SENTENCE - The Fictions of Ralph Robert Moore

Time 2021-01-16 18:05:20

Web Name: SENTENCE - The Fictions of Ralph Robert Moore

WebSite: http://ralphrobertmoore.com

ID:169312

Keywords:

Fictions,The,SENTENCE,

Description:

I'm really, really pleased to announce that my latest collection, Our Elaborate Plans, is now published and ready for purchase, in Kindle and trade paperback editions.This is my tenth book, and my largest collection to date. Twenty stories and novelettes. 550 pages. 160,000 words. It's a mix of horror/weird/slipstream stories. A boy who likes digging holes, has a little sister who adores him, and a mother who is dying.Someone who while urinating feels a lump on one of his testicles.A magician and his monkey assistant, who absolutely adores him, and a top hat that allows him to pull out all sorts of unexpected objects.A man who comes back after peeing in the middle of the night to his bedroom and finds a strange woman in bed where his wife had been.An old man journeys to an abandoned factory in upstate Michigan to an unusual safari where the wildlife driven past isn't animals, but ghosts.A young boy who has to go in for some medical tests, and a neurotic woman who 'meets' him years later.What happens when a wife realizes her older husband is showing signs of dementia?How do you cope when a noise from the sky keeps getting louder and louder, causing more and more people to lose their sense of hearing?What are you willing to do to appear in a porno as a way to escape working as a short-order cook for a racist employer?What happens when you rehearse lines in an abandoned model home for an upcoming part and a stranger shows up?How do you cope when the ghost of your dead dog keeps nipping at you?Is it really safe to visit with the father of a girl you just met in his workplace far under the Hudson River?A man who starts following a woman who likes to insert herself into wedding photographs at the local park.Someone who has to deal with little men running like cockroaches across his ceiling.An old man who's woken at night by naked men barking behind his backyard's fences, pretending they're dogs.A man in a wheelchair who wants to bring his lover, seated in a chair in his motel room with a blanket over his body, back to life.Is it really a good idea for two boys who watch a TV show that gradually gives directions on how to reach a secret house hidden in the woods to seek out that house?Have you really considered all the precautions you need to take when a freak snowstorm blows through Texas?What could possibly go wrong when you take your kids and your second wife on a vacation in the islands?When you see something pass by outside the front glass of an ice cream shop, why do you go to the restaurant's restroom, lock yourself inside a stall, get down on your knees, and start slapping your forehead down on the porcelain edge of the toilet?About Ralph Robert MooreRalph Robert Moore, nominated twice for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society (2013 and 2016), has been published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, France, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies, including Black Static, Cemetery Dance, Shadows & Tall Trees, Nightscript, Midnight Street, Chizine, and Sein und Werden.His books include the novels Father Figure, As Dead As Me, Ghosters and The Angry Red Planet; and the short story collections Remove the Eyes, I Smell Blood, You Can Never Spit It All Out, Behind You, and Breathing Through My Nose."Moore's work is consistently fascinating, original and devastating. His characters speak to you from whatever hell they inhabit, with clear, unambiguous voices."-Trevor Denyer"[Moore's] work is not quite like that of anybody else. He is a true original."-Peter Tennant"Moore's work is always heartfelt, deep and superbly executed…a writer everybody with an interest in dark fiction should be reading."-Grim Reader Reviews"Disturbing. Nightmarish. Terrifying. And above all, original...reinforces his reputation, amongst those in the know, that here we have a genre-storytelling giant in our midst."-AJ Kirby"Moore's writing is consistently powerful, his descriptions (even of the smallest minutia) terrifically rendered. He is not afraid to tap into his darkest imaginings and to go places most writers might very well shy away from. Indeed, he is one of the most singularly powerful authors I've encountered in a long, long while."