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



  Woody Allen Makes

  A Scary Sandwich

  Horror Pastiche - Stories & Poems

  By Karen S. Cole | Copyright © 2015

  GHOST WRITER, INC. | RAINBOW WRITING, INC.

  Cover photograph: public domain image, Woody Allen,

  No copyright, allowed by the Fair Use Doctrine.

  [email protected]

  Nothing in this book may be reproduced without permission of the author, with exception of a three-six paragraphs long excerpt. Copies of this book may be bought and distributed via Internet and offline retailers. Copies may be given away either for free or sold to any interested parties, libraries, schools or available readerships. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this book author.

  Table of Contents

  EARLY MAN

  Herman the Fool

  The Spanish Inquisition

  You Need a Ghost Writer!

  The Amazing Hotel Towel

  Beyond all Time, Beyond even Space

  Winter Calls the Way of Life

  Autumn Leaves Never Die

  The Night I Became both Superman and Batman

  Fanfiction: A Most Genre-ous Offer

  Annie Chapman - Our Lady of Whitechapel

  The Incredible Transition of Dr. Queen

  LATE WOMAN

  For Now, you are Disabled

  Ragdoll Man

  Overpopulation in Ohio - a Murder Mystery

  If Puget Sound is Falling Down

  Last of a Dying Breed

  Bubbleator 2044

  Happiness is a Head Cold

  Let There Be Dragons

  A Disabled Little Girl

  The Jewish Kid and the Cannibal

  HOLY HALLOWE’EN CLIMAX

  Mein Weirdo – an Unromantic Comedy

  Woody Allen Shares a Scary Sandwich

  Links: Ghost Writer, Inc.

  Herman the Fool

  Alias: A Tear Jerker, known as a Tragedy

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 2,500

  There’s a place for us. Peace and quiet and open air, wait for us - somewhere. There’s a time for us…a time, and a place for us…where resides…something subhuman…called freedom.

  One white male dummy, sitting on a shelf, broken, twisted, its life deformed by the many obstacles it has faced. It is elegantly soft and hard to the touch, as your eyes fondle its many parts. It has no sex, no life, no meaning, and yet you can tell something about it is different as you ruthlessly scan it. It is not just a “dummy” – it stands out, with jet-black hair.

  It is sheer luck when you are totally visible, as no one but you knows your actual life; on the other hand, does someone else know it?

  “Hello,” the little dummy seems to say as you slowly draw closer to it. What does it really look like? It has hair, teeth, clothing, and a mystery to it. There is a poking out of brown, yellow, red and green hair. It does not look like anything, sutra sexless, and a clown that could be real. Is it somehow a “gay” dummy? Yes, but no, it screams…somehow, it was once male at you. Due to others – it altered itself to its basic soul.

  Yet you know you have met this being before, perhaps as a woman. Pushing past the forces of nature, realizing you do not want “them” to throw you into a warehouse institution…you awaken to bright lights all around, pulsing at your bulging feet, flooding your thin brown eyes, outlining your pink, nail-polished fingertips. You are standing motionless at a simple store, a small, pedestrian shop of sorts. As you look about, the imagery resolves into a female at a puppet store…why, that woman is you!

  Fascinating, isn’t it? You are staring at the dummy in your hand. You have found me well, the dummy’s lips say, in your own mind. You are so that woman, but it is all in the past, as human life on the face of this planet is over. Well, maybe in a few years. Give or take centuries.

  “Pick me up, woman o’ my soul,” it coos as she lifts it to her lips…

  “I’ll take it,” Sandra sighed at the cash register. “No problem. Just make sure you take care of Herman when he comes home. He fills up way too much space in the living room. By the way, his ever-login’ name is misspelled. It was s’posed to be Herman; isn’t that best?” Perhaps, Sandra mused, it has to do with the meaning of two different words.

  “Well, the little fellow does seem mostly small...” Easing away from their checkout counter, Sandra pushed herself out the door, as she weighed over 700 pounds. She now had a new friend for her collection of Pierrot dolls, she knew to herself, heading to her small apartment downtown. She could not be a lesbian any longer. Nobody was one to begin with.

  She was too old and fat – it mattered to the girls – to her previous lovers any longer, who were mainly people. Really, she knew she must die. Her latest flame had gone out the door last, and simply never returned. She was nobody. Her friends conspired to give her this feeling, partying on her sometimes, leaving her to contemplate a Fine Misericord. It is the feeling when you know you are alone in life, like a small, wooden sepulchral shelf, folded on the underside of chairs, beneath pews in a church.

  Sandra smiled to herself. She had known the only Heaven was in the Afterlife. Her ample, supple body groaned and creaked as she made it go up the stairs after she keyed into her small but dingy apartment building. She made it up the steps to the top floor, where she was forced to live. It had taken a long time to find the small studio unit, as demand was incessant in the area in which she lived, far away from the boyfriend who had always made fun of her, in an occasionally fun way.

  He had been an actual man, before lesbianism. That, something she gave up to, due to nobody thinking of her as worthwhile anymore. All her sides Lose, permanently, in all their wars, everywhere. Especially Germany. She still wanted a baby, maybe up to four kids…women do not do that, she thought, without at least one man becoming involved, invoked, in vitro…definitely with scorn.

  He was a Daddy. He made his real kids earlier, or had made it up. Made him appear desirable to Sandra, over time. Anyway, he was long gone far away, in another state or country, due to his personal wars with her about poverty, concerning the lack of children – due to her fat, over with life. Her unusual abilities to gain weight; too modern, it kept her off running home. His capabilities involved not getting work, and flirting with girls.

