Bill Kte’pi’s Official Web Site

10.

Read the rest…

9.

Read the rest…

8.

“There’s something — in her mouth.”

Read the rest…

7.

Last night I dreamed again of being lost — lost so deep beneath that I didn’t even know where I’d come from, who I was — and I didn’t care. It was a dream of that sort I remember noting as a girl — the dream that begins in progress, but unlike novels might do, there are no subsequent flashbacks, no ruminatory expositions — only a sense of the past having happened in order to put forth the present. The question, of course, is always — is the elision the dream’s doing, or that of memory? Did we in fact dream the beginning? Has memory hidden it from us? Or did we dream in motion, as though landing from a great height and tumbling with the force of it?

It was at that age that I was so fond, as girls are, of the phrase “I would rather die.” I had no idea what that meant, of course — we girls of that age, oh we never did. It was drama, and it was my first love, never you, Michael, never you if you’ll forgive me that. All the great people died, after all, all the very very best people, so naturally I wanted to — naturally! It was so sweet, like a perfect berry, cold and trembling and full of wet. I would lay still sometimes, on my bed, testing out the poses I thought I might wish people to see me in at my wake. I would hold my breath for as long as I could, hoping my lips would turn blue, wondering how skin felt different after death, hoping someone would walk into my bedroom and see me, mistake me for dead.

I dreamed last night I was lost, but not trapped — the difference is so much, so much, the difference between sleeping and laying down. They are associated with one another, but they are not the same. People think of being lost, and they think of, I don’t know, they think of having mixed up their roads in a visiting city, and forgetting which way they came — they think of being somewhere they do not know how to leave, and their ignorance keeps them there. But we are lost from birth — we do not know where we are, and must constantly learn it — but certainly would not, could not, try to find our way “back,” because there is nowhere to which to return. Being lost can mean being hidden — like the “lost world” of that book you liked, Michael, and the “lost continent” I see in so many of those magazine stories — the world, the continent, does not forget where it is, and to return elsewhere is not an option — but it is lost all the same.

Being lost is not the same thing as being trapped. Being lost can be — should be — has been for me — the most wonderful, thrilling thing in the world — as we speak of losing ourselves in sex — we say we lose ourselves to God — we become lost in the moment –

You are only trapped if you want to leave.

M.

Read the rest…

6.
Read the rest…

5.

Read the rest…

4.

Castle examined every inch of earth, but there were no holes. However the cat, rat, whatever, had gotten in, it didn’t seem to have been through the garden. The soil was slightly moist, in that way gardens often are, but not loose enough for a hole to disappear itself. There was a garden snake — garter snake? he’d called it both as a kid and couldn’t remember what it was actually called — he found when he turned over one of the flatter rocks, but for one thing, it was in the garden, not the house; and for another, he wasn’t sure a snake could knock over a glass longneck.

Read the rest…

3.

I’m lost. I don’t know where I came from, and I don’t care.

The voice kept ringing in Castle’s head, and what was disconcerting about it was that it sounded different now. It sounded more like Castle’s own inner voice, the way it would if he were just repeating someone’s phone number to himself so he wouldn’t forget it; not like the breathy, moany, almost Kate Bush-ish voice he’d first heard, clearly but distant as if from a nearby room, when he came downstairs to call Dr Williams about The Incident.

Read the rest…

2.

Read the rest…

I’m going to serialize another free novel here, a haunted house story I wrote in the summer of 2004, largely while watching softball whenever there wasn’t a Red Sox game on.

This was not the first novel I wrote. It wasn’t even the fourth. But it was the first one written in what I think of as my current arc as a writer, which is a lot of horseshit you don’t need to worry about except to know this: I still feel like, and still write like, the writer who wrote this novel. I would not take a substantially different approach with it if I wrote it now. I might be less likely to set it in New England, but I think that was a necessity here; Southern wealth and Boston Brahmin wealth are just not the same beast.

I was immersed in this novel to a greater degree than the others I’d written, and anyone who knew me then would probably confirm: I woke up every morning and asked myself, what can I do to Castle Finch today? What horrible thing can I inflict on him?

So this is chapter one, in which the fortunate son of a wealthy political family is consigned to house arrest in a strange, strange place called Domino. This is a dirty, dirty book, with horrible people doing horrible things, and if your parents were to complain about you reading it, they would undoubtedly be in the right.

Read the rest…