-C.M. MullerBreathing Through My Nose documents eight cases in which Donald Duke entered someone's life."RRM always makes you think. No political correctness here." - Des Lewis, Gestalt Real-Time ReviewsRoy took a deep breath. "There's something else.""You want me to have your babies?""No."Her face registered hurt surprise that he didn't laugh at her joke."While we were making love? I felt a small lump in your breast."She said nothing. Tilted her coffee cup towards her, saw it was empty. "Wait. What?""I felt a small lump in your breast." He pointed at her right breast. "Is that something you're already aware of?"She stared at him, eyes reddening."I didn't mention it at the time. For selfish reasons. And I thought maybe you already knew."She slipped her left hand under the top of her blouse."Do you want me to show you-""Shut up."He sat across from her at the small table, watching as her five fingers, underneath the front of her blouse, moved from one side of her right breast to the other.Anger and relief in her voice, she said, as her fingers kept pressing, "Son of a fucking bitch, Roy, if this is some kind of sick, fucking joke-"Her voice stopped. Her fingers stopped.Her dark eyes looked across the table at him.Fingers moving again under her blouse. In one spot.He could tell she was pressing against the lump with her fingertips, trying to gauge its submerged size, and to see if it was painful. "We used to finish each other's sandwiches."Harry and Edna are a middle-aged married couple who probably did love each other when they were young and just starting out, but now maybe don't any longer? Or possibly still do, in some ways? It's so hard to tell sometimes, with people who have shared their lives for so many years.Harry, a big, angry, disappointed man with a sarcastic sense of humor, flips houses for a living in the greater Dallas area, buying run-down homes, supervising his crew as they go in and renovate the properties, reviving them so they're once again a thing of beauty.Edna, his wife, has become increasingly promiscuous, and has had to undergo more and more invasive surgeries to try to eliminate an infection that has taken hold in her body.The Angry Red Planet is a sad, funny, scary exploration of the changing relationship between a man and a woman, and the daily social irritations that slowly grind them down, like they grind all of us down.About Ralph Robert MooreRalph Robert Moore, nominated twice for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society (2013 and 2016), has been published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, France, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies, including Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, Nightscript, Midnight Street, Chizine, and Sein und Werden.His books include the novels Father Figure, As Dead As Me, and Ghosters; and the short story collections Remove the Eyes, I Smell Blood, You Can Never Spit It All Out, and Behind You."Moore's work is consistently fascinating, original and devastating. His characters speak to you from whatever hell they inhabit, with clear, unambiguous voices."-Trevor Denyer"[Moore's] work is not quite like that of anybody else. He is a true original."-Peter Tennant"Moore's work is always heartfelt, deep and superbly executed…a writer everybody with an interest in dark fiction should be reading."-Grim Reader Reviews"Disturbing. Nightmarish. Terrifying. And above all, original...reinforces his reputation, amongst those in the know, that here we have a genre-storytelling giant in our midst."-AJ Kirby"Moore's writing is consistently powerful, his descriptions (even of the smallest minutia) terrifically rendered. He is not afraid to tap into his darkest imaginings and to go places most writers might very well shy away from. Indeed, he is one of the most singularly powerful authors I've encountered in a long, long while."-C.M. MullerBehind You is my latest collection. 18 stories and novelettes. 400 pages, 110,000 words.Includes "Our Island", nominated in 2013 for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society. What crawls after midnight on elbows and knees into hospital emergency rooms?Who hides in the woods waiting for hikers who get lost?How could a 90-year old woman get pregnant?Is a bird really a bird if it has no feathers or wings or head?Is there a ghost in your best friend's attic?Do dolls get cancer?Can sharks attack someone on a cobblestone street?Is it wise to have an affair with your dental hygienist?What should you do when you suddenly discover you are male, and have a penis?How do priests protect Latino boys from a young girl who likes to put her pet tarantula inside her mouth?Why are you so drawn to a red-haired computer nerd who is indifferent to your beauty?How does a middle-aged couple appearing together in Italo-Spanish-German low budget horror films maintain their relationship when the wife is now being cast in movies as a witch, while the husband still has sex scenes with actresses half his age?When your toilet tells you that you need to get a screening colonoscopy, can your toilet be trusted, especially when your life is being filmed every day by a reality TV crew?How dangerous, and in other