The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories by Spencer William Browning

Author:Spencer, William Browning [Spencer, William Browning]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction.Horror, Fiction.Fantasy, Short Fiction, Collection.Single Author
ISBN: 9781565048713
Google: 2bkOAAAACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 613357
Publisher: Permanent Press, The
Published: 2014-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

MALCOLM

Ten miles south of Gainesville, I pulled the car to the side of the road, got out and vomited.

I am not a good traveler. I do not like driving for hours on end, stopping only to relieve oneself in restrooms defaced with various homosexual come-ons, and living marginally on expensive synthetic road food. I do not like having my life imperiled by amphetamine-deranged truck drivers or having to seek out some interstate gas station every hour in order to scrub the slime of a thousand smashed insects—whose guts could, no doubt, serve as the ultimate super glue—from my windshield.

These bugs were an industry. They were called love bugs because they mated on the highway, huge clouds of them. I bought this small blue and white can of stuff designed especially to dissolve their innards. The service stations also sold screens to put over your cars grill so that the bugs wouldn’t fly into your radiator and cause your car to overheat and blow up. Never underestimate nature. I bought one of the screens, too.

Having vomited, I leaned against my car and stared out at what appeared to be water buffalo and large, white birds. Dots swam before my eyes, dots which proved to be small, malevolent mosquitoes. I slapped at them and climbed back into the car.

This was all my mother’s fault. I had mentioned to her that I might drive to Florida, and she had responded with unwarranted negativity.

“You don’t want to go to Florida,” she said. When I was away at college, my mother had gone to Miami with my father, their first vacation in years. This was a year before their divorce. Relations were already strained.

“Florida is hell,” my mother said. In Florida, according to my mother, the air conditioning does not work, the showers have no hot water, hotel room service is nonexistent, the beaches are crowded and dangerous, the heat is unbearable. An odor of dead fish hangs over the state like an Old Testament curse.

I told her I did not plan on going to Miami, that my intention was to drive down the gulf coast to St. Petersburg.

“Texas has a gulf coast,” my mother argued. “It’s closer and cleaner and cheaper.”

The argument managed to escalate until I found myself saying, “I don’t want to discuss it. I’m going.”

And so I discovered that what had been idle, out-loud daydreaming became, thanks to my mother’s adamant opposition, action.

Sick and disgusted with myself, I wasn’t about to turn back. Besides, I was almost there. A few more hours and I’d be in St. Petersburg.

What then? Well, I’d had time to think about that on the way down. Granted, discovering the whereabouts of Eleanor Greer and Lou Willis had been a sort of exercise, a test of my investigative powers. Granted, also, that I was making this trip in childish defiance of my mother’s wishes. Still.... Perhaps there was a purpose. I am not a very religious man—I am, after all, a Unitarian, and even there my attendance is erratic—but perhaps I was meant to make this trip.

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