In the Woods: A Tall Tale in Words & Beads

The woods were a strange place, filled with odd juxtapositions &  contrasts. One minute dark & foreboding, noises, sights & smells like no other place. Questions, not immediately answered, filled the visitors head: Is that smoke I smell? Is there someone (or something) following me, waiting to pounce at the first opportunity? What's that in the distance? Is it moving, towards me? The visitor moves slowly, cautiously, alert to any possible danger. In the next moment, a clearing to a whole new world opens. The sunlight beams through the trees, noise becomes a flock of birds taking flight. Caution & fear do not disappear, but perceptions are altered, lightened. The visitor continues on...SAM

In the Woods Bracelet: glass, betel nut beads, silver color birds, silver plated sun clasp by samsstuff

 My newest creations, created for a challenge & sent off to a new home...

  * Short story & bracelet by samsstuff, all rights reserved. Share with credit back to original post only. Please contact the blog owner for any other usage.




Made by You...

A Love Story, with a Twist

Birds of Paradise by Shelley McElhiney*

      They were the best of friends. The bond between them visible, almost tangible, floating mid air, between the the two of them. Distance did not alter this, even when that distance spanned over half the planet.

He was an old school hippie turned businessman by the twists & turns of time & place that overtake us all throughout our lives. His look had become business casual, changed by the practicalities of life, but he retained the long hair & sandals that had once been part of his daily uniform. The ravages of age had given him bald spots & had turned his once long, flowing locks grey & wiry. His belly had softened as his life turned sedentary. No longer a wandering member of a scattered & forgotten tribe, he inhabited the bookstore, struggling to keep it afloat, amidst a sea of bills & a lease that eventually overflowed his income & ballooned out, enveloping the building with a sense of strife & struggle.

     She was exotic, if a bit showy. Spending her days basking in the warmth of his attention, she was cranky & inconsolable when he was away. Best described as colorful, she spent her time as a rainbow of excitement, her plumage always in motion. She slept little, constantly watching over her little bookstore kingdom, above the store, but never really out of sight, never really a part of the background. Whenever it seemed as if the store was in danger of slipping into a sad & never ending slumber, it was she who would wake it up, letting out her own, unique squawk, startling customers & employees alike. She would not let them sleep, not while she ruled over all she surveyed. Her demeanor was regal, her appearance filled with more color than all of carnivale. She came from South America, the rainforest her original home. She never quite fit in with the beige walls & slow lifestyle of the store, but she endured it for him. He had brought her here, not directly, but after a series of other places, other homes. She had had other relationships, but had always ended up being too high maintenance, as the years wore by.

     Eventually customers began to disappear from the little store, in search of the shiny & the new, perhaps or maybe just the more convenient. The store employees left, one by one, most pushed from the nest, by the lack of money & the lack of customers, sent to fly away on their own in search of other places to roost.  

     She too left in the end, forced out into the world, into another home, maybe even another bookstore. He could no longer afford her exotic ways, was no longer able to pay for the bookstore, her home. He found another, from a less exotic far away land, this time a fellow tribesman to share his time & his love. She left proudly, without her usual squawks, her colorful feathers ruffled proudly, her head held high & her little feet firmly clutched to the perch inside her gilded cage.

     He visited from time to time, but they were never the same. Their friendship would always be, but they had new loves & new homes in which to nest. SAM

* image & short story by Shelley McElhiney, all rights reserved

Short Story #5

I remember Buzzard Lady, much as I'd like to forget: a stick of a woman, with a hard buzzard face & a sharp buzzard like walk. She never seemed to have much to do of any importance, preferring to wander about like the commandant in some WWII film, issuing orders & squelching any sign of creativity or intelligence that might threaten her hold on us or her position within the organization. Flattery was the only thing that Buzzard Woman responded to, whether the flattery of those within her control or the flattery of those she was trying to control. Day in & day out, she would pick at the bones of those who either threatened or ignored her superiority. Only those who gained her trust, through flattery & a kind of false friendship, escaped the carnage. The Weasel Child was one of these. No personality of her own, she would choose that of whomever would help her most towards her goals. She was the perfect friend for the Buzzard Woman...

