Published by Poetry Editor on August 25, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

The Poem from the Future

(1) Purity of Purpose

At the Ministry of Offence the brains are fermenting in their bottles. War is being thought. On the other side of the world thousands of people fall to the ground. Thought cannot be stopped or detected. Thinking levels the Enemies of Right.

The Rhyme Sinister looks out from his window high in the Ministry of Culture. The black towers of the Ministry of Offence loom in the fog. He knows that freedom of thought must prevail. Only when thought leaves the mind is there purity of purpose. He turns from the window and faces the prisoner nailed in the kind seat. There are three other kind seats in the room but they are empty. Only the blood and feces smeared on them suggests any past occupancy. The prisoner has his mouth sewn shut. The Prime Sinister thinks at him.

You have been speaking poetry. Poetry is forbidden.

The Rhyme Sinister has a poem written by the prisoner lying face-up on his desk. Going over to the desk he lifts it and reads it in his mind.

            Hellebore rips its head through the ground.
            All hellebore uprisen in its flourish. All hellebore.

What is the meaning of this? Thinks the Rhyme Sinister out loud.

The prisoner refuses to think, but instead tries to force his mouth open to form spoken words. His tongue has been rolled and pinned in place. No sound could possibly come from his mouth. The thick thread that binds his lips is dull with blood.

The Rhyme Sinister presses a button on his desk and the kind seat containing the prisoner begins to pamper. The prisoner oozes in the kindness of the seat.

(2) Skin of the Rhyme Sinister

The Rhyme Sinister sleeps soundly in his bed. Today the last of the week’s prisoners was sent to the composting pits. The latest poem to be confiscated by the Ministry of Culture has been destroyed. But poetry cannot be destroyed. It remains in the Rhyme Sinister’s sleeping mind. In the Rhyme Sinister’s memory the poem begins to leak through his thoughts. The Rhyme Sinister dreams of hellebore.

The poem is thought out loud and enters the room. The poem enters the carpets and the curtains and the bedding and the clothes. It enters into the skin of the Rhyme Sinister. The poem poisons everything with its innocent pervasiveness. Once the room is saturated with it the poem leaves by an open window. It penetrates air. Entering starlight it becomes manifold as direction. It travels into the future but the future is unoccuring and therefore impervious.

The poem travels into the past.

The poem arrives here. Here is anywhere. Anywhere you might happen to be.

            Hellebore rips its head through the ground.
            All hellebore uprisen in its flourish. All hellebore.

The poem becomes yours. You have no idea what it means, but suddenly the present is transcendent. All hellebore.

— John Sexton

John W. Sexton was born in 1958 and lives in the Republic of Ireland. His fifth poetry collection, The Offspring of the Moon, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2013. His poem, “The Green Owl,” was awarded the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007 for best single poem, and in that same year he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. His speculative poems are widely published and some have appeared in Apex, The Edinburgh Review, The Irish Times, Mirror Dance, The Pedestal Magazine, Rose Red Review, Silver Blade, Star*Line and Strange Horizons.

Editor’s Notes: This experimental narrative flash poem is very imaginative. The artwork is a juxtaposition of two images: an abstraction of self-destruction, presumably from due to “bad thoughts” (by Kom!sh/deviantart) and that of a torture chamber (taken from a kinky B&B advertisement).

• Continue Reading

Published by Poetry Editor on August 24, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

Thirsty

He picks me out of the throng
in Brownian motion on the sidewalk,
puts an arm around my shoulder
like we’re friends; he looks rich,
so I decide to go along with it.

He walks carelessly through the crowd
as if certain that his strong limbs
could part it easily if he wanted to.
Though he’s bald, I keep imagining
a mane about his head.

I’ve picked a pub with cheap drinks,
but for the past half-hour
all he’s had is masala-dripping chicken
and five glasses of plain water.
He holds up a sixth to me as if

it were wine, and as he turns
the glass to catch the light, I see
the deep red tinge of the water.
“You see it don’t you?” he asks
with a knowing feline grin.

“Dragon’s blood – no joke, no drug,
no alcohol, this is the real thing…
This breeds bravery, this fuels the fight.”
I can see his body tightening up,
growing stronger with each sip.

“Perhaps this is not for you,”
he tells me and directs my gaze
toward the bar where a blue-haired woman
sits sucking ice-cubes that I
notice are a deep cobalt blue.

Her face brightens by the minute
and I can’t help staring at her
and waiting for the sudden
ripple of joy that I know
I’ll feel when she laughs.

The man with me, slaked at last,
leaves, and I leave with him.
In the following days, I meet
others like him – the seekers
of water that is more than water.

I begin to see like them, and soon
I too share visions with the silent man
who sips lilac-hued water
from a steel tumbler
in a small udipi joint.

