Buried Alive: the death of Frederigo Velasquez

In life, all of our worst nightmares come true, sooner or later. No one could have dreamed this.

This was his best suit and his underwear was obviously silk. The air was close and warm and heavy with moisture. Sweat and tears stung his eyes. The blackness was profound. The silence was worse, only the thudding of what must be trucks going down a road nearby came through the hard-packed earth with any clarity. Dragging up his arm in the tightly-enclosed space, the ticking of his watch and the faint glow of the dial was the only reality. Time must soon run out for Frederigo.

His thoughts raced. He knew what must have happened.

The trouble with the alarm button was that there was no way to test it, as if any living person had ever thought to do so. No one had ever considered the possibility that it wouldn’t work.

Life was too precious to take a chance. He thought he hadn’t.

Frederigo Velasquez, born and bred in Buena Vista, was a cautious man, but also a successful man. It all seemed so logical at the time.

When it came time for the hard-working owner of a small chain of laundromats in this thriving city to do some estate planning, a pre-paid funeral plan seemed like a good idea. Maria had been plaguing him about his health for some time, and finally Hector got in on it.

It really would be in their best interest, to save taxes and avoid withdrawal penalties.

His family, whom he loved dearly, and undoubtedly they loved him just as dearly, wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. It was all taken care of now, all paid for, and first-class all the way.

He had provided for the eventualities as thoughtfully as anything else he did.

Like several of the small businesses he had painstakingly built up and then sold over the last twenty-five years, it was a turn-key operation. Although Maria didn’t much appreciate the morbid humour, his son had.

At the last minute, on the suggestion of Uncle Leo, an uncle on Maria’s side it must be said, he had cheerfully put down a little extra for a very special coffin. It had an alarm bell. He remembered the original news stories, when they first came out. It was good for a laugh, and the perpetual optimist that was Federigo laughed easily. It was a small price to pay for peace of mind.

He could make a joke at his own expense and get away with it. Or so he thought.

At fifty-seven, Federigo was still a young man, and might have thirty or forty years, some of them very good years, still ahead of him. He sobbed at the thought of dying, so very, very slowly in there.

He was going to die today. Now. In the next few minutes.

No one would ever know what happened to him; for how could they?

His thoughts raced. Where did he go wrong?

After all those years of hard work, it had felt so good to give in to an insane impulse. Word of the coffin alarm-button quickly got out, whether via an employee or a relative, no matter, and his business had enjoyed a brief spurt in terms of sales. It lasted about two weeks.

Everyone in town came to use the machines, to do their laundry, as clean as a whistle, or so the radio ads said, and to gossip, and to marvel at his foolishness. To be fair, he had made the money back quite quickly.

Federigo came from the barrio. Fighting his way up from the dregs and the sewers had taken a long time, but it had been worth it, eminently so.

He’d been in a few tough spots in his life. He didn’t think he was going to get out of this one, and the emotions overcame him.

The terrible truth about the alarm button was that it didn’t work. The size, shape and length of the box he was in said everything. The hard knob of the button, dead center on the bottom of the lid, was undeniable. He could see it in his mind’s eye.

“Oh, mama.” His lips moved in prayer.

He must have had one of his spells. They must have taken him for dead. He must have been out of it for a few days this time. His gratitude at not being dissected and en-balmed in his sleep was offset by the fact that the button didn’t work.

The fear was unbearable. He couldn’t stop shaking.

He began to scream, and to pound weakly in the limited space at the silk-lined lid of his coffin.

The terror was beyond his control as he kicked and flailed and screamed like a madman.

***

Rain pelted down outside the open veranda windows and it seemed as if the city had gone silent.

Only the occasional swishing of a vehicle in the street outside broke through the hiss of the rain, quickly fading as they passed.

They were alone at last.

Who could say it was wrong for the funeral director, the charming and rakishly handsome Luiz Alvarro, to comfort the bereaved widow?

Maria dried her eyes.

“Are you sure it will be all right?”

They sat on the couch. He took her hands in his.

“Absolutely.” He nodded tenderly.

She looked away, tragically beautiful with her upturned nose and dimpled chin, her long dark hair sweeping down past the pale oval of her face. Her matronly figure only excited him the more. The simple luxury, the room and its bright complementary colours right out of a magazine, said much about her.

She bit her lip.

“He didn’t suffer. I promise you that.” Luiz lifted and kissed her hands tenderly. “Trust me. It’s better this way. He wouldn’t have liked a divorce, especially coming at him out of left field like that. He would have fought like a tiger—you know that. He was insanely jealous, and ultimately, a very possessive man.”

She nodded, still unable to look at him. Over the last years, she had come to hate Federigo, for his tirelessness, his selflessness when it came to the business. There was never enough time for family. There was never enough time for them. But they always had enough money. That was what angered her the most.

It was time for them, for him, and for her. Frederigo, he could never see it that way.

“You’ll get a million and a half for the laundry chain.”

She nodded, raising her eyebrows slightly and finally looking hopefully at Luiz. She never looked more beautiful to him than at that moment.

“Do you think so?”

“Sure. Absolutely. And you know what I was thinking?”

She gazed fondly into those eyes and somehow knew it would be all right.

“No, my love. What were you thinking?”

“Well, we should think about it a while, I guess. But if I sold the funeral home, maybe you and I, and Hector, we could go away somewhere nice.” He’d been waiting for a good opportunity to bring it up.

There was no time like now.

She would need time to think, and to worry, but he was sure she would come around.

“What? Where?” The very thought lifted her spirits.

