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.