I’ve never created a blog site before, or anything else on the web, to be honest. So this is going to be an adventure for me, as I delve into the land of the unknown – the Saulander Evans blogosphere. I feel as though I am in a completely different universe, but I’m sure you know the one of which I’m speaking – cyberspace – the place without air for your voices to travel upon and yet all of you can have your words travel through that cyberspace-time-continuum to reach me, if only to tell me I’m being silly. Yes, silly. I suppose that should be my middle name because I do have that strange, quirky side to my personality that others find silly.
On the other hand, I am dead serious when it comes to my craft – writing. I came to creative writing just a little over a year ago. Since that fateful day when I sat down to my laptop computer, trying to clear my mind of all the imagery that intruded into my mind a month and a half earlier, I have completed writing three fantasy novels. In addition, I am in the process of writing the fourth of the seven part series, as well as a screenplay derived from within the pages of my third novel. Moreover, I have the remaining three novels tucked firmly into the fabric of my mind, the characters screaming at me to hurry up and write down their story. I simply can’t write fast enough to keep those people happy!
I will keep you up to date on my progress from time to time. I hope you won’t find me too boring but perhaps I can lighten your day with whatever silliness has come my way.
Today I'm going to post a poem I wrote at 4:30 in the morning. And I'll follow it up with a couple of Flash Fiction pieces I've written recently. I hope you enjoy them.
Budding of a Cherry Tree
Silent musing of past existential relations
Mind, body, and soul drowning in microbial essence
That blossomed into a mushroom cloud of
Demoralization, reduction to nothing more
Than the sludge of remnants left behind
After eons of poignant turbulence
The tide of change ebbed ever closer
Lapping against the shoreline of insufficiency
Filling in the abyss with the catalytic
Converter of my future prolificacy
And the expurgation of gray matter and physiology
That enlightened my body to sensuality
The desert-dry thirst found the oasis
Transforming, through hydration, the withered shell of
Ancient scars of inadequacy, replacing the suffocating
Radioactive cloud of disease-filled abhorrence
With the budding of a cherry tree, whose blossoms
Long for rapturous strokes of your masculinity
SSE 6/29/05
Good Food for Thought
In the dark early hours of the morning I sit, silently waiting for something to happen – a nibble, a tap, a nudge – anything that will indicate that I have not wasted my time being here. I have been sitting here for hours now, rarely moving, simply staring at one of three points, each approximately eight feet away from me at a forty-five degree angle from where I sit, patiently waiting and waiting and waiting…
Come on; show me a little action over here! I mutely exclaim from within my mind. Then my unspoken commentary continues with a small smile plastered across my face. You know you want it. So why don’t you just take it? Do I have to be more blatant to get your attention?
My body aches; the coolness of the air is creeping into my bones. I pull my blanket closer around me as I close my eyes and roll my head around in circles, first one direction, and then the other, trying to loosen the tension in my neck. I take a deep breath and expel it slowly. I know you want me to give up on you tonight, but you can forget that. I am not going to sleep until I am completely satisfied. Still I wait.
I let my thoughts travel down the hair-like filament into the depths beneath the surface, searching for the answer to my unspoken request. Yet it is too dark truly to see there, I can only image. There is a myriad of activity down there, in the murky depths. The hunter and the hunted; the way it has always been. Whether it is a matter of putting food on the table or simply doing it for sport, the hunt always seems to continue in the depths of that shadowy place.
I stretch and arch my back. I hear it crack, and I wince at the noise it made. I look at my watch. It is getting late. Then I lay my head back on the soft cushion, all the while keeping my eyes on one of the three points that I’ve been watching. Are you going to come back to me tonight? I continue to wait.
Then my thoughts turn to those events that have plagued my mind recently. The excessively high stack of work that awaits me on my desk in the office, the image of the echocardiogram, my surreal life outside the realm of reality – the fantasy word that little by little takes form upon the page. Somehow, sitting here in the dark dampness, they seem so unimportant. The silence around me is a healing silence, not a condemning one. I glance at my watch again; forty-five minutes has passed since I lay my head back to rest as I watched those three points above me, and yet, I continue to stare. It mesmerizes me; I’m wrapped within a spell of tranquility that I simply do not want to break. So, I wait.
(Tap). My heart quickens with a sudden surge of adrenalin with the sound of that tap. I sit up slowly from my comfy pillow, and drop the blanket from around me, all the while watching those three points above me. The center point jostles with four violent movements, first down, up, down, and then back to its original position. I smile. The waiting is over.
I slowly reach out one hand, trying not to disturb the air around me, until my fingers slip around the smooth, thin, flexible device that relayed the message of my tentative dinner guest. Finally, you’ve stopped your frolicking out beyond my reach. I sit motionless for a few moments, waiting to see if it will happen again. (Thump). I wasn’t expecting that. Come on back and try again. (Thump, thump, thump). I close my fingers around the pole, over the clear nylon filament, and then take another slow measured breath. (Thump). I yank back on the pole, and I meet up with resistance.
