The Woven Tale Press Vol. II #4

Passion

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VOL II ISSUE #4

The Woven Tale Press

(c) copyright 2013

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Sandra Tyler Author of Blue Glass, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and After Lydia, both published by Harcourt Brace; awarded BA from Amherst College and MFA in writing from Columbia University; professor of creative writing on both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including at Columbia University, (NY), Wesleyan University (CT), and Manhattanvill College, (NY); served as assistant editor at Ploughshares and The Paris Review literary magazines, and production freelancer for Glamour, Self, and Vogue magazines; freelance editor; Stony Brook University’s national annual fiction contest judge; a 2013 BlogHer.com Voices of the Year. http://www.awriterweavesatale.com

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Michael Dickel, Ph.D. A poet, fiction writer, essayist, photographer and digital artist, Dr. Dickel holds degrees in psychology, creative writing, and English literature. He has taught college, university writing and literature courses for nearly 25 years; served as the director of the Student Writing Center at the University of Minnesota and the Macalester Academic Excellence Center at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN). He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010). His work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, art books, and online for over 20 years, including in:THIS Literary Magazine, Eclectic Flash, Cartier Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Sketchbook, Emerging Visions Visionary Art eZine, and Poetry Midwest. His latest book of poems is Midwest / Mid-East: March 2012 Poetry Tour. http://michaeldickel.info Kelly Garriott Waite Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Science Monitor, Thunderbird Stories Project, Volume One, Valley Living, The Center for a New American Dream and in the on-line magazine, Tales From a Small Planet. Her fiction has been published in The Rose and Thorn Journal (Memory, Misplaced), in Front Row Lit (The Fullness of the Moon) and in Idea Gems Magazine (No Map and No Directions). Her works in progress have been included in the Third Sunday Blog Carnival: The Contours of a Man’s Heart and Wheezy Hart. She is the author of Downriver and The Loneliness Stories, both available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. http://writinginthemarginsburstingattheseams.blogspot.com

ASSISTANT EDITORS: Dyane Forde Author of forthcoming Rise of the Papilion Trilogy: The Purple Morrow (Book 1) http://droppedpebbles.wordpress.com Adrienne Kerman Freelance writer and editor, her essays have appeared in multiple magazines, as well as in The Boston Globe and Washington Post. She has authored a weekly parenting column, MomsTalk, for the Boston area AOL/Patch sites. http://mintsinmymotherspurse.blogspot.com Lisa A. Kramer, Ph.D Freelance writer, editor, theatre director, and arts educator. She has published non-fiction articles in theater journals, as well articles aimed at young people for Listen Magazine. Her fiction is included in Theme-Thology: Invasion published by HDWPBooks. com. She is the director of a writers’ workshop From Stage to Page: Using Creative Dramatics to Inspire Writing. http://www.lisaakramer.com LeoNard Thompson Has published opinion editorials, weekly columns and essays, and interviewed performers, practitioners, writers, politicians and personalities. http://leeyonard.com Lynn Wohlers Awarded BFA from School of Visual Arts, NY, NY; writer for Daily Post’s Photography 101 series. lynn-wohlers.artistwebsites.com, Bluebrightly. WordPress.com

Our staff is an eclectic mix of writers and editors with keen eyes for the striking. So beware – they may be culling your own site for those gems deserving to be unearthed and spotlit in The Woven Tale Press.

Editor’s Note: The Woven Tale Press is a monthly culling of the creative web, exhibiting the artful and innovative.

So enjoy here an eclectic mix of the literary, visual arts, photography, humorous, and offbeat.

All contributors are credited by their interactive urls; click on the urls to visit their blogs or websites.

To submit to the magazine go to: thewoventalepress.net

If you see a “Featured!” button, click on it to read a contributor’s feature on our website.

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Fea

ture

d!

My environment has always inspired me, whether rural or urban. I love untamed nature, craggy rocks and bleak moors. I

find myself fascinated and moved

by crumbling plaster walls that reveal the bones of a building and bear its human

history in marks and faded paint.

Contemporary fine art can be found everywhere.

