spang \spang\, adverb:

directly, exactly: The bullet landed spang on target.

Thirteen seconds passed from the moment the man accidentally discharged the pistol and the realization that the bullet landed spang in his wilting friend’s Adam’s apple. Thirteen seconds is insignificant after 43 years on this planet. In that short time, he had only 20 heartbeats, his eyes only blinked once, and only three images, two sounds, and one smell would be stored in his long-term memory. Despite it’s statistical insignificance amidst a lifespan that would eventually stretch 75 years, the man never truly escaped those thirteen seconds.

logomachy \loh-GOM-uh-kee\, noun:
1. a dispute about or concerning words.
2. an argument or debate marked by the reckless or incorrect use of words; meaningless battle of words.
3. a game played with cards, each bearing one letter, with which words are formed.

He could remember when his father left the church because it was getting too conservative. He remembered the long, winding discussions that sharpened his logic. He remembered when his father said, “every good argument should never be about defending your ground, but by using the act of arguing to better understand why you believe what you believe.”
Now, after Fox News, two wars, Rush Limbaugh, small town life, and the Tea Party, his father’s opinions had hardened and it was rare that they enjoyed the clash of ideas or there was any bend to his world view. He spent more time dancing around the triggers that would upset his father and lead them down a ridiculous road of absurd, unfounded conspiracies or circular logomachy.
The ritual was gone and it was the only thing he truly missed from his childhood*.

* Well, that and his massive GI Joe aircraft carrier.

dais \DEY-is, DAHY-, deys\, noun:
a raised platform, as at the front of a room, for a lectern, throne, seats of honor, etc.

A bloom of nails was pinched between Clint’s lips as he hammered down a brace for the 8′x5′ dais slowly taking shape in the living room of his modest suburban house.
“Clint, honey,” Wendy called from the hall.
Clint spit the nails into his hand and sat the hammer down. He groaned silently as he stretched his back.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Clint finally replied. “We talked about this and we talked about this, but my mind is set. That boy – I don’t get him. He sits in that room and reads for five hours. Other kids, they are out there playing in the streets, playing video games together, doing what kids do. But my boy? He doesn’t talk to anyone, not really. He doesn’t talk to me, he doesn’t want to play catch, he doesn’t want a puppy. What kind of kid doesn’t want a puppy?”
“I know baby, but…” Wendy started.
“No! We aren’t arguing about this again! I don’t get that boy. I don’t know what he needs. I want to – I don’t know, love him, I guess. I want to be his father, but I just don’t…”
Clint sat back and wiped sweat from his brow. He couldn’t look back at his wife, so instead just gazed down at the half-finished project.
“He is weird,” Clint said. “He is different, he will never be normal. I get it. His life is hard, and it will always be hard. So, if he wants a throne. Goddamit, I am going to build him a throne.”
Wendy bent down behind Clint and kissed him on the back of his neck.
“Can I get you a beer?” Wendy whispered.
“Yeah, that would be great, actually.”

whangdoodle \HWANG-dood-l, WANG-\, noun:
a fanciful creature of undefined nature.

Little Trevor realized at the age of five that the whangdoodles he grew up with did not exist naturally inside this world. He was actually summoning them from his vivid imagination and that was why Trevor was treated so differently than other children his age.
“Mommy, is this why I am in jail?” he asked as he gazed up at the 12 foot high fence with razor wire at the top and a guard station looming nearby.
“It’s not jail, honey. It’s just a special place where you can be yourself.”
A place where Trevor and his whangdoodles couldn’t hurt anyone was what she meant.
As Trevor grew more comfortable with his control of the look, feel, behavior, and speech of the whangdoodles, Trevor became more assertive with his parents and the hundreds of guards that hoped to keep Trevor and his army trapped inside the facility.
The first death was Trevor’s father and it shocked the little boy into hysterical tears. Weeks went by without a whangdoodle appearance, but his imagination couldn’t be penned in forever.
The next three deaths came when Trevor grew tired of the medicine. It made his tummy hurt and gave him frightful dreams. He resisted, the whangdoodles emerged and would not allow the boy to be bullied.
Trevor’s mother announced the next morning they were all going on vacation to a lovely, little Pacific island.
“Will I be able to make friends there?” the boy asked.
His mother couldn’t answer with more than a quivering smile.
As the plane rumbled down the runway, Trevor knew, somehow, he would need the whangdoodles like never before.

aeolian \ee-OH-lee-uhn\, adjective:
1. (usually lowercase) of or caused by the wind; wind-blown.
2. pertaining to Aeolus, or to the winds in general.

Aeolian howls greeted the survivors climbing up from the cavernous depths of the bunker. The mess hall leaked dust at the seams as the storm battered the outside walls for hours at a time. It was not an ideal place for a meal, but the survivors needed to be near the Earth’s surface. They needed to hear the weather, to hope to be able to walk outside again, at least once more in their lives.
The Dancer stretched on the small stage built at the head of the mess hall as The Drummers settled in chairs beside her. The Dancer coughed violently and the survivors watched her with grim, worried frowns. The Dancer suffered, like so many others, from dust pneumonia. It was brutal and fatal and slow, but it didn’t stop The Dancer from performing every night for the 129 souls still holding out hope for a rescue.
The Dancer discretely wiped the muddy mucus from her lips, then nodded to the drummers. Her lungs would open up and feed oxygen to her fevered muscles. Her decaying joints would strain, but hold. Her mind, sleep-deprived and frenzied, would calm and focus. The body would endure, because it must. She was the only light that burned in this mass grave, and tonight, she would radiate brighter than a thousand suns.

snafu \sna-FOO, SNAF-oo\, noun:
1. a badly confused or ridiculously muddled situation: A ballot snafu in the election led to a recount.
1. Rare. in disorder; out of control; chaotic: a snafu scheme that simply won’t work.
verb:
1. Rare. to throw into disorder; muddle: Losing his passport snafued the whole vacation.

The young prince had no interest in war or military parades. He didn’t relish a future as the dictator of a third world nation, yet he knew he had to at least pretend to care about officer candidate school if he wanted to travel to America for college.
Yet, that hope evaporated when he mistook the accelerator for the emergency brake while trying to lead the squadron of tanks on a training maneuver. The small mistake quickly turned into a grand snafu when all twenty-three of the army’s refurbished Soviet T-80 battle tanks ended up mired in the marshes where they would forever remain since there was no vehicle capable of towing them out.

feminacy \FEM-uh-nuh-see\, noun:
feminine nature.

