Writer's Muse Magazine: Fall 2013 Issue Read online

father had left him somewhere and he was trying to get back home but couldn’t find his house. I had hoped to bring him in and feed him since he is very hungry.” After feeding Michael, Aiden asked Michael if he wanted to watch television. Michael nodded excitedly and Aiden took him into the living room where he turned on cartoons. Walking into his study with his father and closing the door, Aiden said, “Dad, what are you doing? Who is that boy?” Shamus replied, “I don’t know who he is. I just found him crying on the curb. He looks like a boy I had a dream about last night along with a banshee. He needs help son and I am going to help him. He told me that his father had left him somewhere so that means he isn’t wanted by anyone. I need someone to take over the farm when I pass and you and your sister are not interested. So maybe this young boy needs me and is destined to become the new owner of the farm. I just don’t understand the banshee and its meaning. I am afraid that my time is approaching and so this young boy will be there for your mother and can take over the farm when he is old enough. I will take him home and let him live with us.” Aiden, shaking his head at his father, said, “Okay dad but I hope you aren’t making a mistake with this.”

  Going back into the living room, Michael was sitting on the floor watching the cartoons still. He rose as Shamus and Aiden came into the room. Shamus asked Michael if he would like to come home with him and live there. Shaking his head yes, they climbed into the truck and headed back home.

  Arriving at the cabin, Shamus asked Michael to wait in the truck while he went in and spoke to his wife about him. Michael agreed and Shamus went into the house. Upon entering the house, he called for his wife. “Isobel, where are you honey? I have something to talk to you about.” Not getting a response he walked back to their bedroom and saw her laying face up on the bed. Her hand was clutched at her chest and her lips and fingertips were bluish in color. He ran to her screaming and shook her, trying to wake her up. No response. He ran out to the living room and dialed for an ambulance then went back into the bedroom, cradling his wife, tears streaming down his face. “Baby, wake up. Please wake up. You can’t leave me. I brought us someone to take over the farm when I pass on. It’s supposed to be me dying, not you. Please come back. I can’t survive without you.” His sobs could be heard out to the truck where Michael sat waiting. He could feel Shamus’ pain and climbed out of the truck and went into the house. Walking towards the sobs, Michael found Shamus cradling a woman that Michael thought must be his wife. Heading up to him, he placed his hand over Shamus’ heart and said, “I remember seeing you in my dream last night. The banshee knew you were going to lose her and found a way to bring us together. I am here to help you get through this and will be as good as any son. Please let me help you.” Shamus could not believe this young man was so in tune to how he felt.

  Finally, the ambulance showed up but there was nothing could be done for Isobel. She was gone. Shamus became the best dad Michael could have ever asked for and Michael became the son who would one day become the owner of the farm. Years passed and Shamus was with Michael when he passed away. He held Michael’s hand and whispered, “I hear the banshee. She is calling me. I fear not that you will care for this farm. Take care of it and find yourself a nice woman like my Isobel, and create children who will want to keep this farm going. It is your legacy.” Michael sat there on the bed and held the hand of this man who had brought him into his home and raised him as his own son. As Shamus took his finally breaths Michael said through his tears, “I will father. I promise you, I will.”

  About the Author

  Haven Malone loves to create fictional stories and her favorite would be love stories, although she is also partial to fantasy. Her story “Dreams” publication is a mix of fantasy and reality.

  https://www.facebook.com/HavenMaloneAuthor.

  Samhain in Alma, 2010

  By Stephanie Mesler

  From the poem cycle, Soul Hill Lullabies

  do not answer the ratatatat of

  Children clustered on the door stoop

  masked and starved

  gluttonous gamins out for feast and fright

  the chance to terrify an old woman,

  rarely seen, turned into legendary abomination

  my neighbors’ imaginations lusty and industrious

  Beggars knock til an hour past sunset

  then the sound of sneaking feet and feel of prying eyes

  are replaced by an Autumn wind that sweeps down the Hill, calling me home

  Alma is insistent: you must come.

  At my closet, I consider shocking my clan

  arriving swathed in purple lace and carrying a skull in one hand

  For my peers, I just might deck out in a rainbow of silk and let my hair loose,

  put a diamond in my belly button and dance a bolero.

