Early Halloween Treat from Laura Buckle Author of Flesh!
for this time of year. I looked around at the materials I had rolling around my
craft room and raided the displays at the dollar store to come up with some
Halloween luminaries to perch in my windows.
Two wide-mouth jars
A plastic witch
A plastic ghost
Black sand
Glue gun and glue sticks
Plastic spider rings
Ribbon
Two LED light strings – I used pumpkins and bats
lights, sand, witch, and ghost at my local dollar store. So I’ve invested about
five bucks in this project. I won’t too feel
bad if it doesn’t turn out!
a jar and the ghost in jars. I had originally intended to use mason jars, but I
didn’t have any with mouths wide enough to squeeze the plastic sculptures
through. So I used some plastic jars I had handy. I settled the witch and ghost
in their new homes, then poured some black sand around their feet to simulate
ground. You could also use glitter or black salt or fine pebbles.
that I could use fairy lights for this step, too, but I liked the bats and
pumpkins.
around so that they showed most clearly from the front. I made sure that the
tail of the light string, with the battery pack, extended outside of the jars. I
wanted to be able to turn my luminaries on and off and change batteries without
digging the whole string out of the jar, though you could leave it in the jar,
too. Here’s what they looked like:
damage the thin wire. I made sure that the wire fed out the back side of the
jar. If I needed more room, I would have cut out part of the lid or put the
pack behind the figure inside the jar, but this seemed to work fine with these
materials.
from the bag of spiders. I cut the ring part off the spiders so that they would
lie flat.
the center of the bow, I glued a spider.
“Amanda, I…Oh.”
I don’t know what else to say. My brain just shuts down.
She is wearing the sheet, wound around her like a toga. It trails behind her bare feet, sort of like a painting about Greek goddesses I’ve seen in art books. She’s leaning over another body stored in the cooler unit on a cart. Her back is to me, and I can only see her pale skin and her burgundy-black hair shuddering.
“Amanda.”
She turns at the sound of my voice, seeming only to hear me for the first time. Her face is covered in dark blood. In her hand, she’s holding a big chunk of purple flesh. Her eyes are half-closed. The autopsy incision on the elderly body below her has been ripped open, and I’m pretty sure that what she’s holding is a lung.
“So hungry…” she murmurs.
I retreat until my back presses against the cold door. A whimper escapes my lips, and I drop the laundry basket with a sharp crack of plastic on the tile floor. This has to be a dream. A screwed-up anxiety dream that I’ll wake up from any moment now…
Amanda’s black eyes snap open. She stares at the chunk of flesh in her hand. “I…Agh…What’s going on?”
Lothar waddles over to her and begins to beg. Bile rises in my throat. “That’s Mrs. Canner,” I manage to answer. “She’s seventy-two and died of surgery complications for varicose veins. Deep vein thrombosis, I think. I don’t remember.” I’m babbling, trying to keep the bile down.
Amanda drops the lung with a wet splat. Lothar scrambles to it and begins scarfing it down. Her hands are trembling. She presses them to her temples. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”
I nudge the laundry basket closer to her with my foot. “I brought you some clothes. And, um. Food. You should get dressed.”
I think I should be afraid. I think I really ought to be. But Amanda seems genuinely confused. She reaches for the clothes I’ve brought her. To be polite, I know that I should really look away. But I can’t move. I am not turning my back on her. My heart pounds, and I struggle to take deep, uneven breaths.
Amanda unwinds the sheet and slips into my clothes. Though I avert my eyes, I see that her shoulder and side are still torn open. But my mother hasn’t begun the autopsy yet, so there is no Y-incision across her chest and abdomen.
“Do you remember what happened to you?” I manage to ask. I congratulate myself for having a rational thought. Woot.
Her voice is halting, and her brow wrinkles as she struggles to button my jeans. “I remember…something was chasing me. Jesus, it hurt…” Her hand comes up to her neck, and she seems to remember, fingering the edges of the wound. “Am I in a hospital?” she asks again.
I suck in a breath. “No. You’re at my house.” It’s not a lie. Not really.
She scans the room, as if registering the sight of the cadavers. “You’re the girl whose parents run the funeral home. The Ghoul Girl.”
“It’s gonna be okay,” I tell her.
“Why am I here?” Her breath makes ghosts in the cold air.
“The Sheriff found you, alongside the road.” That’s true also, even if not the whole truth. “I think we should get you upstairs, so you can talk to my parents…”
She shakes her head, and her dark hair slaps across her face. “No. I…Oh my god. I’m here because…somebody thought I was dead?”
I swallow hard. “Yeah.”
Her hands press to the wound on her side. “But I’m not dead!”
“I…uh…I think we need to get you to the hospital.” I tentatively reach toward her, to grasp her arm and guide her upstairs, toward the light of the much more civilized parlor and rational discussion. This is so far over my head, and I need my parents to handle it.
