Garam Masala

 

A new story of mine, "Garam Masala," has been published by The First Line (Volume 28, Issue 2).

 

I tried at least four other versions of this story, given the opening line as a challenge, and gave up on all of them—for no particular reason.  Finally I started once again, simply instead of adding lots of plot contortions, and added in what was fresh in my mind—Van Gogh's paintings of wheatfields which we'd seen a lot of recently during the production of Vincent by our favorite company, downtown.  Finally the story moved compellingly along, without going off on impossible tangents.  It had its own quiet direction, and a heart.  My happening upon the wonderful cookbook, 660 Curries, added the final ingredients needed (in this case coriander and cumin and my mother's favorite cardamom).

 

"She liked that it would last her a very long time, all of the years she could picture ahead.  She liked that the colors of the dishes she prepared and the spices she learned to grind were rather like Vincent Van Gogh's.  A lot of yellows and oranges.  The flavors varied, as the paintings did in mood, while following a common and familiar thread."

 

"Late in the afternoon, sun on the patterned tiles of the worn kitchen floor, Alex made Lamb with Yellow Split Peas, Salmon with Garlic and Turmeric.  Cardamom-scented Chicken.  Green Pea Croquettes.  She tried both Chunky Potatoes with Spinach and Chunky Potatoes with Golden Raisins. Blended twenty spices—all of the fragrant seeds like pigments, crushed and ground, used to create something other.  Something with ingrained radiance."

 

I must spend some of my own summer cooking, as well as looking at art . . . 

 

 

image:  Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul Hospital with a Reaper, Google Art & Culture

 

 

Stillborn

 

For what seemed like much of my life, from late high school until my mother's death and memorial service up the coast, year's end was spent on the Big Island of Hawaii, most often at Keauhou Bay, south of Kailua-Kona.  I collected innumerable impressions and filled notebooks with loving detail of the place and its people, which felt akin and important to my own story.  An abandoned hotel figured in that, as well as the old temples of black lava fallen and reshaped into sea-walls.

 

Mention of those was casually slipped into a story set in England a few years ago, with an entirely different focus, and only last year did I write a fictional piece situated directly in that place of memory, setting and ambiance true and truthful, with only the facts changed to meet my whimsical fictional needs.  (The way, perhaps, I used to reinvent myself each year again waiting for New Year's Eve—and Chinese fireworks—under a little palm or other tree beside the bay.)  Whether I did it justice, finally, I don't know, and doubt, but it meant lots to me to be back there. 

 

"Stillborn" was published by the wonderful The Plentitudes in February, their Issue 21 (Winter 2026).  Here's a small taste of it—

 

Marley could get fairly close to some of the abandoned structures, approaching either from the boat harbor or the golf course, and get into the gardens on the property's periphery.  She unfolded the flowered beach chair she had bought up at the shopping center on the hill, and sat for hours on a strip of sandy lawn, or just in from the pitch black lava pools mirroring sky (cornflower, Maya, satiated blue), and try to picture how the place had been once, full of life.  The ocean was a living presence still, black-hearted blue, the color Helena had christened Kona blue, full of the spiritual energy the Hawaiians called mana.  A graceful freehand tree at harbor's edge, not a species she recognized, was her sole company.  Even the birds seemed to have gone for good.

     Line by line again she read her mother's poems, watched kayaks slipping in and out of the harbor like needles through green silk.  The harbor where the king was born, her mother said—just across the water from here.  Where boats anchored, cruise boats for snorkeling and island history tours, sportfishing boats, kayak rentals, and paddle boards.  She watched a fishing boat go by out of the harbor, past her observation post, loaded with brightly colored floats.  She glanced again the other way, toward the silent old hotel, bare as a scoured bone.

 

 

image:  Keauhou Bay collage, Christie Cochrell

Or Die of Namelessness

 

I'm pleased to have another story out, to start the year—my third published by the excellent Wild Roof Journal, which over the past several years has, it says, "built a community of emerging & established writers, visual artists, teachers, grad students, mental health professionals, travelers, hermits, vagabonds, ragamuffins, etc. etc.," (that sounds like me!); whose name comes from a line in William Blake's The Book of Urizen.