And one day I feel the dangerous
tendrils of all possible futures
through the slime-green water
dripping from a leaky pipe on a slum wall
three buildings away from my apartment.

I begin to think that I understand
it all, that I have tasted
all the waters in this deep-veined city.
But the man in gray shows me
just how shallow I am.

We sit in a small restaurant, sipping tea,
our water glasses untouched.
I call him a man, but truly
I cannot place his age or sex.
I stare only at his face

because his clothes are unbearable to look at—
its edges ending in blinding white
or receding into perilously deep black.
We talk of trivialities, and just before
he pays and leaves, he says to me,

“Look at the water – what color
do you see? None. It’s completely clear.”
But you can feel the thrum, the shift
in light? You know this is no ordinary
glass of water. So what is it then?
It’s something too dangerous
for all the addicts you know.
But what about for you?”

He leaves, but I stay
and stare and stare at the glass.

Three quarters of an hour goes by
and my throat is parched
from the tea which has sweated
every drop of moisture out of me.

I sit fingering the wet outside
of the glass, its rim inches
from my cracked dry lips
that long to touch liquid,
but dare not take a sip.
 
— Rohinton Daruwala

Rohinton Daruwala lives and works in Pune, India. He writes code for a living, and speculative fiction and poetry in his spare time. His work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons, Liminality and Through the Gate. He tweets as @wordbandar and blogs at https://wordbandar.wordpress.com/.

Editor’s Notes: The fractal image (by Qualia Computing)—the scale-free fractal “beauty blue”—is combined with “Shiva” (by Psycofairy Ortiz for Desktop Nexus). This blue lady in the center of the image is an abstract interpretation of the poem.

• Continue Reading

Published by Poetry Editor on August 24, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

In The Museum of Lost Sounds

First there’s the drone of a foghorn;
the clumsy ship lumbers back
down the harbor, leaving you here.
Then the familiar suck
of clinging waves, the bray
of gulls; obscene, realistic,
as if there were fish bones to pick clean.

Your group laughs gaily;
you’re a merry troupe.
Your heels clip on polished tiles
as you go in, clutching stamped tickets.
It’s all very detailed.

In the hall of echoes,
protective coats removed,
you approach the first exhibit, listen
to the throating croak of toads;
their warning lost in translation;
the tisking chide and click
of delicate wings, the silky sift
of April rain falling in Kyoto.

You hear each acute drop as it soaks
the cherry blossom. Its branches rattle,
absorb the low thunder
of the bomb as it first drops
two hundred miles away—
the quiver

of a single blade of grass
to which the ant clings as it rocks
back and forth, back
and forth; the spider swings
precariously in its web. The mist
of toxin has a tiny sound, too.
The web vibrates.
No one smiles.
No matter.

Move on to a bloated bee,
velveted in petals, humming,
pollenating the curled sickly stamen
(remember the bees?)
Exhibit C’s an asphalt playground.
The little children run outside, even
at noon. There’s a silver-sounding bell
far away in the Himalayas. The scrape
of small skates on a lake.

Something falls away.
No matter.

Your group moves readily on
to the hiss of biscuits and
good country bacon frying;
the ache of a robin’s early song.
Rock and roll, artillery fire, prayers.

Still, there is the gnaw of old memory
as you near the exit. There is the exit.
Perhaps it’s just a dull whisper
in your head…but…
the faintest memory, when you

enter evergreen. The end
of snow. Trickling, the sap-drunk
bark and needle pop.
That white bear, laughably small,
(ridiculously small), sliding into the sea
then oddly, probably unrelated,
as you leave, you remember

a particular hot June day
on some wave-crashed beach of your youth;
that one very serious teenaged guard
explaining how most things actually
make no sound at all
as they drown.

— Celeste Helene Schantz

Celeste Helene Schantz has work which appears in Eye to the Telescope, One Throne Magazine, Mud Season Review and others. She was a finalist in the Cultural Center of Cape Cod’s Poetry Competition, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye, and was one of four finalists worldwide in a competition co-sponsored by Poetry International, Rotterdam and The Poetry Project, Ireland. She has twice been chosen as a participant by the author Marge Piercy for a juried poetry workshop in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. She lives in Upstate New York with her son Evan and is currently working on her first book of poetry.

Editor’s notes: The poem itself is a successful experiment in sound. The image, “Hall of Echoes” (by Matt Forsythe), is card art for the Forgotten Myths game

• Continue Reading

Published by Poetry Editor on August 24, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

et in Arcadia ego

Listen…you can hear the ancient breath

of nine billion souls exhaled upon the wind…

these hums of constellations tell their tale.