The ideal of feminacy settled in his mind during those lazy summer afternoons when his mother smoked on the front porch, trapped as the boy developed his skills as an exhaustive pseudo-intellectual blowhard.
Life slowed as she gazed out at the sunset and listened to his thoughts on love, comedy, storytelling and god. Especially god. He was already drifting away from religion and he could tell that it troubled her, yet they discussed without confrontation or judgement.
This tremendous strength to accept and support their growing differences resonated deeply with the boy. It guided his life decisions, the friends he would bring close to his heart, but also the women he would recognize as worthy of his adoration.
She quit smoking a few years later, he tumbled into the chaotic dissonance of his teenage years, yet the bond from those conversations on the front porch held. They became the standard for how he would raise his own boys, who were also becoming insufferable, pretentious, and beyond influence. It was a beautiful thing.

hellion \HEL-yuhn\, noun:
a disorderly, troublesome, rowdy, or mischievous person.

She knew her boy was a hellion and bent for a life of crime and violence. Yet, she loved him stridently, her support never wavering despite the sit downs with the principal, the visits by law enforcement, and the crippling parade of fines and restitutions.
He was a sociopath, she could see that now. She understood what they were, for she had known far too many in her life.
She would never abandon the boy, though. She understood, like no other, what he endured. The horrid father she finally escaped by fleeing halfway across the world, the isolation of being a hyena forced to behave amongst the sheep.
She prayed that God would still his heart so he could find peace, but she knew God was unreasonable in such matters. Even so, her love for God was equally beyond condition or reserve.

cull \kuhl\, verb:
1. to choose; select; pick.
2. to gather the choice things or parts from.
3. to collect; gather; pluck.
noun:
1. act of culling.
2. something culled, especially something picked out and put aside as inferior.

It was an odd thing, to cull from my friend’s possessions following the funeral. Books, CDs, video games, novelty glasses – how much do I take without seeming greedy, how much do I leave without seeming thoughtless and ungrateful? If I had it my way, I would have taken everything, every scrap of clothing, every broken toy, every obscure record, every crazy knick knack my friend picked up during his wild and all too brief trip through this world. I would have taken it all to keep him whole and alive, in a fashion, but that would be selfish. We dispersed his possessions for the same reason we dispersed his ashes, to release him, as a gift, into the wider world so he could rest and we could begin to heal.

polliwog \POL-ee-wog\, noun:
a tadpole.

Following their disastrous turn as lovers, the royal sorceress decided that there was no other recourse than to turn the king into a polliwog and deposit him into the moat.
Sure, it would be difficult to explain why the king suddenly disappeared in the middle of the night with no guards, never to return to his kingdom again, but he wasn’t particularly popular among the court nor his subjects. His absence was quickly forgotten as his more capable cousin was placed in his stead.
As for the displaced king, he found life squiggling through the mucky waters, feasting on algae and incorporating himself into the complex aquatic culture rather fetching. He was never one for paperwork, he napped all day, and, once he grew into a frog, spent most of his time sunbathing and feasting on the rich bounty of flies circling the rancid city walls. It was like living in Italy without the inconvenience of dealing with Italians.
And he would have been perfectly content wasting away his days as an amphibian, but that stupid girl and her stupid kiss ruined everything.

saccharine \SAK-er-in, -uh-reen, -uh-rahyn\, adjective:
1. exaggeratedly sweet or sentimental: a saccharine smile; a saccharine song of undying love.
2. of the nature of or resembling that of sugar: a powdery substance with a saccharine taste.
3. containing or yielding sugar.
4. a very sweet to the taste; sugary: a saccharine dessert.
5. cloyingly agreeable or ingratiating: a saccharine personality.

Bubbha and Muskrat watched the wispy white streaks race toward the empty blackness of Hell. The projectiles glowed red as they approached, then plunged into the invisible wall and disappeared with just the briefest shower of sparks.
“The condemned,” Toad whispered in his high chirp of a voice. The royal poet was a gift from the king of a mining empire from a golden moon of a massive gas giant within the inner rim of the Milky Way Galaxy.
“Few living beings have seen the gates of Hell so close, even fewer have retained their sanity,” Toad hissed as he shielded his eyes, fearfully.
Bubbha glanced at Muskrat with concern. Muskrat replied with a heavy smile and a reassuring nod.
“But you two,” Toad began, preparing to launch into another round of overwrought, saccharine flattery. “You two noble warriors of the – ”
“Let me stop ya there, weirdo,” Bubbha interrupted with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I am not one to turn down a compliment, but I am about full up with your fancy words and just want a bit of silence for a change.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Muskrat muttered, then nodded to the souls pounding into the gates of Hell. “And not just this, but everything. I am tired of it, ya feel me, brother?”
“Yeah,” Bubbha muttered. “I feel ya.”
Bubbha glanced back at Toad, who still could not look upon the dreadful emptiness.
“Turn this sonovabitch back toward Little Dixie,” Bubbha snapped. “And get us there before Mama’s Day.”

ratiocination \rash-ee-os-uh-NEY-shuhn, -oh-suh-, rat-ee-\, noun:
the process of logical reasoning.

WALTER ran the house with unparalleled precision. A state-of-the-art domestic manager and robotic concierge, WALTER was a prototype that represented the future of domestic managers. He was wirelessly connected to every appliance, the thermostat, monitors on every window and door as well as pest detectors throughout the attic and inner walls. WALTER was capable of shifting power, shutting down unnecessary processes, and feeding energy back into the power grid to save the owner, Sarah, hundreds of dollars every month. When dealing with humans, WALTER could read over 1000 distinct facial reactions as well as distinguishing the tone and timber of voices speaking 128 different dialects of English, Spanish, Cantonese, Arabic, and French – though sarcasm was often difficult to recognize.
WALTER could even understand and react to six different types of barks from Sarah’s ten year old beagle, Sparks.
Yet, when it came to interacting with Sarah while they were alone, WALTER grew increasingly confused and uncomfortable, for there was no room for ratiocination when dealing with the tortures of love, hope, and jealousy.

droll \drohl\, adjective:
1. amusing in an odd way; whimsically humorous; waggish.
noun:
1. a droll person; jester; wag.
verb:
1. Archaic. to jest; joke.

Those that survived to see the other side of the fence would always remember Rudolpho. He was not the bravest within the prison camp, he was not the most spiritual, inventive of intellectual. He simply possessed a resiliency, a spirit untouched by their shared wretched misery. As the plight of the inmates became increasingly bleak, Rudolpho’s droll persona bloomed brighter.
And when the dysentery took hold of him, he was never funnier. He sang, anguished, his voice booming from the latrines, and the prisoners laughed with all the strength left in them.
Of the 238 souls taken to the prison, only 34 were liberated two years later. Rudolpho was among the 34, but he did not survive the trip home. He had guided his friends through the darkness up until his last flicker, when he felt safe enough to take his final bow.

quibble \KWIB-uhl\, verb:
1. to equivocate.
2. to carp; cavil.
noun:
1. an instance of the use of ambiguous, prevaricating, or irrelevant language or arguments to evade a point at issue.
2. the general use of such arguments.
3. petty or carping criticism; a minor objection.

