Huzzah. Short Folk #30: Brand New Even the Molecules

Note: Wow, Finally. Last one. Its been interesting, at first these were impossible to write. I couldn't find ideas and I'd spend hours scheming. Then about day 10 I got into a rhythm and the ideas were pretty easy to come by then. I just learned to trust single line ideas more, and not having to have something fully worked out in my head really freed up some interesting pieces. But these last few days have been a real trial, mostly because I have ideas for other stuff to work on and don't really feel like I'm in the market for a bunch of new ideas like I was a month ago. So finally it wasn't 30 in 30 days, but 30 in 32 days. Close. Here's the last one. Thanks for reading. Drop by Bottomless lakes (link below and to the left) as James finishes up his 30 in 30 poems project. I couldn't have done this without his urging.

Short Folk #30: Brand New Even the Molecules

Made man sits alone in a low slung chair. The art of his successful friends hangs on the walls of his successful apartment. Like I said, he's a made man, comfortable. Has what he wants. Late 30's. And he's worked hard to get it too, worked really hard. Has a family, generally well behaved kids and a generally loving wife. And now he is comfortable in the low slung chair in his fashionable apartment.

He looks around the room. Its a quiet Sunday night and he's alone for the evening. His eyes roll over all the things he's accumulated. He gets up and goes over to a storage place under the stairs. He's remembered something just now in the quiet of rolling his eyes over everything. He opens the storage space and there's a bike inside. A nice bike he bought when he first moved to NYC. Ten years ago, when it was brand new, he covered the entire frame of the bike first in saran wrap and then in tightly wound black electric tape. NYC when you're single and starting out is all about making expensive things look cheap and cheap things look adequate. The black tape hid all the brand markings. The made man imagines that underneath the tape everything must be new, brand new, even the molecules, he thinks, must be shining with the newness of the day he wrapped it up in tape. He looks at the bike, the rest of it beat to hell and almost unusable. He wonders if there's any air in there from 10 years ago, anything under that black tape that remembers what it was like when he was not a made man, hungry, struggling, doing amazing things. Doing a whole bunch of hard work and some really amazing things.

The next thing he does is gets a razor blade out of the tool drawer in the kitchen. He goes back to the bike and slices a thin line in the tape of the top part of the frame. He leaves the bottom frame untouched. Then he so very carefully peels off the black electrical tape, the saran wrap shining underneath and the bright red Raleigh logo and dark green paint underneath it. All of it a different color than the rest of the bike. As if an old man had dipped his foot in a stream and it had come out like a baby's foot. He puts his nose right up to the bike and breathes in. breathes in deeply as he takes the saran wrap off. Then he just sits there, made man on the hardwood floor of his comfortable apartment, the top frame brand new again and the other frame waiting under the last of the black electrical tape. And under the last tape everything still new like the day, 10 years ago when he wrapped it up.

Short Folk #29 Millionaires

Note: Still running out of steam and now on a juice cleanse, so I'm grumpy and running out of steam. One more day after today! Haven't written it yet, but I'm semi-excited for this idea.

Short Folk #29: Millionaires

When I was a kid I spent most of my time at my friend John's house. It was about a mile away from my house and there were patches of white flowers, dandelions I think, along the road all the way to his house. I'm the type of person who is always picking things up and absentmindedly taking them apart. Not out of any malice, but still. I would take apart dandelions the whole way to his house. First the white petals, methodically, never more than one at a time. I don't know, that's just the way I would do it. Then the yellow center. You can pick that off like a bottle-cap and get to the real inside of the flower around the stem. There's this fuzziness there on the real inside, you'd know what I was talking about if you ever saw it. Little tendrils of white fuzz that feel to your fingertips like the softest thing on earth. I was fascinated by this stuff. I thought it was the most secret substance. I think I've probably taken apart a thousand dandelions just to feel it between my fingers

I thought too, that I could make millions off of it. Back when I was a kid. I thought about all the geese that die to make down pillows, and how much people in this world value softness. And here I was, a curious boy who had found the softest substance on earth in the heart of a dandelion. I wondered if anyone else out there knew about what you could find when you took off the yellow bottle-cap of a dandelion. I decided to trust John with my secret. We were at his house playing home run derby with tennis balls, hitting the balls high into his neighbors yard. He hit a home run and it landed next to a random dandelion in the neighbor's grass. I picked it and brought it to him with the ball. "Timeout" I said, and then I showed him the dandelion. I peeled off the petals. I twisted off the piece above the fuzz. I showed it to him and made him feel the softness between his fingers, on his face.

In my child's mind I imagined fields and fields of dandelions and I was there too, in overalls, rubbing sweat off my face with a forearm. My imagined self, grown all the way to 6'4, muscular, shining, perfect. John was there, looking confident like he always looked, some beauty queen on his arm. It was a boy's dream of the perfect life. I looked at John holding the dandelion in his hand and it all seemed possible. "We can do this John. You and me, millionaires".

Short Folk #28: Bluff, Utah

Note: I'm running out of steam. I'm running completely out of steam. The best thing about this project is that it has created a ton of new ideas. Problem is now I really want to work on some longer length ideas I have. I'm currently doing a lot of revising older stuff for possible publication and that is making extra writing time for these very scarce. Two more days after today though. So we're on the home stretch. Here is the beginning of one of those longer pieces. Again, not a short, but a taste.

Short Folk #28: Bluff, Utah

I started because I read somewhere about lost Mormon gold. And because I have driven through the deserts out there a bunch and frankly the thought of so much wide open space really gets to me. I imagine there are ridges and bluffs out there that haven't even seen a human footprint. Or maybe just one or two. An Indian on a quest or a lost conquistador searching for El Dorado or something. I swear when you go over a piece of ground that hasn't even seen a footprint you feel a little chill through you, even out there in the desert. That's happened to me a couple times.

I keep at it because I like the heat and the way the headphones when they're on and pinging kind of mute the whole world out. It's like putting a seashell to your ear except the sound is always there. I like to feel the wind whip across my back but not be able to hear it in my ears. And I like how untethered I am out there, a rattlesnake or a twisted ankle and i could disappear forever. That's really happened to people. In 1934 a guy named Everett Ruess went out in the bluffs and desert and no one ever saw him again. They found his mules and stuff but he was gone. Its still a mystery and frankly I like the mystery. You could be swallowed up in a place with no water. Seems like a better way to go than in a hospital room smelling like old blood. At least if you go in the desert people come out and look for you. If Everett Ruess had made it where he was going no one would remember him now. But he's been gone 80 years and people still go out looking for him.

Short Folk #27: Driving back from Calgary

Note: Back by my little old self in Waterton again. Not too bad a life. The lady that owns this internet cafe just said my breakfast is "on the house" which is kinda cool. She said it's because of my loyal patronage, coming here everyday to post these, but really I think its because of my baby blues. Happens all the time.

Short Folk #27: Driving Back from Calgary

You saw butterflies sweep up the slope of the car right into the windshield. That started it. Then you saw an eagle divebomb to break the neck of what looked like its own baby. That was right on the roadside. You saw the still fuzzy featherless thing try to shimmy away before impact. Then you started seeing the really weird things. You saw cars on the road melting to leave “Midnight Black” or “Whetstone Grey” or “Bombay Tan” stains all over the slow lane. You saw the melted faces of their passengers melted inside the cars. You saw the road rise up out of the surrounding landscape like an endless parapet, like the Great Wall of southern Alberta. You saw the raised part of the road get thinner and thinner as you drove, first the road signs would fall off down the slope and then you saw trailers unable to hold the thinning line lose their back end and you saw them tip and yank the whole affair down into the chasm. You saw people getting out of their cars, with their cars balanced on an axle, both wheels hanging off the side of the now footpath of a road. And you saw them continue on, the road getting thinner and thinner at each step until it was one footstep thin, then thinner, then just like the blade of a knife. You saw people cut in slivers and fall away. Later still you saw the road widen again, but keep on widening, until all that rolling country was paved. You saw the mountains paved with perfect lanes painted on the paving. You saw rivers paved with a liquid asphalt. And people came from everywhere to drive on the roads. Every land was bumper to bumper with a thousand cars. And then you saw a huge wind come and take every car away, and every piece of asphalt on the mountains and in the rivers, until it was just you again driving down a two lane highway back to where you came from.

