Soul's Road: A Fiction Collection (26 page)

“Not as many. She’s fiscally more conservative than you. Many of her supporters will side with The Sweating Skull if she gives up.”

“Jesus,” I practically shouted. “She’s got that large a share?”

“Larger than you’d think. Our projections show her as high as twenty percent.”

“Well,” I said. “We’d better make sure the Leafer woman doesn’t give up. Get her on the phone for me.”

Goddamn Leafers. The Eco-Friendly Party had been skirting the edges of polite politics for years, but this was the first time I’d ever known any of them to make any serious political headway. I took a tug from my hip flask and got into the limo. Cracked my knuckles.

“Leonard,” my wife said. “Go meet with Governor Cleve, see if you can get her on our side.”

“Right, good luck there,” I said. “She’ll join Smith before she sides with us and for right now, she’s content to just sit back and steal our votes.”

“That’s why you’re going to win her over.”

I turned look at my wife.

“How am I going to do that?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she said as the limo came to a stop. I got out to find my security detail waiting, standing outside the Cleve party headquarters. I didn’t think she was big enough in the dustbowl to warrant a headquarters. Guess I’d been wrong about a few things lately.

I went inside. The place was empty, save for a smartly-dressed woman sitting behind a desk. $5,000 designer glasses perched on the end of her nose, she smiled at me when I came in. Jesus, I thought. It’s her.

“Ah, Senator Marks,” she said. “Come on in. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You don’t say.”

“I understand you’re here to convince me to either quit or side with you.”

“Why else would I be here? Why else would you be here unless you’re willing to listen.”

“Very good, Senator. I am willing to listen. That is, if you are.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I have a proposal for you, but it must be kept in the strictest of confidence.”

“I’m listening.”

A quick flick of her hand, and her suit came apart. No zippers, no strings, nothing. Just gone.

“Oh God,” I said.

Then things went wrong. Again.

I emerged five hours later to find the car still waiting for me. I looked at myself in the tinted windows for a moment before my wife opened the door. Cracked football helmet, yellow pool floaties, a riding saddle under my left arm, a quart of tequila in my right arm, flippers on my feet. Sock suspenders.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Not bad,” I said. “Not bad.”

Contributor's Notes

John Schimmel
grew up in Beverly Hills, California. Immediately upon graduating high school he fled to the east coast to attend Connecticut’s Wesleyan University. He arrived as a math and physics major but those were tumultuous years and he spent much of his time playing music (bass in folk groups and chamber orchestras, various gongs in a Javanese Gamelan orchestra, a South Indian drum called a mridungam) before finally graduating with a degree in psychology. He spent the summers after his junior and senior years working with songwriter/director/author Elizabeth Swados playing bass for folk festivals Pete Seeger organized as part of his Clearwater organization’s push to clean up the polluted Hudson River.

John migrated to New York where he started doing music for experimental theater at LaMama ETC in between classes at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics. Amongst the many insanities he participated in was a production of Medea that was performed entirely in ancient Greek and Latin, an experiment in nonverbal communication in theater that was directed by Andre Serban. John toured the world with Medea, then returned to New York for a 15 year run as a bass player, including gigs at the Public Theater (Alice in Wonderland with Meryl Streep, a rock adaptation of the Vietnam memoir Dispatches, Runaways that moved to Broadway, and The Cherry Orchard, again with Meryl Streep, at Lincoln Center), with the Les and Larry Elgar Big Band, with punk bands at CBGB and cabaret acts at The Continental Baths and Trudy Heller’s and Reno Sweeny’s, in studio film score and commercial recording sessions, and finally with a Tony-nominated Broadway musical he performed in and co-created called Pump Boys and Dinettes.

It was in the middle of Dispatches that John read a New Yorker article about the real possibility of nuclear terrorism. He and a friend decided to co-author a screenplay based on the idea, and their script was optioned by Twentieth-Century Fox. That screenplay was abandoned the day the studio changed hands but John had been bitten by the movie bug and eventually moved permanently to Los Angeles. His writing partnership over, he started reading scripts for producers, then was hired as a script reader at Warner Bros. John became story editor there, then a production and development executive. Films worked on include The Fugitive, Batman, Interview with the Vampire, Outbreak, and Mr. Wondefrul.

