TAXI

 

  My friend Kim recently sent me a link to a writing competition called Literary Taxidermy. The participants are offered the first and last lines from four works of literature, two short stories and two poems. The idea is to use the lines as the first and last lines of your own story or poem. You can write whatever you want preferably without reference to the original work of literature. 

  I liked the lines from the Edgar Allan Poe story, MS FOUND IN A BOTTLE. The first line is, Of my country and of my family I have little to say. The last line is, Going down!

  The deadline for submission is next week. I just finished my story but I’m not going to submit it. It's not the ten dollar fee, my wife Teresa would spot me that. It’s because I couldn’t handle the adulation if I won. What a lie. I’m eager to spill my guts in public, see my blog. 

So here’s my story:

  Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Indeed what could I say about them growing up in a foreign land, my true country and family left behind. Fortunately my mother and father were kind and did their best to cobble together a history. 

  This was long before DNA testing and all I could do was question my parents. My father thought the family had come over to escape the famine. In our attic was a broken Civil War era drum, but dad didn’t know where it came from or who had beaten it. 

  My mother’s parents had come over in the last century for better opportunities. My old nana was still living when I was a child and she told me of putting potatoes in a sack as the men unearthed them. I said that sounded like fun, but she just smiled and shook her head. 

  I showed nana a small scale map of Ireland and she pointed out the village north of Dublin she had grown up in. My father thought his side was from around the town of Kenmare in the west. When I got old enough I went to Kenmare. 

  I went to the big church in the middle of town but it was locked. In the pub next door I met Brian who worked for Guinness Brewing. He said I would have to know which parish the family lived in to get any information. He said if I bought him a pint he’d take me around the countryside. 

  Fifteen minutes later we were driving down a narrow road in Brian’s Guinness Quality Control van. It was his day off.  The door was open at the first church we came to and Brian found the baptismal records, but my family was not in them. Brian suggested we inquire at the pub. They hadn’t heard of our family either. 

  A half hour later we were on the road again. We spent all of that day visiting the churches and pubs in a seven mile radius around Kenmare. We ended the day at the pub we had started at. Brian said it was his turn to buy. He promised to contact his co-worker in my nana’s town so I could continue my search. As we raised our glasses I said, “Going down.”