The Flora & Fauna of Transgressive, Balls-to-the-Wall Tableaus

By Jeffrey Stoker

THE FLORA & FAUNA OF TRANSGRESSIVE, BALLS-TO-THE-WALL TABLEAUS is author Jeffrey Stoker’s fourth book. Personal and filled to the brim with pathos, it comprises two novellas, both of them struggling-artist-themed, and both of them wholly unpredictable.

The first novella in the rotation, “The Dichotomous Epiphany,” falls squarely under the Psychological Horror subgenre. Set in the early 1990s — Stoker wrote the novella between the years 1995 and 2000; however, due to the S&M overtones inherent in its pages, he sheepishly held off publishing it until 2024 — it centers on Arlene Phillips, an ambitious, unconventional teenager living in a small, hopelessly conventional Utah town.

For years, Arlene has dreamed of nothing more than becoming a world-renowned artist. Unfortunately, most of the drawings and paintings she’s produced thus far in her life have failed to meet her expectations. Now, as the sun begins to set on her high school career, the teen, desperate to prepare herself for college, devises a plan to enhance her visual-composition skills. The rub is that carrying out this plan will come at an incredibly high price. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that the plan will even work.

The second novella in the book, a comedy-drama titled “Port Wine Stain, Animated,” represents Stoker at his sardonic best. Here we follow the exploits of Thad Wakefield, an aspiring writer who’s on the autism spectrum.

Despite the compulsions, tics, and fears that govern Thad’s day-to-day routine, he’s generally a productive, optimistic individual. And why not? He has a beautiful wife who’s supportive to a fault, a pet armadillo that never ceases to amuse him, and a compassionate therapist who’s dedicated to solving as many of his psychological hang-ups as possible. In short, life is good.

Until it isn’t. One day, for reasons far too complicated to go into here, Thad hits a stumbling block in the editing phase of his debut novel. How he chooses to meet this challenge, and the emotionally-draining path this choice ultimately leads him down, is something that even the sharpest of readers won’t see coming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369423394

Jeffrey Stoker

JEFFREY STOKER lives in Layton, Utah, taking his dog for walks, working out at the gym, and hoping to one day regain his sense of smell. Iconic Reflections is first book, although he’s also written a novella, a one-act play, and numerous film reviews. He’s currently working on a collection of short stories.

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Copyright © 2024 by Jeffrey Stoker.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/17/2024

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CONTENTS

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The Dichotomous Epiphany

Port Wine Stain, Animated

This book is

dedicated to Cindy and Henry

THE

DICHOTOMOUS

EPIPHANY

1

Arlene Phillips had finished putting on her makeup and earrings and was getting dressed in front of her full-length mirror while the record player on her recently-refinished dresser drawers blared classic, 1920s-era jazz music. It was noon already on a Wednesday, and school had been going since a quarter of eight, but none of that mattered to the girl: She’d made up her mind the night before to take the day off. She had more important things to do today, and she was growing steadily more estranged from her frivolous, do-what-mommy-and-daddy-tell-me-to-for-a-career classmates besides. She was tired of the pointless parties, the juvenile gossip, and the dates with dumb, chauvinistic dicks, and, as far as she was concerned, it was a good thing graduation day was only a month away and she could start college in the fall.

She slipped into a pink, long-sleeved blouse, and, as had been her daily custom since the start of high school, resolutely did the buttons all the way up to the top. With that finished, she fastened the cuffs, tucked the tails into her pleated, beige Dockers, and threw on a slender, taupe-colored belt.

Not every woman could get away with dressing this formally, it occurred to her as she gave her reflection in the mirror a once-over. No, for this type of non-revealing, no-nonsense ensemble to work, one needed to be striking and exude confidence, and, although she was far too humble to ever admit it to another living soul, she believed wholeheartedly that striking and confident were two words that described her to a T.

She kept her thick, honey-blonde hair closely cropped in a classic short pixie, liking the way the bold ’do (a) framed her triangular, high-cheekboned face, and (b) lent her a sassy, I’m-a-contrarian-through-and-through sort of quality. Her eyes were wide-set and mint-green, her nose was small and straight, and her Cupid’s bow lips were finely-formed and symmetrical. As for her skin, it was smooth, a little ruddy, and (generally speaking) blemish-free.

