SAWDUST, or THE LAST FEW DAYS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Sam stopped the cart at the back door of the sawmill and nodded off for a few minutes until the foreman arrived in the early dawn.
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José’s father and uncle were murdered by the military when José was 17. One morning when they were going to the fields to milk the cows, the military was there, and told José’s older brother not to follow his father and uncle to the fields. José and his brother heard 2 shots. The town drunk was paid a few pesos to bury them. No one ever believed him when he said he’d done that.
The father had no particular political beliefs but the uncle had been more sympathetic to the guerrillas.
José’s grandfather, as a fairly prosperous landowner, had always straddled the political fence but he didn’t like President Duarte.
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The President really is some kind of dope, isn’t he?
Which President?
Good point.
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José’s grandfather had inherited a house built in 1820. Or perhaps it was a house built in 1918. José was never very clear about that.
When José was 11 and his sister a little older, they went to visit his grandparents and then just stayed there. José doesn’t remember why. José told me that his grandfather was fairly authoritarian at the time but was nice to José when he wanted to leave.
José’s grandmother, who was a bit crazy, used to stash money in the attic, and apparently no one knew about it, not even the grandfather, but one day José found the key to the attic and found the money. He felt he couldn’t tell anyone and just put the money back.
After José’s father and uncle were murdered, his grandfather went to San Salvador, then Honduras and then Mexico. It was many years before he felt he could return to El Salvador.
For a while, various of the grandfather’s children (12 of them) lived at the old house. José thought they went there to look for the money.
When José told me this, he said he thought it sounded like a Gabriel García Márquez novel.
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I’m trying to read that novel by that up and coming wizard of words, but I keep getting slowed down by her use of 4 dots. An ellipsis has 3, not 4. How does she not know that, let alone her editor and proofreader? So I gave up reading that novel and went back to Raymond Chandler, despite his unfortunate use of the N-word. I guess he didn’t know any better.
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A while back, I had a short story published called “The Last Few Days Of Ernest Hemingway”. It had, of course, little to do with Hemingway, especially considering that there’s very little evidence about what happened during his last few days.
The film-maker Robert Altman was once asked about his lack of direct narrative and his characters talking over each other in his films. Altman said that he thought it was more naturalistic that way but, more importantly, that when someone leaves a movie or finishes reading a novel or short story or looking at a piece of art, what one is left with is not the piece itself but just an impression of the art. And that makes sense to me, not only in art, but in life. Remember that trip you took to Venice? You don’t remember a lot of details, you have an impression of your visit.
The point of the title of my story was that it grabs someone’s attention, either an editor or a reader, and the story posits the idea that any art can be deliberately superficial and still work because it creates an impression. And the fact that the story was published proved my point. I think...
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“I understand that the point is that regular people when naked don’t look anything like ripped movie stars. But that doesn’t mean I should have to keep seeing really obese people naked, does it? I mean, really...”
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I wonder if Hemingway, or Chandler, for that matter, ever wrote when they were naked. I’ll bet Gabriel García Márquez sometimes did.
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So, you’re a writer of fiction?
Among other things. I write music, poetry, screenplays, plays—
Aha! Plays. So that’s why you write so much dialogue.
No, not really. I write dialogue in fiction when I need to write that as opposed to, what would you call it, description.
But you use dialogue a lot.
Well, yes, when necessary.
And then I saw what he meant. Everything so far was dialogue except for this last paragraph.
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The foreman arrived, Sam got out of his cart, and they acknowledged each other. The foreman unlocked the door to the mill, and they both went inside. Sam picked up a broom and the foreman went to his office.
Sam began to sweep up the sawdust and put it into his leather bag. The foreman came back to Sam and handed him an envelope with money in it. He smiled at Sam. “Pretty good deal, eh, Sam?”
“Sure is, Mr. Wilson,” said Sam, and went back to sweeping.
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Early in 1981, the military came to José’s town and told everyone to leave in 72 hours. Some people didn’t go because they thought the military was just trying to scare them.
The town was bombed on January 29 and completely destroyed. José remembers that distinctly as that was the birthday of his twin sisters. “Hey, kids! Look at the fireworks display we’ve put on for you!” All that was left of José’s grandfather’s house were the kitchen tiles.
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Two alien spacecraft visited Earth on their way home from looking at a comet in the vicinity of Rigel.
The pilot of the first craft was very diligent and arrived above Montréal at the specified time. He reported back to his superiors that Earthlings appeared to not do very much. Although there were some Earthlings walking around the street, doing various things, the vast majority were lying down, in an apparently unconscious state. His conclusion was that Earthlings weren’t particularly interesting.
The pilot of the second craft, being some kind of an irresponsible slacker, arrived several hours later, and reported back that Earthlings were a very busy group of animals, performing numerous different tasks, communicating, creating, and procreating.
