Woody Allen Makes A Scary Sandwich - Horror Pastiche, Stories & Poems

Woody Allen Makes A Scary Sandwich - Horror Pastiche, Stories & Poems Page 13

by Karen S. Cole

  *****

  An eternity later, making myself feel all the pain I could muster, I crawled into an abandoned building. The bombs had not gone off yet, and I guessed they never would. Fainting, I shook myself awake, knowing why I hadn’t bled to death yet. It was my destiny.

  I was stone blind, and without mercy made myself lurch to my feet. With my years of Kellarian training, I was able to perform such an act of titanic strength, but I didn’t know where I was going. God didn’t love me anymore. Yet something rattled through my broiling brain, the words I’d heard across a remorseless distance so long ago:

  Beyond all time, beyond even space, that’s where they keep love. That’s where you can find it, that’s the only place. Beyond all time, beyond even space, beyond any meaning. The only place is with God.

  I laughed weakly, insanely, knowing there was no such thing as love! And I fell down, rolling, and bumped into something that felt peculiarly familiar. It was hot to the touch. I held it in my hated, bleeding fingertips, which had slowly scraped off all their nails on the desert’s rocky floor, and without any sight knew it instantly.

  My memory said it was a hyper-dimensional resonator, easily connectible to a space-time modulator for the necessary power boosting, which uses a tesia coil to generate the zero vector. The HDR, both invented and built by the legendary genius Steven L. Gibbs, of course, only moves one a few years in time either way, without the STM attached to it. You could make big money off the stock market, but so what?

  If I had my family back, hang the stock market, hang adventure, and hang me. God, I begged, save the universe. Make it whole.

  My shaking hands connected the two, the glowing electromagnet overheated, and there was a blinding flash of light with a loud POP! I bilocated. My mind and body swerved into two directions as the POP lingered, not redly volcanic like a firecracker, but sucking small, like a mysteriously vague blue balloon.

  This time, there were no violent waves of dizziness and nausea. Instead, I arose, looking wildly around me. I could see.

  There were people everywhere, happy smiling faces strolling past gorgeous statuary and portraits on the colourful museum walls, chatting amiably about the most fascinating topics. Ronsonians. I’d never really seen them before, in all of their splendour and majesty.

  “Look! It’s that famous retired Head Major General of the vast Kelliconian Empire, What’s His Name! Oh, I’m sorry! Whatever is your name?” chortled an overweight, buxom lady spilling over with expensive jewelry. “What?” I gasped, in a raspy and totally unfamiliar voice.

  Looking over at an antique silvery mirror, lost in a cloud of confusion, I could only gape at my new reflection. I was over ten feet tall, with magnificently flowing blond hair spilling over my uniformed and medallion-aded shoulders. I was wearing the gold chain I’d taken off the dead Drac Commander around my muscular, scaly green neck…scaly? Green? A pale, winsome shade of green, and quite attractive, really! I cut a nobly tall, combination Kel and Drac figure, and I knew the gold chain had never belonged to any “Drac Commander.” It was mine. It had been mine all along, a treasured wedding present from my wife.

  It took hours of explaining matters to me, by the distinguished Ronsonian scientists, to learn what I’d accidentally accomplished. The bombs had gone off, somewhere back there in time, when I had miserably gone unconscious. Due to the lingering aftereffects of my previous time travel, a space-time continuum was instantly created, which had thrown me through the flux I’d experienced again, when I’d first used the time machine. It brought me back to the moment when I’d connected the blackly seductive machine to its smoothly white counterpart. But something important had been altered, as inalterable but flowing past events had entered the continuum, changing my reality.

  There never has been any evil, slaver Draconian Empire, nor a separately good Kellarian one. We have been the Kelliconian Empire since time immemorial, and our duty is to police the universe, making sure that all hosted planets are safe from disaster or any attack by outside forces, though there never are or were any. We’re fortuitously locked by time and space into a graciously eternal, infinite peace.

  My job is to continuously scout and monitor the Kelliconian Empire, and attend to any problems or troubles our widespread, mutually helpful alliance of thousands of planets ever has. And my family?

  My wife, Ikanya, is beautiful and moral as ever, and now over ten feet tall, as I am. I can finally kiss her without craning my neck, and she is the most wonderfully vibrant shade of emerald green you can imagine. And our little daughter, Tirana, is fair and glowing as ever, but mysteriously darker, with deeply green skin covered in fishlike scales that protect her from any harm. She plays constantly with her brother Yakanyo, a handsomely tall lad of twelve who thinks he’s already a man, here on our brilliantly twinly moonlit planet, far away from any such imaginary planet as “Earth.” Sometimes, I tell the children chilling fictional tales of it, and wildly weird stories about strange “wars” we once fought there.

  “Silly Daddy,” they chant in unison, sometimes. “There’s no such thing as ‘war.’ What on Calarico are you talking about?”

  THE END

  Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation and pitch services for your book and/or screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.

  Winter Calls the Way of Life

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 200

  When winter winds down the grey salted pavement

  Superciliously spins the snowflakes of grave doubt.

  I found trouble brewing around the next traffic light

  Without no one to confide in me – neither slams melting.

  As trickle face sliding icicles creeping over Ohio,

  I saw the spears entering my chest via your nose.

  It came to me you were all really people white -

  It came to you I had finally found us out now.

  And we stood together in a back yard in Gahanna,

  Ohio where the winter kills anyone who stands

  Around in a back yard loving every minute of it.

  We were children of the snow for the briefest ten seconds,

  As we sliding down the roof dripped ice pieces of

  Drippy freezing clarity that spawned a Snoopy castle.

 

  Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. Contact her at www.rainbowriting.com for more info about our book, screenplay, script, music and lyrics freelance ghost writing services. We also offer marketing, promotions, publication, optioning and other writing and editing services you need for your worthwhile projects.

  Autumn Leaves Never Die

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word count: 200

 

  Dancing, prancing, floating leaves excite my sight

  Cascading down in wet sheets like chunky rain.

  Some fall singly, each one a summer’s death knell.

  How is this, year after year, they die as they appear?

 

  As at my feet they fall, I pick up one up to study it,

  Searching for the secret of its splendorous attraction.

  Why is a dead plant part lovely, and so obvious?

  Who was its beauty meant to attract and why?

 

  Even though eventually brown, and crunched underfoot

  So like the oncoming snow, sticking to my rubber boots

  The same way, each one is a microcosmic pageant’s

  Reflection – why in the world do they show off this way?

 

  Russet, orange, yellow as the sun, neither blue nor pink,

  Th
ey twirl about in midair defiant of their yearly demise.

  I envy their colors, dreaming of a death like this for me.

  What if I myself radiated the patterns of a dying leaf?

 

  I’d spin around in sophisticated lazy circles as I expired,

  Hurling my body gently to the ground in so many colors

  And styles that God would have to keep me on Earth,

  ‘Til I crisped brown enough on my edges to finally leave.

 

  Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation and pitch services for your book and/or screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.

  The Night I Became Both Superman and Batman

  By Karen S. Cole

  – Alias Wonder Woman

  Word Count: 2,000

  I’m a professional freelance writer, perhaps mainly due to my youthful reading of thousands of comic books. But one night back in 1986, I actually became one of my favorite comic book superheroes – the Batman. And I’m not sure, but I am pretty aware of the fact that I probably also became his best friend, Superman, as well.

  My true story goes like this: I woke up that morning in June thinking, “Today is the day of the arson fire.” I have no idea why I was thinking that, and wondered if it had to do with my relationship with God. I had asked God for some things, and they had come true for me. I had asked Him to send me where I was needed by others, and I had ended up working for the disabled in the Seattle area; plus, I had asked to be able to fight fires, due to my time spent in the YACC fighting a small forest fire that was accidentally set when we burned a huge pile of slash.

  We’d been clearing out an acre of slash on Bainbridge Island that was built during WWII in order to have a bunker from which to spy on any Japanese ships invading the area. This concrete bunker was completely buried under trees and other brush, which we cut down and burned in a pile in the center of the bunker area. But the slash pile burned so well, it being a very dry year in 1980, that the fire looked like it might escape the deep pit we were burning it in; it was leaping skyward, making a huge pillar of fire some 50 feet high.

  I helped the others to contain it, and then found myself liking this. I wanted to fight more fires, especially big ones that encompassed huge areas. I turned down one chance offered to us YACC kids soon later to leap into or alongside such fires, as I thought it was too dangerous. I was right; some teenagers I knew who were dumped into such forest fires did die due to this dangerous practice. But that other day six years later, I suddenly found myself one morning thinking, “I have to fight a huge arson fire today.”

  So I took the Metro bus all over Seattle, looking for the likeliest source of the fire. I finally ended up near a very large forest-like area, the Arboretum in Seattle, down a ways from where I lived. I got off the bus while it was approaching nightfall, and began walking downhill from my neighborhood, entering a new one I’d never seen before, in a mostly Black area of town.

  This place was full of small, run-down row houses, all of which could easily be tinderboxes that year; it was a hot, dry summer with no rain being predominant. And there was no fire department anywhere close to that neighborhood, too; only a recently built brand-new police department. I kept walking downhill, and off in the distance, I heard what sounded like a fire alarm wailing – like hellish jazz.

  It couldn’t be a fire alarm, so I pondered what it meant. I thought I was probably crazy to be doing this, and wondered who’d set off the alarm. But I kept walking downhill towards it, and finally the house with the alarm sounding off came into view. Back in 1986, there weren’t that many houses outfitted with burglar alarms in Seattle, so this was something new to me. While walking, I decided this wasn’t any of my business. It was obvious that someone had broken into the house, and that the alarm had scared them away.

  My memory turned back to when I was 14 years old. I was reading Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” all about how a Black man was spurned by the entire white race, and there’d been a short passage concerning how Black people were murdering each other, Jack the Ripper style, doing terrible things – without the white police interfering with it the right way. At that moment, I swore that if I ever came across such an event, I would do my best to interfere with it, and to somehow end it. So going back to 1986, I had two events I had requested for God to assist me with: stopping a large wildfire and assisting with ending a Ripper-style attack.

  I went all the way down to the end of the street, though; I was scared, and thought it wasn’t any of my business by then, pretty much forgetting my earlier promises to God. I went up a cement stairway to exit the neighborhood; night suddenly fell, and the noise up at the top of the stairway increased until it was a Hellish roar, and from where it came I couldn’t tell. I stopped halfway up, sitting on the cement steps and wondering what to do next. God or the Devil or something wasn’t into letting me out of that neighborhood!

  So I got up, thinking that I had enjoyed enough Christmases, and ran back up the hill all the way to the house with the alarm going off shrilly – continuously. As I walked up to the house, not knowing what else to do or how to handle this, I banged on the front door. But pivoting at a noise behind me, in the street lights I saw the house’s owner pulling into her driveway. She was Black, and she electronically opened the garage door and drove on in. I scrambled down her porch steps, banging on the garage door, to ask her about things.

  She did not reply, going back into her house suddenly. I heard an inner door shut. It dawned on me that whoever had set off the alarm might still be around, waiting for her to come home. I climbed back up her house steps, sitting on the porch and thinking about what I could do. Surely this was the scene of the arson fire – it was an older Black lady, a row house alongside a lot of other tinderbox houses in the awful heat of a dry summer night, and I thought that an older lady like her would probably keep a gasoline can in her garage. It wouldn’t be that hard to break in, under cover of darkness and also the loudly clanging alarm, and to “humiliate” and kill her while setting the house on fire!

  The whole neighborhood would go up, including the Arboretum just down the street. I looked around, stood up on the porch, but didn’t see anything. A plan came to mind; I had some training in martial arts, and could possibly take on whoever it was that was planning this attack. I got up, went over to the overhang above the Black lady’s garage, and hung from it like a bat, upside down. It was very dark by then and I wasn’t completely sure what I was doing, but I knew I had to lure the terrible people who had broken into the lady’s house out into the open, so that I could take them on or at least scare them off.

  I hung like that for twenty minutes, looking down at the ground and gauging my chances; then I launched myself downward, after tucking my head down into my shoulders. I landed all right, rolling in a perfectly executed back flip down at the very end of the driveway. There they were! It was two young Black teenagers, standing there in awe of what I’d done, and holding a basketball. But it was nighttime, not time for any pickup games, and there were clearly no basketball hoops in any of the driveways around. Still, I knew I couldn’t take any chances on their not being the perpetrators; what if they were innocent, and I broke their necks or ruptured their stomachs by attaching them with my karate?

  So instead, I loudly yelled at them, and they swiftly set off running. In the dark, as my teachers had taught me to see behind and all around me in my university martial arts classes, I could tell they were running back around the house, maybe to another house down the street. The Black lady suddenly popped her head out the window, asking me if I wanted her to call the police. I yell
ed, “Yes! Call the cops!” at her loudly, so that she and the boys could hear me – and she pulled her head inside and disappeared. I knew then that if the police discovered me, they would arrest me for the break-in, as they didn’t know about the two boys. I would have to find them somehow, holding them until the police came.

  They were down the street somewhere. So I walked down there, somewhat slowly, and found them sitting on a porch in front of a house. I was still very scared, but I confronted them, and apparently my karate wasn’t as good as I thought. They quickly surrounded me, pinned me down, and were about to do various unspeakable things to me involving using the screwdrivers they were both carrying. They apparently had used these to break into the house, as it turned out later – shades of Bernhard Goetz! But fortunately for me, two police cars appeared noisily out of the darkness. The cops grabbed each of the boys, pulling them off of me and standing them against a nearby tall rock wall.

  Mrs. C—–, as her name turned out to be a year later when I revisited that Black neighborhood, had called the cops just in time. I was safe, and relatively uninjured. But I discovered soon that I had a mild concussion from landing on the driveway previously, even though I had tucked my head in for the back flip. It felt like a throbbing pain, and it soon went away. But the police took me to a hospital, and like it has happened to Batman many a time, they thought I had done something illegal. This was although I’d found the real crooks for them, who otherwise would’ve entered Mrs. C—–’s house and done hideous things to her and the entire neighborhood.

  Those boys were clearly waiting for her to come home. They turned out to be pretty young, so I was glad that I hadn’t attacked them before, although I was somewhat injured myself. The police grilled me for hours, but I kept to my story of having only wandered onto the scene to be a “good neighbor.” I checked the county police records months later, and the two boys had gotten into subsequent trouble, although juvenile detention had released them after they committed their initial crime. During my interrogation, I found out it was definitely them who had broken into Mrs. C—–‘s house, and one of them is still in the King County Jail system, last I checked.

  Eventually the police let me go, after the hospital nurse sewed up the small wound on my head. I was fine, but felt sad that I’d not gone ahead and used my karate skills when I had the chance to come from in front of the boys and surprise them. Well, that’s the real-life story of the night I became both Superman (fighting the probable arsonists, as it was an extremely dry, hot night and a likely house fire was involved) and Batman (saving Mrs. C—–, a nice Black lady in a tiny Black neighborhood, from Jack the Ripper once more having his way in the worst possible style with a woman).

  THE END

  Visit www.rainbowriting.com for affordable book ghostwriting and many other forms of freelance writing, including screenplay, music and lyrics ghost writing and editing, as well as marketing, promotions, publication, optioning and other forms of assistance – for both affordable and Amazon or NYT bestseller ghostwriter pricing.

  Fanfiction: A Most GENRE-OUS Offer

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 6,500

  (Slow pan right to the usual eerie shot of Rod Sterling, in color this time, standing there with that maddening know-it-all smirk on his face.)

  …what happens when someone crosses the line into the reality of her wildest dreams, only to find that the end of them is closer than she thinks? Picture if you will, a woman who wants only to live life to the fullest, who finally finds herself stepping smartly into…the Eventide Zone.

  A MOST GENRE-OUS OFFER

  As though it knew of my presence, the white park bench embraced both me and the snow. I stretched slowly, yawning, taking a content appraisal of my surroundings. Covered in newspapers that crinkled and floated off me banally, as though all was suddenly well, I simply stood up as the snow caressed my face. Why was the park bench white? It seemed odd.

  I remembered being so hungry, and lying down in Central Park to sleep. I was very cold. I knew it was somewhere near Yuletide. But I had no home, no place to go to celebrate the holidays. My husband…had been cruel to me. I had ended up outside, asleep on a bench. The newspapers had been my last refuge of warmth, and they now blew around my chilly feet.

  I was standing, and had a touch of my former disability, which involved turning left. Patting my head with the flat of my hand, I discovered my handicap had rather abated, which was a nice feeling, and I heard a female scream to my immediate right. It echoed around in my head like a narcissistic wail of mistaken ecstasy.

  It was regal, absurdist, and I knew better. She was in trouble. I suddenly bent over in a humble bow, like I was reintroducing my Marsha Larts self to me. I could trash me. Had I done so? Was I dead at last?

  Running would be best. I must not be thinking straight, I mused. Therefore, I had best get over there, and see what I would be interfering with.

  Toddling off in that general direction, I found tragic panoply of a winter’s scene. There were four young guys. Three of them lined up to one side on my right, and the dude to my left was clearly the leader. He…had a rather menacing looking long knife in one hand, and was threatening “the girl” with it. She was simply standing there, laughing, held in another’s arms. The leader started tossing his knife from one hand to the other ever so lightly. I was watching, and clearly looked intrigued, like I rather enjoyed the sight – to fool them.

  She was laughing merrily, lines of drug tracks on her arms, and was “grabbing the strawberry” like crazy. That means she was enjoying her last moments. Guy was going to slice and dice her. I thought, hey, it’s my turn. I am, after all, Marsha Larts! Don’t I hate all such ripping? Maybe I shouldn’t…what is – caring? Isn’t it what Christmas is all about, I thought squeamishly?

  It’s true that my husband knew more martial arts than I ever would, I mused to myself. But he only used them for self-defense, and when he got defensive he was impossible to appreciate. He had given me a permanent disability while I was under his tutelage, and the general shape I’d been in lately was lousy. Sometimes I felt like I’d lost all ability to feel, about myself or anyone else. Still, that girl needed help, or I would be stuck observing her murder.

  So I grabbed her left arm, swiftly jerking her away from there, and danced The Unexpected. I moved right into place as “the girl,” as Laughing Boy behind me took me right into his big ol’ arms. But he was shaking with laughter, certain about what would happen next.

  Everybody seemed to be having a great old time, and most of their seasick emotion eluded me completely. I was sober, and they were under water, filled with alcohol and crystal meth. I stood there smiling, and said, “You look like a great leader, guy. Say, what’s that?”

  “Huh?” he said, his Male Self suddenly alerted to the presence of a wise gal. He stood perfectly motionless, getting his drug-tired self to reappraise the situation. Which made a perfect moment to Japanese-karate-style sidekick him. You see, I really didn’t know what knives are.

  That was indeed unexpected. The knife went flying, I pulled the right arm of the guy holding me simultaneous to that moment of lurching time, just as I twisted sharp too, and I was out of there.

  I took off, running like the wind, but knew I was going to run out of it. Like a character in a movie, I tried to relish the moment of my demise, while fleeing. I was grabbing that final strawberry, as they had told me to do in Karate Class. I wondered why they had prepared me to die. I would only be unconscious forever…was that what my husband, the one who had hurt me, had wanted? No, he was too altogether into dying for me.

  Unfortunately, I was now headed down a weirdly angled city street. Curious and a little off in my timing, I started to lose “running abilities” as I right-angled into an obvious dead-end ally. I was slipping on the snow, and surely was heading toward my downfall. I slid into the alley, and saw the end of the road – and death.

  Tears began streaming down my freezing cheeks, and froze
instantly. Wheeling around, I grabbed two frost-covered trash can lids that were handy. I thought maybe I could distract the thugs, as I could at least lift those things. They weighed about as much as sea foam. I lifted Flotsam and Jetsam, waving them around at the oncoming pack of guys. They definitely had all their Larger Knives out now.

  I didn’t matter. Somehow that girl did. I would at least die fighting.

  Then, something swooped straight out of the cold and isolated darkness itself, and clobbered their leader. I could tell it was an evil thing, not a good thing. They were so valley girl, swooping and darting and sloughing through their faces like sledgehammers leading at once into nowhere.

  Languages, once written, can never be taken back or destroyed, came a voice into my head, clear as a bell, like the insanity around us.

  The trash can lids, as though disappointed, drooped down to my Marsha Larts sides. For indeed, my name was not that, and something most intriguing had shown up. I kept up a brief time of holding trash can lids before me as I felt their coldness sink into my grasping fingers. It, whatever it was, seemed to be a ninja made of no substance, and it took out the other three one at a time as they looked up, robbed of their easy victory.

  Then the moving shadow of a sudden took the shape of a very large man. “Jesse Jackson? Not the dead Bruce Lee…no, Vlad Tepes,” I muttered under my disgruntled gasping breath, referring to Compte Dracula, the Moslem ruler who had killed the 700 Christians of the 700 Club. “Jim Crow?” Was this a racist figure, with which to spook superstitious blacks? Nah, I thought, honest to gosh, from an even older Italy…”Pierrot-?” A somber doll this, one with lengthy black horns on his head, and yet somehow it was so. And finally, I thought to myself, the thing somehow smacked of a medieval Jewish knight.

  But that was not what Pierrot had been, though, quite. Out of nowhere, I was smack dab in the middle of the Commedia Dell’arte, the centuries-old farce of farces, of the clown and the serious man. It was ancient, Mediterranean, and mystical. What could I make of the serious man?

  Pierrot had been white, handsome, and held up a head of straight black hair. He had contested with the curly haired Harlequin the Madcap Clown for Columbine the Beautiful, lost, and then hung himself due to losing his “wife.” It was the woman he was going to marry. That was the Italian “dell’arte” thing, I recalled so vaguely from my dreams. It dawned on me; this black, masked and still hard to see figure must indeed be…Pierrot.

  “No,” said this deeply masculine but vaguely boyish-sounding voice, “I’m me.” I thought: I can’t believe how much I feel at this moment of time. I’m disappointed. I had lost the fight. It would have taken less time if I’d been killed. What did this now mean? I had risked my life to save another’s – for what? For this?

  You see, it simply wasn’t Vlad Tepes, or any such vampire, knight, Kung fu artist, medieval Moslem leader or Italian farce comedy star who was standing there before me. I immediately phased into an abject terror mixed with my lack of disability, changing into a childish sense of wonder. No it couldn’t possibly be…Bateman.

  How understated. The snow blew about in the alley, swirling around his draped costume, the grey and blue-black suit of The Bateman, a mere comic strip, book and movie character.

  “Who are you? What do you think you’re doing?” was said to me in this deep, bell-like carefully measured tone of an actual someone trying to reach an actual someone else. I choked, reaching for my own knowing throat.

  I had something very strange to tell him, as though it now gripped my brain, and I knew what it was well in advance. He only thought I was “one of them,” a street punk, and was trying to “reach me.” Was it possible that I was like Columbine, and that Old Italian Farce, so faded in the echoes of time, had caught up with me? Was it my turn to dance away, off the cliff and into infinity? Surely – not with him. Not with such a laughable premise!

  Why, this was evidence of the downfall of Western civilization!

  Because he really was “The Bateman.” And he was angry at me, for so much as existing, for being what he wasn’t; what…was he? A comic book superhero – or Pierrot? I knew what I had seen back there, and my mind was screaming that as much as this looked like Bateman or the Bateman, it was indeed the Old Italian serious man.

  He was standing there, thinking. I dropped both trash can lids with a loud clatter as “one of them” took off running and made it to elsewhere. Must have been an onlooker. The other three boys had been flattened. I achieved a wise gal look on my face, and shrugged. My husband was a tall Semitic Jew, non-practicing, who to me had always looked a lot like the Jester. I’d always thought it to be a mere coincidence. Now I had to stop and wonder…could it be. He had told me that though Jewish, he hated all Hebrew people. He was somehow anti himself.

  The Jester…that would absolutely have to be Harlequin, from The Harlequinade. Nothing, nowhere, and no one else. The Madcap Clown himself.

  But now Bateman was going to arrest me, or something.

  And the Jester had reeked summarily all along of being Harlequin. The many bright colors of his costume clearly showed it. That comical character of yore, which was surely now going to take vengeance against me through such a ridiculous proxy as this – The Bateman.

  Vengeance—again? Harlequin had won so many times at the Harlequinade. He had made fun of the police, and he had practically pulled the rope that had hung Pierrot when the serious man had finally suicided…from losing Columbine to him.

  If anything ever began to happen, or if “Bateman” there ever even moved. Snow swirled coldly about us both as he stood patiently watching me. A final clatter of noise seemed to hum in the background, as if some cars were nearby.

  I squeamishly thought to myself about this. The Jester had started out as a “grubby” Jew in Detective, in the very first panel of the very first comic book strip he had appeared in, December of 1940. Harlequin had lost his battle in the eventual death throes of the Harlequinade, so long ago. He was not “pure.” Racism had pulled its own ancient strings, one way or another. Harlequin was either too boring or too evil, and therefore Detective had found their victim, someone to lampoon as a villain, apparently. Casting him as a Jewish miser was fairly typical of their occasionally dismal style. A clown to contest with a vampire, for the kids buying “all in color for a dime” funny books. Bateman had merely been a Suprememan rip-off, a detective as a superhero. I remembered it.

  My husband, on either the same or the other hand, had not been any too heroic. He was a curly black-haired clown. He had been up until now my loving and laughter-ridden companion of many years, and we had practiced the martial arts together. But I have already told you about him. He wasn’t…nice.

  And this weird guy in front of me didn’t look any better than him. If anything, he was meaner, tougher and more domineering than my mate. And younger. He now recalled to me nothing more than a black suited boxer, or perhaps a pro wrestler.

  The Bateman, or whoever he was, remained motionless, with that cape surrounding him like an enormous black wrapper. Then he shrugged it off with one arm. He stood there silently, as if appraising me. I briefly wondered if I was good-looking at all to “The Bateman.” For some strange reason, I was wearing a short sleeved shirt and shorts, which didn’t help much in the cold.

  Who was this guy really, and why was he dressed up as…the dark knight?

  “You are going to tell me what your role in this is,” Brice Wayne breathed into my errant ear from too far away. Something told me this man was somehow named that, memories and fleeting impulses did. I had used to read scads of those silly comic books while growing up. And indeed, I had shown that “cop” there fighting capabilities, and had to deal with him – while at the same time trying to figure out what to tell this…human being.

  “Yes, you’re right, Brice,” I muttered, “Good old martial arts are to save only me. Self-defense.” I had to drop down to Columbine’s status in my innocence. She was, I think, the innocent ingénue of t
hat Old Italian Farce. “After all, it’s always self-defense, isn’t it?

  “What are you doing here?” was said in this quizzical Italianesque voice, one that enveloped my soul with deeply baritone overtones of stolid hurt-you Cop. He would kill me, his voice implied, if I so much as moved.

  Wondering briefly if this subhuman monster ever molested people, I shrugged again. “Thought so,” I breathed, it is indeed Bateman, and Suprememan is nowhere in the vicinity of…”Is this Gothic City?” I wincingly asked him. I realized that whoever he was, he could kill very quickly.

  “You know where you are, do you?” he asked me back. It sounded like he was pumping me for information. Maybe he didn’t know me at all. It sounded like a command taken strictly for an early grave.

  I thought, does this man read minds? He used to clobber my ferocious husband on a regular basis, somewhat. My…husband? But that had been my one true love, not The Jester. It was surely a coincidence that they looked so – alike. My husband often liked to dress colorfully. A strange coincidence, that’s all.

  If this was Bateman, wherever I was, what did that make me? Who was…I? Surely, no, I was not Columbine! That was only Columbine High School, where something awful had happened, too. The black suited Bateman-like kids had shot some of the other kids at a high school. I was not seeing Bateman. I was dreaming, but everything was real. And I had a feeling my hair had gone right back to being a bright and cherry colored red, as when I was a teenager.

  And what was worse, at an earlier point in time, I had been named…Schwartz. German or Austrian for Black.

  “Climb on my back, and up we go. On board now.” What? I thought, as weird fantasies go, this one should disappear rapidly. Maybe if I shut my eyes, it would all go away. But I had to open them and go over there, and be next to him. It was like a command from a very serious man, and I was utterly forced to obey it.

  I moved behind him, and got on his back. We were heading up the building at a rapid pace, and I barely had time to clutch those broad shoulders as that Damned Jock went straight up the alley wall. I saw the technical equipment, trembled, and grew dismal. I finally had to say it.

  “Is Harlequin really my husband?” I screamed aloud as we made it over and plumped like bricks, my knees bouncing without too much pain, onto the rubbery roof of the building. That Giant Sucking “Muslim” or Mussel-man who had once been my childhood God and Hero stood there, looking at me as though I were something that was only vaguely amusing. I don’t weigh that much, I thought, as he lead me over to some metal pipes. I felt very embarrassed and ashamed of myself.

  “No, but he’s probably only your basic hilarious Jewish ‘sidekick.’ I’ve met several of those. Remember Jerry Lewis? Actually, he was the main guy and Dean Martin was the sidekick. Did you ever watch their movies? I never had the time to enjoy…” Before he could finish, I cut him off curtly.

  “Take care of my girl, Woman Hater,” I muttered as he chained me to the old, grey pipes sticking out of a slab of concrete, probably something worth studying as I was going to be standing there for a while. I meant the girl I had earlier saved by this curt comment. She was surely wandering around out there somewhere.

  “So that’s what you are, a woman hater?” was chuckled as he simply clicked the handcuffs into place. They were loose, and I was suddenly on a long leash. How long I would be standing there, I didn’t know, time enough to find what to tell this overdressed wombat or whatever it was who was calmly leaving me. “Oh and Satan, there, would you go look out for my…girl?” – He was gone.

  Quite disappeared, having hopped off the roof like a demented humungous chocolate bunny the size of a football linesman. I didn’t even know what those were actually called. How I had placed that sidekick back there, I wondered; I’m not usually capable of such stuff.

  First time in my life I’d ever really done that. I’d karate sparred with my husband, but he’d always won. That was my husband, the one who…had done what? Something, I knew. I watched the snow fill the space where Bateman had been.

  I knew why he’d done that. He went looking for her. Maybe she needed more help. Surely that was it. She was wandering around in the cold.

  I thought, maybe he’s right to have chained me. I wouldn’t have stood there forever. Maybe I would have jumped off, merely to see if I could fly. Perhaps Bateman knew what I was! Cold, tired, and a little too well off. Where was my old and familiar disability, though?

  I was “on Earth Primus,” having landed from plain old Earth, the planet that wrote about the adventures of Bateman, etc. Somehow I needed to tell him so when he got back. Meanwhile, to wait the time out, I thought of The Girl. Why was there another planet full of us…victims? Why was my disability vanished, why was there air, what is Gothic City? Dear God, it was everywhere I could see. Is Gotham City in New Jersey?

  I looked around, and the place seemed to materialize before me, as if it was an area of New York City that lay untrammeled by its acres of skyscrapers. Coated whitely all about me, as far as my blinking eyes could grasp, roofs peaked and sloped so that I could only gauge everything for a short distance. I sighted along the minaretted rooftops of a gleaming silver-grey neighborhood.

  But several monumental buildings stretched in a greyly sprawling, spreading group, overpowering in their rugged austerity and achingly far away, forcing themselves into my newly heightened sense of awestruck wonder. This city contained -held insanely – over many dozens and even more of them. There were the usual NYC-style shining tower shapes of rectangles, but inhabiting a much bigger metropolitan area. The whole gigantic sprawl of a city could only be described as unspeakably huge, gargantuan, spread out further than my eyes could see. And I suddenly realized none of it was blurry. I could see without my glasses.

  I thought, possibly all I could ever see was Gothic, from this low and relatively flat crowded rooftop anyway, and what part of “town” was I in?

  It looked like one district, almost carefully laid out, but with the usual sudden erratic problems of individual, grainy structures that inhabited their huge vista of space. It was a city, yet like none other I’d seen before in my thirty-five years of life. It hit me that a younger me would die to explore a city like that. I would haunt its snug little shops, read its newspapers, and drink its exquisite coffees.

  The VIEW! As it slowly appeared, it was a gargantuan of monolithic color. Sounds of beeping cars and grinding busses pulling up to curbs festooned my ears. This WAS Gothic City. Greens, blues, silvers, reds, purples, sparkling golden were the twinkling lights of the distance between us. Astonished, I strongly yearned to head for the Heaven that was obviously out there. What was that like at night for the Bateman? The place needed Gabriel’s Trumpet to announce it. In the broad daylight, it made Frisco’s sunset mall of loveliness look like a distant memory. It made NYC’s looks become a pale comparison study. It dwarfed Dallas, Texas in its own beautifully symmetrical way. There was no weight on those floating lights, as though the swirling colorful palette of an actual artistic hand had drawn it all for a comic book spectacular issue.

  I could finally see All in Color for a Dime. Gothic City lived and breathed all around me, although I had a clutching thought about drug abuse, ladies of the evening, and cheap hotel rooms. And I knew I was too old for it. I took one deep in breath, and all of the pollution was mysteriously missing. And yet I smelled a cheerful breezy air all about me. Were there bloods out there researching? Did anything of the black race have a chance against the supposedly chosen people? The group I’d fought were as white of trash as I had ever seen. Surely there were black heroes about, brown wonders with strange…I’m imagining this dream I’m having here, I thought.

  What in the world did such a juxtaposition mean? How could there be drug abuse in such a situation as this? Surely there weren’t enough jobs available. The city bustled too harshly, beauty that she was. There was crime in this trap of a Queen. Maybe Metropolis, being King, did not have enough resources to spread them around. M
aybe NYC, the Jack somewhere nearby…I got randomly lost in speculation. What the Jester had to do with such a very odd deck of cards.

  Such a Heaven on Earth deserved to be only entered by young lovers, and the young at heart who could jam their millions of souls into a steady stream of hotel rooms. They were appearing, the antlike people, bustling on the streets, zooming at a brisk walking pace into and out of the glassy, glistening hotels…the word “hotels” didn’t do those buildings justice. I would die gladly to keep such a city clean. I was young again, able again, and the immense broad gargantuan that was The Big City was finally there, after having been hinted around at poorly before. There were superior, colorful babies being born at those hospitals over there. Or were they being torn to ribbons to seek out the chosen people, and experimented upon? Where they being torn to blind rags was in order to make others valiantly see?

  I could get the right job in that thing. I would become an office ant for it. The girl I had saved deserved it, she was so young and so pretty and so utterly heartless. She could do such office work. She was young enough to be trained for it.

  But I knew I wasn’t that age…I was supposed to be billowing with weight and over-the-hill anymore, feeling too goddamned good to remember how terrible of a physical condition I’d been in lately. I checked my nubile body out, finding it altogether female and there, and smiled lazily to myself. I must be drunk on some new wine. I was wearing a green cotton top and my old baggy Army shorts, which showed off my legs extremely well, and for some reason I felt better than I ever had in my life. My legs felt eerily like they had no color, and all of them.

  I’d definitely been “fixed” by someone. Yes, I was real, but most of my disability was gone, and I turned to the right, feeling so much better about myself and hoping that Suprememan or Supremegirl was watching. Frowning, I knew it had to be one of those two who’d done it, and made me be this way.

  Can’t trust anyone else, I spurted out in a laugh. I had not been sliced and diced, at least. I’d had a Mexican friend who’d thought the Justice Legion of America in the comic books, of which Bateman had been the vice president, was actually the Ku Klux Klan. He hated them completely. But I thought they’d make an excellent Greek chorus for this tragic play.

  That, that, I laughed, I’ll wake up from this soon enough, suddenly thinking of The Girl and her nonexistent life; he’s out there trying to chase her down, and she’s a “druggie” who thinks she’s fine.

  Perhaps she’s Columbine, I gasped! What was her name? He’s talking to her, I figured, and I “got jealous,” after having had a decent go at trying to help her. But maybe she always had a rotten life. He probably wasn’t beating her up. Most cops don’t really do that. They try to help. But he might have her down on her back in a cheap motel, somewhere. I hated him.

  Anyway, maybe he took her home. Perhaps I was only…Pierrette. She was the least important character in the ancient Italian mystery play. She was supposed to marry Pierrot…that’s right, and she didn’t. She merely slipped offstage. Did she end up hanging herself, too? I was all hung up on the handcuffs. I looked at the edge of the building roof, longing to jump off it and die. Columbine had danced off a cliff, and I totally had forgotten what had happened to Pierrette.

