Tag Archives: #ShortFiction

As I re-read last week’s post on shifting point of view, I realized that I wanted to try and push the scene further. This coincides will with Part 2 of exercise 8, what LeGuin calls “Thin Ice”.

The task is to write the scene without noticeable transition: “You can of course do Part Two merely by removing the “signals” from Part One, but you won’t learn much by doing so. “Thin Ice” calls for a different narrative technique, and possibly a different narrative. I think it is likely to end up being written by the involved author, even though you are apparently using only limited third-person viewpoint. This ice really is thin, and the waters are deep.”

So back to the apple orchard, and this time into the heads of not just Clayton, Clara, and Junior, but Preacher Holland, Edith Musselman, Dwight, and perhaps Miss Grouse’s grandson.

*****

Holland saw in Clayton Grimes the embodiment of his pastoral duty: the farmer had strayed from the flock, and so needed a gentle nudge back to the fifth pew, lefthand side, which he had been absent from more often than not as of late. Clara had made no excuses for her husband, but while circumspection was his preferred method, a direct approach seemed inevitable.

Preacher Holland had a way with words, so Clay just braced for impact when the black cloud of righteousness roiled its way across the orchard. The preacher nodded to the ladies, shook hands with the men; accepted their compliments on his latest sermon, and spared a keen and chastising eye for those folks who hadn’t come through the sanctuary that week. Clay awaited his turn with an owl’s air, head cocked. Curious.

“Fine afternoon for the families,” the preacher began.

Clay nodded, still as a buck on the wood’s edge. God’s chosen rotundness rolled back and forth on his heels, hands in pockets, expectant. Like he was waiting to make a deal on his boss’s behalf.

“Didn’t see you this morning.”

“I was here, gettin’ ready for the families to come by.”

“Well, you know about resting on the Sabbath, Clayton.”

“I know it. And if the chickens would feed themselves, and the apples would just take a day off growing, then maybe I could spare a day. Course, I was gettin’ read for this ‘fine afternoon.’” His nephew Dwight scampered past. Clayton snatched him by the arm as his friends raced past.

“Go tell Junior to help Mrs. Bittner, would ya?”

“Sure, Uncle Clayton.” Dwight looked away quickly. He had a notion of Junior’s whereabouts, and whose’t eager to find him. The stream beckoned. He would deliver the message and catch up with the other boys after.

The preacher was still rambling about the work of Lord and the Garden of Eden. He knew that Clayton had only lent him half an ear, especially when he waylaid his nephew. But Holland had broken through to more thoroughly lost sheep than this one. Clayton waved to Clara.

“Hold on, Jessica.” Clara put her hand on her neighbor’s shoulder. “I see Clay’s straw hat wavin’ in the breeze, and Preacher Holland right beside him.”

“Sounds like someone needs rescuin’” Jessica laughed. Nothing had changed, even back to their youth. Clay would get into a pickle, and Clara would come running.

But as Clara approached, it wasn’t a rescue Clay wanted.

“Tell Junior to help Mrs. Bittner!”

Edith Musselman, who had been standing not far off, looked surprised. “Can your boy help me after?” Clayton Grimes was gruff, but not unkind. Clara had been lucky, maybe more than she’d ever know.

“I’ll send him your way, Edith. But maybe next time bring those kids of yours? I can give ‘em all a job here for the afternoon, and your bushel basket would be free of charge.”

Edith glowed at the offer. She laughed and patted his arm. “What a delightful offer, Clayton. I’ll bring ‘em.” There would be a fair bit of debate in her house, she knew, because both Stan and Gregory had taken on their father’s aversion to labor. But if she told her husband that a free bushel of fruit hung in the balance, he would win the fight for her. The only things more appealing to Martin Musselman than sloth were greed and gluttony.

“Seems no one is safe from work around you, Clayton,” Preacher Holland observed.

“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” Clay replied. “I’m gonna go help Old Miss Grouse, or would you like to take a basket over to her? She might need a good sermon these days.”

Preacher Holland harrumphed as he left. Clayton would give him a bushel basket of apples free, just to see the back of him. At the edge of the field, Junior carried Mrs. Bittner’s bushel basket to her car.

“And is your Pop gonna plant corn this fall again? I love when we get to pick corn.”

Junior shrugged. He had been distracted, initially by the rugged, tousle-haired lad who accompanied Old Miss Grouse each Sunday, then by Dwight, who coughed loudly when he witnessed the pair exchange smiles. The lad motioned for Junior to come hither; Junior motioned for him to wait.

“You ain’t got time for that, Junior. Uncle Clay wants you back in the orchard helping Mrs. Bittner.”

Junior tapped his wrist, motioned five minutes twice. The lad smiled and mouthed the word ten.

“In the barn,” Junior said. The lad, Ben, licked his lips. Miss Grouse loved to visit the Grimes’ farm and orchard. Her grandson, up from Philadelphia, loved to visit as well. If Granny hadn’t kept him busy around her own crumbling patch each weekend, he might have found even more time to visit.

“I swear to God,” Dwight said. “If Uncle Clayton ever found out—“

“But he won’t, Dwight. Right?”

Dwight rolled his eyes. He hated secrets. Especially ones he found by accident.

*****

There are some logistical problems with the apple orchard scene that has a lot to do with the “pick you own” approach and the  harvesting seasons, but those can be worked out later. This really was thin ice, because I got to share more of what I was seeing, but it also felt like I was cheating—jumping around too quickly into too many heads, which goes against the principle of being purposeful and limited. Of course, that’s probably why this exercise was so important. There will be less of this sort of thing in the final draft, but I could see have broader sections or whole chapters devoted to POV, more than I could see doing these switches by paragraph. If you have any thoughts about this, I’d love to hear from you in the comments or on Twitter!

*****

Old Ghosts

Clay thought his life ecclesiastical. He woke to the rooster’s crow. Fed the hens first, goats second—while he had them. In their absence, he made breakfast. Well, Clara was gone, wasn’t she? She couldn’t make his meals. Dwight, his nephew, managed the fields. Smarter than his father. He’d inherit the whole patch. Just as well. Clay had lost Clara, but he’d thrown Junior away. Junior lived in New York; they never talked. The pill tasted bitter, but Clay swallowed it every day. Afternoons belonged to the garden. He planted less each spring. Less planted, less to harvest. Less to can. Clara liked canning; he liked eating. Sometimes, after chores, he fished. The stream in the hollow beckoned. Light played on the water. Herons dropped in for trout. Well, so did he. Yes, everything had a season, and work was sacred, he still believed.

Clay stepped into the afternoon heat and surveyed his land from the back stoop. The orchard in full bloom gave him hope for a bumper harvest. He had put signs up: Pick your own apples. And that had brought out a a few townsfolk. Junior scampered among them, carrying bushel baskets to cars while he and Clara chatted with customers and took their cash. But without Clara and Junior, he couldn’t keep track of it all. He solved it with a farmstead at the top of the drive. Did Dwight’s wife or kids like to can fruit? Maybe he would just hire migrants to harvest them all, and sell to young families with a lot of mouths to feed. Families used to be bigger. 

Something disappeared into the tall grass at the end of the row. The grass shushed as it slipped away. He often saw deer, foxes—they all loved the orchard, though not usually in spring. He shrugged it off. His fishing gear awaited on the bench in the shed.

He meandered that afternoon, pole over his shoulder, tackle box in hand. Daffodils lifted their faces to the sun; wind-blown blossoms speckled the stream in pink and white. Same every year, the colors of Clara’s flowerbeds. Mums, begonias, pansies, snapdragons—he’d neglected them in the three years since. The beds had grown patchy: wild in some places, barren in others. Yes, he would have to tend them better. She would have long already chastised him for neglect. From the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of black. A darting form. He turned. Nothing.

