Short Story (Flash Fiction) Of the Day, Knowledge Takes Root by Yann

Posted on by Bill Chance

Logically, she could just walk away. Walk away from this tree, from this hilltop, and never come back. What was the tree going to do, uproot itself and follow her?

—–Yann,Knowledge Takes Root

Do trees seem wise to you? Age can be wisdom, but it can be insanity too. Is it wise to wait and to let everything come to you? All you need is some sunshine and water… maybe a little phosphorus and fixed nitrogen. The only hard thing is to spread your seeds. Maybe the one-armed winged helicopter seeds blown by the wind are the way to go. Or better yet – feed the squirrels – so that they carry your progeny far and wide, bury, and hopefully forget about them over the cold winter.

Read it here:

Knowledge Takes Root by Yann

from Gratuitous Text

Short Story Of the Day, Through the Fire by Rudyard Kipling

Posted on by Bill Chance

And she really began to wither away because her heart was dried up with fear, and those who believe in curses die from curses.

—- Rudyard Kipling, Through the Fire

Coal and coke fire, Frisco, Texas.

We all remember Rudyard Kipling’s children’s stories when we were children, Just So. I wanted to read something that wasn’t intended for children, though, and today’s tale of doomed love fits the bill.

One nice thing about reading online – especially reading something set somewhere so foreign and exotic as Kipling’s Himalayan village – are the Wikipedia hyperlinks. With one click you can have the little mysteries resolved in the next tab over. This is truly the best of all possible worlds.

Read it here:

Through the Fire by Rudyard Kipling

from The Short Story Project

 

Short Story (Flash Fiction) Of the Day, Hitch by Brindley Hallam Dennis

Posted on by Bill Chance

Whoever gets the vodka will wear the trousers in the marriage. She was dead keen and talked him in to it. They asked me to prepare the glasses and offer the drinks during the reception. It seemed like a good idea at first. We’ll have to explain it to everyone, I said. Neither family was Polish and nor were any of the guests.

—-Brindley Hallam Dennis, Hitch

Have a drink.

There is the wedding toast – actually, one of the few wedding traditions that I approve of. But even that can, if taken too seriously, spin out of control.

I remember once staying at some chain hotel along the Interstate in some God-forsaken East Texas oil town where I was working for a few days cleaning up a pipeline spill. When I came back to the hotel from a long day searching out and picking up wayward crude, exhausted, there was a wedding reception going on – the party was in full bloom. The bride and groom were good looking but frighteningly young.

When I passed down the corridor the (child) bride was collapsed in hysterics weeping – still in her vast cloud of a wedding dress. Her maids of honor surrounded her in their hideous matching dresses trying to calm her down. I went into the men’s room for a quick piss and discovered the tuxedo-ed groom – as much of a kid as his bride, violently drunk and fiercely puking all over the place. His grooms were trying to get him under control but mostly managing only to despoil their rented rainments.

As I trudged back to my lonely hotel room all I could think about was how sad I was at witnessing this handsome doomed young couple.

Read it here:

Hitch by Brindley Hallam Dennis

from Bhdandme’s Blog

We Can Only Scratch Away

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surface.”
― Jack Horner, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn’t Have to Be Forever

Spring Creek, Garland, Texas

The bicycle bones are exposed yet slowly sinking into the muck along the flowing creek. Like a fossil from the recent explosion of eighteen thousand dockless shared rentals the bright yellow steel attests to the (possibly) well-intentioned  insanity that swept suddenly then faded even faster. No mastodon skeleton could be a better representative of the once-swarming extinct than this pile of tattered metal.

Short Story (Flash Fiction) Of the Day, 1,000 Feet by Andrew Older

Posted on by Bill Chance

I knew I couldn’t keep it a secret forever. But that was part of the pleasure, I suppose: the perversity of the event was what made it almost delectable. To be forbidden is to be desired.

—–Andrew Older, 1,000 Feet

Falling Water Fountain, Dallas Arboretum

Read it here:

1,000 Feet by Andrew Older

from Flash Fiction Magazine

Reborn

Posted on by Bill Chance

“We die a little every day and by degrees we’re reborn into different men, older men in the same clothes, with the same scars.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

Birth II, by Arthur Williams, Dallas, Texas

Over the years, I’ve written about the sculpture that used to sit near the Lover’s Lane DART station – 2013, Egg – then 2019, A First Crack Reaching , and finally 2019, Birth II,

I found the sculpture referenced in a book I have on Texas sculpture and discovered it was called Birth II and was by a man named Arthur Williams.

The area is being extensively redone, and the sculpture disappeared – I wrote about that too Earthly and Mechanical Paraphernalia

I figured that was it – all she wrote.

But in the last few days I have been getting comments on my Birth II blog post. The sculptor’s son messaged me to say his father was retired from sculpting and teaching after losing his studio and work in hurricane Katrina, but was still alive and doing well. That was cool

And then I received a message from a representative from the University Crossing Public Improvement District. The sculpture had been donated to the district, and is being restored. “It’s planned to be placed behind The Highland Hotel at the base of the Mockingbird bridge here in Dallas.”

