The WhoVille stories began on a whim when I lived in Chicago. There are two volumes at the moment: the rather hefty Wicca in WhoVille, which began its life as a National Novel Writing Month project and the much smaller Wickedness in WhoVille, which contains the first WhoVille story I wrote (a novella, actually) and another story from my Chicago days that I adapted slightly to fit it into the WhoVille universe. A third book, Wacky in WhoVille, is still in the works.
The WhoVille stories are totally unlike my Carmelite books. They are whimsical, silly, light. The protagonist, one Damien F. Malachy, is a professor in the Queer Studies Department at a university for misfits, located outside the Windy City. His husband (partner in the early versions) is a retired lawyer and like, another couple we could mention, they share an apartment with two cats.
I offer for your perusal passages from the published works. First a bit from the original novella, "A Hot Time in WhoVille Tonight;" then a section of "The Honorian Patriarch," a short story published with the novella in Wickedness in WhoVille; and finally a bit from Wicca in WhoVille.
That's another of Tom's cover designs. Sorry, folks! That good-looking guy is as unreal as the stories.
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from "A Hot Time"
Every morning I walk to work along the tree-lined
boulevard of University Road. It is in many ways part of a typical
Midwestern college town, but there are differences. Instead of University Park or College Park or some variation on an overused
theme, the neighborhood is known as WhoVille.
Our metropolitan area is notorious for these little neighborhood names –
Boystown, Girlstown, Millville,
Lakeside. WhoVille fits right in. And instead of
Greek Row, the two-block stretch of fraternity houses is called Geek Row. Nothing is quite usual.
The university where I teach is officially Philip Peabody
Horton University,
a private institution of higher learning established by an enormous bequest from
Philip Peabody Horton himself. Except
for his name, there was nothing particularly impressive about Mr. Horton as far
as I know. He had made an unseemly
amount of money in the early nineteenth century by selling cemetery plots door
to door. Having no social life -- no
private life, for that matter – he had put his takings away into a small
family-owned bank where a genius of investments, with the aid supposedly of the
slave and rum trades, made sure that the interest accumulated and accumulated,
until one day Philip Peabody woke up a very rich man through no fault of his
own. Having dealt in death most of his
life, he realized that there was no point in trying to take it with him, and he
had made no headway in generating friends or family to inherit when he passed
on to one of the finest cemetery plots in the neighboring large city. He set up a trust, therefore, for the
establishment of a college, which would bear his name and educate misfits. All its students were given a full
scholarship, but they first must have been refused admittance everywhere else
they applied and had to be certifiably antisocial. There was an AntiSocial
Certification Process, overseen by the Dean of AntiSocial Studies. You can
imagine the sort of campus life this engendered.
Still, antisocial types often include some fairly
bright people, and a number of the Horton alumni went on to make unmentionable
fortunes of their own. Since they, like
the original Founder, had no friends or families, they tended to bestow money
on the PP pot, as it was sometimes called.
The school was rolling in cash by the beginning of the third millennium
in fair Verona, Illinois where we set our scene.
The over-endowed college eventually begat enough
programs and fellowships to become a university. Philip
Peabody Horton
University by now was
known just as Horton
University. In 1956, at an otherwise forgettable rugby
match, the visiting team began to shout and jeer, “Horton U, P-H-U, Pee-you,
Who are You?” As luck would have it,
some of the Horton students in an elementary teachers reading class had been
examining the Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hears a Who. Their perverse little minds took up the
challenge: “We’re H-U Whos, That’s Who” and the Who soon was the unofficial
mascot of the school. Prior to this the
school sports mascot had been a Ho-Chunk chief with an appropriately antisocial
scowl highlighted by war paint. Although this predated concerns about political
correctness by decades, the mascot’s feathered headdress and war paint were
officially retired in 1960, and an elephant costume replaced them. Of course,
Horton was an elephant, not a Who, but a foolish consistency and all that.
With the arrival of How the Grinch Stole Christmas
a few years later and further popularization of the Whos down in WhoVille, the
University leaped aboard the Grinch-wagon and in 1963 created a combination
Winter-Festival-cum-Mardi-Gras-cum Mummers event called “A Hot Time
in WhoVille Tonight”. There is a Cindy
Lou Who beauty contest, a roast-beast chili cook off and nonstop fraternity
keggers. For reasons known to God alone, the event was a big financial success
and got many a young Who U student through the cold dark days of midwinter that
year and thereafter. It also contributed
to the Scrooge McDuck-like coffers of Horton.
I personally did not believe the rumors that three-hundred-and-fifty
pound President St. John St. Clare Samiam begins each day with a skinny-dip in
the money bins, but then that is an image I do not want in my head anyway.
--------------------------------
from "The Honorian Patriarch"
George King woke with a hangover and the phone buzzing
in his ear like an angry rattlesnake. He kicked at Jackson to get the phone, which was on that
side of the bed, but Jackson
was not there. He was out jogging as
usual in the early morning. George
belched, tasted sour mango and grimaced.
