American Blood Moon

By M.K. Stam

Our Western economic system stands in direct opposition to what the earth and its inhabitants need to survive. No one knows this better than Catherine, a middle-aged artist whose career has evaporated and whose eviction lands her in a house abandoned halfway through renovation, which she transforms with her magic touch. She wins the lottery and instead of fixing everything, it sends her life into another tailspin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.K. Stam
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215139103

M.K. Stam

M.K. Stam is an artist and writer. She lives in the mountains outside Los Angeles with her dogs.

Book preview

American Blood Moon

M.K. Stam

Published by M.K. Stam, 2022.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

AMERICAN BLOOD MOON

First edition. November 30, 2022.

Copyright © 2022 M.K. Stam.

ISBN: 979-8215139103

Written by M.K. Stam.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

American Blood Moon

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About the Author

About the Publisher

for missing witches everywhere

1: Bird Tattoo Dream _ Present day _ looking back

I. am. haunted. like my mother. I’d like to be able to say, ...and her mother before her for poetic storytelling continuity, but I simply can’t. My maternal grandmother Cecilia Shannon wasn’t that self-aware. or curious. An artistically inclined but repressed woman who only managed to push herself to the avant-garde edge of porcelain plate embellishment, she cared deeply what the neighbors thought.

But her daughter, my mother, Mary Graham, was an outlier. like me. haunted by her dreams.

She wasn’t a daddy’s girl. They were far too serious for such inanity. But her father, Frank, listened to her, unlike his wife who was more or less bothered by her. She gave birth to her when she was almost 35 and she was tired. but. you know — Catholic.

So when at 11 years of age Mary asked over breakfast, "What does missing in action mean?" Cecilia didn’t even hear her, but her father snapped his attention up from his morning paper and wondered aloud where she’d heard that phrase.

Mary said, I dreamed it. John Scott is missing in action. But then he’s found.

Her father put down his paper and considered her from across their unnecessarily long dining room table. The U.S. had entered the second world war less than four months before. Let’s go for a walk.

Passing the neighbor’s paddock, Mary watched Mildred the cow

grazing in the back acreage. Frank kept his eyes on his daughter. Tell me the dream, he said, exactly as you remember it.

She described the dream in detail. It was their house, but it looked different. The furniture was arranged differently. There were matching wrought iron lamps on either side of the fireplace in the parlor, and other revisions.

He explained what missing in action meant and asked her not to discuss her dream with anyone else. And then he waited.

Life continued as usual, with Frank taking the train to his apothecary on 5th avenue weekdays, the kids attending three different schools and Cecelia running the house, arranging flowers and hosting tea for the gardening guild Wednesday afternoons.

Two months later, Mary was vacuuming her bedroom when Cecilia pulled their 1941 Ford Coupe into the driveway, home from another weekend estate auction, the trunk and backseat jammed with booty. Mary glanced out her upstairs bedroom window and saw the lamps from her dream sticking out the car’s rear window. She took the stairs two at a time.

I saw, Frank said preemptively, gesturing for her to settle down. They helped schlep a sterling tea service, Chinese lanterns, a garden parasol and other goodies, then hung back and watched Cecilia waive chanteuse arms as the help arranged and re-arrange her auction finds. When the lamps ended up on either side of the fireplace, Frank signaled Mary it was time for a walk.

Another month passed which included her 12th birthday. Soon after, Mary came home sweaty and happy from tennis practice to a hysterical Mrs. Scott in their parlor. She was already familiar with this scene. She couldn’t stand to see the woman’s distress and blurted, Don’t worry! — he’s going to be found!

Mrs. Scott stopped her snuffling and hankie-wringing and stared at her. But...how do you know?

I dreamed it — he’s found.

Mary! her mother exclaimed, furious, — go to your room!

Esmerelda Scott didn’t mean how do you know he’ll be found, but how do you know at all? She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone but Cecelia, only moments before. The Scotts were notified nearly three weeks later by telegram their son had indeed been located, a little worse for the wear, but alive. He was recovering from exposure and minor injuries in Switzerland.

Mrs. Scott put the incident right out of her head. Nobody mentioned Mary’s prediction. It simply wasn’t spoken of. It was years before she realized they blamed her for John’s disappearance simply because she had prescient knowledge of it.

