Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer #60: "The Glutton and the Angel Girl."

The Seven Deadly Sins are perpetually fascinating.  I've written two stories about sins on the list (this one and one called "Climax," which appeared in Cliterature). And as a writer I join a long and respected line of commentators:  Langland write about the shriving of the Seven Deadly Sins; Spenser had their procession in The Faerie Queen; Christopher Marlowe had them parade before Dr. Faustus.  Lists vary a bit, but the sins are generally listed as Pride, Lechery, Avarice, Sloth, Envy, Anger, Gluttony.  These are the sins that are particularly bad and will endanger a person's soul.

I picked out gluttony for this story. It isn't thought of as a sin today, even by a lot of Christian people, but it should be. Overeating has led to an epidemic of obesity and all the attendant disorders that go along with it—diabetes, heart disease, problems with knees and joints. In the middle ages, this sort of excessive desire for food and drink was thought of as damning and a soul-endangering.

My story "The Glutton and the Angel Girl" centers on the life of a young man named Daryl Collins. He's overweight, which is not a particular problem when he is a small kid. When he enters the crazy world of high school, however, it becomes much more of an issue. There social order is determined by physical attractiveness.  The aggressive jockeying for social position involves cruelty and rejection. Daryl knows he will be targeted because of his weight. But he is proactive and intelligent and wonders how he might break the system.

Luciano Pavarotti

He does this by drawing on his strengths. He is big, heavy, and he is strong, so he becomes a formidable tackle on the football team. He also knows about food and is appeal. He is a gourmet of sorts and a patron of fine restaurants. He is sharp and intelligent. Another thing Daryl explores is the cool fat guys moving around in the world of celebrity. There are a few:  opera sing Luciano Pavarotti; actors Sebastian Cabot and Orson Wells (in his older days); comedian Jackie Gleason. He studies them and their style. And, to his own astonishment, he begins to win the battle.

Daryl fends off his critics. He makes friends on the football team and cements his friendship by introducing them to gourmet eating. Despite successes, he still despairs about finding the girl of whom he is enamored. This will be the hardest thing to pull off—but, to his astonishment, it begins to happen. Cheerleader and all-around popular girl Margo Miller sits with him and his football friends and talks with Daryl, who tries to get his game on as best he can. They later meet at a bookstore and discuss literature. Several literature friends stop to talk with Daryl. Margo is impressed. They begin dating. Daryl has successful broken the system.

But his success does not go unchallenged. He and Margo become physically intimate. Their relationship brings criticism from Prudence Constantine (Peggy), who is a friend of Margo, to whom Margo has confided. She tells Daryl he needs to back off, he is going to get Margo in trouble, and it's not good to be in the kind of relationship she is in with him. He tells her the relationship is by consent and anytime Margo wants to break out the physical part of it he will gladly oblige her. Peggy accuses him of lust. He scoffs at this, says he is surprised that she did not accuse him of gluttony and suggests she is displaying the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, the sin of Pride.

Later, as he walks out on a bitterly cold winter night to pick up Margo for a date, he slips and falls on the ice. He can't get up and can't get to his cell phone. Despairing, he seems Peggy. She is dressed oddly:  a sequined blue miniskirt, white tights, a pink jacket and boots. She has one some kind of cape or cloak that looks like a pair of wings. And she will not help him.

She tells him he has broken his femur and it has cut an artery in his leg. He will be gone soon. He pleads with her.

        "You aren’t going to help me?”

        "I’ve come here to make certain you get no help.”

        "That’s murder. It’s not fair. It’s a sin. Peggy, help me!”

Peggy says she will not. As Daryl's vision begins to blur and fade, he sees her feet and what looks like the feathers of huge wings that air trailing on the ground and the snow.

Did Margo have a guardian angel? Maybe. 

Is the sin of Gluttony that serious? Or does one sin lead to another? Are they all working together?

 The story appeared in 7^th Sin Anthology, still available. Get a copy here.

For more titles see my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments. 