Before turning away, she patted the back and sides of her head with her hands — delicately, as if her hair was actually long enough to muss if she was more forceful with it — afterwards teasing her Caesar-style bangs a bit with the tips of her fingers.

Bobbing her head and snapping her fingers to the beat of the jazz music, she slunk over to her dresser drawers, intending to stop the record. Once there, however, she dropped her eyes down to the dresser’s nearest corner and had a sudden, unexpected change of plans.

Impassively, she unbuttoned her right cuff, rolled the sleeve up past her elbow, and placed the soft, milky-white underside of that forearm onto the relatively crisp point where the top, front, and left side of the dresser met. Then she closed her eyes and, using her left hand — she was a southpaw — gradually applied pressure to her right arm.

Mmmmmm … . she said with contentment. Lovely.

That’s it, Ms. Phillips, the dresser corner seemed to guide her. Just relax and enjoy the ride. Trust me. The pain I have to offer will sate you in no time.

But it was more than just the pain Arlene was feeding on — it was also the music. For her, the two were creating an unsavory harmony with each other, lighting her up inside in a way she would have been hard-pressed to put into words.

The highpoint came at the fourteen-second mark. That’s when the smarting in her arm, which was still going strong, created a synergy with an especially energetic melodic flourish (in case the reader is interested, said flourish started off with a long, gravelly trumpet blast and resolved with a brief saxophone solo, which was a series of beeps and whines).

Quite frankly, the masochist felt snowed under with rapture, pleased as punch to be alive. At one point, she even let out a small exhalation of pleasure while slowly running the tip of her tongue along the front of her shovel-shaped, preternaturally-white teeth.

As usual, it took her a little over a minute to fully adapt to the pain. Then, the instant that happened, she withdrew her arm from the dresser, rolled her sleeve back down, buttoned the cuff, and dried the watery rims of her eyes with her knuckles.

The jazz tune was nearly over now, and Arlene, having decided to let it finish, stuffed her hands into the front pockets of her slacks, leaned her back against the wall, and casually drank in the scenery with her eyes.

What she saw was a winsome, 11’ x 14’ room with cream-colored walls and brown-and-gray, twist pile carpet. To her left, populating the east end of the room, was a nondescript bedside table, a twin-sized bed with a tartan comforter, a window with drawn, sheer white curtains, and a full-length mirror (the same full-length mirror she’d been getting dressed in front of just minutes earlier). Directly ahead of her, at the south end of the room, was her closet and a four-tiered set of pinewood bookshelves, said shelves holding the first-place soccer trophy she’d earned six or seven summers ago, a lump of loose change, a tin case of Altoids, an eclectic assortment of hard- and paperback copies of classic (and not so classic) works of literature, and a plastic, mist-gray toolbox, which was chockablock with sundry art supply products. Off to her right, at the west end of the room, was the door to the outside hall, and just next to the door, a desk and ladder back chair that, together, formed a set with her aforementioned dresser. Situated on top of the desk was an electric typewriter, and situated next to that was a portable box fan. Of these two appliances, only the fan was plugged in; before going to bed last night, she’d turned the fan’s dial to the MID setting, and since the temperature had yet to decline, she’d allowed the appliance’s blade to continue spinning.

The room’s walls were decorated with an oversize paper map of the world — appropriately, the map’s title, printed in black, Times New Roman letters near the bottom, left-hand corner of the sheet, just above a compressed, comprehensive grid of national flags, was simply THE WORLD — a calendar with a serene scene-from-nature photograph for each month, and several expensively-framed reproductions of Edward Hopper paintings, including Nighthawks, which was Arlene’s personal favorite. In addition to all the purchased wall décor, there was a watercolor painting Arlene had done herself, working from an illustration in an old storybook she’d found in a musty box in the basement, of Raggedy Anne and Andy. Not exactly the finger of God reaching out to touch Adam’s, true, but it was nevertheless the one picture of hers she’d ever liked enough to frame, let alone hang up. All along the picture’s edges, wedged in between the frame and the glass, were photographs of her and her friends — a fact which irked her.

