I wrote this recently as the possible opening for an untitled orphanage project that I’ve otherwise shelved, but it’s a perfect example of one of my favorite ways to commence and build a story: beginning with a setting. Please enjoy!
New Hill Lane never grew used to the attention. Jutting from the apex of a wide, wooded turn along a rural stretch of state highway, unlit and hazardously narrow, the first sixty-eight years of its life were spent in namelessness, unacknowledged by maps, signs, or the steadily rising and ever-pulsing vroom of inbound-outbound urban traffic. The billboard two hundreds yards down the highway began its existence as a soup advertisement, later owned by a hotel and then a pawnshop before the wooden structure was torn down entirely and replaced by something with a sturdy steel frame and LED lights that alternated its display between upcoming sporting events and the burger specials located off the following exit. New Hill Lane barely accommodated the traffic that carved it, yawning its branches two, maybe three times a year for a quarter of a century and often forgetting in the off seasons what size the pick-up trucks were that tread its ruts in the first place, confused by the occasional tractors and truck hitches that never had the manners to become familiar. Over the years, the pick-up trucks, which gradually ballooned in size, fell from infrequent to entirely unseen. Sixty-eight years passed watching traffic with all of the engagement of a house cat lounging on a front lawn.
Then, one night, a crew arrived. They pushed the forest back six feet in both directions. They covered the tire ruts, pouring a thick, hot blanket of mush that continued from the highway’s bend all the way down until it could stand and throw a pebble at the fancy, polished billboard (if road could stand and throw things, obviously.) Railing was erected. The grass was mowed. In a patch of ground where the pick-up trucks and tractors and trailer hitches used to wait for an opportunity to reenter traffic, the crew planted a metal pole, seven feet tall, topped by a green sign with white letters and a trim, white boarder: NEW HILL LN. Thus was made the point, though silently, that something orphaned, for however long, and left with no name, alone, forgotten, won’t necessarily live such a solitary life forever.
May 13th, 2019
The Favoring Wind 