Thursday! The E-Zine for September 6, 2023
V3, I41
Not a lot of chit-chat from me this week because, as you can see, there’s a lot going on just an inch or so below this paragraph! I think you’re going to dig the poems and stories this week quite a lot. I’ve not decided which one1 I’ll read for next week, so I figure you can help me decide. When you’re done reading, let me know in the comments which one(s) you’d like to hear and why! I plan to do another paid-subscriber edition as well, though I don’t know exactly when2. You could even suggest one of the works from a past edition of Thursday! if you prefer. Let me know. The more you tell me, the better Thursday! can be. Cool? Cool. Let’s get cracking.
Poems
Stories
Three Poems About Animals We Consider Safe but You Never Know
I. The thing about a llama And its alleged drama Is that it's rather quiet Until it starts a riot. II. A fuzzy caterpillar Is not thought of as a killer But I have a certain hunch They'd be vicious in a bunch. III. Meet a primate in an alley? It might be your life's finale. You could end up mashed and mangled. Cause of death: orangutangled!
Some Counsel on Worms
I would find worms less outrageous If they weren't so segmentaceous. Cut one in half or even thirds. Use one part to feed some birds. Leave the others unattended When you come back, they'll have mended! Two whole worms you'll see before you. Growling, snarling. They abhor you! But look! They grow to larger size They see you, though they have no eyes. They stretch out far, then separate: Two, then four, then angry eight. Oh no! Oh no! They keep dividing. You could not know what you were inciting When you split that worm in three. Ten billion worms from sea to sea. Squirming hunger for blood and bone You should have left that one alone.
My dream is to support my family with my art. Can such a thing be done? Yes! But I need your help. How? I’m glad you asked!
Upgrade to a paid membership to Thursday! or consider a Founding Membership! You can choose any amount above $65 a year, not just the suggested $240.
Big John’s Last Deal
Big John leaned back in his chair, shined leather boots on his desk, feet crossed, with a grin on his face as big as Chet had ever seen. He snatched a glass of whiskey off the desk, raised to his lips and drained it in one gleeful gulp. It was late, almost midnight, and the moon shone bright through the slats of the blind over the window behind him.
Chet crossed his arms, leaned against the frame of the open doorway, and shook his head. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “You got the court order reversed.”
“Nope,” Big John replied and put the glass back on the desk. “I did something better.”
“Don’t tell me you had someone killed again. And you didn’t ask me to do it? I’m hurt, boss.”
Big John frowned. “Nah. Also, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
Chet rolled his eyes. Big John Marklinson, the richest man in Darkwater County, was not above killing someone who stood between him and a lucrative land development deal. He had buried three men himself in the past two years for his boss and he knew of at least two more who had simply disappeared. But if Big John hadn’t killed the people who had stopped his relocation of the Deep Rest Cemetery, he couldn’t imagine what else would make the big man so happy.
“Okay,” he said, as he walked over to Big John’s desk and pulled up a chair. “I’ll play. You broke some arms?”
“Nope!”
“Kidnapping? Though I’m not sure who you’d kidnap. That pain in the ass lady didn’t have any family hereabouts. Neither did her father, the cranky old bastard.”
Big John shook his head. His jowls quivered with the movement and he giggled, a weird high sound that seemed to creep out of him and scrape off the metal walls of the trailer office.
Chet stomped on the floor. “Come on, John! What did you do? There’s no way you could have changed that judge’s mind and we didn’t have enough on him to blackmail him. So give. What?”
The big man slowly put his feet on the floor and leaned forward until his elbows were on the desk. He looked at Chet with unabashed glee. “I hired someone to handle the move anyhow!”
“Oh, come on now.” Chet narrowed his eyes. “The court order was very specific. And Judge Teague said in open court he’d call in the feds if you so much as moved a teaspoon full of dirt. No chance you got the heavy equipment and the men to run things in a day.”
“Have you ever heard of a necromancer, Chet? A warlock? A hoodoo man?” Big John rested his head in one hand and tapped the desk lightly with the fingers of the other. It was a sure tell to Chet that his boss not only believed that he had the upper hand but that he had the upper hand so completely that there was no reason for him to show a single moment of concern.
“No, John. Well, I mean, I’ve heard about them in old movies like with Vincent Price. They talk to dead people, right?”
