and I'm freaking out because I feel that nobody will Read Me Ever Again...that what looked like a beginning was really fluke-a-rama and I might as well twiddle my thumbs as go on with any of the crap I'm working on.

New column up today on "How To Succeed As A Failing Writer: Look! Up in the Sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s SUPERPOET!!!!

Enjoy!

Challenge #123 (the first bite) is now closed.

Challenge #124 is maps.

maps

I adore maps. Where I've been, where I could go. Strange little names, Horse Heaven Hills, Roberts Run, Ninevah. Why were those hills so good for horses? Who was Roberts? What 18th century scholar lived there and had the power to name a town?

I look at the maps in my genealogy files. Two families, less than a mile apart, but the streams show the ridge that lay between them. Much easier to marry people five miles away up the road by the river than to struggle over the hill. If you only know the words, you wonder why neighbors don't talk. You need to know the lay of the land to see the barriers between.

Connie, I loved that last line.

Scars

Mine: The knuckles of four fingers. A circular patch on the back of my hand, from the skingraft . A puckered line where they removed a windshield wiper from my arm. A tender lump from being smacked with a falling cymbal at one of your shows.

Yours: The network on your lower torso from the intestinal surgeries, a highway of lines connecting to the kidney removal stuff on your back. Two on your chest, the lung collapse. Your arms, from the dialysis.

Roadmaps of us, of our individual survival. Making love, your map met mine, and we became the territory.

"maps" spelled backwards is "spam."

Drabble: maps

The road hadn't been much to begin with, and it got worse the farther we went. Broken pavement turned into rough asphalt, which became a track weaving between pot-holes and rocks and scrub. Then it faded away entirely.

"What are you doing? Why did you stop?"

"No more road."

"What? Of course there's a road. We're right here on the map."

"We'll have to find another way."

"There's only one road on the map, and this is it."

I pointed at the stretch of desert we could see ahead of us. "Map's wrong, then."

"The map can't be wrong. It's the map."

"The map can't be wrong. It's the map."

Hee.

Which reminds me . . .

Visiting Pepe and Julio with Hubby and Tony in Tony's New Subaru

"Your new car manual says this is an all-road vehicle, not an all-terrain vehicle."

"This is a road--"

"Watch the boulder!"

"Hey, I can see the curve of the earth from up here! Look, through that gap in the mountains I can see Salt Lake City!"

"Were those sheep?"

"Look, sheepherder wagons. Who would live up here on the face of a mountain all summer?"

"Pepe and Julio, the Basque shepherds, living their lonely lives in the Utah mountains, far above the cares of civilization."

"Brace yourselves! Major washout in the road! God, I love this car."

"They are so going to void your warranty."

"If I'm on a road, I've got a warranty. If it's on a map, it's a road. We just have to find the right map."

Thanks for the chuckle, connie. I was afraid the last line wouldn't come across as funny. The original punch line was "Of course there's a road, it's right here on the map," but that got buried by needing more dialogue to show his focus on the theoretical over the real -- and most of that got cut, anyway. I thought about cutting the exposition to make room, but I like the set-up too much, it's my connection to both the original real event and the political metaphor.

I usually nit-pick and cut and tweak and over-think these things to the point that I never post them. This time I just said "What the hell...." and did it.

I keep thinking of Twister - yes, I loved that stupid flick, because big! ass! tornadoes! make me happy, so long as I'm nowhere near them - and Phillip Seymour Hoffman yelling at his rookie stormchaser buddy: "Don't fold the maps! Why is there a crease right through the middle of South Dakota? ROLL the MAPS!"