As I No Longer Lay Dying (Part I)

After many tries with many publishers, after numerous disappointments with many projects, after much internal reckoning, this writer has decided to use the technology available to him to distribute his work as widely as he can. In other words, Ghost Dogg is turning to the Internet Machines to publish his work.

This website will feature my word-o-ramas, mostly short stories, but divided into easy to read sections. This, of course, is a nod to the notion that no one wants to read more than 300 words at a time anymore...sigh...

No, scratch that. Because serialized works have a long tradition, and if writing in such a fashion was good enough for Charles Dickens, then surely the rest of us shouldn't turn our noses.

Enough preamble already. The first story I will be posting is one I'm very proud of. It's called As I No Longer Lay Dying, and I tried to write it in the style of William Faulkner. Hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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As I No Longer Lay Dying

I

RENEE SAID:
Your problem is that you don’t think anything you do means anything. You bop through your life. You don’t look back. You don’t look forward. You barely look around. I’ve come to know that about you—I guess I’ve always known it—but I suppose I need to forgive you for that. I’m too dying to carry that grudge anymore. But don’t forget this is all your fault.

And then she did die.

Strange to say, it was all because of a brick. The subtext here is not at all lost on me. A brick, the literal building block of our civilization, at a time long distant baked under the pitiless Egyptian sun, now shipped from the plant to all points of the compass, making the tombs and defensive walls and city halls possible, in concord with its fellow bricks serves to create, and in violent isolation is used to destroy, as it has me and mine. Better to say though, not a brick but the brick. And while the brick was the cause of our end, it did not cause our end. That came by other means.

Leaving Stone Creek for break was a reprieve. January and February are the dog days of the school calendar, what with the endless slow-march of five-day weeks and the tramp-stomp of the unwilling and unresponsive. Renee’s Pink Floyd marathon in the car grew tiresome, but it wasn’t necessarily a joy-killer. It was off-putting. My students aren’t bricks in the wall—they lack both the discipline and the solidity to be bricks. They’re doughy and largely useless. I could have extended this metaphor even further, but Renee purchased my silence by allowing me to put in Motley Crue.

“Rowan Oak is such a strange name,” Renee said. “The lost colony of Virginia.”

“That’s Roanoke the lost settlement of the Virginia Colony, you mean,” I said, which provoked an eye-roll from Renee. “It was actually located in modern-day North Carolina, and no. Faulkner got the name from The Golden Bough. You see, in Scotland there was this tree called the Rowan tree, and peasants would put a cross of it by their doors to protect their homes.”

“Well, that seems handy. We should do that when we get a house.”

“Seriously?” I asked, but based on the absent way she was flipping through People, obviously Renee wasn’t serious. I always catch on a little late, it seems.

“So,” she said, pausing over Brad Pitt in his swim trunks, “so…because he named the whole place Rowan Oak, does that mean the whole place is protected?”

“It would make sense. Sure, I guess.”

“Protected from what?”

“Hmm? I don’t know. The supernatural?”

“Well, duh,” said Renee, and she closed her magazine. We had spent nearly all day in the car, and Renee’s legs weren’t getting any shorter. “Demons? Ghosts? Zombies? Angry bees?”

“I don’t know,” I repeated. “All of it, I guess. I really have no idea.”

For Part II, click here.