Nana’s Girl- Flash Horror Freebie

HI FREN!

It is Black history month so here take a little Blackity Black Black ghost story. Written using my fave prompr book no seriously get it. Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side.

Now here we go. Unedited and hot n fresh.

Prompt-1.102  

Begin a story with the line, “It was when I died that….”  

 ~~
It was when I died that I understood what Nana had meant by, get free at all costs. When I was a baby, everyone said I was her spitting image. Same big black eyes, same crooked right eyebrow, same deep brown skin and as I got older the same stank ass attitude and habitual resting bitch face. There was a picture of the two of us, I think I was four and we both had the evilest expressions. It was my favorite photo. 

Mama said that we were one soul in two bodies like twins separated by time and blood. Nana used to like to take walks at night, the street dudes always spoke so nicely to her. She took me on occasion when I couldn’t sleep, we were both nighttime babies. The first time I was about ten and it was the kind of hot dank night nobody really sleeps very well, we wore almost matching housedresses, she held my hand and we shuffled along together in the deep of the night.  

“Nana, what time is it?” She checked her watch, “it us 2:57 AM. You know what they call 3 AM?” I couldn’t stop staring around, I never got to see our neighborhood at rest. Even the various houseless folks, pimps and hang rounds had gone to bed. I was fascinated by the quiet, I stopped and pointed at shiny eyes peering at us from under a porch. “Nana, what is that under there?” She looked and reached into her purse, she tossed crackers into the yard and a plump opossum waddled out to her bounty. “Look, she got babies.” 

Many nights we walked together that way. We fed the raccoons, opossums and ne’er-do-wells. I loved how even the hardest dudes were so soft and deferential to her. “Hey Mrs. Gennessee. Hello Nina.” I remember one of them, Nana and I called him Walter, everyone else called him Big Money. “Hi Walter. How are you?” He like most of the guys never quite met my eyes, he held his hat in his hands and fidgeted like a child. “I’m good Miss Nina. I um, here.” 

He thrust a paper bag into my hand and Nana handed him a little old babyfood jar. He took it, gave us a strange, terrified smile and sauntered away as quickly as his manhood would let him. “Nana, that ain’t drugs is it?” I gave her the paper bag and she chuckled. “No, you’ll see. Come on baby let’s go home.” The gangsters always found us, Nana showed me how to make them specific mojo bags and oils they anointed themselves in before they went to war. 

When I was 17 at 2:57 AM on February 19^th, Nana visited me one last time. I felt her weight on my bed and I pulled her down to cuddle me. “I don’t want you to go. It is our time; Pisces season is just starting.” She held me and stroked my hair; I felt her whisper in my ear. “Freedom. No matter what Nina Simone Gennessee. You hear me?” I turned to put my face in her soft wrinkly neck, I put my hands in her hair like I did when I was a tot and I wanted 2:59 AM to last forever. 

After she was gone, my hair started to turn grey. Just a scattering of delicate silver coils just like hers. My ass got wider, I started to limp a little bit and favor carrying great ugly bags that tinkled with jars and mystical nonsense in them. On my 50^th birthday, March 10^th at 3 AM I stood in front of the house my Nana had been born in.  

Long before I was born my Grandfather disappeared. Some said he ran off with a loose woman from down the street, others that he was on the run from the law. But, as I stood there watching the play of shadows on the crumbling walls, I knew. I sprinkled salt and a few other things, I watched the spirit trapped inside the remains of the structure rant and rave. I saw Nana right there on the porch, shotgun in her lap and a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. 

When I died, my daughters and granddaughters laid in bed with me. I told them stories, I told my eldest grandbaby, my baby where to find my most secret herbs, recipes and ephemera. And as 3 AM bore down on us, I saw my death and somewhere in the light, ultimate freedom. Before I went, I told my girls like Nana told me.

“Get free baby by any means necessary. Any. Means.”

Spooky Reprint- Murder Room

Originally publised in Sex and Murder Magazine.

TW: violence of course.

The room is destroyed, fragments of a life busted open like a piñata are scattered around. The lights are flickering, what lights there are left, just that single bulb in the kitchen, its weak yellow light no substitute for the big bright floor lamp that lays in a twisted heap in the corner. It would be more fitting if it was raining but, Mother Nature isn’t known for excellent timing.

