deepundergroundpoetry.com
Names in a Box
The first name he was given went unheard as he cured inside the gaunt shell of his momma’s belly when they were forced from home and sent out into the world alone. When he was born down the back of a red-dirt road his thirteen-year-old mother carefully printed the letters “U R S T O N S T R O M A D A M S” in childish block letters on the front page of a new bible. It would be a few years before he knew it was his.
Other names would come first. As a baby wrapped in her thin arms, the head filled with wild, black curls was christened “Dark, Gypsy Angel”. Pressed deep, it was stamped with quick, bullet-like kisses born from a love so intense it tasted like fear. When stubby knees began to propel him about the old house made of cracked window panes and sagging, wooden floors she watched in delight as he rooted and scooted, his pale blue eyes alive with curiosity. In those days she sometimes called him “Critter”.
Life at the edge of an East Texas town came on long and slow for a boy fashioned from hunger, intelligence and rusted dirt. It lingered just beyond the broken glass and gaps in the walls. More often than not his momma spent a goodly portion of her time pulling him down from bureau tops and kitchen counters as he struggled to see the outside. Strong willed, he didn’t take well to the enforced protection and for a time she felt the need to rename him “Brat” but was careful to temper the bluntness of it with the growing excitement of what he may become.
The winter of his fourth year brought him a Daddy. A tall, old man with long, dangling arms and thick, crusted knuckles. He labored long at finding ways to avoid work and had a deep voice which always ended in a nasal whine. He sat at the table first, ate the most and otherwise stayed gone all day making deals. The man named him “Boy” and sent him out into the scrubby front yard to play with sticks and dust.
There was no fear when he was finally allowed to wobble down the rickety steps into the outside. Instead he allowed the red dirt to baptize him, breathing it in deep and tasting the gritty powder of it between his teeth. Some days he burrowed into cooled caves of honeysuckle water-falling over the bits of wood fence that still stood. Others he climbed the mimosa trees, his dirty fingers testing the soft hairs of the fuzzy blossoms. Washing him in coppery bathwater at night his momma would smile tiredly through the bruises and call him “A Fine Mess.”
When he was five his family gained a car, the Daddy having dealed a demented, old lady out of her rattling heap while her son was away fighting the war. His world, now well-worn and explored, expanded by a thousand-fold. On rare shopping trips his feral curls, dark, honeyed skin and alabaster blue eyes gained him stares and comments of “Good Lord, chil’, what devil’s git are you?!”. It was here he learned to answer to his momma’s sharp snap of “Mine!”
It wasn’t until his first year in school, feet pinched in stiff, new shoes that he heard his bible name spoken directly at him. “Urston”. It confused him; this smashing together of sounds that, devoid of his momma’s softness, sternness or sympathy, was meant to mean him. But he was quick, and soon he placed it alongside the others in his head with each torturous letter he pushed out of the thick, red pencil.
Still, “Urston” was too much for real life. A tangled mouthful, it was too hard to thrust out during the rush of childhood so some of the other students tried different ones. “Ursy” didn’t quite fit. It brought to mind bloated, sun-warmed cows lolling in fields chewing cud and nothing about him lolled so it couldn't catch him. “Ton-ton” was faster; a stutter of sharp, clean noises, but he didn’t like it so it didn’t stick either.
“Bastard”, on the other hand, began to dog his steps. One day after school he’d asked his momma what it meant. Her worn eyes had widened and filled with so much hurt the world had crunched down hard around him making it hard to breathe. She didn’t explain the name. Instead she poured a fierce whisper of “Mine” into a hug so tight he vowed to hate the name for her sake. It wasn’t that he minded it. It was a word that felt good on the tongue. Despite that he saw his momma’s pain every time he heard it so he scrapped and scrapped hard. This gained him a name both his momma and the teacher agreed upon. Each day he walked down the red road with a paper fluttering on his chest she would stand on the weathered stoop with its leaning posts and sigh, “Here comes ‘Trouble’.”
Along with being “Trouble” he gained other names as his pencil grew thinner and the words coming out of it grew longer. He found that “Dog” meant dog and “cat” meant cat and Dick and Jane were new friends trapped inside the covers of the books on the window ledge of his classroom. He learned he could set them free to roam and play and could even take the home to visit but only when he was a “Good Boy”. So he tried hard, working at keeping a leash on himself. He did so well that by the time he slipped into his fourth-grade desk he was known as an “Exceptionally Bright Boy”.
