A Story Revived from the Corpse

on finding a long lost story in the wayback machine...and a short story about crimes and misdemeanors at a writers' colony in upstate New York

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For years I’ve wondered whatever happened to a short story I wrote in the mid-nineties, a story inspired by a month I spent at the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York. The story is called “The Colonists.” It is not anywhere on my laptop, and it was not anywhere on my last laptop or the one before that, and I did not include it in either of my story collections, and I don’t have a physical copy—or if I have it, I can’t find it.

Last month, while writing a post about the Millay Colony for a series about writing residencies, I thought of that story. It occurred to me that I probably had the name of the literary magazine in which it was published on an old CV somewhere. So I looked at the oldest CV I could find in the “jobs” folder on my laptop, and there indeed, under “Publications,” was the story “The Colonists,” and the publication date from Exquisite Corpse. It was published in 2001, about 18 years into Andrei Codrescu’s long-running literary experiment.

Ah, Exquisite Corpse! I thought. But didn’t that go under a long time ago? I googled “The Colonists” “Exquisite Corpse,” which pulled up the title Corpse.org—formerly the home of Exquisite Corpse—though the page title was now “Generic Gabapentin In The Uk,” as the website had apparently been purchased by some sort of click farm after Exquisite Corpse went under. The two-line preview, however, included the first few words of the story:

“The barn had been remodeled for ...”

which brought to my mind the entirety of the first two sentences:

“The Barn had been remodeled for human habitation, but hay remained in the eaves. There was a slight, pleasant odor of farm life.”

I remembered the gist of the story—the plot if you will—but I could not really remember the story. Just those two lines. I mean, I knew it involved murder, probably, but I couldn’t be certain. Which made me want to find it even more.

Then, today, while trying to find something to post here on this rekindled author newsletter, I thought of the story again, and googled again, and this time, dear reader, I remembered that thing you used to do when you wanted to see something someone had deleted: cache. So I clicked the three dots in the Google preview and went down the rabbit hole…and the whole story came up!

Of course, a story, like a city you once visited, is never quite as you remembered it—neither as good nor as exciting—and yet, I was happy to have found it, this story that was born nearly a quarter century ago (I like yet loathe being able to refer to centuries, now, in the major fractions.)

Anyway, dear readers, here is the story…but first, a photo of the actual barn:

The Colonists

The Barn
The barn had been remodeled for human habitation, but hay remained in the eaves. There was a slight, pleasant odor of farm life. We behaved, more often than not, like animals. What did they expect?