Michelle M. Shows No Fear

Description:

Haunted by memories of her murdered twin, Keely Morrison is convinced suicide is her only ticket to eternal peace. But in death, she discovers the afterlife is nothing like she expected. Instead of peaceful oblivion or a joyful reunion with her sister, Keely is trapped in a netherworld on Earth with only a bounty-hunting reaper and a sarcastic demon to show her the ropes.

When the demon offers Keely her ultimate temptation--revenge on her sister's killer--she must determine who she can trust. Because, as Keely soon learns, the reaper and demon have been keeping secrets and she fears the worst is true--that her every decision changes how, and with whom, she spends eternity.

Chapter One:

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for they are with me.

I repeated my version of the psalm as I watched the ribbon of blood drift from my wrist. I’d hoped it would be a distraction—something to stop me from wondering what my sister’s dying thoughts had been. Exhaling slowly, I let the emptiness consume me.

Jordan had kept my secrets and I had kept hers. In the end, it came down to just one secret between us that took her life. Now, it would take mine. I should have said something, but nothing I said or did now could bring her back or make anyone understand what she meant to me.

Are you here, Jordan? Are you with me? Tell me about heaven...

I told myself Jordan was gone, never coming back, but her memories continued to haunt me. I had no idea if there even was an afterlife. If God existed, I was convinced he had given up on me. Not once did I sense he’d heard a single one of my prayers. I wasn’t asking for the world—I only wanted to know if my sister was safe and at peace. What was so hard about that?

She should still be here. It wasn’t fair.

I’d been the difficult one—much more than Jordan. For a while, I’d even gotten into drugs. Mom and Dad had worried I’d get Jordan into drugs, too. But I wouldn’t. Not ever. Besides, that part of my life had been over long before Jordan’s death. A small gargoyle tattoo on my left shoulder was all that remained of my previous lifestyle.

Mom and Dad started treating me differently after Jordan’s funeral two months ago. She and I were twins, so I understood how hard it was for them to look at me and not see her. Sometimes, they wouldn’t look at me at all. Mom went to the psychiatrist, but no one asked if I needed to talk to someone about what happened. No one asked if I needed sleeping pills or antidepressants. Yeah, sure. Don’t give the former addict pills of any sort.

Not one person saw the all-consuming suffering that gnawed at my soul. Why couldn’t anyone see? Jordan had been more than my sister—she’d been my Samson, my strength. I would have done anything for her, and yet, I’d failed her. I wasn’t the one who’d killed her, but I might as well have been. How could I ever live with that? My heart had a stillness to it since her death.

I shall fear no evil.

I couldn’t very well recite the first part of Psalm 23 because it said I shall not want, and I did want. I wanted to go back in time. I wanted my sister back. Clearly, goodness and mercy were never going to be part of my life ever again. In my mind, I saw myself walking through the iron gates of hell with demons cackling gleefully all around.

I didn’t want to die. Not really. I was just tired and didn’t know of another way to stop the pain. Doctors removed a bad appendix. Dentists pulled rotten teeth. What was I supposed to do when my very essence hurt, when the cancer I’d come to call depression made every decent memory agonizingly unbearable?

Before I’d gotten down to cutting my wrist (I managed to only cut one), I’d taken a few swigs of Dad’s tequila—the good kind he kept in the basement freezer. I’d used another swig or two to chase down the remainder of Mom’s sleeping pills in the event I failed to hit an artery or vein. Then I’d set the bottle on the ledge of the tub in case I needed further liquid encouragement. Instead of using a knife or a razor, I attached a cutting blade to my Dad’s Dremel. The Dremel was faster, I reasoned. More efficient.

It would have been easier to OD, I suppose. But I felt closer to my sister this way, to suffer as she’d suffered.

I recited the line from Psalms 23 again. It had become my personal mantra.

The words resonated in my parents’ oversized bathroom. I’d chosen theirs because the Jacuzzi tub was larger than the tub in the hall bathroom. Jordan and I used to take bubble baths together in this same tub when we were little.

