Gene Kendall Returns
The author of "yeah, shut up" and "Black Hat Blues" is now bothering people on this thing.
As Mailerlite has become inhospitable toward Gmail addresses, it looks as if Substack will be my preferred method for direct communication in the future.
What to expect from the Substack? Updates on my projects and the occasional short story. In future days, perhaps I’ll post thoughts on Latest Thing, whether it be movies, books, or societal collapse.
I strongly suspect that modern audiences have little tolerance for 2000s-era blogging. Everything’s moved to video or podcasts, making cold blocks of text on a stream something of a chore to the average Joe. But, hey, I have a mailing list and surely you guys are a more discriminating lot.
So, the second audiobook for Efficient and Divine is now on Audible. I have free audio codes below for US and UK audiences. Apologies to Finland.
For Audible US:
Redeem the one-time use code below at https://www.audible.com/acx-promo
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For Audible UK:
Redeem the one-time use code below at https://www.audible.co.uk/acx-promo
7G4L6X64MGMSH
B3S8G49FHG4TA
E9JSRAEF6PQN6
Additionally, I have two new short stories collections, awaiting any reviews.
Ten Tiny Tales: Stories of Broken Elevators and Other Mundane Things - Gene Kendall returns with ten stories of everyday joys, anxieties, and all the gooey stuff in-between. A few tales of families and criminals and windbags and kids who need haircuts. Featuring material originally presented in the Saturday Evening Post. Available on Amazon.
Dogteeth and Other Tales of the Paranormal - Ten stories of the paranormal from Gene Kendall, exploring both the light and the dark. A wood nymph becomes a crucial tool in global domination. A social media fad has the entire world feeling blue. An idyllic young couple faces a literal ghost from the past. Featuring the return of Bradley Burns, the Paranormal Desperado of Love is Dead(ly), and the debut of Dogteeth (don’t you ever call them vampires). Available on Amazon.
A free short story from Dogteeth is below. Hopefully everyone enjoys…and if there are any Substacks you enjoy, send me a note and point me their way.
FIGHT FOR IT
Frankie Grant, in the years before she became Frankie Stanford, lived a remarkably stupid life. Frankie was a born rebel, leaving behind her stodgy parents and their Kiwanis Club ways at the age of sixteen and enjoying a gloriously frenzied life on the road. Kerouac, Burroughs, and Kesey were the girl’s idols, the young lady’s spirit-guides through the backstreets of a world designed by conformists and wallflowers.
Frankie, genius thing that she was, boasted she’d try anything once. No idea, said Frankie, was too absurd to dismiss out of hand. She was open to theories about chemtrails and Bohemian Grove rituals and the hidden backstories behind the world’s established religions. Her thoughts on these matters were often shaped by substances containing lovely chemicals such as THC, MDMA, and DMT.
And her new best bud LSD shouldn’t be overlooked, naturally. She was in the midst of a ten-hour spiritual journey with the substance when she met three other silly girls at a roadside attraction somewhere between Sedona and Phoenix. They spoke of something ridiculous and charming and dangerous. Frankie was enthralled. By that evening, she’d been introduced to a sun-coarsened, scarecrow-shaped man with captivating eyes.
The three silly girls were his brides. He was most interested in having Frankie join them.
She was coy the first few weeks, enjoying their food, wine, and drugs while making no commitments. But the more that man spoke, with his modulated tenor and commanding baritone, the more he made sense.
Frankie’s latest guru spoke of beliefs that predated Hebrew scriptures. Of those dishonorably demeaned spirits who had aided Solomon in the construction of his temple, only now to languish in obscurity. The guru wanted to grant Frankie access to one of these spirits, an ethereal being who promised so much and asked for hardly anything in return. The guru was in close communion with the greatest of them all, an old soul by the name of Ornias.
This Ornias belonged to a higher sphere; was a being of truth and charity. And he shouldn’t be called a “demon,” of course. The guru was adamant she stop using this word.
