I hope you all got to see the fine lunar eclipse the other night. Usually whenever something like this occurs, or a meteor shower, the skies are hazy or clouded over down here on the Gulf. But this time, it was PERFECT! Clear and cool, just a whisp of cloud, and the full moon rising over the bayou, then to be slowly blocked out by shadow. I wanted to sacrafice a virgin, but then this IS the bayou country after all.

So I started a little story instead. I have no idea where it's going to take me (like that's a surprize, huh?), but it just seemed the right time. But, and I know you're gonna sigh with relief at this, I'm only going to post this little first part. I'm still trying to sell some of my longer stories, and maybe this will turn out to be marketable. I just sent off one story to the literary journal of Emerson College in Boston. It's alled "Ploughshares". They print stories and poetry from nobodies like me.

Anyway, here's the first part of this one:

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ECLIPSE

We sat out in the stillness of the night and watched the moon disappear. The shadow eased across it’s perfect silver disc until nothing more than a faint glow remained where the goddess had smiled just an hour before. That’s when I remembered the Louisa Jane, and the night she foundered on the reef, spilling her guts into the sea and drowning the men who had eaten and slept and laughed in the recesses of her fragrant body.

It had been calm that day, like when the heavy yellow air lingers in your lungs before one of the big tropical storms that rush up through the islands to gnaw away the mangroves and the roots of marsh grasses. Isaac had walked out on the deck a dozen times since his watch began. Too hot to be still, he paced and sweated until great dark patches spread from under the arms of the threadbare undershirt he wore above his ancient and heavy dungarees. Each time, he held a gnarled hand above his eyes and looked to the far horizon, searching for the wind as if it were a tangible thing which could be seen, be weighed and cataloged on a page of the ragged journal kept in the single drawer of the capitan’s desk.

They were six days out of Portland, and already late for their berth beside the fruit-scented warehouses of Galveston, when the wind was sucked up into a sky the color of smoke from the smelters he had known as a boy, living in the shadow of London. Even as he peered at the wasted line of the southern horizon, his nostrils flared in anticipation of the smell of sulphur, so strong was the impulse of memory brought on by the dirty smudge of sky which enveloped them. A memory he tried to avoid; the pathways of his childhood were not a place to which he wished to return.

-- Lon (lgal@exp.net), October 29, 2004

Answers

Oh Lon that was a beautiful description of the lunar eclipse. It pleases me so much when someone has taken the time to look up and appreciate the night sky.

Your story is interesting already. What do you mean you are only going to post this little first part???

-- Carol (c@oz.com), October 29, 2004.

It means he's gonna make us send him money for th'rest of it, that's what it means!

-- helen (mule@counts.his.pocket.change), November 01, 2004.

Lol Helen. I'll bet A.B. could buy him out with fudge.

-- Carol (c@oz.com), November 03, 2004.

I dunno, Carol, he's been being good 'cause of his diabetes and all (well, except for the Dots - but they don't count as sugar calories do they?). She might have to pull out the big guns and make her diabetic friendly version (with pecans *and* walnuts) ;-)

-- Tricia the Canuck (jayles@telusplanet.net), November 08, 2004.