I thought a lot about the Tarahumara runners when I wrote Anasazi Runner. And a couple weeks ago, I tried to make some Tarahumara running shoes from an old tire with some friends in Oklahoma. Complete failure. Couldn’t even manage to cut the tire tread in an acceptable way. Enjoy the video.
Filed under Anasazi Video
Welcome to another historical AnasaziStories flash fiction by Jeff Posey.
Astani looked up when Buffalo Boy tapped a stone on the low unfinished wall outside his mother’s house. He stood and walked out into the sunlight.
“They’re moving it at the next full moon,” Buffalo Boy said.
Astani nodded. That meant they had about ten days. “Details?” he asked.
Buffalo Boy worked in the Fat Man’s establishment keeping the girls alive, and he heard things.
“Like usual. They don’t want to arouse suspicion.” He laughed.
“You sure?”
“Hey, I don’t know anything for sure. Neither do you.”
“So, what, ten burden bearers? Six warriors?”
Buffalo Boy laughed. “Yeah, and they won’t even know which one has it. Or what it’s worth.”
“But we do.” Astani didn’t like the way Buffalo Boy smirked and swaggered, but that’s how he always acted. So he said nothing about it. He knew it bothered him now only because of the stone. Bluestone, perfectly in the shape of the brilliant Day Star that faded after a full moon cycle years ago. Unworked by human hands, craftsmanship of the gods. The ancient cultures to the south would give anything for such a stone. The albino woman who now ruled the canyon with soft hands did not deserve such a gift. So instead, Astani would take it. Flee to the south with Buffalo Boy. They would live like High Priests.
“Will the warriors be elites?” Astani asked.
“Oh, of course, Led by that Choovio himself. They think everyone is afraid of him.”
“Aren’t you?” Choovio was a big man, a proven warrior, his face like stone.
“An arrow will pierce even his skin,” said Buffalo Boy. “We’ll take him down first.”
“And the others?”
“If we pick the right place, they won’t know what hit them.”
“So what’s the right place?”
Buffalo Boy paced in front of Astani, strutting. “That’s where my special gift comes in.” He pointed at his head. “They’ll be wary in the hills at the cut. They’ll all be looking up thinking at any minute they’ll be attacked.”
“It’s a good place,” Astani said, imagining rolling boulders onto them.
“But out on the plains after they’ve walked for two days, they’ll almost be sleeping on their feet. That’s where we’ll hit them.”
“Are you crazy? They’ll see us long before they get to us.” He shook his head and turned to walk away. He wouldn’t do it with Buffalo Boy if he thought something as stupid as this would work.
“Wait, Astani,” Buffalo Boy said, stepping in front of him. “You choose to forget the badger dens.”
Astani stopped and a faint grin pulled at the corners of his mouth. Yes, he remembered. Years ago as boys, they challenged each other to a footrace across the flatlands and Buffalo Boy had fallen into an old abandoned badger den. When Astani tried to help him, he fell into another old chamber. It took them hours to overcome their shock and fear of being trapped to work their way out. Of course. They could hide in those, watch the road, and jump out at the last moment.
Astani nodded. “It might work.”
Buffalo Boy stuck out his chest. “Of course it will. We will kill Choovio first. Then the other warriors. And the burden-bearers will be nothing. Then we’ll be rich. We’ll be gods.”
Astani kept nodding. “Yes,” he said, “gods.”
Choovio and the albino woman are a major characters from the historical Anasazi novel Less Than Nothing.
Filed under AnasaziStories, FlashFiction
Precursors to the Anasazi, the Basketmakers are grudgingly revealing their history through archaeology. The more learned about the Basketmakers, the more we can speculate what kind of influence it took (such as ultra-violent fringe warriors from the Toltec/Mayan cultures to the south) to radically change them into what we know as the Anasazi.
From a recent article:
Radiocarbon dates from corn indicate [Basketmakers] inhabited the Animas Valley [of southwestern Colorado] as early as 700 B.C. – 500 years earlier than previously thought.
And they lived here 100 years longer than previously believed, through about 500 A.D., which is about the same time as the end of the Roman Empire.