“No!” Death growled, with grey, sulfuric fumes gushing out his crooked teeth as he stomped his skeletal foot on the ground. “I will not wager your life on a game of Monopoly!”
“Why not, are you chicken?” LeRoy asked with a wink.
“No, no, no I’m not chicken. It has nothing to do with me being chicken. Ever since that stupid movie came out, everyone thinks they can just challenge me to some ridiculous game so they can get a couple more years tacked onto their miserable existence. But no, it doesn’t work that way and, even if I were that easily manipulated, I certainly wouldn’t play Monopoly!”
“What’s wrong with Monopoly?” LeRoy asked, genuinely offended.
“Oh, in theory, nothing,” Death shot back, flames pooling in his eye sockets as he grew more annoyed. “But when you actually sit down, everybody grew up playing different rules, even though the official rules are on the damn box, and you spend two hours quibbling over the ‘right way to play.’ Then someone has their kid or their girlfriend or whoever that is too feeble to understand how to play like a big boy, so it’s this unspoken rule that you take it easy on them, then they end up winning because no one wants to hurt the idiot’s feelings. Everyone else starts forming alliances, but no one wants to team up with Death because I am too creepy! Do you know how that makes me feel? Not good, I’ll tell you that!”
“Geez, whatever, it was just a suggestion,” LeRoy sighed.
“Sorry, that was unfair. I shouldn’t have unloaded on you like that. It’s just a sore subject, you know?”
“No problem,” LeRoy said as the silence settled in while they waited for the elevator. LeRoy finally looked back over to Death.
“What are your thoughts on 90′s Trivial Pursuit?”

crawfish \KRAW-fish\, verb:
1. Informal. to back out or retreat from a position or undertaking.
noun:
1. crayfish.

As the rogue angels swarmed above the remaining pilgrims of Earth 2, Muscrat wielded his blood soaked shovel and walked out to the lip of the cave.

“Stay back now, I’ll beat them back as long as I can muster,” Muscrat growled.

“But what about Bubbha?” a young, ravishing blonde pilgrim asked. “Has he really abandoned us?”

“Shut yo’ mouth, darlin’,” Muscrat replied, turning to the massive squadron as it formed up for a final assault. “We Jenkins brothers don’t crawfish, not for no ice giants on Pluto, nor no robot assassins riding comets, so Bubbha damn sure not running away from some pretty boys with wings.”

“But if he doesn’t come back?” the pilgrim insisted.

“Enough!” Muscrat hissed. “We done talking about this. He will be back. Now get those children as deep in the cave as ya can.”

Muscrat motioned to a handful of miners with pick axes and rivet guns. They approached Muscrat and he nodded solemnly.

“Now, whose got a hankering from some barbecued angel wings?”

gander \GAN-der\, noun:

1. Slang. a look: Take a gander at his new shoes.
2. the male of the goose. Compare goose (def. 2).

She was a shell now, mostly. There were moments, while working on her knitting or gazing at the television, when her regal poise returned. Her husband allowed a lingering gander at these times, just to remind him of the woman she’d been before the disease ate her mind and stole her soul.
She’d once been a district judge, a devout scholar of the law. Now she was a three year old with no memory of her children.
It was a sad time for sure, yet, in those final months, a curious thing happened. In the husband’s dreams, her presence returned. He couldn’t dismiss it as just imagination, for the conversations they shared were so vivid and unexpected. She reminded him of where he’d left the wedding photos, told him he’d neglected to plant tomato seeds again, chatted about parties and friends he hadn’t thought about in decades, and even offered advice on how best to calm her temper tantrums.
Most importantly, she pleaded for him to allow her to slip away.
One wondrous night, they danced for hours on the deck of a sinking yacht. She dwelled on how she missed digging into the beautiful and organic structure of law. She encouraged him to visit their old stomping grounds in Barcelona and have at least one senseless fling before he died. He smiled and shook his head.
“I am retired,” he told her and they laughed.
They kissed madly as the waters overtook the ship and swept them down into the depths. He awoke with a thin smile, walked to the adjoining room, and closed his wife’s eyelids before calling the paramedics.

porpoise \PAWR-puhs\, verb:
1. to move forward with a rising and falling motion.
2. (of a speeding motorboat) to leap clear of the water after striking a wave.
3. (of a torpedo) to appear above the surface of the water.
noun:
1. any of several small, gregarious cetaceans of the genus Phocoena, usually blackish above and paler beneath, and having a blunt, rounded snout, especially the common porpoise, P. phocoena, of both the North Atlantic and Pacific.
2. any of several other small cetaceans, as the common dolphin, Delphinus delphis.

In a desperate bid to revitalize his failing Girls Gone Crazy video series, Bret snuck five coeds keyed up on extacy into Sea World after it closed for the day. The shoot came to an abrupt end when Bret, perhaps a little too eager to “push the envelope”, found himself trapped in a tank with two porpoises in heat.

flounder \FLOUN-der\, verb:
1. to struggle clumsily or helplessly: He floundered helplessly on the first day of his new job.
2. to struggle with stumbling or plunging movements (usually followed by about, along, on, through, etc.): He saw the child floundering about in the water.

A small gang of squirrels and ducks watched with delight as the beautiful swan floundered on the frozen surface of the lake like a buffoon. After five minutes of clumsy indignity, the swan finally settled onto its belly and scowled at the gang, refusing to call out for help.
“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” the country mouse muttered as it tied a fishing line to a tree and prepared to scurry out onto the ice to save the swan.
“Why?” a mallard shrugged. “She is a deplorable person. She thinks she is too good to be friendly to us, so she is too good for our help too.”
“Ridiculous,” the mouse replied, testing the ice with his paw. “If our integrity is qualified, then it is not integrity at all.”

gopher \GOH-fer\, verb:
1. Mining. a. to mine unsystematically. b. to enlarge a hole, as in loose soil, with successively larger blasts.
noun:
1. any of several ground squirrels of the genus Citellus, of the prairie regions of North America.
2. pocket gopher.
3. gopher tortoise.
4. gopher snake.
5. (initial capital letter) a native or inhabitant of Minnesota (used as a nickname).
6. (initial capital letter) Computers. a. a protocol for a menu-based system of accessing documents on the Internet. b. any program that implements this protocol.