Hector was her eighteen year-old son, the last one still living at home. He was employed in his father’s business as a handy-man. The young man was in his room behind closed doors as usual, probably on the computer. The boy didn’t have a girlfriend as far as Luiz knew. Hector could have the internet anywhere, and would soon make new friends. The boy seemed to have that gift. Luiz had put some thought into all of this. The death certificate, the funeral—it all went like a piece of cake. It was unbelievably easy to do away with someone as long as there was no hint of violence. They had all the right witnesses, and there was a good medical explanation. The right pill mixed into the right drink, at a suitable time and place, the right doctor, and the right men waiting to pick up the body.

It didn’t even cost that much, not today. Not in what Mexico had become in recent years, or perhaps more likely, it had always been this way. If only he had known.

“Somewhere nice—like Cannes, or Rio, or somewhere like that. Somewhere like Tahiti, you know?”

It would get them away from the city, the noise, the crime, and the raised eyebrows, of which there were certain to be at least a few. But waiting was madness. There was no time to waste.

They had talked all about this before. Luiz was a patient man. She was sweet, and vulnerable, and of good family, and very much worth the having. He wasn’t getting any younger himself, and maybe it was time to take a rest. She knew all his thoughts. They had talked about it, and dreamt together often. His own wife had left years ago, but he was over all that.

The silence had gone on too long.

“We’ll think about it.” He leaned over and gave her a dry peck on the lips.

“Yes, my love.”

Suddenly she was clinging to him, stirring him with her warmth and her scent. The heavy feel of her breast in his hand was comforting and disturbing at the same time. Her eyes were inches away, and again she was blinking back tears.

“Please don’t leave me.”

He held her tight, loins stirring. She was a magnificent sight in bed, but he wondered if they dared, so soon after the interment…?

And of course the boy was home. They would have to be as quiet as the little mice that somehow eked out a living from the crumbs left behind after Sunday Mass, which was a kind of saying they had around here.

***

Luiz snored lightly on the pillow beside her. His lean, aquiline face was accentuated by the moonlight, filtered by the window coverings. She loved him dearly. He had brought something back into her life, call it excitement. That pencil-thin mustache and huge eyes, the high cheek bones had caught her bored eye. His manners were impeccably romantic, just like out of a book from the thirties. Luiz dressed beautifully, and he had a nice, hard, hairy body.

He was very solicitous of her. He paid attention to her. He loved her, and she knew it. She had no doubts.

Call it hope, call it opportunity knocking. Call it a gamble.

Not turning the bedside light on, she lifted the downy comforter and swung her feet out of bed.

The floor was deliciously cool. Going by the dim light of the hallway, coming in through the crack under the door, as the amber light of a streetlight threw her shadow into sharp detail, she stepped into her slippers and wrapped the housecoat around her.

All was silence in the great, rambling one-floor conglomeration that was their home. It was her home, now. Completely happy to add on a room, and finally a whole new wing, Frederigo had refused to move to the suburbs. He loved the city and its people, another thing that set him apart in their new world of the recently-successful. Her friends professed to hate the city, and she did too. She’d hated this place for a very long time.

Maybe they should go away.

Carefully closing the bedroom door behind her, noting the harsh line of light still visible at this late hour under Hector’s door, she shuffled to the kitchen in hopes of an easy snack. Her mouth just watered at the thought of those rich treats. She really ought to watch her waistline, but the times they were unfortunate. A young widow, or fairly young, recently-bereaved, could be excused some small indulgence.

After the Celebration of Life for poor dear Frederigo, the leftover trays were brought home by a thoughtful Aunt Inez, the thought of which brought some guilt. Aunt Inez was a saint. She’d noticed them in the fridge earlier. Her stomach rumbled at the thought of food, after the long and tedious ordeal of the day, a day of fakery, and a kind of sublime witchcraft.

Poor, poor Frederigo.

How tiresome it must be, to be dead, for one so vibrant, energetic, and full of life.

She had loved him very much, years ago. Now all she had was regrets. He had made her life a boring hell.

***

When she turned on the lights, flooding the big, open plan peasant-style kitchen with crystalline blue light from the overheads and the under-the-cabinet fixtures, at first, she didn’t comprehend the meaning of the dark stains and the crunch of grit and drying muck underfoot.

“Oh…”

Her mouth opened, but the maid was obviously off at this late hour and there was no one there to hear.

There were foot-marks and spots of wet filth all over her beautiful parquet floor, hand laid by the finest craftsmen the local area had to offer. The stuff, whatever it was, was tracked all over the place.

“Nom de Dios…?”

There was the clink of glass on glass and she snapped her head around to confront an apparition.

Her heart stopped dead in her chest as she took in the snack tray, clear plastic wrap peeled back.

A filthy hand popped a petit-four into a gaping red mouth…

A ghastly form, black and wet and muddy and covered in leaves and grass and filth, raised a glass of fine brandy judging by the bottle standing open on the black granite countertop.

It spoke to her in the voice of Frederigo.

“Hello, my love.”

It was the rain, of course, and the soft soil, and the fear. The desperation, and the adrenalin. 

The refusal to die.

That’s what saved him, the sheer stubbornness, that, and one last desperate bid for life, when he rolled over and got his knees scrunched up under him. The rain, the life-giving rain, that and a burial plot in soft soil, right on the edge of a ravine, that was all that had saved him.

She almost died on the spot, chin up, gasping for air and clutching at her throat. Her feet refused to budge.

“Oh…oh…oh.”

