Dirk Knight's Blog

Hello readers,

I am happy to announce that my first novel is going to be available free for the Kindle from July 15-17th

Follow the LINK to download. Please offer a review of the work as payment for the free book[image error]

Thank you for your support!

Preview Here!

http://mobile.audible.com/productDetail.htm?asin=B00HM8Y3NI&s=s

This book is dedicated, was dedicated, and always will have been dedicated to my faithful companion, and dearly departed Labrador, Archer.

Here lies Archer, in my heart.

He was a handsome boy who died way too soon. He was my children’s first dog, and my own since I became what I would call an adult. Today I held him in my arms and watched as he passed peacefully into wherever we go when we pass. He fulfilled his destiny, according to God’s plan. I wonder sometimes if God still hangs around here, checks up on us like we hope he does, or if he’s busy in another galaxy just now.

I have been questioning, lately, the meaning of it all. Life, time, God, whatever else. How do we have free will and at the same time have a creator who is good and just and omniscient, omnipresent and sovereign, who has a plan, and from whose plan we may never deviate? Can both be true? Are they mutually exclusive?

Has all that will happen already happened? Some physicists believe in a concept of time that is non-linear. Instead of events happening in a sequence, they are all laid out exactly as they are on a sort of blanket (space-time fabric). Each stitch of the blanket is an event, and the entire blanket is always woven, has always been woven, and will always have been woven.

We on earth, the living at least, only can see the one stitch at a time, and we see it as happening now, with memories of the past and glimpses, maybe, of the future. Our memories are distorted some, but they are our only way of visiting a stitch that we feel we perceive that we have already left, even though theoretically those stitches, or moments in time, are still there, exactly as they were when we perceived being there.

Sometimes we get déjà vu… I wondered about this in the context of this time theory and imagined riding a boat on the ocean of the time blanket, and sometimes we are cresting the peak of a wrinkle in the blanket, and in this moment we can see other peaks ahead of us… maybe when we see the peaks behind us that is the other part of déjà vu, or simply memory.

Perhaps, then, God is standing over this ocean with his own view, the view of all time… the view of all the stitches at once. He understands how the stitches are woven together across many different eons, decades, and days. You and me, my poor dog, Archer, we have the illusion of free will, but the blanket is already woven. We have no choice but to follow the stitches to the part of the blanket where we cease to be living.

No matter what part of the blanket you are looking at right now, no matter who you are, there is a part of the blanket, a stitch in time, where Archer stopped being archer, in the sense that I knew him. He died, which is a term only the living can understand, and only the living that see time as the linear, one after another progression with no control. On that part of the blanket, which I perceive as November 16th, 2013 at 10:50 AM Pacific, my dog ceased living. Every choice he made, limited as they were, was leading him, had led him, and always would have led him to the same stitch of the blanket where he ceased to live. This was, incidentally, the identical stitch in time, where I prayed over him with the words that follow, even though I knew he was only dead in this moment, and not in so many others.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because I am already dead in one moment of time. I am traveling to that moment now. I don’t know how I am going to get there, but I and I will see you when I arrive. I chose to believe that God does know the path across the blanket, and he can see me and Archer together in a better, softer spot on the blanket. I chose to believe this.

I will love you and miss you in all the moments which follow this one along my path, and I will visit moments behind me, in which you are happy and healthy, often.

Rest peacefully, young boy.

I love you,

Dirk

Let’s talk about War and the veterans who fight them.  And those who don’t fight them but sign up anyway, in case they have to fight them.

I don’t think War is a great thing that deserves celebration, but I do think that those who fill the boots deserve our respect and praise. Wars are fought by the young, over fights that the old people are having. Rarely do the old people die in these wars.

The old people supply the bullets.

Likewise I am not anti-war and do not foolhardily believe that War is unnecessary, or that we can abolish War. Some evils simply must be addressed with brute force and violence. If the world didn’t contain these evils, then War would not be necessary. But it does contain these evils. Perhaps we should abolish evil, instead.

