Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #29: "The Wood of the Suicides"

"The Wood of the Suicides" is one of the two stories by me that were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Every year, a book of award-winning stories and poems is published—a very thick volume—and constitutes what is considered the best writing of the year in English.  Nominations are supplied by magazines and journals, and even to be nominated for one is considered an honor. I've been nominated three times (one poem, two stories), though none of the nominations has landed my writing in the Pushcart volume. Maybe someday . . .

The story under discussion here originally appeared in a journal called Four-Cornered Universe, which folded after about a year. I let the story sit but 1) since I don't write a lot of science fiction; and 2) since I thought the story was a good one and wanted people to read it, I decided to work on it and resubmit the piece.

 

Dore's Illustration of Dante

"The Wood of the Suicides" was inspired by Dante's Inferno. When Dante and Virgil visit the area of hell where the violent are tormented for their sins, they come to a place of punishment for suicides, those who are violent against themselves. The suicides are turned into trees. The trees resemble humans somewhat; you can see faces on them and you can identify them as male and female. They can talk to you. The deeper their roots go down, the more their pain; and harpies, mythical creatures who are half-human and half-bird, perch in their branches and tear at them, pulling off the bark and drawing blood (reminiscent of a section of Virgil's Aeneid). I had read Inferno in an issue that carried French illustrator Gustave Dore's woodcuts, and the one of the Wood of the Suicides stuck in my mind as particularly gruesome.

But my story was not about hell. I thought, What if such a punishment was used not to torment but to rehabilitate? What if the purpose of doing so was both benevolent and retributive?

"The Wood of the Suicides" is told from the point of view of a Terran soldiers stationed on a remote but strategic planet at the edge of Terran space. The planet is inhabited by a race of beings called the Anva. They are a quiet, unassuming people. Their skills in such areas as medicine and agriculture are more advanced than any other race of beings in the galaxy. And they have a unique way of dealing with murderers.

Cullen, the main character, has a sister, Bria, also a soldier, who has murdered someone. The Anva turn her into a tree, their standard sentence for murderers. Upon returning from a deployment, Cullen's wife tells him the Anva have informed them that Bria's term of "rooting" (imprisonment in the form of tree) has ended and she is to be released. They set a time for him to pick her up. When he and his wife arrive, they are surprised at a couple of things:

After a short while, two priestesses came in with Bria. Two things startled him [Cullen] so much he stood up.

One, she was naked.

But even more than that, she was green.

He gaped. It embarrassed him to see his sister bare. He had thought the change of clothing would be for after she took off prison clothes. Instead, she had no clothing at all. And what also amazed him was her apparent lack of concern about it. She did not attempt to cover herself.  Her eyes looked bright, her face intelligent (if a little solemn); she did not seem drugged or incapacitated in any way. She stood there with her arms to her side as if being nude were the most natural and logical thing in the world and nothing to wonder at.

Cullen and Kassa, his wife, dress Bria and take her home. She asks him if it's "okay" that she's green and says her color will never revert to what it was before. The next day she tells about what it was like to be a tree. In a sense, it was beautiful living an elemental life, feeling the rain, snow, cold and heat. But being a tree was simple. Only one life system functioned. As a human being, you had eight or nine systems working simultaneously. Bria has learned, from the transitions her journey has taken her through, how complex and miraculous a human being is—and has taught her the crime of destroying another human life in all its glorious complexity. Her green coloration will never go away. It will always remind her of what she has done. This is the Anva way of dealing with murderers.

"The Wood of the Suicides" turned out to be an adventure in the imagination. It depended on an existing literary source but took the idea in new directions—which is a primary mode of creative endeavor, at least as I see it. And this one got an award!

Read "The Wood of the Suicides" in Empty Oaks. Scroll down to page 32.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

A great Halloween read is Le Cafe de la Mort. Coffee to Die For, Lady Death from Sandman

to serve you--along with Joe Black, Misa Amane,

Lady Death from "Appointment in Samara," and a mysterious Israeli woman who may be the Angel of Death from the book of Exodus.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer #28: Revisionist Fairy Tales and Father Grim.