The room is still and silent, waiting for your gaze.

The room serves as a rich tableau of spent violence. If you look more closely, splotches of still wet blood dot once white walls. There is hair stuck to the wall in a fleshy, bloody clump. You don’t want to think about how the pillows got strewn about the small room. You don’t want to think about what their spilled innards say about what’s gone on here.

Throbbing silence burns in your ears; you can almost feel it against your skin as if the ghost of the violence that took place here is rubbing itself against you. There is pressure, an insistent push to look further. Look beyond the disturbed living room and sad empty pillows, past the splashes of brown and red. You don’t want to. You know that there are forty-two other things you’d rather see and rather do but you’re drawn inextricably to it.

Down a short, demure hallway you can see more blood, sodden little pools of gelatinous crimson. The distance between you and the horror is too short, you want to beg but there’s no one to listen. Remnants of the horrors perpetrated here flash across your conscious like heat lightening you can’t weep; you can’t scream you can only move forward.

The small bathroom was once pink with black and white accents; a decrepit little jewel. The tarnished silver fixtures with their abstract fleur de lis patterns, they are sullied; smeared with gore and death. Your eyes are dragged to the mirror, it is the only thing whole in the room. It is an old thing, slightly warped and ugly but it gives you a moment of respite.

You are really in it now. The abattoir stink of butchered meat seeps into your entire being; it has you.

Your eyes follow the smell to the mess in the bathtub. You don’t know if it was man or a woman, black or white, now it is just the mess in the tub. You wish it hurt; you yearn for some signal that there is something beyond the vision. There is nothing but the suck of violence.

You know the violence, the hate intimately. You cannot separate teeth and torn viscera from each other. This is the apotheosis of memory as visceral experience. Fall to your knees. Despite the rarified terror that pulses under your skin, the arousal and triumph rolls up your spine. Your hands find the bestial arousal between your infidel thighs.

Your body moves, your eyes are riveted to both the present image of cold death in the pink tub and the overlay of blurred nightmare that flashes over it in your imagination. Victim/Victor, Monster/Innocent, you are everything and nothing with one foot in the hard cold world of this room of death and the other in the ether where the monsters roam freely.

Orgasm brings death. The French had it right all along.

La petite mort.

Release of soul and tears and blood and at the end a life you had nothing to do with—a death you enjoy vicariously.

In the end as you retreat from all of it, experience melds with memory that melds with reality that melds with the unreal—

It will never settle. And you will never again touch anything so beautiful and horrifying. The experience will live in you long after the death is gone and those small silent rooms are cleaned up and released from the event.

Talk Nerdy to me- The Origin of the Ghost story Gina Goes Home

Okay buckle up it is fixin to get nerdy af up in this piece today.

Today we’re gonna go all the way the fuck in about a story I wrote last year. Okay you can go read it first or just follow along in another tab, find the chonky baby here.

The Inspiration

I love a good ghost story. I love ghost stories inside of religious mythos, campire yarns. Music, movies, stories I love ghosties. I also love watching paranormal investigation shows. Ghost Hunters, I frickin LOVE Zak Bagins. I watch amateurs on youtube. Love it. That was the initial inspiration.

The other inspo was this. There are theories (no I’m not gonna argue with you if you believe in it or not so don’t) that if you are being haunted, ask the dead what they want. I’ve seen it in movies, referenced in American Gods when Shadow’s dead wife visits and Wednesday asks him if he asked her what she wanted.

The Story

The first thing that this story said to me was, the dead want something. They want someone. They want Gina. I felt like I wanted to tell a story of a modern haunt. Not a historic type thing like a Gray Lady, or even a haunting that would be on an Overlook hotel level.

I really wanted to start small. I call it quaint in the story. I was imagining the kind of hotel you drive by on a roadtrip through the country, not fancy, probably a little shabby but charming. I also wanted to give the reader a clear idea that shit was about to get fucked up.

