#50: The sky was Eddie-eye blue

This month's Pony Express microfiction and visual art

After several months of traveling or hosting travelers, I have nothing on my docket til April. Not a bus ride, not a train ride, not a single human bean on my couch - and hot dang, am I excited. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a privilege to live somewhere only a train ride away from interesting places. And having a friend in my home makes me so happy, I’ll stay up all damn night several nights in a row just to keep making them laugh.

But these next six months? I’ve got so many things on a million different burners across three stoves, and I finally have the space to finish a few of those metaphorical meals and dish up some creative grub. This week was all about catching up on a short story, getting back into oil painting, and making my Postcard Club cards.

Now, I’m ready to start collaborating, starting with a stop motion short for the ole animation co-op this October and wrapping up some co-made photo embroideries with my beloved Jessica Sundstrom.

This noggin is 100% on and ready to go, folks, and this year in art is just revving up for me. And for today, I’ll…

💌 show ya the art I made for the Postcard Club and patrons,

💌 share voting results for this month’s prompt and next month’s historical topic,

💌 deliver my flash historical fiction,

💌 and catch you up on my month’s creative news.

A 35 mm photo from when the 2020 Oregon/California wildfires were so bad that Rhody and I drove to Colorado to stay with some loves awhile. We’d driven for hours at this point and the sky was still this hazy.

🤠 A month in postcard art

You ever picture an art project in your head and it turns out exactly how you imagined it? It doesn’t happen for me often, but wow, y’all. It feels good when it does. The Pony Express theme was begging for some cowboy art, and I knew exactly what I’d make as soon as the votes were final:

Here’s a GIF of all the ones I made this month:

Typed on, embroidered, and ding dang watercolored - and they tie in perfectly with our flash fiction.

🗳 The votes are in

Patrons and full-access subscribers voted for this month’s postcard-fiction prompt:

Action: cutting a plant

Word: harbor

Inspiration: The Pony Express

The fiction is always directly related to the historical theme I researched for the month. If you haven’t read September’s journey on the Pony Express, go there first for some sweet, sweet historical context:

Each month after voting closes, I give myself a measly 48 hours to write you a story set in whatever slice of history we explored. And I gotta say, I think this is one of my favorite microfiction pieces I’ve written y’all in awhile - and not only because I’m biased towards the subject, obsessed with my own brothers as I am!

🌵 After a dead-end year hunting for gold, Joe Mulvaney’s first week on the Pony Express yields a certain kind of treasure.

Here’s the postcard I wrote on:

Here’s the back:

Transcription:

Joe’s horse raced across the Salt Lake Desert, five miles from the next waystation and some seven hundred from where Eddie waited in San Francisco. He hadn’t seen his kid brother in over a year, but in his last letter, Eddie’s handwriting was so grown-up it papercut something deep in Joe’s chest, a slice for each week he’d missed the little idiot getting older. Joe spurred his horse on, as if she weren’t already going so fast the surrounding desert whipped by in a blur. Eddie’d written to ask about the cactuses Joe saw while delivering mail – are they soft under the spines or what? He’d always been good with plants, working the pathetic tenement garden once their Ma took ill. For half a page, he’d rambled about the goddamn cactuses before mentioning offhand that he was working as a day laborer at the harbor. Kid should be in school, he was so bright. It wasn’t right.

It wasn’t. Something – regret, maybe – rippled scalp to toes, and although Joe’s livelihood, and therefore Eddie’s, hinged on his speed, he yanked the reins, drawing his lathered mare to a halt. The blistering sky, blue as Eddie’s eyes had been the day he was born, was so bright Joe’s own eyes watered; he blinked it away. Eddie’s precious cactuses dotted the horizon beyond the trail. One a stone’s throw away sat squat like an overturned pot, and for a wild second Joe imagined lugging the whole damn thing cross country for Eddie, spines and all. Joe hesitated, then dismounted, kneeling eye level with the cactus. Spines longer than his thumbnail orbited the ribbed bulb, and a lone nodule sprang up on one side.

Joe gazed skyward again. Good God, that Eddie-eye blue. After a moment, he pulled out the knife sheathed at his hip, popped the nodule off, and wrapped it in a battered bandana. Eddie would like the cactus, was maybe even smart enough to keep it alive, if Joe didn’t kill it in the next few days. 

Nestling the bud beside the letters in his saddle bag, Joe mounted the horse and kicked, galloping breakneck on West.

Your turn: write some flash fiction!

I’d love love love if you wrote an uber short story, too - 500 words or less - using the same prompts (harbor/cutting a plant/the Pony Express). For reference, my piece was 356 words, which is just over a page double-spaced.

Take a stab! Give yourself 72 hours or less to write it, and remember: the goal isn’t perfection! It’s putting your pen (cursor) to the page (screen) and making some art.

When you’re ready to share it with me, reply to this email, post it directly in the comments, or put it in a saddle bag and giddy on up across the desert.

(As always, if you’re feeling stuck getting started, here’s an article I wrote on microfiction fundamentals.)

🪦 Next month’s theme

Last month The Pony Express won by a single vote. This month couldn’t have been more different, with one topic galloping ahead of the rest. All but two of you voted for the same theme!

This October, we’re getting spooky and political:

🪦 The political prisoner’s letter hidden in a K-Mart Halloween decoration 🪦

If you love this October topic and want to make sure every month is just as juicy, sign up to vote! Alternatively, if you hate the idea of talking about political prisoners, sign the frick up and make sure I can only talk about your favorite things (marshmallows? carpets? butts? you tell me!) in future posts.

To participate in next month’s voting, refer three friends for a free month of membership:

Become a Postcard Club member to vote direct (and receive original artwork in the mail):

Or you can always…

The choice is yours, friends.

🌍 Updates in my creative world

• I’m editing a short story about the sun getting sued via the State of Colorado. It is fun and weird and my first stab at both sci-fi and writing a throuple, but I think it’s going great!

• The past week and a half, I’ve been getting up most mornings and painting for an hour. I’m a chronically slow painter, reworking each segment as I move along, but this past week, something clicked. After a decade+ of oil painting, I think I might sort of understand it now! Here’s what I’m working on:

She’s about 2’/60 cm square.

Like last month’s painting, she’ll have a frame around her image (a copper one), but I’m such a messy painter I have to finish the black and white photo first. It’s a 1930s picture of a brain surgery patient, but my mom says it looks like Blanche in Bonnie & Clyde; I don’t disagree!

• I’m still subbing to agents. I know it’s been a long time, but my gut feels it, folks. This novel is good and unique and a story worth telling. After getting back from WorldCon last month, I realized I’d been subbing to agents who rep things my novel is not: women’s fiction, straightforward fantasy. I’ve refocused my sights solely on agents looking for gender-bending magic realism and I swear, success is a few pirouettes away. I even just got another MS request! 90% of fixing a problem is identifying what the problem is, right? Almost there, baby.

• Finally, while this isn’t my art… Rhody composed a beautiful song! I listen to it literally every day. You should too:

(photo is another 35 mm goodie I took last year of some wildly snowy Alps).

Til next time, where I’ll be full of spooky tales for you.

All my love and stamps and yeehaw energy,

Nikita, your Snail Mail Sweetheart