Algonkian Pre-event Narrative Enhancement Guide - Opening Hook

[LBS]

Assignment: Part III

THE FAMILY THAT LIES TOGETHER

From the Office of Sen. Annalisa M. Blackburn-Moore

Congratulations.

And, I suppose, thank you.

I’m not exactly sure why I am thanking you. I know that I should- that reading my story is an investment of your time and, after all, what is more precious than our time?

I have learned that the hard way, but really, whoever learns when things are easy?
Anyways, considering that sharing my story with you essentially clinches my own downfall all while launching your career into journalistic stardom…

Let’s just say I’m much more comfortable offering you a congratulations over a “thanks.”

Because one of two things are about to happen:

The first obvious choice being that you may delete this story. Which is completely possible, you could be an idiot. From your recent publications I’ve gathered some level of intelligence, some turns of phrase and introspection that have- I’ll admit it- vaguely impressed me. But obviously you are aware we have never met, so really, I have no idea. Your intelligence could be limited to your ability to piece together clever phrases and descriptions- just as mine is restricted to my ability to say what I know others want to hear, to make promises I have no idea or intent in keeping, and to maintain appearances no matter the cost.

You could also delete this because you simply can’t believe that, I, Senator Annalisa Blackburn-Moore would ever reach out to you.

That I, the pin-up and now poster-woman for the extremist political minority currently running our government (Oh, I know what my fans and supporters are, of course I do- I couldn’t manipulate them if I didn’t know exactly how to drive them into their frenzies) is directly contacting you when dozens of journalists from around the globe have strived and failed to bring me to my knees.

It’s been fun really, watching these journalist hacks hunt down and shell out every half-baked and ill-conceived piece of gossip they could get their hands on, and three decades of such debacles have made me quite the professional at disputing such idiotic claims. (A few I’ve even started myself, spread through back channels of course. After all, it’s always good to have your name being whispered about- to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. It’s like they say, there’s no such thing as bad press…but really, it’s so much more fun to dispute such ridiculous stories when you know you’ve started them yourself.)

So, needless to say, I understand your hesitancy; that I would ever reach out directly to you- with your modest degree and even more modest living situation (of course I know all about you, even the simplest intern can run a background check) is unbelievable.

But even with your professional media outlet backing it’s hard to imagine anyone would believe such a fallacious…such an unbelievable story…

A story that not only details a crime of law but of family and of blood, and one that implicates more than just myself.

Of course, It would be ironic if you took this path- if you simply didn’t believe me and deleted all of this; if after all these years of my fighting the published falsehoods and after the half-dozen victories I’ve collected in courts against your prized media entities over their slander and libel…if now, when I finally am coming forward with my true crime that it wouldn’t be printed out of fear of it not being true.

Perhaps that would be a case of ultimate justice, but then those I’ve harmed wouldn’t receive their justice, would they?

So, I will hold out hope that you are as intelligent as I have taken you for, and that you will end up choosing the second option. That you do find a way to print this. That you share it with the world, and everyone learns that all that was whispered in the shadows about me…all that was wondered in fear…that all of it was true.

Yes. I am not the perfect paragon I pretend to be.

Obviously.

Every saint has a past after all- and those of us working so hard to prove our goodness are almost always carrying the heaviest sins.

What?

You think your heroes don’t have a closet of skeletons?

A backyard of bones?

Grow up.

[mhnicholas]

Algonkian Novel Writer's Retreat September 2023--Hoping this is the right place to post this.

[I don't know if this section serves as prologue or as the actual opening.] What I am trying to do here is provide the inciting incident that sends Oliver on a journey from Binghamton NY to Florida to find herself and her "tribe." But, everything is subject to change]

     “Hi, Tammy, how are you today?”

      “Hi, Professor Clifford. Dr. Stockton will be with you in a second.” Before I could even ask Tammy about her kids or get a heads up about the mood of my dean, Tom stuck his head out of his office.

       “Come on in Oliver.” In my six years at Binghamton College, a private liberal arts school existing in the shadow of SUNY Binghamton, I hadn’t spent too much time in this office. For the office of a department head and a professor of English, you had to admire its orderliness. No books stacked on any free horizontal surface; no papers piled up on desk corners or windowsills.

     I took a seat on a chair in front of Tom’s desk, and Tom pulled his chair right up to the edge of his desk. I straightened myself, crossed my legs, and with my hands on my knees, waited for Tom to give me the good news. Should I have worn a skirt and heels rather than…..?

     “….. no easy way to say to this. I am sorry to report that you were not granted tenure. You should receive a letter tomorrow.”

     “I? What? What did you say?”

      “Oliver. You didn’t get tenure. I’m really, really sorry. I intervened as much as I could. But the committee and the dean of liberal arts would not be moved.”

      “I don’t understand. I don’t…..”

       “Oliver. You will get the letter….”

       “You must have a copy of the letter, Tom. What does it say? What did they say?”

       “I really shouldn’t refer to the letter. I really…”

        By now, I was leaning forward in my chair, legs uncrossed and palms pressing into my knees, and Tom was leaning back, his palms pushing against the edge of the desk.

        “Jesus, Tom. It’s the least you can do. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you are telling me this. I mean I know I’m not some celebrity scholar, but I thought I did my work. I thought I did what I was supposed to do. What happened Tom?”

        “Okay. Okay. Your teaching evaluations were great. Your service to the college was satisfactory. Your research. The committee considered that weak.”

        “Weak? I had two articles published, and I’m working on a third. I…

       “Oliver. Those were good articles, but the committee thought you needed to do more, to have more. Like a book. And they didn’t think that was going to happen. You know the college is going in a different direction. Less emphasis on teaching. More emphasis on research. At least for those on the tenure track. You seemed a bit stalled on your project regarding the contemporary novel.”

            “Oh my god.” I stood up and started to pace in front of Tom’s desk. “What am I going to do? What am I going to tell my parents? My friends?” On the frantic scale, I was heading for a ten. Tom must have sensed this because he came from around his desk and blocked my movements.

            “I wish I could help you work through some of this now. But I have another appointment in a few minutes. You have another year to work here. In the meantime, get your CV out there to other schools. You can even use me as a reference,” Tom said as he walked to his office door and opened it.

            As I walked out, my English colleague Cameron Henderson was sitting on the waiting area couch, all coiffed and pressed in her navy pencil skirt. She was Tom’s next appointment, hired the same year I was. She was going to find out about tenure too. In the seconds between walking by the couch and out the door, I processed through an English event at [….]Bar in the fall like a sped-up PowerPoint slide show.

            Slide 1:Tom standing next to Cameron. Holding up a glass of sparkling white in one hand and a hardback cover of a book in the other

            Slide 2: An enlarged image of Cameron’s book: [something on Virginia Woolf]

            Slide 3: Cameron looking in Tom’s direction. Holding her own glass and smoothing out her Calvin Klein ready wear pant suit her parents sent her from Nordstrom’s.

            Slide 4: Me. Huddling behind the small crowd of attendees with Stan Sanders, a close-to-retiring professor. “Good for her,” he said to himself as he downed a shot of Jack Daniels in one gulp.

            “Hi Oliver.” With Cameron’s greeting, the slide show in my head snapped closed.

            “Cameron.” I kept my head down as I passed her, hoping to get through the office doors before she figured out that I was on the brink of breaking down. I had to get to my car.

            “Will we see you on Friday at …..?”

            “Probably not.” I said trying to swallow a scream that was moving from my gut to my throat as if I’d just been hit by a car or seen Stan naked.

            On my way out the door, I heard Tom inviting Cameron into his office. That’s when I knew. She was going to get tenure.

 

[Amy Russell]

Opening chapter:

Driving into the parking lot that first morning, I noticed the new addition to the elegantly painted sign attached to two stone pillars that identified the church , “St. Phillips, Episcopal Church, Established 1890.”  The addition hanging below read, “Rev. Sarah Piper, Rector”.  A little squeeze in my heart region was a silent reaction to this clear evidence that I was really here, my first day of ministry, and there wasn’t any getting out of it.

 All those years of seminary, all the nights of endless cycles of doubt. “Yes, I am doing the right thing!” Then “What the hell was I thinking going to seminary when I’m not even sure what I believe!”  And then “Oh, well, I’ll finish the damn degree and then figure it out.”  I did finish it, then on a softish belief that maybe I did have some kind of “vocation”, I went ahead and completed all the other requirements. A two year internship at an urban church in Boston and a three month chaplaincy at Mass General and endless meetings with my bishop. 

But even after all of that, I still kept returning to the remark my father made when I had announced I was going to seminary.  “The world doesn’t need more ministers, we need more people who act like they give a damn about this sorry mess of a world!”  I had replied, “Yeah, maybe that’s why we need more ministers.” A disgusted look appeared and he went back to reading the New York Times, his Bible.

This morning as I was finishing up my 20 minute yoga and breathing exercises, my cell rang and I saw that it was from Marilyn, my closest friend from seminary. 

“Welcome to the first day of ministry, Sarah!”

“I thought I was doing ministry during my internship.”

“Oh, no, that was just the preview.  You’re in the bunker, now, sweetie!  Good luck today!”

Marilyn had swept into the classroom in those first few weeks of seminary plunking down next to me in Hebrew Testament class.  I noticed her right away as she was carrying not just the Hebrew Testament required for the class, but also a novel by Ondine Williams, a black feminist author who made wondrous fantasy worlds into spiritual adventures.   Anyone who could study the Bible and carry it next to spiritual fantasy was someone I had to know.  When she learned over and whispered, “And another day of the Holy Patriarchal Trio”, I covered my mouth to keep from losing it, and smiled to her, nodding.

Later in the semester, we both received terse notes added to our papers about our “irreverent and arrogant” attitude toward scripture.  Having someone who could love God and still joke about “what would Jesus do” when the toilet in the ladies room overflowed was really the only way I got through those days.  Marilyn would stay up past midnight with me as we struggled to answer those questions about sin and atonement.  We both felt it was more important that we figure out the relevance of Jesus’ teachings to the problem of homelessness rather than whether Jesus believed he was the Messiah or if he just wanted to do good work.

So, here I was, about to walk into my first parish settlement, after having been chosen by a search committee of seven people.   Five of the committee were over 70 and life- long members of this church, and two forty somethings who had moved into the newer neighborhoods when some older buildings had been condemned and demolished and replaced with “McMansions”.  Last night I had attended a congregational welcome dinner where the Senior Warden had introduced me as “a breath of fresh air in our rather stale and outdated church”.  I might be a breath of fresh air to him, but to me, right now, I felt more like a wisp of air about to blow away.

[Seetha Kandik]

BAD ENOUGH addresses difficult themes; included is a content warning for suicide, mental illness, death, racism, and physical, substance and (non-graphic) sexual abuse.

                                                                Chapter One

            If Indira Nowak hadn’t committed to bullying the bullies, she’d still be stuck in the claustrophobic childhood house where she’d left her mother and the bad memories. Life required litigating everything from the truth to room on the road and Indira was a hypervigilant warrior. A partially snow-covered black SUV was stopped ahead of her, like an orca, blocking the street. Indira tapped her horn, which earned her the finger, but that Shamu still rounded the corner in retreat. 

              “I hear that horn.” Her boss’s saccharine chuckle oozed into the car. “You shouldn’t lie about working late, sugar.” Hands-free talking was a curse, but necessary to bend him to her will.  Plus, it was safer than being in the Milwaukee office, which wasn’t hands-free when Ron was around. 

             “I’m meeting clients, remember?” Rabid rage foamed in her mouth, but she swallowed it down. One more week of him thinking he was in charge. If the poker tables had been unkind to him, he’d punch down and be unkind to her. Indira took his call to know for sure.

             “Hold on. I’m parking,” she added. The tangerine sunset’s glare erased the road ahead. She slapped the visor down and squinted the Rogers Park neighborhood into focus. Two rows of salmon-colored bungalows framed the street. Her sedan crunched over frozen slush, seesawing into the only parking spot devoid of a lawn chair holding dibs—a common wintertime practice in Chicago. Indira knew the city well and cutting through its neighborhoods toward Lakeshore Drive had been leisurely until Ron’s call. Her client list was vast and dotted across the city’s perimeter and deep into neighboring suburbs. Indira helped them make better tasting food. 

         There were only a handful of companies making custom ingredient blends in the country, and Milwaukee Flavors was one of them. Blending dry spices with functional ingredients was their niche. They made barbecue chips taste like barbecue and honey mustard pretzels taste like honey and mustard. Hated by mommy bloggers, they used MSG and the hard-to-pronounce ingredients on nutritional panels and killed at it. You’d never know it looking at their branding, but she had a plan to fix that.

          “I’m having a lucky week.” Ron droned about his winning bets while she parked. “You should be with me here in Milwaukee, darling. I can’t mentor you from afar.” 

            A failed New Yorker transplanted to Wisconsin; he spoke with a generic Southern accent to sugarcoat his nasty affect. Where he’d picked it up, nobody knew. His drive west had no reason to dip into the deep south. Maybe he’d lost himself along the way or was just a liar. Nothing about Mister Handsy Pants rang true, but he was her boss for another week and then they’d be colleagues. She’d be the newly minted Director of Marketing.

              “Sounds like you’re too busy winning to have time for me.” She coughed over a laugh. Still, Ron in a good mood was easier to take down. 

[Stephanie Raffelock]

Opening Pages.docx

[Marcus Emanuel]

When Viri found Ursula, dusk was just settling on the city. He stopped on seeing her, blinked a few times, and then, perceiving whatever evidence it was that caused his confidence to click into place, said a silent prayer to his god. 

He waited until she had passed him, counted to six, and then turned to follow her. Backlit now by the red bleed of the sunken sky, she lost her definition, assumed a place in the crowd. That wiggling mass that writhed along State Street, downtown, on a Thursday night. Brisk, curt dashes of commuters hurrying home, as impatient as small children. Bloated bellies hobbling out to see the sites, stones tumbled along by the current. He relished seeing her there amongst them, tracked her through the congestion by her upturned chin, her half-shaved head. He didn’t hesitate when she grabbed the hand of the woman next to her, skipped as gently as a river down the steps of the Red Line. He hurried in after.

Together they rode up to Belmont. They walked through a street festival. Ursula touched the woman next to her with a near compulsive frequency. At a distance — a pinky looped in the other’s, a hand grasping for the elbow’s nook. Twice she plunged in for more — once to hang on the woman’s back and nuzzle her nose against her neck, once to sweep herself under the woman’s arm and into her embrace — but both times before Viri could count to four they had separated again.

They grazed on tacos purchased from a food truck, Viri on a half consumed cob of Mexican corn, neatly placed atop an overflowing waste bin. He followed them until the sun was truly extinguished, until the firmament was one rumbling charcoal smear, and then, to his great delight, he followed them into a bar.

The establishment felt familiar if still well kept, slathered in dark wood paneling, spotted with floor-to-ceiling wood posts, edged with battered wooden booths. It was kidney shaped in layout, or, perhaps more accurately, Viri thought, like an enwombed fetus. They entered through the birth canal and the women positioned themselves somewhere near the chin, along the bar that ran from nose to toes. Viri found a post near the armpit, grabbed two abandoned drinks, mixed them together, and, pinning in place his posture, stood as still as possible. Once his body quieted enough he was able to hear them.

“But that’s not what you said. No, baby, I’m not — I’m not trying to rile shit up. Listen. My girl. I know you don’t want to talk about it but I want to talk about it — for you, and for me, and for us. I’m not trying to like — gotcha! — it’s nothing like that. I just mean . . . it’s not what you said, you know?”

This was from the other woman. One might have called her big boned but this would have been dishonest. Her frame held no sturdiness, carried no weight despite its size, just softness. A gentle softness that wafted up through her dime-sized cheeks, her creamy brown skin, her curlicue smile, which, based on the evidence collected so far, seemed a permanent fixture. 

“I guess then I don’t remember what I said.”

This was from Ursula. One might have described her as smiling but that would have been laughable. It was a grimace, held under shifting eyes, as emotions cycled across her face. Eventually she chose one, swept her hair across her face as, gorgeously, the sheen of it caught the light and danced. It held all the vibrance and elegance of her youth. She couldn’t have been past her early twenties, appeared both younger in years and older in experience than the woman across from her. She tossed her chin upward and settled into chosen response.

“So come on, just tell me.”

“Oh you don’t remember?”

“That’s right.”

“Uh huh. Sure.” The curlicue wound tighter.

