A mayfly really in the grand scheme of things

Sitting wrapped in her towel she tried to remember a time when she didn't feel trapped in this old house. It's gingerbread trim and bright colors should have inspired some other emotion, but it didn't. When passersby would stop to talk about the towering Victorian's history her mother would gladly oblige with dates and the names of previous owners, but to Alice she felt like a brief blip in the life of this house. A fly on the wall, and it made her queasy and produced feeling of unwelcomeness. When she was little she would pretend that she was a princess in her turret room. The days of such imaginings were gone. She counted the days before she left for University.

Hunter Says

I exit the book-store clutching my copy of the diary of Anis Nin like a talisman against some unforeseen danger. The sun blinds me upon exiting into the street, and the crowds of people milling bout along the long brick avenue make me dizzy. My contacts bother my eyes and I curse my vanity that forces me to wear them even though they pain me. As my eyes adjust I see Jenna standing. She is, as she always is, resplendent in her ease. She stands in a floral skirt and sandals, her jet-black hair, dark skin and composed bearing remind me of the grace of the Indian women I see along the streets. She fumbles with a lighter and places a cigarette to her lips. This fumbling, I know, is the result of nerves. I inspect the scene with more care. Standing in front of her is Hunter, a former boyfriend, who has all the vulgar earthyness and bearing of a steel worker. Her hands flit and her mouth smiles but I can see the weariness in her eyes. He cannot. I suddenly feel so very protective and defensive of her, which makes no sense. I don’t desire to posses her, she interests me as she is, but this protectiveness bothers me and I do not know why. I approach her and she doesn’t notice me until the last moment. I am her escape from this unwanted conversation and when she notices me I can see the thought flicker through her mind. Her shoulders relax and she makes the excuse of our date to leave. As we walk down the red colored street the crowds of people that were so offensive to me suddenly melt away. I am elated to step by her side and wonder why she has this effect on me. We pause while she speaks to some people that we both know, but I am quiet, Jenna loves to talk and I let her, which is probably why she spends time with me. I watch her put out her cigarette on the sole of her shoe and I notice that her toenails are painted a florescent green and it reminds me if Sally Bowles from Cabaret. We had planned to get a drink, but she tells me that she has no money so I promise to buy her one. We enter the nearest bar, which is full of people and dark. She weaves through the crowd and finds a table at the back. Men stare at her wherever she moves and I am not envious. I always shrink from the masculine gaze, it makes me feel uncomfortable and uneasy. As if I am being analyzed and dissected, open and naked. Yet she seems to thrive, to blossom under the gaze which utterly destroys me. As we sit together and she talks of her difficulty with men. The difficulty being that there are too many. I want to hold her hand. I don’t. That kind of closeness that seems so easy for most women eludes me. My mother calls me a cold fish, I think it’s just emotional reservation that comes from being an over-sensitive child.

Ghost in a Teacup

She picked up the fragments of the teacup off the living room table. It had survived so many moves between houses and apartments and cross-state trips and now it lay in two halves. It was her own fault for leaving it in the living room where everyone got drunk and played games and had the kind of discussions that involved large sweeping arm gestures. She had just wanted some piece of her history in the community space like everyone else, but her history was laying there cleaved in two. She hadn't even been there to see it break. Even the cup itself seemed faded. She remembered buying it at the garage sale with her mother before they started fighting so much, when she was little and was still convinced that one day she'd grow up to mosaic the kitchen walls with sea shells. She would glue the pieces together but the cup would never again hold water. It seemed so appropriate, because it the early afternoon light, in the dirty living room, she felt as though nothing could stand the test of time. The dreams were just ghosts in that teacup, and now even the ghosts had nowhere to hide.

She felt naked.

Chlorinated

The corporate courtyard fountain re-pumps it's water again and again in an endless loop. People ask me again and again if I'm OK, if I'm tired. Yes, I am exhausted. I am that cheap concrete fountain, recycling old joys in a glass cage courtyard. The water, stale and septic, reeks of chlorine and prays for rain. But even this water will evaporate, and I too will return to the lakes where I belong.

Monday, June 23, 2008

There was nothing left. The houses had crumbled. The streets had grown over with weeds, their winding tendrils reaching over the tar that had become sticky under the sun. The corpses had long since rotted away, the bones bleached in the sun. The silence was unending and thick. There was a sickening wet crack and a tree crashed to the ground. It proved beyond any doubt that a falling tree makes noise, even if not a soul is alive to hear it.

Dean Koontz interview with Newsarama.com

NRAMA: In the larger view of your works, many of your novels contain genre elements. Were you a comic book reader as a kid or did they or their stories influence you at all?

DK: I was never into superhero comics. I was fascinated with Tales from the Crypt and that sort of thing, and also with Scrooge McDuck and his endless battle with the Beagle Boys. Once I began having success with novels, I really had to restrain myself from building a giant money bin, filling it with coins, and driving around in it with a bulldozer.


I've never been a huge Dean Koontz fan but this might possibly be enough to make me want to read his book Frankenstein: Prodigal Son. It's being adapted into a new comic book by Chuck Dixon and Brett Booth.