Yesterday, via social media and Kickstarter updates, I mentioned that daughter Kate and I are working up a “Blood Type” short story for this year’s Halloween celebration anthology, Halloween Haiku II and other hauntings.
Here’s the first line: “The day Sandpoint, Idaho, died, Garrett Cully left work early.”
One of our D6xD6 RPG backers asked, “Why Sandpoint?” (Turns out his wife’s family lives there.) As that setting chapter will soon show, Sandpoint is a perfect choice for the horror campaign my wife and daughter conceived of.
As luck would have it, the city also made an appearance in a poem I wrote back in 2006, an attempt at free verse:
It’s Happy Hour Somewhere
At 5:25 p.m. in Los Angeles,
the Trumpster (in town for an evening)
rises from a trim and invites
his busty stylist to drinks and lobster
thermidor.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin,
I hold the phone, and a tequila,
while my mother’s voice cajoles
me to write something
uplifting
(outside this east window,
snow dunes
glowing in moonlight).
And at a checkpoint east of Baghdad,
a boy from Sandpoint,
Idaho, coaxes five blood-spattered children
from the backseat
of a family
car that would not
STOP.
While in Calcutta,
Mother Teresa’s ghost
rises with the sun, and walks
a flowerless path to the leprosarium.
—Lester Smith