Fossils in the Asphalt - Vol. 1: Fossils in the Asphalt, #1

By JD McDonnell

Ten Strange Tales of the Outlandish, Macabre and Bizarre. All written during the 1990's....
Live For The Sun. The 21st century is dawning and with it we have new-fangled ways of fighting those same old nagging problems with vampires.
True Love. Sir Reginald discovers the true nature of love as he seeks to slay the dragon, free the princess and bask in wealth and glory - but not exactly in that order.
Satellite. Drive really fast in the right place at the right time and you may be able to travel backwards through time, but can you actually change history?
Lobster. Dad brings home some lobsters from a business trip to Maine but Mom has no way of cooking them. So how do we do this? Do we do this?
Doctor Frankenstein Throws in the Towel Only to Find It Has Been Stitched To His Hand. The title pretty much says it all.
Fireworks City. Summer in Memphis can get pretty hot. How hot? Hot enough to melt reality and spark off a revolt under a fireworks tent on the city limits.
AM/FM. A vacummn cleaner salesman finds religion in the middle of nowhere but religion has not found him.
How the World Became Round. Flat-Earthers take note! All the universe was once flat but is no longer. Here is the somewhat-semi-quasi-true story of what may have actually sorta happened.
Scotoophio. Black-Eyed Susan haunts the darkness with a vicious reptilian susurrus, but what is it that she truly wants?
1979. A kid moving to a new town in the late 70's discovers just how fragile life can be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JD McDonnell
• Release date: Sep 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393576181

JD McDonnell

I write books and other things.

Book preview

PG-13

If this book were a movie it would be rated PG-13 for violence, tense situations, rampant titillation, an ocean of salty talk. It is not recommended for minors.

Copyright © 2020 JD McDonnell,

All Rights Reserved.

Please do not copy or reproduce without permission. All characters in this book are either fictional or meant to be portrayed in a fictional manner. For more great, fun stuff come visit the website at:

www.jdmcdonnell.com

I don’t really know what I was thinking. I was probably thinking that my writing career was over. One thing I had failed to realize is that once you start writing, writing stops being a career and becomes your calling. It literally calls to you in the night, it sneaks in between your thoughts with the siren song of a good idea, a dream you might want to scribble down just in case you want to dream it again in the future. Once you let that muse into your life she will never leave you alone.

Back in the year 2000, she was really starting to wear out her welcome. I had been writing short stories quite seriously with every intent of becoming a published author for thirteen years at that point. I had gone to college to get a degree in English with emphasis in Creative Writing. When that failed to gain traction I went back to school to get a Masters degree in English with emphasis in Creative Writing. Why? Because I’m a glutton for punishment!

I graduated in May of 2000 only to discover that it also carried very little weight in the non-academic world. If anything it may have made matters worse. Thanks to my higher education I was now stuck with one foot planted in the world of pop lit — the fun stuff of horror, fantasy and science fiction — and the other foot in the world of actual literature. This was like doing a split between two different planets orbiting separate stars. Long story short, I could not lift a foot out of either world and eventually ended up falling through the depths of outer space. My writing career had no way forward. It was time to move on to something different.

But I love my stories dammit!

I didn’t want to just stash them away in a box only to pull it out in twenty years and ruminate over how good they could have been if only someone had published them. At the very least, I wanted a printed collected of them, something I could keep on my bookshelf and point to, exclaim — AHAH! — See! I did that!

The only problem was that I was still working hand to mouth at the airport and now had a $28k student loan to pay off as well. In the year 2000, print-on-demand was not even a dream in some tech entrepreneur’s head so my options were looking incredibly slim.

Not to be thwarted I decided to do the unthinkable and print the book myself. I laid it out in Microsoft Publisher, printed the pages with an inkjet on some 8.5 x 14 copy paper, folded each page in half and punched holes through its spine with a heavy-duty puncher. This was all bound together with some colorful cord and a makeshift book cover that did not look half bad, but at the same time did not look half good. The end product looked severely homemade. In fact it looked like the literary equivalent of roadkill.

But no! I exclaimed. "This is not roadkill! These are Fossils in the Asphalt!"

