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Love, Chocolate, and a Dog Named Al Capone Author: Abigail Drake Narrator: Alex Bonner Length: 11 hours and 27 minutes Publisher: Abigail Drake Released: Apr. 4, 2022 Genre: Romantic Comedy

Pride, prejudice, and a puppy! A romantic comedy from a Labrador's perspective.

Capone, the newly acquired puppy of Miss Josephine St. Clair, owner of Bartleby's Books, is a literature-loving Labrador. Obsessed with Jane Austen and cursed with a terrible name, Capone hopes to change his doggie karma and prove he's just as much a gentleman as the heroes in his favorite books by finding the perfect Mr. Darcy for the lonely and bookishly adorable Miss Josie.

Unfortunately, the only men Miss Josie seems to encounter aren't Darcys at all. They're Wickhams, Churchills, and Willoughbys. Even worse, there is trouble afoot. Someone has been sabotaging Miss Josie's business, and all signs point to her evil ex.

Can Capone find a way to save Bartleby's Books, help Miss Josie find her true love, and earn, at long last, a name befitting a true gentleman?

©2019 Wende Dikec (P)2022 Wende Dikec

Something was trying to get in 

last night; the windows slammed

gently like violent hands trying to keep 

me from waking up. 

Something got in my dreams all night 

disguising itself as characters I knew from 

television and telling me they were dead. 

It liked to wear make up over soggy skin, 

and spoke like a kid 

who saw what you did.

Something got in to me last night

after an old friend told me he was scared 

about prison for molly, for lucy, 

and I didn't know what to say 

so I prayed to the gods who would listen

            When Rune Zenith was born in 1979 he came out breach with the umbilical cord strangling him. He died for thirty one seconds before being revived. When he was revived he did not wail or cough. He simply opened his eerie violet eyes, looked around the room and then began to laugh, prompting his mother to say: “holy shit.”

            In 2005, he had made the jump from one artificial water fall set to another just before the pyrotechnics missed their mark and blasted him like a cannonball through the lead starlet, the Sarah Lancaster’s, dressing trailer and out into a partially constructed set filled with Robots and Mermaids. As he lay dying on the Indonesian set of his self-financed one hundred million dollar sci-fi romance epic, in which he had demanded no other jobs than financier and all of the male stunt duties, the last words coughed up in bursts of blood spraying laughter, before the cool breeze of death smeared over him, would be “holy shit.” 

            When Rune was four his family moved from their “ancestral” home of Columbia South Carolina to Tucson, Arizona so his mother and father could open and run their own Car Dealership. Four year old Rune wandered out of the house and into the cactus before his nanny finished watching Supermarket Sweep. He met a rattlesnake which bit him in the face when he leaned down to say hello. He died for nineteen seconds before being revived.

            Although Rune did not remember the incident in childhood he would have a very life changing moment at twenty three in an Amsterdam bar bathroom when after ingesting several hits of acid on top of wine, vicodin, what he thought was cocaine but was actually heroin, a white haired demon would torture him in the bathroom stall for several hours before a totem spirit came in the form of a rattlesnake with a German accent, that cast away the demon and opened up his mind so that he remembered not only the incident as a child but several of his past lives. When he exited the bathroom he walked straight over to a dusty piano in the corner and began to play. He thought he was tone deaf before he went in to that bathroom stall. 

            At nine, with the Car Dealership a failed boarded-up husk, the family moved to Tampa, Florida to use their house as a tax shelter giving them time to rebuild. One evening Rune walked out into the driveway during a thunderstorm and was literally blown out of his left shoe by a bolt of lightening. This time he was dead for two minutes and fifteen seconds before waking up soaking wet in the newly sodded grass. There was a cricket starring at him from his hand. His mother was asleep on the couch when he came in. He went in the bathroom. Stared in the mirror. Did the disassociation trick where he made his mind realize that was what the face of the voice in his head actually looked like, lost it, then wiped off the caked blood around his nose and ears, combed his jet black hair, threw his singed clothing in the trash, and never told anyone that this happened.