“Miriam.” Ursula’s hand came across the counter and landed on the other woman’s. It didn’t squeeze it, and Ursula didn’t move any closer. It rested there at a contorted angle, giving the impression of a mauled rodent a cat might have laid at the foot of its owner.

“You said that was the only time, probably, that you’d actually been happy.”

Ursula waited.

The smile unwound. “As in, you aren’t actually happy now. As in, you haven’t ever actually been happy with me. As in, I don’t actually make you happy.”

“Miriam, that’s not what I meant.”

The stiffness beneath the softness revealed itself. It was all in the spine. It shot upward and angled backward, taking on the curve of a scorpion’s tail.

“I mean, I was saying it was the only time I’d been happy about the other stuff in my life.”
Miriam waited. The tail quivered.

“You are — you know this. You are the good thing in my life. I have this one amazing thing in my life, and it’s surrounded by an island of just — shit. And so I meant that that was like, for half a second, the time I felt happy about other things in my life — which was really probably just endorphins or whatever. But I’m always happy about you. It’s just that there’s all the other stuff. The money stuff, my stupid job, my —”

Ursula clipped up her chin again but it wasn’t confidence this time. Like someone holding a mouthful of water they were scared to spill out. Miriam nodded and Ursula swallowed it down.

“But I’m sorry. I don’t want you to ever think that. I — you know how much I love you.”
Her hands were lifted now, as if, perhaps, holding the enormous object of her love before them. During the ensuing pause Viri stiffened to the point of nearly cracking his ear drums, angled his body as far as balance would allow in their direction. With a sigh, the pressure of the scorpion’s tail went lax.

“I know.”

“I mean it, baby, you’re — you’re all I have in this world. You’re everything good there is to me.”

Miriam tilted into the waiting arms. She rested her head on Ursula’s shoulder and her softness pillowed around them both.
Ursula, on the other side, kept her eyes open and her countenance blank. The pleading eyebrows and quivering mouth fell away like a dropped curtain. In their place she pursed her lips and knit her brow, working over the problem. She crept up to the verge of solving it, had just started to chew her inner lip, when her eyes ticked over to the strange man who was staring at her.

Viri.

They both held the connection for longer than, in the moment, either would have chosen to. Then with a start Viri twisted away into his rum and vodka and Ursula straightened up again out of Miriam’s embrace.

Her weepy smile slid back on. She brought Miriam close again, forehead to forehead, gave her a quiet kiss, and then stiffened back upright again, turned abruptly in search of the bartender. 

Miriam squeezed Ursula’s hand, gave her her drink order, and, with one last kiss on Ursula’s shoulder, went off in search of the bathroom.

Ursula succeeded in catching the bartender’s attention, placed their order, tapped a few nervous times on the counter, and then, when she could stand it no more, searched over her shoulder for the strange man who’d been staring at her. She found only an empty post.

“You’re not very good at that, I’m sure you know.”

Ursula whisked around to find him on her other side now, squeezed in close between herself and the patron seated next to her. His bald head gleamed loudly amid the dull ambient light. Air husked noisily out of his nose, as if the effort of creeping up on her had taxed him. He pulled a pen from the inside pocket of his battered black peacoat and slipped the napkin from beneath their neighbor’s drink. There, in a circle around the water stain, he began to write.

“I’m sorry?” Ursula asked.

She angled herself backwards, posturing disgust. The opening gave Viri the room he needed to look up and into her eyes again. This time he was ready. He had small black eyes, packed as tight as marbles and pitted deep in the thick flesh of his face. But they fixed themselves on their target with laser-like precision and glimmered with horrifying perspicacity. Ursula found herself unable to turn away until Viri blinked and turned back to his napkin.

“The lying,” he said. “There’s room for improvement, my dear.”

“Do I know you?”

“No more or less than anyone else.”

“Do you often stare at people you don’t know?”

“Yes, you could probably accuse me of that. Especially —” He finished with his napkin, took a breath and stood upright again. He turned the cannon of his gaze back onto Ursula and she flinched as it locked onto her. “— Especially when they bear such a striking resemblance to their father.”

Ursula’s eyes widened until they could no more. Then she froze exactly as she was, her fingertips still grazing the edge of the countertop, her balance titled too far back. The only movement was caused by her rapid-fire breathing, which made her cheeks flutter, and the manic blinking of her gaping eyes. 

Viri waited until her breathing slowed, took his eyes off of her to help the process. Then he continued on.

“You may think that you don’t know me but I am certain that I know you — more, perhaps, than you would like to know yourself. I know, for example — and knew before, I should say, you caught me witnessing that little performance — that you are not exactly honest, with yourself or anyone, about who you are or what you want. I know — don’t ask me how, not right now — why that is. Because you fear, by being honest, you will rob yourself of the one thing you want so desperately in this life.”

Viri waited and, when Ursula remained silent, he gave one small nod of encouragement.

“What is that?” she asked, the words coming out too close together.

“To escape your fate.” He was focused on his napkin as he spoke, his head angled kindly. He folded it and unfolded it across various axes. “You’re wrong, of course, we both know that. Your dissembling, your dishonesty will only tie you more tightly to it. I have, ahem, an alternative I’d like to offer. You —” a wide smile rippled across his face, bubbled into a low, gurgling belly laugh, “you won’t like it! I’m sorry about that, but it’s the truth. If I had a better way, I promise . . . Alas, though, we must make the most of what we are given.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Ursula asked in a whisper.

“If you’d like to find out, I’d like to show you.”

He slid the napkin across to her.

He took one step away, his own little performance now concluded. He hesitated then, Ursula still as rattled as a pinball machine. With a sigh he took back his step and placed one hand delicately atop Ursula’s.

“You don’t have to keep living this way. I’m offering you an alternative. I’m offering you — is there another word for it? — your inheritance. You might, if nothing else, hear me out.”

Then, with the smile of a disappointed parent, he retreated again, this time following through with it. Weaving through the wooden posts, hurrying out the birth canal, running with gratitude into the smack of fresh, chilled air, searching with gaped mouth for the moon and finding only streetlamps, he collapsed onto the concrete beneath him, still holding its warmth from the day like the skin of a child plucked from her bed. He pressed his forehead to its knobby surface, muttered one final prayer of thanks, and then, with stupendous effort, rose and walked out into the night.

[O.E. Soderberg]

MARKERS UNKNOWN, Speculative Fiction Thriller

Opening Pages—Introduces protagonist, antagonist, setting, tone, and foreshadows the primary crisis and conflict.

 

ONE

Present Time. Colorado Springs Police Station. South Interrogation Room.

That bastard cuffed me to the table and left the room, but we both know my petty theft isn’t what the FBI is after.

In the harsh overhead lighting, I pull hard against the restraints in a continuous succession of aggressive tugs until I draw my own blood. The minute the warm, wet sensation meets the cold air of this unwelcoming environment, I cease all fighting. This is what I was after—not freedom, blood.

Looking down, I study the small drops of liquid beading to the surface of my skin. We all bleed red is the saying, but I’m wondering what that even means at this point. The scars on my arm make a little more sense now that I can remember the tubes running between our bodies. Somehow—call it a good Samaritan, call it altruistic abandonment—I’d been spared years ago. Mine may be a sad fucking existence, but I exist.

After everything I’ve learned in the last forty-eight hours, it’s as if I can see the particles that make up my blood. Human cells that are all determined by genetics, one gene inherited from each parent. But that’s assuming, the person came to be using good old-fashioned sex. That’s not where I came from, and it’s the very reason the FBI has gotten involved.

Footsteps sound behind the door before it swings open with a scratching sound. Special Agent Max Baker steps inside with a demeanor that hints at his calculated intent. His eyes roam my body, from the top of my head, down my face, and settle to where my hands are secured to the center bar of the table. He sees the blood I’ve drawn to the surface and seems to analyze it in the same way I had been. His jaw works as he dips into his front pocket and removes a set of keys. I imagine an apology sits on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t let it slip.

This is his domain. He’s walked every step of this case. His investigation began over a year ago. There was a whistleblower inside the pharmaceutical giant, Lander Medical. This informant was a young scientist with a budding career. After only a couple months of preparing transfusions for the general public, he began to doubt that the product Lander touted as being on the cusp of reversing aging for the general population wasn’t made up of something nefarious. He filed a report with the FBI, but remained working in the lab. He’s now serving as an informant to the special agent standing before me.

Max’s investigation led to the discovery that a different hemoglobin was being mixed into Lander’s product. It carries human DNA but doesn’t have any of the usual markers. Across all the labs in the United States, only one person in the last three decades has been on record to have a blood type masked of any markers. A random girl working as a bartender at the base of the ski slope of Cooper Mountain in Colorado. She was only a little over an hour away from the Lander Medical Compounding Lab. That was too fucking close for the FBI to ignore.

The blood drips down the outer side of my forearm. I know it’s just a collection of proteins, metabolites, ions, and other substances drifting around in water. For other people, that’s the whole truth, but for me, there’s something else beneath the surface. I examine it further like if I look hard enough, I’ll be able see what got me here, what makes me that one girl on record.

Our eyes lock as Agent Baker takes my hand in his. Neither of us blink as the chain between the restraints falls to the table. I’m freed, but for some reason, his touch on me feels more restrictive than the silver cuffs ever had. Running his whole palm down my arm, he leaves behind a smear of red.

Taking two steps back, he wipes his hand on a pant leg that is already soaked in blood that I know isn’t his or mine. Swallowing hard against the lump forming in the back of my throat, I try to push the image of a man falling from a bridge less than two hours ago from my mind.

I focus on Max, to the power imbalance between us. It’s strange seeing him out of his usual dress. He’s not even wearing his badge, just jeans and a bullet proof vest over a dirty t-shirt. He’s unshaven, hair disheveled. I’ve seen him look like this before, but that was in my bed, never on the job. During sex, I’d been the one in control. Now? I worry it may be him. But he’s as off his game as I am. He’s as shaken up about what’s transpired today as me. Gone is the agent who caught me snooping around the Lander Medical facility fifteen months ago. Gone is the man who’s been following me since. 

Pulling out the chair, he slides it across the linoleum floor by its back two legs and takes the seat across from me. He’s silent, like we’re strangers, like he may hate me as much as I hate him in this moment, like we’re both blaming the other for what happened today. But there’s more behind his hard stare. The way he’s looking at me now implies he thinks he knows everything he needs about the girl sitting in front of him. He couldn’t be more wrong.

Max’s eyes sweep around the space, taking in the interrogation room the same way I had done when he first left me in here. It’s cold and empty like a hospital, just not as sterile. I have a sneaking suspicion that he’s attempting to push that same image of a man falling to his death to some hidden corner in his mind, but he plays it off like he’s searching for a clock. Finding nothing on the walls, he settles on raising his wrist to check his watch. Then, two dark forearms rest on the lip of the table, and two cold eyes meet mine.

“Look,” he says. “I’m about to tell you everything that happened on my end. I need you to tell me everything that was happening on yours. We need him to understand we’re not the bad guys here, Quinn.”

I can’t tell if I’m going to laugh or cry. Everything that was happening? This fucking asshole should realize it’s a little late for that. People are dead. He’s had months to share this information and only now is he willing to come clean. Not because he should have from the very beginning, no, because we’d better get our stories straight on the events over the past forty-eight hours. Max needs to form a united front to get Russell Drake on the record or this special agent will be the one to shoulder the blame.

He’s absorbing every inch of my body language, following my eye movements, and reading into all of my involuntary tells. Truth is seeping out through the cracks in my armor. I was his responsibility, and I went rogue. A post-mortem can’t change that fact or why I snapped in the first place. Did I do this? Are these people dead because I couldn’t wait? That’s a truth I can’t harbor. What choice did I have? Max didn’t help me before. We wouldn’t be here, like this, if he had. The fight between personal culpability and blaming him must be painted on my face because Max sucks in a breath to say something more.

I cut him off. “This is why everything was stalled, isn’t it? You knew about him.”

A smile cuts across his face. One I’d been tricked into thinking was devastatingly handsome but have come to realize is condescending in the best light. Here under the neon bulbs of the Colorado Springs police station, it’s nothing but vicious. “You didn’t sign up for this because of him,” he reminds me as if that means anything now. As if that’s what I’m even implying.

“I didn’t sign up for this at all,” I correct. “You approached me. I had no choice but to help.”

He doesn’t reply. Just mouths that last word as he leans back, sucking in a deep breath and pressing his eyes closed. He can mock it all he wants. But my help transitioning from him to myself. My help spiraling into this fucking mess is on his betrayal—not mine. And I want an answer on how deep it goes, Agent Baker.

Pulling my body over the table, I lean in.

“When did you know?” I don’t recognize the ice in my voice. I want to blame him for everything and one small layer beneath that, it’s almost as if I’m begging him to lie to me. Free me from this guilt.

A raw flicker of pain fire behind his irises. With one blink, it’s gone. A brief flash of the man I’d come to know only to watch his face return to the emotionless void he’s offering. A stark contrast from the man I may have said I was falling in love with.

“I can’t tell you that,” he says.

“We’re way past confidential. Don’t feed me that bullshit. When did you know?”

Now it’s his turn to lean in. He creeps toward my cold glare, using every inch that he closes between us to build courage for whatever lie he’ll tell me next.

“Through satellite imagery. We knew someone was with Theodore. A second POI.”

“POI,” I mock. Even when telling the truth, he can’t help but lace it behind the sterile formalities they’re trained to use. Code names and acronyms designed to do nothing more than help stomach the manipulation and tyranny they bestow upon innocent people. “He’s a fucking person, don’t abbreviate it. And I’m not talking about him. When did you know I wouldn’t be finding my sister?”

“Quinn, as much as I’d love to dive into finger pointing right now like, oh, I don’t know — the fact that you were plotting a fucking rescue mission behind my back. Or how about your pilot friend and the longstanding vendetta with Lander Medical you’d conveniently never told me about?”

His words land like a slap to the face.

Max has never acknowledged my pilot friend, Sean, or our foul play before. I knew that he knew. Whether before or after I figured out my insignificant crime wasn’t what the FBI was following, I can’t say. If pillow talk with him has taught me anything, it’s that Max Baker lives strictly by the code of on the record and off the record. He’d told me more than he ever should have, but I guess I hadn’t anticipated the freedom in that philosophy could go both ways.

If I had, maybe this wouldn’t have spiraled so far past complicated. Getting deep into the nature of what the FBI wanted with an orphan bartender was nothing more than self preservation. I’d like to think of it as self sacrifice for Sean. We’d assumed we’d been caught.

We were two stupid kids who aged out of the Leadville, Colorado foster care system, set up on a work program through Cooper Mountain. But four months later, Lander Medical put in a bid for the community owned ski slope, and next thing we knew, the program we’d been surviving on was disbanded.

It’s that very truth that reinforces what I already know in this moment. I’m not the thief this agent sees right now. I’m not the criminal my past actions portray. I won’t apologize for any of it. What other choice did Sean and I have? We were survivors before we were ever vigilantes. Nothing can change that truth—not the past five years of skimming funds from Lander Medical’s investments in the Valley, not the past two years working with this agent, and not even the past forty-eight hours can strip that away—no matter what has been learned and lost.

We. Were. Surviving.

Sometimes that looked like a day of honest work. Other times, it looked like this.

Max becomes amused by my silence, like this is only a game, and he’s already won. It’s no surprise when he licks his lips and redistributes the tension by whispering a single statement to keep us on track. “You were in this for your sister.”

The mention of my sister sends a burning acid pain through my extremities. A bolt of electricity, seeking the nearest exit point.

“A sister wasn’t even on my radar until you came in and fucked with my head,” I say, unloading the building pressure.

He wants truth, there it is. He ruined me. Before the great Special Agent Max Baker came into my life, I hadn’t even known I had a sister. With every new off the record reveal, new memories were forced to surface. I’ve been haunted by flashbacks and remembering being used for human testing wasn’t even the worst part. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t alone, or at least I hadn’t always been. I remembered a vague image of a father, but also someone else. Someone who wasn’t just a sibling, but a sister whose body and mind I still feel connected to. When I focus on the reflection in my memories, I can vividly see us together. Two identical little girls—twins.

“Don’t get it twisted, Max,” I say. “I was waking up in cold sweats and vomiting because every night when I’d close my eyes, I was forced to flip through the family photo album I never knew I had. You used my past against me.”

“I wasn’t the one who did this to you,” he says.

All I can see is the face of the man who betrayed me. It’s funny, all that time in the foster care system, even the time since Sean and I aged out, I always felt sorry for myself. But this bastard has rewritten the story. It no longer feels like abandonment when staying would have meant I’d still be used as the lab rat for Lander Medical.

