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pjthompsonI've posted behind the cut the first two scenes of my short story, "Closes Within a Dream." At least, it was supposed to be a short story: a novelette or a novella. It's argued with me ever since I wrote the first draft. It says it's part of a novel. It's been saying that for several drafts. I think the languid style and crazy quilt of information is more suited towards a novel than a short story, so the first 18 rounds go to the novel—and maybe the decision.
I suck at short stories. I never want to start them where they should be started or end them where they should be ended. I want to include scads of character information. I want to stretch out, go long. Lounge around the side of the pool and slowly bake in the sun, rubbing application after application of sunscreen on my greedy skin, rather than jump in and do my required laps. I recognize there's something willful in this. I am not by nature a short storyist.
I've written several of these stories, centering around this made up place called Dos Lunas and the same set of characters. I'm not sure any of them work entirely as stories (well, maybe one), and I think "Closes" may actually be one of the weakest. They really may be a novel trying to happen, but they are taking their own sweet time in letting me know what the larger conflict is. It comes out of the mist now and again to blow raspberries at me before flitting back into hiding, so I know it's there. I catch a glimpse of it's hind end sometimes when it doesn't know I'm looking. A shapely hind end, to be sure, but I'd really like to get a glimpse of its face.
So why am I posting this? I don't know, except it's part of a larger reassessment of things I'm doing. Of writing and of life, and whatever else you've got. I'm doing a hell of a lot of pondering, but so far the pond of my mind has not let anything crawl onto shore. At least as concerns my Dos Lunas cycle. Something in the primordial ooze part of my brain urges me to put this here, so I have. The rest in still stuck in the deep muck until the big boss opens up and lets this worker drone know what's going on.
JK Montmorency had a dirty little secret.
He'd hidden it from everyone in Dos Lunas County, afraid they'd question his manhood if they knew, only revealing it to the one guy who could satisfy JK's craving—Roberto Bustamante, owner of Two Moon Books in Pyreka, the county's largest city.
So he said a prayer of gratitude as he slipped through the front door of the bookstore just before closing. Slinking up to the counter, he scanned the aisles to be sure he was the only patron.
Roberto quirked an eyebrow as JK slouched forward like some rough beast. "It's been so long I thought you weren't going to pick up your order."
"I had a hard time getting here without being spotted."
Roberto's mouth twitched upwards before going neutral again. "I've told you there's no reason to be ashamed. A man likes what he likes and shouldn't have to answer to anyone for it."
"I know, but people talk and stuff, and I wouldn't want my dad to get embarrassed again by something I'd done."
"Whatever you say, son." Roberto's smile was tolerant, which made these transactions easier. Near seventy, still vigorous—a tall, thin man with the high cheekbones and long, straight nose common to the Kintache Indians of the area, JK had been self-conscious when revealing his secret to somebody old enough to be his grandpa. But he'd found out Roberto shared the same addiction. That was a relief, finally having somebody to talk to about it.
Roberto pulled a slim volume from under the counter and handed it to JK. "Me, I think Ferlinghetti's overrated, but maybe I'm showing my age."
JK read the title: The Coney Island of the Mind. "I'm experimenting with what's out there."
"Nothing wrong with that. The Beats are okay. I appreciate some of Robert Creeley and Alan Ginsberg, but I don't much see the need for profanity in poetry."
JK shrugged. "Just a different style people started using to shake up the middle class, I guess."
"Like I said, maybe I'm showing my age."
"I love all kinds of poetry, even old stuff."
"Old stuff, huh?" Roberto smiled. "Like the Nineteenth Century?"
"Well . . ." Heat bloomed on JK's cheeks. "I'm not into rhymey stuff."
"Not all Nineteenth Century poets rhyme, and even some rhymers have good things to say."
JK tried to sound open. "I guess."
"Tell you what, I just got this in." Roberto slapped a thick book onto the counter, British Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. "Take it along and see if you like it. If you do, drop in and pay for it. If not, bring it back."
