Life Knots
By Terry Hayman
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About this ebook
From Greek slaves to grieving grocery shoppers, everyone has a life knot or two to struggle through. Join a man who meets a talking dog in a grocery aisle, a Montreal prostitute witnessing the possible murder of Harry Houdini, a painter committed to painting one neighborhood his whole life, and more. Contains “The Grocery Zoo Story”, “Observe, If You Will...”, “One Place”, “Never His Sword”, and “The Rock.”
Terry Hayman
Raised in five different countries and currently living with his family in one of the most beautiful places on earth, Terry is a full-time writer and actor who accepts struggle, believes in goodness, and seeks truth always.
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Life Knots - Terry Hayman
LIFE KNOTS
Terry Hayman
Copyright © 2011 Terry Hayman
Published by Fiero Publishing
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Author Foreword
The Grocery Zoo Story
Observe, If You Will...
One Place
Never His Sword
The Rock
afterword
Sample of Chasing the Minotaur
Author Foreword
Ordinary people... Are there such things? For each person ultimately lives their life within their own skin, their own mind, and is therefore the central player in a drama in which they star, on a path uniquely theirs. And as they trudge or dance their way along it, some will become aware that they’ve become snagged with ropes that are dragging them somewhere they don’t necessarily want to go.
Do they fight? Do they calmly try to slide out? Deftly untie the knots? Cut wildly about them to get free?
How they tackle their ropes will make them heroes, clowns, villains, losers who despair, survivors who are reborn.
That diversity of the human struggle is what I try to capture in my stories. Because everyone who’s trying to break free deserves to be heard. They whisper to me. They poke me. They scream for attention. So I write down what they say and do.
So where did this batch of tales come from?
The Grocery Zoo Story – It started with a love of dogs and a love of language. Hence the verbally proficient beast in this story. Sadly, people who believe in talking dogs often have problems of their own, and so I afflicted my poor narrator. Finally, of course, this encounter is a riff off a play I had the pleasure to perform in many years ago, Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. (Wonderful little one-act that you should see if you ever get the opportunity.)
Observe, If You Will – This came out of a love of a certain historical period and an interesting conflux of the lives of two famous people in Montreal, Canada, no less.
One Place – It’s a story about a painter (you’ll see from my novel Chasing the Minotaur that I like such tales), and how certain arbitrary limits might actually lead to unique art.
Never His Sword – This was written for an anthology of stories about famous swords through history, some real, some fantastical. The sword of this story is almost certainly apocryphal, but one of the funner things an author can do is take the apocryphal or epigrammatic story and give it real characters and emotions.
The Rock – This is actually the first professional story I ever sold, but it continues to resonate with me, and, I hope, with others. A pretty basic tale of being pushed right to the edge and making a choice. Or not?
And there we have the fabulous five. May they bring you some times of diversion, when you’re in another place entirely. May they excite and soothe, intrigue and provoke. May you come out the other end better for our time spent together.
-Terry Hayman
North Vancouver,BC
May 21, 2011
He’s been waiting for you.
The Grocery Zoo Story
Terry Hayman
Copyright © 2011 Terry Hayman
I had wrapped my happy into a jacket, laid it in the top basket of a pushcart, and wheeled it around a big city grocery store, when a dog greeted me in the pet food aisle. Hello, Sir. Help a lonely dog find a home?
Not bloody likely,
I said, stumbling and momentarily letting go of my pushcart.
The dog, a big black Labrador retriever, laughed with a barfy smell. Ah, exhumation of the subconscious, you’re thinking. A phantasm of repressed urges, perhaps. Perhaps a simulacrum of past canines known and loved.
Well...um....
No, that wasn’t precisely it. I was actually thinking the grapes I’d plucked to check for sweetness – they hadn’t been, sweet, that is – had been sprayed with LSD by some management aspirant who’d taken to heart the admonition about curbing free sampling in the produce section. After all, if a customer actually bought the produce, he or she would take them home and wash them or cook them. But if you sampled, you’d get the LSD, right? They do it all over.
I assure you, Sir. I am not the stuff dreams are made of,
said the dog. He raised his left paw and was about to put over his heart before he realized that would unbalance him. He put it down. "I am, rather, merely an extraordinary freak of nature, a creation of genetic engineering loosed