Posts Tagged ‘storiesofbilly’
In the Morning
Billy opened the sliding screen door and the young dog bolted out and turned and stood waiting. The old dog was the one Billy had on a leash so that it’s knee could heal, and they stepped gingerly out of the door and onto the earth and started walking around the house and up into…
Read MoreBilly and Jim and You and Me
I’ve been asked on occasion who Billy and Jim are. It’s clear to most that there are elements of myself in both characters, but in my own mind, I am Billy. I’ve always been Billy. Who Jim is remains a mystery to me. I’ve written for years about the both of them, using their beings…
Read MoreThe Close and Distant Valleys
Billy on the rear gate of the pickup truck with his ankles crossed above his boots and the cuffs of his jeans wet from walking through the new snow woods and his chainsaw resting on the floor of the forest, his elbows then resting on his knees and his chin then resting on the heels…
Read MoreA Much Softer Light
Billy woke in the morning and knelt on the cold floor and scratched the skin through the thick fur of the mane of the sitting dog. He looked out the window to the thin crest of light over the shoulder of the mountain, starting orange and rose and fading upward into the dark firmament of…
Read MoreSnippet
Billy watched the valley, and the clouds staggered their passage first on the western mountains and then caught again on the eastern ridge. In between was a space of very blue sky, and the clouds were lit from behind by the western sun that fell away as the world spun on axis in the other…
Read MoreThe Pull of the World
Before the alarm howls the morning is on their room through the blinds, lines of it against the closet door and into the bathroom. There are doves in the trees cooing, wringing night out of their feathers. Elk move through the park across the street and their wet fur steams in the earliest bits of…
Read MoreA More than Half Full Moon
Billy knew that when the curtains were pulled across the windows of the trailer that he shouldn’t come in. He looked up at a moon that was more than half-full that hung above the pine tree on the land as though stabbed there on the pinnacle branch, and the moon and tree were framed in…
Read MoreThe Last Bits of Light
“I hope the winds don’t pick up again. That was horrible last night.” Billy was lowering the blinds on the bathroom window. The window was open to let in the air that blew cool down the mountains, and the night before when the winds picked up the blinds shook and slammed against the windowpane over…
Read MoreThe Small Warmth of the Sun
Billy had gone when the poplars started to bloom, and when they did the last thing he was doing was lying in the winter dead grasses of the hydro cut between the dogs and the dogs laid there with him, Dublin asleep against Billy’s thigh and Maggie at a small distance watching ravens against the…
Read MoreSix Ravens
Six ravens in the sky and one peeled off from the rest. That left 5 ravens together cawing their way up, circling on warm air pocketed below the mountain and one raven ditching toward the forest canopy with it’s wings tucked tight against the body, twisting and checking speed and balance, twisting into the branches…
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