Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Once upon a time there was a man named Carol. Carol was a man’s man. He grew up on a farm, he toiled hard from dawn to dusk and he always had dirty fingernails.
He provided for his family. He killed his sheep, milked his cows and ploughed his fields.
And he loved to finish his working day with an icy cold beer.
He felt manly. He felt valid. He felt strong.
But he fucking hated his name.
He hated his parents for giving it to him. He didn’t understand why a regular, humble farming couple would give their first born son a woman’s name.
One day when Carol was driving his tractor, (it wasn’t an ordinary tractor, it had 5 sets of wheels on it-a contraption that Carol himself had made because he was asked to) he felt a pain. He stopped driving.
It wasn’t the average tractor driving leg ache, or shooting pain from standing awkwardly too long between the cows; that he often experienced during his long days. This pain was different.
It was a prickly, urgent pain deep inside of himself ..but also outside of himself. It was a pain that if someone was to ask him to describe it’s exact location he would have difficulty even speaking. Because it was somewhere he didn’t understand. And it was solid. And it was heavy.
He couldn’t say where it was but he knew it was there and that it was powerful enough for him to stop in his (tractor) tracks and have a big hard think.
This was not something he did often. In fact, he couldn’t recall having ever done it before. He usually just.. did things. Without stopping. Without question.
And now he was stopped under the sky, with nothing but open fields around him and a peculiar pain, and his thoughts came at him like a bull. They charged hard and fast.
He thought about how much he yearned for the ocean. He thought about growing a beard. He thought about how his grandfather taught him to waltz and hit him with a broomstick when he’d lose focus. He thought about how strikingly blue the sky was and how he’d never tasted sorbet. He thought about the size of his penis, he thought about stewing fruit. He thought a about life outside the farm. He wondered if he was happy.
And he thought about a hula hoop he’d seen the day before. It was propped up against a tree by the grain shed. He didn’t know whose it was or how it got there. He couldn’t even be sure if it had just shown up or if it had always been there. He actually had no idea what it even was. But he wanted to get it. He knew that.
Because of that, he smiled. This smile was a smile that Carol had not experienced before. It was a smile that he felt in his body. It was a smile that seemed to make the sun brighter and the air slippery and eager to get inside him to fill him up.
And then the pain stopped.
Carol looked around to see if anyone had seen this peculiar occurrence. Assured that no one had, he started his tractor once more and drove on to the machine room.
But things were different now. He drove differently. He began to notice the details in how he changed gears. He noticed a splash of what looked like green paint next to his seat. He saw a bulbous spider hanging from a small web just under the rear view mirror.
The whole drive saw him like this, really noticing details in things he’d had in front of him every day for most of his life.
He saw that his hands were aging. There were crumples he’d never noticed in his hat on the floor. He picked it up and put it on his head to look at it in the mirror. And he saw his reflection. He looked away and tried to keep noticing the other things. The gears again, the spider had moved up a bit, the paint splash looked kinda like a tree, the whole hat brim was crumpled.
He faced the mirror once more and this time he didn’t turn away. And then finally, as the sun went down, Carol noticed himself.