UNPUBLISHED WORKS
A Plethora of Genres
The following five pieces further illustrate various other writing styles not explored in published works. They are, in order: "Rabbits," noir short story; "To Waste," surrealist poetry; "Rowan Falls," creative fiction; "Daffodils," transcendentalist poetry; and an excerpt from the as-of-yet unfinished book The Wizard's Worlds, long-form comedic fiction.
RABBITS
Noir Short Story
Ciara knows that the rabbit isn’t real.
It’s not a particularly unreasonable looking rabbit. It doesn’t have a waistcoat this time, for one thing, though she wouldn’t be surprised if it did. It twitches its nose like a real rabbit, the motion making the fur by its mouth nudge up against its teeth, and the cotton ball tail looks soft enough. But its eyes glow red like a hare’s in a flashlight’s beam, even though it’s broad daylight out, and the ends of its paws stretch into something a little too close to fingers to be a real rabbit’s paws.
Also, it’s floating halfway up a wall.
Ciara regards the rabbit idly as she takes another drag on her cigarette. One, two, three longs seconds of inhale, the smoke wrapping her lungs like a down coat zipped against the chill of another dry winter in the city. She holds onto the tightness in her chest for another second or so. The rabbit blinks. Ciara is pretty sure rabbits aren’t supposed to do that, either. When she exhales, her breath winds grey fingers into the cold slate sky, and when a frost-edged breeze sends it swirling lazily toward the wall, it passes through the rabbit without pause. It’s strange to watch, but Ciara isn’t surprised.
She’s not delusional. Her doctor had explained that pretty clearly, that the things she sees are illusions, not delusions. She knows what’s real and what’s not; she just can’t see it so well. Visual release hallucinations, that’s what they’re called. Something to do with losing sight in her left eye after her run-in with Justin on the Pennypack Creek Bridge last year. She still remembers the vacuum feel of knuckles connecting with her socket, how it felt like the eye would pop out and suck straight back into her skull all at once. She also remembers the glint she’d seen in Justin’s eye that day, and how getting out of there with a little blindness and a little crazy might just have been the best-case scenario.
The rabbit licks its lips. It has human teeth, so large they barely fit in its head. Ciara shudders and thinks that maybe a little more blindness wouldn’t have been so bad. She finally looks away, glances down at the duffle bag by her feet, decides she doesn’t want to look at that either.
She’s just about to take another drag on the cigarette when Clayton finally pulls up in his rusted truck.
“Get in,” he says without preamble.
Ciara hefts her duffle bag and throws one last look at the wall. The rabbit isn’t there anymore. She puts out the cigarette with her heel and climbs into the passenger seat, depositing the duffle bag onto the back seat.
Clayton casts it a dubious look through his rearview.
“That him?” he asks.
Ciara nods.
The pickup lurches into motion again. Clayton waits the block to 13th street before he says, “Small bag.”
“It’s not… all of him,” Ciara admits.
Clayton shoots her a look out of the corner of his eye. “Well where’s the rest of him?”
Ciara shrugs. She doesn’t want to explain herself, doesn’t want to relive the countless hours of sawing and grinding and of heaving the nonexistent contents of her stomach into the toilet. She doesn’t know how long it took her. She just knows that by the time she was done, it was the next day, the hallucination of a grotesque face growing out of the clock was rolling its eyes at her shaking hands, and anything still recognizably Justin was shoved into a duffle.
“Fed him to Alice,” Ciara says at last.
“That’s a lot of meat.”
“Been saving wet food containers. I’ve got a chest freezer. It’ll last a while.”
“Ciara? Just how long have you been planning this?” Clayton asks. The pickup truck is stopped now, and another rabbit rests on the trunk of the Corolla they’re stuck behind. Its eyes are enormous and human, piercing blue in a way Ciara tries hard not to recognize. As she watches, one of the rabbit’s eyes slowly begins to cloud over. Ciara feels the phantom ache of pain echo dully in her left socket, feels it radiate out toward all the long-since faded bruises that lace across her body, well-hidden under her clothes.
She closes her eyes, leans back against the headrest. They both know the answer to that question. Ciara has been planning to kill Justin Rabbit for a very, very long time.
TO WASTE
Surrealist Poetry
Call me Yeti, I’m wild
Loosed on an arctic
Charcoal tower, uncentered sun
A Thing with witches.
Call you, name you,
Walls slicked with missteps and song,
Come Monday missed again
Line you with forgetting.
Prevalent in stagnation,
Do you notice my lifeline lacing,
Sharp electricity of passion
Pressing like petals to your mouth?
We would not be together.
Bury me in a shredded shroud
Lay me in a coffin with
Loping hares that never rest.
