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by Larry Simpson ISBN 1-891429-61-2 Fiction, 280-pages $14.95 |
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Chapter One The solo came from somewhere hidden, rustling in the pecan tree next to Jack’s open window. The inventive warble was a special concert in complex time, as the fluid notes filled with twists and turns of inventive voice, echoing the best riffs. Answers harmonized from distant quarters like honeysuckle droplets, the depth and color of a fecund field, blooms’ blue dapples in the gold halo of the central Texas morning. As he slept through the mockingbird’s performance, Jack felt the warmth of pure love. He heard a voice announce into his left ear, like a telephone call, “I am Aleigh’wha, God of Light from the Heavens. You will be the one who makes everlasting peace in the Middle East.” Jack tossed, imagined such an impossible challenge, thinking about the extraordinary amounts of money changing hands to finance war ventures. Murky thoughts about what it would take to cover the ransoms, bribes and demobilization of armies rustled in his mind. Such a proposition would take a tremendous amount of cash to satisfy everyone. Jack replied to the voice, “If I am to be the one, then I will need the wealth of three kingdoms to succeed with such a venture.” He awoke and thought how amazing the dream was, how real the voice, although it didn’t surprise him too much. So much had worried Jack Dickens these nearly five years since the attack on the World Trade Towers. But as summer pushed ahead, he’d have even greater concerns. But he always knew phantasms were vapor, because he failed when trying to bring back sunken treasure coins from a dream as a child. But to be sure, to alleviate all doubts, he tried to see if the dream divined some winning lotto numbers. After all, he’d heard of a winner who’d garnered numbers spoken in a dream by a dead grandfather. So Jack closed his eyes for a moment and wrote a set of numbers on his bedside notepad. He put on his rimless Varilux glasses, studied his wife Eloise sleeping next to him. It had been a warm night and the scarlet covers of their faux Eighteenth Century, pecan burl four-poster were pushed down to her feet. The sleeping face of an angel, Eloise’s lithe, nude form over the red sheets made Jack wish he could just watch her from their elaborately carved headboard all day, attending the reposed apparition at his leisure. More alluring than any of Boticelli’s goddesses, ingrained in him deeper than Homer’s Sirens, he relished her soft respiration and mused that their breaths had been synchronized for more than a quarter of a century. Eloise heard Jack’s early stir. Bleary-eyed, she turned, dreaming of days when he wouldn’t be arising so early, when she and her husband would be whiling out old age in idle splendor, surrounded by a covey of grandchildren in a great villa somewhere not in Texas. But she knew such were impossible dreams. For she was fifty-five, their only son Mathew was still single and Jack’s love for the Lone Star State had them firmly rooted in the ancient limestone bedrock of the Hill Country. Jack could see she would awaken soon and both had much more to do than languish in bed. He got up and did his fifty pushups to keep his medium frame trim. His gray beard and thinning, salt-and-pepper hair caught his eye in the mirror. Jack said to himself, “I reckon life is just a series of disappointments punctuated by absolute disasters. Oh, well.” He thought about how they’d gotten there, reflected on his life of fifty-four years. “Good God, the book of my life is more than half written,” he mumbled. Turning on the shower, he wondered if there was any plot to it. But there were rumblings from other quarters. And in a particular place, on a particular day the other side of summer, a bolt from the blue would change everything. * * * “We must go to this man and kill all of his family in front of him. And then kill him!” Mullah Abdullah El-Zawahri said to al-Qaeda operatives Yousef El-Banashiri and Qazi Al-Quaradawi. Both were in their mid-twenties. Yousef was a tall, dark-skinned man with beady, brown eyes, a big, flattened nose and a thick mouth that rounded into a receding chin. Qazi was short and stocky, had a clean-shaven, symmetrical face set with thin lips, a tidy nose and large, blue eyes with Cleopatra lashes under thin, thoughtful brows. Only his wavy, brown hair would have distracted from those eyes, but his head was buzzed to the nub. The operatives were meeting with their cell leader at a cheap, rundown Philadelphia apartment. The mullah doled out tea to the men. He was counting tattered, American currency. He stopped to pick at his long, scraggly, black beard and said, “You have been trained to do this job; you are American citizens, so you will do it well and without detection. This—” ... |
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Jack’s Quest by Larry Simpson ISBN 978-1-891429-62-0 Fiction, 280-pages $14.95 |
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Peace Paint by Larry Simpson ISBN 1-891429-02-7 Fiction, 218-pages $10.00 |
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CHAPTER I
Trust is like a very delicate, translucent-green, jade statue of lotus beauty. It is easily maintained; simply dust it off with truth and honesty. But once it is broken through lies or misdeeds, it is as easily restored to its original condition as a lost virginity. – Ancient Proverb
