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An excerpt in celebration of International Bat Appreciation Day

  By admin • April 18, 2019 - 2:29 am

Hanging upside down on a wooden perch was an animal that Louise had never seen before. It looked like a silver fox with demon wings. Piper hastily opened the locked and reached into the cage.
“Be careful!” Louise warned. “You don’t know what that thing is!”
“I know exactly what it is,” the girl replied. The animal’s clawed feet embraced her hand tenderly as she wrested it from its prison. “The one I know is much older.”
Suddenly a door on the back wall smashed open. A man in his late fifties wearing a safari helmet and khaki clothes leaped into the arena. He was holding a shotgun in one hand and a whip in the other. Continue reading

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An excerpt to celebrate National Rhode Island Day

  By admin • October 5, 2018 - 4:59 am

Houdini smiled at his wife with undisguised adoration. He had just finished a three-day run at the Providence Opera House and was still a bit wired. Howard Lovecraft had attended the show as his guest and then joined him for dinner to discuss their book about the roots of superstition.
“Right you are, my love,” Houdini said as the waiter set a plate of shrimp in garlic wine sauce before him. “But I can already tell that it will never measure up to one of your sumptuous feasts.”
“Oh, posh,” Bess said as the waiter presented her with a sizzling sirloin steeped in a Cognac flamed peppercorn cream.
Howard, who loved his Italian food, got the tagliatelle with meat sauce. The waiter bowed to each of them and left.
Houdini narrowed his eyes. It wasn’t the same waiter who had brought their appetizers. Though he was wearing a white shirt, black vest, and apron like the other waiters, his scalp was covered with a skullcap that was knotted in the back.
Something about the man bothered him. Maybe it was simply the incongruence of a Japanese man working in an Italian restaurant. Continue reading

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Jim Zeigler and Aleister Crowley share the same pretext

  By admin • November 11, 2017 - 5:42 pm

Using the same logic that Jim Zeigler argued to defend Roy Moore’s alleged acts of pedophilia, Aleister Crowley justifies his intention to seduce the teen-aged Piper by saying. “I ask you, was the mother of the Christ-child any older?” Continue reading

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Piper celebrates Memorial Day

  By admin • May 28, 2017 - 1:31 pm

A steamboat sounded its horn as it departed the pier to collect passengers from New York City. Standing upon an outdoor stage beneath a giant seashell canopy, Sam Gumpertz was greeted by cheers, whistles, clapping hands, clapping feet, and even the clapping flippers of the Seal Woman.

Sam extended his hand to the three distinctive landmarks that ascended high into Coney Island’s unblemished blue sky: The Wonder Wheel, the Thunderbolt, and the hundred-foot bejeweled structure that towered above a new roller coaster called the Bobs.

“Welcome to another summer at Dreamland. Or at least what’s left of it,” Sam announced, bowing to the small crowd. Continue reading

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Black History Month: Zip the Unsung Hero

  By admin • February 1, 2016 - 5:45 am

Zip the What Is It, whose real name was William Henry Johnson, was a freak show performer famous for his tapered head. Dressing in a suit of hair and sheering most of his head to accentuate its unique shape, barkers would proclaim Zip as a creature from Africa who had lived with the apes. But he was actually born in Liberty Corner, a community located in Bernards Township, New Jersey, in 1842. He was one of six children born to former slaves. Continue reading

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Black Friday for Black Henry

  By admin • November 29, 2015 - 9:19 am
Black Henry

Many of today’s young pop-culture enthusiasts are only familiar with zombies of the modern, “toxic” variety—corpses restored to life as the result of a horrifying virus or radioactive contamination from an exploded space probe. The iconic zombie owes its heritage to a much earlier period, when Haitian slaves invented stories of such a purgatory to prevent them from committing suicide. Continue reading

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