And the name stuck.

It took about two hours to assemble each copy and I think I made five of them. One to keep and four to give to friends who, judging from the expressions on their faces, were not exactly sure what to do with such a dubious gift. In truth I am hoping they just set it on a shelf somewhere and forgot about it because as much love and care as was put into the creation of those books, I cannot exactly vouch for the quality of the writing. Despite all of my academic training I had never learned the maxim that you cannot edit your own work. I did just that and it shows.

Now it is 20 years later, the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, or what we hope is the middle. People had hoped it would end back in April but now it is August and still going strong. I have had almost too much time to spend with my writing. Seeing as it is an anniversary of sorts, I decided to give Fossils in the Asphalt another chance, only this time not with a single book but a three volume set containing the 10 best stories of each decade.

Volume 3 covers all of my most recent work from 2010 to 2019. Volume 2 comes from that first decade from 2000 to 2009. Volume 1 — this volume — is everything that came before it. To be consistent I truly did want to constrain it to just 1990 to 1999, but I started writing in 1987. I wrote like a hurricane during those three final years of the 1980’s, spending nearly every free night I had at our old PC hammering out story after story with mad abandon. It was probably the most prolific period of my entire writing career, and yet like most of the writing I did prior to the turn of the 21st century I was still learning how to do it.

If you are looking for something good to read, by all means read these volumes in reverse. Start with volume 3 then volume 2 and if you really feel up for it read volume 1. Over the last few months I have edited them all. In truth, the stories that went into volumes 3 and 2 did not need much work. At best they required a little bit of sentence rearranging, punctuation juggling and typo fixing. While I may have said something about writers not being able to edit their own work, I feel that the truth is that a writer should not edit anything they have recently written. If the story is fresh in your imagination you won’t be able to see it through the same frame of reference that a reader does when they first come to it. You will miss how it accrues in a person’s imagination and that is where the problems come from. Let a decent amount of time wash a story from your memory and it might as well be the work of some one else. It is actually quite surprising just how alien your own words can seem to yourself after a broad passage of time.

I am not the same person I was 20 to 30 years ago. Sometimes I read over what I wrote back then and am truly befuddled, if not for the reason why I wrote the way I did then for what exactly I was trying to say. So what you are getting with volume 1, largely unlike volumes 2 & 3, is not the original articles but a collaboration between teen and twenty something me and nearly 50-year-old me. These are not the original articles, and yet they are not me simply rewriting the ideas I had in the past. It is a tug-o-war between my current adult sensibilities and my younger artistic ambitions. They are not as impenetrable as they used to be. At the same time they are not as good as what I’ve been writing more recently. Which, in the end, I guess is all for the best. I would hate to have to admit that I peaked in my 20’s and have been sliding downhill ever since.

Will there be a volume 4? I guess that depends on how the next decade plays out. If there even is a recognizable world ten years from now, instead of a Mad Max existence at a perpetual Burning Man festival.

On the whole, you lose money when you write short stories. Even as a kid I remember thumbing through the pages of my copy of the 1987 Fiction Writers Market (a Christmas gift from my parents! How is that for support?) and realizing that all I needed to do was write and publish one short story per week to make the same amount of money as a burger flipper. The situation for authors has not gotten any better since them.

However.

Still.

When that little hissing voice snakes up to me in the middle of the night to slide between my ears and coil about my brain with a cool new idea. I always wake up. Even at the dreadful hour of 4AM, I dredge myself over to the laptop to jot down some notes because that is what I do. It is who I am. And she won’t let me get back to sleep until I do so.

Shannon’s horse crashed through the living room window like a wrecking ball, busting planks in the pinewood floor, shattering the coffee table and catapulting my brother from his saddle. He flew upside down over the couch to smack back flat against the far wall. For a second he hung there as if shellacked by sweat and fear to the fir paneling before sliding to the floor with an audible squeak.

