Summary:
ABCs of Spellcraft #5-7
Pinyin Bay is in peril!
Dixon Penn has done his share of traveling and is ready to settle down in the city where he grew up. Yuri Volnikov has finally found a place he can call home. But their idyllic life together is threatened when a mysterious buyer starts scooping up properties in Pinyin Bay…and not with the intention of sprucing things up. To add insult to injury, the buyer is using Spellcraft to get what they want.
Pinyin Bay might not be a thriving metropolis, but from the ramshackle tenements of Scrivener Village to the crumbling splendor of Shirque Mansion, the city is rich with Spellcraft history. Even more importantly, it’s the place Dixon and Yuri call home.
Yuri’s Spellcraft talent is exceedingly rare. And although Dixon came into his magical potential recently, he’s been training his whole life to wield his quill. The magic is notoriously capricious—but with explosions rattling the shoreline, Spellcraft is the city’s best hope. Can Dixon and Yuri harness the forces of Spellcraft to save Pinyin Bay?
The ABCs of Spellcraft is a series filled with bad jokes and good magic, where M/M romance meets paranormal cozy. A perky hero, a brooding love interest, and delightfully twisty-turny stories that never end up quite where you’d expect. This collection contains novellas 5 through 7 of The ABCs of Spellcraft series: Last but Not Lease, Don’t Rock the Boardwalk, and What the Frack?
Audiobook Review October 2020:
First off, there isn't much I can say that I didn't already mention in my original reviews earlier in the year. Jordan Castillo Price's ABCs of Spellcraft just keeps getting better and better with each adventure Dixon and Yuri find themselves in. They still remind me a bit of the old serials of the 30s and 40s my folks collect, each has it's own storyline but still connected and continued on. There's mystery but always fun. Entertaining from beginning to end.
As for the narration, Nick Hudson has once again brought life to Dixon and Yuri in a way that I can't imagine anyone else doing as great a job. Dixon can be a bit over the top at times but that's part of his charm and in Don't Rock the Boardwalk he has no trouble playing his part and Hudson's narration of the character is spot on. I could see Dixon on the boardwalk playing to the tourists. Once again, listening to the mens' journeys I truly felt like I was listening to one of the old radio shows I collect, I kept expecting Harlow Wilcox to interrupt Dixon and Yuri with the sponsor's ad(and if you don't know what I'm talking about, I highly suggest Googling it because they were a true brilliant form of entertainment).
Whether in ebook or audio, Jordan Castillo Price's ABCs of Spellcraft is a series that bring endless hours of enjoyment and personally I can't wait to see what adventure awaits them next.
Last but Not Lease #5
RATING:
Original Review April 2020:
Who knew home-hunting could be so . . . magical? Dixon and Yuri are back!!!! I love these two, they are such a mismatched pair on paper but the minute they're together you just know that not only are they perfectly matched, there really is no one else for either. Dixon's peppy-ness and Yuri's stoic-ness should make them run for the hills in opposite directions but they calm each other, balance each other, makes the other stronger. I guess what I'm saying is Jordan Castillo Price knows how to make them work and work they do!
So, in Last but Not Lease, Yuri has lost his home and Dixon's place is cramped, sardines-in-a-pea-pod cramped, so the logical thing is to go home-hunting. But as you can imagine, this pair always seems to find themselves in an intriguing, controlled chaos(and if you don't know what I mean then you haven't been reading the series and need to go back to the beginning-trust me you'll love it!). So I'm not going to give anything away because the magical craziness of this duo is something you need to experience yourself to fully appreciate them and their predicaments.
The best way for me to explain the meshing of humor, magic, mystery, and chemistry is Lucy & Ethel meets Samantha & Darren Stevens meets Nick & Nora Charles. Brilliant characters, great world building, and amazing storytelling make for an all around reading gem that just keeps getting better and better. This is a series that is best read in order as each entry has a little something that is part of a bigger picture as well as following along with Dixon and Yuri as their relationship grows.
The ABCs of Spellcraft was one of my favorite series last year and their new adventures seem to be well on the way to being a fave of 2020 too.
So, in Last but Not Lease, Yuri has lost his home and Dixon's place is cramped, sardines-in-a-pea-pod cramped, so the logical thing is to go home-hunting. But as you can imagine, this pair always seems to find themselves in an intriguing, controlled chaos(and if you don't know what I mean then you haven't been reading the series and need to go back to the beginning-trust me you'll love it!). So I'm not going to give anything away because the magical craziness of this duo is something you need to experience yourself to fully appreciate them and their predicaments.
The best way for me to explain the meshing of humor, magic, mystery, and chemistry is Lucy & Ethel meets Samantha & Darren Stevens meets Nick & Nora Charles. Brilliant characters, great world building, and amazing storytelling make for an all around reading gem that just keeps getting better and better. This is a series that is best read in order as each entry has a little something that is part of a bigger picture as well as following along with Dixon and Yuri as their relationship grows.
The ABCs of Spellcraft was one of my favorite series last year and their new adventures seem to be well on the way to being a fave of 2020 too.
Don't Rock the Boardwalk #6
Original Review June 2020:
This isn't the first time the guys have gone in undercover to discover the "faulty" or misused crafting but there was something about doing so in their own backyard that made Don't Rock the Boardwalk that much more interesting. I hesitate to say "more fun" because the whole series has been fun from the beginning but it does seem to have that something extra special and again for me that was being right their in Pinyin Bay and having come from the Penn family shop.
The whole series has had the perfect blend of romance and humor to label it romantic comedy, for me however it does seem odd to use that genre tag with an equal blend of paranormal and mystery but Jordan Castillo Price makes it work. Don't Rock the Boardwalk is no different. Dixon as a tour guide and Yuri as a street artist is absolutely divine. Let's face it, if you've been reading Dixon and Yuri's adventures you know by now that Dixon has the gift of gab so the tour guide disguise is pure genius, even if some of his facts are of his own creation or embellishment and when Yuri finds himself on the tour one day, I'll just say it may not have been Who's On First? but their timing was as spot on as many classic comedy routines are.
As for Dixon and Yuri on a personal level, they just continue to grow both in their individual crafts and their love for each other. I don't want to say they tackle this case different than others but as they do take on roles that don't work together I think they are apart more in Boardwalk than any other entry in the series. Which in one way is a bit of a disappointment because I love seeing them interact but on the other hand I think it shows just how much they've grown to be able to work apart and still get the job done and still find time for that Dixon/Yuri magic that ABCs of Spellcraft is known for.
If you are wondering about reading order, well The ABCs of Spellcraft needs to be experienced as written. There's a certain level of completion to each novella but there is an overall arc to boys' journey. So far Jordan Castillo Price has two story arcs in the series, #1-4 and #'s 5 & 6 and the upcoming 7: What the Frack?. Trust me, if you enjoy magic, mystery, romance, humor, and heat then Spellcraft is definitely a series for you.
What the Frack? #7
The whole series has had the perfect blend of romance and humor to label it romantic comedy, for me however it does seem odd to use that genre tag with an equal blend of paranormal and mystery but Jordan Castillo Price makes it work. Don't Rock the Boardwalk is no different. Dixon as a tour guide and Yuri as a street artist is absolutely divine. Let's face it, if you've been reading Dixon and Yuri's adventures you know by now that Dixon has the gift of gab so the tour guide disguise is pure genius, even if some of his facts are of his own creation or embellishment and when Yuri finds himself on the tour one day, I'll just say it may not have been Who's On First? but their timing was as spot on as many classic comedy routines are.
As for Dixon and Yuri on a personal level, they just continue to grow both in their individual crafts and their love for each other. I don't want to say they tackle this case different than others but as they do take on roles that don't work together I think they are apart more in Boardwalk than any other entry in the series. Which in one way is a bit of a disappointment because I love seeing them interact but on the other hand I think it shows just how much they've grown to be able to work apart and still get the job done and still find time for that Dixon/Yuri magic that ABCs of Spellcraft is known for.
If you are wondering about reading order, well The ABCs of Spellcraft needs to be experienced as written. There's a certain level of completion to each novella but there is an overall arc to boys' journey. So far Jordan Castillo Price has two story arcs in the series, #1-4 and #'s 5 & 6 and the upcoming 7: What the Frack?. Trust me, if you enjoy magic, mystery, romance, humor, and heat then Spellcraft is definitely a series for you.
What the Frack? #7
Original Review August 2020:
I want to start by saying there has yet to be a cover in The ABCs of Spellcraft series that isn't brilliant and that Dixon and Yuri don't look Yummy in but there is something about What the Frack? that has that little something extra. Is it the hardhats to give the men that hard-at-work look? Is it Dixon in flannel and bibs to give him a rugged edge? Is it Yuri with the sledgehammer in his hand teetering between work and rest? Or is it that slight tip-of-the-hat that gives them a gentlemen yet blue collar look? I don't think I can narrow in on any one thing, it really captures the characters and gives you an inkling into what their latest "case" will entail. Then of course there is the colors, the purplish, bluish, aquaish blend that draws your attention and an almost graphic novel artistry that tells you no matter how much drama they face, Jordan Castillo Price hasn't lost the comedic slice that help get Dixon and Yuri in AND out of trouble.
And who says a cover is just a cover?😉
So let's get to What the Frack? This is the finale of the second story arc in ABCs of Spellcraft, Dixon and Yuri continue to grow and strengthen their relationship. We get to see some of the ins and outs of Pinyin Bay, and though it may not be New York City, Atlanta, or Chicago in the hustle and bustle part of activity, it's no sleepy little burg either. So as the title suggests, the guys are faced with mining in Pinyin Bay and knowing the way these two get themselves into trouble it won't be welcomed by everyone.
What could go wrong? More like what won't go wrong?😉😉
I don't want to give anything away so I'll end it there and just add that if you are already a reader of JCP's newest series then you know it'll be brilliant, if you have yet to experience The ABCs of Spellcraft, now is the perfect time as the second story arc is finished and we await a new set of adventures for our lads. This is a series that must be read in order but you won't regret it. The blending of magic, mystery, romance, mayhem, and humor is enough to tick all my sub-genre boxes making What the Frack? and The ABCs of Spellcraft as a whole a perfect choice no matter what kind of mood I'm in.
And who says a cover is just a cover?😉
So let's get to What the Frack? This is the finale of the second story arc in ABCs of Spellcraft, Dixon and Yuri continue to grow and strengthen their relationship. We get to see some of the ins and outs of Pinyin Bay, and though it may not be New York City, Atlanta, or Chicago in the hustle and bustle part of activity, it's no sleepy little burg either. So as the title suggests, the guys are faced with mining in Pinyin Bay and knowing the way these two get themselves into trouble it won't be welcomed by everyone.
What could go wrong? More like what won't go wrong?😉😉
I don't want to give anything away so I'll end it there and just add that if you are already a reader of JCP's newest series then you know it'll be brilliant, if you have yet to experience The ABCs of Spellcraft, now is the perfect time as the second story arc is finished and we await a new set of adventures for our lads. This is a series that must be read in order but you won't regret it. The blending of magic, mystery, romance, mayhem, and humor is enough to tick all my sub-genre boxes making What the Frack? and The ABCs of Spellcraft as a whole a perfect choice no matter what kind of mood I'm in.
RATING:
Summary:
When Peter Thompson’s best buddy, Brandon Ray discovers there’s a fraternity in town willing to pay two hundred dollars to anyone who spends Halloween night in old Scarborough Manor, he drags Peter and dorm oddball, Creepy Connor along to keep him company. It isn’t long before the boys figure out why no one has ever lasted the entire night in the terrifying place. Peter and his pals can only hope they’ll live to regret their decision.
What a deliciously creepy gem. Not sure how it crossed my path but boy am I glad it did. Until the Morning may be a short story but a brilliant blend of fright, romance, humor, friendship, and did I mention fright?
Connor, Peter, and Brandon all bring great friendship elements to this ghostly story that just heightens the fear factor for me. It's creepy enough to think of being stuck in a haunted house but to worry about your companions as well somehow makes the fear that much more believable.
Don't even get me started on the angel statue. Triple props to the author for the Doctor Who reference, not only am I a Whovian but the Weeping Angels are one of creepiest foes he faced(IMO) so I'll admit even without the author's mention, it's always the first thing I think of when I read/see angel statues.
I couldn't help but think of the classic film The Haunting(the 1963 original not the remake) when I read this, not because anything in it actually resembles the film but the overall blending of "is it really happening?" and "Holy Crap! did you see that?" kept coming to mind. SC Wynne's Until the Morning is what I like to label "low on quantity but high on quality". If you are looking for a tale of ghostly fright, then this is definitely for you.
Summary:
A monster moves through the darkest night, lit only by the full moon, taking them, one by one, from Seattle’s gay gathering areas.
In an atmosphere of spine-tingling fear, Thad Matthews finds his first true love cooking in an Italian restaurant called The Blue Moon Cafe. Sam Lupino is everything Thad has ever hoped for in a man: virile, sexy as hell, kind, and…he can cook!
As the pair’s love heats up, so do the questions. Who is the killer preying on Seattle’s gay men? What secrets is Sam’s Sicilian family hiding? And, more important, why do Sam’s unexplained disappearances always coincide with the full moon?
When the secrets are finally revealed, is Thad and Sam’s love for one another strong enough to weather the horrific revelations revealed by the light of the full moon?
I can't believe it's been three years since I first read Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe. I loved it then and I loved it even more now. Even though this is an older book, I won't give any spoilers because I'm sure there are those out there who are yet to experience it. I'll just say that the brilliance of Rick R Reed is abundantly clear in the pages of Blue Moon. Blending mystery, paranormal, AND romance is not always easy to do. Yes, they are genres that are often together but to make them believable, creepy, full of heart(and heat), and still be edge-of-your-seat entertaining(especially as a re-read) I find not an easy task, something ends up lacking but not in Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe. Rick R Reed definitely has a winner here and now that it's been re-released, maybe if we are super duper uber nice we might get more from Thad and Sam?😉🤞🤞😉 But seriously, whether there is more in the future or not, Blue Moon will be on my Halloween re-read list for years to come.
Original Review October 2017:
I'm going to start by saying that immediate attraction bordering on insta-love is not for everyone and I understand that but when its done right than its amazing. Well, for me Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe is done right. I say "immediate attraction bordering on insta-love" because I think it's pretty instant on Sam's part and for Thad its nearly there but he's afraid to completely embrace it.
I loved seeing inside the mind of the killer in this story, its not something that always works, it can distract from the couple at the heart of the story, but Rick R Reed makes it work here. I get why Sam is leary to reveal everything to Thad and I equally get why this makes Thad hesitant to completely open his heart to Sam but more than once I just wanted to bang their heads together and scream "Communicate!". Throw in Thad's new friend Jared, which some might call an obstacle to the couple being happy but I call just plain awesome. Jared is a fun character that gives Thad some much needed companionship but it also gives him reasons to guard his heart, to grow, and gives his protective side reason to show.
All in all, Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe is a brilliant read that ticked my paranormal, romance, mystery boxes and it also touched on my love of horror as well making this a perfect read for October.
RATING:
I'm going to start by saying that immediate attraction bordering on insta-love is not for everyone and I understand that but when its done right than its amazing. Well, for me Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe is done right. I say "immediate attraction bordering on insta-love" because I think it's pretty instant on Sam's part and for Thad its nearly there but he's afraid to completely embrace it.
