My new word has been officially accepted and published…

When Wen Shu Tang died that summer, the heat over Dayton hung thick as boiled silk. The air shimmered above the sand, and the smell of pig waste from his farms carried for miles.

The town mourned him in the practical way small towns do, by gossiping. Most agreed that Tang had been a hard man, polite but private, fluent in English yet foreign in soul.

He had lived in the back of his laundry on Pike Street, above the ceaseless clatter of washing boards and steam. Some said they saw light in his window late at night, greenish, ghostly light, as if fireflies had taken to crawling along the glass in unholy patterns. Others dismissed it. Tang was an industrious man. Perhaps he read late, or experimented with detergents.

Only Brady knew better.

Brady was Tang’s only friend, a miner’s son who’d once hauled barrels for the laundry and stayed on as handyman. He was often summoned upstairs to fix leaking pipes or broken hinges, and though Tang always paid fairly, he never allowed him to linger.

“Some rooms are not for company,” Tang once said, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes.

After Tang’s death, the sheriff told Brady to collect the man’s belongings and find a relative in China. There were a few trunks of clothes, some ledgers, and jars of preserved ginger, simple enough.

Yet when Brady stepped into Tang’s quarters, the air was thick with camphor and decay. The walls felt damp, as though they sweated grief.

Behind a false panel in the pantry, Brady found a narrow door. Its key hung from a thin red thread nailed above the lintel.

The key was cold, too cold, even in August, and for a moment Brady hesitated. Inside lay a room Tang had never spoken of.

The place was small, low-ceilinged, and lined with dark lacquered wood. A circular table sat in the center, carved with dragons that seemed to writhe when the lamplight hit them.

Around the table were five figures, upright and still. Their bones gleamed faintly, bleached to the color of moonlight, dressed in tattered silks that had once been bright.

They were not whole skeletons. Each frame was a patchwork of mismatched bones, one with two left femurs, another with hands too small for its arms. Yet they were posed carefully, reverently, as if Tang had arranged them for dinner.

In the middle of the table stood a porcelain bowl filled with dust. It pulsed faintly, like something alive.

Brady staggered back, bile rising in his throat.

He told the sheriff, and within a day, the coroner came from Carson City. The discovery drew half the town to the laundry, people whispering in the streets while the deputies carried out the bones.

The coroner’s report came within a week: none of the remains belonged to Chinese individuals. Stranger still, no two bones matched, as every skeleton was a composite, an impossible gathering of the dead.

Speculation ran wild. Grave robbing, witchcraft, old-country, superstitions? Brady alone remembered Tang’s stories, told over cups of tea after long workdays, about “the hungry ones,” spirits that devoured identity and memory, leaving behind only fragments.

Tang had once said, “The dead are never gone. They are waiting for names.”

After the coroner finished, the bones got packed in a crate bound for Carson City. Brady signed the papers himself, relieved to see the wagon leave.

But three days later, word came that the crate had vanished somewhere between Silver Springs and the capital. No one ever found it.

Years passed. The laundry changed hands twice before burning in a freak fire.

But those who worked there after swore the walls sometimes creaked with voices, not words, but the soft, rhythmic sound of syllables trying to form. On windless nights, the scent of camphor and pig’s blood drifted through the ruins.

Brady dreamed of them nightly. In his dreams, the mismatched skeletons rose from their chairs and turned toward him. Their skulls were wrong, assembled from parts of many faces.

When they spoke, their jaws moved in discordant rhythm, and from the porcelain bowl came the sound of breathing, steady and deep. In one dream, Tang was there too, younger than he had ever been in life, his skin pale and waxen.

“You think you bury what you do not understand,” he said, “but it buries you instead.”

Brady woke to find sand in his bed and a faint mark on his chest shaped like the key he had once held.

Somewhere beyond the desert, in a place no map records, a table stands beneath a black sky. Around it sit six figures now, each dressed in rotting silk, waiting for another to join them.

The bowl in the center still breathes.

She was skilled with a scythe.
I sat on the side of the dirt and gravel road, watching her
With each sweep of the blade, she laid low another quarter sheave of wheat.
Stopping momentarily, she mopped the glistening moisture from her brow.
She smiled at me.
I smiled back.
She picked something from the ground.
Playfully, she tossed it in my direction.
I looked down and reached for it.
A gray pebble.
She was already upon me when I looked up.
Her eyes wide and perfect white teeth locked in a maddened grin.
She was skilled with a scythe.

We gathered on the beach, south of Crescent City. It was 1969 and as a Cub Scout I was one of the few to attend. It’s where Kitty Harriman, a Redwood Empire Council leader, and native Tolowa, taught us how to make acorn cakes. She had with her a large burlap sack filled with shelled and dried acorns, ready for grinding and leaching and number of large woven baskets and several boards.

First we crushed, then ground the acorns to a powder, then put it in the baskets. Next, she showed us how to remove the bitter taste, using water taken from the nearby ocean. This took some time, but once done and while the acorn meal was moist, we formed our cakes.