When Frankie agreed to marry the guru, she also agreed to join Ornias in eternal unity. The ceremony was held in a forgotten desert town, following a three-day cleanse of her most imperfect form. Still, the guru assured Frankie as he escorted her from that ramshackle tin shed that she was the most stunning of brides.
Didn’t she like her dress? Was that bouquet of dark violet roses not a thing of beauty?
The girl, this unbelievable dunce, completed the ceremony with tears of joy welling in her crystal blue eyes. As the months passed, in various altered states, Frankie attempted to enjoy her new life in this desert commune that was most assuredly not a cult.
Remarkably, after a few weeks, some doubts were penetrating the girl’s dense skull. Her guru, she realized in those rare moments of sobriety, possessed a patriarchal bent that rivaled her father’s. And her sister-brides cared little for things like literature and philosophy.
It was Ornias, they promised her, who granted exclusive admittance to the truth. She should really stop thinking so much.
The rules and rationalizations and contradictions were enough to drive the girl away. She split on the eve of her first wedding ceremony, taking with her nothing but the tank top and jeans she happened to be wearing. She then lived a far less moronic existence, straightening herself up and finding employment at a grocer’s three states away.
The days passed. This one happened to be Tuesday.
A customer approached her station with a thirty-pound bag of dogfood. His hair was neatly trimmed, his eyes a glimmering shade of turquoise, and his chin gently dimpled in the middle. She kept telling herself she wasn’t smitten, until he opened his lips and offered up that smile.
“Hi, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before. My name’s Leland.”
This wasn’t the day they met, though. Nor was it their wedding day, held at his family’s church in San Antonio. This happened to be the eight hundredth and fortieth day of their marriage. And the two hundredth day of Frankie’s exile to the couple’s attic.
Leland approached with a metallic tray containing a tomato sandwich, potato chips, and a glass of pineapple juice. She could hear the sounds of him placing the tray on the carpet, then brushing the plastic stepstool over with his feet until it was situated directly beneath the attic.
He stood on the stool and knocked on the attic’s entrance. Leland was no coward, but he dared not enter without permission.
“Honey, it’s me,” Leland told Frankie. “I brought lunch. And I know you didn’t eat breakfast, but I really think—”
His phone’s vibration interrupted that thought. With a sigh, he flicked it on and read the text.
Please stop this. Let me die.
Frankie sent those words with palsied hands. She would’ve written more, would’ve written him a Russian novel if she could, but the shakes were bad today.
Frankie never forgot the idiocy of her youth. Today, as much as it broke her heart, she was prepared to pay the price for it.
Leland never inquired much about Frankie’s days of idiocy. His father always used to tell him the past was a cancelled check, and though young Leland was years away from opening his first bank account, he’d discerned the old man’s meaning.
He loved Frankie as the girl he met that day at the market, so her general silence on those “lost years” remained irrelevant. Frankie and Leland started life on similar paths, had been born into similar homes, before one went a certain way and one went the other. What mattered was where they ended up. And, as Leland would often tell her, that was “together,” which meant he was beyond happy.
In his youth, Leland wasn’t sure if happiness was in his forecast. His father was a sheriff’s deputy who died six weeks after Leland’s twelfth birthday, following a domestic call that ended the way far too many end. Leland was then tasked with adult responsibilities that would’ve frightened anyone twice his age, but he tried his best. His mother and sister needed him—and Leland, his father’s son, couldn’t bear the thought of letting them down.
His life was centered on duty, not the pursuit of fun. He dated, had no shortage of girls expressing interest after puberty hit, but didn’t view this as a priority. The local recreational basketball league also ranked far behind family, school, and work for Leland, even though his teammates were convinced Leland was good enough to go pro.
It was his mother who purchased him a chocolate-colored Labrador puppy as a gift on his twenty-fifth birthday. A hole in a bag of dogfood many months later required an unexpected stop by the store. Frankie happened to be working the register this day.
It was a chance meeting of two deprived souls that had Leland rethinking his position on personal happiness.