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #59: "Prosperity"

Inanna

I write about mythology a lot. In more recent days, it has become a niche area for my writing and, recently, I have published stories about Inanna, Sumerian goddess of beauty and fertility; Edesia, Roman goddess of hospitality; Pele, Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. I am composing a story about the Greek god of war, Ares; a couple of blogs ago, I talked about the story "At Your Desire," about the goddess of sex and beauty, Venus. Ancient deities are perpetually fascinating. So are gods and goddesses. The story "Prosperity" fell into this category, and was about a goddess still being worshiped.

The tale takes place during colonial times when the British ruled India. Lyle Durham, a British engineer who owns a boiler factory in India and is trying to perfect a high-velocity steam engine that can propel boats against the swift current of the nearby Wardha River. Making little progress, he receives a visit one morning from a beautiful Indian woman who introduces herself as Parvati Jaspreet and is responding to his need for a translator (he has not advertised this). He is surprised a woman, and one from a high caste, has applied for the job, since India was at that time a very traditional society and women generally did not work, especially upper class woman. Parvati tells him her husband is open-minded and she wants to see the city prosper. 

Things immediately begin to improve. The workers respect the woman—Durham assumes because she is high caste. Able now, through her translation, to make tasks and procedures clear to his workers, he begins to make significant progress on development of his steam engine. Not only this, but his workers' fortunes improve as well. They begin to prosper. One man, whose wife has not been able to have children for years, sees her give birth to a son. He throws a party, invites Durham, and tells her Parvati will be there as well. He agrees to attend—once more surprised that an Indian worker would invite him into his home, since segregation by race was the rule during that time.

 

He goes. During the party Parvati is friendly. He has not brought a gift so she gives him a bag of coins that seem almost to miraculously appear. She calls him by his first name and the two of them go for a walk. He knows the absurdity and immorality of thinking there might be something between them—but he is alone and lonely and she is beautiful. During the walk she places her hands on his head and then they return to the celebration.

Next came a part of the story my writer's group did not like. After the party, Aishwarya, one of Parvati's servant girls, comes to Durham's house on orders from her mistress and offers him a "blessing." The blessing is that she will give her body to him. Appalled, he refuses. She begins to sob.

            “What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked.

           “I don’t want to die.”

           “Die? You’re not going to die.”

           “If you refuse the offering of the mistress through me, I must kill myself.”

           I could only gape.

           "Please, let me bless you as I am instructed. Please don’t send me to my death.”

Aishwarya

His Victorian prudery and sense of ethics (she is very young) extends the argument, but when it's clear to him that she will indeed commit suicide if he refuses her, he consents.

Some people in my writer's group thought this was gratuitous. Some thought it was a bigoted representation of Indian culture. My intention was to show that the ways of another culture, and of a divinity, are different from those a person from another culture, and who is mortal, might hold. Aishwarya becomes Durham's mistress.

And his fortunes continue to change. He develops the engine but cannot find boat propellers that can take the stress from it. A German engineer happens to drop by to see Durham's factory and tells him he has just such propellers. His steamship is a success and opens trade up in the area, bringing prosperity to Durham and the people of the city and province in which he lives. He meets a young English lady living in India and marries her. His steam engine sells worldwide and he becomes a wealthy man. The area of India he lived in prospers as well

Years later, he and his wife go into an Indian temple and see an icon of Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealthy and prosperity. Durham is stunned. The statue looks like Parvati. He knows, of course, that the resemblance is coincidental. Sculptors would make an image of Lakshmi beautiful, and ideas of what is beautiful are consistent in a culture, so the statue would look like a woman such as Parvati. Still, he remembers, the sudden appearance of gold coins at the party (did they fall from her palms?). He remembers the turn of fortune in his factory, and his life after she appeared—the sudden turn to prosperity. He cannot entirely dismiss the notion that he—the rational Victorian engineer—has encountered a goddess.

The story appeared in Catesbury Review, which is no longer in print. No archive of the publication seems to exist. Another story perhaps to re-market.

 A lot of mythic writing has come through my pen (I  write in longhand and then transfer it to a word processor). For a book of modern myth on an ancient race of beings with supernatural power, get a copy of Sinfonia: the First Notes on the Lute, a vampire story. Available here.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.
 
 I would love to hear your comments.

