Thursday, August 2, 2012

Today


Samuel Bailey had teeth like piano keys. Windburned he was. A white man. He dug the dirt from his thorny fingernails with splinters of gunwale and fishbones. Bailey was a bad man, a bad man. You never knew the weather comin’ with that man, his eyes clouded all the storms in his heart. He got wild but Bailey gettin’ wild made him steady like a snake.

He sat at the oars chewing something and spitting and his mouth cracked around his jaws like it hurt to move them or speak anything. His hair was running away from his head and when he took off his hat, it lay in soft wisps over his skin.

I never saw Samuel Bailey panic, not when that black man fronted him on the island with his feathers and spears. Not when that wave rose right up out of a sea and spilled him and the rest of us to the rocks, sucked back and then dropped us again boat and all on the barnacles. Barnacles like a man’s hand with critters living in them, good enough food to suck on when your feet are planted safe on granite. No good to see comin’ toward your face and straining the brine through their jagged teeth and your blood is next.

Bailey was the only one calm. He was tipped into the belly of the whale boat, facing the mess of clouds and he was laughing and telling young Neddy once he found his seat again that he was gonna fucking killim next time he let the boat get that close to the rocks. Break his arm over his knee, break it off and chuck it to the gloamy-eyed grey devils that hunted seal too. Laughing. Made everyone else laugh too and come the next morning one of Neddy’s fingers was a missing, a bleeedin’ stump.
 And Neddy would tell to no one what became of it.

11 comments:

  1. Will it piss you off enormously if I said that this read like something out of Islands in the Stream? In my defence, the man did win a Nobel Peace Prize for Literature after all...

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  2. I'd have to google it Hippo, to know what you you were referring to, before it pisses me off. Just give me a while and I'll start on you with the expletives.

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    1. Actually, it is a very nice thing to say! I guess I'm constantly paranoid that I will plagiarize something I read ten years ago and think I made it up myself.

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    1. Cheers MF and Janine. Samuel Bailey is a pretty good bad guy to muck around with.

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  4. Hi Sarah Loving Samuel Bailey. Is there more and where do I find it?
    A famous edito of one of your favourite writers, told me once, that the fear of plagiarism is generally unfounded. At the time, I was concerned that I'd written something from a subconcious memory which had been written previously by said writer before me. At the time, I noted that Randolph Stowe had written similarly also.
    The esteemed editor then went on to tell me that said writer and Stowe spent time together. His advice was to keep writing, and that someday, someone else will sound a little like you.
    By the way, I'm hearing shades of Herman Melville.

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    1. A good anecdote, thanks Greg.
      Samuel Bailey can be found if you click on 'sealers' in the labels cloud down the bottom right hand side. He is a historical character who lived around here before white settlement.

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  5. I'm seeing Rohan Wilson, but Rohan Wilson saw Cormac McCarthy so its okay. Everything's okay in that regtard. Have to say I had that feeling recently too, the idea I was going to write something thinking it was original only to find it's a rehash of something I'd reaf elsewhere. It came as a kind of deja vu thing at first, which I entertained for mystery's sake, then shat myself when I thought where else it might have come from.


    It's meaty alright, loved the boat capsize, the suck back and dump. Scary as..

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    1. You know Ciaran, after reading your comment I remembered your scene with Neddy that was so similar! That's scary as, given I only wrote that one the other day...
      I was also thinking though about when we do sweeps in the boat off a headland trolling for salmon and how the big water always looks like it will suck us onto the granite. Barnacle bait. It scares the crap out of me in quite a different way to unintended plagiarism.

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    2. All part of the collective consciousness which writing helps so much to spread. I got it from somewhere else. Your seascape images show up the slanting black rock and backwash but being out amongst it is dimentions ahead of just the thought.

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