Five Favorite Stories
One-Armed Guitar Player
The morning fog had begun to lift around the pier, and the weekend tourists were starting to leave their hotel rooms for a day at the beach.
The one-armed guitar player opened his guitar case and carefully removed his Les Paul Deluxe 3 E X model from its well-padded home. He put one foot on the small bench and then rested the instrument on his knee. Some would say that it was remarkable that he could do so much with only his left arm, but for him the routine was ordinary. He held the guitar close to his chest with his chin and then fastened the strap. Once the guitar was secure, he lowered his foot to the ground and stood erect, checking to make certain that everything was comfortable.
It was time to begin his daily show. He plugged the guitar to his battery-powered amplifier. Speaking softly to his guitar, he said, “Time, my sweet, for beautiful music.” He began a soft jazz riff matching his mood and the weather.
Arid
by M.L. Edson
ARID.
The last pomegranate wept from the desolate tree.
Its once brilliant reds had turned to black,
and brittle twigs twisted through the papery foliage.
But the awaited tears evaporated before reaching the ground.
The terrain longed for any moisture to touch its soil and yearned for life to re-enter,
to sprout the dormant seeds waiting within.
Award winning writer, M.L. Edson tells of a time when there is no water. None. Desiccated. Scorched. Saving the merest drop of water is a crime punishable by prison. A Science Fiction work of the highest order.
This work appeared originally in the anthology, From a Writer’s Finger to a Butterfly’s Wing. It is used with the permission of both the author and the Sacramento Suburban Writers.
A Woman of Substance
by Kay Fetner
Eugenia was just thirteen when her father married her off to an older man. This is the story of a girl from Charly, Arkansas who drove her Model A Ford to freedom and a new identity, to become a woman of substance.
~~~
“I was playing with some of my cousins and my younger brothers up by the big chestnut tree, the one my Pap always refused to cut down. The tree had the blight and should’ve been cut down and the stump burned. But my Pap liked that tree. He would never cut it down.
To us kids, it did not matter that it had the blight. It was ours to climb on and to hide in. We were glad that he’d never cut it down.
Anyways, I was playing with my kin up by that big tree. Then, I heard my Pap say, “Eugenia!” He said it loud with a stern voice. I knew to come runnin’ when he called me like that.
He was sitting on the porch next to a gentleman wearing his best Sunday go-to-meetin’ dark suit. The gentleman had some gray hair at the temples, and he was beginning to bald.
When I came up the steps to the porch, both men stood up. My Pap spoke.
“Eugenia, I want you to meet Mr. Winston Garrison.”
“Please to meet you, sir.”
My Pap continued. “Mr. Garrison is an Engineer for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. He has a house up in Omega.”
His voice trailed off. I waited for him to complete his sentence.
“Eugenia, Mr. Garrison is going to be your new husband. I’ve promised him that we can make it official next week in the Parson’s House at the Presbyterian Church in Omega.”
I did not know what to say. I simply stood there. I was just thirteen years old.”
Facts, Just the Facts
“He had done this hundreds of times while working on hundreds of cases. The grizzled, veteran, police detective sergeant checked his notepad for details, and then he turned to the eyewitness to confirm the facts. His job was to confirm the facts. “Just the facts,” as the fictional radio detective Sergeant Joe Friday did every week on the show, Dragnet.”
The police dectective believes that there are facts. Discoverable, evidence-based facts. Hard facts, as the detective sergeant would say. Facts. Not fictions.
Facts are as real as bullets, burglaries, bullies, and bastards.
Facts are discovered. Uncovered. Revealed. They are not made up. Not mere possibilities. Not speculation.
Put all the facts together and you have a whole picture. You know what happened. You know what really occurred. You have the facts.
Yet finding the facts is more obtuse than it seems. In truth, it may not even be possible. Determining which purported events occurred and which did not may ultimately prove fruitless.
Contemplating Evil
He drew a lungful of smoke from his ever-present pipe. He was now 87 years old. He once estimated that he had spent over two-thirds of his life with a pipe between his teeth, filling his lungs with burning Prince Albert pipe tobacco. To be more precise (since he was one who valued precision and accuracy), his estimate had been that he had spent 68.2 percent of his life with a pipe in his mouth.
He came from a generation of Southerners who believed that smoking a pipe was genteel, the sign of a contemplative gentleman, one who measured life carefully, and reached conclusions only after the consideration of all the available evidence.
He sat on his back deck looking at the hills behind his property. Just the merest hint of fall color. If it does not rain, in a couple of weeks the hills will be aflame with all the seasonal colors, and the looki-lews will be coming up to the mountains from Atlanta for their fall pilgrimage. Restaurants and hotels would be full. Craft fairs. Mountain music. A good time to stay home, he thought.
Still, it was good to live in the Georgia mountains. They understood him as no mortal did.
He sat on his back deck, smoking his pipe, in deep contemplation.