Their courtship was as bland and traditional as those chronicled in the pop-radio love songs Frankie had rejected in her youth. “Angel of Mine” or “We Belong Together” or “This I Promise You,” they all could’ve been the same song. All commercial pop Pablum, all dismissed by the recalcitrant girl who was clever enough to see through the schmaltz.
But she found herself humming those songs when anticipating her dates with Leland. He looked like he’d been fashioned specifically to live inside a Nordstrom stylebook, but Frankie thought it was cute. Dorky, but cute.
Frankie was listening to more and more of the Top Forty stuff during her years with Leland. Even drifting sometimes into the mainstream country stations, dominated by something called “Boyfriend Country,” songs from fetching young men sweetly affirming devotion to their special ladies. It was saccharine, predictable, and often able to elicit tears from Frankie during her ride home from work.
But it had been over two hundred days since Frankie last arrived at her humble job. Over two hundred days since a debt from the past was called in and labeled past-due.
The incidents were sporadic, at first. Brief and sporadic. An occasional comment directed at Leland, acidic and undeserved. Words she didn’t mean. She questioned why she said such things, made her apologies, then tried to move on with her pleasant suburban existence.
This was the life she loved beyond all imagining. She adored talking about nothing with the neighbors. She looked forward to surprising Leland with special visits to the lake. Doing their taxes at the H & R Block, that girl was giddy.
One of her neighbor friends used to quiz Frankie about this ideal relationship. “You guys never fight?” asked Jane Wynn, neighborhood gossip and Avon Lady. “Not even over money? Sex? The TV?”
The incidents became less sporadic last year. And both Leland and Frankie noticed something about those bouts of malice. Her inflection was wrong, her voice far too deep. She stayed in denial, though, refusing to even think the name of Ornias.
Leland made a mistake during one of her fits, grabbing her by both wrists and forcing her to look him in the eye. He was frightened and irritated and demanded Frankie explain what was happening. Her response was a head-butt that nearly broke his nose.
He awoke the next day to an empty bed. After searching the house for an hour, he discerned Frankie had sequestered herself to the attic. She spoke to him behind the closed scuttle, promising with a shaky voice that this was best for both of them. Frankie kept making this promise as the days passed, even as it became increasingly difficult for her to speak.
Ornias was here, she had realized, after denying it for so long. Living within her, taking her up on the pledge of fidelity she’d offered up as a slow-witted girl.
For weeks now, she’d been sending texts down to Leland. Sometimes she could tap out a simple I love you and sometimes her mad fingers were unable to finish a message. Three days ago, Frankie made a decision that if Ornias was living through her, enjoying the nutrients of all of these tomato sandwiches and turkey burgers, then it would be best for Frankie to stop eating altogether.
Five hours had passed since Leland left that tray with the tomato sandwich in the hallway. Frankie, resolute, didn’t touch the scuttle. Didn’t take up the food and satisfy the hunger gnawing at her gut.
This thing had to die. Even if this meant taking her with it.
Two distinct sets of footsteps were now coming down the hall. One of them stopped; the other kept going. Was creaking its way up the footstool. “Frankie, it’s me,” Leland said between knocks. “I’m going to be coming in, okay? And I’m not going to be alone. Listen, I’m not asking permission, so please, just…please listen.”
There was some muffled conversation between Leland and a stranger before a colored patch of light entered through the scuttle. “Frankie?” he called into the darkness.
She was there, seated in the vintage rocking chair consigned to the attic years before, as Frankie had decided it didn’t quite match the ambiance of their living room. This is the kind of thing she had become invested in, during those years post-stupidity.
Frankie was there, her chair tucked into the attic’s corner, doing what she could to avoid eye contact with Leland and the stranger. As Leland clicked on the lights, she experienced a wave of shame throughout her body, knowing what greeted his eyes. A broken floor mirror, ripped up photo albums, messages in lipstick on the wall—some frantic cries for help, others vile denunciations of the most holy of things.
“Frankie, honey, I’ve found someone who can help with this. I don’t want you to feel embarrassed talking to her, okay?”
