THE BEST OF THE SCREAM FACTORY

I was lucky enough to have a story in the issue of THE SCREAM FACTORY that was dedicated to the 25th anniversary of George Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. My story was called "The Zombie Who Walked Down Division Street" and is set in the universe of my novella FOR YOU, THE LIVING. Harry Fassl (HEF), dead a decade now, did the beautiful artwork.

THE CHICAGO SKYLINE FROM ADVOCATE CHRIST HOSPITAL IN OAK LAWN

THE TWO-FLAT ON NEWPORT, WITH GREEN WINDOWS FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER

CLARK'S ON BELMONT FROM THE RED LINE

ARMISTICE DAY & THE GREAT INFLUENZA PANDEMIC

Today is Veterans Day. Once Armistise Day, it marked the end of the First World War. And today is the 100th anniversary. Here's the thing. A lot of returning troops brought back a new strain of avian flu, and it became known as the Spanish flu simply because the US military left from Spain to get to the US.

The book by John M. Barry is quite scary and sobering. A pandemic circles the globe. One of my aunt's mother died of the flu. Between 50 and 100 million people died from this flue. 3% of the Earth's population. Three per cent. Just a century ago.

A few years back, a soldier buried at Ft. Riley KS had his corpse dug up and his DNA extracted and, guess what? We recreated the flu strain. Yay! You can find vials of it, along with smallpox and the Black Death, at Ft. Detrick in Maryland. Oh, that's right. They have Ebola and the Lassa viruses there, too.

ON THE SUBJECT OF BELLAIR IN PHOTOS...

yiu can compare the overhead Google Earth images from 2012 and again in 2017. That's me looking out of the last house going north (left) back in 1982. On the exact opposite side of town was where general store would have been, in the tree area arounds the N or the 10. If it is still there at all. The building above the numbering is one I helped work the foundation on with the man named Bus Downing that I wrote about in my poem. The house we all lived in is the last one standing on the west side of the street going south (right). The one tall building at the intersection is that of the church.

At the opposite side, where 10th meets 1980th, the Rich family used to live there. The father Steve was the local constable. The son Lane was ready to go into the military as soon as he graduated high school and we wished he would get out and never come back. This was the house where, one summer night 36 years ago, two young hippies from Chicago brazenly stole a can of Hungry Dog dog food from the steps of the Rich family's back porch.

BACK TO BELLAIR, PROSE NO PHOTOS

I eventually went on to write 75 Terra Strains mini-poems, none kept, many in forgotten small press magazines. I could probably find 10-15 of them. My time spent in Bellair was not that good, but I did make friends my own age, and some much older whom I knew I would never meet again. One piece dates this entire thing. Bus was a fellow who a bunch of us helped dig a ditch, and he spoke matter-of-factly about our ages. This was still the Cold War, and he fully expected there to be nuclear missiles in the air in our lifetimes. Not his. Ours.