I loved seeing inside the mind of the killer in this story, its not something that always works, it can distract from the couple at the heart of the story, but Rick R Reed makes it work here. I get why Sam is leary to reveal everything to Thad and I equally get why this makes Thad hesitant to completely open his heart to Sam but more than once I just wanted to bang their heads together and scream "Communicate!". Throw in Thad's new friend Jared, which some might call an obstacle to the couple being happy but I call just plain awesome. Jared is a fun character that gives Thad some much needed companionship but it also gives him reasons to guard his heart, to grow, and gives his protective side reason to show.
All in all, Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe is a brilliant read that ticked my paranormal, romance, mystery boxes and it also touched on my love of horror as well making this a perfect read for October.
RATING:
Summary:
Jason Day, brilliant designer of video games, is not only a confirmed bachelor, but he’s as gay as a maypole. One wouldn’t think being saddled with his precocious four-year-old nephew for four weeks would be enough to throw him off-kilter.
Wrong. Timmy, Jason’s nephew, is a true handful.
But just when Timmy and Uncle Jason begin to bond, and Jason feels he’s getting a grip on this babysitting business once and for all, he’s thrown for a loop by a couple of visitors—one from Tucson, the other from beyond the grave.
I’m sorry. Say what?
Toss a murder, a hot young stud, an unexpected love affair, and a spooky-ass ghost with a weird sense of humor into Jason’s summer plans, and you’ve got the makings for one hell of a ride.
Wrong. Timmy, Jason’s nephew, is a true handful.
But just when Timmy and Uncle Jason begin to bond, and Jason feels he’s getting a grip on this babysitting business once and for all, he’s thrown for a loop by a couple of visitors—one from Tucson, the other from beyond the grave.
I’m sorry. Say what?
Toss a murder, a hot young stud, an unexpected love affair, and a spooky-ass ghost with a weird sense of humor into Jason’s summer plans, and you’ve got the makings for one hell of a ride.
I don't know why it took me so long to originally read Spirit and I'm even more clueless why it took me so long to listen to the audiobook. John Inman is definitely tops in my book when it comes to creepy, scary, romantic, frightful gems that are perfect for Halloweentime.
The only thing I'm going to say for this listen/re-read is that putting a child into a ghost story adds so many elements to the fright factor. From wanting to do everything possible to protect Timmy to his child-sized brand of humor making me smile, I spent the whole book wanting to wrap him up in a Mama Bear hug. As for what his presence does for Jason, well he brings something into his uncle's life that not even Jason knew he was missing.
Wrap all that emotion into a ghost mystery and you have a story that will suck you in and keep you hooked till that very last page(or narrated line). Speaking of narration, I've never listened to John Anthony Davis before but he brings John Inman's characters to life that keeps you mesmerized all most as deeply as Inman's words themselves. All around perfectly haunting read.
Original ebook Review October 2018:
When Jason Day agreed to care for his four year old nephew, Timmy, while his sister and her boyfriend went on a month long vacation he had no idea what he was getting into. Between the man in the basement Timmy meets and his uncle showing up from Tucson, Jason has his hands full. Wait, what man in the basement? In the middle of mystery, unexplainable noises, and Timmy's limitless energy will Jason find time for a little romance too?
How I haven't read Spirit before is beyond me, it's as unexplainable as the man in the basement first appears to be. Who knew creepy ghost stories could be so lighthearted and humorous? Grasping a child's limitless energy can be a difficult thing to write without them coming across as brats that need more than one timeout but somehow John Inman has made Timmy not only spirited, energetic, a handful, but he's also made him cute, adorable, and exactly what Jason needs.
Now I won't really touch on the plot of this incredibly fun, creepy, and wildly addictive mystery because so many little things give just too much away. I will say that having read some of John Inman's work before, I knew it would be more than just an uncle caring for his nephew while the mother is on vacation and I wasn't wrong. Spirit really does have a little bit of everything(okay there's no sci-fi), it may sound cliche to say its got so much going on but in this case it really does. Jason is incredibly likable and Sam from Tucson has a secret or two in the beginning but he too is absolutely delicious. As I said above Timmy is a rambunctious little boy who despite being a bit sassy at times he really is a sweet little guy you just want to protect.
Spirit has it all and more, it hooked me from the first paragraph and when I reached that final page I was not ready to close it down. If you are like me and already a fan of John Inman than you'll love this story and if you haven't checked out his work before, than Spirit is a great place to start. He has a way about his work that blends edgy, creepy, mysterious, humorous, and of course romantic in just about a near perfect way. I may not get the opportunity to read all his work as it is released but he has certainly earned his place on my "Automatic 1-Click" list.
RATING:
When Jason Day agreed to care for his four year old nephew, Timmy, while his sister and her boyfriend went on a month long vacation he had no idea what he was getting into. Between the man in the basement Timmy meets and his uncle showing up from Tucson, Jason has his hands full. Wait, what man in the basement? In the middle of mystery, unexplainable noises, and Timmy's limitless energy will Jason find time for a little romance too?
How I haven't read Spirit before is beyond me, it's as unexplainable as the man in the basement first appears to be. Who knew creepy ghost stories could be so lighthearted and humorous? Grasping a child's limitless energy can be a difficult thing to write without them coming across as brats that need more than one timeout but somehow John Inman has made Timmy not only spirited, energetic, a handful, but he's also made him cute, adorable, and exactly what Jason needs.
Now I won't really touch on the plot of this incredibly fun, creepy, and wildly addictive mystery because so many little things give just too much away. I will say that having read some of John Inman's work before, I knew it would be more than just an uncle caring for his nephew while the mother is on vacation and I wasn't wrong. Spirit really does have a little bit of everything(okay there's no sci-fi), it may sound cliche to say its got so much going on but in this case it really does. Jason is incredibly likable and Sam from Tucson has a secret or two in the beginning but he too is absolutely delicious. As I said above Timmy is a rambunctious little boy who despite being a bit sassy at times he really is a sweet little guy you just want to protect.
Spirit has it all and more, it hooked me from the first paragraph and when I reached that final page I was not ready to close it down. If you are like me and already a fan of John Inman than you'll love this story and if you haven't checked out his work before, than Spirit is a great place to start. He has a way about his work that blends edgy, creepy, mysterious, humorous, and of course romantic in just about a near perfect way. I may not get the opportunity to read all his work as it is released but he has certainly earned his place on my "Automatic 1-Click" list.
RATING:
Summary:
Jeff Holloway is a twenty-five-year-old skater with a killer smile and lots of free time on his hands. He’s also a vampire who prowls the dark corners of San Francisco looking for entertainment and his next meal. Lately, he’s been spending lots of time watching a tattoo parlor in the Mission District, where someone tall, artistic, and handsome has caught his eye.
Santiago Alvarez, the forty-three-year-old owner of Iron & Ink has a huge secret. He lives a quiet life, finding joy in his career and his friends, but it’s caused him to shut himself off from dating and getting close to anyone romantically. When he bumps into Jeff on the sidewalk near his shop, he’s intrigued but hesitant to let anyone get close.
An unexpected event one night will change everything for both men, and neither of their futures will ever be the same.
I'll admit Inked in Blood was kind of a last minute re-read decision, not that I forgot about the story because Coles & Vaughn is one of my absolute favorite collaborating author duos, it cropped up in the authors' newsletter yesterday and as I had just finished a book I thought, "that was a great one let's give it another read". So glad I opened the newsletter yesterday😉.
Jeff and Santiago are just as entertaining the second time around. Even though Coles & Vaughn's collaborations are generally contemporary romance, it's pretty obvious they have a knack for the spooky side too. So if you've never read one of their amazing stories and want a short introduction to their work, Inked in Blood is a great start. As I said, it's a different genre for them but it's a perfect example of their talent for storytelling. As I said two years ago, maybe one day they'll re-visit their paranormal side and further Jeff and Santiago's adventure. One can hope😉🤞🤞😉.
Original Review November 2018:
Who doesn't love a good vampire tale every Halloween? Inked in Blood is a wonderfully entertaining short read from the collaborated minds of Brigham Vaughn and K Evan Coles. Their previous works together have all been amazing pieces of storytelling and although Inked is drastically shorter in quantity it is not lacking in quality. As I said, their work together is great but so far has all been contemporary but with Inked in Blood, its pretty obvious that they have plenty of talent in the paranormal world of storytelling as well. I really hated to say goodbye to Jeff and Santiago so maybe if we're super good the boys will get another adventure to share.
RATING:
Unfortunately, businesses come with regulations.
Jordan Castillo Price
SC Wynne
S.C. Wynne started writing m/m in 2013 and did look back once. She wanted to say that because it seems everyone’s bio says they never looked back and, well S.C. Wynne is all about the joke. She loves writing m/m and her characters are usually a little jaded, funny and ultimately redeemed through love.
S.C loves red wine, margaritas and Seven and Seven’s. Yes, apparently S.C. Wynne is incredibly thirsty. S.C. Wynne loves the rain and should really live in Seattle but instead has landed in sunny, sunny, unbelievably sunny California. Writing is the best profession she could have chosen because S.C. is a little bit of a control freak. To sit in her pajamas all day and pound the keys of her laptop controlling the every thought and emotion of the characters she invents is a dream come true.
If you’d like to contact S.C. Wynne she is amusing herself on Facebook at all hours of the day or you can contact her at scwynne@scwynne.com.
Rick R Reed
Real Men. True Love.
Rick R. Reed draws inspiration from the lives of gay men to craft stories that quicken the heartbeat, engage emotions, and keep the pages turning. Although he dabbles in horror, dark suspense, and comedy, his attention always returns to the power of love. He’s the award-winning and bestselling author of more than fifty works of published fiction and is forever at work on yet another book. Lambda Literary has called him: “A writer that doesn’t disappoint…” You can find him at his website or blog. Rick lives in Palm Springs, CA with his beloved husband and their fierce Chihuahua/Shiba Inu mix.
John Inman
John has been writing fiction for as long as he can remember. Born on a small farm in Indiana, he now resides in San Diego, California where he spends his time gardening, pampering his pets, hiking and biking the trails and canyons of San Diego, and of course, writing. He and his partner share a passion for theater, books, film, and the continuing fight for marriage equality. If you would like to know more about John, check out his website.
K Evan Coles
K. Evan Coles is a mother and tech pirate by day and a writer by night. She is a dreamer who, with a little hard work and a lot of good coffee, coaxes words out of her head and onto paper.
K. lives in the northeast United States, where she complains bitterly about the winters, but truly loves the region and its diverse, tenacious and deceptively compassionate people. You’ll usually find K. nerding out over books, movies and television with friends and family. She’s especially proud to be raising her son as part of a new generation of unabashed geeks.
K.’s books explore LGBTQ+ romance in contemporary settings.
Her books range from short stories to novellas. They explore gay, lesbian, and polyamorous romance in contemporary settings.
To stay up to date on her latest releases, sign up for the Coles & Vaughn Newsletter.
Who doesn't love a good vampire tale every Halloween? Inked in Blood is a wonderfully entertaining short read from the collaborated minds of Brigham Vaughn and K Evan Coles. Their previous works together have all been amazing pieces of storytelling and although Inked is drastically shorter in quantity it is not lacking in quality. As I said, their work together is great but so far has all been contemporary but with Inked in Blood, its pretty obvious that they have plenty of talent in the paranormal world of storytelling as well. I really hated to say goodbye to Jeff and Santiago so maybe if we're super good the boys will get another adventure to share.
RATING:
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Random Paranormal Tales of 2020
The ABCs of Spellcraft Collection Volume 2 by Jordan Castillo Price
Don't Rock the Boardwalk #6
1
DIXON
Practical Penn is not a fancy shop. It’s situated between a take-and-bake pizza place and a dollar store. The floors are linoleum (worn), the walls are paneling (fake wood), and the acoustic drop ceiling tiles are vaguely discolored. But Practical Penn is more than just a store in some seventies strip mall, it’s my family’s livelihood. And for that reason, it’s the best shop ever.
DIXON
Practical Penn is not a fancy shop. It’s situated between a take-and-bake pizza place and a dollar store. The floors are linoleum (worn), the walls are paneling (fake wood), and the acoustic drop ceiling tiles are vaguely discolored. But Practical Penn is more than just a store in some seventies strip mall, it’s my family’s livelihood. And for that reason, it’s the best shop ever.
Unfortunately, businesses come with regulations.
While I did still have an office in the shop, it was just an out-of-the-way little closet of a room. To save on our liability insurance, my mother had taken me off books several years ago while I was trying out every youth hostel in Europe. That move turned out to be to everyone’s advantage. Because not being officially employed there meant I didn’t have to go to the annual Spellcraft rules and regulations training that was required of every Scrivener in a small-to-midsized shop. With me unofficially manning the helm at the store, Practical Penn could stay open while every other shop in the city had to shut its doors.
Win-win.
Technically, I didn’t need Yuri to come along and keep me company. Chances were, I’d just be sitting around all afternoon watching adorable chipmunk videos on my phone. But he insisted that if Rufus Clahd was the only one I had for backup, some intrepid robber would clean us out for sure. And so, he came along, parked himself at my cousin Sabina’s desk, and shot apprehensive looks at Rufus’s door when he thought no one was watching.
Poor Yuri. I think Rufus freaked him out because he’d never met another Seer before. And Seers tend to be… unusual. Whether it’s because they possess a talent that’s basically a genetic mutation, or because every Scrivener they meet treats them like the next Messiah? Hard to say.
As long as you don’t mess with his things, Rufus can be fairly easygoing. But though he’s got a normal-sized ego, he’s also got extremely large hair. My cousin and I have speculated over the years as to whether or not it’s a white-guy perm. She thinks it must be, whereas I’m not so sure. While some days it looks more tightly coiled than others, I think the discrepancy could be due to a change in shampoo, or humidity… or maybe the occasional trim.
I hadn’t yet determined what Yuri thought of the hair, but I’d wager he had an opinion. It was Yuri’s desire to keep an eye on everything that landed him front and center when the mime walked in.
I often ponder what Yuri’s nightmares must be like— no doubt, they’re in Russian. Yuri’s got a thing about clowns. And while a mime isn’t technically a clown… I guess it’s close enough. He stood up so fast, the office chair spun out behind him and crashed into the wood paneling with a giant clatter. It made enough noise to wake our Seer from his current nap. Rufus’s door cracked open just as I made it over to Yuri’s side to catch him in case he fainted. He’d probably squash me. But, heck, I was used to him squashing me. I might even kind of like it.
The mime walked up to the service counter and started swatting at a bug on the Formica surface. We keep the place well-fumigated, but I supposed it was possible that some of the feeder crickets had escaped their stinky little tank. The office was now home to a variety of nocturnal creatures— apparently, toads get really loud around one a.m. And crickets were a lot less icky to handle than mealworms. Still, those little suckers could really hop. I picked up an empty coffee mug and a pizza menu, and came over to rehome the poor cricket, who’d probably enjoy getting squashed a heck of a lot less than I did. But when I got up to the counter, there was no cricket. And the mime was still swatting away… at nothing. I picked up the edge of a phone directory to see if the little escape artist got away.
“Mime is ringing service bell,” Yuri supplied, from a safe distance away, with an accent gone thick.
Oh. Right. The mime brightened and nodded vigorously.
I could’ve sworn he was swatting a bug.