I drop my head to the table and look up at Max through my brow. “Do I even have a fucking sister?”

He reaches out and takes my hand in his with an expression that says my pain is his pain, but he doesn’t answer. For all the rules Max claims to follow, I still question why he only breaks the ones that hurt me. Anything he knows that may set me free seems to remain locked behind a rule he’s suddenly unwilling to compromise. But what the FBI was really investigating in Lander’s testing, my blood, the origin of the scars running down my arms? That information seemed to slip from his tongue. I didn’t fucking snap, he bent me until I broke. That’s on him.

I tried to do this his way. I confided in both Max and Sean about these flashbacks. The sister, the past I’d never known coming into light. I’d begged Max to help move things along, help figure out what’s happening to me. While Sean only grew angrier with Lander Medical, Max always insisted I hold back. But sitting here in this room, gathering information, is exactly why I couldn’t stand around and wait for the FBI. My life is the product of what waiting on government organizations looks like. Red tape. Paperwork. Warrants. It all takes too long.

This is taking too long. Two days ago, I was convinced my sister was still alive. It was an instinct only twins can know. I felt it in my bones that an extension of me was alive beyond the Lander facility gate. So yeah, I decided to break into the compound on my own. Because of this slow fucking process. And with every minute that is passing, that instinct is becoming less and less, and now, I think Russell Drake was right when he said she had never been there.

I wrench my hand free from Max’s touch. “What do you know?” I can’t tell if I’m begging or accusing. Whether I’m asking if he’s known about her all along, or if he knows I’ll never find her.

He gives me another non-answer. “This is a line of work that can blur the border between right and wrong. I won’t try to justify every decision only that you trust me that I’ve done everything I can to ensure those decisions have a mean that leans toward justice.”

“Is that what happened back there? Justice?”

“What are you implying?” he asks with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. He knows exactly what I’m implying. The unasked question of Did you push him off the bridge? lingers. And just when his facade of calm seems to falter, he shakes his head with that same vicious smile. “I guess I can’t blame you.”

I let out a breath. I don’t even know why I care what he did at the end. What’s done is done. I set all of this in motion. The guilt crawls back to the surface.

“What now, Max?” I say, hearing the fear in my voice, hoping he doesn’t notice.

He slides a device between us and leans in. “We tell them everything.” He pushes the record button.

“Start at the gate. What do you remember?”

[Nora Graves]

Chapter One

The Watcher on the Hill

 

            Kettering was a small country with big secrets. Wini heard the mutterings in the old oak’s leaves above her, sensed the restlessness when a stray breeze lifted a curl from the nape of her neck, shivered with alarm at the cries of starlings rising in one large murmuration from the trees below. She sat small and still on the hard, cold ground, her back against the oak’s trunk, watching the black cloud of wings as they spun upwards and swooped down again—a swirling, shimmering mist prematurely darkening the sky’s slow fade into night.

            In the river valley below, where the glistening Ketteringa snaked southward from the Greater Corr Mountains to the sea, shadows gathered into dark shapes beneath the forest’s canopy. Something stirred among them, stirred the starlings, stirred on the borders of Wini’s consciousness. She stared hard at the shapes in the trees. Now and again, she thought she saw a white hooded figure slip between the trunks. Some sixth sense told her they carried the ancient secrets. It was almost, she told herself, as if they were depositing them in the trees.

            She shivered as the cold and damp of an early spring evening began settling over the hill and pulled the collar of her jacket tightly around her neck. Her father promised he would catch her up. Her resentment toward the stranger who had caused him to dismount his horse and return to the house increased with every minute of his delay. Soon the press of evening would force her return to Windermere House. They had not shared an afternoon ride for many months, and now, instead of her father, Lord Randall, it was the old groom Baxter who kept her company, watching from a respectful distance to her left, holding the reins of her mare Mya in one hand and those of his mount in the other.

            Her father’s leg had been halfway over his saddle when shouts and the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels in the courtyard stopped him. A green landau pulled by four white horses, gilded in gold and bearing the royal arms on its sides, drew his attention from his horse to the heavyset young man in its back seat. Lord Randall sighed and swung his right foot back to the ground.

            “Don’t move, Wini. I’ll be right back,” he ordered and turned to meet an approaching footman.

            Wini watched curiously as her father accompanied the footman back to the carriage. Lord Randall nodded curtly at the young man seated there, who did not return the gesture but stretched a huge arm languidly along the top of the carriage door and studied his massive fingers, one by one, as he talked. Her father half-turned, motioning toward her. The man shrugged and nodded at a woman next to him. Lord Randall hesitated. The man raised his hand from the carriage door and drew tiny circles in the air with his index finger, a fountain of fine white lace cascading from the cuffs of his shirt and swirling in soft folds about his wrist. Then he returned his hand to the top of the carriage door and grew silent.

            Lord Randall retraced his steps to his daughter’s side, scowling.

            “Damn!” He rested a hand on Wini’s knee and eyed her speculatively, perched astride Mya and staring down at him. “Today of all days, when I need time with you. We must talk, Wini. It’s urgent. I’ve put this thing off far too long.”

            He was as taut as a bow, bent to its breaking point. Wini felt his frustration and impatience. They were too much alike for her not to be aware of such things, but the knowledge disturbed her. What had the strange man said to upset him so?

            She lay her hand lightly over his. “I’ll wait for you, Daddy.”

            “No.” He shook his head and signaled the old groom. “You go ahead. I’ll have Baxter accompany you, and as soon as I’m rid of Simonides, I’ll catch you up. Wait for me under the old oak.”

            The footman had helped the couple out of the landau. Wini studied them as her father returned to their side and ushered them to the house. The woman, clothed in flowing blue silk and a flamboyant blue hat with a flat, wide brim, appeared much older than the man at first glance, but she carried a parasol that partially shaded her face and Wini could not be sure of her age. She did not really care. The woman was of little interest. Wini’s attention was riveted on the man beside her.

            He was thick-muscled and barrel-chested, a massive figure next to Lord Randall. Though not much taller than Wini’s father, he seemed to hover over him, risen like a mountain from the ground on which he stood, possessing, not inhabiting, the space around him, the embodiment and personhood of the primordial elements of the universe—immovable as earth, necessary as air, consuming as fire. The upper arms of his brocaded tailcoat threatened to burst their seams and his breeches clung to him like a second skin, drawing Wini’s attention to the curves of his enormous thighs and calves with a prickle of fear. He turned as he mounted the steps to Windermere House and noticed her. For one terrible moment their eyes locked. Wini felt engulfed in wells of darkness; they swept her into their possession and then, as quickly as they had taken her in, they cast her out again. She did not realize she had been holding her breath until he turned back to the house and she exhaled.

            “Who was that man?” she asked Baxter as they picked their way along the hillside, headed in the general direction of the gnarled oak.

            “His name’s Simonides Halford,” Baxter replied. “Though there’s them who calls him by other names, none fit fer yer hearing.”

            Wini tightened her grip on Mya’s reins. “Simonides Halford,” she murmured. “Well, I don’t trust him.”

            “You’d be wise not ter, miss. There’s few that do.”

            “What does he want with my father?”

            Baxter shrugged. “What does anyone want with the great Eye of the King? There’s fightin’ in the Grayling. He’s an officer. Most likely it’s something ter do with that.”

            Wini’s eyes widened. “He wasn’t in uniform.”

            “No,” Baxter agreed. “Maybe callin’ him an officer is more a kind of courtesy. No one trusts him with the real power.”

            “Why don’t people trust him?”

            Baxter slowed his mount and faced her sideways. “Because he’s the half-brother of the king.”

            “The king doesn’t have any brothers. He only has two sisters. Everyone knows that. Cook says when he dies, there’s going to be trouble in Kettering because of it.”

            “Cook talks too much.” Baxter eyed her in silence. They had come to a full stop and sat facing each other in their saddles.  “Simonides don’t have the same mother as the king,” he explained reluctantly. “I said half-brother. If you want ter know more than that, yer’ll have ter ask yer father. I ain’t explainin’ it, miss.”

            He pressed his horse into a walk. Wini sat and stared after him with a puzzled look. He was fifty feet ahead of her when she kicked Mya in the ribs and bounded to his side.

            “Was that his mother with him?”

            Baxter snorted. “She’s old enough ter be. Yer’ll have ter ask yer father about that one, too, Miss Winifred. I can tell you she’s the Countess Nicholai, but more than that is not fer me ter say. Who knows what attracts a man ter a woman? I ain’t never understood it myself. I ain’t never been married.”

            A sudden look of self-consciousness infused the weathered old eyes and he looked away. Wini saw his neck redden. When she tried to resume the conversation later, he refused to oblige her but kept his gaze trained on the path ahead. They rode the rest of the way to the old oak in silence.

            Now as she sat in the chill of the early spring, staring at phantoms in the woods below, Wini wondered afresh at the old groom’s embarrassment.  Unbidden memories stirred her mind, snatches of overheard conversations between servants about her father and the beautiful Lady Diana, his long absences, her mother’s self-inflicted banishment to her room.

            She knew well what changes her brother’s death had left in its wake. Two years were almost a lifetime for a girl of eight-going-on-nine, but she remembered in sharp relief the days of picnics and laughter, of her father’s head in her mother’s lap as they rested beneath the shade of a tree while Wini hunted wildflowers in the wood. Every now and then she would catch them kissing, her father winding his arms around her mother’s neck and pulling her head down to search her lips with his. Wini would blush, half-hidden among the trees, fingers squeezing the stems of her flowers so tightly they withered in her hand, knowing she was trespassing on their privacy but washed anyway with a delicious feeling of well-being. Her world then had been firm and unchanging, her happiness secure in the obvious happiness of her parents.

            Then Diamon drowned in the pool at Little Eye, and her life had spun topsy-turvy upside down. Her parents left the Randall’s country seat and returned to Windermere House in Ketteringas, Kettering’s capital city. Marma grew sick, hiding in her room under her maid Matilda’s watchful care, and the whisperings about Lady Diana began among the servants.

            Only Aunt Greta had not changed—Aunt Greta, tall and straight and stern and unbending, prematurely gray, her skin lighter than her brother’s but darker than Wini’s, her eyes the same gray as her niece’s but always expressionless, windows whose blinds were permanently closed.

            Wini sighed. Clouds were gathering in the east, and the wind was rising. The peculiar scent of air before a rain filled her nostrils. It was apparent her father was not coming. Simonides Halford had spoiled her day. She stood and brushed the leaves from her coat and turned to wave for Mya, but Baxter did not see her. His eyes were fixed on a silhouette topping the crest of the hill above them. Wini recognized the outline of her father on his chestnut gelding Knight.

 

[Eric Brandenburg]

From Explain This! A Sci Fi Thriller

The first scene in the book describes the event that sets the action going. The second scene introduces the female protagonist and this scene, the third,  introduces the male protagonist.

 “Later, maybe,” the little man behind the wheel said, “not to be indelicate or to say there’s anything particularly wrong with what you’re wearin’, but we’ll probably want to take you shoppin’ for some different clothes.”

“That’s fine,” Ryan Flynn replied. He was wedged in the passenger seat, a paper cup full of coffee clutched in his hand. His head ached. He felt like finding some dark place to curl up in for a few hours. They were racing through a tunnel beneath the center of Boston in a black, armored and Land Rover SUV with dark tinted windows. The thing felt like a tank and smelled of new vinyl. It looked like the seats were new, the carpeting. The dash held a police radio, a radar scanner. He took a deep breath and sipped some coffee.

“It’s just that the crew’s got a certain style,” the little man continued. “I hope that’s all right. We’ll work somethin’ out on the money if you’re short on funds. You’ll want a wheelie bag too. We travel a good deal. That service duffel must weigh a ton.”

At the airport, the man had introduced himself as Dickie Gautier. Not Dick, not Richard, just “Dickie.” He seemed like a nice guy, Flynn thought. He certainly was neat as a pin. Dickie had short salt and pepper hair, a well-trimmed mustache and was wearing a well pressed dark suit with a blue silk tie and matching pocket square. He had a flag pin and one of a golden eagle fixed in his left lapel. The suit fit him well, except for where the gun holstered at his left armpit bulged it out a bit.

“You’ll find the company is pretty big on the clothes thing,” Dickie continued. “Those the only shoes you got?”

 Flynn stared down at his red sneakers with black socks. He let his eyes travel up his long body to the plaid suit he was wearing and the ragged tie with its pattern of swimming trout, loose at the open collar of his rumpled shirt.

“I had to pack in a hurry. I forgot my dress shoes in the hotel room. Got the call to come up here around 2:00 am,” he said and cleared his throat. “Maybe I can call the hotel. Have the shoes overnighted. Something. The suit’s my dad’s. My suit got messed up. I was gonna get a new one. Didn’t get to it,” he lied. Well, he’d managed to string together a few sentences. That was something.

“Were you in the service, Dickie?” he asked suddenly.

“20 years. Air Force pilot. Flew A-10s. Was in Desert Storm. Then trained on helicopters. Did a stint with the Company. Latin America mostly. You?” Dickie said.

“The Corps. Just separated eight months ago. As a Captain. Thank you, by the way, for the air cover. A-10’s are awesome. Saved my behind plenty of times.”

 Dickie smiled. Gave a little nod.

“You don’t mind my saying so, you look a bit rough, Ryan,” Dickie said. “You mind I call you Ryan? You feelin’ okay?”

 Flynn didn’t answer right away. He had to think about it. People had been asking him that a lot over the past few months.

“I’m okay, thanks. Ryan’s fine,” he responded finally. He sensed Dickie was looking for something more substantial, but he had nothing.

 

[Cecilia Najar]

The Queen of Almost

Would Gloria Steinem buy leopard print g-string panties? I pulled a plastic hanger out of the lingerie rack to consider underwear with no utility beyond tantalizing my date’s sexual whim. Was I catering to a man's fantasy to shore up my tentative self-worth, or would wearing a thong empower my sagging inner sexy? 

The polyester triangle offered no answer. I tossed the four-dollar sex-celerant into my shopping basket with the hope of finding a quicker path to female empowerment than any of the ones I’d already taken. In a different kind of store, I might have tried on the lingerie but Ross discount department store’s florescent white walls accentuated my every sag and thigh dimple. Plus, the clothes were cheap. This was the last stop on the fast-fashion super highway. The fifty-foot-long racks of last year’s clothing arrived with the taint of rejection. Every jean and jacket had already been passed over by customers at far better, fancier department stores. If my external life mirrored my inner emotional world, I had much in common with my new panties. We both had sat on the shelf too long.  

My phone vibrated announcing a new text. “Think warm feet,” he wrote. The sender added a smiley face icon. He knew I had second thoughts about our upcoming date. "What time are you arriving tonight, beautiful?"

Bad question. A drizzle of tingling anxiety dripped down the back of my neck, creeping into my shoulders and clenching my throat. The fog of non-specific dread shrouded my eyes. Anxiety merged with anger, my gateway emotion for times of inner crisis. I was now pissed. His texts felt like harassment. I might not show up at all.  

I hated this version of myself. 

The problem was I really, really, liked this man. This married man. It had been ten days since we’d met and we’d seen each other seven times. But I couldn’t trust myself to know the difference between admiring his charm and scratching the itch of my toxic patterns. Narcissistic tendencies. Check. Known to lie. Check. Entitled white guy with a sense of grandeur. Double check. But he seemed pretty wonderful too. Smart. Handsome. Add in oxytocin-driven self-delusion that will likely lead me to a shattered emotional meltdown. Checkmate. 

Maybe I should cancel. Our tryst was set for 6 p.m. at a hotel on the west side. There was time. Yes. Cancel. Everyone would be relieved if I quit this thing.

Options. I could ghost him and block his number to avoid all repercussions. Cowardly, but fair game in the world of infidelity. Wilting good girl was also an option. Lots of “I’m so sorry” followed by a few guilty tears and excuses. I have anxiety, after all. Wait. No. I’m trying to eradicate the reflexive feminine “sorry” from my vocabulary, especially when disingenuous.  Anger, maybe? I was an award-winning shame-thrower. Ask my ex-husband. For that, I am truly sorry. 

In the absence of a decision, I turned left into the shoe aisle. There was nothing else available to me. My intuition was choked off by the crescendo chorus of self-doubt. The anxiety party was in full swing. My reasoning cortex had closed for repairs. It was eleven in the morning on a Thursday in a depressing warehouse store with an overcrowded parking lot. I, once again, in my 48-year long, uneventful life, felt trapped. Paralyzed. Broke. Alone. Failing. Stuck.  Over a man. 

