My beloved companion died a week ago now. Over last weekend, I cried so hard for her I made myself sick. I think that phase of grieving has passed. Most of us have lost a pet, so I can write about Lily knowing you will understand how hard and how completely you can love an animal.

It’s a love that is pure and unconditional. Animals return that love to you in the same uncomplicated fashion.  Their love is not mixed in with hurts and disappointments, slights and petty offenses, misunderstandings and losses,  as our human relationships can be. A loving relationship with an animal illustrates the best in us. 

And the worst. We see animals hideously injured and wondered who are the people who do this? What sickness in them bubbles to the surface to starve or beat an animal? Where does it come from? I don’t want to linger there.

_____________

What has risen to the surface in me since Lily’s death is my old fear of The Axe Murderer. I live in a village in rural, mountainous California. Crime here is likely to be teenagers breaking in to vacant cabins. Nonetheless, I am a student of crime and crime fiction, and dark scenarios dance in my mind when I wake in the night.

It’s silent here, and dark. No streetlights.  A breeze might blow up and sigh through the pines and the oaks. Occasionally I hear the yips and barks of coyotes. Yet the motion sensor light often goes on signaling some animal is padding around the house at the bottom of the stairs.  A raccoon, a bobcat.  It could even be the mountain lion that is caught on wildlife cameras. The bears have been driven into town by the drought. 

I’m much more afraid of the human variety of mammal. Lily used to bark frantically when she caught the scent of the bear. I knew her bear bark. As she grew old, she became deaf, her eyes clouded, and she couldn’t see well in the dark. Arthritis and Cushing’s disease took away her agility. I had to carry her up and down the stairs. 

Still, I felt she protected me, even when I knew that was a fanciful notion. Cats can stare at a wall until you believe something terrible lurks behind the drywall. They can look over your shoulder and convince you a killer is right there, a blade ready to strike between your shoulders. 

When I first moved here, I had night terrors about The Axe Murderer. Stalking the back deck, he would be wearing a long black cloak, drag chains, and have red eyes. Thank you, Stephen King.  Thank you very much. Then Lily came into my life and I forgot about him. He’s back. 

My doors lock and I have a butcher knife and a pry bar on my night table. In the state of mind I’m in right now, a gun would be foolish. I might shoot my foot off if the squirrel ran across the roof at night.  

It’s too soon to find another dog. I know that the right dog will find me, just as Lily did.

All is well. All is basically well. Time will pass. 

 Please see a related post: http://marpreston.com/writing-without-a-dog.html

Love and Death and Hope

by Janis Patterson

It seems we live our lives by holiday seasons – Christmas, New Years, Valentines, Easter, Memorial Day… you see what I mean. And it seems that each holiday season crimes go up. Murders increase. Family member turns on family member. What is it about a time that should be all about joy and celebration that turns people murderous?

Perhaps we have too many expectations. Christmas especially for most of us doesn’t live up to the perfect holiday implied by saccharine TV shows and too-perfect-to-be-real Christmas cards. Unfortunately, most families don’t wear their Sunday best to stand around a huge, professionally decorated tree and sing carols, but in spite of this a lot of us wonder why our family isn’t like this.

Valentine’s is no different, though on the whole less emotionally charged. Some people don’t care about the romantic side of life. Some have given up on it. Some have their patterns set with their loved one, and don’t need the traditional frills and furbelows of Traditional Romance. Some of us do, though. We want the candy and the cards and the heartfelt sighs of Everlasting Love – at least for the moment. Jewelry and trips and all the rest would be nice, too, but it’s the emotions that really count. The romantics who can celebrate it and the lonely ones who have no one to celebrate it with (and I have been both) have expectations, expectations reality can never really live up to.

And that’s where the death part comes in. Humans are governed by primal drives. Yes, we have created a veneer of civilization that keeps us from running amok like a two-year-old denied a treat when we are disappointed or fail to get something we want, but that veneer is sometimes terrifyingly thin and fragile. Who hasn’t heard of a spurned lover wreaking vengeance for being rejected? This unhappy circumstance isn’t endemic only to Valentine’s Day, of course – it happens all year round, yet so many instances of sad and/or vicious repercussions of love-deprivation do occur close to the holiday. And yes, to all holidays.

Holidays build up our expectations to an expanded degree, which makes the fact lots of our dreams don’t come true that much more difficult to bear. It’s hard to keep an even keel when everyone but you seems to be wrapped in perfection.