  My folk expect their Gran

  In grey cotton and wool,

  on old lady shoes,

  I start the trek

  up

  and winding

  not by the road, where others answering Alma

  would honk, offering rides to the matriarch.

  Ninety-eight and the last one standing of the century old aughts,

  I use my feet to keep my spine and prove my fire

  The shawl warms.

  A canvas bag carries treasures,

  gifts for the gathered,

  an offering to the turning wheel.

  Bonfire at the crest

  great grand-daughter’s cat looks me in the eye

  I am cheeky to look him straight back

  Others park below the ridge

  Carrying bowls and bottles,

  fiddles and harps,

  they are slow to ascend,

  preceded by their dogs

  all cantering toward the smell of roasting pig.

  The gathering is quickened by mulberry wine

  pace driven by the tapping of feet

  young Walt Gimlin’s banjo leading a merry twirl

  Eyes lit by moon and magic,

  girls test their skill as wantons

  each one slipping slyly away into the forest

  boys only too pleased to play night guide

  under a starry blanket

  as the earth starts its recess.

  Against a wooden crate,

  on a quilt so old as to make suitable ground cover

  (could even be one pieced myself at the firemen’s grange

  in a decade before wars were fought for oil),

  the cat curls up against my old woman’s hip,

  thick stockinged legs tucked under my skirt.

  Bag opened when the moon is high,

  The pipe, polished since last gathering,

  adds musk

  The people of Alma spin through its haze,

  laughter covering the sound of falling leaves.

  No one notices the earth making its final turn to winter.

  It happens silently,

  the crisping of air

  the shortening of days.

  Seemingly sudden,

  a sybaritic repose, months in the earning.

  Great Grand-daughter’s cat descends the mountain

  paws padding over fallen acorns, tail high,

  keeps haughty distance between us.

  At my kitchen door,

  he feigns disinterest until the bowl appears,

  dips his whiskers in milk.

  In the porch rocker, I do not sleep

  but linger more permanently

  drawn past Samhain into wintertide

  barefoot in silks, I satisfy my god.

  Great grand-daughter’s cat purrs til my body cools

  About the Author

  Stephanie Mesler is an author of fiction, poetry, erotica, drama, preachery, teachery, ritual, and creative nonfiction. She is also a columnist and mom. Her previous written works have appeared in publications ranging from Senior Gazette to For The Girls. Currently, she is wrestling with a memoir, Adventures and Confessions of a Fat Lady Who
Sings.

  https://www.facebook.com/apoetsprogress

  A Night for a Nightmare

  By Stephanie Mesler

  It’s the right sort of night for a nightmare,

  when spectres of old times are right there,

  next to your bed, weaving memory’s threads,

  like spider webs dangling just over your head.

  Sitting up in the dark, turn to face them,

  these demons of best forgot jetsam.

  Open your eyes; let your gorge rise!

  The horror of yesteryear plays its reprise

  In the gloom of the hour for witching,

  your mind digging burrows for pitching

  your sanity, lost, your dreams are tossed!

  Banshees from hell your slumber accost!

  Questioning all past decisions,

  bury yourself in derision;

  for choices not made the price you have paid

  is counted in hours when peace is betrayed.

  The wind whistles, shaking the rafters.

  Rain pelts panes like the laughter

  of those you despised. You wished their demise.

  Now you find they saved a surprise.

  They bring you at midnight reminders

  of how you could have been kinder.

  Scarier yet, they come to suggest

  myriad ways to pay your old debts.

  You’ll start by tossing and turning;

  soon your brow will be burning.

  Dripping with sweat, your earnings collect

  in the form of wee hours when slumber is vexed.

  When morn streams at last through the window,

  felling the walls of your Limbo,

  a bugler plays taps but you have rolled craps.

  Back in your bed you finally collapse.

  About the Author

  Stephanie Mesler is an author of fiction, poetry, erotica, drama, preachery, teachery, ritual, and creative nonfiction. She is also a columnist and mom. Her previous written works have appeared in publications ranging from Senior Gazette to For The Girls. Currently, she is wrestling with a memoir, Adventures and Confessions of a Fat Lady Who Sings.

  https://www.facebook.com/apoetsprogress

  The Birthday Present

  By Sumiko Saulson

  Today is my birthday. I haven’t looked forward to my birthday in years, not since my sixth birthday. Everyone knows how badly that turned out.

