A Literary Feast

The Farmer General > Articles by: Brian Snell

Posts by Brian Snell

Riddle Roundup

Posted on June 10th, 2016

Hey kids! Think you’ve got the smarts to bust open these three brain-twisting melon scratchers? Wowie, these riddles sure are tough! But no peaking at the answers until you’ve given each one a shot, okay? Jeremy works in an administrative position for a military subcontractor. The specifics of the work he does are so opaque and tedious that even Jeremy himself is not 100% sure he understands all of it, but the gist is that, when the military buys electronic equipment from foreign companies, it is Jeremy’s job is to develop a summary of the transaction and the equipment purchased to be reviewed by [REDACTED]. After [REDACTED] reviews the summary of the transaction, Jeremy receives notes that he then uses to revise his summary.…

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Apache Chief and Little Bighorn

Posted on July 14th, 2014

They call me Little Bighorn because I’m little but my horn is big. Go figure. They call Apache Chief Apache Chief because Little Bighorn sounds like an Indian name and since we’re always together people figured he ought to have an Indian sounding name too.  I tried to tell them that Apache Chief wasn’t the chief of nothing but by making such a fuss about it I probably just helped the name stick since nobody has called either one of us anything else for a long time now.  We were out past the park again near the place we call Shouter’s Spot because it’s the place where we see the guy who shouts about the prisons to anyone who happens to be nearby.  We…

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The Ancient Egyptians

Posted on May 14th, 2014

    To the Ancient Egyptians, onions symbolized eternity since the concentric rings resembled the nested layers of the Earth and the Heavens. Don’t read too much into it though, to the Ancient Egyptians, everything symbolized everything else. Cats symbolized royalty. Peanuts symbolized democracy. The rippling banks of the Nile symbolized both death and the harvest. A rat with a locust riding on its back symbolized the 1972 Atlanta Braves. Seven white carnations being urinated on by an emu symbolized the sanctity of marriage. Norman Bates symbolized Gary Cooper. A hollow gourd inverted over a well symbolized traditional American values, which in turn symbolized me drinking an icy light beer and listening to ghosts singing through the floorboards. To them, even all of eternity…

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A Hurdy Gurdy Song

Posted on March 17th, 2014

Sometimes when I sit still, if I sit still for long enough without moving much, I can start to feel my pulse throbbing behind and around my eyeballs. It’s not really painful or uncomfortable in any way but it is much more present than usual, pulsing rhythmically and making me think about how fragile my eyeballs and eye sockets are. I have no idea if that is true or not, anatomically speaking, but that is the sensation that I have when I can feel my pulse in my skull that way, and it usually leads to me trying to imagine the way my veins are connected to my eyeballs; in my imagination they curve around the edge of my eyesockets to reach my eyelids and the skin of my face. Somebody…

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I Was Hungry

Posted on January 18th, 2014

I was hungry.  Not that kind of hungry that people in office buildings get when they want expensive salads and talk about their blood sugar, the kind where you’re sick to your stomach and you have a headache and even just thinking really clearly about food makes you dizzy and instead of eating all you can think about is being hungry.  I got up from where I was sitting and walked around my kitchen.  There were things in the cabinets but none of them seemed to be anything that was of any use to me.  So I put on my coat and my boots and my hat and I stepped outside.  It was nighttime.  That stars were all moving around me in such a…

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The Trappestine

Posted on January 18th, 2014

We came across some stuff at the edge of the campus that included a catalogue of teeth, most of a leg wearing most of a stocking, and something like a kind of smear or stain The technical term for this is Human Remains We sent for an ambulance at once, which arrived swiftly and the very personable yet professional paramedics did their best to console us and calm us down, though they had no small amount of trouble securing the smear-stain-tooth-leg-stocking person to the gurney for safe transport We found out later that the name of the smear was Angelica Bedelamante and she had been a Trappistine who had gone missing several days before At the press conference, a number of questions were asked…

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The King of Sola Mesa

Posted on September 30th, 2013

We left a little after sundown, skipping like a stone on glasswater down the old road that used to lead to other settlements, up north of the bay. Now it just spills out from Ciudad and empties at Tierra de la Agua, past the borderlands. Mostly it’s only used by water-truckers anymore, but we hustled down in a beatup old van we’d found on the outskirts and fixed up in secret that summer. In the dark the fires in the borderland shacks winked and flickered through aluminum doorways and the whole desert seemed to twinkle like dust in new light. We were poisoned with bloodrush; I dug my fingernails into the cracked plastic of the seat cushion as the van shivered its way past…

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Howard

Posted on August 19th, 2013

[The Fourth of July.  A suburban backyard, two hours before sundown.  Mismatched Sedans and SUVs line the ring of the Cul-De-Sac in front of the house.  About two dozen adults sip canned beer from cozies and participate in conversations of as many as six and as few as one other adult.  Roughly the same number of children run zig-zag patterns and yell wordlessly throughout the yard, portions of the adjacent yards, and the Cul-De-Sac.  Two plastic washtubs, one filled with beercans floating in water that was ice not long ago, the other likewise but with soda, sit in the sun next to a worn wooden deck, slowly growing warmer.  An arm’s length away sits a slightly rusted charcoal grill, the white-grey ash collected in…

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An Account of the First Annual Estero, Florida Billybon Festival, and What Occurred There

Posted on July 17th, 2013

FRIDAY 7am: Representatives from the Estero Chamber of Commerce and The Estero Billybon Society (formed two years prior by a group of older-aged Estero ladies enthusiastic about preserving the recipe for Billybons, an orb-shaped dessert item, roughly the size of a golf ball, comprised mainly of brown sugar and orange juice- a traditional (i.e. invented sometime in the late 1960’s by a woman named Eva St. Clair) Estero dish, though largely forgotten within the town and virtually unheard of outside) arrive at the Lee County Fairgrounds to begin setup. The aim of the event is to promote the idea that Estero is the site of a rich and historic culture, meriting tourism and emblemized by, of course, the Billybon. The main tent stretches from…

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Paella For One

Posted on June 24th, 2013

Mary Searle is in motion, for the time being. Just another Sunday taken for granted, as the peach-colored rays of mid-afternoon cut sharply through half shut blinds into tepid indoor haze. This one got away from her. She heaves a light sigh, private and genuine, standing barefoot on the cool kitchen tile as she blinks away the clouds from her contact lenses. She opens the refrigerator door, looking for nothing in particular, taking in the scene as if it were a metric by which to judge the remainder of her day. Half full bottles of a dozen different condiments, part of a loaf of bread, four eggs left in the carton. A swallow’s worth of expired milk at the bottom of the gallon. Three…

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