A Work of Fiction By Mose Hayward, Copyright © 1998

As Performed at No Shame Theatre October 2, 1998

The writer resided in a Spanish landscape much like the one I’m looking at now. He lived in a white house with a brown roof. Every day he stepped outside to admire the vista which would ... probably ... never tire him. Then he would try to come up with new phrases to describe what he saw. These are some of them:

• The hills rip skywards out of the Spanish turf, as if pulled by the hands of an almighty god.
• Dreary splotches of faded green vegetation droop over the ragged foothills, beckoning a sad rain out of the clouded sky.
• The giant jagged outcrops of rock shoot towards the sky; like fountains of stone frozen in mid-air.
• The mailman approaches early this morning: A slightly obese man with a rounded and pleasant face, today wearing huge circular sunglasses with reflective deep-blue lenses that make him look like a bug.
• As it scoops away from the mountains, the land bores itself planeally with only mediocre dips and curves, trees pacing atop it in pageant of ennui.
• The first wisps of snow are being shaken from a tranquil grey sky, leaving their hazy home just long enough to foreshadow bitter change before melting into the earth.
• A young woman visits. She has dull straw hair clamped over a startlingly beautiful, childlike face, her round cheeks pull her pink lips apart in a radiant smile, under the slowly gliding glaze of obnoxiously glittering blue eyes.

The writer submitted a collection of these phrases to a weekly poetry magazine in Norway. The editors read them appreciatively but felt that the writer was losing momentum amid ascending boredom. "Where’s the happy ending?" they wrote to the writer. The writer thought about sending back a sideways photograph of his ass with the buttcrack pulled into a grin.

Instead, the search began for something else.

"En Memoria a Cuatro Rosas" debuted October 2, 1998, performed by Mose Hayward.

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