Mandala Press - Bringing You Fiction That Falls Apart

Chapter 25: Start With The Ending

2005-08-10T13:11:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Birds painted orange as goldfish had been released into the blue sky. The flock sparked overhead and Wervers said sardonically, “That’s what you can do with a big budget…I wonder what Spinster is trying to make up here?” From his copper kettle, he poured a cup of green tea for Sam. “Sam, I thought what we could do is start with the ending while we already have the windmills and a mob gathered. Now what I want you to do is—”
But it was too late, the end had already started. All Wervers could do was run the camera as his Frankenstein heard the music playing down from the wrecked top of a windmill and walked big, slow and apocalyptically.
“That’s Cornelius Barter,” George said.
But Wervers gave him such a steely look to be quiet and watch the movie.
Frankenstein moved across a lot of yard full of dandelions and then he pushed his way past the spectators and film crew and entered Alfred Spinster’s picture. Screaming people ran from Sam in fear, but Cornelius Barter went on with the soundtrack, it was all a movie to him. Frankenstein just got to the tied up windmill when the first shot was fired.
George bolted from Wervers.
Wervers swung the camera around as he heard a metallic fluttering clattering up behind him. Only years of experience held him from screaming out in surprise or losing focus.
All that tin of Shriner cars had been welded and torn and turned into a wobbling biplane with ten propellers slicing.
More shots were fired by the military and police.
None of it made any difference to Frankenstein, he had climbed ten feet off the ground, pulling on the white roped ladder, he had clouds and heaven above, ricochets and bullets burst around him.
Tiny Snopes bled and tried to steer but the aircraft was going down in pain, pouring charcoal and flame. It seared over the trees and slope beyond Jupiter Hill and disappeared from view.
Another fire had started, the windmill was hit by a burning wing. Cornelius Barter played on, smoke billowed out gray and smothering out the sight of them.
A cloud window opened and George saw the apparition. He yelled, “Sam!” and ran towards him.
The wounded monster moved with stop animation.
“Sam, you okay?!”
There were still gunshots, this was a dangerous war zone. Everything Sam had warned George about was happening now.
“We have to get out of here!” George yelled. When he caught up with him, George felt blood on his hands. “You okay? You’re bleeding.”
“Let’s go…”
“Of course Sam, I’ll patch you up at the car.” George let the weight of Frankenstein lean on him as they hurried across the World War 1 atmosphere, somehow clawed to where their car was waiting.
The leaking water made the ground mud around it. They crushed little flowers they couldn’t see as George got Sam to the driver’s side. They didn’t even see the letters DUME spraypainted on the side.
“Okay?” George said to the Frankenstein crumpled behind the wheel. “This is the time to test Green 18.”
Sam found the key to start the car.
Wrapped in green soaked bandages, Frankenstein was half mummy when George was done and the car began to roll out of shadows in a wide arc onto the road. The car was more ocean than ever, all the seams were water, a starfish rotated on the speedometer.
“Look out!” George shouted. He grabbed the steering wheel instinctively to avoid the white balloon bomb drifting towards them through the vapors. The silver car slid and kicked up wind that breezed the balloon bomb away. “That was close…” George said just before a big orange explosion occurred behind them, the whole peak of Jupiter Hill was a volcano.
The car shot along the steep hill hundreds of feet above the drop to waves.
“Maybe we don’t need to go quite so fast,” George suggested as a hellish on fire red tin bursting airplane cometed over the hill at them.
George saw Frankenstein lurch the wheel—that was the last the doctor saw of him. George was thrown free and out of a fire that just started. He almost soared, half bird, his arms could have leaned into that and glided him miles. No such luck. He was an unconscious sleeper traveling by air.
George hit the ground and fell in. He dropped into a tunneled world with ice melting everywhere. Passing shadows of fish crossed his collapse into shallow water, a foot from a frozen werewolf.
Sam had been thrown out of his destroyed car too. That silver thing had skidded off the plummet towards the sea below and Sam was left stranded in air with his arm hooked around a root. Madronnas sighed above him raving leaves.
Straight up twenty feet beyond on the road, there an explosion sound as more of Tiny’s airplane burned cars. Sam dug his boots into the cliff side, dislodging rocks and dirt into the climbing fog from the sea. He winced. Some blood trickled down his green painted hand. He had to hold on for the fog. He knew once the fog got to him everything would be alright. But the fog had to hurry.
As he waited, some rocks fell away from his shifting feet. It was close. Ghostly fog birds felt across the ridge and soared on overhead, leading the way for the rest of the shroud. It was coming to save him, he could hear the familiar sounds it carried, reaching to dream him out of here.
Clouds swarmed. A surge of them formed stairs just below his feet. All he had to do was walk up them into the floating world, just let go and belong to the air.

THE END........................

Thanks to Miguel Ramos

Chapter 24: 20 Dollars

2005-08-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

“Yes, hello, is this Mrs. Parrot?”
“Yes! What—who’s this??!”
“Please madame, my name is Rennie and I’m calling you on behalf of your local Shriners Union.”
She sighed a tangled breath back through the receiver.
“Mrs. Parrot, a little while ago you pledged to support our organization with the generous amount of twenty dollars. Now, if you’d like—OH MY GOD!!” he suddenly shrieked and fell against the glass walls of the phone booth, a quarter pulled out like a silver fish on a string.

Chapter 23: Wherever World

2005-08-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Very slowly with brushes, Fled Magyar applied the green make-up of Frankenstein’s monster. Classical records played on the wooden player, one after another as time passed by.
George turned another page of an Edgar Allan Poe book. The bag sat on the next plastic chair beside him. The soldier seemed to be sleeping away the long waiting.
“There we are,” Fled said.
Sam was allowed to lumber out of his chair. His feet were already worn into thick soled boots. He took big chopping steps away from the chair, one by one. What a monster he was as he walked away from Fled to the door.
“Let’s go, George,” he growled.
George followed holding the book up to his face like a rare flower or window to an underwater or wherever world.
Sam opened the tin trailer door. Rays of sunset made him squint his green lidded eyes.
“Hey, don’t forget your bag,” Fled called.
“Oh!” George gasped.
Fled Magyar held the bag and it was open and he was looking inside and smiling. “This is good work,” he told George. “You make this?”
“No,” George answered, resigned slow motion taking the bag back. “To be honest, I found it on the beach, I don’t even know how it stays alive. It defies my medical knowledge. What can I say?”
“Hmmm,” Fled replied. “Not unheard of though. You should come by the circus later tonight.” He stared at the green under his fingernails. “I’ve been keeping something under wraps at the sideshow. It’s a body…Without a head.”
George stood there like paper mache.
“I assure you it’s completely alive and only waiting for a chance like this to come along.”
“Oh…I don’t know,” George said. “I’m sort of looking out for him.”
“Yeah, he’s my guardian angel,” the soldier brayed and sneezed. “Listen doc, you bet I would like having a body again! You fellahs have no idea, this is torture.”
George said, “Well then…Sam…Would you mind if I—”
“No,” Sam burst. “I need you here. This is a dangerous place, there’s a war on, I could get hurt, I need to have my doctor nearby.”
This speech coming from a green Frankenstein made George smile and almost laugh. “Okay Sam, okay.”
“But what about me?” said the soldier’s head. “I need that body.”
“I may be able to do the procedure,” Fled offered. “In fact I’m sure I could.”
The soldier’s head looked hopefully at George.
“Well I don’t mind,” George finally laughed. “I’ll, ahh, it’ll be strange not to be carrying that bag all around.”
“You did forget me a minute ago,” the head reminded George.
“I know, that was a mistake, I was reading a book.” He directed his eyes at Fled, “It’s a fairly simple operation attaching the nerves, veins, muscle structure and various ganglia.”
“Ugh,” the head said. “I don’t want to know.”
“You’ll be okay,” Fled promised. “I’ve done this kind of work for years.”
“It would be a sort of relief,” George sighed looking down into the bag, “No offence to you, I’m just getting tired out emotionally and physically, making sure you’re cared for all the time.”
“You know,” the soldier said, “I’m so grateful that you and Sam Samsara showed up when you did. You saved my life, I’m really thankful for that. But I need to get back to my wife and I don’t want to go back there the way I am. It’s crazy. What’ll she do, put me in a birdcage? If I can be attached to a body again, what could be better? Please doc, give me a chance.”
“Sure, of course.” George let Fled take the bag from him, though it wasn’t entirely easy, it was still like something stolen off a laundry line.
“Don’t worry friend,” Fled said. “A new life isn’t far away.”

Chapter 22: The Sinister Backdrop

2005-08-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

When the road reached Jupiter Hill’s summit, they were slowed by a hive of studio trucks and cars, black and white police cars and military vehicles and finally brought to a stop by a yellow tape strung across the tar.
Sam grumbled and turned the rusted protesting steering wheel towards a glade under a tree.
“What’s going on up here?” George said. “This can’t be for Frankenstein’s Hand, can it?
“I don’t think so,” Sam answered. He killed the motor and a last spasm rippled from the engine down the frame and coughed out the exhaust. “Oh no…” Sam suddenly groaned. “It’s that guy.”
A tall white cowboy hat rode above a thicket of actors and crew. Bronson Griffith strode towards the silver car with a big smile prepared on his face. “You old son of a gun!” he lowed. “Sam Samsara!”
George closed his hands protectively over the bag and followed Sam’s lead getting out of the car. ‘That guy’ actually looked like a match for Sam.
“You on this picture too?” the cowboy boomed. He dropped a fist through the air and caught Sam for a handshake.
George sogged along the long ocean scarred hood of the car. He stopped when he saw one of the rivets moving across the metal, realized it was a gray shelled hermit crab, and moved on around to Sam’s side.
“It sure is something…” Bronson Griffith shook his head, cleaving a hand in the windmills direction. “Wait til you see, it’ll take your breath away. But I’ll tell you what. From now on when people ask me why I do what I do, I’ll say that’s why. That’s the truth, Sam.” Then, as he pushed back the brim of his cowboy hat, a loud sneeze came from the bag George was holding.
“Whu—?” Bronson Griffith leaned to look in the gap of the bag, expecting to see a dog, his features going from mild curiosity to a brightened mask he’d never show on the silver screen. He squeaked, “Whu—?” again.
“Holy cow!” the soldier’s head chattered back at him, “It’s Bronson Griffith!”
George quickly snapped the bag and hurried to explain, “That’s a prop, a puppet, funny isn’t it?” he grinned haphazardly.
Sam gave the cowboy a thud on the shoulder with his oar-sized hand. “Yes, we must be going. The set is that way?”
But the cowboy actor was still waxed and attached to that spot like a statue imitation.
“Excuse me, we will find it,” Sam nodded, leading his companions away, slipping into a crowd carrying light stands, ladders and rolls of wire. Jupiter Hill had gone from hilltop home to windmills to a spilled out anthill. Sam and George were caught in the flow and carried on the crushed lawn past hedges to an amazing movie made sight. Every windmill was strung together with thick white ropes going over every angle and blade up and down lacing like spiderweb.
The soldier sneezed again, but nobody noticed. Sam and George approached it like the Parthenon remains.
After another sneeze, the soldier head said, “You know, I think I’m getting a cold.”
“This is the biggest budget I’ve ever seen,” Sam confided, “It looks like an Alfred Spinster movie.”
George was just amazed by the expert knots and surgical skill involved in the project. He almost felt like laughing.
“Sam Samsara.”
It was Alfred Spinster.
“I should have known you’d be paying your respects up here,” the director remarked. “Yes, it’s a terrible shame this thing had to happen. So tell me Sam, you think you could make an appearance in my film while you’re here?”
“Sure,” Sam said. “I’m…”
“I’m glad you said that, I was hoping you would in fact. I’m very happy with the results. Okay Sam I’ve got a part for you, I want you to picture a little town beside the sea. You can see the movement when the dawn hits. People start getting ready for work, they’re out the door and either they catch a gondola or they walk. That’s where you come in, Sam. That’s where the camera finds you.” Alfred Spinster stopped to take a stare through a kaleidoscope camera lens. “No, no, no!” he cried, “I’m not in focus!” While there was a scramble of crew, Sam felt a tap on his shoulder.
“Sam Samsara.” Wervers was there. “I’m glad to see you. We’re—”
“Hah!” Alfred Spinster spluttered. “I seem to have forgotten your name, oh wait—I remember now. Wervers, right?
“Yes,” Wervers nodded. “Good to see you again.”
“I suppose you’re cashing in on a picture up here too? Probably using some of my sets when I’m not looking? That’s alright. I don’t mind, it’s all in the nature of the beast.”
“Actually,” Wervers broke in, “I’ve been waiting for Sam so we can get started.”
“There you are, taking my actors too. I wonder what kind of slip-shod production you’re up to this time. Monsters on the loose? Ghouls? Let me see, let me guess. This whole tapestry of wound up windmills is only the backdrop to a more sinister paranoid reality. The world is plunged into war and the only one who can stop it is this heroic Sam Samsara.” Imperiously, Alfred Spinster leaned back on his heels to coast in the wind of his words.
Wervers cracked a smile. “I suppose you guessed it.”