“Well, my dear. It’s been a hell of a day.” The grotesque figure swallowed and gasped in fiery gratification. “Perhaps lover-boy would like to join us, eh?”

“Ah, ah…ah.” Words died before they were formed.

“That’s all right. I never liked him anyway.”

Those baleful eyes promised much.

That’s when she screamed, and the glass crashed to the floor. In order to silence her, Frederigo’s big hands found her throat.

No jury in the land would ever convict him.

Besides, he was already dead.

End

A Fireside Chat with Louis Shalako.

Yeah, man. If you don't love FDR, they's something wrong wit' you.

If I wrote a story and then printed it off, and then took it down the hall, up and down the stairs of this building, and ultimately out onto the street, how many people do you think would read my story?

What if I stood out in front of the liquor store, like some unshaven guy with a guitar, only I tried to interest people in my story?

How many people do you think I could get to read my story in one day, i.e. any given 24-hour period?

Not too many, eh? I agree totally with you.

However, when I published ‘5150: the Bug Feeder’ earlier today, I got thirty-eight hits within the first hour. 

By posting it again, later, I see by Blogger analytics that the story has received 53 hits today.*

We can only speculate how many readers got through to the end, or how many rolled their eyes and groaned and shut it down, or how many people were just looking for something else—perhaps there is such a thing as a bug feeder after all. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen—they wanted to buy a bug feeder and I tricked them into reading my story by good SEO. (Search Engine Optimization.)

Seriously.

But how long would it take me to get fifty page hits or ‘reads,’ if you will, by following established protocols, by going the traditional route, by seeking readers ‘the good, old-fashioned way,’ with its massive tooth-to-tail ratio, with all of its built-in costs, and worst of all for one such as I, the committees.

I have little or no patience for the un-artistically inclined, for those who do not share my vision, who just want a secure job with good benefits and pay, just putting in time waiting to retire and head for Fort Lauderdale to take interpretive dance lessons and finally learn how to do a proper set of jazz hands, all spotted due to the liver as they may be…

The committee that decides who will be asked for a partial on their submission—that’s when they ask for chapters four to seven, and whose manuscript, up until now under serious consideration by that very same committee, will be rejected.

The cover committee, the marketing committee, the publicity and promotions committee, the list could be endless for all I know.

But I don’t have to do it that way. Not anymore. That is the real revolution here. I don’t need anyone’s opinion, or permission. Hell, I don’t even need much of a budget. All I need is some drive, some ambition, a little self-worth, and I’m off to the races. All I got to do is write some books and create some products.

I don't need a consensus.

What you need is a product, ladies and gentlemen. Tell you what, selling books is actually quite hard.

Garage doors are easier to sell. Corn, wheat and sow-bellies are easier to sell, real estate is easier to sell. 

Roofs are easier to sell, and so are drywall jobs and all kinds of other skilled or semi-skilled work. You see, people actually need those things, and books are actually a luxury—discretionary spending. People have a choice when it comes to discretionary spending, and that’s because they don’t have to do it.

They just want to and that is okay by me. I got just the thing for you! A book, ladies and gentlemen.

Now if you can sell books you can sell anything, but I don’t really have a ‘philosophy of building a company’ like Jeff Bezos (Amazon) or Steve Jobs (Apple) or anybody. I don’t much care either, because Shalako Publishing is not so much about building a world-wide empire as just writing some books and doing the right thing by them. And the readers, but for me the story is everything. I don’t much give a shit beyond that point, and that is well and truly who I am. It takes all kinds to make a world, right?

Getting them books out into the world where they can do their job of entertaining the people, and if we can squeeze in a little enlightenment along the way, well, then that’s okay too. That’s why I’m here. Basically, I’m just going to do what is necessary and no more—a unique philosophy if there ever was one.

(He’s being facetious. – ed.)

Basically, we’re just doing our jobs around here. (Me and —ed.)

Now, if I had gone the traditional route for a first-timer, ‘a community author,’ which is all well and good if you don’t want to make money, and went about the whole process of making up a beautiful PDF of my traditonally formatted (print) book, it would have cost me about $1500.00 to get ‘professional’ artork, set up on the press, buy the paper and ink, and labour…for one hundred copies of one title, ladies and gentlemen. I would have probably done it once, or twice, or until I went broke or lost heart. Right?

“You see, the thing to do there is to get your book in the BookKeeper, (a local independent bookstore) and when someone buys a copy, you get two or three bucks…yada, yada, yada..” Conventional wisdom gets conventional results.

Yeah, and I’d have to list them at $22.00 to make any money. The store wants a cut, the government wants a cut, it costs money in gas and insurance to take them to the bloody bookstore. You would be lucky to get them in ten independent bookstores within any given tri-county area, and I know all about wrapping up two or three or five books and delivering them, all over a major city on a hot summer’s day  because I have in fact done it before. I’m a repeat offender, ladies and gentlemen.

(You’ve been chasing this dream a long time, Louis. – ed.)

(Tell me about it. It was good experience though—man, I won’t ever do that again.)

At this point I have distributed approximately 40,000+ copies of my works. Under various pen-names, I have sixty-five products, (eleven or twelve PODs do duplicate some of the ebook titles) and I have sold or given away books in Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and God or Darwin or Hugo Grotius or for all I know Blaise Pascal himself, ah, (lost my train of thought there) knows what other countries. Fucking Isaac Newton himself couldn’t answer that question, I’m convinced, because the answer itself is moot, and he knows it, and I know it too. And you heard it here first, so, ah, don’t forget to tell your friends.