“You are indeed losin’ it,” he announced. “Too much nostalgia. Not enough work.” He hoped it wasn’t a bear. His rifle sat secure and useless in the den, locked in the cabinet Clara insisted he buy.

The stream burbled and played. He listened to it through the trees long before he saw it. Then a glimpse, another through a break in the mountain laurel, and the trail followed the water’s edge. Snowmelt strengthened the headwaters, submerging the banks until summer. Clay would stay until the peepers chirped away the sun. So much of life was hiding. Bullfrogs croaked. Furry things scuttled beyond the rushes. Snakes slithered over logs and wound across the water. Shad and trout darted beneath the ripples. Life lived just out of view. 

A brown shape passed behind the dogwoods on the other side. Clay blinked. Deer? Maybe people? It better not be people. This was his land, bought and paid for with hard cash and forty-some years of blood and tears and sweat.

When he arrived at his fishing spot, Clay found it already occupied. A father and son from the look. The waterlogged overalls and dirty face suggested the boy’s natural lack of grace. Clay pictured him tumbling off a slippery bit of trail, or sliding sideways off a rock on the upstream crossing. He was fawnish, leggy and stumbling against the world, a lot like Junior used to be. He held a bamboo rod—an antique. They had gone out of style when Clay was a boy. 

His portly father sat on a log, baiting his hook. Sweat beads dripped down his face, despite his straw hat. He wiped his hand on a pantleg. They shadowed each other. The boy had his father’s round nose and basset hound eyes. The elder was a worn and overfed version of the younger. 

“Like this,” he said, and cast his line. The boy watched, then pulled his line in and recast.

“Better,” his father said.

Clay waved.

“You there!” He called. “How’s the fishin’?”

In the old days—Clay mourned the old days—he and Junior skipped stones. He taught the boy to select flat stones. To flick his wrist just so when throwing—spin and angle equalled skip. Skipping was an art. A skipper graduated from the bowl-sounding plop to the whispering taps—six or seven? ten?—before the stone slipped under for good. He chose one. Skipped it. A five-hopper. Not bad. Perhaps he had only shown the boy once or twice. It felt like more.

They nodded. The man doffed his hat.

“I said, ‘how’s the fishin’?'”

They ignored him. The wind shook the leaves. The stream burbled. A woodpecker rat-a-tatted a poplar. Clay called out.

“You’re on private property, you know.”

He had hunted the woods and cleaned the carcasses in the shed behind the cottage. Fished the stream and scaled and cooked fish on coals from dying trees. Those trees warmed the cottage in winter. He cleared the dead wood, picked wild raspberries, planted the garden. Drove the stakes tied with white cloth to mark the corners. He worked it; it was his.

“It’s disrespectful of you—”

The boy got a bite. A little tug, a stronger tug, and a trout popped out of the stream. It flailed in the air. The man punched his son’s shoulder.

“Now, look here,” Clay called. “I don’t mind you–“

The lad released his catch into their bucket, and the pair sat down on the log again.

Clay thought himself patient. When Clara had come up with the cancer and the doctors hemmed and hawed more than he cared for, he had been patient with them, though Clara’s bony hand on his had done much ’til it couldn’t anymore; and he had been patient with Junior, who hated farmin’ from the start alright, but loved the theatre so much that Clay and Clara had given up whole evenings to watch four years’ worth of school productions, which hadn’t gotten them anything but a visit from Markley come up over the hill, bitchin’ that his boy and Junior were makin’ hog sounds in the loft and threatenin’ to sue over Lord knows what, that had required patience; even when the boy came into the hospital in mascara and lipstick like a red light hussy he had’t yelled or nothin’ just told him to go home and clean up ‘fore his dyin’ mama saw it, and that was that forevermore; but now here this bulbous man and his ragamuffin ilk sat on his log on his stream on his property casting lines and takin’ his trout without the slimmest bit o decency to say “hello, how do you do?” or even recognize that Clay had worked that land for damn near fifty years and who were they to come replacin’ him since he wa’n’t dead yet nor read his name in the obituaries like he ‘spected to one day. 

I picked up a stone and skipped it across the water toward them.

“–I don’t mind you–“

“Hey,” Straw Hat called out. “Who are you?” He stood up and pointed at me with a sausage finger.

“I might ask you the same question,” I said. “Since you’re on my property.”

“Excuse me?” he said. “This is my property.” He motioned to his fishin’ buddy. “Get me the rifle, son,” he said. the younger one dropped his makeshift pole and ran up the path.

“You’re gonna get violent?” I asked.

“When you try to steal my land from me, damn right I will,” he said.

“But it’s not your land,” I insisted.

“Like hell,” he said.

I reached down into the water and pulled up a skipping stone. I played a bit of shortstop in high school. I thought I could peg him in the thigh. He was a big target anyway.

Several seconds of glaring silence passed. His boy reappeared with the gun.

“Mister,” I called out. “You touch that gun and I’ll break your hand with this stone.” I palmed it like a baseball.

He grabbed the gun. I chucked the ball at his hand. It hit him square. Then it passed through his hand, his gun, and his son on the other side.

Well, shit.

He raised it and fired. Then he stared. His boy turned white.

“Son–“

“Right through him, Pop, I swear to God.”

The shotgun crack sent a flock of geese honking skyward. Silence slipped behind them. Suddenly I saw two Lenape women on the opposite bank: one bore a basket of plants, the other filled a clay bowl with water. A column of revolutionaries drank before marching on, muskets perched on their slumping shoulders. A weary-faced grandfather joined the man and boy. A teenager draped in a saggy black clothes sat on a log, a pistol in his hand. 

A stone skipped toward the woman, its whispering hits ending in a plop. She froze. Keen eyes scanned the banks. Across the stream, a demon—a crow-colored man—brooded on fallen log suspended over the water. He hadn’t noticed her, but he hadn’t thrown the rock.

Two boys in blue skipped stones upstream.

“Four,” the taller one said glumly. He chewed a bit of honeysuckle as the other boy skipped his stone.

“Five! Ha!”

“Best of five?”

Behind them the colonel coughed. “You boys don’t want to give away our position I hope?” The men snapped to attention.

“I didn’t think so.” He scanned the water. A father and son fished on the other side, but neither paid them any mind. “You might be lucky today, but luck runs out. Don’t waste it on this.” The men—barely men, the colonel knew—scurried back to camp.

The moments arrived. Clayton waved to the Baxters. Father and son waved back, the pail between them knocked back and forgotten. A woodpecker hammered at a poplar, causing the woman to look up. Clayton, pale and grizzled, was a foreign sight to her. She raised her palm in greeting, unsure of the response. The boy with the gun saw the exchange. The Baxters waved to him; he waved back and contemplated whether or not he wanted an audience for his final act. The soldiers, worn from the march, acknowledged the odd assortment, unsure if there was a confederate spy among them. The Gliesian with his instruments whirred and ticked beneath the shell armor. Six timelines converged and held just long enough for the woodpecker’s assault to end, then they slipped apart. 

The Baxters would scramble away, distressed by the moment, abandoning the pail of worms. The women would return to their camp, and before nightfall, the men would return. armed and wary. They would retrieve the pail, and the development of their technologies and belief system would change. 