You wouldn’t think a little greasepaint would make all that big a difference, but I couldn’t really get a bead on the man behind the makeup. Was he older or younger than me? Dark or fair? And, most importantly, was he better-looking? Between the whiteface and the eyeliner, it was really hard to say. The only thing I knew for sure was that his drawn-on eyebrows made him look perpetually startled.
He gestured at the counter. I looked at it. Back in the day, when smoking was in vogue, a lit cigarette had fallen from an ashtray and left a nicotine-yellow burn on the surface. The mime shook his head and gestured for me to stop looking at the burn mark and pay attention to him instead.
He pinched his fingers together on both hands and raised them in an arc. “You’re typing,” I ventured. “You’re reading the newspaper. You’re folding laundry.”
At the sound of all my excited guesses, Rufus Clahd ambled out of his office. Practical Penn’s official Seer was my parents’ age, and he still dressed like it was 1979. He’d been working here for years… if you counted napping in his office as working. He joined in the guessing game, sounding half-asleep. “You’re eating corn on the cob. With lots of butter. And a sprinkle of Himalayan sea salt.”
Yuri snapped, “He is opening briefcase.”
The mime touched the tip of his nose, winked, and pointed at Yuri.
Yuri shuddered.
Rufus squinted at the mime. “You sure it’s not corn?”
The mime pointed at Yuri again.
“I’m really pretty good at charades,” I said. It wasn’t my fault this mime was so ambiguous.
Once the “briefcase” was open and all three of us Spellcrafters were watching, the mime pulled something out of the case. Except the thing wasn’t imaginary, like the purported briefcase. And it was really obvious he’d just pulled it out of his pocket.
And… it looked a heck of a lot like Spellcraft.
He placed it importantly on the counter and indicated it with both hands, then started making frantic little looping motions.
“You’re cranking a pepper grinder?” I guessed. “No? Crocheting an afghan. Wait, I know— you’re playing Yahtzee.”
Rufus shook his head. “No way, man, he’s definitely waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July, just after sundown, throwing white-hot sparks against the night sky.”
Huh. I’d really never figured Rufus was that imaginative. Then again, it made a lot of sense, given that the weird watercolor blobs he painted (the ones that never looked like anything to anybody) still managed to fix the Spellcraft mojo onto the paper.
Unfortunately, judging by the frustrated huff that came out of the mime, Rufus was also wrong.
Yuri matched it with a huff of his own, though he made no move to come any closer, as if mimeness might be catching. “He is drawing— from right to left and bottom to top. He wishes you to Uncraft spell.”
The mime made a really big deal out of gesturing toward Yuri. Yuri backed up another few steps, until the wood paneling creaked against his back.
Rufus and I both leaned in to get a better look.
I might not have figured out the pantomime for “Uncrafting a spell,” but the Spellcraft itself? That, I recognized right away… even though I really wished I hadn’t. Not because of the Seen— it wouldn’t be the first Rufus Clahd creation I’d unmade— but because of the Scrivening.
The mime waved his hands in a flurry of inexplicable gestures. Rufus scratched his chin and said, “You went for a swim, but the water was colder than you thought, so instead you focused on your Tai Chi.”
While even the mime looked befuddled over that guess, Yuri said from across the room, “He is disturbed by Crafting and hopes we can help him.”
Either Yuri had a better view from where he was standing way over there, pantomime was a flourishing art in Russia (which gave him an unfair advantage), or learning a second language had just made him pretty darn perceptive. The mime hopped up and down in excitement and gave Yuri an eager thumbs-up.
I took a better look at the Crafting. The Seen, predictably, was a messy blue-gray blob that could have been anything— but the Scrivening was pretty darn specific. Go-getters get their goal. I was big on rhyming, and Uncle Fonzo liked to Craft fortune-cookie type sayings. The alliteration, though?
It couldn’t have come from anyone but my father.
No one likes to be the source of a bum Crafting, so naturally, I considered claiming it must’ve come from some other shop. But before I could, Rufus said, “Oh, I remember that one.”
“Really?” I said. “Because it’s awfully, uh… abstract.”
“Nope. That’s Pinyin Bay. See the dip over here? That’s where the power plant sits. And the flat side over here is where they shored up the coastline, so the inmates at the county detention center couldn’t swim away anymore. And the tiny flecks of black inside the water— those are leeches.”
Well… now that he pointed out all those details, I supposed I could see it.
Yuri said to the mime, “I read article that said South Dock Boardwalk is threatened by developers. Is that where you have come from?”
The mime nodded with great purpose.
“The South Dock Boardwalk can’t be sold off,” I declared. “It’s a Pinyin Bay institution!”
Rufus agreed. “That’s where everyone loses their virginity on a full moon under the pier to the sound of off-key buskers yodeling in the distance.”
“Um… not everyone,” I said. “But it’s bad enough some out-of-state corporation bought up the rental cabins on Pinyin Beach. Are they gunning for the Boardwalk, too?”
The mime made an exaggerated frown and nodded.
Yuri said, “If same buyer also has Morticia Shirque’s estate as well as the cabins, when they take the Boardwalk, this entire coastline of the bay will be theirs.”
That couldn’t be. “All of Pinyin Beach?” Even as I said it, landmark after landmark cropped up in my mind’s eye as if I was cruising past on Old Bay Road. The trailer park. Pinyin Inn. The cabins. The Shirque Mansion. From the power plant on one side of the bay to the crumbling bluffs that separated Pinyin Bay city limits from the road to Strangeberg on the other, the only property that hadn’t recently changed hands was the Boardwalk.
The mime knuckled away a fake tear.
I snagged the Crafting by the corner and pulled it across the counter to get a better look at it, but as I did, Yuri caught me by the back of the collar and dragged me into my office. Since I hardly ever used it, tanks filled with toads and lizards and whatever else ate all those escaping crickets took up a lot of the meager real estate. But Yuri crowding me into a gap between my desk and a coatrack was something I could hardly complain about— even though I was pretty sure no kissing would be involved. Not this time, anyhow.
“You would Craft for mime?”
Obviously, Yuri was none too keen on the situation. Even if I didn’t know he had a thing about clowns, he’d been dropping articles left and right ever since the guy gestured his way across the threshold. “Listen, Yuri. Pinyin Beach means a lot to me. But even if it didn’t, that’s not just a Practical Penn Crafting out there… it’s my dad’s.”
Yuri understood. He answered with the sort of slow-blink he reserved for those moments when a long-suffering sigh simply wasn’t enough.
I patted him on the chest. And then added a few more pats for good measure. And then trailed a fingertip along his neck tattoo in a way that made him shiver. “Think about it this way, Yuri. Pinyin Bay is riddled with Spellcrafters. The mime could’ve brought this Crafting to any one of them. But, as luck would have it, we were the only shop open. It’s as if it was meant to be.”
“Nothing is ever a coincidence with the volshebstvo.” Yuri pulled me against him roughly, smoothed my hair back, and paused to cup my face in his palm. Gazing down into my eyes with exquisite tenderness, he said, “You are always taking on problems that are not yours to solve— so, how could I expect you to leave this Crafting to the wind? I know you must do it… but I do not have to like it. Especially when Uncrafting involves no Seen, and can only be done by you, and you alone.”
I brushed a kiss across his frowny lips. “I just knew I could count on your support! Now, let’s get back to the mime before any more Spellcraft shops open up and he can start comparison-shopping.”
We headed back out to the lobby, where Rufus was regaling the mime with a rambling tale about… well, frankly, it’s just as hard to follow Rufus’s stories as it is to figure out which end of his Seens is up. But whatever the narrative might be, it involved a trashcan, a used harmonica and some shaving cream. Just as Rufus wrapped it up by saying, “… and then all of us broke into a half-hearted rendition of Auld Lang Syne!” my cousin shouldered her way through the front door with a teetering stack of pizza boxes in her hands from the take-and-bake joint next door.
“Who holds a meeting in this day and age and doesn’t supply any donuts?” she demanded with all the vehemence with which she demands… well, everything. “I swear I could hardly hear the presenter over the groaning of all the empty Scrivener stomachs.”
Sabina had dressed “professionally” for the mandatory meeting— which was to say, she didn’t have any holes in her black jeans, her Doc Martens were polished, and her bra straps weren’t showing. Fortunately, Spellcraft is one of those professions that doesn’t require you to dress to the same standards as a banker or a politician or a high school principal.
I, myself, might be fond of sharp tailored suits and natty bowties, but Sabina balked at the notion of wearing anything even remotely conservative. My cousin has crammed herself into a pair of pantyhose exactly once in all her twenty-five years. And by the time she was done clawing them off again ten minutes later, everyone up and down the street knew exactly what she thought of them.
Yuri relieved her of the pizza boxes and steered them into the break room, where three toaster ovens we’d found at various garage sales and thrift stores awaited. And with no stack of boxes blocking his view, the mime did an exaggerated double-take at my cousin.
Sabina looked equally as startled— and knowing that she can be just a teensy bit acerbic if you rub her the wrong way, I quickly attempted to steer the mime’s attention back to the matter of the Uncrafting. I slid a contract from a pile of legalese, slapped it down in front of him, and said, “I’d be happy to see to the matter at hand. All I’ll need is your signature on the dotted line and five hundred dollars. We take all the major credit cards, but there’s a five percent discount if you pay cash.”
The mime pretended to be pulling down his pants.
Even if I were single, trading sexual favors for Spellcraft was a line I was simply not willing to cross. “I’ll have you know this is a respectable family business.”
Yuri said, “He is showing you his pockets are empty.”
“Oh. Fine. Well, there may be some wiggle-room.” We didn’t need a Seen painted, after all. “It’s a real stretch, but I can go down to $ 399.”
The mime repeated the gesture.
“Looks like he’s frying up some bacon and eggs,” Rufus observed. Was that a euphemism? Hard to say.
“$ 299?” I tried. No dice. “$ 250, and that’s really the best I can do.”
Unfortunately, it turned out that if I didn’t want my dad’s Crafting to fall into the hands of another Spellcraft shop, I’d have to settle for twenty bucks. I’m usually a lot better at negotiation, but frankly, it’s unsettling when the other party is constantly pretending to disrobe.
The mime handed over a crumpled bill, then pretended to sign the contract with his fingertip.
Sabina rolled her eyes and handed him an actual pen. He brightened and plucked a tiny paper flower from his sleeve, then offered it to her in return with a grand, courtly bow. Until Yuri swatted it out of his hand, anyhow. “Stop dawdling and sign. There is much work to do.”
The mime made a big deal of signing with a flourish. Spellcrafters always get a big kick out of what passes for a flourish among the Handless. But as I spun the contract around to face me, it wasn’t to critique his penmanship, but to figure out what in the heck I should call him. Because it hardly seemed fitting to keep referring to my new customer as “the mime.”
His signature was a vague squiggle.
“Look,” I said. “If we’re going to be working together, I need to know what to call you.”
The mime smiled, spread his arms wide as if to say get a load of this, then bent his knees and straightened them again.
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?” Sabina demanded.
The smile went a bit pained. He repeated the motion.
“You’re jumping rope,” I said. “Are you a boxer? Is your name Muhammed Ali? Ooh, I know, it’s Rocky.”
The mime shook his head and did it again.
“A bunny hop,” I guessed. “A pogo stick.”
Rufus nodded sagely. “That’s exactly how the slow-motion dismount of a gymnast from a pommel horse would look. He’s trying to tell you his name is Trigger.”
Sabina was running out of patience. “How long have you guys been at this?”
“Too long,” Yuri said.
Dang it, I had to get something right. It was a matter of principle now. “You’re looking for something on a low bookshelf. You’re doing squats at the gym. Wait a minute— I know! You’re crouching.” The mime shook his head emphatically… but if he wasn’t willing to speak up for himself, it was his problem, not mine. “That settles it. Crouch it is.”
Win-win.
Technically, I didn’t need Yuri to come along and keep me company. Chances were, I’d just be sitting around all afternoon watching adorable chipmunk videos on my phone. But he insisted that if Rufus Clahd was the only one I had for backup, some intrepid robber would clean us out for sure. And so, he came along, parked himself at my cousin Sabina’s desk, and shot apprehensive looks at Rufus’s door when he thought no one was watching.
Poor Yuri. I think Rufus freaked him out because he’d never met another Seer before. And Seers tend to be… unusual. Whether it’s because they possess a talent that’s basically a genetic mutation, or because every Scrivener they meet treats them like the next Messiah? Hard to say.
As long as you don’t mess with his things, Rufus can be fairly easygoing. But though he’s got a normal-sized ego, he’s also got extremely large hair. My cousin and I have speculated over the years as to whether or not it’s a white-guy perm. She thinks it must be, whereas I’m not so sure. While some days it looks more tightly coiled than others, I think the discrepancy could be due to a change in shampoo, or humidity… or maybe the occasional trim.
I hadn’t yet determined what Yuri thought of the hair, but I’d wager he had an opinion. It was Yuri’s desire to keep an eye on everything that landed him front and center when the mime walked in.
I often ponder what Yuri’s nightmares must be like— no doubt, they’re in Russian. Yuri’s got a thing about clowns. And while a mime isn’t technically a clown… I guess it’s close enough. He stood up so fast, the office chair spun out behind him and crashed into the wood paneling with a giant clatter. It made enough noise to wake our Seer from his current nap. Rufus’s door cracked open just as I made it over to Yuri’s side to catch him in case he fainted. He’d probably squash me. But, heck, I was used to him squashing me. I might even kind of like it.
The mime walked up to the service counter and started swatting at a bug on the Formica surface. We keep the place well-fumigated, but I supposed it was possible that some of the feeder crickets had escaped their stinky little tank. The office was now home to a variety of nocturnal creatures— apparently, toads get really loud around one a.m. And crickets were a lot less icky to handle than mealworms. Still, those little suckers could really hop. I picked up an empty coffee mug and a pizza menu, and came over to rehome the poor cricket, who’d probably enjoy getting squashed a heck of a lot less than I did. But when I got up to the counter, there was no cricket. And the mime was still swatting away… at nothing. I picked up the edge of a phone directory to see if the little escape artist got away.
“Mime is ringing service bell,” Yuri supplied, from a safe distance away, with an accent gone thick.
Oh. Right. The mime brightened and nodded vigorously.
I could’ve sworn he was swatting a bug.
You wouldn’t think a little greasepaint would make all that big a difference, but I couldn’t really get a bead on the man behind the makeup. Was he older or younger than me? Dark or fair? And, most importantly, was he better-looking? Between the whiteface and the eyeliner, it was really hard to say. The only thing I knew for sure was that his drawn-on eyebrows made him look perpetually startled.
He gestured at the counter. I looked at it. Back in the day, when smoking was in vogue, a lit cigarette had fallen from an ashtray and left a nicotine-yellow burn on the surface. The mime shook his head and gestured for me to stop looking at the burn mark and pay attention to him instead.
He pinched his fingers together on both hands and raised them in an arc. “You’re typing,” I ventured. “You’re reading the newspaper. You’re folding laundry.”
At the sound of all my excited guesses, Rufus Clahd ambled out of his office. Practical Penn’s official Seer was my parents’ age, and he still dressed like it was 1979. He’d been working here for years… if you counted napping in his office as working. He joined in the guessing game, sounding half-asleep. “You’re eating corn on the cob. With lots of butter. And a sprinkle of Himalayan sea salt.”
