Quite the Life (and all in Times New Roman 10pt!)
I first crafted O’ Happy Day on 9 Oct 2019. I have no idea what prompted it. Probably seeing some age-based injustice and, being me, getting involved.
Before you ask, I adhere to non-violence. Much prefer discussion, conversation, understanding.
Sometimes that’s not an option.
And so it goes.
Yes, rewrite #4.
And no, I still don’t want to talk about it.
Except to offer what’s happening is probably going to end up in An Experiment in Writing about getting the voice correct (which I’ve done before in experiments 15–18), so perhaps not so much about getting the voice correct as letting the characters do the work.
Yeah, that’s it. Let the characters do the work. Or Arguing With Your Characters. Or Arguable Characters.
Whatever I decide to call it, it’ll be up sometime this month.
Vincent Quarrals watched Monique Modine exit Martin’s store from deep in the shadows of the Kristoffersen’s barn. Stacey Knox headed south a few minutes earlier.
He considered walking over when he saw Knox pull in, decided no. She seemed okay enough. He read up on her at the state capital using what little Monique knew as a starting point, and felt there was more, something beyond her litigation histories, but had no idea what.
She bought the Campbell’s farm. He never noticed her in town before. What, did she come into town on a lark, saw a broken down farm badly in need of repair with a for-sale sign on it, and decided hot damn, that’s for me? One of the top lawyers in New York City decides to go country?
Bullshit. Only a flake would do that and she didn’t seem the flake type.
Did she even know the Campbell farm’s history?
Sad place if ever there was one.
The Stocktons owned the farm since dirt was young. A Stockton niece, Maddy, married big, strapping Al Campbell, whom she met while she nursed and he MPed in Korea. They moved back to his hometown, Manchester, NH, and he joined the police force there.
The Campbells had two children, twins, Al Junior and Blanche, and the whole family’d come out for two weeks each year when Al Senior took his vacation. Once school started, Al Junior and Blanche came out for entire summers and loved it.
That’s when tragedy struck. The first of many. ‘Nam claimed whole lines of the Stockton family, accident and disease claimed most of the other. The Stockton’s entered their golden years with only Al Junior and Blanche to help them, and even then only in the summers.
Tragedy struck again. One hot August night Maddy called long distance. Al Senior’d been shot. He wasn’t expected to last the week. Al Junior and Blanche had to come home immediately.
But they hesitated, said they didn’t want to go home. It wasn’t until the Stocktons threw them out that they got on a bus.
And when Blanche got off the bus, Maddy Campbell saw why she didn’t want to come home.
Vince had no idea who got Blanche pregnant. He wasn’t even sure if it was somebody in Acra or somebody back home. She didn’t come here that way, but Vince was young at the time and probably wouldn’t have noticed if she was.
Maddy took a second-shift job in one of the mills to keep the family going.
Five months later Blanche delivered a still-born babe and never told her mother who the father was.
End of her sophomore year she started to swell again, and Maddy Campbell wants to know what she did to raise such a harlot. People she’d known for years stopped talking to her, Al Junior and Blanche stopped going to high school games and gatherings. One night Al Junior steals a car, and he and Blanche are apprehended coming out of a New York City abortion clinic.
Then one night Maddy Campbell comes home early, walks into her house, and starts screaming. She gets her husband’s revolver and starts shooting up the house. She almost hits Blanche, wings Al Junior, and turns the last shell on herself.
Mrs. Stockton got a call, got on a bus, and did what had to be done. Stayed with them until they graduated – Vince couldn’t imagine what those last years of high school must’ve been like for them – got the house in order, put it on the market, and had Mr. Stockton come out with the pickup to bring them home.
The Stocktons were never the same after that. Mrs Stockton turned bitter and snappy, and Mr. Stockton looked like he was hoping for the grave, which he was granted just a few months later.
Al and Blanche bought the farm with their inheritance. Turned out Al had quite the head for business. He stayed for two years, grew the farm, hired two hands, left Blanche to care for Mrs. Stockton and went off to U of Wisconsin Racine on a scholarship. Got his MBA in Finance in three with honors, came back, converted one of the backrooms into an office, and put a sign out front, Brunswick Investments.
He’d go up to RPI, SUNY-Albany, down to Marist, listen to students give their dissertations, and always picked which dissertations could turn into profitable businesses. He mortgaged the farm, financed winners, used that to buy back the farm, finance more winners, and bought up more and more land surrounding his farm.