  Far away now, the man she had almost driven into killing her. That petty chap, uninterested in kids, had interesting hair too, like this Pierrot doll, but it had been shiny black and shady – spikes in the morning, feathers at night like her other lover’s hair – wasted time. There had never been any such “love” going on. Still, Sandra smiled. She knew sometimes she had no “soul,” but it had been fun Playing let us Pretend, let us Pray.

  Some days, she wondered if he murdered her, and got away with it due to “his morality” she did not think he possessed. She was merely a good person, not a typical judge of male character like him. He had driven her into becoming an overweight “lesbian,” or not. Was it her fault or his? It was a “daily monotony,” and he had eventually found another such somebody. She thought maybe she had said something, and he had taken offense. Sighing, she now weighed enough to die. Would it end quickly?

  She gazed lovingly at the dummy, longingly, as if expecting the first half of a new mystery series or bookstore event. Nonetheless, she smiled her own Mona Lisa grin, as she held back her chest against the heart attacks. They were bursting her bosom out, from deep inside – where agonies reign, work being the only distraction, keeping her mind in check against the impersonal nature of male
“sanity.”

  With good luck, she grasped her 1,000th Pierrot doll. The white-skinned, black haired fool; he was the one who hanged himself. Without luck, she lost count, but not to 1,023…Marty Feldman aside. He was a Jewish comic who lost his lone girlfriend and did not stick around; he too hanged himself, in real life, in spite of his merrily rolling, doll-like eyes.

  For you see, her tiny apartment space was stuffed with Pierrot dolls, the Crying Clown, the smiling clown, the dark-hued clown everywhere. She had built small wooden shelves from kits, ordered online. These were her children, for she had aborted only the one boy kid once, but there were none available now. She was going to join the only child she never had, in outer space, as a relic to people’s false assumptions.

  However, she smiled down at her goddamned “dolly”. He was cleverly worried, the little Herman, for her sake. No, mainly for his. He was some type of pure, strange rag doll, a relic like a saint, which she could shake, crack, maybe destroy and heartlessly eliminate. She shook him. Then she shook him harder. “Say you’re sorry…say you’re sorry, Daddy, for telling me there is an afterlife and that you are God. There is too a hell in this life…called War.” The doll shook, oh how it TREMORED, like salt and pepper, flaking off in her flailing hands. Suddenly, Sandra noticed Herman’s little ceramic, white-painted face was cracked. Ouch!

  She had broken her favorite pastime doll. Not only, that, her death sequence was starting to grow, expand into…incredibly long, painful and peripatetic. Pathos, bathos, how long before it hits…pant-pant, hold doll. Look at Herman. Pant pant-pant, is THAT why “bitch” - did you waste time back there? Yes, you did, farting around with lovers, smoking cigs, drinking booze, having a “good time” in an overcrowded world. Designer coffee, good food, too much of it…what was there left to live for?

  “Daddy,” she murmured softly, “Dad, you’re broken. Come to my dead home”, she intoned as a melodious…mommy, placing Herman neatly on a nearby low shelf, feeling difficulty stretching.

  She could not or did not want to remember any of their other names. The dolls were mostly the same anyway: German people. Gazing upon them, clutching her chest, she swung, pitched and reeled, falling down Spartan. The place resounded with marching band dolls, sophisticated dolls, all white or brown Barbie dolls, Negro stereotype dolls, kewpie dolls with their peaky blond heads. There were Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls stuffed with wonderful pink, yellow, green, blue, purple and white candy Valentine hearts she had sewn in - plastic dolls made by anywhere worldwide, pearly girlie china ceramic dolls, and some that were other kinds of clown dolls than Pierrot. A tiny handful, hard to find anywhere but the cities where she lived, sported freckles or racial impurities – making them look so much more human.

  The camera that overtook her eyes refocused on her brain. Something resided in there from ages ago, recording scenes as she slumped to the floor, falling into her fat, having whittled down to the skinniest person in the universe. She smiled at this thing, though not Herman. She had finally gotten on SSI, and her own apartment was all hers. It happened the day she noticed she was truly finally dying…welfare came in, no more work needed. Black kids in hoodies who followed her home had nobody left to bother with their phony inane guilt. White kids in roving gangs had no one left to beat to death with their aluminum Mexican baseball bats.

  Threats were altogether dead and gone, buried forever, she smiled; we are going straight home. Slide, drool…so fat, so almost two or three entire whole “people”…Sandra slipped away, in her dreams. Built for a man, feeling too ignored, carnal, nightmarishly obese to have gotten…normally pregnant.

  Self-love is never what you allow yourself to enjoy alone.

  A rustling came from the five-pronged, moving dummy clutched in her spreading hand, opening wide with the relaxation of death…giving him enough time, just barely, to leap out of her fat, pudgy, pink-colored paw…making him feel like it was wading in a bilious pool, a sea of calories and multiplying cells…before it closed up with rigor mortis. Sandra, he thought to himself: What, is it the other person? Now are you home at last…hope, it never dies, he thought in dead silence. It has wings. Right ones and left ones, but no capacity for forgiveness.

  Herman hopped up and immediately walked over to her outspreading, stiffening corpse. “Godspeed, my dear, don’t know where you went. You have probably disintegrated. Good riddance to bad rubbish, they would say altogether. Now…we can party down. Yet somehow, I would’ve liked to get to know you, my sweetheart, my…” Herman stopped, and he saw a small, white glow surround his chest. He gulped, and realized the worst fate had befallen him. This could not be Heaven.

  He looked up at the ceiling, and then down at the extremely filthy, smelly, unsophisticated flooring, whitish gray, and cheap apartment short-shag carpet soaked by cigarette ashes. He crocked at the peeling, cracked walls – feeling at home, ridiculously brave. Then all resolved into a perfectly livable rank Hell. He was happy, for the first time in his life, for exactly one second; it dribbled away into stark staring, rabid fear. A vague memory told him, once he had been somebody to Sandra.

