Blossom Archer.

Here is a short story of mine.

I wrote it using the Bradbury method of word association; I picked two nouns (blossom and archer) from a random word generating website, then wrote free-form from that.

Hope you all enjoy, and please let me know what you liked and did not like, or where you think there is room for improvement.  That's what I really need!

Frosty mornings, my brother and I would wake up to the sound of not an alarm, but our father hollering our names up the thirteen stairs, past his empty bedroom on the right, and into ours at the end of the hallway.

The heat vents fought the creeping morning chill, and they won - the carpet was always nice on the toes. We would scamper down the thirteen brown stairs, and the smell of waffles would scamper right up our noses. 

Syrup, plenty of it, and huge dollops of butter were needed here.  These were full-grain waffles in a time before that was the in-thing.  These were waffles that you could measure in pounds per square inch.  Once we wolfed the waffle-shaped bricks down it was a race to the coats and boots.  We each had our spot on the splintered garage steps, and as the youngest and smallest, I would often get pushed off my perch while I still had the boots half on.

My brother would grab the bow.  We called it Morning Glory.  I think we got the name from an old and terrifying spillway tower on the lake.  It was called Morning Glory, or so I remember my father telling me, because it would open it's gates, way down at the bottom of the lake where catfish big as cars slept, right at dawn.  I had a nightmare once of driving by that rusty green monster just at dawn.  An air-raid siren sounded and there was a shifting in the guts of the lake, and it started inhaling water.  A huge whirlpool formed.  Sure as anything, I ended up going down the whirlpool.  The catfish had teeth like old bayonettes, and they laughed hard when I fell in with them, swirling and trapped there forever.  I would almost say that was a memory if it wasn't for the last part.

The bow was the same kind of green.  Someone had picked it up somewhere, and we had no idea of an origin beyond that.  It had ended up in the toy closet in my grandparent's house.  That's like saying it came from a museum, or that a rock came from the ground.  At least four generations had been children in that house, and though each had added something, that toy closet could have been there the whole time.  For all we know that closet could have been there when my ancestors got there.  Wagons west! Until, lo, one stumbles upon a small closet in the middle of a prairie, and inside sits some wooden blocks, dolls, and there  in the back corner, a green bow.  Maybe the Sioux put it there, maybe something else.

I suppose it could have just been a green plastic bow from a general store that someone picked up when they were buying nails and a hammer, so the kids would stay out of their hair while they went on some repairs.  I think it was a little bit special though, at the very least.  For starters, the grip was leather and well worn, but was far too big for a normal set of hands.  It was worn from top to bottom, as though the hands that held it were twice what we get nowadays.  It was as tall as my brother too, which was saying something even then.  I think at this point in his early teens he was already topping six feet.  I wasn't much more than half of that, so you can see it may not have belonged in a toy closet.  It was a longbow, I think, or a good copy of that fine English invention.  Tall and graceful, almost lying about its intentions.

The bow itself was made of something that shimmered in the right light, but could also look dead flat, like when the lake started to freeze.  Usually it sat in our garage closet, gathering dust each night before we would take it out on these fine chilly mornings.

POST REMAINDER REMOVED, PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT IF YOU WOULD LIKE AN ELECTRONIC COPY OF THIS STORY.  THANKS! -A

Credit for the painting at the top of this post:  Richard Herman.  For such a beautiful landscape, I must give credit where credit is due.  He has plenty of other great landscape work if you follow the link.