The Narcofod

Excerpt:
A loud crack sounded in the distance, which might have been the breaking of a physical law; for the tip of the whip never sped past him, nor was it lingering behind when he checked there. Rather, the whip went straight up, snagged on something above.

He looked up at the cloud directly overhead. Great. Leave it to him to somehow snag a cloud. He tugged hard, but it wouldn’t give. He wrapped the whip around his wrist for a better grip, then jerked harder. Suddenly he was hanging in the sky.

“No!” he cried.

The bed drifted onward while he remained hanging in midair. He peered up at the cloud. If he wasn’t mistaken, it was getting closer. Was it descending? No, that didn’t seem to be the case. He was being reeled up!

He hung on for dear life, wishing he could reach into his back pocket to see what The Book of Blank Stares had to say about all this; for though he no longer trusted the book, it was still better than facing the grim unknown alone.

A damp white fog closed about him, obliterating all. Soon it began to thin, and he glimpsed ghostly funnels above, snaking about in wild orientations. He imagined it a graveyard for tornadoes. But as he was reeled up among them, he saw that they were massive funnel webs. There were other structures as well, tubular corridors that twisted away through starbursts of supportive web, branching here and there towards massive organs — as if he were in the visceral cavity of some large beast. Thick twists of glistening web rose from these towards the full moon high above.

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:55 — 37.5MB)

It seems getting a combine was a bit of a mistake. I thought it would speed up the harvest of my backyard wheat.

But it’s big.  It’s r-e-a-l-l-y big.  I can’t get it through the backyard gate.  It’s sitting out along the street right now.  I’m bound to get a ticket.  It’s so wide it sticks way out in the street.  I don’t have any red flags, so I just stuck a bunch of tomatoes on some sticks that jut out — hopefully so people can see it.  Store-bought tomatoes.  My garden isn’t that far along.

Even if I get the combine in the backyard, it’ll be a tight fit.  I really had no idea it would be so big.  The good news is that I’ll be able to do the whole field in one pass — maybe a 10-second ride before I reach the tangerine tree at the end — and then I’ll have to be careful not to behead myself on the low limbs.

But there’s no way I’ll be able to turn it around.  Do combines have a reverse?  I hope so.

Then again, maybe I should just talk to the dealer, see if I can return it.  This is turning into a whole lot more work than I anticipated.

Excerpt:
“Beds fit for a king, for a queen, nay, for a God!”

“Chivalrous beds for the true of heart!”

“Lewd beds for the lustfully lascivious!”

“Buy a bed, get a concubine free!”

With a flurry of negations Kato ran a gauntlet of hawkers. He slipped past beds, cots, sheets, quilts, pillows, casters, canopies, headboards, footboards, even nightcaps and eyeshades. Spindly fingers clutched at him, beds were thrown in his path for free demonstrations, mesmerizing charms waved before his eyes. All about him, hawkers broke into pillow fights over territory and tactics. He lowered his gaze and plunged onward, spinning free of one bargain after another until one voice slowed him to a “just looking” trot:

“Come one, come all, see the bed fashioned at the world’s core, guaranteed to suppress all sensations of a falling nature!”

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:22 — 37.9MB)

My mom, who lives in Indiana and is 80, went on this bus trip to see a musical performance. She enjoyed it … but that’s not what she said, or at least not the point of this post.

Afterwards, on the bus ride home, Gus started in. Gus isn’t his real name. But he and his wife were sitting beside Mom, and they’re friends. Gus is always sending Mom emails, and Mom forwards some of the most ridiculous ones to me.

So anyway, Gus starts in. You know, about how Obama is a Muslim, and how he’s destroying our democracy so on so forth… And finally Mom turns to him and says, “Now Gus, you know Obama isn’t Muslim.” To which Gus says, “Well he is too! Everyone knows it!” When Mom asks where he learned it, he said the internet, that it was all over the internet. He proceeded with the litany of other “facts,” that Obama isn’t an American citizen, so forth. My mom told him she had voted for Obama and these things weren’t true. Not that he listened.

The woman behind Mom leaned forward and patted her shoulder in support. Another woman caught Mom’s attention and rolled her eyes.

Afterwards, Mom told the woman behind her, “I probably shouldn’t have said anything.” The woman said, “Oh, I was fully behind you.”

Mom wonders if she’ll stop getting the Obama-bashing emails that Gus sends on a daily basis (and like I said, Mom forwards some of these to me). Too early to tell. But the emails make for very sobering reading. They brim with hatred and ignorance. Many are racist. I don’t know who writes them, and I don’t know how wide a distribution they have. But I suspect it’s substantial, hinting at an American mental wasteland for which there may not be enough reasonable people to neutralize.

