Time of the Blues - Hollowed Teen Blues Part 1

 Halloween had been murdered.

Strangled, neutered, erased.

A holiday left for dead by the Kingdom.

The Episcopalians and Catholics were allowed to hold onto All Saints Day, although now it was officially called Remembrance Day, a day to remember family members or fellow parishioners who had passed into the great beyond.  

The only remnant of Halloween was a Fall Festival Day celebrated in mid-October. It involved some carnival-like activities, like apple bobbing and cornhole tosses, but mostly was an excuse for revival services. There was some costuming, but they had to be biblical figures, and a smattering of approved historical costumes that represented Kingodm favorites, like Confederate heroes like Robert E Lee and Nathan Bedford, founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, a handful of more modern age heroes like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.  

There were no ghosts or goblins, witches or demons, risque costumes or serial killers.  

And nothing on what was once Halloween.

Except for some rebellious teens. It was a small group that met on Halloween night in makeshift costumes, with eggs and toilet paper in hand.

This special night, the fifth year since Halloween was banned, they met near the old Gurney mansion, a rambling, ancient Victorian that had been empty since 1966.

"To Halloween!" The Fab Five (as they called themselves) lifted their drinks in the air, a special brew concocted by the Harley twins, moonshine made from corn, malted wheat, and sunflowers. That alone could get the five sent to Reeducation Camp.

Hunter Blue repeated, "To Halloween!" and the group toasted again. Hunter was fifteen, lean and short, with thick, curly black hair and intense blue eyes. His costume consisted of camouflage clothing and a hockey goalie's mask. It was easy enough to find - camo was second nature to a hunting family, and his older brother had once played hockey.

Candy Kapok had her arm around Hunter, her other arm raising her glass 'o' mash. She was dressed in a flimsy harem outfit, covered with filmy scarves. It was a costume that her mother wore several years ago, claiming it was Jezebel and, therefore, biblical. Local Kingdom officials disagreed. Even though her mother never wore it again; she kept it in her closet, where it was easy for Candy to find.

The other female, Jessica Daniels, wore a long black dress and had on a pointed black hat (an old sorting hat from the Harry Potter universe, an item her older brother had failed to throw away).  Albin Harley had painted himself green and had on a neckband with two bolts protruding from it. And Winston Gray, the final member of the Fab Five, had failed to find even the simplest costume, except for a plastic axe.

"What are we going to do, Hunter? Just sit here and get drunk? Or are we going up to the mansion and piss off some ghosts?," asked Winston, craving more action, itching to plunk his plastic axe into something.

Candy pulled at Hunter's camo. "Let's dance, baby!" she urged.

Hunter pulled back from her. Candy was fun, but he'd rather do that when he had her one-on-one. "Naw.  Let's do what we come here for."

"Yeah!" echoed Winston, showing his carton of eggs. "Let's break into that mansion and do some damage!"

"Oh, yeah!" added Albin, shakily lifting a toilet paper roll. "Let's put some teepee in the Gurney-hole!" The others didn't quite get the reference, but it sounded way cool.

They high-fived and then charged to the mansion entrance, slowing and hesitating when inches from it. 

"A-are you sure we should we do this?" Jessica was gripped by nervous fear.

"Hell, yeah!" said Hunter, filled with bravado, doing his best to impress Candy.

He tapped the door slightly, and it slowly opened, squeaking spookily. Hunter was wary that all he had to do was lightly touch it, and it was swinging slowly open, seemingly on its own.

They entered the huge foyer, Hunter leading the way. It was dusty and dirty, but still an elegant marble floor, a spiral staircase leading up to a second floor. Cobwebs were covering the staircase rail.

Winston took out an egg and launched it towards the staircase. They laughed as it splats on the third step. 

"Let's go up the steps!" said Albin. "Let's mess up some bedrooms!"

"Naw," said Hunter. "Let's see what's on this floor first."

Before the staircase, there was an open side entrance leading to another room. Inside were empty library shelves, a large ancient desk, and a plush, oversized chair almost like a throne.

A chair that was not empty.  

Stay blogged for Part 2...coming soon!

Time of the Blues 3: Senior Blues

 The Crowley Baptist Retirement Village had seen some hard times. Covid-19 had hit them especially hard, losing almost 10% of their residents and even a few staff members.