After 500 A.D., there seemed to have been a migration out of La Plata County, although two radiocarbon dates from Darkmold suggest that at least a few people were still around in 670 A.D.
via The Durango Herald 09/02/2012 | ‘Darkmold’ dig reshapes our understanding of Basketmakers.
They had more time and the same resources as the Anasazi, yet Basketmakers did not leave a similar legacy of stone buildings and cannibalism. Makes you wonder why, doesn’t it?
Filed under Anasazi
Flash fiction about the ancient Anasazi, part of the ongoing exploration of Anasazi imaginings by Jeff Posey.
People knew him as Ozzie, though when his relatives and friends uttered his name, the sound had only a hint of “Oz.” It sounded more like “Oss-EE.”
The spring after his sixteenth winter erupted in him like the seeds of rain-soaked weeds and he needed to wander. His parents didn’t like that, though they argued the point obliquely.
“I’ve not finished your new summer shoes and clothes yet, Ozzie,” said his mother. “You can’t go.”
His father looked him not in the eye, but in the chest and spoke after a long silence. “There is no wisdom out there in the world that cannot be learned by the planting of corn.”
Only after they both spoke could he respond. “Thank you, mother. The clothes and shoes I have will serve me well. Thank you, father. It is not wisdom I seek, but the joy of moving over the land.” Like a yearling elk or buffalo kicks and whirls in the warming air, he wanted to say, but it seemed damaging to his case to compare himself to something so young.
By rites, he qualified as an adult. That meant he could stay or go with or without their consent. After he showed them the strength of his intent by not backing down, Ozzie strung a sleeping mat, a few arrows with a small bow, too many pouches of parched corn, bean meal, dried squash, and herb-dried elk meat, he left home.
The white-topped mountains attracted him. They held winter longer, kept a store of water in the snow, and stood watch over the land like indifferent giants.
The first day, he encountered deep snow in a shaded mountain pass. He waded through, sinking to his thighs, soaking himself to the waist. That night his feet and legs felt frozen. Needles of pain prickled him when he continued the next morning.
The second day, a bear chased him. One of the big brown ones. Ozzie shinnied up a tree, skinning his arms and inner thighs, even his face. But he managed to climb out of reach of the bear and hung on, his arms shaking while the bear roared and ate all his food. He wedged himself into branches and surprised himself by falling asleep. The next morning he decided to continue, in spite of his wounds, his lack of food, and his fear of encountering another bear.
On the third day he found a naked woman tied to four stakes in a meadow of trampled grass. He fit an arrow into his bow and circled the meadow, looking and listening. Nothing. He crept to the woman for a better look. He had never seen a dead naked woman before. Her skin had a pallid frost to it and her wrists and ankles were tied to spread her body wide. How sad. Her eyelids were closed, dooming her to wander the after-life blind. And so beautiful. Not a mark on her. A goddess staked to the earth.
When her eyes fluttered open, he jumped away in fright. Fell onto his backside. An evil spirit must have entered her body! But then it occurred to him that she might not yet be dead. He cut the cords and touched her arm. As cold as stone. A gasp escaped her lips and he squatted, thinking. Build a fire. Give her his clothes. Hunt something to cook and eat. Make her drink water. That’s how you kept someone alive.
A strong odor entered his nostrils. He looked at the naked woman, but decided it did not come from her. The breeze stirred from the west. He stood on a rock and looked upwind. A billow of steam rose not far away. Hot spring.
He lifted the woman into his arms and carried her. Sat her into a clear, shallow pond of steaming water. With his clothes on, he lay beside her, held her head to keep her face out of the water. He had never been so close to a woman so beautiful and naked. He hoped she lived.
After her head lolled a few times, making Ozzie think she died, her eyes opened and rolled in their sockets. She blinked. Looked at Ozzie.
“Are you a god?” she croaked.
Ozzie smiled. She had the most wonderful eyes. “Yes,” he said without thinking.
“They sacrificed me to you.”
“What?”
“So you will bless them.”
“I will,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, then relaxed into something not quite like sleep.