The gun slipped from the boy’s hand. cursing, he would abandon it, just as his mother had abounded him. Local police would never find the body in the stream. Instead, the boy would seek help from his father’s family. The Gliesian would recover the gun and revise Zeir calculation for invasion back by three hundred Earth years. The gun would make invasion simpler, as those most likely to resist would have been wiped out beforehand. Those most likely to bear guns were also the least likely to think through their actions, making a simple delay practical. Hundreds of Gliesians would be spared a painful death.

The union soldiers would not speak of the moment again. One prayed with all his might, but still died in the hospital at Gettysburg. The other stopped believing in God and died in the wilderness. Belief seemed to make no difference at all.

As for Clayton, he puzzled over what he had seen all the way back to his cottage. That evening, he placed a call to New York.

I dropped to my knees. Clutched my chest. Sweat tickled my nose. I hoisted myself up with my walking stick. They were gone—all of them. The stream dribbled along without a burble. The wind had calmed. No birdcalls. No rustling leaves. Scared, I swore to write down my experience. Just had to get home. I staggered. Shock—I’m sure it was. Yes. It was shock.

They turned and ran. I chased after them, but they disappeared up the path. Somewhere beyond the trees I heard an engine turn over. I dropped into the big guy’s seat on the log. The wood had been worn; it was well used. I looked into the pail. It was empty. Rusted through.

So Clay stood on the bank, skipping stones like he did when he was a boy, like he did when he taught his son, waiting for the guy and his kid to come back. He considered going home, but opted to wait. It was his property, after all. He skipped a mother stone.

“Six hopper.” The sun warmed his face. The stream burbled along.

*****

Le Guin, Ursula  K.. Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (p. 90). HMH Books. Kindle Edition. 

Today’s post will be short. For Chapter #8, LeGuin wants writers to change their point of view within a paragraph. She’s calling our attention to why the thing doesn’t work, as much as she wants us to get used to what does. The moral of her story is below:

“So: you can shift from one viewpoint character to another any time you like, if you know why and how you’re doing it, if you’re cautious about doing it frequently, and if you never do it for a moment only.”

Uh huh. 

So I’m going to go easy on myself this week—I just want to play win that apple orchard again.  I’m not sure this will ever be included, but I want to see more about how Clayton, Clara and Junior interact.

*****

Pastor Holland had a way with words, so Clay just braced for impact when the black cloud of righteousness roiled its way across the orchard. He nodded to the ladies, shook hands with the men; accepted their compliments on his latest sermon, and spared a keen and chastising eye for those folks who hadn’t come through the sanctuary that week. Clay awaited his turn, a hankie in hand to mop the sweat.

“Fine afternoon for the families,” the preacher began.

Clay nodded. 

“Didn’t see you this morning.”

“I was here, gettin’ ready for the families to come by.”

“Well, you know about resting on the Sabbath, Clayton.”

“I know it. And if the chickens would feed themselves, and the apples would just take a day off growing, then maybe I could spare a day off.” His nephew Dwight scampered past. Clayton snatched him as his friends raced by.

“Go tell Junior to help Mrs. Bittner, would ya?”

The preacher had gone on again, something about the work of Lord and the Garden of Eden. Clayton waved to Clara.

“Hold on, Jessica.” Clara put her hand on her neighbor’s shoulder. “I see Clay’s straw hat wavin’ in the breeze, and Preacher Holland right beside him.”

“Sounds like someone needs rescuin’” Jessica laughed.

But as Clara approached, it wasn’t a rescue Clay wanted.

“Tell Junior to help Mrs. Bittner!”  

Edith Musselman, who had been standing not far off, looked surprised. “Can your boy help me after?”

“I’ll send him your way. Maybe next time bring those kids of yours? I can give ‘em all a job here, and then your bushel basket would be free.”

Mrs. Musselman delighted at the offer, though the same wouldn’t be said of her boys, both of whom had taken on their father’s aversion to labor.

“Seems no one is safe from work around you, Clayton,” the preacher observed.

“Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” he replied. “I’m gonna go help Old Miss Grouse, or would you like to take a basket over to her? She might need a good sermon these days.”

Preacher Holland harrumphed as he left. Clayton would give him a bushel basket of apples free, just to see the back of him. At the edge of the field, Junior carried Mrs. Bittner’s bushel basket.

“And is your Pop gonna plant corn this fall again? I love when we get to pick corn.”

Junior shrugged. He had been distracted, initially by the rugged lad who accompanied Old Miss Grouse each Sunday, then by Dwight, who coughed loudly when he witnessed the pair exchange smiles. The lad motioned for Junior to come hither; Junior motioned for him to wait a minute.

“You ain’t got time for that, Junior. Uncle Clay wants you back in the orchard helping Mrs. Bittner.”

Junior tapped his wrist, motioned five minutes twice. The lad smiled and mouthed the word ten.

“I swear to God,” Dwight said. “If Uncle Clay ever found out—“

“But he won’t, Dwight. Right?”

Dwight rolled his eyes. He hated secrets. Especially ones he found by accident.

*****

Okay, so that happened with a lot more switching and a lot faster than it probably should have, but maybe I’ve got the kernel of another story here to stretch out?  Could be fun, and I’m getting a sense at how these folks sound—still not sure about the time period though. It’s mid to late 20th century, but language seems bit outdated, though I know people who speak like this today.

*****

Old Ghosts

Clay thought his life ecclesiastical. He woke to the rooster’s crow. Fed the hens first, goats second—while he had them. In their absence, he made breakfast. Well, Clara was gone, wasn’t she? She couldn’t make his meals. Dwight, his nephew, managed the fields. Smarter than his father. He’d inherit the whole patch. Just as well. Clay had lost Clara, but he’d thrown Junior away. Junior lived in New York; they never talked. The pill tasted bitter, but Clay swallowed it every day. Afternoons belonged to the garden. He planted less each spring. Less planted, less to harvest. Less to can. Clara liked canning; he liked eating. Sometimes, after chores, he fished. The stream in the hollow beckoned. Light played on the water. Herons dropped in for trout. Well, so did he. Yes, everything had a season, and work was sacred, he still believed.

Clay stepped into the afternoon heat and surveyed his land from the back stoop. The orchard in full bloom gave him hope for a bumper harvest. He had put signs up: Pick your own apples. And that had brought out a a few townsfolk. Junior scampered among them, carrying bushel baskets to cars while he and Clara chatted with customers and took their cash. But without Clara and Junior, he couldn’t keep track of it all. He solved it with a farmstead at the top of the drive. Did Dwight’s wife or kids like to can fruit? Maybe he would just hire migrants to harvest them all, and sell to young families with a lot of mouths to feed. Families used to be bigger. 

Something disappeared into the tall grass at the end of the row. The grass shushed as it slipped away. He often saw deer, foxes—they all loved the orchard, though not usually in spring. He shrugged it off. His fishing gear awaited on the bench in the shed.

He meandered that afternoon, pole over his shoulder, tackle box in hand. Daffodils lifted their faces to the sun; wind-blown blossoms speckled the stream in pink and white. Same every year, the colors of Clara’s flowerbeds. Mums, begonias, pansies, snapdragons—he’d neglected them in the three years since. The beds had grown patchy: wild in some places, barren in others. Yes, he would have to tend them better. She would have long already chastised him for neglect. From the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of black. A darting form. He turned. Nothing.

“You are indeed losin’ it,” he announced. “Too much nostalgia. Not enough work.” He hoped it wasn’t a bear. His rifle sat secure and useless in the den, locked in the cabinet Clara insisted he buy.

