Spit and Pathos

By Sumiko Saulson

Spit and Pathos is a collection of short horror stories, beat poetry about love, death, and grief, and essays on African American literature and black womanhood by Sumiko Saulson. Born in the wake of the death of her former fiancé Gregory Hug, the collection includes the award-winning essays "When We First Become Other" and "Elements of Horror in Toni Morrison’s use of Magical Realism and African American Folklore" as well as the award-winning short stories "Balm of Brackish Water" and "The Ride of Herne and Hespeth."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Iconoclast Productions
• Release date: Oct 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463111543

Sumiko Saulson

Sumiko Saulson is a science-fiction, fantasy and horror writer and graphic novelist. She was the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writer Association's "Scholarship from Hell." She is best known for her non-fiction reference guide "60 Black Women in Horror Fiction." Her novels include "Solitude"," The Moon Cried Blood, "Happiness and Other Diseases", "Somnalia", "Insatiable" and the Amazon bestselling horror comedy “Warmth." She has written several short stories for collections and anthologies, including the Carry the Light award winning science-fiction story "Agrippa." She writes for the Oakland Art Scene for the Examiner.com, SEARCH Magazine and horror blogs HorrorAddicts.net and SumikoSaulson.com, which featured a 2013 Women in Horror Month interview series. The child of African American and Russian-Jewish American parents, she is a native Californian who grew up in Los Angeles and Hawaii. She is an Oakland resident who has spent most of her adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Book preview

Spit and Pathos

By Sumiko Saulson

Other Books by Sumiko Saulson

The Somnalia Series

Happiness and Other Diseases

Somnalia

Insatiable

Akmani

The Moon Cried Blood Series

Legend of the Luna

Bloodlines

Dreams of the Departed

Death Omen

Shadows and Substance

Ghosts of Time

Moon Shadow

Dark Luna

Stand Alone Novels

Solitude

Warmth

Disillusionment

Collections

Things That Go Bump In My Head

The Void Between Emotions

Anthologies

Black Magic Women

Non-Fiction

100 Black Women in Horror Fiction

Graphic Novels

Dreamworlds

Agrippa

Mauskaveli

Living A Lie (Illustrator)

Copyright Notice

Spit and Pathos

A Book of Short Stories, Essays and Poetry

By Sumiko Saulson

Copyright 2018 Sumiko Saulson California

First Edition 2018

This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living, dead, or undead is entirely coincidental.

www.SumikoSaulson.com

www.IconoclastProductions.com

Acknowledgements

EDITOR: Buffie Peterson, Peterson Editing in Reno

I would like to thank the many beta readers and proofreaders who went over various stories in this collection. The original publication is listed at the front of each story that has been previously published.

Dedication

To Greg Hug

And Nathan Spon

The devastation of grief

And moving on

This book is dedicated in loving memory of Victoria Darlene Stintson, Gregory Matthew Hug, Andrew Sebastian Adams, Stephen Anthony and Robert Allen Saulson.

But especially, to you, Greg, who has been here though most of my career, and who left my side to tumble down into a pit of despair from which no one could rescue you. My beloved and one time fiancé Gregory Matthew Hug, your light was extinguished May 26, 2017 after only 31 years of living.

To my mother, Carolyn Saulson, who is now and has always been, my greatest support and ally in art and in life. Unfortunately, my mother is in the final stages of multiple myeloma and won’t be around much longer. She’ll be at the center of my world for the rest of her life.

To Nathan Spon, who was there with me as I moved past Greg. I had a rough time at BayCon 2018, with all of the heavy memories associated with Greg’s overdose on the first day of the convention in 2017. No matter what did or will happen between me and Nathan they hold a place in my life as the person who helped me to do anything other than stay trapped grieving for someone I loved who did so many good things with me but became so extremely bad for me in so many way. So the title represents me moving on as best as I can, and wherever you are in the afterlife, Greg, I forgive you.

Spit and Pathos

I dreamed I had all the right words

To tell the story of you and I

Running right in like we hadn't got sense

When we were new and free and wild

And nothing we did could ever be wrong

When we first began crafting our song

When everything was playful and sweet

With breezy hearts and light feet

Dancing beat to beat step to step

Sillouttes in darkened rooms

Opening ourselves to everyone

In places where you come undone

But maybe we opened gifts too fastly

You classy, sassy and pretty but lastly

Nervously stepping out into the light

Waiting for everything to be perfectly right

What a lovely package to undo

All of those bows and ribbons containing you

Not a painting or a picture to be held still

In motion like life itself, doting images

Or chivalric love, a muse that fit me

Hand in glove, but what is it to love

A muse, and what tools does an artist use

To hold you still in my mind's eye?

