Spare Time (Ep. 1)
A Snippet of Fiction
Author Note: After hiking through a local woodland and napping in the sunshine yesterday, I settled in at my desk to devote an hour to whatever came to mind.
Writing eight hundred words without a game plan might not seem like much of a cause for celebration considering that over the past few years I’ve published two companion novels, posted regularly on my website and here on Substack, promoted online as best as I could in more ways than I care to admit, and finished a fair amount of the first draft of my third novel.
But after keeping my nose to the creative grindstone all that time, letting a brand-new random thought take root was an act of pure joy. Although I’ve never posted a first draft before and have no defensible reason for doing so now, this platform offers a comfortable enough fit at this point in my author journey.
So I present Episode 1 of my quirky piece of short fiction for your consideration with more to follow.
[No AI was used in any aspect of the writing above, the fiction piece below, anything else I’ve written, or anything I will ever write, for that matter.]
Spare Time
Episode 1
He knew full well talking with other members of his species tended to lead to disappointment. After all, hardly any of them managed to venture below his placid surface to explore the honeycomb caves roiling with memories and conjectures.
So why bother? Sure, the preliminaries seemed hopeful enough with the standard fare of commentaries, niceties, abstractions, and probing. But at some point or other along the way, the singular event drawing the vast majority of conversations to an abrupt close inevitably materialized, shattering the tentative comradery like a wrecking ball in a house of mirrors.
In fact, he’d become adept at perceiving the subtlest cues signaling the onset of such events to an almost annoying degree. A change of pace, a glance in another direction, feet shuffling, throats clearing, an array of attitude signals flashing among those in the know.
And then the inevitable question he dreaded most of all—“So what do you do in your spare time?”
The man’s initial reaction typically dwelled on some of the particulars of the English language. From a structural standpoint, he still viewed the basic question as a simple construct, of course, but from a metalinguistic perspective, not so much. It seemed to him the pattern was almost etched in stone. No one had ever asked, “So in your spare time, what do you do?” or “So what, in your spare time, do you do?” or “So what do you, in your spare time, do?” Some inquisitors had indeed been more direct, but their questions came across as little more than blunt unforced errors.
So when he rediscovered his childhood kinship with trees, he realized that responding to that dreaded question with the clear truth about his unique gift would do little more than add fuel to the gossip fire flickering around him.
At first he’d attributed the return of the voice to his recovery from anesthesia after a routine colonoscopy ferried him on a meandering sortie through expansive valleys of lucid dreams the likes of which he’d never experienced. But as he stood in his backyard soaking up the beautiful spring day while rubbing his naked body with garden soil to cleanse his skin of the array of life forms from the clinic that had no doubt marshaled forces for an invasion of his gut microbiome, something almost imperceptible shifted.
For a moment, he smiled at the soft, remonstrative tone of his wife’s voice. He assumed she felt it her duty to remind him that sunbathing a la Ben Franklin was not tolerated by their HOA any more than by 18th-century Philadelphia, and that he was certainly not a renowned Renaissance man with the political clout to defy restrictive mores. Then the man remembered his wife was gone—a victim of a virus many of his kind apparently still believed had been a hoax—and veered as close to abject grief as he had in years.
Once he recovered enough to move on, he surmised that the unidentified pleasant voice must belong to his backyard neighbor who’d grown noticeably more animated in her interactions with him following the one-year anniversary of her husband’s gruesome death. However, in a moment of clarity, the man remembered their latest hushed conversation through a gap in the fence between his garden and her garage regarding her upcoming cruise with her daughter’s family and could he please keep an eye on things.
That meant the next voice of interest had to belong to Eulalia, the ubiquitous AI household plastabrain that received glowing five-star reviews from anyone determined to safeguard as many social credits as possible. But he knew that contraption couldn’t be the source since he’d changed the setting from Lilting Scottish Woman to Gritty Bostonian Troglodyte a few days before tripping over his own two feet while carrying an overflowing mop bucket, knocking the compulsory gizmo onto the floor, and stepping on it twice before slipping and spilling half the bucket of dirty water on top for good measure.
And so it was that with all the other credible possibilities scratched off the list, he had no choice but to frame his experience as a Borgesian Whimsy. What aside from magical realism could explain how the towering ponderosa in his backyard that had demonstrated no sign of sentience during decades of relentlessly raining needles and pine cones down at an almost industrial level was now speaking to him in a myriad of mesmerizing voices and obscure dialects?
Each step the man took toward the ancient one felt like an offering to a living, breathing shaman. He extended his greetings to the magnificent being as he had all those years before, trying desperately not to shunt the magic he now craved more than anything.
# # #
Till next time.
Drew
A recent review of my latest novel Core Haven: Hope Amid the Ruins
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P.S. At the time of this writing, Core Haven: Hope Amid the Ruins has maintained its 4.8 out of 5 with 49 global ratings & 47 customer reviews on Amazon, along with 4.62 out of 5 with 131 ratings & 118 reviews on Goodreads. Not too shabby, right?
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