Work In Progress - Two Novels

Writings & Work in Progress by Tony Power
Links to writing are downloadable PDF's

NOVEL 1: SEA TO SKY

Chapter 1- Poolnapping

Through the department-store-sized picture windows he can see clusters of adults in evening dress, some of them seated, most on their feet. It's like a movie without a sound track. Mutely, they move their lips, contort their faces, gesticulate, raise glasses and cigarettes to their mouths. On the far side of the room, up close to the glass, a few couples are performing restrained, adult versions of what they probably believe to be the Frug.
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Chapter 2- Go for it

It was Easter weekend, the Saturday after Good Friday, a day that for all its sunny promise was fated to end nearly as badly as did that night at the pool...This time the trouble was the direct, readily foreseeable consequence of Leo's allowing himself to be persuaded against his better judgment to participate in an ill-advised attempt at combining two recreational pastimes generally considered to be mutually exclusive, namely alpine skiing and the taking of psychedelic drugs.
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Chapter 3- Gondola

When he looked up again he found that she was once more regarding him with big, troubled eyes but quickly looked away -- over at Russ, as it happened... out of the frying pan and into the fire, his brother favoring her with a wolfishly winsome smile that served only to heighten her evident discomfort...Again her gaze darted away, dropping to the door of their cab, to which was affixed a metal sign the size of a playing card specifying the gondola's maximum permissible capacity (4) and weight (1200 lbs.) in three languages (German, French, and English), which she stared down at, blinking and trembling and in fact looking as if she were about to jump out of her perfect creamy skin.
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Chapter 4- On the Peak

The view was amazing, enough to rouse the most apathetic observer, and to set a person to pondering the Big Picture: Geology and Time; the immensity and antiquity of earth and cosmos; and one's own puniness and transience in the scheme of things. Not Leo, though. Not this morning. He was too preoccupied just now with a more immediate question that had been posing itself ever more insistently since they attained the summit a quarter of an hour ago, namely: How to get back down? Specifically, how to get back down on a beat-up, dull-edged pair of Head Standards, with his brain registering ever more powerfully the effects of the little lavender tablet?
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This chapter appeared recently in Memewar #8. Mar. '09'

Chapter 5- On the Peak II

Just as they cleared the ridge and were about to move on to more relaxing terrain the lift engine cut out and the haul-rope froze and they stopped moving, silence falling like a foot of powder. For a moment their chair rocked back and forth in diminishing arcs, then it reversed direction, slipping back through the sheave train and out over the brink of the cliff again before coming once more to a stop. Momentum swung them back and suddenly Leo found himself beholding between the V of his dangling skis a sight he had done his best to avoid during their ascent: a heart-seizing, Wile E. Coyote's-eye view straight down to the heap of talus at the base of the cliff a very long ways below.
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Chapter 6- Black Diamond Blues

Russ bid his grinning band-mates goodnight and reeled off with his prospective paramour across the frozen mud into the black mountain night, his arm encircling her soft waist, palm cupping her hip, her musky perfume wafting up his nostrils and visions of carnal delights on the water-bed in the back bedroom of his uncle's A-frame rising before his eyes -- high hopes that were dashed just a few minutes later when a red Mustang fastback roared past them as they wobbled down the side of the dark highway, then hit the binders and screeched to a stop and ground into reverse and roared back their way and again screeched to a stop, eight-track blasting Hendrix, V-8 revving up near the redline, the driver proving to be a very uptight boyfriend, hitherto undisclosed, who after a brief, tense exchange and several dire threats delivered against a disturbingly apt musical background ('Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand / I'm goin' down to shoot my old lady, caught her messin' round with another man') whisked the suddenly-tearful Vicky off into the icy, star-strewn night, leaving Russ high and dry, inebriated and unfulfilled ... to stumble on down the shoulder of the road and through the woods back to the A-frame and his lonely bed. Read More...