 

My story, "Or Die of Namelessness," can be found in Gallery 1, Knocking on wood: on glass.

 

Its name comes from another poet, Wendell Berry, and these lines of his—

“we must call all things by name out of the silence 

again to be with us, or die of namelessness”

 

The names are of particular interest, for it is the names the forlorn hero of the story is losing, to nominal aphasia, to the lonely, silent void.  Along with all the rest, the names of the fossil shells he had made his career, and the shared language between him and his true love—"Cephalopods, ammonites, opalised pippi shells, spotted Babylon snails, cowries, dolphin gastropods, miters, moon shells, turbans and vases and urchins, whelks; Venus comb murex, hundred-eyed cowrie, rainbow abalone, sheep’s ear abalone, pontifical mitre, orange-mouth olive and lettered olive, colorful coquina clams, chambered nautilus, tusk."

 

A cousin of mine died from aphasia last year, and by coincidence we saw a fine play in the fall about a woman suffering and finally perishing from word loss too—Nick Payne's Constellations.

 

images:  generated in WordItOut

Italian Hand Gestures

 

Originally published by Dime Show Review (now defunct) in early 2017, my whimsical and wistful story "Italian Hand Gestures" has been reprinted now by Doubleback Review (Issue 7:2 - October 2025).

 

The story is (first) about a self-conscious stutterer's discovery of the liberating world of hand gestures to express everything he couldn't convey otherwise.

 

"He especially liked the gesture where the hand moved level over the top of the head, meaning drily, 'go jump in a lake.'  He learned to tilt his hand slightly to specify which lake he had in mind—the lazy length of Lake Como, smoky and blue with late summer bonfires burning tendrils of old grape vine; the gusty German holiday-making shores of Lake Garda with garish bursts of sails; the chilly mirror of a snow-fed lake in the Alps down from the St. Bernard Pass, where the great dogs are raised and archaeologists scour the bedrock for traces of a Roman temple to Jupiter.

         Within just a few weeks, freed as he was from the impediments and hesitations of regular speech, Sam got into the more difficult signs.  The one that cries out with daring insouciance 'bring me some octopus!'  The one that asks 'is the blue of your eyes what the Renaissance artists made from lapis lazuli and called azzuro oltramarino?'  And that gentle flutter of the left-hand fingers against the palm of the other, half-reaching hand, that recalls in a quiet singsong how the sun brushed the pink-throated yellow roses on the morning of your great-grandparents' wedding day before the vows, I, Albert, take you, Nora."

 

 

Image:  Photo by Nahid Hatami on Unsplash

 

The Great Beyond

An appropriate story for this time of the year, Halloween Eve—a story of a ghostly haunting in northern New Mexico, was published earlier this month in Grande Dame Literary Journal.

A spiteful poltergeist, the family matriarch as it happens, is troubling the chapel she loved to retreat to in life—the now ruinous chapel next to the magical Tower of the Riddles, an adobe observatory and place of riddling the skies, initially intended as a belltower for the religious structure just below it on the hill, though the cast iron mission bell purchased in Mexico by one of the daughters had been lost in transit and never replaced.

 

When a frequent visitor to the Las Trampas ranch "asked Reuben [once her science teacher] to explain about the riddles in the tower's name, one summer night when they were studying the rings of Saturn, spectral bands of ice and rock and dust, he'd looked up from the eyepiece of the telescope and after thinking for a moment quoted the Neruda lines which he'd been taken with.  (Neruda's love of the natural world matching his own).

'the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.'"

 

 

image:  New Mexico, photographer unknown

Among the Amazons

 

Another somewhat whimsical story of mine, exploring an eccentric family's stockpile of treasures and secrets, has been published in Rathala Review's Spring 2025 issue.

 

(And don't be fooled by what they say—"Christine" is really only me, Christie.)

 

A family of all women, when the story opens, which the main character, the history-loving sister, Ava, sees as a band of Amazons.

