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Kris Kristofferson The Pilgrim's Progress
By Jason Schneider
Kris Kristofferson has been many things over the course of his 73 years so far: Rhodes Scholar, soldier, janitor, actor, activist, outlaw. But above all he has been a songwriter. Like countless others before him, Kristofferson came to Nashville in the mid-'60s toting a notebook full of original compositions with hopes of hitting the big time. Yet, these were far from the sentimental ballads that Music City was used to. Songs like "Help Me Make It Through The Night" and "Sunday Morning Coming Down" were brutally honest snapshots of the life Kristofferson had chosen in pursuit of his art. Moreover, "Me And Bobby McGee" reflected the social change sweeping through America, as a generation grappled with what for many had become a rootless existence. Despite the fame and prosperity that these songs brought, Kristofferson's own quest has never ended. His undeniable magnetism led to acting, and he has made movies ― some good, some bad, some misunderstood ― when he's had to. But he's never abandoned music, the only avenue that has allowed him the freedom to express the full range of emotions he feels for a country and culture he loves dearly, but often openly challenges. Kristofferson's latest album, Closer To The Bone, is another moving testament to that pursuit of freedom at the heart of his best work. While the performances may sound fragile at this point in his life, they're as honest and inspiring as any he's ever recorded. Like the central figure in another early triumph, "The Pilgrim," Kristofferson remains "a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, takin' every wrong direction on his lonely way back home."
Kris Kristofferson is born June 22, 1936 in Brownsville, Texas. His father, Lars, is a U.S. Air Force major general and his grandfather served as an officer in the Swedish army. Kris is groomed for a military career as well, a process that begins with getting accustomed to frequent relocations throughout his formative years. He composes his first ditty at age 11, although it won't be heard until over 60 years later as a hidden track on Closer To The Bone. "I was still living down in Brownsville," he says today. "I think I made it up while I was raking manure. It was just an attempt to write the opposite of a love song." The family settles in San Mateo, California by the time Kris enters high school. An overachiever, he excels at both English and sports. In 1954 he attends Pomona College, a prestigious California liberal arts institution, where word of his athletic prowess reaches the pages of Sports Illustrated. He graduates in 1958 with a BA in Literature, and earns a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University.
Kristofferson continues to distinguish himself at Oxford, joining the boxing team and concentrating his studies on the poet William Blake. Blake's complete dedication to his art has a profound effect on Kristofferson. He contemplates writing a novel, but is also caught up in the excitement of rock'n'roll's arrival in Britain, which prompts him to write songs and fashion himself as a performer. He encounters impresario Larry Parnes, manager of first-wave British rockers Marty Wilde and Billy Fury, who immediately sees the potential in exploiting Kristofferson's background. Parnes signs him to Top Rank Records and persuades him to record under the name Kris Carson. However, legal issues arise and none of the recordings are ever released. "They wanted to package me as 'A Yank at Oxford,' and I was willing to take it," Kristofferson tells journalist Bill Flanagan. "I thought, 'I want to make a lot of money and be a novelist.' God, if I'd made it then there's no telling how many dumb things I would have done." Kristofferson completes his degree in 1960 and marries his girlfriend Fran Beer upon returning to California. Over the next few years they have two children, Kris Jr. and Tracy. Kristofferson ultimately fulfils his father's wishes by joining the U.S. Army where he is put through Ranger School in Fort Benning, Georgia, and, by his own choice, helicopter flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Achieving the rank of Captain, he is deployed with the 8th Infantry Division to West Germany. When not on duty, Kristofferson rekindles his passion for music, mostly through his admiration of Hank Williams, and forms a band with fellow soldiers. His desire to become a songwriter is sufficiently stoked by the time of his honourable discharge in 1965 that Kristofferson turns down a teaching position at West Point in favour of testing his abilities in Nashville. His connection is friend John Buck Wilkin's relative, Marijohn Wilkin, best known for co-writing "Long Black Veil," originally a hit for Lefty Frizzell. However, Kristofferson is forced to take a lucrative job flying helicopters for oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico to pay for his son's medical bills resulting from a defective oesophagus. The repetitive work spurs Kristofferson to write even more prodigiously, and most of his time back in Nashville is spent pitching his songs. "I didn't think songwriting was something worthy of devoting your life to until I went to Nashville after I'd been in the army," he says. "It was so exciting and creatively stimulating to me being around all of the serious songwriters there. Everybody was hanging out every night listening to each other's stuff. It was like a rebirth."
Now firmly committed to establishing himself in Nashville, Kristofferson even works as a janitor at Columbia Studios to stay close to the action. He is present at the sessions for Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde but is too intimidated to do anything other than observe. He also watches Johnny Cash record, and despite strict orders not to engage the artists, Kristofferson gives demos to June Carter in hopes that she'll pass them on to Cash. These tapes ― along with many other items ― are soon thrown into the lake on Cash's property during one of his drug-induced tirades. Kristofferson instead receives his first legitimate credit when Dave Dudley releases "Viet Nam Blues," leading to Kristofferson recording "The Golden Idol/Killing Time" under his own name for Epic Records in 1967. Although the single flops, Kristofferson remains undeterred. "I think I would have probably drunk myself to death if I hadn't got into something creative," he says. "I always felt like Nashville saved my life. It seemed at the time to my parents and my peers that I'd lost my mind. It was a long way from Oxford. But it was so exciting to me even though it was hard on my family." Kristofferson's songs start catching on in 1968 after Roy Drusky has a Top 30 hit with "Jody and the Kid." Over the next year, many others including Jerry Lee Lewis, Faron Young, and Roger Miller reach the country charts with Kristofferson compositions.
Still bent on having Cash record one of his songs, Kristofferson flies a helicopter to Cash's homestead to deliver more demos. Seeing the chopper, June panics, thinking it is the FBI coming to arrest her husband. However, Cash is suitably impressed by the gesture to invite Kristofferson to regular jam sessions at the home. Cash settles on recording "Sunday Morning Coming Down," although he encourages Kristofferson to sing it himself, along with "Me and Bobby McGee," for a guest appearance during Cash's set at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival. It is Kristofferson's first high-profile live performance and he is so nervous that June Carter has to kick him in the ass to get him on stage. "I started performing around the same time as the songs started getting cut," he says. "After Johnny put me on his show at Newport, I got offers to play at some other folk festivals and I never looked back. After about a year and a half, Ray Price and some others tried to convince me to stop going out on the road and just go back to writing songs. They said, 'You were writing a lot more when you were working down in the Gulf of Mexico.' I guess I was doing better than they thought I was. I never did have to work for a living after that." The success finally ends Kristofferson's already strained marriage, and he begins dating Janis Joplin.
Kristofferson teams with Nashville veteran Fred Foster, who signs him to his label, Monument Records. The first album, Kristofferson, contains all of his best-known songs to that point, but sales are disappointing. Other artists still have more success with their interpretations; Ray Price's version of "For The Good Times" wins the Academy of Country Music's Song of the Year award, while Johnny Cash's version of "Sunday Morning Coming Down" receives the same honour from the Country Music Association. Outside of the country scene, Gordon Lightfoot's career is rejuvenated through his cover of "Me and Bobby McGee," and Joplin's recording of the song becomes her unintended farewell statement when it is released shortly after her death in October 1970. Kristofferson himself seems caught between the country and rock worlds; he performs at the massive Isle of Wight festival in August 1970, alongside Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, two artists with whom he feels a kinship. "I didn't think I had great songs at the time, but for some reason I was immediately taken in as a serious songwriter by these guys who hung out all night at the jam sessions," he says. "Guys like Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen were already heroes to us. I had a feeling at the time I started performing that Canada was the best audience I had. I think it was probably because of how much I looked up to Gordon and Leonard Cohen."