It was during this same time his curls began to inch above his momma’s head and he had to look down at her heart-shaped face when she scolded or smiled at him. She had never grown, remaining a bit of woman who was often mistaken for his sister by strangers. Momma thought this was funny so she began to call him “Brother”.
Around the age of fourteen the task of his naming was passed into other hands. With almost no money in the house and four other children to name and rename, momma simply didn’t have the time or energy to make him any new ones. She stuck with “Brother" while the Daddy swapped out “Boy”, “Lazy” and “Good-For-Nothing”. At school he was called “Honor Roll”, “Bookworm” and “College Material”. Despite this he became “A. Dropout” and took a job that paid fifty cents an hour to pull parts in an auto boneyard where Fat Harry Johnston called him “Mutt” from day one.
He didn’t know anything about cars so he walked the veins of hard, rusted soil and city streets, burning a path to the library. The title of “Poor Boy” came from the librarian each time she eyed the stack he checked out to carry home. The kindness in her eyes competed with the flash of “White Trash” or “Asshole” that sometimes flew out of car windows when they rocketed past as he made his way home.
Giving as much of his pay as he could to help his momma he saved back just enough to buy a few friends, packs of cigarettes and beer. “Urston” was still too much name and “Adams” tasted like school so it was agreed he would be called “U.S.”. He like that. It tasted good. Quick, clean and easy to remember. It sounded like he felt when he stood around with the collar of his jacket flipped up, a beer can in one hand, paperback jutting out of a back pocket and the tail of a cigarette jiggling against his bottom lip.
It was as “U.S.” that life fell into place and he began to push the limits into the face of his companions in exchange for their admiration. Racing dirt roads, flaunting laws, climbing great, busted-out heaps of motorized coffins with tools bristling from his pockets like porcupine spines, he flew willingly into any threat or dare and learned to swagger with pride wrapped in the name of “Cool”. When Elisa Sue Pickens called him “Honey” he weighed it against the newly acquired “Juvenile Delinquent” and decided he liked them both.
Vietnam came and he decided it might be nice to see even more of the outside. There wasn’t time to wait for the draft because the whispered name “Daddy” just might be inching his way through the Big Piney Woods. Besides he was ready for new dirt. So, for the first time in a long while he tried to work at being a “Good Boy” and earn the tag of “Soldier”. He quit smoking and gave up the beer. He kept reading, only now the books muled home all featured flags on the covers. Stopped cold in his white underwear and tee-shirt he was told he was “4-F” instead of “Private-First Class” and sent on his way.
The lines in his momma’s face grew sharper and tighter with each passing month as he went back to climbing - both girls and cars- and racing - both roads and cops - and drinking - just beer. Fate, luck or angels kept him from becoming an “Inmate” though he did spend a few days now and then as a “Prisoner” in the county jail. At home the sounds in “Brother” sank lower and lower under the weight of disappointment and grief.
For a time he found the beer helped but eventually the name grew so heavy that in 1970 he realized it was reaching for him through the softening haze. “Brother” had become a weight which made them both queasy like rotted meat dropped in the middle of the dinner table. In an effort to escape he hooked up with Jerry Paul Tibbins and left home. Together they headed south looking for names they could carry to the bank.
Passing days in Houston brought him temporary titles like “Mechanic”, “Clerk”, and “Roofer”, but they were monikers that slid in and out his calloused hands like second-hand books he picked up, read and dropped where he was standing. “U.S. Adams” was stamped on his checks, but letters home - wrapping paper for crimped dollar bills - were signed simply, “Yours, Brother”.
During his first year as “Bartender” at Sunny’s Saddle Club some of the girls who danced naked called him “Lover” but it turned out to have the same, brief staying power as “Honey” so he drifted through the ranks with some trading it off for “Fucker” while others were kind enough to dilute it down to “Friend”. For the most part, however, he was thought of as “Good People”.
One night in ’72 a fight broke out on the dance-floor. “U.S.” jumped over the bar and broke an arm. Instantly he was promoted to “Bouncer”. This prompted several more trips to the library. Quick to dust off “Bastard”, “Trouble” and “Delinquent” he honed them with newly acquired knowledge and soon gained trophies of busted noses, cracked heads and bloodstains on his boots. In less than nine months he gained the label of “One Mean S.O.B.”.
After watching him for a time Sunny Man, the bearded, bullish owner, approached him with the offer of a new name. “Leg-Breaker”. It seemed that there were men who liked to borrow money but weren’t so keen on paying it back on time. Sunny Man explained that in his world interest was paid in bills or bones. “U.S.”, he pressed, was a natural at getting the latter. The money was good and he thought he could be good at it so he agreed.
