November 1st, 2010
Sure, the ability to read minds would be great. Discover exactly what that honey at the end of the bar wants to hear. Annihilate at the poker table. Figure out why your wife hasn’t talked to you in a week.
But imagine the downside. Learning that your favorite people are monsters – Child-craving, puppy torturing monsters parading as decent folk. Hearing what your loved ones really think of you. The unsavory and unwanted knowledge that as a species, we’re not as loving and selfless as we claim to be. One day – nay, one HOUR! – with the volume turned up on the thoughts of others, you’d be praying for cotton to stuff in your psychic ears.
Gift or curse?
Ask Rudy Weather. Here is a young man who hears it all, the private thoughts of his parents, his teachers, his peers, his heroes. Here is a man who wish there was a mute button.
“One afternoon I stood next to Yvonne Dean, the prettiest girl in the school, in hopes of getting a glimpse of her innermost being. She stood at her locker, all curvy and blonde and pulling off a sweater. When the sweater came off, I was standing before her.
Her thoughts were as ugly as the rest of her was divine.
“Oh, God, Oh, God, Oh, God. Rudy Weather! If he touches me, I’ll scream. I’ll scream and throw up, I just know I will.”
I sucked a thought from the family doctor I had been seeing for years as he pressed a stethoscope to my chest. The voice that fluttered out of his head was slick and dark like a bat. I didn’t understand what I heard.
“So tender and shy, this one. I’d like to get him down in my basement.”
Five years later, they found the bodies of six children in his cellar.”
Nasty stuff. But it gets worse. Oh, so much worse for Rudy Weather, reader of minds. Find out how in Box of Lies.
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October 28th, 2010
If your burps smell like your best friend, you know you haven’t been eating right.
They say if a person eats the flesh of another human, a curse will follow him the rest of his life. I’m not sure I believe it. Although, it’s probably pretty stringy and will get caught in your teeth.
You know the stories. There’s the poor bastards from the Donner party who got stuck in Sierra Nevada during a mean winter and ended up making sandwiches out of each other. There’s the rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, forcing survivors to make that dreadful decision to eat the dead. There’s that guy in the cartoon life raft who keeps seeing hamburgers every time he looks at his friend on the other side of the boat.
History is filthy with cannibals. Survivors of shipwrecks, westward expanders, and hapless mountain travelers munched on each other all the time. There’s a grisly novel by David Morrell in which a father is faced with the decision to eat his own daughter or perish in the snow? It’s called Testament and it can also be used as a cook book.
You’ve probably thought about it a time or two. If faced with starvation, could you bring yourself to eat the flesh of another? Would it matter if it was a loved one or a stranger? Is thigh meat better than flesh?
“The ravaged corpse of Ian Blaine poked from a snow drift, a hideous thing with missing parts. The thighs had been scraped down to the bone. There was no meat left there at all, only hanging strips of skin
An almost perfect square had been removed from his midsection, a gore-streaked window that opened on what was left of the inner organs. The shoulders had been completely hacked away. Same with the buttocks and calves. The lower lip was gone revealing teeth and gums that had gone blue. It had been a fast snack when there wasnt enough energy for carving.”
In “Feast of Friends,” my group of cannibals survive their ordeal. And once a year, they gather together to drink beer and check on each other. Are they cursed?
Probably. But find out for sure in story number eight in Box of Lies. And while you’re up, want to make me a sandwich?
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