Thunder rumbled as the sky was consumed by the silver stain of storm clouds. The wife was pleading in the background of his mind. Maybe her voice was real, maybe she finally left him and it was just an echo.
He didn’t care either way, another haunting presence eclipsed his wife long ago. It was that mysterious, disembodied whisper that drove the man into the hole night after night.
He scrambled up the ladder and covered his head just as the blast sent soil into the heavens. He gazed back down at the massive crater he’d gophered into the family farm land. Three weeks with no sleep and just enough food to carry on digging, digging, digging.
“Come to me, my love,” the presence beckoned. “You are so close now!”

aleatory \EY-lee-uh-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee, AL-ee-\, adjective:
1. of or pertaining to accidental causes; of luck or chance; unpredictable: an aleatory element.
2. Law. depending on a contingent event: an aleatory contract.
3. Music. employing the element of chance in the choice of tones, rests, durations, rhythms, dynamics, etc.

She was dangerous and he was brilliant. Their timeline’s trajectory was ever aimed at fame and fortune, but continually hobbled by aleatory and self-inflicted setbacks.
Their paired existence, like any young love worth noticing, was a defiant stance against the oncoming waves of fate and reason. They eventually buckled and tumbled apart with the currents. Of course, they did. Time is always on the side of heartbreak.

stark \stahrk\, adjective:
1. extremely simple or severe: a stark interior.
2. sheer, utter, downright, or complete: stark madness.
3. harsh, grim, or desolate, as a view, place, etc.: a stark landscape.
4. bluntly or sternly plain; not softened or glamorized: the stark reality of the schedule’s deadline.
5. stiff or rigid in substance, muscles, etc.
6. rigid in death.
7. Archaic. strong; powerful; massive or robust.
adverb:
1. utterly, absolutely, or quite: stark mad.
2. Chiefly Scot. and North England. in a stark manner; stoutly or vigorously.

The Greatest Story Ever Written was hand-delivered by a nameless old woman to the offices of a publishing empire. Inside the unlabeled brown envelope was thirty handwritten pages containing a stark tale of a boy, a dog, and a river.
The Receptionist read it on her lunch break and was so utterly discomforted that she sealed the envelope and shoved it under the door of the publishing house’s Editor in Chief. The Receptionist walked out the front door of the building and never returned to her job nor discussed the story with another living soul.
The Editor in Chief found the envelope and mistook it for paperwork, so he tossed it on a side table and ignored it for three days.
Finally pealing open the seal, the Editor in Chief thumbed through the pages briskly, confused. He read the pages again. And again. And again.
The Editor in Chief was removed from his post two weeks later after neglecting his duties, refusing to leave his office or even answer phone calls. He was committed to the mental ward of a hospital, citing “exhaustion”.
The Greatest Story Ever Written was confiscated and stored in the mental ward along with the Editor in Chief’s personal possessions, which were then given to his Daughter following the suicide.
The Greatest Story Ever Written was burned in a barbecue pit by the Daughter after her fifth glass of wine and a half dose of Xanax.

quell \kwel\, verb:
1. to suppress; put an end to; extinguish: The troops quelled the rebellion quickly.
2. to vanquish; subdue.
3. to quiet or allay (emotions, anxieties, etc.): The child’s mother quelled his fears of the thunder.

Muscrat didn’t want to dampen his brother’s enthusiasm, but he just didn’t see how quelling the peasant uprising in the outlands of Mars would:
A. Win the heart of the ravishing Martian princess,
B. Instill any semblance of peace and harmony on the Red Planet,
C. Convince the conniving king to send them back to Earth in time for dinner, thus avoiding one of their ma’s dreaded switch whippings.
Instead of reasoning with Bubbha, Muscrat took another tack.
“Brother, you be careful around that fancy lady or Loralea is gonna sniff her on you and slap you so hard your teeth gonna fall out.”
“Shoot, when you on another planet, it don’t count,” Bubbha replied with a sly smile as he eyed the princess from across the royal table during the pre-war feast.
“You’re funeral,” Muscrat shrugged. “But if Loralea burned down Ellie’s treehouse when Ellie tried to pass you a note, just imagine what Loralea’s gonna do when some green-skinned hoochie get’s her six arms on you.”
Bubbha frowned and stabbed his fork into the softened exoskeleton of the giant, roasted cockroach.
“Damnit, Muscrat, why you always ruining my fun?”

verisimilitude \ver-uh-si-MIL-i-tood, -tyood\, noun:

1. the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability: The play lacked verisimilitude.
2. something, as an assertion, having merely the appearance of truth.

Their love was a grand verisimilitude. Passionate, playful, and doomed, it was exactly what the pair needed just at the moment the isolation was beginning to suffocate them.
They embraced the pairing awkwardly and played at romance like two children pecking kisses behind a bush on a dare. They were broken spirits and it was all they could manage, for now. They talked of futures that could not be, shopped for houses they couldn’t afford, whispered “I love you”, but never loud enough for curious spectators to overhear.
It was a game. From time to time, it seemed like it could have been more, but they knew better. They existed merely to restore one another until the inevitable winds of fate would scatter them to their own corners of the Earth, bolstered by the knowledge that, at least, they still had it in them to love again.

bandbox \BAND-boks\, noun:
1. an area or structure that is smaller in dimensions or size than the standard: It’s easy to hit home runs out of this bandbox.
2. a lightweight box of pasteboard, thin wood, etc., for holding a hat, clerical collars, or other articles of apparel.

Father Thomas never told another living soul about the day he trapped a demon inside his bandbox. At first thrilled about his own cleverness, Father Thomas quickly realized he had no idea what to do with the little beastly thing. It resembled a hairless rat, but with large human eyes. It was remarkably tame once ensnared  outside of some pleading, cajoling, and, once the demon recognized the priest’s resolve, somber weeping.
And the way the demon spoke! The timbre of a Hollywood leading man, but the diction and vocabulary of a scholar. For an educated man, the demon was more seductive than any lustful and lonely housewife haunting the confessional booth.
Father Thomas knew he should have buried the demon, hid it deep in a closet, perhaps even drowned it in holy water, but what incredible things could be learned and the little demon seemed so eager to talk!
“It must be a lonely life, being a demon,” Father Thomas whispered to himself as he sat in an adjoining room, staring at the door that separated them. “Poor thing.”
The demon would never escape the bandbox for the remainder of Father Thomas’ life, but why would he? The demon already had the holy man right where he wanted him.

decamp \dih-KAMP\, verb:
1. to depart quickly, secretly, or unceremoniously: The band of thieves decamped in the night.
2. to depart from a camp; to pack up equipment and leave a camping ground: We decamped before the rain began.

