Tuesday. The sweet sound of the rain on the tin roof was muffled by the wind in the cedars, the white noise whooshes rising and falling, coming out of the west and loaded with thunderballs. All night off and on she had slept, waking to unholy nightmares and the whipcrack of southern thunder, and finally she opened her eyes to a gray light in the room and knew that it was morning, and arose.
Suddenly all grew quiet and still, the rain slowed and stopped, and the thunder was no longer overhead but way down in the valley rolling away. And then a shaft of sun buzzed up under the blinds and illuminated a picture of herself, smiling at the beach on President’s Day. She saw it as an omen, a sign of something.
She took her coffee cup out to the porch and surveyed the muddy drive that led off the main road to the cabin. It was a mess. Nothing was coming in or going out for a day or two, nothing with wheels anyway. Ah well, she thought, so much for omens…
Early last week her brother said he saw a UFO, right out there across those fields. He was a pretty normal guy, and whatever he said he saw, he saw. She had missed it. She was at a movie with Heather, his wife, and Arthur was out here killing time waiting for them to get back, and that was when he saw it. She thought about it now.
Shit, she whispered, beam me up.
Nice train of thought, you are a natural story teller. Books may be another diversion for you. I saw a UFO when I was 16. I never knew after that if I was intended to see it or it was there for me to witness, it changed the way that I view things now.
I have to ask…and if you ever come back here and see this….what did the UFO look like? I’ve always thought I’d like to see something like that.
This creates quite the image in my mind. With that last paragraph there must be a next installment, right? I lost sleep over this.
I don’t really know where this thing came from. I think it’s old. I guess I’ll have to write something to follow it now. Rats.
Although it is something I would love to see with my eyes, it can only be felt with the heart, seen in the mind, listened to within the soul, and released through the spirit.
Kevin, you wrote: “I have to ask…and if you ever come back here and see this…”
This ties in with putting a button on your blog for people to sign up for notifications of updates or new entries. It’s a standard thing on blogs. It’s usually called something like “subscribe to comments” and you can find it in the help files for setting up your blog. This is how one builds readership of like-minded individuals. If you are using WordPress, I found something that might help below.*
I read all the time. ““Brown Eyed Susan” is one of the most striking short stories I’ve read in a long time; I’m going to read it again. It’s so simple and short and seemingly sweet. Moving and poignant and breathe and exhale. I’m not just saying that as an “empty compliment.” As soon as I started reading, this story – undeveloped though it may be – reminded me of something from “Billy the Kid” by Michael Ondaatje, or any of my favorite books by Steinbeck.
The unfinished longing at the heart of it and the unseen mystery surrounding the little everyday things of life… the dust on the walls, the shafts of light, rain on the roof and mud in the tracks… all these things leads to one thing. A peace that many have never known but have a longing for in their hearts.
You have somehow managed to put this all into words.
I’ve never seen a songwriter / musician be able to write this way. I’ve seen lots of musicians be excellent carpenters and computer programmers (like me on both ends) because it fills a need for order and rhythm in creating something that’s functional beautiful at the same time, with all the symphonies of music swirling around their hearts their hand and their eyes and expressed in whatever they put their hands to in this physical world.
But these words you’ve written on this plain and simple page are like deer tracks on a trail that leads straight to the center of a soul. A great beating heart that lies out there on the prairie, breathing in breathing out and waiting for us to come. A sign of life so it can know itself and know that it’s not all been in vain. Just like flowers spring up after the rain. This is how Life knows itself and how we all began. Since The Beginning of Time we have all had a longing to be known.
That ability as a writer, to bring a story to life on a page, is a blessing not in disguise.
I think I can speak for all of us, as someone did before, that “we are waiting for the next installment,” whenever that will be.
That’s storytelling for ya, at it’s finest.
Many of us may have never met in person or face-to-face, but here in this strange and exotic world we inhabit on the internet, that spans both space and time… where all it takes is words and thoughts to cross the universe to land wherever there seems to be a receptive open resting place. That place right now happens to be HERE.
Like birds on a wire, and a great migration across the sky.
Thank you so much for posting this. It’s a wonderful slow and deep breath in a world that can be so chaotic.
Your friend “in Art & Music,” Catherine Todd
* WordPress › Subscribe to Comments « WordPress Plugins
Dec 14, 2007 … Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. …
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/
Finally, on reflection, I know what I was trying to say about this story: it captures the essence of a moment, like a black and white photograph; a moment in time.