Novel Excerpt

An Excerpt From The Autumndale Manifesto

The crooked shadow drifted through him. His insides seized and his vision spun. The shadow stopped over Emma’s shoulder and lingered behind her like a menacing thunderhead. Emma kept her head down, oblivious. She leaned closer to the flower bed. Her faint auburn hair flowed in a dance of innocence against time’s gale. The crooked shadow began to grow. Adam’s heart rattled against his ribs and his mouth flooded with the taste of electricity. Flashes of brilliant white burned his eyes and a concussive wave of needle stings pummeled his arms. The shadow came alive.

Scuffed work boots grew like vile weeds out of the dirt. A pair of potato sack jeans appeared, releasing an untamed gut over their constricted waistline. A stained checkered shirt hugged the creature’s soft upper half and a green trucker’s cap crowned its greasy skull. Adam’s breath stopped. A glistening meat cleaver appeared in the monster’s hand. The creature stood behind Emma with its mouth ajar. Its eyes snarled.  Adam screamed and charged at his uncle.

Uncle Hank let out a guttural shriek and raised the cleaver. Emma continued stroking the unborn flowers. The cleaver swung down. Emma’s inhuman wail rattled the barn doors.

Adam tripped and fell into the dirt. The cold morning light turned red. His gaze locked onto the unreachable slaughter before him. The cleaver pumped up and swung again, then again, gaining the rhythm of a rusted piston thrust back to life. Full crescendo. Adam winced and yelled and screamed and cried. He could not move.

The butchery ended in seconds. The past faded and the darkening forest returned. Adam watched pieces of Emma’s hacked torso sink like dying lanterns into the dusty barnyard path.

 “Hank!” Adam screamed. “Hank!” He screamed the name again and again. The word lost its meaning. It became a dry hack in his throat.

Julian remained standing at the opposite edge of the stream. He heard Adam’s deranged screams echo in the distance. He could not move. The numb sensation in his legs had grown into cascading waves of searing pain. He turned on the flashlight at the back of his phone. The white plastic beam cut into the trees across the water, robbing them of the last hints of twilight. He felt an urge to make a call. Only the emergency number showed. He put the phone away and let the darkness swallow him.       

Autumnal Ghosts

Autumnal Ghosts (2017)


Edgar slowed his pace as the burial oak crawled into his field of vision from beyond the trail's end. His son Nathan scurried at his side, riding on a meek ripple of strength that would soon fade away. The cascading breeze threw some of the fallen leaves into a whimsical dance around them. Their jumbled earthly hues reminded Edgar of a funeral procession, a flurried gathering of heavy souls. He no longer wept for the boy. Edgar could no longer contest the burning seal of doom woven into his family line. His grief fell into a permeating numbness, bound to his bones by the inescapable gravity of Nathan's imminent death.

The father glanced at his son's sheepish face and smiled at the soft painless expression. Soon it would be torn away and replaced with the hollow stare of suffering. Nathan would be forced back into the country house, back into his shoddy bed, and back under the grip of a fresh syringe. The boy's eyes told his father that he was not yet through fighting the disease. Edgar marveled at his son's strength from behind his own veil of experience. Surely he would beg for suicide in Nathan’s place.

On hushed footsteps they entered the wide embrace of the tree's shadow. Their awareness sunk into its ethereal realm. Its rustic sprawling facade inhaled the remnants of the fading day's warmth, hinting at the barren winters of its past. They approached the claws of its twisting roots and made their way in deliberate paces around the base of the trunk. The wind shifted course and the tree waved to the father a brisk greeting with its outer leaves. To the boy it meant farewell.

"Is God real? Will He be there, when I go?" said Nathan. Edgar looked down at the boy's solemn countenance, which drifted like a fog below the pale hairless curvature of his skull. 

"Yes, God is real," said Edgar. He held the boy's shoulder to assert his lie. "God is both around us and within us. He was here before our planet came to be, and he'll be there when everything is gone."

"Good to know, dad. I get scared imagining what nothing will feel like. I hope God is kind," Nathan said.

"God is beyond anything we know," Edgar said. "What really matters is that you are kind."

The imposing aura radiating from the tree opened a deluge of centuries inside Edgar's mind. Through wealth and trouble, and through toil, feasts, and famine, the names engraved into the trunk fell together and coalesced into a single black diamond, a macabre shrine for those unknowable souls.

"Why are we here?" asked Nathan.

"I wanted to show you the others," Edgar said as he stepped closer towards the engravings.

"What do you mean?"

"The others like you, the kids from our family who got sick when they were eleven years old.” Edgar softened his voice for the forlorn boy who would never know manhood. “Think of them as autumnal ghosts. They blessed their loved ones with their summer light and then drifted off to be with God before the early frost came." Edgar waved his palm over several engravings in the side of the tree.