This is another free writing exercise, that was never finished. It was written many years ago, based on real people & real circumstances. Have you ever been in a situation like this? There are unhealthy or abusive business situations, just as there are unhealthy personal relationships, after all, you're still dealing with other people. The potential for good & bad still exists. The people who are good in personal situations are most likely still good in business circumstances. The people who are bad in business are probably not the easiest people for their friends or family to deal with. I can say, in the case of Buzzard Woman, that she 'divorced' one of her children (& a husband), that she had a room in her home that was for show only, not for family, not for visitors, only for show. It's interesting how parallel her personal & professional lives where. I've met others who seemed to be nice, no matter where they went, their niceness did not prevent them from effectively growing a business. You don't have to be ruthless to succeed, in fact the opposite can be true, customers can sense a cheapness in character & in practice. They will stay away. No one, for instance, wants to watch an employee get yelled at, in public. No one wants to purchase a cheap product, like food that has been left out too long, because it would be a  waste to throw it away. My first job was for a man who would pull product out of the waste bin & put it back out (true story!) or something from an inferior manufacturer, that falls apart right away.
So, what are your thoughts? Your experiences, either as an employee or a customer?  SAM

Photo: "Two Webs" by samsstuff
Property of the author, please do not use without permission

Communal Story...Alien Monster Boy Loves Medusa Girl

I thought I'd try something different here, something that I haven't really seen elsewhere. I thought I'd try sort of a communal story. I'll write my own, elsewhere & we'll write one together. At some point maybe we'll compare, just to see how different the stories become, after starting out in the same place. I might even start this in my ArtFire studio, so there'll be three different stories. What do you think? Sound like fun? What do you think comes next?

That Alien Monster Boy loved Medusa Girl is certainly true. Of that we have no doubt. The evidence is clear. The question of how they met remains. How where they able to have a relationship? How did this pair come to love each other, across time & space? We only have bits & pieces of their story. Tiny particles of archeological evidence that survived millenia, scattered over time & space. Together, we will have to discover their story, using what bits & pieces we have or are yet to discover.

Poetry Trauma...

This is the story of how I came to hate poetry:

It was a dark & stormy night...No it wasn't. I lied. It was daytime & being Tucson, Arizona, probably sunny in the extreme. I don't know for sure. Why wouldn't I know, you might ask? Well, it was junior high & I was inside.
The class was advanced English & I sat somewhere, along the wall, near the center of the room & across a smallish table from a classmate. It was nearer to the end of the term. Somewhere around a third of the way through the the class I had finished all the assigned reading & had become pretty bored. The student who sat across from me finished a little later, around halfway through the class & she, also, was bored. We started playing football. Not, of course, the real game, there wasn't the space or the equipment for that, but the folded paper game, where the other person uses their hands to make the goalpost. This was pretty fun & distracting & I'm sure that we would have gotten bored of this eventually & moved on to something else, but we never got the chance. Apparently, we where not the only ones distracted by our game. Others where watching us play & while we where done with our work, they where not. The teacher noticed He decided that it might help to move us to a table directly in front of his desk. Of course, the real issue wasn't where we where sitting, but that we where bored. Not just bored, but the kind of bored that should start with a capital B. There wasn't anything for us to do, sitting in front of the class & we soon started playing football again. I don't think we where really trying to be defiant or bad, we just needed something more to do than stare at the classroom. This, the teacher finally decided, could not go on. We where far less distracting where we where sitting originally, at least away from the eyes of some of our classmates. The teacher gave us an assignment, not really for credit, just to keep us (& the rest of the class out of trouble). He decided we should read "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner." Now, you may say, why that's a great poem, filled with meaning, a worthy bit of poetry that should be read by all, maybe. For us though, at 11 or 12 years of age & nowhere near adulthood, this was shear torture, a punishment more than a distraction & one that had that whole repentance message, repeated over & over & yes, over again until we felt like strangling ourselves with an albatross just to make it stop. Finally the term ended, we received good grades, thankful that we where graded more on our work than on behavior & went our merry little way, with the belief that beside haiku poems from grade school (way more fun than epic poems, at least for children, by the way), this was what poetry was all about. I tried from time to time, to read other poems, but I couldn't. I tried to like poetry, but the memory haunted me. Eventually, many years later, I found a copy of "The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry" & couldn't stop reading. It was filled with amazing images & beautiful phrases. I still shudder at my junior high poetry trauma, but I can now, at least on occasion appreciate the strength & imagery of a powerful piece of poetry. I doubt that I'll ever again read "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner."
I think I just felt a cold chill...SAM

Short Story #3 by SAM

2/9
He was right at home, there in his office. Surrounded by paperwork, his briefcase overflowing with his days work, the work of a lifetime awaiting him on the other end of his cell phone, this was his current life. All the books a man could want or need right at his fingertips, just waiting for him to notice, but he was too engulfed in his conversation to see. His imagination had been eclipsed by work. Every waking moment was spent in building an empty business castle waiting for its king, high above the rest of the world. The man failed to notice the other human beings rushing past him, interacting & involved in their own mission, oblivious to the man in his castle built of paper & phone calls, next to the phone booth, inside the bookstore.

A true story with alteration.
Free writing excercise