Innocence felt like a lifetime ago. I searched the bathroom for bubble bath but came up short. Soap might have made the laceration hurt more so it was probably just as well. Besides, the crimson streaming from my wrist like watercolor on silk was oddly mesmerizing.

The loneliness inside proved unrelenting, and the line from the psalms made me feel better. I prayed for the agony inside me to stop. I argued with God. Pleaded. But after all was said and done, I just wanted the darkness to call me home.

I tried not to think of who would find my body or who’d read the note I’d left. I blamed myself not only for failing Jordan, but for failing my parents, too.

My lifeline to this existence continued to bleed out into the warm water. Killing myself had been harder than I’d imagined. I hadn’t anticipated the searing fire racing through my veins. I reached for the tequila with my good arm but couldn’t quite manage. Tears welled in my eyes.

Part of me foolishly felt Jordan was here. The other part feared she wasn’t.

Give me a sign, Sis. Just one.

I imagined seeing my parents at my funeral—their gaunt faces, red-eyed and sleepless. How could I do this to them? Wasn’t the devastation of losing one child enough?

No. Stop. A voice in my head screamed. Don’t do this. Don’t. Please...

I shifted my body, attempted to get my uncooperative legs under me. I could see the phone on my parents’ nightstand. I could make it that far. Had to. The voice was right. I didn’t want to do this. I felt disorientated, dizzy. Darkness crept along the edges of my vision. Focusing became difficult. A sweeping shadow of black caught my attention. Someone stood in the bathroom—not my sister. A man. Had I managed to call 911? I couldn’t remember getting out of the tub. And why’d I get back in? Did I use a towel?

Mom is going to be pissed when she sees the blood I’ve tracked all over the bedroom carpet.

“I’m sorry,” I told the man in black.

“It’s okay, Keely. Don’t be afraid.” Not my father’s voice. It was softer, with a hint of sorrow. Distant. Fleeting. Later, I’d feel embarrassed about this, but for now I was safe from the nothing I’d almost become. My teeth clattered from the chill. My eyelids fluttered in time with my breaths. The tub water had turned the color of port wine. The ribbons, the pretty, red watercolor ribbons were gone.

Dull gray clouded my sight.

A voice whispered to me, and my consciousness floated to the surface again.

“—okay, Keely.”

Cold. So cold.

“I’m right here.”

There was no fear in me as the man bent forward, his face inches from mine. He was my father’s age, and yet strangely older. His eyes were so...blue, almost iridescent. The irises were rimmed in a fine line of black, and the creases etched at the corners reminded me of sunbeams as he gave me a weak smile. The oddly. Dressed. Paramedic. A warm hand reached into the water and cradled mine. My fingers clutched his. I sighed, feeling myself floating, drifting. Light—high and intense exploded before me. No! Too much. Too much! I shuddered and labored to catch my breath, but it wouldn’t come.

Finally, the comfort of darkness rose to greet me.

Links:

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Tim Minchin's Storm the Animated Movie

Taken Out to the Wash

Taken Out to the Wash

A Critique of the short film “The Laundromat” by Timothy Melville

By Davin Kimble

“The Laundromat” by Timothy Melville is an interesting take on the “guy gets duped by a pretty woman” story. Men are fallible. We focus sometimes on what we want or what we expect to happen to us instead of seeing what’s right in front of our faces. At least once in our lives a beautiful woman takes us all for a ride, and if we are lucky we’ll get the chance to take that trip more than once. In this story a normal human interaction that can often take months to play out is a lesson told in a few short minutes. Don’t trust a big butt and a smile.

The scene is a Laundromat. The players, an attractive young lady, an attractive young man and an oblivious dude in the background; the snow globe is a gun. The gun changes everything, the gun twists the plot and gives our antagonist some sense of power over her victim; her poor dumbstruck tango. Here we have a woman, standing in a place one might expect a woman to be standing, reading a magazine you might expect any woman doing her wash to be reading, in a place you’d expect a woman to be. The setup is perfect, the visuals in place. We are all thinking, “romantic moment ahead”, grab your tissues or heartstrings or whatever you pull out during these boy meets girl movie moments. But the gun, now the gun changes everything.

