Beyond The Stump

By Lori R. Lopez

The dark harrowing tale of a young woman who must assume her mother's role of Gatekeeper.

A crippled woman's life changes over decades of inhabiting and guarding tainted soil where her only refuge has been the branches of a tall pine tree. Her father had a bad temper and turned into a monster. Mom did her best but couldn't spare her daughter from a terrible Fate: a legacy of sacrifice and despair; the duty to ward off Evil. This horror story by Lori R. Lopez is narrated in the grim voice of a survivor. It is an account of madness and misery, of stark terror and bleak acceptance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lori R. Lopez
• Release date: Nov 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301471720

Lori R. Lopez

Lori R. Lopez wears many hats as an Author and Speculative Poet of Horror, Fantasy, Suspense, Humor and more. She illustrates her books and has written songs, while being an Activist for animals and children. Growing up, Lori roamed graveyards and conducted funerals for dead birds, squirrels, insects and spiders. Her offbeat books include The Dark Mister Snark, Leery Lane, An Ill Wind Blows, Darkverse: The Shadow Hours, Odds & Ends, and The Fairy Fly. In 2023 Lori won Third Place in the Long Category for the SFPA Poetry Contest for "Wake Unto Death". Her Poetry Collection Darkverse was nominated for an Elgin Award and a Finalist in the Kindle Book Awards. Her poems "Crop Circles" and "Nocturnal Embers" were nominated for the Rhysling Award in 2020, "Social Graces" and "The Whistle Stop" in 2021, "Biting Sarcasm" in 2022, "The Whippoorwill" and "If Houses Could Talk" in 2023. Poems "The Maw" and "creatures of the macabre" received Editor's Choice Awards among other honors. Stories and verse have appeared in The Sirens Call, The Horror Zine, Space & Time, Spectral Realms, JOURN-E, Weirdbook, Bewildering Stories, Dreams & Nightmares, Impspired, Altered Reality, Aphelion, and anthologies such as California Screamin' (the Foreword Poem), HWA Poetry Showcases II, III, V, VI, and IX, Journals Of Horror, Grey Matter Monsters, Dead Harvest, Fearful Fathoms I, Terror Train I and II, Trickster's Treats #3, Speculations III (Weird Poets Society), and In Darkness We Play. A member of the Horror Writers Association, Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, and Lewis Carroll Society Of North America. Visit the Fairy Fly Entertainment Website Lori shares with her two talented sons, and their YouTube Channel @FairyFly. They have a Folk Band called The Fairyflies.

Book preview

Beyond The Stump

by Lori R. Lopez

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

media without written permission from the author, except

brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles.

This is a work of fiction.

Copyright © 2012 by Lori R. Lopez

Front Cover Illustration by Lori R. Lopez

Smashwords Edition

Friendship is a sheltering tree. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

THE TREE’S DEMISE never shook the earth or split the air. Its end would mark a nightmare’s dawn: that minute when initial rays of hopeful light appear over the horizon.

Yet then was not the singular brush with evil, as this pillar of pine had saved my neck ages prior to a lowly gravestone finish. Like me it now abides a meager stump, a life disrupted by external forces greater than the strength within to neither bend nor be reduced in stature. This will, this indomitable trust we shared, could not weather and resist a fateful third encounter — tragically much fiercer than the first.

But it is our prefatory clash, the earliest calamity which I should relate in sequence, if order is indeed a timeline not a cycle, not a spinning repetition, before the gruesomest events . . .

You may regard my syllables abstract, my tenor dreary and macabre.

So bequeaths the enigma I embosom, the profound absence of every glimmer, of the slightest twinkle or shine. My thoughts ramble in vague occult riddles because I have no comforting or concrete solutions to supply.

Most people I’ve observed while walking on two limbs exist in a fantasy realm composed of past and future.

They view little of the world around them, always focused somewhere else, ignoring what is there though scarcely noticed. The ordinary details.

I cling to those details, endeavoring to not look back or think ahead, for the present is all I have. All I can endure.

When, however, residual flashbacks violate peace of mind, I scratch these words with twilight-colored ink, across vacant scrapbook pages in an album of photographs untaken, as I guard this unholy site. I have no temptation to blab the story, even to fill awkward spaces between hellos and thank you