See the emperor, the water bearer and the warrior,

spiraling the spoked wheel of the cosmos again.

It is a sorrow-song; nothing but lost mythologies—

cartographies plotted in the faint pulse of electrons.

A marble finger points through drifted sand.

Empty turrets stare into winking stars.

Far away somewhere there’s the echo: an old tune

being sung in someone’s bright and golden hall:

Weep not for the darkness

but only for that darkness

of a planet which will

never know another song.

— Celeste Helene Schantz

Celeste Helene Schantz has work which appears in Eye to the Telescope, One Throne Magazine, Mud Season Review and others. She was a finalist in the Cultural Center of Cape Cod’s Poetry Competition, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye, and was one of four finalists worldwide in a competition co-sponsored by Poetry International, Rotterdam and The Poetry Project, Ireland. She has twice been chosen as a participant by the author Marge Piercy for a juried poetry workshop in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. She lives in Upstate New York with her son Evan and is currently working on her first book of poetry.

Editors Notes: The Latin title translates I too lived in Arcadia, which in the context of the poem, is a warning.

The Ghost of the Cepheus Flare (similar to the Astronomy Picture of the Day, Oct 31, 2011: “Spooky shapes seem to haunt this starry expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds faintly visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood on planet Earth, they lurk at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. Over 2 light-years across the ghostly nebula and relatively isolated Bok globule, also known as vdB 141 or Sh2-136, is near the center of the field. The core of the dark cloud on the right is collapsing and is likely a binary star system in the early stages of formation. Even so, if the spooky shapes could talk, they might well wish you a happy Halloween.”)

But a similar image is used here, a perfect celestial image to complement this poem. Its eerie effect with the greenish rendition (National Optical Astronomy Observatory)—Ghost Nebula, vdB 141: “This image was obtained with the wide-field view of the Mosaic Camera on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. vdB 141 is a reflection nebula located in the constellation Cepheus. Sometimes referred to as the ghost nebula, its awkward name is its catalog number in Sidney van den Bergh’s catalog of reflection nebulae, published in 1966. Several stars are embedded in the nebula. Their light gives it a ghoulish brown color. North is down and East is to the right. Imaged August 28, 2009.” (Credit: T.A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage, H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF)

• Continue Reading

Published by Poetry Editor on August 24, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

Love in the Time of Apocalypse

We could see the end coming from where we stood
when they first pointed it out, a tiny glowing particle
in the night sky, its tail a loose dangling of mangled light.
We watched experts on the TV speculate
on how to change its trajectory or blast it with strong
electromagnetic pulses. We wanted desperately to know
when and how and what it would feel like
when  the end came.

Soon, scientists walked out of interviews, one by one.
Then the newscasters left to go home, their cameras
filming empty chairs. Finally, it came down to just you
and me, our lives so split, we merely nodded in passing
but in the ambiance of impending death’s pink glow,
we remembered the taste of rapture, traded our weapons
of mass destruction for the lure of flesh, the need
for touch.

We could leave no mark here except on each other.
We could save nothing to outlast cosmic dust.
Wormwood bowed at last to the first order
to be fruitful, the primeval need to multiply, usurped.
We sent our ecstasy into the universe unhinging
our catastrophe. And now, we are gone
while the speck grows to a red shimmering flower
opening its petals.

— Ann Thornfield-Long

Ann Thornfield-Long lives in East Tennessee. Her work appears in venues such as The Tennessee Magazine, Tennessee Women of Vision and Courage (Crawford and Smiley 2013) and The Tennessee Sampler (Peter Jenkins and Friends 1985). She’s an established journalist, editor and publisher for regional newspapers. She has also worked as a nurse and first responder and dispatcher for The Norris Volunteer Fire Department. She has taught creative writing classes, and is the sister of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, Dan Luzadder, with whom she maintains great sibling rivalry.

Editor’s Notes:  It’s not that often that my own work inspires another’s. But here is the case where it did. Ann wrote this poem after reading my poetry collection, Apocalypse (Alban Lake Publishing, July 2015). The image is from Hubble: “In a dress rehearsal for the rendezvous between NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft and comet 9P/Tempel 1, the Hubble Space Telescope captured dramatic images of a new jet of dust streaming from the icy comet.