Revisionism is the thing today. Old myths are being redone, so much it has become a veritable industry in writing. Scores of  books change the emphasis of a fairy tale to explore territory, give a character in a long-cherished story a better chance, and hint at a different moral or a different set of values than what the tale originally intended. (Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber is one of the best.) Over the last four years or so I've published quite a few tales like these. The first one, though, dealt with a story by Hans Christian Anderson, one I think I first read in fourth or fifth grade, very familiar, "The Princess and the Pea."

It is the story of a king who wanted to find a suitable bride for his son. The bride must be pure and delicate, as princess brides were expected to be in those days—though if you wanted to bring heirs to the throne into this world, it would seem to me that you would want a strong, well-built, sturdy and healthy woman as your daughter-in-law, not someone who was delicate. At any rate, the king came up with a way to test the constitution of the girls who were candidates to marry his son. He piled up a whole stack of mattresses and put a single pea at the bottom of the stack. If the princess did not feel the very small dried pea under the many layers of padding, she was not the delicate sort of wife he wanted to bring into the royal family.

Scene from Once Upon a Mattress

 The myth, as I said, was popular. I read it in grade school. The musical, Once Upon a Mattress, is in itself a revisionist version of the old fairy tale. When I saw the call for revisionist fairy tales, I got the idea that the princess and pea would be a good idea—especially after I noted an article that dealt with the sexual innuendos in it:  the princess complains that something kept poking her all night long, that it was hard, that she was black and blue from it . . . well, you get the idea. But the press that made the call of submission published mainly horror, so it had to have a horrific side to it as well.

In my version of the story, the princess is slated to marry a prince of a kingdom located in strategic area of her father's kingdom. She journeys there only to be left standing in a storm with high winds and pouring rain. Providentially, a gust of wind shatters the castle gate and the princess is able to get in. The Marquis who owns the castle pleads ignorance, but Eyoline does believe him. She is wise and politick and orders her army to begin "training exercises" in the castle and also to inspect its fortifications. If the Marquis murders her, he is doomed. She hopes to get Alexis, whom the Marquis exiled, and who is raising a revolt in the countryside (and whom she also loves), to come to the castle, marry her, and be reconciled to his father. As ceremony requires, she will sleep in the virgin's bed one night to be eligible to marry.

Princess Eyoline

It is a tall bed, stretching almost to the rafters of the bedroom. Like the bed in the original fairy tale, it piles mattress on mattress. But Princess Eyoline can't sleep. Alexis appears. He has sneaked into the castle and hidden in rafters. He warns her that his father has hired a sorcerer—the father of the girl he had originally meant Alexis to marry—to cast a spell on the bed. They disembark, search for charms or talisman, but only find a pea. Eyoline, in her amusement, pops it in her mouth.

She suddenly feels possessed by evil. Animal urges to kill, drink blood, and destroy grip her. A hand, however grips her by the throat, closes off her nose, and begins to shake her violently. It is Alexis. He shakes her until she coughs up the pea. It is cursed. It is designed so she cannot sleep in the bed. Because she must in fact "sleep" there, the pea would have stopped her from qualifying as a suitable bride for Prince Alexis.

When Eyoline was possessed by the evil of the pea she had swallowed, she received a vision. She takes soldiers and a priest and find the Marquis, the girl he wanted to his son to marry, and the girl's father, practicing black mass:

Three startled faces looked back at them. The Marquis and an older man, both dressed in black; and Morenda, who was lying naked on the altar, the pit around her navel filled with wine, three chunks of bread balanced in the hair of her pubic mound. Black candles blazed. A crucifix hung upside-down over Morenda’s naked body.

She has them detained. Not your sugar-coated princess by a long shot, she throws the three plotters in the dungeon to await execution and then goes back to bed. As instructed, Alexis climbs into bed with her again. Since he has seen her naked, and since they are to be married tomorrow, and since she needs to relax to go to sleep, she yields her virginity to him. Alexis leaves and the princess settles down to a deep sleep. She will have a great deal to do when the sun comes up.

Father Grim's Storybook  is still in print and available. Lots of great myths to look into.

For a modern tales that revises the myth of Orpheus, read my newest book, Le Cafe de la Mort. Coffee to die for an much more.

For more stories that make great reading for Halloween, check out my Writer's Page.

