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The Jagged Edge Of Otherwhen
The Jagged Edge Of Otherwhen
The Jagged Edge Of Otherwhen
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The Jagged Edge Of Otherwhen

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From a combination of two distinct talents - Eugen M. Bacon, author of the critically acclaimed Hybrid series, and E. Don Harpe, author of the notorious Redneck Riviera series - comes ten tales to set your imagination on edge. You’ll find alien war and insect romance, time travel and star travel, gizmos, frogs, and even a turtle.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherE. Don Harpe
Release dateJul 11, 2011
ISBN9781466138254
The Jagged Edge Of Otherwhen
Author

E. Don Harpe

Award winning author E. DON HARPE has had a varied career, from military service in the 60’s to years spent as a published songwriter in Nashville. During this time he won the coveted Silver Pen Award from the Nashville Banner newspaper. Since retiring from public work in 2004, Harpe has concentrated on writing novels, and continuing to move forward with his writing. He also has nearly 40 short stories available which can be found on Smashwords as well as other sites that feature ebooks. His book of memoirs, THE LAST OF THE SOUTH TOWN RINKY DINKS, published in September of 2008, was an instant success with friends and readers alike. The stories are touching, down to earth tales of small town America, and will bring tears and laughter to all who can remember when the world was a kinder, simpler place. It’s one of those books that you won’t be able to put down, and one that you will re-read many times over the years. Now living in Georgia, Harpe devotes his time to Helen, his wife of nearly 50 years, to his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and to his writing. “I’m pretty satisfied in my own skin right now,” Harpe says, “and I just want to continue to write things that will entertain and hold the readers interest.”

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    Book preview

    The Jagged Edge Of Otherwhen - E. Don Harpe

    THE JAGGED EDGE OF OTHERWHEN

    THE COMBINED SHORT STORIES OF

    EUGEN M. BACON & E. DON HARPE

    By E. Don Harpe & Eugen M. Bacon

    Copyright 2008 – 2011 Ernest D. Harp & Eugen M. Bacon

    Smashwords Edition

    Smashwords Edition License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work. This is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to any person, either living or dead, is purely coincidental.

    * * * * *

    TITLE IN THIS VOLUME

    57

    THAT DANGED GIZMO

    SKARVO: BATTLELINE

    THE TURTLE OF HADES

    BLOODLINERS

    THE BOY FROM BRUNET’S CAJUN CAFÉ & OYSTER BAR

    LAPIS LAZULI

    VELOCITY LIKE LIGHT

    DEADLINE: (FROGGIE WENT A’SHOOTIN’)

    THE GLOW

    # # # #

    From a combination of two distinct talents - Eugen M. Bacon, author of the critically acclaimed Hybrid series, and E. Don Harpe, author of the notorious Redneck Riviera series - comes ten tales to set your imagination on edge. You’ll find alien war and insect romance, time travel and star travel.

    Start with 57, an intense tale of molestation and murder, reprisal and retribution. Set amid the swamps and bayous of Southern Louisiana, 57 follows the path taken by a young would-be voodoo princess as she extracts a dark and terrible revenge on those who violated her and left her for dead.

    57

    SOUTH LOUISIANA IN AUGUST is hot and wet. The air is alive with gnat malice, as they buzz and flitter about your face, causing you to constantly wave your hand about, and you have to be prepared at all times to slap at an exposed bit of skin where a mosquito has decided to have a late dinner. Even in the middle of the night the least bit of exertion brings pillow-soaking sweat and more to spare. Enough in fact to demand a grave wiping of it from the eyes and, often, a change of shirt, blouse or night chemise, a garment only to be again moistened in five minutes flat. In the case of Angelina Rousselle tonight, it was a thin white cotton top sopping wet, but it had taken considerably longer than a few minutes to achieve that condition.

    Angie used a red shop towel to wipe the sweat from her eyes, lit her tenth or twelfth cigarette of the hour, and took one final look at her night’s handiwork, a markedly bruised body at her feet. She didn’t see a dead person lying there; that might have proven to be too painful. No, to Angie this was only one more dead fool. The twig doll’s wide open marbled eyes had held more astonishment than dread, eyes that now on James Eckels strangely managed to look as if he was still waiting for something. Her anger had vanished as swiftly as it bloomed, her frenzy to reproduce unending revenge provisionally calmed. By the time she was finished with James Eckels, the twig doll was nothing more than mulch and red sap.

    Now she couldn’t help but smile as she witnessed the 16 inch truck wheel she had tied to what bits were left of the body unquestioningly carry out what it was tasked to accomplish. What it was supposed to do was to take the body to the bottom of the lagoon as soon as she let the bloodied wrap it was held in slip over the edge of the old boat. The wooden dingy was Auntie Pestie’s preacher’s boat, and Angie had borrowed it for her night’s work from the ramshackle pier by the water’s edge.

    The preacher, the man that was the instrument of ‘Gawd’s truth’ for the Natives camped at the north shore of the Bayou, wouldn’t have approved of Angie’s doings, and so she didn’t ask, she just took.

    The truck wheel was working quite well, she noted, as the jaws of water opened wide to swallow James Eckels whole.

