Sherlock is an angel, not fallen, definitely not fallen, in a London where a wide variety of supernatural elements exist.
The Angel of Crows is a collection of intertwined episodes, which is similar to a collection of short stories, yet structured more like a series of the TV show Sherlock with a main plot-of-the-week but with some overarching story threads that build to the end of the book, or season, as it were. This is Sherlock (the TV show) fanfic, admitedly so.
Writing alternate versions of Sherlock Holmes has a fairly long tradition; I tend to like them. I don’t read a lot of fanfic per se, though, mostly because I feel getting into fanfic might be a little dangerous for me. When I was younger, I constantly reread books. These days I have a lot of new things I want to read and don’t want to get set on an infinite spin cycle of Sherlock Holmes or other favorite fiction.
At any rate, I was curious as to how this book would play out. I’ve read another book by this author under her Sarah Monette name and liked it.
There seem to be plusses and minuses to this particular approach to these ideas. (Whether this is consistent across all fanfic, well, probably not.)
Plusses: – Familiar characters. – The drama is focused on the plots, not the two main characters (Crow and Doyle–the “Sherlock” and “Watson” characters, that is–get along well and even treat each other with consistent kindness). – Plot twists that wouldn’t have been acceptable on TV were fine here.
Minuses: – The plots got tired, mainly rehashes of Sherlock Holmes plots, and got shorter and less interesting as the book went on. – There were logical inconsistencies between the Angels being so limited and the Fallen being so powerful; how does any sort of stable society exist? – It feels like this is really a Neverwhere-meets-Sherlock fanfic and there is a second set of rules about the world that’s not handled openly. – The worldbuilding wasn’t organic with everything else; something like Anno Dracula by Kim Newman or A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullen has an overall vision for the world that comes to life. – Some of the plots didn’t pay off, as in, the plot was wrapped up almost as an aside and in the middle of what should have been a smaller, less important plot! One of the big plot twists was completely obvious, if you knew Sherlock Holmes at all. And in a world that has been designed to give readers what they want, there were definitely plot threads where the satisfying choices didn’t happen.
How I experienced this was: – I gulped down the book like a long cool drink of water. – But afterwards I didn’t feel really refreshed, and if there had been more of it, I would still have been gulping for more.
This book was good and fun! Don’t get me wrong. But overall it tells me that fanfic as such may not be for me. Books like this one, where the author has put fanfic out into the wider world, should be fine overall, but may not be something I seek out. What made this book work for me was the author’s writing and ability to handle the characters. Reading an author who isn’t as standout as she is would probably leave me disappointed.
So I think I will leave the first-wave reading to fanfic fans, yet not avoid fanfic-that-is-now-a-packaged-book, but not seek it out, either. Other intrepid souls can bring back the cream of the fanfic crop, as it were.
I want stories that feel like the whole thing fits together seamlessly. Sometimes new work that’s built on existing work can do that; often it can’t. The Angel of Crows didn’t quite make the jump to taking on a life of its own as a retelling (which is what I’m looking for) but was quite readable if you’re a fan of Sherlock.
Recommended if you’re a Sherlock fanfic reader or a historical urban fantasy reader in general. A perfectly readable page turner, even though it doesn’t make the leap to quite becoming its own thing.
Ten Tales of the Fantastic and Falsehood in the Fabulous Roaring Twenties
Dames, detectives, and deception…magic meets the decadence of the Roaring Twenties in ten tales of glitter and jazz.
The year is 1929. It’s two months after the financial collapse on Wall Street, and the world is bating its breath, unsure of what will happen next. Is it the end of an era?
At the Honeybee’s Sting, a speakeasy in the basement of a laundry, a group of unusual figures meets to discuss the past—and perhaps some possible futures: the Detective turned writer, the Dame who’s older than she looks, the Vampire who’s been riding the financial markets for generations, the Spy from across the ocean, the Actress who’s only just learned the truth about Hollywood, and more.
But one of their number is missing, a man connected to the mob, a man who holds the prize for a mysterious storytelling contest—a prize that can give you your heart’s desire.
