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On the day before
The minute paws of a mouse made a light tapping sound on the bedroom wooden floor as it scurried away to safety. That soft noise lasted only for a few seconds, but it was enough to wake Peter up.
Like every single day in the last decades, he opened his eyes to a total darkness. The sunrise was still a couple of hours away. He turned his head to read the big red digits of the naff alarm clock sitting on the bedside table: 4:30 AM. He wasn’t in a hurry. So he stretched his legs, still numb from the night, under the duvet, put both his hands under his pillow and remained still for a moment, staring at the invisible ceiling, his mind empty.
Finally, he decided it was time to get up. With a sigh, he threw the duvet off and sat on his bed, his legs dangling from the frame, his arms tightly pushing against the mattress. He heard the regular breathing of Seamus, his old dog, who was sleeping on the rug. That made him smile. He leant forward and put his hand on the dog’s head – he had no need for light: that gesture had been repeated so many times it was almost reflex now. The dog shuddered with the rough contact, but he made no other sign of protest or content.
“Come on Seamus!” Peter said, as he groped for the light switch. “Time to get up my old hound!”
The dog yawned and opened bleary eyes. At almost fifteen years, he wasn’t supposed to yap or jump for joy. He was a serious dog. He had his dignity to uphold. Occasionally, he would still stoop to running after a branch or a ball his master would throw him. Sometimes he would sniffle the trail of a nearby bitch in heat, but even the vivid memories of his former matings weren’t enough to turn him on any more now. No, that time was past. Now he enjoyed his sedate routine: he liked to spend his days wallowing in the armchair; he liked his food delivered at regular hours; and when he was forced to leave the farm to accompany his master during his chores, seldom did he now venture out of sight of the man who provided him with shelter and love.
And so he did not move when his master walked across the bedroom to the toilets, and back a few moments later. Only reluctantly did he stand up when the tinny rattle of the clashing pans echoed from the distant kitchen, followed soon after by the delicate scent of freshly brewed coffee.
A scent that promised food.
The stovetop coffee pot had just started to steam when Seamus strutted into the kitchen. His master opened the cupboard and paused, shilly-shallying to pick a mug. Finally, he chose the one with the English flag – a souvenir of one of his rare journeys out of the district – went to the stove and poured the hot black liquid into it. Then he padded back to the table, that frayed, ancient, sturdy oak table that was a heirloom of his family and whose top has been polished by uncountable years of use. Close to his mug he placed the a fresh slice of the large loaf of bread he had bought the day before and a slab of fresh butter, which he spread on the crumb.
He chewed his thick slice slowly. Every now and then he tore from the loaf slivers of crust and crumb that he threw to the dog, who had come to sit next to him. When he finished, he turned his gaze to the window pane and beyond it to the void that was the outside, until a muffled thud snatched him out of his reverie. His eyes focussed back on his mug and he chugged what was left inside. He stood up, put the mug in the sink and shuffled to the opposite door, then down the narrow corridor to the entrance of the cowshed. He switched the light on and breathed the strong, pungent odour that permeated the place.
The large room was almost desert. Next to the far wall, in a small pen, a couple of hens were already cackling and tiptoeing on the straw. Not far from them, in a row of hutches, red eyed white bunnies scrunched their jiggling noses against the iron mesh, begging for food. But the denizen who required immediate attention was a large sorrel cow, tied to the long trough that ran throughout the shed by an iron chain, whose clasp was bound to the metal loop of her leather collar, where the bell normally would hang. On her other side, a dirty string, pulled through a clever system of pulleys and springs in the ceiling, held her tail up, even when she was lying. Her flanks were taut and lustrous, her whole body swollen by the the calf she was bearing. Just a couple of days before her ordeal would end.
Meanwhile, she had to remain inside. Peter took the shovel and scrubbed the floor under the animal, pulling the slimy, stinky dung into the trench. When nothing conspicuous remained, he took the hose and doused the floor liberally, flushing the crud into the drain pipe that led a few metres downwards, on the other side of the exterior wall.
When he was satisfied, he turned the tap off, and with a pitchfork ferried hay from a heap which lay in a corner into the trough. The cow mooed softly and, as if to thank him, bobbed her head and started grazing.
When everything was done in the cowshed, Peter returned to the kitchen. He washed his hands, cut himself another slice of bread, wolfed it down and proceeded to the shower.
At five thirty he was back in the kitchen. In summer, he would have gone outside to enjoy the crisp air at the breaking of dawn, weather permitting. But at this time of the year, sunrise was still nowhere near, so he fixed himself another coffee and turned the radio on.
He didn't mind much the words which flooded from the device. The outside world was only half-real to him. As the years had gone by, his territory had shrunk. When he was young, he had often thought to leave this place in the boonies, look for a job in a remote city, meet a girl and maybe have kids. But when his father had died unexpectedly, run over by his own tractor, his bubble had been burst. He had had no choice but to take over in absolute emergency and start to work all year round to take care of the cattle and of his mother. When she in turn had died a few years later, it was too late: he was already too deep in the routine of farming, and found to his surprise that he had formed a liking for the animals.
Unwillingly, he had let himself be snared into that trap. Instead of wedding a girl, he had wedded his farm.
And as the hope of escaping the forlorn spot that was his home faded away, so his interest in the vicissitudes of the world grew dim. His errands rarely bade him further than the nearest middle-sized town, about thirty kilometres away. The number of people he came in contact with slowly dwindled until he ceased to talk to anyone but the inhabitants of the hamlet his farm was part of, and the clerks of the few shops he had to regularly visit.
When he had no errand to run, he spent his days alone with his dog and cattle, and step by step he learnt to find comfort and peace in isolation. At first, he was still happy to take part in the shindigs or revelries the mayor organised all around the year. Maybe, in those years, he was still secretly hoping to meet a girl there, like his father had done before him. But with time passing that dream died out for good, and binge drinking became despicable to him, until he stopped showing up altogether. His fellow farmers were puzzled, but got used to it after a while. Truth be said, in those remote areas, many people had quirks more weird than his.
Around a quarter past six a ghostly light seeped from the window. It was the signal. Peter flicked the radio off, slipped into his boots and put on the grey, warm coat lined with eiderdown that was hanging on the coat stand. He rushed into the corridor, followed by a sleepy Seamus. Snatching two empty, clean milk jugs he flung the front door open and bolted outside.
At the threshold, he paused to glance at the scenery. The sky was still navy blue, studded with bright stars, but high above the timberline the loftiest mountaintops were already tipped in a delicate pink tinge, forerunner of the glory of the sunrise to come.
But he had no time to lose contemplating the landscape. Whistling his dog over, he strode headlong along the path that sloped downwards. The dim light was barely sufficient for his eyes, but he knew the way like the back of his hand.
Five minutes later, he sidled through the chink in the electric fence into the meadow where the rest of the cows were already gathered, lowing as if to greet him. With a smile he grasped the old wooden stool he had left there, removed the lid of the first jug and clucked to coax the beasts.
When the first one ambled to stand before him, he moved sidewise and put the jug straight under her swollen udder, full to the brim, begging to be funnelled. He spat on his gnarled hands, rubbed them together, then slowly closed them around the nearest two teats. He began by pulling them slowly, almost amorously, then harder and harder, until the first jet of warm white liquid spurted and crashed on to the bottom of the jug with a high-pitched rattle.
Milking the cows by hand was a ritual he had grown so fond of that it was out and away his favourite moment of his day. There was something sensual, carnal in the contact his palms and fingers made with the teats. They felt soft and warm. He had often wondered if women's breasts would also feel the same, but he never had had any opportunity to find out, and now it was way too late: as a matter of fact, he didn’t care any more.
Now his thoughts turned further away, and he smiled once more when he imagined what grimace the folks in towns would make if they ever discovered the milk they drank had been brought out manually. Of course, what he produced was but a drop in a white ocean overflowed by the rivers pouring out of modern installations, where scores of highly productive cows were parked inside huge sheds. In those prisons, they never got to see the sun or even a single blade of grass, were artificially inseminated, nurtured with complex, shoddy mixtures of tasteless powders, deprived of their calves at birth and milked by machines that sucked them like vampires three or four times a day until they would dry up and the cycle would start again, on and on. And then, on a bright day, as a welcome thanks for all they had freely given during their pitiful life, the farmer would send them to the slaughterhouse where their carcasses would be chopped and butchered into gobbets of meat to be delivered to the nearest Mac Donalds, where they would end up in repugnant hamburgers.
Modern man envisioned cows as simple and efficient appliances to morph grass into milk and meat.
Grass. There was almost no more need of it. His eyes left his juggling hands and he looked around him. The light had brightened up and the surroundings were plainly visible. What would happen to his meadows after his death? Having no children or even nephews, all his estate would return to the state, namely the municipality. There was a slight odd they might endure, serving as common pasture for the other farmers around. But Peter had no illusion. More likely, they would be sold to a land developer, either to build a slew of cookie-cutter, ugly “chalets” or a new ski lift for fucking dickheads teens coming from the capital city. Traditional farming was done for anyway. Global economy, as they had christened it, called for better ways to exploit mountains, even if it meant defiling the landscape and stripping the place from the soul slowly forged all along the past millennia.
How could he, alone, stand and ride out that juggernaut? He sighed, and focussed his attention back on his hands.
Half an hour later, the jugs were full of steaming, creamy milk. Peter screwed the lids back in place, and endeavoured to tow them back to the farm. Twice ten kilograms to carry uphill. Up until a few years ago, the challenge had left him undaunted. But now it wasn’t the same cakewalk as before, and he had to stop for breath three times along the way.
Maybe he had been slowed by his stream of thoughts, but he had barely returned into the hallway that he heard the familiar drone of the dairy truck pulling in. He about-faced and walked back to the threshold, just in time to see the truck brake and the engine die. The driver, a man in his sixties, his white hair and recessed blue eyes contrasting with a deeply wrinkled, tanned face, stepped out and walked to him. He extended his hand and they shook.
“You’re late Peter?” the driver asked in dialect. “That’s not like you. Are you feeling fine?”
“I got stuck thinking about Nelson’s decision,” Peter lied.
