Scooter and me walk to the swimming hole. He’s playing the blues harp, but even his sour notes don’t distract me from thinking about my birthday. Without Mama, it wouldn’t be a birthday anyway. It would be a few friends, a cake and presents without promise. Now I have to talk to The Secret Keepers, Miss Helen or Miss Delores. If they know where Mama is, maybe they can send word that I refuse to turn twelve without her.
Excerpt from The Moonshine Thicket, by C. Dennis-Willingham
via Present
I was standing in my flight section of fifty-four men. All the ranking men had gone except for the second lieutenant, who was greener than a gourd. He was the squadron commander over everything, and he walked straight over to me and asked, “Soldier, you’ve done previous service, haven’t you?”
“No sir,” I said, standing in rigid attention and trying to figure out why he asked me that question.
“But you’ve had previous training, haven’t you?”
I thought real quick. Hell, I’d had previous training alright—previous training in ranching and sandwich making, not to mention in bank robbing conversations, fighting, and escaping. So I said, “Yes sir, I’ve had previous trainin’.”
“Where at?”
I knew what he was thinking, so again I lied through my teeth and said, “ROTC, sir.” Every officer likes to hear that.
“Can you drill men?”
Shoot, I’d seen enough picture shows to know how to drill men. Any idiot can drill men. I’d been drilled all my life—told what to do, what not to do, when to do it to boot.
“Yes sir!” I said.
He called over the little corporal, pointed to me, and said, “This is your new assistant.”
I had no inkling of an idea of what it meant to be an assistant to a corporal, but I learned quickly enough. An “assistant” meant wearing a piss pot, a little blue helmet that identified you as an assistant just like a piece of tape with your name on it identified you as the newcomer at a Baptist revival.
Little Corporal put that piss pot on my head, and I marched those soldiers straight to the classroom. Then I went to the PX to drink some more coffee.
(new logo for my children’s books)
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper by C. Dennis-Willingham
via Inkling
I dreamt I sat on a low branch of Grandfather tree. It was dark when the man walked toward me, twigs growing out of his head like petrified breadsticks.
I reached down, determined to break off each one so they would not interfere and grow roots to our ancestral tree. Each time I snapped one off, his twigs became thicker and stronger, harder to break off.
Still dreaming, I went to bed and saw the shadow once again- not from my friend the pecan tree lurking outside my window, but from the silhouette of the man I knew him to be.
It was not the Shadow Beast, but a real beast, lurking in the shadows.
In my waking moment, I knew he had to be stopped.
Excerpt from a CD-W novel
photo credit
via Silhouette
Narrated by Cono Dennis:
I listened to those summer bugs, the cicadas, the ones that sound like sandpaper being rubbed together. Aunt Nolie’s radio started to crackle. We knew we were getting close.
Finally, we heard the announcer, Clem McCarthy, saying that the fight was about to start right there in New York’s Yankee Stadium. I tried to picture Yankee Stadium, but I hadno reference for it. Instead, I pictured a crowd a whole lot bigger than the carnival tent in Ranger.
“In the red corner, Max Schmelling weighing in at one hundred and ninety-three pounds. In the black corner, Joe, the Brown Bomber, Louis, weighing in at one hundred ninety-eight and three-quarter pounds.”
The crowd on the radio roared. We sat real quiet, listening to every sound that came through Aunt Nolie’s brown box. Even Dad sat there with us, leaning forward with his hands folded under his chin like he was really there.
Joe had Max up against the ropes and then knocked him down three times. In two minutes and four seconds, Schmelling got in only two punches. The fight was over.
Joe Louis, the man that says, “He can run but he can’t hide” and “Everyone has a plan until they’ve been hit,” had marched right into that ring in front of thousands of people—heard by a million more—and showed us a thing or two about how to get things done.
Boxing’s not my career; it’s more like a survival skill that keeps me alive. I’ll use those skills when I need to, like when I arrive in Temple in a couple of hours, stare into my dad’s eyes and say, “Ding, ding, round one.”
via Finally
excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper
Dad’s ignoring me as usual, but I guess that’s better than a slap on my face. Mother dries off the breakfast skillet, picks up a fussy Delma, and says, “Cono, yer goin’ te town this weekend te sleep over at Mamaw’s.”
“How come?” I ask.
“Aunt Marguerite and Aunt Eva are there. They wanna see ye.”
Well, I can see all the way down to the truth, and it feels like I’ve swallered a ratt’ler. Dad’s still mad that I’d bitten that toothbrush in two and doesn’t want me around. I don’t want to be around him either.
Still, I don’t want to go. I like Dad’s sisters well enough, but I want to stay here with baby Delma.
Mamaw, Dad’s mother, is the toughest grandma I know. It would be a whole lot easier if I just ran away and caught a train to somewhere else. As I sit on that idea like a chicken warming her eggs. I decide against it. Everybody says that the trains are filled with starving hobos on their way to California. They say they like to eat children under the age of twelve. I’m afraid they’d eat me too even though I’m little and skinny.
