Pitt Griffin
Bio
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, it occurred to me I should write things down. It allows you to live wherever you want - at least for awhile.
Stories (47)
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Madda Femi's Long Reach
April 1799 An Atlantic gale strained HMS Lutine’s masts against her shrouds and stays. The wind roared capriciously, veering from west to north and back again. The ship see-sawed, heeling to port and starboard, pitching and yawing at the waves’ direction. Torrential rain lashed her deck. Lookouts, blind in the darkness, peered for any sign of land. The sounding line warned of a rapid shallowing beneath the keel. The shriek of the storm drowned out the Captain’s commands. And junior officers braved the heaving deck to cajole the sailors manning the halyards and sheets to drop some sails and keep the others taut.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in Fiction
A Respected Journalist’s Descent into Insanity
The talking heads at Fox News’s ‘Outnumbered’ were discussing a Florida diner owner. Specifically, her refusal to serve Biden supporters, because of the President’s Afghanistan withdrawal and her belief he had stolen the election. The conversation was the usual boilerplate conservative outrage at a Democratic President, featuring a ‘real American’ putting her principles before profit — until it was Lara Logan’s turn.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in The Swamp
Jenny Got Her Gun
Early September is bittersweet. Summer’s games and romance are consigned to memory. Washing machines have dissolved salt-tinged stains and leached away the coconut sweetness of suntan lotion. Bathing suits and beach towels are packed away. Kayaks and paddles, coolers and racquets are stored at the back of garages or in garden sheds. Crisp tan lines begin to blur. And school starts again.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in Fiction
Achieving Greatness
May 1, 1986 Sitting in a tent, swaddled in a blanket, Ann stared out over a white wasteland of ice. The wind whipped across a monochrome landscape, where signs of humanity were few, fragile and temporary. She was cold, but she had been cold much of her life, and it invigorated her. It cleansed her soul and stripped her psyche of the detritus of daily life. It sharpened her focus and fired her ambition.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in Fiction
Baptism
On my first morning in Kauai, I woke up next to my wife of two years, knowing I would see things of great beauty. Some of the planet’s newest land, as yet unsmoothed by time and tide. Plants and trees of startling vibrancy. And sea-life from the ungainly, and unpronounceable, humuhumunukunukuapua'a to the majestic humpback whale. But that day, at the suggestion of an old man, I would also experience something I did not expect.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in Fiction
Being Here
It is not often that you ride in a limo driven by a bull. But as the bull explained, driving for a living was not his first choice. Initially, he had planned on an agricultural career in Cyprus, his native country. But things often do not go as planned. In his youth, living on a large farm, he had been happy. But after he reached adulthood, circumstances changed, and he emigrated to America.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in Fiction
Time's Thread.
As a girl, whenever Maria got the sniffles, grippe, headache, or an upset tummy, her bisabuela would dose her with an aromatic tea made from the flowers of the cempoalxóchitl plant - which the English, hard-pressed to replicate the subtitles and nuance of the indigenous language, had named 'Mexican marigold'. To this day, its tart, sweet taste of anise reminded Maria of her great-grandmother, Colel, with her flaming red hair, unusual in a Mexican. She was a ‘roja’, a ‘red’, and her hair was a testament to the European adventurers who came to make their fortune harvesting henequen in the Yucatán.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in Fiction
The Suspicious Brown Paper Package Murder.
Anastasia Gault was a gullible young lady. She was the sort of trusting soul who made life profitable for conmen, charlatans, and snake-oil salesmen. There was no extended warranty she wouldn’t buy. No sob story that didn’t break her heart. And no plea for alms she wouldn’t honor with a few dollars. Although, in fairness, she had yet to send any money to a Nigerian Prince with cash flow problems. And for this, she congratulated herself on her common sense and perspicacity.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in Fiction
Death by Chocolate
Artemisia Absinthe was a precocious girl. And while her parents’ boast that she could read by the time she was two was probably an exaggeration springing from parental pride, it was clear to all she was several laps smarter than her older brother, Cyril. Who, even at seven, still lacked the skill to pick his nose - and had never been known to open a book, except to look at the pictures.
By Pitt Griffin4 years ago in Fiction
Animal Barn Revisited
The elderly pig walked through the sagging doors of the old barn that had been his home as a youth - when he was first called Snezhok. No animals lived there now. The feed bins were empty. The sharded glass of broken liquor bottles laid buried, mixed with bones, in dust-clad, desiccated straw. Traces of animality remained in the hoof and trotter tracks pressed long ago into the hardened dirt of the barn’s floor. But the debates and philosophical discussions of how the community would grow and prosper existed only as memories.
By Pitt Griffin5 years ago in Fiction
Twenty Twenty Four
People rushed to help the woman who had collapsed to the floor. A tall youth gently cradled her head as she lay on the bare floor timbers of the ruined house. Although now close to middle age, she looked much as she had on the day she, a newly-minted graduate, married the man who had taught her to love literature. It was soon after she married that the troubles started.
By Pitt Griffin5 years ago in Fiction