A surprised laugh escaped him. "Thanks, Mr. Bustamante! Are you sure?"
"Heck, yeah. Like to help out a fellow poetry lover."
Roberto mentioned a few poets in the volume he thought JK might like as he put the books into a plain brown bag and stapled the top shut. If people saw the bag, they'd probably think JK had porn because he didn't have the best reputation where girls were concerned. Better a reputation as a lecher, he figured, than to be thought a wimp.
#
A small pond with no name nestled on the outskirts of town at the end of the dirt road curving around the boundaries of Pyreka Pines Memorial Cemetery. The oldest tombstones of the cemetery stood nearest the pond so not many folks visited them. On balmy summer evenings, JK parked his ancient Toyota 4x4 there behind the screen of young California laurel trees. It was a good place to be alone with his reading. He had a camping lantern which provided sufficient light and springy grass edging the pond to lie upon.
A lonely place, he supposed, an abandoned place—but JK couldn't help thinking of it as his place of sweet solitude. The dead kept his secret, even if he took a notion to read out loud in order to feel the cadence and rhythm of the poems. Sometimes he wondered about ghosts amongst the graves, but he hadn't seen any, although lately he'd felt a pressure building in his skull when he looked that way.
A not-unfamiliar pressure. The first time he'd felt it he was six and had seen his first ghost: a confused accident victim who followed JK's dad, the sheriff, home from a crash site. Mangled, bloody, seen only by JK, the sight had so terrified him he'd shut down, blanked everything out. None of the doctors or psychic healers of Dos Lunas County could bring him out of that trance. When he'd emerged from it on his own three days later, a door had shut tight in his mind. He never saw a revenant again, never felt that funny pressure in his head.
Until the last few months. Curiosity now outweighed fear, and the idea of seeing a ghost didn't bother him so much these days. In fact, he thought a spirit might live inside his favorite pond. Sometimes eerie lights shifted just below the surface, glowing gold and florescent green. JK had taken to talking to it because it always responded, erupting into gurgles, loud splashes, and plopping sounds, especially when he read poems out loud. Sometimes—JK would never admit this to anyone—he read his own poems. They weren't good, but the pond made polite noises, gurgling encouragement. He couldn't imagine sharing his writing with people, because . . . well, he sucked so bad.
He rolled out his sleeping bag and set the lantern on the grass, sitting cross-legged facing the water. The crickets, disturbed by his presence, went silent before commencing their chirring again from further away. Thankfully, the peppery smell of the laurel leaves was subdued tonight. If it got too strong, it could give you a wicked headache.
JK pulled out the book of Nineteenth Century poets. "We've got some older stuff tonight."
Splash, gurgle, plop, said the pond.
JK turned to Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the guys Roberto had mentioned. Some cool, crazy images. The pond did a lot of splashing after Hopkins, almost like clapping. Matthew Arnold was stiffer. The pond plopped only a little. But for Swinburne the pond gurgled, like the cooing of doves.
"Yeah, cool stuff," JK agreed.
He also came across a poem by a guy named Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam. That was off-putting. The translation of the title wasn't reassuring: 'The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long—Horace.' But it was only two stanzas—so what the hell? He read:
"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
"They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream."
The pond let forth a long, gurgling coo.
"Yeah, I like it, too. Reminds me of what Grandma Adeline says about the Otherworld, only she calls it 'The Dream Land.' She says the afterlife isn't so much like passing into another realm as it's like waking from one dream and going into another."
The pond made no response. JK laid on his back to stare at the night sky: the stars crisp as polished diamonds, plentiful as orange blossoms in spring. Occasionally, a trail of red, green, or yellow lights crossed the sky, adding the essence of color.
That's what JK liked about poetry, the way it described the essence of things and let a person do a lot of pondering about what fit between the lines. Sometimes when a poem was really good, doors opened in his mind. Not only the doors to perception, but he'd swear real doors, like if he had the nerve to take one more step, he could pass through them to a whole new place. Could be related to that door which shut down in him when he was six, and maybe that was why he felt reluctant to step over that threshold.
