Until It Sleeps

Revolving blue petals/Dim the soft silent rotting rooms. --K. Knapp

A Grim Week

It’s been an emotionally grim week. My nephew, Kyle Knapp, lost his life in a house fire. He had been living in the home I grew up in. I went back for the funeral service on Saturday and to be with my sister and her family. Try to find needed closure. But I soon realized it’s not to be, not yet, even though Kyle has told me, 'It’s ok, Uncle David.' It just hurts too damn much. Still, I can see the road ahead and what I need to do for him.

You see, Kyle sent me dozens of poems and several short stories over the last year following the release of Pluvial Gardens, and while the first collection of poetry is striking, what follows is ten-fold beyond. Kyle had begun digging deeper within himself and pulled up astonishing insight from his soul. I can’t even imagine where his art would have taken him as his writing continued to season over the next decade.

Now it’s my turn do justice to Kyle’s writing and get the next collection of poems out. I’m going to take my time and get it right. Kyle had said that having the Pluvial Gardens eBook published was the highlight of his life. That does my heart good. I want to get Gardens out in paperback very soon (something he had wanted) and begin doing inventory on just how much of a body of work Kyle left behind. I’ve found the first eight chapters of a novel he had emailed to me, unfortunately, I think the rest has been lost. But it’s a novel we had talked about, and maybe in time I can finish it for him.

I wish you had known Kyle. He was a wonderful, caring human being. Yes, there were times he was difficult, but he always came back to say, “Sorry, David.” It saddens me he didn’t conquer his alcoholism, but he touches on that in the unreleased poetry, and maybe, just maybe, it will help someone else. I plan to dedicate a significant portion of the sales of all his books to an organization that my sister feels Kyle would have wanted.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Kyle and I have some work to do.

Kyle Joseph Knapp 1989-2013

As I stepped with the blinded women, hand in hand to the wooden terrace
The clouds crawled from the waste like shimmering roses,
And the heather blushed in the snow, pale carmine to a pulse of opal.

I told her of the pluvial gardens
Of the terse white gloam
Of the rotting billows of ashen snow
That blow the silken frost of hemlock so cold
Swathed in a bower of magenta and stone.

My promise to you, Kyle, is that all your poems and short stories will be published. Goodbye for now.

"Hollow" by Neliza Drew at BEAT to a PULP

In the hours between late and dawn, I stroked Ray lazily. Neither of us was feeling much of anything, what with my rebuilt hand full of fresh scars and screws and his newly-built penis created from a strip of thigh and some other spare parts. It was just as well, a metaphor maybe for how little we felt on the inside, both of us numb from the things that broke us. Both of us awake because we couldn't bear to sleep.

He was my only remaining client; I'd stopped turning tricks. Again. But I couldn't give him up. And he wouldn't stop paying me. We couldn't go back to normal. Maybe I'd never known it—or couldn't remember it—but I'd gotten close enough to see it through the glass. To normal, we were both repulsive, some reminder of what could be. I joked that at least he got a few thanks along with the stares, but that wasn't him, wasn't what he wanted.  

Read more of "Hollow" by Neliza Drew at BEAT to a PULP.

The Cinderella Myth by Sandra Seamans

The end of July heat was suffocating Brea. She tossed and turned, feeling smothered by the sheets, the room, and her own troubled thoughts. Sliding out of bed she walked across the room to the window, hoping for a stray breeze. Moonlight filled the night sky, twining its luminous beauty into the dark landscape of her grandfather's farm. Looking out across the pasture she watched moonbeams skip across the surface of the pond. The promise of cool water beckoned.

Why not? Grandpa was asleep and the heat was unbearable. She pulled on a pair of shorts then tiptoed through the house without turning on the lights. The screen door in the kitchen squeaked as she pushed it open and stepped out onto the porch. Brea held her breath until the loud snort from Grandpa's room returned to its familiar snoring cadence. She couldn't face another round of his anger.

Brea touched her bruised cheek, remembering the back of Grandpa's hand as he struck out at her. In her whole life he'd never struck her.

His words hurt worst than the slap. "Did you think I wouldn't find out? Did you think nobody would tell me?"

Read more of "The Cinderella Myth" by Sandra Seamans.

Coming Soon: The Empty Badge by Wayne D. Dundee

It's been weeks since Cash Laramie, the famed "Outlaw Marshal," has been heard from. Meanwhile, at the Federal Marshal headquarters in Cheyenne, Wyoming, some disturbing reports are starting to filter in about the notorious Driscoll Gang rapidly hitting a series of banks, allegedly with the aid of a badge-wearing accomplice claiming to be Laramie. Can it be true? Can it be that the lawman with the hair-trigger temper and the mile-wide independent streak has finally gone completely rogue?

The truth is seldom easy to find. And on the lonely, twisting trails of northwestern Wyoming in the 1880s, it was often lost forever. But every now and then, when those dusty trails converged in certain unexpected ways, answers were revealed and justice was delivered in a blaze of gunfire.

The Empty Badge is the seventh title in the Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles series and the third written by Wayne D. Dundee following the Amazon best-selling success of Manhunter's Mountain and The Guns of Vedauwoo.

Terrie Farley Moran at BEAT to a PULP

A life-long New Yorker, Terrie Farley Moran has had stories published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and in numerous anthologies. Her noir short, “When A Bright Star Fades,” was named a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2008, and can be found in the e-collection, THE AWARENESS and other deadly tales. Terrie blogs amid the grand banter of a group of talented New York mystery writers at Women of Mystery and is presently writing a cozy mystery set in Fort Myers Beach, Florida.

I'm always honored when Terrie stops by BEAT to a PULP with a superb short like "Bobby Wycoff Is Dead."

Flashpoint

My charmers and I were in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, today. Took a ferry to the site upon which initial shots fired on April 12, 1861, sparked the American Civil War.