There is a little piece of green space along the bike trail – I hope that is where it is placed.

That is so cool. I hope to be able to go down the the ribbon cutting.

Mockingbird Pedestrian Bridge

Blue Angels

Posted on by Bill Chance

You must drink. I’m not paying for your art.

—-Kiepert, The Blue Angel

The Blue Angels flew over Dallas in honor of the COVID-19 first responders.

I was at work and pretty much everyone filed out into the parking lot to watch them fly over – wearing our surgical masks and staying six feet apart from each other.

They were over in a few seconds. I had brought my camera and snapped a few photos – though I have friends that were, say, downtown, and took much better pictures of the jets against the towering crystal skyscrapers. Still, I raised my camera and shot – something doesn’t really happen unless you have a photo of it.

 

The Blue Angels over my work parking lot.

The Blue Angels over my work parking lot turning with smoke.

The Blue Angels turning toward downtown Dallas.

Short Story (flash fiction) Of the Day, Confrontations by David Galef

Posted on by Bill Chance

Maggie kept saying I should exercise restraint, that I might still have my teller’s job at First National if I’d been more polite. I had several replies to that, once bottled up, but no longer.

—–David Galef, Confrontations

(click to enlarge)

This guy came to see me at work. “I was almost run over in the crosswalk coming from the parking lot,” he said to me. This happens a lot, especially at certain times of the day; a good portion of the campus population goes by our entrance. When they are late they drive too fast and distracted and when the sun is just rising it’s hard for everyone to see. The guy at my desk though… I had seen him before walking around, very fast, with his head down – like a maniac.

“Do you have any details?” I asked, “What kind of car? Did you get a license number? How fast were they going?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t looking, I actually walked into the side of the car as they drove in front of me. Never even saw it.”

“Umm, that’s a bad spot, you should look before you step off the curb.”

“No!” he said. He was angry. “It’s a crosswalk and I have the right of way. I don’t have to look.”

I think about this all the time. Technically, he is right. The cars have the responsibility to look for pedestrians and to stop. Of course.

But you are a sliver of soft flesh and delicate bone and they are huge metal machines that weigh more than a ton and rush around at high speeds. You are going to get killed and they are going to get smudged. To me, that gives them the ultimate right of way. You are responsible for your own fate, as much as possible… you should… you need to look out.

It’s amazing how drastically different other people can look at the same world that I do.

Read today’s flash fiction here:

Confrontations by David Galef

from BRILLIANT flash fiction

It’s Got Them Disraeli Gears

Posted on by Bill Chance

I just managed to convince my grandmother that it was a worth while that was something to do, you know, and when I did finally get the guitar, it didn’t seem that difficult to me, to be able to make a good noise out of it.

—-Eric Clapton

Dan Colcer
Deep Ellum Art Park
Dallas, Texas

There’s this show that shows up on AXS television – on the cable, you know – called Classic Albums. On the show they take an hour and go through the production of a classic rock album – usually with the musicians, producers, artists, hangers-on… the whole works. It’s pretty cool. I watch for these and DVR the ones that look interesting to me. I’ve seen a few, let’s see… Aja, Dark Side of the Moon, So, Damn the Torpedoes, Pet Sounds.

Last night I watched one on an album I wasn’t all that familiar with – Cream’s Disraeli Gears. I’m old enough to remember Cream back in the day but a bit too young to be a huge fan. They were only together for two years – Disraeli Gears came out in 1967 – and I was ten years old. I didn’t really start listening to popular music until 1968 – I would scrounge up a dollar each week and buy one 45 single on Saturday, the first one I bought was the theme song for Hawaii Five-O (jeez, don’t be hard on me, I was only eleven).

So I remember the Cream album covers in the stores and over the years I heard all the hits (Strange Brew, Sunshine of Your Love, Tales of Brave Ulysses) but didn’t know much about the band except that it had Eric Clapton in it. I did see a documentary about Ginger Baker once – he was a madman.

The show was interesting and gave me a new appreciation of this classic rock music.

But the best part was finding out what Disraeli Gears meant. I always assumed it was some sort of British political statement. It isn’t. It’s a malaprop and a cycling reference.

“You know how the title came about – Disraeli Gears – yeah? We had this Austin Westminster, and Mick Turner was one of the roadies who’d been with me a long time, and he was driving along and Eric (Clapton) was talking about getting a racing bicycle. Mick, driving, went ‘Oh yeah it’s got them Disraeli gears!’ meaning derailleur gears… We all just fell over… We said that’s got to be the album title.”

—-Ginger Backer, 1967

How cool is that! You learn something every day.

Short Story (flash fiction) Of the Day, Havenless by Emily Marcason-Tolmie

Posted on by Bill Chance

The sea of black umbrellas swirls and ebbs around me

—- Emily Marcason-Tolmie, Havenless

Statue on top of a crypt, Saint Louis Cemetery Number One, New Orleans

Read it here:

Havenless by Emily Marcason-Tolmie

from Every Day Fiction

Emily Marcason-Tomie blog