It’s all an effect, after the
fact. It’s all feckless, affected, faking brass tacks. Forever eternity,
briefly brashly, momentary tourney. Flew, flu, flock, fleet, frown, full
frontal. Punctuate, pontificate, point, pointer, poke, perceive, precept,
perky, pet, pugilist. List, lore, lame, loose, luck. Do you follow? Ink.
Pigment. Permanent signification. The mark, the maze, the ashes after the
blaze. I’ll follow you down. I’ll hold you steady, sideways, tangential, a line
upon the circle cycle. I’ll spear the wheel. I’ll speak the heal. I’ll dig in
my spurs to push you over the hedge.
I like turtles.
There is a gate at the end of
the hedgerow. You spy down the leafy tunnel each day on your walk home from
school. The hedges stretch 9 feet high, blotting out whatever lies behind the
sidewalk. Hiding whole lot. The house, the yard, everything. If there even is a
house. Something you’ve never figured out. In the middle of the lot border, there
is a path from sidewalk to a gate. Maybe at some point it could have been
considered a proper path of concrete or stone. But now it’s well covered in dirt
and hedge debris from years, decades even, of neglect. You and your friends joke about what’s down
the path, past the gate. You make silly dares. But no one even thinks to go
down the path. But one day, you’re walking home alone, and you hear the
slightest tinkling of a bell beyond the towering hedge. Is it a cat perhaps? Or
some other pet having lost its way into the spooky yard? Is it whining? A soft
scratching sound like paws scraping into soil, trying to dig its way out maybe?
You feel compelled to help. The poor thing sounds scared in there. You stand
there at the mouth of the path. The breeze picks up slightly, causing the thick
hedge branches to sway and creak against itself. The path is darker than the
rest of the world. Its dimness looks like peering down one’s on throat in the
mirror. The animal whines again. It senses you have stopped. That it may have a
rescuer. You make the decision, and with a tightening of the straps on your
backpack, step into the gap in the hedges. You step forwards slowly, feet
shuffling through the long aged layer of leaves. The animal definitely knows
now you are there, that you are coming in for it. The whining grows louder, and
also the pitch slightly deeper. You keep plodding forward. The path seems so
much longer as your proceed. You see the gate ahead. It looms like a web of
rusted metal. The path yet stretches before. Can there actually a house on the
lot? You have walked so far already, clean through to the alley. Yet the path
goes on. The leaves crunch beneath your feet, the hedge to either side seeming
to grow higher with each step you take. And the animal… the animal has stopped
whining. Now you can hear it pant. A rhythmic breathing, wheezing, sliding into
a faint cadence of laughter. And it no longer sounds small, or little, or
young, or frightened. This has gotten way too weird. You stop. You look back,
but there is no sidewalk behind you, no street. You see only the hedge lined
path stretching back forever, converging in a vanishing point of branches and
dark. The sound of the animal grows closer, closer. You hear whatever it is pushing
into the hedge from inside the lot, pushing towards you. You are frozen in
fear, you cannot move. A large pale hand is thrust out of the hedge towards
you. It grabs your arm, and suddenly you hear, “DON’T WORRY KID, IT’S JUST ME,
BOOOOO RADLEY!”
Weeeee. Ok, suck. Moving on.
I have a book I’ve had for
years. Named, Plotto. The Master Book of All Plots, by William Wallace Cook.
It’s
crazy town. I bought it wondering if it would help me come up with plots. But
it hasn’t, and I’m sure I don’t need it. The real question is what story should
be told. I don’t know if I could successfully use the Bradbury method of “Follow
the story where it leads you”. Maybe I could,
if I was patient enough with myself. I wonder more if I would fare better with a
complete outline, and fully detailed diagram, equation, diagram, of which I
just flesh out the details. Would that be too… mechanical? Contrite? Would it
reek of predestination, without passions or authenticity? Maybe. These are the
questions for this forum. Again, I apologize for boring you with my inner dialogue.
Stop reading now. Roland finds just what he seeks in the top floor of the Dark
Tower. Read no further if you want that to be true.
Picture added to round up to 1K.
2 comments:
I wrote half a book just letting it unspool as it filtered through to my fingers. Re-read it. Re-read it three more times and deleted all of it. I've written another half of a book, carefully plotted and outlined. On my last re-read, I had just about decided to delete it all again. After much chewing and digesting and mellowing, a new story (maybe the true story?) has begun to unfold in my head. And the only question that remains, is, whether I have the courage to write them damn thing.
You had me enthralled. I felt like that story was going somewhere other worldly at any second. I felt as if I had been at the end of that long row of hedge. I certainly think you could have followed that story wherever it may have led and I would have gone down the rabbit hole with you. Maybe all these questions are best answered through trial and error. This would be the venue to explore those things. I'd like to see both styles, open follow the story narrative and outlined and structured, from you in some kind of multiple part short stories.
Post a Comment