He proved to be a “Hard Worker” and in gratitude Sunny Man paid him well and often. Walks to the library were replaced by shopping trips to the bookstore. Dangling six packs of beer birthed into cardboard cases but only on his days off because he didn’t want to be called “A. Drunk”. After he bought the blue El Camino letters home were traded for occasional trips up highway 59. Either way envelopes still made their way into momma’s hands, only now they were stuffed full of cleaner, crisper bills, the stain of their getting carefully invisible.
In two years he got the final promotion into a career he’d keep for some time. Sunny Man asked him to remove a problem. The pay was $1,000.00. He rose to the occasion and found it was surprisingly easy. A short ride to Galveston. The pop of a lock. Two, quick shots and he was now Sunny Man’s “Enforcer.”
Work was sporadic, coming when it came and taking him off the door of the club. A lawyer here. A husband there. Old flames and new rages put extra money in his pockets and somewhere inside he was surprised to find that none of it seemed to touch him. One night, swimming in a swirling sea of drunk, he decided he must be “A. Psychopath” and fell asleep.
It was a Christmas trip home with $900.00 tucked into a card displaying a virgin and her small babe that finally reached the place he hid. Cancer had come for his little momma and though she was just a small sliver of a woman it was taking its sweet time and eating at her slowly. The longer she took to die the less he came home, the harder he worked and the more he drank. With each passing week thoughts pulled him towards home, but the sights and smells in the falling down, old house were things he couldn’t face and in his heart of hearts he called himself “Coward”.
On August 15, 1978, he picked up the phone, heard “Misbegotten Son” and was ordered home by the Daddy, the sisters and the younger brother. Sunny Man gave him the weekend off to go watch his momma die. In a blue streak he raced the highway north, sweating hands strangling the steering wheel.
Momma left twelve minutes before he walked into the stark white room where he became “Orphaned”. He passed the gauntlet of family, slipping and sliding on waves of feeling like someone lost in a frozen hell. Standing beside the bed he stared down at the ravaged frame which hadn’t been all that big to begin with. His sister Shellene, always high-pitched and wound tight, shrieked that he had broken his momma’s heart and let the cancer in. That night, for the first time, he was called “Murderer” to his face.
He left the hospital with a lock of inky curls laced with glittering silver curled in his wallet. After stopping by the bootleggers, he drove with a paper-wrapped bottle resting against his thigh. It was there and then he decided to become “Alcoholic”.
Life passed quickly after that. People died. He drank. He took a wife named Carol and became “Husband” to the petite woman with black curls and a habit of collecting broken people. Despite her effort to turn him into a “Good Man” he stuck to the road he’d chosen and worked hard at not being home. At some point “Daddy” finally caught up with him but it wasn’t given to him by his wife. He took the name anyway once he saw his pale, blue eyes staring up at him from a tiny, round face. He became “Retired” when he shot the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. As soaked in whiskey as he was he had the sense to rename himself “Fugitive” and get the hell out of Houston.
Drink and drive took him all over the South picking up bottles and odd jobs here and there but eventually the black asphalt turned into red dirt and he wound up where he started. He rediscovered the Billy Joes and Johnny Pauls of his youth. His days became laced with second-hand books, friends, beer and cigarettes, only this time they did the buying. He was called “Mooch” behind his back, “Drunkard” by his family and the care-worn “U.S.” by his friends.
It was a beautiful April morning when he was found to be “Deceased”. Stiff, cold and curled around a coverless, paperback book he became “Remains” and was carted off to be carved up. The blood clot which had caused the stroke was found about an hour after his wife was located in Waco. Grayson’s funeral home did the honors and turned what was left of him into “Cremains” before she arrived in a borrowed Pinto.
Broke and with mouths to feed she had no money for a proper burial, but she was well acquainted with the disease of optimism so she placed the six-pound cardboard box on the shelf in her closet. Her heart made plans for a resting place and little stone which would bear his name. As time passed other things moved onto the self and pushed him farther and farther back into the shadows until the watery light of the single bulb no longer touched “URSTONSTROMADAMS” printed on the label when the stained cord was pulled.
"Names in a Box" © 2013, H. Newberry
Other names would come first. As a baby wrapped in her thin arms, the head filled with wild, black curls was christened “Dark, Gypsy Angel”. Pressed deep, it was stamped with quick, bullet-like kisses born from a love so intense it tasted like fear. When stubby knees began to propel him about the old house made of cracked window panes and sagging, wooden floors she watched in delight as he rooted and scooted, his pale blue eyes alive with curiosity. In those days she sometimes called him “Critter”.
