Tag Archives: wall

A Hole in the Wall

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our English dead.”

—–Shakespeare, Henry V, Act-III, Scene-I

Click to Enlarge

There are a lot of brick walls in my part of town (inner-ring suburb) dividing the houses and yards from the every-mile streets – dividing the neighborhood from the outside world.

If you look at these walls, especially at places where streets dead-end into the surrounding road – you will see an odd variation in the types of bricks used. People don’t stop. Cars veer out of control. Then it is time to repair the wall – and exact matches of brick are impossible to find.

On a bike ride I came across an intact breaching – waiting for a work crew to come out in the summer heat and mortar new almost-matching bricks back into the breach.

It’s impossible not to look through the hole – sometimes it’s surprising what’s on the other side.

Flash Fiction of the Day, The Sky Blue Ball by Joyce Carol Oates

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.”

― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

Decaying wall, Ladonia, Texas

Joyce Carol Oates is such a genius – it is scary. Her stories never turn out how you think they will and… most importantly… she is not afraid to go there.

The Sky Blue Ball by Joyce Carol Oates

Their Great Horns Also Seemed To Attract Electricity

Posted on by Bill Chance

“When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd’s mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy’s face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he’d ridden by the day’s end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd – a phantasmagoric burning blue circuitry. The cracking of the cowboy’s whips and the twitching of the cattle’s tails also emitted sparkling “snakes of fire.”
― Rick Bass, The New Wolves: The Return of the Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest

Richardson, Texas

 

Fighting Fish

Posted on by Bill Chance

Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail
and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little
sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she
and her sisters have brought back from the sea.

—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

 

Bishop Arts District, Dallas, Texas

Ignorance the Hard Way

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

Waxahachie, Texas

Bikini Detail

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stair, why had the simple task of shutting the windows of an old house seem fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm wind have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad tidings?”
― John Cheever, The Swimmer

detail of mural by Amber Campagna, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas