- Serenade
- Posted: Dec 02, 2008, 1:05 pm
- It Could Happen to You (accidental re-post)
So I was driving back from the barn, aka where Clancy lives, which is kinda out in the boonies, and something... happened.
The road in particular is long, curvy. A great gray snake flowing into the distance of hills, and there is a long row of overhanging trees spotting the cement with patches of dark gray. Since fall is just folding its skirts onto the landscape, it was as if I was driving under an ornate curtain of red, orange, and yellow. One of the old antique ones you'd find in an opera house or something. The day was bitterly cold, with Oklahoma's signature wind buffeting my car back and forth along the the road, howling at me through the windows.
The car was silent, radio turned off. So I could think. I've been trying to make my writing more subtle, make it seem less like it was written by a teenager. And I had this idea floating around the back of my thoughts lately, this half formed plot idea. I wanted to have a series of unconnected events, peoples, places, things randomly thrown together inside of a story. I would make the prose choppy and staccato, the syntax short with pointed bursts. I was planning this story, with no point, no characters, not even a real plot... but I had a meaning in mind.
I wanted to write this seemingly pointless story and at the end, have the reader step back and have the idea "It could happen to me" appear in their head. Kinda stupid, kinda emo, kinda pointless. But that was what I was thinking when I rounded the bend on 84th last Sunday, my mind was filled with phrases, words, stories, the entire idea of "It could happen to me".
I was driving slowly, because I could, because it was Sunday morning on a rural road, because I was alone . And then I saw movement along the side of the road, and at first I didn't know what it was. But my vision cleared, and I saw. It was a hawk (or some other large bird of prey) not two yards away from me and two feet from the ground. I could make out the individual feathers, gold, yellow, and brown. Instinctively, I slowed down, and in my head, in the vast silence of m car, I filled it with the slow rustle of of wing beats. After a long moment realized what exactly this creature was doing so dangerously close to cars and roads, it was hunting.
There, in its talons, was a squirrel. The hawk was beating its wings (they seemed huge, as long as my arm) against the fierce winds of the day, taking off, as I had missed the initial strike. The squirrels fur was that luxuriant mix of red, brown, and orange, as are most that live in Oklahoma. It dangled from its shoulders, the Hawks talons hooked into the joints of its forelegs, body hanging freely in the air. And I watched that bird levy itself higher into the air, each wing beat must have been a battle, the squirrel fell to the ground. I again filled the emptiness of my car with the sound of its little body hitting the bed of leaves below. A crackle, a hiss, a whooshe.
As my car eased foreword, I was too shocked to stop, my eyes followed the dark shadow of its wings as it grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller. I drove onward, back into my life. I had taken about ten seconds, if that. I felt like smiling, adrenaline was flowing through my body, and my mind clung to that ten seconds of film, playing it over and over as I drove along the body of the gray snake. My hands were just a little shaky on the wheel, and my mind was just a little afraid of the serendipity of it all. It made me want to believe. Not in God, or fate, or in luck, or in anything my writers brain can conceive, but it made me want to believe in... something.
(I tried to edit this, and ended up deleting it...)
