Bards and Sages Quarterly (January 2019)

By Greg Hill, Jennifer R. Povey, Malcolm Laughton and 8 more

For over ten years, The Bards and Sages Quarterly has provided fans of speculative fiction with a unique mix of tales from both new and established authors. With each issue, we strive to introduce readers to exciting and entertaining voices in the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres. In our January 2019 issue: Laura DeHaan, Patrick Doerksen, Greg Hill, Brian James Lewis, Malcolm Laughton, Michael W. Lucht, Jennifer R. Povey, Barbara Buckley Ristine, R. Rozakis, Nilles Sonnemans, Sophie van Llewyn, and Dorothy A. Winsor.

In "Close Calls," a woman contacts her dead mother using new video conferencing technology and discovers that conversations with the dead may not be as ideal as she imagined.

In "The Ugly Wee Man o' The Loch," to escape the consequences of a terrible bargain, a man must venture to a distant castle in search of the laughter tree.

In "Toxicity," the survivor of a workplace shooting finds herself haunted by her former colleagues.

These and other fine tales await our readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages Publishing
• Release date: Dec 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386525967

Greg Hill

Greg Hill took his first sales job in 1978. He has been involved in sales or sales management ever since. He has held positions as an employee, a consultant, a sales manager, an independent contractor, a small business owner, and the owner and president of his own consulting firm. He has worked both on a national level and a local level selling to consumers, local business owners, and national and multinational corporations. Besides being a salesperson himself, he has hired, trained, motivated, and fired salespeople for thirty years. Greg has been on every level of the management team from low level management to Vice President of Sales. He knows salespeople and the world of sales. Greg’s resume includes being an account executive for Wieder Enterprises (Muscle & Fitness, Shape and Flex magazines) 1982 - 1983, and The Western Sales Manager for FIT Magazine (Fit, Runner’s World and Strength Training for Beauty magazines) 1983 – 1984.In November of 1984, he founded The Gregory Hill Company. His clients and positions in their organizations included being a Direct Response Consultant, Vice President of Win Management, a consultant for Buy By Video (a Sub-division of TBC Corporation), and President of Palmer Associates, a magazine rep firm created with Woman’s Sports & Fitness to sell advertising on the West Coast. From 1988 to 1994 he worked in the Yellow Page industry where he was the top representative for GTE Corporation. From 1994 to 2000, Greg became the owner of a small business Politically Incorrect Tobacco & Gifts. After closing his shop, Greg then went to work as the National Sales Manager for 411Web until 2003. In 2003 he again went into business for himself by founding the corporation and consulting firm Greg Media.Today Greg is both a consultant and Vice President of Sales for his major client Planet Online. His responsibilities include market penetration for all of Planet Online’s products (web hosting, website creation and development, an Internet service provider, a cost comparative search engine, and both VOIP and Competitive Local Exchange Carrier phone service), hiring and training of salespeople, acquisition and maintenance of key accounts, advertising, and marketing strategies. As part of the senior staff at Planet Online, he has been involved in or asked to consult on all the major decisions made by the company since 2006 and have been part of the day-to-day decisions that are necessary to keep the company running. Greg is also doing sales and marketing consulting for numerous other corporations. His team analyzes the current sales effort, helps train the existing sales force, and suggests new marketing strategies. He has assisted many organizations in reaching their true potential and sales goals.

Book preview

The Meteorologist’s Makeup

By Greg Hill

THE SUN WAS SETTING by the time she finally got to the exit and pulled off the highway. The difference in traffic reminded Courtney of summer downpours that appeared out of nowhere, blocked out the sun with their torrents, and then vanished suddenly, leaving the neighborhood stray dogs soaked but too stunned to shake the water from their furs. All afternoon, the highway had been a slow-moving din of sirens and horns, drivers leaning out of windows looking at containers tied down to roofs of vehicles creeping for miles in both directions. But there was not a single car here, off the highway—not on the road in either direction, not even parked on the side streets.

Courtney drove straight to the overgrown yard at the corner of Fourteenth and Lincoln and pulled into the driveway. Her father’s Chrysler was thinly dusted with yellow pollen and the splattering of white on both windshields was evidence that the dogwood tree must have hosted birds, though now not even the telephone lines along Lincoln Street showed any signs of them.

