Tracy S. Morris: Recent Episodes
Tracy S. Morris
There was already someone waiting at the front desk of the local police precinct when Celeste walked in to ask for a look at the blotter. As she approached to form a line behind him, she recognized the other person as Joe Turley, Managing Editor (who managed to edit) for the New Orange Register.
What were the odds?
Actually, pretty high, given her bad luck. She licked her lips and eyed the door, wondering if she could turn around and leave without drawing his notice.
In the moment that she hesitated, he turned around and looked her straight in the face.
Mr. Turley squinted at her, then blinked as he tried to place her face.
Celeste could see the moment he recalled their embarrassing first meeting. His entire frame relaxed, and he smiled at her in amusement.
“Celeste Ingram,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you again this soon.”
No, she thought. He probably thought I either died of embarrassment or slunk back to Arkansas on the first bus out of town.
He glanced down at her worn clothing. “Are you working construction?” He asked in earnest.
“Mr. Turley,” she tipped her head in greeting. “I wouldn’t have expected to see the managing editor of a major metro newspaper checking the police blotter. Isn’t that the cop reporter’s job?”
“It is,” He said mildly. “Our cop reporter is on vacation right now.”
“So you’re filling in?” Celeste guessed.
Mr. Turley smiled faintly, as if he found Celeste amusing, like a baby kitten or something. Celeste gritted her teeth.
“Our city reporter is filling in. I’m just checking the blotter for him, since he won’t be on the clock until this afternoon. What are you doing here?”
Celeste considered deflecting. But reporters were some of the nosiest people on the planet. Mr. Turley would recognize misdirection for what it was, and would probably remember it the next time she applied for a job.
“I’m investigating something for my boss,” she settled on. “His basement was trashed out. Whoever or whatever did it came up from the sewers. When he filed a report for insurance, the cops told him that he wasn’t the only one.”
The newspaper man leaned in, eyes narrowing. “Are you writing a story on this?”
She inhaled, feeling suddenly like a gambler with a winning hand. “Why? Do you want one?”
He crossed his arms. “I stand by what I told you before: Your writing isn’t up to our standards, Miss Ingram.”
Celeste crossed her arms, as well. She wasn’t going to give an interview to one of his reporters when she could be writing the story herself. “Then do you know of any newspaper around here willing to take a chance on a green reporter who just needs a little polish for the sake of a good story?”
He scoffed. “More than a little polish.”
“Good story, though.” She raised her eyebrows.
Before Mr. Turley could answer, a uniformed officer entered the room. “Can I help you?” The officer asked her.
Celeste pushed past Mr. Turley. “May I see the blotter?”
The officer waved her through a side door. Celeste took a step, intent on following the officer. Then she had a thought. She turned to face Mr. Turley.
“I’ll be in touch when I have a story,” she told him. “If you don’t want it, someone will.”
As she left the room, she felt like she might have scored a victory, despite her bad luck.
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into a Bar Part 12 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
Since starting to work on the school newspaper in junior high, Celeste had gotten into the habit of composing stories out of significant things that happened to her. It had become a handy way for her to process her day. Now, as she knelt behind the counter to pull a couple of long-necked bottles out of the cooler for the off-duty werewolf cops in the corner, Celeste thought of how a story about the mishap in the basement might read.
Owner Baffled, Bamboozled as Bar Basement Broken
Lucky Whatshisface, owner of Lucky’s tavern in New Orange City, reports that his establishment was recently attacked by an unknown entity, which was in no way related to the bad luck of one Celeste Ingram, but may have been a sewer gator.
The entity entered the premises through a basement access to the sewer system. Reportedly, it knocked over the shelving and broke several expensive bottles of liquor. No one was injured in the attack.
A hand passed in front of Celeste’s face, causing her to jump. She looked up. Lucky stood there, hands on his hips.
“Good daydream?”
“I was thinking about what might have come out of the sewers and trashed the basement.” Celeste stood “And also? I don’t think you ever told me your last name.”
Lucky looked amused. “I don’t need one, kid. There aren’t many one-eyed werewolf bar owners named Lucky running around out there.”
“You got me there,” Celeste said.
“What happened to your basement?” A new voice cut in. The two of them turned to see Ed Piñado lean his bulky centaur frame against the bartop.
“Nothing,” Lucky said.
At the same time Celeste pointed at the floor and said “something came through the tunnel into the sewers and knocked over all the shelves in the basement.
“You have a door into the sewers?” Ed put his drink down and pushed it away.
“No!” Lucky glared at Celeste. “There is an old smuggler’s tunnel down there. It dates back to the war of 1776 when munitions runners smuggled guns out of New Orange to the Yankees, and smuggled rum in to drink. I haven’t used it since prohibition. If you know where to go, you can get into the sewers, the pneumatic system, anywhere in the underground you need to get.
“Usually I keep the door there locked, but last night something broke in.”
“We thought it might have been that leprechaun that Lucky threw out last night,” Celeste said. “But that was a dead end.”
“It could be anything,” Lucky said. “Immigrants from all over the world have passed through New Orange. There’s no telling what they’ve brought with them.”
“Have you filed a report with the cops?” Ed asked.
“I had to, for insurance,” Lucky said.
“You did?” Celeste cut in. “When?”
“After Seamus.”
“Why aren’t they doing anything?” Celeste gestured toward the cops in the corner with the bottle in her hand.
“They have.” Lucky said. “They filed it.”
Celeste raised her eyebrows. “And?”
“And now there is a file on the incident. Apparently we’re the third business that this happened to this week. It’s not a problem until it happens to at least six places.”
Lucky lifted Celeste’s tray into her hands, turned her bodily toward the table of cops waiting for their drinks and gave her a push in that direction.
“I’m going, I’m going.” Celeste grumped. She dropped the drinks at the table, and made a circuit of the room to pick up empty bottles. Ed was still at the counter when she returned. This time nursing a stein filled with amber liquid.
“A water spirit like the each-uisge might come out of the sewer,” he said. “But they usually lure people into jumping on their backs and then drown them. Trashing out your basement wouldn’t be normal behavior.”
“That sounds like something a kelpie would do,” Celeste said. “Mawmaw used to warn us not to play around with strange horses, because you never know if it’s a kelpie or not.”
“Each-uisge are meaner. Then you have hags like Peg Powler, Jenny Greenteeth and Nelly Longarms.” Ed ticked each name off on his fingers as he said it. “They look human, and lure children into the river and drown them. If it looks canine, it might be an ahuizotl which likes to lure the unwary into the water and drown them.”
“I’m sensing a theme here,” Lucky said.
“Of course, it could be a Kappa. They also sort of look like humans, but with webbed hands and feet and turtle shells on their backs.”
“Like a ninja turtle,” Celeste said.
“Close,” Ed nodded. “They lure the unwary into the water –”
“And drown them.” Celeste finished.
Ed looked annoyed at her. “That’s not what I was going to say.”
“Sorry,” Celeste looked contrite. “Please go on.”
“First they pull their victims organs out through their rear. Then they drown them.”
“This is sounding better and better,” Lucky propped his chin on his fist. “How do you know so much about this, Ed?”
“I was in the Merchant Marines’ Equine Program before I opened the carriage company,” Ed said, flexing his massive biceps. “You learn what to watch out for when you work on the water.”
“What do you do if you meet any one of these things?” Lucky asked.
“All the standard things that repel fairies,” Ed said. “Cold Iron, holy water, smudge sticks, salt. Kappas like cucumbers, so you can throw one the other way and it’ll chase that. And almost everything dies if you cut its head off.”
“Thanks, Ed,” Lucky said. “You’ve been helpful.”
Celeste raised an eyebrow at that. Before she could say anything, Lucky started loading her tray with more bottles. He nodded toward the open floor meaningfully. With a scoff, she turned away.
As the night wore on, she found herself composing a different story about the other two places that were vandalized.
Vandalism Spree hits New Orange Businesses
By: Celeste Ingram
Business owners in New Orange are locking their basements tonight in fear of what might come out of the sewers after three local establishments have been hit by a wave of vandalism.
“Hey Lucky?” Celeste plopped her tray on the end of the bar and sat on an empty stool. “We should go talk to the other people who this happened to before we head off into the sewers. Maybe someone got it on video. Or there’s a claw mark or hoofprint or something that might tell us what we’re dealing with.”
Lucky gave her a bemused look. “That’s not a bad idea. Although I don’t think the cops would appreciate us muscling in on their detective work.”
“If the local PD is anything like home, there should be a copy of the daily incident reports at the front desk,” Celeste said. “It’s a matter of public record. And if not, the local newspaper should have it in their police blotter section.”
“You mean the newspaper that you nearly got thrown out of the other day?” Lucky started polishing the bartop.
She laughed, shakily. “I’ll check at the police station, and if it’s not there, then you can go to the newspaper?”
“Why don’t you go? I thought you were popular over there?”
She cringed at the thought of dancing receptionist Barbie again.
“No one cares that you were a pain the last time you went over to that newspaper, kid.” the corner of Lucky’s mouth lifted in a lopsided smile. “They probably don’t even remember what you looked like.”
“Still. . . “ Celeste trailed off, uncertainly.
“I should make you go to that newspaper, and face your fears. But seeing as we might actually use that information, I’ll be happy to check on it for you.”
“You’re a gentleman scholar and a prince among men, Lucky,” Celeste said.
“Stop flattering me and get to work.” Lucky made a dismissive motion with his hands.
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into a Bar Part 11 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
Seamus the Leprechaun stood frozen like a statue, floating two feet off the ground. This allowed Celeste to look him in the face as they approached. He had green eyes, freckles and a shock of red hair that stuck out everywhere, as if he’d tried to give himself a haircut with a bowl and a pair of blunt scissors.
Celeste watched him from up the sidewalk. The occasional pedestrian gave him a wide berth as they passed, but otherwise ignored the floating leprechaun as they walked by.
“Is that normal?” She asked Lucky.
The werewolf shrugged. “New Orangers have better things to do than to get involved.”
She eyed the unmoving, floating leprechaun again. “How do you see this going?” She asked Lucky. “We don’t have a lot of time before that mojo wears off.”
Lucky turned his head, cracking his neck. “We’ll just have to be persuasive with the little time we have.”
“Persuasive?” Celeste said doubtfully. “You mean, you’re going to beat on him until he talks.”
“Something like that.” He motioned her to follow him toward the floating fairy.
Seamus glared at them as they approached. “I haven’t done anything.” He muttered.
“Sure you didn’t,” Lucky said.
“I didn’t! And even if I did,” Seamus’s voice rose. “What are you going to do about it? Sooner or later, this spell will wear off and then we’ll see what’s what.”
“My point exactly,” Celeste whispered to Lucky.
“Then I guess I’ll have to take the mess out of your hide before then.” Lucky said to Seamus, cracking his knuckles. He grabbed Seamus by the lapels and drew back a fist.
“Wait! Wait!” Seamus put an arm over his face to ward off Lucky’s blow.
Lucky put his fist down and raised his eyebrows.
“Before you start beating on me, at least tell me this: Was it very bad?” The Leprechaun looked pleased with himself.
“You know it was,” Lucky said, raising his fist again. “It looks like an elephant was there.”
“Now I wouldn’t go that far.” Seamus put his hands up again.
“I would,” Lucky snarled, shaking the leprechaun by the lapels. “In fact, I’d go farther. Do you know how much your little prank cost me?”
Seamus rolled his eyes up as if mentally calculating the cost. “I’ve some idea.”
“Good! Then maybe you’d like to make a binding agreement to fix what broke in the basement. Otherwise I might start breaking valuable parts of your body, like your spleen!”
“Do fairies have spleens?” Celeste asked. “I thought a lot of them were animated wood?”
“That’s just fae-ke news!” Seamus said. “You think we would be letting humans know anything real about us?” Turning his head back to Lucky, he continued their conversation. “Do you expect me to work off what you think I owe you?”
Lucky scoffed. “As if you would have to work at all with your fairy magic,”
Celeste followed the argument as if it were a tennis match. “Wait!” She waved to them. Both creatures broke off their sniping to look at her. “I don’t think you are having the same conversation.” She pointed at Lucky. “Tell the leprechaun exactly what you think he did.”
“He broke in through the sewers and trashed my basement storeroom.”
“Ha!” Seamus said. “I did no such thing!”
“Then what did you do?” Lucky asked.
Seamus crossed his arms. “I slipped a bit o’ fairy coin into the pockets of your customers. Check your cash box, werewolf. You’ll find a lot of nothing in there. Sorry about the storeroom, but that wasn’t me.”
With that, he dropped out of Lucky’s grip like a rock.
“The mojo wore off!” Lucky cursed.
Seamus gave them a cheery wave, skipped up the street, wiggled his ears and vanished.
“Well, that was useless,” Celeste grumbled.
“At least we know it wasn’t Seamus,” Lucky said. “Which means that it was something else.”
“Like what?” Celeste asked. “Sewer gators?”
Lucky chuckled and shook his head. “What is it with you and sewer gators?”
Celeste held up her hands helplessly.
“If we want to know what it was that trashed out the basement, we’re going to have to go down into the sewers ourselves and find out.”
“Have you ever been down there?” Celeste asked
“Yeah, but not for a long time.” Lucky said. “We’ll head down there first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Yay us,” Celeste said without much enthusiasm.”
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The designers of Guinness’ Pub used an architectural style that Celeste would call aggressively Irish and proud of it. The front was made up entirely of French windows painted green with gold trim below a red and gold sign. The whole front was festooned with gold, green and white tricolor Irish flags. A set of French doors was open, spilling Celtic Punk music into the street.
“You sure you want me to go in there?” Celeste asked.
“Yeah, kid.” Lucky put a hand on her shoulder. “Of the two of us, I have better senses. I can take him down if he does a runner out the back.”
“What if he tries to go through me?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Are you telling me that you can intimidate a room full of werewolf cops, but one leprechaun makes you antsy?”
“I’ve dealt with werewolves before. Not so much with leprechauns.” Celeste said. “You know where you stand with a werewolf. You may be standing in front of a bunch of teeth, but at least you know it.”
“If you’re going to live in New Orange with the kind of abilities you have, sooner or later you are going to have to deal with people like Seamus,” Lucky said. He’s not as bad as Maxwell, and you handled that fine.”
Celeste rubbed one arm as she looked up the street at the pub. “I’m not sure that I came out on top in that meeting,”
“Time will tell.” Lucky turned her body toward the pub. “Right now, that leprechaun isn’t going to flush himself out.”
“I should be so lucky.” Celeste muttered.
She walked up to the open doors, paused to take a fortifying breath, closed her eyes and pulled the magic up from within just as when she had done the same to intimidate the werewolf cops. When she felt her skin prickle from the magic, she opened her eyes again. With a grim smile she walked into the pub.
The room was long and narrow, only a quarter the size of Lucky’s. Most of it was taken up by a long bar with a little space on the other side to squeeze behind the bar patrons. Tonight, it was full of people, all talking and laughing.
When she stepped into the room, all talk trailed away, leaving only the sounds of heavy guitars and a whisky-throated singer crooning about drunken lullabies.
The patrons turned to stare at her like she was a hero in a western, pushing her way through the swinging doors of a saloon and announcing that she was looking for the man who shot her pa. She held in a slightly-hysterical giggle at the thought. All the while checking the impulse to adopt a bow-legged stance, hands on her hips over imaginary six-shooters.
“My name is Celeste Ingram.” The music might have drowned out her words, but the magic would ensure that everyone heard her. “I work down at Lucky’s, and I’m looking for Seamus.”
The barkeep put his dishrag down. Both hands vanished behind the counter where he probably stored his peacekeeper of choice.
“DON’T” Celeste used the magic to let her words slither through the barkeeper’s ears and down into the lizard brain. He automatically put his hands on the counter.
He glanced once at the end of the bar where Seamus no doubt dropped down to hide while she was outside, in full view of the windows drawing up her magic. “What might you be wanting Seamus for?” He asked.
“Lucky threw Seamus out of his place last night. After that, the whole of the stockroom was tossed. It looked like an earthquake hit it, and we want to know what Seamus knows about that.
Without warning, a little man jumped up on the bar and sprinted directly for her, kicking aside any glasses left in the way.
“You were supposed to run out the back!” Celeste braced for the leprechaun to try and run over her. By now the patrons on her end of the bar were snatching up their drinks and ducking beneath the counter to avoid collateral damage from the impending fight.