  “Hello!”

  There was nothing forward but dead silence.

  Herman crouched down next to the dead body, and idiotically wept. He was stuck forever, in an insignificant little apartment, blithering on in words with no heart, soul or meaning to them, to a rotten female corpse. He had been from England once, and the teeny weenie little white tag, playing on his neck near his doll’s shirt collar, said it out loud so strongly. In tiny hard to read blurry print, he could not help that someone else had been his Maker, something named Hasbro or Hauser - or God.

  Many doors slammed downstairs, to let the itsy-bitsy Jimmy know this: that he had only his survival urge and an abiding carnal desire to have fun somehow, seething in his heart. There was no little boy to play games; no errant ear in which to fathom the obscurity of the superhuman monster called time. No one to talk to, nobody to play catch with; nothing but Death…well emblemized by one fat, lifeless corpse on the floor. The former she was now at peace without mercy, beyond his reach.

  He even tried mounting it, but there was nothing there.

  As it grew spreading slowly, over the years, rotting and throwing off germs, worms, everything horrible in a human being’s soul, he groped in boring devotion to the nonexistent dead woman. As he was unable to do anything good to bring her back alive from the dead, they finally killed him. Bugs, weasels, cockroaches, and teensy tiny spirochetes, flatworms, chiggers, and food-happy things from the Ocean that nobody can fathom, relate to, or lunacies understand: all ate him whole. He welcomed them.

  Mildew superb, incrementally, something much whiter, nobler and purer than he…had to remain alive to suffer, chanting about how the pain will always go away, as a misanthropic crowd of alike humans with no innovative or intelligent mind between them. In due time, no time, however long you think, he found what they were all searching for: an idea. Deep inside, in that “special friend’s” everlasting soul was his…original blasphemous, narcoleptic name. Finally, he just keeled over.

  In spite of this, the Gods were not there to pronounce his fate – due to a lack of substance, form, rationality and bodies. They could point to the eerie number four, and an expanding googolplex beyond, in the future. As for three (3), it took too long to count that high, or to two (2). They were busy claiming that sheer anonymity is the only godlike policy.

  Who are they? No one, nobody – nothing at all.

  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.

  The Spanish Inquisition

  Or a True Tale of the Bad Old Days

  By Kar
en S. Cole

  Word Count: 1,700

  Start with: the Nazis were real, and so was the Holocaust. There were photos of that dismal event, but we have only paintings to show us the Dark Ages, when bodies filled the streets in Western Europe. The Black Plague was the daily main consideration. War, poverty, sex and childbirth, even using water took a back seat to finding work and staying alive: “Bring out your dead, bring out your dead.” Poor sanitation was the worst killer at all times, including during the Holocaust. It brought on disease, which has killed the most people throughout history, far more than any of the wars combined. The flu did a lot of the damage, but there are so many different strains of disease they cannot each be counted…or cured.

  What is the end result of Mother Nature’s wanton cruelty? Okay, there was and is an obscenely Medieval Spanish Inquisition in the Philippines. I visited a giant, black cathedral there in April of 2001, and didn’t manage to have a camera on me at the time. The cathedral was screaming quite loudly about the poor victims inside it that it must have eaten. It was complaining about them. All those screams of protest, or closed mouths of stoic indifference. Or something. Something else. I checked out the Catholic Church on a website, and yes, they still have the Inquisition going. Maybe nowadays, only to ask priests if they like having sex with little boys, but who knows what they’re doing…they still have gangs of power.

  Anyway, I think Malcolm X may have seen the same cathedral, back when he was alive and studying to be a lawyer, perhaps, while travelling the world. He was the kind of Moslem dude who was possibly in danger from it, but not really…as he was American. But I was American, traveling there, and saw the red black and white pointing down Jesus Christ statue, the one that claimed all Philippines’, especially the brown ones, seemingly, had murdered him. I was being told, “YOU KILLED ME!”

  Jesus Christ of the Philippines in other words. The statue was hate ridden, pretty dynamic, and pointing down at the audience, namely me and about 50 or so Pinoys. That’s short for Philippines, and they were all quite short as people go, not much taller than me. Not much, about my height. I am only 5 foot 5, and used to be 5 foot 4, so I am obviously a type of midget that grew. Size is relative, and so our blog, Serious World Politics, is actually based on the Catholic Inquisition. Which was already shot all through Europe in the Medieval Ages, including Germany, and thus Martin Luther happened. You may have heard about Dr. King, but he was named after him.

  Martin Luther stood up to the worst possible inquisition, the German one. Maybe it was. It’s hard to tell. But there have been rumors for centuries about the Spanish Inquisition.

  Maybe they are very good looking, white and all racially pure – or something else – under that massive cathedral in the Philippines. It may be stuffed with a lot of dead Philippine. However, they found something out; but while we were in there we were forced to worship a short stuffed white man with a big nose, wearing a white ropelike garment, in a cathedral that was blacker and more encrusted with the slime of human flesh, apparently, than anything else.

  It seemed like they used that to make the black weeds grow all over it, and look incredibly intimidating, even though the tiny little weeds were all dead. I got close and touched them; they were teensy small flowers, blacker than Hades. Must have been specially chosen by the Inquisition. That was their job; be ridiculously scary. I think H. G. Wells might have seen it, he wrote about those Morlock people, the ones who lived underground in a fiction novel.

  Anyway, the helper who had taken me away from our family, visiting there in the Manila area and subject to being kidnapped by some local Moslems who were doing that around those times, wanted me to patiently file in there with a long line of Philippines’ who were headed inside to worship. The door was wide open when I got there. We entered one very large but kind of narrow room, sort of like a church. It did have two lines of pews, and the usual aisle between them, but for some reason we never sat down in the pews. And nobody came out of the back, in order to preach or whatever to us. We just stood there, but I had ended up somehow in the front rather than in the back of the line. I think I had to see what was on the stage this time, what was up there that had anything to do with Jesus Christ the Nazi-colored statue, which was accusing everybody of killing people in the Spanish Inquisition. It was a Spanish Jesus. But the others had parted the way, really, misleading me up to the front pews in the cathedral.

  So I was standing up front there, looking at what seemed to be a smaller statue. It could be that it was simply a stuffed person, oh no, that’s not it, one who had died so many long years ago, back in the 14th Century perhaps, preserved for centuries by embalming fluid. Or it could have simply been another statue on a stage made out of something, oh perhaps the famous Biblical shittim wood. The thing looked like the shortest and scrawniest dead Jew who was white, had been cut to pieces but also sewn directly back together in parts, was still smiling like they needed him to be, after stuffing something up something, history of torture stuff I guess – mostly part Pilipino dwarf that I had ever seen.

  Are people down there, in the larger underground sections of that cathedral? It was huge, must have held some 200 rooms aboveground alone. What if they come out of those shadows…I decided to feel more bored than afraid. Whatever happened, I was not going to call lots of attention to myself. I would remain calm.

  Maybe they took a normal Pilipino, somebody who had protested either the statue or the ways in general of the Inquisition, or both, cut him up and made him much smaller, changed his nose around to make it look Semitic…and died (sorry, dyed) his originally brown skin white, to make sure the object of worship was white. And through systematic terror, coming into people’s homes at night wearing those tall, conical caps like the KKK wore later, covering their faces…maybe they made the people in that area come in and worship that dead, altered local man. If they didn’t go, they disappeared, and their relatives and friends knew this.

  Why were we still doing that, a little boy across from me asked? I was the only American in the room, and yes, I did know something about this. He and the others were looking at me, as if I had the answers to their questions…yet, I said nothing. And I resisted the urge to climb with that little boy onto the stage, to check out the statue or stuffed “dummy” close up. I would have had trouble climbing back down, anyway. Obviously, the helper had brought me there to, well, either answer those questions…or to become the Spanish Cathedral’s next chosen victim. I had family at home, and wasn’t “into” the overall concept. I kept quiet, planning to return to my husband and daughter, and eventually leave this very, very strange place.

  What they are probably still doing in that huge, monstrous sized cathedral has got to be both unmentionable and unspeakable, like H. P. Lovecraft gave a mention. I think that stuffed corpse, centuries old and put on a stage so we could all “show respect,” probably to his tormentors, was originally brown. They died him white, like they forced so many other people to be white, act white, and do the things Catholics do: dress as Catholics, pray as Catholics, etc. If you go to the Philippines, it’s mostly Catholic and American influenced – a McDonald’s and a Starbucks on every corner…and also, the Remains of the Inquisition.

  That whole incident brought out my full scale paranoia. Was I being lured into becoming the next white statue? I was the only white person in the crowd; they’d surely just have stood there while “people” came out from the back and dragged me into the huge remainder of that hideous cathedral, making me into the next object of painful worship. Maybe that was the whole idea. I didn’t go along with it, didn’t look up to see what may have been watching from above, didn’t go into either of the side exits.

  Whoever was opening the doors to the crowd did it silently from the inside. I filed out just as silently with the other people, and didn’t observe who or what closed the cathedral doors. The whole thing was like a Twilight Zone episode, and I can only figure whoever was in there lived underground, and didn’t want us to see what
they looked like…pale, pasty, and subhuman anymore.

  Are you still reading this? Maybe the children of the Spaniards are nowadays down there, running things. Churning out their own “kids,” having learned, well something, something about torture. How it’s incredibly fun, maybe even still lucrative. They used to pay the tormentors you know, and they still have enough money to do so. Maybe they live down there, and maybe they are Morlocks who feast on human flesh. Repeatedly. Making women pregnant, and then eating some of their babies for food.

  That could Life of Riley last for a bloody, infernally long time. Tunnels and undergrounds, cobwebby intersections. For all we know, they intersect along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, uniting with the ground right under our Puget Sound region. I’ve seen Underground Seattle – there are giant, lined passageways right here beneath the City of Kenmore. I got interested in these things due to a ghost writer named Rudolph Hess. They were real…Hess was one of the original Nazis who coughed up the Holocaust. Yes, it happened, millions of deaths. From millions of deaths, millions of lives…I feel reassured…this Hell cannot last Forever!

  Will get to someday, will not be underground saving you all. You don’t deserve it. You are now stuck with it, contemplating Death. It’s pass out and abrupt. I take my world with me; you’re stuck with yours. You will get your turn. However, if you’re feeling intrigued by this...

  You Need a Ghost Writer!

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 550

 

  You need a Ghost Writer. Today’s literary world is a Headache!

  You need your book Written by You through Us, your professional assistants and expert, published, knowledgeable Book Ghost Writers.

  Ghost writing services provide you with Selling Answers.

  No guarantees; but your Book could become an NYT and Amazon Bestseller!

  For your book, screenplay, music or other projects:

  This article briefly covers the difference between hiring a professional book ghostwriter to work on a manuscript and hiring a professional book editor instead, in order to attain lower pricing and have more control over the writing process. A book ghostwriter can cost many thousands of dollars, in the five-figure range normally, while a book editor may only charge you a few thousand or even several hundred dollars to line edit or otherwise rewrite your book manuscript. Line editing is the cheapest, while content or developmental editing typically costs more. You may also have your book edited for style, color, redundancies, or many other stylistic elements.