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Morning Has Broken Oil on Board, 45 x 90 and 45 x 70 cm 2

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Feeling Oil on Canvas

g Good s, 120 x 150 cm

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Triptych Mixed Media

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Reckless with Oil on Canvas, 120 x 90 cm

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Dancing with Graffiti Limited Edition Print Available on Paper, Canvas or Diasec

http://mynameshallsurvive.blogspot.com om

Dear Isis,

This is not a letter. This is a gilded cage. I composed it on the night we met. I composed it the moment I first saw you dancing under a kaleidoscope of light. I watched you that night. Hell, I watched you the entire night. I watched the swaying of your hips cradled by the fabric of your dress. I watched the outline of your breasts where the shadows obscured them from my view. I watched your eyes flash and your lips glisten.

This cage will probably reach you several days from now but by then I should have known you better. By then I should have known why you seemed to glimmer in a crowd full of indiscernible shadows like the full moon on a starless night. By then I should have known fully the resonance of your voice and the rhapsody of your laughter. By then I should have known every detail of your being, your tiny toes like little mice. The mellif7

luous flow of your legs, the straight symmetry of your back, the swell of your cheeks. I should have known all these things by then and more.

We talked that night. We talked about everything and nothing and how everything seems like nothing compared to your hand moving slowly, almost instinctively, on my knee. You blushed, I remember that, and you were a trifle angry at my teasing. You told me that you absolutely loved letters and you laughed when I told you I would write you one.

This unfortunately is not a letter. This is a gilded cage and it is full of little birds.

Since I met you, I hear those birds constantly. I hear the flapping of tiny wings. My words have become little birds. They have become such flighty things. They hover above my head and they sing. Since I met you I see them on the floor at my feet, dancing with a spring. My words have become little birds. They are fragile and nervous. They have become such beautiful things and I want to hold them, but they hop inches within my grasp, just beyond my reach.

Do not worry, I had a plan. I made a gilded cage made of paper and ink and lured them all into it.

The gilded cage is now yours. Place it wherever you wish. Place it in your living room; place it in your study. Place the thing in your bathroom if you want. Place it in your bedroom perhaps, among your sumptuous ebony furniture, your velvety curtains and your rumpled sheets.

“Five o’clock in the afternoon is the most sensual hour of the day,” You said to me that night. “I don’t know what it is. The sun is soft and golden and the air feels like a heavy blanket on a cold night. It feels like sex. I always try to take a nap at five in the afternoon.

Sometimes with my clothes on, sometimes with my clothes off, and it feels just wonderful. I always wake up feeling all tingly inside.”

Maybe you’ll put this gilded cage with my little birds next to your bed, and maybe one day on a lazy sensual five o’clock in the afternoon as you take your nap (maybe with your clothes on but hopefully with your clothes off) you’ll hear the singing of my little birds.

They will sing of your splendor, and their songs will feel like my fingers caressing your skin all over and slowly, until you gasp and shake from head to toe. The singing of my little birds will let you know that am with you as you climb the steps to your release.

Until another five o’clock in the afternoon, Yours, C.

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http://kellygarriottwaite.com

Something Extraordinary

Louisa watched her mother pass the potatoes to her husband, a neat pat of butter softening into the top. “Mom?” “Yes?” “My tooth.” Louisa grinned and revealed the bloody warrior in her palm.

Her stepfather rolled his eyes, helped himself to the pool of butter and a large portion of potatoes beneath. “Must you do that at the table?”

“Oh, let her alone, Charles.”

“Eleanor.”

Louisa could taste the sharp menace in his voice. A warning her mother too-often ignored of late.

“What harm in a tooth?”

“Rinse your mouth, child.”

Louisa immediately rose and went to the lavatory. She sat on the toilet, admiring her prize: the soft crimson center, the long roots on the left side that hadn’t quite been ready to surrender; the rootless right side that had long ago given up their claim to her mouth.

With a safety pin she found in the medicine cabinet, she extracted the pulp from the tooth, her tongue prodding the place where her tooth used to be. For days, she knew, her tongue would return to this emptiness, questioning gently, until she grew accustomed to the emptiness, forgot about it entirely, and was later surprised to find it filled in with something new and extraordinary.

A gentle knock. “Louisa?”

She pocketed the tooth; fixed the pin to the hem of her dress. “Yes?” “All better, dear?”

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“Yes.” She opened the door, trying not to notice the bruise blooming on her mother’s left cheek.

Her mother wet a tissue in the sink and wiped the blood from Louisa’s mouth. “Let’s go have our dinner.”

“Fixed up, then?” Her stepfather. Hermit-crab eyes, eyes on slow wavering stalks, prodding eyes, tentatively questioning.

“Yes.” She sat and accepted the dish of mashed potatoes, wishing for a bit of butter.