Predictably, the front door was open, and the screen door was unlocked. Courtney tossed her keys into the green-glass bowl on the shelf below the television where they clinked loudly with the loose coins at the bottom of the bowl.

Yuuup! her father yelled from the backyard as if the sound of keys hitting coins and glass bowl were Courtney’s way of asking if her father were here.

She took a deep breath, all the smells of the house flooding back to her. Hey-ya, Courtney replied to her father, in shorthand he would know meant, Yeah, it’s me. I’m going to use the bathroom and come out and join you in a minute.

All right, her father’s voice answered. Beers in the fridge.

In front of the bathroom mirror, Courtney leaned over the sink and examined her face with a mix of curiosity and disgust, as if some part of her expected her to look as youthful as she did when she had lived here. Courtney pulled her fingertips down on her cheeks as if stretching her skin could erase the bags under her eyes. The thought occurred to her that she hadn’t seen her face in this particular mirror in over a decade. And until this morning’s phone call, she and her father hadn’t spoken to each other in almost that long.

Maybe you should stop here, her father had suggested over the phone. She had agreed. Then both had hung up. She also realized she looked like she had been crying. She hadn’t been crying. It just looked like she had been.

The faucet still leaked. She splashed cold water on her face and scrubbed off the on-camera makeup she was still wearing. Meteorology makeup, her father had called it when he had driven over to the studio for lunch her first week on the job. She had told him not to come. But she knew how it would look to her new co-workers if she left her father waiting in the reception on the ground floor.

Still focused on the bags under her eyes, she dried her hands on a towel she was sure was even older than she was. She tucked loose locks of brown hair behind her ears, turned and walked to the kitchen.

The photograph was still there, above the little kitchen table, taken when Courtney was in elementary school. Back when her parents were together. When her father’s arms around her shoulders and tugging at her mother’s waist suggested signs of his love for them. When his knuckles were used only for tapping melodies that would play on the radio and he and Courtney would go back and forth guessing each other’s songs until dinner was ready. It was the only photograph in the house.

Besides the beer—and there were both cans and glass bottles—the fridge was bachelor-bare: a single can of orange soda with the six-pack ring still on it, a bag of baby carrots, two opened ketchup bottles, take-out containers from what looked to be two different restaurants, and one of those yellow boxes of baking soda, ripped open. Otherwise, there was no food. Not that it mattered. Not that the grocery store, or even the gas station over on Tenth, would have anything left. Courtney grabbed two of the bottles.

She walked to the backyard and sat down in a lawn chair next to her father. Both chairs were half-reclined. Normally at this time in the evening, the bugs would be biting like crazy. But the whole yard was still, like a painting.

She held out both bottles in one hand.

Makes no difference, he said to her. She took one bottle back in her other hand. Her father grabbed the remaining bottle, twisted off the cap and threw it across the yard. It landed on a patch of dirt but kicked up no dust. He took a swig, swallowed, took another, and scratched at his chin. Courtney stared deep into the fence and trees, then threw her own bottle cap, as if to see if she could move the canvas of the painting, they were sitting in. The projectile struck down, somewhere in the patch where there was still grass, and disappeared in it, like it had never existed at all.

The evening was getting darker now, the clouds on the horizon becoming indistinguishable from the sky. Normally, she would have expected the familiar sounds of crickets this time of year, this time of the evening. But the only sound was the generator growling around the far side of the house. Even the low buzz of streetlights was dead silent, the electricity in the entire neighborhood has been out since midday, maybe even morning, Courtney guessed. The station had its own backup power generator and she seemed to recall it had kicked on some time in the late morning.

She picked at a wet corner of the label on her beer. She could have counted the long seconds of silence. Makes no difference, she thought. She swirled the bottle in little circles, her eyes now focused on Venus sinking in the west and the night’s earliest stars, popping like the first drops of a spring rain shower.

She called, her father said, finally.

Courtney put the bottle to her lips.

Married, he added. Up Rhode Island, apparently.

