** Bring me your tired, derivative, overwrought dead manuscripts, yearning to be erased from memory… This is the fourth in an ongoing series where authors get to share a piece of a novel/writing project that died long before it ever could have proven its worth to its parent, its master: the author. Instead of letting the maybe-horrible, maybe-unbearable Word doc remain untouched in some far off and forgotten file folder, why not let the readers at ENCLAVE have a look? Think of it as closure. They won’t laugh, I swear.
This time we have Bud Smith, author of F-250 and Tollbooth sharing an excerpt from a dead novel entitled, “I Wonder What My Skull Will Look Like.”
If you are interested in having an excerpt featured in the “From the Grave” series, be sure to email me at michael @ coping mechanisms dot net. **
1
I lived in the junkyard for about a year. It wasn’t my kind of job. I did it because I was able to stay there for free inside the tire pile, as long as I remained undetected.
In the quiet of the evening, when the work of the day was done, and the workers went away, I locked the gate from the inside, and hid. Then it was just me and the junkyard dog.
The tire pile was more beautiful than it sounds. I can imagine just what you are picturing.
I found a cave in there that I could enter from a crevice around the back. From the outside, it appeared as any other typical junkyard tire pile, but if you crawled inside, you’d see I had the place furnished rather nicely.
My tire pile was better than a lot of the real homes that people call home. But, I guess, a person with enough determination can call anywhere home.
One time, I heard about someone living in the rafters of a bridge. He liked it there, was comfortable, even ran a power cord. But one day, the bridge started to lift up. Before he knew what was going on, he was vertical. His bed pointed at the sky. Luckily he was wedged in and couldn’t fall. He’d never considered that the bridge might be a drawbridge. Every house has its downside.
My tire pile had a living room with a TV. A fridge, a couch and even a bookcase with some discarded library books and magazines from the dentist across the highway. The receptionist in there liked me. She gave me all the magazines when they were going to throw them away.
The tire pile was good for me. It didn’t bother me to not have a lawn or a telephone or a mailbox. I didn’t mind not having to shovel the driveway when it snowed or paint the shed when it needed painting. Actually, the roof I had constructed for myself within my mole hole was known to leak when the tires above shifted around from a fresh dumping of new tires, or removal of some old tires from the top of the tire pile—so I got my handyman fix just fine by managing that battle with caulk and spray foam insulation.