The first school I knew was a world apart, like other old places, and all the wood and stone kept its smell and coldness no matter how often washed. It was an old Catholic school, once a college but now served grades one through six. Too vast a space for such small students. Our wooden …
Author Archives: M.Wilson
Blog – The Warming Earth: What Is The Greenhouse Effect
When someone is explaining global warming, he might mention a pot of water on a stove, which some frogs have jumped in. Frogs, the writer asserts, don’t realize the heat is rising until it’s too late and they are boiled alive. If they’d only had the sense to jump out of the pot! We are …
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Good Wins Over Evil: The Sad Tale Of Rumplestiltskin, The Unfortunate Subcontractor
She’s a good princess from the top of her golden head to the tips of her tiny, do-gooding shoes. Everyone says so. Her company sells the best and sweetest-smelling straw you could want to bed out a horse stall with, and the crisp grasses it comes from are grown by the nicest farmers with red …
Earthy stuff
(Two attempts) 1. Farming, the way it is done almost everywhere in the U.S., requires tons of fertilizer every time a field is replanted. With every hard rain, quite a bit of that same fertilizer washes off, running into nearby waterways and polluting them. When the crop ripens, machines or hands harvest it, and later …
Cards Night
“Like taking candy from a baby,” Mrs. Tabling said, pulling a card from my hand. That hurt. I was terrible at cards, but this old lady had been making a target of me all night, despite the game changing from gin to Go Fish to whatever we were playing now. The old lady stopped smiling …
Pigs
The traffic light, like most downtown lights, was taking an eternity but I stared at it feeling certain I could will it to change if I just concentrated hard enough. It refused to budge off red, and I sighed. The buildings downtown were shimmering from the heat, reflections from windows were making my eyes hurt. …
Content Marathon No. 1, Memory from Childhood
I’ve now lived longer than my mother did, but still feel less experienced, stupider than she; somehow the stability of the past and the kind of structured life she lived seem better teachers than I had. I am old enough to remember 5-cent candy bars, 29-cents-a-gallon gasoline, and a doctor making a house call (I …
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Something Fairly Ludicrous
In the purpling afternoon, every simple bush and each plucked tree seemed to have its patch of grayish-orange underneath it like a stain spreading on the snow. Starkey stared at the hills, wondering if these shadows got their color merely from the tiredness of his eyes. The sun’s rays did not yet slant although it …
In His House At R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming
Mrs. Reese, the social worker of the hospital, a middle-aged woman with dark, reddish-black straight hair pulled tight into a chignon, shook hands peculiarly; she stuck her hand out with the wrist bent like a gooseneck, and the two sisters hesitated, not quite knowing how to grasp a hand offered so. Yvette extended her own …
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A Mouse, A Village, A Road
by M. Wilson We are building a road. We are a very small Indian village, only a couple dozen people or so, but we need this road desperately to reestablish the trade we formerly had with surrounding areas. As it is, they have forgotten us. Trade has lapsed. The dirt paths that run out of …