The Things They Carried

Friday Fictioneers for March 17th, 2023

Friday is another fictioneers day and Saint Paddy’s Day. I’m mostly Irish, but I never drink green beer and I seldom eat corned beef and cabbage. Who tells a better story than an old Irishman? Who does a better poem read than a young, attractive Irish actor?

Unable to find a suitable Irish lad or lass, Mistress of her storybook realm of fibs and fables, Rochelle, in her high magnificentness, dove down under to Australia. From there, she has shanghaied the prompt photo from Rowena Curtin to lead us into the temptation of creating a complete story with fewer than 101 words.

Click on Rowena’s pic to get the lowdown from Sydney on Rochelle’s blog page. When you’ve written your scoop, you can post it with all the other glorious wonders on inlinkz dot com (see Tim’s photo at the bottom of this blog).

If you can do this (and you certainly can), we promise to read it and comment (nicely) with hopes of delightful reciprocation.

PHOTO PROMPT © Rowena Curtin

Genre: Biographical Fiction
Title: Decisions Made
Word Count: 100

***

He felt betrayed. Trapped. Cheated. Conflicted. Confused. Rage simmered, but what burned him up most was his own self-pity. He was numb. What could he do?

Escape to Canada was wartime treason. If he joined the Army as a rifleman (eleven bravo), he’d be forced to kill or to die. He wanted neither. Everyone he knew would consider him a coward.

The walls closed in. What to do?

He could fight and die in a just war. This one was unjust.

He relented and lived through it all.

Then he wrote about it. Now they would all know his truth.

***

Look both ways because “the bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.”
Mind the gaps because “you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead.”
(Quotes are from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien)

 

Click on Tim O’Brien to read more micro-fiction stories drawn from Rowena’s photo.

NaPoWriMo April 2022 (Day 28)

Click for more.

Today’s prompt was to write a concrete poem. I wanted to do all 30 prompts.

What I did instead was intended to be a black out poem in lieu of the prompt, I’ve done concretes before. Not today.

I decided that rather than black out unused text to create the poem, I would extract the lines from the first few paragraphs of a longer story. If I had more time, I might have attempted some art to overlay the blacked-out area.

If I included the entire narrative, it would have been too long with entire paragraphs blacked out. So, I extracted the parts/words/sections that made up the poem.

I selected the first few paragraphs from the titled section, “On the Rainy River” from the book, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien © (published in 1990 by Houghton Mifflin).

Drafted

one story I’ve never told,
it would only cause embarrassment,
a confession…
makes me squirm,
I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame,
it’s a hard story to tell.

if evil were evil enough, if good were good enough
I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage…
Courage, comes in finite quantities,
it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward.

I was drafted to fight a war I hated.
(You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.)
…I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall within my special province…

The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968.
I was too good for this war.
Too smart, too compassionate, too everything.
I was above it. A mistake, maybe…I was no soldier.

Look both ways for reasons why and why not.
Mind the gaps. That’s where the booby traps hide.

Poetry: War’s Bitterness (NaPoWriMo day 6)

The irony of today’s prompt is that it comes from Holly Lyn Walrath, who wrote of prompts, “…they all suck.” She poses this one as simple.

“Go to a book you love. Find a short line that strikes you. Make that line the title of your poem. Write a poem inspired by the line. Then, after you’ve finished, change the title completely.”

I want to finish this assignment today, so I am amending the prompt slightly.

I have lists of lines (quotes) from books I like. Examples I considered from Bukowski’s poetry book, Love is Dog from Hell, (also the title of one of the poems) include:

  1. “Sissies have a hard life.”
  2. “I never quite understood what it all meant and still don’t.”
  3. “Human relationships aren’t durable.”
  4. “Just drink more beer, more and more beer.”
  5. “An early taste of death is not necessarily a bad thing.”
  6. “Hit that thing/hit it hard.”

I rejected them for a sentence from Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried. The protagonist is referring to his decision to be drafted and go to Viet Nam, rather than flee to Canada.

“I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.”

I used each of these three independent clauses as the title for a quatrain. Then, I wrote the overall title of the combined poem, but I left the original lines.

War’s Bitterness

I would go to the war*—

Not to defend my country
or the Constitution, or our freedom,
or our way of life, to a war
I did not believe in.

I would kill and maybe die*—

Even my own countrymen would
condemn me and others who did
see themselves as defenders, many heroes
who would be wasted in a war they hated.

I was embarrassed not to*—

I cried. I didn’t want to go. I felt
that I had no choice. Could I kill?
Would I be killed or maimed?
Would I ever understand why?

(*Taken from the boat scene while fishing on the Rainy River in the book, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.)

Look both ways. Feel the pressure. Decide.
Mind the gaps, especially those in your mind.
You’re only a living, fallible human.