‘Be Ye Also Perfect’

'Be Ye Also Perfect' by Robert O. Hodgell

(From the painting by Robert O. Hodgell)

By Tony Simmons

In the end, naked as the stars and black as the night, the girl knelt before the old woman and waited. The wise woman, holder of the village history, clutched her book of secrets to her shriveled breast — blind eyes focused on the future. Skin ashen with years and etched like bark, limbs like dried reeds, the woman hovered between the girl and her hut. She would almost disappear into the grain pattern of the wooden walls if not for the simple cotton dress she wore, its colors having faded to a uniform yellow, the flower pattern barely discernible.

The girl, head bowed and hand raised in supplication, caught her breath. For a moment, she thought she smelled the perfume of the flowers on the dress, but then she realized her own bare feet and bended knee crushed the nectar from a hundred night-blooming wildflowers. It was their lifeblood she scented, not the past, not the old woman. She hoped the wise woman had not perceived her confusion, and she bowed deeper, closed her eyes, trembling as the future bloomed and hovered.

“Have ye learned the words of the book?” the old woman asked.

“I know them,” said the girl.

“Are ye frightened of the truth?” the old woman asked.

“No longer. I am amazed and sorrowful.”

“Can ye keep a secret?” the old woman asked.

“If I could, I would not tell you.”

“Then ye are prepared,” the old woman said, lightly placing one palm on the crown of the girl’s head. “Be ye also perfect.”

The woman shrugged out of her dress, bent and folded it, and set her book of secrets upon it by
the girl’s bended knee. Her soundless feet treading night flowers, she walked away from the hut and the girl, naked as the stars, into the night and the jungle.

The girl took the dress and the book. She stood and slipped the dress over herself and stepped into the hut, her head raised, her eyes clear, her future having played out before her.

The Beginning

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(Author's note: This flash fiction arose from an assignment I gave my creative writing students. We meet at the Panama City Centre for the Arts, and I directed them to stroll the gallery and pick out a painting that spoke to them. Then I challenged them to write a short piece based on the story they got from the painting. This is mine.) 

Stories shared in the slipstream

Me, before the beginning.

PANAMA CITY — Writers and listeners and artists gathered Saturday at Floriopolis in St. Andrews for an evening of stories and conversations. Part of the gallery’s exhibit, “The Space Between Words,” the readings were offered by writers who had been recognized in a related short story contest.

The Space Between Words is an art exhibit, a “living” art project, a short story contest, and a fundraiser for Floriopolis. The individual words of Tallahassee writer D.A. Robin’s winning story are being sold as tattoos, so that the story will live and breathe on dozens of people who can construct their own meanings from the words and combinations of phrases. Tattoos, by artist Adam Whitehead at Panama Fox, are $25 per word.

Some families are getting tats of words together, so they can all be part of the story. Even punctuation is for sale, and one woman I know bought enough periods and dashes from Robin’s story to spell her husband’s name in Morse code.

Heather Parker, at right.

“That’s more emotion and personal connection to the story than I expected,” Heather told me in an email. “People have pretty deep reasons for getting tattoos — committing to permanent body art. ... Even I am having to stretch my perception of who gets body art, and we’re all probably guilty of stereotypes when it comes to art.”

As the gathering began, two young women dragged to the event by their mother amused themselves with the lighted zoetrope and drawing “spots” for the Art on the Spot project. A Tallahassee woman sat nearby, hand-writing a scary story she was entering in an anthology later the same evening. Kids on skateboards drifted past the big front windows, and visitors and guests mingled.

Gary, about to read.

Tallahassee made a good showing, with a large group in attendance to support their friends and contest honorees, which also included G.L. “Gary” Dearman and Amy Topol. Dearman started the event with his spirited reading of his tale — which he joked he had titled “The Space Between Words” to curry favor with the judges — about the secret source of infinite stories.

Other readers included Craig Bush of Fountain, who read the preface to his newest novel, “The Forever Effect”; Samantha Neeley, reading her contest entry, “Epilogue for a Corpse”; and me, reading an excerpt from my serial novel, “Giants in the Earth.”

D.A. Robin

Robin read a portion of his entry, “The Boy and His Beach.” The full text will not be released or performed until the end of the exhibit’s tattoo component, so as not to influence the meaning of the words still for sale. Topol brought the house down with her emotional reading of “Flashback,” which was recognized as a story of distinction in the contest.

After the readings, the Tallahassee group strolled to Gracie Rae’s for a sunset supper and party on the deck overlooking St. Andrew Bay.

Dearman said he was jealous that we had a place like Floriopolis, as Tallahassee has nothing to compare with its interactive community focus. He also educated me about “slipstream,” a term for fiction that uses the surreal or strange (sometimes sci-fi or supernatural elements in an everyday setting) to elicit cognitive dissonance; I joked that my non-fiction sometimes had that effect.

Amy Topol, bringing the room to tears.

At least, I meant it as a joke.

Peace.

