The mean little white boys down the road

Oyster Creek, Texas. No oysters, but plenty of mean little white boys. That’s the Oyster Creek I remember. If it offends some, so be it. Our experiences speak for themselves. Gilbert, me, and John. Louis was too small to remember.

A town of little under a thousand people, Oyster Creek is an hour south of Houston. Someone once called me crazy for saying that this town was an hour south of Houston. “You’re crazy, that can’t be. You’ll be in the ocean.” Well, we were a couple of miles off the coast. The point is, we were near Houston, and we were near the coast. But this town has nothing to do with Oysters. A creek does run through the north part of town, but only a couple of homes overlook the creek. The other creek, which I never knew the name to, splits the town into south and north. The highway, FM 523 splits it east and west.

Oyster Creek is the stepchild of Brazoria county. It’s surrounded by Freeport, Clute, Surfside, and Angleton. We Oyster Creeksters were backwards. I felt this as a child.

El Coyote de Freeport

EL Coyote de Freeport by Daniel Reyes

Part of Part 1

Note: This is a quickly written, unedited, rough draft of the first part of a miniseries of El Coyote de Freeport….more to come later.

Freeport had become what most thought it never would: an authoritarian, stockade-like community where folks as young as 10 were forced to work long days and nights in the surrounding chemical refineries. Like with Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia, people were becoming machines whose sole purpose was to produce labor. Anyone with an agenda other than those who dictated were to be reported immediately. Imprisonment or death was the punishment, depending on the severity of the crime, which was dependent on the mood of the judge at the time.

Bar Talk

Bar Talk by Daniel Reyes

Note: This is a rough, rough, rough draft of a short story. It has not been edited, and I’m not sure if it will be.

The blood dripping to the floor from his blue silk shirt hypnotized me. It left a small puddle on the dirty cement floor, but he paid no attention to it. He didn’t notice, or didn’t care that I stared, but I couldn’t help it. I wondered about his story. How did he end up in this piece of shit joint called a bar? I had no choice coming here. The beers were cheap and every now and then a young attractive woman out for an adventure would drop in a for a drink. I never got lucky, except for that one Thanksgiving day, but that story’s for another time. Today there was no one, just the two of us and Leo, the fat drunk bartender.

mfa in creative writing

i’m considering the mfa in creative writing in 2010. i have veteran benefits that i can use if i stay in texas, so i’m looking at universities here. i never thought about an advanced degree in writing. however, i find myself writing more: screenplays, poems, journal entries, random thoughts, and short stories. i don’t have the time or supportive environment to write as much as i would like, and i think the mfa program would provide that. where else can one go for a couple of years to just write? i really am not excited to get a full time job too soon, so grad school sounds like a good option.

the mfa in film production would also be a good choice. but i want to focus on my writing. also, i can see myself teaching writing in the future. in my old age, short gray hair, thin body, huge glasses, i teach college students how to express themselves in diverse genres of writing. in the summer, i head to mexico or china where i work on my next novel or memoir.

of course it depends on freeport, the film i’m working on. if it takes off, then grad school may have to wait. until then, i’ll continue grabbing words and putting them into some format or style, hoping for some engaging and moving story.