Eye to Eye with a Goldfish

by Eric

Out here in the Pennsylvania mountains winter comes down like old age.

Everything creaks: the walls at night; the stairs as I carry another cup of coffee to the office; the snow under my feet when I venture out to check the gauge on the propane tank; my bones all the time. I'm not built for the cold. I came into the world weighing less than a bag of sugar after someone's baked a batch of Christmas cookies and I've never caught up. Chill doesn't have far to travel to reach my bones.

In February silence encases the world like the ice on the branches of the pines beyond the window. With the space heater off you can hear at long intervals trucks shifting gears on the highway a mile away. Nothing else. The birds hopping around the snow-covered porch roof looking for seeds in the gutters never sing. How do they survive, I wonder? Usually the heater needs to be on. Its breathy hum drowns out the silence, muffles the noises of the furnace, water heater, and well pump turning on and off. Existential sounds this time of year. Necessary as heartbeats. I find myself listening for them, anxiously. Not unlike those poor souls who can't help hearing the click-click of their artificial heart valves.

Waiting for the well pump to grind through its cycle and click off successfully is the worst. The water pipes running through the unheated crawlspace beneath the house are wrapped in insulation and heat tapes but have still frozen deep in the hole where they emerge from the ground. You only find out when the pump can't force water through the blocked pipe and the faucets go dry. I'm starting to feel too old to wedge myself through the cat-sized door in the foundation and creep across frozen earth, avoiding pipes and wiring, inhaling cobwebs, in sub-zero darkness and then praying the heat gun won't fail to do the job this time. Come to think of it, I've felt too old to do that roughly from the time I was able to walk.

The cold also makes it impossible to go to the store for weeks on end. This area doesn't get Buffaloed with blizzards but our house is separated from the state road by a stretch of hill that's rendered impassable by an inch of frozen snow or a glaze of ice. So even while we listen out for the household machinery we're keeping track of the groceries we stock up during the fall, hoping they last until a rare winter thaw or spring. Unless this is the year spring doesn't arrive. By mid February warm weather begins to seem like a myth. Luckily we're both connoisseurs of tinned cuisine. If Spam was good enough for the troops during World War II why should a couple of scribblers complain? Besides, Spam is pretty much fat and salt. What's not to like?

Looking on the bright side, we've never failed to get through a winter yet. And the season does have its icy charms. Does life offer a more glorious gift than a snow day for a school kid? Is there any place more magical than snowy woods on a moonlit night? And the goldfish in the ice of the cow pond where my friends and I skated as kids were magical. I remember them, flashes of orange and yellow like gems embedded in the blue under my skates. If you were willing to kneel and let the ice bite through your trousers you could see their bulging eyes goggling up at you. Freed from their bowls during the summer, now they were imprisoned again. We convinced ourselves that as soon as spring arrived the goldfish shook the frost off their scales and swam happily all summer. I've come to doubt that but it's a nice thought.

There's little doubt, though, that Casa Maywrite will eventually thaw out and its inhabitants will resume swimming, however creakily.

A Home With a Hook

by Eric

When I was small my grandmother read me the story of Scuppers the Sailor Dog. The Little Golden book, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Garth Williams, tells the story of a dog who wants to be in his boat on the sea. That’s the only place he feels at home. I still remember the book fondly. I suppose it appealed to an instinctual urge to have the sort of shelter we need, to be just where we want to be.

As kids we were always playing in one sort of shelter or another. There were places that were built for us. Every autumn, my grandfather would construct a hut out of corn shocks in the garden and he and my father put up a fancy tree house with siding and a porch in the big apple tree behind the barn. We spent a lot of time in these shelters but there were others we made for ourselves.

On rainy days my brother and I would push together every table and card table in the house and cover them with sheets to create tent-like mazes. I liked to crayon a control panel onto a cardboard box, take it into my bedroom closet, shut the door and pretend I was in a spaceship. There's an appeal to confined spaces when you're a child. Limited environments are easier to control.

