Accidental Literature: Stories

ACCIDENTAL LITERATURE

Stories

by

A.A. Garrison

Smashwords Edition

©2014 A.A. Garrison

Cover picture: Rebecca Snow

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First-Publication Credits

A Sleeping Place – Southern Gothic anthology

Henny Comes Home – The Story Shack

Hunt – Dark Dispatches anthology

Innocent – The Savage Kick, Issue #6

Roommates – Children, Churches, and Daddies, Issue #222

Sick – Short Sips: Coffee House Flash Collection 2 anthology

The Waiting – Not One of Us, Issue #47

The Woodsman – Inkspill Magazine

Tomorrow – Ephemera, Issue #1

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

I. Tomorrow

II. Clouds

III. Mirrors

IV. Ketu Says Hi (Or, She Laughs at Earthquakes)

V. Hunt

VI. Handcuffs

VII. A Sleeping Place

VIII. An Anthem for Chen

IX. The Waiting

X. Roommates

XI. Henny Comes Home

XII. Innocent

XIII. The Glass House

XIV. Sick

XV. The Videotape

XVI. Our Heroes Suck

XVII. Alcoholism and Bad Sex

XVIII. The President is Dead

XIX. The Woodsman

Story Notes

Author Bio

Author’s Note

Some years ago, when I began dabbling with the written word, I was strictly a speculative guy.

I wrote horror. I wrote sci-fi. I wrote stuff too weird and obtuse for a genre. That is to say, I didn’t write literary fiction. For me, literary symbolized everything my writing wasn’t: straight-laced, traditional, expository, emotive. Not that these adjectives necessarily describe literary fiction’s actuality, but just how I perceived literary fiction – a discrepancy which didn’t really matter, since those perceptions would shape the direction of my writing whether real or imagined. In the end, things are always what we perceive them as, even when they aren’t.

But I digress.

Back to the point: I didn’t start out writing literary fiction, or anything close, in content nor form. I was a writer of speculative fiction, and always would be, and I knew these to be facts. I was so assured, if for no other reason, because I was just a punk writer, an amateur, and, naturally, only a real writer could do anything cool within the literary genre. Flunkies like me just weren’t hip enough for meaningful literary prose, and that’s all there was to it. So I stuck to what I knew: speculative fiction and its neighbors, where imagination would offset a lack of literary chops.

And so was my mindset – until I found myself writing literary fiction.

I didn’t sit down and decide to do it. Only after the fact – when I found myself with several finished stories without speculative elements – did it dawn on me that I, too, possessed the ability to craft literary fiction. It left me rather surprised – astonished, even. Who or what had I channeled, to produce this meaningful but non-fantastic literature? Had I become a real writer when I wasn’t looking? For all my wow, I might’ve laid an egg (perhaps a golden one).

Of course, my amazement was undeserved, since it was based purely on my skewed perceptions of the literary genre. Really, writing is writing, whatever form it takes, because genre is pretty much arbitrary, like most labels. In actuality, genre boundaries will always overlap, good writing can defy all genre, and the only real writers are those who think themselves so (or can convince others to). When determining the merit of a given piece of fiction, meaning and value are the only true currencies, and almost fully subjective ones at that. As it were, the only bad piece of writing is one that no one, anywhere, wants to read.

But, again, I digress.

So, I wrote some literary short stories. I was still writing speculative stuff, mind you; just literary now, too, whenever the mood struck. For me, I found that these stories arrived the same way as others, requiring no special ritual or talisman. My subconscious observed no genres, or any distinction at all; for it, there were only Stories, how an egalitarian parent must see their children. So I continued indulging my literary inspirations, finding that I enjoyed them as much as my other, weirder endeavors. As it so happened, my first published story would be one of these literary forays (The Woodsman, a strange, lyrical piece written while feverously ill, and included in this book).

It is for these reasons that I dubbed this collection of my literary works Accidental Literature, for all of these stories could be regarded as the accidental, bastard children of a writing habit that began nowhere near the down-to-earth territory of literary fiction. Does authoring such a collection mean that I’m a real writer? No, but it does mean that I’ve disabused myself of thinking there’s such a thing.

A.A. Garrison

I. Tomorrow

Monday, Bernie decided to quit the painkillers.

Tuesday was rocky but free of pharmaceuticals.

Wednesday, looking good – what’s dope?

Thursday, he took one, just one, because cold turkey wasn’t working out (and no, the pills had not been flushed).

Friday, it was clear that warm turkey wasn’t working out, either. By Sunday, the pills were exhausted.

Tomorrow, he decided. Cold turkey tomorrow, no fooling around. But Monday morning, he went looking for more.

* * *

Summer heat, the sun high, the street suburban. Bernie strolled busily down the way, young enough to avoid offending the eye, old enough to appreciate outdated pictures. He looked to belong there, in the ‘burbs.

The Cape Cod house resembled a wedge of birthday cake. Yum. Bernie’s sandals clapped the deck. The home’s inhabitant came after one knock, as though in wait.

Yeah? said Mr. Cape Cod.

May I use your bathroom? Bernie asked. He did his best to look anxious.

A moment’s deliberation, and the proprietor nodded Bernie inside. Two doors on the left. He pointed down a knickknacked hallway.

Bernie followed the finger to a half-bath just big enough to hold him. Ceramics sprouting toothbrushes and other tools. Designer everything. Cat wallpaper. He closed the door, raised loudly the toilet seat, and did not sit.

The medicine chest held polite rows of medicines: aspirin, Tylenol, creams. Bernie selected the cabinet’s lone prescription bottle and turned it before his face, reading.

Arthritis meds. Damn.

