The Writer or The Gazebo

05/18/2012 

Is a story action and adventure?  Activity?

We fight.  Mainly to kill each other over what we want.

But a cemetery is so calm.  Grass grows over a memorial granite stone and birds sing in a wood surrounding a quiet sun-dappled clearing featuring an ornate eight-sided gazebo which is lighted at night.

Stately firs, oaks and maples stand sentry in this pleasant-looking glade.  A high-ceilinged, gable-roofed, single-level library rests on a hillside opposite the wooded gazebo background.

Ants toil in their nests below volcano-like mounds in the mortar cracks around the octagonal stone set in the center of the gazebo.  This writer walks to the steps leading down, stepping over different-sized black ants to squat down to read the date on the memorial stone.  Sept. 30, 1979.  A couple had paid to build the gazebo, it seemed.  The writer wondered if they lived yet.

Small red maple tree & other nice accent plants adorn the gazebo.  Mulch.

Three millstones-turned tables are situated around this shaded tree-populated place off the side of the library’s asphalt parking area. 

One unused picnic table rests under a large pine.  “I sit on the second millstone,” the writer writes, looking around at the agreeable surroundings.  Two mail boxes-turned-book drops stand alongside the entry drive, in front of the sidewalk to the library front doors.   The writer checks his cheap cell phone for the time: 2:32 p.m.  Sale starts at three.

Bird sounds.  Briefly, breeze in the moving leaves, then stillness again.  Distant traffic sounds.  Insects fly around the writer’s head.  He removes his hat to discourage any biting insects.  The library condensing unit kicks in, fan blowing hot air at tender shoots of a nearby tree.

Two birds in the sky, up there, seen through openings in the trees.  Not one cloud.  Mid-seventies in the shade.  Mid-80s in the sun. 

The writer walks to his car to put away his spiral notebook and grab his things for the book sale.

*

Sitting on the second millstone again, the writer says, then writes, “Greedy pickers.”  My guess, he continues to himself, is that they got in beforehand, somehow.  Oh well.

One Queen Picker, a giant, bespeckled woman, has just driven away from the back door to the sale.  She’d loaded her bunch of books out the side and took off.

“This is where I dump my books.” She said in line, five minutes before the sale started.   “It’s where I unload my inventory I don’t move,” she explained.  She boasted that her husband had last taken 100 books to this library.

The writer is at his car now, finishing the last couple sentences in the half-shade before his car.  A fly kept pestering him at the millstone.  He’s sworn, after swatting with his hat for the fifth time. 

“I don’t smell that bad,” he’s said aloud to the fly.  Standing, he looked around and saw a black fly-covered bundle at the base of the fir tree near the millstone, less than  ten feet away.  Dead crow, covered with crawling flies.  “I bet that does, though,” he said and walked off, somewhat disgusted, thinking of what the flies had been eating before landing in his hair.

We’re all in this aquarium together, he thought, swatting dead a flying beetle that had landed on his right chest front. 

“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered.