Enormous Wings

Some of the fondest memories of my childhood were of the smell of river silt and the joy of sitting in a patch of clover. When I was asked to write my first fiction piece since high school, I imagined writing a similar scene. Ideas for a short short story: a tobacco paddock, a Coolgardie safe in a peppercorn tree, and a yellow crank-start tractor pumping water out of the creek. I left out the part about the eight snakes I had once passed to get back to this idyllic spot.
At the top of the list was “magic realism”; this brought me to a 1458 word short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (Marquez 1955). I think I enjoyed that story because the scene in the chook shed was relatable, “the hens picked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings”. When I got to the end of my jottings from the scene, I next wrote magic feminism so the story took a different shape.
I made myself into a witch; something my

I had just gotten the internet and Ebay was the first site I visited, so I bought the series written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The reason for this was, I had no idea which genre I wanted to read. The enduring (perhaps imagined) passage I remembered about the books was about Laura wrapped in a shawl trying to stay warm coming out of her claim shanty. I had a fascination for blizzards. I moved on from Laura, to Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly (Oke 2003), which was made into a movie directed by Michael Landon Jnr. The movie starts off with a wagon train much like the cover picture of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, which was one solitary wagon belonging to Pa Ingalls, who ended up settled in South Dakota, scene of The Long Winter. I could empathise with Laura at the back of the wagon bed, much like my trailer, however in Little House on the Prairie Laura’s watermelons were blamed for the families’ malaria aka fever ‘n’