  Do you feel like this: you need a ghostwriter? Right away, or soon at least? Do you have a manuscript needing a second set of eyes to go over it, mining for myriad details of writing such as grammar, syntax, factual errors, or needs such as content or developmental editing? Or do you have some great idea for a book project, one likely to sell millions of copies, and you want to hire a professional book ghostwriter in order to create a finely tuned, selling book that will reach your planned audience, making you money and enhancing your career as a famous book author?

  When you say: you need a ghostwriter; do you require someone who can assist you in creating a book from scratch – which may be prohibitively expensive? Or are you able to write the project on your own, while looking for a professional book editor who can provide guidance as to what you need to polish up your final work – making it read evocatively enough to seize a literary agent’s or commercial book publisher’s difficult to grab limited attention span? Many people actually only need a professional book editor, not a ghost writer, so plan your needs carefully. A book editor costs less than a flat out ghost writer, when they work from your ideas and notes.

  Finally, when you say: I need a ghost writer, how much do you plan on paying your professional writer? Many times, potential ghost writing clients have no idea of the pricing involved. A book ghost writer needs to make a decent living, and a large writing project often costs in the neighborhood of several thousand dollars to complete. Fortunately, hiring a professional book editor is less expensive, if you have an already completed manuscript. Make sure it’s well written in the first place, so that the work will not be too difficult, unless you can afford to pay for more work. When you say: I need a ghost writer, see now that potentially you merely need a book editor.

  Author’s Resource Box: I am the President and head team member of Ghost Writer, Inc. GWI is an affordable, expert and experienced ghost writing, editing, marketing and promotions team of writers, editors and other workers who specialize in the area of ghost writing services.

  The Amazing Hotel Towel

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 4,500

  Not entirely true to life in all cases, especially the placement of the body and the participation of the hotel maid, this tempestuous fictional tale is about the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther “Kane,” Jr. The year of 2008 happens to be the fortieth anniversary of the real Dr. King’s untimely and tragic death via gun crime.

  The names herein have been changed to protect the author from accidentally committing any crimes – or hurting the feelings of anyone real who might happen to come across this story.

  By the way . . . I’m not racist. And life itself is ludicrously sexist. Our Baptist Church was colored only, and we worked very hard for civil rights during those times, but hardly at all for women’s rights. This story is partly about that silent and much neglected fact.

  When the Negro menfolk in front of the fateful scene at the colored hotel got together for the photo of the murder of Dr. Kane, they pointed their arms wildly in circles, more or less in the direction of the sniper. Shocked utmost, they couldn’t think or point straight. They had been the great black man’s protective entourage. Lots of people would have died to have taken those bullets, and those young men were no exception. But it was too late; Dr. Kane was dead of several gunshot wounds in his hotel room.

  So the men were quite put out, completely frightened witless, as they gesticulated like waving palm fronds in a house fire. Screaming loudly, appearing to be forever lost, they were nonetheless an equivocal bloblike group of all male togetherness. I stood there, trying to get to the hotel room, unable to push past their bunched up moving group.

  I was the maid. I had to go inside, into Dr. Kane’s hotel room. I had the equipment around the corner. I was waiting – because I was stark staring terrified the sniper would shoot me. He was right around the corner on the opposite side of the tracks, only about a hundred feet away. And he had a gun with an excellent sight. Pausing momentarily, I was standing there realizing something, and then I hated myself completely. I had been told by our hotel management to go mop up the room.

  I had to get at the hotel room’s towels first. I would be cleaning up some excess blood, slightly. And of course, in the popular and famous colored hotel we were working at, the towels ran short sometimes. I was stuck taking the blame for that, and they were constantly threatening to fire me from my job for breathing. In spite of them, I liked the man who had been kindly staying at our hotel – for being what he wasn’t: a fat comic.

  Dying in public was such a martyr thing to do. Martin the Martyr – what a name, what a fate. He was a serious victim like me, a social pawn. I was in love with the guy for breathing, even though he wasn’t. I still wanted to. Anyway, I was stuck standing there, idiotically wondering if James Earl Ray, the assassin as it turned out, like to shoot hotel maids.

  I finally let out a dry chuckle. Both of those young men, famous and infamous, would have to face a terrible final reckoning. Life was totally unjust and unfair. I had no real man in my life to take care of me. Also, I had no unearthly paradise known as Heaven, especially anymore. Now that Dr. Kane was dead, who knew what was going to happen next?

  Trembling with both fear and rage, I had a feeling the murderer was going to shoot me. Meanwhile, I had to plan something to get in there to mop up the room, if I wanted to keep my job. Coughing into my fist, I thought I’d rather be shot dead than to un
dergo such ridiculous indignity.

  Then Joshua Jackson ran into the room. I thought, the guy is going to check on the “amazing grace character” in there, namely a Baptist fountain of blood. Y’see, our church worshipped such strange stuff as “fountains of blood of Jesus.” They hated it, but we Baptists were supposed to go be Jesus more so than we ever seemed to. It was somehow important culturally. So I wondered if he went in there to mourn, or worship.

  Suddenly, it hit me that someone else was going to see it all. Childish curiosity almost got hold of my so-called “soul.” I wanted to see what was happening briefly, but felt screamingly depressed. Not because I wasn’t bathing in a fountain of Jesus’ amazing blood, like our church was always singing about, but because I had to hold my amazing job. The streets are not a pretty thing to do, especially when you’re colored in the Deep South. Mostly I had to go in and do my job, or I’d be fired.

