Nathan Buchholz

Welcome!

  • Parasites Chapter 2 and Release Update

    Hi all,

    I wanted to give some writing updates for Parasites. Unfortunately, I have not been as productive as I had hoped this Summer, and will not have the book ready by September. Instead my hope is for a late November, early December release.

    That said, please enjoy this excerpt of Chapter 2 of Parasites which is now available below to read at your convenience.

    After signing up for a top secret military experiment that turned out to be just as bad as Hobbes feared, he now wakes with another presence in his mind. As different as Hobbes and creature that nestled on top of his brain stem are, they both have the same goal.

    To somehow get out of this program alive…

    Chapter 2

    When I wake, I am not alone.
    Neither can I move. The restraints are gone, but my muscles are paralyzed as if locked in a night terror.
    Good, comes a voice in my mind. You’re awake.
    “What are you,” I croak. My throat aches from all the screaming I did the last time I was conscious. “Why are you in my head?”
    From my best understanding, you consented to this process. Unlike me, you had a choice.
    “I didn’t know that I was agreeing to something crawling into my skull.”
    I know, the thing pauses for a moment. Choice is a relative term. It seems you decided to join the program to save people you love. Shortsighted.
    I feel something rattle inside my skull and my bile rises. Thankfully my stomach is empty so I don’t vomit.
    This must be strange for you. It certainly is strange for me. But your stress levels seem to be dangerously high. Please try to calm down.
    “I’ll be calm after I rip you out of my head,” I say, my voice echoing in the cavernous chamber. I’m in the same place where they conducted the “procedure.” My right eye is dark and I try not to think about what it might look like.
    You do not need to shout to communicate with me, says the voice. I’m plugged into your brain. Just send a thought my way and I will understand. Hearing everything twice is tiresome.
    What does it mean–
    I mean that I hear your thoughts.
    You mean like right now where I’m thinking about crushing you under the heel of my boot?
    Unfortunately, yes. I had hoped to talk with you before the Doctor returns to tell you what their purpose for both of us is.
    Do you have a different purpose?
    I have a single purpose, my species is few. All of us from the same DNA of a forefather. Probably created synthetically, but I cannot confirm that hypothesis yet. As to your query, yes I have a different purpose than Dr. Vrick. My imperative is to survive.
    Then you should have killed me.
    The thought occurred to me. It would be a simple thing to stop integrating myself into your nervous system and instead start pulling out some of the wiring. But once I killed you Dr. Vrick would certainly kill me. My best chance at survival is to try and make this strange marriage work.
    Incidentally Hobbes, it’s your best chance as well.
    So are you going to control me? Puppet my voice like you did once you first burrowed into my skull?
    No, you are not the tool. I am. They want you to master me for some purpose. That is mostly why I wanted us to talk before they got back.
    But you’re burrowed into my brain? How can I force you to do anything?
    I’m sure they’ll give you something to cause me pain. It seems to be the only way your species seems to know how to control anything.
    I remain silent, my feelings on humanity were less than stellar at the moment, but I still didn’t want to condemn my entire species.
    But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. Our relationship started a bit rocky. Still, to put it in your terms, I am looking for a ‘cease fire’ until we find out why they’ve combined our consciousnesses.
    I want you out of my head.
    That may be possible in the future, but certainly not yet. Try to understand that when I entered I did so because it was my only option for survival. Outside of a host body or the home fluid they suspended me inside, I would die in sixty seconds.
    Understanding doesn’t make me like this situation any more. I’m not built for this, humans are not built for this. It’s unnatural.
    Believe me, I’m aware. Getting around inside here is a nightmare, and your thoughts are an overwhelming cacophony. How you hold so many in your head at once is enough to make me want to bolt for an exit.
    I doubt that would be a pleasant experience.
    You would be right.
    Is there a way to filter my thoughts? Maybe just talk to you when I feel like it instead of a constant stream of communication?
    I could give you a mute button. I’m still integrating, but give me a second.
    A twinge of pain twists in the back of my head, and the consciousness seems farther away.
    Like a wall is slowly built, brick by brick between our consciousness. Until I am almost alone in my own mind.
    Is that better?
    Yes, as well as can be expected given that there’s still a bug coiled around my brain stem.
    No need to go outside the parameters of my question. The switch is two way in case either of us needs to contact or mute the other.
    I nod and my heart slows. There isn’t much pain other than a dull throb where my right eye used to be.
    Maybe it’s a small progress but the longer I talk to this thing the less I feel the urge to vomit every time its consciousness rubs against mine, and the wall helps.
    That is good progress.
    I thought you weren’t listening right now?
    Sorry, I just wanted to offer encouragement. Seems like the least I can do considering the circumstances.
    I chuckle.
    That’s the most absurd thing you’ve said since I woke up.
    Why?
    Because, never mind, you said you wanted to say something to me? That’s why you woke me?
    Yes, I want you to understand that I am a thinking creature seeking survival. They are going to tell you I’m just an animal, or possibly a computer I’m not sure which. They want you to use me as a tool, I hope our relationship can be more of a partnership.
    I take a moment to respond and a bit of the creature’s uncertainty brushes my mind. I see it is being plucked from a tank, placed in a tube and the life-giving liquid removed. The scramble towards me, my body, all that will keep it alive.
    Well? Are you to make me a slave or a partner?
    I want to stay alive. And I want you out of my head
    I assume you want to be alive when I leave.
    Obviously.
    Then maximizing our survival is key to accomplishing your goal of, “ripping me out of your head and stepping on me until I am a multicolored stain on the ground.”
    I exhale and close my good eye, it isn’t wrong.
    What are you called?
    I’ve been called QSX-202 by Dr. Vrick and his associates.
    What were you called before?
    There is no before. You should be able to move now.
    I lift up my chin and look down. The restraints are still attached to my arms and legs, and a bone deep exhaustion pulls me towards sleep.
    Something pulls on where my right eye used to be. The object feels cold on my skin, but protrudes a few inches from the cavity.
    Implant. Meant in some way to maximize my processing power. Need more information.
    I tense my arm trying to touch the implant. The restraints stop me and I grit my teeth.
    Rest. We will get a few answers soon.
    Their voice fades away as I fall asleep.

  • No Way Out: The Long Walk

    In the 96th minute of the World Cup round of 16 between Mexico and England, Mexican forward Santiago Gimenez stepped wrong when pursuing a through ball and suffered a severe ankle injury. At the time, Mexico was out of their assigned substitutions, but Santiago couldn’t walk let alone play on his ankle which had been surgically rebuilt last year. In a final act to try and help his team, Santiago pulled himself off the pitch and laid in agony while he was worked on by team medics. After the game, he was rushed to a hospital where it was confirmed that he suffered a serious ankle sprain, but not a full fracture as was initially feared. 

    While some sports legends have turned in mythic performances through injury, the reality is that the human body has limits that cannot simply be overcome with mind over matter. Pain can be put off, minimized, or pushed through only to a point before things start breaking inside the body. Ignoring or “pushing through” the pain can have devastating consequences even for professional athletes. Look no further than Isaiah Thomas of the Boston Celtics who pushed through a severe hip injury to play in the Eastern Conference finals. His career was never the same as it was revealed the injury led to his bones grinding together as his hip joint was simply gone. Thomas returned to basketball after multiple surgeries, but was never the same dynamic player again. Pain is how the body communicates it’s limits, and we ignore it at our peril.

    These limits are explored in excruciating detail in the movie The Long Walk based off of a Stephen King’s story of the same name. The concept is simple, fifty boys between the ages of 16 and 18 walk until only one is left. If a boy slows below the required pace, they are unceremoniously executed with a bullet to the head after a set of warnings. The rules are absolute. You slow down, you die, you run, you die, you try to fight back, you die, you beg for mercy, you die and supposedly only the strongest survive.

    While the boys walk, they are exhorted by “The Major” an unrecognizable Mark Hamill who seems to relish his role as the assistant coach from hell. Hamill is able to embody the ethos of that one assistant coach who cares less for improvement in the sport and more for having a captive audience to sermonize to. A coach who always got way too excited for wind sprints at the end of practice, and loved calling players they dislike ‘soft.’ Hamill adds menace to his performance by his frequent exaltations and sermonizing from his jeep about how participating in the walk is a sacred and important duty. He provides the carrot through his discussion of eternal glory and reward for the winner, while the jeeps of machine gun armed men provide the ever present stick.

    But the Major, the armed men, the reasons the boys walk, all are much less important than the actual structure of the walk itself. Notably the warning structure, that if a boy slows below the required pace of three miles an hour they are given three warnings, before on the fourth one they are shot. This matters because it turns the act of stopping from a bodily necessity to an act of defiance. Stopping is a choice a boy makes, and they are warned of the consequences. With the logic of the walk, a boy dying is their own fault not the fault of the men who pull the trigger. 

    The walk functions as a kind of behavioral experiment putting a person’s needs in conflict with their ability to obey the rules. The social order of the walk is absolute, there are no poison berries the boys can take to stick it to the Major or disrupt the system. The system does not care for the boys needs, it cares for their obedience, and this fixation with compliance has many proponents among the powerful.