She shakes her head. “No. No. No.”
I hold her elbow gently, trying to keep her calm until I can get her upstairs to my parents. Her skin radiates cold through the sweatshirt, and I can see that the edges of her neck wound are dry, not seeping so much as a hint of blood. “Come with me.” I open the door and gently lead her into the lab, as if I’m herding a frightened cat. She gazes at the stainless-steel equipment. “I was here. I remember being here.”
“Come upstairs,” I urge, struggling to keep my composure. I use all the empathy that I’ve learned, dealing with grieving family members, trying to understand the shock and lead her away from the Body Shop.
She squints up at the buzzing light. “You were here, weren’t you? You and that woman. Looking at me.”
“My mother,” I say. I’m thinking crap crap crap. I’ve heard of cases of people whose vitals have dropped far beyond detection, who have awoken in hospital morgues. This has never happened to us. Not ever. Oh shit. The other body. Maybe it the same thing…
“The woman with that knife…” Her fingers go to her sternum, where my mother’s scalpel had rested. All of a sudden, Amanda becomes rooted in place, as immovable as a mountain.
“No one’s going to hurt you,” I promise. “Let me make you some coffee.”
She shakes her head, and I feel her trembling. Her eyes slide to the back door.
She slips from my grip. Before I can stop her, she rushes to the back door. She slams it open with a sound like a gunshot and plunges into the darkness.
It was Spooktacular having you with us today. Please feel free to stop by anytime. Good Luck with Flesh!
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Posted in Authors' Secrets Blog and tagged fantasy, Flesh, HOrra, Laura Bickle, Paranormal, YA by Tena Stetler with 2 comments.
Interview with Laura Bickle Author of Witch Creek
Give a warm welcome to Laura BIckle, author of Witch Creek, second book in The Wildlands Series just released on February 27, 2018! Following Nine of Stars comes the next chapter in Laura Bickle’s critically acclaimed Wildlands series.
Pull up a chair, grab a drink of your choice from the cooler, a Chocolate Chip or Peanut Butter cookie from the plate, and let’s find out a little about Laura Bickle and Witch Creek.
Lets start with what inspired this particular story?
I’ve always been very curious about alchemy, about how the ideas of magic and science got mashed up in our history before taking divergent paths. Researching alchemy has been one of my hobbies, and I finally got the chance to work what I learned into the Wildlands series.
I created Petra Dee, the protagonist of the series, to reflect some of the uncertainty of alchemy. She’s a scientist, a geologist working in the back country of Yellowstone. But she’s also the daughter of an alchemist, and has to come to terms with magic that’s unraveling the edges of her world.
This magic takes various forms – an undead cowboy she’s fallen in love with, drug-dealing alchemists, the alchemical Tree of Life. In WITCH CREEK, she faces off against a sinister mermaid. Muirenn was once a witch, cursed to take the shape of a flesh-devouring mermaid. She’s been imprisoned underground for more than a hundred and fifty years. But now she’s on the loose, and it’s up to Petra and her coyote sidekick, Sig, to stop her.
What secret do you use to blast through writer’s block?
For me, there’s no cure for writer’s block except doing it. I’ve been experimenting with various carrots, like promising myself some relaxing time in the garden for completed scenes. But I haven’t really come up with a solution other than sitting down and writing. I tend to get into a trap of perfectionism, and giving myself permission to write something imperfect (to edit later!) helps a lot.
Who is your favorite character of all of the books you’ve written and Why?
I’ve written a lot of characters who I adore, but my most recent favorite is Sig, Petra’s coyote sidekick in the Wildlands series. Petra first encountered Sig digging up a magic compass in the field outside her trailer, and he’s stuck around ever since. At first, she thought he was hanging around solely for lunch meat. But Sig is has remained her loyal ally. He may or may not be The Coyote with a capital C, working his own agenda that runs parallel to hers. I find him to be charming, impish, and a lot of fun to write about.
If writing is your first passion, what is your second?
Heh. I think I’d have to say that one of my passions is working with animals. I have a pretty dense garden in our backyard, and every so often, a feral cat will find his way in. I will work with the cat until he’s ready to come indoors, get him medical care, and he’ll eventually decide to be tame. It takes a long time, sometimes years. But I am most proud of the cats that have come to trust me as much as they do.
I have one that I’m working with now. He’s very terrified at the moment, but has turned out to be quite the gourmand. He likes milk, tuna, salmon, but his favorite thing is hiding behind a bookshelf. Someday, though, he’ll be curled up at the foot of my bed, dozing in the sunshine. It always happens. It just takes time, patience, love…and a whole lot of tuna.
Petra Dee has battled supernatural horrors and experienced astonishing wonders.
