novella

The Crossed Star of Bethlehem, Chapter Six: A Hundred-year-old Man

Chapter Six

Sighs, echoing laughter, and half-remembered faces that belong to all-forgotten names gather in the pooling shadows of Corson Street; the ghosts gaze at Holly More as he walks alone in search of a hundred-year-old man. No matter how much money Charleston pours into the “revitalization” of the Corson district, its ghosts remain stubborn and continue to luxuriate in the riches of the poverty into which they had been born, thus lived, and brought home from their graves.

An ageless weeping-willow—gnarled and endowed with a sleepy wisdom by the salty winds that constantly assail it off Philo Bay—has changed little since Holly was a boy. Although Holly knows nothing of its origin, he is certain that the willow is an unplanned tree, whose critical seed blew in from the bay and took hold in the soil—so determined to live, that not even two nearby house fires or three major earthquakes could dissuade its fractal-reach into the sky. Nowadays the willow’s neighbors include a dealer in silk flowers and a tidy, albeit anal-retentive, mortician.

A verse takes shape in Holly’s mind:

From not weepy willow contrive my wreath;

Lay plastic greens and berries on thine door.

Show your sentimental, shallow-most grief;

Never display love extant beyond before.

“Eleven notes on the last,” Holly whispers. Eleven is an unlucky number. It seldom carries its own weight.

A young couple exits a retro-clothing shop. They are wholesome and attractive and move easily in the light gravity of youth. Their radiance is bulletproof, and is even enhanced by the raw October weather.

As brown is to orange, fresh faces are to cable-knit. Holly sighs. There might have been something in that line, but it’s already gone.

“I still hate the way that debate went last night,” the man said to the woman. “All that yelling. And we’re supposed to give one of them Lincoln’s old job?”

The young woman smiles sweetly, too briefly, at Holly, when the couple passes him by. “Right?” he hears her say. “It was all ‘You’re the antichrist!’ and ‘Oh yeah? Well, you’re the bigger, scarier antichrist!’”

They can take turns being the antichrist, Holly thinks. If you’ve seen one candidate debate, pretty lady, you’ve seen them all. Maybe what we need is a good old fashioned dictator, like Stalin—that way everyone will know who the antichrist is without guesswork.

The mournful, ululate warning bell of an unseen shipyard tram interrupts his thoughts. Holly pauses on the sidewalk and absently draws his jacket collar up to his chin. He has heard this sound all his life, and he always associates it with Beth, Harry and Saint Frances; three faces too near to his heart to ever be seen as ghosts.

Charleston wouldn’t exist without the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. “Green” peace-and-love-types often spy irony in a hand of the American killing machine causing life to flourish; but that sort of thing doesn’t hold up well when you consider what Darwin had to say on the subject.

Alas, big items such as war and peace do not interest Holly. He’d rather have the latter, but he thinks that a serious alteration in the natural ways of humankind will have to happen before the former becomes unnecessary.

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Holly likes this, except for the twenty-five notes. Twenty-five is unlucky. It stacks like money.

As a poet, Holly More is constantly on the lookout for an honest hundred-year -old man. He must be honest unto himself only. He must be clear and complete and yet neither relate nor compare to no other being or memory, even in paradox.

Holly’s lifelong friend, Bethlehem, knows about this quest. When they were children on Corson Street during the sixties and seventies, the hundred-year-old man was their by-word for interesting situations and objects one or the other had discovered in the alley that ran between Corson and Wycoff Avenue. On the Wycoff side of the alley stood a row of large turn-of-the-century houses that had been divided into apartments for the poor and working-class. Holly and his troubled mother had lived on the top floor of one of the tenements, while Beth and her fun-loving, widowed mother, “Harry,” had rented rooms in the basement. With Harry, you always got Saint Frances.

The alley still runs along between Corson and Wycoff—and although the old houses had succumbed to the wrecking ball twenty years back, the unreachable poor and those who live from paycheck to paycheck still inhabit the Wycoff side. But nowadays they do so in a monotonous row of low-income duplexes. It’s the same old story: plastic sheathed windows, shoes flung up over the lines, ignorant wanna-bee gangstas on the make, and unplanned kids everywhere.

Although Corson Street begins near the foot of Torqwamni Hill, follows the curve of Philo Bay, and eventually merges with the highway that leads out of Charleston, for Holly and Beth it actually began at The Temple of the Dow Lady Emporium and ended at the White Pig Tavern. In between lay Elmo’s Adult Books; Clarke’s Drugs; various dives; two or three Mom and Pop’s; possibly the only Masonic Temple on earth made entirely out of wood; a busy pawnbroker, and the A&P—at which Holly’s mother often got her cigarettes on the strength of a note she’d send along with her son. Not surprisingly to Holly, the Dow, Pig, Charleston Loans, and Elmo’s continue to do business to this day. These places, along with the alley, are the heaviest with ghosts.

