GHOST DIAMOND

GHOST DIAMOND
by Jason Earls
author of Cocoon of Terror, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Red Zen, & Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711


The drummer, Neil, hit three cymbal crashes, choking each one by catching the edge of the cymbals, as Ian, the lead guitarist, hit three F power chords simultaneously, fast and sharp – part of the dynamics to the new song his band Hostile Effluvium was working on. Then the drummer stopped playing, stood up from his drum stool and announced, “Wait guys, I’ve got a good idea for a new song.”
Ian scoffed. “But we’ve got to learn this one first, Neil.”
The rehearsal wasn’t going well. Ian was in a bad mood. Worried about his girlfriend acting so crazy lately and maybe even cheating on him. He was also worried about what might happen at the upcoming Battle of the Bands contest they had entered, which was now only a couple of weeks away. Ian didn’t feel like listening to any new song ideas. The bass player, Bob, stayed silent in the corner; he was in a bad mood as well.
“But I’ve got to tell you guys about this new song before I forget the main idea,” said the drummer.
“All right,” said Ian. “Go ahead.” He frowned and took off his guitar, sat down on the floor and crossed his legs.
“I want to write a song about a woman whose husband dies relatively young. Say at 35. He dies of a heart attack. One day his heart just starts beating in his chest like a machine gun and won’t stop. But he keeps on smoking cigarettes and joints anyway and ignores the pain of his fast-beating heart. After 54 hours his heart explodes and all the veins in his head turn purple and burst like fireworks. His wife loses it. She sees him die in the living room while they’re watching a reality t.v. show. She goes crazy with grief as she pounds on his chest trying to get his heart beating again. Finally she takes him to the hospital and he’s pronounced dead on arrival. Her husband always told her he wanted to be cremated so she tells a funeral director about it and they comply and she asks what to do with his ashes after his corpse is burned to cinders. The nice funeral director gives her a few options and the last one involves a company that will make a diamond from the person’s cremated remains. The woman loves the idea and writes the director a check for $10,000 to handle all the details and have the diamond made for her. Six months goes by and the company finally sends her the diamond mounted as a ring and she absolutely adores it, seeing it as a wonderful memorial to her husband who died from an exploding heart at a young age. One night she sits in her favorite chair with the television on in the background, staring at the diamond for hours. She touches it and thinks of her husband. She loves the ring more than anything else because it reminds her of all the wonderful times she had had with her soul mate. And she knows his essence is right there in the ring with her; his mystical essence is inside the diamond; the stone made from the ashes of the man she loved more than anyone else in the world.
“About two months goes by.
“Strange things start happening.
“One night when she gets out of bed for a glass of water she sees an elderly woman wearing a tall white paper hat walking around her house. And the elderly lady doesn’t have normal arms, they’re all orange and gooey and alien-like. The old woman throws the paper hat at the woman one evening with her gooey arms and runs out the front door. The woman just thinks it’s a bad dream. But the next night she says the old woman again, running in and out of her house, carrying torches and thick chains and wearing long fur coats. Then she hears moaning noises and sees men at her window with long pointed noses and bug eyes. At first she doesn’t associate these happenings with the ring. But then the people start speaking to her. They say it wasn’t really a heart attack that killed her husband. They say he committed suicide to get away from his wife. That he actually hated her. They claim he wanted to kill her but he didn’t want to go to prison so he decided to just kill himself instead. They say he left a note in the house explaining everything. They said she should search for the note and read it. Finally the woman gets pissed off and screams at the visitors:
‘YOU LYING MOTHERFUCKERS GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE. FUCK YOU ALL. MY HUSBAND LOVED ME AND I LOVED HIM. HE DIDN’T WRITE A GODDAMN NOTE. HE DIED OF A HEART ATTACK. I SAW IT. HE DIDN’T COMMIT SUICIDE. THIS RING ON MY FINGER IS MADE FROM HIS ASHES. THAT’S HOW MUCH I LOVED HIM. I WANT HIM TO BE CLOSE TO ME AT ALL TIMES. DONT’ YOU UNDERSTAND THAT, CAN’T YOU GET THAT THROUGH YOUR STUPID SKULLS YOU SICK FUCKING GHOULS!’
“And the visitors all crowded around the irate woman. Six of them. White ghosts. They each held up a piece of paper. Each note was folded. She looked at them. Read only a few words. The notes were identical. Creased in the same places. But she couldn’t take the notes. She wouldn’t read them. Didn’t want to believe they were real. So she screamed:
‘GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, GET OUT OF HERE YOU CRUEL PIECES OF SHIT GO BACK TO FUCKING HELL WHERE YOU CAME FROM, YOU’RE NOTHING BUT ROTTEN DICK-SUCKING SECOND CLASS GHOSTS TRYING TO TRICK ME.’
“Then the woman’s finger began to hurt. She looked down at it, all yellow and throbbing. The diamond was glowing red and green. WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING, she thought. So she pulls the diamond ring off her finger, runs to the sink and throws it down the drain, flicks on the garbage disposal switch. The metal and the diamond grind to dust. She turns around. The ghosts had vanished. They were coming out of the diamond ring made from her husband’s ashes. So that’s the song idea I have guys, what do you think? Should we write it up?”
Ian sighed and slowly stood up fromn the floor where he’d been listening to the drummer’s long explanation. “Goddamn,” he said. “It’s a little long, don’t you think? That might make a good novel, but there’s no way we can dilute that down to three or four verses of song lyrics without eliminating most of the details.”
“Well, maybe we can have six or seven verses. Who says we have to limit a song to only three verses? Plus, it’s just an idea. Go ahead and work on it you guys. See where you can take it and what you can come up with. I’m easy to please. I’ve got a killer drum beat I can put to it. And I may have a main guitar riff too.” The drummer started playing a 3/4 drum beat. It had a good groove.
“It’s all right,” said Ian. “But we can’t work on it now. Let’s get back to the other song.”
“So you like it?” the drummer said.
“Sure. We can do something with it. Got a title for it?”
“Yeah, Ghost Diamond.”
“Right on. Now let’s get back to the other song.”
“All right.”

-end-

(Thanks for reading. If you have any comments, or know of any magazines that would like to publish this piece, please contact the author: zevi_35711@yahoo.com. Also, you would be helping out the author greatly if you purchased one of his books from Amazon.com or another online book store of your choice. Thanks again.)

http://www.youtube.com/user/zevi35711
http://becomeguitaristfromhell.blogspot.com/
http://zombiesofthereddescent.blogspot.com/

Bio: Jason Earls is the author of Cocoon of Terror (Afterbirth Books), Heartless Bastard In Ecstasy, How to Become a Guitar Player from Hell, Zombies of the Red Descent, If(Sid_Vicious == TRUE && Alan_Turing == TRUE) {ERROR_Cyberpunk(); }, Red Zen, and 0.136101521283655... all available at Amazon.com and other online book stores. His fiction and mathematical work have been published in Red Scream, Yankee Pot Roast, M-Brane SF, Scientia Magna, three of Clifford Pickover’s books, Mathworld.com, AlienSkin, Recreational and Educational Computing, Escaping Elsewhere, Neometropolis, Thirteen, Dogmatika, Prime Curios, the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, OG’s Speculative Fiction, Nocturnal Ooze, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens and other publications. He currently resides in Oklahoma with his wife, Christine.