Genre of Silence

by Matt Briggs

My Father and the Genre of Silence

My father died in 2011 and left behind him a rebuilt red Chevy Super Impala convertible 1968, a couple of houses, and about a half dozen shoeboxes full of several thousand photographs of the Central Cascade mountains. I hadn’t spoken with my father for five years before his death. Even before even though my dad had a lot to say and said it, his conversation was hardly intimate or even interactive. He delivered monologues that precluded any type of exchange. His talk was the superficial “How’s the weather,” sort of talk. His main line of conversation was to deliver very long monologues about his hikes in the Alpine Lake Wilderness area. If this sounds kind of boring and event abstract, it was. And he could not handle any sort of interruption. Although I quickly lost a sense of what river basin he was in, or which ridge line he was following, he told these stories with a kind of urgency. It was a bit like listening to a lab rat narrate his passage through a maze. Only at the end there wasn’t cheese, but rather my father’s attempt to describe the view from a remote mountain crag.

Seattle is a Vortex

by Matt Briggs

I often stumble into a new part of Seattle. The smell of freshly poured concrete and sprayed paint creates a sensation like vertigo, like standing on top of the Aurora Bridge, staring down into the ship canal and realizing I’m standing on a shell of asphalt and concrete and steel wrapping the wind and current and muck. I might stand on a Seattle street with crowds milling around me next to a ten-story structure. Only three months ago that high-rise didn’t exist. Only twenty-years ago, the previous building didn’t even exist as a blueprint. A hundred and fifty years ago (a catnap in the life of most cities) Seattle didn’t exist at all. The shock of Seattle’s instant architecture makes me keenly aware that all of this asphalt, concrete, steel is just a by-product of something else. I’ve run into this sensation enough now since the building spree started when I was fifteen (and maybe it was like this before?) that the sensation no longer really causes a shock but merely a sense of movement, like stepping onto a bus. On a Seattle street, I expect to hear the keen of seagulls, smell Elliott Bay brine, and have this sense of architectural vertigo. I’ve stumbled into new skyscrapers. I’ve walked along the waterfront and realized I had somehow entered into a new convention center. I’ve spilled out of a movie theater crowd onto an oddly familiar street corner and realized I came out of a mall that stands where something else stood that I thought still existed even though I couldn’t quite recall what was there before.

Pacific Highway South: Best American Strip City

by Matt Briggs

Walking the Dog

I live across the street from a swampy vacant lot. Cottonwoods grow on the lot’s margins, and around the lot there are houses, apartment buildings, highways. There are a lot of people who never see one another.

A bird’s nest, empty most of the time except during the spring migration, clings to the cottonwood closest to my subdivision.

Fred Is Dead

by Matt Briggs Hhhh

My uncle was obsessed with being alive to the point where he didn’t live at all. He filled a cardboard box with free verse, a landfill with green bottles and a tin urn with his ashes. When I was first aware of him, he was growing things out, weird like Howard Hughes. Uncle Fred decided to grow a whisker under his chin as long as it would grow. It grew and grew like a long fishing line. I asked him if people stepped on his whisker. It was that long.

Flag Ceremony

by Matt Briggs

Sometime after I had been in my Army basic training unit long enough, I knew how to polish my boots until the surface held a thin, buffed glaze richer than the spay-on polish applied by the Drill Sergeants. The aerosol shine left a mucous sheen still shiny even after trail dirt and field dust coated their heels. I knew how to take my time stripping down the excess, black Kiwi wax and then applying a light touch and buffing the leather with my brush. My brush softened after hours of back and forth blows across the boots. I kept both pairs of my boots rotating on my feet unlike most of my more clever bunkmates. They kept one pair highly polished, ready-to-go. The other pair they wore. They could be instantly ready-to-go for inspection. The problem with this was that their polished, inspection ready-to-go pair remained unbroken. Their feet blistered just standing in line during inspection. And if they had to march in those boots, I didn’t want to be around when they peeled back their socks and their skin pulled away from the meat on their heels in white, fluid filled bubbles. I kept both pairs worn and ready and after some time they became more comfortable than tennis shoes. Weeks later after Basic Training when I finally put on the old pair of KEDs I’d worn to Fort Dix, the sneakers with their thin, faded canvas felt light and inconsequential, really. They were hardly on my feet compared to the bulk and weight and authority of my army boots. They felt as though I wore socks. I liked the additional height in the stacked, rubber heels of the army boots. I liked the sound they made on the crumbling cement walkway where we drilled.

About Suburgian

My name is Matt Briggs. I’m a writer living in the suburbs south of Seattle, north of Tacoma.

About Matt Briggs

I’ve written some books set in the Seattle area. Several of these books are based on my experience growing up in the Snoqualmie Valley in the 70s and early 80s. Both of my parents grew up in Seattle, but in the early 70s wanted to move to a place where they could grow their own food and escape the city. Some of their friends could afford lands in British Columbia or Idaho. My parents kept their jobs, working in diners, and bought an acre of land in the middle of the forest.

Post collections

I’ve grouped my blog posts into collections that tell a cohesive story, much like chapters in a book. This format helps me share complete ideas in an organized manner.

Every collection revolves around a specific theme, allowing for a more in-depth look at the topic. This approach makes may make it easier for readers to collect the content without having to jump between unrelated articles.

Stories on Suburgian

The following are original short stories that I’ve published on this site.

• Des Moines Creek Ghost Story
• A Higher Power
• My Depakote Regimen
• Depressions on the Moon
• The Centripetal Force of Holding Hands