We get there by the second paragraph, I wasn’t going for subtle. That said, it isn’t the scariest thing, it is if you’re a skeptic you could say that meh, not that bad. See below:

The quaintness of the resident ghosts lasted until 2015. The first report, in the form of a middle-aged shrieking man in basketball shorts and little else came hauling his half naked self-down four flights of stairs. “There, help, please-” Mariah at the front desk had experienced a jumpy guest or two, she had a spare robe behind the desk for such occasions and offered to the gentleman while assuring him she’d check out his room.

This sort of thing happens a lot in hotels. Folks will act up in all sorts of ways and I didn’t want to come right out the gate with the BOO GHOST!

In the next paragraph we have the first instance of what the dead want. If you’ve read me a lot, you know I like to play with repetition for varying effects and in this case, I want the reader to not only hear what the dead want but, at some point it does get unsettling. Who is Gina? Where is Gina? How do we get Gina? What do they want with Gina?

One of the other things I did in this story was get into the body. Horror gives us such a great opportunity to really do things that are not unsettling because they are traditionally creepy but, I think a lot of us have bodily responses to things and sometimes our bodies will duplicate what we’re reading or seeing in sympathy. Looky here:

The sexless whisper was clear as day and came from the still air. She felt no chill, no movement, no sense of another person in the room. Fear gripped her sacrum in cold, hard fingers. Her anus contracted, her whole body tingled, and turned to stone. It took all of her will to take a breath and turn her head to the right. She forced her eyes wide open and saw nothing. She scooted out of the room and stood in the hallway, “oh shit.”

This paragraph is where I get creepy. I didn’t necessarily want to use common ghost tropes to begin with, cold spots, woowoo chain rattling etc. But the body. Those are always my favorite responses when I watch my paranormal shows and I am fascinated with how our bodies do stuff. When your butthole clenches up because oh fuck what the fuck was that. I really LOVE getting into the body. Real talk, I feel like the best way to learn this technique is to write some real nasty erotica. I’m talking super explicit in order to expand your thinking as to how bodies work and can work.

We’ll talk more about that at another time.

Through the next bits I hit on some common ghost/haunting stuff I hear in my shows. Construction riles up ghosts. I was really thinking of something a friend told me about the hotel he’d been working in. They were refurbishing it and the ghosts went buck fuckin wild and caused at least three of housekeeping to straight up fled mid shift.

As we get into some more of the action, I leave little breadcrumbs that these are not white people. That is important to me and interestingly enough, I did have one white reader be not really here for it because the framing of how these non white folks deal with it, is not what we’re presented with in the paranormal stuff I like.

It starts with this:

“Well ma’am, there are unhappy spirits asking for Gina. We’ve done everything, the ofrenda is fresh, the sills and doorways have been protected. Evelyn even brought her Grandfather around to say a blessing.”

This is not for white readers to be honest. This is a headnod to other POC from me. We have an ofrenda, if that’s too much Spanish google it. Also FYI I do not EVER italicize other languages. Fight me don’t @ me.

SHIT I am long winded as fuck. Anyway moving along.

To speed things along, I added some bro type ghost hunters who wanted to provoke and then, I decided to get into the entities. I wanted to explore the maybe was once human but is not totally not type ghosty, along with some lesser ghosties and create a community so they could have a goal. To get Gina.

As they say, a broken clock is right twice a day and the leader of the ghost hunting group was right about one thing. There was something bad. Someone bad, the other dead called him Boss. While the crew gathered themselves, the dead congregated in the basement. While the camera in the corner rolled, the air roiled with orbs and zigzagging streaks of energy.

“Boss? Boss make them get Gina. Bring Gina home.” Some of the hobgoblins grouped together to whisper, “Gina. Where is Gina?” The chorus of Gina and where is Gina and bring her home wavered through the air. “Boss tell them. Tell them.” Something that resided in the crawl space let their high, thin wail out and spoke for them all, “we want Gina. Gina must come home.”

Now, to me it is a bit more frightening to have the ghosties decide to gang up. Then I went into some classic haunting stuff, the cold air, the more traditional type haunt we get to see on the shows.

In order not to totally spoil the rest cause I want you to read it. I really went in on the idea of after the investigators came, how the situation gets solved and as usual, I wrote a not entirely satisfying ending. it ends but I don’t tell you everything that happened because I’m an asshole. I don’t explain who Gina really is, why they want her or anything.

