PLOW THE BONES
Douglas F. Warrick
Apex Publications
Lexington, KY
Apex Voices: Book 1
This collection is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
Plow the Bones
Copyright © 2013 Douglas F. Warrick
Cover art © 2013 Saber Core
Cover design by Danni Kelly
Interior design by Jason Sizemore
“Behindeye: A History” © 2010, The Drabblecast; “Her Father’s Collection” © 2009, Tales of the Mountain State 3 (Woodland Press); “Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation” © 2010, Dark Faith (Apex Publications); “The Itaewon Eschatology Show” © 2011, Apex Magazine; “Come to My Arms, My Beamish Boy” © 2009, Murky Depths; “Funeral Song for a Ventriloquist” © 2010, The Drabblecast; “Ballad of a Hot Air Balloon–Headed Girl” © 2012, DailyScienceFiction.com; “Rattenkönig” © 2013, Vampires Don’t Sparkle (Seventh Star Press); “Stickhead (Or… In the Dark, in the Wet, We Are Collected)” © 2006, MudRock; “I Inhale the City, the City Exhales Me” © 2012, Dark Faith: Invocations (Apex Publications); “Inhuman Zones: An Oral History of Jan Landau’s Golem Band,” “Drag,” “Old Roses,” and “Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl” are original to this edition.
“Introduction” © 2013, Gary A. Braunbeck
“Apex Voices: What Do You Hear” © 2013, Jason Sizemore
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Published by Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524
www.apexbookcompany.com
First Edition: May 2013
To Gene Milner,
who taught me how to love stories.
To Don Warrick,
who taught me how to tell stories.
And to Mary Louise,
who taught me how to respect the act of telling stories.
Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
The only difference between disappointment and depression is your level of commitment
— Marc Maron
— Contents —
Apex Voices: What Do You Hear?
Introduction
Behindeye: A History
Her Father’s Collection
Zen and the Art of Gordon Dratch’s Damnation
The Itaewon Eschatology Show
Come to My Arms, My Beamish Boy
Funeral Song for a Ventriloquist
Inhuman Zones: An Oral History of Jan Landau’s Golem Band
Drag
Ballad of a Hot Air Balloon–Headed Girl
Rattenkönig
Old Roses
Stickhead (Or… In the Dark, in the Wet, We Are Collected)
I Inhale the City, the City Exhales Me
Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl
Acknowledgments
Biographies
Apex Voices: What Do You Hear?
Not so long ago, I accosted a handful of the Apex faithful with an important question.
“What comes to mind when you think of our books?”
The answers were varied, but thematically, they bore a striking similarity. Terminology like “genre–bending,” “smart fiction,” “surreal,” and “unconventional” were mentioned repeatedly. As a publisher, I was quite pleased and couldn’t help but smile. My goal with Apex has always been to bring entertaining fiction to genre fans who like to have their perceptions and imaginations challenged. To a degree, I appear to have met that goal.
But hold on! I have a second major goal, as well. As a publisher and editor, I derive no greater sense of accomplishment than bringing a fantastic new (or underappreciated) author to the attention of genre readers. That’s why this book exists. Thus the Apex Voices series.
From 2006 through 2008, I ran a monthly online feature called “The Apex Featured Writer Program.” It was quite popular, and I don’t recall why I stopped doing it. The writers appreciated the opportunity and exposure. Our readers enjoyed finding talented new writers. A win–win for everybody. Let us consider the Apex Voices series a delayed continuation of the long–lost featured writer program.
Here’s how I envision this series working out. Two, three, maybe four times a year, Apex will bring you the work of a writer who we feel has a unique writing voice. Often, these writers will be someone you have never read or heard about. And often, after reading their Apex Voices book, these writers will be people you’ll notice being published more and more often — because they’re just that damn good.
Apex is pleased to offer this collection of work by Doug F. Warrick as the first book in the series. Doug is a unique individual and fantastic author… well, Gary A. Braunbeck does a great job describing Mr. Warrick in his introduction, and I would hate to spoil that pleasure for you (okay, I have to mention the sideburns, because they’re awesome).
Sit back. Enjoy. And let Doug Warrick’s voice take control of your grey matter.
Jason Sizemore
Publisher/Editor–in–Chief
Introduction
Gary A. Braunbeck
“…he pours and pours and pours…”
Try this on for an opening paragraph:
“I knew a girl who tied a hot air balloon envelope to her shoulders, just in case her head should ever burst into flames. It was homemade, sewn together from stolen scraps of Dacron, mottled and gaudy. It was as wide as her shoulders and it hung down to the small of her back like a pair of folded oil–slick dragonfly wings. She pierced the thin, tender skin of her shoulders with four strong surgical–steel rings, two just above the delicate cliff of her clavicle and two over the twin plateaus of her shoulder blades, and to these she anchored the envelope.”
Beats the hell out of, say: “It was a dark and stormy night,” doesn’t it?
