RAILROADED
First Person – A Sense of Discovery
When I began this blog, in the Fall of 2014, my immediate intention was giving a home to “Railroaded” a short story I’d recently written. I wanted to practice writing a character in first-person. Both my novels, The Long Shadow of Hope and The Lost Lantern, in different stages of production then, are written in third-person omniscient point of view, they have an all-knowing narrator, someone who can be in the head of everyone involved. This makes life a little easier for the writer, although if you read “Lantern” you’ll realize the weave of the story was problematic enough. I have plans for a novel in first-person, where the protagonist stumbles along, making mistakes and discoveries along with the reader. That’s where “Railroaded” takes you, if you have time on a cold, Super Bowl Sunday. Thanks for reading, A.S.
© 2018
Author’s note: This began as an exercise in first-person and became nearly 11,000 words. Thanks for the interest. A.S.
THERE WERE AT least five reasons I believed that Joe Early murdered Carmel Richardson. But they didn’t become clear to me until I read the flower-arrangement card signed by Joe and some railroad co-workers some ten years after Carmel’s funeral.
Can you imagine? Eight names on one of ten or twelve cards, tucked away in a file by my grandmother, Audrey Fulks Raines Richardson, saved in an upright, four-drawer file cabinet my mother refused to get rid of after Grandma’s death eight years ago. That cabinet has been relocated twice as I’ve moved my mother’s unsellable, garage-full of obsolete, particle-board furniture. I’m not talking about estate sale items, if you catch my drift. She’s a hoarder, plain and simple. Not to the point of paths through the home. She has a…
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