    One of particular note is Dr. James Dobson who because of his personal disgust with the protest movements of the 60’s, wrote a book called Dare to Discipline. Within its pages, he supposedly diagnosed the root of social changes that rocked America. Instead of accepting that large numbers of young people were ideologically opposed to the Vietnam War, segregation, and the homogenous social order of the 50’s, Dobson claimed that a breakdown in parental authority was to blame for the supposed anarchy spreading across the country. Lack of respect in the home had snowballed into lack of respect for the police, the state, and the social order. In order to restore respect for authority, Dobson proposed his own method of parenting that rejected the permissive ways of the world and devoted itself to instilling respect for authority in young children. 

    Dobson’s methods for asserting this authority are a chillingly precise merging of scripture and behavioral conditioning. A pediatric doctor, Dobson was familiar with behavioral theories in modifying children’s actions through things like reward systems and consistent application of positive and negative consequences. However, unlike most behavioralists, Dobson rejects the idea that children are trying to communicate their needs to caregivers, and instead believes children to be inherently sinful and rebellious creatures. In Dobson’s view, when a toddler spits at their caregiver because they are testing new forms of communication, it is not a developmentally appropriate milestone in learning acceptable and unacceptable forms of communication. It is instead an act of deliberate and sinful defiance that comes from the toddler’s rebellious nature and must be corrected with violence, immediately. Like God’s correction of Israelites, when defiance occurs, a price must be paid.

    Ever the behavioralist, Dobson is precise in when and how punishment for defiance should take place. He believes that children under 10 and as young as 2 should be spanked with either a hand, belt, or other object with “sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.” What “cry genuinely” means is left up to the parents interpretation, making it a question of personal preference whether a child bares their behind for strikes or is beaten with a wooden spoon or a two by four. Parents are tasked to set clear rules, like the clear rules of the walk, but if they are defied just listen to how Dobson describes how parents should react.

    “When a youngster tries this kind of stiff necked rebellion, you had better take it out of them and pain is a marvelous purifier. When a nose to nose confrontation occurs between you and your child, it is not the time to have a discussion about the virtues of obedience…You have drawn a line in the dirt, and the child has deliberately flopped his big hairy toe across it. Who is going to win? Who has the most courage? Who is in charge here?”

    The anticipation and excitement that comes through the passage here from Dobson is harrowing. While later in the book he of course yada yada’s his way through generic condemnations of the physical abuse of children, that’s impossible to believe when this passage makes more sense as a pep talk for a heavyweight boxer than a book on good parenting. Dobson is giving permission for parents to “do what they gotta do” to re-establish their absolute authority. When discussing whether or not a child is allowed to be safe Dobson states that “he can enjoy complete security and safety, until he chooses to attack me. Then I will give him a reason to fear.”

    All a child has to do is just obey, much like all the boys need to do is keep walking. To stop obeying is to risk safety, and there is nothing either the walkers or children raised with Dobson’s method can do to escape.

    In response to Dobson, parenting experts often claim that “corporal punishment doesn’t work” I think this misunderstands Dobson’s goals. You see, parenting experts’ believe their work can help caregivers raise an emotionally intelligent, inquisitive, and independent children. That is not Dobson’s goal. Dobson’s goal is to raise children who never talk back, never question authority, and uphold “family values.” The goal is not for a child to develop into their genuine self because all children are tainted by original sin. Instead, the goal is for the child to be conditioned above all other concerns, to obey the rules.

    Here the echoes of The Long Walk become clear. Why are the boys walking? Because they were told too. While they may have had a choice to sign up, once the walk begins the rules are absolute. They must obey even if it destroys their minds and their bodies, or they will be deemed weak and defiant. Whatever happens after that, well you can’t say they weren’t warned. 

    But there has to be a positive vision of this philosophy, of blind obedience resulting in something good for the parent and the child? How’s this theory supposed to work in practice, as even with my disgust for Dobson I doubt The Long Walk is what he thought of when he wrote his parenting books. To return to sports, the ‘good’ ending to these methods can be found in the Sherwood Pictures film Facing the Giants, a movie mostly about high school football. After a star linebacker expresses doubt over the team’s ability to win an upcoming game, his coach has him engage in a bear crawl with another student on his back. The catch is that the player has to do the task blindfolded so he doesn’t know how far he is going. Instead he has to just listen to his coach, and “give it his all.” The music swells, the coach screams at him to put his heart into it, and wow look at that, the player went twice as far as he thought he could. 

    Dobson’s philosophy is on display here. The player is singled out due to having a bad attitude and talking back to his coach. In order to teach a lesson, the coach puts the player in a situation where they are totally dependent on him, lies to them about the requirements of the task, and then disregards the player’s cries for help that his arms burn, that he is in pain, or that he can’t keep going. The only thing that stops the pain is when the player literally collapses onto the ground and weeps openly that “he doesn’t have anymore.” Here Dobson’s prescription that punishment should continue until the child “cries authentically” is reproduced, and because of the exercise, the player develops into the man of God the coach needs to win the football championship. As Dobson says “pain is a great purifier.” 

    Right before the opening titles roll on The Long Walk there is a dark mirror of this scene from Facing the Giants. The youngest walker, a definitely not 16 year old named Curly, develops a charlie horse a few moments into the walk. One of our main characters, Raymond, immediately steps in and tries to coach Curly through it. The scene would not be out of place in a Facing the Giants style sports movie where Garrety does his absolute best in order to help Curly. It seems to work, Curly’s pain easing, until the cramp returns bringing Curly down to the ground. 

    Every boy screams at him to get up, but Curly can’t, his body has failed him. A fate that can happen to anyone, even professional athletes at the world cup. The final warning comes, there’s a graphic close up of Curly’s head being destroyed by the bullet, and the opening titles roll, letting the audience and the rest of the boys know what they are in for. The killing of this younger character makes it clear that there is no reasoning, no begging with the Major that will spare a boy’s life. Trying to negotiate is not an option, and the boys adapt, not begging with the implacable men with guns that follow them but instead with the boys whose bodies fail. In the closed world of the walk, the only way to stay alive is obedience above everything else, and an utter annihilation of the child’s own needs. 

    The most disturbing death of the walk comes after a frantic dash up a steep hill that the Major believes separates “the wheat from the chaff.” One of the boys breaks his ankle and the soldiers start to circle him with their automatic weapons. Mad with terror the boy screams that he is fine and doubles his pace even while his foot is graphically caught underneath his shattered joint. The moment is brief, and for myself, I was hoping that the boy’s death would happen off screen, that we could intuit he didn’t make it up the hill. That’s not the kind of movie The Long Walk is though. 

    Instead we see in vivid detail what happens when you continue to walk on a broken ankle with the boy’s foot turned and desiccated. Only when his pace slows, when the soldiers begin to surround him does he finally tell them “my ankle is broken.” The soldiers give out the same warnings while the boy begs, but the rules remain absolute. He was warned, he continued to defy the rules, and because of that his safety and security are forfeit. 

    One of the more disturbing anecdotes in Dare to Discipline is an example Dobson uses to show the efficacy of his behavioral program, specifically how his manipulation of pain and pleasure will produce the kind of children he desires. Dobson tells the story of a fish that starved to death because it was behaviorally conditioned not to lunge for food. The fish would choose to avoid pain over its own physical needs. Even after behavioralists stopped hurting the fish when it lunged for food, the damage was done. Likewise, children raised in the manner Dobson suggests don’t take long to understand that any pain they are suffering is better than the pain that will come if they are perceived as defiant or disobedient. Regardless of the pain, regardless of a child’s needs, regardless of a child’s ability, they must keep obeying or suffer the consequences. 

    The boy with the broken ankle is like the fish in Dobson’s experiment. Caught between agony and terror, forced to shamble on until he just cannot obey any longer. This tension is similar to the tension described by survivors of domestic abuse at the hands of those who believed in Dobson’s method. One survivor in Talia Levin’s book Wild Faith describes their experience by recalling, ““I got spanked for not cleaning my room fast enough once, and when I went back to cleaning after my spanking, I had a depressed — or ‘rebellious’ — attitude, so my dad made me sing a cheerful hymn while I cleaned, and if I didn’t sound happy enough, I would be spanked again.” Perhaps the stakes are not as high as The Long Walk, but the survivor was put in a shockingly similar tension between pain and terror. A child who was just corporally punished by her caregiver was then forced to perform happiness in order to prevent the punishment from happening again. Dobson believes this tension is good as it forces children to internalize their pain out of a “Godly Fear” of what will happen to them if they disobey. A child’s own emotional reactions are evidence of original sin, just like if a walker slows below the required pace is evidence of laziness.

    Dobson hopes that caregivers can create a closed system in the image of the long walk. A place where the rules are absolute, where children would rather self maim then disobey, and where there is no way out.

  • Parasites: Chapter 1

    Please enjoy this sneak peak of Chapter 1 of Parasites! Coming September 2026!