Short Folk #26: Buddy

Note: This is the beginning to what I hope will be a much longer piece. I've gotten some good feedback on how to focus on voice. So this piece is all about voice, and its a continuation of some characters I have used in the past. And its supposedly what will follow that weird intro I posted about a week ago.

Short Folk: 26 Buddy

So My buddy calls me up and says he’s got his momma in a jar and he ain’t stoppin til she sees the California ocean. Funny, but I knew just what he was thinkin. So I said goodbye to my own mother and took a greyhound east to Jacksonville which is the last place I knew he was at. I make it ok and I get up to the trailer I knew he rented with his momma and there was nothing but a note saying he couldn’t wait any longer and that he had started out hitchin and telling me to find him out on highway 30. There was this big ol rusty Skylark with not more than a drop of gas in it, so that’s what I took, spending the last of my traveling money on a full tank to find him. Finding him was the easy part. Can’t miss buddy. He’s sitting on the side of the highway near the state line with the urn at his side that was all bronze like a bullet with a lid on it. And he’s just looking down the road in my direction, like he knew it was me that was coming over the horizon.

First off he says it took me long enough, then before he’ll get in the car with me, he says I have to “submit to the ritual” was how he said it. And he takes the top off that bronze bullet of an urn and tells me to wet my fingers. Hell no I say but then he gives me those eyes of his that are saying, if you don’t do this, I’ll just keep right on going in the skylark. And theres no true way of telling about buddy except to say that its damn impossible to say no to him when he gives you those eyes. At least at this point, I would have followed him to the ends of the earth when he gave me those blue eyes. So I wet a finger like testing the wind and dipped into the urn and felt the ash in there like real fine sand and when I brought it out the wet part was covered in a grey dusting of the stuff and then I put my finger in my mouth. Good says buddy, now there are four of us traveling in this car. You and my momma and me and my momma. And you remember to keep your manners around my momma.

Short Folk #25: Ancestor

Animals, or they could be the souls of my ancestors, scurry across the road just out of reach of the high beams. Oh how I punish my station wagon in these corners. In the full dark, that was the near dark when I stopped fishing and hastily strapped the kayak on top of the car. Now it twists and shimmies under my too fast, too loose setup.


There was a moment at the lake, after the fish stopped rising, after the last sightseers left me alone, when a strange bird made a tiny call in the dark pines and all my widowers’ loneliness coalesced into fear. I was tired and alone. I had been alone for so long. The forest and the darkness combined against me. They laid on me like a stone on the chest.


I was a child again, and my father had just sent me out after dinner to pick up the mail at the end of our long drive. The going out was fine, but once I had it in my hands and the night at my back I was overwhelmed by an imagined malevolence. I ran like I’d never run towards the houselights, all the while expecting the darkness to form like a basket and carry me away into oblivion. When I was finally inside, panting, the door slammed behind me, I realized that I had crushed the mail in my fists.

Now I feel like the night is trying to come in through the windows. And the kayak is bobbing as if gripped from above by an enormous hand. 12 miles to go til home on this thin alpine road. I hear the fan of the heater and I see the fleeting shapes of more small animals, the souls of my forefathers. Sometimes I just see their eyes lit up in the edges of the headlights. Like me, they are frightened. Why has everyone left me so alone?


I round a corner with hurtling speed and a bull moose materializes in the high beams. He is too close and too huge for us to do anything but look at each other. Time compresses. His eyes are cloudy and I see no surprise in them. I see weariness and hurt and understanding. The heavy fear completely leaves, and there is nothing now but me and the animal. “Whose soul are you?” I ask in the moment of impact. “Your soul”, he answers. And then we touch.

Short Folk #24: Bayou

 Note: James Best, my good buddy and my co-conspirator in this 30 stories in 30 days project is now up visiting me in Canada.  This is a piece from a writing exercise we did last night. I know, we do writing excercises together. Nerd writers of the world unite!  The inspiration for this piece was the 3rd verse of a great folk song called "Silver Dagger". The most recent (and best ever) cover is by the Fleet Foxes, but any cover is great.  The song is extremely old, and I find the lyrics fascinating.  Here is the third verse:

My daddy, he's a handsome devil
he's got a chain five miles long
and on every rung a heart does dangle
of someone  he has loved and wronged. 

Then we had 15 minutes to come up with some piece of writing inspired by that verse. Here's what I came up with.

Short Folk #24: Bayou


We came down into an ochre valley. Sunken trees or broke off at the stumps. Fireflies. Humidity that felt like drowning, where the wet air rushed fast into every space our bodies left in our walking.  I couldn’t stand anymore to be the one in front, the fear had me so. But I couldn’t stand to be the one in back, either. That was a different, snatching, fear. So Sarah and I walked side by side down the trail, mud and rotted bark and mulch.  Drawn onward. I felt drunk on all the liquid in the air.

Further down the smell of a bonfire and then further, a riverbend clearing and a bonfire. Trash all around it in circles, like the fire was a mass with its own gravity. Empty tin cans, their tops pried away as with great force. No clean lines or cuts. Milk Crates. Some food eaten, other food just smashed.  Sarah called “hello”. I couldn’t speak.  And then a man, pulling back an army surplus tent flap and moving towards us. And something about him that made the air lose all is humidity in his advance. I was cold. I gravitated closer to the fire.  He came with long strides, loping and casual. Sarah moved closer to me.  “Who are you” I said. I lost it. “Who are you, I shouted. To have us on a string like a cosmos.” I felt like a plaything, an amusement. It wasn’t fair. “Well we’ve come” I yelled. “Who are you and what now?”  He had clean white teeth when he smiled. “Car trouble?” is what he said, the cold, dry air pressing through his teeth.

Short Folk #23: Reading it Twice

Note: 

I think reading is special. It’s powerful. I think it can even change your personality. But there’s something more special than reading and that’s reading something twice. I’m reading Anne Carson’s Plainwater and I had forgotten that I had previously read it. I had read it 4 years ago for an assignment and I had read just this one section where Carson is giving these incredible daily reports from a pilgrimage she is taking thru Spain.  Well I just got to that section and reading it again brought back all the memories of where I was and who I was when I was reading it. That’s why reading something twice can be so moving. The text mixes with the memory of first reading that text, and lets you know how far you’ve come or how far you haven’t. 

So this story will probably be the most personal of them all so far. Because I’m going to write about myself from 4 years ago. Plus, Carson’s narrator is very open in her writing, so I’ll take a cue from that. 

Short Folk #23: Reading it Twice

I remember reading it before and then after a nap, but reading it better after the nap. On the bed in a chilly upstairs bedroom, where I had taken the duvet out from its cover because I couldn’t stand how it bunched down near my toes. It was early spring and things were just thawing out. I was pretty sure I was in love. Just that morning, driving, I saw two red herons, their long thin legs like arm bones, stalking through a field. I remember thinking they must mate for life, though I really didn’t know.  That spring I was always looking for signs of love being permanent. 

The heron’s made me want to read Basho and all his Haiku’s. Frogs that splashed in water, willow trees leaning in a wind, and the one that went “without my journey, and without this spring, I would have missed this dawn.” I think those were Basho, though I’m not sure.  So I read Haiku’s all morning, and the one that moved me most wasn’t by Basho, but Issa, after the death of his father, and it went “At Dawn, My father and I used to look out at green fields”.  Heron’s and Haiku’s and a good measure of put-on mourning. These are the things you think about when you’re pretty sure you’re in love.  

But what I remember most, what I was talking about reading at the beginning, was Anne Carson writing about a pilgrimage to Compostela. I remember it because I have just read the same book again, now 4 years later.  And again with a nap in-between. Back then the image that stayed with me “latest and deepest” as Whitman would say, was of Ximena kissing El Cid on the shoulder. What an intimate and confident movement! I longed to emulate it.  But not anymore. Now, what stays with me are more important things: A drowned dog floating in a river. A water bird standing on one strong leg. A dawn-golden horseman drumming furiously across the plain, coming for me. The message so urgent that he shouts it while still in the saddle, while still a far way off is “don’t turn around!”.

