“Got this ________ book on the docket right now” I announced to the little group in the parking lot.
“Italian fishing?” Janet leaned forward, confused.
“No, science fiction.” I shifted the chewing gum out of the way to enunciate, and laugh…amazed at the idea of Italian fishing stories.
“Ayyyyyy! The fish got away! Don’t worry about it.”
Italian Fishing Stories as a genre. Yes. The dramatic and poetic, only slightly exaggerated. That’s what I write. It would be less problematic if I happened to be of Italian descent, but perhaps if it were viewed in the same light as a style of opera or baroque music, it would work.
The tenants of style would include: a connection to nature, human emotion; dramatic, bordering on emo; short; may or may not be exaggerated, but the reader will feel narrowed eyes throughout, often concluding with a pleasant chuckle. (You know, the usual Josh fare.)
Mandolins are optional to imagine as a soundtrack, but are always suggested. You might play this as you read:
A Short Italian Fishing Story, No. 1
The friends found themselves huddled together, blown across the back parking lot like the first leaves that would fall soon.
“It’s already dark” someone said. “Getting to be that time of year.”
They laughed and talked. Did anyone feel the cool in the air?
The purple butterfly bushes by the door scented the late summer air, sweet and sad as a last kiss.
If summer were a lady, she would have cried as they all left. Indeed, the skies were gray above the streetlights.
Later, in the midnight stillness, one of the men crept outside his house, and looked up at the moon peeking out from a cloud.
It’s nearly full. The blue moon is tomorrow. A delicate scent hung on the living night air. The solitary ghostly white blossom of the Angel Trumpet nodded from a planter. He breathed in the precious scent in a swirl of magic.
Once, when he was a boy, his grandfather told a tale of chasing a legendary fish. “I never caught it, but saw the shadow pass under my boat one bright night under the moonlight. I’ve never been the same. Look for the fish, nipote.”
The man looked up at the modern moon now, suddenly timeless, all the moons, gliding behind the midnight clouds, and thought of that story.
He went back to bed, wondering.