Tag: My Fiction

The Safety Dance – Part 1

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The man stood alone on the subway platform at ten thirty in the morning and considered where his life was going.  He had just been laid off at the office and now was trying to work out how he was going to break the news to his wife.  She was home with their three small children and the dog and had been hoping that the Christmas bonus he had been expecting today would pay for them to move to an apartment in a nicer town where the schools were decent.

Now all of that was in the wind and he’d have to start looking for a job in a not-so-great economy with a not-so-great resume to sell.  Suddenly getting home seemed like a really bad idea.  He looked behind him at the cardboard box sitting on the bench.  There were some books, a coffee mug, some desk toys and a few papers that his boss had watched him take and which were considered “non-proprietary.”  No company secrets sneaking out the door, not even a Swingline stapler.  Suddenly looking at this pathetic flotsam representing five years of his life, he picked up the box and dumped it in the nearest trash barrel.  The coffee mug made a satisfying tinkling sound as it smashed against the metal barrel.

And just like that he felt considerably better.  He opened up his brief case and started lightening the load.  He got rid of anything he didn’t think would ever be of any use in the afterlife of corporate separation.  Most satisfying, he ripped apart his safety lanyard with its annoying multi-colored slogan about reducing risk to zero.  That seemed the most pathetic part of the corporate culture that he had had to endure at work.  How exactly had the never-ending safety dance protected him from the danger of losing his job.  He had to admit that the culture had saved him from earthquakes, lightning and tornadoes but it had been useless against unemployment.  He stopped for a second when he found the free roast beef card from the company cafeteria.  He had nine out of the ten spots stamped.  He was a week away from the free sandwich.  He had to admit that one burned.  But he chucked it away too.  There was nothing left in the brief case so for good measure he chucked that too.  Now he felt giddy.

He walked up out of the subway station into the cold, bright light of a December morning in Manhattan and thought, “Okay, Odysseus, now what?  Instinctively, he started walking uptown.  By noon he realized he wanted a cup of coffee and a snack so he stopped at a coffee shop and bought a very overpriced coffee and doughnut and sat near the front window and looked out at the city.  He was in the middle of a block that was mostly expensive five story walk-ups.  Remarkably there weren’t any homeless tents on the sidewalk so the illusion of pre-COVID, pre-George Floyd New York was almost perfect.  As he drank his coffee and ate his doughnut a feeling of happiness washed over him.  But when the snack was finished, he realized that it was time to decide how this day would end on a better note.  He needed a path forward.

He took out his phone and looking in his contacts he saw the name of a guy he worked with at the job before this one.  They had been friendly but the somewhat odd personality of this guy had always kept things a little off.  But he had been pretty well connected.  They both were inside-sales guys for large industrial equipment manufacturers and he had heard the guy was doing alright.  So, he called him up and heard, “Jim!  Wow, I haven’t thought about you in a million years.  What’s up?”

“Dave, my boss gave me the boot today.  I’m looking for any leads for something right away.”  The speaker went silent for a few seconds and then, “You know, it’s a damn funny thing.  I know you’re a local boy and never set foot outside the northeast but there’s a very nice opening I just heard of in Missouri that is probably right up your alley.”

Now it was Jim’s turn to go quiet.  Missouri, how the hell was he supposed to move there?  He didn’t know anything about living outside of New York and he didn’t want to try.  But he decided not to shoot it down right away, “Well, I guess I’d like to hear a little more about it.”

Now Dave’s voice sounded a little annoyed, “You know this is a pretty sweet deal.  I wouldn’t wait too long before coming in.  Can you meet for lunch tomorrow?  I’ll bring along the hiring manager and you can impress him with your sparkling wit.”  Deciding quickly, Jim said, “I’ll be there.  Where should we meet?”

…………

The Long National Nightmare of Me Being Way Too Busy is Over!

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Today I finished up a weeklong marathon project that really made my life a misery and seriously cut into my on-line time to the detriment of this site.

Whew!!!

So here I am looking around and I see…

The same crap as the week before!

Hmmm.

