The Rusty Racoon

Happy New Year, darlings! How has it been so far? Do you make New Year’s resolutions? If yes, what resolutions do you have for 2023?

I don’t make resolutions because I know I never keep them—however, what I do like and find important to do at this time is taking inventory of the past year and setting some directions for the new year. This time I actually sat down with a friend of mine to put it on paper, too. It’s not too late for you to do it as well:) The { Year Compass } is a very useful little booklet for this.

But the point is, me and this friend of mine—who’s just started writing recently and wants to practice more—have begun to use this internet-wide well-known method of giving each other writing prompts, and after a week or so we read our story aloud to each other. Let me tell you, so far it’s going very nicely! And since I haven’t been posting many actual stories here lately, and with this method I am actually writing more frequently again, I’ve decided to share with you the better, more interesting ones using the { #prompt } label. So this is what you can expect to see here this February:)

The reason why my attempts at prompt-based writing hadn’t worked before—because I have given it multiple shots—is that I’m not yet very good at keeping myself accountable, thus I always abandoned projects like NaNoWriMo and the like after some time. However, in July and August I started writing for prompts again with a German friend of mine who also writes. That project did not result in many decent works but only a couple of them—I figure I’ll post them here before publishing the new ones. (The original version is in English because of my German friend, but of course I’ll post the { Hungarian translation } as well.)

A főszereplő egy kisfalusi kocsmatulajdonos

- @the.plottery “July - Saturday 02” plot

  

It was a warm summer day in the middle of nowhere. It was the Rusty Racoon, to be exact, which was located, in fact, in the middle of nowhere. 

The Rusty Racoon had been named at the toss of a coin. Miss Nelly, the dutiful owner of said bar, had watched Jimmy the alcoholic and Cheesy Charles—both of whom were regulars ever since—argue over the name of the then-nameless place. Miss Nelly would’ve been completely fine with referring to it simply as ‘the bar’ ‒ not that there were any other bars around to confuse it with. But the question of naming the bar or not was the first question ever those two men were of the same opinion on so Nelly had decided not to stop the argument. Because, of course, the exact name was something to argue on once again. So, at one point Cheesy Charles had produced a coin and flipped it with the romantic idea of a compromise; however, the result was tails while Charles had called heads. Pistols were out in a blink of an eye. So Nelly had no choice but to intervene, even though she’d had no plans of doing so ‒ and that’s the story of the glorious name of the Rusty Racoon; Miss Nelly had scissored it together from the two ideas of the two men, along with a free pint of beer each to preserve the peace.

Miss Nelly had always been in favor of peace. She did have a pistol because better be safe than sorry, but she’d never used it and didn’t plan on it either. She thought a saloon owner must have a gun, that was simply how this line of business was, but it was stored tucked away under the counter, with a million other things on top of it, so it would’ve been a hustle to just get it in her hand, let alone doing it fast enough. She never had to think about it though; she had a crowd of regulars coming to her bar, and she knew all of them personally. They loved her, too. They would never hurt her ‒ quite the contrary, actually. The only job she had, really, was protecting them from each other. She had gotten pretty good at preventing fights, and even breaking them up if necessary. 

The main example of how she was preventing fights was the fact that she called her place ‘a bar’ in the first place. It had taken a while to make the people in the town let go of the name ‘saloon’, but she’d achieved it. She did this in the hopes of people not associating the place with the idea of a typical saloon, with those daily pistol fights and all. Introducing the new concept of a bar seemed like a smart move, after all; people only went there to drink. (And argue.) She was quite pleased with herself.

Miss Nelly had not seen much of the world, not many other saloons either, but once she’d decided on the kind of life she wanted to have, nothing could’ve stopped her from achieving it. 

Ironically enough, she was a gunsmith’s daughter. Never knew her mother. She and her two older brothers had been raised in a small house in the town center. With her father being a diligent worker with lots of requests, he’d spent most of his time in his workshop. However, the family had always been quite well-off because of this. Young Nelly had had a good relationship with her brothers prior to their leaving sometime in her teen years. She remembered fondly the times the three of them had snuck out at night to the nearby lake or the mountains. Her father never had the time so it was her brothers who had actually taught her how to use a gun. As soon as she got just barely old enough, they took her to the saloon in the next town (the one they’d been going to too so that their father wouldn’t accidentally hear about it from the townspeople). That was the moment she fell in love with the atmosphere inside such a place. She kept visiting the saloon regularly with her brothers from then on ‒ oftentimes, she’d watch her brothers flirt with ladies of easy virtue or get involved in drunken brawls. They would always go home in good spirits, laughing about a failed attempt at seduction or a black eye of one of the boys. Even to this day, she cherished these memories dearly.

Then her brothers left ‘to see the world’ (their phrasing). She had to take on all the responsibilities at home from then on, especially with her father getting older and being less and less able to work. She’d always done whatever she had to, not even hating it, but somewhere deep down she’d known since the moment she first stepped foot in that saloon that she wanted that. Something like that. 

Eventually, she had to bury her father. It was a sad and rueful day, but at the same time, a feeling of relief lingered in her soul that she didn’t seem to be able to shake off; it made her feel guilty. 

Time passed, and soon there had been nothing and no one left to take care of, and she had finally been free to make something of herself. It had been overwhelming but exciting nonetheless.

Then the news came ‒ her brothers had been killed. She had learned that day that her brothers had gained notoriety in the past years as witty gunslingers. She’d nearly fallen off her stool when she heard that. 

Long years of mourning followed. She’d lost herself and her will to care; she had wandered from town to town, always drunk, always winning over the best-looking men, and she would trick them into paying for it too. She avoided guns at all costs. All her family had been killed by guns ‒ she wanted nothing more to do with them. She’d always been smart in her own ways; at first, sneaking in a mention of her brothers had been enough to make anyone back off, and by the time the death of her brothers had spread, she’d come up with other methods of avoiding unwanted attention.

At some point she decided she’d had enough; she’d returned to her birth-town where all the townspeople had welcomed her like a long-lost daughter. Most of the elders smiled at her, recalling how good of a man her father had been, and some of the elders never made their peace with her because of how her brothers had chosen to live their short-cut lives. The opinions of her among the younger people were also varied, it mainly depended on the parents’ opinions. But the youth wasn’t that affected so they cared less too. Nelly was fine with the odds. By now, she’d become very fast at making her peace with things.

All that mattered now was her bar. And it—with the regular drunks, and all the pointless arguments that came with them—made her happy.