John left Warner Bros. and landed at Douglas-Reuther, a production company owned by Michael Douglas and Steve Reuther with a deal on the Paramount lot. He worked on Face/Off and Rainmaker before the company lost its financing. John did a stint as president of Michael Douglas’s production company Furthur Flms, then went to work with Steve Reuther as senior vice president of production at Belair Entertainment where he worked on films like Collateral Damage and Sweet November.

John’s most recent job in Hollywood was as president of production for Ascendant Pictures, an independent film production and finance company that made films like The Big White, Lucky Number Slevin, and Lord of War.

John recently received his MFA in creative writing from Goddard College, a program he intensely enjoyed, and hopes to hack out the time to polish the novel he started there. He is currently serving as executive vice president of strategy and production at a startup called Splashlife that intends to be a new kind of social network for the Millennial generation, and has just joined the faculty at the University of California at Riverside’s low residency writers program teaching screenwriting.

John has a beautiful wife and three spectacular children and still plays bass once a week in a parent band at his youngest daughter’s elementary school. That is far and away the best music gig he has ever had.

Natasha Oliver
is a recent Goddard graduate who writes fiction, the more fantastical the better. She's had stories published in The Anthology 2008 by Spinetinglers and The Pitkin Review.

Isla McKetta
earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Goddard College in Port Townsend, WA and was a guest reader with the Artsmith Salon Series in Doe Bay, WA. "Empirical Facts" is an excerpt from her novella, Murmurs of the River, which was researched during the year Isla spent as a Rotary exchange student living in Toruń, Poland during the 1990s. Murmurs of the River won third place in The Blotter Magazine’s 2011 Laine Cunningham Novel Awards and an excerpt won Fiction Circus's Translation Nexus and can be read in over 60 languages at http://www.translationnexus.com. During the day Isla works as Managing Editor for Forum magazine, while at night she is working on her next project, a novel entitled Hungry Ghosts, managing the facebook page for Soul’s Road (http://www.facebook.com/souls.road) and writing the occasional blog at http://soulsroadfiction.blogspot.com. Isla is actively seeking representation and publication for Murmurs of the River and can be reached at [email protected]. She lives in Seattle with her partner, Clayton, and their dog, Rocky.

Karen K. Hugg
, a native of Chicago, earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois-Chicago. She was an editor at Amazon during the dot.com boom and bust before returning to writing fiction. She has been published in Poetry East, Opium, Specs, Northwest Garden News, and Desert Dog. Her translations from the Polish appeared in the anthology Shifting Borders: Eastern European Poetry. In 2011 she received her M.F.A. from Goddard College and lives in the Seattle area with her husband, three kids, two cats and one dog. She works as a gardener.

Phil Paddock
was born in Walnut Creek, California. He is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and received his M.F.A. from Goddard College. He lives in Ojai, California, where he teaches English. “Confluence,” which appears in Soul's Road as an independent story, forms a series of linked stories in the collection Next Season. In it, a community basketball court in a coastal California town brings together a ragtag lineup of men and boys. Their failures, obsessions and hopes steer the narrative through teetering marriages, bewitching attractions and irrepressible loyalty to the Golden State Warriors. The author looks forward to making Next Season available to readers in the coming year. You may contact the author with questions and comments at [email protected]

Sidney Williams
, a Louisiana native, is a former newspaper reporter. He has written pulp fiction, comic books and graphic novels. His early work is being reissued in e-book editions from Crossroad Press.

