Flora

Porches is mixing a single today. Glanton's Guns sounds nice and polished and ready for a set of ears. Whoop!

Bone Road

Follow the rusty tracks down to my secret spot with Oliver’s shoes tucked under my arm. There’s no one’s footprints in the grass or the gravel, no one else that’s been here in my secret spot. Hear grass tickling in the wind and the wind pulling my shirt and tickling my hair, but nothing else. Turn down the bend and there’s Red Creek bubbling far away. Find Old Rusty where he’s supposed to be, leaning in the beach grass behind the red storage house. Water’s tapping on his coppery roof. Walk to him and look in through the empty windows and kick my foot against his slumped tires. Old Rusty. Pieces of driftwood still bed around the car—all the ones found along the beach that looked like bones. They curl like fingerbones and armbones with knots like elbows and knuckles. Drop Oliver’s shoes on the driver seat and kneel in the grass to look at my bones. No one’s been here. The bones are still crisscrossed.

            Open the door. It creaks like a voice.

            Hello?

            Take out the box under the seat and open it. The moldy pacifier. The rattle. The bib. The little tin boy dragging the blanket—it used to hang in the Christmas tree. No one’s been here. Drop the shoes in the box. Close the lid and slide the box under the seat and sit down in the seat with my hands around the steering wheel. Shut the door and hear the little voice creak before the door clicks shut. Look out the window, down at the bones circling the car like a white road, like they pass under. Water’s dripping on the roof, dripping like a faucet, dripping like the faucet. See the bathtub now, like it’s out the windshield. See the water coming up over the white shiny edges and spilling to the floor, and the faucet still dripping. The bones are moving faster under the car. Look into the passenger seat, say: Where do you want to go, Oliver? But he can’t answer and the water keeps dripping.

A Pixelated Fawn

I'm taking a writing class this term called Process Response—and it's awesome! We write and write and never look back. We have little groups to share our writing with. That's it. The point is to write in whatever form we are interested in and think about the process of writing and write about writing and never revise. The point is to move forward, disconnect ourselves from our own expectations and standards.

I've set myself up with only one restriction: I can only use this class to work on my novel. So far It's got me going places I didn't plan on going. Here's a little sampler of today's work (and what has been an inspiring photo by Myoung Ho Lee):

Up the long path of water into the woods there’s a fawn curled against the base of a rock, the thin hide of its back formed to its bedding in the underbrush. A hiker comes up the draw from the highway, his breath loud in the forest. He pauses when he spots the animal and waits for it to stir. He takes his phone from his pocket and snaps a photo, shades the daylight from the screen and looks at the image—the tan curvature lost in the fern. He walks again, slowly, phone held out like a crucifix. Something snaps under his boot and the sharp whipcrack startles him. He stops and looks down at the broken stick in the dirt, then quickly up the draw so as not to miss a vision of the fawn as it bounds through the forest. But the fawn hasn’t moved. It’s back keeps curled to him, face hidden somewhere among its folded limbs. The hitchhiker stiffens. He coughs, claps his hands awkwardly around his phone, whistles and listens to the forest swallow the sounds. Other, stiller noises replace his—the wind continuing its work through the trees, the water chattering anathemas beside him. And the fawn doesn’t move. He keeps his eyes on its spine as he inches away, down the draw. He is afraid to turn his back to the rock until it’s out of sight. He turns then and paces down the rest of the draw. When he comes to the trail, he finally slows to a walk.
         Back on the highway, he climbs into his truck and slams the door shut. He starts the engine and while he waits for it to heat up, he glances at the thick entrance of the forest where things bloom imperceptibly over the trailhead, clenching the path in fronds and dark shadows of fronds. A flock of swallows darts out from the treetops, black and scattered like buckshot against the sky. He watches them flee through the canopy. His phone sits brightly in his hand and he looks down at it, at the image there, the pixelated lump in the underbrush. Revving the engine, he erases the picture and tosses the phone away from him, onto the passenger seat. Then he lurches, tires crunching, down the road.