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There is a country beyond that which is known to humankind. A stray country. A country that exists west of October. Whose borders are somewhere between midnight train whistles and the distant howl of a dog. A country that lies somewhere in the stitched and jittering static between radio stations. A country that drifts through America like a traveling salesman, but every now and then stops to nest on a small town. A small church. A single street. And maybe, just maybe, some kinda delayed radio broadcast you’ve stuffed in your ears . . . STRAY COUNTRY is a fiction podcast. Original Novels. Delivered chapter by chapter. Come to the Country - www.straycountry.com. If you’d like to support the podcast consider leaving a rating, sharing it on social media/with a friend, or visiting my Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/ckturner See you in the Country . . .
Find out more about me
If you like my writing, you can support me on Patreon -
Thursday May 13, 2021
Thursday May 13, 2021
Thursday May 13, 2021
1987. America. The suburbs. Old Lady Brogan dies on Halloween trying to light her cigarette. A cigarette held in the mad conquistador grip of a dead woman all Halloween day. A cigarette that falls from her hand as her body is carted away. A cigarette found by two boys who soon after begin being followed by a white plastic grocery sack. A cigarette they can no longer return because it's been smoked . . . somewhere in Stray Country.
Tuesday May 18, 2021
Tuesday May 18, 2021
Tuesday May 18, 2021
Portrait of a small suburban street. This is the world homecoming G.I.s built after witnessing death delivered on an industrial scale. Small. Quiet. Ordinary. Well behaved to the point of being boring. Green manicured lawns stretched out like slumbering cats. Polite little houses, all standing in a row. Two trees per yard. A streetlight keeping watch on every corner and smoke panting up out of a thousand chimneys like the soft plumes of faraway trains. There's something of a carousel quality to it all. Been here before. Seen this already. But this is where men who'd gone to fight the first fully mechanized war tried to forget about it. A war without horses. A war dedicated to the patron saint of internal combustion. Where cannons drove themselves, and gasoline was as good as gunpowder. A war governed by bombs and bigger bombs and bigger bombs until the bombs had grown so big there was fear they'd crack the planet like a nut. These poor boys came home looking for a quiet not even the churches could portion. Hushed corners of America had to be built to suit, named Southmoor, or Westmoor, or Moormont where former soldiers tried to drain their heads of all the noise of the frustrated, frightened century. The jangled century of hate and heavy industry and fascist wars. If you've ever stood on a quiet suburban street in the middle of the day and noticed the hushed picture has something of a cemetery quality to it, you may consider who it was built for, after where they'd been, and what they'd seen. Men who thought they were running away from the machines, but ended up in the same place. Like a ride on a carousel. Because their homes and streets were milled at a rate of thirty houses a day in a distilled twenty-six step process. Manufactured on the same scale, using the same principles and converted energy of industrial war engines. You see, a hungry beast built this peace and quiet. A hoggish, greedy entity that shows up once humankind starts playing with machines. A type of pig.
. . . and even though this is 1987, there is still something hungry on Eastmoor Road.
Thursday May 20, 2021
Thursday May 20, 2021
Thursday May 20, 2021
Old Lady Brogan dies on Halloween trying to light her cigarette. A cigarette clutched in the mad conquistador grip of a dying woman all Halloween day. Turning a simple Marlboro Red into some kind of backwards and badly-spoiled relic.
This is a woman who began her dying early, hoisting her automatic knuckles, walking a long agonizing route through a maze of smoke and cellophane. A woman who lived for the spark of a flint wheel, the candle-like glow of a cheap plastic Bic, and the prayer-like ritual of the very first drag.
You see, this was Mary Brogan's very last cigarette. And she's not going to leave it behind.
Thursday May 27, 2021
Thursday May 27, 2021
Thursday May 27, 2021
Halloween night. Four hours from November. Jack-o'-lanterns flicker on porches. Leaves fall from the trees. The street is washed in all the milk colors of the moon. And the trick or treaters have thinned to nothing.
A reverential hush has descended on Eastmoor Road after the passing of one of their own. Neighbors are tucked back into their warmly lit homes to think on the lost bits and pieces of a woman named Mary Brogan - here only this morning, now plucked out of the fabric of humankind.