Once my friends and I found three wooden doors discarded in the nettles at the edge of the scrubby patch of woods behind our homes. We cobbled the doors together with throw rugs and corrugated cardboard to make a clubhouse. It was good place to tell ghost stories when we were allowed to stay up late until fireflies flashed in the dark bushes all around. When we weren't in the mood for stories "Joe" would swipe his dad's Aqua Velva and a pack of matches and see how long he could hold a handful of flaming aftershave.

We didn't use the clubhouse for long. The first hard rain found gaps in our workmanship, dissolved the cardboard, and turned the rugs into a sodden slimy mass. It was unsalvageable. Joe suggested we burn the remains down but we decided to leave it too be engulfed by weeds, a monument to past ages when the summer had been young.

The most intriguing place of all was the subterranean cave an older friend made in his backyard, down a hill and behind bushes, out of sight of his house. He dug a hole, laid plywood over the top and covered the plywood with sod. A hinged trapdoor and ladder provided access. The hole seemed about ten feet deep. It probably wasn’t but I could stand up without hitting my head on the ceiling. We’d sit down there in the dirt with a flashlight and pretend we were cave explorers. Sometimes we’d turn the flashlight off and pretend we were cave explorers whose flashlight batteries had died. We’d imagine earthworms emerging from the walls in the darkness. Other times we’d take a snack with us and play at being miners trapped by a cave-in with nothing left to eat but a bag of Cheese Curls.

That wasn’t even the best part. There was also a tunnel which curved around from one wall to the adjacent wall. The passage was barely wide enough to crawl through. Rocks sticking up out of the soil bruised your knees. You could feel the severed ends of roots brushing at you. There weren’t any wood supports. It was an animal’s burrow. If you paused at the u-bend you might as well have been prematurely buried. You could almost feel the weight of the damp earth pressing in all around, squeezing the dark into a viscous blackness that lay right up against your eyes.

It was cozy down in the hole in a horrible sort of way. I imagine it was dangerous. We could have ended up in the local paper, stupid kids smothered under a ton of collapsed dirt, a sad lesson for others.

I suppose I was searching for my own version of Scuppers' boat where, when he retired to his bunk at the end of the day he could place his hat on the hook for his hat, his rope on the hook for his rope, and his spyglass on the hook for his spyglass. Maybe that’s what home is about – a hook for everything we need a hook for.

Naked Came the Treacle Pudding

by Mary

This is the time of year when assorted versions of Dickens' seasonal masterpiece A Christmas Carol vie for space on TV and streaming services. I am reading the novel again and recently reached the description of the Cratchit family's Christmas pudding singing in the wash-house copper as it cooked. And when it emerged from that unusual vessel, what a pudding it was! A positive prince of puddings!

Dickens describes the scene: "A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding!...a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top."

While at one time the Reed family lived in a Victorian era flat still retaining its wash copper in a corner of the scullery, we did not cook our Christmas puddings in the same fashion. No, they were steamed in a basin wrapped in a tea towel set in a large pan, so we were familiar with the steamy smell invoked by the extract above. On the other hand, the Cratchit's pudding most likely did not conceal a lucky coin as ours always did, perhaps a sixpenny piece or if not a pre-decimal penny wrapped in greaseproof paper. We kids understood this precaution was intended to avoid poisoning someone at the festive table, because whereas sixpences were made of silver, the old penny was manufactured from a baser metal and so considered dangerous to everyone's health.

Mind you, while you had to be careful of your teeth, the lucky diner whose pudding portion turned out to contain the coin was guaranteed good luck in the coming year. Round our way, it was rumoured those who did not possess a big enough pan in which to boil their puddings would employ a bucket. Which reminds me that some years ago we sampled a cylindrical because tinned Christmas pudding. In flavour it wasn't too bad, in appearance it just wasn't quite right somehow.

On the other hand, lack of a coin in the pudding would not be surprising given Bob Cratchit took home, as Dickens puts it, fifteen copies of his Christian name a week, and he with a wife and several children to support. However, we are perhaps safe in visualising the Cratchit children giving the pudding mixture a good stir apiece while making a wish in the good old traditional way.

