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****Sam Richard’s TO WALLOW IN
ASH AND OTHER SORROWS is #114 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from
a fiction genre and how that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt. All INSIDE
THE EMOTION OF FICTION links are at the end of this piece.
Name of
fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to
share with us? To Wallow in Ash and Other Sorrows. I played
with a few others on the same tone. To
Wallow in Ash and Other Grief, To
Wallow in Ash and Other Sorrow, To
Wallow in Ash and other Anguish. Sorrows feels the best rolling off my
tongue.
Has this
been published? And it is totally fine if the answer is no. If yes, what
publisher and what publication date? October 11th,
2019, by NihilismRevised
What is the
date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely
finished the piece of fiction? Most of
these stories were written over the last twenty months, but two are a few years
old.
Where did
you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in
detail. And can you please include a
photo? I alternate between sitting on my
couch and sitting at my desk. It’s probably around a 50/50 split and largely
depends on my mood.
I recently moved my desk out of my
back bedroom office and into the ‘dining room’ in my house (which I never use
as a dining room) so that it will be more present in my day-to-day life and
will encourage me to use it more.
What were
your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you
wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific
time of day? Most of the
time I write on my laptop. Typically, my little ritual is to grab a beer and a
bourbon, put on one of the Cryo Chamber mixes on Youtube, and let my brain pour
through my fingertips. Occasionally I’ll swap out the ambient sounds for black
metal and I don’t always have a drink or four. I tend to write in the evening
and, if I can, I tend to go late into the night. But I work early Monday
through Friday, so late nights are typically reserved for the weekend.
I’ll write on my lunch break at
work, too, sometimes, though lately I’ve been using that time for other tasks
associated with the publishing side of things for my small press Weirdpunk Books (https://www.facebook.com/weirdpunkbooks) and out upcoming David Cronenberg tribute anthology, The New
Flesh.
What is the
summary of this specific fiction work? Aside from
the two older stories that I’m including, everything else in this collection
has been written in the wake of my late wife’s death. These were all difficult
to write and several of them are the most painful pieces of art I’ve ever
created. A few are exorcisms of elements of grief and others are explorations
of me trying to figure out how to keep living. The stories vary, but all have
strong elements of loss, grief, sorrow, and/or the annihilation of the self.
Can you give
the reader just enough information for them to understand what is going on in
the excerpt? This is
from the titular story from the collection. To Wallow in Ash. It was initially
published in NihilismRevised’s Strange Behaviors anthology
The narrator’s wife has died recently, tragically. This is about
mid-way through this story. Everything up to here has been about the nature of
loss and grief; about the smoldering crater his life has become in the wake of
her death and him trying to confront his new reality.
Please
include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one
excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
Mona’s friend Chris asked for a
little bit of her ashes, before I returned her to nature. He talked about
getting them tattooed into him. I hadn’t thought of that before, but I
immediately purchased a small cache of mini-urns, to give a few close friends
and her family a little bit of her to keep, or spread wherever they wanted.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the
tattoo idea. Four days after she died, I got a tattoo of a Satyr and a Dryad
dancing on my leg. It was the image that had been on our wedding invitation, an
old illustration from the 1920s. We always talked about having that as our
couples tattoo. We joked that it was us: her, ever the ethereal and earthen and
me, often seeking the sensual and excessive. Initially we wanted a gentleman
devil dancing with some sort of sprite or nymph, but that image eluded us. The moment
we saw this one, we knew it was perfect.
They never tell you that ashes in an
urn are also in a plastic bag. They really never tell you that getting them out
of the bag but having them remain in the vessel is a pretty tedious and messy
process. Her ash got on the table and all over me. She was fine but gritty and
almost had no smell beyond that clean, burnt scent. This was the first time I
had tasted my lover since she passed.
I supplied the
small group of friends and family with their vials of Mona, for them to do with
her what they wanted. I took a small amount and had it added to the ink upon my
next tattoo session. I thought that, Amy, one of Mona’s former coworkers, would
be slightly resistant to the idea, but they took it in stride and didn’t really
even comment on it. The ladies at the shop were all going through their own
dark nights, and I think they understood this grief in a way that few others
could. Mona was their sister. They all said that none of them were each other’s
favorite, that they loved each other equally, aside from Mona, who was all of
their most favorite. It felt good to bond in pain with them, and to be bonded
in blood and cinder to Mona. It felt like I was making it impossible for her to
slip away.
