Bright Segments: The Complete Short Fiction

by James Sallis

Genres: General Fiction; Short Stories; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

For the first time ever, the complete short fiction of literary legend James Sallis is collected in one gorgeous volume—a must-have holiday gift for the crime, mystery, or speculative fiction fan in your life.

Published over the six decades of Sallis's storied career, the complete collection contains 154 stories, 11 of which are exclusive to this volume.

James Sallis moves with ease among genres and modes: novels, stories, poetry, criticism, musicology, biography, translation. Best known perhaps as a crime writer—author of Drive and the six Lew Griffin novels along with others—his first acclaim came in the 1960s from groundbreaking short stories in science fiction publications like Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, for which he served for a time as editor, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies.

In years since, he’s published eighteen novels, numerous collections of essays, six volumes of poetry, a landmark biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin, while writing widely about books for The New York Times, LA Times, The Washington Post, and for The Boston Globe, where he served as books columnist. He’s received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.

Through it all, his interest in the short story has remained strong, with work appearing regularly in venues ranging from The Georgia Review to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Herein you’ll find science fiction, comedy low and high, fantasy, crime stories, stories of everyday life: the realist, arealist, and surreal all together in a jumble, enjambed. Literature, Jim insists, is not a cabinet with labeled drawers, it’s a banquet table. Stroll around, pick what you want from it all. What you need. Enjoy.

