Curious Tales Wrought by Quarantine

By T War Powers Tilden

2020 is the year everyone wanted to return to 2019. Failing that, a group of city friends coping through social-distance try to enliven the boredom & anxieties wrought by quarantine, dwindling wages, and social unrest during the hottest summer on record by entertaining themselves with homespun horror tales --- until a real horror show comes over the newsfeed, threatening the very lives of each of them.

 

Among this collection of short stories is one with a scary prediction for Inauguration Day 2021, followed by another futuristic tale about the most dangerous of exports.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TWP Tilden
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393030546

T War Powers Tilden

The author was born and educated in the United States. He lives in Barcelona. 

Book preview

Alex threw his head back against the sofa cushion and glared ruefully at the faint stain on the ceiling. Madness! he fussed, with angry resignation. Whether the spot was due to water or a smudge of dirt, he couldn’t tell. Suddenly focussing on it, though, only made him feel idiotic and even more depressed, and his eyeballs moved to look at something else, anything else, in the room. Without intending to, Alex scooped up his cell phone and regarded it. The digital calendar glowed back at him: APRIL 1. He groaned and swore through his teeth a string of profanities. April Fool’s Day. What a fine, fine motherfucking joke! It was some consolation to not have to bite one’s tongue. Then he saw evergreen trees, tinsel decorative strings of lights and lots of other things in red, green, silver and white. Alex shook his head and got to his feet. No! No! No, no, no! If it came to that...?! No. Out damn thought, out! One had to tell himself, No, it just wouldn’t.

Fussily combing the afro pick through his hair Alex shuffled to the kitchenette and tried to picture other, more immediate things. Just like with the cell phone, he reached for the icebox and opened it before having any idea wherefore. Its automatic interior light was reassuring although Alex wasn’t conscious of this creature-comfort nor would he be until the tiny bulb was in need of replacing. Even then, replacing it, under the circumstances, wouldn’t be the inconvenience it might have once been. At least now it would grant him another reason to leave the house.

Across the tracks, in another zip code, Arnold caught himself, for the umpteenth time, chewing the insides of his mouth. It was an irritating tick that plagued him of late. These days the news updates in real-time had the same effect on him as Internet porn: short doses of pleasure until he pulled up stakes and admitted the novelty was well worn—and wasteful—and deliberately weaned himself, often amid a residue of jadedness and self-loathing, from the endless teat of just one more click. Arnold was tired of porn, too, for that matter. His esteem could do without the mocking stimulations’ empty calories -—at least for another day or two.

Instead of reaching for the television remote control his hand went toward the bookshelf over his desk which Alex helped in putting up. With his head crooked to one side, he traced a finger along the row of books, reading the titles running down their spines.

Oh, yeah! This, he reflected.

This was a second-hand book, bent and flipped through fifty times over. Arnold had picked it up at a yard sale solely because he felt sorry for the little girl sitting there. She looked so hopeful her family’s belongings would sell like hotcakes. He had bought it for a quarter. No, wait. It was fifty-cents, no, twenty-five cents. That’s right, twenty-five cents; and for just another twenty-five cents, mister, he could buy a baggie of popcorn or popcorn ball. Yeah, that was it. Very entrepreneurial. Arnold remembered walking away intending to dump the book in the first donation bin or bus stop passed. Then he thought as he flipped through it, coordinating his steps and munching on popcorn, that maybe the book was worth a read after all.

That was, oh, he sighed, ages ago, and let it go at that, not bringing himself to calculate the passage of months. Oh well, better now than never.

He slumped in his desk chair, extended his legs fully out and considered the paperback’s table of contents. Then Alex thought better of it and moved over to the bed. He peeled off his socks, propped himself comfortably up against the headboard and settled in.

The House That Kept Jack

Outside the smudgy dirty window lay dry field, barren of anything save for a pitiful wood of petrified, twisted trees whose skeleton branches and rocks obscured nothing. A miserable ditch scratched not far from the house all the way, way, a ways in the distance to the nearly imperceptible bisection of gray black horizons of land, something, sky. The something might have been mountains, more woods, or a large body of water. It was just a shade faintly darker than the upper and lower halves of sky and land between which it lay. The branches never swayed nor the leaves rustled because there was never wind and no leaves. The outside’s pitch grayness was like the grainy chemical black and white of a silent film.

