No, this isn't it.
    Three men went ashore at first to find out what had happened to the
Roanoke colony. I hardly remember that I was there, and the other two
had names now lost to me, so: three men.
    Pools of dark water shuddered where once homes stood, or maybe no
home ever stood. Maybe there had been a single hut. Maybe they buried
the dead. Three years before, I had left that place teeming with life.
Back to England for supplies, but I took too long to return. Perhaps in
my absence they all grew old and died, and their children with them.
    We had arranged signs so that if forced to move my colonists of it.
Every tree had letters engraved on it to my fearful eye. LXI here-- did
61 of them survive the first winter? Over there a tree's bark spelled
out A F B O but the smaller of the two men with me remembered his Latin
well and assured me there was no more sense in it in the Roman tongue
than in my own. I knew in faith there must be a sign for us. But that
wasn't it.
    As we had sailed from England the larger one had composed an anthem.
I forbade him to sing the words until I knew whether anyone yet lived at
Roanoke, but he sang the melody without end. At times, as we combed the
woods for traces of a dwelling, he would slip and let out a 'crown' or a
'sky' or an 'ever!' at the end of a line, then hiss at himself with
aggravation for it.

    Now they have built a city of Raleigh, as I once planned to do. I
imagine my daughter there, alive, of course, purchasing meat. Perhaps it
isn't Raleigh. Would they still name it for him? She would either be 50
years old now or 40.

    On the twelfth day back on Roanoke Island, my crew all gave up hope
and said as one that we would all return to England. I was no Governor,
they no citizens, my anthem no reply. They told me as the sun rose that
if I didn't not find my daughter by noon she was lost.
    That spot where we had landed still felt familiar. I raked the inky
pools with my own hands hoping each glint came from my daughter's
locket, though I thought I might have taken it from her and removed it
to England. I might have, but I thought I might have forgot.
    A man cannot just melt away, you know. An illness may atrophy his
limbs but even so, in death there is almost as much of him as there ever
was. One hundred men, though... one hundred men can vanish into the
ground, eaten by the new world, forgotten by God himself.

    One night, sailing back, the larger man of the two that first
accompanied me ashore offered me a sweet, small orange. With the temper
I was in I could not eat it. "I would rather have," he said, "a song or
an orange than a daughter."
    "And if, once knowing a song, you lost it?" I asked.
    He shrugged his shoulders. "When I awoke this morning I had an
orange which I thought, once peeled, would be more delicious than any
other. I could not say what happened to it." He held up a barren rind.
"But this isn't it."

written for Ethan Zoller while standing up 5/15/04

I looked up Roanoke on the 'net before starting and found that it was, among other things, the site of a failed/vanished settlement in the early colonial years.

After writing this I set it aside, because I didn't even like it enough to post it right away (despite still having pledged to do so eventually). Then I lost it, and had to transcribe it from the carbon paper-- luckily, I'd used a fresh piece and then not used it again afterward-- four months later. It's not as bad as I thought. It strongly resembles the first few improv pieces I did, with a stylized (annoying) voice and an idea that I latched onto halfway through as my theme.

It's both maudlin and callous. Oh boy! If the narrator had been searching for an object all the way through rather than a daughter, maybe it would have worked better.

(Oh! There's also some ridiculous time-sequence mangling. I think I was trying to frame it as something being told long after it had happened, with the narrator's memory failing, to justify the first line. Not sure. It clearly didn't even work well enough for me to remember what was going on.)

Toward the end I became convinced that "tangerine" would have been an anachronism, and talked around it.

Note from the future: Now it's 2008 and I like this a lot, except for having apparently left some words out in the third paragraph. Fickle.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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