“It is said that all that you are seeking is
also seeking you, that if you lie still, sit still, it will find you. It has been waiting for you a long time. Once it is here, don’t move away. Rest.
See what happens next.” ~ Clarissa Pinkerton-Estes, Women Who Run With
the Wolves
Happy Valentine’s
Day! I decided my gift to you all is a
handful of excerpts from my books – both those already published and those to
be published this year – on a theme in keeping with this day. The theme is:
the way you never know, as you walk through your ordinary day, when
someone out of the ordinary will appear…and change your life - for better or worse.
***
This first one is from my novella about a woman who leaves civilization to go live in a ghost town…and, despite her reclusive needs, she begins to wish for at least an imaginary lover…
Excerpt from HUNGER IN THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR:
Stories of Desire and Power (Amador Publishers 1992)
from Chapter 3: The Tea Maker
I have seen him. Oh god, this was not how I expected it to
be. I had so much more I wanted to write
here before he entered. And he is not –
somehow he is not my fantasy. I haven’t
had time to conjure him, to work on the details. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to be stocky
and blond or gaunt and dark – I wanted to create him. Damn, I
wanted to invent him myself! And
here he is.
As for stalking, how ludicrous! Not turning a corner to find him, loin cloth,
poised to pounce. Instead I find him
standing in t-shirt and jeans making a pot of tea at the Ranford cabin wood
stove!
The Ranford cabin is at the other end of Main Street, with
the Ranford name carved on a panel of the front door. I went there this afternoon because I remembered
seeing a piece of screen on the back porch which I needed to patch a
window. I knelt to pry the screen from
between two boards and, as I stood, something dark blue, almost invisible in
the deep grey interior of the cabin, moved slowly inside the kitchen. I stepped to the door quietly, peered in, and
saw him. Or his back, at least, bending
to pour boiling tea water into a pot.
The strange part is I somehow knew,
immediately, that this was no ordinary hiker with a backpack for me to
scavenge. There have been no signs of
his arrival or presence, and he is suddenly here. But, more than that, he pulled my attention
in a different way than the hikers did – something similar to those times back
in the real world when I would walk into a room full of people and sense one
particular person’s presence, in peripheral view, before really looking at them
– a recognition at subterranean levels.
This was similar, except the context was not a room full of people but
the silence and stillness of my ghost town.
He drew my attention so fully that I forgot to be afraid he’d see me,
and it is this that has me so disturbed.
Not only does this visitor puzzle me, but
the details are odd – like the look of the teapot. Not a camper’s tin, but cream colored, with
tiny red flowers clustered on the front, and a chip in the handle. And what about the wood stove fueled up and
burning? I didn’t see chimney smoke when
I walked toward the cabin, nor smell it when I was on the back step. Yet there he was, bending to pour steaming
tea.
He didn’t seem to see or hear me, which is
peculiar. It’s so silent here, the
slightest noise is heavy on your eardrums, and we were standing only about six
feet apart. He should have at least sensed
a change in the airflow from the doorway or felt my shadow cross his
light. But he didn’t turn, just
continued his task. I heard the sound of water pouring, saw the steam
rising. I pulled back quickly, off the
porch, around the cabin, ran back here,
and bolted the door. Not the brave,
stalking landlady…
The next excerpt is a bit of a scene which
takes place in a New Mexico
truck stop on Route 66. Two people are trying to travel solo down that infamous
highway, but something about their past lives in Mesoamerica
seems to want to interfere with their plans…
Excerpt from JOURNEY FROM THE KEEP OF BONES (Amador Publishers 2003)
From Chapter 28: The Mother Road
He
had imagined being on the road would feel free, no rules to obey, no
restrictions. Apparently he was
wrong. There was a whole other hierarchy
out here. He was no better than a
fast-food, French-fry boy with a master’s degree in philosophy,
his first day on the job. He would have
to apprentice at this hitchhiking business, swallow his pride, work his way up
to pro level. He should have picked up a
paperback about this; surely there was some sort of “Hiker’s Rules of the
Road”. He’d read Kerouac’s On the Road, of course, but that was
written almost forty years ago. Maybe
Route 66 wasn’t even Steinbeck’s Mother
Road or the Road of Flight anymore. Hell, The
Grapes of Wrath came out in ’39.
Looked like it was too late for him to do this trip. Wrong generation, almost sixty years too late.
He began to feel depressed again. That same old sinking, strangling feeling he
thought he’d left fifty miles back, rolled up in the used sheets and towels of
his Albuquerque
motel room.