There was a flash of anger inside Frankie, indignant at the suggestion she could still speak. Ornias was exultant, getting a taste out of his host that varied from her normal flavor. Regret and self-pity were fine, but genuine anger—a sensation Frankie so rarely indulged in—that was delectable.
“This is Marylou Budden, and she’s going to help us…help us with all this, Frankie,” Leland told her as he motioned for their guest to step forward.
She had whiskey-colored eyes and dark hair with silver streaks, which she wore piled atop her sizeable head. A scent of King Edward cigars was clinging to her denim outfit. Leland had spent weeks researching the spiritualist community—something he hardly believed existed—parsing through the charlatans until he found someone with a credible résumé.
“Okay, dear, hate to be a downer, but I think hubby has oversold my skills, perhaps,” Marylou said in a gravelly, nearly masculine voice, stepping ahead of Leland and eying Frankie over. She gave no visible tells, examining the pallid character of Frankie’s skin and the putrefying condition of her clothes, as if the cotton itself was rotting.
“I’m knowledgeable on certain matters,” Marylou continued, her tone carrying no fear, “but I’ve yet to work a miracle on my lonesome. If you want to be free of the unholy juju wafting outta every pore of your cute little bod, you’re gonna have to work for it.”
Frankie seemed to be looking at nothing at all, until her body bolted out of the chair and over to the wall. Lipstick in hand, she attempted to write a message on the plaster.
“No, you don’t get to play the silent game with me,” Marylou said as she placed a firm hand on Frankie’s shoulder. She grabbed the lipstick and, with a flick of her wrist, flung it away. “See, hon, this ain’t Pictionary. You got something to say to me, you can have the decency to open those pretty lips and spit it out.”
Frankie reacted by feverishly shaking her head and biting her lower lip. Marylou pressed harder on her shoulders and turned Frankie back around so that their noses nearly touched. “Oh, I get it. Someone else gets to control your words, huh?” she asked in a tone as sarcastic as it was sympathetic. “Well, are you just going to give that to him? Not even gonna put up a fight?”
A grim pause lingered before Frankie’s lips moved. What came out sounded like a crackling fire intertwined with a cat’s lonely midnight wail.
“She…has no choice…” spoke the thing living within Frankie.
“Uh-huh. And who says that?”
“Ornias,” answered Frankie’s possessed lips, her face contorted in a mask of condescension and hate. “Woman…do you know of Ornias?”
Marylou took a step back and reached into her shirt pocket. Leland was expecting her to produce a small vial of something mystic and holy. Something that would repulse the dark spirit inhabiting his bride.
Instead, Marylou had in her hand a singular match and one of her beloved King Edwards. She struck the match against her thumb, then lit the cigar. After enjoying a lengthy puff, she finally addressed the spirit.
“Yeah, I’ve heard some things, Ornias. Some gossip about how much you enjoy entering earthly vessels. How you’re a dark, perverted version of those teeny-tiny mites that live on eyelashes.” Two more puffs, then a subtle ashing of the cigar on the attic’s antique barnwood flooring.
“But you don’t feast on dead skin cells,” she continued, aiming the cigar now at Frankie’s face, “you’ve got an appetite for all kinds of spirit and flesh. Yeah, Ornias, I’ve heard about you. Heard you’re not inclined to leave until your host is nothing but a husk of sagging skin.”
Frankie’s eyes squinted. “Ornias…doesn’t approve of your tone.”
“I don’t approve of you. And if our gal Frankie is willing to fight, willing to grit those pearl-white teeth and do some hard work, then I’m thinking I can help her shoo you along to your next engagement.”
An obscure smile crept along Frankie’s full lips. “This girl, Frankie…has no fight. Understands…Ornias is all. Ornias is eternal.”
“I got a suspicion she’s tougher than you give her credit for. Those cute ones, even the ones with the Bambi eyes and plump lips, you’ve gotta watch out for ’em.”
“No fight…overpowers a covenant.”