Holly cuts through a vacant lot choked with grabby, feral blackberry brambles and hibernating Scotch broom to access the alley. He recalls how the hundred-year-old man got started in 1967:

“Wanna see a hunnert-year-old man?” Holly says.

Beth rolls her incredibly large kewpie-doll eyes and says, “Don’t talk like PWT.” At eight, Beth is a year older than Holly, and she’s already doing high school course work because her IQ shook out close to that of Tesla. She considers it her duty to keep her “boyfriend” from speaking like a poor white trash brush picker.

“Awright, then say ‘Mother may I’ and spell cup.” Holly has recently learned this witticism in second grade. He uses it plenty.

Beth shakes her head. Some things are just plain hopeless.

According to Beth, the only trouble with the hundred-year-old man was that there was one. Almost certainly in his eighties, he was knowingly referred to as “the Jew” by the landlady, Mrs. Wells: “Come Monday they squeeze every dime ‘til Liberty screams—it’s their christless way of doin’ business.”

Unlike everyone else, Holly found the hundred-year-old man interesting to observe. The fellow had a huge hook-nose, a corona of wispy white hair that splayed out from beneath a red beret, and was as hunched over as a fairy tale wizard. He’d beat about a cane with one hand and carried a perfectly filthy shopping bag in the other—and no matter how warm the day, he was never seen in any less than three sweaters. Looking back, the unlucky sneer that Mrs. Wells had laid in Jew depresses Holly. Although she could be quick with “Jew,” “colored” or “dago,” she had also been a kind woman who had never turned anyone out on account of what they were—except for hippies—Mrs. Wells had hell’s own fury toward hippies; she had lost a brother on Omaha Beach.

Although Beth had been unimpressed by Holly’s discovery, the phrase “hundred-year-old man” (in reference to an interesting discovery) somehow stuck to the kids’ private idiom and has remained active for half a century. During the sixties, hundred-year-old men would turn up everywhere in the alley. Once, it was a dead cat that the kids did their best to bury in the stony, switch-grass root-infested soil of the lot behind Elmo’s. At the “funeral,” Holly read something from the Bible that he had gotten from the lady who ran Good News—for quoting Holy Scripture seemed like the thing to do. Another time they stood in the shadows mystified by the sight of an obviously drunken young woman dancing with an imaginary partner at her window. Her blouse and bra had been equally imaginary. For months afterward Holly’s eyes would suddenly glaze over with memory, and Beth would goddam well know that he was thinking about “boobies.”

She seldom steps her best,

‘til she’s got it off her chest.

“That’s not good enough to be dirty,” Holly mutters. Then he spies a lost ghost wandering from shadow to shadow. It’s bad luck to be afraid of a ghost. Nor is it polite to stare. The thing to do is jump the first solid, unrelated thought that seeing the ghost summons in your mind—the one that comes right after, “Jesus, Christ, I think I see a ghost,” that is. It’s what lost ghosts do best; they resurrect misplaced hundred-year-old men.

Holly tags along with the ghost (yet he keeps a respectful distance) on its way up the alley toward the White Pig Tavern. Who are you? A junkie who nodded -off one time too many behind the Pig? A raincoat boy oozing his way out Elmo’s backdoor before heading home to be the man of the house—a bed-stain your wife didn’t understand? Did you catch the free peep-show the dancing lady starred in? Holly doesn’t worry about offending the ghost with his thoughts, for even lost ghosts know only the truth.

It doesn’t matter to Holly that the ghost is his own moving reflection passing across broken windows and over the surfaces of mud puddles. Nor is this to be considered madness. If anything, Holly is too well tuned to reality; to the degree that he must constantly escape it to protect his soul. Alcohol used to provide a safe haven, but it had turned on him as any self-respecting demon must. It had become evident within the bleak passages that had lain between debaucheries that he had stopped pulling his own weight, and thus had become unlucky. Even though Beth is wealthy and has yet to wholly drop the fantasy of a patron/artist relationship, Holly knew that he was a kept man mostly owing to Beth’s loyalty and inability to turn her back on a loved one. Holly quit drinking a couple of years back, and he now has a job—well, sort of. He’s the night custodian at the Temple of the Dow Lady, which is about the best a fifty-six-year-old notorious town drunk, womanizer, ex-actor, and fifty-cent poet—who does things such as not speaking on Thursdays because he’s got it in his head that Thursday is the day of the week in which people who talk too much talk most—can hope for.

The lost ghost sees both home and a hundred-year-old man. It follows a trail of shattered glass to a rise of cracked stone steps that lead to an elevated, weedy vacant lot. Holly climbs the steps and stops on the third. Three is a hit or miss number; you can never tell what it is up to.