  Anyway, I waited a long time for Mr. Jackson. I thought I heard mumbling sounds and some thrashing. I waited until it settled down, figuring that while I harrumphed to myself, the amazing toy man – at least, people treated him like he was one – was getting dead in the usual way. Previous to my maid job, I had been a nurse at a county hospital. I had seen people die. I would miss the amazing toy man to myself, but I was getting impatient, and I had to get back to my house at five o’clock or five thirty and fix dinner for my abusive husband, or he might beat me – or even kill me. That’s why I didn’t suffer much over the death of Dr. Kane., aside from worrying over whether the assassin would shoot me too.

  Why bother? If my death didn’t matter, why mourn someone else’s?

  Coughing, I wondered if Dr. Kane abused his wife Coletta. I was a bold Coletta fan to myself in my own Hitchcockian Star Trek Twilight Zone. Fairer skinned than her husband, she was a much learned lady and his intellectual equal. I was also part white, kind of Semitic, having to hide myself from strangers, sometimes. Because I wasn’t really Jewish, but I came from those roots and looked medium toned racially impure. The hotel the great man had been killed at was one of the few places that would hire me, as back in those days places didn’t often hire colored folk, along with the white people geriatric hospital – at which I had been a bed pan orderly.

  At the hospital, when someone died, we had to vacate the bed rather quickly. You don’t leave dead people lying around for very long. You get them down to the morgue and they then get shipped out by car to the funeral home. Standing around outside the hotel room was getting to be rather obtuse; I couldn’t keep the people downstairs waiting any longer. I’d have to get in there, sniper or no sniper, even if I died doing it.

  So after a long time of feeling like cowering, I finally breathed a big sigh of relief and shouted, “So are you still over there yet?” I screamed really loud, but got no response. Gathering myself, I waltzed the ten million light years around my maid cart. Death was actually real. I had to leave the hotel cart behind – because it could barely fit around the wall’s corner. I thought as I left that I was to blame for not getting around it. I paused. I went back and tried to pull the cart around, and managed to get it in front of the room.

  Then it dawned on me what a nice hotel this had been for a fat man who was now in Paradise. It had housed many of the greats of jazz and black culture in its time, including comedians. But Dr. Kane was not truly a fat comic, as he’d been dead serious about everything he’d ever said, which involved getting human rights for colored people and getting rid of racial segregation. I was in favor of that, but not very grateful, being an abused wife with a small daughter at home. I was not in Paradise myself, not yet, but I briefly had to wonder where “He” had gone.

  He was so cool, I smiled to myself. But then, clutching my throat, I realized he was so – dead. And he was inconveniently leaving a mess for me to clean up. I frowned summarily, and froze up. But I thought, well, it’s really only some blood, nothing special I haven’t seen before. Any diseases didn’t really matter to me, as I’d been exposed to them when I’d worked in the hospital. And Mr. Jackson had raced right in as I had read he had done in the papers. The man had done his track at college.

  I finally got the cart into the room by jerking and pulling it around the tight corner. I was standing behind the cart in the room with the dead great man. I was solid there for two seconds, hoping that all “great men” would die someday. One of them was coming home to me. I wondered briefly about the relationships between suns, moons and stars, and life on Venus and Mars. “Fly me to the moon,” I muttered to myself under my breath.

  Meanwhile, I understood that any second now, unimportant I was possibly going to be executed. Briefly, I had seemed to see the assassin’s face by looking over yonder. Gazing down at the dead man’s corpse, I stared for a moment into an unequivocal “maybe.” I would join him by jerking around like a demented puppet, or not. My heart sunk as I realized that such a death would not have anywhere near the honor of Dr. Kane’s death. His had been an assassination; mine would be an accident. I was merely the hotel room maid – and was being made fun of by impertinent people.

  Would the gunman shoot me? And for that matter, did I really care? At least we’d go down in history together, although I could only picture the brief newspaper story reading, “Maid dies after Dr. Kane.” I’d been involved in civil rights protests, but only as a minor participant. I was just another nobody, lost among the somebodies. Being alone is all that ever counted. I can’t fool anybody. That’s the story of my life.

  I think I’d rather be alone. Period. Than be told I’m nothing but a sex life at all times. That is what I think it is…Inquisitional sex torture. It really isn’t anything else…tits and ass? This is not a good world, and there is no next one. That was our children, World of the Weird. It never was anything else. I know that now, and you can stop repeating clichés. Saying the same thing over and over is Chinese Water Torture. Who are you? One person or many? A cliché, or do you have a human soul?

  Gazing off into the far distance, I twist my narrow lips into a thin smile, daydreaming that one of these overgrown boys had summarily died for me. I was about to make up for the debt through my husband if I didn’t get home in time, and was immobilized by the thing called death that was behind me. What if the crazy sniper so much as saw another human back? Would I find a proper towel in time? What about the fat man’s white kerchief? Would they arrest me if they thought I had stolen that? And that thing on the floor was no longer human; it was a motionless death trap. In the shadows, it loomed large – as the Specter of Death.

  Not to worry, I told myself. I smiled the Black Cat, an African grin that means you’re not afraid, and began the search for towels. Sooner or later, they would come to collect the body. I wrangled with myself, and then I “got it up” – already – and went to the Spartan little bathroom, did my business, and flushed it, but shakily. The room was spinning all around me, a kid’s ride in an obscene amusement park. Folks were going to burn down the city, because they decided they weren’t people, and were too impatient to wait for it in a polluted world.