Celeste held out her hands, envisioning an invisible wall made of magical power extending floor to ceiling that the leprechaun wouldn’t be able to parkour over. Before Seamus reached her, he held his own hands out and pushed. Celeste felt a second wall impact her own, flipping her end over end until she was on her back like a turtle. Then the leprechaun was out the door.
With a groan, she sat up. “He was supposed to run out the back,” she mumbled.
Just then Lucky put his head in the door. “We got him!”
“Got him?” Celeste blinked up at him in confusion. “How? You were going to wait out back.”
Lucky shrugged. “There was a fifty-fifty shot that he would head out the front. So I waited at the mouth of the alley. I got him with the mojo when he went out the front door and up the sidewalk in front of me.”
“Lucky?” The barkeep glared at the werewolf.
“Yeah?”
He replied by placing a loaded revolver on the counter. Then he crossed his arms. His expression said that he didn’t want to use the peacemaker, but he would if they didn’t comply with his next request.
“Take your help and get out of my place.”
“Fair enough,” Lucky said. He held out a hand to help Celeste up. “Are we looking at another round of bad luck for you?”
Celeste groaned as she got to her feet. “I feel like I just got hit by a truck. That probably was the bad luck.”
He looked skeptical. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll walk back home on the other side of the street.”
“You’re all heart, Lucky.”
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into a Bar Part 9 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
“Seamus’ usual watering hole is a place called Guinness’ out near Chelsea,” Lucky told Celeste once they were out on the street again. “Let’s swing by there and see if we can catch up to him.”
“What’s the plan?” Celeste asked. She hurried alongside him, taking three steps for every one of his and ducking behind him to avoid pedestrians going the other way. She’d learned the hard way on her first day in town that people would plow into her and keep going without stopping if she didn’t get out of their way.
Lucky stopped and turned to her. The oncoming pedestrians broke around him like water breaking around a rock. “What are you doing?”
She looked around in confusion. What did he think she was doing wrong? “Walking?”
He snorted. “Well, you’re doing it wrong.”
“Okay?” She shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve been walking this way my whole life.”
“That’s fine in Elk Fart, where you’re from. But now you’re in the city. You’ve got to walk like you own the sidewalk. Here: let me show you.” He walked back down the sidewalk, turned then walked back to her with purpose.
When he reached her, he spread his hands in front of him as if to say: well?
“You look like you’re on your way to commit murder.” Celeste looked him up and down. “Those are definite murder vibes.”
He looked thoughtful. “Not today.”
“Seamus’ usual watering hole is a place called Guinness’ out near Chelsea,” Lucky told Celeste once they were out on the street again. “Let’s swing by there and see if we can catch up to him.”
“What’s the plan?” Celeste asked. She hurried alongside him, taking three steps for every one of his and ducking behind him to avoid pedestrians going the other way. She’d learned the hard way on her first day in town that people would plow into her and keep going without stopping if she didn’t get out of their way.
Lucky stopped and turned to her. The oncoming pedestrians broke around him like water breaking around a rock. “What are you doing?”
She looked around in confusion. What did he think she was doing wrong? “Walking?”
He snorted. “Well, you’re doing it wrong.”
“Okay?” She shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve been walking this way my whole life.”
“That’s fine in Elk Fart, where you’re from. But now you’re in the city. You’ve got to walk like you own the sidewalk. Here: let me show you.” He walked back down the sidewalk, turned then walked back to her with purpose.
When he reached her, he spread his hands in front of him as if to say: well?
“You look like you’re on your way to commit murder.” Celeste looked him up and down. “Those are definite murder vibes.”
He looked thoughtful. “Not today.”
“You’re joking,” Celeste rolled her eyes. “Tell me you’re joking.”
“Well, I am a werewolf, so it’s never off the table.”
“Is that why so many of your customers were cops?”
“I mean, not officially.” Lucky chucked her on the shoulder. “With Seamus, it probably won’t come to that.”
“That’s not as reassuring as you probably want it to be.”
“Sorry, kid.” He winced. “Back to walking. You do have a point. People will get out of your way if you look dangerous. So think about murder as you walk.”
“I’m a foot shorter than you. I don’t think it’s quite the same.”
Lucky made a sweeping motion with his right hand. “Just try it.”
She walked up the sidewalk, turned and made an exaggerated shrug in his direction. He grinned and gave her a very dad-like thumbs-up. Or what she assumed would be dad-like… on a normal dad, unlike hers.
She shook away that thought.
Okay, murder. She took a deep breath, puffed out her chest and stalked toward Lucky. Murder. To her surprise, she slipped into a loose-limbed confident stride.
Around her, pedestrians stepped aside to make way.
She grinned when she reached Lucky. “Whadda you know? It worked!”
“Of course it did,” Lucky said. “Just keep thinking murder while you’re flushing Seamus out.”
“When I, what the what?” Celeste stopped in her tracks.
“That’s the plan,” Lucky said. “You go in the front door and confront Seamus. I’ll hide in the alley and hit him with Scaevola’s mojo when he does a runner.”
“Why am I the one scaring him? You’re six-six with an eye patch!”
“Yeah, but you have an awesome murder strut, kid!” Lucky grinned. “It would be a shame to waste it.”
Celeste palmed her forehead. “You set me up. I’m such a sucker!”
“A sucker who is going to flush out that leprechaun, now let’s go!”
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into a Bar Part 8 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
“How do we catch a Leprechaun?” Celeste asked.
“You grasp it by the heel.” Scaevola smirked at her. “I thought everyone knew that.”
“We did know that!” Celeste waved her hands in the air.
“Was my answer unhelpful?” He tsked. “Perhaps you’re not asking the right questions.”
“How—“
“Ah! Ah!” The old wand waver interrupted her. “It’s my turn. What’s your name, girl?”
Girl. Suddenly, Kid didn’t seem like such a bad nickname. “Celeste Ingram.” She snapped.
“So, you are an Ingram.” He looked delighted with himself that his guess proved correct.
She gritted her teeth. “Is that your second question?”
“Is this yours?”
Lucky put his hand across Celeste’s body, stopping her angry retort. “We think,” he put in, speaking slowly, “that a Leprechaun wrecked my bar. We would like to question him. If you were in my place, how would you do that?”
One of Scaevola’s eyebrows rose. “Now, that is the right question. If I were you, I would find some way to trap him.” He turned to Celeste with an expectant look. “Have you made a formal study of your craft?”
She sighed internally. No wonder Lucky didn’t like Scaevola. He was being intentionally unhelpful.
But, she realized, the less he helps us, the more questions of his I’ll have to answer.
Well, two could play at this game.
“No.”
“No?”
“Is that another question?” She shot back.
Scaevola scowled.
She blinked innocently at him. “I can be just as unhelpful as you can. Or just as helpful.”
He clicked his teeth. Then abruptly nodded at her in approval. As if she’d passed some kind of test that she didn’t even know she was taking. “Very well. Assuming I give you something to trap your Leprechaun with, will you answer five questions for me? Fully and honestly?”
“Four.” She said just to show him that she was the one in control.
“Done!” Scaevola said so quickly that Celeste wondered if she should have limited the questions to three.
He turned and waved for them to follow. “You can answer them while I work. My lab is this way.”
#
“Lab” made it sound like Scaevola had test tubes and stainless steel counters. In reality, he had a kitchen. It was big and fancy, but it was still just a kitchen.
He put a copper pot on the gas Viking stove and turned the burner on. Then he poured water from the kettle into the pot and started taking down bottles from his spice cabinet.
Over his shoulder, Celeste was able to read the labels. Iron supplements, echinacea, sage, garlic and rosemary.
“Those are just health food herbs,” She said. “I could have brewed that.”
“But you didn’t.” Scaevola shot back. “My turn: Why haven’t you studied your craft?”
Here it was. “Because every time I try the simplest thing, the unlucky counter slaps me down. I tried a notice-me-not spell the other day, and it rained on me. Just me. Studying the craft isn’t worth dying over.”
Scaevola hummed at that as he threw some lavender into the pot.
“There better not be wolfsbane in whatever you’re brewing,” Lucky said.
“Please,” He scoffed as he stirred the pot. First clockwise, then counter-clockwise. “What do you take me for?”
Then he turned to Celeste. “What would you say if I told you that I fought in the Battle of Actium?”
Celeste had no idea what that was. “Okay?”
Scaevola’s brow creased as he realized that she was clueless. “The Battle of Actium? Mark Antony?”
“The musician?” Celeste asked.
“That’s Marc Anthony,” Lucky said.
“What do they teach kids in history now?” Scaevola sneered at her. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been alive for two and a half millennia.”
Celeste’s jaw dropped. “That’s . . . How? The luck kills everyone sooner or later.”
“There are ways to defer the bad luck,” he smiled mysteriously. “Third question: would you be interested in learning the things I could teach?”
She took a step back. “Why? What’s in it for you?”
“Wouldn’t it be enough that I am no longer the only wand waver in New Orange? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. It doesn’t count.” He turned off the burner and retrieved a thermos from a cabinet above the sink. Then he put a funnel into the mouth of the container and lined it with a coffee filter.
“It is very boring to live alone for as long as I have.” He poured the liquid through the strainer. “You seem like an entertaining sort of child.”
Celeste liked the idea of being able to do magic whenever she wanted. But it sounded too good to be true. “Can I think about it?”
“Certainly.” He capped the thermos and handed it to Lucky. “Throw the liquid on the leprechaun, it should fix him in place for an hour.”
“Just an hour?” Lucky asked.
“That’s an hour longer than you could hold him on your own.” Scaevola shot back.
“True.”
“You still have two questions,” Celeste said.
Scaevola’s smile made her skin crawl. “I’ll save them for later.”
Celeste followed Lucky back to the elevator without speaking. Once the doors closed and the fancy cage was once again descending to the street, she finally gave voice to her thoughts.
“You were right about one thing.”
“You don’t like him?”
“I like him about as much as a cow likes a steakhouse chef,” Celeste said.
“But you’re going to let him mentor you.” It wasn’t a question.
She leaned her hip against the brass bar of the cage and gave him a sideways look. “You think I should?”
“I would if I were you.”
“I’m not sure it’s worth it if I have to put up with that guy,” She tapped her foot. “He looks at me like I’m one of those treasures on his bookshelf.”
“Pretty sure you’re a little too annoying to keep on display next to the Ark of the Covenant,” Lucky poked her in the shoulder.
“He’s not exactly humble either.”
“I don’t think he has to be,” he said. “If he’s not a genius, then he’s nearly one.”
“He won’t miss an opportunity to tell me about it, either.”
“Which means something.”
“What?”
He put his hands on his hips. “Think about it, Kid. You don’t try to impress someone if you don’t care about their opinion.”
“He was peacocking?” She scoffed.
“Yep.” Lucky popped the P. “How much power do you have if you impressed Scaevola that much?”
Celeste shrugged. “A lot, I guess.”
“Enough to set you up here in the city?” Lucky asked.
“You trying to get rid of me, Boss?”
“Just looking out for you, Kid. My back room is no long-term plan.”
“I’m not sure putting up with that guy is any kind of long-term plan, either.”
The elevator reached the ground floor.
“In the short-term, we have a Leprechaun to catch,” Lucky said.
Celeste linked arms with him. “Lead on, MacDuck!”
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into a Bar Part 7 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
Lucky’s single-room apartment upstairs from the bar had a murphy bed that folded up into the wall to form a kitchen table. Celeste’s boss sat there nursing a steaming mug of coffee and a toaster pastry when she walked in that morning.
The words ‘Breakfast of champions, huh?’ died in her throat when he raised a single eyebrow, as if daring her to say something.
Instead, she fixed herself a cup of coffee and her own toaster pastry. Lucky might be a workaholic living in his kitchen, but at least he had a kitchen to live in. Which was more than she had at the moment.
A fact that she would do well not to point out when she was living on his charity.
“What’s the plan, Boss?” she asked him.
He made a face. “Don’t call me that, kid.”
“Kid.” Celeste sat across from him and blew on her drink. “Sure thing, Boss.” She grinned at him over the lip of the mug.
He rolled his eye, but let the comment pass. “First order of business is to replace whatever broke last night. It didn’t look like a lot, thankfully. But some of that stuff ain’t cheap. Next thing, we bolt those shelves down so they can’t go nowhere anymore.
“Then we track down Seamus and make him pay for the damages he caused.”
“That might be the hard part,” Celeste said. “Fairies, like leprechauns, aren’t exactly known for being generous.”
“How much do you know about the fair folk?” Lucky asked.
“Not as much as I probably should,” Celeste said. “The Folk back in the Ozarks pretty much kept to themselves and wanted to be left alone. I know what everyone knows about leprechauns. They’re supposed to have a pot of gold hidden somewhere, and if you catch them by the heel, you can make them give it to you.”
“That’s a literal fairy tale,” Lucky said. “No leprechaun has a pot of gold. And if they did, it would be that counterfeit fairy gold.”
He scoffed. “No, the fairies make that up because they think it’s funny when mundanes twist themselves all up trying to catch leprechauns.”
“So how do we catch this leprechaun without twisting ourselves all up?”
He looked like he’d swallowed something unpleasant. “I know a guy with the New Orange PD who might be able to help us. But you won’t like him.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I don’t like him. He’s a rich snob and he lets all of us know that he’s slumming it whenever he’s around.”
“I can hardly wait.” Celeste said.
#
“I thought we were going to the police station?” Celeste asked as she followed Lucky along the sidewalk bordering Mid-Central Park. “Why are we going to Citrus Park?”
“This guy avoids going into the police station if he can help it. We’re going to his place.” Lucky pointed to an apartment building overlooking the park.
The high-rise had a square, art-deco look with aerodynamic concrete gods peeking out from setbacks and gold-colored sunbursts erupting from the top of every window.
She followed Lucky through a set of double doors made of glass, with fan-shaped lotus frame motifs. Lucky paused at a wooden and brass desk in the lobby.
“We’re here to see Marcus Scaevola. He should be expecting us.” Lucky told the guard behind the desk.
The man handed him a key. “Use his private elevator.”
The guard pointed them to a set of sculpted brass double doors at the end of the hall.
As Lucky put the key into the slot above the buttons and waited for the elevator, Celeste stared at the blocky brass god bearing a flaming torch and fleeing before a thunderbolt.
“Private elevator? What does he do for the police?”
“He’s more what you’d call a pro-bono consultant,” Lucky said. ”Scaevola is obscenely rich. The cops just go to him for help with really weird cases.”
“Weird cases like Sherlock Holmes solves, or Wyrd cases, like Sam and Dean Winchester solve?”
The elevator doors slid open, revealing a brass cage.
Lucky pursed his lips. “The second. Leprechauns are the least of the things Marcus Scaevola knows about. Just keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking.”
They rode the elevator in tense silence. Celeste studied the floral stained-glass covering the top of the cage as they ascended. The elevator doors opened into a private foyer.
“He owns the whole top floor?” Celeste squeaked in surprise.
“He owns the whole building,” Lucky said.
The home looked like Indiana Jones could have furnished it. Sepia toned maps covered the walls and dusty artifacts were crammed between books on the many shelves lining the walls. Celeste tucked her hands behind her back to avoid the temptation to pick things up and examine them.
A tall man with close-cropped black hair and a nose so narrow she could cut silk on it walked into the room. He looked at them like they were something he’d tracked in on his shoe.
“The bartender,” he noted.
“Scaevola.” Lucky reminded Celeste of a spring coiled too tightly.
“And who is this?” Marcus Scaevola turned fathomless dark eyes on her.
Celeste had the disorienting feeling that he was looking at the back of her brain through her own eye holes. She slammed down her mental shields. Hard.
Scaevola flinched.
That was him? She felt like she’d been thrown into an icy river. He’s like me. She glared at Lucky. Thanks for the warning.
Lucky shrugged.
“Well.” Scaevola’s tone changed. “It’s been a while since I’ve met a fellow wand waver. Where are you from?”
“Around.” Celeste crossed her arms. “We’re not here about that.”
He smiled like he was enjoying a private joke. “Somewhere in the South. Closer to the Midwest than the coast. That would make you some relation to the Ingrams.”
Celeste froze. Then she forced her posture to loosen. The number of wand wavers out there was miniscule. Her Maw-Maw had always told her that. An obvious scholar like this Scaevola guy would probably know the family names of all the old families.
“Some,” she allowed. “We need information on a leprechaun.”
