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39 pages

English

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This is the first in the Roddy Granger, Insurance Claims Investigator Series of Novellas, introducing the Gastrointestinal Fantasy Genre, a parody combining the most exciting elements of Witchcraft with Mundane Concern and Intestinal Pathology. In this first book, Roddy Granger arrives at Lester's Place, a run down bar in a deserted Industrial part of the city to be introduced to Lester and his wife Estelle, a Romanian witch. Roddy gets far more than he bargained for in his very first case as a field investigator.

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Publié par	Hekate Publishing
Date de parution	18 avril 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781912017607
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Table of Contents
THE LADY FROM SHANG SHANG
ESTELLE AND HER HOBBY CACHE
LESTER MAKES A DEAL WITH ESTELLE’S ROMANIAN COUSINS
ESTELLE WHISPERS SOME PRETTY NASTY THINGS PREPARING FOR THE BIG DAY
STRANGER AT THE DOOR
ESTELLE HAS AN “AGENDA”
RODDY GRANGER ENTERS THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE
THE STRANGER EATS HIS CHURCH CARD WHILE PEEING
LESTER FELT THE STRANGER’S BEHAVIOR HAD BECOME REPULSIVE, EVEN BY HIS STANDARDS
AFTER ESTELLE GOT HER THING BACK, THE STRANGER HAD SOME ODD THOUGHTS, WHILE LESTER . . .
EPILOGUE
Title Page
THE LADY FROM SHANG SHANG
Each and every morning Estelle poured olive oil over the top of her head, leaned forward and allowed it to drip off her bangs. As soon as the oil formed a good-sized puddle on the cracked urine stained tiles at her feet, she dragged a pinky down the middle of it all, uncovered one eye and examined herself in the booger-smeared bathroom mirror.
“Well that’s fittingly self-deprecating, don’t you think Estelle?” she whispered. Straight away she replied: “No, it’s not. That greasy black waterfall is only half self-deprecating.”
Estelle let her hair fall back in place and remained silent, not asking the obvious follow up question to either of her selves: 'If my black waterfall is only half self-deprecating, then what about the other half?'
When she emerged from the restroom after the very first olive oiling, Lester leered and remarked,
“Well don’t you look like the Lady from Shang Shang.”
“Guess that means you’d be trapped in a hall of mirrors then doesn’t it, Lester?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Estelle.”
“I know you don’t, Lester.”
Estelle knew a few things Lester didn't. For one, her olive oiled bangs covered two galaxy shaped clusters of maroon freckles on either cheek which Lester never paid much mind. Because of these distinctive markings, an old hag who had lived two houses down from Estelle's childhood home called her “the little witch.” Spat betel juice onto the ground whenever the girl walked past her porch on the way to school. The woman became obsessed with Estelle's freckles, in fact, and each morning took to waiting by her mailbox so as to follow the child to and from school, shaking a knarled finger, crossing and recrossing herself, sputtering curse after curse after curse. A devout Pentecostal, the woman felt bound to the task: Any form of display was an abomination, and in Estelle's case, those freckle clusters glowed a less-than-God-like orange, obviously some pigmentation from hell.
“Something’s not right with the child. She carries the sign," the crone announced to members of her congregation. One might have thought an agitated pack of coyotes had been turned loose inside that little church. Many took to the ground and writhed on their backs as if being electrocuted while others spoke in voices seldom heard since ancient astronauts roamed the Earth.
By age seven, Estelle had decided to live the life of a rebel on top of what was already naturally ‘not right’ about her.
Living the life of a rebel signified different things to different people, of course. For Estelle, it meant wielding a teaspoon of magic every now and then, whenever that struck her fancy.
As it happened, the old lady was killed by a dump truck which for no apparent reason careened up onto the sidewalk where she had been standing. The hag had been in a particularly foul mood that day, hurling vehement curses toward little Estelle and punctuating these with dark blood-flecked spittle. More significantly, on that occasion Estelle's art teacher, Ms. Pledgefeather, had showed her class for the first time how to make collage. Estelle had been beside herself with all that realm of possibility and on her way home, had been in no mood for the old woman’s ranting, brown-staining an otherwise wonderful day with unfounded negativity. She slammed her front door, rushed upstairs and commenced snipping pictures out of magazines, knowing right away she had discovered a hidden garden within herself.
The hag planted her arthritic feet in front of the girl’s house and insisted on pointing her knobby cudgel upward toward the bedroom window only to continue her wet invective. Estelle yanked the blinds down at the exact instant that truck jumped the curb to pin the woman against the sturdy black tarred telephone pole which sat in front of Estelle’s house. He severed legs released onto the sidewalk making the dull percussions Mrs. Stillsbury next door said she heard, likening the sound to a butcher's delivery of ham hocks onto her back porch: Thump, thump.