So the overall lesson is this. Try some shit out. I’ve never written a ghost story like this before and I quite enjoyed doing it. Below find some relevant links.

Zak Bagans Demon House lost footage.

Ofrenda altars, also to give an in the know reader a sense of the time of year.

DASSIT. Happy Women in Horror Month!

Oh Uncle Steve..

Before I get going, let me give y’all some background.

I have loved Stephen King since I was 8 years old. The first adult novel I read was ‘Firestarter’. I thought it was verboten so I hid a borrowed copy and read it feverishly whenever I could until I finished it. I have been a lover of horror since.

As an adult I have struggled with my love of King. I wanted to excuse his Magical Negros and constant fallback to racist tropes. I tried.

My love of his oeuvre and the impact on the artist I am not withstanding, I gotta once again realize that Uncle Steve ain’t here for folks like me.

[image description: a tweet by Stephen King that reads: …I wound never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me to do otherwise would be wrong. Dated 4:20 AM Jan 14, 2020

Unky Steve tried to walk it back but look.

This issue is something I’ve spoken about for ages. I’m not gonna rehash. But let’s get a few things 100.

1. This position assumes all things are equal. They are not.
2. This position assumes that, things like institutional racism, sexism etc has no bearing in the arts. They do.
3. It is just a goddamn bad take.

The main problem with people in Kings position making these type proclamations is that, he is in SUCH a position of influence. Like when I wrote about Phil Anselmo from one of my fave bands Pantera doing Nazi-esque shit as “jokes” I have the same issue here. Yeah, he might not have meant it that way but, there is an impact.

Like Phil, I fucking still love the dude. If I knew either of them, I’d probably just be like BRO WHAT THE FUCK IS U DOING….because I care about them. I enjoy their art.

Here’s the thing.

When people in positions of influene, like Mssrs. Anselmo and King, say and do dumb shit like this, there is a large part of their fans/followers and people they influence in their respective arenas who absolutely use things like this to back their own bias and put it into action.

The problem is that, it is #20-dingdang-20 and we HAVE to stop allowing White liberals to say shit like this and pretend like it is fine. It is not fine.

Had Uncle Steve been paying attention to his own industry for I dunno the last 15 years, he’d probably be well aware that in his most famous genre in particular, women, POC, etc have not been exactly welcomed with open arms.

We who are not cis white hetero men, don’t have the luxury of sitting back and resting on the quality of our work. We never have. Here in the year of fuckery of 2020 we still don’t.

As it is, right this minute. There are many white people in influential positions in horror publishing who are publicly neonazis. This is happening now.

How about a storytime? This is post Racefail ’09 and happened to me a few years ago when I decided to maybe start easing my way back into the horror area of lit life, I went to an event where there were HWA people.

It was some bucketlist shit for me. Many moons and out of prints ago, I was super close to making enough pro horror sales to qualify to be a member. That is all I wanted in life. Now, you may or may not know that in meatspace, I can be kinda shy and skittish. I’m a feral cat in a dress and easily startled. BUT when I wanna meet folks, I sweat and get it done.

I met some folks from the org and they were nice white folks. Generally welcoming, I don’t know if they were local to me. BUT, when we started talking authors, neither of them (and they were both older than me) had heard of not one SINGLE Black writer I mentioned. Most of the writers I tried to talk to them about were members in good standing, several of them were quite prolific and included Tananarive Due.

Tananarive Due.

……………

Y’all. It was enlightening to me.

The fact that they had NO IDEA of contempary horror writers who were producing work for big houses at that point, and weirdly they were all not White….

For a bit further sauce, around the same time I had been contacted by a small (no longer around) horror start up mag. They knew of my work from my porny horror I’d had published years earlier, they were nice White folks who said diversity a lot.

They liked a lot of the horror stuff I like. They solicited work from me. I may have the bones of the story somewhere but basically, it was a hood ass haunted house story. Very classic haunting and yes in the hood without the smirk. Hood kids, one of them with a root working Nana,

Their style of editing was quite eh, handsy. They wanted to work in a very collaborative, edit as you go type of way that they framed as “shaping” and “development”. I wasn’t a fan but I really wanted to be in their debut issue with a fat ass Blackity Black Black horror story.

