Part 7

A Highschool American Football game (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It had taken four months for her love to die. Four months of watching him avoid the girl, four months of his absence while he thought about her, four months of her name in their bed. It became his obsession, this girl who he had to avoid at risk of her safety. This girl who he trained to act out on the stage the confidence and determination she lacked in herself. This girl who began to take her place in his thoughts.

He said it was innocent, it was nothing, it wasn’t what they had. And it wasn’t, not in most ways. But it was something, and innocence was a matter of degree and perspective.

Franklin was staying late. Of course, there were the play rehearsals, and those took time. But what wasn’t explained away was his focus on the girl, how he talked about her as if she was a part of their life, how he expressed his concern for her.

She’d come to school once, to surprise him, but mostly to see if he was really working. She was almost to his office when she heard a girl’s voice. She stopped. Finding a place behind the bend in the hall, she peered to the other side and watched this girl in his arms, laughing, and then their lips met.

He’d said that night they were rehearsing lines, but the love was dead by then.

So Berta decided to make everything stop.

She thought it would be the quickest way to end this, even if the girl would have to suffer. It would be a share of the suffering she herself had been feeling. The neglect, and anger, the loneliness. So she found Stephen after football practice. He was wiping the sweat away from his face, looking at her with concentration, as if he could see her eyes behind the sunglasses she wore. Dark, so he wouldn’t see her lie.

“Can I help you?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. I didn’t come here for that.”

“What did you come for, then?”

Her lips tightened. “Now listen here, you tell your little slut of a girlfriend to stay the hell away from my husband.”

She could see his smile fade like the haze of an October morning.

“What are you talking about,” he said, his voice cracking.

“I’m Mrs. Ray, and you know damn well what I’m talking about. If I ever find her lipstick on his shirt, or smell her perfume on his crotch again, I’m going to do what you should have done a long time ago.”

The words dying as they hung in the air, she turned and walked away. She didn’t give him time to respond. She knew he’d have no response anyway.

And so she couldn’t see how Stephen ripped his jersey from his chest, then the pads, and then ran inside the school.

Part 6

Franklin stood outside of the church, far enough to not be seen but close enough to watch every face that passed through the leaves hanging on the burnt summer branches as they walked up the stairs to where the funeral would soon take place. His throat was dry. He wanted to go in, to watch, to see what kind of people felt sorry such a person was gone. Dead. Aching in a new place or silent in forever, or what ever happened to people when they died. He wanted to see him, his cold face in the box.

But he knew he wasn’t welcome.

He was not a murderer, not in this country. And if war wasn’t murder then he had no guilt to carry, even though he did, every day. And yet, this man, this boy, had died because of him. Because of what he’d said.

He’d often considered suicide himself. Not in the way Stephen had gone about it. There were better ways. A suicide, he thought, was not a demonstration. Those times when the death came in grand fashion were crimes committed by people who didn’t really want to die. Their suicides were accidents. Stephen hadn’t really wanted to die, either.

August seared itself into his skin, and he scratched it away. Couldn’t go inside. People would whisper. They’d look at him and think that he’d made love to one of his students, say he’d driven a young man to a death inspired by heartbreak. Some of it might be true.

He wondered if Stephen’s face looked like it had that day he’d seen him standing outside his door. It seemed like a long time ago. In many ways it was. A lot had happened, some of it good, most of it bad. The bad started that day on the porch, he behind the screen and Stephen on the other side of it, the day Stephen had told him he’d just wanted to make sure which house they lived in. The day the son of a bitch said that he was entrusting Crystal’s safety with him. He had a sick way of keeping someone safe.

“So this is how I see it, Franklin,” he’d said, not even having respect enough to call him Mr. Ray, like the other students. “Her safety depends on what you do. So think about it. Your actions can help her, or hurt her. But things are probably the opposite of what you’re imagining.”

“Are you threatening me?” he’d asked Stephen.

“No. I’m not threatening you.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if I see you with her, ‘helping her’ in the way you feel like you should, I’ll know you want her to feel pain.”

