Glorious Gardens of Teetering Rust
Brian S. Wheeler
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Fallen Stardust: A boy, an outcast and an alien must find salvation in a world of ruin. Samuel must find a medicine to cure the fever ravaging his village. Markus must find the motive that murdered those he loved. And an angel must find a future in a city crumbled into debris. But something lurks beneath the wasted world, and waking it may doom what little of humanity survives.
The Sisters Will Dance: Blaine Woosely claws his way back to the living. He has cleaned his blood of his addiction, and an unexpected, family farm home rewards his efforts. Only, the country acres isolate Blaine when a sharp-toothed monster hunts to bring Blaine back to dark. The sad history of Blaine's blood brings magic to the country home's new master, but in the end, only Blaine himself can break his chains.
Mr. Hancock’s Signature: The dead walk in Monteray. The corpse of a nearly forgotten farmer named Hancock arrives via train. Ian Washington remembers Mr. Hancock and vows to return the body home. Yet Mr. Hancock's body will not rest while Ian works to reopen a cemetery, and the corpse staring each morning upon the doorstep forces the town to choose between the isolation of their fear or the hope of their fellowship.
Glorious Gardens of Teetering Rust
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2013 by Brian S. Wheeler
Glorious Gardens of Teetering Rust
Contents
Chapter 1 – Lonely Camper Nights
Chapter 2 – Uncles and Peanut Butter Sandwiches
Chapter 3 – Mumblings About Color
Chapter 4 – Shifting Lines and Changing Angles
Chapter 5 – Elephants and Parasols
Chapter 6 – Faces of Dust
Chapter 7 – Towers in the Dust
Chapter 8 – Granted Mercy
Chapter 9 – The Stuff of Dreams
Chapter 10 – Dinner in the Trash
Chapter 11 – Color at the Heart
Chapter 12 – Never Finding the End of It
Help Spread the Story
About the Writer
Other Stories
Chapter 1 – Lonely Camper Nights...
Brandon Tuggle slept and toiled upon the sharpest of acres. His bed felt lonely. His work scratched him with scars.
Brandon, like any in his family of Tuggles, gathered salvage. He collected discarded steel and rusting, iron rebar. He gathered broken brick and shattered glass. He horded slag and piled castaway stone. Brandon refused no aluminum, copper or tin, and the piles of his accumulation teetered in the wind, so that such rusting towers’ shade cooled him in summer, until the edges that protruded from so much stacked refuse mapped his flesh with the crisscrossing scars of suffered lacerations.
At night, Brandon sought shelter within the dented camper trailer angled upon a foundation of cement blocks set only a handful of yards inside the Tuggle salvage yard’s central entrance. At night, when moonlight and star twinkle failed to provide enough light to safely mark the path through such sharp piles of salvage, Brandon sat upon the cot that served as kitchen table, sofa, and bed and dressed the day’s new wounds beneath the light cast by a naked, overhead bulb. Long ago, the sun and rust had dyed his skin a shade of ochre that refused to wash clean beneath even the roughest soap’s pumice.
The Tuggle’s salvage yard provided little luxury. None of the televisions Brandon gathered could any longer paint pictures with flickering light. He knew of tall piles composed solely of radios, but all of the box’s dials could no longer glow, and none of the speakers any more mumbled speech or slurred a song. Occasionally, Brandon discovered guitars, but none of those instruments still held any strings. All the books he unearthed from the rubbish missed too many of their original pages to any longer offer complete tales.
Thus Brandon’s nights passed slowly following his days’ hard labors.
Once satisfied the flow of any blood had been staunched, Brandon Tuggle would break his gaze from his broken mirror’s reflection and consider the artwork that covered his camper’s inner walls in the same rust tone that dominated the outside salvage yard. He did not understand the inspiration that fell upon his sleeping mind and moved his rust-stained fingers across whatever cardboard shred, notebook page or paper napkin his dreams considered a canvas. Brandon never remembered scratching the intricate maze of lines, the complex systems of ovals, the smudges of shadows, the recesses of negative space that greeted him each morning when his body felt like it had slept most soundly. He could never recreate such work while awake, and the day’s work left him too exhausted to fret over whatever pattern he might sketch in his dreams. So the panels of labyrinth scratches and fingernail lines expanded upon his camper walls until Brandon knew no sanctuary from the ochre color that dominated his land.
Brandon sat upon his cot and listened to the wind whistle through his salvage piles, hoping to hear the shuffling of one of his many uncles returning from amidst so many acres of cutting tin and biting iron.
He had not seen any of his uncles for a very long time, and Brandon craved a little company to distract his thoughts from the ceaseless sunburn and irritating cuts he could not avoid during his day.
At least the summer season’s nights were short, so that extended stretches of boredom did not magnify Brandon’s loneliness after the day took such a toll on his body. Still, Brandon always sighed when slumber eventual found him his camper’s narrow confines.
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