As we worked, most of their inquiries were thinly veiled white folks being amazed that Black things exist. A lot of the story was hooked to 90s r&b and they questioned if their audience would recognize it. See also questions about if their audience would “feel” things like:

• Mentioning braids or beaded hairstyles
• Very light AAVE
• Endless questions about things folks in the story did/knew about. Black biker gangs, passing mention of thins like Rodney King (remember this was very much placed in the 90s),

Etc etc. It became very clear to me that their discomfort was not the story itself but the absolutely unapologetic Blackness. That this story was not centered in the White gaze and thus was not “relatable”. They never questioned the quality of the work. They loved the idea but not the execution in that it was not, centered in the traditionally super whiteness of Horror.

I pulled out. I couldn’t take it. I felt so beat down and defeated. After that, I bounced off of horror for a long time. I didn’t read a lot of it, I didn’t follow the industry. I stuck to tried and true faves until the Anti-Blackness in those (UNCLE STEVE) was too much for me.

So look.

We can’t keep pretending that all things are equal in any sense of the word. Uncle Steve, please stop. This shit is exhausting. Read the link below and follow the links in it. Y’all can we fuckin not.

#StokersSoWhite: 2016-2018, the fall of tokenism at the HWA by Sumiko Saulson. 

Fiction Fun Using Prompts

OH Hi there.

So one of my favorite things in the world is to write mythos, y’all know this. I’ve been feeling a little creatively constipated so I brought out the big guns.

Instigation: Creative Prompts on the Dark Side by Michael A. Arnzen.* (evil empire affiliate link srry).

This book came out in 2013 and I’ve literally been using it since the week after it debuted. This is one of my favorite books of prompts and it has been so well worth the money. I love to use prompts to see what happens when I poke my brain meat.

Below find a um, refashioning of a Lovecraft beasty. For reference this is about Shub-Niggurath.

For whatever reason, my brain parsed the prompt as, write a Black as fuck new Lovecrafty thing. SO I present you a fresh out of my brainmeat, recrafting of Shub-Niggurath. An origin tale if you will. With the prompt. ENJOY!

Prompt-1.57  

The title of your piece is “Death by Chocolate.” Go.  

Tarasha Golden had a routine. She woke at 5 AM sharp, did her fifteen-minute yoga practice, made her smoothie bowls and spent time caring for her skin and body. Most mornings, she even managed to use some little part of herself as an offering, she kept bits of herself to offer to her Mother to keep their connection. To exist on the Earth meant she had options, her decisions to transubstantiate revolved around her love of the gibbering lust of weak men and her perverted desires to procreate just to see what could happen.  

This time around she built herself in the image of the ones she loved to look at. The Black girls she liked were thick, goddess bodied women who lived in the liminal shadow of hate and desire. She made herself to be in that place. Prior to committing to the physical, she had looked at women all over the world. The coveted beauties. The lotus footed beauties in the Song Dynasty, the lead poisoned priestesses in Greece, the blessed Hijra, the masculine beauties with wives in the American west, so many to choose from. She loved them in their intricate diversity, she walked in their skins feeling herself as the kids started to say at some point. 

Tarasha had been all of them, she inhabited the flesh and the experience in ways that as she had learned by the modern age, were easy to use as weapons. The twin flames of lust and hate, rather than greed or even religion were the means she liked to use to destroy the weakest amongst men. Upon close examination of her earliest mates and playthings, their desires cut into their most secret hatreds, their petty jealousies and could turn from a lover‘s touch to an abusers slap, with the speed of the word no crossing her lips.  

Once she happened upon the broken mix of human malaise and the depths of depravity her favorite prey mates could reach, there was no turning back. In modern times, Tarasha watched for a time. It was time for her to mate and cultivate the Gof’nn hupadgh, her most beloved worshippers once more. She was ready to give them suck of her milk and bear her many children.  

Tarasha chose wisely for both her own aesthetic pleasure and to tickle the hateful madness in her prey mates. She made herself tall and deep dark brown, thick as the human children said, fine and yes, yes she could look at her new form in the mirror, naked and gleaming, gloriously fertile and everything, her prey mates hated, she felt resplendent and ready.  