Our Christmas pudding arrived at the table sans holly and brandy, as did other familiar steamed puddings such as spotted dick or those featuring a treacle, syrup, or jam base. Covered in piping hot custard, all were common fare for working folks' "afters" and even occasionally made an appearance in school dinners. Treacle pudding was my favourite anywhere I went, although until writing this I had not found reason to reflect on the number of pans the school's kitchen staff must have employed to supply enough puddings for all their young diners. Alas, no custard was served with them, so it was always a case of naked came the treacle pudding.

Returning to Dickens, despite supernatural intervention, the sea change Scrooge underwent is all the more remarkable given early in the novel he emphatically states if he could work his will "every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

As for interpretations of Scrooge, my vote goes to Alistair Sim. Subscribers may prefer other performances but let us at least be civil in our disagreements. Therefore there is to be no sharpening of holly branches if you please.

To Sleep, Perchance to Scream

by Mary

Years ago, a friend who lived in the Middle East at the time mentioned she had met another expat who worked for the BBC. who observed they were not getting as many submissions as they would like for the Short Story spot on the World Service.

Well, of course I had to have a go at it! Thus was born Aunt Ba's Story, partly inspired by a dream and Arthur Hughes' painting Home From Sea. It was my first sale.

Lately we have been watching supernatural films created in the spirit of the season (no pun intended) and reckon the actor who provides that shadowy outline so often seen crossing quickly just in front of the camera and not noticed by anyone else must make a goodly salary, given all the work he has done. In passing, let me mention I have noticed so far at least the silhouette has always been male. Perhaps it is him or his brother I seem to see occasionally when waking up from dreaming, convinced a dark silhouette is standing nearby. It feels real at the time, even though I gather experts say the phenomenon is caused by the mind trying to make sense of shadows.

But what sense can be made of a serial nightmare that has been a night-time visitor to me over many months?

It began when an already deceased family member was murdered and buried in a cupboard in a house in which the family once lived in the old country. Unlikely though it sounds, every now and then I dream a bit more of the unfolding story, including a pursuit closing in on the culprit. In the last episode dreamt the story had reached the point where a detective looking around a well-lit room opened the door to the adjoining room, revealed to be the one with the fateful cupboard. Looking over his shoulder, I could see the other room was dark but there was enough light spilling in to show it was littered with broken toys and other rubbish. So I am supposing the unmasking of the culprit is doubtless not far off, at which time the blue-clad long arm of the law will be reach out to grab them.

Unlike the detective, I already know the identify of the dream murderer. It was me.

Skunk Cabbage Dreams

by Eric

Dreams are funny things. Or maybe not. I never wake up laughing. Screaming is another matter. I'm not sure why I never have funny dreams. Is it just me?

Some say humor is based on incongruity. What strikes us as funny is the perception of something incongruous — something that violates our mental patterns and expectations. This theory was set forth by several philosophers including Arthur Schopenhauer, whose favorite joke was purportedly: "What is the angle between a circle and its tangent?" Which kind of makes one wonder if Arthur had any business philosophizing on humor.

Still, tangents and circles aside, were this theory true it would follow that dreams can't be funny. Where could we find incongruity in the dream world where the expectations of our waking lives don't apply and we accept the irrational as a matter of course?

Well, I do anyway. While I'm experiencing them, dreams are absolutely real to me. So real that they can spill over into wakefulness, coloring my thoughts during the day. Dreams are like a second, alternative life. I remember being impressed by a science fiction story I read as a child. One night a man dreams he is an alien skunk cabbage on another planet. Soon his friends have the same dream, Yes, as it turns out, humans are actually alien skunk cabbages who were only dreaming of being human. (No, they don't write them like they used to.)

I am leery of describing my dreams for fear people might draw psychological conclusions. (Unflattering ones at that) But as Freud said, "sometimes a dream is just a dream" or was that Jung, or neither?

