January 17, 2013

Here’s what judge and editor Mark Richards wrote of my story “Saturdays He Drove the Ford Pick-up”:

I kept coming back to one story in particular that at first reading wasn’t necessarily the strongest submission in terms of craft or sentence structure.  It certainly wasn’t “spiritual” or “religious” in the way other stories brought in literal churches, youth fellowship meetings, pastors, priests and final rites to their narratives.  

But “Saturdays He Drove the Ford Pick-Up” spoke to me as a parable would, and I’m always inclined toward a parable.  And on subsequent readings, it seemed a bit more layered than I originally thought.  The things I thought originally sentimental about the piece actually gave it ultimate poignancy.  

A woman has a “different” neighbor, a mysterious man who digs in his garden at all hours of the day and night.  He seems harmless enough at first; the only remarkable thing about him is his ability to grow flowers that bloom later than most, even into the first snow.  Then a friend (a failed pastor!) remarks after dinner one night that decomposing bodies provide a special kind of warmth.  A simple, flippant, wine-soaked party-exit wisecrack, but it finds a place in the narrator’s mind like a seed falling onto fertile ground.  Soon the woman is convinced the mysterious neighbor IS burying bodies next door at night.  So of course she calls the police who arrive and destroy the man’s garden in search of what the woman begins to realize will never be found. The police only uncover an old skeleton of a long-dead cat.

Yet for me, it’s all there, in a Christian sense.  A stranger, an “other” person appears whose only apparent crime in the beginning is to bring beauty into the world.  But that’s too much for the Pharisee in us.  There must be something darker, more dangerous, more threatening to this individual than that.  He must be stopped. He must be sacrificed to protect “us.”  Sound familiar?  I won’t belabor the theology, but I think you can read as far into the story as you want to read. I did and I enjoyed the ending, the kind toward which all short stories should strive – surprise and inevitability.

His editing was, as they say, “hard”-- but in the end I am reconciled. Few people other than me would prefer my version to his. But I’m sad. It’s like coming home and finding someone has redecorated your house. It really won’t matter how good it is--

Rains. Most amazing rains.