Moss Gathers

  All that there was was the sound of the wind and the tickle f the grass against one side of my face. And then there was a light in the sky, brighter than anything I had ever seen. Then the falling, then the waking with a shudder.

  I make coffee and light the day's first cigarette, trying not to go back to bed every way I know how. I don't know that many ways, so I find myself laying back on the mattress, and wrapping myself back up in the covers that haven't even gotten the chance to get cold yet. I get up an hour later, feed that cats that are mewling on my chest and leave the house so I don't sink back into the cozy trap of home.

  The morning is a tour of things I should have done. I walk through the park where I saw her the first time, and then down the street where we used to live before she said no. Then I'm back, back at home, with the cats and the coffee and shitty little laptop, where the work I'm supposed to do lives. Deadlines, submissions yet to be sent. All the things that pay the bills. Or most of them. Missed the one for the telephone this month. Might  never pay it again. Who uses landlines now anyway?

   Fourteen minutes into what i'm supposed to do, I get restless. Another cup, another cigarette, another walk. This time different route, different memories. Remind me why I didn't move out of this town after? When ever fucking sidewalk brings up memories, and none of them are exactly happy, why do I stay? Probably for the same reason I don't pay the phone bill and I missed the gas and lights last month: laziness, inertia. I am here, and I can live with this, why change it to make myself comfortable and happy? The rent is low. I can eat cheap. I know where things are.

These things don't sound as compelling as they do in my head when I think about moving away.

Third cup, third cigarette. No work done yet. Good morning inertia.

Third walk runs in the track of the first one, and I sit down on the bench where I saw her crying after that asshole left her. Lean against the tree where I kissed her for the first time, drunk and beautiful. I lay down in the  grass where I was for five hours after the end of things, after she flew to Portland. Then I go home, and hope that maybe there's something to watch on t.v. Because it doesn't care if I'm too lazy to move.

The Things That Happen On The Way

   Monday morning is shining in through a window specked with dust from years of running on dirty streets, in little cloud-like patterns. Maybe you could draw in them, leave messages and letters to strangers. But that would be strange. Besides, I'm reading a newspaper. That is who I am on this bus in the morning: the man who reads the paper. You can't just upset that kind of routine to write a love poem in dust to a stranger. Though I want to. So I stare at the window, past the article I'm not reading. I don't stare at the woman who is mumbling to herself and shaking, because that is what she does. That is what she's there for. And I am not the man that stares at crazy people. I read the newspaper. And I don't introduce myself to the girl with the sad face, because I am not the man who comforts sad people. I get off at my stop, and walk down the street. Because I am the man who goes to work.

He Tried

   He tried to write stories about the South. But he couldn't. He didn't feel like it belonged to him, that the places he had lived and the places he had seen were places he had only passed through. He'd spent half his life in the deepest parts of it, in places where the land was all hills and hollers and little creeks woven through, but it felt like only the city was his. And everyone knows even Southern cities aren't the South. So he couldn't, so he didn't and he left for the woods again, to write stories about the city. And they all sounded a little like the way the South was supposed to sound.

So This Is Pretty Much What's Happening.

Hey there,

I'm trying to get stories out to an audience of people that might want to read them. Assuming these people exist, publication would make that happen.

But publication is hard.
Blogs are not.

So here we are. I'll be posting stories here four times a week (unless I feel lazy. Then it will be three.), with three stories a day. The first two will be supershorts, stories less than a page (or five hundred words) in length. Little sketches of scenes and situations. The third will be a longer short story, if about three pages in length, and on Sundays I will be posting serialized pieces of a longer story (excepting this first post. Spending time on the first episode of our gripping narrative).

Also,  stay tuned for the SUPER AWESOME MONTHLY STORYTELLING ADVENTURE!
The installments of the month's adventure in stories in public places will be posted every Wednesday (beginning the first Wednesday in September), and will be mindblowingly cool. I promise.