Chapter 21: Starfish

2005-07-26T13:09:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

George’s opened eyes stared at a black and white photograph of Frances. He stirred in real terror not knowing yet if this was a bad dream starting. Her picture was on a green can, words above it said, Have You Seen Me? George grabbed the can from Sam Samsara. He turned the can around trying to find something out. Cactus Juice. There was no news about Frances, but he tipped the can to read the fine print on the side. Water, Agave, Saguaro Puree from Concentrate, Sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Citric Acid, Beta Carotene, Green 18. “Green 18?” George gulped.
“That’s from their factory,” Sam told him.
George lifted himself off the park bench.
There it was, filling air with deep throbbing of living machines and furnaces. Smokestacks roiled out green colored smoke.
“You got this over there?”
“They gave it to me,” Sam shrugged. “I’m a movie star. You should give some to the soldier. Maybe it will grow the rest of his body.”
“Not funny Mr. Samsara!” the head chimed.
George turned in the direction of the ocean. “Did you see--?”
Cornelius Barter wasn’t out there anymore. “What time is it?”
“Relax George,” Sam laughed. “The car’s out of the water, those elephants were swell. Take a look.” Sam took a couple steps back and motioned. The silver car, crumpled sheets of abalone metal, was parked up on the grass off the road. Like a steamship boiler it hissed, like a sunken ship dragged ashore it was covered with barnacles and weeping leafy camouflage.
“It still works…” George’s floating words were as hollow as heron bones.
“Come along, Wervers wants us to meet him on Jupiter Hill.”
“No, I can’t. I have to find out about this can, this picture on it is my daughter.” George held it out to Sam and the giant began to laugh.
“Your daughter??”
George looked at the can again, turned quickly in his hand. Have You Seen Me? asked the bold letters. It was a picture of a shepherd dog.
“Your daughter,” Sam repeated as if he had to remember that punchline for the camera crew. He slapped George on the back with a weighty hand. “Let’s go.”
A hallucination, George decided—I saw the wolfish dog and I thought of her; it’s all a trick of the subconscious mind…After all, he had been asleep, it was nothing more than the last melting imprint of a dream…Absently he put the can into his bag.
“Yiiii!!” the soldier yelped.
“Oh—sorry.” George fumbled the cool green can from the face’s skin.
“Careful there, doctor. Don’t ever forget I’m in here.”
George put the can into his coat pocket, thinking who knows, it might stop another bullet. And “Green 18?” he muttered barely audible. What was Green 18? Was it an improved Green 17? Would he be able to run some experiments? Or was it up to fate for him to find out?
Sam was halfway to his car when he turned to check on George who shrouded slowly after him. “My daughter,” Sam husked.
Closer to the car George could see light stripes of rust banding it like a tiger. The rattling engine wheezed out charcoaled smoke from cut holes and torn tin edges—it had a hard time in the sea.
Sam crawled into the big harpooned shark. There was a splashing sound. While George caught up, Sam baled out cupfuls of water.
When George opened the door on his side a small waterfall poured out on his shoes.
“I still have not got all the ocean out,” Sam apologized.
“I can see that,” George answered. He put his bag down and sat in the aquarium car. He stared at the starfish on the dashboard. They probably think it’s low tide and all they have to do is wait for the ocean to return.

Chapter 20: The Water Operation

2005-07-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Sam Samsara was in a rowboat again. The oars were stowed and he leaned over. The small boat tipped dangerously as he stared past the glassy surface swerve. The high tide floated him over his car sunk shoulders in the sand below. A flight of sticklebacks flecked across the shining silver submarined hull. It seemed a peaceful part of the sea, there were weeds and anemones already waving to it.
With slow unreeling, Sam let an anchor line descend through the green. He had to scull an oar to catch the car’s bumper on the second try. He pulled; it was tight; he let the line unloop around the oarlock to keep it caught while he rowed back to shore.
The bow hushed up onto the sand. Sam stepped out trailing the lasso. It cut a taut trail back to the ocean.
George had already drifted from the scene at the beach. He didn’t feel like watching elephants pull a waterlogged car, he was busy wondering. It occurred to George that he hadn’t slept for a long time…Had he? He felt warm in the glow of the climbing sun of another new day. Then he darkened with the breaking thought—what if he was sleeping right now? What if this was a dream, how could he know? This world seemed as real as a dream. These worries carried him away from Sam and the elephants and the water operation.
He left soft footprints in the sand like the invisible man fading from view across a thin white layer of London snow. By the time he passed around the rocky bend of the cove, he was a mile away. The city showed itself across the bay. Gray barrage balloons made buttons in the sky. The war was started. He wandered on to the next beach holding the soldier in the bag. He stopped when he remembered and looked inside.
“You okay?”
“Sure.”
“What are you thinking about?” George asked him casually.
The soldier didn’t worry over words, “I’m thinking about what will happen when I’m back. Look what’s left of me…How am I supposed to be when I go home? Mister, my mind is going a hundred miles an hour thinking.”
“I know,” George said. His eyes were on the distance too. “Do you mind if I take a walk to that pier way over there?”
“No. Go ahead.”
That was all they said for a while along the high tide chalk mark. Like a strange two-headed machine steam powered by hundreds of thoughts, George followed the washed up flotsam, ribbon bits of weed, beautiful stones shining wetly in sand, shells, bird prints and odd remnants of man-made things.
Each time George looked up from his feet, the dock materialized closer and clearer as if it was building itself. It had the look of something that was built very swiftly. It leaned crooked angles, there were boards missing, light shone through its planks like a rickety piano keyboard.
“There’s someone out there at the very end,” the soldier said. His head was half out of the doctor’s kit bag so he could see.
George nodded. He switched the bag to the other hand.
“Woahh!”
“Sorry. My hand’s getting sore,” George said. He was curious to see what the silhouette on that cartoon dock was doing. He wasn’t expecting to know who it was, but he did.
It was Cornelius Barter playing his trumpet to the sea.
“Look at that,” said the soldier.
George was. Cornelius Barter was actually playing directly into the ocean, the bell of the trumpet had a microphone wire fishing underwater. George didn’t want to be a disturbance, so he stopped near the rocky shoreline.
The water was hopping around the microphone wire. At first George thought the bubbles and chop were from the sound and trumpet air. But he soon realized there were hundreds of thrashing fish. It reminded him of a summer a long time ago when he was out in the woods and he heard the ecstatic water slapping of those carps in the lagoon. The fish had gone lovestruck or something. Maybe he was playing in a particular key that caused such a reaction in that species of fish, George noted. It’s certainly a possibility, George yawned. He looked for somewhere to lay down for just a minute.
Beyond the fish, the ballad reached into darker and deeper water, in veils offshore where the cold current welled, a Japanese submarine drifted in riveted silence. Sailors crowded around the receiving monitors while a reel to reel live recording was made for Imperial Broadcasting Services, to be pressed next week into long playing records labeled The Cornelius Barter Water Opera.

Chapter 19: Revenge of the Shriners

2005-07-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

The old men stood outside the drawn down door. They all wore the same peculiar uniform, wine red fezzes, blue suits, festooned with ribbons and ranks and heraldry. The shriners had been there for fifteen minutes in the blue shade of Tiny’s Garage. They knew he was in there, the mad sounds of hammering, the whoosh of an arc welder, Connie Francis’ ululation echoing; Tiny was in there alright, an oyster shut up tight with the industry sounds of creating its pearl.
“What’s he doing to our cars?”
Four or five of the vanguard addressed each other before the shrill cacophony.
The elder with the most lean into his cane picked the weight of his arm from the mottled door. “Rennie!” he bleated.
The less silvered Rennie stepped forward eagerly with sun blasting gold on his black rimmed glasses.
“Rennie, I want you on stake-out in that phone booth over there.”
The whole daffodil contingent turned to stare at the phone booth. It looked like it had tumbled onto the street corner from the top of one of the warehouses. Bent frame, cracked or shattered glass panes, the phone hanging to a twisting cord.
But Rennie saluted smartly.
“You can keep yourself busy with this phone list.” The oldest man took a parchment from his coat pocket. “These are people you can hit up for contributions,” he explained. “You know the routine. And—” he added, digging into another pocket, “Use this quarter for the calls.” He dangled a coin, sewn through with a loop of thread so it could be pulled out of the machine afterwards. They all chuckled, making the dry rasp of forest leaves unfolding in the breeze.
“Let’s get back to the 249.” He referred to the lodge by its familiar name. While Rennie took up residence in the phone booth, the rest of the shriners ambled, hobbled and steered chairs past the garage to the alley in between Tiny’s and Shelton’s Packaging.
Their parked squadron of miniature red motorcycles waited in rows. Some of them had sidecars for the less nimble. It took them a while to prepare helmets, goggles, get seated and start motors. They had done this for hundreds of parades, but time made them slower and slower.

