Reginald Blisterkunst, Ph.D.
Among the Remembered Saints: My Life and Subsequent Death
Pluto Wars

Greg Chandler
"Bee's Tree"
"Local Folk"
"Roland's Feast"
"Pond Story "

Doug Childers
"The Baptism"

Gene Cox
The Sunset Lounge

Clarke Crutchfield
"The Break-In"
"The Canceled Party"
"The Imaginary Bullet"

Jason DeBoer
"The Execution of the Sun"

Deanna Francis Mason
"The Daguerreian Marvel"

Dennis Must
"Boys"
"Star-Crossed"

Charlie Onion
"Halloween"
"Love Among the Jellyfish"
Pluto Wars
"Feast of the Manfestation"

Chris Orlet
"Romantic Comedy"

Daniel Rosenblum
"A Full Donkey"

Deanna Frances Mason
"The Daguerreian Marvel"

Andrew L. Wilson
"Fat Cake and Double Talk"

Jackson Davis
"The Shovel"
"Depth of Field"
"Come Back"
"Using the Briar Blade"
"Ash Hand"
"Fishing from the Blue Canoe"
"A Virginia Private at Appomatox"
"My Mother's Death"

Christopher Voigt
"Chapel"
"Let Me Try"
"Sad Vespers"
"The Secular Child"

Editor's Note: This is a sequel to Reginald Blisterkunst's Among the Remembered Saints: My Life and Subsequent Death, which was originally serialized in WAG. Readers who prefer to begin at the beginning may read the first book by clicking here.

Part One

Look Dear: Here Comes the Afterbirth

There is a small disc in the sky, glowing like a sapphire and accented with blinking red lights, and for a moment, I merely stand and watch as it dips wafer-sized over the trees. Then the front door bursts open on the ramshackle house across the street and an old woman in a star-covered house dress appears on the porch. The disc hesitates and then dips back over the woman, who is, I can now see in the glow coming off the disc, clutching a shotgun.

A thin shaft of white light shoots from the bottom of the disc and surrounds the woman, who immediately, with an angry, guttural yawp, lifts the shotgun to her shoulder and fires. A tin-tinged ping leaps off the side of the disc and it flutters momentarily. The spotlight that had bathed the woman clicks off. The woman cracks the shotgun open, reloads and squeezes off another shot that goes wide.

Without fanfare, the disc wobbles to tree height and disappears over the horizon. Triumphant, the woman lifts her free fist to the clouds and with the other shakes the shotgun, threatening.

—Goddamn saucers, she shouts. Keep the hell off my property.

Turning back to the street, she spots me watching her.

—What the hell are you looking at?

I shake my head, shrug my shoulders, fumble with the keys. I thrust the gold one at the lock and drop the bunch.

—Well? shouts the old woman over my shoulder, expectant.

I bend down, clutch the keys and jam the gold one home. In a single, sweeping gesture, I turn the key, twist the knob, throw the door open and leap inside.

—She's doing it again, I say.

—Eh? says Woody.

He's sitting on the couch with the very pregnant Candy Tabitha, who even now, with the little womb-walled Woody growing and dropping lightwards, is not Mrs. Arbunkle, née Lewis. Together, they are watching a videotape on natural childbirth. Glancing screenwards and then away, quickly, I notice I have arrived at a particularly bad time, though there are probably never good times on such tapes. From the TV comes the sound of cellophane being pulled off a package of meat, or so it seems, and then a lot of backslapping and tears are shared all around. Candy Tabitha, I notice, rubs her swelling belly happily in anticipation.

—Eh? says Woody again.

—That old bat, I say, pointing doorward. She's shooting at that damn flying thing again.

—Oh, Arbunkle says. That. Look, dear, he says to Candy Tabitha. Here comes the afterbirth.

Ill-advisedly, I look at the TV and see what looks like a flat sheet of canned beets being pushed through a...well, never mind that. I hesitate for a moment, looking at various rather dull objects in the room, and then I gather my sense of purpose and climb the stairs to the guest room. Halfway up, from the little landing where the stairs take a right turn, I hear Candy Tabitha say in a stage-whisper:

—When's he going to find a place of his own, anyway?

To which Woody, lifelong friend, college roommate and best man at my now-failed marriage, says:

—I'll talk to the bastard about it.

I close the door behind me and sit down on my squeaky, borrowed bed. The window is open, and while I resist a momentary urge to weep mercilessly, a faint, spring-tinged wind tickles my neck.

Downstairs, I hear Woody and Candy Tabitha trilling like lovebirds, doubtless over some amusing aspect of the birthing process. For lack of something better to do, I lay out a shirt and a pair of jeans to wear the next morning and then, with the curtains open, I lie on the bed and watch the sky. Saucerless. Within minutes, I'm asleep and dreaming.

Cindy is calling me. The room is different, I notice, sitting up. I'm home again. I slip the pants on and I'm pulling the shirt over my head when she comes into the room.

—What are you doing here? she says.

I pull the shirt down over my torso.

—This is my home, I say.

From the hallway behind her comes the sound of someone clearing their throat and then our dear old departmental head appears—Chairman Mao, I used to call him—perched on a hovering saucer.

—I say, he says, smiling triumphant from within his high Nehru collar. Not any more, old man.

