Dirt Road Tales

  A two-toned, red and white Chevy pickup truck was parked in the sparsely grassed spot underneath the shaded limbs of one of the two magnificent pecan trees which dominated either side of the old farm house’s front walk. From the covered front porch clear out to the road could be heard the excited voice of Eli Gold describing live action from The Charlotte Motor Speedway, even though it was only a hand-sized transistor radio. Beside the truck, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a dripping sponge in hand, stood a man caught in a curious pause from his truck washing, having stopped to watch his four year old at play. The child was behaving in an unusual, if enticing manner, having climbed down inside her pink, pedal-powered plastic Barbie car to remove the bicycle-chain linkage which acted as the little car’s transmission. The man’s ’Lil Miss had managed to identify the master link, then had used some unknown tool to pry it apart, and was currently attempting to shorten, or tig...

  So this is where the years wind up? This is where it ends? The man crouched on the stool atop the stage touches the strings with delicate if resilient fingers, but the tattered Marshall amp on which his boot rests doesn't care. The Marshall likes it loud, just as the Gibson connected to the amp does, and just as the old rocker who cradles the classic guitar to his breast does. And like the other two the aged amp still works fine, which it proves by ejecting the single chord through the “business end” of it’s speaker like a well-tuned cannon’s blast. The lonely chord reverberates through the practically empty room, an amplified clarion call of Axeman, Gibson and Marshall, but the few paired-up people in the bar are inattentive, all but one. In the harsh glow of the footlights his fingerprints and sweat streaks besmudge the guitar’s fire-burst design, soiling it, the same as the man’s blue jeans are soiled, and the boots beneath them. His hair is long and unwashed, and his beard, a...

  Lainey found it to be true, the fact that wild, feral eyes are drawn to the movements of other wild, feral things, as her own eyes were currently attracted to the prowling's of one such thing, her ears tuned toward it’s guttural reverberations, her senses recognizing something of herself in the way the souped-up roadster crept jerkily towards her, it’s muscle flexing against it’s brakes as though anxious to pounce, the familiarity of it tickling at a salacious memory deep within her.   The car stirred some untamed thing inside Lainey which slowed her steps, allowing the danger to creep ever closer in spite of her natural predilection to flee… even wild things have a breaking point… but then a resigned willingness to either consume or be consumed halted her steps altogether until she waited, allowing the distance between she and it to close. Lainey couldn’t forget. How did one unlearn the exhilaration of lust, or the intoxication of being it’s object. God knows she had tried,...

  If a peeling streak of lightning  came rippling towards the crown  of some great and ancient oak tree  rooted to a grassy mound  and if with sublime majesty  that tree came toppling down  would it even let a whisper out  if no one was around? And would the after rumbles  echo through some sleepy town  where crying little children  huddled from the hellish pounds  of a Heaven flushed with anger  and a spite that knows no bounds  that a tree which lived 300 years could fall without a sound.

  The initial excitement created by my first assignment for The Post’s “Paranormal Column” quickly waned as I lumbered up the crumbling stone steps leading to a Goliathan wrought-iron door. If ever there was a vampire, this was certainly the sort of place it might choose to die through it’s days. A vampire?  Ha! As if. So convinced, I rapped my knuckles with an unfelt boldness upon the door. He is playing up for high drama as I enter, spotlighted amidst what has the reverberating feel of a cavernous room, the entire space pitch dark but for some unseen trick of light which projects upon him from some hidden place, as there is no visible beam shining from either above or below. The effect is as if this illumination emanates from within. It is a swell parlor trick. I must remember to ask him how it is done during the interview’s debriefing, though I am still too curiously, excitedly apprehensive to take time to jot down that tid-bit in my notes. There is the shuttering of the do...