A pair of black lug-soled boots caught my eye. My right foot slid into the leather upper and landed into a perfect fit. I took three deep breaths and tried to remember I held the power in my life. 

“I can’t wait to see you.” Another text from him. 

The left boot pinched my long second toe but stomping on the linoleum floors felt grounding. No man will save you from feeling unloveable. No man has the power to change my life because I won’t let him. It’s my life. I choose.  

That simple declarative statement let loose my chorus of doom.  He’s using you. You’ll be dumped. He’s the player. You’re the game. He’s a liar and a cheater. Stop being stupid. My body vibrated in time to the chant in my head. My head felt dizzy. My heart manic. 

Cancel. 

I called the hotel where we had planned to meet later. “My husband and I are staying at the hotel tonight," I lied to the receptionist. “Is the room refundable?” 

It wasn’t. I hung up and resigned myself to pay the bill if I didn't show up for our date. It was only fair. I had agreed to the tryst so I’d own the responsibility of the inevitable end to our delicious flirtation. He'd likely never speak to me again. I took another deep breath. Was that so awful? If I screwed this up, there would always be another married man, and another. Shortage mentality had no place in a world where seventy million people are actively seeking an affair on an infidelity hook-up website. My email box was full of married men hungry for my attention. I could run this practice dating game for as long as I wanted. 

But. Fuck. I liked him. I was so smitten, I was smutten. 

I tossed the pair of suede boots in my basket then took a left turn out of shoes, past housewares into the maze of clothing racks. Through jeans, then pants, past joggers and athleisure turning into juniors, more jeans, skirts then a tunnel of long dresses. My walk transformed into a meditation. Slowly I heard my breath more clearly than the voices of doom.  

A white halter dress, a replica of Marilyn Monroe's costume in "Some Like It Hot," hung on the end of an aisle. Maybe it was a sign, a wink from the heavens that broken women can still hold power. I blessed the dress by hanging the leopard panties over its hanger and walked away. Bless all of us, so fierce and so fragile. Here’s to us. 

A long checkout line formed to the right of the entrance. We, shoppers, shuffled past a gauntlet of hand-sized impulse buys, caramel popcorn, Halloween oven mitts, candy-colored headphones, and socks with slogans.

A new text came. “I’ve ordered Prosecco.”

My heart now felt calm as I cast my eyes downward and I waited my turn to pay for my boots. 

"Where you look is where you go,” I heard my inner voice remind me. It was one of those phrases that stuck with me after a weekend self-empowerment workshop. I’d taken dozens. This one taught me to traverse narrow trails on a mountain bike to learn how to live with courage. I raised my eyes. What would I focus on? Where did I want to go?  

I’d done enough spiritual work to see two narrow paths in front of me. One formed a closed loop shaped by the stories I'd heard, said, and repeated, the ones I called facts. Men are unreliable. Men lie. Men don’t know what they want. Men are dangerous. Men make you happy. Men make you miserable. I’d been over that exquisite torture so many times I expected the failure of every love story before it began. 

The second path demanded I stop living as if the stories I told myself were true. Look at what had just happened: three texts from one eager man trying to confirm a date had ruined my morning. A straight-forward sexual liaison had turned into a dull one-woman drama. What a fucked up life. If the mere presence of testosterone could make me contort myself with doubt, confusion, and fear, I had yet to find my center. 

There were no stakes. Well, except my life. This man was not my future partner. He was not my soulmate. This man was not my destination. But he terrified me in all the right ways. In his presence, I felt small and hungry, flawed and tame, desperate to please, and certain of my intrinsic failures. In that sense, he was my perfect practice partner. 

I felt the dread and texted my date a smiley face. 

“See you soon,” I wrote. And I went back and bought the leopard panties.

 

 

 

 

 

[Stacy HA]

opening scenes

[JimHCT]

OPENING SCENE: Introduces one of the protagonists and the setting and circumstances under which he lives.

May 3, 2046

Fifty thousand feet above the basement apartment of Jeffrey Maslow in the Westwood section of Denver, a Delta Boeing 939 propelled at a speed of Mach 1.13 toward its San Francisco destination.

Thirty-eight thousand feet lower, storm clouds began to gather and build strength. They would deliver their payload of hail onto Aurora, 10.98 miles northeast of Jeff, in seventeen minutes, twenty-five seconds, eventually resulting in property damage amounting to $4.76 million US.

On the floor above Jeff, Cheryl Daniels, aged forty-eight years four months, was completing her session with the latest release of the SKYN line of personal AI massage devices, which learned the most pleasurable ways to bring the user to a full and sustained release, measuring the input from her Apple Watch, home sensors, and Twitter feed. Based on her current heart rate, the humidity, and two recent likes, it estimated Cheryl’s climax would occur in thirteen minutes thirty-seven seconds.

In Jeff’s studio, a framed picture of Jesus Christ hung on the opposite wall, four feet two inches above his sleeping head.

And at 6:59 am, Jeff rolled in his mattress, knocking an empty bottle of Coors Premium IPA to the floor, fortunately only two inches below. It rolled to the corner of the room, stopping at the base of his half-packed suitcase. Startled by the sound, he immediately looked at his watch and popped-up naked, his thirty-nine-year-old chiseled frame facing Jesus. He thought he heard something drop onto the floor above him as he tripped to the kitchen table. He ran the Colorado WorkingPlace app on his tablet PC tablet and placed his finger on the scanner, confirming his presence via the implanted microscopic chip that held his unique cryptographically-secured identity. Within five seconds, the system took his personal history, education, work experience, skills, salary requirements, and personality profile and matched them against the thousands of contract jobs available. If it required in-person presence, the system also noted Jeff’s location and ensured he was within a sixty-minute commute.

Despite his Johns Hopkins undergrad with honors, the bidding closed, and the system indicated no opportunities. Jeff assumed it was because it noted his sign-in of 07:03:12, an obvious red flag indicating someone who did not take his job search seriously, as job auctions throughout the state started promptly at 7 am.

And then a window popped up.

MIGHT WE SUGGEST THESE GREAT JOBS YOU APPEAR QUALIFIED FOR:

Slaughter Technician, Globeville

Pew polish and wax technician, Colorado Springs

He rejected the proposed jobs and received a text from the Colorado unemployment office twenty seconds later noting his failure to obtain work and the subsequent application of unemployment benefits to start at 8 am. The text also provided his current remaining annual balance: twenty-five hours, thirty-four minutes, and forty-five seconds, counting down for good measure.

It was May, he knew. Something like the third. Or fifth. That wasn’t a lot left. He brought up his bank account balance, which appeared as a hologram emanating from his watch, and performed a back-of-the-napkin estimate that told him he had about two more weeks before he would be out of funds. It was either send out an SOS home for cash or just give up and move there.

It wasn’t that his dad wouldn’t give him the money: he always made it clear to his son that finances should never be an issue, encouraging his attempt to work in education despite the significant headwinds. If he required help, he just needed to ask, no questions or judgment. But after his father got him his first, and last, full-time job, it was a decision of final resort. He was going to make it on his own and overcome the career-limiting decision to get a degree in English, influenced by watching his father work brutal hours for years in financial services: the bank seized just about all his father’s days. It was seemingly impossible to land an education position that most school districts had outsourced to lower-cost teachers from countries like Ireland and Scotland, which enabled a cost-effective model at market rates and terms, without unions getting in the way. The state-mandated core curriculum of American Math, American Science, American History, American Christianity, and gym received full-time, in-person American teachers. The non-core classes of language and the arts went to the visa holders. After all, did a teacher need to be an American to talk about Shakespeare’s sonnets? Or other things that didn’t matter in the real world?

[Eli A. Susman]

Eli A. Susman

Writer of coming-of-age fiction in short story and novel form. Balancing between Young Adult and Adult fiction (big fan of New Adult as a catagory) 

Free Falling With Ryan Ramsey-A Novel-First 10 pages

 

CHAPTER 1-A STRAIGHT ARROW

 

 

 

Ryan Ramsey walked into the first class of our freshman year English seminar five minutes late. As she passed me towards the back of the class a combination of stale cigarettes, dried sweat, and a faint whiff of weed flew into my nose. I tried listening to the middle-aged professor, but I don’t remember a word of what he said. I only remember Ryan, with her long curly red hair and double sided arrow tattoo on her chest. Immediately I noticed the thorned vines of green, red, and purple that circled her wrists and fingers, as if to say: don’t get too close, I bite. 

Everybody warned me New England would be cold when I decided to move across the country for college, but even with six fans scattered throughout the classroom, it was the heat getting on my nerves. I wiped sweat from my brow and watched this strange girl aimlessly plop a piece of gum into her mouth. I couldn’t decide whether her enigmatic looks, her lack of a backpack, or the fact that she had headphones in and was bobbing her head to music took more of my attention. I could tell she was hardly on top of her shit, unlike me. 

Then again, Ryan sat in the same college classroom as me. 

I figured she had to be a musician, or an artist, or a poet. Something creative. That’s what my parents always said about people with tattoos. And they didn’t mean it as a positive. 

I imagined her playing the bass, and singing in some indie band on campus. I imagined her with a pencil behind her ear, as she smudged some charcoal onto her canvas, drawing the nude person posing in front of her. I saw her lying on her stomach in the dirt to get the perfect picture of the forest around her. 

I had plenty of time to dream like this. Despite sharing a classroom with Ryan twice a week, and constantly being on the verge of attempting a conversation with her, I didn’t have a true chance to speak to her till a few weeks into the semester. 

At that point my freshman year had dragged along as I expected: plainly. I’d hoped to have some intellectual friends, but I still spent all my time secluded in my dorm room doing my class assignments. The high levels of dork in my personality created a dilemma where I started to find the seclusion satisfying, almost peaceful. I’d hoped to have funny moments with random students in the dining hall and in my classes, even hoped to find a girlfriend for the first time. But in coming up on the one-month mark, I had nothing but daydreams. 

My perfect standardized test scores from my time being homeschooled translated quite nicely to the college grading system. I thought I was so smart, so ready to follow the computer science, to Google job, to six-figure salary pipeline. Not once did I stop to think whether I actually enjoyed what kept me busy. My parents taught me only one way: Study Hard Do Well. 

I felt awkward everywhere I went, and there was never any chance of me starting a conversation with someone. Still though, I was tall, fit looking, and despite the Jewish stereotypes, I had wavy blonde hair and blue eyes. I looked more like the “cool-guy-party-animal” type than the “too nervous to talk to anybody” type. I think that’s why out of the blue during my Psychology class a beefy boy asked me if I wanted to come out to a party at his fraternity. I panicked and faked a cough. 

“I think I’m coming down with something.” I said, even though I was well aware of how good a chance this was to make friends. I knew I should say yes, but I didn’t know how. And the idea of sitting in my room and getting ahead on my assignments sounded more appropriate than going to a party where I didn’t know anyone. Besides, last time I let loose, I let too loose. 

I could still feel the cool air rushing past my body as I ran through the night. The hands on my shoulders pushing me to do it, do it. And the camera lights, I’ll never forget the camera lights. I hated myself for letting their fake words eat at my pride. A night meant to bring friendship brought me nothing but torment. I don’t know what was worse, my own embarrassment, or the wrath my parents unleashed upon me.

“If you’ve done this, what’s next Max?” Mom had said. “There are going to be some serious changes around here.” 

And serious changes there were.

“You’re sick?” another guy from his posse leaned in and said. We sat dead center of the lecture hall with some old Professor droning on. “Okay whatever, bro.” 

They leaned back in their chairs as a way of showing me the conversation was over. 

Immediately I wished I had said something different. I cursed myself silently, knowing I’d let a good opportunity to socialize slip away from me. I hated how talking to people, such a simple and seemingly natural human mechanism, could be so difficult for me. I pressed my tongue against the top of my mouth and allowed the satisfying tap-tap of my note-taking fingers on my laptop keyboard distract me from my frustration.

 

 

***

 

By the time Friday came around, my curiosity started to get the best of me. I kept imagining what the party would be like. I had an idea of what happened at frat parties, I’d seen movies and read about them online when applying to college. Even if I did only apply to my parents’ alma mater. My dad warned me about the party culture immediately upon submitting the application. 

            “Just a bunch of beer drinking, drug doing idiots if you ask me.” He would say, his skinny shoulders trying their best to look tough. I knew the look because my shoulders did the same thing. 

            I had no strong urge to drink beer or do drugs, but I still found myself lying in bed, computer science homework open on my computer, thinking about what it would be like to go to the party. I went over to my mirror to see if I looked party ready. My navy-blue cargo shorts, white high socks, and brown t-shirt with a golden retriever on it said I wasn’t. I cursed under my breath and put on a pair of jeans instead. Another look in the mirror confirmed that I at least looked nicer than before. I took that as a win and went into my closet to put extra deodorant on. I wasn’t going to the party, but I convinced myself that I could at least dress up as if I was, to experiment with the idea. That’s when a loud voice erupted from the other side of my door. 

“Dermot! Dermot! Let’s gooooo!” I dropped my deodorant as my door shook beside me. In my time at school, nobody had knocked on my door, so this guy definitely had the wrong room. Dermot lived next door to me. I only knew him by name and face. And that he was lucky to get a single room, like me. But much more than that I didn’t know in concrete. I did infer a lot though. He must have spoken Spanish, because I heard him screaming along to music in Spanish all the time—usually while I tried to focus on the various problem sets in front of me. And he smoked a lot of weed, because I smelled it in the hallway constantly throughout the day.

As for the guy banging on my door, I had no clue who he was. I figured he was huge, because his voice was loud, and I assumed he was drunk, because my door had my name on it, and no sober person would make that kind of mistake. 

I opened the door and looked down upon a short guy. 

“You’re not Dermot.” He said right away.  

            He had dark brown skin and ear-length curls. His stubby body gave him the innocent look of someone that you couldn’t help but get along with.

            “Who are you?” He asked. 

            “I’m Max, who are you?” 

            “I’m Josiah, isn’t this Dermot’s room?”

            “Obviously not,” I said. 

            “Uhhhhh, not so obvious,” he slapped his hand against my door. A sticker with the name Dermot stuck to my door in the spot that usually said Max. 

            “What the hell?” I turned around and looked at my bed that was terribly unmade. “This is my room. Dermot is next door.” I gestured to the right with my thumb as if looking to hitchhike. 

            “Ohhhhh shit, how much you want to bet Dermot switched the names while I was in the bathroom? I’m an idiot for not realizing.” 

            “I don’t really want to bet anything, actually, so…” 

            “He’s not usually a prankster like that!” Josiah erupted, completely ignoring me. “He drank too much already.”

            Josiah’s voice had a bouncy feel to it, making everything he said sound lighthearted. Though his hair hung down to his eyes, he bounced around so much when he talked that the hair tended to stay from blocking his vision. I waited for him to turn and walk off, but he didn’t. 

            Instead, he started shamefully laughing and said, “We were pre-gaming for the party tonight.”    

             “Yeah, well, Dermot’s probably waiting for you,” I pointed where again, this time more clearly. The extendedness of the conversation started to hit me. All the moisture in my mouth disappeared. 

            “Yeah, for sure for sure…” He looked me up and down then glanced behind me into my room, nodding his head and slowly rubbing his cheeks. “So, what you up to, you going out tonight?”

            “What?”

            “Did I insult you?” He put his hand to his chest insincerely.

            “No, you just…”

            “I just asked you a question.” 

            I wanted friends, yes, but that didn’t mean I knew how to make them, or that I wanted some random guy to come barging up to my room. Maybe he was only trying to start a conversation. But I wasn’t ready to have one at that very moment. “You’re at the wrong room buddy!” I felt like shouting at him. His mere laxness about everything infuriated me. Josiah spoke up almost right away. 

            “I don’t mean to be rude.” His shoulders sunk, the light in his eye flattened, and his eager voice lowered. “I’ll leave you alone.” 

            Even if I couldn’t get myself to say it yet, I didn’t want him to leave me alone. But before I could do anything my phone rang in my palm; I looked down and saw my mom’s picture on the screen. 

            “I guess you have plans already,” he said, taking the name off my door and going over to Dermot’s room. He knocked, and when the door opened the light ignited in him again. As he walked through the door and out of my sight he turned and looked at me. He gave a shrug that had more character to it than any shrug I’d ever seen. Even with my lack of social intuition, I thought I knew exactly what he wanted to convey. 

            His shoulders and hands softly moved up to show me that he wouldn’t try if I didn’t want him to. But his eyes showed something different. His eyes told me there was a chance—an in.