On the fourth day, wearing only his loincloth, he carried her on his back toward the house of his mother, which they blessed with many children, the offspring of a god and a sacrificial goddess.
For more Anasazi Stories, see the Less Than Nothing: a novel of Anasazi strife and The Witchery of Flutes: forty-seven short dramas of Anasazi daily life.
Filed under AnasaziStories, FlashFiction
I want to thank Jon Strother of Mad Utopia for his great review of Less Than Nothing: a novel of Anasazi strife. Jon was an early supporter, which is always great to have.
Jeff has done a wonderful job here of weaving a seamless and complex tale involving many fascinating characters wrapped in layers of intrigue. … It was such a pleasure to rediscover them, not just as a series of shorts, but a full fledged, fully realized, and very well executed novel.
I have a new short story available. It may look like it’s about bowling (bowling?), but it’s not really. It’s a coming-of-age story. I hope you enjoy.
Making Spares: a short story, by Jeff Posey
Buy in ebook form for $0.99 from Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, or Smashwords (in any e-format). Coming soon to other ebookstores.
Short Description
Take a juvenile delinquent bowling? Preposterous. Mr. Meyers put it out of his mind. But he finds himself at the detention center offering to take a kid bowling. Reuben pretty much defies everyone, including himself. In a surprising way, of course.
Long Description
Mr. Meyers lost his two sons in American wars and his wife to her own cells that went wild with disease. He coped by bowling. Every afternoon. For a decade.
Then he saw a boy one afternoon in the custody of police going into the Juvenile Detention Facility. Mr. Meyers stopped his car, seeing the place for the first time, imaging the people inside. The next day he went in and offered to take a kid bowling once a week.
They gave him Reuben. A wild-eyed, wild-haired ball of surly anger.
Mr. Meyers took him to the bowling alley.
“I ain’t bowling,” said Reuben.
Mr. Meyers played without him. But the boy began to watch. Creep closer.
“I can beat you, old man,” Reuben said.
“I don’t think you can,” Mr. Meyers said softly.
Then Reuben picked up a ball and surprised both of them.
See a full page of description on Making Spares: a short story.
Categories
Fiction>short stories; Fiction>Sports
Cover Credit
Photo of bowling sign copyright Robert Hamilton on Flickr (see photo here). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
Filed under Hot Water Press
A flash fiction piece in preparation for my novel tentatively titled Annie and the Second Anasazi, scheduled for publication in late 2012. Sign up for notification by email here.
Antone had been the star center in high school basketball, recruited by Duke. But that all fell through nearly thirty years ago when the world started going to hell. Now he laid stone in exchange for scraps of food. A grim life, maybe. But simple. Peaceful. He’d learned to master the mechanics of his long bones and the natural inclination of stone to break in certain ways. Just like his father, and his father’s brother. It had honor if not much inspiration. Until this woman showed up. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“What if you didn’t use any steel tools?” Annie asked. “What if they broke or wore down and you couldn’t replace them?”
Antone stretched his six-eleven frame without leaving his seat. “I’ve thought about that. It makes you want to work with softer stone.”
“You’ve done it?” she asked.
He nodded. “Tried a few times.” He spoke slowly, carefully, with nominal hand gestures as if they were too tired to have much to say. “Good, hard hammerstone on some friable sandstone and you can do pretty good if you’re not too picky.”
“What does it look like?”
“Basic blocks or slabs are best. Can’t do much of anything like sculpture. It’s a pretty coarse way to work.”
“Like the Anasazi bread-loaf stones?” Annie smiled at him, hoping for agreement and recognition.
Antone swung his eyes to her and smiled back. “Yes. Exactly. That’s why they made them that way. Their artistry was the placement of the stones, the courses of smaller slivers between the big bread loafs, like you say. Then they covered them with plaster and painted over them.”
Annie nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”
Annie and the Second Anasazi is about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Note that Antone is the son of Cowtown, the sculptor of The One-Hundredth Goliath.
Filed under Contemporary, FlashFiction
A flash fiction piece in preparation for my novel tentatively titled Annie and the Second Anasazi, scheduled for publication in late 2012. Sign up for notification by email here.