    It had taken a lot of effort on Angie’s part to get the body out of the trunk of the custom 57 Chevvy that he drove, then down to the water’s edge and into the small boat. She was a diminutive woman and, despite the natural strength in her arms, Eckels weighed at least 200 pounds. Dragging his dead weight 30 or so feet to the tiny wooden slatted dock where a boat was tied had been enough exercise to bring a soaking of sweat, a process somewhat slowed by wind knocking softly against her skin.

    Bubbles of gas released from the body bobbed to the surface a few times and then slipped beneath with small sighs of relief. This death was the last one, there would be no more. Now she could get back to living her life in the peace and quiet of the little farmhouse that had become her home. A house far different from another within whose walls all of this had begun.

    Summer of 1965. The day Angie turned 17 was a day so beautiful, it made her want to weep. The sky was golden and blue and so filled with promise, she could have wept for love, for life, for trust, for integrity, she wanted to weep for them all: the very things she had found in Brava and Auntie Pestie. Angie was a looker but she had few friends. Her dark, robust hair and flashing eyes, 5 foot 6 stature – slim, but rounded in all of the right places, were the envy of many, including Dorothy Marshall, Bets Knotworth, Tracey Sheffield, and Sissy Blake who drove a Chevvy, a spruced mock-up of the car Angie’s mother sold after her second husband, Earl, died. All these girls were Angie’s friends; way more than acquaintances but their loyalty was in question, mostly as a result of the glances Angie got from the men in town. Ray Gibson Jr. carried interest in his eyes, a notice that Angie did not seem to especially mind, though she didn’t know him quite well enough to be sure of his feelings.

    She had graduated from high school in May of that year, and had found a job at the local JC Penny store, and was giving more than a smidgen of thought on going to college the next fall. She couldn’t singly afford the fee, but she’d graduated at the top of her class and had managed to secure a scholarship with which she might be able to swing it through the course of Natural Medicine.

    In her heart, Angie knew she’d make it. She had what her Papa had called ‘grit’; which she knew meant enough determination to get over the obstacles and enough sense not to tie herself to any one boy for the next few years. In her mind, that summer of 1965, her future looked as bright as the July full moon.

    If only her past had been that filled with promise.

    Papa had died in a country halfway around the world called Korea, and Clarin, Angie’s mom, had remarried the winter that Angie turned 7. Earl Roberre had been a demanding step-father, and it hadn’t been long before Angie realized he was much more than that. Somewhere between her mother’s cheery introduction of him: Angie, babie, I gots you a new daddy! as the tall lean stranger with a frown clasped his hat in big hands, and the day Earl died, a drunken, three-jowl monster had lived in Angie’s house.

    She had barely turned nine when that monster visited her bedroom late one night, fully dressed as he had just arrived from Gordon’s Pub. His breath was swollen with something foul and far cheaper than Southern Comfort or the Black Jack that Papa used to drink. She thought and acted quick enough to jump out of her bed, but she didn’t get far. She felt his breath on her neck, all smoky and rough from the decay inside his mouth, and felt his leathered hands as they clamped her scream and shoved her hard against the wall.

    You the prettiest little thing I ever seen, Earl whispered to her neck, words that summoned startling might in Angie’s growing arms to shove him off her.

    You are the vilest creep I ever met, she hissed. What will Mama think when I tell her?

    He put all his shoulder behind his slap and as Angie’s body reckoned with the raw pain of the blow, he grabbed her night gown and dragged her beneath him. Shoveling legs could do little to hold him off, and he proved his cyclone dominance with abundance.

    Them feet was made for dancin’, he spoke intimately to her neck. Not kicking.

    The needle pricks began with her hips and spread all the way to her back. It was all over in seconds, but to Angie it was interminable. She sensed more than felt the oily spill of memories swimming deep and wide inside her but, by this time, the needles had grown to vicious knives that cut from her big toe to the back of her neck. Only her head remained remarkably clear, painless. Matter of fact, all it held was something akin to a dull circulation inside it, something that sifted with vague questioning: what was Mama dreaming now in her sleep?

    But when he finished and sat on the side of the bed, heavily pulling his pants back on, what he left behind was no longer his stepdaughter but a thin shadow of herself, a broken stick girl stained with sweat and raw vile bodily fluids. It was only then that she allowed a single tear to moisten her cheek. A cheek still flaming scarlet from the vicious slap.

    Tell her, he said, tell yo’ mama. His eyes avoided looking directly at her as he buckled his belt, I swear. I ain’t gonna kill you. What I aim to do when you do – is worse. He wiped with a careless sleeve the bright sheen of his lust and his sweat from his face.

    After he left, almost blinded by his slap, she stumbled to the bathroom, relying on touch and smell to find her way out of her room. Her entire body felt baked and cracked. How could she ever face her mother again?

    But she did. The next day and the next and the next. Even when Clarin’s flustered eyes rose from the laundry tub, cherry lips pouting, and she regarded Angie with motherly puzzlement. Even when her questioning eyes slowed from fondness to a flogging curiosity that rolled over her daughter’s face, a look that begged for a child-to-parent confession, affection, revelation, something, Angie managed to stare back, keeping whatever was hidden in her soul safe behind

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