I noticed all kinds of verb tense, grammar and punctuation errors from the previous posting of this story. I cleaned it up tonight after my weekly game of D&D. Here is a revised version of my fable The Used Car Salesman.
Month: September 2019
Story Fragment, Singing to Bees
I mentioned early in the book that Diana knew how to sing to bees, so here’s a singing scene…
After all the other humans turned in for the night, Diana walked with Borussa out to the bee hives. The bees too were settled in for the night, but a few milled about at the entrances. Borussa was wary of this place, for he didn’t much like being stung by bees, and so stood back a little while Diana approached the hives. After all the violence of the week, and missing her husband, she turned to the one thing that brought her peace and serenity. She took a deep breath, and then began to hum in the back of her throat, a peculiar kind of singing that few in the word had mastered. In this she produced several notes simultaneously, in harmony, and the bees, while deaf, picked up the vibrations in the air.
First they awoke from their rest, and then in twos and threes climbed out of the box hives, and then before long in bunches of ten or twenty, until the surface of the hives were covered with bees. In the moonlight it looked like ripples of water.
She increased and decreased pitch simultaneously, and the tempo of her song increased, and the bees took to flight and orbited about her, until she was like a planet with several rings, all illuminated by the stars and the moon.
The bees danced as she altered pitch, tempo, and rested one note while continuing the other. The rings broke up into semi-circles, and then a ray from each semi-circle to a pyramidal apex some five feet above her, like children wrapping a maypole. Later they swarmed into a ball eclipsing the moon from Diana’s sight, all holding onto each other and flapping their wings furiously.
The bees, in file, all twirled down and swirled about Diana like a tornado of buzzing insects, and then returned to their respective hives.
Borussa startled Diana out of meditation with a snort. The moon was already on its way down. She had lost hours while the bored pig dutifully stayed nearby to watch out for trouble. Diana realized her own fatigue, and went to pet Borussa on the head. “I’m sorry Borussa. You must be sleepy. Come on.”
The two returned to the house, and Kevin there in a long chair smoking a pipe. “I was beginning to wonder where you were off to, mother. Then I heard you singing.” Borussa quietly trotted off to the barn.
Diana walked over and kissed her son on his bald head. “Thank you for coming,” she said.
“What else would I do?”
“Yes I know. Codes of honor. You still made a choice to help.”
“Are you alright, mother?”
Diana yawned, “I just miss your father.”
“He’ll be back soon. No monster, or dragon, or army of orcs could stop him. He doesn’t know how to die. How about a pipe to help you sleep?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“How about a zoot?” He hopped up and embraced his mother, and blew a zoot on her cheek, and she chuckled and tapped her other cheek. “This side’s jealous.”
So Kevin blew a zoot on her other cheek, a high pitched, squeaky zoot, and it tickled terribly so that she pulled back reflexively. “You’ll wake everyone up,” she hissed with a smile.
She hugged her son and went to bed, and he stayed up until some insomniac birds began to sing their premature sun welcoming hymns.
Here comes the sun
It’s a bright new day
No it’s not. Shut up and sleep!
But here comes
Be Quiet!
Oh…
Another PDF Work-in-Progress of my book “Zootaloot”
The Download link is below.
I’m posting another update of my work-in-progress because I’ve made the acquaintance of a lovely lady who appreciates literature. I’m making it available to her to read at her leisure if she feels so inclined.
There’s been only a few pages since my last posting of the work-in-progress, as well as some revisions for sentence structure, spelling and verb tense. On days when I get a little writers block, I spend time editing for those things.
The aforementioned lady and I got to discussing the challenges of writing, and we exchanged some interesting thoughts. I’m getting fairly close to wrapping up the introductory segment of the novel, and I’ve debated just cleaning it up and releasing it as Book One. Partially because I anticipate editing a some 500 page book (if it gets that large) to be a monumental task (but of course it has been done by the great authors of the past). I figured it might be easier to take the scalpel to a 50-ish page book and tidy it up.
However, once I finish a Book One, the canon is established, and I may find myself wishing I added one thing or another to the beginning of the story. It’s not like I’m going to post it twice to Lulu.com saying “And here’s version 2.0 of Zootaloot Book One, with extra material.”
So with a little anxiety, I’m going to try to finish the whole thing and then publish it. If Tolkien can revise The Lord of the Rings through several drafts, then my work which pales in comparison can be done in the same way.
We also discussed how you sometimes learn things about characters as you create them. I didn’t anticipate the witch in the Foggy Swamp to be a petite pretty Ogre. At first I pictured her as a stereotypical withered hag. Nor did I anticipate her sticking her nose into the affairs of the world aside from brewing the cure to the Horn Rot. Now I had her using her powers to smite the rat who gave the the disease to the Rhino Men.
