Claiming T-Mo Read online

  Praise for Claiming T-Mo

  “Bacon explores a four-generation alien family saga in this gleeful, wacky debut.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[Bacon’s] eloquent, elegant and lyrical prose gripped me from the very first sentence of this immensely passionate, moving and thought-provoking story . . . [an] amazing, magical book.”

  —Linda Hepworth, NB Magazine (5 stars)

  “Bacon enthralls readers with an innovative narrative that extols the potency of using poetic language in fiction . . . the true substance of Claiming T-Mo is in each woman’s process of understanding T-Mo.”

  —Megan Kelly, Aurealis Magazine

  “Claiming T-Mo silkily links reality with the surreal, and grounded with the unearthly.”

  —Angela Wauchop, Other Terrain Journal

  “Nothing is off limits in Claiming T-Mo, with a literary eloquence and decadence, which transports the mundane into the magical, suspending time and place into a kaleidoscopic universe.”

  —Weekend Notes

  “Lush, hypnotic and absorbing. Bacon speaks in a language all her own, transporting us to an original, surreal, very real invented world.”

  —Kaaron Warren, award-winning author of Tide of Stone and

  The Grief Hole

  “Bacon’s sentences are endlessly full of these nimble, assured, madly inventive leaps. Her work is striking; I’ve never read anything like it.”

  —Keith Rosson, award-winning author of

  The Mercy of the Tide and Smoke City

  “Claiming T-Mo is more than a novel—it is a life force, a beautiful and heartfelt sentience that speaks to you in equal parts charm, thrill, and wonder. Eugen Bacon is an emerging force in literary and genre circles alike, and quite simply her work is highly recommended.”

  —Eric J. Guignard, award-winning author and editor,

  That Which Grows Wild and A World of Horror

  “Bacon scrambles and codifies and defamiliarizes with a deft hand, bringing characters to vivid life and evoking worlds within worlds. Singing plants and sons severed from their best selves by bad intent; blue-haired aliens, murderous laws, and mothers who hide in the shadows—lyrical and mesmerizing.”

  —J.S. Breukelaar, author of Collision: Stories and Aletheia

  “With Claiming T-Mo, Eugen Bacon has written an unforgettable saga of power, curse and hope, as lived by three generations of exceptional women. Magical, violent, enthralling, it is a book that shines with its own specific aura, a somber and beautiful unique object, designed by a truly splendid writer. A must.”

  —Seb Doubinsky, author of The City-States Cycle series

  “Prose with a rhythm that sets it apart. Come for the music, stay for the story.”

  —Michael Pryor, author of Gap Year in Ghost Town

  and the Laws of Magic series

  “Claiming T-Mo is a story of generations of women striving for fulfillment, but caught in webs of passion, magic and stardust. Eugen Bacon embraces the strange and estranged in this unanticipated contemporary trickster myth.”

  —Emmet O’Cuana, author of Faraway

  “The use of language—the breadth of vocabulary and the attention to detail are absolutely engrossing.”

  —Dominique Hecq, award-winning poet, novelist,

  short fiction writer and playwright

  “Claiming T-Mo takes the reader on a breathless journey through kaleidoscopic worlds which, on looking closer, resemble the mythic veins and sinews of our own, pulsing with unalloyed vitality . . . As playful as it is thought-provoking, this is a work of dizzying originality and profound humanity.”

  —Prof. Oz Hardwick, award-winning poet and

  author of Learning to Have Lost and The Lithium Codex

  “A highly imaginative and well written novel with some highly evocative scenes and well realized characters, it uses the conventions of its genre to explore sophisticated themes.”

  —Julian Novitz, award-winning author of Holocaust Tours

  and My Real Life and Other Stories

  “The voice is particular and energetic . . . the sentences have a bridling, writhing energy . . . The style is reminiscent of Toni Morrison, particularly in works like The Bluest Eye, where she experiments with non-standard English, but is far more playful. The combination of voice infused with the playful energy of a form of Standard Black English, combined with a story of quests and magic produces a unique work.”

  —Nike Sulway, award-winning author of

  Dying in the First Person and Rupetta

  “Eugen Bacon’s novel is ambitious and skillful . . . a novel with several types of magic in it, the magic of beautiful prose, the magic we expect of these characters, and a magically large heart within the telling.”

  —Prof. Kevin Brophy, award-winning poet, novelist,

  short fiction writer and essayist

  “Worlds are described, like those from Calvino’s Imaginary Cities, held up for the reader to admire, and then disappear to invite extrapolation . . . strange and yet familiar; more importantly, the worlds are fully imagined and fully realized. We are placed into them confidently and with assurance, and allowed to make our own way.”

  —George Green, author of Hound

  CLAIMING T-MO

  EUGEN BACON

  Meerkat Press

  Atlanta

  CLAIMING T-MO. Copyright © 2019 by Eugen Bacon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at [email protected].