Life at the edge of an East Texas town came on long and slow for a boy fashioned from hunger, intelligence and rusted dirt. It lingered just beyond the broken glass and gaps in the walls. More often than not his momma spent a goodly portion of her time pulling him down from bureau tops and kitchen counters as he struggled to see the outside. Strong willed, he didn’t take well to the enforced protection and for a time she felt the need to rename him “Brat” but was careful to temper the bluntness of it with the growing excitement of what he may become.
The winter of his fourth year brought him a Daddy. A tall, old man with long, dangling arms and thick, crusted knuckles. He labored long at finding ways to avoid work and had a deep voice which always ended in a nasal whine. He sat at the table first, ate the most and otherwise stayed gone all day making deals. The man named him “Boy” and sent him out into the scrubby front yard to play with sticks and dust.
There was no fear when he was finally allowed to wobble down the rickety steps into the outside. Instead he allowed the red dirt to baptize him, breathing it in deep and tasting the gritty powder of it between his teeth. Some days he burrowed into cooled caves of honeysuckle water-falling over the bits of wood fence that still stood. Others he climbed the mimosa trees, his dirty fingers testing the soft hairs of the fuzzy blossoms. Washing him in coppery bathwater at night his momma would smile tiredly through the bruises and call him “A Fine Mess.”
When he was five his family gained a car, the Daddy having dealed a demented, old lady out of her rattling heap while her son was away fighting the war. His world, now well-worn and explored, expanded by a thousand-fold. On rare shopping trips his feral curls, dark, honeyed skin and alabaster blue eyes gained him stares and comments of “Good Lord, chil’, what devil’s git are you?!”. It was here he learned to answer to his momma’s sharp snap of “Mine!”
It wasn’t until his first year in school, feet pinched in stiff, new shoes that he heard his bible name spoken directly at him. “Urston”. It confused him; this smashing together of sounds that, devoid of his momma’s softness, sternness or sympathy, was meant to mean him. But he was quick, and soon he placed it alongside the others in his head with each torturous letter he pushed out of the thick, red pencil.
Still, “Urston” was too much for real life. A tangled mouthful, it was too hard to thrust out during the rush of childhood so some of the other students tried different ones. “Ursy” didn’t quite fit. It brought to mind bloated, sun-warmed cows lolling in fields chewing cud and nothing about him lolled so it couldn't catch him. “Ton-ton” was faster; a stutter of sharp, clean noises, but he didn’t like it so it didn’t stick either.
“Bastard”, on the other hand, began to dog his steps. One day after school he’d asked his momma what it meant. Her worn eyes had widened and filled with so much hurt the world had crunched down hard around him making it hard to breathe. She didn’t explain the name. Instead she poured a fierce whisper of “Mine” into a hug so tight he vowed to hate the name for her sake. It wasn’t that he minded it. It was a word that felt good on the tongue. Despite that he saw his momma’s pain every time he heard it so he scrapped and scrapped hard. This gained him a name both his momma and the teacher agreed upon. Each day he walked down the red road with a paper fluttering on his chest she would stand on the weathered stoop with its leaning posts and sigh, “Here comes ‘Trouble’.”
Along with being “Trouble” he gained other names as his pencil grew thinner and the words coming out of it grew longer. He found that “Dog” meant dog and “cat” meant cat and Dick and Jane were new friends trapped inside the covers of the books on the window ledge of his classroom. He learned he could set them free to roam and play and could even take the home to visit but only when he was a “Good Boy”. So he tried hard, working at keeping a leash on himself. He did so well that by the time he slipped into his fourth-grade desk he was known as an “Exceptionally Bright Boy”.
It was during this same time his curls began to inch above his momma’s head and he had to look down at her heart-shaped face when she scolded or smiled at him. She had never grown, remaining a bit of woman who was often mistaken for his sister by strangers. Momma thought this was funny so she began to call him “Brother”.
Around the age of fourteen the task of his naming was passed into other hands. With almost no money in the house and four other children to name and rename, momma simply didn’t have the time or energy to make him any new ones. She stuck with “Brother" while the Daddy swapped out “Boy”, “Lazy” and “Good-For-Nothing”. At school he was called “Honor Roll”, “Bookworm” and “College Material”. Despite this he became “A. Dropout” and took a job that paid fifty cents an hour to pull parts in an auto boneyard where Fat Harry Johnston called him “Mutt” from day one.
