Category: works-in-progress

[I’m currently working on a short story about rescuing the fawn I call Cairn. Here are a few words that I wrote on the day of her rescue. This is a work in progress and rather rough.]

Tiny hooves dance across the chambers of my heart. Her cry for help becons me into the wild. The call of the heart, like the cry of a fawn, lost and forlorn, easily ignored and covered up with so much to do. I call her Cairn. Wedged between two boulders and crying for help, she is like all of us who get stuck between a rock and a hard place fighting like hell to get out of all that bogs us down, only to dig ourselves deeper in with each fighting breath.

I call her Cairn because she marks the way forward: a beacon of hope in a prickly forest of thorns.

I call her Cairn because her beauty is held gracefully upon four tiny hooves.

I call her Cairn because she’s a joyful reminder that the creative is found everywhere and in all living beings.

[This is a story in progress continued from 10Aug2020]

Unable to free her with a push from behind, I clawed at tree roots and dark, loamy earth to create more space for my arm. I got enough leverage to lift her halfway out, but she let out a louder cry than before – this one tinged with pain, so I quickly set her back down. Supporting her with my left hand for fear that she might slip out of reach and into the stream below, I wasn’t so sure I could save her.

After more frantic digging, I got my hand far enough into the hole to discover one of her back legs pinned between two boulders. I maneuvered her leg up and around the pinch point, freeing it and finally lifting her all the way out. Seeing her whole body for the first time, I was amazed at how tiny she was – about 18” long and not more than 3 weeks old by the look of it. Placing her gently on a moss-covered rock I kept one hand on her back as I reigned in my fear of losing her. 

Hoping for the best. I took a few deep breaths and lifted her tiny body high enough to see if she could bear some weight. Her legs immediately collapsed underneath like a wet rag. Not knowing what else to do, I quickly wrapped her in my raincoat, carried her up and over the porcupine lair, and made my way back to the office for help.

With sand between toes Allie scours the ocean floor, searching for traces of ancient mariners. Petrified hulls, once hell-bent for high water, now teeming with life: urchin, fish spawn, and seagrass tethered to transom reviving mythic tales of treasure and conquest. An ocean exploration spawned by her father’s unfinished dreams brought her to these shores, once home to the family she now knows only from photographs, their paper edges rounded with time, surfaces creased and cracking, resembling the grooves on her grandmother’s papery skin – what little she remembers of it. 

She relishes those moments, few and far between, when she can reach into the past, wondering about her family’s history and what her father was thinking as he sanded the tiller of his first sailboat. At 8 years old, he looks so grand sitting there on that rickety bench, happily sanding away, his aunt and uncle hard at work repairing the hull of a boat that would take him on his first adventure away from home. Is this why she decided to take this journey? She brushes the bangs from her eyes and looks off to the distant shore of Gardiner’s Island, the white windmill glinting in the sun, as it has so many times before, like a beacon calling on a courage that she never knew existed until the day her father left.

…to be continued

[A novel start]