A long time ago in the future, there was this artist cat, Calvin Cavinaugh. He was pretty cool and one of the hottest painters the world had ever seen. Man, he could paint. Calvin could take a collection of oil paints – yeah, they still used oils a long time ago in the future – and he could give a skin tone the radiance of a living, human being. Like, you expected them to start talkin’. An’ he could make simple ochres, browns and whites pop with the bright gleam, and soft heft, of pure, metallic gold. Or primary pigments dance like real flowers in the fecundity of a springtime hillside – you could almost smell ’em. And hear the bees workin’. Man, this Calvin could paint. He could get so surreal that you’d know you’d been there, somewhere in a phantasmagoria, and things got inside out and Klein-bottle-like and you knew he was telling you somethin’. Like, a plain, flat canvas come to life, rich with dimension, speaking to you in a dream. So, this Calvin cat was seein’ stuff in his paintings, learning from them, too. Like, he’d get working on them, and they’d take on their own life, and the powers behind creativity would tell him where to go with it. Because he was creative, he was connected to the Muses and they’d send him into nether worlds. And he would go. This guy could really go. He’d start a three-by-four-meter canvas (they finally went universally metric a long time ago in the future) and he was so skillful that he could whip out a whole, marvelous, detailed work in just a few days. And these works would just scream out, and pull you in. Calvin was really somethin’, worked incessantly, and all the cool people totally dug his stuff. Everybody paid a lot of attention to him and his work. The authorities first got interested in Calvin because he was turning oil paint and canvas into some really good bread, and they wanted to get their hooks into as much of it as they possibly could. But it wasn’t all that easy, ’cause the dude could afford to be honest. The artist made so much money that he was able to lose the bulk of it to taxes, and still keep enough to maintain his frugal life-style. Now, the authorities were a lot different than they are now, but they suffered human weaknesses like anybody in any era. They still almost had a strong constitution and laws and stuff, but the authorities a long time ago in the future had this bizarre thing for coin and power. They’d write all these abstract laws on paper, not to benefit the people, but just to cop themselves higher positions and heavier bread. But that still wasn’t enough, especially if some upstart artist does his own thing. The authorities got very interested in Calvin, mainly because what he was workin’ on wasn’t so complimentary to some of them. In part, they were afraid that his two-dimensional islands of blended, pigmented, linseed oil on canvas, copied and printed by a weekly news magazine, might get as powerful as their abstract words on paper. Some were even outraged by an art preview printed in last week’s, glitzy, news magazine. So this Calvin Cavinaugh cat had a lot goin’ against him, because of these authorities. And of those he criticized, some of ’em had lots of power and not much more to do with their time, other than hassle an honest, law-abiding, taxpaying-citizen. ... |
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Peace Paint by Larry Simpson ISBN 1-891429-02-7 Fiction, 218-pages $10.00 |
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The Ritual by Larry Simpson ISBN 1-891429-01-9 Fiction, 189-pages $10.00 |
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One “Some towns are just light bulbs with a lot o’ bugs around them. The bugs come in, gather, struggle, feed, have a breedin’ frenzy and die there. They leave the hulks of their bodies, their eggs and larvae, for others to fight over and eat. “When the bugs see that light bulb, they think it’s a crack in the night and a way out of the heavy darkness. But it’s only an illusion, a delicate, white-hot thread, encased in thin glass. “But other towns, so very rare and hidden as they are today, are brilliant, daylight beacons for humanity. Persons in those places live, work, build, eat, make love, have families, traditions and pass on rich legacies to the children. “If you’ve lived in one kind of town, it’s impossible to live in the other. I’ve lived in both kinds of places and know I only belong to one,” dryly declared the dark, old man in the mustard-yellow sports coat, as he sat down next to me on the four hundred-year-old, granite bench to eat his pungent, chorizo sandwich. The sun was slowly cutting across a steel-blue, afternoon sky like a white-hot acetylene torch. He was a stranger, but the man seemed interesting enough to be familiar, so I remained with him sitting too closely. It was my first full day in the small, backwater town of Santa Juana, Latin American Community, having arrived the previous evening. And I expected that I had a couple more days to kill while I was waiting for the rest of my crew to show up. On that day, I turned thirty years old and had been doing work for the People’s World Autocracy for seven years. That was the day my life—and perhaps the world—got turned upside down because of the beautiful woman. “I think I know what you mean,” I said, as I scrutinized the man’s slicked back, black hair, smelling of pomade and old tobacco. His deeply weathered, mustached face was dominated by a big, porous nose, that pulled on his tiny, black eyes, with their blood-brown whites matching his gapped incisors. Oppressively hot and wanting to show indifference, I reached for my brown bottle of beer. Taking a sip of the