Covid-19 was now a thing of the past, for the most part. At least, that was the thought. The Kingdom no longer identified COVID-19 deaths. Many elderly deaths were just listed as 'natural causes.' If another wave were to hit of this or any other contagious disease, the CBRV (Crowley Baptist Retirement Village) would be in big trouble. The use of masks was outlawed (except for surgeons and a few other professional exceptions), and vaccines were no longer available.

Occasionally, the press of the US and Pacifica would report that the lifespan in the Kingdom had receded dramatically. Still, the Kingdom would deny it and kept no official statistics to show otherwise.

Franny knew, though. At least here at the CBRV. In the last five years, the average age of the census had declined from 78 to 73. A fluke? Maybe. But she didn't think so.

Franny Goodkind sat in her office, looking over her agenda for the day. Lots of patient visits, lots of staff consultations, reviews of medications, contacting patient physicians to advise of any required changes. This was her routine every day. And she loved it. Fifteen years ago, she was a waitress at the Honey Dew. Now, through education and hard work, she is the chief RN in charge of the day shift.

She preferred to spend her time with residents and sometimes had difficulty with the bureaucratic parts of her job. It allowed her, however, to have more influence over the care given to all the residents. Even with coping with all the rules imposed by the Kingdom, she did the best she could to protect them.

Today was a very special resident's birthday. Known mainly as Mama Blue, Daphne Blue would turn 95 today. She was the oldest resident at the facility. Ethel Verleen was next at 93. There was a time when CBRV would have three or more residents over 100, but that hadn't happened in at least ten years.

Daphne was not just the oldest resident; she was also the oldest of the Blue clan, one of the most prominent and prolific families in Dixon County. Withered and confined to a wheelchair, this once tall and proud woman had shrunken about half a foot. She often had a glazed look in her eyes, like she was not there anymore. But when Franny engaged her in conversation, she would light up and spin tales of her younger days. The stories were engaging and sometimes quite spicy. 

The stories were so spicy that nosy Dotty Mathers once overheard and threatened to go to Kingdom officials and notify them. Luckily, Franny was able to distract her by reminiscing with her about her former political career, and soon, Dotty had forgotten all about it. Dotty remembered the past better than the present. If not for her increasing Alzheimer's, Dotty might have been a prominent Kingdom Elder. Such is life.

"Hey, Mama Blue!" Franny said, approaching her with a big smile. "Ready for your big day!"

Daphne returned the smile with a big grin of her own. "I don't know. Once you pass 90, it might be best just to forget the whole thing!"

"Nonsense! Every day seeing you is special! Today is just an excuse to celebrate that!"  Franny leaned down and gave her a hug.

They were in the commons room with many residents and staff and some Blue family members, including two of her grandchildren, Larry and Melinsey. They began to sing Happy Birthday as Susie Kapak brought out a cupcake with a candle. Other cupcakes were wheeled in on carts.

There was a time when huge decorated cakes were used to celebrate,  But that ended fifteen years ago when 105-year-old Rachel Compton expired while in the act of blowing out the candles on her giant cake decorated with Pogo and his swamp friends.

Daphne's cupcake had only two candles, a nine and a five. It was chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Daphne was an unrepentant chocoholic.

She took a deep breath and blew out both candles at once. She did not die.

Everyone was grateful for that.

If you'd like more of CBRV, please follow the tag Crowley Stories and read A Crowley Celebration of Longevity.

Echoes of '59 - 2023 Rewrite

 

Echoes of '59

by T. M. Strait

This is a previously published story that never went through Grammarly.  So here it is, for better or worse, after those edits. 

The closest I ever came to the supernatural was that summer of '59 in Eugene, Oregon. My dad was a teacher, and he would fill his summer break each year by accepting a National Science Foundation Scholarship. One year, it was Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Another it was Ball State in Muncie, Indiana. That summer, it was the University of Oregon. 

That summer was weird and wonderful, filled with unexplained events that still mystify me. I was only four, my sister Carol was three, and it was our first real experience away from home, so maybe it was just the exotic newness of the locale. My parents had rented the top floor of a big Victorian house, set spookily on top of a hill (probably not that big of a hill, but impressive enough to a family from Michigan's flatlands). Male college students occupied the first and second floors.