All he knew was that the language in poems swam up from the land of dreams—even the bare root stuff, the hard and flinty and profane stuff. The good poems, the ones JK liked best, used pared down language to float big ideas from a different part of the mind then folks used for day-to-day thinking. The part of the mind where dreams lived.
He was kind of short on dreams these days. Oh yeah, he liked pondering, but he didn't much like thinking about what to do with his life.
"I don't want to be a disappointment," he said to the night sky. "I just don't feel a calling yet."
The pond splashed behind him and he turned back onto his stomach. "You don't know this about me because I haven't talked about it much, but I once mortified my dad. See, I've got this problem with . . . concupiscence." The pond made a questioning noise. "Lust." The pond gurgled. JK gave a nervous laugh. "I'm sort of a horn dog." An enormous gurgle erupted in the water. "This one time a few years back when I was sixteen, Marian St. Cloud's grandfather came downstairs and caught us doing it right there on the parlor couch. I was lucky to escape with my life. But my pants got left behind on the floor, and Duff St. Cloud charged into my dad's office waving them like a flag."
Plop, plop, splash!
"Even worse, word leaked along the gossip grapevine about me and Marian. The whole county knew within a day. "
Burble, burble, burble.
"The two other girls I was spending time with got real mad. They thought we had an exclusive thing, but I swear I never told them that." Good thing the pond couldn't see him. His cheeks burned bright. "I didn't exactly correct their assumptions about our exclusivity, though. Word got to the grapevine about them, too. I got labeled the biggest bad boy in Dos Lunas County. I guess I deserve it."
Gurrrrrrrgle, fizzzz, fizzzz, fizzzzz.
"Oh yeah, funny, haha. Unless you're the one being gossiped about. Humiliated the hell out of Dad. Only time in my life he said he was ashamed of me. I never want to hear that from him again."
Ploooooop.
"So I've got to figure out what to do with my life. Make something of myself so he can be proud of me."
The pond had no answer—not even a tiny splash.
#
I suck at short stories. I never want to start them where they should be started or end them where they should be ended. I want to include scads of character information. I want to stretch out, go long. Lounge around the side of the pool and slowly bake in the sun, rubbing application after application of sunscreen on my greedy skin, rather than jump in and do my required laps. I recognize there's something willful in this. I am not by nature a short storyist.
I've written several of these stories, centering around this made up place called Dos Lunas and the same set of characters. I'm not sure any of them work entirely as stories (well, maybe one), and I think "Closes" may actually be one of the weakest. They really may be a novel trying to happen, but they are taking their own sweet time in letting me know what the larger conflict is. It comes out of the mist now and again to blow raspberries at me before flitting back into hiding, so I know it's there. I catch a glimpse of it's hind end sometimes when it doesn't know I'm looking. A shapely hind end, to be sure, but I'd really like to get a glimpse of its face.
So why am I posting this? I don't know, except it's part of a larger reassessment of things I'm doing. Of writing and of life, and whatever else you've got. I'm doing a hell of a lot of pondering, but so far the pond of my mind has not let anything crawl onto shore. At least as concerns my Dos Lunas cycle. Something in the primordial ooze part of my brain urges me to put this here, so I have. The rest in still stuck in the deep muck until the big boss opens up and lets this worker drone know what's going on.
JK Montmorency had a dirty little secret.
He'd hidden it from everyone in Dos Lunas County, afraid they'd question his manhood if they knew, only revealing it to the one guy who could satisfy JK's craving—Roberto Bustamante, owner of Two Moon Books in Pyreka, the county's largest city.
So he said a prayer of gratitude as he slipped through the front door of the bookstore just before closing. Slinking up to the counter, he scanned the aisles to be sure he was the only patron.
Roberto quirked an eyebrow as JK slouched forward like some rough beast. "It's been so long I thought you weren't going to pick up your order."
"I had a hard time getting here without being spotted."
Roberto's mouth twitched upwards before going neutral again. "I've told you there's no reason to be ashamed. A man likes what he likes and shouldn't have to answer to anyone for it."