I guess I have to go.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper
via Age
photo credit
Hardly Saddler’s rolled up his wagon, pitched a tent and started up his Medicine Show. He told us about his elixirs and about how, if we bought them, they could treat most of our ailments. If he had an elixir for meanness, I would have bought a bottle right then and there, mixed it into a Pearl beer and taken it straight home to Dad.
Hardley Saddler had all kinds of shows to see and games to play. One of them was a contest to see who could hammer their one big nail the fastest into the wooden board. This contest was only open to girls, since there were other contests open for boys.
“Hey, look who’s enterin’ the contest,” Dorothy says , spitting a watermelon seed at my face. I spit one back and see Aunt Nolie and Genevieve, Dorothy’s sister, step up to the boards.
Besides Aunt Nolie and Genevieve, there were five other ladies lined up at the board. The whistle blew and there they were, those gals pounding their nails in such a hurry you would have thought they were putting up a church roof to keep Jesus dry before a storm. We were all cheering and a hollering for our favorite girl and wouldn’t you know it? I was still picturing Freezer’s eyeballs twitching and Aunt Nolie hammering something else.
Aunt Nolie got real close to winning, her face just dripping with girl sweat. But Genevieve slammed that nail in quicker than a racehorse coming out the gate.
After Genevieve was declared the winner, I couldn’t believe what the first prize was. Genevieve had won herself a brand new, over-the-knee fur coat. Even the folks who had rooted for someone else to win were hooting and clapping that at least one person in Rotan owned a new fur coat.
The next morning peeked out the window and saw Lottie, Genevieve’s mother, standing outside her cabin, a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, her bare feet in the snow. She looked over and waved to me like she does every morning. But on this particular day, she waved like she was the Queen of England except she was wearing nothing but a toothless grin and a brand new over-the-knee fur coat.
Ain’t that a pisser?
A true story from No Hill for a Stepper.
photo credit
via Particular
While in the midst of writing No Hill for a Stepper, my father recounted this event. Here is the excerpt:
Delma and me come home from school and can’t find Mother anywhere. She’s always home when we come home from school, so we start to get a little worried until we see her talking to our Tourist Court neighbor on her front porch.
Miss Essie stoops over her cane and is a least a hundred years old if she’s a day. “C’mon ov’r here, kids, I wanna tell ye what I jes’t tol’ yer mother,” she says, using her cane like a big hand to wave us over. We sit on her step and look up at the old lady sitting in her wobbly porch chair.
“Well, my nephew took me into Sweetwater t’day, ya know, ta do a little shoppin’?”
Oh sweet Jesus, I have to hear a shopping story.
“Well, I was at the Five and Dime and I got in line to pay for the odds and ends I’d picked up, ye know like a new hair bonnet, a few necessary toiletries. What else did I get now?” She looks up at the sky like she’s waiting for Jesus to remind her. Delma and me look up too but we don’t hear any loud voice coming from heaven. That doesn’t surprise me none.
“Oh, some of that sweet smelling toilet water they sell up by the front counter. What’s it called again, Elnora?” This time she doesn’t look up. Mother shakes her head back and forth to say she doesn’t know, while I take my mind to anywhere but shopping in Sweetwater with Miss Essie.
She grunts as she stands up from her chair. So I think she’s forgotten and is going inside and I can get on with my day, but she keeps going.
“Then I see this gal in front’a me with a stack’a clothes piled up on the counter, ‘nuff fer three families, mind ye, three families. Well, the clerk starts ringin’ up them clothes, but the gal says, now listen to this children, the gal says, ‘I ain’t payin’. Jes’t put ‘em in a bag. I’m Bonnie Parker.’ Kin ye imagine, I was standing right next to Bonnie Parker herself. I could’a been kilt right then and there, right then and there.” Then she fans the heat and fear off herself and sits down in her rickety porch chair like she’s about to faint.
“Bonnie Parker?” I say. “Like Bonnie and Clyde Parker?”
“One’n the same.”
“Who’s Bonnie and Clyde Parker?” Delma asks.
“Barrow,” Mother says. “Clyde Barrow.”
“Who’s Bonnie and Clyde Barrow?” she asks again.
“Never ye mind Delma,” says Mother.
“I’ll tell ye later,” I whisper to Sis.
But Miss Essie says, “Killers, that’s what they are. Natural born killers.” She keeps fanning like she’s trying to air herself away from being dead.
I sat there thinking on what it would be like to meet Bonnie and Clyde. All the kids talk about them and sometimes, when our parents don’t know, we pretend we’re holding up banks just like they do.
The sun is starting to set as the wind starts to pick up, making whirlwinds in the dust. Mother walks out into the street and stares up to the sky. I follow her and see strange looking clouds that start on the ground and go up instead of the other way around like they’re supposed to.
