Temple Archives

It is time for a little bit of a rant. Though sad to say, it is less of a rant than an exasperated sigh, because I have been around this so much and over it and through it and back and forth that mostly, I am just tired. But I have exhausted all other options save complaining to my friends. Know, therefore, that you are my last resort, and possibly by making a fool of myself by ranting in public I will please the mercurial spirits in charge of our nation’s parcel post, and they will have mercy at last.

In November, I bought a doll head off of DoA for next to nothing. His owner had bought him for faceup practice, but had never removed the faceup. She warned that he was old and not in great shape. His resin had yellowed and he had been bought during a company old-stock clearout sale. However, that didn’t change the fact that he was an AngelRegion half-eyed Ren with the limited Glory Angel faceup (never put on sleepy Rens, just the full-eye ones), making him an OOAK by one of my most-admired faceup artists and my favorite doll mold evar, now discontinued by the manufacturer. We were strapped for cash with the trip to NYC coming up, but we scraped up the $40 for him. I loved him from the moment he came out of the box. I already had perfect eyes and a wig for him. I picked out clothes for my stock, anticipating a time when he would have limbs. I thought of him as something like a Sephiroth clone, and waffled between naming him Junon (the city) or Jenova (the oft-contested head of yo mamma). Turns out I should have named him Jenova, as he seems doomed to be a head forever, and not for want of trying.

His resin color is no longer made (and even so, he’s yellowed, and would not match new resin) and his company does not sell separate bodies anyway. I spent a month looking at various doll bodies online, trying to find a company that had a yellow white resin, that sold bodies separately, that had a sculpt I actually liked, that did not cost a hiujilion dollars. I settled on Dollzone as we have a similar head on that type of body already, and I know it looks good. I was not expecting to get a body anytime soon, as now we were broke /after/ the trip to NYC. But one day a secondhand white skin DZ boy body cropped up on the marketplace on Den of Angels, for a really good price. The seller turned out to be willing to hold for as long as needed, and Joy and I dug out the money once I got paid, so I could get him as a slightly belated Christmas present. You must imagine a tone of bitter irony on the word “slightly.”

My seller was in Norway, and I spent $60 shipping for Carry On Cash, the EMS of Norway’s postal service. I heard nothing for several days, got antsy, and poked my seller to ask when she would ship. She apologized on account of the holidays, and mailed him out with some extras for the delay on Dec 21. (I must stress that I do not have any concern over whether or not she sent him, as the tracking worked and obviously, there is /a/ package from her out there somewhere.) The parcel crawled from Molde to Oslo and there it sat. And sat. And sat.

There were blizzards. There were holidays. There were air strikes. Through it all my package was ‘preparing shipment.’ I started threads in marketplace concerns, wondering how long Norway mail usually spent in transit. I found a general holiday/storm malaise had gripped most European mail, and suffered through the usual “stay optimistic!” drivel from other members, which is about as helpful as keeping your socks in a ziplock bag of water in the freezer. While I waited, I googled, and posted some more. I haunted forums for people who brazenly import truckloads of bootleg sports jerseys and dodgy pharmaceuticals. I combed through customer service websites in Norsk, looking for email addresses. Eventually I found out that incoming mail in the US over a pound is now subject to intense scrutiny. These boxes are pulled from the cycle, placed in a chair and forced to endure hours of interrogation under bright lights, as someone repeatedly demands to know if they contain anything liquid, fragile, or potentially hazardous. Ah well, I thought, that’s the delay. But once it clears that, it’ll be fine. Except it was still in the Netherlands, waiting to leave Europe, which it finally did, in the second week of January.

Finally, on January 14, there was an update. My parcel had hit customs, and had cleared customs and gone to sorting! From that point, it was usually only two days until it was on my doorstep. So again, I waited. And waited. And in the words of all farytales, am waiting still. My tracking has not updated since. I have emailed USPS. I have called customs. I’ve emailed customs. I’ve filled out complaint forms. I’ve called my local post office. I have bothered every person who might have a notion of where my box is, and have been doing so for nearly a month, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by insulating levels of bureaucracy. The latest laugh is the form letter from USPS telling me they only know what my tracking says, and that Customs has my parcel and they can’t track it, followed almost instantly by a letter from customs telling me that USPS can track my package, and that Customs can’t. And somewhere in all this there is one son of a bitch right in the middle who knows where my box is.