Okay, there’s a claim that Biden’s poll numbers have gone up a point or maybe two.  Let’s grant that.  But his swing state numbers, both with and without third party candidates are the same or maybe even a little bit worse than before.  And inflation has gotten worse but the disastrous housing market is forcing the Fed to drop interest rates to try and generate some good news for Biden.  Which will make the inflation worse still.

And the Zoomers are really angry about Gaza.

Apparently, the big tent party is beginning to turn on its Jewish contingent because of Biden’s support for the Gaza War.  And this is causing pundits like the Ragin’ Cajun James Carville to hit the panic button.  His exact words were:

“I’ve been very vocal about this,” Carville said. “It’s horrifying, our numbers among younger voters, particularly younger Blacks, younger Latinos … younger people of color. Particularly males. We’re not shedding them, they’re leaving in droves,” he added.”

So, Biden has lots of election problems because the country has lots of problems and it’s too late to fix them before November.

And the border crisis is worse than ever and the criminal aliens are in the news every day.  And the cities are becoming war zones.

And now ships are crashing into bridges and destroying them.  I mean, you can’t make this stuff up!

Sure, this is more of the same.  But it’s like a train crash.  Once you’ve discovered that you have no brakes and you’re closer than some minimum distance “x” then you can’t avoid the crash.  But the closer you get to the impact the more terrifying is the view from the engineer’s seat.  So, I’m sure whoever is running the Biden campaign is in daily contact with the voting officials in Pennsylvania figuring out if they can add an extra five million votes to the Biden total on Election Day.

Well, enough election crap.  Instead something nearer and dearer to my heart; my novel (The American Archipelago: Book 1 – The Sniper).  Thanks to all who’ve been reading along and special thanks to those who have provided feedback.  Honest criticism is extremely valuable when you’re trying to make a story attractive to the publishers and compelling for the readers.

Anyone who has a taste for dystopian science fiction, I ask that you give it a whirl and leave some comments that reflect your take on the story, positive or negative.  And the more specific the better.

Here in Dunwich the weird is the rule and the weather is no exception to this.  It’s supposed to snow tonight and then rain will freeze up tomorrow night and create a Class IV Kill Storm. So tomorrow, after helping Camera Girl navigate the frozen tundra, we’ll probably hunker down and enjoy the sounds of squealing brakes and screeching cries on the road outside as the black ice claims numberless victims on the crater strewn back roads of Dunwich.  Afterward I’ll go out for the traditional gathering of the pocket change from the bodies of the crash victims and I’ll return as a conquering hero (of sorts) as I dole out this largesse to my minions (dog one and dog two) in the form of low-quality pressed rawhide that I purchase on the websites of third world competitors of Amazon dot com.

I’ve often wondered what would happen if a prolonged storm cut off the supply of these “treats.”  I fear that my minions might notice that there is a disturbing similarity between pressed rawhide and, well, me!  Me thinks Dog One has a lean hungry look about him.  Such minions are dangerous.

Well, anyway, enough yammering.  I’m back and on the job.

Angry Old Joe and Better Things

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I scanned through about five minutes of Joe Biden’s “old man shouting at the camera” routine.  Well, he didn’t fall down or begin speaking literal gibberish.  But I found it intolerable after just a few minutes.  I guess it could be summed up as Ukraine, abortion and January 6th.”  Okay, let’s see how that works out for him.  Maybe everyone will forget that their jobs are being given to illegal aliens that are also assaulting and murdering their wives and daughters.  And maybe they’ll forget that everything is now twice as expensive as it was during Trump’s term in office.  So maybe the Dems will be able to win the November election by fraud.  I guess we’ll see.  But it’s time to look around and spend our time thinking about and doing things that we consider important.

And that goes for me too.  Serializing my incomplete novel has been an interesting experience for me.  It has taken me a lot of time to get about half way through writing it and you kind of forget how you thought up various scenes and bits of dialogue.  So, seeing the beginning again is an odd case of seeing it with new eyes.  I guess I’ve been pleasantly surprised with what I’ve reread.  It seems to hold up pretty well.  Of course, you always find small mistakes and even inconsistencies that have to be tweaked.  But all in all, it isn’t half bad.  And that is immensely gratifying for me and gives me the encouragement I need to start banging away at the second half of the story.  And this rereading has also given me some new insights into some additions that I need to make to fill in some holes that I now find in the story.  It really was necessary to get about this far in the story before I could have enough perspective about the tempo and the balance of the various story lines.

