CANDLELIT CHRONICLES: HISTORIC HAUNTS

June 18 and Free Read wc871

Many years ago I read Norman Mailer's book The Executioner's Song, a sort of fictionalized account of the life and execution by Utah firing squad of convicted killer Gary Gilmore. I found it intriguing because at that time, as now, Utah is the only state maintaining this particular execution method. Now, life once again imitates art:





http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-firing-squad-20100618,0,668...





A convicted Death Row inmate was executed earlier this morning, at his request by firing squad, allowed because his conviction occurred before the law was changed to use the method of lethal injection so popular in other states.  This is Utah's first execution by firing squad in 14 years.





         I've been struggling with a gum infection for 15 days; think it's the kind of infection usually termed “ear,” but in my case it has lodged below a back molar and is paining my gum, mouth, and jaw. The first two days of it-June 4 and 5-I had a painful canker sore on my tongue. Mostly the problem is it makes my thinking patchy and vague, and causes a constant low-grade irritability and inability to concentrate. Got to get in gear; the 2nd June Mad Dash starts tonight and I've committed again to 500 words/daily blogging and 500 words/daily on the novel Finding the Abandoned Child. I didn't blog on Tuesday but I wrote 500+ on the novel; Wednesday and Thursday I blogged, but wrote nothing on the novel. I am “struggling” in the Sequels Workshop, because it has turned out to be geared toward publication-which is fine, but not at all helpful to me. Plus with my incapacity for clear thinking these past two weeks nothing seems to make sense to me. Poor me LOL





Today's Free Read: Chapter One of Finding The Abandoned Child:





Chapter One





epigram:


“We all live in a Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine.”-The Beatles





         We were all asleep-almost all of us- when the event occurred that changed our lives. Only Pastor Janns, in our compound, was awake and alert, studying his endless progression of religious works in the study at the South angle of our pale stucco home. The Pastor slept very little, perhaps two to four hours per night, due to injuries he had suffered during the Big War twenty-two years earlier, when he was a very young man. Pains kept him awake, and rather than take laudanum, which he believed to be addictive, he read and studied all night.





         Mamma and I slept, as did my cousins Natay-lee and Jahro, boys of twelve and eleven, respectively. Mamma and I had taken the boys in when her sister Ja-lil-ah passed away last autumn season. Now that it had been a year, the boys had pretty much settled in, although once in a while we would be awakened by Jahro's muted weeping in the night-but not nearly as often as when they first appeared, when Natay-lee acted out, and Jahro cried all night, every night.





            Dawn slipped flat spatulate fingers across window sills and under the edges of curtains before the event that changed our city occurred. Only the cattle in the meadows atop the hilltop overlooking the harbor watched it happen: both sunrise and the event. They lowed quietly amongst themselves, looking down at the quiet fishing boats in the harbor bobbing on the sudden swells. They likely ignored the signs out to sea: the ashy slate colour of the firmament at the Eastern horizon; the booming surf just below that; the pounding from under the ocean as a tectonic plate shifted and resettled itself. The cattle weren't affected and so they didn't care. In their own creaturish way, they recognized that the dawn brought their milkers, and so they lowed patiently while they awaited relief.





          Pastor Janns had just reached down a text on the Apocalypse and settled back into his reading chair at the study table by the window when he perceived the rumble. At first he thought he must have fallen asleep, and tilting the chair, had almost fallen and righted himself; then he realized he was not asleep at all and had not been. The rumble came from outdoors, not near the Complex, but somewhere just outside the City of Mellaigch. He slapped the book closed, jumping from the chair and this time in actuality tipping it over, running out of the Study and down the hall to the Northeast angle, where my mother had her suite. He banged on her sitting-room door until she awoke and sped through from her bedroom to open it.





         “Washundra! Awake! Something's happening-Apocalypse!”





         My mother doubted that, but clearly it must be a serious imminent event to disturb Pastor Janns to this extent. She tightened the sash on the blue silk robe she had already donned and opened the sitting-room door, pushing past the Pastor and rushing down the hall toward my room, which was three doors down, also on the North wall, so that my views were all of the hills North of the City. Since I had become a light sleeper over the past seasons, due to my perceived need to protect my young orphaned cousins, I was already  awake and stepping through my doorway.





         “What is it, my Mother?”