Parcels have started to trickle through. My seller instigated a trace and claim from her end (it’s laughable, how the recipient of a box can do nothing at all). I have not heard back from her about the result, if there is one, even though I messaged her a few days ago and she has been prompt to respond to me though this ordeal. The other parcel she mailed out before Christmas got to its buyer some weeks ago, after a similar delay. DoA users have finally gotten boxes, one from a swap partner in Norway, finding them unsealed and probed by customs but without any letter of apology or explanation.

I begin to have paranoid thoughts. Was some zealot at customs opening my box, looking for bombs, only to find a headless, naked, and atomically correct doll? Did this violate some kind of new pedophilia law designed to protect imaginary children, like the ones in Japanese comics who are made out of drawings, and who are terribly hurt by the fact that people dress them in bondage gear (also made out of drawings), which are then looked at by lonely men living in their parents’ basements? Right now am I being investigated by the FBI as part of a underage decapitated doll fetishists ring, accused of salacious importation of resin boy-tackle? Or was it simply that the shoes my seller put in as an apology featured some nike or converse logo, marking them as a bootleg import as those companies do not produce trainers in three-inch size?

Or is my package just lost, lost in a vast system of paranoid homeland security, bloated bureaucracy, failing customer service systems, and the fact that the two vast engines of Getting Stuff Into The USA refuse to actually talk to each other? Probably, it’s the latter. Gone are the days when my postman rang my doorbell on a Sunday to deliver an EMS package with a doll in it, four days after it left Korea. They’re looking at us in all our naked glory in airports now, there’s no reason our inanimate mail should have more privacy than that.

I only hope my box turns up eventually, violated and riffled-through and badly re-taped together. And it’s a sad day when that’s a thing that we hope for. The irony most apparent in all this? Even now, I am not 100% certain if the resin of the body will even match the doll I have. But right now, I suppose that’s pretty much a moot point, because he’s not yet a doll, he’s just a head, and very likely to stay that way for some time.

I suppose his name should be Jenova after all.

We left our polling place out the back door, through the little side garden there that’s sandwiched between the two churches, one church facing out to second street and one facing out (rightly enough) to Church street. Nestled between, heads to the east and snug to the old wall, are a row of old graves. The headstones are inscribed by hand, several in German, and their knobby peaks are blind to the asphalt beyond the wall, the towering emptiness of the parking garage. In the little garden, it is another world entirely. They’ve made the space of graves a flower-bed, mums dropping petals on the one impressive slab of marble laid over a grave. There’s something very old-world about that line of graves, the way they’re slap up to the wall, as though they could be in Edinburgh or Munich or Cardiff. But they are American graves, and the dates hover in the 1700s, toeing only rarely into the next century, and then only as the second date. I see them every time we go vote, and the rest of the while I always forget they’re there.

“America was barely a country then,” Joy said, as I tried to read the worn-away script on the marble slab. “It was just some new, raw, upstart thing that they were making.”

“Yeah,” I said, and then I said, to the graves, to the air, or to whatever might be listening, “So, we just voted, you guys. Thanks.”

There’s been a surge lately in people handing out Chick Tracts around here. I first noticed a batch of them being spread around (like tuberculosis) to the crowd gathered to watch a horrible fire in a historic building downtown. When I asked Joy who would have the bad taste to proselytize on such an occasion, I realized the people who condone Chick Tracts know nothing of good taste.

Joy will read them (she’s also amused by spam email) while I cannot throw them away fast enough. I was the same way when some shit left an anti-gay tract on my car at a Burger King in West Virginia. (They’ve a right, I suppose, to their bigoted ideas, they have no right to touch my car and litter on it, and I hope they saw my reaction when I threw it away. And what kind of nutcase keeps a stack of homophobic flyers in their car just in case they happen upon some car with a rainbow sticker, anyway? Sheeze.)