Mary Brogan. The only smoker on the street. A woman whose arms were lifted and lugged by a company called Phillip Morris. A woman known for hoisting her automated knuckles, her marionette arms hauling tar and tobacco and the soft red glow of a cigarette.
Billy used to walk past her house nights and see her Marlboro Red blinking on and off like a radio tower. The signal is gone. But as Billy passes her house tonight, his ears tune into something else . . . something that sounds a lot like radio static.
A white plastic sack, fluttering in her willow tree . . .
Thursday Jun 03, 2021
Thursday Jun 03, 2021
Thursday Jun 03, 2021
Marlboro Country. Stray Country. Two countries that share a common border. Spend enough time in one, and you're likely to find the other. One exists in the semi-gloss pages of 1950s American magazines, a country once stumbled upon by accident, waiting in a dentist office or driving past a billboard at the side of a freeway. The other is similarly a country entered by pure chance.
Both may kill you.
Mary Brogan, former citizen of Marlboro Country, expatriated. Current status - refugee. Location - somewhere in Stray Country.
There is a nightmare endemic to the soil of both countries. A nightmare by the name of nicotine. It is the same nightmare as prison bars, leg irons, and state penitentiaries. The kind of nightmare ghosts basted themselves in night sweats over.
Mary Brogan. Died trying to light her cigarette. A woman who spent her life working on a single, solitary puzzle. Morning. Noon. Night. Kitchen. Living Room. In front of the television. An enigma unraveled thread by thread. Year by year. A single-gram puzzle made out of tobacco, tar, filter, and paper that a woman needs to solve no matter how dead she is.
No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact
Mary Brogan's not gone. She's just crossed borders. And she wants her cigarette.
Friday Jun 11, 2021
Friday Jun 11, 2021
Friday Jun 11, 2021
A school off script.
What makes up a school? Kids. Textbooks. Teachers. Noise. Daylight. Strip these away, one by one, and start stacking up midnight hours against the vacant building, what might you find?
Maybe, a small corner of Stray Country.
You see, if you're a boy like Billy, a boy who's begun to wonder if he's being followed by a white plastic grocery sack, then you're also a boy that can see a school is only a school when all the right ingredients are stirred together. But take them away one by one, mix in silence, space, quiet, nighttime, flickering fluorescents - and the tight threads of school begin to unravel . . .
There's a science book in there somewhere. At least, there was by day.
And a janitor.
The type of man who might just whisper to white plastic sacks.
Friday Jun 18, 2021
Friday Jun 18, 2021
Friday Jun 18, 2021
There is a building not far from your home. A squatty, ugly building. Expansive. Long. But small, in the eyes of the world. Of little historical consequence. It will have no historian. No lengthy narration. No bound and shelved chronicle. Someday, it will be torn down and built anew. After which it will exist in the memories of those who were unlucky enough to have passed through it, until the bodies that hold those memories are eaten by worms or shut up in a furnace. It is a building that haunts folks no matter how far they run from it. No matter how many years they put between themselves and it. A building that does as much to shape a kid as a rigid church, a broken home, a drunken father.
It is a building composed in the main of bricks and mortar. But in truth, built on the strange shifting tides of adolescent years. A building where children are forced to inter their childhoods, and try on the strange, starchy, and ill-fitting funeration clothing of adulthood. A burial ground for song, dance, and invisible friends. A corner of the country where Americans lose the faith, in the religion of being children.
Which means an ill-lit corner of Stray Country.
And would you believe there is a man who chose this building as his place of employment? He's called a janitor. And he's the man who mops up the molt of kids' childhood shells. After hours. Alone. By himself. Perhaps looking . . . perhaps, wondering . . . just where he misplaced his own childhood.
Friday Jun 25, 2021
Friday Jun 25, 2021
Friday Jun 25, 2021
There is a man in this tale who is never named. A man simply called by a singular title, same as Prophet, Priest or King.
Janitor
A man who once upon a time had much in common with Mary Brogan. And though the two never met, both were disciples of Phillip Morris's strange religion. Both engaged in faithful worship. Daily prayers. Morning study. Sunday service. And all the other sacraments of the religion.