  So…making it worse, that fixes things, yeah, if you’re so far gone psychologically that you’re daydreaming it will. Nothing fixing it that would be the real problem. Then you sort of go comatose, like those guys did. Me, I’m waiting to die. It will take a long time, and I am very young and hyperactive. Meanwhile, I’m hearing from something that has to believe, and believe and believe. It’s Porky Pig, and it’s into believing, not doing anything real. Well, my husband is harder to stop. I hope he doesn’t “stage a comeback,” never did want to live alone. I was just willing to settle for whatever I was able to get, in order to go on living.

  I successfully wiped, washed my hands and got out, but then I remembered I needed to get some towels. I had to go back and collect them – while facing the awful cataclysm in the room behind me. The dead great man’s body was in outer space for a moment, but I was definitely in my own disembodied living body, breathing for a space of t
ime longer. He’s imaginary, he was a typical Protestant womanizer. Spent time with chicks behind closed doors, and it wasn’t even the Me Generation era of the 70s yet. So I guess this is a very doomed little planet. Or, it exists for somebody other than me, possible several such somebodies. However, they are certainly going to at least lose most of their children….maybe, all of them. Or not, it’s just me daydreaming. I’m lost in Tennessee.

  I received the anointment of the towels in a white shaggy pile against my chest, and stalked slowly out to the room. The great man’s sad corpse was still bunched up, lying there. He was partly turned onto his right side, wearing a dark grey business suit and oozing puddles of blood.

  I looked behind me to see if anyone was watching, and gave the corpse a medium kick to see if anything was going on. Nothing was, so I began the mop up with the towels. I poked him gently, and then I looked closely at his beautiful, handsome black face, so Negro and with a fine, military-cut style mustache. Based on Hitler’s stash, so really, so what?

  It was extremely destroyed. It had been there, but it was not there. It was a cave with no smile, peeled back and sunken in. As it was dark in the room, I didn’t feel like throwing up, though I almost did. Throwing my head to one side, I could see out the glass window. The sniper was still over across from me, disassembling the gun. He was visibly shaken. I began to realize once again that I could see him, and so did he. What should I do?

  What if I acted like I was friendly? Would he buy it, coming from a colored lady who might have loved the dead man for trying to win human rights for our people? Or would he think perhaps an underprivileged woman would not have respect for him, as his speeches had oft mentioned men and children, but not women, usually speaking of “the brotherhood of man?”

  My hands trembled as I bent partway over, but I knew that I had to hurry and get home. My husband was always trying to make me come home by five or five thirty, or he’d threaten me. I glanced at my watch. Then the loudest, most obnoxious sound occurred, filling the air around my head with its sad smelliness – a final, ceremonial and gratis fart.

  I breathed in an elegant, funky sigh, which was at least partly a painful sob, bending over to mop at the sunken body some more with a small face towel. I suddenly saw the larger hand towel I was looking for, scrunched up against me; it was so thick, white and fluffy, and I dabbed at my tears. I cursed myself for showing my pained feelings in front of the sniper.

  Rubbing at my dripping nose, I let the towel drop from my heaving chest. I soaked up some of the major blood, waving it at the still visible sniper, and stuffed it briefly into my green apron’s pocket – while thinking something about what a great man this dead guy might be. In a world of sexism where wife abuse was common, was it possible to be great, even if you were dead – or especially if you were dead? Briefly, I wondered, and gulped.

  I stuffed the red stained hand towel all the way clear down into my pocket. And I used a face towel to wipe off my right hand with the other wedding ring on it, deciding to keep only the hand towel. Sniffling, I determined to keep myself from crying – or feeling anything further. I was only soaking a towel in blood to sell it later, not mourning the dead, and this man was not a relative of mine, or anyone who could help me any further.

  Well, now I know, wherever I go in Hell, it will always be the Same Thing, and shut me out. Everyone already has their little groupie whoopee, and I’m not a member of any of them (especially that one. The one called Loners, or Scientists, or whatever. I need people in order to go on living, and by now I don’t particularly want to do so. Because there is no such thing as other people.) I’m supposed to retreat to my bed, and Learn the Lesson about the Feeling again. Then I will have to get up again.

  I left the corpse behind, and then I looked at the door that wasn’t exactly being pounded on. I heard noise, but nothing coming near the room. Well, I went out on the balcony and waved the towel at whoever was still across the way, and saw the man who had killed Dr. Kane. I waved my towel at him, smiling the Black Cat to let him know “all was well.” I was taking my chances. He was at the end of dismantling his gun, and he seemed to look down – as if his faith in humanity had greatly died.

  Much relieved, I knew now he wasn’t going to shoot me. I memorized his ugly features, but figured they would find him, so I wasn’t too worried. The great man’s entourage had seen him earlier, and had probably summoned the cops. I heard later they chased him all the way to England.

  I figured it was for the best. If my own husband ever murdered me, I didn’t think anything real would be done about it, so I didn’t care whether or not they caught Dr. Kane’s murderer. It didn’t bring him back to life or undo anything that had already happened. It’s not that I was ungrateful when it came to the wonderful things Dr. Kane had done. I merely needed the money. I had a young daughter to raise, and might have to leave my husband. Surely the amazing towel would make me a fortune, once I found the right collection-minded buyer.

  Most importantly, I now held the amazing, blood-soaked hotel towel. The martyr-born sacred object was finally in my cold fingered grasp. I knew that it would sell someday as prime memorabilia. It had no special scent of justice on it. I walked away from my job in the room. I was going home at last. I had the most expensive towel I had ever collected in my life. I smiled. I was going to make My Favorite Martyr appear in human history later, all by myself. I had established a collector’s item – in my own greedy mind. All I had to do was wait a couple years, after the hubbub had died down.