That is the real revolution.

It has its weaknesses. I cheerfully admit, the boys and girls at the local paper would look decidedly askance if I went down there in four or five different guises and tried to get publicity for my pen-names, just as a traditonal, ‘community author’ really ought to do...because they really want to bring my story to the attention of the local community, (and I accept that,) which, probably, never as long as I lived could have ever absorbed even the few thousand books I have sold or distributed by now…and I got a long ways to go, ah, ladies and gentlemen. A long ways. I’m going to have fun too. Just watch me.

You’ll see.

Anyway, the way I see it, the question itself has become moot.

That’s pretty groovy, baby.

*Okay, now we get to the asterisk. My story, ‘Time out of Whack,’ got about eighteen hits today. That’s search-engine traffic, word-of-mouth, ‘passive discoverability,’ call it what you will. Yet I wrote that one a long time ago, and it just keeps on giving. That is a story that exhibits some ‘virality.’ There is the virality of the medium, and of course some human factors, on the part of readers or searchers or whatever.

For all I know, some first-year university kids are boning up on the speculative philosophy of particle physics or something. 

Hopefully they’re smart enough to check their sources or get a second opinion.

Anyway, that’s it for me, and I am out of here.

Thanks for being here. Oh, I almost forgot: here’s a link to some other fireside chats.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireside_chats

5150: the Bug Feeder.

Shift supervisor Sergeant Leisha Bogaert pulled up behind Officer Dale Rossiter’s cruiser.

She checked in with dispatch.

“On the scene of the 5150.” It was out in the country but still within the city limits.

“Super on scene.” The air hissed over the speakers. “Time is zero-one-fourteen and thirty.”

“Roger that.” She shook her head as the dispatcher read off the incident report number.

Too much coffee over there.

Shoving her baton into its belt-loop, settling her cap firmly, she sauntered up to where Rossiter stood with the concerned local citizen, a CLC, noting the pale visage of the offender in the passenger side of Rossiter’s cruiser, Unit Nine.

“So. What’s up?”

She already knew the bare details.

Local farmer Joe Sverdlup had been returning with his wife Angelina from a night at the clubs, when he could have sworn he saw a monk get out of a parked car and enter his fields. The car, a little white Sunbird, was sitting right there and everything,

Becoming suspicious of he knew not what, although dope growers and murderers dumping bodies were not exactly unheard of in the modern world, the fact was it was just plain odd. The thoughts of devil worship and occult rituals wouldn’t let him alone, and it was private property after all. Libtards, and child sex trafficking...

The car was still there fifteen minutes later when he went to put the dogs out in the yard. He checked out back of the barn and saw a naked person standing in the middle of his soybeans under the silvery light of a full August moon and so he called 911.

“I can’t tell if the gentleman is disturbed or just some kind of a crackpot.” Dale was non-committal.

The big question was whether he would become a danger to himself or the community.

“Okay.”

She stood looking at their new friend, huddled under a blanket in the back seat.

“What was he doing out there?”

“He says he was feeding the bugs.’

“What?” The word was torn from her.

She thought she’d seen everything.

“He’s got the bites to prove it.” Rossiter had his arms crossed against the chill of the night. “He stands there with arms wide open. It’s like he’s high on life or something. There were hundreds, thousands on him when I came along.”

“Ugh. Was he naked?” She turned to Rossiter.

“No. He says he kept his underwear on and he has those rubber crocs, you know—”

Leisha knew, as her own brood of seven to twelve year-olds all had to have them, and yet shopping with them was sheer hell.

“Huh.” She blew air out through her lips. “Are you making a complaint?”

She eyed Mister Sverdlup.

“Oh, golly.”

They all grinned.

“I could live without the publicity.” He had a vegetable stand in season and sold a lot of sweet corn, squash, peaches and the like.

Joe was a vendor at the Saturday morning farmer’s market in town.

“Okay. Let me talk to the gentleman.”

With no other ideas, and no real harm done, Rossiter nodded.

#

She got Rossiter to open the door and she stood, hand on roof and door frame, leaning in and looking Mister Ermine Swales over. He was a slender man in his early thirties. She took her time sniffing for giveaways and taking a look at his eyes. Dale and Joe conferred in dubious tones by the front hood of the car.

They had a real winner here.

“Sir?”

“What?”

“Can you tell me what you were doing out there?”

He flushed a little and gathered his dignity.

“I was feeding the mosquitoes.”

She bit her lip and shook her head.

“Why? Why would you want to do that?”

“I don’t really know why. I just enjoy it, I guess.”

She nodded.

“Promise me, cross your heart and, ah, hope to die, that you had your underwear on and stuff like that? You don’t seem to have been drinking…”

“No! No! I have to keep my blood pure for God’s little creatures.”

She bit back a scream. A real winner. Didn’t do drugs or anything. In a bygone age he might have chained himself in a niche and dispensed spiritual advice.

“I’m also a poet.” He was attempting to be helpful.

She patted him on the shoulder.

“You’re not in trouble, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, sir, so you have your shoes. The gentleman said you looked like a monk. Did you have any other clothes?”

“Oh, yes, officer. I left my housecoat hanging on a branch.” It was velour and had a hood, dark brown with cream lining.

“Ah. Of course.” She mentally reviewed the facts. “And your driver’s license is good. You have insurance, and all that sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

She thought it over. Rossiter had all of his ID. The man had never been transported, no arrests, no record. No restrictions and no parole violations.