Haunted by the
knowledge that her being a part of me would force the memories to stay, like a
donated organ receiver taking on behaviors and mannerisms of the donor, I
desired more of her to unify with me. So I tasted her again, this time on
purpose. I licked my finger, dipped it into the ash, and pulled it out. A light
grey coating stuck to my skin, clouds of it dusting off as I moved my hand.
Lifting it to my mouth, I said a mental prayer to her, asking her to stay with
me, to not leave.
The ash was salty
from the urn, but also bitter and burnt tasting. It coated my mouth and left me
coughing, gasping for a drink. Pouring myself bourbon, I washed it down and let
the alcohol numb my parched tongue. I felt awful. How had I landed at this
place? Trying to consume a bit of my deceased wife’s ashes in the name of
keeping her memory close to me, what the fuck had happened? I spent weeks
hating myself, wondering how she would have felt about it. But the honest
answer was that she would have thought it was sweet. I know this for a fact.
After we first
started dating, just over five years ago, she read a true story about a couple
who decided that instead of exchanging rings, they would bite the tip of each
other’s ring finger off, at the small knuckle between the bones. She told me
about it, not knowing that I too had heard the story and had been fascinated by
it for years. Apparently, they soaked their fingers in ice for a half-hour and
then bit on the count of three. He bit cleanly, but she tore a little of his
skin off. Due to this, while the baffled doctors were able to stitch her finger
up neatly, he had a little bit of bone that was showing, forever.
When Mona told me
this, I told her how sweet I thought it was, but that the one thing they got
wrong was spitting the fingers out. It would have been more romantic, to me at
least, had they swallowed the bits of finger, as a sort of blasphemous
communion. This is my body, broken for you. For you, and you alone. Instead of
looking at me like I was crazy, she agreed on the romantic nature of the
situation. She thought I would be weirded out by it. I thought she would be
weirded out by my reaction. We were both wrong.
After the initial
waves of guilt and shame subsided, I kept coming back to this story, to her
urn, to her ashes. It was sitting on a shelf in my dining room, awaiting the
day that I would finally decide to illegally bury it in the bank of the
Mississippi River at low tide. I wanted her to be able to make it down to New
Orleans, a city that lived in her heart, and then out to the ocean to be one
with the whole world. What if I kept a little more of her? Would that be ok?
Not just one vial, maybe I’d buy two or three, just to have her around. And I
kept waiting. Maybe I didn’t need to bury her at all. Maybe she could stay with
me forever. But that made me feel worse. She wanted to return to nature, not be
cooped up in our house forever. How much was enough to give to the earth?”
Why is this
excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe
your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? I wrote this story 16 days after my wife died. It was written in
one horrible sitting while still suffocated by shock and total, black despair.
This story was everything going on inside my mind as I tried to reconcile the
reality of my wife’s death with my interior life. It just came gushing out of
me and gets incredibly dark as it goes.
Were there
any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please
include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. I edit as I write, so I don’t keep previous versions around. I
think of it as building up rather than reconstructing something over and over
again. I’m sure there were many deletions, I just am not sure what they were. I
tend to have the rough story-beats laid out in my head and that allows me some
flexibility to improvise and meander as I go.
Other works
you have published? I have
edited and co-edited several anthologies through my press Weirdpunk Books, the
most recent being Zombie Punks Fuck Off (co-released with Clash Books). I am also
currently co-editing another called The New Flesh: A Literary Tribute To David
Cronenberg which will be out later this fall. I’ve got pieces in
Strange Stories of the Sea, Breaking Bizarro, Dark Moon Digest, Clash Magazine,
and a few other places.
Also a few friends and I got
together and each wrote our own 80s Mall-Horror stories. The result is a 3
story anthology called LAZERMALL which will be out very
soon through Filthy Loot. Additionally, I am currently working on placing a
small-creature horror novella.
Sam
Richard is the owner of Weirdpunk Books. He is the co-editor of The
New Flesh: A Literary Tribute to David Cronenberg, editor of Zombie
Punks Fuck Off, and co-editor of Hybrid Moments: A Literary Tribute to the
Misfits. His writing has appeared in such varied publications as
Strange Stories of the Sea, Breaking Bizarro, Strange Behaviors, Dark Moon
Digest, and many others. Recently a widower, his primary focus is on writing
weird horror with an emphasis on grief. He slowly rots in Minneapolis, MN with
his dog Nero.
IG: @SammyTotep
Twitter: @SammyTotep / @WeirdpunkBooks
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