Once, while I was taking a creative writing course at UCLA, the class was assigned to write a short story. We didn't have to write a complete story; we just had to come up with a good beginning, meaning one with an intriguing "hook".
So I thought about it a bit and came up with what I thought was a pretty promising premise for a humorous story: it was to be about a man (named Jones I think... this was a long time ago and I don't have the manuscript any more) who died after having led what might generously be described as a moderately dissolute, though not particularly evil, sort of life in the fictitious town of Narrow Bend, Alabama -- then came back to life at his own funeral, to the shock of everyone. Here I had the town doctor, who'd pronounced Jones dead, say it was "the most unusual thing he had seen in ten or twelve years" (I'm rather fond of this bit of understated hyperbole, if that makes sense; it sounds classic American to me, not too unlike the signature style of... Mark Twain(?!) (please forgive the awesomely daring impertinent allegation!)).
Naturally everyone was curious to know what, if anything, Jones remembered about his experience while he was dead. And yes, Jones had a story to tell -- boy, did he! Indeed a whopping astounding yarn! The moment his soul was unburdened of its mortal coil, said Jones, it dropped straight down into Hell (rather as expected by the good townspeople), but it turned out that Hell -- overseen, by the way, by manager Mr. Scratch, who was a fat black fellow with a multicolored bowler hat, a scraggly beard and a hearty booming laugh -- was not nearly so bad a place as it had been made out to be in Bible class, not by a long shot. In fact he'd found that it suited him just fine precisely because it was chock-full of all the stuff that was considered bad or immoral in this life, such as poaching, gambling, delicious greasy diner food, and loose living -- which included loose wimmen folk. What a "life" he was set to enjoy for eternity, until somehow his damn ticker decided to start ticking again!
And that's as far as I got with the story. I never tried to finish writing it, because, well, I kind of felt I'd bitten off more than I could chew, at least at that stage in my training and life experience, and was afraid I might end up spoiling what started out as a decent beginning. I put it away, thinking vaguely that I would some day return to finish it -- but other things in life got in the way, and over the years I sort of forgot about my would-have-been career as the next O. Henry. Oh well.
One thing that I do remember, though: Jones had a best friend, a man whom everybody knew as Gimpy Brown. I didn't think it was a particularly clever nickname; after all, I'd envisioned the character as actually having a bum leg -- it was something of a throwaway detail -- but for some reason my classmates seemed to find it quite amusing and even witty. Maybe they thought I would come up with a funny backstory to explain his limp😄
Which brings me to the real point of this post. I had just added a new batch of cicada skins to my cache
when I noticed that somebody had lost a leg.
Normally I don't keep such seriously damaged shells, but as there was no way to find out which one it was, I had no choice but to just throw the leg in the jar, too.
Maybe that's why that one individual was reluctant to join the others in the jar...
Anyway, all the foregoing about the short story I was reminded of, because of the one brown nymph with a lost leg. Alias "Gimpy Brown".
