87° 43″N

Fiction Prompts, Historical Fiction, What Pegman Saw8 Comments35 views


May 11, 1926

09:00
The Norge’s keel resembles a warehouse as we ascend, piled with sleds and skis, tents and snowshoes. We lack only the dogs to make ourselves an Eskimo village.

0930
Byrd’s cursed Fokker gallingly flew alongside us for a quarter-hour this morning, as though to say to Amundsen “no matter what you do today, you shall not be first.” I expected this to set off more wrangling between the leaders, but they abstained.

10:00
I am ever fascinated watching the Norge‘s shadow gliding over the frozen tundra.

10:30
A chilling fog has closed in, glazing the airship with ice. Nobile has taken us above the cloud. Bitter cold.

10:55
Ellsworth and Amundsen were silent as we passed over 87° 43″N where just last year they were forced to abandon their attempt, nearly dying in the process.

11:40
A doom-like pall pervades the cabin. I pray we overcome it.

14:30
One of the port motors has stalled.

 

What Pegman Saw

 

Note:
I have been reading about the hyper-competitive egomaniacal polar exploration that took place in the first part of the twentieth century. Many well-heeled adventurers sought to claim discovery of the North Pole, but this was hard to accomplish and easy to dispute. Peary laid claim to it first, but this was hotly argued for a decade. When air travel became more reliable, Byrd flew a tri-motor Fokker airplane over what he claimed was the definitive pole. The next day, famed South Pole explorer Roald Amundsen set out in an Italian dirigible to drop Norwegian and American flags on the spot. It turned out that this was the easy part  of the journey. The subsequent decision to fly to Nome almost cost the party their lives.

Leopard Circus

Daily Prompt, Poetry1 Comment41 views

The tiger is  a leopard

with painted stripes

applied while he sleeps

he never wonders

about these new markings

so like the shadows

of the bars of his cage

where keepers feed him

more than he can ever eat,

the stench of the rotting carrion

assumed to come from him

When told the tricks a tiger must do

he does not think the Tiger Tamer

is talking about him

for he is a leopard

and everyone knows  the leopard

cannot change his spots

The Daily Post

Seventeen Cents

Fiction Prompts, Friday Fictioneers16 Comments62 views

“Ten seventeen,” says the lady. She’s real old, maybe too old to be working.

“The sign said the hats were ten bucks.”

“That’s right, and with tax it’s ten seventeen.”

“Ten is all I have,” I say, looking at the pile of torn singles and dirty change on the counter. “Plus, I’m already wearing the hat.”
She smiles without using her eyes. “I see that. But it’s still ten seventeen with tax.”

That look. Like I’m trash. That makes me lose it.

Next thing I know, she’s down bleeding and I’m pulling bills from the register, running out the door.

 

Friday Fictioneers

Thirteen Gone Missing

Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw11 Comments48 views

The FBI ASAC’s office walls were plastered floor to ceiling with maps of the various open serial murder cases scattered across the country. As the local law liaison, only one of them interested me, the map of central Iowa that had most red circles of any in the room, ten. Ten of the thirteen gone missing.

He got up and we shook hands. He offered me coffee, which I accepted.  It was like one of those nature documentaries you see on public television where the bull elk circle each other before getting down the serious business of locking horns.

He was about to bring up the Iowa Hawkeyes playing in the Rose Bowl next week, but I cut him off by walking over and tapping the map. “All this is frozen  now. We expect to find the other three girls, but we can’t dig for them until March or maybe April.”

 

What Pegman Saw

The Malevolence of Everyday Objects

Daily Prompt, Fiction Prompts, Poetry2 Comments40 views

It starts when you ascend the stairs,
drop your keys square on your foot
kick out and send them rattle-clang smack
down the three flights
your arms full of groceries, you lose it

as the bottom of the sack
packed by that lazy pit-faced troglodyte
at the Shop-n-Sav gives way
when the freezer spinach plastic
slick with condensation soaks the corners soggy

lurches from your arms, heavy black bean cans
he stupidly set  atop the bags of frozen stuff
tumble and roll goddamn it and you
went to all the trouble to sort that shit

on the conveyor belt to save time
and every fucking red light in the world
and the AC doesn’t get cold until
you pull up in front of your building and fucking great

the goddamned fucking box of spaghetti
you almost didn’t buy since gluten
goddamn spills out fuck fuck fuck
joins the cans and the keys on a nice trip downstairs
God must fucking hate you fuck fuck fuck

the eggs, of course
are fine. Some kind of lesson, God.
Thanks for that. The flour. on the other hand
drifts in powdered mockery, whiteface
bags of chips, blood, shit, drop your guts like a slit hog right
there in the fucking stairwell

sending you a goddamned message

burn down this joke of a life, it says
one thing and another
all roads lead to Rome

because the Goddamned Romans built the roads

Follow the keys and the cans and goddamn

 