“You know you were trespassing there, right?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see any signs. Besides, I’ve done it before.”

Her jaw dropped.

“Here?”

“Oh, yes, and other places too.”

“Sir…do you mind if I ask a personal question?”

“Not at all, officer. Sorry. You’re a sergeant, right?”

She grinned.

“Yep.”

This was an opportunity of sorts.

“Why do you do it? I mean, what’s the attraction?” She didn’t say it, but there were all kinds of odd-ball things available in town if you knew where to look, and this was just so out of the ordinary.

“I wanted to feel something, officer. I just wanted to feel something.”

“I see.”

That one hit home for some reason. She could sort of see his point. Sheer loneliness caused so many problems in the world, and her heart ached at the thought sometimes.

“And…how does it feel…exactly?”

“Exquisite…sublime…” He turned and engaged her fully for the first time. “It really is wonderful.”

The ecstatic look in his eyes was enough for Leisha.

“Uh, huh. Okay, thank you, sir. I’ll just talk to these other people for a moment.”

Leaving the door open, Leisha walked up to the front of the car.

“Joe.”

“Yes?”

“If this guy maybe asked nicely for your permission, I mean…would you mind if he sort of came here out once in a while and fed the mosquitoes.?”

“Oh, ahhh…ahhh. Ha! I…ah…I suppose not.” Joe was flabbergasted, and not a little intrigued.

His knees went limp or something for a moment there.

“Ahhh…sure. Why not?”

Leisha looked at Rossiter.

He looked at their prisoner. He turned back to her, with an odd shake of his head and the right side of his mouth curling up.

Joe Sverdlup’s ears were at full perk.

“Outstanding. Sergeant.” She hadn’t seen Rossiter smile like that in a while—a long while.

“I’ll leave it in your capable hands then, gentlemen.”

“Sergeant! Sergeant!”

“What?”

“Before you go, I want to get you some cucumbers…we got tons of them, all the rain this year.”

“Oh, no, really…I couldn’t.” From the sublime to the surreal, all in one easy twelve-hour shift.

“Sure you could!” He scuttled on bandy legs to the kiosk and quickly unlocked it.

Mister Sverdlup was back in jig time, plying her with cucumbers and some nice, firm plums that drew a squirt of saliva on seeing them. Sergeant Bogaert got back in her car and drove away without a second look, enjoying a strangely good feeling about this one.

What the hell.

It takes all kinds to make a world.

Besides, it saved a lot of paperwork.

END

Here are my books on Barnes & Noble, still free (mostly) for a limited time only.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/c/louis-shalako

Looking for Mr. Goodbookcover

Out with the old and in with the new.

Hopefully the reader can view these images without signing up on Canstock. You can spend hours, days even, browsing for marketing or book cover images on Canstock. Luckily, (or perhaps not) there are only fifteen pages in this category. Some categories—blonde girls for example, can have fifteen hundred or more pages, each with 75 images per page. It’s a hard job sometimes, what can I say?

What does this image say about the story? This is probably the number one question. How is it relevant? Obviously, if the reader knows nothing about the book, they really can’t help me. It’s all up to the person who publishes the book.

The title of the book is ‘On the Nature of the Gods.’ I’ve always liked the original cover, but it’s a free image from Morguefile and it’s time to upgrade. I can never really tell if the book is weird western or steam-punk, but Amazon lists it in steam-punk so there you go. I tagged it both weird western and steam-punk when I published it.

Again, what does it say about the story? As for hot babes, there are a couple in the book and Hope Ng is described as a ‘raven-haired’ beauty.

Okay, now that’s one crazy-looking dude, and while it doesn’t say western, it sure says weird, which is just exactly what the book is.

Same dude. Without complex help such as Adobe CS-6, I tend to keep the covers simple. I have one layer and some text. I have seen many nice covers with the text dead front and centre. Yet I look for images like this one because I can sort of stick my text over and above, or even around it. In a year or six months from now things might be different, and I might have CS-6. In which case, I can still use the $5.65 incl. tax marketing image. Basically, this image doesn’t grab me by the short hairs and so we’ll move on.

This image sort of works, the question is what do I do with the text? There is a fair amount of blank or black space to work with.

A strong contender so far. This one resembles the Evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff, a character in the book. Nutty as a fruitcake, that one is as steam-punk as all heck. Bold white text might show up fairly well.

I like the girl and the gun. The trouble is that background, and whether things would show up properly. It’s best not to buy an image I can’t use.

Sometimes you just want to buy an image and either write a story around it for publication, or maybe just to have it in your personal collection. As far as book covers…I don’t know, and that probably means no.

Now, I think, I’m just loitering. (Grins.) I sure would like to write a story about that one!

Blogger is being a real pain lately, so I have to format this in HTML. Talk about dedication, eh?

Or maybe I just have a little too much time on my hands, anyhow, thanks for stopping in.

End

Poetic Genes

Nicholausbroussard (Wiki.)

By Louis Shalako, with a little help from Edmond Rostand.




There was an inseparable gulf between him and that other world.

The young man stood outside the club, waiting. Rain shimmered in the glare of the streetlights, but he was oblivious. There was a lineup but he had no hope of getting in. Wrong clothes. He had the wrong hair, the wrong look. He could never have faked it. Even money wasn’t enough to help with that. He’d learned that the hard way.

But there was another gaggle of fans, real fans, the ones that bought the recordings and paid the bills, hoping to catch a glimpse of their idol.

