HELP!

Hello everyone,

I have a recently completed manuscript. It's a work of fiction. It doesn't contain vampires or supernatural elements added to a pre-existing classic. It also doesn't have any conspiracies involving the Catholic Church or anything to do with the phrase “legal thriller”. It's entitled Last Fair Deal. It does have a strong plot and three dimensional characters. None of them are wizards though. I understand that it may be impossible to publish a novel without these things, but if you or anyone you know might be interested in publishing such an thing, please let me know.

Thanks,

Casey

'Round Midnight

My poem 'Round Midnight is now up at Illogical Muse. Check it Out.

Modern Times

I watched this the other night because Paulette Goddard reminds me of my Siamese twin that I lost.  

door in the floor

On the other side of the door in the floor is a one-legged man. He's serious, or at least he has a serious side. Every time I come by the house, he comes out from under the floor and introduces himself. The last time he told me his name was Doug. Each time it's something different.

Doug is the type to make sure everything except his nose is clean when he's under his man hole cover. Doug offers me a box of day old donuts and a place to sit. He shuffles around the kitchen dragging his plastic and titanium left leg a bit. The slight drag is how I can tell he's tired.

When Doug reaches the edge of the kitchen counter, he turns and comes halfway back to where the open window is letting in the songs of Saturday afternoon. "During the great bloodless revolution," he begins, "I was a colonel in the army. My men and I didn't charge any hills, didn't surprise any enemies."
 
I opened the box of donuts and noticed right off that they all looked flat, as if their jelly insides had been sucked out.

"I lost my leg wrestling a gator on a twenty dollar bet."

The first time we met, Doug had lost the leg to a shark. Over the course of the six months I've known him, his missing limb has been the result of a shark attack, an elephant goring, frostbite, lightning strike. My favorite though, is when he told of how after the revolution, his enemies captured him, tied him to the ground with his left leg exposed. They then let four starving badgers loose, who ripped it off his body. 

My grandmother once advised me to never attack someone's imagination, so I let Doug talk, occasionally throwing donut husks at him when he's not looking.

What Passes.

I decided to clear my head from atop a municipal parking garage. Above the people, above the grimness of reality, I knew I could escape. It was nearing dawn as I climbed the stairwell that smelled of piss, left by various drunkards and bums. I was clutching a half-empty bottle of wine I took from the party. When I reached the top, I took a swig and made my way over to the edge. I peered down, watched the world like a hunchback, as the cops came and went from street to street. I wondered if one of them might be the one who stopped me a few weeks earlier while I was walking these same streets below. He'd asked me what I was doing. “Just walking,” I replied. Then he informed me about the bums who would gladly slit my throat “For a dollar.” “If I only had a dollar,” I'd muttered under my breath.

Deeply rooted in the here and now, I stood quietly and watched the moon disappear. Ah, the mystical moon, Lorca's moon, I mused. The revelations that crept into my mind, like the veils, were long and black. I took a long pull from the bottle and watched the buildings race each other into the sky. From behind and below, I could hear someone beating out rhythms on bucket drums. Whoever it was, they were calling out to the spirits. I glanced up and gazed at the Hotel Florida, with its dark, sad, visage; it stood alone decaying, a forgotten corpse of a time I knew nothing of. As I took another long pull, I turned, studied the lone black car parked behind me, imagining there was a dead man inside it. If there was one, would I report it or just walk away, leaving it for someone else to discover? If the door's unlocked would I search the corpses pockets? I didn't have answers to any of these questions. The situation seemed rife with possibilities and all the potential actions left me feeling morally ambiguous.

Words and tricks have lead me to this place -- left to drift in thoughts and memories -- passing through days and nights, people and places, hoping to transform sweet intentions and bad interpretations into something more meaningful. Standing over a rotting, pointless city, where over the years I've met prophets and con-men, seen visions and horrors. But there has to be something greater than this, I thought. It's like Antonin Artaud once wrote, “It's not possible that in the end the miracle will not occur.”

swiftly goes the reflection

The eye to eye seeing

of me in the midst--

revolution.

You of the past

running, screaming

into the labyrinth.

The bones of images

twisted to form

lyrics to songs

about death and direction.

A captive warrior

becomes a captive audience.

Succumbing to the fracturing

of selves

into multiple millions

with the same functioning organs.

And what can we hope to gain

from trying to comprehend,

infinity being carried on the back of a dust mite.

from bridges

ala wai river

the things we keep

Despite the importance he placed on objects, the artifacts of his own past, Dr. Thomas Barker kept very few photographs, only seven in all.

The first was of him in a dark suit, starched white shirt -- black bow tie. Next to him is his younger sister, Joanne, in a light colored cotton dress. The photograph is in black and white and he can't remember the color of the dress. The honeysuckle bushes behind he and his sister are in full bloom. It was the day of their older sister, Marianne's, wedding.

Next to it is a photograph of his mother and father on their wedding day. His future parents were both too young to look as defeated as they do in the photo. If Thomas stared at their faces too long, thought about their afflictions and righteous anger, it reminded him of how blind he was to it during their lifetime. And every time he reaches back into the vault, he finds that night forty-one years ago when his mother, for the first and only time in her life, threatened to kill his father. His parents always fought in code, he never understood what his father did to warrant the death threat that night. The reason, the truth, was something his parents would both take to their grave.

On the table next the crystal ashtray he used when he still smoked, and won't part with, is a picture of himself and his wife, Kate posing with their daughter, Carmen in the nursery on the day they brought her home. Their faces wore tight intense smiles, a blend of joy and terror. Two kids running on hopes and adrenalin.

The photo next to it on the same table is of he and Kate with Carmen and their newest addition, Kyle, on his first day home from the hospital. Kate is sitting in the comfortable recliner with newborn in her lap. She is still visibly weary from a difficult birth. His daughter is standing next to her mother, while Dr. Barker stands proudly behind them. Their smiles are all soft and happy, unaware of the alternate reality that was twelve years down the road. The family in this photo would never believe what fortune had waiting for them.

On the book shelf that is to the left of the door, Barker kept a photograph from the year he had his first breakdown. It was Christmas. The last one anyone remembers enjoying all together. For the next eight years the family consciously alternated the suffering. It began with Dr. Barker's Christmas Eve meltdown eight years ago and has continued year after year, with the last being his daughter's cheating boyfriend discovery on Christmas morning. Half way between those incidents was a breast cancer scare. Mrs. Barker found a lump on the 23^rd but wouldn't be able to see her doctor until January 4^th. The notion of this being the Barker's last Christmas together lived and breathed in the room with the family until it got so tense that everyone went their separate ways after dinner.

The sixth picture in his collection rests in the back corner of a table by the window. When Dr Barker was in an overall better mindset, he would open the blinds of the window and appear to stare out the window. Truth is, he was gazing upon a photo of Bonnie Beachum, a beautiful blond haired teenage girl. Just as Thomas is no longer the boy she fell in love with, Bonnie is no longer the girl he fell in love with, either. He was naïve and seventeen, she was twenty-one, sexual and mysterious. She knew about magic charms and was on the pill. As much as Barker loved that year of his life, the blinds on the window have at least two years worth of dust.

The seventh photo is on his desk, behind and to the left of the phone. It's a self portrait. Every year since he was sixteen years old, he's snapped a self portrait of himself, keeping it only until his next birthday, when he takes a new one. In the early years he'd hold a ceremony, that began with him picking up the photos from the developer, then driving home without opening them. Once he was alone in his office, he'd remove the photo from the envelope. Then he'd remove the framed photo and for a few moments he's compare the two, and make a mental checklist of the facial differences, before discarding last years model.