We’ve discussed why, exactly, she’s faintly amused and curious about them, while I have absolute disgust. In part we suspected it’s because I grew up Southern Baptist, with all kinds of political agendas and creationist bullshit shoveled unwillingly down my throat, while she had a much more laid-back Episcopal upbringing. (Her Pop-pop, a former Episcopalian minister, sent us a very loving and thoughtful card on the occasion of our marriage.)

Today, though, I figured out what it is that bugs me so damn hard about things like that, and it’s the exact same thing that annoys the hell out of me about getting ‘helpful’ xeroxed handouts about how to prevent cancer by only eating peas and water or whatever, and it is this:

I resent people nosing in my business.

I resent the implicit assumption that my life is somehow lacking this kernel of knowledge they just found, I resent the assumption that they know better than me (me being either total-stranger or coworker associate) I resent the thought that that their tidbit of whatever off the internet or ideological tract or politician flyer is of some kind of immense value to me. (I also dislike people relentlessly shoving their unasked-for suggestions for books or TV shows on me, which is why, to this day, I still refuse to watch Cowboy Bebop. Oh, I know it’s great. I’ve been told so roughly eighty billion times by a long chain of increasingly annoying people.)

A co-worker just handed out some sheet about how you’re never supposed to drink milk or eat cooked food or drink distilled water because it feeds cancer cells or what the fuckever, and to always breathe deep and do yoga and eat soybeans and fresh birch leaves. I know she means to be helpful, I know a relative of hers just died of cancer, I know she only means well and is probably searching for some scrap of knowledge that the horrible thing her loved one went through is magically preventable if you never eat turnips again, or only turnips, or something. That is a natural reaction to grief, whether it’s from your doctor or your minister or a dubiously coded internet site. You’ve got [problem]? Well here is [simple solution which really isn’t but you’ll feel better for a bit until you heal with time]! Life doesn’t work that way, yet sometimes surely we all want to think it does. I understand that. Whatver works for you, do it, and let it work for you. That’s great and I encourage that sort of thing. In private, at least.

AND YET. Once you cross the line and foist that stuff upon me, my sympathy evaporates. Stuff like that fills me with inexplicable, frothing aggravation. I neither want nor need your bright ideas for my health or my spiritual well-being. Not unless you are my doctor, or my religious mentor, and I have sought your services.

I predict in a past life I spent a good deal of time on the porch of an old farmhouse in the woods, with a very large loaded shotgun and a very large (loaded) dog, and dagblamgolldurnit you better have damn good reason for bein’ on my property, son.

“What day is this event?” My mother asks, on the phone, from 500 miles away physically and far further in terms of understanding. It’s the first time we’ve spoken in two months. She can’t bring herself to say wedding. It is an event, much like scheduled visitation before a funeral, or going to court to pay a parking ticket. It is not a celebration, it is something that is simply happening, something she is helpless to comprehend or halt. My wedding, my legal marriage at last to the woman I’ve been with for the past decade, is yet another milepost on the road of my life. It is a road she cannot take, a road that curves off into the distance while she stands, immobile, at the last turning, the place years in the past where she felt she last understood her daughter.

“Thursday,” I say. I keep my tone upbeat, cheerful. “We’re meeting Joy’s parents at the courthouse and then going to Jenn’s for food. She and Tima are hiring a Georgian caterer for the party as our present.”

“What kind of food is Georgian?” she asks.

“Lots of almond and pomegranate flavors,” I say. “Jenn and Tima say it’s wonderful.”