Go Mom.

Excerpt:
“Watch it your horse don’t step in my hole,” the man said, adjusting his slipshod hat.

Kato saw a tiny pole in front of the man. A line trailed from its tip to a bobber centered in a hole in the ice.

“There’s a woman down there!” Kato gasped. “She’ll drown — or freeze to death!”

“A fish is all it is,” the man said, glancing up at him.

Kato gawked at the face now visible under the brim of his slipshod hat. “Lord Kran? Is it you?”

“An easy mistake to make,” the man said. “Actually, I’m his twin brother.”

“Twin bro–?” Kato looked more closely. “The spitting image!”

“He didn’t mention me, did he. Never does. Anyway, I’m the one without the hat. That’s how to tell us apart.”

“But you’re wearing a hat,” Kato cautiously pointed out.

The man felt atop his head. “So I am.” He removed it. “There, sorry to confuse you more. The name’s Bill. And I’m not much with words, not like my brother. Fishing’s about all I do, and not very well. In fact, I’m about as close to a nobody as you’ll ever meet.”

“You shouldn’t berate yourself–” Kato began to say. But the figure beneath the ice again caught his attention. “That has to be a woman! It doesn’t look anything like a fish. She’ll drown!”

“Just a fish,” Bill assured him. “A Whadayawant, we call it. It mimics our deepest desires, for whatever reasons.”

The adventure continues…
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:16 — 30.5MB)

Excerpt:
When the sounds had faded away, Kato squeezed out of the log and looked about. A wild boar snored atop the log, an ornate vase precariously balanced between its tusks. The skeleton of a horse stood tethered to a stump. Blue and green marbles were scattered beside the log, spelling out “CAMOUFLAGE,” while red marbles lay on the log’s other side, spelling “MARBLE.” An owl hung upside down in midair, tangled in fishing line that dangled from the overcast, and robust orange grasshoppers marched single file in a large circle.

Kato continued his journey through the logfall. The fog to the north had advanced some, but not enough to be of concern. He stopped now and then, hearing faint cries, drummings, the clinking of wine glasses or chain mail — as if the strange properties of the logs had begun to resonate across the land. Was there any danger he might be swept up in endless imaginings? What potent brew had the daughter of God instilled in the logs? Or was it just an artifact of the manufacturing or distribution process? He had no way of knowing, or learning. Yet rather than be alarmed by his situation, he felt ever more at home here, as if this were a safe haven from the real world and its dangers. After all, the logs had always been good to him — in many ways his closest friends and allies.

The adventure continues…
Subscribe to Gary W Shockley Audiobooks in iTunes, or go to garywshockley.com to see more options.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:59 — 34.8MB)

I’m putting up quarter-round trim in Lori’s room. It’s not easy. I cut the strips in the garage. They’re roughly 10 feet long, and getting them into the house, through the living room, into the hallway and then into her room is an awkward twisty-pokey-clattery affair. The trim is bright pink, to go with Lori’s purple room. There’s no accounting for taste. I’m good with color. I did our living room ceiling.

I finagle the first of the quarter-rounds into her room, climb up the ladder, and fit it into place. To my exasperation, it’s several inches short. I can’t believe it. Lori helped me days ago with a tape measure to pin down all the lengths to a 32nd of an inch. How could I miss by inches?

Later I’ll recall that when we were measuring, I was up on a ladder, barely able to reach, so I placed the spool of the tape measure against the end, then wrote down the measurement where the tape entered the spool — with the understanding that I would then need to add the length of the spool. I even explained all this to Lori at the time. But I never did it. I forgot. The spool is 2.5 inches long — making my cut 2.5 inches short.

But right now I don’t know what’s going on. Flustered, I climb down from the ladder with the strip. I need to take it back out to the garage to recheck my numbers.

Again I’m fighting to maneuver the strip out of Lori’s room, into the hallway, then into the living room. The strip seems determined to snag every object within reach at both ends. Then I hear it — an ominous shifting of porcelain. I glance over my shoulder just in time to see a large figurine atop a small bookcase just inside Lori’s room tottering.

It’s the Monkey King!

There’s no time to get to it. I watch in horror as it falls. Fortunately, it hits the carpet in the hallway and makes a two-inch bounce. But it’s a football bounce, sending it onto the unforgiving linoleum of Lori’s room. There it conks gently and cracks in two, the pieces rocking gently like cradles in hell.

The end … of me.