But in light of that impulse to cut things up and sew them back together in a pleasing form, today's writing prompt takes some random words and puts them into a story pattern:

Random words: relation, requirement, region, role, reaction, revolution, ratio.
The pattern:  (character+needs+action)

Story 1
Everything looked tiny from the sky that time of day. The ratio of tree to shadow all out of proportion, as if the shadow had overthrown its role. She felt the idea take hold, that a revolution was rolling across the surface of the world. That long, branching shadow was just then throwing a tree into existence against the burning disk of sun.

The crackling of her headset recalled her to the reality of the chopper, the dry air and the dust, the possibility of light glinting off something lethal on the ground below her.  

"Barnett! Two clicks!" 

She nodded and took a deep, steadying breath. Without consulting the laminated instruction sheet clipped to the seat-back, she ticked off the safety requirements again. She snugged the buckles, threaded gloved fingers along the straps. This time, she swung her legs to the side and let her boots meet the skids. 

"Barnett, I am counting in four, three, two ––" the horizon took a quarter turn, and she punched the release on her seatbelt. Gravity loaded as the chopper rose away from her. The chute deployed, and she bounced lightly in the harness in the middle of the air.

The toggles felt like reins, she thought, and the wing was like a horse racing downhill. Shit, she was flaking out. She was a target waiting to sighted. With an effort, she lined up a particular tan formation of rock with its own long shadow and urged the horses to gallop. 

The gritty sand rose to meet her, and she landed running. Hustling the wing into the pack, she didn't spare a moment looking into the hills. She trotted up the narrow ravine for fifteen minutes, the only sound her boots and her own pulse like a snare drum in her ears.



Whoa. That's a surprise. Sometimes the scraps turn themselves into something unexpected.

​I wonder if it's Afghanistan or Mars. Why is she solo? I may return to this one day, and I thank you for joining me in my rhetorical calisthenics. 

Imagination is like the common cold virus: it's always there, lurking, waiting for the chance to nip in and take the wheel. There's no sure cure, though you can treat the symptoms. Medical advice says let it run its course. 

Today's fiction prompt: a photo I took on a fishing trip to Wyoming.

Rudolph was no fiberglass elk, bugling soundlessly on the street of Thermopolis.
He was neither the victim of a fierce electrical taping nor did he lose an ear during a wrestling match with a drunk guy.
He did not lift his rack of fiberglass antlers into the wide Wyoming sky in an effort to voice his pain.
He did not wear a saddle-pad of twinkling holiday lights. 
He did not sport a compact fluorescent bulb painted red at the distal point of his noggin.

They might have let Rudolph join in any reindeer games, but little matter.
Was he like Bartleby before him, preferring not?
Or like Robert Cratchit, beetling away for the chance of a day's liberty?
Or Balthazar, with the insight to know what lay ahead?
Or maybe, inert as can be, he is like the Yule log, waiting for the dark to yield to light and then celebrate another year beginning.

​Hope your season is bright. 

We started the Devil's Garden trail at 6:30 perhaps –– the sun was up, but the shadows were long when we left the paved trail at Landscape Arch. 
​
​Bonus travel tip:  Even in the busiest and most popular national parks, we found that by hiking a few hundred yards down nearly any trail*, we could leave most of the seething mass of vacationing humanity behind.

Sad truth: few tourists do more than meander to overlook, snap a photo, and then roar off in an air-conditioned car.

Edward Abbey was right: "What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener."
​Desert Solitaire p 290.

*Exception to the trail rule? The Narrows at Zion. It was kind of the only game in town after the landslides of 2018  (aside from scaling bare rock faces). That hike –– a wet, awe-inspiring meander up the slot canyon –– did fill up considerably come lunchtime. Early morning or off-season recommended.

So, back to the dusty devilly trail.  

Devil's Garden trail is nearly 8 miles there-and-back again. A good scramble up red sandstone rocks, along ledges, through dusty piñon pine groves.  We ran into families of deer –– the females showing ribs and the fawns leggy and curious –– a couple of parties of human hikers, lizards of various stripe, intriguing tracks in the sand, and the odd path marker.

​Some markers odder than others. To a certain sort of thinker, this is an ambiguous sign:

I read it first as a series of nouns: road + leaf + laundry.

Clearly wrong.

A series of verbs: follows + goes + cleans.

Er, nope. Because, you know, why? But interesting. Return to this thought later, I told myself, tucking the camera back into my pocket.

I stopped for a sip of water a hundred or two hundreds yards later. The words transposed themselves: Trail Wash Leaves.

That seemed nearly probable: maybe the trail had a new name. The National Park people seem to engineer their signage so that visitors can have a more genuine park experience, complete with navigational anxiety and an understanding that maps are imperfect representations of the truth.