There is a pause, of approximately fifteen years. I’m thinking of that day when I was in college, and I was telling my mother about two gay friends of mine in the theatre department, how happy they were together. I was not seeking any sort of opinion from her, I was merely talking about my life and my friends. “I just don’t want you to think it’s normal,” my mother said then. I’m thinking of that. I’m also thinking of my father, watching something about gay rights on the news and saying, “I don’t understand it, but then I don’t understand people who murder their kids, either.” I’m thinking of my sister, on the phone from college, saying that bisexual people are worse than gay people because they’re just sluts who will sleep with anybody. I’m thinking this present silence is much like the one around the dining table in 2003, when I at last stated the obvious, that I loved Joy, that I wanted to have a holy union ceremony in a church to say so. (Joy’s mother drove 500 miles alone to give us the family silver, as due the eldest daughter on her wedding day. My parents, five miles away, did not come.) I’m thinking about the silence that night after I came out to my mother, when I lay awake in the dark and for the first time in my life really thought about cutting myself, feeling so much pain and frustration that I wanted some external proof of my struggle. I’m thinking the silence is a lot like the one when my sister called me because she’d gone looking through my livejournal uninvited, confronted me about being gay (among other, more hurtful and untrue accusations). She forcibly expelled me from the closet; it was either that or let her continue to think I was a pedophile, based on the incredibly solid evidence that I liked BL manga—a term she failed to grasp—and had recently been to San Fransisco, as I guess pedophiles do? I wouldn’t know. After that, she insisted I tell our parents immediately because she was uncomfortable with her knowledge. She always did tell our parents everything. I always told them as little as possible, because the lack of comprehension on their faces when I occasionally dared to unload my dreams on them grew gradually harder and harder to bear as I aged. I was the Difficult Child. In this current silence, crowded with the echoes of all those other silences, that has never been more apparent. I am still the Difficult Child.

“Well,” my mother says at last, “You know I love you.” It is the very best she can do, the most she can offer. She no longer says the other half of the statement, the one bracketed to that phrase for years. “I don’t understand.” It is said, all the same. It’s as understood and scripted as a silent rest in a measure of music. Her inability to comprehend me is a wall between us, an iron curtain in miniature.

“I love you too,” I say, still cheerful, still upbeat. Always cheerful, always upbeat. We veer off onto superficially sturdier ground, my father’s travel, my mother’s knee issues, my sister’s wonderful children. Before signing off, we repeat the little exchange, my mother’s grieving, uncomprehending statement of love. I know she feels she has lost me, somehow. That somehow, through the incidental fact that the person I’m marrying has the same chromosome arrangement as me, I am some changeling switched at age twenty-three, everything that I was before in form, but molded of strange stuff.

She does not understand, and I cannot understand why she does not understand. The difference yawns wide and unfathomably deep before her. From my side, I feel it could be breached with only a hand outstretched to mine. It taints everything to do with me, every conversation and mention and memory of me she has, she cannot escape it and it shames her that her daughter is gay. She wears it like sackcloth, and hopes that no one sees, that no one knows.

My parents will be absent for my second marriage ceremony. I do not expect that I will have another one.

When I’m chewing on a new idea, I can’t sit still. It doesn’t matter that I have both a cold and impractical shoes, I still take multiple trips to the bathroom or the break room to let the things I’m learning sink in, to let the rivulets of my thoughts cut new little paths as they diverge along routes of their own choosing. If I wasn’t at work, I would go for a long walk with a notebook, but I haven’t the liberty of a noble patron to support my artistic endeavors. I am not the boy in my head.

My new idea is an old idea. It’s an idea that’s been there since my Japanese theatre class in 1999, which was held in the basement of the art building, with its ghastly orange upholstery and implications of banishment. (I had an acting class there, too. The orange basement was a place for classes there was nowhere else to put; it was the miscellaneous liberal arts purgatory, and none of the desks ever matched.) I met him first there, that boy, with his intriguing footnote delicately overlooked by my professor. I should write that story, I thought, and dismissed it as soon as I thought it. The overwhelming amount of research, of work, the language barrier alone, all of it was an immense obstacle for a footnote. Not to mention I was more interested in producing scads of video game fanfiction instead, with all its lazy brevity and quick returns, and the thought of seriously writing books of my own for a living was years off.