Franklin had told him to get the hell off of his property. He’d threatened to call the police. Stephen said that was also a good way for Crystal to get hurt. He’d said that anything Franklin did that he didn’t like, Crystal would be punished for.

It had terrified him.

The doors shut and the people stopped coming. There was no music inside the church, no sound but the passing traffic and the wind.

He wanted to see, to make sure he was dead.

Franklin stepped from behind the tree where he’d been standing, trying to look like he belonged there, and walked up the steps. The air was cool inside.

There were people near the front, and empty rows of chairs in the back. He sat down in one. He didn’t want to stay long.

They might say it was his fault, if they knew what had really happened. But they would have done it themselves if they’d seen what Franklin had seen.

Stephen’s casket was in the front, closed. Maybe the bullet had disfigured him too badly to fix.

Franklin had once thought he could save her. That was before he’d lost his way.

Part 4

And then there was Franklin.

He’d first met Crystal at the auditions. It was his first year as a theatre instructor, following the first job offer he’d received after completing the “Troops to Teachers” certification process when he’d left the Army. There wasn’t much need for art specialists in public schools, but he also covered technology applications classes. He’d also spent 10 years as a computer systems manager, installing communications components from Fort Bliss to Fort Bragg, and as far as Afghanistan. He didn’t like to think about Afghanistan.

Crystal wasn’t in choir, wasn’t in the high school band. But for some reason she’d picked that day to come up on the stage and sing “With You” from the musical Pippen. He hadn’t heard a teenager sing like that before. Every note was perfect, gentle, heartbreaking. When the call-backs were announced she was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t until the next day that he’d been able to tell her she’d earned the starring role.

He found her as she left her advanced Algebra class. She’d walked by him, so he’d called after her.

“Miss McCarthy?”

“Yes,”

“Hi, I’m Mr. Ray, you auditioned yesterday. I was hoping to see you at the call backs.”

“Oh… yeah. I had some things to do.”

“Listen, you auditioned really well. In fact, we’d like you to take a part in the musical.”

Crystal didn’t smile, her eyes didn’t change, in fact she looked a little sad. “That’s great, Mr. Ray but I really don’t think I have the time. I just wanted to see if I was brave enough to audition, you know?”

“You mean you don’t want to be in the musical?”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

Franklin had never talked to her before, but he knew there was something dark behind her reason. Perhaps it was the way the corner of her mouth pulled her smile down instead of up, like she’d wished she didn’t have to try to put on a happy face. Perhaps it was the way she’d looked behind her before she said it.

“Well, if you change your mind,” he said, “My office is upstairs, 257. I’d like you to think about it, at least. If you can’t make the musical we’ll be holding auditions for our winter play in a few weeks.”

“Ok.”

That afternoon while Franklin was turning off his computer and getting ready to head to the teacher’s lounge for some coffee before heading home, Crystal knocked on his door. He let her in, and she fell into his arms, crying. He knew this wasn’t appropriate, he knew that under no circumstances was he to touch a student, but he held her just the same, her face pressed tight against his chest. He felt the tears bleed through to his skin. And she cried and cried.

Stephen had followed her there, wanting to see if she’d go home like she said she was going to. He’d wanted to sneak up to the men’s room, see if anyone was inside and take her in. She’d made up some stupid excuse. He’d offered to walk her home, but she’d said she told her friend Suzzie she’d meet her for a class project. So he’d left, just long enough for her to think he was gone. Then he’d followed her.

Now she had her hands around that idiot new teacher.

Stephen took a knife from his pocket, the one he always carried with him, and thought about it for a moment. He put it back in his pocket, and knew what he would do.

Part 3

High school was a place of forgetting and of unbecoming. Stephen had attended five schools in eight years, and had managed not to make a single lasting friend. He blamed his parents, his life, his circumstance, but never himself. He was a young man comprised of parts; the places he lived, the men who’d hurt him, the women who hadn’t given him the ability to see their value, and the hopelessness that comes from being slow. He wasn’t slow, he told himself. It hadn’t been his fault that he’d repeated first grade. It was a matter of starting late. He’d started everything late.

