me and Frenchie down by the schoolyard

I wrote a short story once about a young girl waking up beside a small, flowing river, reeds and cattails leaning with the current, and she sees a muskrat walking from the shore up towards an embankment behind her, and it’s total deja vu, because she’s seen this very scene before, that certainty of hazy memory. So she gets up to follow and there’s a dirt road along a big field and booming noises way over there, and some kind of funeral in a cemetary, and the girl’s captured by aliens who plan to do wicked experiments on her, but one of the aliens is tired of that act and helps her escape. Only, in fact, the girl’s been in charge all along, like tricking the aliens to expose their whereabouts because she’s the leader of another group of aliens, who are cooler and hipper and kinder, and at the end she’s back down by the small, flowing river and there’s a muskrat walking.

I don’t have a clue what happened to that story, even what it was called, and why it never was published, say in my collection of short stories, “It’s Like This.” Which is really the focus of this post, the not having a clue, this current state of mine in which sorrow and promise dance around together, and I am entirely focused on what I have to do – that degree of focus like a survival skill, at least as it applies to me and my typical let’s see what happens next.

There’s something intimate about abiding in this place.