I cleaned the mess I call a room this week. While doing so, I found two short stories that never made it passed the first draft. Both were, oddly enough, titled after Bob Dylan songs. “Not Dark Yet” is about a man who flashes back to his childhood on his way to his father’s funeral. …
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing–these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. –Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried “The thing about a story,” wrote Tim O’Brien in “The Lives of the Dead,” the concluding short story in his …
Patter. Patter. Sounds resonating from somewhere in the depths of being. Patter. Patter. The old man: I have always expected to become devout. All my family died very devout. But somehow it does not come. Perhaps I have outlived my religious feeling. A man drifts into the sea. His body never is recovered. Sinking below. …
