The Book of Ulie

By Jennifer M. Fulford

"It is not down in any map; true places never are." ~ Melville

 

Ulie Dahl needs to finish one last assignment to get the hell out of college and Indianapolis. What could possibly go wrong?

Larken Lee Fisher needs to make a friend and learn how to ride a bike. But at 11, living in a remote farmhouse outside Muncie, Indiana, that's harder than it looks.

 

These storybook characters—one racy and sarcastic, the other precocious and innocent—need each other to get to the other side.

Jennifer Fulford's contemporary novella weaves two whimsical but troubled stories, whose characters navigate yearnings for connection.

Fulford works and writes from her home in western North Carolina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: blackbombbooks
• Release date: Aug 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9798988381518

Book preview

The Book of Ulie

A novella

Jennifer M. Fulford

For Michele and Greg, who made possible my soft landing.

Much could be written about the virtues of a sexy jawline. Take this guy across from me in the Chatterbox. He’s wearing a black leather jacket with worn-out elbows patches and too many silver snake rings on one hand. Dark licorice eyes. Perfect jaw, razor-straight, with stubble just right for a graze on a delicate private part.

Several options come to mind. Write a story about him, a limerick maybe, on my Mac while guzzling my morning double-shot cappuccino, pretending to be preoccupied with my writing assignment for class. Or, ask him if he’s next to an outlet and strike up a conversation over his croissant while bending waaay over to plug in. Or, last option, the written come-on: Offer him the NYT Book Review from my bag and scrawl my phone number across the bottom. Of course, that options needs a teaser. HEY, ROCK STAR. Pfft, amatuer. There’s always I’M AVAILABLE. The right words are sooo tricky. Not too forward but front’n’center. The most forward: I COULD SWALLOW YOU WHOLE.

He’s walking. At the cream-and-sugar counter now, almost got a spoon. Great writers don’t let sexual opportunity slip away. They follow it with impetuous ferocity. How many of the greats were flirts or philanderers? Hemingway, for sure. Dickens, I think, was a ladies man. Dumas, a skirt chaser, but he wasn’t that great of a writer. Fitzgerald was notorious. While Zelda was cooped up in an asylum, F. Scott was eyeballing (and other activities minus the eyes) ladies in swanky hotels. So, that does it. Book Review, it is.

Under the fold, I scribble the always safe but sassy: COCKTAILS? Followed by my name, Ulie Dahl. Full of naked potential, I slip him the paper as I sashay by, adopting a new technique, a cutesy shrug, meaning: I’m done. Want it?

How long should I wait in the bathroom so it seems as if I’ve peed?

By the time I finish loitering in the bathroom of the Chatterbox, Leatherman has left without the NYT Book Review. Just as well. There’s my story to attend to, a novel. I’m at work on my first attempt of a full-length manuscript. It’s about a girl named Larken, an eleven-year-old shadow child living with a family of recluses. This imaginary heroine, Larken, lives in rural Indiana, just north of my real-life outpost in Indianapolis, same Central Time zone. She’s growing up in a dark, two-story house in the country surrounded by woods and a thick green yard. Oz green. She lives with her two writer parents who never leave the house. Let me emphasize—they never leave the house. Just go with it. This is fiction, maybe even bordering on fantasy. Simply follow along.

Falls and Greta, her parents, work all day in separate bedroom offices and write. They don’t have to leave the house because they order everything online. They have food delivered. They video chat on Google with friends, though they have few. They write books, email them to their editors, upload the edited manuscripts to sell on Amazon, and get paid via direct deposit. If someone gets sick, a doctor is called. Every three months or so, Falls or Greta publishes a new book. They have cupcakes delivered.

As a result, Larken has never left the house. Again, just hang with me. When she was a baby, she played in her crib, then when she started to walk, she played in her mom’s office with a baby gate on the door. By five, she roamed the second floor, safety gate on the stairs, playing Hunchback of Notre Dame and Tom Sawyer, books she’d been reading on her own. By six, she could roam the whole house without supervision. Cook her own frozen dinners. She also started reading, in earnest, Moby Dick.

Once in those early years, she attempted to go outside, but lightning struck in the center of her expansive front yard near where she wanted to play, leaving a divot the size of a bowling ball. Dazed and flustered and fearing another near-miss, she stayed under roof, literally watching the grass grow. After the improbable bolt, she never thinks going outside is a viable option, and because she’s a caution child, she never tries again. She’s an indoor cat, preferring window seats to caterpillars in the weeds. She gets fresh air from the cracks in the windows, and the screened door, the only places for fresh air. It’s normal to her. Her parents have no television nor transportation. Provisions always arrive when needed.

In the mornings, she waits at the screened door for the delivery man. Really, he’s a teenager, Zion, a local young man whom her parents have hired for ten dollars a day to drop-off food and sundries. Each weekday, he brings to the porch a bag of groceries, the mail from their P.O. box in town, the local newspaper and, occasionally, fresh bagels and lox. He walks the whole way. About five miles, roundtrip. He does his job faithfully and does not linger.

During my writing jags, my clothes always take on the smell of the coffee shop—coffee grounds and vaguely rancid oil. Why do the smell of grounds and day-old pastry cling to fabric? Even at the Chatterbox, my only true hangout in a weary part of downtown Indy (local shorthand for Indianapolis), the odor always follows me home. Nevertheless, the dive attracts hangers-on, people I need, who loiter throughout the day over their cups of brown caffeine.

To write my story about Larken, the possibility of distraction helps, so all the souls passing through the Chatterbox give me steam. This may sound like a contradiction for a writer, but when I’m stuck, they entertain. On any given day, from a spot in the back near the cranky HVAC, there’s a most scrumptious selection of men to gawk. But mostly, my typing or scribbling goes on in long, uninterrupted stretches. That’s when I feel most like Larken. In a good way. Cardboard-boxed into her world. She’s a gentle kid but a loner, nonetheless. Like me, Ulie Dahl.

Dutifully, Larken waits cross-legged on the porch for Zion. He’s seventeen, she thinks. She hasn’t had many deep conversations with him. She likes to make a chart of how his hair appears every day. It’s the shade of a faded yellow tiger lily and a mess, generally, but an artistic expression of chaos. Her hair chart