He returned the bottle and flushed the toilet and made a perfunctory spray of the faucet. Outside, Mr. Cape Cod was nowhere to be found. Bernie left the way he’d come.

Two doors down, to a weird house for which there is no name. It rose angrily before the sky, a spire of wood and window and strange. Bernie creaked open the gate and followed a trail of flagstones. The lawn was hedged by a scornful stand of sycamores and willows, lending an insularity Bernie wasn’t sure he liked.

Four knocks, and the door opened to a bright-eyed old woman. Bernie asked if he could use the bathroom. The woman said yes, but stayed in the doorway, with something like suspicion.

He blinked. She stepped aside. He entered. The woman’s wet-looking eyes didn’t leave him.

This way, she said, and ushered Bernie forward, employing a bizarre, plodding gait like gelatin given life. The bathroom smelled of sachet and female. He thanked her and entered.

The closed door said, You’re welcome.

Bernie opened the toilet lid, as usual. He waited for footsteps, then raided the woman’s vanity as he had that of the Cape Cod. Aspirin. Cosmetics. Unguents. Female-hygiene products he did not touch. And not a single orange bottle.

Damn.

He closed the cabinet and flushed the toilet and ran the faucet for one convincing burst, then left the bathroom. The woman stood in wait. She was asking him something about the Lord when the door banged.

Three doors down this time, another Cape Cod. Ding-dong, and a large, hard-faced man appeared. All business, this fellow.

Whad’yoo want? the man asked, and there was no breath more foul.

May I use your bathroom?

Appraisal, the man’s grouchy head swinging up and down, eyes like roaming gun-barrels. Bernie’s antenna was up, and it said bad things.

Come on, Hard Face said. The words weighed in the tons.

Bernie entered. Elegance inside, a world of paintings and decoration, in excellence of the homes visited previously. Bernie commented on this and got no answer.

The hard-faced man showed Bernie into the back of the house, past sculptures and flower-filled vases, antiques forbidding touch. Hard Face ensured that Bernie went first.

A dim hallway, constructivist art, everywhere soviet red and Cyrillic text. Then, the bathroom.

This one, Hard Face said through pursed lips, and extended a hairy hand. The eyes held Bernie’s until consumed by the door.

The bathroom smelled, recently used. The humid remains of a shower. Few furnishings. A Man’s Room.

Toilet lid up ... but no footsteps followed. Bernie waited, but the footsteps never came. After a big minute, he decided they’d come without his noticing – stupid, but he was jonesing and that changes things.

He tugged on the mirror with him in it, and it did not open. He tugged again, as to quake his reflection, unsuccessfully. No medicine cabinet.

He took to the drawers below the ivory vanity. The top awarded scissors and a razor and a strop, creams for shaving. The next held bandages and aspirin.

Damn, Bernie felt more than thought.

Drawer three was empty, so he went to the next sequential row, finding more creams and unguents.

Damn your creams, old man.

Bernie rubbed out an eyebooger and flicked it away and shook his head, joneses like the devil ahhhhh! He opened the last drawer, not expecting anything, but it had everything: an array of white caps, blue-and-white RX’s like the writ of God.

Please, please, please, Bernie prayed to the unhearing dope-god known to all junkies. He took to the bottles with abandon, and the first contained a sentence-long drug that he knoweth not. The second was also Greek.

Please, please, please.

The third contained Valium. Getting warmer, he thought, and deposited the candy-orange bottle into a shorts pocket. The pills chattered like teeth.

The fourth bottle contained a mild opiate painkiller, and Bernie smiled. It would do, and there were more bottles to explore. Like the promise of another day. Like lands unknown. His hands were a blur.

More Greco-drugs – and then, lo and behold, one bottle contained the very pills Bernie had sworn off of and then consumed heartily within the space of a week. He refreshed his smile, and joined these with the rest.

Bernie started to lower the toilet lid, but instead relieved himself, in fulfillment of his stated premise for entering the home. He then flushed the toilet and ran faucet water and drank some and it was good.

When Bernie stepped outside, the hard-faced man was waiting, inches away, unmoved. Bernie startled back, the pill bottles speaking.

Whad’yoo do? the man asked. He was not smiling.

Bernie said nothing. His heart thumped blood.

Whad’yoo do, mister? Hard Face said as he bulged forward. I herdj’a in there, huh? Whad’yoo do?

Bernie said Used the bathroom, but even he did not believe it, despite its truth in this rare instance.

What’s in those pockets, huh?

Lint.

Show me, said Hard Face, staring with the trackless eyes of a Grecian statue. He folded hairy tree-arms, the chest like nippled fists.

Bernie pulled out his left pocket, a white tongue of fabric. He fingered the other but didn’t pull it out.

Show me. Hard Face came closer, closer. He smelled of garlic and onions and rusty nails, how an Italian devil must.

Bernie slipped a hand in his criminal pocket, looked down ... then dashed left and away, worthy of a puff of dust.

Sumbitch!

The soviet hallway blurred like melting brick, Bernie zigging left then right then left. Pill-chatter with each step, his jones lending it a wah-wah reverb.

From behind: Oh no you don’t, huh! Not from me, son!

Bernie sprinted the mazy hallway at the moderate speed allowed by his sandals, but soon a terrible vise seized his shoulder and spun him around.

Steal from me!

The world shook –

A fist in brutal course for Bernie –

His face cold then hot, an incredible pain that should not be –

"Steal from me! Steal from me!"

A preposterous blow on each me, pill-chatter beneath the rumpus. Bernie staggered, fell, and blackness stole the world.

* * *

Tuesday, Bernie remained unconscious.

Wednesday, he awoke in a hospital, swimming the broken fractals of a fever dream.

His faculties returned