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.

30 Shorts In 30 Days.

Welcome. I've created Short Folk as an outlet for all my exercises in short short fiction.  Think of them as somewhere between a prose poem and a short story.   I try to keep them under 500 words. They are the front line of where I go for longer creative inspiration. I hope you enjoy. 

This blog starts with a collaboration with a good friend and extremely talented poet, James Best, who maintains the Bottomless Lakes Blog linked to your <----- left.   He will write 30 poems in 30 days while I will write 30 shorts in 30 days...Starting Now.  I can't say enough about how great a poet he is, so make sure to check it out.

The one rule of the next month is that the stories and poems have to be fresh as hotcakes.  If you like or lurk, please comment.

-Aaron