“SNOW ANGEL”
by N. Pendleton
Inspired by the song by Jamie Barnes

Snow Angel arrives on December 22, later than she has in years past.  But this time she  stays with me in my small walkup apartment rather than booking a room downtown.  She’s more than ten years older than me, but she’s the newest, brightest thing in my place, standing there against the worn varnished door, the tarnished brass knob, the dull plaster walls.  She’s in a white coat, white skirt, white boots.  Her eyes are blue like the earth from space, her lips ruby red, hair black and impossibly straight.  She smiles at me there in the doorway, and I’m so drunk on the sight of her, I just stand and stare and forget to take her bag.  She only comes with the cold, the first snow.  She spends the holidays here with me.  I’m no one special, not rich or particularly interesting, but I’m her vacation.  And her stay is the only present I want or receive each year.

Snow Angel has a past, but she doesn’t share it with me and I don’t care.  She also has a present, a family and a husband back where she lives, where it never snows.  She claims not to know where or when we met, but I will always remember.  She’s important in this world and she’s required to remember too many things and times and people and places.  I’m not important, I live in the spaces between places and times, and I like it that way, just as long as Snow Angel comes to me for the holidays.  I do not like her because she’s famous and important, because she’s a mother or a wife.  I do not like her for any of these things.  I like her because she’s Snow Angel.  Because I can become drunk on her standing in the doorway of my shabby walkup.  And that’s why she likes me.  I require nothing of her, ask nothing of her.  And here with me, she can just be.

Snow Angel stashes her things in my closet and says she’s hungry.  There is a deli down the hill from my apartment that stays open late so we head there.  “You’ve gotten older,” she says smiling, her breath rising into the cold damp air.  Her eyes shine in the street lamp light.  “It suits you very well.”  She pecks my cheek, comes back, lingers, reopens the hole in my heart.  I reach around her to pull her close, but lose my balance on a hidden ice patch and go down, taking her with me.  It hurts, but she laughs.  “That’s going to leave a bruise.”  And then she laughs harder.

Snow Angel avoids being noticed in my neighborhood because I’m the perfect cover.  When a woman in the deli recognizes her, and asks if she’s Snow Angel, I step in and say, “Listen, she’s with me.  Now, if she was really Snow Angel, do you think she’d be spending the holidays in this town with me?”  It’s enough to convince.  “The resemblance is uncanny,” the woman says.  “You’re a very lucky young man.”  Suddenly she’s judging us, probably because of the age difference, and soon she’s leaving with her husband who’s been waiting patiently for her by the door.

Snow Angel warms the cold night.  She warms my bed.  My arm curls over her.  I bury my face into her hair.  She turns just enough so that I can see her profile in the light of the bay window.  If you look just right, it appears that the snow is falling on her, absorbing into her person.  “Will they burn the giant sheep again this year?  Tell me yes.”  I laugh.  “It’s a Yule goat.  Yes, of course they will.  Just like last year and the year before.”  She turns back to the window.  “I just worry they’ll make them stop doing it some year.  I look forward to it each visit.”  I say, “Well, we at least have this year.  Let’s not think about next year.”  But I always think of the next time we will be together.

Snow Angel loves my neighborhood’s tiny holiday festival.  It’s by no means traditional, a hodgepodge of things borrowed from the Christians and the Pagans, some stuff smuggled over from Europe.  Father Christmas gives gifts to the kids and helps the men chase off the Krampus, who’s always trying to ruin everyone’s Christmas Eve.  They pelt him with snowballs, and he plows his grisly masked face into a snow drift, his shaggy legs kicking up in the air behind him.  Father Christmas, followed by the kids, tall and lean with a wreath on his head, banishes the Krampus from the neighborhood for another year.  We celebrate with hot cider as the old tree branches are unbundled in the lot behind the used book store.  Here the sticks are weaved together in the crude shape of a giant quadruped, our Yule goat.  A man in a long stocking cap walks amongst those of us gathered, tears off strips of paper from a legal pad, and hands them to all adults present.  “Put your burdens on the paper and give them to the Yule goat!  Lighten your load!”  Some of us write out our troubles on the paper, others just pray or meditate or just think over them.  It’s a symbol, after all.

Snow Angel takes a long time, writing on the paper in a small tight script I don’t try to read.  She’s important and famous and has many concerns that she gives to the goat each year.  I, on the other hand, have only one burden I write on the scrap.  We all approach the beast, jam our burdens into its body, and someone from the bookstore sets it alight.  It goes up fast, brilliant, and hot.  Everyone steps back as the flames rise higher.  We’re singing carols now, and the mood is light, but even though the words burn in the animal’s carcass, and even though Snow Angel is right here beside me right now, her arms wrapped around my arm, I cannot help but think about tomorrow.

Snow Angel will leave me again.  And the ashen words will find there way back into the hole she’s left in my heart.  How many years must I write the same thing?  How many times must I scribble, “I am in love with you, Snow Angel.”

