So! I’m participating in NaNoWriMo this year (for the first time) because in 2020, I’m taking every opportunity to cling to my frail illusions of hope, meaning, and purpose. Yippy! I’ve done I decent job this year of putting my money where my mouth is by finally accomplishing things I’ve long meant to do. I left (or have at least taken a break from) the service industry after roughly 8 years. I self-published a poetry book. I finished illustrating a parody kids book (which wasn’t that great, but I’ll take my wins wherever I can.) I improved my social media presence and learned more about using Instagram. I launched a little YouTube series. Pardon me for tooting my own horn, but I’m proud of staying productive while also jobless and without unemployment as democracy teeters on a razor’s edge. To keep that train rolling, it felt appropriate to take this year’s NaNoWriMo as an opportunity for me to finally write a completed draft of a novel I’ve put off finishing for almost ten years. I have dozens of pages of notes and a sixty thousand word partial draft which needs to be gutted for parts. Whatever I write in the next month doesn’t have to be perfect; it doesn’t even have to be good! All I need is to finish. My intent in sharing this now is to put some added pressure on myself to fulfill what I’m setting out to do. It’s a daunting task, but it can’t be more nerve wracking than the rest of this year! The title is The Year All of the Fish Stayed at the Bottom, and without further ado, here is the prologue:
Or, as with the bards, the first verse:
Someone mentioned all of this already …
… on an autumn hayride, beside a roaring fire, in the darkness of a camping trip, late at night in a cheap motel when the cable misbehaved and the splishing of the outdoor pool calmed to leave a shivering sensation in every waiting ear. A trucker knows the story, and he shares it with his pancakes every Sunday morning when he stops in South Dakota. Whispers travel slowly, and often none of them are true.
The true stories of unspoken America – the child in a highchair spilling his cereal, the flock of geese rising from a secluded forest lake as the fisherman frees his line from the branch of a willow, the sports car that purrs past a sports car that rumbles while the driver of the first struggles to remember what his wife told him the night before and the driver of the second car cries, the old man waiting every morning at the bus stop – hardly seem important anymore. But the child in his highchair will grow up to hear from his father the fisherman how the owner of the purring sports car was once forced to ride the bus and met the old man at the bus stop who told him a rather fascinating story, and the owner of the purring sports car told this story to the fisherman, and the fisherman later met the driver of the rumbling sports car and passed the story along to her, and then he married her because his story had eased her crying. So the child from the highchair will have both the old man’s story and the story of how it was handed finally to him, for that is how these particular stories go.
It is important to underscore at this juncture the fractal nature of our human narratives. Every story begets a new story, be they daily events converging to propel a greater journey, the simple retelling of a family legend at the dinner table that plants a seed in the life of the child listening, or the realization that a single moment sipping coffee at a riverside cafe is the product of events that can be traced back to the origin of time. If every religion is a lie, we are still the children of those tales. If our grandmothers tell us how they met our grandfathers, we are the products of those meetings as well as of the knowledge of how they happened.
Likewise, we fear the night and the darkness thanks in part to memories and legends and the original events those stories have recounted:
“She was murdered.”
“He came at me.”
“They were lost.”
“I swear I spotted something in the shadows.”
When a mother tells her little girl of the creature in the cupboards, the child hears the kitchen creak and believes she hears that fiend, for it has always been the case that you cannot tell an old ghost story without immediately inciting a new one – not if the ghost story is true.
Our stories, though it’s difficult to reason how, unraveled finally during the Old Fashioned Fourth of July celebration in Lightfield, Kansas, a town roughly thirty miles downstream from where the Arkansas River makes its bend, which matters if you know the River Lowlands, and Jacob certainly did not. The child was only mildly aware that the bodies of water paralleling his home were currently saving his life.
Jacob’s father heard his voice amid the crowd’s stir and caught him hunkered in the shade of an unobtrusive pine tree, meditating in the summer heat. The boy who had not half an hour before been biking around the lake with his friends reclined against the scratchy trunk with what struck his father as a surprising calm, plucking absentmindedly at the loose bark. From a distance, Pat reveled at his son’s expression, which he described to himself as a sort of fugitive smile. Jacob’s lips were still, but moments before, Pat could have sworn that he had heard the boy singing.
“Where’d Lucas and your friends go?” Patrick asked, crossing the park lawn to where the fourteen-year-old sat.
“Somewhere,” the boy answered. It was characteristic of Jacob to abandon his friends for long bouts of solitude, but Pat had not expected it today. Between funnel cakes and fireworks, he counted on his son to get swept away in the commotion. Still, considering the sort of summer they were having, Jacob’s ongoing introversion was hardly surprising.