"I know, but people talk and stuff, and I wouldn't want my dad to get embarrassed again by something I'd done."
"Whatever you say, son." Roberto's smile was tolerant, which made these transactions easier. Near seventy, still vigorous—a tall, thin man with the high cheekbones and long, straight nose common to the Kintache Indians of the area, JK had been self-conscious when revealing his secret to somebody old enough to be his grandpa. But he'd found out Roberto shared the same addiction. That was a relief, finally having somebody to talk to about it.
Roberto pulled a slim volume from under the counter and handed it to JK. "Me, I think Ferlinghetti's overrated, but maybe I'm showing my age."
JK read the title: The Coney Island of the Mind. "I'm experimenting with what's out there."
"Nothing wrong with that. The Beats are okay. I appreciate some of Robert Creeley and Alan Ginsberg, but I don't much see the need for profanity in poetry."
JK shrugged. "Just a different style people started using to shake up the middle class, I guess."
"Like I said, maybe I'm showing my age."
"I love all kinds of poetry, even old stuff."
"Old stuff, huh?" Roberto smiled. "Like the Nineteenth Century?"
"Well . . ." Heat bloomed on JK's cheeks. "I'm not into rhymey stuff."
"Not all Nineteenth Century poets rhyme, and even some rhymers have good things to say."
JK tried to sound open. "I guess."
"Tell you what, I just got this in." Roberto slapped a thick book onto the counter, British Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. "Take it along and see if you like it. If you do, drop in and pay for it. If not, bring it back."
A surprised laugh escaped him. "Thanks, Mr. Bustamante! Are you sure?"
"Heck, yeah. Like to help out a fellow poetry lover."
Roberto mentioned a few poets in the volume he thought JK might like as he put the books into a plain brown bag and stapled the top shut. If people saw the bag, they'd probably think JK had porn because he didn't have the best reputation where girls were concerned. Better a reputation as a lecher, he figured, than to be thought a wimp.
#
A small pond with no name nestled on the outskirts of town at the end of the dirt road curving around the boundaries of Pyreka Pines Memorial Cemetery. The oldest tombstones of the cemetery stood nearest the pond so not many folks visited them. On balmy summer evenings, JK parked his ancient Toyota 4x4 there behind the screen of young California laurel trees. It was a good place to be alone with his reading. He had a camping lantern which provided sufficient light and springy grass edging the pond to lie upon.
A lonely place, he supposed, an abandoned place—but JK couldn't help thinking of it as his place of sweet solitude. The dead kept his secret, even if he took a notion to read out loud in order to feel the cadence and rhythm of the poems. Sometimes he wondered about ghosts amongst the graves, but he hadn't seen any, although lately he'd felt a pressure building in his skull when he looked that way.
A not-unfamiliar pressure. The first time he'd felt it he was six and had seen his first ghost: a confused accident victim who followed JK's dad, the sheriff, home from a crash site. Mangled, bloody, seen only by JK, the sight had so terrified him he'd shut down, blanked everything out. None of the doctors or psychic healers of Dos Lunas County could bring him out of that trance. When he'd emerged from it on his own three days later, a door had shut tight in his mind. He never saw a revenant again, never felt that funny pressure in his head.
Until the last few months. Curiosity now outweighed fear, and the idea of seeing a ghost didn't bother him so much these days. In fact, he thought a spirit might live inside his favorite pond. Sometimes eerie lights shifted just below the surface, glowing gold and florescent green. JK had taken to talking to it because it always responded, erupting into gurgles, loud splashes, and plopping sounds, especially when he read poems out loud. Sometimes—JK would never admit this to anyone—he read his own poems. They weren't good, but the pond made polite noises, gurgling encouragement. He couldn't imagine sharing his writing with people, because . . . well, he sucked so bad.
He rolled out his sleeping bag and set the lantern on the grass, sitting cross-legged facing the water. The crickets, disturbed by his presence, went silent before commencing their chirring again from further away. Thankfully, the peppery smell of the laurel leaves was subdued tonight. If it got too strong, it could give you a wicked headache.