It’s a brilliant if dangerous scheme but it works on this guy. But why wouldn’t it? I would be thinking, “There is no way I am handing this gun over to this chick. It’s obvious she put it there”. I would have at the very least unloaded it first. But this guy … this guy is seeing what he wants to see. All he is thinking is, “this is a chance to get to know a beautiful woman” to his detriment. The story stresses this. He continues to do what she asks thinking she is flirting with him. He dances, unsure of himself. He hands over his wallet and makes excuses for the value of his watch, unsure of himself. He has no weapons, no power. Even had I made the mistake of handing over the gun I would have, I believe, come out of that situation a whole lot better, or dead, but I wouldn’t have danced to her tune. She would have had to dance to mine … or kill me. Women love a man with a gun after all but what this guy missed is that he didn’t have the gun anymore, she did and he had no other weapons to work with.

In a way this is a very empowering feminist tale of the balance of power. This woman, slight of build, seemingly soft and potentially vulnerable has balls bigger than a chimpanzee. Buy itself being ballsy is a hell of a leg up, but having a gun to boot, now there is a tipping point in the balance of power that cannot be denied. But she continues to play coy, sweet, teasing him along with a promise that only he believes is real. She holds all of the cards and she is the only one who realizes it. How easily he hands over his wallet, his watch and his heart if he had been given another half a chance. He even offers to go along with her as a hostage, handing her all of his cards, his “guns”, knives and his dignity. He had no guns left. He’s lucky she left him his manhood. Her position and his desire set him up to be robbed in a public Laundromat.

I think that there are lessons in this tale that speak to the human condition. For instance, what about the guy reading the paper in the back? Did he not even hear the word gun? Why on earth did he not look around now and then? Who sits there never once taking in their environment? Too many people is the answer. This guy is the representation of the ignorant bliss so many walk around in. He witnessed a brazen robbery but the sad part is he will never know it. The robbed man witnessed an brilliant scheme but he will never recognize it. I can hear him telling the story. I can see him thinking on it wistfully, wondering if he’ll ever see her again, longing for it, masturbating to it. She was right. Woman love a man with a gun. They love a man with confidence, a sense of brazen fearlessness, a depth of focus and an innate awareness. This film showed me how you can visually realize a depth of emotion, character and sense of story in a very short frame of time. You can leave your audience wondering what came before and what might come after. You can teach them to wonder who these people are and encourage them to create the rest of the story to their little hearts contentment.

The Laundromat

Love Actually

This is a comment to an article I read in The Atlantic some years ago Read the article here.

Love Actually

The Response follows.

There is a huge deep and dark hole in this whole discussion. There is a balance that no one really seems to care to talk much about. In this article, and it would seem this book, everyone is focusing on the plight and woes of teenage girls. No one considers the other side of that dynamic, the teenage boys. And that, is truly a bigger part of the problem than all of your nincompoop about these girls.

But, since you brought it up, allow me to address the young ladies. On the whole they have completely discarded the FRIEND part of the boyfriend experience. They want a boy who will fall into all of the fantasies of the boyfriend idea. Twilight teaches our young girls that the angry, loner cute weird guy with a whole family of issues is the one that you should skip school for, the one you should chase all over the northern territories, the one you should place yourself in mortal peril, even commit suicide for because nothing is more important than love. These girls all expect some tall, dark and handsome to wrap them up in this fantasy. The truth is, that guy is usually the one who cajoles, seduces and threatens your daughters into those locker rooms in the first place. He is the prime beef cake and the girls are expected to compete for his attention. Hollywood teaches them this. The very tales you cite in your piece as bringing our young womens head out of the gutter are social lies that give them no more freedom from attachment to a man than the 1950's did. And with attachment to a man comes sex.