            They said, “Remember, Dermot and I are right next door.” 

 

***

 

I slammed my door shut and answered the phone. 

“You’re not out going crazy and partying, are you?” My mom said immediately. She sniffled and laughed, and I could hear my dad’s chuckle in the background. She was only joking, but I couldn’t believe how spot on she was. Did she know? Was she a psychic? I began pacing around my tiny room. I’d barely decorated, which my mom hated, but my dad understood that I was too busy with schoolwork to decorate. I didn’t see the use in having a homey room. Four walls, a bed, and a desk were just fine with me for the time being. Josiah sparked something in me. My heartbeat pulsed in my temples, and my room, already steamy and hot, began to overwhelm me. I sat down in my chair near the tiny window. 

“No, of course not.” I tried to sound lighthearted.  

“She’s joking Max,” my dad said, as if that wasn’t abundantly clear. They were obviously sitting beside each other on speaker phone. “Have you gone out at all this semester? Met anyone cool?”

“I was invited to a frat party tonight, but…” I looked at myself in the mirror again. “But I don’t think I’m gonna go.”  

            “You know what happens at those kinds of college parties.” He said it as a statement, not as a question. 

            “Just a bunch of beer drinking…”

            “Drug doing idiots.” He said, “Exactly.”

            “Did you go to the Chabad Shabbat tonight?” My mom asked. 

            “No, I never said I was going to.”

“Well a frat party alone doesn’t sound like a great option.”

I agreed with her, really, I knew going would end in disaster. But someone had invited me to a party for the first time. And with my parents out of the picture, it became easier to imagine myself breaking the rules. The rules were across the country, what could they do about it? Kill me for thinking for only a moment that I could survive at a college frat party.

“Remember what happened last time Max?”  

            “Yes,” I said, not wanting to dwell. I didn’t enjoy talking about that night. Not with anyone, and especially not with my parents. “Obviously I remember.” 

            “It’s best not to go alone.” My dad said. “Do you not have any friends to go with?” 

“Adam!” My mom shouted; I could hear her hand slapping his shoulder. 

            “Max, I didn’t mean it like that, you just…”

            “I get exactly what you mean dad.” My voice lowered, and I spoke practically in monotone. I heard my parents whispering tensely, before my mom spoke up. 

            “All we think is that you should have buddies. It isn’t smart for you to try doing something like that at such a new place without anyone you know by your side. Know what we mean?” 

            “Like I said, I know exactly what you mean. I’ll talk to you later.” 

            “Okay, I’m sorry honey, have a good night.” 

            I hung up the phone and put my head back onto my pillow. They had good intentions, my parents, I knew that even if it often resulted in my belittling and restricting. But this time their input only made me want to go to the party more. They said I didn’t have friends, that was true, but Josiah and Dermot were right next door. I could hear the mumble of their voices. Josiah’s light and loud, Dermot’s low and smooth. Josiah seemed to imply that going out with them was an option. But that wasn’t even the biggest question. The real question was whether I thought I should go to the party in the first place, Josiah and Dermot with me or not. 

            And finally I knew my answer. 

            Yes, I was going to the party. I had to. I had to at least try. 

I’d made up my mind, there was nothing my parents could do about it. I’d go next door, knock, and tell Josiah I wanted to go to the party with them. That could work. Though, how the rest of that conversation would go, I had no clue. Going against all my previous learned logic, I slid my keys and phone into my pockets, and pulled my door open. 

But when I stepped out into the hallway, I nearly shit my pants. 

Josiah and Dermot had stepped into the hall at the very same time as me.

“Going somewhere?” Josiah asked. 

I had to force out my words. 

“Um…. sort of?”

 “Sort of?” 

             “I wanted to go to the, the uh, the party, yeah.” 

            “Real smooth dude. Come on, let’s go.” He started walking down the hall towards the stairs before stopping and looking back. “Oh, and this is Dermot.” 

            “Yo,” Dermot raised a hand to wave. I noticed Dermot’s earrings and nose ring for the first time—two studs, one on each ear, and a ring through the right of his nose. His bleached buzzcut blended nicely with his tan skin. Dermot toed the line between off-beat loser and put together perfectionist. 

            Seconds passed before I spoke up in a shaky voice. 

            “Okay, let’s go.” As I said it, I tried my best to replicate Josiah’s meaningful shrug back to him. I don’t think I did a very good job, but I think he understood what I meant. As I would soon come to know, Josiah usually knew what you meant by even the slightest of hints. He always was a receptive motherfucker.

[Adele Falco]

Scene: meeting Tess, a day after moving in to the farmhouse: 

“Hello!” She was dressed in sleek black workout gear, glossy and energetic ponytail tresses dancing around the collar of her warm-up jacket. Her skin, her hair and the fabric of her clothing all reflecting the morning sun as she stood in the frame of the half-door. Her smile wide and brimming with polished teeth. In her hand she held a white cake box.

“Hi, I’m Tess!” she pronounced with enthusiasm as she shot her free arm straight at me - a hand open for grasping. Emma struggled to open the lower half of the door from its crooked frame but was able to snap the door free by giving it a hard pull, which caused it to hit her in the knee. She knelt down to hold her kneecap for a moment as the neighbor entered, hence she found herself shaking hands from her crouched position.  “Hello, I’m Emma. So sorry, we haven’t used this door before.” 

“Oh, don’t worry about it. Are you all right? I shouldn’t have startled you like that. I just came by to welcome you to the neighborhood. Thought I’d catch you early before I went to the gym.” 

“I’m fine. I was just getting going here,” Emma stumbled upright, realizing she was in her clothes from yesterday, which she had slept in after collapsing in a sudden finale at the end of a long day of physical labor. She hadn’t looked at a mirror or would even know where to find one. 

    “Come in, come in. I’m so sorry. I’m just not thinking yet. Moving is a bear,” Emma gestured into the kitchen, which had suddenly taken on a worn out, cluttered and neglected appearance. By entering the house, Tess had aged everything around her, a form of energy that draws up all that around it and discards the extras. At this moment, Emma felt like an extra herself, older and more flaccid that she had been just moments before Tess entered that room, like an accelerator that aged all the matter around it.  She extended the white box in her direction. 

“Here’s the best blueberry pie you’ll ever have,” she said. “From a bakery just a few miles from here and the best one around. You’re going to love it. I put myself on a quota, just once per month or I’d be eating something from there every day.” She laughed easily, the way you can laugh when you know the risk of eating too many baked goods does not apply to you. 

“Thank you. Thank you so much. The kids will love this,” Emma took the pie and placed it safely among a pile of boxes on the counter. “This place is a mess. So much to do. A pie will make a good breakfast, right?” She smirked. Tess paused and then smiled. 

“Why not? Suppose it’s not much different than a muffin or croissant, right? Where did you guys move from? And I saw two kids, right? Are they twins? So adorable. I watched them trying to help the movers yesterday. What helpers you have there!” 

“New York and yes, those are my two - Nate and Sara. They’re eight years old.”

“We’re also New Yorkers. Moved up two years ago. Big change! But I love it now. We have two kids too, Bryce and Madison. Eight and ten-years old. They’re getting ready for camp now or I’d have brought them with me. Plus I need any excuse to get out in the morning. Always chaos around there looking for something at the last minute. You know, crazy sock day or whatever.” She glanced around the kitchen.  “Nice old bones, these farmhouses, right? So much you can do with them. Did you pick your architect yet? I can recommend a few that have done some awesome renovation projects around here.” 

“Architect? Uh, no. We’re just moving in here,” Emma said. 

“Of course! I get it, but when you need some names, just ask. I’ve got some friends who turned their farmhouses into some spectacular homes, you know the kind, the ones with lots of…” and she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Stunning homes. Modern farmhouse and all that jazz.”

“Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, that would be great,” Emma stuttered. 

“And you have so much land! Are you thinking of a pool? Imagine sitting out there with a nice gin and tonic!” She smiled so broadly. A big overarching smile so wide  it looked as if the whole dim room might be swept up into its cavern. 

“Pool? Uh, I don’t think so. I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it.” 

“With that land, I’d put in a pool, a pool house and who-else-knows-what?!? This place could be a resort! Your husband better not be listening or he’ll hate me before he even meets me,” she laughed and looked quizzically into the living room.

“Ha. No, no husband - just me and the kids here,” Emma replied. “Our first actual, physical, home on an actual piece of land that we can put our feet on. We’ve always lived in apartments.” 

Just then Nate appeared in the kitchen doorway, blurry eyed and with a fuzzy clump of hair sticking sideways from his head.  “Mom?” 

“Good morning, Nate! I’m Tess, your new neighbor.” Tess stooped to extend her arm to him now. Nate stood placidly against the wall, a look of cautious wonder on his face. “Oh, I get it. Bryce needs time to wake up too. You’re going to love Bryce, Nate. Do you play video games? He does. And he plays them a lot! Too much, I think but heck, you gotta let them find the thing they love, right?” 

Emma put an arm around Nate’s shoulder, drawing him closer. “Tess bought us a blueberry pie, Nate. Isn’t that great?” Nate stared at her silently.  “Yeah, Nate, it’s from one of the best bakeries around here and we’re even going to have a piece for breakfast!” Emma added a false-sounding enthusiasm but could see Nate had not sniffed the bait. He stood still, blinking his eyes as if to improve his focus on Tess. 

“No worries, Emma. We’ve got plenty of time to get these guys together. I’ve got to run to my cross-fit class now. We’ll catch up soon, okay?” 

“Yeah, sure.  Looking forward to it. Thank you again. Thanks for stopping by. So nice of you to bring us a pie. We’ll enjoy that today.” Emma moved towards the Dutch door to yank it open again, giving it extra exertion. It swung open clumsily.

“Aren’t these half doors charming?” Tess moved to the doorway and down the uneven stone steps with caution, her every step thoughtful and precise. A rush of air hurried after her, carrying a scent of perfumed cleanliness. Emma stood in the kitchen reconstructing herself, a pie box in hand. 

[Jan H]

         I'm attaching a file instead of a copy/paste.  For some reason, pasting my text removes the single spacing.  Go figure.   The sample is from a novel I started a few years ago.  I chose this to show a sample of my written dialogue.

        My current project by design will have no dialogue for at least the first 20-30 pages.  I'm still working on the opening scenes leading up to the point where the elk hunter is abducted by a Sasquatch.  Following the abduction, the two will establish a means of communicating, at which point I'll introduce dialogue.  

 

           

Workshop Assignment 3.docx

[Danielle Ward]

This excerpt is from the first chapter, which occurs after an initial scene offering backstory into Alicia that includes the following character development: 

     If you could turn a person inside-out, Alicia’s innards would reveal a Willy Wonka-warped world shaped by the books, movies, plays, and musicals she ingested like vitamins. Her white blood cells worked for the White Queen. Her fascia tightened around her muscles thanks to the tiny people of Lilliput. Her bones shared DNA with Poor Yorick. Her heartbeat kept rhythm with the song, “On My Own,” from Les Miz.

    All of this combined to make an interesting internal life.

*****

The liminal space between being a child and becoming a young adult is like floating amid the cosmos without either a working watch or a map of the stars.

It helps to have another hand to hold, another to travel with, to problem-solve, to cheer you on and, for Alicia, Leslie was that other. The two became fast friends in sixth grade.

“My name’s Leslie Burke.”

God bless Leslie Burke for introducing herself at recess to the new transfer student circumnavigating the playground, even though new girl looked as if the FBI employed her to patrol the perimeter.

Leslie could have let the girl’s serious face and sunglasses stop her. Others did. They assumed it an act of snobbery instead of a desperate attempt to avoid unfamiliar faces at the lunch tables and a way to protect her sensitive eyes now that she started wearing contacts.

“We’re in the same class,” Leslie continued and she jogged to catch up.

“You’re good at stating the obvious,” replied Alicia and then immediately wanted to back-handspring back in time. To cover her rudeness, she explained, “At my old school, I used to be the fastest kid in the third, fourth, and fifth grades. Mama warns me against my mind going as fast as my feet. I’m honestly not always good at noticing details.”

“Yeah. Bill, my dad, he says my mind makes him dizzy. But I blame Joyce Ann, May Belle, Aaron, Oliver, Brenda, Jessie, and Ellie because they certainly make me feel dizzy.”

“That’s a lot of people…”

“My brothers and sisters. I am one of eight children of God.” Leslie always explained it that way. “What about you?”

“I’m an only child with three siblings,” responded Alicia. She enjoyed letting the non sequitur land, often pausing before offering an explanation. “My parents both remarried and I’m the one they had together. Jane, Lydia, and Andrew are much older, with their own places, their own lives. Don’t ask me why we have a house with so many rooms when it’s only ever me and my parents.”

“Maybe I could move in. We sleep on top of each other at my house.”

The two shared a smile and, from that day forth, Alicia and Leslie were inseparable.

While quiet and shy around others, they felt safe to expose their peculiarities when alone —like how Leslie feared moths and Alicia felt petrified earthquakes or how they both saved their pennies each year to adopt a whale. (Though Leslie wisely knew not to expect the whale to be delivered to her swimming pool.)

Two parts of an unshelled peanut. Both slender and pale girls with long mousy brown hair, braces, freckles, and an off-kilter style. Yet, it went deeper than that; a parallel need moved inside their blood. The same longing. Leslie’s large family and Alicia’s devoted parents offered more love than most, still the loneliness, the constant feeling of being an outsider, it grew just the same. It multiplied and it divided, spreading into every cell.

Loneliness is a strong glue. Elmer would be out of business if they could ever figure a way to bottle and sell it.

Their relationship continued past Lark Creek Elementary and on through middle school. (Though middle school is a whole other book—one of the horror variety—that I am not brave enough to relive here.)

The girls continued to grow beyond what their families could hold, growing at the same slow and steady pace. While consistently an inch-and-a-half ahead of Leslie, Alicia hoped to at least push past 64” before high school started. Chances looked slim, however, since she still hovered at the last pencil mark on the doorjamb dated May ’91 and she was already in August.

She did continue growing though, just not in the way she recognized. There were her hips, morphing her from genderless pillar into more of a Greek carving of womanhood; her hair on her legs, underarms, and previously naked sex, darkening; and the speedbumps on her chest rising, made noticeable by the automatic cleavage formed from the inherited concave dip in her sternum.

Alicia spent so much time in her head, she rarely noticed the southern parts. Only when blood started trickling from between her legs, coupled with a few inconsistent twinges, did she finally recognize the coming cosmic shift.

She woke up to it all on August 17 while flipping pancakes.

Her first thought: “This changes everything. I have to tell Leslie.”

It didn’t matter that the thick sanitary pad she took from her mom’s cabinet felt like a soft brick between her legs. It didn’t matter that, as a sprinter, the mile-long journey to Leslie’s house felt like a marathon, a marathon in 80 degrees weather. It didn’t even matter that she arrived stinking like a wet dog. It was imperative that she talk to her other.

When she knocked, Alicia heard a scuffle. Inside, May Belle rushed to be first at the door though the older kids argued against it. Alicia smiled in spite of herself. Leslie’s house reminded her of an ant farm.

Whenever Alicia came over for dinner, the ease of the nightly routine impressed her. In this motherless household—Leslie’s mom died right after the birth of Joyce Ann—all of the duties were distributed amongst the kids. Talk about organized chaos.

The two oldest girls made dinner, something affordable, usually enlisting the help of the three littles as choppers, stirrers, and table setters. In turn, the eldest brother helped with schoolwork while the other tidied up the toys and magazines. Washing the dishes was Leslie’s responsibility. Each moved in to fill a gap, all in preparation for when their father walked in the door at 5:45, doling out hugs and quiet hellos.

Before they all started talk over each other, Alicia thought it odd how Mr. Burke sat at the head of the table, facing the image of the red-robed man at the other end, thanking God instead of his eight kids for dinner. But then, no one said grace in her family, so she unclear on the rules.

When Leslie came to stay at the Bennet’s house, she enjoyed the novelty as well. Here, Alicia’s father, Roy, handled the traditional wife roles, including cooking, tidying up, and stacking the dishwasher just so, all while listening to the worries of the world on the TV. While she knew not to say it aloud, Roy seemed to her to worship the newscasters. They were certainly the most prominent thing in an otherwise quite house. Alicia’s job, other than doing her homework, which took priority, included feeding the dog and setting the table whenever her mother strolled in. 

