Nine Ladies Dancing
My back hurts me. I stand, stretch my arms over my head, and then settle back onto the concrete stoop. I push myself up against the door so I don’t hang off the tiny step too far. Folding my hands on my lap, I look up and down at the front doors lining the city sidewalk.
I really got to pee.
There’s that pigeon again, strutting on the sidewalk like he was a peacock. I swear he gets paid to keep an eye on me. He bends to the ground, pecking among the brown leaves at invisible treats. If he gets paid more than I do to sit here, I’ll be pissed.
I lock eyes with the pigeon. ”Can you watch while I go pee?”
He nods. I jump up from the stoop, fling open the door and slip into the bathroom just inside. I hear their voices from the basement. Some laughing. Some yelling. Panic runs through me at the thought of them hearing me come inside. I almost can’t pee. Oh, there it comes. I button up, fly back out the door and sit on the stoop again.
The pigeon looks up from his pecking. His expression seems to warn me not to leave my post again. I knew I shouldn’t have had that soda this morning. It always makes me pee.
I scan the doors and windows around me. I catch a glimpse of a shadow in one of the windows across the street on the second floor. Squinting, I see the apartment is still vacant, the way it’s been since the old guy who lived there died a couple of months ago.
Tom Spinosa walks down the sidewalk towards me. He must be running late today. Or maybe he had an errand to run.
His loud voice always startles me. “Morning, Howie. How’s it goin’, kid?”
I stand and step to one side so he can go in the door. ”Oh, you know, Mr. Spinosa. The usual.”
“Take it easy.” He closes the door behind him. I sit again.
I check my watch. 10:30am. I hope I didn’t miss her while I was inside peeing. I crane my neck around the side of the building. Nope, here she comes: my favorite scenery of the day.
She floats down the sidewalk, blonde hair slicked back. Her long black coat is unbuttoned; it sweeps open as she walks so I can see her costume. I’m going to cry when she has to button it against the cold. Pink, gauzy fabric covers her. Her hips sway, ruffling the gray ballet skirt flaring out from her waist.
Some days she is running late and doesn’t glance at me. Today she’s early. She smiles at me with fiery lips and tosses her head, flipping her ponytail. I attempt a smile but it feels more like a smirk on my face. She walks past and leaves a soft scent of fancy perfume behind in the crisp air. I breathe it in as I watch her continue down the sidewalk.
Once she’s out of sight, I pull on the corner of my baseball cap and settle back against the stoop. The pigeon looks at me again and seems to raise his eyebrows, if he had any.
“No, you can’t have her. She’s all mine.”
I hear Christmas music from one of the nearby apartments and recognize it instantly: ”Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies” from the Nutcracker. I have plenty of visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.
*****
Chief Miller falls to the carpet in the second floor apartment, as Howie looks straight at him.
He says, “Shit. He might have seen me.”
The Chief crawls on his knees until he is well back from the window in the shadows and resumes peering down at Howie on the stoop. He sees Spinosa arrive. Scanning the checklist on the table – the only furniture in the room besides three folding chairs – he makes a checkmark next to Tom Spinosa’s name. All the other names already have checkmarks. At some point during the morning, all gang members have entered the house and nobody has left.
The Chief says, “I figure we have at least another hour while the group is there to make our bust. Let’s go ahead and radio the guys to take their positions. Tell them ten minutes to ‘go’ time.”
The Lieutenant picks up the radio mic and says into it, “Attention all units. Operation Ballerina will commence in an estimated ten minutes, at 11:00am. Take your positions and wait for the signal.”
Chief Miller turns to the rookie standing next to him. “OK, kid. Your job is to get Howie away from that door without him ringing the buzzer. I think our plan will work, but in the end, just do whatever you have to do. He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, if you know what I mean. I’ve known his family for years. I’d really rather not have him involved in any of this.”
“OK, Chief,” the rookie says. “I’m ready.”
*****
A kid about my age comes walking down the street. He stops when he gets to where I’m sitting.
“Hey, how’s it going?” He says.
“It’s going okay. What’s up?”
He slips his hands in his pockets. “Oh, nothing. I’m just on my way to the dance studio around the corner.”
“The dance studio?”
He grins at me. “Yeah. You know there’s a class going on right now in the front room. You can stand on the sidewalk and watch it through the picture window.”
My heart beats in my ears. “Really? Those classes are normally in the back room.”
“I know, right? Well, my buddy called me and told me that today it’s in the front room and …” He leans towards me and whispers. “They’ve got nine ladies dancing in there today.”
“Nine? You’re shitting me. There are usually only three or four in that class.”
He nods slowly. “Nine. My buddy just told me. You want to come with me to watch them?”
I shake my head. “No, sorry, I can’t. Um, I’m waiting for a friend to come.” I have butterflies in my stomach thinking about my blonde with eight other ladies dancing.
“Are you sure? It’s just around the corner and it would only be for a minute or two. These women are incredible in their dance outfits with their fluffy skirts …”
“Oh, okay. But only for a minute.” I look for the pigeon but I don’t see him anywhere. My hands shake as I walk with the kid down the street.
We round the corner and I rush to the window of the dance studio. Darkness fills the front room, but a glimmer of light shines through the doorway to the back room. I look at the kid and start to ask him what the deal is.
He says, “Kid, you’ve got to get out of here. A bust is going down.”
I just stare at him and then I hear the shout from around the corner. ”Police! Open up!” My eyes fly open.
“Run, kid!” He pushes me. I stumble and then run in the direction away from my stoop. I hear more shouts in the distance. A staccato of gunshots.
My raspy breathing drowns out any further sounds from my ears. I run many blocks until I feel my lungs seize up and my legs buckle. Panic has now spread to every corner of my body. An image flashes through my mind: the look on Spinosa’s face when he finds out I wasn’t at my post when the bust went down.
I reach into my pocket. $71 and some chewing gum. Plenty to get some lunch.
I have run and walked further than I thought because I see my favorite diner just across the street. I cross, swing open the door and enter, taking a seat at the counter. Sweat pours down my face and neck. I mop myself with a napkin. The silver-haired waitress takes my order, but then my eyes are riveted to the television hanging in the corner.
Dozens of dancers recede to the edges of the stage and one ballet dancer in soft pink floats across the center of the stage as if a string suspends her. The soft plucking sounds come at my ears for the second time today: “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies.” Anger and shame boil up in me.
I say, “Could you change the channel, please?”
The waitress purses her lips and sighs, but she flips the channel with the remote.
The head and shoulders of a newscaster fill the screen. I pour cream into my coffee from a tin pitcher and stir. I put the cup to my lips. The next image on the screen is that of Tom Spinosa. The newscaster says, “We have some breaking news to report…” My hand begins shaking. I put my cup down on the saucer as coffee splashes out of either side of the mug.
“We don’t have many details at the moment, but we are working on a story for the evening report regarding the arrest of the notorious crime boss Thomas Spinosa and many of his gang members. We are getting reports of up to twenty-two arrests. Three of the members of the gang were fatally shot during the bust, which was carried out a short time ago by local police. Be sure to watch the six o’clock report for further details on this story.”
The silver-haired waitress appears with my plate of food in her hand. She sets it down in front of me. “Are you okay, son?”
I pick up my napkin to clean up the spilled coffee. “Yes, thanks.”
As I chew each mouthful of food, I run some calculations. Twenty-two arrests. Three dead. That leaves seventeen gang members who are still free. That leaves seventeen gang members who will be coming after me for betraying them by leaving my post. Seventy-one dollars. Subtract fifteen dollars for lunch. That leaves just enough for a forty-nine dollar bus ticket to my cousin’s house in Spartan. My mom’s been trying to kick me out of the house for years, anyway.
I finish my lunch, leave the fifteen dollars next to my plate and walk outside. It feels much cooler than it did earlier. The pigeon sits just outside the diner door.
“You want to come with me? You know, you weren’t there either.”
The pigeon twitches his head from side to side.
“Okay, suit yourself, but I’ll bet they have ballet dancers in Spartan.” I head towards the bus station, leaving the pigeon to face his fate alone.
PJ Kaiser
© 2010
This story appeared previously in the 12 Days 2010 anthology, edited by Jim Bronyaur.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Writers Talk - PJ Kaiser
Happy Thursday, folks, & welcome to another edition of Writers Talk. Today’s writer is PJ Kaiser, a real presence in the Twitter & blogging writing communities & a wonderfully supportive person as well as a talented writer. It's been my observation that Ms Kaiser has a good grasp of how to utilize social media in her career as an independent writer, & I believe she has a lot to teach others who are looking to make a mark in fiction or poetry outside the traditional publishing model.
P.J. Kaiser stays at home with her two young children and finds time to write – generally in thirty-second increments. She writes mostly flash fiction and serial stories in a variety of genres. Several of her stories have appeared in print and electronic publications. Two of her stories - “The Request” and “The Foot of the Bridge” have appeared at Soft Whispers. Her story “The Turtle Dove” appeared in the anthology 12 Days 2009. “Halloween Guests” was selected for the Best of Friday Flash Volume 1 anthology. Her micro-fiction “Ditz Alert” was selected for the chapbook Dog Days of Summer 2010 – Not From Here, Are You?. She also assisted with editing the anthology 50 Stories for Pakistan, which includes her story “Arthur’s Emptiness.” In early 2010, she won the February writing challenge at Write On! Online with her story “Waiting for Spring.” She also has stories forthcoming in 100 Stories for Queensland and in Nothing but Flowers: Tales of Post-Apocalyptic Love, a publication of Emergent Publishing. She can be found hanging around at her blog Inspired by Real Life. P.J. is also the co-moderator of Tuesday Serial, a weekly collection of links to the latest installments of some of the web’s best online serials. P.J. is working on publishing a collection of her stories and is working on her first novel. P.J. lives with her family in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Don’t forget to check out PJ Kaiser’s story “Nine Ladies Dancing” on The Writers Talk blog!
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
In high school I had an assignment to write a short story. So I wrote the story, but I wasn’t sure of the ending. So I kept writing. And writing. It was, of course, complete drivel, but I had great fun writing it and I began to think that maybe one day I would like to learn how to write “for real.” I’ve always been an avid reader and I think most avid readers harbor dreams of being a writer.
We lived in Mexico for several years and while we were there I met a woman originally from Germany. She told us the most fascinating stories about her life and I told her she should write her memoir. She dismissed the idea since she had no interest in writing. So I decided to take up the challenge. I spent a summer interviewing her and gathering information for the book and then unfortunately we lost touch. So the book will be fiction but very loosely based on a real story.
I decided that I had to learn how to write properly in order to do her story justice and it’s been a fascinating journey for me. This first novel is in very rough draft stages right now (I won NaNoWriMo 2009 with it) but in the meantime I have enjoyed learning how to write short stories and serial fiction. I’ve experimented with a wide variety of genres, but haven’t yet found one with which I want to be monogamous.
Describe the creative process involved in any one piece you’ve written—this could be book, a story, a poem, an essay, etc.
My most recent serial story “Rainy Rendezvous” was inspired by a friend’s Facebook update. He commented that he enjoyed going kayaking alone because it was so peaceful. I commented that would be a great inspiration for a story…and no sooner had I made the comment than my mind began churning on an idea and within a week I had drafted five installments of a serial story.
Recent short stories have been inspired by seeing a woman fall on a street corner next to a crossing guard, getting a pedicure, and going swimming (not all at once ;-). And several stories have been inspired by dreams. Nearly all of my stories are inspired by something from my real life, even if it’s just a tiny nugget of real life. Hence the name of my blog “Inspired by Real Life.”
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process? (this can be publishing in any form, from traditional book publishing to blogging, etc)
My main publishing activity at the moment is blogging, apart from a few short stories that have been published. I began writing in the summer of 2009 and my main focus at the moment is on improving my craft rather than publishing. I am, however, beginning to pull together and polish some of my stories in hopes of publishing an e-book collection.