  Cover Art by Micaela Dawn

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-13-2 (Paperback)

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-14-9 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019904850

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in the United States of America by

  Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia

  www.meerkatpress.com

  To Nicholas

  Contents

  SALEM

  SILHOUETTE

  SALEM

  SILHOUETTE

  SALEM

  SILHOUETTE

  MARGO

  MYRA

  TEMPEST

  AMBER

  T-MO

  ODYSSEUS

  My deepest passion was reading. At some point—not early, I was thirty-five or thirty-six—I realized there was a book that I wanted very much to read that really hadn’t been written, and so I sort of played around with it in trying to construct the kind of book I wanted to read.

  —Toni Morrison, Time Magazine, May 2008

  SALEM

  • 1 •

  T-Mo happened exactly one week after the puzzle-piece woman with fifty-cent eyes.

  One night, black as misery, Salem Drew stood, arms wrapped about herself, at the bus depot three streets from the IGA where she worked late shifts. A bunch of commuters had just clambered onto a number 146 for Carnegie, and Salem found herself alone at the depot.

  She waited for a night express bus to take her back to a cheerless home that housed equally cheerless parents. An easy wind around her was just as dreary, foggy as lunacy.
There, just then, the shadow of a woman’s face jumped into her vision.

  Salem blinked. Was the woman real or a figment of thought? Singular parts of her were easy to file, were possibly real: maroon hair, rugged skin the color of coffee beans. And the scar . . . But all put together, cohesion was lost.

  The puzzle-piece woman stood head lowered, quiet in the mist. When she raised her face, silver shimmered from one good eye, petite and round as a fifty-cent coin. The other eye was broken, feasibly some bygone injury. Even though it was as smooth and flawlessly round as the right eye, it held no sight. The coin perfection of its shape was embedded in scar tissue, a disfigurement that needed nothing but a single glance to seal the hideousness of it.

  If Salem thought to speak, to ask, “Who are you? How long have you been standing there, watching me, and why?” the mighty keenness of the woman’s good telescopic eye, the one that filtered, turned inward, then came back at her without translation, threw it right out of Salem’s mind.

  Thunder like the hammering of a thousand hooves did it. Salem ran without a scream, all the way through all that night, never minding the night bus when it whooshed past. All she minded was the gobbling eye, and the unwarned sound of deep belly laughter that chased behind.

  • 2 •

  Freedom and beyond. That was where T-Mo took Salem. He foisted himself into her life, waltzed her straight to liberty.

  There is a magical quality about a man who steps through locked doors, unbroken walls. One minute he stood outside her window, next he was beside her in front of a projector show on the wall, one calm hand stretched along the back of her seat.

  They were watching Part I of A Moment with God, Salem’s parents’ idea of an unchaperoned date, inside a cul-de-sac chalet that held no sink or toilet, not even a tacky kitchen. It stood three meters from the back door of the main building, close enough for a parent to sniff out trouble. That was the little servant room the pastor had sublet to his daughter.

  Even though they had been going out some time now, Salem’s temple fluttered, as did the veins in her neck. Her gaze wavered each time it met his, all through Part II of the monologue on the wall. She shifted on the couch to create distance from his reckless hand. So disoriented was she, it took awhile before she noticed the tape reel still rolled but showed nothing except snow lines on the darkened wall. Somehow T-Mo had managed to maneuver himself within inches of her skin.

  “Life-forms,” he said.

  She jumped. “What?”

  “Do you not wonder what else exists in the universe?”

  She stuttered. “W-what sort of existence?”

  “Complex. Minds beyond human. Do you not wonder?”

  “N-no.”

  “But I do.” He held her gaze. “And I am.”

  “W-what?”she said, part in trepidation of never being able to understand him, the rest in misery that at this point she really didn’t.

  “Complex.” He reclined. “Do you not wonder,” his voice drawled, “how molecular composition tolerates teleporting?”

  “Teleporting?”

  “See me walk through that door?”

  “N-no.”

  “Well, then.”

  She blinked, studied him anew. The man whose eyes were full of space when they were not holding something wild. They were chameleon, shifting appearance with light, as did the color of his skin.

  Sometimes he seemed quite tanned, sometimes tan lifted to gray. The first time she saw him, she was sure it was an ailment. How creased, so youthful a face: it had to be a disorder. The disorder soon became art under her study. The more she analyzed its pattern, the weaves and crossings of the cells on it, the more it confounded her.

  Salem wasn’t sure at first what it was that drew her to him, because he wore the same fossil skin then. She was nineteen, he looked forty. But the jazz in his eyes made her whimsical. She wondered about this man of darkness and light who yet felt more natural than wind. How did he measure up to her father’s barometer?

  She knew that choices needed to be made. She could never go back to Milk is Available Here. Not the IGA again. Never.

