The Specter Thought To Be Vanquished

I am starting my own writing group on discord, fiction and poetry both the core focus. I have a certification for fiction writing fundamentals that I can prove by print, and I have an intermediate level of experience writing independently while also having two sizeable featured interviews on a podcast, Beyond The Zero.

My name is Elijah C. Moss. I am 28.

I have written one novella length composition, many short stories, and even one very strange short story about a zebra demigod. It is, I repeat, incredibly deranged literary fluff.

I am 70 pages (booklet one/four) completed compositionally with my debut novel-length project, and I can advise any aspiring writers on how to help collect sketches, ideas, notes, and any germs of threads concerning story, character, theming, plot, and structure, so as to guide the adventurous toward having a better control over the organizational portfolio necessary for longer-length fiction projects.

    By the time you read this, none of it will be true anymore. It will become increasingly clear that the boundaries have been breached longago. There is no need for ourselves to think lesser, once the publicity has done the release against what my convictions has left me behind, limbs lightweight and the subsequent sadness that ate my sentence into the lingering acrimony caught inside my cell-shaded letters: the line belongs to another who has been caught red-handed in the killing of someone who could of destroyed this precarious balance, although I do not suspect it had a thing to do with your own ruse.

        Tawdry, though tantalizing to touch in all respects, the testimony brings the divide between the powerful and the pauper into closer, if poorly shown in hindsight, view. 

The world I was left inside has us all scrambling for the front page, near shrieking at every second for the notice that another's feelings could shake the order wherein all our feelings are just that: the boundaries of the too late for it to affect anyone but ourselves, alone. This is the saddest song, reprised tonight at Graceland manor. 

Already the reception was underneath the forceful splash my invasion of my father's estate had done magnificently, surefire and galvanized, thereby magnetizing my brief stay.

    Another tangent, although there is enough space between this open window and the promenading mob, the vicious and expectant crowd watching me as the moment soars dangerously alive. “Tell it to the judge, you child killer!”, one of thousands hurls as stones are thrown against my only escape; poly-admiralty, it appears, has been hunting me down for sport until it brought them ravenous at my frontage, and there does not seem to be any sign of surrender from either end. I am fearfully unafraid of what fame has in cold storage for mine alone: plentiful, row after row, columnated, there is space enough for open shelves.

        Worship this naked exposure, I rally the strength for my audience gathering at my shadowed footfall’s outline. Enjoy it to the last drop, the adjudicator's last tears spread across the perfume of innocent limbs, seeking solitude in the clamour of many. “Monster!”, they all cry outside my range, ringing false praise with a dejected halo’s garrison, smaller although taller when I emerge within hearing, all voices are circles faded to my ear whereas I was only beginning my fated death’s penultimate harmony.

    I pull myself out from the opaque shadow work of my balcony. A helicopter is slicing the air thinner than my appearance into the fray would benefit. After supplying myself amply with hollow-point shells, I take to the front stage. A reflexive twist, feed the fireworks! A scattering of my frenetic rage roams a distant shot into the darkened side of the gathering mob. “She did it again!” Of course. I am always susceptible to playing favorites.

    “Child killer!” they howl in bleeding unison. I grin, amorously expectant for the finale. 

*

    The reply was drawn out in rapid succession. The gunfire, blown out proportions, viscera, gory and the return did not look favourably toward my living image’s restoration.

    I look upward from the crowd, inching forward and nearer, bloodthirsty at the belligerent, quicksilver sky, both beaming at one another, wrathfully. The moon was shrouded in the neon-polyglot explosion. All of this commotion, I wondered, dazed. All because of me… It must be destiny, to die under the onrush of glorious limelight, persecution, kinetic tendrils of a lifetime sprinting now to devour my bleeding legacy…

My name is Meredith Presley. From a distance, if you squint hard enough, you could almost see the resemblance as the blood gouts that pour from my face and my convulsive poise, akimbo, concentrated almost look the splitting image of our family’s namesake, The King, himself a tornado of rhinestone and graceful hamstrung movement. I wish you were here to see me rise from nobody, father… Humiliating, from a speck in the beautiful glass, now shattering your legacy as a tempest seeming to outlast… This is the saddest song you ever heard in your life… I've never seen a night so long… And time goes crawling by…The moon just went behind the clouds….To hide its face and cry… I’m so lonesome I could just… Die.

*

Yesterday has already made my death cemented in cinder, and the faded tragedians arrive at the scene whereas my remains have long been carried away, splayed across a stainless tray and bled out under antiseptic arrays of light and gloved utensils. Doubtful if their own fingers would penetrate my fall from grace with adequate results, doctors and news reporters scramble to uncover some penalty, however paltry, to wherein my death and the death of my followers, comeuppance crept whereupon was my ecstatic hand did my own fingers play so nimble across the stage: 13 dead, including the shooter herself, including three children; 22 mortally injured, field forensics and more expected incoming once the investigators have taken fuller measures to determine the damages caused by last night’s horrible public massacre… The Presley Estate declines further comment, despite the scandal occurring at their beloved Graceland mansion home… Nationwide, and here back at home in Tennessee, we are at a loss of words and extend our sympathy to the travesty that has benighted our fondest homegrown memories of The King, Elvis Presley… 

Unbecoming, saccharine enough to sift the truth from the pan where everyone eats indiscriminately at the remains: already my name has meant nothing but the shit that cannot be caught within the immortal rigamarole. And I am so lonely…. This is the saddest song–...