Kristofferson records The Silver-Tongued Devil and I, which includes "Jody and the Kid," "The Taker" (already covered by Waylon Jennings), "Epitaph" (his tribute to Joplin), and "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33" (his tribute to Cash). Sales are much stronger, aided by the re-release of his first album under the title Me and Bobby McGee. Immediately after Kristofferson's L.A. debut at the Troubadour, he starts receiving acting offers, even though he has no experience in that field. "Everything was happening so fast that I'm surprised that it didn't completely knock me off," he says. "I think I was lucky that I was ten years older than my peers in Nashville. And I think that time in the army and my education saved me from some of the pitfalls that such sudden fame could have posed for me. Suddenly all of these people that I'd idolized from afar were now mates." Dennis Hopper persuades him to join the cast of The Last Movie, the director's long-gestating follow-up to Easy Rider, being shot in Peru. Unfortunately, the film's challenging nature does not earn it a wide release, and it is quickly relegated to cult status. Kristofferson has a bit more luck with Cisco Pike, in which he stars as a down-and-out musician forced to sell marijuana by a crooked cop (Gene Hackman) in order to avoid jail time for prior offences. Although not a critical or box office success, Kristofferson's performance draws the attention of other directors.
His third album, Border Lord, is released, featuring members of his road band along with Nashville session stars. Sales dip, but he wins several Grammy awards, including Country Song of the Year for "Help Me Make It Through The Night," a huge crossover hit for Sammi Smith the previous year. "It was pretty amazing because maybe five years before that I couldn't even sing my own demos," he says. "They weren't used to hearing a voice like mine. I think Bob Dylan helped a lot of us in that way. They couldn't understand Dylan, but he was doing so great that I guess that gave us a chance to try to make a living at it." Kristofferson starts using his growing influence to help fellow singer/songwriters John Prine and Steve Goodman get more exposure. He recalls, "Paul Anka was in town to see my show. Afterward, Steve took us to a club to see Prine, and Paul offered to fly them both to New York where I was going to be playing at the Bitter End. He got the owner to let them play however long they wanted to. Jerry Wexler from Atlantic Records came to see one of the shows and signed Prine on the spot. We made some demos with Steve there and he got a record deal too." Kristofferson also enters into a new relationship with singer Rita Coolidge, and the two are photographed together for the cover of his next album, Jesus Was A Capricorn. Its most popular song is "Why Me," which quickly becomes a gospel standard.
Kristofferson's music and acting careers continue to flourish. He appears in Paul Mazursky's Blume In Love, and Sam Peckinpah casts him as Billy in Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid. The latter is Bob Dylan's big-screen debut ― he also composes the soundtrack ― which inevitably overshadows the rest of the production. Kristofferson and Coolidge marry ― they soon have a daughter named Casey ― and record an album of duets, Full Moon, released on A&M Records to widespread acclaim. Kristofferson's next album, Spooky Lady's Sideshow, does not fare as well, in part due to the amount of songs that dwell on drinking and other self-destructive behaviour. "Things did get a little blurry," he says. "You can't drink as much as I drank and not have things get blurry. Fortunately, I think I had enough survival skills by that time to not fall under the train." He teams up again with Peckinpah for Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, and Martin Scorsese casts him in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Scorsese will later tip his cap to Kristofferson in Taxi Driver, when Travis (Robert DeNiro) purchases a copy of The Silver-Tongued Devil and I for Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) after she quotes lyrics from "The Pilgrim." A second Kris & Rita album, Breakaway, is released at the end of 1974.
Kristofferson releases Who's To Bless... And Who's To Blame, his lowest-charting album to date. Conversely, his acting career begins to reach its peak. He receives good reviews for the otherwise forgettable action flick Vigilante Force, before heading in an entirely different direction with his role in the drama The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea, based on the Japanese novel of the same name. A whole new level of fame beckons next though, when he is cast alongside one-time flame Barbra Streisand in her remake of A Star Is Born, a role she originally wanted Elvis Presley to play. The film is an international smash, and Kristofferson takes home a Golden Globe Award as Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. His next album, Surreal Thing, vanishes in the midst of all of this, and is noteworthy primarily for new versions of "The Golden Idol" and "Killing Time," his 1967 single.
After co-starring with Burt Reynolds in Semi-Tough, the compilation Songs of Kristofferson briefly gets him back on the charts. Both of its successors, Easter Island, and his final album with Coolidge, Natural Act, cannot build upon that momentum. He teams up with Peckinpah one last time as well, starring as a hell-bent trucker named Rubber Duck in Convoy, before sharing top billing with Muhammad Ali in the made-for-TV slave drama Freedom Road. Willie Nelson enjoys strong sales of his album of Kristofferson material, yet Kris's next album, Shake Hands With The Devil, fails to make it onto either the country or pop charts, an ominous sign.
Kristofferson is cast in the lead role for Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. The director is the current darling of Hollywood after his first feature, The Deer Hunter. Based on this, his studio, United Artists, bows to all of his demands until the film's budget reaches a then-unprecedented $42 million. With constant negative publicity leading up to the film's release ― and scathing reviews afterward ― it can only manage to earn $3 million at the box office, effectively bankrupting the studio. Kristofferson, who gave a fine performance, still feels the criticism is unjustified. "I'm sure to this day that it was political assassination," he says. "The Attorney General at the time [William French Smith], who was an ex-Navy guy, had a meeting in Hollywood where he said there would be no more pictures that gave a negative portrayal of American history, which is what Heaven's Gate is about. That just did it in. There wasn't one favourable review, and I used to read them all. I'd never heard of any film that was treated like that." Compounding this, Kristofferson and Coolidge divorce. He goes on to explain, "My music wasn't getting as much attention because the record company I was with was sort of sinking in the west. I made several albums that nobody heard. It was getting tough to balance everything, but so much was happening that I wasn't too worried. Then life crashed in at the end. Rita and I got divorced, and at the same time Heaven's Gate was the biggest bomb of all time. It put me out of work for a while, but poor Cimino hasn't done anything since then."
Kristofferson attempts to bounce back with To The Bone, a collection of songs stemming from his divorce. It again fails to chart. In 1982, Monument releases The Winning Hand, a double album of obscure material that Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Brenda Lee had all each recorded for the label over the years. It cracks the Top 5 on the U.S. country chart, bringing Kristofferson some much-needed attention. As a follow-up, the four artists participate in a two-hour TV variety show hosted by Johnny Cash. It is the first chance that Kristofferson and Nelson have to get to know each other and they form an instant friendship. Their bond is immediately exploited as the two are cast as the leads in Alan Rudolph's film Songwriter, loosely based on some of Nelson's personal experiences. The soundtrack album enjoys healthy sales, and is nominated for an Academy Award, ultimately losing to Prince's Purple Rain. Kristofferson marries for the third time, to Lisa Meyers, and they go on to have five children over the next ten years.