John’s fingers tapped out a rhumba rhythm on the cheap desk. “More than talk, Chet. They can command the dead. Make them do stuff. I heard a rumor once there really is a necromancer, a crazy old man who lives down near Tumbolt, on the edge of that big lake down there. Rumor said he can make the dead get up and walk.”
“Now you’re crazy,” Chet exclaimed, then laughed. “Only one man ever raised the dead, or so the Presbyterians say. You’d better hope they’re not right, though, ’cause if they are, you and me got a lot of time coming in a very hot place.”
Chet’s laughter trailed off. His Aunt June was one of those Presbyterians and, just for a moment, he had a distinct memory of his Aunt, wiry and strong, kneading out bread dough and telling him how he needed to say his prayers twice a day or the Devil would take him. Big John’s talk was starting to worry him. It felt like the Devil, even though Chet had put all that God talk far from him a long time before he ever killed a man.
Big John stopped tapping his fingers and sat back in the chair. “I talked with the old man, Chet. He’s real. He showed me things. A dog, dead ten years. A…I guess you’d say it’s a zombie. Dead for sure. I knew the man. So did you. You helped sink him in that lake two years ago.”
“No way, boss. Seriously. There’s no way you sa–“
“I DID!” Big John thumped his ham hock fist on the desk and Chet thought he heard it crack. He thought he also heard a noise from outside, like someone walking up the gravel lane.
“That old man had raised Peter Wanamaker from the dead! He showed me the bullet wound that killed him. That wouldn’t have convinced me, Chet. Not in a million years. I’m too smart and he could have faked it. But he showed me the bullet from that sonofabitches body. It had the initials carved in it just like I did before I shot that lying pissant down! I HELD IT IN MY HAND!”
Chet couldn’t say anything at first. Big John had half risen to his feet. His eyes had that look that Chet recognized meant there was no joking now. Big John was deep into the business now and Chet had to be careful. The big man liked Chet, but he had liked a lot of people who were now dead, buried in concrete foundations, sunk in deep water, cut to pieces and fed to the hogs that Big John raised for just that purpose. He let the silence sit for a couple of moments. Outside, the wind pushed leaves around the construction site, the sound like shuffling of bare feet.
His boss looked at him, eyes dark and glittering, waiting for a challenge Chet has no desire to give. The wind kicked up again and something — trash or a stray empty concrete bag — brushed along the side of the trailer. Chet finally spoke.
“Okay. You met this…necromancer. What does that have to do with the court order?”
“Hee hee! That’s the beautiful part! You’ll recall that the court order prevents me or anyone else from moving any of the bodies from the graveyard. I can’t even, as the judge said, “use a single living human muscle to disturb any grave.” Big John was smiling again, on the verge of leaning back in his chair again. He had it pushed back almost against the window. His head scraped the metal blind and it seemed to rattle against the glass of the window.
“Yes. Fine. I remember that, but how…,” Chet stopped as it finally hit him. His eyed widened.
“Oh, John. You…hired…?”
“Yes! I hired the necromancer to make the bodies in the cemetery move themselves!” He laughed and pushed back. His chair hit the wall of the trailer and Chet would have sworn that he heard something outside, something that growled with anger. Big John stood up, his face alight with triumph.
Chet stood up as well and edged toward the door. “Boss, I don’t–“
“I did it, Chet, my boy! I hired that crazy old man for hardly any money at all. He promised he’d raise every single sonofabitch in that graveyard and make them walk wherever I wanted. He told me he could even make them dance a chorus line down Main Street if I felt a fancy too. Imagine that, Chet! Imagine that whole graveyard full of dead people prancing past that Judge’s house! Wouldn’t that beat all?”
“Boss, you didn’t–”
“Nah. I told him I didn’t care where they went so long as they got out of my cemetery. MY CEMETERY!” He laughed his high, screechy laugh again.
Chet had taken two more steps toward the door when he heard the noise of rattling and scratching at it that made his blood cold. He knew in that moment that the old necromancer had done just what he had promised. He had raised all the dead from the Deep Rest Cemetery and sent them to a new place. Big John told the old man he didn’t care where they went but he should have.
He should have.
