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

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. She gave them some broth without any bread, And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.” No one lives in a shoe. That’s just what the children call it. The building curves inward in a way that doesn’t feel right. Hallways narrow toward the ends. Rooms taper off like something was trying to make space where there wasn’t any. The youngest are kept at the “toe.” The older ones, what few there are, closer to the “heel.” It’s not official terminology. But it sticks. The woman assigned to the ward isn’t as old as she looks. Forty, maybe. Fifty at most. Hard to tell under the weight of it all. Too many children. Not enough staff. Not enough food. Not enough patience left in the world. She has charts. Protocols. A schedule that says what happens and when. Morning: broth. Afternoon: quiet time. Evening: correction. They don’t call it whipping anymore. Not out loud. But the marks tell their o...

It was as good a town as any for semi-retirement.  On the surface, Linden looked quiet. But like most small towns, it buzzed with characters. The sheriff was known as Beer Belly - “Beer” for short - and he answered to Judge Pee Wee, a man so fond of drinking he required a police escort more often than not. By nightfall, I wasn’t new anymore. I hadn’t introduced myself. I didn’t have to. Somewhere between unloading my bags and walking into town, I’d already been named, placed, understood.  New fella from up north. That was enough. Privacy wasn’t exactly the local currency. Neither was surprise. Not anymore. There was no bar, but the gas station did double duty. Picnic tables out front for beer, gossip, and weather reports. Shopping options were limited: a Food King, a video store, the B&H diner, The Rusty Hook if you wanted catfish—and Crazy Fay’s, where you could buy Confederate memorabilia and black velvet Elvis art in the same transaction without anyone batting an eye. ...

2:40am, and he was lost in the sounds of Zufälligen Einbildungskraft. The rest of the world was asleep. He knew it wasn't his fault - at least not this time. However, he had a nagging feeling. The closer he was to achieving his goal, the further away it seemed. He'd read, studied, conjugated and codified - yet he felt no closer than when he began. The world was drowning in a sea of poorly corrected pitch, and he was helpless to do anything about it. The vibrations of authenticity and originality were growing fainter by the minute. It had been over thirty years since the last explosion, and even that had been a hollow replica of days gone by. His heart broke a little when he realized Waits was little more than a Partch fanboy with delusions of Satchmotic wailings.  Bones was a killer - with strings.  The legends had become just that. Forgotten mythology rotting on a shelf, waiting to be rediscovered by academics and weirdos. The day before, he'd sent pleas in multiple lang...

 It was late February 2002, and I was getting ready for my first trip overseas.  I had lucked into a handful of gigs, and I was thrilled by the chance. I grew up watching lots of Hammer horror films, and almost any British show I could find. Monty Python's Flying Circus, The Benny Hill Show, Dave Allen, and Tommy Cooper were regular viewing thanks to public television. I spent plenty of time reading British literature, especially Arthur Conan Doyle. My maternal grandfather’s family was British, so it’s fair to say I was an Anglophile. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of “the Queen’s English.” I was well acquainted with terms like spanner, lorry, telly, and most hilarious to twelve-year-old me, fags (or cigarettes, for those unaware). I was under the mistaken impression that “wanker” could be used as a term of endearment, not unlike jagoff. I later found this to be…not quite accurate. I was admittedly concerned about the food. While I occasionally consider myself ad...

I remember some years back having to switch to a new phone. I’m not a fan of change, especially when it comes to things I consider appliances. In the landline days of old, phones were relatively cheap, and you didn’t have to get a new one every couple of years. I still own a couple of rotary phones from the 1940s that work perfectly fine and have better sound quality than anything else I’ve ever used. But this story ain’t about phones. Or change. It’s about my personal phonebook. That’s one thing I’ll admit to liking about cell phones. Everyone’s number right there in the device. No more having to remember - or risk forgetting - telephone numbers. At the time of this particular phone change, I was at one of those midlife crossroads. My dilemma was simple enough: Do I continue with music at some professional level? I wasn’t happy with my playing. I felt like I was spinning my wheels, doing the same songs over and over. I was burned out. It happens. The young lady at the phone store help...

Lately, he’d been thinking about his ex-father-in-law. Not the ex-wife - calm down. That road had enough potholes already. No, this was about Kolya. They had never been especially close. Between the language barrier, the cultural divide, and the lingering fog of the recently ended Cold War, “warm relationship” was never really on the menu. Still, Kolya had made an impression. Men like that tended to. He was somewhere in his mid-to-late sixties when they met. Picture the farmer from American Gothic if he’d been drafted by the Soviet Union, fed boiled cabbage, and taught to glare professionally. Bald as a cannonball, which somehow made his head seem even larger. Thick square plastic eyeglasses magnified his eyes until they looked like a permanent accusation. He dressed sharply, but in a way that suggested the tailor’s motto had been adequate for the State . Then there were his teeth. No expert on the subject, he could only assume cosmetic dentistry had been dismissed by the Soviets a...