Describe my position? I dare the truth to dig into my body. The marrow has a broth that demands the charity of the eager, the fanatical, the grooves of lampooning the needless and the fatal all within one kitsch-rimmed shimmery frame. This is the saddest… I am so lonely… What could you do, Father? Entertainment has us in the garrote of legacy.

*

Emilee is loud, so there is a struggle for me and Issak to share in what has been uncovered beneath the lawn's acreage.

 The acreage is an ugly sort of brown only what I could have felt was my favorite sort of ugly brown color that tinfoil gets when Issak has finished busywork around the family property, one that has flames lick the crinkly sheet until it has made Issak stop feeling about each day of labor. Issak binds me to the tree because what was discovered under the leaves was unrelated to this odd habit I see Issak go and do every time the sunlight drops from the horizon overhead, and then me and Issak are struggling for the indoor sunlight to keep us bright and early tomorrow. Emilee is so loud, she does not stop with the loudmouth moans and cries. It is no longer loud when we all share a crawlspace for us three as young kids who live and work on the land that our family has owned since we were decided to be the least valuable to live among the grown-ups, who likewise saw it good for us to live and sleep on the ground floor. In the crawlspace.

 There was four children, Issak once told me during one of our nights where the tinfoil would shoot through a straw, and all the feelings Issak would later swear were useless would dissolve out of his eyes. His eyes would close. He did not look ugly as the color that the leaves not too different from that favorite sort of brown I see on the tinfoil sheet on a regular basis. Issak was a know-it-all. Emilee was loud. Too loud for all the nights, us numbering a shared three in our ground floor living space.

 There was four children who lived above our heads, Issak sez, the fire in his voice the same fire the sunlight escapes with every single damn day. Emilee is louder than the light inside our space. Under the leaves, there is a discovery unrelated to my knowledge of my beloved Issak that has risen someone outside of our routinely uniform work model. Issak has not had time to inhale the properties of the common findings to separate the right way to talk about what me and Issak saw under the leaves after we are done raking this afternoon.

 Issak binds me with a wire that hurts but it feels correct that Issak does this because what if what I see hurts the family property? The dark of late autumn goes loud with Emilee. Not her voice. She is quieter than a cricket when it does not sing. Emilee is loud in her looks and actions. Emilee is louder than before. There is a problem with me seeing the same plain-as-day thing that Issak sees during this time of the day. It could be the year. Issak does not have time to explain, it looks to me. I focus not on Issak seethin' with the motion of his hands around my neck and my paunch, but on the happier feeling I see on the special sort of ugly brown color that is the leaves where outside the offensive thing for me to see so easy, I can think of the times when that color represents a favorite pastime that kept us carrying the sunlight busy until it was small enough to leave our ground floor crawlspace.

 The voice that Issak uses is the same feeling as the sand feels when that sunlight no longer is within our hands. It, Issak once told me in a calm breeze of phosphorescent smoke that fell from his eyes and nose, and did not even stay on the tip of his thin olive-skinned lip. There was no bottom or up when it was Issak speaking during the sunlight curfew. It was all one loud feeling that gave, Issak went on during the usual nights, for the four children unseen to keep the sunlight safe from us children who do labor and do not have any purpose other than to be loud, like Emilee I often felt was a point of common disturbance among our own space. Issak never mentioned Emilee except to create another loudness that often made her loudness a stillness of mouth.

 It was a usual part of our routine, and what arrived to me as Issak was no longer his normal self. I could not have a favorite sort of ugly brown, it felt bended and my arms were pent higher than my legs could ever stand upright alone against that nearby tree. Issak did not even speak. Issak, I felt without speaking, knew I had ugly touch when I started thinkin' about anything except using my hands, and following him without interruptin' the same order for the sunlight to keep bouncy enough. It would bounce so much when we did not look at it during midday that when we was done, it would bounce off the horizon and into the care of the children who lived, unseen, above us. Then we danced in the ground floor, loud and ugly until Issak spoke at once from the tinfoil when it spoke from the ugly brown sheet shriveled up like a turd when one of us went to use the corner inside our space.

 Turds turn greyer than any sky I ever saw except now it is not just grey but there feels like there is no tomorrow because Issak is teaching me what ugly means when Emilee is no longer loud in our space: She bounces up from the leaves. She is now with the sunlight and the four children who know how ugly we all must look from the cozy dark of the porch. 

The sign above our ground floor space is loud but not as loud as Emilee when she bounces up into the sunlight.

 There is no more speakin' for me and Issak. Issak no longer is kind. Issak is louder than everything I have ever heard or seen. It is because I saw the same ugly when I had a chance at Emilee being quiet. I didn't leave her indoors. She belongs with the loudness below the sign.

 The sign does not show anything but lines and an orangish haze that is also ugly, but ugly like the speakin' Issak did when my favorite color showed up on the tinfoil sheet.

 Ugly did not need to be shared. It was felt. Alone. Issak kept the loudness until I was bouncy enough to stop having weight useless to the one who kept the four above safe, and unseen.

 Now I am unseen but I feel loud enough to quit yelling.

I was interviewed on Beyond The Zero again, this time lined up doing a brief book recommendations panel with published author Benjamin Black.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4jCbwnpvM2mrhSUdqBaUMo?si=yJZwHuv_S5Wy2d6e95lB3A

I have finished book one (out of four) in the volume that is to be my debut novel compositional work, making it 70 pages drafted and structured for readable sequencing. It is strange. It is available in pdf format, those 70 pages.

Wrote a lot of short fiction. Will continue to do so.