Candace rang the doorbell. El-Don wasn't expecting his old high school flame. Neither was Teary. El-Don was reading an article on his tablet. His doctor had prescribed some sedatives to calm his nerves after the trip to Lolly's cabin. El-Don was lying down on the couch, his mind buzzing from all the drugs, trying to distract himself. He wasn't sure if he was still among the living, he might be on his way to visit Saint Peter. He looked at the screen again.
"Richard Brautigan's dabble into Black Magic was imaginative and cursory. As the author himself said in an unfinished novel, 'I opened a writing manual recommended to me by a benefactor. It spoke to me like a plague of locusts. So I shut the manual and left it where I found it at Luella's Hair Salon on Fulton Street. Luella generously never offered me another word of literary advice. I figured she needed the company of loquacious insects because she often felt alone and misunderstood.' *
Brautigan didn't need anything other than his fantasty to transform objects, such as a writing manual into a plague of locusts, and placing them into unusual situations, such as an unfrequented hair salon, by using simple turns of language to achieve this feat. Also known to a few close friends as Mr. InBetween, Brautigan navigated graveyards and vegetable gardens, looking for inspiration in the names planted in the ground. In this way, a telephone pole became a barfly, and Mr. J. Burnet Ham became a vegan waitress."
* In no way or manner should Brautigan's first person prose be taken as the absolute truth. In fact, he had been given two such spell books in 1968 by teenage Digger members who had traded hot-wired German convertibles for the magic texts, aiming to evaporate corporate wealth. After Brautigan's death, these two spell books ended up in the estate of Charles Edwin Murray and were sold in 2018 for two hundred dollars a piece. A year later they again came up for sale and were sold for an undisclosed sum to an undisclosed buyer. The catalogue for the 2018 sale specificed that one page had a number of coffee stains, namely page forty-two.
El-Don paused, was this how Flora became a giant prairie dog? Plagues of Locusts were in the Bible, but Giant Prairie Dogs were not. At least, not as far as El-Don knew. Did Mr. InBetween, aka Brautigan, have something to do with Flora's transformation? Wasn't Mr. InBetween one of Keith Kumasen Abbott's novels? Wasn't Abbott a friend of Brautigan's? Could the novel Mr. InBetween undo the spell? Wait, wasn't El-Don himself on the board of the InBetween Foundation which was the entity through which Abbott's house was supposed to be sold? Hadn't he secretly sold Abbott's notebooks to the notable esquire who collected Brautigan memorablia? El-Don tried to think. He had to fix a problem. But what was the problem? He could barely remember his last thought.
Then he heard the doorbell. Teary answered the door. El-Don heard Candace's voice. The doctor hadn't believed El-Don when he said that his daughter was shacking up with Big Foot in Lolly's cabin. Would Candace believe him?
"El-Don," Candace said, stepping past Teary, "we've got to talk."
"Yes," El-Don sat up, and looked for his shoes. "You're right. To save Flora, I must write a critical essay about the genius of Keith Kumasen Abbott."
"What did you do with the notebooks?" Candace demanded. To the best of her knowledge, El-Don was not capable of writing a critical essay about anything. And certainly not in the state he was in at that moment.
"I've got to get Flora back," El-Don said, still looking for his shoes.
"El-DON! What did you do with the notebooks?"
"The lawyer..." El-Don said, reaching down. He waved his hand around down by his ankles, looking for his shoes.
Teary smiled at Candace. "He's not feeling quite himself," she said. She didn't know yet that El-Don (along with Meth T, Goody and Buck Rogers), was being sued for unethical business practices linked to the Intergalatical Telepathic Interface System (ITIS).
Mila was watching Keith. And Keith was watching Mila.
"Do you see it?" Blessing asked.
"I see something," Mila said. "Blurry."
"Can you ask it where Emery is? Is she okay?"
Keith wrote on the wall with his phantom genius marker.
"She's fine - a leggy blond in San Francisco, 1973," the girls read.
"Is she coming back?" Blessing asked.
"Dunno her plans." Keith wrote.
"But we've got a French exam tomorrow," Blessing said.
"Need a ride," Keith wrote.
"Okay," Mila said, picking up her car keys.
"To a lost cause," Keith wrote.
"Maybe we should pick up Nolan," Blessing suggested.
"The murderous shiva group is great, Persephone!" Loonie Noggle wagged his head. They were having a Teams meeting. "Netflix is hooked!"
"Well, they didn't commit murder, they were part of the Beige Widow's plan to cover up the murder," Persephone corrected Loonie Noggle.
"We'll just keep this hook like it is," Loonie said. "What we need now, is some romance, steam it up a bit. The teenage love interest between Blessing and Nolan is cute, but what about Mila rekindling her flame with Tristan?"
"Why should it be the Latina heroine that has to be involved in a sex scene?" Persephone asked. "I mean the character of Mila is leaning a bit too far into stereotypes already. To defend myself, I was inspired for Mila's character from one of the Izzies from People Versus Food."
"Oh, which Izzie?"
"The half Philippino-half Pakistani woman. I love her voice and her energy."
"Okay." Loonie paused for thought. "But these days Mormons are hot. How about Emery hitting it off with Mr. InBetween?"
"Emery is a lesbian. But maybe I could find a way to put in a 1973 lesbian sex scene...."
"Sapphic sideline....I like that," Loonie said. "But we need some real ramming..."
"What about Mr. Marzipan crashing his Plymouth Fury?"
"Not that kind of ramming, Persephone. The other kind."
Persephone decided that she would write whatever she wanted to write. As usual.
Coming Soon Chapter Thirty-Eight
#longmont #colorado #nestormarzipan #keithkumasenabbott #keithabbott #ghoststory #persephone #richardbrautigan #mrinbetween #netflix #loonienoggle #literaryagent
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