Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller, Mort Castle (Ed) Page B
Authors: Sam Weller, Mort Castle (Ed)
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the van. I climbed in, started the engine, and turned it around. The whole time, the guy continued to glare. He was saying something, too, pointing at me, but I couldn’t hear him because the windows were up.
After work, I went home and straight downstairs. I pulled the phone bill out of my back pocket and unfolded it. I felt guilty for stealing the thing. I stared at the New York City address. I imagined some old gray-stone building along a tree-lined street. The building had a lobby with brass mailboxes set into the wall. The phone bill would have been delivered there, waiting for Catherine.
I tore open the envelope. The bill was several pages. It had an itemized list of the calls made in the last weeks of May. Many were to Illinois, probably to her mother. Dozens were to New York numbers, a few to Newark and Boston, one to Chicago. I thought about going to New York City, going to the apartment building and meeting her neighbors. Find out how she died.
But then I realized it didn’t matter at all. It didn’t matter how she died. What mattered was that she was no longer alive, and I had no chance at all. I thought of the soft fabric of that sweater under my fingertips, her closed eyes and smooth skin, that slight scar and how she got it—and the dreams. I thought of those dreams and how she never spoke to me.
I looked at the phone bill. Jesus. The phone bill. At the top of the first page was her number. I picked up my phone and dialed. The first ring. The second. And a third and a fourth and then the voice mail answered.
“Hi,” she said, her voice strong and clear. “This is Catherine. I’m not here right now, but you know what to do.”
And then there was the beep, and I hung up the line.
About “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor”
When I was nineteen, I delivered flowers in a far-west suburb of Chicago where the strip malls ended and the farmland began. One crisp Saturday morning I set an arrangement up in a funeral home before the services. I was all alone, just me and the deceased resting in a plush, open casket. I glanced at the body that day, and the image has been branded in my mind ever since. Lying in the casket was a young mother holding her baby. I was shocked. I left and climbed into my delivery truck and started to cry. That mother and child have haunted me ever since.
It was this memory that caused me to write “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor.” But I didn’t want to just retell my experience; I wanted to look at my memory through the prism of fiction, as Ray Bradbury has regularly done in such stories as “The Lake,” “The Crowd,” “Banshee,” and so many others. I wanted my story to take on a life of its own, as good stories so often do. It was at this point that the concept came to me—what if you met the love of your life and it was too late? What if that true love was dead?
The story almost wrote itself from that moment forward.
Certainly, Bradbury’s 1957 novel-in-stories, Dandelion Wine , was a tremendous influence on my story—the small-town setting; the theme of unrequited love; the element of magic and sorrow in the everyday; the pervasive sense of melancholy. One of my very favorite lesser-known Bradbury short stories is “The Swan,” from Dandelion Wine (the titles of the stories in that book were removed to lend the further appearance that it is a novel rather than a connected collection). In “The Swan,” a man and a woman meet at completely different junctures in their lives. He is young and just starting out; she is old and at the end of her countless splendid days. My story looks at this theme of missed connections through a darker, more extreme lens. The two lovers never meet, for it is too late. One of them is already gone.
—Sam Weller
THE COMPANIONS
David Morrell
F rank shouldn’t have been there. On Thursday, unexpected script meetings required him to fly from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. His discussions with the film’s director and its star
After work, I went home and straight downstairs. I pulled the phone bill out of my back pocket and unfolded it. I felt guilty for stealing the thing. I stared at the New York City address. I imagined some old gray-stone building along a tree-lined street. The building had a lobby with brass mailboxes set into the wall. The phone bill would have been delivered there, waiting for Catherine.
I tore open the envelope. The bill was several pages. It had an itemized list of the calls made in the last weeks of May. Many were to Illinois, probably to her mother. Dozens were to New York numbers, a few to Newark and Boston, one to Chicago. I thought about going to New York City, going to the apartment building and meeting her neighbors. Find out how she died.
But then I realized it didn’t matter at all. It didn’t matter how she died. What mattered was that she was no longer alive, and I had no chance at all. I thought of the soft fabric of that sweater under my fingertips, her closed eyes and smooth skin, that slight scar and how she got it—and the dreams. I thought of those dreams and how she never spoke to me.
I looked at the phone bill. Jesus. The phone bill. At the top of the first page was her number. I picked up my phone and dialed. The first ring. The second. And a third and a fourth and then the voice mail answered.
“Hi,” she said, her voice strong and clear. “This is Catherine. I’m not here right now, but you know what to do.”
And then there was the beep, and I hung up the line.
About “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor”
When I was nineteen, I delivered flowers in a far-west suburb of Chicago where the strip malls ended and the farmland began. One crisp Saturday morning I set an arrangement up in a funeral home before the services. I was all alone, just me and the deceased resting in a plush, open casket. I glanced at the body that day, and the image has been branded in my mind ever since. Lying in the casket was a young mother holding her baby. I was shocked. I left and climbed into my delivery truck and started to cry. That mother and child have haunted me ever since.
It was this memory that caused me to write “The Girl in the Funeral Parlor.” But I didn’t want to just retell my experience; I wanted to look at my memory through the prism of fiction, as Ray Bradbury has regularly done in such stories as “The Lake,” “The Crowd,” “Banshee,” and so many others. I wanted my story to take on a life of its own, as good stories so often do. It was at this point that the concept came to me—what if you met the love of your life and it was too late? What if that true love was dead?
The story almost wrote itself from that moment forward.
Certainly, Bradbury’s 1957 novel-in-stories, Dandelion Wine , was a tremendous influence on my story—the small-town setting; the theme of unrequited love; the element of magic and sorrow in the everyday; the pervasive sense of melancholy. One of my very favorite lesser-known Bradbury short stories is “The Swan,” from Dandelion Wine (the titles of the stories in that book were removed to lend the further appearance that it is a novel rather than a connected collection). In “The Swan,” a man and a woman meet at completely different junctures in their lives. He is young and just starting out; she is old and at the end of her countless splendid days. My story looks at this theme of missed connections through a darker, more extreme lens. The two lovers never meet, for it is too late. One of them is already gone.
—Sam Weller
THE COMPANIONS
David Morrell
F rank shouldn’t have been there. On Thursday, unexpected script meetings required him to fly from Santa Fe to Los Angeles. His discussions with the film’s director and its star
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