I wanted to include one last section for anyone to write in some intentionally bad Good Writing, or good Bad Writing or any combination thereof. I’ll try and work on a paragraph of my own, but I thought it’d be fun to give people the opportunity, since it seemed like so much fun in the book.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Bad Good Writing
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Belayed in the Tertiary: An Etiquette of Regret
ReplyDelete(a very serious short story by me, Steve)
Pacing the hay-swept floor of the barn, Elspeth worried her hands carefully and downward, as if in inverted prayer. She knew she'd made a mistake, but the fake snakes of her decision were now out--the faux can o' nuts of her existence could withstand no more recoil, their once-novel springs now lilting, limp, flaccid. Rusty. A chicken clucked at her feet; its recombinant beak aspired to feed.
Her brother the butcher emerged from the gambrel, his apron bloody as a civil war surgeon's and twice as worse for wear, shaking his head. Elspeth knew already the prognosis but was determined to make him say it. Her lips pensive, her eyes a sui generis of hope, breathing wrought latticework.
Removing a hunk of chaw with a single hooked finger and flinging it mindlessly, Clem finally spoke. "Did me all I could, Spethy. 'Tweren't enough."
In the shadow-shorn silo behind them rested a secret they'd harbored since the lower Tetons, a secret that lay prone for myriad winters, a secret, yes, a secret so grand and so sweeping and so so damning that the world's strongest anitbacterial lotion couldn't offer respite.
A secret, indeed, coming home to roost.
"You know what we got to do." Clem pantomimed the shaking of and then the rolling of numbered die. He blew on the his enclosed fingers for effect.
And affect.
Elspeth shuddered. "I can't. She's just a girl. Or, was."
"She ain't no more. You knew what we was tryin' to do--we just ain't did it right enough. We's compelled to warm up the hovercraft." Pellucid as ever, Clem cut to the chase, the heart of the matter, the kernel of the corn, the champagne room of the conceptual strip club.
"We swore to never use it again. We need to think of the physics, Clem. The physics." The rational part of Elspeth's brain had never totally comported to the reality of her brother's experiments, so her plea, however circumspect, was rendered inert the moment her vocal chords first advanced it. This was no time for rational thought.
Besides, their copy of Zeitalter der Aufklärung had just been returned to the library.
"Hellfire on all that. Now go get the tarp off and fire that sumbitch up."
She did as told, first removing her turgid purple shawl, then the tarp, and, after many buttons pushed and before long, the hovercraft had once again been resurrected, like Jesus, whose countenance was rendered, reverently, in velvet and hung over the door where a horseshoe should be and whose eye was always following you like so many a felled and taxidermied mounted marlin.
Clem, ever the dyspeptic one, pensively reached into his saddlebag and withdrew the remote control. Steering the joystick, and thus the hovercraft through the bowels of the barn and soon alight toward the rapidly evaporating horizon, he thought back to that sunny, fate-filled day in Oregon. Had it really been seventeen years? Would he remember how to navigate it? Could he keep the eels at bay this time?
"Bout to find out," he muttered to no one in particular.