Unapologetic Lives
Book 1
A. B. Funkhauser
Genre: Adult, Contemporary, Fiction,
Metaphysical, Paranormal, Dark Humor
Publisher: Solstice Publishing
Date of Publication: April 23, 2015
Number of pages: 237
Formats available: Electronic, Paper Back
Cover Artist: Michelle Crocker
Book Description:
Unrepentant cooze hound lawyer Jürgen Heuer dies suddenly and unexpectedly in his litter-strewn home. Undiscovered, he rages against god, Nazis, deep fryers and analogous women who disappoint him.
At last found, he is delivered to Weibigand Brothers Funeral Home, a ramshackle establishment peopled with above average eccentrics, including boozy Enid, a former girl friend with serious denial issues. With her help and the help of a wise cracking spirit guide, Heuer will try to move on to the next plane. But before he can do this, he must endure an inept embalming, feral whispers, and Enid’s flawed recollections of their murky past.
Is it really worth it?
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Reviews:
Fresh writing filled with rich
vocabulary, this story features a vivid cast of colourful, living-breathing
characters. This one will keep you reading late into the night until the final
page.—Yvonne Hess, Charter Member, The Brooklin 7
Ms. A.B Funkhauser is a brilliant
and wacky writer …Her distinctive voice tells an intriguing story that mixes
moral conflicts with dark humor.—Rachael Stapleton, Author, The Temple of
Indra’s Jewel and Curse of the Purple Delhi Sapphire
The macabre black comedy is
definitely a different sort of book! You will enjoy this book with its mixture
of horror and humour. —Diana Harrison, Author, Always and Forever
Heuer Lost and Found is a quirky
and irreverent story about a man who dies and finds his spirit trapped in a
funeral home with an ex-lover who happens to be the mortician. The
characterization is rich the story well-told.—Cryssa Bazos, Writer’s Community
of Durham Region, Ontario, Canada
Author A. B. Funkhauser strikes a
macabre cord with her book "Heuer Lost and Found". I found it to have
a similar feel to the HBO series "Six Feet Under".--Young,
Author, A Harem Boy’s Saga Vol I, II, and III
Excerpt:
Chapter Two
Two Weeks
Ago
The house, like the man who lived in it, was
remarkable: a 1950s clapboard-brick number with a metal garage door that needed
serious painting. Likewise, the windows, which had been replaced once in the
Seventies under some home improvement program, then never again. They were
wooden and they were cracked, allowing wasps and other insects inside.
This was of little consequence to him.
The neighbors, whom Heuer prodigiously
ignored, would stare at the place. Greek, Italian, and house proud, they found
the man’s disdain for his own home objectionable. He could see it on their
faces when he looked out at them through dirty windows.
To hell with them.
If the neighbors disapproved of the moss
green roof with its tar shingles that habitually blew off, then let them
replace it. Money didn’t fall from the sky and if it did, he wouldn’t spend it
on improvements to please strangers.
They were insects.
And yet there were times when Jürgen Heuer
was forced to compromise. Money, he learned, could solve just about anything.
But not where the willful and the pernicious were concerned. These, once
singled out, required special attention.
Alfons Vermiglia, the Genovese neighbor next
door, had taken great offense to his acacia tree, a towering twenty-five foot
behemoth that had grown from a cutting given to him by a lodge brother. The
acacia was esteemed in Masonic lore appearing often in ritual, rendering it so
much more than just mere tree. In practical terms, it provided relief, offering
shade on hot days to the little things beneath it. And it bloomed
semi-annually, whimsically
releasing a preponderance of white petals that carried on the wind mystical
scent—the same found in sacred incense and parfums.
What horseshit.
It was a dirty son
of a bitch of a tree that dropped its leaves continuously from spring to fall,
shedding tiny branches from its diffident margins. These were covered in nasty
little thorns that damaged vinyl pool liners and soft feet alike. They also did
a pretty amazing job of clogging Alfons’ pool filter, turning his twenty-five
hundred gallon toy pool green overnight.
This chemistry
compromised the neighbor’s pleasure and it heightened his passions, blinding
Alfons to the true nature of his enemy. He crossed over onto Heuer’s property
and drove copper nails into the root system. It was an old trick, Byzantine in
its treachery; the copper would kill the tree slowly over time leading no one
to suspect foul play.