 

    We did have horses, of a kind—the little herd of faded carousel horses that lived out in the barn along with Beulah and Otis’s trunks and souvenirs and Dad’s old snare drum set and heaps of files from everyone (even our kindergarten art, and an “opera” I had begun at six for Sam, whom I adored, called “Tigger on the Tigris”). Also, from Dad, a life-size Sphinx, on wheels, a fiberglass palm tree, and a ruminative caravan of camels painted on a long canvas backdrop. A gypsy caravan, minus a wheel. An Eiffel Tower made of resin coated styrofoam. Some faux French Art Deco posters, bigger than me. Props he’d made and painted for one of the independent film studios in LA, long before computer days, which he’d brought north to Santa Clara County, the inland, midpeninsula reaches of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with his three motorbikes. One fatally twisted but not gotten rid of (why ever not?)—the one Aunt Talia had met her fate on, that inglorious September afternoon. 

         I was the keeper of the horses, like the heroines of Flika, or National Velvet, keeping them spic and span, lining them up just so, taking arty pictures of them for class projects—glass eyes, swept manes, gilded bridles, legs flying in a gallop. I wasn’t a real Amazon, I knew, only the horses and the archery kept me a kind of honorary member, rather disdained by the others, considered insignificant. 

 

When Ada, keeper of horses, becomes keeper of family secrets as well, things of significance happen.

 

 

image:  Antique Ilions Supreme Carousel Horse

Shadow-fighting

 

One of my recent stories, "Shadow-fighting," has been published by the colorful confetti magazine.  

 

A curious small tale which began with a first line prompt.  "My life is a sham."

 

And frolics on from there, thusly:

 

"My life is a sham." 

Maud was making blackberry clafoutis with vanilla and brandy, and making pronouncements as she mixed the eggs with the liquid ingredients, downing a goodish slug of the St-Rémy from the bottle before putting the cork back in.

“I’m not fooling myself any longer.”

Another glug.

“I.  Am.  Not.  Fooling.  Anyone.”

Lowery ignored Maud as usual, shaggy head down, going on studying his lines for the Stoppard (a revival of The Real Thing, at the little theater up in the redwoods) in a spill of early summer sunlight through the breakfast nook window.

 

It includes but is by no means limited to the dramatic Judith Bliss from Noël Coward's Hayfever, blackberry clafoutis, Tom Stoppard quotes, a pragmatic and bespectacled twelve-year-old, an Akita puppy never allowed in the kitchen, Edith Piaf, Cleo the Goldfish, etymology (again), a ferris wheel, Chekhov and Dr. Seuss, and a galvinizing case of long Covid.

 

It was great fun to write, and I enjoyed spending time with its family of eccentric characters.

 

 

image:  Reflex Production, Roman Kogomachenko from Pixabay

Les Godasses Émile

 

My short-story “Les Godasses Émile” has been published in Lowestoft Chronicle, issue #61.  This is a nostalgic look at Paris, as you will see, and indeed a nostalgic look back on my part, remembering how sore my feet were after walking endlessly to see the famous sights, museums, bookstores, and cafés there, and once, in addition, all of the hoopla (tout ce tapage) attending the Bicentennial of the French Revolution and the crowds of le 14 juillet.

 

This is the third story of mine to have appeared in the delightful Lowestoft Chronicle, which celebrates both travel and humor; the others were "Octopus" and "Show Me the Bust of Marcus Agrippa."  Here's what some happy readers say about this quarterly online literary magazine—

 

“Reading Lowestoft Chronicle is like jostling through a sprawling bazaar in Tashkent or Ulaanbaatar, with eyes wide open and wits on high alert.  Invigorating, too.”

— Victor Robert Lee, author of Performance Anomalies

 

“What a delightful refuge the Lowestoft Chronicle provides, artful and clean, featuring sparkling writing in multiple voices—all of it strong, provocative, wry, funny, and wise.  I’m so proud to be part of it.  Add this marvelous site to your reading matter, travelers and armchair travelers alike: your world, and mind and heart, will get larger.”