situations quite useful, are bananas?How many versions of you and the love of your life exist?Is the world just one island, and endless ocean?What are you hiding, where are you hiding it, and are you willing to submit to a rectal exam?Includes "Dirt Land", nominated in 2016 for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society. Children born with four feet. A man physically attached to three other men. A pushy waitress. A woman who dresses up as Santa Claus on Halloween. An off-campus NYC apartment overrun with tiny, crawling faces. A tomato with spikes sticking out of its red skin. A third rate stand-up comic who insists he isn't gay. A lonely woman who constructs a tabletop village of miniature buildings wherever she moves. A widow who's visited by God in a dream, singing instructions to her about the structure He wants her to build. A psychiatry student who has to convince a handcuffed serial rapist to sit on a toilet seat to reconnect with his childhood. Featuring 3 novelettes from Black Static, "Dirt Land", "Kebab Bob" and "Drown Town"; 3 novelettes from Midnight Street, "They Hide in Tomatoes", "Nobody I Knew", and "Suddenly the Sun Appeared"; 1 novelette from Hellfire Crossroads, "She Has Maids", and 3 novelettes never before published, "During the Time I Was Out", "Imperfect Boy", and "Boyfriend"."Up on the mountain, not everything that gets born is human. Or at least, human enough. That's just the way it is. Some of them are kept, if they look close enough, but a lot are taken down to the river before they get big, and drowned. Shaken out of a blanket. If you go downstream, you'll find all kinds of dead babies bumping against the gray river rocks. Stiff limbs, open mouths. Getting picked at by fish. Of course, up on the mountain, the people who live there catch that fish, like they catch all fish. Fry it. Eat it. That may be part of the problem." --Opening paragraph of "Dirt Land"The full text of Father Figure is now available in new trade paperback and Kindle editions, with a 2015 Author's Preface, and an appendix which includes 6,000 words in deleted scenes. Father Figure is also available at all other Amazon sites worldwide, and additional online venues. 175,000 words, plus 6,000 words of deleted scenes. South of Anchorage, accessible only from a mud-rutted road off Seward Highway, lies the town of Lodgepole. After midnight, among the blueberry bushes of White Birch Park, a man climbs on top of a woman and begins making love to her. As her orgasm rises he puts his hands around her throat, shutting off her air. She struggles, not to stop him, but to stop herself from trying instinctively to pull his hands off her throat. As the top joints of his thumb meet at the front of her throat she comes, her cry of orgasm ricocheting around inside her forever.Daryl Putnam, handsome, bookish, wakes up from a nightmare and decides to do something he hasn't done in years. Take a walk outside at night. Down in the park, at the lime green shores of Little Muncho Lake, he comes across the body of the strangled woman.The next morning, at the coffee shop of the hospital where he works, Daryl meets Sally, a pretty, dark-haired girl. He's intelligent, she's outgoing. What they have in common is both are living lonely lives. Until today.Also in the hospital coffee shop, shaking half a can of black pepper onto his tomato soup, is Sam Rudolph, a fiftyish man with eyes like an angry dog's, who has spent over twenty years quietly manipulating events in Daryl and Sally's lives to have this seemingly chance encounter among the three of them occur.And who is actually a lot older than fifty."It is easy to see why Father Figure has become an underground classic over the years. It is a dark, extremely disturbing but completely gripping suspense thriller with a strongly erotic subtext...Moore is an extremely talented writer with a gift for pushing the reader's emotional buttons...certainly liable to become a cult classic, and deservedly so."From an editorial review"Immensely readable and informed by a lucid intelligence, Father Figure belongs up there with the likes of Delany's The Mad Man, Bataille's Story of the Eye, Sade's oeuvre, The Story of O, and other works of transgressive literature that challenge our assumptions as what is normal and what goes beyond the pale."Peter Tennant, Black Static magazineIn our modern world, only Ghosters know what comes after death. What stays behind. And what dwells between.Ghosters are a small, loosely-connected group of individuals who travel the highways of America curing people of their hauntings. For as much money as they can negotiate from each client. They are legitimate. But they are not nice. If you're here, it's probably night. You can see a window from where you sit, and the window is dark. Who really knows what's outside?I write. If