Three booths away in the same truck
stop outside Laguna, Adrianne – oblivious to the curious stares drawn by her
shaven head – was drinking her first cup of Route 66 coffee in one of those
classic, cream-colored mugs that was almost too heavy to hoist. She’d made it out of Ojo de Sombras before
the snow began to whiten the sides of the road.
It had been rainy from there. She
drove down to Bernalillo and then picked up I-25 to I-40, heading for
Grants. Despite the late hour, she felt
she could drive until dawn.
She unfolded her map and was tracing
the route to her first motel stop with her finger when the blinking Christmas
lights went out. She looked up,
startled, thinking the electricity was out, but the overhead lights, coffee
machines and heating vents were still energetically glaring, perking and
blowing. Amused, she watched the truckers
trying to impress the waitress, upsetting chairs and shoving tables aside as
they followed the green, plastic Chinese ropes to the wall sockets, twisting
and jiggling the light lines to no avail.
Adrianne started to tell the waitress
that if you made sure all the bulbs were twisted in tight, the lights would
probably come back on, but thought better of it. She didn’t want to get involved in the sexual
banter, which had elevated markedly during this electrical event. Instead, she
curled one leg underneath her in the booth, sipped her coffee and unobtrusively
sketched one of the truckers as he jiggled the lights, the waitress as she
wrote out a ticket, a lanky man in a bomber jacket sitting three booths
away. The expression on his face was
interesting. He seemed to be judging the
conversations around him, staring out the window with a soft smirk. Yet his eyes seemed sad. No, angry.
No…she couldn’t quite describe his expression in words, so she sketched
instead.
Something about him bugged her. As she shaded in the set of his eyelids, he
began to seem familiar to her, but from another context. He was out of place here.
She sipped her coffee and closed her
sketchbook, then opened it from the first page and leafed through it, each
sketch bringing back a memory. A couple
pages of Red Rock Mesa. One she had
tried from memory of the Pueblo
grandpa’s face in the rearview mirror.
Sam, black, taking a sun bath; Sam, white, sleeping in the
moonlight. The Maxine-jaguar-fish
dream. A nude of Laura sleeping, the
crow feather she’d left behind. The
trees across Rio de Sombras, a jack-o-lantern.
A page of animal shadows, a detailed drawing of the jaguar knife. The view from the Watermelon of the man
straddling the 66 Center window ledge--
Adrianne’s head jerked up and she shot
a look at the man in the bomber jacket.
A rush of fear washed through her and, as it receded, she sat staring at
him, puzzled at her reaction. Fear? Why fear?
Because it was damned strange, him
being here. The one she’d painted, the
cocoon-woman portrait. The window man,
the one she kept missing at the Center that night. She felt a strong inclination to jump up and
leave as quickly as possible, hoping he wouldn’t notice her. But why should he notice her? She had seen him that day, he probably hadn’t
seen her at all. Well, briefly, when she
went into that black-&-white studio.
But he probably wouldn’t remember that.
Adrianne exhaled slowly. She forced herself to avert her eyes and take
a deliberate sip of her coffee, as if nothing was wrong. She tried to pin down exactly what was wrong.
Two sips later she had it figured
out. She was upset because one very big
point of heading out on Route 66 had been to be anonymous. To observe and not be observed. To slip down the road, in and out of the
truck stops and motels, as if invisible
To watch, listen, sketch and keep moving. To see who drew her attention, male or
female, and why.
But how could she, if every damned
nightmare she ever had was going to keep showing up, sitting there drinking
from truck-stop mugs, interrupting her solitude – pulling and tugging her
backwards into dreams already dreamed, people already come and gone from her
life? She had hoped the cycle of dream
portraits was at an end, that by staying mobile for a while and traveling alone, the dreams would
just stop and she could move on to painting simple things—mountains, old
abandoned trucks along the Painted Desert, maybe even the ocean if she got that
far.
Adrianne
shot an accusing glance in the window man’s direction. But he was gone. His seat was empty, his cup being whisked
away by the waitress. Adrianne looked
around the truck stop and outside the window.
He was definitely gone…
Back
in her car, Adrianne wiped the rain from her scalp with Laura’s old muffler and
rubbed her gloved hands together. While
she waited for the defroster to kick in and melt down the window fog, she
surveyed the interior of her traveling home with a thrill of pleasure…her
camping gear, overnight bag, and a healthy supply of t-shirts, socks and
sweaters. Spread across the back seat
were a pillow, sleeping bag, wicker trunk of art supplies and a small cooler
filled with fruit and sandwich things.