Of course, the hardest part for an author is to find a publisher and/or a market for his literary offspring.  After listening to a podcast about how incredibly difficult it is to get self-published science fiction novels “recognized” on the Kindle site I think I’ll try to see if I can interest any of the traditional publishing companies in my deathless prose.  After all, who could fail to recognize the brilliant writing, the deep psychological truth in the characters’ underpinnings and the timeless quality of the epic struggle between the King of the Mole Men and the faceless, soulless minions of unspeakable evil?  Wait a minute.  Is mole-men two words or a hyphenate?

Well, regardless.  Thanks to all that have plowed through the chapters and please feel free to send along criticism and thoughts on how you think the story should proceed.  I’ve only put up on the site about two thirds of what I’ve already written so there’s still a bit to go but I’m sure many people can guess some of how this story proceeds.  There is an inexorable logic to how a clandestine war is prosecuted and where the dramatic tension needs to exist.  Suffice it to say that things need to start going wrong for our heroes pretty soon.  But I’m sure everything will be resolved by the final chapter.

Or maybe not everything.  There’s always got to be a sequel you know.

 

“Oh if I were the King of the Mole Men, Not queen, not duke, not prince.

My regal robes of the Mole Men, would be satin, not cotton, not chintz.”

Dunwich in the Time of Mud

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Spring has arrived with its endless supply of muck and slop and just in time with it the town has gone topsy turvy.  Revolution has broken out.  The Old Guard and the Young Turks are having a set to and I’m caught in the middle.  I’ll be working more and making a little extra money but being of an extremely lazy nature I’d prefer the opposite.  But there are some interesting aspects to this turn of events.  New England town democracy in action is a bizarre force to observe.  The fact that the Old Guard is putting up a fight is almost unheard of in this neck of the woods.  I’ll have a ringside seat for the proceedings so it may make an interesting story when all is said and done but I expect that much angst and hard feelings will spill over into everyday life.

But at the same time, it will also cut into my blogging time, in fact it already has.  And on top of that I’ve mended my ways and now have begun applying myself to my fiction writing.  I cranked out four thousand words over the last three days and that has also cut into my posting.  But that’s all to the good.  The story is expanding and becoming more interesting.  I’ve definitely decided to nuke my hero’s base at some point.  I mean what’s a science fiction story without an atom bomb somewhere?  No one calls them atomic bombs anymore.  It’s nuke this and nuke that.  Thermo-nuclear.  Who came up with that name?  Thermo- implies heat.  Are there any cold nuclear explosions?  I guess if they ever figure out an actual cold fusion process, we could talk about it but anyway I think I’m going to nuke my base.

I’ve had to write some personal scenes into the book.  The hero gets to see his family for the first time in a long while and there are grandkids and his son’s widow and that was tricky.  I think I did alright which surprised me.  I’m not a very touchy feely kinda guy but I could see that leaving out his relationship with his family felt fake.  So, there you go, human interest.  What’s next, an Oprah interview for our hero?  I’ve even added an AI character.  That’s actually kind of fun.  It’s funny once you get going these things kind of write themselves in.  Anyway, the story is percolating along.

But all this stuff really just enhances the blogging.  You can’t just write about national stories all the time.  It’s just too much of the same thing.  We’ve got to be in the story too, or what’s the point?  I could just listen to Tucker Carlson or some other talking head.  That’s why I like when some of the guest contributors have something to add.  I like to get some other angles on things and I’m sure that’s the same with everybody else.

I think the whole Trump indictment story is both a ridiculous joke and at the same time an important object lesson.  It’s important that everyone on our side realize that this is not our country anymore and it doesn’t work by the rules we were told apply.  The people in charge change the rules as needed.  They don’t play fair and they play as rough as needed.  And if the January 6th prisoners aren’t enough to convince you of that just wait till Donald Trump gets his treatment.

