New serial fiction from Rodger Jacobs… Part I is here

A human voice, distinctly male, called out from behind a walnut tree. I was momentarily distracted by a salamander crossing the trail – they are not very tasty, though certainly reliable for a quick jolt of energy. I scrambled behind a grove of eucalyptus trees after the man’s voice startled me with its urgency and near proximity.

“Abigail! Abigail? Where the hell did you go?”

Abigail. That must be the name of the female human who turned to stone when I spoke to her. She was in the brush where she fainted, lying very still and breathing in small shallow gasps. She had to be in shock.

“Hey!” He was looking directly at me, an odd-looking human male with massive shoulders. His backpack, blue shorts, and white shirt exactly matched those of the female. They could have been twins. He had an ugly face with primitive features fixed in a grimace suggesting one who is on the verge of defecating.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you!” I warned him when he stooped to pick up a large gray rock. “I’m likely to bite your ass and send you home with a story no one will ever believe.”

His large head darted around on those powerful shoulders; he had no neck to speak of, only a chin that dissolved into his clavicle.

“Who said that?” He was holding the rock high above his head, poised to strike, his unpleasant face red with anger and primal fear, frantically looking about for the source of the voice.

I took a hesitant step toward him. “I said it. What do you think? A tree said it? Have you ever seen a talking tree? Good God, you humans can be dumb asses sometimes.”

He dropped the rock clutched in his beefy hand and extended one thick leg in mid-stride before he realized that he had forgotten exactly how to put one foot in front of another. He collapsed in the brush next to his Abigail. They looked rather sweet laying there together and I would have stayed and savored the moment – humans are, after all, awfully tender when they are quiet and not moving about – but I had my own female to find before she, too, was struck down by something unforeseeable.

New serial fiction from Rodger Jacobs…

Her fresh scent lingered on a clump of dry brown manzanita at a point where the trail forked. Traveling north would take her back into the park and the rolling hills and rambling thicket but her journey was decidedly southern, away from the wilderness and toward the human dens. If she got anywhere near the winding paved roadways, the hot asphalt and the careening steel carriers that transported humans from one den to the next, her path would be cut short. I would probably find her at the side of the road, lying in a patch of dry brush waiting to die.

I know more about humans than most coyotes have the right or privilege to know. I once lived among them. I can speak their language but only to a select few. I know their customs and I know their ways. If I was going to find her, I would have to go back into their world again. Their hunting and grazing field is large, hemmed in one edge by the sand-blown Land of the Ancestors and the other by the vast body of water they call an ocean.

A human appeared on the trail below me, a young female wearing short blue pants that exposed her tan white legs and a shirt that barely cupped her swaying bulbous breasts. She wore a backpack and a look of fixed determination on her sweaty brow. I stepped forward quietly.

“Excuse me,” I said in my most polite tone. “Will that trail take me to Los Feliz Boulevard?”

Her eyes rolled into the back of her head as if she had been thunderstruck, she opened her painted lips as if to speak but no words came forth, and she collapsed in the brush. This is what normally happens when I try to talk to humans.

Rodger Jacob’s noir parody serial enters the final two thrilling episodes!

It was then that the ground trembled with a vengeance. At first I heard a loud slam that I mistook for the steel loading ramp of a delivery truck smacking the asphalt. You’re familiar with that sound, right? But there was no delivery truck in sight and suddenly the sky itself began to shake or perhaps it was the ground below my feet that had suddenly abandoned all natural laws and began churning like quicksand. It was an earthquake, alright, one mother of a shaker that would bring down the rafters of the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel, killing my girl Zivi in the process, but I would only learn this way after the fact, after my own body was laid out on a slab in the L.A. morgue with a bunch of other stiffs who suddenly got chatty. They knew all about Zivi. They knew all about me, more maybe than I knew about myself. Did you know, for instance, that I was a cop? A narcotics agent, I’ve been told. And that girl in the bar? The one who caused all of this ruckus in the first place? Well, she was a quarry of mine and I had her cornered like a canary in a coal mine until she slipped a hallucinogenic compound in my cocktail while I had my eyes trained on the black midget and the tall albino, all dead now at the hands of the man wielding the killer typewriter.