There are people who spat on soldiers coming home from Vietnam, threw bags of this or that thing at them, and those things were never pleasant smelling. Some of these soldiers were wounded, or had just seen their friends and leaders killed. These young soldiers were, and are, signing up to preserve the integrity of a nation, and defend those who cannot defend themselves. Even if you don’t agree with the premise of the war, your disagreement is with some old man somewhere, not a soldier.

I find it disgusting when soldiers are treated with anything less than great honor, for being willing to leave their families behind, travel into a strange and hostile environment with only a few items they can carry and their training to comfort them. They are forced to take action following the orders of those who are following orders of those who are the old men quarreling.

When they return home they have seen and done things that they have to question and live with and move past. They should never have to come home to a nation that is more hostile to them than the one they were fighting in. When I see images of Iraqi’s and Afghani’s bringing tea or water to front line soldiers and understand that these men and women want to be freed from oppression, and they don’t have enough young men or bullets to throw at the old men in their country to make it happen, we can offer them shelter and hope. Our young men and women offer themselves.

Our old men offer their bullets.

Veterans are the ones who make sure we can sleep without starbursts and bombs and mortars in our own back yard. Many countries don’t have peace. Some do when we leave.

I am proud to be an American, where a few have such love of country and patriotism that the men and women we need to fight these wars are there and willing to stand up for our sovereignty.

I do not like war, I do not like evil, but I do love our veterans, because they hate those things enough to stand up and fight them, rather than to just blog about it.

Trust me when I say, that for every peace loving flower child who opposes war, there is a soldier that hates war even more, because they understand war and why it’s necessary, and because they have lived it. They hate it because they have seen what the world looks like without soldiers. They protect those peace loving people from what they cannot see… that there would be no peace without WAR.

Hello readers,

I have sent out a few different methods of communication thus far regarding a book signing I have coming in a week. If you have already RSVP’d on Facebook or via E-Vite, please disregard.

If not, and you plan to attend, please RSVP by emailing events@dirkknight.com .

This will just help us get a better understanding of how to staff and stock the event.

Half Price Books in Paradise Valley has been kind enough to lend me the space to set up and offer copies of my new novel, Dimly, Through Glass, on Saturday November 16th.

The even will start promptly at 2:00 pm and will last until  4:00 pm.

Half Price Books Records Magazines

4322 E Cactus Rd, Phoenix, Arizona 85032

Again, you can RSVP to hold a copy by emailing the address above.

I look forward to seeing you there. Anyone subscribed to this newsletter is a valuable part of why I do what I do.

If you aren’t able to make it, or if you want to purchase a copy in advance, you may order a paperback online (click here) and bring it to the event. I will sign anything that I have written, regardless of where the original purchase was made.

Dimly, Through Glass is my first published novel. It is a very dark tale of a haunted man. He is entirely unlovable and I will show you why. This story is not for the fainthearted.

Dennis Foster is not too different from you and me, other than his inability to say no to those little synaptic flashes that catch in his brain. Dennis’s switch has been flipped. We all have the same hardware, all with short circuits in the wiring, but he isn’t able to kill the engine. Mr. Foster acts upon impulses we have all had—and many we haven’t. For Dennis sees himself only dimly, as though reflected only in part, and will come to know himself clearly, face to face with the venomous monstrosity truly shining back in the glass.

Dennis is driven by a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing, instilled in him first by his mother, and then by his failures with every woman who has tried to replace her. Though he has been given an opportunity to reclaim the masculinity, and control he relinquished so long ago, his troubled past and incomprehensible urges, buried and hidden for years, will boil over into a homicidal frenzy when he is forced to kill a man in self-defense. His carefully crafted façade will decay, leaving only the vulnerable truth. We are going to follow his descent and decomposing mental state, and trace the dark pathways that lead to the root causes of evil.

The good guy (every story needs one), though another dark character, is a virtuous rogue who has used his dangerous past to impel him towards the light. He is driven forward by the memories of the woman he loved, who was always too good for him, and his best friend from Operation Iraqi Freedom, both of whom he watched die.

Will good triumph over evil as so often happens in the movies, or will the demented, disjointed maniac fulfill his imagined destiny and shatter the innocence of his victims?