Peter prayed to Jesus:

“Lord, I meant no harm;

For I got it straight from Judas,

‘Third time’s the charm.’”

Beth has a stunning memory. Although genius cannot be taught, she believes that there are certain doorways in the mind that anybody may enter and recover the past with clarity. “It all exists as it had been,” she has said time after time. “The brain’s like cloud storage. And I’m willing to wager that even your pickled egg of a temporal lobe still contains something—although I’m fairly certain that your overall brain is now as smooth and hard and small as a shoehorn. You shouldn’t have drunk away your crinkles, Sir Hollyhock—they’re what cause us to think.”

Whatever.

Although Holly knows that he is as likely to recreate the past the way Beth sees it as he is to begin thinking in logarithms, he does have his own genius for the recollection of emotional memory. Beth can take him back to a long gone afternoon and describe details down to the tilt of a miss-pulled window shade, and he believes her. (That’s the thing about dear Bethlehem—she cannot tell a lie because she has never needed to learn how to do so.) But he has a knack for sniffing his way back through time, following the long trail left behind by a certain feeling all the way back to that feeling’s lucky moment. He had awoken this afternoon with a quality that is best described as earned trust nibbling at his thoughts. Instinctively, he went to Corson Street and the alley to find the moment when the feeling had been pure. And in his jumping from here-to-there, then-back-here-after-another-there thinking process, he examines this hundred-year-old man.

This is an important third step. Mom died on this step—not on the sofa where I had found her; she finally passed in my mind and heart when Beth, Harry and Saint Frances spoke the truth to me until it stuck for keeps. It’s a hell of a thing to look into a face that knows that nobody gives a damn anymore. You see it in stray cats, mostly. And in the eyes of mothers who’d rather be dead than hear the voices any longer. Do demons still have plenty to say after the host has died? Maybe they linger and hoot on the lawn in the predawn darkness like party-goers who can’t quite get it through their heads that the host is dead.

Then the hundred-year-old man comes to Holly, as he knew it would. It’s a dirty trick to play on a memory, this pretending to be lost in unfocused dreams, all the while casting a line along the periphery for what is actually being sought. If you want to attract a squirrel, feed a crow.

Although his mother’s death when he was sixteen is something Holly thinks about at least ten times a day, it, as it goes with his thoughts on war and peace, is too vast to be made sense of. It’s the little things that live large, they build up unto themselves and, in time, compare to nothing, not even in the context of paradox. And when the timid yet persistent small image comes to his head, his deeply furrowed brow smoothens and he turns to face Holman House even though all there really is to see is an apathetic, slouchy cottonwood, which clings to the last of its leaves like that tree outside the sick window in the O. Henry story. Even though the image is clear in meaning, Holly’s imagination fills in the details:

“You’re old enough to do this for a lady without being told how,” Fran says holding out a delicate gold chain that holds a crucifix. Fran and Harry are busy getting ready to go out for the evening. The process is a religious rite of sorts, and takes no less than two hours to perform.

Harry glances up from a small mirror, which she only uses to add mascara to her already long lashes and gazes at Holly, a playful grin darts along her lips. “How old are you, kid?” she asks.

“Seven.”

“A year younger than me,” Beth chimes in. “Just like Pooh-bear and Christopher Robin.”

“I dunno, Frannie,” Harry says, still grinning. ”That boy looks like a born boob-snoop if I’ve ever seen one.”

Holly and Beth exchange knowing glances.

“Just because you date goose-necked guys doesn’t mean that I suffer from the same weakness, Harriet,” Fran says. “Come here, my little gentleman. Once you’ve mastered this skill, the ladies will crumble at your feet.”

“They’ll do it faster if you drop a twenty dollar bill,” says Harry.

“Never mind her,” Fran says. She hands Holly the necklace and sits in a kitchen chair. Then she holds her long blond hair up and aside to expose the back of her neck to him. “Loop it under my chin and fasten the clasp; don’t let your eyes wander over and down.”

“’Over and down,’” Holly says. Even at seven, he had known what that had meant. He has sympathy for men who had grown up in histories written by men. Holly met his father just once. It had been at a bar, and the only thing he took from that meeting was the desire not to repeat it. That set up had been awkward as hell; it was as much a hundred-year old man as ordering a pizza. Not surprisingly, the women in his life had no hand in arranging that terrible little comedy.

The mournful ululate wail of the still unseen shipyard tram reaches his thoughts once more. And the spell is broken, and the lot and the stairs become what they have been for decades, ruins given over to bramble and broom and neglect.

No verse comes from the memory; nothing will do, and any attempt would be unlucky. Holly almost pushes for such anyway, for he thinks that a posy ought to be tossed at this grave. But he finally thinks better of it. It would be the same as sneaking a peek over and down.