Or were they real at all?

The earthquake. That’s the only thing that’s certain. The earthquake had really happened.

Previously…

“I’m Officer West,” he said. “I’m with the Lemuel Pitkin Department of Apologies, more specifically from Superintendent Maria Wyeth’s office in the division of Anti-Trust and Ape and Essence, if you understand.”

I smiled. “I do understand. Do you have a cigarette?”

“No. I don’t smoke.”

I squinted into the harsh sunlight. It was white and punishing on the eyes. Whatever happened to radiant gold sunshine or was that merely the stuff of novels and nursery rhymes? “If you don’t smoke then you’re no good to me, Officer West. Step aside.”

“No. Wait.” He shuffled on his large feet to block my passage. “I have a message for you from Mr. Dunne, Mr. John Gregory Dunne.”

I found a cigarette butt in my coat pocket and fished it out, lit it with my lucky red Bic. “He’s dead, died a few years ago. True Confessions, great L.A. noir book.”

Officer West snorted. “Be that as it may, he requested that you deliver a message. To his wife.”

I laughed. “Are you kidding? You got the wrong guy. I don’t know Joan Didion.”

“The message is,” West persisted, “that he’s sorry. Plain and simple, Mr. Maker: I’m sorry. How you deliver the message is entirely up to you but you have been entrusted with it and any violation of that trust is considered treason, which may or may not result in your execution. Do you understand me?”

“As clear as Kafka,” I muttered through a swirl of smoke.

Previously…

We’re in the home stretch of our 10 part flash fiction series by Rodger Jacobs…

I should explain that the Phantom Typewriter is not a person, per se. Of course, I would be getting ahead of myself if I said that so I won’t say it. According to police reports here’s what happened in the minutes between 2:53 PM, when I was laying out cold like stone statuary in the bar parking lot, and 3:18 PM when I was roused out of my coma by two of the LAPD’s finest:

Someone or some thing wielding an 11-pound Smith-Corona Wordsmith 200 typewriter suddenly arrived on the scene. The black midget who was crouched over me with the handgun in my face was the first to go, his forehead crushed into the sidewalk with the sharp edge of the typewriter keyboard. They found the amputee bludgeoned to death in his wheelchair near the dart board, the lifeless skull of the albino oozing blood and brain matter on the floor nearby. Poor Evelyn. I don’t even want to say what happened to her except to add that she had two blue eyes: one blew that way, the other blew that way. But to tell you that would be a lie. Evelyn had coal-black eyes … or haven’t you been paying attention to the narrative?

They haul me down to the East Hollywood Station with me feeling like three kinds of camel shit wrapped in Armenian bread and grilled on an open flame. They have questions. Lots and lots of questions. And I have no answers that seem to please them or make their greasy lunch easier to digest. A bunch of strange people in a strange bar in East Hollywood got bludgeoned to death by someone toting a typewriter as an instrument of death. What the hell did I care?

“Here’s the strange thing,” one of the detectives in the interrogation room said to me. “We ran the serial number of that typewriter through several databases …”

“We have some terrific databases,” the other detective chirped. Sunday school flunkie. Doing his “civic duty” as a cop. I hate those types more than the redneck Rodney King-beating bastards.

“And that typewriter comes up as a no-match,” the detective lingering in the doorway said. “That Smith-Corona Wordsmith 200 typewriter that was used to beat five people to death was, apparently, never manufactured. It’s a Phantom Typewriter.”

That was the moment I decided to buy a typewriter and become a writer. Providence had spoken. But I would be dead before I could make good on the pledge.