You may crack.
I’ll hear you
Coil a fluttering
From your teeth.
ROWAN FALLS
Creative Fiction
Technically, Rowan Falls ends at the river.
It’s the sort of town with borders set down on paper somewhere in the 1700s and never re-examined, the kind of settlement that was always meant to be temporary, but perhaps no one had ever thought to tell the town, for it certainly has not stopped hosting life. And it was supposed to end at the river. Beyond the waterline was the wild territory, and the comfortable nestle of Rowan Falls was always meant to be a reprieve from the wild.
This was before they built the bridge. Once the bridge was up, the town seeped outward, laid down tracks and foundations and sunk its roots into the wild soil. Folks see a cluster of trees and think they’re looking at true wild, but true wild doesn’t abide by things like the McFerrin farm and their scarecrows that always look bored. Young boys think they’re getting a taste of wild when they teem in giddy crowds around the old train tracks, but the locomotives beat the wild out of that place years ago.
Those boys will grow up into men who’ll say the wildest thing in Rowan Falls is the foxes screaming just outside the careful ring of memorial trees in the park, but the women know better. The women know that the foxes feed on the scraps Mrs. Henson leaves them in her bin and they howl at any old car whose revving comes through on a stray breeze. There’s barely any wild left in most of those foxes. Except, of course, for the ones that tread nearest the house on the hill. That house, the women know, is closer to wild than most will ever admit—won’t admit, that is, except for maybe once a winter.
Grandmother says the house was there before the town, although the hill wasn’t. She says the house was there when her mother was a child, and when her mother’s mother was a child, and so on and so forth all the way back to the first Hollyhock women to set up their clotheslines in Rowan Falls. But the hill came after the bridge.
Eric says that Grandmother’s stories are silly. But they aren’t stories for him. They are stories for my mother, and for me, and one day for my daughter. We will tell the stories of the iron hands of Finn Rowan that reach out from the front of Rowan Falls, and of what those hands are trying to push back. We will tell tales of the one night each winter the ever-unnamed river flows backward, and we will tell the real history of the small church and the bones that lie beneath it, and whose bones they are besides. And we will tell the story of how, when the first of the settlers crossed the bridge, the house on the hill-before-there-was-a-hill drew the wild in a circle around itself and raised itself up so that no man might touch it.
They did not build the path to the house on the hill. The library, quaint and cone-topped and sandwiched between the empty lot and the building that changes businesses each year, has a book on the history of Rowan Falls, and the book will say that they built the path after they built the bridge. But they didn’t. The path was never built. How could it be? It’s made of a hundred years of footfalls that press through the snow on the one day the river flows backward, and who is to say which way the footfalls flow?
The women know. The women have always known. But they will not say, just smile and tell you to listen real close the next time the foxes start laughing into the night. My grandmother knows, but she will not tell me. My mother, too, holds this secret in her smile. But I do not mind.
I know where the bridge is, and when to find the path, when I am ready to find out.
DAFFODILS
Transcendentalist Poetry
On the walk home, I knelt beside you,
Fingers outstretched into the crispness of winter’s tail
That turns the sky tchelet, hallowed turquoise,
And I told the man I walked with, “This,
This is what love looks like, and every year
It is too early, but every year still a herald.”
I want to approach this poem with my boots
Tapping careless on each line, breathing in the love of you
In the overgrown stretches that line the sidewalk
Of my childhood home, black-eyed susans
And orphaned tulips and you, to whom I have wanted
To write a love poem for so many years.
I want to write you a love poem like I am a child again
And only just learning what it is to want to lie next to someone
And close my eyes and know only the stretch
Of each of their breaths; who coaxes no clumsy odes
Or contrived metaphors, but only writes in their journal
“I love you, I love you,” and means it.
Narcissus who kisses his own reflection,
I think they have forgotten a piece of your story.
I think you rose your perfect head to the first breath of warmth
And knelt above the still-frozen lake and knew
That you were the first of all things beautiful
That your death would mark the true beginning of spring.
You taste one breath of the smiling sun and give yourself wholly
To a sleeping mother, who will lay you in a moss bed
Of crocus and violets under robin red-breast feathers;
Beloved first child who never learns that February kills,
That March is for mourning, that when at last she cries in April
It will water the promised flowers of May.
You are every viridescent daydream nestled
In an impossible background of age-riddled fencing and
Moss between brickwork and the crawling inevitability
Of ivy-crowned stonework on the edge of the city line
And of insistent roots beneath the pavement, and yet
You are more life than all of them combined.