My blog recently crashed and I am in the process of reconstructing it. So, because it’s fresh in my mind, I can tell you that I have written 71 stories – including flash fiction and serial installments. Twenty-four of these, by the way, will not be carried over to the new blog (or anywhere else); they are being “retired.”
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
Most of my family thinks I’ve been pursuing a strange little pastime. That might have changed a bit when I gave each of them a copy of “50 Stories for Pakistan” which includes one of my stories. ;-)
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to—if any? This may be a “real” or “virtual” (in more than one sense) community.
I don’t have a “real” writing community because I can never seem to leave the house without my two children. But my virtual community more than makes up for its absence. I got the bug to write originally from people I encountered on Twitter and my writing community has grown organically through Twitter. I participate off and on in various Twitter chats such as #writechat and #litchat and my main writing communities come from #fridayflash and #tuesdayserial. I can’t even begin to describe the friendships that I’ve made and the things I’ve learned from my friends in my virtual writing community – they’ve been indispensible.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
At the moment, my goals are very loose. I want to keep writing short stories and serial fiction as I have bits of time here and there. I want to continue to improve my writing by taking classes and working with editors. Eventually I want to finish my novel. I find that if I put too many deadlines or milestones on my plans, then I get too stressed out and I turn away from writing. So, keeping things low-key allows me to continue to enjoy it and stay with it.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
Hmmm, I’m going to say a piano. When it works, the sound is fantastic. Every now and then, though, I strike a clunker that sticks out like a sore thumb. I am just trying to work on striking clunkers with less frequency.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Writers Talk - Caroline Hagood
It’s my pleasure to introduce this week’s writer, Caroline Hagood. Ms Hagood is yet another writer I’ve meet in the Twitterverse—you writers out there who aren’t on Twitter, I must say you’re missing out on lots of smart & supportive folks. Since meeting Caroline on Twitter, I’ve also begun to follow her excellent Culture Sandwich, an aptly named blog that I recommend highly. Ms Hagood’s writerly bio reads as follows:
Caroline Hagood is a poet and writer who spends way too much time on the internet. She teaches English and writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. She has written on arts and culture for The Guardian, Salon, the Huffington Post, and her own blog, Culture Sandwich, among others. Her poetry has appeared in Shooting the Rat (Hanging Loose Press), Movin' (Orchard Books), Huffington Post, Angelic Dynamo, Ginosko, and Manhattan Chronicles. She has also written a collection of poetry and a novel. She's always looking for adventure, the perfect slice of pizza, and new creative projects.
& now, on to the interview:
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
As a weird little girl who thought everything should be either magical or funny, and when it wasn’t, decided to write it that way.
Describe the creative process involved in any one piece you’ve written—this could be book, a story, a poem, an essay, etc.
Whenever I’m working on anything, the equation seems to be writing with a side order of life. So my typical Sunday would look something like this: Writing with brief interludes of eating anything in the chocolate family; watching old Twilight Zone episodes; crying over little things; laughing over little things; going people-watching; reading some big book that I feel I should have read already; calling my friend to tell her something funny; and googling for entirely too long.
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process? (this can be publishing in any form, from traditional book publishing to blogging, etc)
I should really hatch some green plan to recycle all my rejection letters into something extraordinary. Yet my relationship to the publishing process remains…hopeful. I’m certainly grateful to all the people who have agreed to publish my poems and articles.
Actually, publishing takes on a whole new meaning when you start your own blog. I remember being nervous at first, then hesitantly sending my words out into the blogo-verse. Suddenly, I got to assume all the roles in the little play of my own publication. I had a place to air my interests and found myself with more of them than ever. Having a blog is like being able to place each of your orphaned ideas in loving homes. It’s pretty powerful.
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
It’s a wonder my husband hasn’t left me. Just kidding (I think). I like to think that my all-encompassing fixation brings new things to the lives of those I love. This is true on good days. On bad days, I can be a moody one—one of those horrible writer stereotypes that’s true, in my case.
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to—if any? This may be a “real” or “virtual” (in more than one sense) community.
At this point, it’s definitely more virtual because most of my in-flesh friends aren’t writers. Of my cyber-writing-squad, I’d say we’re an obsessive, lonely, self-deprecating, goofy, excitable bunch, in love with information and putting together and taking things apart with our minds, who can take out a box of donuts in one sitting, oh wait, that last one is just me.
There’s one blogger in particular, Hansel Castro over at Hallucina, whose blog I love. I befriended him in the first flush of my blogging life, but have never met him, at least not in that boring, real-world sense.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
Besides taking over the writing world and reinventing language? No, but seriously, I would like to be able to complete the writing projects on my exceedingly long to-do-list, which I revise in my mind pretty much all the time, but especially while on stopped subways, in boring movies, or while being chewed out by authority figures, which happens more than you might think. It would also be nice to have those writings be appreciated by the public, but that might be asking too much. At this point, with Manhattan real estate being what it is, I might just settle for a room of my own.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
It would definitely be a trombone. No doubt about it. I was never one for subtle.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Don't Fall Asleep, A Dream Assassin Novel (excerpt) - Laura Eno
Excerpt from Don't Fall Asleep, A Dream Assassin Novel
Light bounced off alley walls in odd places amid the swirling tendrils of fog. Cassandra's heels clicked on cobblestone, the only sound in this junkie's paradise. She knew her quarry heard her footsteps, but imagined his mind tried to fit the sound into his fevered dream as something he created. She smiled. He was in for a nasty surprise.
The only smell in this jumbled place was the man's essence—a mixture of onion/cold/mold that made Cassandra's sinuses ache. Doorways hung at odd angles on either side of her but she ignored them. The man she came for sat against the wall at the end of the alley, a pool of light cast over him like a damn spotlight.
Bloodshot eyes studied her without enthusiasm; she wasn't the pre-pubescent type that got his rocks off.
"Who are you?"
"I'm Death." A blaster appeared in her hand. His eyes widened in understanding just before she shot him.
The alley disappeared, replaced by a gray nothingness that swept his stink away as well. Cassandra smiled in grim satisfaction before stepping out of the dead man's head. Another pedophile off the streets, dead from an apparent heart attack.
She awakened back in her own body, superstition driving her to a mirror to make sure she came back unchanged. Angle-cut auburn hair and startling blue eyes gazed back at her, allowing Cassandra to let go of the tension in her body.
Relaxing on the black leather sofa, Cassandra took in the high ceilinged room with its white walls and carpet, letting the minimalist effect wash over her. She stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows, gazing at the city lights far below her perch on the cliff. Peace stole over her with surroundings so unlike the jumbled constructions of other people's dreams.
One of the hazards of being a Dream Assassin, she thought, having to poke around in the sewers of someone else's creations. She climbed off the sofa and stretched. There was still much to do before the sun rose. She left the house to continue her search.
Cassandra headed to the underbelly of the city. She wanted to experience the heartbeat of the metropolis, not shiny metal and glass buildings full of tourists ogling the sights. The Dream Merchants didn't work up top. They plied their trade down below among the desperate. One of them would make a suitable partner, although she hadn't found one yet in two months of searching.
The nondescript bar Cassandra walked into seemed like dozens of others—smells of booze and sweat, her senses reeling from unsavory essences only a Dream Merchant could read. She blocked them out and wove her way through the tables in the dim light, sitting in a corner where she could watch the customers.
There. In the opposite corner. Another Dream Merchant, weaving dreams for sale as she once had. Cassandra studied the good-looking man as he dealt with a steady stream of customers. He must be an excellent weaver, with a clientele who raced over to him the moment they hit the door.
She let down her barrier for just a moment and watched his head pop up, scanning the crowd as he sensed her. Good. He's quick-witted.
During a lull in his work, Cassandra walked over to the dark-haired man. "Can I buy you a drink?"
He looked up at her with jade-green eyes and a sardonic smile on his face. "Sorry, lady. I don't swing that way."
She smiled back and dropped her mental barrier, watched his eyes first widen then narrow as he recognized what she was.
"I'm not asking for a date. I might have a business proposition for you though." She walked back to her table and let him think it over. His essence was the first one she'd found that Cassandra thought she could work with. He was cinnamon/warm/lemon with a bitter tinge to it. She wondered what had happened in his life to put the bitter there.
Menace rolled off a heavy-set man as he walked in the door, his pug-face scowl deepened further as he walked by the Merchant's table before disappearing into the back room. The man Cassandra waited for raised his glass at the bartender and strode over to her table, flipping a chair backwards before sitting on it.
"The name's Nathan Wilder. And yours?"
"Cassandra Dade." She watched his expression—cool smile but alert for any trouble. "What's the story on Mr. Big, Bad and Ugly?"
Nathan laughed and relaxed a fraction. "The owner thinks I should give him a cut of my profits for using his bar."
Cassandra chuckled and twirled ice in her glass, taking in the faded red wallpaper and burned-out lights above the liquor display.
"You probably bring in more customers than he would ever see without you."
"He knows that, but he doesn't believe in Dream Merchants. He thinks I'm dealing in illicits and complains that Enforcement will find out."
"Did you ever weave a dream for him?"
"Sure, I did. He called it the power of suggestion, although he did admit it was unlike any dream he'd ever had." Nathan shrugged and downed his drink. "I haven't seen you around and I know most of the Merchants. What's your specialty?"
Cassandra observed him while he studied her with greater interest than he would care to admit. That told her he was bored with his present circumstances and looking to put his talent to something new. Otherwise, he would have defended his territory against her.
"I'm looking for a partner. If you're interested, meet me Topside tomorrow in the Golem Café at noon." She stood to leave, meeting his puzzled expression with a smile. "As for my specialty, I don't weave dreams anymore—I enter them."
Light bounced off alley walls in odd places amid the swirling tendrils of fog. Cassandra's heels clicked on cobblestone, the only sound in this junkie's paradise. She knew her quarry heard her footsteps, but imagined his mind tried to fit the sound into his fevered dream as something he created. She smiled. He was in for a nasty surprise.
The only smell in this jumbled place was the man's essence—a mixture of onion/cold/mold that made Cassandra's sinuses ache. Doorways hung at odd angles on either side of her but she ignored them. The man she came for sat against the wall at the end of the alley, a pool of light cast over him like a damn spotlight.
Bloodshot eyes studied her without enthusiasm; she wasn't the pre-pubescent type that got his rocks off.
"Who are you?"
"I'm Death." A blaster appeared in her hand. His eyes widened in understanding just before she shot him.
The alley disappeared, replaced by a gray nothingness that swept his stink away as well. Cassandra smiled in grim satisfaction before stepping out of the dead man's head. Another pedophile off the streets, dead from an apparent heart attack.
She awakened back in her own body, superstition driving her to a mirror to make sure she came back unchanged. Angle-cut auburn hair and startling blue eyes gazed back at her, allowing Cassandra to let go of the tension in her body.
Relaxing on the black leather sofa, Cassandra took in the high ceilinged room with its white walls and carpet, letting the minimalist effect wash over her. She stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows, gazing at the city lights far below her perch on the cliff. Peace stole over her with surroundings so unlike the jumbled constructions of other people's dreams.
One of the hazards of being a Dream Assassin, she thought, having to poke around in the sewers of someone else's creations. She climbed off the sofa and stretched. There was still much to do before the sun rose. She left the house to continue her search.
Cassandra headed to the underbelly of the city. She wanted to experience the heartbeat of the metropolis, not shiny metal and glass buildings full of tourists ogling the sights. The Dream Merchants didn't work up top. They plied their trade down below among the desperate. One of them would make a suitable partner, although she hadn't found one yet in two months of searching.
The nondescript bar Cassandra walked into seemed like dozens of others—smells of booze and sweat, her senses reeling from unsavory essences only a Dream Merchant could read. She blocked them out and wove her way through the tables in the dim light, sitting in a corner where she could watch the customers.