The images are a reminder that Tempel 1’s icy nucleus, roughly the size of central Paris, is dynamic and volatile. Astronomers hope the eruption of dust seen in these observations is a preview of the fireworks that may come 4 July, when a probe from the Deep Impact spacecraft will slam into the comet, possibly blasting off material and giving rise to a similar dust plume.” (Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Feldman (Johns Hopkins University), and H. Weaver (Applied Physics Lab))

Artistically, this Hubble image has a foreshadowing effect, with the inset image being the consequence (Deep Impact hit the big screen in 1998, giving seekers of disaster cinema what New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin called a ‘costly comet thriller.’ (Paramount))

• Continue Reading

Published by Poetry Editor on August 24, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

The Raven Mockers

In the rooms of the dying,
they hover,
eager to take the heart
and leave the body
You pray against this force
and it is exhausting
At the moment of death
there is a great gathering of energy
that some mistake for peace
You have been too much with the dying
Your own spirit grows thin and frayed
Your own heart is in danger
Even photographs of bones contaminate
All the defilement of graves:
it is not enough to repatriate
We don’t like to gaze at death like white people do
You confronted it once: dark mass, pushing against your back,
taller than a human, black as shadows’ shadows
Another time cat on porch tried to look benign,
but you recognized it
Same with crow that fussed and gazed too long
Violent dreams from which you woke with deep scratches
You let them know you knew their name
You declined to feed their power through fear
You and your elder patient pray in Cherokee
Your mistakes make her laugh, positive force mocking negative
When she finally sleeps, you keep vigil as long as you can
 
— Kimberly L. Becker
 

__________________________________________________________________________

“The Raven Mockers”: In Cherokee tradition, malevolent forces that prey on the vulnerable dying. Strong prayers and medicine are needed to counteract their power.

Kimberly L. Becker, Cherokee/Celtic/Teutonic descent, is author of Words Facing East and The Dividings. A member of Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers, her poems appear in journals such as Drunken Boat and Fulcrum and in anthologies such as Indigenous Message on Water and Bared. www.kimberlylbecker.com

 
Editor’s notes: This haunting poem is complemented with several artwrok pieces. “Man’s Shadow in Water” (Static Flickr), which is reminiscent of the shadow of Death, is collaged with a stock image of crows and a Creative Commons image of “A Murder of Crows at Disneyland” using varying degrees of transparency and coloration in PPT and subsequently processed in iPhoto.

• Continue Reading

Published by Poetry Editor on May 31, 2016. This item is listed in Introductions, Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

Introduction to Silver Blade Poetry Issue 30

by John C. Mannone

Welcome to Issue 30 of Silver Blade. One thing you will notice is the wide variety of voices and styles of presentation, let alone speculative texture. At the last minute, we lost a couple poems that provided better bridges for the rest of the collection, but you will not be disappointed with this unusual collage of poetry. The complementary artwork was found using the Advance Google Image search. Images might have been enhanced and/or combined with simple applications (PowerPoint, iPhoto, Word).

We open with Margaret Wack’s dark post apocalyptic poem, “Conflagration,” and quickly move into Mary Soon Lee’s poem rendered as a 2-minute play, “First Lesson.” Ash Krafton’s poem may have physics and astronomy flavors, but the physical is transcended to the metaphysical in “Temporally Illuminate.” This segues nicely into John W. Sexton’s well-crafted “Seeming Space.” And this is followed by yet more astronomy-based scifi work of John Philip Johnson, “Lesser Lunar Geese.” Wendy S. Delmater’s “fan fiction” fantasy poem, “Fëanor,” is based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s character. Finally, in the spirit of a speculative poem in translation, Ef Deal translates this poem into French.

John C. Mannone

• Continue Reading

Published by Poetry Editor on May 31, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

Conflagration

Like hungry birds we circled destruction,
eyes wide and glittering: we were eighteen,
starving for fire. We drove the narrow strip
of street again and watched the buildings blaze
outrageously and were appeased. A brief
augur of ruination sweetened in our open
mouths: we were in love, we slipped a smile
between our lips tasting the blood
and honey there. World without end they said
but even then they knew the call
of conflagration, knew the eagerness
for sirens and for bloody, burning screams
and thirsted for the still silence,
the smoky, hollow dawn that follows fire.
Soot in our hair, we wake bare and bereft
and taste the mist, and praise the sun, and roll
naked and lovely over the scorched earth,
and we sing.

–Margaret Wack

Margaret Wack has had her work previously published in ditch, Eclectica, and Strange Horizons, among others. She lives in Massachusetts.
 
Editor’s Image Note: The image is a combine of a swarm of gargoyles (gargoyle queen) with a classical painting of the Lake of Fire (artist could not be identified)

• Continue Reading
• 1 Comment

Published by Poetry Editor on May 31, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

First Lesson

                        Scene: Prince Keng sitting on a rock.
                        The dragon enters, flying down.
 
DRAGON Good morning, Princeling. Have you come to
           admire my magnificence?
 
KENG    My father sent me. He said you would teach me
           to be king.
 
DRAGON Your father? Your father is your greatest
           threat aside from me.
 
                        The dragon menaces the boy, who holds his place.
 