            On his Thirtieth birthday Rune watched the rain from his porch in New Orleans. His wife from several of his past lives would be strolling in red cowboy boots down the street when he for the first and only time in his life whistled at a girl. She let him make her diner and dry her short mop of brown hair with a towel, stopping to stare in massive green eyes. She smelled like the ocean. He knew he loved her but that she was just passing though in this life. After several weeks where neither of them wore much in terms of clothes Rune turned around and when he turned back his apartment was empty. Rune sat in his bath tub, picked up his boom box off the toilet with it still plugged into the wall and playing commercials in between classic rock. At just the moment that he dropped it towards the water, a bolt of lightning blew apart the transistor and the power went out. He swore that her face flashed in the surface of the bath with the crack of the bolt. He never told anyone this happened.

At fifteen he stole his father’s motorcycle for a joy ride and slid out into a ravine. He died for thirty eight seconds when his head hit the guardrail, was revived, and then went into a coma for three days. The doctors told his parents that he may never wake up and even if that were to occur he probably would have severe brain trauma which would keep him from ever leading a normal life. On the third day Rune woke up. There was no one in the room because his father was in his car crying and did not want to be seen, so Rune picked up the TV remote control and his father found him laughing at an episode of Married With Children which prompted his father to say, “You stole my motorcycle you, little asshole.”

            Rune thought about this for a second and then said, “so that did really happen?”

             By nineteen Rune’s father had latched on to the growing bottled water phenomenon and had made outlandish amounts of money starting a company out of Bradonton Florida called Diamond Springs. His mother had become a successful real estate agent when they all decided to take a trip to their real ancestral home of Germany. The plane crashed into the Atlantic off the coast of the massive dunes of Tybee Island Georgia. Rune was found floating face up in the waves. The crew of the Coast Guard cutter looked at each other, since most of the other bodies were now charred, water logged garbage flesh bags and this kid did not appear to have a single mark on him.

            A few weeks later Rune sat at a Train station in Minneapolis wearing a black Yves St Lauren suit, a Cartier watch, a pair of two thousand dollar Italian leather shoes, long wavy black hair, and the knowledge that he was now worth nearly a billion dollars  in liquid and controlled assets. He put down his copy of The I-Ching, and stared through the window out to the salt smeared train platform. The air was surging and it was about to snow, but there was still a butterfly prancing in the wind. 

All commercials are your friends now. They don’t want to convince you that there is an easier way to live your life that only their type of lawnmower can provide. They don’t want to show that their hairspray is superior to other hairsprays. No. Now commercials are your friends. Remember this when you are sitting in your shitty apartment or in your shitty double wide or your shitty wherever surrounded by beer cans, ignored bills, and your own anger. Remember that somewhere Walmart is creating an America that is full of giant families living in giant houses having giant feasts till the dog whimsically ruins it. Oh you stupid fucking dog, you’re a motherfucking scamp.

            Because the world is going great! Everywhere you look people are smiling and high-fiving and sucking each others dicks because you know why? Walmart is our friend and you know who else is? Chase bank. When you are strolling down the city you are not from, in the neighborhoods safe enough for your cracker ass in your bad gray pants tan jacket sport coat outfit that you subconsciously picked out because the television has been raising you, remember that at Chase they love you and are totally into how smiley you are. Because you have tons of money in this commercial, you have Chase Freedom, not regular freedom but Chase freedom which is superior because it entitles you to have a spouse or a dog or a car or whatever is in the commercial that you don’t actually have. Chase knows and they are here to remind you.

            There are so many friends it’s hard to name them all in fact it’s goddamn overwhelming my brain. My best friend McDonalds and me have been together so long they creep around the playgrounds of my nostalgia. Their jingle haunts my dreams and when I am break dancing or laughing with my multi cultural friends or having dinner with my extremely fit, healthy, attractive, relatable significant other we are doing it at McDonalds and everyone one there is applauding and doing cartwheels and are not in the least bit depressed by the human garbage that is the western society that washes up in their off white putrid glowing plastic booths.