Ten stories, woven together in the style of The Canterbury Tales, follow the contest along a long, dark night where nothing is what it seems and the best way to tell the truth is to lie.
Pour yourself a cocktail and join us at the liar’s table for the divine, the slapstick, the tragic, the transcendent 1920s today!
Table of Contents:
The Liar’s Table
When Pigs Fly
Myrna and the Thirteen-Year Witch
All the Retros at the New Cotton Club
The Mysterious Artifact
Memento Temporis
The Page-Turners
The Last Word Cocktail
The Man Who Would Sell Fear
The Liar’s Table, Part 2
Sample: A Liar’s Table
The Honeybee’s Sting was a speakeasy back in Prohibition days, in a big brick Lincoln Park building in Chicago. The main floor was a Chinese laundry. Upstairs was Madame Ixnay’s, a house of what you might call ill repute, with eight working girls.
It was a classy joint, as far as those things went.
The bribes it took to keep that place open flowed like the Chicago River into Lake Michigan—polluted and thick.
The Boss was a big man, broad in the shoulders, with a big bushy mustache and dark hair. He had impeccable taste in suits and a knack for getting supplies of decent liquor, sometimes even with the right labels on the outside. He was connected to at least two crime families but somehow managed to stay independent. Everyone knew the Boss was bringing in the liquor via the laundry carts, but as long as the bottles weren’t sticking out from under the piles of towels and bedsheets, the cops pretended not to notice.
The Honeybee’s Sting was down in the basement. The outside of the building was plain brick, nothing fancy. You’d get there by car. The driver would pull up to a door in the alleyway, a huge double steel door stenciled with the words KNOCK FOR SERVICE.
You’d get out of the car, dressed to the nines, and knock on the door with whatever the secret code was that week, and either the door would open or it wouldn’t.
That door was never wrong. There was a lock on it but we never used it. It was just that the door would open…or it wouldn’t.
Like magic.
You’d go inside through a plain brick landing stacked with empty laundry carts, then down some cement stairs to the basement, where there was another heavy door, oak this time. You’d knock the code on the door again, and someone would have to swing it open to let you in.
Light and sound would come spilling out, and the smell of alcohol and perfume and men in heavy coats sweating like pigs, the sound of Black men playing jazz or an octoroon crooning, voices chattering, the sound of glass smashing, of women laughing.
You stepped inside that door and the temperature went up at least twenty degrees. The door slammed behind you, and you were in.
Back then, speakeasies couldn’t afford to be all that fancy, unless they were run directly by the mob. You had to be ready for the cops to seize whatever they could get their hands on. The patrons weren’t too gentle on things, either.
So the Honeybee’s Sting wasn’t all that much to look at in 1929. After Prohibition ended, we fancied it up, but that was later.
In 1929, the walls were open brickwork and the floors were bare cement. A high oak table served as the bar and there were high, round tables around the edges of the room. One corner was cleared for the musicians, and the center of the room was cleared out for dancing. Silk palm trees stood in pots in the corner, half-hiding the spittoons. Bare bulbs hung from overhead on cords.
Behind the bar was a door that led to a reinforced smuggler’s closet that was hidden behind a second door at the back of a shallow safe—not a place you wanted to get locked up in at night, but it did mean that the cops couldn’t get at the liquor stores during a raid.
Opposite the safe was a door to the back room, which used to be the coal cellar. The coal furnace had been replaced a few years ago with a gas furnace that worked more efficiently, and didn’t require stoking.
At least, that’s what everyone said had happened. But I never saw where that gas furnace wasin that basement, or anywhere else for that matter. We had radiators for heat and no end to the amount of hot water for the ladies to wash clothes in, but I never saw a hot-water tank, either. Dom told me not to worry about it.
If the Boss was big, Dom, the bartender, was bigger.
Dom was his own favorite bouncer. If it was busy, the Boss might send one or two guys over to help him, but mostly what they did was answer the door and pour drinks for the girls. I never saw a one of those other guys have to lift a finger against a customer. Dom took it as a point of pride to handle things personally. Word got around. Dom would let loose on some scumbag about once every six months. There was one time Dom cut a guy’s pinky finger off, right in the bar. I put it in a jar of milk to help keep it fresh while he saw if a doctor could sew it back on again.