Once, she had to wait for a new moon and a woodland and the call of sacrificial flesh and blood and other nonsense.  Instead, there was one of her Gof’nn hupadgh, her most fervent true believer who, in lieu of a woodland or person to sacrifice, called under a new moon, in a room reeking of her offspring and jittering with the ruckus of her gibbering dark offspring. They made the wood and thus she came. 

The Gof’nn hupadgh, fell to his knees before her. He could not hide his surprise nor his momentary uncontrolled feral hate and lust, it was delicious. She smiled at him, “what’s wrong Gof’nn hupadgh? Do I not please you?” From her voluptuous lips, the voice churned in the human. He felt it pull and the dank heat of it in his bowels, “forgive me mother but you, you’re-” 

She bent forward and the splendid Black body she had created, undulated and flickered to give glimpses of the gleaming wet black maw of her true self. “I am, what?” The Gof’nn hupadgh’s eyes went white all round as the Black body he wanted and hated, exposed the corpse scented tentacled true body of his most beloved Mother and his little mind, his poor mind could not reconcile the two. Hate, lust, want, need, the impostures of his own broken desires begat a new madness. 

Tarasha, so named by her own mind wanted this and when the Gof’nn hupadgh at her feet, let go and raised his hands to her, his eyes settling between her legs, she understood this new game. She understood the new game in this world, to use their latent hate and allow them to fertilize a new generation of her Dark Young. A new tradition. New fun in form and function. 

She took the Gof’nn hupadgh into her womb and felt, his anger and disgust and need and it was good. Upon taking him in, she let the blessed event proceed as it had done for millennia before. He would be her first, and yet not her last. Upon his rebirth, he knelt at her feet mewling for her milk.  

Tarasha stroked the creature tenderly, a smile on her lush carmine lips. “Yes, I know. Now come on, we have things to do, come come come.” 

Tarasha Golden strode out of the makeshift wood, under the New Moon, in her new skin and feeling fine and ready for the realm.  

Horror Musings- Ma and #ownvoices

I saw the movie Ma recently and (spoilers in link) and I have some thots. Buckle up. SPOILERS bro.

On the surface of it, Ma is a pretty okay movie. Good amount of suspense, interesting main antagonist but, by the time they started to “reveal” Ma’s backstory it was really too late. This was obviously not written by a Black person. I checked and sure enough, nope.

From the start, this had potential had someone Black written it. Here we have Sue Anne, one of obviously very few Black folks in this town and we (we as in probably mostly Black folks lezbehonest) know some shit happened. When you are one of few Black folks in any very white place, shit is gonna go down.

Perfect set up for a psychological thriller where you Sue Anne get your revenge by killing the kids of the folks who fucked with you. However, this is where #ownvoices is so important, in spite of how magnificent and menacing Octavia was in this role, the lack of providing us even glimpses via flashback, nightmares, something left the later mentions of stuff having happened empty to me.

In the end, regardless of the performances (I also really loved Juliette Lewis playing a grown person) there is a disconnect in this film. I could tell very quickly this was not a Black story. From wiki, this is the problem:

He read Scotty Landes’ script of the film, which Blumhouse Productions had bought the day before.^[5] Although the original draft was written with a white woman in the title role, Taylor immediately thought about Spencer.^[4] He went out to the hall, called Spencer, and asked her if she would like to be in a horror film;^[5] without reading the script, Spencer boarded the project.^[5]

The issue is that, you can’t just plug Blackness into any story. You can’t always just say NO BUT MAKE THEM BLACK and have that make the Blackness in the media you’re creating work. To put a finer point on it, if you’re going to bring in that racism and misogynoir into the story, the men who wrote it have no clue about how those things could make a monster like Sue Anne and for me it fell flat.

This is where I would say the solution is sensitivity readers/writers. I think Blumhouse really missed a great chance to look at a script and say, we need Black folks on this to make this story better. If you want to:

“I want to do something really fucked up.”^[5]

Do the damn work.

This is why #ownvoices is so important. This film could have been so much better. Deeper. Richer. A more terrifying experience.