Maybe. But probably not.

The pieces fitted together a half mile or more later: Alert, hikers: your trail, which has followed the path of this dried stream-bed –– known locally as a wash or a gulch –– is about to diverge from the stream-bed.

Oh. That. 

Huh.

For the rest of the walk, series of words started presenting themselves. Triangular structures, each side a simple word that goes both ways: One can trail one's hand on the trail. One can leave the leaves behind, one can wash the wash.

Stone Ride Ice.
Rein Plant Saddle
Mount Slide Hollow.
Chant Riddle Stop.

Then we arrived back at the start of the trail.

And in the blink of an eye, we were addressing ourselves to pizza and cold beverages and a bookstore on the funky little main drag of Moab.

Speculative fiction (what some longtime readers might think of as "SciFi") can be described as the fiction of ideas.

​Even more than other fiction, SF often examines the consequences of one idea across a whole society.  For instance, what if robots became so beautifully built that they could pass for human? What if you could outsource your own memories? What if Hitler had won the war?*

So with SF on my mind, today's writing warm-up exercise:

Story 1
The eclipse was less dramatic than she'd expected. Not that she was in the cone of totality, but still, she'd never witnessed a solar eclipse before. Never mind a double.
Still, she'd taken the afternoon off, and though the cheap protective glasses had broken –– she'd forgotten them in the seat of her vehicle and then sat on the damn things when she'd slid into the seat in the cool darkness of the parking bay.
Still there it was: her first double-lunar eclipse. She watched two penumbral cones shaving the sun into a puny lozenge of light. An unseasonable breeze sprang up. She shivered and wished there was someone next to her. She hadn't considered herself in any way sentimental, but she longed now for something communal, a human companion.
The sight of the sun, even as small and cold as it was from this distance, turning just that much smaller and colder –– well, she felt for a moment that she understood primitive superstition.
And then, as quick as the remembered snap of a plastic tiddley-wink, the moons parted and the sun shone round and bright again. 

Story 2
He kept watch on the mirror-calm surface of the water, barely breathing.
He was comfortable –– or anyway about as as comfortable as anyone zipped into a breather suit and strapped bodily against the pot-bellied ventral surface of a drone hopper could expect to be. He refused to consider the blurring of the features of shore, blocked out thoughts of the hopper's speed (only a quarter-sonic, almost survivable without the suit), kept his attention on the glassy reflection of the sky.

The handful of beta-blockers he'd swallowed at the start of his shift was working to keep his blood-pressure low. He shrugged his shoulders against the petal-soft lining of the suit. He stretched the webbing between first his left and then his right hand.

Eyes open, he told himself. He was going to need to be very quick and very lucky or he was going to end up very dead. And he wouldn't be the only one. 

The third time, I realized quoting the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English was a painful dating stratagem of people in my chosen field of study. The idea being, perhaps, to stupefy and render the object unconscious.  

Still, April is a time when folk DO long to hit the road.

Springtime itchy feet.

​Questing for sunny beaches or the last few downhill runs, going for the peak cherry blossoms or those first bulbs poking heads out of the mud. 

Each trip worth a Tale.

P-p-pa-poetry? Here, this won'd hurt much:

The Caterpillar by Ogden Nash
​
I find among the poems of Schiller
No mention of the caterpillar
Nor can I find one anywhere
In Petrarch or in Baudelaire
So here I sit in extra session
To give my personal impression.
The caterpillar, as it's called,
Is often hairy, seldom bald;
It looks as if it never shaves;
When it walks, it walks in waves.
And from the cradle to the chrysalis
It's utterly speechless, songless, whistless. 
​

Writing is not exactly like playing professional football, but sometimes it feels like it.

Stretching and warming up.
The tackles and the ice-baths and the bruises.
The snail's pace forward.
That.bossy guy in stripes on the sideline demonstrating –– incorrectly, as it turns out –– how to perform the hokey-pokey.  

But fer reals, like any would-be linebacker, a writer has to practice and run drills. Here's my own little practice session. Omaha! Omaha Seventy-Eight! Set! Hut! 

Story 1
He woke to the familiar cathedral space of the pavilion. He smelled frost in the air and made a careful effort to roll in place on the cardboard, not wanting to let cold air into his sleeping bag. 
     If he waited maybe half an hour, there would be bitter coffee to warm his hands and burn his mouth. But if he waited too long, someone would hustle him along and there would be no coffee at all. Perhaps it was time already. He braced himself and then slid himself from of the cocoon of warmth, keeping his sock feet on the Ollie-Ollie-Oxenfree safety of his little bivouac. He stretched, feeling the crackle of his joints and an unpleasant stretching of his skin.
     He was not old –– no one would call him old –– but life on the road had weathered him. Only a few silver threads showed in matted hair, but chalky patches of callus punctuated his corners, showing like mushrooms at his elbows and knees. 

