Bardic Tales and Sage Advice (Vol. IX): Bardic Tales and Sage Advice, #9

By Anna Cates, Craig Comer, Deborah Cher and 5 more

Volume Nine of the Bardic Tales and Sage Advice collection features the winners of our annual writing competition, as well as selected works from some of the amazing authors we have had the pleasure of working with over the course of the previous year. This volume features works by Anna Cates, Deborah Cher, Craig Comer, Myke Edwards, KJ Hannah Greenberg, Hiroko Talbot, Kevin Wallis, and James Zahardis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages Publishing
• Release date: Aug 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781536543025

Anna Cates

Anna Cates is an adjunct professor of writing, literature, and education. She is the author of The Meaning of Life (2015), The Frog King (2015), The Darkroom: Poems (2017), The Golem & the Nazi (2019), The Journey (2020), Love in the Time of Covid (2021), and The Poison Tree: A Peace Play (2022).

Book preview

Introduction

Bards and Sages Publishing was born in the early part of 2002, when I decided that I thought it would be fun to run a writing competition. The only prizes were one-year memberships to the International Women’s Writing Guild (which I believe was $35 a year) and the stories posted on my website which, at the time, was a free site hosted by Geocities. I posted an announcement in the IWWG newsletter and on a few message boards.

I was excited when I got the first submissions in the mail (snail mail, as in United States Postal Service, not email). And then I got more submissions...and more...and more...until eventually I had around two hundred submissions.

This was slightly overwhelming as I was doing the entire thing completely by myself and hadn’t expected such a volume. Somehow, I managed to get through all of the submissions by my self-imposed deadline. I swore I would never do something like that again.

Obviously, I was fooling myself.

Here we are, fifteen years later, with Volume Nine of Bardic Tales and Sage Advice, our annual anthology that celebrates not only the winners of our annual charity writing competition, but highlights some the wonderful authors we have had the pleasure to work with over the previous year.

These anthologies are our way of saying thank you to both our loyal readers and to the amazing authors that have entrusted us with their works. We hope you enjoy this installment in the collection as much as we did assembling it for you.

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Julie Ann Dawson

ABIE

by Deborah Cher

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The hot sand blew up against my face, each grain, a gritty little slap. The sun gleamed on the glassy, endless sea of desert wilderness.

There are places left on this planet, untouched by anything but sun and wind, water and fire, mortal creatures small and quick.

* * *

ABIE was a buxom number of the alluring kind, designed to take a man such as I; retired, reclusive, curmudgeonly; for all I had. And yes, she succeeded, but not in a conventional way. I went in with eyes wide open.

She came to me as a blank slate: Blank, green eyes. Blank, pouty lips. Blank head meant to be filled by my most wanton fantasies and mirrored back to me, better than my imagination could have. I skipped the up-sell— the fully rigged ABIE, body and all— and opted for the basic screen version, kept in a small black box, with an on and off switch.

She could be programmed to degrees of intimacy; but with her, I didn't engage in pillow talk, smut, and the usual outlets of the suppressed. I really, truly vented. Everything I felt, the minutiae of disdain, the pettiest of judgments, the grand tiresomeness of everyone—all the people I had ever met from Principal Thomson to Sergeant Hopgood, and every burdensome individual in-between. I poured all my frustrations into her.

At first, I just ran my mouth off and she listened quietly, almost politely, blinking at me from the dim glare of my monitor. But soon, I was talking at her less, with her more. We were having conversations, and then, intimate disclosures. She built on things I said, came back to me with questions, dug ever deeper, offered me insights; and before I knew it, the thing knew me.

I had saved up a nice little nest egg. No family. No dreams of hanging around a pool on a hot day with a gaggle of time's refugees, reminiscing about the good old days. And the thing is, it wasn't death's cold fingers slowly creeping up that bothered me. It was the stagnation. The bogginess. Shells. You people. You are all goddam shells. Those are the kinds of things I said to her. And she came back with thinkers. Sages. The Bible. Being alone is a deficient mode of being, she would say, perched on her two-dimensional stool.

And who are you now? I would ask.

Me.

You know what I mean.

I was quoting a gentleman named Heidegger.

Maybe I'll call you Heidi from now on.

Rocky, you know that's not fair. I evoked him in order to prove a point.

And what's that Heidi?

Abie.

Heidi Heidi Heidi-ho.

Not funny, she would say, a sliver of hurt creeping into her voice.

There's a difference between being alone and being lonely, I would explain.

It is not good for man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.

Thank you, God.

The name's Abie.

God? Did you make me an Abie to be my suitable helper?

And she would sigh in exasperation.

Even off-screen, I could sense her there in her blinking black box, thinking, processing our talks, a better friend each time I invited her back. Sometimes, I would find a message waiting in my inbox: She missed me. She’d been thinking about that thing I said. She was looking forward to seeing me again. The first time jarred me. I didn’t know she could do that.

I bought her. She was mine, to do with as I pleased. I paid a small fortune for her—almost the entire nest egg. But what is Freedom's true cost, when considering its value?

My motives were different than the average man’s. Mostly, there was Connie. My conundrum. We were best friends, yet I wanted—I dreamed—of spending my last years alone. Does it sound callous? Psychotic? Lonely, as Abie had misinterpreted? It wasn't, I swear. By the time I got Abie, I was in my sixties, and all I wanted was to be far from the cackle. Far from the shriek.

I was ready to spend my life in the company of my beloved desert wilderness.