Kristofferson, Cash, Nelson, and Jennings band together, in part to bolster their careers amid the onset of "new country." They release the album Highwayman ― with the title track contributed by Jimmy Webb ― and from then on are known as the Highwaymen. The album is a huge hit, and they are able to sell out large venues around the world. Kristofferson's next film, Alan Rudolph's Trouble In Mind, is a surreal detective story that few see, and following its release he records his first solo album since 1981. Repossessed is infused with Kristofferson's anger over U.S. military action in Central America, while "They Killed Him" is an anti-war meditation that cites Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Bob Dylan records the song not long after for Knocked Out Loaded. Kristofferson's political leanings are further questioned when he next appears in the TV mini-series Amerika, which hypothesizes life in the United States after a takeover by the Soviet Union.
Apart from touring with the Highwaymen, Kristofferson continues to appear in several uninspired film and television productions. He remains a vocal supporter of the Sandinistas, and joins the growing choruses demanding the release of Nelson Mandela and Native American protester Leonard Peltier. It's no surprise then that his next album, Third World Warrior, takes an even stronger militant stance, although unfortunately it is released at the same time as Highwaymen 2. In spite of some great songs like "Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down," sales of his solo effort are a fraction of what the group generates. "That was a time when that information wasn't generally known everywhere," he says now. "We were undermining these countries in Central America, blowing up schools, and training the Contras to mine roads and overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and kill people in El Salvador. It used to piss people off when I would sing those songs, and it doesn't anymore because they've been exposed to the same information."
Kristofferson acts as MC at the Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden. He introduces Sinead O'Connor, who is promptly booed offstage, having torn up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live the week before. In a dramatic scene, she runs into Kristofferson's arms and he is clearly heard telling her, "Don't let the bastards get you down." He revisits this moment in the song "Sister Sinead" on Closer To The Bone. Also at that concert he meets producer Don Was, who is eventually enlisted to produce what will be the final Highwaymen album, The Road Goes On Forever. Sales don't match those of its predecessors, and all four artists go back to their solo careers. Kristofferson works with Was again on A Moment Of Forever, released independently on Justice Records. The album features a stellar line-up of musicians, and includes remakes of several songs, along with "Johnny Lobo," a new piece inspired by Native American activist John Trudell.
A standout performance in John Sayles' Lone Star revives Kristofferson's acting career, leading to a recurring supporting role in the Blade trilogy. He earns further acclaim for a star turn in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, and reconnects with his core audience through the album The Austin Sessions, a selection of classic material performed with guests that include Steve Earle, Mark Knopfler, Allison Krauss, and Jackson Browne.
Kristofferson remains busy with several films and documentaries, the most high profile being a role in Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes. In 2003, the live album Broken Freedom Song is released on John Prine's Oh Boy label. Recorded in San Francisco, it largely draws from his latter-day political work. Waylon Jennings dies in 2002, and Johnny Cash dies the following year. Kristofferson writes of Cash in Rolling Stone, "[He] was a biblical character... I don't think we'll see anyone like him again."
Kristofferson signs with New West Records and records This Old Road with Don Was, his first album of new material in 11 years. The album's stripped-down sound reflects the more philosophical tone in most of the songs. One he retools is "The Burden of Freedom," first heard on Border Lord. Explaining this decision, Kristofferson says, "When I wrote it back in the late '60s, it was about leaving the path I had been prepared for ― West Point and all that ― but it's mostly about doing what you believe is right, whether that makes you enemies or not." The album is warmly embraced by critics, and reaches the Top 40 on the country chart. Unlike most names associated with Nashville, Kristofferson formally endorses Barack Obama for president.
Closer To The Bone picks up where This Old Road leaves off, and is the last recording with Kristofferson's long-time guitarist Stephen Bruton, who dies in May. The stark qualities of the performances bear similarities to Johnny Cash's American series, to which Kristofferson responds, "I was glad to see [John] make those last few records, and glad that Rick Rubin was so behind it. But Don Was was the guy who really suggested that I be recording like this." Yet, Cash's presence is there in the song "Good Morning John." "I wrote that at June's request after John had just gotten out of a rehab ― I think it was the last one he was in. After that he straightened up for the rest of his life. There were a lot of songs like 'Good Morning John' that I hadn't recorded that really meant something to me. I wanted to get as many of them on this record as I could." Kristofferson has made it known that he wants the opening lines of Leonard Cohen's "Bird On The Wire" ― "Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free" ― engraved on his tombstone, but until then he plans on maintaining a full schedule. "I can make an occasional film and go out on the road any time I want," he says. "I feel very fortunate with how my life has turned out."
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Bill #
Bill Description
S.3188 Cosponsored — American Renewable Biomass Heating Act of 2010 03/25/10
S.3175 Sponsored — A bill to amend the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 to require the Bureau of Land Management to provide a claimant of a small miner waiver from claim maintenance fees with a period of 60... 03/25/10
S.3152 Cosponsored — A bill to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. 03/23/10
S.3154 Sponsored — Advancing FASD Research, Prevention, and Services Act 03/23/10
S.3150 Cosponsored — Service Members Permanent Change of Station Relief Act 03/22/10
S.1011 Cosponsored — Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2009 03/11/10
S.3059 Cosponsored — National Energy Efficiency Enhancement Act of 2010 03/10/10
S.3063 Cosponsored — Invasive Species Emergency Response Fund Act 03/03/10
S.522 Sponsored — Salmon Lake Land Selection Resolution Act 03/02/10
S.3058 Cosponsored — A bill to amend the Public Health Service Act to reauthorize the special diabetes programs for Type I diabetes and Indians under that Act. 03/02/10
S.782 Sponsored — National Volcano Early Warning and Monitoring Program Act 03/02/10
S.2962 Cosponsored — Blind Persons Return to Work Act of 2010 01/28/10
S.2938 Cosponsored — Erasing our National Debt Through Accountability and Responsibility Plan Act of 2010 01/20/10
S.69 Cosponsored — Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent Act 12/23/09
S.1422 Cosponsored — Airline Flight Crew Technical Corrections Act 12/21/09
S.1790 Cosponsored — Indian Health Care Improvement Reauthorization and Extension Act of 2009 12/16/09
S.2853 Cosponsored — Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action Act of 2009 12/10/09
S.2849 Sponsored — Arctic Deep Water Sea Port Act of 2009 12/08/09
S.2796 Cosponsored — A bill to extend the authority of the Secretary of Education to purchase guaranteed student loans for an additional year, and for other purposes. 11/18/09
S.2787 Cosponsored — TARP Sunset Act of 2009 11/17/09
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Category: October 2017 Flash Fiction – Horror	(Page 1 of 4)
October 31: TRICK OR TREAT
In Free Blog Fiction, October 2017 Flash Fiction - Horror
The whole collection is live!
Oct 31: TRICK OR TREAT
It is a thousand years from now. Whenever now is, it's a thousand years after that.
