This blog is devoted to a select group of poets. We're starting with poets from the Ann Arbor area, but, hey, if you're from Detroit, Grand Rapids, Saginaw or the Upper Peninsula, then that is okay, too.
Our goal is to provide you with a prompt every day from which you are to garner inspiration and submit a poem. How to submit will be very easy. Just put your poem or short story in the comments section and hit post. You may not immediately see your post, but it is there under the "Comments" section. You may need to click on "Comments" to see your poem. It is there on another page.
You may need to have a Gmail account to post in the comments section. Most of you do have Gmail, but for those of you that don't it's extremely worthwhile to open up one now! That way you've got a chance to get your work out there in the world.
Today's poem or short story prompt is the word "fairy tale".
Fairy Tales from Saginaw County
ReplyDeleteHis mother gave him many wrong ideas about life. Steered him wrong about the importance of things that really had no importance.
For instance, she encouraged him to play with bugs she called rolly-poly bugs. Raised on a farm and with limited toy resources, she found these pillbugs a source of amusement and entertainment. So, he collected the bugs and kept them in homemade ant colony. The bugs only had one trick, however, that being when touched they would roll into a tight ball. Try to disappear. Still, if you are four and you haven't seen much out the world outside of Saginaw County, the rolly poly bug was impressive.
Later, his mother told him that the dried dandelions that blew across their lawn were fairies in search of their home. If you caught the dandelion fairy you would be granted one wish. So over the summer, he collected a large coffee can full of dried-out dandelons. After he couldn't fit one more dandelion in the can, he took out his list of wishes and began letting out each fairy. Yet, the fairies didn't fly very far, it not being a windy day and instead they fell in clumps to the ground. Still he wished. Not one wish, but at least twenty. Five year old wishes--a new bike, chocolate chip ice cream in the refrigerator every day, a trip to the Monster Car races. When none of these wishes came true he asked his mother what went wrong. She told him that the fairies didn't find their way home. It only works if they are find their way home.
So he collected another coffee can full of dandelion fairies. He went from one neighbor's lawn to another neighbor's lawn. He felt so good about the fairies and wishes this time he told three of his friends to join him and bring 5 wishes of their own.
Yet, this time he couldn't do the wish follow-up. Three days later he broke his arm falling off the monkey bars. The cast overshadowed his summer and wish list.
Day 6 of 7: FAIRY TALE
ReplyDelete[I've decided that I will use this week's prompts to create a 7-part short story. Wish me luck!]
"Phffft!"
I spit out a mouthful of bark and dried leaves. My hands slid in the mud and I fell back on my face again. It was raining, the cold water soaking my clothes and matting my hair. I felt my chest for the place Odin had stabbed me with his spear. As expected, I'd suffered no real damage. Another god-encounter with no lasting after effects.
"Mister?" a little girl's voice called. I picked my head up out of the mud and looked around. A small girl wearing a red hood and carrying a picnic basket stood a few feet away from me, staring with wide eyes.
"Mister?" she repeated.
"Yes?" I replied.
"I'm on my way to Grandma's house. Would you walk with me? I'm afraid there might be wolves in the forest and I have a basket full of food."
I stared at her for a second, then decided I was being rude. "Of course, dear."
We started walking. She told me about the lunch she was carrying, how she brought lunch to her grandma three times a week and always came the same way. About the wolf she'd seen last time. It followed her halfway to Grandma's house, but then vanished into the woods before she got there.
"Is your name Little Red Riding Hood?" I asked.
She laughed. "No, silly. My name is Gretchen vonDerHoven. Who would name their child 'Little Red Riding Hood'?" She looked over her shoulder. "I think the wolf is behind us."
ReplyDeleteI turned slowly and stared into the woods. Sure enough, there was a Wolf hiding behind one of the trees. He was walking on his hind legs, balancing himself by moving from tree to tree and using his front paws for balance.
"This is insane!" I screamed. "Now, I'm supposed to believe in fairy tales!!!?"
Almost instantly, I sprang and found myself sitting at a wooden table in a Bavarian pub. There were three other men at the table, scruffy looking fellows swilling beer and chewing bretzels.
"Wilhelm! You cannot have the little girl eating porridge!" one of them was yelling. He waved his flaggard of ale at one of the other two men.
"But Jacob, it works. It maintains the symmetry. She will..."
"No!" Jacob yelled. He slammed his mug down on the table and screamed into his brother's face, "it ruins the story! It just ruins it!"
The third man looked up at me and calmly said, "you wonder why you're here, don't you?"
I stared at him. Who was this man and why was he addressing me? His eyes locked onto mine and he gave me a big smile.
"Isn't this the kind of thing you wanted?" he asked. "You've met how many Gods over the last six months? Dozens? Hundreds?"
I shook my head. "I haven't met the right one yet. I haven't met one that can give me the answer I want. You're tricking me, you've orchestrated all of this to keep me frustrated."
"To keep you frustrated?" the figure laughed. "Oh no, I have no intention of frustrating you. I want you to see the truth, to know the truth." He got up and walked around the table, sat down on the bench in front of me. "The reality is, there is no logic to it. There is no structure you can find, no pattern to follow."
I shook my head. "I don't believe that."
"Look, I'll give you an example. Take these two here - the Brothers Grimm. They create whole worlds, whole universes, all the times. It is their stock in trade. Don't you think they might have the answer you seek?"
"No, of course not!" I screamed. "They create fictional worlds. I want the answers in the Real World! I want to know what it all Means!!!"
He just laughed at me, then vanished. Nobody seemed to notice, nobody seemed to hear me. The Brothers Grimm kept on with their argument, the one that would lead them to write The Three Bears story.
I understood the point -- when you create a world, you get to make the rules -- but it wasn't enough, it wasn't going to satisfy me. It was too arbitrary, it made it all too easy and all too simple and it gave me no hope at all of ever controlling anything about my future.
I realized then that was what I wanted. It wasn't understanding, it was control. I wanted to understand so I could control.
I fell to my knees and cried. I thought I'd been on a quest for knowledge, but I was fooling myself. I was no better than the guys at Monsanto or at DOW or at any of a hundred different organizations. I wasn't seeking to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. I was seeking to make a profit. I wanted to know life so I could control it, so nothing like what happened to Ken would ever happen again.
It was a pipe dream, a fantasy, as impossible as the idea of doing pure science in a way that couldn't be turned into a weapon, or of creating things that couldn't be turned into simple commodities. It was the way of the world and I was fighting upstream.
I needed to give up.
I needed to find my place in a system that had no place for me.