The stream burbled and played. He listened to it through the trees long before he saw it. Then a glimpse, another through a break in the mountain laurel, and the trail followed the water’s edge. Snowmelt strengthened the headwaters, submerging the banks until summer. Clay would stay until the peepers chirped away the sun. So much of life was hiding. Bullfrogs croaked. Furry things scuttled beyond the rushes. Snakes slithered over logs and wound across the water. Shad and trout darted beneath the ripples. Life lived just out of view. 

A brown shape passed behind the dogwoods on the other side. Clay blinked. Deer? Maybe people? It better not be people. This was his land, bought and paid for with hard cash and forty-some years of blood and tears and sweat.

When he arrived at his fishing spot, Clay found it already occupied. A father and son from the look. The waterlogged overalls and dirty face suggested the boy’s natural lack of grace. Clay pictured him tumbling off a slippery bit of trail, or sliding sideways off a rock on the upstream crossing. He was fawnish, leggy and stumbling against the world, a lot like Junior used to be. He held a bamboo rod—an antique. They had gone out of style when Clay was a boy. 

His portly father sat on a log, baiting his hook. Sweat beads dripped down his face, despite his straw hat. He wiped his hand on a pantleg. They shadowed each other. The boy had his father’s round nose and basset hound eyes. The elder was a worn and overfed version of the younger. 

“Like this,” he said, and cast his line. The boy watched, then pulled his line in and recast.

“Better,” his father said.

Clay waved.

“You there!” He called. “How’s the fishin’?”

In the old days—Clay mourned the old days—he and Junior skipped stones. He taught the boy to select flat stones. To flick his wrist just so when throwing—spin and angle equalled skip. Skipping was an art. A skipper graduated from the bowl-sounding plop to the whispering taps—six or seven? ten?—before the stone slipped under for good. He chose one. Skipped it. A five-hopper. Not bad. Perhaps he had only shown the boy once or twice. It felt like more.

They nodded. The man doffed his hat.

“I said, ‘how’s the fishin’?'”

They ignored him. The wind shook the leaves. The stream burbled. A woodpecker rat-a-tatted a poplar. Clay called out.

“You’re on private property, you know.”

He had hunted the woods and cleaned the carcasses in the shed behind the cottage. Fished the stream and scaled and cooked fish on coals from dying trees. Those trees warmed the cottage in winter. He cleared the dead wood, picked wild raspberries, planted the garden. Drove the stakes tied with white cloth to mark the corners. He worked it; it was his.

“It’s disrespectful of you—”

The boy got a bite. A little tug, a stronger tug, and a trout popped out of the stream. It flailed in the air. The man punched his son’s shoulder.

“Now, look here,” Clay called. “I don’t mind you–“

The lad released his catch into their bucket, and the pair sat down on the log again.

Clay thought himself patient. When Clara had come up with the cancer and the doctors hemmed and hawed more than he cared for, he had been patient with them, though Clara’s bony hand on his had done much ’til it couldn’t anymore; and he had been patient with Junior, who hated farmin’ from the start alright, but loved the theatre so much that Clay and Clara had given up whole evenings to watch four years’ worth of school productions, which hadn’t gotten them anything but a visit from Markley come up over the hill, bitchin’ that his boy and Junior were makin’ hog sounds in the loft and threatenin’ to sue over Lord knows what, that had required patience; even when the boy came into the hospital in mascara and lipstick like a red light hussy he had’t yelled or nothin’ just told him to go home and clean up ‘fore his dyin’ mama saw it, and that was that forevermore; but now here this bulbous man and his ragamuffin ilk sat on his log on his stream on his property casting lines and takin’ his trout without the slimmest bit o decency to say “hello, how do you do?” or even recognize that Clay had worked that land for damn near fifty years and who were they to come replacin’ him since he wa’n’t dead yet nor read his name in the obituaries like he ‘spected to one day. 

I picked up a stone and skipped it across the water toward them.

“–I don’t mind you–“

“Hey,” Straw Hat called out. “Who are you?” He stood up and pointed at me with a sausage finger.

“I might ask you the same question,” I said. “Since you’re on my property.”

“Excuse me?” he said. “This is my property.” He motioned to his fishin’ buddy. “Get me the rifle, son,” he said. the younger one dropped his makeshift pole and ran up the path.

“You’re gonna get violent?” I asked.

“When you try to steal my land from me, damn right I will,” he said.

“But it’s not your land,” I insisted.

“Like hell,” he said.

I reached down into the water and pulled up a skipping stone. I played a bit of shortstop in high school. I thought I could peg him in the thigh. He was a big target anyway.

Several seconds of glaring silence passed. His boy reappeared with the gun.

“Mister,” I called out. “You touch that gun and I’ll break your hand with this stone.” I palmed it like a baseball.

He grabbed the gun. I chucked the ball at his hand. It hit him square. Then it passed through his hand, his gun, and his son on the other side.

Well, shit.

He raised it and fired. Then he stared. His boy turned white.

“Son–“

“Right through him, Pop, I swear to God.”

The shotgun crack sent a flock of geese honking skyward. Silence slipped behind them. Suddenly I saw two Lenape women on the opposite bank: one bore a basket of plants, the other filled a clay bowl with water. A column of revolutionaries drank before marching on, muskets perched on their slumping shoulders. A weary-faced grandfather joined the man and boy. A teenager draped in a saggy black clothes sat on a log, a pistol in his hand. 

A stone skipped toward the woman, its whispering hits ending in a plop. She froze. Keen eyes scanned the banks. Across the stream, a demon—a crow-colored man—brooded on fallen log suspended over the water. He hadn’t noticed her, but he hadn’t thrown the rock.

Two boys in blue skipped stones upstream.

“Four,” the taller one said glumly. He chewed a bit of honeysuckle as the other boy skipped his stone.

“Five! Ha!”

“Best of five?”

Behind them the colonel coughed. “You boys don’t want to give away our position I hope?” The men snapped to attention.

“I didn’t think so.” He scanned the water. A father and son fished on the other side, but neither paid them any mind. “You might be lucky today, but luck runs out. Don’t waste it on this.” The men—barely men, the colonel knew—scurried back to camp.

The moments arrived. Clayton waved to the Baxters. Father and son waved back, the pail between them knocked back and forgotten. A woodpecker hammered at a poplar, causing the woman to look up. Clayton, pale and grizzled, was a foreign sight to her. She raised her palm in greeting, unsure of the response. The boy with the gun saw the exchange. The Baxters waved to him; he waved back and contemplated whether or not he wanted an audience for his final act. The soldiers, worn from the march, acknowledged the odd assortment, unsure if there was a confederate spy among them. The Gliesian with his instruments whirred and ticked beneath the shell armor. Six timelines converged and held just long enough for the woodpecker’s assault to end, then they slipped apart. 

The Baxters would scramble away, distressed by the moment, abandoning the pail of worms. The women would return to their camp, and before nightfall, the men would return. armed and wary. They would retrieve the pail, and the development of their technologies and belief system would change. 

The gun slipped from the boy’s hand. cursing, he would abandon it, just as his mother had abounded him. Local police would never find the body in the stream. Instead, the boy would seek help from his father’s family. The Gliesian would recover the gun and revise Zeir calculation for invasion back by three hundred Earth years. The gun would make invasion simpler, as those most likely to resist would have been wiped out beforehand. Those most likely to bear guns were also the least likely to think through their actions, making a simple delay practical. Hundreds of Gliesians would be spared a painful death.

The union soldiers would not speak of the moment again. One prayed with all his might, but still died in the hospital at Gettysburg. The other stopped believing in God and died in the wilderness. Belief seemed to make no difference at all.

As for Clayton, he puzzled over what he had seen all the way back to his cottage. That evening, he placed a call to New York.