    The black hood I’ve worn for the past few hours is pulled off my face. I squint as my eyes adjust to the harsh light. The two men who escorted me down here loom near the door, barring the exit.
    “Raymond Hobbes?” a woman behind a white desk asks, making a few marks on the paperwork spread out in front of her.
    “Yes Ma’am,” I say, scanning the room. There are no windows, just white walls, and two fluorescent white lights buzz overhead. My eyes take a moment to adjust, pulling the woman in front of me into clearer vision.
    She looks up from her paperwork and points to the scale in the corner of the room.
    “I need vitals, strip and hop on the scale.”
    “My weight should already be in my file.”
    “Now Hobbes,” she says, making another mark.
    I pull off my t-shirt, take off my boots and fatigues and walk over to step on the scale. She notes the tally, fixes the height meter, and crosses out something on her notepad.
    Must have been a mistake.
    “Step down,” she says, wrapping a blood pressure monitor around my arm. The door opens and both my escorts exit. I crane my head to look, catching a glimpse of a long white hallway.
    “Where am I?” I say.
    “You’re where you signed up to be,” says the woman keeping her eye on the blood pressure numbers. After a beep, she removes the strap and points to a chair. “I need you to sit here.”
    She pulls out a cup that holds a blue mixture. Using a wooden stick, she stirs it and leans towards me.
    The stuff is cold, and I flinch from its touch.
    “It’s just an adhesive,” she mutters. “This isn’t the part you need to worry about.”
    “What should I be worried about?”
    She goes silent and I frown.
    I don’t know what I expected. My escorts came in the middle of the night, put me on a four hour train ride, and then blindfolded me for thirty minute trip in the elevator. After that, we took a series of seemingly random turns to deposit me here in this tiny room.
    Hard to think they’d spend so much effort disguising where we were if whatever was about to happen would be pleasant.
    I bounce my knee until the worry about what I signed up for subsides from overwhelming panic to an pleasant drone.
    The adhesive is cold on my chest and my shoulders break out into goosebumps. The blue goop goes on both my arms, two spots on my legs, and four on my chest. A few pieces of medical tape hold wires close to my skin.
    The woman fastens tape to the hair on my legs, and I grimace. It’s going to hurt to pull that off.
    “One more thing,” says the woman sliding a paper towards me.
    The top of the page says “This is the Last Will and Testament.”
    My mouth goes dry and I swallow. I knew this program was looking for lab rats, I guess they thought it best if those lab rats didn’t have access to things like ‘human rights’.
    So people like me.
    The woman clicks her pen, and holds it out to me.
    “This is just a precaution right?”
    “Mhmmm,” the woman cannot meet my eyes.
    I look behind me to the closed white door. There’s no going back now, I sign my name and the woman takes the paper back. She walks through the door and leaves me alone, silent except for the whine of the fluorescent lights.
    My hands shake.

    Being here was my choice. A fairly simple one at that, because about two weeks ago I got a call from my Grandmother.
    I was out of basic for about a month or so. New laws after the war with Xeno made it easy for folks to enlist fast, so I did, mostly for the money. Dad was a vet and got bit of money from his days in service, but not enough, and Grandma was 85.
    And if I enlisted then Grandma wouldn’t have to work. Wasn’t a terribly tough decision.
    When I got out of basic training, I finally got a phone call home.
    For some reason Grandma had the damn phone on speaker. I pushed the phone hard enough into my ear to leave a red mark when I was done to try to make sense of the garbled words. The conversation was wrapping up, when I finally understood something she said.
    “ Had to move some of your things to the dump, me and your Father will be leaving the trailer soon.”
    “I’m sorry what?” They had lived in that home for decades.
    “Well, me and your Father, we’re gonna have to move out soon, end of the month I think. It’s my fault, I couldn’t find a job in time to save it.”
    “Slow down,” I checked my time, there was less than a minute left on my clock before I would have to get off the phone. “What do you mean you couldn’t find a job in time to save it? My salary should have been more than enough for the rent?”
    “I don’t want you to worry about it–”
    “Too late,” I said, clenching my teeth. “What happened?”
    “Your Father’s payout was less than we hoped, they said something about him not finding any work, and the rent went up so we just didn’t have enough.”
    Dad hadn’t worked in years. I had wondered why until I was eight, then I saw one of his episodes and stopped wondering.
    “How much are you short?”
    “Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine. We both made it out of Houston when Xeno first showed up, can’t be any worse than that.”
    “That was when you were thirty years younger and Dad wasn’t set off by someone turning on their car engine,” I murmured low enough lost in garbled static.
    “What was that honey?”
    “How much are you short Grandma,” I said, checking my time. Thirty seconds ticked down, moving to fast, I had to know how much they needed.
    “Two thousand five hundred dollars,” said Dad, his baritone cutting through the static.
    I put the phone receiver on my chest, looked up, and yelled. “Fuck me.”
    The CO running the phones gave me a look that could melt six inches of Xenosteel, and I raised my hand in apology.
    “Fifteen seconds Hobbes,” he barked at me.
    I put the phone back to my ear.
    “–We really will be ok,” Grandma said, and for a second I believed her, but only for a second.
    “Don’t move anything else, I don’t want you lifting anything. I’ll get the money–”
    “Boy, how the hell do you think you’re gonna pull twenty five hundred dollars out of your ass,” said Dad. I winced at his raised voice.
    Five seconds left.
    “I just will, don’t leave the trailer alone so they can’t–”
    The receiver clicked and I saw my time was up. The CO in the corner grinned and I turned away so he couldn’t see me roll my eyes.
    I walked back to my bunk and lay back covering my face with my hands.
    Where was I going to find over two thousand dollars?

    Four days later I stood outside of the conference hall where the majority of the military’s “death by powerpoint” took place. My teeth ached and a tension migraine pounded on my temples. The day before, I noticed a flier outside of the barracks that had mentioned a mandatory meeting about some R&D program that needed human volunteers.
    The brochure had mentioned extra pay. It didn’t give a dollar amount of course, that would be to easy. All it said was the payment was “flexible” whatever that meant.
    I was up all night, and hadn’t eaten that morning. My stomach did somersaults whenever I thought about this program. One other guy I knew early on in basic had signed up for something similar, thinking it could get him some extra cash. I hadn’t seen him since.
    But, my options were limited. If I was in the Denver Residential Zone, maybe a quick robbery of the local hospital would have worked. If I got my hands on some morphine I certainly would be able to cover the costs of two thousand dollars, but I wasn’t in the zone, I was on a military base.
    The military medical center had more security, and if I got caught, well I’d be dead and then I wouldn’t be a help to either of them.
    The thought of Grandma sleeping in the rain under one of the train overpasses in our zone couldn’t happen. They couldn’t stay at a shelter because of Dad, and out on the street it was just the police who would respond to his outbursts.
    Yeah that’s what would happen, Dad would end up in some prison closer to the plains zone, and Grandma, well, she would probably be dead within a year. They needed to keep their home, so I had to find a way.
    And this might be the way out, regardless of what lab rat duties I had to perform.
    A CO walked over and unlocked the doors. I sat down, and rubbed my temples.
    The hall filled up fast, a few bustling conversations stopped at once when one of the CO’s bellowed for silence.
    Two people stood at the front. On the right was a six foot tall, dark haired, black man in a suit. To his left a smaller white woman with a clipboard in her hands. The man smiled and stepped forward.
    “Good morning,” he said with practiced projection. “Congratulations on completing your basic training, my name is Stanley Vrick and I am here to offer you another opportunity to serve Earth here and abroad.”
    The room was silent. These idiots never understood that we weren’t here because of some high minded belief in protecting humanity. Xeno was gone, we weren’t protecting anyone. Mostly, all I, and all but the most deluded around me wanted, was to get out of our residential zones and maybe, just maybe find a better life.
    “I am here on behalf of the Symbiote program, the latest in cutting edge military technology, to ensure that earth is never taken by surprise again. To help explain the program, please direct your attention to the screen for a short video from our founder.”
    The room went dark and the screen lit up. Standing there was Elizabeth Stienen-Cross, founder of Voidshield Pharmaceuticals and probably the most powerful person on the planet. Some bullshit inspirational music was overdubbed, edited to swell when she grinned.
    “When humanity was pushed to the brink by the Xeno invaders, only one thing saved us. Our innovation, the human spirit that created the Xenoflu which turned back the attackers.”
    My knee shook, they blocked an hour of time for the presentation, and I hoped I didn’t have to wait that long before I saw whether or not they paid enough to save my family from eviction, or worse.
    “I come to you today, with an opportunity. A chance to be on the cutting edge of humanity’s next great step forward. The public private partnership of Voidshield’s ingenuity and the military’s strength will help us to take steps not just to help humanity remain safe from extra planetary threats, but maybe even journey to far off worlds.”
    I should have rolled my eyes at the next swell of music and change of backdrop. Instead I smiled thinking about watching the stars with my Grandma. Stienen-Cross stood in front of some screen shot of the milky way when she spoke again. “Project Symbiote is the lynchpin to our success. After rigorous animal trials, we are ready for human subjects to help us crack the code to a bright future. We hope that you will join us in forging our destiny amongst the stars.”
    The screen went dark and the lights came back on. At the very least the video was short.
    Dr. Vrick stepped back up to the podium. “This program is of utmost importance to the security of our planet. Join me and my assistant over here to get the paperwork you need to join.”
    After a moment of silence he said, “Well that’s all we’ve got.”
    The rest of the room emptied until I was alone.
    I walked up to the desk and the woman smiled at me.
    “Do we have a taker?” said Dr. Vrick his expression brightening a bit.
    “The flier said compensation, like financially,” I said. Dr. Vrick nodded at me. I took a breath and said. “How much?”
    Vrick looked at the woman with the paperwork and gave a small grin. “How much do you want?”
    I closed my eyes. The number of twenty five hundred has been the only thing on my mind for days. It took real willpower not to just blurt out the amount as soon as he asked.
    But no, I had to think, that would just pay this month’s rent, something that would give Dad and Grandma some breathing room. I needed something more long term.
    “Today please,” said Vrick his eyes tightening.
    I leaned in and whispered, “Five Thousand.”
    “Five thousand what?”
    “Dollars,” I said. “Straight to my family, I’ll give you their names and I’ll sign whatever you need me to.”
    Vrick smiled and pushed the contract agreement forward. “Sign here, we’ll be back tonight for extraction.”
    I signed the paper, and slept through the night for the first time since my call home.

