never forget the chill that struck all the way to my very core — the horrible sight that my eyes saw from that road.

The lake was gone. The view was so shocking and unexpected it took several seconds for my mind to comprehend what I was looking at.

Above the old waterline, everything was as it always was; the cottages lined up, the big lodge house, smoke still curling up against the light rain from its cluster of chimneys. The boardwalks still ran along the edge, extending out to the fishing and boat docks, which still stood in place. The hills still ran up and away, covered with the green growth of spring, the blue mountain mists still licked down the hollows to the old waterline.

Below this line, however, everything was horribly, horribly wrong. The lake was replaced with an enormous black wound in the earth. To look down, down into the gaping maw of mud, to see small rivulets of filthy water still running down the impossibly steep sides was to stare into the very depths of hell. I couldn’t stand it. I turned my head away and looked over at the dam itself and saw that it too, had simply ceased to exist. The huge earthen wall was represented now by two small, steep hillocks at each end of an immense chasm. The dam had been neatly sliced away entire by the unimaginable force of the water confined behind it.

Instinctively, I looked back at our own cottage. The dock still stood, except now it was perched high in the air, on stilted legs above an obscene slick, barren hillside. My sailboat hung from its mooring line at the bow, dangling in mid air, swinging in the breeze. Something else moved down there, and I had to look closely to make out the Italian workmen, wading down into the mud. They were grabbing the stranded fish, the bass flopping around helpless, and stuffing them into canvas bags.

For one second I felt sorry for myself. Our wonderful cottage, my beautiful boat, the summers all ruined. That instant of self-pity was drowned by a clear voice that welled up from somewhere deep within me, a voice of awful clarity in the confusion. That voice simply asked, “Where did the water go?”

The lake had been several miles long and up to seventy feet deep. Millions and millions of tons of water had rushed out in what must have been little more than minutes, carrying with it the untold tons more of earth and rock that made up the dam itself. I shuddered when I thought of the power of that giant wave, of how it would grow in deadly fury as it rushed down the mountainside, picking up trees, rocks, roadway… any thing that stood in its inexorable path.

I thought of the narrow canyon that carried the stream down off the mountain, the very valley that I had fought my way up the day before. There was nothing along that way to halt or even slow down the wave; it would actually focus the power, help it to build up upon itself.

Finally, I thought of the city of Johnstown far below. It was already flooded, waterlogged, completely at the mercy of the disaster that fell from the mountains above. The remains of the lake would descend upon the town like a falling mountain, a moving mountain of water and debris, a flying, boiling unstoppable wave of violent death.

Finally, I thought of Maggie in her little shack, perched right there on the bank by the water. Right where the Conemaugh River opened up into the doomed helpless hopeless city.

I let out a cry, a shriek like that of a pitiful useless animal and began to shake uncontrollably. An icy coldness held me in a merciless grip. I couldn’t move. My father saw my state and, still muttering “Act of God, nobody’s fault, Act of God” grabbed the reins of my horse and led us all away into the woods along the rough path.