Chapter 18: 421 Maple

2005-07-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

In the doctor’s black bag the soldier’s head had gone off, quiet and marble gray. The morning sun was painting Monets over the canvas big top tent.
“Do you remember where he said he lived?” George asked Sam in a sigh.
“Yes. 421 Maple.” Sam touched his forehead, “Remember? Photographic memory.”
George clasped the doctor’s kit shut. “We better take him home.”
Sam thought about it for a moment, then agreed.
Wervers got the circus to loan them some transportation so they could hurry back, get their car and drive to the studio.
After a last cup of green tea, they were freed into a jitney cart pulled by a zebra, trotting out of the circus into the other world.
The sky was mad with flying wings burning contrails. For a while the thick green canopy of cedars and maples hid the swarm from view and George was glad. A crazy war was starting and there was no way to stop it. He thought about the doctors in the cities that would be bombed. They won’t get any sleep, their distant streets will be filled with terror.
Sam interrupted him, “I never drove one of these!” His face was gleeful. He held the ringing bell reins like an antique, staring at the zebra’s amazing stripes, the look of a star struck moon man crowning him. There was no shouting motor or crushing speed velocity, the clapping hooves on the road was all they needed to hup along.
“There’s Maple,” George pointed at the green street sign pressed in a lilac tree. The zebra responded to Sam, they turned the corner. Sedans parked under the awning of leaves, lawn mown yards led to big houses. The sound of them arriving on the quiet street brought faces to windows to see a red painted miracle zebra rattling bells. Little did they know how it hid a wonder as apocalyptic as some folklore portent; they had arrived with a severed head.
George looked nervously back into the bag. “What are we going to say? He never told us what we were supposed to tell his wife.”
Sam shrugged.
They shook to the next block. A dog barked along a slatted fence.
“421,” Sam said. There on their right was the house. They clip clopped to the grassy edge of the curb and Sam pulled the reins to a stop. The zebra reached out for a mouthful of dandelions. Sam looked at George. “Let’s go.”
“Okay…” George got out and stood next to the short white fence. Rose petals patterned across the yard on the other side, scattered by the windblown night before. George read the name on the little swinging gate. “Parrot Residence,” painted on a flat piece of driftwood. George hefted the zipped bag in his hand. “Okay,” he sighed.
Sam pushed open the gate and led the way up the stone path. His shadow threw down a cloud.
“What should we say?” George hissed, hurrying behind him.
“We’ll find out what happens.”
Sam’s big hand tightened into a rumpled fist and he knocked on the door.
A woman with a baby in her arms opened the door, stood there surprised. “You’re--!” she stammered. She looked into her yard for cameras. She noticed the strange zebra contraption eating her flower bed. “Is this one of those sweepstakes?”
Sam shook his head, “No.”
“Sam Samsara,” she laughed and stepped aside. “You can come in, I’m just making tea, can you stay?”
“Yes please,” the giant had to duck under the eaves a bit. George followed quietly, carrying that bag with her husband…what was left of him. “George is my friend,” Sam told her.
“Hi,” she smiled, “Edith,” and took them by the photographs in the hallway to the kitchen. The baby stared over her shoulder at them. A teapot was steaming. “I wish Archie was here, he’ll never believe Sam Samsara was here! He used to see you every Monday when you were a sumo wrestler. Now we see you in the movies and magazines. What a world, huh?” she laughed.
“Please take a seat.” A table with a candle and half a bowl of oatmeal.
Sam sat down and rested his hand on the windowsill and asked, “Can I turn on the radio?”
“Yes, of course Mr. Samsara.”
He did so, deftly spinning the dial to his station and landed on it.
George was relieved when it was Cornelius Barter. It would have been a nightmare if Sam smashed her radio right away. Hopefully the music would last a while.
Edith opened a cupboard over the sink and took down three cups.
George startled Sam as he plopped the black bag onto the tabletop.
“Excuse me,” Sam remembered, “We have news about your husband.”
“Archie?”
“Is he in the army?”
“Yes—Oh no! Did something happen to him?” She hugged the baby tight enough to make his arms windmill. “What happened?” Then she whirled around so she wouldn’t see them tell, busied herself pouring hot water into three cups.
George glanced at Sam, wishing he had a script, something really heroic he could say, like in the movies.
“Ms. Parrot—”
“Edith,” she urged Sam.
“Your husband had to guard the circus last night, that’s why he didn’t show up yet. He wanted you to know he’d be late.”
“Oh—” she let a laugh go. “What a relief. I thought—” She turned to hide her face again.
George gasped as he saw the kit bag inch forwards. He clapped his hands on it. The baby was watching over Edith’s shoulder. George opened the bag some and said, “Shhhh…” into it.
Sam whispered in a croak, “He’s alive again?”
“He must have been sleeping, I guess.”
Edith carried two cups over for them, holding her baby pressed to her. She was still a little rattled.
“He—” Sam tried, starting a new story for her.
The soldier spoke up again, “It’s okay, you can tell her.”
“What’s that?” she asked George with growing alarm.
The hidden voice called to her, “I’m in here, darling.”
“Uhh…” George stood up with the bag held closed against him.
“Is that my husband’s voice?” she pointed.
“No!” George yelped.
Then Edith’s confusion abruptly managed another nervous laugh, “This IS one of those sweepstakes, isn’t it? Is there a telephone in there?” She reached for the bag.
George grappled Sam’s arm. Cornelius Barter was fading out. “Oh no…” He reached and tried to turn off the radio, quickly, before it got crunched. To his horror, the head rolled out of the bag with a plop.
Edith screamed.
The song ended. George knocked the radio off the windowsill into the oatmeal.
Edith screamed again. The baby was crying.
The soldier stared up at the woman and child. “Who are you?”
She bit her hand in terror. “What is that?!” Her screeching son crabbed in her arms.
“She’s not my wife,” the soldier’s eyes rolled gruesomely at Sam and George.
And the radio clucked the news bulletin in a grim monotone. Sam flinched, flashed a block fist onto it, crushing it all into pulp and oatmeal.
George jumped, the head teetered, Edith screamed again.
“Sam, I think we better leave.”
“Yeahh,” the big man stood, “Sorry for this, Ms. Parrot. We found him on the beach like this. He asked to be brought here.”
“Actually,” George tried to soothe her, “We got the wrong address.”
“Thanks for the tea though,” Sam bowed to the woman, “I apologize for your radio, I’ll have a new one delivered.”
She was holding her baby and staring at the table, the shattered bowl and radio, the candle knocked down, rolled against a cup of spilled green tea, a man’s head planted in the middle.
Sam batted the head into George’s bag and they left the kitchen in a sprint, the hall, bashed out the door.
“That went well, didn’t it?” George panted, but Sam was approaching the crowd of boys ganged around the jitney. He cracked his knuckles and they turned around.
“Samsara…” It was Crybaby Johnson. “What are you doing riding this rig? You doing a circus picture?”
“No.”
“It looks like you’ll finally be doing a movie with us.”
Sam pushed through them.
“We started production today in a haunted house,” Crybaby Johnson continued.
In two strides Sam got back up in the creaking jitney. George sat next to him.
“We’ll be seeing you, Sam,” Crybaby Johnson tried to make words sound as rough as sand dollars.
Sam clicked and flicked the reins across the zebra’s back.
“Want me to count the stripes and make sure they didn’t take any?” George asked.
The Crybaby Gang stood watching them go, grown no taller than the lilies and the half eaten weeds.
“You brought me to the wrong house!” the soldier gasped inside the open bag.
“I don’t know what happened,” Sam murmured. “I thought I had photographic memory. I’m very sorry.”
“That’s alright, Mr. Samsara. Heck, after that scene my wife will be a breeze.”
“412 Maple,” George said. “That sounds right to me.”
“Yeah,” the soldier agreed. “412 Maple is where I live. Hold me up, let me see.”
George obeyed. “Just don’t fall out again.”
“Hey—a zebra!”
“There’s 412,” Sam said. “That’s the place, correct?”
“Home sweet home.”
“Alright, let’s do this right this time,” Sam said as he pulled the zebra to stop. He bounded out.
A spray of sparrows flew out of the overhanging mimosa tree.
George got down and patted the zebra for luck. Saturn Circus was stamped on the white of a stripe.
“Don’t worry fellahs, my wife isn’t loony.”
“I hope you’re right,” George replied. He kept the bag open to dapple in the light of the front yard to the porch and the screen door that Sam opened.
After a rap on the wooden frame they all waited listening. Sam rapped again and one last time. “She’s not home,” he decided.
“Look,” the soldier piped. “I don’t want to be any more trouble to you. There’s a key over the door. Just let me inside and you can go.”
George looked at Sam.
Sam shook his head. “No, we cannot risk another misfortune. We will all return later.”
“Aw! You can put me on the mantle, I’ll be fine there Mr. Samsara, honest.”
“No,” Sam burred and he looked like he was on the verge, Imperial flag unfurling in the background. It would have been the perfect time for words to match a movie.

Chapter 17: The Rainy Movie

2005-07-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Frances stared at her reflection on the ice wall. Behind the thick frozen window, a couple salmon rocking-chaired in the current. Smaller fish hurried past, upstream or downstream, she didn’t know. This was a good place for her to end up, she thought, after everything she’d done. Some moon was getting on the ice and even though the electric effect of it may only be enough to run a train set, it was powerful enough to keep her a werewolf.
She remembered everything…tying real explosives onto the white balloons, arming and setting a timer on a torpedo, howling in the fog last night…she covered ground on all fours and made it to the top of Jupiter Hill where the Mayan looking windmills powered half the city.
The newspapers and radios were already chattering about how it happened—using cover of the fog, a skilled team of Nazi saboteurs had struck! Even far underground she could feel the rumble.
Would they ever know it was her? Far above Frances, the doomed windmills tilted against each other, broken shells of them were scattered around. She had torn down power lines and used them to rope all the sails together and bring the whole fleet of windmills crashing into each other. No wonder her arms were sore. After that and the fall, she could barely move at all.
So this is why her father kept her inside all those years of full moon nights—it wasn’t so much a dangerous world…it was a dangerous her. She relived watching her destruction sparking against the black sky swoop like fireworks, then the explosion and the ground gave way, she fell into an old mine or well. She was in a room sized cavern. It would be dark if not for the flickering moonlight coming from the ice.
She leaned a wolf’s arm against the frozen projection. The ice traveling down her arm took its time, freezing her and transforming her into a statue. Maybe it was best for her to stay tombed, she was too tired anyway. In front of her, the ice steamed with her breath. Her breathing slowed from one minute to the next. There wasn’t much to do but lean on the blue window and watch the rainy movie of the swimming fish.

Chapter 16: The Unfilmed Beginning

2005-07-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Wind brushed across the field in a
ripple effect pouring up to the road.
Next to the worn-out gray tar
stands a fence post with a silver
dented mailbox. The red flag is up.
A car engine can be heard approaching,
wheels stop next to it and the driver
reaches out to grab the mailbox door.
The door snaps open and a sudden huge
green hand springs, reaching out of
the dark:

FRANKENSTEIN’S HAND

Chapter 15: Some Dream Contraption

2005-07-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

George made room in his doctor’s kit bag for the soldier’s head.
“Don’t close it all the way!” he pleaded, so George let the bag gap open.
“Everything will be fine,” George reassured him. Sam was the quiet one, green with moonlight, staggering along like an oak tree put roots and all onto a moving treadmill.
George led them away from the shore towards a soft glow settled in over the saw grass and sand hill. “Everything will be fine,” George repeated.
By some fortune they found a violet path, tracked up that sand until they got to the top of the rise. They were looking down on other fires, not wreckage but campfires and candle lanterns strung around a big dark shrouding tent and the gloomed dinosaur boned shapes of amusement rides.
“It’s a circus.” George tipped the doctor bag so the soldier could see it.
“Hey!” the soldier brightened. “We’re not far from my house. 412 Maple,” he chirped, “I saw these guys setting up this morning before I left for work.”
Sam had his eye on the animals tied in the tent shadows. He mumbled, “I bet those elephants could pull the car back to the road.”
They followed the path again. Sand slid in front of them in sugary gasps.
Soon the soldier asked, “Do you suppose you could drop me off at home? I’m not sure yet what I’m going to tell my wife…but I think I should be there.”
George nodded down at him, “We’ll get you there. Let’s talk to these circus people first.”
They went towards the nearest burning fire, trampling the last of the beach grass as the ground leveled into shadow. Weird scraps of burning paper took to the air whirled and jerked into nothingness.
Someone saw them arriving and stood up.
George waved his arm that wasn’t holding the soldier steadily. “Hello,” he called and stopped.
Sam stopped walking right next to him. “We had a crash on the beach,” he graveled. “Could you spare a couple elephants?”
After a dead dropped silence, “Hah!” was drilled back at them.
George looked at Sam.
“Sammmmsara!” someone at the fireside yelled.
George and Sam froze in criminal poses.
“Where have you been?” Wervers yelled, “Join us over here, wait til you hear what happened.”
While he spoke George and Sam got closer. They were a little amazed to find Wervers where they were.
Wervers made a raspberry sound, “Our movie’s over. The studio brass showed up and shut it down. They didn’t like the dailies we shot. The balloon bombs and the sinking lightship were a little too realistic for them.” Wervers laughed.
George and Sam walked into the floodlight with the moths.
He smiled an ivory set of teeth, “They took us off the film, boys. It wasn’t going the right way. Guess what? They gave me the choice of two movies to accept instead…The Crybaby Gang Meets The Gong, or Frankenstein’s Hand.”
George and Sam were caught in the amber circle of firelight.
“It’s probably no surprise to you, no way am I going to work with that Crybaby Johnson or his rotten gang ever again.” He made a sour face. “I had no choice but to take the monster movie.” He paused dramatically, “Of course, I thought of you first. You’d be perfect for the monster, Mr. Samsara.”
Sam shrugged. Movies were all the same to him. He’d been every other shade of villain, he didn’t mind being Frankenstein too.
“That’s great!” Wervers explained, “That’s the reason I came here, to get help. That’s Fled Magyar over there. He’s going to do the special effects. He makes puppets and he can do the make-up.” He laughed, “Believe it or not, I’m looking forward to doing this. It’s got a great opening shot. Anyway,” Wervers kept the story going, kept them hypnotized reading from the script, building and building the movie into some dream contraption, reminding them that tomorrow was the start of Frankenstein’s Hand and before they knew it, the sky was rolling over to dawn, tomorrow was today.