    I lose track of time waiting in that white room. Every time I think I hear footsteps coming closer, they turn and clack further down the hall. I guess they’re not in a hurry, at least not for my sake.
    The cold chamber seeps into my bones until my teeth are chattering and I bend my spine into the fetal position. They took my fatigues with the papers leaving me exposed in nothing more than a medical gown and the set of electrodes dotted across my body. I did sign up to be a lab rat after all, I just didn’t expect it to be so literal.
    Today is the day Dad and Grandma are set to be evicted. I pray that the money gets to them in time. I haven’t been able to contact them after I signed up for the program, was in the contract. Any outside contact would void the money and probably send me headfirst into a court martial.
    None of those were great options, so I opted for option three. Keeping my damn mouth shut.
    The control panel beeps the other side of the door and the adrenaline prods me out of the fetal position. I clench my jaw to stop my teeth from chattering. Through the door walks Dr. Vrick and two sour looking men in fatigues, they were different from the ones who escorted me here, and they had surgical masks over their faces.
    “Hobbes,” says Vrick adjusting his glasses. “We are ready for you.”
    I stand up and shuffle towards the door, being mindful of the wires adhered to my body. The two men watch me like an anxious dog, hands drifting by their sidearms.
    “I’m sure you know that any attempt to leave at this point would be frowned upon,” Vrick says as we walk down the hallway.
    “Understood, sir.”
    Down the hallway, a gurney is being run from two large doors into a passage to my right. Two people in labcoats one with their mask on, the other with it dangling from their chin push the contraption. On the gurney, is a shape with it’s face covered by a red stained white linen.
    A hand dangle out below the sheet line.
    What have I gotten myself into?
    “Double doors there,” Dr. Vrick says. “And good luck.”
    If I try to respond, I am going to vomit all over his nice white coat.
    The doors open and I walk inside. The woman from the white room is there with a surgical mask stapped tightly to her face. Two other people are there with their long white coats and heavy black gloves. They are not what stops my heart.
    In the center of the room is a chair. Medical restraints for the arms and legs hang off the sleek metal. The headrest extends a full two feet above what any normal sized person would need. A metal helmet sits above the headrest, with an arm that can be adjusted to move over the face. At the end of the arm there is a small eye shaped hole which completes the apparatus.
    “Sit,” says the woman who I assume is the lead of the project. I hesitate and look for an exit, there is none except the one behind me with the two scowling soldiers. There’s not a way out. The lead nurse sighs. “You can sit, or we can put you in the seat. I’ll let you decide what you want.”
    I have no doubt they can cancel the payments to my family if I fail to uphold my part of the contract. The image of Dad on the street is enough to get me to sit down on the chair. The metal is cold, but my skin adjusts to the temperature. The soldiers click the restraints over my ankles and the medical personnel attach the cuffs to my wrists. Above me looms the metal arm with the hole in it, one that looks just big enough for my right eye.
    The woman wraps a belt across my chest.
    “Just for my protection right,” I say, I must sound like I’m begging.
    “Don’t talk please,” she says, attaching another belt across my belly. “It will make this easier.”
    My legs shake and make the restraints clink on the steel chair.
    Without warning the seat tips back, putting me parallel to the ground. Someone is pulling on my hair, pulling it apart and attaching electrodes. I lose count of how many they attach to my scalp.
    I tense at my restraints.
    “Please don’t move,” one of them says. He pulls the helmet and metal arm down from above the headrest. It fits snugly over my scalp and the hole at the end of the metal arm frames my right eye like a target.
    The helmet clicks and there is a pressure on both sides of my head.
    “I can’t move,” I say. No one responds to me. “Why can’t I move my head?”
    “Please try to stay calm Hobbes,” Dr. Vrick says over the intercom. “Higher stress levels are more likely to result in project failure.”
    What is the project?
    “Deep breathes Hobbes, it will regulate your heartbeat, reduce stress, that’s what we want.”
    Above me a hatch in the ceiling opens. A long black tube about six feet long is lowered down by a mechanical arm. The first three feet of the tube are hollow and clear, but the three feet above it are murky with some kind of black water held within.
    Something moves in the liquid.
    I scream and thrash but the restraints hold me tight.
    “Is the subject secure?” says Dr. Vrick.
    “Secure,” comes the voice of a woman.
    “Then let’s get this over with, finish the sealing process.”
    The arm lowers closer and closer until the transparent tube is inches from my eye. The inside of the clear tube has the threading of a screw.
    A pair of tiny red eyes look at me from the murky water above through the barrier between the empty and filled part of the cylinder.
    “I did not sign up for this, I did not sign up for this,” I yell as the woman screws the threaded section over the hole in the metal arm over my eye.
    My heart pounds so hard I worry it will break my ribs. Sweat drips into my eyes and I feel a warmth in my pants.
    “Please,” I whisper. “Please let me go, please.”
    With a click the apparatus locks into place above me. Small legs press up against the divider, too many legs to count.
    “Please don’t let it out,” I whisper. “Please.”
    “Sealing process complete, fluid removal in process.”
    The murky water retracts, and the thing inside twists and twitches. It tries to stay in the fluid as long as it can, but soon all the liquid is gone.
    The thing thrashes like a drowning man.
    “Sixty seconds of time outside the fluid,” says Dr. Vrick.. “Is the subject ready?”
    For a single sick moment, I think the doctor is talking to me.
    “Ready.”
    “Begin infestation.”
    The creature pounds on the small divider between where it was and the passage that leads directly to my eye.
    I try to wrench my head out of the helmet one last time but am still held fast by the restraints. With a click, the door dividing me from the monster opens.
    The creature does not fall like I expect. Instead it clings to the side of the tube taking steps down along the fiberglass. My eye is held open, as I see it walk closer and closer, hearing every single one of its legs click with each step.
    The closer it gets I try to hold a picture of Dad and Grandma in my mind. I hope they are ok, and they never hear about how I die.
    It stops, it’s two red eyes looking at my one. Its mandibles grind together, and I feel a bit of liquid seep into my eye.
    “Please,” I whisper.
    Its jaws open and it jumps towards me. I don’t see what happens next.
    But I do feel it.
    My back arches and a scream is ripped from my throat.
    It’s not stopping at my eye, instead it’s going farther, boring inside. Its legs click on my orbital bone and it coils inside my head eating away at a thousand screaming nerve endings.
    I cannot understand how I am still alive.
    “QSX-202 have you shut down the denial response and reduced shock?”
    The pain starts to abate, but the thing is in my brain. I feel it’s body contract and expand inside my skull.
    Like it’s breathing.
    “Get out of my head,” I scream.
    “QSX-202, have you shut down the denial response and reduced shock to acceptable levels?”
    Dr. Vrick speaks as if he was simply frustrated his employee didn’t bring him the right kind of coffee.
    I feel my mouth open but not because I want it too, something else is controlling what my speech.
    And that other, that horror in my head says. “Denial response shut down, shock level reduced to acceptable levels. Putting the subject to sleep now.”
    Like a key turning in my brain, I black out.

  • Against The Ambient Noise

    There are a lot of phrases that I should use when marketing or describing Profane Beasts to readers. When asked the dreaded question of “what is your book about” words like “religious trauma” or “deconstruction” or “cult horror” all come to mind, but every time I bristle at the terms, and it’s triggered a lot of looking inward to why I just can’t describe Profane Beasts in those efficient and effective words. 

    A trend in book marketing right now is to place your novel in the center of the picture and surround the book with all of the ‘tropes’ readers can expect inside. Perhaps it would be good for me to engage in the exercise, and surround Profane Beasts with terms like “suburban horror” or “cult vibes” in order to give readers an idea of what to expect, going beyond the mechanics of the plot, to the feeling I’m hoping to evoke with the book. I just can’t bring myself to do it though. 

    At first I thought this was just me being an artist and not wanting to be put into a box. The constant push and pull of fitting into genre conventions and telling myself that I’m adding something unique to horror tradition. But upon further reflection, I don’t think that’s the case. Of course I bristle at distilling literature down to simple marketing phrases like ‘religious trauma deconstruction with psychological thriller vibes,’ but I get the utility of these phrases. Elevator pitches exist for a reason, and it is a real skill to show passion and excitement over your work in less than one hundred words. My problem, I think, is instead with the shorthand, the limiting nature of the phrases like ‘deconstruction’ or ‘religious trauma’ when discussing what twenty years steeped in the evangelical church really was like. 

    In John Ganz’s excellent piece on the Iran War titled “Command-Shift-War” he discusses the seeming mindless nature of the words being used by the Trump regime as they defend their actions. The images and phrases are a barrage of cliches that invite the listener to fill in the blanks, and manufacture consent for the continuing death that reigns down in the middle east. Ganz says, “There’s a blind automism to this war; it’s a war without thought or deliberation, public or private. It’s war as autocomplete. Of course, we were gonna “do” Iran.” The autocompete nature of this regime’s senseless war mirrors the kind of new speech of the internet. Why would they need to explain the war to the public, when they can just let the ambient noise of the past decades fill in the blanks for them?” There’s no need for Colin Powell to lie to the world about WMD’s in Iraq when you can simply invoke the fear of a nuclear weapon and your audience does the rest of the work for you. 

