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Feels Like Summer Rambling Thoughts


Woke up yesterday morning to warm, sun, and what passes for humidity here, and I thought, “Summer?” The question mark is essential because Rob believes we are in for a non-summer this year. Great. Let’s punctuate that with a heaping of Swine flu when school starts up and snow before Halloween too, shall we?

I long ago lost my taste for blistering Iowa summers which draped a person in hot moist air like a towel in a steam room. Back in the late 90’s, when I was still very much on my own, I loved that kind of weather. I ran around all summer in cut-offs, bikini tops and halters, went to the pool every afternoon and took long runs in the evenings. A decadent lifestyle. 

Humidity now feels like someone is stuffing a wet towel down my throat while kneeling on my chest, and I have neither the figure for a bikini top nor the patience for kid infested afternoons at the local pool. And long runs? Not to my knees’ liking. 

Ten years. Where have you gone? And what have you done with me?

Monday was lazy. Dee and I went into town to run errands. One of them was taking deposit containers back to the Bottle Depot, a filthy, disgusting time suck of a chore. I may have mentioned that the family that runs the place have a relative notion about hours of operation. Although the sign says 10am to 4PM, open and close have a 20 to 30 minute give or take on both. Knowing this, I just did a drive by around 10:30 and found customers backed out on to the street. Off we went to run the other errands, which included fortifying Dee with take away lunch because I was sure we’d still end up sitting and waiting a good half hour when we tried the Bottle Depot again.

While we were at the grocery, Dee spied two Army light-armoured transports and wanted to go over and take a peek as the soldiers were clearly on lunch break. One invited her to climb aboard and check things out. She did. She loves heavy machinery and uniforms. Rob says this is how they begin their seduction of the youth.

As we walked away we discussed the fact that soldiers are the ones who “stand on guard for thee”. Dee takes this duty of all Canadians very seriously.

“I watch all the time except for when I blink and am asleep.”

When do we lose that? The first time we single issue vote?

Later, as we sat at the Bottle Depot (40 minutes), I watched the car ahead of me. A young man not too many years younger than the soldiers we saw earlier. Iron Maiden shirt. Camouflage shorts. Cigarette dangling from his lower lip and hauling box after bag out of this little Nissan, each filled with beer cans. I wonder if he still stands on guard for Canada?

Where Were You Monday Meme


So, on the 20th we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 and one small step and MSNBC wonders where in the world we all were that historic day.

I was 5 and I remember my mother had the little black and white that normally sat on the kitchen counter top in the bedroom so she could watch the news as she ironed. It was hot but the sky was black and rumbly with an impending storm. If there hadn’t been lightning, I’d have been outside getting wet. Playing in the rain was summertime fun. Racing little twig boats down the raging rapids of the curbs and watching them disappear into the yawning opening of the sewer. But lightning meant being kept indoors and Dr. Max, my favorite cartoon show, was being pre-empted by the moon and I was grumpy.

“Come and look at the moon,” Mom coaxed.

But there was nothing to look at but Walter Cronkite and child of television that I was – first generation Sesame Street after all – I didn’t see anything special about people on the moon. People on tv could do anything they liked. It was tv.

What’s  your story? Where were you?

Eubie Blake #fridayflash


A Eubie Blake Flash Tale*

Eubie rode the subway downtown on weekday mornings even though he’d last worked for Banality of Evil Inc. four years earlier. He thought it was four years at any rate. Time was elusive since time had become other than what he remembered, a world where vampires were his friends and rather than short selling commodities he peddled necrotizing flesh like Hell’s butcher.

The last stop before the financial district was the Grand Hall. It hadn’t changed but for the murals which depicted a national history he knew he didn’t learn in school though everyone around him seemed quite comfortable with it. Eubie stopped to ponder an intricate portrait of the March on Washington that took place the year he remembered being born. The Mall was awash in reds and greens. Red blood and Army khaki. Photographic in detail Eubie found himself choking back a warm lump of bile and looking around as the few people who rode the trains as earlier as he did hurried past without a glance.

His own eyes burned as bloodshot as the bodies when faint strains of a classical tune he knew but whose dead composer slid just past his tongue tugged his attention toward the tunnels leading back down to the platforms.

Violin? No, viola, Dad, how could you not know the sounds of a viola?

That little girl’s image was tattooed on the used to be side of the dual screen deep in his cerebellum. Once he was certain he carried years worth of photos of her in his wallet. Now the only thing in his wallet, aside from a disturbing amount of cash stamped with likeness of dead presidents he didn’t always recognize, was a state mandated i.d. – chip-less because despite the equally mandatory prison farm sentence – it was just the way he rolled through this brave new existence. He could afford it.

Following the soft, insistent melody Eubie tried to remember the last time he’d been to see the Philharmonic. Zoey had season tickets but when she was in a snit she’d drag along one of her stiff vamp friends making sure he knew. Zoey was an old friend, a new lover and someone like himself who seemed to remember there was another time before the present one. She was also a vampire which had been Eubie’s first clue that life was amiss. Zoey was as beautiful and enticing as ever but not nearly as robust and ruddy with life and not nearly as obsessed with his inner thighs then as now.

“I have always loved a man with a good leg,” she’d said when he pointed out the differences.

“Did I have a good leg then?”

“When?” she asked.

Vampires had the attention span of a dog in an aviary. Zoey used hers to great advantage.

Short of the severely sloping floor that ran up to the turnstiles, he saw her. Sitting on a collapsible stool and propped up a bit by the tiled wall, her head tilted to the right and holding the viola lightly with her chin and graying cheek. Her skirted legs splayed in a manner most unladylike and had her legs not been covered with the first signs of mottling, Eubie would have been sorely tempted to bend a bit to sneak a peek.
“Duo in G Major? ” Eubie asked as he approached.

Unusual for one so involved in craft and decomposition, she nodded though it was more of an off tempo lolling of the head from side to side. It was a difficult piece for someone whose fingers weren’t near gelatinous and being sawed slowly off by the strings. Eubie admired pluck when he encountered it. He rocked back and forth from heel to toe and hummed along until instinct, and his appraiser’s eye, took over. He noted the youthful plump smoothness of skin that hadn’t yet to visibly succumb and the sureness of tone and pace in the music.

He reached into his jacket pocket for the phone to post a quick listing when a young suit walked between him and the dead musician. Eubie enjoyed catching shadowy glimpses of his former self from time to time but as the fellow continued by without a glance to right or left as all attention was honed on the blue-tooth and his own vacuous words, Eubie passed the phone and gently fingered the frequency jammer he never left his apartment without.

The infant businessman stopped in mid-word and stride and tapped quizically and than angrily on the hard black plastic protruding from his ear.

“Damn,” he said and continued on as he appeared to have caught the clatter of a coming train.

“Philistine,” Eubie said to the former girl who was finished and half-staring at him, her arms limp and the bow and viola balancing precariously on her thighs.

He walked a step closer, but no more. It looked hungry. He dropped a hundred dollar note in the open viola case that was well within her lunging range, but she watched him dully with seeming interest.

“Have a nice lunch on me,” Eubie told her.

*I write Eubie stories under the pen name of Christie Cox. This is an original flash fiction piece written especially for #fridayflash and it is the fourth Eubie Blake story I have written this summer. My inspiration will be obvious to a few who read my blog regularly and complete a mystery to others. I am currently waiting on a Eubie short story I have submitted to a spec fiction magazine. I am 50/50 hopes wise. Zombies are a hard genre because they are hard to make original because as a story there is not much by way of undiscovered country.