I really need to get around to taking all those out, she thought. It makes no sense to have the one thing I’ve ever come within miles of greatness in creating be even partially hidden by silly old snapshots.

Maybe the next time I do my spring cleaning I’ll tuck them all away into one of my desk drawers. Then again, maybe I’ll just throw them into the garbage and forget they ever existed.

Decisions, decisions.

The jazz tune trailed off into silence, and Arlene lifted the stylus needle off the record and set it down on the tone arm rest. Then she removed the record from the player and slipped it back into its protective sleeve. Finally, she went to her bedside table, knelt down to the bottom shelf, and returned the record to its place among the rest of her scanty, positioned-upright-like-books collection (the collection had been much larger when it had belonged to her parents, but it had decreased considerably after they’d decided to let her have it and, as her first order of business, she’d discarded all of the dismal, twangy country albums).

Hello, my pretties, she said, running her fingers across the stack’s not-quite-flush edge. Have I told you recently how grateful I am to have you all in my life? No? Well, then it’s high time that I did. I couldn’t be more proud of you if I tried. You may not be the most extensive or impressive collection of music in the world, but what you lack in scale you more than make up for in style and range.

And it did. Had the collection consisted entirely of instrumental records like the one she’d just been listening to, it would have been too one-note (no pun intended). Fortunately, though, the collection was also stupid with records featuring songs that had lyrics. Old stuff — timeless stuff. Petula Clark, Johnny Mathis, Gogi Grant, Frank Sinatra, The Platters, The Troggs. The kind of stuff her staunchly-contemporary friends would never in a million years deign to listen to.

Waiting for her on her bed was a brick-sized, metallic-orange, paperback book, two No. 2 pencils, a cardboard, 20 x 26 traveling portfolio, and a rayon, pouch-style handbag, aquamarine in color. After packing the book and the pencils into the handbag, she turned off the box fan and the room’s overhead light. Then she left the room holding her portfolio in one hand, and her handbag in the other.

Passing through the house’s cozy living room towards the front door, Arlene inwardly admired her mother’s porcelain- and ceramic knickknacks, and even more so, the ornate, handmade mantle and shelves her father had, in his spare time, built for them to be displayed upon.

He’s quite the craftsman, that dad of mine. I can only hope I inherited even one-tenth of his talent.

At the door she stopped and stared fixedly (as if for the last time) at the family picture of her and her parents that hung on the wall. As usual, her eyes were inexorably drawn to a slightly discordant element in the picture, an element that would have most likely gone unnoticed by anyone who didn’t already know it was there: her unnaturally-sparse eyebrows.

A few days before the picture had been taken, a four-year-old Arlene had been sitting on the bathroom counter, no more than an inch away from the mirror, plucking her eyebrows with a pair of tweezers. Early on in these proceedings — it might have been as much as five minutes into them or as little as one, but looking back, she could no longer be certain — a startling revelation had dawned on her: Eyebrow-plucking wasn’t, as it turned out, a bothersome chore women must periodically perform in life in order to look their best — at least, not for her, it wasn’t. Nope. For her, the strident little stings she was issuing herself were like bonbons in her mouth, rich, creamy bonbons. She loved them!

Before long, her eyes had pearled from the multitude of stings, as anyone’s would; moreover, her nose had begun to run and tickle so much she’d actually sneezed a couple of times. These physical reactions notwithstanding, though, she’d kept going, and after a while, she’d realized she was no longer plucking only her superfluous brow hairs, but many of the ones she’d do well to keep, too.

You better stop, she remembered telling herself. If you don’t, you’re gonna end up looking weird.

But she hadn’t stopped. She’d tried, but somehow she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it.

By the time her mother had come in to see what was taking Arlene so long to relieve herself, it had been too late — the girl’s eyebrows had already had the unnaturally-sparse look to them cited above.

Arlene! her mother had shrieked with maternal protectiveness, the expression on her face being one of sheer mortification. What did you do to your eyebrows?

Plucked ’em.

Why?

To make ’em look like yours.

Oh, sweetheart, you did it too much. Laughing in spite of herself, the woman had lifted Arlene off the counter and set her back down on the floor. You have to be careful when you do it. Sometimes they don’t grow back.