Chapter 14: An Old Side-B Song

2005-06-28T09:18:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

George pushed through the crowded Lucky Note. It resembled a subway terminal at rush hour some holiday night, people standing in the rumble and haze. The Cornelius Barter Quintet was done and standing around a pillar talking with Sam Samsara—the grin spread on his face looked like a carved and painted mask. Smoke from cigarettes made a fog, everyone was talking and Symphony Sid boomed platters from big speakers. The scene was a lot like outside George realized on his maze way over to Sam. He supposed the fog was in here too, poured in through the door and windows.
Sam was handing Cornelius an ornate oblong wooden box. Japanese characters skirled around its five sides. George hated to interrupt him to tell him about the car, but it turned out he didn’t have to.
“Excuse me,” Sam added quickly, “Can you please accept this award from our government.” He held another hinged wooden box, smaller, opened to show a gold sun medal with red and white ribbon attached.
Cornelius put his hand on his head, “Wow…” he said.
All at once, the music stopped and a microphone asked, “Will the owner of the silver land yacht get it out of the alley. Or else it will be towed… By a couple of elephants if that’s what it takes…” The music cut back in.
Sam bowed, flustered, passed the musician the medal and eased away. George followed in the path Sam broke to the exit.
The announcer had the misfortune to stop the music a last time, “If you got a greyhound bus for a car, I’ve got news for you—it’s breaking the law to park in an alley.” That was all he managed before Sam reached a straight arm over the blue counter and chopped him. The monitor jolted just enough to start running the jazz again. Like a movie, everything continued as before.
George took a passing look at the man sinking with the microphone slowly below the counter. He sighed. There wasn’t much a doctor could do.
The door shoved aside to a midnight of fog. George caught up with Sam stopped at the crunched hull of his car.
“Hmmm…” Sam grunted. He ran his fingers over the crushed metal topographically. He regarded the skin of it as keenly as a detective, then reaching under the damaged, bolted panel, he pushed the shape of it smooth. He cleared his throat in a satisfied manner and said, “Okay George, let’s go.”
The moon net had trapped more sounds since they were inside the club. Now, amid the echoes of roaming souls with radios and wind sounding slightly out of tune, George felt a howl creep his spine. He wished he could have believed it was only the steam whistle on a lost train, but he knew there was something else out there.
Sam got the monster engine started and George was glad that was all he could hear. He folded his hands on his green splattered suit. At least that was funny, he thought.
“That…” Sam pointed at the Lucky Note, “was great!” Then he sent the wheels spinning. Each cobblestone drummed faster underneath as they picked up speed. “Cornelius Barter!” Sam yelled into the slipstream. “Hey George!” he yanked the wheel hard to get them onto the road.
Good thing the road’s empty, George reflected. Sometimes their way wasn’t so lucky and something would get pulverized. George would try to think of it as the law of nature, survival of the fittest. So the law of the road favored them; they were the biggest thing; a battleship on cement.
“Hey George! Start the record player!”
Below the space where the radio was constantly replaced, George pressed a button. The mahogany panel slipped downwards, cupping a turntable with a record already circling.
“Yeah!” Sam bellowed.
The needle dropped into the scratched groove.
An old Side-B song from years before materialized, when Cornelius Barter and his quartet recorded in a basement near the ocean, beautiful and sad, drums brushing, a muted trumpet, a bass bowed and a celeste. They drove the night around the car. A few minutes long and then the fog was gone. The giant car broke out of its wall to emerge magically flying on wet moonlit sand. The beach ran for miles.
The jukebox dropped down another jazz record ring. Sam mashed his shoe into the pedal and red sparks shot into the clear salt air.
For this feeling shooting on a perfect arrow of high speed with angel music pulling beyond, for finding heaven while you’re still alive, that’s why they were going. Everyday-people were long asleep by now, Sam and George were burning up like a meteor.
Green dials on the dashboard, fiery glows from the stacks cut in the cowl ahead, the car could have roared on and turned around to go back and forth until dawn. Well…gasoline would have run out by then…In any case, it doesn’t matter because there were little shipwrecked fires to avoid.
“What the--?!” The car swerved a bonfire, the left wheel hit into fireworks, another near miss, they were sliding sideways for a second, then Sam had them going okay, a couple seconds of relief, except they didn’t see the snapped ribs of the washed ashore Harry S. Keeler.
George wasn’t aware of what was happening until he could breathe a simple sentence, “What?” He was laying on his side. He could hear the slowly beating heart of the surf. Wake up, he made himself move, he dragged himself out of the flipped on side car. He dug his fingers deeply into the sand every time to pull himself further away…In case it might explode…Slow motion turned into him being able to stand and stumble.
“George!”
Daguerreotype shuffling cards settled on a single picture in three shades of dreamy color, blue and black and white. He heard a name being called. After a while he realized it was his name.
“Ahh…” he replied.
“George!” Sam waded into vision.
“Look…”
The car looked like a rocket smashed on another planet. It was skidded into a mound of pushed sand.
The merry-go-round slowed. George stopped walking. There were burning remains all around them.
Sam Samsara stood there wide as a drive-in movie screen on the beach, his gray suit reflecting all the little bonfires. He moved and they moved like fireflies against the black sky.
“You okay George?”
“Sure, sure Frances,” he grinned, “I could do this in my sleep.”
Before Sam could respond, another voice called, “Hey! Can you give me a hand?!”
George and Sam looked around themselves.
“Down here fellahs!”
There was a man’s face looking up at them. Bits of broken glass twinkled. “I’d sure like to get a hand out of this sand, Mr. Samsara.”
Sam bent down. “Oh, it’s you…” He recognized the soldier from the morning’s shoot.
“Yeah…I was out on the lightship when it blew. Guess I washed up here. Lucky thing the gulls didn’t see me buried like this, huh?” he laughed a wheeze.
Sam brushed the sand around him and dug his hands in to find shoulders. The head rolled against his shoveling hands. Sam let out a scream.
The head screamed too. Staring straight up into the stars, “Where’s the rest of me?!” it yowled.
Sam shot a terrified look at George.
George sat down. “Shhh.” He lay a hand on the head. “I’m a doctor.”
The head’s eyes rolled at George. “Yeah? So—So—Tell me then…How bad is it?”
George scooped the soldier’s head gently between his hands and lifted.

Chapter 13: Wolf O'Clock

2005-06-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Her change was occurring a lot faster than she could control. At first she thought she could shave her wrists and hands and that would hide it for a while more, but by the time she got to the bathroom at the back of the Lucky Note, the full moon was taking its fearsome effects. Frances just had time to slam the door and scream into her muffling paw.
Cornelius Barter bopped his buzzing soundtrack to the transformation as she grabbed the wall and howled. Powerful arms swung around and gripped the porcelain sink. It was so easy to tear it out of the tiles and pile it at the door.
Water broke across the room in jet sprays, flicking diamonds on the fur grown all over her. There wasn’t much left of Frances in the creature she became. Some white stocking. Her eyes were closed when she was done; she seemed to purr with the sound from the other room. Yellow eyes snapped open.
The door was being shoved. The music was pushing in loud around scrabbling hands and nightclub yells. The room was a mess of debris and waterfalls.
Frances bounded to the window, out in a leap, luffing the curtains, gone. Mid-air she writhed against the full moon pinned like a moth on its backdrop, before the fog spirited her down.
She was falling at a world that already had another life going, that didn’t know anything about her arriving.
A white half candle flickered on the dashboard in front of George. He had carefully tabbed open the can of cactus juice and was drawing it towards his mouth, really looking forward to it at last, when something like a loose turning dam turbine slammed into the long engine cowling. The crushing kerash knocked George down onto the floorboards.
Frances popped up beside the car spectrally, an outraged roar that shook the fog. She snarled and snapped in a circle. The only thing directly near was a telephone pole that she hit with enough force of her claws to slice into it like butter.
George cowered down near the foot pedals. He held his breath in and didn’t move again until he was absolutely sure that the beast—or was it raining lions?—must have moved on. Only then did he pull his crumpled legs and arms out from him, uncurling himself like a night flower, to push up onto the seat. The can of cactus juice clacked empty to his feet. The contents were all over him again. He smiled wide enough for three photographs…It was the second time Green 17 had spilled on him and saved his life.

Chapter 12: The Martian Conspiracy

2005-06-21T10:33:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Where the wind takes things can be a mystery, there’s invisible pockets sewn in the sky, clouds disguise dragons, or on this foggy night a white balloon carrying a bomb beneath. It had escaped the fate of the other day’s explosions when it hit an updraft and soared above the ocean a thousand feet. The wind kept it there frozen in place until nightfall. With help from the dark swivel of the planet, the ocean fog and the clouds, it quietly rejoined the panic where radio waves bounced desperate signals into the ether, a hundred terror stories per hour.
Tiny’s Garage was open late, hammering, a frantic radio keeping the little man company. The big swinging door was open on the night and let out a bright yellow-white Titanic light. The oily cement room was filled with a shiny assembly line of red Shriner cars. Tiny was halfway along the row of them banging a crumpled fender with a wooden hammer.
In a way, what happened was worthy of a prayer—that terrible bombing of the city coincided with the Memorial Day parade. Puffs of burning buildings caused the Shriners to blow their practiced figure-8 thrills. Not only them though, the whole city went haywire and needed repair. Anyway, Tiny should have counted his blessings for this sudden appearance of twenty damaged miniature cars. They carried a hundred dollars apiece. What a windfall.
He had the radio going full blast so he could be sure to hear any news while he battered and bashed at the cars. Since seeing the doc’s green blood and then his daughter with her strange hunting creatures, Tiny was waiting for the end of America as we know it. Any second it was going to happen—Tiny had seen the Martian Conspiracy!
Finally he couldn’t take it anymore, he set his hammer on beveled chrome and hurried over to the telephone that held down a stack of paperwork. He dialed the spindle and drummed his fingers impatiently.
“This is Arlo Wilbur speaking. You’re on the air.”
“Listen Arlo, you got it all wrong!”
“Is that so?”
“Yeahhh,” Tiny sneered. He cocked his head towards the radio blaring among the cars. He heard his voice broadcasting a five second delay. “Listen Arlo, you got it all wrong!” He liked the sound of it.
“Sir—Sir, you’ll have to turn down your radio,” Arlo said in the receiver.
“Yeahhh,” Tiny’s hiss squealed out of the speaker.
“Okay, okay,” Tiny barked at the telephone and he left it for a moment.
“Sir—Sir, you’ll have to turn down your radio.”
“I know! I know!” Tiny screeched as he slapped at the wooden face of the Philco, turned and raced back to the telephone. “There!” he growled and panted, “Now listen up, Arlo. I know who’s behind these bombs and it ain’t who you think.”
“Really sir?”
“Yeah.”
“Even though the Nazis have publicly taken credit for—”
“Enough of the Nazis already!”
“Sir, this isn’t the time or place for hysterics. We need to—”
“Listen Arlo. We’re up against an enemy that ain’t even human!” Tiny raged. “I’ve seen them, they’re from Mars!”
Suddenly the telephone got cold; it was like holding a curl of ice to his ear.
“It’s Martians that are doing it,” he muttered. “Did you hear me, Arlo? Martians…” he repeated.
Arlo Wilbur was gone. The phone had lost him overboard.
“Hey!” Tiny jiggled the cradle. The dial tone hummed in his ear. “Agghh!” He threw the phone down on the sliding papers and ran back to the radio. Arlo Wilbur was lecturing sternly, “—got to maintain our faculties and reason in what will surely be a very trying time for our great nation. We must continue nobly and settle for nothing less than victory. I hope this next caller—”
Tiny snapped at the switch. He grabbed his wooden hammer and swung it in his clenched fist above the radio. Only a blur of motion in the doorway stopped him from striking.
Glowing in the swirling gloam of fog stood a ghost holding a candle. Actually, it was George, holding a fifty cent flame, with a can of cactus juice in his coat pocket, but when Tiny beheld that vision he dropped the hammer. It hit him on the head and clattered to the floor.
“Oohoww!” Tiny shrieked. He rubbed the sore knot on his forehead. When he took his hands from his face, the doc had blown.

Chapter 11: In Its Moon Net

2005-06-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Night fell on the city early. With the lightship out of the way the harbor let a blanket of thick fog pile in. It came steadily over the waves, shored stone beaches, rolled up into the leaning red armed madrona hills, crawled down and followed the roads leading to town. Cars stopped on the street, their amber lamps were no use. Something with a life of its own had invaded.
So it was a ghostly walk that Frances took to get to the Lucky Note. The fog was thick enough she could lift her feet off the ground and float for a moment. Air thick enough to swim in. She could wave her arms like a windmill and make snow-angel shapes follow in her wake. Everything was captured in its moon net. Shapes loomed and gloomed and vanished, paging in and out of the white. She heard a trolley that wasn’t there, it could have been a mile away, but the sound carried to her. Other sounds, all kinds of sounds, echoed and wandered became memories that caught and couldn’t get out. The whole haunted town had been absorbed and embalmed by a hungry creature sent from the Sargasso, the Sea of Lost Ships.
Whatever dangers of whirlpools, shark dead ends, or broken rocks may have stopped others, Frances made it through to the fragile melody of a trumpet coming from an orange window pumpkin eye cut glowing in the dark. A Cornelius Barter ballad reeled out like a blind flower seller feeling from curb to corner. He was in there spinning and she was pulled to the door of the Lucky Note.
She had not been gone for more than ten seconds when loose chips of brick shook on the road. A cobblestone rat fled behind a garbage can and soon a noise transformed into the sight of Sam Samsara’s monsooning car. It submarined to a halt in the alley. Slain fog streaked and beaded off its silver aerodynamic hull. When it shut down there was a groan of engine death, silence, then a deep breath later the sound turned up again. Cornelius Barter was singing, “Oh you crazy moon, you broke my heart.”
Sam left the car carried by the swirls of roiling cloud. George watched him go propelled and buoyed gently to the club. The door opened, a blast of jazz, then closed and George was left alone.
The open cab bristled with the atmosphere. Fog sparked on his face like some watery form of electricity. George was finally coming out of a long day’s dream and he needed a minute to gather himself. He lifted an arm, poked the radio button, focused on the little green glow of the dial.
“—broadcasting to all the ships at sea and our armed forces everywhere. Folks, before I sign off our Dos Pedros program this evening, may I remind you of this. The used fats that you’re saving up, while it’s swell that you are saving them, but remember they won’t do anybody a speck of good as long as you keep them in your icebox. Please turn them in. As soon as you have a can that’s full. Not in a glass container please. Any tin can will do. You’ll be paid in cash and receive two red points for each pound of used fats that you turn in. Thank you. And goodnight!” An orchestra swelled up into the mariachi theme song. George turned the radio off. The first clear thought he had all day bloomed in his head. A picture of a can with Green 17.

