M F Korn, page 1
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Aliens, Minibikes and Other Staples of Suburbia
by M.F. Korn
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Copyright (c)2004 by M.F. Korn
First published by DDP, November 2004
Double Dragon Publication
www.double-dragon-ebooks.com
Speculative Fiction
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk, network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines and/or imprisonment.
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All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc. of Markham Ontario, Canada.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from Double Dragon Publishing Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by:
*Double Dragon eBooks*
PO Box 54016 1-5762 Highway 7 East
Markham, Ontario L3P 7Y4 CANADA
double-dragon-ebooks.com
Layout and Cover Illustration by Deron Douglas
ISBN: 1-55404-194-5
First Edition eBook Publication November 1, 2004
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For Savannah Hart Korn
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*Contents*
An Introduction
The Spectral Carnival Show
How Soothing Are My Anachronisms
Catch of the Century
A Digging in Providence
Who Are You, You and You?
Is It Live or Is It Lysergic Acid?
Going on a Submarine Ride
Laboring in the Valley of Ashes
Aliens and Minibikes
About the Author
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*An Introduction by Sherry Decker*
This fine collection of short fiction, plus novella, are a nostalgic return to childhood when we all had innocence, faith and imagination. Decades Page 1
have passed with the writing of these varied tales -- some written in the mid 1980s, some more recent -- all of them fascinating in their own way.
While reading, you'll be picked up and dropped straight into your own history while visiting various, imaginary neighborhoods and worlds. What an amazing pageant of dates, details and deja vu in this collection! We glimpse a carnival that set up camp in a small town -- here today, gone tomorrow --
leaving behind a list of missing children. We enter a bizarre junk store filled with truly 'impossible' things. We experience a fish tale about discovery and loss -- a slice of life wrought with childhood disappointment, yet a grain of promise. We're questioned, "If you could bring back a famous person from the dead, whom would it be?" And we're then reminded, be careful what you wish for. We accompany a guy named Rick in a downward spiral toward insanity -- or is he right, and the world has taken cloning to a point beyond the extreme? We read on and shudder to ourselves: don't mess with them video manipulators! Then comes a tale with a question and a twist ending -- Will Daddy show up to take you to Disneyland?
I thoroughly enjoyed every story in this collection, but my favorite would have to be the novella, "Aliens and Minibikes" -- a story about a neighborhood and some very believable boys and girls. It's a science fiction and puberty cocktail, that first amused me, pulled me in, then scared me.
Won't tell you the ending, but it was good!
I recommend this collection. You won't be sorry you read it. It's nostalgia at its finest.
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*The Spectral Carnival Show*
Crandall and I rode around Hammond arguing about what restaurant we would pick for lunch.
"You're the businessman, you know the best spots for chrissakes," he said.
"But I don't live here, you do."
He was a professional magician, he really was fun to be around even if he didn't drink. I sighed. It was the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Were we going to drive by the college again to watch coeds walk by, unseen by our carnal stares through Crandall's tinted windows?
"Hey, a carnival!" I said.
"Ah YESS..." he said in his best W. C. Fields voice. On every other day it was an abandoned shopping center parking lot. Now it was a conundrum of machinery, rides for the kiddies bolted together too fast.
"I drove by yesterday and this setup wasn't here," Crandall said as his Hawaiian shirt billowed about his flabby arms and he turned the wheel. We parked and looked.
In the bright sun I saw snooker tables, nudger machines and bronzed barkers. Children were strapped into the swirling rides of steel and screaming. The haunted house trailer with the sheet metal whirring skirt blowers, tilted floors and spooky interior lights was towards the back. I wanted to be scared by the apparitions flying at me run by gearshifts and conveyor belts.
Even from a distance the people running the show looked tough-skinned and countrified.
"There isn't much of a crowd here," Crandall said.
"Yeah."
"Let's stop by the games and see the setup," Crandall said. I knew he was going to ask the folks running the games and booths how the profits were going. He looked at me as he pulled the parking brake up and opened the door of the car. "It's not the rides that make them the most money. It's those games, believe me..." he said and pulled up the sun visor, "...they really rake up on those..."
* * * *
There were folks sleeping in old peeling trailers. A tied up pit-bull was begging for food from a pale fat biker. He gawked at us and muttered Page 2
something.
We walked down the barker strip.
"We're making a big mistake walking this way with no money..." Crandall said.
"I don't see what you mean..." I said.
Two kids were throwing darts at balloons for prizes. Hung up in the booth were Heavy Metal wallets and framed beer mirrors. A kid was trying to snag a ring onto a Coke bottle. More kids were pitching pennies into shallow dishes.
Across the highway I saw mothers going through the garbage that the Goodwill Store had just thrown out for the day.
"Hey man! Buy somethin' for your woman!" a ruddy man yelled at us.
I looked down.
A kid managed to get a penny in a glass. The man gave him a cloth beanbag instead of the glass. "You gotta get beyond the rope, you was leaning over."
Hammond had lots of Georgian houses that cut the sky in quaint ways.
