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Snood!
I brought the volume of Brita
And now I think I hear… is it my imagination?
No.
Someone has come visiting.
I plugged the pipe, but the rats still escaped. I filled in the well, but she also found her way out. And this time I don’t think she’s alone. I think I hear two sets of shuffling feet, not just one. Or Three? Is it three? Is the girl who would have been my daughter-in-law in a better world with them as well?
I think she is. Three corpses shuffling up the hall, their faces (what remains of them) disfigured by rat-bites, Arlette’s cocked to one side as well… by the kick of a dying cow.
Another bite on the ankle.
And another!
How the management would Ow! Another. But they won’t have me. And my visitors won’t, either, although now I can see the doorknob turning and I can smell them, the remaining flesh hanging on their bones giving off the stench of slaughtered slaught
The gun god where is the stop
OH MAKE THEM STOP BITING M
From the Omaha World-Herald, April 14th, 1930
Bizarre Scene Greets Hotel Security Man
The body of Wilfred James, a librarian at the Omaha Public Library, was found in a local hotel on Sunday when efforts by hotel staff to contact him met with no response. The resident of a nearby room had complained of “a smell like bad meat,” and a hotel chambermaid reported hearing “muffled shouting or crying, like a man in pain” late Friday afternoon.
After knocking repeatedly and receiving no response, the hotel’s Chief of Security used his pass-key and discovered the body of Mr. James, slumped over the room’s writing desk. “I saw a pistol and assumed he had shot himself,” the security man said, “but no-one had reported a gunshot, and there was no smell of expended powder. When I checked the gun, I determined it was a badly maintained.25, and not loaded.
“By then, of course, I had seen the blood. I have never seen anything like that before, and never want to again. He had bitten himself all over-arms, legs, ankles, even his toes. Nor was that all. It was clear he had been busy with some sort of writing project, but he had chewed up the paper, as well. It was all over the floor. It looked like paper does when rats chew it up to make their nests. In the end, he chewed his own wrists open. I believe that’s what killed him. He certainly must have been deranged.”
Little is known of Mr. James at this writing. Ronald Quarles, the head librarian at the Omaha Public Library, took Mr. James on in late 1926. “He was obviously down on his luck, and handicapped by the loss of a hand, but he knew his books and his references were good,” Quarles said. “He was collegial but distant. I believe he had been doing factory work before applying for a position here, and he told people that before losing his hand, he had owned a small farm in Hemingford County.”
The World-Herald is interested in the unfortunate Mr. James, and solicits information from any readers who may have known him. The body is being held at the Omaha County Morgue, pending disposition by next of kin. “If no next of kin appears,” said Dr. Tattersall, the Morgue’s Chief Medical Officer, “I suppose he will be buried in public ground.”
BIG DRIVER
– 1 -
Tess accepted twelve compensated speaking engagements a year, if she could get them. At twelve hundred dollars each, that came to over fourteen thousand dollars. It was her retirement fund. She was still happy enough with the Willow Grove Knitting Society after twelve books, but didn’t kid herself that she could go on writing them until she was in her seventies. If she did, what would she find at the bottom of the barrel? The Willow Grove Knitting Society Goes to Terre Haute? The Willow Grove Knitting Society Visits the International Space Station? No. Not even if the ladies’ book societies who were her mainstay read them (and they probably would). No.
So she was a good little squirrel, living well on the money her books brought in… but putting away acorns for the winter. Each year for the last ten she had put between twelve and sixteen thousand dollars into her money market fund. The total wasn’t as high as she might have wished, thanks to the gyrations of the stock market, but she told herself that if she kept on plugging, she’d probably be all right; she was the little engine that could. And she did at least three events each year gratis to salve her conscience. That often a
Other than an honorarium of at least twelve hundred dollars, she had one other requirement: that she be able to drive to the location of her lecture, with not more than one overnight stop on the way to or from. This meant she rarely went farther south than Richmond or farther west than Cleveland. One night in a motel was tiring but acceptable; two made her useless for a week. And Fritzy, her cat, hated keeping house by himself. This he made clear when she came home, twining between her feet on the stairs and often making promiscuous use of his claws when he sat in her lap. And although Patsy McClain from next door was very good about feeding him, he rarely ate much until Tess came home.
It wasn’t that she was afraid of flying, or hesitant about billing the organizations that engaged her for travel expenses just as she billed them for her motel rooms (always nice, never elegant). She just hated it: the crowding, the indignity of the full-body scans, the way the airlines now had their hands out for what used to be free, the delays… and the inescapable fact that you were not in charge. That was the worst. Once you went through the interminable security checkpoints and were allowed to board, you had put your most valuable possession-your life-into the hands of strangers.
Of course that was also true on the turnpikes and interstates she almost always used when she traveled, a drunk could lose control, jump the median strip, and end your life in a head-on collision (they would live; the drunks, it seemed, always did), but at least when she was behind the wheel of her car, she had the illusion of control. And she liked to drive. It was soothing. She had some of her best ideas when she was on cruise control with the radio off.
“I bet you were a long-haul trucker in your last incarnation,” Patsy McClain told her once.
Tess didn’t believe in past lifetimes, or future ones for that matter-in metaphysical terms, she thought what you saw was pretty much what you got-but she liked the idea of a life where she was not a small woman with an elfin face, a shy smile, and a job writing cozy mysteries, but a big guy with a big hat shading his sunburned brow and grizzled cheeks, letting a bulldog hood ornament lead him along the million roads that crisscrossed the country. No need to carefully match her clothes before public appearances in that life; faded jeans and boots with side-buckles would do. She liked to write, and she didn’t mind public speaking, but what she really liked to do was drive. After her Chicopee appearance, this struck her as fu