If challenged, they’d have to admit 12 year old Mary couldn’t possibly be responsible for John going missing on another continent 3,716 miles across the sea, but it was never spoken of, so they were never challenged. She was regarded with trepidation ever after.

Mom had dreams about me, too. When I was 19, assaulted outside a Fear gig, for instance. The next morning she came into my room. What happened. Are you alright? My head was pounding but I denied everything, said I was fine. She had enough to worry about. She shook her head, trying to clear a very real visual. She knew. Crossing the room, she placed a hand over my forehead, eyed me suspiciously. ...Okay... she murmured with reluctance. It’s difficult to rebel when your mom sees your every move.

She couldn’t explain how she knew when a dream was predictive, she just knew. 90% of her prescient dreams came true to one degree or another. For instance, the one about Viv having an affair and absconding with her grandchildren to Las Vegas — close, but no cigar. or slot. Sometimes a slot is just a slot. you’ll have to decide.

I grew up with these stories. But. When one of the required psychology classes at grad school was Dream Tending, even though I knew better, I thought — puh — such bullshit.

You have to rebel against something to make it your own, Catherine, a woman in a long ago printmaking class once said to me. That’s Catherine The Vernacular to you, I thought, Patron Saint of Swearing. She was talking about Christianity — the born-again variety. I believe being born once is traumatic enough. I was raised Catholic — the Latin variety. Protestant Christianity always seemed like Catholic Light to me, and Evangelical Christianity — a downright punishment. No incense? No candles? No gorgeous iconography or transcendent celestial chants? A gathering without incandescent incantations sung in a dead language isn’t a ritual, it’s a lecture. And white Evengelical lectures were abusive, in my experience.

I blew her off then, just like I dismissed the graduate class. I told myself Dream Tending was woo-woo, hippie-dippy newage-rhymes-with-sewage bullshit, even though deep down I knew there was something there. My resistance told me so. And of course, it was exactly what I’d been looking for — the key to my next series of paintings, in fact — where the images come from: where the wild things are.

Still, I resisted. Even a month in, after the dream tending class had proven its content to be more than worthy of my attention and I had this dream about Phin, I dismissed the importance of it, choosing instead to focus on its interesting imagery. I can be hard-headed.

Phin is on a beach in Polynesia, somewhere — Fiji, probably. Seems like he would like Fiji. He’s being tattooed by a large illustrated man in a sarong using a quill — a Hawk feather. The tattoo artist transmogrifies into a hummingbird, the quill floating to the ground, and uses his beak to finish tattooing extravagant wings over Phin’s entire back and down his arms, weaving from one shoulder to the other — a spell. Hidden in the texture of the feathers he threads symbols from Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu mythologies: sacred geometry, Ganesh, Islamic arabesques. But they can only be seen at an angle — the chameleon effect of a sharkskin suit. The iridescent images lay in the feather fiber like secrets revealed only upon movement — a flutter of wing or shift in perspective of the onlooker. 

When the hummingbird finishes, he flies away. Phin transitions into a hawk, beginning with his feet and legs and ending with his head. He takes to the sky, scooping up the skin of the earth like a blanket in his beak and flying off leaving only the golden after-glow of one country gleaming in the substrate: India.

Phin had already gone to India. this was just. i don’t know. stupid.

Sure, the imagery was interesting. That seeing the secret language in the wings requires a shift in perspective is noteworthy, and Phin didn’t turn into a Phoenix, but a Hawk: Hawk-eye. Maybe he’s becoming sharper, more perceptive. One of Phin’s super powers is his ability to focus. Unfortunately, he often uses the ability to focus elsewhere — compartmentalize — willful ignorance to the tenth power.

But here I am trippin’. My boy scout brother would never ever get a tattoo, so my brain is just cooking shit up.

Dreams are supposed to tell us how things are, said my inner voice. Ugh — who cares — I had breakfast to make. and crap to pack. I hate moving.

2: Lucky _ Present day _ imperfect

Right up until the eviction I was painting like a mad woman — enormous twisters — dramatic impasto storms of foreboding.

Well-meaning friends often suggested practical ways for me to make a living with my art. It’s just my entrepreneurial mind at work, Dan said, as if bestowing jewels on me, but why not make prints and sell them?

