this is a story from my Home Recordings
(2009, Bird Dog Publishing) originally
published in Pie in the Sky magazine #24
(pieintheskymagazine.blogspot.com/)
March 15, 1993 12:24 PM:
THE SECOND TIME
They decided to wait until winter to cut at
the blackberry bushes piled behind their house.
When January set in across everything, the vines
would shed their leaves and snake back to burrow,
then they could cut them and rake the ground and
turn it into a garden in Spring. It would be good
to have it gone. In August they picked ripe berries
to make their last ever jam and pies.
Early in December, snow fell, but they were
going to wait a little longer. The vines tangled
in the cold. Wearing double layers of clothes,
Elmer Ford marched up and down the hall,
ringing a bell. This was the morning they had
all been waiting for. Children came running
through doors. Outside, they fell around the
frozen vines and sliced at them with rakes
and wooden swords. Elmer even tied a rope
from the bumper of his Model T and dragged
roots out of the ground. That’s how he dislodged
the tube. It was plowed out of the earth like
a bomb, it sparkled as something golden
from Mars in the weak sunlight.
Elmer’s children were making drum noises on it
with their rakes and weapons when he got out of
the tin car and made them stop. He examined
the steel hollow tube and he found letters on it,
underneath the dirt and weeds. Already one of
his sons had discovered a silver door handle
on the side and he turned it open. The hiss
of steam threw them all backwards, they stared
as a tall man stood up. It was him, it was
Abraham Lincoln. He put on his stovepipe hat
to shade his eyes from the glare of the
twentieth century America. To get his bearings
here, in a ruin of blackberry vines fifty years
after the war, he cleared his throat and gave
the Gettysburg Address again.
0 comments:
Post a Comment