Ruth came home at various times depending on the after-school extras, bringing home stories of the 350 kids and 15 elementary teachers she shepherded towards becoming their wiser selves. And then, over steak and artichokes or something equally exotic, the conversation inevitably turned to Alicia; her day at school, her extra-curricular activities, her friends, her goals, her dreams, and her plans for successfully achieving all of these. All eyes turned to her, as if studying the inner life of Mona Lisa. Alicia shared many things. Still, like the famous lady, Alicia withheld something behind her enigmatic smile.  

Leslie answered the door and a grateful Alicia pulled her friend outside, away from the other ears, towards the curb where they could sit together.

“Nothing gold can stay,” Alicia said with an air of melodramatic despair.

“Oooo-kay, What’s up, Pony Boy?”

“Robert Frost actually. S.E. Hinton referenced the poetic line in The Outsiders, but that’s beside the point.”

Alicia turned to her friend with a deadly serious look, signaling her to prepare herself. Then she whispered. “I started. It came. I’m…bleeding.”

“Really?”

Alicia nodded as she cradled her head in her hands.

“That’s great. Right? Just in time for high school.” Leslie said, trying to sound positive. “Hey, you aren’t going to make me start in on the ‘I must—I must—I must increase my bust’ exercises, so I can catch up, are you?”

“As if I’d take puberty advice from Judy Blume.”

Alicia looked panicked as she turned to her friend to say, “Be serious. Leslie, we have to do something. It’s all slipping away.”

“What is?”

“Childhood. And everything that goes with it…the innocence, the playfulness, the happy-go-lucky freedoms. Soon all of Narnia will be out of reach.”

(If this seems like an odd conversation, consider that these two agreed to read a bunch of banned books together this summer because Alicia’s mother said that if they did, she would take them to the library every Saturday. She figured it was a good way to expand their love of literature and keep them out of trouble.

Ancient wisdom, perfumed with scents of almond, vanilla, and freshly pressed flowers, adorned the building up to its high ceiling. The library was a sort of church, at least to Alicia. For Leslie, church was church, but the library was also sacred, and, truth be told, it’s where she would have rather been.

So, the two had a whole shared vocabulary of characters and their misadventures to riff off of. They even made a game out of quoting a book to see if the other could recognize the source.)

Leslie knew better than to try to argue with Alicia’s mood. Instead, she offered some literary wisdom, “One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.”

“That’s from ‘The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.’ You’re trying to trick me though. That wasn’t even in the actual book. It came from C.S. Lewis’ dedication.”

“Still, it’s fitting, isn’t it?” replied Leslie.

Alicia responded wryly with, “You don’t get extra points for apropos placement.”

The two sat in silence for a moment before Leslie brightened.

“We’ll just have to build our own Narnia.”

“Our own Narnia? Like…” Alicia was thinking about it, “…like our own corner of the world where we can still just be you and me, no matter what? Ooooh, like in The Secret Garden?”

“Or like Terabithia. It’s classic childhood magic, so it’s in tons of books,” Leslie said sounding very astute.

“We can’t have it here though. Too many snooping eyes, especially May Belle.”

Alicia thought for a moment. “There is that large rock formation on the hill above my house…but I saw a rattler there once and tons of lizards.”

“I say the reptiles can keep their spot.”

“How about the Christmas tree forest in my backyard?”

Since moving into their house, Alicia’s dad planted their holiday trees across the top of the embankment, making for quite a wooded area thirteen years later.

[mariwestcott2]

I started drinking at noon that day. I left work early because I wasn’t ‘feeling well’. The reality was I felt like I was going to crawl out of my own skin if I didn’t get a drink. I looked at my half empty bottle of vodka, then down at my phone. I was trolling dating sites for someone to hook up with. One night stands weren’t usually my style, but since my divorce I had taken to them like a duck to water.

“Want to get together tonight?” Gabe typed into the little white box in the Bumble app.

“Sure, where should we meet?”

“There’s a bar on Alvarado called Bull and Bear, how about there?” he responded.

“Okay, meet you there in an hour,” I sent a happy face along with the message and jumped up to get into the shower. The Bull and Bear was one of the crummiest bar’s in Monterey. The floor was nearly sawdust and it smelled of piss and beer. There was a tacky country band playing live in the corner. Stained glass light fixtures hung over each booth and cast an eerie glow on the room. I grabbed at seat at the bar and ordered a Long Island Ice tea.

We didn’t stay long at the bar, Gabe ordered some French fries that were awful. I wasn’t sure if it was the fries or the fact that I had already had too much to drink. We went back to my apartment. I don’t remember much about the sex, I couldn’t tell you if it was good or bad or even if it had been violent because I blacked out. I came to holding a cigarette, wrapped up in a blanket on my balcony. I looked in at Gabe who was snoring, the moonlight streamed through the glass doors in my bedroom and fell on his face. I felt sick.

“Hey, you gotta go. I don’t feel well.” I felt kind of bad for kicking him out like that, but I just didn’t want him there anymore.

I woke up late the next morning. I rushed to get to Santa Clara for my classes. “Shit, shit, shit, I’m gonna be late!” I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror and got the sudden urge to cry. I cried the entire hour and half drive to the university. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stop crying. I managed to pull myself together enough to walk into class. I quietly slipped into my seat, smelling of sex and booze despite my shower.

The professor came in and told us all to prepare for meditation to begin the class. I pushed my books aside and took a swig of my coffee then closed my eyes to follow the guided meditation that started each class on group therapy. Flashes of the night before started running through my mind, I shook my head to try to make them stop, took a deep breath and tried to settle in again. The flickers of time kept coming up behind my closed eyes, then they began mixing with images of my step-dad Joe. They continued becoming more graphic. It was like watching a film of myself being molested. I jumped up and ran out of class, vomiting violently in the parking lot.

“Oh my God, Annie! Help me!” I explained my sister Annalise what had happened on the phone.

“I’ll meet you at your apartment, are you okay to drive?”

“I think so? I might have to stop to throw up again, but I think I’ll be okay.”

I was numb on the drive home. Watching the other cars and trucks on the freeway passing by as if I were standing still. I stared at the brick wall that separated the freeway from the housing track on the other side,

I could just turn the wheel and run straight into it!

Then I’d probably end up a vegetable or paralyzed. Either way, I wouldn’t die because life and God just wouldn’t be that kind to me. I thought about how I couldn’t remember huge parts of my life. Until now, I had considered that those dark corners were best left undiscovered. If my brain didn’t want to recall them, then there was probably a good reason. I was drinking to erase all of my pain and awful memories; the problem was it was having the opposite effect. It was shaking everything lose. All of the lies, the lost memories, the horrors I didn’t want to remember, the secrets I was not supposed to tell came tumbling at me like someone had opened a closet door and everything had collapsed out.

[Padraig]

 

Secession

 

When her soon-to-be ex-husband gets involved in a statehood movement in Northern California, Islin Ryan shrugs it off as another of his stupid antics, but when he gets their son Jason involved, she fears that he will go down the same right-wing rabbit hole her soon-to-be ex jumped down. Jason goes to work for the Jefferson movement and lands in the crosshairs of the US government when Jefferson decides to secede from the US. To save her son, she must confront a former flame and reveal a long-hidden secret. And maybe, if she can save her kid, she can save California, too. 

 

The following comes from the second chapter:

 

An enormous, olive drab box with caterpillar treads sat outside the slate-blue ranch house. The box had a sloping front with three tiny windows like rectangular ship’s portals. The behemoth was so large it filled the entire view out of the wide, plate glass front window. Fog common to the Northern California Coast washed over it, condensing on the sides and running down until the water dripped onto the grass. The sun would burn the fog away by noon, but for now, no one driving by the home could see the piece of Army surplus.

The diesel engine rumbled to a stop and then around the back of the hulking steel tank a broad door swung open with a great screech of rusty metal. Islin watched from the window, slack-jawed, as Kevin popped out and walked up the steps. 

Islin greeted him at the door. 

“Kevin, what the ever-loving fuck? Where did this come from?”

“It’s for the coming storm.”

“I’m not even going to ask what that means. Whose is this?”

“It’s mine.” Kevin planted his feet, ready to go on offense. 

“Yours? How did you pay for it? Wait. Is that why I had to use my credit card at Safeway the other day? Goddammit Kevin!” What began as deep and controlled breaths devolved into hyperventilating.

“We had the money. Besides, our survival is far more important.”

“What do you mean, ‘we had the money’? How much did this cost? Where did you get the money from?” Islin looked increasingly alarmed. 

“It’s not like Jason is going to go to college.” 

“What? Tell me you didn’t take Jason’s college fund. Tell me. Kevin, so help me God, you didn’t take his money.”

Islin turned and sat down on the armrest of the couch. She reached for her phone and unplugged it from the charger. She gave the screen a quick wipe up and then opened the banking app. She scrolled to the bottom of the page to the link to the savings accounts and with another tap, she was able to see the balance for Jason’s college fund. The account registered $94.73. Islin dropped her phone. 

“Kevin, there was more than $40,000 in that account!” 

Kevin looked unnaturally relaxed, as if he might be prone to say, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” He wasn’t known for being a smartass, at least, not deliberately. Without bothering to shrug, he said, “I only took what we needed.”

“Motherfucker. Don’t make this about ‘we.’ You did this all on your own; you never even mentioned this to me or the kids. You’ve got no right.”

“Didn’t I? I’ve got to protect my family from what’s coming.”

Islin swallowed a couple of times and then got up and ran for the bathroom. She flipped the seat up but before she could make it to her knees she threw up. She dropped to the floor and wrapped her arms around the bowl in time for the second spasm, which moved through her as she began sobbing. 

After a third retch, Islin made it to her knees, turned to the towel bar and grabbed a washcloth. She turned on the hot water, soaked the Terry cloth and then wiped her face. She looked in the mirror and saw that some of her hair was slimed. She wiped the wet locks then rinsed the washcloth in cold water, folded it up and held it to her forehead. 

Islin bent over the sink, elbows on the counter and began counting. It took her three tries to make it to her age, but when she did, she stood up, walked out of the bathroom and back to the living room. She looked at Kevin for a moment, trying to decide which thing she needed to say first. 

For Kevin, the event was over, finished. He’d won. At least, that’s what he thought. He picked up the TV remote and began to scan for the Alabama game. When he leaned back and put his feet up on the coffee table, small clods of mud fell off. 

Seeing the dirt on the table, Islin considered just how many times she’d told Kevin to take his boots off at the door, how many times she’d said, “The barn is over there. We don’t live in it.” She realized there would never come a day when she wouldn’t have to remind Kevin. There would never come a day when Kevin took his boots off at the door, when he took his beer bottles back in the kitchen, when he’d put a plate in the dishwasher, when he’d consider whether the family could really afford that new gun or the 1000 rounds of ammo, or the tank. 

In an effort to lessen the bitter, acidic taste of her stomach acid, Islin swallowed several times. No amount of swallowing was going to rinse the bad taste from her mouth, she realized, and turned and walked into the kitchen and poured herself a cup of coffee. While she preferred her coffee with cream, she felt neither the patience nor the need to soften the dark roast; anything at all was less bitter than her bile. Years later, she would kid that Kevin left a bad taste in her mouth. 

After taking a few sips, she concluded that she was unlikely to throw up again and eating something might help calm her. She grabbed the package of bagels from the fridge, sliced one in half on the cutting board and dropped the two halves in the toaster. As she listened to the buzz of the heating coils she went to the fridge for butter and strawberry preserves. After the toaster sprang up, she coated the bagel in thin slices of butter followed by a layer of the preserves. She took a tentative bite and when it went well, she took a bigger one. 

Islin felt something shift in her, as if her stomach had moved out of position when she saw the tank, but was now slipping back into place. She experienced a moment of calm in which her path forward became as clear to her as a credit card statement—a few easy to comprehend data points and pages of fine print that were a mystery to her. In order to shepherd her kids toward adulthood, Islin needed to free herself and her kids from Kevin. She set her bagel down and walked into the living room. 

You know what, Kevin? “Mi casa is no longer su casa! I’m fucking done. This crazy ass shit has gone on too long and gotten too weird. I’ve put up with far too much. You and your gun-crazy buddies can go drive your tank and build a clubhouse somewhere the fuck else.”

“It’s not a tank. It’s an armored personnel carrier, an APC. And it’s not a clubhouse. It’s a bunker. And there’s enough land here that you won’t even notice it, and the feds will never find it.”

Islin looked out the window at the Bobcat sitting next to the barn. Considering the bucket loader on the front she began to ask herself how many weekends of digging it would take to make a hole as deep as he wanted, then caught herself. She looked past the Bobcat and could see the first yellow leaves on the one oak in sight, while several redwoods rose into the fog. Islin felt grateful that the Mendocino Coastal fog hadn’t burned off. 

“I don’t care what you call it. You’re not building it here. You’re packing, Kevin. And you can put it all in the tank you bought.” 

“I said, it’s not a tank; it’s an APC. You don’t even know what this armament is or why we need it.”

“That’s just it. I don’t need it. Our kids don’t need it. In fact, you don’t need it. What you believe is fucking crazy.”

Kevin stood upon realizing that the episode was not over and he was going to miss the kickoff to the ‘Bama game. He held his hands in a gesture that said stop. “Now hold on, Iz. Don’t go all—”

“Don’t even. You’re not going to minimize this. You’re not going to gaslight me—or the kids. This?” She gestured in the direction of the hulking green thing. “This is the last fucking straw.”

[Susan Church Downer]

..

[J.M. Getz]

Excerpt from first chapter: Not the very first pages, but I wanted to include some dialogue. The first pages feature mostly philosophy, description, and action. Not much talking.

Scene: Introduces the setting, antagonist, and mentor character while also establishing tone and pace.

 

I turn my head and see a glaring light peeking out from a very upset looking conductor. I roll my eyes and sigh as I hear “Now arriving at our final stop for the day, all passengers must de-board.” from an electronic recording coming out of the speakers above our heads. 

“Oh, so now the princess decides to wake up, aye?” The pissed off conductor says in an English accent as he flings spittle in my face with each word. “Well you bett-uh listen here, lit-tle girl. That’s gonna be ten dollars for tha ride and another ten dollars for my time that you wasted.” The conductor says as he moves closer and closer into my space, letting off the distinct smell of old onions and cheese. 

I slowly start to slip out from underneath his stance and begin to back toward the door as I reach in my bag looking for loose bills. “Well, I'm really sorry, but I only have ten bucks, so that will have to do.” I say in a polite tone while reaching out my arm with my last ten dollars in the world. “Here you go sir. Thank you” I say as I set the bill down and then head quickly for the door. 

“Oi- hold up, I wasn't done with you!,” the man yells, as I begin to dart, dodge and duck my way through the crowded subway station. 

I turn around and hold my two middle fingers up to him and spin my way into the sea of people, where I can make my escape. That’s the thing about living in the city, though, isn’t it? Everyone is always thinking about how to make their big escape while everyone tries to take advantage of each other. But it isn’t all that bad. We do have thousands of restaurants that I can’t afford and tons of other expensive attractions to keep the upper class kids from feeling like regular people. But again, that aint me. 

After exiting the train station, I join the throng of people as we make our way home  from work or school. I notice how we all divide, spreading in our separate directions like threads in a spider web. In the crowd, things almost seem to stand still as if the constant movement of society’s matrix appears to stop when viewed from the inside. Just as the movement of society creates a sort of motionlessness, the lights of the city do anything but stand still as they pierce your psyche down to your core. Dancing lit-up advertisements reign over the whole cityscape of the lights coming from people’s businesses, apartments, parks, theaters, bars, etc... Meanwhile, zooming lights fly past you up and down the road nonstop, going through intersections lit up with more lights and driving on roads that are lined with…well, even more lights. After a while all of the lights grow blinding, so I tend to walk with my hood on and my head down. 

I walk until the lights become dimmer and fade away as I move from the city center to the neighborhoods, and then my neighborhood. Only this is no private school country club neighborhood with an HOA and a membership plan. No, this little gem that I call home is quite the opposite. I live in Lakeside, which may sound nice to you if you come from a good area and hear it, but it actually has a different meaning if you're from around here. Then you know that Lakeside has the highest murder rate per-capita in the entire country. And yes, the lake is famous- but famous for the amount of bodies retrieved from it. I don't want to become one of those bodies, so when I walk through my neighborhood I have to walk with my shoulders high, but not too high; with my face mean, but not to mean; with a mask on that says, ‘Don’t mess with me’! 

The consistent problem is that I’m really not this mean and rugged person. I’m actually fascinated by astronomy, biology, literature, mythology, and really everything else they teach in school. I love watching anime, creating artwork and cuddling with my cat, but these Lakesiders don't know that. I walk around incognito through the streets and usually only feel safe in the confines of my own home.

