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I'd like thank UncertaintyCrossing for offering critique, and
MaliceAforethought for saying the title in discord, which eventually led to me writing this!
Is adding to the Journal even allowed? We're gonna find out together!
1/14/23 Edit: now featuring an absolutely breathtaking watercolor art piece from TrapdoorViolet ! I'm absolutely gobsmacked by it lol, thank you so much!!
I found this easy to read after a long day during which I couldn't focus on anything, and yet it felt meaningful and beautiful. This definitely deserves an upvote ^_^
EDIT: almost a year later, this story was still present somewhere in the back of my head, so I decided to make some music based on it. It's in Serpentsongs, under the "strange brass constructs" collapsible
He may be a clown,but this post was no joke! Well done snap, this was an awesome piece
There, I upvoted this, may I get out of your "TO HUNT FOR SPORT" list now? /j
Jokes aside, I already said this but this was a real touching short story, I could legit picture the scenes on my mind as well, and I feel bad for that poor scarecrow. Great work as always!
I really adored the little moody bits of detail that added to this as a whole, building the world out in my head as it passed was made very delightful :)
Scarecrows are cute, I feel bad for the poor thing.
Lovely work Snap!
As someone that wandered a lot, this really captured the almost magical feeling that stumbling across a tiny bit of history. Everywhere has something and I love looking for that somewhere. This made me nostalgic for my time as an adolescent, going on long hikes into nowhere fir fun. Thank you
I watch the yonder hills
See foodwrenches toil in dust
Let their cacophonous calls
Rend our bodies to rust
yo.
i think there are just a billion reasons why this rules and why it is so successful, and i consider it somewhat of a gold standard amongst JoTW entries. i'll touch on a few.
Perhaps it was a type I was unfamiliar with. Or perhaps I had shrunken.
just funny. clever. charming. here's another:
The scarecrow looked at me wide-eyed, as if I had missed something painfully obvious. "I mean, isn't it painfully obvious?
this is brilliant. straight out of joseph heller's playbook. in the middle of this piece, which leads with a somber meditation of death and solitude, the work is spiced with this humor during the interaction between the narrator and the entity with whom they interact. speaking of which:
Personally, when I have a door to open, I leave it open in case visitors come by, but this felt unintentional.
It would have been improper of me, as a guest, to leave the body as it were, so I brought it to a small garden behind the farmhouse, distinct in its purpose for pleasure and not profit, and buried it. The sacrifice of the cleanliness of my clothes was a small price to pay.
I recited the remembrances of a poet, as I felt they were appropriate, as well as the fact that I had never witnessed a farmer's funeral.
As a general rule for wandering, if a path presents itself, I usually take it, so I decided to explore the path before it became completely dark.
Why anyone would want to scare away birds, especially such intelligent creatures as crows is beyond me, but before I had a chance to ponder upon this fact, the scarecrow turned and noticed me.
I've found that some individuals in my wanderings cannot be helped, or refuse help when offered. You have to let these things go once you've done all you could, which I did as I watched the scarecrow frantically kick more and more until it finally fell silent, drawing its legs up against its chest, shaking, just slightly.
these tidbits are just exemplary. they are so on-theme, and they establish so much about who the narrator is without ever making the primary focus the narrator themselves.
thank you for writing this.
snapdragons and hibiscus
AUTHOR INSERT MUCH
Image on this page is created by me and released under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Thank you for this wonderful story that inspired me to create some art.
-Vi