The Crossed Star of Bethlehem, Chapter Five: Time and Chance Happenneth to All Gods

Chapter Five

Holly spots a lucky omen far downhill: every backlit tree in a row of poplars along a stretch of the Port Washington Narrows is clasped like hands in prayer, except one. A single, stunted, sloppily unfurled poplar, unloved in shadows, holds the luck. It watches out for the others; it allows them to be confidently pretty by giving the eye something less to compare them to. “Unpoplar,” as Ogden Nash might’ve put it.

The golf course trees, however, don’t say much of anything to Holly. Coddled elms and hand-fattened maples protected against the harsh November winds that howl down the Narrows like steamed souls passing through cracks in hell, have little in the way of luck. They might as well be painted onto the surface of the eye. Stage prop trees.

“Are you ever going to hit the goddam ball?” Beth calls out. She had purposely sent her turn into the bunker because, well, just because.

“It could a cerebral hemorrhage,” says Fran, who is sitting in a golf-cart and smoking a joint. “He looks like a froze-up rock lizard.”

Beth concentrates her large and expressive eyes on Fran. “I hope the oxygen’s off while you do that,” she says. “I’d hate to explain two corpses to the cops.”

Fran pats the canister that lies beside her like a little dog that has gone to sleep. “’No worries,’ as everyone who ought to be worried most says nowadays,” Fran says. “Who better to trust with combustibles than a stoned old lady?”

“Tell me, Bethlehem,” Holly says, “why do your shots always end up in the worst possible places?” He then kicks the ball and a considerable amount of sand onto the fairway.

“Because you didn’t think of it first, reptile,” Beth says. She brings a match off her left boot-heel and lights a cigarette. “Consider it unlucky.”

The idea for golf had been concocted that morning in the nicotine and THC miasma of Beth’s house (where Fran now stays). Holly, a non-smoker, had once again observed that the atmosphere in the living room resembled what the air must be like on Neptune. “All right, Your Anus,” Beth had said, “maybe we ought to take Frannie out for some fresh air.” Upon hearing this exchange, Fran said, “Let’s go golfing. I want one last chance at beating the fourth green at Tor-Hill.”

Holly is fifty-six, Beth a year older. Even though both are plenty young, neither one have set foot on a golf course before today. Until a year ago, and even in her late seventies, Fran could have easily wiped the Torqwamni Hill Tribal Golf Course with her “students.” She was as fine an athlete as the city of Charleston has ever produced, but cancer has steadily robbed her of her physical grace. The oxygen canister became necessary a month ago; and, perhaps more telling, Fran’s dependence on morphine is no longer a concern to her physician. She’s allowed to take her pills “as needed,” and her refills are no longer the subject of dispute. “It’s a part of the process,” Fran, a former nurse whose mind remains as keen as ever, had recently said to Beth. “They watch you until it no longer matters to the law. Oh, I know how cold it sounds—but you should remember that an oncologist’s calendar is full of dying old patients. I mean, yes, we are all people, but unless it touches you personally, you’ve got to be detached to do your job right. And you could even say that the end-gamers have your back when it comes to protecting your immortal soul; dotty codgers have a way of crossing-up meds—It‘s not suicide if you’ve confused the green with the blue.”

They had decided to play a round as one person. Holly and Beth were to somehow get the ball onto the green where Fran would sink the putt. Although every rickety rise Fran takes out of the golf cart causes Beth’s heart to drop underground and wonder why she has allowed such a ridiculous event to come to fruition, she has to admit that she hasn’t seen Fran this happy in a long time.

Fran’s happiness withstanding; it has taken three hours and only God knows how many strokes for the threesome to arrive at the fourth fairway. Since that is the green Fran wants to at long last tame, the three of them have agreed to quit at four holes.

“What’s so funny, Hollister?” Beth asks. She had been aiming the ball at the squirrel-infested, bushy rough along the fairway, but had accidentally hit the first realistic-looking golf shot that either she or Holly had brought into the universe. The ball travelled sixty feet or so by air then bounced a similar distance onto the green and eventually stopped rolling twenty feet shy of the flag.

“I was thinking how you can’t help but do the right thing if given enough time,” Holly says. “You’ve always been kinder than you aim to be.”

Beth considers a verbal retort, but decides that The Finger is good enough.

“Look at that shitty break, would you,” Fran says. She raises a shaky palm and tilts it to the left. “I’ve pissed away a good sixty strokes here over the years because I’ve never beat the curve. I nearly wrapped this two-hundred-dollar putter around that spruce after a thirty-foot putt just hung on the lip. A damn breeze would have dropped it—oh, but hell no—God just let the ball hang there. It would still be doing so if I hadn’t launched the fucking thing into the pond.”

