/lit/ - Literature

I sat on the wooden step of the cabin surrounded by the smell of fish scales and firs. The whole of the cabin was constructed of that wood, bent out of shape and snored in the wind like an old man sleeps on public transport. Id been hold up here for the past two weeks. The clocks ticked in defiance, spiting my restlessness. It isn’t that I don’t love nature n’ all, but there some things happenin outside of it I intended to be a part of. I got up and chopped some wood; lit a fire to fight away the night. The flame ate up the air, gettin hotter and brighter and smellin like it used to. The sounds of birds, carried by the wind, was sporadically punctured by the fires pop of burnt up wood. The trees snored that contagious snore of the cabin, like a bacteria coughed up by the wind. And I couldn’t see too much. All I could do was sit and listen, while the fire kept the darkness but a few steps from me. That fire that couldn’t keep them images from being burnt into the back of my eyelids when I closed em. That fire that I could stare at deep, till the back of my eyes looked all white when shut - but those images always were there.

I took the drainin fish to a spitroast over that fire; walked over the creek to toss the bucket of guts. Not that there were tons of em, but enough to stink some’mh over here bigger than me. Some’mh that might be scared of the flame and my uprightness take to eatin me. The bears weren’t hardly what I was scared of, but - it was something to consider hard enough - least to walk through them dark n shrubs to toss ‘em guts. The sound of an engine, like a breath outta the woods’ lung, leaked from it, coughed a spat of birds cries. Maybe they were pickin me up at last. I lay into the chair and lit my pipe to complete the picture. A flame burned in my chest; in my eyes’ lids. My ears swallowed them motor sounds like a resuscitated swallows up air. There’s a fire inside of me that burns for this, that pushes back the long day’s night; and I was scared of that fire like the bears were scared of mine.

My favorite books are all translations.