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #58: Ghost Stories: "The Understudy"

Steven King once wrote that ghost stories are not a sub-genre within short stories; the opposite is true:  short stories—literary short stories—arose from ghost stories. Ghost stories predated the literary version of that kind of literature.  King may be overstating, but ghost tales have been with us ever since people told stories around the tribal campfire. Ghost stories are, and were, a big part of literature. And everyone from Poe to Henry James and onward has written them. My first ghost story, "The Understudy," was written a little ways into my career as a writer. After going through several revisions it finally got printed in a journal and then by a company that sold online books. That company seems to have gone defunct, though the journal is still in print. Every writer has a story that he or she likes but not many other people seem to like, and this story is one of them. The company that printed the story folded and I have not been able to find any other publishers interested in a reprint.

Ghost light burning on a dark stage

The idea for this story came from an old theater superstition. Theaters always keep a light burning backstage. The reason: if you don't, you will get a ghost. Actors can be superstitious. They won't say "Macbeth," and refer to it as "the Scottish play." And the same with the stage light. I played guitar in a pit orchestra at an evangelical Christian college a couple of times  (played for productions of The Sound of Music) and noticed they kept a light burning backstage. One would think evangelical Christians would not believe in ghosts, but apparently they do—or at least kept the light burning for the sake of tradition.

In "The Understudy" my on-going character Sossity Chandler gets a role in a stage play that requires a character who can sing and play guitar. The hard-driving director has instituted a cost-cutting program. Part of the cost-cutting got rid of the stage light—despite the objections of the actors. Sossity comes in early one night and encounters a woman wandering on the stage, looking bewildered, and greets her, thinking she is a cast member. The woman introduces herself as Elaine Boswell. They talk and, when Sossity momentarily looks away and then looks back at the woman, she is gone. The next day she goes to the theater and sees the woman, who vanishes. Upset, Sossity goes to Adrienne (the director's) office and sees a photograph of Elaine hanging on the wall with shots of the other actors who have performed there over the years.

She learns Elaine's story:  a celebrated actress with a rising career, she returns her home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan, to play a role celebrating the remodeling and expansion of City Theater. This is during the Prohibition Era. She and her boyfriend are drunk one night and her boyfriend kills her. He is eventually executed for murder and Elaine is trapped as a stage ghost. The light has kept her away for several decades. When Adrienne has it removed, she returns.

She is a benevolent ghost—for the most part. But when she gets angry, she turns into a frightening wraith with bloody hands, chains, green skin, and flaming hair. Sossity knows that ghosts haunt places because they are connected to them by bad memories. And if they can do something to disconnect, they will go to their rest. After a while, Elaine says she is attached to the theater because she never got to the play the role that meant so much to her. If she could act in a play on the stage, she would be free. But, she says, that would be impossible.

Sossity isn’t so sure.

In my "ghost universe," ghosts have bodies at night. They are transparent and specter-like the rest of the time. Since Elaine is corporal enough to play on stage during the hours the play is being performed, Sossity arranges for an audition and she gets a minor part. There are, of course, complications, dangers, obstacles to be overcome, but Elaine acts the part. Afterwards, she is free to go.

After the final performance, the two of them stand in the snow outside of the theater. Elaine thanks Sossity and asks her if her career as a singer is going well. She says it is not. Elaine assures her things will go better and, once more when Sossity is looking away, vanishes. But she leaves behind a scarf with her initials embroidered in it. Sossity takes it home with her. It is implied this good-luck object, given in gratitude for what Sossity has done for Elaine, will be what she needs to see her career as a singer pick up.

The Understudy was published in Bewildering Stories, a journal still alive and well after many years. Read it here.

 For more tales of the undead (vampires, not ghosts), pick up a copy of Sinfonia: the First Notes on the Lute.  Nelleke Reitsma is a world-renowned guitarist and lutenist. She should be:  she has had 300 years to practice. And after concerts at night, her passion for music is changed to a different set of passions and desires.

For additional titles, check out my Writer's Page.  If you are interested in the many anthologies I've printed stories in, look me up on Amazon, starting with my Amazon Writer's Page. Lots of good stuff to read.

I would love to hear your comments.

Do you like ghost stories?

Have you ever really been scared by one? Scared somebody else?

Read and keep reading.