Neatly arranged on the floor on the passenger’s side were a coffee
thermos, water bottle, bag of pretzels, emergency flashlight and box of
cassettes. Her maps were tucked into the
driver door pocket, her mink-and-Navajo-blanket medicine bag occupied the
passenger seat, and on the dashboard were the requisite “I Fished the Rio de
Sombras!” commuter mug and a combination plastic Guadalupe Virgin
statue/compass. Hanging from the rearview
were Laura’s crow feather, a sprig of sage and the tiny violet feather from her
sleepwalking night, all tied together with a strand of old rosary beads.
The
window was clear and she pulled out of the truck-stop lights onto the half-lit
access road, flipping on her windshield wipers.
There, up ahead at the bottom of the ramp, a dark figure wearing a
backpack stood with his thumb out. As
she drew closer to the intersection, Adrianne saw the bomber jacket and
haggard-yet-hopeful face of the 66 Center window man…
From my family book…Holly has been told not
to talk to strangers…but sometimes it’s hard to obey that rule…
Excerpt from THE GREEN DOGS OF LONELY WOODS (Green
Phoenix Productions to be published Autumn 2014)
When she got to the edge of the woods
where her fort had been, Holly stood a
long time staring into the darker part where she had seen—or imagined—the tree
puppy yesterday. Maybe she should put
her new fort in there, away from the fly tippers. That way when the grown ups had a litter pick
they might leave it alone. She could
make a better fort this time, using more tree branches and even a roof woven
with branches and reeds. If it was
disguised to look more like part of the woods, then the grown ups wouldn’t even
see it.
Holly
found the spot where she had buried the box.
She began poking at the ground with her new sword, then knelt to scoop
up the dirt. She was sure this was the
spot, it had been the third tree to the left of her old fort. But dig as she might, the box was gone.
“Very
strange,” she said to herself. She had
not told anyone where it was, and had been alone when she buried it.
“Is
this what you’re looking for?” a strange, scratchy voice suddenly spoke. Holly whirled around but no one was
there. She knelt back on the ground,
very still, her eyes darting all around.
“H...hello?”
she whispered, not sure why she was whispering.
“Over here,” the voice said, now
laughing—a rusty kind of laugh. Holly
turned toward the sound but still could see nothing but trees and long grass
and wildflowers. Then a movement in the
grass, a flash of purple and tin. And,
above, just like yesterday, Max hanging from a tree branch. She started to leap up and rush toward her
prizes but stopped herself. After her
tangle yesterday with the tree puppy, she was not going to fall for that again!
“Oh
come on, I was just saving them for you,” said the voice. It was an odd gravelly voice with a squeak to
it like tree branches rubbing each other in a wind storm. It was hard to tell if it was a man or woman
but it was definitely an old voice.
Holly squinted and peered into the green but still could not see
anyone. Just Max and her treasure box. Slowly she stood and crept over to them. Before she could reach for them, the green
grass and tree limbs seemed to quiver, and the box and Max seemed to float
toward her.
That
was when she realised they were being handed to her, by hands. Green hands with twiggy knuckles and mossy
thumbs, but hands nevertheless! Shaking
now, Holly
took the box and Max, stepped back and started to run away.
But now a face began to emerge from the
green and brown tangle of the woods. And
that’s when she first saw Manny Greenkeeper, although of course she didn’t know
his name yet.
Basically
he was green. His skin, the irises of
his eyes, even his teeth were various shades of green. His nose was long and craggy and very like a
bit of carroty root with a knob on the end.
His hair hung in scraggly clumps like moss and seaweed, with leafy sideburns,
and his ears were rather large like flattened green peppers. He was the skinniest creature Holly had ever
seen, and at least 7 feet tall. The most
noticeable thing was the way he smelled—like
mushrooms and spores and wild garlic.
There
he sat, creaking as he moved to arrange
himself, his leafy skin making the sound of autumn rustling, his joints
cracking like twigs underfoot. It seemed
he had trailed the vines and debris from the ground and gathered it like a
cape, draped across his lap. Holly let
her gaze follow the greenery back into the darker part of the woods from where
he must have crept when she wasn’t looking.
It was as if he was a spider and the green threads of the woods were his
web, attached to his body. He laughed
again, leaned back on his elbows, and nodded at Max in her arms.
“I know
he is important to you, but why? When
there are so many real doggies who need a girl like you to take care of them?”