So anyway, busy, busy, busy but still keeping my nose to the grindstone.  Wow, that sounds painful!

Another Snippet from My Book

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I’ve been trying to speed up my writing but there’s always something distracting me.  but I thought it would be fun to post a little part of a scene.

“After the meeting, Director Sparks called Chastain and told him to meet him at Sparks’ temporary office in the Pentagon.  When Chastain arrived Sparks briefed him.  “We can’t play around anymore.  I’ve been given unlimited resources to catch this man.  I want you to act as the lead.  There will be three separate teams.  One will investigate the physical evidence at the Hoover building site to figure out what the hell we’re up against.  The second team will pursue the cyber trail of whoever released the video.  That leak must be plugged.  But most important, the third team will find Boghadair.  You will have first priority on all the surveillance infrastructure, public and private.  You can write a blank check for whatever you need but I want that man in custody within the week.  If not, your head is on the block.  And that’s not a joke.  If Boghadair isn’t in shackles in a week from today you’re done.”  Chastain bit back some bitter words and said, “Okay, I’ll need a command center with a room where I can crash; bed, shower, kitchen.  Tell me the cost center numbers I can charge to and give me the contact information for my three team leads.  I’ll find Boghadair for you or you can have my job.  But I wonder what else I’ll find.  Apparently, this thing is a lot bigger than one man.”

Sparks handed him a briefcase.  “All the documents are on a drive.  There’s a folder with all the contact information and the codes you need to access the databases and the systems you’ll need.  I also want a list of government officials that Boghadair might target and conjecture on the order of attack.  I want that list by tomorrow morning.”  Chastain nodded his head.  Sparks growled, “That’s all.”  And Chastain left the office and walked out of the building.  As he was leaving the building he thought, “You’re at the top of that list you fool.”

As Director Sparks left his temporary office that night that very idea occurred to him.  He was headed home to a gated community in one of the most expensive suburbs of Washington.  And he was scared.  He decided to travel back to his home by a different route.  Taking this circuitous route and seeing no cars following him he slowly calmed down and by the time he was within a mile of his home he felt foolish about his fears.  When he was caught at a red light that usually never changed on him he was a little confused.  Then he noticed that the video display on his dashboard shifted from the typical menu view to a video feed.  He could see a man in the driver’s seat of a car.  After a second or two he realized he was looking at an image of himself.  He was for a second stunned and by the time he comprehended his peril the bullet was already entering the side of his head.  When his foot slipped off the brake his car rolled into the intersection and was struck by traffic going through the intersection.  The local police were on the scene rather quickly and alerted the FBI based on the car’s license plate number.  Late that night the report reached George Chastain and his first thought was, “I guess I should let the Attorney General know he’s next on the list.””

Gee, it’s fun killing bad guys.  It just feels right.  Well, on to the Attorney General.

Nuclear Armageddon as a Plot Device

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Recently Joe Biden made the news when he reversed a campaign vow and stated that under his administration the United States would maintain the right to nuclear first strike as a military option.  Now the idea of Dementia Joe mistaking the nuclear football for his tv remote and ordering up an all-out nuclear blitz on Russia and China while trying to access some kind of hair fetish programming is obviously concerning.

But really this article is more about fiction writing.  In a story that I have been working on (forever) I reached a point in the story where I considered that the best way to escape from the corner I’d painted myself into was by having thermonuclear war break out between Russia and the United States.

Admittedly, that seems like a sad statement on my writing abilities but in point of fact it provided a definitive solution to multiple plot problems I was faced with.  After all, there aren’t many scenarios that can put the US federal government on its heels.  But three 20-megaton thermonuclear ICBMs detonating over Washington is a leading contender.  So, I will confess that I considered the scenario very carefully.

One thing I noticed though is that the impact of a nuked United States is extremely disruptive to a storyline.  Even the most tyrannical US administration looks quite different after the mushroom cloud sprouts over it.  Because now all of a sudden millions of Americans are dead and the ones still living are stunned, scared and desperate for a path forward.  At that point they’d follow Satan himself if he knows where to get food and fuel.

