All text and images copyright Tim Myers 2008
Tim Myers: Fiction Excerpts
“Later, neither of them saw, lost in the deep slumber of their young bodies, how, with the rise of a warm south wind, clouds began moving easily
across the quiet starlit sky--how the last ice edging the streambeds and riverbanks broke away and dissolved in the flowing water, the last hidden
patches of snow on the wooded north slopes soaking into the earth. None of the sleepers in the great house, wine and food settling slowly through
them, dreams rising and falling, smelled the now warm dampness of the ground as it came in at the windows, clean and strong with the opening of
numberless seeds and bulbs and the stirring of roots and tubers down within it. And no one at all--except perhaps Hauberk or another of the mastiffs, waking momentarily in the kennel pens at first light--heard the strange new note of joy in the great singing of the birds as dawn opened out over the greening land.”
--”Arthur’s Wishes” (short story)
“Jen, he chanted in his heart, standing on the front porch with the door ajar behind him, spent nail in hand, Jen, Jen, how could he say it, he couldn’t drag Julie in, couldn’t rope her and pull her into that house with its closed doors, that shut bedroom with its sour and sullen odors, couldn’t sweeten the time that was left, couldn’t do anything but drive the nail, helplessness looming over him vast as night. Jen, my Jen, the bright fierce thing was draining out of her, there were no words to make Julie understand her mother’s many kinds of pain, nothing he could say to bring Jen peace, to reconcile her, as she died, to the uncaring fierceness of life.”
--”Driving Nails” (short story)
“When I’m in bed at night I still think about it. Sometimes I pretend I can talk to it. I say, You came, You came--like You came just for me. You let me see You. I don’t tell nobody about that; I never will. But it could of killed me, but it didn’t. And it was right there in front of me, like it wanted me to see it. I ain’t finished being scared of it. It comes in my dreams too, and it’s right there again, black and spinning and making that terrible noise so my teeth hurt. But I like those dreams too, even if they’re partly nightmares. Cuz it’s not like all the other ordinary stuff in the world. Nobody else saw it like I did; that stupid stuff on the Wizard of Oz, with the boat floating in it, and the chickens, and the witch--that’s
dumb-ass stuff from people that don’t know nothing. They act like it’s a toy, or a game, or just something in a story. It ain’t. It could come again and kill me--I know it could. I don’t mind. People’d think I’m crazy if they heard me say that. But I ain’t.
But it ain’t like it belongs to me; I’d never say that. More like I belong to it. Cuz even when I was scared and peeing my pants, I knew there ain’t nothing else like it in the whole wide world. And now I got it here, right here inside me.
I know what I seen.”
--”Tornado” (short story)