Murality is Murreal

a spooky little reprint

“This mural was created by Raleigh-based, international muralist Taylor White as part of the #noblankwalls project. Taylor White is a figurative artist who utilizes the human form to depict conversations, explore fields of consciousness, and realize the cathartic points at which the soul confronts its physical form.” From the publicartgso website below.

This story came out in American Dread: a Horror Anthology by Muddy Paw Press sometime in 2021.

Unlike many other anthologies, our goal is to offer content that, above all else, entertains and excites. Bring us your pulp, bring us blood and gore, give us werewolves and aliens and sexbots and haunted houses. Do you have something weird? Something fun? Something you're not even sure what to call? Take a look at the submission guidelines!

I’m pretty sure I wrote the story in response to that prompt, which I probably found on a Facebook group for open calls in speculative fiction. I don’t do a lot of spooky stuff, except in response to someone else’s provocation. It’s just not where my mind settles.

Greensboro has seen a boom in “public art” over the past ten to fifteen years.

• gso_murals on Instagram

• https://publicartgso.org/

• https://www.kotisstreetart.com/

I walk / bike / drive / bus around town and I see these things. They range from visual references to commercial pop icons to whimsical furry one-eyed monsters to high-concept social critiques. I like most of them.

The purple hands is a personal favorite, but I didn’t have any particular one in mind as I was writing the story, and I never even saw this zombie-ish one until I was scavenging for images this morning.

Photo by Jordan Thomas of The Collegian, a student newspaper at Greensboro College.

Although I grew up on a farm, and I have dissected a number of cats with pre-nursing students, I was also writing out of zero knowledge of haruspicy, the art of divining the future by inspecting the entrails of slaughtered animals.

"Haruspicy" is a method of divination that was practiced by the ancient Etruscans, who had an advanced civilization in Italy before the Roman Empire. In fact the Romans learned much of their culture and art from the Etruscans (or Rasna as they called themselves). They also brought the art of writing to Europe: the Latin alphabet is mostly derived from the Etruscan, and Runes are based on a northern Etruscan alphabet. Although the Etruscans have been called The People of the Book, very little of their writing survives. Their language is mysterious, being non-Indo-European and apparently unrelated to all other languages in the area; it has been only partly deciphered, and that quite recently.

The principles of haruspicy were contained in the Libri Tagetici, a collection of books dictated by Tages, who was said to be a childlike being unearthed in a field by Tarchon, a Tarquinian peasant. After teaching the art of haruspicy to the Lucumones (high priests) of the twelve Etruscan tribes, Tages disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared.

(They dug up a childlike being, and then wrote down everything he said?)

That was a happy coincidence, from a writer / researcher point of view. I was just making shit up to be funny, and along comes Etruscan mythology to make me seem a lot more clever than I actually am. I kind of feel another story brewing there.

Anyway, here is today’s paywalled reprint. Enjoy.

Murality is Murreal

by Randall Hayes

Sketchy the clown was burned for a witch, along with his familiar, a little dog named Doodles.