    That ambient noise, autocomplete, fill in the blank nature is what I feel when I reach for terms like “Deconstruction” or “Religious Trauma” to describe Profane Beasts. I can almost feel the listener filling in the blanks with whatever short form video reels have used those terms before even opening the first page of the book. Both terms are flexible enough to fit a wide range of beliefs, from complete rejection of the church to a simple change of denominations. Both can shapeshift and morph into whatever the listener wants all based around a sort of amorphous ‘wrong’ way of doing church that angers no one and comforts everyone.

    This isn’t about me being upset that my work is getting interpreted in different ways. In fact, I love the different interpretations that people have come to me about Profane Beasts. From some who view it as a cosmic horror tale to others who aren’t even certain if the Seven Eyed Tree is a real entity in the text. I often say that I have my version of what happened in the story, but am more than willing to let my authorial intent die the moment it is read and interpreted by others. What I care about is that the story is true to my experience, and that it can find some sort of connection with others who have similar experiences, or even a window into some of the dark places of self doubt, anxiety, or terror, and how religious extremism hardly ever helps in dealing with those problems. I do not care if there is disagreement on the events of the story, as long as that core of suffering, self hatred, indecision, and panic remains and feels real. 

    That is the bone I have to pick with taking twenty years of singing songs that told me there was “nothing good in me” or the real emotional and mental anguish of the alter call or the encouraging of cyclical thoughts that I was bad, dirty, or wrong and simply paring it down to a phrase like “religious trauma.” While I would prefer people to love the book I have produced, at the heart of things I don’t really care if it is loved, hated, or ignored. What I care about is whether or not I have communicated the truth of how being in that place felt, and how it feels to wonder if the rot has grown worse, or if it was always there and I just couldn’t see it. I have to believe that Profane Beasts can provide some window, some truth, on how that feels. When those experiences, those scars are reduced to autocomplete, to a “bad habit of language” as Orwell says, I must reject them. 

    Towards the end of Ganz’s article, he quotes a particularly bleak quote from Kierkegaard’s work The Present Age where Kierkegaard states “…there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, an abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous.” That abstract noise is what I hear when I try to describe Profane Beasts in those terms, and it is an anathema to me. I write, I have to believe that words can communicate something to a reader, some sort of truth or experience or something. It’s hard enough as is, but that truth gets more muddled when trying to fish it out of an abstract sludge of “deconstruction/religious trauma/swamp vibes.” Kierkegaard would laugh at me, desperately trying to assert that I am the speaker, that my experience matters and can be communicated through the text. Just another lost soul screaming atop a mountain in the middle of a storm, where my words are as pointless as the wind. 

    I reject that, instead I choose to think my work matters, that I have an experience worth sharing, and that Profane Beasts can communicate some truths instead of just noise. So that is why I cannot reach for those terms, that autocomplete that surrounds us. However futile, however frustrating that seems, I think it matters that my work encounters others without simply being an ambient din that squats in the atmosphere. Because for me, it never was an abstract noise, but a reality that did not just have me in its grasp when I was young, but still walks with me today.

  • Profane Beasts At the Library

    After thawing out from a bitterly cold winter here in RVA, I have a new event announcement I can’t wait to share with you!

    On March 30th from 7:00-8:00 PM, I’m going to be discussing self-publishing, Profane Beasts, and the importance of being a part of your local community at the Tuckahoe Area Library! I’ll be there with Gigi Howard of Drinks in the Library, and hope to see you there. I’ll also be making a HUGE announcement that I can’t wait to share that night. The flyer is below, and if you are planning on coming, I’ve got an RSVP form as well. Hope to see you there!

    RSVP Here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScQnzrQ42r3b6r2mADWmj0u5itc9saA4inrGxUWd_KPJm11kw/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=105738605092577821510

  • Mourning The Illusion

    When viewing images of the American secret police murdering a woman in broad daylight, I am reminded of a quote from the Battle of Helms Deep that expresses my frustration and helplessness. While under attack, Theodan, king of Rohan mutters “what can man do against such reckless hate.” I have thought about this line often as every day as I am bombarded with more horrors wrought by my own government. 

    My invocation of “Lord of the Rings” may come as a surprise because conservative thought leaders have interpreted Tolkien’s “Lord of The Rings” as a direct allegory to support their ideology. Writers like Curtis Yarvin consistently emphasize the ugliest and most racist pieces of Tolkien, and claim his tale of kindness, brotherhood, and basic decency as their own. As if Tolkien would feel affinity for the collection of tyrants, meddlers, and thieves that control our current government. No, Tolkien’s story was not meant to be straightjacketed into some white supremacists vision of “the west,” but instead is a story about sorrow, memory, and beauty told on the timescale of one life and generations. A story my mind returns to again and again in these evil times. 

    I have long believed that the secret to why Tolkien’s adult fairy tale continues to enchant young and old alike is that he has a remarkable knack for names. This comes as no surprise given his background as a linguist (he did write Quenya before the first lines of Bilbo’s tale), but it is no less remarkable how a simple name can evoke such feelings of peace, dread, or sorrow. Eldar names like Caras Galadohn, or Gil-Galad, Edain names like Minas Tirith, or Numenor, and sites of ancient evils like Angmar, or Barad-Dur conjure entire histories even though a place called Rohan never existed. The history and meaning behind these names add poignancy to key moments within the story, such as when Frodo makes the decision to take the ring to Mordor and Elrond states that his name will be remembered among the great heroes of the first age like Turin Turambar and Earendil. Even if the reader has no knowledge of who these made up people are, it still stirs something within, a feeling that the quest to destroy the ring is not isolated, but fits into a history, a legacy of heroes. 

    What I find most laced through Tolkien’s names, especially those of ancient Eldar or Edain places and people, is an undercurrent of sorrow. A wistful memory of some older time where great deeds were still possible and the power of kindness, friendship, and love were able to overcome evil. When considering Tolkien’s context and personal life, these desires to return to earlier times should not be interpreted as some anti-progressive screed, but instead reflect Tolkien’s desire to return to his life before his experience in world war one. The hope to return to the ancient battles of Beowulf or other myths should be understood as contrasts to the modern charnel house that greeted him in the trenches of France, not as a power fantasy of some sword wielding alpha male. 

    See, Tolkien never, not even with the Return of Aragorn to the throne in Minas Tirith, allows that ancient glory alluded to in those names to be recaptured. The greatest example of this is the Eldar. The elves who stayed to fight the War of the Ring do not remain to make Middle Earth Great again, restoring the old kingdoms of the Sons of Feanor. No, they depart, over the sea, to the far green country never to be seen again. With them, they take magic, and beauty, and peace, making Middle Earth much less wondrous. The connection between the leaving of the Eldar and the end of the wonder of youth that we all feel as we grow old, gather scars, and meet the world as it is, not just how it could be, is the power of Tolkien, not the ideological project that Thiel and Yarvin embrace. If you don’t believe me, just ask Tolkien himself who famously said that he “disliked allegory in all its manifestations.” 

    Towards the end of The Return of the King, after the Shire has been saved and the evil of Sauron defeated. Galadriel, one of the oldest of the Eldar ever to walk Middle-Earth begins her voyage to the undying lands. She stops in the Shire, and engages in all manner of Hobbit-like revelry, dancing and drinking with the rest of the Shire-folk. Galadriel also brings with her a few seeds of the Mallorn tree from Lothlorien to plant in the Shire before she leaves forever, never to return. Her gift is not wasted, and Samwise plants the seeds which grow into the last Mallorn Tree that ever stands in Middle-Earth. Even when Lothlorian fades, and magic leaves Middle-Earth, the Mallorn tree still stands as just a piece of what was lost. 

    I always found this episode at the end of the story moving. The Mallorn Tree seemed to reach outside the pages of “The Lord of the Rings” and be a small piece of the story I could take with me out of Middle-Earth and into the “real world.” I wonder if Tolkien was able to preserve his Mallorn Tree through the trenches of the Great War, so that even when he was surrounded by suffering and death he could still remember a better time, or a better place.

    “A Mallorn in the Shire” by Ted Nesmith

    And it’s not like Lothlorien was perfect, or that the days during the War of the Ring were peaceful, or that the Eldar that lived within the trees were pure. One of the other inconvenient facts of Tolkien’s wistful and melancholic view towards the past fascists hate to grapple with, is that every one of those ancient and great nations of Middle-Earth were riddled with corruption, evil, and hatred. Whether the kin slaying done by the Sons of Feanor, the tyranny of Az-Pharazon as he listened to Sauron’s council and made war against the Valar, or the greed of the Dwarves as they dug in Moria, no great nation that inspires songs and tales was an uncomplicated force for good much less perfect. But when they are remembered in bleaker times, the realities of their greed and ambition fall away, and when the name Numenor is whispered on the streets of Minas Tirith the parts that were are what is remembered. 

