Denny Grelock had an iron rosary. He wore it like a
belt but only in the afternoon. He didn't like wearing it in the
morning because church happens in the morning and he didn't want to
offend God.
It was a Tuesday when his grandmother cuffed his ear
and said, freckles wrinkling on her scruffed rug face, "eat your
soup and crackers you damn fool boy!"
Trouble was, Denny had no soup and crackers. The
reality was, Denny's granny was very old and a bit on the not sane
side. That didn't matter to Denny too much. He always just nodded,
grinned and rubbed his ear.
Granny's hair was very white. White as swan feathers.
It stood up like feathers, too. It looked kind of stupid to Denny
because it stood so high and tried to be a full head of hair but it
was thinning badly. Kind of a full bodied balding was going on atop
Granny's head.
Snow fell in silvery plinkets on the rolling, once
green hills. Elder pines rose in an iron wall.
Windows peppered the blocky houses.
He was a pigeon-headed oaf. Bulky in form, he had a
knack for wearing the wrong t-shirt. If he was going to be caught at
a skinhead rally that day, odds were he would be wearing an African
pride top or Remember the Holocaust across his chest.
Instead of shoes, he wore black plastic flip-flops.
Sandals were 'in' after all.
All the magic in the world had slowly been bottled
over thousands of years and now, in Herbert's dream, it was
unleashed. Oddities and fascinations rarely thought of roiled around
the densely populated city. a kaliedescope of wonderment.
How odd it was for him to notice, in a small church
whose top had been blown off and strange rainbow colored star-men
zoomed loopdy-loops in the air; amid the writhing bean stalks, one
young man on bent knee proposing to a pretty girl with solid curls
for hair playing down the side of her head.
Cursed with a high swept forehead, receding hairline
and downturned nose, the Slovenian man had a near alien appearance.
He sat, sprawled in the corner booth of the cafe, dark octagonal
sunglasses joining his hair in vivid contrast to his pale, white skin.
An ugly woman with a crevassed face clinging to the
front of her skull spoke to him with an intense expression in low tones.
Her face had a serpentine quality to it like a snake,
coiled tightly and ready to strike. Her eyes were dark around the
edges, but not from a lack of sleep. Maybe it was from the things she
had seen, horrible things.
the NEW
stuff
I think I will die on a lush green hilltop in Ireland.
It will be a rainy day, gray clouds as far as the eye can see. I will
be alone. I will be old. I will be drenched from head to toe in the
tears of the sky and I will die happy.
I think I will be trying to run like I did in my
youth, before I grew up and began running to get away from things. I
would be running because it made me feel free and powerful. I would
be running through the hills I loved so much.
I wouldn't slip and hit my head. I wouldn't have the
sudden chest pains of a heart attack. I would simply finish running
to a place where no houses and no streets and no person was visible.
I would lay down. I would go to sleep. And I would be reborn.
Yes, I am certain now. I will die on a lush green
hilltop in Ireland.
He liked the title "Master of the Maelstrom and
the Tempest." It didn't mean anything to anyone else, but to a
twelve year old boy whose mind was trapped in a rural town, it was a
calling. It was cause to stride through the cornfields and bean rows
and through the barns and orchards and march on to destiny. That
title held power. And power would be had, even by someone with so
meager a beginning.
Henry remembered eating light green pears from the
trees across the street. Actually it was a road, a dirt road. The
trees were in the side yard of the Gorski's farm house. They raised
cows, grew corn and had three dogs.
The pears were the sweetest thing that grew in the
little world Henry grew up in. Sweeter than the apples in his own
yard and sweeter than the choke cherries in the back field where he
had trapped and killed a mouse once.
Actually, the mouse hadn't died. It had fallen into a
pit he had dug out and set a trap in the bottom of. It was still
breathing when Henry found it. He took it to his mother and she told
him it was his job to finish the job.
Henry never forgot the sound the shovel made on the
mouse. He never forgot the taste of the pears, either.