The Confabulator Cafe

Author: jcampbell

  • The Next Step

    The knock came early on Sunday morning, between my second cup of coffee and my first beer. I didn’t get much company. The last ten people to knock on my door were UPS drivers, and they fled in their big brown trucks before I even answered the door.

    I peeked out the front window, expecting my landlord, who would want to know when to expect last month’s rent. Instead, I saw Mack Davis, the guy who had made my two years at Bobtown University a little piece of Hell. He didn’t look like I remembered. A couple of decades wore everyone down, but his once full frame had grown slack. His gray temples faded in to a receding hairline. Time had erased his trademark smirk and had left crow’s feet in its wake.

    I opened the door as far as the brass security chain would allow. “What do you want?”

    “Hi, Sammy. Do you still go by Sammy?”

    “It’s Sam, now.”

    Mack took a deep breath and blew it out. “Okay, Sam.”

    “What do you want?”

    “Can I come in for a second?”

    This man had taunted me. I skipped classes just to avoid him. He once beat me so badly that I couldn’t sleep and spent the night sitting on the benches at student health, waiting for the doors to open. Now, he stood before me, turning a yellowing piece of notebook paper over in his hands. His slumped shoulders stole at least three inches from his height, and he had lost at least thirty pounds of muscle.

    “Why?” I asked. (more…)

  • Arbor Day

    Marvin’s war with the squirrels began with the roar of a chainsaw. He stood in his backyard wearing a Budweiser baseball cap, a pair of short shorts, and a farmer’s tan. Red body hair nearly hid a faded “April” tattoo that arched over his round gut. My daughter Tressa watched him front the fence line, as I sweated in to a fresh hole that would soon be home to a young oak tree.

    I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand and tossed the shovel aside. “Honey, come on back and give me a hand.” Don’t make eye contact with him, I thought. He might come over here.

    Tressa wandered back to the hole, weaving across the grass. She seemed to drift rather than walk as her new spring dress swirled in the breeze. “Why does he have the month tattooed on his stomach?”

    “I don’t think that is the month, kiddo. It’s a woman’s name.”

    “But his wife’s name is Sandy.”

    I wasn’t sure where to go from there, so like any good parent, I let the line of questioning vanish. Marvin helped out by cranking up a Jackyl cassette on a beaten-up boom box. He downed a can of beer, crushed it, and then tossed it in a growing pile of aluminum next to his patio door. The King of Beers was lucky to have such a devoted subject. Marvin gunned the chainsaw in time to the music as he laid in to an old maple in the center of his yard. Squirrels fled, leaping from its limbs to a nearby oak or fleeing to the grass to be chased by Red, Marvin’s barking pitbull.

    Red snatched a squirrel that had moved too slowly and shook it. Red strutted to Marvin’s side and dropped his prize. Marvin stopped cutting and patted the dog’s head before picking up the squirrel and punting it over our fence. Tressa hurried over to it.

    I called after her. “Don’t touch it, Tressa. Squirrels can carry diseases.”

    She dropped down to her knees beside the body. “Poor squirrel. He’s a mean man. Why is he cutting down the tree?” (more…)

  • A House with Many Doors

    Falling asleep in a library can be a dangerous thing. Time warps as you drown within a sea of imagination. The dreams and musings of thousands of your fellow human beings surround you, whispering “Read me.” Lay your ear upon the cover and maybe you can hear it. Or maybe–if you don’t watch yourself–you will fall asleep with a pillow of leather-bound dreams tucked beneath your head. That’s what happened to me. It’s why I am writing these pages–in desperate hope that they will be found by other library dreamers before they share my unfortunate fate. (more…)

  • The Cow of Cthulhu

    On the morning of the unfathomable event, I, Robert Joseph Edgerton III, was awaken from a fitful slumber by a heavy knock upon my bed chamber door.

    “Bobby Joe,” my mother said. “You’d best get out of that bed and get to breakfast. Those chores ain’t gonna to do themselves.”

    I wiped a crust of sleep from the corner of my eye. My faithful feline companion Applejack stretched and then leapt from my feather-stuffed mattress. Applejack and I had spent my sleeping hours exploring the Dreamlands city of Ulthar, using sleep techniques promoted by my renowned professors. My feline guide had escorted me on a tour of the legendary village where no man may kill a cat. (more…)

  • The Gift of Flesh

    On the first day of Christmas, I received a big toe. I stepped out of the front door of my house with my greyhound rescue Clever. The crisp winter air cut through my jogging gear. I cursed the 5:30 AM alarm, and my veterinarian’s insistence that Clever needed more exercise.
    I didn’t see the package. Not at first. I leaped off the doorstep and plunged forward in to the wind only to be yanked back by the leash.

    “Clever, come on boy,” I said, raising my voice in the high, slightly embarrassing tone that I only used with him.

    Clever sat anchored to the concrete. His sniffed a small package on the ice-glazed step, snorting as if he might inhale the thing. I snatched the cardboard box from beneath his nose. (more…)

  • Week 2: Down with the Sickness

    For the last week, I have had about the worst cold of my life. I’ve worked through sickness before. The flu, colds, and other ailments are generally mild inconveniences for me. But this illness is the most soul-sucking, lung hacking respiratory ailment that I’ve ever had.

