Tag: literature promotion

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Five

A few days later, some rich old men were playing golf on their exclusive country club’s course in Indiana…the one Gary had been talking about. One of them, Gene, snorted at his caddy, who was daydreaming at the moment.

“Jeff!” Gene growled at the young man. “Get out of dreamland and get me my putter!”

As Jeff looked through Gene’s golf bag, he said (not softly enough), “Little kids should be playing here, not grumpy old men with too much money.”

“What?” Gene snapped.

“I think you heard me fine,” Jeff said, looking Gene straight in the eye.

“It’s your job to be my caddy, to give me advice on how to play and give me my clubs immediately, not to give me lip! Do you understand?!”

“Yes, but you can try being a little nicer, too, old man. We workers have feelings too, you know.”

“Do I have to report you to the country club, you insolent little bastard?”

“I’ll speed things up for you, you stuck-up rich cunt! I quit.” Jeff gave him the finger along with the putter, then started walking off.

“I’ll make sure you never work as a caddy again, you little shit!”

“Good,” Jeff said as he kept going.

“Smart-ass kids these days have no respect for the elderly,” said the man Gene was playing against. “He’ll need all the help he can get finding a job in this economy.”

“You’re goddamn right, Roger,” Gene said, then got into position to putt his ball into the hole. “Those working-class lowlifes are way beneath us.”

But just as he was about to tap the ball, the ground began shaking.

“What the hell?” Roger said. “Since when do we ever get earthquakes in this area?”

The shaking didn’t stop. In fact, it got worse. Instead of being afraid, though, Gene just got angry with the inconvenience of it all.

“Goddammit, when’s the shaking gonna stop?” Gene grumbled. “I’m surprised my ball hasn’t fallen off its tee.”

“Yet,” Roger added.

“Oh, shit!” Gene shouted as he saw it finally fall off. “It’s rolling away!”

“Oh, my God!” Roger yelled as the shaking was getting really bad, causing them both to stagger.

The two men were no longer able to keep their balance. They fell on their asses. Their golf cart went on its side. Other golfers were yelling in shock at the worsening quake, staggering and falling, too.

Then Gene and Roger, still lying on the ground, looked down at the grass just by them. The ground was cracking open. The two men gasped.

Gene’s ball fell in the widening opening.

A few seconds later, so did Gene and Roger, screaming the whole time as they went down. 

Their bodies smashed against the rocky walls inside, then their screaming stopped forever.

Several other rich golfers fell in screaming, too, their screams also being silenced soon after.

Shocked Jeff was frozen in fear, after having also fallen to the ground and lying there, as he saw his two bosses fall to their deaths, swallowed up in the earth. 

I may not have liked the two of them, he thought, but I wouldn’t have wished that on them. I wouldn’t have wished that on my worst enemy.

Then he looked down at the grass, now that the earthquake had ended and the cracks had closed up.

He saw a woman’s beautiful, smiling face in the shadows between the grass blades.

“What in the flying fuck?” he whispered to himself. I’m not high. Why am I seeing that? he wondered.

Gary wasn’t anywhere on the grass to see her face, but he was in the staff building, in his brother’s office. They all felt the quake, Gary having just finished chatting with his brother about the thunderstorm and the sea storm, as well as the dreams, and putting up with his brother’s sneers and derision about Gary’s pagan interpretations of what had happened. 

The beginning of the quake stopped his brother’s laughing. 

The continuing—and worsening—of the quake replaced his laughing with bodily trembling.

They both needed several minutes to calm down once the shaking ended.

“Do you believe me now, Cam?” Gary asked.

“You think a goddess caused this quake?” Cam, who’d had both shared dreams but forgot all about them, said. “Look, I’ll agree that this was scary, what just happened, but I’m not about to lose my ability to reason, Gary.”

“Suit it yourself, Cam,” Gary said. “But I can guarantee you that more mayhem is going to come, and to more rich people like those old farts out there. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cam said. “Sure. Pray for me, won’t you?”

“I will, Cam. But it will be up to you to change your attitude if you expect to survive what’s coming.”

“Oooh!” Cam walked out of the room laughing, if nervously.

“If you’re not going to worry about yourself, you can worry about your clients, Cam!”