Low lights and dark walls can't contain

You lovely as a study of sunset in oils

But besoiled and besmirched and unfolding

In secret places, eyes closed, mouth sealed

A rebellion of butterflies cascade from lips

Covered in a thin glaze of spit and pathos

How could not be moved by your plight?

Constrained by shackles of your own

No hand truly your master but your own

I'd take your side just to come along and see

You ultimately free, destiny in your hands

Because wild things shouldn't live in cages

That they don't own and operate

Experiment IV

Unheard Music

If Death had a voice, what would it sound like? Would it be the distressed voice of a Jewish mother singing her emaciated daughter to sleep in the gloomy corner of the concentration camp at Auschwitz? Would it be the slow buzz of hungry flies descending on the corpse of a starving infant in Ethiopia? Or would it be the long, low seduction of the jazzman’s saxophone on a hot day in New Orleans? Or the pounding bass note on the dance floor the moment a madman snapped and shot the first of forty-nine people in an Orlando gay nightclub?

Would it be something so sinisterly subliminal no human could hear it, yet every living thing felt it? A dark metronome taking the pulse of every warm blooded, beating heart the second before life was snuffed away. The opposite of all natural rhythm, cranking away in maddeningly peculiar tempo…a strange disconcerting hiss underneath the white noise created by everything we think of as real?

I contemplated this while I slipped behind my terminal. I switched up the song on iTunes, putting on The Unheard Music by the punk band X, gently dabbing away tears under my mascara so my coworker wouldn’t see. My tears weren’t the only thing Robert Dubois was incapable of seeing. The ghost of my dead husband clung to my person like a second skin, clammy and wet as morning dew, gray and listless as dust in cobwebbed corners. It rendered me quiet and morbid where I used to be cocky, sarcastic. Greg passed away two and a half years ago, but the wounds were fresh for me.

The Dungeon

It was always ice-cold where I worked. Our laboratory, a dank subbasement below Fort Point in San Francisco, was named The Dungeon. The Dungeon was a hidden military installment below the Golden Gate Bridge. Tourists never saw The Dungeon. What they saw was Fort Point, a stone fortification build in 1853, only three years after the Gold Rush pushed California into US Statehood. The sturdy stone structure pre-dated the Golden Gate Bridge by eighty years.

Most folks on the East Coast don’t think of California as a state with any history, but that’s just because we grow up on English history. American schoolbooks gloss right over the eighty odd years the Spanish occupied San Francisco before we got here. By the time the USA declared its independence on July 4, 1776 there was already a Spanish mission and Presidio here in San Francisco. Afraid of the British Navy, the Spaniards established Castillo de San Joaquin on this very spot back in 1793. That old adobe fell to neglect, and the wind and the rain had rotted most of it away by the time the US Core of Army Engineers leveled what was left of it to build Fort Point.

Each day, I drove down the lonely hill winding its way into the parking lot below the Golden Gate Bridge. I parked in my spot under the old eucalyptus tree that grew sideways due to the strong sea breezes that twisted its surface over the years. I looked up above me at the sheer cliff the army core of engineers cut out of the side of the mountain. I stared as commuters and tourists traversed the famously international orange-painted bridge. Then, I entered Fort Point, traveled through a series of doors until I reached the secret entrance to The Dungeon.

A series of dark, mysterious tunnels wound under the ground below Fort Point. I had been told on many occasions that much of The Dungeon was under the San Francisco Bay, spanning the space between Fort Point and the first of the bridge’s towers.

The official account stated it was constructed during the 1930s, alongside the bridge construction. The enigmatic Charles Alton Ellis, a senior structural engineer who was obsessed with the bridge, was said to have been part of a secret society that constructed The Dungeon. Ellis worked on the project day and night, even after Joseph Strauss fired him, often forgoing sleep to work sixteen or twenty hours a day. Some said that Ellis found a secret underground bunker left behind by the Spanish, and expanded on it. Rumors say, parts of the Dungeon had been the basement and subbasement of the Castillo de San Joaquin.

And, of course, it was haunted. Some said by slaves who had been promised they would be freed during the Gold Rush as soon as the state entered the Union as free, but were murdered by greedy prospectors who didn’t want them to have their share. That made little sense to me, since there was little prospecting here in San Francisco, but the ghost stories persisted. Others said pirates abducted unsuspecting folks over at the Barbary Coast and dumped the bodies of the ones that were too damaged or weak to be seaworthy, on our shore on their way out to sea.

Dubois, ever the conspiracy theorist, posited they were built during WWII to host dark experiments of fleeing Nazi scientists. The basement above, he claimed, was housing for a bunch of evil refugees evading the Nuremburg Trials. Mysterious sounds sometimes creeped in from the hallways, muffled screams and moans blending in with the omnipresent buzz of flickering fluorescent lights. I could never tell if they were living persons, or ghosts.