But while Mary Brogan died in the faith, the janitor is a man in a state of apostasy. A man who shut his Bible years ago, so to speak. A fence-sitter in the war for people's lungs. A man who did his damnedest, but never could give up cigarettes. So he gave up matches. Lighters. Fire of all types. A man who still plants an empty prayer on his lips by the name of Marlboro Red. A lonely cigarette that never meets a match. Like a prayer that gets written down, but never sent to God.
This is a man who once upon a time blessed the sacrament at The Church of Phillip Morris. A priest familiar with the alter cloth of white plastic grocery sacks used in service. A clergyman whose own golden years were the incense in the censer.
And though he's no longer practicing, you never outgrow the religion of your youth. Which makes him the type of man who may just notice if a boy were being followed by a white plastic grocery sack.
Friday Jul 02, 2021
Friday Jul 02, 2021
Friday Jul 02, 2021
Only one day ago, there was a stray corner of Stray Country kept hemmed in by a retired seamstress on Eastmoor rd.
Mrs. Mary Brogan, who by the sacraments of her religion was aging. An over-the-hill husk of a woman who now and then caught a reflection of a woman who'd left too many pieces of her youth in too many ashtrays for too many years for too few executives at 120 Park Avenue.
Mrs. Mary Brogan, a woman who kept the faith, but left a second chance lying in a pile of smoke in a glass-blown ashtray somewhere on Eastmoor rd.
A woman who always believed the next cigarette was her last cigarette, and her last cigarette was her last chance.
A woman who still believes it . . . even in death.
Friday Jul 09, 2021
Friday Jul 09, 2021
Friday Jul 09, 2021
Mom.
Dad.
Two actors who headline the Broadway pageant of our lives. But in Stray Country may play bit parts to a cigarette. Third billing to a dead lady down the street. Be upstaged by a white plastic grocery sack.
Two people who may as well be in another country.
Because they are.
This is how Stray Country works.
It is not a country a man decides to visit. It is not a country a woman flies or drives to. It is not a place anyone can point to on any map.
It is a country that finds you.
Takes you far away.
Somewhere very staticky.
Somewhere between radio signals.
Somewhere beyond the range of parental radio towers.
Friday Jul 16, 2021
Friday Jul 16, 2021
Friday Jul 16, 2021
We've reached the part of the story where it may be time to ask yourself, perhaps it's time to consider the origin of the white plastic grocery sack. What it is. And how it got here.
Don't bother reaching for your phone.
You don't need it.
Because you already know it was made by a group of people. Men or women who hog-tied one dollar. A dollar they were trying to turn into two. So they could take both dollars and breed them like dogs. Men who wanted to stud Benjamin Franklin. Women who took the forefather's maxim 'money begets money' quite Biblically. People who saw Grant, and Jackson, Lincoln and Washington as heat-cycle bitches.
You see the white plastic grocery sack was not an invention.
It's a byproduct.
Same as soot. Same as slag. Same as smoke. Same as straw. A byproduct of breeding dollar bills. Something that shows up once humankind starts studding dead presidents on an industrial scale.
The moral of today's chapter?
I'll let you decide.
Friday Jul 23, 2021
Friday Jul 23, 2021
Friday Jul 23, 2021
In 1981 the Federal Trade Commission of the United States issued a report to the American Congress that concluded health warning labels had little effect on public knowledge and attitudes about smoking. As a result Congress enacted the Comprehensive Smoking Education Act of 1984, which required four specific health warnings on all cigarette packages and advertisements.
They are, as follows:
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risk to Your Health.
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Birth Weight.
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.
May I suggest a fifth:
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: There is No Risk-Free Level of Exposure to Secondhand Smoke.
Friday Jul 30, 2021
Friday Jul 30, 2021
Friday Jul 30, 2021
Just exactly how many cigarettes does it take to kill you?
Most smokers lose count. But they say there's a guy in the sky who is counting. Who will never lose count. And they say come death there'll be a scoreboard of sorts, where a man or a woman or a person's life will be tallied-up and measured. Something, perhaps, not too dissimilar to the witches calculus, hen-scratches and check-marks it takes to get a loan from a bank. Where all your human activity is quantified, measure and weighed. Where people are distilled into ones, zeros and decimal points to determine who gets into Heaven and who gets turned away.
