𝙱𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚎 𝚄𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛 𝚊 𝙱𝚊𝚍 𝚂𝚒𝚐𝚗

Kicking off a summertime extravaganza of relatively straightforward, no-frills fiction.

He sat in the hot seat, the reader’s chair, staring down a tribunal of stone-faced peers.

“Good evening, everyone. I’m the narrator of this story.”

He cleared his throat and looked at the book in his cool, calm and collected hands.

“In the beginning… God created the heavens and the earth.”

Pause for polite laughter, perhaps even applause.

“Oops! Wrong story.”

He flipped to a different page.

“This one is a parable, about courage in the face of adversity, homeownership, and the nightmare of non-Euclidean geometry. Pay close, careful attention to the crab. Let’s begin.”

---

Despite her birth in early July, nineteen fifty-five, arriving smack between the post-war economic boom and the revolt of the hippies, Jiminy Harper never figured his wife of nearly forty years, Charlene Dixon Harper, would die of cancer. Her tragic, mildly premature demise brought waves of affection and support from his community in West Texas, neighborhood women baking their best casseroles for an elderly man, fresh on the market and likely lonely. Behind his cataracts, however, Jiminy’s focus narrowed in pursuit of a troubling passion project: to build a proper memorial for his deceased Charlene on the front lawn of his suburban home.

It started small, respectable, a halfway decent display of the love that bound their lives together, orchids and hydrangeas arranged near a modest cross. The local bible study ladies smiled every time they walked on by. Emboldened by grief, an emotional boulevard that’s anything but linear, Jiminy trekked down to an office supply chain and returned with a custom, fit-to-print banner that read MY DEAR CHARLENE, I MISS YOU SO MUCH in decorative capital letters. He staked two thin pillars of wood in the grass behind the flowers and hung his sign for all to see. This brazen act of empathy irked the other members of his cul-de-sac, their generous heaps of deep-fried sympathy running dangerously low.

“That’s ridiculous,” one said.

“He must realize he’s embarrassing himself,” another added.

“How dare he tarnish the upstanding veneer of our neighborhood,” a third muttered under his sour breath.

Unfortunately for these hostile opinion-makers, greater disappointment was imminent. Jiminy paid a visit to the fireworks warehouse on the outskirts of town and purchased four jumbo deluxe sparklers, aiming to further honor Charlene with flaming electric fanfare. At this point, his homeowners association felt well within their right to intervene; they submitted a motion to propose an emergency meeting of the board to put a swift end to this madness.

Under Jiminy’s creaky door was delivered one well-composed petition, featuring one hundred elegant signatures, a document granting him permission to continue experiencing sadness but would he please tone it down, scale it back, the hazards were immense, combining a large burning device with arid southern air and distant water sources, don’t be a complete and total fool, Jiminy! This final statement was not included, however the subliminal message was loud, clear, firm and unwavering.

Fortunately for the old widower, his ears didn’t hear quite as good as they once did; from the raw red clay of a nearby quarry, he shaped a full-size replica of Charlene’s mortal form, a terracotta reproduction of her brightest moment, that thin ivory grin from their wedding day. And yet, why stop there? He folded and molded numerous other soft statues of his late wife, chronicling her spectrum of good moods, from hip-to-be-square on up to slap-happy-as-can-be.

The tightly-maintained tempers of his most-antagonistic opposition simply boiled over in their shared stock pot, and the organization filed an injunction against poor Jiminy, citing the importance of aesthetic standards to prevent an invasion of the garish, the outlandish, what’s next, junker cars up on bricks, motor homes with missing parts, decommissioned sailboats for local strippers to shake their derrières upon!

That ancient man, a stubborn roadblock by any other name, ignored the frothing vitriol of his not-so-neighborly detractors, loaded his pick-up truck with lumber from the local hardware store, and constructed a rudimentary barrier around his private property, a pseudo-force-field to shield the probing eyes of his enemies, practically quadrupling the height of his white picket fence overnight.

Well, enough was enough: the homeowners association rang the sheriff, who dialed the deputy, who sent over an officer to enforce eminent domain and seize Jiminy’s land for repurposing into a public park. On a balmy afternoon, the lawman knocked on the gate and entered the premises, the first trespasser in over a week who crossed the perimeter with efforts to see that towering homage to Charlene.

What the young recruit witnessed instead was a terrifying impossibility of metaphysics, an image of the cosmic invisible, filling him with a sense of disorientation, insignificance and dread. Through the gloaming, in the space where a simple floral memorial once stood, a perfect sphere floated a meter above the ground yet also seemed to blot out the sun, converting the eclipsed light into a reserve of crackling chi. In the dark, each right angle was a sharp left turn, and every straight line curved away to destinations most infernal.

---

The narrator glanced up and smiled at his audience. “We’ll conclude with a short Q&A. You supply the Q, I’ll spice it up with some A. Nothing? Alright, thank you and have a nice day.”

If you like my jive and would like me to survive, perhaps even thrive, then consider purchasing a copy of my debut novel, The Charlatan. Available here.