A cure for mortality has been created—crafted—perfected. Humanity has moved to the stars. Why not? We have literally nothing better to do than to explore the universe, no matter how long it takes. The generation ships accelerate across what once would have been generations. They still have not reached their destinations. In another thousand years, they still will have not. We couldn't think of what else to call them, though. Starships sounded too retro. In many ways we are still lazy. Immortality won't make you outgrow that.
But at least we know, no matter what happens to our homeworld, that humanity will continue. The End will never happen. Every day, every moment, is now a new beginning.
On Earth, in a city called New Venice, which used to be called Bologna until the seas rose, was a house that was sealed up the day that it was declared that free immortality would be available for all.
Throngs lined up for their shots and pills, but the house remained closed. The residents, of whom there were thirteen, communicated with the outside world freely—but they kept their doors locked.
Everyone who had become immortal began to complain about having to take care of those who had not. In some ways that was a good thing—because many people had "accidentally" not received immortality because they were overlooked.
But not the baker's dozen inside the house.
"No, no, thank you, if any of us fall ill, it is not your problem, do not concern yourself," they said. "We will take care of our own."
Then it came to pass that everyone who had had a religious objection to immortality was overruled—they were taken up in vans and brought to the doctors, and administered immortality whether they wanted it or not.
It was a big hullabaloo. But it was for their own good, even if it meant they would never meet their maker. By then sentiments were starting to turn. Death became a privilege, something that must be earned, based on one's contributions to humanity. You couldn't buy it. No amount of donations or endowments were considered in the balance.
Only time.
Death was so far out of reach that you could journey to the stars and back again, and still not reach it.
But from the Thirteen inside the house: "No, no, we won't be having any of that. Don't worry. We won't be a bother at all."
I'm sure you have questions. "How did this work? Were people zombies? What if their heads were cut off? What about people incinerated in a nuclear holocaust? Or who dove into the heart of a star?"
The answers I have to give you are terrible, terrible. As people began to desire death, the enforcement of immortality changed in order to keep pace. First flesh was altered, then the mind. For a time we became machines, then flesh again—but you would not have recognized us as human.
Still, the house in New Venice remained sealed.
The last holdouts.
A propitious day was identified. Halloween. Several of us were sent to the house, wearing such masks as to make them seem more "human," in the old style.
They knocked on the door.
"Haha, we're all fine in here, just fine. No need to worry…but do come for Halloween. We're always game for trick or treat if you are!"
It was a tradition for those brave enough to do so, to knock on the door of the Mortal House on Halloween. The door would open, a bowl of candy would be revealed among purple light and a smoke machine. Once you took the candy and left, the door would once again close. If you tried to push your way into the house, you would find only a sealed vestibule of reinforced concrete with no other apertures. The door was a decoy.
If the bowl was emptied, however, it would be refilled the next time the door was opened.
A mystery, although most of us thought it was an A.I. running the whole show on the inside by now. Still, we had to know.
As I said, the door was knocked upon and the magic words spoken. The door opened, and a bowl of candy appeared on a small table with a silk handkerchief on it. Purple lights shone from overhead, and a smoke machine's fog rolled out of the doorway.
I was there. The others pushed me forward, and I took a small chocolate bar wrapped in foil.
It was not dusty; the paint had not worn away. It seemed brand new. I unwrapped it and shoved it into the mouthhole of my mask.
It was delicious.
The others shoved past me and into the vestibule, banging on the walls with pressure guns, powdering the concrete and smashing the reinforcing rods into shivers of metal, little petals of it that flaked off and tumbled gently to the floor.
In moments the wall was destroyed. They stepped through.
I waited for two hours for the screams to stop, and then I left, shoving all the chocolate into my pockets, then closing the door behind me.
I whistled on the way home. I've always liked chocolate. But I'm not stupid enough to assume that there's only one way to master death…
And I am not yet tired of life.
And that's it–the end of the flash fictions. You can purchase the entire collection here.
I'm still trying to work this one out. Was it a trick? Or a treat? At any rate, I had Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of Red Death" on my brain while I was writing this.
New Release: October Nights
October Nights: 31 Tales of Hauntings and Halloween
Available on Kindle
A collection of flash fiction: 31 tales for the 31 nights of October. As wide a variety of horror as I could come up with–from Barker to Bradbury to Zenna Henderson.
SPOOKY SHORT FICTION – PERFECT FOR A HALLOWEEN NIGHT!
Thirty-one horror tales of ghosts, haunted houses, vampires black cats, mad science, weird plants, demons, zombies, and Halloween. From the surreal to the gory, surprise twists, black humor, bad puns, dark dreamlands, old myths, thrillers, chillers, and illers. Twilight Zone stories, dark fantasy stories, Black Mirror stories, and far-future dystopias.
Short & sweet…monsters & meat.
(For teens and up.)
October 30: GHOST
Oct 30: GHOST
"It's experimental," Whitcomb said. "So we're not sure what's going to come out of it. It could be about as interesting as giving a toddler a keyboard."
"You know what they say," Nicholls joked nervously. "An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually type out Hamlet."
The electrodes taped to his skull itched. And his head was cold. He'd never shaved his head before. His teenage years had been pitifully lame, spent in the basement reading old horror novels and trying to avoid his stepfather. Sometimes he had a broken arm in a cast. Sometimes he didn't. At any rate he wanted a warm stocking cap to put over the electrodes, but even if he could get away with doing something like that, it was too late now. The test was about to begin.
Whitcomb picked up the syringe full of the chemical goop that was supposed to suppress some of the functions of his dreaming, enough so that his subconscious could still access the part of his brain that knew how to type and spell and form words and sentences, but not enough so that he'd get up and walk around or talk in his sleep or anything like that. She flicked it with her fingernail, then pushed the plunger slightly to make sure no air bubbles had collected near the needle.
Nicholls took deep breaths as she approached him. "Not scared of needles, are you?"
"Not normally, no. But this is a strange situation."
"Unusual, certainly. Are you sure you want to go through with this?"
"I've had writers' block for ten years now. Stick it in, Doc."
They were old friends. She smiled wryly as she gave him the jab. "I hope this works for you."
He lay back on the cot, feeling the colder liquid prickle painfully through his veins. "Me, too."
In the background, he could hear Whitcomb murmuring to a tape recorder. But he tuned her out.
He was already falling asleep.
When he woke up, he was shivering. In fact he was naked, crouched in a corner of the little exam room where the cot had been set up. He rubbed a hand over his head. The electrodes were gone, just a half-dozen sticky spots on his skull where the adhesive pads had been ripped off.
The room had been trashed. The cot was bent and twisted and looked like it had holes eaten in the fabric. The medical charts had been ripped off the walls. The walls? Covered with claw marks.
The cabinets were splattered with fluid, this gray-green viscous stuff.
And Whitcomb lay on the floor in a pool of blood. Nicholls's hospital nightgown was wrapped around her throat, but that wasn't the worst part. Her guts had been ripped open and loops of moist organs lay around her, like a child's bath toys that needed to be put away.
"Janet!"
He crawled over to her. He had bruises all up and down his legs. How? How?
She was dead.
He got shakily to his feet and started to hobble toward the door. The clock over it said that it was after midnight.
There was supposed to be a camera monitoring him that fed back to the computer that was receiving the signals his brain was sending out. Writing in his sleep. Who the hell had thought it was a good idea to…to unleash the creative forces that had been trapped in his skull for the last ten years…it had to be his fault. Had to be.