Yuri snapped, “He is opening briefcase.”
The mime touched the tip of his nose, winked, and pointed at Yuri.
Yuri shuddered.
Rufus squinted at the mime. “You sure it’s not corn?”
The mime pointed at Yuri again.
“I’m really pretty good at charades,” I said. It wasn’t my fault this mime was so ambiguous.
Once the “briefcase” was open and all three of us Spellcrafters were watching, the mime pulled something out of the case. Except the thing wasn’t imaginary, like the purported briefcase. And it was really obvious he’d just pulled it out of his pocket.
And… it looked a heck of a lot like Spellcraft.
He placed it importantly on the counter and indicated it with both hands, then started making frantic little looping motions.
“You’re cranking a pepper grinder?” I guessed. “No? Crocheting an afghan. Wait, I know— you’re playing Yahtzee.”
Rufus shook his head. “No way, man, he’s definitely waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July, just after sundown, throwing white-hot sparks against the night sky.”
Huh. I’d really never figured Rufus was that imaginative. Then again, it made a lot of sense, given that the weird watercolor blobs he painted (the ones that never looked like anything to anybody) still managed to fix the Spellcraft mojo onto the paper.
Unfortunately, judging by the frustrated huff that came out of the mime, Rufus was also wrong.
Yuri matched it with a huff of his own, though he made no move to come any closer, as if mimeness might be catching. “He is drawing— from right to left and bottom to top. He wishes you to Uncraft spell.”
The mime made a really big deal out of gesturing toward Yuri. Yuri backed up another few steps, until the wood paneling creaked against his back.
Rufus and I both leaned in to get a better look.
I might not have figured out the pantomime for “Uncrafting a spell,” but the Spellcraft itself? That, I recognized right away… even though I really wished I hadn’t. Not because of the Seen— it wouldn’t be the first Rufus Clahd creation I’d unmade— but because of the Scrivening.
The mime waved his hands in a flurry of inexplicable gestures. Rufus scratched his chin and said, “You went for a swim, but the water was colder than you thought, so instead you focused on your Tai Chi.”
While even the mime looked befuddled over that guess, Yuri said from across the room, “He is disturbed by Crafting and hopes we can help him.”
Either Yuri had a better view from where he was standing way over there, pantomime was a flourishing art in Russia (which gave him an unfair advantage), or learning a second language had just made him pretty darn perceptive. The mime hopped up and down in excitement and gave Yuri an eager thumbs-up.
I took a better look at the Crafting. The Seen, predictably, was a messy blue-gray blob that could have been anything— but the Scrivening was pretty darn specific. Go-getters get their goal. I was big on rhyming, and Uncle Fonzo liked to Craft fortune-cookie type sayings. The alliteration, though?
It couldn’t have come from anyone but my father.
No one likes to be the source of a bum Crafting, so naturally, I considered claiming it must’ve come from some other shop. But before I could, Rufus said, “Oh, I remember that one.”
“Really?” I said. “Because it’s awfully, uh… abstract.”
“Nope. That’s Pinyin Bay. See the dip over here? That’s where the power plant sits. And the flat side over here is where they shored up the coastline, so the inmates at the county detention center couldn’t swim away anymore. And the tiny flecks of black inside the water— those are leeches.”
Well… now that he pointed out all those details, I supposed I could see it.
Yuri said to the mime, “I read article that said South Dock Boardwalk is threatened by developers. Is that where you have come from?”
The mime nodded with great purpose.
“The South Dock Boardwalk can’t be sold off,” I declared. “It’s a Pinyin Bay institution!”
Rufus agreed. “That’s where everyone loses their virginity on a full moon under the pier to the sound of off-key buskers yodeling in the distance.”
“Um… not everyone,” I said. “But it’s bad enough some out-of-state corporation bought up the rental cabins on Pinyin Beach. Are they gunning for the Boardwalk, too?”
The mime made an exaggerated frown and nodded.
Yuri said, “If same buyer also has Morticia Shirque’s estate as well as the cabins, when they take the Boardwalk, this entire coastline of the bay will be theirs.”
That couldn’t be. “All of Pinyin Beach?” Even as I said it, landmark after landmark cropped up in my mind’s eye as if I was cruising past on Old Bay Road. The trailer park. Pinyin Inn. The cabins. The Shirque Mansion. From the power plant on one side of the bay to the crumbling bluffs that separated Pinyin Bay city limits from the road to Strangeberg on the other, the only property that hadn’t recently changed hands was the Boardwalk.
The mime knuckled away a fake tear.
I snagged the Crafting by the corner and pulled it across the counter to get a better look at it, but as I did, Yuri caught me by the back of the collar and dragged me into my office. Since I hardly ever used it, tanks filled with toads and lizards and whatever else ate all those escaping crickets took up a lot of the meager real estate. But Yuri crowding me into a gap between my desk and a coatrack was something I could hardly complain about— even though I was pretty sure no kissing would be involved. Not this time, anyhow.
“You would Craft for mime?”
Obviously, Yuri was none too keen on the situation. Even if I didn’t know he had a thing about clowns, he’d been dropping articles left and right ever since the guy gestured his way across the threshold. “Listen, Yuri. Pinyin Beach means a lot to me. But even if it didn’t, that’s not just a Practical Penn Crafting out there… it’s my dad’s.”
Yuri understood. He answered with the sort of slow-blink he reserved for those moments when a long-suffering sigh simply wasn’t enough.
I patted him on the chest. And then added a few more pats for good measure. And then trailed a fingertip along his neck tattoo in a way that made him shiver. “Think about it this way, Yuri. Pinyin Bay is riddled with Spellcrafters. The mime could’ve brought this Crafting to any one of them. But, as luck would have it, we were the only shop open. It’s as if it was meant to be.”
“Nothing is ever a coincidence with the volshebstvo.” Yuri pulled me against him roughly, smoothed my hair back, and paused to cup my face in his palm. Gazing down into my eyes with exquisite tenderness, he said, “You are always taking on problems that are not yours to solve— so, how could I expect you to leave this Crafting to the wind? I know you must do it… but I do not have to like it. Especially when Uncrafting involves no Seen, and can only be done by you, and you alone.”
I brushed a kiss across his frowny lips. “I just knew I could count on your support! Now, let’s get back to the mime before any more Spellcraft shops open up and he can start comparison-shopping.”
We headed back out to the lobby, where Rufus was regaling the mime with a rambling tale about… well, frankly, it’s just as hard to follow Rufus’s stories as it is to figure out which end of his Seens is up. But whatever the narrative might be, it involved a trashcan, a used harmonica and some shaving cream. Just as Rufus wrapped it up by saying, “… and then all of us broke into a half-hearted rendition of Auld Lang Syne!” my cousin shouldered her way through the front door with a teetering stack of pizza boxes in her hands from the take-and-bake joint next door.
“Who holds a meeting in this day and age and doesn’t supply any donuts?” she demanded with all the vehemence with which she demands… well, everything. “I swear I could hardly hear the presenter over the groaning of all the empty Scrivener stomachs.”
Sabina had dressed “professionally” for the mandatory meeting— which was to say, she didn’t have any holes in her black jeans, her Doc Martens were polished, and her bra straps weren’t showing. Fortunately, Spellcraft is one of those professions that doesn’t require you to dress to the same standards as a banker or a politician or a high school principal.
I, myself, might be fond of sharp tailored suits and natty bowties, but Sabina balked at the notion of wearing anything even remotely conservative. My cousin has crammed herself into a pair of pantyhose exactly once in all her twenty-five years. And by the time she was done clawing them off again ten minutes later, everyone up and down the street knew exactly what she thought of them.
Yuri relieved her of the pizza boxes and steered them into the break room, where three toaster ovens we’d found at various garage sales and thrift stores awaited. And with no stack of boxes blocking his view, the mime did an exaggerated double-take at my cousin.
Sabina looked equally as startled— and knowing that she can be just a teensy bit acerbic if you rub her the wrong way, I quickly attempted to steer the mime’s attention back to the matter of the Uncrafting. I slid a contract from a pile of legalese, slapped it down in front of him, and said, “I’d be happy to see to the matter at hand. All I’ll need is your signature on the dotted line and five hundred dollars. We take all the major credit cards, but there’s a five percent discount if you pay cash.”
The mime pretended to be pulling down his pants.
Even if I were single, trading sexual favors for Spellcraft was a line I was simply not willing to cross. “I’ll have you know this is a respectable family business.”
Yuri said, “He is showing you his pockets are empty.”
“Oh. Fine. Well, there may be some wiggle-room.” We didn’t need a Seen painted, after all. “It’s a real stretch, but I can go down to $ 399.”
The mime repeated the gesture.
“Looks like he’s frying up some bacon and eggs,” Rufus observed. Was that a euphemism? Hard to say.
“$ 299?” I tried. No dice. “$ 250, and that’s really the best I can do.”
Unfortunately, it turned out that if I didn’t want my dad’s Crafting to fall into the hands of another Spellcraft shop, I’d have to settle for twenty bucks. I’m usually a lot better at negotiation, but frankly, it’s unsettling when the other party is constantly pretending to disrobe.
The mime handed over a crumpled bill, then pretended to sign the contract with his fingertip.
Sabina rolled her eyes and handed him an actual pen. He brightened and plucked a tiny paper flower from his sleeve, then offered it to her in return with a grand, courtly bow. Until Yuri swatted it out of his hand, anyhow. “Stop dawdling and sign. There is much work to do.”
The mime made a big deal of signing with a flourish. Spellcrafters always get a big kick out of what passes for a flourish among the Handless. But as I spun the contract around to face me, it wasn’t to critique his penmanship, but to figure out what in the heck I should call him. Because it hardly seemed fitting to keep referring to my new customer as “the mime.”
His signature was a vague squiggle.
“Look,” I said. “If we’re going to be working together, I need to know what to call you.”
The mime smiled, spread his arms wide as if to say get a load of this, then bent his knees and straightened them again.
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?” Sabina demanded.
The smile went a bit pained. He repeated the motion.
“You’re jumping rope,” I said. “Are you a boxer? Is your name Muhammed Ali? Ooh, I know, it’s Rocky.”
The mime shook his head and did it again.
“A bunny hop,” I guessed. “A pogo stick.”
Rufus nodded sagely. “That’s exactly how the slow-motion dismount of a gymnast from a pommel horse would look. He’s trying to tell you his name is Trigger.”
Sabina was running out of patience. “How long have you guys been at this?”
“Too long,” Yuri said.
Dang it, I had to get something right. It was a matter of principle now. “You’re looking for something on a low bookshelf. You’re doing squats at the gym. Wait a minute— I know! You’re crouching.” The mime shook his head emphatically… but if he wasn’t willing to speak up for himself, it was his problem, not mine. “That settles it. Crouch it is.”
Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe by Rick R Reed
Chapter One
Music from his clock radio woke Thad Matthews at 6:00 a.m. The song, “Smokestack Lightning,” yanked him from a heavy, dream-laden sleep. Its energy forced his eyes open wider, caused synapses, eight hours dormant, to tingle, and made him want to move. Nonetheless, he slapped at the snooze button, silencing the bluesy wail, rolled over, and then pulled the comforter over his head. He was glad he had tuned his clock radio to KPLU, Seattle’s only all-blues all-the-time station, but he desperately wanted to recapture just a few more minutes of his dream, in which he’d found himself on the moors of England. All he could recall was that the moors themselves were appropriately fog shrouded and lit with a silvery luminance from above. Someone waited for him in the shadows and fog. And he couldn’t, for the life of him, know for certain if that someone meant to do him harm or meant to just do him.
He’d been having a lot of sexual dreams lately.
As much as he wanted to unravel the mystery of the dream—and to perhaps savor the vague sexual vibrations he was getting from it—sleep eluded him. He found thoughts of the day crowding in, preventing even the most remote possibility of a recurrence of slumber.
Thad sat up in the four-poster, rubbing his eyes like a little boy, and wondered why he bothered setting an alarm. He had no job to go to, no pressing engagements, no muse to answer to—hell, he didn’t even have an appointment for an oil change.
This day, like all his others, stretched out before him completely unmarred with obligations other than the requirements life imposed upon him, such as eating and going to the bathroom, which the erection poking up under his sheets compelled him to take care of. He called this morning wood a pee-on, because once he had put that particular need to rest, it most often subsided.
After stumbling to the adjoining bathroom and letting go with a flow that caused a mighty sigh of relief to issue forth from him, he thought once again that maybe today should be the day he looked harder into getting himself some employment—anything to put him into contact with other people and to fill his waking hours. Lord knew he filled out enough applications and answered enough Help Wanted ads on Craigslist to keep the officials down at unemployment sending him checks. But all his efforts, dishearteningly, were ignored.
It had been nearly four months since he had been laid off at Perk, the national chain of coffee shops headquartered in suburban Shoreline. Thad had been there for six years, in the marketing department, spending his days writing clever sayings for paper coffee cups and point-of-purchase signs for the stores. It was a tough job, but someone had to do it. And writing phrases like “Plan on Being Spontaneous” paid the bills, even if it didn’t provide much creative or intellectual challenge. It helped sell coffee, and Thad never kidded himself: that’s why he was employed there.
Except now they didn’t need him anymore. Who would write the signs for their special Iced Coffee blend?
He gazed down at the bubbling golden froth in the toilet and flushed it away, along with his thoughts about his former job. He turned and rinsed his hands under the sink, then splashed cold water on his face. Standing up straight, he stared at his reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror.
“You’re too young for a life of leisure,” he said to his reflection, rubbing his hands through his short, coarse red hair, which stuck up in a multitude of directions. People paid good money for products that would make their hair look as fetchingly disheveled as Thad’s did right now. He peered closer at himself, taking inventory of his pale skin, his gray eyes, and the constellation of freckles that spanned his nose and the tops of his cheeks. He flexed, thinking he was looking a little flabby around the middle.
“Workout day. I’ll head over to the gym today. I need it.” He sucked in his gut and let it out again, thinking it was empty and needed refilling. A Pagliacci delivery pizza only went so far. His slumber and active dream life, he supposed, had all but digested the pie.
Thad moved to the bedroom and began tossing pillows on the floor to make up his bed. He wasn’t sure why he bothered with this either, since it was unlikely anyone would see the military-neat bed except for him, when he would approach it once more this evening just to mess it all up again. But it was important to Thad to have a routine. Otherwise his days would blend into one meaningless chunk of time, formless, without definition or purpose.
It was becoming increasingly hard enough to distinguish Tuesday from Thursday—or Sunday, for that matter.
Back when he was putting in forty-plus hours a week, he envied the increasing number of friends and acquaintances who had gotten laid off during the economic downturn. The money they made on unemployment seemed like enough—at least for him and his modest lifestyle in his Green Lake studio apartment—and the freedom they had seemed worth the cut in pay.
But now he wasn’t so sure. The uncertainty of what would happen if he still wasn’t working when the unemployment checks dwindled down to zero hung over him like a vague threat. And the freedom wasn’t really so great, when that same threat prevented him from spending much money, lest he should need it down the road for luxuries like food and a roof over his head.
Worst of all was what the job loss had done to his self-esteem. Thad needed some meaning in his life, a purpose. That much had been instilled in him since he was a little boy, back in Chicago growing up in the working class neighborhood of Bridgeport, where his father was a cop and his mother waited tables at a Lithuanian restaurant.
He pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, padded out to the office area of his apartment, and plopped down in front of his laptop. He planned to check out the classifieds on Craigslist, then Monster, then CareerBuilder. When he was first laid off, he looked only at writing and editing jobs but had lately broadened his search to include, well, just about everything. Thad realized he would work retail, man a customer service phone line, groom dogs, or wait tables, as long as he had a job.
Yet the rest of the world hadn’t gotten wind of his eagerness to accept any kind of employment. Or if they had, they weren’t saying.
Before he went through the often-depressing ritual of cyber pavement pounding, he would check out what had happened in the world since he had stumbled in last night from an evening of self-consolation and vodka on Capitol Hill. He hit the little orange-and-blue Firefox icon on the dock at the bottom of his screen to bring up the day’s online news…
And was jolted right out of whatever sluggishness he was feeling. He stared at the lead article for that day’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer. A chill coursed through him, and he slowly shook his head as he read the details of that morning’s top story, titled “Brutal Slaying in Capitol Hill.” The article described how an as-yet-unidentified young man had been killed in an alley in the Seattle neighborhood known for its heavy concentration of gay bars and clubs. Thad had to stop reading for a moment to close his eyes because the gruesome details were simply too much to bear. His stomach churned. The man had not just been killed but had been literally ripped apart. Very little blood was found at the scene. And forensics had already determined that there was no trace of metal found on the victim’s flesh, which meant that the deed had to have been done with something other than a knife. The worst detail of all was the fact that the remains bore definite signs that much of the man’s flesh had been eaten. Authorities are keeping details to themselves regarding who—or what—the perpetrator could have been. The story closed with the usual cautions about what to do—don’t travel alone, avoid strangers and unlit places—when something so unsettling and violent occurs.
Thad exited Firefox sooner than he had planned and stared out the window. His heart thumped in his chest. Bile splashed at the back of his throat and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. He had been in Capitol Hill the night before, having a dirty martini or three at Neighbours, one of the gay ghetto’s most popular hangouts. He wondered if, as he had made his way back to the bus stop, he had passed the killer or killers. If perhaps the killer or killers had eyed him, wondering if he would suffice for their demented purposes. He could see himself through their eyes, being watched from the shadows of a vestibule or an alley as he made his way back to the bus stop on Broadway. He wondered if he looked appetizing. He had been told on more than one occasion that he was “tasty” and “delicious,” but those doing the describing were not thinking of him as dinner—at least not in the conventional sense. He wondered if perhaps the only thing that had saved him was the coincidental passing of a boisterous group from the University of Washington, coming up alongside him just as the fiend in the dark was ready to pounce. He shivered. For once, rejection was a comforting thought.
Rejection, under these circumstances, was the new “getting lucky.”
Still, some poor soul had not been as lucky as he had, and today forensics was probably busy trying to figure out just who this unfortunate soul was. From what Thad had read, it didn’t sound like they had much to go on. Dental records, maybe? What kind of animal would not only kill a fellow human being but also eat his flesh and drink his blood? Was this a human being at all? Thad had heard of bears occasionally making their misguided ways down from the mountains and into Seattle, but they usually got no farther than suburban parks and backyards. And the “bears” that routinely cruised the Capitol Hill neighborhood were of a much more cuddly variety.
Surely, though, an animal couldn’t have been roaming around busy Capitol Hill on Friday night. The neighborhood, on weekend nights, was a blur of barhoppers and partiers, its hilly streets filled with people and cars jockeying for position. Loud and well lit, it was the kind of neighborhood that would scare the shit out of an animal, at least an animal with normal fears and inclinations. This had to be the work of a person, or people, right? And whoever was behind such a thing had to be majorly warped. Thad had a quick vision of pale-gray eyes and enormous canine teeth until he banished the imagery to the back of his brain, grateful for another kind of canine distraction.
That distraction had just sidled up beside Thad, her arrival signaled by a clicking of toenails on hardwood. Thad glanced down at his gray-and-white Chihuahua, Edith, staring up at him with her dark eyes. Her tongue stuck out one side of her mouth, giving her a both comical and wizened appearance. The dog was about a hundred years old, and Thad thought, for better or worse, she was his very best friend in the world. Edith got up on her hind legs to paw at Thad’s lap, indicating to him that he was not the only creature in the house that had to pee first thing in the morning.
Thad got up and, with Edith following impatiently behind, slid into flip-flops and grabbed her leash. “C’mon, sweetheart, let’s take a little walk down to the lake, and then we’ll see about getting us both some breakfast.”
******
Saturday passed much as Monday had, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and so on. In other words, Thad cleaned his studio apartment that didn’t need cleaning; updated his Facebook status five times and his Twitter status three—stealing quotes from Lily Tomlin and Kathy Griffin to make himself sound more witty than he was; searched on Facebook for several hours for old friends, relatives, classmates, and boyfriends; made tuna salad for lunch—half the can of Chicken of the Sea went to Edith, who seduced him out of it with her eyes—and streamed three episodes of True Blood on his laptop.
By six o’clock Thad was staring out the window and thinking about counting his freckles, just for something to do. Perhaps he could shave the hair between his eyebrows? Do another online crossword? Google himself again?
“I gotta get out of here, money or no money.” He glanced down at Edith, who was lying at the opposite end of the couch. She looked up at him as if she understood and then glanced over at the door.
“That’s right, sweetheart. Daddy needs to get out…at least for a little dinner.” Thad had just gotten a flyer in the mail the day before, describing a new place that had opened on Green Lake Way called the Blue Moon Café. He had gone by it several times during his runs around the lake and watched as the restaurant had slowly come together: one day kitchen equipment was delivered, another it was dark-cherry tables and chairs, still another a shipment of beer and wine. Yet he had no idea, really, what kind of cuisine they’d serve.
But one thing Thad had loved about the Green Lake neighborhood when he moved in was its abundance of stores, restaurants, pubs, and cafés within walking distance. Thad had never owned a car and didn’t want one. So he liked to support the businesses there, even though many of them were more geared toward families and couples than the livelier—and gayer—Capitol Hill neighborhood, ten or fifteen minutes away depending on traffic.
After serving Edith her dinner of Thad’s own special blend of brown rice, chicken, and peas and carrots, Thad hit the shower. He took a long time under the hot spray, washing and conditioning his hair, soaping every orifice, and shaving the hair on his balls and adjacent to his penis, revealing his manhood in its most flattering light. Even in Green Lake and even on an outing for a quiet meal, one never knew whom one would meet. Besides, Thad had all the time in the world.
Don’t remind me, he thought, sliding his head under the shower to rinse the conditioner from his ginger hair.
He dressed in a pair of black jeans, combat boots, and a vintage Cockney Rejects T-shirt he’d found a couple of weeks ago at Value Village. He worked a dollop of hair wax through his hair, making it stand on end fetchingly and giving him that just-out-of-bed look. Although he hadn’t made it to the gym that day, the black made him look thinner and made his shoulders, naturally broad, stand out. The thin cotton fabric also clung alluringly to his pecs.
He thought briefly that he should head to Capitol Hill instead, or even the University District just east of him, but Thad was the kind of guy who, once he had made a plan, stuck to it.
He took Edith out for a quick bathroom break, kissed the top of her head, and set off for the Blue Moon Café. His step was light, and he’d set his status on Facebook to “optimistic.”
Who knew what the night would bring?
Spirit by John Inman
Chapter One
SALLY’S SUITCASE was dusty rose with little Alice-blue primroses on it. Very pretty. It was also big and bulky and weighed a fucking ton. I grunted like a caveman and broke out in a sweat simply hefting it into the trunk of the taxi. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I felt a couple of sinews in my back snap like rubber bands.
“What do you have in here? A dead body?”
“Oh, pooh,” Sally said, slapping my arm. “You gay guys gripe about everything. Just suck up the pain and try to be butch. Fake it if you have to.”
Since butch doesn’t always work for me and since I was never very good at faking anything, including maturity, I stuck my tongue out at her instead. “Blow me, Sis.” Since I knew it irked her, I cast a critical eye at her ash-blonde hair. It was bleached to within an inch of its life, and it had been that way since high school. “And stop bleaching. One of these days you’re going to wake up bald.”
She flipped her long hair back off her shoulder. “I don’t bleach, I tone.”
“Whatever.”
“Jason, you’re such a brat.” She smirked, sticking out her own tongue and waggling it around in midair, just as she had when she was nine and I was six and she was trying to freak me out. My sister could even now, at the ripe old age of thirty-one, touch the tip of her nose with her tongue. I had always admired that remarkable ability. Being a gay man, I’ve used my tongue extensively over the years in a number of scenarios, and in a number of dark moist places, but I still haven’t acquired that skill.
“Bitch. Floozy. Slut,” I mumbled under my breath, making her smile.
During this exchange, the cab driver stood way off to the side glowering, smoking a cigarette, and looking worried that someone was going to ask him to lift something. Since I had dealt with cab drivers before, I knew better than to ask.
The driver was a stodgy old guy who peered out at the world through a perpetual squint, or maybe he was just trying to keep the smoke out of his eyes. In any case, he now made it a point to stare at his wristwatch and clear his throat as he stomped out his cigarette underfoot.
“Time to roll,” he seemed to be saying. “Things to do, places to go.”
Sally and I gave each other a perfunctory peck on the cheek, and only then did we gaze around, wondering where Timmy had gone. Mother of the year, and babysitter extraordinaire, we weren’t. I quickly realized I hadn’t seen the kid in over a minute. He could be in Texas by now.
With a sigh of relief, I spotted my four-year-old nephew on his hands and knees by the foundation of the house, trying to peer through one of the tiny ground-level windows that looked into the basement. He had his little hands on the glass, with his face stuck in between them to shut out the glare, and he was talking to himself and snickering.
“Look, Sally,” I intoned. “The kid’s insane already, and you’ve only had him four and a half years.”
She slapped my arm again. “Oh, shut up.” Glancing at her wristwatch, she said, “Where the heck is Jack? He said he’d be here by now.”
“Jack comes when Jack comes.” I rolled my eyes when I said it. I didn’t much care for Jack.
Sally gave me a devilish grin. “Don’t get pornographic.”
“What? I didn’t mean it that way!”
But Sally wasn’t listening. We were already traipsing across my tiny front yard to fetch the kid. Since I got there first, I scooped Timmy into my arms. His hands and face were muddy brown where he had pressed them against the dirty window.
Sally stuck her fists on her hips and scowled at him. “You look like a miner,” she said.
“He is a minor,” I said. “He’s only four.”
“Oh, shut up,” Sally said again.
Timmy stuck his dirty finger up my nose and laughed. “You guys are funny.”
Sally stared at the two of us as if wondering what she had been thinking, bringing us together like this. “You’re going to ruin him, aren’t you, Jason? When I get back in four weeks, I won’t know my son. He’ll be lost to me forever.”
I shrugged and snapped and snarled and tried to bite Timmy’s hand off, which made him laugh even harder. “That’s the chance you take, Sis. Free babysitters don’t come cheap, you know.”
Sally just shook her head and headed back to the cab, mumbling under her breath, “That makes a lot of sense.”
A car horn in the distance snagged our attention. It was Jack, barreling down the street in his stupid MINI Cooper with the British flag on the roof. Jack was about as British as an Ethiopian famine. He gave a cheery wave out the window and pulled up to the curb with the warbling of a coloratura wailing from his tape deck. Jack liked opera.
I set Timmy on the lawn, and Sally and I watched as Jack jumped from the car, suitcase in hand. Sally was smiling. Remember when I said I didn’t like Jack? Well, Sally did.
“Isn’t he gorgeous?” she asked the tree beside her. She couldn’t have been asking me. She knew perfectly well how I felt about the twit.
Although I had to admit, Jack was immensely easy on the eyes, with his tall, hunky frame and broad shoulders and wavy black hair. I also suspected he was a homophobe, though, since he couldn’t say two words to me without making a snarky comment about my being gay.
“Hey, Sally!” he called out to my sister. “Hey, Rosemary!” he called out to me.
He thought that was funny. I merely turned and scooped a surprised Timmy off the ground and held him in my arms so I wouldn’t have to shake Jack’s hand.
Did I mention I didn’t like Jack?
Jack tossed his bag into the back of the cab beside Sally’s, overflexing a few muscles while he did it just to prove he could.
He walked up to Timmy, who was firmly perched on my arm, and tweaked his nose. Me, he ignored.
Timmy said, “Ppffthh!” and turned away from the guy. He didn’t like Jack either.
Jack didn’t even notice. He gave Sally a smooch on the mouth and said, “Ready, babe?”
The driver tucked himself in behind the wheel and started the engine, all the while making a big show of buckling his seatbelt and fiddling with the meter like he was the busiest guy on the planet. He hadn’t even closed the trunk, so while Sally and Dipshit climbed into the backseat, I set Timmy down on the edge of the lawn for the second time, laid a finger on his nose, and told him to stay put. In a brilliant flash of insight, I realized he wouldn’t do any such thing, so I immediately snatched him up in my arms again. Then I slammed the taxi’s trunk lid closed myself—one-handed, I might add, since Timmy was dangling from my other arm like a wiggling stalk of bananas.
Jack’s hand came out of the window and pointed across the roof of the cab. He clicked his car keys at the MINI Cooper at the curb, which beeped in response and locked itself up tighter than a drum. Sort of like the Batmobile.
“Don’t tip the driver,” I whispered, as Sally leaned out the other window to give me a final good-bye peck. Timmy laughed. He had his finger up my nose again.
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Sally said, stretching her neck out a little farther to give Timmy a good-bye kiss as well. Then she took one look at the kid’s filthy face and settled on a friendly pat atop his head instead. She wagged a finger in his face. “You be good. Obey your uncle while I’m gone.”
Timmy really laughed at that. “Yeah, right.” He giggled and, squirming out of my arms, he took off running back to the basement window, where he once again dropped to his knees and peered inside.
“Maybe he got my brat gene,” I said, not entirely joking.
Sally didn’t even pretend to find that statement untrue. “No maybes about it,” she said, ruffling through her purse, making sure she had her money, her plane tickets, and whatever else women scramble around for in their purses when they’re trying to be efficient.
I stepped away from the cab, molding my face to look trustworthy. “Don’t worry about the kid. I’ll lock him in the closet if I have to.”
“Just don’t scar him emotionally. I spend enough money on my own therapy.”
“Very funny.”
Then Jack chimed in with, “Don’t turn him gay either. We can’t afford all the makeup you boys use.”
I blushed. Had he noticed I’d used a cover stick on a zit that morning, or was he just talking out of his homophobic ass again?
I couldn’t help myself. I leaned back in the window and crooned, “Don’t worry, Jacqueline. I’ll try to restrain myself. And we won’t listen to opera. I promise. I read that a lot of closeted gay guys listen to opera. Oh, and we won’t use napkins when we eat either, and we’ll blow our noses directly onto the ground just by pressing our thumb to the opposing nostril and blowing the crap out that way. Either that or we’ll wipe the snot on our shirtsleeves. You know. Like you do.”