Things went well until Mrs. Stockton wandered off one day and where to nobody knew. No body, no clothes, it was like she left the planet.
It only got worse when kids went out drinking in the Campbell’s woods and said they could hear some old woman calling them.
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Power Unlimited is a science fiction humor piece about an accidental meeting with aliens from roughly 1985. The story’s based on my experiences lifting weights back in the day when gyms had weights; no machines (or few which were mostly homemade cable pull devices); no aerobic equipment of any kind; were in basements, garages, warehouses; men lifted, you wore heavy, heavy sweats; and you stank and were proud of it.
I wrote the story for a writing class I took at the time. My teacher loved it. LOVED IT!
He wrote he wished he’d written it. It was brilliant. He called (this was back when long distance charges applied. I was in northern NH, he was in western Ohio) to tell me how good it was and how impressed he was.
Should I send it out?
A definite yes!
I sent it to George Scithers (sp?), then editor of Amazing Stories. He loved it. He thought it was brilliant. He also wasn’t going to buy it because the concept was weary and done too often before, but “please send me more if you have it.”
Which I did.
To which he threatened to black list me if I continued.
To which I realized editors and publishers (at the time) were…different.
How’s that for political correctness?
Meanwhile and thanks to the internet’s expansion of markets, Power Unlimited‘s been published in ARAASP April 1992, my self-pubbed anthology Tales Told ‘Round Celestial Campfires 2016, Daikaijuzine July 2021, and now Tall Tale TV April 2025.
Oh, how exciting! Another brand new never-before-seen chapter!
Enjoy.
Monique headed to Albany and passed a tall, skinny kid not dressed for the weather walking about a mile north of town and checked her rearviews. “That’s the kid Martin has working for him.” She pulled over and lowered the passenger window when he caught up. “You’re John, right? I met you in Martin’s store a few days ago, didn’t I?”
He stood by the door.
“I can’t hear you if you’re talking and I can’t see your head if you’re nodding. You John, yes or no?”
He bent over to reveal a bad haircut and a few bristles of ginger mustache. “Yes, Ma’am.”
“Where you heading?”
“Albany.”
“Walking?”
“You offering a ride?”
“Aren’t you cold dressed like that?”
He shrugged.
“Get in. Just Albany in general or a particular place?”
“You know the Radio Shack downtown?”
“How you getting back?”
He shrugged again.
“I’ve got business’ll take me an hour. That enough time for you to get whatever you’re doing done?”
“You offering a ride back?”
“Be where I drop you off in an hour and I’ll give you a ride back.”
An hour plus a little she saw him shivering outside the Radio Shack holding a big paper bag like it contained gold.
She nodded at the bag as he got in. “You can put that in the backseat. Or is it lost treasure and you don’t want anybody else touching it?”
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Oh, how exciting! A brand new never-before-seen chapter!
Enjoy.
Martin caught the soft drink cooler’s light blink twice then go out. Sheriff Quarrals, at the Pavoni and reading the instructions for a coffee, also caught it. “How much you pay for that new unit and the light goes out every few weeks?”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve got some spare bulbs up in the apartment. Mind watching the store for five or so minutes?”
Quarrals went back to the instruction manual and waved him on.
Upstairs in his bedroom, Martin instituted Croyden’s Cone of Silence and lifted a phone handset from a drawer.
Tony Morelli’s low tenor came on the line. “Long time no talk, Larry. How is life in small town America?”
Martin chuckled. “Parochial, Tony. How’s east coast America?”
“What’s interesting about Stacey Allen Knox?”
“I got bored, Tony. Don’t know if our Unsub’s dead, gone to ground, done a runner, … Nothing new for the last month and I do random lookups on whatever’s in the news to keep my hand in, that’s all. You keeping tabs on me, Tony?”
“Did you see she just got back from Rio?”
“Rio interests you?”
“Rio interests a cross-department team with East Coast Operations being one of the departments in the cross. Nobody would’ve cared except she’s a named attorney who routinely works with internationals, not all of whom play nice with their US partners, so she was added to our persons-of-interest list.” Director of East Coast Operations Anthony Morelli paused. “We had eyes on her. She walked out of her hotel in the center of town, took a left, stopped in front of an alley between two skyscrapers, and disappeared.”
“One of our people lost her?”
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