“Uh-huh. It’s still sticking in everybody’s craw, doesn’t it?”
Peter looked down and scuffed the ground. “I don’t understand it. Why sell eighty percent of his property to those…” he hesitated. “Vultures.”
The driver put his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Look. The guy has kids. He probably wants a better future for them than all this.” With his other arm he made a gesture that took in all the landscape.
For all answer Peter grunted. There was a hush that lasted several seconds, until Seamus barked at some distant shadow hurrying along the road.
“Come on,” the driver finally said. “I’ve got your check. May I come in?”
“Sure,” Peter said, “there might be some coffee left.” Both men trod into the house.
“Hundred twenty-three?!” Peter exclaimed.
“Yeah, and there’s no mistake. I’m sorry.”
“It gets lower month by month. Is that ever going to stop?”
“Not sure. Tim says milk prices are on the skids. Too much production, you see? The world is glutting with milk, and the dairy transformers are fuelling the downfall, in order to improve their margins and line their pockets. Modern life… Who cares about small producers any more? Vultures are anywhere, you know.”
“We are doomed…” Peter said glumly, his gaze locked on his mug.
“I mean, at the end of the line, sure thing. And then when it’s not the price, it’s the law. I heard they’re preparing new regulations in high places, driven by the current paranoia about bacteria and stuff. Everything will have to be sanitised, cleansed three times, pasteurised, disposable gloves, overalls and stuff, and so on. Good bye old jugs, good bye hand milking. They want to turn every farm into a sort of modern factory. In a couple of years, you’ll be ready to get embalmed and enter the museum, pal. End of an our era… soon we’ll be dinosaurs.”
“Time to retire, you think?”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t hesitate… What do you have to lose? I’m sure you’d get a higher allowance than what you currently eke out with your cattle – well what’s left of it…”
There was another heavy break. The driver gulped what what left of his coffee, then scraped his chair backwards and stood up. “Gotta go,” he said almost apologetically. “Still a few guys to visit before turning home. Thanks for the coffee. Take care.”
“Yeah, thanks, you too,” Peter answered. He remained seated. “Don’t forget to pick up yesterday evening’s jugs in the fridge before leaving,” he added.
“Will do,” the driver said. “See you tomorrow Peter. Don’t keel over. We will stand and fight, be it only for honour’s sake.” And with that, he exited, closed the kitchen door behind him and was gone. Peter heard the engine start up and the clutch being engaged. The noise faded away as the conveyance backed along the path to the main road.
A sudden fatigue fell over him. He lay both his arms on the table into a cradle and buried his face in it. He closed his eyes and blanked his mind…
How long did he remain seated in his chair, asleep, he couldn’t tell. But when he finally roused from his dozing, it was well past noon.
He felt famished now.
He sliced another hunk of bread, slathered butter on it and lay atop a sliver of ham and another of cheese from his larder. Finally, he chopped a clove of garlic and sprinkled the bits mall over his personal bruschetta. When he had munched it away, he washed it down with a glass of red plonk.
He felt slightly better. Maybe this was the end of an era, but there were still things to enjoy.
He stood up and stuffed some lumber into the stove’s hearth. Then he laced his trekking shoes, clasped the walking stick he had carved himself out of an aspen branch and put his coat on. Finally, he squashed a nondescript plastic bag into one of his pockets. With the dog skittering ahead of him, he simply pull the door closed behind him – he never locked it; what was the need? There were no burglars here, and anyway he had nothing worth stealing, except maybe the few tenners he tucked away in one of the drawers of his bedroom cabinet.
Now instead of taking the right path to his meadows or left one to the main road he elected the one that ran sidewise to his house and straight ahead into the forest. As he arrived under the cover of the first spruces, that small path joined a larger trail that looked like a forest road. In his youth, when it was just used by the lumberjacks to tow timber down, that path was one of his favourite strolls. During the week-ends, and especially at this time of the year, he would get up before sunrise and set out into the woods. Already at twelve years old he was enjoying the silence and freshness of the early morning, loved to slake his thirst at the clear water of the merry brooks that crossed the path, and would occasionally freeze in wonder when, round a hairpin, he would catch a glimpse of a deer, before the elegant animal would pronk away to safety.
For a long time the trail had remained unspoiled. But, with the runaway development of tourism, some city pricks had eventually discovered it. Then, for a couple of years, it had mutated into a sort of whimsical highway: every summer, cars would line up and trundle up with difficulty, digging deep ruts all along the way and transforming the meadows that lay above the forest into a vast parking lot defiled by the trash those disgusting city scumbags always left behind them. Until the inevitable had finally happened: two cars had come to face each other in the narrowest and steepest stretch. No driver had yielded, and the car that drove along the precipice had tried to force the way up. But an unseen rut had made it slew into the void, and it had tumbled down, crashing more than one hundred meters down. Two kids and their parents had died that fateful day.
Thereafter the municipality had built a barrier, and, except for the general state of the path, which was now all cut up by the repeated trampling, the area had reverted to its former state. That is, up until two years ago when the new team had decided this was an ideal playground for mountain biking. So now, starting late spring and ending early autumn, squads of nutjobs of all ages regularly barrelled down on their bikes, to the despair of the causal walker who had to be constantly on guard, lest one of those frenzied missiles would lose control and smash into him.
But there was nothing to fear now. The last mountain biker had vanished with the return of hoarfrost, and, anyway, during the week the traffic all but was nil. So Peter ambled up quietly and enjoyed the quiet, inhaling deeply the almost pure oxygen while his dog scampered along, his tail wagging with each spoor he sniffed. About one hour and half later he had reached the upper edge of the forest. From there, the path continued for a short while, skirting around the meadows that extended up to the hilltop, before sinking back into the trees’ shadow until it finally ended at the wooden shack built by the hunters to serve as a meeting point.
That was not, however, Peter’s target for today. Rather, several hundreds metres before the shack, he left the path to venture into the untrodden undergrowth. He knew a secret spot where he would be able to find a certain variety of cep and various other mushrooms he planned to eat tonight with his omelette.
It was around five when he came back home. Tossing his bag full of mushrooms on the kitchen table, he hurried to tend to his cattle. Milking cows had to be done at regular times, the slightest delay could cause great pain to the placid beasts. When that chore was over and the jugs safely stored into the fridge, waiting to be collected the next morning, he turned his attention back to the pregnant cow who was stranded in the shed, gave carrots and salad to the rabbits, corn to the hens, and picked up the eggs they had lain during the day.
Back in the kitchen, he rinsed the mushrooms in the sink and chopped them. He put a frying pan on the stove, dropped a dollop of butter inside. When the butter had melted, he added the mushroom slices and the garlic leftovers of his lunch.
While the mixture sizzled and a nice scent filled the room, Peter broke the eggs and whipped them into a perfect bright orange fluid that he in turn poured into the pan. He watched it warm and coagulate into a solid mass. When it was cooked enough for his taste, he slid it out of the pan into his plate and sprinkled ground pepper over it. He sampled it: it was scrumptious. Satisfied, he filled his glass with the same red plonk and set about eating the rest.
His dinner over and the flatware washed up, he proceeded to the shower. Then, purged at last from the stains of the day, he went on to close all the shutters: first the kitchen, then the living room. He was about the close the bedroom ones when something outside caught his attention. What was it?
Was it the unusual carmine of the dying sun, as an army of ruthless dark clouds angrily marched against it through the already darkened sky, blotting out the light of the early stars? Was it the puzzling lack of any bird chirping? Was it the deep, doleful tone of one of his cows’ mooing? He couldn’t place it. Something was amiss. Something was definitely weird, and Peter stood at the window, both intrigued and fascinated, all his senses in alert.
Then, in a flash of realisation, he understood, and a bright smile illuminated his face. He had nothing to do, just to wait. How long exactly he didn’t know, but the issue was inevitable. His instinct, honed by decades of experience, couldn’t betray him. He felt elated, like in his childhood, when every fifth of March he would go to bed, eager to wake up the next morning to discover what his parents had bought him for his birthday.
He closed the window and, calling Seamus, he walked to the front door and outside. There he stopped and lifted his face up towards the invisible sky, as his dog came to sit next to him. Both remained out in the cold, expectant, two tiny shadows lost under a greater one.
Until at some point in the midst of darkness Peter felt on his nose the soft, but icy, touch of the first flake.
Like every single day in the last decades, he opened his eyes to a total darkness. The sunrise was still a couple of hours away. He turned his head to read the big red digits of the naff alarm clock sitting on the bedside table: 4:30 AM. He wasn’t in a hurry. So he stretched his legs, still numb from the night, under the duvet, put both his hands under his pillow and remained still for a moment, staring at the invisible ceiling, his mind empty.
Finally, he decided it was time to get up. With a sigh, he threw the duvet off and sat on his bed, his legs dangling from the frame, his arms tightly pushing against the mattress. He heard the regular breathing of Seamus, his old dog, who was sleeping on the rug. That made him smile. He leant forward and put his hand on the dog’s head – he had no need for light: that gesture had been repeated so many times it was almost reflex now. The dog shuddered with the rough contact, but he made no other sign of protest or content.
“Come on Seamus!” Peter said, as he groped for the light switch. “Time to get up my old hound!”
The dog yawned and opened bleary eyes. At almost fifteen years, he wasn’t supposed to yap or jump for joy. He was a serious dog. He had his dignity to uphold. Occasionally, he would still stoop to running after a branch or a ball his master would throw him. Sometimes he would sniffle the trail of a nearby bitch in heat, but even the vivid memories of his former matings weren’t enough to turn him on any more now. No, that time was past. Now he enjoyed his sedate routine: he liked to spend his days wallowing in the armchair; he liked his food delivered at regular hours; and when he was forced to leave the farm to accompany his master during his chores, seldom did he now venture out of sight of the man who provided him with shelter and love.
And so he did not move when his master walked across the bedroom to the toilets, and back a few moments later. Only reluctantly did he stand up when the tinny rattle of the clashing pans echoed from the distant kitchen, followed soon after by the delicate scent of freshly brewed coffee.
A scent that promised food.
The stovetop coffee pot had just started to steam when Seamus strutted into the kitchen. His master opened the cupboard and paused, shilly-shallying to pick a mug. Finally, he chose the one with the English flag – a souvenir of one of his rare journeys out of the district – went to the stove and poured the hot black liquid into it. Then he padded back to the table, that frayed, ancient, sturdy oak table that was a heirloom of his family and whose top has been polished by uncountable years of use. Close to his mug he placed the a fresh slice of the large loaf of bread he had bought the day before and a slab of fresh butter, which he spread on the crumb.
He chewed his thick slice slowly. Every now and then he tore from the loaf slivers of crust and crumb that he threw to the dog, who had come to sit next to him. When he finished, he turned his gaze to the window pane and beyond it to the void that was the outside, until a muffled thud snatched him out of his reverie. His eyes focussed back on his mug and he chugged what was left inside. He stood up, put the mug in the sink and shuffled to the opposite door, then down the narrow corridor to the entrance of the cowshed. He switched the light on and breathed the strong, pungent odour that permeated the place.
The large room was almost desert. Next to the far wall, in a small pen, a couple of hens were already cackling and tiptoeing on the straw. Not far from them, in a row of hutches, red eyed white bunnies scrunched their jiggling noses against the iron mesh, begging for food. But the denizen who required immediate attention was a large sorrel cow, tied to the long trough that ran throughout the shed by an iron chain, whose clasp was bound to the metal loop of her leather collar, where the bell normally would hang. On her other side, a dirty string, pulled through a clever system of pulleys and springs in the ceiling, held her tail up, even when she was lying. Her flanks were taut and lustrous, her whole body swollen by the the calf she was bearing. Just a couple of days before her ordeal would end.
Meanwhile, she had to remain inside. Peter took the shovel and scrubbed the floor under the animal, pulling the slimy, stinky dung into the trench. When nothing conspicuous remained, he took the hose and doused the floor liberally, flushing the crud into the drain pipe that led a few metres downwards, on the other side of the exterior wall.
When he was satisfied, he turned the tap off, and with a pitchfork ferried hay from a heap which lay in a corner into the trough. The cow mooed softly and, as if to thank him, bobbed her head and started grazing.
When everything was done in the cowshed, Peter returned to the kitchen. He washed his hands, cut himself another slice of bread, wolfed it down and proceeded to the shower.
At five thirty he was back in the kitchen. In summer, he would have gone outside to enjoy the crisp air at the breaking of dawn, weather permitting. But at this time of the year, sunrise was still nowhere near, so he fixed himself another coffee and turned the radio on.
He didn't mind much the words which flooded from the device. The outside world was only half-real to him. As the years had gone by, his territory had shrunk. When he was young, he had often thought to leave this place in the boonies, look for a job in a remote city, meet a girl and maybe have kids. But when his father had died unexpectedly, run over by his own tractor, his bubble had been burst. He had had no choice but to take over in absolute emergency and start to work all year round to take care of the cattle and of his mother. When she in turn had died a few years later, it was too late: he was already too deep in the routine of farming, and found to his surprise that he had formed a liking for the animals.
Unwillingly, he had let himself be snared into that trap. Instead of wedding a girl, he had wedded his farm.
And as the hope of escaping the forlorn spot that was his home faded away, so his interest in the vicissitudes of the world grew dim. His errands rarely bade him further than the nearest middle-sized town, about thirty kilometres away. The number of people he came in contact with slowly dwindled until he ceased to talk to anyone but the inhabitants of the hamlet his farm was part of, and the clerks of the few shops he had to regularly visit.
When he had no errand to run, he spent his days alone with his dog and cattle, and step by step he learnt to find comfort and peace in isolation. At first, he was still happy to take part in the shindigs or revelries the mayor organised all around the year. Maybe, in those years, he was still secretly hoping to meet a girl there, like his father had done before him. But with time passing that dream died out for good, and binge drinking became despicable to him, until he stopped showing up altogether. His fellow farmers were puzzled, but got used to it after a while. Truth be said, in those remote areas, many people had quirks more weird than his.
Around a quarter past six a ghostly light seeped from the window. It was the signal. Peter flicked the radio off, slipped into his boots and put on the grey, warm coat lined with eiderdown that was hanging on the coat stand. He rushed into the corridor, followed by a sleepy Seamus. Snatching two empty, clean milk jugs he flung the front door open and bolted outside.
At the threshold, he paused to glance at the scenery. The sky was still navy blue, studded with bright stars, but high above the timberline the loftiest mountaintops were already tipped in a delicate pink tinge, forerunner of the glory of the sunrise to come.
But he had no time to lose contemplating the landscape. Whistling his dog over, he strode headlong along the path that sloped downwards. The dim light was barely sufficient for his eyes, but he knew the way like the back of his hand.
Five minutes later, he sidled through the chink in the electric fence into the meadow where the rest of the cows were already gathered, lowing as if to greet him. With a smile he grasped the old wooden stool he had left there, removed the lid of the first jug and clucked to coax the beasts.
When the first one ambled to stand before him, he moved sidewise and put the jug straight under her swollen udder, full to the brim, begging to be funnelled. He spat on his gnarled hands, rubbed them together, then slowly closed them around the nearest two teats. He began by pulling them slowly, almost amorously, then harder and harder, until the first jet of warm white liquid spurted and crashed on to the bottom of the jug with a high-pitched rattle.
Milking the cows by hand was a ritual he had grown so fond of that it was out and away his favourite moment of his day. There was something sensual, carnal in the contact his palms and fingers made with the teats. They felt soft and warm. He had often wondered if women's breasts would also feel the same, but he never had had any opportunity to find out, and now it was way too late: as a matter of fact, he didn’t care any more.
Now his thoughts turned further away, and he smiled once more when he imagined what grimace the folks in towns would make if they ever discovered the milk they drank had been brought out manually. Of course, what he produced was but a drop in a white ocean overflowed by the rivers pouring out of modern installations, where scores of highly productive cows were parked inside huge sheds. In those prisons, they never got to see the sun or even a single blade of grass, were artificially inseminated, nurtured with complex, shoddy mixtures of tasteless powders, deprived of their calves at birth and milked by machines that sucked them like vampires three or four times a day until they would dry up and the cycle would start again, on and on. And then, on a bright day, as a welcome thanks for all they had freely given during their pitiful life, the farmer would send them to the slaughterhouse where their carcasses would be chopped and butchered into gobbets of meat to be delivered to the nearest Mac Donalds, where they would end up in repugnant hamburgers.
Modern man envisioned cows as simple and efficient appliances to morph grass into milk and meat.
Grass. There was almost no more need of it. His eyes left his juggling hands and he looked around him. The light had brightened up and the surroundings were plainly visible. What would happen to his meadows after his death? Having no children or even nephews, all his estate would return to the state, namely the municipality. There was a slight odd they might endure, serving as common pasture for the other farmers around. But Peter had no illusion. More likely, they would be sold to a land developer, either to build a slew of cookie-cutter, ugly “chalets” or a new ski lift for fucking dickheads teens coming from the capital city. Traditional farming was done for anyway. Global economy, as they had christened it, called for better ways to exploit mountains, even if it meant defiling the landscape and stripping the place from the soul slowly forged all along the past millennia.
How could he, alone, stand and ride out that juggernaut? He sighed, and focussed his attention back on his hands.
Half an hour later, the jugs were full of steaming, creamy milk. Peter screwed the lids back in place, and endeavoured to tow them back to the farm. Twice ten kilograms to carry uphill. Up until a few years ago, the challenge had left him undaunted. But now it wasn’t the same cakewalk as before, and he had to stop for breath three times along the way.
Maybe he had been slowed by his stream of thoughts, but he had barely returned into the hallway that he heard the familiar drone of the dairy truck pulling in. He about-faced and walked back to the threshold, just in time to see the truck brake and the engine die. The driver, a man in his sixties, his white hair and recessed blue eyes contrasting with a deeply wrinkled, tanned face, stepped out and walked to him. He extended his hand and they shook.
“You’re late Peter?” the driver asked in dialect. “That’s not like you. Are you feeling fine?”
“I got stuck thinking about Nelson’s decision,” Peter lied.
“Uh-huh. It’s still sticking in everybody’s craw, doesn’t it?”
Peter looked down and scuffed the ground. “I don’t understand it. Why sell eighty percent of his property to those…” he hesitated. “Vultures.”
The driver put his hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Look. The guy has kids. He probably wants a better future for them than all this.” With his other arm he made a gesture that took in all the landscape.
For all answer Peter grunted. There was a hush that lasted several seconds, until Seamus barked at some distant shadow hurrying along the road.
“Come on,” the driver finally said. “I’ve got your check. May I come in?”
“Sure,” Peter said, “there might be some coffee left.” Both men trod into the house.
***
“Hundred twenty-three?!” Peter exclaimed.
“Yeah, and there’s no mistake. I’m sorry.”
“It gets lower month by month. Is that ever going to stop?”
“Not sure. Tim says milk prices are on the skids. Too much production, you see? The world is glutting with milk, and the dairy transformers are fuelling the downfall, in order to improve their margins and line their pockets. Modern life… Who cares about small producers any more? Vultures are anywhere, you know.”
“We are doomed…” Peter said glumly, his gaze locked on his mug.
“I mean, at the end of the line, sure thing. And then when it’s not the price, it’s the law. I heard they’re preparing new regulations in high places, driven by the current paranoia about bacteria and stuff. Everything will have to be sanitised, cleansed three times, pasteurised, disposable gloves, overalls and stuff, and so on. Good bye old jugs, good bye hand milking. They want to turn every farm into a sort of modern factory. In a couple of years, you’ll be ready to get embalmed and enter the museum, pal. End of an our era… soon we’ll be dinosaurs.”
“Time to retire, you think?”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t hesitate… What do you have to lose? I’m sure you’d get a higher allowance than what you currently eke out with your cattle – well what’s left of it…”
There was another heavy break. The driver gulped what what left of his coffee, then scraped his chair backwards and stood up. “Gotta go,” he said almost apologetically. “Still a few guys to visit before turning home. Thanks for the coffee. Take care.”
