Pegasus Sky

The Pegasus sky is the color of Tim Burton dreams, the texture of crunchy nightmares. This makes me happy. A trio of dragons fly by, and I stare at the girl astride the smallest of the three. She doesn’t acknowledge me. This also makes me happy. The two angels that accompany me are snorting cocaine and imploring me to “do my duty.” This makes me unhappy.

I stare at the computer screen, unsure of where to go next. I have a main theme: redemption. Which may or may not be the right theme. The angels symbolize something or other. Maybe I need some sort of motif. I hear they’re all the rage right now. The sky could be a metaphor for something important, like desires or regrets or some shit like that. Metaphors are important. Ask any English teacher.

Lydia doesn’t understand the title. Good. That’s the point (I tell myself). I want the reader to see what they want to see (I continue to tell myself). I sure as hell don’t have any idea what it means. I just like the title. I have no idea where to go from here, but I’m in love with the opening paragraph. The possibilities are endless. I’m giving myself several built-in Dei ex machina to work with. A cheap trick, I know, but needs must.

I write, but I’m not a real writer any longer.

Lydia disagrees, but she’s my wife and she loves me, so she feels justified in lying to me to make me feel better. I don’t mind that – most of the time. I mean, it’s evidence of love. Isn’t it? Has to be. She also lets me drink whiskey on the front porch while I write, not caring what the neighbors think. More evidence of love. Spare my feelings but not my liver.

My daughter calls it enabling. Semantics. We don’t agree to disagree. We just disagree.

I start again, despite my love for the title and the first paragraph. I’m thinking a love story might be a good second novel. Everyone likes romances, right?

                                                      **************

I fell in love with “The Pegasus Sky,” and, by proxy, with its author. When I finally met her, I was taken aback. The novel, irreverent and funny, contrasted starkly with the author. She wore a severe countenance, and she was all sharp angles and hardness. I imagined that having sex with her would be like fucking a folding lawn chair.

She drank champagne demurely, as if she wanted the world to know that she wasn’t an alcoholic like her father. She dressed demurely as well, just to let everyone know that she wasn’t a slut like her mother. Everything about her screamed irreproachable and unapproachable, an unassailable vessel that would never set sail beyond the pages of her writings.

And then she smiled at me.

A decade of living dangerously began with a flash of white teeth and curved lips.

Well…no. Not happening. I’m barely able to understand why my wife stays with me, let alone creating a love story – however tenuous – between fictional characters. I’m thinking of that original first paragraph, the one that was over a decade in the making. The fantasy genre seems doable (I like dragons), but I can’t see my way through it. Like this pitiful love tale, there just doesn’t seem to be any real fodder. I blame my knowledge of literature and my job (which I don’t consider to be a career) for this because it’s easier than blaming myself.

Teaching at a private university deep in the heart of Texas has taken away much of my writing time. I know it’s a bullshit excuse but I use it anyway. The fact is, I’m blocked.

I know all the terms. Deus ex machina. Roman á clef. Synecdoche. Dénouement. Can’t say that it helps me much, except when marking papers. I throw out a few of these terms and the students think I’m a genius. They never argue over a grade. I was the same way when I was a student.

The thing is, I start obsessing over everything. The terms – and there seems to be a billion of them – are always nagging at me. Am I using allegory? Do I have a proper inciting incident? What about dissonance, consonance, assonance. All of the ances.  And I used the word fuck in the previous paragraph, and that’s a no-no, unless you’re J.D. Salinger or Chuck Palahniuk. Real writers.

I lean back and sigh. I light a cigarette. T.S. Elliot and Hunter S. Thompson smoked when they wrote. So did William S. Burroughs, but he usually smoked weed laced with opium. Why am I thinking of authors that use their middle initials, and why is that initial S? My middle initial is R. Lydia’s middle initial is S. Maybe she should be writing my second book.

I watch the neighbors go by, walking their dogs – or the dogs walking the neighbors, I’m not sure which – chatting amicably and parting as if they are lifelong friends. Hell, maybe they are. The neighborhood is devoid of kids right now because of school, but full of babies and their mothers, still pudgy from the pregnancy. Lydia knows which ones will never get their girlish figures back and which ones will hit the gym and deprive themselves of carbs so they can fit into their high school jeans again. She’s never wrong about these types of things.

I tell myself I’m not procrastinating, but I know I am. A real writer would just get down to it. I bet Stephen King doesn’t sit on his front porch and hypothesize about his neighbors’ fat asses and irritating pets.