Music Made To Kill

I pulled up Kate Bush in my iTunes and played the song Experiment IV. The sound lifted high above the whining fans in the air conditioning system, and filled the room with operatic voice and pop symphony. I caught myself chuckling to myself at every lyric that referenced government research into murderous sound.

Damn, girl! Dubois winced, hating the Irish pop star with the seven octave range. He was convinced I was betraying all of my black genetics by listening to her. Daenisha McLaurin, why do always have to be so edgy? Why can’t you play something normal, like Rihanna? He turned to me and flashed that brilliant smile. If I wasn’t still hurting, I might have been into him. Flawless ebony skin, high cheekbones, and the kind of teeth only pretty momma’s boys with trust funds seem to have. He was a young Republican who always teased me about how liberal I am, but I knew he was crazy about me.

I’m not trying to be cool, I laughed. I just am, naturally. The lighthearted banter helped stave off the constant chill here in our sterile, lifeless facility. It also assuaged the pangs of conscience I felt when I thought about what we were doing.

Sound

The team of scientistsshowed us so many cute little tricks, things they could do with audio waves. They could move objects, change the temperature of our skin, make our fingers dance involuntarily. They were so charming and seemingly harmless, but the sheer power of these devices raised a red flag before we knew anything about their purpose.

The gentle breeze wafting through the air conditioner batted around the thin strips of cloth that muffled the sound of the fan. I was once told there were sound dampening devices all over the room to protect us from the side effects of the project we were working on. I wondered if they also muffled the screams of animals they tested the damned thing on. Or, perhaps, those higher up the food chain than mere animals…

We were working on a sound that could kill. It was a strategic weapon the government would use for targeted strikes on our enemies. This device, pinpoint accurate, would enable the government to secretly eliminate high profile targets the way they hit Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. This was a black ops project, and neither of us had enough clearance or expertise to know how the larger system worked. We were programmers, working on something simple, like Google Maps, or the Pokémon Go type app, that would be used to help the military select critical targets and hit them with the sound.

When I looked up at my monitor, I swear I saw Greg’s reflection in the glass. Please, don’t do this! he begged, murmuring in my ear. I tried to ignore him, like all of the other ghosts in my head, but his whisper was persistent, a warning.

Secrets and Lies

I remember the first day they informed us what the project was all about. There were ten of us sitting around a clean room full of mainframes. Two rows of chairs were arranged in the center of the room. An outside consultant, Dr. Cartel, was there to lecture us. He unfolded a tripod from his black leather satchel and erected it. He hung a large pad of paper on the tripod and flipped page after page of oversized PowerPoint slides.

Music to soothe the savage beast, Dr. Cartel said with a nod and a wink. He pointed at the diagram with his wand. We were not the creators of this technology. We were a test team. The product we were testing? Mind control wrapped in a non-threatening packet of pop music or smooth jazz. Or so they said.

A week later, we learned the truth. They were building a weapon.

It will eliminate our enemies without any risk of friendly fire. We will also save civilians on their side, Dubois sputtered excitedly. This is awesome!

I would never willingly commit to anything so heinous. I thought we were building something much cooler, with lots of fun and the potential to be good for society aspects. They’d showed me earlier how we could use the sound tech to read minds, to exchange thoughts telepathically, and use telekinetic powers to coordinate our actions. They never told us it was potentially lethal!

We were so low on the food chain, by the time we discovered what we’d built, it was too late to inform anyone with enough power to prevent what was coming. So, I did something dangerous – I contacted my friends at Anonymous, the ones who were responsible for putting secret intelligence out on WikiLeaks. Had I done the right thing? I’m not sure. It was treason, wasn’t it?

Anonymous told me to keep an eye on things, to let them know under cloak via a complicated video game information network we used. I felt like such a fool, following breadcrumbs that led to nowhere. I believed I was part of the liberation force, a secret underground that would alert the American people to the dangers of mind control. I believed the lies my commanders told me. It all seemed so harmless, the way they defined the project.

I was part of a covert effort to leak information to the resistance cells. Or, at least, I thought I was. Now, I wonder if those cells exist at all. From time to time, it feels like the movie Total Recall. I think I’m a hero in the resistance releasing this information to the free press; I’m probably secretly being misled by the enemy. Blue skies on Mars my ass! I’m probably suffering from an embolism. Maybe they’ve Moriartied me, like on Star Trek: TNG where they locked the sentient Moriarty hologram up in a subroutine where he thought he ran the world. I’m probably like Nancy in The Craft, losing my damn mind, in a psych ward somewhere, screaming I’m flying!

I don’t even know if I am working for the good guys, but believing that I am seems to be the only valid reason to