The superiors were mystified by these conflicting reports, and sent another spacecraft to Earth, which confirmed, by searching many other settlements along the same longitude as Montréal, that the second pilot was correct, and the first one incorrect. The first pilot was dismissed from the job.
The point of this anecdote, I suppose, is that sometimes it pays to be late.
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Following this episode, another group of aliens visited Earth. They knew that it was also called Terra, which was only a slightly better name than Earth, and actually neither really applied since the surface was 70% water and so the place should have been called Ocean or Water.
One of the aliens got separated from his group, and decided to land as he was getting claustrophobic and needed a fresh supply of oxygen.
He went to a bar (in Montréal, coincidentally), had a beer, and talked to the bartender. He asked where he could get oxygen.
The bartender chuckled and said, “Just breathe in, my friend. The air is full of it.”
So the alien breathed in and, because his lungs were well-formed, he took in about 99% of the world’s oxygen in a single breath.
This was a problem.
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Later, Earth being severely de-populated, leaving sixteen people on the planet, the remnants of the human race had a meeting, but it didn’t make any difference because the few who believed in democracy were definitely not pleased with the rest of them.
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The President of the U.S.A. has the nuclear codes but there are two keys needed to actually set off a nuclear weapon, and the President has only one of them. The other key is held by a trusted military man. The two locks to unlock the nuclear weapon are far enough away from each other that one man is unable to unlock the two of them at the same time. This seemed like a reasonable compromise in order to prevent some lunatic from setting off nuclear weapons. However, the President knocked the military officer out with a blow to the head from a sledgehammer and stole the other key. He spent the rest of his term trying to stretch himself to be able to reach the other lock.
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I know a guy (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) who has always paid for everything in cash. I once asked him about this, and he said he preferred to do it that way. I pointed out that if he used a credit card, he would get bonus points for various things, but he didn’t want to do that. He said he didn’t want to be tracked by the credit card company. I said that if he takes money out of a bank machine with a bank card, he could get tracked by that. I don’t remember what his response was; I don’t think he had one. I started to wonder if he had to use cash; perhaps he’d done some deal that was under the table or illegal, and he had all this cash.
One night I had a few drinks with his daughter, and she was getting a little tipsy so I asked her, “So, is your dad almost through all that dirty money?”
She looked at me. “How did you know about that?”
I answered, “I didn’t until right now.”
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Sam carried his leather bag of sawdust over his shoulder, and went into the butcher shop. “Good morning, Mr. Burgess,” he said.
“Mornin’, Sam,” replied the butcher.
Sam sprinkled the sawdust on the shop floor, in front of and behind the counter, and then went to the door.
“Oh, Sam,” said the butcher. “You’ve forgotten your pay.” He went to the door and gave Sam some money. “Where are you off to now?”
“Over to the pub, Mr. Burgess. They need sawdust too.”
“Where do you get the sawdust, Sam?”
“Down at the mill.”
“Um, excuse me for asking, but how do you get it? Do you pay for it?”
Sam smiled. “Trade secret, Mr. Burgess.”
“I understand,” said the butcher.
He turned back to his shop, Sam got onto his cart and drove down the street as some sawdust flew off the back of the cart.
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The town drunk who buried José’s father and uncle was murdered the next day. 20 years later, when new houses were being built, the construction workers found the graves that no one had believed the drunk had dug.
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José invited me to his house in Canada. It was a lot bigger and nicer than he had ever described. I wonder where he got the money for it.
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Sam sprinkled the sawdust all over the pub floor when the owner/bartender came out from the back. “Sam, I can’t pay you right now. Business is a little slow. I’m sure it’ll pick up when the economy gets worse.”
“No problem, Mr. Culhane,” said Sam. “Whenever you can pay is OK with me.”
“I heard a rumour,” said Culhane, “that the government might not allow sawdust in pubs or butcher shops anymore. Someone says it’s unhygienic.”
Sam laughed. “Unhygienic? That’s ridiculous. There’s a health regulation no one is asking for. No, I think I’ll be making a good living for a long time.”
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The difficulty with skipping stones on water these days is that, because there are over 7 billion people on the planet, most of the good flat rocks are 40 feet out into the water.
by William Kitcher
Bill’s stories, plays, and comedy sketches have been published and/or produced in Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, England, Guernsey, Holland, India, Ireland, and the U.S. Recent stories were published in Black Petals, Slippage Lit, Schlock!, Alien Station, 365 Tomorrows, Theme of Absence, Yellow Mama, 34 Orchard, Antipodean SF, Revolute, Great Ape, Jokes Review, Sledgehammer, Literally Stories, and Across The Margin, and he has stories forthcoming in Inklette, Bewildering Stories, The Bookends Review, Defenestration, Spank The Carp, Evening Street Review, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Sirens Call, and 2 stories (one co-written) in the Horrified Press anthology, “Twisted Time”.