The Old Funeral Home. A new novel by Tim and Amy Torkildson. Chapter One.

 Chapter One.

The best books are written in the spring. The best stories start and finish with buds and bunnies and baby robins and pink rosy clouds settling into a Disney sunset as the icicles thaw away and the babbling brook begins to burble.

You can already tell this is going to be a disgustingly quaint tale, can't you?

So be it.

After spending a year on nothing but haiku, I am ready to resume a longer narrative form. Or rather, We are.  To create protagonists and the ever-elusive mise-en-scene. And by the way, when you come to a parenthesis you'll know that it is the Beloved writing, not me. That's how we've divided up the labor; I'll dictate to her, and as she writes my golden words down she will interject her thoughts and feelings, in parenthesis.)

Hey, if it worked for Tristam Shandy it can work for us.

Spell check is turned off. We've canceled our subscription to Grammarly. This is going to be a work of pure unfiltered art. Stream of consciousness and surreal all at once.

And it starts with Michu, the World's Smallest Man. He indirectly got me my first broadcast job at KGCX Radio in Williston North Dakota.

I started there in the spring as news director. Got paid 600 dollars per month. No benefits, unless you count getting up at 3 a.m. each morning as part of 'the early to bed and early to rise' gambit to great health, wealth, and wisdom. Which I don't. I have always loved to sleep in. Until I grew old and bothersome. Now I never sleep past 4 a.m. no matter what I do. Go figure.

As I saying, I wrote down local news stories on great rolls of yellow AP paper -- a grainy parchment carpet that was attached to the dinging, clattering, AP typing machine in the broom closet. That poor old machine shook like a man with the d.t.'s. 

Once I was settled into my work in Williston I discovered the old funeral home. Where my Beloved lived. Fifty miles due north in Tioga.

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