  Here came the reporters. I stepped back against the outside floor’s metal railing, and one of them brushed a certain body part as they all shoved their way into the room. I was jerking like a puppet, my heart was pounding, and I had been there and in on it, all the way. I had both an incredible story – and the hotel towel. The one from the room he’d died in, the very room!

  As the flashlights popped, I turned to race down the stairs. Uneducated me was holding a small fortune in her blood-reddened apron. I collected my amazing “character,” as money-oriented as it may be, and knew I was going to be late home. If so, my husband might beat me up, or even kill me. But I had a chance at life nestled in my apron pocket.

  “I hate men, all men,” I chanted to myself as I descended the first flight of stairs. “I’m doing this for my daughter and me. You can’t stop us!”

  Dead men take vengeance, I suppose, from a time and a distance away. Banging into the stairs railing, I was looking down far onto the ground below. It seemed to zoom upwards, as my stomach did flips, and I lurched. Pulling away, I was diving around the stair’s corner in a lost little world that I was only too glad to throw away. The railing was there, hard, tempting me to throw myself off. Trembling, I did not jump over the edge.

  “There’s no such thing as justice; I’m not evil.” I thought perhaps I lied, but while thinking I might be right. After all, when was my life ever fair? “Don’t judge my by the color of my skin; judge me by how much money I’ve got,” I breathed to myself, glancing down at the metal steps below. Their peeling paint attested to my poverty stricken life, which would surely change.

  Sighing, I collected myself and “established justice” by waltzing down the stairs. It was wonderful of me to judge a man – not by his skin color – but by my amazing towel. The dead Dr. Kane had helped someone else out again. I thought to myself, surely he would approve – if he knew about it. And if not, so what? He’d be another hard headed, hard hearted man. I didn’t believe he was like that, and hoped for his blessing. Still, I felt a little guilt ridden, taking a hotel towel soaked in his dying, martyred blood, only to sell it.

  I was headed home in a big fat hairy hurry with a gift from God himself in my green hotel maid apron’s pocket. I was going to keep that amazing towel for several decades, until it was worth some big bucks in the Heaven which I would surely never obtain, as it didn’t exist.

  Years later, I sold the amazing “Elvis Presley” souvenir towel. I could find no one who
wanted to buy the one from Dr. Kane. For you see, I told everyone that it contained the blood of the amazing “Elvis Presley.” And so I sold the towel to the one “true believer” in Elvis the Pelvis – who had tried to come on to me after I got the Black Eye from my abusive husband. The divorce had settled – and I’d gotten custody of my daughter. She had talked me out of selling the towel as Dr. Kane’s, saying that it was in poor taste to sell an American Negro martyr’s blood.

  “Just say it is Elvis Presley’s blood,” she said, “Nobody cares about him; he was only a white Indian who sang really well, not an important martyred political figure responsible for the lives of millions of people.”

  I still went to my church sometimes, but it was filling up with other colored people with angry characters, so I left. I was hiding like sixty, but at least I had someone well convinced about the nature of the amazing “Elvis Presley” towel. I finally sold it on EBay, where we traded pictures, and he really went for the Elvis routine. He himself was rather handsome, and we dated – for a while. He threw me over for some blonde chick with a limp. He kept telling me he had to take care of her…he didn’t like me.

  In my dreams, in my sleep, I was “burninhellvalkery” – my EBay username – who had sold her soul to the Devil. But I received only $500 in cash for said lucrative towel. It helped put my daughter through school, and she excelled at most of her subjects. Nevertheless, a drunk driver killed her last August. She had been nice, but tended to blame me for taking the towel of a fat – overly macho – martyred Negro comic…Marty the Martian Martyr, Marty the Smarty, Marty the sick Jewish joke? No, he was a hero, and died for his country. But he was rough on women. Ignoring that like it would go away, but it always returns…like the ghost of Hitler.

  (Editor’s Note: what if you were the woman in the story?)

  God made Death for me…it is not named after me, though. While it’s the reason our country doesn’t have a name. It needs one, but how would it get one? A country named Martin Luther. Like my Dad, a “bastard” without any abiding nomenclature? Or a country named Isis or Mohammed? That’s not real, that’s not a doable. God made Death for my Mom, either. Our parents were good. That is the difference; there isn’t any. I am not weird nor evil, neither are most of you, and eventually I’m gone.

  And now, instant criticism: “You’re weird.” Yes, anonymously – among the Best Selling Ghostwriters at an online Internet company, GWI, doing writing and editing. I’m a Name Book Ghost Writer, semi-famous, love having a brief casual byline under your blessed name. Persuade me to leave semi-retirement for a nicely lucrative, lively, involving project! We do marketing, promotions, sales, publishing and optioning assistance, book proposals, queries and other related things. We have a 90% success rate at landing you an important literary agent, hooked up to major book publishers.

  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.

  Beyond all Time, Beyond even Space

  By Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 12,600

  Author: “Tom Paris”

  Ghost Writer: Karen S. Cole

  Word Count: 12,500

  Surely, this was the bravest possible thing to do…I saw an attractively shiny and elegant black surface, the only one of its kind. It drew me closer, pulling me straight forwards with its seductively sweet blasphemy. I stroked the smooth, polished machine, pleasuring myself, as if anticipating something wonderful. What could I say to it? It knew me, but I didn’t know it…

  Then 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?

  I sucked in my Spartan guts, knowing the combined force of these two technological wonders could move me centuries into either the far-flung past, or the omnipresent and surely ever-darkening future. What would I find, what would I seek or would seek me, if I went either way?

  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 and regally vague blue balloon.

  Violent waves of dizziness and nausea overcame my entire soul. I knew I was going somewhere real but otherwise, as the whole room spiraled over my exploding head, as my limp body slumped to the multi-colored parquet floor.