Chapter Readings (stream/download MP3 and Ogg Vorbis)
How do you subscribe to these spoken word downloads? Copy the URL in the box below into your preferred podcasting software (e.g.
Feedreader, iTunes, Juice, etc.). You will automatically receive Midwife
in the Tire Swing chapter listings. The TOC will also connect you to individual chapters.
Each chapter has an onboard menu of links. Click “Audio Version” to choose from
the available audio formats. And you are invited to follow along—select “Print”
for an HTML page with a sizeable font.
http://www.onetinleg.com/midwifeRSS.xml
eREADERS FOR eBOOKS FROM ONETINLEG.COM
handle the display and accessibility issues with reasonable success. Some have
glitches, some have different glitches. They’re usually free, so who’s to complain?
Adobe Digital Editions will do ePub quite nicely, and there is a Firefox widget
that turns your browser into a book. The PDFs and .mobi (Mobipocket, likewise
free) boast many free applications and even Amazon offers a free desktop Kindle
reader. Kindle—both on your desktop and on the Amazon device—wants to see your
download as a .prc, the Kindle-friendly, non-DRM alternative. Be prepared to
drag and drop. The Midwife is expected to arrive as a newly-edited
edition by summer 2018.
Ahhh, where was I now? Oh, yes—the disclaimer. These MP3 downloads are released
under a Creative Commons license. They’re free. Copy the files as much as you
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If you like what you hear, tell your friends. And thanks for listening.
To download these to your computer right-click and “Save link as...” generally.
Have a look at the User’s Manual. And check
out the MP3s at onetinleg.com.
Fr. Coughlin gasped, struggled for
breath and sank to his knees on the Berber carpeting—twelve-fifty the
square foot, beige in color and Belgian in origin, the shearings of
an untamed Moroccan mountain goat imported at great expense by the Radio
Vestrymen’s Guild.
Boom. That was how explosions were supposed to be written down; Young
Lucy was an avid reader and knew this. But this was more of a Thump,
felt through the soles of his feet rather than heard, and impossible
to write down.
“He’s such a little boy,” said Mrs.
Schultz. “Such a tiny child could not have caused so much damage.” The
telltale odor of dynamite was not remarked on.
The tiger on the wall above the bathtub
was painted with the foreshortening of a heroic tableau. By a trompe
l’oeil trick assumed its intended proportions when viewed from below.
“It’s sexy. You know... wet.” It slavered: lust, rage—indigestion, perhaps.
Alicia lived in daily dread of the
shopping forays of Lucy’s grandson, Ian Emory Hobart. He scavenged the
Salvation Army and resale stores for giant plush animals and aloha shirts.
He sent Sarah Drye a picture with a stuffed cheetah wearing sunglasses
seated beside him in his repossessed convertible.
“Gotta get inside their head,” Prentiss Mayfield said softly to Lucy. His huge fist flashed and the fly was gone. “See.” He opened his fist and the fly, damaged but not dead, fell into his mashed potatoes. “It’s your eyes,” Mayfield said as he tucked into his potatoes, fly and all.
Benjie Stallings, an eighth-grader, showed up for home room roll
call with a back pack full of left-handed lightbulbs and was a big shot for the
rest of the day. Pauley and Jerry have tried this once, stoned—harvesting subway
bulbs—and considered themselves pioneers in two-man pyramid research.”
Lucy has wired the oil tank with an incendiary device to beat out
the state at any tax sale that might be forthcoming at his death: “Kaboom, The Big
Bung, so I know where they’re going to get it—straight up the ass,” he says.
Beholden to no man, Willipaqers had trudged to town on Election Day with only an occasional rebellion since the Aroostook War of 1839. Voting involved the heroic consumption of alcohol supplied free of charge by the candidates, and not a few bullet wounds, gouged eyes, broken limbs and missing teeth. Albeit tales of cannibal sacrifice by roving bands of free-lance desperados persisted, they voted their consciences and split their tickets.
Sarah is unmoved by the
recounting of Archie Drye’s murder. “Wherever he is, I’m sure he is
grateful,” she says. However, “It is time you were dead, too. I have
come to help.”