  It was so cold. I began shifting my legs back and forth to keep myself warm. Would “Bateman” ever return? The very thought of it made me sick. Surely, that was a new form of cop who knew martial arts, all dressed up as Bateman. I was in New York City still, and this was only a dream. Furthermore, they were really doing it, and I had read about it in the newspapers, near the stories about the gangs of teens who were raping, knifing and killing people in Central Park.

  Some dream. I breathed, sighed, looked out into Gothic City. Might be worth exploring. Might be like NYC of my wildest dreams. I cackled suddenly and clamped my own hand over my mouth.

  Then “the sight” happened. He looked mildly tired as he climbed back over the roof. He strolled over to me, as though something was on his mind. Or Mind? Let’s see, these guys are more highly evolved life forms than me, sort of like the X-Men from Marvel, but slower or something, and human enough to relate to. Or, he’s just some bastard of a ludicrous cop. I showed him what I thought of this with deep tiredness on my face.

  Let’s see what he does with that, I reflected.

  “Yeah. So, who do you think I am?” The very idea startled me out of my reverie. I hadn’t expected him to say anything like that, so fiercely and protectively, so deeply. The voice there was quite austere, was letting me know what I was, and was angry at me. I paused, gathering myself, and said, “Who, me? Uh unh. I’m an ex-journalist, sorta like – Clark Kane, your buddy Suprememan there – but my name’s…Marsha. Do you know what’s up with that?”

  “What’s up with what?” Said harshly, slowly, almost movingly. I nearly wretched my lunch out with the aching and utter disappointment I felt, even though I was hungry. It was true! This was a weird new police tactic, not Bateman!

  What had I been thinking, I grabbed myself and inwardly shouted, no, this is not Bateman! I have to collect my soul, and tell him off. Now.

  “Brice, I know who you are. This is Earth Primus,” I choked into my palm. “Remember C. Bates? The guy who rewrote all your stories, changed your suit, put a yellow circle around the bat on your chest, and reestablished everything about your planet? The hippie writer for Detective? That didn’t exactly hit your newspapers, did it?” All that spilled out of my mouth, spewing out beyond my capacity to understand. I had to say it; there was nothing else to say. Maybe if I played along with the farce, “Bateman” would confess his falseness.

  “Okay,” said the same voice, sounding totally tired. “What are you doing here…no, come home with me, and…I’ll show you where I’m living…right now.” I remembered that The Bateman didn’t necessarily get a lot of sleep at night.

  “So you do read minds? But I’m married…” I stumbled out, feeling extremely embarrassed. What I’d said. No, that was not right. I breathed to myself, thought it wasn’t, and collected myself. “Please remove the handcuffs.”

  “Of course. Calm down. You’re riding piggyback all the way home.”

  Okay, I thought. And I told him what I remembered of my entire life story as we swooped through the enormity that was Gothic City down to the car. It was tumultuous and too lengthy to herein describe, but scared me a little less.

  “James Band of NYC, you homebody you, oh Haunter of Gothic City, don’t…something me,” I breathed into his comic-book ear. I was sure his real ones were somewhere under those Mr. Spock-like protrusions. Maybe he wouldn’t do that. No, he wouldn’t cut off those ears.

  “No, I’m technically deaf today,” he intoned like a distant church bell. We made it to the car. Good old…Batemobile. We landed with a pronounced thump, and I staggered over to it, my head reeling from all that. The car looked so weird, and yet so normally familiar. My parents had owned a lengthy Cadillac with tailfins.

  “You must be used to soaring. Swoop and snatch. I mean, you like Suprememan, you! You will not take anything unacceptable out on me, who am, is surely imagining this. Not!” He’s dressed up as the enemy, I reasoned out, slowly, over a long period of time.

  “No, it’s not. I’m not. Get into the car, vagabond. And do exactly what I say.” Who knows what he was making of my knowledge of his identity. Probably wants me to stay at home all day. What will we do while I’m trying to stay faithful to my husband?

  But he had done something terribly wrong, my usually sweet man had, something undeniably hideous – which I could not remember.

  It seemed in a dismal blur to have to do with my husband’s breaking open my breastbone, ripping my screaming chest open, and tearing out my…soul. It had hurt. There’d been great pain and blood, everywhere. Then I’d passed out.

  “‘Nkay…” I blurredly intoned as he opened the car door. I was wobbling on my feet after the wild and windy ride. It had taken some time, and it was growing d
ark outside. I was staring at the car, which looked pristinely black, but menacing.

  He nodded, while looking carefully at my head, and blithely he ducked my entire body down into the vehicle. I sat there waiting as he climbed artistically, the same old familiar moving shadow, down into his own side. “Whatever you do, don’t turn me over to, uh, them,” I suddenly said. “The JLA.”

  “What, the Justice Legion of America?” Who were those, I mused, that group of superheroes with their own Earth-centered satellite, of which The Bateman was supposedly a member – or something like the B’nai Brith or the Italian Anti-Defamation Legion? Strangers in suits, who fought for civil rights? Or was the Justice Legion of America only the Klu Klux Klan, like my Mexican friend had told me before?

  He had really hated the JLA and would never read their comic books. That “Bateman” the concept was mas o menos a racist ode to a version lower-than-Suprememan-of the Black Man- had probably hit him too. It seemed an accident, yet Bateman was clearly not as powerful as Suprememan.

  Meanwhile, I was with that same racist cartoon character. Where to now?

  “No sweat. We’re going to my apartment, and we’re leaving for there, starting right now. You’ll be safest at home, o careless female. You know too much. You’ll have to stay put while I figure out what we should do with you.”

  The car swiftly fired up, and we were out of that shadowy back alley after all of the vehicle’s systems had shut on – too rapidly for me to follow.

  I sat back, lurching not at all. “So tell me why we’re moving so fast and easily.”

  “Might be Suprememan,” intoned The Voice of The Bateman, “But this incredible journey is mostly being brought to you by me, a lot of technical equipment including ozone positrons that you can’t possibly understand, and my need to fill you in is…nonexistent.” Long pause. “As yet.”

  “Understood,” I whispered ramblingly, glancing around. We were on the freeway pretty fast, honking at exactly one fannish driver. I guessed the guy was just saying hello. The Batemobile strutted neatly to her own purring repose, nonchalantly maneuvering into place as though circumscribed lines and angles were all around, guiding and lighting her way. The snow was glistening, streaked by the side windows without affecting them, and in an instant was melting.

  The same gorgeous sight, Gothic City, was still out there. Now it was starting to “jewel up,” or become lustrous with the many bright lights of late evening, reminding me of one time I’d entered San Francisco at night. It was so beautiful.

  “I finally broke down and thought ‘her,'” I said, to measure his mental telepathy. I nonchalantly waited. Nothing. “I mean the car. No, ‘the girl.’ What happened? What did she turn into? A beastly parking garage?”

  That’s when the Batemobile suddenly dove downward into a midnight blue underground garage, after doing a swift swoop straight off the freeway. We were in an enclosed space, deep underground. The Bateman turned to me, and whipped his demonic mask off. I was gape mouthed again, because I couldn’t believe what I saw. What I shouldn’t have been able to see, three mere inches away from my face.

  Love.

  And so I waited for The Bateman’s considerate reply, as the cold beneath and around us slowly melted. A cocoon of warmth emanating straight from the sun surrounded us, and I heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s old poem about Xanadu, something about “…weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of…”

  “The Girl, Brice. What did she turn into?” I interjected.

  “I turned her into rehab, and you don’t care about her at all. You are now with me, with me you will stay forever, and there will be no more running around rescuing people. Got that? Leave that to us. Good. Oh, and by the way…”

  “What?” I breathlessly asked Brice Wayne, who with his mask off looked very dark, male and awesomely handsome. In a way beyond telling, one that wasn’t strictly…human. Looking down shyly, I noticed the black bat symbol on his massive chest.

  It wasn’t really a picture of a bat. It seemed to emblemize something else, like a massive gaping wound. I remembered that Bateman was sometimes called “The Dark Knight.” And I recalled he’d been nicknamed “The Caped Crusader.” Didn’t those titles have to do with the Crusades? There had been Jewish, Christian, and Moslem knights, I realized. Had Pierrot been one of their number? I had heard Jesus Christ invented vampire bats.

  It was as if something had happened to him, because of something having happened to me. I blinked, looking again, and the symbol was back to being a filled-in outline of a black, “campy” bat, surrounded by the yellow glowing moon that Cary Bates had long ago supplied.

  I had a feeling the Commedia Dell’arte was over. Finally.

  “Happy Holidays, my dear Marital Arts,” the Bateman sighed, taking off one glove and cradling my small chin smoothly in his large, tawny hand. “Ever hear of a legal matter called getting a divorce? Works much better than running away. If you’re hungry, there’s plenty of food upstairs. By the way, I’m cooking our dinner. What do you like? Chinese, Thai…Italian?”

  “I love spaghetti. What happened to Albert?”

  “He’s still around. He has…tonight off.”

  (Cut a long, slow pan to Rod Sterling, who isn’t smiling as usual, as he never did at the end of each episode. Instead, he’s wincing mildly – as if in great pain about the unknown.)

  …and such is the tale of a simple woman who came to a startling realization about a potentially Christian, or presumably otherwise, winter’s holiday. One that could be portrayed by almost anything, such as: a bat-like symbol; a tawdry joke by a fat, unsmiling black man as a TV show’s earnest host; or a somewhat realistic hero who could save a nice, brave lady from something far, far worse than a storytelling white man like me…the Eventide Zone.

  THE END

  Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation and pitch services for your book and/or screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.

  Annie Chapman - Our Lady of Whitechapel

  Subtitled: Dandelions in the Garden of Earthly Delights

  This story is on Annie, a black-haired all-white woman…not a redhead with freckles…but she herself isn’t truly in it. Instead, she’s a corpse for someone else to hide behind. She represents her fellow Ripper victim – prostitute Katherine Eddoes, a name with many spellings. She is poor, permanently found flat aback in bed, her blood-soaked heart draped over a nearby pillow. Jack made fun of her “ginger-hood;” maybe she was not able to find a more adult job in those days than hooking. Freckles were enough.

  “‘Til richer or poorer, in sickness and in health”, ‘til death do you part, forgoing poverty’s envoy…you will find the cleanup crews of an overcrowded, thriving London, England. During the 1870s, it lurked as a realm of genius, Victorian “morality”, and seething antipathy toward women. The War was on in Afghanistan; arrogant Holmes roomed with wounded Watson, uncaring about finding someone else to make children.

  Ants, mushrooms, fungi, white mildew…and that which appears during this time of year, in order to remind the British Isles they need to move further inland soon, in order to avoid rough weather. Pitying them does not count; it must be pleasant nowadays THERE, when you are sane.

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word count: 32,000

 

  This novelette is strictly fiction based on fact. I chose to write about Annie due to the coincidence between her last name and the district where she both lived and was murdered: Whitechapel. And I interchanged her death’s circumstances with that of another Ripper victim: Catherine Eddoes.r />
  The names Chapman and Whitechapel are possibly where the British term “chap” originated, as the Ripper murders are that well known. When it comes to the Internet regarding Whitechapel, the only website not dealing with the murders I could find was about a small art museum. I also found a website relating where they put Annie’s lovely new grave marker; some of the other victims’ graves have been equally updated.

  Meet Victorian Era London:

  The Whitechapel murders in the district of that same name in London, England in the late 1800s have gone down as some of the most grisly and infamous crimes in all of history. This is generally thought to be because the killer wrote local newspapers boasting of his work, making pithy comments like, “I hate whores, and I love to rip them.”

  He called himself “Jack the Ripper,” and thought he had a handle on the type of person the authorities would let him get away with killing: ladies of the evening, chippies, or in other words, whores, hookers and prostitutes. And in fact, nobody ever stopped him. He disappeared and was never caught. There is, however, hearsay evidence he may have drowned himself in London’s Thames River to avoid dying of venereal diseases.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, MD, revealed the probable identity of Jack the Ripper was a doctor acquaintance of his who was dying of such illnesses, whom everyone knew fornicated with corpses: Dr. Jack Reinhardt. Doyle wrote of shaking his hand and laughing with Reinhardt over something hideous to do with killing people. Doyle could be overtly meaningful about death sometimes, and mostly wrote his “Sherlock Holmes” stories to capitalize on the crimes being committed; but what else can I say about myself? I guess I can argue this story is mainly a tribute empowering two of the victims, namely Annie Chapman and Catherine Eddoes.

  In order to show the similarities between them, and for a reason I reveal at the end of this story, I invented for Annie something similar to her own personality – but also gave her Catherine’s circumstances instead of her own, interchanging their lives in a somewhat consistent manner. For example, Catherine Eddoes, not Annie Chapman, died in the rented room I mentioned, where death may have taken eight hours – or three weeks.

  Also, in order to further flavor and color their lives, which were miserable but not without some happiness or merit, I added characters and nuances based on situations in which I knew they were involved, and political and social events of those intriguing times about which they may have truly cared, such as women’s liberation, local ethnic groups like Negroes, Hindu Indians and the Chinese, the liberal arts and the literary world, gay and lesbian rights, and overly brutal police tactics.

  Meet the Story Itself:

  An ordinary domestic dandelion is a beautiful, golden yellow weed that may gradually take over your house’s garden, if you let it. When I was a child, I hated to destroy them, because they were lovely flowers. I cried when my father rooted them out of our lawn with vile poisons.

  It is up to you to decide if the people in this story are yellow weeds like the dandelions, or human beings with souls which require better fates.

  There is a young British woman who died long ago, in the company of at least eight others. Is she something that needs to be rooted out of a giant lawn – namely, London, England? Before she takes it over, ruling and dominating it with the world’s most painful forms of diseases and death?

  And is she to blame for what is oft exaggerated and not such a terrible way to die, or even deadly – or the actions of those who work against her and her kind? Is she to blame for her own oppression, or is something else?

  Or is it Charles, a stranger in a strange land, whom Annie sees as her “bonnie Charlie,” who is the real yellow dandelion? Could you see him seeking his eternally lost soul, which he thought was in the future, or could it possibly never have existed at all? Is he only a human weed?

  Lastly, could it be the person or people you would most suspect of such a status – murderers? Are they the true “dandelions” of life? Some think death is something to be imitated, though it may be a lone weed in all of our gardens, especially as its menace struck deeply in Whitechapel.

  And one of the world’s most famous killers, so hideously imitated by so many pathetic but intelligent others, is a major part of the following fact-based fiction story: Dr. Jack “the Ripper” Reinhardt.

  Meet Annie Chapman:

  “This will never be easy,” sighed me to myself as I gazed out the filthy panes of the room I was renting. It was a beautiful day in our many districts of London, some of which I inhabited in England of the late 1800s.

  I knew, however, that I was special and different, not merely a blithering idiot of a street whore, though I was set to fast become one of such illegal creatures of the night. I had been favored by the gods that be for some unusual purpose, or I was imagining things. Some unnatural being, or my own natural feelings, had been telling me what to be for life’s purpose.

  For my name was Annie Chapman, born of two parents as all such usual people are; but I was definitely stuck now living in the Whitechapel area of a small but scattered parish of London. ‘Twas a city of multiple desires and random lost causes, but mostly punishment. In my time, it was well known – and all our mortal souls had to suffer its bitterest stings.

  So far as I could tell, women and children seemed to suffer most from these prejudices. The men, both young and old, poor and rich, had a hideous freedom to their causes widespread throughout Victorian England, in spite of the fact we were ruled by a queen.

  Feeling depressed about this, I gazed out a window, looking at an autumn tree beginning to sprout its wondrous and small leaves. I recalled my late father, a man of austerity and grace, who was born impoverished. The fact he had been stuck presiding over what upon my reflection was always only an overly complicated ant farm . . . bothered me.

  I sensed to myself, that although I was some colored and unfavoured, as I was not very coloured, I could perhaps get a job from the Juwes down the street at one of their many small perfume, antique and trinket shoppes, a jewelry store, or perhaps a lasting slot as a flower girl in another district. Still, as my parents had told me to trust Jesus our Lord and Saviour, I was curious. I had found Whitechapel district, and it seemed to me that we were so overcrowded and under favoured in London of that time and place that it would be best to end my existence here. I did not much apply at the shoppes. I saw my looks to be somewhat freakish – and felt work for me was scarce in all known quarters.

  I was not certain of suicide, but had taken to light drinking of the only local beverage that afforded me any substantial pleasure at all, which of course was small beer. I noticed these imported beers were oft German or Irish. As I was with the other local “girls” who inhabited the lodgings of our elderly female landlord, who winked at me and let me know that only pleasures of the evening or money could reconcile her duplicate balance sheets, which I was dead sure she was forced to keep, I was sad, for I knew my eventual end must come from intractable diseases.

  On the other hand, nightly I dreamed of a time when I could experience genuine sexual pleasure. This often involved fornication in broad daylight, which I only imagined. Sometimes I also envisioned a husband, who looked peculiarly like my father. He was finally killing me to get rid of enforced existence, and I hated this as much as anyone would in near same situation.

  I loathed being only a girl in a men’s world, and did not want to be anything else. For to me, it would make no difference if I lived or died, as it seemed to be for all others in my time, but in some way I would have liked to lead an entire human existence.

  My soul’s body was to be for the filthy old men – and the younger, equally filthy rogue, lordly and absurd – but well-dressed middle aged gentleman of that era, and whatever else came my way, one which would only be stifled as far as ultimate heartbreak and pain needed to be hidden. I cheerfully went about my business, sometimes wondering if a time would come when I would meet my true lord and saviour of the world, Jesus Christ.

  For I could
not forsake the duty that God Himself had apparently handed me. I was surely to leave this world too soon. With the juxtaposition of a name like Annie Chapman with Whitechapel, I knew my end would not be pleasant, nor a good example. I understood my tale that was never told was not for your children, the god fearing, or the happy.

  I often thought: the word between me and Whitechapel was “chap,” a common word used in England at that time. There was a logical – perhaps religious – explanation for my concupiscent, unstoppable fate. Perhaps our local, bitter deaths were supplying its greater usage. Yet after having applied at a dozen small shops, including apparently two Juwish ones, and after several episodes of being winked at, tormented by flies and insects, and smelling the street garbage, I felt something like a voice telling me where to go. I knew I was no such “chap.” I was a crappie and would never be a dowager. I had to learn that man is the dominant life form, and that woman was only a feeling appendage.

  I headed for Whitechapel based upon this. There was simply nowhere else to go. But I wondered. Was there some other place for one like me, I thought as I looked down the length and breadth of my home’s glowering streets, wandering for the sake of exercise alone, during the day. I thought, it is time. I must gather my long skirts to myself, and reflect upon what I must do. It will not a good thing be. I must never gain too much weight, or I would lose the one job I had left my family early to access.

  I will have to sell myself at night to these strange men, as I cannot seem to get another job. Yet, it is not so much because of my eerie skin color, I reflected. Surely, although I am “dirty,” and “filthy,” and all of those things, this could not be a pre-ordained fate. I am as much blonde and blue eyed I decided, as I am a lady of colour, although I am only one person, who must decide if she is a person. Surely a lady of the evening could never be let to be. Although at one time, I found myself at a veterinarian’s office, being told that the only living I could have was cleaning animal cages.

  I wondered to the man in charge if I could have any facial coverings for this. “No, chit, hurry up and clean those cages, or you are terminated from this job. Get over here, and when you are done, come in the back. I have a big surprise waiting for you, chippie.” He wanted it clearly for free. As I left, I told him, “Next time, supply the “chippie” with a mask of some kind.”

  Needless to say, once outside this office, I realized what my definite fate would have to be. I had been too defiant in my own way of something I could not understand or relate my life about. I was rooming near the Whitechapel district at the time, in a rundown and filthy hovel, and I simply went to the office of the renting hostelry, talked to the manage, and was told I owed sixteen farthings for rent, even though I owed none. I knew I needed a certain amount of farthings to make my way in the world, and had oft lost count, as the varieties of pence and farthing, quid and crown danced through my growing mind. I had not met the level of souls who needed only pence, as that would come later.

  I remember thinking, damn you, God in the highest. You are simply some concept dreamed up by man. I am going to live in Whitechapel district, alone, and away from you. But at night, I cannot even dream of a man. I must face down the British Empire beasts who think they are lions at night, one at a time, until “it” finally happens. And the unicorn can never help lasses who cannot see straight after two days of life. As the seal of the British Empire dictates, something is a lion, and something is a freak.

  Therefore the first is a predator, it casts around for what to feed upon, and it must eat in order to survive. If this is its wife, its husband or its own land, it must make its statements, sign onto its “just” causes, and take on its own workloads. But these are always assigned to it by another force, one which subsumes it to cause its death.

  Meet “Our Bonnie Charles”:

  Casting about for the dozen girls whom I was to work with, whom I had first met at a trade school, I found Cecilia, and Mary. I asked Mary if there was anyone else named same as her in Whitecap area. I immediate thought there ought to be two such Maries. “I should like to live in the same rooms with her,” I told Cecilia, planning to thus pay less money out.

  “What are you – an invert? Do you like women? You don’t look ugly, dark or short enough. I’d think beer and the high life would be enough for the likes of you. I have a nice man who wants to see you. His name is Charles. He’s the cutest bloody bloke in England. Come back here.” She was indicating the deep interior of the tavern we congregated at, to speak between us.

  I paused for a moment. “What, is Charles not lit up? Is he, ah, a drunkard, and perhaps not white or something?” I had been introduced for breeding purposes to many such. Having turned them all down as unsuitable, I had slept only with white men.

  “Whatever would make you say that? He has a name and a pedigree. Don’t you think you would like to meet him? By the way, he wants to discuss an arrangement with you. He told me he wants to organize us ladies into sort of union. Can you imagine, Annie, we could work for decent wages for a change?” She giggled. “Really, he thinks he’s bonnie Prince Charlie, oh, he’s a rough but good hearted cuss. No, he’s out for blood.”

  I had read in the newspapers, having been a schoolgirl and able to read, and having greatly enjoyed this period of time in my life, of things such as unions and also how men only took advantage of women. Still, I knew how men lived and died on the job. My father had perished away from our apartment, and we had never known what had happened. There had been a story in the papers out of Sussex about an industrial accident in the silver mines of Brazil. I wondered how my father had traversed the waters, maybe easily, maybe hard; in a ship, or in a slave boat?

  Such had begun my long slow slide downwards. I had taken to drinking and also carousing with the local men. But I had also contemplated drug abuse, especially cocaine, and had turned aside. I had thought of my education. But my mother ran out for our four other children, all younger than me, and I had to go work for my living. For a time, I had to suffer cocaine withdrawal, but we were all tough girls and rowdies, an’ no problem was had waiting out the shaking.

  We ladies of the evening were more disciplined in those times than you modern day folk might think. You see, the elaborate clothing of our Victorian era dictated our existences almost completely. It took well-nigh unto fifteen minutes to lace up one’s high button shoes, and they cramped one’s feet sufficiently to cause intolerable agony, although removal of them felt like surrender.

  Most fortuitously, in Leeds I found a new style of shoes that were less ponderous. These simply laced up to the ankles and had become widespread in America. Made of patent leather, they were expensive but not impossible to buy with our wages.

  Penny small pence for my thoughts, where I could ever head them, as my dark friend Cecilia, who was good at slipping in and out of the shadows and back alleys as she introduced me to the Life, dragged me to the back of the dingy tavern and I came across Charles. He was standing there, and sure enough, I had to think what I thought. He was indeed a Negro man, and he had on the most arcane African grin I had ever seen.

  “Would you care to make more money at what you are bound to do?” Charles asked me, taking my hand quite gently and giving me an obviously acquisitive peck on the back of my hand. “I’ve never been treated so like a lady before, Charles. Isn’t it your real name?”

  “Yes, but you are now to have a new name. I want to call you something else, but you may select it, my fair lady. What would’ a care to be called, now if you work for us?” He was a scant taller than me, but loomed larger than my desires could push him back.

  I reflected upon how much I loved my Lord and Saviour, and how much Charles looked like the Devil. As he stood there, he resembled pictures of the Moors I had seen in my book. They were treated as the enemies of our England, and I wondered. Would this man help secure me better fortunes? No, there was no such thing as hope. He held my hand for the briefest of moments, and then released it as his gently slid downwards
.

  “I’m sorry, Charles, but I do so work alone. I will reside in Whitechapel, and, ah, I will await the coming of the one who will save me from my appointed task. Upon the coming of my Lord, I will then go home. Do you understand this, my Charlie?” I decided to give him his grin back, and smiled the smile of one I knew was quite uncertain. Perhaps this boyish man had something in mind along the lines of gathering up our monies.

  His hat was cut of the finest cloth, and his costume smacked of recent times and extremely well adjusted accouterment. He looked like a good “old boy” from say, Liverpool, where I understood the fine arts were gaining in attention, and there were nice museums. But I doubted he’d long attended school, from his overly active mannerisms. His frown was too like his smile; arduous, songlike, and full of evil implications.

  “Ah, I understand. But would you like me to buy you a beer first?” The fellow stood there, looking at me proudly and far too arrogantly to be thinking he would be in any trouble for accosting me. I knew now what my prospective clients would also probably be. There would be no mercy whatsoever from the disease threat. I knew now beyond all certainty what I was going to be forced to become. And it might last longer than long. There were growing hospitals that could take me in, and the treatments there for disease were as medieval and arcane as any I had studied in my way at school.

  I would be taking some of the men of England with me on this unpleasant Biblical Job like journey, I decided. If not many a long year would await my misfortune, I should be a slit throat. It would help make up for some of I and my girls’ lack of good circumstance. It was not the men folks’ fault; I could not see it any other way. And yet they all seemed to think that sex was something they owned or otherwise could throw away as some sort of ungodly machinelike contraption. I was sure I myself would turn out to be one.

  “Charles, I need initiated into this. Could you buy me a beer, and could we step upwards into an upstairs bedroom, one last time, before I settle down into my life of prostitution?”

  He snidely frowned, and said, “Look, young lady, I am definitely not liking your mood and would require some recompense for your time, if I was to be a fancy man for you. I have done this now for several years, and it is high time I became upwardly mobile. When do you want to go into an upstairs bedroom with me?” As he stood there, I saw that he would be rankled if I took anything like a sweet time with him. Also, I picked up a deep sense that he wanted something nice out of life which he could never obtain.

  I took his two toned but silken left hand in one sudden motion. “I have sixteen pence in my pocket. If you must be such a small boy about this, I can certainly pay you for going through the motions with an aging and soiled dove such as me. It is my rent money, and it is all I have. Let us go upstairs, and for one hour, let us be a man and a woman together. You can show me the way. I will even lead the way upstairs for you. Do you want to beat on me? Do you have equipment, or is it as simple as it looks?”

  “No,” said Charles, casting his eyes away. “I do, but actually, I will take your sixteen pence and get you out of here. Let us go buy you one beer, and be done with you. Come on now, such a choppy; let us go buy you a glass of wine. Come on now, Dove.”

  So he led me over to where I and my friends congregated, and was the only one of his kind there as we settled in to what would be one of my few last glasses of heavy and dark brew. I sat and tired watched its aged traces swirl in the glass, wishing I could be a fish, and float.

  The piano player was fetching a good tune out of the wooden instrument, and several of the girls were dancing merrily, pulling their skirts up aways, sometimes doing what we thought of as the stage dancing which I had seen growing up, down in another district, one which the rich were known to haunt and which had many a festive ballroom hall dance going in it. Some journeymen, carpenters and tradesmen, were dancing about, as the tavern was not as small as it looked from the outside, and it was a good time being had by all. Even…me.

  I was surprised as I looked around, happy for a moment at the lack of Christian antipathy. The men whirled their girls around, dipping them, sometimes dancing erratically. I began tapping my shod foot rapid time to the music, and clapping my hands.

  “Chuck – my bonnie lad,” I tittered into my feminine hand, which had beautiful red nail polish on each nail – but it was starting to chip round the edges. “Charlie, my darling, let us get up and dance.” As I gazed down the bar, I could see the Juwish owner of the tavern, or so I thought of him, wiping all the glasses with one towel, and dreamed briefly of securing a job as a tavern girl. Charles seemed to flinch. I thought, would the tavern owner hire him? Perhaps he would not work there. I wanted to reach out and grab him by the waistcoat and haul him – slowly – upstairs with me.

  “Wait. I have to go dance with the ladies who work for me. Wait here.” He left me, his grey tailcoats swirling around in mock protest. Then one of what I assumed now were his girls handed me a newspaper. It was a headline on that grabbed my attention. As I read it, my heart sank, although it was nothing unexpected and I had been looking for it. We all knew there had been more frequent deaths of street life in the District as late.

  It read, “Ladies of the Evening Disappearing in Whitechapel.” As I read the story, it turned out they were doing anything but disappearing. Our bodies were being found in strange and peculiar places, splayed out like carpetbags, in odd positions. And I felt chilled to the bone when I found other Mary indeed. It was a young girl I knew who had gone to a separate school than mine, once I had met her at a coffee shop, and we had shared dreams of working as writers, musicians, waitresses and artists, and she had been found in an alley with her throat ripped wide open and her abdominal cavity also gutted through her heavy clothing, in a position which began to sink deeply into me.

  Sitting with my head spinning out of control, I happenstance saw a street at night. It was one of many – with dead bodies upon it. I also viewed an absolute picture of what had happened. As the grey cold swirls of a thick London negotiable fog gathered around both the victim and the oppressor, I saw who it was. He wore a long black cloak and a broad grey brimmed hat. He knew what he was doing, too good of a job at it. If it was one person, it was an unlined medical doctor. I read other articles, and there was some attempt to blame the entire local Juwish population. It finally centered on a butcher named Leather Apron, and there was talk of arresting this Juwe. I knew for a cold hard fact that it was not him, but a cadaveric that lived and worked near the vicinity.

  And I next saw a sepia toned picture of what the “vultures” that gather and make money off of us had done to her “pretty” corse. She was so dark and mysterious, and had lovely long black hair. They had sewed her body all up to pose her both as a new thing called pornography – and as a medical item. I had to think, I somewhat minded the porno, but was happy about the medical aspect. Then it dawned on me. This would lead to the widespread abuse of women. However, it seemed a new way to make money, one that might get some of us away from the horrendous sweatshops, where in crowds you could only work until you dropped, were out on the streets and got yours. And the growing photography arena must of course have something strange to take on. I thought, Charles should try taking pictures of us, but perhaps he has not such knowledge as that.

  I was sure of a sudden that it had all been a necessity, and that it had happed before, but had not been reported on by the newspapers so frequently. Please if there be a God, I briefly prayed: do not take enormous photographs of my dead naked body. And what if this attitude spread out, engulfed the other citizens of London, and destroyed her?

  “Excuse me. I have to go see a doctor now, everyone. Oh, I have to get out of here.” Being medium height but of slight build, yet a little paunchy round the middle, it took quite a lot of lifting my skirts and pushing to get the crowd aside and to leave the large room of a tavern. God was telling me where next to go. I cruised lightly down the street, giving a glance to the left of me every time, seeing the be
autiful shops of the Juwes and others gleaming in the broad daylight. It looked like a nice home for real people, the sort that could wish you a taught day and hand you the proper portion of goods. I looked, and there was someone who looked like Charles working in the back part of grocers.

  It turned out to be an island woman who was sweet on white men, the likes of whom gave her three children, but had deserted her each time for someone else. Every time I needed fresh fruit, I would ask her to give me an extra portion for the others. But she finally stated that her billet was too long to give us any further. Her name was Hattie, and I almost asked grocers if they would hire me instead of her. Grocers was white mostly, but Hattie had been so nice to us I could not bear to hurt her and ruin her life.

  I sighed, adjusting my bonnet and retying the strings alongside my glowing cheeks. In autumn in London town, there were many bustling down the sidewalks, heading places all unknown to me, many of which I had already been. I knew the shop of the doctor was down the street about two more blocks. I shifted my skirts about my leggings, and began padding like I was some sort of panther – or perhaps another cat of my own – a bit further. As my eyesight was perilously obscure, I could barely make out the sign above the door. It had been hand painted, but I had been told long ago that only men folk painted signs.

  Meet the Doctor, Jack Rinehart:

  “Dr. Jack Rinehart,” it seemed to proudly proclaim, “Mortician, barber, necrologies’, and exterminator.” But not, “Jack the Ripper.”

  As I lingered over the last word, I seemed to hear a macabre song in my head, one about cockroaches and the plague. I shuddered as the wind whipped around my bonnet, and as I looked over at a greenly growing oak tree in a planter, it sent some leaves over to me. They slicked across my eyes – and then I took one – and peeled it off. It was the only way I could be a “peeler.” That was a member of the authorities, such as Scotland Yard, or the local bobby police. The job of a policewoman was rare indeed. All of our girls made the lowest possible wages, and were easy to take advantage of, but so were most of the men, I supposed.

  I had dreamed of taking the train to Stratford of Avon on Sea, but I’d no relatives there whom I could stay with while I found work. I had hoofed it to the chap’s office, thinking that if enough of us were dead, they would eventually catch the miscreant.

  Still, considering what we were doing, it seemed all right to me either way. Surely, the population of England could use lowering. I bet I could avoid dying outright myself, for a while. Shame on me, I thought to myself, not for being a street whore, but for thinking such thoughts.

  I paused at the door of his offices. It was so crowded in downtown London that it probably was also his place of abode. There was at least one set of rooms above, and a gaslight already flickering in one of them. In those days, you see, we had no electric light everywhere and relied on flame lights. I entered the front, and there was a short stairway up to his actual offices. I climbed it tentatively, as the day was growing late, but came to rest right outside of a door reading, “Dr. Jack Rinehart – Necrologies’.”

  What should I tell him, that I need to see a doctor for something? But this man was a practicing corpse doctor, and I’d heard tell of him by way of the district. My street friends told me he took a shine to young “fancy” boys: dead ones. Victorian England brought out the worst in people; they looked askance – but away – at such matters. Even so, as I pushed the glass fronted door open and entered, I choked in horror.

  There were various undone dead naked girls on the tables, and quite a few boys; dead naked boys, everywhere.

  They were some adult, but all very young, and none were old people at all. Corpses were openly spread wide, to be examined spuriously in patently sexual ways. As I wheeled around, having seen dead people for the first time in my life, I gulped, wheezed, and gasped. I drew a hand to my throat, putting it away, and stared at the man with a kind of astonished shock.

  Something real was telling me this was our persecutor, and not a good man, nor an ordinary medical doctor. But he was smiling at me.

  “Are…you a mortician? Is this where you take their lives, or save them?” He looked slowly over his pince nez, taking his spectacles off, rubbing them on his blooded sleeve. I looked into what appeared to be a Teutonic face, one which I had never seen before. It was white but red with a kind of age, and looked furrowed above the brows. His hair was uncombed, and his brown leather apron as blood soaked as I had ever seen on a cattle butcher. There would be news of another man called “Leather Apron” in the papers about Jack the Ripper, but it wasn’t this man.

  For one moment, in the dim light, his body seemed shot full of diseases, especially his ruddy face. Then, in the next space of time, he looked merely normal, seeming a plain, smooth-faced, charming pink fellow.

  “Miss, I presume you want to speak with me? Come have a seat over here. Would you like to get up on a table, so I can examine you?” His lips curled into a kind of vicious snarl, as he began to reach behind me, perhaps to close the door at my back. I inched myself backwards, holding the door’s handle grasped firmly, ready to swing it open, but had nowhere really to go at this point in time.

  “Nooooooooooo,” I scattered through my loose and probably rotting teeth, as I had not seen a dentist in years, thinking this could be the occasion I had been waiting for right here in his office. I’d best make ready, as I might be entering Heaven or Hell shortly, depending on God’s good graces.

  “Do you, that is, are you Jack Rinehart, and would you come up with me to my rooms and we could have a good time?” Astonished at what I had said, I paused – on my part such cheek! I wondered if trying to make him into a customer would settle his hash.

  But it was more than obvious he had something utmost lifelong in mind that I couldn’t approach. “Do you think, ahu, Jack, you and I could go up the street to a lovely restaurant?”

  Meet Jack the Ripper:

  “Women are the xx chromosome, an eternal optimist. Men, on the other hand, are a xy chromosome. Far superior to women, they are so much more ready to kill than to be optimistic. Eating is out of the question when you are the thing that needs to be eaten. By the way, only one of my little poppet whores – what makes you think my name is Jack?”

  I thought to myself: that is the most inane thing I have ever heard.

  “Do tell,” rang out the hollowest voice I ever heard a man speak with. “Are you ready for me now, little whore? I am certainly ready for you. Come, lie down,” he breathed, motioning behind himself.