Though his brother was certainly worried about his clients, especially the families of those who had been swallowed up in the earth, he didn’t show such concern to Gary by closing the hallway door behind him. 

Gary just sat on a sofa in the room and let out a big sigh.

“What the hell am I going to do?” he whispered to himself. Cam is never going to listen to me. He’s such an arrogant asshole, but he’s my brother, and I love him. His sympathies lie completely with the rich bastards to patronize this country club. All he cares about is the money this place makes, the profits he shares with the boss. He’s gonna die with all of them when the gods finally do their thing. How am I going to save Cam?

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Four

The next day, the incident was discussed on social media. Of course, virtually nobody, outside of a few in the neopagan community, mentioned the face in the water.

“I have no sympathy for the dead,” one embittered woman, one of the staff on the yacht, said about the wealthy there. “I overheard their conversations while I was serving them. They showed no sympathy for how the economy was affecting the poor. They were also often rude and impatient with our service. Why should I feel bad for them?”

The woman who’d tried to help clean the bad-tempered guest’s dress said this about her: “The ocean cleaned her dress. Good enough.”

Michelle and Gary were in a group chat with their friend, Nina.

“So, you had the same dream as us?” Gary asked Nina.

“Judging by how the two of you described it, I’d say I had the exact same dream as you,” Nina said. “I know there were a few people who claim they saw a bearded face in the clouds the night of the thunderstorm, and a bearded face on the waves when the yacht sank.”

“Were the people who saw the face any of the staff on that yacht?” Michelle asked.

“No, they were people on the rescue boat, including people who don’t believe in any gods, just people too shocked to believe their own eyes,” Nina said, “and too reluctant to go public with what they saw.” 

“Another thing should be talked about,” Gary said. “The people who were killed were all rich and powerful.”

“They were also widely hated,” Nina added.

“Yes,” Michelle said. “And when you put that together with the fact that the world is being destroyed by global warming, constant wars, and economic hardship, you can see why the gods are intervening. Us all having the same dream, the faces of—let’s use Greek names, for convenience—Zeus and Poseidon in the clouds and water, these are clear signs that something major is happening. This is all way beyond mere synchronicity.”

“We can be sure of one thing,” Gary said. “The gods are very, very angry.”

“Angry?” Nina said. “They’re enraged.”

“Infuriated,” Michelle said.

“As they said in the dream, man’s wickedness has gone too far, and the gods don’t wish to sit idly by anymore,” Gary said.

“We’re going to have to keep our eyes and ears open,” Nina said. “Something big is going to happen, and we don’t want to be among those who suffer and die in it. We must discuss this with more of our friends and fellow believers, as well as our families.”

“My brother manages a country club where lots of rich folks go to play golf,” Gary said. “I have a premonition something’s going to happen there. I had a dream in which I saw the earth-goddess’s weeping face. It ended with the green of a golf course. It really looked like the one in my brother’s country club.”

“Oh, my God!” Michelle said. “Did you see the globe of the Earth with a woman’s crying face, coming nearer and nearer to you, like a camera closeup?”

Gary gulped and said, “Yes.”

“So did I,” Michelle said.

“So did I,” Nina said. “Exactly as you both described.”

None of them said anything for several more seconds.

Gary was the first to type something next: “Some of us have family who won’t ever open their minds to anything even remotely pagan. Still, that won’t stop us from loving them. My brother, whom I mentioned a little while ago, is such a person. How are we going to convince them to do what needs to be done, if a worldwide disaster is coming, as all the signs seem to be showing?”

“That’s a good question,” Michelle responded. “My mother is a Christian, but the books I’ve bought her over the years, ones by Bishop ‘Jack’ Spong, have opened her mind up a little. I might be able to get her to listen to reason, but I don’t think it will be easy. I wonder if she’s had the same dreams as us.”

“Let’s pray for the best,” Nina said. “My husband doesn’t share my faith, either, but I bet I can nag him to do what needs to be done. As I said, let’s pray to the gods for help when this all starts to get scary, as it looks like it will.”

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Three

A week later, Mr. and Ms. Plantagenet, owners of a large investment company named after themselves, were on their yacht with some wealthy friends on a California shore. The yacht was tied to the pier, and all the people aboard had each already had several drinks.