“Okay,
George. No more fruity drinks, no matter how cute the fruit mixing them.”
By the time he groped his way through tangled sheets
to the phone, it had stopped buzzing and the flashing blue light alerted him to
a message. “1 missed call 9:03 AM” He pushed the call-back button.
“Who the hell is
calling at 9:03 AM on
Sunday, for God’s sake?”
“Mr. George Basilarion?” a hesitant voice asked.
It had been five years since anyone had called him
that. George’s mumble was apparently affirmative enough.
The voice continued, “Your Holiness, it is with
profound sorrow that I tell you that His Holiness, Patriarch Honorius,
Twenty-third of the blessed name, Episkopos Apostolicos of the One Church of
the One God, One Son and One Will, has passed into the glory of the One Kingdom
he has so long desired, ahead of all human expectation, but in accord with the
One All-Knowing and All-Merciful Will of God.
The Patriarch is dead. Long live
the Patriarch, Your Holiness.”
Silence.
George’s mind blurred even more.
“No,” he
thought, “ that can’t be right.”
Images flashed through his vodka-fogged mind: plumes
of incense, dots of candlelight reflecting off black satin robes, tall veiled
hats, chains dangling jeweled crosses and enameled images of the Virgin, gold
staff.
“Now that’s drag!” he had once announced to his
aunt. The Patriarcha was famously not
amused.
George King, 23 and gay, was called Peach by his
friends because he had been born in Buford,
Georgia, when
his mother unexpectedly went into labor while on the way to Florida to visit Epcot Center.
He competed in drag contests as Miss Peachy Keene, twirling the fire baton,
which he considered a lost art. In the
real world he was a clerk at a vintage/used clothing store called “Been There,
Worn That” on Clark Street
on the border of Boystown and Girlstown.
The store had originally been called “OUT-Worn”, but that soon described
how people felt about the place, so the owners, vegetarian Orthodox lesbians, changed it.
George’s real family name was Basilarion, but he
anglicized it when he hit 18. His slender build, olive skin, hazel eyes, full
lips, lean face and scruffy beard got him attention in the bars. He had a nervous tic of running his fingers
through his short, thick, curls. He
smoked constantly, his fingers stained from the tobacco.
He was also the unlikely nephew of the Honorian
Patriarch, an anomaly he either hid or used as a pickup line. No one even knew what he meant, most of the
time – “Hi, I’m George. My uncle is the Honorian Patriarch.” It didn’t matter that they didn’t
understand. For a couple of years before he met Jackson, it usually got him at least a second
look, sometimes a drink and a chance to hook up.
The last time George had attended the Sacred Liturgy
was at Easter, and he did so only because he chanced to stagger by the tiny
Cathedral on his way home from a champagne brunch in Boystown. Brunch was perhaps the wrong word – it was
actually an exceptionally late Saturday supper.
His uncle-the-Honorian-Patriarch, surrounded by lesser luminaries
adorned as seraphim or cherubim, had calmly ignored him, although the
Patriarcha had glared. She had been
saddled with the disturbing name of Livia by her own bishop-father, and she
cultivated that deadly empress’s least charming characteristics. Jackson
adored and fawned over her because he knew it drove both George and Livia mad.
After another moment of silence, the voice on the
phone explained what had happened, but George couldn’t make sense of it. Patiently the messenger repeated the
story. His version sounded like a press
release.
What had actually happened, as George was to learn later,
was this: The Patriarch (Honorius XXIII)
and his son, Athanasius, who should have succeeded him, had died in an
automobile explosion. At first it was
reported as an assassination, and this was the version that George received on
the initial call. Careful polices
investigation, however, indicated that
Athanasius had flipped a lit Havana cigar – a gift from the mayor – out of the window, and it rolled into a drain filled with sewer
gas, setting off the blast. This was at
the corner of Michigan
and Van Buren. The Patriarch’s gold
chain flew through the air and landed on the outstretched arm of one of the
horse-mounted-Indian statues that faced
one another across the street. The
sirens were whining before the chain stopped spinning.
Two blocks away, crowds of children playing in the
fountain at Millennium Park looked up to see the fire reflected in the giant
jellybean sculpture (which the creator insisted
on calling “Cloud Gate,” a name no one else used), bursting into cheers
and applause at the spectacle, thinking it was a movie or a fireworks
exhibition. Parents scurried into the
fountain, ignoring for once their fine shoes and slacks, scooping up their
babies and heading for shelter under the aluminum waves of the Frank
Gehry-designed performance space. The
car had passed the Park moments before, the stout chauffeur hidden behind his
sunglasses, the enormous Patriarch munching on a square of pastry layers filled
with honey, nuts and soaked in orange liqueur.
It was the Patriarch’s complaints
that his son’s cigar smoke was spoiling the taste of the sweet that led to the
disaster.
“Oh. Thank you, ” George said, reflexively polite and
completely inappropriate. He hung up and fell back onto the pillows.
“What a weird
dream!”
The phone rang again in two minutes, but this time he
buried his head under the covers and ignored it. He wasn’t falling for that again.