Before I can finish my thought, I receive a shove from the back that nearly pushes me to the ground as my heavy book bag slams up against the back of my head.

“Ow, what the heck-” I turn around and see a gigantic towering figure of a teenager with a barreling chest and wide shoulders staring at me with little beatty black eyes. Petra. My own personal torture, sent here to remind me of the harsh reality that Lakeside is. 

“What are you doing here, Aleksondra?” Petra snarls as I regain my footing. 

“Well, you know Pete, I'm just walking home from school, and if you wanted to start a conversation with a girl- that's not really the way to do it.”  I say while sharply.

“Why don't you just leave Lakeside, anyways, you spoiled brat?” As Petra speaks, he pushes me into one of his other two goons.

One guy, Billy Akers,  pushes me back to a different guy I'd never seen before, spitting out, “Yeah, why don't you just leave-brat?” I wonder how they can hate me so much when I don’t even know them.

The other guy catches me and reaffirms, “Nobody wants you here,” before shoving me to the ground and leaning over my body.

As the guys circle me, I look down at the ground and start to cry. 

Petra speaks again, “But you’re so spoiled  that you probably don't even realize that, do you?” Petra’s words cut through me like a knife. 

“I'm just trying to make it home, Pete. I thought we had outgrown all of this schoolyard bullying stuff,” I plea to the group.

“Oh really?” He laughs with his crew. “It doesn’t work that way, sweetheart.” 

Why do these guys hate me so much for being different? For going to a different school than them in a different neighborhood? Before I can really ponder the answer to this question, I catch a glimpse of Petra’s huge foot coming straight for my face. White shining stars of light flutter across my vision before I drop to the cement and everything goes dark as the picture of these terrible guys fade out of focus. I can still hear them talking back and forth as I play possum and remain down to give off the look of being unconscious. Hopefully they will leave me alone. 

“Now she looks just like her father!” Petra says in a cynical way to the others. 

“Yeah, cold, unconscious, and alone on the ground just the same as …” before he can finish, I hear Bapa's voice come crashing through. 

“Aleksondra, Is that you?” I can hear him yell in a booming tone as he gets closer to the group.  “Get away from her, you creeps!”

In a fluster he yells, “Hey, what the hell is going on here?” Directing his attention to the guys huddled around me.

Petra says, “Mind your own business old man before somebody else gets hurt.”.

“You're threatening me, buddy?” Bapa coughs out in a surprised tone. “I should teach you a lesson right here and now for  touching my granddaughter but I’m not catching charges for beating up a minor.”

My eyes are still closed as I am playing possum, but I can hear the shift in Petra’s voice and he moves from me to Bapa, ”What did you say, old man?” He says in a low and threatening tone. 

“You heard me, you little halfwit spawn of chucky, get the hell on before I call the cops on you. Or are you too dumb to understand that?” The boys just stare through Gramps as he stands in between me and the bullies. “Hmmm, let me try again then, you little terrors get back to the field before the other children of the corn see that you've gone missing,” Bapa always spoke with such confidence and charisma for someone his age. 

[Teresa Drosselmeyer]

“Your momma flew over all the roses and landed in a cow pile,.” grandma would say. I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about since I was just a little kid visiting during summer vacation at her old farmhouse situated on dry, Indian land somewhere between the Wilburton Mountains and the skyline of Oklahoma City, but I gathered it had something to do with my dad.

Mom had been the oldest of grandma’s four children, but her family called her Babe until the day she died, even nieces and nephews, and she wore it proudly. Once, as a birthday gift to Mom, I retouched an old photo of my young grandfather, dressed in oversized pants wearing a beret, kneeling next to my eighteen-month-old mother standing precariously in a dress and bonnet by his side as he gazed at her adoringly. They looked like characters from an old film complete with a clapboard house on barren, dusty land in the background reminiscent of a scene from Grapes of Wrath. As I filled in the large hand resting across his knee with color, I wondered what it would have been like to be her, to have his big hands lift me up to carry me, to feel his immense love through touch, to be worshipped by my daddy.

Even the passage of time and the end of their lives could not erase the affection that was not only evident in my Grandaddy’s face but from the unseen person taking the picture. Touching the details of the fading old and brittle photograph made me feel like I was indulging in a voyeuristic crime watching through the windowpane of yellow images of a happy family life. The tenderness captured in time connected to me through the art pencil I held with positioned fingers learned in a kindergarten class around a too big, yellow No. 2 pencil. Even though I was acutely aware of my imposition on their love triangle – my mother and her parents – it seemed like there was more than enough devotion to go around. Grandma’s distinctive handwriting on the back of the photo read in pencil: “Joe and his babe Bernice.”

My grandparents, who tied the knot on Christmas Day, had a good marriage, at least as far as I could tell since he died when I was quite young. What I knew of him was that he was a big man who wore overalls with small pockets stitched on the bib where he carried a pouch of tobacco, rolling papers and a box of Diamond matches. Leaning on his knee trying to nudge my cousin out of the way so I could be closest to Granddaddy, he took turns letting each of us blow out a match, an exciting event for preschoolers who were forbidden to play with fire. What I understood of him were through stories grandma would narrate from her favorite rocking chair, the same one I inherited that sits in a corner in an upstairs bedroom where I have rocked my own grandchildren feeling her presence and smiling approval. The toes from her tiny swollen feet pushed off the floor next to where I sat sending her swaying back and forth like an oversized metronome taking pause in her recollections to smack lips covered with red wine she sipped from an iced tea glass, which she said made her “sleep real good.” Mom corrected her, “Hell, momma! You’re not sleeping, you’re passing out!”

Grandma was a small woman, no more than four foot, ten inches, that wore plain, shapeless shifts, worn-out house shoes and cat-eyeglasses. A stark contrast to the picture of her as a young mother posing with my mom and her younger brother, Granddad, and an uncle around a Model T in another lifetime when she traveled the country with the men who built oil refineries. “We were very wealthy,” grandma explained, “those are very fashionable clothes.”  I tried to find my grandmother in that photo, the one wearing a feathered hat and a coat that had a collar resembling a dead fox, but the woman pictured did not remind me of my grandma. Time had made her like a nice, worn-out pillow – soft to squeeze and even better to sleep with – no deceased animals in sight.

Intent I would know the love of her life, Grandma would repeat my Granddaddy’s full name for memorization on every one of my visits: Joseph Miles John Paul Peterburgh Orf, which was required of me to rattle off back to her almost as much as I was drilled on the names of the Five Civilized Tribes. Both seemed equally important.

Although his death occurred more than a decade before her own passing, I knew she always waited for the day they would be reunited in a heavenly home.  Shortly after she had been released from the hospital after suffering a broken hip that had become life-threatening, she told me about his visit. According to Grandma, she had awakened from a nap in her hospital room to find my deceased grandfather perched on the windowsill. “He was there just like you and me are sitting here right now.” She was not trying to convince me of a supernatural occurrence, there was no doubt of the reality of her experience, she was just merely relating the encounter the same as if she had run into one of her children at the grocery store.

“Come on, Ruby. Come go with me,” he coaxed with an outstretched hand, but grandma refused. She could not leave, the kids still needed her. Years later he came again, and I guess we were all doing well, because this time she slipped her small hand in his and left the room.

But that happy ending was not true for both of her daughters. Back then, a bad marriage was just as accepted as a good one—choosing a spouse was a lottery of sorts, kind of a Forest Gump arrangement since “you never know what you’re gonna get”—but one thing was for sure, being single (especially a single mother) was unthinkable.

 

My mother’s little sister, Poos-y, was born Barbara Ann but no one ever referred to her given name, except her abusive husband. The odd nickname had come about in a weird historical way in that when my grandmother was pregnant, Native Americans in the area had made her a papoose in which to carry the infant. It had made her mad, she said, but I thought it unusual for Indians to make a white woman something so cultural. My favorite place in her tiny four room house was the back bedroom where this artifact hung on the wall. I was not allowed to touch it, but often she would take me to that special gift and point out the beautiful details appreciating the intricacies of its handiwork made from tree limbs tied together with care. Grandma had placed a baby doll where her child would have been cuddled by the colorful red-hued blanket that danced with brilliant linear designs. I loved it, and I think, secretly, grandma did too.

Tragedy seemed to surround my Aunt Poos-y like foggy days in Seattle.  Not too long ago, it was revealed to me by a family member that she had been a ‘bad girl’ forced to marry to “give the baby a name.” For the rest of her days, she would endure a drunken, drug-addict truck driver of a husband who hit her on a regular basis, whether she was pregnant or not. My aunt led a neglected life dying way before her time of pneumonia because she did not receive medical attention until it was too late. I always wondered why she felt underserving of a better life.

There were many times grandma would look intently into my upturned face and command, “Don’t you ever let a man hit you. If a man hits you, you wait until he falls asleep and then you hit him over the head with a baseball bat.” If I had ever been in an abusive situation, I would not have hesitated to carry out her instructions. It just never occurred to me that I might get into legal trouble because it seemed like such a practical solution. That was before I knew that there was little justice for battered women. Nowadays, I wonder if motivation for this advice came from my Aunt Poos-y’s predicament.

 

I do not think my grandmother had many details about my mother’s wedding day since, from what I gathered, she eloped, which was evident of the wedding photos that were void of my grandparents. It was odd that grandma’s version of my parent’s marriage involved her crying for days and that my paternal grandfather had promised my grandparents that, as long as he lived, he would never let my dad hurt their daughter. “That’s a bizarre promise,” I thought. Nonetheless, I never tired of her retelling of the time my momma married dad and how my granddaddy lectured her sternly to stop crying all the time because it was going to make her sick. “I don’t know how to stop,” she admitted to him, to which he replied, “Well, just do like me. Stay busy all day and keep your mind off of it.”

The next day she took his advice to heart working hard around the house leaving no time to dwell on her sadness. From the kitchen window, just beyond the worn wooden outhouse, it was her normal routine to watch granddaddy chugging past the frame in an old red tractor across the swaying golden wheat field, but today she had not seen him in quite some time. Wiping her hands on the flour-caked apron, she left the house as the creaking screen door slapped back into place, and beelines back to the barbed-wire fence that separates yard from field as white chickens with dangling red chins dart out of her way clucking to voice their displeasure.  She hollers “Joe!” before opening the spring-loaded door to check occupancy of the two-hole outhouse. The same place where grandma would hold me with weathered-hands placed under tiny arms as my bottom teetered over the splintered wooden edge of a make-shift toilet seat as I expressed mild hysteria that I was pretty sure my butt was going to be bitten by a snake, “Honey, nothing wants to live down there” she tried to reason.

Although I had no problem envisioning whacking an abusive sleeping husband in the head with a baseball bat (would this be something that would be around the house, or something I would need to purchase, or a wedding gift? I was never sure.) believing her no-biting-critters-in-the-outhouse-hole theory was always difficult to digest. But just as that smelly place was void of sneaky asps living in a home of mounting dung, my grandfather was also absent from the crude bathroom. When Grandma walked around the back of the barn for a better look at the fields, she found him sitting in the overgrown soft green grass leaning against the graying, weathered siding with his head bent over sobbing into those big, loving hands that once held his Babe Bernice.

 

[JSBaumeister]

I have included the excerpt I applied with and the opening pages, I hope that's OK!

 

PIVOTAL SCENE PART II: Introduces secondary conflict, additional dialogue

 

   Who the fuck is calling me in the middle of the fucking night? It’s after five in the morning and my phone has been vibrating for five minutes. It doesn’t seem to have woken Eve up, but it’s driving me crazy.

     I grab my phone and see Madison is calling me. What could that bitch possibly want now? A drunk, emotional apology for getting Eve hammered? Couldn’t it wait until morning? I hit ignore.

     Instantly my phone starts ringing again. It’s Madison.

     “Hello?”

     “Dave?”

     “Yes?”

     “You need to come to the hospital now. It’s Steve. We’re at Weill-Cornell. I think it’s on 68^th maybe. I don’t know but come now.”

     “Is he OK?”

     “I don’t know.”    

     “He’s going to be OK?” I say almost pleading.

     “I don’t think so.”

     Madison sounds like she’s barely hanging on. I tell her I am on my way and hang up the phone. Eve is still unconscious and I don’t want to drag her into this. I scribble a quick note telling her I had to go to the hospital, some emergency with Steve and I’ll be back as soon as possible. I leave it on the nightstand then pull on my jeans and a sweater while I look up the address of the emergency room and request an uber.

     In the car on my way to the hospital I tell myself over and over again that Steve will be OK. Nothing really bad can happen to him. He’s young, he’s strong, he’s about to be a fucking Marine. Steve is going to be totally fine. I might even go down to Parris Island one weekend when he has an off-base pass and I’ll hang out with him and his new Marine buddies. We’ll raise hell in the town and it’ll be great. Then after OCS, when he’s an officer and he gets posted somewhere exotic, Eve and I will go visit him. He’s going to be the best man at my wedding, and we’re going to be friends forever. Nothing bad is really going to happen to him. I do need to set him up with a more suitable girl though. It’s nice that he’s been having fun with Madison. She is hot and all, but she isn’t the kind of girl you really settle down with. I guess Steve doesn’t need to settle down yet though. He’s young, he’s about to be a Marine. This is still the time for him to have fun. We can find him a nice girl in a couple of years, and then they’ll settle down. Maybe we’ll sit on his porch and she’ll make us iced tea and it’ll be real calm and everything will be like it is in people’s stories. Steve’s going to be fine.

     The car pulls up to the cul-de-sac in front of the Emergency Room at Weill-Cornell. I get out, run inside, and I see Mr. Norris, Mrs. Norris and Madison all sitting together in the waiting room crying. When I see them all sitting there, and see that no one is in with Steve, I know he’s dead. I don’t want to accept it yet, but I know it.

     I lock eyes with Steve’s mother, because his dad can’t seem to bring his head up, or keep his hand from his face and we’re both searching for words as we look at each other. I start shaking my head from side to side furiously as if to say, “No,” and the tears start coming. When Mrs. Norris sees this, she starts crying even harder and lightly moves her head up and down to confirm my fears. Then her lip starts trembling and she’s back to wailing and her head is down in her hands. I start saying “No,” softly, then louder until I am screaming. I run over to his mother and hug her, and then I hug his dad, Carl, and I completely lose it. Madison tries to hug me from behind and I am furious at the intrusion. This bitch doesn’t belong here. We are all people that love Steve. She doesn’t have a place in this group. This cannot really be happening. WAKE UP. I ask Steve’s mom, who used to make lunch for us and cut the crusts off Steve’s sandwiches,

     “Where is he?”

     “He’s gone Dave.”

     “I don’t believe it. I want to see him.”

     “Please Dave. Please. He’s gone.”

     “Then I want to say goodbye.”

     The doctors don’t know what to make of this. They tell me they don’t advise that I see him and generally this sort of thing is only for family.

     “He is my fucking family. He is my goddamn brother and I want to say goodbye.”

     I am so forceful and sincere and upset that I think the doctor realizes he isn’t going to be able to reason with me, and he says OK. He warns me that it isn’t going to be pleasant, but if I insist, he’ll take me. I need to see it. I don’t believe it. This cannot be real. WAKE UP.

     The guy leads me down to the morgue. When we get to the door, he tells me he’ll leave me alone for a few seconds. Then he opens the door. I enter alone and the door shuts. It’s just me and Steve for one last time. I’m alone with the horror.

     There’s my best friend. Naked, partially covered by a sheet lying on a cold metal tray. I know you hear a lot about how people look like they’re sleeping when they’re dead. Maybe they do after the funeral home dresses them up and everything, but not when you are dealing with the raw reality.

     Steve almost doesn’t look real. He’s lying there, his eyes are shut and it looks like his skin is sunken back, like he was in one of those G-force machines or something. It’s not like cartoonishly pulled back, but the skin doesn’t sit on a dead person’s face the way it does when someone’s alive. I know that my best friend is really and truly gone.

     I’m not religious really, and I told you I don’t have a great handle on all of that stuff, but I hope that Steve’s spirit is somewhere in the room, or at least I hope he’s looking down on this whole scene from somewhere good.

     “I love you brother.”

     I’m going to miss him so goddamn much I don’t know what I am going to do. Forget me. I don’t know how his parents will ever be able to get on with their lives. How will Carl bury both of his sons and ever get out of bed again.