            Friends, Friends, Friends across time and logic. My Coke Polar bears doing whatever the shit they are up to in a beautiful Arctic wonderland with Aurora Borealis going on over their idealic lives that mirror your shiny sentient bear like life. Or the Captial One Vikings who no longer are here to rape and pillage in the name of Thor but to go canoeing with you or accidentally break your grandmas china while you roll your eyes and laugh. Their rape feels so good you don’t even know that it’s happening.

            Ford Trucks and Verizon phones, Tostitos Fiestas and Jimmy Johns Delivery boys, Old Spice Surrealism and Nike Heros. They all are there to guide me in this glorious world. We have so many friends now that the kids don’t even go outside anymore. We have so many friends why would you go outside unless it was to seek them out and tell them your stories about how you see ghosts, your fears about the trees screaming at you in your dreams, your hopes that the forest will overtake the city, your secret sexual fetishes about raping a parking meter in front of a Dominos delivery driver. They are your shoulder to cry on and your priest to whisper to.

The smell of extinct chalks and farm stack hay

in the days when the king used to ride up to you

on his horse and have a conversation,

in those days,

they called the redheads firekissed.

They were charged up by the old gods

so their laugh was addiction

so their smiles were infliction

so their kisses were the glorious, sloppy things of fiction.

They were basically mermaids with legs

but also Glenda good witches

and then as I read from the I-Ching in the Chicago Public Library

I know that you are rare, rarest of rare,

“I dreamed your dreams” I whisper to myself,

 We have to smoke weed to have a good time.

We have to. We do.

We drift in between parked cars all the way up to the AMC.

Teenagers are swarming in plump jackets and fur linings, howling

And gnashing teeth like hyenas. My own age group zombies around,

I zombie around, the boomers stare down from apartment windows

at the terrifying zoo they let loose.

My brain crash landed in the ocean and now I float in the debris.

Towards the glittering marquee.

  Jill lights her dainty cigarettes over lips stick and howls smoke

Her boots click in stride with mine.

  She says, what kind of X-Men power do you want?

I tell her I don’t feel like it tonight and stare up over the neon glow,

Up into the pinked up sky at one star a billion years away

Let the wind eat at my face, let it into me

 let her do all the talking because

Some times its high some times its low.

  And right now, I’m low.

She says walk through walls?

Heal all wounds? Turn to ice? Sprout wings and soar?

  I say that I want to say the right thing at exactly the right time

Forever and ever.

  She says that ain’t in the X-men.

Yeah but maybe if we had all the words, more words, better words

We could turn it all beautiful and never sink.

  She says she wants to shoot laser beams out of her eyes. I tell her she

Already can. She holds the door for me and for a second I know that I’m happier

The house Boomer was rebuilding was two hundred years old. It was a compact two-story constructed out of termite-mutilated wood and peeling blue paint, a mile back from the road on a few acres of spindly gum trees.  When I crept my Honda up the gravel I saw tons of scaffolding, power tools, and ladders that looked like they’d been left in the rain for weeks.

            He’d become “Boomer” because in kindergarten the only words he ever said were, “no,” “yes,” and “boom.”  In the south there is no such thing as autism or Aspergers.

No, you are “touched” which, according to my third-grade teacher, means that, “An angel from Jesus” came down and presumably dipped its glowing E.T. finger into Boomer’s brain and turned him into an asshole who kicked over our Lincoln Logs while shouting “Boom.”           

However those of us who were in the same town and Little League and shopped at the same Wal-Mart  knew that Boomer was eerily smart and could trick any adult ever since he had learned to do it with his frantic drunk meth-head parents. He was in control of every situation, .