Sally giggled, Jack turned away unamused, and the driver gave the lot of us an odd look in the rearview mirror, which made me blush again. Sally didn’t give a crap what the driver thought, and Jack was too busy being a prick and trying to look important to notice. He was studiously ignoring me as he checked his airline tickets, plucking them out of his pocket, flipping them open, perusing the contents. They weren’t going to Mars after all. It was just a four-week vacation. After a week in New York to catch a few shows, enjoy a few restaurants, and gain a few pounds, they were then going to diddle up and down the Eastern Seaboard on a train. Several trains, in fact. Personally, I would rather set myself on fire than trap myself in a rumbling metal tube for three weeks with Dipshit; but hey, that’s just me.
Sally reached out, patted my head like she had Timmy’s, then poked it back out of the window with the heel of her hand.
“Stop causing trouble,” she said with a merry sparkle in her eyes. Then she turned to the driver and said, “Airport.”
I heard him mumble, “Well, there’s a surprise,” as the cab backed out onto the street.
I waved, watching the yellow cab hustle off into San Diego traffic, and when I turned to find Timmy, he was gone again.
Holy crap! The kid was a gazelle. What had I gotten myself into?
His disappearance was solved when I found him around the corner of the house in the backyard, peeking through a different basement window. Jeez, he was like Gollum, seeking out the world’s deepest, darkest places.
When I scooped him into my arms, he sang out, “Daddy!”
And I thought, Well isn’t that sweet.
I HAD toddler-proofed the house as best I could. The basement door was securely latched so the kid couldn’t tumble headfirst down the flight of stairs leading into the bowels of the house, snapping a myriad of youthful bones along the way. Electrical wires were safely coiled and taped up and tucked under furniture in case Timmy got the inexplicable urge to chew on them. Electrical outlets were covered. All breakable knick-knacks were raised out of reach and all dangerous objects securely stashed away—switchblades, rolls of barbed wire, plastic explosives, bobby pins. (Just kidding about the bobby pins. I’m not that nelly.)
My dog, Thumper, who was a mix of Chihuahua, dachshund, miniature poodle, and quite possibly a three-toed sloth, was no threat to Timmy at all. The poor thing was almost twenty years old and hardly had any teeth left. I hadn’t heard her bark in three years. She only moved off the sofa to eat and go potty, and once her business was done, she stood in front of the sofa looking up like the Queen Mother waiting for the carriage door to be opened until I scooped her off the floor and redeposited her among the cushions. Poor thing. (I mean me.) She lay there all day long watching TV: Channel 9, the Mexican channel. Don’t ask me why, but that was the only channel she would tolerate. Couldn’t live without it, in fact. The one benefit to this annoying habit of hers was that, while I didn’t understand my dog at all, I was pretty sure I was beginning to comprehend Spanish.
Timmy was at that happy stage of child rearing where he could pull down his own pants and climb onto the commode without any help from squeamish gay uncles. He had brought an entourage of toys with him that would have kept an orphanage entertained. The first thing I did after finding a trail of little black skid marks on my new oak flooring was to confiscate his tricycle, allocating the thing to outdoor use only, which Timmy accepted with stoic resignation, although I did hear him mumble something about chicken poop and peckerheads. I’m not sure if his watered-down-obscenity-strewn mumbling was related to the tricycle announcement but fear it was. While the kid might have gotten my brat gene, there was also little doubt he had inherited my sister’s sarcastic-foulmouthed-snarky gene. God help his teachers when he started school.
With his mother and his mother’s twit of a boyfriend safely out of the way, Timmy and I settled into a routine. The routine was this: he ran around like a cyclone, and I ran around behind him trying to keep him alive. It took my nephew a mere two hours to wear me out completely, and while I dozed for five minutes on the sofa to recoup my strength, using Thumper for a pillow (she did have a few uses), Timmy managed to find a screwdriver somewhere and proceeded to climb onto a chair in the kitchen and remove the back panel from the microwave. Don’t ask me why. What took him five minutes to take apart took me thirty minutes to put back together. I’m not handy with tools. Timmy, on the other hand, seemed quite proficient. If I hadn’t been afraid he might actually succeed, and consequently make me feel even dumber than I already did, I would have asked him to change the oil in my Toyota.
In the middle of the afternoon, Timmy and I found ourselves in the backyard picking oranges off my orange tree for the next day’s breakfast. (Well, I was picking the oranges. Timmy was stuffing them down his shorts. Who knows why?) He was squealing happily and running around with oranges dropping out of his trouser legs and rolling merrily across the yard. I was busy trying to be masculine like a proper hunter/gatherer, climbing up into the orange tree to get that one beautiful orange on the tippy-top limb that I couldn’t quite reach to whap with the broom handle, when I was suddenly stunned by the sound of silence. God, it was lovely. Lovely and suspicious. I peeked through the foliage toward the ground and saw Timmy sprawled out like a dead thing, sound asleep in the grass.
I could only assume it was naptime.
Being the ever-conscientious uncle, I climbed quietly down the tree, gently scooped the kid into my arms, and carried him into the house. The moment I laid Timmy on the bed in the guest room upstairs—since Thumper was hogging the couch—Timmy popped his eyes open and stuck his finger up my nose again. In two seconds flat, he was wide-awake, tearing through the house and screaming like a banshee.
Note to self. Next time the kid goes to sleep, no matter where it is, leave him there. Edge of a cliff? No problem. Middle of the street? Don’t worry about it. Just put up a couple of safety cones to redirect traffic and let him be.
Timmy was making so much noise, and his voice was so annoyingly high-pitched, that Thumper had buried her head under the sofa cushions. I longed to crawl under there with her, but being the adult in charge, God help me, I couldn’t. I rummaged through the mound of clothes Sally had supplied for Timmy’s four-week stay, hoping to find a tiny straightjacket and a soundproof muzzle in among the T-shirts and shorts and Daffy Duck underpants, but she must have forgotten to pack them, dammit.
For my headache, which was quickly blossoming into an epic doozy, I popped four aspirins and chewed them dry. How’s that for butch? And to distract Timmy from doing whatever the hell it was he was doing, I asked him if he’d like to help me fix dinner.
“What are we having?” he asked. There was a rope of snot dangling out of his nose that looked like a bungee cord. I watched, fascinated, as he sucked it back in. A moment later, it made another appearance, flapped around for a minute, then he snorted it back up again. It was a fascinating thing to watch. Fascinating and disgusting.
“Salmon and green-bean casserole,” I finally answered, trying not to barf.
He made a face. “Blechhh! I want hot dogs.”
“Hot dogs.”
“And ’roni.”
“What the heck is ’roni?”
“With cheese,” he said. “’Roni and cheese.”
“Oh. Macaroni and cheese. No way. Do you know how many calories are in that? I have to watch my figure.”
Timmy giggled. “Jack says you’re like a girl. He says you even like boys.”
“I do like boys. But not that one. Jack’s a twit.”
Timmy giggled again, but it was a crafty giggle. “If you make ’roni and cheese and hot dogs for dinner, I won’t tell him you said that.”
“Ever hear of extortion?”
“No,” he said, “but if you make hot dogs tonight, we can have ’stortion tomorrow.”
“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t a complete idiot. I’d serve him salmon tomorrow and tell him it was extortion. The kid was four years old, for Christ’s sake. He’d believe anything I told him, right?
With the uneasy feeling I was in over my head, I stuck the beautiful slab of salmon back in the fridge for another day and rummaged through the freezer until I found a package of hot dogs buried under the edamame and brussels sprouts. The hot dogs had been there since some long ago Fourth of July celebration. Wonder of wonders, I found a box of macaroni and cheese in the pantry off the garage. Gee. I didn’t even know I had it. Maybe the kid was not only annoying, but psychic as well. That was a scary thought. A prescient four-year-old.
Later, while sitting at the kitchen table consuming our 50,000-calorie dinner, Timmy didn’t shut up once.
“The man in the basement is nice,” Timmy said around a mouthful of hot dog.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said.
“He said to tell you he’s glad you live here.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m glad he approves.”
“He hates Mommy.”
“Well, she can be annoying sometimes. Don’t tell her I said that.”
Timmy shrugged. “Can I have another hot dog?”
“You haven’t finished the one you’ve got.”
“I only like the middles. The ends taste funny.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
“Thank you.”
“How’s the ’roni and cheese?”
“Good, but it needs more butter. Mommy uses two sticks.”
It was my turn to shrug. “It’s making my ass grow as it is. I can feel it ballooning underneath me in my chair even as we speak. Both cheeks. Mommy’s ass will be ballooning soon too. Watch if it doesn’t. One day she’ll wake up and she’ll be all ass. No head, no arms, no bleached-blonde hair, just ass, with maybe a few toes sticking out. And if you count the man she’s with, it’ll be two asses.”
Timmy giggled. “You’re funny.”
“And you’re nuts,” I said, building him another hot dog. “Mustard?”
“Ketchup.”
“Yuk.”
“It’s good. Here, try it.” He leaned over the table and squirted ketchup on my hot dog.
“Jesus, kid, you’re killing me here.”
“Eat it,” he said.
I took a bite of my ketchupy hot dog. Damn. I liked it.
Timmy grinned at my expression. “See?” he said. He scooped up a big ladle full of macaroni and cheese and glopped that on my plate next to the teeny pile I had placed there myself.
“Eat,” he said, sounding like every overworked mother of every finicky-ass kid that ever walked the face of the planet since the beginning of time.
So I ate. Every noodle. Every fat-saturated glob of cheese and margarine. Then I had another hotdog. With ketchup. And two glasses of chocolate milk. I hadn’t drunk chocolate milk for fifteen years. Damn. I liked that too. Blasted kid.
Tomorrow I’d diet.
When we were stuffed to the gills, Timmy stood on a chair and dried the dishes while I washed. I didn’t own a dishwasher. Timmy seemed slightly astounded by that fact.
“Is this how they did dishes in the old days?”
“Yes,” I said. “Later we’ll take the laundry down to the river and beat it on a rock.”
“Oh, goody. I like rivers.”
“That was a joke. I have a washing machine just like Mommy.”
“Shit.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“There’s a scary movie on TV tonight, Uncle Jason. If you’re good, I’ll let you watch it.”
“Screw you, kid. I’ll let you watch it.”
Timmy clapped his hands and almost dropped a plate. “Yay, we’re watching a scary movie!”
I stared at my nephew for about fifteen seconds. Had I just been tricked into telling him he could watch a scary movie? He wasn’t that smart, was he? Good lord, I’d have to be on my toes for the next four weeks or this kid would be leading me around like a poodle on a leash.
Speaking of which. “Wanna help me walk Thumper?”
Timmy’s eyes got big and round. “You mean the dog?”
“No, my pet anteater. Of course the dog.”
“Can she walk? I thought she was dead.”
“She’s not dead. She’s just old.”
“But she hasn’t moved all day.”
“Like I said, she’s old. One day you’ll be old and you won’t move all day either.” And God, wouldn’t that be a blessing.
Timmy craned his neck back and looked through the kitchen doorway into the living room, where even now I could hear Thumper snoring like a sawmill.
Timmy stood there on the chair, the plate forgotten in his hand, his face agape with wonder like one of the shepherd kids in Fatima, Portugal, eyeballing the Virgin Mary popping out of a stump. “I wanna see her walk. Are you sure she’s not dead?”
“Yes,” I said, molding my face into a phony smile, a la used car salesman trying to sell a clunker to anybody who’d listen. Shooting for camaraderie, I waggled a finger in Timmy’s ribs. “And just to make it more fun, it’ll be your job to pick up the poop.”
Timmy turned and stared at me. Then he guffawed. It’s a little disconcerting when a four-year-old guffaws. “She’s your dog,” Timmy said, his face scrunched up in concentration while he dug a booger out of his nose. “You pick up the poop.”
Damn. I thought I had him that time. I handed the kid a tissue, plucked the plate from his hand, and tossed it back in the dishwater in case it had a booger on it—and decided on the spot if Timmy ever managed to stay alive long enough to grow up, he’d probably be president. Two terms. Hell, even I’d vote for him. Both times.
Timmy seemed properly astounded that Thumper truly was alive. He even insisted on holding the leash as we traipsed out into the night. Of course, we were traipsing at a snail’s pace since Thumper’s arthritic joints were not conducive to scampering.
“She’s awful slow,” Timmy whined.
“When you’re old, you’ll be slow too.”
“Then I won’t get old.”
“Fine, Peter Pan. Just walk the frigging dog.”
The night was gorgeous and balmy. It was June, and June in San Diego is perfect. With a younger dog, we might have enjoyed the evening for hours, but with Thumper, we barely got around the block. In fact, we didn’t. We were halfway around the block when Thumper gave out and insisted on being carried the rest of the way home.
“Will you carry me too?” Timmy asked.
“No.”
“Can I wear the leash?”
“Sure,” I said. I unclipped the collar from Thumper’s throat and clipped it around Timmy’s neck. He followed along behind me on the leash like a good little puppy until we passed Mrs. Lindquist, who lives down the block. She was walking her Pomeranian, and when she spotted me with the kid on a leash, she felt it her duty to intervene.
She bent over Timmy and patted his head. “Is this man hurting you?” she asked.
“Woof!” Timmy said.
Mrs. Lindquist straightened up and nailed me with a piercing stare. “Is he normal?” she asked.
I smiled and said, “Define normal.”
Mrs. Lindquist simply shook her head and walked on, dragging the poor Pom behind her. Lucky bitch. At least her dog could walk.
Back at the house, we deposited Thumper in among the sofa cushions, and she promptly fell asleep, worn out completely by all the excitement. Timmy didn’t want to take the collar off, so I merely unhooked the leash and left the collar in place around his scrawny neck. He looked like a tiny submissive, waiting for his Dom to come along and whap him with a whip.
I ran a couple of inches of warm water into the tub and laid out a towel and my favorite rubber ducky. Don’t ask.
“We have twenty minutes before the movie,” I said, handing him his pajamas. “Go take your bath.”
“Mommy only makes me take a bath once a month.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Nice try, Timmy. Get in the tub.”
He glowered and snatched the pj’s out of my hand. “Don’t watch. I know you like boys.”
At that, I laughed. “Jesus, kid, just go take your bath, and I’ll make us some popcorn for the movie.”
He brightened up. “With butter?”
“No. I thought I’d just dip it in lard.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Timmy skipped off to the bathroom and closed the door behind him.
He skipped back out of the bathroom three minutes later. His hair was a little damp, but that was probably just for show. If any other body parts had seen moisture, he couldn’t have been long about it. Unfortunately, I was too worn out to care. His pajamas had little rocket ships on them. I found myself sort of wishing I had a pair.
We settled onto the sofa on either side of Thumper and tuned in to the movie, switching the sound from Spanish to English. Thumper raised her head and growled, so I switched it back to Spanish. Timmy thought it was funny, watching the movie in Spanish. We had English subtitles of course, but he couldn’t read them. At least I didn’t think he could. Still, he didn’t seem to mind.
The movie was so bad I found myself giggling halfway through it. Then it got scary, and I found myself chewing on a cushion and squinting through the gory parts, trying not to look. Timmy and Thumper both sat there wide-eyed and breathless, taking in every spurt of blood and every dying moan from the poor helpless citizens of Burbank being devoured by zombies on the screen.
The movie wasn’t yet over when Timmy doubled over like a pocketknife and fell sound asleep. This time when I oh so carefully carried him in my arms up the stairs and deposited him in his bed, he stayed there.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
I toddled downstairs, as happy as I had ever been in my life, poured myself a healthy dollop of scotch, and settled in to finish the movie. Thumper was still watching it. I guess she liked it too. Her tail was wagging. Or maybe she was just as elated as I was that Timmy had finally crashed.