Dom had an on-again, off-again middle-European accent. He used to talk to the bar itself, and that’s when the accent would come out. “Tair tair,” he’d tell the bar while wiping it. “Is only scratch, noboty means bat. Only scratch.” Then he’d turn around and, in a pure Chicago nasal accent that went straight through your eardrums, would yell, “Hey mister, you gonna get yer fat ass offa that tabletop, or yam I gonna have ta come over and remove it?”
The tables were small, the Black jazz musicians were all right when you could hear them, the girls serving drinks were pretty and had sharpened fingernails, and I washed dishes, mopped floors, swept out spiderwebs, and served as general dogsbody.
They called me Kid. I started working there in 1927 and stayed after Prohibition ended, all the way to 1949 when it closed. Some new folks re-opened the bar in 1993. It wasn’t the same. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, I couldn’t tell you. Just different.
The Honeybee’s Sting had a number of incidents worth telling stories about, but one in particular sticks in my mind.
The date was December 29th. Two nights later, it would be one of the busiest days of the year, with everyone out looking to celebrate the change from one decade to another. But the twenty-ninth was a cold Sunday night, cold enough to freeze your spit before it hit the ground, a night so cold it couldn’t snow. It was windy as hell, though, and what snow there was on the ground whipped around like knives.
In short, it was a slow night, even for the girls upstairs. Nobody wanted to go anywhere. Even the jazz trio, always desperate for tips, hadn’t showed up.
And yet that night, the back room had been reserved for special guests.
The back room was darker and damper than the main room and had a low ceiling, just high enough that I didn’t hit my head. Two walls were nothing but rough brick, and the far wall had an old coal chute that had been rebuilt as a back exit against police raids.
When I had come in for the night, Dom had told me, “The Boss wants you to serve the special guests tonight, so the girls can go home.”
I said I was game, and the girls left gratefully. I even got a kiss on the cheek from one of them. Problem was, I was so shy I could barely stutter out my own name, let alone make witty banter. I hoped I wouldn’t have to say much. Maybe the whole thing would be cancelled due to weather.
I finished up my chores early, then sat at a table, reading an old back issue of Black Mask that I had in my back pocket. I reread one of the Continental Op stories, and waited.
…and then there are our worlds, secret, wild, and free.
We can’t remember when we first noticed magic.
Oh, sure. When we were kids, we played pretend and imagined we were powerful sorcerers, clever tricksters, and subtle witches. But then we got older, and we told everyone that we’d grown up and were too old for that stuff now. How much we wanted to be like the adults!
But then the enchantments of adulthood grew thin. We may not like to talk about it, but we know it’s true: all the things we truly needed to learn in our lives, we learned as children, as dreamers. We learned what it was like to be stand up for what we believed in…and what it was like to be punished for it. We learned how to fall in love…and how to be rejected by our first crush. We got up to mischief…and hurt someone we shouldn’t have.
And we knew what it was like to be filled with wonder at the world.
But adulthood doesn’t last forever. As the enchantments of adulthood finally grew as thin as a haze in the sky, we began to see magic again.
Here and there.
In the small things—and sometimes in the big things when we needed it most. We vowed to protect it, to nurture it, and to visit it as often as we can.
The Wild Magic bundle holds ten volumes of the magic. Ten books about what we find after we have passed through the illusion that we can live without wonder in the world, and come out the other side.
Pack your bags, put on your good walking shoes, and make sure you bring plenty of water. We’re going out into the wilderness, and who knows when we’ll be back?
A Shrewdness Of Swindlers
Ten Tales of Fantasy and Falsehood in the Fabulous Roaring Twenties
Dames, detectives, and deception…magic meets the decadence of the Roaring Twenties in ten tales of glitter and jazz.
The year is 1929. It’s two months after the financial collapse on Wall Street, and the world is bating its breath, unsure of what will happen next. Is it the end of an era?
