Tempered Magazine December 2013 // January 2014 // Issue 01 | Page 13

GREAT GRANITE DADS
By Angus McLinn

Happy Anderson hit the ground

corona, its outward shooting rays

and all of a sudden he wasn’t in

the only evidence that it was ever

one piece anymore. One of his legs

there at all. That’s when he knew

was still attached but somehow

that he was in some real trouble,

separate. The sky was buzzing.

the biggest he’d ever been in.

Everything was buzzing. A summer
evening saturated with cicadas.
His lungs were floating. The blood
in his mouth tasted like a whiff of
kerosene. The tram cables were far
above him, but he could hear each
filament stretch and groan and
finally pop, great steel ligaments
giving away one after another.

When the tram cable hit the ground
it had to go through part of Happy
Anderson’s jawbone first, which
was a crying shame. He’d been
blessed with a prodigious beard
and the workers were using it as a
model for Abraham Lincoln’s, the
construction of which had yet to be
completed. It was a difficult beard

As the cable failed and whipped

to capture in stone, transformative

across the sky then down, down,

yet diplomatic, the kind of beard

down, and right towards him, had

that might seek to preserve the

he survived, Happy Anderson

Union without interfering with the

would’ve claimed that he saw a

institution of slavery. Construction

metal serpent swallow the sun

of the monument was certain to be

whole. A true astrological wonder,

delayed as a result of his death.

the sun obscured but for a golden

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