Brandon Taylor - Creative Content Writer
Creative Writing
This is where things get a little interesting..
The following are a few samplings from my secret garden of creative writing. The full collection - accumulated through the years into a sinewy, luminous tangle - can only be found deep within the BT forest.
Bill was a human being.
He had brown hair, and wore it medium short. His face was vaguely Russian in that it was white and his eyes and nose weren’t very big. Some women found him attractive, and Bill was not horrible at figuring out which. He did wonder at times what type of man was attractive in general. He was a bad judge of it, and women’s comments on how dreamy one or another man was usually surprised him.
His social graces were all there – people felt comfortable around him usually. He could navigate a dinner party and remember names, but never could predict what people would remember about him.
One thing about Bill – he liked to leave his mark on things. Most times the mark was something only he knew about. Think about that sign post for a while – marked. Stand under a stranger’s tree for several minutes – marked. Move a rock or pull a leaf off a bush – marked. Crumple up the leaf and put it in an empty planter – marked with a marker. Nice. Effective marks were things he would not normally do, which became harder to come by as the single acts of claiming built up.
The purpose behind the marking was a sort of personal growth regime. Bill’s thoughts were organized on some subjects, but not for the overwhelming majority that is everything else. The disorganized attempt at categorizing experiences with marks reflects that feature of Bill pretty well. Human beings have to deal with a staggering lack of control over the things they are aware of, after all. And the things that they are aware they are not aware of. Perhaps the marks were more about what Bill was thinking of when he made them than the actual marks themselves. It is a known fact that a bush missing a leaf doesn’t matter very much, and a sign post doesn’t know whether or not it got thought about.
One could say Bill was collecting the story of his thoughts. It's easy to remember things you do but much harder to recall the ideas running through your head at a given moment, especially if that moment has passed. Having not much more than his thoughts, Bill was constantly losing most of what he had. In marking, he was bailing water out of a boat made of notions. Patching up the holes with bits of crumpled leaf.
He lived in the small apartment of the single and unrich. White walls not to be painted, drippy cement stairs outside, that kind of thing. Some paintings up by Bill, some of which were marks but none of which were really good. He didn't paint, and he didn't kid himself, but he put up the things he painted because they definitely did happen, and took him long enough that denying their occurrence would hurt, so there they hung like pieces of his face that he couldn't do much about. Most people that visited knew him beyond paying much attention to his face anyway. And anyway, the real home of Bill existed inside his head - a great growing up, falling apart tree of patched up notions.
This is about a place in North Carolina that I know.
The porch had a screen around it. It was on the second story and the floorboards sagged away from the building to let the rain off. Thunderous clouds still hawk their drops to the planks but the water slides down with the same dumb necessity that brought me here.
I am a slow person, and my insides drip like syrup over things I have known for a long time. You might wonder if the syrup is a thing that even knows what it has and hasn’t covered. It’s had a long time to do it, but I don't think it's covered the porch.
The feeling of that place sticks to me, disobeying the way people tend to forget things. The deck slanted just enough to sicken your step. Way off trees like a dusty postcard through the haze and the heat. Humid air like a living thing pressed up against you. Sitting on that porch was like running your hand along the belly of a cat.
I did some good thinking there, I believe because it provided a stationary anticipation. A kind of begging for something to happen. Like a stone on the edge of a cliff quite secured. That sight that makes your mind push, and when the rock won’t fall, it seems like time to push on something else.
The Restaurant
Two brothers, bald as toads. A loose fit in the booth as they laugh and pick at their food. Well, one laughs. The other wears glasses and has a face too rigid for an easy smile. You can't tell how often they see each other. Maybe not very because there's a sort of wringing out to this experience. Silence can't stand, and the laughing brother keeps touching his head and looking out the window for the next thing to say. The older brother watches him when he does this. A reactive personality? Predict, observe, and retaliate? It would explain where they got their money.