I dropped to my knees. Clutched my chest. Sweat tickled my nose. I hoisted myself up with my walking stick. They were gone—all of them. The stream dribbled along without a burble. The wind had calmed. No birdcalls. No rustling leaves. Scared, I swore to write down my experience. Just had to get home. I staggered. Shock—I’m sure it was. Yes. It was shock.

They turned and ran. I chased after them, but they disappeared up the path. Somewhere beyond the trees I heard an engine turn over. I dropped into the big guy’s seat on the log. The wood had been worn; it was well used. I looked into the pail. It was empty. Rusted through.

So Clay stood on the bank, skipping stones like he did when he was a boy, like he did when he taught his son, waiting for the guy and his kid to come back. He considered going home, but opted to wait. It was his property, after all. He skipped a mother stone.

“Six hopper.” The sun warmed his face. The stream burbled along.

*****

Le Guin, Ursula  K.. Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (p. 89). HMH Books. Kindle Edition. 

Chapter Six of Steering the Craft is titled “Verbs: Person and Tense”. LeGuin continues to call our attention to concepts and ideas that writers take for granted, often without really understanding what they are doing. 

For this activity, she wants two versions of the same reminiscence. The prompt involves an old woman moving back and forth in time between doing something and remembering something, but since my protagonist is doing a lot of the same kind of movement, I’m going to focus on his work on the farm. The goal today is to consider person and tense, and to not get them confused. Some version of the two paragraphs I’m writing today will likely become the second paragraph of the final piece.

Version One: Third Person, all in the past

Clay stepped into the afternoon heat and surveyed his land from the back stoop. The orchard in full bloom gave him hope for a bumper harvest. He had put signs up: Pick your own apples. And that had brought out a a few townsfolk. Junior scampered among them, carrying bushel baskets to cars while he and Clara chatted with customers and took their cash. But without Clara and Junior, he couldn’t keep track of it all. He solved it with a farmstead at the top of the drive. Did Dwight’s wife or kids like to can fruit? Maybe he would just hire migrants to harvest them all, and sell to young families with a lot of mouths to feed. Families used to be bigger. 

Something disappeared into the tall grass at the end of the row. The grass shushed as it slipped away. He often saw deer, foxes—they all loved the orchard, though not usually in spring. He shrugged it off. His fishing gear awaited on the bench in the shed. 

Version Two: First Person, present tense to show now, past tense to show then

The heat is oppressive. It doesn’t feel like spring. Summer’s getting a head start. My little apple orchard is in full bloom. Clara loved the orchard in spring—as much as she loved her flower beds in summer. I am walking in our footsteps. Here is where she chatted with the ladies from the church quilting bee. I told Junior to carry their baskets to the car. There is where I first taught Junior to climb trees, Clara alternating between concerns and amusement. The grass isn’t high yet, but it’s tall enough to shush under my feet. I love the sound of walking through tall grass. I—

Something disappears into the high weeds at the end of the row. A deer or fox. Maybe a raccoon, but should’t be in daytime. The orchard’s popular, but not spring. Once I’m racing to pick the harvest—probably with some migrants—we’ll all be in a race.

I look back a the house. For a moment I think it’s not there. Just a foundation and some charred timbers. I blink. Everything’s right with the world. The heat’s getting to me, so I hurry toward the shed. The fishing gear is waiting on the bench. An afternoon by the stream, resting on my favorite log in the shade of the willow… that’s what I need.

If you’re just joining me, here’s the in-process short story, so you can read where the paragraphs above might fit.

*****

Old Ghosts

Clay thought his life ecclesiastical. He woke to the rooster’s crow. Fed the hens first, goats second—while he had them. In their absence, he made breakfast. Well, Clara was gone, wasn’t she? She couldn’t make his meals. Dwight, his nephew, managed the fields. Smarter than his father. He’d inherit the whole patch. Just as well. Clay had lost Clara, but he’d thrown Junior away. Junior lived in New York; they never talked. The pill tasted bitter, but Clay swallowed it every day. Afternoons belonged to the garden. He planted less each spring. Less planted, less to harvest. Less to can. Clara liked canning; he liked eating. Sometimes, after chores, he fished. The stream in the hollow beckoned. Light played on the water. Herons dropped in for trout. Well, so did he. Yes, everything had a season, and work was sacred, he still believed.

PARAGRAPH ABOVE GOES HERE

He meandered that afternoon, pole over his shoulder, tackle box in hand. Daffodils lifted their faces to the sun; wind-blown blossoms speckled the stream in pink and white. Same every year, the colors of Clara’s flowerbeds. Mums, begonias, pansies, snapdragons—he’d neglected them in the three years since. The beds had grown patchy: wild in some places, barren in others. Yes, he would have to tend them better. She would have long already chastised him for neglect. From the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of black. A darting form. He turned. Nothing.

“You are indeed losin’ it,” he announced. “Too much nostalgia. Not enough work.” He hoped it wasn’t a bear. His rifle sat secure and useless in the den, locked in the cabinet Clara insisted he buy.

The stream burbled and played. He listened to it through the trees long before he saw it. Then a glimpse, another through a break in the mountain laurel, and the trail followed the water’s edge. Snowmelt strengthened the headwaters, submerging the banks until summer. Clay would stay until the peepers chirped away the sun. So much of life was hiding. Bullfrogs croaked. Furry things scuttled beyond the rushes. Snakes slithered over logs and wound across the water. Shad and trout darted beneath the ripples. Life lived just out of view. 

A brown shape passed behind the dogwoods on the other side. Clay blinked. Deer? Maybe people? It better not be people. This was his land, bought and paid for with hard cash and forty-some years of blood and tears and sweat.

When he arrived at his fishing spot, Clay found it already occupied. A father and son from the look. The waterlogged overalls and dirty face suggested the boy’s natural lack of grace. Clay pictured him tumbling off a slippery bit of trail, or sliding sideways off a rock on the upstream crossing. He was fawnish, leggy and stumbling against the world, a lot like Junior used to be. He held a bamboo rod—an antique. They had gone out of style when Clay was a boy. 

His portly father sat on a log, baiting his hook. Sweat beads dripped down his face, despite his straw hat. He wiped his hand on a pantleg. They shadowed each other. The boy had his father’s round nose and basset hound eyes. The elder was a worn and overfed version of the younger. 

“Like this,” he said, and cast his line. The boy watched, then pulled his line in and recast.

“Better,” his father said.

Clay waved.

“You there!” He called. “How’s the fishin’?”

In the old days—Clay mourned the old days—he and Junior skipped stones. He taught the boy to select flat stones. To flick his wrist just so when throwing—spin and angle equalled skip. Skipping was an art. A skipper graduated from the bowl-sounding plop to the whispering taps—six or seven? ten?—before the stone slipped under for good. He chose one. Skipped it. A five-hopper. Not bad. Perhaps he had only shown the boy once or twice. It felt like more.

They nodded. The man doffed his hat.

“I said, ‘how’s the fishin’?'”

They ignored him. The wind shook the leaves. The stream burbled. A woodpecker rat-a-tatted a poplar. Clay called out.

“You’re on private property, you know.”

He had hunted the woods and cleaned the carcasses in the shed behind the cottage. Fished the stream and scaled and cooked fish on coals from dying trees. Those trees warmed the cottage in winter. He cleared the dead wood, picked wild raspberries, planted the garden. Drove the stakes tied with white cloth to mark the corners. He worked it; it was his.

“It’s disrespectful of you—”

The boy got a bite. A little tug, a stronger tug, and a trout popped out of the stream. It flailed in the air. The man punched his son’s shoulder.

