My first flash-fiction piece has been published in Boston Literary Magazine. Entitled “Curtain,” it is a dark exploration in just 1,000 words on the politics of fear and desperation. As it also presents a unique spin on the vampire tale, I was tempted — though I resisted — to give it the subtitle “a biting satire…”
Speaking of vampires, here’s my brother, actor David Michaels, in his true form:
This is a posting of three very different events.
First the good news. Last week two different magazines, and two highly prestigious contests, honored my writing. For starters, my story “Everywhere After All” won Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest. This is the premiere science-fiction competition in the world, the Wimbledon of the genre. I am deeply honored.
A day later, two poems of mine were published in The Eclectic Muse. They never sent me an acceptance letter or email, but rather shipped several copies of the magazine to me with my poems already included. While unused to this breach of etiquette, I was nonetheless delighted by the surprise.
Another one of my pulp adventure stories was accepted in Astonishing Adventures, and a very talented artist is illustrating it for their next issue. Set in the early ‘30s in Shanghai, it combines several adventurous elements including Triad gangs, Near East assassins, treasure maps, a dangerous artifact, and an uncharted island of mystery in a tribute to the bygone serial pulps. It is titled “Dragon of the Veil.”
Two of my screenplays placed fourth in the Writer’s Digest annual competition. The first was a screenplay of my novel “Never Grow Old,” and the second was of my unpublished novel “Starspeaker.” They actually tied each other for fourth place.
One more piece of good news before the bad. I have become one of the top columnists with Examiner.com. It’s a job I love, giving me both the freedom and responsibility to analyze national politics and cultural issues that are defining our age. My most recent column is “5 Things to do with $10 Billion a Month,” and is both an admonishment and a challenge to our government.
Okay, on to the bad.
My girlfriend and I were in a car accident last week. Dark, rainy night, leaves on the street making bad conditions worse. My car traveling uphill, about to follow the bend in the road, when another vehicle flies around the corner at high speeds into my lane.
Our ancestors, having survived a scrape with a mammoth, must have seen those terrible tusks for several nights afterwards. I see golden headlights.
Yanking my wheel to the right, I avoided a head-on collision by about a half-second. The impact came midway along the driver’s side of my vehicle. The combined momentum sent my car careening across the road towards a telephone pole. I pulled the wheel farther, and we avoided the pole and came to a stop by a wooden fence. In the enveloping silence which followed, one plank of the fence popped out at plunked against the ground.
It happened so fast there was no time to feel anything. I found myself calling the police. Then I went to find the other driver, who had continued down the road across someone yard and into a parked vehicle.
No alcohol, no drugs. Just the reckless driving of the young.
“Remember tonight,” I told him after finally wrangling my anger. “We all could have been killed tonight. Mark it down on your calendar and remember it.”
No one was seriously hurt, and local residents were concerned and helpful. Cars are totaled, but the humans inside them are alive.
*
The above incident is about a near-death.
This final part is about a real death.
As a sentient entity, I resent the very idea of mortality. I eagerly look forward to the completion of the Blue Brain project, which has the very real promise of one day being able to store a human mind in perfect replica – neural synapses with all their memories, thoughts, and dreams. And why not? Future mausoleums would be waiting rooms, wherein a disc containing all your data would wait for the technology to regrow bodies and then download your loved ones. No one would die, ever again.
But in this future world, maybe we’ll have better ways of treating the abusive, the terrible, and the poisonous among us.
The day before Thanksgiving, someone I knew died. This wasn’t someone I was close to, but she had connections to someone I care about very deeply.
I don’t believe in lionizing everyone who dies. I don’t believe in refusing to speak ill of the dead.
I do believe in honesty.
This person of whom I speak was a monster. She was a parasite of the lowest order, and she brought misery to everyone around her. Emotionally abusive to her family, a thief and liar to those she worked with, and a toxin to her environment. These kinds of people are rare, but some families can point to an example somewhere among them. These kinds of people are destructive cancers who fester, feeding their engines of self-destruction at the expense of those around them. The clinical word is sociopath.
We don’t like to admit that there are people like this in the world. And when forced to, we might blame the things they drink or the pills they took.
Drink and pills are merely the outward habits of an inner problem. No amount of pills made this woman the monster she was. She tormented her family, and shattered a good many lives. While others may choose to “pretty up” the deceased, I refuse such dishonesty.
Not all deaths are a travesty.