“What did I miss?” I asked.
Thumper ignored me. Too wrapped up in the movie to respond, I supposed.
After three scotches and the demise of upwards of a hundred movie extras, all torn to shreds and devoured by the scary-ass zombies, I was ready for bed myself.
I peeked into Timmy’s room to make sure he was still sound asleep, and he looked like a little angel lying there in his rocket-ship pajamas. Of course, I had spent the day with him. I knew better.
I brushed my teeth, then switched on the newly acquired baby monitor I had bought myself before Timmy’s arrival and which now sat like a tiny guardian angel on the nightstand insuring me a little peace of mind that Timmy wouldn’t dismantle the house while I slept. The baby monitor exuded a comforting fuzz of sound, filling up the shadows quite nicely. I rather enjoyed hearing it. I tucked myself naked into my bed, since it’s the only way I can sleep, then tucked Thumper under the covers beside me like a hot water bottle. I lay there all snug and secure with the crackly sound of the baby monitor and those three or four scotch and waters coaxing me into dreamland. Thumper rested her chin on my leg and was snoring in less than a minute. It took me a little longer. Just before my eyes and brain happily shut down for the night, a thought hit me in the head like a line drive, jarring me awake.
I bolted straight up in bed, suddenly remembering what Timmy had said at dinner.
“The man in the basement is nice.”
I blinked.
What man in the basement?
SALLY’S SUITCASE was dusty rose with little Alice-blue primroses on it. Very pretty. It was also big and bulky and weighed a fucking ton. I grunted like a caveman and broke out in a sweat simply hefting it into the trunk of the taxi. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I felt a couple of sinews in my back snap like rubber bands.
“What do you have in here? A dead body?”
“Oh, pooh,” Sally said, slapping my arm. “You gay guys gripe about everything. Just suck up the pain and try to be butch. Fake it if you have to.”
Since butch doesn’t always work for me and since I was never very good at faking anything, including maturity, I stuck my tongue out at her instead. “Blow me, Sis.” Since I knew it irked her, I cast a critical eye at her ash-blonde hair. It was bleached to within an inch of its life, and it had been that way since high school. “And stop bleaching. One of these days you’re going to wake up bald.”
She flipped her long hair back off her shoulder. “I don’t bleach, I tone.”
“Whatever.”
“Jason, you’re such a brat.” She smirked, sticking out her own tongue and waggling it around in midair, just as she had when she was nine and I was six and she was trying to freak me out. My sister could even now, at the ripe old age of thirty-one, touch the tip of her nose with her tongue. I had always admired that remarkable ability. Being a gay man, I’ve used my tongue extensively over the years in a number of scenarios, and in a number of dark moist places, but I still haven’t acquired that skill.
“Bitch. Floozy. Slut,” I mumbled under my breath, making her smile.
During this exchange, the cab driver stood way off to the side glowering, smoking a cigarette, and looking worried that someone was going to ask him to lift something. Since I had dealt with cab drivers before, I knew better than to ask.
The driver was a stodgy old guy who peered out at the world through a perpetual squint, or maybe he was just trying to keep the smoke out of his eyes. In any case, he now made it a point to stare at his wristwatch and clear his throat as he stomped out his cigarette underfoot.
“Time to roll,” he seemed to be saying. “Things to do, places to go.”
Sally and I gave each other a perfunctory peck on the cheek, and only then did we gaze around, wondering where Timmy had gone. Mother of the year, and babysitter extraordinaire, we weren’t. I quickly realized I hadn’t seen the kid in over a minute. He could be in Texas by now.
With a sigh of relief, I spotted my four-year-old nephew on his hands and knees by the foundation of the house, trying to peer through one of the tiny ground-level windows that looked into the basement. He had his little hands on the glass, with his face stuck in between them to shut out the glare, and he was talking to himself and snickering.
“Look, Sally,” I intoned. “The kid’s insane already, and you’ve only had him four and a half years.”
She slapped my arm again. “Oh, shut up.” Glancing at her wristwatch, she said, “Where the heck is Jack? He said he’d be here by now.”
“Jack comes when Jack comes.” I rolled my eyes when I said it. I didn’t much care for Jack.
Sally gave me a devilish grin. “Don’t get pornographic.”
“What? I didn’t mean it that way!”
But Sally wasn’t listening. We were already traipsing across my tiny front yard to fetch the kid. Since I got there first, I scooped Timmy into my arms. His hands and face were muddy brown where he had pressed them against the dirty window.
Sally stuck her fists on her hips and scowled at him. “You look like a miner,” she said.
“He is a minor,” I said. “He’s only four.”
“Oh, shut up,” Sally said again.
Timmy stuck his dirty finger up my nose and laughed. “You guys are funny.”
Sally stared at the two of us as if wondering what she had been thinking, bringing us together like this. “You’re going to ruin him, aren’t you, Jason? When I get back in four weeks, I won’t know my son. He’ll be lost to me forever.”
I shrugged and snapped and snarled and tried to bite Timmy’s hand off, which made him laugh even harder. “That’s the chance you take, Sis. Free babysitters don’t come cheap, you know.”
Sally just shook her head and headed back to the cab, mumbling under her breath, “That makes a lot of sense.”
A car horn in the distance snagged our attention. It was Jack, barreling down the street in his stupid MINI Cooper with the British flag on the roof. Jack was about as British as an Ethiopian famine. He gave a cheery wave out the window and pulled up to the curb with the warbling of a coloratura wailing from his tape deck. Jack liked opera.
I set Timmy on the lawn, and Sally and I watched as Jack jumped from the car, suitcase in hand. Sally was smiling. Remember when I said I didn’t like Jack? Well, Sally did.
“Isn’t he gorgeous?” she asked the tree beside her. She couldn’t have been asking me. She knew perfectly well how I felt about the twit.
Although I had to admit, Jack was immensely easy on the eyes, with his tall, hunky frame and broad shoulders and wavy black hair. I also suspected he was a homophobe, though, since he couldn’t say two words to me without making a snarky comment about my being gay.
“Hey, Sally!” he called out to my sister. “Hey, Rosemary!” he called out to me.
He thought that was funny. I merely turned and scooped a surprised Timmy off the ground and held him in my arms so I wouldn’t have to shake Jack’s hand.
Did I mention I didn’t like Jack?
Jack tossed his bag into the back of the cab beside Sally’s, overflexing a few muscles while he did it just to prove he could.
He walked up to Timmy, who was firmly perched on my arm, and tweaked his nose. Me, he ignored.
Timmy said, “Ppffthh!” and turned away from the guy. He didn’t like Jack either.
Jack didn’t even notice. He gave Sally a smooch on the mouth and said, “Ready, babe?”
The driver tucked himself in behind the wheel and started the engine, all the while making a big show of buckling his seatbelt and fiddling with the meter like he was the busiest guy on the planet. He hadn’t even closed the trunk, so while Sally and Dipshit climbed into the backseat, I set Timmy down on the edge of the lawn for the second time, laid a finger on his nose, and told him to stay put. In a brilliant flash of insight, I realized he wouldn’t do any such thing, so I immediately snatched him up in my arms again. Then I slammed the taxi’s trunk lid closed myself—one-handed, I might add, since Timmy was dangling from my other arm like a wiggling stalk of bananas.
Jack’s hand came out of the window and pointed across the roof of the cab. He clicked his car keys at the MINI Cooper at the curb, which beeped in response and locked itself up tighter than a drum. Sort of like the Batmobile.
“Don’t tip the driver,” I whispered, as Sally leaned out the other window to give me a final good-bye peck. Timmy laughed. He had his finger up my nose again.
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Sally said, stretching her neck out a little farther to give Timmy a good-bye kiss as well. Then she took one look at the kid’s filthy face and settled on a friendly pat atop his head instead. She wagged a finger in his face. “You be good. Obey your uncle while I’m gone.”
Timmy really laughed at that. “Yeah, right.” He giggled and, squirming out of my arms, he took off running back to the basement window, where he once again dropped to his knees and peered inside.
“Maybe he got my brat gene,” I said, not entirely joking.
Sally didn’t even pretend to find that statement untrue. “No maybes about it,” she said, ruffling through her purse, making sure she had her money, her plane tickets, and whatever else women scramble around for in their purses when they’re trying to be efficient.
I stepped away from the cab, molding my face to look trustworthy. “Don’t worry about the kid. I’ll lock him in the closet if I have to.”
“Just don’t scar him emotionally. I spend enough money on my own therapy.”
“Very funny.”
Then Jack chimed in with, “Don’t turn him gay either. We can’t afford all the makeup you boys use.”
I blushed. Had he noticed I’d used a cover stick on a zit that morning, or was he just talking out of his homophobic ass again?
I couldn’t help myself. I leaned back in the window and crooned, “Don’t worry, Jacqueline. I’ll try to restrain myself. And we won’t listen to opera. I promise. I read that a lot of closeted gay guys listen to opera. Oh, and we won’t use napkins when we eat either, and we’ll blow our noses directly onto the ground just by pressing our thumb to the opposing nostril and blowing the crap out that way. Either that or we’ll wipe the snot on our shirtsleeves. You know. Like you do.”
Sally giggled, Jack turned away unamused, and the driver gave the lot of us an odd look in the rearview mirror, which made me blush again. Sally didn’t give a crap what the driver thought, and Jack was too busy being a prick and trying to look important to notice. He was studiously ignoring me as he checked his airline tickets, plucking them out of his pocket, flipping them open, perusing the contents. They weren’t going to Mars after all. It was just a four-week vacation. After a week in New York to catch a few shows, enjoy a few restaurants, and gain a few pounds, they were then going to diddle up and down the Eastern Seaboard on a train. Several trains, in fact. Personally, I would rather set myself on fire than trap myself in a rumbling metal tube for three weeks with Dipshit; but hey, that’s just me.
Sally reached out, patted my head like she had Timmy’s, then poked it back out of the window with the heel of her hand.
“Stop causing trouble,” she said with a merry sparkle in her eyes. Then she turned to the driver and said, “Airport.”
I heard him mumble, “Well, there’s a surprise,” as the cab backed out onto the street.
I waved, watching the yellow cab hustle off into San Diego traffic, and when I turned to find Timmy, he was gone again.
Holy crap! The kid was a gazelle. What had I gotten myself into?
His disappearance was solved when I found him around the corner of the house in the backyard, peeking through a different basement window. Jeez, he was like Gollum, seeking out the world’s deepest, darkest places.
When I scooped him into my arms, he sang out, “Daddy!”
And I thought, Well isn’t that sweet.
I HAD toddler-proofed the house as best I could. The basement door was securely latched so the kid couldn’t tumble headfirst down the flight of stairs leading into the bowels of the house, snapping a myriad of youthful bones along the way. Electrical wires were safely coiled and taped up and tucked under furniture in case Timmy got the inexplicable urge to chew on them. Electrical outlets were covered. All breakable knick-knacks were raised out of reach and all dangerous objects securely stashed away—switchblades, rolls of barbed wire, plastic explosives, bobby pins. (Just kidding about the bobby pins. I’m not that nelly.)
My dog, Thumper, who was a mix of Chihuahua, dachshund, miniature poodle, and quite possibly a three-toed sloth, was no threat to Timmy at all. The poor thing was almost twenty years old and hardly had any teeth left. I hadn’t heard her bark in three years. She only moved off the sofa to eat and go potty, and once her business was done, she stood in front of the sofa looking up like the Queen Mother waiting for the carriage door to be opened until I scooped her off the floor and redeposited her among the cushions. Poor thing. (I mean me.) She lay there all day long watching TV: Channel 9, the Mexican channel. Don’t ask me why, but that was the only channel she would tolerate. Couldn’t live without it, in fact. The one benefit to this annoying habit of hers was that, while I didn’t understand my dog at all, I was pretty sure I was beginning to comprehend Spanish.
Timmy was at that happy stage of child rearing where he could pull down his own pants and climb onto the commode without any help from squeamish gay uncles. He had brought an entourage of toys with him that would have kept an orphanage entertained. The first thing I did after finding a trail of little black skid marks on my new oak flooring was to confiscate his tricycle, allocating the thing to outdoor use only, which Timmy accepted with stoic resignation, although I did hear him mumble something about chicken poop and peckerheads. I’m not sure if his watered-down-obscenity-strewn mumbling was related to the tricycle announcement but fear it was. While the kid might have gotten my brat gene, there was also little doubt he had inherited my sister’s sarcastic-foulmouthed-snarky gene. God help his teachers when he started school.
With his mother and his mother’s twit of a boyfriend safely out of the way, Timmy and I settled into a routine. The routine was this: he ran around like a cyclone, and I ran around behind him trying to keep him alive. It took my nephew a mere two hours to wear me out completely, and while I dozed for five minutes on the sofa to recoup my strength, using Thumper for a pillow (she did have a few uses), Timmy managed to find a screwdriver somewhere and proceeded to climb onto a chair in the kitchen and remove the back panel from the microwave. Don’t ask me why. What took him five minutes to take apart took me thirty minutes to put back together. I’m not handy with tools. Timmy, on the other hand, seemed quite proficient. If I hadn’t been afraid he might actually succeed, and consequently make me feel even dumber than I already did, I would have asked him to change the oil in my Toyota.
In the middle of the afternoon, Timmy and I found ourselves in the backyard picking oranges off my orange tree for the next day’s breakfast. (Well, I was picking the oranges. Timmy was stuffing them down his shorts. Who knows why?) He was squealing happily and running around with oranges dropping out of his trouser legs and rolling merrily across the yard. I was busy trying to be masculine like a proper hunter/gatherer, climbing up into the orange tree to get that one beautiful orange on the tippy-top limb that I couldn’t quite reach to whap with the broom handle, when I was suddenly stunned by the sound of silence. God, it was lovely. Lovely and suspicious. I peeked through the foliage toward the ground and saw Timmy sprawled out like a dead thing, sound asleep in the grass.
I could only assume it was naptime.
Being the ever-conscientious uncle, I climbed quietly down the tree, gently scooped the kid into my arms, and carried him into the house. The moment I laid Timmy on the bed in the guest room upstairs—since Thumper was hogging the couch—Timmy popped his eyes open and stuck his finger up my nose again. In two seconds flat, he was wide-awake, tearing through the house and screaming like a banshee.
Note to self. Next time the kid goes to sleep, no matter where it is, leave him there. Edge of a cliff? No problem. Middle of the street? Don’t worry about it. Just put up a couple of safety cones to redirect traffic and let him be.
Timmy was making so much noise, and his voice was so annoyingly high-pitched, that Thumper had buried her head under the sofa cushions. I longed to crawl under there with her, but being the adult in charge, God help me, I couldn’t. I rummaged through the mound of clothes Sally had supplied for Timmy’s four-week stay, hoping to find a tiny straightjacket and a soundproof muzzle in among the T-shirts and shorts and Daffy Duck underpants, but she must have forgotten to pack them, dammit.
For my headache, which was quickly blossoming into an epic doozy, I popped four aspirins and chewed them dry. How’s that for butch? And to distract Timmy from doing whatever the hell it was he was doing, I asked him if he’d like to help me fix dinner.
“What are we having?” he asked. There was a rope of snot dangling out of his nose that looked like a bungee cord. I watched, fascinated, as he sucked it back in. A moment later, it made another appearance, flapped around for a minute, then he snorted it back up again. It was a fascinating thing to watch. Fascinating and disgusting.