There. In the opposite corner. Another Dream Merchant, weaving dreams for sale as she once had. Cassandra studied the good-looking man as he dealt with a steady stream of customers. He must be an excellent weaver, with a clientele who raced over to him the moment they hit the door.
She let down her barrier for just a moment and watched his head pop up, scanning the crowd as he sensed her. Good. He's quick-witted.
During a lull in his work, Cassandra walked over to the dark-haired man. "Can I buy you a drink?"
He looked up at her with jade-green eyes and a sardonic smile on his face. "Sorry, lady. I don't swing that way."
She smiled back and dropped her mental barrier, watched his eyes first widen then narrow as he recognized what she was.
"I'm not asking for a date. I might have a business proposition for you though." She walked back to her table and let him think it over. His essence was the first one she'd found that Cassandra thought she could work with. He was cinnamon/warm/lemon with a bitter tinge to it. She wondered what had happened in his life to put the bitter there.
Menace rolled off a heavy-set man as he walked in the door, his pug-face scowl deepened further as he walked by the Merchant's table before disappearing into the back room. The man Cassandra waited for raised his glass at the bartender and strode over to her table, flipping a chair backwards before sitting on it.
"The name's Nathan Wilder. And yours?"
"Cassandra Dade." She watched his expression—cool smile but alert for any trouble. "What's the story on Mr. Big, Bad and Ugly?"
Nathan laughed and relaxed a fraction. "The owner thinks I should give him a cut of my profits for using his bar."
Cassandra chuckled and twirled ice in her glass, taking in the faded red wallpaper and burned-out lights above the liquor display.
"You probably bring in more customers than he would ever see without you."
"He knows that, but he doesn't believe in Dream Merchants. He thinks I'm dealing in illicits and complains that Enforcement will find out."
"Did you ever weave a dream for him?"
"Sure, I did. He called it the power of suggestion, although he did admit it was unlike any dream he'd ever had." Nathan shrugged and downed his drink. "I haven't seen you around and I know most of the Merchants. What's your specialty?"
Cassandra observed him while he studied her with greater interest than he would care to admit. That told her he was bored with his present circumstances and looking to put his talent to something new. Otherwise, he would have defended his territory against her.
"I'm looking for a partner. If you're interested, meet me Topside tomorrow in the Golem Café at noon." She stood to leave, meeting his puzzled expression with a smile. "As for my specialty, I don't weave dreams anymore—I enter them."
Writers Talk - Laura Eno
Happy Thursday, one & all. We're back with the first Writers Talk interview of the New Year, & it's my pleasure to introduce Laura Eno, a fiction writer with numerous publications—her Goodreads author page lists five novels & eight fiction anthologies.
Laura Eno lives in Florida with a very tolerant husband, three skulking cats and an absurdly happy dog. She has a pet from the Underworld named Jezebel and a skull called Mr. Fluffy who help her write novels late at night. Please visit her strange imagination at A Shift in Dimensions. Links to all of Laura Eno's published work can be found on her blog. In addition, you can read an excerpt from Ms Eno's novel Don't Fall Asleep: A Dream Assassin Novel over on the companion Writers Talk blog. Please do check that out!
I have to thank Karen Schindler, whose Writers Talk interview appeared here last month for connecting Laura with Robert Frost's Banjo. The result was the following delightful interview:
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
I think it was when the voices in my head tied me to a chair and demanded a venue of their own. Since then, we've enjoyed an uneasy truce; they speak and I write down what they say. If I ignore them, my sleep is severely disrupted and the arguments become verbal. It's not a pretty sight.
Describe the creative process involved in any one piece you’ve written—this could be book, a story, a poem, an essay, etc.
I will jot down story ideas, creating a simple outline, but the characters grow rather organically from there. They have much to say when I shut up and listen to them, weaving intricate stories of wonder.
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process? (this can be publishing in any form, from traditional book publishing to blogging, etc)
Ah, relationships… First, and foremost, I have a relationship to my story. For that reason, I am an indie author. That means I have complete control and responsibility over content. My readers are the only ones judging my story's worth.
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
Being a writer has strengthened my relationships. I'm happier for having the outlet and my family can now put a label on my strangeness. "Well, she's a writer" as explanation smoothes over many a faux pas—especially if I'm staring off into space or examining a knife with a maniacal look on my face.
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to—if any? This may be a “real” or “virtual” (in more than one sense) community.
Blogging, Twitter and Facebook have opened a wonderful world of like-minded friendships for me. Many writers are introverts and I am no exception. The online community feeds my soul and understands me in a way that I've never encountered before. I'm no longer sitting in the dark, afraid to reach out.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
I plan to keep writing, both short stories and novels, always looking to connect with my readers. Bringing laughter and tears to those who would immerse themselves in my work is the ultimate thrill for me. It is what keeps me breathing.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
Definitely drums. The beat of a heart, the pounding of fear, the light tap of laughter—all pulsating in the rhythm of life.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Writers Talk - Karen Schindler
Karen Schindler writes even when she's not writing. A wonderer, a cherisher of experiences, she lives life with gleeful abandon and pulls others into her wake. Karen has been or is about to be published at Eclectic Flash, Voxpoetica, WeirdYear, 52 Stitches, Flashes in the Dark, InkNode, Negative Suck, Blink/Ink and various other ezines and print anthologies. You can find Karen and more of her work at Miscellaneous Yammering, or visit her hanging out as the managing editor of Pow Fast Flash Fiction when she's not busy ghostwriting and editing for a living.
Karen says: "Be sure to visit me at Miscellaneous Yammering where there's always something to make you smile." I concur; & I add: don't forget to check out Karen's poem "Counter Clockwise" over on the Writers Talk blog!
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to?
Oh my gosh, I love the online writing community. I remember the day when I first connected with a group of people who were as prone to flights of fancy as I am. There was a big multi- part fast and furious conversation going on and smack dab in the middle of it, I stopped, dumbstruck with the joy of the experience and said aloud to an empty room “ My god, I’ve found my people.” It was like being struck in the head by lighting, or suddenly falling in love. Or it might have been a bit like those people who snap and run through their old workplace with an uzi….but I think it was more like the first two scenarios.
Describe your creative process?
Most days I feel like there is a meteor headed toward my house and the words, much like rats fleeing a sinking ship, have to get themselves onto the page before the impact. Then there are days where there are no words at all. On those days I go to the park and hug trees. It's a win/win situation.
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
I’ve been writing my whole life, but I didn’t describe myself as a writer until the last couple of years. These days I introduce myself at gatherings as a writer/editor. The only problem with that is people now pitch me ideas, or ask if they can just “send me a little something to look at” when I have a minute. When that happens it makes me think that I might know a little bit about how a doctor feels when he gets backed into a corner at a cocktail party so the person can show him their rash.
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process?
I think anything that’s been released into the world whether electronically or in print has been published. I don’t understand the hesitation that people have when they hedge their credits with the words “but it was only published online.” There are an amazing amount of opportunities to get your work read on the web. Some print publications have a smaller audience than a lot of ezines. If you create it, and they come to read it, you’ve done the job you set out to do. You’ve unleashed your words into the reader’s imagination, and that’s publishing as far as I’m concerned.
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
There are two things that I have to watch out for A) noticing the glassy eyed stare of the poor trapped civilian [read: “non writer”] I’ve button holed and duct taped to a chair to make them, once again, listen while I discuss my latest WIP and B) writing people I know into my stories either consciously or unconsciously before the statute of limitations runs out on whatever it was that they did.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
My long term goal is to one day have my best selling novel on the shelves of the paperback department of any grocery store that I go into. If the buyer who provides books to Giant Eagle has heard of you, then you’re pretty much a household name.
And….most importantly…. in my book jacket cover I want to be on a pony.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
A flugelhorn.
Karen says: "Be sure to visit me at Miscellaneous Yammering where there's always something to make you smile." I concur; & I add: don't forget to check out Karen's poem "Counter Clockwise" over on the Writers Talk blog!
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to?
Oh my gosh, I love the online writing community. I remember the day when I first connected with a group of people who were as prone to flights of fancy as I am. There was a big multi- part fast and furious conversation going on and smack dab in the middle of it, I stopped, dumbstruck with the joy of the experience and said aloud to an empty room “ My god, I’ve found my people.” It was like being struck in the head by lighting, or suddenly falling in love. Or it might have been a bit like those people who snap and run through their old workplace with an uzi….but I think it was more like the first two scenarios.
Describe your creative process?
Most days I feel like there is a meteor headed toward my house and the words, much like rats fleeing a sinking ship, have to get themselves onto the page before the impact. Then there are days where there are no words at all. On those days I go to the park and hug trees. It's a win/win situation.
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
I’ve been writing my whole life, but I didn’t describe myself as a writer until the last couple of years. These days I introduce myself at gatherings as a writer/editor. The only problem with that is people now pitch me ideas, or ask if they can just “send me a little something to look at” when I have a minute. When that happens it makes me think that I might know a little bit about how a doctor feels when he gets backed into a corner at a cocktail party so the person can show him their rash.
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process?
I think anything that’s been released into the world whether electronically or in print has been published. I don’t understand the hesitation that people have when they hedge their credits with the words “but it was only published online.” There are an amazing amount of opportunities to get your work read on the web. Some print publications have a smaller audience than a lot of ezines. If you create it, and they come to read it, you’ve done the job you set out to do. You’ve unleashed your words into the reader’s imagination, and that’s publishing as far as I’m concerned.
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
There are two things that I have to watch out for A) noticing the glassy eyed stare of the poor trapped civilian [read: “non writer”] I’ve button holed and duct taped to a chair to make them, once again, listen while I discuss my latest WIP and B) writing people I know into my stories either consciously or unconsciously before the statute of limitations runs out on whatever it was that they did.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
My long term goal is to one day have my best selling novel on the shelves of the paperback department of any grocery store that I go into. If the buyer who provides books to Giant Eagle has heard of you, then you’re pretty much a household name.
And….most importantly…. in my book jacket cover I want to be on a pony.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
A flugelhorn.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Meet Me in Nuthatch - Chapter 1 - Jacqueline T. Lynch
MEET ME IN NUTHATCH
CHAPTER ONE
Everett Campbell wanted more time. That’s all. He walked the mile into town instead of taking his truck. The icy slush slopped over the tops of his work boots and stung his ankles. He did not mind. It made him feel tough, indomitable.
That feeling indomitable came at so little cost was nice, but made him feel somewhat guilty as well. He had been raised to believe effort was a virtue—maybe the biggest virtue.
Stepping, occasionally sliding down Campbell Road like an unsteady surfer onto Bookbinder Street, Everett ran over in his mind the list of the things he had to say.
Then his work boot traction departed, and his long legs flew out before him in a sciatic-inspired ballet. He landed hard. The back of his head bounced on the ice a couple of times. Fortunately, his rear end took the brunt of it.
Everett heard the slow crunch of snow tires before he saw the accusing headlight beams approaching. With relief, he realized it was Marv’s car, and not Roy Murphy’s. He began to flail his arms and legs rhythmically, as to appear to be making a snow angel.
Marv stuck his head out the car window, guffawed, and shook his head.
“Jeez, Ev, you scared me for a minute. I thought I was coming up to some dead guy. Last thing I need right now. Stop being such a joker, will ya? You’re impossible!” Marv chuckled, rolled up his window, and drove on to the meeting. Everett noted that Marv did not offer him a ride to the meeting to which they were both going. But, he reminded himself, he still needed time to think, even if his rear end was wet and freezing.
He did a systems check on his body, while the clear, deep black sky and the distant, crystal white stars created the classic tableau above his head. He hesitated only briefly to give them notice. They were there, same as always. Check. He got up with relief and gratitude that he was unhurt, marveling at it, and congratulating himself for it.
For Everett, there was only one concern, the ridiculous solution he had planned to solve their problem. It being ridiculous was what really appealed to him.