So, everything in my story is turned upside down.  Instead of the plucky rebels fighting the evil feds in a series of hit and run attacks, suddenly they find themselves wondering how they’ll survive without the now non-existent FEMA agency to save them from starvation and hypothermia.  Now what happens to my rebellion story?  All of a sudden enemies need each other just to survive.  Freedom and independence suddenly don’t mean much when staying alive requires all hands-on deck.

So that’s the change in the atmosphere, the feel of the story.  Does it still make sense?  Can the story survive the change?  Not as originally conceived.  I was looking at a series of stories with the rebels taking on the Deep State one step at a time with the rest of the country sizing up the battle and the balance of power gradually tilting toward the rebels.  But now the battle is over but without the dramatic tension and the action.  Instead, we have a tale of catastrophe and dissolution.

And to make that story work will require a change in emphasis.  Now instead of a slowly building wave of battle we have a nuclear wipe out and a tide going out.  Instead of a war with winners and losers we have the flotsam and jetsam from a deluge struggling to survive and trying to rebuild some kind of patchwork of settlements.  That’s a totally different thing.  It becomes a bunch of smaller stories at the village level.  Instead of armies we have farmers and mechanics, men and women and their children trying to survive without supermarkets and gas stations, even without electricity.  It’s nothing like the story I was envisioning but somehow it makes sense.  Because even though we may have forgotten about the atom bomb it hasn’t gone away.  It’s still there and it has its own internal logic that makes it the executioner of last resort.  If we decide that the arc of history bends in our direction and we can do as we please no matter what, we may find that the arc is just the ballistic track of an ICBM.

So inexorably I think the story is telling me to make a turn.  Even as a fictional plot device it does make one pause.  Imagine the largest fifty American cities reduced to rubble and charred bodies.  Imagine fallout killing off a quarter of the survivors.  And food and fuel gone for the rest of the survivors.  The grimness of such a tale is hard to overstate.  How do you tell such a story so that people will want to read it?

Well, that’s a subject for another day.  But this one has helped me get my thoughts in some kind of order.  Okay, hit all those buttons!

Per Un Barbiere di Qualità!

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Princess Sack-of-Potatoes’ birthday party was a great success.  My daughter’s in-laws were very congenial and we all good-naturedly performed all the kids’ party rituals.  We dutifully sang off key to ‘Happy Birthday” and applauded the blowing out of the four candles.  We watched as the cake was cut and the opening of the presents and even a spirited game of pin the tail on the donkey.  Only for some unknown reason it was tape the nose on the clown.  This particular clown looked like some kind of nightmarish psychopath which I found quite disturbing but the kids were unperturbed.

When we had all eaten enough burgers and potato salad and cake and ice cream and all the presents were opened the parents gathered up their kids and headed home.  Camera Girl agreed that the event was a great success and we began some of the clean-up.

But I was in the mood for something interesting.  Lately I have been watching YouTube videos of the operatic aria “Largo al factotum” from the Barber of Seville.  It’s the song that everyone remembers from various classic cartoons of the 1940s that has the famous stanza, “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ipb9xbXSAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJIpVj_YkNo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKDXr_fimQ8

I watched about a dozen different versions, some going back to the 1920s.  And it occurred to me, “What an interesting character Figaro is!”  Here is the swaggering braggart.  He is a big fish in a little pond.  In his own mind he is a hero, a Hercules of a thousand great labors.  He is always in demand and always acclaimed by the crowd.

And of course, he is merely a legend in his own mind.  His actual trades are barber, dentist, wig maker and a sort of go-between for couples in love.  He passes love notes and such things.  So, he really is a nothing.

But he has a quick wit, the gift of gab, a way with women and enormous self-confidence.  And putting those things together creates a formidable character.  Some people may recognize someone like this.  I knew someone of exactly the type.  They always have a treasure trove of amazing personal stories.  And their personal lives tend to be an awful mess.  They combine recklessness, selfishness and even a bit of cruelty along with their natural abilities as a clown, a skirt chaser and a leader of the riff-raff.  In many ways they are fascinating personalities but they leave a trail of angry women in their wake and never seem to grow up.

And it occurred to me that is why I enjoy the aria.  I recognize the type that Figaro is the symbol of.  And the scene captures that reality splendidly.  And the music is wonderful.