For reasons unknown today it reared up again, cast assembled, scripts ready, swords drawn, banners stirring in the faint breeze. It’s waited all this time, rolled over now and again as “that book I should totally write someday” but nothing else. Today it had me googling voraciously on my lunchbreak, and cringing at the steep price of university press English editions of musty old literature most modern Japanese people don’t give a damn about.

Why does a story suddenly heave itself together out of the ether and say, ‘now’? How can such things lie dormant, dusty and undisturbed, for a decade, before bursting across my morning with all the messy immediacy of an overturned inkpot? I am elbows-deep in another story, one I hope to have squared away into a solid draft by the end of the year. I always have a running list of alternatives, of course, a folder full of ideas, neatly sorted, but I try not to switch focus for too long. It knows that, this story. It knows I won’t set loose one tamed bird to sprint after a wild one. But it knows as well that it will need research and patience, things to seek out and steep in before any of the words can begin at all. It knows I will need something to fill the hole once the present story is a coherent draft.

Right now it is a page of messy notes and copies of emails I sent to Joy. It is full of ludicrous notions about magic and intrigue and love, notions that I really ought to cross-check with a few good biographies before they become too firmly stuck onto people with actual historical lives. It is a flurry of possibility and creativity desperate to get out before the cold bars of fact slam all around it and lock it down. It is a boy with a mask, half-sketched on the back of a bit of recycling paper.

It is that book I ought to write someday, and somehow it has elbowed its way to the front of the queue.

This thing makes me want an ipad, which is remarkable when really I think ipads are completely otherwise frigging useless. Of course, the thing in question isn’t a real product. It’s an April Fool’s gag, which is just as well. Though it probably says something about me that I think that’s a crying shame. Also, I want to know who made it, so they can build me a miniature Joust cabinet for my dolls. Or maybe Galaga. So many choices.

What’s sad is of all the ThinkGeek gag items (including the canned unicorn meat, which I suspected was just, you know, spam with sparkles) I found the Tribbles and Bits cereal to be the most unlikely. Because it comes with a free Captain Pike action figure and dude. DUDE. Nobody gets free figures IN their boxes anymore. You’ve got to mail off 37 UPCs and wait four to six months for that shit these days.

Free prizes just aren’t what they used to be. I got a box of Cracker Jacks at work this week and my fun surprise inside was a piece of paper with two slits in it. It’s to be used, purportedly, as a pencil topper. I realize CJ prizes haven’t been three-dimensional since 1973, but you know, I do recall getting stickers. Or temporary tattoos! Something that vaguely resembled an object with a function. Not a Talisman of Unspeakable Lameness +2.

At least the Cracker Jacks themselves are still tasty. So it’s not a total loss.

December 2, 2009

Dear Santa:

In spite of many claims to the contrary, I would still like to think you exist, somewhere under the burden of consumerism and marketing and the crushing grip of bottom-lines and budgets. I like to think that requests of you are no less sacred than the whispered prayer in the darkest corner of the world: a plea for benevolence out of chaos, to a mighty and kindly benefactor from beyond the edge of the known. In saintly awe and heavenly charge are your roots laid, and though we often forget that, I doubt that you ever do.

My list is crammed with material representations of the things I truly crave, a masquerade perpetuated, I expect, over most of the surface of the earth. Electronic gizmos and tiny wonders I can ill-afford to procure for myself or for anyone, so the burden is divested on others, to intercede and labor on your behalf. They are the ones capable of bestowing such goods, and they always have done so, in your name.

But the wishes behind those wishes cannot be fulfilled by mere mortals, only by a convergence of fate and fortune which can be stirred into patterns only by the hands of the immortals. The true objects of my desire are the stuff of dreams made real, a wish for better things for me and those around me, and at Christmastime we can hope, at least, that such wishes might be heard by a being capable of bringing them to fruition. To you children send their hopes of dolls and dump-trucks, electronic pets incapable of true affection, action figures and building blocks and game systems tiny enough to balance on the head of a pin and powerful enough to send a man to the moon. The diamond rings and sophisticated cell phones desired by adults are no less toys, and in reality no more deserving to be conjured on a whim than are the largely forgettable trinkets of childhood.