The plastic, pink, faux-Dickens lanterns dangled in a more or less straight line down the road, now that he had turned onto Bookbinder Street. They bobbed and waved in the wind, their symmetry broken up only by the few that were cracked or had gone missing over the decades since they first appeared to herald the Christmas season, and from economy as much as sentiment, reused annually. Some in town voiced the opinion that the plastic lanterns had never been exactly attractive, but all privately agreed it would not be Christmas without them. Status quo was, for them, a form of sentiment.
Everett volunteered to help hang the lanterns on every light post that still had a bracket for them, just as his father and uncle had done since the 1950s, when they were purchased.
Everett stopped at the lantern that bobbed in the wind before the entrance to the old school. Built in 1902, the Nuthatch School had closed in middle 1990s when the town became absorbed into the county regional school system. The building that had once held all twelve grades in eight rooms and a hall now housed the Town Offices, the Senior Center, the library, and the storage closet where they kept the Christmas lanterns when it was not Christmas.
Town meeting tonight. About twenty people showed up, generally the same twenty people as always, give or take. The three town selectmen sat behind the big library table at the head of the old kindergarten classroom: Norm Hooker, Marv Howe, and Miss Finchley. All wore their coats, because they did not heat the building over the Christmas holiday.
“Any new business?” Norm asked, “Or can we go home?”
Everett squished himself into an old student desk. A man behind him asked, “When are we going to get town water up my way, Norm?”
“That’s old business,” Norm said, his bushy eyebrows slamming together as he frowned, “and stop asking me. Yes?”
Everett had raised his hand.
“For godssake, whad’ya want, Everett? Just speak up.”
“I got a proposal,” Everett said.
He could feel the room skid to a stop.
“A proposal?” Norm rested his chin on his hand, because he was tired. It made him look cute somehow. “Well, Everett, it’s been the longest time since we had one of those.” There was some perfunctory chuckling, but that was as funny as Norm could ever make himself be, so without milking it, he continued, “What is it?”
Everett stood, like in the Norman Rockwell painting "Freedom of Speech," but not out of respect; the student desk was maiming him.
“I think we should make it a new town ordinance that we all have to live like it was 1904.”
They were hesitant to laugh at first, because it was cold, and because Everett had no reputation for being terribly funny. He certainly was no Norm. What he lacked in delivery, he usually made up for in execution. Everett Campbell was infamous for being the best practical joker in town.
“April Fools is four months away, Ev. And I liked your suggestion last April better, that we make a new town water tank out of Legos.”
“Do you still have the model you made?”
Now there was laughing, more like perfunctory huffing. Their laughter expressed their individual and communal reserve.
“That was a joke then, Norm,” Everett said, “This isn’t.”
“Then it’s stupid. Sit down. Anybody else? Oh, Miss Finchley, don’t bother putting that in the minutes.”
Miss Finchley paused, fountain pen in hand, a green, celluloid Esterbrook she had owned since 1954. She filled the bladder by a small lever on the side. Everybody admired it, took their children to see it while Miss Finchley patiently gave demonstrations neatly writing her name. She had given out more autographs in thirty years than Elvis and Elizabeth Taylor in their whole careers combined.
“You haven’t heard me out,” Everett said, “I want to explain.”
“Explain what?”
“The man has the floor, Norm,” Miss Finchley said.
“He’s not making sense.”
“Doesn’t have to make a bit of sense. That’s democracy.”
Norm sighed and rolled his eyes to the broken ceiling tiles. Miss Finchley was not to be contradicted.
“Fine. Everett, please make it quick. It’s wicked cold in here.”
“Why did we have to have a meeting when there’s no heat?” someone said from the back of the room. “This meeting couldn’t have waited until next month?”
“You’re out of order, Josh. It’s Everett’s turn,” Miss Finchley said.
“Sorry, Miss Finchley. Sorry, Ev.”
“Go ahead, Everett,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Finchley. Thank you. Well, we were watching Meet Me In St. Louis on TV, my family was, on Christmas Day. My daughter loved it. She’s eleven.”
“We watched It’s a Wonderful Life,” Louisa Conroy said, shaking a box of Tic Tacs like a maraca and popping several at once.
“Um, yeah, we saw that five or six times in the past couple of weeks, too,” Everett continued, “But, on Christmas Day, we watched Meet Me in St. Louis. Reception was pretty good, too, with the plating factory shut down in Worsted for the holiday.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Sam Jurado said, “Reception was quite good. Uncharacteristically good.”
“Hey, yeah, Norm, I got an issue to raise,” Big Fat Jerry called, “when are we going to get cable?”
“You go and call the cable company and have them laugh in your face, Jerry,” Norm said, “I’m tired of doing it.”
“Were you watching Meet Me in St. Louis?” Kenny Mislow asked Sam Jurado.
“No, I didn’t find out that was on until it was almost over. I was watching some German choir singing German Christmas carols, from somewhere over in Germany.”
“That was on PBS.”
“Yeah.”
Everett looked from one speaker to another, and finally found an opportunity to interrupt, “So, anyway . . .”
“It was nice, the Christmas carols, but it was all in German, so you didn’t know what they were saying.”
“They didn’t have the words on the bottom?”
“Yeah, only they had them in German. Assholes.”
Everett tried again.
“About the movie . . .”
“Yes, that was a good movie,” Sam said, “I missed the Trolley Song part. I turned it on after that.”
Bud Markey, owner of the small bar on upper Bookbinder Street, quaintly named in a moment of cheery inspiration “Bud’s House of Beer,” sat on the windowsill, where it was even colder, but he was too big for the student desks.
“I like that part,” Bud said. His voice carried a wistful tone.
“Me, too,” Sam said. “Judy was so young.”
Norm had had it. He began to put on the mittens his mother made him. “Folks, let’s let Everett say his piece and then we can go home and warm up.”
The room quieted with dutiful swiftness and a dubious show of respect, and Everett felt the discomfort again of everybody’s full attention.
“Yes, it was a good movie,” Everett continued, “But, my point is, I got an idea that we could try to make an ordinance to live like they did in the 1904, like in the movie.”
“You want us to run around singing ‘The Trolley Song’?” Norm was on a roll tonight. More chuckling.
“I know most of it.”
“Shut up, Bud.”
“Watch your stinkin’ mouth.”
“Norm,” Everett said, “today my last best friend drove out of town with his family to start over . . .”
“Hey!”
“Oh, no Bud, I didn’t mean you aren’t my best friend, you are.”
“I like that.”
“I’m talking about David Pellier. He and his family left town today. We went to school together. Well, he’s sure not the first to leave, is he? He probably won’t be the last.”
“I still thought I was your best friend.”
“You are, dammit! Jeez, will you let me finish!” Everett swiped his toque off, and brushed his gloved hand through his thick, black hair, now infiltrated with gray.
“My kids have practically no one to play with anymore. They’ve got to ride a bus an hour and a half every day to the regional school. We got sixty-three people living here, no industry, one variety store with a gas pump. No money for roads or water, maintenance, or much of anything. We have to do something. Why not this?”
“Because it’s nuts, Everett.”
“Not that the movie wasn’t good, though.”
“I like It’s a Wonderful Life better. Why don’t we do that one?”
“It’s not the movie,” Everett said, “It’s the idea. It’s for tourism.”
“Tourism? Why would anyone want to come here?”
“Exactly. What is there that’s here? What do we got? We don’t have much land for farming, with the whole town practically sliding off the north side of the mountain. We don’t have a lot of zoned property for industry or business. State forest takes up a good chunk of the land area. But tourism--that’s something else. You don’t need much of anything to be a tourist attraction.”
“He’s right,” Bud said, “Some people will go anyplace just to say they been there.”
“My cousin went out to Los Angeles, California, to take a picture of himself at those concrete steps where Laurel and Hardy had to carry up a piano,” Sam Jurado said. Everybody looked at him for an even longer period of time than after his Judy Garland remark. “Well, he did. He likes Laurel and Hardy. He has a picture of them in his kitchen.”
“Think of the Amish, living the way they do, for generations,” Everett said, trying to pull everybody back on track, feeling his own way as he went.
“That’s their religion. They’re used to it.”
“Yeah, but what I mean is, think of the people driving all over Amish Country just to watch these people doing nothing but being themselves.”
“That’s a little extreme, Ev.”
“Think of Hershey, Pennsylvania. Chocolate factory. Or, take a place like Disney World, that’s a completely made up place. Or think of Plimouth Plantation or Sturbridge Village, recreations of places set in certain times.”
Miss Finchley had been watching Everett, a slight smile softening the hard line of her jaw, noting, but not commenting on the incongruity of lumping Disney World with an Amish community. She asked, “Why 1904, Everett?”
“It was a long time ago--that’s all, really. A hundred years ago. People think of the old days as better. Romantic. Think of the stir we’d cause by choosing to conduct our public business . . . just public, I’m saying. People can still do whatever they want in their own homes, but if we were to wear those old-fashioned clothes on the outside and just . . .”
“Like one of them reality TV shows? I hate those. I hate people who watch ‘em--and worse, I hate people who watch ‘em and talk all about ‘em at work.”
“Are we going to have to eat bugs, do stunts, and be followed around by camera crews?”
“No! I’m just saying, time is running out. We have to try something.”
Bud wiggled on the counter by the window, trying to get comfortable.
“No TV, and horseshit all over the roads, Ev. Oh, sorry, Miss Finchley. I mean poop. Oh, uh, sorry, again. Anyway, Ev, is that what you want?”
“I want to live a good life in the same place my grandparents and great-grandparents lived. I don’t know why I can’t. They had a future here and I don’t. None of us do. How much business are you doing at the bar, Bud?”
“You mean other than Marv?”
“We’d make fools of ourselves.” Norm said. “What’ll people think of us?”
“I think sometimes nobody else knows we’re here, Norm.”
“Are you making a motion, Everett?” Miss Finchley said, prompting him.
“Yes, Miss Finchley. I propose we conduct public business within the town limits as if Nuthatch was living in 1904.”
“Who would be the judge as to what was accurate and what wasn’t?”
“Miss Finchley.”
Miss Finchley smiled slightly with only a quick jerk at the corner of her mouth that always foreshadowed her wry delivery.
“Contrary to popular belief, I am not that old.”
“He just means you’re knowledgeable, Miss Finchley. Everybody knows that. Is anybody going to second this dumbass motion?”
It was growing colder, so several people seconded at the same time, arms reaching for the sky as if they were all being held up at gunpoint, hoping to speed things up.
“A motion has been made and seconded. All those in favor?”
Jacqueline T. Lynch
© 2010
The novel Meet Me in Nuthatch is available as an ebook thru Amazon.com & as a pdf thru Smashwords
CHAPTER ONE
Everett Campbell wanted more time. That’s all. He walked the mile into town instead of taking his truck. The icy slush slopped over the tops of his work boots and stung his ankles. He did not mind. It made him feel tough, indomitable.
That feeling indomitable came at so little cost was nice, but made him feel somewhat guilty as well. He had been raised to believe effort was a virtue—maybe the biggest virtue.
Stepping, occasionally sliding down Campbell Road like an unsteady surfer onto Bookbinder Street, Everett ran over in his mind the list of the things he had to say.
Then his work boot traction departed, and his long legs flew out before him in a sciatic-inspired ballet. He landed hard. The back of his head bounced on the ice a couple of times. Fortunately, his rear end took the brunt of it.
Everett heard the slow crunch of snow tires before he saw the accusing headlight beams approaching. With relief, he realized it was Marv’s car, and not Roy Murphy’s. He began to flail his arms and legs rhythmically, as to appear to be making a snow angel.
Marv stuck his head out the car window, guffawed, and shook his head.
“Jeez, Ev, you scared me for a minute. I thought I was coming up to some dead guy. Last thing I need right now. Stop being such a joker, will ya? You’re impossible!” Marv chuckled, rolled up his window, and drove on to the meeting. Everett noted that Marv did not offer him a ride to the meeting to which they were both going. But, he reminded himself, he still needed time to think, even if his rear end was wet and freezing.
