Fragments

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the fragments

these are pieces of writing. things that are written with no plan or purpose usually sprung from the top of my head. they were placed here at someone's whim. there's really only one person reading this page anyway so u know who u are...

if you've read all the old stuff, this link will take u down the page to the new stuff...

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Denny Grelock had an iron rosary. He wore it like a belt but only in the afternoon. He didn't like wearing it in the morning because church happens in the morning and he didn't want to offend God.

It was a Tuesday when his grandmother cuffed his ear and said, freckles wrinkling on her scruffed rug face, "eat your soup and crackers you damn fool boy!"

Trouble was, Denny had no soup and crackers. The reality was, Denny's granny was very old and a bit on the not sane side. That didn't matter to Denny too much. He always just nodded, grinned and rubbed his ear.

Granny's hair was very white. White as swan feathers. It stood up like feathers, too. It looked kind of stupid to Denny because it stood so high and tried to be a full head of hair but it was thinning badly. Kind of a full bodied balding was going on atop Granny's head.

Snow fell in silvery plinkets on the rolling, once green hills. Elder pines rose in an iron wall.

Windows peppered the blocky houses.

He was a pigeon-headed oaf. Bulky in form, he had a knack for wearing the wrong t-shirt. If he was going to be caught at a skinhead rally that day, odds were he would be wearing an African pride top or Remember the Holocaust across his chest.

Instead of shoes, he wore black plastic flip-flops. Sandals were 'in' after all.

All the magic in the world had slowly been bottled over thousands of years and now, in Herbert's dream, it was unleashed. Oddities and fascinations rarely thought of roiled around the densely populated city. a kaliedescope of wonderment.

How odd it was for him to notice, in a small church whose top had been blown off and strange rainbow colored star-men zoomed loopdy-loops in the air; amid the writhing bean stalks, one young man on bent knee proposing to a pretty girl with solid curls for hair playing down the side of her head.

Cursed with a high swept forehead, receding hairline and downturned nose, the Slovenian man had a near alien appearance. He sat, sprawled in the corner booth of the cafe, dark octagonal sunglasses joining his hair in vivid contrast to his pale, white skin.

An ugly woman with a crevassed face clinging to the front of her skull spoke to him with an intense expression in low tones.

Her face had a serpentine quality to it like a snake, coiled tightly and ready to strike. Her eyes were dark around the edges, but not from a lack of sleep. Maybe it was from the things she had seen, horrible things.

the NEW stuff

I think I will die on a lush green hilltop in Ireland. It will be a rainy day, gray clouds as far as the eye can see. I will be alone. I will be old. I will be drenched from head to toe in the tears of the sky and I will die happy.

I think I will be trying to run like I did in my youth, before I grew up and began running to get away from things. I would be running because it made me feel free and powerful. I would be running through the hills I loved so much.

I wouldn't slip and hit my head. I wouldn't have the sudden chest pains of a heart attack. I would simply finish running to a place where no houses and no streets and no person was visible. I would lay down. I would go to sleep. And I would be reborn.

Yes, I am certain now. I will die on a lush green hilltop in Ireland.

He liked the title "Master of the Maelstrom and the Tempest." It didn't mean anything to anyone else, but to a twelve year old boy whose mind was trapped in a rural town, it was a calling. It was cause to stride through the cornfields and bean rows and through the barns and orchards and march on to destiny. That title held power. And power would be had, even by someone with so meager a beginning.

Henry remembered eating light green pears from the trees across the street. Actually it was a road, a dirt road. The trees were in the side yard of the Gorski's farm house. They raised cows, grew corn and had three dogs.

The pears were the sweetest thing that grew in the little world Henry grew up in. Sweeter than the apples in his own yard and sweeter than the choke cherries in the back field where he had trapped and killed a mouse once.

Actually, the mouse hadn't died. It had fallen into a pit he had dug out and set a trap in the bottom of. It was still breathing when Henry found it. He took it to his mother and she told him it was his job to finish the job.

Henry never forgot the sound the shovel made on the mouse. He never forgot the taste of the pears, either.