In 6 days we publish Colin Winnette’s Fondly, two novellas. As the cover exposes the innards of a thing, so will we, each day revealing another illustration from the book by artist Scott Teplin alongside excerpts from the novellas In One Story, The Two Sisters and Gainesville.
He sat in the backyard with a BB gun for the rest of the afternoon, shot cans lined up along the fence. He loaded the gun, pumped until it was painful to push, and fired. The cans went flying. He drank beers and loaded the gun. A stray dog was sniffing one of the dropped cans. William pumped the gun. A car passed in front of the house and the dog moved away from the can, toward the field that opened up out of William’s backyard. It was state land, marked off with a barbed-wire fence, but it was an old fence. The dog slid through and William watched it go. He went to the garage and found a shovel. He dug for an hour or so, a ditch in the backyard. He climbed inside. About knee deep and a few feet wide. He dug a little more because it felt good on his arms. The next morning he had to work. The ditch was a little deeper now. He climbed inside. He knelt and examined the mud walls. The end of an earthworm dangled there and he plucked it with his fingers, broke it loose from its front and brought it to his eye. The earthworm worked all the time. Or it never worked. He pressed his fingers together, smeared the earthworm between them.
–from Gainesville