Gogh is Gone
Original Stories
by
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"Dear Violet," began the note pulled out of the Harry Winston diamond dog collar of my precious dog Gogh, shivering in a fireman’s arms. "I don’t love you anymore. Haven’t for a really long time, I’m thinking maybe never. I do, however, love our maid, Consuela. We’re running off to Paris to start brand new lives as Christian missionaries. Since we will need some start-up cash I’ve cleaned out our bank accounts. I’m sure you won’t mind. It’s for the Lord’s work after all. I felt in order to ensure closure for us both it was important to torch the house. Hey, it’s only stuff anyway. Cheers! Silas. P.S. How many times have I told you enough with the frigging flower paintings." Ouch. There is no poison deadlier than ink. Closure? That’s only applicable to events that didn’t matter much to you in the first place. Most calamities in one’s life never reach closure. Their memory leaves you for awhile, you laugh again, you love again, but eventually the memory will pop back into your brain at an unexpected and inappropriate time, triggered by something as mundane as bacon frying on a cold Monday morning in January.
I stood staring at my former home, which in a brief two-hour period has been transformed into a giant ball of florescent blue, mango orange, and poinsettia red flames. Funny how something so physically beautiful and so colorful could be so devastating. I’d only gone down the street for some Bloody Marys and some fresh air, in that order. I needed both after making the mistake of opening the paper this morning to the Arts section instead of the one which contains daily horoscope readings from Diandra. It undoubtedly would have said, "Are you out of your bed while you are reading this? Immediately go back to bed if you are. Stay in bed all day and sleep. Don’t even think about starting this day, sister. If you do, it promises to be a lulu." Instead I saw some large printed words on the top line that said, "THE HAS-BEEN THAT NEVER WAS." Reading further to find out who the poor sucker was, I was startled to find the poor sucker to be none other than myself. Cruel journalistic wags. How dare they trash my flower paintings. So what if I’d done them for thirty years?
I began painting flowers when I was seven years old and emerged from a trance-like state I had been in for a month after watching my parents drown on a lovely spring day. You would have thought that experience alone would have set me good and straight about the seriousness and fickleness of fate. But I still slap my hands to my face, which has a startled look on it, every time something really awful happens to me. We were at a family picnic by a lake in Southern Illinois. The sky one moment was a gorgeous, paradise blue, not unlike the color of blue newborn baby-boys’ buntings. The next moment it turned black, black as a painting would be with the title "A Thousand Crows at Midnight." With the change in sky color came a powerful storm. One minute my parents were waving and smiling at me as I stood on shore. Faster than I could swallow my own spit, their boat tipped over and they didn’t come up again. Alive that is. I sat speechless for a month, eating only Oreo cookies dipped in milk and staring into space. Or so I’ve been told. I can’t remember any of this. One time at a party a plastered shrink told me I probably was in the theta state during that period – a place somewhere between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind where creativity and problem-solving take place. Somehow I got a double dose of the creative part and not even a minuscule dose of the problem-solving abilities.
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About the Book
Nancy Freyburger’s first novella and collection of short stories is a gathering of the quirky, the romantic, the dark, and the whimsical. The odd sights, sounds and colorful cast of characters create a carnival of the surreal, yet oddly familiar. It all begins with Gogh is Gone, a 100-page novella that captures the exploits of Violet, who’s kidnapped her cousin Zoreen to help her find her beloved, one-eared pooch Gogh. Gogh sports a diamond collar and painted red nails, and has been spotted in a sweat lodge with Indian Joe, eating opossum stew at a local diner, sipping martini, and courting a psychic dog named Tabu. The search for Gogh, though harrowing at times, leads to some exceptional discoveries about life, love, and starting over. The other short stories capture vignettes of life in America that are anything but apple pie and Doris Day. There’s Three Blind Mice, where the girls next door are tragically blinded, but whose optimism serves as a beacon of hope. In Why I Hate Broccoli, two twins strive to overcome living in the shadow of their deceased twin brothers. There’s a page after page of engaging original characters whose stories, though anything but sugarcoated, are indeed sweet. So sit back, buckle up, and savor the read.
About the Author
Nancy Freyburger is an artist and writer living in Chicago, Illinois. Her creativity and imagination, which in the past manifested themselves in jewelry design and painting, take a different turn in another medium: the written word. Seeing things through an artist’s eye, the characters, language, and scenes are written with visual images in mind.