Ann Keeling
is a writer, editor, and teacher. As founder of Grandparent Gift Book, she writes and creates books of family stories and history. In her home town, she teaches teen writing camps, memoir workshops, and fiction classes. Ann was the Editor-in-Chief of the Goddard College literary journal, the Pitkin Review. She has contributed articles to Dance Magazine, Mothering Magazine, and is currently a contributing writer to the online magazine, Momtastic. She holds the degree of MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. When not lovingly distracted by her husband, son, and dog in the beautiful Sierra Mountain foothills, she writes.

Deborah Grace Staley
was born and raised in Kingsport, Tennessee-that's in the upper eastern tip of the state-Deborah Grace Staley is the youngest of four children. Since there were not a lot of neighborhood children to play with and no siblings close in age, she learned to amuse herself by creating stories that played out in her head. For some reason, she never gave a thought to committing them to paper.

A painfully slow reader, Deborah decided if she was going to earn a college degree, her reading speed would have to improve. So the summer before she entered King College in Bristol, Tennessee, she went to her local library and checked out a variety of books. She fell in love with Harlequins. By the end of the summer, she was reading a book a day written by classic romance authors such as Anne Mather and Carole Mortimer.

After earning her degree, she tried out a couple of careers including travel agent, high school French teacher, paralegal and disability services specialist in higher education. Meanwhile, she kept reading romance while her own stories kept spinning around in her head, but now were demanding to be written. With a degree in French, she had no idea how to write a novel. So, she took three novel writing courses at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and got started. Four years and one baby later, with one completed book in hand, she began submitting, joined Romance Writers of America and began attending conferences for romance writers.

Deborah never sold that first book she wrote, and it took nine years before her dream of being a published romance novelist became a reality. Still, she never doubted that it would happen when the time was right. "To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven." Ecclesiastes 3:1.

Today, Deborah writes full-time and is married to her college sweetheart. They make their home on five acres in the Foothills of the Smoky Mountains near the shores of the Little Tennessee River in a circa 1867 farmhouse with gingerbread trim that has Angel's Wings. She has one son who is in college and plays baseball.

Now that her stories are out of her head and on paper, she's so thankful for the opportunity to share them with readers! Visit www.deborahgracestaley.com for information about book signings and upcoming releases. She'd love to hear from you via e-mail at [email protected] or via snail mail at P.O. Box 672, Vonore, Tennessee, 37885.

Peter McMinn
writes stories and poems reflecting his experiences growing up and living in the woods, mountains and coastlines of the Northwest and making a living in Greece, Sri Lanka and Korea. An avid hiker and sailor, he finds nourishment not only in the laden flow of material from his public library but also in the steady urgency of wilderness. He has published only a few poems, mainly through various university presses and local newspapers. Most recently, his poem, “Paving Trinco Road,” appeared in the Spring ‘09 issue of Pitkin Review. As a means of furthering his interest in story-telling, Peter now explores fiction and creative non-fiction, answering a certain call to writing that originally compelled him to the Goddard MFA program. He is currently working on a set of short stories which he hopes to bring to market in late 2012. By then, he will have taught himself how to revise his thesis-manuscript, also for publication. Other projects underway include a set of vignettes around the life of his great grandfather and a longish piece exploring the people we may have been—and may yet be—under other circumstances. Peter doesn’t know much about ghosts, only that they reside in most of his work. He teaches English in Portland, Oregon where he lives with his brilliant wife, son and daughter. And Cedar, the flying dog.

Paula Altschuler
is thrilled to have her first published work included in this collection. She is currently working on a fictionalized humorous memoir--an extension of her Soul's Road short story. In February 2012, she graduates Goddard College with an MFA in creative writing. Paula lives in Park City, Utah with her husband, Ben, and their orange dog, Frank Zappa.

Joseph Pierce
lives in rural New England with a collection of matches and ghosts. When he’s not writing, working on his Goddard education or fighting crime, he’s probably wandering the stars from the safety of his backyard. His short story, “Some Kind of Apocalypse,” is the first piece of fiction he’s had published, though he’s had several poems picked up before. He’s been an Editor on “The Pitkin Review” for a year now. He’s excited for Soul’s Road the same way a blind man is excited for a fully functional eye transplant.