He did a systems check on his body, while the clear, deep black sky and the distant, crystal white stars created the classic tableau above his head. He hesitated only briefly to give them notice. They were there, same as always. Check. He got up with relief and gratitude that he was unhurt, marveling at it, and congratulating himself for it.
For Everett, there was only one concern, the ridiculous solution he had planned to solve their problem. It being ridiculous was what really appealed to him.
The plastic, pink, faux-Dickens lanterns dangled in a more or less straight line down the road, now that he had turned onto Bookbinder Street. They bobbed and waved in the wind, their symmetry broken up only by the few that were cracked or had gone missing over the decades since they first appeared to herald the Christmas season, and from economy as much as sentiment, reused annually. Some in town voiced the opinion that the plastic lanterns had never been exactly attractive, but all privately agreed it would not be Christmas without them. Status quo was, for them, a form of sentiment.
Everett volunteered to help hang the lanterns on every light post that still had a bracket for them, just as his father and uncle had done since the 1950s, when they were purchased.
Everett stopped at the lantern that bobbed in the wind before the entrance to the old school. Built in 1902, the Nuthatch School had closed in middle 1990s when the town became absorbed into the county regional school system. The building that had once held all twelve grades in eight rooms and a hall now housed the Town Offices, the Senior Center, the library, and the storage closet where they kept the Christmas lanterns when it was not Christmas.
Town meeting tonight. About twenty people showed up, generally the same twenty people as always, give or take. The three town selectmen sat behind the big library table at the head of the old kindergarten classroom: Norm Hooker, Marv Howe, and Miss Finchley. All wore their coats, because they did not heat the building over the Christmas holiday.
“Any new business?” Norm asked, “Or can we go home?”
Everett squished himself into an old student desk. A man behind him asked, “When are we going to get town water up my way, Norm?”
“That’s old business,” Norm said, his bushy eyebrows slamming together as he frowned, “and stop asking me. Yes?”
Everett had raised his hand.
“For godssake, whad’ya want, Everett? Just speak up.”
“I got a proposal,” Everett said.
He could feel the room skid to a stop.
“A proposal?” Norm rested his chin on his hand, because he was tired. It made him look cute somehow. “Well, Everett, it’s been the longest time since we had one of those.” There was some perfunctory chuckling, but that was as funny as Norm could ever make himself be, so without milking it, he continued, “What is it?”
Everett stood, like in the Norman Rockwell painting "Freedom of Speech," but not out of respect; the student desk was maiming him.
“I think we should make it a new town ordinance that we all have to live like it was 1904.”
They were hesitant to laugh at first, because it was cold, and because Everett had no reputation for being terribly funny. He certainly was no Norm. What he lacked in delivery, he usually made up for in execution. Everett Campbell was infamous for being the best practical joker in town.
“April Fools is four months away, Ev. And I liked your suggestion last April better, that we make a new town water tank out of Legos.”
“Do you still have the model you made?”
Now there was laughing, more like perfunctory huffing. Their laughter expressed their individual and communal reserve.
“That was a joke then, Norm,” Everett said, “This isn’t.”
“Then it’s stupid. Sit down. Anybody else? Oh, Miss Finchley, don’t bother putting that in the minutes.”
Miss Finchley paused, fountain pen in hand, a green, celluloid Esterbrook she had owned since 1954. She filled the bladder by a small lever on the side. Everybody admired it, took their children to see it while Miss Finchley patiently gave demonstrations neatly writing her name. She had given out more autographs in thirty years than Elvis and Elizabeth Taylor in their whole careers combined.
“You haven’t heard me out,” Everett said, “I want to explain.”
“Explain what?”
“The man has the floor, Norm,” Miss Finchley said.
“He’s not making sense.”
“Doesn’t have to make a bit of sense. That’s democracy.”
Norm sighed and rolled his eyes to the broken ceiling tiles. Miss Finchley was not to be contradicted.
“Fine. Everett, please make it quick. It’s wicked cold in here.”
“Why did we have to have a meeting when there’s no heat?” someone said from the back of the room. “This meeting couldn’t have waited until next month?”
“You’re out of order, Josh. It’s Everett’s turn,” Miss Finchley said.
“Sorry, Miss Finchley. Sorry, Ev.”
“Go ahead, Everett,” she said.
“Yes, Miss Finchley. Thank you. Well, we were watching Meet Me In St. Louis on TV, my family was, on Christmas Day. My daughter loved it. She’s eleven.”
“We watched It’s a Wonderful Life,” Louisa Conroy said, shaking a box of Tic Tacs like a maraca and popping several at once.
“Um, yeah, we saw that five or six times in the past couple of weeks, too,” Everett continued, “But, on Christmas Day, we watched Meet Me in St. Louis. Reception was pretty good, too, with the plating factory shut down in Worsted for the holiday.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Sam Jurado said, “Reception was quite good. Uncharacteristically good.”
“Hey, yeah, Norm, I got an issue to raise,” Big Fat Jerry called, “when are we going to get cable?”
“You go and call the cable company and have them laugh in your face, Jerry,” Norm said, “I’m tired of doing it.”
“Were you watching Meet Me in St. Louis?” Kenny Mislow asked Sam Jurado.
“No, I didn’t find out that was on until it was almost over. I was watching some German choir singing German Christmas carols, from somewhere over in Germany.”
“That was on PBS.”
“Yeah.”
Everett looked from one speaker to another, and finally found an opportunity to interrupt, “So, anyway . . .”
“It was nice, the Christmas carols, but it was all in German, so you didn’t know what they were saying.”
“They didn’t have the words on the bottom?”
“Yeah, only they had them in German. Assholes.”
Everett tried again.
“About the movie . . .”
“Yes, that was a good movie,” Sam said, “I missed the Trolley Song part. I turned it on after that.”
Bud Markey, owner of the small bar on upper Bookbinder Street, quaintly named in a moment of cheery inspiration “Bud’s House of Beer,” sat on the windowsill, where it was even colder, but he was too big for the student desks.
“I like that part,” Bud said. His voice carried a wistful tone.
“Me, too,” Sam said. “Judy was so young.”
Norm had had it. He began to put on the mittens his mother made him. “Folks, let’s let Everett say his piece and then we can go home and warm up.”
The room quieted with dutiful swiftness and a dubious show of respect, and Everett felt the discomfort again of everybody’s full attention.
“Yes, it was a good movie,” Everett continued, “But, my point is, I got an idea that we could try to make an ordinance to live like they did in the 1904, like in the movie.”
“You want us to run around singing ‘The Trolley Song’?” Norm was on a roll tonight. More chuckling.
“I know most of it.”
“Shut up, Bud.”
“Watch your stinkin’ mouth.”
“Norm,” Everett said, “today my last best friend drove out of town with his family to start over . . .”
“Hey!”
“Oh, no Bud, I didn’t mean you aren’t my best friend, you are.”
“I like that.”
“I’m talking about David Pellier. He and his family left town today. We went to school together. Well, he’s sure not the first to leave, is he? He probably won’t be the last.”
“I still thought I was your best friend.”
“You are, dammit! Jeez, will you let me finish!” Everett swiped his toque off, and brushed his gloved hand through his thick, black hair, now infiltrated with gray.
“My kids have practically no one to play with anymore. They’ve got to ride a bus an hour and a half every day to the regional school. We got sixty-three people living here, no industry, one variety store with a gas pump. No money for roads or water, maintenance, or much of anything. We have to do something. Why not this?”
“Because it’s nuts, Everett.”
“Not that the movie wasn’t good, though.”
“I like It’s a Wonderful Life better. Why don’t we do that one?”
“It’s not the movie,” Everett said, “It’s the idea. It’s for tourism.”
“Tourism? Why would anyone want to come here?”
“Exactly. What is there that’s here? What do we got? We don’t have much land for farming, with the whole town practically sliding off the north side of the mountain. We don’t have a lot of zoned property for industry or business. State forest takes up a good chunk of the land area. But tourism--that’s something else. You don’t need much of anything to be a tourist attraction.”
“He’s right,” Bud said, “Some people will go anyplace just to say they been there.”
“My cousin went out to Los Angeles, California, to take a picture of himself at those concrete steps where Laurel and Hardy had to carry up a piano,” Sam Jurado said. Everybody looked at him for an even longer period of time than after his Judy Garland remark. “Well, he did. He likes Laurel and Hardy. He has a picture of them in his kitchen.”
“Think of the Amish, living the way they do, for generations,” Everett said, trying to pull everybody back on track, feeling his own way as he went.
“That’s their religion. They’re used to it.”
“Yeah, but what I mean is, think of the people driving all over Amish Country just to watch these people doing nothing but being themselves.”
“That’s a little extreme, Ev.”
“Think of Hershey, Pennsylvania. Chocolate factory. Or, take a place like Disney World, that’s a completely made up place. Or think of Plimouth Plantation or Sturbridge Village, recreations of places set in certain times.”
Miss Finchley had been watching Everett, a slight smile softening the hard line of her jaw, noting, but not commenting on the incongruity of lumping Disney World with an Amish community. She asked, “Why 1904, Everett?”
“It was a long time ago--that’s all, really. A hundred years ago. People think of the old days as better. Romantic. Think of the stir we’d cause by choosing to conduct our public business . . . just public, I’m saying. People can still do whatever they want in their own homes, but if we were to wear those old-fashioned clothes on the outside and just . . .”
“Like one of them reality TV shows? I hate those. I hate people who watch ‘em--and worse, I hate people who watch ‘em and talk all about ‘em at work.”
“Are we going to have to eat bugs, do stunts, and be followed around by camera crews?”
“No! I’m just saying, time is running out. We have to try something.”
Bud wiggled on the counter by the window, trying to get comfortable.
“No TV, and horseshit all over the roads, Ev. Oh, sorry, Miss Finchley. I mean poop. Oh, uh, sorry, again. Anyway, Ev, is that what you want?”
“I want to live a good life in the same place my grandparents and great-grandparents lived. I don’t know why I can’t. They had a future here and I don’t. None of us do. How much business are you doing at the bar, Bud?”
“You mean other than Marv?”
“We’d make fools of ourselves.” Norm said. “What’ll people think of us?”
“I think sometimes nobody else knows we’re here, Norm.”
“Are you making a motion, Everett?” Miss Finchley said, prompting him.
“Yes, Miss Finchley. I propose we conduct public business within the town limits as if Nuthatch was living in 1904.”
“Who would be the judge as to what was accurate and what wasn’t?”
“Miss Finchley.”
Miss Finchley smiled slightly with only a quick jerk at the corner of her mouth that always foreshadowed her wry delivery.
“Contrary to popular belief, I am not that old.”
“He just means you’re knowledgeable, Miss Finchley. Everybody knows that. Is anybody going to second this dumbass motion?”
It was growing colder, so several people seconded at the same time, arms reaching for the sky as if they were all being held up at gunpoint, hoping to speed things up.
“A motion has been made and seconded. All those in favor?”
Jacqueline T. Lynch
© 2010
The novel Meet Me in Nuthatch is available as an ebook thru Amazon.com & as a pdf thru Smashwords
Writers Talk - Jacqueline T. Lynch
I'm very happy to introduce today's featured Writers Talk interviewee, Jacqueline T. Lynch. Before getting into Ms Lynch's curriculum vitae, I want to say on a personal note that Jacqueline is one of the first cyber friends I made thru the Robert Frost's Banjo blog, & she has remained a steadfast supporter of the blog & my various ventures. When I drove to New England this spring I even had the pleasure of meeting Jacqueline!
Jacqueline T. Lynch has published articles and short fiction in regional & national publications, including the anthology “60 Seconds to Shine: 161 Monologues from Literature” (Smith & Kraus, 2007), North & South, Civil War Magazine, History Magazine & several plays with Eldridge Publishing, Brooklyn Publishers, & Dramatic Publishing Company, one of which has been translated into Dutch & produced in the Netherlands. Her novel “Meet Me in Nuthatch” is now available as an ebook through Amazon.com & Smashwords.