Thanks for your support and, as always, Keep Reading!

 Dimly Through Glass is my latest novel. It is a very dark tale of a haunted man. He is entirely unlovable and I will show you why. This story is not for the fainthearted.

Dennis Foster is not too different from you and me, other than his inability to say no to those little synaptic flashes that catch in his brain. Dennis’s switch has been flipped. We all have the same hardware, all with short circuits in the wiring, but he isn’t able to kill the engine. Mr. Foster acts upon impulses we have all had—and many we haven’t. For Dennis sees himself only dimly, as though reflected only in part, and will come to know himself clearly, face to face with the venomous monstrosity truly shining back in the glass.

Dennis is driven by a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing, instilled in him first by his mother, and then by his failures with every woman who has tried to replace her. Though he has been given an opportunity to reclaim the masculinity, and control he relinquished so long ago, his troubled past and incomprehensible urges, buried and hidden for years, will boil over into a homicidal frenzy when he is forced to kill a man in self-defense. His carefully crafted façade will decay, leaving only the vulnerable truth. We are going to follow his descent and decomposing mental state, and trace the dark pathways that lead to the root causes of evil.

The good guy (every story needs one), though another dark character, is a virtuous rogue who has used his dangerous past to impel him towards the light. He is driven forward by the memories of the woman he loved, who was always too good for him, and his best friend from Operation Iraqi Freedom, both of whom he watched die.

Will good triumph over evil as so often happens in the movies, or will the demented, disjointed maniac fulfill his imagined destiny and shatter the innocence of his victims?

Samurai Comics

Jessee James Comics

Half Price Books – Paradise Valley

Amazon and Barnes & Noble

http://azdirkknight.blogspot.com/2013/10/dimly-through-glass-on-sale-today.html?m=1

The Girls

A Novel

Dirk Knight

The young lady had no idea what she was getting into when she opened the green metal ammo canister and leafed through the man’s journal.

The can squealed open loudly and warned her away. The air within the canister was stale and rusty and spat dust in her face, but still her curiosity was paramount.

She thumbed through the pages and felt the weight of the paper and smelled the years of the pages, along with the rust and dust, as she turned. Through her reading, she would come to know the man as Cirril, and he would haunt her dreams for nearly a decade.

Though she never actually met him, she had developed a pretty clear understanding of what Cirril would look like, simply by reading his psychotic handwritten notes. She knew this much the same way you might have pictured a business associate on the phone, or a client that you’d yet to meet, although in those instances the client or associates face was never what you’d expected. This was not the case with the man who’d written the journal, she was sure of it.

He was ugly, first and foremost. Acne pockmarks littered his greasy face and marked him as though he had been present on the Lunar surface some millions of years past for the furious raining down of meteors and meteorites, as well as more than a couple rouge comets.

The Moon’s face was somewhat smoother and more appealing than was Cirril’s, truth be told.

Cirril’s hair was thinning and too long at the same time. The lack of washing had given the long wiry threads, which sprung from his scalp like dog whiskers, an extra weight and they sagged into his empty eyes and down the back of his neck and into the collar of his ragged flannel shirt. Blackheads swirled around his face, between and within the craters of his untreated acne, like black holes. They were so numerous and large that they appeared to consume all of the remaining white flesh as well as sucking up a considerable amount of grease.

But not enough.

The grease that remained was enough to remind her of a fresh baked pizza. She pictured the grease swirling and swarming across his dermis and into the black holes and became nauseous. His skin was producing new pizza grease at a rate too rapid for the singularities to compensate, so he was still nearly dripping. If Cirril’s face were a peperoni pizza, it would be the one you laid a doubled up napkin over and blotted gently before it crossed your lips.

But who needs the empty calories?

His Paul Bunyan Flannel shirt and splotchy frayed denim pants seemed to be something he had grabbed from a pile of discarded laundry outside a hobo’s cardboard box shanty, under a sign that read, “For the less fortunate.” His shoes were old black leather combat boots. They were still shiny and supple, though not from care. It is more likely that he had gotten a fresh coat of grease on them as he stood inside a dumpster, rooting around and fighting with the rats for the food that the roaches and maggots refused to eat.