Scaevola stared at her like he was reading her story in her threadbare jeans, worn boots and southern accent. Given his association with the police, he probably was.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I will answer your questions if you answer mine.”
Celeste glanced at Lucky in uncertainty.
The werewolf shrugged. “Up to you, kid.”
She grit her teeth. She wanted nothing to do with other wand wavers lest she draw unwanted collateral damage from his spellwork.
On the other hand, Lucky needed this information.
“Fine!” She ground out. “But we ask the first question.”
“If you want,” Scaevola purred.
The post A Wizard Walks Into a Bar Part 6 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
She put it from her mind, pasted her friendly barmaid smile on her face and crossed the room to the centaurs. Both of them were built like draft horses but with thick, barreled human torsos. One wore a buttoned tuxedo shirt. His rolled-up sleeves revealed muscular forearms. He also wore a loose bow tie and an open red vest. The other was dressed in half of a rumpled police uniform. She wondered what the one dressed like a wedding caterer did for a living.
“Howdy, Fellas! Y’all order these?”
“Howdy? Who do you think you are? Will Rogers?” The uniformed centaur asked.
“Well, I am from that part of the country.” Celeste deflected as she sat the drinks on the table. “What about you two? You’re obviously with the police.” She pointed to the uniform. “But what about you? Are you a waiter?” She addressed the other centaur.
The cop centaur brayed in laughter. “Do you hear that, Ed? The kid wants to know if you’re a waiter!”
Celeste sighed to herself. She was getting really tired of people calling her kid.
“I work for the Mid-Central Park Carriage Company.” The Centaur Ed clipped his words as he frowned into his pitcher.
“Sorry!” She winced. There went her tip. “Are you the mascot, or something?”
He glared at her. “How about you go bother someone else?”
She held up her hands and backed away.
Lucky was standing in nearly the same spot at the counter that he had been at this morning when she’d met him, polishing the counter again. He craned his neck to see over her shoulder at the centaurs.
“I don’t think I made a good impression,” she reported.
“I”ll say. What happened?”
“I asked the not-cop one what he did for a living.”
“That’s Edward Pinado. But everyone calls him Mr. Ed. It stopped being funny after the first time, but there you go. He owns a carriage company in Mid-Central Park. They’re sub-contracted through the parks department.”
Celeste groaned, slapping a hand over her eyes. “I asked if he was the company mascot.”
“His hooves are the size of sewer grates. You’re lucky he didn’t kick you all the way back to Arkansas.
“Yes, thank you! So helpful!”
Lucky patted her shoulder in reassurance. “You can apologize later when he’s relaxed a little. Ed is always uptight at the start of the night. Centaurs wear glamour when they work. It makes them look like men on horseback, but it gives them a killer migraine.”
“No wonder he was grumpy,” Celeste said.
Then the bell rang as another patron walked through the door – this one, a leprechaun.
“Turn right back around and walk out of here, Seamus!” Lucky yelled at the leprechaun.
It looked left and right, then pointed at itself as if to say ‘who, me?’
“Yeah, you!” Lucky stabbed the air with his pointer finger, as if he were mentally stabbing the fae creature through the heart. “Every time you come in here, you try to pass me a counterfeit bill. Find some other bar to pedal your fairie money at!”
The leprechaun Seamus replied with a lewd gesture, then turned and slammed the door as he left.
The rest of the night passed uneventfully in a blur of serving patrons and cleaning up after them. Before Celeste knew it, she was elbow-deep in a sink of dirty glassware as Lucky proclaimed last call. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Ed down his last swallow of drink and then put a battered tophat on his head at an angle.
“The new girl is a sweet kid, Lucky,” Ed slurred. “Even if she don’t know nothing bout us.” He stumbled to his feet, leaning heavily on his centaur cop friend, and pointed at Celeste.
“If this old wolf don’t hire you, you can come work for me!”
Lucky put his shoulder under Ed’s other arm until he got his knees fully under himself and rose to his full height. The tophat fell off, and his head brushed the ceiling beams.
The werewolf picked up the hat and handed it back to Ed. “How’s she going to work for you, Ed?” He asked, a half-smile on his face. “She can’t pull a carriage, and I don’t think you want to buy a horse.”
Ed blinked in confusion. “Oh, y’r right. That won’t work.”
“Don’t worry about her.” Lucky took Ed’s forearm and steered him around the tables and toward the exit. “I think she’ll work out just fine.”
The centaur weaved unsteadily on his feet, knocking chairs askew as he moved to the exit.
“Let me call you a Trailer.”
“Thank you,” Ed hiccuped. He paused on the threshold of the door while Lucky fished his phone from his pocket. “Good kid,” he muttered again.
Then Lucky took him outside.
Celeste finished the glasses, waving to various patrons as they left. Then she picked up a serving tray and went from table to table gathering up trash, empty bottles and dirty glasses, while pocketing the cash left for tips.
To her satisfaction, she’d been left more than Lucky predicted. Though not as much as it could have been, she had faith that the tips would grow as people got to know her.
After a while, Lucky returned, closing and locking the door behind him and turning off the light.
“What’s Trailer?” Celeste asked.
“It’s like Uber for Centaurs.”
“And I’ll work out just fine, huh?” She grinned at him from where she stood drying the last of the glasses and putting them away.
He smirked at her. “Yeah, kid. You did fine.” He opened his mouth to say more, but a loud, gurgling sound interrupted him. He looked at Celeste with concern.
“That’s the sound I heard when I was down in the basement earlier,” Celeste said. “It was coming from behind that locked door.”
“It better not be the sewer backing up,” He growled as he turned toward the door to the back.
“That seems like a health code violation,” Celeste put down her drying rag and followed him. “Wouldn’t you be shut down for something like that?
“The sewer tunnels are a long way from the basement,” Lucky said as he wrenched open the door to the basement and stepped inside. “There hasn’t been a backup since the storm in ‘38. And the sewer was backing up into the streets then. A real pain in the—“
Celeste stood on her toes to look over his shoulder. The basement looked like the aftermath of an earthquake, not a backed up sewer. The shelves had tipped like dominoes, spilling their contents across the floor. Some of the cases of liquor had split open. A few bottles were broken.
Lucky turned to her, a suspicious look on his face.
She put her hands up. “This wasn’t me!”
“How do you know?” He growled.
“I was upstairs! Whatever caused this, it was out of my personal bad karma radius! And besides, if it had been me, it would have been so much worse!”
“So what happened?” Lucky asked. He vaulted over the rail and dropped to the basement floor as casually as a child jumping through mud puddles.
Celeste hurried down the steps. Under the stairs, she could see that the door had been violently pushed out from the tunnel side.
“Something really wanted to get in here.”
“Yeah,” Lucky picked up a big green bottle of champagne. Bubbly liquid spilled out of the top. “Most of these bottles are fine. They make ‘em sturdy. But a few of these,” he looked in disgust at the drink. “It takes a lot to get them to pop their corks. Especially because they wire them on.”
“The door must have knocked the shelves over when it blew inward,” she said. What could do that?”
Lucky’s eyes narrowed. “Seamus!”
“The leprechaun from earlier?” Celeste wondered. “You think this was revenge for throwing him out?”
“He is a fae,” Lucky said. “This is in line with the kind of petty revenge those guys like to play.”
Celeste didn’t know a lot about fairies. Things in France and the British Isles were tense right now due to The Changeling Accords, and there was some talk of war. But countries on this side of the ocean were doing their best to stay out of it.
She knew that the good fairies were supposed to be seelie and the bad fairies were supposed to be unseelie, but both liked to pull pranks. So Lucky had a point; something like this could be the work of the leprechaun from earlier.
“What are we going to do?” She asked Lucky. “We?” He gave her a sideways look.
“Yeah, we,” Celeste said. “I work here now. This is my problem, too.”
The werewolf grinned, crinkling the corner of his eye. “Alright, then. Go get a broom and start sweeping up the glass. I’m going to put that door back on.”
His face took on a hungry expression. “Tomorrow, we’ll go have a talk with Seamus.”
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into A Bar Part 5 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
From behind the bar, Lucky pursed his lips when Celeste squelched her way through the front door.
“What happened to you?” He asked.
“I got caught in the rain,” Celeste spread her hands as if the answer should be obvious.
“Rain?” Lucky looked out the front windows at the cloudless sky. “What rain?”
“And yet here I am, soaking wet.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“What?” Celeste snapped back, hands moving to her hips. “You don’t think I dragged myself backwards through a fountain for kicks and giggles, do you?”
“You used magic, and that happened,” he surmised with a whistle. “You weren’t kidding about magic being dangerous to use.”
“No, I was not kidding.” Celeste said with a mirthless laugh.
Lucky threw her a bar towel. “Here. Clean yourself up, then come help me restock the shelves while there’s a lull in customers. Your trial starts when you get back.”
While toweling off her hair, Celeste crossed to the door at the end of the counter. She entered the back room, passing the stairs that led up to the apartment that Lucky lived in over the bar, then passed the steps that led to the basement stockroom. At first glance, there seemed to be nothing else back here except a solid brick wall. But when she kicked a certain wall brick – one row up and three over from the brick with the yellow paint drip on it – a section of the wall swung inward.
Lucky said that the room on the other side was an old rotgut room from prohibition. Now it was storage for broken furniture. A warped pool table with ripped green flannel and busted pockets took up most of the room. On it lay dusty chair pieces. In front of all this sat a moth-eaten futon.
This was where Lucky usually put drunks to sleep off the effects of the alcohol. It smelled like sour laundry, but at least it wasn’t riddled with bed bugs. In Celeste’s opinion, it was a step up in the world.
She hooked her duffle from beneath the bed with her toe, put it on the mattress and dug out a change of clothes. Once she was changed, she spread her wet things over the broken chairs to dry.
Then she pulled her damp hair into a ponytail. She left the bag open on the mattress and returned to the front.
Lucky nodded in approval at her speedy return. “Where’d you go today? Sightseeing?”
“I wish,” she said ruefully. “If I had gone sightseeing, I would have had a better time.” As the two of them worked together, replacing empty bottles on shelves, she recounted her failed attempt at getting her foot in the door at the local newspaper.
“Sounds like you were trying to run before you could crawl,” Lucky said.
“Showing up and asking for work got me this job,” Celeste said.
“Yeah, but I’m not exactly awash with applicants,” Lucky said. “I bet the editor of the New Orange Register has his pick of eager little Lois Lanes and Jimmy Olsens. He’s not looking for Daisy Mae from Dogpatch.”
“As a matter of fact, I am from Dogpatch,” Celeste said.
“There’s an actual Dogpatch?” Lucky blinked his eye.
“They named the town after the comic strip,” Celeste said.
Lucky shook his head. “I had a point.”
“I’m listening.”
“You need to jump through hoops if you want a professional job like that. So maybe you should figure out what those hoops are. And – I haven’t hired you yet. This is just a trial.”
Celeste refrained from observing that Lucky was showing a lot of concern for someone he was on the fence about hiring.
Once the shelves were filled, she put clean glasses under the counter while he hooked up fresh kegs to the taps. Then she picked up a broom,swept the floors and straightened chairs. She had just put the broom away when the bell over the door announced a patron.
She turned to see four guys in NOPD uniforms walk in. They stopped, sniffed the air and turned as one to stare her down.
“Lucky? There’s a kid in here!” The guy in front grinned at her, showing elongated canines. “Are you lost, little girl?”
Their ugly laughter surrounded her like choking, poisonous smoke. ‘Werewolf cops, great.’ Celeste thought. She lifted her chin. This was the test, right here. If she backed down or let Lucky handle the confrontation, none of his patrons would respect her and he wouldn’t be able to hire her.
On the other hand, she couldn’t just punch a cop because he was being a bully. Once you get a reputation as a cop-puncher, no cop would ever cut you a break.
Shutting her eyes, she pulled the magic up from within, picturing lighting, like the kind her poor luck had sent crackling across the sky earlier today. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck and arms stood up.
Around her, the cruel laughter trailed off, leaving uncertain silence behind.
Celeste opened her eyes, knowing that they’d shifted from chocolate brown to a black so dark the pupils were lost.
“I’m right where I should be,” she said quietly. The power caused her voice to slither into their ears and hiss at them like a spitting cobra. She pushed past them and took up a position behind the counter before letting the collected power slide back down where it belonged.
“That was . . . unsettling,” Lucky said.
“Good,” Celeste said as she started putting bottled drinks into a mini-fridge below the bar that they had somehow missed earlier. “I was aiming for unsettling. Think it worked?”
Lucky studied the officers as they drifted over to a corner booth. They took turns glancing her way.
“Yeah, I’ve never seen Morty or his bunch cautious like that,” Lucky said. “You did good, kid. You let them know that you weren’t someone to be messed with. And you did it without challenging any of them. I’ll have to answer a question or two, but they’ll leave you alone.”
He looked thoughtful. “Is it going to rain again because you used magic?”
“I hope not, since that was a really minor use of power.” Celeste looked up. Right then, a bottle that she was holding by the cap uncapped itself, fell and shattered on the floor in a spray of foam. The other eleven bottles in the pack shook, then the caps exploded in a fountain of liquid.
She sighed, shoulders sagging. “I’ll pay for that.”
“I got it,” Lucky said. “You run down to the stockroom and bring up a pack of towels and another case of beer.
Celeste grabbed another towel to wipe down her hair for a second time that day as she walked toward the door.
“And kid!” Lucky called out.
“Yeah?” She looked over her shoulder from under the towel.
“Stop using magic!”
“I’m doing my best!” She shouted back over her shoulder as she passed through the door at the end of the bar. As much as she hated to admit being wrong about anything, Lucky had a point. She’d been using tiny bits of magic for convenience sake over the past few days, and justifying it.
Could she have found another way to warn off those bullies in the bar? Probably, if she’d given it more than a half-second thought. But why be creative when magic was so convenient, and right there for her to use.
Which was the trap that every one of her very dead ancestors had fallen into.
She took extra care in descending the stairs down to the stockroom. The beer bottles spontaneously exploding right in front of her were dramatic enough that her bad luck had likely run its course for now.
Maybe.
Probably.
Inside the stockroom, the temperature dropped far enough to raise goose flesh across her arms. She turned on the lights, and rubbed her biceps to put warmth back into them. She’d wondered why Lucky put his supplies in a basement when it meant lugging heavy crates up and down stairs. At the time, it hadn’t made sense when the old speakeasy turned junk room was right there at the back of the first floor. But the basement storage was less of a basement and more of an ice house.
Metal utility shelves lined the walls and stood doubled in rows across the open floor. Some held crates of alcohol, while others held cleaning supplies, glassware and enough paper towels and toilet paper to supply half of New Orange.
“I guess Lucky caused the paper shortage,” Celeste muttered.
Now where were those bar towels? She stepped around the nearest set of free-standing shelves and spotted a giant cage with a padlock in the far corner of the room.
Celeste stared at the cage.
She inhaled slowly. Then exhaled.
Okay.
There was a rational explanation for Hannibal Lecter’s vacation home. Lucky had to go somewhere during the full moon. This was probably it.
Right. She’d just find the bar towels, a case of beer and hurry back upstairs.
With one last look at the cage, she returned to searching for the bar towels. She found them on a shelf behind the stairs. She grabbed a wrapped pack, threw them on top of a box of beer bottles and pulled the box to her chest.
She forced herself to walk slowly toward the stairs. There was no need to hurry, because there was nothing to be afraid of down here.
Absolutely nothing.
And anyway, everyone was upstairs waiting for her to return with the towels and the beer.
But if her stride was slightly longer than normal, there was no one down here to see it, was there?
Just as she reached the steps, a weird noise issued from somewhere underneath the stairs.
Celeste froze.
There it was again. Some kind of liquid growl, like water being forced down a giant pipe. She backed off the steps, and shuffled to the left. Still in range to run for it, but now at the proper angle to see under the steps.
There was an old door there, like something from her Grandma’s house. One of those old wooden things with a glass doorknob and ten layers of lead paint on it. It was probably painted shut. Even if there hadn’t been a padlock the size of her head bolted on over the knob, Celeste doubted she’d be able to open it.
The gurgle-growl sounded out from behind the door again; louder now.
“Nope!” Celeste said. She marched double-time up the stairs with the box and kicked the door closed behind her.
“Lucky!” She called out. Then she ran through the door back into the bar. “Lucky!”
He turned. Behind him, sitting at the counter was The Headless Horseman.