But there’s no magic on earth that can defeat her recent cancer diagnosis, or
help find her missing husband, Gabriel. Still, she would bet all her remaining
days that the answer to his disappearance lies in the dark subterranean world
beneath the Rutherford Ranch on the outskirts of Temperance, Wyoming.
the sheriff and heir to the ranch, Owen Rutherford. Owen is determined to
harness the power of the Tree of Life—and he needs Gabe to reveal its magic.
Secretly, the sheriff has also made a pact to free a creature of the underground,
a flesh-devouring mermaid. Muirenn has vowed to exact vengeance on Gabe, who
helped imprison her, but first . . . she’s hungry. Once freed, she will swim
into Yellowstone—to feed.
Petra must descend into the underworld to rescue Gabe before it’s too late . .
. for both of them.
Peering through the cattails, she saw a man with a fishing pole, standing on an outcropping. He seemed alone, caught in a bit of reverie, gazing at his line skipping along the surface of the water.
She dipped below the surface of the water, toward the shiver of the fishing line. With green-spotted fingers, she lifted the struggling fish from the hook. The line jerked away.
The man swore.
Muirenn lifted her head above the water.
“Holy shit.” The man stumbled backward. “I didn’t realize you were swimming there . . . I . . .”
His expression changed from embarrassment to curiosity as he looked at her. The pupils of his eyes dilated. “Who . . . are you?”
Muirenn gripped the fish close to her chest, giving a small smile.
The fisherman crouched on the rock, setting his pole beside him. “Wow. You’re uh . . . green? Is that real?”
Muirenn cocked her head and slipped forward a bit in the water. The edge of her tail skimmed above the surface.
“Is that like . . . one of those tails that the girls have at that park in Florida? For a movie or something?” His suntanned brow wrinkled. “No. That’s real,” he decided. “You, um . . . want the fish? You can have it.”
She was within arm’s length of him. She released the squirming fish into the water.
“You wanted to let it go? Look, I . . .”
The man talked too much. She swam closer, tentatively.
The fisherman looked at her, at her dappled skin and the dark rust hair spreading into the water. She wouldn’t ordinarily have been so bold. The weight off her tail was going to her head. She let him take in the black of her eyes, the gills on her throat. He gazed in wonder, and his fingers twitched to a small square piece of plastic on top of his tackle box.
“Can I take your picture? What . . . are you?”
A smile played across her lips, and she spoke to him in a silvery voice. “I’m the Mermaid.”
“Wow. I . . . wow. I’m, uh, Norm. Do I, like, make a wish or something?”
“You can, if you want. I’ll listen.”
She reached up with delicate fingers to touch him. Her fingers brushed the pockets of his fishing vest, playing with wonder over the bits and baubles there meant to lure the attention of fish. The man forgot about his camera and stared, transfixed.
Muirenn reached up for his collar . . .
. . . and dragged him down into the water.
He splashed and flailed. She brought him down—down to the bottom of the creek. It wasn’t so far, but it was far enough for a land dweller. He couldn’t fight her for long. He thrashed until his lungs grew heavy with creek water. He convulsed as the lack of oxygen reached his heart and filtered up to his brain. And then he stopped.
Muirenn grinned, showing row upon row of shark-like teeth. She ripped off his arm and began to chew. It had been so long since she’d had anything but the errant fish that wandered into her realm . . . this was a meal worth waiting for.
The creek ran red.
Red as the idle red-and-white bobber drifting on the surface of the water.
You can find Witch Creek at the following online retailers.
Ohio, reading entirely too many comic books out loud to her favorite Wonder
Woman doll. After graduating with an MA in Sociology – Criminology from Ohio
State University and an MLIS in Library Science from the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she patrolled the stacks at the public library and worked
with data systems in criminal justice. She now dreams up stories about the
monsters under the stairs, also writing contemporary fantasy novels under the
name Alayna Williams.
ALA’s Amelia Bloomer Project 2013 reading list and the State Library of Ohio’s
Choose to Read Ohio reading list for 2015-2016.
It was wonderful having you with us today. Please feel free to stop by anytime. Good Luck with Witch Creek!
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Posted in Authors' Secrets Blog and tagged Dark Fantasy, Laura Bickle, Yellowstone by Tena Stetler with 2 comments.
Spotlight on The Dragon’s Playlist by Laura Bickle
Give a warm welcome to Laura Bickle, author of The Dragon’s Playlist!
Pull up a chair, grab a drink of your choice from the cooler, a Chocolate Chip or Peanut Butter cookie from the plate, and enjoy the spotlight on The Dragon’s Playlist.
Newsletter Sign Up: https://goo.gl/TNgIjL
I hope you enjoyed the spotlight on The Dragon’s Playlist. Please feel free to stop by anytime. Good Luck to Laura Bickle The Dragon’s Playlist!
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Posted in Authors' Secrets Blog and tagged Contemporary Fantasy, Dragon's Playlist, Laura Bickle, music, Violinist, West Virginia by Tena Stetler with 2 comments.