The Victorians named you chivalrous,
Said you held in your yellow cup respect and regard, true,
But also unrequited love and deceitful hopes;
But I think these are not bad things because
Who but you could teach me to love myself so recklessly,
To savor life for heartache and not despite it?
THE WIZARD'S WORLDS
An excerpt from Chapter 1 — Long-Form Comedic Fiction
The house, Corin thinks, is exactly the sort of place you would expect to find a wizard, provided you came equipped with the assumption that all wizards are tacky pack rats. Which, in Corin’s (admittedly limited) experience, they are. Not that he intends to say that within earshot of the Wise and Mysterious Feidlimid, on whose doorstep he currently finds himself wavering. No, unless you particularly envy the life of a slightly-diseased frog with a mild personality disorder, that’s not the sort of thing you say in front of a wizard.
Corin raises his fist to knock for maybe the third time since he arrived, and hesitates again. He has interacted with only a few wizards in his time, yes, but each was more cryptic and worrisome than the last. He remembers, fondly, thinking that the worst thing about wizards was their tendency to translate what the birds outside their windows were saying, which was especially irksome since the birds in question were usually loudly requesting intercourse. That was what he thought was the worst thing, of course, before The Great and Terrible Feyrdon had turned Finn into a wolf, and Corin had been the only one available to break the curse and had gotten a little too familiar with the taste of dog slobber for his own liking, and—well. Suffice to say that there are far more harrowing—and more embarrassing—potential side effects of a wizard knowing you exist.
“What are you so worried about?” he mutters to himself. “You are Sir Corin of Stardale, knight to His Majesty King Isor the True. You will not be intimidated by a man whose doormat declares the virtues of life, laughter, and love!”
Corin knocks. After a moment, he hears footsteps approaching from somewhere within the house, accompanied by a grumbling that doesn’t make much sense from what he can hear of it. It sounds something like, “—can’t even remember what genre I landed in this time. Nice one, Fed, filling your own damn house with normal tchotchkes, makin’ it damn-near impossible to tell what world you’re in. What was it, Horror? Sci-fi?”
The man (Or is it a woman? It’s difficult to tell.) who answers the door could never be anyone but Feidlimid; only a wizard would dress like that. Corin doesn’t know how the embroidered flowers on their shirt lie so flat or stand out so brightly, but he assumes it’s magic.
“Oh,” Feidlimid says upon seeing Corin. “Right. It was Fantasy.” They sigh. “Look, if you’re selling Jesus or quests, I’m not interested. Cookies or dumb trinkets and we’ll see.”
Corin realizes he’s staring. “Ah! Um. Right! No, no I—I seek to sell no wares, Good Wizard.”
Feidlimid mutters something about knowing waterfowl carnally, but Corin barrels on.
“I am Sir Corin of Stardale,” he continues, “knight to His Majesty King Isor the True. I am on a quest to rescue the Princess Elera from the Raven Tower, where she is—”
The door slams shut in his face before he can finish. Corin stands on the doorstep for a moment, opens and closes his mouth a few times as though to speak, fails to think of anything to say, and knocks again.
“Not interested!” Feidlimid calls through the door.
“Please, my Lord! Er, Lady? My Good Wizard, I implore thee, you must—”
“I don’t gotta do jack squat, kid! Now scram!”
Corin mutters a swear (and counts his blessings that Finn isn’t around to tease him for it). The wise-woman at the inn had told him to use her name only as a last resort, but he fears he has no other choice. “I have been told to inform you,” he calls through the door, “that if you do not let me in, Aradia is not above affecting your supply of… ah, kush? Am I saying that correctly?”
A pause. Then, slowly, the door cracks open, and Feidlimid peeks through. “She wouldn’t.”
Whatever kush is, Corin thinks, it must be vital to Feidlimid’s potions. He straightens and trains a level stare on Feidlimid. “Oh, but I fear she would, Good Wizard.”
Feidlimid glares back at him for a moment before finally thrusting open the door. They continue grumbling under their breath, but past a general sense of annoyance toward Aradia, Corin doesn’t process much of it. Instead, he finds himself transfixed by the assortment of oddities that litter the confines of the house’s small front room. He sees several bulbous, thorny shapes that, judging by the shades of green, are probably foreign plants harvested for use in potions (although Corin wonders if it is customary to store potion ingredients in bright pink containers that look vaguely like horses). Strange books titled in languages he has never seen before teeter in haphazard stacks among what look to be discarded metal cubes. Corin would wonder why they aren’t on the shelves, but then again, the shelves are a jumbled puzzle of fabrics and materials Corin could not name if he tried. He gingerly picks up an oddly-shaped vase of the most beautifully glittering stained glass he has ever seen in such small quantities.