Ok. WWJDD. What would Joan Didion do? Play it as it Lays? Slouch towards Bethlehem? LOLOL Good one, right?

I put out my cigarette and get back to it. Horror sounds good. The title is terrific, one of my best, so I’m not giving up on that. Yeah, horror would fit the title.

                                                        **************

I smell his fetid breath, feel his sweaty hands running over my body. The room is dark, but not so dark that I can’t make out the silhouette of the man who had chained me to a cold steel table. He whispers something about a Pegasus sky. It makes no sense, and I’m too terrified to care. I scream and scream, but my kidnaper just laughs. That’s when I spot the chainsaw. I’m fucked.

First-person POV. That works, but she’s gotta live, right? If I go third-person omniscient, she can die horribly and then…then I have to find a different hero. What kind of hero? A gritty, street-wise woman? Tough cop? Nerdy psychological man (or woman. Shit. Another decision to make.) who sees deeply into the manifold evils of the human heart? It’s all very trite. Maybe I can get that author woman from the previous paragraph and somehow use her. I like her!

My mind wanders again. Maybe I can incorporate dragons, the author woman, and a psychology nerd into one tale. Sure. And maybe Lydia will suddenly learn to cook some decent shrimp and grits.

I shouldn’t complain. She’s from Minnesota, so shrimp and grits aren’t treated with the proper respect in that part of the country. She’s a hell of a graphic designer, though. She did the design for my book; that’s how I met her. She was so cute and so enamored of my novel. Said it was the best book she had ever read this side of Bleak House. She’s got a thing for plain-looking, underdog heroines. Dickens does underdogs well. The brilliant fucker.

There I go again. The no-no word. Maybe if I stop thinking it, I’ll stop writing it. The thing is, I used it 231 times in The First American Angel. My editor/agent counted. Actually, I think he used a word processing feature to find out how many times I used the no-no word. That gave him plenty of time to harangue me about writing another book. He’s retired now, but the fucker would be happy to know that I’m working on it.

Shit! Will no one rid me of this turbulent word?

A real horror story should contain some sort of supernatural element. A killer that won’t die. A ritual that imbues otherworldly powers upon the evildoer. I mean, it may be trite and all, but people buy that shit, right? Why, I have no idea. It isn’t real literature.

Proust and his recollection of madeleines is real writing, but no one reads him any longer. Everyone wants to read about hipster vampires and pretty-boy werewolves. Ughh! Or wizards at school. Or some woman solving murders in her spare time, between baking whatever bakers bake.

The First American Angel made me rich. Well, rich-ish. Lydia and I got married, bought a house in a decent area of San Antonio, and immediately produced a child. Lydia was certain that it happened in the kitchen. I believe her because I made shrimp and grits for us that particular night. There’s real magic in shellfish and dried dent corn.

Lydia wanted to name our daughter Desdemona. I plumped for Madison. We compromised and named her Desdemona. Everyone calls her Des.

Des left for college last month. She told Lydia to “kick dad in the nuts every day until he gets another book published.” I think my daughter loves me, but she’s starting to sound like my new agent.

Don’t get me wrong. I write stuff. Articles for literary magazines. I do book reviews for several newspapers. Reader’s Digest publishes me twice a year. But that isn’t genuine writing. The First American Angel was real writing, and I was a real writer. Full stop.

I have Gabriel García Márquez to thank for my inspiration. Magical realism and all that. The Buendía family. Allegorical tale of man’s origin. I mean, 100 Years of Solitude had it all. But where do you go after writing your magnum opus?

Maybe I need to go Southern Gothic. Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers made it respectable, all that post-Civil War depression and violence. Wise Blood never got the credit it deserved. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter has been forgotten. Maybe it’s time to revive this genre, shake it up, give it a nip and a tuck, get it a little black dress and take it out for a night on the town. Uglier girls have made it to the ball, right?

                                                        **************

Jenny hauled the last bucket of water for the day back to the house. She needed it for her baby and her dead mother. She would finish digging the grave tomorrow, before it got too hot and before mamma started to stink. Pegasus Sky gurgled happily, not caring that she lay next to a dead woman. Jenny fed her baby and cleaned her mother before laying down to sleep next to them. She wouldn’t be hearing her mother snore any longer, or hear her cry out for her husband. The war hadn’t taken him, but the pneumonia had. Jenny had dug that grave as well. As long as she didn’t have to dig a hole for Pegasus, she’d be fine.

