Mr. James > Recent Status Updates

Now she had become part of that other world and would be rearranged by other humans. Her cart was half-filled with provisions for a week's living, and the sight of the cans and boxes and wrapped meats filled him with a sharp agonized, terror. Looking into the dead woman's cart, he wondered what they would do with the groceries. -- S.K.

The chemist tore off a piece of paper from a pad and poised with his pen. Just let me have the name of the person or persons you intend to poison, he said. We're required to keep records. -- C.M.

You have any other animals? said Suttree. Dog or anything? No. Just goats. I think a feller gets started with goats he just more or less sticks to goats. -- C.M.

He stood in a concrete room painted white and pissed painfully a few drops into an oldfashioned urinal and came out again. She was waiting for him. Did you do your business? she said, smiling. Just a little. Number one or number two? Suttree couldnt remember what the numbers corresponded to. Wee wee, he said. He felt completely stupid. -- C.M.

A cold sweat broke out upon him. He felt his head. Terminal brain damage under the towels? He tried to recite the multiplication tables and this filled him with sexual memories and caused him to lie back smiling. -- C.M.

Who the fuck are we fighting? said Suttree. Who the fuck cares? If he aint from McAnally bust him. And they are whelmed in dark riot, the smoking hall a no man's land filled with lethal looking drunks reeling about with bleeding eyes and reeking of homemade whiskey. -- C.M.

J-Bone raised himself and looked over the back of the seat. Sharpe had a small fire going in the floor of the car and he was holding his hands over it. J-Bone leaned over the seat and held his own hands out for warmth. Watch Cabbage's leg there, he said. -- C.M.

That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I don't think I've seen anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lighting up the snow and the trees and the night. -- C.M.

The building dropped away. They were going by a frozen mudflat, lunar, naked, spoored with fossil dogtracks. Under the billboard lights small sprawling mica constellations. The lightwires slung past in shallow convections pole to pole and the loneliness rode in his stomach like an egg. -- C.M.

Only one thing that bothers me, and that's a feeling I get from time to time that I'm a character in some bad writer's book and he's already decided how things are going to turn out and why. -- S.K.

Suttree just shook his head. The stripling on the stool beside him with his heron's legs dangling smelled like a smoked jockstrap. Even the waitress's eyes went a little funny when she passed and she herself no rosegarde. -- C.M.

Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in a perpetual storm. Suttree went to his knees in the grass, his hand cupped over his ears. -- C.M.

Inside there is nothing. No bones, no dust. How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it. -- C.M.

By now the mother had come from the porch. She was dressed in black and closed upon them soundless as a plague, her bitter twisted face looming, axemark for a mouth and eyes crazed with hatred. She tried to speak but only a half strangled scream came out. The girl was thrown aside and this demented harridan was at him clawing, kicking, gurgling with rage. -- C.M.

They watched from the porch, gathered there like a sitting for some old sepia tintype, the mother's hand on the seated patriarch's shoulder. Watched him coming up the walk with his empty hands and burnt looking eyes. Suttree's abandoned wife. -- C.M.

For heaven's sake, I broke in. Don't call me a nice man to her. I'm here to look at her throat on the chance that she might have diphtheria and possibly die of it. But that's nothing to her. Look here, I said to the child, we're going to look at your throat. You're old enough to understand what I'm saying. Will you open it now by yourself or shall we have to open it for you? -- W.C.W

He was a black of a contemplative nature and he was just slightly drunk and he stood leaning there against the abutment of the viaduct and took a sip from a halfpint bottle and slipped it back into his hip pocket and wiped his mouth and watched this spectacle of frenzied mayhem with a troubled gaze. -- C.M.

The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by sheer velocity of time... I am, I am. An artifact of a prior race. -- C.M.

The preacher had the man by the collar. He was sputtering and reeling about and he looked half crazy. The preacher steadied him by the forehead, intoning the baptismal service. Suttree rose and dusted the grass from his trousers. You aint fixin to leave are ye? The old man asked. I sure as hell am, said Suttree. [...] Suttree knew the river well already and he turned his back to these malingerers and went on. -- C.M.

“He's a plucky little devil, thought the boss, and he felt a real admiration for the fly's courage.” -- K.M.

Suttree smiled. I hear that old woman shot you the other night. [...] She shot about four holes in the wall. Shot a picture down. I ducked behind the sofa and she shot a hole in that and John Clancy said they was a rat the size of a housecat come out from under it just shittin and a gettin it. He was layin in the floor and he said it run right over the top of him. -- C.M.

"Better than what you're doing." Vinnie turned away abruptly, almost bumping Santa, who said something that sounded suspiciously like watch where the fuck you're going. -- S.K.

He went into the Gold Sun... sitting at the counter among the morning smells of fried sausage and eggs. He rolled back the folds of his trouserlegs and examined his wound. The beggar's illspaced teeth had printed two little sickle shapes, the flesh blue, small pinlets of blood. Harrogate wet a paper napkin in his water glass and laved it over his queer stigmata. Son of a bitch, he muttered. -- C.M.

The carpeting had been rained on and was lightly furred with pale blue mold. Something small and fat and wet with an umbilical looking tail lying there. A sort of slug. He picked it up. A human eye looked up at him from between his thumb and forefinger. -- C.M.

The CLOD & the PEBBLE: A Clod of Clay frames Heaven where Hell turns away; but a Pebble knows Hell always faces the right way.

He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light. Here one tinted easter pink along the edges of his white fur belly and wings. Eyes black, triangular, a robber's mask. Furred and wizened face not unlike a monkey's and wearing a windswept ermine shako. Suttree bent to see him better. What do you want? -- C.M.

I'd like these shoes soled I dreamt I dreamt. An old bent cobbler looked up from his lasts and lapstone with eyes dim and windowed. Not these, my boy, they are far too far gone, these soles. But I've no others. The old man shook his head. You must forget these and find others now. -- C.M.

Suttree looked at him. He was not lovable. This adenoidal leptosome that crouched above his bed like a wizened bird, his razorous shoulderblades, jutting in the thin cloth of his striped shirt. Sly, ratfaced, a convicted pervert of a botanical bent. Who would do worse when in the world again. Bet on it. But something in him so transparent, something vulnerable. -- C.M.

In the long days of fall they went like dreamers. Watching the sky for rain. When it came it rained for days. [...] A sad and bitter season. Barrenness of heart and gothic loneliness. Suttree dreamed old dreams of fairgrounds where young girls with flowered hair and wide child's eyes watched by flarelight sequined aerialists aloft. Visions of unspeakable loveliness from a world lost. -- C.M.

Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons. [...] What do you aim to do? Hell, I don't know. It's about too late to do anything. He's damn near screwed the whole patch. I don't see why he couldnt of stuck to just one. Or a few. Well, I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailor in a whorehouse. -- C.M.