He was the third child of a loveless home. His older brother Reggie had joined the Army before he’d finished high school, and became a hero in his absence. His sister Nikki had a way with men, barely a woman herself, and gave little appreciation to the image she was instilling in her younger brother. She’d had no regard for the restrictions of society and good grace, and instead had embarked upon nightly journeys through the taverns and truck stops of their small town, bringing home strays to make them beg for her. The noises through the wall from her room to his often sounded like a confrontation of dogs. When the parents were away, she’d lock in him his room, his only entertainment being the sounds of laughter, grunting, screaming, and then the drunken requests for him to do something funny, or painful for the sake of entertaining the unknown guests. Stephen observed all of this, and saw what a woman would do for a man’s attention. He learned the lessons she taught very well.

His father had broken him. His face had become numb to the fingers that after years had become fists, and he learned to retaliate by hating him. The more the man would strike him, the more he would wish the most horrific death upon him. Stephen didn’t know that a son was supposed to love his father, but he did know that a son should follow in a father’s footsteps. What hurt him more than his own abuse was watching his mother, as he peeked from behind a chair or a cracked door, while the old man would lay into her, pulling her hair so hard sometimes it made a tearing sound like a ripping burlap, and her cries sounded like they were coming from the lowest, deepest part of her. This, too, he observed, and learned that despite harsh treatment, a good woman took it and stayed.

In high school he had unbecome. He didn’t want to be the poor kid a grade behind. He had anger. He had retribution to bestow. He joined the football team and no one could hit harder than he could, run faster than he could, or play with such brutality. His violence made him a star.

But a girl had made him question once. She was pretty, and had smiled at him. He’d asked her name and that night had said it a thousand times to himself, wondering if she’d say yes if he asked her for a date. He felt vulnerable, weak, and he began to loath her. Loathing felt a lot like love, and somewhere the two got mixed up inside him until he couldn’t tell them apart.

There were things she did that made him feel like he was flying, and things she did that made him feel like he wanted to kill her.

And then there was Franklin.

Part 2

2

Stories often begin with an ending. That’s how it started, with the funeral of Stephen Jacob Murphy on August 12, 1993. The obituary had given a quick overview of a life; born in 1973, son of Martha and Benjamin, twice selected state all-star in track and field, working toward a degree in communications at Boise State University. Dog-lover. Member of the church choir. Will be missed by all.

What was missing from the truncated report were the journalistic details. Those had been displayed on page 2 of the Statesman the week before. 20 year-old man found dead in a car in the Taste-e-Freeze drive-thru. Rumored to have been stalking one of the cashiers, several previous police reports. The bullet that passed through his head from the gun found in his hand had embedded itself in the house on the other side of the fence. Reason to believe that the individual was also involved in a July break-in at the cashier’s home where two small animals were killed and their innards strung across the front yard. The suicide brings an end to a troubled relationship.

Crystal didn’t read the story or the obituary. She’d pulled the curtains in the room she had grown up in, on the second floor of her parent’s house, and didn’t come out for three days. All she wanted to do was forget that Stephen ever lived, or that she had ever loved him.

She’d known him since high school, the smart, handsome athlete that had asked her to a movie one night that felt like a million years ago. She’d said yes without telling her parents, and had gone on the first of many dates that had seen her experience her first real kiss, and the loss of her virginity. But Stephen had an angry side, one that her friends had told her to be careful about. She didn’t think much of it, just a guy’s way of blowing off steam, until he’d first struck her.

She’d auditioned for the school play, and had been selected for a quite controversial role for a high school in a religious town. She was a burlesque dancer, whose lone scene had her draping her arm around an old-time cowboy and sitting on his lap. Stephen had come to watch a rehearsal and that had been that. She’d lied and said she’d fallen, when all she’d wanted was to hide the fact that she’d dropped out of the play because makeup didn’t hide the purple bruise on her cheek.