Short Folk #22: On the West

Note:

I finished Murakami, and then I read Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, and then I read a bit from Borges Labyrinths (more on that another day) and now I’m reading Anne Carson’s Plainwater. I’ve read a lot of Carson in my life and its one of my favorite things to do.  Her books are all jumbles of poetry, essay and story and each of them done at the absolutely highest level. None of the individual pieces make sense standalone but somehow, put together, you can see the threads running through them.  I admire that. Its tough for me to describe how much I admire what Carson is doing. Her erudition and skill is rather daunting.  In Plainwater she has a section of short stories, or lectures, each about a paragraph long that she calls “Short Talks”. I’ll transcribe one below, so you can get a sense of them, and then I’ll borrow liberally from her to write one of my own for today’s entry.  Its really hard to take any of her stuff out of context though, you need to real the whole series. Please do.

“On Reading

            Some fathers hate to read but love to take the family on trips. Some children hate trips but love to read. Funny how often these find themselves passengers in the same automobile. I glimpsed the stupendous clear-cut shoulders of the Rockies from between paragraphs of Madame Bovary. Cloud shadows roved languidly across her huge rock throat, traced her fir flanks. Since those days, I do not look at hair on female flesh without thinking, Deciduous?”

Short Folk #22: On The West

           

There are places where it’s so dry and weathered the mountains sink up to their shoulders in dust. You’ll be driving on some highway and realize that all you are seeing are the tips of them, like islands. You realize that you’re driving on an ocean of old dust, and could maybe sink.  There are other places where it’s so wet and new that the rivers cut the mountains right down to the roots. You’ll be driving on some highway and realize that you can see up every crisp fold of them, every place the rock bends. You realize that mountains grow like your children do, their height measured by notches in the wall.   But the thing about the West is that there’s a highway at the very bottom of that ocean of dust, and it’s the same highway where you looked up at the striated face of the new mountains and thought of your children. How can that be, you ask? But the West doesn’t speak. It only grows or covers.

Short Folk #22: Wet Candle

 Note: This story is a mix of a really weird old story with new stuff. I still think it's weird.  If you've been following along with all of these you'll notice I'm moving pretty far away from any type of plot conclusions. I'm leaving things really open ended. I don't know if I like it or not. I'm just trying stuff out, I guess. My apologies if it makes the entries weirder. 

 Short Folk #22: Wet Candle

She stood at the night table and looked down at the burning wick of the white candle. She paused, standing in her slip, frail, looking at the flame. Then she put her thumb and forefinger in her mouth and ran them pinching down along the sides of her tongue, wetting them.  She reached down and snuffed out the candle with her saliva-wet fingers. So wet she hardly felt the heat of the flame where she touched the wick. 

            Then it was dark, but she didn’t climb into the empty bed.  She stood in place, swaying a bit from the strange pleasure of pinching out the candle with her wet fingers. First time she’d ever done it that way. She stood there and thought about how many thousands of candles she’d blown or put out in her life, and never once with wet fingers. Then she got into the bed she had shared for 47 years but now did not share. 

            But she couldn’t get to sleep. She hadn’t expected the simple pleasure of putting the candle out in that way. She hadn’t expected any new sensations.  The newness thrilled her, the tiny rebellion against the way she’d always been. She lay awake in the dark with her eyes open. Normally she would be afraid of the dark, or wary of it at least. But this dark was different, because she had put out the light in such a new way. It was her dark. She felt an urge to get up and stretch around in it. To move through the empty rooms of her home as if swimming in it. She felt like dancing. It was the first time in a long time she had felt that way. 

            She got up and found the book of matches on the night table. She lit one, and brought the tiny flame back to the wick.  She watched the fuse gain full flame again, then she put her fingers back in her mouth, running them again along the sides of her tongue. She tasted the soot from the first time, reached down and snuffed out the candle again. Jumpy and timid as she did it, like there was some strange new power in her wet fingers. Then she just stood there again in her luxurious dark. 

Short Folk #21: Open Ocean

I’m a person who has spent some time on boats.  Once I was in a bay, in the Caribbean.  I had found my mooring early and was making dinner for my wife and the friends that were with us.  I was barbequing off the back deck of the boat. Fish that I had caught in the lagoon and some vegetables my wife had bought at the island market earlier that day.  A tiny sailboat came around the point and into the bay.  I couldn’t imagine anyone being comfortable on a boat that small in the open ocean.  It was maybe 14 feet long, but with the proportions of any regular keelboat. Tiny cabin with one porthole. A single mast. A wheel at the helm.  I turned down the heat of the barbeque, trying to stall so I could see who would emerge from such a boat.  But the fish was done and so, reluctantly, I brought it all inside and sat down for dinner.

I told my wife about the boat as we were washing dishes after dinner, about how I couldn’t believe something so small could survive on the open ocean. She wanted to see, so we went above to see if it had moored anywhere near us.  One of those immaculate Caribbean sunsets was just finishing and the tiny sailboat was moored directly off our stern.  Pinks and red’s and every shade of orange in the low sky and all of it bouncing in bluer hues across the small bay waves.  Much of the sailboat was silhouetted already, and we couldn’t see details of a name or a berth. But the captain was on deck, with one hand on the wire of a mast stanchion, swinging around it like a tetherball. At the edge of his turn his body was out completely over the water, and the small boat dipped and pulled to follow his weight. His face seemed incredibly old, white hair and a long white beard. But his body, naked except for a purple speedo, was bronzed and moved much too young for a white-haired man. 

 After a bit of watching the sunset and that strange man swinging around his rigging, my wife went below. I could tell the whole scene had unnerved her in some strange way.  It unnerved me too, but not in any way I can describe. And I stayed above, watching the death throes of the day and that tiny boat that was now black in the silhouette light. The swinging captain had gone below, but even the small bay waves rocked the boat back and forth like the needle of some violent metronome. I couldn’t imagine how someone could stand being on a boat that small in the open ocean.

Short Folk #20 Lobster Hunting

Note: Both stories today have a nautical theme. Don't know why, they just came out. Both are experiences I have lived, though in different settings and with different company. Enjoy. 

The lagoon is in darkness except for one light. I think it is two men in an outrigger canoe, paddling deliberately across the water. They are hunting for something.  They move away from me, out towards the reef, until all I can see against the dark backdrop is the light and the curved line of the canoe in the circle of the light. 

And now the light has split. I see it somehow divide. Each man must be carrying a light now because they are moving away from each other. Where there two boats to begin with? Or are these men walking knee deep in the lagoon? And if so, what are they hunting? What could they possibly be hunting?

Short Folk #19: 30 and 1/2 Friends

Note: I haven’t written this one yet, and I’m really excited about the idea. I came up with it last night after a couple of hours more reading Murakami, then I slept on it, and I was still excited about it in the morning.   I imagine that it will be real similar to the “copy change” kind of poems James likes to write on Bottomless Lakes.  Very Very much influenced by Murakami. Especially if you’ve read “Wind up Bird Chronicle” you’ll realize just how much I think I’m going to borrow from it.  Speaking of Murakami, before I get to writing today’s story I want to share just a hint of why I am liking his writing so much. His chapter’s all have multiples titles, and the titles are usually vague one-line summaries of what happens in the chapter. For instance, chapter 24 of book 3 has as one of its titles “The Long Arm Reaches Out”, and yet, so far in the book we haven’t been introduced to any concept of a long arm reaching out. So the title is a clue, a tantalizing one for someone who reads with the intent that I usually do.   Somewhere in the middle of the chapter we are introduced to the concept of the long arm, it’s a metaphor that a character uses. Another clue, because we still haven’t seen any long arm reaching out.  So the reader is immediately brought back to the title of the chapter, and this, compounded with the second clue, heightens the suspense even further.  When the Long Arm finally does reach out, metaphorically and physically, it has the effect of a intense climax, because it has been so carefully set up. Yet, as you read, the setup seems effortless.

He does this all throughout the book. So the major suspense of the plot hangs at the end of the book (I think), but all throughout, these minor suspenses rise and fall and keep me (the reader) relatively enthralled. They also keep me distracted enough from the final suspenseful question that I’m sure, when (or if) it hits, it will be even more powerful. Just really good writing.

Short Folk # 19: 30 and ½ Friends. 

Charlotte called me up after we hadn’t spoken in about a month. She had in her voice an eagerness to speak with me that I recognized. Something had happened in her life and she needed perspective on it. Maybe she had had her tranquility carried away by some new boy. I kept my tranquility pretty well, and Charlotte always came by for doses of it when hers was carried away.  I could tell that’s what she wanted by the relief in her voice when I answered the phone. “Girlfriend” she had said, “We simply must have a talk and a coffee”.

