Category: literature promotion

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Two

“Oh, there goes Al again!” his older brother, Freddie, called from the top of the basement stairs. “In the basement, talking to himself.”

“Shut up, Freddie!” Al shouted. “Go away and mind your own business! I’m busy!”

“Yeah, busy talking to yourself,” Freddie said. “Freak!”

“I’m not talking to myself. I’m praying to the ancestors. You know that, you faithless scum!”

“I know you still believe in that stupid old religion, which never did the family any good, and which we all left behind in Asia, ’cause we aren’t backward-thinking, the way you are!”

“My praying to the ancestors is the only thing keeping the family’s bad luck from getting any worse.”

“You’re the only one giving the family any bad luck,” Freddie said. “You’re a stupid, spastic loser!”

“Go to hell!” Al shouted. “Leave me alone!”

“Leave me alone!” Freddie said in a mocking, whiny voice.

“Will both of you be quiet?” their father shouted from the living room. “Freddie, get out of the basement and help me move this desk. Leave Al to his silly praying, if he must do it. Cut out the noise, and give the rest of us some peace!”

“Freak!” Freddie shouted at Al, then slammed the basement door.

“Asshole,” Al whispered, then he sighed and looked back at the altar. He closed his eyes and started to concentrate on the spirits.

He breathed in and out, slowly and deeply.

He listened in the silence of the dark room, waiting for a sign of the spirits’ presence.

Finally, after about half a minute, he heard a hoarse, feminine voice, speaking in Chinese.

What do you want, boy?

“Po?” Al said, his voice wavering.

Well, what is it?

“I have a girlfriend,” he stammered in Chinese.

How sweet, the old woman’s voice rasped with sarcasm.

“She w-wants to m-meet the family,” he went on. “Please d-don’t cause any trouble w-while we have dinner together here. I love her v-very much.”

How touching. Why should we care about your personal problems, boy? Your family abandoned us years ago. We became demons because of your neglect. Your weak attempts to placate us are far from enough to compensate. Why should we do anything kind for a worm like you?

“What can I do t-to ease your wrath? What do you want me to do t-to ensure that she and my family can have a pleasant dinner here together, with no bad luck, no disasters of any kind?”

There was a long silence.

“Please, Po. What do you want from me?”

Po paused thoughtfully in silence a little longer.

He opened his eyes, then said, “Po?”

A glow of light appeared weakly at first, then it grew larger and brighter. Finally, he saw an apparition of an old woman in traditional Chinese clothing, a red Qing Dynasty dress with an ornate, light-blue headdress. She looked like a bride at an old wedding.

As pretty as her clothes were, though, the look on her face was anything but pleasant. It wore a scowl and piercing, malignant black eyes that looked at him as though she wanted to kill him, slowly and painfully.

He was afraid to ask again, but he knew he had to.

“What do you want me to do for you, Po?”

Have the girl’s whole family come here for dinner.

“Her whole family?”

Yes. Her mother, father, brothers, and sisters, if any.

“Why h-have all of them come, Po?”

Why not? If you want to marry this girl one day, don’t you think it’s right if all of both families meet and get to know each other?

“W-well, yes, but…”

But what? What could be the problem? Now, Po was grinning. What could possibly be wrong with that? Families should be close, shouldn’t they? Her words implied his family’s neglect.

“O-of course, but…what do you want to do with her family?”

What we spirits will do with her family is none of your concern, boy. Just make sure they’re all here, and don’t interfere with us while they’re here. If you want to live a long and happy life with this girl, with us never troubling you again, then you’ll do exactly as we wish without question. Give us her family, and you’ll be free of us forever. I give you my word.

“But, Po,” he said as he saw her image slowly fading away, “at least give me some idea of what you plan…”

Give us her family… Her voice dissolved in a reverberating echo, as did her apparition.

He just stood there alone in the darkness, shuddering.

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter One

Al Dan, 25, and Hannah Sandy, 24, were taking a walk in the park at around 9 pm. They’d been seeing each other for almost a year. Smiling, she had her head on his shoulder. With an ear-to-ear grin, he was enjoying resting the side of his head against the top of hers, feeling the soft cushioning of her long, blonde hair.

He looked up at the night sky. “The stars are really beautiful, aren’t they, Hannah?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said after taking a quick look. “I love coming out here in this park with you.”