you read, we've just made a connection.SENTENCE is the forest you fall asleep into.I created SENTENCE back in 1998 as a way of letting readers know a little bit more about me. Here you'll find about a dozen of my stories, the complete text of my novel Father Figure, essays of mine, videos I've made, photographs I've shot, 20 years of my on-line diary entries, some of my favorite recipes, and much, much more. I don't fear plagiarism. Ideas can be stolen-- a simile, a description, a plot, a joke-- but that will happen regardless of the medium in which your luggage is left alone on the airport floor. The truth is, fear of plagiarism is fear of readership. To be plagiarized is never fatal. What is more important is to be read. Because if it's in a box, and no one but you knows about the storms raging through the paragraphs, the footsteps plodding soggily down the sentences, water dripping off the rims of words, that's the biggest shame of all. A fizzle. Because the real achievement of writing is not the writing. The real achievement of writing is someone else reading the writing.SENTENCE started as an island. Over the years, its accumulated bulk, added to each month, became a continent.Art is an invitation to go inside someone else's mind. To see our world as they see it. SENTENCE is my mind.I've been published in America, Canada, England, Ireland, France, India and Australia in a wide variety of genre and literary magazines and anthologies. I've been nominated twice for Best Story of the Year by the British Fantasy Society, in 2013 and 2016. My fiction has been called "graphically morbid". My writings are not for everyone. Are they for you? Find out.I'm glad you came. I just lit a cigarette. I just made a drink. I hope you enjoy your exploration.And to see what I'm up to right now, and what currently interests me, visit my page.I remember way, way backwards through the turbulent decades to the black and white photographs of my youth under black and white trees, running across black and white grass, when often on a Saturday morning my stupid face wouldn't rise off the softness of my white pillow until eleven a.m., or later.I always felt so rested!But the past twenty years or so, I'm up by three or four o'clock in the morning.If I'm lucky.Sometimes I'm awake by one. Not unusually, by eleven. It's still the day I fell asleep! What the fuck?The thing is, when you wake up while the rest of the world is still pushing out breaths between their lips, there's not a whole lot you can do.It's dark, it's quiet.I can't turn on the TV, because that would wake Mary.So I do one of two things.I stay in bed, under the covers. Reclose my eyes and try to fall back asleep. Which almost never works. While I try to fall back asleep I think of a time in the near future, after a zombie apocalypse, where a ragged group of survivors are trudging down a road out in the middle of nowhere, all of them in dirty clothes, all of them stinking because they haven't washed for months, all of them skinny, the men with full beards, the women with ratty hair, and a vehicle appears behind them, slowly approaching. The raggedy group's leader holding up a knife, swaying. All the others in the group swinging their fearful eyes to this leader, looking to her for direction on how to react to this frightening development.They've encountered other groups of survivors in the past.And it's never gone well.The vehicle gets even closer, and closer.Brakes.Voice over a loudspeaker. But quiet enough it's unlikely to be heard by the undead stumbling around in the surrounding woods, banging their foreheads against low tree limbs in a vaudeville way that would have been funny at one time, before all this shit, but is absolutely, absolutely, absolutely no longer humorous."Good morning. Would the leader of your group please raise their hand."All fearful eyes swinging to her.At what point does someone stop believing in God?How many disappointments does it take?And at what point does someone say, I don't know why I'm being put through this, I don't know your plan, but I have kept my faith.She raises her hand."We would like to meet with you. If you are agreeable to that. To sit down with your group over bowls of homemade chicken noodle soup, and buttered biscuits, to discuss your group possibly joining with us. To be a part of something. Are you agreeable to considering that? If you are, please once again raise your hand."Everyone wants to be a leader. In charge. But unless you've actually been a leader at some point in your life, you have no idea of the burden that carries. The responsibility. The weight. Leaders are rarely happy. They just pretend to be happy.Her people are dying. Starving to death. This could be a terrible decision. It could be a ploy to steal whatever few pathetic possessions they still own, to rape the