— Joan Frank, author of All the News I Need and Because You Have To:  A Writing Life

 

 

 

image:  depositphotos, Vintage Paris

Slowness, Speed (again)

 

I feel immensely honored to have had my story “Slowness, Speed” included in Pinyon’s impressive 30th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Fall 2024), just out.  The story was originally published in Pinyon in June, 2022 (Edition 31).  This is a lovely publication, and the cover is of handsomely textured paper, with an elegantly high-spirited font.  The inside is full of great full-color art and written content.  The editor’s introduction to this celebration of continuing creation ends “What we’ve gained, or lost, in this world hasn’t changed who we are, and for that I believe we all should be not only grateful, but joyous.”  And so I am.

 

This should inspire me to get back to work on the novel I’ve conceived which includes this story and its sequel—a story which has morphed three times and now again, last time I checked still called “Ojos de Dios,” though I think that too has changed to something like “The Weight of Butterflies.”  It might well be a grateful, joyous, worthwhile thing, if I give it the attention and care it needs.

 

Thank you, Pinyon.

Hymn to Pan

 

Appropriate, perhaps, to have this story published now—dealing as it does with a seemingly dreadful man, a famous breakcore musician, a torturously disruptive neighbor, who the heroine must write up for the upscale music review she works for.

 

Carly has been ordered to make her article positive (“Capital P”), and can’t imagine how she’ll manage that, the way she feels about the man and his excruciating entourage next door.

 

“Maybe Antonio Zugasti thought himself some kind of warlock or vodouisant.  He wore his warpaint often, hung around his scraggly neck some kind of charm pendant with snakes worn on a length of nylon climbing rope.  He kept those witchy Cayuga ducks, shimmery emerald green, on a black-hearted water pond beside his neo-Soviet Brutalist house.  My daughter was intrigued by the green waterfowl, but I couldn't let her go anywhere near.”

 

One idea she explores is classical—

“Maybe metaphor, or myth?  I pulled my laptop toward me, balancing it on my knees, following a desperate train of thought.  I found the words to the Homeric hymn to Pan my classicist mother once read to me: 

         "Muse, tell me about Pan, the dear son of Hermes, with his goat's feet 

            and two horns—a lover of merry noise. Through wooded glades he 

            wanders with dancing nymphs who foot it on some sheer cliff's edge, 

            calling upon Pan, the shepherd-god, long-haired, unkempt." 

Could I expand on that?  Pan, the god of music, was Antonio Zugasti's sort.  Maybe somehow I could worm out lots of jocund Pan-like details without having to actually interview the man.  I liked that, smiled.  Humor or my sense of the absurd might after all save me.”

 

Her journey to a workable answer, acceptable to everyone, can be read in the “Second Look” themed issue of Constellations, Vol. 14, Fall 2024 (print only).  And of course the half-goat Pan has his own constellation—Capricorn.

 

 

image:  Pan, mythologysource.com

True North

 

Just published by Toasted Cheese Literary Magazine, Issue 24:3, this short story tells of a mother and her young daughter having to relocate from Arizona to the San Juan Islands—the two facing the involuntary move with very different expectations and first impressions.  Melda dreading the idea of north, and all that water, motion, instability; Luna excited by everything new she meets with open arms and heart.

 

“When the ferry took off, into the wind, Luna shifted from foot to foot at the deck rail—lost in wonder, feeling the spray caress her skin, and all the while chattering a mile a minute at her newfound friend as the big boat plowed up the Sound and then the Salish Sea, the open water between Seattle and Vancouver Island.  Melda, meanwhile, leaned against the comfortless support of the hull or bulkhead or whatever they called it.  She didn’t even know the names of things here, or their purposes.  She drew as far back as she could into herself, her still center, though it felt assaulted and anything but still.  She stared blankly at her phone, trying to summon the spirits from home, a million miles away, to help her through this awful journey into the unknown.  She’d saved and brought along the words which she and Shanti had collected for a little ceremony last summer before Shanti’s graduation from Arizona State.  All four of the directions were there, in this prayer, but now she had to focus on the North.