JK pulled out the book of Nineteenth Century poets. "We've got some older stuff tonight."
Splash, gurgle, plop, said the pond.
JK turned to Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the guys Roberto had mentioned. Some cool, crazy images. The pond did a lot of splashing after Hopkins, almost like clapping. Matthew Arnold was stiffer. The pond plopped only a little. But for Swinburne the pond gurgled, like the cooing of doves.
"Yeah, cool stuff," JK agreed.
He also came across a poem by a guy named Ernest Dowson, Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam. That was off-putting. The translation of the title wasn't reassuring: 'The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long—Horace.' But it was only two stanzas—so what the hell? He read:
"They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
"They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream."
The pond let forth a long, gurgling coo.
"Yeah, I like it, too. Reminds me of what Grandma Adeline says about the Otherworld, only she calls it 'The Dream Land.' She says the afterlife isn't so much like passing into another realm as it's like waking from one dream and going into another."
The pond made no response. JK laid on his back to stare at the night sky: the stars crisp as polished diamonds, plentiful as orange blossoms in spring. Occasionally, a trail of red, green, or yellow lights crossed the sky, adding the essence of color.
That's what JK liked about poetry, the way it described the essence of things and let a person do a lot of pondering about what fit between the lines. Sometimes when a poem was really good, doors opened in his mind. Not only the doors to perception, but he'd swear real doors, like if he had the nerve to take one more step, he could pass through them to a whole new place. Could be related to that door which shut down in him when he was six, and maybe that was why he felt reluctant to step over that threshold.
All he knew was that the language in poems swam up from the land of dreams—even the bare root stuff, the hard and flinty and profane stuff. The good poems, the ones JK liked best, used pared down language to float big ideas from a different part of the mind then folks used for day-to-day thinking. The part of the mind where dreams lived.
He was kind of short on dreams these days. Oh yeah, he liked pondering, but he didn't much like thinking about what to do with his life.
"I don't want to be a disappointment," he said to the night sky. "I just don't feel a calling yet."
The pond splashed behind him and he turned back onto his stomach. "You don't know this about me because I haven't talked about it much, but I once mortified my dad. See, I've got this problem with . . . concupiscence." The pond made a questioning noise. "Lust." The pond gurgled. JK gave a nervous laugh. "I'm sort of a horn dog." An enormous gurgle erupted in the water. "This one time a few years back when I was sixteen, Marian St. Cloud's grandfather came downstairs and caught us doing it right there on the parlor couch. I was lucky to escape with my life. But my pants got left behind on the floor, and Duff St. Cloud charged into my dad's office waving them like a flag."
Plop, plop, splash!
"Even worse, word leaked along the gossip grapevine about me and Marian. The whole county knew within a day. "
Burble, burble, burble.
"The two other girls I was spending time with got real mad. They thought we had an exclusive thing, but I swear I never told them that." Good thing the pond couldn't see him. His cheeks burned bright. "I didn't exactly correct their assumptions about our exclusivity, though. Word got to the grapevine about them, too. I got labeled the biggest bad boy in Dos Lunas County. I guess I deserve it."
Gurrrrrrrgle, fizzzz, fizzzz, fizzzzz.
"Oh yeah, funny, haha. Unless you're the one being gossiped about. Humiliated the hell out of Dad. Only time in my life he said he was ashamed of me. I never want to hear that from him again."
Ploooooop.
"So I've got to figure out what to do with my life. Make something of myself so he can be proud of me."
The pond had no answer—not even a tiny splash.
#
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Date: 2009-12-22 11:01 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-12-23 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-12-23 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-23 01:30 am (UTC)Which is bullshit, but whatever.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-23 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-23 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-23 01:25 pm (UTC)I decided "JK" stands for "John Keats"--not that your character is Keatslike, and his dad would certainly not have named him that, but that's what I decided :-)
no subject
Date: 2009-12-23 05:22 pm (UTC)