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  In hindsight of course, it was pretty strange that I ran to Mom for rescue from the Storm Giants. Mom saving me from the Storm Giants was the only time I can remember her saving anyone from anything, and I finally come to realize I could expect no other acts of salvation.

  A blur of years have passed since I left home as a young teenager; years spent learning the Life, making myself into the tight unit I had to become to survive. I have it together now. I’m well respected in all the right circles, and I’ve earned a place for myself where my talents are respected.

  But I can’t share any of that with Mom even if I’d been inclined to speak it, as she lays here in a doped up sleep she’ll never awaken from.

  She’s just another harmless, dying woman now. She’d been a torturer once, and a beautiful dancer that foolish horny men had drooled over as if famished while vomiting cash in her general direction. But she was also the woman who bore me in her womb and showed me that single act of kindness so long ago.

  What was it all supposed to mean? Didn’t have a clue.

  “Abracadabra, Mom,” I whisper, not really expecting it to impinge on her comatose brain at all.

  I stand up, kiss her on her unresponsive cheek, and walk away from Mother one more time.

  For the last time?

  No: Even I know better than that.

  Later that night in a Fremont motel room, my eyes open and I’m fully awake instantly, listening hard. Something’s just happened; I know it even if I can’t tell what it is.

  I don’t really mind this interruption in sleep pattern, as I’d been in the middle of one of my trade-marked ‘Storm Giant’ dreams (which were more distracting than the usual nightmares). I dislike sleeping at the best of times.

  I call the Hospital on impulse – they tell me Mom has just passed a few moments before. Would I care to make funeral arrangements? I flatten down the self as I hang up, pack my bags, and am on the road within five minutes.

  As I drive at exactly the speed limit down the highway, Mom’s face looms to fill the night sky in front of my car, strong emotions contorting her face as she looks down at me. What was she trying to convey?

  I can’t tell with the Storm Giants laughing behind her, even if they can’t get past her, can’t get all the way at me as long as she stands there. I don’t like seeing the Storm Giants while awake, but it’s been a while since I last moved and they were overdue to close in. I guess it’s time to change towns again.

  In the meantime, as I’m alone it’s safe to let the snarl exit my mouth as I raise one hand from the steering wheel and claw the delusional images to the side – they obligingly disappear for now, leaving nothing in front of my humming little rental car but the two-lane blacktop illuminated by my headlights.

  It’s good that I’m temporarily rid of them one more time as I have to concentrate now. There’s a man in Salt Lake City that needs to be dead, and I’ve been paid good money to make it happen.

  Girl’s Night Out

  I read here in the paper, the Pope wants to finally allow prayer to the Virgin Mary. Seems folks have been praying to her for centuries now, and it's been giving the Vatican conniption fits all this time.

  She's only Jesus' mother, the padres would yell at their various flocks - she's only a woman, and she has no formal rank in God's army. A lot of those good Catholics would stare blankly back, then turn right around and pray to her anyway, on the sly as it were.

  I guess it's only natural to pray to Mother Mary. Folks probably think she's a little more likely to care if you're lying there squirting arterial blood in the gutter.

  After all, you ever take a gander at pictures of the saints? They're a pretty stern looking bunch.

  Even Jesus, you take a good look at him up on a crucifix sometime, he looks pretty distracted by that whole 'crown of thorns, spikes through the hands and feet' thing. I mean, he's got problems of his own, right?

  But prayer to the Madonna probably cuts right past all that, straight back to ancient times, when the Earth was worshipped as the Mother of us all. Back then, women owned the magic, and the whole wide world to boot.

  Males had no part in the magic of making babies, women being thought to be impregnated by the wind. Us guys were basically kept around as boy toys and occasional human sacrifices to improve the crops, not to mention lifting heavy objects and reaching things down from tall places. Men were definitely kept in their place back then, and women and the Earth Mother ruled over all.

  Then along came those milk-drinking father-loving Aryans, strutting onto the scene with new-fangled ideas about men having something to do with making babies. They stopped the sacrifice of males and generally trampled on this woman's paradise, believing that penises and state-of-the-art cutlery gave them the right to treat females like livestock.

  Heck, they couldn't even leave the Earth Mother alone: they threw down her temples and married her priestesses (to put it politely) and said that she was inferior to their male god Zeus. They went so far as to rewrite all the histories, putting it down that their manly god had created the world by impregnating Mother Earth with his thunder cock way back in the beginning of things, one of the first known examples of spin-doctoring.

  Of course, worship of the Earth Mother continued in secret, back in the sticks, and women didn't always take the new male regime lying down. I'm reminded of the maenads, back in Greek times – housewives, little old ladies and pubescent cuties would get together in the hills sometimes for wild doings.

  They'd light bonfires, strip naked, and get totally blasted on hallucinogenic mushrooms. Then they'd run naked through the darkness in screaming mobs, tearing apart small animals and children if they could catch them, and gang-raping any men they found.

  When the man could no longer rise to the occasion as it were, the women would do a little elective surgery before cutting his throat with a stone knife, then dance around holding the poor guy's family jewels high. Hungry hormones and hallucinogenic frenzy, all wrapped up in a homicidal ball: makes a guy want to shrivel right up, if you know what I mean. Men knew better than to go out of doors some nights, back then.