He stood among them, on the far side of the street, clustered under a light-post, with giggles, coughs, shouts and voices all around. He had never felt so alone, but that was a lie, because he always felt alone. Ever since he could remember, he had been alone. It was his fate unless something happened to contradict it.

A limousine, big and black and long, pulled into the pool of light across the street. The curbside valet opened the far side door, and Zachary peered through the intervening gloom to see who it was.

The dark head of a man, a man with a neat beard and mustache, poked up above the roof first, as he turned and helped someone out. He had silvery, wire-rimmed glasses and an air of quiet assurance. The woman stood up. He saw wild blonde hair, and that was maddeningly all.

Was it her? Everyone else started shouting, yet he was still not sure.

“Lana! Lana!”

Voices cried all around him, and so he shouted too.

The sidewalk was roped off, but she had a crowd of people over there to contend with first. Finally she turned. It was her. She smiled and blew a kiss over the top of the car at the people on this side, with Zach, one of many, jumping up and down, waving his arms and shouting at the top of his lungs.

“I love you, Lana!” Was it just imagination, wishful thinking, or did their eyes lock for one brief second, with her mouth open in breathless poise, and did she not give an extra little wave and sparkling smile just for him?

Probably not, he conceded, but it could have been. It could have been.

“I love you Lana.” He turned and began threading his way out of the mob.

Late as it was, when he got home he had a cold beer and watched TV for a while. His mom could be heard puttering about up above. After a time, even that stopped. Munching stale pretzels from the bowl on the coffee table, the only thing in the guide that looked half-decent was Gerard Depardieu in Cyrano de Bergerac. He lay on the couch, ignoring the TV. He liked Gerard Depardieu, partly for whatever reason and partly because there was an uncanny resemblance between them. Zach had the same barrel type torso, the same big head and jaw, and, he carelessly admitted, the same sort of dumb look on his face, a kind of serene innocence in a cold world. He identified with him a little too much, which was why he had turned off the movie. What was hilariously funny at first soon hit home in the emotional guts, and he quickly tired of the romance, which was just what he didn’t have in his life. No one loved him, and realistically, he loved no one but Lana—and there was just no way in hell that was ever going to happen. Of course he wondered if he even really loved her, really. Puppy-love, sick crush, it still felt the same, the same sweet pain of longing and hopeless desire. He’d felt it about other women, but those women were closer to him and had responded or encouraged him…at least at first. It’s not like there weren’t some lessons there for him, far from it. The lessons were all too obvious, but he didn’t care to dwell too long on them.

There was nothing among the infomercials that he particularly thought he needed or would ever need. That was a bleak enough thought. When would he ever have to cook? Or entertain friends?

Hah.

Hah.

Finally he spent some time on Facebook. A friend in Auckland, one of the Facebook friends that he had never actually met and was probably never going to meet, just some guy he’d clicked on, posted a link to a fellow who was looking for academic approval for a bizarre nano-poetry project. His friend worked at the university there, as far as he had gathered over the two or three years he had been following his posts.

Grinning, Zachary read up on it. Apparently the guy was going to write a poem for the occasion, and then encode it onto a strand of DNA, and then inject it into a bacterium. The reason for doing this seemed pointlessly obscure, but then Zachary didn’t understand poetry or art at all. He liked certain songs on the radio. That was about it. He liked pictures of pretty girls and after that mostly landscapes. He had a cowboy painting on the wall, it was just there and he hardly even acknowledged it.

At that point he shut the machine off, and took some melatonin to help him sleep, although the morning logy effect would be pronounced after only five, or if he was lucky, six hours sleep.

Then he brushed his teeth and went to bed.

#

Friday morning dawned bright and clear. It had the look of another brilliant summer day, hot as hell later, but that was okay. The main company lot was almost empty of vehicles. Security waved him through the gate, after a quick glance at the windshield sticker.

He pulled his brand-new Focus into a vacant slot up near the doors for a change. Getting out, he locked it silently as was his way, no extroverted beep-beep for him, and headed into the research labs of Gentech International. Off to the right and behind was their sprawling Los Angeles plant, specializing in pharmaceuticals, agricultural products, and gene therapies targeting various aspects of immunodeficiency.

Zach unlocked the door and hung up his coat. He was just tending to the coffeemaker, putting in a fresh filter and six scoops of Maxwell House when Doctor Morrow came in.

Hands shaking slightly, he ignored Gus’s nasal breathing and concentrated on filling up the tank with hot water without spilling any. He put the lid down and hit the switch.

“Isn’t this Happy Friday?”

Technically, with the thirty-seven and a half-hour work week, this was true.

“Ah, yes, but.”

Gus nodded knowledgeably. As a senior researcher, he was on salary, while the lab technician Zach was on hourly.

“It’s just that—”

Gus slapped him on the back, assuming that Zach was swapping hours as next weekend was the long weekend and maybe he could get four days off in a row.

“It’s not like I care.” Then he winked in a conspiratorial manner. “Keep up the good work.”

Then he took the morning papers and headed for the john.

#

Normally Zach was looking for certain indicator proteins, doing the simple test on wide racks with hundreds of small glass tubes, putting in the chemicals with a multi-pronged syringe, and keeping careful and accurate records.

He understood what they were doing. The telomere was on the end of every strand of DNA, and it shrunk over the course of a person’s life. They prevented a person’s chromosomes from fusing or rearrangement, which led to cancer. This of course was the initial attraction of the research, to find a cure for cancer. Cancer was caused by immortal cells which somehow bypassed or subverted the telomere process. The whole immortality thing was an outlier of the original premise. When they got down to about twenty-five percent of the former length, the person’s immune system and glandular systems began to accelerate the aging process and break down in innumerable ways. Nature, intent on evolution and a strong gene pool, had essentially ensured a natural life span for each organism which ensured the vitality of the species.