Marylou took another pull on her cigar. “Could be. You saying Miss Happy Homemaker over here invited you in willingly?”
“A wedding…years back, her time perhaps…to Ornias, yesterday.”
Marylou’s head tilted, and she grew silent for far longer than Leland liked. She was studying something he couldn’t see, processing data he’d never be able to make sense of.
“You had other brides, didn’t you? Burned your way through ’em, and now you’re on to this girl, huh?” asked Marylou. She didn’t receive an answer. Not a verbal one, at least.
There was another pull on her King Edwards, then a shift in her body. Her shoulders were less rigid, her stance not as obstinate. That cockiness was gone, and in its place was a resigned acceptance.
Frankie experienced Ornias’ elation, an icy chill spreading over her spine, as they watched Marylou return to Leland and explain some harsh truths. He was shaking his head, indignant. Tears pooling in his eyes, Leland grabbed the strange woman and demanded she try something else.
A muttered conversation followed. Whatever Marylou was telling him, it was with a visible reluctance.
An eternity later, the remaining, flickering portion of Frankie’s heart went south as she watched Leland approach. “If Ornias wants a willing host,” he said after a sharp intake of breath, “then I’ll give one to him.”
Somewhere, Frankie was screaming a defiant NO! Yet her lips formed a smile. “Does Leland understand…what’s being offered?” spoke Ornias through her.
His eyes were steely, his hands both tightened into fists. “If it means Frankie is free, and there aren’t any strings attached or some catch in the fine print…then I’ll offer myself up in her place.”
She resisted with newfound strength, attempting to keep her eyes shut, prevent them from looking Leland over. She felt it, though. Felt Ornias studying Leland, ogling his broad shoulders and toned muscles. “Closer…to Ornias,” spoke Frankie’s lips, though she was cursing each word.
Leland inched nearer, his steps signaling both contempt and resolve. “I know you don’t want this, Frankie,” he said when touching both sides of her pristine face, “but you shouldn’t be worrying about me. Just let me, honey…let me do this for you.”
A nervous tremor passed through Ornias’ consciousness, so eager he was to devour such a prized host.
Physical perfection, yes. But the circumstances were also remarkable. A willing body, one keenly aware of what he was entering into, unlike those frail young things Ornias so often found out in the desert.
Through a vision unknown to mortals, Ornias could peer through Leland Stanford, see past every defense the strapping young thing presented to the world. Ornias did a cursory inspection of this proffered soul and found some tempting dark corners.
Did Leland Stanford always put aside his personal pleasure for the sake of others? Was there no resentment anywhere in his being for those who always, always, always needed his help? Was he truly as forgiving of Frankie’s past as he used to tell her during those cold, dark nights when she was in tears yet again?
Leland remained stone-faced as Ornias scrutinized his new purchase and located something he found just delightful. This man who prided himself on his lack of judgment, who never pressed Frankie on her ridiculous past, who always repeated his father’s line about the cancelled checks…this man had a spot on his soul.
One Leland hardly knew existed, true, but one flummoxed, frustrated, and ashamed by that stupid girl’s choices. It was so small, but it was there. And Ornias was gifted. He knew how to make these spots grow. Understood how delectable they could be when properly nourished.
Ornias was anticipating the days left in this proffered body—tallying up every enzyme and muscle fiber and robust cellular structure lying within—when a queer, kicking sensation rumbled. It was enough for Frankie’s body to take a step back. When Ornias resisted, a sudden flare within Frankie’s gut forced their body to the floor.
With a squinted eye and exhale of breath, Ornias commanded that body to rise. She refused, raged in a way Ornias had never anticipated. The sensation was like broken glass under his skin, like kerosene sprayed into his nostrils.
Frankie—stupid, disobedient, stubborn—was projecting her manic paranoia about this new union throughout the core of Ornias’ being. This mate of hers wouldn’t be paying the price for her mistakes, it seemed. Not if she had any say over it.
She didn’t, though. Ornias reminded Frankie of this. She could resist with the tenacity of a crazed bull, but it would make no difference.