  He was about medium height, and for one moment, I daydreamed about describing him to Scotland Yard. He had a brush of brown hair on top, and his bluish green eyes danced with foul wickedness. Yet I was finally confronting my male self. He was as diseased as he could possibly be. I had never seen a white man or anyone else look that far along when it came to dying. His voice began echoing in my head for a while, like a ringing declaration of the bottomless pits of hell. I knew he could have no wife, no lover, and no children. I wondered if he cerebrally loved men. I finally decided he had been having at those corpses – indeed.

  From the positions of their being played out, he had obviously been having…intercourse with them…even the ones left of…boy children. What an outrageous, perhaps even courageous…man?

  No, he wanted us to fare far worse than him. Did he actually need to be doing what he was doing, and what was it for? And I knew his total lack of mercy must be sustained for life. He had been plotted by the forces of chaos for infinity before he was even born.

  At this I knew, right now I had only freckles, and my minor acne surely did not matter that much. It was almost as if I had seen my “other” at last, where I was putting my possible victims and most significantly, myself. And I know how I accidentally looked at him. The dazed wonder that crossed my face, combined with devastating loneliness, spread wide.

  For a long instant of time, we gazed levelly at each other, I with a kind of quaint friendliness, and h
e with the utmost disdain and deep hatred.

  In the next moment, the lust for blood or something else took over his finely, elegantly alabaster features, twisting them into a sort of malevolent but farfetched grin. It couldn’t be described as happiness. But I thought I saw a new spark in his eyes, as though he took an interest in me.

  Surely he didn’t see me as anything but another of his potential dead victims? As I stared, he finally gave me a boyish grin, and then licked his lips. Some flush stole into his face, as if he were growing excited.

  “You…don’t know me. Yes, you’re quite lovely. Or, perhaps I should know you better. Come on, chippie,” he said, patting his thigh as if I were a dog and he were summoning me to his side, “and let me tell you what I’m doing for you people, you idiotic, racially impure…little girl.” I began to realize that his voice held a slight German accent, quite Teutonic really.

  When I really was a girl, we had a neighbor who let us climb his trees and pick apples; he was from Germany. His accent was thick, enough to confuse you. Sometimes he yelled at us, if we stayed in his trees too long: “Get down here, or I’ll strip your stupnegal skins off!” That was clearly understood, and we would instantly climb down.

  “I won’t hurt you; I promise. You only need to climb up, and tell me your troubles. I will treat you like a father. Here is the place, babe, and your home, new child of the night. I will save you much pain – and take no long time with you.” He motioned in a Londoner’s way towards a sterile, empty vivisection table, with a pure white cotton cloth spread perfectly on it.

  His suit under the brown leather apron was impeccable, expensive Scottish grey and brown tweed with a high thread count, and with a shiny brown silk vest buttoned across his muscular chest. I could see he was a young and vital man, perhaps somewhat short for a German, and he was ungodly handsome, except for traces of acne in his finely etched face.

  “I won’t hurt you, honestly, as I promise. Simply perch on this table, pretty bird. You need your health checked into, and regular medical care. Isn’t that what a doctor is here for, to help you? I have two decades of experience working with whores. It won’t hurt one micron.” His grin turned friendly, and he looked so normal and polite.

  He did not even reach for me. Letting me stand there, he had me silently contemplating only the silver slab of an examination table.

  I saw my shallow death, only about five feet away from where I stood. It would involve much bloodletting, and an agony he would not want to cause here. My screams would carry, so he must be somehow mentally gone. I knew how it had to happen, and I felt so disappointed, and not afraid. A kind of disgust appeared as well. I could not really see his medical instruments, and a few of them began to gleam at me, vacillating in the autumn heat as they loomed larger. I had seen pictures in books of Inquisition tortures.

  For a moment, I wished he would use smaller implements instead. Then I realized what that would entail, and closed my eyes for ten seconds.

  The idea occurred that perhaps hundreds of children had fallen to this maniac. A ping in my head, and I felt as though it told me many more virgins would in the future, in the natives’ countries especially. Innocent children would fall – who had no life in the sex trade.

  Or was it only we “whores” who would die, should these “maniacs” keep their practices? My head and heart would tell me no further. Yet, as I eased the door behind me back and forth, I did not say anything and looked, to see if any of the “bodies” moved. I dreamed of childhood prostitution leading to the sale of body parts. I’d heard this done.

  A voice whispered in my ear that the doctor was going to go down in history, as possibly one of the world’s evilest men. He would even be blamed somewhat for the actions of other, even viler Germans, during times of civil strife and world war.

  Why would a Britisher named Jack Rinehart be held accountable for world evil? It was a German born name. It flashed through my mind that he had been writing letters to the newspaper, boasting flagrantly of his many crimes. Perhaps he was simply the “very first” murderer to seek such widespread publicity. He had left his “lady” corpses as widespread indeed as humanly possible, with slit vaginas open wide for the public to view, in as nauseating of final poses as could abuse fragile senses. As I found later, so much doubt would be held about them.

  No one knew if he had committed four or twenty such murders, and all supposedly of London prostitutes. One source settled on nine, stating that was the apparent number of such deaths in his vicinity. And so many other crimes were committed that were similar to his, by other “people” at that time. People placed on fires in crowded hovels, people left to die in the gutter. Our overcrowded city was why, and it took a while for me to collect my mind.

  He had been German, and something had sent him to “our” country. His name meant River Heart. I thought, when he is done, he will throw himself into the Thames. It was a splendid yet now polluted river winding its way through the heart of London, which of course had nothing of the sort but the Strand region. Right in downtown London, they sold popular magazines for those who could take the time to read them. I often had nothing but time on my ladylike hands. I liked to read the publications which were housed in that area, and once I had bought something new.

  It was a tale of a pair of learned sophisticates who roomed together, named Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It was said the author, Arthur Conan Doyle, had based them on a doctor he respected and himself. I had a feeling the stories were a distant attempt to solve our murders. The real life doctor could tell where you were from anywhere in England by examining you. I chuckled, thinking he certainly at least knew where our Charles was from.

  They were something new called private detectives, and they wanted to help mankind – howsoever, only in a fictive way. The writer was an optometrist who had friends in the medical profession, and I had a feeling one of them was probably the “gentleman” before me, well protected by his lifelong cohorts. They would never do anything about him, only boasting and bragging about their abilities to save us, be like us, or some other way steal our stories from us – and otherwise pretend to help us without ever doing so. The entirety of London was abuzz with what was happening to us, and what to do about it.

  “You are a good man, Dr. Jack Rinehart,” I stumbled out. “I am not trying to save myself. Not anymore. But would you give me some time to be sure of where I am located? I am Annie Chapman, and this is most assuredly Whitechapel District of England. Is it not, and oh, I would like so to lie down, but I must hurry back as I never finished my beer. Also, I should enjoy it much if you would take me out to lunch, once, as I have never been escorted to luncheon by a real man before,” I lied, liberally applying the butter of my best charms. I was trying to save myself, I decided. “Would you do such honors to a lady of the evening as I am now? I was once a good girl, much like…”

  It occurred to me of the strong Juwish presence about this district of town. Lately, there had been some reports of doing something about “the Juwes menace.” I felt sad, thinking somehow perhaps we were possibly to blame for their woes. Then I realized the “good doctor” was tapping my knee with a rubber instrument. I had not read of our “menace” by far, although there was talk of running us out of the districts. We were too “needed” by the local insatiable gentry to think of ruining the Victorian English “male” life. And I had thought it proper to live such a life in its way, but had finally run into our deaths. I knew that women, men and children were being used in obscene and furtive manners. It could only be our overcrowded city’s living conditions, and lack of jobs…no, he was not a good man. Somehow, it was a decision; he was not above me, he was beneath me.

  “I hate you, Dr. Rinehart. You are killing people, real people with lives, needlessly. You must stop what you are doing, before it’s too late!”

  “Hah. Lie down, whore, and I will get the instruments of torture. There you go.” He seemed to gesticulate in the general direction of the table. Being qui
te fast on my feet, I was already out the door, and knew who “Jack the Ripper” was…now. I thought his instruments of torture are the medical devices we currently have to use, and they certainly were.

  As I hurriedly passed by everyone who must have missionary position to get pregnant and all of whom “Knew” women were somehow smutty whores, or that somehow certain ladies were all right and being such judges of character as I, I smiled. The lot of them seemed to have someplace to go, perhaps home to a hearth and fire. I watched a carriage pull up to someone elegant and she got in with a man and their three children. “Dear God, Allah, Mary…whomever,” I thought to myself, when will they ever learn to stop? I figured me probably – and all whom I knew – could find pregnancy on our own.

  Stop what, I deemed to myself. But as a sewer rat, white as a sheet and larger than a cat lurked in an alley ten steps from where I trod, I took myself down another side street to make my way “home” and pack swiftly enough to leave. I still had my sixteen farthings. And I heighted myself over to Whitechapel District, on the other side of where I had lived before, earnestly endeavouring to look as harried and impromptu as I possibly could. I thought to the crowd, see me, feel me, touch me, reel me in – and peel me. Peel me, it dawned on me for the first time, peel me like an onion. Diaries, I twittered, coughing into my hand, a head cold that felt like pneumonia. Again that time of year, as I pulled my blue shawl about my neck and dreamed of such a death. Well, now that I have met the murdered, it is probably only a matter of time before he comes. How will he know which rooming house I am lodging at? I must enquire there to see if I can elude him, or if the police would be intrigued enough to settle this incident of mine.

  Meet the Lodger:

  “…‘allow,” I breezed to the night manager of the lodgings, who was a short and settled unkempt Indian man, probably a Hindu landed immigrant, keeping his books behind a complicated hand carved antique desk in the lodgings. The desk was not Victorian, like our Queen, and was something particularly beautiful and exquisitely fashioned from his own nativity. “What’s your name?” I leapt forward with, anxiously searching him.

  “If you think you are going to make a lay instead of paying me money outright, upfront for your rooms, each paid every week you stay here, until you are gone for good, you are wrong. Would you care for room 221 A? There is a girl staying there, but it is a private room. We have another one available for two people, but of course, chippie, you will want a private room. Or would you like something more expensive?”

  “Ah, I have but sixpenny farthing.”

  “Sixteen will bring you recompense and a good night’s sleep, for a time.”

  “I have sixpenny farthing.”

  “Here’s the key and there’s a good girl. Go downstairs and to your left,” he said, and I complied immediately. It was good enough that I had an honest man for a manage and I didn’t mind his attitude, but he could change on me any time. I dared think his kind might steal from me if I owned anything, but I wasn’t planning on it. Maybe if I lasted, I would slowly gather some few cheap items for my room, such as I could buy at local shops. I had trouble inserting the key in the lock, and it nearly bent twain – although it was made of a thick iron. Finally, I jimmied the door open.

  There’s your room. Put the key down on the filthy table. Now you can see what you are. Look in the mirror. See what used to be your pretty face? Now it will be gone for a long time. Look at the bed? See the stains. It used to be a bed, and it is still pleasurable. Now, lie down upon it. There’s a dear. Ready for a good time? The bed is not as bad as those “the slaves” used to not own, but you are already exposed to mildew. And now, I thought, what would I be exposed to? I had seen bloodless hookers who seemed normal. When Allen had first suggested I try Whitechapel, he had said, “Do not fear the diseases.” I had tested out well in school – but did not think my abilities were sufficient for the sweatshops; however, I had applied at them and been told to go away. I had waited in a line for over twelve hours, and Allen the shop steward had brought me a jug of pure water to drink. The sweat had soaked my entire two sets of clothes, and the water was a stream straight from Jesus. I downed half of it and said, “Here, you have some.”

  I had thought those were the longest half day of hours I had spent in my life. Little did I know that a half day must repeat itself, even though the first one had been arduous? It had involved noise and a feeling I could not handle a life of severe work without any breaks. I was sure they let you attend a lavatory and at least have time for a sitting down.

  No, I have to wash up and get ready for tonight. I have to go out and collect my rent money. And I have to be sex in any position any man wants outside, even in the pouring rain. I have to do this in spite of a good Christian upbringing, and being as sturdy as I am from running in the woods outside of Leeds, to compete with the other girls at school, I must not retire, truly, ever again. Also, whoever you are, I am not a man. Nor am I an invert, nor an object of worship. I daresay I sham not ever get a proper grave.

  Oh, but you shall, my dearie cheerio, you shall. And there will be colour pictures, and such wakeful and “new” celebrity. All English women whatsoever, no matter what their birthright, will come to fear your attackers. You will be photographed repeatedly in various odd positions. Also, the photographs will improve over time until you are making money hand over fist, you and all such beings of worship everywhere. There, see yourself in the mirror? See how pretty you are? Ah, you think yourself an ordinary girl of the streets. The grave will be equally pretty, over one hundred and one years from now. Forsworn, you all had told me that I, Annie Chapman, must live life in the 1870s as best I can, and it will not last long. For what is life if it is so dominated by perversity?

  I am going to leave your heart laid out on a pillow, the voice of Jack said arch deeply into my head. I have gone mad indeed, I reflected as the voices continued. Perhaps smart I had an overactive imagination. Once a teacher said “we” could imagine anything you want, and it would happen to you. Now, lie down on the bed. There’s a girl. I am going to come soon, no, don’t get up. I will send Charles if you don’t listen to me, and he will not be happy with you as you are not helping him earn his keep. He’s such a caged up little spoiled bratty monster. I trust you would not wait for him? He is my own male Negro.

  “Thanks none, and now I have no volition of my own.” I looked out the dusty window at the street traffic, and realized to my happy surprise and painful downfall simultaneously that the avenue or whatever it was outside obscured all street noises coming in. The rattling carriages and push carts could be heard by me no longer. I was trapped, decided I was insane for “knowing” what Jack Rinehart was, and lay down to relax on my bed. Oddly, for a moment I almost felt a kind of luxury. I looked up at the cracked ceiling, and at the tiny bedroom I now inhabited, probably for life. I thought, I never knew I could live in such a space as this. It was plenty for me, and I felt a deep relief.

  I cast my white arms to either side of me, feeling the soft nature of the smelly old bedding, relaxing myself solely for the purpose of readying my body for what must soon take place. I would have to go out beyond, out in the alleys of the district, which wound and twisted in the deep nightly fog of industrial Great Britain, so polluted with the tars of factories that tended to hire men alone and some women, and listen for the tomes of Old Ben, the biggest standing clock tower in the world, to tell me when to come home. I would have to stand and wait, as the odd “rich” men of London came to while me away, taking their time, as I insisted on pay in advance for each opportunity they took.

  In a few hours, I must begin the process of somehow dying for and against Great Britain. I would feed the birds and insects soon, the rats and cats and dogs of the streets, or perhaps only be carried away to the morgue to await perhaps a notch longer fate. I had often seen indications of the Catholic Hell, and perhaps it would be eternal, as I was uncertain if I had somehow chosen this. I recall coming through Leeds where I was borne on
a train, and seeing the scrawling of a madman or two on the train depot walls. It said, “Blame us your problems then lengthy kill yourself.” And underneath, I had seen the words, “Annie will light the way for no one’s life.” As I got off the train, a professional looking man pushed into me, stating, “I have been waiting for you, and you come across my way when you least expect it. Then you will be our great stupid whore for life.”

  However, as a schoolgirl should, I shuddered to myself as a surge of pleasure tackled my parts below. I would never feel fulfilled by a man, I reasoned; I would have to tolerate a kind of abstract torture indeed. This my hideous master had so informed me. But eventually, I also believed, he would have to share similar fate to all of his victims. If nothing else, he would have to work especially hard for his living. And surely he would have to be as my real father, who had gone somewhere. Perhaps I could even get him to give up, trust me, love me, and marry me. Lastly, as the pleasure checked by me went off, I made my way into the train station.

  But as I was searching for the public loo, a feeling assaulted me in the center of my clothed but parted bosom. It seemed to be proclaiming what a “heart” I had, and how it would be of some use. I did not want to touch my own bodice over this. I shuddered, as for the first time I thought I had felt the “passion” of Christ. It was not a good feeling, felt like having sex with myself alone, and I put it right away. I flashed on somehow it would involve the slow removal of my living heart from my dying body.

  As life is unfair to all, I gathered myself up, smiling, and pulled my brush and comb out of my traveling bag. I had done this at the train station, and now in my final room in Whitechapel. It was a large carpet bag, dotted with flowers, and I opened it carefully, pulling the brush through my long hair that was brown and shone with some other colors. It made straightway as I pinned my hair back and put on my choice bonnet. I was bathed and dressed, due to the water closet right there at my disposal. I had thought it would be down the hall and to be shared with the other girls, but for an unknown reason, it was right there next my room. I wondered briefly what a long fall “death” would be.

  I stalked like a true whore out of my room, gathering my courage and smoothing my long dress. As I entered the darkening of the nighttime, I took small steps, spacing each apart, my high button shoes clicking lightly on the pavement. What a thing being a detective would be, I mused; what a life that would have been, under other circumstances. Peering over my spectacles, if I could have afforded them, I would be looking all around for clues, in order to tell the authorities what to do to solve these awful “crimes.” But I was a criminal, an illegal person called a prostitute, and I had to do what I was doing. For half a distracting second, I thought I saw a brief glimpse of someone. He was standing there in the fog. As I moved towards him, he disappeared, quite out of sight.

  Meet a Typical “No-Name John,” or Client:

  I followed him. “Oh sir, kind sir, would you like to come see my lodgings? I live up four blocks, in Whitechapel district, and need you to share my wares. Would you like to be with me for a brief while, and spend my time or perhaps dinner with me?”

  “No, stranger, I am busy. Perhaps you are seeking some other gentleman to take your time with and find another pastime which you can overcome with greater ease. Say, would you like to stroll down this alley with me? I find that the night air allows some other beings of an evening to make their choice appearance, oh say in a dark manner, that might need such a lovely girl as you,” said this man new to me as he grasped my arm so lightly and then harder as we went down an available alley, making me think he must believe he is nearer to God than I, and an obvious conclusion to that, as we strolled past a Bobbie, the local London police. The bobby looked away. I winked at him as we walked past, quite a couple of chips floating along the avenue, like a kind of steered boat. I noticed the man was doing all of the steering. I trembled, but said nothing.

  I somewhat wondered if this gentleman’s god was a man named Charles. As I had studied somewhat that people came from either Jerusalem or Africa, I had to figure so. I was being silly, but he was grasping my arm quite hard and pinching it. I sighed, reflecting on oops he does seem to be pinching me. “I believe you are a bobby at this rate.”

  “What? Are you talking to me, whore? I am not pinching you.” To pinch someone at the time was a London expression for arresting them. Of course I was in danger of this.

  “Well, where would you like,” I whispered, “to stop and get our business done? I must take payment in advance, and I must know what you can afford to pay me. I would take at least ten quid for a standing up, and at least twenty-five quid for lying down.”

  “That is way too much money for a good girl like you. I will tell you what. Go over there, and stand up. Then I will give you a real treat. You will like what I am doing so much, that you will beg me over and over for more. First, I will take of your behind.”

  As he squeezed my buttocks, a silence passed over and within the steady fog. I heard the clanging of the bells far away signaling the passing of the boats through the locks. They had always been musical to me, letting me know life held at least one good in it.

  “No, actually, I have to make my rent money, and I need you to pay me in advance,” I declared, wrenching painfully away from his tight grasp. But I was still held. So I said, “Look, young sir, I need payment for anything I am going to do here.”

  He released me. “You like what I am going to do to you.”

  “I do, and indeed, you are such a fine young gentleman. But I require minor recompense for my actions on your behalf. I tell you what; five quid is enough for a standing.”

  “A standing what? Surely you want to wrap your fine,” here he put his hand under my chin and stroked my face so fetchingly that I wanted to wretch up my dinner, which I had not had that evening, “Mouth around my wonderful loins and suckle like a babe.”

  “No, but I will do that for you if you pay me ten quid and five farthings in advance. I must have the money first, or I will refuse to do anything for you whatsoever.”

  “Then I will hit you repeatedly, my dear,” he said, drawing me over to the alley wall. I wrenched away, and backed up. As he started towards me, I screamed at him, “Save me!” to see if the bobby would arrest me or what he would do. Then I ran, raising my skirts. “Idiot chit, I would have pleasured you! Stop, I will not run after you!”

  Scared, I wondered at this, as the event had seemed not to make sense. Would I make any money at this, with such discouragement? Perhaps I had best find my friends again and discuss matters with this Charles. Was there some way to make a better arrangement? I strode over to my new abode, trying to hide myself, and then it dawned on me. I would have to go out again, this same even, and try to find someone else who would pay.

  I decided to cast around and see if Charles or any of my female friends were in the vicinity. As I walked casually through the London fog, I sneezed. I took out my Becky box and a pinch of snuff, applied it to my nostrils and felt good about not being too scared to sneeze in public. Snuff was common for colds back then, although it cured nothing. I looked for shapes in the fog as I took the opposite way from my first “customer,” who was obviously recalcitrant about payment.

  Noticing I was heading out of Whitechapel and into outer downtown London proper, not far from where I could go to the Strand, get a nice cup of tea and a paper to read, and while thinking perhaps of buying me the Strand Magazine to read the further adventures of the two detectives, who fascinated me for a reason I could not fathom, I cast around. There were too many persons of interest in this district truly to make a customer. Bobbies lurked around every other corner, and I could barely see. Whistling for a taxi, I pulled over a carriage and boarded it. I had plenty enough money.

  “Take me out to the waterfront. I have payment, and need to view the ocean for my health. And thank you,” I told the carriage as he helped me step into the vehicle, and he took his seat and the horses’ reins. As we traveled,
I began to hear a voice. It said that someday, such carriages would be without drivers, and would involve an internal combustion engine. Fancy that, I chortled. I tilted my bonnet, which had a nice but fairly unkempt hat perched upon it, back over my mildly sweating head. I did not wear makeup, although whores of the time did, as my features were pleasant and passable.

  Big Ben began its nightly chimes, sounding that the hour was two am. There are three victims of Jack before you, said the voice. I thought, now I know I will end up in Charring Cross, on the mental wards. I had best tell no one of this, although that would be one way out, and I thought this would have to do as the way out. I dreamed of drowning myself once we got to the water. But I deduced the thing to do was take a long stroll, paying no attention to anyone, until some man approached me. Surely such would then have the money to pay for my business, which I planned to work at.

  Meet London’s Chinese:

  I debarked the carriage, paid the driver, wished him a good even, and took myself down to the waterfront’s edge, pushing through the fog with a light air. It parted before me, and I heard the voices of men fishing off the docks, all of whom looked strangely Asiatic. I thought, these are the Chinese, the chin amen who fish out here beyond most public reach. I had heard they might be good for some conversation from my girlfriends. Approaching shyly and tentatively, I came behind one who was pulling bait from his hook.

  For a moment, I recalled the British habit of dropping articles such as “the” and “a” and “an” when speaking, especially in the poorer districts, among the lower classes.

  “Any luck catching worthwhile grabby? I hear they flock down here…droves.”

  “Who, me? No speak you. You not lady. Go away. Aw, such unhappy face. Don’t cry. No, stay. I show you how to fish. You look like work hard.”

  I leaned across the wooden railing of the deck, not understanding the tears. Then I registered that he’d said, “Work hard.” It seemed to jar something inside me.

  Really, I inwardly squealed! And then he did it. He actually baited a hook for me. “Here you go. Now, when fish nibble on line, pull up. You wait for jerk on line. I jerk, ha. You jerk, now you go down in line and pull up when fish bites.”

  I stood there, ready to fish until I died. I had found a nice man. But he was not a paying customer. Nonetheless, I let the gentlemen there show me how to fish for the next three hours, listening carefully to the chimes of Big Ben letting me know when I should make my way back. I had the best night of my entire life fishing with the china men. And after one and a half hours, I had caught me the finest groupie that ever had cleaned the waters of the Thames in our backwaters. Then I caught another, and another.

  “You done now, Lady? We go fish and keep ourselves now. You go home.”

  Wanting to hug this man like he was my Saviors, I held back fresh tears. Then I said, “Yes, I must be toddling off to my rooms – and you get a night’s or a day’s rest. There is so much I have to finish tomorrow. By the by of this river, do you happen to know where I can find male clients? Do you have the business around the docks?”

  “Nah – that is not nice girl. You should get work. Tell you what. You come back here tomalley night, and I think maybe find job for you shelling clams and oysters. You likee? Wife and I love have you cook dinner for us. I own a big inn on these docks. We have food and serve liquor drinks.” I marveled at this simple man’s ironic honesty.

  I paused. This man was not a Christian, but was offering me a job. I had heard the poisoned waters of the Thames made the shellfish unpalatable, and knew British shops refused to sell them to their regular customers. Looking away, I said, “Thank you very much for your kind concern. But I have to do business as I should. Thank you. I hope you and your families prosper and never have any more problems.” I knew the industrial pollution being pumped into the Thames would last for possibly centuries. The rest of the entire world would have to suffer from our horrific practices, and perhaps die.

  Gathering my long skirts again, I headed off in the direction of the street, where the regular carriages gathered in a long row, waiting for gentlemen. And also ladies. I had not ascertained that any such clients were in the vicinity of this whereabouts, but the carriages were obviously waiting for them. I approached the lead carriage, a silky black in the pale moonlight, and asked the driver pardon. “Could you tell me, is there any place a girl can work “the business” around here? Are there any other prostitutes in this vicinity?” My boldness shocked me, as if I thought I had found a way to have others at my beck and call.

  “Yes, there are those Chine whores who go down back the buildings. Maybe you should go over there and talk to them. They have a good time down there, and you can check at the local tavern…or the opium den as to how they would expect you to…perform.” For once, I dreamed of the lure of strong opium, recalling my stint with cocaine. But the Chinese charge you for using their dens, and I had no money. They would probably demand payment for entering the seedy drug havens, built mostly for men, but not the taverns. I wanted to go back and fish with my “friend” forever. I needed something more. There were real folks around these parts of the sea, who had good souls.

  “Perform what? You mean like in a play? Do they have plays and arts down here?”

  “No, not for a girl like you I don’t think, although I suppose you could ask.” The man was white, and I felt like I noticed this for the first time in my life. He was friendly, and smiling at me. But he had the same aura of an uncertainty I could strictly feel.

  There will be horseless carriages someday, I had heard the voices in my head speak, and as I had now insanity, I did not suddenly want to pollute the troubled Chinamen of this good district. They had their germs they were born with, and I mine. Even though Charles seemed so well and not to mind his trade, which was obviously not in his best interests. I was sure there were rougher Chinese than the good man who had helped me fish, but he obviously wanted to pull me in. I thought, perhaps he only wants a cook, and the wages do tend to be rather low. I will go die alone.

  As I left, I saw a somewhat Occidental Chine looking girl pass by, obviously diseased. She glanced at me as though she could love no one, and I immediately swayed. As she passed, I longingly glanced in her direction. Shamed, I hurried on and took the second closest carriage back to the district I had decided I would be working from until I found out whether the voices were correct in their assumptions. I saw a gathering of Asian girls, all chines looking, clustered around a tavern as I left the area.

  What a splendid place! I saw the lettering of the Chinese and obviously the Nipponese or others begin to magically appear in the gaining twilight. It must be about five o’clock morn. I had found the Occidental district of London – at last. There was lettering on the shops I would never see again, and I could almost read it in the gaslight. I wished I could stop and get one of their newspapers and read all about what their “doings” were, and how they fared. But they only used whores here too, and the streets were perhaps lined with them.

  I called out as I passed, “What is the name of this sweet district?” The crowd of Chinese people looked at my carriage with narrow and staring eyes. I fancied the neat pigtails on the menfolk, and the pertly drawn black hair of their women. They towed their children along, holding their tiny hands. Not knowing what it would be like to be an ethnic group for a change, I yelled, “I mean – what it is in Chinese?”

  “The Waterfront,” said one lady, “and you go away now, you white whore.”

  Pulling up to the kerb, the carriage let me out, and I felt the chill begin to grip me. It was the end of autumn, and winter’s awesome grasp began to clutch at everyone around me. The day labourers and their present accompaniments such as street clearances surrounded me. I felt rather trapped, like a person perilously close to realizing the total authority of nature in a large metropolitan city. I began to wonder if it was possible to seek male clients during the day, perhaps in a guarded back alley of some kind. Then it dawned on me.
Seek out Charles. It wasn’t a voice in my head; it was my mind, calling me to understand that I would have to use a male authority figure to collect my prostitution monies. Surely, if I went back to the tavern in the other district, I could find “our” Charles, or someone like him. I wandered through the streets, being pushed aside by people repeatedly until I wound my way through them, and came to the tavern where I had initially began my search as to where to live to become a street lady.

  “‘Allow, governor, where’s the bloke who runs our racket around here?”

  “What d’you mean?” said the tavern keeper. It was the same bloke as before, and he seemed no greyer or older than when I’d last set eyes upon him, but he acted as though he had never seen me before in his life. I strolled up to the long, shiny and flat brown bar between us, the zone delineated and marked by that which kept the customers away from the professionals. It was meant both to be sat at and as a wall of separation.

  “I need bonnie Charles the…what is it called? The union of prostitute’s organizer. Could you tell me, kind sir, where I can find him nowadays?”

  He looked at me to punish me again for having said the word most awful. Then he coolly turned to continue putting glasses away and straighten out the various drinks and bottles behind the bar. I sat myself down on the wooden chair pulled up by me, and asked him, “Dare you listen to me at all? Is there someone else around?”

  “If you think that is it, you are sadly mistaken. I only tolerate your kind when there is the lot of you, and no other time, mollycoddle. I will ring the authorities if you pester me.” He turned to me with a look on his face which shot through my entire beginning to come down with influenza, but yes I was a sturdy girl, and he said, “Go straight to Hell.”

  “No,” I said, “I need to talk to Bonnie Prince Charlie, my one true love. Where is he, oh barkeep, that I may talk to him and treasure him and treat him as my husband?” There was a long pause. The barkeep stepped back one pace as if to ram his fist down my throat, but then he sighed and paused. “I don’t know. He usually hangs out at the pool hall down three blocks apace, turn left, saunter down that avenue, and turn right.”

  That was it and so I bought a glass of beer to thank the keep and paid for it with what was left of my sixpenny ha’pence, and you don’t need to know how much I had on me. Turning to leave, I left a halfpenny on the bar as tip, and said thanks to the gods again.

  Meet Robert – the Teenage Irishman:

  Following the directions, I found the pool hall, and many a fine swarthy fellow and some girls were hanging about in the smoke filled atmosphere, some with glasses of beer, wine and liquor, others smoking pipes and some simply playing billiards. I sauntered up to one table and was told to lie low, so I went quickly over to another and watched their game. Two men, obvious in their teens, were trying to figure out their routine and how to gamble, and having a right time by gauging a scoring system hanging as a giant sign of something perverse overhead. Before I watched the game, I looked at the scoring system. It was pretty, made of multiple colors. I thought on how Charles was not pretty, nor made of multiple colors, as the twosome playing the game bestowed before me were having.

  One of them sudden looked at me and said as in reply to my twisted thinking, “Would you like to play the winner, Sparrow? I’ve got this right down to brass tacks and only need to shove in three balls.” He came over and showed me slowly how one plays the game of billiards. One uses the laws of averages, and computes the many angles of knocking the rainbow coloured balls into the six pockets of the enormous green table. There are now ten balls to knock in, and it is so fascinatingly tricky. “I’m Bob McKenzie, and you are lovely, my dear.” He held my arms as I learned the tricks of the pool trade, for the next two hours, and we made the loveliest music together as we danced. The entire time, as I was stuck looking for Charlie and had to call him my love, my mind turned evil. It seemed the right thing. I decided to peach on him and thus kill him.

  “I am going to arrange something of an intrigue for you, Mr. McKenzie. Oh, that’s best, tuck your arm under my bodice, no, put it over there, oh you did, and let me hold the stick myself now. Why, I can line up the shot perfectly. Let me do this, Bob! I will arrange a neat demise of my supposed “suitor” over this incident.” I looked at him with a lust for murdering Charlie that must have illuminated my youthful visage well. “All you need do is turn authorities and order the death of…” I was swift interrupted.

  “What? I would like to die for you, my lady, if you would come lie down with me. I should not die there, but will do a job servicing…” His voice trailed off. “Actually, I tend to let out my spleen playing pool during the day, mostly, and I do brickwork around these districts plus out in the country occasionally.” His look at me made my jaw drop. Oh dear God, no, not that sort of man and he is one. “Uh, hi. Are you eligible for marriage?”

  Laughter, heard all around the room, raucous and loud, prolonged and proud. Bob put his stick up, motioned to grind chalk into it, and then stopped. He looked at me as if seeing me for the first time in my life. “Nah, I don’t make anything financially sound naught to get a wife, but you know, I should certainly think about that. Say, do you live around here somewhere?” The laughter had been coming from the surrounding crowd. “Bob, you’ve got a pretty girl fascinated by you. And as you are, it’s again and again.”

  “Lucky man! Hey chaps, Bob’s found a sucker! Chit, you’re a street whore or no, aren’t you?” And other such calls began to sound out. However, Bob sudden put a hand about my waist and stated, “Any further men calls this lady anything but,” and then he bounded onto the pool table with the pool cue, “Shall feel the wrath of the billiards champion!” He towered over the crowd, a thin figure with great wits and learning about him. He slowly twirled the pool cue in a kind of figure eight motion, taking up his entire frontal space. “And if you think I don’t mean it, I have a switchblade on me.”

  “Awww,” said a girl several tables away, “C’mon Bob, you’re everyone’s love, admit it, don’t fool the poor girl, there’s a love and come down.” The manage assistant at the hall yelled, “If you don’t get off the table, you are out of here forever, Bobbers.”

  “I’m a copper and I’m arresting you all for impersonating a lady. Come up, here, Annie. Daresay I know your name. Why do I know your name, Annie, when you didn’t.…come up here – there’s a love.” I was up on the table with him in one second flat. “Awww, you silly twits, you don’t know a real man when you see one. I like this one. Come here and give me a kiss, Bob, and make it deep and last forever….” I was rather cut off by the kiss, one of passion and great splendour. “Let me die defending you, Annie Chapman. Please, let me do it now, and not to you.” He heaved a heavy but too menacing sigh as he swept the pool stick out, encompassing the crowd. “Let me take on each one of these until I am cut entirely too long and bleeding ribbons. You can watch, and cheer me on.”

  I stroked his fine and extremely handsome ruddy Irish face. “Betimes, I would let you, but I have another idea in mind. Would you like to find me a man named Charles, who is our current boss?” I and he gazed across a distance greater than that between Scotland and the South Pole, as I took his hand. “Here come the coppers you two, get off the table and run for it, the lead rang up and there’s Bobbies at the door out the back!” We leapt off the table, I nearly tripping and falling in a mass of clothing that tore under my shoe and I followed him out the back through a winding alley at top speed as we ran demons.

  “Bob, I should think we heading back to my place or yours pant oh I haven’t run like this since division school when I did cocaine and lost my two sisters…no dear I have a flat up the street here’s the way in come on Dove let’s go in there by the way, you’re mine now,” and he turned to me and said, “Now, shall you come in with me? Or no?”

  Breathless, I caught myself and spurted out with, “Let us not tarry about anything!” And we walked up the steps of the brownstone building, which I assumed
was an apartment somewhere outside the districts surrounding Whitechapel, and we made our way up a narrow dark stairway to Bob’s rooms. “Oops, I forgot, I’d best go downstairs first. I have to talk to our landlady about this. Please come back down with me.”

  “No, I shall await your return.” I watched as he leapt down the stairs as lightly as a feather and raced off to go talk to his manage about something unknown. I really gulped as I knew it might mean my getting kicked out of the building permanently. And the cops or Bobbies or whatever they were waited outside – thus to arrest only me. Bob had at least a good chance at life, and could travel wherever he damned well pleased.

  Waiting, I then saw a heavy hearted Bob come shamefaced up the stairs. He glanced at me once, and said, “I don’t need to live here anymore. Would you let me take you to my room? I don’t want anything. Whatever you would like.” He came up the stairs, looking far too much like something I had waited my whole life to achieve, and I said, “No.”

  “I have a job and can rent elsewhere. What makes you think I don’t?”

  “You need the reference to get another apartment, and I won’t let you.”

