Tag: link

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Steve’s Place

http://ffffound.com/image/81f5d5d012a86fc4bba0ea46af44a3837898a17f

I looked for a better source of this photo but didn’t find one before I started running out of time to write.

Steven Tattersall lived in New Zealand and that gave him a familiar but exotic mystique. It also made him funny—to Karen at least. And for some reason she held the impression he was or had been a sailor, but he never had. This is his home.

Steve’s place is unusual, and part of the problem describing it is that you want to stop there and just say, “Well, you’d have to see it.” But all the pieces of Steve’s treehouse—because that’s where you go after you’ve already said ‘unusual’—are completely normal. They just aren’t combined in an expected way. Imagine a perfectly usual cabin with a hipped roof and a Queen Anne style dormer above the classically centered front door. Then float that cabin two stories above the shoreline of a good-sized pond, build in the first and second stories with tin and cedar and plywood to hold your perfectly usual cabin up, sprout an extra-tall extra bedroom out of the top of your usual cabin, and finally add a bell tower to the top of that. As time permits, cobble on some walkways and lean-outs and fashion a multi-tiered redwood party deck to hover out over the pond. Just call the whiskey barrels and teak love-seat homey embellishments.

236 words on day 821

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Valley Number 12

If I write anything more than this single sentence then today will be a triumph of promise over necessity.

http://www.stefan-morrell.com/Gallery/12Valley.jpg

“Dal! Come take a look!” Neven shouted, not even bothering to pull her head back in the window of their new flat.

“I’m not going out on any of those,” Dal said as he continued to remove their clothes from a day bag and place them in unfamiliar cabinets.

“What?”

“I said, ‘I’m not going out on…’. Would you get back in here?”

Neven turned from the shuttered window to face him and the room. Dal wondered if the alcove she stood in even had anything beneath it. Or if it jutted out from the building, out over the street, out from the safety of where he stood in the center of the room. He pinched the corners of a t-shirt with both hands to keep the fold intact then placed it into the top drawer.

“You can go out one of those walkways—or all of them for all I care—but you’re not getting me out on one.”

“But they all have walls. And I think I saw one with a cover…” Neven twisted to peer out the window, but turned back to the room.

“No. Just knowing that writing desk there is probably suspended…” Dal shivered.

“But the other building has all the shops. And, and food. How are we going to eat?”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go over there. Just not over a bridge.”

249 words on day 804

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Maison dans les Feuilles

http://bit.ly/jGO2C

Tritti had been watching the horizon since she and Johnka climbed down from his sledge and stepped onto the desert sand. The cheap blue sky slammed harshly into the undulating orange sand as distinctly as [black frame borders a white matte]—except where Johnka now led her. There, just beyond his shoulder, a smudge marred the crisp horizon. It got wider as they approached; it did not look natural.

Less than an hour ago he’d handed her a small water bottle, apologized for a bit of a walk, and said to follow him before hiking out into the near-noon sun. He’d not stopped, slowed, nor spoken since. Johnka’s abrupt reticence and quick pace kept her quiet too and many steps back from the man she’d started thinking of as an uncle until now.

137 words on day 790