He grabbed a robe from the rack as he passed, leaving behind a bloody smear. First, a phone call to the police. He didn't care that he was damning himself. He was too stunned to care. He deserved whatever happened to him.
Waiting for the police to arrive, he washed his hands, then went back into Whitcomb's office. Gingerly, he sat in her chair and woke up the computer.
His file was open.
Make him stop make him stop I can't move oh god I have to help her and I can't move please dear god make it stop no no no
In the end, he had written almost sixty single-spaced pages full of despair and horror.
A tab started flashing on the task bar at the bottom of the screen, a file named with today's date that was trying to get his attention.
With a shaking hand, he clicked the file name. It opened, footage from the camera Whitcomb had rigged up in her room.
The ghost had been waiting for her, a sharply-defined but translucent layer of pale green, a figure in a doctor's coat. One hand was twisted…skeletal…bearing scalpel-thin claws. The ghost grinned at the camera as Nicholls lay back on the cot and Whitcomb spoke into her microphone.
Then it turned back toward her as she kissed Nicholls on the forehead and mouthed the words good luck.
This one was inspired by Stant Litore, who was joking that someday he'd like to be able to nap and write at the same time. "What could possibly go wrong with that?" I asked. What indeed.
October 29: FULL MOON
Oct 29: FULL MOON
Mary could only leave the house on a full moon. The doctors said she had agoraphobia, but that was because they didn't have a word for what she had. She had always thought it rather strange—that the inside of her mind was determined by words, rather than the other way around.
The full moon made everything magic. That was it: she couldn't go anywhere that wasn't magic. And oh, the feeling of moonlight on her bare skin! But she knew it was for the best that she not spend more than a few minutes on each full-moon night at the window. There was a lascivious pleasure in it that simply wasn't decent.
The moonlight could be covered by clouds after she had seen it, and she would still feel the delight of it running along her skin, but in order to leave the house, she first had to see it.
She would bask in the rays for a few moments, turning this way and that, on tiptoe.
Then, with her eyes full of the divine light, she would shake off her skin like a rug and leave it on the bedroom floor. Off she would go, galloping through the neighborhood, knocking on windows, climbing chimneys, trailing her fingers across car windows, leaving footprints on the rooftops, and—
She would wake in her own bed at sunrise, just as the moon set, trapped once again.
This house, she would think, every time she woke. This terrible, terrible house.
The things that trap you, the things that keep you safe. I don't know–I was thinking of women horror writers like Shirley Jackson, Zenna Henderson, Joyce Carol Oates.
October 28: CEMETERY
Oct 28: CEMETERY
The day was gray and depressing. The golden leaves had all fallen and been raked away, and the hills around the cemetery were dull as pot-metal from all the bare tree branches. One or two evergreens speckled the vista, but for the most part it was scenery in need of some snow. The grass was going dormant for the winter. Jones could have cut it down to ground level and still not been able to kill it completely, but for the sake of the mice and birds, he cut it about two and a half inches. That way the snow, when it did come, would catch in it and provide some ground cover. Plus if he cut it too short, the water would wash the topsoil away, come spring.
The air was warm enough that if any moisture came, it would be rain, at least by the time it hit the ground.
But no rain came.
Jones prepared two grave sites, one next to the other but not on the same plot. It had been chance that both men had died about the same time. For all Jones knew, they'd never met. Soon they'd be sharing the wait to Eternity together. But that was the luck.
One had been a murder; the other had been a heart attack. The murder victim had been the first to die. An autopsy, an inquest, a trial—the whole bit. The murderer would go to the state pen, and, in a condition suitable only for a closed casket, the victim would be buried here.
The heart attack victim–the dead, no matter what else they were, were all victims–had been sudden. It was less than a week since he had passed.
There seemed no rhyme nor reason to it, unless it was to serve as a cautionary tale. Two men had died on different days, but both in such a way as to arrive in the cemetery on this day and no other.
All men would die and be brought to the same place, strangers until at last they came to Heaven. All souls were strangers, all family dust, all lovers food for worms, the wicked and the innocent mingled together, the tormented and the tormentors—all came to the same graves in the end.
Jones didn't like the thought of it, that was all.
That was why the babies and the children, he took from their coffins and buried them somewhere else. He knew who was buried in the cemetery, after all. He heard them whispering in the dark.
And if it meant a few of them returned before the Resurrection from being buried in unhallowed ground, well, that was just the luck.
It's a gray day out and I'm feeling depressed (and sick from a sinus infection), and for some reason had written the words "creepy children" on my notepad last night. I can't remember what I had intended to write when I wrote the note, which is annoying–the story that got away.
The word "cemetery" always reminds me of the movie Cemetery Man, from which I found the wonderful comic series Dylan Dog. But…I just couldn't work myself up to that level of grand Italian black humor this morning. One twist, and that's all I could handle.
Oct 27: MASK
Whenever I get a diagnosis, I'm never really sure that it's my diagnosis. I have what I have nicknamed Mystery Autoimmune Disease, or as my sarcasm-laden boyfriend likes to call it, "MAD Cow Disease." I forgive him because he painted me a picture of a Holstein cow in a can-can dress dancing on top of the Empire State Building, with purple biplanes circling around it and a Red Bull energy drink clutched in one fist. Around Matt, you just go with it.
He loves me, even after what the disease has done to my face.
Which, honestly, isn't that much, but it still makes me self-conscious. My face is always puffy and swollen, and sometimes I break out in this rash that looks like small yellowish mountains erupting from my face. It's gross. It grosses me out, I mean. Matt would yell at me if he heard me say that. "Remember that you're beautiful and I love you!" But I really am self-conscious about it.
He never makes masks for me, and he never paints "me," no matter how silly, with a mask on.
I'm not the only one out on the streets wearing a mask. I see others like me all the time. A tiny little nod of recognition shows up between people who are wearing masks sometimes. Glitter twinkles, peacock feathers bob, even those faceless stretchy see-thru thingies kind of shimmer. I gotta wonder if it's becoming a fashion statement. Yo! Fashion!
I asked Mike if he wanted to try out a plain mask the other day. The two of us could walk around town like that. After dark, why wouldn't you? I like the feeling that every night is Carnival. He said thanks, but no. Save it for Carnival.
About the only time that it gets to me anymore is seeing masks on kids when it's not Halloween. Poor kiddos. But they look so cute.
And then there was yesterday. At the Metro station I had to stand in front of a woman who didn't have a mask on her face and stop three people with masks from hurting her. They were calling her ugly and throwing trash at her.
"Shouldn't you do something about your face?" one asked. "You whore? Who do you think you are?"
I jumped in front of them. It didn't look like anyone else was going to do anything.
"Whoa, Whoa!"
"What are you, some kind of fake sicko?" one asked. "You don't belong here. Go home."
I had to show them my face and they laughed at me and left, without showing me their faces. The unmasked woman was still cowering behind me.
She was. But what about tomorrow? And what about the next day? The train came, but she scurried off in the other direction while I got on. Embarrassed? Still afraid? I didn't actually ever see her face. She had pulled her coat over her head.