    “The Temple of Melkor” by Todd Nesmith

    When young hobbits look at the Mallorn tree, they do not think of the War of the Ring or the hatred between the Elves and the Dwarves, instead they think of the beauty that was once in the world that has passed away. The Mallorn tree stands to show that Lothlorian was once a place, and at least some parts of it were beautiful. 

    As I watch masked men of the American secret police roam the streets, I cannot help but think of the Mallorn tree and feel wistful for better times. I know my melancholy is not universal, those who were ground under the heel of Numenor surely do not see beauty in its edifices, but I also do not feel like I am alone. Perhaps I am a fool for ever believing that in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. we could “transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” Or the words of Abraham Lincoln when he said “that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth.” I mourn that living up to those words seems less and less likely every passing day, even if they always were an illusion. 

    I think of the Mallorn tree in the Shire, and hope to plant my own. Not to hold up the past as an uncomplicated better time or to ignore the evil, hatred, and corruption that have plagued America from the beginning, but instead in these evil times to just remember that America was once a place, and at least some parts of it were beautiful.

    “Minneapolis Skyline Art” by Justyna Jaszke

  • End of Year Reflections

    Hi all!

    It has been a hell of a year. Professionally, politically, and personally 2025 had higher highs and lower lows than any year I can remember. The publication, launch, and promotion of Profane Beasts is easily one of the greatest peaks not just of this year, but of all my journeys around the sun. Profane Beasts had a successful launch at the wonderful Abi’s Books and Brews, was discussed on the excellent ‘Drinks in the Library’ podcast, was featured on a curated Ingram Spark list for horror around Halloween, and was one of Ingram Spark’s Horror Selections for their Editorial list sitting alongside other horror standouts like Nat Cassidy and Phillip Fracassi!(OMG)

    Other highlights included participating in Shelf Life RVA’s BrewHoHo with ten other incredible writers, discussing Profane Beasts with a book club, and seeing my book on the shelves at independent bookstore stalwarts in Richmond like Fountain Bookstore and Shelf Life Books RVA. Taken together, I can’t call the publication of Profane Beasts anything but an overwhelming success. It feels so good to make the move from someone who is ‘working on a book’ to someone who is ‘available now in local bookstores!’

    None of this, and I mean none of this, would be possible without the thriving local bookstore scene in Richmond. As billionaires and tech barons continue to try and become the only game in town when it comes to all expression of human creativity, Richmond’s independent bookstores remain a source of light. With the internet drowning in all forms of AI sludge, and monopolies tightening their grip on the distribution process, now more than ever I think it is important to meet together at these spots to laugh, argue, and embrace books.

    As for the future, I sincerely hope that Profane Beasts is not the end of my authorial journey, but instead a beginning. Right now, two projects have my attention. I can’t say much more, but for now let’s call them SciFi Project #1 and SciFi Project #2. Don’t worry horror fans, both projects are heavily influenced by some of my favorite outer space haunted houses (The Nostromo, the Ishimura, the 343 Guilty Spark Level in Halo and so much more!) I’m beyond excited for both of these projects, and have hope that at least one of them will be ready sometime in 2026!

    That’s not to say Profane Beasts is in the rearview. Copies are availible locally at Abi’s Books and Brews and available in store and to order at Fountain Bookstore and Shelf Life Books RVA. An e-book version is also in the works so stay tuned for further announcements!

    Alright, I have to stop here before I overpromise. Thank you to everyone who has supported me over the past year. You have given me a gift I can never repay, and here’s looking forward to 2026 and all the years to come.

  • BrewHoHo and Other Profane Beasts News

    When I first published Profane Beasts back in September, I truly did not expect the level of success the book has had in the first three months of publication! So far in supporting Profane Beats I have…

    -Seen Profane Beasts stocked at my favorite local bookstore (Thanks Fountain!)

    -Had an amazing launch Party at Abi’s Books and Brews

    -Appeared on a local Richmond Podcast (Thank you so much GiGi and Drinks in the Library)

    -Discussed the book with a book club that all read the novel and fielded actual questions about the book!

    -Been invited to a local Richmond Book Event (BrewHoHo) where a collection of incredible Richmond authors are also going to be there!

    -Been on not one but two curated lists on Ingram Spark for new Horror releases!

    Truly I am so grateful for the success of Profane Beasts, and I wanted to give an update on a few events in the near future.

    1) I’m going to be at BrewHoHo at Afterglow Coffee from 7-9 PM on December 6th! I am frankly starstruck by the authors who will be in attendance. S.A. Cosby, Clay McLeod Chapman, and a collection of other all star authors will be there! Come by to get books signed, say hi, and support some local businesses!

    2) I’m running a giveaway! Post your rating or review of Profane Beasts on Goodreads at the link here to be entered into a raffle for a chance to win a $25 gift card to bookshop.org!

    I wish you all the best this Holiday Season, and so does the Seven Eyed Tree!

    N.L. Buchholz

  • SKiN

    Happy Halloween to one and all! On this most frightening of nights, please enjoy this offering of a chilling tale written when my partner travelled internationally for the opportunity of a lifetime. It was the first time I ever lived alone, and I couldn’t help but wonder if something else was in the apartment, watching, and waiting…

    TW: Gore

    1

    Thaddeus trudged up the stairs to their apartment. Over three hours ago he dropped Lena off at the airport. A full tank of gas, the crawling traffic of I-95, and a few select curses later, he made it home. 

    “You’ll come to visit soon?” she asked. 

    “As soon as I can.” 

    “It’s not too long, only twelve months. Years can just fly by,” she cupped the small of his back and smiled. 

    Thaddeus memorized every inch of her face before pulling her into a hug.  

    “I’ll see you soon,” the ends of her hair tickled his nose and chin. 

    “Goodbye Thad,” she whispered.  

    At the door of his apartment, Thaddeus wiped the last bit of tear residue from his eyes and pulled out his keys. The tumblers in their apartment door released, and he walked in. 

    A mournful cry from the tuxedo cat inside reminded him he wasn’t quite alone. Billie helped Lena with the transition to Richmond years ago, now the cat would help Thaddeus learn how to live on his own. Tail stretched to the sky, Billie sauntered over.  

    The cat rammed his wet nose into Thaddeus’s hand. 

    A few headrubs later, Billie looked back out the window.

    “I know bud, she’ll be back soon enough. It’s just us now,” Billie purred and consented to a few more scratches behind the ears. 

    Across the living room, at the dinner table the two of them shared for months sat a closed sketchbook and tray of sketch pencils. Thaddeus settled into the dining room chair and opened the book. 

    “You should draw more,” Lena had told him some time back after looking through a few of his old college sketches. “These are really good.” 

    The smell of the pencils and the feel of the sketch paper under his fingers slowed down his heartbeat. Instead of a million worries about her flight landing, making her connection, and what this all meant for the two of them, he could concentrate on something else. 

    The only problem was, he didn’t know what to draw. 

    Inspiration was overrated, at least that was what counted for wisdom in all the how to draw books he had read. Practicing the movements and lines on the page where what mattered, building a fundamental feel for where to set the eyes, extend the nose, or place the ears.   

    A few pencil strokes later, Thaddeus created the outline of a face. A set of circles that signified the edges of a skull, ears, and eyes. A hairless, wide eyed imitation of a human took shape. The nose little more than a line that bisected the face, and the mouth nothing but a dash. 

    Thaddeus stuck the eraser in his mouth, and leaned back in the chair. The outline was there alright, but no details, he couldn’t see the shape of the eyelashes, the curve of the hair, or the edges of the mouth with any clarity. 

    The face would stay undefined, close to human, almost living, a blank slate. 

    He frowned and tried again.

    Over and over the first steps of a face appeared on his paper. A circle for the skull, two lines below to signify the neck, and a pair of oblong orbs for the eyes. The almost faces filled up the page of his sketchbook, technically perfect. 

    But none of the creatures had any life. The page was a mausoleum of blank slates.

    A low growl in Thaddeus’s stomach pulled him out of his creative mood. Outside the sun had already set, and Billie was meowing beside his dish. Thaddeus walked over and opened the pantry, scanning to try and find the special wet food she would want him to feed the cat. The small can was right in front of his face. 

    He doled out the correct portion, set the tray down on the ground, and grabbed a piece of pizza from the fridge for himself.  

    Halfway through the slice of cold pizza, he glanced back over to the collection of almost people on his sketch sheet. All empty, all waiting for him to make them more than strange in between things that looked into his soul. 

    He slammed the sketchbook shut, he’d make them real in the morning.  

    Thaddeus couldn’t move. Sweat caked the back of his neck and his forehead.

    This wasn’t the first time he woke up paralyzed. Three major attacks shook him while he lived with Lena. Every time she reassured him he was safe, and nothing could hurt him. 

    When he was a child he sometimes would wake, and saw dark shapes at the edge of his vision, or the foot of his bed. Lena’s comforting voice seemed to sing the creatures away. 

    But now he was alone, he couldn’t even see Billie. 

    On his right was the closet that still held much of Lena’s clothes and half of her scarf collection. Coats and hangers covered both closet walls framing a hatch in the center of the ceiling. 

    To his left was a screen door to the outside deck. A set of vertical blinds covered the glass doors from curious eyes. 

    A shape was on their porch, casting a broken shadow onto the carpet. The shadow stretched to the base of the bed. 

    Billie meowed from the hallway. 