Story 2
In semiphore, the universe was telling him to cash in his bonds, sell his Persian rugs, set the birds free, and dispense with personal hygiene.
     Things were happening. An electric crackle at the edge of his hearing and the way the flags snapped in syncopation? It was all coming clear. They were directives, acronyms spelled out in flags, commands that he could not ignore. 
     He'd been waiting, he realized now, for his whole life for this. He found himself holding his breath, counting steps, feverishly translating phrases into Latin and then Spanish and then back into English. The sense of impending moment, like a cresting wave arrested briefly by the shutter of a camera, arched above him. The heavy perfume of orange blossom intoxicated him with sweetness.
     He woke to the familiar cathedral space of the pavilion. He smelled frost in the air and made a careful effort to roll in place on the cardboard, not wanting to let cold air into his sleeping bag.

  

So. Much. Happening in this photo.

All to the good: Let it be fodder for the imagination.

Story1
Absenthe, she tended to remind herself, does not make the heart grow fonder.

Her thoughts slid, like the needle finding its vinyl groove, to her long-ago college adventures, already three generations too late to know about the real Absenthe. A young dreamer 80 after the green fairy flitted through fin-de-ciecle Paris. In French, la fée verte, the fairy who inspired and drove artists mad. But maybe that was just the wormwood talking.  

She knew the flavor –– anise, of course, always licorice –– and she knew how the emerald-green liquor clouded into the color of a mint milkshake when mixed with water.  

"Give a chap a drink," they used to call across open space to one another, college kids with a yearning for Hemingway's sort of possibilities.

"Isn't it pretty to think so," was the correct response. A bit of self-conscious whimsy. A pose. Ersatz nostalgia with a wink.   

They usually ended up with beer. It was cheaper and plentiful, and it was only much later that anyone laid hands on the heavy glass bottle that held a genuine green fairy.

But they were just college kids afternoon-drinking then, hoisting glass mugs of yellow beer, waxing gently ironic about their dreams.

She shook her head as she trudged along, and then caught the eye of a young person –– boy? girl? not that it mattered, a slim figure dressed entirely in black who probably thought she was a crazy old bat. Far ridere il polli.

She felt her shoulders rise in an exaggerated shrug and quickly added a neck roll to make herself look less ridiculous.  Wormwood, she had been thinking, artemisia absenthium, a medicinal bitter herb.

Stopping to catch her breath and shift the shopping bag from left to right, she considered the plant. Silvery leaves dried like sage, with the scent –– what else? –– mildly licorice-scented.  If she remembered her Culpeper's Complete Herbal (circa 1653), and she did, "This herb is good for something, for God made nothing in vain."  

She expelled the irony in one sharp exhale: "Or anyway, Isn't it pretty to think so?"

He probably needed to warm up before tortoising. Today's writing prompt comes all the way from the Galápagos.

Pranayama

He tried to still his thoughts.

Circular breathing.  He counted in with the breath: one-belly, two-ribs, three-shoulders. He attempted to send his breath into the interstitial area, wherever that was––!  And then out again: shoulders-one, ribs-two, three-belly. And pause.

He was happy to pause. He could out-pause anyone. Not that it was a competition.

The instructor went on, and he decided to keep pausing. He'd hold still, he figured, and then nip back in next time.

Like Arlo Guthrie, he'd just wait for the chorus to come around again. Circular breathing was frustrating and difficult, but the practice was only forty minutes out of a day.

Ah, there it was: Inhale. He did, trying to make the breath open first his belly, then ribs, and finally, shoulders. Or what would be shoulders, had he any. Ribs? His ribs were fused into carapace, and everyone knew a carapace didn't –– shouldn't!–– flex. And what chance did his belly have against the dusty plastron? He lived inside a shell corset, and he might just as soon ask his breath to give him wings.

He recognized the monkey-brain resistance and focused on the air moving through his sinuses. He sipped the air in and ahhed the breath out. His eyes closed. In. Out. In.

The class finished and the day turned into night before he opened his bleary eyes again. The night was absolute, fog blotting out the yellow streetlights and the stars alike. Damn, he thought. How long was I out? I wonder what year it is.

My editorial life is about helping people tell their stories.  Helping them say what they are trying to say.  

The goal is to make the projects better, more useful, and pleasant for the wider world of readers.

Sometimes the job resembles therapy. 

One writer might need a hand to get past things that make him fearful or full of doubt. Another might require a subtle check on the runaway train that is her imagination.

I'm torn. On the one hand, face-palm. Verbiage like this an affirmation for why there is a profession like mine.

​On the other hand, gently massaging my forehead, I am just grateful that this didn't happen on my watch.