Writing
Dance with the Angels
Seven years, and finally he had found her. He knew every curve of her body. From inside the bar he watches Jasmine spin and shimmy to the throb of the music. Her blue skirt swirls like water around her. He touches the cold silver of the bracelet in his pocket, Carla’s bracelet. After the dance he will give it to her, she will wear it and she will dance for him, just for him….
Musician and belly dancer Diana Taylor performs several times a week at a friend’s Kitsilano restaurant. One night her bewitching dancing attracts the attention of a psychopath who is searching for Carla -- the woman he loves, lost, and now hates, and who still controls his twisted world. Jasmine becomes his latest Carla, and like all of the others, he wants to possess her, making her a shrine to her memory in a grotesque and deadly ritual.
Diana's death opens a Pandora’s Box of unsolved crimes: other women, many of them dancers, who have died in suspicious circumstances. Can the Vancouver Vice Squad find the serial killer before he kills again?
NOW AVAILABLE
Amazon Kindle Kobo iTunes
Viva Vivisection
or
A day in the Lab with Dr. Chop
I have always found vivisection to be a seductive experience. In my laboratory, with its gleaming instruments and steel tabletops, with the diagram at my side I pick up the syringe and inject my living specimen with the anaesthetic inducing what will be the final sleep.
What I am doing is a biography of a living creature. I am creating a portfolio of his life. My report will be that creature’s history. No more conjecture, my scalpel blade will reveal his body’s secrets: the pulsating telegraph of his heart valve, his thoracic duct, his red blood cells, his pulmonary function, and whether or not there is insecticide residue in his tissues. Like paragraphs in an essay his story unfolds.
My scalpel cleanly bisects his liver and I deduce it to be disease free. This is not a subjective evaluation. His liver speaks for itself, likewise his lungs and his kidneys. My dissection creates the portfolio of this creature’s life, man or beast.
My scalpel is the pen. His body is my story. I slice through his geography reading the map of his inner world.
Published in Words Worth Learning
Published in Keys to a Powerful Vocabulary
Sumo Jo
Jo fit the stereotype of the massively robust sumo wrestler weighing in at 200 kilos. Stigmatized because he was big-boned and twice as wide as other kids his age Jo was teased, ridiculed, and shunned: to play with Jo was taboo and anyone who did was ostracized by other children until Jo was abandoned again and left friendless, a hanger-on outside the group. Jo masked his hurt with an attitude of jovial nonchalance and, pretending to not care a fig about his lonely status on the school playground, he began to train in the martial arts, kick-boxing and karate, finally zeroing in on the art of sumo in his teens. By the time he was seventeen to be kicked in the back by Jo meant losing a kidney.
One day something snapped in Jo leading him into a secret life and a sinister hobby. He shaved his head clean of his sumo topknot, tattooed his biceps with spider webs and joined a cell of angry skinheads. He began spray painting brick store fronts and subway walls with messages and symbols until the thrill of the spray aerosol can became ‘so yesterday’. His focus became clear when he shifted to harassing those he called “Featherweights”, the compulsive dieters and weaklings he despised. He began stalking, grabbing skinny people off the street and force-feeding them Hungry Man Pizzas. He shoved Dilly Bars down the throats of anorexics and fled using the rapid-strike-and-escape-by-sidecar-motorbike method he had perfected. Then he planned what was to be his major coup. It took place in the frozen foods Lean Cuisine section of Safeway. It was Friday evening when his pipe bomb filled with fertilizer, glycerine and jujubes detonated at 6:15 seriously wounding three slender girls and gutting the entire diet food section. The scene was frightening: Lean Turkey Meatballs pelted the hanging packages of salami directly across from the cooler while shattered trays of Peppery Chicken Quinoa slithered across the aisles causing one shopper to fall shattering both kneecaps. Bits of veggies splattered every freezer window clouding the entire selection of flavoured tofu ice cream. It was Safeway’s good fortune that most of the slim folks were still upstairs in Planet Fitness working out over the dinner hour, and that the many customers in fresh red meats were far enough away from being peppered with veggies when the pipe bomb blew.
