Shadow & Coyote by Joel Simon
Over on TCF’s The Writer’s Block, my good pal and fellow keyboard-abuser Joel Simon has posted this piece: the first in a possible series of modern day folktales. Modern day folktale is a style I’m quite the sucker for, and Joel has done it just right. The serious (and, of course, deeply libertarian) moral is made effective and delicious by the use of a light but poetic style. Like all the good folktales, this one is about the far from common experiences of common folk.
Check it out!
Snadow & Coyote
They crossed a rough, wooded meadow between the bluff and the wash. Here the wash forked for a bit before coming back together. There was an island of grass-encrusted sand that was easier to cross, then another wide expanse of the soft stuff. On the far side was a high cliff of crumbled rock, riven off to the left by a blind canyon. Coyote angled toward the canyon.
“Hey, Coyote! I don’t wanna go in there. It’s gone bad just lately.” Shadow had no idea why a place that had once been neutral, even beneficial with all the good things that washed and blew and snagged up in there, had suddenly turned bad a few months earlier. But it had, and Shadow didn’t go where he wasn’t wanted.
“I know!” said Coyote. “Wanna see why?”
Well, he was kinda curious. Magic gone bad, if that was what this was, could bring a patch of foul luck but had never really hurt him. It might be worth checking out, and anyway he wouldn’t back down in front of Coyote.
A note to Joel: You may want to re-consider the name of your main character. ‘Shadow’ was the name of the hero of Neil Gaiman’s Hugo Award winning American Gods, itself a modern and Americanized retelling of various mythological sagas. Your character bears little resemblence to Gaiman’s but some people will use any excuse to dismiss a story as we both know.