Sometimes they don’t grow back. When those words had first escaped her mother’s lips during what in the Phillips household was now popularly known as The Eyebrow-Plucking Incident, they’d simply meant to Arlene that, unless one didn’t mind being bald in the region of one’s face just north of one’s eyes, one needed to always, without exception, err on the side of caution when plucking one’s eyebrows. In later years, however, whenever she thought back on the incident, those same words always reminded her of a short story by Stephen King called Sometimes They Come Back — not because the story had anything to do with a little girl over-plucking her eyebrows, but because, to her, the wording of its title sounded a bit like the author was directly contradicting her mother’s admonition.

Arlene shifted her footing so that the light coming through the bay window turned the picture frame’s glass into a mirror. Then, after taking a second to admire the pair of perfect, makeup-enhanced, not-too-thick-or-thin eyebrows being reflected back at her, she exultantly said, Well, Ma, I hate to break it to you, but it looks like you were wrong all those years ago, and that the horror-meister was right. Because, despite the sin of over-plucking I committed that day, my eyebrows, as you can now plainly see, did indeed come back.

Soon she was on the road in her parents’ azure-blue Geo Prizm, not particularly looking forward to the day she had ahead of her.

2

Kaysville, Utah wasn’t exactly Arlene’s cup of tea. The summers were way too hot, and during them, the road construction increased exponentially, a phenomenon that created a galling, and often scary, hellscape; conversely, the winters were way too cold, and none of the drivers seemed willing to adapt to the slick, icy roads by lowering their speeds (Arlene had a theory that most Utahns were California transplants, and that, as such, they’d never learned the proper way to drive in the snow).

The fall and spring were much better in terms of weather and road construction, but even then, there was a year-round issue that Arlene, who was one of those people that can never truly be happy unless they’re proud of their surroundings, had to wrestle with: the general vibe of incompetence the city gave off. A perfect example of this incompetence was the two-legged, wood-framed sign holder that stood on the grass in front of a decrepit storage building on Second North. Years ago, some nimrod had placed a Wardley for-sale sign upside-down in the holder, and to Arlene’s consternation, no one had ever bothered to correct the error.

Severe weather, excessive road construction, and a vibe of incompetence weren’t, however, what chapped Arlene’s hide the most about Kaysville. Rather, it was the unimaginative, prosaic mindset of its residents. To her, it seemed like none of her fellow Kaysville-ites really had any high expectations in life. Which is to say, it seemed like most of them were content to follow the typical Mormon outline of getting married at the age of twenty-one — they only waited that long so the guys had time to serve two-year-long missions for the church — and then, after securing a sensible, dreary job somewhere local, starting a family.

Not her. Once she graduated from high school, she was going to enroll in college, earn her B.A., then move away to a different part of the country. Most likely a state like Washington or Oregon, where it rained a lot; she loved the rain. In any case, though, she supposed the exact location where she chose to put down roots ultimately wouldn’t matter a great deal. That’s because most of the time she’d probably be away from home, drawing or painting pictures of things she saw in magical, breathtaking places like England, France, Rome, and Italy.

It would be another year before Arlene discovered that Rome and Italy weren’t two separate places, but rather that one was a city located within the country of the other.

When we’re done with college, she’d recently said to her friend Shayna, we ought to just move away from Utah. Y’know? Broaden our horizons. Nothing cool’s ever gonna happen to us here.

Well, it’d have to be a place with mou’ains, Shayna had replied, pronouncing mountains with that glottal stop so common to Utah speech. I’d miss my mou’ains.

Stupid fucking hayseed, Arlene had thought but not actually said.

After parking the Geo on the west side of Main Street, Arlene gathered her handbag and portfolio, walked to a nearby bus vestibule, and sat down on the bench. It was the perfect angle to sketch the Kaysville Theater from, a tan-stucco-and-red-brick building that was like something torn from the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

The budding artist gulped audibly. She’d been going to the Kaysville Theater for as long as she could remember, and she desperately hoped to capture its appeal today on her sketchpad. If done correctly, her drawing might someday come to be seen as an important historical document — especially if the theater was ever regrettably demolished and replaced with something else in the name of progress. It was a lot of pressure.