“It’s such a nice place for us to take a walk after having dinner,” he said. “The trees, the grass, the smell of the flowers, the soft breeze on our faces, and best of all, you.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet,” she said, then they gave each other a peck on the lips. “You know, Al, we’ve been going out for about a year now, and I’m so happy with you, I don’t see myself being with anyone else.”

“I feel the same way. You’re pretty, you’re nice,…”

“You’re cute, you’re sweet, you’re funny, you’re considerate to me in ways that no other guy I’ve dated ever has been,…”

“You drive me wild in bed,…”

She giggled and hugged him tight. “You’re great in bed,…”

They both hugged each other even tighter and kissed again.

“There’s just one thing, though, Al.” They stopped walking and looked at each other.

“What’s that?” His smile faded.

“I introduced you to my mom, dad, and brother months ago, but I still haven’t met your family. Not even once.”

He was frowning and visibly shaking.

“What is it, Al? I’ve asked to meet your family for the third time now. The first two times, you made excuses to get out of it, and now, you’re still uncomfortable about me meeting them. What’s wrong?”

He was stammering, groping for the right words.

“Your family doesn’t like the idea of you dating a white woman, is that it?” she said with growing anger. “They’d never accept you with anyone other than an Asian, someone of Chinese descent only, is that it?”

“No, no,” he said, holding her hands and looking into her eyes so she’d see his sincerity. “It isn’t like that at all. My family’s not racist at all. They’re completely tolerant. It’s…just…that…”

“What?!”

“Well, it’s hard to put into words. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think I’m crazy.”

“Well, what is it?” She was calming down, and sensing genuine anxiety about his family mixed in with that love for her that she’d always known was sincere. She looked in his eyes with empathy. “Come on, Al. What’s bothering you about your family?”

“Well,…my mom and dad…and my brother and sister…are always putting me down, insulting me, bullying me, and blaming me for everything that goes wrong in the family. They’ll make me look stupid, and I’m afraid that after a night of listening to them belittle me, you’ll think I’m a loser and want to dump me.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, then hugged him. “If I see your family treating you badly, I’ll see that as a blot on them, not on you. I know the real you, and if they can’t see your goodness, then that’s their problem, not yours. I’ll always love you, no matter what. But let me meet them so I can at least see for myself what kind of people they are, OK?”

He put on his most convincing fake smile, hiding all of his undying worries. “OK.” They kissed.

*************

After walking her home and kissing her good night, Al walked back to his house as slowly as possible, for he needed as much time as he could give himself to think of a way out of this predicament.

What the hell am I going to do? he wondered. I can’t tell Hannah about my family’s secret curse! She’d never believe me; she’d think I’m crazy, and I probably am. I’ve certainly been driven crazy by this problem my family started ever since we moved here in Toronto from China, and they gave up on the old family traditions.

I’m the only one who still believes in them, and the family laughs at me for doing so. The ghosts of the ancestors, mad at the family for neglecting them, directly trouble only me. Only I ever pray to them, keeping them from doing their worst. The only problems we have are constant cases of bad luck, which the family blames on me, instead of realizing it’s the ghosts that are doing it. If I were to stop praying to them, they’d be far more malevolent, even violent. Not only could a lot of bad luck happen during our big dinner together; the ghosts may do something awful to Hannah, to hurt her. I can’t let that happen!

Oh, what am I going to do? I can’t keep making excuses to stop Hannah from seeing my family. She isn’t going to accept verbal abuse from them as a sufficient reason to avoid meeting them. She wants to take our relationship to the next level, and I do, too. I want to marry this girl! No one’s ever loved me or valued me the way she does, and marrying her will require my family’s involvement, one way or the other. I’ll have to take this risk if I’m to keep her.

Al was now within a block of his house. He thought, Maybe I can pray extra hard to the ancestors. The family’s neglect of praying to them is what has made them so angry with us, so if I pray all the more earnestly to them, maybe I can appease their wrath, at least to an extent. Maybe I can ask them to tell me what they want me to do in exchange for not troubling us anymore. Trying to get the family to pray to them again is useless: they don’t believe in the spirits, and as I’ve always known, the moments of bad luck that the ghosts cause are always made to look like they’re my fault, rather than being supernatural. I’m the pious one who prays to the ghosts, but I suffer the worst: no good deed goes unpunished!