Of course no one wanted to die. Not normal people anyway. People would pay anything not to die. His own father had been so confused, so resentful. Yet he’d had a long life, and suffered for so many years…the thing in the paper, ‘passed away peacefully,’ was pure bullshit.

No one ever went peacefully. Zach had that much figured out. He was still troubled by vague feelings of guilt and the inescapable images of his father’s last breath.

All they had to do was to either slow the rate down or stop it, and human lifespan would take a great leap forward in terms of longevity. While it was believed that human physical immortality was unlikely, even another fifty or a hundred years of life would be something—something special in terms of pharmaceuticals, with other potential applications in a hundred other fields.

Not the least of which was in cancer research.

That’s what he told himself as he went looking for the samples from Cyrano de Bergerac, whose remains had been allegedly dug up and were waiting to be compared with some other samples, all allegedly direct descendents, and all from the same region in Gascony, in the hopes of proving to a rather large cable TV audience that the body dug up was indeed him. Or something like that. He hadn’t actually watched the show, only seen a commercial for it.

Taken on its own, it was interesting and challenging work. The trouble was when his mind went off on a tangent and started thinking of Lana.

It was a crazy idea, but it was all he had.

#

Gus came back in. It smelled like he’d splashed on just a ton of aftershave.

“So, I’ve got a meeting, and then lunch, and then it’s a one-o’clock tee-off at Briarwood Oaks.”

“Ah.”

“So you’re on your own then.”

“Ah, right. Okay. Well, I’ve got plenty of work to do, so—”

Since Gus was always going to be Gus, naturally that wasn’t the end of it.

“Well, make sure you do those samples I asked you for.” By the look on his face, he had a list.

Zach indicated the trays in front of him.

“Already on it, chief.” His breezy tone was all the reassurance Gus needed.

Face brightening at the thought of all that work being done for him by Monday morning, he took off this lab coat and went looking for his jacket.

He came out of his small office again, thrusting arms awkwardly through the tight sleeves.

“Where’s Busby?”

“Off. It’s Happy Friday.”

“Oh. Right.” Gus stood there for a moment looking lost. “Oh. Yeah. Thanks for coming in.”

Without another word, he nodded decisively and headed for the door.

#

With no one around to plague him, he soon had his work all caught up insofar as Monday morning was concerned. Zach understood that the money was good and the work they did here was important. But sometimes the job could be boring as hell. Some chemists were involved with tests that were so painstaking and irritating that he would get home with a crick in his neck and a dull, throbbing headache that three aspirins just wouldn’t kill. None of them guys seemed to be around today, and that was good.

Testing takes time, and a lab technician can’t walk away. With all the A-type personalities stalking these labs, sitting around with your thumb up your ass wasn’t an option. Zach had learned to look busy, which included reading all the company memos, which arrived on a daily basis. He cudgeled his brain, trying to think exactly when he had seen it. Much of the memo traffic was proprietary information, top secret, yet relevant documents would be available across company departments…and even samples, if the supply was large enough, could be requested by other departments.

The knowledge was shared for the benefit of all.

His chair was angled away, and his feet were up on the corner of the desk, and he had one ear cocked for anyone coming down the hallway.

He thought it was last year, six or eight months ago. He started in June and worked his way through until he hit it, a memo from mid-July. He read it over three or four times, thinking.

Finally he closed the file of memos.

He sat there staring off into nowhere.

Then he swung his feet down off the desk. Grabbing a pen and a big piece of paper, be began to map out an expression system that would allow an identifiable trait—hopefully a DNA sequence for artistic expression and linguistics, to be inserted into a host organism’s own cell structure. As for whether Cyrano had left any good samples or how much degradation they might have suffered over the centuries, he just didn’t know.

He’d ask Busby, but that would have to wait for Monday morning.

#

Putting a sheaf of papers into a liitle-used soft-sided briefcase, Zach headed for home about four-thirty in the afternoon.

The usual forty-minute commute seemed longer and hotter than usual, but his frustration was held at bay by the thoughts in his head. He needed time to think it through, although the plan was simple enough. The house was an oasis of cool, clean serenity.

“Hi, mom.” It always surprised him when he saw the lines around her eyes, what sort of bothered him even more was her habit of dressing up all the time.

No stretchy pink pants with sagging knees and bottoms for Hazel, yet she hadn’t really gone out in years and if the extensive daily preparation period was in hopes of finding another love in her life, it hadn’t worked so far.

“Hi, honey.” The kitchen smelled marvelous and he was reminded that he’d only had a couple of doughnuts and a coffee for lunch. “How did your day go?”

“Uh, fine.”

“Sit down, you’re just in time.”

Zach rented the granny suite in the basement. As the story went, he was saving up for a big down payment on a nice house somewhere. Privately he acknowledged it was just a story.

His mom had a habit of cooking just a little too much for one person, and Zach always parked on the street and entered through the front door. His timing paid off in a quick helping of lasagna and some leftover salad. That finished, he took the briefcase downstairs and headed for the shower.

Unusually for the weekend, he had no major plans, no clubs, no bars, no meeting up with friends on the immediate horizon.

With no urgent need to go out or anything like that, although the grass would have to be cut sooner or later, he pulled out the sheets with the expression system and began studying it with care, mind far, far away, on a sunny desert island. His mind was somewhere in the South Pacific with the pop singer known as Lana.

