I thought I would post a portion of the newest thing I have to do for creative writing class.  The assignment was "a piece in a (traditionally) non-literary form."  And, given our reading for the week, one of those forms is the epistolary -- despite the long tradition of false letters in literature. 

So, then, "Correspondence between Howard Fullbright, Archaeologist, and Alwilda Smith-Peters"

522 Cozen Square
Ridgewood, Massachusetts

7 March, 2006


Dear Alwilda,

I hope you are doing well, and that your sister hasn't locked herself out of the house recently.  I received your last letter this morning, and now sit under a window, which tapers to a point about three inches across at the bottom, with the last moments of day dying in the sky through it.  The weather has been terrible, which is no surprise, this far north.  Trees are just beginning to grow their leaf-coats, and the flowers are still gleams in their seeds' eyes.  Mostly it rains, and I suppose it's good for the plants, but I've grown to hate my macintosh, as I'm bundled it in almost every other day as we range the woods. 

Good luck recovering from your injury, by the way.  I never did learn to ride a bicycle, and I don't feel I've missed much.  I'm sure you don't agree, of course.  You've always waxed poetic, if I may say so, about the speed, wind, and freedom of near-flight you get with the cycling, and it's lovely to hear you speak of such things, and lovelier to watch your face color, then rise like bread as you recreate the sensations in your mind.  I have felt something similar these past weeks, leaning against the wind that swoops across the hills.  Often I feel a drunken silence in the glens and saddles, only to be struck again by the wind when I top a peak – it carries traces of phlox and columbine, and did even early last month.  It's encouraging, and the force of the hill-wind reminds me of you and your rushes down hills on your thin-beamed blue bicycle.

Charles D. continues to be rather rough-fisted, as I said last time.  He insists all the boys call him Mister Ward, and, frankly, I'm surprised he allows me to call him more familiarly.  An odd man, to be sure, but quite cut out for the sort of work we're in for up here.  He has a trunk filled with maps, and all of the New England woodlands and coasts; I don't mean a sort of valise, but a large steamer trunk, which fills his cabin with maple and cold iron smells. 

How is Jeremy Coldiron, by the way?  Did he win the election for sheriff?  There's a fellow here named Holiness Coldiron.  He told me, after much pressing, that a few of his family moved “south” (all he's willing to divulge, I'm afraid) two or three generations ago, to avoid “besmirching” (his word, not mine) the family honor.  That is the whole of what he will tell me regarding his family, but he is quite vocal about the expedition.  Every morning he comes by.  First he knocks on the door, peers in when it's opened, and says, “Have ye lost anyone yet?”  From underneath his stiff brown hat, rather like those the pilgrims in the portraits always wore, it seems very comic at first, but as the weeks have gone on it has grown disconcerting.  I never fail to shudder when I see that hat scuttle over a hill's rise, Holiness following after.  He appears sometimes at dusk, sometimes at noon.  Yesterday, for example, he stamped through a pool of last year's dead leaves, sending the taste of rotten maple and birch through the air, and asked me, “So where's ye damnable guide, Bookman?”  This is all he will ever call me, so I paid no attention to his odd “ye” and rather insulting reference to Charles, and pointed him to a disappointing cave the others hadn't given up on just yet.

The day has failed at last, Ra or Lugh slain again, as your fables would have it.  The locals call it “the Devil's racket,” and certainly the trees do rustle and creak here at sunset as I have heard them do nowhere else.  Every night for a week Davis has been dreaming horrors.  At least, from his shouts and rank sweats it seems that way.  He jostles and jitters when the sun sets now, thinking of what awaits him in bed, I suppose.  I've had a few odd nightmares myself, actually, but nothing to get so worked up about.  A few tentacled figures, covered in seaweed, and the odd mountain man turned cannibal chasing me with a hatchet.  Davis has just come through the door, in fact, and his trouser cuffs are wobbling – that's how hard he's shaking.  Perhaps the warm soup will help.  I should have some myself.



Any thoughts?  Some of you might notice an allusion there, hidden in the suspiciously-banal.