“I’m so glad the stock market crash didn’t affect any of us, Tom,” a female guest said to Mr. Plantagenet.

“That’s because, due to our ability to pull the strings of the banks and the federal government, we could prevent the stock market crash from affecting us,” Tom said.

All the guests chuckled.

“A phone call here, an email there, and our representatives can bail out anyone we need them to,” Ms. Plantagenet said.

“That’s so reassuring, Donna,” a male guest said to Ms. Plantagenet. “Since my company was one of the ones that needed a bailout.”

“As Donna and I know, let the common people suffer under the bad economy, not us,” Tom said.

The rope that moored the yacht was loosening and untying…all by itself.

“I agree, Tom,” the male guest said. “The masses are not our problem.”

“Hear, hear,” Tom said. All the guests clinked their champagne glasses together.

“If the masses don’t want to suffer, they should lay off the drugs and stop wasting money on non-essentials,” Donna said.

“Agreed,” the others said together.

The boat was drifting into the ocean, though everyone was too caught up in the conversation to notice.

“A most annoying thing happened to us while at work today, you know,” Tom said.

“Oh, and what was that?” the male guest asked.

“A bunch of university students were protesting in front of our building this morning, can you believe that?” Donna said with a sneer.

“Protesting about what?” the female guest asked.

“Oh, the usual bullshit,” Tom grunted as he had his glass refilled. “We’ve too much influence on the banks and the government, we have too much money and they have too little, all that crap.”

The other guests groaned in annoyance.

“What did you do about it?” another guest asked.

“We called the cops and got rid of them, of course,” Donna said. “A few of the long-haired young men resisted arrest, so the cops beat them.”

“Served the bastards right,” Tom said.

“Oh, definitely,” the third guest said.

Finally, one of them looked out at the water. “Where are we?” she asked.

“What do you mean, ‘where are we’?” Tom asked, then looked out at the ocean. “What?”

Everyone was looking out at the water now.

The pier and shore were nowhere in sight.

The sun had set. Clouds were covering the moon and stars. The guests had only the yacht’s electricity for light. Worried murmurs were heard.

“Derrick?” Donna called out to a staff member. “Radio the Yacht Club onshore. Ask for help.”

“Yes, Donna,” Derrick said, then went off to do it.

Heavy gusts of wind started blowing. The waves were rocking the yacht. Drinks were spilt.

“Dammit!” one of the guests yelled at the stain on her dress. “You!” she shouted at one of the female staff. “Come with me and help me clean this!” They left for the washroom.

The wind and rocking of the yacht continued; it was getting more intense. It also started to rain.

“Oh, no!” Donna said. “Derrick, have you contacted the Yacht Club? What did they say?”

“There’s something wrong with the radio,” he said. “I can’t get any connection with the shore. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t.”

“What are we going to do?” a guest said. “It’s looking like a storm out there!”

A sudden crack of thunder startled everyone.

A flash of lightning scared them even more.

The rain was splashing down. The rocking of the yacht was giving everyone the feeling of a real possibility of capsizing. Everyone onboard was panicking.

Derrick looked out on the water. He blinked and looked again. When the lightning flashed and provided some brief light, he was sure he saw a man’s bearded face among the waves. Apart from the moving of the waves distorting the image, it was as precise as a photograph. The face looked malevolent.

I haven’t had a drop of booze tonight, he thought. No pot, no LSD. And I never hallucinate.

Suddenly, there were bumping, crunching, and snapping sounds, as well as several great jerks as the yacht hit a rock.

The screaming got louder as the yacht was sinking. Everyone was trying to hang onto something to stay above the water, but only the staff managed to do so. Tom, Donna, and all their guests went straight underwater; it felt as though watery arms were pulling them all down. Some of them thought they actually saw and felt watery arms grabbing their bodies.

Before they all passed out, the last thing they saw, because of a few more lightning flashes, was that same bearded, scowling face among the shadows of the deep.

Hardly a second passed by since the last of the rich drowned, then the storm ended. The stars and the moon reappeared, restoring some light to the scene. The staff, hanging onto pieces of the broken yacht or to the huge rock it had smashed into, saw a boat approaching. A light from the boat shone on them. The staff cheered at their rescuers. 