I feel triumph as I stand, taking the handle of the center fishing pole into my left hand and begin the play of sport to reel in my first catch in the past two hours to add to those already in the large bucket half-filled with water from the inlet in which they lived up until earlier that evening. This catfish is a feisty little fish, that gives me a thrill to bring it up to shore, yet it does come, slowly but surely, and joins his fellow catfish in the bucket.
I look at my watch again. Three o’clock, am I done yet? Nah, not yet. I pull the old bait off the two hooks with a pair of needle-nose pliers, cut off a small sliver of the catfish’s favorite three o’clock snack, bait the hooks, check the knots on the egg-shaped weight at the end of the line, and cast it out into the inlet once again. Then I sit back down on the shoreline, replace the pole against its perch, draw my knees up close, and begin my sentry duty once again, with a smile of satisfaction that fishing is good food for thought.
SSE
Sir! Are You...?
I have a tendency to open mouth and insert foot with raunchiness sometimes without even realizing I am doing it. When that happens, it inevitably is hilarious to everyone around me. Now, let me just say this, more times than not, when I give a come-on line to someone, I deliver it so as not to confuse the issue. It is provocative, sultry and on occasion a bit playful or a little silly, but I have never purposely come right out and asked a man about his anatomy.
Approximately ten years ago, I experienced one of those occasions when my mouth was the instrument to my own embarrassment. My husband, who is a hairdresser, owned a few salons here in Virginia Beach, and at the time, I was the business manager of them. That mid-August day was a scorcher, and as luck would have it, the air conditioning unit decided that particular day was prime-pickings for going on the fritz so that everyone had sweat rolling down their backs as they toiled away trying to make the homely look a little less bedraggled and the pretty women look drop dead gorgeous. I called for a technician early that morning, and he finally showed up at around three o’clock that afternoon.
“I understand you need the air-conditioner serviced,” he said.
Duh, I thought, arming the sweat off my forehead. They sent a nice looking guy this time. I bet his last customer kept him busy. I looked over to where my husband was busy foiling Kathy Sexton’s hair, and then I met the repairperson’s eyes once again. “Yes, thank you for coming. The unit is on the roof.”
He nodded his head and made his way out the backdoor. A few moments later, he returned. “The compressor is on the roof, but the unit must be in the ceiling. I’ll need to check that out as well.”
He brought a stepladder into the salon, and proceeded to poke his head up through the ceiling tiles. “Ah, here’s the little bugger.” He hoisted himself up through the hole in the ceiling as I made my way back to the reception desk to begin the closeout of the cash drawer before the night receptionist came waltzing into the salon to relieve Nikki for the day. A short time later, I glanced down the long aisle between the twenty workstations where the hairdressers were working their magic.
What the hell? The technician’s feet dangled motionless, dead center through the hole in the ceiling. I stared, jaw-opened, eyes bugging out of their socks, heart pumping madly in my chest. What the fuck? I mentally amended to my first silent exclamation. Jesus Christ! Come on, move or twitch or something damn it! Nothing. They remained stock-still, and my shock began to turn into dread, and then panic. I have a dead guy in the ceiling! Shit, shit, shit!
I ran down the aisle of loud, boisterous hairdressers, ignoring the incessant howling of the blow dryers and the high-pitched whine of the nail technicians’ electronic filling tools, as well as Mrs. Maddry’s goose-like cackling as she laughed at one of Delaine’s inane jokes. From my place below his motionless feet, I looked up through the hole in the ceiling. I can’t see a damn thing but the guy’s feet! It’s darker than shit up there!
Still panic-stricken, I called up the hole… “Sir! Are you hung?” There was no reply and no movement whatsoever, so I repeated the question more loudly… “Sir! Are you hung?” Still no reply.
My demeanor, or perhaps it was the question itself, caught the attention of the salon staff, and the blow dryers began to quiet as everyone turned toward the commotion I was making. I didn’t care that I was making a scene; I simply was freaking out over the guy in my ceiling.
“I SAID, ARE YOU HUNG UP THERE?!” Still no reply. In a last ditch effort to deny my sickening realization I needed to call 911, I yelled, “SIR! ARE YOU OKAY OR ARE YOU DEAD?”
“Well, I didn’t know how to respond,” he called down to me. “My wife thinks I’m hung just fine.”
I finally breathed a sigh of relief. The entire salon of hairdressers and clients were staring at me, laughing their asses off at my foolishness. I suddenly realized that I had said something so totally and completely thick and raunchy. Sir, are you hung? Duh! I thought the guy was hanging from the end of a rope or something, and I’m asking if he was hung! I hit the middle of my forehead with the palm of my hand and called back up to him… “Well, I hope it moves more than your feet just were, you scared the shit out of me!”
SSE