“What strange and wondrous artifacts you have, O Good Wizard,” he breathes, hoping to appeal to the disproportionate pride all wizards seem to have in the weird stuff they’ve found in locations of questionable legality.
“That,” Feidlimid says, plucking the object from Corin’s hands and returning it to the shelf, “is my bong. Now make it snappy and get out.”
“Fiedlimid,” Corin starts, then frowns. He knows he’s seen the name written out, but Aradia had mostly referred to Feidlimid by strange and whimsical titles like Crazy Old Coot and Stoner McLoner, so he can’t be sure how to properly say it. “Er, Fedlimid. Feilimid? How exactly do you pronounce your name? I’ve, uh, heard differing reports.”
Feidlimid rolls their eyes. “I’ve been called everything from FedEx to Fate Limited Edition. I don’t give two shits if you pronounce my name right. Frankly, I don’t want you sticking around long enough to use it too often, and I certainly don’t need you passing on my resume to any other plucky young dumbasses.”
“Great Wizard—”
“Not a wizard.”
“Pardon?”
“Just some schmuck with a bit of mystic-looking bullshit lying around. Not a wizard.”
Corin frowns. “No? You certainly dress like one.”
“Yeah,” Feidlimid counters with a raised eyebrow, “if I was auditioning to mentor a young, animated Arthur, maybe.”
“Sir—madam—whatever you are, you make so little sense that you must, forgive my saying it, be either wizened or mad!” He realizes belatedly that he is attempting to get a rise out of Feidlimid, and thanks the stars yet again that Finn stayed back at the Inn. Otherwise, he’d have never heard the end of how ‘you knights would all rather be turned into sex-addled hedgehogs by a peeved off mage than be bored for half a second.’
Unfortunately, Feidlimid doesn’t seem to be in the mood to perform any grand displays of magic, hedgehog-related or otherwise. They fold their arms and regard Corin with a tight smile. “If it turns out I’m mad,” they ask, “will you get the hell out of my house?”
Corin takes a slow, deep breath and closes his eyes. He really does wish Finn were here. He’s better with people than Corin is, and much more willing to put up with the whimsical shenanigans that wizards are prone to. But alas, Aradia warned that only one of them should attempt to approach Feidlimid, and it would hardly seem fitting for a knight of King Isor the True to send a manservant in his stead.
“If not a Great Wizard,” Corin says, taking great care not to let his voice show that he is gleefully imagining tiny dragons setting Feidlimid’s hair on fire, “then what am I to call you?”
Feidlimid shrugs. “Fed is fine.”
“Fine.”
“Short for Fed Up, get it?”
“I really, really don’t.”
He must not do as good a job as he thinks keeping the weariness out of his tone, because Feidlimid—Fed—sighs and gestures toward one of the rickety chairs arranged loosely around a gray table.
“Look,” Fed says, “I’m not helping you on your quest, or whatever the hell it is you’re doing, but you can sit for a couple minutes. Probably do you some good. I can see if I got any coffee left, maybe. Y’all got coffee in Ye Olde Fantasy Dark Ages? Don’t wanna accidentally send you into cardiac arrest or something.”
Corin hesitantly sits on the proffered chair, which squeals indignantly under his weight. “You speak such strange words, Fed,” he says, “and seem to shift so arbitrarily to kindness. Is it any wonder I take you to be a wizard?”
“Look,” Fed says again. They grimace and take a seat across from Corin. “Look. I don’t—it’s not personal, okay? Well, okay, it’s kind of personal. But I’ve tried kindness, kid, and it doesn’t turn people away as fast as being an asshole does.”
It’s the closest they’ve come to making sense since Corin set foot in their house, and so Corin nods slowly. “Wise advice. I shall take it in—”
“Shit, no,” Fed interrupts, “I wasn’t trying to give you advice, I just—Look. I’ve spent a lot of time and effort doing my damndest not to have to give advice to anyone, okay? And everywhere I go, every single world I travel to, I’ve always got dumb kids like you—no offense—knocking on my door or whatever expecting me to be the wise old woman in the woods or the old man out on the edge of town who’s gonna tell them whatever they need to know at some pivotal moment in their own personal drama. Couldn’t even retire to Florida without getting tied up in some Hallmark bullshit. What I’m trying to say is this.”
They reach out to place a hand on Corin’s shoulder and look him in the eyes. There is something impossibly knowledgeable and ancient in those eyes, something edged in a haziness Corin cannot begin to name. For the briefest of moments, Corin feels deeply, achingly understood.
“I do not give a singular shit,” Fed tells him earnestly, “about a single thing you’re going through. Please leave my house immediately.”