         Great Spirit of Love,
         come to us with the power of the North
         make us courageous when the cold winds 

            of life fall upon us.
         Give us strength and endurance
         for everything that is harsh,
         everything that hurts,
         everything that makes us squint.
         Let us move through life ready to take 

            what comes from the North.” 

 

Images:  Rafael Quaty, Pexels

thefullonmonet, Pexels

No Rest for the Wicked

 

A story which was fun to write (inspired by another prompt from The First Line, namely “Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die”), and has been given really fun personalized illustrations by Iuniki Dkhar on the Half and One website, posted September 9, 2024.

 

One of the illustrations (above) is of this ineffective séance which Margaret Morrison asks her friend Sally to conduct, in hopes of contacting her dead husband Ellis:

“They lit candles and held hands at the little mango wood table with its mandala design Sally had snatched up at a car boot sale somewhere, but though one of the candles flickered madly at one point, and her cat Tinkerbell gave them an awful fright springing up out of nowhere into Margaret’s unguarded lap, claws out, the spirit world contributed nothing.  Sally (transformed into ‘Salamandra the Seer’ with dusky purple velvet drapery at village fêtes) cajoled and even threatened for a good half an hour, but could get nothing out of Ellis’s intractable spirit.

“You know he never did like me; he says his lips are sealed.”

So they gave up and spent the rest of the evening contemplatively eating ice-cream with an Amaretto float (brought home by Sally at Easter from Mantua after seeing the Chamber of the Giants and the Relic of the Holy Blood).”

 

 

 

image:  Iuniki Dkhar

The Great Thieves

 

My words have traveled far—all of the way to Australia, where a story of mine, “The Great Thieves,” was published at the end of August in StylusLit, Issue 16, September 2024.  The story’s set in Boston, so it’s well-traveled altogether.

 

This is a fictional account which draws on the real-life (bigger than life) occurrences of March 1990, when thirteen major works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston's Fens—a lovely museum I’ve visited often, standing each time looking sadly at the empty frames waiting forlornly for their missing contents to return.  This account of “the single largest property theft in the world,” still unsolved over thirty years later, is purely fictional but in broad terms based fairly closely on what actually happened.

 

One of the characters in the story dwells on the subtleties of theft:  “Life is essentially all about theft, I’ve concluded.  What we steal from others; what we make of that.  Mireille stole this space, to improve it, transform it.  What my mother steals is to obliterate, lay waste to—like salting the earth behind a retreating army.  The theft of your paintings, who knows?  Only the thieves know what they’ve done with them, and why.  Diogenes, who I studied at Tufts, compares the little thief (Mireille, if you like, and each of us to some degree) to the great thieves—my mother, taking life and possibility away.  Whoever stole the art.  The ‘treasurers of the temple’—the crooks in charge, who have the power to ruin great segments of the population daily, just because they can.”

 

 

 

image:  Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

 

Papier-Mâché

 

I have been accepted again as a member of the Heartland Society of Women Writers, presumably because my heart is in the right place.  They have published my short story “Papier-Mâché” in their [w]hole Anthology, which came out in August.  (Previously, online, they published “A Lilac Year.”)

 

“Papier-Mâché” is part of my “suite” of mask pieces, started in 2020, of which four have previously been published:  “The Persian Warrior,” “L’inconnue de la Seine,” “Kachinas,” and “Day of the Dead.”  There are two remaining, and I hope to see them all together some day, as a single work.  If only I had the letterpress I once dreamed of!

 

My particular papier-mâché is (typically) complicated:   “There were strips of newspapers—of crossword puzzles, book reviews, World Series pitchers, stories about rescued dogs, and comics including Calvin and Hobbes.  And for upper layers, colored strips from National Geographics of sea anemones and cheetahs, El Tajín in Veracruz (which the aide, Martina, knew from family visits and told them was named after a thunder god).  Saturn and sharks, pandas and sunken ships, mountain gorillas and strange, creepy insects.  Funny roly-poly armadillos.  Eskimo and Maya children, children from Poland, from the Sudan.