For three days, Grace Holloway was herself again.  Or the version she preferred to call herself. No headaches. No lost time. No strange notes. No waking with dirt beneath her nails or blood she could not explain. She slept eight hours each night. She attended a luncheon, chaired a committee meeting, sent flowers to a widow she barely knew, and was told twice she looked radiant. Grace almost laughed. Perhaps it had been stress. Hormones. Some temporary neurological storm. Perhaps Dr. Julian Vale had frightened her with his expensive calm and ominous questions. Perhaps all of it was passing. By the fourth evening, she was nearly certain. --- The package arrived at 6:40. No return address. Inside was a single cream card. Same time next week. The others adore you. Nothing else. Grace stood in her foyer for a long time. Then, despite every rational instinct, she dressed. Not elegantly. Automatically. As if following remembered instructions her conscious mind had never learned. --- The t...

Three days after the church incident, Grace Holloway lost nearly six hours. She remembered leaving work. Rain on the windshield. A voicemail from her mother. The smell of wet wool. Then - Music. Heavy bass, muffled through walls. Grace opened her eyes while lying on a velvet chaise lounge in a room lit red and gold. Her head throbbed. Bodies moved everywhere around her - half-dressed, masked, laughing too loudly, touching without tenderness. Champagne spilled. Someone cried and kept laughing. A man in a suit was on his knees praying or vomiting, or something else entirely. Grace could not tell which, until she noticed his head bobbing up and down. No one seemed surprised to see her awake. Someone passed and kissed her forehead. “Back from the dead,” he said. Grace sat upright too fast. She was clothed, mostly. Expensively, but incorrectly. One heel missing. Blouse buttoned wrong. Her hands trembled. There were dark stains on one cuff. Wine, she thought instantly. Blood, she the thought...

Thirty-one-year-old Grace Holloway was, by every public measure, a lovely woman. People used that word often. Lovely . Lovely smile. Lovely manners. Lovely home. Lovely to work with. Lovely to have at dinner. She remembered names, birthdays, dietary restrictions, anniversaries, children’s allergies, preferred wine, and exactly how long to hold eye contact before looking modestly away. She sent sympathy cards on thick cream stationery. She volunteered suggestions where photographs might be taken. She touched forearms when speaking, leaned in at the right moments, laughed without showing too much gum, and could make almost anyone leave a conversation feeling slightly improved. Grace had spent years becoming indispensable. No one noticed that no one really knew her. --- The headaches began in late October. A bright, needling pain behind the left eye. Brief at first. A pulse. A stitch. Then gone. She blamed backlit computer screens. Stress. Weather. Then came the lost minutes. Standing in ...

He sometimes said his greatest regret was not taking the old Trans-Siberian Railway eastward to Lake Baikal. Not because he cared much for bucket lists. He considered such catalogs as vanity with stationery, for those who had wasted decades suddenly writing down ten expensive ways to continue wasting time. No, what he regretted was more precise than that. He regretted never sitting in a dim canteen somewhere near Irkutsk while some broad-faced stranger lied to him magnificently over soup and vodka. He regretted never hearing the room laugh at a joke he only half understood. He regretted missing stories that would now likely never be told the same way again. His body had long since vetoed such ambitions. These days he was lucky if the month’s arithmetic ended with enough left over for prescriptions. If Melinda French Gates wished to finance a crippled Pennsylvanian’s global adventures, he remained open to discussion, but until then, conversations near Lake Baikal would have to survi...

  Collected Papers of Rev. Andrew Kaczmarek (1857–1903) Editor’s Preface (1903) The following documents were recovered from the personal effects of Rev. Andrew Kaczmarek, formerly of St. Rita of Cascia Church. They were found in a trunk beneath the floorboards of a rented room in Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, following the Reverend’s unexplained disappearance in October of 1857. The materials consist of letters, journal entries, copied fragments, and several loose pages of uncertain origin. Some show signs of water damage inconsistent with their place of storage. Several letters addressed to a Dr. Elias Whitcomb were found among the Reverend’s papers. Though properly dated and prepared for post, none bear evidence of having been mailed. No body was recovered. No formal inquiry was pursued. The Reverend’s last known movements placed him in the Allegheny foothills, traveling alone. Letter I June 3rd, 1857 My Dear Dr. Whitcomb, You once asked whether I had encountered, in...