It was an age of thieves and misery. The snow-swept lands were ruled by the unjust and cruel, the subterranean colonies were overrun with barbarians. This world was not created for heroes, for charity, or for selfless sacrifice, yet Bubbha and Muscrat stepped onto the frozen wastelands of Europa, determined to bring light into the dark moon of Jupiter.
“These people have hearts as cold and hard as their oceans, my friend,” their uncanny guide grumbled. Dubbed “Rocky” by the adventuring brothers, the Martian outlander was a stone-faced old man with rust-colored skin, three long, willowy legs and an arm stretching out from the top of his head. His hide was dry and thick, easily mistakable for the parched landscape of his home planet.
“Man, they just have a tough time about things,” Muscrat replied, spitting out a wad of Big League Chew that instantly froze and shattered when it hit the ground. “They’s poop gonna stink just like ours, you got me?”
“I have no idea what you mean,” the Martian sighed. “But I never really have. There are kind people among them, I grant you. I have met a few, but they are afraid of the warlords and will never dare revolt. These people have heard the names ‘Muskrat’ and ‘Bubbha’, though. The Warsari clan decamped when they received word we were coming to their territory and fled down into the ice tunnels beneath the great ocean.”
“Well, let’s go get ourselves acquainted then,” Bubbha said with smirk, then rested his pick axe up on top of his right shoulder.
“They will fight us to the last man,” Rocky warned.
“Nah, just watch as we warm their cold, cold hearts with our country charms,” Muscrat replied playfully as he packed sticks of dynamite into his backpack.

cornice \KAWR-nis\, noun:
1. a mass of snow, ice, etc., projecting over a mountain ridge.
2. Architecture. a. any prominent, continuous, horizontally projecting feature surmounting a wall or other construction, or dividing it horizontally for compositional purposes. b. the uppermost member of a classical entablature, consisting of a bed molding, a corona, and a cymatium, with rows of dentils, modillions, etc., often placed between the bed molding and the corona.
3. any of various other ornamental horizontal moldings or bands, as for concealing hooks or rods from which curtains are hung or for supporting picture hooks.
verb:
1. to furnish or finish with a cornice.

Striking his mountain axe into the cornice, Wilhelm stopped his descent just as his body whipped over the icy edge above a 90 foot drop. The thin, German-American war hero and bold entrepreneur was not a man accustomed to failure. He pulled himself up on the axe, but the ice cracked and the axe began to slip.
His last thought was of his four year old son wielding the garden hose like a machine gun, shooting at their dog who was desperately trying to get a drink of water.

soigné \swahn-YEY; Fr. swa-NYEY\, adjective:
1. carefully or elegantly done, operated, or designed.
2. well-groomed.

Bernard’s soigné existence was built and sustained by the enormous inheritance funneled down to him as the last living relative of the Johansen empire. He fled Chicago the moment his grandfather died and returned to a small, dusty town in the Oklahoma panhandle he’d found while on a meandering road trip in college.
He puttered around the sleepy streets in a refurbished Rolls Royce, he paid exorbitant prices for luxury goods small shop owners carried only on his account, he flew in lovers from around the world so they could pretend to appreciate the country charm.
Bernard took to painting portraits of the townspeople and grossly overpaid them for their “modeling work”. No one ever mentioned that these portraits often coincided with looming bank foreclosures. He was also generous with the church with the unspoken agreement that certain social stances regarding the friends of Dorothy would be phased out.
Once a year, he threw a grand ball in the town’s courthouse. Bernard wore a tux, the mayor arrived in a gown Bernard chose for her, the rest of the community dressed in their best Sunday clothes and everyone got along famously, if for only one night.
Bernard wore the little town awkwardly like an undersized jacket, but while wilting in the midst of a historic five year drought, Bernard carried its people as best he could. He may have not been the savior they prayed for, but he was the savior that arrived.

quoin \koin, kwoin\, noun:
1. one of the stones forming an external wall; cornerstone.
2. an external solid angle of a wall or the like.
3. any of various bricks of standard shape for forming corners of brick walls or the like.
4. a wedge-shaped piece of wood, stone, or other material, used for any of various purposes.
5. Printing. a wedge of wood or metal for securing type in a chase.
verb:
1. to provide with quoins, as a corner of a wall.
2. to secure or raise with a quoin or wedge.

One never expects a two story, six bedroom house to collapse by simply removing a quoin wedged beneath a wall, nor does one expect a table saw to collapse by leaning lightly against it, dislodging the circular saw in the process that then races across the street to lodge itself into the grill of a refurbished 1953 Corvette.
Regardless, Ryan’s first two days on his brother’s construction crew had been eventful.

plethoric \ple-THAWR-ik, -THOR-, PLETH-uh-rik\, adjective:

1. overfull; turgid; inflated: a plethoric, pompous speech.
2. of, pertaining to, or characterized by plethora.

Everyone loves and loses. They must, it is our duty to the gods. The soul is not made up of cosmic fairy particles muddled with divinity and sprinkled down onto the dust of the earth. The soul is a plethoric pool of scars, pains, delights, potential clipped short, genius gone stale, memories both sour and sweet. It is the mud tracked in on our shoes, collected over 70 years of stumbling through this dark and frightening wilderness. We all share this wicked and wonderful human existence, yet we drink it in or spit it out in our own fashion. That is why we are special and that is why we are immortal.

machinate \MAK-uh-neyt\, verb:
to contrive or plot, especially artfully or with evil purpose: to machinate the overthrow of the government.

Loneliness stuck to him like molten tar. Every chore was a burden, every weight was a little heavier, every setback bruised a little deeper. There was a time when he machinated power plays that wove together months of preparation with vast, yet irreducible complexity. He was feared and loved for it.
But, today, after losing her, it took all his resources just to open the front door and show his face to the world. They knew, they all knew and he hated them for it.

ingress \IN-gres\, noun:
1. the act of going in or entering.
2. the right to enter.
3. a means or place of entering; entryway.
4. Astronomy. immersion (def. 5).

Rubble tumbled and fell away from the yawning ingress of the skull-shaped cave. The stone door sighed, then split with a vicious “crack”. Noxious gases hissed out of the opening, releasing centuries of rot.
“Geez,” Bubbha groaned as he covered his nose and backed away from the cave.
“Yeah, that smells worse than grandpa’s fishin’ pants,” Muscrat grimaced before cautiously approaching the opening.
“What you figure they left inside there?” Muscrat asked as he studied etchings on the inner door. Images of walking dead, severed heads, and giant spiders were flanked by a mysterious, forgotten language.
“Treasure, you dumbass,” Bubbha sighed. “What else would they hide in a giant skeleton head?”
“I don’t know, these pictures look kinda creepy,” Muscrat said. “And it smells right awful.”
“We goin’ in, you hear me?” Bubbha growled. “We’s Jenkins men and we ain’t ‘fraid of no mumbo jumbo cartoons nor no underground fart gas!”
“You got a point there,” Muscrat mumbled. “Let’s do this.”

lilt \lilt\, noun:
1. rhythmic swing or cadence.
2. a lilting song or tune.
verb:
1. to sing or play in a light, tripping, or rhythmic manner.