“Yeah, thanks, you too,” Peter answered. He remained seated. “Don’t forget to pick up yesterday evening’s jugs in the fridge before leaving,” he added.
“Will do,” the driver said. “See you tomorrow Peter. Don’t keel over. We will stand and fight, be it only for honour’s sake.” And with that, he exited, closed the kitchen door behind him and was gone. Peter heard the engine start up and the clutch being engaged. The noise faded away as the conveyance backed along the path to the main road.
A sudden fatigue fell over him. He lay both his arms on the table into a cradle and buried his face in it. He closed his eyes and blanked his mind…
*
How long did he remain seated in his chair, asleep, he couldn’t tell. But when he finally roused from his dozing, it was well past noon.
He felt famished now.
He sliced another hunk of bread, slathered butter on it and lay atop a sliver of ham and another of cheese from his larder. Finally, he chopped a clove of garlic and sprinkled the bits mall over his personal bruschetta. When he had munched it away, he washed it down with a glass of red plonk.
He felt slightly better. Maybe this was the end of an era, but there were still things to enjoy.
He stood up and stuffed some lumber into the stove’s hearth. Then he laced his trekking shoes, clasped the walking stick he had carved himself out of an aspen branch and put his coat on. Finally, he squashed a nondescript plastic bag into one of his pockets. With the dog skittering ahead of him, he simply pull the door closed behind him – he never locked it; what was the need? There were no burglars here, and anyway he had nothing worth stealing, except maybe the few tenners he tucked away in one of the drawers of his bedroom cabinet.
Now instead of taking the right path to his meadows or left one to the main road he elected the one that ran sidewise to his house and straight ahead into the forest. As he arrived under the cover of the first spruces, that small path joined a larger trail that looked like a forest road. In his youth, when it was just used by the lumberjacks to tow timber down, that path was one of his favourite strolls. During the week-ends, and especially at this time of the year, he would get up before sunrise and set out into the woods. Already at twelve years old he was enjoying the silence and freshness of the early morning, loved to slake his thirst at the clear water of the merry brooks that crossed the path, and would occasionally freeze in wonder when, round a hairpin, he would catch a glimpse of a deer, before the elegant animal would pronk away to safety.
For a long time the trail had remained unspoiled. But, with the runaway development of tourism, some city pricks had eventually discovered it. Then, for a couple of years, it had mutated into a sort of whimsical highway: every summer, cars would line up and trundle up with difficulty, digging deep ruts all along the way and transforming the meadows that lay above the forest into a vast parking lot defiled by the trash those disgusting city scumbags always left behind them. Until the inevitable had finally happened: two cars had come to face each other in the narrowest and steepest stretch. No driver had yielded, and the car that drove along the precipice had tried to force the way up. But an unseen rut had made it slew into the void, and it had tumbled down, crashing more than one hundred meters down. Two kids and their parents had died that fateful day.
Thereafter the municipality had built a barrier, and, except for the general state of the path, which was now all cut up by the repeated trampling, the area had reverted to its former state. That is, up until two years ago when the new team had decided this was an ideal playground for mountain biking. So now, starting late spring and ending early autumn, squads of nutjobs of all ages regularly barrelled down on their bikes, to the despair of the causal walker who had to be constantly on guard, lest one of those frenzied missiles would lose control and smash into him.
But there was nothing to fear now. The last mountain biker had vanished with the return of hoarfrost, and, anyway, during the week the traffic all but was nil. So Peter ambled up quietly and enjoyed the quiet, inhaling deeply the almost pure oxygen while his dog scampered along, his tail wagging with each spoor he sniffed. About one hour and half later he had reached the upper edge of the forest. From there, the path continued for a short while, skirting around the meadows that extended up to the hilltop, before sinking back into the trees’ shadow until it finally ended at the wooden shack built by the hunters to serve as a meeting point.
That was not, however, Peter’s target for today. Rather, several hundreds metres before the shack, he left the path to venture into the untrodden undergrowth. He knew a secret spot where he would be able to find a certain variety of cep and various other mushrooms he planned to eat tonight with his omelette.
*
It was around five when he came back home. Tossing his bag full of mushrooms on the kitchen table, he hurried to tend to his cattle. Milking cows had to be done at regular times, the slightest delay could cause great pain to the placid beasts. When that chore was over and the jugs safely stored into the fridge, waiting to be collected the next morning, he turned his attention back to the pregnant cow who was stranded in the shed, gave carrots and salad to the rabbits, corn to the hens, and picked up the eggs they had lain during the day.
Back in the kitchen, he rinsed the mushrooms in the sink and chopped them. He put a frying pan on the stove, dropped a dollop of butter inside. When the butter had melted, he added the mushroom slices and the garlic leftovers of his lunch.
While the mixture sizzled and a nice scent filled the room, Peter broke the eggs and whipped them into a perfect bright orange fluid that he in turn poured into the pan. He watched it warm and coagulate into a solid mass. When it was cooked enough for his taste, he slid it out of the pan into his plate and sprinkled ground pepper over it. He sampled it: it was scrumptious. Satisfied, he filled his glass with the same red plonk and set about eating the rest.
His dinner over and the flatware washed up, he proceeded to the shower. Then, purged at last from the stains of the day, he went on to close all the shutters: first the kitchen, then the living room. He was about the close the bedroom ones when something outside caught his attention. What was it?
Was it the unusual carmine of the dying sun, as an army of ruthless dark clouds angrily marched against it through the already darkened sky, blotting out the light of the early stars? Was it the puzzling lack of any bird chirping? Was it the deep, doleful tone of one of his cows’ mooing? He couldn’t place it. Something was amiss. Something was definitely weird, and Peter stood at the window, both intrigued and fascinated, all his senses in alert.
Then, in a flash of realisation, he understood, and a bright smile illuminated his face. He had nothing to do, just to wait. How long exactly he didn’t know, but the issue was inevitable. His instinct, honed by decades of experience, couldn’t betray him. He felt elated, like in his childhood, when every fifth of March he would go to bed, eager to wake up the next morning to discover what his parents had bought him for his birthday.
He closed the window and, calling Seamus, he walked to the front door and outside. There he stopped and lifted his face up towards the invisible sky, as his dog came to sit next to him. Both remained out in the cold, expectant, two tiny shadows lost under a greater one.
Until at some point in the midst of darkness Peter felt on his nose the soft, but icy, touch of the first flake.
Boy, this is another thing that seems fine, even generally well-written, but absolutely not for me.
There's so much detail here, but... Very little happens. And not just in the sense that this is a slice of life. I mean the first hint we have of what conflict/theme you're interested in comes... 1700 words into the story? This story's hook isn't just dull or buried a little. It's melted away in the core of the earth. By the time I feel like I'm supposed to be getting important things, my eyes are skimming the paragraphs. It doesn't help as well that the perspective is floating pretty freely from concrete things that Peter's doing, to his reflections, to exposition about his past, leaving me unanchored into the scenes.
I felt very disappointed here: the author clearly has skill, but they also seem unconcerned that they are (inadvertently) wasting my time.
There's so much detail here, but... Very little happens. And not just in the sense that this is a slice of life. I mean the first hint we have of what conflict/theme you're interested in comes... 1700 words into the story? This story's hook isn't just dull or buried a little. It's melted away in the core of the earth. By the time I feel like I'm supposed to be getting important things, my eyes are skimming the paragraphs. It doesn't help as well that the perspective is floating pretty freely from concrete things that Peter's doing, to his reflections, to exposition about his past, leaving me unanchored into the scenes.
I felt very disappointed here: the author clearly has skill, but they also seem unconcerned that they are (inadvertently) wasting my time.
This was a nice slice-of-life story.
It's the day in the life of an old farmer. I think you captured that mood and that life quite spectacularly.
This story isn't from a genre that usually grabs me, but I think people that like this sort of thing would enjoy it.
----
(Side rambling that's pretty much unrelated featuring me trying to figure out my stance on the entire genre of realistic fiction)
This is my first original fiction round so it's interesting reading all these non-pony stories. However, I'm running into a weird personal problem where I find realistic fictional humans... not that interesting. For some reason if this was a nonfiction round I think I would be more interested in stories like this, because then at the end there'd be an actual person to talk about and appreciate.
I guess I've just been spoiled by podcasts like The Moth and Lore. If something is going to be normal, I'd like it to be a true story. Because there are just so many fascinating stories that are true that deserve to be told.
But then again, fiction is just as worthy to be told as non-fiction. (Please don't let someone on the internet tell you what not to write!)
And while I say that I don't like realistic fiction, I do have a counter-example that I did like: The Fault in Our Stars. I think it was because it told the story in a very intriguing way. It was a representative story that encompassed a lot of aspects of problems cancer patients face. And shed some light into that problem.
But didn't this story also shed some light into a problem? That the nature of modern agriculture is changing, and probably for the worse? Then again, that really wasn't the focus of the story, so maybe that's why it didn't really excite me?
Okay, I didn't have an opinion when I started writing, but I think I have one now. Except in rare circumstances, I don't usually like realistic fiction. So I am biased. Sorry about that. But at least I know what my bias is now.
It's the day in the life of an old farmer. I think you captured that mood and that life quite spectacularly.
This story isn't from a genre that usually grabs me, but I think people that like this sort of thing would enjoy it.
----
(Side rambling that's pretty much unrelated featuring me trying to figure out my stance on the entire genre of realistic fiction)
This is my first original fiction round so it's interesting reading all these non-pony stories. However, I'm running into a weird personal problem where I find realistic fictional humans... not that interesting. For some reason if this was a nonfiction round I think I would be more interested in stories like this, because then at the end there'd be an actual person to talk about and appreciate.
I guess I've just been spoiled by podcasts like The Moth and Lore. If something is going to be normal, I'd like it to be a true story. Because there are just so many fascinating stories that are true that deserve to be told.
But then again, fiction is just as worthy to be told as non-fiction. (Please don't let someone on the internet tell you what not to write!)
And while I say that I don't like realistic fiction, I do have a counter-example that I did like: The Fault in Our Stars. I think it was because it told the story in a very intriguing way. It was a representative story that encompassed a lot of aspects of problems cancer patients face. And shed some light into that problem.
