Chasing Wood. Chapter 1.
I would like to start with a note before the chapter. It was not my intention of writing fiction here, not per se. However, we had a great idea with Christopher Robin, Will Hull, yesnodunno, and Carlos Garbiras to collaborate on a piece of fiction. Now, I’ll bet we’ll all have different styles, and different ways of working on this type of things. I could go for a whole essay about how writing fiction makes me feel vulnerable, as it was my childhood dream to be a novelist, but, oh well, here comes the story.
Mid-June down at the lake. It comes a point when one simply forgets about the west, and the life they once had. I had to, after what happened with Amazon.
Here I am now, in a room that smells like life.
Yesterday I had that call with my brother, Al — the one that tells everyone the same story about me shitting in my pants at 6 years old at every Christmas dinner — when he told me he too, was spending a couple of days in the wild. Well, he calls it the wild. He decided to spontaneously spend the weekend in our family lodge up the mountains, one hour away from where we grew up.
Each year our parents would bring the three of us, Al, Rick and I, to the lodge to spend two weeks surrounded by nature. Unfortunately, we would spend most of the time inside, watching tv, reading magazines, and playing games. However, there would always be a weekend when Al and I would venture the woods to go visit Irma, or more accurately, to spy on her.
Irma was beautiful, in her own way, but that was not the reason why we would go and observe her. She was old, so old it did not seem like she grew any older with the passing decades, though, the memories of youth are feeble, and could very well be that as I too aged, I saw her the same. Anyway, Irma was a farmer and a baker, and we would go and watch her kneading and baking from the window, and sometimes chase her chickens around for fun.
The whole atmosphere is still present in some corner of my mind, popping out of nowhere every now and then. The smell of animals and mud, but also the smell of fresh hot bread, apple pie, cinnamon. It’s something difficult to explain, but that will forever stay connected to my memories of “growing up”.
“I wanted the girls to feel like we used to”, said my brother at some point. Like we used to… Is it even possible after so many years? Isn’t life so different, so changed by the perennial spinning of the planet, that everything is transformed; changed? Even the woods, or the air up the mountains.
It felt great, in general, being there. Being here now has this feeling of homeliness, only because it reminds me of those two weeks per year, and of growing up. Although in this wooden house, no one plays games, or reads magazines. And I don’t even want to. The childhood woods had the grandiosity of everything that seemed mysterious during childhood, which usually feels important too. A landmark.
It felt great especially when my brother and I would go and chase animals, the poor things. We used to call the rooster Spenny. While chasing him, we used to scare him too, of course. No, not by throwing things at him, or anything violent of the sort. We would very quietly — so as not to get Irma’s attention — threaten him with phrases such as “Mmh, I wonder how rooster soup tastes like!”, and “Hey, do you think the old lady would have an heart attack if she found your severed head on her bed tomorrow morning?”. To a rooster, it hardly mattered the content of our scoldings, but rather the mafia-esque tones. And he hated us for it.
As I sit now, I forget of all the problems that lead me here, this beautiful yet unfamiliar place. I think of poor Spenny, and having fun with my family. One summer, after we had our fun with him, we sat at a distance on a rock where we could see Irma from. It was far, and we thought she didn’t know we were there watching, secretly hoping for a slice of cake.
That day, something weird happened that I had almost forgotten. The sky seemed to turn dark very fast. Thinking back about it now, it could have been a storm. All of a sudden, boom. A streak of light, that did not exactly seem like a lighting, fell crashing to the ground in an explosion. Irma rushed out, and overwhelmed with concerned, she almost surely didn’t see us. Scared, Al and I jumped into a bush to make a run for the path to home, when we could hear her asking “Is anyone there? Anyone out here?”. “Oh, no! Poor baby”. Curious we looked back, through the trees. Spenny had exploded, only his head remained, still slightly fizzling on fire.
The next time I call Al, if I remember, I’ll ask him to head over to spy on Irma and give me an update. Or, who knows, if Irma is long gone, to see if the house is still there, and send me some pictures. I’ll ask him if he remembers Spenny, and then I’ll end the call before he could say “…k!, bye poopy head!”.