  “I can live off the streets as I choose, and even be you as well as this Charles. It doesn’t matter to me one single whit.” He came up the stairs and took my hand and kissed it fully. “And for that matter, if you tell me to drown myself in the Thames, I will instant. But first, you need to be taken out to dinner with the last of my pocket money.”

  He smiled up at me, a grin that implied another face I had previous seen. I trembled with an anger beyond the scorning of women. “You only fear the weather, and how badly you will chill each season with pneumonia. I don’t care a brass farthing for your petty courage. You will be taken away from me shortly, and you don’t count for a thing.”

  He looked down over the railing. “Ask me to jump off these legs first up there, and I will do so. But pardon me, I had rather stay about and tell you where to go if you think I would not, beautiful Annie. But first, tell me why I know your name?” He flared with an arch grimace up at me. “You are meant and bound for elsewhere, are you not? I know now what I must do to. I shall suicide first in the Thames. You are not for here. I love you. Now tell me what I must do.” Trembling, I realized he was dead serious.

  “Before you suicide,” I said with an iron look crossing my face that I had never known before, “You must arrange an arrest with Charles. You must have that what is it a pimp called arrested for extorting money from us prostitutes while claiming he is trying to form up a union for us. It is a false precept and he needs to be arrested for it. You need to inform the papers of a black man wearing…” and I gave him the remainder of the details about Charles, whose last name I could not recall, fearing that nothing would happen. But I had decided that “his kind” needed to be trounced out of England.

  More’s the pity; I chuckled to myself as we took to downstairs slowly. I lifted my skirts over a restaurant’s threshold for the first time in it seemed three years and we had a most pleasant dinner out. “This wine is called which name, my gentleman Bob? Is it a merlot, or a rose? I have it between my thighs. I am a wine most seductive myself, don’t you think?” To which he replied, “I have not a life and you have guessed me, but nobody else here does, and they all strive to defend it. I have never understood why. Will you come up to my flat with me? I did not want to deride our landlord, as she is a lady.”

  He looked at me so archly with his bushy eyebrows, as he raised his glass. I thought how men such as him were called “Archie’s.” It was the usual invert label for them. “But if you think you are the first I have, you are mistaken, although I do love you. Tura lura lura, my sweet, do tura loura lie. Say you love me as well. Or I will kill you.”

  The Irishmen of that era were almost always part English and other things, and they boasted of not fitting in to our society as beings I could not believe in – forever.

  “In which case, you do not, although you would die for a woman of any stripe. I am not impressed.” I put my wineglass out, the type of which he had not told me. “Let us clink these stems together and salute the Queen.”

  He laughed, and the restaurant suddenly rang with his Irish laughter. “Do tell. Long live Queen Victoria, the Dowager Slut of England! I have a lady with me tonight, but no.” He clinked with me in a swift motion and we set them both down. “You receive no toast. Oh look,” he said, reaching down to the floor. “The thing has landed butter side up. Let me show you what to do about that.” He stomped the floor with one foot, smiling to himself about something I could not see. Everything as usual was blurry over there. “Now we are married. And if you don’t away with me, as I seek better work, I shall die.”

  “So what?”

  This seemed to present a pickle to Bob. I reflected on how nothing I meant to this man, in all probability. He had a long string of harlots at his pool halls and life of Riley, and I asked him what else he did than sleep around with harlots or men.

  “Mean of you little lady, but I am trying to organize some unions around here and I’m involved with the bunch trying to get better pay for the brick workers. It’s Chapter 89 of the United Kingdom Brick Workers Association, and I am attempting to move up in the ranks. Say, did you ever see a real riot, where people might get bashed, or hurt each other,” and here he hung over the table with a kind of high born expectancy, “Or do anything along those lines? I keep expecting something evil to break out and be. The bosses are all English, some of us are English, and we have a few of you in membership. They are all inverts I think, but I’m seventeen years old, and dropped out, so I’m as ignorant as they come around here. Oh, and you need your mouth wiped.”

  Bob reached out and dabbed daintily at the sides of my mouth, as I brushed his hand away. “No, I have work to do, and don’t want to see you contesting for greater social position as you vainly attempt to get ahead in these crowded rooms. What is the use, McKenzie, as you will never find your way to conquering the world?’

  “Don’t want to. And I can help organize our union, but as for you, I will go find this Charles and filet him outright. How long do you want him to suffer? Do you want me to use a knife on him? I think that would be best, although I should like to get a few of my boys and show him his cowardice. We can all use pocket knives and I know where I can get scalpels from a friend. Also, we can have his almighty purple muster stuffed and mounted by a taxidermist friend of mine.”

  He meant what had been harming me. I was not a virgin. I grew as aghast as a God fearing Christian woman had, namely my mother, when confronted with such an enormity of an undertaking. “Right, you can kill him later. I want you to simply have Scotland Yard organize a search party for a wanted fugitive, get it how it prolongs his agony, and have him arrested for the crime of organizing women of the evening. There is no such thing – and can never be as that. I cannot believe a Negro is innovative in such a light, although I could be wrong, but no one else could either.

  “Therefore, before the manage of this has us arrested, please make arrangements toward this with your buddies, and go find him. I know he is trying solely to make his keep off us, and has no other options in life I suppose, but he could be working else wise. Please stop him – and this practice of his leaching off us ladies and young men, as he is simply a madam.”

  “You ought to be one,” Bob heavily breathed at me. “If you require his manhood at your disposal, you must want it in some other way indeed. Leave him and it alone and let him rot somewhere in the jail system. It is the only alternative that makes sense.” I leveled as firm of a gaze as I could at my suitor, who was only one of many and I was only one of many, as I surest knew, and supposed he would attempt to follow my command. In the British jail system, you were presumed guilty until proven innocent, which in Charles case could happen or no, but only after extreme and heated debate.

  “Queen Vickie, at your humble disposal, your servant, Sherlock Holmes. Say, do you read those? They are getting so popula
r lately. I keep thinking everyone thinks I am insane for wanting to like those, but the two gents in it and everyone else is so bloody inspiring. I should like to do such work as comes in myself, like the detective in the story, as he chooses what work he does by which clients he cares to take on, but I have to go soon to work for those I cannot chose. Let us leave for your place, and make the music I was meant to make with you together.”

  “Let’s,” I breathed into his ear as we stalked simply out the door, me scared because no one had accosted me for what I had proposed as we took ourselves into the carriage, rattling through the many districts surrounding downtown London proper and settled in for a long ride while we held hands and kissed many times. “You think you are my brother and you kiss like a girl. I hope you are better when we are in my rooms.”

  I noticed how cool Bob was to the touch, as if he were a fairy from the north of Scotland, and I had to wonder about our Charles. I was sure love with him would have been spicy hot, and I dreamed of him the entire time I and my temporary Irishman made love. It was simultaneous cool and warm, so chary and fairy and temporary, and as I looked in the mirror at us, never had I seen a man so handsome and so boyish looking. I was twenty, and we were the same size and wore the same looks as we cajoled and frolicked.

  All the time, I was thinking, this bed is meant for customers, and I need to invite the boys in here. They are simply too unsophisticated to get chance taking down. Unlike Bob, they had nothing material in mind when it came to escorting a whore. I could only figure each man had his own plans, something like the good doctor, whom I would probably not meet again. Each one needed to be guided by me to a place where aging I could show each one of them how to handle a woman sexually, how to do it right, and how to have his own way without unnecessarily blaming me for our universal undertaking.

  Wishing Bob farewell in the morning, I washed up, deciding to never see him again, and as I looked in the mirror, I thought I saw something on my face. It seemed to be a ripped tearing across both my cheeks, one which split my face down the middle in red. I looked again, and the voice said, “Don’t worry; the Dahlia is not due to your actions. As you think, this is a bad situation all in all. You are not the world’s only hooker. Or, perhaps you are. Do you suppose you are responsible for all of these horrendous crimes?” Then as I told the mirror I didn’t care if my face went back to normal, it did.

  I finished washing in the metal basin and dressed, preparing for a day of killing time by hanging out around the Strand area, as Bob had given me a week’s wages out of our special night, and I certainly had both time and money to kill now. It saddened me that he was only a customer in the end, that our love could never be, and that I was having him kill a man or perchance a partial man for me. He would probably find our Charles. As I strolled the long walk to the Strand’s tea parlors, coffee shops, candy stores, and places where I could now buy some new clothing, I reflected upon Charles’ life.

  Like me, like Bob, he had no such toy to play with, but seemed to think he had. Poor little bear of a man, but now I have arranged to take what circumstances he had completely away and stuff them down his dark African throat for the next unknown time period. Well, when he gets out of our jail system, he can certainly find me and do whatever he wants. There is no such justice for the likes of me far above the likes of him. Or perhaps, I deigned to imply without speaking as I bought my clothes, poking through the flower children’s wares, there’s a nice boy and thank you for that here’s three pence, and I strolled through the milling crowd over to have coffee at the French pastry shop.

  Meet London’s Negroes:

  Charles ilk or lot in life, I could not tell which, as I sipped some excellent java from Spain, grown in the finest outlying forests, while eating a cheese sandwich and having a glass of unreported milk that had the cream mixed in it, mind you, he could come here too, but then again I see not his kind again anywhere. I don’t suppose they chase them off? Then again, I see someone down at the other end of this café area, and she looks lonelier than I have seen woman before. Then others sat down with her, black like her so far as I can see, and settle into their food and unknown way of life. They look like us, but I know of something wrong. Yet it is strictly invisible at all times to me.

  I am afraid that to me, they do not resemble people. Such plug noses, and such an air of authority they do not have in this country. Charles and I would never have got on, such an idea, he was only there to take advantage of us, why would I think he knew anything right, oh thank you for taking my plates away – and here’s a quid. It’s a young red haired girl who looks vaguely like someone from another country, or is one of us. “My name is Karen, and you might talk to me later. Don’t feel bad about your Charlie.” It’s hard to tell when all is a blur, and I thought of going to the spectacles’. Maybe I could buy myself an eyepiece or perhaps a monocle and attain the silly authority old ladies had, or even a pince nez. Like Jack’s. He’s around here somewhere, and eventually he will spot and force me back to my hovel, I suppose. There is simply nowhere to go in all of London, or he is keeping busy. He looked busy with “bursting” others, indeed. Yet I have checked the papers, and there are only three murders so far reported. Do the rest go unheeded? It is a long wait to become the fourth victim of Jack the Ripper.

  In Victorian England, I sighed to myself, I suppose all things are possible. Most of them seem to be evil possibilities. It is only a matter of time before I die of either diseases, going into Charring Cross or a local lunatic ward, or die of the knife. I saw in my mind Jack approach my window, leer into it with his overwhelming grin, and grew dismal. He was sizing up as to when he was going to come in with me and take his time.

  If photographs are taken of me after he is done with me, I reasoned, there would be a move to do more of the same. I thought, I shall pray to Jesus that mine is not the best stepping stone for subsequent murders, and that like my name, there be something most special about it. My mind reeled for a moment at how that would have to make my murder be much more prominent, and then it dawned on me. Two kinds of people in the world. Maybe I didn’t have much life choices, or left, but someone else might.

  Send this message to my lover Jack, oh Jesus, oh there you are Jesus, now I see, and I do have to start work for real tonight and let me skirts up all the way as they act like boys, no, I am going to lure them into my room, but wait, there is not the way to do that because of the manage who is too conservative as he’s from India, oh no, I have to do the street routine still, even though I have a perfectly good room, sigh, I knew Dove you would have to do it that way, I dared dream for an instant of something else.

  Ten nights later, and after I had learned several hellish ways of finding roughly two clients per night, and several of which had banged my head against the brick walls, thrown me down upon the back alley pavements, insisted upon all the wrong orifices of my body and otherwise had “their way” with me, which had assumed a turn in the direction solely of punishing me for being a whore and nothing else, as I had assumed, but which was growing to be an unspeakable experience beyond words I barely handled or should take, I found the article in the paper. They had executed Charles.

  I prayed to Jesus, God and Allah that I would never meet him again, and that he was gone forever, not because I hated him, but because I wanted to see him safe from any harm. In my inner being, beyond all reach, was a longing for the unattainable him. For one prolonged moment, I wanted him safe with his mother, somehow encompassed within. But I knew his execution had been tepid, beneath his dignity, and still malevolent, of the nature I had deeply hoped for; he was revealed as a raw coward at the last moments. Somewhere else, where he knew himself, he would be the bravest man alive.

  With an anger beyond all mentioning, as I feared forsaken his life, I read on. No, they had only decided he was a new Cause Celebre, as he had been trying to organize more than one union after all, which I read with a kind of perverse glee and longing, and there was much talk of parties attempti
ng to lynch him. I had never heard of such a thing before. They were keeping him in jail in the county area and talked of shuttling him around, but the discussion largely centered on whether Negroes in England had any such social rights or justice, or turned toward discussion of what to do with the Juwes who were supposedly also “making trouble” and causing a general stir. None of these people seemed to have enough to do with each other, and all of them appeared out for each other’s blood, but at a distance where it looked to me like they were all showing off to imaginary women, children or circumstances all of them could never truly obtain.

  I pitied Charles, as he and his kind were rather alone in this, as all the discussion finally proved to be about them and not by them, but I pitied him more for not taking a job at the newspaper. I have no idea why he needed to be a leach off us instead, I thought, and then realized what a leach off of men I had become indeed. What else in life is there but being a leech?

  We are a society of ants in Great Britain, I’ll warrant, each keeping the other’s truest measure beyond all reach, and pretending that by doing nothing but contesting or working against each other, we shall someday work our single ways up. It is all we have at present in the late 18th century, and as all animals are competitive, I think it is all we will ever have. I vacillated between reading the newspaper stories to kill time during the day, or the fiction stories, some of which were being written by women and children who were way ahead of me in the brains category, and I especially loved Sherlock Holmes.

  If only there were a ways to stop fools from dreaming, or otherwise to go on living in some house out in the country, from the city where all overbuilt monstrosities of lovely but bloody brownstone and multi storied buildings were going up, I would like it. But you know, as fast as the brinkmen and carpenters lay them down, and as seldom as they fall or are razed, you would suppose it were less crowded around here. My father wants to see me in Heaven, I supposed, but that is where he is. He said once about the traffic around Stratford on the Sea, “They must have opened up the gates of Hell.” That’s when I decided life was too crowded for me to be a good girl or ever have a life.

  He would pat me on the head and send me out the door to buy at grocers. A good and handsome man of excellent British stock, and some other, he had a handlebar mustache and a walking cane, but he was too lower classes to get a proper education. He kept us well and we had our family, but he disappeared out of here so long ago. And I of course have not spoken with my mother or sisters since I undertook this life of utmost shame and complete utter degradation. I wonder if work in a steel mill is anything like this. They often fall off of bridges as they build them, and the rest line up to complete the work. And as the paper mills and smoke stacks create a smell worse than the odor of dead bodies, they die too. I suppose the work of creating dead bodies must exude such a smell really as awful, and you would think it would not, if we are a lot that is so condemned.

  I have done what Jesus did, to deserve my death somewhat, and imprisoned Charles. I know he would not have helped us any, but as I read the papers, they claimed he had been trying to, and I thought they but threw a sop to his race. The stories eventually ended and centered on other things, but I finally told God, “If you are sending me these voices, please end it with bonnie Charlie. Have them haul him out and finish him off.” I knew he was reveling in his chance to somehow take on the entirety of England by himself.

  Charles Surest Meets Death:

  The next day, I hit the Strand, and was going to reach for the latest magazine installment of several wonderful earthy stories about many English and worldwide locales such as America and apparently most of the rest of our cosmos, which humanity was only beginning to uncover, and I reached for “The London Times” which had one summary headline halfway down the page, front page though. They had taken, “A Negro, Black as Our Spades, Out to His Scaffold.” For a moment, I thought Scaffold was a town. His name turned out to be Charles Augustus Murphy, of Essex, and a local university as well, which he had actually graduated from to my surprise, with more than one degree, and they had done him in anyway. What a fool to never have found his career.

  An illegal lynch mob. Now some of them were in trouble with the authorities. My goodness, I have done something fierce but I warrant it under this sky I suppose. It has nothing to do with justice, as we are all blind fools who must live out our lives. Mine was now a satanic misery on the face of the planet, and deep in my heart, I wanted to believe that I had my Bonne’s kind to blame for it. Chocolate is so acid when you eat it and you have to take on every germ in the vicinity, including all tropical ones, but who cares. On the other hand, I could only pretend to enjoy myself during the day, and await my inevitable one of several potential death sentences at night.

  I lay in bed one night to take it off, having made enough wages of sin indeed to pay off the rent, buy some canned food I could keep in my rooms, plan ahead for extra clothing, and have a Chinese silken fan tucked away in one corner that I could look at occasionally and dream of other people, other places, where they had lives and houses and children and grandchildren, polar explorers found my attentions the most. And the women’s movement of England was pledging to an eternal fight for the right to vote. I thought, it’s time I did something completely different with my body for a change.

  Meet the Women’s Movement:

  “‘Allow, I’m Annie Chapman. Is this the office of Women’s Suffrage?”

  The tall woman at the desk as I had strolled up to the flat above stairs in my best clothes frowned at me. “Are you a street girl? We don’t take those when it comes to our campaigning. If you need help with domestic issues or violence, or abuse and neglect, welcome, as we are striving forward in these directions, but we cannot help you.”

  “Why not?” Of a sudden, I asked God to retract my question. I kept it to myself, thinking I had nothing of the sort said. “Of course, I am a lady brick worker. I have a friend I could refer over to you who could sign verity to my job.” The author of the Sherlock Holmes series himself worked for women’s rights, but not for us, only for working women. He never wanted it for us or for housewives, I think. “So you could have your friend sign and verify you are a brick worker? If you can do so, have him come in.”

  “Is there a reason I need a man to do such a thing for me?” I was rudely interrupted by a short woman who looked eerily familiar bursting in through the door. I had seen her gracing the local papers recently. “They are beginning to arrest our suffragettes outside the dockets of the prison, and they are mishandling them. I had the papers lined up and there are photos being taken. It’s a whole new world when it comes to publicity. Alice and whoever you are, come, let’s go and get arrested! We need to add bodies to the stack! They might do anything, including shooting into the crowd.”

  I serious doubted this, but thought they might tell us to quietly disperse and go home.

  I was racing out the door when the tall lady grabbed me from behind. “Not you, chippie, you have to go get the signature and come back. We’ll take care of this for you and your kind, but you will have to do that ere any of us can help you. Ophelia, look to the stairs.” They both ran down it, slowing to a sedate pace as others glanced out of offices at them. I decided I had enough of attempting to be a suffragette, winked at myself, and took off after them. I joined them as they attempted to board a carriage.

  “I’m paying for this and you can’t stop me. I’m paying all the way, all the time. By the way, my name is Annie Chapman. I’m boarding this thing invented by men first.” I then barked onto the carriage, slamming the door in front of the two ladies’ faces. “I am faster than any wind you have ever met in your banal lives. Do you want aboard?”

  “Ah, I think she means it. Gloria or whoever you are in there, please ape the door and let us in. We are the local leaders of this chapter and you must let us get to the protest.”

  “Maybe.” I breathed to myself heavily, whooping air out of me in a whoosh, and paused with my
hand on the door handle. “You must pledge to let ladies of the evening get the vote before I will ever let you into our carriage. This carriage is now for us.”

  There was the strangest minute of silence on the other side of the carriage door. As I sat there, burning more with pneumonia I thought than the other diseases, and still looking a young lady although I now had quite some facial acne, I also said, “If you are thinking what we are doing is a choice, you are sadly mistaken Christian old farts who mean nothing in this life. You are waiting for “you” Jesus to rescue you from inversion. I am not. You are going to stand there forever until I let you into this taxi cab. I am doing this for the Chinese, for Negroes, for so called white people, and everyone on Earth.”

  “We are going to call the CC mental wards and have they come take you off.”

  “Those are the Catholics and their hideous medieval tortures. You two are men forever and traitors to our cause. I am sitting here and thinking about what I will do to you. You are rats in a pack who only can oppose one person. I am not.”

  It came to me the entire human race is but descendants of the amoeba, which surrounds its food as a particle and then eats it. I would be long slow eaten indeed. Where, I did not know, and it would be a long process of wondering why there had been so many indications of Hell. I would have faith in something else for other people. And I am a suffragette against this vixen. I dreamed of my nonexistent friends, and laughed. Charles and Bob and everyone else, whom I dared pretend to represent. There would never be such a thing as the vote for women. I looked at the front of the carriage, and called out, “Driver, be off with you, and take me to where those ladies were going.”

  “Absolutely, and this ride is completely free for Annie; horses, I lash you and away with you.” I thought I was speaking his words for him, it was so strange. We were off, and had left the invert or those who hated inverts couple behind. I sudden knew the driver was a woman. “How are you, Shirley, no that’s not your name is it?”

  “No,” called out this booming but not quite masculine voice, “And I’ve been pretending to be a man for years and not gotten caught at it, but I’m joining you at this.”

  We arrived at the rally, and I had to stand through the most boring presentation by men and women that I had seen and there was a crowd of protestors marching, but it was quite small as we had suspected. “Shirley” – who may have been man or woman – strode with me as we walked nonviolently through the ringing mob about us, shouting things like, “How can you believe you need when none of you take political office, and women are too weak minded to govern,” and such nonsense as that. Then the bully boy cops, who were huge, showed up to wind at us and rub our sex parts. They also hit us with their sturdy clubs, but there was not much screaming. Only about three dozen or so were on parade in public for this, although as I could not see, it may have been more or less. For a moment, caught by surprise, I realized I had been expecting something else, but it was not too much of a surprise. They were aiming the guns upon us. I could not tell if anyone else was being handled, but as one giant copper had my skirts up and was severely pinching my parts – until I screamed in direst agony, my friend reached to lay him low with one single punch. He stood over the man for a second merely to crow, which due to my friend’s size was an incredibly loud sound that silenced some of our crowd.

  “No problem,” he growled, for I thought of her that way, “And you will return me the favor, but not in a way I can ever understand or appreciate. By the way, I’m really a man, I’m not into women, but you are getting out of here before they arrest you all. Hey, let’s go over there,” said my now unknown assailant, grabbing my arm in a firm but gentle way as he pulled me over to the side of the street. “You don’t need arrested, sweetie,” he said in the most welcome unfamiliar womanly voice I had ever heard. “You are one of them!” I cried aloud, “You do have dark hair and look foreign, but you’re so tall.”

  “Well, I try to be, sweetie. You are one of us if you want to be. Anyway, I’m going to hug you, and see if they get any messages. Sure enough,” he whispered in such a high falsetto in my ear, “Now don’t think it’s how I’m large sized. See, they are going after all the alone ones to teach them a lesson. My kind will never get married or is a family or anything but homosexual perverts for a long time to come. Let’s get out of here!”

  “Who ARE you?” I squealed as he and I raced away, him not dragging me at all now, and we slowed to a walk. I had been willing to get arrested, but only was manhandled. “Ah love, I’m a charmer but I have had more boys than you can ever see, and you know what has probably happened to them all. If they are not in the Thames, they have sought graves in many other places. Thays, would a-like an American bear hug?” He gave me such a nice squeeze, and we traversed over to where the photographers were. “My name is Alvin and I have a “friend” named, ohhh, Oscar Wilde – you should see his wordy portrait – who has the most fantastic salon around here, ah yes, it’s about one mile south of Lancaster, here’s the carriage, Righteous Dove, and let’s pile in. Oh, and I’d like to introduce you to all of our satanic familiars. We’re witches. And I can’t stand the idea of being sent to jail to be stuffed up the bum, as I have and never done that to others.”

  Meet Half of England’s Gay Movement:

  The carriage was stuffed full of men dressed as women. Full makeup, clothes, and clear attitude problems from being sent to boys’ school for all their lives. I had gone to an all girls’ school and hated it, which set me to wandering and chasing men. These were the faggots of England truly. I was so freaked out at this I could not be angry anymore. They were teenagers and grown men mostly, and as we took to the streets in broad daylight, the arrogance and lack of some of these jesters made me laugh so loud I was feeling free again for the first time in my life. We felt for each other and only hugged and kissed lightly as we sped along in our bumpy, rocky coach, where over every rough spot in the roadway, it bounced and went up our rears. Most carriage rides were like that for everyone back then, when the road was rough. “So you are the Jokers of London.”

  “Darling, we are the Ladies of the Day and Night – and Forever Mourning.” Meeting the boys who laughed at death all the time was most refreshing to all my senses. “Would you like to meet the ‘Gentlemen’ Who Satisfy Nobodies? I think not. But you will hear some of them speak for you.” I decided they meant the lesbian inverts, as I figured they must have an active fantasy life, not much else. I wasn’t one myself, and wondered. Was it any fun being an invert, or was it a life much like mine – only abysmal?

  “Did you take it up the bum? Ooooh, Charlie and Freddie, you are the bums I like.” I pulled the two of them over to me, as they had rescued me from the perverted cops! We caroused like lovers who had known each other time immemorial all along the way.

  “Say, chit, come to America with us after we show you the best salon and the best homo pervert and lover of boys in all of London. You are such a grand lady next to his sickened and lost soul, you don’t know yourself. You need a permanent wave and some brand new fetching bodices and you know what? You need a new district entirely to work in. That Whitechapel thing is SO inappropriate for you, Turtle Dove. Come with us and we’ll fix you up so you are a beauty princess, next to that ugly old doggie Queer of ours, and you’ll eat with us if you want to and we have plenty of drugs if you’d like and we can show you our special little world. Now, don’t mind the young boys; they’re all mental retards, but they love our Oscar and he tells them all the literary realities and detailed fictional fantasies they want. Now, stop jouncing the carriage like that, Oscar! Say, have you read those ridiculous little gay stories in the Strand? Sher and Doc, ohhh, such a couple. We’re waiting to see them break down and go after Professor Moriarty and have a major three way. Look, Alice in Wonderland, there’s the Kasbah!”

  Meet London’s Half-Esteemed Literati:

  I now knew I was among the best and finest fancy men I had ever seen in my life. We bailed out of the c
arriage and I tripped all over my long skirts to their incredibly girlish and unseemly laughter as we joined their party. “Look, Alice, there’s the caterpillar and his hookah, oy gevaldt such a long snout it has, hey, gang, let’s ignore that and hear Oscar do a reading.” What’s a reading, I thought to myself.

  “You know how you used to like the arts and want to get involved? We have a whole French poetry society going here, and the best literary lions of Europe gather around us just to see a bunch of peer farts – it’s insatiable, darling! And we host them. Tonight we have Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, all three Bronte sisters, Emily Dickenson who is such a feminist, and you.” Needless to say, I decided they must mean they had imposters who took the roles of said notables.

  I entered a room where we all slowed down and I finally saw the other side of Victorian London. There was a huge hall where the social types and others were gathered for literary readings and poetry. It had a supremely festive atmosphere, which had obviously been supplied by the entire local invert community, and gaily festooned every wall with gorgeous artwork. I was crying and tears were streaming down my checkered face freely. I was no longer in hell; I was in literary, not pervert Heaven. There were all kinds of real people, everywhere, so far as I could tell maybe Britishers, French, Americans, my God them too, oh look Asians, and we were taking our seats and listening to some speakers.

  “Ladies and gentleman, as a special treat tonight, high mathematician Charles Dodgson is going to give a reading of his award winning book of numerical poesies, limericks, puzzles, creative brain teasers, mysteries, children’s fantasies, riddles, especially for bright little girls,” and here I had to sigh and wonder what that meant, “intellectual spoofs and jokes, and by the way, I was molested repeatedly as a child and withstand you, but I’m here, and for your elucidation and enjoyment you know me as Lewis Carroll. I wrote strictly to get in with the queen and her society and achieve knighthood. This never really occurred, not in time, and I could never be such a thing as a crusader.

  “In Detective Comics of America in the 20th Century, I will be known as the Fiddler. It had to do with the Inquisition. The question always was, “Is a Raven like a Writing Desk?” So they took the title of a show from the Black Crow Shakespeare and me. Could you look into the future? Do you think life will be a breeze? I decided, being of a mathematical mind, that black girls needed their formal education, nothing I was allowed to affect or change in England, but they do receive education there.

  “Yes, I also dreamed of going to Hell for you girls. Never rate down certain Americans again, unless they beg you for it. Thanks to American television, the answer is now “yes.” We now have Raven the Anti-heroine. In the audience there is one special young lady, and although I named Alice as the heroine of my series of books, she bears no mention in them. I will only write two books in honor of our Annie Chapman. I have borne the insult all of my life and announce it now, and forever more will not mention it. But I have taken photos of living women, to show the world girls are not ashamed of being naked, and they are not. I could only handle the public embarrassment none.

  “This young lady will have to be photographed, ah, some other way, and now I have to do the reading. I have chosen a poem you find popular and consequential called “Jabberwocky” – in which I invented several new panjandrum words which will find dictionary status, thus rendering me immortal in an insignificant way. Our Annie is about to become immortal in a significant way, one which she will never understand or know. It has to do with the Pacific North West of the United States. The event transpiring in the future involves nothing she is to be credited or blamed for, and indeed no one else is either. It is because all events are already past, and there can be neither time nor future forevermore. Moreover, here are the “sick and sadistic ravings” as many have said of a man gone mad who likes children and you:

  ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe,

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

  Beware the Jabberwock, my son,

  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch,

  Beware the Jubjub bird and shun,

  The frumious Bandersnatch.

  He took his vorpal sword in hand,

  Long time the manxome foe he sought,

  Then rested he by the Tumtum tree,

  And stood awhile in thought.

  And as in huffish thought he stood,

  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

  Came whiffling through the tulgy wood,

  And burbled as it came.

  One two, one two, and through and through,

  The vorpal blade went snicker snack.

  He left it dead and with its head,

  He went galumphing back.

  “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

  Oh frabjous day, callou, callay,

  He chortled in his joy.

  ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves,

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

  All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.”

  Did all girls get jealous of this part of his book, where he favoured boys? It was about going to war, and fighting. Lewis Carroll, author of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Alice through the Looking Glass,” who made one think of someone going through a plate window and breaking a glass ceiling, but perhaps it was not a wage earning thing, finished up with some poetry – and left and right winged his way home.

  When Emily Dickenson came on, she read the poetry we have never found. It was far better than the earlier poetry, but still involved the impossible longing for a man. The audience asked her why she couldn’t write of other things than sex, and she said, “Ask Dorothy Parker. She always had trouble finding carfare home from the Algonquin Round Table, and although she had a ready wit and a sharp tongue, she was still hanged. Probably had a lot to do with being a Native American who could never exist.”

  Then there were many others, but the final entrant in what was to be a contest of wits as they joked around and carried on, was Oscar Wilde. “Here comes the Wild Ass Man!”

  “I can’t be you ladies; I’m an attempt to keep you from troubles. It will never happen, nor be there a world where troubles are swept from those who don’t seek them, never find them, and become Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde. You may think I was simply “Batman’s” Oswald Chesterfield Cobble pot. I am too huge to be a penguin – and that is an insult to short boys and men. I certainly may or may not have done what you think I did, but on the other hand, I was trapped in England and what else is there to do but eliminate as many people as I could reach while fearing the dockets. As I am going to be arrested for the crime of inversion shortly, with minor boys who were willing but I am not, I have to give a final speech and say this: I did love but indecently, and there are no tape recorders in this room.

  “I am a coward, e’en though I did love once the Sword – but no more. All things must turn to a reckoning, and I plan to hold them off while finally giving up to the law as soon as I possibly can. Then I suppose the rotting of my flesh will not be great, but my reputation may or may not allay such friendships as I cannot obtain here. I go before the insanely unjust and illiberal dockets as a dark, huge bear of a man who does not want to bring on sex with children, but worked as a pioneer for gay rights. I will swear one more time that all of the boys I had were willing, and not coerced by me. Meanwhile, my Annie, I would have loved to have twelve boys and twenty girls with you, but that is no longer possible, and you would not have survived the first child due to the fact I am well over six foot eight inches tall. My dear, I am your ‘batman’ for the moment, when it comes to playing cricket, but you are destined for the worst possible one. I would sooner die than hurt you, but cannot help you, and must face the law in my own way. If it takes homosexuality to do something about our prob
lems, it is the least violent method.

  “Annie Chapman, could you come up to this hideous stage, based on nothing but public executions of your friends, and read me some of your poetry?” Oscar looked me up and down with an expectancy not quite of sexual longing, hovering on the brown edges of each dying leaf like a tired freak with no received human understanding had to say. I knew it was still autumn, but winter was nearly here. He was the Gentle Giant that I had envisioned, a soul who needed love in his life and had absolutely none. He did give it, such as in his work, “The Portrait of Dorian Grey.” He was rotting from lack of love. I had deucedly known this – as I had read all his works.

  I said, “Your woes are nothing next to mine, and I have turned the man I originally loved over to the unknown. Some day he may end up in the deepest dungeons of Spain, and for no reason whatsoever. When you are shuffled around, you don’t know where you go. But he shall not get out of jail in time to injure me. His woes are nothing next to mine, I must suppose. I must go home now, and tidy up. Then I must apologize to you, and say I understand your moral dilemma.”

  “Come read us your poetry, Annie Chapman, who forever resides in Whitechapel. Come, predestined girl ‘whore’ of the ages, please tell us about what you feel, and how slime must slide throughout your entire body. Tell us how you can never feel clean, no matter how oft you bathe, and how your death is not one any of the rest of us can experience. Or, recalling you are on the dockets by being on the stage, say anything. Perhaps you could mention you should have fought the urge to follow your name and live there.”

  “It can’t possibly be the worst life and death in all of human history.” I felt a baited expectancy seize me coldly, wanting me to heave all of my lunch out. I threw myself out into the aisles, racing and tripping over my long dresses as I sought the lavatory. When I got there, my headache roared through my bursting head and I threw up all the food for the past two weeks, which was not much, into the pull chain toilet. I lifted up, and saw how others in a day with no way to say it must die a long, slow death from the ancient life forms that cause both disease and illness. They must face the worst hospital deaths in all of their histories, each to his or her own, and they would suffer them. Why should not ladies of the evening be treated for disease? AIDS was treatment for them in Africa. It probably only ended their lives, and put them in drug agonies. How did I know of this “AIDS” idea?

  Then I reflected more cautiously upon those with no such hospital, and longed to be them. Would there ever be a time when science was not out to make its “money” off of victims? There was no cure for what I’d come down with, and acne was the tip of a mysterious iceberg. But the legal head of state of England, a land that avoided the Nazi tyrants’ bloodshed for a long time by being nonviolent and resistive, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and many others had suffered such arcane and incurable diseases, and had children who recovered and were normal, and who subsequently had other normal children. In spite of Winston having venereal diseases, he has had great grandchildren and they still live in England.

  Meet Death in the Mirror:

  Wiping my face myself as I always had, I gazed upon my acne, which was increasing. I was nothing but food, and as I lowered my head in extreme shame, racing somehow to the past to remake every decision I had made in my entire life, the room reeled and bobbed as I grew sick and had to fight with myself, perhaps for all infinity.

  Do you believe it’d be a good idea to seek cure for venereal diseases? Or is it a matter of Nature vs. Time, and what doctoring cannot do?

  “No, infinity is not the same as eternity, and you must go to seek timelessness. It is out there beyond London, way beyond the Moon, far beyond Antares, and isn’t that the most idiotic thing you have ever thought, little whore? You are so unimportant. I am so important, that I am a man. I am Jack the Ripper. Do you know what I have started to do for you? I have to treat you to the way of life you already know, and you are naïve and know nothing. Meanwhile, do you not feel a thrill somewhere in the vicinity of your chest? It is an artificial lion – and you know it is falsity which dooms Moslem boys to never-ending battle. Not to mention their people and it is a vengeance that will kill them some day. What they believe comes from their Allah; they know it must be the other side of life. I am a German and I seek vengeance for some known reasons.”

  Annie thought, I believe Israel could win someday, and make peace there happen.

  “Some people never realize how important some things are. You must take your carriage out of here and go home. Run, run home at your top panic and rest in your room. Relax, lay back, and let the good doctor take care of you.” I wheezed, now feeling I knew who this was. But all my life I did not know why I was a babe, a girl, a woman, and never to be an old curmudgeon. I would not have minded being a grandmother and would not be a mother under such overcrowded living conditions.

  And now Satan was in direct contact with me, pretending to be Jesus Christ the White Man in order to fake deliver me. But he would, I thought, to what? To a moonlit walk up the beach? Given the vast misfortunes of my life, I could only hope to be delivered to death. I said to the mirror, “Charles is more a man than you will ever be, and he is a stupid, arrogant, omnipresent lout. He thinks he is you, you think you are him, and the two of you will never awaken.”