  Men still acknowledge the Mother whether we admit it or not, and the power of women too. Even today, when the fellas stand around making jokes about PMS and 'that time of month,' there's an undercurrent of nervousness to our laughter.

  Any chauvinistic oppression of womankind may be because some men are terrified of giving women a leg up again. Woman and motherhood are still the dominant forces in our world, they still own the sex magick – and most of us men know it, too.

  Even the Church has had to take the Mother into account. When those old time Christian evangelists first came on the scene enforcing baptism with sword and torch, they realized a lot of folks still gave worship and sacrifice to the Earth Goddess. Being the sly dogs that they were, these missionaries told the people, "Oh, you're just worshipping the Virgin Mary under a different name! So come on along and hop on the Jesus train with us!"

  And the people did. But when they were in church, kneeling in front of the Virgin – it was the Mother they prayed to. The Vatican realized their new converts were still performing idolatry, still worshipping that heathen Earth Goddess by worshipping Mary, and they did their best to put a stop to it. Until now.

  All this time, the Earth Mother has been on hold, like a fly stuck in amber from the old days. When the Pope recognizes prayer to Mary, will it open a psychic floodgate; will it bring the Goddess back?

  And when she returns, will it be like a blooming fruit tree, all touchy-feely and cute little baby cartoon animals with big eyes? Or will she rear from the dark like a tigress, eyes and teeth glittering, blood dripping down her arm from the uplifted sacrificial knife?

  All I know is, if I look out my window some night and see fire on the hilltop, and hear chanting women's voices blowing down the wind - I know just what I'll do. I'll tweak my blinds shut, crank up the volume on the Knicks game with my remote, and lean back in my recliner as I
pound down a six-pack or three – and pray I don't hear fingers fumbling at my front door, trying to gain entrance.

  Maybe that old Pope should just leave the Earth Mother in peace.

  Greater Than the Sum

  Someone once told me I should write, and so I did. Endlessly, perhaps ad nauseum, pouring all my priceless thoughts and precious feelings onto paper, painting images and pictures with words. Telling tales from my life or making them up from whole cloth.

  Every story unique. Or so I thought at first.

  Then one day someone pointed out that all my stories seemed to be about my father. At first I didn't believe it - until I went back over my work carefully.

  To my amazement, Dad was there, in everything I had written. It was like one of those novelty optical illusion posters, where you can't see the real, hidden picture until you squint and concentrate very hard - then it lunges at you from the background like a rabid jack-in-the-box.

  The stories of defiant young boys versus old ogres were easy enough to spot. But my father inhabited all the others also, in disguise.

  In one tale he was the vicious ax murderer, gloating over his bound victim; in another, the passerby leering around the alley corner at a gang rape. Dad was always the conqueror, always at the top of the food chain. He seemed to grin up at me from all the pages I had written, as if his ghost had crept in and fouled my writing like a worm at the core of an apple.

  I stopped writing for a long time after that.

  Dad had loomed over my life like an evil moon since I was a small boy. Above and beyond my personal catalog of abuses at his hands, I was there at the dinner table the night he murdered my uncle; the scene seared indelibly onto my thirteen-year-old mind. Even after he was executed by the State, my father still starred regularly in my dreams, in nightmares that made me spring shouting from the depths of sleep to sit ramrod straight in my bed, entwined in my sweat-drenched sheets.

  But I came back to my writing – I had to, you see. Once I'd had that outlet, not being able to write was like some sort of spiritual constipation – and more than that, something now seemed to draw me irresistibly back to my pen.

  I had to write again. And so I did. Yet now my father haunted my work openly.

  At first it was no more than a prickling at the back of my neck, or the sensation of a presence nearby. Soon enough though, the sketchy outlines of his face appeared, hovering in the air of my room at the periphery of my vision. He watched me as I worked, his ghostly face growing ever more real, fading from view with ever more arrogant reluctance whenever I whipped my head around to look directly at him.

  Finally he stopped disappearing no matter how long I stared. Each night after that when I sat down at my battered desk to write, I would see Dad's transparent shape floating next to me, peering over my shoulder as I scribbled words onto paper.

  His ghostly features twisted into his old familiar feral grin and his vaporous hands dangled bloodstained at his sides. He looked just as he had the last time I saw him in life, standing over my uncle's mangled remains, shackled, as the police prepared to take him away.

  During the light of day I was racked with doubts and suspicions: Was I mad? Was this really happening? What was the ultimate end of this whole process? What did Dad want?

  Each day I swore never to write again. But when darkness fell, my writing desk would pull me to it like a magnet. And like any addict I was drawn in again.

  I was terrified by the growing hold my father had over my writing, but unable now to stop this obsession. Dad was taking over, he was the main character of all my stories- and yet, to my surprise, a small part of me welcomed him.

  I knew so little about my father, the man behind the bloody mask, the monster that had made my childhood unbearable. Each new story I wrote showed me another facet of him, and each new story made his ghost at my shoulder more and more dense.