“Now, look here,” Clay called. “I don’t mind you–“

The lad released his catch into their bucket, and the pair sat down on the log again.

Clay thought himself patient. When Clara had come up with the cancer and the doctors hemmed and hawed more than he cared for, he had been patient with them, though Clara’s bony hand on his had done much ’til it couldn’t anymore; and he had been patient with Junior, who hated farmin’ from the start alright, but loved the theatre so much that Clay and Clara had given up whole evenings to watch four years’ worth of school productions, which hadn’t gotten them anything but a visit from Markley come up over the hill, bitchin’ that his boy and Junior were makin’ hog sounds in the loft and threatenin’ to sue over Lord knows what, that had required patience; even when the boy came into the hospital in mascara and lipstick like a red light hussy he had’t yelled or nothin’ just told him to go home and clean up ‘fore his dyin’ mama saw it, and that was that forevermore; but now here this bulbous man and his ragamuffin ilk sat on his log on his stream on his property casting lines and takin’ his trout without the slimmest bit o decency to say “hello, how do you do?” or even recognize that Clay had worked that land for damn near fifty years and who were they to come replacin’ him since he wa’n’t dead yet nor read his name in the obituaries like he ‘spected to one day. 

I picked up a stone and skipped it across the water toward them.

“–I don’t mind you–“

“Hey,” Straw Hat called out. “Who are you?” He stood up and pointed at me with a sausage finger.

“I might ask you the same question,” I said. “Since you’re on my property.”

“Excuse me?” he said. “This is my property.” He motioned to his fishin’ buddy. “Get me the rifle, son,” he said. the younger one dropped his makeshift pole and ran up the path.

“You’re gonna get violent?” I asked.

“When you try to steal my land from me, damn right I will,” he said.

“But it’s not your land,” I insisted.

“Like hell,” he said.

I reached down into the water and pulled up a skipping stone. I played a bit of shortstop in high school. I thought I could peg him in the thigh. He was a big target anyway.

Several seconds of glaring silence passed. His boy reappeared with the gun.

“Mister,” I called out. “You touch that gun and I’ll break your hand with this stone.” I palmed it like a baseball.

He grabbed the gun. I chucked the ball at his hand. It hit him square. Then it passed through his hand, his gun, and his son on the other side.

Well, shit.

He raised it and fired. Then he stared. His boy turned white.

“Son–“

“Right through him, Pop, I swear to God.”

The shotgun crack sent a flock of geese honking skyward. Silence slipped behind them. Suddenly I saw two Lenape women on the opposite bank: one bore a basket of plants, the other filled a clay bowl with water. A column of revolutionaries drank before marching on, muskets perched on their slumping shoulders. A weary-faced grandfather joined the man and boy. A teenager draped in a saggy black clothes sat on a log, a pistol in his hand. 

A stone skipped toward the woman, its whispering hits ending in a plop. She froze. Keen eyes scanned the banks. Across the stream, a demon—a crow-colored man—brooded on fallen log suspended over the water. He hadn’t noticed her, but he hadn’t thrown the rock.

Two boys in blue skipped stones upstream.

“Four,” the taller one said glumly. He chewed a bit of honeysuckle as the other boy skipped his stone.

“Five! Ha!”

“Best of five?”

Behind them the colonel coughed. “You boys don’t want to give away our position I hope?” The men snapped to attention.

“I didn’t think so.” He scanned the water. A father and son fished on the other side, but neither paid them any mind. “You might be lucky today, but luck runs out. Don’t waste it on this.” The men—barely men, the colonel knew—scurried back to camp.

Everything converged. The women retreated into the wild. The soldiers marched onward. Grandfather, son, and grandson cast their lines as one. The boy blew his head off. 

I dropped to my knees. Clutched my chest. Sweat tickled my nose. I hoisted myself up with my walking stick. They were gone—all of them. The stream dribbled along without a burble. The wind had calmed. No birdcalls. No rustling leaves. Scared, I swore to write down my experience. Just had to get home. I staggered. Shock—I’m sure it was. Yes. It was shock.

They turned and ran. I chased after them, but they disappeared up the path. Somewhere beyond the trees I heard an engine turn over. I dropped into the big guy’s seat on the log. The wood had been worn; it was well used. I looked into the pail. It was empty. Rusted through.

So Clay stood on the bank, skipping stones like he did when he was a boy, like he did when he taught his son, waiting for the guy and his kid to come back. He considered going home, but opted to wait. It was his property, after all. He skipped a mother stone.

“Six hopper.” The sun warmed his face. The stream burbled along.

*****

Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. HMH Books. Kindle Edition. 

I’m at the half way point of LeGuin’s Steering the Craft. This week: adjectives and adverbs. This is a beautiful little chapter, neatly summarizing a writer’s relationship to these parts of speech in what I think are very clear terms: 

“Adjectives and Adverbs are rich and good and nourishing. They add color, life, immediacy. They cause obesity in prose only when used lazily or overused. 

When the quality that the adverb indicates can be put in the verb itself (they ran quickly = they raced) or the quality the adjective indicates can be put in the noun itself (a growling voice = a growl), the prose will be cleaner, more intense, more vivid.” (43)

These sentences capture the contrast that writers often feel about these words: we are told to reduce them, cut them—do anything except use them—then we are reminded that the English lexicon has a rich array of words for capturing nuance so we should be fearless in their employ. But that second sentence captures the issue: not all adjectives and adverbs are equal. We should discern which to use based on the needs of our ideas, a task that takes time and care.

Her exercise is this: “Write a paragraph to a page (200–350 words) of descriptive narrative prose without adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. The point is to give a vivid description of a scene or an action using only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles (45)”. She recommends that this work be done at home instead of in a writing group because of its difficulty.

So today I’m giving “Old Ghosts” the chop… kind of. Ins tead of completely new text, I’m revising old, hunting for adjectives and adverbs in the first part of the piece, and in the process searching for the right nouns and verbs. I’ll add a caveat. My priority will be on narrative, not dialogue, but I might add or cut a bit there as well.

*****

Old Ghosts

Clay thought his life ecclesiastical. He woke to the rooster’s crow. Fed the hens first, goats second—while he had them. In their absence, he made breakfast. Well, Clara was gone, wasn’t she? She couldn’t make his meals. Dwight, his nephew, managed the fields. Smarter than his father. He’d inherit the whole patch. Just as well. Clay had lost Clara, but he’d thrown Junior away. Junior lived in New York; they never talked. The pill tasted bitter, but Clay swallowed it every day. Afternoons belonged to the garden. He planted less each spring. Less planted, less to harvest. Less to can. Clara liked canning; he liked eating. Sometimes, after chores, he fished. The stream in the hollow beckoned. Light played on the water. Herons dropped in for trout. Well, so did he. Yes, everything had a season, and work was sacred, he still believed.

He meandered that afternoon, pole over his shoulder, tackle box in hand. Daffodils lifted their faces to the sun; wind-blown blossoms speckled the stream in pink and white. Same every year, the colors of Clara’s flowerbeds. Mums, begonias, pansies, snapdragons—he’d neglected them in the three years since. The beds had grown patchy: wild in some places, barren in others. Yes, he would have to tend them better. She would have long already chastised him for neglect. From the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of black. A darting form. He turned. Nothing.

“You are indeed losin’ it,” he announced. “Too much nostalgia. Not enough work.” He hoped it wasn’t a bear. His rifle sat secure and useless in the den, locked in the cabinet Clara insisted he buy.