The Weaver

THE WEAVER

By Tony Simmons

~

The ancient weaver works her loom in darkness, though the morning sun warms her face. A girl, not her daughter, sits beside her, invisible but for the scent and sense of her presence, a mass with little gravity and no voice. The child feeds the crone’s dry fingertips the threads from spools arrayed on a wooden rack like rainbow pools as the weaver requests them.

”Give me the blue of the sky on a summer’s morning,” says the weaver. ”The sun not yet at zenith, as it is now. No clouds or haze. The blue of an infant day.”

Taking the thread from the girl, the weaver feels its texture, recognizes its touch upon calluses that time has smoothed from the youthful swirls once etched in her skin like the weaving of a fleshy fabric. She nods, feeds it into her loom. Flexes her back, moves with the machine, building visions she glimpses only in her darkness, visions only the unseen child can confirm.

”Give me the emerald of the shallows,” the woman says. ”Waveless. A reflecting pool fashioned from crystal, revealing the sugar carpet where stone crabs scuttle. The emerald of a swimmer’s salty perspective.”

Once more, the girl delivers the thread into the old weaver’s grasp, and she in turn provides its thin materials to her contraption, working the narrow hairs into wide swaths of texture and hue until drops of sweat run off her nose and the day’s light softens upon her head.

”Give me the white of ghosts, of a virgin’s wedding dress, a saint’s halo,” she says. ”White of sugar, white of salt, white of quartz or bone bleached by the sun of a billion years.”

The weaver takes the thread she receives into her fingertips, and she pauses. The texture is incorrect. She sniffs the material, gathers a clump of it rolled like webbing in her palm and strokes it against her sunken cheek. She drops it in the empty, black space between herself and the girl, feels the cool of evening descend as the sun disappears, Apollo abandons his orbit.

”Girl, this is not the white thread I wanted,” she says. ”This is not my thread at all. What are you trying to do? What game is this?”

The darkness is quiet, though she senses the child still sitting beside her, like a breath in the night. The weaver waits as the air turns cool on her face, her fingers go cold, and the ache in her bones becomes a steady moan only she can hear.

”Try again, child,” she says. ”Find me the thread though your sight be rendered black as mine.”

Something moves then. A sound of air and soft contact, of wood scraping. The old weaver knows the noise like she knows the cry of her own muscles – thread in the loom, the sweep of the arm, the action of the machine.

And she moves aside, her day done, someone else picking up the thread of her life and working it into images she cannot even imagine.

----

(This is the story I wrote for use in our short film, "Stringing a Yarn." It was designed for use with a typewriter font that only had working end quotes, and no apostrophe.)

In defense of zombies

Me, Zombified

Zombies scare me.

I don't know why, exactly. Maybe it's the idea that they are us, just with our morals switched off and our hunger turned to 11.

Maybe it's the idea that they can't be reasoned with (insert your favorite political joke here), or that they never tire, they never stop, and it seems like they come out of nowhere by the multitudes.

Maybe it's the overwhelming dread of a worldwide plague turning the planet into a dead zone where the slightest noise or a change in the direction the breeze blows can mean death.

I seldom have nightmares about zombies. I generally recall my dreams in detail, and my really bad dreams are usually about demons. (Don't even get me started.)

Then one night I dreamed that I was a zombie. I "woke up" in the middle of a feeding frenzy, at first frightened and confused by the walking corpses all around me and the prey they were devouring, and suddenly a weird calm came over me.

My new e-book of short stories

I realized what I was and why the horde wasn't trying to attack me. I was just like them. And I realized that was okay with me (in this dream, at least) — knowing what I was, I could deal with that. (I've tried to decipher the psychological implications of this dream. In fact, I'm writing a book to deal with them.)

But see:  There was a sense of personal freedom that set in once I realized that my continued existence had been made so simple. There were no worries, because the worst had already happened. All I had to do was feed myself, and the rest of the world could go to hell.

Like I said, I'm working this out: That's where the opening scene of my new novel takes place — as an undead man "awakens" (becomes self-aware) in the middle of an afternoon snack he's sharing with another undead man. (You can read this opening scene in my new ebook, "Tales of the Awakening Dead," only 99 cents on Kindle!)

I spent last year's NaNoWriMo exploring what happens next — a simple thing, as the man recognizes that the food stocks are being depleted while the number of predators rises. That won't do, of course, so he has to find a way to reduce the feeders and fatten the prey and ensure a steady supply of "This Mortal Flesh."

The trailer video for Tales of the Awakening Dead

As I wrote in the introduction to 'Tales of the Awakening Dead,' there's some cultural backlash already rising that indicates people think the zombie apocalypse is played out as a source for storytelling. That's being floated out there at a time when "The Walking Dead" is a hit comic book and a super-hit TV series. (It returns for its fourth season Sunday, and AMC is now developing a spin-off series to fill the seasonal hiatus next summer.)

The Walking Dead Season Four Trailer

So obviously, there are still plenty of stories to tell.

Myself, I write about zombies for a variety of reasons beyond my own desire to understand my dreamstates. One, they make excellent metaphors for just about any massive, mindless groupthink you want to apply. Two, you can set up different rules for how the creatures multiply and how they operate (can they speak? do they run or shamble? does only a bite spread infection?). Three, exploring how your human characters relate to one another and the zombies in such an environment reveals so many things about the human condition.

