Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies by John Langan

Author:John Langan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror collection, short stories
Publisher: Word Horde
Published: 2022-06-19T18:00:12+00:00

Carson emptied what remained in his glass. He did not refill it.

The next morning, I hiked out of the Lost River Range. I brought with me fifty-four poems, which I began submitting to literary journals as soon as I was settled in a room in a boarding house in Boise. The first was accepted for publication late the following winter. Days, I worked a succession of odd jobs. I started to take classes in combatives. That was how I met Willa, at my martial arts school. She’d received one too many advances from pushy guys who thought they should be the ones to date Boise’s hottest meteorologist. She and I got together. I was promoted to assistant manager at my job, then manager. And while all of this was happening, the pages on the calendar peeling away, I wrote, what had started in the cabin in the mountains continuing to the room in the boarding house, then a small apartment, then Willa’s condo once we shacked up, and finally to the house we bought in Hayley after she accepted the job there. I published a chapbook with a micropress. Robert Haas said some complimentary things about it. The University of Virginia published my first full length collection of poems.

I know you know all of this. What you don’t know is that the creature, the fiery monster, pursued me. It took years for it to track me to my apartment. At first, I didn’t know it had found me. I looked out the living room window one night and saw flames on the roof of a building down the street, and assumed it was a normal fire. Only when the flames gathered into a sphere, which hung over the roof before bursting apart like a firework, did I understand that I had been located. The same night, I carried my meager belongings to my car and drove to a motel on the south side of the city. I stayed there for a couple of days while I considered my options. Willa had been asking me to move in with her, and she owned a nice condo in a suburb about a half-hour outside of Boise. I could chance taking her up on her offer, or I could get onto the interstate and let it take me where it would. The second option, I understood, was the prudent, the responsible one. But I loved Willa, loved the life I thought we could have together. I called her, told her I’d decided she was right, it was time for us to take the next step in our relationship.

Well. You see how right I was about that. Funny thing is, the beast didn’t catch up with me again until the very end, after Willa had decided it was time for her to move onto bigger and better things, a move that did not require the encumbrance of me. Our marriage had been the axis holding the rest of my life in orbit. When it was over, everything went spiraling off in its own direction.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.