Category: Novel excerpts

(The following is an excerpt from a longer piece.)

CHAPTER ONE

Dr. Kat Sheroki stood in her office, her hands on her hips as she leaned back and forth side-to-side gazing from her second story suite window. Her deep, hazel eyes were a perfect complement to her light brown hair, and softly painted freckles on a pale complexion. Her short, petite and gracefully slender figure seemed a contradiction by a professional sense of superiority and detachment some may have described as ice-cold and demanded sharp respect.

Lifting her coffee mug to her lips, she would have benefited from a refill, but had not the time or enthusiasm to take a trip to the break room. Instead, she slowly swirled the remnants around, and peered numbly into it to discern the coffee stains. It looked as if an alternate world had been turned upside down and inside out, and its land dwelled above a muddy ocean … a concept to which many of her patients could relate. She set the mug down turning her attention to the window overlooking parking lot. Continue reading “Dust within a thought”

(The following is an excerpt from a longer work.)

DJ Kees flees Amsterdam under mysterious circumstances with teen daughter & story narrator, Alouette. They fly to Brooklyn to begin a new life of surreal gigs in illegal nonplace warehouses, exploitation by the slumlord-artist-grifter Amber, and a series of hallucinatory, hilarious and harrowing post-hipster adventures. The slumlord eventually turns the duo in at Brooklyn’s DHS immigration office as part of a plea bargain & for which he earns a modest bounty…

As the son of a legendary WW2 Resistance radio builder, papa’s name naturally came up at a kraakbeweging [squat movement] meeting. “Little Jammer” (papa’s nickname back then) was enthusiastically recruited to build a stoorzender or jamming station because people figured like father like son – transmitter-building as genetic predestination.

Jamming is the intentional use of radio noise or signals to create radio frequency disruption of normal transmissions. Jams occur when you decrease the ratio of signal power to noise background power. A decibel ratio greater than 1:1 (0 DB) means more signal [useful info] than noise [irrelevant data] and vice versa. Broadcasting consists of a radio transmitter that receives information in the form of an electronic signal such as audio from a microphone. The transmitter combines the information signal with the radio frequency signal, which generates an alternating current or modulation. The signal is sent to an antenna, usually located on a rooftop to increase reach. Continue reading “Radio activity kills”

(The following is an excerpt from a longer work.)

Chapter 1

She called me a murderer. Under the oak tree in my friend’s backyard at 9 Hood Avenue, she found me standing over her daughter’s body. Gwendolyn died two years ago maybe three days ago or was it last week? Time was time, it came and it went and this malleable thing and my thoughts were muddled by the smell of apple blossoms. When in bloom, the apples whisked me away to 9 Hood Avenue behind the brownstone two story house under the oak tree where Gwen and I had carved our names into the trunk. The wind struck the chimes while I drew circles with blood on Gwen’s light coffee brown skin.

Through her glistening hazel eyes, I had seen my death, a very gruesome one at that, blood splashed across the manicured lawn and bulging guts thrown in front of my body. Rage and sadness left an imprint on my dead dark brown eyes and my mocha skin told the story of my death. Ten fingers around my bony neck and the broken vessels in my eyes coloured the whites of it red. She had strangled me. My lilac shirt was ripped, grass and mud stained my black tights and the silver buckles on my tall black boots were broken. I had fought back. Clumps of her straightened black hair were clutched tightly in my right hand and her thin lips were bloody. I had hurt her. The impression of her orange shiny work boot on my chest, rope burns around my wrists, burns on my arms and cuts on my bruised face. I was tortured. Continue reading “YODO: You only die once”

(The following is an excerpt from a longer work.)

Warlord Nil Maelstrom, Warlord of the Dead and Guardian of Realms Unseen was currently in his throne room watching TV. Currently the Dread Lord was watching afternoon soaps, half sprawled on his throne. He was currently taking a break from recruitment, reflecting on how hard it was to get decent soldiers.

Things had been easier in his predecessor’s day, back then power wasn’t something that came from masses of other people. Back then, power came from within. You had to be tough. You had to be self-reliant.  Back then everything and everyone was out to kill you.

Now with only seven members left, the everys were succeeding.

Recruiting for the Dahk was tough. To Nil it was just another form of police work; except these days the living didn’t want it, and the dead never could have it. It took a very strange mind to accept the conversion from human to darkness. Most of humanity today didn’t have the ability to withstand the rippling torment that came from turning their soul into eternal dark. It was also quite irreversible, and warriors who took the dark path we’re not to be allowed to cross into the afterworld when they were slain. The fear of them turning around and walking back out was quite real. Continue reading “Heroic measures”

(The following is an excerpt from a longer work.)

