Fun Reads by Rich Schram

Light Off An Ebola Corolla Some months ago I fought my way through a portion of   The Decameron , Giovanni Boccaccio’s 700-page, 14 th century expos é of human nature. A doorstop? Yes. Boring? Not entirely. I gained tongue-clicking insight into the mores of that century’s wild and crazy upper crust of society. Perhaps their devil-may-care attitude may have been a last-ditch response to the horror of Italian life Boccaccio described in the introduction: a synapse-numbing depiction of how the black plague killed 65% of Florence’s 80,000 inhabitants in 1348-1349. Those were not happy times. During the four-year period when the black plague raged throughout Europe, ignorance and fear reigned. Residents in some locations fought the disease by attacking, killing, or burning alive members of any group deemed responsible: Jews and Gypsies (always unfortunate targets), anyone with a skin malady (the original heartache of psoriasis), foreigners, and refugees. One also...

Makes Sense To Me In her book, Word Painting, Rebecca McClanahan discusses the importance of exploiting our senses in our writing. Description of odor, she noted, is especially difficult. This is a challenge for me in the best of circumstances; my smeller began to fail in 1962 when I sniffed an open, unlabeled container and discovered ammonia’s dark potential. Use of one’s senses is not always about ability. Sometimes memories go dormant, waiting for the right trigger to waken them. I may have been forty years old when I entered a restaurant foyer heated by a kerosene stove. Wham! That combusting kerosene odor hit my brain, tears flooded my eyes, and my throat knotted like I’d swallowed a stone. When I was young, my nose was crackerjack, and I still possess old olfactory memories. Put my nose anywhere near a kerosene heater, and I fly back in time faster than Doctor Who. Zap! I’m in my four-year-old body in a chicken coop, planted on a bed of fresh sawdust among the warmth of a ...

1 SECRETS KEPT, DEC 15, 1995 He waited and watched, unmoving and unobserved. No fishermen lingered on the water. No navigation lights revealed boats underway or at anchor. No voices carried over the water to disclose anyone drift fishing, and no dock lights bragged of catches being cleaned. Other than waves slapping against the shoreline, the lake lay quiet. Battened against December’s cold and dampness, all lakeside residents had darkened their homes for sleep. Snappish weather ruled the land and water. Reassured no lakeside neighbors would see him, he tried Teri Moderow’s front and back doors. Locked . His gloved hand raised a hammer but hesitated, shaking. “No, too loud,” he whispered to himself. He laid the hammer on the doormat and instead extracted a key from beneath a nearby ceramic frog. Following an almost inaudible click of the deadbolt, he reinserted the key into the frog’s glazed belly and picked up the hammer. Inside, the house lay in dark, cave-like silence...