Part 6 | Part 5 | Part 4 | Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1

Part 6: The Phantom Typewriter Appears

Why did I run? Well, I’ve gotta assume that any broad who’s holding a piece on me has a hideout on her somewhere. I hit the door like a stallion out the gate, all bang and bravado and potential broken bones. It’s nothing like how it looks in a John Wayne movie. First of all, every fiber in my shoulder sang out in a perfectly unison chorus of “What in the hell have you done …?” And then the back of my neck added: “Motherfucker!”

I ate a chunk of the hot asphalt when I fell, my pedaling feet tangled in the pink leash attached to a gray mutt of a poodle, said leash attached to a stout and balding guy in Bermuda shorts and a tan Corona T-shirt, a wet stogie parked in the corner of his mouth, black Ray-Bans shielding what were no doubt beady eyes. I’d bet anything his name was Louie and he was a minor rackets player but liked to boast to his friends, minor players in the grand design themselves, that he was a made man.

Suddenly I was one with the asphalt. The hot earthy smell exploded into my lungs moments before my incisors were scraped of their enamel by the concrete. There was the sensation of one hundred wasps peeling the skin away from my chin with their stingers. My eyes rolled back into some unexplored chasm of my cranium.

“We’re tired of it!” a shrill and tiny voice shouted. It was the black midget. He was crouched over me with the muzzle of some kind of handgun looking awfully comfortable in my face. “You are fumigating the universe with your mind essence!”

That was the moment I passed out. It was the same moment, I would later learn, that the Phantom Typewriter appeared.

Part 5 | Part 4 | Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1

Crumbling Slowly Part 5: At the Philosopher’s Ball

It’s funny how sound travels in a crowded room. There you are, engaged in your own conversation while stray bits of speech and white noise drip into your ears. “How is Artie?” someone says with a growl while the cue ball sinks the red number-eight into the right corner pocket with a bang, a thud, and a low roll as the ball travels down the ramp. Brenda Lee screeches on the jukebox; the amputee in the wheelchair must have dropped the two-bits in the box to make that happen. But the voices raised in argument are the voices that always arrest your full attention.

“Only the dead know Buddha!” the black dwarf unexpectedly shouted. I tore my eyes away from Evelyn to consider the sharp voice.

The tall albino jabbed his pool cue down to the floor. “I’m sick and tired of you polluting the universe with your abstract philosophy. Screw Spinoza and Nietzsche. You got a problem with me, motherfucker, you address it directly, and not in the form of abstract philosophy!”

“This kind of talk always bores me,” Evelyn whispered into my ear. Her lips were so close to me I could feel the heat from the hot maple syrup she poured over her pancakes that morning. Something hard and cold and metal tickled my ribs but not in a funny way. She nearly took my breath away.

“Let’s take a walk, sailor,” she said, thrusting the muzzle between two emaciated rib bones. “We need to talk about Spinoza and Nietzsche. Just the two of us.”

I spun on the stool and grabbed the wrist that held the gun. I squeezed tight, as tight as I could, full of venom and fury and images of my landlord’s face imploring payment for the past due rent – three months now — and I heard the frail bones protest and begin to break. Her face turned three shades of red in as many seconds. I seized the gun and held it at my side, not sure what to do with it, and walked briskly to the exit. I never walked so fast in my life.

Part 4

Serialized flash fiction by Rodger Jacobs… updated every Monday

Crumbling Slowly 4: Hector Escobar

The remote control for the TV was resting on the bar top next to a jar of cocktail onions and a stack of napkins. “Here, I’ll show you what I mean, “she said. “Have you ever heard of a man named Hector Escobar?”

I popped a handful of peanuts into my mouth. “Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of the man, no.”

“He has a nice home in Holmby Hills. What do you think is happening to Hector Escobar right now?”

I sipped my Maker’s Mark and shrugged indifferently. “I dunno. He’s having a colonoscopy? A guy named Hector Escobar sounds like he needs a colonoscopy. I have visions of undigested carne asada and chunks of green salsa in his colon. It’s not a good prognosis.”