Stephen had said he’d loved her, that his feelings for her had driven him to do it to her. He didn’t want to feel that way, but he loved her so much that the idea of anyone else touching her drove him crazy. A part of her was flattered. Crystal had tried to explain that to her mother, as they both tried to blend away the mark from the “softball” accident so that people wouldn’t stare at her and get any wrong ideas. And there had been the flowers delivered to home room that let the world know Stephen was a man who took care of his girl.

Crystal tried to forgive, less because she felt he was her prince, more because of how important she felt being his princess. She stayed with him. That was the first step she took toward killing Franklin.

Unintended Consequences

English: `Stone circle` in a small open space. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While doing research for my new novel, I stumbled across something fascinating, and disturbing. One of the primary settings in the book, a church in southern England (which I won’t name because I don’t want to risk spoiling the story) appears at first glance to have a history dating from early in the last millennium. It has classic gothic architecture, with a form and design used in many of the churches that dot the island. But if you take a closer look, you see something doesn’t look quite right. There’s something odd about its foundation.

Around and under the base of the church, in regular intervals, are large, odd shaped rocks that have been incorporated into the structure. A little poking around and you’ll find the answer to what these rocks are. They comprise an ancient stone circle dating from the Bronze Age, used for centuries before the first missionaries reached the English soil by druids and others for worship and burial.

The church is built right on top of a pagan ritual site.

This opens the doors to all kinds of possibilities. Perhaps the early Christians wanted to appropriate this ancient place of worship to convert the people of the area. Maybe they wanted to cover up a religion that wasn’t compatible with their own. Or perhaps, they left the stones on purpose, exposed underneath the base of the church, to proclaim the superiority of their God.

Whatever the reason, the outcome is mysterious. The church was a setting in my new novel before I knew this particularly wicked detail. I’d picked it out from a search of churches in the area due to its appearance, but honestly, I could have chosen a dozen other churches in a dozen other towns. In fact, I’d already had the story plotted, and almost 1/3rd of it written before I discovered the rune stones in a place I’d already featured prominently. I felt as if the story had led me there, as if it had been part of the story all along. I just had to discover it myself.

I have to assume that this isn’t the only church built on pagan ruins. Perhaps it is the way of the world. But I can’t help but think that something remains of those people long ago who prayed to different entities. Call it what you want – spirits, energy, ghosts – but these things remain long after the physical has died. I’ve written about it before, in my post on Sarah Winchester. Here, in this English church, things that are opposed are existing on the same ground.

One of the characters from my new novel, an old woman imprisoned for witchcraft, gave this warning: “Be careful when you mix the gods and the demons. You can’t put them all in one place and expect them to stay happy.”

I can’t wait to see what else I discover about my own story.

What have you discovered while writing? Has something ever snuck up on you, without warning, and made you think that, just maybe, this wasn’t your story after all?

This Beautiful Subject

English: Illustration to a fairy tale “King_Thrushbeard” Русский: Иллюстрация К.Фогеля (1893) к сказке “Король Дроздобород” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There once was a king who lived alone, as his wife had been dead for many years. He heard rumors of a girl in his kingdom that was so beautiful, whatever man saw her would fall in love with her. The king was lonely, and desired to meet this beautiful subject. He sent his men throughout the kingdom to find her, and at last a report came that the girl lived with her father in a particular village. But the messenger warned him, “My lord, they say that the girl is so beautiful that whoever sees her is blinded by love. I’m afraid there is no one you can trust to bring her here.”

The king thought for a time, and at last decided the only person he could trust was his own son. He called the boy to him, and told him to bring the girl back to the castle. The son bowed, and headed off. Several days passed, but the king’s son did not return. The king was distraught with worry, and wondered if his son had been set upon and harmed. So one night the king set out alone, to the house where the messengers had said the girl lived.