Holly and Beth help Fran out of the cart and follow her to the ball, then step back. While Fran takes her time to line up the putt, Beth begins to speak in a hushed, golf announcer whisper:

“Saint Frances of Rome Mary Josephine Bauer Bowers—confirmation name, Bernadette, is likely on her own here at the fourth green due to her continuing blasphemy and profanity directed at God and His mysterious ways.”

“Why should this time be different?” Fran says. “God doesn’t golf, my little star.”

A long list of the items that God also doesn’t do takes shape in Beth’s mind. But those vanish into the ether when she spies a pair of teenage girls clad in soccer uniforms passing by. Beth assumes that they belong to the nearby middle school, and that they’re most likely taking a shortcut. Her fantastic eyes aren’t just for show; they work well, and she easily reads “Stoppage-fucking- time” mouthed by one to the other, followed by a titter of giggles. The comment had obviously been directed at Fran.

How’s that, Miss Metaphor? Has someone played her full ninety and is waiting to hear the final whistle blow? It could very well be that she’s been carrying a yellow since the first half and yet continues to snipe at the ref, not giving a rat’s ass one way or the other that He’s notoriously touchy and quick to draw the red without a legit reason, Beth thinks. “Do you French your foster father with that mouth?” is what she says, loud enough to get it across to the kids.

The girls are no more than eleven, and both of their faces turn red with embarrassment and they scurry off into the tamed trees. Beth often regrets her mouth. Just a couple of little kids drying their wings, she thinks. It doesn’t help to discover that Fran and Holly are staring at her.

“Let’s beat them up for their lunch money,” Beth says. “We’ll buy a turkey. A person could easily roast a turkey in the time it takes some people to line up a putt.”

Fran smiles and shakes her head. Then she makes a facetious show of wetting her finger and checking the wind.

Holly smiles at Beth. “I saw a lucky omen in an unpoplar,” he says.

Throughout the fifty-plus year run of their extraordinary friendship, Holly has given Beth thousands of reasons for her to doubt his sanity. When they were children together on Corson Street, he often claimed that sadness creeps into late afternoon shadows the same way high pressure follows the low. He also saw hope and kindness in shriveled blackberries that lay among their plump and juicy “brothers and sisters” because the failed berries had selflessly improved the beauty of their siblings. Unlucky shadows; fortunate blackberries; and such things contain a special foretelling that heralds the sway of human events.

Beth trains her eyes on Fran. Nowadays, every time she looks at Fran without first steeling herself to do so, her heart breaks a little more. Fran and Holly are the only two persons alive whom Beth cannot recall first meeting. They seem to her as old as breathing and just as necessary. And I want her to die before the thing she becomes at night kills my sweet memories of her, Beth thinks, laying words to a selfish and scared and frustrated emotion she feels when Fran awakens a screaming brute in the wee-hour darkness. It’s an ugly little thought; but according to Holly’s way of seeing things, it will serve an altruistic purpose.

Beth sidles up beside Holly and takes his hand. Fran at last strikes her putt. The putter and ball combine makes the good click that happens only when the function is performed properly.

All three watch the immutable path of the ball, which approaches the cup at a long and steep angle.

“If this goes in,” Holly says, “she’ll live to see Christmas.”

The Crossed Star of Bethlehem, Chapter Three: God’s Secret Name

Chapter Three

“Fran,” Beth says, “do you know that tall people do not live as long as short people? It’s a scientific fact, and most likely why basketball has never caught on in Okinawa.”

Fran, who is exactly one foot taller than Beth, leans on her custom made left-handed putter, takes a thoughtful pull off a joint, exhales a stream of sticky smoke, and says, “Gulliver should have stomped you little creeps out when he had the chance.”

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The Oz Exception: The Season Finale

At the western edge of Chareslton’s New Town Cemetery lies humble, yet magical Alone Park. Although it is no more than an aged, somewhat forlorn bench (generously slathered with decades of birdshit) in a tiny lot rich with crabgrass, the presence of a non-fruiting Enchanted Cherry Tree makes it special.

Unique occurrences are commonplace at Alone Park. Just a half hour ago, the Volunteer Weekend Caretaker, Gwen Cooper, her Ghost boyfriend, John Mallory (contained inside her phone), and a Pygmy Goat named Fenwick Kloverleaf had passed through an interdimensional vortex that had briefly opened in the trunk of the Enchanted Cherry.

And just a moment ago, the door reappeared. It irised open and out popped a keg and six Black Rats dressed like movers in old movies, complete with little baseball hats. They huffed and puffed the keg down the side of the tree and placed it on the bench. The crew returned to the vortex, hopped in and from inside came the unmistakable, congenial sound of tips being passed out. “Thank you boys, here’s one for you and you and you…”

Gwen Cooper climbed out of the vortex, with her phone in hand. In the realm of Saragun Springs, John has a strange elastic physical shape, but here he only exists in the Caretaker’s Cottage or in Gwen’s smartphone when movement is necessary.

