Hemingway’s style emerged in the 1920s. His prose was direct and unadorned. He was considered a master of dialogue, with repetition in conversation designed to make the reader remember what was said. His spare, polished writing with simple, vigorous words brought a new dimension to prose. In the decades to follow, Hemingway would become America’s most celebrated writer since Mark Twain. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

A parody pays homage to the writer’s style, and by exaggerating for comic effect, hopes to make other fans recognize the in-jokes and laugh at the gap between the over-the-top parody and the classic source. With that in mind, I give you:

“A Bell Tolls Near Kilimanjaro”

Adam Nicks crawled from under the mosquito netting. He touched his shoulder. It felt warm and sticky where he had pulled the tarantula off the night before. Welts stood up in the wound. Pink and tender. The mosquito netting had a big hole in it. Bigger than he thought.

Damn the spider, he thought. Damn the mosquito netting. Damn the truly big hole in the mosquito netting. It’s time for me to get the hell out of here.

He rolled up his sleeping bag and headed toward the river. The river was brown and fast-moving and had fish in it. He was hungry.

Adam took his jackknife from his pocket. He opened it. He cut a branch from a nearby tree and shaved the bark from it. He wrapped the knife to the branch with a strong vine. He tied it sure and true and chewed off the end of the vine with his teeth.

Adam walked close to the water and raised the spear above his head. He waited for the fish to come. He felt a gnawing in his stomach as he waited. It was hunger again. Always the hunger. Every morning the gnawing hunger.

A fish swam by. Quickly Adam thrust the spear through the slippery body. He boned the fish, built a fire and roasted it above the flames in the same way he had roasted hotdogs back in Hugamoose Bay, Michigan.

He thought of Hugamoose Bay. He thought of Myrtle. They were far away now and he must not think of the past. Life was Now, not Then.

He walked through the thick undergrowth, and then, in a clearing, he saw her. He admired her lithe body as she swung from tree to tree. He admired the bounce in her strong calves as she jumped from the tree and landed on the ground.

Adam knew what he wanted. He hoped he would not be disappointed. He went to her. He was not disappointed. She was a woman.

“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she said.
“Where can we go?” he said.
“Follow me,” she said.

Later, he left the woman. As he came back into the clearing, he felt he was being watched. The skin on the back of his neck was prickling and the soles of his feet were beginning to sweat. He needed his gun, but he’d lost it hunting kudus on the western slope of Kilimanjaro.

Suddenly, a black-skinned native jumped from behind a bush. A parrot sat on his shoulder.
“Who the hell are you?” Adam and the native said at the same time to each other.
“He wants to know who the hell I am,” the native said to the parrot. The parrot swore.

“I saw you with the woman,” the native said.
“I don’t think you saw me with any woman,” Nick said.
“I think I did!”
“I don’t think so.”
“I think so.”
The parrot swore.

“That woman is my woman,” the black man said, “and I’m going to beat your stinking brains out!”
The parrot flew to a coconut tree, and the black man lunged at Adam. Adam swung a left to the black man’s jaw and a right to his stomach, and another left to his chin, but he didn’t go down and Adam knew he was in for a fight.

The black man bent low and picked up an empty brandy bottle. He aimed the blow at Nick’s head, but Adam ducked and the bottle broke on his shoulder. Blood and pus oozed from the spider bite.

Adam felt weaker and he knew he’d have to make a run for it. He tore himself loose from the clinch and began to run. He ran well and fast.

The black man raised his spear with ostrich feathers on the end of it and threw it at Adam. The spear hit Adam at a diagonal and passed in and out of the lower muscles of his right leg.

Adam stopped running. He had to do something. I could pull it all the way through if it weren’t for the damn ostrich feathers, he thought. He broke off the protruding ends of the spear and left only the middle section in his leg. He picked up the broken tip of the arrow and examined it. As he suspected, it was poisoned.

The pain in his leg was excruciating. Adam looked around. He saw he was out of the jungle and on the hot bare plain. Truly he had run fast. He dragged himself to a bush and laid down. Take it easy now, Nicks, he told himself. Now it’s time to take it easy.

His leg had stopped bleeding. Too soon, he thought. It should bleed more. It was swollen and puffy and the skin was a purplish-green color. The poison was in it.

His luck had run out. It was bad to die for a woman whom you could not remember well. A woman with springy calves. A woman with no name. Big Legs, he had called her fondly. Yet, it was bad to die for a woman whose true name was unknown.

His mouth had a vile taste in it. Adam tried to compare it to a taste he had known before. It was like. . . like . . . roasted fish. It was roasted fish, Adam remembered, that he’d eaten for breakfast. The taste, then, was not part of the dying.

Dying was uncomplicated. It was just waiting and thinking. He looked up into the sky, and saw a spot of black in it. The spot was a vulture, far away. It was coming closer. It was directly over Adam’s head. It circled, as if searching for a place to land. It landed.

Adam had never felt a vulture sitting on his chest before. The filthy, pointed claws dug deep into his flesh. The feathers carried a stench that was unbearable.

Adam closed his eyes. A man must die honorably. Think about something he told himself. Think of Myrtle back in Hugamoose Bay. I can’t. Think of Big Legs. I can’t. Think of the vulture.

Adam opened his eyes. The vulture was still there. Adam looked at the red eyes. He saw an anticipatory gleam that had not been there before. The waiting would end soon.

***

Lucy Bell, former writing consultant and published author, is inspired by James Baldwin who said:  One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. Lucy mines her own experiences with a preference for the humorous.  She is currently working on a collection of essays titled “Most of It Was Fun.”