FoxTales is a story telling event in it’s fourth season at the Marilyn Rodman Performing Arts Center in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Each year the organizers come up with monthly themes and have storytellers pitch ideas for a seven minute story that if selected they perform live. The audience votes on
Trying something different today. Here are three small pieces I tried and failed to flesh out into something bigger but liked too much just to leave in a drafts folder.
That undiluted dose hit me like a freight train. It slammed into me like a tsunami. That shit felt AMAZING. It felt like the euphoria of dying.
Guy got laid. Guy was never alone. Guy never got cheated on. Guy never pined away. Guy never had to hide drunken tears in a latrine shower. Guy was always smiling. He always had a girl on his arm.
...barracks ethics made her off limits and as much as Pierce disliked the machine gunner from New Jersey and liked the little dark haired girl from California he couldn't act on it. He wasn’t a Blue Falcon, he wasn’t Jody. Normally...
Turns out even twenty-two years old, three thousand miles from home, drunk in the parking lot of a foreign motel I’m not that guy.
I get it now. I understand why New Englanders flee south.
I was a redneck kid with redneck friends and it’s hard to sneak a cigarette in High School but it’s easy to sneak a dip. Shop teacher didn’t even pretend not to notice. Smokeless tobacco ruled the high school bleachers. I started, like all St Tammany Parish kids do, with Skoal Bandits
I was staring at that stack of journals, knowing I needed to write something for the first of the year and wondering if I could find some inspiration in Memaw’s words.
...doesn't receive."
He makes a circuit counter clockwise around the perimeter of the yard, checking the tree where he saw a squirrel, the rock wall where he heard a chipmunk, and under the shed where he knows the rabbits live.
We both hid a part of ourselves behind a soldier’s body armor and camo paint and when that didn’t work we retreated behind the smile of a beer drinking buddy.
memoir
After thirty years how it all ended doesn’t matter. Those missed signals, my idiot roommate, Lorrie’s unrequited crush, a strange new soldier, and the United States Army don’t mean a fucking thing...
commentary
The inevitable Graham Platner rant.
commentary
So I kept walking, on to Chinatown long enough to see street signs with golden dragons on top, then back East toward the blocks that held hundred thousand dollar watches, Ferrari’s and the AKC French Bulldog people with their hard silicon faces.
memoir
It’s a song about a man facing heartbreak who retreats to the winter woods. It’s a song about healing heartbreak on a cold morning with a Browning Auto 5. It took me back to Bienville Parish. It took me back to the first weekend in October. It sounded like my father’s voice.
commentary
...I pity them. I feel genuinely sorry for all of them with their yellow ribbon stickers and “would’ve served but” because I experienced something else during those dark days, something they will never experience for themselves.
memoir
It was little better than prison food. Three slices of cold roast turkey in between two sliced of white bread, no condiments, just a Styrofoam cup of water to wash it down and lime Jello for dessert.
memoir
For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me, that the reason I didn’t have faith was because I was bad or broken. I don’t believe that anymore, but I still don’t understand. How is it everyone I love takes comfort in religion and I find none?
commentary
When faced with unimaginable horrors some people will run, more will freeze, but a surprising number will fight. A shocking number of people will run to aid their fellow man. I’ve seen it
memoir
It was on those long drives that I talked myself into asking out a girl for the first, second, and third times and where I dealt with the crushing defeat of rejection and the low grade, lingering pain of being “just friends.”
memoir
Fishing buddies give no quarter and accept none. He ragged me endlessly. I was beginning to think he’d legitimately cursed me. I seriously considered seeing if I could find a gris gris to lift the curse.
fiction
There were plenty of bars, nightclubs, and strip joints scattered along the stretch of Louisiana Highway one seventy one that ran through Leesville, all of them designed to extract the maximum amount of money from the Fort Polk “community”.
commentary
Felt good to be joyous. Man doing something is so much better than sitting, watching, and feeling like shit isn’t it? Remember that feeling. Cherish it.