A quote: “Home is the most popular and will be the most enduring of all earthly establishments”. ~~ Channing Pollock
I’ll start with a story …
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The harvest’s in, food canned, meat cured, and we pack up our community to move to winter holdings.
We won’t be returning here to farm. The grey men of the city may trade, but they aren’t to be trusted.
I lost my Judith this season and am loathe to leave. But our boys, now men, ride escort ahead and I shan’t be lonely. The old men follow, to hide the trail and watch.
I have a good horse, a fine rifle and the silver cross I gave Judith on our wedding day around my neck. No, I shan’t be lonely.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe stock standard license
Lewis says: He yanked the wig off. He snipped the threads on the base to release the map. Tucking it in his tunic pocket he picked up his pack, trudged down the filthy street headed to the people’s park. The park edged the Bleak-lands. For three days he made his way, slept under what rocks and overhangs he could find, ate and drank his stash, following the map as best he could. It had taken weeks of communication snippets to build the map. Was it correct? If not, he was a dead man. He tried not to doubt.
The fourth afternoon he topped a ridge coming eye level with grey clouds and sky, below that he could just make out green pastures. He moved down the ridge til he could make out the log house, the barns, the cattle, the greens of what might be gardens. He moved down the slope. The cabin door opened as he stepped on the porch. Inside he said “Never find us on this entire crap planet, projecting that fake atmosphere was genius!” The red-head grinned and said “Welcome Home, Cowboy!”
Cameron says: The UN called it “Paradise” after reassuring everyone that it was not a reference to any religion. They were determined that this pristine world would be carbon neutral and the people would be careful not to cause any warming.
I got in because I could lie convincingly. I stole the horse and took off running two weeks after arrival. Luckily, solar powered APCs weren’t that fast. But they did corner me.
That’s when the other colonists who had escaped came out. We were badly outnumbered. But we believed in guns. They didn’t. Paradise got a lot better after that day.
Dupin says: Well, this was another fine mess I’d gotten myself into. I kicked my horse into a gallop. I had a long time to go and a short way to get there, and before the posse gets me.
It’s not helping that my mind is throwing paraphrases from Oliver Hardy and Jerry Reed that would be anachronistic here in 1887. Besides, my trail was more northbound and up. Still, I did shoot the sheriff, but he was between me and saving a few million people.
Now, if I found the temporal taxi before the posse caught up, I’d save another world.
Navig8r says: I love this life, the freedom, just my horse and me, out on the range in the sunshine the clean air, and God’s great scenery. And the adrenaline rush of that glorious burst of speed when he’s in the right mood. Old age will eventually catch up to both of us, and I am trying to set aside a little money for when that happens. That burst of speed could win races, but unfortunately, he wasn’t in the mood last time, so here I am. Broke again. Note to self. Next race, bring along a recording of an angry rattlesnake.
Lewis says: Good one!
Kevin says: How to Recognize a Cult: (1) Absolute authoritarianism without accountability (2) Zero tolerance for criticism or questions (3) Lack of meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget (4) Unreasonable fears about the outside world that often involve evil conspiracies and persecutions.
Scott says: Ok, so you described democrats to a “T”, but what does that have to do with the fiction challenge?
Kevin says: Hey Scott, if it makes you feel better; kind of like a hit a meth. Denial (Da Nile) isn’t a river in Africa.
Cameron says: Give it a rest, child. You’re not as impressive as you keep thinking you are.
Kevin says: Cameron, you should take your own advice.
When Basil had come down here to visit Uncle Cory and Aunt Ruby, he’d been excited to meet family he knew only from his mother’s stories. He’d never expected to fall in love with the ranching life, the wide open expanses of range so unlike the redwood forest where he’d lived all his life to that point. But it hadn’t taken him long to settle in, to master the art of riding a horse, of handling cattle, of reading the weather and finding his way without a GPS. And being Spartan’s son, trained as a fighter of Sparta Point, had put him in good stead in being able to defend against menaces that ran on paws, flew on feathery wings, or slithered amidst the chapparral.
But now it was time to say good-bye, to head back home to the redwood forest and the old ranger station that his father had transformed into both a home and a base for Spartan’s Own. They had a battle to fight, to save the Republic and restore Constitutional government to a country that had been taken over by those who would stigmatize whole groups of people as irredeemably soiled, traife.
And much as the parting hurt, Basil knew that he could not abandon the fight.
William H. Stoddard says: I regret to say that that passage doesn’t sound right to my inner ear. At its current length, I’m not sure if it’s omniscient or third person, but either way I have trouble with it.
If it’s omniscient, then I have to take its statements as matters of fact. And that includes the evaluative words: “menaces” in the first paragraph and the whole phrase about “to save the Republic and restore Constitutional government . . .” in the second—especially that judgmental word “stigmative.” It doesn’t seem to me that an omniscient author should tell the audience what is good or bad, or right or wrong; I prefer to have the narrated facts before me and to decide for myself how to judge them.
Contrariwise, if it’s third person—well, I’ll accept that a teenager, which is how I envision Basil, might think of such a choice seriously, and even use elevated language for it, though it does seem to me that teenagers often find it hard to relate their own choices to moral abstractions. But I don’t find it natural for a young man making a difficult moral choice to at the same time be thinking of poetic parallelisms like “that ran on paws, flew on feathery wings, or slithered amidst the chapparal.” And while a simile such as “as irredeemably soiled, traife” might occur in a political speech to an audience, it’s hard to sympathize with a young man who orates to himself when he’s faced with a weighty personal choice; I feel as if he’s trying to talk himself INTO something rather than the hard decision flowing OUT of him. (I always think of Martin Luther’s “Here I stand. God help me, I cannot do otherwise” as a perfect example of confessional voice.)
I’m also not sure that a young man whose cultural background is Russian (and presumably not Ashkenazi) would think of using the word “traife,” and even less at a moment of intense feeling.
I’m not questioning the action that this bit of narrative is meant to convey, or even the motivation. I think I can see the intent. But the style hinders my involvement in them.
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