Courtney’s mother had married again. Not that this should have surprised her. Father wasn’t her first husband. Nor her second. Nor third, even. Though he had been her longest marriage. By quite a bit.

She said so? Rhode Island? Courtney asked as if her mother’s location were the most interesting new revelation.

She said.

She said. Courtney let that sit in the air between them. Her mother hadn’t said anything to either of them in twenty-two years. No letter, no phone call. One day she was picking the red onions off Courtney’s plate of stir-fry because she knew her daughter wouldn’t want them. The next day all the shoes were gone from the front closet.

How long didja talk?

They each took another swig. Long enough.

"Long enough what."

Her father drew a long breath, surveyed the sky and scratched his chin again. To apologize. There’s one. He was pointing at the sky, finding the first shooting star of the evening.

Even in middle school, Courtney had been old enough to realize her mother eventually would leave her and her father no matter what. Leaving was inevitable. She’d pieced together her mother’s habit of leaving husbands, though she knew nothing of the men themselves, not even their names. No one had ever named them for her. Courtney only knew the cities her mother had lived in and roughly how long she’d been married before she left each one. Fort Collins: just over three years. Then Bemidji: year and a half. Then Huntsville: five months, almost. As far as she knew, the cities might as well have been the men’s names. If she’d ever asked, she’d never learned anything else.

Maybe her mother was just flighty. Or fickle. Maybe she bored easily. Maybe she couldn’t settle into patterns. Aside from the pattern of leaving, anyway.

Maybe the men had abused or beaten her. That, at least, would have been a good reason to leave. But as far as Courtney could tell, her father had never beaten her mother. He was violent, she knew. She still had fist-sized scars and belt marks on her own back that would have spilled that secret.

Early on, Courtney had decided the beatings were the reason her mother was still around, that she wouldn’t leave if her daughter were still in danger. That’s how she rationalized it, anyway. Not that her mother did anything to stop the beatings she had to know her own daughter endured.

It wasn’t that Courtney sought out beatings, exactly. But she knew how to get the storm brewing inside her father. She knew that low grades at school or saying anything bad about the Navy or the president would land her bruises behind her knees and that disparaging her father’s spotty record of employment would lead to knuckles on her shoulders or belt whips on her back. As if her father abided some peculiar code, he never touched her face, nor anywhere it would show at school. If a hand did miss its mark, she could always touch up the bruises with makeup. But she never wore a crop top when those were popular in high school. And she never wore a bikini or any two-piece at a beach or pool, even after her mother left, which is when the beatings abruptly stopped.

Who apologized? You? Courtney asked, in a tone more biting than she’d intended.

What? No. Another meteor streaked across the sky, but neither acknowledged it. Your mother. He raised his bottle back to his lips.

For leaving you? Courtney caught herself becoming disgusted. Took more than twenty years. And now? A third meteor streaked above them. One that felt slower as it broke across the atmosphere.

You.

Courtney stopped looking at the sky and turned to her father. What? she asked.

For leaving you.

Courtney stared at her father, whose gaze continued skyward.

For, you know...

"No, I do not know.

He shifted in his chair. Leaving you with me. He turned his head to face her. For the length of a breath, her brown eyes locked with his. Then they both faced forward again.

"So, she called you." Courtney looked down at the bottle in her hand. She picked at the label again.

This house still has the same number.

The cell towers and all the phones, including landlines, had stopped working today, around the same time the electricity shut off. She must have called before then. Courtney wondered how much time her father had let pass between getting that call and calling her to suggest she come here.

She didn’t even know your last name, her father added.

Courtney had eloped the year after high school. The worst part of her own marriage was that it didn’t even last long as Fort Collins. Or Bemidji. Or Huntsville. But she wasn’t going to change her last name back to match her father’s. Besides, it was already the name she used on camera and at the station.

The stars appeared to flicker off briefly as a sheet of rain clouds rolled between the stars and the stargazers, then flicked on as the sky cleared again.

That was the end of that conversation. If he had more information, like how long she’d been in Rhode Island, or if she’d lived anywhere else in between, he would, more than likely, swallow it with his beer.