I was right about the boy and the tranquility, she let it all pour out over coffee in the Cafe of a Barnes and Noble.  And I was so glad she had come to me for advice, so glad she had known that I was someone who kept extra tranquility around for just such an occasion. I had tried to tell her a couple of times before this just how good it made me feel to help people with “problems of perspective” as I liked to call it.  But everytime I tried to explain it just came out wrong, a jumbled mess of gratitude and earnestness, a vomit of gratitude and earnestness. And it was always at the end of the conversation too, after Charlotte’s crisis had passed and the solutions to her problems had formed into action plans that she was eager to leave and execute.  She always looked at me after the vomit of gratitude as if I was some strange creature, to be cherished for sure, but also protected from the banal, from any quotidian concern. 

But this time I decided to end the conversation differently. It’s not that I felt that she owed me anything. I gave much more than I got with Charlotte, that was what I was always trying to say in the effusions of gratitude. I just felt like switching it up. So before she left I asked her this:

“How often do you feel the need to speak with me” I asked, “I mean, how often in the way that we are speaking now, deeply, I guess would be the word for it.”

She looked at me like this was some kind of test. I could tell she was taking the question seriously.

“Deeply like this?” she asked “I guess about once a month. I don’t know why. I guess about once a month”

I sat and thought about that for a moment. My history with her had given me the right to muse right in the middle of conversations.

“What’s 365 divided by 12?” I said, “Can you figure that out off the top of your head?”

“In the 30’s I think, but you know I can’t stand math. Why do you ask?”

“I was just thinking about something random” I said.

“Well then,” she began and I knew she was moving back into the practical, into the action plans that we had put in place to bring back her tranquility. 

After she left, striding through the double doors with her plan and a new sense of purpose, I sat and did the math more carefully in my head.  365 divided by 12, I thought. Around 30 and ½.  30 and ½ friends like Charlotte and I would never have another hollow day. I sat there and thought about that for a long time. I sat and thought about how fulfilling that life would be.  I stored up tranquility for the next time Charlotte would call and I sat and thought about 30 and ½ friends for a very long time.

Short Folk #17 & #18: Forever and Predator

 Note:  I'm posting two short ones today in an effort to try and catch up with my buddy James, who is doing a 30 poems in 30 days project alongside me on his blog Bottomless Lakes. You can find it on the link below and to the left.  I'm about halfway through Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicles and I have to say its incredible. Both of these pieces are definitely very influenced by it. I'm into the book in a way that goes beyond my analytical writers mind and into pure enjoyment. And that's why we read, right?

In other news I'm sporting the gnarliest black eye of my life today after a bungee cord snapped off the kayak I was putting on my car and the metal bit recoiled and hit me just below my left eye. I'm lucky it didn't blind me, and now I look like I joined Fight Club, which is what I'm telling everyone anyway.  I took my anger out on the fish as my buddy Gary and I caught some very nice rainbow trout today at the lake. After I post this we'll go back to the cabin and grill 'em.  Tough life, I know.  Enjoy.

Short Folk #17: Forever

The boy lay awake in his bed thinking about forever. He was 10 and for all he could remember this was the first time he had ever thought about forever. In the half-moon shaped room an aquarium against the curved wall bubbled away and his younger brother slept with heavy breaths in the bunk above him.  Forever was such a chameleon thing to think about. Think about it for a short time and it’s comforting, you imagine loved ones. You imagine an eternal continuation of all the things you enjoy. But then really think about forever, stare into the never-ending of it, the no-rest of it, the eons and eons of time stretching forward relentlessly, the total lack of cessation. Think too hard on that forever and it will keep you up at night. It will scare you as much as the first time you thought about it, 10 years old, in the half-moon shaped bedroom, with your brother’s heavy breathing in the bunk above you and the aquarium against the curved wall bubbling away the nighttime.


 Short Folk #18: Predator

The trout at his feet struggled against the curved hull of the boat. He realized then that he was a predator, floating on a lake full of predators, in a world full of predators, and who knows, maybe even the planets spun after each other with their own murderous gravity. 

Short Folk #16: Cat in the Orchard in the Fog

It was early and he was in the backseat of a car, coming back from somewhere he shouldn’t have been. The woman he shouldn’t have been with was in the passenger seat, and her boyfriend was driving. The boyfriend didn’t know anything. 

He reached up from the backseat to rub the shoulders of the woman in front of him. Her shoulders tensed when he touched her. He was so brash in the early morning and in the knowledge of what they had done that he continued rubbing her shoulders. 

“Getting a little friendly there aren’t we” said the boyfriend. 

“Getting a little possessive there aren’t we” he shot back. 

But still he let go of her shoulders and pushed back into his seat, a bit petulant. After all, the punk had no idea. 

Then everyone in the car was silent. He looked out the window. They were driving slow along thin country roads. A low orchard was passing by. It was so early there were tiny clouds all along the ground, pockets of mist that settled into depressions or hovered among the roots and trunks of the squat trees. He saw a cat, a housecat, but lean and feral looking, stalking with quiet paws in the fog and the wet earth under the trees. It was so cautious in its steps, and so focused. Cat in an orchard in the fog, hunting with quiet paws. 

The complete image sobered him and he turned forward and saw the brown pony tail of the girl and her left hand holding the right hand of her boyfriend. All his brashness left him. It was so early, and he was in the backseat of a car coming back from somewhere he never should have been. 

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Composition Notes; 

This is a very old idea but the first time I've written it into a story. The experience comes from something similar (but much less promiscuous) I lived in College. I was coming back from a friends house and I was giddy and brash in the morning, just too comfortable. Then I saw this image and it stuck with me. I was trying to capture that moment, the moment when confidence or arrogance leaves you in the face of something sobering.  

Wrote it for about a half an hour yesterday, then slept on the idea and finished it up in about a half an hour this morning.  I'm still reading the "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" by Murakami, and I think this is still very influenced by that.   Oh and I'm eating some super high quality soup right now in some great company,  so maybe that has something to do with it. 

Short Folk #15

At lunch they sit on boxes and cans of paint and primer all around my living room turned construction zone. They speak Cantonese, a low quick singing to my ear. They’ve brought me lunch in a take out container, boiled strips of chicken and some large leafed steamed vegetable, all of it covered in watery gravy that looks a little like mucous.  They watched me eat for a few minutes and then they started talking.

They look up at a hinged, architect’s style, lamp that they’ve just installed on the wall above my writing desk. Loung starts talking in a lecturing tone, pointing to his elbow, pointing to the hinge of it as he moves it. I think they are talking about how the lamp hinges. Kuo and Lin move their elbows and nod their heads in understanding. More quick low Cantonese singing. Now they are pointing to a scar on Loung’s arm, near the elbow, and he mimes a fall and I think he is talking about how he got it. Now all three of them are pulling up shirts or turning over palms to show old scars. 

I’m fascinated by how a gesture can turn into a fully articulated thought, an entire concept. Since they started work three weeks ago I’ve started to speak wholly in gestures. When they are gone I catch myself still speaking in gestures, speaking to myself by throwing my hands into the air, or rolling my neck forward and my shoulders back. 

Just today I tried to find a way to tell them J.D. Salinger had died. First with words, “writer”, “artist”, “like me”.  Then I made like typing on a computer keyboard. But that seemed wrong, too modern, so I made like writing a scroll, touching the tip of an imaginary quill to my tongue. They didn’t understand, looking back at me with blank good nature.  Finally I made like a typewriter, typing big in the air with the index fingers of both hands, then making the noise and motion of the return mechanism. They got that. And then I pointed to a picture of Salinger from one of his book jackets. I said his name and ran my finger across my throat.  Then the word “today” which I knew they understood.  Picture, typewriter, finger across throat, “Today”. Typewriter, picture, finger across throat, “Today”. Finger across throat, picture, typewriter, “today”.  They nodded, probably thinking Salinger had killed himself with a typewriter.  Floating there somewhere around all those gestures was the real truth. 

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Notes: 

This was recreated from an incident that happened a few months ago while I was doing some renovations on my apartment. I really don't know where it's going. And this is obviously not the end, but I hit my word count and couldn't find any way to wrap it up.  That's also a reason why it doesn't have a title.  I'll be better tomorrow. promise.

Short Folk # 14: Buddy Intro

Note: Suffer through this, I'll explain after.