And for that we must be held partially responsible. We as writers are the myth-makers. It is from our pens that the archetypes flow. Should we change our stories so that our characters have no hope, that their lives are as glum and free from redemption as the most tortured of real life persons? I most sincerely hope not. As writers we owe the public good stories, but I think that we also owe our readers at least a glimmering of hope – hope, not necessarily expectations. Not everyone in life gets a happy ending, and not every character gets a happy ending, but I think they should at least have the hope of a happy ending – whatever that happens to mean to them. Yes, for a love-deprived serial killer that hope might be the extermination of his next victim – something that should not happen, especially in real life – but to be a well-rounded character he needs hope, however twisted his vision of that might be.

Do I believe every character deserves a hearts-and-flowers-rainbows-and-unicorns happy ending? No. That kind of universal joy neatly tied with a string belongs in fairy tales. But neither do I believe in total doom and gloom and no ray of sunshine ever. Perhaps our characters don’t get what they want, but like humans, they deserve at least the hope of it. In other words, a story shouldn’t end when the pages run out. We go on spurred by hope, and our characters should too, even if the book is finished. Hope is what makes us – and our characters – truly live.

Washed Ashore

My boyfriend and I have a morning routine on days I don't go to my day job. We walk up to George's Zoo, a little market/deli across from the San Francisco Zoo, getting hot drinks (coffee for me, chai tea latte for Dave) and walking on the beach for an hour or so. I'm a dedicated (okay, compulsive) beachcomber, with a house and garage full of shells, rocks, driftwood and beach glass as testimony to my obsession. I have restrained myself from hacking out teeth, skulls and other pieces parts from dead seals or sea birds. Too messy and smelly.

I am totally fascinated by the variety of stuff that washes ashore every day and how the terrain of the beach can change after one stormy night. There's a shipwreck, the King Philip, under the sands of Ocean Beach up by Noriega Street. It lies concealed most of the time, but once every decade or so the sands shift to reveal bits of it. Last year the ruined prow poked up, rusted metal bits clinging to the wood. It was fascinating and always made me wonder what else was under there.

A month or so ago we were out in the morning and saw police cordoning off a section of beach (also down near Noriega). There was a dead body lying on the sand, up out of the tide line, stiff and...well, dead. For someone as fascinated with horror movies, morbid ways to die and/or kill someone (I'm a mystery writer, so I figure it's normal enough. Right? RIGHT?!), I found the sight of this poor dead fellow very disturbing. It brought home issues of mortality I didn't realize I had. I mean, it's one thing to come across a dead seal with an obvious shark bite taken out of its body, but a fellow human being is a different matter. At least for me. Funny 'cause when I read a book or watch a movie, I'm always far more upset when an animal is hurt or killed than when a person gets kacked. Go figure.

This morning Dave and I went for our usual walk and saw a sailboat listing to one side in the sands down the beach a ways (near Noriega, to be exact. Gotta wonder if there's an ancient Indian burial ground or something else around there...) so we wandered down to check it out. The sails were gone, just the metal skeleton of the rigging remained.

A young woman was doing stretches in front of it, a small dog leashed up to the railing. We asked if it was her boat. It wasn't. Evidently it had run aground Christmas Day during a storm and the owner of the boat was found dead inside the cabin. He had been removed, but the boat was basically abandoned.

People had taken the sails and a few other items, but there were still sandwiches inside the cabin, books, DVDs, mail... I know this because Dave climbed up and poked around for a few minutes. I didn't. It seemed too much like desecrating a grave, a reaction I found surprising. I love poking around old historical sites, graveyards, ruins, you name it. But this...well, it was too new. Besides, I've seen far too many Japanese horror movies like GRUDGE with pissed off, vengeful spirits. I told Dave if he brought home a white faced ghost with lots of black hair or a spooky little kid, he was in deep shite.

Dave looked at the mail. There was a bill from a pathology lab and an alimony payment notice alongside a half empty bottle of wine. It made us both wonder what had happened out there on the ocean. Did this man decide to kill himself, perhaps riddled with some incurable cancer? If so, did he expect the boat to go down in the water or did he have visions of it sailing unmanned like a modern day Flying Dutchman? Something about the combination of the mail, the wine, and the fact he was out alone on the ocean during a storm at Christmas more than hints at premeditated suicide.

Poor guy.

There are those nasty thoughts of mortality creeping in again. They're definitely mixed up with a desire to use this in a book and a certain amount of guilt at using someone else's tragedy as creative inspiration.