Celeste stopped. All thought about whatever was in the basement of doom vanished. Because right there was The. Headless. Horseman.
He leaned on one elbow, arm draped casually across the counter with fingers tapping out a tune only he could hear. His head rested on the counter by his elbow. He had a beer stein in front of him with a green crazy straw inserted in it. The straw looped and coiled around the stein, ending at mouth-height for the head. The head glanced her way and seemed to dismiss her before it looked away again.
“You were down there a while,” Lucky said. “Did you find everything?”
”That’s The Headless Horseman!” Celeste squeaked.
Lucky took the crate from her and put it on the bar. Then he pulled her aside, getting between her and the counter where The Headless Horseman sat.
“Leave him alone, kid. And don’t ask for his autograph. He comes down from Tarrytown because he can drink here in peace. That’s all he really wants: To be left alone.”
”How does he drink?” Celeste rose up on her toes. To look over Lucky’s shoulder at The Headless Horseman.
“With his mouth.” Lucky said in a flat tone. “It ends up in his stomach somehow, even though the head and neck aren’t connected anymore.”
“Ohh, it’s not attached, but it’s connected,” Celeste said. “There’s a difference.”
”This is hinky magic mumbo-jumbo, isn’t it?” He raised an eyebrow even as he titled his head down to catch her gaze.
“Think of it this way: a cell phone is connected, but a land line is attached.”
”Biology is not supposed to work that way,” Lucky grumbled.
“Says the man who turns into a wolf once a month,” Celeste said with a grin. “Think he’d give me an autograph?”
“Don’t scare away my customers, kid.” Lucky turned to retrieve two pitchers and handed them to her. “Take these to the centaurs in the corner.”
“A pitcher for each centaur?” She asked to clarify.
“Yeah, they drink like horses. Well, not literally. Otherwise I’d be serving them with buckets.”
“Before I go —” Now that the subject of a local headless celebrity casually having a drink at the counter was past, Celeste remembered that she had come up here with a topic to discuss. “There was some kind of weird noise coming from the door under the stairs. The one with the padlock on it that’s bigger than the padlock on the cage.”
“That’s an old smuggler’s tunnel from the war of 1776,” Lucky said. “It connects to the sewers now. If you heard a noise, it’s probably from that.”
”Like a sewer gator or something?” Celeste asked.
He gave her an unimpressed look. “Clearly you haven’t lived through a New Orange winter. It’s too cold for alligators. There are some rats the size of baby hippos down there.”
“Is that why you need a padlock?”
Lucky crossed his arms. “No, the padlock is because I store a lot of expensive alcohol downstairs and I don’t want it walking off.”
“Fair enough,” Celeste hoisted the pitchers higher. Working here was definitely going to build up her biceps.
As she crossed the room, she heard Lucky mutter to himself. “Sewer gators.” He laughed.
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into A Bar Part 4 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
From behind the bar, Lucky pursed his lips when Celeste squelched her way through the front door.
“What happened to you?” He asked.
“I got caught in the rain,” Celeste spread her hands as if the answer should be obvious.
“Rain?” Lucky looked out the front windows at the cloudless sky. “What rain?”
“And yet here I am, soaking wet.”
He narrowed his eyes at her.
“What?” Celeste snapped back, hands moving to her hips. “You don’t think I dragged myself backwards through a fountain for kicks and giggles, do you?”
“You used magic, and that happened,” he surmised with a whistle. “You weren’t kidding about magic being dangerous to use.”
“No, I was not kidding.” Celeste said with a mirthless laugh.
Lucky threw her a bar towel. “Here. Clean yourself up, then come help me restock the shelves while there’s a lull in customers. Your trial starts when you get back.”
While toweling off her hair, Celeste crossed to the door at the end of the counter. She entered the back room, passing the stairs that led up to the apartment that Lucky lived in over the bar, then passed the steps that led to the basement stockroom. At first glance, there seemed to be nothing else back here except a solid brick wall. But when she kicked a certain wall brick – one row up and three over from the brick with the yellow paint drip on it – a section of the wall swung inward.
Lucky said that the room on the other side was an old rotgut room from prohibition. Now it was storage for broken furniture. A warped pool table with ripped green flannel and busted pockets took up most of the room. On it lay dusty chair pieces. In front of all this sat a moth-eaten futon.
This was where Lucky usually put drunks to sleep off the effects of the alcohol. It smelled like sour laundry, but at least it wasn’t riddled with bed bugs. In Celeste’s opinion, it was a step up in the world.
She hooked her duffle from beneath the bed with her toe, put it on the mattress and dug out a change of clothes. Once she was changed, she spread her wet things over the broken chairs to dry.
Then she pulled her damp hair into a ponytail. She left the bag open on the mattress and returned to the front.
Lucky nodded in approval at her speedy return. “Where’d you go today? Sightseeing?”
“I wish,” she said ruefully. “If I had gone sightseeing, I would have had a better time.” As the two of them worked together, replacing empty bottles on shelves, she recounted her failed attempt at getting her foot in the door at the local newspaper.
“Sounds like you were trying to run before you could crawl,” Lucky said.
“Showing up and asking for work got me this job,” Celeste said.
“Yeah, but I’m not exactly awash with applicants,” Lucky said. “I bet the editor of the New Orange Register has his pick of eager little Lois Lanes and Jimmy Olsens. He’s not looking for Daisy Mae from Dogpatch.”
“As a matter of fact, I am from Dogpatch,” Celeste said.
“There’s an actual Dogpatch?” Lucky blinked his eye.
“They named the town after the comic strip,” Celeste said.
Lucky shook his head. “I had a point.”
“I’m listening.”
“You need to jump through hoops if you want a professional job like that. So maybe you should figure out what those hoops are. And – I haven’t hired you yet. This is just a trial.”
Celeste refrained from observing that Lucky was showing a lot of concern for someone he was on the fence about hiring.
Once the shelves were filled, she put clean glasses under the counter while he hooked up fresh kegs to the taps. Then she picked up a broom,swept the floors and straightened chairs. She had just put the broom away when the bell over the door announced a patron.
She turned to see four guys in NOPD uniforms walk in. They stopped, sniffed the air and turned as one to stare her down.
“Lucky? There’s a kid in here!” The guy in front grinned at her, showing elongated canines. “Are you lost, little girl?”
Their ugly laughter surrounded her like choking, poisonous smoke. ‘Werewolf cops, great.’ Celeste thought. She lifted her chin. This was the test, right here. If she backed down or let Lucky handle the confrontation, none of his patrons would respect her and he wouldn’t be able to hire her.
On the other hand, she couldn’t just punch a cop because he was being a bully. Once you get a reputation as a cop-puncher, no cop would ever cut you a break.
Shutting her eyes, she pulled the magic up from within, picturing lighting, like the kind her poor luck had sent crackling across the sky earlier today. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck and arms stood up.
Around her, the cruel laughter trailed off, leaving uncertain silence behind.
Celeste opened her eyes, knowing that they’d shifted from chocolate brown to a black so dark the pupils were lost.
“I’m right where I should be,” she said quietly. The power caused her voice to slither into their ears and hiss at them like a spitting cobra. She pushed past them and took up a position behind the counter before letting the collected power slide back down where it belonged.
“That was . . . unsettling,” Lucky said.
“Good,” Celeste said as she started putting bottled drinks into a mini-fridge below the bar that they had somehow missed earlier. “I was aiming for unsettling. Think it worked?”
Lucky studied the officers as they drifted over to a corner booth. They took turns glancing her way.
“Yeah, I’ve never seen Morty or his bunch cautious like that,” Lucky said. “You did good, kid. You let them know that you weren’t someone to be messed with. And you did it without challenging any of them. I’ll have to answer a question or two, but they’ll leave you alone.”
He looked thoughtful. “Is it going to rain again because you used magic?”
“I hope not, since that was a really minor use of power.” Celeste looked up. Right then, a bottle that she was holding by the cap uncapped itself, fell and shattered on the floor in a spray of foam. The other eleven bottles in the pack shook, then the caps exploded in a fountain of liquid.
She sighed, shoulders sagging. “I’ll pay for that.”
“I got it,” Lucky said. “You run down to the stockroom and bring up a pack of towels and another case of beer.
Celeste grabbed another towel to wipe down her hair for a second time that day as she walked toward the door.
“And kid!” Lucky called out.
“Yeah?” She looked over her shoulder from under the towel.
“Stop using magic!”
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into A Bar Part 3 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
Celeste hugged her folder closer to herself as the receptionist standing behind the rose marble counter gave her a plastic smile.
“I’m sorry,” Receptionist Barbie said to her in a sing-song voice. “But Mr. Turley is very busy. You’ll need to make an appointment.”
Celeste matched the perfunctory smile. “I’d love to make an appointment. Who do I need to speak with?”
Barbie passed her a business card: a simple white cardstock rectangle with the logo of the New Orange Register in the center; green letters bracketing an orange.
The smaller letters on the lower edge of the card were embossed in the same shade of green with: Joe Turley, Managing Editor, New Orange Register
Before Barbie could say another word, the phone rang. She held up a manicured finger to indicate that Celeste would have to wait to continue the conversation. Then she picked up the phone. “New Orange Register, how can I help you? . . . Yes, we do have a classified section. . . Yes, you can place an ad.”
While the receptionist was distracted, Celeste backed away. The rest of the lobby was covered in the same rose marble as the reception desk that ran the length of the room. A bank of elevators stood at one end, and the entrance at the other.
In order to speak with Joe Turley, she’d need to find her way to the newsroom, either by use of the elevators or the stairs behind the Barbie Dream Desk.
Once she was out of the woman’s direct line of sight, she thought hard about not being noticed.
Celeste had always been able to make little things happen just by wanting them really hard. It was like the power wanted to obey her. The difficult thing was having the power and not using it.
Even now, she knew that just making herself unnoticeable would lead to trouble down the road. Magic always came with a karmic price. Maybe she would twist an ankle on the stairs or be splashed by a taxi in the street. Or maybe she would just get hit by a car and that would be the predictable end of yet another wand waver.
But the key to her dream was somewhere up in the newsroom. How could she not take that chance?
She slipped past Barbie and up the stairs, being careful with every step so that she didn’t slip and fall.
The newsroom had an open floor plan. Desks were pushed together in little islands around the room. A big television mounted on one wall had the 24 hour news playing, muted with captions scrolling. One reporter sat hunched over her computer while another leaned back with his feet on the corner of their station, a phone wedged between their ear and shoulder.
Celeste leaned against a wall on the landing, cataloging the room like an anthropologist. The sports department must be in the corner by the file cabinet with the fat old tv straight from 1998 on top of it. The photography department looked like it was in the other corner. One computer there had a makeshift shade of posterboard taped onto the top of the screen and a digital camera sitting on the desk next to it. A couple of framed photographs were up on the wall behind that station.
An actual glass-sided cubicle sat off to one side, like a fish tank. Gold leaf lettering on the door should have read: Joe Turley, Managing Editor. But someone had taken sticky notes and a marker so that the signage read was: Managing To Edit.
Celeste smiled wryly at that.
A pair of feet, wearing men’s dress shoes, rose into her sight from behind the desk.
Celeste blinked, then squinted. A pair of khaki slacks were drooping down around the ankles, revealing skinny black dress socks.
She moved in closer for a better look. Through the wall of the aquarium she could see a man lying on his back on the floor. Joe Turley, she assumed.
‘ Clearly a very busy man.’
She stopped wishing to be invisible and opened the door to the office.
“Are you okay?”
The man rolled to his feet, a sheepish expression on his face. “It’s supposed to help with blood pressure.” He frowned at her, as if trying to place her. “Who are you?”
“Celeste Ingram,” she smiled confidently at him. “I was told to make an appointment.”
“So why didn’t you?” Joe Turley snapped back.
“We can do that now? Unless you want to wait for me to call you in five minutes?” Celeste bounced on her toes.
He opened a book on his desk and clicked a pen. “About?”
“I’m a freelancer, new to the area. Looking to get my foot in the door. Celeste Ingram,” she repeated out of nerves.
“Celeste Ingram, so you said twice.” He muttered as he wrote in his appointment book. Then he put down his pen and gave her an appraising look. “You’re bold, I’ll give you that. What’s your J-school?”
Celeste felt her heart sink. This would be where the bad luck kicked in. Just like with Lucky earlier, Joe thought she was a kid.
“I’m from Arkansas?” She stammered. That wasn’t a lie.
“Is that a question?” Joe asked.
“Nope.” Celeste said, injecting false confidence into the statement. She concluded with an ear-to-ear smile, like a visual exclamation mark.
The managing editor pointed at her chest. “Is that your résumé?”
For half a moment, she was confused. Was he pointing at her boobs? She was kind of flat-chested so she wouldn’t exactly call them a résumé. But she might call human resources over harassment. Then she remembered that she’d been hugging a folder of her clips to her chest all this time.
“It’s my string book.” She held it out to him with the care of a first time mother handing off an infant. “Everything I’ve written over the years.”
“Stringbook?” He scoffed as he took the proffered portfolio. “That’s a word I haven’t heard since my college days. A word of advice: call it a portfolio. You’re not in flyover country anymore. You need to present yourself as a professional.” He gave her clothing a pointed once over.
Celeste grasped her elbows with her hands and tapped her left heel with the toe of her right work boot. The minutes seemed to drag like hours as the only sound was that of Joe paging through her portfolio. At last, he folded it up and placed it on his desk.
He stared at the clock over her head while rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “This is your only copy of your work, isn’t it?”
“No!” Yes.
He sighed. “You’ve got talent, but you’ve also got a lot to learn.” He pointed to her clips, and made a shoeing motion. “Take some college writing classes, Celeste Ingram. Work on a student publication and get an internship or two under your belt. Then come see me. You don’t have enough experience right now. And there are people who get paid to teach this kind of thing.”
Celeste’s eyes felt hot and itchy. She snatched up the clip file and whirled around to the door. Her throat was closing up now. She needed to get out of here before the tears fell.
“Hey!” Joe called out.
She stopped in the doorway, head down so the few reporters out in the newsroom also wouldn’t see her ugly cry.
“Next time, clean up your portfolio,” Joe said in a kind tone. “You’ve brought me fifty loose photocopies of your stories. I’d rather have a résumé and a website where I can see three or four examples of your best work online. And try wearing a pants suit. You look like you wandered in from a construction site.”
With a half turn, she swiped the tears from her eyes. “What makes you think I’ll be back?”
She winced at the way her voice sounded like she’d been gargling rocks.
The corner of his mouth turned up in a lopsided smile. “I don’t talk to randos off the street, and the front desk knows it. You were brazen enough to sneak up here. That kind of initiative can take you far in this business. I respect it, even if I can’t hire you. Come back when you’re ready.”
Celeste shook her head. She turned again, intent on running for the stairs, only to see that she’d become the focus of the few reporters in the newsroom. If she ran now, she’d just look like a silly kid. Instead she lifted her chin and walked toward the stairs as if she’d gotten exactly what she wanted out of this interview.
When she reached the lobby, she did run past Receptionist Barbie to reach the street out front.
“Hey! What are you doing back there? You’re not supposed to be there!” The receptionist yelled after her, but she was already at the door. She flapped her right hand over her left shoulder while slamming into the crossbar and pushing the glass door open.
Well that didn’t go the way I thought it would!
With hindsight, she could see that Joe was right about working on her presentation. She looked like a hick right off the farm. No wonder he thought she needed some polish.
She would be back. Somehow, she’d get a job there. He had said that she had potential, after all.
What she didn’t have was money for college, so she’d have to find another way to get her foot in the door. But first, she needed to get back to Lucky’s and work on keeping the job she did have.
Suddenly lighting forked across the sky. Thunder rolled like a drum sound off the canyon-like walls of the skyscrapers.
“Oh come on!” Celeste squinted up at the sky. It wasn’t supposed to rain today.
As if the mere thought had pushed her luck too far, the sky opened up and water came down in sheets.
She covered her head with her denim jacket and ran for the bus stop, where even now the bus was pulling away, leaving her to huddle under the bus stop awning with a river of runoff already sluicing down her back.
I just had to push my luck.
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into A Bar Part 2 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
There was a werewolf behind the bar.
Celeste Ingram knew it. He had to be a werewolf! Why else would he look like a shaved yeti?
When he bothered glancing up from polishing the counter, she could see that he also had an eyepatch.