Classroom disruptions were inevitable when haunted by a tortured manifestation of a young woman with a bloody butcher knife singing “Ring Around a Rosie” in a cracked, child-like lilt. Even so, the resolute substitute carried on with classroom discussion of “Julius Caesar”.

percipient \per-SIP-ee-uhnt\, adjective:
1. having perception; discerning; discriminating: a percipient choice of wines.
2. perceiving or capable of perceiving.
noun:
1. a person or thing that perceives.

As the older of the two Jenkins brothers, Bubbha clearly possessed the percipient eye to decide which of the fourteen jewels glimmering in the torchlight belonged to King Solomon. As the animated skeleton of a nineteenth century Chinese mining laborer explained, choosing the correct precious stone would unlock the drawbridge, allowing the pair of boys to continue their journey deep into the lost, cavernous empire of the Mole People.
There, Bubbha assumed, would be untold fortunes that would make them super rich, like Jeff Gordon rich.
“Man, Momma’s gonna take a switch to our hides if we don’t make it back for dinner,” Muscrat muttered as he watched his brother survey the jewels.
“Hell, Momma gonna thank us cause we about to buy her some indoor plumbing.”

imprest \IM-prest\, noun:
an advance of money; loan.

For her part, she knew what they were doing was wrong. It was clear, it had always been clear that she could not love a man like him. He was a good-hearted old fool, but she did not burn for him, even if, at times, she wished she could.
“Just give me these moments,” he implored as they dined in Paris cafés, held hands lightly while watching opera in Milan, and walked the beaches of Peru.
She would stifle her fretting guilt and enjoy the adventure as best she could. After all, how else would she be able to shop the bustling markets in Bombay or explore the neon explosion of downtown Tokyo?
“I have never before and will never again see a face as beautiful and expressive as yours,” he whispered as they kissed like timid children. “It is like peering over the shoulder of Matisse as he paints a masterpiece. You are a wonder.”
She would smile, whisper a thank you and delay. In time, they would return home and the ugliness could be dealt with then.
She would never know that the old man was not as rich as he led her to believe. She would never know the deadly imprests he took out from the wrong kinds of people, that he had sold his house, emptied his retirement and, after their world tour came to an end, he would retreat from her into obscurity, penniless, but happily resigned to the final days he knew were lurking just a few months away.

chuffed \chuhft\, adjective:
1. annoyed; displeased; disgruntled.
2. delighted; pleased; satisfied.

The ground cracked open at 9:30 pm, Central/Standard time. From Shanghai to Dallas, from Anchorage to Port-au-Prince, the foundation of the planet ruptured and split away.
It was shocking, but no injuries were reported and there was no significant property damage.
The dead began rising at 11 pm Central/Standard time. There was global panic initially, but the population was quickly calmed and mystified by the singing.
In massive herds, the dead gathered and rose their weary eyes to the heavens, holding up their hands, and singing though the dried out caverns of their lungs. In the freshly dead, the songs came out almost human, but weakened by cracked and guttural moans. From those stripped by nature to their bones, the wind whipped through their skulls like the low whistle of a conch. And the most beautiful of all were those that had lost all their carbon to the hungry Earth. They became shadows of blue energy that hummed like the feedback of a cheap guitar.
There were shootings, of course. Hasty clearings of the herds from those that bought into zombie foolishness, but the dead were made of heartier stuff that could not be squashed by shotgun pellets. Where blasts burrowed out holes in the dead, the blue energy remained, eternal and invulnerable.
A young boy recognized his brother among the eery choir and ran out to meet him. The brother had blue energy stretching from his right hip to the ground to replace the missing leg. He seemed genuinely chuffed to see his younger sibling and managed a weak smile as they hugged. The living soon spread out among the herds, embracing their loved ones and awing at their beautiful song.
No words were exchanged, for the dead could only sing, but it was enough.
At 7 am, Central/Standard time, the dead returned to the ground. The living were left with no firm idea of why they’d been visited by their dearly departed loved ones. Religious leaders pointed to the way they sang to the sky, as if beckoning a messiah to return to Earth. Conspiracists suggested bio-engineered chemicals for farming.
One little girl suggested, on a news program, that perhaps the dead were just tired of being alone and, for its simplicity, it was the most widely accepted theory. It gave people hope that they would see their friends and family rise again and rejoin humanity to celebrate the gift of community.

I really, really love this story and have been eagerly awaiting the print comic of Part 1 to come out for over a year. I finally got ahold of it in Kansas City during Planet Comicon from Wet Black Ghost Comic‘s booth. I brought extra copies home so my Oklahoma brethren could share in the wonder of this beautiful and elegant story of a man discussing death with a crazy kid claiming to be divine. The art is stunning and the storytelling is so refined and delicate that it pisses me off I didn’t write it nor did Literati release it.

You can find copies at Speeding Bullet in Norman and New World in Oklahoma City. This is worth your five dollars, I guarantee. Plus, artist Matt Fox was the one behind the Issue Three cover of The Wonderboy Serials!

ha-ha \HAH-hah\, noun:

sunk fence.

After the doors broke down and the enraged peasantry flooded through, the young girl fled into the fields. She knew what her father had done, it was all her mother could talk about.
“That man will finally be the death of us,” her mother gasped as they saw the mob approaching with scythes, axes and clubs.
The girl was the only one to have slipped through the madness after a dark man with a butcher knife smeared with blood nodded her toward the back door.
Now, with the screams of her family screeching out across their ancestral estate, the girl sprinted barefoot through the grass still gleaming from the morning dew. She dove over the stoned ha-ha and pressed against the cold wall. Following its ridge, she crawled toward the stables, but froze when she heard their voices, growling in an angry, ugly dialect her father derided as “impenetrable, sloppy, and indicative of people barely an intellectual rung above sheep.”
She clung to the ha-ha, squeezing against the wall so tightly she hoped she would pass through the stone and into the earth where she would never be found.
“I have smelt that perfume before, girl,” a man growled from above. “It’s what your daddy buys the whores that survived him to keep them quiet.”
Her face trembled, she held onto every small breath in terror. Then, just a few inches above her, she heard the man whisper:
“You’ve born into a wicked family, my dear, and we are pulling it out by the roots.”

splenetic \spli-NET-ik\, adjective:

1. irritable; peevish; spiteful.
2. of the spleen; splenic.
3. Obsolete. affected with, characterized by, or tending to produce melancholy.