The stream burbled and played. He listened to it through the trees long before he saw it. Then a glimpse, another through a break in the mountain laurel, and the trail followed the water’s edge. Snowmelt strengthened the headwaters, submerging the banks until summer. Clay would stay until the peepers chirped away the sun. So much of life was hiding. Bullfrogs croaked. Furry things scuttled beyond the rushes. Snakes slithered over logs and wound across the water. Shad and trout darted beneath the ripples. Life lived just out of view. 

A brown shape passed behind the dogwoods on the other side. Clay blinked. Deer? Maybe people? It better not be people. This was his land, bought and paid for with hard cash and forty-some years of blood and tears and sweat.

When he arrived at his fishing spot, Clay found it already occupied. A father and son from the look. The waterlogged overalls and dirty face suggested the boy’s natural lack of grace. Clay pictured him tumbling off a slippery bit of trail, or sliding sideways off a rock on the upstream crossing. He was fawnish, leggy and stumbling against the world, a lot like Junior used to be. He held a bamboo rod—an antique. They had gone out of style when Clay was a boy. 

His portly father sat on a log, baiting his hook. Sweat beads dripped down his face, despite his straw hat. He wiped his hand on a pantleg. They shadowed each other. The boy had his father’s round nose and basset hound eyes. The elder was a worn and overfed version of the younger. 

“Like this,” he said, and cast his line. The boy watched, then pulled his line in and recast.

“Better,” his father said.

Clay waved.

“You there!” He called. “How’s the fishin’?”

END OF ADJECTIVE & ADVERB REVISION

In the old days—Clay laughed ruefully at the idea of old days—he and Junior skipped stones from time to time. He taught the boy to select the flattest stones. To flick his wrist just so on the throw—spin was everything to the skip. Skipping was an art. You had to graduate from the hollowed out bowl-sound of a plopping rock to the whispering brush of six or seven taps before the stone slipped under water for good. He selected a stone from the bank and skipped it. A five-hopper. Not bad. Perhaps he had only shown the boy once or twice. It felt like more.

They nodded. The fat man doffed his hat.

“I said, ‘how’s the fishin’?'”

They ignored me. The wind blew gently. The stream burbled. A woodpecker pecked a poplar. I could think of no earthly reason they should ignore me, so I called out.

“You’re on private property, you know.”

It was true. I hunted the woods and still cleaned the carcasses in the shed behind the stone cottage. Fished the stream and scaled and cooked that fish on red coals. Cut down the trees to keep the cottage warm in winter, to say nothing of cooking my meals. Cleared the dead wood, picked wild raspberries, planted the garden. Drove the stakes tied with white cloth to mark the corners. I worked it; it was mine.

“It’s disrespectful of you—”

Tee-and-Flannel got a bite. A little tug, a stronger tug, and a trout popped out of the stream. It flailed in the air. The big man punched his shoulder. They continued to act as if I wasn’t there.

“Now, look here,” I called. “I don’t mind you–“

The younger fella released his catch, and the pair sat down on the bank again.

He thought himself patient about most things in life; like when Clara had come up with the cancer and the doctors hemmed and hawed more than he cared for, he had been patient with them, though Clara’s bony hand on his had done much ’til it couldn’t anymore; and he had been patient with Junior, who hated farmin’ from the start alright, but loved the theatre so much that Clay and Clara had given up whole evenings to watch four years’ worth of school productions, which hadn’t gotten them anything but a visit from Markley come up over the hill, bitchin’ that his boy and Junior were makin’ hog sounds in the loft and threatenin’ to sue over Lord knows what, that had required patience; even when the boy came into the hospital in mascara and lipstick like a red light hussy he had’t yelled or nothin’ just told him to go home and clean up ‘fore his dyin’ mama saw it, and that was that forevermore; but now here this bulbous man and his ragamuffin ilk sat on his log on his stream on his property casting lines and takin’ his trout without the slimmest bit o decency to say “hello, how do you do?” or even recognize that Clay had worked that land for damn near fifty years and who were they to come replacin’ him since he wa’n’t dead yet nor read his name in the obituaries like he ‘spected to one day. 

I picked up a stone and skipped it across the water toward them.

“–I don’t mind you–“

“Hey,” Straw Hat called out. “Who are you?” He stood up and pointed at me with a sausage finger.

“I might ask you the same question,” I said. “Since you’re on my property.”

“Excuse me?” he said. “This is my property.” He motioned to his fishin’ buddy. “Get me the rifle, son,” he said. the younger one dropped his makeshift pole and ran up the path.

“You’re gonna get violent?” I asked.

“When you try to steal my land from me, damn right I will,” he said.

“But it’s not your land,” I insisted.

“Like hell,” he said.

I reached down into the water and pulled up a skipping stone. I played a bit of shortstop in high school. I thought I could peg him in the thigh. He was a big target anyway.

Several seconds of glaring silence passed. His boy reappeared with the gun.

“Mister,” I called out. “You touch that gun and I’ll break your hand with this stone.” I palmed it like a baseball.

He grabbed the gun. I chucked the ball at his hand. It hit him square. Then it passed through his hand, his gun, and his son on the other side.

Well, shit.

He raised it and fired. Then he stared. His boy turned white.

“Son–“

“Right through him, Pop, I swear to God.”

The shotgun crack sent a flock of geese honking skyward. Silence slipped behind them. Suddenly I saw two Lenape women on the opposite bank: one bore a basket of plants, the other filled a clay bowl with water. A column of revolutionaries drank before marching on, muskets perched on their slumping shoulders. A weary-faced grandfather joined the man and boy. A teenager draped in a saggy black clothes sat on a log, a pistol in his hand. 

A stone skipped toward the woman, its whispering hits ending in a plop. She froze. Keen eyes scanned the banks. Across the stream, a demon—a crow-colored man—brooded on fallen log suspended over the water. He hadn’t noticed her, but he hadn’t thrown the rock.

Two boys in blue skipped stones upstream.

“Four,” the taller one said glumly. He chewed a bit of honeysuckle as the other boy skipped his stone.

“Five! Ha!”

“Best of five?”

Behind them the colonel coughed. “You boys don’t want to give away our position I hope?” The men snapped to attention.

“I didn’t think so.” He scanned the water. A father and son fished on the other side, but neither paid them any mind. “You might be lucky today, but luck runs out. Don’t waste it on this.” The men—barely men, the colonel knew—scurried back to camp.

Everything converged. The women retreated into the wild. The soldiers marched onward. Grandfather, son, and grandson cast their lines as one. The boy blew his head off. 

I dropped to my knees. Clutched my chest. Sweat tickled my nose. I hoisted myself up with my walking stick. They were gone—all of them. The stream dribbled along without a burble. The wind had calmed. No birdcalls. No rustling leaves. Scared, I swore to write down my experience. Just had to get home. I staggered. Shock—I’m sure it was. Yes. It was shock.

They turned and ran. I chased after them, but they disappeared up the path. Somewhere beyond the trees I heard an engine turn over. I dropped into the big guy’s seat on the log. The wood had been worn; it was well used. I looked into the pail. It was empty. Rusted through.

So Clay stood on the bank, skipping stones like he did when he was a boy, like he did when he taught his son, waiting for the guy and his kid to come back. He considered going home, but opted to wait. It was his property, after all. He skipped a mother stone.

“Six hopper.” The sun warmed his face. The stream burbled along.

*****

Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. HMH Books. Kindle Edition. 

If you’re just checking out my blog, I’m in the early stages of a summer project: applying lessons from LeGuin’s Steering the Craft to a short story idea I had been messing with unsuccessfully.