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer #27: Organized Crime and the Supernatural: "The Sorceress Contract"

 

David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson

Television shows sometimes center around an individual's encounter with the supernatural. I remember a show from my teenage days called Kolchak: The Night Stalker. It was about a private investigator who pursued occult cases. He tracked down ghosts, zombies, shaman, and all manner of creatures from the realm of the occult and always tried to get evidence to prove their existence (though he never succeeded in doing so). The most successful of these programs was, undoubtedly, The X-Files, which had a ten-year run and basically followed the same dramatic set-up as Kolchak, except its main players were two FBI agent, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder. (Darrin McGavin, 

who played Kolchak, was a regular guest star on The X-Files.)

I think I got the idea for the story "The Sorceress Contract" from my love for Chris Carter's show, The X-Files (I also loved his other production, Millennium, which only ran for three years but was a great program). When law enforcement faces the occult, what happens? Or, in my story when organized crime meets the occult, what might happen.

Coven of pretty witches from the film The Craft

"The Sorceress Contract" is about a coven of witches that is being attacked by a powerful sorceress who has left their coven and is actively fighting against it by interfering with their spells—particularly, she is blocking the spell that gives the members of the group continual life. They are dying. In fact, the hundreds of years some of them have lived are catching up to them and will soon render them decrepit and dead. They know where the witch lives but are not strong enough to stop or destroy her. The solution:  hire a hit man to kill her.

The hit man is named Mallinson. He is independent and is also, as far as one can be in his line of work, ethical. He will not take a hit unless he thinks there is a moral reason for eliminating the person. The reader learns how he became a professional killer and about his divorce. When he is contacted by the figure that arranges his jobs and told it is for a coven of witches, he scoffs, calling them "a bunch of looneys." They offer him $100,000.00 to take the job, and he consents.

Meeting with the witches, he learns their story. They convince him their magical power is real by a demonstration and also take him to witness the last moments of a young woman in the coven who suffered from anorexia and had gone back in time to escape her condition. With the renegade sorceress interfering with their magic, she has come back into real time and dies from her starved condition. Mallinson agrees to take the case. He begins his investigation. Soon after, he meets a woman in a coffee bar. This is the Sorceress Maireen, whose name is Helena Adamson.

She tells him she knows of his plot to kill her and explains why she is interfering with the coven's magic. She replies that she doesn’t think magic is right, no one has a right to live forever, and she thinks the amorality of the coven is wrong. She herself plans to exit the world of sorcery, but she has to eliminate the coven before she can do so, since she has pledged her soul to it. 

They talk. She tells him she has cast a spell so the people in the coffee bar can see and hear them, but their speech and presence will not register with them—as if they are not there. He asks where she got her magical power. She tells him you can learn magic or you can gain it through ascetic practices, like gurus or shamans:

“For two solid years I lived in a cave. I went naked all that time and did not bathe or cut my hair or nails. I stood vigil in the snow and mediated at night in the desert cold. I fasted. When I did eat, it was roots and plants, and when I drank, it was spring water. Two years I suffered and denied myself. But in that time I accumulated a store of power—power I could use without the kind of amorality I depended on before that.”

Maireen says she won't harm Mallinson with her magic if he agrees to drop the contract. When he tells her the money has been paid to him, she says she will match it and then makes a trip to the ladies room. When she returns and sips her flavored milk, he says if she had offered to double the payment, he would have left her alone. She is puzzled, but then begins to feel the effect of the fast-acting poison he has put in her drink. As she dies, he tells her she had no right to impose her ideas of good and bad on the coven—and that is sickened him to see Donna, the girl with anorexia, die because of Maireen's whims.

She dies. People see her but take no notice. Mallinson leaves. Because of the lingering power of her magic, no one notices her body slumped over the table until late that night. The coven of witches is pleased. He receives an offer from one of their leaders, Donna Cuba, now young again, and quite beautiful in her youth, to go out for a drink.

Exploring the human side of people deemed evil is intriguing. Witches for whom you feel compassion; a self-righteous sorceress who claims to be doing good with her magic; a hit man who is, like all of us, human, with scruples and reasons for what he does. I can't sort out all the morality, but it's intriguing to explore.