“High school is four blocks down from here,” he said without looking up. He had the kind of English accent that put her in mind of someone swinging from the main mast with a cutlass in their teeth or a parrot on their shoulder. The eyepatch only reinforced her mental picture.
Celeste shook off the image and looked around. She was the only other person here, and therefore probably the one he was talking to. Unless he really liked talking to his bar rag.
He assumed she was a lost high schooler. Not the impression she wanted to give.
The bar had a homey, neighborhood pub kind of vibe. Like it was the sort of place where the bartender would know you by name, have your favorite drink at the ready the moment you sat down and ask you about your job, your mother and if your daughter’s wedding went off without a hitch.
A layer of grime covered everything. But it was respectable grime, not dirt. The kind that sets up like concrete when a place has been around an extremely long time. Though the windows were clean, the ancient film coating them filtered the noonday sun to a soft twilight glow. The neon sign hanging in the window on the right advertised that the bar was called Lucky’s.
Pendant lights with shabby green shades created pools of illumination over high maple and brass tables that smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and wood polish. A battered pool table sat in one corner of the room.
The mirrored wall behind the bar made the room look bigger than it was. Shelves of alcohol, lit from below, glowed in pastel hues, like potions from a movie wizard’s workshop. The werewolf had mounted a television over the shelves. The sound was off, but it was broadcasting sportsball of some kind.
A scarred dartboard hung in a cabinet at the end of the counter.
“Are you Lucky?” She tried to pull his attention from his cleaning.
He looked up again. “You still here, kid?”
“I’m looking for work, actually,” Celeste drawled, pointing to herself. “Celeste Ingram. Nice to meet you.”
Lucky paused, then went back to his task. “Try the McDonalds two blocks over.”
Not promising, but she thought she had a way to change his mind. She tucked her hands in the pockets of her worn out jeans and leaned against the doorframe. “Full moon’s next week. You need someone to work that night, or do you just shut the bar down?”
He went very still; not still like a rabbit trying to hide from a hawk, but still like a cat deciding if it is going to pounce on a mouse. Every hair stood up on the back of Celeste’s neck.
“Why would you say that?” He asked slowly, his voice sounded like a gravel truck downshifting on a hillside.
“I used to work at a roadhouse owned by a couple of weres back home. Mostly I filled in on full moon nights.” She was a little proud that her voice remained nonchalant even though her knees felt like jelly. She hadn’t moved from the doorway, in case she needed to bail.
He really looked up at her this time. His eye was brown with a gold ring around the edge. “How old are you? Sixteen?”
“Twenty two,” Celeste snapped. “But I’ve been bartending since I was eighteen.”
He blinked at her. Then his eye narrowed. “I believe that,” he said at last. “You sound like you’re from Alabama.”
“Arkansas, actually.”
“There are werewolf bars in Arkansas?” He tossed the rag down and leaned on the counter.
“Ozark mountains,” Celeste said. “Plenty of nice, private woodland for a werewolf to live in peace and quiet if they want.”
“Huh.” He made a thoughtful rumbling sound as his jaw worked from side to side. Then he nodded to himself and opened the little half-door to let her behind the bar. “Okay Arkansas, show me what you got.”
Celeste hid her grin as she wove between tables, crossed behind him and studied the displayed bottles. “What do you want?”
“How about a Bee’s Knees?”
Triumph caused little bubbles of happiness to fizz in her veins. The euphoria made her feel bolder than she might have felt otherwise. She knew how to make this one.
“Wow, you’re really reaching back into the past there, Gatsby,” she snarked at him. “Do you happen to have honey syrup, or do you expect me to make some?”
His grumpy frown lifted at the corners, as if he was fighting back a smile at being sassed by a kid. He pointed to a bottle full of amber liquid on one of the mirrored shelves. “If you want to work here, you have to make classic drinks for old werewolves. The Bee’s Knees was popular during prohibition.”
She grabbed the syrup as well as a bottle of gin, then opened the cooler and pulled out a lemon. “Where I’m from, moonshine was more popular during that era. Still is in some parts.”
Finally, she retrieved a shaker from the sink. While she worked, the werewolf continued to talk about the pub.
“This tavern dates back to the founding of New Orange City, when it was a little port town known as New Amsterdam,” he told her. “Some of my patrons were here then. They like things like rum punch. You’d have to learn to make that.”
“Any tiki bar owner could tell you how to make rum punch.” Celeste scoffed. “Were you here way back in ye olden times?”
He chuckled at that. “How old do you think I am, kid?”
“Supernatural folk don’t age like human kind,” Celeste grinned over her shoulder while she measured out the gin.
“Fair point,” he said.
“Not going to answer?”
“You’re a nosy kid.”
“I’m a reporter,” Celeste said.
Lucky crossed his arms. “Then why are you here, begging for work?”
“I’m kind of new to the area, and I haven’t made any contacts with the local papers.”
“Well, if walking into a place and demanding a job is your usual practice, I can see why.” He sounded bemused.
“Cute.” She peeled a strip of rind away from the lemon with a zesting tool. Then she sliced the lemon in half and squeezed the juice into the shaker.
“New to the area, huh?” Lucky prodded.
“I was trying to get as far away from home as I could with a bus ticket. It was New Orange or Yerba Buena. The coin came up tails, so here I am.”
His jaw dropped. “You came here because a quarter told you to?”
It was a penny. And she had to borrow it from the ticket man, but she didn’t want him to know how much she really needed a job.
“No,” she scoffed. “I don’t have much luck with coin flips. So I did the opposite of what the coin said to do.” She measured out the syrup and alcohol. Then put the lid on the shaker and did as the name suggested.
She poured the drink into a glass and popped the ribbon of lemon peel into it for garnish. With a flourish, she held her hands out in front of her. “Ta-da!”
Lucky sipped the drink, eye tilted upward. The thoughtful growl returned. “What’s your story?”
“I don’t have a story,” she said.
“Everyone has a past,” he crossed behind her to put the empty glass in the sink. “In my experience, boring people don’t hide theirs. The important thing here is whether yours would cause problems for me if I give you a job. So why were you trying to get away from home?”
“Perceptive.” She wanted to deflect. But his expression told her that if she didn’t give him something of her history, that he wouldn’t be giving her a job. “I’ve been around bars my whole life. Grew up on a farm and was mostly raised by my grandparents.”
“No parents?” He asked.
“No mom,” Celeste said. “Dad . . . would be why I have been around bars my whole life.”
“And these are werewolf bars? Would Dad be a werewolf?”
“Dad would be an actual human disaster, not a werewolf,” she cut him off. “And until I turned eighteen, the bars I was in were normal, human bars where I was not allowed to drink. But I was expected to keep him out of fights and drag him home when he got falling-down drunk.”
“How did you end up working in a werewolf roadhouse, then?” His expression was skeptical.
“The owners were family friends. The arrangement helped them out, and let me earn a little spending money.”
“Nice story,” Lucky crossed his arms. “But I don’t buy it. That’s a lot of trouble for a teenage kid with no special skills to handle.”
Celeste sank in on herself. There was nothing for it. She would have to give up her biggest secret. With a sigh, she pointed her right index finger into the palm of a cupped left hand. A tiny bolt of lightning shot from her pointed finger and ground itself into the other hand.
Lucky jumped. “You’re a-“
“Don’t say it!” She interrupted him, holding up her smoking index finger. “I know we’re called wand wavers. But that’s a stupid name. I don’t use a wand.”
“I’ve never met -“
“Didn’t expect you would have,” Celeste said. “There’s a high price that comes with using magic. Most of my kind can’t afford it. We spend like the bill will never come. And when it does, it’s usually fatal.”
He turned his assessing gaze back on her. She was aware how down-on-her-luck she looked in worn out canvas sneakers, a thrift-store Colossus of Liberty t-shirt and jeans so holey they could have started their own religion.
“What is it that magic asks of you?”
“Using magic brings bad karma. All my life I’ve been paying for the magic my ancestors used and just trying to get by without adding to the debt. It’s easier here where no one knows me.” Where no relatvies expected her to figuratively light herself on fire to keep them comfortable.
“Why this bar?”
She pointed to the sign in the window. “Lucky’s. I could use some luck. Seemed like a good omen.”
He laughed outright at that. “Should I be concerned about collateral damage?”
“No,” she said. “The bad luck is confined to the family lineage. Anyway, I do want to be a journalist but I haven’t been to college. My experience is limited to my high school paper and some freelance gigs I pulled in from the weekly courier back home.
“I rolled into town on a greyhound bus yesterday with nothing but what I could fit into a backpack. I’m staying in a hostel until I can find a place, but everything here is more expensive than I thought it would be.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” he huffed. “You would be better off if you get back on that bus and find a cheaper city to live in. Maybe somewhere in Florida where the bars are plentiful and the homeless don’t freeze to death in the winter.”
She grimaced. Her plan had been to charm him into giving her a job. But it looks like she’d done the job a little too well if he was trying to talk her out of living here. Time to throw out her pride and admit that she was out of options.
“Look, I need money now, and I’m good at this.” She waved to indicate the bar. “If you give me a chance, you won’t be sorry. Competent help is hard to come by. Especially in a supernatural bar. You can’t just hire anyone.”
Lucky puffed out his cheeks while he digested this.
“Okay!” He let the air out explosively. “I’ll give you a shot. Why not?” He sounded like he was talking to himself, more than her. “Pay is cash under the table. We’ll settle up at the end of the night. If you survive.
“I keep all my tips.” Celeste stood a little taller. Her knees suddenly didn’t feel like jello anymore.
“You won’t get tips, because you’re a human. And werewolves won’t leave your kind a tip.” He waved her words away.
“You underestimate the pity tip,” Celeste made her eyes look big and sad. She blinked at him a time or two.
He stared at her in horror. “Stop that! It’s creepy!”
She laughed. “It works. You’ll see! And I’ll keep my tips.”
He suddenly looked as if he had been tasting something bitter. “Don’t put the cart before the horse, kid. You still have to survive working here for one shift. I don’t know if you realize this, but city weres are different than the guys who live out in Toad Suck, or wherever you’re from. They won’t be nice to you just because you’re a kid with a face like a haunted doll.”
“I’m from Dogpatch, actually,” Celeste said. “Toad Suck is down near Conway.”
The werewolf’s left eye twitched. ”There’s actually a . . . Never mind.” He shook himself. “Just survive the next shift, and then we’ll talk.”
–To be continued in part 2–
The post New Fiction: A Wizard Walks Into a Bar Part 1 appeared first on Tracy S. Morris.
I’m wrestling with the concept of writer’s block, lately. I realize that experience is subjective. No two writers experience an event in quite the same way. So it’s kind of astounding that we just slap a label on the thing in which words won’t come and call it writer’s block. Because I think it’s a […]
I’ve been invited to guest on Philip Drayer Duncan’s new podcast Future Bestseller. We’ll record tonight, and the show will be up sometime soon. I will also be at Soonercon June 30-July 2, 2023. My schedule is as follows: Friday June 30: 12:00 noon – my life in another world (portal fantasy stories) 5:00 – […]
It’s May 3, which is the first dated entry in Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel (dated diary entries), Dracula.
In the first few entries, Johnathan Harker is traveling through Hungary en route to Transylvania. As he travels, he notes down what he eats, including a dish he calls “paprika hendl.”
This is probably a dish we would know today as chicken paprikash (or paprikás csirke, as it’s known in Hungary). You or I might think of it as a chicken dish flavored with paprika. But it would be more proper to think of it as a paprika and onion dish that happens to have chicken in it.
Many food traditions have a holy trinity. In cajun cooking, it’s celery onions and bell pepper. In France, it’s onion, carrots and celery. In Hungary, it’s paprika, onion and fat. So in chicken paprikash, the paprika is the reason for the dish (the base), rather than the seasoning in the dish.
Paprika is the backbone of Hungarian cooking. The word in Hungary is a broad catch-all for anything related to pepper. It can be fresh peppers, dried peppers, pepper paste, pepper sauce, pepper purée, sweet peppers or spicy peppers.
Paprika was introduced to Hungary 400 years ago. First as a little flourish decorating the plate. Then as a medicine before becoming a dominant flavor. Today it’s so ubiquitous that children will put it on their dessert.
The paprika in Johnathan’s dish is spicy. He calls the food thirsty. Which is an interesting word choice given that this is a book about a vampire.
In writing, if food gets a mention, it’s usually for a reason. In Dracula, eating – or at the very least, consuming – is the central theme of the book. Dracula drinks blood. Renfield consumes flies. At one point, Dr. Seward asks Mina to eat so that she’ll have the strength to hear the sad tale of Lucy’s death.
Dracula is also a tale that plays on western fears of being consumed or subverted by the other. Dracula is an exotic foreign count who moves into England and immediately seduces away the metaphorical virtue of it’s English women.
As Johnathan heads east, the first hint of the exotic that he (and we through him) encounter is through food. And since he has an English appetite, he finds the food spicy. Too spicy, and he blames the spice for his bad dreams. Yet he wants more (Mem. get recipe for Mina). Johnathan is a man who is more ruled by his desire than would be considered proper for a Victorian gentleman to be.
Here he’s allowing himself to be seduced by foreign ways. This foreshadows the push-pull tension he experiences when he sees the brides before the true horror of what they are sets in.
Additionally, there’s a bit of a juxtaposition between Johnathan and Dracula. In eating foreign food, Johnathan is consuming the otherness of the east. Where Dracula is the other that consumes the Englishman.
I like to cook. Which is good, because I do it a lot. Enough that I have several novelty cookbooks sharing shelf space with the Hometown Presbyterian Ladies’ cookbook and The Joy of Cooking.
As I’ve cooked over the years, I’ve come to realize that cooking is a great way to experience culture and history of a place.
When I make gumbo, I think of the intersecting cultures that led to okra, dried sassafras leaves and roux all sharing a pot.
So when I see mention of food in something I’m reading or watching, I pay attention.
During season 3 of The Mandalorian (episode 18, The Mines of Mandalore) Bo-Karan Kryze shares a food she calls pog soup with the show’s hero, Din Djarin. She also references the food’s cultural importance.
“You’ve never eaten pog soup?”
“No.”
“Can you appreciate the irony? Any Mandalorian worth their armor was raised on this since they were his (Grogu’s) size.”
This is a nice bit of world building. We’ve seen in the show that the Mandalorians are a race that take their culture seriously. But they’re also a diaspora. One that has spent time in hiding after being persecuted by the imperial government.
In our real life diasporas, one of the things we try to hold onto are recipes. Items can be lost, but recipes can be recreated from memory and handed down. Consuming them puts us in mind of people and places we no longer have access to.
The Children Of The Watch have managed to hold on to what is culturally most important (their forge, their creed).
But along the way, they lost simpler pleasures, like comfort foods.
What is it about pog soup that makes it a cultural touchstone? It’s not listed in any Star Wars cookbook I own. The Galaxy’s Edge cookbook lists two Mandalorian foods – a spicy chicken stew and a sticky and spiced fruit and nut cake.
In the cookbook, the fictional author speculated that Mandalorian food is spicy because the warrior culture looked at it as a test of their bravery to eat.
There are supposedly four essentials of Mandalorian cooking, but the only one mentioned in canon is that the food must be portable.
It makes sense that the Mandalorian comfort food is soup. You can put it in a mug and drink it on the go. Especially if you are running to your next battle. And it’s probably spicy.
The Star Wars website helpfully provides a recipe that includes bell peppers, onions, assorted flavorful spices, a little heat from curry powder and sweetness from coconut milk.
It honestly looks delicious. Sweet, with complex notes from the spice blend. But not too hot for a child’s palette.
I wonder about what we could infer about Mandalorian culture based on particular spices? Are they native to Mandalore? If they were one more thing lost in the purge (except in places like Bo Katan’s palace gardens ) that might explain why Din hadn’t heard of pog soup.
Otoh, it also highlights the way the two characters are diametric opposites. For Din Djarin, adhering to the creed is what makes him Mandalorian. For Bo Katan, she is Mandalorian because her collection of tiny experiences add up to a Mandalorian identity: taking the creed in the living waters, drinking Pog soup. Her people may have abandoned her, but her basic identity as a Mandalorian is not what she doubts about herself.
Bo-Katan sharing an experience over food with Din Djarin shows how the two characters who represent different types of Mandalorian are becoming more alike. It’s the first step in their journey as partners.
That’s quite a lot of meaning to pack into a simple cup of soup.