Cupolas came out their gambreled roofs. Shadowy alcoves of huge oaks were full of moss. Kids would swing on wrought iron gates and picket fences. I suddenly remembered listening to a choir when I used to walk to the college, crossing over the railroad tracks, thinking about my youth.
There was something about this carnival. I thought I heard a muffled conversation between two women at the goat barbecue stand. "Lotsa pickings here." A huge man in a Harley t-shirt held an folded shotgun, cleaning it carefully sitting in a lawn chair by his trailer. He glowered at me with more than a usual country way-of-knowing. Tinny strains of Kitty Wells resonanced from an ugly trailer with contorted figures painted on its side.
I smiled. "They have a side show?"
"It's closed," said a skinny man with lines all over his leathered face. I thought I heard crying from somewhere.
What hucksters out to rook and cheat people. Damn! I wanted to see a side show.
Crandall went over to talk to the fellow running the BB gun shoot, a fellow with one arm gone tattooed all over, a stump of mauve and aquamarine ink.
"How are the profits going?" The man didn't answer.
I was standing right by a fat crooked-smiling lady in double-knit polyester slacks talking with a skinny black woman with gold teeth, both holding onto their children. "When they sent up that space shuttle God got mad and flooded Denham Springs." "Oh, yeah lard..." the black lady smiled.
"I heard it in the Ponchatoula Pentecostal Church." I smiled. Little black boys by the video games were brushing up against the suburban boys maybe to steal their wallets as they played Zaxxon and Galaxia.
Crandall told the stumped fellow that he was a professional magician.
"We're both in the same business..." I saw the barker's eyes and I realized something in the boiling hot sun. This clan of folks were all one incestuous family. They had a pall of plain sinister trashiness. Even amidst the happy young children.
"Go away!" the one-armed barker snarled and spit as he handed a kid a loaded BB gun. "Ain't none of your business." We turned and laughed and left, right as a couple of kids were placing dollar bills down for some rats racing on a spinning board. It was an invisible cloak of black death, I thought, upon seeing the rats. It was a nice day before Easter Sunday, community basking in an ordinary way. I thought of the generations of squirrels eating acorns in the park under the gazebo, where a barbershop quartet sang "By the Sea" once.
We drove in silence.
We went inside "Br ady's" to sit down away from the heat. I gave sidelong glances at the stuck-up waitresses from the college in their Irish green. Crandall for the first time didn't ask me to be the patsy in his neverending quest for the perfect card trick. He looked at me and smiled. He Page 3
did a couple of tricks with his tallyho fan cards and I was the mark. We drank our sepia colored iced tea with no lemon under a bronzed ceiling and I craved alcohol but always managed to fight it off well enough.
"They were kind of on the mean side."
He nodded.
The soiled flapping banner had been painted 'Spectral Carnival Show.'
"Did you notice how trashy those people looked?" I asked.
"It wasn't that. They were dangerous."
"What is a rotten carnival like that doing here the day before Easter Sunday?" This was even better than when the mall had chickens dancing on hot plates for a quarter, or when I played Tic-tac-toe with a rabbit. When Crandall had tried to talk to them, they had something besides loose change in their crooked staring eyes. Something that courted death. I finished my meal.
Crandall just fanned and shuffled the cards.
We went to the mall and caught the five thirty matinee. While we walked around the mall it seemed word had spread about something like electricity. In the car Crandall tuned in the local radio station:
"Several children are apparently missing that had attended the carnival
... Police at this hour are looking for seven youngsters, apparently the kids had strayed from their mothers' care. Authorities are still combing the area now in an attempt to retrieve the unfortunate kids, ranging from 5 years to 13
years..."
Then a commercial, "Sundayyy! Sunday! At state capitol dragway ... Don Garlitz's Funny Car..." He turned it down and looked at me and I shook my head.
We hauled through the tiny arteries of pitted roads, traversing subdivisions, streets leading to dead ends only to find another shortcut. At twilight I expected to see the load cranking generators feeding juice to the joy machines swirling like a kaleidoscopic art picture in neon lights. It had turned into something almost supernatural beneath the veneer of the golden garden spot of magical wonderment.
Instead was an empty parking lot. The carnival had already skipped town. We were too late. There were a few police cars around the vast stretch of terminal pavement and concrete graveyard of empty bottles. The carnival and seven toddlers vanished like a large phantom.
How could such an event fold up as quick as a magician's setup stand, as fast as Crandall could make a card disappear behind his hand or as fast as flash powder spectrally poofed in a blazing inordinate blink of molted fire?
* * * *
A few months went by. I heard the authorities didn't find those unfortunate kids. The mothers must have mourned their babies' disappearance in the Ponchatoula Pentecostal Church. Maybe that band of Gypsy beggars had found a certain use for the kids. Maybe they were going to raise them. Teach them the ways of the circus. The rituals that were foretold by the creaking of the rooking bastard's bones, the glint of maligned and clearly discerned unnaturalness. Kids tied up with knotted rope, dressed up surgically as experiments in the upcoming mutant freak show that we never got to see. They enticed kids to run away with them, to snatch the kids from their mother's nurturing breast like the unfortunate boys that were bad whose ears turned donkey-like in _Pinocchio_. It was not anything Toby Tylerish, to participate with a chicken biting carnival freak show geek and be his apprentice, to be an unwilling victim of some sort of black mass ritual as old as Bible times that would leave them maimed, mutilated, or worse.