DRAGON Good. You’re brave. You’ll make a fine king.
           Now go away.
 
KENG    That’s all? Don’t you have advice for me?
           I thought….
 
DRAGON An excellent habit for a king, thinking.
           You should try it more often.
 
KENG    [Kneeling] Please. Teach me what a king
           should know.
 
DRAGON A king should know that he cannot know
           all he should know. Men’s lives are
           too short.
 
KENG    Then teach me what I most need to know.
 
DRAGON I tried to do so. Perhaps you weren’t
           paying attention.
 
KENG    You said men’s lives are short. That my
           father is my greatest threat–why? Why is
           he a threat?
 
DRAGON Because men will measure you against him,
           and find you lacking. No matter how hard
           you try, his reputation will outmatch you
           as the tiger outmatches the rabbit.
 
KENG    That would be true of anybody you chose as
           king. No one can equal him.
 
DRAGON No one? As for you, if you ever take the
           throne, I advise you to begin badly.
           Quickly quash people’s hopes. Then any
           mistakes you make will be no more than they
           expect, and any successes will appear the
           greater.
 
KENG   No.
 
DRAGON No?
 
KENG    If I am king, I will do the best I can.
           From the beginning.
 
DRAGON Good.
 
KENG    But you just said I should begin badly–
 

DRAGON Indeed. And I may argue the merits of that
           at a later date. What pleased me is that
           you didn’t blindly agree. However wise his
           advisors, a king should weigh their words
           for himself. And so ends your first lesson.
           You may come back tomorrow.
 
                        Keng bows, turns to leave, turns back.
 
KENG    What would you have done if I’d left when
           you first told me to go?
 
DRAGON Eaten you.
 
 
–Mary Soon Lee

Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but now lives in Pittsburgh. She is working on an epic fantasy in verse, the first book of which has been nominated for the Elgin Award (“Crowned,” Dark Renaissance Books, 2015). The opening poem, “Interregnum,” won the 2014 Rhysling Award for best long poem.
 
Editor’s Image Note: Picture courtesy tumblr.com (artist unknown)

• Continue Reading
• 1 Comment

Published by Associate Editor on May 31, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 30, Issue 30 Stories, Short Stories

Eddie 2.0

by  Jill Hand

Outside the clouds hung oppressively low, spitting cold rain that turned to hail. The frozen pellets clicked against the windowpanes, sounding like skeleton fingers tap-tap-tapping, demanding to be let in. The roads were going to be bad if it kept up. I was seated at my desk, eating chicken salad on an onion bagel, when Sanjay phoned.

“I think we may have found him,” he said.

“Where?”

“Alexandria, Virginia. He was born in Boston. Boston!  Can you believe it?”  He sounded giddy. I pictured him pacing back and forth, as revved-up as a new father by the birth of a son.

“The mom was an actress. Cammie Hodges. Cute, not a lot of talent, but petite and bubbly. She was on that reality show, Summer Interns. Remember it?”

I did, vaguely. Rowdy college kids working at summer jobs with the predictable hijinks ensuing. There was a girl named Vella or Venna who dressed like a tart and fought with everybody but I didn’t remember Cammie.

“She’s dead?”

“Oh, yeah. Killed in a car accident on the Beltway, coming back to collect the kid after doing a dinner theater performance of A Streetcar Named Desire somewhere in Maryland. She played Stella Kowalski.”

“And the father, where’s he?”

“He’s out of the picture. He’s an actor, lives in L.A. Does mostly voice-overs. The relationship was on the rocks even before she got pregnant. He took off around the time the kid was born. He doesn’t see him. Sends the occasional check, that’s all.”

I took a bite of bagel and thought about it. So far, things were lining up. It wouldn’t be a perfect match, but it was close. Both parents were actors. Mom dead. Dad not dead, but he might as well be for all the contact he has with his son. Yes, it was close, maybe even close enough to work.

“Where’s the boy now?” I asked. “You said Alexandria?”

“Yeah, staying with these rich WASPs, Mitch and Suzanne DeGraw. Suzanne’s sort of like his aunt, I guess you’d say. She and the boy’s father had the same stepfather. Their moms were married to him at different times. It gets a little confusing. Anyway, the DeGraws have no kids of their own. Suzanne is fond of little Eddie. She used to take care of him sometimes when his mom was working, so now she’s got him full-time.”

I sat up straight in my chair. I didn’t believe in omens, but the boy’s name gave me pause. “His name’s Edgar?”

“Naw, that would be a little too freaky, wouldn’t it?  Who names their kids Edgar anymore?”  Sanjay chuckled.  “He’s Edward, like the vampire in those Twilight books. His mom thought he was so dreamy that she named the kid after him, if what my sources tell me is correct, which it is.”  He sounded smug and I didn’t blame him. This was quite a coup. Our employer would be very interested in this little semi-orphan, the boy named after a brooding vampire.