And what a great character he would be to put in a story!  Somehow, I’ve got to have a swaggering braggart in one of my stories.  It would just be too great a thing to ignore.  And in fact, I need him to be a recurring character in a “world” that I make.  It will be a sort of an homage to an old friend that I knew long, long ago in a place far, far away.

Ah, bravo Figaro! Bravo, bravissimo!  Fortunatissimo per verità!

Pleasant Fiction and Painful Reality

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Today was a fiction writing day.  I made some good progress on the plot.  But I was stymied on an aspect of the story that only recently occurred to me.  What I realized is that one of my main characters doesn’t have enough back story.  He has a reasonably well-defined personality but he’s floating alone in his little bubble of the story.  I need to tell the readers why he is the way he is.  So, I started making up this past in my head but then I realized I need a way to have him tell this info to the readers.  That’s an awful lot of exposition.  So, what I’ll do is come up with a situation where the protagonist and this character are involved in some scene where they’re trapped together and forced to wait for some crisis to pass and that’s when I’ll have them swap histories.  To make it more natural I’ll have them both talking about their pasts.  In the context of both of them not knowing if they’re about to be killed it makes it a little more likely, emotionally, for them to be talking about their lives.

And one other problem remains.  Where does the story end?  This will be a series of books and I want to end the first book with a bang but I have to make sure that the empire will be able to strike back.  So, I have to leave enough villains to allow them to regroup.  Maybe there’s more to this writing thing than I thought.

I saw a news article that said that the FBI took Trump’s passports.  Isn’t that just too cute of them?  Apparently, they’re pulling out all the stops.  I think that’s good.  November should be the perfect storm.  We should know for sure whether there’s any hope of fixing the system.  And if the Deep State commits themselves to every banana republic tactic and holds nothing back then we’ll have no doubt about whether this is our best-case scenario.  If the mid-terms aren’t a referendum on Biden’s incompetence and the Deep State’s unconstitutional behavior then there is no conceivable way, we’ll ever push them out of power.  And it doesn’t matter whether it’s an honest election or not.  A loss for us either way says to me that it’s all over.

And I don’t say that in a melodramatic way.  On Wednesday November 9th if the Democrats still hold the House and Senate, I won’t be donning sackcloth and sifting ashes into my hair.  I won’t even put a for sale sign up in front of the Compound.  But I will be weighing my options and making some changes.  After all, living in a country that is run by an oligarchy that is proven to have an unshakeable lock on the levers of power and is also clearly working to disenfranchise your family isn’t necessarily the best option, even if it is the richest and most powerful country on the planet and has always been your home.

So, I’ll think long and hard about what’s best for me and mine.  I’m sure I’ll have plenty of company in that contemplation.  The 2020 election fraud was a shock.  But with the COVID lockdown being used to allow all kinds of irregularities it left a question as to whether the fraud could be reined in afterward.  If it’s repeated this year then it can be repeated indefinitely.  If the Justice Department can run two kinds of “justice” then we’ve already ceased to be a legitimate state.  So, many people will be reflecting on these facts.

But, enough of that gloomy talk.  Tomorrow is Liz Cheney’s Primary Day.  I intend to enjoy that event to its fullest.  Maybe she’ll give a tearful concession speech or a defiant vow to be back on top someday soon.  But either way I will savor the moment.  Quoting Khan Noonien Singh (or actually Herman Melville) “to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee,” I revel in the spite inherent in punishing the RINOs.  It’s the only thing that we can do to redress the injuries these people inflict on us every day.  The least we can do is celebrate their defeat.

02DEC2021 – Dunwich Complainer – Local COVID Actions

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Here in Dunwich as everywhere in America, COVID has been a scourge.  Of course, the spread and the symptoms in Dunwich are atypical and highly disturbing (as is everything here).  The disease is completely restricted to a one-mile radius around the historic home of Zebadiah Cobblestoner the legendary Whaling Fleet Magnate.