“How was school, then?”

“Fine.” She made a well in her potatoes.

“Making any friends?”

“Some.” Filled the well with gravy.

“I’m thinking,” her stepfather said, “we ought to get a cat.”

She met his eyes, refused to yield. “You’re allergic.” She forked the side of the potatoes, her eyes worrying the mark on her mother’s face.

As she watched the gravy bleed into her corn, Louisa realized that missing teeth were painful truths. A person could be broken, shattered, even. A person could feel so strangely rooted to a place…or a person…that she refused to let go.

But, eventually, Louisa thought, looking at the angle at which her mother now held her chin and the straightness of her spine, eventually a person’s need for that old thing she so clung to would melt and fall away. Something new and better, and quite possibly something extraordinary would grow in its place.

Louisa lifted a spoonful of mashed potatoes, shoved them into the empty place in her mouth, filling it with a warmth painful yet comforting. Outside a gentle mist settled upon the landscape and she felt a mixture of melancholy and tenderness and the first hints of exhilaration.

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http://deborahbatterman.com

Divesting

Behind a very beautiful corrugated wall of perforated aluminum in my downstairs family room are shelves and shelves of “stuff.’” Accumulated theatrical lighting from my husband’s days as an interior designer. Suitcases and a toolbox or two. A classic (nonworking) IBM Selectric typewriter, a vintage electric Smith-Corona, and possibly the nearest and dearest to my heart, my very first portable Olympia.

Let’s not forget the boxes filled with what we generously call memorabilia: my wedding gown and hat; congratulatory cards dating back to 1984; invitations and leftover party favors from my daughter’s bat mitzvah ten years ago; trinkets and toys and dolls (Barbies, American Girls, My Little Ponies); my own personal box of old photographs, letters, postcards, and birthday cards from “marker” years. My training log for the NYC Marathon,1981.

Magazines that bear the mark of collectors’ items (go ahead, laugh): The 40th anniversary issue of Esquire, 5th anniversary issue of Ms. Magazine, 75th anniversary issue of The New Yorker, literary journals I’ve cherished. Favorite issues of National Geographic.

Just opening any of them reminds me of something long gone, the vivid glossy photographs that fired my imagination and longing to travel, a quaint reminder that tangible had a different meaning in pre-1024×768 resolution days.

A box of papers and maps that belonged to my father-in-law, including the log book from his days as a WW II navigator. An old camera of my father’s, a relic from his war days, along with the (yes) snapshots of him and his buddies stationed in North Africa and Italy.

Blankets and pillows and lamps, oh my!

Last weekend found me in the attic of a dear friend’s house, and if size is a factor, this attic can easily handle its accumulation. But my friend wanted this attic to speak to/for only what matters. Her beautiful house, home in every rich sense of the word to the children who had grown up there, was in a state of flux.The daughter was months away from becoming a mother herself. The question implied here is one I think about a great deal: Once the children are gone, what does “home” retain? An essence, intangible as it is, that speaks to a time and place imprinted on our being.

There was a trundle bed lying on its side in the attic, dislocated from the son’s room 11

now a guest room. Of all the things in the attic – the chairs and conference table from her husband’s office, boxes and boxes of wedding gifts her daughter and son-in-law cannot (yet) make use of in their NYC apartment, the things from her own life she has deemed “save-worthy” – it was the bed that appeared to bother her least. Maybe her daughter could make use of it one day, she thought. Only her daughter has clearly said she doesn’t want it.

I suggested she get rid of the bed.

Because everything we accumulate becomes a part of who we are, until one day when we might drown in that very accumulation. But perhaps the “value” my friend placed on the bed had as much to do with the sentimental/emotional space it occupied, as on its actual worth.

Then there’s simple sentiment, the desire to pass along things from generation-to-generation. How can we reshape the very places we call home, in a way that suits what they now are but also retain the essence of what they once were?

Back to my own little storage corner: I started to fill empty boxes, not wanting to wait until a leisurely choice became a necessity. Nobody wants used stuffed animals anymore, so into a “discard” box they went. Books, children’s games to donate to the local thrift shop went into another box, along with an old wallet milky with dust from sitting on a shelf.

My husband pulled out the wallet. “You can’t give this away,” he said. It was brown leather wallet (Prada), a little worn but usable, a gift from my brother-in-law for a marker birthday, my 50th. Someone else will enjoy using it, I said. He agreed, even if he had a different someone else in mind. He cleaned up the wallet, placed it into a box of its own, to send to our daughter.