Sanjay sent me pictures of the DeGraws, and of little Eddie. I started a file, as I did for all our projects. It grew substantially over the years. In the first photo, Eddie was three. His big dark eyes looked sad. No wonder. Suzanne and Mitch weren’t exactly the most cuddly pair to raise a child. She was blonde, tanned, and Botoxed to within an inch of her life. He was dark and intense, giving off an air of irritability, even when he smiled. They led a busy social life and gave generously to museums, symphony orchestras, and charitable foundations. Here they were photographed wearing white linen in the pages of Luxury Yacht. Here was another of them in formal wear in Town & Country. Here they were again, in riding habits, looking at a brown horse in front of a barn in Southern Living. These and other pictures all made it into the file, as well as a number of other documents pertaining to Eddie.

He was just past his fourth birthday when the DeGraws started him at Rolling Hills Country Day School, annual tuition twenty-five thousand dollars. I added a picture of him from the school yearbook to the file. He was wearing little khaki trousers and the requisite navy blue polo shirt with the school crest embroidered in gold on the breast pocket. The picture was taken with him facing front and center, like a mugshot. He stared blankly out at the viewer, his expression one of abject misery.

So far, so good.

Mitch DeGraw was in commercial real estate. He loved commercial real estate. He used to take Eddie around with him to building sites, hoping to instill a love of commercial real estate in him. There’s a photo in the file of them standing side by side next to an excavation where an office building would eventually be, both of them wearing hard hats. In this one, Eddie is seven. His expression says I am not enjoying myself. Not one bit.

He enjoyed himself even less at Granite Mountain Military Academy in Pennsylvania, where he was sent when he was twelve. Mitch thought the boy needed discipline. A picture of Eddie wearing a grey uniform was added to the growing file. In it, he’s standing at attention on the parade ground with a drum strapped to his chest. His jaw is clenched and his eyes hold a hopeless expression. He resembles a Confederate drummer boy, one who is fairly certain that he is doomed.

His father had disappeared by then, having seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth, escaping his many creditors. You can still do that, you know, even in the twenty-first century. All it takes is enough money and the desire not to be found. The money was supplied by an anonymous benefactor: my employer, mine and Sanjay’s and dozens of other people who were mainly academics and researchers and literary critics.

I won’t tell you our employer’s name. I signed a confidentiality agreement when I started working for him. It’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of him, although you probably have at least one of the devices he invented somewhere around your house. All I’ll say is that he’s very rich and very determined, one could almost say obsessive. I’ve met him twice. He’s a delightful conversationalist. He especially enjoys talking about literature. His checks make it easier for me to live on an adjunct professor’s salary.

What were our employer’s intentions for the little boy with the dead mother and the vanished father?  It should be apparent to you by now, those of you who are familiar with the life of Edgar Allan Poe. He was attempting to create another Poe, one whom he hoped someday would write something as good as “The Raven”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and all the others. We called what we were doing Project Eddie 2.0.

You don’t think it’s possible?  It probably wouldn’t be if our goal was to produce another Charlemagne or Cleopatra, but we weren’t trying to design rulers; we were trying to design authors. We’d already had success with the Bickford sisters, Stephanie, Amy, and Elise. They were the daughters of a widowed Presbyterian minister who grew up in a cold and drafty farmhouse in Aroostook County, Maine, with lots of books to read and no other children for company. With assistance from our employer, Stephanie, Amy, and Elise – the Brontë sisters 2.0 – had already published several best-selling novels. If it worked with them, we thought it might work with Eddie.

One of the teachers at Granite Mountain was a former Army officer who taught language arts. He was happy to be paid a little something extra under the table to encourage the boy to write. But could he write?  That was the question. We waited anxiously for the answer, which to our delight turned out to be could he ever!  For a twelve-year-old he was quite good. I have a copy of one of the first stories he turned in to his helpful tutor. It involved the premature burial of a pet dog, mistaken for dead after being struck by a car. The dog manages to dig his way out of the grave and comes bounding home to his young master, scaring the daylights out of him and everyone else in the house when he turns up scratching at the back door in the middle of the night, tongue lolling, covered in mud and blood.

“This is good,” I said to Sanjay, who leaned against my desk, arms folded. “Really good. Mature use of language for a child that age and excellent pacing. I like it.”

“Do you?” he said. “I dunno. It’s not exactly what we were hoping for, is it?”

“Why?  What’s wrong with it?”

He regarded me bleakly. “It’s funny.”

