My friend Lonnie asks me, "Do you ever write any regular stories? You know, just like a regular story?"
"I guess not," I tell her.
"Well, I have something I once wrote," she tells me, " and I was wondering if you could expand it into a story."
So I looked at it, and I told her that I didn't think I could expand it into a story. Or rather, sure, I could probably take what she wrote and write a story from it. But that would make it something completely different. That would ruin it.
So here it is, as she wrote it.
They killed her in the front yard, with a duck in her mouth.
We all packed in the station wagon. Shovels, kids, hot dogs, a stick of butter, and bread.
All us kids had our jars and lines.
It's hard to walk the dunes, you sink in sometimes. We found her den about halfway to the sand bar. 7 pups, each of us kids got one. Cause Mike gave his back, it bit him.
We were three Swills, two Mooneys, and a Morgan and two Queens.
We couldn't do it any better. Singing and dancing. They carried us back to the car with full stomachs and jars.
My uncle owned an island.
Published here on September 29, 2003