         Silly probably to make a big deal about the paper, but Ruth Sims felt there was an indefinable magic in choosing words and images that spoke from everyday and far away as the foundation of the masks, even though they'd be painted over or covered with origami paper, tissue-thin gold leaf, feathers and raffia and beads.  What was inside counted every bit as much, Ruth told Martina.”

 

What was inside is the thrust of this exploration.

 

 

image:  ApplesPC, Pixabay

Provenance

 

The Plentitudes has been one of my favorite venues, since I was first published by them.  Their format is attractive and their philosophy congenial:  “The Plentitudes is an international literary journal showcasing captivating fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from diverse voices.  We believe in the power of writing—in its plentitudes of forms, styles, and modes of exploration—to move the spirit, shift the gaze, and offer new perspectives.  Founded in New York City in 2020, we are truly global:  our editors, reading board members, and contributors (and their stories) represent an international and multicultural blend.  Our editorial team carefully curates each issue to bring our philosophy to the page and to our avid readers. We are most excited by works that approach the human condition from a mix of critical and creative approaches and we support exigent narratives and counternarratives.  We aim to amplify emerging voices and add to the growing diversity and vibrancy of the literary community.”

 

I’ve had a third story published there, this summer, one originally written with a “body politic” theme in mind.  In this case the body is one of an archaeologist suffering from arthritis, the politics those of an Italian patriarch claiming to be of the Medici family.  The two clash, naturally, when the past is unearthed and the present left substantially unsettled.

 

The archaeologist, Juliana, finds momentary solace in the music her baritone friend and lover (also uncertain) offers on a brief visit:

“As dusk came on, he stood beside her small piano (spruce from Italy’s eastern Alps) and sang Macbeth’s aria, ‘Pietà, rispetto, amore’—sad and heavy as the ancient hills, full of regret and terrible longing.  Juliana sat by the window wrapped in cotton folds and listened to Verdi’s music.  She loved that aria, loved Renzo’s voice—like salted caramel, like sage, like gilded capitals in books of hours illustrated in some sacred dim-lit space by gentle monks.  Reverent and powerful.”

 

This story is related through Juliana and its setting in Tuscany to one of the first stories I had published, back in Spring 2019 in The Wild Word, “She Who Hesitates.”  This isn’t technically a sequel, but there are some continuations and resonances.

 

 

image:  Ekaterina Astakhova, Pexels

Right at the Water's Edge

 

Another prompt from The First Line, whose resultant story they decided not to publish, has led me to another appearance in Catamaran, the Summer 2024 issue, with this even more fabulous than usual cover. 

“Right at the Water’s Edge” drew inspiration not just from the intriguing first line “Mr. Morton needed a new pair of shoes,” but also from our almost-local Irish transplant poet, David Whyte, and his wonderful poem “Finisterre.”  We here in Santa Cruz are indeed at land’s end, at water’s edge, and have to think about exactly what that means, and where we go from here, if go we do.

 

And about how and where Mr. Morton went, in his new shoes, from here.

“An altogether new way of walking, for an old stay-at-home like him.  A crazy, chancy way of walking on, that made his new experimental heartbeat quicken, syncopate like ragtime, jazz, under his homely old tweed jacket, his no-iron button-cuff dress shirt.”

 

And about how a small boat happens to come into it, and a sea journey north . . . 

 

Find Catamaran here, and Mr. Morton here.

 

 

image:  Adam Jahiel

A Golden Opportunity

 

My first publication in a wonderfully productive July was a story with an unexpected twist, “A Golden Opportunity”—written in response to the latest prompt from The First Line:  “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today.”

