{"id":6800,"date":"2010-02-13T13:34:21","date_gmt":"2010-02-13T18:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?page_id=6800"},"modified":"2010-02-13T13:34:21","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T18:34:21","slug":"seems-to-fit-excerpt-the-green-stone","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/seems-to-fit-excerpt-the-green-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Seems to Fit<\/em> (Excerpt): The Green Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he year: 1727. A moonless night in the dark, dark forest of Sababurg in central Germany. A cabin in a clearing. In the cabin, a woodcutter and his family huddle around a fire, pretending that the cabin affords security from the wolves, from the sprites and witches and familiars of the gods — even though in his bedtime story, the woodcutter is doing his entertaining best to convince them that no such security is possible.<\/p>\n

\n

The woodcutter’s name is Jurgen Landes.<\/p>\n

Just as he reaches a climax in the story’s action, a sudden whooshing sound comes from outside, and a loud thump<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Jurgen stops speaking and looks at his wife, Magda. I’ll go check<\/em>, he tells her. You stay inside with the little ones<\/em>. He picks up his small hand-ax, recently sharpened, and his lantern, and leaves the cabin.<\/p>\n

Outside, night crowds around the cabin. All is silent for a long moment, during which Jurgen does not move from before the door.<\/p>\n

Then a nightjar trills, gets a lengthy answer from the other side of the clearing. Frogs begin to chirp, blat, and gronk. Crickets resume their chorus. Jurgen steps away from the cabin and examines the roof.<\/p>\n

Whatever thump<\/em>ed, it had not thumped into the roof as far as he can tell from the ground. He will have to get up to the housetop for a closer inspection. With no ladder available, he must climb a nearby tree and perhaps jump the short distance from a limb to the roof—<\/p>\n

He does not get that far. He puts the lantern at the foot of the closest tree and hangs the hand-ax from a sling at his waist. He gets ten feet off the ground, his arms and legs wrapped around the tree trunk, when suddenly beneath one hand he feels a sharp pain, a burn<\/em>. He shimmies sideways around the trunk.<\/p>\n

Almost buried in the wood is a bright-green source of light and heat. He looks closer at it, uses the hand-ax to chop a little into the surface of the tree around it. Smoke wisps curl from around the shallow hole which the stone has punched into the trunk. The woodcutter grasps the ax up close to the head, chops away a little more wood; finally he can pry the blade under the stone, popping it easily free of the wood. It drops to the forest floor, followed at once — Oof!<\/em> — by Jurgen himself.<\/p>\n

The stone is still warm, and Jurgen tosses it lightly from one hand to the other while inspecting it.<\/p>\n

It is nearly round, less than half a hand’s breadth across. The bright green glow has faded a bit, but not entirely, and seems to have settled into a steady pale phosphorescence.<\/p>\n

He carries the rock into the house…<\/p>\n

Jurgen Landes will live to one hundred fourteen years of age. His eldest son, Jakob, will live to one hundred twelve. Jakob’s son Max will live to only eighty-four — dying in a fall from a beech — but Max’s sister Gretchen will emigrate from Germany and move to the United States of America, where her name will be recorded as Gretchen Landis, and where she will live to the ripe old age of one hundred sixteen, surviving her husband Gerald Drinkwater by nearly half a century. To her only child Sanford, hideously disfigured as he is surely among the least likely ever to father a child of his own, she will bequeath a small amount of money and an odd… well a doorstop<\/em>, perhaps: a weatherbeaten old log, carried across centuries, a continent, an ocean. Her last words, whispered into Sandy’s left ear as he bent over her bedside, were Teilen Sie es<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Share it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The year: 1727. A moonless night in the dark, dark forest of Sababurg in central Germany. A cabin in a clearing. In the cabin, a woodcutter and his family huddle around a fire, pretending that the cabin affords security from the wolves, from the sprites and witches and familiars of the gods — even though […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-6800","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P6kZSG-1LG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6800"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6823,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6800\/revisions\/6823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}