Just more empty calories, I guess you might say.

What she couldn’t understand was how the man Cirril, whom she had never met, could have written so many journal entries that were addressed directly to her. It was not probable that he would have known that she would find the journal. That she would venture farther still and read them, yet here is was.

“Ellen wore a yellow blouse today. It flapped in the wind while she awaited the bus and her nose was pink with the chill.”

Hence her infatuation with and subsequent haunting by the man Cirril’s day by day accounts of hers, and many others’, lives. Sure he lived downstairs, but only for a little while, since her mother’s funeral, and she’d never actually seen him.

Ellen isn’t an uncommon name, or anything, but she knew it was her. She was actually wearing the same yellow blouse now, which raised her hackles. She knew that the Ellen was her, and not some teacher in Benton, Ellen. Or some waitress in Pine Bluff, Ellen.

She was the only Ellen mentioned in all the journals. She pored through them in search.

It was her story.

No one else would ever want to be in this story, no one named Ellen or Barbara or Claudette or Norma Rae or Coleen or Suzy. Certainly no one named Victory or Forgiveness, Fidelity or Justice. No one would want to be who Ellen was reading about.

***

It was a hot summer day in Arkansas, Ellen remembered because she was out of school and was playing with the neighbor kid, Sean. Sean lived next door to the crumby walk-up apartment that her father had crammed them into after her mother passed. She had met Sean at a neighborhood cookout type of gathering in the street, where everyone was loaded and handing out beers, clearly not a Sunday in Arkansas, when you couldn’t buy beer. The Southern Hospitality and neighborly spirit dies down from about midnight Saturday to roughly 8:00 AM on Monday, when the chains come off the beer coolers at Seven-Eleven. There used to be a lot of those types of shindigs, in North Little Rock, in the Mid-Eighties—everyone drinking, talking about sports, making plans to go to Burns Park and play volleyball or toss a Frisbee before it got hot out. The men were always drinking, and once they started, they began to hatch plans to go drinking elsewhere. Some of the women were rallying other mothers to take the kids to the rocket slide, or the tiny little play-land across from the putt-putt, where the kids could ride the tiny train, complete with a conductor in an engineer’s hat. Fewer still were expressing concerns to go grab a shaved ice along the way.

It must get boring to drink in the same place all the time, Ellen thought, since people are always looking for new places to swill beer, smoke, and listen to Hall and Oats blaring from the opened windows of an ElCamino.

Things had gone sour pretty quickly after the block-party-cookout day, as they often do when massive amounts of Miller Highlife become introduced to the situation. It was usually about 11:47 when someone announced, “We are going to need some Sunday beer,” and suddenly the remaining cans were discreetly tucked away and rationed; hoarded like dense crackers on a lifeboat adrift for days in the ocean. It always seemed to astonish Ellen that the grown-ups never had any idea that they needed this, “Sunday Beer,” in advance. At this point, everyone decides that they have waited too long to purchase any Sunday beer and therefore they will spend the next day, not at Burns Park, but at a local bar where they can continue the consumption. Directly following this revelation comes the unnerving stage where the grown-ups consume as much as they can, racing the other adults, to get as much of the remaining Saturday Beer as they can before their peers. This resulted in the kind of atrocities Ellen hates.

Like Sean’s mother becoming extremely flirtations and grabby with the men who sat on coolers, guardians of the supply. She assumed that her flirty, over the top, groping made up for her face, which had the opposite effect. Ellen’s father once said that she killed more wood than termites. Still that didn’t stop either of them that night, while Ellen’s father perched atop a Coleman cooler. The Southern Oracle, as it was.

Ellen’s dad had been respectful enough of Sean’s mom’s boyfriend when he was around, they were neighbors after all, but her beau hadn’t made it that night. And you know what they say about cats and mice and when they play.

They play when copious volumes of Miller Highlife are introduced to an ugly flirtatious woman and a widowed carpenter.

Not only did they fuck, but also they made a spectacle of it, in front of the neighbors. Not actually balling in the street, mind you, but leaving little else to the imagination.