My true Christmas list is for joy and contentment without feeling the draining pang of material lack, for validation and affection, for encouragement and support, for love unashamed and understanding, for recognition of the wealth I already possess. Those things take on different symbolic shapes, be they a perfect job for Joy or an agent’s interest in my manuscript. But even those are not quite the real deal: the welling-up of peace and goodwill that comes from some source inside of us, unstoppered only when we take our faith out of the hands of the shop assistant, and put it in the only hands capable of giving it back: those of God, and of each other, and of you.

Merry Christmas, Santa Claus. And thank you. Give my best to the missus, and to Blitzen, he was always my favorite.

Love,

Leah

PS: It might be noted, however, just in case your workshop has outlets in Korean doll shops and Nintendo headquarters, that I have been extraordinarily good this year.

Amazon has this new thing where you make up some crazy phrase to use as a payment shortcut in case you shop so damn much you can’t be bothered to repeatedly type your own address, so you can type some doofball text-generated spew instead. I expect it’s for people who live in places that are tricky to spell. It’s constantly prompting me with suggestions for ones I might decide to use. Today’s is: Leah’s Temporal Diadem.*

Others include Leah’s Steadfast Throne* and Leah’s Eternal Art*.

…erm.

I’m only about 200 words short of my NaNo word count for today—It really helps not being a million and two words behind. But if I still was, I could just use my temporal diadem to slow down the motion of space and time and take as long typing as I want. I might even be able to use it to take over the world, and then I could rule from my steadfast throne, while creating eternal art in my free time.

That’s a plot for a novel right there. Or at least a cool item for your next AD&D campaign.

* Of course, I am not actually using any of these phrases. My address is easier to type and less surreal than any of them.

I have acquired a gentleman. Joy found him first, in point of fact, while I was looking at the mismatched light and dark eyes of a Spanish woman in a too-small bodice. There were two duplicates of the picture, actually, one was inexplicably $3 and one was $5. (I got the $3, of course. I’m not adverse to bargain-basement gentlemen.)

I like his cassock, of course. I also like the precise angle of his haircut and the drape of fabric from his knee, the slight blur of his hand indicative of a restless shiver or an intake of breath. But mostly I like how he is not really looking at the camera, though he appears to be at first glance. He’s looking very slightly to the side, as though the contraption makes him uncomfortable. I expect that the desk and book and chair are not his, rather, they belong to the photography studio. Why was he having his picture taken? To commemorate some occasion? To send home to his mother, his sister? A woman he did not marry? A friend from school?

The back of the photo paper is labeled with the name of the photographer (as I have googled his name and found other photos by him). It reads EDMUND FREDE and in a ribboned motif beneath:

Hof-Photograph Sr.Kgl. Hoh. des Prinzen Friederich Carl
MÜNSTER
Neubrückenstr. No. 147.
Die Original. Platte ist zumm Nachbestellen aufbewahst.

I don’t know who he is to me. I’ve been rolling around an idea about a fraudulent spirit photographer and his sad underestimation of his own skill. I wonder if this fellow has something to do with that. But even more than who he will be in my hands, I wonder who he really was in his own. I’m only able to answer one of those questions.

He’s not able to tell me the rest. He can only sit, mute and sightly impatient, for the moment in my past and his future when he will get up and move, beyond my sight or my ken, out of the frame and into a life that is already over.

On any given school day in 1988, if you had entered the modest library of Foley Middle School through the right hand door you would have happened upon certain immutable landmarks.

Directly behind the door was a small gray machine which, for the modest sum of twenty-five cents, would spit out a fresh pencil for you. Very often the pencil would be stamped with a holographic, seasonal pattern. Pumpkins for Halloween and red shiny bells on a white backdrop for Christmas, green and gold for St. Patrick’s day. There was no window in the device, and you never knew what you were going to get. In all my years since I have yet to happen upon a more delightful means of getting pencils.