Sex and Murder has ceased publication, but you can read The Sorceress Contract in the archives.

In perhaps the same vein is Le Cafe de la Mort . The Angel of Death is beautiful; and she makes a great cup of coffee too.  

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #26: My First Book, The Gallery.

Your first book is like your first time having sex or your first day in school. You never forget it and it's a landmark event in your life. If you're a writer, you always have a soft spot for it—rather like you do for your first lover or your first-grade teacher. The book I published to begin my career as an author-finally-in-print was a novelette titled The Gallery. Like most people's first day in school or first seduction, it took a lot of doing.

I got an acceptance of it by an indie press up in Canada. Naturally, I was elated. But time passed and nothing happened. My attempts to contact the press did not produce replies. Finally, I got an email that said they had to cut costs and were not going to publish The Gallery. I had a contract, and I suppose I could have made trouble, but I decided to just let it slide. Back to the drawing board; back to the weary, tiresome tasks of submitting the story.

The Gallery is about a musician. In fact, it is one of my ongoing characters, Martin Rollins, who appears in far fewer stories than Sossity Chandler, but is notable for being the narrator of the first short story I published, "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake." He has appeared in a couple of others. (Note to self:  write more stories with Rollins as main character.) Martin is doing a concert and meets an artist, Siobhan O'Conner. They fall in together. As their relationship develops, he learns more about her.

She is a skillful artist who is able to live off the sales of her paintings. She is working on a major exhibit. She also suffers from partial amnesia as the result of an automobile accent. She can remember, but large spots of her life—her school days and some of her early adulthood—are blank. As she opens up, and as Martin becomes more involved in her life, he finds out some other things—things that are unsettling.

Most unsettling, she is being stalked. A man named Seamus Keirce—a thin, tall, gangly Irishman—seems to follow her around and warns Martin that he must not let Siobhan sell her art. When asked why, he simply says he has his reasons and he shows up at several events where the young woman is present. Martin feels duty-bound to watch out for her. When he mentions the man's name, Siobhan laughs and says there is a legend about Seamus the Wraith, one of the undead who haunts houses with paintings hanging on their walls and art galleries. An internet search confirms Siobhan's identification of the man. The article Martin reads says that Keirce seems to sustain himself through the power and creativity locked in art. Obviously, Siobhan's art is of particular interest to him.

Tensions mount. Keirce begins to follow Siobhan and also to harass Martin. Siobhan asks him to pick up some paintings she has in a storage area and bring them to her long-awaited art show. When he tries to, he is attacked by Keirce, who admits he is one of the undead and needs the paintings to draw his life energy. He comes at Martin with a knife. Martin is unarmed, but takes a writing pen out of his pocket to use as a weapon. He stabs Keirce in the shoulder with it, hoping to disable him so he cannot use the knife. The pen, a graduation gift from his father, is silver and, once it pierces Seamus the Wraith's skin, destroys him. He vanishes slowly in a flaring of red light. Martin retrieves the pen and takes the paintings to Siobhan's presentation.

All the art has sold out and made her a hundred-thousand of dollars. One is purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Aine, Cletic goddess of poetry and love

They return home that night. Martin dreams. In his dream he sees a goddess. Siobhan has told him about Aine and Cliodna, Celtic goddesses of art, poetry, and fertility. Somehow Martin knows—perhaps the goddess communicates it to him—that the woman in the dream is Aine and that she has inhabited the empty spaces in Siobhan's mind vacated by amnesia; and that she had possessed Siobhan for a mission:  to rid the world of Seamus the Wraith.  In the morning, he sees Aine, in her form as a white gull, fly off.

The story ends on a note of ambiguity. Martin knows Siobhan will not be the same without the goddess possessing her spirit. Still, love can change. 

He lies in bed and contemplates this as a new day begins.

My first book, The Gallery is available through Amazon. It's a great Halloween  read--short enough to finish on that particularly spooky night.

If you want to read a story featuring my ongoing character, Martin Rollins, I suggest "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake" online at Amarillo Bay Magazine; or "The Space Between," which appeared in Scholars and Rogues.

For more titles, see my Writer's Page.

A brand new book (number nine now) is available as well:  Le Cafe de la Mort offers coffee to die for--and a whole lot more.