At the Honeybee’s Sting, a speakeasy in the basement of a laundry, a group of unusual figures meets to discuss the past—and perhaps some possible futures: the Detective turned writer, the Dame who’s older than she looks, the Vampire who’s been riding the financial markets for generations, the Spy from across the ocean, the Actress who’s only just learned the truth about Hollywood, and more.
But one of their number is missing, a man connected to the mob, a man who holds the prize for a mysterious storytelling contest—a prize that can give you your heart’s desire.
Ten stories, woven together in the style of The Canterbury Tales, follow the contest along a long, dark night where nothing is what it seems and the best way to tell the truth is to lie.
Pour yourself a cocktail and join us at the liar’s table for the divine, the slapstick, the tragic, the transcendent 1920s today!
Table of Contents:
The Liar’s Table
When Pigs Fly
Myrna and the Thirteen-Year Witch
All the Retros at the New Cotton Club
The Mysterious Artifact
Memento Temporis
The Page-Turners
The Last Word Cocktail
The Man Who Would Sell Fear
The Liar’s Table, Part 2
Sample!
The Honeybee’s Sting was a speakeasy back in Prohibition days, in a big brick Lincoln Park building in Chicago. The main floor was a Chinese laundry. Upstairs was Madame Ixnay’s, a house of what you might call ill repute, with eight working girls.
It was a classy joint, as far as those things went.
The bribes it took to keep that place open flowed like the Chicago River into Lake Michigan—polluted and thick.
The Boss was a big man, broad in the shoulders, with a big bushy mustache and dark hair. He had impeccable taste in suits and a knack for getting supplies of decent liquor, sometimes even with the right labels on the outside. He was connected to at least two crime families but somehow managed to stay independent. Everyone knew the Boss was bringing in the liquor via the laundry carts, but as long as the bottles weren’t sticking out from under the piles of towels and bedsheets, the cops pretended not to notice.
The Honeybee’s Sting was down in the basement. The outside of the building was plain brick, nothing fancy. You’d get there by car. The driver would pull up to a door in the alleyway, a huge double steel door stenciled with the words KNOCK FOR SERVICE.
You’d get out of the car, dressed to the nines, and knock on the door with whatever the secret code was that week, and either the door would open or it wouldn’t.
That door was never wrong. There was a lock on it but we never used it. It was just that the door would open…or it wouldn’t.
Like magic.
You’d go inside through a plain brick landing stacked with empty laundry carts, then down some cement stairs to the basement, where there was another heavy door, oak this time. You’d knock the code on the door again, and someone would have to swing it open to let you in.
Light and sound would come spilling out, and the smell of alcohol and perfume and men in heavy coats sweating like pigs, the sound of Black men playing jazz or an octoroon crooning, voices chattering, the sound of glass smashing, of women laughing.
You stepped inside that door and the temperature went up at least twenty degrees. The door slammed behind you, and you were in.
Back then, speakeasies couldn’t afford to be all that fancy, unless they were run directly by the mob. You had to be ready for the cops to seize whatever they could get their hands on. The patrons weren’t too gentle on things, either.
So the Honeybee’s Sting wasn’t all that much to look at in 1929. After Prohibition ended, we fancied it up, but that was later.
In 1929, the walls were open brickwork and the floors were bare cement. A high oak table served as the bar and there were high, round tables around the edges of the room. One corner was cleared for the musicians, and the center of the room was cleared out for dancing. Silk palm trees stood in pots in the corner, half-hiding the spittoons. Bare bulbs hung from overhead on cords.
Behind the bar was a door that led to a reinforced smuggler’s closet that was hidden behind a second door at the back of a shallow safe—not a place you wanted to get locked up in at night, but it did mean that the cops couldn’t get at the liquor stores during a raid.
Opposite the safe was a door to the back room, which used to be the coal cellar. The coal furnace had been replaced a few years ago with a gas furnace that worked more efficiently, and didn’t require stoking.
At least, that’s what everyone said had happened. But I never saw where that gas furnace was in that basement, or anywhere else for that matter. We had radiators for heat and no end to the amount of hot water for the ladies to wash clothes in, but I never saw a hot-water tank, either. Dom told me not to worry about it.