Alone in the empty Extension office, Ed got up and walked over to the wall behind his secretary’s desk where a large, loud clock spun away the seconds, minutes, hours. It came from Walmart and lost five minutes a week. “I want to get laid,” said Ed. He held his head against the clock’s plastic face; it felt cool without being cool, a caress of plastic.
Chapter
12: Samantha Rear-ends Sarah at the Phaneuf Gas Station
The sun sliced through her
sunglasses with icepick intensity; Sarah signaled for a turn, hoping
there was nobody in the oncoming lane. Dino, the Sinclair dinosaur,
smiled down. Stop! Clean Restrooms! Sarah’s ears volunteered a
make-believe sizzle as the sweat droplet between her eyes
evaporated. She was alone and lost. Yesterday’s reptile trolled on
for vacationers, a smiling lie set to misdirect one last wagon
train.
It had been two days since the incident with the medicine cabinet.
Samantha looked forlornly toward the bathroom where silver duct tape formed a fragile barricade.
Inside were Xanax, Prozac, her toothbrush and the last three rolls of toilet paper.
Catherine Armstrong Hobart dozes
in her chair; Hollywood Squares blares unattended from the
television. Lucy shuffles over to mute the set and bends to kiss his
wife on the forehead. “True I talk of dreams, which are the children
of an idle mind,” Lucy whispers in her ear. Cat stirs but does not
wake up.
Lucy had resisted the cable hook-up, for that meant they would
have to buy a television set to go with it. “Something at the end of the wire? Where
the pictures come in? That would be nice,” Cat said.
It is 1930 and at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, scientists report finding a ninth planet.
Zorro, Robin Hood of the Old West, is unaware of the discovery.
Cat’s efforts to get the window down were thwarted by the perplexing ingenuities of the visiting nurse association’s leased
automobile. The keys were in the ignition. She turned the key; four cylinders softly pooted to life, and three of four windows rolled down.
The driver’s side stayed shut. She abandoned the nurse’s car on a traffic circle, neatly parallel parked, and hitchhiked home.
The Chevy 6 roadster was under a blue tarp piled with baled hay and weighted with stones.
The old car was the only memorial to Elliot, who had died falling off a ladder.
Sarah chewed nicotine gum by the wad, by the box, yard, fathom
and furlong. Sarah developed large, strong jaws. Billie Sundae, proprietrix of Quilter’s
Paradise, read a singleness of purpose into Sarah’s clenched teeth and felt she
was ready for more responsibility. Sarah was moved up to paper-piecing and appliqué.
“Hoplitomeryx must have had a smile like a wolf,” said Sarah Drye
as Jerry Levy nibbled at her gluteus maximus. “Wolves smile after dinner. Not many
get to see a wolf smile,” said Sarah. Jerry looked up and smiled.
“Moribund.” Billie Sundae thrust her rosy cheeks and perky nose
around the corner of the door. Sara’s appliqué and paper-piecing
class was just breaking up. “Moribund is to have passed a point of
any possible usefulness, to be redundant, dead without the presence
of mind or the stick-to-itiveness to lie down and stop breathing.”
My
father, Sarah thought.
Chapter 20: These Violent Delights have Violent Ends
Elder Jesse Youngblood of the Church of the Divine Satisfaction was hunting. His cuffless corduroy trousers were tucked inside heavy toeless woolen knee-highs.
Elder Jesse favored two pairs of socks in his boot preceded by a wad of tissue in the toe.
“Groundhog. Mighty fine eatin’,” said Elder Jesse. He fingered in a pocket, counting his .22 caliber cartridges.
Ian Emory Hobart learned about lenses, processing and depth of focus, and attended high school with no serious malfeasances. He raked blueberries on the down-county barrens in the summer for pocket money. Considering his boyhood steeped in the Puritan work ethic—honest sweat, honest toil, value given for value received plus ten percent—this was not unusual, despite Lucy’s best efforts.
Cat had wedded Lucy in the same house, before the same familiar
faces, amid the same furniture with identical rows of the orchards marching parallel
ranks to the Atlantic shores three miles away. When I came to this house as
a bride, things were different, thought Cat. But not much different.
It was the artist in Cat’s mother; she wanted to watch somebody
die. The thought came upon her as she was catching up on the darning in her workbasket. People went somewhere else to die.