Chapter 10: Under A Black Umbrella

2005-06-07T13:15:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

George watched the world from under a black umbrella. Its broken spokes stuck out and the wind blew the ripped waterproof cloth like petals. It was raining but Wervers was determined to keep the film rolling, setting up the next shot as soon as one was done. George had trouble with the frantic pace, instead he looked away from them, over the edge of the dock to see weeds and kelp floating in the deep green water. A patch of small fish ebbed among the piers. Rain drilled holes on the surface.
Sam was trying to fit sitting in a low rowboat tied to the dock getting wet. The camera was close to him, framing him against the vast pour of the sea. It was a cheat shot, to make him look like he had rowed a mile from shore.
“Action!” Wervers cried.
Carefully, Sam stood up. He was holding a torpedo across his arms. He turned with it and pointed the silver prop towards a target…pressed a button near his hand.
That was all supposed to happen.
Then Sam almost lost his balance as the propeller end of the torpedo whirled alive. It bucked from him like a swordfish trying to escape capture. He caught sharp blades and dropped the torpedo overboard as he clamped his hand over his wound.
“Cut!”
In the doomed quiet that followed, rain popped on the dock around the film crew. They all watched the torpedo leaving its traveling wake of bubbles out to sea. Sam stood in the middle of the small rowboat while a stream of paint-red blood cut down his white Imperial uniform.
“Ohhhh boooyyy…” drawled Wervers. Everyone else realized where the torpedo was going too…the collective sigh sounded like summer thunder five miles away.
The lightship was a sitting duck at the mouth of the harbor. For over twenty years the Harry S. Keeler had been anchored there, blinking its light in the dark and sounding a foghorn when there was nothing to see.
Wervers cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose there’s any way to bring it back…”
Nobody could answer.
“Or press self destruct?”
The torpedo was out of sight into the gentle waves. The Harry S. Keeler was celebrating its last moments of floatation.
“I guess we better get it on film anyway…” Wervers decided. “We can sell it to the newsreels if we’re lucky.”
After twenty seconds of falling rain, there was the explosion. It threw a spray of water high above the flames of the burst open vessel. It didn’t have time for a last whistle or S.O.S, it rolled over and sank quickly, leaving a swarm of burning wreckage and an ugly cloud of black lurking smoke in the background.
In the foreground, Sam got out of the rowboat unsteadily, as comical as a clown stepping over the side of a bathtub, except for the blood that ran off his elbow. “George,” he said. “I lost a finger.”

Chapter 9: The 4 Agnews

2005-06-02T13:17:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

She still had connections. Don Benny paid her to walk his dogs everyday. She made a living that way. Later in the morning, she took his three greyhounds for a walk to the park. The straining end of the leash kept them from running away. Her dog Agnew tried to keep pace with them, but Don Benny’s dogs were all retired racers. Frances was still tired from the full moon effects. “Agnews!” she called, getting louder, “Agnews! Agnews! Stop!”
Finally, all three of them halted instantly. The greyhounds turned their puppet like heads to stare big black watery eyes at her.
“What’s got into you Agnews?”
Her old Agnew panted to her side rustily.
“The park’s not going anywhere…” She took a breath. “Just take it easy.”
They started again and before long they were running again. Frances held the shrouds of the dog sail. The park appeared like a green island beyond the meridian.
Once they passed over the cement curb onto the cobblestones into the leafy shade of it, the three Agnews caught her by surprise with a quick rip that took the leash out of her hand. They bolted gone across the lawn. She couldn’t hope to match their speed in her long skirt and this daylight. A hundred yards away she saw a rhododendron lash as they whipped into its cover.
“Ohhh Agnew…” she sat down on a bench. Agnew lay in the slatted shade underneath. Agnew was a gift from Don Benny—when he found out she was still alive, and heard her heroic rescue of Agnew from the candy store blaze, he gave her the dog. That was kind of him, but more than he could bear; he bought three more dogs to replace his old friend. She rubbed her sore calves. “They’re probably after a rabbit. I’m not going running after them right away.” She slipped off her shoes and socks. The grass felt good and instantly she remembered last night. Fast pieces of it flew at her like jagged glass, someplace she had been before, fragments of a dream, parts of a whole she couldn’t piece together…Why did it always have to disappear when she woke up?
She stood up and splashed into the cut grass. “Come on Agnew, I guess we better go now.”
There was a man running a kite with his daughter. They got it going into the air in blue swoops back and forth. Frances looked away at her shoes in her hand. It still hurt to think about her father. Don Benny got out of that same burning room but not him…Don Benny told her all he left behind in there was fire and smoke.
“Agnews!” she called. The sky replied with the roaring pass of a Flying Wing on patrol. If they weren’t always looking for war, maybe they wouldn’t find one, she thought. She squinted her eyes at its silver knife shape glinting sun. It was quickly gone, leaving a charcoal trail in the cloudless sky. “Agnews!” she repeated.
The Agnews weren’t in the undergrowth. The brush and flowers turned back into field on the other side. “Agnew, can you track them?” Frances asked her companion. She pointed her finger beyond. “Where’d they go, boy?”
Agnew crept gingerly through the last of the shrubs. He was camouflaged by a cover of burs, torn leaves and brambles. He’d been through a lot in the past year, seven years for a dog, and the baleful look he gave Frances told her that in spades. She scratched him, “I know…”
A gust of wind came rushing across the new field like an ocean wave and with it came a faint cry of, “Help!”
“What’s that?” She heard the yell again.
Even Agnew creaked to his four feet.
More breeze poured off the crown of maple trees towards them. Milkweed pollen loosed gauze made her sneeze. It was a long minute running over the field to the tall stand of arbor. “Look!” Frances yelled back to Agnew.
The Agnews were bunched at a trunk, staring up into the leaves at the thing they had treed. The leash wrapped around them so tightly it bunched them together making the Agnews resemble one dog with three heads. They snapped and wheezed at whatever was up there in the leaves.
“Help!” the voice piped down. “Get it away from me Frances. Please!”
She thought she knew that wretched voice, but he was well hidden.
“What it that thing!? Did you bring it from Mars?”
“Is that you, Tiny?”
“Yes it’s me. Listen Frances, I’m sorry I took a shot at your dad. We got a code, you know. Nobody deserts!”
“My father? What are you talking about?”
The three Agnews were joined by her leafy Agnew who huffed his paws up against the trunk and snapped at the little foot positioned on a limb.
“Aiieee!” Tiny shrieked. “Call your monsters back!”
She almost told him they were only dogs, but she paused instead. “First tell me what you know.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll talk. What choice do I have? I’ll give with it…It took me a long time to find him. I had to know if he was still alive. I put the pieces together. A guy like that knows too much. I’m sorry to say this Frances, but it’s the business we’re in. He turned the cops on to us when he found a new supply. The doc traded us for a connection straight from the source then he thought he’d drop out of sight. Savvy?”
“No.”
“I finally found him and I plugged him. But I didn’t plan on him being from outer space. A Martian stool pigeon.”
She wanted to say something about that, but she didn’t dare. What was her father’s plan?
“Not til I saw that green blood spilled out of him did I know…” His shift in the tree caused the leaves to rustle and branches clack. The dogs shifted below. “When I saw that green blood I panicked. I didn’t know what I was up against. Now I do. I know you Martians have got rockets and monsters and advanced technology and robot armies. Look, can’t we make a truce, you can forget it all and get back in your rocket and go back to Mars? I don’t want to start an interplanetary war.”
Frances stood and listened without saying a word.
His voice floated a sigh down from the tree, “I don’t know if I killed him or not. I doubt it. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. There…That’s it…If you want to shoot me with a raygun and feed me to your monsters, go ahead. But I promise, if you let me go, I promise he’s off the hit list. We don’t know him from now on.”
Frances paused again while she thought about the possibility. Her father bleeding green? That couldn’t be? He must be okay, somewhere in the city. The dogs whined again. She crept closer and took the leash. “Alright Tiny. It’s a deal. I’ll take the monsters back. Give me a minute or two to get away, then you can come down.”
“Thanks Frances…”
She tugged the Agnews, “Let’s go,” and they all followed along in the deep swerving weeds, retracing the path they had sawed getting there.

Chapter 8: That Same Morning

2005-05-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

That same morning, Wervers strode back and forth at the studio
with his hands deep in pockets. The rest of the crew watched him go on his wind-up way, hoping he would stop before too long and say something else or point cameras anyway. They were all in a dull shock, but at least he was moving.
Finally, he did stop. Next to a boom he turned to face them all. He touched his chin and said, “On the other hand…It’s not like anyone ssaaawww us send those balloons right? I mean, who could have known where they came from?”
“That’s right,” a woman in a pilot costume agreed. Some other murmurs echoed around the stage.
Wervers continued, “And it shouldn’t stop us from making our movie, right? We can’t let this disaster, this horrible disaster, defeat us.” He put his foot up on a chair and weighed the copper tea kettle rounded on his open hand. He tried to Hamlet out the words for them. They were watching him, they needed some poetry, they were waiting for that.
From the end of the room a door clapped open and the light threw someone in. “We’re off the hook!” The door banged shut. The secretary ran across the wooden floor towards the film makers. “It’s on the radio, the Nazis are taking credit for the attack.”
“What?” Wervers stared at her. “Nazis?”
“Talk about luck.” She laughed nervously.
“What do you mean, Nazis?”
“They’re saying they did it. They said this is just the start, more is on the way.” She shook the thick pile of paper script at him. It seemed to take the timed burn of a fuse for her news to pop. “That means we can keep making the movie!”
That was the message Wervers had been waiting for. He was overjoyed, he leaped over to her and hugged her so tightly and suddenly the pages of the movie fell away from her grip and splashed all over the floor. He swung her around and let her back down. Everyone felt the same way, reacting with shouts and laughs and hurrays.
“Well!” Wervers rejoiced. “Let’s set up that next shot, down at the bay. Let’s go, let’s go!” Equipment had to be loaded onto trucks, all the actors and props. Wervers caught Sam’s arm as he bowled past. “Wait a second Sam, you can come with me in my car.”
Sam nodded. He snapped his fingers at the swaying doctor caught in his shadow. “Hey George, follow me.”
Wervers had a blue Packard sedan, it looked like an automobile version of himself, rusted on the edges and faded to silver by years of weather, but it started up eagerly once they all got in. The old man pulled at the wheel and turned them around the crowd, down the road between stage buildings and the track. “Sam, what do you make of what happened?” he asked. “I can’t figure out why those were real bombs…We’re lucky we weren’t all blown sky high.”
With a shrug that could have bent a trestle, Sam grunted, “Don’t know.”
“Well…I think we better keep an eye on things. It’s up to me to get this movie made and I don’t want the Nazis or whoever sabotaging us like that again.” He waved at the gate man and they drove out of the studio onto the two-lane road.
After a pause drifting on the edge of the wildflower shoulder, Wervers continued, “Do you suppose it’s possible the Nazis might have got on our set and switched the dummy bombs with real ones? I’d hate to think it was an inside job.”
Sam kept quiet.
“If they’re really using our movie to start their war, forget it, I couldn’t be a part of that.”
The Packard bucked over some potholes, slowed, turned to follow a small side road that made a run for the ocean. “We’ll shoot down there.” They shook across a rail line into the iron colored flats that bordered the sea. Now the harbor was revealed and the city shimmered across the waves. “Those balloons floated this way yesterday,” Wervers traced a crooked finger across the windshield slant. “Phewww!”
They hit another rut and George in the backseat thumped against the window. He slumped like a human cargo.
“Is your friend okay back there?” Wervers asked Sam.
“He’s fine,” Sam said. “He’s tired.”
“He’s a doctor, right?” Wervers’ eyes filled the rear view mirror. “Maybe he sat on one of his hypodermic needles?”
Sam glared at his director. Was the old man playing a game with him? What did he know?
“One film we did up in the canyon, we shot a cougar with one of those tranquilizers.” Wervers was warming up to the story but he stopped his thought and his car at the sight of a soldier waving a gun at them. “Woah!”
Sam’s fists clenched. George bumped against the front seat.
The soldier came over to Wervers who unrolled his window.
“What’s your business here?”
“Hello there, soldier. Name’s Wervers, I’m directing a movie. The rest of the crew is on the way. You need to see the permit? Papers?”
The soldier stared past Wervers and his face beamed like a lamp. “Hey! You’re Sam Samsara, the wrestler. I’ve seen you in those serials too!”
Sam nodded at the man.
“You fellahs making your serial here today?!”
“That’s right,” Wervers told him. “Soon as we get set up.”
“Aww, I can’t believe my luck! I thought I got stuck with guard duty and now look! Hey, can I watch you guys film?”
“Yes of course. Maybe I can even put you in somewhere.”
“In a picture with Sam Samsara!” the soldier rubbed his eyes. “This is like a dream.” He slapped the car, “You go right ahead Mr. Wervers, I’ll do whatever I can to help out.”
“Thank you soldier. We’ll park up there on the bank. Rest of them should be coming along shortly.”
“Hot dog!”
Wervers saluted and restarted the car. They pulled ahead over gravel and dry ryegrass.