  “Then how am I a stupid lout? I have an education and am fully accepted in England. We are not ex-slaves with axes to grind, and we know what your place is here.”

  “I know members of your kind who are good people who want to help us. They don’t feel they can under these present conditions.”

  Malevolent chuckling emanated from the mirror. I said to the reflective glass, “There will be real doctors oh you know someday I suppose, perhaps on another planet, and you and your ilk will be reduced obviously to the same fortunes you think you are bestowing upon me. I suppose you simply want your mother to hurt over you.” Recalling what I had thought earlier about Charlie, I winced.

  “Idiot whore, whose mind is now as composed of yeast shit as mine, don’t despair. Come back, and let a man who can handle a brain full of excrement from millions of sources show you the clear light of day. Why would I make you hurt worse than me? I am a charitable man, a medical doctor, and cannot harm you as you say. Why, as you know, I plan to find out the lay of this land by drowning myself in the biggest local river. Why would you think you would die an equal death to mine? Or even lead an equal life? Did you not have fun and interesting but dreggy time in your existence, as I worked and slaved away on my divine mission from Satan? Or was it God? Or your Mary?

  “Do you really think you matter to me? You do. I am a medical doctor, and I must tell you, oh, you know, just come back. I set out to serve mankind, stupid whore. Where else would you go, dearie?” I thought, I should find any other “doctor” at all.

  “I have listened to a mathematician tonight, and it all sounded alike to me.”

  “Come home.” As I looked at the mirror, I only saw scientific reality. It felt like a magical burden had lifted from my entire mind, and that I knew I could go back to my simple rooms. I gagged on what this probably meant, and went over to the toilet, sticking my fingers down my blue clad throat and loosening my widow’s collar. I thought, it would be nice to have something like dignity as I died. Who knew if I would?

  He was going to have to tie a gag into my mouth, to stifle the screams. I was sure he’d stuff it right in there. It had been “right” to be brave and await mine end in a small room away from the street, if being reclusive was the right thing to do in this shocking situation. Also, I could get drunk every day, and that might take out some of the pain. I thought, I should get drunk as I pleased, and not bother. Finally, he was going to have to tie me to the bedposts or otherwise enchain me, splay me out as Jesus on the Cross, which must have happened to multiple people, and begin eviscerating me. This heroic tale was not heroic because of the need for the missionary position, which makes women pregnant. Anyway, in future I dreamed,
others would devise new ways to make women pregnant. We would however never be free. And thus neither would anyone else.

  If one were “free,” I chuckled; they would all Christian think they’re me. And many will subsequently do this when they find the corse – they will get jealous. I feel sorriest for the Jews, or the Juwes, who own those nice shops I almost took work at. Oh dear God, they will come to get them. Please do not flee; Juwes of England; take a brave stand at them. You know, everyone else must make their living at photography. I am now a mother goddess who will be discounted at all times because I spread diseases. I will start truly only one industry, known as pornography, and perhaps it is because I did not trust Charles. But his viewpoint is to lionize our prostitution, and sneakily degrade our England as an act of vicarious vengeance. He could have gotten a job, or no. I could have done the same, or no. Such questions can never be settled, by perverts who could have gotten a job. And all of us our working our jobs. We are the sea of army ants.

  I loved this planet, and the turning of it. I wish I could make things better, as I like people. But there is no way to do it, and yet evolution may make certain that such better ways of life will at least occur for some. I looked in the mirror one more time, and thought I saw a beautiful young lady. Having never seen myself that way before at all, I wondered where my desiccated corpse would end up. I thought I would somehow tolerate all of the pain along the way. Jesus was a sick joke by sillies like Bob, who wanted us to have a good time.

  It was only human. The pain would be incredible, and perhaps I would go straight to Hell, simply because it is there. I had seen so many indications of this. And none of the religious theories including this one held water for a feeling animal, a partially white woman such as I. I had seen the other women with their perfect spiritual lives, and their essences smacked of what I could never fathom. Human perfection. Maybe they would all go to a perfect Heaven. I never wanted or sought to join them there. Nonetheless, I had best be hurrying home, to await my hideous tormentor.

  It would take only a few hours at most, I was thinking, but then as I boarded the new train back in order to speed things up, a few thoughts occurred to me. I put aside the ones about fleeing almost immediately. I would simply stay in the rooms and probably I would have to go out and work some while waiting. As some of my life was good, it probably meant that there would be a long fall as I descended into extreme pain. There would be an end to the pain, in all likelihood. It would be like a major surgery. Yes, he was probably going to use his instruments. All those silver clad implements, all designed for me. Jack was my gold, and I was his silver, I suppose. I should somehow take the blame for it all, but refused to do so. I would disown this Hell if I should ever have to face it.

  I had to wonder; was our acne only the result of not washing up right? I had done so plenty of times, and washed regularly, but perhaps something like dirt was blocking my pores. What if it wasn’t exactly deadly? I had acne for years as a teenager, and then most of it had gone away. I did feel tired all the time, but was up nights – and much of the days.

  “And you can destroy me, but I will not leave. I will haunt this place somehow through my death, until one such as me or someone else or several someone else’s do something about these problems. I shall stick around, and wait, or perhaps, sigh, it is too late. Even Dr. Jack Rinehart had something in mind to help people originally, I should guess. I feel like you are listening to me and judging my character. I will see you there, and say nothing until you move. Then I will do something again that takes care of you. No, I don’t know what I am going to do. There, that’s the building rooms. I’m going to torment the manage, or at least his wife, the other one, before I die. Let’s see; what could I say?

  “Hello, sir, is your name Gunga Din? Like in that poem by Rudyard Kipling? Do you really run about giving soldiers a final drink?” I dreamed of the sweat shops line, where I had given back the jug of water.

  Meet London’s Hindu Indians:

  “I don’t know why you ladies torment me when I rent to you. Where is it?” I had been building up quite a rap sheet with him, and owed him over four month’s rent. “Sir, I can only pay you when I get the money, and you always charge me on a schedule.”

  I cheerfully paid the manage all of the owed money. “Because we are afraid you will overcharge us.” He smiled at me in that peculiar way the ex-inhabitants of “our” erstwhile India have, and said, “I think you are not Sherlock Holmes, Annie. Come back around here, and have a spot of coffee with me. No, I am not a Mahatma. I have something to show you, if you want to look at it. I own several pieces of antique Indian furniture that was designed by the British overseers of our land, the Raj. You would like to see these pieces I am sure, so come back here with me.”

  The man was too old and looked about eighty to do anything to me back there, and I certainly didn’t care anymore. We went through a parted glass bead curtain, and the back of the manage’s area was revealed at last as the loveliest little living room with curtains and some strategically placed sofa pillows, which were hand stitched in the most elaborate Hindu fashion. They were so beautiful and seemed to be made out of millions of tiny threads with the greatest of care taken to make the most heavenly pictures of white fleshed people intertwined with other people that I have seen and I will never see it again. Then I looked at his carvings collection. “Does your wife do or own any of this?”

  “Yes, she carved that elephant, and I carved that piece with the lion and the tiger and the three insects that represent peace, prosperity, and long life. Welcome to Cabalistic Hindu. Seriously, we’re Jewish and Hindu, and you know, my kind thinks it rules the universe. It thinks we thought up all of the world’s religions, thoughts and belief systems. My wife has always reassured me that we are not immortal, nor anything but old. Say, Geneva, would you go ahead and fetch us a tea cozy, the one with the hand painted bone china service and the gold and copper edging? I think that one will do for the young lady.”

  I was angry and didn’t want to hold back any more tears. “Why?”

  “We don’t know these things, but if you want to look at what we used to have, go ahead. This was all for a passing period of time, for a limited time only, you might say.”

  “Honey, show her the telephone. Oh miss, look here it’s such a device technology you can dial this and guess what, you can call your friends from far away, maybe across the world in a few years. See, when you ring them up, it’s not to make them come over. You can talk to them, and I understand someday there will newer forms of communication.”

  “Can I ever ring up Sherlock Holmes and ask him to solve my murder case? The man involved is so hot to be evil he might slaughter all of England pretending to look for just me. You too. Maybe he will find you and kill you. Please don’t call the cops on me. Understand? I’m not asking you to save me, but please, tell them and save yourselves.”

  Annie Enters the Twilight (Eventide) Zone:

  The brown skinned and English looking couple glared first at each other, then me. “We don’t mind so much, as we’re old. Really,” said the old lady, “I wish I could take your place. I would hurt a lot less, but you are young and it will be so painful. He’s going to take over twelve hours, or maybe longer, to slowly slice you a half inch at a time with a small but razor sharp scalpel. Really, he doesn’t have all day, so he’ll have to leave.”

  “So…he’s going to make a series of extremely small cuts until I’m quite opened out?” I thought clinically, he was going to make a series of incisions – and keep going. For a moment, I leapt into the future, and didn’t like what I saw.

  The Twilight (Eventide) Zone Enters Annie:

  I saw a young woman who looked a lot like me splayed out all over the Seattle Center Fountain, sometime in the 20th Century. It was in Washington State, and her boyfriend had decided that because she was not the marrying kind, he had to kill her exceedingly slowly and leave her “lengthy” guts trailed all along a fountain. Seems he needed the Virg
in Mary approach to living to even so much as draw breath.

  I whispered to the Goddess, kill a “black” man instead of her. They will both use the same maneuver of turning their backs to the enemy. Hmmm, the black man is a phony medical doctor who used tactics on his enemies to serve mankind. How better than Jack. It seems his name was Michael King, he turned his back on his enemy, and he got shot. Then the young woman, the Goddess told me, will be saved by turning her back on her enemy. They will then both get up and leave the Seattle Center, and she will put her enemy on a bus and see him again later. Then he will help Dr. King through the X-Men. Meanwhile, the young lady in the future will never get the sick joke. As I envisioned this, I realized the young woman was being saved for the purpose I had seen earlier. She was to return the favor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by saving the lives of a black family and their tormentors, who thought for some reason they had to be Dr. Jack Rinehart.

  I asked God and the Goddess and someone else’s if I would get to see this when it happened. It said many people would, several of whom were victims of something odd called the Holocaust, another odd thing called the Green River Murders, including the murderer, and that it was all being televised and shown to a being named Alfred Dimeworth – and another being called Aunt Hattie who resided on Earth One.

  Then I saw a strange American man, a descendant of Sherlock Holmes’ called The Bateman, and he explained to me that in a completely unlimited universe, all things are possible. His costume was dark and mysterious, and made him look sort of like a Moorish vampire. He said that where he was from, which was in another dimension, he was something called a superhero, and that he combatted crime in the middle of the night.

  I thought to myself, I have been committing crimes in the middle of the night. Does this peculiar crappie care to arrest me?

  “I thought you would only be a detective,” I said. He sat down beside me, brushing his cloak away, and held my hand clasped in his.

  But I am also Jewish. The Juwes of England wanted to save you, Annie Chapman, and instead they saved a young American lady. You see, once you were dead, they were blamed for your murders, and the authorities came to get them. Years later, they did get them, in Rinehart’s Germany, on the Night of the Long Knives. The Juwes wrote on a wall that they were either innocent or guilty of the crimes of Jack the Ripper; that fact is in dispute to this day, or our days. The Nazis claimed they did it; American Jews say not only didn’t they do it, they proclaimed their innocence.”

  How do you know these things? Annie whispered.

  I know them because my secret name is Outer Space, which you are entering tonight. I’m Scots-Irish, like you, and English. But I am the Night, of Jewish descent, and I oppose those who commit murders.

  Omigod, I thought; that was Satan. No, I’m the Phantom of the Opera. Grey Canary was the lady who sang for me, when I wore a mask, when she needed to be free. And the Juwes are now in Israel. Someday, maybe we will figure out a way to end world war and not overpopulate. Meanwhile, there are concentration camps again, and yes, they are death camps. US President George Bush is known for torturing the innocent, but he will be leaving office soon, hopefully…as he spoke, his darkly cloaked figure blinked out of existence, not unlike a hallucination. I felt somewhat relieved, as his cloak and gloves had reminded me too much of Dr. Jack Reinhardt when he was dressed as Jack the Ripper. A reporter had done a composite drawing for the papers.

  “Yes, that’s all we can figure. Your Jesus is not going to save you, and you are going straight to Hell forever, but would you like a lovely cup of green Ceylon tea? It’s the finest that we have available.” The old woman poured the tea into a simple but exquisite Indian China cup for me. Her husband scowled at her. “I only mean she’s not a nice young lady.”

  Then the old man looked down at me. “I had a feeling this was going to happen. Shoot, I have to go get the beef in the oven. Hold fast; this is being explained to us as we go. I have a feeling it’s to punish you for those other hookers in England while they die. Good grief, you are not to blame for that. Anyway, here’s your tea, and I have to go get the roast.”

  “Can I stay for some roast beef?” They harrumphed, and of course as I eased myself into their absolutely gorgeous couch. I was so happy. Now I knew exactly what was going to happen. It was so mysteriously lovely, and involved the infinite eternal universe and – omigoodness – all things beyond what I could ever imagine or begin to understand. Surely that’s what the visit from Bateman had meant; surely, he wasn’t Satan, who didn’t have a pair of relatives for his housekeepers in Hell, of course.

  Then an older gentleman whom I recognized appeared in the chair next me. He was a famous local playwright, one who had rewritten “Pygmalion.” Some said it was loosely based on the lives of loose women like us. And a voice whispered in my head, it would be made into “My Fair Lady.”

  “You are made out of solid matter, and you are entering outer space tonight. Along the way, you will not be wondering what is going on anymore. Instead, you will be in Hell itself for approximately the length of time it would take you to sneeze if you hadn’t a kerchief, the sneeze caught in your throat, and remember the line you had to stand in to wait for a job at the sweat shops? Uh, what do you think, maybe it beats the diseases. Well, young lady, remember this; you will only feel your own pain, and thus pain is limited. You won’t feel anyone else’s pain but your personal own.”

  That was George Bernard Shaw, creator of “Man and Superman.” He faded off, and next was a handsome, normal looking young gent with glasses.

  He had been named Clark Dent, and was also sitting next me. “You see, we had been looking into this Hell fixation for quite some time, but don’t worry. It won’t take overlong. I’m well known for saving the world, but I can only try to save you from a bad afterlife. I believe in a God called Roa, anyway, and he was only a Cryptonian philosopher who pleaded for peace. But even I have no idea where you are going after you are murdered.

  By the way, GB Shaw practically invented me, but up until now, he hasn’t gotten any of the credit for it. The being he invented is my other self, called Superman. I’d call myself Suprememan, but in reality, Detective Comics shouldn’t own rights to the name Superman. GB Shaw invented it.”

  Then he too vanished. Shaw had been ruddy English, and had written a play which I now knew was all about me and our girls. Fancy that! I began laughing uproariously; I was being visited by comic book characters from America, and a famous British playwright – who was I kidding?

  “I have diseases in my brain, and now they have caught up with me. I am having hallucinations.” Everything vanished, and I saw the Indian manage and his fair lady. They were laying into their beefsteak, and then one of them said, “Oh, I forgot, here’s your plate.” It was the other of the manages. She handed me the plate with vegetable, potato and some roast beef. It was all quite delish. What was all that about another dimension? Did they mean Heaven, or Hell? I wondered which Earth I was on suddenly, but it felt like solid ground.

  You have to go home after you eat, and then really go home again, said the same mysterious man, only a voice now, who called himself The Bateman. I had to wonder once more if t’were the Devil in Disguise.

  I hear you, I spoke in my mind, and I am finishing my dinner now, give me some time you arrogant bastard. Are you a bastard like my father? Why are you impatient with me? Because I am impatient with you. There, the steak is finished, and I don’t need much else. That’s a good potato; please sit there while I eat you. And some lovely broccoli…before I die.

  “Would you like some desert?” enquired the lady manage. I said I’d take a piece of chocolate cake, and they served it to me. It wasn’t any cake I had ever eaten; it had ginger in it, and such a familiar flavor from long ago. But I had never tasted it before, and then I remembered. My mother had given me some Indian cake from a shop up the street, and it had ginger in it. I was eight years old. I saw myself in an odd picture, and someone named Bruce Wayne
was trying to escort me somewhere. I was in a place called Gotham City, instead of London town.

  I thought, I’m daydreaming that the incredibly handsome Oscar Wilde has reincarnated as someone else. It’s very Hindu to believe in reincarnation for a moment before you die. Imagine if Oscar was Batman and he finally found his boy Sparrows at last. And maybe instead of having sex with each other like blind fools, they fought crime. What a strange idea. On some other planet. “Would you like to visit us sometime, Annie Chapman?”

  “No, that’s okay. Lola Lane can come visit us, and try to stop our Jack, and all, but I would really like it if you could slow down your birth rate, make prostitution legal or at least put legal controls on it which help ladies of the evening, stop oppressing hookers and do all that, but I don’t tell you what to do. I’m going home and straight to bed.”

  You saved one woman named Karen in the 1980s. You thus saved about over one hundred people’s lives in the future, as Karen went on to save a whole black family from misery and heartache, as it can spread out far from even one murder alone; and Karen still hopes to go on living. She feels bad because some naïve serial murders happened due to “something she did” back when she lived in Ohio as a teenager.

  Mostly, she lazed around her living room watching TV, which caused her to get a spoiled suburban attitude. She then ordered a book on Jack the Ripper and acted like she was going to enjoy it, which her father overheard. When she read the book she was horrified, of which her angry father was not aware, and then some serial murders began to happen.

  Her Dad seems to have accidentally ordered her execution because he thought Karen was laughing at the Ripper murders, and apparently he slipped a man at his work some money to murder Karen. This started the man at work on a serial killing spree. Karen refused, however, to get into his car, which saved her for later, when she opposed the Mexican man at the Seattle Center Fountain, and when she helped save the black elderly lady from being sliced and diced. She’s amazed that she’s alive to tell anyone about these things, which not unlike these stories are all true to a certain extent – nah; it’s the truth in her case. She’s become a world renowned ghost writer since then, and she does ghost writing, copy editing and proof reading among other such freelance writing services for people.

  She’s married to a Philippine-American-Canadian who had to run around a war torn country trying to die rescuing people. He wasn’t “trying to die” – he was straining to do the job right. However, he was so lonely he didn’t have a lot of motivation to go on living. Both he and she have tried to commit suicide, but now they are together.

  Those two have also saved plenty of lives; they are ex-civil rights workers of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement, which he didn’t own, and Karen was involved in the Independent Living Movement, but Dr. King saved her life apparently by getting shot in the back when she wasn’t stabbed in the back. Something metaphysical must be involved, like some sort of political tradeoff. Something rescued her from being murdered at the Seattle Center, when Karen’s back was spared, and Dr. King’s was not.

  Also, he got her to marry “Remerio” – who had a daughter Angela with her, and they attempted to move north to “The Promised Land” of Canada, with insurance money Karen received from the deaths of her grandmother and great aunts. It’s ironic; Malcolm X’s family lost out on most of their insurance money when his father was murdered, but they finally received a small portion of it. Karen feels somewhat lucky that she received her insurance monies. She felt bad while growing up that Brother Malcolm X Shabazz had such a hard life and didn’t get all of his insurance money. She wasn’t Muslim, but felt sympathy for him.

  A famous Canadian book author named Farley Mowat told her to go live in Saskatchewan, Canada, because there’s no other place on Earth like it. So the Coles are buying a large, six bedroom house up there. It almost has room for the entire United States to fit inside it, that is, Saskatchewan, not the six bedroom house, but not everyone can move there. You can even look up where and how to move on the Internet…you’re yawning.

  Annie Meets Death at Long Last:

  Really? I’m tired, and I want to go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it went right to my head. Stop showing me the way to go home. And I miss Charles and Bob. I also miss my fellow dead chippies. Where are they? And why did I have no career? If all this was so helpful and meant to be, why am I going to be murdered by Jack the Ripper tonight? Tell me that, all you voices and blokes discussing Heaven and Hell. Anybody else?

  Maybe, said a voice. Go upstairs, and wait, woman. It is not going to be a good time, but haven’t you been used to that before? Yes, it’s going to be evil, bloody murder that takes its time and toll. Recall: it’s only pain.

  He’s coming for you, and he thinks he’s the world’s most evil man. He even wants to be him. Wait, and bide your time. He’s just a little lost German with Hell on his conscience, and he doesn’t take forever to kill people. He’s going to take a long time with you because he had fallen deeply in love with you from a great distance away. And yes, it could take anywhere from eight hours to three weeks for him to finish the job. These two Indian landlords have been told not to interfere with history. And he will have to keep coming back and forth, to maintain his job and civic presence. He will keep you waiting. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to keep him waiting.

  The voices paused, ever so dramatically, for one minute.

  Therefore, Annie told the voices – I must go up to my room now. All you people are “bloody smashing,” whatever that’s supposed to mean – it sounds like getting hit over the head with a shillelagh – but I am the most tired young whore I have met and need to get some rest. I don’t want to hear about being murdered any longer. I am going to get some much needed sleep…she trailed off and yawned, but Annie knew what they were saying had to be the case. She was to be murdered, tonight; maybe.

  She wasn’t afraid; only deeply disappointed. Still, she had been expecting such a terrible ending to her awful life. And so she toddled off to bed, waving a lovely Chinese fan she’d bought at the Strand.

  There. I am on my bed, and waiting. I am too restless for sleep. It is because of old Ben, that I use to tell time as it rings outside. It chimes every hour on the hour. I counted to three bells. It’s getting kind of late, and I’m tired of waiting. Time to go to Dr. Jack’s office and try to lure him down to where I live. Or perhaps I should simply stalk the streets. I will put on my fresh bonnet after I wash up and change my two sets of clothes, I will put on my laced shoes from America – and stop these depraved fantasies.

  Was that a noise I heard on the street? It sounds like the clicking of men’s heels against the pavement. They sound more solid than women’s heels.

  I am not dying to save anyone else. I am only another whore of England who lives in a small rooming house and I must die later my painful but uneventful death. I was dreaming about those real and unreal strangers and hallucinations celebrating my demise as it were some important.

  I am overripe with disease and must be shortly slaughtered like a rude pigeon, or I shall have to haunt these streets at night forever, looking for men to torment me with what I am doing. And when I am dead…the newspapers will use the terrible photograph of what Dr. Jack “the Ripper” Rinehart did to me to accidentally and uncaringly…begin a wave of serial murders…that will heartbreakingly sweep the world…Annie drifted off to sleep, but was rudely awakened by Jack entering her tiny room. At last you are here, she sighed. Yes, for a very long time, he growled.

  “I and I” – the Mystique, or the Mistake?

  The rest of this is mixed up, much like the remains of the women Jack the Ripper killed; a little messy, but well but together by experts. It involves the “I and I” mystique of the murders, where you feel like you are two people, like a somewhat good doctor and also like an evil, awful killer. It relates to the characters in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which I like to think is loosely based upon the fa
ct that doctors sometimes accidentally kill people. It can give them some strange attitude problems, like those had by the writer of the “Sherlock Holmes” series of stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, MD.

  I will not describe in detail the gory beginnings of serial murders. Later, dozens of paid photographers took her sad picture, splayed out on a bed from perhaps thousands of cuts, he face completely unrecognizable, her heart draped over a pillow to her left. For the sake of identity purposes, physicians like Dr. Jack Rinehart made their money sewing her back up together like she was a mere rag doll; then they could see her face. It had been lovely, but in the photograph I saw, her heart was still missing. Yes, that was the awful and hugely publicized beginnings of the horrifying history of worldwide serial murders.

  Cold blooded torture and foulest murder had gone before, but nothing as spectacularly prolonged and hideous as this, or so the serial murderers who copied Jack seemed to think. Most of them have imitated his methods, for example the Zodiac of San Francisco, who contacted the newspapers to boast of his crimes, and to give difficult clues to them. Other murders had happened before in London, perhaps as bad. But the overly widespread photographs of the equally splayed out Ripper victims appeared to make serial murdering widely imitated – and otherwise very intractable.

  It will be so bad; it will affect major aspects of Dr. King’s civil rights movement of the later century. A man named Ralph Ellison, a Negro, will write of this in his book “Invisible Man” – and then Karen S. Cole will read it. She is not a Negro. She is someone her own family accidentally slotted as being black, or something. She has always wanted to write, and now she has helped write over 100 books for other people. But she has a book based on IM that she wants to get out to a lot of people to read. It’s unlikely that it will go far in life as it is not a particularly needed book.

  Yet it is humorous, contains fun Hispanic, Black and White and other people characters who interact and have adventures, and it makes fun of violence in the movie cinema, which has gotten so excessive nowadays. She has several scenes where the main character gets to be courageous in a nonviolent manner, and where unspeakable violence is made fun of and laughed to scorn. She wonders if such a multicultural book could be useful, change society and the cinema, and go places someday.

  I wonder if there are any of those types of books out nowadays. Karen thinks she hasn’t seen any. Must be some other type of book.

  This is not important when it comes to reading books, but sometimes it is important when it comes to time periods, being selected for fame, and the writing of books. So her first reaction to Mr. Ellison’s book was, “He got published, and I never will!” She doesn’t know how lucky she is that she’s alive, because something is tormenting her. She has helped over 100 people get out books, and published five of her own, but she wants “The Rainbow Horizon” to finally hit the big time and give her some well-deserved recognition. She has literary credentials under her belt. But it’s a rough modern day book market for anyone. In spite of all her experience and wisdom, she’s afraid of lack of commercial publication. She thinks somehow her book may not sell, and flop. Or simply create its own niche market, and sell a few thousand copies over time, years and years.

  When she is upbeat, she thinks she can land a literary agent and sweep the country and the world (maybe the Universe!) with her book. I wish she could read the writing I have been doing faithfully every day in my journal, the diary of Annie Chapman, fatal Lady of the Night. No, I’m not that romantic, but I did write all this down over time, days and weeks, including the last bit I’m scrawling in my bed while waiting for “him.”

  Yes, she will read it, because something good told her to. Or something good told her not to. She will read books and get somewhere and she will write this epitaph for me, for Annie Chapman’s grave. Dr. King did not understand what we had been through, but Ralph Ellison did. Ellison was not shot in the back for what happened to us – and Dr. King apparently was shot in the back in an effort to convict murderers of other people. It worked, and his allowed murder helped against the violence of death.

  In which case, I suppose Dr. King gets his “revenge” for being shot instead of stabbed, for being a man instead of a woman, for having a crowd when I was alone. Do I thus get something for going on living, and for reaping the benefits of what he bestowed? And did he reap the benefits of getting to die, namely helping to end racism? I ponder such deep questions.

  Even now, I also blur the line between me and Annie, because when I read the Jack the Ripper book, I was afraid. I sort of entered the schizophrenic “I and I” mystique of the Ripper Murders, feeling like two people; one me, the other with some stranger feelings. So I told something of a “tall tale.”

  The true lady murdered in her bed, over eight hours to three weeks of hideous time, was not Annie Chapman. That’s why this was a fictionalized account. I didn’t quite tell you the entire truth. The lady found in her bed was actually Catherine Eddoes, an entirely different Ripper victim. And I gave Annie, who had black hair and fair skin, the brown hair and probably freckled features of Catherine Eddoes.

  I was seventeen years old at the time I read their stories. As my name is Karen, and I have brown hair and freckled skin, I was too “freaked” to use the other lady’s name. My name of Karen is a derivative of the name of Catherine, which means “purity”; another strange coincidence – like “Chapman” and “Whitechapel” – as Eddoes’ life and death were almost purely sad, miserable and evil.

  I decided to not identify with anything but a combination of the two victims, to put myself at a safe distance from the murders. One of them had died indoors, and the other had died in the cold and heartless streets, found somewhere in an alley, out in the bitter cold. That was the real, dark haired, well-figured Annie Chapman. The woman who died in a room – but perhaps over three weeks – was entirely someone else, Catherine Eddoes.

  Near my name, near my face, near my skin; what did that mean? Was I condemned to die? I settled down swiftly and read further, but a part of my mind entered “I and I” – and has never quite escaped. It wasn’t much later that the strange man tried to make me get into his car, a man who later turned out to kill another girl who attended my school. After that, my Mexican boyfriend tried to kill me with a knife, and I escaped; then there was the 1986 incident. At least three times, I have almost been killed violently by men with knives; why, I do not know.

  So I substituted another Ripper victim, Annie Chapman, whose poor and sexually abused body was found in a doorway outside, or in an alley somewhere. The Ripper didn’t harm her as badly as he did Catherine Eddoes, perhaps because Annie Chapman did not have freckles or dark skin. It is a mystery to this day. Annie’s pretty face and lovely black hair are visible in a photograph and not as badly deformed as Catherine Eddoes, who was literally cut to ribbons over time. The sewn together features of Catherine reveal patches of darkness, but she’s very hard to see.

  Epitaph for Annie, Catherine, the others – & Jack:

  So this story is a kind of a fictional epitaph for Annie Chapman. She has her new and beautiful well-appointed grave after much effort by others on her behalf, somewhere in England, where it is right and proper to bury a young woman who only fell to an impoverished profession. As in the case of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Mrs. Coretta Scott King, they took a while to figure out exactly where to bury “our” Annie.

  So I have written this story, hidden away in the back of a long piece on my Google blog, perhaps to be read by no other eyes than mine.

  It is so long, it is a novelette. I may go ahead and combine it with other related stories, and make a full scale novel out of the tales I have written: stories of Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddoes, and Dr. Jack “the Ripper” Reinhardt; Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X Shabazz; possibly Stan “the Man” Lee; and of all people, “The Bateman.”

  It’s enough material to make a solid novel.

  Meet the Blended Us:

>   It may never be seen by other human eyes than hers. It will only be seen by I and I. Annie Chapman and Karen S. Cole will see these words together, and someone will think I wish I had done a better job portraying the most exploited white women in the world, but I think there have been other such people, a googolplex number of them, indeed. They all wanted to do something about the “World’s Worst Murder,” really they did.

  Well, there have been worse deaths, the on the field soldier Nazis notably died quite a few of them, as they were oft large individuals and it took them some time to kick off, and so forth. And of course your own death has to always be the worst of all. You have to suffer through that eventually, it will vary from person to person, and who knows? And there are the people the Nazis dumped alive into the crematoriums, and piled upon blazing fires. God only knows who in human history has died the worst possible death. That’s what the story of Jesus Christ was for; get you to believe someone else would perform that onerous task for you, namely Jesus Christ.

  Do not try to get someone else to die for you. They never will be able to do that, and unfortunately, in a world full of schemes, dreams and ideas, both the lucratively and romantically minded brands of erstwhile fools will try to do something like that. And fools like me will daydream that someone else was shot in the back to save her own life later, so she could save someone else’s, a black lady’s, a life that was near and dear to Dr. King’s heart.

  For the world has its many parallel coincidences, and to die for someone else will always be – strangely enough – one of them. Jesus Christ cannot die your death for you; someone else might die to save you at some point in time. It’s strange, but we’re stuck doing that for each other, sometimes. They say it happens every day, in parallel universes, on street corners, and perhaps even in dark and infamous British alleys. Such are my dreams, and also my nightmares. But I prefer to dream of life being good, than to nightmare about it being evil. I dream of a different path to follow.

  I dream that Brother Malcolm X Shabazz would be happy my pagan family got the insurance money to buy our house, especially since my family is now Philippine and mostly brown skinned. And I dream that Catherine Eddoes, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and the other Jack the Ripper victims reached out to save my life from their graves, by letting me know what murder is: irreparable, impossible to escape once its too late – but not unstoppable. And finally, I dream of a Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – who bravely and purposefully laid his life down to end murders not unlike mine – on an all too often imitative, and all too soon over with, exotic, quixotic, and altogether sometimes pleasant – sometimes unpleasant – ant farm.

  Rest in Peace, Catherine Eddoes. Remain beautiful forever, Annie Chapman. Be avenged by the Thames River, Elizabeth Stride, the two “Marys,” and the other four victims of the world’s first major serial killer, Dr. Jack “the Ripper” Reinhardt. And stop being imitated, Jack!

  THE END

  Editor’s Note: Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, AKA “the Walrus,” MD, revealed the probable identity of Jack the Ripper was a doctor acquaintance who was dying of sexual diseases, whom everyone knew fornicated with corpses, namely Dr. Jack Reinhardt. Doyle wrote of shaking his hand and laughing with Reinhardt over something hideous to do with killing people. Doyle could be overtly meaningful about death sometimes, and mostly wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories to capitalize on the crimes being committed; but what else can I say about myself? I laugh when I’m nervous, too.

  Anyway, Dr. Doyle knew it simply had to be Dr. Reinhardt. Jack was “Jack.” The man simply had too much experience dissecting cadavers, and that was obvious from the position the victims were found in and the shape and manner of their murders; they were just like dissections of corpses, showing a doctor’s knowledge of human anatomy and physical characteristics. The book I read said he probably threw himself into the Thames to keep from dying of venereal diseases. A fitting end. That may be why nobody bothered to turn him in for his crimes, including Doyle. Reinhardt probably even confessed to Doyle. He had nobody else as friends but his fellow doctors. So if you trust the author of the “Sherlock Holmes” canon of sixty stories – and his own intuition about who the Ripper was – now you know!

  Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a worldwide professional copy writers, book authors, ghostwriters, copyeditors, proofreaders, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and analysts’ service. We also do presentation and pitch services for your book and/or screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.

  The Incredible Transition of Dr. King

  One long short story – or perhaps a novelette

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 12,000

  Having to contemplate the meaning of the word “colored” was once a social issue for certain famous Americans, who promoted civil rights as their primary political cause. Colorful and lively is what they were often forced to become, in order to help their kind of people become more welcome in American society as they sojourned away from black and white racial segregation.

  The arts, music and theater gained from the addition of remarkable talent from these hallmarks of American and world society, who felt they had to prove themselves in a world which was capable of killing or incarcerating people solely due to their skin color. Racial segregation was definitely the road to extreme enforced injustice as the only alternative for not granting people their full civil, legal and human rights, so these people wanted to make sure their attainments were not in vain, and that they taught people racial equality.

  “The Movement” is an umbrella term for all kinds of people gaining and exercising all kinds of human rights. This is sort of their partial and jumbled story, as told by me. It covers some of racism, sexism, disability rights, gay rights, and God knows what else. It’s set in a cross between “the sixties” and modern times. The pitfalls of cigarette smoking also figure in.

  The one uniting factor is the Civil Rights Movement. I came along much later – when it comes to the major problem with this story, namely lots to write about, I had to “fictionalize” everything. I spent years as a personal care attendant for the disabled, working for black, brown and white people, in dozens of peculiar and challenging situations. It was difficult but rewarding. However, this story mainly concerns a pair of civil rights workers you may have heard of before: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King.

  Dr. King has to be Dr. Queen, etc., in case somehow I’m accidentally “racist,” to make me be more “controversial,” and also because of “libel and slander” laws. It’s a serious matter. I don’t believe I’m entitled to ever use those two real people, who are both now deceased, as fictional characters. Instead, I’m going to use fictional “people” loosely based on them, and thank them profusely for being “my purple godparents.” I know it’s okay to write factual accounts using real people, and a lot of what I mention in this story are facts about Dr. King and his wife, but this is highly fictionalized. Not everything I say herein holds true about them. I’m breaking or bending a few rules to write this, so please bear with me.

  You are the judge, gentle reader. You will see what you think of the below. But first, grab yourself a tall glass of lemonade, as this is definitely going to be somewhat a long winded – short term adventure in reading.

 

  MEET ONE MAN NAMED MICHAEL KING:

 

  That was the original nomenclature of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His Dad tried to rescue mankind by bestowing a title on his son, and on himself as well. He named them both after Martin Luther, the white founder of Protestantism, who wanted to rescue people several centuries ago. Such a rescue may not be an option nowadays, in the time of Global Warming and worldwide uncertainties about race and religion.

  Believe it or not, this is all excusable background
for the main story below, which is largely about racism and the supernatural. But this digression is over for now. I have to now talk about my purple African “godparents.” I have to thank them, trust me.

  They are mysteriously appearing in an extravagantly well appointed, but “seedy” and “cheap” hotel room somewhere. They are from the past, and currently no longer exist. They both died, spaced centuries apart, at least to one of them. “Dr. Queen” was shot and killed, and his widow had to go on without him. But in my story, they get to play a little “catch up” with each other, for a change.