It was. I laughed out loud while reading it. Darkly funny, but was that such a bad thing?  True, Poe didn’t write humor. A piece he did for the New York Sun, the hoax story about a hot air balloon crossing of the Atlantic was probably as close as he ever came to writing anything that was funny. The old-time typeface, heralding the amazing feat by eight gentlemen riding in something called Mr. Monck Mason’s FLYING MACHINE!!! looks amusing to twenty-first century eyes, but the story wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. Poe’s other fiction writing was uniformly grim. No yuks there at all. Lots of shivers, but no yuks.

“Give him time,” I said. “He’s going through puberty. What do you want to bet he falls in love with a girl and she rejects him? A little teenage angst will get him going in the right direction.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I sure hope so.”

Enter Sophie Ludlow. She attended a nearby girls’ boarding school. They met at a dance and Eddie was smitten. By then he was fifteen and in hot water for writing an article for the student newspaper at Granite Mountain, The Salvo, about the Battle of Gettysburg. It read like a straightforward account of the battle, with loads of facts and interesting little details, until someone happened to notice that the first word of each sentence spelled out an account of a passionate clandestine love affair between the headmaster and the school’s mascot, a ram named General Patton.

“He’s a little scamp, isn’t he?” I said to Sanjay when I telephoned him in Prague to tell him the news. He was over there scouting out a young lady whom our employer hoped might become another Jane Austen.

“I’ll say,” he replied. “Did they expel him?”

The headmaster had wanted to, but Eddie’s foster parents offered to donate money toward the construction of a new gymnasium, and all that happened was that he was confined to barracks for a month.

The DeGraws had never formally adopted him. We weren’t sure how Eddie felt about that. There was a lot we didn’t know about him, although apparently he didn’t mind too much about being confined to barracks. (The barracks in question were more like dormitories at a good college than Army barracks.)  Eddie spent the time writing, mostly poems and love letters to Sophie, but short stories too, all of which he mailed to her. One of them was called “The Prisoner of Granite Mountain”.  It was high gothic (Barred windows! Lightning flashes illuminating the wretched prisoner dressed in rags, huddled in one corner of a horrible rat-filled dungeon!)  But it also contained goofy humor (the wretched prisoner bewails the fact that the internet connection down in the dungeon is no good, and that he can’t get the local pizzeria to deliver.)  It was nicely done, especially for a kid his age, but it wasn’t what Poe would have written.

And the love poems were awful. Real sappy stuff, the kind any fifteen-year-old might write. Poetry just wasn’t Eddie’s thing. No doubt he really loved Sophie, he may even have loved her with a ‘love that was more than love’, but he couldn’t express it through poetry other than the most banal moon-spoon-June variety. Most people can’t. We would have liked another “Annabel Lee”, but it looked like we wouldn’t be getting it from Eddie.

How did we get our hands on his correspondence to Sophie?  We didn’t send someone to climb through her dorm room window in the dead of night and steal it if that’s what you’re thinking. Sophie didn’t save her boyfriend’s poems and letters in a pretty keepsake box, tied up with a pink satin ribbon. No, she casually read them and tossed them in the trash. We paid her roommate to fish them out and send them to us. Like I said, our employer is very rich. If Sophie wondered where her roommate got the money for her new iPhone and those designer handbags, she didn’t ask.

Eddie was eighteen when Sophie dumped him for the young scion of a family who made their fortune manufacturing paint and solvents. He didn’t see it coming, although he probably should have; three years is a long time for a teenage romance to last, especially when one of the persons involved will be going to Wellesley in September and the other will be going to Virginia State.

The DeGraws had gotten divorced by that time and Mitch stopped paying Eddie an allowance, being fed up with him for a number of reasons, the most significant of which was his failure to take an interest in the commercial real estate business. Suzanne had a little money of her own and she agreed to pay his tuition at Virginia State, but he had to come up with his own money for room and board and books and any extras.

Sanjay and I held our breaths and waited to see what would happen next.

He started firing off a series of despairing emails to a friend in Chicago. He wanted to die! He couldn’t believe Sophie would do this to him! Didn’t she realize how much he loved her? Oh god, it wasn’t fair! Why was this happening to him? It wasn’t fair! If he died, then she’d be sorry! It wasn’t fair! And so on and so forth.

I have a copy of the emails. They were sent to me by Eddie’s friend in Chicago, who bought himself a new laptop computer and a set of new tires for his car, courtesy of my employer. (In case you’re wondering, no one we approached with an offer of cash in exchange for assisting us in our endeavors ever turned us down.) One email in particular stands out. Eddie wrote, sourly:  ‘It seems I’m not rich enough for her. When I told her I’d be going to a state school she was horrified, as if I said I’d be going to prison for knifing a convenience store clerk. Now she’s seeing Nash Kincaid, who looks like a brain-damaged horse.’