Whether or not that is all true is irrelevant.
Because there's also another guy in the sky counting. Perhaps a woman. A person, up in the heavens but not as far north as God. Somewhere on the 26th floor. Philip Morris Building - 120 Park Ave. These are people counting just how many cigarettes it takes to kill someone. They have an answer. A very specific number.
I won't claim to know the number. But, I can promise you one thing -
That number isn't one.
Friday Aug 06, 2021
Friday Aug 06, 2021
Friday Aug 06, 2021
Edward Walter Schneider
1972-1987
Edward "Eddie" Walter Schneider was called home to a greater purpose in Heaven. We will miss his smile, his voice, his calm demeanor, his laugh, his hugs (rare as they were), his late mornings (trying to pull 'the bear' out of his cave), asking him to turn down his music (again), and watching him grow into 'Switchback Jack' - the stage name he'd picked out for when he became a famous rock star. Mom, Dad & Bethany miss you, Eddie. Add some color to Heaven's choir. In lieu of flowers, please support a musician.
Friday Aug 13, 2021
Friday Aug 13, 2021
Friday Aug 13, 2021
Billy.
Jack.
Smart boys. Able to understand much. Bound to be successful at most things in life, but not in the one thing all humans try and fail - looking over the lonely country we call death and grasping what they see.
Two boys still young enough to climb a tree. Taking in the view every man, woman, or person must take in at some point in their life. Forming a question that will never be answered. Not by a poet. Not by a pastor. Not by a physician. Not by a prayer.
How is it the knots that moor us here feel so tight yet slip so easily?
Friday Aug 20, 2021
Friday Aug 20, 2021
Friday Aug 20, 2021
If you entered the bedroom of a dead boy what might you find?
Maybe a stray corner of Stray Country.
There's an old saying, "Every human is put on Earth condemned to die. Time and method of execution unknown." Case in point: Edward Schneider. Lately deceased. A brash boy, yearning to impress a girl. Beaten by a cigarette, by his own ego, and by the shifting winds that blow somewhere in Stray Country.
What has he left behind?
Less than you think.
Friday Aug 27, 2021
Friday Aug 27, 2021
Friday Aug 27, 2021
Edward Schneider. Not the first, and certainly not the last American who died precisely the way he lived, chasing a hunger across shopping malls and retail outlets only to wind up suffocated by the little world he'd built. Edward Schneider, body removed, just this morning lying on the floor of his bedroom between so much commercial flotsam, all his gathered goods worthless as the white plastic sack that carted them home.
Friday Sep 03, 2021
Friday Sep 03, 2021
Friday Sep 03, 2021
You are about to see the last microscopic puzzle pieces of Eddie Schneider lying in a latex dumpster, lying in a white plastic grocery sack moonlighting as a bedroom trash liner, soon to be carted away to a steel-rimmed garbage can, only to be swallowed by a mammoth steel beast, only to be vomited into a city landfill, where it will be buried and buried and buried until sunlight is some kind of fairy tale. A puzzle that will forever remain a jumbled mess of jigsaw pieces. Never to be put together. So the story of Edward Schneider comes to a close. A narrative much different, and yet the same as your average American smoker.
Friday Sep 10, 2021
Friday Sep 10, 2021
Friday Sep 10, 2021
Billy.
Jack.
Two boys who are now being followed by a white plastic grocery sack.
Friday Sep 17, 2021
Friday Sep 17, 2021
Friday Sep 17, 2021
Portrait of a junior high school. Deep autumn. A carpet of red leaves rolled out on the walk. The sun sliding away into the trees. But the glitz of Hollywood is far away. This is a cheap sun. A nickel and dime sun. With a cheapness that goes past half-hearted rays and clocking out early. This is a sun that sang its loudest songs somewhere on a stage last July. Last August. An aging lounge singer. A faded star. No longer part of the sky. Eclipsed by movement of earth and time. A tawdry little shine soon to flame out west. Forgotten. A sun that doesn't give a shit that it's leaving two boys alone, with a junior high school.