No Rest for the Wicked

 

A story which was fun to write (inspired by another prompt from The First Line, namely “Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die”), and has been given really fun personalized illustrations by Iuniki Dkhar on the Half and One website, posted September 9, 2024.

 

One of the illustrations (above) is of this ineffective séance which Margaret Morrison asks her friend Sally to conduct, in hopes of contacting her dead husband Ellis:

“They lit candles and held hands at the little mango wood table with its mandala design Sally had snatched up at a car boot sale somewhere, but though one of the candles flickered madly at one point, and her cat Tinkerbell gave them an awful fright springing up out of nowhere into Margaret’s unguarded lap, claws out, the spirit world contributed nothing.  Sally (transformed into ‘Salamandra the Seer’ with dusky purple velvet drapery at village fêtes) cajoled and even threatened for a good half an hour, but could get nothing out of Ellis’s intractable spirit.

“You know he never did like me; he says his lips are sealed.”

So they gave up and spent the rest of the evening contemplatively eating ice-cream with an Amaretto float (brought home by Sally at Easter from Mantua after seeing the Chamber of the Giants and the Relic of the Holy Blood).”

 

 

 

image:  Iuniki Dkhar

The Great Thieves

 

My words have traveled far—all of the way to Australia, where a story of mine, “The Great Thieves,” was published at the end of August in StylusLit, Issue 16, September 2024.  The story’s set in Boston, so it’s well-traveled altogether.

 

This is a fictional account which draws on the real-life (bigger than life) occurrences of March 1990, when thirteen major works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston's Fens—a lovely museum I’ve visited often, standing each time looking sadly at the empty frames waiting forlornly for their missing contents to return.  This account of “the single largest property theft in the world,” still unsolved over thirty years later, is purely fictional but in broad terms based fairly closely on what actually happened.

 

One of the characters in the story dwells on the subtleties of theft:  “Life is essentially all about theft, I’ve concluded.  What we steal from others; what we make of that.  Mireille stole this space, to improve it, transform it.  What my mother steals is to obliterate, lay waste to—like salting the earth behind a retreating army.  The theft of your paintings, who knows?  Only the thieves know what they’ve done with them, and why.  Diogenes, who I studied at Tufts, compares the little thief (Mireille, if you like, and each of us to some degree) to the great thieves—my mother, taking life and possibility away.  Whoever stole the art.  The ‘treasurers of the temple’—the crooks in charge, who have the power to ruin great segments of the population daily, just because they can.”

 

 

 

image:  Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

 

Papier-Mâché

 

I have been accepted again as a member of the Heartland Society of Women Writers, presumably because my heart is in the right place.  They have published my short story “Papier-Mâché” in their [w]hole Anthology, which came out in August.  (Previously, online, they published “A Lilac Year.”)

 

“Papier-Mâché” is part of my “suite” of mask pieces, started in 2020, of which four have previously been published:  “The Persian Warrior,” “L’inconnue de la Seine,” “Kachinas,” and “Day of the Dead.”  There are two remaining, and I hope to see them all together some day, as a single work.  If only I had the letterpress I once dreamed of!

 

My particular papier-mâché is (typically) complicated:   “There were strips of newspapers—of crossword puzzles, book reviews, World Series pitchers, stories about rescued dogs, and comics including Calvin and Hobbes.  And for upper layers, colored strips from National Geographics of sea anemones and cheetahs, El Tajín in Veracruz (which the aide, Martina, knew from family visits and told them was named after a thunder god).  Saturn and sharks, pandas and sunken ships, mountain gorillas and strange, creepy insects.  Funny roly-poly armadillos.  Eskimo and Maya children, children from Poland, from the Sudan.

         Silly probably to make a big deal about the paper, but Ruth Sims felt there was an indefinable magic in choosing words and images that spoke from everyday and far away as the foundation of the masks, even though they'd be painted over or covered with origami paper, tissue-thin gold leaf, feathers and raffia and beads.  What was inside counted every bit as much, Ruth told Martina.”

 

What was inside is the thrust of this exploration.

