This slender volume, called Lost Arrow and Other
True Stories, contains eleven stories that are placed under five
headings: Carpentry, The Middle East, Mountain Climbing, Life in the Fast Lane, and
African-American. The author, Scott C. Davis,
says "The purpose of Lost Arrow
is to acquaint the reader with stories that are guiding my work on larger writing
projects. That's the logic behind my subject headings. Each subject
corresponds to a literary construction site, rather untidy, with new materials, scrap,
scaffolding, skeletal structure, and pieces of finished work " Here is an
opportunity to delve briefly into some fascinating and distinctly different worlds."Scott
C. Davis is a crisp, sane, honest, actual writer. I love reading him."
John Felstiner, Stanford University
"If the craft of writing is to regain its place as the hallmark of our culture, we
must think of words as precious object. Such is the achievement of Scott C. Davis in
Lost Arrow."
Joegil Lundquist, Literacy Unlimited
The second story in Construction is The Day We
Squished Phil.
The human body is composed of 97% water and 3% solids. Or so I have read.
And you could say that a primary obligation of a building contractor toward his
employees is the keep their bodies from devolving into these two elements. In the
case of Phil, however, I was not entirely successful.
Beginning the Middle East section is The Singing Boy.
I made it to Aleppo, the ancient trading city of northern Syria, toured its castle, its
market, its museum. I had come to the Umayyad mosque . . . Before long, a boy of about
twelve walked to my end of the courtyard. He was wearing an old dress coat, brown
slacks, and an over-large pair of sunglasses. I turned back to my cards and a few
minutes later heard a voice of great purity singing lines from the Quran. It was the
boy, sitting cross-legged near the place of ablutions. His voice echoed and
reverberated, filling the courtyard, touching us all. Then it rose above the
rooftops, carrying me with it, and soared higher and higher until I imagined that the boy
was sitting at the most slender point of the minaret. And what did he see?
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