Thursday, October 22, 2009

A new beginning

I'm not really sure how I'm going to use this blog. I used to blog all the time. I'd write mysterious, personal, poetical sounding things and let people guess what I was talking about. One of the things I look back on and laugh at. But I'll probably end up doing the same thing on here. Its been a while though, so I thought I'd just start out with a few of the fiction exercises I've been doing lately, trying to be an "obedient servant" like Madeleine L'engle told me to be. Not me, specifically... although, in all my arrogant artsy-Anneishness, I'm convinced that she would have found me a kindred spirit if only we had met. Oh gosh. This already sounds ridiculous.

Okay here's the first one. A new beginning to a story I've tried to tell over and over. The one that always gets away.




in the land of goshen... where the four rivers meet.

In my name I am prosperous and no where else. Shen looked at the the paper before him. Unacceptable.
Re-do.

Reject if received in such and such condition.

Instead of starting AGAIN the assignment that he has completed twice already Shen typed those words into the empty space:

"in the land of goshen, where the four rivers meet, the grain waves like the sea. The Blue sky meets the golden sea just out of my reach. then I look and see a road. A earth-brown road, firm and smooth, making its way through the sea. A road through the sea all the way to the blue, blue sky. The wheat rubs against my legs as I make my way through it, pushing it aside gently, trying not the break the stalks. I get closer and closer. But before I can reach the road the sky darkens and black clouds roll in, more quickly than seems possible. They burst forth and flood the land.

I can't see. It pours and pours until I can't breath without choking. And then, right as I start to suffocate, the clouds roll back and the rain stops. Leaving behind broken stalks without heads and mud knee deep.

The sun comes out and beats down on me as I try to make my way through the muck. Even as I walk, I hear the grain crackle and dry in the heat. The mud hardens. I can't get me feet out. They are stuck fast, and I whither in the sun like the wheat.

So much for the land of Goshen."

It was a dream. Only a dream. Born of his parents strange choice for their fistborn. "We're not even Jewish."

Perhaps they thought naming him after a prosperous place would bode well for their his future.

But they were wrong.




1 comment:

Jonathan said...

I'm hooked.

- your bro