Speaker 1: Lay Your Armor Down, a novel by Michael Ferris Smith,
Chapter one. She moved in the solemn lamplight of the
cluttered house, like a vague figure of a troubled dream.
She shuffled from room to room, opening drawers and closet doors,
and picking up things and putting them into the grocery sack,
no sense or order to the gathering. A random ring
and a broken bracelet from a spilled jewelry box, one shoe,
a ragged notebook from the bottom of a stack of
other ragged notebooks, two postcards from a long dead sister,
a handful of hair clips, a small wooden picture frame
that held the rudimentary drawing of an angel that had
been created by her child decades before. She wore a
thin housecoat that hung on her aged and slender figure,
her gray hair, and a matted mess. She talked to
herself as she moved throughout the house, reminding herself of
errands that had been years ago completed, and gossiping about
people she no longer knew, and singing fragments of songs
that had once played on the radio during the summer
days of her small down ut. In doorways, she would
stop and look into the shadows and touch the tip
of her index finger to her chin and hold it
there in trouble fault, and then she would begin again
to fill the sack with random fragments of time gone by.
At the end of the hallway, the closet door was open,
and the contents overflowed and spilled out onto the floor,
as if the house were regurgitating its own clutter. The
pace of her rambling quickened as she dropped to her
knees and began to dig into the closet as if
just remembering something essential, her arms thin and weak but
working in a sudden fever as she pushed away dirty
towels and newspapers and shoe boxes. As she burrowed into
the closet. At the bottom of the pile, she found
a thin red coffee can, and she opened the top
and felt inside and touched the roll of cash. She
kept digging, and she pulled out three more coffee cans
from beneath the rubble, and each one held a roll
of cash of various size, a savings hidden away and
then forgotten, and then remembered again in the swirling winds
of her mind. She dropped the rolls of money into
a grocery sack. With the random gathering, ran her fingers
across her pallid face, her eyes like deepest windows into
the sprawling world. She seemed to gather herself and let
out a great exhale, as if arriving at a moment
of resignation. She stood and straightened her house coat, and
stepped out of her slippers and brushed off her ashy feet,
and then she stepped back into them, and she took
the grocery sack under her arm, and she made for
the front door. She opened it, and the night wind
greeted her, and she gazed out into the darkness, a
traveler ready for some journey, a star blown sky above
the winding road that led from the house, and the
road badly patched and bumpy as she stumbled twice, but
caught herself both times, cursing the uneven ground in a
quick insult, before returning again to the harried conversations of
her lost world. She wandered from the road and into
the field, where she pushed through the knee high grass.
Were searching eyes busied with the hunt stop stared in
the direction of her shuffling, and the wind pushed at
her wild hair and slushed through the wild grass, and
on the other side of the field, she entered into
the woods, where the moon glow gave shadows through the trees,
and where she held out her hands and touched the
trunks as she moved through the forest, the dark guardians
willing to give her pass, and the wind shook leaves
from the limbs and they fell around her in swirls
of decay. As she stepped across the leaf strewn earth,
the small crunches of aged and careful steps. She was
not afraid until she was deep into the woods, and
she stopped and looked around, and whatever confused purpose had
been there to guide her slipped off into the dark
and left her alone. There was wind, and there were
the calls of the night, and between the black tree
limbs there were stars and moon the heaven's infinite. She
leaned her back against a tree and hugged herself as
if suddenly cold, and she began to cry. She cried
and began walking again, in no direction, moving through the
woods in a confused and careful gait, and beginning to
call out the names of people who passed through her mind,
names that both meant something and meant nothing. Her father
and a woman she once sat next to on an airplane,
and a pigtail friend from childhood, and the old man
who taught her to ride a horse, and the boy
who sacked her groceries. Once upon a time, the wind
gained strength, and the limbs swayed and bent, and her
hair whipped on her head, and she clutched the sack
with both hands and called out to anyone who might
be listening. And she lost a slipper and moved with
one bare foot and panicked eyes and a deepening fear
that something in the dark was going to devour her.
She was lost in head and heart and soul. And
she stopped and stared up at the moon, and she
began to question it, as if it had the answers
to the universe. Who are you? And where am I?
What are we? And the questions continue and carried her
as she meandered through the dark, walking into branches that
scratched her face, and bits of leaf and limb getting
stuck in her hair, and she lost her other slipper.
She was no longer crying and no longer questioning the moon,
but now transformed into something ancient and mindless and driven
by some ordained task, as if she was no longer
of grat flesh and bone, but instead a shapeless spirit
of the wood that drifted timelessly. She moved through the
night in a random pattern of wind, and then through
the trees she saw the firelight. She fixed her eyes
on the flames, and she pushed away low hanging limbs
and crunched across the leaves, and her mouth moved as
if speaking, but she was soundless. As she came into
the clearing, two crouching silhouettes next to the fire, two
figures rising when they looked up at the old woman
who emerged from the wood, Twigs in her hair and
a torn housecoat and bare feet and stick like legs,
and the distant gaze She regarded the dark figures, and
then she looked again into the starstruck night, at the
marble white moon. She let her arms fall to her sides,
and a great release, and she spoke in some language
they did not understand. She then fell silent, and the
sack dropped from her hand and spilled onto the ground.
