Flash Fiction: The Country Singer
(Tulip Culture by George Hitchcock, 1889)
Today I will share a story that has been rejected by many places. At least a couple of places said it was too surreal, but I’m fond of it. After the story, I’ll give you an idea of what the heck I was thinking when I wrote it. Some readers hate surreal stories, and I understand! They don’t work for everyone. For me, sometimes reading a surreal story or poem taps into buried feelings that I can’t otherwise articulate. Stories don’t have to be understood, and we can each enjoy our own private meanings. I don’t have the desire or the ability to explain all my stories, but I have some ideas about this one.
The Country Singer
I was there a long time before I realized I was dreaming. When I started to understand my situation, I met the country singer. He told me to stop worrying about my other occupations at the time, like teaching in a one-room schoolhouse, driving my grandma to her beauty appointments, and guarding the secrets in my basement. I had so many things to do, but the country singer talked me into joining him on the road.
"So what if you're dreaming? Let's be stars."
He dressed in black and kept his Stetson low over his eyes. His voice was sugar strawberries and thistles. He didn’t talk so much as whisper, and I had to get close to him to hear. I didn’t care about being a star, but I wanted the country singer.
“What was your childhood like?” I asked as we rode in our tour bus to the next venue.
He stared out the window. The sunset leaked through, pinkening our hands. I kept trying to hold his hand, but I couldn’t reach it.
He held his guitar, and he sang, “Just as weeds are bleeding, just as rare as dew, just as sweet as angel things, I still need your rules.” Something like that.
He wouldn’t let me touch him. Not until we made it big.
"If we love each other, we won’t be hungry for the love of our fans," he said, putting on glasses that magnified his eyes. I warmed a can of beans.
I wasn’t sure if I was beautiful. I asked for a mirror. Our manager said it was coming in the mail.
Our first show was at a tavern filled with florescent light. Since I didn’t know the songs, I repeated his lines. The crowd was emotional but shy. They didn’t clap or cheer, which hurt me on behalf of the country singer.
After that, I couldn’t sit next to him on the tour bus because he put his guitar case in the seat beside him.
He laughed. “This is work,” he reminded me.
“I have work at home,” I reminded him.
He didn’t know what to say to that. He strummed and sang. “Maybe I’m sorry, maybe I’m sorry, maybe I’m sorry.” Those were my favorite songs, the ones I could remember.
The next place we sang was a church. I thought—oh, look at me when I sing! I felt beautiful. I could see my hands playing my guitar, and they were intricate as arachnids. But he looked at the crowd and not at me.
I noticed a man on the front pew staring at me as if I were a god.
The double doors opened, and a crocodile entered. She moved slowly down the aisle, and I felt like we were kin. She swaggered up to a loudspeaker on the floor, opened her prehistoric mouth, and chewed on a mess of red wires blooming from the loudspeaker’s body. She was electrocuted. Her body went stiff.
I elbowed the country singer and pointed at the problem of the crocodile, but he just gave me a wave and went back to his song about Jesus and a honkytonk.
What could I do? Our manager was nowhere in sight—probably out with the preacher’s wife. Smooth devil. My thoughts were like honey too cold to flow. The crocodile was unpleasant, but it didn’t seem right to ignore suffering.
The man from the front pew who adored me pulled a knife from his pocket, and he ran to the crocodile and cut the red wires. The man’s body was electrocuted, too, and he stiffened like the crocodile.
Tossing away my guitar, I ran. Away, away, away from the church, past our tour bus, and into the desert that winked at me with one pink eye. The desert is painted, they say, like a woman. I wasn’t sure if she’d embrace me, but I figured she’d let me rest under a scraggle tree and take a sip from a juicy cactus. Now I saw the world for what it was. It was an ugly place where people got hurt. Real hurt. And I had made the world, designed it in my mind. Like the crocodile, my mind was a simple sack of chemistry that had eaten electricity.
I’d hurt the crocodile, the man who adored me, and myself. I had sacrificed everything for the country singer.
My tears fell onto the desert floor, and a tulip grew there. In the morning, it held a little cup of dew for me. I saw my reflection before I drank, and I accepted it. I tried to cry more tears so I would have more cups of dew the next morning, but it didn’t work. I tried to be satisfied with just the one tulip.
Finally, the tour bus appeared on the horizon. I didn’t run away.
“I saved the day,” the country singer said when he found me. He invited me back onto the tour bus, and I ascended the steps like I was an angel and it was my heaven.
He told me he’d found a way to shut off the church’s electricity and give the man and the crocodile first aid. I had made him a hero, after all.
“So everyone’s okay?”
A tear fell down his cheek, and I didn’t ask him again.
“Why did I make my world this way?” I asked instead.
The sun was going down, but our faces were visible in the dim light inside the tour bus. I could see myself in his eyes. He didn’t answer me.
“I won’t go with you if we can’t be together,” I said.
He gave me a sexy grin. He knew I wouldn’t leave him.
"When we are stars—the kind that can't be snuffed—then I will take your hand in mine."
We got into the bus and kept going.
What the heck does this story mean?
Why are you asking me? Well, okay, I’ll give some brief thoughts.
I wrote this while watching the Ken Burns Country Music documentary on PBS, so I had country singers on my mind when I had a dream that inspired this story. I’d also been reading some Carl Jung, and I was thinking…if part of my self (my so-called animus) is a country singer, what does that mean about me?
I tend not to trust ambitious people, and I certainly don’t trust my own ambition. I saw the country singer in this story as a personification of my ambition, as both a source of adventure and torture. He gets me to go out to do things, but he keeps me from having a really good time.
Then the crocodile walks in. I had another dream where a crocodile ate some wires while I stood by and didn’t save him. The crocodile makes me think of the reptilian brain, the part of us that wants to sit in the sun and eat whatever passes, interested only in self-preservation.
I want the different parts of my mind to make peace. I want tulips! Yet by the end of the story, I don’t know how to achieve any permanent enlightenment. I can’t seem to leave the country singer behind, and I don’t know how to get him to reform. So I follow him along, abiding by his annoying rules.
But mark my words, someday I’ll get the better of him.