The Real Memphis Mike (don't settle for imitations)

There’s old folks up through the hills of Pennsylvania who’ll tell you, plain as day, not to whistle after dark. Most young people laugh at it now, of course. They laugh at haints too, right up until some lonely night when the woods start sounding a little too alive. But the old folks always knew better. My gran used to tell us this story whenever the evenings got still and the thrushes, warblers, and whippoorwills started up beyond the fields. She’d sit out back with her old pipe, rocking slow, the tobacco glowing red in the dark while us kids huddled around trying to act brave. “Don’t you kids go whistlin’ after sundown,” she’d say. “Ain’t nothing in them woods meant to answer back.” Then she’d tell about Elias Griggs. This would’ve been a long time before I was born, back when there were still logging camps scattered through the hills and whole stretches of mountain where a body could walk half a day without seeing another soul. Elias Griggs lived alone in a little cabin near the ti...

He had a head full of demons - and they always had questions. “WHY?” was the loudest. Why did he do that? Why didn’t he do that? Then came the endless parade of shoulda-coulda-wouldas. How and When appeared less often. The devil, he suspected, wasn’t nearly as interested in details as people liked to believe. Only if they served his twisted purpose. He’d noticed a behavior pattern emerging among his aging contemporaries. A desperate need to relive the same dreams they’d spent entire lifetimes chasing. They were all old men now, though some refused to accept it. Maybe they’d simply avoided the physical cruelties of time. Maybe they were more stubborn than he was. Or maybe they were too damned blind to see the world in front of them. His own relevance had risen, dwindled, and changed shape more times than he could count. Most days he just wanted a nap. Another cup of coffee usually sufficed. He didn’t miss the hangovers, though he occasionally missed the feeling that induced them - that ...

He'd been trapped in his house for five years.  Not imprisoned exactly. No court had ordered it. No chains held him there. His own body had simply staged a quiet rebellion and won. A series of health problems had reduced his world to a few safe pathways through a three-bedroom house in a respectable neighborhood with a respectable yard. He had once traveled the world. He had stood on foreign streets where he could not read the signs or understand the language, and somehow had felt less lost there than he did now standing at the bottom of his own staircase. The stairs terrified him. They waited every morning like a dare. Go ahead, old man. Climb. One wrong step and they would finish what time had started. So his life became measured in reachable things. The bathroom. The kitchen. The chair beside the window. The distance from the couch to the front door on bad days. The slow geography of decline. His wife still worked. Still moved through the world with purpose. They loved each othe...

Sometimes old stories become songs. Sometimes it's the other way 'round. - MM The grass out back needed cut something fierce. Following the heavy afternoon rain, the whole yard shimmered in the early evening sun like diamonds had somehow taken root in the dirt and grass alike. Steam rose from the fields beyond the house. The air smelled of wet earth, fish grease, and mildew. Inside, the baby just would not stop crying. Eddie sat slumped at the kitchen table while Mama had just started frying bluegill in an iron skillet blackened by thirty years of suppers. He looked bad. Worse than he had in a good while. His hair hung damp against his forehead and there were dark half-moons beneath his eyes. His shirt was streaked with mud up to the elbows. He kept rubbing at his temples like he was trying to press the pain out through his skull. “Can Mary fry some fish, Mama?” he muttered weakly. “I’m as hungry as can be.” “I’m already fixin’ it,” Mama answered softly. Eddie lowered his head...

It started when he was 15. Pieces of her to play with...it didn't sound like the worst idea. Probably wasn't his best. His teachers would have told you the same, had anyone bothered to ask. Knives to filet and carve with. Cleavers. Hell, machetes, hatchets, axes, all in the shed and as handy as a sword. His mind was on which pieces and the best possible game.  It should have just been a simple play on words, but it turned into a lifelong addiction. Words and ideas came quick then - much quicker than now. His beat,  his attack...all slower than before. Even the fire burns more sluggishly now.  He'd be the first to tell you - the idea came from movies. Such bad, bad movies. Poorly written, and filmed for budget audiences; the types that frequented the drive-in picture shows on a Tuesday night with a case of Hamm's in the back seat. He noticed the audiences loved every moment, predictable as it was. A group of friends. Some pretty teens. Lack of supervision. Cigarettes, re...

 Aging sucks. He found that out the hard way.  The beer and liquor no longer flowed. The pills didn't do the trick anymore. A lifetime of crafting tales that thrilled a generation - gone. The well ran dry.  It's the fear of every writer. What happens when the ideas stop coming? No mere 'writer's block' - the reality outside his door was more terrifying than any fictional fear or foe he could cobble together from his own neuroses and phobias.  The government had come clean. It didn't give a damn about the people, the laws, or anything else it was supposed to. It came down to two things: money and power. Enough of either one assured the other. The people could live or die, it didn't matter. There would always be someone to take their place. Someone who had no choice, no say.  The Constitution had all but been abolished. Decades of embedding partisan plants in the judiciary had guaranteed it. The media, before it was forced into piracy, claimed that it all happ...