Image courtesy of Flickr user Dennis Church by way of a Creative Commons license. https://www.flickr.com/photos/dfc_pcola/
When I want to experience nature in the flesh NATURE’S flesh, that is, not mine – I don’t hike in the woods. I go to the golf course. Such was the case the other day when Scott, my golfing accomplice,… READ MORE
The doorbell rang.
He was still young, in his mid-20s now, and taller and heavier than I. She was about the same age, maybe a year or two younger, with wavy blond hair and a million-dollar smile.
I hadn’t seen him in a year. Or was it two? I couldn’t remember. I’d never met her, but I’d read about her in his letters.
They came inside. I offered a prayer to whatever impulse had gotten me out of bed at 8 that morning to clean the house – the laundry was done, the garbage emptied, the dishes washed, the windows cleaned … and that horror of a barbecue grill I hadn’t taken out of the box in four years – the box that was peeling like old paint – was put together and sitting on the patio as if it had always been like that.
Since this was their first visit to my townhouse, I gave them the cook’s tour. There’s the patio – yes, it looks out on the pool. Yes, I have a pair of binoculars. He liked my telephone. He recognized his sister’s writing desk in my office; I’d paid her $150 for it.
We went through my bedroom, and he spotted the tennis racket-clock he and the other kids on my tennis team had given me. What year was that? 1979? Eleven years ago, he observed with an amazed sigh. Where has the time gone? We’re all getting older.
We trooped downstairs and sat around the dining room table. He was drinking beer. He made a comment about her drinking beer and I poured her one, unaware that he was joking. It’s just as well; there was a dead bug in her mug. I drank a Diet Coke.
They’d driven from Illinois, gotten into town last Friday, gone to a wedding Saturday, and apparently shopped for an engagement ring Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. He said they were getting married, but he hadn’t gotten around to asking her yet. She poked him in the arm and smiled. He said he wanted new rims for his BMW but couldn’t afford them now because of her; she punched him in the arm and smiled sweetly. One more errant comment, I thought, and she’ll go for the throat.
He’s a second lieutenant in the Air Force. She manages a clothing store and does some modeling. They were concerned about debts, whether to buy a house or a condo, and if he’d get his master’s and go to work in the private sector.
I told him all this responsibility would be good for him. I told her she’d have to straighten him out. I wasn’t the first to warn her about that, she said apprehensively, and he was astonished anybody would think that he, as an Air Force officer, couldn’t handle responsibility.
He has lots of responsibility, but I couldn’t forget when he was a kid, and I taught him to drive a stick shift, or took him to the county fair, or helped him with that book report on Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle.” I remember his youth, when all he could do was look forward to getting married.
They couldn’t stay. They had a last-minute date with the beach, and then they were heading back to Illinois. I liked her sunglasses.
Eleven years. Had it really been 11 years?
This column was originally published in the Nov. 16, 1990 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone's stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra's Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone's comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled "December" for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman's Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone's novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild's award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida's best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn't look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
The doorbell rang. He was still young, in his mid-20s now, and taller and heavier than I. She was about the same age, maybe a year or two younger, with wavy blond hair and a million-dollar smile. I hadn’t seen… READ MORE
Image courtesy of pxfuel.
Lately, torch-wielding mobs have been gathering at my front door, demanding to know what I want for Christmas this year. These mobs are in luck, because after thinking about last year’s very sad Christmas, when I received mere thousands of… READ MORE
In this photo the author (left) greets a visitor to the Northwest Florida Daily News' booth at a local festival. As you can see, the author is overjoyed by the warm - make that cold - greeting the visitor had to offer, which probably resulted in even more gray hairs appearing in his head. Photo courtesy of the Northwest Florida Daily News
This morning I thought we would take an intimate look at eye crud, but a vastly more important issue has since arisen: Apparently I’ve reached that point in life when, in order to continue looking young, I must give Mother… READ MORE
Image courtesy of MGM/UA.
“Pumpkinhead” Starring Lance Henriksen, Jeff East, John D’Aquino and Florence Shauffler. Directed by Stan Winston. 86 minutes. Rated R. Amazon Prime. Del’s take They had me at the cicadas. If I remember the South for anything it will be sluggish… READ MORE
Del Stone Jr. / Chat GPT
I have amazing news for you homeowners who may not be up on your pest lore. This amazing information comes to us from the Allentown Morning Call, which is a newspaper with a strange name, almost as strange as Playground…. READ MORE
I want to relate to you diet-conscious consumers an important health tip about shopping in supermarkets. To put it bluntly, if you value your health, you will stop snooping in my cart to see what kind of food I buy…. READ MORE
Google AI.
Here is everything you need to know about the contemporary music scene: (Important note to readers who are about to stop reading and write me nasty letters calling me a tone-deaf burrowing parasite for ridiculing contemporary music: This is not… READ MORE
The women in the backshop are standing there putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and I want this madness to stop right now because they’ve almost got it finished and I could never get past unwrapping the box.
You’d have to be nuts to sit there for hours trying to fit little hacked-up pieces of cardboard to form a picture of Elvis, when you can go down to a roadside stand and BUY a perfectly good picture of Elvis on purple and black velvet, and it’s already put together.
