New Story Day: "Phantom View" at Reactor!

My final publication of the year dropped today: a new novelette called “Phantom View”! I love that Reactor held this one off for Halloween.

“Phantom View” is about a son caretaking for his father, and discovering a blurry person in all their family photos. He has no memory of this person. He can’t even tell if it is a person. Then he discovers the same blurry figure is in all his dad’s old paintings--and the figure may be in the house with them right now.

Re-reading this story shook me up a little. I’d long wanted to write about disabled people caring for other disabled people. I got in touch with a piece of myself. Even better, I got to play with notions of accessibility devices, both for corporeal and incorporeal beings. “Phantom View” is for people who loved “Open House on Haunted Hill” and “That Story Isn’t The Story.” It’s about the macabre stirring something in our hearts.

You can read “Phantom View” at Reactor through this handy link.

Or you can buy “Phantom View” on Kindle at this handy link.

No matter how you read it, let me know what you think! And happy spooky season!

 

Happy Urban Legend 4: Alligators in the Sewer

There is a venerable urban legend of alligators living in the sewers of major metropolitan areas. It began as one baby gator stolen from the pet store by a capricious child, and once discovered by his parents, is flushed down the toilet. It grew up, spawned and proceeded to stalk the sewers for the rest of its days. Three things are patently untrue about this urban legend:

1)      Alligators aren't sold in most pet stores. It wasn't stolen from one.

2)      The child flushed it not because of parents, but because children as sadistic and evil monsters.

3)      It was actually a baby crocodile, but most people don't know the difference.

Some version of the gator/croc infestation is real in most cities where children have access to wildlife and toilets. However the average sewer croc is friendly to the point of being entrepreneurial, perpetually stalking the sewers in order to collect all the change people drop down grates, pipes and sinks. The reason there is not one, but many crocs in the average sewer is because the original croc made enough money to get his family across the border and into the neighborhood.

If you find yourself underground and cornered by something like an alligator or crocodile, offer it a dollar. If this does not dissuade it, offer to flush anything from the surface world it wants as soon as you get topside again. This usually does the trick. Be sure to follow through with the sewer croc's demands, though: the part about them coming up through the toilet for revenge is truer than is worth risking.

Happy Urban Legend 2: Chain Letters

One of the first superstitions of the digital era was the chain letter. An immigrant from the postal service, the superstition came in the form of a letter, and later an e-mail, threatening you to copy the message and send it to several friends. Why you'd do that to a friend has always been a course of mystery, stretching back to the first girl to ever compose a chain e-mail. To be fair, she was dead when she did it.

Anyone who follows the instructions of a chain e-mail is passed over and experiences none of Google's first paranormal agent. Anyone who disregards such an e-mail, though, will be haunted by the ghost of the girl who set the scheme up. She will haunt your inbox for the rest of your life, complimenting your good taste by acting as a secondary spam filter. You will very likely never see another penis enlargement ad that she thinks you don't need.

Skeptics should still be wary, for though disregarding her power has benefits, calling her work a superstition is hazardous. Doing so upsets her ghost and cause her to expose your search history to a loved one. That has never ended well, and ironically, its contents are always passed on by word of mouth.

Bathroom Monologue: Happy Urban Legends

The Hook Hand

It's said he lurks on romantic cliffs and in abandoned parking lots. Wherever teens go to neck, he may be spotted in the rear-view mirror. At first you'll only hear a faint scratching. If you're attentive, the radio will warn you that a madman has escaped from a nearby asylum. But you won't hear it, because he wouldn't come for you if you listened to important information.

So as hands slip under sweaters and toes curl, little scratches will climb up the door of the car. You may mistake the whine of his hook hand on the roof for the moans of your partner. Most folks are scared witless when his specter finally looms, pulling on their clothes as they peel off for civilization.

It's miles of burned rubber and ruined hard-ons later that the survivors discover a wrapped condom hanging from the driver-side mirror. The hook-handed maniac takes reproductive health very seriously.