We saw him, outside that Texaco. Outside that Flying J. Old white guy. I’d say he was middle age. We saw him with grey hair and a lumberjack’s flannel shirt. I saw him with a denim jacket and long salt and pepper hair. He was real old when we saw him. He seemed to be just sitting there. In Texas I seen him. In New Mexico. It was Arizona when we saw him, at a Chevron. He had really blue eyes. He wasn’t asking for money. We saw him on the way to Moab. It was in the early 90’s I think. Like he was meditating, just sitting there. I saw him up near Sturgis, he was real ragged. I’ve seen him once for each of my marriages. August 12^th, 1974. 2:46 in the afternoon, that’s when I saw him. We saw him in a bomber jacket like a vet would wear. He seemed powerful, that’s the only way I can say it. He was sitting outside the chevron, on the curb of the parking lot, he had these really big eyes. We’ve never seen him, we’ve never wanted to. We saw him at a rest stop near Fort Worth. The only thing my bastard father and I share is that we’ve both seen him. The kids wouldn’t leave the car for fear of him. I’ll never forget those eyes. My old lady’s real religious, and she lit a candle and put it at his feet. He wasn’t begging or anything. Like a totem pole. We’ve seen him twice. I said “Hey buddy” and then he looked into my eyes and I couldn’t remember what else I was going to say. We’ve never forgotten him. We were heading to get a quickie wedding in Vegas when we saw him. I just felt like following him wherever he was going. My wife and I felt the strange pull to sit with him, we still talk about it. We gave him twenty dollars, and then just waited for him to say something, I dunno to tell us our fortunes or something. When I’m driving near the road where I first seen him, I keep the doors locked, even going 70. We saw him last year. I don’t put nothing past him. He pulled me out of a wreck, I swear it was him. Our kid gave him a dollar and he touched him and since then he ain’t ever had asthma no more. He’s Cain I tell you, forced to wander the earth. We saw him. I touched him. It was in Little Rock. Barstow, believe it or not. Colorado Springs. Dillon, Montana. Taos. Yessir, Memphis. Pocatello, just last year. We just knew there was something about him. My Lord and my God. I’ve started keeping time from the moment I saw him. This sound’s funny but we’ve always thought that when he dies, America dies, if he can die. Patron Saint of the highways. I saw him last spring, but my uncle says he saw him in 64’ and he was just as old. Show me his grave and I’ll call you a liar. I’ve seen him and I don’t want to talk about it. When I die, either way, he’s gonna be the one that comes for me. I asked him his name. He said his friends just call him Buddy.

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Composition notes.  For A long time I've been wanting to write a novel about a kind of wanderer/god/savant/bum/evil Forrest Gump kind of guy.  The guy's name is Buddy. Think of it as a mix between On the road/Fear and Loathing/The Bible with a bit of Rime of the Ancient Mariner thrown in for kicks.  I've been thinking about an intro for that book for a while. I decided to finally write the first version of it.  I'm going for a "filmic" or cinematic type style with this thing. Epigrammatic.  Supposed to be a bunch of different speakers. I hope that comes through. I wish I could upload pictures at this cafe because there are some awesome ones of roadside bums.

Short Folk #13: Business Traveler.

 Note: Finally.  Note Note: I've been listening to William Hurt read Hemingway's A sun also rises over the last couple of days. Hemingway holds up so well for me, except I can't believe people could ever really drink that much. It's interesting to reread/listen to this book in particular because the last time I read it I was 18 and IN LOVE with Lady Ashley.  My experience now is very different.  Here is my best shot at writing like Hemingway. BTW, there are hilarious contests where people do this, So I guess this is my entry.

 Business Traveler. 

He was the kind of man that had money to travel, and had to often for business.  And he was the kind of romantic that only ever wrote me letters from hotel stationary.  Reams of letters, and the way he numbered the pages and how his writing slanted awkwardly across the unlined sheets was cute, even endearing. The way incredibly drunk people can be endearing in their helplessness.  I imagine he wrote more than a few of those letters drunk.  In fact, I can just picture him, up in the room after a few hours drinking screwdrivers at the hotel bar. He’d think it was old fashioned to drink at the hotel bar, but what it really meant was that he was too afraid to go out among the real citizens of whatever city he might be in. I can imagine the minibar hanging open where he’d raided it in a fit of bad judgment.  And now feeling a rotten whimsy he’d look out at the glittering lights of wherever he was and think of me, my apparent goodness, my warm lap, and he’d pull out the hotel stationary and take advantage of me vicariously.I bet he sealed and sent each letter the very night he wrote it, dropping it off at the front desk, because if he would have waited til morning, with the clean unemotional promise of a day full of meetings or a sleek plane to catch, I don’t he would have ever sent them. Maybe written them off as ramblings or saved them for one of his journal entries. But no, he sent all of them. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he has a journal somewhere where each page is a letter addressed to me.

I didn’t find out til after about 15 letters, with their luxury names as nostalgic headings, that he was married. But that’s ok I guess, because so was I.

Note. Internet is down.

Sorry team. Posting from my phone which can get costly. Internet cafe is down. Bummer too because I wrote what I think is a great story on my laptop and it's just too much to rewrite it here. I'll post it early tomorrow if the Internet is working again at the cafe. Then I'll post another in the afternoon.

Short Folk #12: Mullet on Wheels

We had a ‘85 Ford F-150 with a 10 foot camper mounted in the bed. One of those big winged setups that looks like it’s going to swallow the truck. You know, where from head-on the truck looks like a mule, carrying the weight of that camper on its back. Abby used to call it a mullet on wheels, you know, business in the front and party in the back. Huh. But it wasn’t for a while that she started calling it that. 

I remember once she was standing in that camper, dying her hair purple in the kitchen sink. It must have been the mid 90’s.  We had been bumming up the Rockies for a couple of months, sleeping in rest stops or camping in national parks. The national parks were the easiest, they’re all laid out like an explosion, you’ve got your city in the middle, your hub, and then the forest all around it like debris. When it gets near dark everybody heads back into the hub, that’s where the campgrounds are, the hookups, and I guess more than that you feel safer there. Well, our thing was to head out into the park in the dark, in the real wildness of it. It was Abby’s idea first I think. There was nobody was going out to the wildness in the dark like we could. Find a nice place to park, streamside or a road turnout, and you were home free for the night. Like I said, nobody strong enough to start out into the wild in the dark, certainly not anybody who would want to bust us for free camping like that. And we were early risers so we could be back on the road at dawn as if nothing happened. 

            We went up the whole Rockies like that, all the way into Canada. Making love nights in the back of that camper, bumming gas or stealing.  Never once had a complaint about the pace of that life, even though I think for a whole summer we ate nothing but canned beans and peaches. Sometimes fish I’d caught. Anyway, I feel like I was talking about something else. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Abby in the morning washing her hair in kitchen sink. That was in Jasper. Goddamnit if that doesn’t feel like five lifetimes ago. 

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Composition Notes:  Hopefully there's another one coming today. it all depends on if I get back to town before the internet cafe closes.  This piece is really an exercise in voice. I have been writing a lot of a-b-c linear type of shorts recently, at least that's what it feels like. and i wanted to write something that had nothing to do with the traditional mode of telling a story.  I like this type of voice. this nostalgic bum type of dialogue. I've used it a lot in other stuff. It fits my personality when I'm feeling nostalgic. But I don't know if I'll keep using it.  The trigger for this piece was seeing this couple yesterday at a lake. truck and everything. Sorry for the lack of photos on these blogs, there's just not enough bandwidth in this cafe.

Short Folk #11: Great Loop Fire of 1972

He had a ‘58 T-bird parked in an old barn. It was cherry red, with whitewall tires and a cream leather interior.  He had owned it 51 years. Since 1958. It was his pride and joy—his one extravagance in an otherwise simple, patterned, farm owner’s life. He almost never drove it around. At his age, it was too much car for his frayed reflexes.  But then again, he never let anyone else drive it.

Just last year the barn collapsed in a bad blizzard. The cross beam that was the peak of the roof crushed the T-bird. Right down it’s axis, a near clinical vivisection. No one wanted to talk to him after that, afraid of what state of mind he might be in, afraid that the crushing of the T-bird might also have crushed him.  

But he went right on as if everything was OK, that is, he kept doing the things he had always done. As independent as ever, he planted his garden in the spring. He went and decorated his late wife’s grave. He got in his truck to drive the 100 or so miles to visit his grown children and grand children.  

