Ralph Pullins

Posts

Millar's Song

So I have been sitting on this one for quite a while, the reason being is that I feel it is publishable in my humble opinion, and if I post it here it is no longer, since most journals and magazines and whathave you make it extremely clear that they only want original unpublished works, and my having posted this on my website counts in a way as publishing. But I reasoned that since I'm not subbing it anywhere anyway, who cares if I render it unpublishable? I wrote this a while ago, and I quite like it. I have sent it to a few people, family and friends, and other untrustworthy folk, and have gotten a mixed response, which I am certainly used to by now. I identify quite a bit with Mr Millar, in that I am not a serious man either, and I tend to sing while I work and make up stories if my mind is left idle too long. Oh, and I named him after my high school principal for no particular reason other than it amused me at the time to do so. Anyway, this is Millar's Song Millar&

Fighting for Clarity

There's this to be said about fighting: while you're doing it, you don't have room in your head for anything else, not your busted ass car or your worries about your family, not the leak under your bathroom sink, or how you're going to pay your bills. There's only breathe one two, step out of range, shift off the center line, move breathe one three two slip the jab level change three to the body check the low kick counter one two... it is a better escape than most, and I've tried most of them, believe me. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here. I get humbled and beat up at every session, I don't understand why I even go. I'm feeling defeated; everything is so fucking hard for me, and I don't know why I'm doing it. I should just quit, right? Fuck you. I'll show you motherfuckers what I am capable of. I'll show you- And then I go and I try and my knees give and I get pummeled and twisted and what the fuck man how humble do I

Kintsukuroi

You painted my hands with violence, painted them to be bludgeons, crude and scarred. You painted my heart the color of despair, the sickly yellow of self loathing. I was untouched at first, Tabula Rasa, waiting for the artist's hands to tell me who I was, to tell me what I will be, but I didn't get an artist, I didn't get a saint. You showed me who I was, who I would be. You did this, and then you handed me the brush and told me to keep painting. My hands are not an artist's hands, they are thick and blunt, the hands of a fighter, of a brute, of a monster, I took the brush and slopped paint over everything you showed me, layer over layer, tried to cover the worst, hide it from view, and sometimes I could convince myself that it wasn't there at all, but in vino veritas , and some things cannot be hidden, some stains cannot be washed away. You painted my hands with violence, black and red with rage, you painted my face into a leering jack o lantern and now what can

#FFF

So as many of you must know, November is National Novel Writing Month and writers everywhere get all wound up and try to knock out a novel in a month. It is abbreviated as NaNoWriMo or something stupid, presumably an event created by and intended for writers and that's the best thing that they could come up with? The world's most garbage portmanteau? Writing circles generally call it Nano, which is only marginally better, but at least its shorter. I never do it because November is a terrible month to attempt to do anything other than watch football and dream of turkey and mashed potatoes and whatnot. Who has time to sit down at the keys in November? I don't know about y'all, but I haven't been able to do jack shit creatively in the last year, what with the pandemic and the election and protests and civil unrest and the many and varied other goddamn attacks on my peace and sanity and holy shit it was all I could do to hold it together and not run screaming out o

You Can Get Out Any Time You Want

Step on, get in, you are going on a ride. You sit down, wait for the safety rail to come down and when it fails to, you look at the attendant for an explanation. S afety? he says, Y ou don't need it; you can get out any time you want , and he smiles, because he always smiles and did you see his face slip a little, a fleshmask over something else, something... did you imagine it? But it is too late now and anyway, you can see that he was right; the way is easy, the track stretches off into the distance and you know it must curve, but you can barely even tell, maybe far off down the line, it turns? The ride is slow, and you remember the attendant telling you that you can get off any time you want to and maybe you do, just to prove that you can, you get out and you walk along, you sit down next to the tracks and watch as the car keeps rolling into the distance. It is easy here, easy and fun, and you catch up and get into the car again because riding is better than walking. You rel

Rats

The boy walked across the field with his grandpa. The old man carried a large dented gasoline can, the old timey kind, rounded on the top and probably older than the boy's dad. The boy liked being around his grandpa, liked his silence and his tolerance of the boy's questions. The boy was quiet for the most part, studious, and curious and interested in learning, so his questions were never the inane kind, but usually of the how does that work, why do you do it that way, can you show me how variety which the old man appreciated and approved of. The boy liked his time with the old man and he liked when one of his questions would make the old man pause and he could tell he had said something that had made his grandpa think about something in a new way or from a new angle. He looked over to their destination, the storage shed, large and dark, filled with the smells he associated with summers out here, dust and grease. There was something special about the air, the boy had dec