“Miss Essie, yer nephew gonna be home soon?” I hear Mother ask.
“Should be home any time now. Why?”
“Cause I think we’re about to have ourselves a sand storm.”
“Oh, Lordy, what a day! First a brush with death and now a sand storm!”
photo credit
Daily word prompt: faint
We finish our meal and Mother takes all the empty plates off the table and replaces them with the little ones made especially for slices of apple pie.
I take my first bite. The crust is the perfect cover for the apples that melt like butter in my mouth. I eat every single bit of my piece. I even lick my pointer finger and use it like a fork just so I can pick up any stray crumbs.
Ike’s pie is still sitting there, untouched of course. Everybody knows Ike would just as soon be chewing on a piece of mesquite bark than to eat pie. He says he prefers to get his sugar from a whiskey bottle.
I stare at his piece and see that it’s bigger than mine was. The sweet apples ooze out the sides between the top and bottom crust. It’s calling me forward, challenging me to come and get it.
I slowly reach over and pull Ike’s pie in front of me. I stare down at it and wonder if Ike’s piece is gonna taste as good as my first.
Dad says nary a word when he reaches across the table and slowly pulls that slice of pie back over to Ike like we’re playing a game of checkers. I concentrate thinking that the next move is mine. I smile and slowly pull that pie towards me thinking I should be kinged.
The hard slap across my face surprises me and drives me halfway out of my chair.
What the hell just happened?
I stand up knocking my chair over, grab a knife off the table, and swing it under Dad’s chin, wanting to cut his head plumb off.
I’ve made a big mistake. I missed.
Dad runs around to my side of the table holding a craze of fire where his eyes used to be. He grabs me by my shirt collar, and kicks a table leg that snaps off. Dishes crash to the floor. He drags me to the door. I hear it slam shut. We’re outside. He’s not finished.
Although I feel the fast blows to my head and face, they seem to come at me in slow motion. I curl up into a ball on the ground.
“Protect yourself at all times!”
Who’s saying that? Who’s saying that? There’s no one else out here!
“Put your arms around your head! Protect yourself!”
I do as the voice tells me. I wrap my elbows over my ears, my hands on top of my head. Okay, that’s better. It doesn’t hurt as much. My eyes are stinging from the sandstorm. No, it’s a hail storm. I can feel big clumps of ice hammering my body.
My ears ring. Somewhere close to me Pooch is barking his head off. There’s so much noise in my ears, I can’t tell where he is. Then I scream really loud, “The first chance I get, I’m gonna kill you!”, the words that only I can hear.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper by C. Dennis-Willingham, my father’s story
Author’s note: After this event in my father’s life, he later became a boxer in the Army.
Daily word prompt: Crumb
If that clock didn’t tell her the time so accurately, Sofie would have taken a hammer to it long ago. Why else would she have kept it?
But she needed the clock. It gave her the idea.
She pulled Meta’s box out from under the bed and opened the lid and removed the papers as carefully as unwrapping an unsolicited gift given by a macabre client. She placed them on her writing table.
Sofie inhaled the scent of moth balls Meta had placed inside in what seemed like ages ago. Those spherical balls of cedar had kept her bonnets, kerchiefs as well as her revealing words from being eaten and destroyed by those tiny winged creatures, the ones who did not distinguish between good or evil longhand.
Regardless of the pungent smell of cedar, regardless of the desertion she felt, Sofie could still take in the scent of Meta’s lilac-fragranced soap on her young, thin hands, could still imagine Meta’s right hand dipping the pen into the ink in order to recreate the unusual bizarre events of her young life.
Sofie looked down at her hands, still somewhat youthful for being eight years older than Meta and still attractive. But she felt old at almost twenty-eight, old due to the wear and tear of her insides from the constant thrusting and prodding of too many men. At least her so-called clients were transparent. They wanted one thing, a warm twat to comfort themselves, or if they were worried about disease, a warm and wet mouth to surround their growing phallus. Such control she had over that one simple bodypart.
But she was tired of that now. Only if she was in great need of money or a favor, would she sucomb to pleasing one of the hairy oafs. Besides, it was Meta who taught her about love. But it was also Meta who had done those awful things.
Excerpt from The Edges of Two Fields, an unfinished novel.
Daily word prompt: Recreate
Photo credit
There she was, the unbuttoned girl who didn’t know right from wrong, who always took the path over thorny ground. Demented in heart and void of conscious. Squeezing the life out of my bordello one person at a time until she did it to herself.
And I never saw it coming. Never saw her falling into the depths of insanity. I did what needed doing. I protected my business. I had her transported to Southwestern Insane Asylum and never told a soul except Reba. And not once did I visit her.
I made a pact with myself. No regrets for what I was about to do.
Excerpt from The Last Bordello
Daily word prompt: Thorny
photo credit
Carolyn Dennis-Willingham 