The piece he was mesmerized by while imparting this wisdom was an 8 foot by 6 foot painting called Men At The Gate With Veil, featuring in black, raw umber and metallic silver, gaunt and tortured souls gathered at the gate of Buchenwald in 1945 (from a famous photo by Margaret Bourke White), seen through a diaphanous veil imprinted with a crimson graphic from a Nazi-issued postage stamp.

The power of the piece lay in its life size. It worked best in a tiny space around a corner when gallery patrons were suddenly confronted face to face with the reality. 8 by 6 foot prints? I like the piece, but I don’t think the average art lover really wants this haunting holocaust remembrance staring them in the face every day.

Most often the suggestion was to hang my work in local bistros. Have you not eyes in your head? I would think. How appetizing is this piece about the Rosewood massacre?

Their hearts were in the right place, but most of my work was not commercial. Or appetizing. I had limited energy, so I only made paintings I wanted to see. If the subject didn’t hold my interest for the time it took to finish, I painted over it.

Over the last 30 years I was able to charm the elements, enchant ideas, incant spirit and manage to live decently. Then something in the stratosphere shifted, and my eco system collapsed.

I hadn’t deluded myself. I was able to more than get by for years. My brain was often in the ether, but I never kidded myself about practicalities like rent. My career as a freelance graphic designer had completely evaporated. When it started to shift, I tried everything. For months, my life was bartering on Craig’s List, interview after interview, applying for multiple jobs daily — even ones outside my field, like working the checkout at grocery stores — nothing materialized. Sometimes things just break apart and all you can do is watch and pray the pieces fall together again in a functional form.

How did I land here? in this house. in all this nature. Years ago I’d said to my neighbor Denise I needed to live in the hills. I don’t do well with noise. Our apartments were built prison style: three stories high around a rectangular pool kids jumped into from the railings.

That didn’t bother me. What got to me was the reverberating echo of the hollering dive bombers, three a.m. phone calls my upstairs neighbor made I could hear through the paper thin ceiling, and packs of roving, screaming children. They resembled flocks of feral geese stampeding through the breezeways. The echo bounded before and bounced along after the marauding pack of them, and their parents allowed it, no matter how fervently Denise and I complained.

And now here I am in the Angeles National Forest after being evicted from the pink stucco prison apartment for lack of means. I’m here, but I’m broke. Phin was kind enough to pay the first three months rent, which is ridiculously low due to the landlord’s need for a caretaker. I fix things up around the house, like the French doors that fell apart weeks after I moved in. I’ve found a little freelance work and am squeaking by.

I love it here. it’s peaceful. it’s serene. it’s all-temperature bliss, summers notwithstanding. I can think here. I can sleep here. I know who I am here, more than any place I’ve lived.

Social interaction has been a challenge since that fateful Fear show. It took awhile to notice my new sensitivities. At first, the days-long headache took all my attention. I popped twice the recommended dose of Advil and tried to sleep it off. After Mary came in to check on me I went back to sleep until two. I don’t remember much more of that day. Everyone else was out of the house. It was quiet. I got up, puttered a little, then went back to bed. I wasn’t hungry.

The next day I noticed food had no flavor. The following days revealed I could taste and hear color, though, and see sounds. The color orange tanged in my lymph nodes, green tasted like cucumber, yellow made the tender skin around my eyes perspire. Music bloomed bright rainbow bursts in my brain, and thoughts, if attached to emotions, had accompanying scents as well as hues.

Weird, right? My wires were crossed — I was concussed or something. It would pass. I began straightening compulsively — pencils parallel to book spines on the desk, front-facing cans and jars of condiments in the pantry, straightening and untangling the venetian blinds.

That a knock on the head would result in synesthesia and compulsive behavior was a bizarre thing I didn’t even think to deny. I simply moved forward.

Willful ignorance of my condition didn’t last. That same woman in my printmaking class heard me describe a particular shade of yellow as tasting bitter and feeling cold. She asked if I was synesthesic. After she explained it was the crossing over of the senses, I had to say yes. I relaxed a little to find it was a thing other people had, as well.

My ability to taste food came back little by little over the next few weeks: first hot spice, then sugar and finally salt; my compulsive tidying faded like new jeans, very slowly. The hankering to make art increased — I had several senses conspiring now, compelling me to paint.

In retrospect, I should have gone to the hospital, but that was something we Stephanopolouses just didn’t do. It never even crossed my mind.