On the train I sat down and just crashed. Every joint in my body hurt just from walking around. I'd been hurting all day, and pretending not to. And short of breath. Dizzy.
That's when I took off the mask. It wasn't that I didn't need it anymore. It wasn't that I felt beautiful or that I didn't want to support other people like me.
I just…didn't feel like it.
"Look at me," I whispered all the way home as the masked and the maskless on the car stared at me. "I'm here. Look at me."
This one, I'm not sure about. I'm not sure what it means. I may have completely hosed this one. I know it's not about going, "People with chronic conditions need to shut up about it!" or anything like that. More like, "Nobody should have to hide in plain sight."
Anyway, I glimpsed a friend's post that said, "Progress is more important than perfection," and decided to run with it. I don't mind progress. But I'm coming to loathe perfection.
October 26: VOODOO
Oct 26: VOODOO
Sam's kitchen wasn't one of those photogenic open restaurant kitchens. Au contraire. It was stained floor tiles and a gaping grate in the middle of the floor, battered heavy-guage pots hanging from blackened hooks, a walk-in baking oven with yellowed glass, a mixer with a bowl that could hold a couple of small children, plastic tubs stuck with tape.
He hadn't been able to get all the blood off the ceiling. But it was supposed to be non-infectious after twenty-four hours, anyway.
And it had been seven years since the previous—the final—zombie outbreak.
Exactly seven years. He had come in early to, what was the word, celebrate? To mark the ending of all that death. There was something about the length of time that spoke to him, although he didn't know why.
He started pulling the ingredients out of the fridge and stacking them on the counters. Before he knew it, he had the butter and flour measured out and mixed up and in a couple of big pots.
Two big pots. Two sets of ingredients.
That night seven years ago, he had lost his best friend in the world, a gigantic mother of a man named Tony, who was six and a half feet tall if he was an inch. A real monster of a man, you know? Ugly as sin and sweet as caramel. He couldn't work the front of the house because he would scare folks, but every night he was at the restaurant, the whole kitchen sang. Figuratively, because the dishes Tony sent out—hell, anything that he so much as touched—would be so good that it would fill your heart. And literally, because he had the voice of an angel. Or rather the angels sang like Tony, a sweet baritone voice that knew every Frank Sinatra song by heart.
Best friend? If he couldn't tell the truth now, when would he? He had been in love with the bastard, and worried that Tony would not love him back.
Seven years was a long time to be without your best friend. The love of his life.
The roux started to cook, filling the kitchen with that raw-flour smell. He stirred both pots with wooden spatulas, sometimes one in each hand.
From the fridge he heard something moving. Ignoring it, he kept his eye on the roux. He didn't have the ingredients he needed to start all over again. It was now or never, and come hell or high water, he was not going to let his roux burn.
He started humming. You do something to me…
Finally both sets of roux were a deep, rich chocolate brown. Through the double doors leading out of the kitchen, it was just now starting to get light. Rising on a day he might never see.
He added the holy trinity and for a moment just stood there in the steam coming up, wafting over him. Then he added the big links of sausage, making sure not to make a mixup, even through his tears. Then the chunks of gator. He wanted to let that stew for a while, too.
The broth he had made ahead of time. He had to take a small plastic tub and ladle the clear brown liquid into the two pots; the container was too heavy to lift. The ice bath he'd packed it in had melted, but it was all good. He'd only had to take the thinnest of scum layers off the top before he wheeled it out.
Only one type of broth. He hadn't been able to save any of the bones. The CDC had claimed all those. Because of the marrow. Now he felt nothing but anger. None of them would have had to die, if only–
Brought to a simmer, he added sugar, salt, Tabasco sauce, his own seasoning mix, bay leaves, stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce from a farmer that lived on the edge of the swamp.
He checked the fridge. Not quite.
He cleaned for a while. It was a kitchen. It always needed cleaning. The blood splatter on the ceiling tiles remained where it was.
The filé powder went in, and then, in a big skillet with bacon drippings, he cooked the okra with a little distilled vinegar until it turned soft. People who were afraid of a little slime didn't belong in his kitchen.
Crabmeat, shrimp, Worcestershire sauce. Another forty-five minutes until it was done and perfect.
At forty minutes, the fridge door opened, and Sam swayed, caching himself against the counter by the big pots. He covered the pot that he'd made with pork sausage and fat as the fridge door swung closed and clicked back shut.
Tony was still big, but he wasn't exactly a man anymore. Sam had been thawing him out for a week, though. And now it was time.
Him or the gumbo? Sam was humming under his breath again. And crying. Big fat tears running down his face.
He wanted to beg forgiveness. Seven years he had held out against temptation. Seven years he had left Tony to rot in a frozen hell.
But the loneliness and his longing had never faded.
"Tony?" he said. "Sing for me, Tony."
The big man bared his teeth.
And then it was all down to a last test of faith.
That his gumbo really was good enough to bring back the dead.
Unfortunately, I don't know enough about actual Voodoo practices to treat them with respect. But I do know something about cooking.
October 25: TRANSFORMATION
Oct 25: TRANSFORMATION
I found it while going through an old newsgroup, looking for a copy of one of the first poems that I ever wrote. Rec.alt.tentacles, the newsgroup where all the cool kids hung out back in the day. Everyone pretended to be some sort of extra-dimensional being of godlike status. I was Saint Cthylla.
I found the poem I was looking for right away. It stank.
But I ended up wasting a couple of hours going through posts anyway.
All the way to the end. The last post was from an old online friend of mine who went by the handle jazzathoth, like five years after the post before that.
It went like this:
I'm getting married tomorrow. Part of me is undeniably happy about this. But part of me is grieving, and I need to say goodbye to the only people who would understand. They're all dead now—moved on, I hope. Newsgroups are over. The polls and the stupid posts and the bad poetry—hey, Saint Cthylla! Not that you'll ever see this—they're all over. We've grown up, started families, failed and succeeded and failed again. I feel like I'm the last one. Probably not. Probably there's still a lurker out there who's never posted and still living in his mom's basement (ha-ha).
Tonight I'm going to pull myself a hot bath, put the straight razor on the side of the tub, and get drunk on whiskey.
In one world, I'll bleed out in comfort. In this one, I'll carry on. Or maybe the other way around. Who knows? Does it even matter?
That was the end of the post. I tried looking him up, but of course I couldn't find him. One way or another, he'd stopped using that handle.
Time? Is weird. This one wrote itself in like two minutes, after I spent several days sweating over another one. I actually did spent a LOT of time on rec.alt.vampyres (I think that's how we spelled it), and posted a lot of poetry there.
October 24: BONES, PART II
Oct 24: BONES, PART II
(Haven't read part I yet? It's here.)
It was time to face the airplane. Lakeisha's son lay injured in a hospital in Hawaii. She had to go. Cars and trains would not do, of course, but Donte, in a delirium, had left her a message: The bone man will be on the boat this time.
The trouble was, she believed him. She'd never told him about the bone man, which wasn't a man at all. So, against all sanity, she had bought a plane ticket instead.
And now, standing at the gate of the airplane, she couldn't force herself to get on the plane.
Oh, her luggage was already on the plane, but she wasn't. The attendant at the gate said, "Ma'am? Are you all right?"
"I'm terrified of flying but my son is hurt over in Hawaii so I have to go."