I need some grotesque to come along and insert himself into Jenny’s life. Evil grotesque or Godly grotesque? I need some Catholic undertones. That should be easy. I teach at a fucking Catholic university, right? You should see the campus. Mother Mary all over the place, smiling beatifically at you as you pass. I wonder what the good mother thought of Flannery and Carson.

I don’t think I can do southern gothic. I’ve written one paragraph and I already want to slit my wrists. That’s sacrilegious. The Brothers on campus would be shocked if they heard me voice that particular thought.

I like the Brothers. They day drink, and all four of them have a two-pack-a-day habit. All of them offer solid, practical advice about teaching, though they hadn’t taught in decades. Best of all, they’re liberal with sharing their whiskey with me. It’s expensive stuff, too.

I’m thinking maybe I’m like the Brothers. I did my thing with that one novel. Maybe I should just drink good whiskey, smoke two packs a day, and sit around doing a whole lot of nothing. They seem pretty happy.

However.

However, I’m not. Happy, that is. I’m anxious and skittish and unsettled. I’ve been this way for twenty years. Now I’m desperate. I owe it to Lydia and Des to write another book. I just don’t know how.

I make a deal with the devil. Ok, that’s a little too dramatic.

I make a deal with Des.

                                                      **************

I left the mountain after grandpa died, taking little with me, for there was little to take. I would go on to kill seventy-three men, all bad. I would return to the mountain in due time, the prodigal son who wasn’t a son at all but a daughter. This is how it all happened.

I look at Des and shake my head.

“How the hell am I supposed to work with that?”

She gives me that look. The one her mother gives me when she’s exasperated with me but doesn’t want to unleash a verbal assault on my ass.

“You just do it. We made a deal.”

I scratch my beard. Lydia doesn’t like my beard, but Des thinks it makes me look professorial.

“And stop drinking my whiskey. You’re not even twenty-one yet.”

Des defies me. She pours out two fingers and mixes it with carbonated water. Lightweight.

“Get to it, old man.”

So I do.

I left during a Pegasus sky. That’s a term only us mountain people know. When eagles are flying closer to the ground than normal, it means they spotted a small rabbit or a rattlesnake. Since it was midday, it had to be a rattlesnake. Step careful and step quiet, grandpa used to say.

I shove the computer back to Des. She reads it and nods.

“You’ve been obsessing over this stupid phrase for years and now, suddenly, you explain it. What gives?”

I don’t know what to say to her, so I shrug. Ok, I do know how to explain it, but I won’t. Denial of one’s faults is part of the human condition. I could tell her that but she’d eye-roll me, just like her mother does.

“Oh! I get it! There’s always a way to spot evil if you know the signs. Since this bad-ass chick is gonna kill all these men, she must know what to look for. That’s kind of brilliant.”

“Yep.”

No need to brag. I can do that later.

I have these rules that grandpa taught me. Rule #11 says that when you kill, you kill quick and you kill sure. Now, I only killed rabbit and deer and squirrel and rattlesnake before I went down the mountain, but that son-of-a-bitch Russel treated me real bad so he had to be killed.

“Where the hell are you going with this?”

I had to ask, right?

“You write your paragraphs and I’ll write mine.”

She takes another sip of whiskey, just to piss me off. She succeeded.

“What did he do that was so bad?”

“Maybe he raped her.”

Des says this matter of factly, which saddens me. It’s a reality in her world, this sort of shit. I wish I could protect her, but I can’t. Not from everything.

We trade more paragraphs, arguing about each other’s work along the way. Thrust and parry. Remark and retort. Lydia watches us and smiles. Why is she so happy about Des and me arguing? The woman is clearly insane. It had to happen eventually, living with me.

It took me a few months to get it, but I got it. Keeping it to myself, though.

                                                  **************

Pegasus Sky became a runaway best seller. Des used the pen name Olivia du Mugne because she admired the works of Daphne du Maurier. I argued for Lillith Longtree. Something reminiscent of the old west, and very American. We compromised and used the name Olivia du Mugne.

The novel made her rich. Not just rich-ish, but fuck-you rich.

Ironically, we never used the word fuck in Pegasus Sky.

We now write novels together, using that stupid pen name and churning out books that people snap up by the millions. We argue about every paragraph. She usually wins. I’m not a real writer, after all, and she’s my daughter.

So it goes.