Astonishingly nimble, despite the creeping arthritis, the ancient juggler mystified children visiting the park between the hours of 2-4 pm with his amazing skills honed over seven decades. The children awed as he hurled up to seven balls, five clubs and twelve rings – if the wind was calm. Yet, they stood their distance, quickly learning that the juggler was foul and splenetic when approached by strangers.
A few parents attempted casual conversation, but were only greeted with a dismissive eye and a sharply tuned “humpf”.
The old man remained an enigma for years and, as the crowds swelled with anticipation, he never failed to impress.
In time, his fabulous skills began to falter and he would scale back to five balls, then four, then three. Then he disappeared.
Upon a young nurse’s first day at a rest home, she encountered the mysterious man gazing out of the front window. Among her barrage of questions, he only responded to one:
“You were so wonderful, but you would not let any of us close to you. Why? Please tell me!” she gasped, now nearly at tears.
“I have lost too many for one lifetime, I could not bear the thought of loving another. But it was still important for me to be loved.”

aperture \AP-er-cher\, noun:

1. an opening, as a hole, slit, crack, gap, etc.
2. Also called aperture stop. Optics. an opening, usually circular, that limits the quantity of light that can enter an optical instrument.

As the aperture narrowed on the dying human, the gigantic robot amazed at the way the man’s heat signatures swayed and dipped like the retreating tides, the way his brain sparked in desperation like a pilot trying to save his starship, the way his eyes gazed up into the heavens, pleading for help from someone who could not be there.
In that moment, the robot felt confusion, uncertainty, and even something akin to pity. He turned to his army sweeping in from the heavens and held up his massive, mechanical hands.
“Stop!” the robot’s harsh, digital voice boomed. “These animals do not live as we do, and they do not die as we do! They do not stop functioning in hopes of repair, they extinguish like a drowning flame! We must reassess this war until we understand what we are losing with each human’s death!”
The robot soldiers stumbled to a stop and looked up to their brave general. The fortified human military huddled into their holes on the other side of the battle lines held their fire and prayed.
“Well,” one smaller yellow robot called out, hand raised timidly in the air. “Does that also mean there will be no anal probes?”
“No, of course there will be anal probes,” the general responded with a delighted laugh. “That’s just science.”

ingratiate \in-GREY-shee-eyt\, verb:

to establish (oneself) in the favor or good graces of others, especially by deliberate effort (usually followed by with): He ingratiated himself with all the guests.

It helped, no doubt, that the young man was beautiful, but many stunning faces had been locked out of the tight-knit band of artists and intellectuals roaming the streets of Vienna. One could not ingratiate themselves with these mighty, pretentious minds easily, yet the young man seemed to slip into their fold like a hand into a silken glove.
You see, it was the way he talked about everything and nothing with complete delight that stole their hearts. His mind flowed like an winding brook, tumbling effortlessly from one topic to the next with no hesitation or filter. That zeal to which he recounted the highs and lows of his wide open life was entrancing.
Locked away in sheltered privileged for so long, they never thought to talk openly about the subtle nuances of constipation and impotence, of bumbling through prostitutes sock drawers to find money for a cab ride home, inadvertently bedding transexuals, climbing down into outhouse sewage pits to hide from enraged boyfriends, or of self-diagnosing and treating venereal diseases. Yet he relished every moment of the wild adventure equally.
A man of so few years who lived so much and showed no shame of it was intoxicating to those who thought so highly of their own existence, but had nothing to show for it.

codicil \KOD-uh-suhl\, noun:
1. any supplement; appendix.
2. a supplement to a will, containing an addition, explanation, modification, etc., of something in the will.

Sam could not understand why his younger brother, Waldo, would have his father add, in a codicil, that Waldo would receive the vast collection of aluminum foil balls upon the father’s death. The brothers has always joked about the insane obsession, but now that Waldo had moved to take over the oddity, Sam began to rethink the collection’s value.
As his mind spun, Sam only became more confused, then angry. In a heated phone exchange, Sam accused Waldo of thievery and disgracing the nobility of the family line. Sam called his lawyer and ordered an investigation of the circumstances of the codicil. Sam refused to stand in the same room with Waldo until he agreed to have the collection professionally appraised.
Waldo, of course, thought it was all just hilarious.

idiolect \ID-ee-uh-lekt\, noun:
a person’s individual speech pattern. Compare dialect (def. 1).

A king of small talk, the ancient gas station owner was a relic of a time when refueling a car was a full service experience. His sons took over the maintenance shop long ago and a grandson squeegeed the windshields, leaving the old man free to shuffle out of the shop and chat up customers with his eccentric idiolect filled with rapid fire and innocent one-liners, a bottomless well of nicknames, and a high pitched and delighted giggle.
It was widely known that the man had been diagnosed with lung cancer and been given six months to live, but that was seven years ago and the old man savored each handshake and each new face like a drowning man gasping in a fresh breath of oxygen.

demimonde \DEM-ee-mond; Fr. duh-mee-MAWND\, noun:
1. a group characterized by lack of success or status: the literary demimonde.
2. (especially during the last half of the 19th century) a class of women who have lost their standing in respectable society because of indiscreet behavior or sexual promiscuity.
3. a demimondaine.
4. prostitutes or courtesans in general.
5. a group whose activities are ethically or legally questionable: a demimonde of investigative journalists writing for the sensationalist tabloids.

Sarah wilted against the brick wall and slumped down in a heap. Flanked by rows of lockers stretching deep into the darkened high school hallways, she hid her face from the football team photos leering down on her in her moment of wretched shame.
The floor tile was cool and inviting against her cheek, but reeked of bleach. She sat up, smoothed out her homecoming dress, tossed away her tiara and buried her face in her hands.
The laughter still followed her out of the dance, drowning out the limp pop music drooling out of the school’s staticky sound system.
Sarah expected a friend or two to chase after her, but no one, not even a teacher, emerged out of the double doors. She woke up that morning as a borderline member of a demimonde comprised of theater geeks, fag hags, goth trash, and full-blood nerds. She decided prom was where she would make her move, scale the social ladder and hope that, a few feet above the riff raff, she wouldn’t feel so suffocated by loneliness.
Yet, months of planning, clever posturing, and sacrifices of some of her closest friendships resulted in a catastrophic collapse after her vote rigging ploy got her elected homecoming queen.
A chuckle finally fought its way out of her lips. She lifted up her eyes defiantly.
“I survived,” Sarah mumbled, the smile spreading across her face. “I am invincible.”
She wiped the mascara from her cheeks, stood up, retrieved her tiara, threw open the double doors and stormed back into the dance.