Remember, if you’re part of the #WriteLGBTQ and #WritingCommunity groups on Twitter, maybe you’ll join me on this excursion by sharing your response to this post on Twitter! Use the hashtag #steeringthecraft and reply to me @nicanorabbott.

Here’s the draft of the short story “Old Ghosts”. I’m pretty sure I have to take it out of first person, and there’s a disjuncture near the end between old and new material. I am trying to speak about the temporary nature of people as a product of time in a given space.

*****

Old Ghosts

A spring wind whipped the woods to life. Daffodils lifted yellow faces to the sun, and blossoms blown from the trees speckled the stream in pinks and whites. Mountain ridge snowmelt strengthened the headwaters. The stream swelled; muddy banks submerged, lost until summer. The peepers chirped away the sun each night. Bullfrogs croaked. Little furry things scuttled beyond the rushes. Snakes slithered over bent logs and wound their way across the surface. Shad and trout returned. And with them came the people.

I happened upon a pair the other day, just after dawn. They set up camp on a fallen oak, a beaten metal pail between them. The older man was scruffy; his hat brim frayed from weather.  His trousers were patched in one knee, the waistband taut around his girth.

“Like this,” he said, and cast his line again.

The waif was a scrawnier version of his teacher. From the muddy, waterlogged state of his overalls and the dirt on his face and hands, it seemed the natural lack of grace in boys that age had already taken its toll that morning.

The fishing rods seemed antique, perhaps forced back into service? Bamboo rods had gone out of style even before I was a boy, and their lines were too visible, too thick to be modern.

I waved. My right, of course. They were on my property.

“You there!” I called. “How’s the fishin’?”

They nodded. The fat man doffed his hat.

“I said, ‘how’s the fishin’?'”

They ignored me. The wind blew gently. The stream burbled. A woodpecker pecked a poplar. I could think of no earthly reason they should ignore me, so I called out.

“You’re on private property, you know.”

It was true. I hunted the woods and still cleaned the carcasses in the shed behind the stone cottage. Fished the stream and scaled and cooked that fish on red coals. Cut down the trees to keep the cottage warm in winter, to say nothing of cooking my meals. Cleared the dead wood, picked wild raspberries, planted the garden. Drove the stakes tied with white cloth to mark the corners. I worked it; it was mine.

“It’s disrespectful of you—”

Tee-and-Flannel got a bite. A little tug, a stronger tug, and a trout popped out of the stream. It flailed in the air. The big man punched his shoulder. They continued to act as if I wasn’t there.

“Now, look here,” I called. “I don’t mind you–“

The younger fella released his catch, and the pair sat down on the bank again.

I picked up a stone and skipped it across the water toward them.

“–I don’t mind you–“

“Hey,” Straw Hat called out. “Who are you?” He stood up and pointed at me with a sausage finger.

“I might ask you the same question,” I said. “Since you’re on my property.”

“Excuse me?” he said. “This is my property.” He motioned to his fishin’ buddy. “Get me the rifle, son,” he said. the younger one dropped his makeshift pole and ran up the path.

“You’re gonna get violent?” I asked.

“When you try to steal my land from me, damn right I will,” he said.

“But it’s not your land,” I insisted.

“Like hell,” he said.

I reached down into the water and pulled up a skipping stone. I played a bit of shortstop in high school. I thought I could peg him in the thigh. He was a big target anyway.

Several seconds of glaring silence passed. His boy reappeared with the gun.

“Mister,” I called out. “You touch that gun and I’ll break your hand with this stone.” I palmed it like a baseball.

He grabbed the gun. I chucked the ball at his hand. It hit him square. Then it passed through his hand, his gun, and his son on the other side.

Well, shit.

He raised it and fired. Then he stared. His boy turned white.

“Son–“

“Right through him, Pop, I swear to God.”

The shotgun crack sent a flock of geese honking skyward. Silence slipped behind them. Suddenly I saw two Lenape women on the opposite bank: one bore a basket of plants, the other filled a clay bowl with water. A column of revolutionaries drank before marching on, muskets perched on their slumping shoulders. A weary-faced grandfather joined the man and boy. A teenager draped in a saggy black clothes sat on a log, a pistol in his hand. 

Everything converged. The women retreated into the wild. The soldiers marched onward. Grandfather, son, and grandson cast their lines as one. The boy blew his head off. 

I dropped to my knees. Clutched my chest. Sweat tickled my nose. I hoisted myself up with my walking stick. They were gone—all of them. The stream dribbled along without a burble. The wind had calmed. No birdcalls. No rustling leaves. Scared, I swore to write down my experience. Just had to get home. I staggered. Shock—I’m sure it was. Yes. It was shock.

Outdated Ending

I kept walking toward them. They turned and ran. I chased after them, but they disappeared up the path. Somewhere beyond the trees I heard an engine turn over. I dropped into the big guy’s seat on the log. The wood had been worn; it was well used. I looked into the pail. It was empty. Rusted through.

So this is where I sit, waiting for the guy and his kid to come back. Seems like it’s been a while. I should probably head home soon. It’s my property after all.

*****

In the Chapter “Sentence Length and Complex Syntax,” LeGuin provides several passages from other writers, including Twain, Stowe, and Woolf, and asks readers to look at how length and syntax shape the motion of the story and the development of voice, among other things. She then recommends “EXERCISE THREE: Short and Long. Part One: Write a paragraph of narrative, 100–150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments! Each must have a subject and a verb. Part Two: Write a half page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, that is all one sentence.

So here is the 100-150 words, in sentences seven words long or fewer, and in full sentences. This might be the new opening paragraph:

Clay called his life Ecclesiastical. He woke with the crowin’ rooster. The hens came first. Goats followed, while he had them. In their absence, he made breakfast. Well, Clara was gone, wasn’t she? She couldn’t make meals anymore. His nephew managed the fields. Smarter than his father, that one. He’d inherit the whole patch. Just as well. Clay’d lost Clara. He’d thrown Tommy away, hadn’t he? Junior lived in New York. They never talked. Pill tasted bitter. But Clay swallowed it every day. Afternoons belonged to the garden. He planted less each spring. Less planted, less to harvest. He didn’t can as much. Clara liked cannin’. He liked eatin’. Sometimes, after the chores, he fished. The stream in the hollow beckoned. Light played on the water. Herons dropped in. Trout was good for beast and bird. Yes, to everything he had a season. Work was sacred, he still believed.

Now one sentence up to 350 words. Clay (previously “I”) is working up a lather over being ignored by the father and son:

He thought himself patient about most things in life; like when Clara had come up with the cancer and the doctors hemmed and hawed more than he cared for, he had been patient with them, though Clara’s bony hand on his had done much ’til it couldn’t anymore; and he had been patient with Junior, who hated farmin’ from the start alright, but loved the theatre so much that Clay and Clara had given up whole evenings to watch four years’ worth of school productions, which hadn’t gotten them anything but a visit from Markley come up over the hill, bitchin’ that his boy and Junior were makin’ hog sounds in the loft and threatenin’ to sue over Lord knows what, that had required patience; even when the boy came into the hospital in mascara and lipstick like a red light hussy he hadn’t yelled or nothin’ just told him to go home and clean up ‘fore his dyin’ mama saw it, and that was that forevermore; but now here this bulbous man and his ragamuffin ilk sat on his log on his stream on his property casting lines and takin’ his trout without the slimmest bit o’ decency to say “hello, how do you do?” or even recognize that Clay had worked that land for damn near fifty years and who were they to come replacin’ him since he wa’n’t dead yet nor read his name in the obituaries like he ‘spected to one day. 

Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (p. 32). HMH Books. Kindle Edition.