Gwen landed on her feet and gave the keg a happy knock. SARAGUN SPRINGS FAERIE ALE BREWED BY THE PDQ PILSNER CO. OF SARAGUN SPRINGS. BOTTOMLESS.

“I’ll have to get the hand truck to move this,” she said.

Fenwick poked his head out the vortex. “No need,” he said. “Now that it is in your realm, it is even more weightless than a balloon–that is typical of bottomless kegs. The Rats put on a bit of a show.”

Gwen plucked the keg up in one hand. “Amazing.”

Hark reader! You hear a strange noise, like the grinding of gears as this post goes from the past to the present tense…

Right now, John’s face fills the screen of your mind. “Dear reader, today was supposed to be the penultimate chapter of this tale. But Leila got blasted at the party and deleted what might have been the greatest work of genius in the history of literature…”

From off screen, you hear a laugh and a voice a lot like Gwen’s mutter “as if.”

“Anyway,” John says, smiling like a candiate’s better half, “as a great man once said after Lassie plucked Timmy from yet another abandoned well, ‘All’s well as long as Timmy isn’t in it.’ If that quote makes sense in your mind to any degree, then you have been exposed to Saragun Springs much too long, and we encourage you to seek the help of a mental health specialistor nearest liquorcabinet. Before we go, I encourage everyone to remember to put the cream on your scones before the jam…”

Gwen is again heard off screen. “What! Not that again–no wonder you are dead, lover. Too ignorant to live. No live human being has ever ruined a scone that way!”

“Just completing the tale, darling,” John says. “Ending where it began.”

“I see,” says Gwen. “Oh well, just roll the credits.”

The Oz Exception

Starring….

Dame Daisy Kloverleaf/The GOAT

Gwen Cooper

John Mallory’s Ghost

Fewnwick Kloverleaf

Penrose the Flying Weasel

The Great HeXopatha/Renfield/Mari-Kat Lywd (an identity mixture at best)

Pie-Eyed Peety the PDQ Pilsner Pigeon/PDQ Pete

The Woak Grove

Ernie the Evilmost Elm

Sheep up the yingyang

Juan Gee

Professor Moriarty

Beezer and Barkevious the Braw Bros. Baw

One Legion of Black Rats and various minions

The Spring itself

One Conjured Demon

One conjured Bad Pixie

The Interdimensional Vortex

16 Psyche

Pong

Ping

the billigits

“D.O.”

And of course our vast herd of belligerent little Lambs featuring

Tam, Boaby and the other one whose name I forget.

and Leila Allison as the befuddled pen

The Oz Exception has been brought to you by PDQ Pilsner, proud sponsor of the Pushsprings awards–be sure to try the newly acquired Faerie Ale.

Next week will feature an edited novella from long ago, whose excepts first appeared in Literally Stories UK. Then sometime come spring beware of the “rubaiyat of the billigits.” (remember, billies do not use caps). Double beware of a sample of their work coming here tomorrow.

The End

The Oz Exception: Part Twenty-Three

Ah, here we are nearing the end of this minor catastrophe. Soon, the little fellows pushing horseshit wheelbarrows will be the only ones remaining of this peculiar parade. And yet we have endured a long run of strangely turned out events. In that manner, the Oz Exception is pretty much a match for the Universe because the cosmos makes as much sense and has zero story arc; according to the James Webb Space Telescope there’s just more and more of the same stuff,  farther than any eye can see, or any mind to imagine. And yet there’s that measure of Free Will that allows for unlikely changes….

Gwen and John approached Juan Gee from behind. Both were dressed in Oktoberfest garb, carrying tankards of Faerie Ale, and there was a considerable amount of polka music within the chamber.

“Welcome to the Pushsprings Awards afterparty,” said Juan. Whose voice is an awful lot like that of Truman Capote, which, trust me, takes a bit of getting used to when spoken by a Dinosaur.

Peety and Daisy eschewed their Team GOAT costumes and here clad in dirndl and lederhosen.

“What?” I bellowed across the astral plane. “Whose idea was this? What happened to the giant wizard’s head over the boiling cauldron and the chorus of dancing demons?”

“Oh, they’re all here,” said Penorose, who swooped into view. “It’s just that we got tired of waiting for you to spice up the narrative, so we decided to have a party instead.”

“You know about this, Daisy?”

“Yesly, yes–it was my ideally idea.”

I cast about my mind for better ideas that would not cost me too much effort and came up empty. “All right,” I said, “fill a tankard for me.”