Meanwhile, back in the center of the room, Shannon’s horse Sally was a carousel ride from hell, thrashing about on broken legs and spraying blood in every direction as she desperately tried to escape the pit of broken floorboards. Sally was not neighing or braying but out and out screaming as she tried to right herself on bloody stumps. The air hung thick with blood, piss and horse sweat. Amidst all that chaos you would not think that anyone would notice something as small and insignificant as a human hand reaching in through the busted out window, but there I saw it. The hand was careful yet unsteady, reaching as one might shakily stretch an arm into a blazing hot oven. It grabbed a hold of Sally’s tail and yanked.

The whole horse slid back across the floor.

At the window other hands joined in, clawing out of the darkness on arms that stretched as they saw fit. The hands were frail, cosmopolitan, crystal thin and ivory white. They looked as if they might struggle to lift a perfume bottle off a counter at Macy’s, yet the razor sharp nails had no problem ripping through the coat of horse hair and digging out hefty chunks of dark red meat. Together, with only a slightly strained effort the hands stopped tearing at the beast and hauled the whole horse up over the window sill and out into the night.

Sally?

As it was happening the horse looked at me as if...,

As if.

As if by being human I don’t think we are geared to remember the facial expressions of animals. Oh they grimace and laugh and smile and frown just as we do, but in order to eat and abuse them the way we do I think humankind has developed a mental blind spot for such things. However, a horse to a rancher is more than just a friend and I will never forget Sally’s long snout stretching and nostrils flaring to lay on me every curse in the Palomino language. Why was it that I, human and master of all things, was allowing this to happen? Why wasn’t I letting loose into the darkness with both six-guns flaring? My back had been pressed so tightly against the front door I might as well have been spackled there. Sally did not understand this and aside from not owning a revolver and being unable to do any of the things I felt called to do, neither did I.

She gave me one last look. In nature shows this is that final dull stare of understanding a fallen gazelle gives the rest of the herd while lions pounce up and down on her soon to be carcass. It is a gaze of contentment from just over the edge of eternity. A look to those cud chewing morons in the rest of the pack that is quietly sharp with the sly certainty that their turn is coming soon, that it will not be long before they end up on the bottom of the cat pile.

Just you wait you cowardly bastards.

The rest of the horse was ripped out onto the porch. An avalanche of sound surrounded her. Smacking, gorging, ripping, chattering, swallowing sound. And then nothing. My stomach flipped daisy stalks. I thought that if only I had grabbed her by the reigns I could have saved her. With two broken front legs I would have had to put her down as soon as possible, but at least she wouldn’t have had to go in the way that she did.

My mind zipped to the small diamond shaped window cut in the door above my head. I imagined those thin pale arms bursting through it to grab me by the ears and yank me out through it like ground chuck. Slowly and quietly I slid to a squat on the boot mat. There was a scrabble of fingertips along the edges of the door. They moved up and down the seam, almost as if they had no idea what a door was for, let alone a door knob. The stereo swished to change CDs. I had forgotten the stereo was on. I felt compelled to turn the volume down, to show them that no one was home. I spotted the remote controller atop the TV set. Half a room away but it might as well be a mile. The door jumped behind my back as fists pounded on the oak. Brass hinges rang like bells. Barely five feet away was a busted out picture window which anyone could have stepped through, yet they weren’t the only ones so caught up in the moment that they weren’t thinking straight. And so I sat there, petrified, my back pressed against the door. Garth Brooks began to play.

The weather worn planks of the front porch began to screech and bind with the sound of feet tapping on it in rhythmic fashion. This wasn’t writhing in agony as one might suspect but a coordinated effort devoid of thought, devoid of all soul. By God in Heaven I think they were line-dancing out there. This made perfect sense given everything else that had happened. What else does one do after tearing through a whole horse, ass-first, uncooked, unmarinaded, and still freakin’ kicking – other than a little bit of the electric slide? The CD player had been on random play, it swished to another disc. The yodel of Slim Pickens split the air and was closely followed by the distinctive sound of people running off into the night.

An hour would pass before I knowingly breathed another breath. Two more hours would pass before Shannon’s sporadic groaning turned into words.

Jim? Jim? Are you there man?

Yeah. I said, Shut up. I’m here.

Are they out there?

"Ah don’t know.