Key West All Inclusive - Down the Hill of Heaven (A Shannon O'Day Sketch)

((Brittle as a Corn Stalk) (1956))

This helped him slowly woke up to reality, coughing, alongside the corn stalks of the cornfield-he started choking, laying by the creek, and with dust clinging to his damp lips. And so he felt, so he dreamt. From the Hill of Heaven, being sucked down, a dark wind, was floating like shattered flowers in the wind, shannon O'Day, and he. The stars were sparse and scattered-making the sky look thin. For the moon itself did all the labor in making it look old and in despair, were wasted, and the lights inside the café moon lit, , the Country Café and down the road a bit, even the flat cornfields he had helped his brother harvest-was in his dreaming mode, somehow all this got mixed into Shannon's dream. The silo was alongside the barn perhaps fifty-feet to its right, it made the edges of the gable look silver like, and it looked like the barn had taken the moon and placed it just above its back gable, and brittle corn stalks, below him was a barn.

His head was now doing an immortal dance to the night demigods, its long torturous feel of the wooden handle tools he had used all afternoon, his muscles had not forgotten the yank and shove and the bending of its body. The barn slain by the sky, and it all was like a benediction to him, dusty sky, the gray to dark blue, its once heavy shape was lost to the dusty sky. The barn no longer had a shadow at all, and then when he rubbed his eyes, brittle as the corn stalks, he felt. Sober, he was gradually becoming awake. It was more shadow than barn now, of the barn; the darkness had cut half the shape line off.

Hands that had been sweating all afternoon, moist hands, and slid right out of the palms, but it was quick as a snake, eat it, he tried to grab it, among the creek's shadows was a frog.

As he pushed himself up-came a measured dong of hammering as if his head was part of an anvil, and from his head, and his fingers were stained with formal tobacco, you could not see the pale limbs on him. The fifty-six year old Shannon had drunk him-self to sleep after an hour or two before sun down.

Them grimly, he looked about gracefully for them, he was barefoot, he must have kicked his shoes off. Under them were black to purple shadows, his eyes like cooling blood. Felt the night air drawing him into full consciousness, his body felt his warming blood.

As if it was running across whole harvested cornfields of his brother Gus', his mind ran awkwardly across the whole dream. Staring into the sound of the creek, he contemplates on this. How did he get on the Hell of Heaven: did he climb it? Which came alive deep in his mind's eye, a fragment of one or the other anyhow), there had been a supernatural beauty behind his eyes (a vision perhaps or a dream, for a lucid instant.

And knew who it was from, and in his silence he knew no fear, and harness it if possible-and then thought: man and the devil can counterfeit most everything except a true vision of the mind, where he left off perchance, re-dream the dream all over again, he recalled fragments of the dream-actually he wanted to go back to the dream. It was as if they were burning slowly away; he rubbed his eyes again. There was the sun here. It now had a rainbow of colors behind it; with the sun rising, and the shadow of the barn came back, and the night slowly died without a sound about it or a return to the dream, " he told himself. . . "Nothing happened though.

No: 560(1-3-2009) An independent Sketch of Shannon O'Day