Silence with background noise. The kind a city person hears in wild country. Boredom with low-grade fear. The kind a country boy feels in a subway.
“Passengers step down,” the wild man said.
She stepped, the only passenger. The sun heated her scalp, her lashless eyelids. Third toll stop. She knew the drill already. Every Centipede engineer had a rifle and kept them handy at the stops. Sometimes the wild men backed down, waved them through on a courtesy. Meant only that they felt weak just then for whatever reason. Weren’t willing to face the Centipede rifles. Sometimes they begged a modest fee with no show of force. In exchange for maintenance on the rails.
This stop felt a little different. The wild men seemed confident. Too casual.
“Hit the ground when I say so,” whispered Theo. He stayed in his segment, rifle balanced on the light railing.
Annie didn’t nod or speak, just looked for a place to duck. She could roll under Theo’s Centipede segment and then back under the platform. She readied herself.
Forty-seven men in forty-seven Centipede segments pointed forty-seven rifles at the wild men. Maybe fifty of them. None obviously armed with rifles. A few had belt pistols, none drawn.
The Train Master walked to the front of the platform from his Free Car, powered by the other segments, and approached the leader of the wild men.
“All right, what’s your toll?” he asked, wiping his nose with his sleeve. If he wiped again, the Centipede men would shoot.
“Toll? There’s no toll,” said the chief wild man. His long hair looked naturally dreadlocked and his yellow teeth were rimmed in black fuzz.
“What do you mean?” asked the Train Master.
“Track’s out.” The wild man grinned.
“Then you and your filthy-bugger friends get out there and fix it! That’s why we pay our tolls!”
The wild man chief laughed. “Broke rail. Can’t fix it.”
“Then why in hell didn’t you call a request back for a new one? The Fort Worth yard has stacks of them.”
“Talk line is dead.”
“You’re not the head man last time I went through here. Who are you?”
“New head man.” He grinned again.
“So what is it you want, Mr. Head Man?”
“Everything. And the girl. Especially the girl.” That grin again.
“Are you brave or stupid?”
“I think maybe brave.” He grinned again. “And stupid.” A shot rang out and a slug to the chest knocked the Train Master back against the Free Car. The next shot, from a Centipede man, took the top of the head wild man’s head off.
Annie dropped to the gravel bed below the train and rolled into darkness under the boards. Shooting erupted from all sides. Slugs splintered wood, slammed into rails, pinged on the metal of the Centipede segments. Men cried out. The shooting stopped. Smoke drifted through the slanted light across the rail cars.
When Annie peeked, she saw more human meat and gristle and bones than she’d ever seen or imagined. She retched into the gravel while Theo watched her.
“Got five of ’em,” he said, and then he went off with a greasy burlap sack to get his share of plunder.
This is exploratory flash fiction for my work-in-progress, tentatively titled Annie and the Second Anasazi, about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the American South. Note that Theo is the son of Sean and Kira from Anasazi Runner. Annie is the daughter of Tucker and Lydia Roth of Girl on a Rock.
Filed under Contemporary, FlashFiction
A flash fiction piece in preparation for my novel tentatively titled Annie and the Second Anasazi, scheduled for publication in late 2012. Sign up for notification by email here.
Helicopters pounded the air and everyone scattered. Annie didn’t know what to do and hesitated.
“Annie!” Serles shouted. “Over here!” She heard but couldn’t locate him and turned her head in the wrong direction.
The four helicopters surrounded her, their ferocious weapons covering her in an overlapping extreme overkill zone.
“Annie,” a voice said over a loudspeaker. She recognized the voice at the same time she wondered how she heard it over the din of the blades.
“Annie,” Reagan Newcastle said again. “I’m not in any of the machines. I’m back home in Fort Worth, where you should be. But I can see you. And you can hear me.”
Annie stood her ground, turning from one copter to the other, each hovering twenty feet off the ground. A dust storm obliterated the view beyond the flying machines, the peaceful desert morning ruined. But the initial rush of fear left her. Reagan Newcastle would never hurt her. She was his only weakness. It made her smile. That meant she had a chance to escape.