I know that the episode that references pog soup has been out a little while, and I’m probably behind in posting my thoughts, but I just had to let this digest fa bit.
. . . I’ll just see myself out.
When I was a kid, my aunt had this amazing library. Shelves and shelves of classics in hardback that were put out during the early part of the 20th century. This was where I first read Sherlock Holmes and Little Women.
When she passed away two years ago, It fell to me to clean out a lot of her house. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find her books.
In one of her garages, I found a couple milk crates with some golf instructional manuals, and some education theory textbooks from the 60s. As well as some of the books I had as a kid. But that’s pretty much it.
At one point she had an antiques store, so I figured she got rid of her antiquarian books back then.
Today while my dad and I were cleaning out the garage attached to the house, we finally cleared enough space to get into the attic.
It was mostly a crawl space with two layers of insulation. (And spiders.). But there were 5 apple boxes full of old books. So that’s what she did with her library.
The apple boxes weren’t in great shape, and a few of the books were falling apart. But I was able to hand them all down 2-3 at a time to my dad. It took about an hour to get them all down.
As I said, they’re not all in great shape. And I probably won’t keep everything. But I found it. I feel a little like the dragon in The Hobbit. Just sitting around staring at my treasure and being all happy about it.
Boxes and boxes of books!
I’m writing more, and more consistently than ever. Yet I’m struggling with guilt when I have a moment that I could be writing, but I choose to read a book, listen to a podcast, play Animal Crossing or something else instead.
It’s really annoying, because I love writing. And guilt should not be playing into something I love.
So when I start to feel guilty, I just remind myself, that I am not a writing machine. Writing is art. And writers need to nourish their souls. Otherwise the creativity dries up.
So hubby and I finally watched the last episodes of Willow. I like it well enough to come back and finish. But at the same time, it’s forgettable enough that when we paused watching so that we could get in all our holiday specials before January, we forgot that we hadn’t seen the last two episodes.
I’ve been honestly confused why It has so many haters. Because to me, it’s too bland to raise ire over. What it gets right, it really gets right. And I think I finally know why it stirred up so much hate.
But the good stuff first:
Warwick Davis returns to form. He was a young farmer in over his head and very cranky about it in the first movie. Here he’s a wise old wizard, still in over his head and still cranky about it.
The kid they get to play Madmartigan and Sorsha’s son looks like they cloned Val Kilmer’s bee-stung lips and then dressed that test tube baby in Kilmer’s leftover clothes from The Doors. He has good chemistry with the villainess. So it’s actually pretty plausible when he’s tempted to turn to the dark side.
They got Joanne Whalley back as Sorsha, here older and regretting the choices she’s had to make as a ruler. They even get Jean Marsh back to do some voice over dialog for Bavmorda.
Ruby Cruz as Sorsha and Madmartigan’s daughter does a good job echoing Whalley’s turn as Sorsha in the first movie: the brat princess trapped in a life she does not want because of choices her mother made for her.
They even got Whalley and Val Kilmer’s son Jack to do a voice over as Madmartigan.
But I think I see where the hate comes from after thinking about it for a bit. It’s a show that wants to be on the CW. Airing right after Reign.
Which is a major tonal shift from the movie. Willow the show, like Willow the movie, is an epic fantasy quest. Which is like a road trip where three fourths of the series is about getting to know the world. And when the world is about swinging swords and casting magic spells, it’s kind of jarring to see someone say that Willow “lost his mojo.”
There is even a training montage in the next-to-last chapter that feels like a music video. It would not look out of place in a movie. But that movie would probably be A Knight’s Tale, not Lord of the Rings.
I know that Val Kilmer brought that kind of energy to the first Willow. But his performance still integrated with the rest of the movie. This is not so seamless.
If you can get past the modern slang and the classic rock covers, watch it for the nostalgia. There is plenty of fanservice, and you can tell that the people who made it really did love the original.
Consider this: Dracula decides to invade England. He hires the most wifeguy of real estate agents, with a side hobby of travel and recipe blogging. He pretends to be his entire domestic staff, so when the lawyer isn’t looking, he’s cooking the food and cleaning the house like it’s an episode of Frazier. He hires […]
So Elon Musk has finally gone and done it. He’s hugely over-leveraged his purchase power and bought Twitter. This is either a huge mistake or a move that will make him extremely rich. . . Er. So naturally, the internet is melting down. What does it mean? What does it mean? Honestly? I never got […]
I’ll be at Soonercon in Oklahoma City this weekend. This is the first convention I will have been to since 2019, and the first Soonercon I will have been to since 2017. Since my last Soonercon, I’ve released two books. It Came to Tranquility, which rounds out the Tranquility trilogy, and The Grantville Inquisitor. Additionally, […]
“So how are you enjoying Dracula so far?” “It’s a little bonkers, but I like it.” “Have you gotten to the part with the cowboy yet?” “. . . I’m sorry? The what?”
So when Top Gun: Maverick was announced . . . 4 years ago? My first thought was “who asked for this?” The internet has not been kind to Tom Cruise’s reputation. And at this point his character Maverick should have aged out of flying jets. So what could a Top Gun sequel set 3.5 decades after the original possibly have to offer?
Quite a bit, as it turns out.
I come from a family of teachers, and I think that we have to change the way we view mass shootings.
As some of you know, summer starts early in the house of chaos, owing to the fact that my kids’ school gets out earlier than public school.
We find that this is usually the best time to take summer vacation, since most destinations are juuuuust starting to open up, but most potential tourists are not yet out and about.
Buckle up, buttercup. I’m going to try to keep this politically neutral. But it is gonna be political. The other day I read an article in which Katie Porter, a Representative from California talked about having to put back Bacon because it was out of her budget. Which? Kudos to her for sticking to a […]
So Dracula is written as in epistolary form, that is to say dated letters, newspaper clippings and journal entries. There’s a Substack called Dracula Daily that emails out the entries on the day they are dated, starting May 3 and ending November 10. The thing is, Dracula is kind of unintentionally hilarious when you read it this way
Like Mirabel in Encanto, I wasn’t expecting the past couple weeks of blog posts to be autobiographical. But this week Naomi Judd died. So here we are. Remember that story last week about how I moved and worked at the census office and life was one long string of no-good, horrible, very bad days? The […]
It’s been 50 years since Terry Pratchett’s first book, The Carpet People was released. l’ve been a fan for more than two decades. A realization that causes me not a little bit of dissonance, since I’ve joked that I’m 29 and holding for so long that I have to stop and add up my real age.
Forget the New York Times, USA Today or the Washington Post. The finest paper in the country was the Benton County Daily Record. And I worked there.
So. Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife’s condition. And weeks later, people are still talking about it.
Why?
Last year for Father’s Day I bough my husband the Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge official cookbook. We had just come back from Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge theme park, so it seemed like a fun way to extend the park experience.
In 2005 Yard Dog Press released my first novel, Tranquility as part of Double Dog #2. Nearly 20 years later, Yard Dog Press is releasing Tranquility in paperback as a stand alone novel.
When we go I to a bookstore, we expect our potential reading experience to be classified by genre. But did you ever stop to think that your vacation experience is a kind of genre, too?
When I was coming up through journalism school, my impression of the profession was that every reporter was a secret super hero something akin to Clark Kent.
Maybe they weren’t able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but they could stop Nixon with a series of articles.
In retrospect, I think it’s telling that the highest honor in Journalism, the Pulitzer Prize was named for a guy who helped start the Spanish-American war.
Where would Harry Potter be without his magical Butterbeer? Or James Bond without his Vesper Martini? Some of my favorite books give me a sense of place through food.
Ahead of the opening of Disney’s high-priced Star-Wars themed hotel, Disney brought in a bunch of influencers and reviewers to experience the vacation. The reviews have been mixed.
I’m not one to believe in writer’s block. Yet for years, I’ve been stuck on this one project. I knew where it was going. The problem was twofold.
I liked The Book of Boba Fett. In the same way I like a McDonalds Crispy Chicken Sandwich from the dollar menu. If I’m at McDonalds, and I’m hungry, that’s probably what I’m going to get. It’s satisfying. I would order it multiple times. But it’s no Slim Chickens.
My kids drew a Star Wars art book for me. It’s the sweetest, most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen. And now you can see it too.
More eloquent writers than me are defending Maus, so I’ll leave it to them. I’m more concerned with the current push to ban and censor educational material on the grounds that “it might upset someone.” I think upsetting someone is the point.
The influences on my writing are all a bit problematic. In the same way a giant pile of cow dung on fire In the barn could charitably be described as problematic.
I went looking for a mermaid. What I found was something that looked like an uncanny valley cross between The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Grandpa Jones from Hee Haw.
I saw Spider Man: No Way Home, and boy, Do I have thoughts! Buckle up, buttercup, it’s going to be a trip!
So this year has been a minute, hasn’t it? 2021 has been full of ups and downs for everyone. I think we were all hoping for a better year than 2020. And on that score, 2021 gets the “not as big of a jerk as you could have been” award. On a down note, I […]
Amongst my family and close friends, I have a bit of a reputation as a good cook. So earlier this year I bought the Hubby the Galaxy’s Edge cookbook with the promise that I would cook my way through it for the family. Tonight I made Braised Shaak Roast, which is pot roast iiiiinnnnnn Spaaaaacccceeee! […]
It occurs to me that there is a difference between an entertaining story and a fun story. It’s the level of seriousness with which it takes itself, and how serious we’re expected to be when we engage with the material. Entertaining material is material I will discuss over the water cooler. Fun material makes me […]
When I think of my local theme parks, I don’t usually think of the food. Sure, we make the skillet from Silver Dollar City on the regular, but we don’t plan a trip to SDC dreaming of their succotash. But Disney. Ah, Disney. For some reason there is a whole food culture built up around […]
I’ve been doing video tours on YouTube while I ride my stationary bike. It’s a great way in these days of pandemic non-travel to feel like I’m seeing places that I’ve always wanted to see, like Pompeii and Venice The most recent one was a cycling tour of the Appian way in Rome. One thing […]
Last week I had the pleasure of watching my niece graduate from my Alma Mater: Mountainburg High. Although something struck me during one of the speeches. One of the presenters for a scholarship mentioned that in the next few years, the decisions that these kids make will shape the rest of their lives. On one […]
So I grew up 2 hours south of Silver Dollar City (which is a moderate-sized Midwestern theme park). The family strategy for going to the theme park amounts to rolling up, paying the admission fee, and doing whatever. We seriously put more thought into a trip to Wal Mart for groceries than we did to […]
The other day I walked in on Hubby and the Sprogs binge watching this Australian tv show on Netflix called The New Legend of Monkey. The old legend of monkey was apparently a Japanese tv show in the 70’s (simply called Monkey), which is itself based on a novel called Journey Into the West, which […]
The kids are finally old enough to realize that the Easter Bunny has been stuffing their plastic hidden eggs with their leftover Halloween Starbursts, and Jolly Ranchers from the bottom of the candy bucket. Now they think the Easter Bunny is a jerk. Someday we will all look back and laugh at this. But not […]
Hubby and I just binge-watched Wandavision last night. This is going to be my spoiler-filled thoughts. So if you haven’t watched Wandavision, you might want to back away. The show was a lot of fun. It had loving homages to classic tv sitcoms, with a darker undercurrent (Wanda is ostensibly the hero of the series, […]
The family is through the plague, and life is slowly returning to what resembles normal in these pandemic times. Which involves digging myself out of the backlog of things that built up while I was too sick and tired to do them before. To keep myself focused, because otherwise my attention span is at the […]
Owing to the fact that we are in the house of plague, last night was the first time in years that we haven’t hosted a Super Bowl party. Hubby was a bit more alert, so we instead binged Avatar: The Last Airbender. I get it now. I see the genius of Uncle Iroh. Long may […]
So hubby wasn’t seeing improvement by Monday, and took himself to the doctor. Surprise! It’s COVID. We also got a call that my son, in a separate incident, was also directly exposed. So that’s three separate exposure instances in one house. And we almost made it! Just a few more months until we could get […]
Life has a funny way of making you slow down when you don’t want to. Last weekend hubby contracted something. Based on his symptoms, I’m guessing it’s the flu – which everyone swears isn’t a thing this year. Then the whole third grade shut down because: quarantine. With my child getting the extra bonus prize […]
Intrigue! Romance! Murder! And one nutty redhead! Paul Kindred’s Grantville Times is Grantville’s trusted name in news. But for those occasions when a story is a little too politically hot — or when notorious redhead reporter Betsy Springer and her partner, artist Denis Sesma, go a little too deep down the rabbit hole of crazy […]
My aunt died in mid-December. And now I have to find a home for a player piano and 50 rolls of tinfoil. Those two sentences seem so absurd together. One drops like a bomb. Like the sound The One Ring makes when Frodo drops it onto the tile in his entrance hall in Lord Of […]
If you follow me on social media, you’re probably aware that I’ve been editing a work in progress for the past week. The work in progress is no longer in progress. We’ve signed the contracts, and I can finally talk about it. My writing partner Brad Sinor and I are under contract with Ring of […]
Hubby and I have a soft spot for Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth. One of our first date movies was The Two Towers. So we’ve been gradually working our way through the two Middle Earth trilogies over the past few months as we have the time. With the pandemic, and ongoing efforts at social […]
It’s been two months since Rise of Skywalker was released. I couldn’t possibly say anything about it that hasn’t been said better elsewhere. But yesterday, while watching super bowl ads for a new crop of movies (James Bond, Black Widow, Mulan, And the Fast and the Furious 9) I had a realization.
When I hear the term Fiber Arts, I wonder if it has to do with creative ways to sneak more veggies into my family’s diet.
Not quite.
I’ve have more than a month to chew on this movie, and now I think I’m ready to share my thoughts. Frozen 2 has surprisingly deep messages about the passage of time, and about depression. It’s like it was aimed toward the parents in the audience just as much as the kids.
What? You thought I was going to talk about Star Wars?
I was thinking about the word YOLO today. It’s become an acronym along the line of Carpe Diem. Live life to the fullest, because you only get one. But YOLO has darker connotations. “ It’s ok to do what you want (even if what you want is eating a whole birthday cake for dinner) because […]
In this episode, we delve into William Buckland, a pioneer in Paleontology who was more than a little obsessed with Poop.
We tend to think of Mark Twain As a grandfatherly man in a white suit, telling stories with a knowing wink and a smile. But during his youth, Samuel Clemens (Twain’s real-life name) was an epic troll. (One who sorta resembled my grandma’s old lady picture). Sam (let’s just call him Sam) was a young […]
There are some family history stories that you just know you should take with a grain of salt. Like the one about how your ancestor was bffs forevah with George Washington. Or the one where you are omg we totes swear a descendant of a queen. Or at least an Indian princess.
