You Can't Force a Story That Doesn't Want to Be Told - Chris Callaghan

A Great Blue Heron flew over my house this morning – his long legs leaving a trail of words behind him in the sky. The words joined the particulate matter from the California fires swirling in the air above me. Several paragraphs worth settled onto the back half acre of desert behind the house. They spread across the landscape like pieces of shredded documents.

I wanted those words.

I equip myself with empty buckets, gloves, hat, and a fine mesh strainer for the shyer consonants. The flat-blade shovel is too big, so I chose a small spade and a hand trowel. Once out there bending to my task, the yard looks enormous and I realize that my verbal archeological dig will take some time. I return to the house for a low, tri-cornered stool with rubber wheels. Sitting will save my back while I sift through imaginary grids in the desert dust.

A flock of grazing mourning doves lifts and settles – lifts and settles just beyond my feet. I tell them that they are welcome to the beetles and the ants, but please do not peck up stray ‘an’s and the’s and but’s.’ I will need those to assemble the sentences. A large Quail swoops down and stabs a phrase. The words overflow on either side of his beak. I can clearly see the beginning of “no part of this story may be reproduced…” on one side, and “except in the case of brief quotations…” on the other. Maybe the Heron will never know.

Each time I fill my buckets, I carry them to the shallow trays I’ve laid out on the table beneath the portico. Here I’ll make my effort to re-assemble the prose. By dusk, I’ve found several pages worth, but the fulcrum and the climax have eluded me. Still I’m determined to bend what I’ve found into shape, knowing I’ve a cache of vowels and punctuation to dip into just beneath the table.

A shadow crosses my yard, re-enforcements for the doves. And the Quail has marshaled his troops. I rush out, flapping my arms and yelling. “The Heron no longer owns those words! I have recovery rights to them as they are on my land.”

The mourning doves chuckle en masse, and the Quail shakes his imposing top knot at me. “It isn’t the Heron that commands us, you fool,” he says. “It’s the story itself that refuses to be told. Don’t you know you can’t force it?”