Overall, it was ok. I’ll probably watch it again for Octavia’s work alone but, really if you’re gonna make a Black ass horror story, consult some Black people.

If you’re gonna use a racism trope, use it. Don’t drop it in cause you’ve switched your main antagonist to be a Black person. This is an instance where I want to cheer but I feel like, y’all coulda done more. Blumhouse has the cash. Do the work. Take a chance on doing something great and fucked up.

In terms of horror fiction, this is a great set up. It is rich territory to explore and we need more of it. Just, not done by a team of white folks.

I think that’s all for now. Coming soon, book reviews!!

First up next week, beloved Jen Pastiloff then beloved Gabino Iglesias. WOO!

 

Yeah Write #452- Harold in the Afterlife

 

Harold in the Afterlife

by

Shannon Barber

He was excited to see 150 new emails in his inbox. The world had given him the gift of solitude in his communications. No more ridiculous chanting, no more exhausting transmogrification on demand, a simple button push and voila, everything he needed to get it all done. The little ding of an email sent or received had become his greatest pleasure.

He thought he would spend the rest of his eternity quietly tapping away on his miracle machine with dignity and organizational beauty but, no. One email, a single line and the dreaded high importance flag.

“Fifteen minutes.”

He left his little safe space and appeared as summoned. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, trying to look pleasant. The Boss looked at him over his glasses.

“Harold. We need to talk.”

“Yes sir.”

The Boss nodded.

“Harold, you are not an administrator anymore. You are dead. You are a ghost. Do your job please. Those emails you send, they don’t go anywhere. Please, you are assigned to full manifestations and shadow person appearances. We have tried to work with your needs and this, situation is untenable. It has been fifteen years.”

Harold sighed and squirmed.

“Yes sir.”

He looked so dejected and heart broken, The Boss held up a finger and tilted his head back. He hated to see such a face and made a decision.

“Harold, we’ll be moving you into this new industrial office park. It was built on desecrated ground. They have a lot of those computers you are so fond of. You can get in there and do whatever you want. Send emails, block emails, uh do the YouTube.”

The grin that spread across Harold’s misty face was beatific for a moment.

“Oh yes sir. I would like that very much. May I go right now?”

The Boss nodded and Harold dissipated. The Boss shook his head a little and muttered as he got back to work, “once a bureaucrat….”

###

Yeah Write #442-….safe.

….safe.

by

Shannon Barber

In the sun, in June you are safe. But, it grows. Cradled in light and heat, you are free, safe. There is no reason for the world to slip and slide on the periphery of you. No reason for the chill between your thighs.

You will not scream. The darkness will not come. And yet the cold place grows inside.

###

Yeah, Write #430

Yeah, Write #430 

-you’ll Laugh

You Know.

by Shannon Barber

You know.

-you’ll laugh.

You want to call them faceless, nameless, formless even- it would be easier wouldn’t it? Everything would be better if you didn’t feel their name songs in your bones when you lay down to sleep, if you didn’t see their faces smile at you from darkened corners, if your skin didn’t remember the heat of their touch. Easy, you crave any ease and moments of illusory peace.

You know.

-you’ll laugh.

You watch everyone else. Their petty struggles and their ignorance of the name songs and weight of the dead that hangs on them make you smile when everything else is- as is. You hold your truth close, truth is your secret. Watch the rest of the fools dance and squirm. You tell yourself while your bones vibrate with name songs and your skin buzzes with ghosts, at least you know. Tonight you’ll laugh.

You know.

-you’ll laugh.

You know. You will take your complexities and one foot on the other side life because-

You know-

-you’ll laugh.

###

Ay listen.

Hi babes.

Can we talk about some shit I’ve been learning lately?

First thing I’ve not learned but we’ll say that has been reinforced to me is that, a lot of general promotional advice is woefully out of date. It doesn’t account how a lot of us have our links on platforms like FB throttled so hard, even our “close” friends don’t see them.

So I kinda am trying to make a deeper peace with that. I’m working on it.

The other thing is that, I’ve noticed that even with me taking pains to reduce how much stuff I give away, I STILL don’t really generate things that are buyable by my general audience across a few platforms. How do I know?