I didn’t anticipate Troy and Martin McDougal being friends. When I first thought of Martin, I imagined him as a try-hard outsider that would do anything to fit in, and so clung too much to Troy. I’m glad that changed. He’s a bit clumsy and eats a little too much, but otherwise he’s kind and sincere and loving, and I like that a lot better.
I Wrote a Fable, The Used Car Salesman
I was inspired to write a fable. Make of it what you will. You of course may disagree with the premise. That’s great, because the world would be boring if we all thought alike.
The Used Car Salesman
Consider a car that won’t pass inspection. Vacuum it out, spray some new car smell. Put a coat of paint on it. Add a racing stripe. Reset the Check Engine light. Pre-tune the radio to something with a lot of bass and crank the volume to add to the excitement. The dash board looks pretty with the vinyl polished up. The door handles work. The wheels roll on the axles.
Now sell it.
It won’t just get you here to there but it will get you there in style. It’s sexy. It’s fun! That grinding in the wheel bearing is a feature. It has character and so will you! It’s been around and you can now be around as well! Picture yourself, burning up the highway in this hot, sexy car, the wind in your hair, the stereo blaring. That blast of oily smoke from the exhaust is to let the world know that you’re there! In this car, you are a person to be reckoned with.
And it sells. Time and time again, people buy similar cars, because the sale is so good. That first day driving it, the second day, maybe the first couple of weeks, fabulous. They feel stylish. They feel sexy. That grinding wheel bearing really is character! That blast of oily smoke from the exhaust let’s the world know that they’re there! In this car, they are a person to be reckoned with.
Then the check engine light comes on, and its too expensive to fix. So they buy another one.
Used car salesmen are ready to sell them another one, because it’s all they have to sell. And people are buying because they’re not buying the car, but the sales pitch itself. It becomes the norm…
A man named Fred was curious about selling cars, and had a few decent cars to sell. They cars were not perfect. But he changed the oil every 5,000 miles, and fixed those things he could fix. He even upgraded the fuel systems to make them more efficient, and installed good struts to absorb the shock of traveling, and the wheels were always aligned. The cars had manufacturer defects, and occasionally he neglected to check the tire pressure, because he’s not perfect. The basic paint was sufficient, and he saw no need to upgrade the less important features. On the whole, he took good care of the cars, so by any objective measurement they were worth buying. He was acutely aware that the cars had some problems, and he was honest about their flaws, so who would want to buy them?
Nonetheless, with great difficulty, Fred sold a few cars. He thought he was happy to sell his good quality used cars. Then he fell prey to a few scams. Then someone wrote a bad check. They kept bringing the cars in on the pretense of warranty service, even when it didn’t apply. The finance company downgraded his business. All who bought his cars would drove them into the ground. They wouldn’t change the oil, or failed to shift before red-lining, or aligned the wheels, or repair the struts. They picked the manufacturer’s defects he tried to correct, posted about in all the newspapers, and made it a miserable task for him to sell cars. Each of his customers tried to ruin him, and he despaired of selling cars. Not all customers, said his friends, would try to harm him. But in his experience, they did.
Fred got out of the used car business for a while. He ran a plant nursery and bred dogs. These things brought him joy. He could have bred plants and dogs for the rest of his life, but a small part of him missed selling cars.
Then in time Fred made the acquaintance of some used car salesmen. They met at a gentleman’s club every Tuesday to drink Martinis and boast of their sales. He saw the joy they got from selling their cars, and others in buying them. And he talked about how difficult it was for him to sell his cars.
So the used car salesmen check out Fred’s cars, and they’re amazed he’s not selling them. They’re good, reliable cars. He just needs to make a good sales pitch. After many months of frustration, he realized that its often the case that folks with the least to sell were the best at selling. He was accused by a few of feeling entitled to other people’s money, but he wasn’t. On occasion he figured it would make sense, if he sold quality cars, to be doing better than folks who do not. But life isn’t fair, and the reality was that people bought the sales pitch and not the cars themselves.
Fred eventually learned the sales pitch. No longer did he give a fair and polite introduction to the cars he had for sale. He learned to speak lies and believe them: It won’t just get you here to there but it will get you there in style. It’s sexy. It’s fun! That grinding in the wheel bearing is a feature. It has character! It’s been around and you can now be around as well! That blast of oily smoke from the exhaust is to let the world know that you’re there! In this car, you are a person to be reckoned with.
Fred sold the good cars. But he was sad to find that his customers continued to write bad checks, and drove the cars into the ground, and trashed his reputation with the car finance company, and bring the car back on bogus warranty claims.