End Partly Party Twenty-Three

The Oz Exception: Part Twenty-Two

“As Team GOAT walked through the Witch’s dark castle, uninhabited save for a mouthy Flying Weasel named Penrose, an invisible voice, like that of an unnecessarily hushed golf announcer, who is a hundred yards from the green, spoke incredibly long, needlessly italicized sentences (such as this one) about their doings…”

“That winged Rodent bit of this and that, keeps tailing us?” Beezer said, noticing Penrose’s androgynous shadow cast by torchlight, falling on the stone floor.

“The wee critter got sucked into the gravity of yer behind,” Barkevious said, using his go to insult when he’s unable to think up better.

“You excel at a shit attitude, brother,” said Beezer.

“Hooray for me,” Barkevious said, doing a sarcastic little dance. “I’m number one at behaving like number two.”

Daisy hoof stomped the floor. “Quiet! The readers can’t hear GOAT’s backstory.

“Ah damn, that again,” said the italicized invisible voice. “Anyhoo, GOAT goes inside stories to help out protagonists who are hard against it all. For instance, they entered an old Twilight Zone episode and gave a character who had tragically broken his glasses to an ironic conclusion a new pair, and once they ‘went’ inside a film called The Valley of Gwangi, and actually kidnapped the Dinosaur lead and bring him to Saragun Springs–but his name is Juan G. due to copyright issues….”

“In fact, the crew turned a corner and found Juan Gee guarding a room from which familiar voices flowed…”

“’Who goes there?’ In his transfer to Sargun Springs, Juan reduced in size from being a thirty-foot tall Allosaurus to about five-ten. Still nearly two yards of Thunder Lizard is a lot to suddenly behold when you round a corner in a dark castle. The wind was howling outside and flashes of lightning illuminated the walls through openings in the ceiling.“

“Daisy stopped and looked up in the general diterction that the invisible voice was coming from and said, ‘Are you sayinly saying it’s a darkly dark and stormily stormy night?’”

“The wind sighed and poured herself another drink.”

End part twenty-two

The Oz Exception: Part Twenty-One

Daisy has it in her contract that there be rousing, heroic music when Team GOAT arrives on the scene. So, imagine if you will, something like the Star Wars’ theme, or that of the Christopher Reeve Superman, and you will know the flavor of the duo’s entrance melody.

Although her transformation and that of Peety (who somehow rearranges his drawn image to include a mask–but he still carries the beer and quotes the same films) to Team GOAT was coincidental to both Daisy and Peety disappearing, Dogs are very good sports and will go with the flow.

Weasels, however, have an obligation to live up to their names as used when compared to humans.

“Haha!” she/he laughed, “It’s Bruce Wayne and his boy toy.”

“Interfere with the storyline again, Weasely Weasel and you will see little hoofprints everytime you need to wipe,” said Dai–the GOAT, who is not the most patient of superheroes.

“‘Roadtrip!’ Bluto, Animal House,” said PDQ Pete–it was at least the twentieth time he had said that since the linoleum was rolled out, but no one got shitty about it, except, for, you guessed it, Penrose, as the brave four entered the castle just to have the door raised behind them.

“I once read an article about the brain power of Pigeons,” said the Weasel from up high in his turret. “It was written in invisible ink.”

“Goddamnit,” I said, watching it on my Chromebook–”Oh, well, that’s what I get for letting a Weasel ad lib.”

“Silence, nonsensical Stoat,” said the GOAT. “I believe that this is where the narrator fills in the backstory of Team GOAT as we walk deeper into the castle,” she added, looking directly into the camera.

“Oh, shit,” I said. It’s a hell of a thing to blow your lines when you are writing them, but I have special talents. I turned on my microphone and began reciting what you will read tomorrow.

End Part Twenty-One

The Oz Exception: Part Twenty

I was watching the progress of the team on my Chromebook (HeXy’s castle is loaded with several easy to tap into cameras and microphones) when the hotline rang. Only the Dubious One uses it, and only when she has her usual dubious nonsense to share with me.

“What?” I snarled, answering the phone with that special tone I share only with her.

“Hmm, uh huh, yeah–I see–little Dogs shouldn’t be so liberal with the word ‘cunt.’ Perhaps ‘twat’ will appeal to your prudish sensibilities. I’m sure that the uptight older Brit royals use it all the time, when referencing the shitty choices in marriage that some of them make. Not that I’d call Fergie or Philip a cunt, but I can see where twat might apply to the late consort of the late queen, who was probably neither–despite what Johnny Rotten said about her.”

The previous paragraph is an example of the strategy I use on the Dubious One. She’s usually on a bender or in the midst of a heavy hangover. All you have to do is blather in her ear until you hear the magic words: “Fine. Whatever,” followed by a click and the sweet sweet dial tone. This is exactly what happened.

Then I had an inspiration. One that would end this third week of our ongoing adventure and seamlessly lead into the final five installments that begin on Monday.