But didn't this story also shed some light into a problem? That the nature of modern agriculture is changing, and probably for the worse? Then again, that really wasn't the focus of the story, so maybe that's why it didn't really excite me?
Okay, I didn't have an opinion when I started writing, but I think I have one now. Except in rare circumstances, I don't usually like realistic fiction. So I am biased. Sorry about that. But at least I know what my bias is now.
Wow, this guy comes off as a real misanthrope to me. He doesn't seem to like a single thing or person, and basically the entire story is a litany of complaints except for his food.
I mean, it kinda almost works for me because of that? Since at the end, he finally seems to be enjoying something that's changing, and it's the snow, and that's kinda great. The thing is, I'm really not sure what the snow means to him, so I have a hard time extracting the moral of the story.
Is it because snow covers up all the man-made things, and the world is 'better' that way? (Kill the humans! Destroy civilization!)
Is it because it's a callback to his childhood, when everything was bright and rosy and wonderful because reasons? (Everything's better in hindsight, even if it sucked then?)
Is it because the bikers are going to go skidding off the cliff and fall to their doom more often? (GET OFF MY LAWN!)
I dunno, and I wish I did, because I think I'd like this story more because of it.
Um, there are some other issues as well. The meaning of 'plonk' is clear enough from context, but it's a very odd word to me; apparently british/australian slang?
There's a bit at the beginning where the POV seems to change to the dog's, and I'm not really sure why. That kinda bothered me.
There are some slightly awkward word choices - the room being 'almost desert' instead of 'almost deserted'. I know 'desert' is used like that for 'desert islands', but otherwise 'desert' basically means those sandy places. Stuff like this; a whip-round with a good proofreader ought to catch most of it.
How is his cow having a calf in autumn? Doesn't that usually happen in the spring? Also, I thought milk doesn't come until after calving, and not all year, either... so I dunno, is this one cow just really late, or are the rest of his cows early, or what's going on with that?
I want this story to be something I like - a crusty old man having a good day despite himself. However, I'm not really sure that's what it is. There's definitely skill on display, but I wish it came to a stronger conclusion.
I mean, it kinda almost works for me because of that? Since at the end, he finally seems to be enjoying something that's changing, and it's the snow, and that's kinda great. The thing is, I'm really not sure what the snow means to him, so I have a hard time extracting the moral of the story.
Is it because snow covers up all the man-made things, and the world is 'better' that way? (Kill the humans! Destroy civilization!)
Is it because it's a callback to his childhood, when everything was bright and rosy and wonderful because reasons? (Everything's better in hindsight, even if it sucked then?)
Is it because the bikers are going to go skidding off the cliff and fall to their doom more often? (GET OFF MY LAWN!)
I dunno, and I wish I did, because I think I'd like this story more because of it.
Um, there are some other issues as well. The meaning of 'plonk' is clear enough from context, but it's a very odd word to me; apparently british/australian slang?
There's a bit at the beginning where the POV seems to change to the dog's, and I'm not really sure why. That kinda bothered me.
There are some slightly awkward word choices - the room being 'almost desert' instead of 'almost deserted'. I know 'desert' is used like that for 'desert islands', but otherwise 'desert' basically means those sandy places. Stuff like this; a whip-round with a good proofreader ought to catch most of it.
How is his cow having a calf in autumn? Doesn't that usually happen in the spring? Also, I thought milk doesn't come until after calving, and not all year, either... so I dunno, is this one cow just really late, or are the rest of his cows early, or what's going on with that?
I want this story to be something I like - a crusty old man having a good day despite himself. However, I'm not really sure that's what it is. There's definitely skill on display, but I wish it came to a stronger conclusion.
This felt a bit meandering, the food prep and routine lasted a bit too long for me, especially during the beginning. But that might be the point, it's being told from a perspective that values that routine and that's reflected throughout.
The exchange with the driver was good. Grumbling about stifling regulations immediately after that disturbing milking scene felt... honest might be the word? The focus stays on how those regulations effect the people who have to follow them while not neglecting why they're also a good idea in the first place.
This story wasn't necessarily for me. Despite that I can still see where Peter's coming from, and his feelings about getting squeezed out as times change definitely get through. The story managed to get that perspective across, even to the sort of person who's a bit foreign to it.
The exchange with the driver was good. Grumbling about stifling regulations immediately after that disturbing milking scene felt... honest might be the word? The focus stays on how those regulations effect the people who have to follow them while not neglecting why they're also a good idea in the first place.
This story wasn't necessarily for me. Despite that I can still see where Peter's coming from, and his feelings about getting squeezed out as times change definitely get through. The story managed to get that perspective across, even to the sort of person who's a bit foreign to it.
I actually really enjoyed this story. The whole concept of a farmer just going about his day and encountering various creatures is interesting enough, and it's written with such a clarity that I felt really involved with the story. The imagery was also beautiful; there was never a point where I had trouble visualizing this farm or any other places the farmer encounters during his day. Finally, there was an underlying feeling that he and his way of life were slowly dying, but he wasn't really fighting against it as it was just a natural occurrence, like the winter. That's what I took the ending as with the snow: him realizing that his eventual decline was just another happening in nature and that there was no shame in gently fading away like the other seasons of the year.
However, there were some things that did bother me. The most obvious was some of the strong language used to describe the modernistic things encroaching his farm. For instance:
The sudden escalation to "fucking dickheads" just felt a bit too awkward. Here is a man that comes off as relatively calm, yet this anger comes out of nowhere and in such extreme language. I'm not saying elders don't curse, but the sudden intensity just feels out of place and very out of character for a guy who seemed rather down-to-earth with his speaking. Also, it didn't make sense for this to occur when the narrator had been a relatively neutral third-person perspective for the rest of the story.
I also got somewhat annoyed by how much time was spent slamming all of the modern things around him. Admittedly, I can see why it was needed with his conversation with the driver, given how that's the topic of their discussion. However, there were scenes where it spent so much time dwelling on it (i.e. the milking cows scene and the walk in the forest scene) that it felt more like a hit piece against modern life than a story about this man's life in a backwoods farm. It's so frustrating to see a very well-done story like this spend too much time soap-boxing instead of letting this natural story play out. The story doesn't need a moral or an aesop about modern life destroying the little man; let it breathe as is.
Despite these issues, this was one of my favorites for this round so far. It was one of the few that seemed more focused on a situation and a character than a plot, and I thought it executed it for the most part well. There's no real destination or journey, just an experience. Some might say that it's dull and feels rather pointless because of this, but I think that it works as a demonstration of observation of setting and character. Fix it up a bit, and I think it would be a good piece of fiction.
However, there were some things that did bother me. The most obvious was some of the strong language used to describe the modernistic things encroaching his farm. For instance:
More likely, they would be sold to a land developer, either to build a slew of cookie-cutter, ugly “chalets” or a new ski lift for fucking dickheads teens coming from the capital city.
The sudden escalation to "fucking dickheads" just felt a bit too awkward. Here is a man that comes off as relatively calm, yet this anger comes out of nowhere and in such extreme language. I'm not saying elders don't curse, but the sudden intensity just feels out of place and very out of character for a guy who seemed rather down-to-earth with his speaking. Also, it didn't make sense for this to occur when the narrator had been a relatively neutral third-person perspective for the rest of the story.
I also got somewhat annoyed by how much time was spent slamming all of the modern things around him. Admittedly, I can see why it was needed with his conversation with the driver, given how that's the topic of their discussion. However, there were scenes where it spent so much time dwelling on it (i.e. the milking cows scene and the walk in the forest scene) that it felt more like a hit piece against modern life than a story about this man's life in a backwoods farm. It's so frustrating to see a very well-done story like this spend too much time soap-boxing instead of letting this natural story play out. The story doesn't need a moral or an aesop about modern life destroying the little man; let it breathe as is.
Despite these issues, this was one of my favorites for this round so far. It was one of the few that seemed more focused on a situation and a character than a plot, and I thought it executed it for the most part well. There's no real destination or journey, just an experience. Some might say that it's dull and feels rather pointless because of this, but I think that it works as a demonstration of observation of setting and character. Fix it up a bit, and I think it would be a good piece of fiction.
So there's an interesting split here: >>Ferd Threstle and >>Chinchillax both complain about the lack of conflict, and >>Windfox and >>libertydude defend or appreciate the lengthy, extended look at the protagonist's routine. (By the way, by my count it's almost 2400 words before the first conflict hook: when he starts talking with Peter about his neighbors' abandonment of farming, and he gets the ever-smaller check for the milk.) So I think it's far from a hard and fast rule that a story has to have conflict; clearly this is finding an appreciative audience. But I'm going to come down on the side of those arguing that the lack of conflict is hurting the story, and I'm going to try to explain why.
The one iron law of writing is, to quote Vonnegut: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." Conflict, plot, characterization, even spelling and grammar: these things are all ultimately secondary to whether you have entertained your audience. The thing is, all of those elements are big tools in the fiction toolbox because they strongly help with that goal, and if you're going to discard them it helps to make sure you're hooking readers in other ways.
For me, a lot of that comes down to novelty. This is why, all other things being equal, I prefer to curl up with some good sci-fi or fantasy. (And it's a lot of what I appreciate about My Little Pony.) If a story is laying out a cool setting, exploring that can engage me. If a story is realistic fiction but telling me about a place outside of my experience, exploring that can engage me. But it's not a genre thing, it's still a novelty thing.
Some examples. (Looking just at the settings and not my overall opinions of the story.) All of these are sci-fi or sci-fi-ish: Competing against Immortals' discussion of AI overtaking human employment was familiar ground to me and so a little lackluster; The Job's setting was not clear enough to draw me in; Guard and Assist's robot junkyard was kind of in a sweet spot. And some modern-day pieces: Marjah grounded its story so much in a particular sense of place that I felt like I was getting a full travelogue out of it; The Collision of Seasons' two dudes playing video games is kind of a walking cliche; and You Can't Take It With You has some weird-cool family legacy stuff going on when it's not just a kid and his mom in a car. Here, even though it's set on a dairy farm, the entire first scene is a guy waking up and eating breakfast, which is entirely unexceptional, and it's not even until he heads outside that I start seeing descriptions of things I don't personally do every day.