When the cat’s away, the mice may play, or when drunk or lonely or bored, but the gossip of a southern town always makes its way back around.

Sleeping with Sean’s mom would turn out to be yet another event sponsored by booze, which Ellen’s dad would have to pay for.

He had to fight her boyfriend the very next night that beer was involved, but this time it was a Budweiser night. Payday.

There was a lot of shouting and a lamp was broken in the carport, why there was a floor lamp sitting in the carport, Ellen never thought to ask. She was too terrified to tremble. She was as petrified as the desert she’d read about in school. She would later note in a journal of her own how frightening it was for her, and therefore must be to other children to watch so-called grown-ups fight. She commented about the entire event (other than her neglecting to question the lamp’s presence) in great detail, and then tore the pages out and tossed them atop the stove, allowing the pilot light to catch them and send the ashes asunder. She did this without knowing why, but it wasn’t the first or last thing she would burn in her lifetime.

One of the details she harkened back to repeatedly, though, was the need for a child to have a stable and safe place, somewhere to feel protected, and that it had been impossible to feel safe and comfortable while the men were spilling blood out all over the patio and lamps were being slaughtered needlessly.

In the end, the men picked one another up, no one bothered with the lamp, and Ellen’s dad presented a joint as a peace offering. The other, bloodier, man decided that Sean’s mom wasn’t worth all the hassle, what, with her offensive face and all, and sat down to smoke his half of the doobie.  Sean, who had watched the entire skirmish from his own vantage, just beyond where the lamp probably should have been, wore a look of shame and injury. The words the men had shouted were only audible, and not intelligible to Ellen who was on the second floor, looking down through glass, but a mere screen door and ten feet separated Sean. Ellen felt bad for him that his mother was unclean.

“If I had a dog that looked like that,” Ellen’s dad started.

“I’d Shave its ass and teach it to walk backwards,” the second man said through his exhalation of pot stink. They both laughed and this sent Sean running back into the house proper. Ellen never spoke to him about the fight.

In another letter Ellen would write, she would note that the men who were demeaning Sean’s mother had both slept with the woman, and transferred their guilt into her lasciviousness. She noted in the letter that each of those men seemed far more unclean than the woman, and that the woman hadn’t reduced herself to pettiness and violence. The letter would go unanswered, but she was confident her father had read it. Prisoners rarely get mail, so they will read even if it’s hateful or cruel.

What Ellen wouldn’t know, couldn’t really, was that her father would read the letter only once, memorize it, and would also burn the paper and scatter the remnants—an act that would land him in the hole for a month, and get his lighter confiscated. Had Ellen have known she and her father shared this odd behavioral quirk, it might have saved us all a great deal of time and probably a few lives to boot.

Though they never spoke of it, Ellen was sure that Sean was still ashamed of the whole ordeal. In the letter she burned, Ellen ruminated on how poor a choice it had been for her father to sleep with the girl next door. Especially when the girl was a walleyed fish-dog that would keep inviting him back over for dinners. Her dad had to see her every day for as long as he had to, and what made it worse was that she and Sean were joined at the hip that summer and every time he saw her father, he looked at his own feet. He did the same with his own mother, though Ellen wondered if that wasn’t just to avoid seeing her hairy moles or to keep down confusion as you tried to decide which of her wandering eyes to attend to.

Ellen sensed that her and Sean’s constant proximity was a sort of shield for Sean, and it was no doubt how they ended up in the downstairs apartment together, inside Cirril’s home, and rifling through his shitty shit. The apartment, which was a home that had been broken up into an upstairs and downstairs duplex, was stuffy and dank. Her apartment, the upper half, was small but pleasant. The lower quarters were nonesuch. There were potatoes on the windowsill with two and three inch eyes growing out of them; sweet potatoes that had gotten so close to the edge of rot and decomposition that they had taken on the responsibility to father new life. In a letter that Ellen did not burn but should have, she wondered if they had actually mothered new life, and if so, if she knew who the father was. Her psychoanalyst would eventually burn the letter, though not intentionally, but when her office spontaneously caught fire some three years after releasing Ellen into society with a clean bill of mental health.