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http://mikespicercartoonist.blogspot.com

Cartoon/Photo Mash-Ups

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http://whatknotnow.blogspot.com

vertebrae cuff b

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The backbone of this bracelet (the poly clay toggle with the bumps on

it) is the focal point of this

hand-dyed cotton construction.

Loops of the cotton

cord are placed on the ridges and secured with nylon

thread through a series of holes.

bracelet

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http://artsyforager.com

Feminine Wiles

Early on, a college painting professor labeled me a colorist; I’ve always been drawn to color and color theory, and one of my first color experiences was with fashion in classic films. As a little girl, I imagined myself in those beautiful clothes, becoming those charismatic leading ladies. Now as a grown woman, I’ve found myself analyzing the use of color in the establishment of character – the reasoning behind why the film’s costume director chose a particular gown, in a particular shade, for a particular scene.

For this first series, which I’ve tentatively titled “Feminine Wiles”, I’m focusing on the fashion of iconic female film characters.

Each painting is a small abstract portrait of a character, of how that character is defined by a particular costume choice.

The first painting is a study of Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. While the character’s series of elegant little black dresses is synonymous with the character, I’ve always been drawn to the pink Givenchy cocktail dress.

The character is wearing this confection in the midst of wooing her Brazilian milimages found here here and here 17

lionaire would-be fiancé. She is no longer fashioned as cool and elegant, her style for Jose is warm and feminine and festive. It is such an interesting contrast to the devastation that happens later in the scene.

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, The Pink Dress by Lesley Frenz Acrylic on Canvas Panel 18

The second painting in my Feminine Wiles series: Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker in Bonnie & Clyde may not have have the most glamorous of wardrobes, but it definitely conveys a sense of the time and character.

Dunaway’s earthy neutral wardrobe palette fits her role well as a woman challenging a domain usually reserved for men. Yet Bonnie’s fashions retain a femininity that isn’t entirely cold– a bit of warmth shows through the callous exterior.

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Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker, Acrylic on Panel

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I admit, I’m a big fan of the candy-colored confections of 1950s and 1960s film. The costumes! The dancing! I love it all. One of my favorites of these sweet treats is Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn.

For the third painting in the series, I wanted to capture the glamour and struggle of Jo’s transformation in Funny Face. Intellectual and bookish Jo finds herself thrown into the world of modeling and couture fashion, struggling to reconcile her newfound feminine allure with her high-minded beliefs. I love that the character doesn’t allow her physical transformation to change her ideals.

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Audrey Hepburn as Jo Stockton, Funny Face, The Blue Cape by Lesley Frenz Acrylic on Canvas Panel

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Vocal Technique

In the thirty years that I’ve been on stage, 25 of which I’ve spent singing, I have had to run, crawl, climb, carry and balance myself through many a production destined to make it difficult for the artist to work. I have been a troll, bandit, policeman, king, devil, vampire, woman, medium, pirate, businessman, janitor, gardener, doctor, hunchback, schoolboy, painter, disciple, butler and an auctioneer.

A professional singer encounters many things in his work on stage. Imagine the stress of a four-hour production that not only requires the hard skill of singing over a hundred-piece orchestra, but seven costume changes.

Now imagine that three of these complete costume changes actually occur within a half a minute, and that you have

Moulton playing Mozart in a concert performance with the New Philharmonic Westphalia (The boy is little Wonder-Child Tino Cardenes, age seven. They were Big Mozart and Little Mozart.)

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to sing yourself through one of these costume changes. Now imagine that you have to sing your work up in the galleries of the house, then run down and sing on the stage, before you have to change, then run down to the basement, to crawl into sub-stage and be taken back up in an elavator to stage level again.

Working as a professional singer means maintaining a high physical endurance. A classical singer has to be heard over an orchestra of 100 musicians. Composers such as a Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi wrote music necessitating the singing of a three-octave range consecutively during as long as a four-hour time span.

More often than not nowadays, singers in repetory companies sing three or four performances every week, in addition to rehearsing other operas in the mornings.

This stress on the voice can only be achieved with good breathing techniques and a wide knowledge of the support. The support surrounds the entire back and stomach areas. It is an elastic and flexible area closely connected to the lungs.

In fact, the work of the support involves all the areas of the body, beginning with the entrance of air through the nostrils,and into the throat, then into the deepest part of the singer’s lung capacity.