In despair, he took the remaining profits from those cars and invested in junk cars that do not pass inspection. He put a coat of paint on them, and sprayed some new car smell, and vacuumed the interior, and reset the Check Engine Light. He stopped maintaining them: no more struts for the bumpy road, to hell with the alignment that keeps the tires from wearing, and it mattered not if the fuel system was efficient. And he sold them.
Since Fred had not sold anything of value, nobody felt the need to sue him, or run him down on warranty claims (for there was no warranty), and since what he sold required no credit, his credit was not downgraded. He could just sell more junk cars. Customers would sometimes gripe about his cars, go to another used car salesman, and then come back when he made a sweet sales pitch.
In fact, as long as Fred got a little cash from the sale, he didn’t care much about anything at all. It didn’t matter if he sold cars, or who got hurt driving the bad ones. He got a buzz from the sale. He didn’t really feel that good, and he didn’t really feel bad. Nothing got him up much, but nothing got him down either. In time, to amuse himself, he figured he could sell turd sandwiches, and occasionally he did. His friends he met on Tuesdays snickered when he told them this, because they were selling turd sandwiches with their cars for years.
Fred realized all the hard work and maintenance he put into his used cars in the past was a waste of time, and settled into a life of clever sales pitches. He sold the sale, and not the cars, for there was nothing about the cars worth selling.
One day he sold a junk car and a turd sandwich to someone who had been screwed over one too many times, and that person caved in his skull with the rusty tire iron from the trunk of the car. The other salesmen discussed this over Martinis on Tuesdays, and thought not much of it. Each of them had known fellow used car salesmen who were killed in the same way and for same reason. As nothing really got them up or down, it was just passing news, and they went on discussing the sales they made the previous week.
The End
Story Fragment: The rats defeated, for now.
Here is more from my book in progress, “Zootaloot”.
The rats are defeated in a one-sided anti-climactic battle. More interesting than the battle is how the humans and animals work together. I’m also interested in the mystery left behind, and how it affects the protagonists of the story. I honestly don’t know what remains down in the rats’ fort. What did the sorcerer leave behind? How long with the rat skeletons stand there: decades, centuries? I also take joy in showing how the peoples of the Pig tribe celebrate victory, even as they struggle to not scratch at their poison ivy…
The Captain of the rat guard, in dismay, tossed his weapons, unbuckled the straps to his breast plate, and returned to running on all fours. He bolted for the deepest chamber, which was the Rat Sorcerer’s room. Up the dark tunnel behind him he could hear the screams and squeals of battle, and the reek of ferret wafted down the tunnel. The captain pounded on the door, “Master! Master! We’re beaten! Open the door! Master!” He then put his shoulder to the door, and popped in, and shut it behind him, trying to catch his breath. Here he found a nearly empty chamber with a carpet, the stones arranged in a portal, and the skeleton guards who immediately moved on him. He didn’t have a chance to squeal.
The few rats hiding in the cursed trees gave up the fight when their home was overrun with ferrets, and carefully slunk away. Now all the humans walked about the rock pile, examining the constructions of the rats, and their armors and weapons, and found it all very curious and sad. Kevin went about, listening for the suffering of still living rats, and found a few badly injured ones. He put them out of their misery, all except one who limped along with a broken leg and arm. For this one, he put on thick leather gloves and picked him up, and spoke with him.
“I can take away you pain.”
“Go spit, Hew Man!”
“What kind of talk is that?” With this he took out a vial of poppy oil, and fed the rat a drop.
The rat seemed to relax after a few seconds, and he questioned the creature further. “Who set this place up?”
“The sorcerer.”
“Which sorcerer?” Kevin set the rat down on some dry leaves, and it began to unbuckle its breastplate with its good arm. Kevin took off his gloves, and helped with the other side, impressed with the handiwork of rats.
“Ours,” said the rat.
“Where is he?”
“In his chamber no doubt, working spells while we all die.”
Tana stood nearby and listened to this exchange. Then amid the milling about of the other people, and the pigs eating dead rat, and the ferrets licking their wounds and lounging, she wandered over to the main entrance, and peered down into the darkness. The hole was large enough for her to crawl in on all fours, if she wanted to.
Diana happened to glance in Tana’s direction, and realized what Tana was considering. “Tana don’t go down there,” she said, and came up next to her. “What are you doing?”
“The rat sorcerer is down there. Kevin learned it from a hurt rat.”
Looking up at the moldy, accursed trees about the place, Diana didn’t like the thought of a sorcerer down in the rat den. “Then we’ll smoke him out.” With that she asked Carberry, Ferguson and the McDougals to fetch some deadwood and leaves. Troy heard this conversation and went to the entrance, and got on his knees next to Tana, looking into the entrance. He summoned a mild, glowing orb, and sent it down the tunnel.