Zebadiah was known in the early nineteenth century as the whale prostate king.  His company sold pickled whale prostate throughout the New England region where its healing properties were much in demand.  And with the proceeds of this lucrative trade Zebadiah built a magnificent mansion in his native town Dunwich.  And there he lived in great opulence until the great whale prostate crash of 1841.  In that year the medical profession actually investigated the “healing effects” of whale prostate and discovered that its only effect on humans was to imbue its users with a decidedly bright blue coloration around their private parts.

Needless to say, Zebadiah’s fortunes fell on hard times.  In addition, a local witch named Hepzibah Goodbody was so outraged at the coloration she had contracted that she put a curse on Cobblestoner that not only killed him but rendered his mansion a nexus of contagion and miasma ever after.  At first this miasma was restricted to anyone foolhardy enough to inhabit Zebadiah’s mansion.  But over the years the contagion grew until now it had reached out to all the inhabitants of the formerly prestigious Toenail Hill area.  The malady starts out as general abdominal discomfort but in its terminal stage it presents as an exaggerated swelling of the lower abdomen followed by detonation of the prostate which usually leaves only the legs and upper body of the victim intact.  Surprisingly both males and females are equally afflicted in this syndrome.

Now you may be asking yourself how a nineteenth century witch’s spell that causes people to explode could be diagnosed as COVID.  Well, it turns out that the federal and state governments have provided, let us say, inducements to local governments for finding COVID cases in their areas.  And let’s face it, it’s not cheap cleaning up the biohazard when someone’s pelvic region explodes so First Selectman Cthulhu worked it out with the Dunwich Department of Health to sort of roll the Cobblestoner Curse victims in with the COVID census.

But with the recent state budget cuts the “subsidy” for the COVID cases has dried up and so the Board decided something should be done to clean up this problem.  I was contracted to do it.  And it was stressed that I could employ all means necessary.

Using satellite imagery, I was able to triangulate the source of the miasma to a corner of the Cobblestoner estate.  In fact, it turned out to be centered around Zebadiah Cobblestoner’s private cemetery.  I brought along one hundred tanker trucks, each loaded with 6,000 gallons of aqua regia which is a combination of saturated hydrochloric acid and fuming nitric acid.  My team excavated down to one hundred feet where we started to uncover a stone-like mass of enormous size finally we could see its shape was spherical with a diameter of over a thousand feet.  When we reached the bottom of this structure, we saw with horror that it was attached to the centuries dead but normal sized corpse of Zebadiah Cobblestoner.  We had uncovered his decidedly malign hypertrophied prostate bulging out of his body!

We climbed out of the excavation in a panicked rout but before following my team in a sprint for the hills I slammed the valve actuator that released the veritable lake of hyper-corrosive acid into the pit.  As I panted from the effort of escaping the scene, clouds of acrid fumes spread along the ground.  Earth tremors made it difficult to keep my legs under me but I finally reached a ridge about a mile off from the pit.  And there I witnessed a sight that has shaken my sanity and left me a shell of the man I was.

The ground around the pit convulsed and swelled.  The prostate swelled up to ten times its size and glowed a bright yellow.  Then the prostate shrank down and disappeared below ground.  But suddenly the corpse of Cobblestoner took its place swelling up to the size of the prostate and even larger.  Its face was distorted with pain and rage and I feared something truly horrible was about to occur.  All at once an enormous flatulence erupted from the nether regions of Cobblestoner.  A hurricane of unbelievably foul air stormed past me.  But almost as soon as it arrived it passed and a look of angelic peace suffused Cobblestoner’s face and then he slowly shrank back into the pit.

After a safe period of time had elapsed, I dared to return to the top of the pit.  There was no sign at all of Cobblestoner or his cursed prostate.  The area had been miraculously cleansed by the potent acids and the miasma was gone!  There are signs in the last few days that Toenail Hill is once again a healthy place.  I’ve notice that Zillow has quadrupled the value of all the local real estate and speculators have snatched up all the likeliest properties including the Cobblestoner mansion and gravel pit.

One other salubrious result of the exorcism is that for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic not a single COVID victim has exploded.  That means I’ll probably get paid for my efforts by the Town of Dunwich.  And I call that a win.