He went in the front door of his house, then into the basement where the altar was. He sighed, then lit a stick of incense and put it between his hands. He bowed before the altar. Oh, well, he thought. It’s worth a try.

Raised Fist

O, keep your fingers
on the pulse of what
the people need in this
alienating, unfair world!
A good rule of thumb is
remembering we can’t
do all of this alone.
We all must raise
our arms together
in loving solidarity.
Alone, we’re weak;
together, we’re not.
When our muscles
are stacked, one on
top of the other, we
can be unstoppable,
a giant which could
pound the crap out
of the ruling class. There are so many more of us than there are of them.
They want us just to be fingers and thumbs, all insignificant sinews. We
must link up–as ligaments–muscles and bones. A fist that’s connected
can punch out the rich, so let’s raise it together. Our rulers would have
us all fighting, so we won’t be fighting them, defeating them for good.

‘Primal Scream,’ a Sci-fi Short Story

When the loud, rumbling thud came just a while away from the house where ten-year-old Ted lived on his parents’ farm, he shook even more than the ground did. He turned off the TV, rose from the living room sofa, and ran out the front door to see where the thud had come from.

He ran across a field of wheat, a rolling hill just by the house. At the far end of the field he saw a huge rock that hadn’t been there before.

That must’ve been what made that shaking, and that noise, he thought as he kept running towards it.

When he finally reached the rock, he tumbled and fell right on it, smacking his hands and knees against it. He looked down at his knees, which hurt; his jeans were cut there, with bloody cuts on both knees.

“Ow!” he grunted. “Mom and Dad are gonna kill me when they see these holes in my pants.”

Suddenly, he felt a stinging burn on his left hand, making him wince and pull his arm off the rock. It felt like a spark that had flown out of a campfire and hit him on the hand; but he looked at his hand and saw no mark. Whatever it was, it had to have been too small to be visible, or it had left as quickly as it got there.

He looked back at the rock. His eyes could barely make out something on it, thousands of things that, each taken individually, would have been as invisible as whatever had come onto his hand, but all together, looked like a kind of mist, or many wisps of hair. They seemed to be making a buzzing sound, as if they were insects.

He found the sound disturbing, and he began to worry that he might have caught germs and would get sick from the rock, so he let himself fall back onto the grass to distance himself from the rock, then he got up and ran back in the direction of the house.

He saw his mom’s and dad’s pickup truck coming in on the driveway. They’d just come back from shopping in town.

They got out of the truck and saw him running across the field, stomping on the wheat.

“Look at that dumb kid!” his dad shouted. “He’s running on my wheat again! Get outta there!“

He turned to his left and ran off the field to the gravel road and went along that to get to the house. “Mom! Dad!” he shouted in excitement. “Did you see the big rock in the field?”

“What nonsense are you blabbering about now?” his mom said while taking two bags of groceries out of the truck. Then she and his dad took a look far out across the field. Her eyes widened. “Oh, my God. What do you think that is, John?”

“A meteor?” John said. “Fell from out in space, do you think, Jean?”

“Looks that way,” Jean said. “You didn’t go up and touch it, did you, Ted?”

He looked down at his feet. “Yes, I did.”

“You stupid kid,” she said. “And look at what you did to your jeans! And those cuts on your knees! You’re all filthy dirty. You’re gonna need a bath. Oh, you’ve always gotta find more work for me to do, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry,” the boy said softly.

“Get in the house, boy,” John said.

Ted went with his mother straight to the bathroom. She got his bath ready as he got out of his clothes. Both of them were frowning the whole time.

With the bathtub full of sudsy water and Ted naked and ready to go in, she turned around to look at him. “OK, Ted, get in the w…oh, my God!”

His skin was all a yellowish-green.

His eyeballs were yellow.

His blond hair had all turned grey.

“What the hell did you do, boy, getting so close to that meteor?” she shouted. “Such a stupid kid, always doing the wrong thing! What the hell is wrong with you?”

His father heard his mom’s shouting, then he ran from the living room and over to the bathroom. He saw his immobile, naked son…with that yellowish-green skin.

His eyes widened, and his jaw dropped.