She also writes three blogs:
Another Old Movie Blog: A blog on classic films.
New England Travels: A blog on historical and cultural sites in New England.
Tragedy and Comedy in New England: A blog on theatre in New England, past and present.
website: www.JacquelineTLynch.com
Please check out Chapter 1 of Jacqueline T. Lynch's novel, Meet Me in Nuthatch on the Writers Talk blog. & so: here's Jacqueline!
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
I was about 14 years old. It was a Thursday. No, wait, a Friday. I don’t remember. The realization came to me unexpectedly, because I can be kind of obtuse. I always wrote from a very young age: stories, poems, notes on things that interested me. But, for all that, I never intended to be a writer. When I was a child, I wanted very much to be a zoologist. I was a devotee of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and I loved its host, Marlin Perkins. I think it was that dapper white mustache and the squared-off handkerchief in his breast pocket. Sexy. Then I saw myself as Jane Goodall, sitting on an African hillside at dawn in my khaki shorts and shirt, taking notes on chimpanzees.
It was the note-taking, the analysis that appealed (besides the whole animal thing). I did it all the time. I’m still a chronic jotter-down of things. I actually wrote compositions on things that interested me as a child, just for fun, not for school. It was how I explained things to myself, how I explored the world.
Then when I was 14 I graduated to the adult section of the city library from the children’s department, and started in on their shelf of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. I got hooked on mysteries, and starting writing one myself, longhand on notebook paper. I don’t think I ever finished it. It was harder than I thought it would be. But something clicked, something blew me away about the process of setting, and character, and dialogue, people doing and saying things that I could control, but could never say and do myself.
I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.
So here I sit, in my khaki shorts, typing a play script on a laptop, with one eye cast towards the male house sparrow sitting on my neighbor’s fence. I have an urge to note it in a logbook.
Describe the creative process involved in any one piece you’ve written—this could be book, a story, a poem, an essay, etc.
One slapstick comedy I wrote called “Delusions of Grandeur” sprang purely from a comment I’d heard about a parent telling her teenager that the she had to be out of the house when she reached 18. I suppose I could have found more serious and socially conscious message here, but instead, I found silliness. Deadlines can be funny when they’re not scaring the socks off you.
Writing a play is probably like surfing or riding a roller coaster. I say probably, because I neither surf nor ride roller coasters, but the excitement is immediate, the need for balance crucial, and you get right into the action. There is no slow development as you get through a novel; you have to hit the ground running knowing everything about the characters and expressing it through their own voices, which must be unique and individual. Every action on stage must be deliberate and for a specific reason. It’s all the character as expressed through dialogue, the author gets no omniscient voice. And because the play never really comes alive until the director and the actors get a hold of it, the writer becomes suddenly part of a team. That’s the most thrilling of all.
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process (this can be publishing in any form, from traditional book publishing to blogging, etc)
I’ve been a published and produced playwright for several years. I’ve enjoyed working with my editors and publishers very much. I would like to publish a novel, and by the time this piece is posted, I will have likely self-published as an e-book a humorous novel called “Meet Me in Nuthatch.”
The traditional publishing process is formal, a many-layered, highly structured game. There are many advantages to having the support of editors (and obviously, the support of a marketing and publicity department). My preference for publishing a novel would be through traditional publishing, but self publishing as it is gaining momentum today is intriguing. I am interested, and would like to be part of, both processes.
Blogging is personal, and its immediate communication to the readership makes it appealing for the sense of freedom it gives. I enjoy the immediacy of blogging and use it for a kind of writing practice. It’s also an outlet for other interests. I write three of them:
Another Old Movie Blog: A blog on classic films.
New England Travels: A blog on historical and cultural sites in New England.
Tragedy and Comedy in New England: A blog on theatre in New England, past and present.
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
I don’t think it has. Though I’ve enjoyed working and socializing with colleagues, most of the people closest to me are not writers. Some of them are awfully good storytellers, though.
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to—if any? This may be a “real” or “virtual” (in more than one sense) community.
Since I don’t belong to a writer’s group, I suppose we go back to blogging here. It’s a delightful community of diversity in experiences and interests. I visit many blogs, though I regret there isn’t time to comment on all of them as often as I’d like.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
I just take life one manuscript at a time.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
An oboe, I think. It has a distinct, oddball sound, but one that can be very pleasing, and easily recognizable. It seems like a minor chord, a less emphatic sound, not flashy or attention-getting, but it still manages to stand out from the rest of the orchestra just by doing its thing, a poignant mixture of somberness and silliness.
I might say a cello, too, for the low undercurrent of the minor chord aspect, but cellos have a greater timbre, and are much harder to take on a bus or subway. My writing, conversely, does not have as much timbre as a cello, but I’m pleased to say it is much easier to bring with you on public transportation.
Jacqueline T. Lynch has published articles and short fiction in regional & national publications, including the anthology “60 Seconds to Shine: 161 Monologues from Literature” (Smith & Kraus, 2007), North & South, Civil War Magazine, History Magazine & several plays with Eldridge Publishing, Brooklyn Publishers, & Dramatic Publishing Company, one of which has been translated into Dutch & produced in the Netherlands. Her novel “Meet Me in Nuthatch” is now available as an ebook through Amazon.com & Smashwords.
She also writes three blogs:
Another Old Movie Blog: A blog on classic films.
New England Travels: A blog on historical and cultural sites in New England.
Tragedy and Comedy in New England: A blog on theatre in New England, past and present.
website: www.JacquelineTLynch.com
Please check out Chapter 1 of Jacqueline T. Lynch's novel, Meet Me in Nuthatch on the Writers Talk blog. & so: here's Jacqueline!
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
I was about 14 years old. It was a Thursday. No, wait, a Friday. I don’t remember. The realization came to me unexpectedly, because I can be kind of obtuse. I always wrote from a very young age: stories, poems, notes on things that interested me. But, for all that, I never intended to be a writer. When I was a child, I wanted very much to be a zoologist. I was a devotee of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and I loved its host, Marlin Perkins. I think it was that dapper white mustache and the squared-off handkerchief in his breast pocket. Sexy. Then I saw myself as Jane Goodall, sitting on an African hillside at dawn in my khaki shorts and shirt, taking notes on chimpanzees.
It was the note-taking, the analysis that appealed (besides the whole animal thing). I did it all the time. I’m still a chronic jotter-down of things. I actually wrote compositions on things that interested me as a child, just for fun, not for school. It was how I explained things to myself, how I explored the world.
Then when I was 14 I graduated to the adult section of the city library from the children’s department, and started in on their shelf of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. I got hooked on mysteries, and starting writing one myself, longhand on notebook paper. I don’t think I ever finished it. It was harder than I thought it would be. But something clicked, something blew me away about the process of setting, and character, and dialogue, people doing and saying things that I could control, but could never say and do myself.
I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.
So here I sit, in my khaki shorts, typing a play script on a laptop, with one eye cast towards the male house sparrow sitting on my neighbor’s fence. I have an urge to note it in a logbook.
Describe the creative process involved in any one piece you’ve written—this could be book, a story, a poem, an essay, etc.
One slapstick comedy I wrote called “Delusions of Grandeur” sprang purely from a comment I’d heard about a parent telling her teenager that the she had to be out of the house when she reached 18. I suppose I could have found more serious and socially conscious message here, but instead, I found silliness. Deadlines can be funny when they’re not scaring the socks off you.
Writing a play is probably like surfing or riding a roller coaster. I say probably, because I neither surf nor ride roller coasters, but the excitement is immediate, the need for balance crucial, and you get right into the action. There is no slow development as you get through a novel; you have to hit the ground running knowing everything about the characters and expressing it through their own voices, which must be unique and individual. Every action on stage must be deliberate and for a specific reason. It’s all the character as expressed through dialogue, the author gets no omniscient voice. And because the play never really comes alive until the director and the actors get a hold of it, the writer becomes suddenly part of a team. That’s the most thrilling of all.
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process (this can be publishing in any form, from traditional book publishing to blogging, etc)
I’ve been a published and produced playwright for several years. I’ve enjoyed working with my editors and publishers very much. I would like to publish a novel, and by the time this piece is posted, I will have likely self-published as an e-book a humorous novel called “Meet Me in Nuthatch.”
The traditional publishing process is formal, a many-layered, highly structured game. There are many advantages to having the support of editors (and obviously, the support of a marketing and publicity department). My preference for publishing a novel would be through traditional publishing, but self publishing as it is gaining momentum today is intriguing. I am interested, and would like to be part of, both processes.
Blogging is personal, and its immediate communication to the readership makes it appealing for the sense of freedom it gives. I enjoy the immediacy of blogging and use it for a kind of writing practice. It’s also an outlet for other interests. I write three of them:
Another Old Movie Blog: A blog on classic films.
New England Travels: A blog on historical and cultural sites in New England.
Tragedy and Comedy in New England: A blog on theatre in New England, past and present.
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
I don’t think it has. Though I’ve enjoyed working and socializing with colleagues, most of the people closest to me are not writers. Some of them are awfully good storytellers, though.
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to—if any? This may be a “real” or “virtual” (in more than one sense) community.
Since I don’t belong to a writer’s group, I suppose we go back to blogging here. It’s a delightful community of diversity in experiences and interests. I visit many blogs, though I regret there isn’t time to comment on all of them as often as I’d like.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
I just take life one manuscript at a time.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
An oboe, I think. It has a distinct, oddball sound, but one that can be very pleasing, and easily recognizable. It seems like a minor chord, a less emphatic sound, not flashy or attention-getting, but it still manages to stand out from the rest of the orchestra just by doing its thing, a poignant mixture of somberness and silliness.
I might say a cello, too, for the low undercurrent of the minor chord aspect, but cellos have a greater timbre, and are much harder to take on a bus or subway. My writing, conversely, does not have as much timbre as a cello, but I’m pleased to say it is much easier to bring with you on public transportation.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Writer Talk - LE Leone
Please check out L.E. Leone's Writers Talk interview on Robert Frost's Banjo!
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Writers Talk - B.N.
I'm so very happy that my good friend B.N. has agreed to participate in the Writer's Talk series. My association with B.N. goes back to 1984, Charlottesville, VA, when she was in the final year of her poetry MFA & I was in my first year. B.N. really was the first person I connected with in the program, & we've maintained a friendship based on both writing & a shared wry view of reality. I have the greatest respect for B.N.'s writing talents, & it's been a privilege to make her work available here on Robert Frost's Banjo; it's also been heartening to see how many people have responded to her work, because I strongly believe her work should have a wide audience, & in fact much wider than what I can offer her here. Speaking of B.N.'s work being posted here: please check in next week for her story Still Life with Girl, which will be serialized from Monday September 27th thru Thursday Septemer 30th.
B.N.'s work has appeared in the following publications: Gulf Coast, The Gettysburg Review, The Cream City Review, Quarterly West, Memphis State Review, Seneca Review & Timbuktu. Speaking of Timbuktu, the production of another dear old friend, Molly Turner, you can read B.N.'s poem "A Story" from that publication over at the Writers Talk blog.
Without further ado, here's B.N.
When did you first realize your identity as a writer?
I wanted to write from an early age—maybe 12. I grew up in a home with thousands of books. They were perhaps the most significant possession—certainly afforded the most space. Books were sacred objects. This came from a history of the Holocaust—Nazis burned books. I understood pretty early, maybe six, that books were what separated the clean from the dirty, the compassionate from the brutish, the sacred from the profane.
My identity as a writer—me calling myself a writer has waxed and waned over the years. At points I found it deeply pretentious—would rather call myself a wife, a mother. I think that is because I am an Orthodox Jewish woman and our identity in our day to day lives is much more based on family.
Describe the creative process involved in any one piece you’ve written—this could be book, a story, a poem, an essay, etc.