When the king reached the little house, he rushed to the door and begged the owner to come out to meet him. An old man cracked the door just wide enough to peer through, and after a few moments realized he was standing before his king. The old man knelt to the ground, but the king begged him to rise. The king asked, “I sent my son here a week ago, but he has not returned. Did he come to this house?”

The old man answered, “Yes, he did.”

The king’s heart was at once relived and suspicious. “Where then is your daughter?” he asked the old man.

“I don’t know where she is,” he replied. “She is your daughter, now.”

The Beauty of Pain

I often wonder why the writing, films, and music I love best are often the darkest. I stumbled upon this quote from a 19th century essayist. For me, it’s an adequate explanation.

English: Despair (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Works of genius have this in common, that even when they vividly capture the nothingness of things, when they clearly show and make us feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, and when they express the most terrible despair, nonetheless to a great soul – though he find himself in a state of extreme duress, disillusion, nothingness, noia, and despair of life, or in the bitterest and deadliest misfortunes (caused by deep feelings of whatever) – these works always console and rekindle enthusiasm; and though they treat or represent only death, they give back to him, at least temporarily, that life which he had lost.”

— Giacomo Liapardi (1798-1837) from his diary called Zibaldone 

Flowers of Evil

Nederlands: Public domain: Portrait de Jeanne Duval par Charles Baudelaire, 1850 Jeanne Duval licence : Publiek domein author: Charles Baudelaire (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Always be a poet, even in prose.” – Charles Baudelaire

He was young and wealthy. Only 21, and the inheritor of large fortune, the young man lived in opulence on the Isle St. Louis in France. He was ready to find his place in the world, and become a proud member of the elite. And then he met a women.

Her name was Jeanne. He was also young, but not nearly so naive. She’d just arrived from Haiti, and had started work as a cabaret girl. In a smoke filled club at the seedy end of the Champs Elysees, she sang a song, risque in nature. In the audience sat young Charles. He was smitten with her.

She was nothing like the kind of woman he was supposed to fall in love with. She was not of a landed family, she did not care for equestrian sports. She possibly did not know the proper order of eating utensils on a table setting. But no matter, she was ravishing. The next day, Charles sat in his carriage and watched the delivery boy give her a bouquet of red roses. This was their beginning.

His friends were horrified. Many pleaded with him for reason, no doubt, but he could find nothing better to invest his fortune in than her happiness. He was prepared to give her anything she could ever want, as any love-stuck man would do. And so he began to frequent this dark part of the city, the brothels and opium dens that lines streets filled with scoundrels and harlots.

He stood out like the proverbial sore thumb – a well-dressed and well-heeled man cavorting with patrons of back street bars. Instead of trying to elevate his dear love’s state, he preferred to meet her down at her own.

His poetry, already sentimentally dark, began to turn like a decaying flower into something much more striking. And like that flower that withers and dies, his poetry kept its beauty, even magnified it. He found the beauty in sorry and death, He once said “I can barely conceive of a beauty in which there is no melancholy.” That melancholy, that realization that beauty has a darker nature, helped him to pen Les Fleurs du Mal, widely known as one of the greatest works of poetry ever written.

And of Jeanne? She was his constant companion, his ravenous, biting muse. Illiterate though she was, she would sit and listen as he read his poetry for her, then yawn and raise a foot for him to kiss. He would often position her in the sunlight, and draw every curve of her body, his pencil practicing in place of his hands. Below one of his most intricate sketchings of her, he wrote the following inscription, “Quaerens quem devouret.”  It translates as “Seeking whom to devour.”

Jeanne introduced him to opium. They tore their lives down together, each needing the other to pull their meaning apart. They fought. She spent his money with abandon. And yet, he needed her. When his money was gone, she sold every last thing he owned. She began having affairs with his friends, and even sold herself on the street. But Charles couldn’t get out of her spell.

At last she left him, a broken, drug afflicted man. He lived out his life in the shadow of her absence. He even paid her expenses as she was sick and dying. He never got that first taste of bitter, anguishing, delusional love out of his heart.