“Oh, my God!” John said. “You stupid kid!”

“Normally, I’d beat your ass for doing such a stupid thing, but I’m afraid I’ll catch whatever disease you’ve got,” she said. “I’m scared to bathe you, as you are. I’m afraid to be near you. We’ve got to get you to a hospital. Get your clothes back on. There you go again, boy, giving me more work to do!”

Ted just stood there, still and morose.

“Well, hurry up, boy!” John shouted. “You heard her.”

He walked around to look his son in the face.

He saw that sullen expression on the boy, his eyes looking up at his father as if he’d like to kill him.

“Don’t you be lookin’ at me like that, boy!” his father shouted. “I got a good mind to smack you!”

“Don’t touch him, John,” Jean said. “You might catch whatever he got from that meteor.”

Then Ted looked at her in the same, threatening way.

“Hey, don’t you be looking at your mother that way,” she said. “You’re lucky I don’t smack you.”

He continued looking at both of them hatefully.

“I told you to stop it, boy!” she shouted.

“Stop looking at us that way, you little brat!” John said.

Ted kept the scowl on his face. It was even meaner now.

“Stop it!” his parents shouted.

“NO, YOU STOP IT!” he screamed. “YOU TWO ARE ALWAYS MEAN TO ME! YELLING AT ME, CALLING ME STUPID, SAYING I MAKE MORE WORK FOR YOU! YOU DON’T LOVE ME! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUUUUUUU!!!“

As he was screaming, a kind of toxic energy was emanating from his body and penetrating theirs. They couldn’t react in any way except to shake and tilt back with their eyes wide open and their jaws dropped in horror.

Ted kept screaming, but with no more words. He was just letting out unmitigated rage and pain.

John’s and Jean’s bodies were changing now, hardening. They were both petrified as physically as they were emotionally. They soon stood as still as glass statues.

Ted looked at them and smiled.

He let out one last, long scream.

Those statues fragmented and crumbled to the floor in two piles of rock-like pieces.

He smiled an even wider smile.

Then he got in the tub of water and bathed himself. After finishing his bath and drying himself off with a large towel, he left the bathroom, went into his bedroom, and put on a clean set of clothes.

He made himself a sandwich and ate it while watching the TV in peace. When the sun went down, he went to bed, thinking about how he could use his new power on the bullies at school.

He slept like a baby.

When he left for school the next morning after fixing himself a bowl of cereal, he’d never once looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t care how he looked.

Walking on the gravel road all the way to school, he didn’t care how tired he was or how sore his legs were. He didn’t miss getting a ride to school in his parents’ truck at all. His eyes were looking around everywhere on that road, watching out for bullies. This wasn’t out of fear, of course; on the contrary, he couldn’t wait to run into some of them.

About two-thirds of the way there, and having walked for about twenty tiring minutes, Ted saw two bigger boys, Rod and Barry, walking on the road on the way to his school. He smiled at the sight of them, but not because he considered them friends.

The two boys look one look at Ted and froze.

“Holy shit!” Rod said. “What the fuck happened to you, Ted?”

“What a freak!” Barry said. Both of them started laughing at Ted.

Smiling, Ted walked closer to them.

“Hey, stay away from us, you freak!” Rod said. “We don’t want your germs.”

Ted kept coming closer, the smile never leaving his yellow-green face.

“I mean it, you frog-boy, stay away!” Rod said. Both boys picked up rocks.

Ted kept coming at them.

“Stay the fuck away!” Barry said, and both of them started throwing the rocks at Ted.

Barry’s rock hit Ted on the shoulder, and Rod’s hit him on the forehead. Ted’s smile turned into a frown.

“Aww, look,” Barry said. “He lost his smart-ass smirk. I’ll bet he’s gonna start cryin’ for his mommy.”

The boys picked up some more rocks, choosing bigger ones.

Ted stayed where he was, only a few feet away from the boys.

“You’d better start runnin’, freak,” Rod said. Both boys, with rocks in their hands, raised their arms up, ready to throw.

As soon as their arms were backed up to throw the rocks at Ted, he opened his mouth wide.

“AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!” he screamed.

The boys dropped their rocks and plugged their fingers in their ears, though it did them little good. They were shaking all over. Who would have thought that the little twerp could have been so terrifying all of a sudden?

