I started cribinacrackhood because my friend Red lives in a crack hood. We took footage of burnt out houses, created a map of whores, gangs, innocent bystanders, and just another drug-related crime (that’s all on the cribinacrackhood pages). But then it became evident that crack hoods are everywhere, especially inside every human heart. Horrible things happen in crack hoods, but so do fantastic things, because in the Crack hood, the furnace is hot, burning away all the impurities. The Crack Hood is a crucible. Why? Because of love. Why do you think people smoke crack in the first place? LOVE. It’s more dangerous than all the crack on the planet. And you never ever get free of love. It’s a serial killer. A mass murderer. The only way out? Through the black tunnel, the bright white. Through the orchid doused in nectar and fumbling through pollen – you bumbling bee.
An Excerpt from my unpublished Vampire novel, Feeders:
Leah acquired my heart in the manner of a hornbill. She placed the orchid upon my tongue a petal at a time, showing me the ingenious devices the orchid employed in acquiring and dispersing pollen through the aid of a bee.
“Here is the nectar Luce.” She tore open the column, a specialized petal, to reveal the nectar sack. “Taste.” She touched it to my tongue then pulled it away.
I struggled to catch it in my teeth. Leah rubbed it against my cheek. At that point, she had even secured my head. I couldn’t turn to eat it. Leah was starving me.
“This is where he enters,” she said, “That horny male bee. He wants to fuck. He wants to eat. But he gets all drunk and fumbly and can’t get back out the way he came.” She watched my eyes fall upon the fruit she had placed on the table next to her.
“You’re very hungry aren’t you Luce?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes what?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She smiled.
“And this tunnel. Do you see it?” She held it to my face. “This is where the pollen lies. The orchid forces him to go there. He’s sticky and drunk and gets pollen all over himself.” She laid it against my lips. I opened and she placed it upon my tongue.
As I chewed and swallowed her small gift of food, she kissed me on my forehead.
“I am the orchid Luce. You are the bee. Don’t forget that. I’m always soaking you in nectar and dousing you with pollen. You will always follow the path that I choose.”
This next excerpt I think I may have posted before on this blog, from my most recent novel, Line of Battle:
It was an exceptional period of her life, filled with all those screams, the sheer mass of bodies, the need to honor the dead, and the impact of so much burial upon the eyes, the chest, the fingers, and the arms themselves. And how, when you’ve ascertained through subtle clues (in spite of the handcuffs and the blindfold) that the next session of torture is about to begin, a magnificent array of bright points sprays into your face and the backdrop of your heart. And you are escorted by your torturers through the field of battle to the line of battle that sways first one direction, then the other. And there at the spot where the fighting is most fierce, that is where you find the body of Kurzan hanging in the forest with a single bright hole in his forehead. And having been forced to go this far, you climb the long climb that is the length of Kurzan’s legs and thighs. You scrabble and claw and after quite a lot of disturbing sounds of battle, you reach the central flower in his forehead where the mining stake had been used to pry open a door. And crawling blind through the brightness of the flower, you learn how you only guessed at life before, viewing all life as though through binoculars.
Even as a child, she never wanted a life well-fed, a life of taffeta and wine and ice. She wanted life dirty. To live a truth, she thought, a simple curve that life itself demands of you, is impossible. You hope to find that wedge of unfiltered light, not golden (or perhaps only faintly so), and not lily-like in its hue. She saw the light many times while walking farther and farther in the special hut whose name meant fresh, new. The old man never let the fire go out. And Mars lay naked and warm, floating in milk, in the creamy skin of a woman who carried Mars back and forth across the great ocean. A person introduced and known to her quite simply, as the Envoy. A simple revelation, over and over, of something flawless. And Mars had been there, in its passing.