I write reams—or it feels like reams. How I picture the character in a certain situation. I will also have themes—class and money, sexuality and age. In fiction I never plot—although I love an O. Henry twist, these days very out of fashion. In general my creative process will involve one piece of music—a song over and over until a draft is done. As I work a very dull day job, I write small notes all day long and then when I get home I type them into the computer. I review them every few days to see what I can still use.
Could you describe your relationship to the publishing process (this can be publishing in any form, from traditional book publishing to blogging, etc)
I have had very limited relationship with publishing. For some early years I published a couple of things a year—both poems and stories. Those few publications a year required me sending out a lot. This became costly both in money and energy. Then I had a family and had to support the family. The last thing I ever wanted to see in those days was a rejection note from a grad student that said something to the effect of—nice stuff but not today. That would have just been too much. My favorite line is: “this just does not meet out needs.” I always have a vision of little grimy editors trying to satisfy their needs—black Lycra.
In truth, I think there is so much great stuff published—much more in fiction than poetry but then there is also a lot of crap—a lot. I can’t figure it out. Taste and trends are not something I have ever had a handle on. It seems that much of the fiction I see published is articulate, not super ambitious and invariably makes gestures toward some third world life in traditional garb. A cult of the exotic—change the characters names to Joe and Dianne, set the whole thing in the rust belt and nobody, nobody would give it a second glance. Unfortunately it does speak to a poverty of imagination that is American—and not very exotic at all. This scares and saddens me. What we take as diversity only (which is morally good) and giving other voices is only happening because to a large extent there are few voices emerging.
Logistically, publication is a challenging. I am also not a very record keeper. It has happened that something was accepted that I do not remember sending, and once I just received a copy of a journal and lo and behold there was something of mine in it. I essentially gave up the whole notion of publication
How has being a writer affected your relationships?
It may have made me more difficult to live with and more messy as there are sheets of paper every place. In reality I am not sure it has had such a huge effect.
How would you describe the community of writers you belong to—if any? This may be a “real” or “virtual” (in more than one sense) community.
I have a few “writer” friends and those relationships are “virtual,” meaning email and phone. They are like any other “long distance” relationship in that in some ways they are more precious than my day-to-day relationships. For people who live far from large communities or cities where there are other writers they are essential.
What are your future goals in terms of writing?
I want to write the best book of short stories to hit the world in the last 50 years—I want it to knock socks off.
Bonus Question: If your writing were a musical instrument, what would it be?
Oh it would have to be something with broken strings. It is hard to be a mediocre violin. What else has strings?—not a guitar—they are too sexual—maybe some kind of dulcimer
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Beyond Peaking - Aaron M Wilson
Elise Winter sat down with a large bowl of popcorn. After a long day of work, she was ready to relax and think about something other than her boss’s pending promotion, which would mean she’d likely have to do the work of two for several months. However, Elise had poured a stiff rum and Coke and her favorite mysteries were on tonight.
Elise didn’t think it was odd that violent imagery, murder, and alcohol helped take the edge off an exhausting day. Instead of the gore, and if you asked her, the gore did bother her, she focused on the sexy, smart detectives and the workplace drama that empathized right and wrong – catching the bad guys. Everyone, including the crime scene cleanup crew, was nothing but smiles. Elise’s work place was full of ambiguity and sullen expressions.
About half way into her first mystery, a reporter interrupted. “Sorry for the interruption. We go live, now, to the White House for coverage of what we have been told will be a turning point in American history. No wait, world history.” The reporter looked pale and ill prepared. “We’ve been told that in just a few seconds we will be addressed by the president.” There was a strange pause as the reporter listened, putting his hand over his left ear. He looked into the camera and sternly said, “We go live to the White House.”
Elise didn’t believe that anything this president had to say was important enough to interrupt her mysteries. As she waited on the couch, too tired to get up, too depressed to even try and change the channel, she started thinking about work. What was going to happen? Should she apply for her boss’s job when her boss got the promotion? She didn’t want to have to work under anyone else. Her current boss was a good boss. She listened to Elise’s input and took it seriously. Elise thought they worked well together and didn’t want the team to separate. Besides, it had been a long time since Elise had had a good boss, and she felt she’d had her fair share of terrible ones.
The president sat in the oval office, but Elise had tuned him out. He wasn’t her president. Her president would have respected the sanctity of evening mysteries. However, she sat up and paid attention when she heard the words, “gas prices,” because she commuted an hour each direction, to and from work, and the trip was too expensive at $2.75 a gallon now.
The president continued: “OPEC and the oil industry, either in an attempt to keep the junkie hooked up or in ignorance so complete, have lied to the American people. They have lied to the world. I deeply wish that I had better news, but we – the human race – have come to a head…”
In her pajamas, Elise pushed aside her popcorn and grabbed the keys to her car. She was seeing an environmental economist a couple times a week. He was a cutie, but he was depressing and overly serious about the state of the world’s natural capital, whatever that was. What he did have going for him, besides his looks, was a deep voice that cause Elise to dream of better tomorrows on sandy beaches. She hung on every word he spoke. One night, he had told her over dinner that if the president ever said “OPEC” and “lied” in a national address, she’d only have a few minutes to act.
Elise couldn’t believe that her boyfriend was right about all this fossil fuel mumbo-jumbo. She had wanted to stick around and listen to the end of the presidential address, but she had taken her boyfriend’s advice and driven to the nearest store. She felt lucky as she stood in line at Wal-Mart that Wal-Mart was only just down the street. She was drawing attention from other shoppers, but she knew what she was doing was right.
The cashier asked, “How many? I can just scan one, if that’s all you got in your cart.”
“Twenty. I could only fit twenty in the cart.” Elise put hand over her mouth. “What if twenty isn’t enough?”
“Ma’am, I’ve never seen anyone buy more than one at a time.”
Elise nodded and paid with her credit card. She hated credit cards and used it only for absolute emergencies. She couldn’t think of bigger emergency than this one, but she still hated the feeling of the potential interest accruing if she didn’t pay it all off at once.
After loading her car, Elise noticed that the streets were still quiet. She was having a hard time understanding why no one was on the move. Was she just that far a head of everyone else? When she saw her boyfriend again, she would have to thank him. She was sure that he was out doing the same thing right now. She thought of calling him until she realized that as she hurried out of the house she’d left her cell phone on the coffee table in front of the TV. Elise pulled into the first gas station she came across.
The Shell station was empty. Elise didn’t understand what was taking everyone so long, but it was in her favor. First, she filled up her car. Then, she slowly, carefully filled up each of the twenty, four-gallon tanks she’d just bought from Wal-Mart. Filling all twenty went faster than Elise had expected. After replacing the pump, she watched the small gray and black screen. When the screen was finished asking her if she’d like a carwash, coffee, or cheap cigarettes, and she selected “Yes” for a receipt. Her receipt read as she expected it would read: $2.75 per gallon.
After loading her car and pulling out into the street, she stopped at the light. Elise could see down the hill into the valley headlights pulling out from driveways. She thought she could hear angry car horns in the distance. Still waiting for the light to turn, she happened to look in her review mirror. The Shell sign that had just read $2.75 per gallon, now read: “Closed. Gas Reserved. Homeland Security.”
Elise didn’t think it was odd that violent imagery, murder, and alcohol helped take the edge off an exhausting day. Instead of the gore, and if you asked her, the gore did bother her, she focused on the sexy, smart detectives and the workplace drama that empathized right and wrong – catching the bad guys. Everyone, including the crime scene cleanup crew, was nothing but smiles. Elise’s work place was full of ambiguity and sullen expressions.
About half way into her first mystery, a reporter interrupted. “Sorry for the interruption. We go live, now, to the White House for coverage of what we have been told will be a turning point in American history. No wait, world history.” The reporter looked pale and ill prepared. “We’ve been told that in just a few seconds we will be addressed by the president.” There was a strange pause as the reporter listened, putting his hand over his left ear. He looked into the camera and sternly said, “We go live to the White House.”
Elise didn’t believe that anything this president had to say was important enough to interrupt her mysteries. As she waited on the couch, too tired to get up, too depressed to even try and change the channel, she started thinking about work. What was going to happen? Should she apply for her boss’s job when her boss got the promotion? She didn’t want to have to work under anyone else. Her current boss was a good boss. She listened to Elise’s input and took it seriously. Elise thought they worked well together and didn’t want the team to separate. Besides, it had been a long time since Elise had had a good boss, and she felt she’d had her fair share of terrible ones.
The president sat in the oval office, but Elise had tuned him out. He wasn’t her president. Her president would have respected the sanctity of evening mysteries. However, she sat up and paid attention when she heard the words, “gas prices,” because she commuted an hour each direction, to and from work, and the trip was too expensive at $2.75 a gallon now.
The president continued: “OPEC and the oil industry, either in an attempt to keep the junkie hooked up or in ignorance so complete, have lied to the American people. They have lied to the world. I deeply wish that I had better news, but we – the human race – have come to a head…”
In her pajamas, Elise pushed aside her popcorn and grabbed the keys to her car. She was seeing an environmental economist a couple times a week. He was a cutie, but he was depressing and overly serious about the state of the world’s natural capital, whatever that was. What he did have going for him, besides his looks, was a deep voice that cause Elise to dream of better tomorrows on sandy beaches. She hung on every word he spoke. One night, he had told her over dinner that if the president ever said “OPEC” and “lied” in a national address, she’d only have a few minutes to act.
Elise couldn’t believe that her boyfriend was right about all this fossil fuel mumbo-jumbo. She had wanted to stick around and listen to the end of the presidential address, but she had taken her boyfriend’s advice and driven to the nearest store. She felt lucky as she stood in line at Wal-Mart that Wal-Mart was only just down the street. She was drawing attention from other shoppers, but she knew what she was doing was right.
The cashier asked, “How many? I can just scan one, if that’s all you got in your cart.”
“Twenty. I could only fit twenty in the cart.” Elise put hand over her mouth. “What if twenty isn’t enough?”
“Ma’am, I’ve never seen anyone buy more than one at a time.”
Elise nodded and paid with her credit card. She hated credit cards and used it only for absolute emergencies. She couldn’t think of bigger emergency than this one, but she still hated the feeling of the potential interest accruing if she didn’t pay it all off at once.
After loading her car, Elise noticed that the streets were still quiet. She was having a hard time understanding why no one was on the move. Was she just that far a head of everyone else? When she saw her boyfriend again, she would have to thank him. She was sure that he was out doing the same thing right now. She thought of calling him until she realized that as she hurried out of the house she’d left her cell phone on the coffee table in front of the TV. Elise pulled into the first gas station she came across.
The Shell station was empty. Elise didn’t understand what was taking everyone so long, but it was in her favor. First, she filled up her car. Then, she slowly, carefully filled up each of the twenty, four-gallon tanks she’d just bought from Wal-Mart. Filling all twenty went faster than Elise had expected. After replacing the pump, she watched the small gray and black screen. When the screen was finished asking her if she’d like a carwash, coffee, or cheap cigarettes, and she selected “Yes” for a receipt. Her receipt read as she expected it would read: $2.75 per gallon.
After loading her car and pulling out into the street, she stopped at the light. Elise could see down the hill into the valley headlights pulling out from driveways. She thought she could hear angry car horns in the distance. Still waiting for the light to turn, she happened to look in her review mirror. The Shell sign that had just read $2.75 per gallon, now read: “Closed. Gas Reserved. Homeland Security.”
Aaron M. Wilson
© 2010
all rights reserved
"Beyond Peaking" originally appeared in The Hive Mind. Ed. Alexandra Wolfe. Web. 18 June 2010.
This is an excerpt from Mr Wilson's novel-in-progress, Solar Capital
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The Sportswoman's Notebook - Eberle Umbach (excerpt)
THE SPORTSWOMAN’S NOTEBOOK
TREIS AGUAS- THE APPARITION
Given all the time I have lived—enough time for centuries of shades, of specters clanking chains or alighting with voluptuous claws on the nightly body—it is remarkable that the first ghost I should ever encounter would smell of cheap perfume, would be, in fact, a majorette.
