The Woodcutter
M.T. Fallon


In the Sacher, after my second coffee, he who I had written stood up from his sentence and walked off the page. Czech pants, secondhand boots, a zoster-pocked face, I had only love for him but there was nothing I could say. He was free to do as he wished. He started across the table, but before he leapt down to the empty chair he turned back and gripped one arm in the other, an obscene gesture. I closed the notebook, gathered my papers and took a stroll through the Burggarten. Later, sitting in the Ambassador with my only son, he who I had written came walking in the Kartnerstrasse though I did not see him till he had climbed atop the table and stood beside the champagne. Look, I said to my son, and waved my hand to this little one standing before us with his absurd Tyrolean hat. My son gazed into his eyes, taking the measure of his tiny heart, then turned to me with a giving smile. I loved my son's smile perhaps more than anything I have ever created, and so I set the newspaper aside and opened my notebook. I described a little Carinthian cottage with an open door, inside of which a woodcutter's wife cooked pig's trotter soup. He who I had written walked onto the page and slipped into the sentence, and I closed the door behind him.




M. T. Fallon's fiction appears or will appear in Beloit Fiction Journal, elimae, Hobart, Opium, Lamination Colony and Unsaid.

To link to this story directly: http://wigleaf.com/200904woodcutter.htm

Read MTF's "Finale" from the archive.

Photo on page main page courtesy of Dylan.







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