They were impressed to see a well crafted passage, squarely cut, with shoring beams every so often, and this twisted away out of sight. They had a glimpse of a door on the outer bend of the passage. “More like men than rats, in some ways.”
“Did they make the trees go bad?” asked Tana.
“Yes, it seems that way,” said Troy as he combed the dirt in the entrance with his fingertips. There were no rat droppings. “Look Tana, there’s no poop.”
“Maybe they’re clean rats,” said Tana, also combing the dirt.
At this Martin McDougal, covered in dirt and scratches, plumped his fat self down next to Troy and slapped him gently on the back. He saw them studying the dirt, and said, “Maybe they eat their poop.”
“Who eats poop?” cried Ferguson with a laugh, who with Carberry, carried faggots of kindling over and plumped them down next to Troy.
“Since you’re down there,” said Carberry, “How about shoving this down the hole?”
Troy looked up at his abrasive brother and smiled. “Since you’re up there, how about you fetch me some supper and a mug of ale?” Tana kept staring into the passage as Troy pushed the wood and leaves inside. She wanted to know what other things the rats in their fort, but was obedient to her mother, and did not go down there.
Before long, the entrance was stopped with wood and dry leaves, and Carberry set it afire with his flint and steel. It wasn’t long until there fire became good and hot, and then they all helped fill the entryway with rocks and dirt to trap the smoke, and they stood around the rock pile and waited.
It wasn’t long until smoke began to come out of crevices in the rock pile, and the ferrets waited anxiously for rats to emerge. Nothing came but a few moths and beetles. All the rats were dead or fled after the battle. The the rat skeletons stood in the abandoned chamber surrounded in smoke: silent, breathless, waiting to execute the last order given to them.
* * * * *
The humans and their animals stood guard on the smoking rat fort for about hour, and the sun began to set. No stray rat shot quills at them, and the accursed, moldy trees gave up dropping branches, and seemed to slump over in undeath. The grabbing vines ceased to grab, and aside from the faint crackle of fire, there was an eerie silence.
Diana was satisfied that their menace was defeated, and called for a return home. All made ready, to leave. Kevin took the wounded rat and put it in a sling around his neck, and it slept peacefully. The O’Reillys called all their goats by name, and lead the parade out. The McDougals summoned all their ferrets, and after a difficult head count of the scrambling creatures, followed the O’Reillys. The Zootaloots made ready to go, but Tana lingered by smoking rat den with Borussa on one side and Nelly on the other.
“Come along Tana,” said Diana at the edge of the thorny ivy.
“We should go,” said Borussa. “It is finished.”
“And I want a bath,” said Nelly, who was exhausted from chasing rats up and down the rocks.
Tana had a nagging feeling like they missed something, but couldn’t express it in words. But she made a mental note to come back to this spot, and figure it out.
The party got home by dusk, and they were weary, and itchy. All the humans doffed their armor and their soiled clothes and jumped in the pond to wash the grime and itchy oils from their skin. They were naked, and not ashamed.
The animals were all happy to be back on the farm. “Mother,” said Borussa as Diana splashed in the pond, “unbuckle my armor.” But she didn’t understand. “Mother?” He made as to wade into the pond, and Diana noticed him. “Borussa, don’t come in, you’ll rust your armor!”
Carberry heard him, however, and swam to the shore, and unbuckled Borussa’s armor. Nelly, who lounged under the willow tree, then said, “Oh! Me too!” and trotted over. Carberry unbuckled her armor as well, and the two big fighting pigs splashed into the pond and swam with everyone else. It looked like a giant pool party of humans, pigs, goats, ferrets, and a six armed orangutan. The cows wandered over in curiosity and because they were thirsty. Upon seeing the merry gathering decided to wait until it was quieter before venturing down.
The humans broke out in rashes all over their bodies, except Martin and Donalda, who did not have the allergy, and Tana who carefully avoided touching the thorny poison ivy. They helped Kevin prepare salves to sooth their rashes, and also fetched water to drink, and food to eat, while everyone else tried not to scratch.
The elder generations of McDougals, and Cale O’Reilly, sat naked in the lamplight around a stump playing a raucous game of cards and swilled a good amount of ale and mead, and did their best to ignore their rashes. Alan McDougal alternated between his pipe, his ale, and a root he had a habit of chewing for its sedative properties. “Alan, dear” said Aine, who among them all seemed to bear her rashes with a little more dignity, “put one of those down, I can see your cards.”
“Now I know I really am old,” replied Alan, who spat the root away, “when I’m here naked, and all you can notice is my cards!” Everyone burst out in laughter, a great belly laugh, and it helped them forget their discomfort.
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