A spindle of cash rolled forward and settled in the firelight,
and there was no judgment among them, but for the
emptiness in which they all stood. Chapter two. They left
the dying fire and walked out of the clearing, the
tawny light on their backs and darkness before them. Their
car parked on the roadside, a big four door thing
long as a boat, two hubcaps missing, the antenna snapped off.
Each man lit a cigarette before climbing in and closing
the doors, and then they sat there, smoking and staring
through the bulk smeared windshield. Something small and bright eyed
crossed the road, and it stopped and looked at the car,
and then continued on its journey and disappeared into the brush.
Falling leaves swirled in the wind and fell in the
moonlight like flakes of rust. One man sniffed and the
other coughed as the car filled with smoke, and the
driver rolled down the window and he smoked and scratched
at his beard before flicking out the cigarette a little
red spray as the butt bounced on the road. The
man in the passenger seat smoked more methodically and was
still at it when the car cranked and the headlight
split the dark. The big car moved in a great
lurch and began its descent from the hillside, filling the
night with a low rumble. They drove through the darkness,
past rolling pastures lying by leaning fence posts held erect
by strands of barbed wire, pass gatherings of hard woods,
and over skinny bridges with rotted rails, where the moon
reflected in the wabbled creek water. The big car crews
through the bends in the road where deer stood, backed
away and still and waiting. It rolled through the desolate
four way stops where there was nothing and no one,
and they drove on with their red tipped cigarettes across
the fallen landscape of the autumn, where the fields had
turned the color of sand, and the stars stabbed the
sky and darts of silver. Neither man spoke. They emerged
from the unmarked country roads and turned onto a two
lane highway. Mailboxes stood on the roadside at the end
of the gravel driveways, and sleeping houses sat quiet and peaceful.
Back in the gloom. Dogs slept on porches and raised
their heads to regard the loud thing moving through the night,
and then returned to slumber. As the growl of the
engine disappeared, the lights of the world appeared in the
fluorescence of gas stations and in flashing red signals and
yellow street lamps, and then disappeared in the rear view
mirror as the car followed the highway right through the
meager town and entered a new dark thirteen more miles
of silence between them and pine trees and the rise
and dip of the hills, And then, as if leaving
one country and crossing into another, the landscape bottomed out.
The car now traveled a flat terrain in a rhythmic glide,
as if rolling across the serenity of lake water. Spanish
moss hung from tree limbs in gray and gathered clumps,
and the long and drooping limbs of the willows swayed
in the wind, and the swamp slurped up against the roadside,
as if only waiting for the command from some weather
god to swallow what was left of the raised earth.
The frame that held the child's drawing of the angel
sat between them on the bench seat. The man in
the passenger seat picked it up. He flicked a cigarette
lighter and looked at it in the solitary light of
the flame, and he ran his thumb across an angel
wing then he set the frame back on the seat
and gazed out into the night. The driver looked over
at him and wanted to ask why they had bothered
to bring it along, but he only gave a silent
look of disgust and his eyes returned to the road.
Then there it was, the all night truck stop, sat
in isolation, as if it had long ago been misplaced
and forgotten. The car bumped across the potholed parking lot
and stopped in front of the glass doors of the diner.
A handful of cats hunted around the dumpster. Two eighteen
wheelers parked off behind the gas pumps. Darkness closed around,
as if the place had been created as a sojourn
for some final plummet. The neon sign read open in
the front window, and the bugs danced around it in
the cotton candy glow. From behind bent and twisted blinds.
The lights of the diner cut into the night in
awkward slants. The two men sat there and stared until
the man in the passenger seat coughed and shifted in
his seat. Well, ain't you going to say something? The
driver grabbed a cigarette pack from the dashboard. About what
The driver then looked at himself in the rear view
mirror and rubbed at his bloodshot eyes before climbing out
of the car. The passenger watched as the bearded man
pulled open the door to the dinner and disappeared inside.
About what he muttered, and then got out and followed. Okay,
that was a couple of chapters from a recently released
novel by Michael Ferris Smith. The title of the novel
is Lay Your Armor Down. I ordered a hard copy
of this book. Smith has become one of my favorite authors.
The stories are great and the way he writes them
as just spectacular as you could as you just heard.
He has several novels available on Amazon. I'll link his
author page and a link to this particular novel in
the description below. You can click on it and go
straight to it and buy the Kendall copy a hard copy.
I don't know if it's out in paperback yet, but
this book has met with great reviews, great sales. I
read it and covered from cover to cover. I pre
ordered it and it came to me like the first
day that it was released. It showed up in my
mailbox and I read it in like two nights. It's
just so good. Like all of his work, it's really good,
so wanted to share that with y'all. Check him out.
Michael Ferris myth fantastic author. If you haven't heard me
talk about him before. He's got two of his novels
have been made into major motion pictures. He's a good
screenplay writer, and he's a very talented musician as well.
He's got a band in Oxford and they do a
few gigs here and there, so he's a real creative person.
And hope you guys enjoyed chapter one and two of
that novel. There's a lot more to it. It's a
I don't know, thirty chapter book, but it's a great story,
so you guys pick it up. Thanks for listening to
the podcast, and we'll see you guys on the next one.