    I’m tired, because I can’t sleep. I spend all night coughing and twisting, trying, in vain, to find a position that doesn’t make me feel like I can’t breathe. All in all, it has been a bad week.  The coughing has been distracting. The exhaustion has suppressed any creative drive that I have.

    Now, with the halfway party only a few hours away, I am nowhere near halfway through my novel. What I do have is pretty good, although there is a long way to go. I am about to launch in to a point of the novel where I really don’t have much of an idea about what is going to happen. This is nothing new for me. I don’t really plan novels. I just have a general idea about what is going to happen.

    Up until this point, the book has taken place at the old run-down motel that my protagonist manages. Much to my surprise, he just got fired, and the book is pushing off towards parts unknown. I really didn’t plan for this, and it is probably going to involve some research on the fly, and a lot of editing for continuity later. Still, that is part of the game, and I am excited to see where the book leads.

    In the meantime, there has to be some way to get rid of the plague. NyQuil and DayQuil have made valiant efforts, but really haven’t taken the edge off of the sickness. Mucinex has called in reinforcements, but still, we seem to be losing the battle. Every day, I get a little more behind. Hopefully, the sickness will leave me soon, and my ability to work will return.

    Current word count: 13,000

  • Week 1: What the Hell?! I’m behind already?!

    They call me the Terminator. It could be that when wearing sunglasses, I bear a slight resemblance to Schwarzenegger. God knows that we have the same muscular build that simultaneously inspires and intimidates.

    Well–that’s not true. They call me that because I sit and write without distraction. I always push forward, and I never miss my word count. So why, only a week after giving a speech about always being able to find the time to write, have I not found the time to write?

    There are a load of reasons and none of them are particularly good. I could point at work being busy, but work is always busy this time of year, and I haven’t been in for the last couple of days due to having some sort of sickness that started in sinuses head and has descended in to my lungs. I could blame it on being sick, but I’ve written while under the weather before. Hell, it is one of the best things about being a writer. You can work without risk of giving the plague to someone else.

    I could blame it on Penny, our new puppy. But really, why would you ever blame anything on a puppy? No, the truth of it is that I have failed for no good reason. The novel is coming along fine. I still have a lot of story ahead of me, and I know where I am going next. What I’ve written, I’ve done in two large chunks of over 3,000 words each, so the words are coming easily. I simply have not made enough time to work on this project, so far.

    This isn’t really a problem, not at this juncture. I will probably go for another 3,000 words or so today, which will put me only about a day behind schedule. This early in the month, it really isn’t that hard to make up for a few lazy days. It just takes a couple hundred extra words a day, hardly anything in he grand scheme of things.

    However, most people start off NaNoWriMo with a bang, charging forward and killing the majority of the first ten thousand words in just a few days. It’s generally a bad sign to be lagging behind already. That being said, I still believe I will make it to fifty thousand by the end of the month, as long as I make the time to write this book.

    I’ve just done a poor job of it, so far.

  • Party at Pinehurst

    For the first time in three generations, Pinehurst Mansion felt vibrant and alive. The annual interfraternity council Halloween party packed the place with more students than a Psych 101 lecture hall. Sexy police officers danced with black and white striped prisoners. Vampires necked with mobsters, their plastic tommy guns forgotten in dark corners. A neon green liquid flowed liberally from a punch bowl bigger than a laundry basket.

    I swam drunkeningly through the ballroom floor, tripping over my own feet, hoping to find a bathroom or at the very least a rough equivalent. I had hoped that tonight I would finally profess my infatuation to Keri Wilson.  Elegantly, of course, with poetry, song, or one of the other sickenly sweet romantic devices that I had concocted. Instead, I got drunk and put it off for another day–the right day–I told myself. Some day when I didn’t need to find a place to puke. (more…)

  • The Rest of Us: Bottoms Up

    This short story takes place in the world of my planned dystopian science fiction novel The Rest of Us.

    The glassware clattered as another rocket launched. My father, sitting at the head of the large oak table, steadied his wine glass and then lifted it up as if that had been his plan all along.

    “To a new future,” he said, yelling over the roar of the nearby launch. “Bottoms up.”

    We drank. My mom, father, and brother-in-law drank wine from a dark, dusty bottle. I, along with my six-months-pregnant older sister, drank iced tea. The noise of the rocket faded. My father smacked his lips and sat his glass back down next to the bone-white China, the finest plate he had ever seen. (more…)

  • The Red House

    The red house shuddered as Tony poured gasoline over the dining room’s bare warped floorboards. He felt its shiver and wondered if it was afraid.

    The voices whispered, a tiny insect buzz that the drugs kept brushing away. Tony tried to ignore it, to remind himself that houses did not talk. The doctors had told him so–over and over again–for the last eight years.

    He carried the red plastic gas can in to the kitchen. Light warm rain fell through a hole in the collapsed ceiling. Tony raised his face to the soft overcast sky, gray and as smooth as slate.

    A rainbow sheen surfed the rain-glazed floor as he sloshed gas across the peeling linoleum. The red house groaned, a guttural vibration. Tony told himself was just the settling of the house’s rotten frame. (more…)