A shadow moved against the window behind John. Chet didn’t even have time to shout a warning before a pair of arms, partially skeletal, partially hung with rotting flesh and old suit fabric, smashed through the glass and wrapped themselves around John’s fleshy neck. Other arms reached through, all in some semblance of decay, and grabbed any part of the crime boss they could. His eyes went wide and his mouth made a small “o” as he inhaled in surprise, a rattling squeak that turned into a broad gasp as his boots left the floor and his upper body was pulled through the window and into a horror of tearing bare bones and furious gnashing teeth.
Chet looked around for a weapon but his time ran out as the trailer door bent and squealed and the hinges gave way. A stench rolled into the trailer, the smell of death and rot and worms and worse, that would have taken his breath away if he had not seen what filled the darkened of the torn-open door. Chet screamed as the former residents of the cemetery, angry behind any mortal measure at having their long rest disturbed, crawled and screamed and lumbered into the trailer. He tried to pray but, in his last moments, realized he had forgotten how.
(Photo Credit: kalhh on Pixabay)
Become Like the Water
Angus Brown was an unhappy man. He hated his job, where his desk sat next to the loudest water cooler in the building. His boss, who decided the water cooler just had to be right there, never looked directly at him and frequently called him Agnes. The apartment building in which he lived was old, moldy, and expensive. His neighbor in the apartment above him enjoyed smoking cigars on his balcony and singing boy band songs loudly and in no particular key, often at the same time. One evening, Angus worked up the courage to ask him to be a little quieter. The next night, a red-hot ash flicked down from the balcony above, landed on a plant Angus kept on his kitchen windowsill, and burned it up.
Angus had stomach aches almost every day and, sometimes, he woke up in the middle of the night afraid of everything yet of nothing specific at all. He ate a bologna sandwich and an apple for lunch and boxed mac and cheese for dinner and sighed a lot.
He was also going bald.
One morning, when he arrived at work, Angus saw a book on his desk. The title said “Become Like the Water”. He didn’t know who left it there but he liked the picture on the front cover. It was a picture of the ocean at sunrise in a place Angus just knew was neither too warm during the day nor too cold at night. It was a picture of the place he saw in his dreams every night before the scary thoughts crowded it out and woke him up. He looked around, as if he were afraid of being caught, and stuffed the book in his lunch bag. When he got home, he didn’t even make dinner before he opened that magical, lovely cover and started reading. When he finished the last word, as the dawn peeked through the closed blind of his bedroom window, five minutes before his alarm clock was to ring, he slowly closed the front cover and ran his fingers over the blue-grey sea. He sat there a moment, looking at his fingers on the book. He blinked slowly, as if someone or something had called his name from a great distance away. Then he picked up his flip-phone, called his boss, and spoke five words in a voice more sure than he had ever spoken in his life.
“This is Angus. I quit.”
For the next three months, Angus tried to Become Like the Water. Every morning, he woke up and looked at that lovely cover. Every day he flowed and puddled and streamed. He learned the great secrets of the rain and the name of the River of Life. He breathed like a cloud and ground like a glacier. He had no idea what he was doing, really, and he didn’t feel very much like water, but he felt a little bit better every day and that was all right. Something was happening; he just didn’t know what. One evening he ordered dinner from a nearby Chinese restaurant that he looked up on the internet. Szechuan Chicken. The first bite was so spicy he thought he was dying but he recovered and ate every bite, including the cookie.
The fortune inside was a simple drawing of a waterfall.
One day, Angus stood in the shower, listening intently to the sound of the drops splashing in the tub when he felt a funny feeling in the deepest pit of his stomach and in the middle of his forehead. Before he could even wonder what was happening, Angus Brown became just like the water. He flowed right down the drain, through the old copper pipes, into the sewer, and away to the wide open sea. At first he was afraid, but his fear didn’t last long. He had nothing he would miss at his apartment, where soon the shower overflowed the tub and splashed down on the head of the building supervisor. He had become like water in the lovely ocean, the place of his dreams. And while he was there he made a friend, a starfish named Lucinda who always called him by his right name.
Angus Brown, finally, was a happy man.
Or two or three…
Certainly before next week, though. Maybe Friday. Maybe after the weekend. I have a Sunday School lesson to prepare for Sunday morning, so I may not have quite as much time to record a story as I’d like until after that.