The woman's face softened in sympathy. "Can I walk with you onto the plane?"
Lakeisha couldn't see how that would help, but she couldn't turn down the offer. "Please."
Lakeisha held her purse in front of her, gripped in both hands. She felt like an old woman. She felt like a fool.
The bone man was a childhood delusion. It was all the fear she had felt as a child of that previous plane crash, made into a monster. She had run off in the woods and been abducted by people, bad people, and had fought her way free.
Donte needed her.
The attendant, who must have been all of twenty years old, held out her hand, and Lakeisha was surrounded by the cloying scent of raspberry hand lotion. It wasn't exactly soothing, but it snapped her out of the worst of it. There were no bone men in the world of Bath & Body Works. They did not stalk people in the woods, let alone at a shoddy airport terminal with stained blue carpet underfoot. She clutched the attendant's hand like it was a piece of raw, unfeeling meat and they walked together down the gangway.
She shuddered as she stepped over the empty place between the walkway and the plane. What if something reached up through the crack to get her?
"When we disembark, ma'am, please stay in your seat, and I'll come to get you," one of the stewardesses said, after a brief discussion with the attendant. "It might feel like you're trapped with all the passengers trying to push their way out," she said, and Lakeisha wished she hadn't, "but I promise that I'll come as soon as I can."
"And give me a wave if you need help."
She wouldn't. "Okay."
"I'm sorry about your son."
At first she thought she would die of a heart attack when the plane finally took off. But then she realized she was laughing—laughing hysterically—from the stress. Someone gave her a vomit bag and told her to breathe into it. She did. She had the middle seat, crushed in on both sides, and she was grateful for it.
The flight was long. Too long. She checked her phone a dozen times an hour. They were supposed to arrive in seven hours and twenty minutes. That was how long the flight was supposed to take. A nonstop flight.
She calculated and recalculated the time change.
Seven hours twenty-five minutes. Seven hours thirty minutes.
"Are we there yet?" she asked.
"Not far now," said the woman beside her, patting her arm.
"Only, we're supposed to be there already. Aren't we?"
"Not far now."
"And they haven't announced a delay."
The woman patted her arm again, and started to sing a hymn, "How Great Thou Art."
Lakeisha's stomach turned.
A loud bang made her look around her in panic. The singing woman raised her voice as the passengers around her started to scream. A hole appeared in the top of the plane, a long bright line of nothing.
A thin claw, made of bone, raked through the metal like it was butter.
Lakeisha started awake. She was still at the airport, she had dozed off in one of the seats. She stood up on shaking legs and began to walk away from the boarding area.
"Ma'am? Ma'am?"
She didn't look back.
Let the bone man come and get her, she thought, and booked a flight to San Francisco and a cruise ticket for the rest of the way. It was one of those ironies. Four sea days instead of seven hours, and all that money…and she was still going to have to fly on a plane.
But that short flight was nothing. Easy peasy, she thought, prying her fingers loose from the armrests after takeoff.
When she landed it was to about a hundred different reporters flashing their cameras in her face.
"What made you get off Flight 6089, Ms. Washington?"
And that's how she learned that her first airplane had gone down in the Pacific, nobody was sure where yet.
"I had a nightmare," she said.
They laughed.
"Is it true that you survived a plane crash as a child? Do you have an intuition about planes?"
"No, no," she said. "I'm sorry, I have to get on a boat now."
They found her three days later on a life raft in the Pacific, all alone, holding a piece of damp bone in one hand, as if she had been gripping it for comfort. The cruise ship had gone down the night before in a terrible malfunction. She was a hundred miles away from the rest of the passengers they'd recovered–every single one of them dead.
And, once again, she didn't remember a damned thing.
My family went to the 13th Floor Haunted House in Denver this year, and I had a blast–fear and delight.
But the really cool part is that I saw the bone man there, a huge aniamatronic centipede thing with a massive skull on top with pointy teeth and lots of swaying mandibles. It made no sense, from a biological point of view, but I gasped. I'm sure I had little hearts in my eyes.
It almost got me on the way out of the room, too…
October 23: MAD SCIENTIST
Oct 23: MAD SCIENTIST
My best friend and I hadn't talked for eleven years, after the accident. She said she was sorry, I said I'd never ride in a car that she was driving again, and she said if I didn't trust her absolutely then I didn't deserve her friendship, and I said, "Prove that, and I want to see the data," and, well, eleven years.
Then one day my cell phone rang and it was her. She was in front of my apartment in a smooth sports car, not a DeLorean of course, but something that looked like space had been folded in on itself in bright cherry red. She leaned up against the door with the cell phone at her ear, then waved.
I understood what that meant immediately.
She had spent the last eleven years proving me wrong, step by careful step, and she was here to make me eat my words. Which, to be honest, are something that I've had to make a meal of several times.
I went to my closet and threw on a leather jacket I hadn't worn for years, took it off again, pulled the note saying "I told you so" out of my sleeve, and grabbed my bug-out bag.
Finally she said, "Okay, I was wrong this time. You drive."
I said, "This isn't real, is it?"
"Technically, no. It's a simulation that I created."
"You created a simulation this real just to prove me wrong. And then got us lost in it."
"So sue me."
I parked the car in front of the apartment. It was on fire, because of course it was. A dragon was sitting on the next building over, spraying fire on it. Flakes of burning ash settled on top of the car.
She shrugged.
"Again, I have to ask. If we get killed here, do we really die?"
Another shrug.
The light went on above my head, one of those good old incandescant ones that put out more heat than light, and that sometimes pop and go out without warning. In my opinion, those things were vastly overrated.
"You don't know what's real anymore."
"I told you we were lost."
I put the car into reverse.
"When did the simulation start?" I asked. "When did you upload me or whatever it was you did."
She bit her lip.
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"I mean…never mind."
The stars spiraled around the car.
Finally we were back. Or at least close enough to back that I could deal with it. I got out of the car and tried to slam the door behind me but it hissed and closed with a soft snick. My jacket stank like ash and blood and alien vomit, my boots had holes eaten through the leather, and my hands were covered in small blue tattoos. My bug-out bag was long gone.
"You're wrong," I said. "Why don't you just admit it?"
"I'm not wrong," she said. "We just have to keep looking."
"We have been through countless universes and you still haven't found one where you're a decent driver."
"Just think of the research papers that will come out of this," she said.
"Try a peer review and use a turn signal once in a while," I shouted, then stalked off.
My best friend and I hadn't talked for eleven years, since the car accident that had killed me. Until one morning she called me. Déjà vu all over again, I thought. I knew what was in store for me.
I knew who I was.
I grabbed my leather jacket, put it on, took it off and pulled the note saying, "I told you so," out of the sleeve, and put it back on again. Then I grabbed my bug-out bag, filled a travel mug full of hot coffee (I had set the timer the night before this time), and headed downstairs.
"Here," I said, before she could talk. "Special delivery."
I shoved the note in her face and climbed in the driver's seat.
She gave me a sick, horrified look.
I said, "Either delete me or get in the car, Octavia. We have a lot of turf to cover, if we're going to make this simulation truly self-aware."