There were dozens of boxes of cereal, but not full sized, they were the little child sized individual serving boxes that they gave out at school breakfasts and shitty hotels as part of a continental breakfast. They had served them at Rivendell Psychiatric Hospital, too, but Ellen was always too sedated to eat in the cafeteria, plus she was on a watch list for threatening to incinerate her psychoanalyst’s office (no, it wasn’t her).

“Why does he have so many of these?” Ellen had asked Sean, who ignored her while stuffing as many of the boxes of Frosted Flakes and Fruit Loops into his over-shirt as he could carry. By the time he stood again there were a mountain of blue and green cartons with innumerable tigers and toucans peering out over the cotton.

“Who cares? Grab the rest,” Sean said, but Ellen was still concerned with the cereal’s origin. They seemed so out of place in the dump apartment with the rotten tubers. Ellen’s mother had been very cautious about foodstuffs, especially on Halloween: Searching each individually wrapped portion, before they were known as “Fun Sized”, in search of razor blades or syringe holes or dynamite or a human head.

Fun Sized.

Ellen’s mother hadn’t died from tainted Halloween candy. Perhaps she should have been on the lookout for drunk drivers instead of Halloween terrorism. Perhaps she should have been more cognizant of her husband’s copious consumption of Miller Highlife. It was the 80’s… they weren’t about to make Ellen Ward of the State in order to send her father to prison, even though that also may have saved us some time and potentially saved a few of the girls. Ellen wrote this into a letter as well. The letter was a vehicle to indict the system that had let her father remain in charge, and on the road behind the wheel, and had left her in an unsafe environment, where she became a danger to herself and others. She condemned, by name, law enforcement officials, judges and her psychoanalyst for their parts in covering up what they knew about Ellen and her father. She didn’t burn the letter, she shoved it into a plastic bag and then into her vagina, where it remained until recovered in a strip search and added to her file. Ellen was satisfied by the look on the guard’s face, but disappointed by the lack of long-term consequence.

Aside from being ineffectual, the letter was not written until years after her mother’s funeral and after Ellen had been forced to see her father’s smiling face day after day, while he swilled beer and her mother composted. She would hate him if she could. If she had anyone else besides the timid Sean to lean on.

Now, with her gone, Ellen was beginning to display more and more characteristics of her mother, and borrowing traits she had seen displayed therein. She was, for example, very apprehensive about consuming any of the foodstuffs they had found within Cirril’s abhorrent domicile.

But still, she opened the refrigerator.

Some people go for the medicine cabinet—most, actually—when no one is looking. They excuse themselves at dinner parties and lock the door behind them, relieve their bowels or bladder or both, and then run the sink loudly and pretend to wash up while cataloging the contents of the mirrored box. They felt nothing in the way of apprehension or discomfort, as though this was assumed and therefore acceptable for all guests. In that same fashion it is a wonder more visitors wouldn’t go through hosts’ chest of drawers, or under their mattress. The end result of this horrendous betrayal of trust would, no doubt, be something along the lines of, “Did you know that Susan is on Valium?” being uttered at the next dinner party, while some other scavenger was no doubt riffling through some other party thrower’s medicine cabinet, and the mixed company at the shindig would respond with gasps and whispers. Amidst “Oohs,” and “Ahhs,” and “You don’t says,” the news of the contents of the medicine cabinet would spread through the town like a virus at a kindergarten, and yet no one would even stutter a bit, or question what illness had led this individual to pilfer through someone else’s personal artifacts. They would, instead, speculate at length that Susan’s husband must be alcoholic, or abusive, or both, or perhaps that the mortgage was past due and the stress had eaten away at poor Susan’s sanity, or that their oldest son was a homosexual, or something equally as embarrassing and had therefore driven her to the pharmacologist’s.

By the next dinner party the swell would have consumed all the chunks of gossip and beaten them into a ridiculous chum of insane untruths to attract further more sharks and remoras and parasitic succubae who would smile to her face and boil her otherwise. And the poor Susan will have forever regretted taking the valium prescription from her physician, who’d offered them to her when her sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and she’d taken to insomnia and worry.

