I remember red dogs, two of them, Irish setters, who bounded with their silky copper hair over the green hillocks at the end of Loop Road. This was the seventies, when all things good and young and promising bounded down gentle slopes, through waist-high grass with waving seedheads, under an effervescent sun.
I don't remember the dogs' names, but I do remember the kitten Eureka, black, who replaced Eureka, white, crushed by the left rear tire of the sunshine-yellow Toyota. My mother was driving. Her hair was long and brown. It fell in two thick curtains around her face. It was morning. A school day.
I remember the brown pony, Prince, who stood guard in the field on his four hooves, each packed tight with dirt and manure that I was supposed to scrape away with my steel hoof pick. I was nine years old. The pick was cold and heavy in my plump hand. My hair was gold and sparkled in the sun. I tugged at Prince's slender leg, his backward knee, his knobby ankle, but the hoof with its hoard of dirt would not lift from the ground. I crept away, and folded myself through the split redwood beams of the fence.
I remember the white-and-brown cow, Dolly, who met her end at the end of my parents' marriage, far away unseen in the fields, dead by gunshot. I was standing on a sunny patch of lawn just outside the sliding glass door when I heard the report. It echoed around the valley, around the redwood stumps and the outcroppings of fern and Queen Ann's lace and tangled blackberry. The dried mud-ground pitted with hoof-prints, tough knots of grass. You had to be careful when you ran. Paper-wrapped packets of frozen ground beef in the meat locker at Fernbridge for a year after that. My mother picked up dinner on her drive home. Yellow Toyota in a new driveway.
I remember the tan guinea pig, dead of dehydration. Through the wire bars of her cage I viewed her body. She lay stiff on her side, stretched out, as if in her guinea-pig dream she had been running through grassland, open and close to the sky. My guilt was blinding white on the summer morning of her death.
I remember the red crab, our mutual wariness when we surprised each other in the concrete alley. This was in Bangkok, when I was five or six. She will be dead by now, the crab, along with her freckled shell. She must have tiptoed up from the canal, where the water was flat and brown. I was barefoot. The soft hair on my legs would have glimmered in the tropical sun. There would have been bruises up and down the shinbones. They would have been an inky wash of colors: purple-black, yellow-blue, orange-green.
Very well done--the imagery and voice is reflective, warm with memory. Not a story, I suppose, but I could see that with another paragraph or two, one could well be told.
Really lovely imagery. Such nice writing, the reflective voice, as Susan Gibb put it, warm with memory, and, for me, a strange undercurrent of menace. I agree, it's not a story yet, but easily could be.
"Paper-wrapped packets of frozen ground beef in the meat locker at Fernbridge for a year after that." Is this dead Dolly?
yes, I think it is dead Dolly Cherise.
Farm life holds hard and tender memories. That guinea pig, did me in.
It is memoir, of sorts, and as such doesn't need to be made into a story, but it well could as pointed out above. What struck me with this is the imagery of course, but also the progression of two large creatures dying at the hands of others, to the the two smaller creatures, the third, a transitionary one, dying at your hands,the last inflicting harm.
Which, if a memoir is true, but you manage to present it in a manner that is provoking.
This is so rich with detail and emotion. I don't want anything more from it when I read it, really. The mother running over the cat and bringing home the meat from Dolly is, well, wonderful. What I really love is the image of the little girl's bruised legs, the colors and the strangeness of the crab in Bangkok compared to the more ordinary rural scene and that, chronologically, Bangkok precedes "the green hillocks at the end of Loop Road." This really resonates with me, Chalon.
No reason to label it as anything but damn wonderful writing. It can be anything, everything. I love this, it reminds me very much of my own life.
No reason to label it as anything but damn wonderful writing. It can be anything, everything. I love this, it reminds me very much of my own life.
Nice take. Enjoyed very much.
I really like what you do with time, especially in the last paragraph.
This was...She will be...She must have...hair...would have...There would have been...They would have been...
This provides a richness and texture that really complicates the simpler memories of the earlier paragraphs. It allows the expanding imagination in and I really like that.
Nice piece.
Wow! You start us out with a terrific story for your first post. More, more!
This is "damn wonderful" as Meg says. Just fabulous. Beautiful & sad without being sentimental in the least. I can't wait to read more!
the writing here is really lovely.
i love "the tough knots of grass"
and how you use the word "shinbone."
Wonderful use of detail throughout this piece. Pulls the reader in. This is fine work, Chalon.
Chalon, I love the colors of the animals and inanimate things mingled with the colors of emotion. Very, very well done. Fav
I like animal stories. I like death stories. This is wonderful.
I love this. The entire thing is so well written. For some reason, I was particularly attached to that last paragraph. That’s just great stuff there.
Well done. My favorite paragraph is the one about "the tan guinea pig."
Great piece.
Oh, Chalon, I do love this! It calls into being a whole big world and life and life history. I love the route it takes through domestic animals and then through that startling crab to get there.