Dad was nearly driven crazy that first year. It’s nice that you’re cleaning — I appreciate it, George sighed, bleary and drooping with sleep, "but it’s three in the morning. What’s wrong with you?"

It took awhile to sort out. My parents never found out about the gig — they would never have let me go to another. Not that I really wanted to after that, but I wanted the option. The price to witness Lee Ving screaming angstily into a microphone was grossly inflated. The vibrating air saturated with sweat and tension wasn’t fun. There was dense, chewy fury permeating that dank room.

Curt suggested we escape it, so he, my pal Robin and I went outside for a breather. They wandered off to get something out of Robin’s car. I was leaning against a wall when Tommie, a thin white blonde girl stepped up on me. I can’t tell you what she was yelling in my face, but she was doing it from an inch away. I stood stock still. She ran out of words I guess, and I said into the lull, You trying to kiss me, bitch?

Apparently, that was the invitation she was looking for. She turned to her boyfriend, one of the MacLeod brothers, and informed him: She called me a bitch. He body slammed me against the wall and began pummeling me. He wouldn’t have stopped had someone not retrieved a bouncer.

This may be a stretch, but I suspect there was more to it. A few weeks prior I’d been at a local night spot with a group of friends — some of them friends, most acquaintances — and Matt MacLeod was there. I had a bit of a crush on him, despite his recent admission of having been an active member of a skinhead gang in the not too distant past. He was complex.

The Matt I knew was laid back — downright charming. I think I didn’t really believe him when he said the smell of blood was a driving force in his life for years. I don’t remember the name of the gang, but I’d seen the like around, at the fear gig, for instance. Hobnail booted skinheads in ratty jeans and torn T’s, plaid shirts tied around their waists (the California version of a kilt), skins slick with sweat, dirt and blood, slamming against each other in mosh pits of the southland.

I couldn’t reconcile this tale with the Matt before me — a man who read the newspaper mornings and was never at a loss for intelligent,  humorous conversation. A gentle giant. He had a genetic hormonal condition and was nearly seven feet tall and heavy set, like Andre the Giant. He had a belly. which I stupidly, absently rubbed like he was a magic Buddha. in front of people.

Sidling up and going in for a side hug, I couldn’t wrap my arm around him and let my hand come to rest on his belly. and then. yes — made a counter-clockwise circular motion. or two. like he was a magic Buddha.

Mortification crept up my neck and flushed my face red when the realization hit. He stopped talking. looked down on me then laughed it off, but was more shocked than anything.

I’ve often wondered if he asked his brother to go after me because I embarrassed him in front of his friends. Or maybe his brother just did it on his own for that reason. who knows.

That was the end of punk rock events for me. Live by the sword. The resulting karma is an almost autistic level of hypersensitivity to stimuli. It’s waned, but I still can’t listen to Stiff Little Fingers. In fact, I only listen to music when I paint these days, and do that less and less. My dreams are symphonic and not any symphonies I’ve heard in waking life. My weird brain composes sound tracks when I dream.

Synesthesia necessitated rearranging my work schedule to avoid extreme rushes, which made me go nearly catatonic with overload. I framed pictures, stocked and tracked product more and worked the register less at an art store part time.

People distilled into colors. While arranging the mat samples at work soon after the incident I realized I’d been correlating the cinnabar color with Low. Her skin was actually somewhat that tone, and her personality was all that color. When thinking of Phin, a medium olive green popped into my head. I didn’t see auras, the colors didn’t change the way auras do. supposedly.

My sister Eris was a shield of blinding safety yellow accompanied by the reverberating sound of circular saws that made my teeth hurt. Occasionally I’d get a confusing whiff of freshly mown grass, as if she’s an amoral force of nature, not malignantly responsible for the wreckage in her wake.

The color and scent permeating the air around my best gal-pal Judith St. George is one in the same: a clean, light linen, tinged faintly with lemon. The air does not crystallize around Judith’s peaches and cream complexion as she runs down villainous Soviet operatives. She’s not protected from foggy London cold war elements by a Nehru jacket and square toed ankle boots that zip up the back. She’s not an MI5 agent as her name suggests. She’s a mixed race 21st century intuitive counselor with a background in social work and 1200 braids all her own that fall nearly to her calves. Normally I would call her Jude, but I love her entire spy gal name so much I use it unabridged as often as I can. Judith Saint George! I hail when I answer her calls.