If the Boss was big, Dom, the bartender, was bigger.
Dom was his own favorite bouncer. If it was busy, the Boss might send one or two guys over to help him, but mostly what they did was answer the door and pour drinks for the girls. I never saw a one of those other guys have to lift a finger against a customer. Dom took it as a point of pride to handle things personally. Word got around. Dom would let loose on some scumbag about once every six months. There was one time Dom cut a guy’s pinky finger off, right in the bar. I put it in a jar of milk to help keep it fresh while he saw if a doctor could sew it back on again.
Dom had an on-again, off-again middle-European accent. He used to talk to the bar itself, and that’s when the accent would come out. “Tair tair,” he’d tell the bar while wiping it. “Is only scratch, noboty means bat. Only scratch.” Then he’d turn around and, in a pure Chicago nasal accent that went straight through your eardrums, would yell, “Hey mister, you gonna get yer fat ass offa that tabletop, or yam I gonna have ta come over and remove it?”
The tables were small, the Black jazz musicians were all right when you could hear them, the girls serving drinks were pretty and had sharpened fingernails, and I washed dishes, mopped floors, swept out spiderwebs, and served as general dogsbody.
They called me Kid. I started working there in 1927 and stayed after Prohibition ended, all the way to 1949 when it closed. Some new folks re-opened the bar in 1993. It wasn’t the same. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, I couldn’t tell you. Just different.
The Honeybee’s Sting had a number of incidents worth telling stories about, but one in particular sticks in my mind.
The date was December 29th. Two nights later, it would be one of the busiest days of the year, with everyone out looking to celebrate the change from one decade to another. But the twenty-ninth was a cold Sunday night, cold enough to freeze your spit before it hit the ground, a night so cold it couldn’t snow. It was windy as hell, though, and what snow there was on the ground whipped around like knives.
In short, it was a slow night, even for the girls upstairs. Nobody wanted to go anywhere. Even the jazz trio, always desperate for tips, hadn’t showed up.
And yet that night, the back room had been reserved for special guests.
The back room was darker and damper than the main room and had a low ceiling, just high enough that I didn’t hit my head. Two walls were nothing but rough brick, and the far wall had an old coal chute that had been rebuilt as a back exit against police raids.
When I had come in for the night, Dom had told me, “The Boss wants you to serve the special guests tonight, so the girls can go home.”
I said I was game, and the girls left gratefully. I even got a kiss on the cheek from one of them. Problem was, I was so shy I could barely stutter out my own name, let alone make witty banter. I hoped I wouldn’t have to say much. Maybe the whole thing would be cancelled due to weather.
I finished up my chores early, then sat at a table, reading an old back issue of Black Mask that I had in my back pocket. I reread one of the Continental Op stories, and waited…
Release #4 in the short horror story, Twilight-Zone-esque Tenebrosities series, “Trick or Treat,” is available now. I originally wrote this in 2012, but rewrote it this month to rescue it–I just liked the story and characters too much to completely blow it off 🙂
It’s Halloween. Just over a month ago, Jake’s brother Dave died in Afghanistan, killed by an IED bomb. Now Jake is going trick or treating, dressed like a solder. Dressed like his brother.
He decides to take the same route that he and his brother took, cutting through a junkyard, walking down a big hill, and scoring candy at the kind of neighborhood where the neighbors actually leave the lights on and don’t pretend not to be home.
But something is waiting for him in the graveyard.
Is it the ghost of Jake’s dead brother?
A creepy horror tale about what finds us when we’re vulnerable, on Halloween.
Trick or Treat
Jake stood at the edge of the junkyard, dressed as a soldier and holding a fake rifle on a strap over his shoulder. The rifle had an orange tip in case anyone was stupid enough to think it was real. The sun had set and the dark sky was covered in low clouds, turned orange from the streetlights. Lone flakes of snow descended here and there. Did that really count as “snowing” or not? The air smelled like rust. A ton of sirens were going off on the far side of the junkyard, more of them every second, like they were headed toward a fire or a big accident.