Jigsaw puzzles are things mothers once used to get the kids out of their hair until television was invented. The problem was that kids couldn’t go more than a few seconds before puzzle-building gave way to hair-pulling, then the pieces would get scattered all over the house and you’d be finding them in the refrigerator or in the bedsheets for months afterwards.
What was worse, children had this terrible habit of asking their parents for help. The standard reply was, “No, dear. Mommy can’t help because that would spoil all the fun for you,” which really meant, “Mommy doesn’t want to put together some dumb jigsaw puzzle of Bambi and Thumper discussing the nature of reality, and why don’t you kids work on it for several years until I get a healthy layer of scar tissue over these ulcers?”
But then Mommy would be passing by and see a piece that fit into a hole, and pretty soon Mommy would be on the floor searching for more pieces that fit and occasionally shrieking “I FOUND ONE!” while the kids are off pulling each other’s hair or testing the cat’s reaction to having its tale inserted into the garbage disposal.
A big problem with jigsaw puzzles is that a piece is always missing. Space aliens from the galactic center of the universe could land in Washington, D.C., and deliver a solid gold jigsaw puzzle as a gift to all mankind, and piece would be missing.
Another thing you have to consider is the personality of a person who enjoys working jigsaw puzzles. Basically, these people sick. Why else would anyone spend a significant portion of his lifetime connecting pieces of cardboard to form pictures of things he would never allow to soil his walls, when he could be doing constructive things such as developing new uses for that stuff that collects in drains, or solving the mounting national deficit?
Which leads me to the mounting crisis of the national deficit. I have hit upon the solution to the deficit problem, which is to have Oliver North shred it into 20 or 30 jillion skillion pieces and mail envelopes of the pieces to all the taxpayers, then throw a national jigsaw puzzle party and invite the entire nation to put the deficit back together.
While everybody is doing this, the government can jack taxes through the roof and nobody will notice because they’ll be busy covering North America with the Mounting Crisis of National Deficit Puzzle, and by the time it’s put together nobody will be around to worry about the deficit.
This column was originally published in the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone's stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra's Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone's comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled "December" for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman's Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone's novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild's award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida's best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn't look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
The women in the backshop are standing there putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and I want this madness to stop right now because they’ve almost got it finished and I could never get past unwrapping the box. You’d have to… READ MORE
I recently had an opportunity to take a midwinter vacation, and because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money traveling somewhere, I decided to spend this week right here in Florida, the tourist capital of the United States,
So … what does one do when vacationing in Florida? He goes to the beach, naturally, and that’s what I did. But early February isn’t exactly a boom season for beach-lounging.
I picked up garbage.
At this point you must be thinking, “He’s finally done something to earn one of those jackets with no sleeves and permanent residency in a padded cell.” Picking up garbage might not constitute a vacation you write home about, but if nothing else, it was an education for me.
A few years ago I took another midwinter vacation, and I spent that week exploring nearby places I had never seen. One stretch of beach particularly impressed me with its unspoiled beauty. It must have looked that way for hundreds of years. Except for the garbage.
The garbage had been left there by boaters and explorers like myself who were less appreciative of the natural wonder about them. It made me angry, and this time I decided to do something about it.
I spent only four days picking up garbage. It rained three days and I took off a day because I hurt my back with all that bending over and lifting. But in those four days I hauled 30 bags of garbage from a stretch of land I’d estimate to be 200 yards in length.
In a way it was fun, because you wouldn’t believe some of the junk I found. Empty flare cartridges. Light bulbs – who takes light bulbs to the beach? Disposable diapers (yech!). Shot cups from shotgun shells. Broken toys. Shoes. Socks. Photos that apparently had fallen from somebody’s wallet. Somebody’s boat registration (It was sealed in a plastic bag, and the owner’s address was printed on the front, So I returned it to him. Water had gotten inside the bag, but I think he could dry it in the oven).
But 90 percent of the garbage consisted of bottles and plastic, and I am now convinced this state needs a bottle deposit law. You simply would not believe the number of bottles I found. Some had been broken in horrifying ways. It was commonplace to find huge, jagged pieces of glass protruding from the sand. If someone had stepped on the glass, he would have needed a trip to the hospital.
And the plastic! Bags and pieces of rope and plastic containers were scattered everywhere. They were ensnarled in tree roots; they littered the dunes and thatches of beach scrub.
Seeing this kind of thing can give you an unhealthy disrespect for your fellow man.
You read stories and you watch television programs about the environment and how mankind’s disregard for the world around him is laying nature to waste. You never see those stories about this area, though. Everything is supposed to be generally OK in these parts.
Well, if this is OK, I’d hate to see the really bad places. Because nothing must live there, not even people.
This column was originally published in the March 3, 1988 edition of the Northwest Florida Daily News and is used with permission.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone's stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra's Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone's comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled "December" for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman's Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone's novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild's award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida's best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn't look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
I recently had an opportunity to take a midwinter vacation, and because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money traveling somewhere, I decided to spend this week right here in Florida, the tourist capital of the United States,… READ MORE