            By high school, that werido had turned into a beautiful brick house. He looked like Clark Kent, if Clark Kent had a Dirty South moustache/goatee combo, a Camo Dernhart hat, and spit dip on the carpet in the back of Ms. Lee’s 11th-grade English class.  I admit by then I only hated the guy out of jealousy and, occasionally, awe. Half the girls at Summit High School dreamt of sleeping with him, and the other half did, including Elyse Patko, the hottest, witchiest thing I’d seen in seventeen years of life. His jokes had evolved to become hilarious social sadism mixed with the unbridled rebellious sneer of the delightfully mentally ill. He was a revered mechanic down at the Citgo on Highway 64 and basically taught auto shop, and was the only self-made high school senior I had ever seen. I imagined that he would be the Lynrd Skynrd roadie lookalike to get a full ride at MIT since he was so amazing at AP Calculus and Chemistry the teachers didn’t even make eye contact with him. And fucking of course he played the guitar like he invented it.

            But he sucked at English, and I started letting him copy off me during vocab quizzes, and he started paying me wads of oily twenties to write papers for him. Before too long we used to get high and listen to Led Zeppelin at lunch in my Honda. I mocked his redneck uniform sponsored by Wrangler and Nascar. He accused me of dressing like a heroin vampire.

            Nobody other than me knew about the house. One night, as the summer of our senior year approached, he came roaring up high speed in his dented Chevy pickup and walked,  smiling, up to my porch. It was a particularly moonless night. There was a storm wind in the air, and our faces were only illuminated in flashes of orange from the embers of our cigarettes.

            “I done bought that house out yonder off Yates property.” He looked up into the black night sky as he spoke.

            “That’s cool, I guess, if you like living in haunted shacks.” I took a swig off a bottle of vanilla extract. (Since I was a teenage squatter in the South, it was the cheapest and easiest way to get hammered.)

            “Naw, man, I’m gonna fixer up good. She’s gonna be beautiful.” This was a different voice then I had ever heard out of Boomer. It wasn’t the southern deadpan of a savant; this had power at the edges. This was a voice charged up by love. We let the wind blow into us for a few minutes, listening to the leaves rubbing together in the gusts.

            That night, I had the most horrific nightmare of my life. It was a Calculus problem. It gnawed at my mind like a rat with razor teeth. I couldn’t follow it, but for some reason I had to, but as I began to figure it out, I was filled by the most disgusting dread;, still I worked and worked though it for an eternity, and then I came to the solution that there never was a solution and never would be. I woke up sweating and so shaken that my fear wouldn’t leave me until I stood staring at myself in the bathroom for a full fifteen minutes.

 When Boomer had been missing for weeks, all I said was that I didn’t really know him which, from a certain view point, was true; once he dropped out of school and started building that house, when you looked in his eyes it was like somebody’d turned off the light.

When I hadn’t seen him myself in a month, I figured I’d kept the secret for long enough.

I stared through the heat waves at the house; haphazard plastic curtains billowed from the windows like the molting feathers of a dead bird. I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing. The lawn was a forest of crabgrass and right there, right there in sweltering broad daylight, were two-foot pillars of black shadow wandering around and ducking behind trees.

            I made a break for the house. Inside, only the pink insulation was up on the walls; in the kitchen was a card table covered in electric sanders and nail guns, all with the cords wrapped neatly around them. They were covered in dust. Above me was a hideous scratching. I followed it up the stairs to the archaic birch door at the top. The only room with a ceiling.

 I told myself to stop being a pussy and kicked open the door.  Boomer was naked, sweating, emaciated, on all fours, and scribbling a gigantic chalk equation on the floor boards: a mass of wild digits and symbols that spread numerical tentacles up the wall. He didn’t even notice I was there.

            I talked at him for about half an hour. Finally he paused, kneeled, wiped the sweat from his eyes and said, “Just let him leave.” He looked through me to something in the corner as he said it. I wheeled to see a solid all-black mass leaning in the corner. It had a face. I have nightmares where it makes a noise like a short sharp dog bark.

I came to an hour later, after rear-ending a car a hundred miles away in Pathko County.

The sheriff told me I looked like the devil had touched me.