Fiction

Welcome to the RockSnark music podcast with me, Nathan Pool, and no prizes for guessing it’s going to be about the late Gerry Solby, who died this week.

I arrived early on my first day at Palacio Cardoso. The air was heavy with exhaust fumes. I crossed the street, shielding my eyes from the glare, and hugged the thin strip of shade provided by the buildings until I found a tiny café.

I love my mother, but if I ever see her again, I’ll kill her.

Perhaps I love my mother because of biology, but biology can be hacked these days, so who can trust that anymore?

When I was a child, my father used to scare me with this rubber Halloween mask. It’s burned into my brain like the remnant image left on a TV screen after you power it down. It covered his entire head and changed his skin from pale white to black and red with a piercing set of yellow eyes.

The heat oozed through the windows and pooled behind Scott’s blackout curtains. If he sat still, hunched over his desk, he could stay cool enough to think.

Even after all those years, the yellow eyes still haunted him. A sickening feeling roiled in his stomach. He looked out the window and saw the ground below him menacing, almost grinning at the prodigal son’s return.

We were hiking in dense woods when a sudden rainstorm blew up. We ran, looking for shelter, and came upon an old, abandoned house—a mansion, really, that must have once been beautiful.

If she squinted and imagined nightmares, the house would have looked haunted. With eyes wide open, and her darker dreams tucked away, it was just a big gray building adrift in a sea of trees. Charity Barnes opened the rental car door in a cloud of dust she’d trailed in from the gravel road and dirt driveway.

You left your phone in the car when you got out to pump gas. The sleep-shorts you wore offered little protection against the cool autumn night. Gooseflesh broke out on your bare skin, and you wanted nothing more than to get back home quickly to snuggle up under your sheets.

Most people are blind to life’s distractions. Normal people can move smoothly from one task to the next, allotting each one exactly the attention it needs. They don’t see how dirty the cabinets are or how tall the pile of mail has gotten.