     I start bawling. I am crying for Steve, and Steve’s parents but most of all I am crying for all of the things that will never happen. Steve won’t be the best man at my wedding. I’m not going to be there when he has kids. We aren’t going to end up old men sitting on a porch drinking iced tea with our wives, telling stories about when we used to be wild and crazy kids. Steve’s story is ending now. Tonight. On a fucking cold, gray metal table in the bowels of a hospital on the East Side. I am never going to be able to talk to him again, or hug him or ask him for advice.

     I kiss him goodbye on his forehead. It’s cold to my lips and this is even more horrible than I thought it would be. I start crying harder and try to hug him, but he’s cold and stiff and I know this isn’t Steve anymore. I can’t wake up. This is real. This is forever and there’s nothing I can do.

     For a while everything is kind of hazy. I don’t know exactly how many days go past. I get back from the hospital and Eve’s still in bed. I tell her what’s happened and the tears come back. I don’t get out of bed for a while, and I keep the lights off. When my parents find out what’s happened, they get on a plane straight away and are back in New York. At some point I tell Eve I’ll be OK and that she should go back downtown and go to class and get on with her life. I need some time and I will text her when I know about the funeral. My parents try to check on me every now and again, but I can’t move. I just want to lie in the dark and pretend none of this is happening.

     Steve’s heart stopped. I knew he looked fucked up that night at his going away party, but I didn’t know half of the story. He’d been at it for a few nights already without sleep. Not just the drinking and the cocaine. He’d been getting into harder stuff with Jacques and Trent. Fucking Madison was close with those guys, and the four of them had apparently been on a bender for days. When they left Dorrian’s they all went back to Trent’s place, because he lived the closest.

     Trent and Madison went out around two in the morning to meet up with Trent’s dealer, and Steve and Jacques stayed behind and kept partying. Apparently Steve collapsed some time around then and Jacques freaked the fuck out. Instead of calling 911 or helping Steve, he took off and went home. I guess he was worried if he called 911 he’d get in trouble for the drugs. So, instead of helping, he watched Steve collapse and slowly die on the floor, probably pleading, at least with his eyes if he couldn’t speak, for Jacques to help him, for anyone to get help and save his life. At least that’s what I imagine happened. Jacques isn’t talking to anyone, and if I see that motherfucker I will murder him. When Trent and Madison got back, they found Steve and called 911, but it was too late. The paramedics couldn’t revive him. They brought him to the hospital, because I guess that’s procedure, but the Doctors there couldn’t do anything besides pronounce him dead.

     The funeral is on a Tuesday. My parents tell me the night before, and I text Eve. We agree she will meet me at my parent’s place and we’ll go together.

     At the church, I hug Mrs. Norris and I tell her about the time I was in Chicago, and I was drunk and had nowhere to stay and I didn’t know what to do. I called Steve, and told him and he booked me a room with his credit card and told me to go over. He never brought it up again, asking for credit. He never even wanted the money back,

     “That was just the kind of guy he was. He would do anything for his friends.”

     “And you were his best friend Dave.”

     This is too much for me, and I start crying again and hug his mother. This is the woman who used to make sure we didn’t drink too much soda and stay up all night when I would sleep over at Steve’s house when we were kids. How can this be happening? How can Steve be gone? How did we get here?

     We settle into a pew with my parents and I’m in a fog for most of the day. I’m one of the pallbearers, and when we get to the cemetery, I’m situated behind Carl and I worry that my legs are going to give out like that night back in Ohio and I’m going to fall and fail Steve one last time.

     I grip Eve’s hand so tight that I worry I might hurt her as we start coming to the conclusion of everything out at the cemetery. I don’t think I can even cry anymore. I feel like my eyes have been burned out and there’s nothing left inside me.

     Then, they lower the casket and Steve’s parents shovel the first bit of dirt onto it. I have a lot more crying left in me. As I stand over the open grave with dirt in my hand and look down on the wooden box containing my best friend, I say, “Goodbye Steve, goodbye brother,” one last time, kiss my hand and throw the dirt down in the hole.

 

OPENING SCENE: Introduces protagonist/antagonist, setting, tone and foreshadows wounds/conflict

 

   In my dream there is a white horse. He is muscular and powerful. He’s running at tremendous speed, but he doesn’t seem to be exerting himself at all. There’s no hint of fatigue. It seems as if the horse could continue ripping along at this pace forever. The cloudless sky is a deep cobalt and the flat sand is khaki. It’s expansively bleak in every direction and the terrain is so featureless that it could be a salt flat if not for the beige color of the sand. In the distance, days of riding away, there are ridgelines. Then suddenly, in a physics defying way, the horse goes from full gallop to a dead stop. There’s no transition to a trot, it’s an abrupt and sudden halt. Perched on the horse there’s a shadowy figure in dark robes. I can’t see his face. I hear,

     “And I saw a pale horse,”

   I wake up with a start. There’s an uneasy feeling of creeping dread in the pit of my stomach. I know that line is something from the Bible. I don’t remember all of it, but the gist of it is with the pale horse comes death.

     This is just perfect. I’m flying this morning, and I am not a good flyer. On top of my normal “I’m going to die, I hate flying” craziness is the fact that on the other end of this flight there isn’t a beach or anything fun, just three more months at school in Maskirovka, Ohio. Three more months in the gray bleakness that is the United States between New York and Los Angeles.

   At least Lindsey is out there. We’ve been together for a while now, and I’m fairly sure she’s the love of my life. We’ve been apart for all of winter break, and I really miss her. New Years wasn’t great without her.

   The check-in line for first class is mercifully short. I get my ticket and quickly head through security, but there’s no time for a drink before boarding.

   Seat 2F a window, excellent. The seats in first class are leather, and they’re supposed to be comfortable, but really they’re nothing too spectacular. The horrors of domestic air travel.

   I carefully stow my carry-on in the overhead, and hope no one will crush it. I have a Christmas present for Lindsey in there.

   I look out the window and do a quick scan over the wing, trying to ease my insane paranoia about flying by assuring myself that everything looks OK.

   The stewardess stops by to take pre-departure beverage orders, and I surprise myself when I hear,

   “I’ll have a Jack and Coke,”

   Come out of my mouth. Not that I don’t drink or anything let’s get serious. Still, it’s pretty early in the morning, and normally I at least have the decorum to order an eye opener on morning flights. I need it to calm down. When “Teri” arrives with my drink, I throw it down pretty quick, and flag her down on her way back to the galley to order another.

   She looks a bit shook but complies. I start worrying about the bag again, but figure nothing in there is really fragile. I don’t want the box to get messed up. The box is half the appeal right? I got Lindsey a necklace from Tiffany’s. It’s a heart with our initials on it. I also wrote a poem for her. I know it’s really sappy and cringe worthy, I’m a little embarrassed about it and I don’t want to dwell. The box should be sturdy enough to survive the journey.

   Halfway through my second drink, Teri returns to gather the glasses, since I guess for some reason the FAA doesn’t feel it’s safe for passengers to have drinks during takeoff.

   The plane pushes back from the gate and we’re rolling towards the runway. There’s no turning back now. Settle on the centerline. Hear the engines spool up. Take off time. I grip the armrest and my knuckles go white. I try to look at the seat in front of me as we climb, but sometimes I look out the window anyway and I realize just how far we are from the ground. I force myself to take deep breaths, trying to fight off the panic attack that’s coming on. I wish I had a Xanax. 

[Rebecca Chianese]

sample1WP.docx

[Rebecca Chianese]

 

sample1WP (1).docx

[Ines Garcia]

OPENING PAGES: Introduces the antagonist, the setting and tone, gives some history about the first book in this series, and foreshadows the primary and secondary conflict.

 

PROLOGUE

              “We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of a remarkable woman, the godmother of El Cid. Agnus Delacroix, lamb of God, who was never born and will never die.”

              It’s a cold, windy day as I make my way past the other mourners toward the gates of the old cemetery. The sky is weeping gently. I walk past my father's grave and brush my fingers lightly over the top of his headstone. I swore I wasn’t going to cry, but just the act of touching my father's headstone opens the floodgates, and I can taste my tears mixing with the now pouring rain.

              There’s a storm brewing off the coast; I can feel it. I contemplate going out onto the pier. What a fitting way to go, following my sister into the deep waters, but instead, I make my way down the tree-lined street to my house, the palm fronds whipping in the wind, throwing shadows in the lightning. “Agnus Delacroix, lamb of God, who was never born and will never die,” echoing through my head.

              I enter through the kitchen door, past Agnus’ room, and up the back steps. I walk past my bedroom and up the spiral ship’s stairs to my office. I sit down at my desk and open the bottom drawer. I can see the old lady standing there on the widow’s walk, just outside the French doors, watching me, her long grey hair whipping in the wind. A bolt of lightning shoots across the sky, and I can see her clearly now through the rain.

              I take the revolver out of the drawer and turn it around in my lap; the pearl handle feels cool and smooth in my hands.

              “Go ahead, pull the trigger,” she whispers in my head.

              I cock the gun.

 

OPENING DAY

              I can’t do this. What was I thinking, trying to do this with no prior knowledge and no experience? I checked myself out of the looney bin just yesterday and opened this bed and breakfast today. I’m way over my head here, and I don’t see how I’ll ever stop myself from drowning. I’m hiding in the back office on the excuse I needed to change out of my high-heeled pumps, which was not really a lie. It’s only eleven o'clock, and my feet are already killing me. Luna, our new house cat, jumps up and sits on my lap and starts to complain; she hasn’t had her breakfast yet, so I slip on my flats, nudge her off my lap, and go into the kitchen to get her food.

              “There, at least, there’s one happy customer.” I think to myself as I put the bowl of Fancy Feast, Salmon and Shrimp down on her mat. She likes it when I stroke her gently while she’s eating, so I take another minute to comply. Carly’s at the front podium fielding questions about the local attractions and showing people how to check in remotely, while Michael’s running around with his head cut off, doing who knows what, but with that calm demeanor of his. Thank God for Michael. What other husband would take two weeks off of his high-paying job as an executive lead architect in a famous New York City firm to come down to Florida and work for his wife as a maintenance man/busboy for no pay?

              And speaking of pay, I haven’t had time to so much as glance at the books. I don’t even know if this scheme is going to break us or what. I didn’t even write out a business plan. I know nothing about running a bed and breakfast – I’m an interior designer. Just because I can decorate the place doesn’t mean I know how to run it. I’m going to need to find some help and fast. Carly leaves for Boston on Sunday. She has to get back to college and her life, and I can’t blame her. Michael leaves in two weeks to go back to New York and give his notice at work, that is, unless he changes his mind after today. Our first day open, and I already have misgivings about whether or not this is going to work or even how it’s going to work. I take one more glance at a contented Luna, now stretched out on her back on the kitchen floor, before I go back into the lions' den. Luna was a gift from Lucy, one of a litter of 15 cats. She’s only been here a few days, and already she’s at home, who wouldn’t be? She’s the queen of the house. I envy Luna.

              “Agnus,” I say out loud to nobody. I must call Agnus; she’ll know where to find some help. She’s finally using the iPhone I gave her; she even knows how to text. She must be 110 years old, and she never ceases to amaze me. That woman will probably live forever; at least, I know she’ll outlive me.

              “Excuse me,” someone says as I walk over to the podium outside the dining room, which serves as a front desk as well as a hostess stand. “Is that the ghost of Marina?” I had that picture of Marina that Agnus gave me framed and hung it on the wall behind the podium with the name “Casa Marina” in brass letters just below it.

              “Yes, that’s Marina.” I simply say with a smile. I’m ambivalent talking about Marina and the house being haunted. It’s too soon. And anyway, I’m sure Marina is gone to a better place now, and that she won’t be coming back to haunt us anymore. I’m going to miss her terribly, but I know it’s for the best.

              “Can you tell me where the Norton Museum is?”  She asks.

              I walk over to the rack, hanging on the wall by the powder room and select a few different leaflets advertising some of the nearby attractions. Suddenly, a cold chill runs up my spine – something’s wrong; I chase it out of my mind.

              “Here you are,” I say, handing her the one for the Norton Museum. “It’s a few blocks away, but certainly walking distance. Here’s the map on the back, and here’s Casa Marina. You might also want to visit the Anne Norton Sculpture Gardens on the way back. It’s such a beautiful place and a lovely day to stroll around on the grounds.”

              “Thank you,” she says, as someone else asks, “Where are the bicycles?”

              And now they are all shouting questions at me.

              “What time is breakfast tomorrow?"

              “When can we go fishing?”

              “I can’t get my room key to work.”

              God, help me. I think about texting Agnus and asking her to get Lucy and come over here right away. It’s eleven thirty, and there's a long line of guests trying to check-in. Michael’s running up and down the stairs with the luggage, and Carly is still playing “computer instructor” with her iPad, showing them how to check in by themselves. The POS system was probably the best investment we made; at least, we thought so at the time. If only our guests were young enough and computer savvy enough to know how to use it. Again, my mind goes back to the expense account and balancing the ledger. I’m afraid we’ll never see a profit from this crazy dream of mine. There’s that feeling again – something’s not right.

              “Where’s the grave?” someone asks.

              “Did you really try to burn the house down?” another voice from the crowd.

              “Were you really in the nut house?”

              “It’s ok, Mom,” Carly whispers in my ear as she gently touches my arm and nods to the back room. “I got this.”

              I walk away, ignoring the crowd and the questions. I know I’ll have to deal with this at some point, but not just now. I’m not ready. I don’t even know how to process all that’s happened since I bought this house and moved down here last year, let alone explain it to strangers. I hear Carly making up some story about rumors and publicity as I run for my hiding place to text Agnus. Just then, before I even get my phone out of my pocket, she walks in through the kitchen door.

              “Oh, my God, Nissy, how did you know? I’m in so much trouble.” I break down, sobbing in her arms.

              Agnus is a tall, thin, beautiful black woman with a perfect complexion and warm eyes. I don’t know when I started calling her Nissy, Marina’s nickname for her, but it just feels right to do so, and I know she doesn’t mind. I suspect she even likes it.

              “There, there, now, baby child.” She says in her island drawl, as she smooths out my hair as if I were a child.

              She’s very old, but one wouldn’t know it by looking at her. I remember the first time I ever saw her. I was struck by her beauty as if I were looking at a masterpiece painted by some famous artist. But it was more than that. I instantly had the feeling I had known her in some past life. She’s my rock, my counselor, the mother I never had. Today, she’s wearing a bright fuchsia jumpsuit with bell-bottomed legs, sporting wide black embroidered hems and white go-go boots. Her fine-toned arms are bare in the sleeveless top, and she has on her signature gold hoops, big enough to just touch her collarbone. Her hair is up in a simple bun on top of her head, which makes her look like a ballerina on stilts.

              “What seems to be the problem, baby child?”

              “I, I can’t do this,” I sob. I’m in way over my head, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

              “Of course you do, my dear. You can do this; you just need a little help, that’s all.”

              I’m full-on crying now as we stand, embracing in the kitchen.

              “There, there, baby child. You just leave it to your Nissy; I’ll take care of everything. We’ll get you some proper help and then everything will be ok, you’ll see.”

              With that, she leads me into the back office and sits me down at the desk chair. I start to calm down, the tears subsiding, as she strolls – no – glides out into the hall and makes her way to the front of the house.

              Suddenly, there's a knock on the back door. I open it to see a delivery man with a hand truck and several boxes.

              “Delivery,” he says.

              “Delivery?” I ask. “I didn’t order anything.” At least I don’t remember ordering anything; that is, we’ve received all our orders in preparation for the opening.

              But he’s not listening to me as he hands me a clipboard and says, “Sign here, please. Where can I put these?”

              “What are they, exactly?" I ask.

              Just then, Michael walks up behind me and looks at the boxes. He takes the clipboard from me and says to the man, “Right in here,” as he points to the kitchen.

              “What is all this?” I ask.

              Michael is reading the paperwork and the letter attached to it. “It’s brandy. House brandy, Cheralena’s house brandy, to be exact.”

              He opens the top box and pulls out a bottle of the old house brandy. “Wow, twelve cases of it.”

              “But I don’t understand. Where did it come from?”

              “This letter is from the church. You know, the people we originally bought the house from. It seems Cheralena was using the basement of the church for storage. They’re sending it back to us, the rightful owners. Since we bought the estate, the brandy is ours. What luck – huh?”

              Michael seems pleased, but I don’t have a good feeling about this. I thought I saw the last of that brandy when Marina and I used it to burn our father’s letters and almost burned the house down.

              “I don’t understand,” I say again to no one in particular. There’s a knot in the pit of my stomach.

              “Good luck, lady.” The delivery guy says as he turns and walks back to his truck, and drives away.