“WHY DON’T YOU PICK ON SOMEONE YOUR OWN SIZE, YOU BULLYING BASTAAAARDS!!!“

The two boys looked down at themselves in horror and disbelief as they saw their bodies hardening. The screaming was so ear-splitting that their whole heads were stinging with the sharpest pain, yet they had no hope of going deaf.

“YOU THINK YOU’RE SO TOUGH, YOU ASSHOLES?!” Ted continued. “YOU’RE A COUPLE O’ COWARDS, PICKING ON LITTLE KIDS! I HATE YOUUUUUU!!!“

The statues that the two boys had become now shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces that scattered all along the road. With a little wind blowing them about, they’d become indistinguishable from the rest of the gravel. The boys’ clothes and schoolbags fell to the ground.

Ted looked at their remains and grinned.

“I’m so powerful,” he said, then continued toward school.

When he got to the gate surrounding the play area beside the small, one-storey school, where all the kids were out playing, some of them noticed him, shuddered, and pointed him out to their friends. Within a few seconds, all the kids started screaming.

“TED’S A MONSTER!!!”

“HE’S SO UGLY!!! DISGUSTING!!!”

“HELP US, SOMEBODY!!!”

Since Ted had never bothered to get a good look at himself in a mirror at home, he didn’t understand why everyone was calling him ‘freak’ and ‘ugly.’ All he knew was that those words hurt.

So he decided to do some screaming of his own.

“WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO BE SO MEAN TO ME? WHY CAN’T I HAVE ANY FRIENDS? NO ONE LOVES ME! NO ONE ACCEPTS ME AS I AM, AND I’M SICK AND TIRED OF IT!!!“

Every child in that playing area, and every teacher there or coming out there to hear what all the screaming was about, froze in his or her tracks, trembled at the deafening noise and the toxic energy radiating from the boy, and became emotionally and physically petrified.

He let out one more scream, and all those glass-like statues shattered all over the grass.

Ted himself was shaking with rage and poisonous hatred. He walked with stomping feet into the school. The remaining staff of the school, who were still alive but terrified by the superhuman volume of Ted’s screaming outside, just stood still where they were, shaking as they heard his approaching, stomping feet.

A few of them in the main hall saw him and gasped at how inhumanly green he looked.

He looked in their horrified eyes with a scowl.

“SO, YOU ALL HATE ME TOO, EEEEEEHHHHH!!!“

With that long scream, they all froze and hardened.

He took a deep breath, then, “AAAAHHHH!!!”

Their bodies all blew up, the pieces spread all over the floor.

Now burning with hate, he went through room after room, checking to see if anyone at all was still alive. All he saw of humanity were scattered fragments of petrified pieces of former people.

“Good,” he grunted. “They’re all dead.”

Then he walked by a mirror and saw himself.

Not only did he have that yellow-green skin, the yellow eyes, and the greyed hair; his teeth, bared in his rage, were blood red, as if he’d just eaten an animal. He had green, wart-like spots all over his skin. Worst of all, he knew why he looked this way.

It wasn’t so much his exposure to the meteor.

It was all of his built-up rage and hate.

He couldn’t stand to see how he looked.

He hated all the more the person he’d become.

No better than John or Jean.

No better than the school bullies.

Much worse, in fact.

“AAAAAHHHH!!! I’M A MONSTER!!!”

He froze into a statue.

Ten minutes later, a six-year-old girl walked into the hallway, crying.

“Everybody’s dead,” she sobbed. “My teachers, my friends, all my classmates. They’re all just…broken little pieces. Why?”

Then she saw Ted’s green, deformed statue. She got up close to it. She saw his agape, red mouth and widened, yellow eyes. Her own mouth and eyes widened.

“AAAAAHHHH!!!” she screamed.

His statue shattered.

She trembled at the reaction, but stayed where she was.

“Oww!” she yelped at a slight burning feeling on her arm.

Droppings

A
plane
flies over a helpless people,
dropping

bombs

on

a

frightened, hungry, homeless, unarmed group of civilians.

A
plane
then flies over that helpless people,
dropping

rotten

food

to

dirty, starving civilians who are shot at when trying to get it.

A
plane
that does these things might as well be
dropping

shit

in

a

toilet, since that is how they look down on Gazans.