Serial Fiction: Part 1

06Apr09

Here, I’d like to do an experiment. Join me, won’t you? A short story in 200-word installments. I don’t know how it comes out, or who these characters might turn out to be. I’m hoping that the thrill of writing and publishing on the fly, without worrying over revision, will push me to places I haven’t tried yet in my fiction. The goal is one a day, for a week or however long it takes.

So, presented here is Part 1, in which we are introduced to our characters and their problems.

The Shifting Supercontinent: Part 1

A ghost moon hangs in the top corner of the windshield; the sun invades the passenger window, blinding. Wildflowers, dead, roll by and I’m silent still, hours later.

Fast-forward. See the clouds sweep and jump in time-lapsed arcs across the horizon. Rock, pine, oak, palm, sand.

Somewhere we left the interstate, picked up lazy county roads, bobbing and weaving along the jagged coast, beaches broken with cedar stumps like dead molars. Sand giving way to the Gulf of Mexico on my side, pine trees and weather-beaten, warped houses on stilts on hers.

The sun disappears behind a low hill, inland.

Karen sleeps, her forehead bouncing against her window, drool shining intermittently in the headlights of passing cars. She’s beautiful still.

This, after we had a long fight through most of Georgia. Staccato outbursts, shaking fists, blaring radio interspersed with heavy silences.

It’s the money, why we’re driving, everything.

Karen wakes up, and I’ve stopped the car in a shell-strewn parking lot. Crossing the bridge to the island, climbing up and up over the gulf, I had hoped we might take flight. But it seems we’re eternally landed. Here. A parking lot on a summer island in the thick of winter.

Tune in tomorrow to find out what happens.

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