  Did you know that when you’re a little kid, you have teeth inside your skull? Not just the ones in your mouth, no, not just the ones that come out through your gums. There are actually teeth sitting in your jawbone and your upper mandible just waiting to come out when your baby teeth drop out. And my baby teeth – well, there was something wrong with them. When they came in they were all sharp and jagged like shark teeth. And when I turned six, my adult teeth came in. Came in is the wrong word – they more like erupted from everywhere – sharp, barbed teeth sticking out from under my lip, the center of my chin, my jaw below my ear, my left nostril… everywhere. There was even a tooth sticking out of my cheek about an inch below my right eyeball.

  My seventh birthday wasn’t much better since my present was extensive surgery and dental work to repair the damage.

  So I would not be exaggerating even a little if I said my birthday presents invariably sucked. But that didn’t stop my mom from trying to give me these huge birthday parties. Like the one today.

  Let me take you back to two hours ago. The high, thin whine of easy-listening music was sliding into the room through the high-mounted ancient speakers of Sheckley’s Rock and Bowl, adding to the creepy jaundiced ambiance of the place provided courtesy of its filthy, yellowed neon lights. It was a bowling alley and pool house, and I was pretty sure that it hadn’t been rocking since the 1950s. It smelled like stale corndogs, damp drywall with molds growing somewhere deep in its innards, and the occasional loaded diaper that the visitors on family day casually tossed into one of the beige bodied and red-lidded plastic trash bins in the bowling area instead of in the bathroom where they belonged.

  I was sitting in the corner seat, smashed between my aunt and my mother, waiting for my turn. Squishing my toes up and down in the stiff-soled, tacky tri-toned rented bowling shoes, I silently contemplated the various fungi that were undoubtedly living within. I wondered whether or not my black cotton business socks would provide a thick enough barrier to prevent the athlete’s foot fungus from creeping forth and latching onto the sensitive skin in between my toes? The medicated powder I’d liberally doused the innards with before slipping on the hot and sweaty size sevens probably wasn’t enough. I was busy contemplating the animated mushrooms from my old Super Mario Brother’s video game dancing around in my shoe when my mom jabbed me in the shoulder with her long, sharp fingernail.

  “Ouch!” I cried out.

  “Don’t be such a baby,” my mom said between loud smacks of her sugar free chewing gum. She always seemed to use the nail file to rub each fingernail into an evil inverted v-shape, as if she were expecting to engage in a catfight to the death momentarily. “Your turn, Minnie,” she said sourly. The muscles under her foundation-caked face twitched angrily. I jumped up and moved for the ball, eager to avoid an untimely slap to the face by the maternal claws of doom.

  Mom was a pretty fifty-eight year old woman under her too-thick Maybelline, and when I was a little thing everyone said I looked just like her. Well, I wasn’t a little thing anymore. Now, I was an acne-covered, overweight teenager with hot-comb burned overly straightened hay hair and coke-bottle glasses. My brother and sisters were grown now, and I was the last one left in the home… maybe that’s why mom was making such a big deal about my sweet-sixteen party. I don’t think she truly understood my age, that I was nearly a woman now. I wanted to do something cool for my birthday, like go to a concert, but no, instead I had to be stuck down here on Family Discount Bowling Night with a bunch of families with their funky rug rats howling in the background.

  I felt a migraine coming on.

  Mama had invited everyone up here to Sheckley’s Rock and Bowl, “everyone” being my twenty-two year old brother Joe, my twenty-four year old twin sisters Alicia and Felicia, and my oldest sister Angelyne, who was twenty-eight and had a nine year old daughter, Tammyline, my mother’s first and only grandchild. The other girls were from momma’s first marriage to Darnel, a serviceman who died in the war. Little Joe was the son of her second husband, Big Joe, a much older man who died of a heart attack before I was born. Big Joe was my daddy, too… on paper, but by now I was old enough know better. No pregnancy lasted fourteen months, at least no human one. One thing was for sure: no one was expecting me, what with momma being over forty and daddy being under dirt on the day I was born.

  The whole lot of siblings, aunties, uncles and cousins began a round of distracting applause as I stood up and brushed the popcorn off of my hand-me-down Applebottom jeans. My momma might be skinny, like I used to be back when she gave me the nickname “Minnie” after that Austin Powers sidekick mini-me, because I was supposed to be a mini her, but I wasn’t anymore, and neither were my aunts. We weren’t mini anything. As I stood, I inhaled the deep aroma of stale popcorn, body odor, and sewage-tainted trashcan water that was the perfume of Sheckley’s Rock & Bowl.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Gary, the boy from my P.E. class who always tried to talk to me. “You sure run fast for a girl your size,” she remembered him saying last Tuesday, as he made steady eye contact my cleavage squished below the XXL school issue gym tank v-neck. It turned out he worked at Sheckley’s concession stand. He was staring right at my booty as I walked towards the ball rack. I didn’t really like him, but I liked the attention, and I admit that I was swishing my butt a little as I walked over to select my favorite bubble-gum colored bowling ball, the one with the sparkles in it.

  I walked up to the bowling alley with my pretty pink bowling ball shining like the best oversized rubber bouncing ball ev
er, the hot overhead bowling alley lights gleaming reflectively from the glitter embedded inside. I imagined myself walking in slow motion, hair bouncing and curves flashing in the spotlight like a plus sized beauty queen, a model, maybe Queen Latifah. I was really feeling myself when I tossed that ball on the aisle…

  Maybe that’s why I was so horrified when I heard the loud “carrack!” sound.

  I reached around with both my hands, grabbing my backside, feeling around for what must have been a rip in the seat of my pants, but I couldn’t feel anything. My face burned hot with embarrassment. A strange aroma of swampy water and sulfur filled the air. If it wasn’t a tear, maybe I’d farted?

  It was just then that the bottom of the aisles began to crack and twist. My ball bounced hard up and down as the lane writhed like a snake. A crack down the center of it began to expand, until suddenly a sinkhole dropped open right in the middle of it. My ball rolled forward undeterred until it dropped, suddenly, into the ground. Two equal sized holes opened up in the adjoining lanes, and it looked like a pool ball falling into the center pocket of the table as it when sliding down into the hole. Smoke rolled out of the holes like a thick, putrid, stinking fog. That’s when the screaming started.

  Sinkholes were opening up all over Sheckley’s. The elderly lady the next lane over was just standing there with her fingers still in her bowling ball hole, purple polyester pantsuit flapping in the reeking breeze when a hole opened up right under her feet, and she dropped down into the ground. Was it my imagination, or had the stinking steam emissions belching forth from the pit melted the flesh off her contorted face in the moments just prior to her sudden sinking?

  I was still staring at the puddle of pink and purple putrescence that used to be Alice Worthington of the Little Old Ladies Bowling League when my aunt Janice came barreling past me with such force that when she knocked into my arm, it sent me spinning, and my glasses flew off my face in the general direction of the terrible pit of stench. My eyes are very bad, without my glasses I am so nearsighted that I am legally blind, and a sense of sinking dread came over me, as I determined that I was totally screwed.

  Everything went into soft-focus all of the sudden, like a really cheesy romantic film, only one that was loaded with carnage and death. I could hear the mothers with their hordes of infants screaming in and wailing in unison. Fear seemed to be the equalizer for all ages and genders, because one man’s scream blended in with the howling of his infant in perfect, hellish harmony. As blind as I was, I could still see the sinkhole that my ball had fallen into stretching and expanding, so that it joined with the two on either side of it and stretched across three lanes. I was sure it was big enough to swallow a car by now. I turned around and ran for the door.

  I couldn’t see very well, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I just kept racing forward in the general direction of the mass of bodies that was flooding towards the door. I was about to pass the bathroom when a weird, scaly hand grabbed my arm.

  “Stop, Damiana,” the commanding voice uttered.

  I blinked rapidly. Damiana was my name, but no one called me Damiana. Everyone called me Minnie. My mom tried to make out like Minnie was an appropriate way to shorten my name… Damiana, Miana, Minnie, but we all knew that it was the mini-me thing.

  “I am your father,” it announced, and the tone of voice was not even remotely reassuring. I looked on in horror as a sinkhole appeared before me – right in front of the door – and