seanessay.com (under 900 words)
Falling down the rabbit hole.
prompt- Don’t eat the snow
Have you ever been to Missoula? Right on the Great Plains? Right next to Canada? Let me tell you—here in Missoula? We hate Canadians. Why? It’s too far to go to hunt or ski, but not too far for them to gift us with their dam cold weather. Every time they open their refrigerators—all at once, I’m sure—we get an arctic front… From Canada.
Sure, sometimes the winds come from east or west like trundling Buffalo, but mainly from those guys. And what else? They refuse to believe we used to have herds of buffalo. Say “bison” they tell us, the plains had bison. Really? Do you think I’m going to wear a bison skin coat, pay for it with a bison coin, or, —get this— buy bison beer? Real men don’t drink bison. And next time a Canadian tries to tell me otherwise, he’ll get buffaloed…. Somewhere up north is a Canadian moron, named Bison Bill Cody. Not the same.
We hate Canadians because when their moms are down here they talk about soccer. Soccer? Down here we play baseball, Mom, and when the winds blow we get all padded up for football. There will never be such a thing as Friday Night Soccer Lights. What a stupid name for a TV show.
Here in Montana we like our big skies and our big campuses. I don’t mean lots of students, I mean really spread out. We expect our students to be athletic, and able bodied, not like those bleeding heart Canadians with all their “disability access” and crowded buildings. How can you enjoy our prairie winds if your buildings are only two minutes apart? Those wimps.
And when was the last time you saw a Canadian campus with an ROTC? In Vancouver the campus so-called armory is their book deposit.
…
prompt- The third day
One day Clark said, “Let’s go down to the pool.” So we did. Small town. The pool was to the east of town, while the soda fountain was to the west. It made for a nice walk. “Girls,” Clark told me, “don’t bike, so we won’t either.” As a typical. boy, I liked to race around on my bike, but hey, I guess Clark was right. So we walked along in the sun.
Clark and I had that rhythm where we don’t need to talk much. Not like girls. “I think,” I said, “they like to walk along so they can talk.”
Clark smiled with my side of his mouth, “Yep, I think that’s it.”
Both of us were eying a Chevy as we walked up to it, and passed it. What made Clark different was he didn’t just look where everyone else looked. As soon as we passed the car I saw him glance at a roof with an iron rooster.
After we walked ten paces, he suddenly said, “Tin. If there was a way to paint tin, then the rooster on my roof would be tin. Painted black.” We walked ten more paces and I considered this, and then I took in the other roofs, and the sky, because I knew Clark was doing so, and I wondered what he was seeing. Sometimes I liked to sketch what I saw. How would I sketch Clark?
Just as “Clark.” I couldn’t use him as a model for superman, or a bank robber, or mad scientist, or anything. Clark would sketch out as just Clark. The skin stretched sideways across his eyes, while his freckles distracted people from seeing the fellow who was peering out. His limbs were like a puppet’s, very smooth and easy. He wasn’t fat or skinny—not like a puppet who has to be one or the other. You just knew that when we became grown ups, like the ones at the store or the plant or the dealership, that Clark would still have the same shape, and he would still be visiting his momma, and she would still be making crackers.
Clark cried, “Bearing one o’clock, girls!”
…
prompt- Groundhog day
The sun rises and sets,
My life is routine, no bets.
The days go by, and here am I,
Wondering where the groundhogs are.
,
The clutter advances like the tide,
At least I can work to have some pride,
And then my clutter departs, recedes
But under bare ground, you know there’s weeds.
Another book read, article wrote, speech made,
I deserve to sit in the shade,
as the years could become a gloomier glade.
But no, these things count, don’t let them fade,
Wondering where the groundhogs are.
,
Again the open road, again the wondrous town,
Again the joy of leaving my burdens down,
A chance to walk like an eager clown,
Wondering where the groundhogs are.
…
…
Landing with a thump as my peers smile about having five minutes in Sean’s clown life.
Sean Crawford,
sometimes at Friday Free Fall we don’t get around to including the prompt words,
In the Great White North,
July 2021
Note: ROTC stands for Reserve Officer Training Corps. High schools may have JROTC, perhaps with a shooting range in the school basement.
Another note: A local award winning writer said he could safely write a funny book with “hating Canadians” in the title because the title would show right away it was a comedy. I mean, who hates Canadians?
