In 1908, three things happened: Henry Ford released his Model T, the very last White-Tipped Gilfinch on the planet was killed in a tragic accident that no one seemed to notice, and Dennis Morgan’s life was forever changed, despite his not being born for another sixty-seven years. You see, it was in 1908 that a notoriously reckless Carlyle Lamoreaux, both the object of Blakeville County’s snidest gossip and most ferocious envy, purchased the first Model T in the area and took a rather fast-looking young woman whose name was most certainly not worth knowing on a ride down a sleepy country lane on the outskirts of town, to the staunch disapproval of Blakeville mothers and daughters alike.
The only documentation of the romp (and subsequent tragedy) that managed to survive the incident four years later that was dubbed by citizens as “The Great Library Fire of 1912” was found in the diary of a girl who, according to her own writings, had lived in a grand house with a bedroom window overlooking that same lane. The girl, determined by local historians to be most certainly thirteen or fourteen years in age based on the flourishes of the script and the abundance of small red hearts drawn in the margins, never penned her name in the book, but its discovery in the hollow of a tree in the early 1940’s was declared an invaluable confirmation of what scientists had speculated for decades: the very last White-Tipped Gilfinch, a magnificent little bird with white tail-feathers that flashed brilliantly in the summertime sun and a lilting song that once warmed the airs of many a North American wetland, had lived and died in swampy Blakeville County.
Though the low-flying path of the Gilfinch and the heart-rending puff of white and black feathers against the front bumper of the Model T were mere asides in a much lengthier description of the “not really all
that attractive” girl in the passenger seat whose “empty and crude banter” most certainly caused the “dashing and daring Mr. Lamoreaux” to swerve out of control at a risky speed, what brief commentary there was on the bird and its physical appearance was sufficient enough to convince ornithologists that this was, indeed, the very last sighting of the White-Tipped Gilfinch ever to be documented. Being the last people who were even aware that the Gilfinch had once existed, and having finally cleared the whole uncertain mess up, the ornithologists moved neatly on, and so there wasn’t anyone left who ever thought about the poor beautiful extinct Gilfinch.
That is, until a rather nomadic man and amateur birdwatcher going by the name Larry Star arrived in Blakeville County half a century later on a bicycle and became convinced in the aisles of the public library’s catalog of local flora and fauna that the heartbreaking song he’d heard from his canoe earlier that day was, in fact, the sound of the long lost White-Tipped Gilfinch. So vehement and vocal was Larry Star in this conviction that the myth of the bird’s phantom existence spread across the country in a matter of months, sparking the imaginations of scientists and laypeople alike. Dennis Morgan happened to be among the believers.
In 1908, three things happened: Henry Ford released his Model T, the very last White-Tipped Gilfinch on the planet was killed in a tragic accident that no one seemed to notice, and Dennis Morgan’s life was forever changed, despite his not being born for another sixty-seven years. You see, it was in 1908 that a notoriously reckless Carlyle Lamoreaux, both the object of Blakeville County’s snidest gossip and most ferocious envy, purchased the first Model T in the area and took a rather fast-looking young woman whose name was most certainly not worth knowing on a ride down a sleepy country lane on the outskirts of town, to the staunch disapproval of Blakeville mothers and daughters alike.
There's probably nothing I like better than an odd, wacky, original idea that, when thrown down on paper and executed properly, somehow feels almost innate in its rightness. It gives you this great moment of recognition when you realize that, in spite of its strangeness, or more probably because of its strangeness, the idea manages to hit precisely at the heart of something from a direction you'd never thought of. And I guess really that goes for any kind of art, not just writing. Anyway, that's why I liked this very short piece that won the "Three-Minute Fiction" contest hosted by the NPR radio show, All Things Considered. It's totally random and about snatching ducks, but doesn't lose anything because of it. Plus, it manages to unfold this whole complex story in just a very few words, which is probably one of the hardest things to accomplish when you're writing. So, enjoy.
And so the boy pedaled slowly across the hot pavement, white sneakers bright in the summertime. He turned left at the next street in a wide, sweeping arc before disappearing around the bend, toward the playground. She stood for a while on the sidewalk in her blue polka-dress, tracing the cracks with one shoe, pressing the small pale green blades of grass back into the soil. She thought, just maybe, he might circle back around on his bike in a bit. It was a hot and beautiful day.
She lived in the apartment upstairs, and sometimes we would ride the elevator together and talk about the economy going to hell or the noise that the neighbor’s dog made last night or the weather when we really couldn’t think of anything. Her hair was cut short around her chin and I liked that about her. Lots of girls can’t pull it off but I think she had the right bone structure or skin color or something because it looked good on her. I only saw her sometimes but it was nice when I did—she seemed clean and pleasant and wore nice clothes that weren’t too stylish but not frumpy, either. Girls who wear too many fancy clothes with the purses and those shoes with the heels and their mascara are always hiding something, if you ask me. They seem so shiny and glowy with their long, long endless legs and then you meet them and you realize they hate their dad or their first boyfriend hit them once, hard, in the backyard and told them not to tell and they didn’t or they’ve got some mom who’s always telling them they’re fat. But Cat wasn’t like those girls so I thought she probably was different, better somehow. I imagined that really she didn’t walk so much as floated because she didn’t have all the heavy things weighing her down like the rest of us since she lived in the apartment upstairs and wore clean, tasteful clothes and sounded smart when I talked to her in the elevator for the minute or so it took to get from the lobby to the seventh floor.