AUTHOR’S NOTE
Jeffrey Ford: When I got the request from Dominik and Navah to do a story that was to be a riff on a classic fairy tale for their anthology, they requested that I send, as soon as possible, which fairy tale I’d be working with, so I got up, walked five feet to a bookcase shelf where I have a lot of fairy tale anthologies, and picked a book at random. The one I came up with was Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book. I opened the book in the middle to the story, “The Voice of Death.” Without reading it, I wrote to them and told them that was the one I’d be using. Months later, when I had time to actually write the story, I read the tale. That morning, before reading it, I’d had a memory from when my mother died. I was in a limo with my wife and kids. In the opposite seat was this old Irish woman, Rose, who lived across the street from my parents and whose lawn I used to cut when I was young. The day was sweltering hot and my younger son, maybe two at the time, got carsick and puked. Right when that happened, I looked out the window and we were passing this old abandoned bar, all the windows busted out and partially burned. Its sign was still intact. The Thousand Eyes, it read. That memory mixed with the fact that I’d gotten a call the day before from my painter friend, Barney, who lives in southwest Jersey, by the Delaware River, which is a strange land unto itself. And the final influence was some of the true-life ghost stories old Rose brought from Ireland and used to scare the shit out of me with when we’d sit in her grape arbor after the mowing was done.
THE THOUSAND EYES
Jeffrey Ford
SupeR_StaR
16.03.19 в 16:49
