Six Sentence Sunday - 2/12/2012 - From "The Fountain of Eden"

I just finished making revisions from my editor's notes on my horror novelette, Larvae, which will be published in a matter of days. But for this Six Sentence Sunday I'm returning one last time to The Fountain of Eden: A Myth of Birth, Death, and Beer. The novel will be free for download from the Kindle store on February 15th, 16th, and 17th. The promotion on the 15th is in conjunction with an event at World Literary Cafe, a great website that every indie author should be involved with. They're so darn nice over there! They'll be helping to promote forty or so free Kindle e-books this Wednesday, so be sure to stop by. Surely, out of all those, you can find something that interests you. Pick yerself up a copy of Fountain if you enjoy an irreverent comic fantasy. Just don't take it too seriously. :)

The scene below occurs in Chapter 4, entitled Adventures of a Patchrobed Novice. Sitting Lotus is one of the major secondary characters in the book. The perpetual novice Zen monk residing at Eden, Virginia's own New Shaolin Monastery (ten years tenured with no monk-hood in sight), he comes across a water bottle filled with fizzling liquid while scavenging for discarded but useable goods on his weekly Dumpster-diving route. (BTW, Dumpster-diving has been around since the time of Buddha himself, just minus the giant metal bins. So I guess it was called something else back then, like stinking-refuse-pile-diving and . . . I'm gonna shut up now.)

*

He unscrewed the cap of the bottle to dispose of the fluid, and an indescribable aroma of loveliness wafted its way up to his nostrils. It was the best-smelling smell he had ever smelled; it was the smell to end all smells. It transported his mind into new, undiscovered realms--and Sitting Lotus's longstanding crystalline walls of mental formations fragmented into oblivion, and he solved his koan.

With no sense of accomplishment--accomplishment was a drug, a dream, a lie--he looked down, down, down, into the bubbling water, shining within the bottle like liquid starlight. Not dwelling on good, not dwelling on evil, he brought the bottle to his lips--and drank Zen, Buddha, Mind, all the way down to the last drop.

 Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug.

Now, just what you always wanted: a little bit of boring-ass backstory. The koan Sitting Lotus has been puzzling over since he arrived at New Shaolin is: "Not dwelling on good, not dwelling on evil, what is your original face before you were born?" Uh, yeah, so . . . anybody got an answer to that one? I certainly don't, but Sitting Lotus somehow figured it out. So what if he had a little outside help from the Water of Life?

Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to wander over to Six Sunday and peep the short but sugary posts from all the fine writers.