I remember the piercing introductory music of Perry Mason, my mother's favorite show. Carol and I would hear it from our beds and shiver. I remember my first pet, a turtle I took out onto the roof in the mistaken belief that he needed more sun. He required much less attention after that. I remember getting mad at Carol and shoving her down the stairs. In a normal world, she should have been maimed or killed, with me suffering horrendous guilt for the rest of my natural-born days. Instead, she tumbled down like a gymnast doing an Olympic routine, popped up at the end of the stairs, and came flying back up, ready to kick some brother butt. But what I remember most was the car we brought back to life.

We were playing in the front driveway when we got bored. So my sister conceived of a tag game where we would chase each other like idiots unless we could touch the safe spot first, which she decided in her infinite toddler wisdom should be a yellow Ford Mustang belonging to one of the college guys. Remembering Perry, the fried turtle, and Elastic Girl tumbling down the stairs, I said, "Are you crazy? That's not our car! What if we break it or something?"

Carol laughed. "Stupy boy!" which, in her lingo, said it all. And then she proceeded to show me that it was okee-dokie to touch the car. She raced to it and whacked it on its front hood. Her effrontery paralyzed me, but we were horror-struck by what happened next. The car started to back out the driveway, turn into the street, and drive away! The college guy whose car it was came bursting out of the house, cursing us as little brats and running after his suddenly untamed Mustang.

Selective childhood memories repress what happened after that. Maybe we were spanked, maybe the college guy saddled his car before it wrecked, maybe his car made it to the fields where Mustangs roam free. I don't know. It wasn't until years later that it occurred to me that gravity and parking brakes could have played a role. I still prefer to think of it as I did in my youth, as one of those rare times when real magic echoed through our souls.

            

Time of the Blues 2: Book Blues

 Many shelves were just bare.

Melinsey Blue pushed her book cart down the juvenile non-fiction aisle. The bookcase was three shelves high and a display of books on top. The top shelf was half full, the middle a quarter, and there was nothing on the bottom shelf.

She picked a book from her cart. The True History of the Founders by Mike Huckabee. She noted the cover illustration - Jesus with his arms wrapped around George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Amazing, she thought. Jesus supporting two deists who were also slaveowners. Not what she would expect from WWJD (What Would Jesus Do).

Butt that's the way it was at  Crowley Patriot Library. Everything had to be approved through the Patriot Board. It wasn't a public library anymore. Oh, sure, it was founded by government funds, but that's where it ended. That money was given to a private entity to run and manage the 'public library." 

The Patriot Board has seven members. Three are selected from mega-churches - one from the two largest Baptist congregations and a third from a Pentecostal church. Two others were chosen from other Kingdom-approved churches. The Crowley City Council and the Dixon County Commission nominated the last two. 

When the Kingdom emerged, every book was taken off the shelf. Once the new board was established, they would approve individual books brought back okayed by Kingdom censors.

She grabbed another book to reshelve, The Fight for Kingdom Island by Kirk Cameron, part of the Brave book series that dominated the shelves. 

Melinsey was the last staff member left from the time before, when it was truly a public library. Her brother, Larry, had urged her to quit, but she was determined to stick it out. She had spent a lifetime hiding who she was and how she felt, so subjugating her feelings was nothing new to her.

She wasn't very tall, standing just a half-foot higher than the shelves she stacked. She had long, black hair (Kingdom culture seemed to prefer women to have long hair - she didn't care; it was an easy way to blend in), thin but wiry, thick-framed glasses, dark brown eyes that occasionally lit up with her intellectual curiosity but most often presented an impenetrable blank slate.

She picked another book from her cart, one of the most important, because she had put it there. It was a plain-looking hardback, the spine indicating it was The History of Salt by Roger Peters. But that's not what was inside. Inside, once you turned to page 44, was another book, I Am Rosa Parks, by Brad Meltzer.

She put this book on the second shelf, at the end, in slight defiance of Dewey Decimal (it didn't matter - she was the only one left at the library who had even a dim understanding of that filing system - one of the reasons that she was able to maintain her job).  

It took some work. You had to pick an approved book, but you had to know it was never taken out. But many, many books were never taken out. Most other books were ignored once you got away from some of the big Kingdom-approved book lines, like Mike Huckabee's and Brave.  

The truth is once the Christian Right took over the library, they seldom used it. They had little interest in reading anything of any type. Their primary goal was to ensure others couldn't access books that went against their own views.

A select few knew about the books within the books, and they came in and checked out the books she had rigged. The truth is still out there - if you knew where to look.

