September 2, 2024

Dam(n)

Have put the novel away for a few days. I am up at the river typing this on my phone. I came up last night. Always hard setting up tent in the dark esp where there’s no overnight camping. There’s a dam that’s why. People associate camping with drinking and dams like this are dangerous for the temporarily brave. There are plenty of frogs you can’t see them until they move and you hear a splash and there they are all slick with moonlight pretending not to be frogs. Funny how the ear can detect such a small movement in water when not far away the river is squeezing through a dam and howling out the other side. This is how I fish for story ideas. Tell the truth a while and then something like a frog budges and I feel like lying and off I go talking about aunts I don’t have, friends I don’t know, ghosts I haven’t met but might be waiting for me on the other side. That’s what my dad used to say. Careful of the ghosts, kiddo, you’re never alone. I said that once to his sister, Auntie Bess, I called her Auntie Guess because that’s what it sounded like and she said she liked it better than her real name, the same way, when it’s dark like this, I like lies better than truth.

Anyway she said that was my father’s way of getting me to behave, she said it’s the oldest trick in the book, that he was just substituting ghosts for God but it was the same thing.

It backfired though, I grew up in the company of these ghosts but I wasn’t afraid of them, I didn’t behave for them, they became my audience and I felt it like the splash when they gasped and giggled behind their invisible hands, they were on the edge of their seats my ghosts, I showed them guts and broken bones, I gave them danger and love in acute proportions, certainly not what my father intended and now he’s the ghost for whom I perform, hiding here as I do in the forest in the dark solitude of my tent, writing these lies on my phone.