But Heuer was cagey
and suspicious by nature, so when the tree displayed signs of failure, he knew
where to look.
The acacia recovered
and Alfons said nothing. Heuer planted aralia—the “Devil’s Walking Stick”—along
the fence line and this served as an even thornier reminder that he knew. And if there was any doubt
at all, he went further by coating his neighbor’s corkscrew hazel with a
generous dose of Wipe Out.
Intrusive neighbors
and their misplaced curiosities were, by turns, annoying and amusing and their
interest, though unwanted, did not go unappreciated. The Greeks on the other
side of him weren’t combative in the least and they offered gardening advice whenever
they caught him out of doors. The man, Panos, talked politics and cars, and
expressed interest in the vehicle that sat shrouded and silent on Heuer’s
driveway. He spoke long and colorfully about the glory days of Detroit muscle
cars and how it all got bungled and bargained away.
“They sacrificed an
industry to please a bunch of big mouths in Hollywood,” Panos would rant in
complete disregard for history: Al Gore and Global Warming didn’t kill the GTO;
the OPEC oil crisis did. But there was no point in telling him that.
Panos was an
armchair car guy and incurable conspiracy theorist. He also kept to his side of
the fence, unlike his wife, Stavroula, who was driven by natural instinct. Not
content to leave an unmarried man alone, she routinely crossed Heuer’s weedy
lawn, banging on the door with offers of food and a good housecleaning.
Heuer had no trouble
accepting her cooking. But he declined her brush and broom. Was it kindness, or
was she trying to see inside? He suspected the latter.
No one was ever seen
entering Heuer’s house and while this piqued public interest, he never gave in,
not even to those who were kind to him. He liked Panos and Stavroula and he
regretted poisoning their cat.
But not enough to
let them in to his home.
Others on the street
had less contact with him. Canvassers at election time would disturb him, in
spite of the lawn sign warning the solicitous away. That this didn’t apply to
neighbor kids brave enough to pedal cookies and magazine subscriptions in spite
of the sign, was a testament, perhaps, to some residual soft spot in his heart
that endured.
Even so, he knew
that people talked about him and, frankly, he had trouble accounting for their
fascination. Short, curt, bespectacled, he courted an ethos that favored enforced
detachment. When people got close enough to hear him speak, they detected a
trace of an accent. Now faded after years of U.S. residency, his speech still
bore the unmistakable patterns of someone undeniably foreign. Elaborate,
overwrought and heavy on the adverbs, he spoke very much like his neighbors.
Yet the distance between them was incalculable…
***
Day 1: Post
Mortem
Heuer shook his head, finding it especially
odd that he would think of such things at this particular moment. The
circumstances, after all, were beyond peculiar. Coming out of thick, dense fog,
standing upright, looking wildly around, and having difficulty comprehending,
the last thing that should trouble him was human relations.
The man on the floor would have agreed, had
he not lacked the resources to speak.
Heuer canvassed his surroundings. The room,
still dark, the shades drawn, and the plants Stavroula forced on him, wilted
and dry, bespoke of an unqualified sadness. His computer, left on and
unattended, buzzed pointlessly in the corner, its screen saver, a multi-colored
Spirograph montage, interspersed with translucent images of faceless Bond
girls, twisting ad infinitum for an audience of none.
What
happened here?
The bottle of Johnnie Black lay open and
empty on the bedroom floor, along with a pack of Marlboro’s, gifts from an old
friend. The desk chair lay on its side, toppled, in keeping with the rest of
the room. His bed sheets were twisted, the pillows on the floor, and there were
stains on the walls; strange residues deposited over time representing neglect
and a desire to tell.
He looked down at his hands. They kept
changing; the veins, wavy, rose and fell like pots of worms.
Trippy.
There was no evidence of eating, however, and
this was really weird, for it was in this room that Heuer lived. Flat screens,
mounted on the ceiling and on the desktop, kept him in line with the world
outside in ways that papers could not. Screens blasted twenty-four and seven
with their talking heads and CNN, whereas papers were flat and dirty, suitable
only for the bottoms of bird cages. He cancelled the dailies first and then the weeklies, seeing no
value whatever in printed words.