“I,
uh, I...my mother won’t let me have a real dog,” was all Holly could think to
say, staring at the green creature and wondering how it was possible for her to
be talking with him in the middle of a Sunday
afternoon, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. Her mother had always said “Don’t talk to
strangers” after all, and this was about as strange as you could get! But Holly was beginning to realize nothing
about these woods was exactly normal, so she might as well go along with the
game, whatever it was. Oddly, she didn’t
feel afraid, just very curious…
***
Excerpt from GUARDIAN OF THE DARK SCHOOL (Green
Phoenix Productions to be published Spring 2014)
From CHAPTER 5: Emerging Poets
Fiona hung up the phone and sat in the
darkness, feeling the warmth of the dinner wine. She mused over the perplexing events of the
evening -- not daring to try to give much thought to the strange sexual events
of the afternoon. Those she would save
for later, back in her casita.
Her conversation with her father had been
brief. It was late on his end, and he
was just about to turn in after a day of gardening and mowing. They didn’t have the conversation she
envisioned earlier, the one in which she would tell him how much she regretted
having come to New Mexico, and how she would probably be going back to
Baltimore by the week's end.
Instead, after dinner, she called and
babbled to him about the beautiful New
Mexico sunset outside the stained glass window of
this room. She was quietly pleased when,
asking to use the hacienda phone, she was directed toward, and left at the
threshold of the chess library. Talle
was entirely courteous, even warm, telling Fiona to use this phone because it
would afford her the most privacy of all the other phones in the house. It appeared that her hostess didn’t suspect
her of having left leaves in the hall or spilling wine on her journal after
all. While dialing her father's number,
Fiona was able to inspect the chess board in the soft glow of the green library
lamps. The dust patterns exactly matched
the Green Man's instructions. The white
rook to f6, the black knight to b5. She
quietly and quickly replaced the pieces, amazed at her good fortune; no one had
discovered her accident before she could correct it.
Fiona chatted with her father from a
place of wine and relief, describing in great detail the beautiful mansion, her
casita, the bookstore. Leaving
out the disconcerting fax from her professor, the local mythology of the
missing poet, the scene at the hot
springs, all of her doubts and forebodings. She told him she would be honored at a poetry
reading in two weeks and he said, sleepily, "That's great, sugar plum, I
know you'll knock 'em dead." She
promised to call next week, to keep him posted on her great adventure.
She found it amazing that the Green
Man was right about the chess pieces. Or
her subconscious was. Perhaps here, away
from the city, she was more able to tune in to her intuitive, instinctual
self. Fiona felt her emotions had turned
around, and she wanted to stay the full two months. She wanted nothing to do with the
restrictive, competitive atmosphere of the Baltimore Fine Arts Institute’s
creative writing department, and did not long for the dark cave of her basement
apartment. She would indeed write while
here. The first poem was bubbling and
brewing, she felt ready to burn the midnight pinon logs, to get back to
her Green Man poems. She would write
about him from the sensuality of these woods and mountains, from the eroticism
of her experience and dream this afternoon.
Very different than that dry, intellectual place she’d worked from at
the Institute. Fiona stared up at the
resin replica. There he was, grinning
slyly at her again, as he had last night, and today in her dream. She rose and crept over the luxurious
rose-colored Persian rug, to get a better look at the Bomberg replica.
"Did you reach your party?"
Fiona gasped, startled, and turned
around to see Liam Fagan in the doorway.
It was still hard to believe -- as it had been through dinner -- that
this was the same man she had seen spilling his seed in the valley this
afternoon. For one thing, in the indoor
light of the hacienda, Fagan -- in his
late fifties -- was very pale, not the nudist brown she distinctly witnessed
earlier. His hair was the same -- long
and white, now tied severely at the nape of his neck with a black cord. He had the same face and eyes, but his body
-- albeit hidden in the loose folds of 1940's-style, wide trousers, a
non-descript white shirt, and an over-sized cardigan which looked like an Irish
knit to her -- seemed thin and ethereal, not muscled as it had been in the
raw. His eyes were distant, a pale
blue-grey, and his cheekbones were very lean.
The effect was of a man staring right through you into another
dimension, not really seeing you or connecting.
His hands, picking up silverware
at the table earlier, were delicate and long-fingered, fascinating to watch,
but seeming to barely make contact with objects -- as if feathers lightly
dusting over the surface. Somehow she
knew that his skin, to the touch, would be very cold. Yet, outside on the sunlit rock, it would
have been fevered and damp.
"Your call, did you have success?"
"Oh,
yes. I was calling my father. Thank you for letting me use the phone...this
is an exquisite room."
Liam Fagan moved into the room,
pausing at the chess board. He frowned,
lightly touching the two replaced pieces.