It also drapes your brain in a cloak of surreal imagery that somehow manages to still anchor itself to the mundane, making it all the more puzzling, challenging, and, well… fascinating. It’s not only an example of a writer with a full–tilt bozo luxuriant imagination warming up, it’s an example of what can be accomplished when a writer tosses off the manacles of traditional thinking when applying that imagination to the structure of a traditional short–story narrative — and as Borges–esque as that paragraph may seem, the story from which those lines are taken (as well as all others in this mind–bender of a collection) is, ultimately, respectful of the traditional short–story form, and adheres to it insomuch as the story itself needs to; that is to say, the guy writing those lines knows the rules, so he also knows when and how to break them.
The writer is, of course, Douglas Warrick, and to meet him in person you’d never suspect that he’s capable of producing the kind of mesmerizing, head–spinning, and often incendiary work which graces the pages of this book you have the good sense to be reading.
Let me see if I can describe Doug to you: he is not of what you would call “towering” stature — I stand a little over 5’10” and the top of his head almost reaches my nose — his facial features can best be categorized as “delicate” (my wife put it like this: “he’s a very pretty man.”), he’s a quite soft–spoken sort of fellow, usually sporting a pair of the thickest, curliest, this–side–of–a–70s–porn–star bitchin’ sideburns you’ve ever seen, and if it weren’t for his feet being too small to qualify, you’d almost think
he was a Hobbit. He is a citizen of the world, knows a great deal about so–called “foreign” cultures, and for as young as he is has a wealth of human experience that makes you feel like you’ve been standing at a bus stop making tweets since you were eleven years old.
He is also one of the most painstakingly precise writers I’ve ever encountered. Obsessively painstaking, to be exact. This book you’re holding? It not only almost didn’t almost happen, it almost didn’t happen three times. I’ll spare you the details, but the whole shebang reminds me of a (probably anecdotal) story concerning Margaret Mitchell and her novel Gone With the Wind: the story goes that Mitchell was so hell–bound determined to make sure the book was as perfect as she could make it that her publisher had to literally yank it out of her hands via a strenuous tug–of–war. I don’t know if Jason Sizemore and the gang at Apex had to go to that length to finally get this book out of Doug’s hands, but I do know that I threatened him with physical violence if he pulled it from publication again — and you’ll recall I’m taller than him.
Was it worth the wait(s)? Damn right it was.
Plow the Bones is hands–down the finest single–author collection I’ve read in a decade. I had the pleasure of hearing Doug read “I Inhale the City, the City Exhales Me” (and damn if I don’t wish I’d come up with that title) at an Apex Day gathering a few years ago, and it was something of a minor revelation to me; that story — a beautifully–rendered extended metaphor tale about urban paranoia and personal isolation carried to phantasmagoric extremes — forever destroyed any preconceptions I’d had about the man and his work: Doug Warrick was the Real Thing. Most writers are well into their fourth or fifth decade before achieving the level of skill and craftsmanship he’s already reached. (I should mention here, just to keep everything above–board, that I am 53 and I hate him. Talented little toad’s work makes mine look like it’s been running on fumes; I think I shall rip those sideburns from his delicate face whence we meet again. Digression endeth here.)
I am tempted to compare Doug’s work to that of Harlan Ellison, and while that might not off–base (you’d have to be clinically brain–dead to not see the Ellison influence in some of these pieces), it’s far too easy and obvious an association, and trivializes both writer’s work; I do feel that there are echoes here of Kobo Abe, Donald Barthelme, Gertrude Stein, Borges, a touch of Kafka and Angela Carter, and a dash of Richard Brautigan — but even those comparisons look trivial now that I re–read them. It comes down, methinks, to a matter of how a writer approaches language, whether it is something he or she works with or something she or he allows to possess them.
Warrick is most definitely possessed. He is acutely aware of language in all of its colors, textures, lyricism, and subtleties; he uses words the way composers use musical notes, and understands the undercurrent of the words’ vibrations like a physicist understands the intricacies of String Theory. Once you’ve finished reading “Her Father’s Collection” (a remarkable story that left me shaking with something akin to awe) or “Inhuman Zones: An Oral History of Jan Landau’s Golem Band” (a piece both hysterical and heartfelt), and find yourself finished off with the closing novella, “Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl” (a masterpiece, a story that should win many awards), you will know, as I did, that Douglas F. Warrick has at last arrived on the scene on a Big Way, and that the incandescent cyclone of his imagination is overpowering.
Yeah, I kinda liked this collection, if you haven’t figured it out yet.
I can think of no better way to characterize Doug Warrick the writer than to quote a line (arguably my favorite line in the book) from one of the early stories contained herein; a line that should serve as something of incantation for all writers to perform when that damned story just has to be released from your head and set upon the page: “…he pours and pours and pours until that sad and noisy world behind his eyes is eaten by a great white flood.”
Welcome to the sad, noisy, mind–bending worlds of Douglas F. Warrick. You have no idea what you’re in for. As it should be.
Behindeye: A History
THERE IS A MAN WHOSE pupils are full of moths. Dry moths, dying moment by moment and collecting in drifts behind his eyes, deep down in that secret and endless world behind his face. A blue desert world populated only by the moths and a timid hermit with no eyes of his own, who only leaves his moth–wing hut to scoop up handfuls of dead moths and shovel them into his mouth.
