Michael's Texas Embrace

“It’s a godamm blood bath in there,” The Sheriff announced.  “You could take a damn bath in it.”  He looked at Lyle.  “You seen that mess?”

            “I got here the same time as you,” Lyle responded.

“Guess you did.”  Sheriff Darby surveyed the mostly empty parking lot and wiped at his brow with a handkerchief, then sighed wearily before turning to Callista.  “You the one found this mess?”

            “Yes sir,” Callista said.

            “I reckon you’ll have some interesting dreams then,” Darby said.  “Write ‘em down for me.”

            Callista tucked her hair behind her ears.  “Write them down?”

            Darby nodded and squinted at the sunset.

# posted by Michael : 8:25 PM  0 Comments

I'm ahead of "break 50K by the 30th pace," but behind my new goal of being pracrically done by the 26th...we'll see how that goes...

.......................................

She down shifted, accelerated, and felt for an instant like a hot country chick, out to hunt a werewolf.  A lone wolf in the night comes to embrace the tender maiden in a dewy glade, with silken-sandpaper tongue, with velvet fur, with alabaster virgin skin, they entwine, throbbing chords of different species—one rope, knotted in loved till, like dogs, they are tied together on sensuous, wet moss amongst the ferns.  She blinks, an eon passes like so many beats of a butterfly’s wing till at last the wolf’s seed is spent; they loosen and uncoil and grope toward each other, fang to cheek, twitching ear to luminescent skin, furry haunch to silken thigh till blurring, their hearts and veins and throats and skin throb as one in the opalescent green glade.  The girl and the wolf gaze into each other’s eyes and the wolf knows her soul: he sees his doom and she licks her lip and slip the dagger between his ribs and into his breast.  The wolf is drained and his life flickers out—yet his seed is carried from the verdant eternal in her womb, in ecstasy, in horror and squalor and glee.

# posted by Michael : 9:12 PM  1 Comments

Halfway there!

            Lyle said, “I don’t know.  What do you think?  Think somebody can just up and blow up everywhere?  Like, he woke up and exploded."  He paused.  "Some ole Chinese dude once dreamed he was a butterfly—you heard that?”

            “I think so.  He woke up and wondered for the rest of his life if he wasn’t a butterfly dreaming he was a man.  Right?”

            “That’s the one.”  Lyle fell silent.

            Callista asked, “What does that have to do with Buck?”

            “Well, maybe Buck dreamed he was an explosion, and instead of spending his life wonderin’, he just blew the hell up all over the room.  Hell, I don’t know.  How do you make sense of anything?  What do you think?”

“About what?”

            “About whether you’re you, or you’re something else, dreamin’ that you’re you.  What if you wake up and you’re an explosion, or a wolf-thing?  Maybe werewolves are just people that wake up at night and realize they’re just wolves, dreamin’ they’re people all day.”

# posted by Michael : 1:18 PM  0 Comments

She rounded a corner and heard a quiet rustling sound from last room on the floor.

            Callista eased forward toward the room; the door was ajar.  She pushed the door open with the tip of the flashlight and there was the lumberjack, sitting on the floor, rummaging through a chest.

            “What are you doing?” she asked.  She had not known what to expect, but she was caught off guard by this casual rummage.

            “Looking for something to help me escape or kill you,” he said.  He pulled papers, books, and what looked like packets of herbs or seeds out of the chest, turning each thing over in his hand and examining it, sometimes smelling the item.  

# posted by Michael : 9:22 PM  1 Comments

            She grabbed the lumberjack’s arms and dragged him into the dark parlor.  She felt curiously like a murderer; the heist had gone wrong and she’d had to kill her partner.  With a gasp, she left him in the middle of the room.  He looked out of place on the floor, and Callista had a strange feeling of guilt.  Here she had only been in her uncle’s house for a few days, and already she had two prisoners.

           She fled the room and wedged a chair under the door, not entirely certain that trick actually worked.  She retrieved the pistol and her phone from the living room, called Lyle, and sat down in the kitchen to wait.

            The lumberjack knocked on the inside of the parlor door in what Callista thought was a metered, polite manner.  “Miss,” he called from within in a personable tone.  “Would you let me out?”

            Callista did not respond.  She did not think it prudent to communicate with murderers or rapists or whatever the lumberjack was.

            He said, “I think there has been a misunderstanding.”

            He said, “I mean you no harm.”

            He said, “You’re totally overreacting here.”

# posted by Michael : 9:37 PM  1 Comments

Barnibus Doyle was not the only visitor that day.  Much to Callista’s chagrin, quite a few visitors materialized at her door.  A man dressed head-to-toe in camouflage obligingly offered to shoot the wolf-boy for her—he too had been listening to a police scanner and thought the creature would make “awful interesting jerky.”

            A man identifying himself as “Leonard from the National Park Service” wanted to verify if the creature might not belong at the wildlife reserve.  He declined to specify which wildlife reserve, and Callista sent him on his way.