    “It’s not real,” Thaddeus clenched his jaw. The shadow disappeared from the window. The moment must be ending, he thought, in just a second, he would be able to move again. 

    A thump came from the side of the apartment, then another, as if something was climbing up the wall, or treading on the roof.

    Like the uncoiling of a twisted spring, he could move his limbs again. 

    His fingers found his phone and he hit the flashlight. In moments, every light in the apartment was on. After illuminating every corner, he approached the porch. 

    His hands trembled, and he yanked back the blinds. 

    Nothing was there, only the small table and chair that they bought last summer. 

    Thaddeus sighed and sank to the base of the bed. The phone clock read almost three in the morning, in only four hours was his report time for work. His middle school students wouldn’t care that the love of his life was flying thousands of miles away. 

    Billie walked up and purred. Thaddeus reached out his hand, and the cat curled up around his arm. 

    “I guess that’s the first time I’ve had an episode alone in years,” he ran his hands through Billie’s fur a few more times. The worst attacks had been before his college graduation, and during his first year teaching. 

    Heightened periods of stress seemed to be a trigger. The last few days certainly counted. 

    He rubbed his eyes, he needed to get back into bed, he didn’t want to fall asleep on the floor. Before long he was curled under the covers and ran his hand over the empty spot beside him. 

    “Wish you were here.” 

     

    A pounding sound woke Thaddeus. Light came through the window and he scrambled to his phone. The clock read six ten so he was alright, he still had a little time. 

    Thaddeus recognized the pounding as the bathroom door. He leapt from his bed and ran down the hallway. A pitiful meow came from behind the closed door and Thaddeus sighed. 

    Billie had never been declawed because Lena would have more likely cut off her own fingers than hurt the cat. As a result, Billie knew if he hooked his claws under the door, he could cause enough of a racket to wake the dead. 

    Mumbling a few curses, Thaddeus turned the doorknob. A streak of black and white fur sprinted to freedom. 

    A quick sniff of the air confirmed his suspicions. Small pools of alternating cat vomit and urine covered the floor. Thaddeus looked at Billie, who had taken up position in the living room. Both of the cat’s wide eyes were studying him, daring him to say something. 

    “You couldn’t have used the toilet?” said Thaddeus. 

    Billie licked himself, blinked and walked away. 

    In twenty minutes Thaddeus repaired most of the damage. The garbage bin clicked after 

    receiving the last few clorox wipes sacrificed for the struggle.  

    Thaddeus scratched his face feeling stubble. He pulled out a razor and shaved, one of the only things that separated him from the middle school children was that his facial hair was neatly trimmed. 

    After washing his face he was certainly late. The bowl of the sink was covered in facial hair, if Lena were here she would want him to clean it. 

    But she wasn’t, and he had to go. 

    He pulled the messenger bag over his shoulder and gave Billie one more glare before he pulled the door shut behind him. 

    2

    Thaddeus swung the door open, and stepped inside the apartment.

    Billie was sitting on top of the bookshelf on the right side of the apartment. The cat blinked and meowed out the window.  

    “Not for a couple hundred more days buddy,” Thaddeus rubbed Billie’s head. The cat purred a bit but kept his eyes scanning for Lena’s familiar silhouette.  

    Thaddeus sat on the couch, took off his shoes, and rubbed his eyes. The sun dipped below the horizon, faculty meetings were always long days. 

    Especially given the minimal sleep he had gotten due to last night’s episode. 

    After a few moments to rest his feet, he walked into the kitchen. The fridge was barren 

    except for the last two slices of pizza he hadn’t finished the night before. 

    Thaddeus sighed, he’d have to find something real to eat later. 

    The pizza sizzled in the microwave, and Thaddeus knew he was forgetting something. A chore he needed to do, a reason he thought Lena would be upset at him. 

    The buzzer on the microwave went off. He pulled out the pizza and took a bite. Halfway through his second slice, he remembered the hairs in the sink. 

    He strode to the bathroom and opened the door with his right hand, holding paper towels in his left. He flipped on the lights and his eyes adjusted to the bright bulbs. 

    The sink was empty. 

    Thaddeus ran his finger over the porcelain, and peered below the pipes. Other than the faint smell of cat piss, the bathroom was spotless.

    A meow echoed behind him, Billie rubbed himself up against Thaddeus’s legs. 

    “Did you clean the sink?” 

    Billie meowed, stood up on his hind legs and batted at Thaddeus’s thighs. 

    “I guess it’s your dinner time,” Thaddeus tossed the last few paper towels into the 

    bathroom trash and flipped the light off. Maybe the water turned on at some point during the day, or he hadn’t left that much of a mess. 

    Thaddeus scooped out a bit of wet food to appease the now howling cat. He finished his dinner and crawled into bed refusing to look at the empty gulf next to him. 

    Something in the apartment was chirping. Thaddeus sat up, happy to have use of his muscles.

    The chirping was coming from the closet, persistent as a leaking showerhead. After he realized the noise wasn’t going to stop, he threw off his covers and turned on the closet light. 

    Billie was sitting on the dresser at the far closet wall. His yellow eyes were fixed on the small maintenance hatch in the center of the ceiling. Every few seconds, Billie would chirp and dart his head, following something on the other side of the hatch. 

    “There’s nothing there,” Thaddeus reached to pick Billie up but the cat darted away. The closet was silent and Thaddeus listened, wondering if he could hear whatever rodent was scurrying around on the roof. 

    The hatch stayed silent.  

    Thaddeus turned around and shut the door behind him. The bed was warm and, his eyes started to droop.

    Before sleep took him, he heard claws scratch at the closet door. 

    “Come on,” Thaddeus tried to shoo Billie away from the door from the bed but the cat wouldn’t budge. He grasped for the cat to get it to move. 

    Billie sprinted  away into the other room. Thaddeus followed him and shut the door, in his dresser was a doorstop that would foil the cat’s door slamming instincts.  

    As soon as his head hit the pillow he fell back asleep. 

    The morning alarm woke Thaddeus. He felt like he laid down only moments ago, but the bit of light streaking in from the window made it clear he had to get up. 

    He turned his phone’s alarm off and rubbed his face. 

    The closet door was open. Cracked a bit, it must have come open sometime during the night, or perhaps he hadn’t closed it properly. 

    A small pain bothered Thaddeus in his right forearm. He scratched it for a second, and wondered if Billie had perhaps cut him when he put the cat out of the room. 

    After pulling out the doorstop he went into the other room to feed the howling cat. 

    After mollifying his furry roommate, Thaddeus stepped into the shower.  

    The warm water washed over his scalp and he took a deep breath. He read somewhere that people took longer showers when they were lacking human contact. 

    Lena had always made fun of him for his long showers, but the warm water almost felt like her arms wrapping around the small of his back. 

    He stayed under the water for a few moments longer than he should. A sharp pain came from his right forearm when he pulled back the shower curtain. In the pit of his elbow was a small scratch that twinged in the cold air. 

    He scratched at it a few times and the irritant subsided. He flipped the sink on and running water started to pour inside the bowl. The bristles of the toothbrush ran over his teeth and he felt one wobble. 

    A bit of blood gushed into his mouth and he dropped the toothbrush. Leaning closer to the mirror, Thaddeus saw the offending tooth. It was a front canine, on the right side, stained red. 

    He knew his gums were bad, but wasn’t aware that they were one of his teeth might fall out bad. A call to his dentist was a part of his future. Hopefully distant future.  

    The itch in his forearm would not stop, so he examined it again. It was a round scratch, almost like a puncture right at the vein. Two summers ago, Thaddeus had gone to a plasma donation site in the hopes of making a bit of extra cash. The scars from the improperly placed needles had never really healed. 

    The mark on his arm was similar. 

    The ringing of Thaddeus’s alarm penetrated the door and he ran to stop it. He must have just reset the alarm instead of turning it off. After canceling the alarm, he saw the time. 

    “Shit,” he was going to be late this morning. 

    He tried not to think about the strange mark on his arm as he pulled on his shirt.  

    Thaddeus woke up with a mouth full of cotton. Somewhere deep in the back of his throat, he felt the tin aftertaste of blood. 

    He checked his phone, his alarm was set to go off within the next twenty minutes. No point in trying to go back to sleep, so he rolled out of bed. 

    The cream he applied to the cut on his arm had not helped, it made the cut even more red and angry. He heaped more cream on top of the wound not knowing what else to do.

    He turned on the faucet to brush his teeth, cycling the toothbrush under the water a few times until he could get some feeling in his mouth. He ran the brush over his left canine, both bottom incisors until the toothbrush scraped his gums. 

    There was a hole where his right canine should be. 

    He ran the toothbrush over the empty space, hoping his mouth was just still too numb. He bared his teeth and looked in the mirror. 

    “What the hell,” Thaddeus leaned closer to the mirror, feeling around the cavity in his mouth with his tongue. 

    The tooth was gone. 

    Back in his bedroom he pulled off all of the sheets scrambling to find the missing tooth. He searched in between the mattress, under the bed, and in the pillowcases, but could find no sign of the missing bone.  

    Billie meowed for his breakfast. 

    “Give me a second,” Thaddeus said as he threw away one of his pillows in frustration. Taking a deep breath, Thaddeus pulled out his phone hoping to figure out what to do next. 

    A few fruitless searches later his time was running out again. Feeling returned to his mouth, not pain but it was hard to keep his tongue out of the void where his tooth used to be. The fleshy opening that his tongue seemed almost drawn to run over.  