There was a cautious status quo there once, in this windless world of Behindeye. The timid old hermit wandered and ate and he was mostly happy, if not lonely. But there was a change. The blind hermit found an infant in one of the heaps of dead moths, some wretched baby born skinless, born without lips so that his teeth struck out from his face like fence posts, born without a nose so that the skin of his face slid without interruption from his eyebrows down to the rough ridge of his upper gum line, and his slit nostrils opened his skull like sudden sinkholes. And when those moths who were still alive saw the infant, they saw a lizard–like horror, red and screaming, and they feared it, for moths fear few things as they do lizards. The hermit could not see those things, because he had no eyes of his own, so he took the infant back to his moth–wing shack, and he kept him warm and fed him dead–moth soup. And in a few years, the infant had grown into a lipless, skinless, noseless lizard–boy, red and screaming.
And this is what life is like now in the world behind some guy’s eyes. The hermit worships the lizard–boy as a god, for the lizard–boy leads him through the moth–drifts and provides for him in all the ways that a man without eyes cannot provide for himself. The moths regard the lizard–boy, the howling, mewling, gurgling, skinless, lipless, noseless, red and screaming lizard–boy, as a devil. “Grave Eater” they call him, and “The Meat Golem” because he has no skin (and because the moths are Jewish). In moth mythology, the lizard–boy is the negative aspect of the God of Abraham, who exists to define suffering with his screaming, with his grinding, slobbering teeth, and his skinless awfulness.
The lizard–boy is aware of none of this. Life is very painful for him. He often wants to die. But he loves the hermit so much. He watches him sleep at night, risking all–over nerve–burning agony just to use his skinless fingers to brush away a strand of the hermit’s hair from where it sticks at the spit–sticky corner of the old fellow’s mouth, and tuck it behind his ear. He does not know the word, “father,” and he wishes he had some name for this perfect, fragile, sweet old thing who saved him from certain suffocation in the moth–drifts.
Now, the moths watch him from the corners of the shack’s single window. They do not make any sound. In just a few seconds, they will kill the lizard–boy while the hermit sleeps. They do not need him anymore. They do not need a reminder of suffering. They understand now, and they have wept and prayed and howled, “Elohim, Elohim!” at the sky, and they thanked God for the lesson they have learned. And they have vowed to do away with this totem of suffering, now made obsolete. They have planned this night for years, passing down the stratagems through generations. Their fear, their work, their prayers, spanning a million — no, no a billion — three–day lifespans, and today, TODAY, they will lay to rest the aspirations of their forefathers! Today they earn the legacy of their ancestors! They have crafted sharp teeth for themselves from the tiny crystal bones of their dead and mounted them in their mouths. Was it painful? You’re goddamn right it was! Setting crystal spines into their soft tiny moth–gums, drawing fountains of their own blood, God, how they screamed and cried. But they are almost ready. In just seconds, they will be ready. No. Now.
Now they are ready.
They dive. There is blood and there are broken wings and moth powder scattered in poison clouds. The lizard–boy bawls and screams and swats and chomps with his grinding, slobbering, fencepost teeth, but theirs are sharper and faster and more precise. They shred him. The hermit wakes to the sounds of screaming, and he cries out, and he wants to know what is happening to
his poor lizard–boy, his miracle god–son, what is happening, what is happening, my God, what is happening? He stands and he swats and he stomps, wading through helpless ragged screams and armies of moths that he cannot see, and he is useless. There is so much terrible noise. There is war. And it is not over for a very long time.
At home tonight, the man behind whose eyes exist the moths and the hermit and the dying, red and screaming lizard–boy, he rummages beneath the sink until he finds the bright white bottle of Clorox. He says to himself that this will probably hurt an awful lot, and he steels himself. This must be done. At the office tomorrow, they will talk. They will say it was an accident, an awful tragedy, poor man, blinded like that, he should sue! They will not know the details. They will construct the story themselves. But that will happen later. For now, he unscrews the bottle. And he pours and pours and pours until that sad and noisy world behind his eyes is eaten by a great white flood.
Her Father’s Collection
SHE RUNS. OH, YES, SHE runs. Her bare feet slap like hands against the rough, loose–packed dirt of her father’s carriage trail. Tiny rocks stick to her heels, gnawing divots into them, little pink craters like bite marks, and why yes, that does seem just about right, doesn’t it? Because Sunrise Mansion does have teeth. Sunrise Mansion devours.
She can hear the shrill, severe laughter of the Girls, and she feels like she has missed the set–up and punch line of a particularly cruel joke.
Somewhere up above her, in her father’s awful house, there is a fireplace. She feels the meanness and the promise of it, even though seventy years have passed since she has seen it in person, seventy years since she died. Her sides hurt and her lungs blaze white–hot in her chest, and all she wants to think about is the run, the dash, the great blind escape. Despite all of this, her father’s fireplace crawls up out of her memory and its image glows inside her head. The faces that stretch and strain from its surface, each one a stolen thing, a collection of sculpted Christs and gargoyle heads, each from a different place and a different time. The stones set into the face of the mantle, each with its birthplace carved into the surface. Westminster Abbey. The Birthplace of William the Conqueror. The Great Wall of China.
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