fragments: the contents of a box

This piece actually began as fragments. I was in a bit of a creative rut for a few months and couldn't seem to finish anything. I began going on these long walks in the early mornings of late winter and eventually came to view these fragmented bits of writing as suggestive of the disjointed nature in which we exist in a fragmented world. Piecing them together created a whole that didn't exist before. There is a beauty in the tiny souvenirs of experience we all collect, and it's a subject that's irresistible to me.

I'm hearing fragments of amplified harmonica. Fragments of bottles and knives against steel strings. Twang. Snarl. Writing fragments of a novel I don't intend to finish. I'm taking fragments of walks around landscapes I used to remember. I've replaced the cell phone in my shirt pocket with the fragment of the notebook that used to contain all my big ideas and the fragment of the pencil that I used to write them down with. I don't want to end up the jagged and knotty fragment of a fragment. I'm not a cobbler, but I own many pairs of boots and a few of them are expensive and well-built and all of them are worn, worn, worn from walking around ideas and walking around drunken, blacked-out nights, and walking around pain, and walking around the brightness of a million pounds of TNT on an Alamogordo, New Mexican desert pre-dawn fire which is always just slightly beyond the reach of my tired legs. I should quit my life. Instead, I'm taking the fragmented inventory of the tiny wooden box that sits on my bedside table. The contents of this box include:

• Funeral cards from everyone I know that has died

• A cheap cigar in a glass tube

• Pocketknives, including a whittler, a sowbelly, a Swiss Army, and an illegal stiletto

• Souvenir squished pennies with embossed pictures of the tourist traps where they were acquired

• A wooden nickel from the Pine Knot bar

• All of my broken pocket watches

• A gumball machine ring, it's origin and sentimental value forgotten

• The fragmented baby teeth of my children

Freelance writer and filmmaker Joseph Johnston made his first movie at the age of 11, an industrial espionage thriller that continues to play to excited crowds in his parent’s living room every Christmas. His work has appeared in Rawboned, GTK Creative Journal, Old Northwest Review, and the Linden Avenue Literary Journal and his movie "Fragments" was the inaugural winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review's Video Literature contest. You can keep up with him at http://www.joe-johnston.com

For more work by Joe Johnston, visit his page at our Online Sundries site.

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