Jedediah Smith

From pulp horror to avant garde poetics, writing that hits hard by Jedediah Smith

Tag: family

  • Learning to Dance: a fable

    A young boy kept his neighbor’s foot under his bed. It lay among the dust bunnies, idle, bereft, still wearing its oxblood leather shoe. The boy had not forgotten the foot, but he rarely took it out anymore.

    Months before, the boy had stolen it on impulse. He had seen his elderly neighbor napping in a hammock in his backyard. Cleverly, he took the foot without waking the old man.

    For a while, the boy thought the foot a marvelous toy. He made it march about his room. It would kick through the boy’s green plastic army men in great mock battles. He dressed it in his mother’s pumps, painted the toes, and practiced his pose. Occasionally, the boy would feed the foot, peeling back the shoe’s tongue and tenderly hand-feeding it oats or kernels of corn.

    With time, the games grew crueler. The boy would swell like a lion and ambush the foot or tickle its arch until it cringed in a corner. But soon he became bored and ignored the foot and felt depressed.

    The boy turned to his neighbor for help.

    I have lost all joy in the things of this world, the boy would say.

    The old man could only weep, while hopping on one foot.

    Life seems very long, the boy would cry. How my days stretch before me.

    After weeks of such talk, the old man spoke. Give me your hand, he said. I’ll teach you to dance.

    from Esau’s Fables: Prose Poems

    The book will be available as a Kindle Countdown Deal for $0.99, marked down from its original list price of $6.99, from November 8, 2025 to November 15, 2025.

    Details
    Publisher‏: ‎ Mount Diablo Books
    Publication date: ‎ January 23, 2025
    Language: ‎ English
    File size: ‎ 2.9 MB
    Print length: ‎ 111 pages

    Back cover image

    Working in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture. As the author puts it himself in “Carnival Road,” the a story about an unpaved lane that is in some inexplicable way hallucinogenic, each parable “creates its own logic that is neither symbol nor allegory but an insistence upon a world of its own making, where images connect in ways that cannot be explained, only experienced.”

  • Who Ordered the Cocoa?

    That evening as always, my wife and I were at home reading on the couch.

    According to this, she said, more children disappear every year.

    Looking up from my newspaper, I asked, How can that be when on our block children are running everywhere? I picked six out of the orange tree this morning.

    Getting up, I headed for the kitchen to make a sandwich.

    Could you fix me a drink while you’re up?

    The usual?

    Naturally, she said, and I walked straight through the kitchen, out the door, and into the house next door. I picked up the book I had left in my chair and sat down.

    According to this, I said to my wife who sat in the other chair, the oceans are still rising.

    How can that be, my wife asked, when you just read me a story about how we’re running out of water?

    Getting up, she headed for the kitchen.

    Could you fix me a drink while you’re up?

    The usual?

    Naturally, I said.

    When she handed me my drink, I looked up and asked, did you just hear the paperboy?

    There are no more paperboys, she said, just screaming children.

    I got up and headed out the front door to see. Walking across the lawn, I entered the house next door through the kitchen and took the drink to my wife.

    Sorry to put you to so much trouble.

    No trouble, I said, picking up my newspaper and sitting back on the couch.

    According to this, I said to my wife, they are running out of paper and will stop printing these soon.

    I know, she said. They stopped months ago.

    I realized I was not holding a newspaper but a cup of cocoa. Oh yes, I said, now I remember.

    I headed upstairs to a bedroom. Inside thirty or forty children were jumping around, screaming and fighting with pillows, and I had to shout to be heard, Who ordered the cocoa?

    A selection from Esau’s Fables, available from Amazon in softcover and Kindle.

    “Prose poems. Working in the tradition of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, John Lennon, and Jorge Luis Borges, Jedediah Smith uses surrealism and the absurd to travel easily between Homeric battle fields and Universal monster sets, quantum physics and the Fortean paranormal, archetypal mythology and modern pop culture.”