Although Jo finally found his niche in terrorism, he made the mistake that day of lurking by the Butter Chicken freezer to watch the pipe bomb attack. It took six cops to finally subdue Jo, the sumo wrestler who became infamous for one moment as The Safeway Terrorist and who today teaches the art of sumo in Sing Sing.
that toolbelt guy
that toolbelt guy
just watch him move –
on the concrete slab over there –
yeah, that’s him!
just watch his –
thighs sheathed in sprayed-on denim
watch his –
belt slung low
his tools slotted in bondage leather
hugging his hips and his butt
his hammers and pliers grippers and snippers
sway with every stride
mime the undulations of his gait – oh yeah!
just watch that tool guy move –
that sinewy glide
that jingly belt
those dangly tools
that gunslinger walk
Stoneface
I remember that even as a baby Simon’s somber eyes looked right into my soul. He would sit in his stroller watching us, a little guru wearing his disturbing judge-and-jury look, reading my private predicaments, hunting for my torrid little secrets. Simon’s mother, my sister, was exasperated with Simon’s serious little face. Can a baby really be that humourless she wondered? She reacted to Simon’s apparent over-abundance of self-esteem with a groan and a sigh, “Simon is only fourteen months old and he sits here judging us all, his eyes insinuating that we’re his inferiors. Why doesn’t he giggle like other babies? Or cry? Or scream? No, he acts like he’s seventy years old observing us in the midst of our turmoil like a little Buddha. What’s the matter with him! Do you think he’s normal?” I always reassured her that he was, although I secretly wondered.
Even now, twenty-two years later, Simon remains a conundrum. We thought he might become a philosopher cached in some dusty corner of a library behind piles of esoteric tomes, or a solitary writer churning out heaps of boring how-to pamphlets on his computer. A seer, perhaps, forecasting planetary doom. A monk secreted behind high walls praying for us all, but no! Simon is a dancer. No, not ballet. Not jazz. Simon is one of those Chippendales flaunting his six-pack of oiled abs gyrating for a panting, screeching female crowd, and how they love him! They call him “The Judge”. Yes, I admit that little black-and-white bowtie collar really suits him. Still stonefaced, however, Simon never smiles.
Published in Keys to a Powerful Vocabulary
chameleon
as long as I have known you
your colours keep changing
today
you were silver
as the sun was over English Bay
cool
delicate
your face luminous
your thoughts whispered over lips
falling into the space between us
like threads of gossamer
you held your vulnerability
in your hands
and offered it to me
Baryshnikov
“You dance, and I hurt from so much beauty...
quicksilver you move and change
audacious sensual
boyish intangible
You dance, and I ache.
puppet-master over bone and sinew
grace and power encased in flesh
a tiger in human form
You dance, and I hunger.
some unquenchable light pours forth from within you
fuelled by some inexhaustible power source
that feeds your indescribable strength
You tear out pieces of my soul.
Published in Words Worth Learning
Heartbeats
After reading the article written by the renowned Dr. Hertz, “Commercial Uses for the Cardiograph” in this month’s Medical Journal, I quickly glanced at his bibliography to see if Dr. Hertz had made reference to my recent publication, “Checking the Heartbeats of Tropical Fruits”. He had. Damnation.
Dr. Coeur is my name. My intention through years of research is to expand the use of the cardiograph into the food-for-export market sector by using a cardiogram to categorize fruits for export on the strength of their heartbeats. In my experiments I have validated that, as with a human heart, a strong heartbeat means, of course, a healthy fruit and a healthy fruit will ship well with less bruising and damage to the flesh.
That fruits have heartbeats may seem strange to you but I have spent twenty years in my laboratory studying precisely this. I have proven that plants have hearts. Based on this little-known truth, I have deduced that it would be a shrewd idea to connect my scientific knowledge of fruit heartbeats with my knowledge of the cardiograph and to make money from marketing cardiograph machinery to the fruit growers of the world. It’s a clever idea I think.
If you have a sectarian mind you might find my idea foolish or hard to grasp. However, when I am sitting on my fancy sectional sofa in my fancy living room running my toes through the royalties deriving from this concept you won’t be laughing at me or at Dr. Hertz, either, whom I fear hopes to cash in on my idea.