]]> http://nfpendleton.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/new-fiction-snow-angel/feed/ 0 nfpendleton http://nfpendleton.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/%e2%80%9cjust-because-its-nature-is-different-you-haven%e2%80%99t-any-right-to-say-it%e2%80%99s-necessarily-evil-%e2%80%9d/ http://nfpendleton.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/%e2%80%9cjust-because-its-nature-is-different-you-haven%e2%80%99t-any-right-to-say-it%e2%80%99s-necessarily-evil-%e2%80%9d/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 05:11:06 +0000 nfpendleton http://nfpendleton.wordpress.com/?p=1091 ]]>

It was face up there on the plain, greasy planks of the table… Three mad, hate-filled eyes blazed up with a living fire, bright as fresh-spilled blood. from a face ringed with a writhing, loathsome nest of worms, blue, mobile worms that crawled where hair should grow…

–from Who Goes There?, by John W. Campbell

"Child of Nature, eh? Well, it was a hell of an evil Nature."

View the pdf of “SUMMER: 2,” by N. Pendleton

–from “The Dunwich Horror,” by H.P. Lovecraft

"... HELP! HELP! ... ff-ff-FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!"

“… The object was nauseous; a filthy whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life…”

                                      –from “The Lurking Fear,” by Howard Phillips Lovecraft

He's got those Martense eyes...

Pencils...

Let the inks soak in or it gets the hose again...

Finished.

]]> http://nfpendleton.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/if-you-draw-and-if-you-like-horror-you-will-eventually-draw-cthulhu/feed/ 0 CthulhuFinal nfpendleton CthulhuPencil CthulhuInProgress CthulhuFinal http://nfpendleton.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/the-cover-stories-euphictions-free-fiction/ http://nfpendleton.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/the-cover-stories-euphictions-free-fiction/#comments Sun, 28 Aug 2011 07:08:07 +0000 nfpendleton http://nfpendleton.wordpress.com/?p=1059 Read more]]> Linernotes:

AND SO I FOUND MYSELF, in the early 21st Century, perfectly out of touch with most everything musical.  I realized I’d become that guy who lives in his back catalog, playing the same old songs from the same worn, scratched CDs and not know if they even still made music for him in the Outer Whirled anymore.  I was that guy who watched as his favorite bands either broke up or mellowed into irrelevance.  I was that guy who, if he contemplated adding anything to his collection at all, it was only to fill in empty spaces of that back catalog.

This was not a state of affairs I embraced.  I was not a purist or a snob.  I was not happy.  The issue was that I wasn’t yet 35, and I’d felt music had left me behind.

Until I found that album.

It was not their first album.  It may not have even been their first single for that album that I heard that day.  But in a matter of moments I was hooked on something that sounded familiar yet brought with it energy new and exciting, and proved that that guy was still young enough and perhaps even still a bit relevant.  The single — and then the entire album — dragged me from the doldrums of that guy‘s life, acting as the key to a whole new world of sounds.  The album and its 10 tracks were my gateway drugs back into the intoxicating world of turgid emotions and the “fuck you” aesthetic I’d once so deeply enjoyed.

That album, Interpol’s ANTICS, and eventually her three sister albums, Turn on the Bright Lights, Our Love to Admire, and INTERPOL have not only influenced me artistically, but have changed me as a person, in the way only music can really change how the chemicals bubble and churn in the human mind.

Interpol is a New York band.  And in a city defined by its crowded, illuminated congestion, they manage to find every dark, empty, cavernous expanse therein.  Sometimes these spaces are physical dimesions, other times they’re the emptiness in the lost and lonely, but mostly they are a blurring of both ideas.  Through their surreal lyrics, tender versus bombastic delivery, and echoing guitars, they describe why these distinctions are illusory and their delineation counterfeit on the surface.  Their New York is as much an idea as it is a place on the map.  Their world is a dark dreamland built not of nightmares, but of sadness and yearning.  It’s a world I visit often.

I could not hope to leave you with the same feeling that Interpol has left in me.  Only music can do what I’m proposing.  No, what I have hoped to accomplish with the forthcoming fictions is to share even the slightest miniscule sliver of that magic and new life that was given to me at the beginning of our 21st Century.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this has been accomplished.  Fictions are dialogues between author and reader, after all, and I’ve had my say from this side of the divide.  I’ve done what I can.  These stories are in your hands now.

–N. Pendleton, 2011

Download: N.Pendleton_COVER_STORIES

Originally compiled for the Museion Art website as a proposed first in a series, this book enjoyed a brief stint in print journal format.  Some of these stories have appeared around the Internet and in audio format as part of Volumes 1 and 2 of the MuseionCast podcast.

It is now presented here as a free pdf download.

I hope you enjoy.  Thanks.

nfp

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