The first dream I can recall had me perched precariously on the steps of a high porch. The gaps between the steps were wide enough for a four year old like me to fall through. The ground below, so clearly visible through the gaps, lay hundreds of feet below. This was an only slightly exaggerated description of the porch on my parents' second story apartment. Heights have terrified me ever since. I still dream of ladders in the sky with missing rungs, swaying bridges without railings and bizarre, skeletal skyscrapers which must be climbed by eroding staircases open to the clouds.

The only time I don't fear falling is when I fly. Haven't we all dreamt of flying? I don't power my way through the air like Superman or soar like a bird. I levitate. What a wonderful feeling! And as I levitate hither and yon I am thinking how cool it is and how it seems like a dream but-- wow -- it's real! Even asleep I'm a sucker.

My nocturnal imaginings are seldom so pleasant. As a child I had nightmares which I rather miss because they were entertaining as a Saturday matinee. I thrilled to Martian war machines looming over the houses on my street, shuddered at the unseen horror lurking in the shadows of the attic, gasped when I opened my closet door to reveal an endless twilit plain littered with skulls.

These days my dreams mostly lack the tropes of science fiction and horror. They are not frightening, merely muddled and disturbing, populated by people long gone or dead. And I can't tell you how many times I've found myself on the wrong bus, racing through unfamiliar countryside, headed God knows where. The story of my life perhaps?

Now, finally I see gray light through the office blinds. It's time for me to stop typing. I got up in the middle of the night to write this because I couldn't sleep for some reason.

Not Even a Gravestone to Point a Finger

by Eric

Not to give too much away, but in our Byzantine mysteries the murderer is rarely turned over to the authorities. Rather, our detective, John the Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian, usually finds some way to bring justice to the miscreants himself. This isn't merely an artistic decision on the part of the authors. In fact, for much of its history the Roman Empire lacked the criminal justice apparatus we take for granted. There were no official police forces, or prison system, and as for murder...well, there was no general law against it.

That surprising fact is one of many aspects of murder, broadly defined, dealt with in A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Emma Southon discusses assassinations, murder within the family, murder by magic, and murder in the gladiatorial arena among other subjects. Although the book covers only the Republic and early Roman Empire the laws involved are not much different from those of Justinian's time.

And very strange they appear to us. Who in the twenty-first century would inscribe the following on a child's gravestone?

"To the spirits of the dead and to the most unfortunate Julia Restuta, murdered at the age of ten on account of her jewelry. Her parents, Julius Restutus and Statia Pudentilla, [set this up]."

This and other such epitaphs were likely the only "justice" average murder victims were likely to receive. Since murder was for centuries not a crime in the Roman Empire the responsibility for investigating, prosecuting and punishing a murder was entirely on the family and friends of the deceased. Unless a family was wealthy it had no way to pursue a murderer. The poor couldn't even afford a gravestone pointing a finger.

Roman law, at its inception in the Twelve Tables, was largely concerned with property rights. Perhaps because of the Ten Commandments we expect laws to have a moral basis but the Romans didn't think that way. Nor were they interested in interfering in family affairs. As Southon puts it: "The Roman state, at least until the dawn of the Imperial period, did not consider itself to be harmed, threatened or challenged when a man strangled his wife or stabbed a rival. That was their personal business."

Although we tend to think of the fellow on the library floor with the knife stuck in his back as the victim, technically the victim in a murder prosecution is the state. The state is the plaintiff. The state has suffered a challenge to its power to control the behavior of its citizens via the laws it has passed and thus it is the state that brings the case.

The Roman state was more interested in protecting private property than in protecting human life. Thus, while the family of a child killed in a mugging had no recourse, a man whose slave was murdered -- the slave being property and no more a human being than a table -- was at least reimbursed for his loss at market value just as he would have been for the destruction of cattle.

To the extent that Roman law dealt with murder it was through a hodge podge of provisions designed to deal with specific situations without apparent reference to any general concept of morality. For example, the father had absolute control of his family. Therefore infanticide was legal, however there was a law against parricide. This killing of any ancestor must have struck the Romans as particularly heinous -- as opposed to leaving an unwanted baby on a rock -- because the miscreant was put into a sack with a dog, a cockerel, a monkey and a snake. And then the sack was thrown into the sea. Did the phrase cruel and unusual spring to mind? (And where was the ASPCA?)