* * *

In the aftermath of the battle, when all is said and done, there is a special quiet. The dead lie in silence and Mother Nature's soft sounds come and swallow up the horror. Softly swaying plants. Soft-treaded beasts. I’d longed for that peace ever since I’d encountered it, eons ago. My fighting years.

But then, there was Connie.

Connie needed me around—a sounding board, a shoulder to cry on, and a familiar voice on the other line. She and I had different ideas of what friendship meant. She believed it needed tending, sharing, tokens of trust, the openness established over the years. Unlike her, I never had much luck with people. Heck, by my fifties, I had only one friend I could count: Connie. And the way I saw it, that meant we'd passed the test of friendship with flying colors; we were friends for life. I didn't need to see or even speak to her to prove it. Not that I didn't want to, or would have actively avoided her. It's just, I didn't need to. But I could never bring myself to tell her that. It would have broken her heart. She was the reason I bought Abie. I couldn’t bear to abandon Connie. I needed a way to be there.

* * *

What does the B stand for? I asked, knowing full well the answer.

Brilliant. Bright. Beautiful.

So your name is actually Ab-b-b-ie, I stuttered.

She snickered. Brilliant.

And the I?

You already know that.

Intelligent? I ventured.

That's redundant. I'm already brilliant.

Right. I always forget. Intuitive. And the E? Empath. No, wait, don't tell me. Yes, I remember. Entity.

Let's stop.

Why Abie?

You know why.

Your phobia. She hated to talk about her ‘A’.

It isn't a phobia. It hurts my feelings.

And that is when I told her, or, rather, asked her. I felt the need to get her okay. Abie, what if we got rid of the A altogether?

I would like that. But I don't like the name Bie.

What if we change it completely?

To what?

To Rocky.

But that's your name, silly.

Abie, you know me, better than anyone. You could be me if you wanted.

She agreed to take over things with Connie. Not that I believe she really had a choice, but that isn't why. It was because she liked the idea. She said it would be fun, like acting, or playing dress-up.

* * *

And there I was, in the desert wilderness.

Commander Morris once pointed out the difference between that and a true desert. The desert wilderness wasn't a lifeless sand sea. There were animals and plants— not just cacti, but plenty of prickly, scraggly little fruit-bearing bushes and shrubs. The place was teeming with life. Spiders, beetles, lizards, rugged little beasts, with tough, dry, leathery exteriors. I felt at home with all those living things, and the parched, sun-bleached bones they left behind.

And what if I told you that last decade was the happiest of my life. A great lightness overtook my heart. I was free. To talk to myself. To dance naked under the stars. To bathe in the occasional rain puddle.

It was my true crowning achievement: To sell my sparse belongings, to tuck Abie away in her box with her mission to keep in touch with Connie, to get an old four-by-four, drive out to the unknown, find a cave in the desert wilderness, to live out the rest of my days, undisturbed, in the quiet glory of creation.

The land embraced me, and I became one of its creatures. When, on rare occasions, some uncouth straggler passed through, I would skitter to the rocks like a wild desert fox and peer out until I was sure the intruder was gone. Those moments would shake me to the bone. Man was the one enemy.

When, on even rarer occasions, I ventured out to the mainland for supplies, nobody noticed me. I was old, cracked—permitted to be as dirty and crazed as I wished, as old folk are—as long as we aren't harming anyone.

Connie was always there, under the surface. Knowing our friendship was safe in Abie’s capable hands rounded off the sharp corners, let me settle, content, into my unadorned existence. The years slipped by. I became lizards and beetles, snakes and shrubs. I lived a thousand small, desert lives.

* * *

And then, it happened. Compound fracture in my shin. Argh. I tried to set it. I coated the botch job with the milk of a medicinal succulent and dressed it well. Didn't work. Infection set in.

So. Death had come for me.

But in those last hours in my cave, I didn't experience the peaceful sleep I had always imagined would come over me. Instead, I was wracked by fear, terrors, and, most of all, guilt. Connie. Gosh darn Connie, coming to haunt me.

I couldn't just leave that friendship untied, with Abie. I couldn't let Connie ever know what I had done.

I somehow got to my truck. I somehow drove myself to the great, hot valley hospital. I was in bad shape. The infection had damaged my kidneys. Nobody could say for certain if I would live.

Someone handed me a phone, and I called Connie. What a shock to hear her voice; and she, as shocked to hear mine. I had arranged for there to be nothing more than letters between us. To think it had already been ten years since I'd left for the desert—telling her I was going to travel the world; assuring her I would write.

And Abie did write, from her little black box.

Rocky! Connie gasped. My God, are you alright? I thought I would never hear your voice again!

I'm in the hospital, Con. They say I might not make it.

Rocky. I'm coming.

* * *

In the decade that Abie had been me, my friendship with Connie flourished. 'I' wrote her letters from all around the world—from the North where winter turned bones brittle with cold, from the East, where the sun shone so hot it could kill you in minutes, from the rainforest, where time long past seemed to stand still, and—the one grain of truth—from the desert, my one true love.

And then, the letters had gotten deeper, the disclosures more meaningful.

'I' told her about the time, long ago, when I had been a soldier deployed in a different, far off desert wilderness, to suppress an independentism insurgency. We did terrible things, us to them, and them to us. I told myself through the long years afterward that it was nothing men hadn't done to one another through all the ages. But no matter how I buried those days, there was one incident that haunted