Ian Emory learned from Lucy who taught him the life skills that
had served him when he was In The War: how to shoot craps kneeling on cement and
fade a low roller; how to shave with a straight razor on a moving train; how to
shoot a .50 caliber machine gun.
“So he really flew. Superman. That’s the only answer. Special effects were limited. This was the early eighties—special effects weren’t digital yet.” Dorothy Needy, Mrs. Tad Two, swept Sarah’s plate away from under her nose.
“I fear death has slowed my libido. Possession by demons, I fear, is pure hokum, a liturgical flim-flam. The real, the corporeal me is moldering in a Brooklyn landfill.”
“I promised you the advent of a Miraculous Child. Three wise men
and a virgin and all that good stuff. How too, too theosophagous: you have swallowed
the whole thing, hook, line and Thessalonians.”
That the Long Walkers could have found their way back each year
was puzzling to the ants. It was also observed that the Walkers were not urinating
at all times, thus creating a scent trail. Perhaps they had nothing to say.
Intermezzo 10: The invention of Television, Jesus arrives, etc.
Sixteen, Fr. Coughlin didn’t think sixteen was too young. The girls in high school were doing it like rabbits, giving it away.
Or so he thought, so they told him in the confessional; they never gave him any.
Chapter 28: Ian calls Philomena. Francyann answers. Cat listens in.
“Alicia is dead. You’ll have to call an undertaker. A woman called
me from Vancouver. They found my address on the body. An Asian woman’s voice. ‘You
mother here. You come get her.’ By the accent, probably from Hong Kong and a new
arrival. Hong Kong women, very Asiatic, exotic—you see them in the Kung Fu movies.
She probably has her PhD. Now she works in the bus depot, freight forwarding.”
Chapter 29: Ed Hobart and the Patrons of Husbandry
Ed was driving at night, a thing he had sworn he would not do. He had the radio on and his gaze fixed on the white line painted to warn of where the blacktop ended. The white line was a conscience sop against a bond issue—fair warning that there was no shoulder, just a drop into nothingness.
“Lucy, that stuff’s going to kill you,” Ed Sanders, the pharmacist,
was referring to Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia. He spoke with the same depth of concern
an AA sponsor might spend on a postulant discovered with a quart of J. W. Dant under
his arm.
Who wouldn’t prefer a compression technology inspired by Terry Pratchett’s
Discworld? Ogg is the enclosure, Vorbis the codec—more bounce to the ounce and
at a potentially lower bit weight than MP3s. There is a panoply of Ogg Vorbis
players out there—I use the VLC player; you can download it
here.
But then, I am an Windows 7 holdout. The Windows 7 operating system comes with
the Ogg-friendly Windows Media Player 12. Windows 10? Before you backup everything
and yank the big red lever there is reading to do. I am putting this one off
for as long as possible; there is no Media Player packed with Win10. There are
add-ons for older and newer devices, too. Mac? Yep. For OS X follow the bread
crumbs at http://www.vorbis.com/.
While navigating these tales of
onetinleg.com you may notice
some (depending on your feedreader and RSS source) tagged as explicit. No outside
agency is responsible for this. I did it myself. The free-living citizens of
these yarns exercise a talent for robust self-expression and have likewise been
known to procreate at the drop of a, well... at the drop-of-a... Tsk, tsk.
Bulk downloads
For those Midwife
followers with sufficient time for an Internet download totaling over a
gigabyte split between two files, less romantically called an infodump, or
gardyloo
(Google this one). These are long-form MP3s—VBR 0 at 220-260 kbps.
Midwife in the Tire Swing Part #1
here (Prolog through Intermezzo 8—runtime 8¼ hours) Midwife in the Tire Swing Part #2 here (coming
eventually)
The iBOOKS app for iPAD (a free download for
ePub eBooks)
Because the iBooks app uses ePub, you can also
use it to read ePub books you get from other sources with your computer. Just
drag the ePub files into your iTunes Library (or select Add to Library from
the iTunes File menu), then sync your iPad with your computer (iTunes 9.1 required).
The books will appear on your shelf in iBooks right alongside the ones you get
through iBookstore.
Prologue: The Radio Hour of the Little Flower
Ogg
Vorbis?