I shrug and start to leave. Then I notice Cindy is bulging with new life.

—I hope that's not mine, I say, as a parting jab.

—Didn't know you were capable, the Chairman says, escorting me down the stairs.

I won't go into the humilities involved in being frogmarched out of one's own house by a gloating apparition hovering just out of one's swinging reach. Glancing back at the bottom of the stairs, I notice the bastard's now wearing a turban and silky pajamas.

—I say, he calls down. How's the world from down there, eh? Getting you down yet, old man?

Somehow, while his hands are occupied with an elaborate, gold-plated hookah, Mao's saucer manages to dip for a moment and give me a solid nudge doorwards. With the little dignity I can muster up, I draw myself erect and step manfully outside.

I then find myself on Woody's porch, not twelve feet below my sleeping corpse. It is nighttime, and the saucer is again inspecting the woman across the street. As in a dream, I tell myself, the woman lifts the shotgun to her shoulder and fires. A tin-tinged ping leaps off the side of the disc and, as before, it flutters momentarily.

—Spotlight: click, I tell myself, just before it does.

In the sudden darkness, I hear the woman crack the shotgun open. Aside from a vague sense that the objects I see lack a certain, unseen heft, everything is identical. Despite myself, I stand on the porch and marvel at the dream motor. Then the woman squeezes off the shot that goes wide.

Disc: wobble wobble and gone. Triumphant, the woman lifts her free fist to the clouds and with the other shakes the shotgun, threatening.

—Goddamn saucers, she shouts, though it seems to lack threat this time around, as even the most vengeful, bloody operas must when viewed several times from the wings.

—Keep the hell off my property, I prompt, a bit too loudly.

Turning back to the street, she spots me.

—What the hell are you looking at?

The shotgun, which she is even now reloading, seems a bit more real, and I shrug my shoulders and fumble with the keys. I thrust the gold one at the lock and drop the bunch.

—Well? shouts the old woman over my shoulder, expectant.

I bend down, clutch the keys and jam the gold one home. In a single, sweeping gesture, I turn the key, twist the knob, throw the door open and leap inside.

—She's doing it again, I say.

—I say, old man, says Mao, still saucer-perched.

Cindy has joined him, and somehow, despite her newborn girth, she has managed to kneel beside the hookah and engage herself in something I would rather not describe. (I'm sorry; I know about the need to visualize such things, but really, if you expect me to finish this thing, see it through to the bitter end, you'll have to let me ration out my suffering. And here, with Cindy's head rising and falling like a damn—Christ. No. I've said too much already.)

As quickly as one can move in such dreams, I hurl myself back through the door and slam it shut, but not before hearing Cindy, her mouth full, growl:

—When's he going to find a place of his own, anyway?

To which the Chairman, sometime boss and now cuckold-making emir, says:

—I'll talk to the bastard about it.

The street has been replaced with a beach—an expanse of anemic, shell-lumped sand that looks dishearteningly close to the Greek island I had only a month ago abandoned. Across from what had been Woody's street stretches an endless span of blue water. The sun shines mercilessly overhead, blotting out the flying saucer that hovers over me so close I could touch it, it seems. Only after I hear the hum do I shade my eyes and look up and then, in a panic, I run down the beach heavily, like a panting horse, and dive into the water head-first—and stop stone-cement-still.

It's as if I had dove beneath the surface of another planet—Pluto, perhaps. Cracking through its ice and finding beneath it a green-fog-tinged underworld that seals the ice-hole quietly behind me. It is, I soon discover, squirming, a planet without our own Earth's basic components—warmth, air, beckoning life forms.

Emerging after a Tarzan-worthy wrestling match with the cold death god, I stare lifeless-like at the sky and wonder why none of it will go into me. Not even gasping but merely staring at the wide-spread, heavy-lidded sky. Then come the short puffs but only enough to show that I am indeed dying, alone on a pebbly beach far from home. Somehow, I manage to struggle beachwards, panting, and after an eternity I find myself no longer in an alien air. Breathing again and glad of it, though I no longer look at the sea laughing behind me but merely pace the beach, making a show of studying the shells and stones the sea offers up as proof of its ceaseless, grinding work.

Rather than turning to face the world beyond the sand and risk passing yet again from one dream-womb to the next like an eternal dream wanderer, I spend the rest of the night facing the sea, picking over its effluvia (and wondering: am I, also, effluvia among secondary events? the by-product of a dreaming demon's endless, grinding machinations?). Sifting through the shells, as I did, waking, one month before: throwing the flat ones into the sea and waiting for the sea to spit them back to me like pearl-hard afterbirths, all the while pacing and thinking: such is the life of the self-imposed exile. Such is the life of the self-imposed exile.

Control Tower, check. Unidentified object spotted. Appears to be a saucer, maybe ten feet across. No visible means of propulsion. Travelling at low rate of speed, altitude one hundred feet and falling. Eighty feet. Man, he's just over the trees. Now rising. Speed reaching—Jesus. Did you see that? No sign of him. What the hell's the military up to, anyway?

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10

About the Authors

The late Reginald Blisterkunst was a college professor whose areas of expertise were Milton and the Metaphysical Poets. Among the Remembered Saints, his first novel, was also serialized on the WAG Web site.

Charlie Onion is a frequent WAG contributor.