One more for the Road
Intro – Squeezing it out., Abstraction turning to look at itself, shedding its skin to reveal a new creature. From where?
The Urn - Draft 2
The Urn
“I remember this place. It’s changed a lot.”
“Me too, and there’s parts I’d rather forget, or rather, I remember parts I thought I’d forgotten.”
“What are you making?
Oh, I’m not sure yet, something for the kids.
Her hands cupped the clay, squeezing as it spun, her thumbs pushed down in the centre opening it up.
How do you do that, make something from nothing?
It’s not from nothing, it’s from everything. I throw the memories at the wheel and make a shape as it spins. It’s already there. It’s there before I throw it. The wheel and I just help it come into this world. “The big things help the small things along.”
He left her, went to the window, and looked through the panes. Outside autumn put sunset in the leaves and pulled them to the earth. A fresh wind came through the crack at the bottom. Behind, the sound of the wheel quickened and could smell clay.
Every empty moment in the whole square room was filled. The bees floating over clover flowers underneath the clothesline, grandma hanging washing with funny looking pegs. Water planes landing on the lake over smooth rocks under cold water. A lot had changed. He turned back.
“How’s it coming along? The wheel slowed.
Almost done. I’ll have to go soon.
Where are you going?
Back out there.
Can I come?
Later
Well, I will not forget you. The wheel stopped. What is it?
It’s an urn.
Oh, that is beautiful. Is that for the kids? What will you put in there?
Ashes
Comment
This works for me so far. I like the autumn outside, hopefully it conveys an approaching cold (death). The woman making the urn knows what is going on, the man has little idea. The whole thing makes me feel sad which is fine. The images in the middle are from my childhood in another country. They are like postcard memories.
The balance of innuendo, realism, and dream needs tuning.
A melancholic sweet spot.
Glad I perused this.
Working on two or more stories at once helps.
Gives space for things to percolate.
Now I’ve got two stories under the same brief:
One a straight forward telling of events,
the other a reflection on the certainty of death.
Never Enough
Had time to kill on a train last weekend.
Started jotting ideas for one more story for this month’s project.
The Tomb
I trusted him, but was never sure I believed him, and yet I followed, through the labyrinth of his wishes, to this bowel of a place in the dark, under all this rock. Years had stretched our friendship over the racks of a shared desperation, sown demented webs that bore us to this forsaken hole in the earth. I needed this too, some reason to exist in hopes’ abstract residue, a phantom looking for some substance, alone but for our dream.
Now, all that weeks blasting had brought us to that chamber, under all that rock. The Captain barked his orders in the dead air.
“Heave, heave, push!”
Graysons’ eyes bulged next to mine as we gave all we had to the slab, but it gave no quarter.
“Grayson, light another torch. You men, push with me now – Heeeaaavvve…”
It nudged, scraped, just a finger.
“Get a wedge in there, it’s moved!”
Sweat hit dust in the meek light as our mad muscle forced its will on the stone. Sinews and sweat man against time, till a palpable joy signaled ???
“It’s coming! Hurry, another torch! Kandinsky, hammer a wedge…”
Kandinsky drove hard on the wedge, and we levered on the slab with unnatural strength, until in a blaring moment, it split a crack open into the dark. We paused in the torch-light, a ppppA crack like an ice cube in boiling water then eerie sounds, like the whirring of breath over pipes from below.
The hammer swung again, pounded at the wedge with smacks that dissolved in the hollow space, and something moved, dislodged in the earth below, and I saw the Captains beard, singed with ginger, pulled with the rapid sucking of air from around us.
“Give it one more men, one more!”
Heave, the bagpipes, then, Kandinsky swung and missed as the stone gave way and cracked over the wedge caving into the empty cold of the crypt. A lewd cobalt-blue beamed from the opening in the dark of the chamber, and a calm came upon us, a resting of force, relief.
It’s true. What they had written, in all those books, over all those years. It
The hammer slipped from grip and fell away, the handle swinging into the crypt like the hands of a clock around its head, and it whirled down, smaller into the deep blue, and we watched, as it fell into an open, stary sky.
I’ve tried making this one work over and over.
But something doesn’t click.
Then I was listening to How to Write Freakishly Fast — Steven Levitan, one of my favorite interviews by David Perell.
Levitan talks about “the line between two characters”—how it needs to crackle.
That hit me.
There’s no real dynamic between the characters yet.
Kandinsky needs to dislike me.
I need to be jealous of the Captain.
So when they open the tomb at the end, they break their differences—
and unite under a shared goal.
Also: I’m going to rewrite it from the end forward.
I like the end.
So why not start there?
The title?
Too Mummy.
Too cliché.
Needs something more gothic.
More M.R. James.
More Shirley Jackson.
Some say it helps your writing to think about the fleeting nature of life.
For me, it’s more about accepting that I probably think about it too much.
This little story captures a sliver of that sorrow.
And that’s okay.
Every emotion is valid.
Every feeling has the right to be made real.
Sharing them through story is how I understand them.
We conjure it from just behind the veil—
and purge it onto the page.