“Salmon and green-bean casserole,” I finally answered, trying not to barf.
He made a face. “Blechhh! I want hot dogs.”
“Hot dogs.”
“And ’roni.”
“What the heck is ’roni?”
“With cheese,” he said. “’Roni and cheese.”
“Oh. Macaroni and cheese. No way. Do you know how many calories are in that? I have to watch my figure.”
Timmy giggled. “Jack says you’re like a girl. He says you even like boys.”
“I do like boys. But not that one. Jack’s a twit.”
Timmy giggled again, but it was a crafty giggle. “If you make ’roni and cheese and hot dogs for dinner, I won’t tell him you said that.”
“Ever hear of extortion?”
“No,” he said, “but if you make hot dogs tonight, we can have ’stortion tomorrow.”
“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t a complete idiot. I’d serve him salmon tomorrow and tell him it was extortion. The kid was four years old, for Christ’s sake. He’d believe anything I told him, right?
With the uneasy feeling I was in over my head, I stuck the beautiful slab of salmon back in the fridge for another day and rummaged through the freezer until I found a package of hot dogs buried under the edamame and brussels sprouts. The hot dogs had been there since some long ago Fourth of July celebration. Wonder of wonders, I found a box of macaroni and cheese in the pantry off the garage. Gee. I didn’t even know I had it. Maybe the kid was not only annoying, but psychic as well. That was a scary thought. A prescient four-year-old.
Later, while sitting at the kitchen table consuming our 50,000-calorie dinner, Timmy didn’t shut up once.
“The man in the basement is nice,” Timmy said around a mouthful of hot dog.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said.
“He said to tell you he’s glad you live here.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m glad he approves.”
“He hates Mommy.”
“Well, she can be annoying sometimes. Don’t tell her I said that.”
Timmy shrugged. “Can I have another hot dog?”
“You haven’t finished the one you’ve got.”
“I only like the middles. The ends taste funny.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”
“Thank you.”
“How’s the ’roni and cheese?”
“Good, but it needs more butter. Mommy uses two sticks.”
It was my turn to shrug. “It’s making my ass grow as it is. I can feel it ballooning underneath me in my chair even as we speak. Both cheeks. Mommy’s ass will be ballooning soon too. Watch if it doesn’t. One day she’ll wake up and she’ll be all ass. No head, no arms, no bleached-blonde hair, just ass, with maybe a few toes sticking out. And if you count the man she’s with, it’ll be two asses.”
Timmy giggled. “You’re funny.”
“And you’re nuts,” I said, building him another hot dog. “Mustard?”
“Ketchup.”
“Yuk.”
“It’s good. Here, try it.” He leaned over the table and squirted ketchup on my hot dog.
“Jesus, kid, you’re killing me here.”
“Eat it,” he said.
I took a bite of my ketchupy hot dog. Damn. I liked it.
Timmy grinned at my expression. “See?” he said. He scooped up a big ladle full of macaroni and cheese and glopped that on my plate next to the teeny pile I had placed there myself.
“Eat,” he said, sounding like every overworked mother of every finicky-ass kid that ever walked the face of the planet since the beginning of time.
So I ate. Every noodle. Every fat-saturated glob of cheese and margarine. Then I had another hotdog. With ketchup. And two glasses of chocolate milk. I hadn’t drunk chocolate milk for fifteen years. Damn. I liked that too. Blasted kid.
Tomorrow I’d diet.
When we were stuffed to the gills, Timmy stood on a chair and dried the dishes while I washed. I didn’t own a dishwasher. Timmy seemed slightly astounded by that fact.
“Is this how they did dishes in the old days?”
“Yes,” I said. “Later we’ll take the laundry down to the river and beat it on a rock.”
“Oh, goody. I like rivers.”
“That was a joke. I have a washing machine just like Mommy.”
“Shit.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“There’s a scary movie on TV tonight, Uncle Jason. If you’re good, I’ll let you watch it.”
“Screw you, kid. I’ll let you watch it.”
Timmy clapped his hands and almost dropped a plate. “Yay, we’re watching a scary movie!”
I stared at my nephew for about fifteen seconds. Had I just been tricked into telling him he could watch a scary movie? He wasn’t that smart, was he? Good lord, I’d have to be on my toes for the next four weeks or this kid would be leading me around like a poodle on a leash.
Speaking of which. “Wanna help me walk Thumper?”
Timmy’s eyes got big and round. “You mean the dog?”
“No, my pet anteater. Of course the dog.”
“Can she walk? I thought she was dead.”
“She’s not dead. She’s just old.”
“But she hasn’t moved all day.”
“Like I said, she’s old. One day you’ll be old and you won’t move all day either.” And God, wouldn’t that be a blessing.
Timmy craned his neck back and looked through the kitchen doorway into the living room, where even now I could hear Thumper snoring like a sawmill.
Timmy stood there on the chair, the plate forgotten in his hand, his face agape with wonder like one of the shepherd kids in Fatima, Portugal, eyeballing the Virgin Mary popping out of a stump. “I wanna see her walk. Are you sure she’s not dead?”
“Yes,” I said, molding my face into a phony smile, a la used car salesman trying to sell a clunker to anybody who’d listen. Shooting for camaraderie, I waggled a finger in Timmy’s ribs. “And just to make it more fun, it’ll be your job to pick up the poop.”
Timmy turned and stared at me. Then he guffawed. It’s a little disconcerting when a four-year-old guffaws. “She’s your dog,” Timmy said, his face scrunched up in concentration while he dug a booger out of his nose. “You pick up the poop.”
Damn. I thought I had him that time. I handed the kid a tissue, plucked the plate from his hand, and tossed it back in the dishwater in case it had a booger on it—and decided on the spot if Timmy ever managed to stay alive long enough to grow up, he’d probably be president. Two terms. Hell, even I’d vote for him. Both times.
Timmy seemed properly astounded that Thumper truly was alive. He even insisted on holding the leash as we traipsed out into the night. Of course, we were traipsing at a snail’s pace since Thumper’s arthritic joints were not conducive to scampering.
“She’s awful slow,” Timmy whined.
“When you’re old, you’ll be slow too.”
“Then I won’t get old.”
“Fine, Peter Pan. Just walk the frigging dog.”
The night was gorgeous and balmy. It was June, and June in San Diego is perfect. With a younger dog, we might have enjoyed the evening for hours, but with Thumper, we barely got around the block. In fact, we didn’t. We were halfway around the block when Thumper gave out and insisted on being carried the rest of the way home.
“Will you carry me too?” Timmy asked.
“No.”
“Can I wear the leash?”
“Sure,” I said. I unclipped the collar from Thumper’s throat and clipped it around Timmy’s neck. He followed along behind me on the leash like a good little puppy until we passed Mrs. Lindquist, who lives down the block. She was walking her Pomeranian, and when she spotted me with the kid on a leash, she felt it her duty to intervene.
She bent over Timmy and patted his head. “Is this man hurting you?” she asked.
“Woof!” Timmy said.
Mrs. Lindquist straightened up and nailed me with a piercing stare. “Is he normal?” she asked.
I smiled and said, “Define normal.”
Mrs. Lindquist simply shook her head and walked on, dragging the poor Pom behind her. Lucky bitch. At least her dog could walk.
Back at the house, we deposited Thumper in among the sofa cushions, and she promptly fell asleep, worn out completely by all the excitement. Timmy didn’t want to take the collar off, so I merely unhooked the leash and left the collar in place around his scrawny neck. He looked like a tiny submissive, waiting for his Dom to come along and whap him with a whip.
I ran a couple of inches of warm water into the tub and laid out a towel and my favorite rubber ducky. Don’t ask.
“We have twenty minutes before the movie,” I said, handing him his pajamas. “Go take your bath.”
“Mommy only makes me take a bath once a month.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Nice try, Timmy. Get in the tub.”
He glowered and snatched the pj’s out of my hand. “Don’t watch. I know you like boys.”
At that, I laughed. “Jesus, kid, just go take your bath, and I’ll make us some popcorn for the movie.”
He brightened up. “With butter?”
“No. I thought I’d just dip it in lard.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Timmy skipped off to the bathroom and closed the door behind him.
He skipped back out of the bathroom three minutes later. His hair was a little damp, but that was probably just for show. If any other body parts had seen moisture, he couldn’t have been long about it. Unfortunately, I was too worn out to care. His pajamas had little rocket ships on them. I found myself sort of wishing I had a pair.
We settled onto the sofa on either side of Thumper and tuned in to the movie, switching the sound from Spanish to English. Thumper raised her head and growled, so I switched it back to Spanish. Timmy thought it was funny, watching the movie in Spanish. We had English subtitles of course, but he couldn’t read them. At least I didn’t think he could. Still, he didn’t seem to mind.
The movie was so bad I found myself giggling halfway through it. Then it got scary, and I found myself chewing on a cushion and squinting through the gory parts, trying not to look. Timmy and Thumper both sat there wide-eyed and breathless, taking in every spurt of blood and every dying moan from the poor helpless citizens of Burbank being devoured by zombies on the screen.
The movie wasn’t yet over when Timmy doubled over like a pocketknife and fell sound asleep. This time when I oh so carefully carried him in my arms up the stairs and deposited him in his bed, he stayed there.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
I toddled downstairs, as happy as I had ever been in my life, poured myself a healthy dollop of scotch, and settled in to finish the movie. Thumper was still watching it. I guess she liked it too. Her tail was wagging. Or maybe she was just as elated as I was that Timmy had finally crashed.
“What did I miss?” I asked.
Thumper ignored me. Too wrapped up in the movie to respond, I supposed.
After three scotches and the demise of upwards of a hundred movie extras, all torn to shreds and devoured by the scary-ass zombies, I was ready for bed myself.
I peeked into Timmy’s room to make sure he was still sound asleep, and he looked like a little angel lying there in his rocket-ship pajamas. Of course, I had spent the day with him. I knew better.
I brushed my teeth, then switched on the newly acquired baby monitor I had bought myself before Timmy’s arrival and which now sat like a tiny guardian angel on the nightstand insuring me a little peace of mind that Timmy wouldn’t dismantle the house while I slept. The baby monitor exuded a comforting fuzz of sound, filling up the shadows quite nicely. I rather enjoyed hearing it. I tucked myself naked into my bed, since it’s the only way I can sleep, then tucked Thumper under the covers beside me like a hot water bottle. I lay there all snug and secure with the crackly sound of the baby monitor and those three or four scotch and waters coaxing me into dreamland. Thumper rested her chin on my leg and was snoring in less than a minute. It took me a little longer. Just before my eyes and brain happily shut down for the night, a thought hit me in the head like a line drive, jarring me awake.
I bolted straight up in bed, suddenly remembering what Timmy had said at dinner.
“The man in the basement is nice.”
I blinked.
What man in the basement?
Author and artist Jordan Castillo Price is the owner of JCP Books LLC. Her paranormal thrillers are colored by her time in the midwest, from inner city Chicago, to small town Wisconsin, to liberal Madison.
Jordan is best known as the author of the PsyCop series, an unfolding tale of paranormal mystery and suspense starring Victor Bayne, a gay medium who's plagued by ghostly visitations. Also check out her new series, Mnevermind, where memories are made...one client at a time.
With her education in fine arts and practical experience as a graphic designer, Jordan set out to create high quality ebooks with lavish cover art, quality editing and gripping content. The result is JCP Books, offering stories you'll want to read again and again.
S.C. Wynne started writing m/m in 2013 and did look back once. She wanted to say that because it seems everyone’s bio says they never looked back and, well S.C. Wynne is all about the joke. She loves writing m/m and her characters are usually a little jaded, funny and ultimately redeemed through love.
S.C loves red wine, margaritas and Seven and Seven’s. Yes, apparently S.C. Wynne is incredibly thirsty. S.C. Wynne loves the rain and should really live in Seattle but instead has landed in sunny, sunny, unbelievably sunny California. Writing is the best profession she could have chosen because S.C. is a little bit of a control freak. To sit in her pajamas all day and pound the keys of her laptop controlling the every thought and emotion of the characters she invents is a dream come true.
If you’d like to contact S.C. Wynne she is amusing herself on Facebook at all hours of the day or you can contact her at scwynne@scwynne.com.
Real Men. True Love.
Rick R. Reed draws inspiration from the lives of gay men to craft stories that quicken the heartbeat, engage emotions, and keep the pages turning. Although he dabbles in horror, dark suspense, and comedy, his attention always returns to the power of love. He’s the award-winning and bestselling author of more than fifty works of published fiction and is forever at work on yet another book. Lambda Literary has called him: “A writer that doesn’t disappoint…” You can find him at his website or blog. Rick lives in Palm Springs, CA with his beloved husband and their fierce Chihuahua/Shiba Inu mix.
John has been writing fiction for as long as he can remember. Born on a small farm in Indiana, he now resides in San Diego, California where he spends his time gardening, pampering his pets, hiking and biking the trails and canyons of San Diego, and of course, writing. He and his partner share a passion for theater, books, film, and the continuing fight for marriage equality. If you would like to know more about John, check out his website.
K. Evan Coles is a mother and tech pirate by day and a writer by night. She is a dreamer who, with a little hard work and a lot of good coffee, coaxes words out of her head and onto paper.
K. lives in the northeast United States, where she complains bitterly about the winters, but truly loves the region and its diverse, tenacious and deceptively compassionate people. You’ll usually find K. nerding out over books, movies and television with friends and family. She’s especially proud to be raising her son as part of a new generation of unabashed geeks.
K.’s books explore LGBTQ+ romance in contemporary settings.
Brigham Vaughn
Brigham Vaughn is on the adventure of a lifetime as a full-time writer. She devours books at an alarming rate and hasn’t let her short arms and long torso stop her from doing yoga. She makes a killer key lime pie, hates green peppers, and loves wine tasting tours. A collector of vintage Nancy Drew books and green glassware, she enjoys poking around in antique shops and refinishing thrift store furniture. An avid photographer, she dreams of traveling the world and she can’t wait to discover everything else life has to offer her.Her books range from short stories to novellas. They explore gay, lesbian, and polyamorous romance in contemporary settings.
To stay up to date on her latest releases, sign up for the Coles & Vaughn Newsletter.
Jordan Castillo Price
WEBSITE / NEWSLETTER / KOBO
SMASHWORDS / LIVEJOURNAL / B&N
EMAILS: jordan@psycop.com
jcp.heat@gmail.com
SC Wynne
WEBSITE / NEWSLETTER / KOBO
EMAIL: scwynne@scwynne.com
Rick R Reed
EMAIL: rickrreedbooks@gmail.com
John Inman
iTUNES / GOOGLE PLAY / AMAZON
EMAIL: John492@att.net
K Evan Coles
GOOGLE PLAY / BOOKBUB / B&N
EMAIL: coles.k.evan@gmail.com
Brigham Vaughn
SMASHWORDS / PINTEREST / SCRIBd / B&N
EMAIL: brighamvaughn@gmail.com
The ABCs of Spellcraft Collection Volume 2 by Jordan Castillo Price
Until the Morning by SC Wynne
Dinner at the Blue Moon Cafe by Rick R Reed
AUDIBLE / iTUNES / BOOKS2READ
Spirit by John Inman
Inked in Blood by K Evan Coles & Brigham Vaughn
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