When the singer’s support is expanded with the filling of the lungs, a contraction occcurs that boosts the voice upwards. Charles E.J. Moulton playing The Big Bopper in This boost relieves the throat of all work. Buddy, the musical, in 2000, Hamburg This is vitally necessary to keep a professional singing for decades, especially in this day and age. Competition is fierce, the demands are high, opera houses produce a wide variety of music, and classical singers now sing many different kinds of music. It is not uncommon to find opera singers singing rock music or musical singers singing Schubert.

The articulation itself has to be clear, the consonants precise and to the point, and the vowels open and round. When it comes to pronounciation, one can think of vocal work as a pyramid. In the lower register, the consonants are long and widespread. In the higher

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register, the consonants are short, allowing room for much longer and stronger vowels.

The traditional belcanto singing can benefit any singer, regardless of gender or musical preference. Belcanto means beautiful singing and has its origin in 17th-century Italy.

Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti were prime belancto composers. Legato, the art of long and connected melodic tones, plays an important part in this technique. The opposite, staccato or short tones, also can be used in belcanto as an artistic mannerism.

A singer never ceases to work on his voice. If he is smart, he works like the actor: constantly studying with teachers, perfecting his craft. He must work his support to its maximum, interpret a role well, and tell a story with his own vocal technique. In addition, he must strictly adhere to the composer’s often painstakingly exact criteria. This fact makes singing classical music olympic in effort. Nothing can be left to chance.

Whatever music a singer chooses to sing in the end doesn’t matter. Once he or she knows and has learned the classical craft of singing, he can use this skill to sing anything he chooses. Even steady rock ‘n roll work or singing a musical en-suite eight times a week won’t hurt him.

Why? Because he knows how to protect his voice. His throat is never strained. Even public speakers should learn this craft. The singer has primed his support to serve as a buffer against all hindrances. There is a lot to be said for first perfecting the skill before actually employing it; a teacher of mine spent his entire first year at the music academy practicing vocal exercises without ever singing a single song.

A singer’s education has to be of a high standard today, simply because a singer has to be prepared for anything. His vocal technique has to be so good, that he can forget the technique itself –the luxury of good vocal technique and the benefit of years of effective study.

Studious work, by the way, that never ends. After all, an artist never ceases to learn how to improve himself. That is the joy of creativity.

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Moutlon as Barbavano in Offenbach’s operetta The Bandits in The Vienna Chamber Opera

His first stage experience: Moulton with his parents who toured the world as “The Singing Couple” in 1976, after a concert in Osage, Iowa. Moulton joined them for the encore of the Viennese song “Wien, Wien, Nur Du Allein”

The blonde bombshell, a role created by Moulton himself, in a German production of Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss (2007) in Gelsenkircen, Germany 26

http://dragonscaleclippings.wordpress.com

Being Being – 1

I haven’t been rushing, I have been doing but now I am being. Cleaning, making soup and bread, updating accounts, phoning, scheduling guest posts on pure haiku, ironing and now two minutes of quiet before I walk in the rain.

Being – 2

Tasks accomplished, some for tomorrow already done, feeling peaceful in my head, exhausted body, more to do tomorrow but for now I rest.

Being – 3

Mist levels the land, divided from indistinct sea by flickering star-like harbour lights.

Being – 4

Grey eyes clear, compelling, outlined by kohl staring out of the page, looking through me, beyond me as if I do not exist.

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Being – 5

Gusts of dry wind inflate my lungs, leave my head dizzy feel like Piglet on a windy day, everything streams out behind.

Being – 6

Sky bleached blue, decorated with lines of wavy pink cloud so thin you have to look hard to see it, like a huge ripple effect; cloudscape at dawn.

Being – 7

I am trying to describe the word blue; it is both hot and cold, hard and soft, it is overarching, high, yet comforting and secure, it is relaxing and invigorating; I am describing my reactions to blue, I cannot define it.

Being – 8

Jules’ renga soothes my jangled pride; both rejected, both unsure of the validity of the editor…

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http://stewartkirby.blogspot.com

Whitey Eats a Peanut

. . . Living in Madrani, Sean and Maloc vowed to make looking in on Whitey, as they called the being, part of a regular routine.