Meanwhile, she cleared an area in the bottom of fire we’d built earlier, laid large leaves down, placed our patties on them, covering them with more leaves, followed by hot coals. A few minutes later, we retrieved them and ate.

Since then I’ve made cakes while camping, using pine nuts instead. While pine nuts don’t require leaching, do take time to shell and dry. This is my recipe, which works for both the field and kitchen:

2/3 cup finely ground pine nut meal
1/3 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
¾ cup milk (more for batter)
1 tablespoon honey (more if you like them sweeter)
3-4 tablespoons melted unsalted butter

Fold the dry ingredients together. Mix in the egg, milk, and honey, then beat, while pouring in melted butter. If you like your mixture to be the consistency of pancake batter, add more milk. Spoon or pour the batter into a hot, greased pan or griddle. Bacon grease and a cast iron pan are my favorite. Cook each cake until brown on both sides. Eat them plain or with your favorite syrup or jelly. Personally, I love blackberry jam.

Don’t forget the coffee!

It was January 1986, and Doug Tracht, better known as ‘The Greaseman,’ while working at  WWDC-FM in Washington, D.C., created an uproar by telling an on-air joke regarding the new federal holiday, Martin Luther King Day.

“Why don’t we shoot four more and get the whole week off?” Tracht said, “Come on, now, you know I don’t mean nothin’!”

Not even the free speech guaranteed by the US Constitution, could protect the disc jockey. He was suspended from the station for five days, publicly apologized, and later donated money to create a scholarship at Howard University in honor of Dr. King.

Herman Krakatoa is a profuse bleeder.
An massive eruption every minute.
He leaves puddles of sticky redness everywhere.
Everyone thinks him disgusting.
Herman bleeds so much he fills up city buses.
He bleeds all over the office.
He even bleeds on dogs, chicken and children.

Herman likes to go swimming.
The ocean is his playground.
Drives the sharkies insane.
They bite everybody.

Elon Musk bought Herman a Tesla.
Herman filled it with blood.
The millionaire built a rocket ship.
He sent Herman into outer space.
Now Herman bleeds on the stars.
He bleeds on other worlds too.
Drives the aliens insane.
They visit Elon often.

the sky is dirty gray
wind breezing a winter cold
birds are hiding

A friend of mine lives in a house that she technically no longer owns. A squatter. She worked for me at one time and when I left that job, we lost contact. Since then she worked several jobs and after being fired one final time, she’s never found another.

To be honest, I think she made some bad choices. Drugs. Men. Roommates. She was depressed and alone. But thanks to social media we reconnected.

Soon she asked for help; a ride into town to donate her plasma, to which I agreed. During our short weekly trip into town, we discussed getting her out of her situation. Finding a job. New digs. Transportation. Even had her over for Thanksgiving one year and a couple of backyard cookouts that following summer.

Soon that single weekly trip turned into two and so on. Her cash flow very tight, I never asked for gas money. Ever. For nearly two years this continued. The more I assisted the more she depended upon that assistance. Point is, she did not help herself and I finally said enough and stopped helping her.

A heart wrenching decision for me. Contrary to my tough outward persona, inwardly I’m a big softy with a genuine love for the common man or woman down of their fortune. Tough love they call it. I am still not sure who it’s tougher on – the person it is aimed at helping or myself.

That’s been five-years ago and we again have lost touch. I think about her, concerned for her welfare; mental and physical, and I talk to God about her from time-to-time. I’ve been assured in my heart-of-hearts that there are times when it is okay to look away, that assistance it meant to be temporary and not permanent.

Still…

Since paying to add ‘followers,’ is out of the question, would adding a cute cat picture to every post, even if the post has nothing to do with felines, increase readership?  Asking for a friend.

My friend is from Southampton, England. She’s against Great Britain leaving the European Union and though she’s tried to explain her position on this to me, I’m still lost as I jus’ don’t know enough about UK politics.

She recently asked me where I stood on the subject and I answered, “It doesn’t matter much to me as I’m not a British citizen.”

“True, but I still want to know your opinion.”

“Didn’t they jus’ hold a referendum on this where the majority voted to leave the EU?”

“Yes, but don’t avoid the question, please.”

“Okay, but you have to understand that I’m a citizen of a country that went to war to establish their right to self-governance. The original Brexit plan, if you will.”

“Yes, yes, Great Britain – but that was a long time ago. Besides, I don’t think the two equate.”

“Time doesn’t really matter when I comes to freedom. And, yes they do equate.”

“So you’re for Brexit.”

“Yes and the fact that not a shot was fired to achieve England’s exit from the EU makes it all the more sweeter.”

“You Americans have a strange sense of self.”

“Yeah – it’s called ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. ”

“Okay,  now your simply being a wanker, so let’s talk about something else before you piss me off.”

“Sure. How’s about the War of 1812?”

“Go shag yourself!”