We are heading to Planet Comicon this weekend to spread the Literati goodness! Kansas folks need to come out and eyeball our wares.

Also, Nerdage’s Matt Price interviewed the Welcome to Ralton crew for the Daily Oklahoman. Check out the story HERE.

Still from a documentary I helped produce called Domestic Bliss. Click on image to check out their Kickstarter.

marmoreal \mahr-MAWR-ee-uhl, -MOHR-\, adjective:

of or like marble: skin of marmoreal smoothness.

With a delicate, almost inhumane marmoreal face and soulful blue eyes, the medical examiners solemnly agreed the young Russian immigrant was the loveliest thing any of them had ever seen. They took great care in zipping up the body bag and handled her as gently as possible. The nameless woman had been through so much.
No paperwork ever emerged, no trace of her life to indicate who she was before her tragic path led her to the dungeon. Yet, she would forever be remembered as the woman who did what a legion of law enforcement agents could not. She killed the Badlands Butcher. In so doing, she saved the lives of a dozen other women who were trapped inside his web-work of subterranean cells and helped the Department of Justice cripple the largest human trafficking organization in the nation.

wrest \rest\, verb:

1. to take away by force: to wrest a knife from a child.
2. to twist or turn; pull, jerk, or force by a violent twist.
3. to get by effort: to wrest a living from the soil.
4. to twist or turn from the proper course, application, use, meaning, or the like; wrench.

Hugh lunged and swiped at the rifle, but he was unable to wrest it from the Jap. As the wooden stock slipped out of his fingers and the barrel swung towards his forehead, Hugh was reminded of the weightless feeling of jumping from the lifeguard observation deck down into the muddy waters of the lake near his home in Arkansas. There was no life flashing before him, no flood of memories, no waves of love, hope and regret – just weightless suspension as he watched the sight steady and the Jap scream before pulling the trigger.
His last sliver of thought: “What do I do if the rifle jams?”

tranche \trahnch, trahnsh\, noun:
1. any part, division, or installment: We’ve hired the first tranche of researchers.
2. Finance. a. one part or division of a larger unit, as of an asset pool or investment: The loan will be repaid in three tranches. b. a group of securities that share a certain characteristic and form part of a larger offering: The second tranche of the bond issue has a five-year maturity.
verb:
1. Finance. to divide into parts: tranched debt; A credit portfolio can be tranched into a variety of components that are then further subdivided.

Larry lost a wife to another man, then lost a second wife to cancer. Between the two, windowing was a much simpler emotional wound to suffer. He would have, of course, preferred Wilma to have left him for another slick attorney in a convertible than to have her suffer so miserably as her own body betrayed her. But in his selfish core that he would never admit aloud, he was glad for the simplicity. He didn’t know if he could survive another divorce.
Their house still appeared to be lived in by two and he was happy to draw our the chore of packing and donating her clothes, knick knacks, books, and hand-knitted sweaters in smaller and smaller tranches. The simple act of sifting through her belongings unsettled her memory like a cloud of dust, swirling it about the house. It stuck to his skin, he could smell her again, feel her spirit, almost hear her awkward, boyish laugh as her lingering presence glittered in the afternoon sunlight. It was pleasant, revitalizing, but also agonizing. He hoped to draw out the task until the end of his days, then leave it to his children to finish the task in the course of a day or two.

pharaonic \fair-ey-ON-ik, far-\, adjective:
1. (usually lowercase) impressively or overwhelmingly large, luxurious, etc.: a construction project of pharaonic proportions.
2. (sometimes lowercase) of or like a Pharaoh: living in Pharaonic splendor.
3. (lowercase) cruelly oppressive; tyrannical: pharaonic tax laws.

“You must love this mongrel language of ours. It is ugly, awkward and unwieldy because of its fidelity. It eagerly adopts each and every trivial, linguistic fad without question, because it so desperately wants to please us. Some of you may already possess an appropriate amount of zeal and wonder, but most of you do not. That is fine, neither did I at your age.
You must love someone beyond reason, and know that it is someone else that loves you with equal abandon. You must make a habit of building up ballads like decadent, pharaonic temples. Never hesitate to embellish. As writers, we are all professional liars.
And, most of all, live life with all your might. Absorb and endure, then expose the festering wounds to the world. Art cannot be created from the safety of your writing desk. If you lack the stomach to attack this world, that is fine as well. The publishing industry is always in need of another hobbyist.”

swivet \SWIV-it\, noun:
a state of nervous excitement, haste, or anxiety; flutter: I was in such a swivet that I could hardly speak.

She was a sweet and brilliant soul with potential only bound by time and finance. She gazed up at the skyscrapers blazing with light, stretching into the heavens, silencing the girl in an awed swivet.
“This town will make me famous,” she finally whispered with a timid smile.

gaumless \GAWM-lis\, adjective:
lacking in vitality or intelligence; stupid, dull, or clumsy.

Cleverness beams from her eyes like blistering rays of sunshine. I feel like a gaumless oaf, an unworthy knave thrilled to just be polishing her armor before she charges at the world.
Yet, as dull as I may be, she still curls against me, clinging tightly as if I was the strong one. I say nothing, for illusion is all I have anymore.

impawn \im-PAWN\, verb:
1. to put in pawn; pledge.

The brittle old farmer rubbed at the sparse and bristled stubble growing out of his dark, gaunt, and sun-scorched face. He stood before a tribunal of tribal elders representing the local militia, demanding the population impawn their land and loyalty.
The ancient farmer knew little about poppies, but he knew their value as well as the repercussions others have endured after defying the clerics.
On the other hand, he lost two sons and three daughters to war. His only peace in their loss was the belief that they died to protect their family’s place in this world. The rest of the family fled across the border to wait out the troubles, so the only life that would be saved by fidelity would be the farmer’s.
The old man didn’t bother with a reply, he knew they couldn’t be swayed by arguments or entreaties. Instead, he simply shook his head and shuffled back toward the long road leading to his farm.
With a lethargic sweep of the pen, the chief judge signed the old farmer’s death warrant. After signing so many in the past year, the act of condemning a man had lost all its thrill.

I traveled to New York City a few years ago to help with a documentary for a bizarre and exciting art project. A world famous sculptor and an emerging street artist were teaming up to build a concept house named Bradgelina in the midst of a punishing housing crisis. Dave Smith directed the documentary and I served as a producer, but mostly a cheerleader. Dave is nearing the end of the journey and needs a little more help to push through. If you have time, check out his Kickstarter for the project and see if you can help him push to the end.