 

This tangled tale goes on the talk about an unscrupulous student, a year in Rome, a pilfered Etruscan bracelet, a couple of clean starts, and a rather fine Añejo tequila.  The bracelet is indeed a wondrous golden thing:

 

“From her designer handbag, probably one of those famous Italian knock-offs, she took out a small cloth bundle, then got up from the chair and handed it to me.  I hesitated to take it from her, but then, relenting, curious, took the worn velvet as I might an injured bird with its heart fluttering, in both my palms, and held it for a long moment before unwrapping it.  Touched with wonder, I likely sighed to see the breathtaking bangle, yellow gold, with the delicate wirework, granulation, filigree that distinguished the finest Etruscan jewelry.”

 

Available only in print, this issue of The First Line—Volume 26, Issue 2—can be purchased here (see column 2).

 

image:  The British Museum, Art & Object

Vagaries (part Two)

 

I am jazzed (a word I latched onto earlier this year) to have a story in the March/April 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post—and to join the company of such illustrious authors as that other Christie (i.e. Agatha), William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather, to name but a few.

 

My story is “Vagaries,” which was first published in Catamaran in Winter/Spring 2019.  Somehow the Editor-in-Chief of the Post came across “Vagaries” in Catamaran, and went to a lot of trouble to contact me through my editor there, Elizabeth McKenzie, and ask if they could reprint it.  I did say yes, when he finally reached me after a string of e-mail glitches followed by some phone tag . . .

images:  The Saturday Evening Post

The Days That Must Happen to You

 

“When he died, their father had two requests.  First, that his ashes be taken to the palacio on the river the third week in September, on what would have been his 90th birthday.  And second, that the whole family be there to take part in the scattering.  Or, as he put it in the codicil, quoting his favorite poet, Walt Whitman, and underlining the words twice, ‘These are the days that must happen to you.’

         That second was the sticking point, of course—though he'd cunningly left generous funds with Daniel Kim, his dexterous executor and sandcastling buddy, to cover travel from their various boltholes across the world, and made it clear that only if they carried out that dire last commandment would there be another cent.  But even so, could they forget their rancor, their cherished pet peeves, and tolerate each other's company for three interminable days?” 

 

Thus begins another story inspired by a prompt from The First Line.  (Yes, there are many yet to come!)  This was published yesterday by Eucalyptus Lit, who had this to say:

“Today is the winter solstice: a natural pivot in the seasonal cycle, aligning with our exploration of change in this issue. Allow yourselves to be changed, inspired by the work of the community around us.  Great art is meant to be enjoyed—to be shared—so please feel free to spread the word about our issue to your friends, family, and fellow literature enthusiasts.” 

 

I told them when it was accepted, "It is especially nice to have my story published by you, since eucalyptus has graced much of my life—from the Mills College campus to the foothills around Palo Alto where I spent some thirty years, to the park here in Santa Cruz whose eucalyptus shelters long-traveling Monarch butterflies.”

 

And it was fun to spend some time in the Carmel Valley with this peevish family over three days, along with Walt Whitman, and see where all of us came out.

 

 

 

Image:  Feel Good and Travel, How to Build a Sandcastle

Signature Required

 

Here’s another of my wilder whimsies, a.k.a. "What Should We Do with the Body?", in response to a prompt by The First Line—who (in more sober frame of mind) did not accept it for publication.  It’s been picked up instead by Cerasus Magazine, appropriately situated, as is the story, in England.

 

For those who enjoy whimsy involving Punk rockers, Paladian bridges, Polish chickens, an early Renaissance stiletto, and a stray cassowary (or, indeed, as an editor I once worked with once enthused, for “anyone with an interest in anything”), a paperback copy of Issue #11 can be purchased from Amazon, or the pdf can be downloaded here.

 

I’ve imagined that an ideal film version of this story would star the following:

John Gielgud as old retainer

Ken Stott (Rebus) as Digby

young Stephen Fry or Simon Callow as Aiken

Ian McShane (Lovejoy) or David Jason (Frost) as Man with Clipboard 2

Richard Briers or John Cleese as Lord Ashenden

Bill Nighy as Parson Q

Peter Vaughan as the Major General

But that's just further whimsy, of course . . .

 

 

 

Image:  Palladian Bridge, Prior Park, England