Prayers to Broken Stones Read Online Free

room, carried out the scattered body parts, hosed down the walls, spread sawdust on the carpet, and generally made ready for the next sacrifice.
    As it turned out, I was the next sacrifice.
    “Who is this
Simmons?
” bellowed Ellison. “Stand up, wave your hand,
show
yourself, goddammit. What egomaniacal monstrosity has the fucking
gall,
the unmitigated
hubris
to inflict a story of
five thousand fucking words
on this workshop?
Show yourself, Simmons!
”
    In one of the braver (read ‘insane’) moments of my life, I waggled my fingers. Stood.
    Ellison stared at me over the top of his glasses. “At this length, it had better be
good,
Simmons … no, it had better be fucking
brilliant,
or you will not leave this room alive.
Comprende? Capish?
”
    I left the room alive. In fact, I left it more alive than I had been in some years. It was not merely that Ellison had liked it. He … he and Ed Bryant and several of the other writers there … had found every flaw in the story, had revealed every false note and fake wall, had honed in on the places where I’d tapdanced fast rather than do the necessary work, had pulled the curtain off every crippled sentence and humbug phrase.
But they had taken the story seriously.
    Harlan Ellison did more than that. He told me what I had known for years but had lost the nerve to believe—he told me that I had no choice but to continue writing, whether anything was ever published or not. He told me that few heard the music but those who did had no choice but to follow the piper. He told me that if I didn’t get backto the typewriter and keep working that he would fly to Colorado and rip my fucking nose off.
    I went back to the typewriter. Ed Bryant was generous enough to allow me to become the first unpublished writer to attend the Milford Writers’ Conference … where I learned to play pool with the big boys.
    That autumn, I submitted the revised “The River Styx Runs Upstream” to
Twilight Zone Magazine
for their first annual contest for unpublished writers. According to the folks at
TZ
, more than nine thousand stories came in over the transom and had to be read and judged. “The River Styx …” tied for first place with a story by W.G. Norris.
    Thus, my first published story reached the stands on February 15, 1982. It happened to be the same day that our daughter, Jane, was born.
    It was some time before anyone, even I, really noticed that I’d been published. Analogies are fine and the similarities between being published and pregnancy are clever enough, but when it comes to being born—babies are the real thing.
    And so, submitted for your approval (as a certain gentleman once said)—a story about love, and loss, and about the sad necessity sometimes to surrender what thou lov’st well …

The River Styx
Runs Upstream

    What thou lovest well remains

   
the rest is dross
    What thou lov’st well shall not be reft

   
from thee
    What thou lov’st well is thy

   
true heritage …
    —Ezra Pound
Canto LXXXI
    I loved my mother very much. After her funeral, after the coffin was lowered, the family went home and waited for her return.
    I was only eight at the time. Of the required ceremony I remember little. I recall that the collar of the previous year’s shirt was far too tight and that the unaccustomed tie was like a noose around my neck. I remember that the June day was too beautiful for such a solemn gathering. I remember Uncle Will’s heavy drinking that morning and the bottle of Jack Daniels he pulled out as we drove home from the funeral. I remember my father’s face.
    The afternoon was too long. I had no role to play inthe family’s gathering that day, and the adults ignored me. I found myself wandering from room to room with a warm glass of Kool-Aid, until finally I escaped to the backyard. Even that familiar landscape of play and seclusion was ruined by the glimpse of pale, fat faces staring out from the neighbor’s windows. They were