1. SOFIA

I remember walking through the woods on the hill above the city, listening to morning traffic and wondering where I would be in ten or twenty years. The memory has been with me since I was eleven, and it reappears whenever I hear the wind in the trees and, sometimes, the sound of a car on a distant road. I see myself in navy-blue shorts, a white shirt and the strap of a schoolbag slung over one shoulder. I hurry along the path toward my eight o’clock class where, even now, I hear the bell, the voices and the scuffing of shoes on the wooden floor. We students slide into place at our desks and wait for our teacher to walk through the door. He wears a black robe and under his graying beard a two-flapped white collar. We stand: Bonjour cher frère. He leads us in prayer.  We recite a Hail Mary, make the sign of the cross and sit down. A picture of the Virgin hangs on the wall above the desk, her bleeding heart transpierced by a sword.

It is the French lycée in Sofia, a school for boys run by Franciscans, junior high through college. One classmate, André Tarnowsky, the son of the Polish ambassador, speaks fluent French. His governess is French. Another classmate, Théophile Kelchinsky, is the son of the Polish cultural attaché. I remember Théo’s broad shoulders, red face and brown hair, cut short, straight up.  André has blond hair, Hitler’s ideal. Théo wears black shorts that are too tight around the thighs, and he cries when his academic ranking fails to meet his  expectations. Sometimes, when he is at the blackboard working on a math problem, cher frère switches a slender baton across a bear leg. There are now red marks on his calf, and tears running down his cheeks. Continue reading “Transgression: Hitler, Mirka, Mireille and me”

(The following is an excerpt from a longer work.)

CHAPTER ONE

I’ve been in the shower so long my fingers are wrinkled, but I’m too mad to turn off the water. Mixing with my hot tears, it swirls down the drain along with my supposedly happy life.

My stomach hurts as I sob, quiet moans punctuated with wails of anguish as the thought of each new consequence crosses my mind.

“What did I do?” I say over and over rocking back and forth trying anything to comfort myself. I have never felt so wretched, alone, and discarded.

I didn’t take my clothes off when I got in. I just needed to get clean. To cleanse myself of I don’t know what, Shame? Betrayal? None of this makes any sense, except that it’s not fair.

I glance towards the hall. The divorce papers that came earlier are now strewn on the hall floor.  I didn’t get past the first page. I dropped them like they were covered with shit. They might as well be, because that’s how I feel, the victim of an ambush. A shitty heartless one. Continue reading “The trophy wife: A jilted wife’s revenge”

The following is an excerpt from a longer work called Angel of Aleppo, a Story of the Armenian Genocide

Aleppo, January, 1916

I came south, by way of Cemesgerik. After a week, it felt like I had been on the run all my life. That was last year, around May. There was no warning at all. One day the soldiers were there, shouting at us, carrying off the prettiest girls, stealing everything.

They hung all the men of our village in front of us. We had to stand in the square and watch as the soldiers strung them up, one group after the next. Women were crying, tearing out their hair, scratching their faces. The soldiers shot the loudest of them where they stood. When the smoke cleared, my aunts lay dead and my mother was nowhere to be seen.

They came to our house and I ran out back to the house next door. I hid behind the vines and watched as a soldier came to that house and told the mother there he was taking the oldest daughter. Our neighbour had the little sister and brother hiding under her apron. The soldier pulled at the older girl’s hand. Her mama clung to her other hand, crying, screaming.

I was taught that God had a plan for all of us. Was this a part of God’s plan? Continue reading “Haykuhi’s story”

(The following is an excerpt from a longer work.)

Children who grew up on military bases are called Army brats. Asylum brats were those few of us who grew up on the grounds of state insane asylums where our parents, who worked there, had housing provided by the state. We weren’t shoved from base to base, state to state, country to country, so we couldn’t claim we didn’t put down roots. Instead, we were buffeted between the bizarre personalities among whom we lived, if we chose to know the lives of those mostly benign inmates — excuse me, patients — from whose lunacy our parents earned their livings.

My sister, Sally, ignored them. Not me. I got into trouble early in my life by making the acquaintance of so many of those twisted souls. My mother almost had had a heart attack when I wandered away at the age of four and showed up back at her door holding the hand of a huge man who wasn’t insane, just retarded. He had had the good sense to bring me home before I had gone too far away. For his good deed he was screamed at by my mother, who called the campus police, who hauled him away, tears streaming down his big, uncomprehending face. Continue reading “Crazy about you”