  It had to do with certain circumstances. How does one thank such people? How does one even attempt to know them? My ignorance, and your innocence, dictates this. What can I say to people to whom I may owe my life?

  May we enter their life story somehow, and be right there with them?

 

  @@@@@@@

 

  One night, a celebrated chocolate man decided something had gone wrong with his entire set of circumstances, and his wife did, too. Out of nowhere, they had melted into an extremely hot scenario — like unearthly large horizontal giants on a hotel bed.

  One of them, not being altogether fat, having the build of a boxer, was strikingly virile and handsome with his little mustache to the point where one’s mind would be boggled. He was relaxing on “never his own bed” looking at a black and white hotel television, lying down prone and relaxed after a hard day of walking and terse interviews. He was sprawled but composed on top of the pilled and soiled covers, which had seen lots of use and wear, but were still elegantly shiny and soft to the touch.

  For some reason, a disgruntled look slowly crossed his dark, plump, beautiful – manly, perhaps not at all lovely to some – Negroid facial features. A quizzical, bemused grin crinkled the corner of one sleepy but slanted dark, large brown eye. And then a look of raw, unadulterated joy melded through all of his deeply brown facial features.

  For you see, the black Negro man on the bed had ended up with what was once the most precious and prized ownership problem of our proto-nuclear age — the TV remote control. He cradled it, firmly enclosed in his massive brown hand. He intelligently scanned the television screen, squinting with a gimlet eye at what he saw on it. None of it was familiar.

  The man knew one of his black eyes looked eerily Asiatic, especially his right one. The staleness of the surrounding air permeated his brain as the cig smoke seeped away from his fingertips. He knew the room, one of many in which he had practically been living, was smoke-filled. Over the years, ash had seeped into the walls, permeating and blackening the wrinkled fabric of the room’s wallpaper. He had guarded himself from the awful effects for millennia, perhaps.

  He often wondered why people smoked, being the victim of second-hand dust since before he was born. Both the sandy plains of equatorial Africa and the non-pleasurable smoke of industrial America had clotted his darkening, sighing pink lungs. “Rod Sterling” appears briefly and says: For you see before you a man going almost completely and quietly insane, both with and without his quite desirable woman.

  She’s not around him as much as he’d like her to be. Normally, he lets his stress out at the camera. His wife does not have much to tell people ordinarily, at least not what he wants to say. She’s right there beside him, but could be killed at any given time. She’d rather, seemingly, pour his coffee and serve him his food. Or would she? To wonder about this is not unusual for her. She took classes at her school so many long years ago on how diseases were the main reason they were in this predicament, stuck whiling their time away in hotel rooms. The classes had informed her of why their lives were a color-coded obscenity. The “better people” had to be kept healthy. It was “natural law.”

  While he’s watching TV, you also see this elegant man studying an “Eventide Zone” episode, realizing meanwhile that he must die shortly. He’s “known” by the FBI – who may have doctored all of the tapes on him – to have one of the world’s most wanton sex lives, asking both men and women to be “his” for a brief period of time. This is perhaps because he’s destined to die young, and wants to live it up. Or it’s because audio tapes are easy to change, especially those run by your enemies.

  He also wants to not bend over backwards to make himself look unapproachable – like “colored wouldn’t dare do that.” He’s a Negro. He thinks in his darker moments that he’s only headed nowhere, or at least somewhere not so wonderful.

  He gets stressed out about that sometimes, to the point of appearing paranoid. He fears intensively that most people see his four ghostlike “kids” as giant African animals that need slaughtered. To try to prove the naysayers and bigots wrong, our hero is in full dress, a business suit as it were, sometimes called a monkey suit, and is beginning to deeply indent the scratchy, prickly box spring mattress of many an ancient lost love. He has actually spent time with both boys and girls in his prime, not having sex but somewhat getting them into obtuse trouble due to the violent events at his political protests.

  The political protests were to get those children their full legal and civil rights back, stolen from them when they were hauled away from Africa to America. But this usually gentle man likes life and living, to the fullest when he can, to do everything a black man can do. A lot of white people would rather that he shut up and die, but he’s not very game for that. He doesn’t like being told what to do.

  His university self is watching a show on TV that he secretly liked, as it involved his special underground buddy, Rod Sterling. He could relate to the short, dark, intense white man on it, who was artful and clever and told him a good, moral story most of the time. It was fun for a change back there, when he gritted his teeth and turned away, to watch. Well, Freddie Hitchcock was good for an in-joke as well. Both Rod and Fred promoted white male death interests enough to morbidly fascinate Dr. Queen, who generally liked the news and sports far more than any TV fiction story.

  Yet the man we see before us also had a good story to tell. He had formed up the Montchapel Bus Boycott, to make sure Negro people didn’t have to ride solely in the far back of a city bus. Alabama was – however – not the only place with such problems. In the Seattle Metropolitan area, the buses clearly indicated where “colored” should sit with brown trim around the back windows. What could this be but an unspoken BM reference, even that far north? What being shuffled off to Buffalo would that mean, if it kept up forever, with black people being told they were made of s–t?

  Why spend life as a chute joke? It made no sense to him. Maybe gay sex was okay, but not being “lost,” out in public as the world’s foremost representative of human manure. Nothing was Christian about that – nada.

  Sideways slides the black and white camera – Rod Sterling, with his usual slouching class, slips upright in with the following words: For you see, the man on the bed is electronically color-coded to die in advance by history itself, and he doesn’t know why. It’s his fate, written in the stars and planned by many others, although his final destination remains unknown. Some onlookers, noticing his name, have rather inquisitional plans for him. He keeps surrounded by an entourage, rather like the President, to protect him from being snatched away and burned alive at the stake.

  He knows his name is coincidentally Martin, and that he’s destined to die a martyr. He knows he is the king of a most peculiar kingdom, not unlike “The King.” Elvis was his own brand of a soul singer, but thought of as a white man. Michael, otherwise named Martin, disgruntledly accepts the fact of his own “niggerization” by nearly everyone who must continue their strange color-coded way of life.

  Almost everyone seems to be a believer in Jesus, God and the Afterlife. Michael believes he’d like his kids to go on living, even if they eventually become white someday. Dr. Queen is there to ensure that they will grow up, even if he himself does not “make it to the Promised Land.” Who needs it?

  He shares in a wonderful African American subculture, but his own version of it is studious
ly religious and arrogantly bombastic in its peculiar style. He is his own behemoth of paranoia. In a jovial way, he knows that, but doesn’t laugh at himself. Even if he grew large as the planet Jupiter, he wouldn’t break so much as a smile on certain occasions. He had to go down in history as an angry young man, not one who “got the joke.”

  That would be to give into a belief with which he has no accord. And that is why he must now enter The Eventide Zone. For indeed, without a jester, a king, and a kingdom…is there even truly a jest? – The camera then zooms away from Sterling, focusing on a black night of sparkling white stars.

 

  THE INCREDIBLE TRANSITION OF DR. QUEEN

 

  No man is truly a queen until he puts on a woman’s dress. Martin Queen, on the other hand, never notably did so. The head of the FBI was a noted transvestite, but no, not our hero. J. Edward Hoover once tried to get Dr. Queen to suicide by “telling” on him to his wife, who got quite a chuckle out of that. As Dr. Queen lay on his hotel bed, he bemusedly wonders what the attraction is to women’s clothing, but decides he likes it better on Coletta, who was quite a voluptuous pinup girl in her day.

  Instead, he thinks to himself how the color-coded nonsense where his people have to sit or eat or live in seedy, cheap places has to do with how things are organic or inorganic, as he’s been involved deeply with his college of supposed choice. He was fourteen when he began attending it. His whole life was laid out before him, in spite of the hard work, and he had to go to that particular accredited and acclaimed Negro oriented school.

  At fifteen, he breezed through his white oriented paperwork. His graduate thesis in college was a work of artifice, not art, as he had plagiarized it – he could have done his own work, but was in a great hurry. His speeches, lowest common denominator to reach the masses, were written largely by his fellow ministers. He is however a fully accredited minister in the Baptist Church, able to marry people legally, or lecture them about the twin devilries of racism and classism, either.

  But he’s not really able to attain the Presidency, as many people want him to; the separation of church and state precludes this. Being kept from other high social positions by white people caused this problem, where a Christian minister must “pine” for death and not for life. And he knows the hotels he’s staying at are no longer cheap. Racial segregation had led to an impasse, where many “colored” commodities were getting to be as good as or better than their “white” counterparts – such as jazz music.

  But as he lies there on the bed, his life is running through his head, as a kind of demolished motion picture show. He’d had to fake his own resume to prove he wasn’t scared of going to Hell when he died, as white people liked to accuse them of that by literally putting them there. He had to face it down as a civilized white man, by being unafraid in the face of certain death, and worse yet, he enjoys doing it that way for others. Sometimes. Mostly, he figures his end will come from gunshot wounds.

  Everywhere he’d been at his brief college, a tacky red carpet was splayed out for him. Most of his friends seemed to be other Baptist ministers. And he did attend to the great place’s more esoteric science classes, where they’d taught him racism was part of human nature. He really liked to think he had written a good thesis proclaiming loudly against those “Natural Laws” where he wasn’t allowed to marry the wife he’d chosen. According to racial supremacists, his fair-skinned Coletta wasn’t allowed to so much as exist. A beautiful young lady, she’d done more for the Civil Rights Movement than most people knew about, while still remaining faithfully wed to her dark-hued gentleman.

  But he is wearing velvety black skin, he was my “knight in shining armor” you see, and he is feeling sleepy, large and queasy because he hears his wife preparing him dinner in the kitchen suppinette. They had hiked around town by themselves for a lark, without their entourage, and picked up some lovely casual food at an Asian grocery store. This hotel room at least had a cooker and a fridge, not to mention a cigarette machine. An extremely prominent grayish one – it stood in the hallway outside their room and had a silvery top – which was always cleaned off. The colored/black lady maid had also visited their room that morning, and all was in tip top shape for them.

  But the black Negro man, not being an animal, doesn’t feel like he has to work hard for a living. He’s been plugging away at words all his life. He feels a bit lazy at the present moment. Maybe even sleazy. How had he done a damn fool thing right? He was stuck thinking this to himself earlier as he punched the cigarette machine with one plump index finger, receiving a pack of Marlboros. Usually he doesn’t smoke.

  He appears slightly guilt ridden as he slinks down the hallway. He knows I don’t know if he even smoked. He knows my parents smoked. And he knows, while lying there, all about me. He had seen the black and white episode on TV in his hotel room, on Sterling’s show. Twice, now. Why? And far more familiar to him was the look of the people on the show, in ways that none of them should have been familiar to him. Why, he muses to himself, do I know about this stranger who is haunting my head? The drug certainly works; he gags, as he balls up one fist. But the childish cough he was going to withstand filters away. He is stalking slowly, slowly back to the bed, while carrying the cigs he bought.

  In the prior Eventide Zone episode, the one Martin viewed originally, he had seen my father cruelly teasing me into running into my bedroom. I was white, and so was my father. But I was not entirely white. My father had run after me screaming what he was “gonna” do to me. I had ended up under my bed – scrunched up against the wall. My father obviously tried to not lift up the bed to tear me to pieces. He scrabbled under the bed with one arm. He then finally left. Later – I found a little black hole in the wall – and had disappeared into it momentarily. I stayed in the hole to escape my violent father, in case he came back. I emerged unscathed after a long, long while.

  He was someone whom I dearly loved. Maybe I had been a bad girl, to get fat and all. And I had wished someone could find me in the tiny hole and save me. No one seemed to have done so. And my father was harmed psychologically by the misery of having lost me forever. That is because, in the episode as seen by Dr. Queen, I’d permanently vanished. It wasn’t so much “the poor girl” got through it: I’d disappeared away completely. When my father came back in the first episode, I was gone forever.

  Funny thing was, in the newer episode Dr. Queen was watching, the ending had changed. The little girl was not lost, and had ended up elsewhere. And the entire episode was now in color, very realistic color at that. Dr. Queen wondered when the hotel had managed to install color TV in their room. He pinched himself and felt a slight “pang,” and so knew he wasn’t dreaming. He had thrown the open packet of cigs down on the night stand near him.

  The black man, lounging around on the well-appointed soft bed, sighs to himself about the episode. It’d reminded him about something stupid in his own upbringing, which he had both liked and disliked. His father was a yeller, and had been an occasional “curser.” It wasn’t such a nightmarish upbringing as the little girl’s had been. No one had been around his small but sophisticated home, jotting all down on a reporter’s notepad. Instead he recalled family and friends, almost a worthy life that implied greater living to be, if he could get the others moving in time.

  But cameras have been around him frequently lately, and the black Negro man feels like he has become pretty much only a personal media circus. Would anything he has done mean anything real to someone, his own human history? Would it matter if he died in public, or in private? He didn’t want to die, or make it look like he liked dying. He’d rather work – hard.

  He honestly doesn’t even know what the Godlike reason is why he’s stuck working for a living, so often away from his family, giving odd speeches here and there. He has a doctorate in the religious sciences, and wishes he was able to answer all of those theosophical questions. He knows the whole thing is a political setup for men to use to manipulate others’ mi
nds. But he’s a phantom stranger who uses big words indeed – such as philanthropist and egalitarian – and perhaps lethargic toad. But at least, he muses to himself, I use that about weirdoes and not myself.

  The phrase “hopeless romantic” also comes to mind. He is stuck forever trying to write a perfect speech, as he must “dumb” them all down. Stuff like the “I Have Dreams” speech was written by an obscure third party, most of it taken from a speech by a fellow minister. And all of his actions, including the wiser ones, are questioned by everybody.

  He is trying to get some well-deserved rest while lodging around, a sniper gun sight could spy his bulky figure through the dirt streaked window one foot away from his bed, and he hears noises outside that don’t belong to him. He’s very anti the Viet Nam War. He knows communist Africa could attack the United States through the atom bomb. One of the colored motels he was going to stay at was recently bombed, probably by the Ku Klux Klan. He is a pacifist, but gets angry enough to kill people sometimes.

  Whether or not he ever “punched out” white women is not known. Some people said he used church money to buy “loose” girls, and then beat on them. It was the infamous “Marquis de Sade” claim. Lonely on the road, he had seen black hookers, according to his minister friends. They said he was nothing but absolutely gracious with them. Now Coletta was with him – at his side for a change, but so what?

  I have a dream, he thinks to himself. Good line for a great speech, by an absolutely phony white man. I’ll never be one, he muses. He has his own self-doubt all nailed. He drifts off for a few moments and subsequently has the strangest actual dream as he snores profoundly on the bed: a decade after a gigantic herd of colored Africans and other myriad minority groups have defended humanity through the leading philosophy of being peaceful warriors, a small passel of white wheelchair people, all disabled, learn how to get Seattle’s Metro buses reequipped with proper wheelchair lifts. They are thus able to get their civil rights that way – mainly, the right to spontaneously ride the bus, without it being a “planned trip.”

  As some of them must go out, or perhaps die along the way, they need to get on the bus. Every other transit option is a hard to arrange trip. No spontaneity. The disabled people have to fill an independent living need, even if it involves white women deliberately falling off the first misguided attempts at wheelchair lifts. One of them did go ahead with that, and she managed to live through the hospital stay later. If she were here, she would say that being alive is the best way to go – but one must risk death for a good reason. It’s better than waiting to die of a head cold.

  How do they do that, in Michael’s dream? The original “folding camel” lifts on the buses are lousy. Wheelchair people might get hurt on them, especially little old ladies. So the younger disabled radicals boldly risk their lives purposefully pointing out how faulty the lifts are by riding them the wrong way. One, John Tyler, is my 350 pound weighing radical black haired white Indian hero man. He successfully breaks one of the faulty lifts. The guy has polio and is seriously disabled, and dropping like that is extremely hard on him – and anyone else, if it happened accidentally.

  The new lift company then puts the right lifts on the buses. Those “jobbers” hold up to 1000 pounds and have solid metal flaps on the rims of the lifts to ensure your personal safety. And disabled women were involved in the attempt to make sure the lifts didn’t support “worthless” life forms. One of the ladies apparently deliberately fell off the folding camel lift, once. Basically, when you gotta go, you gotta go. But fortunately, she lived through it. Gee, I wish I was that kind of brave.

  Anyway, I come along. I’m the girl as the personal care attendant for one of these brave wheelchair people, a male handsome Jew who is the son of two Austrians who fled the Holocaust, and I help ensure the buses are properly ridden once the wheelchair person is strapped in. I have to do battle during this time with white male bus drivers who want to strap in the wheelchair people improperly.

  I was the little “white” girl who disappeared through the hole in the wall to avoid her white male father. I manage later to not disappear and hide. I calmly end up accepting having to strap people in while being “bugged” by those drivers, until they learn how to do it right. Their argument is that disabled folks “can go ride in the vans.” Some of them drove vans for the disabled, and I made friends with one such driver, so in general they weren’t actually that discourteous.

  Nonetheless, I make sure my Jewish fiancée is strapped into a slot on the bus, with what used to be airplane cargo straps from Boeing. It works. Later on, we get married in Golden Gardens Park in Seattle, near Ballard Locks, through a hippie wedding. Both sets of our parents and all our living relatives and friends are there. It’s quite a mixed rainbow crowd of different skin colors and religions, white men and disabled folk alike. Our catering is Matzo Mamas’ cold cuts and cheeses combined with my family’s hot dogs and hamburgers — plus potato salad. It’s a virtual smorgasbord. Ron and I are wearing Hawaiian shirts, and it’s a lot like a luau too.

  Dr. Queen, feeling relaxed, hungry and happy, finds he’s applauding away at a great distance of deep, sleepy space and time. Largely, he’s trying to fight the image off. The wedding looks mostly like white people. As he turns to Coletta, he wakes up, as the dream ends with many black disabled people not being able to ride the bus. These are guys like him with no lives of their own. No women to marry, no way to make children. No real job they’ll be allowed to work, no real place to go. They’re stuck living at United Cerebral Palsy Residential Center, working for Boeing, putting together machine parts and not being able to work for an honest living.

  And yet, they all need to ride the bus. It would get them out – help them look through a window. The whole entire situation robs them of anything like true dignity, and what they need is to learn to read – mainly. They’re stuck in a strange existence until something gets done. They need to help themselves. Unfortunately, none know if they can. What is the meaning in such a life, you might ponder? I have been away from those black men for so long, maybe somebody has done it, and they are at least riding the buses at long last.

  The black man on the bed can barely think. Deep sleeplessness…it will be affecting her again. She was always lovely, but he had noticed her looking extra bedraggled today. She needed something real. Something good in her life, some way better she could feel.

  “Coletta, are you ready for this? Something is coming across on the TV that didn’t belong to Sterling. I remember the previous episode — and this is not the same one in any way, shape or format. Some such is way wrong, and it’s happening, my dear mother goddess. Do you suppose we can do anything about it? HMMMMM!?!?!”

  He stormily threw an unusually level gaze at her, but glanced away. He was always afraid of his own arrogance with her. But she looked back at him without any fear in her face. All that ran through both their minds was: we could use a vacation, not more utter nonsense in our lives. Instead, now we have to hear from the supernatural.

  “Well,” she said dryly, her throat parched with smoking the cigs and the surrounding arid atmosphere, “I suppose we can die at it, handsome, but is that all we’re going to do — given this?” Is that all there is, she meant. She regained her composure, stretching out on the bed in a luxurious business suit of sorts, one that cannot be described herein but as very lovely in the dark, and yet quite wretched. It was relatively expensive and grey, but rumpled somewhat.

  For you see, she had been about town, and her feathers, as her man knew, were completely ruffled. She relaxed assiduously on the bed, and reclined. “Yes, you’re right.” She snuggled next to him. She knew something weird was set for the premises. A sudden heat wave had been drying everyone up, even black people. She is staying the day with him in the middle of a dreadful summer, somewhere in Mississippi, where the summers are usually heat drenched. It is her time with him, found on the run, when they could get together and be.

  Something is certainly melting
in their mutual intellectual heavens, and as the two spontaneous detectives are learning, there was nothing right on television. Doctor Queen is flipping through several channels at once. He keeps punching the remote with his thumb, wondering why they had what appears to be cable television. He knows that in 1967 or 1968, although the exact year they’re in was weirdly escaping him, all they have is the ability to manually change the channels. The TV is set up for manual, not automatic transmission. He suddenly recalls it was supposed to be 1968, and he has an eerie feeling something monumental has already happened.

  Dr. Queen doesn’t know what they are watching, but he and Coletta had certainly come across something new. What was going on, really, that didn’t involve bombings, dead people and having a color-coded name? It’s a little hot outside, the weather. Steamy, sultry, Mississippi mysterious. The television is full of the war coverage, and local news, sports and weather, but it’s not right. It is all from the future, which is getting to be pretty obvious. The war is being held in Iraq and the Middle East, not Vietnam and Southeast Asia. They both wonder if cig smoking, rare for them, has anything to do with this particular mystery switch.

  Much earlier, back when everything was still normal, they had seen an unusual sight. Two perfectly white cigarettes had been laid out by someone on the small and dingy plastic table next to their hotel room bed. They had obviously been set up by and for someone else, who had roomed there and left. Yet they’d seemed briefly inviting. Both Dr. Queen and his Coletta had broken down briefly, had decided to enjoy life, and had lit up.

  They felt themselves drifting back and forth in time, between the past and the present, with a feeling that the future cannot be far behind . . . the not-so-fat man gets uncomfortable, and breaks the silence. “Hey, Mommy Dearest there, what do you think? How about exploring outer space without all those Chinese veggies between our teeth?” He neatly flicked away the leftover part of his burnt down cigarette. “Did you unpack our toothbrushes? What do you say? Let’s go exploring. The last thing we were ever responsible for was Vietnam. Or these bed bunks, sweet as they almost are. I honestly think the war is the reason they want to kill us. Some of us are even Muslims, you know, their old enemies.

  “Did white people do this? It’s like something out of Ray Bradbury – all of a sudden, we’re in the future. Something tells me we have to go somewhere else…and it won’t necessarily be a better place…”

  He smiles at her. Is there any other soul out there who thinks Africa was maybe the original pits? Heavy duty heat. Dr. Queen thinks, I don’t always like being me, but I’m all we’ve got. I don’t want to go back there, never. “What is going on? They expect someone listening to them as they rant and rave about Heaven and Hell. Africa was Hell, but this USA is the Heaven, you know…?”

  Coletta is silent. She likes silence, but has a degree in something else. “You know there’s no God, we are their God, and we did leave the planet earlier. Whoops, lack of sleep.” She brushes her hair back with one long light brown finger, which is perfectly polished. She glares at the finger, realizing it wasn’t all that red and gorgeously shiny previously.

  She tiredly spurts, “Yes, something is wrong with one who signifies nothing. Perhaps it is me, perhaps it is you, Mr. Flirt, and perhaps it is the weather…” A hole in the wall diner appears in both of their minds. One of her “other kids” had agreed to meet them there. Their Johnny was like a son to them, but was also someone else’s child. The media of late had made a fuss out of how he had children out of wedlock. How quaint, Coletta sighed, considering that any unwed reporter could be so picky.

  Coletta is sighing as she is lying there, sweating mildly. It is so hot. Love with her man is stolen on the fly. Why, this room doesn’t have a fan, she thinks. She slowly drags her hand down his sizeable business suited chest, thinking things don’t change in a thousand years. “Yes, they are into watching us. Why do we in particular attract all of that attention from the European Inquisition? That’s all the KKK ever will be. It is the most curious ideal I’ve ever heard of – that YOU PEOPLE can go to Hell.”

  She smiles, meaning why does the Klan attack colored people: blacks, Indians, Jews, Chinese, and whoever? She had and hadn’t studied the history of it. Race wars tended to escape her as to having any realistic meaning to them.

  “We’re willing to be at peace with them. Why don’t they leave us alone? Why do they insist on f—–g us over, when they have f—–g themselves to blame?” Ladylike, Coletta coughs delicately into her curved hand. Everything they do they do for the FBI, which is constantly taping them back there in the 1960s, where they belong. A record is being made of their every other action, in an attempt to arrest them for breathing.

  “Yes, Coletta, you simply overuse their words. We are not even creatures of cussing, really. Some days I feel like a closet imitation white man. We able bodied Africans will simply never get it…cannibalism. I suppose it freaks out their mental abilities. They simply MUST cannibalize us, because they have figured out that we are cannibalistic electronic color-coded parts, lost in the mechanisms and machineries of time, don’t you think? And we do have sex…?

  He gently and sweetly strokes her thick, luxuriantly pomaded black hair. They had four children, in a way, maybe more out there somewhere, but enough was enough. Coletta frowns at him summarily. “No, we don’t. Not in front of them. We are going to look for that hole in the wall, starting now. Get up, old dog, don’t go for the liquor as you never do that, and we don’t have any in here. I am dragging you to that wall if you don’t get out of bed,” she snarled, with angry words jerked from her melting mind.

  Sometimes she felt inwardly peeved, when she thought her husband was doing all the damned work. She did help out from time to time, and was on several important committees. But now this: a strange little almost white girl wanted rescued from death at the hands of her overlord white father, whom Coletta could see screaming at her. She is hot, tired and doesn’t want to respond to any such rescue requests. She instead glances down at the cigs pulling their own suck on the bedside table. Smoke curls and wafts up inches from where they lay. Something seems mildly different about the nature of the smoke. Is it only tobacco? It hadn’t tasted quite right.

  Coletta finally figures out that it was, well, probably weed. She slowly perceives that the almighty suction device of babyhood has something to do with it. For some reason, a person has “just got” to smoke, even though it causes lung cancer, whether it’s weed or tobacco. She had tried to avoid smoking, but we all have oral fixations. Yes, that was it. Then a certain disgruntled look slips across her silent face as everything goes black. Time sneaks away from the present as it fell back into the past. Falling, she reeled slightly from all of the hard work she had done before, giving one of her own public speeches – and she fainted, her head racing down to the very hard wooden floor.

  Dr. Queen’s muscular arms stoutly caught her. They were both standing upright, with Coletta’s supple heels clicking on the well-polished hardwood floorboards and Dr. Queen’s large men’s shoes firmly planted on his feet. For the first time ever, they realized how odd the perfect fit of them, how silent was the stranger who seemed to be guiding them.

  Their gold wedding rings had also been a perfect fit when they got married years ago, and their previously raw, uncomfortable feet were now encompassed in snug, patent leather shoes. This was a bit of a problem. Earlier, they both knew they had kicked off all four of their tight, expensive thick soled shoes. What were they doing still there, with their feet still encased in previously peeled off stockings? First their television set, and now this. It had been easy enough to change the channel, but it was a color TV set.

  Had they been smoking an illegal substance…was that stuff Mary Jane? Coletta knew her shoes had been grey soft toed walkers. Now they were black stiletto high heels, quite fashionable, but not what she’d been wearing a few minutes ago. This had something to do with the little girl, and the presumed hole in the wall from the TV show
.

  Earlier, they had been to a lovely old Chinese hole in the wall restaurant. Johnny had picked up the dinner for them. They’d eaten together and enjoyed it without cameras around everywhere, for a change. Now they were hungry again, for what reason their churning minds fathomed, must have something to do with the cigs being more powerful than they looked. But it had seemed so harmless to take a moment off. Dr. Queen’s face shifted into a wide, exotic African smile, the Black Cat.

  “I know…perhaps not enough, my darling, as I am an accredited genius, but I’ve the feeling we’re needed somewhere. It has to do with this mysteriously hot onset of weather. We are experiencing a Field Effect of sorts. I wonder if it’s at all because we are dark. Let us look for that hole in the wall now, before it closes up completely. We are definitely needed by something in there. Somebody else is facing death completely, and we are needed…someone,” he spurted out with a dry chuckle, “needs us off of cigarettes.

  “We’re supposed to not smoke them anymore. We were the university PhD crowd, nah, and she never understood us that profoundly. We are going there now, sugar, so come with me to the wall and let’s see if that hole is there. Courage? She says she has not her own life,” Dr. Queen smiled down at Coletta.

  He ended this speech with a gentle note as he stared at his reflection looking back at him through a woman, a real and light black woman. A lady of color – a colored lady. He gripped her hand tightly, swept one arm around her small waist, and practically dragged her through the wall. But they made it down the brief unlit hallway to the little black hole in the wall – and were staring it over, as if waiting for it to speak. As they stood there, beads of salty sweat dropped from both their intent faces.

  One of them, with the guts and panache of a lion in what he thought of as the hollow, shabby body of a man, was caught trying to grimace the hole away. Surely it was only another death threat for his woman. One of the reasons his wife was not a “limelight” person was so she could live to take care of their children. Coletta looked surprised, felt hungry, and yet neither one of them could eat the small hole — nor did both know they could not.

  They were brutally overwhelmed by the simple fact they were starving. Yet life itself hinting around about food and drugs was not the answer. The cigs were way back there, and they were someone else entirely as they stared at the little black hole in the wall. Whatever was in the cigs not only clouded their brains, it made them think mainly of food alone. What that meant about how their universe had come unraveled was unknown.

  They felt the divine lift “cigs” could give them, and hated it. Yet at the same time – as the brief high dribbled away – they felt like someone was trying to thank them for something, and show them some gratitude. Someone, perhaps the little girl, was trying to give them as much assistance as she could. The drug high was to get them over it, and talk them permanently out of smoking. Dr. Queen filled his hefty chest with a clean breath of air, feeling grateful for that – but growing angrier by the second.

  “You’re…move,” he muttered with exceeding impatience. Coletta knew she wasn’t talking to him, and then something dawned on them both. Cigarettes and tobacco smoking had been invented by Native Americans, and that had something to do with what was now happening. Was it the Indians trying to tell them something through tobacco? A thank you for existing, for helping them too? They did not want to leave from their assigned task, or be poisoned by natives…as they were originally displaced Africans.

  Coletta had studied at her school how all humans had originally come from Africa. We had spread out, summarily becoming other racial groups. There was, however, another school of thought where humanity was separated into several species, meeting up again later.

  Were the Indians, or Native Americans, somehow an enemy of theirs whom they had discounted? Did this mean Cherokee or whatever tribal vengeance against them, where they had unknown victims due to hypocrisy? The black people marches for their civil rights – was it a mistake to base them on The Trail of Tears? Coletta gulped, recalling that for the Indians, the enforced long marches were much more like The Trail of Blood. Blown away Native American heads, bodies dropping by the roadside as the whites made them walk for hundreds of miles – was this some strange form of vengeance against them?

  “No,” she sighed decisively. “We Negroes didn’t make them do that. Long, death-defying fatalistic marches have occurred forever, all throughout human history. This is due to our inhalation of that idiotic drug. It must be pot. I’ve never been this hungry in my entire life.”

  The dark couple had accidentally broken down and smoked those two leftover perfect cigs, after they had a couple from the pack Dr. Queen had bought. Were they poisoned? What an idiotic assassination that would be. No cameras as they pitched to the floor in their final throes of restless death agonies. Dr. Queen harrumphed, and Coletta deeply bowed her head to such an obnoxious fate. She performed her own feminine glare.

  After a short pause, Dr. Queen spoke. “I know she’s needed, somehow, and only wants to thank us for being her alternating purple godparents, yet I do know that racism is a field effect that I studied back at that college in one of my science classes,” said Dr. Queen.

  The Right Reverend and all. Perhaps the nearest thing to God on the face of the planet was one proud and virtuously arrogant black man. “We must go vanish through that hole for a second and leave. Yet I know we will back out on this empty promise and broken dream that way. Shall we do either, or both? I assume we will risk not coming back. Yet our reality has been so disrupted, I don’t see how we have any kind of a choice.”

  “Colored, white, white, colored?” coughed and spat Coletta. “How they must keep us apart for fear of diseases, African and European, except when we exist at their sexual whimsy for the sake of the almighty dollar. What an empty place we must leave momentarily, my darling. Shall we do it, and show them we were Africans? Where does that obvious portal lead us to? Death?” She smiled at him, and he thought he saw the little girl he knew from her family photographs. “Perhaps the Klan has finally mastered further magic powers than wearing those sheets while riding horses – and appearing mysteriously at night.”

  “Should we take such a quaint leap in time, go through a purple hole or not, and see into such a future? They will never let us approach the arousing majesty of such an arresting moment, you know,” she sighed decisively. “They want to see us groping about sexually in public. We are too conservative for that…the Cotton Club and our entire culture aside. We were practically created to be left to our own devices.”

  Coletta’s thoughts faded away. It felt like someone was doing her thinking for her, but she realized she had her own private self-intact. She chuckled to herself inwardly. “This is not anything like ladies’ bridge night. I thought you said the worst thing that happened when you were alone was on the spot interviews about your views on the Viet Nam War and communism, and your strange position on . . .”

  “Well, Collie, as long as YOU feel brave,” cut off Martin, “We can play a game of detective work. What am I but the Batman’s Fatman? My growing fat is merely to survive the bullets, to speed the power of my elocution to help others, and because I already have you. We have been out in the open for quite a long time. The African veldt was stuffed with animals against us. Anything at all could come through that window over there,” stated the portly black gentleman as he stuffed a strange pocket watch out and put it back in.

  “I have a feeling we have to travel forward in time, and I do not know why, except to rescue that little girl. Surely you’re feeling particularly courageous?” As his wife was endangered, Dr. Queen did not feel much that way, so he thought to himself, posing a simple question to God. He was quite certain someone else was listening.

  Something next told him to examine himself from the outside in. As Dr. Queen looked down, he was puzzled. He could see his waistline, and he really didn’t feel as overweight as he had before. It was as if he was slowly shrinking back t
o his previously lean self.

  Coletta looked at him without that lost little girl look, and then sighed. “Those cigs are indeed a drug from Hell. I suppose we shall simply have to go back to where we belong, back to the future, back to the past, back to…where we must have come from.”

  “Hush up, Coletta, and let’s jump hoodoo the damn hole, now, lady.” He looked at her with a terrific smile on his lips. “We are simply needed elsewhere. So what’s wrong with taking a chance once in a while? We are the deadest ducks in all of human history. We’re Daffy Duck, we’re this, and we’re that – LET’S SEE IF IT’S REALLY THERE!!!”

  Even Coletta lurched back at the power and timbre of his mighty voice. But she was so used to him, she smiled as she did her favorite joke, waving in front of her face to make the breeze there go away. She was now Baptist too, like her husband, and forever elegantly so. Baptist means, let’s face hellfire, and brimstone, and actually get in a fight occasionally. The girl they were planning on rescuing was also Baptist – through her father’s East German side of the family.

  The woman outside the hole paused briefly and dreamed of lighting up another smoke. She had smoked before, and it had never given her so much trouble. Lung cancer, said a voice coming from somewhere. “I can handle a cigarette or two,” she told the air.

  Coletta fell silent. She realized deeply that making fun of racism was no fun, and felt mildly peeved at herself. The little girl, when grown up, had been misused by blacks, browns, and whites, and also well treated by them all. She had also miraculously saved the lives of a black woman and her two probable rapists by simply interfering with a house burglary, later when she had grown up. She had not only escaped the hole, she had become someone who was at least helpful to others.

  A feeling in Coletta’s head stated this, but said they were still needed somewhere – if they wanted to go. “Why not?” interrupted her proud husband’s stentoriously growl of a voice. “Don’t ever get that way, lady of mine, but I’m opening up this mystery hole with my barest hands. I’m going to jump into it alone. Unless you change your summarily untitled mind. I can’t stand being this curious any longer. Can you wait for me?”

  Coletta sneakily glared up at him. “God is but a boy, and I am only your girl,” she sweetly breathed. “I’ll jump too, because your real name is Mike King – my “Mikey.” I love you and always will, but you’re not leaving me behind, not this time.”

  It was malicious. Viciously mischievous of her. She untwisted her face into a pretty grin. “Do go jump first.” Ladies only of the evening do not do specific things. They are different – they get to be “hah yallow” and say stuff apparently, mused Dr. Queen. “No, and although I may be going first, we are jumping together,” sighed the large and portly Negro gentleman. He was now rather thin and attractive, and starting to feel both afraid and angry at himself. He also had a feeling they were being watched by strange people. Surely this new trickery could not end well for either of them.

  He hoped whoever it was would die more horribly than she would. He had loaded his letters to fellow ministers and certain public speeches with every word he could find that featured anything like the French term “Negro” in it. His speeches seethed with word bullets, right back at ‘em for enslaving and subsequently killing his kind, and robbing them of their freedom. Everyone in town was gunning for him – for fear of a terrible woman. My wife will always be my queen, he thought, no matter what happens. Melting, melting, is the Queen, melting, melting, so obscene.