But a little more about the theater and what made it special. The place was so small it could show no more than two movies during any given week — this week those movies were Four Weddings and a Funeral and Guarding Tess — and its entrance doors were deeply inset, a feature that gave its otherwise anodyne façade a mysterious, gothic aura. Despite the fact that rowdy teenagers accounted for much of the business’s clientele, there was never even a trace of litter, graffiti, or property damage on the inside or outside of the premises; instead, the owners always managed to stay on top of those types of things, laboriously giving the pavement a thorough sweeping every morning, as well as covering up or fixing any acts of vandalism that may have occurred the night before.

Arlene emptied the contents of her portfolio, an oversize, spiral-bound sketchpad and a plastic, eighteen-inch ruler, onto her lap. Then she flipped the pad open to a blank page and fished one of her pencils out of her handbag. Before making so much as a mark on her pad, though, she checked the schedule on the vestibule wall to see when the next bus was due. Having this information would allow her to exit the vestibule a minute or two before the next scheduled stop, wait for the bus to arrive, then save the driver the trouble of pulling over by shooing him or her away with her hands. She knew, of course, that she’d come off like a complete fool if the driver ignored her shooing and stopped to let off a passenger; however, being the courteous, uninhibited person that she was, she didn’t much care.

According to the schedule, the next bus wouldn’t be coming until 12:45, and the reader board above the town bank down the street told her it was presently only a quarter into the hour. If she got started on the drawing now, she’d probably be finished with it before the next bus even got there.

Cars were whizzing by left and right in front of her, but the dominating noise was, oddly enough, the chirping of birds in the trees behind the vestibule. Arlene listened to this mellifluous sound to divert her attention from her stomach’s incessant growling — she hadn’t eaten since six the night before — and, more significantly, to help relax her.

Okay, she said, at length. I think I’m feeling about as zen as I possibly could just before starting a new picture. Let’s get this show on the road.

With that, she rotated her sketchpad from portrait to landscape position, and, using her ruler, drew a one-inch border.

Now, then. Which part of the picture shall I tackle first?

It was a good question, and for the next half a minute, she shifted her eyes repeatedly from the subject matter across the street to the blank sheet of paper on her lap. Then her artist’s instincts, silent all this time, at last spoke up, telling her, in no uncertain terms, that she should start with the building’s awnings. She listened to them.

I sure am glad … that these awnings … are of the umbrella-shaped variety … she said in a far-off voice, busily moving the head of her pencil in a semi-circular motion a millimeter or two above the paper’s surface. Somehow I doubt that … standard, plane-framed awnings … would be nearly as much fun to draw … .

At first, Arlene was loath to move past the noncommittal practice strokes she was making — a blank surface, as every artist on the planet can attest to, is an awfully daunting thing — but the girl had moxie, and eventually she stopped dragging her feet and forced herself to take the plunge.

What followed was a brief period of impassioned, uninterrupted toil; throughout this period, Arlene licked her upper lip in deep concentration, a nervous habit she wasn’t even aware she had. She was really in a zone, and little by little, the blessedly familiar form of an awning began to take shape in the upper-left quadrant of her picture plane.

Once she’d finished articulating the awning, Arlene set her pencil onto the bench and looked her work over.

Well, she said, it’s definitely more bulbous on its arch than I’d prefer, and any art aficionado worth his or her salt would agree that the line work’s distractingly hairy in places — but all in all, I’d say I’m off to a pretty good start.

She was about to pick up her pencil and move on to the next awning, when suddenly, wanting to hedge her bets, she decided to give the awning she’d just completed one last look.

Shit, she griped within seconds. It’s way too big.

Which was true. At the scale she’d drawn the awning, she’d be lucky to fit twenty percent of the theater onto the sheet of paper.

Looks like I’m gonna have to start over. Nothing like doubling up my work. Grrrr!

This drawing was supposed to be her big breakthrough. She wanted it to have a grand visual scope with all the stops taken out, and to achieve such a drawing she couldn’t very well crop out everything in her line of sight but a few awnings and two-thirds of a marquee.

Still, she’d be damned if she was going to erase