Steve Tem - Onion Songs

“Smells good, sweetheart. Smells wonderful!” He almost laughs, because he’s so surprised to hear the sound of his own voice. It seems forever since he’s heard the sound of his own voice. But of course it was only this morning, or perhaps last night, certainly no further away than yesterday afternoon. He and his daughter speak every day, after all: long, serious talks about politics and morals and her many dreams. She’s always had so much ambition. She takes after him. She takes after him.

Even to the point of sounding like him: his voice, her voice, indistinguishable.

He’s just had so many bad dreams of late in which he wasn’t able to speak to her, he wasn’t allowed to speak to her, and he’d been so hungry for conversation. He is so hungry.

Dad, I’m not telling you again! Dinner!

He’s always been late for dinner. He’ll get so busy sometimes, there is always so much to do, and a person of ambition can go on and on without replenishment sometimes, building on what he has already done, using the same words, the same thoughts again and again, reusing the dreams he’s dreamed a thousand times before.

That line of thinking is making him vaguely uncomfortable. Better to get on to dinner, otherwise he might hurt her feelings. Nothing wrong here. Nothing is wrong.

She’s kept the kitchen as spotless as the rest of the house. Gleaming countertops, crystalline glass, shiny silver of the utensils. The finest linen. But where’s the food? He doesn’t see any food.

Not that he needs to eat, however hungry he may feel. He’s gotten so fat of late, he could lie in bed a year or more and live off all that he contains.

Better not to think of that. Better to keep a positive attitude. He has so many bad dreams. He has so many awful things in his head.

“Sweetheart,” he says. “Sweetheart. I don’t see the food.”

Look down, Daddy, she says from the other side of the wall.

He looks down at his plate but there is nothing. There is nothing to eat. “There’s nothing here, sweetheart.”

Don’t be so helpless, Daddy. Make yourself a meal. Make yourself a meal.

He can feel the sheets gathered around his head. He can hear his wife’s body torn asunder and carried out of the world. He can smell the reek and decay of everything he has ever loved. He tries to cover his ears against the screams of this world but he cannot move. He cannot move.

Make yourself a meal, her voice says with finality.

He gazes down at his ponderous belly and fumbles at all the utensils suddenly spilling off the edge of the table: all the sharp edges, all the knives of the world.

The telephone rings. The answering machine picks it up. “Are you there?” the male voice asks. “Pick up. Pick up.”

“I’m not here!” he says. “I’m not here!”

Make yourself a meal, she says, and, grabbing the sharpest knife, he does.

1. “Onion Song” appears here for the first time.

2. “The Sadness,” Star*Line , Nov/Dec 2009

3. “The Messenger,” Weird Tales , Fall 1981, Vol. 48, No. 3

4. “The Hijacker,” Eldritch Tales 8 , 1982

5. “Out Late In the Park,” GATHERING THE BONES , Jack Dann, Ramsey Campbell, and Dennis Etchison editors, 2003

6. “Picnic” appears here for the first time.

7. “Doodles,” Noctulpa 7:Sinistre , 1993 (reprinted in Ellen Datlow's Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror)

8. “Strands,” Noctulpa 4 , 1990

9. “Night: the Endless Snowfall,” Eldritch Tales #12 , 1986

10. “Archetype,” NonStop Magazine 2 , Winter 1995

11. “The Hunter Home from the Hill,” 2001 (India), July 1991

12. “Shoplifter,” Kayak 60 , 1982

13. “Brain of Shadows,” Psychos '92

14. “Attached,” Kayak 60 , 1982

15. “The Rifleman, the Cancerous Cow, and the Swedish Memorial Hospital,” Pig Iron 11 , The New Surrealists issue , 1983

16. “Jungle J.D.,” It Came From the Drive-in , ed. Norman Partridge

17. “Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures,” Talebones 21 , Spring 2001

18. “How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark,” The Spook , July 2002

19. “Minimalist Biography” appears here for the first time.

20. “Sometimes I Get Lost,” Electric Velocipede 11 , 2006

21. “The Changing Room” appears here for the first time.

22. “Charles,” Black Static 12 , 2009

23. “The Figure in Motion,” Postscripts , 22/23 - The Company He Keeps

24. “The Glare and the Glow,” Interzone 227, 2010

25. “Slapstick,” Bare Bone 11 , 2009

26. “Strangeness,” Sybil's Garage 4 , 2007

27. “Off the Map,” Albedo One #35 , 2008

28. “Unknown,” Black Static 2 , 2007

29. “Saturday Afternoon,” Brutarian 33 , 2001

30. “A Visit Home,” The Tiger Garden , ed. Nicholas Royle

31. “The Multiples of Sorrow,” Cinnabar's Gnosis Ex Occidente Press

32. “Fish,” Horror D’oeuvres (online), 2006

33. “Merry-Go-Round,” New Pathways 14 , 1989

34. “The Green Dog,” Null Immortalis: Nemonymous 10

35. “A Dream of the Dead,” Album Zutique #1 , ed. Jeff Vandermeer

36. “Saturday” appears here for the first time.

37. “Aphasic World Syndrome,” Pindeldyboz (online), November 15, 2007

38. “December,” HORRORS! 365 SCARY STORIES , Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, Robert E. Weinberg eds, 1998

39. “The Mask Child” (a play for puppets) originally appeared on the multimedia CD Imagination Box , Melanie & Steve Tem, Lone Wolf Publications, 2001

40. “Shuffle” originally appeared as a virtual card deck on the multimedia CD Imagination Box , Melanie & Steve Tem, Lone Wolf Publications, 2001

41. “12 Minutes of Darkness,” a chapbook, Chris Drumm Books, 1991

42. “An Ending,” A Walk on the Darkside , John Pelan editor, 2004

“Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.”

“Tem’s stories are written with an enviable precision of language and the hallucinatory candour of the true visionary, but with all the signature notes of a keen and compassionate intelligence at work. Consistent in quality and diverse in content, as impressive as it is impressionistic, and spanning thirty years of the author's career, Onion Songs is the strongest collection of short stories that I've read in the last year.”

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For more information about these books and others, please visit: http://chomupress.com/

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Onion Songs copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2013

The right of Steve Rasnic Tem to be identified as Author of this

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the