Release date: November 12, 2024

Publisher: Soho Crime

Print pages: 848

Sample

Kazoo

Walking down the street on my way to see The Leech, I’m attacked by this guy who jumps out of the alley shouting Hai! Hai! Feefifofum! (you know: bloodcurdling) over and over, cutting air with the sides of his bands. He says Hai! again, then Watch out, man! I’m gonna lay you open! He’s still assaulting the air, battering it too.
    My, I think, an alley cat. Then I stand off and kind of watch this little dance he’s doing. Dispassionately in front, you see, but I get to admiring it. I mean, he’s cutting some great steps, beating hell out of the air. I snap my fingers for him, clap a little.
    You watch out, man! he says. You get cute, I’m gonna hurt you bad, put you through that wall there. Then he goes back to his Hai! and Feefifofum! He’s standing off about three yards from me, jumping around, chopping his hands back and forth, looking mean, a real hardankle. He’s about five foot and looks like he might have modeled for Dylan Thomas’s bit about the “bunched monkey coming.”
    By this time there’s quite a crowd piling up. They’re all standing around clapping, snapping their fingers, digging the action. Some guy in like black heads in to sell Watchtowers and this Morton pops up and starts passing around stone tablets and pillows of salt. There’s a guy out on the edge of the crowd, he’s picking pockets, got three arms. Deep Fat Friar passes by, frowns, goes on down the street flogging himself with a vinyl fly swatter. And there’s this cop on the fringe giving out with a mantra of dispersal. Ibishuma, go go; Ibishuma, go go. (Don’t think he had it quite right, you know?)
    One guy pulls out a set of plastic spoons and commences to make them go clackety-clack, clackety-clack between his thumb and great toe. Another guy has a kazoo. Someone else is trying to get them to do “Melancholy Baby.” Take your clothes off and be adancin’ bare, this smartass yells out of the back of the crowd. He is kinda hairy, this guy.
    Come on, Ralph, he shouts at me. Come on, man, we’re gonna tangle. Hai! Feefifofum! But you can tell he likes it, the attention I mean, because he goes up on his toes and pirouettes.
    I stand there looking at him, frowning a little, dispassionate again. I mean, I’m getting kind of tired of the bit by now. Some guy comes by about then with a monkey on his back, grinding at a nut-chopper. Another one’s hunkered down on the corner to demonstrate his Vegamatic; his buddy’s scraping bananas. And there’s this like arthritic wobbling down the sidewalk with a Dixie cup, begging green stamps.
    Hai! Hai! Hing! (that last one way up in the nose).
    He stops and drops his hands, looks down at the concrete, shuffles his feet. Aw come on, Ralph . . . Then he’s Hai!-ing and Feefifofum!-ing again, going at it like mad, jumping around.
    And by this time I’m beginning to get real tired. I mean, I put up with his bag through here but now I’m gonna be late to see The Leech, so I—and let this be a lesson to all of you—I move in for the kill. I’ve been watching Captain Conqueroo on the morning tube, you see, and I’m like eager to try this thing out. So when this guy sees me coming and charges in, I just step ever so casually to one side and with a sudden blur of motion I get him with the Triple-Reverse Elbow Block, lay it right on him. He folds up like a letter that’s getting put in an envelope that’s too small for it and he falls down in like slow motion. His tongue’s hanging out and a fly’s walking up it toward his teeth.
    Name’s not Ralph, I tell him. Then I stand there humming along with the spoons and kazoo till he can breathe again. Which doesn’t take him over twenty minutes or so—we’d only got through “Black Snake Rag,” “Mountain Morning Moan,” and part of “America the Beautiful” (raga form).
    Anyhow, he starts coming back from violet toward the pinkish end of the spectrum, and he looks up at me and he says, Aw gee, Algernon. Look, give me a chance. Sorry I bugged you. Saying that reminds him of something and he stops long enough to spit out the fly. Wasn’t my idea, he goes on. Nothing personal against you, guy told me to do it . . . Bartholomew?
    I shake my head. I kick him a little. Who.
    Guy just came up to me at the bus stop, told me you were on your way to the bank, don’t know who he was. Said if I beat you up I could have the money and if I didn’t he’d send his parakeet out to get me . . . Chauncey?
    I kick him again. Big guy? Southerner? Hair looked like a helmet? Scar where his nose should be, cigar stuck in it?
    Yeah . . . Look, you wouldn’t be Rumpelstiltskin by any chance?
    Sorry. I tell him that as I’m kicking him.
    Didn’t think so.
    I reach down to help him up, since he’s obviously going to need help. That’d be Savannah Rolla, a friend of mine, I tell him. Savvy’s a film-maker and I know he and a poet-type by the name of Round John Virgin are hassling with a love epic called Bloodpies—in which the symbols of the mudcake, the blood bath, the cow patty, and innocent youth find their existential union—so I look around for the cameras. But I can’t spot them.
    I’m on my way to the blood bank, I tell the guy. He’s got a funny sense of humor, Savannah does. Do anything for a friend, though. And since his hand’s in mine anyway since I’m helping him up, I shake it.
    Ferdinand Turnip, I introduce myself—Ferdinand. My wife is a Bella, name’s Donna.
    Percival Potato, he says, and gives me this big grin like he’s busting open. Mad to greet you. He’s giving me the eye, so I take it and put it in my wallet right next to the finger someone gave me the day before.
    We talk a while, have lunch together in the laundromat, then it’s time for me to split. We notice the band’s still going at it so Percy cops a garbage can and heads over to blow some conga drum with them. I walk a mile, catch a camel, and rush to the blood bank. I realize I’ve left all my beaver pelts at home again, so I take off one of my socks (the red one) and give it to the driver. He blows his nose on it, thanks me, and puts it in his lapel.
    At the blood bank Dr. Acid tells me The Leech is dead from overeating. Dr. Acid has three friends: Grass, who’s rooting around in the drawers; Roach, who looks like a leftover; and Big H, who rides a horse—Joint has the bends and is taking the day off. They’re all eating popcorn balls and scraping bits of The Leech off the wall, putting the pieces in a picnic basket that has a place for bottles of wine too. They ask me to stay for a potluck dinner, but I say no. I cop some old commercials with them for a while, then I dive out of the window and swim to my studio. Someone’s dumped Jell-O in the water, and it’s pretty tough going. The crocs are uptight today, but the piranha seem placid enough.
    At the studio, reverently, I apply the sixty-fifth coat to my Soft Thing—four more to go. I’ve carefully calculated the weight of my paint, canvas, medium. The last brush stroke of the sixty-ninth coat, and my painting will fall through the floor. It will be a masterpiece of aesthetic subtlety.
    By the time I’ve drunk all the turpentine and finished burning the brushes, it’s willy-nilly time to dine. But the lemmings are bad in the hall so I’m late catching my swan and I have to wait on top of the TV antenna for over an hour. Then by the time I get home, the vampires are out. They wave as I pass. Everyone knows you can’t get blood from a Turnip.
    I go in and Donna comes up and kisses me and puts her arm around me and tells me she doesn’t love me anymore. I look out the window. Sure enough, the world’s stopped going ’round.
So I go in the john and find my kazoo and I play for a long time.