            To Callista’s surprise, Marge, owner of Marge’s restaurant, showed up with a massive, ruddy man.  “We’re here to kill the monster,” she said frankly.  The chunk of granite behind her nodded.  Callista simply closed the door.

# posted by Michael : 8:40 PM  1 Comments

      Lyle and Callista stood, dumbfounded, gaping at the strange, trembling creature.  It started to whimper pathetically.

    Callista said, “I don’t think this thing is dangerous.”  She reached toward it, and it bared sharp, uneven teeth.

     Lyle pulled Callista’s hand back.  “Anything cornered is dangerous.”

    “Well we can't leave it up here.”

    He crossed his arms and regarded the creature.  “Well what do you want me to do?”

     “Look, I just don't think it's dangerous.  It's like a scared little animal.”

     “Except for the part where it's some kinda wolf monster.”

     “Right.  Except for that.” 

# posted by Michael : 8:25 PM  0 Comments

The darkness moved before them.  Lyle's flashlight brought forth the flash of two eyes peering from the gloom.  The creature moved.  Callista saw a snout and fur.  A long shaggy grey body broke left and into darkness.  

Lyle spun and fired.  His bullets hit the wall, but before the light and the deafening shots, a form dropped to the floor and squealed—a high keening.  Then the thing froze and trembled against the wall.

Before them cowered the strangest thing Callista had ever seen.  It was small, perhaps seventy or eighty pounds, roughly four feet in length, and covered in fur.  The creature pressed itself into the corner and whimpered like an injured dog.  And Callista thought that perhaps it was a dog, until it turned its face to the light.

# posted by Michael : 9:09 PM  0 Comments

            Callista laughed.  She could not help it.  “I’m sorry, you expect me to believe you when you say my uncle John killed your grandfather, and that it’s common knowledge?  Don't you have laws around here?”

            “Oh we have laws.  But my granddaddy was a werewolf, and you ain’t got rights when you’re a monster.”

            “But wouldn’t your grandfather have been a person most of the time?”

            “People don’t eat live chickens by the dozen like damned super foxes.”

            Callista furrowed her brow, feeling as if she were treading water.  “Is that all he did, was kill chickens?”

            “That I know of, anyway.”

            “And you think he should have died for that?”

# posted by Michael : 9:32 PM  0 Comments

When she reached the third floor window she found it was not a glare that prevented her from seeing anything.  The window was blacked out.  And it was locked.  She shook it and hit the edges with her palms and it did not budge.  Puzzled, she descended the ladder and tried another window.  And another.  She tried every window on the third floor and found each of them the same: blacked out and locked tight.

She sat down in the grass and frowned at the house.  Was the third floor fake?  Just for show?  If that were true there would be a massive hollow space above the second floor.  It must at least be an attic or a storage space.  That would explain the surprising lack of personal effects in the cabin.  Other than the Hall of Werewolves, the interior was decorated with generic, rustic décor, as if it were for tourists—a rental, a caricature of a cabin.  Except for all the mounted heads, of course.

# posted by Michael : 10:38 AM  1 Comments

“Well, like I said, as far as I know they are what you’d call a localized phenomenon.  They’re Appalachian werewolves.  Like good ole boys who tear it up on the weekend, except they happen to be secretive, cursed, half-wolf creatures hell-bent on murder.  Although, I ain’t convinced they’re all hell-bent on murder.  I seen one outside Big Pig’s pub one night, ‘bout two in the a.m.  I didn’t have my gun on account of being off duty and drunker than hell.  I thought I was likely a goner.  Conventional werewolf wisdom is they’d assume kill you as look at you, but this one was just lookin’ at me.  I put my hands up like I was under arrest, too.  Said ‘easy there boy,’ and told it I weren’t keen on killin’ or being killed.  You know, I swear, it tilted its head like it was trying to figure what I was sayin’.  Then it sort of grunted and took off.  It could of killed me if it had a mind to.  It just didn’t.  And for the life of me, I can’t figure what that means.  Does it mean they’re more like people than they get credit for?  That there’s good and bad, like regular folks?  I don’t know, but I might think twice before takin’ a shot at one.”  Lyle fell silent and glowered at the heads along the wall.  “Let’s get out of this room.  It’s stuffy.”

# posted by Michael : 6:09 PM  2 Comments

The trio walked across the parking lot together. Callista commented on the name of the motel. "Field Ham Inn is an unusual name, Mr. Scoob."

"Scoob. It's just Scoob." he replied. "I found a ham in that field over there." He waved absently toward a scraggly field behind the motel. "Spiral cut, smoked ham. With a maple glaze. One of the best days of my life."

Callista struggled not to laugh, to cackle wildy in the parking lot. The hour was late in this strange land. "Oh, my. That was quite a find," she managed to say after mastering herself.

# posted by Michael : 7:23 PM  1 Comments