“Do you want to know about Hector Escobar or not?”

“Rock on.”

Evelyn grabbed the remote and clicked on the TV impatiently. It flared to life.

Breaking News

Holmby Hills

Helicopter shots of a raging house fire and the pilot communicating with the retards at the anchor desk through that damn microphone filter thing in his helmet.

“That,” Evelyn turned to me slowly, “is Hector Escobar’s house. We did that. The Moss Foundation did that. Sadly, Hector Escobar did not make it out alive but society as we know it is this much further away from slipping into entropic destruction.”

She watched the hungry fire devour the luxurious home on the TV screen and her eyes positively glowed like jewels.

Part 3

Crumbling Slowly Down to the Ocean Part 3: The Moss Foundation

The bar smelled of stale beer, piss, and disinfectant. A black dwarf with an eye patch and a hell of a bank shot was shooting pool with a tall, lanky albino dressed all in white. The pool table was positioned awkwardly near the entrance to the men’s room; the green felt was worn through and almost totally degraded. An old man in a wheelchair, his left leg lopped off just above the knee, sat in a far corner nursing a beer and quietly watching the dwarf and the albino with a suspicious gaze, as if he expected all hell to break loose at any moment.

“Care for some company?” Evelyn repeated. “I have the entire afternoon off and I haven’t been to the museum in years.”

I had to get to know her a little better first; in this part of Hollywood, jumping into a car with a stranger, no matter how attractive and appealing the imagination of the libido can make it sound, can be counterproductive to one’s attempts to remain above ground. Just ask the unclaimed bodies resting in shallow graves up in the Angeles National Forest.

“What do you do for a living?” I motioned the silent bartender for another round.

“I work for the Moss Foundation in Santa Monica,” she said, then ran the tip of her pink tongue across her crimson lips.

“Never heard of ‘em.”

“We’re a think tank, privately funded. We’re concerned with the idea of entropy, the tendency of energy in a fixed system to run down.”

“So you sit around and think about entropy all day?” I tried to keep a smile from playing on my lips but intellectual bullshit always makes me laugh.

“It’s not terribly amusing,” she said, batting her lashes quickly. “Machines cannot go on forever, you know. The whole process that keeps our modern society afloat – technology, capitalism, industrialism – is subject to thermodynamic entropy, which creates waste, and communication entropy, which creates silence.”

“You’re waiting for an apocalypse,” I said.

“We’re trying to forestall it. Or at least slow its progress.”

Part 2

CRUMBLING SLOWLY TO THE OCEAN 2: THE SCREAMING POPE

Since she offered to buy me a drink I made it a top shelf selection (or what passed for top shelf in this dive): Maker’s Mark and a water back. She didn’t flinch when the bartender gave her the total, simply rolled a twenty off a wad of bills thick enough to choke a Santa Monica Boulevard streetwalker with and tossed it at the guy.

“You live in the neighborhood?” Evelyn said after introducing herself. Her voice was laced with whiskey and cigarettes and maybe something else I didn’t want to know about.

“Here?” I laughed. “No. I’m going to see a show at the MOMA.”

“You’re awfully far from the art museum,” she rasped with raised eyebrows, sipping her Canadian Club.

“I got thirsty.” I knocked back the Maker’s Mark, let it scorch and claw at my throat for a moment.

The bartender rolled a shot glass full of peanuts toward me.

“It’s a Francis Bacon exhibit, British artist, dead for awhile now,” I said while biting into a peanut shell. “There’s one painting I want to see, been dying to see it for some time. It’s called Study After Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent, done in 1953; it’s sometimes called The Screaming Pope. He captures the cry of Christ on the cross through the shrieking image of Pope Innocent, sitting upright in his papal throne as if in an electric chair, everything shining golden and his jaw is dropped open in an eternal scream of damnation.”

“Torture and eternal damnation,” she said, coal-black eyes locked onto mine. “Sounds like my idea of a good time. Care for some company?”

Part 1 |