The Poem-Skull
J.M. Hushour
Author Bio
J.M. Hushour was born, as writers often are. He will also die, as writers almost always do. Before then, he plans to write more novels and learn how to appreciate the novelty of the edible parachute.
Unfashionably hairy, he spends much of his time loping about the Pacific Northwest wondering why everyone is shooting at him.
‘The Poem-Skull’ is his first novel. He is currently writing its sequel and another short novel best described as a love story about death.
Description
Shiv Tickle leads a pointless, lazy, millennial life, drifting from text to text, post to post, trapped in a pointless marriage with her asexual spouse, Carl Filer. Carl just happens to be developing a malevolent software-in-a-soda called the Youniverse that allows its user to create a personalized Internet with the body as the computer and guided by an interface called, oddly, God. Their mutual friend, Bradley Sternum, just happens to be the secret leader of an anti-art cult called Our Lady of Attack whose goal is the utter destruction of everything beautiful in the world. Everything seems to be going along swimmingly for everyone. That is until the Poem-Skull, a magical poem-spouting skull (duh) falls into Shiv’s hands and begins warning her that everything is gonna get verse. For if all these lunatics are to be stopped and Shiv’s own addictive self-destruction in her own Youniverse is to be avoided, it’s up to her and the Poem-Skull to prove to the world that, yes, poetry can be a superpower and save everyone, wise-ass, thanks for asking.
Book excerpt
There was a skull sitting on the kitchen counter.
Cracker-less she rose with an ache, clutching her blanket around herself reanimated-style, and karloffed into the kitchen. She was about to amuse herself silly by perching a cracker atop her head with a congested croon of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” when she stopped in mid-forage and slowly turned around. There was a skull sitting on the kitchen counter. She shuffled two wooly steps backward to draw level with it. In the fuzz of her sickness, she cocked her head and reflected that she didn’t remember leaving that there. She reached up with a tissue-bit and snot-flecked hand and pushed on her temple. Not hers. She tapped a toe and stared, chewing on her lip. The skull, lipless, stared back. She turned at the waist and scanned the room slowly for what she wasn’t sure: a headless skeleton? Father shroud? Mother death? She half-expected to see a black-robed figure, hood flapping emptily, tapping along the linoleum with the innocent end of an enormous scythe. Here about the reaping. Where’s my head?!
She crossed her arms then uncrossed them, chewed on a finger, then a hesitant hand reached out. No, wait. She had this habit where’d she just touch everything on impulse, legacy of a life lived amongst buttons everywhere! But this was trap-worthy. She scanned the room again, cocked an ear to listen. Carl was at work? She was/had been alone? The television caught her eye: Dave’s silent surge into space in that forced one-point perspective. That part usually got her going but she was ill and weirder things were afoot. She looked down at the skull. It boned up at her.
Then something shifted. Later, it became easier for her to describe what exactly occurred at that decisive moment, that pivotal moment. It was like—it was like the surface of reality had suddenly become the surface of a potato chip bag: there was a palpable rustle, not just the sound, that kind of feathery comet crisp-crush, but the sensation. Not a buckling or warping, but the feeling you might get if you were getting a wisdom tooth pulled, when you can’t feel it, but, holy fuck, you can hear it, but instead of enamel your teeth were made of fallen leaves in autumn, and there’s that same crispiness and then the crinkle-crinkle of the yank and then you’re spitting up abscissively and for the first time kids want to jump in piles of your bloody spit. It had that dual quality of eeriness and glee.
Then there was a pizzicato playfulness that tickled up Tickle’s back. A prickly tingle: take a cello bow, freeze it, apply to spine, retune. For a moment she wasn’t sure if she was the cello or the bow, but just behind her eyes she could feel tiny little knobs being tightened.
There was a tiny white something sticking out of the skull like a bleached tongue. She blinked again in surprise. That hadn’t just been there. Not before that shift in the way things were. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and considered. She scratched her sickbed hair. She shifted her lean this way and that. The dog whimpered. She snaked a hand out and then quickly pulled it back. The naked teeth looked bite-savvy. Again, she reached out and pushed her finger against the white mystery. It was paper. A tiny piece of paper. She twisted her wrist and settled thumb and forefinger to its edge. Hand shaking, she noticed. Tremolo from the sneeze, she decided. Very carefully she drew it out and held it up. Nothing happened, no tripwire boulder or poisonous hand-trap. It looks like a fortune cookie fortune, she thought. Curious for wisdom, she turned it over. There was writing on it. She squinted at the neat and tiny letters. It said:
“She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.”
“It’s a little poem,” she whisper-cooed as if a poem was a chick she had just discovered cowering in her omelet. She read it again out loud this time. She had a husky, honeyed criminal’s voice, coarsened even more by her cold.