The Daily Post: Ascend

Two Upon Four of Us

Fiction Prompts, Friday Fictioneers25 Comments85 views

Two upon four of us
Thank God there aren’t more of us

You never escape our kind of poverty, not fully. Nowadays I overhear a woman on the way to the chip stand say she’s starving, see how her bum spills out of her waistband, remembering all them winter days walking to school with my fist bunched into my belly, trying  to fool myself into believing there was something in it aside from the hunger that carved me hollow, made my cold bones ache all day, clots of hair in my comb and gaps where second teeth never came in.

 

Friday Fictioneers

There Will Be No Peace Without Canada

Fiction Prompts11 Comments30 views

Adams slouched in an elbow chair,  snoring softly. Jay set down his pen. He sprinkled the wet ink with sand, blew it off in cloud that also extinguished his candle. He held up the document.

“Mr. Adams,” he said. “I’ve finished.”

Adams started up, blinking. “The proposal? Excellent.” He stood and stretched, not much taller standing than seated. “Let us show it to Franklin.”

“Where might he be?”

“I’ve an idea. Come.”

Jay followed Adams through the gilt halls of the palace and out into the blinding sunshine of the gardens. The familiar rumpled figure of Franklin was seated next to the fountain, his gouty foot raised on a bench. Adams strode over, the paper in hand.

“This is it, then?” said Franklin.

Adams nodded.

Franklin took it and read. “But you’ve left out Canada.” Franklin’s tired eyes blazed with anger. “There will be no peace without they give us Canada.”

 

What Pegman Saw

The Peace of Paris was signed at the Palace of Versailles on September 3rd, 1783  by representatives of King George III and representatives of the United States of America. It formally ended the American Revolutionary War.
Negotiating for the new United States were John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin. The initial talks began in April, but John Jay realized he could get a better deal for his country by negotiating directly with the British (who rightly saw the former colonies as a valuable trading partner).
Franklin pressed for the annexation of Canada, but was persuaded to settle for all of the area east of the Mississippi River, north of Florida, and south of Canada. The United States also gained fishing rights off Canadian coasts in exchange for allowing British merchants and Loyalists to try to recover property seized during the war.
Not bad for their first treaty.

Inner Man

Fiction Prompts, Friday Fictioneers17 Comments50 views

Since my seventieth birthday I have assiduously avoided mirrors. I find it is better for me not to remind myself of my appearance, for it belies my inner man.

This is not to say that I have the boundless vigor and flexibility of youth, but I certainly feel better than the shrunken visage of sparse white hair and sagging skin my barber tries to show me.

But what of the myriad youthful ambitions that shaped me and drove my life? Let me say that a swimmer who has safely reached the shore doesn’t pine for the struggle of nearly drowning.

 

Friday Fictioneers

私を忘れないでください

Fiction Prompts, What Pegman Saw13 Comments62 views

When Tamura Takashi was growing up, his grandmother told stories of the terrible night American bombers turned the sacred city of Nagoya into a lake of fire.

“The next morning was so odd,” she said. “There was nothing left. No buildings, no trees, no people. Only miles of ashes as far as the eye could see.”

Takashi felt lucky to be born in a time when Japan was at peace with the world and such things belonged in the history books.

But when he exited the train at the Shinchi station as he had many times before, he had the same odd feeling his grandmother described. There was nothing left of the resort where his girlfriend had worked for two years. No shops, no trees, no buildings.

Her cellphone had been found a mile inland containing a final text he had never received: So much tsunami. Do not forget me.

 

What Pegman Saw

 

On Friday, March 11, 2011, the  9.0 ōhoku Earthquake off the coast  of Japan created a tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people. Many of the survivors never found out what happened to their loved ones.

 

 

Gone Like a Train

Daily Prompt, Poetry2 Comments40 views

Soft words about how she’s waiting
only made it worse. As though her going
never counted for shit
as though it was only a step in a direction.

Why’d they say that I want to know
the part about her waiting was just to get me
to stop crying, but I think about it now all the time
picture her sitting in some station watching the door

 

 

The Daily Post: Serene