“Were you singing to yourself?”
Jacob studied his father without a clue what he meant. “No… I was humming earlier.”
“Really?” Patrick planted the handle of his fishing rod at the roots of the pine and took a seat beside his son. “Humming what?”
With a smirk, Jacob hummed his tune, but after a glance at his father’s blank expression, he sang:
“Oh, I wish I had a river… I could skate away on…”
Patrick pursed his lips, and with a “hmmmm,” scratched the stubble on his chin. “Did you know that’s the wrong holiday?”
Through a silent laugh, Jacob nodded.
“I can understand Christmas in July, but who introduced you to Joni Mitchell?”
The sun separated the needles of the tree and cast thin, serrated shadows on their skin. Jacob blew uselessly at the shapes swaying on his arm and gave an honest answer, “I don’t remember.”
“Well,” Pat sighed as he stood, lifting his rod and spying the restless spots of the lake’s bright surface, “I’ve always loved that song.”
“I wasn’t singing it for myself.”
Pat turned slowly toward his son, whose eyes were fixed on the ground. Again Patrick stuck the fishing rod down, and with the certain delicacy of a father, knelt beside Jacob. “Is this about your mother?”
Jacob batted the idea away like swatting off a fly. “It’s not like that! It’s something different…” His eyes narrowed like a hawk’s. “It’s like a dream.”
His father waited for a little clarification, which he quickly realized was not coming. “How so?”
The hot wind baffled the surrounding trees, and Jacob’s pine tree spat needles on his face and shirt. “In no way what so ever,” he answered distantly. The fractal narrative, as previously alluded to, displayed itself vividly before the boy like a nonsensical projection from life’s cutting-room floor. “Like maybe for a moment…” he said in awe, “I’m in someone else’s life.”
“Not just like a day dream?”
“It’s like a secret, or a clue…” Jacob closed his eyes and saw a man in a dark room, a gun aiming at him from the shadows. The image faded and that of a woman took its place waiting with a young man for a streetcar. “I see these little threads,” he continued. “Just small threads between each dream, but not just one, ’cause a single thread is thin and a thin strand breaks. But lots of little threads…” he whispered, “many threads that weave and form a rope…”
Patrick stood and backed away from his son, whose words and tone, while out of place in the young boy’s voice, were dangerously familiar to his father. “So you’re singing for… or about the people in these dreams?”
“Not all of them,” he clarified. “Just one. The first one.”
“The first dream?”
Jacob opened his eyes. “The first person.”
“Well, do you know who –”
“I’m not really sure,” Jacob interrupted, staring at the flakes of bark crumbled beneath his hand. “I can’t say who he is, or even where – or when… I can’t say if he’s dead or dying or some baby who hasn’t grown up yet… But he’s thinking of Christmas, and he affects me somehow. And holy shit, it feels important.”
Patrick stared at the flecked bark with Jacob, watching the boy’s fingers crush flakes of wood onto his pant-legs, but Jacob was not watching the bark. Through an all too vivid daydream, he saw a girl whose broken body rested quietly in the nooks of oak roots, cradled by the wild wood, patiently awaiting discovery. She lay beside a forgotten road buried deep in leaves, a path lost save for where the trees and bushes took shape and their branches remembered the way, her blood still flowing but certain to dry and crumble long before anyone would come to find her. Something about the girl struck Jacob as familiar but difficult to distinguish through the shadows on her face. A green like ivy grew behind her eyes and the unmistakable pink of cherry blossoms faded slowly from her cheeks. Jacob realized now that he must be an owl or rodent staring down at her body from some high oak perch, as if from a guard tower, scouring the forest for field mice. By chance, he turned his gaze across the path to the shadowy cove of an uprooted maple tree, and in that darkness he began to make out two impossibly red eyes glaring back at him, eyes that narrowed and flared – and snarled. Deep in the darkness, his trance broke.
Jacob gawked at the bark and shook the dead wood from his hands in sudden disgust, tossing it through the air like the mulchish debris of a landmine. He twisted his neck to face his father, his fugitive smile replaced by ebbing terror. “Today’s about to get weirder,” he whispered, wiping dirt and bark from his hands. “Someone’s on his way.”
“The man in your dream?”
“That man’s name,” Jacob hesitated, “is Joseph. He’s got something of mine, Dad, and by the end of the night, I’m afraid I’m going to need it back.”
© 2020
The Favoring Wind 