{"id":24373,"date":"1981-03-10T21:53:54","date_gmt":"1981-03-11T03:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/?p=24373"},"modified":"2025-11-16T12:51:35","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T18:51:35","slug":"short-story-agua-fria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/1981\/03\/10\/short-story-agua-fria\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Story: Agua Fria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Short Story: Agua Fria<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Richard R. Barron<\/p>\n

Click. Whir. Click. The song started again.<\/p>\n

I was going to wear out this cassette tape.<\/p>\n

I sat there in the cold, listening to this same song again and again. As I did, I wrote and rewrote a script for it in my head.<\/p>\n

Script. Sure. It was a script for my lame, sophomoric story about Melissa, who I thought I’d never see again.<\/p>\n

I had the song copied from my vinyl record album to a cassette tape. My friends and I thought it was important to do this, so our records wouldn’t wear out, and we could play the cassettes in our cars. A funny, sad trick of fate is that most of those records are at the bottom of a dump somewhere now. We also thought it was beyond important to use expensive cassette tapes.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

The song was called Embers<\/em>, a melodic and engaging yet entirely sappy piano piece that was probably meant to evoke harmony, peace, contemplation, blah blah, whatever.<\/p>\n

For me, it might as well have been called “Goodbye, Melissa.” Hmm. Or maybe, “Goodbye, Melissa, you bitch.”<\/p>\n

The script in my head was really just the end title cards of a movie about her. Roll credits.<\/p>\n

Actually, as much as I wanted to be one, I wasn’t much of a writer. I wanted to be a writer more than I wanted to write. My freshman composition teacher once told me, “You think like a thinker, not like a writer.”<\/p>\n

I don’t know. Maybe I killed her off at the end of the movie. Maybe she died of some kind of make-you-prettier cancer like Ali MacGraw did in Love Story<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I was having a very self-indulgent freshman year at college. I cooked up a philosophy, which I cavalierly named Omnitheistic Relativism. I thought reason was all and emotionalism was a crime. Emotionalists, I thought, were idiots.<\/p>\n

No, I know it’s ironic. I’m getting to that.<\/p>\n

Click. Whir. I watched the counter on the face of the cassette deck race back toward zero, and clicked “stop” just in time to play the song again.<\/p>\n

Around me the dark cabin in northern New Mexico trembled in the winter wind. Snow fell outside, and I was happy about that, since in the morning, I was going to take my first snow skiing lesson at nearby Angel Fire Resort.<\/p>\n

But as the notes sang to me over and over, I began to feel that something more was going on inside me. The script was writing itself deeper into my self. The “embers” were themselves the last glow of hope for a relationship I’d hoped for for years, and they were burning out.<\/p>\n

There, in the tiny village of Agua Fria, New Mexico, with the mountains in the dark, silent snow, I decided that I would never see her again.<\/p>\n

I closed my eyes, and tried to concentrate on a moment just six months earlier. I was visiting her at her parent’s\u00a0 house in Warrensburg, Missouri. She was right there next to me, soft and pretty and pregnant.<\/p>\n

She was so young to be pregnant, and so unhappy about it. I tired to hold her hand. I tried to be her friend. I tried to put my arms around her. All my efforts fell on deaf ears, a deaf soul, a deaf chance for love.<\/p>\n

The smoke from the fireplace in the cabin, my only source of warmth,\u00a0 was getting in my eyes, but I rewound the tape again and again. The tears were not from the smoke. The tears were from me, and from her.<\/p>\n

LIsten to it now and write your own script…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Short Story: Agua Fria by Richard R. Barron Click. Whir. Click. The song started again. I was going to wear out this cassette tape. I sat there in the cold, listening to this same song again and again. As I did, I wrote and rewrote a script for it in my head. Script. Sure. It…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-short-stories-and-other-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24373"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33220,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24373\/revisions\/33220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/richardbarron.net\/giantmuh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}