#

Zach and Busby argued for three days, back and forth, back and forth, abruptly catching themselves in the middle of a heated argument when Morrow or one of the other chemists walked in.

Finally the pair just shut up about it. Busby didn’t approve, that was the one thing. Lana meant nothing to him, she was just another unnaturally talented teenager—he was shocked when he found that out, he had thought her in her early twenties—but she dressed differently from some of the other acts. Busby figured the country music scene was just different. Not like that one pop singer, he forgot her name, always wearing her underwear on the outside.

Friday rolled around again and Zach gave it one more shot.

“Come on. I need you to document this. It’s like you say, what if something goes wrong. I might be very ill, I might not be able to talk.”

“Argh. You are just fuckin’ nuts. That is the problem. You’re going to risk your own life and your health for sure. Over some chick who has no idea of your very existence, and no doubt she could care less when she finds out, which, incidentally, I must assume to mean that you have a plan for that too! Argh. It’s too nuts.” His buddy had a point, but Zach pressed on.

“Look.” He tried to inject a note of calm into his voice, even a fake resignation. “Just read the expression system. See if I’ve missed anything. Just give me an opinion.”

“Let it go.” Busby, looking forward to a long summer weekend with the wife and kids, was running out of patience.

These off the books, private projects were definitely frowned upon and probably grounds for instant dismissal. He wished Zach had never told him.

The man wanted something he just couldn’t have, and didn’t have the sense or quite frankly, the maturity, to admit it. Busby marveled at this display of narcissistic angst. He’d never seen anything like it in anything so closely resembling a grown man…Zach stood almost hugging himself with frustration, firmly convinced that this all could work. Did he know what he looked like? Obviously not.

What was he expecting to do? Lie in wait somewhere? Recite poetry as she strode past down Rodeo Drive? Send her love letters? That would creep her out for sure, and who could blame her. Was he going to write songs for her, then? Busby’s face hung slack at this mental picture of his friend.

It seemed awfully far-fetched. He regarded his sheepish young friend with mild disapproval, laced with a hint of astonishment.

“Seriously. You’re out of your mind.” There was just no way.

“Please.” Such humble eloquence was unusual for Zach. “Please?”

“You must admit that destroying every opportunity that comes your way is a little extreme!”

Busby had set Zach up more than once with a sure thing, well a pretty sure thing a time or two, but his young buddy hadn’t seen the light. One of the girls in the front office, the lovely Rebecca, had hot eyes for him so bad it was downright embarrassing. The only saving grace there was that Zach was totally oblivious.

“Yes, I admit it. I am sometimes extreme.” Zach sighed, deeply.

“Aha!”

“But to take a stand, or to defend a principle, sometimes requires one to act in extreme ways.”

That was one way to describe a crush on some millionaire rock star who graced the cover of a new magazine every other week.

“Oh, God damn it, forget your childish lust for a moment. You have too much to live for, Zach.”

“Oh, yes? But what would you have me do? Be like the wretched ivy that clings around a big tree and creeps upward not by its own strength but by trickery? No, thank you! Dedicate poems to bankers, like other poets have done? Act like a cringing fool just for the hope of seeing a condescending smile on a patron's lips? Thank you, but no! Learn to swallow insults every day? Scrape my knees raw from kneeling and bend my back till it breaks from bowing? No, thank you! Or be two-faced and sly, running with the hare while at the same time hunting with the hounds? Learn the cheap art of flattering people so that they may praise me? Step on people to make my way ahead? Navigate the sea of life with madrigals for sails, blown gently windward by old ladies’ sighs? Thank you, but no! Bribe kindly editors to print my poetry? Aspire to be elected pope of tavern councils held by drunken idiots? Work my whole life to bank my reputation on one famous sonnet instead of writing hundreds? Be terrorized by all the papers, thinking such things as, ‘Oh, if only the Mercury would give me a kind review!’ Grow pale and fearful and scheming? Prefer to make visits instead of poems? Seek introductions to the right people, sign the right petitions? No! No! And no again! But sing? And dream and laugh? Yes! Go freely, wherever I please, with eyes that look straight forward and with a fearless voice! To wear my hat just the way I choose! To decide for myself in any situation whether to fight a duel or to recite a poem! To work without one thought of fortune or fame, and to realize that journey to the moon! Never to write a line that has not sprung straight from my heart. To be modest. To be content with every flower, fruit or even leaf—but pluck them from my own garden and no one else's! And then, if glory ever does by chance come my way, I’ll pay no tribute to Caesar, because the merit will be my own. In short, I will never be like that wretched ivy. Whether I rise very high or not, I am content because I climb alone.”

Busby wandered over and dropped into a chair. He held his head in his hands.

“Oh, boy. Boy, oh, boy.” Busby was beginning to develop a real sick feeling in his guts. “Oh, you stupid son of a bitch—you’ve really gone and done it now!”

And in spite of all his best efforts, he had managed to suck Busby into it as well.

There was a long silence, but then Busby looked up. It was clear that Zach had already injected himself. This was just his way of announcing it.

“You speak so very loud and proud to the world. But can you whisper the truth into my ear—she does not love you, does she?”

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Kobo.

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Edmond Rostand (who wrote Cyrano de Bergerac.)


Editor’s Note: only those parts written by Monsieur Shalako are copyright 2013; all other parts are public domain. If Edmond Rostand were alive today, he’d be a very old man, and most likely pretty cranky.