Recently in Fiction on the Spot Category
If I were to be kidnapped and dragged to the universe where chaps are worn and not met for tea, this is what it would look like.
A bullriding event is an excellent place to form bizarre fictional plots. For instance, in the above incident, a clown with very large pants attempts to flee an angry bull. This could certainly stand on its own in one of those artistically rendered, painfully long short fiction pieces that one finds in the speculative fiction magazines. But we aspire to more than that. We aspire to plot. We aspire to character development. Who is the clown? How has he arrived? Why are his pants so large? Is it that his pants are so large, or is the real thing here that his pants contain so...little? You see, our clown has reached the far edges of the ring, and safety lies just over the final bar. He reaches, oh yes, he reaches, but--
Well that was lucky, wasn't it? The clown hangs on to his pants for one more day. The valiant cowboy triumphs with his sturdy rope. Perhaps the story is really the cowboy, with his compact horse, and his secret love for the clown, who has provided him with many nights of comfort in the back of a half-empty animal trailer, my goodness, perhaps we are back to the pants after all--
--now this is the sort of twist I wasn't looking for. I had a good thing going there, a sort of bullriding version of Brokeback Mountain, but now I find that I am wrong, so WRONG, that there is not secret love for the clown, no happy bed of straw mussed with streaks of red facepaint and a loose foam nose. No, the cowboy and the clown are members of a bizarre satanic cult of Anglophiles, who conceal the true nature of their love for all things tea and crumpets by pretending to be rough-hewn cowboys, signaling their true Brit-obsession to one another by the affecting of elaborate chaps. Chaps for the chaps, the boys say, chaps for the chaps.
And so concludes this episode of Fiction on the Spot. You may now return to page 322 of James Joyce's Ulysses, to which your left eye has been stuck for six weeks with no forward progress.
This was in Minneapolis, last Saturday night.
A bullriding event is an excellent place to form bizarre fictional plots. For instance, in the above incident, a clown with very large pants attempts to flee an angry bull. This could certainly stand on its own in one of those artistically rendered, painfully long short fiction pieces that one finds in the speculative fiction magazines. But we aspire to more than that. We aspire to plot. We aspire to character development. Who is the clown? How has he arrived? Why are his pants so large? Is it that his pants are so large, or is the real thing here that his pants contain so...little? You see, our clown has reached the far edges of the ring, and safety lies just over the final bar. He reaches, oh yes, he reaches, but--
--now this is the sort of twist I wasn't looking for. I had a good thing going there, a sort of bullriding version of Brokeback Mountain, but now I find that I am wrong, so WRONG, that there is not secret love for the clown, no happy bed of straw mussed with streaks of red facepaint and a loose foam nose. No, the cowboy and the clown are members of a bizarre satanic cult of Anglophiles, who conceal the true nature of their love for all things tea and crumpets by pretending to be rough-hewn cowboys, signaling their true Brit-obsession to one another by the affecting of elaborate chaps. Chaps for the chaps, the boys say, chaps for the chaps.
And so concludes this episode of Fiction on the Spot. You may now return to page 322 of James Joyce's Ulysses, to which your left eye has been stuck for six weeks with no forward progress.