Chapter 7: If You Don't Mind

2005-05-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

Frances woke up without moving. Crows were squawking outside her window behind the blue flowered curtains, but her eyes wandered down her bare leg thrown out of the covers. She noticed the long thin red scrape and began to wonder. She slowly wriggled her toes. The nails were dark with dirt underneath, the skin of her feet stained green yellow and stuck with leaves of grass. The crows all at once flapped in a clatter. A wing bumped the glass as they left cawing away.
Her arm was heavy to move, to bend to her face so she could look at her curved fingers. They too were scratched and soiled, as if she’d been running on all fours in the middle of the night. She sighed, tried to breath in the new day without too much pain in her ribs. “Ohhh…” she moaned as she noticed the state of her room.
The door was bucked off its hinges. A force stronger than the metal latch had snapped it free. Everything in her bedroom had been friction bent by that whirlwind. What remained of yesterday’s purple blouse was a rip of cloth looped around her left wrist. She shook it off. It was the moon at fault, it was the full white face of it howling from space that had done this to her again…another werewolf night…
It was like the first breath of being returned to life. She pushed herself to move off her bed with that same slide out of darkness she knew from time and again. Where had she been, what had happened? She slipped a bathrobe on. Her memory painted fierce images. Was she on someone’s lawn, was it the park? She tried to fight the fog to figure out where she had been. Lots of trees. Not much ground cover, it had been gnawed away to the dirt. She padded across it. When she got to a tall chain link fence, she easily climbed over it to the other side. That was all for memories.
A gray violet morning light flooded the hallway behind the splintered door. It was quiet. She stepped around the door and onto the panels of daylight falling in from the kitchen windows. She looked down the hall. The front door was closed. It was quiet but she couldn’t help feeling like she was being rolled along tighter in a spider’s web.
The kitchen clock tick-tocked above the stove. Spring leaves swayed on the branches beyond the window. The screen was open, she could hear a mourning dove breezing on a wire across the street. Something scratched the linoleum floor under the table. Frances shot a look at it, suddenly saw the claws curl up, the panting big teeth, glinting eyes and dark fur.
She was so relieved by the friendly sight she cried out his name, “Agnew!”
The dog whined and scratched and licked at her hand.
“Oh Agnew. Good old Agnew.” The gangster’s dog had been with her ever since their escape from the candy shop. He had kept her safe from police and crime all this time. She patted him gratefully. “I’ll get you some breakfast Agnew. I could use some tea, I don’t know about you.” She opened the cupboard door and jumped at the face looking back.
It was herself reflecting from the shiny tin surface of a can on the shelf. For a second though, she had seen a fanged beast. “I’m a little scared still,” she tried to laugh, explaining to him, “Last night was another full moon.”
She took down the can, placed it on the counter and opened it for him. Agnew remained under the table, the same place he would crawl when there was thunder or fireworks on the 4th of July. She tipped half the food onto a blue and white china plate set gently down by the chrome leg of a chair. “There you go.”
Some music would be nice, that might go a long way towards making her feel better. First some water in the pan to get the tea going. After the pan was filled and put on the gas burner, Frances reached and switched on the wooden radio. It took a moment to warm and turn gold.
Instead of music the station chattered with news of the attack downtown. The radio panicked and shrieked voices who had seen it happen, it was war, it had to be! In one quick spin like a safecracker she wheeled the dial out of there and it hit on the sound she had been looking for. Cornelius Barter played ‘It Never Entered My Mind.’ The trumpet poured it out sad like some dented flower.
When the song was over, Frances was staring into the iris of a boiling silver pan of water. The announcer rattled to the microphone. “And Cornelius Barter will be playing tonight at the Lucky Note. That’s set for an eight o’clock show. As far as I know that’s still going to happen. Cornelius Barter in town tonight. So…Let’s…Uh, let’s play another cut. If you don’t mind.”

Chapter 6: The Night Balloons

2005-05-18T13:09:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

“George is my friend,” Sam took a hand off the steering wheel and pointed at his grim passenger on the seat next to him.
The guard nodded, “Yes sir, Mr. Samsara.” Snapped around, he took the long walk back to the kiosk to open the studio gate. He had to walk past the rumbling long train engine under the silver hood of Sam’s car. The pistons churned and pounded the ground for fifteen feet in front of where Sam Samsara drove the colossal bullet shape.
When the striped yellow gate rose over the airstreamed grill, Sam took his foot off the brake plate and the automobile roared forward. They were already there when he hit the brake again, fit in a runway parking spot between a row of potted palm trees. Sam turned the ignition key over and one by one the valves shut down with the growl and sparking cough of a dragon. The silence in the air afterwards was deafening.
George crawled over the side. He had never been to the film studio before, he only left the apartment for short walks. Today though, Sam had requested his services as personal doctor—he was doing a stunt that had the possibility of going very wrong and he wanted George along just in case. From the swinging grip of his left hand George carried a black leather bag.
“This used to be a horse track,” Sam grunted. “Even has an old radio tower…That comes in handy.”
A big stable in front of them had been converted into a film stage. A studio jeep pulling a torpedo on a trailer drove in the wide rolling doors. “There it is,” Sam told him. “That’s where we film.”
Even before they got there, George could smell the horses’ ghosts. After he turned his head he saw the abandoned field inside the dead track. It was overgrown with mountains of blackberry vines, it was a briar patch like Uncle Remus or the Brothers Grimm. In the middle some white balloons were tied to piles of garbage.
“Those balloons are in today’s shoot.”
George said, “Mmm.” They walked by a parked truck. The back of it was filled with standing sheets of plate glass that reflected them walking. George got a good look at the two of them. Sam wore the uniform of the Imperial Japanese Army. George was dressed like the Invisible Man. What a sight, what a horror, George thought. Then they were met at the open door.
“Sam, Sam good morning!”
“Wervers…” Sam told George. “He’s the director.”
The nervous fellow gimped up to them. He carried a copper tea kettle. “You got your lines memorized?”
Sam tapped his temple. “Photographic.”
“Oh yeah!” Wervers laughed, “That’s right, Sam. Well come on in, we need you now.”
George had taken a step into another world. The light inside was brighter than sunshine. A crew was dismantling the last scene. They were ripping out the nails of a jungle. George followed Sam to the edge where ferns were propped and a couple folding chairs waited.
While Sam perched himself carefully into his creaking chair, a cup of green tea was quickly poured from the copper kettle. The china cup fit in his hand like a hummingbird nest. Sam inhaled the steam and liquid then held the empty cup out for more.
“I got a neighbor lady who thinks you’re great!” the old man gibbered while he applied make-up to Sam’s face. “Course she’s nuts about all the bad guys, but she likes your pictures most of all. I told her I know Sam, I work with Mr. Samsara, he’s not like that at all. But she just gives me one of those looks, you know. One of these days I’d like to get your autographed photo, I’d sure love to see her face when I drop that on her!”
George was watching the last of the jungle fade away. It was being carted away and replaced by grey walls, painted windows that showed a harbor view, battered furniture and a single red rose in a slender vase. The last thing one of the stagehands brought in was a big cardboard contraption. It was a box in shape with silver aerials crowning rows of phony levers and dials. Then the floodlamps went back on, George had to shade his eyes from the bright yellow.
“Okay Sam. This is it.” Wervers left his side and went to the camera.
Sam stood up and took big steps onto the set. He sat at the table. He let the last preparations go on while he laid hands on the prop machine and waited for the director to yell, “Action!”
A sour voice came through a close-up on the speaker, “Are the radishes in the garden?”
Sam leaned toward the transmitter and turned a nob, “Yes Master. They are ready for harvesting.”
A chuckling laugh replied, “Then carry out your orders.”
Sam nodded and snapped a switch. He stood up and looked out the window, the sight of the harbor, the sleeping city fading out at the sound of seagulls.
The next chair George was sitting in, he was under a cloud of gulls, staring over heaps of garbage, car and kitchen parts that framed the scene of rubble at the junk yard. This film was rushing along like a train through a dream.
The camera leaned towards Sam as he took out a bomb from a red wheelbarrow and tied it underneath the white bobbing balloon. He moved from balloon to balloon, arming them with bombs and letting them drift airborne.
Afterwards, Sam came over to George and explained. “That was for Chapter 6, The Night Balloons.” He jabbed at the weak afternoon sun, “This is supposed to be nighttime. The camera has on a dark lens.”
“I see,” George nodded. “So you’re sending out weather balloons to blow up clouds? Interesting idea.”
“No. The balloons are heading for the city. Over there…” Sam pointed across the harbor at the tall buildings along the shore.
George stared at the toy-like scene.
“Well Sam!” Wervers clapped his hands together, “That was great. Talk about cliffhangers! The kids will be lined up around the block for the next installment.”
They stood there and watched the film crew. It took five people to push the camera on the tracks they’d made through the thorns.
In the distance, across the water, the silhouette of skyscrapers dotted with orange explosions and black smoke.
The sound rolled towards them like thunder.
“Holy –!” Wervers staggered.
The crew hurried to push the camera back up the hill.
A smile winched down the corners of Sam’s mouth.
George fell backwards into his folding chair and blacked out.

Chapter 5: Green 17

2005-05-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

The late afternoon windows were raining. The radio song had calmed Sam and he reflected back the weather’s celery color. This was a good time for George to take a walk.
He quietly put on his big coat and the gray fedora that rode just above his eyebrows. He left the watch in front of Sam, still spinning Cornelius Barter jazz. He had a clear premonition of the watch’s fate. It would be smashed flat when he got back. So what. Time and radios weren’t built to last.
He went out the kitchen door. The rain pattered on the dark wooden stairway. The stairs tipped and showed wet chipped yellow paint. Wounded, they crawled down one floor to the alley. Clothes hung like band-aids from the ropes strung above. The air rolled smooth and cold and smelled like the ocean. George held the rail and went down.
All the usual creaks. He was used to this place, a half year after the explosion and here he stayed. Everything had been blown away that day. It was okay. He didn't need to go back to the ruins and pick up pieces. He didn't need the mob anymore either. Sam was keeping him supplied. He could lay low forever. It was best if he seemed dead.
In his black coat and slouch he moved in the rain like no one. He walked on the sidewalk along bricks and windows. A tree strained tall out of the cement. Other green smaller leaves were finding their way out of the pavement too. He remembered it was spring. And this unfreezing rain was another reminder. For a sad moment before he turned into the bodega he thought of his daughter.
Then the music and Mexican movie posters overpowered him. George nodded at the man reading a newspaper at the cash register. He drifted by the Spanish words on the cans that lined the shelves and stopped when he reached the green labeled can of cactus juice. “Cactus juice…” he thought, “what a thing to be craving.” As a doctor, he observed this phenomenon as the body signaling a specific deficiency. Perhaps, he concluded, a diagnosis is in order…So he turned the can in his hand, read the ingredients in a mumble, “Water, Agave, Saguaro Puree from Concentrate, Sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Citric Acid, Beta Carotene, Green 17.”
He speculated. He knew the effects of all active ingredients except Green 17. What could it be? Why would his brain order it? And what could it do?
Anyway, he carried it to the counter and set it down next to the reader.
George had time enough there to stare into the front page as if it was a tabloid mirror. Dos Pedros was the bold headline. The words went on below with a photo he was leaning to look at when the paper snapped down.
“Fifty cents.”
George managed to find the coins in his change purse.
There was an old fashioned bell and clang of machinery and he was gone with the can.
Outside it was starting to really rain. He tucked the can under his coat and bent into getting wet.
“Hold it, doc.”
The shrill voice sapped George in the back of the head and he turned around.
“Yeah…It’s me…” the little face of Tiny Snopes sneered. “I finally caught up with you.” In a quick motion he had a pistol in the air. He snarled, “I hate talking to you!” then he pulled the trigger.
The blow hit George over the heart. A stream of green looking blood poured out the puncture in his jacket. He gasped for air to breathe.
“Martian!!” Tiny Snopes squealed. The tiny man recoiled so fast he bumped against a stack of garbage cans. They crashed all around him and knocked him down. When he got up, he was running away.