Chapter 7- Trip Down

Time even for a fitting musical selection to pop up on his inner juke-box: '5-D': Trippy little ditty by The Byrds, with their trademark harmonies and jangly twelve-string and lysergic lyrics:
'Oh how is it that I could come out to here
And be still floatin'?
And never hit bottom and keep fallin' through
Just relaxed and paying attention...'

And simultaneously the view back past his companion water drop through his splayed, booted feet at the underbelly of the bridge: wet black wood glistening with damp and ice, and mottled with pale-green, weakly phosphorescent foxfire. And above, the boughs of a cedar, dark green against an amazingly blue sky ruled in two by a diagonal slash of white, the contrail of a jet. And from out of that blue, in the instant that the sequence ended -- a scream. Then an explosion of colour and rupture. Read More...

Chapter 8- Title to Come

He shut the book and returned it to the pack, wondering if it was possible to live at home with your family in a far-west Canadian suburb, to frequent bourgeois ski resorts, to number among your associates several members of Demolay -- and still be an Existentialist? It seemed doubtful.

Now he raised his head and looked around, trying to remember what he was after. Over by the gondola barn the injured skier was still flat on his back, still puffing away on his— Cigarette!

Quickly, he located his Gauloises but the package proved dismayingly flat. Empty.

A memory now from late morning. Riding up alone on the new Blue Chair... bringing out the blue package and shaking out the last one in his palm... getting it lit on the third match and immediately hacking himself half to death... giving up and snapping it down into the snow flowing past below like a white river... wondering what French lungs had going for them that they could abide the things. If it weren't his artistic obligation to smoke them he'd have switched long ago.
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Chapter 9- Title to Come

Leo, too, faced back around and sipped his drink and dragged on his cigarette and blew smoke rings at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar while keeping an eye on the rowdy table. The rings emerged from his puckered lips fat and round, but immediately were pulled out of shape and drawn ceilingwards under the influence of the overhead fan.

The guy in the buckskin jacket was slumped in his chair at the end of the table nearest the bandstand, arms folded across his chest, staring down the room with a crooked little smile and an avid, covetous expression on his face.

Leo followed his eye to a table across from the bandstand by the window, not far from where the three women had been sitting. There, impaled on his predacious gaze like an exquisite butterfly on a straight pin, sat the girl from the gondola
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NOVEL II: WORK IN PROGRESS

Chapter 1- Smell of Art

Realism had been his ambition -- insofar at least as such was possible with a 'blind' contour drawing -- but the sketch before him on the table was wildly expressionist. Abstract expressionist almost. The male figure was a tubby hominoid with stunted, flipper-like arms -- the Pillsbury Thalidomide Doughboy -- and the female an even worse mess: hands like baseball mitts; face like one of those Picasso African-mask hookers; a giraffe neck that even whatshisname, the Italian guy, might have thought a bit much; and elephantine legs like those fatsos by that South American painter Melanie thought so 'amazing!', the Colombian. Overall the effect was of something produced in the clinical trial of some potent psychotropic drug by a severely tripped-out subject with minimal drafting skills, and a hand tremor to boot.
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This chapter was recently published in the Seattle magazine Golden Handcuffs Review #12 (Fall-Winter 2009).

Hear Tony reading from this chapter at the Railway Club in Vancouver on Nov. 25, 2008. This flash file may take a minute or two to load, as it is a large file.



If this player does not work on your browser, you can go to Zachariah Wells' Blog and listen to it there. Or to the original archive site where it is also listed.

Chapter 3- Sweet Little Sixteen

Hadn’t he already suffered his share of grief for one week -- more than his share -- at the hands of crazy teenage girls? What the hell was this one’s problem exactly? And whatever it might be was there any conceivable good reason even so why she couldn’t bring herself to offer some bare acknowledgement of his existence? Make some slight effort, no matter how token, to join him in conversation? Even the grandest of dames deigned to chitchat with the common folk from time to time, did they not? Accept tribute from their subjects and retainers? Exchange pleasantries with the people downstairs and the little people they crossed paths with in their travels? If Princess Grace and Jackie O. and the Queen could manage it, why not the brooding beauty in the seat next to him?
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