You would think one of the many pro-Kingdom employees would notice the books that were checked out and wonder why. But they never reflected that deep a level of curiosity. They were more interested in the food treats brought in (sometimes by Melinsey) and gossiping within themselves or the Christian right mons that would come in than they were in anything about their jobs.

Yes, Melinsey had been very fortunate, and it made her feel good that she could fight the power in her own way.

She looked up towards the desk and saw someone staring at her, a curious look on their face. It's the new hire, someone who had moved from Macon, someone Melinsey didn't know.

Melinsey's intuition was blaring alarms in her head. This may be someone who is not easily fooled. And there was no way of knowing - was she a Kingdom true believer? Was she a rebel like Melinsey?

There was no direct way to know. No clever way to interrogate and find the truth of where the new hire stood. If the new hire was like Melinsey, then whatever the true stance, that would be covered with allegiance to the Kingdom, real or not.

The new hire moved out from the desk, strolling towards the children's section, sliding ever closer to where Melinsey stood.

Is this the end? Is this where Melinsey would be caught, dismissed, and all the good she tried to do erased? Or would she find another ally?

Stay tuned to this blog!

Time of the Blues 1: Rocking at the Country Boy

The Blue was singing the Blues.

Larry didn't mean to complain. It just started pouring out.

"I miss pineapple, Walter." He eased back into his rocking chair. "I really do."

"Hell, Walter," mused his friend, Walter. "You couldn't afford it even if we had it. The last pineapple I saw was $21 at the Pig."

"That was more than a year ago!" Larry shifted his massive bulk in the rocker. It was his habit to sit out on the porch of County Boy's Gassed 'n' Goed for an hour or so early in the morning before the heat got oppressive. Often, he would be joined by his skinny, one-eyed partner in inertia, Walter Strickland. Sometimes, Walter had his glass eye. On other days, he didn't want to mess with it and wore an eyepatch. Today was an eyepatch day.

Larry Blue would spend much of his time singing the Blues. Woe is me; look how much I have been put upon, weren't times better in yesteryear? Of course, Larry was careful enough not to define what yesteryear was. But they knew what he meant.  

"What do you miss, Walter? Surely, you must miss somethin'. What do you miss most of all?"

Walter's eye misted. "I miss Julie."

Oh, now Larry had stepped into it. He should've known better. Julie is Larry's daughter, who now must be close to 30, Larry thought. But Walter hadn't seen her in years. Julie left just before the borders were closed. She left a note to Walter and her mother, Janeen, indicating that she was going to the Great Lakes Union. Occasionally, they would get a smuggled letter from her, but the last one was over a year ago. Walter knew she married. He knew he was a grandfather, a granddaughter he might never see.

"Sorry, Walter. Of course, you miss your daughter. And here I am going on about some ridiculous fruit. Sometimes I can be an insensitive jerkwater."  At least Larry didn't have to go through that. All the Blues were within a hundred miles of each other, more or less.

Mildred started to come up the steps. "You boys got nothing better to do than to sit here and whine all day?" She was short and stocky but with solid muscle, unlike Larry's bubbling blubber. Her hair was close-cropped. She used to have a mohawk, colored powder blue. She used to have piercings in her nose, lips, and tongue, but they had long since closed up. The only piercings left were her ears (at least piercings visible to the general public). She had tattoos, of which only the ones on her arms were visible. You could keep your tattoos as long as they hadn't been deemed sacrilegious.  

Walter spit out part of his chaw. "I'm doing 'zactly what I want to do. How about you, Mildred?"

"I'm hitting on all cylinders, boys. Just gotta get some feed so I can tend to my animals. Responsibilities, ya know?"

"You're looking good, Mildred," Larry complimented. "Nice to see you out and about."

Mildred guffawed at Larry's ingratiations. "You look mighty tight in that rocker, Larry. Maybe Herschel should install you a double wide."  Herschel was the owner of the Country Boy.

Sometimes it don't pay to be nice, Larry thought. Kindness was a basic human value; that's what Jesus taught. Even if it didn't seem to be held up as such anymore.

"Well, I can't just jaw with you two knuckleheads all day. I got mouths to feed."  She bounded past them and went into the store.

Even if he wouldn't say it out loud, Larry had to admit that he was a little sweet on Mildred. Even dressed in her everyday apparel of cowboy boots, work jeans, and muscle shirt, she held appeal to him. Yeah, there were rumors about Mildred, but Larry chose to ignore them.

None of that was talked about anymore because the consequences would be dire if it could be proved.

Dire, indeed.