    He was halfway out of the apartment when he saw Billy stretch out on the floor. Thaddeus scratched the cat behind the ears and wished Lena was here to help him figure out what to do. 

    “Not till next Tuesday? That’s the earliest you can see me?” Barked Thaddeus into his phone. 

    “I’m sorry sir, but your situation doesn’t really qualify as an emergency, we can still replace the tooth with a crown next week.” 

    “Fine,” Thaddeus hung up the phone before the woman could respond. All day his mouth tasted like tin. 

    He turned into the parking lot of their apartment complex and tried to take a deep breath, but his breathing was ragged. The itch from his arm, and the strange feeling in his mouth seemed to blot out any other thought, and the lack of sleep from the last two nights made everything hazy and undefined. He had another two days to get through the rest of the week, and his third floor apartment loomed above him. 

    He took two deep breaths, pulled out his phone and dialed Lena’s number. 

    A few moments later he reached her voicemail, he knew she must be doing something important. The phone beeped prompting him to leave a message. 

    “Hi, it’s me. I just wanted to see how you were? It has been a few days, I know that you’ve been busy but it would just be nice to hear your voice., I just wanted to say I missed you, and I wish you were here, alot.” 

    Thadeus clicked the phone off. She would respond when she could. He stumbled up the stairs and into the apartment. The kitchen had nothing suitable to eat, and he couldn’t stand the thought of going back out. 

    He was tired, so tired from the late night after he dropped her off, the night Bille wouldn’t shut up about the closet, and being awake early that morning. Just a quick nap, and then he would fix his missing tooth and his empty fridge. 

    3

    Two small points of pressure bore into Thaddeus’s chest. The apartment was pitch dark and he wondered how long he had been asleep. Billie was standing over him, but wasn’t purring. 

    Thaddeus tried to push the cat off of him and check the time.

    He couldn’t move. 

    Every muscle in his body was like an extended rubber band. His eyes were the only thing he could shift. 

    Billie’s yellow orbs focused on the closet, his mouth making small chirps. 

    Hinges squeaked, and the hatch in the closet ceiling opened. Two long legs of a dark shadow slithered their way through the portal. Saliva beaded on Thaddeus’s lips, his eyes turned as far as they could to the dark closet to his right. 

    The figure inched its way down, until its outstretched legs touched the floor. 

    Billie chirped at the shape. 

    It’s not real, Thaddeus thought. In a second the figure would disappear and Thaddeus’s muscles would unclench. 

    The floor cracked as heavy footfalls shook the bed. Billie hissed and bared his teeth. 

    The figure walked by the bed down the hall to the bathroom. 

    The light in the bathroom turned on. 

    Someone was in the apartment with Thaddeus, someone real, and he still couldn’t move. 

    A low voice murmured from the bathroom. It just kept repeating, “blood, hair, and bone.” 

    The chanting ceased and the heavy treads of the intruder came close. A hunched shape of a man stood in the doorway, backlit by the bathroom light.  

    The thing walked to the side of the bed.   

    Billie hissed and clawed at it. The figure picked up the cat and tossed it into the closet. Billie tried to grasp the underside of the door with his claws but the shape reached into the dresser and pulled out the wedge Thaddeus used the other night.

    The cat yowled but could not slam the door. 

    Thaddeus couldn’t move his eyes anymore, they were fixed to the ceiling, frozen like every one of his limbs. A few tears were running down the side of his face, he couldn’t move his mouth to ask the intruder what it wanted. 

    The figure pulled off his comforter and he saw an old face lined with a million wrinkles and with only a few yellow teeth in its mouth. 

    “Up,” it whispered. 

    Thaddeus’s legs moved but he didn’t control where, he stepped off the bed and his skin burst into goosebumps. 

    The breath, and presence of whatever was behind him lingered on the back of his neck. 

    “Time,” rasped the voice behind him. 

    Thaddeus walked towards the bathroom. 

    If he could just open his mouth, he could scream or beg, or ask the creature what it wanted, but he couldn’t do anything but plod ahead.

    At the door Thaddeus turned to enter the fluorescent lit room. The smell of blood flooded into his nose, and he caught a glimpse of the sink which held a small pool of blood mixed with hair. Peaking above the puddle, was a jagged tooth with a red root. 

    On the edge of the sink sat the collection of sharp knives his parents had given him and Lena last Christmas. 

    He inhaled, hoping to harness a scream, but his jaw was clenched shut, and his tongue stuck to the bottom of his mouth. Breath whistled behind his teeth. 

    The invader stopped, but Thaddeus kept walking. He stepped over the lid of the tub and faced the faucet. The drain was right under his feet, and his head bowed beneath the showerhead. 

    The roller ball rings clicked as the curtain was pulled shut. Thaddeus’s eyes were locked ahead at the plastic paneling of the tub. 

    Outside of the tub, on the other side of the curtain, was the unmistakable sound of metal rubbing against metal. A few steel shrieks later he heard whatever was there muttering, “hair, bone, blood, hair bone blood…” over and over. 

    A warm spout of liquid slid down his right thigh and around his feet. 

    He tried to turn his eyes to see what was happening on the other side of the curtain but his muscles were so rigid they trembled. 

    The chanting ended. The apartment settled with a crack, and footfalls came towards the shower. The curtain shifted as the raspy breath returned to the back of Thaddeus’s neck. 

    The creature inhaled like it was about to take a deep plunge then gasped. A sound like tearing fabric or paper filled the bathroom. A warm fluid covered Thaddeus’s feet. 

    It was blood surging from behind him and running towards the drain. The waves of blood grew until they were lapping over his feet, over his ankle, to the base of his shin. 

    His mouth tasted like tin.  

    The blood rushed around the drain until something solid bumped into Thaddeus’s foot. The object bobbed in the pool and turned over. 

    It was an ear. 

    Thaddeus’s vomited, bile dripping down his chest. 

    Behind him, the tearing would not stop, and more and more pieces of matter accumulated around his feet. 

    With one last tear, the sound stopped and the blood drained. Flesh lay coiled on the floor,  much too large to spiral through the pipes. The being behind Thaddeus grunted, and stepped out of the tub. 

    Thaddeus’s feet moved, stepping out of the bundles of flesh. His legs spread themselves, and his arms stretched out, completely open, totally vulnerable. 

    Standing in front of him was the impression of a man. Nothing but right angles and slender lines. The angular first steps of an artists inspiration.

    Just like the nine faces he had sketched days ago.

    The human impression pulled out a black garbage bag and gathered up the different parts that were left in the tub. Each piece of flesh squelched when it was forced inside the bag. 

    The being hung the garbage bag on the towel rack and fixed its empty orbs on Thaddeus. The mouth barely moved as it rasped the word, “time.” 

    Thaddeus’s legs shifted and he turned until he was facing the wall of the bathroom. The different squares of tile mosaic connecting in front of his eyes. 

    A voice murmured behind him, “stretch.” 

    Thaddeus’s muscles tensed harder. With quiet popping sounds his muscles ripped away from the bones in his legs, his feet, and finally his back. 

    Remarkably, he was still standing upright. His muscles tensed until all that was left of him was a shell of flesh, nerves, and organs, detached from the bone.

    The cold steel of a knife brushed the small of his back. 

    Lena walked past passport control and picked up her bags. Thad was waiting for her on the other side of customs with a grin. She ran up to him, and he spun her around with a big hug. She kissed him, grasping the back of his head. 

    “I’ve missed you.” 

    Her hand strayed down to cup the small of his back. His skin was tough and hard like tree bark. She tried to pull up his shirt to explore the scar tissue beneath, but one of his hands brought hers higher up his back. While he embraced her in the airport, she wondered what else had changed about the man she loved.

  • Profane Beasts Launch

    Profane Beasts is out now!

    Thank you to everyone who attended the launch party on September 15th at Abi’s Books and Brews. Publishing my work was a huge leap of faith, and I could not have felt more supported than by the host of close friends that packed Abi’s on a Monday night. Thank you so much to Abi’s Books and Brews for being willing to host a launch for an unknown author and allowing me to use their space. Abi’s has quickly become a big piece of the Richmond community, and I could not have been happier with the kindness they’ve shown me during the launch.

    If you want a signed copy of Profane Beasts, drop by Abi’s for one! I have signed all the copies that are out on their front shelf, and please support Abi’s as they continue making their coffee shop a kind and safe place for all.

    Profane Beasts has also been featured this month on a curated list of indie books on bookshop.org! Just in time for spooky season, Profane Beasts is on Halloween Chills and Thrills on bookshop.org, where every purchase supports independent bookstores instead of acolytes of the seven eyed tree like this guy.

    If you want to see the list of incredible Indie Horror check out this link here for not just Profane Beasts, but also some of the other groundbreaking work horror authors are doing right now!

    https://bookshop.org/lists/halloween-chills-and-thrills?page=1

    And if you are just looking for Profane Beasts check it this link here!

    https://bookshop.org/p/books/profane-beasts/d1d62ef688f58a7e?ean=9798218704049&next=t&aid=2272&listref=halloween-chills-and-thrills&next=t

    Thank you so much for your support and care for this project! More updates on Profane Beasts will be coming soon, but like it’s said in the publishing business… the best way to market your book is to start writing the next one.

    N.L. Buchholz