Even though his hurt and wounded pride came through loud and clear, I chuckled. Eddie had a way with words.

What he did next was surprising. Sanjay was in Seoul, checking up on a girl who showed promise of becoming the next Emily Dickinson. I called him to tell him the news.

“You won’t believe what Eddie is doing,” I said.

“What? Is he drinking? Gambling? What’s he doing?”

If he expected him to follow in Poe’s footsteps that way, he was going to be disappointed.

“Neither one,” I said.

“Is it drugs?” Sanjay asked. “It’s drugs, isn’t it?” Did I detect a trace of eagerness in his voice? I thought I did.

“Not drugs. He’s doing stand-up comedy.”

Sanjay’s reply was unprintable. He ranted about how we’d had such high hopes for him and now everything was ruined and he didn’t know what our employer was going to say and what the hell was wrong with the kid anyway? Why wasn’t he sinking into a black depression and writing some really top-notch stuff about grave robbery or some kind of hideous curse?

“Dammit!  It’s all over. All the trouble we went to and for what?  So he can get up on stage and tell jokes? He probably sucks, doesn’t he?”

On the contrary. I’d caught his act and it was good. In fact, it was better than good. The audience was mixed, mostly college kids, but some older people, and he made us laugh until it hurt. Eddie told stories about his summer job, which had entailed cleaning people’s basements and garages, working for a company that does that kind of thing. He talked about the items that he found, some of which were very strange indeed. At one point, he picked up a guitar and sang a song about discovering a freezer full of dead cats, all of them dressed in doll’s clothes. The audience joined him in the chorus. It was hilarious, as was his rendition of “Eyeball on the Ceiling”, a song he wrote about an incident at another of his jobs, working for a company that cleaned up crime scenes after the police were through with them.

“That’s grotesque,” Sanjay said.

Grotesque and Arabesque, I thought, recalling the name of a collection of Poe’s short stories, for which he received not a cent, just twenty free copies. Despite his prodigious talent, Poe remained broke pretty much his entire adult life. “You should have been there; it was great,” I said.

Then I told him the best part: Eddie was still writing fiction. He was one of those people who can’t seem to stop writing, come hell or high water. He wrote stories that were gruesome and funny at the same time. That’s not easy to pull off and get it right, but Eddie got it right. He’d written a novel about a priest who runs a business on the side disposing of the bodies of dead hookers. Our employer had found him an agent and a couple of publishers had expressed interest in it.

“But he’s not writing like Poe,” Sanjay said dejectedly.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But he’s not going to marry his fourteen-year-old cousin either – not that he has a fourteen-year-old cousin – but still, the people he cares about aren’t going to waste away and die of tuberculosis. That’s better than being another Poe.”

Sanjay harrumphed. He clearly didn’t agree.

“And listen,” I said. “He’s young. He’s already writing great stuff. He’s got years and years to improve and who knows? Maybe someday he’ll write something that will live on long after he’s gone, just like Poe did.” I’d read Father Mulcahy’s Sideline, Eddie’s book about the dead-hooker-disposing priest. There were passages where I’d caught an echo of Edgar Allan Poe. Lots of authors have imitated Poe, to greater or lesser success, but Eddie wasn’t imitating. He had his own voice. His writing style was leaner than Poe’s, without the nineteenth-century flourishes and furbelows, but the echo was there. It rang through his work like the tolling of an iron bell. It gave me the shivers.

“He seems to be happy, now that he got away from Mitch DeGraw and Granite Mountain. He’s doing what he loves and he probably won’t die broke and miserable. Isn’t that better than being a tormented genius who got paid next to nothing for his work when he was alive?”

Sanjay didn’t answer. Finally he said, “Well, if our employer’s satisfied then I guess I am.” He didn’t sound particularly satisfied. Then he brightened. “Did I tell you? I’m off to Australia. There’s a kid there our employer wants me to check out. His parents are these improvident actors, really bad with money. Loads of debt and they’ve got like, five kids, and this kid had to drop out of school and go work in a warehouse to help support the family. He’s also stringing for a newspaper, covering the local courts.”

He paused to allow me to make the connection. It didn’t take me long. “Dickens? You’re hoping he’s going to be another Charles Dickens!”

“Correct,” he said, sounding happier than when I delivered the news about Eddie. “Better start another file. We can call it Project Charlie 2.0.”

—«»-«»-«»—

Jill Hand is the author of The Blue Horse, a science fiction/fantasy novella from Kellan Publishing based on a true story.  It contains no zombies, moody teenage vampires, or young people forced to fight to the death in a post apocalyptic future. It does, however, contain humor and some lively historical facts.

• Continue Reading