This morning—Halloween—he’d decided to cut through the junkyard on his way to go trick-or-treating at the bottom of Cliff Avenue. Now he wasn’t sure.
Stuff had changed at the junkyard since the last time he had been there.
The fence had a new line of barbed wire at the top, one that hadn’t been there before, and there was a new sign up on the fence.
Beware of dog.
Jake had cut through the junkyard once before with his older brother Dave, when he was ten. But that was two years ago.
Last year Dave had graduated early, joined the Army and gone to Afghanistan. And then in September he had died from some stupid homemade bomb buried under the road. Mom had told the Government to cremate Dave’s ashes. They were in a memorial building that looked like a post office, with Dave’s name on a brass plate.
Nobody was okay at Jake’s house. Not Jake, who was always in trouble at school, and not his mom, who was an EMT and had a pretty good excuse, and not his older sister Amy, who was fourteen and just plain mean anyway.
Tonight she had yelled at him that he was too old to go trick-or-treating, and he had to stay home and pass out candy so she could hang out with her friends.
He had screamed back at her that she didn’t have friends and run out the front door, slamming it behind him.
Then realized he had forgotten his trick or treat bag.
He wasn’t going back. And he wasn’t going trick-or-treating in his own neighborhood, either. Too many people who locked their doors and turned off all their lights, except for the TV flickering in the living room.
A mocking voice seemed to whisper in his ear:
What’s the matter, Jake?
Chicken?
Before Jake could think too much about it, he threw his fake rifle over the fence.
It turned around and around through the air, the orange tip flashing under the streetlight, and crashed on top of a car before skidding out of sight.
Welcome to the Big Time Storybundle, home of time travel stories and other wibbly wobbly timey wimey weirdness.
Throw down a minimum of $5 US (or your local equivalent) and take home four books, including mine (The House Without a Summer). Increase your pledge to $15 in order to abscond with all ten books.
These future sci fi and fantasy classics were written by as fine a collection of huge nerds as I have had the pleasure to encounter (in this timeline at least).
We may not be able to make it possible to travel through time (forward, backward, or sideways). We maaaay not be able to shift you into an alternate dimension where current events are a little easier on your blood pressure. And we certainly never promised you a time machine.
But any of these books can definitely help you escape from the present moment!
P.S. My story is The Year Without a Summer, a gothic horror novel that isn’t quite part of the Cthulhu mythos, but was written in part to play with Lovecraftian tropes taken to some logical conclusions. Goodbye, ordinary space-time.
What makes the fae so terrifying is how subtle they are…
One foggy night, Lee Warnick waits for her dad to come home from the factory. Lately, more and more people have been disappearing from her small town, and she feels that her family might be next.
No one else will talk about it, but Lee knows the truth: the fae have been abducting people, on the nights when the fog rises up.
Haunted by nightmares and terrified for her family, Lee must find a way to keep the faeries from striking again…
A night full of primal dread…and horrifying illusions.
…
Good Neighbors
Lee Warnick leaned her head on her arms and watched out the window. Her mom said, “Come away from the window, Lee, why don’t you call your friend Jenny? Or watch some TV?” but Lee ignored her. Her dad was working late at Smithfield Parts Fabrication—the factory—that night, and she wanted to see him come home.
Her mom wasn’t fooling anybody. They were both nervous.
That day had been one of those fall days that are too beautiful, too perfect. The sky was a clear and artificial blue-green, and the leaves rattled as they tumbled along the streets and through the parks, picking up strays. Everything had come easy at school. For example, almost everyone had gotten an A on the math test from last week, and nobody had gotten lower than a C. The worst thing that had happened was that a couple of senior boys were smoking behind the building and had made rude comments to her, but their hearts weren’t in it. It was the kind of day where no elementary school kids were beaten up for their lunch money, no stray dogs were kicked, and no soufflés went flat.
Those days, those days. Those terrifying days.
About four o’clock the air turned damp and cool and wet. “It’ll be foggy tonight.” About a dozen people called her mom to tell her that, as if she didn’t know. With her husband working late at the factory tonight. Driving home in that fog.