The thing is, so much of this story is about that scene-setting and that sense of place that ... well, I'm not sure what else there is to provide engagement until you start bringing the conflict in later on. Another way of framing that is the difference between effective writing and good writing: you certainly effectively characterize the farmer's unchanging daily routine, but writing well about boring things doesn't fix the core problem of them being boring.
I'd suggest perhaps taking your late conflict -- over the growing poverty as the milk money dries up -- and seeding that throughout your story more deliberately. Peter eats a slice of bread for breakfast, and feeds Seamus bread. What if he pauses to think about the more filling foods he wishes he was having, or we hear Seamus whine for some meat that Peter can't afford? Peter gets up in the morning. What if he's cold in spots because the blanket's thin and lumpy and all he can do is try to patch it up by hand until he saves up enough for a new one? A struggle against poverty really feeds into your themes here, and introduces conflict immediately from the start.
The scenes of milking are probably the strongest and most engaging of your pure-scene-setting moments, and probably stand on their own (although if he sets aside some milk for himself and Seamus, that might feed back into the breakfast scene I suggested earlier).
Anyway, hope that helps.
Tier: Almost There
The one iron law of writing is, to quote Vonnegut: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." Conflict, plot, characterization, even spelling and grammar: these things are all ultimately secondary to whether you have entertained your audience. The thing is, all of those elements are big tools in the fiction toolbox because they strongly help with that goal, and if you're going to discard them it helps to make sure you're hooking readers in other ways.
For me, a lot of that comes down to novelty. This is why, all other things being equal, I prefer to curl up with some good sci-fi or fantasy. (And it's a lot of what I appreciate about My Little Pony.) If a story is laying out a cool setting, exploring that can engage me. If a story is realistic fiction but telling me about a place outside of my experience, exploring that can engage me. But it's not a genre thing, it's still a novelty thing.
Some examples. (Looking just at the settings and not my overall opinions of the story.) All of these are sci-fi or sci-fi-ish: Competing against Immortals' discussion of AI overtaking human employment was familiar ground to me and so a little lackluster; The Job's setting was not clear enough to draw me in; Guard and Assist's robot junkyard was kind of in a sweet spot. And some modern-day pieces: Marjah grounded its story so much in a particular sense of place that I felt like I was getting a full travelogue out of it; The Collision of Seasons' two dudes playing video games is kind of a walking cliche; and You Can't Take It With You has some weird-cool family legacy stuff going on when it's not just a kid and his mom in a car. Here, even though it's set on a dairy farm, the entire first scene is a guy waking up and eating breakfast, which is entirely unexceptional, and it's not even until he heads outside that I start seeing descriptions of things I don't personally do every day.
The thing is, so much of this story is about that scene-setting and that sense of place that ... well, I'm not sure what else there is to provide engagement until you start bringing the conflict in later on. Another way of framing that is the difference between effective writing and good writing: you certainly effectively characterize the farmer's unchanging daily routine, but writing well about boring things doesn't fix the core problem of them being boring.
I'd suggest perhaps taking your late conflict -- over the growing poverty as the milk money dries up -- and seeding that throughout your story more deliberately. Peter eats a slice of bread for breakfast, and feeds Seamus bread. What if he pauses to think about the more filling foods he wishes he was having, or we hear Seamus whine for some meat that Peter can't afford? Peter gets up in the morning. What if he's cold in spots because the blanket's thin and lumpy and all he can do is try to patch it up by hand until he saves up enough for a new one? A struggle against poverty really feeds into your themes here, and introduces conflict immediately from the start.
The scenes of milking are probably the strongest and most engaging of your pure-scene-setting moments, and probably stand on their own (although if he sets aside some milk for himself and Seamus, that might feed back into the breakfast scene I suggested earlier).
Anyway, hope that helps.
Tier: Almost There
>>horizon
This was actually a very good explanation of why you think it doesn't work, and I'm glad you said it. It made me think more about why I personally liked it, and I think I figured it out.
For me, I'm willing to dabble in more realistic, everyday subjects. While I, like you, do prefer to read fantasy and sci-fi, I enjoy more realistic and familiar situations...if they can be relayed to me in interesting ways. In this piece, the way in which the farmer eats breakfast and how he goes about his day is more interesting to me than the conflict itself. The lackadaisical pace of the events really invokes the few experiences I've had on farms, where taking care of the land is done with both reverence and quiet urgency. In fact, I feel like the conflict should've just been this: him taking care of the farm and dealing with old age. The rants against modernity are actually one of the things I dislike about the story, and I wish they were toned down. The conflict is already here, and it works better when it's not beaten over the reader's head as obviously.
Of course, this may just be a difference in taste, but I still maintain that this story is one of the better ones of this ilk. But it was still intriguing to see how your approach differs from mine and how that can affect one's perception of a work.
This was actually a very good explanation of why you think it doesn't work, and I'm glad you said it. It made me think more about why I personally liked it, and I think I figured it out.
For me, I'm willing to dabble in more realistic, everyday subjects. While I, like you, do prefer to read fantasy and sci-fi, I enjoy more realistic and familiar situations...if they can be relayed to me in interesting ways. In this piece, the way in which the farmer eats breakfast and how he goes about his day is more interesting to me than the conflict itself. The lackadaisical pace of the events really invokes the few experiences I've had on farms, where taking care of the land is done with both reverence and quiet urgency. In fact, I feel like the conflict should've just been this: him taking care of the farm and dealing with old age. The rants against modernity are actually one of the things I dislike about the story, and I wish they were toned down. The conflict is already here, and it works better when it's not beaten over the reader's head as obviously.
Of course, this may just be a difference in taste, but I still maintain that this story is one of the better ones of this ilk. But it was still intriguing to see how your approach differs from mine and how that can affect one's perception of a work.
A solid and evocative take on the prompt.
And absolutely not for me. I find the main character utterly insufferable, and since this is almost entirely a character piece, it just isn't going to work for me unfortunately.
The biggest problem I have technically is that the narrative is very clipped. There's a lot of "He X. He Y. He Z." when such things could be handled a little more elegantly with more varied sentence structure. It might by a stylistic choice, but if it is, I don't think it does the narration any favors.
Also, yeah, cow scene was weird. Doubly so with the hoofed origins of this community. >_>
Very nice ending though. Strongest bit of the whole thing.
And absolutely not for me. I find the main character utterly insufferable, and since this is almost entirely a character piece, it just isn't going to work for me unfortunately.
The biggest problem I have technically is that the narrative is very clipped. There's a lot of "He X. He Y. He Z." when such things could be handled a little more elegantly with more varied sentence structure. It might by a stylistic choice, but if it is, I don't think it does the narration any favors.
Also, yeah, cow scene was weird. Doubly so with the hoofed origins of this community. >_>
Very nice ending though. Strongest bit of the whole thing.
On the day before
This text was written in the middle of a chaotic weekend, where I had to fix my SME’s mail server, the former one having failed the Thursday before. I was under a lot of stress – you know how the life of people, both professional and personal, now depends upon the quick and reliable delivery of those messages – but things unexpectedly brightened up and I was able to restore most of the functionalities, with improvements, Sunday night (with further tweaking until yesterday). Also I had a lecture Monday morning so lacked real time to edit the piece, explaining for example the “desert” instead of “deserted” – Horizon I remember you castigating Cali for that rounds ago.
When I “took my quill” to begin writing this, I suddenly realised it was a subject I had been wanting to tackle for a long while, but it had remained in the background of my mind, waiting for the right time to come out.
Mostly, this is a digest, in a slightly modified form, of what the life of the farmers during the late 70s in the small valley of the northern French Alps were I partly grew up looked like (of course I had to delete all the names, otherwise it would have been so easy to spot me as the author). They were still abiding by ancestral traditions, and not much had changed since centuries (think that in the Basque country, at the Spain-France border, agricultural practice in the early 20th century, as evidenced by ethnologists, could still be traced back to Neolithic: few things had changed in more than six millennia). Of course, they had access to electricity and cars, but that had not profoundly altered the way they lived, which was regulated by the seasons and the daily tasks they had to perform
The more “lucky” parts of the Alpine range, especially the higher villages, had already experienced what has been dubbed as “Le plan neige” (Snow plan), starting in the ‘50s: touristic resorts and ski-lifts were built at an accelerated pace, defiling the landscape (think about a couple of high-rise, bare concrete buildings with associated parking lots and malls where a meadow cleft by a brook had been lying for ages) and transforming the life of the former farmers into … something else: some became ski teachers, some went to work for the ski-lift operators, some became snowcat drivers, some opened shops or restaurants, etc. In a couple of decades, their life took a dramatic turn no one had expected. That sweeping tidal wave could not be dammed off even by the highest peaks, and the smaller valleys were touched too, though to a lesser degree: tourism kicked in, but developed at a much more moderate pace. Farmers managed to adapt, tending to their animals in the early morning and late evening, and spending the rest of the day at the ski-lifts. In a way, they killed two birds with one stone, ditching their old winter occupations (that had been outdated by modernity anyway) to morph into daytime employees and earn a regular income – at least during the ski season.
One of the farmers I was very close to (she considered me as one of their nephews of sorts) worked at the end/top station of a ski-lift , watching the people as they stood up from the moving chairs, ready the press the red bouton that would stop the merry-go-round if anything went wrong. We would spend days inside the cabin, small-taking about anything and slandering some “clients” (the most garish ones) while their continuous flow poured on and on. At noon, we would eat cheese and smoked ham she and her husband had made themselves.
(The lumber stove that is described in the story serves as a stove, but also warms the water that’s fed into the various heaters scattered through the house. This is of course modern equipment: in the very old times, heating was provided by the animal themselves. There was no wall between the cowshed and the bedroom, as evidenced by the fact that both bear the same name in dialect “beust”, where you can recognise the “be-” root as in beef. Also, directly behind the stove was a small cabinet where the exhaust pipe would open; that's where they put ham and sausages to be smoked – called “starfu”. They had plenty of spruce logs at their disposal, as in exchange for light summer chores, the municipality would allow each farmer to fell a quantity of timber more than sufficient to provide with heating all the winter through.)