He didn’t know anything about cars so he walked the veins of hard, rusted soil and city streets, burning a path to the library. The title of “Poor Boy” came from the librarian each time she eyed the stack he checked out to carry home. The kindness in her eyes competed with the flash of “White Trash” or “Asshole” that sometimes flew out of car windows when they rocketed past as he made his way home.
Giving as much of his pay as he could to help his momma he saved back just enough to buy a few friends, packs of cigarettes and beer. “Urston” was still too much name and “Adams” tasted like school so it was agreed he would be called “U.S.”. He like that. It tasted good. Quick, clean and easy to remember. It sounded like he felt when he stood around with the collar of his jacket flipped up, a beer can in one hand, paperback jutting out of a back pocket and the tail of a cigarette jiggling against his bottom lip.
It was as “U.S.” that life fell into place and he began to push the limits into the face of his companions in exchange for their admiration. Racing dirt roads, flaunting laws, climbing great, busted-out heaps of motorized coffins with tools bristling from his pockets like porcupine spines, he flew willingly into any threat or dare and learned to swagger with pride wrapped in the name of “Cool”. When Elisa Sue Pickens called him “Honey” he weighed it against the newly acquired “Juvenile Delinquent” and decided he liked them both.
Vietnam came and he decided it might be nice to see even more of the outside. There wasn’t time to wait for the draft because the whispered name “Daddy” just might be inching his way through the Big Piney Woods. Besides he was ready for new dirt. So, for the first time in a long while he tried to work at being a “Good Boy” and earn the tag of “Soldier”. He quit smoking and gave up the beer. He kept reading, only now the books muled home all featured flags on the covers. Stopped cold in his white underwear and tee-shirt he was told he was “4-F” instead of “Private-First Class” and sent on his way.
The lines in his momma’s face grew sharper and tighter with each passing month as he went back to climbing - both girls and cars- and racing - both roads and cops - and drinking - just beer. Fate, luck or angels kept him from becoming an “Inmate” though he did spend a few days now and then as a “Prisoner” in the county jail. At home the sounds in “Brother” sank lower and lower under the weight of disappointment and grief.
For a time he found the beer helped but eventually the name grew so heavy that in 1970 he realized it was reaching for him through the softening haze. “Brother” had become a weight which made them both queasy like rotted meat dropped in the middle of the dinner table. In an effort to escape he hooked up with Jerry Paul Tibbins and left home. Together they headed south looking for names they could carry to the bank.
Passing days in Houston brought him temporary titles like “Mechanic”, “Clerk”, and “Roofer”, but they were monikers that slid in and out his calloused hands like second-hand books he picked up, read and dropped where he was standing. “U.S. Adams” was stamped on his checks, but letters home - wrapping paper for crimped dollar bills - were signed simply, “Yours, Brother”.
During his first year as “Bartender” at Sunny’s Saddle Club some of the girls who danced naked called him “Lover” but it turned out to have the same, brief staying power as “Honey” so he drifted through the ranks with some trading it off for “Fucker” while others were kind enough to dilute it down to “Friend”. For the most part, however, he was thought of as “Good People”.
One night in ’72 a fight broke out on the dance-floor. “U.S.” jumped over the bar and broke an arm. Instantly he was promoted to “Bouncer”. This prompted several more trips to the library. Quick to dust off “Bastard”, “Trouble” and “Delinquent” he honed them with newly acquired knowledge and soon gained trophies of busted noses, cracked heads and bloodstains on his boots. In less than nine months he gained the label of “One Mean S.O.B.”.
After watching him for a time Sunny Man, the bearded, bullish owner, approached him with the offer of a new name. “Leg-Breaker”. It seemed that there were men who liked to borrow money but weren’t so keen on paying it back on time. Sunny Man explained that in his world interest was paid in bills or bones. “U.S.”, he pressed, was a natural at getting the latter. The money was good and he thought he could be good at it so he agreed.
He proved to be a “Hard Worker” and in gratitude Sunny Man paid him well and often. Walks to the library were replaced by shopping trips to the bookstore. Dangling six packs of beer birthed into cardboard cases but only on his days off because he didn’t want to be called “A. Drunk”. After he bought the blue El Camino letters home were traded for occasional trips up highway 59. Either way envelopes still made their way into momma’s hands, only now they were stuffed full of cleaner, crisper bills, the stain of their getting carefully invisible.