Medium for instance. I currently have 19 pieces behind the paywall, a good variety of type of content. Here in 2019 I’ve made less than a dollar. I mean…my read ratio regardless of topic or length is under 2 out of 10. Then of course when I can read stuff on medium, I see a LOT of bullshit that makes hundreds of dollars likely.

It makes me tired.

I’ve been using KoFi for almost a month exactly and have three things to read. One poem, two essay type things. And goose eggs.

I talked about it on my main fb account a while back. And funnily enough when I said, don’t blow smoke up my ass if you’re not going to at the very least share, my share rate went from few to literally 2-4. And so did engagement.

So really, I’ve learned that the call to action, the asking my community for help etc etc. Ain’t for me. I’ve tried. I’ve modified my tone, I’ve changed what I’m giving, etc. I think I can make some peace with that. Silence and inaction says volumes. More so when the folks who do the share because they don’t have $$ to support, are literally the same 4-6 people it has been for a decade. That’s my real audience. They are the real Gs and I’m not talking about them.

What else?

In terms of Gasoline Heart here’s some interesting things. (NOTE TO SELF ASK PUBLISHER FOR NEW BOX O BOOKS) Some of the folks who’ve read it, really loved it. one of the things I’ve seen in several reviews are along the lines of, HOW DID I MISS THIS/THE WORLD MISS IT?

Easily. SO the above issues. I mean, a few people (the book has been out for a while now) who’ve known me for a long time have said, I didn’t see X links. Sorta believable. Also I am not represented, I am not a darling, I am not very famous or really even connected in the poetry world. So yeah, you won’t find my lil book in lists and shit. That is just how it is.

Also, I learned that I do not have the cash on hand to be trying to get my lil book awards. Shit is expensive. In secret I spent a few months last fall really dedicating hours of my week to submitting to free publicity or award things with my lil book. The hours cost me in terms of spoons and time not spent writing and netted me one very nice rejection letter.

And real talk. I STILL can’t get poetry published. At last submission spree, even with mentioning the book and including a poem or two from it, I don’t really get no love from the lit poetry world. That’s fine but it also means that I’m chasing my tail trying to promote my fucking book.

So yeah. That’s been a struggle but I’m glad I did it. I can see the whole pathway and what obstacles exist for me in particular and that I don’t honestly have the spoons to try to get around them. So I do what I have energy for.

NON BULLSHITS.

So last year I decided to focus more on getting back into the fiction world and boy howdy. Quite a few years ago I had about a 60% acceptance rate in the short fiction world. That was huge.

My return to it has been fucking lit.

This year I’ve placed stories in two anthologies that are both HUGE DEALS to me. Huge. I got an experimental horrory story into Would but Time Await: An Anthology of New England. 

I was REALLY nervous because the story was an experiment. It is a Black story and I haven’t really been in the horror community for a while.

THEN I got a little tiny horror story accepted over at Heavy Feather (will announce when it goes up). The editor Jason dropped me a note months ago and I FINALLY made something I’m into.

And then, I got the notification and one of the best damn acceptance notes ever. My lil supernatural noir story got into the Gimme the Loot: Stories Inspired by The Notorious B.I.G. Forthcoming from Clash.

The uniting theme in these is that, I’m at my best when I write what the fuck I want to write. I think freelancing really kind of crushed that in me to a degree. Yes there are some publishers who have been all the way the fuck in with me. But, largely that is not the case. This is the same thing with the flirtations with agents and mainstream publishing.

It is like, OKAY we fuck with you but about 40% so dial it back.

I don’t write great things with that in mind. I don’t write great things when I’m trying so hard to get paid what I’m worth.

All of this is really about me pupating so I can in fact find my place in the lit world. Someone who was trying really hard to be encouraging was comparing me to two very famous, very amazing Black writers and y’all, it made me cry. I like both authors. But, I am not like them and cannot be.

I hate this whole struggle between wanting a seat at the table, wanting some “success” (as termed by our culture) and just wanting to be my weird little self, make some writing, make some pomes, do my shit and maybe sometimes be shown appreciation in the form of coins.

I’m working on it. One lil thing at a time.