Crandall laughed when I told him this.
The dark carnival of blinking and winking seemed one step ahead of the law and of the childless mothers. I told Crandall I reckoned they were out West somewhere by now, in the desert, past Nuevo Laredo, or Matamoros. They dismantled that twisted machinery of instant joy fast. I thought of the revolving rides and twisting teacups that made me dizzy when I was a kid. They were back into their trailers and out of town before the sun went down; they Page 4
were not of anyplace Crandall and I, nor anyone of these parts would ever understand.
I would see carnivals again, but that pre-Sabbath carnival was not coming back here next year...
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*How Soothing Are My Anachronisms*
Guy Basehart walked into the old brownstone building under a neon sign that faintly said, "Curiosities and Oddities." He had never noticed the building really before, the sign was so small and barely lit. It was a cool autumnal late afternoon, perfect for a stroll to glance at whatever one fancied. When he stepped inside, he noticed several racks of odd looking _bric a brac_, antiques, art deco, and what looked like plain ordinary junk.
"Good afternoon, sir, have you come as a browser or are you genuinely interested in the obscure?"
"No, just browsing." The odd looking old man with unkempt facial hair and a bespectacled countenance of bronze tan frowned to himself.
"Well, just feel free to look around."
And that is what Guy Basehart did. He saw cheaply manufactured trinkets and old belt buckles, what looked like a fake antique gun collection that said, "Property of Jesse James Once." Here over by the knives was a knife that said, "Jim Bowie's knife." And on and on, a phonograph record of an ampico piano roll recording by Brahms, letters of Abraham Lincoln that looked too crisp and clean to be real; it offended one's sensibilities. Guy Basehart knew he wasn't going to fall for these cheap fakes and the quite ostentatious prices that accompanied the curios.
"Are all these things really real, Mister?" he asked the man.
"Why," he said, "of course they are." Just then his eyes glimmered with ancientness, of knowledge and experiences that went past any man-of-the-world or sailor, any European traveler who crisscrossed hemispheres constantly.
So Guy Basehart thought he might question him about the ampico recording by Brahms. "I thought there weren't any known recordings by Johannes Brahms, because he died before anyone ever got the chance to record him."
"No, this here is the only known piano roll recording by the great master."
"Really?" said Guy, not believing.
"Are you still a browser, sir?"
"But you already asked me that." Outside the air was fresh but in here it smelled like an attic that was centuries old, where sun and moonbeams never entered, the smell of dust and ageless time was in here.
"I know," the bronze man said. "I am giving you another chance to answer."
Guy thought for a second.
"Okay, what was it you said before?"
"Genuinely interested."
"Yes, I am genuinely interested in the obscure!" He chuckled. Then the tanned man-of-the-world brought him to a small enclosed shunted room in the back, through some beaded curtains. Here the room was filled with unmentionable things that one wished were really true and existed, but were obviously forgeries and flukes and fakes.
In one corner was a kinetoscope which the man turned on, and a silent celluloid footage newsreel of none other than Abraham Lincoln showed up on the screen before him. The old man said, "Eh?"
In another corner was a reel to reel recording which had a speech by Napoleon on it, at least that was what it said. He played that for a half a minute. By it was a videotape of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that's what it said.
"Are you convinced?" the man asked Guy.
Guy thought, this is a place of anomalies and anachronisms, of what surely could not be true. None of it, just beautiful hoaxes, though the age of the peculiarities was evident in the tears and streaks and oldness of each Page 5
item. But how was it done?
"No, not really," Guy had said. And that was when the man had finally made him realize this was all true, though there was simply no explanation.
In the far corner he had pulled out a photograph. On it, on the polaroid snapshot was the shape of a man on the cross. A polaroid of none other than Jesus Christ. And that was when Guy knew this was all real. The man showed him out, telling him that none was for sale, he just enjoyed showing these things. And Guy Basehart walked out into the night air, whistling Brahms.
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*Catch of the Century*
What Mr. Wayne Langouis didn't know was that the fish in his bathtub was one-hundred and fifty million years old.
He had been fishing in Old River Bayou near St. Martinville, Louisiana, an estuary that jutted out of the Atchafalaya Swamp. With crickets, shiners, and night crawlers, he kept on catching one Choupique after another. Those were ugly prehistoric fish with teeth snapping the hell out of one's fingers while one tried to unscrew the hook from their mean bony jaws and gills. He had just finished eating a ham sandwich and was right in the middle of his fifteenth smoked oyster when he had felt a tug on the line. He just knew it was another Choupique. Catching Alligator Gar wasn't bad because they got made into fried breaded gar-balls. Too many bones though with those Choupiques.