I wrote a different story about a mad scientist losing his funding and uploading his simulation into his brain, but I hated it so I deleted it and wrote this instead. "Where did that other story go?" I keep asking myself. "And what if it decided to come back to this reality and kick my ass?"
This is the loose retelling of the Pygmalion story that I'd like to see, anyway.


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text:
Ashton Kutcher Hospitalized Due to Fruit Diet for jOBS Role
Kutcher's diet consisted of fruit, nuts and seeds.
Ashton Kutcher has revealed that he was hospitalized two days before filming began in order to play Steve Jobs in the upcoming biopic of the late Apple co-founder, jOBS.
"First of all, the fruitarian diet can lead to like severe issues. I went to the hospital like two days before we started shooting the movie. I was like doubled over in pain," he said after the film's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
"My pancreas levels were completely out of whack. It was really terrifying," he added. Kutcher's diet constituted of solely fruit, nuts and seeds; the film claims Jobs diet consisted of said food products. The Apple co-founder passed away at the age of 56 during 2011 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Kutcher also said he worked on replicating Jobs' hunched walk and how he generally behaved by studying tapes. He shared "a ravenous interest in the tech space" with Jobs: "I think we can all sort of relate to that in some place in our life where we are moving forward with something and we fall down. You have to have the guts to get back up and go again. I think I share that as well."
jOBS, which has a fabricated opening scene according to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, is scheduled for a release in the U.S. on April 19.
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Ancient Chinese emperors were great city builders they planned each and every aspect of a city when constructing it. Among these were the ornate and expansive Chinese gardens that are found in many historic areas of Chinese cities such as Beijing or Shanghai. The balance of various energies was important to the Chinese, thus they set aside space for gardens and open recreational areas in almost every town or city.
Though Shanghai of today is a bustling metropolis and in many ways is the engine of growth in China, this city is also home a beautiful garden known as the Yuyuan Gardens. The notion of building a garden in Shanghai was first though of by the Ming dynasty in the middle of the 16th century, the Ming dynasty's claim to these gardens is accentuated by the presence of two Ming lions that guard the doorway which allows entrance into the garden. At the time the gardens were being built they were the most expansive and ornate of all imperial gardens in Shanghai. Some historians even claim that the expense that was spent on the Yuyuan Gardens lead to the bankruptcy of Pan family which founded it. The ownership of the garden was passed down family until it was bought over by a group of merchants in the early 18th century. They were instrumental in restoring the gardens to their former glory and opening it up to the public.
Today the extent of the gardens is about five acres and it is laid out in the traditional Chinese Suzhou style. There are six different areas consisting of rockeries, flower gardens and ornate Chinese halls which are great examples of Ming dynasty architecture.
The first section seen by a visitor is the rockery which has a maximum height of fourteen feet, from the top a birds eye view of the entire garden can be seen similar to a valley spread out below a cliff. The rockery has been designed to emulate a natural landscape complete with mountains, valleys, cliffs and waterfalls. As the Yuyuan Gardens are located close to China hotels such as Millennium & Copthorne Hotels China it can be easily accessed by tourists. Guests staying at hotels in China on business visits will defineitly benefit from the serenity offered by these historic gardens.


text:
Choosing names for the babies.
Серия рассказов на Englisho.ru
For two years there were no children in the Ruggles family, and then another boy appeared. «There will be no difficulty about this one, » said Jo. «He'll be called after me. » He was, but there was a difficulty all the same. With two Jos in one house Mr. Ruggles had to become «Old Jo», and sometimes, when he was tired, Tie said he felt it.
Another two years went by before the next baby came, and this time it was a girl. «Good thing too, » said Mrs. Ruggles, «I'm tired of boys. And it's my turn to choose a name, » she continued, looking hard at Old Jo as he sat smoking his after tea pipe. «Yes, it's my turn, and I'm going to have my way this time. Margaret Rosie she's going to be, after me and the little princess together, and if it's too grand for a dustman's child— well, you can always call her Peggy. — I don't mind. » And when Mrs. Ruggles was tired of boys, four years later another one appeared. «And the last I hope, girl or boy, » said Rosie. There was no difficulty with the baby's name, for Rosie had a bright idea. She thought it might be nice and delicate to call him after the Vicar who had always been so kind to them. «We must know first what his name is, » said Mr. Ruggles — he had fears of Roland or Nigel or something like them again. Mrs. Ruggles asked the Vicar if he would mind if she called her last baby after him.The Vicar said he would be very pleased, but his name was James, and surely, if he was not mistaken, that name had already been given to one of the twins. Would William, his second name, do? Mrs. Ruggles said, oh yes, it would do very well indeed, thank you. And then she saw a pound note ... a christening present for William. Mrs. Ruggles almost ran back to №1 One End Street with the good news. «Well?» said her husband as he met her at the door. «Well, whai have you done about it?» «А flowery' name, » cried Rosie, lifting the sleeping baby in her arms and kissing him so that he woke and began to howl. «Another 'flowery' name!» «What? » cried Jo. «I won't have flowery' name in my family — and a boy too!» « He's William! » shouted Rosie. "Sweet William, and he's given me a pound note for William for a christening present" Mrs. Ruggles breathed a sigh of relief. So the baby was William, and he was the last;.
1 have fears [fiez] — бояться,
2 turn — очередь
3 lift — поднимать
4 howl [haul] — плакать, хныкать
5 breathe a sigh of relief — вздохнуть с облегчением
2. Translate these sentences from the text.
a. Another two years went by before the next baby came
b. There was no difficulty with this baby's name, for Rosie had a bright idea.
c. Mrs. Ruggles asked the Vicar if he would mind if she called her last baby after him.
d. Would William, his second name, do?
c. So the baby was William, and he was the last.
3. Write questions to these answers.
1. He'll be called after me. (What...?)
2. For Rosie had a bright idea. (Why...?)
3. ... if he would mind if she called her last baby after him. (What...?)
4. That name had already been given to one of the twins, (Why...?)
5. Mrs. Ruggles almost ran back to №1 One End Street. (How...?)
4. Give extensive answers to these questions about the text.
1. Why did Mr. Ruggles have to become «Old Jo»?
2. Who was Margaret Rosie called after?
3. When did the last boy appear in the Ruggles family?
4. What present did the Vicar give Mrs. Ruggles for the baby?
5. Why did the baby begin to howl?
6. Why didn't Mr. Ruggles object to the name of Williams?
5. Develop the following idea to sum up the contents of the text.
О It was not an easy task for Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles to choose a name for the little baby.


text:
California governor refuses to release Robert Kennedy assassin on parole
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has refused to grant parole to Jordanian Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy, TASS reports.
"Mr. Sirhan's assassination of Senator Kennedy is one of the most infamous crimes in American history. After decades in prison, he was never able to deal with the flaws that made him kill Senator Kennedy," the governor said in a statement.
Recall that Sirhan Sirhan shot Senator Kennedy on June 5, 1968. According to the killer, he did this in retaliation for Kennedy's support for the supply of American military aircraft to Israel.
Earlier, US authorities released new materials regarding the assassination of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, in November 1963.
Almost one and a half thousand previously classified documents were published on the official website of the US National Archives and Records Administration.
The materials include thousands of pages of investigative reports, memos, as well as documents from the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and State Department.
Источник aif.ru
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