females, rape some of the males, which has happened before and before and before.Homemade chicken noodle soup.Their bellies are so concave below their rib cages.Tears streaming down her cheeks.She raises her hand.Or I do the second thing.I rise out of bed.In the darkness, in the silence.Both hands out sideways, right hand in this black blindness touching the hardness of the recumbent bicycle's handles, the wall of the short white hallway leading from our bedroom to the kitchen. I navigate my way to the wooden cabinet next to the side-by-side, pull down a tall glass tumbler. Normally I would just push the height of the glass against the spout spilling down ice cubes, but since it's three in the morning, and the tumbling down is noisy, surprisingly so, I instead swing open the stainless steel door on the freezer side of the side-by-side, lift my fingers up, down into the tall clear plastic tank holding all the ice cubes, scooping out some, dropping them into my glass, holding the glass against the spout that pours down cold filtered water, watching the glass fill at three a.m. Ice cubes rising like jewels up the glass's interior circularity.And that's my first beverage of the day.Ice water.I ascend the stairs at the front of our home to the second story.At the top of the stairs, off on the right, my study.Floor to ceiling blonde-wood bookcases against three of the tall walls. Holding the weight of thousands of books. By subject matter, and then alphabetical.The fourth side of the study, with a desk and my computer, a half wall overlooking the two-story cathedral ceiling living room below.I light a cigarette. Lift and sip my ice water. Read my emails. Check out any comments I've had on my Facebook page. Click the Amazon KDP stats to find out how many copies of my ten books I've sold overnight. Do a sideways shoulder-shake sitting down dance in my pajamas in celebration of new sales, silly, but still celebratory. People are reading me. All I ever asked for. Go to Google, click on the News app, scroll through what's been going on around our imperfect world while I slept. If it's really early, where it'll be hours before Mary's likely to wake, I'll watch a foreign-language movie on one of the streaming services we subscribe to: Netflix, Amazon Prime, Shudder, Hulu, HBOMax. Mary and I used to watch foreign-language movies together, but since her stroke in 2002, she, one of the most well-read persons I know, can no longer read subtitles (aphasia), so we stick with English-language films only.Go to YouTube, try to find videos I can use for our latest Rob and Mary videos session later today. Rob and Mary videos are where Mary and I sit side by side at my computer, around six-thirty at night, watch videos I think Mary might like. Fail Army videos, Idiots at Work, Idiots in Cars, Reddit gifs, song videos, Carbonaro magic tricks, animals helping other animals, etc.While I'm doing all this, Sweet Pea, our one remaining cat, is screeching by my bare feet, whining for food. The thing is, never, ever feed a cat when it first starts begging for food. Because otherwise, it's going to start begging for food at six a.m., then three a.m., then eleven p.m.Instead, just ignore its pleadings and feed it each morning at a convenient time for you.You'll thank me for this.Around seven, I go downstairs.A really good time to get a lot of the day's chores out of the way.Sweet Pea jumping around the flexing tendons of my descending bare feet, whining a meow that sounds a lot like, 'LOL', 'LOL", which is fucking eerie that early in the morning. Feed her wet cat food from a small can, black plastic fork dropping that glop down into a white Styrofoam bowl.Check to see if the lights are on in our bedroom. Usually not.Get Mary's beers for this new day out of the fridge in the garage.Turn on the lights in the kitchen.Pull anything from the garage we need to defrost for breakfast. Bacon, bread, ham, English muffins. If we need to microwave red-skinned potatoes for cottage fries, get them rotating.Empty the dishwasher. Bend over in my pajamas, pull each plate and bowl out of the racks, careful not to let their weights bang against each other, like a bell that could awake my love.Clean and refill the cat's water bowl, a large, oval green bowl that was used when I ordered red roses to be delivered to Mary's office a couple of decades ago.Sitting at the black breakfast nook table, sort through the mail, pay any bills that are due.If the trash can in the kitchen is full, lift it out of its tall rectangular black container, twist its ties on top, haul it out to the garage, drop it in the trash bin. Put a new trash liner in the kitchen's trash container.Flatten the colorful cardboard packages for the frozen food we ate last night, toss them in the recycle bin.If it's trash day, Thursday, gather up all the