bitter, local brew, I looked around the square where we were sitting. Its lifeless, adobe facades listened apathetically to the buzzing of the few bugs that could move; dull, deep-set windows silently stared at the town’s young, colorfully—albeit scantily—clad, modern women humbly pushing squeaky-wheeled baby carriages; paint blistered and peeled to mock the old ladies. Draped in black, they hung around like tattered, rag-veiled crows. The town square looked like the squares of many other villages where my work with the Geological Resource Survey had taken me. But on that particular day, things looked a little different. A little remarkable, like twinkling specks of gold found in a gritty handful of common creek sand. I studied the unkept, ornate wrought-iron railings of the limestone gazebo at the town’s center. Its green, copper roof had collapsed on one side and sections of the once-ornate, rusty railing were loosely hanging off, like so much forgotten laundry. Surrounding it were dry, thorny trees with large, purple rose hips that looked like dull, little apples. The tributaries of their roots were pushing into the cobblestones, pushing the rounded gray, metamorphic river stones back into their natural disarray. The man interrupted, “You look like a man stuck somewhere in the middle, too. This is a town, where you will become. This town, she has been both places. You will become in this town, no? This I know.” His breath reeked of stale tobacco, which was highly illegal, but still used by the natives. I looked again at the weather-beaten, once-whitewashed adobe buildings, plastered with faded posters advertising modern commercial goods: computers, canned chili beans and coffee. And I ignored his remark about my “becoming” because I thought I knew what he’d meant, though I didn’t want to admit it, even to myself. I told myself he was rambling, that he didn’t know anything about these new feelings I was having. “What could this smelly old coot know?” I sneered. “I have been coming to this town since I was a boy,” the man recollected. “In those days, it was a place of God and everyone seemed so happy. People smiled at you in the streets and the ladies always had a piece of candy for a little boy such as me, such as I was. They danced in the square on Saturday nights and they all went to mass on Sunday morning. They worked hard and they had their traditional festivals when it was time. It was truly a place of God, of tradition. Traditions connecting the generations. Then the secularists came, those thirty years ago.” I got sucked into his memories, imagined a past when a brass band played happy harmonies, when the gazebo was new. The roses were young and pink, in bloom. The old ladies were fresh peaches, dancing to life’s passionate rhythms with their hopeful young men. I could feel the torrid blood rushing through prurient veins as they sought one another in the excitement of the tinny, staccato beat. I wondered where they had gone and wished the gazebo could be rebuilt, repainted, renewed, so I could be dancing with a certain new woman there. These were novel kinds of thoughts to me, arising from fresh, potent emotions. “And now?” I asked, glancing at the previous evening’s, beautiful woman, crossing from the other side of the plaza, carrying some bulky, string bags. In the glow of full daylight, I saw her pause at a shop window that had brown packing tape tracing the jagged path of a crack across one corner of its clouded pane of thick glass. The view of her made me feel a thrill in my torso, again, making my blood hot. Just looking at her delicate form made me feel something extremely powerful—an emotional something—stronger than anything I had known. “And now,” the man rasped, as he offered me a crude, gnarled, brown-black cigar, “now it is a town in transition. It is a town that will either die, or come back to God. Either people will be trapped into tapping on the thin glass of a bulb, or they will be allowed to find a true life and will not want to get out through an illusion.” “I don’t know,” I said, as I furtively struck a match for his tobacco cigar and then openly lit my own marijuana cigarette. “I think things are going to be fine. Living men, not your dead deity, will make things better.” The sun went behind a small cloud, his face darkened and he grated, “Or the blood of living men— No, but listen, I’m telling you. You have to understand: ever since the good men left and the World Autocracy people came, this town has never been the same. It used to be better, don’t you know? Now, there’s no unity. Unity in the world, yes. But unity in this town, no. Maybe a happy world, but very certainly an unhappy town. “The PWA took over the church and took away many of the men. Without a church, there is no life, no traditions. Without a living church, there is no center, no balance. “The World Autocracy people only bring money. They take the young men away and they only return money. Some of the chosen PWA impregnate the women, but they bring no life. Money has no life. Don’t you see? This town is becoming a light bulb with bugs. Just another light bulb with bugs—trying to get out—surrounding it, crawling over and around the illusion. “You will be different, though, won’t you? You will be one to do something to bring back the life, yes? Will you help change this place back into a town, with living people?” ... |
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The Ritual by Larry Simpson ISBN 1-891429-01-9 Fiction, 189-pages $10.00 |
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