But an added bonus, and probably most importantly: You can tell any story in this framework. When it comes to human relationships, action/adventure, or even buddy cop stories, zombies are like bacon — they can make any story better.

Don't believe me? Next time you're writing and you hit a wall, and you don't know what happens next, have a zombie come through the window. Instant writer's block solvent.

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Thoughts? Refutations? Please comment!

‘Between There’ features ghostly tales

PANAMA CITY — A young deputy trying to make a name for himself opens a cold case and is visited on Halloween by a restless spirit as he answers a call to Econfina Creek.

Homeless men witness a murder while hanging out under Hathaway Bridge.

Two supernatural creatures are involved in a paranormal investigation of Bay County’s Tram Road.

Those are descriptions of “Cold Case” by Ruth Corley, “The Dog Watch” by Mark Boss, and “Elusive Prey” by Anthony S. Buoni, three of 13 frightening tales in the new anthology, “Between There” Vol. 2.

Such ghostly stories will be on tap Tuesday evening at Chez Amavida in Panama City, which is hosting the launch party for “Between There” in conjunction with Writers Gallery, the monthly open mic gathering for local writers. Books will be for sale, and everyone will be invited to play haunted bingo for door prizes. Costumes are encouraged.

“The coffee shop has been home to the Writers’ Gallery meetings on the third Tuesday of each month, allowing local authors a stage for sharing their work,” Buoni said. “This month’s meeting will not only let writers read their material, but will showcase several authors featured in the anthology, reading and signing copies of the book.”

Buoni describes himself as “a haunted writer” living in Panama City Beach whose work has been featured in magazines, noir anthologies and his own local underground ’zine “the meow.” In addition to writing, he is a musician, father and ghost hunter.

“Between There” Vol. 2, , released by Pulpwood Press, features the work of regional and national writers exploring what happens when departed souls intrude upon everyday lives. Ranging from mystery and horror to philosophy and erotica, the book showcases short stories, flash fiction, campfire yarns and a screenplay that brings readers not quite to the realm of Death, but somewhere between here and there.

Many of the writers involved are from Bay County. Joining Buoni, Corley and Boss are N. Wayne Garrett, Conrad Young, Brittany Lamoureux, Kyle Clements, Angela Apperson and Joseph Davis. Others include Autumn Lishky from Oklahoma, Dee Jordan from Mobile, Ala., and Jacqueline Seewald, previously nominated for a Nebula Award for her short story, “Touched by Wonder.”

Mark Boss at left, Ruth Corley at right

 (Full disclosure: I’m part of a writing critique group that includes Boss and Corley (see photo at left for the whole group posing with author Tim Dorsey), and one of my short stories appeared in the first volume of “Between There.” I’m also a regular participant at Writers Gallery.)

Corley is a fiction writer in addition to her job as public information specialist with the Bay County Sheriff’s Office. The two interests led her down a surprising trail as she wrote “Cold Case.”

“I love to hear the stories of the ‘old days’ in law enforcement here in Bay County,” she said. “A friend told me how the top floor of the old Old Jail (before what we now refer to as the Old Jail/BCSO Office was built, which used to be next to the Court House) was considered haunted. … I thought I would use that bit of folklore in a story and set it back in 1990, when both buildings were used simultaneously. Oh, to make it even creepier, the county morgue was housed in the basement of the old Old Jail, which also gave the building a unique ambience.”

Boss, a freelance editor and author of thrillers, said his inspiration came from multiple sources.

“The title has a double meaning,” he said. “It refers to a dog they see, and it’s also the nautical term for the short watches on a ship that take place between 4 to 6 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. I drew on the excellent work our local Association of St. Jude does in helping the homeless, and combined that with a scary location. The stuff about the dog and the murder, I made up.”

Corley said her characters often surprise her as she’s in the process of writing.

And that bodes well for a book about things that go bump in the night.

(Rest in) Peace. 

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BOOK LAUNCH
What: Release party for ghost story anthology ‘Between There’; books for sale; play haunted bingo for door prizes; costumes encouraged
When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 15
Where: Chez Amavida, 2997 W. 10th St., Panama City

(This is my column for PanamaCity.com and The News Herald this week.)

Break on Through

Had one tonight. Cracked this story I started last night. It incorporates elements from ideas I first churned at the Rosemary conference, as I think I mentioned already. But it's a new thing, and I think it works. I'm pretty pleased right now, but then, I'm not working on the details of it yet. That will be tomorrow, when I begin to force the parts into a shape.
But this is a cool place to be in right this moment. To paraphrase Hannibal Smith, I love it when a plot comes together.

Peace.

Tonight

Macro image of deep ocean worm
Taken from Telegram.co.uk

This is what I'm working on tonight:
A horror short story. An original creature (not a vampire, werewolf or zombie). At least three deaths. Taking place in Century.
And I'm stealing all of my own ideas from the recent writers conference prompts to get there.
Wish me luck.
Peace.