Chapter 4: Tenuchi's Story

2005-04-18T23:37:00.000-07:00

by Miguel Ramos

Hideo’s voice rumbled from his chest with the soothing tones of a large diesel engine, a sound George had always found pleasant. It reminded him of his childhood home behind the train yards, listening to the giant engines warm up every morning before heading out with the day’s coal runs.

George took another drink of bourbon and tightened his stitches, listening to Hideo’s story, letting the warmth of the liquor relax his muscles.

“Tenuchi’s parents lived in the floating world, which exists as a shadow over this world. Tenuchi’s mother was named Akemi. She was a singer in a club owned by my oyabun, my boss, Takayama. The club’s name was – is – the Lucky Monkey.

Anyone who wanted to buy heroin in our territory came to the Lucky Monkey. But many came to hear Akemi sing…”

The downpour had finally stopped, but the dripping from the many eaves filled the streets with the sounds of raindrops. The ghost of rain. It was beginning to darken, and it was cold. Shijo turned his collar up against the chill and drew on his cigarette. The attaché case was heavy with heroin and yens. He carried a loaded .10mm pistol under his left arm, but he wasn’t worried about using it. Not in the Minato district. Takayama’s grip was iron hard here.

Shijo could smell the sea not far away, but it was faint, overpowered by the smells of rotten vegetables and human sweat. He ran a hand through his wet hair and cursed the weather, fantasizing for the twelfth time that day of retiring early to some warm island, Tahiti or maybe Fiji.

He stepped in a puddle, the cold water immediately drenching his left foot. Swearing out loud this time he pulled his foot out and shook it, then walked around the puddle. He could see the Lucky Monkey just ahead. Already the leather of his shoe was squeaking from the soaking.

As he neared the ornate, black wooden doors he could hear the thumping beat of the break box inside, the rhythm entwined around some sampled jazz trumpet wailing. He paused and listened. The breathy quality of the loop sounded like Miles. He smiled for the first time in hours. Akemi must be on stage.

Shijo paused to light another cigarette before stepping into the club. The sound enveloped him like a warm, wet blanket, heavy beats and Mingus chords chasing Miles’ trumpet from one side of the long, rectangular room to the other. Akemi, wearing a long silver dress, leaned into her mic, rapping her poetry and anger into the air. Kids with short, dayglo colored hair bounced on the floor around the stage.

Shijo walked to the bar and grabbed a beer before heading to the back of the club.

Chapter 3: Sam and the Firefly

2005-04-11T13:31:00.000-07:00

By Allen Frost

The crash startled the fragile man into trembling spider-like motion, up off the daybed and across the creaking floor to the door. He hadn’t been sleeping, at least he didn’t think so, but maybe his mind had been playing tricks on him. He pushed the door open into the small room that served as kitchen and everything else in the apartment.
Not surprisingly, Sam had broken their new wooden radio. Crushed splinters of it, gray tin foil and mechanics, heaped smoking on the scarred floor. Out of it croaked a last crazy word or two more. It was still plugged in by a thick black wire. Then the heap crackled a spark, died.
“Sam,” he rasped, “Maybe you shouldn’t listen to the radio for a while…”
For a moment his gigantic roommate really became the super-villain of those B movies he starred in. That was the face Sam made when his submarine ran aground, whenever the Empire suffered a temporary loss.
“Relax Sam…That’s my advice to you, as your doctor.”
Sam’s big hand went into the radio rubble. Giving a huff, he caught the Firefly between his thumb and forefinger. He held it up to his gaze like a jeweler and a diamond.
A tiny voice appealed from it, “This is a possession of the United States of America. Any resultant felony and, or, breaking of applicable laws is punishable by law.”
Sam made it dust when he shut his fingers together.
“I feel the same way about the news,” the doctor said. He shook his head at the mess. “What a nightmare.”
Sam growled, “Why can’t they just play the music?”
“You know, I told you. That’s not the way they do things in this country, Sam. On radio you have to have commercials and news. I told you, just turn it off when that happens. The music always comes on afterwards.”
The words hissed out of Sam like pistons of a steam engine, “The Empire will not be defeated.”
“I know…I know…” the doctor held up his hands placating, then he noticed the wrist watch on his right arm. He raised it to see. A button started music out of a little warbling speaker. It hummed like a cricket on his arm.
“Cornelius Barter,” Sam nodded. The effect was immediate and soporific. Sam dropped back dreamily into a straw-backed Van Gogh chair.

Chapter 2: Little Finger, Big Man

2005-04-01T17:13:00.000-08:00

by Miguel Ramos

George Mariz opened his eyes. He didn’t know where he was. He slowly sat up and looked around him. Metal desk, two folding chairs, a long, padded examining table, no windows. His office. He could hear music coming through the thinly plastered old walls. The bodega must still be open.

George stood up from the floor where he had been laying. His body wasn’t too stiff, so he must not have been out for long, though he couldn’t recall clearly when he must have fallen asleep this time.

He could hear heavy footsteps walking down the hallway between his office and the bodega. They got louder as whoever it was approached his door, and finally stopped. After a few seconds, during which George stared at the door, his head bowed expectantly, a series of loud knocks rattled the door in its frame.

Only business used that door. Paying customers. No one else would venture down the hallway (lit with flickering, old fluorescent tubes that George refused to replace), past the stock room with its locked, iron-barred door (through which the smells of Mexico and South America wafted), past the janitor’s closet (its door long missing, with a wheeled bucket and stiff, dry mop the sole occupants), and finally to George’s unmarked door (which used to open into the manager’s office when the building had housed workers from the local textile mills and included a private bathroom, years of cigar smoke stains, and a hidden exit beside the bathroom sink (that George did not know about)).

George crossed to the door and opened it. The man who stood there clutching a bloody rag around his left hand towered over him. The top of his head disappeared above the door’s lintel. George backed up and motioned the giant man in. He had to turn sideways and duck his head to get through. He had solid, wide legs and a full stomach that pushed at the buttons of a red silk shirt he wore beneath an open, black sports coat. He had long, dark hair pulled back and tied into a ponytail, a gold hoop through his left ear, and a thin, long nose. He stared down at George through narrow, slanted eyes, looking angry, then took one step back and bowed.

“Mariz-san. My name is Hideo Nakata. Salvatore Contadino-san sent me to you. He said you could repair this.” He thrust out the hand covered with the blood stained rag. George picked up one corner and took a look. Hideo’s little finger was missing just below the first knuckle. It had been tied off with what looked like dental floss. George looked up at Hideo.

“Please, Mariz-san, I need to you repair this.” Hideo reached into his coat’s pocket with his right hand and pulled out an ice filled zip-lock baggie. The missing finger swam inside the pink tinged water. George saw that Hideo’s right hand was already missing the little finger.

“Go over to the table and sit down Hideo.” While the giant man sat George closed and locked his door. He then walked to his desk and opened up the top left drawer, pulling out a bottle of penicillin and one of Demerol, as well as two syringes. He also gathered a pair of latex gloves, a large pad of gauze, saline solution, forceps, suture and needle from the middle drawer. He then opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon and two glasses. George put everything on a tray and walked over to the table.

“Hideo, did Sal tell you how much this would cost?”

Hideo grunted and reached into an inside coat pocket, pulling out a roll of twenty dollar bills. He handed it over to George. George counted out $300 and gave the roll back to Hideo. He then poured them each a drink.

After they had each swallowed the bourbon George started working, injecting the Demerol and preparing to sew Hideo’s finger back on. He placed Hideo’s hand flat on top of a piece of gauze cleaned the wound with the saline. The cut was fresh and straight.

“It’s good that you used a sharp knife and came here right away. That will make it easier to sew your finger back on. I can’t guarantee that it will heal properly, though. If you’re lucky it will, but if you start to see any signs of infection you should come back and let me take it back off.”

Hideo, who was watching George work, nodded.

“I understand, Mariz-san, but it is very important to me that the finger heals well. I’ve already lost one finger. I would be very shamed to have missing fingers on both hands.”

“If it doesn’t heal properly I may be able to get you a prosthetic. Then it wouldn’t be as obvious.”

Hideo smiled and shook his head. “No, it must be my real finger. I feel that it will heal. I trust your work.”

George looked up from his sewing and stared at Hideo. “Why do you trust me? You don’t even know me.”

Hideo straightened his back. “You are wrong. I do know you. It is you who do not know me.”

“You know my son, don’t you?” asked George.

“No, Mariz-san, but I knew his parents. How is Tenuchi fairing?”

George turned back to Hideo’s finger, concentrating on the sutures. “The material I’m using for these stitches is called Dexon. It will dissolve in about three weeks, so if the finger is healing normally you won’t need to come back.”

“I am going to tell you a story, Mariz-san, of how I know your son’s parents, and why I am here in the United States. You continue working, and listen.”