I went to my closet and pulled out the special spotlight. Since it was night, Ping was up, so I aimed the light at him when he was directly over HeXy’s castle in the Enchanted Wood.

After doing so I returned to my Chromebook. As desired I saw Daisy looking skyward then she whispered something to Peety; both disappeared behind an Evilmost Elm Tree. When they returned I beheld the GOAT and PDQ Pete, our resident superhero team.

Funny thing is that only Daisy can see exactly what image is cast on Ping. It’s a blur to everyone else, me included. Of course that might be due to the oddity of the Goat eye, but since Fenwick can’t make it out either, it remains a mystery–or maybe it’s because I cannot think of something interesting or entertaining enough to describe it with.

Regardless, team GOAT was on the job…

End Part Twenty

Starting Monday, the final five installments

The Oz Exception: Part Eighteen

The gang marched onward and soon encountered a field that contained a giant poppyseed themed buffet. Daisy went for the poppyseed muffins, Beezer and Barkevious both devoured the poppyseed pizza and even Promo wasn’t finicky enough to bypass the poppyseed herring (although he had been told about the “trap”).

The poppyseed laden food caused the breathing creatures to fall asleep. They were snoring under the azure sky and when they awoke they’d forget all about the mission and go home. Or so that was how the spell was set up.

But all spells have their loopholes and being that Peety is unaffected by poppyseeds and wouldn’t eat any unless there was poppyseed PDQ (which HeXy overlooked), he remained conscious, well, at least in his version of such a state.

He flitted to each of the sleepers and poured a swallow of PDQ in their mouths, at the same time sharing quotes from his favorite films, because those are as close to magic words he knows.

Daisy heard: “‘I’ll be back,’ thuh Arnold, The Terminator.”

Promo was informed: “‘When you’re Jewish, you either learn to fight or take a lotta shit. I don’t take shit.’ Schwartz, Porky’s.”

For Beezer: “‘Thank you sir, may I please have another?’ Sir Kevin Bacon, Animal House.”

And Barkevious: “‘Don’t be obsessed with your desires, Danny. The Zen philosopher, Basho, once wrote “a flute without holes is not a flute, a donut without a hole is a Danish.”’ The late Chevy Chase, CaddyShack.”

“Chevy Chase is still alive,” Barkevious said as he awoke.

“Tell that to his career,” said Daisy.

Naturally, the Baws went back to the buffet before anyone could stop them. But it was all right, with his Google-like mind, Peety is never out of magic words.

End part eighteen

The Oz Exception: Part Seventeen

(As Told, partly, by the Great HeXopatha)

So many peasants are needlessly afraid of Witches. As long as you do as told and do not become curious about events that do not concern you, all will be well under your tiny thatched rooftops.

And yet from my point on the astral plane, I saw a little Goat in a blue gingham dress, that strange Pigeon that I’d dearly love to collect and two Dogs with more personality than brain power, all bent on interfering with one of my projects. Fortunately, I had a minion embedded amongst them, Professor Moriarty. Black Cats are born into the dark service, no matter “who” thinks they own them.

I magically placed a transponder in “Promo’s” collar, which let my Legion of Lambs know where the imps were at, therefore freeing me from always having to be on the astral plane. Still, it is always good to rattle the bowels of do-gooding seekers. On cue, four carefully hidden Lambs tossed green smoke bombs into the path, and I appeared in the haze.

Alas, not all went as planned, but rest assured I will remedy the situation….

I, Leila, returned to the astral plane and took back the wheel of the narrative because HeXy is loath to recount her backfired attempt at scaring the infidels.

Upon her “incorporation” in the green smoke, both Beezer and Barkevious broke character and ran to her with tails wagging. Not only is there the uncanny resemblance between Renfield (the Boy’s master) and HeXopatha, but their scents, as sniffed by Dogs, apparently, are precisely the same as well.

“I am the Great and Powerful HeXopatha, Hounds–begone and quiver in my mightiness!” she said, but her dismissal would have carried more weight if she hadn’t smiled affectionately, given both  boys pats on the head and milk bones  from a sack concealed in her robe.

“Would you like a glass of water?” Daisy ad libbed, referencing the Wicked Witch of the West’s demise, I guess. Another script  shot to hell.

“No thank you, I’d rather have a house dropped on my head,” Ren–HeXopatha laughed. (Apparently,  whoever she was had guessed the same thing.)

Yes, the scene was officially taking the big swirl into the sewer. And to complete the disaster, Peety went on a bizarre rant: “‘What the fuck happened to the Delta I used to know? Where’s the spirit? Where’s the guts, huh? This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you’re gonna let it be the worst. “Ooh, we’re afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble.” Well just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I’m not gonna take this. Wormer, he’s a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer…’ Bluto, Animal House.”

It was long past time to leave the astral plane and hope for a better tomorrow.

End Part Seventeen