Some say she introduced Baudelaire to the animistic and pagan religions of her native Haiti. There are rumors that she was some kind of enchantress, casting a spell on the good looking man in the back row, damning him to a life in her hold. But in the end, whether enchanted by spells or by beauty, the addiction is the same, is it not?

”The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hands, of her bosom, of her knees, of her hair, of her supple and floating clothes, … has contracted from this contact a tender skin and a distinct accent, a kind of androgyny without which the harshest and most masculine genius remains, as far as perfection in art is concerned, an incomplete being.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), French poet, critic. Artificial Paradise, An Opium-eater, VII. Childhood Sorrows (1860). On men who have been raised by women.

The Seattle Sound

Seattle Rain (Photo credit: ArtBrom)

‘Seattle’ was a man before it was a city. Chief Seattle, or Si’ahl, his mother Duwamish and his father of the Suquamish tribe, once gave a warning to settlers who had come to take his land. Many believe that his words were a curse to those who would live in the place that bore his name.

The “Seattle Sound” could mean many things. The city itself rests on the hills overlooking the Puget Sound. I spent some time there, a little less than a year, after I graduated high school. It was where I best learned the lesson that dreams don’t come just because you dream them. I wanted to be a star, but wasn’t willing to immolate myself to shine.

Anyone who has been to Seattle, Washington usually remembers two things about the city. First, it’s strikingly beautiful. Second, it’s almost always covered in clouds.

There are sunny days here and there, and when they come they are a wonderful relief to the gray skies and damp air. But for those who live there year round, they know that the sun is only a fleeting visitor. These wet and cloudy days give birth to a mood, an atmosphere among the people, imparting a flavor to life that is reflected in its artists. It is this atmosphere, this soul of the city, that expresses itself in the Seattle sound.

The sound is often music of death.

As I write this post, I’m listening to the newest release from the band “Alice In Chains.” They were role models for my early attempts at rock stardom. I decorated myself with cornrows and pierced myself to become the model they’d made a preferred vessel to fame. They, and a few other bands – most notably “Nirvana” – paved the way for a new type of music quickly labeled “grunge.” It was the Seattle sound, and soon young hipsters from Los Angeles to London were sporting flannel shirts and growing their hair over their eyes. The lyrics were often of the desperation of life, the pain of the very act of existing, and the temptation of challenging death by embracing it. It was a dangerous mixture, and one that led me down a path to depression. Under those same, dark Seattle skies I also felt the pull of this spirit, tempted to the savagery that disguised itself in hopeless indifference. It is a pull so strong that, you might have noticed, not everyone survives.

The original singer for “Alice In Chains,” Layne Staley, was found dead a few years after the band’s celebrity peaked. It was said that his body, locked away in his apartment for a few weeks because no one had come to check on the star, was unrecognizable. The main themes of his music were death, suicide and heroin. Of course, he was not the only one. Another Seattle musician, Kurt Cobain, perhaps the most prolific artist of his time, shot the back of his head out in the room above his garage. He once wrote a song titled “I Hate Myself and Want to Die.” People clapped when he sang it.

The Seattle sound didn’t really start in the early ’90s, though. Maybe the most well-known Seattleite is Jimi Hendrix. Seattle stayed in him even as he travelled far from home. He was found dead at age of 27 in a London hotel with enough drugs and alcohol in his system to kill him a few times.

There are others such as Andrew Wood from Mother Love Bone, Mike Starr – another member of Alice in Chains – and everyday there are more and more lesser-known musicians who succumb to something that comes disguised as depression, drugs, or whatever demon is available.

Some believe this is all the result of a warrior’s forgotten curse.

It was recorded that in 1854, Chief Seattle spoke to a gathering of men preparing to take the land from his tribe. He told them soon his people would vanish from the land, their memory gone with them. But it would not be the end.

“Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We will see. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.”

That is what he said. Was it a curse? Maybe not. But if it was, perhaps that’s why so many of those who’ve come to live on his land have watched their children die.