Thanksgiving in Dunwich

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I’ve been so busy with my own personal Thanksgiving plans that I lost track of what the town of Dunwich was planning for the holiday.  Last year the COVID lockdown put a damper on this but this year First Selectman Cthulhu and the rest of the Board were determined to get things back to normal.  So, to get the ball rolling Cthulhu invited fifty of the wealthiest and most influential Dunwichians to his house on Monday for a sumptuous dinner.

Of course, there was a misunderstanding.  The guests assumed they were going to eat instead of being eaten but you can hardly fault the First Selectman for that.  He was specific that the menu would come directly from his favorite cookbook, “To Serve Man.”  When I spoke to him, he was still recovering from overindulging but after a couple of barrels of Alka Seltzer he was feeling much better.  He told me his favorite moment was when the guests walked through a doorway and after failing to find any light switches on the walls used their phone lights to determine that they were inside their host’s mouth.  Their screams of terror made the meal all that much more enjoyable.  Oh, that First Selectman, he’s incorrigible!

I read an advertisement in the Dunwich Complainer that a town fair was going to take place on Wednesday.  There would be the usual pie contests and a silent auction for the various crafts that the townspeople would donate.  There were also supposed to be games.  The one that interested me the most was the sack race.  In most towns this is a pretty straight forward affair but the twist that is employed in Dunwich is that Cthulhu alters the geometry of space in the playing field.  This makes moving in a straight line rather tricky.  Three years ago, Josiah Bishop ended up falling through a portal and landed inside of Azathoth’s gallbladder.  He reappeared three weeks later in pretty horrendous condition.  His ears had pretty much melted off and his hair was orange.  When asked what happened he said, “Outside the ordered universe is that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.”  A lot of people just assumed Josiah had just stomped off because he’s a sore loser and because Jenkin Brown took the prize and they’ve never gotten along.

But by far the oddest story I’ve heard this week was from Arthur Birdsong.  He was walking through some of the more overgrown areas of the northern hills of Dunwich when he was caught in one of the frequent thunderstorms.  Searching for cover he saw a very dilapidated house and ran to it.  The door wasn’t locked so he let himself in.  Finding a fire in the living room he warmed himself and then looked around at his surroundings.  There was a very old book open on a table and he saw that the book was describing cannibalism among certain tribes in Africa and an illustration showed a butcher’s shop with human body parts for sale.  Arms, legs and organs were grouped on tables.  Suddenly he heard a door open above and a white-haired man in 17th century garb walked down the staircase.  The man saw that Arthur had been interested in the book and he began a long meandering tale, the gist of which was that he had come to the notion that feeding on human flesh would enormously extend the human lifespan.  Just then a drop of blood from the ceiling splashed down in between the two men and Arthur looked up and saw an enormous spot of blood on the ceiling and realized that the horrid old man was a cannibal and had just been butchering of one of his victims upstairs.

At first Arthur was hoping that a bolt of lightning would burn the house and the cannibal in the righteous fire of heaven.  But when that failed to happen, he asked the old man what time was dinner.

Arthur had to admit that human pot pie wasn’t bad.  A little gamey and fatty but no worse than mutton.  And the old fellow even threw in some pretty decent hard cider.  So, they became pretty chummy and after dinner they stayed up late chatting and Arthur discovered that they had both gone to the same prep school.  So, they sang school songs and Arthur invited his new friend over for Thanksgiving dinner.  He had been planning to serve a turkey dinner but in light of his new perspective on health food he decided to invite his least favorite blue-haired feminist wine-auntie over and serve her up instead.  I told Arthur that was splendid and I hoped it became a family tradition.  He sadly informed me that he only had three wine-aunties so it would be a short-lived tradition.  I told him to cheer up.  I have dozens of relatives that need eating.  I told him I’d donate one of mine every Thanksgiving for the foreseeable future.  Well, this brought tears to Arthur’s eyes and he declared it a “Thanksgiving Miracle.”  I said, “Nonsense, it is always better to give than to receive.”

So, you can see we here in Dunwich have a lot to be thankful for; friends, family and meat tenderizer.  Here’s hoping your Thanksgiving allows you to enjoy your family as much as we intend to enjoy (parts of) ours.