  Finally, I was close to breaking. Something had to be done.

  In desperation I decided to no longer let him be the predator in my stories – he would be prey!

  That night I sat down determined to regain control of my writing. In my first story of the evening, I made Dad a homeless bum, drained empty of his blood by a bloodsucking baby in an abandoned van. The creased grin left Dad's translucent face, replaced by a rippling expression of distinct unease.

  In the next tale he was stabbed to death by a horde of six-inch tall imps, in a dumpster behind a convenience store. Dad turned an uncomfortable, bilious shade of green as he observed this development. I sat straighter at my desk now as my father's scars began to be erased from me, one by one.

  I wrote on, in an almost hysterical fever as the hours passed, far past midnight. I wore pencils down to stubs, continuing to scribble more and more stories even as my hands cramped into numbness.

  Dad began fading beside me as I wrote, and every trauma I had suffered at his hands as a child faded with him. In tale after tale I heaped upon him every degradation and suffering that I could imagine – and I am very imaginative, I assure you.

  Finally I stopped to take a breath. There was that hushed air outside my window that comes when the darkness is just about to flee to wherever it sleeps, and the dawn prepares to erupt.

  All the tortures my father had inflicted on me when I was young, all the agony that had been my childhood - it was if it had never been. I stood erect to stretch and looked at the heaps of paper on my desk, covered with my self-healing words. And then I turned defiantly toward my father's ghost.

  He no longer stood there. Instead, I was now looking down into a spectral grave that hung in the air a few inches above my floor.

  A little ghost boy lay in it, almost completely buried, only his face exposed. I recognized the boy, from old family photos taken during the Depression: it was my father. He had become as a child.

  Somehow I sensed that one more story would bury him completely. The little boy in the grave stared up at me helplessly, waiting for the last inevitable handful of psychic earth to cover his face.

  I pictured that boy's spirit buried alone for eternity, and I shuddered. I could not write that last story.

  I bent from my chair and reached down into his grave clawing aside the ectoplasmic soil. It parted effortlessly, with a feeling as of cobwebs ripping.

  I pulled that ghost boy to me and held him close. His arms clung to me, but lightly as a night breeze.

  Dad began to cry, and I comforted him as best I could. For the first time I asked myself what his childhood must have been like. I began to almost understand.

  As his ghost wails rose like the piping cries of some strange sea bird there in my lonely room, I pictured all the other people of the world, moving in their solitary courses like planets through the void. All of us alone, locked eternally within prisons of flesh and bone. Did we all hide secret faces in our hearts?

  Dad's spirit stopped howling in lament, and lay quiet against my breast. We were father and son together, two pieces of a puzzle fitted together to create something totally new. For a moment, the sensation was peaceful, blissful, the child parent to the father.

  But then I felt Dad's ghost smile, the ectoplasmic lips rippling back into a feral sneer, and he sank into my flesh like dew seeping into plowed earth. I heard that vicious bass snicker of his that I knew so well, but echoing this time from within the flesh drum of my own torso, the laugh exiting my own lungs to spew from my mouth in dry, heaving grunts.

  After a few minutes the paroxysms subsided. Dad's ghost tendrils had infiltrated my entire being, and a new creature stood up from the floor to look at this stranger's apartment that I had infested for so many years.

  The new amalgam cooperated in moving our mutual body to the window, where we stood looking out through our shared eyes.

  We could hear the world waking up outside, the ever-increasing stirrings of the human ant nest around us. We smiled: we will be with you soon.

  We Are the World

  The noon sun streams down onto the packed
crowd. It’s Sunday, free concert day. There are maybe a hundred people in the audience listening as the reggae band on stage hammers out the jams.

  Frank would need a shoehorn to work his way through the mass of people to the stage up front, so he and Sherry are standing in back, next to the ruins. He looks down at Sherry, his wife – she’s moving with the tropically metallic sound of the steel drums, her hips swishing from side to side with the beat in that sultry way she has, her long linen dress clinging to the lines of her body.

  She feels Frank’s eyes on her and looks up at him with a smile – a smile he knows from experience promises a hot time on the home front tonight. Frank returns her smile, but only with his lips – his nervous gaze lifts away from Sherry, to focus on the woman by the ruins.

  The ruins are a tumbledown mass of condemned buildings at the edge of the park. Frank and Sherry are in line with the main entrance, which gapes blackly like a toothless mouth. Broken glass litters the ground around the entrance, and graffiti covers the shattered foundations.

  Squatters, drug addicts and cultists use the abandoned buildings from time to time, and the ruins have a bad reputation in the community – people whisper of chanting heard at midnight beneath the full moon, and pets disappear regularly from the surrounding neighborhoods. The ruins have always given Frank the creeps – he remembers wondering why the concert promoters would put their show so close to them.

  When he and Sherry had first arrived, a tall woman was huddled alone by the ruins, talking to herself as she rocked back and forth squatting with her long arms wrapped around her shins. She was wearing a dark bandanna that completely covered her hair; Frank couldn’t tell her age. He was struck by the contrast between her gaunt, shadowed face and her bloated body that seemed to strain the seams of her thrift store clothing.