NOIR: Another Excerpt
Read the first excerpt here:
You never can tell what desperation will make someone do, but you never ever expect something like that. My own sister, casket closed. The details never made it to me, but her face, or what was left of her head, was a real mess as I understand. Annabelle was always odd, allowed to be peculiar all her life by Jim and Alice. She had aspirations, high ones, in the art world, but she got caught up with that man, that man who didn't even shed a tear over her grave, or at least not one that anyone heard or saw. Such indecency. At least have the courage to fake it, the vile pig. He was an artist or musician, but he never made any art or wrote any songs. A real peculiar man, but he carved out a living the way most failed artists do, by towing the line and edging along in cubicles that they spent their youth scoffing, but he was purely working class, so it's no surprise he never rose above.
That poor girl, she must have all of his disease in her, the peculiarity, the bouts of rage, of depression, and now she's got the suicide to factor in, and I wonder whose fault it was, that man's or our parents who allowed her to dream, to grow whims, and never tried to put her feet down properly, but they nailed mine down, oh boy, did they nail me down, and I'm glad they did, and I owe it to their recognition of past mistakes. Annabelle lived in another world all her life, head past the clouds, breathing smoke behind the house, under the light of the alley and the garage. She was always out there, halfdancing, eyes closed, probably hallucinating, waiting for him or her or whoever was coming to pick her up and drive her past the suburbs, out of these dead cities. She dreamt of New York, of Paris. They all do, the ones who think they're Picasso or whatever. I guess she was good, that's what people said anyway. Lines and scribbles and fits of agony. She'd rip her hair out over them, but they all looked the same to me and she screamed at me once because I threw one away. She left it on my bed for me, a big white sheet of paper with what looked like deer tracks near one of the corners. How was I to know? I crumpled it up and tossed it away. She said I didn't appreciate anything and Jim and Alice agreed that it was a mean thing to do, but, anyway.
That man stood there watching the casket like he watched her life fall apart and never offered a hand to help, only pulled her deeper into a world of shit that he created. I never liked him, even when Anna really loved him. Always an ass, always loud, always crass. They loved him, though, Jim and Alice, especially Jim took to him right away like he was the real thing with his Morrison affectations, and is there anyone worse to emulate than that fat bastard? He wrote poems on the napkins, on the table, on the walls, and Anna loved him especially for that, I think, his unconventionality.
And I saw that poor girl that day, the day her mother was buried, and she seemed to be unaware. Her hair, usually curled and dark, like my sister's, was cropped and brutalized, like a patient in a mental asylum. All uneven and I cried looking at her, but I couldn't go near because I hadn't seen her since before she could talk, but Anna sent me pictures every year. She did things like that, took a picture of her daughter every six months, a way to record time, to trace the past as it was written. I didn't recognize her at first, my niece, until I saw whose hand she was holding. That man. I wanted to think he did it to her, that in his madness he tried to kill her, one inch of hair at a time, but I guess she did it. That man came home to find his daughter with scissors in hand, hair chopped unevenly and haphazardly, sticking to the blood of his newly suicided wife. The cops said she found her mother and was in the room for at least two hours before that man arrived home. She could read by then, I think, five years old, and there was a note. Can't quite remember what it said, but it didn't point fingers or scream of insanity or delusion. It was short and kind of sweet, but there's nothing sweet about finding your mother without a head.
That poor poor girl. Her dress was robin’s egg blue and her shoes were bright red. I was mortified, at a funeral, at her mother's funeral, at the funeral of that man's wife, he couldn't even dress her properly. But that's what those types are like. No decency, not even a sense of it. My kids were afraid of her, the poor girl, and I cried through the whole ceremony, not because it was my sister, and not because I hadn't spoken to her in years, but because I knew we shared the same blood and even more so because of that poor girl. That poor wretched girl and the life she was forced to begin with.
Time eats you. Dead or dreaming.
That's what it said, the note, remembering now, and it still makes no sense to me, and I doubt she ever meant to. She was always like that, saying things, any thing, always sounding slightly philosophical, but meaning always nothing. Phrases that sound clever, empty stultifying phrases, and that's why they're always hard to remember. There's no meaning attached and she'd never explain what she meant, surely because she never meant anything. In worse moments, I think she did it, suicided, for much the same reason. Just to do it, as an act, empty of any meaning, or at least any meaning for her, because all it really means is that she left a beautiful little girl to meet the world without her, a little girl who would have her mother's blood staining her hands even on the day of her funeral. I never saw, but I was told that her palms were still crimson, that color between dried blood and new blood.
She gives me the creeps, honestly. I almost talked to her, almost picked her up in my arms and wept over her, but, when I got close, she saw me, and her eyes, a pale fire, those eyes, I felt like a sand sculpture, disintegrating under her gaze, like she was made of water. It's like she never saw me, though, but bore through me, and I know she recognized me. It froze my heart and I couldn't breathe, and I grabbed Victoria and Timmy and told them that we had to go, that they could meet their cousin later. They did. Eventually. But I wasn't there and I can't see her.
Years later, her and Victoria became friends, and I was scared again, still picturing my five year old niece and the horror behind her eyes. I watched her from my window one night when Victoria left the house with her. She looked up to my bedroom and I could feel her in there with me, inside me, turning everything cold, to ice. I closed the blinds and rushed to Drew, but I couldn't sleep that night, her specter everywhere, singing songs of doom in the room, and I knew, I think, for the first time what it meant to know my sister, what life was like for her, and what it meant to see her die, to see her die every single moment of every single day, in the faces of strangers, in the clouds at night, and buried in my retinas.
Pre-order Noir: A Love Story here.
My novels:
Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster
Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion
Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure
Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera
The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.
Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.
Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers
Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.
Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants
Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.
Some free books for your trouble:
Beautifully written