Story ideas are all around. You just have to open your ears. You can find them in all manner of places, including a pub in Ireland in a town called Renvyle on the Connemara coast, a pub called Paddy Coynes, small and dark and warm, which would’ve been smoky in another era, over a pint of Guinness, naturally.
That’s where I first came up with the idea for my story, The Two Burials of Francisco Collins, recently published in Folklore Review.
I was in that pub with my cousin and his wife. We were spending the weekend in Renvyle celebrating their tenth anniversary (they were married there, not the pub but the town), and that night over that pint my cousin’s wife told me of an Irish documentary about a man in Ireland whose body was buried twice. The documentary is called Con Carey and the Twelve Apostles, and I never got around to listening to it (probably will today after I write this) but it gave me a hell of an idea for a story.
An idea that stuck. That’s what good ideas do. They stick. Often I’ll tell myself I’m going to use something I hear or see in a story, but oftentimes it doesn’t stick. This one did. The premise was simple enough, but the question I needed to confront was this: why would a person be buried twice?
For that I went to one of my neglected literary loves: magic realism. The king of that is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and truth be told I’m woefully deficient in my knowledge of magic realism, but to me it’s a close cousin of speculative fiction. It deals with events that are fantastical and improbable or impossible in our world, but totally in keeping with the fictional world in which they occur.
That’s my baseline for this story. In it, an old man recounts the true story of the events surrounding the two burials of the title character, a patriarch of a ranching family, and what led his son, Xavier to do what he did.
So the documentary gave me the idea, the genre gave me the vehicle, and for the heart of it all (every story needs a heart) I went to my own.
It’s been several years since my own father was killed in a plane crash, so I drew up my own personal experiences and feelings around his life and death, our relationship, and I funneled them into this story. Sometimes things get complicated. Sometimes people are complicated. Sometimes relationships are complicated. And truth be told it’s not always easy to reveal some personal things. But that’s my job as a writer: to put it all on the page, to leave a piece of myself behind, for the reader to see, for the world to witness.
Here’s the latest entry in the structured, timed prompts series. This one’s called Person, Place, and Thing.
The set-up: take ten minutes to write intensively about a thing, a person, and a place (that’s ten minutes for each). And then, take another ten minutes to weave all three into a story. The purpose behind this exercise is to develop descriptive skills, to learn how to really get into the language behind whatever it is you’re writing about.
Here are my results:
Thing
No one knew where this lighter came from. There were no identifying markings on it. No made in China or USA or wherever such things are fabricated. No name. Not a single word to place it somewhere in the universe. It was larger than most lighters typically are. It felt meaty, solid in your palm, like something forged for a king or a queen. Its case was gold, not pure gold but steel colored in gold, or so one assumed. On one side the image of a dragon with ruby stones for eyes, its scales raised as if it longed to break free of its metal prisons. On the other side was a heron with a slender neck and long beak that jutted out to a sharpened point. Its feathers felt light to the touch, almost. If you stroked your finger along them you might think they were real, as if a bird could be shrunk and trapped in metal. Its lone eye visible in profile was a purple gem.
The lid sat tight on its hinges, with two fingers needed to pry it up, the light wheel so finely serrated it almost felt like silk, and it glided with just a flick of your finger and sent a spark that blinked and sputtered, and then the flame, uncontrollable and ravenous and shooting up inches into the sky, so bold and cruel that if you held it too close to your face it would singe your eyebrow clean away.
Person
Molly wasn’t a crier, that’s what she always insisted but she knew in her heart it wasn’t the truth. She’d only cry alone, in her bedroom, the place where she could lock the world out, the place where she could see herself as she believed herself to be: old at 45, too old. She wore clothes that never quite fit her right: too tight in the middle or too loose in the shoulders, never hugging her hips as she believed they should, but always colors, the bolder the better, a dare to herself; she never wanted to be looked at, but she insisted she needed to get over that silly insecurity, though she never did. Hair that never fell just right, light brown that frizzed with the slightest humidity, resistant to any product, hair in a constant state of rebellion, a rebellion that the teenage Molly never dared to partake in.
She considered herself not quite pretty but not quite plain. But there was one thing she appreciated about herself—appreciated more than loved—her eyes, wide and violet, an almost unreal color, blue edging close to purple, and with those eyes she compensated for the litany of shortcomings that looped through her mind. She used her eyes to capture people. Tame them. Her eyes made friends of enemies.
She’d tell herself out loud that she could heal all those old wounds that never seemed to stay closed, that she needed to, and she’d wring her hands together until her joints burned. But even with all of this she managed to hold on to that one bit of crucial hope that despite the past, the future would be hers, her lined and unlipsticked mouth set firm with a smile.
Place
Somewhere in the distance a fire burned. Smoke not unpleasant but somehow rude, filtered through air that carried the scent of the sea. Just a few people sat out here on this beach with sand so fine-grained that it almost felt like water, sand that seemed as if it would swallow you up but not with any evil intent but with love. The water lapped the shoreline with slow rolls that emanated a hum, rhythmic like a heartbeat that pulsed along the sand and reverberated through your body. A smattering of palm trees weak and lonely edged the sand behind you, and behind them, the lights of the houses, eyes that stared at the ocean that stretched out into a black infinity. Every so often a voice would carry through the night, a woman’s shrill laugh, a man’s rough bark, these noises alien and jarring, interrupting the calm, breaking something precious. Figures moved near that distant firelight, jostling and rolling and shifting, so distracting that you’d have to blot them out from your existence and focus solely on the warm breeze and the fell of the sand and the sheen of salt that hugged your skin and the forever ocean that whispers to you that there’s so much more to this world than what’s behind you.
And the story
Truth be told Molly hated that lighter. It belonged to her grandfather, and he willed it to her thinking that he’d done her a favor but she couldn’t help see it as a curse. It was bigger than a normal lighter, gold but not real gold, weighing heavy in her hand. She did love the dragon on one side. When she was a girl she’d named him Clyde and imagined that this red-eyed beauty would break free of its metal cage and swoop out and burn everything down, everything except for her, of course. Or that the heron on the other side, with its one eye a purple so close in color to her otherworldly eyes, would fly free and carry her off to that secret kingdom where she was originally from, the one she belonged in. She’d named the heron Matilda.
Still, she hated the lighter because it was the last remnant she had from her own family but she could never get rid of it. She stared out at the ocean, so black and calm and endless. She felt the pulse of the waves as they lapped the shore in time with her own heartbeat and she wished she could stay on this moonlit beach the rest of her life, her frizzy hair be damned. The world would just have to get used to her wildness, then.
She caught the scent of the bonfire, far away but not far enough. Who were they? Those happy people laughing and shouting, moving ghoullike in the glow of the fire. She considered going up to them, luring them in, making new friends but she declined. Not this night of all nights.
It was a necessary thing, she told herself, and she would cry about it later. Perhaps. But she’d only do it alone. Not in front of anyone, not ever. She cradled the lighter in her hand and on a whim she pried open the too-stiff top and flicked the light wheel and watched the flame soar and flicker and she shone it on her bare ring finger with its band of pale flesh and she felt no sadness, no regret. She hovered the flame close to her skin, just enough to feel the heat but she had no intention of hurting herself. She vowed she wouldn’t do that to herself, ever. She was single, once again, as she always should have been, perhaps. She closed the lighter’s lid and let the moonlight coat her and she stared out into the black sea that promised her some new forever.
Read by Kevin 