04/09/2009

1. Perhaps I should tell you about the rules. The column of fiction must be generated in one burst. There is no getting up from the first burst. The first burst should feel like you can’t get in enough air, like there is something pressing against your chest and the only way to relieve it is to keep typing.
     The second read may be interrupted particularly if something cuts a little close to the bone (remember rule about bone and meat: if the meat is on the bone when the bone is cooked, then the meat will also be cooked). The second read may also be interrupted if something seems too far away from the general meat of the piece, or, more accurately, if the meat seems a bit too far away from the bone. If a part of the story takes flight and suddenly looms over the rest like a scary house, then the second read may also be used to steamroller over the first burst in order to flatten it into a platform for the flying part of the story. On the other hand, in order to be true to the intention of the column, it may be that the story only lifts off at the end, such as with the smell of burning cast iron, the way that pot was beginning to rust, the smell of rust being heated up.
     The second read may also be interrupted to look out the window and notice the old man shuffling down the road. The old man wears a hunting cap, a red sweatshirt, blue pajama pants and black rubber boots. He takes one step at a time in a way that makes him look as if he is just learning how to walk again, which may be true. And that blue truck driving slowly alongside and slightly behind him: is that his son, watching? Is that the son that was in jail? Is that the son that got caught trying to bribe the town animal control officer to take his father’s 10 cats? Or is that just a stranger, worrying that the old man is suddenly going to veer off the shoulder and wobble right into the road? Is the old man the one that set fire to his woodpile this winter in a moment of frozen confusion while his son was in the hoosegow? Was that the woodpile fire that then caught the corner of the garage, where the vinyl siding didn’t quite cover the old boards, and first melted the vinyl and then charred the entire corner of the garage? But then the fire company, luckily, is right up the street, and they happened to be having a meeting. At least that’s what we heard. A garage with only three corners is not a very good garage.

2. For the sake of pace and rhythm — and possibly for the sake of Richard’s sense of the music of things; the time that things take; the time that words ought to take and the deliberate placement of them in time — lists can and should be used when they suit. The number 2 has a particular hopefulness, since it means a list is going to possibly start. But lists should never stop with number 2. That is not a list. That is a pairing. Pairings have no place in this column, except in the most obtuse and veiled of ways. Pairings should not be considered as an expression of partnership or kinship, but rather as an expression of juxtaposition and unease. You cannot simply pair two lovers in this column, for instance, like the child-man and the tall girl, or the self-sensitive obsessive and the numbed out ex-addict. That is not what this column should be about.
     You might pair memory with regret, but only if the regret is filtered through a smell or sound. In general, regret is not a constructive emotion for a piece to have. But yesterday I remembered (as the coyotes howled through the night, and broke into the yip yips of the aftermath of hunting, probably the old man’s cats, or a late fawn) how during the Great Flood at Mink Hollow, after three days of cataclysmic rain, the retaining wall under the one bridge back out to the main road simply crumbled and thundered into the rushing water below. I remembered that the booms were sonic. The whole house shook. Little creases in the ground became brooks and brooks became streams and the streams became creeks and the creeks became rivers and the rivers were outraged at having to handle so much mud and silt and debris and water all at once, a really unreasonable amount of everything, and maybe if it had only been a lot of mud, or only a lot of water, it would have been doable. But when you start throwing a bunch of trees into the mix, what else is the water to do but throw them against the edge of that bridge, again and again, until the bridge begins to give and the fire department shows up and bullhorns that everyone has 15 minutes to pack and get out. And I remembered last night that while I was packing and the house was shaking, the intersection of stream into creek, now river to the east into river to the west threatened to swallow the house and the yard up entirely, the yard a brown swirl, the hydrangea drowning, the top of its old blooms just crowning out of the water, the forsythia drowning, the everything drowning.