As they got on the boat, a few of them, including Derrick, looked into the water, and with the light from the boat shining out onto the water, they saw that bearded face. Their eyes all widened.

This time, the face was smiling.

Cake

S
w
i
f
t
i
e
s
were swooning
at the wedding
Taylor-made in
Madison Square Garden.
Closing off major roads,
costing the city millions,
and making a public spectacle out
of a private union are no object to
billionaires and their excesses. It’s
a society as tiered as a wedding cake that
we all live in. ‘Let them eat cake,’ the rich
will say. ‘Eat the rich,’ is how we’d answer.
Let the Swifties boast of their heroine’s ineffectual
charity work. May their red-lipped idol, and all her
wealthy ilk, go the bloody way of Marie Antoinette.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Two

The next day, social media was all abuzz about the freak accident. A few mentioned seeing a face in the clouds, but no one believed them.

A former employee of the Wellses, Jonathan Bailey, remembered how mean and stingy the two were, always paying him the minimum to slave away in a kitchen cooking for them, washing their dishes, taking out the garbage, and helping with the cleaning up of the mansion in general.

In his comments on the news story, he stressed the connection between their business, a weapons manufacturing company, and how the military is the world’s worst polluter and contributor to climate change.

“I’m not shedding one tear for them,” he commented. “Their death tells us that, apparently, there is a God.”

“Or that there are many gods,” Michelle replied to his comment.

“My comment was just meant as an expression,” Jonathan replied to her. “I don’t believe in any gods. The world’s too cruel a place to believe in any kind of divine justice.”

“Mine was literal,” she said. “In fact, I have a friend living in the area who claims she saw a face in the clouds during and after the thunderstorm.”

“If so, then I’d say I need to find her dealer,” he said in the comments with a lol. “I’ll bet she gets some good shit from him.”

She responded with a lol of her own. “Is there anyone else out there, a part of this discussion, who saw the face, or who knows someone who claims to have seen the face? I’d really like to know, for confirmation of my friend’s report.”

No replies.

“Anyone at all?”

Still no replies. 

Finally, Gary said, “I don’t know anybody who does, Michelle, but I’m a neopagan like you (I assume), and I’ll ask around the neopagan community, online and irl, if anyone else has seen, or knows anyone who’s seen, a face in the clouds that night.”

“Thanks, Gary,” she said. “I appreciate it. Add me as a Facebook friend, and if you know any others, we can discuss what happened from our perspective.”

“Cool,” Gary said. “I’ll be glad to help, and to friend you.”

Five minutes later, not only were Michelle and Gary Facebook friends, they were also engaging in a private message about the divine phenomena.

“A funny thing happened to me, several nights before that thunderstorm,” Michelle said. “I had a dream about the gods assembled in a dark…cave, or something, and they were all discussing how fed up they were with the wickedness of man, and they were planning to wipe out such men, while also giving warnings to everyone, though the wicked would never heed the warning.”

Gary paused with a gasp before typing his reply. “Did the gods discuss the ecological degradation, the endless wars, the war-god never getting a chance to sleep because of the wars, and the earth goddess weeping over these evils?”

Now, Michelle was the one gasping before replying. “My God, yes! Those exact things happened in my dream. Did you dream the same thing, around the same time as I did?”

“Not only did I have such a dream, like you, about two or three nights before the thunderstorm,” Gary typed. “So did a number of friends of mine, and other members of the neopagan community.”

Now both of them were gasping, and for a dozen seconds, they were unable to think about what to type next.

“Do you think there could be a connection between our shared dream and what happened to the Wellses, Gary?” Michelle asked.

“Let’s not jump to any hasty conclusions for now,” he answered. “Let’s wait and see if any more ‘freak accidents’ like that happen over the next few weeks or so.”

Stripes

We need not see white stars against a blue background
to know the blood of the red against the white. As early
as the Mystic Massacre of the Pequot, we already have
the proof we need to see the bloodlust of the 13 British
colonies, whose men began the first phase of the killing, with stripes of red on
red skin, hardly thanksgiving for all the good the aboriginals did for us whites.
We were helped in the cold; we burned them alive in their villages and tepees.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter One

Kurt Wells and his wife, Samantha, were being driven home from dinner in a French restaurant one night in Vermont. He was looking through the business section of a newspaper, checking his stocks.