Jack knew it was day time.

He limped, head bowed, through the window-lined hallway, wanting that his eyes met as little as possible of the interior. He loathed even more the reflex to look without. But it was a hopeless paranoiac impulse which, despite the resultant mocking pain, Jack could only just barely stifle. He looked because windows are made to look through; because it’s subconsciously absurd not to look if you’re on the inside. And because forced solitary confinement makes peering through even the feeblest of apertures irresistible. Jack could almost just picture himself, looking up and beholding this desperate, terror stricken face beseeching from the window. But it was a face no one would ever see. He trudged along the hall with his eyes riveted on his dirty and hardened feet. He was shaking from crying but his tear ducts were as dry as the scar of ditch beyond the window. It had been so long since he felt or tasted tears.

This was just another morning in his ocean of night-days.

Slouched in the large ratty, overstuffed chair, several many days later, and lifeless as a deflated blow-up doll, Jack stared across the empty room at the miniature view from the window. It was a melancholy modernist view, in slate, with lonesome scraggly vertical lines and was just sufficiently obtuse to whisper across the embers of his torment.

His worn eyes glazed over, blurring the window from its frame and the disenchanted outside overflowed into the room until the unevenness of earth brushed against his feet. His pupils ached from the trance and he blinked to relieve the strain. Then stiffened. Jack shivered from a pang he long feared would never revisit his waking hours ever again.

One of the trees moved! He stared wide eyed at the spot as though his eyelids were pulled back and taped to his forehead. Every muscle fiber, follicle, and desire tensed to lurch him running to the window. But Jack held back. His fingers dug rigidly into the arms of the chair as though binding himself to the bow against the siren’s inevitable mockery and disappointment. He dared to blink again. Then Jack closed his eyes altogether and collapsed into himself with a grievous sigh.

Fool! He fumed with clenched fists. DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU! DAMN YOU! Daa..., until, exhausted, he slid down, like a fur coat falling off a chair, to the creaking and gnarled floor, where he muttered, Why...why, why...why...., as he sobbed himself to sleep.

Jack dreamt he was awakened by a knocking. He had been rocking side to side inside of a tanker’s dark hull, powerless to stake equilibrium against the elements. At times the knocking was the ship’s response to the ocean’s sway and at other times, the sonar of gigantic sperm whales communicating, a natural lullaby of calm, rhythmic repetition. But Jack knew he had never been inside a sea vessel and, so, was not in one now. Grasping at the false reality of it, Jack asked, How can I go to sleep if I’m not awake? Then he was instantly aware of the smell and feel of the house under his face.

Jack remained his eyes closed but knew there was no returning. He was awake. The ephemeral spell was broken and its refuge banished...gone...snuffed out.

The sound of knocking clung, so vivid so actual, and he squeezed his eyelids tighter hoping that, maybe, he was still tipsy with somnolence and could get back to the hull because—-.

His eyes opened and listened with every antennae of his being. Was he to be imprisoned by his mind too? Not even granted the bliss of insanity, the cruel solace of accepted defeat? A familiar and impotent anger welled up in him and just as he neared the raving repertoire of dry-mouth rants and gnashing and calloused feet stampings Jack snapped upright, like an alerted sleeping dog, and hushed. His ears pricked keenly. His nose sniffed at the air. He dared to do it:

WHAT? he hopelessly demanded of the knocking. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?

Hello?

He scrambled to his feet and down the stair. More than once, he tripped over himself or the sudden appearances of floor lamps and end tables and children’s toys and stools. Coming! Coming! I’m coming, Jack implored, high on a forsaken hope, begging the knock to persist just a second more.

Upon reaching the bottom of the stair he swayed with a swelling of vertigo. The floor compressed under his step and the walls rippled with tiny waves. The sparse furniture creakily turned to face him, the things on the bookcase formed into a grimace of crooked teeth while the arched entryway scowled and