Pictures were
another matter. Several in paint and charcoal and sepia covered the walls and
floors. He loved them all, and he stared at them for hours when he pondered.
His beer fridge, humidor, and model rocket collection completed him; housing
the things he loved, all within perfect reach.
His senses, though
dulled, honed in on a scent, distant yet familiar, coming from inside the room.
It was bog-like-foul like a place he’d visited long ago, buried under wood ash.
He frowned.
What was the last
thing he ate? Did he cook or go for takeout? He wanted to go down to the
kitchen to check, but found, to his astonishment, that he could not get past
the doorframe into the outer hall.
Nein, das kann nicht sein!—Now
this is not right!—he fumed, switching to German. He would do this whenever he
encountered static. The spit and sharp of it forced people back because they
could not understand what he meant.
Unballing his fists
he felt his chest, registering the sensation of “feel”—he could feel “touch,” but he could not locate
the beating heart. Consciously knitting his brows, he considered other bodily
wants, his legal mind checking and balancing the laws of nature against the
laws of the impossible. He could not, for example, feel “hunger” and he wasn’t
dying for a drink either.
Was this a mark of
passage into the nether? The man on the floor had no comment.
He thought about his
bowels and if they needed attention, but that, to his great relief, no longer
appeared to matter. Regularity, in recent years, wasn’t all it was cracked up
to be. When he was young, he reveled in a good clean out after the morning
coffee because it reset his clock and established the tone for the rest of the
day. Not so latterly. His prostate had kept its promise, letting him down, enlarging,
pressing where it ought naught. Awake most nights, he lost sleep and dreams.
With this in mind,
he bounced up and down on the soles of his expensive shoes in an effort to
confirm if he was awake or not. Perhaps he was sleepwalking, or heading off to
the can for another urinary evacuation that wouldn’t come?
The man on the floor
ruled out these options.
He tried the door
again, and again, to his dismay, he could not leave.
What to do? What to
do?
‘I think, therefore
I am,’ went the popular saying, but what good was ‘being’ when one was confined
to a bedroom like a rat in a cage?
He struggled to
remain calm, just as he became aware of that heavy oppressive feeling one gets
before receiving bad news. Pacing back and forth across the ancient floorboards
in the house he was born into, he checked for the kinds of incriminating evidence
the court of public opinion would hold against him once found. Pornography,
loaded handguns, too many candy wrappers all had to be dispatched before
someone inevitably broke the door down.
As light turned to
dark and day gave over into night, Heuer’s thoughts came faster and faster, in
different languages, interspersed with corrugated images, accompanied by
generous doses of Seventies rock; a fitting sound track for the old life, now
ended.
He fell to his
knees. Somewhere in this mélange was something to be grateful for and with
time, he was sure, he would figure out what that single, great, thing might be.
For now, all he could really do was take comfort in the fact that his death had
been perfect.
About the Author:
A.B. Funkhauser is a funeral director, fiction writer and wildlife enthusiast living in Ontario, Canada. Like most funeral directors, she is governed by a strong sense of altruism fueled by the belief that life chooses us and we not it.
“Were it not for the calling, I would have just as likely remained an office assistant shuffling files around, and would have been happy doing so.”
Life had another plan. After a long day at the funeral home in the waning months of winter 2010, she looked down the long hall joining the director’s office to the back door leading three steps up and out into the parking lot. At that moment a thought occurred: What if a slightly life-challenged mortician tripped over her man shoes and landed squarely on her posterior, only to learn that someone she once knew and cared about had died, and that she was next on the staff roster to care for his remains?
Like funeral directing, the writing called, and four years and several drafts later, Heuer Lost and Found was born.
What’s a Heuer? Beyond a word rhyming with “lawyer,” Heuer the lawyer is a man conflicted. Complex, layered, and very dead, he counts on the ministrations of the funeral director to set him free. A labor of love and a quintessential muse, Heuer has gone on to inspire four other full length works and over a dozen short stories.
“To my husband John and my children Adam and Melina, I owe thanks for the encouragement, the support, and the belief that what I was doing was as important as anything I’ve tackled before at work or in art.”
Funkhauser is currently working on a new manuscript begun in November during NaNoWriMo 2014.
Author Links:
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