Some years back, I made up my mind not to post to this blog for a while. Or perhaps for ever. I wasn't sure.
Perhaps you've come across old blogs which the author no longer updates. The final post ends up looking unduly significant. Every time you check back, that last post is still the last thing they had to say.
Wanting to end a little more "intentionally", if that's the word, I took it into my head to write a little parable at the end about Bellatrix's last words. Figuring it would be meta. As the last blog post. You get it.
Our regard for, maybe reverence for, the last thing a person said before death gives us occasion to find profundity, for these words are spoken from a vantage each of us reaches only once. But there is also room for absurdity there—old John Sedgwick, for example, the general who, according to legend, said to his men, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance," and then duly got fatally hit at that distance.
So I goofed a bit with the idea and then left it as my, ahem, last words. Much later, that blog post underwent a fair bit of revision and ended up one of the Melancholic Parables—eventually titled "Done and Dusted"—and now it has been published in Masque & Spectacle along with another parable.
The second parable they've been kind enough to publish is called "Unring the Bells," and it's based on a blog post as well—not a story at all, originally, just a short rumination my own death. I found I couldn't leave the idea alone and ended up roughing it into a flash fiction piece.
The pieces weren't written as a pair, or either with the other in mind, so it is interesting to me how they've ended up yoked together in publication. Perhaps, like two fallen leaves blown together in one spot by the wind, the overlapping shapes of these stories will look to you like some new shape.
If you are interested, you can read the stories here. And do look through the whole issue. You may find a lot to like inside.