  He bowed his head in seeming prayer, disguising his dark face. The hole was emanating a mysterious power of light that was screaming white people, weird spacey noises, and the scrambling of brains.

  It was so, even though he had always tried to temper his oratory with the depth and wisdom of human understanding. Even though watering down his speeches was needed, for the sake of masses who did not attend college, he had tried to include something which would not be so lowly in them. Children were what he had leaned on in his most famous speech. Airy fairy . . . children.

  All children everywhere are subject to the adult laws of chance. They don’t hold hands on a playground, and can’t ever be that way. “I knew that,” said the black Negro gentleman. “I was using Christian allegory.”

  Sterling cuts in sideways with: Is that enough digression for you? Dr. Queen finally pulled the wretched whole wide open with a jerk – and saw a suctioning dark vortex where it had been. It looked mysteriously like they’d get pulled into something unspeakable. He ground his capped white teeth slightly, didn’t feel like himself at all, and wilted at it.

  How could he protect his wife now, by being the one who died? They were both too proud to turn down entering the thing, and it might mean being lost somewhere forever, or worse. There had to be Hell to pay.

  The heat was building way up outside, and he seemed to be sweating too profusely. This was getting altogether worrisome. “I suppose I should smoke a cigarette at it and see if it does go away. Oh, it shall my darling, as I am an electronic component part of amazing humanity of the astonishing Eventide Zone that we are already in, so..?” With an arch smile, he cocked his large head at her quizzically. “Your move.” He realized even he couldn’t get the significance of this dreadful moment.

  What was on the other side of that infinite . . . hell hole? “So what?” was dragged out of Coletta, as she had obviously gotten nothing that she wanted out of life but him, who was her man, and a degree, and a fabulous party of some sort had been deeply appreciated. She was suddenly aware that it was fit for a queen, to be held some thirty-five years in the future. A jubilee. Her own Irish wake. And her children were all alive.

  Any such children were lost to the obscurity of the thing called history. She had graduated valedictorian from high school. She had breezed through college without much trouble. She had aced all of those classes. But she was extremely tired, and felt like she was gonna drop dead any second. And she had children. Oh, so many children to capture and shoot, like they were indeed foreign wildlife of sorts. White, black and brown children to strut before the camera in extremely disheveled nervousness.

  “Perhaps we are the very partiers, my king?” was what she finally said. “I am a Scott, you know, and it is obvious something is odd around these parts….” If what one needed was a true Scot of any sort. What was that? And what’s really the nature of the God Queen had studied? It or He made people suffer, not like a good God would, and then hideously canned the entire human race.

  Canned, as in forever, the human race? They both turned to stones of dour attention as they contemplated the infinite lack of meritritiousness of potential Hell. Bad feelings washed over them, breaking like painful waves on the shores of their worst doubts about life. Maybe they no longer had any reason to go on living. Life as they knew it was over.

  Hell itself, right before them, as if on the horizon of their own terrified doubts. There was something new in the world called Global Warming. The phrase came to both of them in a blinding split second. Calling them forth had happened again. Baptism by fire was happening again. They were being asked to do something straightaway about it, when nothing could be done, at least not by the studious pair of them. Who would do this?

  A future icon, they simultaneous realized – an ode to the future – called a disease free white person. That was the nature of the so-called God. Which Coletta knew was technically impossible. One has to digest one’s food. The little “white” girl was freckly – and not disease free, either.

  “Oh yes, the Ku Klux Klan. They are the ones who leave them scattered through the woods like so many lost limbs of brown trees . . . it must be her, on the other side,” Coletta finally stated decisively. “Let’s enter the hole, but I don’t want to at all. It would be so lesbian, so very thespian and I simply don’t do anything like that. I’m nervous, my dear! I thought of lesbianism. A voice told me Johnny would have problems with that. He wanted to not have a separate but equal marriage license for them
.” In real life, “Coletta” supported gay rights, as well as other left wing rights.

  “Are we physically disabled or not? Do we ask questions or not? What is life, after all, my dear Coletta? We are obviously nowhere near it at the moment – and I’m tired as you are. It is a drag knowing we are both African enough to tolerate this and unable to do it permanently. Something now thinks we need life amongst the joyful stars and…”

  They stopped. They realized they were human, and afraid, not of evil, but of something good for them. They were highly selfless, unselfish types, generally speaking. They had almost stalked away from the potential obtuse field effect that Queen had been studying. It had to do with major flocculation between joy and sorrow. It had to do with a baby’s cry at night, and how it taught you not to need sleep anymore. Lack of sleep can make people into strange bedfellows, in the racially segregated hotels they are forced to sleep in at night. And to be watched can make certain African wonders – oh so angry.

  While breathing. Harder, and with a mounting angry curiosity at the immense hole. It beckoned them, spewing a suctioning fearsome Blackness…incarnate Evil, rancid Afterlife persuasion. Lusts from their green younger days…tales of how they had done wrong, luring people into dying on the streets for them while they were driven around in their lily-livered, air-conditioned limousines, safe from cops, dogs and bullets. Their own excuses, their own political, biased lies floated back through time…on the winds of reason, on specious ideations…all about escaping Death. What was the point of the Movement, if it meant dying to save everyone else…what was the point of this ridiculous life…why a Black Hole?

  WHAT little girl? Hell pulsed out at them, daring them in.

  But they kept it themselves in the quiet of a restful sleep they had once altogether shared, the sleep of those who had never done a specious drug, and also of those “done gave away” no sleep. They remembered a certain “son” of theirs, Johnny, who seemed to have accomplished nothing. In short, he may have accomplished something. He may have helped there be brief peace, the only kind possible, in the Middle East. He had at least won awards for helping others, and cared about poverty stricken black people, even at his own expense. Dr. Queen broke a noble grin as he peered across the small distance at his wife, whose ample, redly bow rimmed mouth stretched into a sort of petulant grimace.

  Call it churchy experimentation, screw the afterlife, and eat some socks. Did either of those two want to go to Hell for other people?

  “One moment, my sweet, and do take my hand. We must leap through time and space, but must leave our world behind to do it. We must take this…jump…indeed,” he mused as their two fairly slim black bodies in business suits scrunched through the symbolic cervix that was finally dilated enough for them both, albeit it being several feet wide instead of several centimeters. They were smiling a secret African smile, and needed to “go back to where they once belonged,” swiftly moving up the stairs of a large and silver hued machine.

  One of them was outracing the other and practically leaping up the stairs, for you know, at least then, they could truly be African at last. But the other one was heading up the stairs with mounting terror. Yes, it was Coletta. She grabbed the coattails of Dr. Queen, who was sprinting upward as “superior man,” and she decided this must be a prettier way to die. He always had been the impatient type. She was slowly inching her way up the stairs at lightning speed, while wearing stiletto heels yet, and while tightly holding his hand. She had to assume her place behind him with a casual reluctance. It seemed mostly like home to her.

  She was escaping the KKK’s Inquisition, and taking her man with her – all the way. She and he were leaving the most major commitment of their lives behind, to help a little white girl who now had a brown daughter, to save her from the same thing that had gone for them — that which notices any vulnerability and always ruthlessly exploits it.

  As the former little girl – and then grownup personal care attendant – had lost my job, I was feeling like too much of my life had been devoted to the disabled. It had hurt me a lot to lose my disabled husband to death. I’d been rescued by someone much older than me – a man from the Philippines. He was a degreed doctor who was an osteopath. He’d been a helicopter medic like on TV’s MASH series, but during the Viet Nam War.

  He appeared to me after my disabled Jewish husband had died. He sat behind me in a certified nursing class, and kicked my chair hard to get my attention. We ended up having one child – a girl. It turned out that Pinoy Remmie is a bar mitzvah Jew, which is rare in the almost entirely Catholic Philippines. His Dad gave him the coming of age party.

  Meanwhile, the pomade in Coletta’s hair had loosened, and what was left was strikingly gorgeous in the light filtering through the filthy silver windowpanes. Surely, mused Dr. Queen, we are still in a cheap hotel, but it’s mutating into something like NASA Headquarters. Slowing down, they filed up the stairs, thinking that whatever it was it was — and it was — and it WAS — up there, and they must seek it out, kill it possibly, or simply withstand it. One of them got humorously adventurous. Yes, it was Dr. Queen.

  He looked handsome to her, and she winked back at him – oh so tiredly. She smoothed her own ruffled feathers of a lady’s rumpled grey clothing. “Somehow,” she sighed in an awesomely dry and sophisticated way. “To the stars, as we all ooze into a giant grilled and ham patty cheese melt . . .”

  “Somehow,” agreed Dr. Queen, panting as he moved up the stairs. “We should hate to tell her, but we already know what’s going on in everyone else’s heat heightened mind. We go where we head, but I know precisely where I wanted to be. Shall we? Compassion was made for this life, and you are surely the next one. I shall send for all of our children.”

  He reached down, helping Coletta up the final steps. But as they silently approached the stair top, they both realized they were destined to go back to The Movement. Breathing sighs of relief between them, they made a final advance up the stairs. Other phrases were whispered in their ears.

  “You shall have to wait for me after all, my dear Coletta,” smiled Dr. Queen. “I will be leaving the planet first, as we all figured, when we return. For a moment, I had hoped to keep you with me.”

  “I’ll wait for you until I die. And I never wanted to desert all those people for one little girl,” said Coletta. “But we had to answer this supernatural challenge. I didn’t mind rescuing her, even if she was white, but I’m relieved we’re definitely returning. Now, what is up there?”

  For what are mere words? – With this, Rod Sterling cuts in again and then leaves. He exits to the left, and I enter from the right. I say this: Gratitude came to me when John Tyler had rescued me from my father. John had wheeled up to me on the street in Seattle and hired me for a job working for the disabled, which happened before I went home that day to tell my Dad in Bremerton that I wanted my parents to fund my school in California. I was going to tell them that community colleges in CA were pretty cheap. If my volatile dad had found something wrong with that – who knows? Maybe he would have succeeded at killing me off – directly or indirectly.

  It is that “Who knows?” that drives all unsoiled machinery. Would colored and white parts on the bus have worked out? I doubt it. All those people knew in their own heads what that meant. As I knew that it might work out working for the disabled, as it allowed me plenty of time for writing.

  Once NASA keyed in on our couple, they’d entered the small area within the octagonal white spacecraft. They felt like they were vacationing in the Florida Keys, where the National Aeronautics and Space Administration used to be located. It was dingy white on the outside, incredibly complicated in its divine machinery all around, and high tech wonderfulness on the inside. And outside, the scenery was spectacularly lovely to their swiftly filling up senses.

  They were in something like the Space Shuttle combined with an immense rocket of a futuristic stripe. They strapped themselves into the lounge like capsule seats. Somehow, they now knew what t
he Hell they were doing as they worked the controls. The past has again fully become the future, at least for the moment.

  There is a NEW little girl standing near the launch pad, watching them. The girl – mine and my husband’s – some grown and with nut brown skin and freckles – is waving at them from a short distance of space and time. Unlike my auburn red hair, she has long, shiny black hair. “Welcome to your trip to Jupiter,” she says as the spaceship begins its ascent. And I am putting it all down for posterity, or possibly for my posterior, which is beginning to smart. I’m sure yours must be starting to feel much the same way.

  But as the immense moon-sized red spot on the surface of the gaseous giant named Jupiter hovers into view for them, the Queens peacefully fall asleep. They’re still holding tawny and brown Negro hands as we watch the white spaceship disappear into the warm summer sun. As it vanishes, it seems to melt throughout the far-flung distance.

  Jupiter has a long history of waiting for someone really cool to settle on it. It’s too big of a planet to go entirely without any intelligent life forms forever. The Movement will have to wait, or perhaps was finished a brief while ago. Some folks think it is over with, anyway.

  We now switch to the vast depth of nighttime space, bejeweled with myriad glowing stars, as Sterling comes back on stage. “You know who the Queens were,” he enchanted sighs. Rod finishes the episode: Such is life itself, moody, mysterious and altogether Mississippi charming. You never know which twists and turns it may take, even though you might be able to guess. Such as when you are a pair of relatively unpaid civil rights workers. Or something more than a mere pair of them.

  Such is life when you yourself happen to be the key component of The Eventide Zone. Oh, and by the way – drink some more lemonade. It’s good for you.

 

  THE END

 

  Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation and pitch services for your book and/or screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.

  For Now, you are Disabled

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 250

  You Are NOT Disabled, Too!

  I meant it when I said to you that disability is

  Not a “state of mind,” nor spirit, nor emotion.

  Tendencies to regard people as the source

  Fertility of spiritual essence make me puke. ar

  When every day the tactic is to be warmer

  “Goodness” is the standard you must be

  Than ice trickles capturing the essence of

  A cold doubt about when you are disabled.

  You’d like to think you’re still normal, also

  Always young, forever unmatched by time.

  You know the mirror has told you only your

  Story: the end of your life being what it says.

  Hear voices, feel touches, see sights you’ve

  Seen before as you gimp around the block,

  Hurting too deep inside at the lack of sanity,

  Hearing, “You people are all street people!”

  And go inside, pulling your wheelchair over

  To the television, having no job and no way

  To have sex ever again, or get married well,

  And tell me once again that you’re disabled.

 

  Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation and pitch services for your book and/or screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.

  Ragdoll Man

  Short Version, Fanfiction about Malcolm X:

  To make up for a pronounced lack of the original X-Men in the 1970’s version of Marvel Comics,

  Who were the Black Muslim Nation of America – Marvel’s inspiration for the X-Men – while they never got much of a mention there!

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 9,000

  Did you know that in the sixties, the men of X were Malcolm X’s, trying to remake the country for Black America? And did you ever think that the X-Men from Marvel Comics might be a hidden derivative life form from them, probably one inspired by their heroic feats and nobler natures?

  The Marvel comic book company’s X-Men, as created by Stan Lee, claim to be super mutants; I think they are almost total derivatives from Malcolm X’s Black Nationalist movement. But some think such a derivative evolution is simply a “sport,” which can go off in any direction it pleases, finding new natural zones in which to perform its adaptations. And some other beings say that man always has an eternal soul, meant to go places, do new things, and become and create wholly new people.

  Lastly, some say that if you are alone, heroic and isolated, you are Satanic and meant to die in a particularly horrific way. . .

  …howsoever, I’ve changed the names in this story to protect the innocent – namely, me and everyone else – from libel or slander charges. The last thing I wanted to do was to make light of an amazing man’s political assassination, or to make fun of such a tragic occurrence. The death of Malcolm X was dramatic, however, in its own way; he even ended up dying in his loyal wife’s loving arms. But this story isn’t about his actual assassination – it’s also not an attempt to exploit it, either.

  Instead, I wanted to emphasize the heroic nature of Malcolm X’s death, along the lines of what would be the Marvel Comics X-Men and their sometimes overly heroic exploits. I wanted to bring said mostly white and obviously derivative superheroes back to their roots – as the original Men of X, true militants who existed in real life, and from which the X-Men to me seem to be clearly purloined, being they constantly complain about the world “misunderstanding” them and their mutant origins.

  This story is an attempt to avenge the original Mr. X, and to keep to a respectful distance from any attempts to discredit, malign or otherwise badmouth him and his policies of Black Nationalism and self-defense against racism. In short: it’s fanfiction about Malcolm X (a name assigned him by Elijah Muhammad, just a cross to replace his “slave name”), AKA Malcolm Little X Shabazz.

  I always thought Shabazz sounds like “Shazam!” which is what Billy Batson yelled to change into a superhero called Captain Marvel. It’s also what Jim Nabors spouted all the time on TV, while in character as Gomer Pyle, USMC. That’s the United States Marine Corps. Why heroes real and fictive go Sha-zayam…it’s beyond me, help me, Mommy. I’ll be good, you’ll see; take this dream away. . .

  The story itself proceeds as follows:

  In a time of vast opportunities and no splendor but the eternal ongoing murder of one’s family and friends by each other, the authorities, petty circumstances, poverty, guilt and unknown hideous romances, an overburdened tall man once tried to halt the violent spread of social injustice. His way was rife with political questions that were never truly answered. Due to many frustrating circumstances such as these, that young man was stabbed four times in the chest; touching his heart oh so deeply before he went home. His home was a nice, normal house at the time, not far away from the black section of Harlem in New York City. That area is still poverty stricken to this day.

  He gazed wonderingly in the mirror, saw a tall, skinny but thick-cheated bull exactly like Satan, with a clean-shaven goatee and mustache, midnight black and scary-looking, and he reflected. He had turned in some other certain, powerful people to the authorities, and now he had t
o pay the price for his actions. This largely involved suicide by firing squad. He had wanted not to be killed, and to be murdered meant its own diabolical implications, especially for his growing family of daughters.

  “I’m black finally,” he thought to himself, “and they still don’t love me. Gee, why is that?” Mur knew he was only having a hangover for half a split second. “I have spent year after unadulterated year trying to become black for them, after moving around enough to have run away from nearly everyone. I am the utmost coward that I have ever met, and I only want to kill all of you. I don’t even know who you are as yet, strangely enough. It is because we are forever at war with each other. I am standing here with four gaping open wounds slowly closing and unclosing, and I have no desire left to go hit up a hospital anymore for my dough. I have pulled stickups, heists and burglaries.

  “What gives with that, Mur? What happened to you? Ah shit, all my old family is dead, every last relative, and I am the man in the middle. I now have a family through Bette and the kids, and they’re waiting for me to give the last speech. I have to go mount that podium, don’t I? And I’m unlikely to make it there before I fall down dead.”

  He knew Bette cared about him, as she loved him deeply. She had only had children with him, but he also had a feeling she was always afraid for them. She didn’t look around at other guys, and she seemed to be very proud of him. But he wondered what she really thought.

  He felt like such a miserable failure at life, sometimes. Who was going to provide for his family? And what if the people who killed him killed them as well? It wasn’t that unlikely. And so far as he knew, Bette was pregnant again, due to give birth in a few months.

  He watched himself ooze, shooting his cuffs. Assuredly, he thought it would be best to change these clothes, but considering the lack of anyone caring about me at all, he decided, it would be better to mount that podium as my own red self. Red, red, nothing but red. I would say a green light would be a better chance for him, the devil in the mirror, he sighed. And altogether, I am a Muslim no longer tonight.

  As he gazed upon himself in the mirror, he gasped. He pulled his rag doll self-deep inside to him, for he really had to “be a man” now. He had to still be his old, familiar self to his own eyes – but everyone he met had seemed to see a good man in Satan. He was the biggest, tallest, most strapping Lucifer that he had ever seen, as a yellow man. He didn’t feel half as unique as he looked, being surrounded often by other black men. Scots, he dreamed, must lead the most arrogant existence as white males that the world had usually told of. Old Nordic civilizations ruled his universe, but he liked the Islamic ones.

  He drew himself up in full pose, reflecting upon how much a mirror can bleed. The pain that tore through his right chest enormously suited this new perspective. He smoothed back his simple haircut, a fifties crew that felt easier to take care of – but pathetic.

  “At last, at last. Well, I’ve told Bette off for the final time. Bad cat.” He smoothed down the walls of his contained within a roughly six foot four body thick chest. It throbbed. It was interesting to feel such a noise coming from deep within him. “Help me, Allah. No, don’t. Actually,” he chuckled, “As you must kill me at the theatre, I suppose you would not like to be me any further, would you? I think I should make a cutting fellow for a few bullet wounds that could insist on. Dad, would you mind if I f—-d up your speech?”

  No, the chap in the mirror reflected as he frowned in supple manners. Black people, we don’t seem to go away, even when we’re ninety percent white. It is the heat of an African sun that lends us any such thing as mere superiority. A strong man who was laid in front of a moving street car with a bashed head should never have woken up. How could he – but if the streetcar had jarred as it cut into him, he could’ve felt it. Murdock was tired and getting dried out now. His Dad should’ve had his human rights somehow, and not simply been a human gravesite for good ideas.

  I should be a Scot, as named “Sir Murdock,” he shyly whispered, smoothing down his newly bleeding white lapels. Africa suits me better, though, and I’m handling this death of mine well enough. My courage is both celebrated and well-known, if not presumptuous. He thought they would wince as inwardly as he did, chuckling. It felt good to be dying oh so slowly. Still, if he kept them waiting at the better theatre for his choice appearance…he raised his hand up to his mouth, lightly licking blood off his steak like fingers. They tasted awfully good. He drew his long tongue over each one in turn, relishing the taste of it.

  Huh, he thought. I shall never impress my lady, but at least I already have her set up with her new husband. It shall not be more than a pain than (wince) to die slowly on stage, but my heart is stabbed through. As it opened, Murdock knew momentarily that he must die right now. The pain was telling him so, although the ache in his actual heart of a black and lonely selfless but fatherly soul began to override it. It pulled through him as it ripped wider within him. Needing to be saved from himself, he grabbed at his dresser drawer, staring above it at the vanity’s surface, which was slick and nut brown like him.

  In the mirror of his handsome features lurked a witless presence, peering through centuries of time and insane persecution. “Wander down to that Catholic Church on the street corner, and see what you saw before in the sidewalk, written in the anti-Semitic letters of sand. Yourself, super stud, wanting to save the whole entire world through Satan. That is not the way, the truth or the guiding light. Who is an individual must reap the benefits of all human misery, and as a Black Scot, don’t you think? Would you rather be torn apart with knives – or with more bullets? What is the best performance?”

  “Myself,” he freaked casually at the mirror, lips curling into a fair snarl. “Too much to take into infinity, and yet I have seen you before, whoever you are, and here I am as you. I am not your white, am I? I have never been allowed to be white under this set of circumstances which I think now I freely chose. Chuckle.” He decided he’d better set to straightening out his clothes and going, so he laid out a pair of shoes on his bed and began to shine them well. As he worked, which took all of five minutes, he thought about the audacity of a man who had been mostly shining shoes for white men. But having children in poverty meant to better their circumstances.

  And he seemed to have a reflective crowd of black statues who pulled a fine spooky figure – for cowards. Actually, so many of them had helped him out so often, and had died bravely to serve the Cause. But were they his real friends? Or did they have nothing further to give him, now?

  Completing the act of fixing his personal appearance, he combed his scrubby hair as his newly dying body throbbed. “How long I have is beyond me. Falling down on the way to the theater suits, but I must walk there now without panting. Hold on, bud, I really have to do this. It’s the last mile. I have murdered so many people through proxy, I must be akin to Hitler and surest will meet him where we all must go. I suppose I shall end up shining his shoes by making him eat them. Well, let’s be off.”

  As his bloody hand pulled at the doorknob of his small bedroom, he looked back through time at the wall. He remembered when a chunk of it had flown over to him and landed at his feet, which were clad in bedroom slippers at the time. The noise of guns had been deafening, and he had reached for his, but once more, it had been spectacularly missing. “A cracker, a cracker, a kingdom for such sustenance from you, shadow weirdoes. I know I am hallucinating all this. Still, Bette’s safe, and so are the kids, so far. It must be the new family. I shall buy them tonight as my own personal future. It is best that way.”

  A “cracker” was once an alliterative slur about white people in America. It has to do with them being shot full of little holes. However, such a being is improper sustenance for a tall and growing taller Black man. A square cracker, light brown and edged with burn marks, is relatively meaningless, too small to relate to anyone real or practical.

  Meanwhile, as he was dying, Mur began to wonder about the audacity of guns that were always placed
conveniently out of his handsome reach. He also thought that Allah must be kind on one hand, as all his life he had never really wanted to shoot one. Too many people had been shooting at him personally for him to really want to kill them. On the other hand, he would have deeply relished the chance to slaughter them all back.

  As a shadow slipped over the horizon, Murdock little peered around Harlem. Others waved at him, then flinched slowly as they moved away. Oh, I smell of iron, thought Mur to himself. Red blood is so full of lovely dark protein. Sustenance I suppose, but as the evening shades enveloped the wan smells of stores and people milling throughout the grey streets, he casually strolled towards his reckoning premise. On the way, he passed the filthy doors of that same Catholic Church, the small one for blacks that had inhabited Harlem since some time immemorial. It was never the same regal church twice, being frequently updated by its invisible black hierarchy. He turned right to brutally sigh, letting all the air out his huge chest, as the four wounds gainfully poured forth their fullest measure. How touching. It promised peace in Heaven for the spiritual, such as his wife and children. They somehow seemed whiter than white to him.

  “Well, this is as good a time for it as any, I would guess?” he stated aloud. The filthy door taunted him with its message of green paint peeling back the layers of the necessity of the thing called Death, which had been chasing him forever his short life, as he had noticed from when he was in crib and his mom had spilled talcum powder right into his mouth. The sound of multiple guns firing had come right through the door. This put his mind into a useful state of grace, which he used to get around in traffic.

  If I could quite recollect, I need to go down cherry, take a right on oh here we go there’s the stoplight. Right, stay right there. Oh heart that is not made out of candy – be good. It is good. Yes, there’s the light. Murdock the Red walked against the light and then saw the theater and realized it was not where it ought to be. It had definitely been located between Alder and Bourbon with a little white people flower shop situated across from it. I believe that if I ever sliced into those white people I would see red blood, but I have never seen them at all in that form. My mother was whiter than I, and she ended up in many mental asylums over my dad.

  Meanwhile, I have never really killed anyone, he supposed. For one second, he clutched his failing heart, feeling it thud…once.

  He briefly harrumphed, pulling at his collar, which was quite wet with perspiration. As the finality of the thing called Death began to travel through his entire body, he jerked himself awake. He had a fantasy about having killed a hooker and also being a gay prostitute who pimped. It promised him a summer sun, deep in the heart of equatorial Africa. He loved this strange continent, which was merely a giant world in his mind. But it was full of communist countries. Mecca had been fun to contemplate, as long as he didn’t really want to go to Heaven. As he frowned, he realized he was being told that a total fix of heroin like before was on the horizon, and all he had to do was not walk into the theater. If he simply went over to the Busted Denizens coffee shop across the street, he could avoid falling down. It was a sweet little coffee shop, one where he’d almost had a good time. It beckoned to him like a way out of dying now.

  A voice in his head said if he called it off, life would be normal again. He had been busted so many times, it was a wonder his military crew cut was yet in place. To be busted means to be under arrest for impersonating a large, scary animal, he reflected. He coughed into his reddened hand, gazing upon it with undying affection for himself. He was martial and military without feeling it. Having a tiny military of his own was entirely out of the question now, and he had to keep aware that many people didn’t like him or his new family anymore. These people would be gunning for them in mysterious ways, all of which promoted supernatural feelings. He wanted to kill the supernatural and stop.

  The voice in his head, so very like his own, told him it is easy to kill it. All you need to do is face it down fearlessly, and then you can tell it what to do. But if you do that, you will have to suffer the immediate consequences of your dire and violent actions.

  He looked over at the theater door. There was the usual bright red neon glowing sign, reading Apollo Theater. It winked on and off up high in the air, floating above the stacks of the chimney factory area down the block away from the street. Murdock sighed. This was going to be tricky, because he suddenly felt like his wife and children were not there in a theatre he was about to enter.

  As pain wrenched his body, he mumbled, “Enough. I am a radio program, but not a television one. I don’t carry this forward.” The theater had been the one thing he could count on to be normal. It was not. As he searched out the front of it, he knew it was not at all the same theater he knew. As the undying pains of possibilities racked that young amateur lawyer who had determined that merely attempting to save his people was enough for his soul, he pulled himself into place.

  His whole body coldly told him to fall down and die. As his knees buckled, he pulled a buck and wing and stood sharply erect into place. It had been a good idea, to wage war with the United States, and then die fighting. It had been appropriate. There. That was enough. Feeling cold all through him, he realized the wounds had quit oozing momentarily, perhaps for the next twenty-five seconds or so. Ah yeah, I can reach for that door – push – and there we go, now it’s time to enter the theater and meet Death or not. Say, the thought occurs that I am already Death myself. It is like being made half of hot summer air, like usual. Right now though, I wish I could rend another wound most deeply into my lonely immortal soul. My last female cousin whom I can remember fell to a house burglary recently, but at least I still have one or two relatives left alive. There is something wrong with leaving my entire older, almost dead family completely behind. Yet I have now to save a father headed family – of mine.

  I read somewhere that I am only two percent solid matter, and the rest must be winging its way around in there like crazy. If I push through this door, what could happen? Bette and the kids – and those murderous assholes – might be waiting in there for me, but come to think of it, I’m going to have to follow my elaborate plan. I have a speech prepared, but I have no idea when the bullets are going to begin through the air at me. Or us. And she and the kids are right there in the audience. “Whoops, there goes my heart again,” he told himself, nearly falling down on his knees. He finally tried, and got back up again.

  As he went through the open door and gently let it slide shut behind him, he walked down the steps. Each concrete bar shot through him, but he was trying to guide it back behind him. Ouch, he thought, now I have to do something other than stepping forward, I think. So he bounded down the last five steps and landed, going: now I do feel I’m a nightmare marine. Odds bodkins, I’m definitely service personnel here, aren’t I? I’m going to have to lure them away from Bette and her kids. I wonder how. They are not out to kill only me – so far as I am aware, although I have done my best to attract them like a dust magnet. If I am truly Satan here, the racially mixed Jewish black man, they should be out to kill only me, under Islamic rules. However, they view Bette and the kids as pagans and are equally out to kill them. If they want to get at me. Satan should be enough to get their attention, but is it? Am I real enough a performer to pull this off?

  Roger. I’m a big strapping Black American. So patriotic. If I needed to be patriotic to get out of this one, that ended a long time ago. I can’t stand the attitudes of the country which I am born into, as it is full of shit. Still, I am good at blaming our and their womankind for my problems. Yeah, blame mom, which will get me out of this one. She’s long gone in my mind, he thought smiling to himself – as he approached the stage door back. He peered silently around it, whipping off his narrow black glasses to quickly wipe and put them back on. They were now obscure, relatively difficult to see through. Shrug. I’ve handled that before, he thought. But no, there was something wrong this time. Still, I have about five minutes to get on stage. Umm, no, the
se go off. So Mur took off the glasses, carefully placing them in a side pocket. Then he shook with laughter at himself. Why keep the glasses, when he was not going to go on living?

  He took his prescription frames, which he had worn since a boy, back out of the pocket, saying, “L’Chaim.” Now I’m summarily Jewish, he smiled to himself, crushing them under his left shoe succinctly. This will make a stronger Satan for them, but I do not like this. I fear much for my true family. Stomping them once, they were a clear mess in the shadows under the floor, seeming to disappear as they so blended in. At least it will be a life without glasses for five minutes, he wheezed, patting his chest down again. Something was strange, for it seemed to be rising and falling in an unusual rhythm for a change. Well, he figured, this is not it. The floor is weird and flesh colored. I had a deep cut on my hand after a knife fight that I let to go, and it healed all right. These cuts can never heal again under any circumstances, and I would relish their claiming me.

  Why, this is not it, again. Walk through door. There they are. Walk forward, stand in front of – no – behind podium. There is the white podium, off in the near distance. It is a few meager steps away to my simple death. The lighting is great tonight here at the Apollo. I see a huge crowd of the vultures, gathering to feed on the upper sky lighting. Not on me, I suppose, but on Negroes. None of them seem to know there are Negroes – and I believe they have now all become demons, white or black.

  They seem to be gabbling away at each other, a hubbub. I wonder what a hubbub is going to turn out to be in the next realm. Surely, something pitiful, circling the skies over my head as I pitch up my lunch. Nah, I’m walking toward this. There is the gravesite podium, two steps away.

  So Brother Murdock Shabazz leapt up the final steps to the podium and grabbed it with one fine thin brown paw. He was standing on a wooden platform behind it, one of those short stepstool ones, and needed to get rid of it. So he jumped back, kicking it away to the right side with one foot. He had done this solely because it had seemed “right.”

  Something again clicked in his head. As he did so, the upper lights all flew on. He was looking over the podium, the top of which hit about chest level under his stomach, and he felt a little too tall and moist for the podium. So he grabbed it bodily, shaking it back and forth as it swayed, letting it settle down, and began his final speech.

  It had been supposed to be about the Marcus Garvey return to Africa movement, but in fact Murdock had finally decided that movement was the one the white men had kidded his father into believing was possible. It might be, he thought, in an actual world. This is however not the real world so far as I can tell, he reasoned out, and I am leaving it. So he had to begin his “speech” now, while unable to read off the paperwork.

  “Ladies and gentleman, welcome. I am now the Wizard of Oz. Oh, and I have no such announcements to make. As the Mafia is now situated in the audience, can I see a show of hands? What, no hands? Hey, looka here. Hi there, how ya doing? Wait a minute, this podium is getting a little juicier than me.” Mur tipped his head to one side, thinking this was surely the Jesus Christ moment of reckoning. It could slip away there, but as he had to protect Bette and only Bette surely, the best way to do it was to crash the podium. So he grabbed it and pulled it away to the right, where it neatly bounced off the side wall of the entry area he had come through, landing within a curtain and pulling if off stage to one side. It nestled there, after having made a lot of loud noise, crashing resoundingly.

  The distant echoes of this shut up the entire audience momentarily. As he grabbed the mike, he looked down and noticed the speech someone had prepared for him was held within his left hand. He frowned at it summarily, and ripped it into several bunches of white pieces of paper, the lofty ripping of which filled the entire anteroom. These then dribbled down, as he pitched forward a little. Then the strangest feeling enveloped him. Bette and the kids were over on the right wing side of the auditorium, and she was giving his oldest girl a sandwich, but she wasn’t looking at him. Checks, that’s Bette. She remains calm in these difficult situations, but tonight I have to show her something, he decided, involving what she should do to leave immediately. She’s the best…

  My wife, he brutally cried to himself inside, spent a lot of time in her life noticing me, my accomplishments, and many of the things we did together; she helped me all along. She isn’t selfish; she’s oppressed, and that is what I always wanted to believe, thought Murdock X. But I have this all set up for her if I can ever survive this theater, which I cannot do. Meanwhile, I have to keep the audience as distracted as humanly possible. She has got to handle the kids in a few moments.

  Frowning summarily, while clenching his teeth against the pain, he decided to make his final announcement anyway. He had been listened to before in the early days of his movement, but now he was apparently getting old and slow. “Okay, I always have been completely one with “Stan” – the Devil White Man. I sold my immortal soul to all of your white Christian enemies’ millennia ago. I am Satan, and it is time for my public execution, which should be in keeping within the heavy rules of Koran order. I hereby commit the unforgivable sin of evil pride and renounce all ties to Islam whatsoever. I am obviously supposed to go straight to Hell itself for you. Wonderful, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do here tonight for all of you wonderful…Godly folks.”

  In the original version of this, the event was supposed to hit the newspapers and cause political changes to happen, several of which may or may not occur in anyone’s real lifetime. Some people think they may, and some people think it may never happen. But in this instance, something had to go in an entirely other direction.

  “Unfortunately, the entire Jewish race is not dead in a major forest fire yet. That is what the Hell in the Koran is about, up in the frozen north. That’s what is in the book in the portion preceding my death. That is supposed to happen before the Devil here can hit such a town as Hell. I have an associate who has slipped me this impertinent information. Would one of you guys in the audience like to tell me who it is?” He crossed his mostly African feeling business suited arms across his massive chest, which was heaving inwardly with the sighs of a lost paradise that he’d never truly obtained. Everyone in the audience seemed to be having a lot of a good time at his expense – as true universal cold enveloped his entire body. It felt excruciatingly good. Still, as he looked the thing over, he could not see anything out there that looked ripe for a kill. He needed about ten men with guns, he figured, to show up. Ten, twenty, four, whatever was there.

  “Hey, friends, where are you? Please show up, now. I’ve come to give you milk and honey and all the images and all that. You know, guys with the guns. You must have about ten of you ready now, like a Roman numeral ‘X,’ c’mon, lemma see those major firearms. I’ve been waiting for rifles all of my life – and you’ve all been keeping them out of reach. Please, pretty please, I beg you on the mercy of being a Negro, come show me your guns so I can see how pretty they are. There you go!”

  As the paced out group of men in the middle section pulled out their handguns one at a time, they pointed summarily at his closed off chest, telling him to open up so they could begin the firing squad action they were set to do. He had already turned himself in for the petty crimes he had committed, and now it was time to be blasted away. He had fought with something like meager thousands of these before, and had suffered through some skirmishes, but as the coalescing group began to murmur about how long it was taking, the solution materialized in his own mind like an Egyptian pyramid.

