Since the two characters aren’t ready to leave my head just yet, I decided to extend the short story I posted yesterday to see where these ideas take me (see JUST ADDED in the previous post). Preachers are interesting characters to write about. They have deep belief. They inspire faith. They have a following. And everyone brings their own notions of what these men and women should be about to a story whether they realize it or not. That makes it somewhat easier on a writer in that we don’t have to provide as much character background, but I couldn’t help myself in this case. I have big plans for Preacher White. He’s no ordinary man. Read the rest of this entry »
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Arnie Braugher showed up before the air around the grocery store was heavy with donut smell and the traffic light at the main intersection on the highway stopped flashing red. The parking lot, as usual, was occupied by a couple compact cars belonging to the bakery employees only this morning they’d caught some newspapers under wheel that had been blown from a nearby display. On the sidewalk, chained to a support pole, there was a battered boy’s bicycle that someone had abandoned a few weeks before - that the store manager could not bring himself to cut free on the chance that whoever left it there might change their mind, do the right thing, and claim it. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Short Story
Plain white church off the interstate, behind a billboard advertising economy rooms at the Super 8. Shiny metal septic tank out front at the parking lot’s edged. Houses - small ones - peaking over bleak hillsides onto fast food drive-thrus and the lazy main stretch, a small roadside town gone by in flash behind the wheel as if it were imagined or magic. Back to empty dead fields pilfered last fall and giving abundant life (and people like me someties saying you have to look around for evidence that there is a higher power.) Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Notes
Burning wildly, fire whips through the log stack first from the middle, then higher, into the dark perfect corners that frame its orange and blue gradients in the fireplace. The flames lick and hiss naturally, as they would if real wood had been split and set atop kindling. But the wood that’s piled there is phony - metal fashioned to resemble logs - and the flames are the kind whoe strength can be controlled by gas valves. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Fire
Mr. Bukowski, I can understand your torment and your cynicism. Tapping the keys alone in your apartment in Los Angeles, the symphony on a small radio overlaid by the background street sounds blowing in the open window. I can see the fresh poems falling from the typewriter toward chair legs but finding neither, coming to rest in grooves across beer cans. Though you never wrote about it, I imagine an oscillating fan spinning the midnight air, and the pale lamp light, a sickly yellow, drawing out the color in your skin. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Bukowski, Letters