Miles is the only one to date with simultaneous, complementary expressions: aubergine and golden topaz, with dual scents of after-rain and fragrant Amber. Shostakovich’s 11th and The Blue Hearts ran through my mind when he was on it. Because he’s complex? Because he’s balanced? Who knows. The opposing sensations of heaviness and buoyancy are also associated with him — the same dichotomy I sometimes experience on the verge of sleep: the constriction of being enormous in a shoe box-size room, or the insecurity of feeling like a speck of dust in a space the size of an airplane hanger. I also craved Trader Joe’s caramelly Belgian milk chocolate whenever I thought of, saw or spoke with him. Miles was bad for my diet, but so, so sweet.

We met when he bought a pair of ropers from me in my three part-time jobs days. He was gorgeous, and a complete goofball. He wandered toward the floor length mirror, then back, looked down at the boots, grinned and made a gesture a little too close to jazz hands: I feel sexy!

That he brought up the scents of amber and after-rain and made me crave chocolate would have been enough, but he also defended me when Robin, with whom I eventually had a forever falling out, attacked.

We all met for an art opening in Venice and ended up at the Rose Cafe, like you do. Robin’s impending nuptials had her on edge, especially since she was clearly attracted to Miles, whom she’d seen occasionally at parties we attended. Close proximity to him seemed to unnerve her. At one point mid-obsession, she halted, looked down her nose at me and spat, You would make a terrible mom!

Miles thunked back in the booth. You. Are. So. Wrong. Cat would make a great mother. He shook his head, not believing what he’d just witnessed.

She was stricken with embarrassment. And Miles was my hero.

The air after a good rainfall is intoxicating. Southern California would be vastly improved by more of it. And amber is a very distinct, warm and complex fragrance; the key ingredient in Coco Chanel’s signature scent. They’re my favorite aromas. Amber resin is often mistaken for Patchoulli, which I disdain because I associate it with unbathed hippies. People who conflate the two don’t have a discerning sense of smell and likely lack taste altogether. I know. I’m a snob. About art. About language. About tea. About scents. Particular, you could say.

Since moving to the foothills, my sensorial connections have rewired. Two years later tall grasses no longer smell exotic. Earth has become part of my perfume. Mother Nature snuck up on me with her gifts and left them on the back stoop, completely mellowing me out.

At first, I had to shrink to the size of a dormouse to slip past a massive tangle of lethal bougainvillea overgrowing the front porch, just to get to the front door. Taming such wild shrew-ish shrubbery was so difficult I was inspired to make up a word to describe it: shrewery.

My recently widowed friend Ken generously loaded up the back of my Element with cuttings from his succulent garden. I’m not a fan of succulents and cactus. I’m more a moss witch. I like calm, shady garden nooks. But I gratefully drove off with a car full of cuttings because they were free. It wasn’t until a year later when I was pulling the blue agave pups and other volunteers and tossing them in a heap that I thought, I bet I can sell those.

I put them up on Etsy for $7 each plus shipping and they sold in a day. Holy Mother of God — this place was a goldmine. I clipped and propagated all the most interesting plants, listing them online immediately. By the time they went into shipping, they’d already begun to root. Magic and realism. Then a friend gave me 40 Blue Dream seeds and I was making medicine in weeks.

Since the move, my apprehension at the sound of helicopters has deepened. They used to buzz my neighborhood in Highland Park in search of hoodlums, spotlights piercing every sliver of window they could find, loudspeakers blaring at two and three am. every. fucking. weekend. Now, the hollow thwack of blades against static, dry air means one of two things: wildfire or stranded hikers. Summers are harrowing, especially because of idiots who set off fireworks illegally here in the tinder foothills of the forest.

Fucking morons.

Still. I was lucky. No one attaches the adjective amazing to this house, as I did when I first took in the sight of the abandoned renovation wreathed in hip-high dead grass and weeds. I love a good project. And this house saved me.

Other choices were my friend Ken’s guest room or my car. Ken’s guest room came with strings attached. Pat died a few months earlier after a ten year battle with cancer. I helped sort through her ceramics studio and find buyers for her collections of vintage clothes and art books. The second week in, we’d made good progress. I was logging sales in a spiral notebook