Despite the woman being divided in half, the truck's engine managed to cauterize all her major blood vessels allowing her to raise a knarled finger one final time and point in the direction of Estelle, who peeked out from behind the blind, head filled with a myriad of ideas for both cut and paste as well as photo manipulation techniques.
The day Estelle found the red horned rims sitting on Lester’s bar top was what some people might call a game changer. She continued to apply the olive oil but stopped all her whispering inquiries. The red horned rims cinched her look: Self-deprecation was gobbled up by its opposite: An astute fashion statement. Whoever left the glasses on the bar top that night and where that person might have acquired horned rims that exquisite was anybody’s guess; there’d been too much of the usual yelling and screaming, beer mugs shattering and so forth to narrow down who that person might have been. The bottom line was, for Estelle, the red horned rims were a gift from some anonymous drunken angel swooping down from Heaven on a rope, like Tarzan, King of the Apes, placing the specs by the Schlitz tap for her to find.
She’d been mopping up a puddle of urine at the base of a bar stool when she spotted the glasses and right away recognized their potential. She threw a crumbled napkin over the top of them like some secret agent at Checkpoint Charlie, sliver of microfilm embedded in a rear molar. The last thing Estelle wanted at this point was call Lester's attention to the find. He would have 'confiscated' the glasses on the spot.
Lester had been counting money, straightening crumbled one dollar bills out on the side of his scuffed and dented cash register, like he always did that time of day. Estelle slipped her prize into an apron pocket and made a bee-line for the rest room, twirling once en route. She'd seen Sissy Spacek do that in Coal Miner’s Daughter. Any time she felt a rare semblance of hope, she twirled.
Stepping inside the silver fish ridden rest room and locking the flimsy door behind her, she right away clamped the glasses over her heavily olive-oil laden hair. They stuck fast: Red against black. Perfect. She uncovered an eye and peered closely at her reflection in the cracked mirror between smudges of grimy fingerprints. The whole experience was not unlike a visit to the Louvre itself; as if she'd flown all the way to Paris, France, and was met at the airport by the dead General Charles De Gaulle, only to have him plant a warm welcoming smacker on both her cheeks and bequeathing the Légion d'Honneur.
What a find, those red horned rims had been! They turned out to be more than a little something for her to clutch onto, more than a sturdy branch growing out the side of that sheer cliff face to which she'd been clinging all these years, ever since Lester had swiped her wand. The horned rims represented not just small case hope but Hope with a capital H. And Hope with a capital H was exactly what Estelle needed to stow in her apron pocket as opposed to the small case hope; she knew small case hope was something along the lines of baby Jesus will be waiting for somebody at the pearly gates and handing them a triple scoop ice cream cone.
Estelle needed those glasses along with Hope with a capital H because of what Lester had done to her. She couldn’t leave the bar for one. Her wand and its magic had been dictated those terms. Although she didn’t care so much about that, the real tragedy as she saw it was being unable to express herself or show anybody who mattered what she looked like in the new horn rims, how they contrasted perfectly against her trademark waterfall of oily black hair. Although if you pressed Estelle, she would admit she could have shown the regulars, the piss-in-your-pants sterno-drinkers staggering in and out of Lester's bar every evening. But they wouldn’t have cared if she showed up in a burlap sack with undies pulled down over her head.
Estelle wanted to make her fashion statement at the mall, not inside some dingy old beer hall squat down on the deserted outskirts of a factory town. Going to the mall with her glasses was ALL she wanted to do, that, and collage. Her needs were modest.
Lester didn't let her though. He could have, conceivably, as he was in possession of her wand. The magic would have technically allowed him to, according to ancient rules and all that. But Lester didn't because, as Estelle put it, and always in a whisper: “Lester was one big Asshole, an Asshole with a capital A.”
Year after year Estelle had stayed within the confines of the shabby bar, her wand hidden somewhere inside. She lived there twenty-four seven. Slept upstairs in the crawl space, dreaming of her mall days, when she'd been free to wander the stores, levels one, two and three, visit the craft shop, taking both up and down escalators while wearing the mod styles of the time; not those billowing brown and black one-piece shit-ass ankle length smocks Lester brought her from the Salvation Army store.
Estelle was forced to keep her deep dark secrets locked up. She was forced to play the good little church mouse whenever Lester was skulking around. Estelle was biding her time and Lester was in for a surprise, a big surprise, not one of those clapping your hands together goody goose egg types of surprises.
In her frustration, Estelle imagined herself pulling out hair follicles on