The Burnt Place

By Victor J Banis

It was just a big old farmhouse that had been burned at some time in the past and never rebuilt. We moved there when I was 6, maybe 7. Eleven of us, plus mother and father. We moved there from The Streetcar. My younger brother (I was number 10) was born in The Streetcar. No, it wasn’t moving. It had been parked on an empty lot, and where the conductor once sat was a sort of stove made of bricks, that served for cooking and heating. There isn’t much room in a streetcar. Elbow to elbow, ego to ego. To stretch, you turned inward. What an enormous space the mind is.

The Burnt Place had lots of space. Outside, the fields and pastures, a creek, a barn and a spring house. Inside, charred beams. Stairs that went nowhere. Rooms without ceilings, one missing two walls. It had ghosts. We are a family of ghost-seers, believers in the intangible, dream pursuers. Book people, too, readers. Bibles and library books and borrowed books and comic books and school books. All those words. “Come play with us,” the laughing words cried, and a delighted little boy took them to his heart, splashed in the creek with them and cavorted in the woods and drowzed in the sunlit pasture, conspiring in their seduction. “There is a place, at the roof of the world,” the honeyed words whispered, “The wind at your back blows down from the high Himalayas and at your feet, in a vast, green valley lies the ancient kingdom of Chin. Come, let us take you there.”

A writer is born.

The Reluctant Muse

The Reluctant Muse by Dorien Grey

I invited my muse over this morning to talk about selecting a topic for this blog entry. Normally, I don't need his—and yes, all my muses are male—help on what to talk about, but after having headed off in various directions only to have my eyes glaze over in less than a paragraph, I decided I could use a little help.

"You got a beer?" he asked.

"Its eleven o'clock in the morning," I pointed out.

"So?"

I got him his beer.

"Now, about today's blog," I began.

"Did you watch Lost the other night?" he asked, sitting on the couch and putting his feet up on the coffee table.

"Yeah," I said. "But I wasn't thinking about a possible blog topic when I watched. What do you suggest?"

"Nothing…I just wondered if you saw it. Good show. I still think Jack and Sawyer should run off together."

"You want me to write a blog about Jack and Sawyer getting it on?"

"There are worse topics."

"Well, I'm not sure anyone would be interested in reading about my erotic fantasies."

"So what do you want to write about?" he asked.

"That's why I called on you. You're the muse."

"You don't have to do a new blog every day."

"I know, but I hate to have someone take their valuable time to come to the site and not find anything new. I'm afraid they won't come back."

He took a deep swig of his beer and started flipping through a magazine. "You worry too much," he said.

"I was thinking of maybe doing one on the pets I've had through my life."

He glanced up from the magazine and raised an eyebrow. "Oh, there's a winner. I bet it'll end up with you getting all puddle-eyed, won't it?"

"Well, I'd hope not. But it's true they all died."

"Death's a bummer," he said.

"Yes, but it's a part of life. It's part of my life. It's part of everybody's life."

"So's a good laugh. You should try for that a little more often. Or at least a grin."

"I'm not Henny Youngman," I said.

He gave me a blank look. "Who's that?" he asked.

"Forget it," I said. "The point is, I can't think of a single thing to write about for tomorrow. You're my muse! Are you going to help me out with this blog or not?"

He finished his beer, stifled a belch, tossed the magazine back on the stack with the others, and got up, heading for the door. "I just did," he said. "See 'ya."

And with that he left.

Originally posted on Dorien's Blog HERE