Depending on who you ask, Thomas Jefferson is either much loved, or the founding father you love to hate. Not only did he write the Declaration of Independence, but he also presided over the Louisana Purchase and pushed for the Lewis and Clark expedition. On the other hand, he sat out most of the revolution […]
In 1284, the town of Hamelin was overrun by rats. A man carrying a musical set of pipes and dressed in a suit of many colors showed up and offered to make the rat problem go away. For a price. The mayor agreed to the price, and when the man played his instrument, the rats […]
100 years ago was a simpler time. A time when you could pin postage on your four year old’s coat and send them on a mail train to Grandma. Back then people would laugh about it and go “Oh, You!” Now trying something similar would probably lead to a phone call and a visit from […]
In 1930, if you wanted to find a missing child, strike oil or win a bet at the track, you could go see Lady Wonder, the country’s most famous psychic. For one dollar – $15 in today’s money, Lady Wonder would answer three questions by typing the answers out on a special typewriter. But she […]
During Christmas many people dream about Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. But in Sweden, many people are hoping not to see a straw goat roasting on an open fire. The straw goat is the Gävle Goat, a large goat made of straw erected in Gävle, Sweden during Christmas yearly, and also the frequent target […]
In 1964, one of the hottest selling items around Thanksgiving was the aluminum Christmas tree. The Aluminum Specialty Company manufactured an estimated 150,000 trees that year. Then in 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas aired. By 1970 the Aluminum Specialty Company had shut down all production of aluminum Christmas Trees. In this episode, I discuss how and […]
Note: I’m somewhat behind on my podcast. With good reason. Over thanksgiving, I struck a deer, doing significant damage to my car. The next day I turned my ankle while walking out my grandmother’s front door. So writing blog posts and podcasting have been rather low priority. I’m attempting to dig myself out, however. Starting […]
Susan B. Antony and Nine Friends managed to vote for Ulysses S. Grant. For her trouble, Anthony was arrested, sent to court and fined. She swore she would never pay the fine, and she didn’t. Today’s podcast is about all the people who drew a line, so that tomorrow we can stand in one to […]
If I asked where i could find the most mummies in one spot on the planet, you’d probably tell me Egypt, or maybe Peru. But for sheer concentrated quantity, Palermo Italy has them all beat. Palermo is located on the island of Sicily in southern Italy. If you studied it in geography, you would have […]
It’s the season of ghosts, ghouls and goblins. So let’s tell a story. This is the story of Julie, or possibly Julia Brown, or possibly Black, or maybe even White. A Voodoo practitioner said to have taken a whole town with her when she died. Or maybe that was just coincidence. You know how these […]
Have you ever seen the Dead Marshes scene in Lord of the Rings? Three of the main characters are trekking through an ancient battlefield, when one of them looks into a pool of water, only to find a dead man looking back at him. Travelers trekking through the Himalayas in Northern India have had a […]
Rightly or wrongly (and these days, everyone considers it wrongly) Columbus is known as “The Man Who Discovered America.” For many of us, that is how history is taught: Columbus set out to prove that the Earth wasn’t flat, landed in the Caribbean and said “whoooo hoooo! New world!” The truth is a little (okay […]
There are a lot of very bizarre ways to meet your maker. One that deserves mentioning is that of Henry of Champagne, who history says died thanks to a dwarf. Up until his untimely demise, life had been good to Henry. He inherited the dukedom Of Champagne from his father before joining the Third Crusade. […]
A well-worn Hollywood plot is one where the President’s daughter is kidnapped, so a hero has to rescue her. In real life, this never would have happened to Alice Roosevelt. Not just because her father, Teddy Roosevelt was a badass who could have rescued her himself. But also because the apple didn’t fall far from […]
On September 2, a fire destroyed the National Museum of Brazil, taking with it 90 percent of the museum’s collection. This included recordings of dead languages and zoological and botanical specimens. When we think about large, destructive loss of accumulated knowledge, we think of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. But the burning of […]
Meet an island that acts like a bad party guest, announcing it’s entrance, causing drama and slipping away without so much as a goodbye.
When Thomas Jefferson envisioned westward expansion, he wanted the new states to be neat and orderly, unlike the 13 colonies. Jefferson wanted each state boundary to lay along latitude and longitude markers. As anyone who has ever seen a map of the United States knows, that’s not what happened. So why do the 50 US […]
When a man in a business suit handed Florence Schaffer a note, she thought nothing of it. As a flight attendant, lonely passengers had tried to pass her their numbers before. Schaffer put it in her purse. Then the man leaned over and said to her “Miss, you better look at that note. I have […]
The attacks came in the night. Monsters came into the very tents, undaunted by campfire and torchlight. The monsters dragged fully grown men from their beds, taking them away in the night to satisfy their bloodlust. It sounds like the plot of a horror film, but this really happened. The monsters weren’t eldritch beasts straight […]
In life, we take certain things for granted: the Sun will rise in the morning, Winter follows spring, and carrots are orange. Or are they? If you’ve ever been to a fancy restaurant, you may have been given a salad with yellow, pink or even purple carrots. So why do we think of carrots as […]
The archaeopterx is considered the link between dinosaurs and modern birds. A Chickenosarus might resemble one of these extinct creatures. After working as a consultant on Jurassic Park, a paleontologist wants to bring back the dinosaurs. Clearly, he didn’t pay enough attention to the movie.
Mankind once held a fascination with ghost ships that seems to have faded with time. Perhaps because our dependence on ships has lessened. Or perhaps it’s because at one point, parts of the nautical map were blanks, filled with dragons and ominous warnings. There is a horror aspect to sailing that does not exist on […]
Inspired by the holiday, and by my Arkansas Razorbacks Baseball Team going to the college world series (where, despite my wishes in the podcast, they did not win) I focused on the history of Baseball for this episode. Or what we think we know. Because once again, while I am not making this up, someone […]
We’re fascinated by the personal lives of American Presidents. Particularly their pets. Who could forget Socks the Cat, or Checkers the Dog. Or that John Quincy Adams had an alligator. Wait, hold up. He had a what? An alligator, or so the story says. But it turns out that might not be the whole story. […]
For something that could be considered the poster child for processed food, hot dogs have a very organic origin.
Every Fourth of July, Americans gather to celebrate their Independence. And while some people have cookouts, and others go swimming, once the sun goes down, everyone is setting off fireworks. Although India and the Middle East both make competing claims, most historians believe the Chinese invented fireworks. In approximately 200 BC, someone noticed that if […]
There is a story (definitely not true) that Martha Washington invented ice cream. Regardless of the story’s truth or fiction, George Washington loved ice cream. So much that he and Martha served it to guests both at Mt. Vernon, and when they were at the president’s home in New York City. While these days ice […]
When we think of mummies, our first thought is King Tut with his treasure. But some of the most fascinating mummies around have been preserved by accident. In 1991, hikers in the Alps found what they thought was a the scene of an accident: a human body lying facedown, half frozen in a glacier. The […]
You would think that Comicon attendees invented cosplay, but Queen Marie Antoinette would tell you au contraire. When she was Queen of France, rocked the milkmaid look while visiting her personal village on the grounds of Versailles.
Just a quick note to let folks know that the podcast is about a day or so behind schedule. I’ve had a few allergy issues, and I’m going to see if a good night’s sleep can make my voice sound any better.
If I asked you to name an enemy that brought the Australian Army to it’s knees, your first guess probably wouldn’t be the emu (unless you’ve seen all the memes). But in 1932, that’s just what happened. Post WWI, the Australian Government had a lot of returning soldiers and not a lot of jobs for […]
When something is easy, we say that it’s like taking candy from a baby. Maybe we should say that it’s like stealing the French Crown Jewels. Because stealing the French Crown Jewels was just that easy. Allegedly. I wouldn’t know personally.
If I asked you to name a wealthy man with crass manners, and little education who was known for seeking public accolades, there is one name that comes to mind.
Timothy Dexter.
Was that not the name you thought of?
In 1992, a young man named Christopher McCandless hiked into the Alaskan wilderness near Denali National Park. Inspired by the likes of Thoreau, Tolstoy and Jack London, he was living a tramp lifestyle while searching for something undefinable. He lived in an abandoned bus for five months before starving to death. Paradoxically enough for a […]
One of the most infamous outlaws of the Old West may not have existed, but may have been invented by real murderers to cover up the lynching of an innocent rancher and her husband. This is the story of who Cattle Kate was, and who she was not.
On December 31, 1812, Theodosia Burr Alston boarded the Patriot, a ship bound from South Carolina to New York. She and the ship were never heard from again. But just as with Elvis, sightings of her continued for years.
Ever hear of the cobra effect? Sadly, it’s not an episode of GI Joe. But if you listen to this episode, you’ll know what it is. And knowing is half the battle.
Your favorite fictional cowboy was probably based on Bass Reeves, an African American Deputy Marshal more badass than Batman.
When you think of a lion tamer, you probably imagine a guy in a safari outfit, pith helmet and wielding a chair and whip. That’s because the most famous lion tamer ever, Clyde Beatty, dressed in safari gear, and wielded a chair. Beatty was so famous that the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey’s Circus once […]
If you visit the Outer Banks of South Carolina, you may see the descendants of some of the first immigrants to our country, still living in the area where their ancestors first settled. These descendants are still living as their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago. But they’re not Amish. They’re not even human. They’re […]
Queen Marie Antoinette was innocent in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. But it didn’t matter. In the court of public opinion, she was Austrian, and a spendthrift. So she may as well have been guilty.
We all think we know the story of Sarah Winchester. Folklore states that the heiress of the Winchester fortune was told by a psychic to go west and build a house for the spirits of everyone who had ever been killed by a Winchester rifle. In truth, Sarah probably had something in common with the […]
According to the Smithsonian Museum, one of their most popular exhibits (other than their pair of Ruby Slippers from The Wizard Of Oz) is the Hope Diamond.
The Hope Diamond is a 45 and-slightly-over-a-half-carat phosphorescent blue diamond with a long, sordid history, and (legends say) a curse attached to it.
If Russian hackers crash this podcast and website, you’ll know that this episode is why. Yesterday, the New England Patriots met the Philadelphia Eagles in the Superbowl for the first time in 13 years. The last time the two met, the Patriots narrowly squeaked out a win for their third consecutive Superbowl victory. Shortly after, […]
In 1913, women pushing for the right to vote faced vigilante attacks and police brutality. These women defended themselves and in some cases literally struck back with Jujitsu.
Honey is not just a sweetener for your tea. It has been used for everything from mummies to medicine. Honey has even been used as a weapon in war.
Napoleon is widely regarded as one of the greatest military leaders of all time, up there with Alexander the Great. But one of his most humiliating defeats actually came from a pack of domesticated rabbits.
When the Kong’s special warden in charge of France’s VIPs (Very Important Prisoners) changed prisons, people noticed. Especially when he moved a man in a mask. Soon everyone wondered: who was that masked man?
Imagine you’re an American farmer 170 years ago. Depending on where you live, you may go to a big city once a year, when it’s time to sell off your surplus livestock.
And, after you’ve done that, you might go have one of those fancy daguerreotype light paintings made.
Having a Daguerreotype image made was the 1850’s fad equivalent to taking a selfie at Disneyland while performing in a flash mob in front of Cinderella’s castle. And if you adjust for inflation, the price was about the same.
Too often, you hear on the news of spontaneous fighting breaking out in war-torn areas. But during the 1914 Christmas of World War I, spontaneous peace broke out. And to the officers in charge, spontaneous peace was received just as badly as spontaneous warfare would be.
You probably already know that no two snowflakes are alike. Every school child knows that. But before 1931, no one knew that. The man who changed our perspective on snowflakes was Wilson “snowflake” Bentley.
Some ideas are simply timely ideas. Which might explain all the competing patents for things like airplanes and radio. Saving Christmas was another timely idea.
Gingerbread men are practically synonymous with Christmas. But, at the risk of sounding click-bait-y, you won’t believe the surprising origins of this cookie.
Spoiler it’s Queen Elizabeth. Maybe.
Unless you are a fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas, you probably leave the ghosts and other creepy stuff firmly behind in Halloween. But this hasn’t always been the case. Prior to the Victorian era, Christmas was a darker holiday, one in which ghosts and ghost stories were a big part.
When we gather around the table this Thanksgiving, we’ll probably have turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing and mashed potatoes.
Turkey is such an iconic part of Thanksgiving that there is even a giant turkey float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade.
But the first Thanksgiving may not have even had turkey.
We all know the story of the first American Thanksgiving, when in 1598, the Spanish under Juan de Oñate reached the Rio Grande and held a party because: Yay! We survived crossing a desert with no water!
This Thanksgiving, remember that long before the founding of the United States, some of the first colonists didn’t have much to be thankful for. Including food. They called that season the starving time.
When most people move into a new home, they expect to contend with vermin. Maybe a rat or two, or some roaches. They don’t expect to have a maybe-bear come at them through a window.
But that’s what happened to Elizabeth Ford in 1971. And her story would go on to chill and thrill millions when it was made into a movie – The Legend Of Boggy Creek.
Fouke, Arkansas is in the same general area as Texarkana. (Which I wrote about last Monday in connection with a series of murders that may have inspired the hookman urban legend). It’s a quiet, mostly rural area where you might expect to see wildlife. (Even today, a few people will get into car accidents by hitting a deer.)
So when Bobby and Elizabeth Ford heard a large animal around their new home at night, they assumed it was a bear.
They weren’t thinking of The Jonesville Monster, a large, ape-like creature that locals had occasionally seen in the woods around Southwest Arkansas over the past century.
Unlike Grizzly bears, the Black Bears that are native to Arkansas are not an aggressive species. If you leave them alone, (the saying goes) they will leave you alone.
But this creature didn’t leave the Fords alone. On The night of May 1, 1971, while Elizabeth slept on her couch, some kind of large animal reached at her through her screen window.
Elizabeth’s husband Bobby and her brother Don scared the creature away by shooting at it. They claimed that throughout the night, the creature kept coming back. When they called police, a constable responded by bringing them a strong light and a shotgun.
At one point in the night, Bobby said that something with a hairy arm tried to grab him. He would be treated for scratches at a local clinic.
The inhabitants of the house described the creature as being seven foot tall, three foot wide, hairy with red eyes the size of half-dollars.
They said that they shot at the animal seven times throughout the night, and believed that they hit it. But no blood was found on the property. A daylight search revealed three-toed tracks and scratches made with something that had three claws.
In an interview with the Texarkana Gazette, Bobby Ford said that he planned to move out of his new home immediately.
In the days following the attack, authorities speculated that the creature might be a large cat, such as a mountain lion. As sightings continued to plague the area, some wondered if the “Fouke Monster,” might be an escaped circus ape. A Little Rock radio station even offered a $1,000 bounty on the monster.
Then in 1973, filmmaker and Texarkana resident Charles B. Pierce made The Legend Of Boggy Creek, a movie about the monster and his attack on the Ford family. Pierce would go on to make The Town That Dreaded Sundown about the Texarkana murders three years later.
Sightings and other signs of the creature have appeared sporadically around Arkansas (even as far north as Russellville) ever since.
Is The Jonesville/Fouke/Boggy Creek monster real? Experts say no. One month after the attacks on the Ford family, an archaeologists at Southern Arkansas University said that there was a 99 percent chance that the footprints were a hoax.
The uptick in sightings of the beast also coincided with an uptick on Bigfoot sightings across the country. In the early 1970’s, Bigfoot and similar cryptids were a trend in the same way that chupacabras were in the mid-1990’s, and scary clowns have become in the mid 2010’s.
It’s possible that someone could have played a trick on the Ford family, or an encounter with a wild animal got blown out of proportion. The story could have fed local pranksters, leading to strange footprints found in later sightings.
Author and skeptic Brian Dunning has noted that all evidence related to the Fouke Monster is anecdotal (therefore not testable).” The implication being that the monster is probably, like the movie it’s based on, more fiction than fact.
But, as the box office returns for The Legend Of Boggy Creek can attest to, it makes for a really good story.
Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one, because it’s based on a true story.
The Hookman was even a monster-of-the-week on season one of Supernatural.
A young couple went parking on Lover’s Lane. The radio is on to set the mood. In between songs, there is a bulletin: lock your doors. A mental patient escaped from the local asylum. He’s known for killing his family with his prosthetic hook.
The girl gets scared and demands her boyfriend take her home. But the boy is reluctant. After all, he’s parked in Lover’s Lane, so he’s not thinking with the right head. And people in horror stories don’t know they are in horror stories.
In some versions, the girl insists. With the mood broken, the boy takes the girl home in a huff. When he goes to open the door for her, they find a bloody hook hanging from her door handle.
In other versions, the boy gets angry that the girl wants to go home instead of putting out (because all horror stories are really morality plays). So he taunts her, then gets out of the car and runs off to teach her a lesson. She sits in the car, terrified. Then she starts to hear a scratching on the roof. She musters up her courage and gets out, only to find that her boyfriend has been killed and strung up over the car. The scratching she heard was his fingers brushing the car’s roof.
The hookman story is an old standard at slumber parties and around campfires. It was even an episode of Supernatural back during season 1, when the show was less about biblical drama and more about two guys hunting folklore monsters.
But like some old favorites, the hookman story might be rooted in actual events: a series of murders called the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. As the name implies, the murders took place in Texarkana in 1946.
In an article on the murders for Texas Monthly, journalist Prudence Mackintosh remembers Texarkana at this time as a Norman Rockwellesque town. The city straddles a state line, with two of everything. Two post offices and courtrooms in one building that the state line bisects. Two high schools with an intense football rivalry.
That same folksy quality was what Walt Disney remembered about Kansas City of the same era, and would try to reproduce in his Main Street USA at Disneyland.
Now imagine a horror movie dropped into Main Street USA.
February 22, 1946 would have been a chilly night. So when Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey parked on a lover’s lane near the outskirts of town (on the Texas side), their activities would have fogged up the windows of their car. So neither of them were too alarmed when a man came up and shined a light in their window.