In two years he got the final promotion into a career he’d keep for some time. Sunny Man asked him to remove a problem. The pay was $1,000.00. He rose to the occasion and found it was surprisingly easy. A short ride to Galveston. The pop of a lock. Two, quick shots and he was now Sunny Man’s “Enforcer.”
Work was sporadic, coming when it came and taking him off the door of the club. A lawyer here. A husband there. Old flames and new rages put extra money in his pockets and somewhere inside he was surprised to find that none of it seemed to touch him. One night, swimming in a swirling sea of drunk, he decided he must be “A. Psychopath” and fell asleep.
It was a Christmas trip home with $900.00 tucked into a card displaying a virgin and her small babe that finally reached the place he hid. Cancer had come for his little momma and though she was just a small sliver of a woman it was taking its sweet time and eating at her slowly. The longer she took to die the less he came home, the harder he worked and the more he drank. With each passing week thoughts pulled him towards home, but the sights and smells in the falling down, old house were things he couldn’t face and in his heart of hearts he called himself “Coward”.
On August 15, 1978, he picked up the phone, heard “Misbegotten Son” and was ordered home by the Daddy, the sisters and the younger brother. Sunny Man gave him the weekend off to go watch his momma die. In a blue streak he raced the highway north, sweating hands strangling the steering wheel.
Momma left twelve minutes before he walked into the stark white room where he became “Orphaned”. He passed the gauntlet of family, slipping and sliding on waves of feeling like someone lost in a frozen hell. Standing beside the bed he stared down at the ravaged frame which hadn’t been all that big to begin with. His sister Shellene, always high-pitched and wound tight, shrieked that he had broken his momma’s heart and let the cancer in. That night, for the first time, he was called “Murderer” to his face.
He left the hospital with a lock of inky curls laced with glittering silver curled in his wallet. After stopping by the bootleggers, he drove with a paper-wrapped bottle resting against his thigh. It was there and then he decided to become “Alcoholic”.
Life passed quickly after that. People died. He drank. He took a wife named Carol and became “Husband” to the petite woman with black curls and a habit of collecting broken people. Despite her effort to turn him into a “Good Man” he stuck to the road he’d chosen and worked hard at not being home. At some point “Daddy” finally caught up with him but it wasn’t given to him by his wife. He took the name anyway once he saw his pale, blue eyes staring up at him from a tiny, round face. He became “Retired” when he shot the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. As soaked in whiskey as he was he had the sense to rename himself “Fugitive” and get the hell out of Houston.
Drink and drive took him all over the South picking up bottles and odd jobs here and there but eventually the black asphalt turned into red dirt and he wound up where he started. He rediscovered the Billy Joes and Johnny Pauls of his youth. His days became laced with second-hand books, friends, beer and cigarettes, only this time they did the buying. He was called “Mooch” behind his back, “Drunkard” by his family and the care-worn “U.S.” by his friends.
It was a beautiful April morning when he was found to be “Deceased”. Stiff, cold and curled around a coverless, paperback book he became “Remains” and was carted off to be carved up. The blood clot which had caused the stroke was found about an hour after his wife was located in Waco. Grayson’s funeral home did the honors and turned what was left of him into “Cremains” before she arrived in a borrowed Pinto.
Broke and with mouths to feed she had no money for a proper burial, but she was well acquainted with the disease of optimism so she placed the six-pound cardboard box on the shelf in her closet. Her heart made plans for a resting place and little stone which would bear his name. As time passed other things moved onto the self and pushed him farther and farther back into the shadows until the watery light of the single bulb no longer touched “URSTONSTROMADAMS” printed on the label when the stained cord was pulled.
"Names in a Box" © 2013, H. Newberry
Published 18th Dec 2016
All writing remains the property of the author. Don't use it for any purpose without their permission.
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Much has been invested into this story were it not for the fine writing it would have been difficult to read as it is the story is well told and a pleasure to read.So much takes place, all falls into place as the reader follows the tale. I have read this but once ,need to read again. You write well,very well Thankyou for posting
26th Dec 2016 11:21am
And thank you for reading my work. It's appreciated more than you know. I came to the conclusion long ago that the majority of my writing isn't for everyone so I feel especially honored when someone enjoys it. I guess that's one of the reasons I'm here - searching for my tribe.
This is one of my favorite pieces written in a symbolic, storytelling style I played around with a few years ago when trying to find my 'voice'. It's dedicated to my uncle who's life it represents.
This is one of my favorite pieces written in a symbolic, storytelling style I played around with a few years ago when trying to find my 'voice'. It's dedicated to my uncle who's life it represents.