Ornias offered the woman a round of psionic discipline. Though her head was soon a throbbing mess, her body was standing upright, taking the necessary steps towards her groom.
The woman’s resistance was practically forgotten by Ornias the moment Leland again pressed his virile hands against Frankie’s face. A new home, a new meal, given freely. Yes, this was most pleasing to the spirit.
Leland advised Frankie to stop fighting. Tears were rolling past his cheeks, but he kept saying it.
Ornias forced Frankie’s tongue to utter these words: “Say… ‘Ornias is all. Ornias…I belong to you.’”
Leland obeyed, with only a minor stammer.
What followed was a brimming cauldron of two souls. In any other circumstance, Ornias would’ve been overjoyed, would’ve been tingling all within his odious form.
But as Ornias enjoyed one final taste of Frankie’s soul, he experienced Frankie’s love for her husband, and within that, a sliver of self-loathing that made Leland’s acceptance of her past a source of unspoken resentment. Another infinitesimal component of their relationship, never allowed to fester into something nasty.
Ornias had been working on that bruise, hoping to transform it into a truly foul wound. Realizing it remained rather tiny, in spite of his labor, he chided himself for the failure. He’d do better next time, he was sure, picking on all of Big Handsome Leland’s hidden scabs.
This sensation, this dizzy expectation, lasted only a moment.
As Ornias made his way from Frankie to Leland, all three ambiances intermixing, those two lovebirds had their chance to reconnect. The sensation hit Frankie like a lightning bolt. Had her raging again, drenching Ornias in a new round of guilt, agony, and determination that this exchange never occur. Simultaneously, Ornias experienced the sum and substance of Leland Stanford, a good man determined now to do something his every cell found repulsive.
The density of it all, the tangled mass of contradictory motivations he was now wrapped up in, made Ornias queasy in a way the spirit had never before experienced.
As the souls passed through, they engaged in a barn-burner of a fight. Both yelling at the other to stop this now, both willing to experience a literal hell for the other. The two essences circulated within the other, creating curious sensations of light and scent. In spite of the quarrel, or perhaps because of it, they soon formed something white and beautiful that forced the sickly Ornias to release a scream of exasperation.
The fine meal Ornias desired so badly now tasted bitter like wormwood. The ingredients of his stew now all wrong.
Within that mass of something white, lovely, and oddly-scented was a consensus from the two spirits. They weren’t leaving one another, regardless of which body Ornias chose to inhabit. They would stay and fight—fight one another, fight Ornias, whatever. They would keep fighting and Ornias wouldn’t receive a moment’s rest.
“Looks like you’re riding on some square wheels there, Mr. Ornias, sir,” spoke a nicotine-tinted voice. Another irritant for Ornias. One more thing that caused teeth to grind.
Ornias looked past the blurred souls before him to see again the corporeal world. Standing only an inch away, reeking of tobacco, was Marylou Budden.
“Y’wanna live like this, live with this constant agitation, until both these young bodies get themselves burned out?” she asked after blowing a smoke ring. “Seems kinda uncomfortable to me. Like sittin’ on a tack, or tolerating bunched-up underwear all day.”
Ornias wasn’t certain which vocal cords to command, though he did desperately want to scream at the old woman. Realizing she was correct, that he was setting himself up for potentially years of misery, however, Ornias made the only sensible decision.
He scurried away. Left as silently as a roach crawls up the ceiling.
Marylou spent the next hour calming the couple down, talking through this madness and offering suggestions on how their domestic life could return to something close to normal. “This was a nasty thing, sure,” she told them.
“But it ain’t the first or last demon to enter your life. Only a more literal one. And, hey, because of your tenacity, he just ran outta here with his tail between his legs.” She offered the couple a congratulatory cigar. Both declined.
Days became weeks, which amazingly turned into months and years. Frankie and Leland continued on, aware now of those shadows on their souls. They talked them through, approached the touchy subjects with understanding and love. It was a fight, but not the kind Jane the Avon Lady had on her busybody mind.