“You’ve got me mixed up with someone else,” Hollis told the man with the light. But the guy demanded they get out of the car. Both Hollis and Larey started to get scared when they realized that the man with the light had a bag over his head to hide his identity. The masked man demanded Hollis’s pants. Then hit Hollis over the head and chased Larey. Larey was eventually able to escape, and summoned the police.
Other young couples wouldn’t be as fortunate. Four weeks later, on March 23, someone would kill Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore. Then again on April 14, Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were killed. Then the press gave the killer a scary nickname: the Phantom.
The final attack occurred May 3. A farmer named Virgil Starks was shot through a window at close range. His wife Kate was shot in the face while trying to phone the police. She ran to a neighbor’s house and was taken to a hospital.
There would be no more murders, but the city-wide hysteria was just beginning. Before, one could avoid the killer by coming home before dark. Now he was attacking people in their homes.
The city put a curfew in place. Residents began locking doors and pulling their shades at night. Gun and ammunition sales skyrocketed.
And though both Arkansas State Police and Texas Rangers joined the investigation, they had their hands full dealing with rumors, false alarms and stupidity that was caused by panic. People booby trapped their homes, a few even accidentally shot their neighbors. Some young adults armed themselves and parked in lover’s lanes in the hopes of getting the drop on the killer.
Cops had to turn on their sirens and announce themselves, so they didn’t get shot. Liquor stores refused to sell alcohol to anyone who didn’t seem to have a sound mind, so as not to double the police’s workload.
Though police never officially caught the Phantom killer, their prime suspect was a local counterfeiter and car thief named Youell Swinney. Their belief was so strong, they never looked into another suspect. And while circumstantial evidence linked him to the crimes, it was not enough to make an arrest. Police were able to gain a conviction against Swinney for car theft.
A sensationalized account of an already sensational story.
Was Swinney guilty? No one can say for certain. His wife believed him to be the killer. But in 1946 she couldn’t be made to testify against him. The discription Hollis and Larey gave was contradictory. Hollis believed their attacker was a dark skinned caucasian, while Larey said he was a light-skinned African American.
In his book, The Cases That Haunt Us, FBI profiler John Douglas states that a serial killer will usually continue to murder unless he mentally deteriorates, or an outside force (such as being incarcerated) stops him. I think it’s telling that after Swinney was arrested, there were no new murders. The Phantom seems to have vanished.
Is the Phantom the basis for the hookman story? The timeline fits. Accounts of the hookman story began spreading in the 1950’s. The first printed account was in Dear Abby in 1960.
The Phantom’s story has been immortalized in more than just the hookman campfire tale. In 1976, Texarkana native Charles B. Pierce (of The Legend Of Boggy Creek fame) made a movie based on the murders called The Town that Dreaded Sundown.
In Texarkana today, The Town that Dreaded Sundown is by tradition the last film shown during the city’s annual “movies in the park” series that screens each year from May through October.
The Phantom killer may have left one more unfortunate legacy. His method of killing (murdering couples in lovers lanes while concealing his face with a bag) might have been copied by the more famous and also never identified Zodiac killer nearly twenty years later.
Author Edgar Allan Poe is known for some of the best horror fiction around. He’s also a bit of a sad sack for whom things never seemed to go right. In the days leading up to his death, he vanished. He was found in clothes that didn’t belong to him, unconscious. Though he did wake, no one could make sense of his ravings before he died.
Join author Melanie Miller Fletcher and I as we discuss our favorite theories about what might have happened to Poe.
It seems odd that there are still places where large numbers of people can vanish without a trace. But as recently as early this year, ghost ships have washed up on the shore of Japan.
And while there is an easy explanation for these ghost ships – fishing vessels from North Korea – what happened to some ghost ships remains shrouded in mystery.
Such is the case with the Mary Celeste, possibly the world’s most famous ghost ship.
On December 5, 1872, a Canadian two-masted sailing ship named the Dei Gratia sighted a ship off the shores of the Azores islands. But something seemed wrong.
The ship moved toward them in an erratic line, with it’s sails in dissarray. As the strange ship drew closer, the crew of the Dei Gratia couldn’t see anyone aboard. Attempts to hail the strange ship went unanswered.
So Captain David Moorehouse sent his first and second mates, Oliver Deveau and John Wright in a ship’s boat to investigate. The two men reported back that the ship was the Mary Celeste.
This may have caused some concern for Captain David Moorehouse. As a Captain who sailed the same general shipping route as the Mary Celeste, he would have been a colleague of the Mary Celeste’s Captain Benjamin Briggs — Sort of the nautical equivalent of a water cooler friend. Moorehouse might have known that Briggs sailed with his wife and two year old daughter aboard the ship.
The two man expedition to the Mary Celeste reported that the ship was completely abandoned. Yet they could find nothing wrong with the ship. The cargo of crude alcohol remained intact. There was a single lifeboat missing, and the ship’s log was last updated nine days previously. It was as if the ship’s crew had simply abandoned in a great hurry.
To this day, what happened to the Mary Celeste’s crew remains a mystery. Theories range from the outlandish — UFOs and Sea Monsters, to practical — the captain may have feared that the cargo of alcohol would explode, and abandoned ship. Suspicion even fell onto the crew of the Dei Gratia, who stood to benefit from salvage of the Mary Celeste.
Even Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the world’s most famous detective novels, weighed in with a sensationalized fictional account that blamed a murderous crew member.
As recently as 2007, a documentary claimed that Briggs ordered an abandon ship due to fear of sinking after a combination of rough seas, a broken pump and a broken chronometer.
Whatever the real story might be, we may never know. But the mystery is what keeps the story alive in our minds.
It could be that some of us would prefer the mystery to remain a mystery.
Author Melanie Miller Fletcher is my special guest for this episode. Join us as we discuss the birth of Science Fiction and the modern vampire (A.K.A. the Byronpire).
In 1814, Mount Tambora erupted, sending volcanic ash into the atmosphere and causing an unseasonably cold summer in 1815. During this summer, called “The Year Without Summer,” poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, writer Mary Godwin (soon to be Shelley), and Mary’s sister Claire Clairmont stayed at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and his doctor, John Polidori.
To amuse themselves over the long, dreary summer, they told each other ghost stories. Out of those storytelling sessions we got the first Science Fiction story: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, as well as the first modern vampire story: The Vampyre (who was totes modeled after Lord Byron).
When we think of reality shows, we think of people who look like rockstars decorating cakes with power tools. But reality-based entertainment is older than you’d think.
The monarchy in the courts of Louis XIV up through Louis the XVI (up until the French Revolution) lived life in a fishbowl, allowing random nobility to watch them do everything from eating to giving birth.
Prior to Louis the XIV, the royal monarchy of France was locked in a power struggle with the nobility. Away from Paris, nobles ran their own lands as they saw fit: avoiding taxes and service to the crown while ignoring pesky laws when it suited them.
Louis XIV changed that by creating a cult of personality around the monarchy. The Monarch ruled by divine right. The power he displayed came to him by divine appointment. And this power should be put on display for anyone to see.
First he moved the royal family to a country home (a hunting lodge named Versailles, which he then renovated into the lavish estate we know today).
Moving the royalty to the country helped Louis control the nobility. If courtiers wanted the King’s favor, they had to spend most of their time at Versailles. And they had to adhere to strict etiquette that determined everything, right down to which stool they could sit on. This kept them from building their own power bases to challenge his rule.
Louis then developed a rigid schedule of ceremony for the royal family and nobles to follow. You could set your watch by the Sun King’s schedule. And tourists and nobles could watch the royal family and officials get up, dress, eat, take walks and go to bed.
During the time of Louis the XVI, nobles could even watch the queen give birth. (The birthing room was so crowded when Marie Antoinette gave birth to her first child, that the queen fainted, prompting Louis XVI to throw open a window and ban courtiers from being present at subsequent births).
Because of the performance nature of life at Versailles, the court became an attraction for tourists from other countries. France gained a reputation for style and taste that it still holds today.
But like many reality shows, the performance of life in Versailles declined in quality after the first season. While the Sun King stuck to a rigid schedule and never varied his performances, his grandson Louis XV (Louis The Good) and great-grandson Louis XVI (The one who got his head cut off) chafed under their lack of privacy and retreated from public life as often as possible. Courtiers often complained that they never saw their king.
To make things worse, neither of the later kings was a very good ruler. Louis XV set the country on a dangerous path to financial instability, and Louis XVI wasn’t able to turn the show around. He was too busy playing with his locks. That’s not a euphemism. He had a lock collection the way some modern basement dwellers have a bug/stamp/comic collection.
Ultimately, the French Revolution gave the reality show life at Versailles a literal axe by cutting off Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette’s heads. If you want to watch anything resembling it these days, you have to watch the non-reality-based TV show, also named Versailles.
One of my favorite conventions of the year, FenCon is coming. My schedule, however, is here.
Friday:
3:00 Invasion Of The Podcast People
4:00 Return Of Son Of Super – Hero
10:00 Yard Dog Press Roadshow
Saturday
10:00 FenCon Squares (yee Haw!)
1:00 autographs
1:30 Reading
Sunday
11:00 – female Fighters and armor
See you there!
Though The Robert Browning poem The Laboratory is a fictional poem, it may be based on a true event. A scandal that swept 17th century France, leading all the way to the Sun King’s inner circle, and right to the doors of his official mistress.
In 1883, two ranchers near Eagle Creek Arizona left their wives and children in their ranch house and rode out to check their cattle.
One of the women went to draw water from a nearby spring, leaving the other to tend to the children.
The woman in the house heard a scream. When she looked out the window, she saw some kind of monster, riding a fearsome red beast. Frightened, she locked the door and pulled the kids close. Her friend never returned.
When the ranchers returned that night, they found the other woman’s trampled body, surrounded by cloven hoof prints.
We invent tall tales, Folklore and legends to explain the unexplainable. And as more sightings of the ghoulish rider and red monster occurred around Arizona, the creature earned a name: the Red Ghost of Arizona.
Over the next few months, the ghost would appear again and again. It would trample a tent filled with miners near Clifton, and be spotted by ranchers and miners all around Arizona.
Then a rancher named Cyrus Hamblin offered an explanation. Hamblin was working on his ranch near the salt river when he spotted the Red Ghost. But Hamblin recognized the beast. It was a camel.
To Hamblin’s horror, he could see a skeleton tied to the camel’s back.
A few months later, when some miners shot at the Red Ghost, something fell from it’s back as it ran away. The miner’s were terrified to find that what had fallen off was a mummified human skull.
To trace the birth of Arizona’s Red Ghost, you have to go back to 1848. Settlers were expanding westward into the American Southwest despite the hostile landscape and even more hostile natives.
‘Why not bring in camels to help settle the land?’ Thought some. Camels are more resilient than horses. They can go longer without water. Their hooves are adapted to cover the sand like a pillow rather than sinking in like a horse’s.
Some prominent men lobbied congress to bring camels over for the army, including Army Quartermaster Major Henry Wayne and secretary of war Jefferson Davis. (Yes, future Confederate president Jefferson Davis. That guy.)
And so in 1857, the army received 72 camels. And they quickly learned that camels would bite, spit, kick, scare horses and wander off at night. Soldiers assigned to the camels hated them.
This is where the legend of the Red Ghost’s skeletal rider came from. Stories say that a young camel rider was afraid to get onto his mount. So his friends tied him on with rawhide rope. Then they slapped the camel on the bottom to make it run – only to find that they couldn’t catch up with it after.
Even though the camel program floundered, the army kept it going. Since the government had payed so much to bring camels to the US, the army couldn’t really get rid of the camels when buyers remorse set in. Some remained in at Camp Verde, Texas while others went to California.
Then the civil war broke out. Suddenly, with the Union’s shifting priorities, the camels were a liability.
Most camels were sold to butchers, miners, circuses and some even worked on the transcontinental railroad.
But when Confederate forces seized Camp Verde, they released some of the animals into the wild. Thanks to that, feral camel sightings were reported from Arkansas to Arizona right up into the 20th century.
But unlike the Wild Mustangs, or Pablo Escobar’s hippos, camels didn’t thrive in the southwest. There just weren’t enough camels concentrated in one spot to create a sustainable and growing herd. So eventually the feral camels died out.
But what of Arizona’s Red Ghost?
In the mid 1880’s a rancher in Arizona spotted a camel in it’s garden. The rancher shot the camel with a Winchester rifle. When he examined the creature’s body, he found scars across the torso from where something had been tied to it’s back with a rawhide rope and left there until the rope rotted away.
If the Red Ghost ever existed, it was gone now.
There is a story of a girl who is locked away in a tower and forbidden to see her one true love. But this is no story about a signing princess with a talking animal friend. And the king in this story is the bad guy.
Imagine if JK Rowling hated Harry Potter. Hated him so much that she killed– ok, bad example.
But there is one author out there who killed off the protagonist of his best-known work because he actively hated the character. That author is Arthur Conan Doyle.
Doyle’s extended family came from wealth, though thanks to his own father’s alcoholism, his immediate family was impoverished. Thanks to his uncles, he was able to attend boarding school and eventually college.
He took a break from studying to be a doctor in order to work as a ship’s surgeon, first on a whaler in the Arctic, then on a steamer to West-Africa.
His adventures brought him as close to death as Sherlock Holmes would have come during one of his adventures. During the Arctic job Doyle fell into icy water and nearly froze to death. His trip to West Africa involved close calls with malaria, sharks, crocodiles and a shipboard fire.
Later, as he struggled to make ends meet establishing his practice, Doyle turned to writing. First accounts of his trips, then novels. During this time he wrote A Study in Scarlett.
In writing A Study In Scarlett, Doyle was dipping his pen into a new kind of genre: the detective story.
Just a short time earlier, Edgar Allan Poe penned a story called The Murders In The Rue Morgue. The protagonist was a detective with unique talents far beyond those of ordinary men.
In writing A Study in Scarlett, Doyle’s Holmes acknowledges Poe’s stories. Yet Doyle also based Holmes on a real person, a doctor who he had served as an assistant to: Dr. Joseph Bell.
Like Holmes, Dr. Bell could make deductions based on a person’s mannerisms, speech patterns and other tiny clues. To a generation raised on CSI, this kind of thing seems elementary. But to the Victorians reading the Holmes stories, the notion was sensational.
Sensing that he had something in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle switched to shorter works that he could write quickly and sell easily to the magazine market. Because in those days, one could actually make money writing short stories. (Did unicorns exist back then too?)
Then an awful thing happened. (Hand wringing, clutching the pearls, swooning on the fainting couch.) The stories became popular. Holmes captured the public imagination and held it.
Doyle, who wanted to be known for writing serious historical accounts, instead felt pressured to crank out Holmes story after Holmes story. Plus he had to devote mental energy to plotting each mystery so that it would satisfy the reader with it’s complexity.
And while Sherlock Holmes was popular, Doyle didn’t receive the respect he wanted. His name wasn’t emblazoned alongside the names of literary giants. He was a writer of popular fiction, and disregarded as such.
So he killed off his greatest creation. Pushed him over a waterfall. And good riddance.
Except it didn’t end there. Fan backlash like that wouldn’t be seen again until Bella chose Edward over Jacob. . . Or so I heard.
Men wore armbands in mourning. A woman attacked Doyle with a handbag. But eventually money won out. Doyle brought Holmes back in 1902. By 1927 when Doyle published his last Holmes story, he’d written 4 novels and 56 short stories about Holmes and his ever-present sidekick Watson.
Doyle’s adventures continued outside the scope of his detective stories. He served as an army doctor in the 1899 Boer War and wrote a best-selling history of the conflict. He was knighted, not for his Holmes stories, but for his service in the war.
Twice he ran (unsuccessfully) for parliament. He pushed for reform for divorce law, led the move for an English Channel tunnel, and (ironically) got involved in the spiritualism movement (which I touched on in my podcast about the Fox sisters).
Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, but Sherlock Holmes has taken on a life of his own. Since his inception, the famous detective has appeared in additional stories, movies, tv, plays and even a ballet. As of this writing there is a BBC series and one on CBS, both set in contemporary times. There was also recently a medical drama in which a doctor is loosely based on Holmes, as well as two movies.
In writing Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle created an enduring character who appeals to every generation. Too bad his creator hated him.
This hearse conducted Lincolon’s body from his train to scheduled public viewings.
When you’re a high-profile figure, your life isn’t really your own. This can even be true of elected officials. Particularly martyred elected officials. Such was the case with Abraham Lincoln, who was sent on a farewell tour after his death that would have been worthy of any rock band.