“The Doom Song” :: Susan Rooke

Archive for “The Doom Song”

Of Pumpkins and “Jack-o’-Bone”

October 25, 2018

Posted by Susan Rooke

First of all, a big thank you to everyone who told me how much they enjoyed last week’s 500-word flash fiction, “One Evening at Happy Hour.” Gracias, folks! It was wonderful to hear that and I appreciate my readers so much! (If you haven’t read it yet, find it here.)

Now, unfathomable as it is, we find ourselves almost at the end of October. 2018 has one palsied foot in the grave. And as we careen crazily toward 2019 as if we’re riding the Runaway Mine Train at Six Flags, I ask myself (again) how the year got away from me so quickly. I’m pretty sure I was here and awake for more than two thirds of it, so how did I miss it all?

I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more this time of year provokes such thoughts in me. Also, October is my birth month, so it feels as if I get a double dose of gloom. (I’m kind of over the excitement of being another year older.) However, even though these late October days bring failing light and dying leaves to remind us of the impermanence of all things, I do love them. Cooler weather, open windows, flocks of ducks and sandhill cranes crossing the evening sky, the sweet-sharp scent of woodsmoke hanging in the air . . . After the stifling misery of a Central Texas summer, late October is a gift I look forward to opening.

Oh, who am I kidding? I love October because of Halloween! The time of year when it’s socially acceptable, even encouraged, to wallow in our mortality and embrace the monstrous! To slink disguised through the darkness, to listen for that anomalous *bump* in the house at night, to carve large orange squash into frightful or fanciful patterns and then set a live flame flickering inside them! Thank heavens for Halloween! Because it distracts me from the fact that Christmas is only two months away. And that after that, 2019 will be here and then it’ll be Christmas again and then 2020 will be here and then . . . You see where I’m going with this. I might as well start singing “The Doom Song” now.

But not just yet. Because first, there are jack-o’-lanterns. And we need to enjoy them while we can because they won’t last long.

These beauties are from The Son-in-Law and The Daughter. Wesley’s is the one on top. Both so fun that I wanted to share them with you. And to point out that neither design was produced by a stencil. (Wesley is clearly putting his engineering degree to impressive use.)

And here are my two designs. I sprained my back last week, so I’m going with the bottom one. It’ll be way easier to execute. Glen is insisting that he’ll clean out the pumpkin’s guts for me, and, much as that feels like cheating, I might just let him.

And finally, here’s a little something I wrote a couple of years ago that appeared in the Best Austin Poetry 2015-2016 anthology. It took home the Trick or Treat Award (a contest sponsored by poet, writer and Halloween birthday girl Carie Juettner) in the 2016 Austin Poetry Society Annual Awards. Because, just as I love the physical trappings of Halloween—the jack-o’-lanterns, the mounds of warty squashes, the witchy yard décor, the horror movies on TV—so do I enjoy reading (and writing) stories and poems that send a thrill up my spine.

Jack-o’-Bone

Pluck me from my bed of vines.
Cut me. Gut me hollow
as an empty boot. My flesh,
gouged. My seed, discarded.
Carve me lidless eyes incapable
of closing, that I might never
look away. My head trepanned,
you strike a flame inside me
and set my heart afire, then
call me lantern, crown me
with a circlet of my skull.

If I had hands I’d whittle you
the way you’ve whittled me,
scrape out your head to glow
through darkness until rot
snuffs you, until you are
but wind and memory, shadows
amid leafless trees, the space
between two blowing pages of a book.

Let it begin. My eyes are wide,
my rictus grin is graven in my skin.
I am the jester this unhallowed night.
Come. Smile. Taunt me.
I am Jack, in my crown of bone.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Blog, Featured Post, Halloween, Holidays, Poems, Writing

Resolved

December 29, 2016

Posted by Susan Rooke

10 Comments

There’s something about the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day that can make me a bit melancholy. Some of it is probably due to the ghostly memories of the too many used-up years behind me. Their sheer weight hangs from the eaves like melting ice, and I can hear the drip, drip, drip until the new year is safely underway.

It’s a tad depressing, but fairly easy to talk myself out of. The primary source of the melancholy, however, is beyond my control. It’s the seasonal gloom that blots the face of half the earth this time of year.

Lots of people I know welcome what they seem to feel is the warm-hearth-and-fuzzy-slippers coziness of early nightfall. Not me. I dread the end of Daylight Savings Time. Each year I’ll change the clocks in the house to Standard Time, but I’ll leave my wristwatch set to DST. When it gets dark at 5:30 p.m., I’ll tell myself it’s really 6:30. This fools no one.

And each December I celebrate the day when sunset times resume their forward motion. In this area it happens mid-month—sooner than many people realize—days before the solstice. Here, the great machinery ground into forward gear again on Thursday, December 15th (believe me; I keep track) and as of today, we’ve already gained 10 minutes of evening daylight (yay!). At this point it’s still a few days before the rise of the sun reverses to an earlier time, but it’s not sunrise I care about. I operate on the assumption that it’s likely to rise pretty soon after I do. It’s the light at the end of the day that matters to me. And at this time of year, there’s much too little of it.

Christmas is a welcome distraction from all that, but after it’s over, I’m still left with weeks of endless night on my hands. After darkness descends, all I can see is gloom, gloom and more gloom. (Literally. I don’t see well at night. Or any other time, for that matter.) But, since I’m powerless to change the rotation of the earth, I have to accept things the way they are. In the spirit of acceptance, therefore, I’ve been thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Because it’s not like making a resolution is going to change anything, right?

Well, not typical resolutions, maybe. At least not any of the ones I’ve ever made. “I will write a poem every day for a year.” I made that resolution four years in a row. Never got through even the first six months. “This year, I will make every recipe in Baking with Julia.” That’s Dorie Greenspan’s wonderful book of Julia Child’s PBS series, and a ridiculous notion of mine. I baked perhaps three or four recipes out of the book. Not entirely my fault, though. The croissants were so good (just ask Katie and Glen) that I never got past them.

But on the other hand, it’s quite possible to make resolutions that do stand a reasonable chance of success. Not the good-for-you kind. The fun-for-you kind. Since I don’t want to overload myself with too much fun (it can be just as burdensome as too much self-improvement), for 2017 I’m going to make just three:

1. I will drink more champagne.
2. I will sing “The Doom Song.”
3. I will contemplate my favorite tree.

And I might just do all three at once.

My reason for the first: A well-mixed cocktail in the evening is lovely, but champagne . . . well, it’s champagne! It’s delicious, it’s effervescent, it’s a golden, sparkly celebration in a glass, even on the dullest of evenings. It’s “Life Made Festive, One Flute at a Time.” © Susan Rooke 2016. You read it here first. I think.

My reason for the second: Doom is an awful word, a horrific concept. It’s a thought that keeps me company all too often on these endless winter nights. But then I click here. I get approximately 30 seconds of a cartoon figure repeatedly singing the word “doom” in a shrill voice, to no apparent tune. It makes me laugh every time, and takes—for those 30 seconds, at least—the gloom out of “doom.” Thank you, Katie, for introducing me to “The Doom Song.”

My reason for the third: This enormous tree quiets my mind. Here it moves from fall into winter, ever graceful.

The world can be a brutish, frightening place. Eyes watch us from the dark woods; the beast’s belly is a vault that holds a universe of souls. We all know by now that I’m a pantywaist, which makes it even more important that I hold this determination: As often as I can, for as long as I can, I will have fun, be festive, and celebrate silliness for its own sake. Because I believe it’s necessary.

Thank you for your company; I appreciate you all. Now. Who wants to have a glass of champagne and sing “The Doom Song” with me?

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