He decided against the straight roads and took the scenic route through the mountains of northern Montana. Thin roads, tight curves, a drive he used to love to take in the T-bird.  This time he took his time, stopping at scenic turn-outs, reminiscing. At a switchback loop he came across a bronze plaque he hadn’t seen before, a new monument dedicated to explaining the great loop fire of 1972. All around the road you could see the half tall new growth of pine, with a few blackened trunks rising like reminders high above the green. 

He got out of his truck. He read the plaque. He so cleanly remembered the fire. The smoke creeping through the windows of the T-bird. Him and his wife on the way to Missoula. Soot on the whitewall, and the last low flames moving over the burnt ground like colonies of insects, right outside the passenger window.  He remembered coming around a corner, where the road rose beyond the choking blanket of smoke, and the sun through the windshield and the clear air was a new birth. A clean-slate earth to live in. 

He went back to the truck and got a shotgun out of a toolbox in the bed. He stood at an angle and fired, peppering and denting the bronze and making the text unreadable. Then he got back in his car and drove carefully to his son’s house. If you would have asked him why he shot he would have said it was foolish for anyone to make a plaque for something people were still alive to tell you about.

Note: In the Land that the Internet Forgot

Yes,   I'm alive and I'm still writing. I'm just in the land that internet has not yet reached---Canada.  Zing, to all my Canadian friends.  Long road trip to get up here and now just a very shotty internet connection at a cafe.  I'm going to start posting twice a day for the next couple of days until I get caught up.  I will get caught up.

Short Folk #10: Cameo (travel day again)

 Note:  Travel day again today. Road trip this time. So this is not a fresh short story. But it is one I wrote (and rewrote) recently. We're one third of the way there in my quest to come up with 30 short stories in 30 days.  I feel bad about these retreads but the internet isn't everywhere I'm going so it makes it tough. This should be the last old story, the rest should be hot off the presses.  Thanks for all your support.  This story, "Cameo" is an exercise in a totally different writing style. lots of run-on sentences. Some people like it, some people can't understand what's going on :) Enjoy.

Cameo

In the bus heavy with old people, with the potholes bumping us all along. And out the window where I was looking the light blue of the water and the breakers and the coral flashing by like an old filmstrip, broken by moments of thick banana leaves and the raised capillary roots of banyan trees.

We stopped in the gravel parking lot of a roadside cameo workshop. It was on the tour. The sound of gravel under the tires when we finally stopped. All of us getting gingerly off the air-conditioned bus and the blast of humidity. And most of us then shuffling into the cameo shop to be back in the AC again, but there was none and then men fanning themselves with their tourbooks and women taking off their straw hats with floral patterned bands and fanning them.

The owner was happy, he had a deal with the buses I guess. He met us in the lobby and directed us to a table in the corner with all the shells laid out on it. Conch, snail. In pinks and greens and indigos. Then standing behind the table with cursory waves of his hands over the shells, and the being in the family for generations, and the shells laid out in front of him in various stages of preparation, some full cameos, some with half formed women’s faces peeking out in profile from the smooth surfaces. And some of the women, the ones that lived wealthy lives, who had really traveled, peeling off from the margins of the crowd before he had finished.

Then with a sweep of his hand turning us to the showroom where what must have been his grandaughters were waiting behind the glass display tables. The air moving with hats and tourbooks and the spinning of an off balance acacia wood fan. And throughout that afternoon the glances of old women at mirrors to see themselves peeking out in profile.

When we came out the driver sitting on the concrete parking curb saying yes, yes ready to go? Yes. And putting out his cigarette on the concrete before he stood and looked us over to see who he could name. Mr Thompson. Miss Shirley.

Back to the air conditioning and the potholes, the gentle curve of the island road that, if you took it long enough, would eventually take you back to where you started. That was where the tour ended. But before that, the looking out the window at the banyan roots and the banana leaves and every once in a while peeking out, on cue, the indigo blue of the lagoon and the deeper blue beyond the breakers, and the women that bought cameos swearing they looked just like that when they were young.

Short Folk #9: Perfect Specimen

Two doctors were at my bedside with their long white coats, each with an attendant nurse. My wife was also there. My parents too.  All these people had been coming in shifts from the beginning but this was the first time everyone had been in the room at the same time.  Good or bad, something was about to happen. The moment balanced on the sharp edge of a scalpel.

The head doctor was the first to speak. I figured it would be him or my father.

 "You do not have cancer. You are not dying. It's more than that, actually.  My colleague and I have been keeping you off your feet for a purpose. We needed to run more tests, but not for your sake."

He looked hard at me as if I was supposed to understand. I didn't and I looked around at my family. They all seemed to understand, like they had been briefed earlier. Still, they looked on the verge of tears, even with the good news. I was confused and tired. My mother though, looked as if she were proud. The other doctor was the next to speak. He was a cardiologist.

"This is really quite unique. And not at all easy to say. I'll admit, though, it gives me some pride to say it. I'll come right out with it. You are perfect. We can find no asymmetry in your body. There is nothing in any of your tests which is not optimum. No microscopic impurities in your blood. No indication of contamination whatsoever. Independent tests of your organ functions shows each one in textbook shape. In fact, there is nothing about you that is not textbook. You are the textbook. God, your heart is a marvel.  Of course you are aging, that is natural, but, and this might not make sense to you, but you are aging perfectly."

The other doctor broke in, a little impatient,

"It's unprecedented. And that's exactly the point. You are unprecedented. You are the only perfect specimen in the history of medical literature, and we need to keep you here so you can be studied. And we need to study you, how do I say this delicately? in ways where your consciousness will not effect our studies. Do you grasp what I am saying? I'm saying that even if I had to spend the rest of my life in jail I'd still euthanize you so that others could study you.  Do you realize what you could do for the human race?"

He looked hard at me again, this whole time he had been looking hard at me, as if I was supposed to understand. I did understand now.  I looked around the faces in the room, my mother and her proud and tragic look, my father with an approving nod, the light blue walls, the nurses averting their eyes almost respectfully, the hard look of the head doctor, the bemused look of the cardiologist, my wife deliberately looking away but still holding my right hand.  I looked down at her hand. Her hand in my right hand. Her hand in my perfect right hand. My perfect right hand. I was going to speak.  I could feel it. Something perfect was about to happen.


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Composition Notes:

I was just reading Haruki Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle and this story is an attempt at some points of his style. Stark contrast it seems to me from yesterday. Yesterday I was reading Sutree and I think that story came out strongly influenced by McCarthy, with some Raymond Carver (love him) thrown in for good measure.  Not that I don't love that, but it seemed like time for something different on this blog. There are so many ways that I admire Murakami. His pacing. He saves his most imagistic prose for heightened moments in the text, so it serves a double purpose of beauty and warning for the reader. And his "normal" prose is very clear. The reader is able to clearly follow along, with few distractions.  I'm especially in love with how even his expository prose comes across as clear and uncomplicated. It makes his stuff so easy to read. It has a much higher entertainment value in that way than an author  like McCarthy, who I tend to love to death, but can only read 20-30 pages at a time.  The idea for this story came from a line in the Wind Up Bird Chronicle where Kumiko mentions having a deep well inside, in a figurative sense.  I took it literally and wondered what it would be like if someone had a fountain of youth inside, what the implications would be. Then the whole perfection thing came out of that initial musing after I started writing the scene.

Short Folk # 8: Mastodon

She’s sleeping on her side, grey t-shirt, hair caught under her shoulder, still in the jeans she had on yesterday. There’s no AC in this barely motel, and she’s got dark rings under her arms and her hair is wet where it touches the back of her neck.  Not the light she’d want to be described in, I’m sure.

Outside, the fly buzz summertime and the yawning repetition of asphalt and truck stops. Mile markers. Heat that rises from the ground.  When you get to the center of the nation, on the plains, in the heart, it seems like everyone’s going either all the way east or all the way west, and whichever way you go it’s hard to feel at home until you get there. Most likely I’ve been a fool. 

She tightens in her sleep, curls up, a child’s pose. She’s been with me so long I can guess she’s dreaming of Mastodons, of the biggest herds that used to cross the whole of this continent. They’d migrate and chew it all up. I bet she’s dreaming of following on foot, right behind them. And when she tightened in her dream just now I bet she was curling up for the night in the womb hollow of a footprint.

Most likely I’m a fool. Still, when she wakes we’ll get back in the trailer and keep on going. 