Chapter 1: A Bargain For Frances

2005-03-25T12:08:00.000-08:00

By Allen Frost

The wind came through the broken blinds into the basement and woke him up.
“How long have I been out?” he asked his daughter.
“Only a couple of minutes maybe,” she said. “I’ve got the carotid pressed. He’s still alive. You can save him when you’re ready.”
He smiled, “Okay,” and took over the life of gangster ‘Charlie’ Benodonci quickly and skillfully. His tired voice continued, drawn like charcoal, “One of these days I may not return from that black sleep. You’ll be looking at me but I’ll be gone. But don’t worry,” he looked at her with awakened eyes. “That will be your chance to escape this racket.” He sewed the life back into the gunned down hood.
All the blood that covered Charlie could have ended him, but he found the crime doctor just in time. His wound was healed and the doctor was suddenly falling asleep beside him.
Frances caught her father before he fell over the table. She led him back onto the stretcher. He needed some rest now.
She left them, doctor and patient, closed the door on that room and went into the other.
She was facing a counter, a cash register, and a mob of children waiting for her. “Uhh, who’s next?”
“I’m next!” piped up Crybaby Johnson. He had his gang of first graders all crowded around him. Their eyes barely made it over the counter but they were all looking at her. “I want a pound of Whoppers.”
“Of course,” Francis smiled while she spun around. She noticed some blood on her hand as she unscrewed the jar. She wiped her hand on her black apron, poured a paper bag full of malted chocolate and returned. “Two ninety five,” she said.
“Is that a pound?” Crybaby squinted at her.
The boy next to him rattled at her, “Yeah, is it, dummy?”
“Weigh it,” the little voice ordered.
“Yeah dummy, weigh it.”
What could she do? She put up with them. She set the paper bag onto the silver scale and everyone stared up at the red moving arrow. It stopped on one pound exactly.
A moment of silence passed, then Crybaby said, “Not bad.”
“She’s cheating!” shrieked his partner. “She’s a big dummy!”
Crybaby Johnson gave her a long look. “No…I don’t think so.”
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” she said. “Here you go then, a pound, that’s $2.95.” The bag plopped down onto the glass.
“Pay her, Louie,” the boy leader snapped his fingers softly at some other six year old as he grabbed his candy. “Let’s scram.”
She watched them leave, the shrill little crowd of bird voices flying away, all except for Louie. He was left at the counter, standing on his tip-toes counting through a pile of silver and copper coins. He tipped his glasses and tried again. “Sixty three, sixty four…seventy four…” he mumbled. All the money was a math problem for him.
“That’s okay,” she told him with a wave. “You can go with them.”
The relief shined out of him. “Thanks lady!” and he pulled his hands away and ran away. The bell over the door rang as he left.
With the store quiet again, she raked the coins into the cash drawer and yawned. She was about to go check on the operating room when the door rang back open.
Wind and some flicks of falling snow blew in a tall thin man, wearing a black coat, staggering like a mechanical wind-up toy.
“I need the doc,” he gasped.
“I can see that.” She slid around the counter and caught him before he collapsed into a tower of chocolate boxes. “I’ll help you.”
“Never saw it coming…They had tommy guns,” he coughed.
She wiped the blood off his mouth, “Take it easy,” she urged. “Follow me to the back of the store. The doctor’s in there.” She clawed open the paneled door and yelled, “Wake up! Bullet wounds!”
Her father gave a jerk falling up off the flat stretcher. “Nobody’s bulletproof,” he muttered to life. “Lay him down on my table, I’ll get my tools.”
He had a bad habit of falling asleep at any moment. Even if his life was broken up by dreaming spells, this place was his calling. When he was awake, he saved lives. As he prepared his patient, he recognized the scars from one of his previous jobs next to the fresh wounds.
His daughter had already placed the mask over their patient, feeding him gas.
A bare light bulb stuck in the wall above the door was flashing. “Oh!” Frances cried, “Someone needs me out there. Will you be okay?”
“Sure, sure Frances,” he grinned, “I could do this in my sleep.”
“If you start fading out, give me a shout before you go,” she said as she left.
The shop was silent and looked empty, until a girl with green eyes jumped up above the counter level. “Can I have twenty cents of taffy, please?” she hopped.
“Yes, of course.” Frances scooped an arm into a jar. “Here you are.”
“Thank you,” said the girl, adding, “Ummm, this is for the doctor, from Tiny Snopes.” She put a gray soft looking statue on the counter. It looked like a guitar wearing a dress.
“Wow! Another one…Will you tell him thanks.”
“Mm-hmm,” the little girl answered. With five cents of taffy chewing away, she sunk, out of sight until she got to the other side of the floor and opened the front door. “Bye.”
“Bye bye.”
Frances thought about locking the door, putting up a Closed sign, but what would they do? The doctor was in business saving the lives of the underground, the element who would die in the street if bullets weren’t taken out. They needed them.
She put the cold flesh feeling statue on the wall shelf, in the row full of more guitars wearing dresses. There were slight variations on the theme. Or was he just getting better?
A year ago, the doctor had sewn new hands on Tiny Snopes. Every
month or so another sculpture would arrive. Maybe he was getting better.
Frances opened the door to the next room.
She was glad to see her father’s back, standing there at the table while she followed the tiled floor to the sink. “We got another present from Tiny,” she told him. She smiled, turned around to face him, “Another thanks to you.”
Quiet…except for the slow drop of blood onto the floor. Her father was asleep standing up, with a saw cut stuck in the arm of his patient.
In the next second Frances clicked out across the distance to wake him, shout him out and reverse the cold death taking over.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered for the hundredth time, “I’m sorry,” again. He quickly put his knowledge into saving what he might have lost to sleep. The hovering specter fled as he cut, sewed and fed new blood into that dying form. From that moment to the next, he worked the miracle. Frances passed the tools to him, followed his directions, until another gangster was going again.
She reached and touched his shoulder. “You okay?”
“Sure.” He had a smile after all. “I’m tired though.”
“Okay dad. Take a rest now.”
By the time she settled him on another cot, he was already gone. No, there was nothing she could do about it. He came and he went. She dimmed the light in the room. It was alright. There were already two patients resting, plus her father. While they all slept, she crept to the door and went back to the store.
It was quiet in there but nothing was wrong. She found her seat behind the counter. She picked up a book that hadn’t been seen for hours. There was a page marked where she left off. There was always time for poetry when time allowed.
The door belled open with a crash.
“Tiny!” she yelped. The book fell from her.
Snow falling off him, he tottered through the candy displays like a small slow motion mummy. “Can you hide me?” he asked her. “For a while?”
“Yes. Of course.” Frances pointed at the wide cardboard display of a chocolate colored cow. “You can hide behind that. There’s room back there nobody can see.”
He was already gone.
“Thanks for the new statue,” she whispered.
The quiet was slow before she lifted her book again. The page remembered where they were.
With a sighing, the door behind her opened and her father stepped out. He put a hand on her shoulder, “Frances. We’re a little low on ammonia. Could you go to the store and get some more?”
“Of course,” she said. Her book caught that place where she left it. “Are you okay if I go?”
He laughed. “Go ahead. Don’t worry about me. I’ve given myself an injection. I’ll be here and I won’t fade.”
“Really?”
“Don’t worry.”
Outside wasn’t a place she went very often. Out there was where gangsters got shot. Death roamed where she let herself out and it was snowing.
The black sky showed between all the tall grown buildings with the wind scattering white. The street was so cold she felt difficulty going in that dimension. She hurried as fast as she could go in that other dream.
Across the street, in the distance, Food Castle was a burning sight of haloed neon, pale blue in the night. She cut across a dark parking lot, over the curb and street to the next block. She directed herself towards the light of it. She and every moth in the neighborhood flew to the same bright place.
She walked by parked cars turning into white sloped and sleeping silhouettes. It could have been a peaceful walk until she got closer to the corner, where she saw a dog thrown down on the sidewalk and a man holding its paw.
She sped up, she was sure it was someone she knew. He was.
“Can you get us to the doc?” the big sad face of Don Benny begged her. “They shot him…This crazy dog took the bullets meant for me,” he choked.
“Here…” she reached and took the dog’s pulse, her hand touching fur and snow. “We have to get him back to the store.”
“I can carry him lady. I’d walk ten miles for this dog.”
“Alright Mr. Benny. We have to hurry though.”
He staggered after her across the parking lot. The three of them made a monster movie image, wading away.
“You’ve gotta save him,” he puffed clouds in the cold air. The dog was draped in his arms, its breath made ghosts, it was still alive.
“We’re almost there,” she told him. They crossed the street. The light was a blur in the curtained candy store window. As she hurried ahead to unlock the door, she noticed fresh footprints running from the wall.
“What?” she said aloud as she read the graffiti left behind. DUME. It took her about five seconds, then “Ohh…” she said as she realized what it was, sounding it out, “Dummy.”
“Lady…” Don Benny wheezed up to her, straining and resting the dog over his leg.
“Yes!” She quickly found the handle and they went inside.
“We’re here,” Don Benny told his dog. “Everything’s going to be alright.”
Frances led them to the back door. She brushed snow off her and pushed the door open.
Ahead of them the doctor was okay, sharpening a blade with a whet stone.
“Bullet case,” Frances announced to her father. “Here, you can lay him here, Mr. Benny.” She straightened the fresh sheet on the table.
Don Benny’s hands and gold coat buttons were wet with blood. He stared like an owl.
“A dog…” The doctor approached and looked at the wounds. “What’s his name?” he asked while he went to work.
“Agnew,” Don Benny rasped.
“Agnew. Agnew?!” the doctor looked up for a moment until the next.
“Can you save him, doc? Can you fix animals?”
“Of course. We’re all animals. I remember one time we had a racehorse in here. Sniper got him. I put him back on the track though. You’ll see, Agnew will be good once I get these bullets out of him. All he needs is a lot of blood.”
“That’s what I’m here for!” Don Benny suddenly rolled up his sleeve. “Take all you want,” he held out his arm. “What’s mine is his.”
“Okay. You want to sit him down, Frances? And get an I.V set up.” There was a plink rattle as a bullet dropped into the tray. “There’s one,” he said.
Frances guided Don Benny onto the cot beside the operating table. “Lay down here Mr. Benny,” her voice poured while she prepared the needle and the tube to connect him to his dog.
“There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Agnew.”
“I know, Mr. Benny. Now relax…” she tied off the vein, “This will only hurt a second, just take it easy. The doctor will take care of you both.”
Don Benny let out a yelp when it bit and the blood flowed out of him.
Another bullet clinked into the pan.
“Oh!” Frances turned to look at the door. The light bulb above it was flashing.
“Go ahead,” her father answered. “This is fine. I’ve got company and man’s best friend.”
“Alright. I’ll be back soon as I can.”
“Go sell some candy.”
“Okay.” She smiled back at him before she left the room.
Opening the door she had to push on someone leaning against the other side. Registering the police uniform before her, she tried to hide the operating room from sight as she slid into the store.
The officer was absorbed in something else though.
“Can I help you?” she asked him.
“This thing.” He hefted one of the sculptures in his hand. “Where’d you get all these things?”
Cautiously she said, “I’m not sure…Maybe from—”
“This is pure opium,” he interrupted.
She stood blocking the operating room door, with her body pressed against it and the frame.
“So this is what’s going on around here.” He was getting louder. “We’ve been watching this place.” He carried the sculpture to the space in front of the counter and plopped it down. “All this candy in here is nothing but a front,” he pointed at the chocolate boxes and penny bins, “Opium is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Opium!”
Frances didn’t say anything, someone else’s voice did. “It ain’t opium.”
“What?” the policeman spun to see who was in the corner.
“It’s Connie Francis.” Tiny Snopes stepped out of the darkness. “Stick your hands up, copper.” He sneered, “Opium…” He chuckled. He was holding a little gun pointed at the policeman. Tiny steered the conversation into the middle of the room. “You got a chair for the lawman?” he asked Frances.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Let’s just get the lawman com-for-table.” Tiny Snopes let it drawl.
She pulled a stool across the wooden boards. “I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”
“Noone’s gonna get hurt, precious,” the little man sneered. “Not if everything goes alright. So sit down, flat-foot.”
“What do you mean Connie Francis?” the policeman finally spoke. “Is that something new? Slang?”
Tiny Snopes gasped.
“Listen outlaw—”
“What do you know about opium?” Tiny waved his gun at him.
“We know this place is crawling with opium. There’s more officers
outside, they’re waiting for the signal from me.”
“Those are just statues I made. Art of an angel, Connie Francis.”
“You made this, huh?” The policeman’s hand began to squeeze. The gray form mushed and spilled out between his fingers.
“Hey!!” Tiny Snopes shrieked. “That’s it! No mercy for you! Nobody messes with Connie Francis!”
Frances wanted to step in and stop whatever was building into happening, but just then the operating room door flung open.
“He’s alive!” Don Benny lurched into the store. He trailed a loop of tubing taped to his arm vein. “He’s alive!” When he saw the policeman though, he turned instantly malevolent, hissing, “Copper…” as he reached into his coat.
“He’s mine!” Tiny Snopes shot. “I’ve got a plan for him. Oh yeah…” he grinned wickedly. “Why don’t you give me a hand, Benny?”
Frances was worried about this. “Listen fellows, I think we should stop this.”
Tiny Snopes hissed at Don Benny, “Bring me the rest of those statues.”
“With pleasure,” Don Benny grinned. He filled his arms with Connie Francis idols.
The policeman stood there frozen, his numb face watching his fate unfold.
Don Benny and Tiny Snopes worked efficiently, tucking the statues in all over the silent policeman.
Then Tiny Snopes took a roll of wire out of his coat pocket. He spun the thin copper coil back and forth, round and round the blue uniform, connecting the charges. “Opium!” he spat laughter.
Don Benny wheezed with delight. “Yeah, opium!”
“What are you going to do to him?” Frances asked at last. “That’s plastic explosive, isn’t it?”
“Flatfoot here is going to take a little walk,” Tiny Snopes leered. “He’s gonna go out there and call off the raid, see. He’s gonna tell all his pals he was mistaken and—” he jerked the end of his wire tied to the policeman like a leash, “And if he makes any stupid mistakes…it’s curtains.”
Don Benny laughed like a dry sprinkler. “Fourth of July!”
“Get walking!” Tiny Snopes snapped the wire and began to let out slack.
“This won’t work, Tiny,” the officer warned. He took a couple steps toward the door, pulling wire along, pausing.
“Walk!”
Onto the leak of light coming from under the operating room door, Frances faded from the store, swung through the wall and locked the latch behind her.
The operating room was an underwater green. There was that dog Agnew sprawled across the table, striped white with bandages, sleeping off the effects.
“Dad?” she called. She looked around. She followed the smoke signal cloud coming from the corner, behind a Chinese folding screen.
She peered around and caught her breath in surprise.
Atop a cushion, her father rested with a long black pipe laid across his folded legs. He smiled at her and lost some smoke.
“Opium?” she sighed, realized.
“Yes…” he whispered slowly. “Opium…The mob keeps me supplied…I’m addicted…I belong to them…But I made a bargain with them.” He took another tug of smoke and drifted into a nod.
“Wait! We have to get out of here! This place is surrounded by police.”
He was smiling. He was asleep and didn’t mind at all. Then he awoke for a breath and his words walked out. “This is your chance, Frances. I always told you it would happen like this. I made a bargain with them…They own me but when I’m gone you’re set free. My life for your life. Use the passage…” he motioned the pipe at the bookcase. “I’ve got my escape. Now go while you can.” His eyes closed him down. He was gone.
Frances heard a crash behind her and she spun around. It was the dog, Agnew. Either he had rolled off or pushed himself off of the table. The will to survive staggered him in his mummy cloth, his bleary eyes searching for a way out.
“This way, boy,” she called. “This way!” She ran to the bookcase full of medical tomes. Pushing the shelf revealed the creaking passage opening beyond.

Hello World!

2005-03-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

This blog will serve to publish the works of Allen Frost and Miguel Ramos (and others someday) as part of the work of Mandala Press.

We chose the name Mandala because we want to eventually print these works onto pulp paper and publish them as pulp paperbacks. These will wear apart and fall away, just like a mandala.

Enjoy!