  • 3 •

  Salem was a little turtle locked up in its shell, before T-Mo. Her parents conversed with her on a need-to-know basis. Her mother had stormed out of Nana Modesty’s womb the very night of a Christmas pageant to earn the name Pageant. Her father . . . she could think of no other name that suited him better. No one set eyes upon his righteous face and felt no need to go: Ike! He was a militant man, raised her so.

  Both parents were immigrants, second or third cousins to each other but singly raised in spartan households by Salem’s equally migrant grandparents, Modesty and Roam. Ike and Pageant found themselves tossed together in a flight to freedom, thousands of miles on foot as refugees, an army of them, sometimes fearful, often cold, always hungry. Fleeing war from a troubled country. Soon as they found peaceable settlement in a place called East Point, Ike clasped a hat in his fist and told, not asked, Pageant to be the mother of his babies. “Marry you?” she said. “Yes,” he said.

  Growing up, Salem nurtured dreams of abandoning her parents. Walk, trot, run—anything to take her to a place far enough that her parents could never find her. In her dreams she did trains, streets, park benches, dumpsters. In real life her ventures outside the house were the dentist, the library, the church.

  The only moments she found recreation were when Pastor Ike shared his congregation with a visitor reverend. Like Bennetts Brooke. Reverend Brooke was a wired little fellow with mouth and bounce. His voice thundered, his feet danced. He bobbed at the pulpit, tossed knees and elbows, and boomed his voice at the faithful through a wireless microphone: “Who, Lord?”

  “Us!” the brethren cried.

  “Who, Lord!”

  “Us, Lord!”

  “Who did Bless His Holy Name choose?”

  “Us!”

  “He loves you,” pointing at a woman in the front row.

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “And you, and you, and you.”

  “Oh yes. Lord, oh Lord.”

  His eyes went intimate or wild to hush or animate the brethren. “This,” he cried, holding the crucified savior on his timber cross, raising the wretched savior to face the faithful. “This”—a whisper now—“is the completeness of His Love.”

  “Mercy.”

  “Hear us, Lord.”

  “Amen.”

  The pastor’s eye fell upon her. “Amen,” he whispered. “Amen,” he shouted.

  “Amen,” she whispered.

  Beside Salem, Pageant shook. Her eyes were closed in fervor, quite unusual for a most unemotional woman. “Yes Lord,” she whispered, over and over, moments before she fell convulsing from the pew. Reverend Brooke held his cross on her convulsing self, held and held it, even as the choir burst into song:

  Come Thou Holy Spirit,

  Holy, Holy, Infinite,

  Come Thou Power and Peace,

  Oh Ye Seraphim

  Oh Ye Blessed Light

  Come Thou Holy Spirit.

  Come.

  “Amen,” said the reverend. “Amen,” repeatedly. Held and held the cross as, around the church, people spread their hands and began to speak in tongues:

  Ahmm-bralla-gaither-malu-theologa-umber-trivo!

  Pla-ci-te-reciter-spiriniu-printa-go!

  Salem, thrilled and curious, watched as the reverend held and held that cross on her mother’s chest until Pageant came to and, meek as a person hypnotized, took the reverend’s hand that steered her back to the pew. The choir chimed a lustful chorus from page 37 (b) of the hymnbook:

  Sing to the mountains.

  Lift your hearts!

  Pageant’s palm was sweaty when Salem slipped her hand into it. Somewhere in the back of the church, commotion as another of the brethren h
ad the shakes. Somewhere to her right, a little child was asking his mother why she was “crying in God’s garden.”

  To Salem, it was the best day ever, an occasion. Marked the turning point from lack of adventure to escapades in the church. Outside church, Salem watched people come and go. Often there was tea and people brought things: lavender sandwiches, salad buns, face fingers, frost-cream scones, honeydew puffs, poppy seed muffins . . . and much tea and lemonade. Slowly she learnt people, understood those whose sincerity flowed easy as water, those whose charitable words reeked with malice, those who came to observe and collect gossip, those who shook hands and genuinely cared, those who collected around each other and showed brand new bags, veils, hats, gloves, jackets, neckties, anything that glittered. Some gowns had lace, others didn’t. Some were ankle length, others above the knee. Some ballooned before the knee or hugged thighs or ran down tiered or straight. It was a parade which, in her modest tunic and level heels, Salem found delight in watching. She understood all kinds of folk, filtered them like a sieve.

  When she grew up enough to earn the chalet at the back of the house, her distractions were mainly visitor reverends, church fetes and family bees. Her life was empty, she knew. But how to change it? There were harmless tea parties where she swallowed lemonade that looked and tasted like cough medicine, nibbled finger food that was scrumptious but meager; you put it in your mouth and it melted. There were tongue-tied girls and polished boys who never wore bad socks or a single hair out of place. But these boys knew enough of Pastor Ike Drew not to muck about with his daughter, or the daughters of his parishioners.