“One of the helicopters is going to land, Annie. I want you to get inside it. We won’t hurt any of the others there with you if you come along peacefully.”
Annie saw a figure emerge from the dust coming toward her. She recognized the way he walked. Serles. The copters reacted, flew up like scattered insects, then reformed with both Serles and Annie in the strike zone.
Serles continued to walk toward Annie. She felt her hands and jaw clench. Surely they wouldn’t shoot him down in front of her.
“Stop that man!” Newcastle cried.
Rapid chest-thumping fire erupted. Bursts of sand exploded between Annie and Serles, who ran, collided with Annie, pulled her two steps away to a solid metal hatch in the ground that opened. Serles threw Annie down the shaft so hard her teeth clattered. The hatch closed with a hissing sound. The pounding of helicopters and the chatter of machine gun fire became muted. They heard a soft explosion overhead. Then another.
“Missiles,” Serles said, wrapping an arm around Annie’s waist. “I guess Reagan Newcastle wants you dead or alive now.”
“What is this place?” Annie asked.
“Old nuclear missile site. Luther used to work here. He knows how to stop the helicopters.”
Annie looked at him, dust covering his curly hair, two days’ growth of beard. He’s the only man she’d ever met who kept her full attention every time she looked at him. She’d nearly fainted when the shooting started and she thought he would die.
“Listen,” Serles said.
She heard only silence. The helicopters. She no longer heard them. “Where did they go?” she whispered. The silence seemed overwhelming.
“They took a little fall.” He smiled. His teeth and the whites of his eyes gleamed in the dim light.
“How?”
“Luther and his bag of tricks. Some kind of electromotive pulse. Knocks out everything electronic for, I dunno, a mile or so I guess.”
Annie nodded. That wouldn’t stop Reagan Newcastle. It would enrage him. Not the loss of his men, which saddened her. People were expendable to him. But the loss of four helicopters. It would make it harder for him to get close to her again. He wouldn’t likely risk losing so much next time. No. Next time, he would be much more sneaky.
This is exploratory flash fiction for my work-in-progress, tentatively titled Annie and the Second Anasazi, about a migration of intellectuals into the deserts of New Mexico after the great disruption (see Gilding) where people live like the ancient ones because of changing climate coupled with an intolerable mix of politics and religion that rises in the cities of the South.
Filed under Contemporary, FlashFiction
Anasazi Runner: a novel of identity and speed
New! Buy in Paperback for $12.99 from Amazon or CreateSpace.
Sean, a gifted runner, inherited only one thing from his mother, a mysterious carved amulet with three haunting faces. He doesn’t understand why, but when he carries it, he runs faster and feels closer to his unknown ancestors.
His girlfriend’s grandmother fears the amulet is an omen of evil from the ancient Navajo enemies, the Anasazi, and pleads with him to “put it back” in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, but Sean cannot bring himself to part with it.
Instead, he straps the amulet to himself and, with the help of his retired high school running coach, begins to train in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, for an audacious attempt at making history – but what he discovers and achieves is bigger than anything he ever imagined.
Includes samples of Less Than Nothing: a novel of Anasazi strife and The G.O.D. Journal: a search for gold, available in late spring 2012: Sign up for notification by email here.
Publication Date: Mar 21 2012
ISBN/EAN13: 0615597122 / 9780615597126
Page Count: 244
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 6″ x 9″
Language: English
Color: Black and White
Related Categories: Fiction / Sports
Filed under Hot Water Press
Sixteen stones stacked high as a man’s head, one upon the other, spindly and apt to fall in a hard wind, but it had been there for as long as the boy could remember. He liked looking at it, a reminder of the strength of perfect balance. How one could stand alone and survive.
He sat in a place on the rock where two shallow scrapes fit his buttocks, and where the shadow of the sixteen standing stones passed in its daily march. The boy half-closed his eyes and made his spine as straight as the standing stones, the pull of gravity precisely his center, an arrow into the earth, a resistance to the forces of all things human and natural, a perfect monument of the power of patient persistence.