Many authors like to draw parallels between past events and today based on the supposition that human nature hasn't changed through the ages. And yet, looking at history from a modern perspective it is easy -- too easy -- to interpret the past in light of the present, to assume that people long dead had exactly the same motivations and goals and thought processes we do. Given our prejudices it is sometimes more difficult to see the differences between us and our ancestors than it is to see the similarities. A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is not only a fascinating look at murder in all its forms during the Roman Empire, it is also an excellent antidote to the tendency to describe the past as the present but without cell phones.

Where There's a Will There's Usually Trouble

by Mary

We've never written a legal thriller. However, it could well be said Five For Silver took us as close to contributing to that particular sub-genre as we've ever been, since the focus of the plot revolves around our Lord Chamberlain's labours to locate witnesses to a wealthy man's will.

Given our protagonist's position and power, this would seem an easy task for him to accomplish but it was one of the most difficult he has had to tackle, given this entry in the series is set during the Justinianic plague, which has been estimated as causing between five and ten thousand deaths a day. Nobody was safe and as a result Constantinople became a ghost city, largely deserted between the mounting number of deaths and the flight of residents deserting it for what was regarded as the safer countryside. The pandemic played no favourites -- Justinian himself was infected but managed to survive its deadly touch.

Since a will is the key to the plot, our preliminary research necessarily involved taking a plunge into Justinian's Institutes, a fascinating collection of laws. Glancing through it, certain situations give the modern reader pause. For example, it was illegal to engage in abusive language in an attempt to cause a crowd to form. Another provision concerned what would nowadays be considered stalking, in this instance defined as "following a matron, or a young boy or girl below the age of puberty", Meanwhile, writers faced punishment for "writing, composing, or publishing defamatory prose or verse." Compensation due to an injured party depended upon their social position, so as a result an aristocrat was entitled to greater pecuniary compensation than "a mere stranger, or to a person of low condition".

We'd never think of Peter, John's elderly servant and like his master a former slave, as one of low condition although doubtless he would have been considered such -- if he was thought of at all -- during his period of enslavement.

It is in fact Peter whose vision of an angel visiting him to announce "Gregory. Murder. Justice" starts the engine of the plot after John undertakes to find out if Gregory, Peter's oldest friend, has indeed been murdered. This in turn leads to John's need to search for witnesses to a deathbed will made by Nereus, a superstitious and wealthy shipper, in order to disinherit his wastrel son Triton.

But as we all know, where there's a will, there's often trouble.

Another dip into the Institutes provided most useful information. Oral wills were valid, provided the intent to make one and its provisions were declared before an assembly of seven witnesses. Slaves, lunatics, and those with certain disabilities or who were under the age of puberty were among those not permitted to serve in this capacity. Women were also barred from witnessing a will.

The task presented to John seems impossible given Peter, despite his long friendship with Gregory, does not know where the latter lived or his occupation. However, when John's friend Anatolius turns out to be one of the last to see Gregory alive, this sliver of information, scanty though it is, serves to enable John to begin tracing Gregory's movements.

As John pursues his time-consuming and increasingly urgent daisy chain of finding and interviewing witnesses, he is ever aware the plague could carry off any or all of them at any moment, not to mention the distinct possibility of one or more having fled the increasingly deserted city. As he discovers, there were indeed seven men present when Nereus made his will, a motley band who by a combination of circumstances happened to be in the right place at the right time to serve as witnesses.

The septet in question included Peter's friend Gregory as well as a seller of dodgy antiquities, a morbidly lugubrious court poet, the assistant to Nereus' house steward, a holy fool notorious for dancing in the street with the dead, a rustic carter, and an archdeacon.

The Institutes declares "The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give every man his due" and when John's winding path finally leads him to the culprit, he administers justice both terrible and appropriate -- without shedding blood.