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Composition notes: 

I didn't have much today, nothing fresh at least that I had brooded over yesterday. I saw the word Mastodon in a poem on poetrydaily.com earlier today and I just decided to write from that first word, nothing else to go on but that. The image of the woman sleeping on her side came first.  Interesting what came out after that.  I've been on the road and I started to want to recreate that. But then I don't know where it went. I know it's hopelessly opaque, mostly because I can't ever decide which side of the backstory line I'm supposed to come down on. Maybe its more interactive that way.  Your thoughts? 

Short Folk #7: Quaker Allison

Note: This is most likely going to suck. Writing it now just under my deadline. Just barely got back from the Airport and Mexico City. Believe it or not I think I had a crazier day today than Fridays flying car episode.   I went with some friends to el Socalo (don't have time to spell check) which is the HUGE square in the center of colonial Mexico City.  Well, little did we know we were walking into a political rally for Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador,(pictured above, remind you of anyone?). He lost the last presidential election, but has declared himself the legitimate president of Mexico and is extremely left wing. So there was this incredibly huge stage and towers and towers of giant speakers, and over 20,000 people massed in the square. The type of on-the-brink, charged rally that I don't think the US has seen since Vietnam.  Anyway, there were other crazy things to happen (I heard the Cardinal of Mexico give mass in the cathedral right next to where the rally was going on...you could hear the chants and vitriol of Obrador echo hollowly through the cathedral, very eerie.) but this isn't a journal. Its a new story (which will probably be crappy):

Quaker Allison

I was hopelessly and unrealistically in love with a Quaker girl all through high school. Allison. Mousey hair and brown rimmed glasses.  Her family was from a branch of Quakers that eschewed all technology. For me that held such mystery. They had no phone. No TV. She just sat and read a book whenever we had computer class.

Late at night, when I was in the throes of it in a way only awkward teenage boys could ever really understand, I would pick up the plastic hamburger phone by my bedside and fantasize about secret phone numbers I could dial to somehow reach her. Something that bypassed all jacks and tangles of wires and got to straight to the place where I hoped she was waiting, breathless, to hear my voice. I'd dial 9111 because I felt that one extra bit of urgency to communicate with her. Or I'd dial 9288042581, my birthday and hers together. Or 8008 because I was a teenager and the hormones and all.

Soon my fascination with Allison moved beyond the hamburger phone. I'd fantasize reaching her heart with entirely new forms of human communication: Driving down her street and revving my car in Morse code. Intricate paper airplanes that could fly the miles between our houses, using their braille messages for aerodynamics (she wasn't blind, but still). Even a huge tower that I would build to the moon so I could cast shadow puppet charades of my love down on her hair as she sat by her window.  And others, some of the most imaginative ideas of my life.

But, with a shame maybe only awkward teenage boys can ever truly understand, I never did anything, never said more than 10 words to Allison. I got a cellphone and moved on to girls I could call with it. 

I'm writing this now because I just saw her on Facebook. Allison. That Allison. I'm sure of it. I didn't friend her. I never will. I feel like crying. I feel like revving out the end of the best, most childlike, part of myself in old Camaro Morse code. I feel old. I feel like building that tower to the moon and asking, in delicate shadow puppetry, if there are any more Quakers left in the world.

End, (thankfully, better tomorrow)

Short folk 6: True Lies

So this isn't a story. It's something that happened last night after our seminar here in Mexico city. Our generous and kind and extremely classy hosts picked my father and I up from the airport in their beautiful jeep grand Cherokee. Brand new. Plush leather. Can you see where this is going? We valeted the car at the skyscraper where we were having the seminar. the first four floors of the skyscraper are a parking structure. It was a Great meeting. 2plus hours of the Allen show, my father and I speaking to about 100 people. Really great. But while we were talking the Valets were joyriding that jeep grand Cherokee. Apparently pretty vigourously because one of them drove it through the iron facade of the skyscraper and off of the fourth floor of the building. When it fell it crushed a parked car, flipped over and took out an entire electrical pole-- the live wires snaking all around the sidestreet and cutting power to the city block. The valet walked away from it which is kind of a miracle.

Later in the hotel room my father and I were just trying to take it all in. You should have seen the chaos of that scene. It'd post the picture if I could from my iPhone. We turned on the tv to unwind and a scwarzenneger movie was on. 6th day I think it was called. Lots of car chases. Lots of cars falling off of cliffs and the whole time my father and I chuckling guiltily as we'd say "looks about a fourth story fall to me". Crazy night. Regular posts will resume tomorrow when (if) I get bac to the states.

Short Folk #5: His Next Life was as a Knife

 Note: Travel day today. Salt Lake to Mexico City. Busy weekend ahead with no sure internet connection. I'll do my best.  I might have to recycle some slightly older drafts to fill up the travel days. Here is something I wrote about a month ago. The genesis is seeing an incredibly thin gaunt old guy on the subway and instantly thinking that he would be reincarnated as a knife. I tried that concept around with some things and it didn't fit until I added this female narrator and this family setting.  Sentimentality is the beast I try to avoid, and I'm not so sure about this one, but oh well.  Also, I love this Picture----->

 His Next Life was as a Knife

 There was a man who was so sharp with me. Hard with me. I finally left him, sure that his next life would be as a knife. 
 

            Seven years later I’m in the kitchen cutting apples for my daughter. With my sharpest knife, cutting apples on the white countertop—it’s blue tile backsplash.  Just one of those regular perfect days—in the clean blue kitchen cutting apples for my three year old daughter.

             

Two types of apples are in front of me. One’s Gala. And it’s clear to me that the sharpest knife in my hand prefers Gala apples. It wants to taste them, it has a will to cut them, so I obey, slicing halfway, letting the blade linger a bit in the apple’s flesh. I think about it for a long moment. Then I say over my shoulder,

             

“John, do you remember where we got this knife?”

             

He comes into the kitchen. He leans over my shoulder. His hand is on the small of my back. He looks at the knife.

             

“That’s the one my mom brought back from Japan.”

           

He sneaks a slice of the apple and then he leaves the kitchen—leaves me with the knife in my hand and the power to do anything with it. Anything at all.  I slide it back into the apples’ flesh, for old times’ sake. Then I speak to it. I say,

           

“Tyson how’d you die? And how did you make it all the way to Japan?”

           

John hears me. “Rachel?” he asks from the other room.

Short Folk #4: House Sparrow

They were just lying there, close under a grey blanket on the front net that stretched between the two hulls of the catamaran. The boat lolled gently in the reef’s cove and moved in a slow curve around its anchor.

A finch, or it could have been a sparrow, something small and buffeted, flew in on the warm air and landed angled on the wire of a mast stanchion. They both watched it, close by them but too dark to make out its coloring. It started calling, a high-pitched plaintive chreep.  The woman was the first to speak, but hushed, so as not to scare away the bird.

-Funny, it’s almost like it has something to tell us.

-He’s the designated welcome committee. Seems like the natives are hostile.

-Something like that.

Then they were quiet for a bit just watching the bird. Silhouetted on the wire against the sky they could see all the askance feathers that windfluttered away from its compact body. The man was the next to speak, chuckling softly.

-Reminds me of the time at my grandfather’s house where the bird got down the chimney. Have I told you that story?

-I don’t think so

-I was in my twenties. I went back up to Canada to visit them. We had this big Sunday dinner with all my aunts and uncles, all the grandkids. They had this wood-burning stove in the old brick chimney, with a tall stovepipe that T’d at the top.  And this tiny house sparrow got down it and then couldn’t get out. The whole dinner we could hear it flying around in the pipe and making the same urgent sound that one’s making now.

-That has to be the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard.

-And over and over my grandpa keeps muttering that he put chicken wire up there and there’s no reason why the dumb bird should have got down there in the first place.  It was killing the dinner, and we didn’t know how to react to my grandfather because he was such a stern man. But then my grandmother says ‘Well it doesn’t quite sound like a chicken that’s down there, does it Heber’?

The man paused to see if the punch line would have any effect on her. It didn’t and he kept going.

-Anyway, we all looked at him to see how he would take it. But he just laughed and that set us all off laughing. Strange that a little bird could bring that memory back.

The woman waited a breath to see if he would continue, then she spoke,

            -And the bird? What happened to the bird?

            -After a while we just lit the stove. It seemed like the most humane thing to do.