big and small trash bags from the various waste baskets upstairs and downstairs, quietly get a set of clothes and pair of blue sneakers from the bedroom, a brown leather bomber's jacket since it's cold outside now, and mail that needs to go out. Roll up the wide garage door. It's pretty much pitch-black outside. Where we live, mail isn't delivered to each individual home. Instead, it's put into a kiosk about a two-minute brisk walk down the street from our home, a kiosk we share with five other houses. Usually, there's no one else outside at this hour. A few weeks ago, I was walking our mail down to the kiosk, and across the street, suddenly appearing, a large racoon with three smaller racoons behind it. They stopped their race down the street when they became aware of me. Staring at me. I kept walking, and after a moment's hesitation, the large racoon, realizing I meant no harm, continued his or her scamper, the smaller ones keeping up, small claws dashing behind. Slide the envelopes of paid bills into the metal slot at the top left of the pick-up compartment of the kiosk. Unlock the small square door assigned to our home. Pull everything out, careful not to drop anything. Walk back to the open wide door of our garage. Roll the tall trash bin to the sidewalk, positioning it according to the town's waste management specifications. If it's full, do the same with the recycle bin.Make coffee.We use French Market coffee, a New Orleans coffee made with chicory to give it a more complex flavor.Eight heaping tablespoons of coffee, tall as soft dark pyramids, dropped into the filter basket.Add water to the leftwards tilted carafe maneuvered under the side-by-side's filtered water spout. Carafe filled to the brim.Right thumb pressing the On button.And this coffee is my second beverage of the day.Around eight o'clock I go back into the bedroom.Walk past the bed in the master bedroom.To the master bathroom.Turn on the overhead light in the toilet alcove.Turn on the overhead light in the large walk-in closet.At this point, all those lights on, Mary might start stirring.Or she might not.If she doesn't, I lower the metal bars on my side of the bed, which prevent me from rolling out of the bed in the middle of the night. Which before the bars happened more than once. Disorienting, to wake up spinning down in the air, hitting my head against the side of the white plastic waste basket, my shoulder on the brown carpet.And that lowering metallic noise always makes her raise her head off the pillow.Once Mary's awake, and we're watching the Today Show, a show that used to be great, but is now a shit show, basically a really long commercial for different NBC shows, we get our coffee, sip it, and switch over to Judge Judy, Family Feud. Sometimes, Chopped.I give Mary her morning pills.Make breakfast.Eat it in bed. Because why the fuck would you ever eat sitting at a kitchen table when you can eat lying on your side in bed?Try to rotate the meats. Bacon and eggs with oat nut toast; sausage patties with cottage fries cooked in the fat from the patties, and eggs; scrambled eggs with cubed ham and rye toast; waffles with maple syrup and bacon; thick ham slice with English muffins with butter and blueberry jam, and eggs; sausage patties with hash browns, and eggs; ham and egg and American cheese sandwiches with potato patties on the side. Every once in a while a breakfast burrito; a BLT; hot dogs; a pork chop or chicken-fried steak with pan gravy, a biscuit, and eggs; a soft chicken taco; a steak and pepper sandwich; fresh nachos; or a Huevos Rancheros, my favorite, two partially overlapping fried corn tortillas, Huevos Ranchero sauce atop, fried eggs over that, grated Mexican cheeses raining down on the tops of the eggs, a plump, juicy medium-rare filet mignon to the side of the plate. Now, that's a good breakfast. Dipping the redness of a cut slice of the ruby filet into that rich, red sauce, that golden, molten egg yolk.After breakfast, we watch a movie. Usually a horror film, sometimes something else. Just something well-made. Then usually a TV show. Could be an hour-long documentary from Showtime or HBO, could be an episode of Bravo's Below Deck, or The Amazing Race or Survivor. Up next, in the early afternoon, we continue our rewatch of The Walking Dead.This is the first time we've revisited the series since first watching it, years ago. And I'm impressed at how good it is. Better than I remembered. Much grimmer, and more moving, than I had recalled.We just finished season 6, which overall is very strong, one of the better seasons, and now we're marching on into season 7.After watching an episode of The Walking Dead, we see the latest episode in our favorite TV shows cycle.There are 10 shows we rewatch on a regular basis.Those shows are Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Office (up to where Michael leaves), True Blood, Banshee, Fargo, Quarry, and Mad Men. Given that we watch one episode a day (two episodes of The Office since it's a half hour show), we rewatch each episode about every two years.Right now, we're in season 2 of The Sopranos.After we finish watching the latest episode of the Walking Dead, and before we start watching the latest episode of The Sopranos, I get out of bed and walk through the short white hallway connecting the master bedroom to the kitchen, and make an RRM.An RRM is my third beverage of the day.And isn't it so pretentious of me that I named a drink after myself?But we're allowed to be pretentious. We're allowed to do almost anything we want to do.I love steamed clams. The dark, warm slipperiness across tongue and teeth. (And I love, love, raw oysters. I don't use lemon juice or hot sauce or any other squirt, just tilt their slide between my upturned lips. Love the brininess, love that I'm killing a small live animal in my mouth with each chew of my back molars, savoring that little death.)Here's how you make an RRM.Pull down from the wooden cabinet by the stainless steel side-by-side an old-fashioned glass. Fill it halfway up with chilled Clamato. Shake down about a dozen dark dashes of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce. Too many shakes of table salt-about half a dozen. Eight grinds of black peppercorns, to where the red surface is floating like a crowd of empty life jackets with freshly-ground black pepper.And the most important step.DO NOT STIR IT.Sip it tilted sideways.As your sipping lowers the solution in the glass, the intensity of the settling snakes of Worcestershire, the salt, the pepper, will intensify. Until it's almost too much, and you're down to the dregs.And that's an RRM.After we finish our latest rewatch of one of the ten series we repeat, we prepare to go upstairs.I fix a Manhattan. My fourth beverage of the day.But actually now, just a whiskey.A Manhattan is made with a cherry in the bottom of a short glass, ice cubes tumbled atop, whiskey rising up the interior sides of the glass, a splash of dry vermouth, a shake of Angostura bitters. I did that for years.In honor of Mary's dad, Joe, who loved Manhattans.Over the decades, we met up with Joe at different locations across America. In Sacramento, California, where he and his wife Joan were living while he worked as a space engineer for Aerotech. In Florida, while we were travelling across the country, and he was attending a space scientist conference in Miami. We went out to a seafood restaurant after his latest conference, and boy did the seafood suck. Florida has terrible seafood restaurants. Surprisingly.A few years later we flew from Maine, where we were then living, to meet up with Joe and Joan in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee, where they had retired because Joan still had sisters living there. Ate at a lot of wonderful restaurants in Milwaukee, Joe always ordering a Manhattan to start his meal. Still later, they drove by car to Maine to visit with us for a week. Maine has absolutely the worst shit restaurants in America, but Joe still managed to get his Manhattans.Finally, after Joan's death, Joe would fly down to our home in Texas and spend each holiday season with us, and we always made sure we had Manhattan fixings for him.After he died, found on the kitchen floor by his next door neighbor, I started drinking a Manhattan each day in honor of him. Raising a glass to my wife's father.We go upstairs each day around 3:30. Come back down to the kitchen around 4:30. Take our latest round of pills, and Mary's eyedrops to control her borderline glaucoma.She gets a second cold beer. German or Mexican bitter draft. I get a tall tumbler filled with ice cubes, vodka, and Coca-Cola. My fifth beverage of the day.Start writing stories. Smoking even more cigarettes.At seven we troop downstairs for the evening. Eat dinner in bed, now often frozen meals, rather than the elaborate preparations of our past. But that's okay. We still have our breakfasts.Switch back to ice water. The cycle goes on.Lights out around eight.Mary falls asleep easily.I'm glad she does. She deserves her rest.I think of a time in the near future, after a zombie apocalypse, where a ragged group of survivors are trudging down a road out in the middle of nowhere, all of them in dirty clothes, all of them stinking because they haven't washed for months, all of them skinny, the men with full beards, the women with ratty hair, and a vehicle appears behind them, slowly approaching. A new Lately is published the first of each month. To print this Lately, please go here. To read previous Latelys, please go here.

TAGS:Fictions The SENTENCE 

<<< Thank you for your visit >>>

Fiction, novel excerpts, short stories, essays

Hot Websites