But although they derived all those incomes from the tourists, they profoundly despised them. They saw them as ruthless intruders, brazen and uncouth braggarts trampling on their traditions. Motto was “Give us your money and fuck off”. Which, like all sweeping statements, were both true and false. True, some people were really arrogant, considering the locals as primitive hicks barely able to speak French (most people were still speaking in dialect back then) and sell them their ski-lift passes. But some others were really nice, and moved by a genuine desire to discover aspects of the farmers’ lives that were, so to speak, hidden under the snow blanket.
However, the majority was just indifferent, simply coming to breathe unspoiled air and have fun sliding down the pistes.
But, overall, the transition was too quick, too brutal, resulting in a sort of mini-clash of civilisation. The shockwave also fractured the families, with the elders sticking to the old ways, and the younger eager to embrace the modern life they would catch a glimpse of through the habits and stuff the tourists carried with them (TV also was a strong catalyst). That led some farmers to sell their estate to the land developers in order to fuel the studies of their children, something I only skimmed in the story.
But no, Horizon, they weren't poor anymore. They could sell a small piece of their estate any time and live on a hoard for the rest of their lives. If they ate bread, that’s because they'd always done so. They lived humbly and skimpily. They had no real needs. Pork products they made themselves, rearing a hog during spring/summer and slaughtering it when autumn came. Veggies they grew in their garden, and in Fall they gathered mushrooms, chestnuts and other edible sweets nature offered liberally. Cheese, butter and cream they made themselves too. Eggs they had galore. All they needed was bread, and noodles (wheat), wine, fresh fruit during winter. With fruit from their trees (plum, mainly, but also apple, pear…) they made brandy. Their dogs ate noodles and leftovers.
Modernity had smashed their way of life, but made them rich – if they wanted.
Of course, that way of life was inherited from a time were their ancestors were really destitute.
That brings me to another tangent, the history of the word “cretin”. When the Reformation hit the world, it cast a profound split between those who embraced the new dogma (often voluntarily) and those whose rejected it (often because they simply weren't aware of it, or they were submissive to their curate’s words). In the French Alps, the Reformation was welcomed in the (rich and intellectual) city of Geneva, while the neighbouring mountains remained staunch to the old faith. The actual border between France and Switzerland around Geneva, which isn't backed by any distinctive trait in the landscape (no mountain ridge, no major river) is a testament to this period.
Now Geneva sits on the Rhone river, which flows all the way down to the Mediterranean. Boats could sail upstream and bring in produce from the south of France, amongst which marine salt that was lacking in the mountains (as far I as know, there isn't any salt mine in the Northern Alps). So Genevans were rich and lucky enough to get the salt the poor peasants in the mountains didn't have access to.
What of it? With marine salt comes iodine, that substance indispensable to the thyroid gland. No salt, no iodine, atrophied thyroid. And the thyroid controls brain development, so lack of iodine means you become a moron (among others symptoms). So moronism was frequent amid the peasants, but spared the denizens of the more privileged city of Geneva.
Now Genevans came to refer to the peasants as “Cretins”, that word meaning just “Christians” in dialect, as opposed to themselves, the Protestants. So those Cretins were associated with moronism, and when the word passed from dialect into regular French it acquired that specialised meaning, and kept it when it was in turn borrowed into English.
So no, there was no conflict to be developed around the notion that the guy was poor, which he wasn't. He was simply living the way he'd always lived, but with diminishing incomes.
That brings me to the second quake, the advent of modern regulations, mainly imposed by the European administration (which became a scapegoat for many other woes). When I was young, small farmers still milked cows manually, and the dairy cooperative had a small laboratory to assess the number of bacteria (especially E. Coli) found in the milk: “less contaminated” milk was paid higher as there was less processing involved. In turn, that milk was used for the fabrication of the local cheese called “Reblochon” (made with boiled milk, so the process would pasteurise away all the bacteria anyway). But then European rules kicked in, mainly driven by northern Anglo-Saxon countries, with an emphasis on cleanness. Manual milking was phased out as dirty, and the new rules imposed the use of milking machines and a strict control of dung elimination and cowshed cleaning.
That was, so to speak, the final blow to small farmers. With herds hardly over a dozen beasts, they didn't have the financial resources to face these new requirements and invest into new machines (and the banks wouldn’t lend them the money anyway); on the other hand, the bigger farmers did it, and some of the smaller ones sold their animals to them, leading to a “concentration” process. Now, I’m not certain those European rules were needed or relevant, but there’s a modern phobia of dirtiness the authorities could not ignore. I have no opinion on the matter. I just merely note that those people who weren’t afraid of grime and crud were and still are bit by ticks all around the year, and they never develop any Lyme symptom (and are seldom ill anyway).
Sometimes those regulations go a bit overkill. The “reblochon”, that cheese made up from local milk, is now protected under an “AOC”. Typically, that means that the name is copyrighted and reserved to a cheese that meets a number of stringent standards spelled out on a charter. Amid these criteria is, of course, the place of making, but also the race of the cows that produce the milk used, as well as the size, depth and weight of the final product.
Until a few years ago, it was possible to find “declassified” cheeses, meaning one criterium, often weight or size, was outside the tolerances. Those cheeses were denied the name reblochon and sold as anonymous produce, and you could get two for the price of a single branded reblochon (by the way, if you want to know the story of that name, ask me). They were scrumptious, often better than the genuine ones; most restaurants used them to make tartiflette, a (apocryphal) dish made up of sliced potatoes topped with reblochon and baked in oven (the cheese would melt so the aspect of the original product did not matter much anyway).
Now, since a couple of years ago, new regulations have entered in force and it is forbidden to sell those culled out cheeses. I suppose the restaurants still get them by unofficial, undercurrent means, but for those who don't know personally any producer, it’s dead as a doornail.
So times change, and not always for the best.
As you can have figured out now, everything I wrote in the story I witnessed in my youth. The forest road and the hunters’ shack exist, but there's never been any accident as far as I know.
The objective here was to write a pure slice of life without conflict. No need to shake everything down to the roots, its absence was deliberate.
It was a documentary fiction. You can't expect a documentary to be constructed like a regular fiction, be it written or filmed.
I was aware the WriteOff would be a bad choice to "publish" such as "story", given the profile of mainly young, urban and American readers. This speaks of things so remote to the modern American universe that most readers had no reason to care for or root for the guy. I was expecting the text to resonate slightly better among the more "rural" people (Hat), which it some how did.
I knew the slight perspective change from man to dog back to man at the beginning would jar some, but I had no better means to slur over the toilet scene: should I have instead gone in every detail?
The antipathy against the tourists was real. And as far as I know this has been stirred up again recently when teens from the city suburbs have had access to winter holidays, bringing their own rowdy deportment to the pistes (rap music and so on). That’s what is reflected in the story.
Now on to the last scene. I was always told how magical it was to go to bed in a landscape painted in green, yellow and ochre, wake up the next morning and discover all had been washed away during the night, the colours now hidden under a white, immaculate blanket, shining and twinkling under the rays of the sunrise. As if during the course of a few hours the universe had been cleansed and reborn under a different guise.
Magic of nature they were attuned to.
Now snow just means the ski-lifts can open earlier.
O tempora, o mores.
I wasn’t expecting anything, least of it making to the finals, so no worries. On the contrary, I’m flattered most of you appreciated the prose and the way that non-story was written. Most of all, the Writeoff are an opportunity to practice my English and my style, and I hope I didn’t fail you in that.
Good luck to the finalists, happy Christmas to all! See you for the next round,
maybe!
2400 words in four hours. Can I submit this? :P
This text was written in the middle of a chaotic weekend, where I had to fix my SME’s mail server, the former one having failed the Thursday before. I was under a lot of stress – you know how the life of people, both professional and personal, now depends upon the quick and reliable delivery of those messages – but things unexpectedly brightened up and I was able to restore most of the functionalities, with improvements, Sunday night (with further tweaking until yesterday). Also I had a lecture Monday morning so lacked real time to edit the piece, explaining for example the “desert” instead of “deserted” – Horizon I remember you castigating Cali for that rounds ago.
When I “took my quill” to begin writing this, I suddenly realised it was a subject I had been wanting to tackle for a long while, but it had remained in the background of my mind, waiting for the right time to come out.
Mostly, this is a digest, in a slightly modified form, of what the life of the farmers during the late 70s in the small valley of the northern French Alps were I partly grew up looked like (of course I had to delete all the names, otherwise it would have been so easy to spot me as the author). They were still abiding by ancestral traditions, and not much had changed since centuries (think that in the Basque country, at the Spain-France border, agricultural practice in the early 20th century, as evidenced by ethnologists, could still be traced back to Neolithic: few things had changed in more than six millennia). Of course, they had access to electricity and cars, but that had not profoundly altered the way they lived, which was regulated by the seasons and the daily tasks they had to perform
The more “lucky” parts of the Alpine range, especially the higher villages, had already experienced what has been dubbed as “Le plan neige” (Snow plan), starting in the ‘50s: touristic resorts and ski-lifts were built at an accelerated pace, defiling the landscape (think about a couple of high-rise, bare concrete buildings with associated parking lots and malls where a meadow cleft by a brook had been lying for ages) and transforming the life of the former farmers into … something else: some became ski teachers, some went to work for the ski-lift operators, some became snowcat drivers, some opened shops or restaurants, etc. In a couple of decades, their life took a dramatic turn no one had expected. That sweeping tidal wave could not be dammed off even by the highest peaks, and the smaller valleys were touched too, though to a lesser degree: tourism kicked in, but developed at a much more moderate pace. Farmers managed to adapt, tending to their animals in the early morning and late evening, and spending the rest of the day at the ski-lifts. In a way, they killed two birds with one stone, ditching their old winter occupations (that had been outdated by modernity anyway) to morph into daytime employees and earn a regular income – at least during the ski season.
