Halloween Brew

Happy All Hallows’ Eve to you and yours.

‘Tis a dark and stormy night
The vampires are out for a bite
And the ghosties on the prowl.
Something out there’s smelling foul.
While down in Zombie Town
There’s the howl of a devil hound
And deep in Castle Vlad
Frank ‘N’ Stein are in their lab
Mixing up their ghoulish stew
Stirring up that Halloween Brew.
On Transylvania Street
There’s a lot of trick or treat
As the jack ‘o lantern choir
In their Halloween attire
Walk the walking dead dance,
Skeletons doing their scary prance.
The headless horseman rides
With his head held at his side
In the Grand All Hallow’s
Eve Parade and Spooktastic Show.
Under a full witching moon
Midnight’ll be here soon.
Then at “The Pit and Pendulum”
They’ll gather with their ghastly grins
For the Ushers will be there.
A cask of Amontillado they’ll share.
They’ll spill their tell-tale hearts
Spinning tales of the darker arts
And the time of the Halloween Brew
When they drank F ‘N’ S’s stew.
Another year rolls around
And the dead sleep safe and sound.
Then October shall arrive
When the dead come alive
For another show and tell
Under autumn’s darkest spell
When the goblins take to the air
For the Great Halloween Affair
And more of that Good Stew,
A tall hot mug of Halloween Brew.

The Sentence

Surrounded by books, hundreds of books, bookshelf after bookshelf of books he would never have the chance to read, Lionel, called Nello by his friends, set at his large round desk, built out of a great oak by his grandfather and willed to him. He typed the first sentence of a new work:

He loved the woman more than he’d ever loved a woman.

The he in the sentence was his father. Nello did not write a second sentence. The sentence had taken a lot out of him. Emotionally. The woman was not his mother.

Nello stood up, Walked over to the window and opened the curtains. Outside, it was a green spring morning. He raised the window and listened to the spring birds courting one another with song.

What kind of song did his father use on the woman? He’d used a very sad one on his mother. They went to the south of France for their honeymoon. It rained the two weeks. Their marriage cracked shortly after they returned from France. His mother had confused the word mirage with the word marriage.

He stretched his arms out like wings. He was unable to fly out the window and faraway from the sentence. A chain stretched from that sentence to his body and pulled him back to his large, wooden desk made by his father’s father.

He looked at the sentence again. Stared at it. If I erased that sentence, would that woman my father loved more than any woman be my mother?

Probably not.

What that sentence needed was a second sentence. One that called that first sentence out. One that began with an irreversible however. If he wrote that second sentence, would his father be the man he was.

Nello pulled a book off one of his shelves. The Father-less Man. His last novel. He opened it up to the middle and read several paragraphs. He closed the book and set his fingers on the keyboard, determined to have the courage to write that second sentence. Father or not. That was the only way he would be free to write the new novel. He typed.

“But the woman did not love him.”

With that sentence, he knew the title of his next novel: Love in the Third Sentence.

The Camera

“Just aim and shoot,” Paulie said to his girlfriend. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Yeah, says you,” she said.

She was not good at all with mechanical things. A camera was a mechanical thing. An instrument. She had a long history of breaking things. In high school, she broke her biology teacher’s favorite microscope. It was an accident but she had a hard time not getting expelled. She never got back in her teacher’s good graces, barely passing with a D. Now her boyfriend was telling her that operating a camera was easy peasy. No way. She didn’t dare touch it. It would break just to spite her.

“C’mon, Emily,” he said, handing her the camera.

It was such a nice camera. It must have cost a bunch. She, for sure, did not want to break it. She pushed his hand away and shook her head. “You have no idea how easy it will be for me to break it.”

“You’re not going to break it,” he insisted. Was he being foolish or what? Of course, she would break it if she took it.

For all the money in the world, she was not going to touch the camera. Not for all the money in the world. “No,” she said. Tears were forming in her eyes. She was about to cry. As the old saying goes, she was between a rock and a hard place, and she was not getting out anytime soon.

He opened her hand and set the camera in it.

It wasn’t as heavy as it looked. Her hand shook. “Stop, hand,” she commanded it.

The camera seemed to like her hand. How ‘bout that. It was unbelievable.

Then the camera spoke to her, “You drop me and you’re a dead woman.” If you’ve ever been threatened by a camera, it’s a scary thing.

 

An Encounter With Angels

I met an angel
Then there were two
In long white robes
And shoes off-blue

The tall fellow spoke
Ever so soft,
“We’re here to take you
Up to the loft

Where the weather’s good
The food’s delish
Wine’s from Cana
You’ll love the fish

Caught by Saint Pete
When he’s on break
From nine hole golf
At the Pearly Gates.”

I hesitated
And didn’t trust
Two guys with signs
“Heaven or bust”.

“Or there’s the basement
If you prefer
We’ve got one heck
Of a job offer

Hell needs a boss
With a can-do
Management style.
So why not you?”

Given the choices
‘Tween up or down
I preferred sky
Not the undereground.

The angel’s boots
Kicked my tush
“Hope you enjoyed
Our little push.

“We were just fooling.
Couldn’t you tell?
Hope things down there
Are really swell.”

So listen to me.
Take my advice.
If angels knock
They may not make nice.

Get out the garlic,
The green glow sticks,
Silver bullets.
They should do the trick.

Remember demons
Take a shine
To cosplaying
All that’s divine.

Short Story Recommends

I love short stories. I love to read them, and I love to write them. For me, there’s nothing like finding a good short story. And as I writer, I look for short stories for inspiration. The way I see short stories as opposed to novels and novellas: A novel is like a movie, a novella is like an hour-long drama, and a short story is a photograph that sums up a life with one image. So here’s sixteen absolutely perfect short stories I think you might enjoy. Some are well-known, a few not-as-well-known. Enjoy.

1.       Silent Snow, Secret Snow by Conrad Aiken
2.       Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin
3.       An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
4.       Killings by Andre Dubus
5.       Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway
6.       The Last Leaf by O. Henry
7.       The Dead by James Joyce
8.       A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri
9.       To Build a Fire by Jack London
10.     Walker Brothers Cowboy by Alice Munro
11.     The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
12.     I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen
13.     The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
14.     A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J. D. Salinger
15.     After Rain by William Trevor
16.     A & P by John Updike