“You never knew when something might happen.”
But that was it, wasn’t it? Nobody knew. Nobody knew why some people, on foggy nights in the town of East Smithville, just flat-out disappeared.
Or rather, everyone knew why. The fairies took people.
They would take one or two or three or six people a year. The records went back to 1875, and there were no years where no people were taken; the most was six, although one of them had looked more like a crib death than a taking, at least to Lee.
But it could have started before 1875. That’s just when the records started.
The question was: how did the fairies decide who to take?
A haunting tale of a monster who lived inside mirrors, and the ghost he left behind when he died…
What would you do to get rid of an abusive ghost?
When Michael’s father died, he left behind a grown-up family shattered by years of his broken, abusive, alcoholic behavior—and a legion of adoring fans who hung on every word of his stories.
They called him creative. But the truth was that Michael’s father had the ability to violate the boundary between one side of the mirror and the other, traveling between reflections and watching, and interfering, with other people’s private lives until there was little of the man left—only a monster.
Now the man is dead. But part of the monster has been left behind…
…
Evil Twin
One last time of cleaning up after you, Dad.
I’d slept downstairs on the couch, expecting him to get up and stumble downstairs, looking for beer or bourbon or something to piss in, but his body was still in the shower stall. His hip, covered with old blue jeans, lay against the glass door, pressed flat against the soap scum. His head lay against the fiberglass wall, curly white-gold hair surrounding his head like a halo. His pants bulged, filled but fortunately not overrunning with shit. I was tempted to turn the shower on and hose him down, one last time. You’re a drunk, you’ve always been a drunk, you died a drunk, you even haunted me drunk. He still wore his professorial corduroy jacket with leather patches at the elbows, real as the number on the scale after Thanksgiving. At least he hadn’t haunted me in the leisure suit Mom had him buried in.
I shoved the double-paned shower doors open so I could get at his legs. His right boot caught against the glass, then suddenly unstuck itself and lumped onto the rug. I grabbed him by the ankle and pulled until his head thumped onto the shower floor, then lifted his other leg and turned his hips around until he was an L-shape with his legs out on the tiles.
If he’d been alive, I would have worried about tearing the skin under his shirt, or on his face. A fact learned from my long history of cleaning up after my father: cheekbones get caught on the damnedest things. Ridges between rooms, uneven tiles, rubber floor mats. I used to always put a pillow under his head when I had to drag him out of places by myself, one of those u-shaped corduroy travel pillows. Kept it in a Ziploc bag under the passenger seat in the car, so the car wouldn’t smell like puke.
I pulled him out of the shower stall onto the rug, being careful not to look toward the medicine cabinet, and checked that he wasn’t leaving a trail. He was; the cup had runneth over. I rolled both Dad and the rug onto a fitted sheet from the closet that I couldn’t remember seeing lately on our bed. I closed my eyes as I passed the hall mirror, then covered it with a sheet on the way back.
Then I called Joanna and got serious about dragging him out of the house…
I started a new series – or rather continued a story that I had put up a while ago and turned it into a series for middle-graders (9-12 y.o.). These aren’t picture books or chapter books (like Magic Tree House), but more on the level of Percy Jackson or early Harry Potter books.
Note: I’ll be updating the cover for “The Society of Secret Cats” to match “The Nightmare House.”
I realized I’d kept putting off posting that I had a new story up “until everything was perfect,” then decideed that I’d never get it announced if I waited for that 🙂
A third story, “The King of Cats,” will be out soon.
The Society of Secret Cats (Defenders of Dream #1)
What if cats were really there to guard your dreams? Handsome, dashing Ferntail the cat must rescue his human charge from a nightmare that invades her dream, with the help of a mysterious and beautiful cat.
Ferntail the cat can do nothing about the nightmares the house is giving his family. For that, a dog must be called in. An annoying pug puppy named Nodoji.
Only one question: will Ferntail or the house get Nodoji first?
No matter where you go, no matter what you do, some cat, somewhere, is always watching you! Nine tales of cat magic, suitable for reading in front of clever, adorable, and even irascible cats.