The wraith-man appeared and the boy lost his balance. Panic spiked in him and the urge to run back to the village gripped him, but he thought of the wind and how the sixteen stacked stones resisted and held its center. He swallowed and breathed deeply, trying once again to make his backbone become a column of stacked stones.
“Twenty-four,” rasped the wraith-man.
The boy refused to look directly at him, but in his peripheral vision, he saw the wild gray hair, the bony body clothed only in a thin loincloth, the skin mottle and burned by the sun. He knew to say nothing to the man. He had been expelled from the village for a reason, though the boy did not know what the reason had been.
“Twenty-four,” the wraith-man said, and the boy clenched his eyes trying to ignore him. But a tendril of wonder entered the boy’s head. Twenty-four what? Involuntarily, he glanced at the wraith-man, who saw him and cackled with laughter. He jumped up and dashed to the sixteen standing stones, and the boy’s heart leaped in his chest thinking he would try to knock them over, but he stopped short and raised his arms up above the stones, caressing them without touching them.
“Twenty-four, there used to be,” croaked the wraith-man, as if he had not used his voice in an age. He sounded as rock might sound if they spoke, as the sixteen standing stones might if they suddently gave voice to the world.
“A council of priests, we were, three moons in the making,” said the wraith-man. He dashed from the stones and put his face close to the boy’s. The man’s face was filthy, with rivulets of less-filth streaking from where his eyes had overflowed and run. The boy, even in a paroxysm of recoil, wondered if the wraith-man had been crying.
“Twenty-four high, all from the sacred place. Twenty-four, not sixteen. Eight not here, half of sixteen. All from the sacred place. And they blamed me! Half of sixteen off the top. Half of sixteen.” He turned and looked at the standing stones, then ran to them and raised his arms as if feeling the missing stones.
“Did you take them?” asked the boy, surprised by his own voice. He had not inended to speak to the wraith-man. The elders forbade it. He was to be ignored as if he did not exist.
The wraith-man turned his eyes wide and flashing in the sun, his hair tangled and twisted in the wind. “Yes,” he said, his arms frozen in caress of the missing stones. “Want to see?”
He dashed away up and over a shelf of rock between two boulders, then turned to look back at the boy, who did not know what to do. What if the village banished him because he went with the wraith-man? He stood and looked around, his body shaking. He saw no one, but that did not mean they did not see him. Then he looked at the sixteen stacked standing stones and imagined eight more stones balanced perfectly on top, even greater grandeur for the forces of serenity. What if he could restore them? What if he could retrieve them from the wraith-man and make the stack higher than a man’s head? Would his back be straighter, stronger, balanced against even the force of his grandmother and his clan, the elders and the village? A rush went into his head, making his ears pop, and he nodded ot the stacked stones as if they had spoken to him. “Yes,” he whispered. “I will.”
He turned and followed the wraith-man, who scrambled over rocks to a hidden place with a shallow cave, a fire ring with scattered broken pots, and a column of eight standing stones, smaller than the others, but the boy saw clearly how they would fit on top. He crept carefully to them while the wraith-man crouched and watched, his mouth working from an O to a grin and back again.
The stones came to the boy’s waist and they gave a heat as if alive, and did they hum, or was that inside his head?
“Let’s put them back,” said the boy.
The wraith-man jumped up and stood beside the boy, fidgeting and rocking on his legs. “The eight back with the sixteen t make twenty-four!” He kept repeating it over and over. Until he had said it twenty-four times, then he looked at the boy and said, “Yes!”
They worked in the night to the light of a three-quarter moon, the boy imagining his grandmother calling and calling. They built a circling scaffold of wood and the wraith-man lifted the stones to the boy who balanced them on top.
“Balance,” said the wraith-man. “Center line. Perfect now. Be perfect.”
By morning, they had removed the scaffold and when the first light of morning touched the topmost of the twenty-four stacked standing stones, the village chief and the boy’s grandmother arrived, the entire village behind, and they stared without speaking until the chief dropped to his knees, the boy’s grandmother too, and they chanted glory, glory, glory to the sun god.
Filed under AnasaziStories, FlashFiction