Even more common than searching for telltale medications in the bathroom cabinetry, Ellen supposed, was the compulsion to sort through someone’s refrigerator. “What are you looking for?” someone might ask you after walking in on you snooping into his or her cold-box. And then you would say something like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was just thirsty and looking for a soda or tea.”

“Let me get that for you.”

“Oh, no thanks, really.” You might then say, and so on.

Sean neglected to ask Ellen what she was looking for, as he knew they were currently on a Goonies-level treasure hunt in another man’s garbage. Neither he nor she seemed concerned that they had no justification or alibi as to why they were inside. If they were to be caught, Ellen thought, they would have no choice other than to run and smash through the plate-glass window and fall into the holly bushes outside. I wonder if the draperies would protect me from the glass as well as the holly thorns, she thought. In essence, they were burglars. Small innocent looking, children, but burglars nonetheless. Now they were in the fridge, Sean already having a sizeable lump of cereal boxes protruding from his abdomen like a pregnant Captain Crunch.

Though the refrigerator remained plugged in and the compressor could be heard thrumming and humming like a dying something or another, the inside of the box was warm and dank and the bulb didn’t light. That the bulb hadn’t come on was, perhaps, something for which they should’ve been thankful. If there had been something to eliminate the odor, in lieu of the bulb, that would have been a spot better. It was the distinct and unmistakable smell of a cat, who had died no less than one week prior, and was now festering and decomposing somewhere under a stairwell somewhere never to be found. That was Ellen’s take on the whole thing, anyhow. How that smell had come to be emanating from Cirril’s icebox was somewhat a mystery to her, as she had no light other than the natural sunlight that had oozed its way past the layer of fry grease and into the tiny apartment.

The light gave her enough vantage to see that there was, in fact, something hairy in there, but that is was not a cat. It appeared to be what was left of a pork chop, and the hair was a layer of mold that was cultivating on the bone, creating new life from old, as it sucked out the marrow. Life sometimes sells just like death, Ellen thought in that moment.

She would think it again some years later when she was giving birth to twins, one of whom was born still, and both of whom were taken from her without so much as a second to hold them, and she was summarily placed back into her cell to recover and mourn behind glass. The iodine on her episiotomy stitches not yet dry, before her face was wet with remorse. Even a rape baby should get to be held, she thought and wept herself to sleep with the help of her morphine drip.

It must’ve been something about the smelly, dead / alive pork chop that finally tuned Sean’s radar to the same frequency as Ellen’s own, but it had finally permitted them both to be frightened enough to decide upon egress. Nevertheless, it was just then, just as they were leaving, never to return, not even in their minds, when Ellen spotted an old ammo canister, Circa 1972 Viet Nam. If it would have been sealed shut, she could have left it, abandoned just like the rest of the godforsaken pit of despair the man had called a home. Probably just like the men who had carried the canister into the South Pacific jungle to do battle with enemies that didn’t care and carry out orders that weren’t clear.

The canister was not sealed shut, though. The canister was not wide open, but instead was cracked just enough to reveal the corner of one wrinkled page of one weathered book, which would change Ellen’s life forever. Not just change it, but become it. She, an avid reader, had no choice but to pry it open and see what the pages revealed. She was, after all, only a child. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back,” she said to Sean who was screaming that he didn’t want to die in this shit shack, and for her to hurry. Clearly, the dead-cat smelling thing in the refrigerator hadn’t been satisfied, She thought. No coming back from that.

And so, she ended up with the book, but had no intention of reading it. Or, at least, that is what she told the curious cat of her imagination as she pried the rusty metal lid from its frame. Off ya go, She told the cat. Just want to see what all’s in here, is all, she told that cat.

Meow, the cat said back, granting her permission in its apathy. And so, her intentions of not reading the book slowly transmogrified into a need to know what was inside.

You knew I was going to read it, all along, she accused the cat, who sat licking its furry balls in the corner of her mind while she thumbed back the cover and read the first page.

Chapter One—The Girls, it read.