Straight ahead past the machine was a row of shelves which contained fiction books. Somewhere in the middle you would find a copy of my brother Sam is dead, which I never read. It was not at all my sort of book (at the time I was not much on any history after about 1700), and I boggled at the title. Surely the people who made books were aware of proper capital letters, and punctuation. If I could not get away with such nonsense down the hall in my English class, then how was this bold-faced aberration allowed in the school library? I notice now that current editions of the work have all capitals in the title, unlike the version that would be, as I said, in the shelf to your right. Just beyond that was the circulation desk. That’s all on the right-hand side.

However, if you were to come in the door and look directly to your left, you would see a row of interior windows. These faced across the hall, to the office, where I was rarely sent in all those miserable years, and only when the daily torment from Candace or Angie or some other girl-child-monster reached such extremes that I lashed out at them in retaliation. Once in the office I sobbed for clemency, got it, and then was turned out to face more abuse from my peers, who never got anything more than a lecture to Be Nice. Middle school is rarely a good time for anyone and it’s even worse for the bookish fat ones.

Below the library windows were the non-fiction shelves and right hard up against the door was one very small shelf containing the whole collection of the only books whose Dewey decimal numbers I ever remembered, the 130s. Paranormal and the Occult. This, I learned early on, is where all the decent ghost stories were. (Much like I didn’t care about any history not involving queens and armored knights, I also didn’t care much for made-up ghost stories. There were few exceptions, but among them were Wait Till Helen Comes (I have a signed copy now, a gift from my mother-in-law), Can I Get There by Candlelight?,and The Ghost in the Swing.)

In front of this shelf of spooky folklore, you very likely would have found me, probably in the turquoise and white striped shirt and matching solid knit jumper, with a book in my lap. While it’s possible that book might have been Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey, more than likely it would be instead a big hardback tome, gray, I think, or blue. I don’t recall the title; it was nondescript. Ghosts of the British Isles, or something suggestive of that. It was one of those vast compendiums of lore, full of things my mother wouldn’t have wanted me reading. The one about the jealous Scotsman still gives me nightmares. It was in this book that I first encountered stories of wild country lords who foolishly challenged the Devil to a hand of cards, and whose fates were the worse for it. (It happened so often that either Satan was a busy cardsharp, or it was an effective cautionary tale about the ills of gambling.) Lord Evern Reichwyn, of Chancelion in Easting, owes much to this crowd, and Devil’s Luck would be a different story without them.

I was thinking today of one such tale in particular, about a midwife summoned in the night to come to the aid of a masked lady in her hour of need, and of a newborn baby thrown upon the fire by his father. Not knowing where she was, and witness to the father’s horrible infanticide, the midwife cut a square of cloth from the bedcurtain. Although she notified the authorities, and though the fabric swatch matched the cut hole in the manor bedcurtains, no one was brought to justice for the crime. I remembered the details of the story, I suspected that the troublemaking rake was one of those devil-gambling noblemen, I resurrected the whole library and my childhood self into the bargain, but I could not remember the man’s name. Or the name of the manor. Or the book the story was in. I googled variations on midwife pregnant woman mask lace curtains and got returns for varieties of pornography you really don’t even want to think about.

I bewailed this fact to Joy, and she within three minutes presented me with the name Wild William Darrell, and Littlecote House in Wiltshire. This woman should be working for the FBI. The wiki doesn’t detail the bit about the lace curtain, and if our Wild Willy D played a hand of cards with the Devil, it doesn’t mention that, either. It’s possible that’s another story entirely, and I’ll have to figure out the name of that ghost stories book to sort it out.

But I don’t really want to spend any more time in this phantom library of my past. I’d rather not read that story of the murderous Scotsman again, and how “what he discovered in the bureau was more horrible than he could bear” and he dumped his wife’s decomposed upper half in the floorboards instead of burying it in the garden with her legs. Some stories you only need to read once.

Still, you gotta admit, the pencil machine was pretty awesome.