  Maybe it was time to unleash brute force upon you people, but you can’t dive into an audience like they’re a swimming pool. How do I keep these guys busy, when my family is not going to leave the theater without me? Bette is the least realistic person I have ever met in my life, though she guides me to paradise in her own lost fashion. Still, this must be done. Perhaps keeping these children of mine distracted enough to ascertain their own political purposes and not br
ing in the other beings with weapons would help. I can keep both groups at bay until something right comes of this situation – or something wrong.

  “You know,” said Murdock as he unbuttoned his shirt collar, “It is getting so bloody hot in here, muggier than the deep south, and oh pardon me is that my ugly Mommy in the audience? Say, I am going now to open up my chest and front and get some air. It’s stuffy here at this Asshole Theater. You know, how about if I rip myself wide open, to make it easier for you? Maybe I can show you the right methodology of dying.”

  He daydreamed about an earlier obscene group of white men, easier to keep track of, called the Ku Klux Klan, which had faded away into obscurity and become several black groups, all of which wanted the honor of disposing of his body in improper fashion. The Klan had been big on killing blacks, and so were all his present groups of people.

  Brother Murdock then slowly pulled apart the sticky remains of his reddened shirt and undershirt, ripping it all open as he went, baring his black and hairy muscular chest ever so carefully until he pulled it all away as far as he could get it open. He exposed himself as much as possible to the wall of guns that were steadily pointed at around his chest walls and stomach, peeling himself like he was a kind of overripe tomato. As he peeled, a mysterious change started to overcome him. He had to pick off parts of his brown skin and white shirt, tearing a goodly shred of it over one of the stab wounds. Then he finally grabbed everything he could scratch at with large hands, and pulled it all away. Now he felt his reddened and raw chest expand appreciably. It felt so lousy to take in lots of stale cigarette smoke laden air, so he wrenched his dying chest outwards, inwardly cursing out loud. Heaving back a single sob, he thrust out what he could feel moving.

  “Here am I, crowd of strange African wonders. I love you all with my entire being, with all of my heart and soul. Here – I am a strange voodoo object of merriment and good times remembered, in the last fifteen seconds anyway.” He bent his head back and said, “I wish you could all be here instead of me. It’s such an enjoyable experience.” Wilting inwardly, he began to realize he could croak before any of his persecutors bothered to fire.

  He thought: I must tell them exactly where to end this altogether, for it looks like the weather outside could tend to rain shortly, and there are those on foot who must leave this our major theater and walk home in the pounding rain. Therefore, I am going to have to sacrifice my family and friends. There is no other way out of the theater and into this movie. I honestly don’t know who is making a major production number out of this, but it’s for the media so far as I can tell. Perhaps the Mafia is here also. The cameras are steadily rolling over there, and every flash bulb is ready to be popped.

  “Hey Rubes, would you believe I have a speech all prepared in your shaggy heads? It’s about how you need to shoot me right here, and aim at it really well. See the chest? It’s deep brown – for no apparent reason. It doesn’t light up that well, I guess. Please, lighting, go ahead and train the spotlights on it. Whoomph! There, that’s good. Now you can all see exactly where to aim. Wouldn’t want anyone in the audience to get hurt.”

  Heaving harder, Mur stuck his manly breast out much further. The lights at the Apollo seemed to flicker momentarily, as though they would go out as he pushed himself open. “I’m crowing, world, I’ve done this before – and it is finally the time. Hey guys, how come none of you are human beings yet? I woke up and didn’t become one either. Here’s the blood, the meat and the wine and all that, here’s this strapping black animal and all, here’s what you have been coming to this theater to collect on an artificial altar and pray over and feast upon for hours. Where are the billions of gunshots? I’ve been waiting for this moment all of my life. Shoot Bette!” He had said this last thing to indicate to her she had better get her act in gear and soon. But he also truly meant it, down to the bottom of his black hearted soul. He shouted, “If you shoot my wife first, shoot me next!”

  As the hubbub died down, one large portly Black lady in the audience wretchedly stammered, in a voice ground up by winds, rains, the buildup of extreme heat, and ever-mounting subtler imaginary horrors:

  “What, boy?”

  There was a loud crashing sound in the back of the auditorium. No one however was coming through the doors in back. It seemed to be a distraction of some kind. As Mur overlooked the crowd, he could finally see the faces of some of the unusual beings with the guns as they began looking over to their right at his wife, who seemed to be putting her hand over her face.

  No, this is not the right way to have done this. I should’ve read my prepared speech, been shot in the middle of it and my chest, and died. “No, actually,” he cried, “I didn’t mean that. Say, look over here, why don’t you? I am here already. I just wanted to let you know that Satan makes a great shoot. Look, I’m ready to take down and all, meat on the table for you and everything. The cameras are sitting all around this beautiful goddamn auditorium training on my gorgeous existence and you all are here for the ride. Look, suckers, calm down. I’m ready for Hell here.”

  Every move a serious politico makes is always questioned in great detail by the authorities, the petty ones or otherwise. Would this one work better for the cameras? Every cut hurts, every trait any man has is magnified if one is a bull well boy or something like that, every drop of blood screams for high pressure, every taunt is a welt, and every time someone must come up with something new, the question occurs.

  He raised one eyebrow as the men with guns pulled away their attention from Bette, slowly spreading the guns out in a wave at the entire audience, as though they would begin to fire if there was so much as even another mild crashing sound. Then there were several little streaks of light filtering in from outside, cluttering up the windows. Murdock X knew there was an odd chance of other groups occurring on the premises, ones which also wanted to kill him. Still, it felt as though something was controlling the premises. Maybe the sixteen other groups with rifles, machine guns and bombs were busy.

  Still, Murdock reflected, the strangers in this audience don’t seem to be getting any of my outer space messages. That’s pretty normal for them. I’m the leader of “us all” and that must be an influence on life, I guess. “So it would,” he roared at the top of his bull stomach, “be most kind of all you shits in the audience,” he smoothly squelched through his dying outthrust lungs, “to continue to point all them guns in my general direction, no, put them together a bit more, there you go. Are you almost there?” The fetching group of silver automatics, each with one or more potential rounds, waved like tentacles from the octopus like group of faces behind them. “Do you think you can tell us what to do, when you’ve condemned us?” said one of them, not materializing from the crowd at all. “We were hired to blast traitors who don’t believe in the Nation of Islam – to death.”

  “Yes, I told them all about Black Nationalist Supremacy, but the problem is that I am now a Black Nationalist. So I decided to die at them, so sue me. No, don’t. Put the guns back in place and point them straight at me, here’s the target and everything, right here. I love you. I love you all. I am a huge undying wall of blue meat here, I am going to die incredibly slowly – and I am waiting to be slaughtered, fools! Seriously, fire right into these major holes, or I’ll kill you. I’m Satan, I’m burnt ready, and here I am. C’mon, what took you so long?” Murdock looked down at the unmoving guns and flinched inwardly. Now was the time of reckoning. All of this could go any which way, or another.

  If they would shoot him, he would not be there to make sure his family got safe home. Meanwhile, the theater ushers were starting to open the back doors as if to give him some air. This alone caused a great unutterable disappointment to rack his very being. He had tried, he figured, and now that he was about to faint dead on the floor he oh pardon Satan that’s it he decided – summarily pitched forward and pointed at the open doors.

  “Those who stay in their seats get an expensive prize for inadequacy if they move at all. I h
ave six open guns trained on all of you behind the stage doors on either side of this auditorium. If you so much as move, I will have them all fire at you. Say, bunnies with the guns, is you ready? I am determined to not be the only cuss to die in this theater tonight. When I give the signal, all of those guns are going to open fire.”

  As the entire audience froze motionless, and the ushers alone rushed to shut the back doors, Murdock sagged down. This was getting to be a dismal meeting for a night at the good old Apollo, one where he had summarily enjoyed nights out with friends on rare occasions. He’d even circulated a depraved underground flyer claiming he needed someone to kill someone else for him, for once, maybe a blond kid. Circumstances had forbid it ever being anyone else but him. What was with Black America?

  “Well, can you get back here with the guns? There you go.” Murdock now had a clear field to see them get ready. He asked them inwardly if they were really subhuman enough to fire at nearly the one exact spot that was hurting the most. Then he asked them repeatedly if they were really subhuman. The guns bobbed up and down with a kind of silent laughter, then pointed steadily at various parts of his anatomy.

  “That’s more like it, blind fools. Can you listen to the sound of my voice? It’s a mighty timorous majesty now, one which you’ve seldom encountered. Listen, you need to take aim right all over my body, or even my head. It’s there, just don’t be nervous. I see you’re not nervous. There you go. All over myself. You’re my children at last.” Murdock waved over at Bette, trusting she was looking, and smiled. “Please plug this sucking crow right now, as soon as I give you the order to fire. We’re not going back to Africa except on vacation from now on, and for the entire consecutive future.” I wonder how these folks will afford such vacations, he had to realize. We could, or at least Bette could, as her family has some money.

  Murdock heaved a sigh, knowing he was only himself and not Satan. He never had much thought as that stereotype, but it came together in a blinding flash that he would have to be one of the most Satanic caricatures for whites ever if he kept this up. He tightened himself, breathing slightly, and realized he was far, far away from his own dying process.

  Coldly, he stood erect and eased back on the execution stage. He briefly recalled himself as a young man, but knew that everywhere he’d been, he had seen something unfamiliar at every turn. The supernatural could kick butt, he figured, but only if it was under my own particular command. I don’t want to do this, he suddenly decided.

  He froze in a summary surprised gape. The guns were still trained on him, as though the beings behind him did not exist. And the beings in front of him began to pull him back to his human status. “I know I’ve been a bad daddy for all of you pukes who have been following me for so many years, for to have to live with this haunting imagery is the most pathetic attempt at a buck god of raw meat the world has usually seen. We have them on the run at last, I believe, those frozen stones of the north. Do we not? And now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. There. All of your guns are now aimed right at the center of my immortal soul.” He appreciated the fact. Here we go. . .

  Ahu, they are indeed. The strangely marine-like head of Murdock X, which had come up with one number as the digit signifying his death and the deaths of many others, centered over his manly body in a nearly perfect diametrical line. He froze up, thrusting his meaty white chest out, making sure to pull back the last of his shredded black clothes, which were oozing in porous layers every drop of life and banal men’s soul left in him. He looked over the huge audience, thinking he would have liked it if any of them had ever chanced to be real or human in any form. In a way, they were almost like his Bette.

  They still weren’t doing anything in his direction. Not just yet. Somebody switched on the music from “Carmen” and it began playing sweetly and softly in the background.

  “Red is for blood, black is for death, white is for your extreme Right, and pure yellow is for me – mayhap. Meanwhile, are you ready? I doubt it. But you must take aim and fire. Point the guns now. Straight at me in perfect little lines. There. You are now ready.”

  I mutter as I mumble, methinks himself ah yes I am surely this at last. I would rather go to the permanent hell as a boy than see Bette and my children ever get shot, leave their home again, or go anywhere else but the shopping mall and to all the wonderful places I have seen in a distant dream as we packed going from house to house to evade their awesomely boring enemy. They had come through the walls too many times. Yes, this is surely scientific reality, and I will not get my death – as I am an utmost raw fearless coward. I am made out of shit, excrement and pee, and that is where I must go.

  Looking at the stage lights in their myriad crystalline colors, he begged God to let Allah there go to the best possible place where a girl could make up for a strange difficulty. To the pages of a book serene, or perhaps a small field and a polluted stream. He smiled, smirking to himself as one silver point crossed his mind. None of this was fun. It seemed like the setup for children that his life had streaked through, in a wonderful way.

  He looked, feeling weirdly like himself one last time over at Bette and his children. She seemed to be staring at him with something like hatred but akin to respect lighting her features, as if at long last. He swung his head back to the beings awaiting his purple command in the audience. They still awaited it. I am a good little tin soldier, I am, he thought with the greatest swell of black pride he had ever felt in his life. It filled his whole being, overflowing into his soul as it finally dawned on him what was doing.

  He had figured the enemy was somewhat right about something, and this must be what it was. They’d been evolving the form of the thing that opposes the sun, still its primary victim, merely a man. His children were now on the proper path. Or were they? He fretted for them momentarily. Then he gazed up at the lighting, which was not the same way it had been before. Oh, my oath for a better Apollo. Take me, do not take my wife and kids, do what you will with me, but make it a better theater.

  Stuff it up my rear later soon as can be for a better reality for all the below, he thought to himself. “Oh and you suckers in the crowd, now is the time. Here are the simple commands for you to never follow again, ever again, in the future.” You don’t know that I am genuinely thinking that for you, and you don’t even care. You don’t know how ready I was to flay my soul itself completely to Hell for you, to serve all mankind. For I am only a father now, Allah and Moses incarnate, and I am also the supper. I am the only level God incarnate in this entire room. It is all that I ever wanted out of life, save death, but you still know that I am only a bugger. That means I want to only bug you into shooting me as painfully as possible. Please take your time and fire each bullet slowly.”

  “What?” smirked one of the white Moore denizens with the guns. Each of the ten or more guns was pointed straight to the center of his chest, which was throbbing with a kind of sexual ecstasy. He couldn’t get past an enormous feeling of infinite endless love for all human and otherwise mankind, and the mostly sexual part of it was dribbling away rapidly. As he spread his bleeding, growing and bursting arms wide, and as each brutal shot rang out summarily spaced apart by exactly one century or more of time, or as each shot spaced itself farther and farther out into space, the slowly dancing rag doll prayed the event would matter somehow – and also that the crowd would not descend and feed upon him later, or that they surely finally would.

  I must now keep this up, he figured out, to the last me. He also prayed that Bette and all of his real children would shortly vacate the theater, as they were getting nervous. He heard the doors of Hell open and close, and knew his wife was perhaps locked in there with him, but waited. Suddenly, the voice said they left summarily and were gone home. He breathed a sigh of relief – for a while.

  Still, the rag doll willfully danced on the stage, absorbing each bullet and pushing it out his bursting open, exploding painful backside. He spread his demonic white boned winged s
houlders as one plunging black crow, a hunk of exploding feathers opening to the center of his virile chest. A deeply oceanic, blue and black fissure swiftly formed, growing into an enormous blossom, the only flower of true Scottish manhood. How erotic, smiled the once incredibly handsome man – to himself. How proud, how ungainly though, how egotistically obtuse and mundane. Am I God now? I may have stopped a giant land war in the Americas. . .

  As he fell over backwards, on his knees forever at last, all the scarlet sap of a true Harlem sucker was oozing out of his sunken in chest – and it felt so weirdly cool. A round of applause came cascading over the rafters.

  Could be the best draw for tickets the Apollo will never get again. And this one time, I got to tell off the crowd the right way, although I cannot do it ever again…I’m slipping away. Funny; this doesn’t feel like death. It seems like my body’s whisking through time and space, to somewhere else, a place that I was somehow always destined to be.

  But why is it raining on me? I thought that was blood at first; but there’s a lashing wind and rain falling all around. I’m on a slippery, sloping hill, in the middle of a rainstorm. I’ll look around, but this is not pretty. In fact, I’m out of doors, in the middle of a hundred men racing around me.

  As someone who’d always looked like a U.S. Marine, with a square head shape and a liberal’s outlook on life, Murdock had to take a quick appraisal of his new surroundings as he cocked his handsome head to one side. He had shown too good of form to live. He stood up. Everything was wavy, nauseating, and increasingly painful, only set to go further along. He also had to tell them where to shoot him. Or for a change, he had to tell them where to shoot them, as he had to tell them that every time.

  They were on a jaggedly, verdantly green hill. It was in Scotland, where they had to defend the overhanging mountain pass while the enemy was coming. As several of them charged up the hill, most of the clan had to hold positions downwards. Using swords, bows and arrows, and shillelaghs, they swarmed fiercely. Guns weren’t involved and shields were too heavy to carry, except for the lighter cow-skin ones.

  ‘Twas the Battle of Dunkeld in 1689. It involved the Jacobean army. Dunkeld was the last battle in Scotland in the 17th century to restore the Stewarts to the throne. The men were all cowards, so slow and stupid – no, they were but worn out from battle, which had raged many days.

  Murdoch’s army was made of a tattered, almost wretched horde of men in both animal skins and Roman cloth and garb; but they were of no one skin color, some being quite dark and some very pale and white. They staunchly wielded their bloody weapons and archery equipment slung over their broad shoulders, which pumped up and down with the rage of battle. And as Murdoch wheeled around, he saw the enemy’s fatal charge.

  Out of nowhere, an impenetrable wall of HUNDREDS of sticks arced through the open blue sky, thin as dark birds. For a second, they eclipsed the sun, whistling in screaming whips. Mur heard this awful sound of Arrows…chucking up, his right hand had exposed chests, limbs and faces. Many of them raised their cowhide shields, determined to survive, as Murdoch’s men valorously whipped out their meagre bows and arrows – bravely, stoically fighting back.

  No losing without streams of War Red, bad gain either way. Murdoch’s entire Army dies enmesh, if he does not move. Shocked into THE utmost livid, scarlet horror, unable to concentrate or see, he issues his Eternal Orders, ruddy-faced and angry, locked in a prolonged race conflict...unto the other side of Infinity, or ‘til the other Insane Bitch Barks Aloud that Bastard Sound from Hell – FROM which there is No True Return:

  “READY…AIM…FIRE!”

  THE END

 

  The “feint” of this story bases on how after the death of James Graham, Viscount Dundee at Killiecrankie, the Jacobi army had “no leader of quality”. Therefore, you gave them one; how the battle went largely depends upon your personal POV, or ideal point of view.

  Executive Director of Ghost Writer, Inc., Karen S. Cole writes. GWI at www.rainbowriting.com is a renowned affordable online professional copy writers, book authors, ghost writers, copy editors, proof readers, coauthors, rewriters, book cover creation, graphics and CAD, digital and other photography, publishing assistance and book and screenplay writers, editors, developers and paid analysts service. We also do presentation | pitch services for your book and screenplay ideas to major TV and film industry representatives.

  Overpopulation in Ohio - a Murder Mystery

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 3,700

  Fiction Based on Fact Murder Mystery:

  There was a murder I didn’t exactly participate in around Gahanna, Ohio in the 1970s. I simply told my father to ask “the guy at work” to pick me up, implying something. I think that man, who’s dead by now, murdered his wife and buried her somewhere. Up until now, I’m not sure if I caused those murders, or was only an innocent victim. Did it matter that I asked my Dad an open-ended question, more like a command, one which meant I was giving up on life in order to become a murder victim?

  I ran alongside the road with my track team members, two girls, in front of me, running oh about a quarter mile ahead. I didn’t think they could hear me if I screamed. We were way out in the fields and farmlands of Ohio, and we were the long distance girls’ track team of Gahanna Lincoln High School. I had been expecting the guy to show up, the man from Dad’s work. I’d seen him in a photograph, and he looked like he was being picked on by the guy looming behind him in the photo, probably on a daily basis. Dad’s work could be odd sometimes.

  He was a mentally disabled WWII veteran of the US Navy, retired, working at North American Rockwell in Ohio. He was prone to violent temper tantrums and liked to tease me into crying. He’d then get extremely angry, running me down and screaming like a male banshee in my streaming yellow face. I thought he was going to kill me, several times, but Mom always stopped him from falling over the edge. She was psychically well, had the patience and mannerisms of a saint, and held us all together like glue. I miss them both royally. I was their youngest, the princess, why we lived in Ohio.

  I had to choose whether or not to stop, let the guy come out of his white sedan car, and maybe then I could fight him, but I didn’t know enough yet on how to fight with someone. That takes karate, judo, kung fu, martial arts training. I wouldn’t attain any of that until years later, when I went to college. I only vaguely knew how to side kick from watching David Carradine on “Kung Fu,” the television show in the 1970s. I was running with the girls’ track team during the early summer of 1977, when this terrible event transpired. I would later win my high school letter, but for now the man had come to me, and was swerving in front of me, constantly cutting me off.

  So I wouldn’t stop running, even though I felt like some sort of female Jerry Lewis, and I was constantly running, more so than he ever did in his entire jaded celebrity life. I ran and ran and ran, achingly slowly, as the guy from Dad’s work constantly cut alongside me, at perfect 45 degree angles about two feet ahead of me each time. I had to pace myself so that I was not run over by the nose of his car. It was white and unfamiliar, like the Lincoln used by James Earl Ray when he shot Dr. King in 1968. Anyway, the driver kept cutting a perfect angle in front of me; I kept thinking it was a sign of certain death, the perfection of how he angled the car each time. It surely meant he had a gun ready, armed with an expensive silencer.

  Did that tell me something about the driver being too innocuous to truly be innocent in an overcrowded Ohio? There was plenty of wide open spaces and fields dedicated to spreading, major commercial farmlands, with smaller farms being sold out to the government on a regular basis back then, so it was overcrowded maximally in Ohio’s major cities. People rode bicycles on the sidewalks, and the major arterials were clogged with cars and other vehicles. The papers claimed statistics showed looming overpopulation, and my Dad believed Ohio was getting crowded with people, coming in like we did from elsewhere, to the beauty of a nearly East Coast State that was loade
d down mainly with farmlands. I read recently on the Internet that Ohio is now more overcrowded than ever, but I don’t know who is keeping such statistics, or what they are used for, really.

  I read in Mad Magazine in the 1970s that people across the entire planet “have nowhere else to go.” I learned at school from one of my male teachers that we had reached the ends of the Earth in the early Twentieth Century, and that is why the Holocaust, the Purges and the Gulag etc. happened, as historically the right wing elements of male history have decided the planet was overpopulated. This also led to mass homicides through knifings in Mexico several centuries ago, due to a crying need for more protein – albeit human food – and the huge, million member genocide by gore-covered machetes of Rwanda, Africa in 1994. So this came to me right there in Ohio – I would become a murder victim to stop from ever getting pregnant, along with other girls, and would not add to the problem. Murder was surely better in some way than concentration death camps. It meant dying on your feet and not living on your knees, hopefully!

  Anyway, the guy in the white car looked like someone hideous mentioned by Jewish psychiatrist Victor Frankl in his Holocaust book, cutting perfect, deathly still and grave-like marker corners right in front of me, to let me know I was a lifelong faggot going straight to Hell – simply because I’d joined the girl’s track team, a recent event under Title 9 for women’s sports back in the 1970s; or because I had accidentally arranged the murder of his daughter. The truth is that I walked up to my father while he was reading the papers, after having gotten sick and tired of waiting around for something like that guy from Dad’s work to show up in my life…his daughter was blond and blue eyed, gorgeous but a little odd looking…tall, not doing her homework. Unless the girl I thought was his daughter was the class valedictorian, and was never killed by anyone.

  Something like God was screaming at me that the girl I saw in the cafeteria, not doing her homework, was the one, though. But I was lonely, tired of waiting for a nonexistent Prince Charming. She looked like she had one of those prearranged, down a road of Soccer Motherhood and bliss. But she also looked phony, off and all-pervading…gone evil. Ghostly, outlined in glowing white as if barely in human existence. It may have been my autism, where I sometimes see people appear in a moon aura of grey, black or white, as if they’re ethereal or otherwise not particularly here.

  Perhaps her Dad kept her worried into place. Was that blonde girl his daughter? I practically zoomed sideways, falling into the seat in front of her. I tried complimenting her, telling her that if she wore two different earrings, they might offset her beauty and make her look much more appealing. I didn’t like judging her, so I tried to talk, make her smile, something. I was afraid to tell her stuff, for fear of being labeled a lesbian. I didn’t want to care about anyone, considering the overall situation – especially some all-white girl much taller than me. She could be a model, someone who didn’t need to put forth any relative effort in order to attain an almost perfect life, sitting in the cafeteria and smiling completely without any fear for her personal safety. She didn’t have to worry about being bullied by the other girls and the miserable, misbegotten boys, like I did. It was an everyday event with me. She didn’t run track way out in the countryside, alone, without the other runners keeping alongside her, like I did.

  The two girls far ahead of me on my team, a straight quarter mile away and shimmering off in the distance like twin fairies, couldn’t possibly hear me. I waited while the guy in the white car kept cutting me off, at least half a dozen or more times, maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen. It was a long moment of forcing me to realize that he had a lovely “naked gun” as well as his gun in the car; maybe he also had a nice, sharp Jack the Ripper knife. Maybe the perfect death reference was subterfuge, hiding what he was really planning to do to me. Take half an hour, two hours or more to rape, cut up and kill me, inserting the knife into my vagina slowly, or whatever.

  It was a long time of worshipful respect for the Ripper, and the lessons that had taught me. According to the Victorian Era book I had read, girls like me think it means sex. Hope lasts until the very end, does it not? Screaming with my mouth taped over, nobody to hear until it was too late. My body dumped along the road, in a secluded woody area, similar to the Green River in Washington State. Excruciatingly alive, waiting for the ants and other bugs to slowly finish me off, my mind gone coldly to die of eventual thirst. It takes a week to leave from no water, they taught me at school. Since I was athletic, maybe two weeks, biting my lips to produce blood to suck on.

  And yet angrily, fearfully, I longed solely to oppose that guy, if he ever stopped the car and pulled over to uh, greet me. Or grab me and stuff me in. I waited for centuries, millennia of sloppy, Jerry Lewis style running around the place, stumbling over myself, arms and legs crossing and crisscrossing and flailing around in a spastic, terrorized manner, as if I was signaling for help from a nonexistent male, jealous God hating girls like me and who wanted to teach me a horrible lesson. Something like my Dad, who hated me more, who had arranged for this while laying the blame at my own doorstep?

  It must be a huge fat man. I was right; I saw his form as I glanced through the window, so terrified I was barely able to turn my head to the left. I picked him out years later in the two photos Dad had of his work. I guess my father did, maybe innocently, mention me to the guy at his work, pent up and frustrated after years of not getting promoted, being picked “up” in a funny way by another guy at work, a dark man obviously making fun of him. The dude at work was innocent in a hideous way; but how innocent is a man who’s willing to kill someone because they think they are the “wrong” sexual preference, just because they are newly in a women’s sport? Or are too willing to give up trying?

  He must have killed his wife, he surely killed his daughter. What he did, I don’t know. Daddy, he dropped bombs on the Japanese during WWII, so he didn’t particularly care because he was trained to kill during boot camp in WWII. Totally necessary for the country. He was a decorated WWII veteran, and to him his daughter seemed to be a latter day hippie, gay, odd somehow. To him and my Mom. I wasn’t really one, I just liked to dress up differently for various reasons. And maybe the whole thing was sexism, where those two men had no real respect for women at all.

  Anyway, I didn’t ask Daddy to kill me. I just stated, “Dad, have the guy from work come pick me up.” Not a question – a command. Did he mistake it for an order from his Navy days? Mom told him to do a lot of things, such as stop drinking beer; did Dad listen to me on this, when I asked him to let me give up trying? Inescapable fate, like Mad Magazine said. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Nothing. Where was I going to go in life? I did my homework faithfully, and I was getting ready to go to college. But my low thyroid made me tired all the time, shoving me to push myself to the outer limits. Work for Dad and that guy must’ve been simple, easy and incredibly difficult all at the same time. However, my Dad had a Trick Knee and that made work, much, much more difficult for him. So he went to work and three days later, the guy from work showed up to become Jack the Ripper at me.

  You know, serial murder and cannibalism in crowded apartment buildings. The gifts that keep on giving, that people just know all about, and can tag everyone in some simian way about. Repeating ourselves over and over, without ever doing anything real about the problem. Such labor has to be through the authorities, paid work. And 99% of the time, it involves coming in after the crime has been committed, after the deed is done, after the bodies are found. The murderer may finally be stopped, but only after he’s ruined dozens to hundreds of lives in an overcrowded, fitful world.

  The guy from Dad’s work, after he tried to get me into the car, failing miserably to do so because he wouldn’t stop the car and I wouldn’t stop running…well, after I shouted the single word “HELP!” at the tops of my lungs, with it coming out like a “peep” – I thought for sure no way could it be heard by anyone – my two fellow female track runners, Nancy and Jeanie, turned around and rac
ed back toward the car. As dark-outlined, screaming, claw-extending shadowy little Valkyries. My autism made them both look unreal, like shadows without any form or substance. They dove in the car’s direction, and you should have seen that white man jerk the car into a perfect U-turn, right around, heading back the way he’d come with screeching tires. I saw through the window that he was now far more terrified, horrified and scared than I was, having witnessed the Valkyries. He zoomed away like a vanilla bat out of interminable Hell, beaten and found guilty out of his mind – ecstatic, I jumped into the air, laughing!

  The car was gone; I didn’t have paper or pen in my pocket to write down that horrible man’s license plate. Maybe I should have memorized the number, but we were way out in the country and I would’ve needed to chant it silently for the next half hour. I was far too tired and too happy to do so. It was only two seconds before the man in the white car took off. I wonder what happened to his wife and daughter. Did he bury his wife out in the backyard, with no one caring about it or maybe he did it at night; Dad told me the girl’s body was found two blocks away from our house. He said she was drenched in semen, her arms and legs were broken, she was cut everywhere and that her eyes were gouged out of her unsmiling face, with blood caked all over her body.

  “Do you want to go see?” Daddy gloated. I was in the bathroom, waiting too long in my shocked response. “No,” I sighed. “That’s okay.” Daddy smiled, the worst knowing smirk I’d seen in my short life. “By now, the ambulance has picked her up. Too bad; they don’t know if she is dead or alive.” I didn’t need to find out more; nor did I like the way Daddy looked. I wondered if he was proud of me for having escaped, fighting a battle of wits where someone other than me, normally luckier in our privileged society, had lost. Should I have tried harder to rescue her? She was all-white and tall, I was off-white and short, and maybe she usually did her homework at home and not at school; but if that had indeed been her Dad, apparently she had nowhere else to go.

  Actually, I think that “dead or alive” comment indicated there was no dead body. Dad had laughingly sent the guy from work to “teach me a lesson,” being worried about my tendency to range around the Ohio countryside, running down country roads and touring for miles and miles on my ten-speed bicycle. It was merely a stern warning that the sort of thing he was describing could happen – he gave a damn about me. I loved my Dad; he provided quite well for us, moving us to Ohio so I could grow up in an innocent, untrammeled place, one without too many people. We were disappointed soon after we moved there, with a giant freeway thrusting into our neighborhood. The city put up a concrete sound deflection wall, but you could hear the roaring noises emanating from the Eternal Highway System. “They opened the gates”, Dad sighed one time while driving, indicating lines, lines and more lines of stacked up cars going by – while he tried vainly to pull out into traffic. He clearly meant those, well, Gates of Hell. I believe Hell Itself is in this life, not the next (and a War reference too), but I deal with it the best I possibly can. Making a Heaven out of Hell and a Hell out of Heaven is what most people try to do best.

  Dad is dead now, and so is Mom as of last year. They both passed gently on, of Natural Causes. I can say this and get it off my chest: I do not think waltzing over to Dad sitting in his easy chair, giving up on my alleged life to see what matters, counts for anything real. A sense of fitful curiosity on my part, and nothing more…it seemed way, WAY too easy, as if something was deliberately misleading me into taking the blame for the actions of SOMEBODY ELSE, such as that Ohio murderer who killed over 100 people, stating it was due to overpopulation.

  Could be that dude in the white sedan four-door car was none other than him, using my earnest difficulties during track practice in order to further his weird aims. Being taught sheer nonsense at school brought me that pickle, is what I think; “YOU did it” being handed to me, instead of full acknowledgement that someone else indeed had. Like Hillary Clinton being blamed because her name sounds like Hitler. Must be if a man commits genocide, there needs to be someone female to take the rap. Someone like his mother, or maybe if anybody kills people…has to be somebody else, not the murderer, which is something you cannot like, ever.

  Was “my idea” based on the Holocaust; was it an idiotic Hitler thing? Planning was NOT highly involved; I thought I might be the first in a string of serial murders, also thought I might not be its first victim. I reasoned that if I weaseled out, there might be other such females, as I had gotten the “person at work” started on murdering girls and maybe women. I was willing to take a long chance, too curious as to what was going on to back out, yet had a feeling I might get away, while having to realize what I had done.

  If I died, would it matter worth a hill of beans during Vietnam? While waiting for the Cold War Era to end life on the planet? Did my soul even begin to count, or mean anything? What I think to this day is either the guy from Dad’s work, or the 100+ persons murderer, probably including his dead wife…that somehow I came along, with my usual peculiar luck, as seemingly someone he could blame for his baser, viler actions. If he “knew” there was something wrong with me, such as a girl is “subhuman” or a “faggot” or somehow such stuff matters – how can it?

  They say the personal is political; I’d like to see how I am a murderer, when someone else did ALL of the killing, I didn’t ORDER any of it, and all I did was line up to be his idiotic victim for the sake of alleged overpopulation, a confusing, amoral and complex issue. I was only 14 and then finally 17, too young to understand what to do yet. Wishing I could have one kid, once, in an overcrowded, weirdo wacko world…not die in it. Not yet. Yet whom would I find, if they were “into” blaming me for their actions?

  After all, wouldn’t they (the murderer’s family) have had to make one more child, eventually? Maybe he had slowed it down to one kid, through intemperate habits like overeating, smoking, drinking, seeing hookers, etc. That would be sad, if they only had that one girl and no others, and he still felt like Ohio was overcrowded enough to need vengeance enough to murder people. On the day after the white car cut me off, I decided that when I grew up, I would only have one baby, and no more. I would battle overpopulation that way, even if it never did anyone any good – I was sick of murders, and their belated aftermaths.

  Recently, I looked up the local papers in both Gahanna and Columbus, Ohio, finding no evidence of any dead bodies left two blocks down from where we lived. Maybe Dad and the guy from work pulled a joke on me. One week after the incident, I read in the Columbus Dispatch about the man who shot dead 100+ men, women and children, before he turned himself in. Days after I was almost killed by him, probably. I do not know if he was the same man or not, and what I meant by I am not exactly white is that I’m “racially impure” or have more than freckles under my pale, wan-colored skin.

  Maybe it’s a lot of Black and Brown influence. 100+ is a reference, coincidental or otherwise, to a movie by Walt Disney, “101 Dalmatians”. Those are the dogs covered in spots. Black spots, similar to freckles. I was the only kid in my whole high school with “racial impurities” so far as I knew, and it was like that nearly everywhere I went in life. Hitler was obsessed with Aryan white purity, so I wonder about things like that sometimes. Why there AREN’T more people like me, where I can see them.

  But the other white, etc. people in an overcrowded Ohio? The type that don’t talk, don’t dance, don’t do anything but drugs, or smoke and drink? That stand around idly chatting, chain smoking, swilling cheap beer and wine, lonely, bored and disinterested in life? The type that believes in Jesus above all else, snorting cocaine in the bathroom and shooting up heroin in the bedroom? In an afterlife, something to do with the theory of relativity, all orchestrated by men somehow? By people locked into power struggles, making up organized religion, causing an overpopulated, overbuilt, overcrowded grey-shaded world without any foresight, mercy or lasting useful memories?

  What happened to the three of us, my Dad, me and the guy from work? I
left for college and didn’t find out, except Dad died a few years back. I tried to turn in the murderer one day after my father said it had happened. All I could tell the authorities concerned a fat man in a white sedan car; the cop I called over to our house was righteously disgusted because I couldn’t give him any further details. For my Mom’s sake, and because Dad was psychologically “off,” I didn’t mention the guy from work; there was no report in the papers either. Maybe none of it so much as took place. Maybe I dreamed up the whole thing; but I remember too much, especially running down the road.

  I grabbed Jerry Lewis tight in my limping, heat-stricken mind as I forever continued to ploddingly run, after the white car had fled, after the two girls has run far away from me once more, and I had to continue along a narrow, dirt-lined straight path, forcing my body universally forward. Eventually, I grew up, married, bore that girl child of my dreams, not a killer at heart in any way. She’s a runner herself, grown up now too, and she learned her basic karate skills from me.

  That old guy from Dad’s work is certainly dead by now, as he was outright obese and otherwise patently ignoble. We were all German Americans, really, prone to the most disastrous of habits. I hope he’s not reading this. I don’t even remember his name.

  THE END

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  Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karen_S_Col

  If Puget Sound is Falling Down

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word count: 3,000

  This article won awards for featuring what you should do before, during and after an earthquake. Largely, fall down on the floor, get in a doorway, and cover up – that sort of thing. It might help to be concerned about your surroundings, bottle up some water, stow away some canned food and stably pin down your water heater and any loose shelving. Planned use in advance of these simple techniques works in a time of great crisis.

 

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