“How are your investments doing, Kurt?” she asked.

“Wonderful!” he said. “Excellent! They’re the highest they’ve been in…oh…four years.”

“Really?” she asked. “And so many people complain about the economy.”

“The people who don’t matter complain,” he said. “And the people who do matter, don’t complain.”

Their chauffeur, worried about his unemployed brother, tried to keep his sigh inaudible.

A sudden, loud crack of thunder startled all three of them. Then the rain started to fall.

“Have our large umbrella ready for us, Phil,” she told their driver.

“Yes, ma’am,” Phil said.

A huge gust of wind whistled by the car, startling them all again.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “This is going to be a nasty one.”

A flash of lightning switched the black of night to white for a split second. The rain was coming down heavily now, drenching the car.

The Wellses could see their mansion, surrounded by its large, gated lawn. In the flashing lightning and black of night, it looked to Phil like Dracula’s castle.

The gates opened, and the car went in. A bolt of lightning hit the right side of the gate just after the car drove past.

“My God!” Kurt shouted. “That scared the life out of me!”

“Oh, the gate is destroyed,” Samantha said. “How much it will cost to replace it!”

You can afford it, you billionaire bitch, Phil thought.

“Drop us off by the front door, and have our umbrella ready,” Kurt said. “I don’t want to go through the annoyance of parking in the basement parking lot, and then having to go up the stairs to the ground floor, what with my gout.”

Phil parked as instructed, and had the umbrella in his hand. He got out of the car and went over to open the right back door of the limo. He had the umbrella over himself for the moment.

“The umbrella is not for you, Phil, it’s for us!” Kurt snapped at him; then he held it over Kurt and Samantha.

Yeah, I’ve gotta get totally soaked for you, don’t I, you selfish oligarch bastard, Phil thought.

The couple got out of the car. A gust of wind blew rain all over Kurt and Samantha. His black tuxedo and her dark red evening gown were soaked.

“Phil, be careful!” she shouted. “Make sure the umbrella protects us from the rain!”

Yeah, like I’m supposed to be able to predict when the wind’s gonna blow the rain which way, Phil thought.

A bolt of lightning hit the walkway just a few feet behind where the three of them were.

“Oh, my God!” she screamed.

“Hurry up and get us inside, you lazy fool!” Kurt shouted.

Since when am I dawdling, you grumpy piece of shit? Phil thought. I wanna get out of this storm as quickly as you do. I can’t help it if the wind and rain are slowing us all down.

They’d reached the front door of the mansion and the butler opened it to let the couple in. Just then, the loudest crack of thunder they’d hear that night jolted all four of them.

Immediately after that, without even a second to calm down, a jagged fork of lightning came right at Kurt and Samantha, not only electrifying them, but also impaling them with its points.

They both screamed as their bodies shook and their blood sprayed and mixed with the rain. After several more seconds of this screaming, shaking, and spraying of blood—their bodies lit up like Christmas trees and burning to crisps—the forked spear of a lightning bolt disappeared, and the two lifeless bodies fell face-forward on the walkway immediately in front of the door.

They were charred black from head to toe. Holes in their chests, the diameter of thick spears, went all the way through from their backs to their fronts. Phil and the butler—shaking as much as their dead bosses had just been, their eyes and mouths agape—could see through their bosses’ backs to the concrete underneath. The two servants would keep shaking for another two minutes, always staring at the corpses.

Finally, Phil looked up at the night sky, for the storm had stopped just after Kurt and Samantha died. It stopped as quickly as it had begun. He intuited, correctly, that it was as if the whole purpose of the storm had been to cause the deaths of his wealthy bosses.

As he looked up there, he sensed how correct he had been to assume that it had, indeed, been the purpose of the storm, for Phil could clearly make out, in the darker spots inside the clouds, a large man’s face: eyes, nostrils, a smiling mouth, and even a beard.

It wasn’t pareidolia, either: it was too perfectly proportioned for that. In fact, Phil was sure he saw the eyes and mouth move.