She waited at his side just long enough that he wouldn’t guess at why she was leaving.  And when she rolled away and stood the boat rolled and the bird left the wire, flying hard towards land, darting on the vectors of the wind. Before she went below she turned and looked at him there in the milky dark, under the blanket on the white mesh net, something akin to disbelief in her eyes. It occurred to her that she didn’t know him. Ashy grey shape. Strange clotted mass. Inhuman form.

Short Folk #3: Idea of Order in a Best Buy Parking Lot

Note for the weak eared: she's full of swears.

 Spindles of light in the brown water off the edge of the dock. Paddleboats. Boys and girls leaping off, then turning and holding the edge with one hand as they tread water to splash their friends.  Off the floor of the pond the reedy grasses rise, same color and shape as the wheaty lines of sunlight arcing down to feed them. A dry group of children in mother purchased gaudy swimsuits looks straight down from the dock and can’t tell where sun ends and grass begins. And they’re afraid to test the depth of the sunlight’s safe water—afraid to feel the mannequin hands of the grass oscillate against their ankles—afraid to breach that safe margin. A simple enough fear.

       But if you are one of those dry children you should know you will probably end up, in your late middle age, sitting in your beat-up idling pickup in a Best Buy parking lot (nothing better to do on a Tuesday evening) watching the future corpses of America waddle by with their grocery bags.

     Then you’ll probably look up at the huge American flag lolling in a tiny breeze. You’ll be desperate to find a rhythm in it, a known cadence, anything. But you won’t and you’ll start to curse the inconsistency of its undulations—the completely random and irredeemable chance with which the wind sails and billows it.   “Stand straight out, damn you!” you’ll say as you watch it. “Stand straight out, Goddamn you, so I can count your stars!”

But it won’t. These twilight gusts are nowhere near strong enough. And child you won’t either. Unless you jump.

Composition Notes:

Trigger: remembering the way the sunlight looked off of a dock when I was 10 or so. Then waiting in a Best Buy parking lot, grumpy, and looking at the big flag.

Influence (anxiety of): Yesterday I read the first 40 pages of C. McCarthy’s Suttree, and then watching Inception (holy crap) right afterwards. Big time double whammy for introspection. I measure out how much I allow myself to read McCarthy, because I think he’s the bees knees and I know there’s only so much left that I haven’t read. I’m in awe of his vocabulary and how he describes things. My attempt at the sunlight and the reeds is a shadow of a shadow of what he does in describing the Tennessee river in Suttree. Inception was absolutely amazing. I love creative things that force you to think on a different plane.

Music: I was listening to “The National” station on last.fm (again, major introspection J )while I did some of the early paragraph, but then I needed to read out loud to test some of the sentences, so I turned it down and forgot to turn it up again.

Timeframe: Yesterday I jotted down some notes while looking at that flag, then last night there was the long drive back from the movie where I mused on it, then today, about 45 minutes actually writing it out. Had no idea it was headed where it was until I wrote the last line.

Note: Its nice to have such talented friends.

      Thanks dear friends for all the positive feedback so far. We’re just 3 days in but this project is starting to feel very hopeful. Keep in mind that my good buddy James Best is posting one incredible poem a day to match my story a day. So follow the link or to the left to check him out at Bottomless Lakes

     One note about these stories to clarify from a bit of the feedback I have gotten. They are fiction. I write a ton in the first person and one of the reasons is to invite intimacy between these often nameless narrators and the reader. But keep in mind that the narrator is never wholly myself, nor could he/she ever be.  If you want to critique or interact with them in the comments please feel free to do so without fear of stepping on toes or hurting any feelings. I loved to see Rusty play around with it in his little comment on the last post. By the way, Rusty is another friend who apart from being an incredible designer and person, heads up an amazing LDS themed blog called Nine-Moons Check it out. Its great to have such talented friends.  One more thing. After each post from now on I’m going to do a little section describing the genesis of the idea and detailing some moments on it’s composition.  Some friends have asked where these things come from, and its fun to share. –Aaron

Short Folk #2: Lower Carthew

Note: This is a great story to illustrate one of the main ways I like to write. I'll take true occurrences and then make them more abstract, both in the story behind the story (what I lived) and what happens in the plot and narration of the story.  I like to think of it as turning the focus dial on the camera lens from fine to coarse. I love the freedom it gives me and the "universality" it tends to add to the pieces.  So, that said. here's today's short, 506 words.

"We skirted the boulder field where the ice-age glacier had finally melted, leaving in huge piles the heaviest of its rock cargo, and descended past the lip of Lower Carthew Lake, the sound of it’s waterfall always to our right as we side-stepped down the dry shale of the switchbacks. 

            There was a man climbing up towards us on the same switchbacks, apparently making the summit from the other side. Not a very common thing to do. We met up about halfway and, as is common with other hikers in rather lonely mountain passes, we stopped and said hello, shaking hands. He was an older man, wiry, with white hair and a single, thick, wooden walking pole. He had a wry grin on his face when he recognized my father. His name was Tim and 40 years ago growing up in a tiny Alberta foothill town he had been best friends with my father’s only, older, brother.           

 

      They started sharing stories of my grandfather hiking and fishing with them in these same mountains; of shakes and hamburgers he had bought them in the townsite afterwards. Rare reminiscences that my father, now a stranger to this area and a man who lives largely in the present, had never shared with me.  Then my father asked him how he was, how his experience of life had been, the sort of intimate questions you can only ask someone after having known them and then, for forty years, not known them.

       Tim sat down on the tilted shale and talked about his wife and his children and his divorce, and then a period of wild years in his forties—always dropping names of people my father might have known or remembered—my father always half-faking familiarity in order to keep the conversation going.  Then Tim got more hushed, but more adamant, urgency and a wildness coming into his eyes. He asked if he could share something personal that he had never told anyone. Then, without waiting for an answer he told the story of how he had lost his faith, and then, after a heart attack, when he was recovering in his hospital room, a darkness in the corner of the room had collected into a sort of humanoid shape of pure evil. And it had spoken his name, Tim. As if it knew him, as if he was a friend. It scared him straight back into a better life.

There were a few more minutes of conversation and then he and my father hugged and he winked at me and then he moved on up the mountain. I don’t imagine I’ll ever see him again. So many conversations and its funny the ones that stick with you. And I’ve never shared this with anybody, and I know its silly, but in strange rooms or moments when I’m afraid for my own mortality I still look in the corner shadows for signs of movement—to see if the darkness there wants to coalesce and starting calling my name."

Short Folk #1: Finch Hatton

I wish you could have known Christopher Talbot, who was killed by a hippo while walking back to his bungalow at Finch Hatton's safari camp, Tsavo National Park, Kenya, Africa.

From the main lodge there's a pathway to a long bridge over the spring and hippo pond, with a double rope railing strung through wooden posts. In the daytime if you look down you can see turtles gliding under the bridge, and from the bungalows laid out like an archipelago around the pond you can hear the hippos braying, obese revelers in the cool water, submerged to their ears, twitching away the flies.  At night, when the hippos leave the pond to graze, there's supposed to be an escort guard in a dark windbreaker with a penlight that makes his white teeth glow in the otherwise darkness. The danger is part of the luxury.

 I remember Christopher sitting in the lofted library just off the main dining hall, with white trousers reading a yellowed book about Africa, taking everything in, but none of it seriously. Finch Hatton's was such a strange place, trumped up exclusivity that traded freely on the luxury name of a man who had never even visited the land on which it was built. Too long, overwrought dinners in the cream colored dining room, with hard chairs, five courses and an army of waiters half-trained in the colonial style.
And we ate it up, all of us with our wives or our mistresses, with our entanglements, just languishing in the dream of an Africa from another century--the Queen, the hunt, the smell of cedar wood and pressed linen.

All of us but Talbot, who was there alone, it seemed almost without vices.  Who dealt with the pretentiousness with affability, a mocking conformity. Until the short high scream and the rutting sound of a surprised hippo, the sound of mud quickly being made, and then the back of the throat groan that was the last thing we heard. Such a coarse end for such a polished man.


Better, instead of leaving without an escort and finding that huge animal, I like to imagine him walking straight past the hippo pond and into the bush. In the daylight he stays cool in the shade of a Mimosa tree. In the darkness he sleeps high in the matted branches of a Bilbao tree. He won't come back because he knows something we don't. And he won't be found because he is at peace.  Or maybe my imaginings are just what we always do to dead things. In their absence we make them into what they never were.