 

 

image:  ApplesPC, Pixabay

Provenance

 

The Plentitudes has been one of my favorite venues, since I was first published by them.  Their format is attractive and their philosophy congenial:  “The Plentitudes is an international literary journal showcasing captivating fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from diverse voices.  We believe in the power of writing—in its plentitudes of forms, styles, and modes of exploration—to move the spirit, shift the gaze, and offer new perspectives.  Founded in New York City in 2020, we are truly global:  our editors, reading board members, and contributors (and their stories) represent an international and multicultural blend.  Our editorial team carefully curates each issue to bring our philosophy to the page and to our avid readers. We are most excited by works that approach the human condition from a mix of critical and creative approaches and we support exigent narratives and counternarratives.  We aim to amplify emerging voices and add to the growing diversity and vibrancy of the literary community.”

 

I’ve had a third story published there, this summer, one originally written with a “body politic” theme in mind.  In this case the body is one of an archaeologist suffering from arthritis, the politics those of an Italian patriarch claiming to be of the Medici family.  The two clash, naturally, when the past is unearthed and the present left substantially unsettled.

 

The archaeologist, Juliana, finds momentary solace in the music her baritone friend and lover (also uncertain) offers on a brief visit:

“As dusk came on, he stood beside her small piano (spruce from Italy’s eastern Alps) and sang Macbeth’s aria, ‘Pietà, rispetto, amore’—sad and heavy as the ancient hills, full of regret and terrible longing.  Juliana sat by the window wrapped in cotton folds and listened to Verdi’s music.  She loved that aria, loved Renzo’s voice—like salted caramel, like sage, like gilded capitals in books of hours illustrated in some sacred dim-lit space by gentle monks.  Reverent and powerful.”

 

This story is related through Juliana and its setting in Tuscany to one of the first stories I had published, back in Spring 2019 in The Wild Word, “She Who Hesitates.”  This isn’t technically a sequel, but there are some continuations and resonances.

 

 

image:  Ekaterina Astakhova, Pexels

Right at the Water's Edge

 

Another prompt from The First Line, whose resultant story they decided not to publish, has led me to another appearance in Catamaran, the Summer 2024 issue, with this even more fabulous than usual cover. 

“Right at the Water’s Edge” drew inspiration not just from the intriguing first line “Mr. Morton needed a new pair of shoes,” but also from our almost-local Irish transplant poet, David Whyte, and his wonderful poem “Finisterre.”  We here in Santa Cruz are indeed at land’s end, at water’s edge, and have to think about exactly what that means, and where we go from here, if go we do.

 

And about how and where Mr. Morton went, in his new shoes, from here.

“An altogether new way of walking, for an old stay-at-home like him.  A crazy, chancy way of walking on, that made his new experimental heartbeat quicken, syncopate like ragtime, jazz, under his homely old tweed jacket, his no-iron button-cuff dress shirt.”

 

And about how a small boat happens to come into it, and a sea journey north . . . 

 

Find Catamaran here, and Mr. Morton here.

 

 

image:  Adam Jahiel

A Golden Opportunity

 

My first publication in a wonderfully productive July was a story with an unexpected twist, “A Golden Opportunity”—written in response to the latest prompt from The First Line:  “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today.”

 

This tangled tale goes on the talk about an unscrupulous student, a year in Rome, a pilfered Etruscan bracelet, a couple of clean starts, and a rather fine Añejo tequila.  The bracelet is indeed a wondrous golden thing:

 

“From her designer handbag, probably one of those famous Italian knock-offs, she took out a small cloth bundle, then got up from the chair and handed it to me.  I hesitated to take it from her, but then, relenting, curious, took the worn velvet as I might an injured bird with its heart fluttering, in both my palms, and held it for a long moment before unwrapping it.  Touched with wonder, I likely sighed to see the breathtaking bangle, yellow gold, with the delicate wirework, granulation, filigree that distinguished the finest Etruscan jewelry.”

 

Available only in print, this issue of The First Line—Volume 26, Issue 2—can be purchased here (see column 2).

 

image:  The British Museum, Art & Object

Vagaries (part Two)

 

I am jazzed (a word I latched onto earlier this year) to have a story in the March/April 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post—and to join the company of such illustrious authors as that other Christie (i.e. Agatha), William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, to name but a few.

 

My story is “Vagaries,” which was first published in Catamaran in Winter/Spring 2019.  Somehow the Editor-in-Chief of the Post came across “Vagaries” in Catamaran, and went to a lot of trouble to contact me through my editor there, Elizabeth McKenzie, and ask if they could reprint it.  I did say yes, when he finally reached me after a string of e-mail glitches followed by some phone tag . . .

images:  The Saturday Evening Post