One of the farmers I was very close to (she considered me as one of their nephews of sorts) worked at the end/top station of a ski-lift , watching the people as they stood up from the moving chairs, ready the press the red bouton that would stop the merry-go-round if anything went wrong. We would spend days inside the cabin, small-taking about anything and slandering some “clients” (the most garish ones) while their continuous flow poured on and on. At noon, we would eat cheese and smoked ham she and her husband had made themselves.
(The lumber stove that is described in the story serves as a stove, but also warms the water that’s fed into the various heaters scattered through the house. This is of course modern equipment: in the very old times, heating was provided by the animal themselves. There was no wall between the cowshed and the bedroom, as evidenced by the fact that both bear the same name in dialect “beust”, where you can recognise the “be-” root as in beef. Also, directly behind the stove was a small cabinet where the exhaust pipe would open; that's where they put ham and sausages to be smoked – called “starfu”. They had plenty of spruce logs at their disposal, as in exchange for light summer chores, the municipality would allow each farmer to fell a quantity of timber more than sufficient to provide with heating all the winter through.)
But although they derived all those incomes from the tourists, they profoundly despised them. They saw them as ruthless intruders, brazen and uncouth braggarts trampling on their traditions. Motto was “Give us your money and fuck off”. Which, like all sweeping statements, were both true and false. True, some people were really arrogant, considering the locals as primitive hicks barely able to speak French (most people were still speaking in dialect back then) and sell them their ski-lift passes. But some others were really nice, and moved by a genuine desire to discover aspects of the farmers’ lives that were, so to speak, hidden under the snow blanket.
However, the majority was just indifferent, simply coming to breathe unspoiled air and have fun sliding down the pistes.
But, overall, the transition was too quick, too brutal, resulting in a sort of mini-clash of civilisation. The shockwave also fractured the families, with the elders sticking to the old ways, and the younger eager to embrace the modern life they would catch a glimpse of through the habits and stuff the tourists carried with them (TV also was a strong catalyst). That led some farmers to sell their estate to the land developers in order to fuel the studies of their children, something I only skimmed in the story.
But no, Horizon, they weren't poor anymore. They could sell a small piece of their estate any time and live on a hoard for the rest of their lives. If they ate bread, that’s because they'd always done so. They lived humbly and skimpily. They had no real needs. Pork products they made themselves, rearing a hog during spring/summer and slaughtering it when autumn came. Veggies they grew in their garden, and in Fall they gathered mushrooms, chestnuts and other edible sweets nature offered liberally. Cheese, butter and cream they made themselves too. Eggs they had galore. All they needed was bread, and noodles (wheat), wine, fresh fruit during winter. With fruit from their trees (plum, mainly, but also apple, pear…) they made brandy. Their dogs ate noodles and leftovers.
Modernity had smashed their way of life, but made them rich – if they wanted.
Of course, that way of life was inherited from a time were their ancestors were really destitute.
That brings me to another tangent, the history of the word “cretin”. When the Reformation hit the world, it cast a profound split between those who embraced the new dogma (often voluntarily) and those whose rejected it (often because they simply weren't aware of it, or they were submissive to their curate’s words). In the French Alps, the Reformation was welcomed in the (rich and intellectual) city of Geneva, while the neighbouring mountains remained staunch to the old faith. The actual border between France and Switzerland around Geneva, which isn't backed by any distinctive trait in the landscape (no mountain ridge, no major river) is a testament to this period.
Now Geneva sits on the Rhone river, which flows all the way down to the Mediterranean. Boats could sail upstream and bring in produce from the south of France, amongst which marine salt that was lacking in the mountains (as far I as know, there isn't any salt mine in the Northern Alps). So Genevans were rich and lucky enough to get the salt the poor peasants in the mountains didn't have access to.
What of it? With marine salt comes iodine, that substance indispensable to the thyroid gland. No salt, no iodine, atrophied thyroid. And the thyroid controls brain development, so lack of iodine means you become a moron (among others symptoms). So moronism was frequent amid the peasants, but spared the denizens of the more privileged city of Geneva.
Now Genevans came to refer to the peasants as “Cretins”, that word meaning just “Christians” in dialect, as opposed to themselves, the Protestants. So those Cretins were associated with moronism, and when the word passed from dialect into regular French it acquired that specialised meaning, and kept it when it was in turn borrowed into English.
So no, there was no conflict to be developed around the notion that the guy was poor, which he wasn't. He was simply living the way he'd always lived, but with diminishing incomes.
That brings me to the second quake, the advent of modern regulations, mainly imposed by the European administration (which became a scapegoat for many other woes). When I was young, small farmers still milked cows manually, and the dairy cooperative had a small laboratory to assess the number of bacteria (especially E. Coli) found in the milk: “less contaminated” milk was paid higher as there was less processing involved. In turn, that milk was used for the fabrication of the local cheese called “Reblochon” (made with boiled milk, so the process would pasteurise away all the bacteria anyway). But then European rules kicked in, mainly driven by northern Anglo-Saxon countries, with an emphasis on cleanness. Manual milking was phased out as dirty, and the new rules imposed the use of milking machines and a strict control of dung elimination and cowshed cleaning.
That was, so to speak, the final blow to small farmers. With herds hardly over a dozen beasts, they didn't have the financial resources to face these new requirements and invest into new machines (and the banks wouldn’t lend them the money anyway); on the other hand, the bigger farmers did it, and some of the smaller ones sold their animals to them, leading to a “concentration” process. Now, I’m not certain those European rules were needed or relevant, but there’s a modern phobia of dirtiness the authorities could not ignore. I have no opinion on the matter. I just merely note that those people who weren’t afraid of grime and crud were and still are bit by ticks all around the year, and they never develop any Lyme symptom (and are seldom ill anyway).
Sometimes those regulations go a bit overkill. The “reblochon”, that cheese made up from local milk, is now protected under an “AOC”. Typically, that means that the name is copyrighted and reserved to a cheese that meets a number of stringent standards spelled out on a charter. Amid these criteria is, of course, the place of making, but also the race of the cows that produce the milk used, as well as the size, depth and weight of the final product.
Until a few years ago, it was possible to find “declassified” cheeses, meaning one criterium, often weight or size, was outside the tolerances. Those cheeses were denied the name reblochon and sold as anonymous produce, and you could get two for the price of a single branded reblochon (by the way, if you want to know the story of that name, ask me). They were scrumptious, often better than the genuine ones; most restaurants used them to make tartiflette, a (apocryphal) dish made up of sliced potatoes topped with reblochon and baked in oven (the cheese would melt so the aspect of the original product did not matter much anyway).
Now, since a couple of years ago, new regulations have entered in force and it is forbidden to sell those culled out cheeses. I suppose the restaurants still get them by unofficial, undercurrent means, but for those who don't know personally any producer, it’s dead as a doornail.
So times change, and not always for the best.
As you can have figured out now, everything I wrote in the story I witnessed in my youth. The forest road and the hunters’ shack exist, but there's never been any accident as far as I know.
The objective here was to write a pure slice of life without conflict. No need to shake everything down to the roots, its absence was deliberate.
It was a documentary fiction. You can't expect a documentary to be constructed like a regular fiction, be it written or filmed.
I was aware the WriteOff would be a bad choice to "publish" such as "story", given the profile of mainly young, urban and American readers. This speaks of things so remote to the modern American universe that most readers had no reason to care for or root for the guy. I was expecting the text to resonate slightly better among the more "rural" people (Hat), which it some how did.
I knew the slight perspective change from man to dog back to man at the beginning would jar some, but I had no better means to slur over the toilet scene: should I have instead gone in every detail?
The antipathy against the tourists was real. And as far as I know this has been stirred up again recently when teens from the city suburbs have had access to winter holidays, bringing their own rowdy deportment to the pistes (rap music and so on). That’s what is reflected in the story.
Now on to the last scene. I was always told how magical it was to go to bed in a landscape painted in green, yellow and ochre, wake up the next morning and discover all had been washed away during the night, the colours now hidden under a white, immaculate blanket, shining and twinkling under the rays of the sunrise. As if during the course of a few hours the universe had been cleansed and reborn under a different guise.
Magic of nature they were attuned to.
Now snow just means the ski-lifts can open earlier.
O tempora, o mores.
I wasn’t expecting anything, least of it making to the finals, so no worries. On the contrary, I’m flattered most of you appreciated the prose and the way that non-story was written. Most of all, the Writeoff are an opportunity to practice my English and my style, and I hope I didn’t fail you in that.
Good luck to the finalists, happy Christmas to all! See you for the next round,
maybe!
2400 words in four hours. Can I submit this? :P
>>Monokeras
I totally missed that you were skipping a bathroom scene by changing the viewpoint. Still, I think you could probably use a bit of narration to skim over it - 'he visited the loo' or something - or maybe put in a bit more. I remember being slightly curious if this house had a flush toilet or not. But either way, I don't think it's worth the confusion of switching viewpoints, especially so early in the story; it's like, is this a story about a man, or a story about a dog?
Thanks for the write-up; I found your influences here very interesting to read about. I've lived in more rural areas, but I've also lived in a country that's facing 'modernization' (although with much less aplomb in many ways :P ) and my grandfather was a small-time dairy farmer, so... I really do understand a fair bit of what's going on here personally, even if it's not personally happening to me.
I totally missed that you were skipping a bathroom scene by changing the viewpoint. Still, I think you could probably use a bit of narration to skim over it - 'he visited the loo' or something - or maybe put in a bit more. I remember being slightly curious if this house had a flush toilet or not. But either way, I don't think it's worth the confusion of switching viewpoints, especially so early in the story; it's like, is this a story about a man, or a story about a dog?
Thanks for the write-up; I found your influences here very interesting to read about. I've lived in more rural areas, but I've also lived in a country that's facing 'modernization' (although with much less aplomb in many ways :P ) and my grandfather was a small-time dairy farmer, so... I really do understand a fair bit of what's going on here personally, even if it's not personally happening to me.
>>Not_A_Hat
Hat you’re a peach ;)
Happy you could relate to the story, but I was certain you would have anyway! :P
Hat you’re a peach ;)
Happy you could relate to the story, but I was certain you would have anyway! :P