And the boys are entirely rounded up in sex as a thought. At 12-15 years old our young men have less than no guidance when it comes to relationship issues. Things are handled, in boy world, with violence of action whether it be fighting or fucking; the most direct route to conflict resolution is a physical one. Maybe if the angst ridden vampire boy in Twilight had received some communications classes he could have just told the stupid mortal girl what the deal was in the first place. Instead he moaned, and whined and enticed her and led her on. And people completely missed that he's a VAMPIRE, and evil being bent on human destruction. On one hand boys are still taught to respect a women and treat them with kindness and care; but on the other we are also taught that there are things a woman can't handle and you should keep them out. The real sticker is, and it begins around junior high when the girls "harass the boys with their endless flirtations" is that the women control the whole game. Just because it may seem to you that we didn't notice, or care, we did. Those of us you shoved aside in high school so you could go blow Donny rock star in the bathroom. Even if you had no intention of blowing him, why did you follow him in there in the first place? It's unseemly. But they did, we watched the girls do these things. What the boys are taught, by these ceaseless images of masculine attractiveness is that unless you are one of these guys, hot, rich, sexy, you will never be happy. And as one of those guys, the girls are going to expect you virile.

There was a time in my middle and early high school years when I believed that the only way to have a girlfriend was to make a friend first. I made a lot of friends but I never had a girlfriend. I was told that you had to woo a woman. I was told you had to do little things to let her know how much you cared. It would be a long time before I had a girlfriend. I watched the other guys, the guys I knew were jackasses, get the girls. Being a friend to females got you nothing and I soon learned that making them desire YOU changed the game. I became the desirable man and I believed I had it all together, and I was still in high school. During those years we had a lot of sex with a lot of girls and not one moment of it was forced or coerced. There was little conversation from our parents about sex at all so what we learned we learned from experimenting, and in my generation we experimented all the time, every weekend and twice during school if we could. But it was all to learn the please the ladies, who were coming for the sex anyway.

There is something in this idea that these girls are the only ones deluded here, that the fantasy is all theirs and when they stray from it they become victims. It is also the burden of the boy who doesn't know what to do with the information he's given any more than she does. Think of that kid who stood by and watched the girl he loved throw herself into the midst of those wolves in the first place. Maybe he tried to talk to her, but would she have heard him? Her message is follow the meat, his message is lure the girl. No wonder they come to some physical head, for good or worse, and it's usually worse.

The voice of the boy is a mute one, shrouded in violence and secrecy. yet we are held responsible for the state of the girls that ignore us. Because there is a sex culture that borders on the destructive, it does not mean that the onus lies with the male. For every bald faced jerk out there, there is a man just struggling to figure out what the hell women really want. And for every woman that makes a male friend there is one who simply wants to spend some time naked in a locker room.

The boys, and we all know boys, are putting it where they can put it and they are not thinking about it because no one told them they should. They have no control over it because no one told them how. The boys aren't to blame here, the boys, like the girls, are lost in the same sea of emotion and misinformation we were lost in. And those candid conversations about sex they are so upset by are the ones we need to be having with them. We have to step in where everyone else is failing and talk to our kids about the realities of sex and relationships. I promise you, the "Boyfriend" culture isn't going to fly just because women are having a change of heart. No one thought to ask the boys if they wanted to engage in a new sort of game? What if we want to focus on education, physical fitness, skills, talents, and power that you'll some to suck up when we're thirty.

4th in Photo's

Hey ya'll. I hope your 4th of July has been a great one. Before I give you my little bit of my day I want to ask you to do something for me. Read this. Remember why we celebrate this day.

The Declaration of independence

And now without further delay. Enjoy a bit of small town celebration.

I am Ready to go.

All the Fire Departments from 4 counties were in attendance.
So glad we have them. Hate to ever have to call them.
Thanks guys for all you do.

The prerequisite band.

These guys were pretty good.

And the Flag Corps!

Our local Motorcycle Club.

These guys rock.

This guy REALLY ROCKS!

I salute you sir!

Dublin Represent!

American History right there.

Remember where where we came from.

Tiny milk truck.

This is Dairy Country!

USA! Who was this?

Damn my camera sucks.

Support Local Roller Derby!

You'd better, or I'll come after you!

My baby celebrating.

Celebrate baby!

The Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy. 

It is a part of our history ... sigh, like it or not.

Horsies!

Happy Independence Day!