Fiona froze.
"Odd. These had fallen. I needed to check my computer to see where to
replace them. But someone has,
already."
He looked up at Fiona, expectantly.
He looked back at the pieces, his
fingers still hovering over the horse
head of the knight, the castle's turrets.
"They are replaced exactly right,
now that I see it. Sometimes, you know,
you have to visually see a thing to discern its pattern. It's not enough to remember it in your mind's
eye. At least, at my age it is so."
"I know what you mean,"
Fiona breathed quickly. "I was admiring
your Green Man," she added, hoping to distract his attention.
"Was it you who replaced the
pieces?"
Fiona froze again, stopping in
mid-gesture as she faced the Green Man on the wall, her back to Liam
Fagan. She made a quick choice and
turned to face her benefactor.
"Yes, it was me. I apologize.
Last night I was lost and wandered in here. I knocked them over in the dark, by accident. I felt I had disturbed something quite
sacred."
"Sacred. Interesting word choice. But you are one of the poets, after all. I’m curious -- why did you wait until tonight
to replace them?"
Fiona looked down at the exotic floral
carpet. Again, she made a choice about
how to interact with this strange man of an obviously dual nature.
"I had a dream. The Green Man told me how to replace
them. I checked the dust pattern. He was right."
Liam looked up from the chess board
and stared into her eyes. At first, it
seemed as if he stared through her, as he had all during dinner. But now they were focused, intently, and an
icy heat radiated from them that was probing, shrewd, kindly, alarmed and, to
her surprise, erotic.
It was her body that registered that
final implication, a heat starting up her lower spine. At the same time, her pulse increased and her
breathing shortened. It took Fiona
several seconds -- which felt like several minutes -- to begin to feel able to
receive this disturbing gaze without embarrassment or discomfort. However, just as she began to relax into it,
with curiosity and pleasure, their gaze was broken -- with apparent reluctance
on Liam Fagan's part, for he grimaced at the interruption -- by Talle's form
filling the library doorway.
Fagan's wife had apparently been in
the hallway long enough to hear Fiona's confession. She looked from Liam to Fiona and gave a
warm, practiced smile -- which struck Fiona at that moment as a
"professional" smile -- and spoke, in muted, cultured tones, as if
noting the name of a pattern on an antique porcelain tea cup.
"That's interesting. Apparently you were not the only one to have
a mishap in the night. This morning I
found someone spilled wine on my book..."
Fiona looked Talle in the eyes, still
warmed and aroused by the gaze with Liam that had been interrupted. "Coitus interruptus" came to
mind, and she smothered the urge to giggle.
"...Or was that you, also?"
Fiona made her third choice of the
evening.
"No, I only spilled the chess
pieces."
"Probably the sidhe,
dear," Fagan smiled at his wife.
"You know how such things happen all the time, here."
Talle smiled at him in return, herself
initiating a long gaze. He responded
with a cool, detached smile. The woman
then rested her gaze on Fiona, considering the young poet. Fiona surprised herself at how easily she
sustained the eye contact, how steady and calm she felt doing so. And how, at some level, she realized she
didn't care whether or not Talle believed her.
It wasn't that she disliked the woman;
it was that, for some reason Fiona did not yet grasp, she had decided to
proceed with honesty with Liam and dishonesty with Talle. Her reward for that honesty with Liam had
been a look shared between them, like rich and potent sherry. It was a secret, a knot of decadent chocolate
slipped into her palm by a stranger, a knot she wanted to take back to her casita
and examine. She knew that honesty with
Talle, at this moment, would dissolve that chocolate, and something precious
would be lost, forever.
It struck Fiona that she felt exactly
as if Talle had walked in on Liam and Fiona naked across the chess board. Fiona now finally blushed thoroughly,
recalling Professor Bregman's faxed message.
She looked at Liam. He was
staring straight at her, a small and knowing smile on his lips…
Illustration at THE GREEN DOGS OF LONELY WOODS by Chris Bell (c) 2014. May not be used without author's permission.
On this typically rainy, windy Scottish evening, I have
wrapped in a blanket on the sofa with the dogs snoring nearby. I have put a CD on low, lit some candles and am
settled in for a few chapters of Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit. The CD is
Seal’s “Seal IV” which I haven’t listened to in a few years because, simply, I couldn’t
find it after I moved into this house. Searching
for something else in an unpacked box today, I found a CD carrier which had Seal
and all the other CDs which I thought I had lost – everything from Patrick Bernard
to The Blue Nile. 