--------------------------
from Wicca in WhoVille
Overture
The tall,
white-haired man stepped out of the shadow of a yew tree and strode to the
center of a clearing. He wore a purple tunic, speckled with gold, which ended
slightly above his ankles, over a white linen under-tunic that reached to the
ground. A simple gold band encircled his
head, and a crescent hung from it over his brow.
The grass in
the clearing was beaten down in a circle. Faint smudges of white chalk marked
out four points around its circumference. Crossing his hands over his chest,
the man bowed to each point of the circle, turning clockwise as he did so. Then
he lifted his hands and eyes to the partially clouded sky and began to sing
softly:
A Bhrid, ar goroi, an-gheal Bheanrion;
Lo de thoil e beannachta sinn.
Is sinn bhur leanai, is tu ar mamai
Bi ag isteacht duinn mar sin.
Is tu an coire, anois inar doire;
A Bhean-domhan tinfim orainn.
A thine ghra, a thine bheatha;
Lo de thoil e ag teacht Bhrid duinn!
In the
darkness of the trees behind him, a woman in a dark robe pulled her hood closer
around her face and peered out at him. Flicking open her cell phone, she tapped
a recording app and held the phone towards the chanting voice. Later back in
her office, she would try to decide what language he was using. Meanwhile the
important thing was to capture as much of it as she could. A cool wind sprang
up, and more thick clouds slid across the sky to hide the stars. She pulled the
robe tighter and shivered. Rain had been in the forecast. She hoped she was
safely back home before it began.
+
“Dang it all
to heck!” he shouted, the heavy Bible slipping from his hands to the floor. He
bent over to pick it up. “I have to learn how to hold this thing in one hand
and not drop it when I point with the other!”
Rusty Piper
got a firmer grasp on the Corinthian leather cover, opened the book to the
passage he had marked and let the sides flop back and down over his strong left
hand. His eyes ran down the column until he found the verses he wanted.
Planting his feet firmly on the ground, he jabbed at the book with his right
forefinger and kept it there, preventing the book from sliding away again.
“Brothers and
sisters, it says right here, right here in God’s holy word, I tell you! It says
right here in Exodus chapter 22 verse three that a man has a right to defend
his property even if it means killing someone. The Lord’s own words to Moses,
‘If a thief is caught breaking in at night and is struck a fatal blow, the
defender is not guilty of bloodshed.’ No, wait, that’s verse 2. Verse three
says … ‘but if it happens after sunrise, the defender is guilty of bloodshed.’
Well, I don’t need to read verse 3, it would just confuse people. That verse
two, that’s the verse. That’s clear as can be.”
His eyes
scanned the rest of the page to see if there was anything else he might want to
talk about. “Something about sorcerers, something about bestiality, something
about not charging interest on a loan… What, no interest on a loan? Well, that
sure ain’t true any longer! Thank God we don’t keep the foolish parts of the
Old Testament any more. Just the parts that make good Christian sense.”
Rusty sat down
and reached for the beer on his desk, his damp t-shirt molding to strong chest
muscles. The Bible sure was easy to
misunderstand, he thought. He was glad he was helping people find the truth
and not get confused by side issues. He took a sip from the beer, clicked on
the television and picked up a five-pound hand weight from the floor. With one
hand he surfed through the channels while he lifted the weight to his shoulder
over and over.
Outside the
wind had picked up and a few drops of rain struck the windows.
+
There was not
enough light in the kitchen to see what she was doing, but the Lady preferred
to do things by candlelight anyway. She lit a rose-colored taper and put it
into a small holder made of topaz. Walking across the flagstone floor, she
reached up to open a cabinet door. Inside the shelves were lined with bottles,
each bearing a neat label in beautiful calligraphy script. Unerringly she
reached for the two she needed. Uncorking the bottles, she scooped out first a
small handful of coarse salt and then a bit of minced garlic. She replaced the
corks and put the bottles back in place before closing the door. She closed her
eyes for a moment and held her hands over the salt and garlic.
She reached
for the basalt metate she used for grinding herbs, spices and other things she
needed. Some of her friends thought the metate an affectation, suggesting that
a mortar and pestle were more appropriate. But she liked the idea that the
metate was a New World artifact, and since she was now in the New World, she
would use the metate.
She put the
salt and garlic into a small pile in the center of the metate and rolled the
ball-shaped grinding stone back and forth, blending them together.
As she worked,
she sang softly under her breath,
“Salt and
garlic, garlic and salt,
With your
strength all evil halt.
Strong and
powerful, guard this hall,
Keep safe
within it one and all.”
She stopped
blending and set the mixture aside to dry near the hearth. She would have
preferred to let it dry in the sun, but the sun had disappeared hours ago and
rain was beating down on the roof. The warmth from the small fire burning on
the kitchen hearth was sufficient for the task.
Later she
would walk through the old house and sprinkle a pinch on every window sill,
doorway, hearth and any other openings she could find.
Smiling to
herself, she said aloud, “So I ask and make my plea, All you gods, So mote it
be.”