“Were they lonely?" asked Nathan. 

"No. They were loved,” said Edgar. He spoke like a somber grandfather. “At first I didn't believe the rumors, and I stopped thinking about them for a while. Then you were born and I was overjoyed, but then…" Edgar's mind froze as he remembered his wife's suicide. "Then your mom got sick, so we came here."

"I didn't really know mom," said Nathan.

"Your first treatment started when she was already gone," said Edgar. "Her spirit was gone, anyway. I doubt you remember much from that time."

"Needles," said Nathan. "I remember all kinds of needles, and lots drilling and light."

"Then it's for the best," said Edgar. Nathan's expression grew inquisitive. Edgar's grief withheld much of the past from him.

"So you say those relatives caused my sickness? How?" Nathan scowled with the remaining strength in his face. "I don't know everything the doctors say but I know it's not a curse and I don't think I belong here with the others.”

"It's okay, son, just sit down on that grass for a minute, " said Edgar. He forgot to bring the emergency dose of medicine.

"But how can that be true? Why did you and mom have me at all?" said Nathan. He kneeled over and his chest convulsed under tiny, jagged breaths. A tear slid from his face and into the dirt.

"I spent months doing research after you got sick," said Edgar. "I tracked down my father's ancestors, from centuries ago."

Nathan sat down on the grass in a broken slump, but he did not collapse.

"I'm weak," Nathan said. "If I was stronger I could get better and be here with you, on the farm, and help out, and be happy." He succumbed to another coughing fit. Edgar considered running back to the house for the medicine, but remained still.

"You're not weak," Edgar said when the boy's throat finally ceased its grinding convulsions. "I know you feel like you are. We're all powerless against the tides of time. Your mother would have been so proud of you, so proud..." Edgar's eyes sank into the shadows.

"I'm still glad I could live for a little bit," said Nathan. Edgar cleared his throat to rattle the swelling of his own tears.

"Most of the boys remembered here had a phrase engraved near their name," Edgar said. He glanced over the older marks as his spirit buckled under the burden of what those who stood here long ago must have endured. The generational death spiral pulsed in his veins. Edgar’s own blood mocked him. The very same matter that kept him alive pulled his only son into an early grave. "If you have anything you want engraved here, just let me know. Take some time, think about it." 

Edgar took several steps around the oak while keeping an eye on his son sitting in the grass. Time’s reaper would heed none of his son’s bravery. Edgar's gut seized up with the sudden urge to tear down the tree, yet he knew he never would. He could boil out his own blood and drown Nathan in the finest medicine, but it wouldn’t matter. The immutable mechanism behind their parting lives would clamor on like a stone bull.

"I've got something, dad," Nathan said.

"Already? What is it?"

"Behold the shadows, for there is light," said Nathan. His voice and eyes sank into the dirt.

"That's beautiful," said Edgar.

In silence they watched the forest swallow the final rays of the setting sun. A line of birds bound for warmer lands shimmered beneath a lonely cloud as it hung motionless in the air. The life around them withdrew into the fringes of the land.

"What will you do after I'm gone?" said Nathan. They walked towards the house. Nathan’s feeble legs struggled to move over the flat dusty path. Edgar walked close enough to catch the boy, but his instinct told him not to.

"I'll remember you," said Edgar. "You're the bravest person I'll ever know." He paused, admiring the enduring spirit at his side. His burning shame reminded him that the boy was unreachable. "Then I'll keep going. I'll keep going and then some day you'll be all better and I'll see you again."

*****

Nathan passed away during the dead of night without a hint or a whimper. Edgar did not look at the body. When the early morning came, a silent ambulance carried the dead son away from the farm. Edgar signed a few papers for the driver and then returned to the house to complete his remaining chores. He watered the living room plants and gathered Nathan's old clothes and bedding. He stuffed the decrepit fabrics into a large cotton sack and placed it in the center of the backyard fire pit. He fetched a tin canister of ignition fluid from beneath the deck's stairway and sprayed some of it on the cloth bundle. He lit the top of the pile. The flame burst forth with great force, then faded into a simmer. 

Edgar returned to the house to gather his wallet and car keys. He produced a hefty pile of unpaid medical bills from a seldom used drawer and walked out of the front door. On his way to his car Edgar threw the envelopes on top of Nathan's smoldering belongings. He sprayed the rest of the ignition fluid into the flame wisps and turned his back to them, walking away from the resurrected pyre.

The sun's disk rose over the shallow hills and the air remained still as the fire raged on, taking everything that it could.

Edgar drove his worn out sedan down the grey country road as his life dissolved into the monotone horizon behind him. In his soul there were no shadows, and so there was no light. The boy, the wife, and the autumnal ghosts tugged at his memory, hoping to extract some closing grace from his self reflection. He offered them none. He narrowed his eyes at the rising sun, pulled down the visor, and kept going.