They entered the forest from the south end of town, descending into the cool lush darkness of the redwoods via Maloc’s Pinto, looking for and finding the good pullout that they wanted. Shouldering their backpacks, they steamed up a hillside rife with emerald fern and green redwood twigs turned to the rust duff of decay, until they reached the trail that took them out of sight from locals and tourists alike driving in occasional cars on the winding road below.

Maloc led. Unseen strands of spiderweb encountered on his arms and face assured him of the trail’s disuse. Multi-colored mushrooms of vivid orange and red, and bright white mushroom ghosts, dotted moss of neon green. The hollow tok, tok in the upper reaches of the trees and bold swoop of wings announced a raven or two.

Proceeding at a switchback into a cluster of redwoods sprouted centuries earlier from some fallen giant, took them off the trail and marked what they regarded as the starting point of the trail known only to them, which they had forged, like the secret doorway to a hidden passage.

Maples interspersed among the preponderance of coastal redwood at peak in color, had largely dropped their withered crimson and gold leaves, boughs outstretched like gem-laden supplicants bearing offerings before the ancient giants.

It was late afternoon. The sun descending on the western mountains cast through the branches kaleidoscopic rays. When they reached the creek, they traveled up–walking out on fallen trees crisscrossing like bridges–until reaching a stump shaped like a pointing finger. Here they took another trail down a dank boulder-choked gorge which marked the way to the mouth of the cave.

They took off their packs at the yawning entrance, breathing hard. The darkness within demanded the use of their flashlights, but the familiarity of several visits permitted the twine which they carried to remain in their packs. When they reached the chamber, they saw Whitey waiting.

Sean produced from his pack a small blanket, an unopened bottle of purified wa-

29 ter, various quantities of salt, sugar, trail mix, applesauce, Swiss cheese, peanuts

and a banana.

Maloc brought candles, two root beers, chocolate, honey, rice cakes, baked tofu, three bagels, a pomegranate and a camera with which they had already taken a fair number of shots. After their initial elation in Maloc’s room with Byron present, they had realized that most people looking at the photos, even if they had been taken with proper lighting (which they were not) would simply say that the pictures were fakes.

The boys lit the candles and presented the array of items, then sat cross-legged, with gentle gestures indicating that Whitey, opposite them, do likewise.

Whitey did. Proceeding to partake of the bounty before them, the boys respectfully invited Whitey to join them.

Whitey did not.

“What are we going to do?” Sean asked, slicing some Swiss cheese and putting it on half a bagel.

Maloc broke off a piece of rice cake and poured honey on it. “I don’t know.”

“He’s got a mouth, doesn’t he? He’s got to eat.”

“Makes sense to me, but he hasn’t eaten anything yet. He’s breathing our air. He’s got a stomach.”

“What does breathing our air have to do with it?”

“I don’t know. I guess our world can’t be all that bad for him.”

“Maybe he’s not even a, you know, one of them.”

Maloc turned to Sean with an incredulous expression, then looked back at Whitey.

“I wonder if they’ve always been here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well who’s to say they all have to come from somewhere else? Maybe they’ve been here all along.”

“They had to come from somewhere.”

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They froze.

Slowly, Whitey reached toward the food stretched before him. Thin smooth pale fingers selected and retracted.

“Look,” Sean whispered. “He’s got a peanut.”

Regarding the boys with black almond eyes, Whitey put the peanut in his mouth and chewed.

The boys watched as the mouth, small as a child’s, ceased chewing, swallowed. In the great obsidian orbs no reflected candle burned. It was as though Whitey’s eyes sucked in all light, twin black holes.

Whitey rose. The pale form, seemingly neither unclad nor clothed, frail in appearance yet deceptively rangy and sturdy, stood motionless as the inscrutable mouth, hardly more than a sullen slit, widened and contracted into a small silent circle.

The hands went to the throat. Lesions on the pallid skin came suddenly into view. With a sickening slap Whitey fell to the hard-packed dirt of the floor and went into convulsions.

The boys looked on in horror as for approximately ten minutes the being twitched. Then all movement stopped. A minute later, bursting into the cave, breathing hard more from desperation than exertion, Sam appeared . . .

After an alien abduction accidentally lands Sam Hain in a parallel universe version of his redwood county home, his only hope of getting back is finding the pale little almond-eyed being with the bulbous head who accidentally landed with him and fled into the forest, while, unknown to Sam, it’s his own blood coming into contact with the biosphere that’s causing the bugs to grow so big.

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Harry-Styles buys Passion 4 by Jessica Zoob

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