It was noon, a Sunday in the rainy season. A few hours before, the air had been filled with the sounds of market-day: melodious shouts and the horns of the trucks; horses snorting; church bells and the smell of butchering up on the hill. It struck me today that I would probably never forget this particular smell, of fresh blood and fear mixing with the thin, high-pitched smell of ripe pineapples spread out in the marketplace on an abundance of newspaper.
Heaps of pineapples, lightly bruised and oozing—a sweetness in the throat as soft as frog-song. We had, in the interior, an obvious abundance of fruit. The newspaper, however, was another story—a mystery that was never to be solved by Emily or me during our stay at Treis Aguas. There were no newspapers for sale in the region, for the fairly obvious reason that almost no one could read. Neither could pens be purchased at the market; Emily and I bought ours at the ocean, a day’s journey away, in the stinking coastal city of Tierra Branca.
Emily, I believe, loved that stink because it meant pens and paper and lovely beer. In Treis Aguas she made do with sugar-cane spirits like everybody else; what bothered her more was the absence of pens. She never completely believed that no one else in our household had even a slight desire for these implements. The night that Florissima and Antoni taught us to play dominoes she nudged me when it came time to keep score. “Now,” she whispered, “they will have to write.” But Florissima went into the next room where the setting hens were sleeping under baskets; when she came back, she spilled a handful of dried corn onto the table to use as counters.
In spite of the fact that no one read newspapers, an enormous supply of them flowed continuously into the interior. Some ended up at the market in Mbicci, for wrapping purchases of goiaba, manioc flour, soap, and hunks of the various animals freshly slaughtered whose blood made a thin wash of red run between the cobblestones outside the meat market.
It was after lunch that the ghost appeared, in the quasi-delirium buzzing with flies that takes hold after the women have cooked the weekly meal of meat and the men have eaten it. A breeze came out of nowhere, stirring the fronds of the coconut palm in the courtyard outside my window and wafting the smell of cowshit and orange blossom across the mud yard that bloomed, each day of the rains, with green shapes like huge algae, monstrously amorphous. She came marching across the courtyard in white boots, twirling a baton in a cloud of glittering dust—which made it immediately clear to me that what I saw was a vision. No boots could stay white in the mud that steamed behind her, and dust was only a distant dream until the dry season.
I smiled to think that death could include intricate tricks with a sparkling baton, and I rested my arms on the window sill, leaned out farther. The sharp little heels of her boots did not sink into the muddy clay of the courtyard, patterned with the marks of chicken and guinea fowl feet, cat and duck feet, that everyone else had to cross on a wobbly mesh of long cut twigs. Twirling and tossing the baton she marched in front of the smoking ashes of the clay-brick stove where a clay pot still rested holding the remains of the midday beans.
The buttons running down her milkless breasts made double rows of bright gold polished nipples and I saw the fighting cock, captive in a woven basket against the wall, twitch his green-gold tail feathers as she passed. She marched on—so ringleted so well-fed and young-- her strong white teeth and strong white thighs part of some terrible machine of destruction that men, with their peculiar masochism, would tend to desire painfully.
Then I became aware of the sound of corn being ground for the evening meal. The grinding of corn is slow painstaking work, performed only by women. It seemed to be an endless task: somewhere, there was always a woman grinding corn. As I formulated that thought, the majorette vanished into the thin steaming air. The sound of grinding became suddenly loud, grating on my nerves as it often did.
The sound of the grinding was worse, for me, than the tiny but mesmerizing sound of cockroaches chewing all night that bothered Emily. They were eating her manuscripts, she pointed out, and she wondered if she would ever be able to write quickly enough to keep ahead of them. Secretly, however, I believe she liked the idea. The cockroaches ate her words and the chickens ate the cockroaches and then we ate the chickens—so in the end, she fed us. That was Emily’s notion of domestic economy.
I craned my neck out the window, but the majorette could no longer be seen. The spell was broken and I flung myself into my hammock, suddenly overtaken by a dark and violent mood. One arm over my eyes blocked out the sun as I listened to the chorus of the damned— flies the incessant sopranos, and irregular locusts deepening the pulse—a slow frenzy never breaking free of itself, always returning.
Of course, I told myself bitterly, it would be a majorette. I thought of the others who were like me, whom I had seen over the years and recognized—the ones with centuries behind their eyes. Though they shared my fate in some ways, none had really resembled me. They were men, for instance, who were reflecting together on the refined ironies of immortality—in Paris! —while I was wandering alone crashing through the stench of rain forests with screaming parrots my only teachers. They were advising the rulers of Egypt while I was chained in the swan-plucking sheds, the endless frozen tundra around me and no traditions, no history I could recognize as my own.
I was certain of one thing about those men: they would never be contacted for any reason by a majorette from the spirit-world. Whatever spirits they encountered would be complex, with the elaborate ways of Medieval demons, with the smell of candle-smoke and burnt offerings clinging to them, not the smell of the majorette’s cheap perfume. And the vision would be meaningful to them; it would not simply disappear, as mine had, without a message, without significance. Apparently I could not escape the taint of the monstrous, even in my hallucinations. The heat of the afternoon pressed on me heavily and I abandoned myself to the contemplation of hopelessness.
Then Emily appeared in my window, as she sometimes did, by climbing out of hers and crossing on the branches of the star-fruit tree that grew at the corner of the house. I hadn’t heard her crossing, and couldn’t help but be delighted, in spite of my troubled thoughts, as she waggled her eyebrows at me with the impertinence of a schoolgirl.
She crouched in the deep pale blue well of the window, framed by dark green shutters fastened open against the inside wall. There was no window glass here, no screens, and we had always been glad of that. She perched for a moment on her delicate haunches, then swung her legs into my room. Behind her, the breeze moved again, rustling the deep green of the leaves and gently swelling the ribs of the star-fruit hanging in the boughs.
Eberle Umbach© 2001-present
all rights reserved
TREIS AGUAS- THE APPARITION
Given all the time I have lived—enough time for centuries of shades, of specters clanking chains or alighting with voluptuous claws on the nightly body—it is remarkable that the first ghost I should ever encounter would smell of cheap perfume, would be, in fact, a majorette.
It was noon, a Sunday in the rainy season. A few hours before, the air had been filled with the sounds of market-day: melodious shouts and the horns of the trucks; horses snorting; church bells and the smell of butchering up on the hill. It struck me today that I would probably never forget this particular smell, of fresh blood and fear mixing with the thin, high-pitched smell of ripe pineapples spread out in the marketplace on an abundance of newspaper.
Heaps of pineapples, lightly bruised and oozing—a sweetness in the throat as soft as frog-song. We had, in the interior, an obvious abundance of fruit. The newspaper, however, was another story—a mystery that was never to be solved by Emily or me during our stay at Treis Aguas. There were no newspapers for sale in the region, for the fairly obvious reason that almost no one could read. Neither could pens be purchased at the market; Emily and I bought ours at the ocean, a day’s journey away, in the stinking coastal city of Tierra Branca.
Emily, I believe, loved that stink because it meant pens and paper and lovely beer. In Treis Aguas she made do with sugar-cane spirits like everybody else; what bothered her more was the absence of pens. She never completely believed that no one else in our household had even a slight desire for these implements. The night that Florissima and Antoni taught us to play dominoes she nudged me when it came time to keep score. “Now,” she whispered, “they will have to write.” But Florissima went into the next room where the setting hens were sleeping under baskets; when she came back, she spilled a handful of dried corn onto the table to use as counters.
In spite of the fact that no one read newspapers, an enormous supply of them flowed continuously into the interior. Some ended up at the market in Mbicci, for wrapping purchases of goiaba, manioc flour, soap, and hunks of the various animals freshly slaughtered whose blood made a thin wash of red run between the cobblestones outside the meat market.
It was after lunch that the ghost appeared, in the quasi-delirium buzzing with flies that takes hold after the women have cooked the weekly meal of meat and the men have eaten it. A breeze came out of nowhere, stirring the fronds of the coconut palm in the courtyard outside my window and wafting the smell of cowshit and orange blossom across the mud yard that bloomed, each day of the rains, with green shapes like huge algae, monstrously amorphous. She came marching across the courtyard in white boots, twirling a baton in a cloud of glittering dust—which made it immediately clear to me that what I saw was a vision. No boots could stay white in the mud that steamed behind her, and dust was only a distant dream until the dry season.
I smiled to think that death could include intricate tricks with a sparkling baton, and I rested my arms on the window sill, leaned out farther. The sharp little heels of her boots did not sink into the muddy clay of the courtyard, patterned with the marks of chicken and guinea fowl feet, cat and duck feet, that everyone else had to cross on a wobbly mesh of long cut twigs. Twirling and tossing the baton she marched in front of the smoking ashes of the clay-brick stove where a clay pot still rested holding the remains of the midday beans.
The buttons running down her milkless breasts made double rows of bright gold polished nipples and I saw the fighting cock, captive in a woven basket against the wall, twitch his green-gold tail feathers as she passed. She marched on—so ringleted so well-fed and young-- her strong white teeth and strong white thighs part of some terrible machine of destruction that men, with their peculiar masochism, would tend to desire painfully.
Then I became aware of the sound of corn being ground for the evening meal. The grinding of corn is slow painstaking work, performed only by women. It seemed to be an endless task: somewhere, there was always a woman grinding corn. As I formulated that thought, the majorette vanished into the thin steaming air. The sound of grinding became suddenly loud, grating on my nerves as it often did.
The sound of the grinding was worse, for me, than the tiny but mesmerizing sound of cockroaches chewing all night that bothered Emily. They were eating her manuscripts, she pointed out, and she wondered if she would ever be able to write quickly enough to keep ahead of them. Secretly, however, I believe she liked the idea. The cockroaches ate her words and the chickens ate the cockroaches and then we ate the chickens—so in the end, she fed us. That was Emily’s notion of domestic economy.
I craned my neck out the window, but the majorette could no longer be seen. The spell was broken and I flung myself into my hammock, suddenly overtaken by a dark and violent mood. One arm over my eyes blocked out the sun as I listened to the chorus of the damned— flies the incessant sopranos, and irregular locusts deepening the pulse—a slow frenzy never breaking free of itself, always returning.
Of course, I told myself bitterly, it would be a majorette. I thought of the others who were like me, whom I had seen over the years and recognized—the ones with centuries behind their eyes. Though they shared my fate in some ways, none had really resembled me. They were men, for instance, who were reflecting together on the refined ironies of immortality—in Paris! —while I was wandering alone crashing through the stench of rain forests with screaming parrots my only teachers. They were advising the rulers of Egypt while I was chained in the swan-plucking sheds, the endless frozen tundra around me and no traditions, no history I could recognize as my own.
I was certain of one thing about those men: they would never be contacted for any reason by a majorette from the spirit-world. Whatever spirits they encountered would be complex, with the elaborate ways of Medieval demons, with the smell of candle-smoke and burnt offerings clinging to them, not the smell of the majorette’s cheap perfume. And the vision would be meaningful to them; it would not simply disappear, as mine had, without a message, without significance. Apparently I could not escape the taint of the monstrous, even in my hallucinations. The heat of the afternoon pressed on me heavily and I abandoned myself to the contemplation of hopelessness.
Then Emily appeared in my window, as she sometimes did, by climbing out of hers and crossing on the branches of the star-fruit tree that grew at the corner of the house. I hadn’t heard her crossing, and couldn’t help but be delighted, in spite of my troubled thoughts, as she waggled her eyebrows at me with the impertinence of a schoolgirl.
She crouched in the deep pale blue well of the window, framed by dark green shutters fastened open against the inside wall. There was no window glass here, no screens, and we had always been glad of that. She perched for a moment on her delicate haunches, then swung her legs into my room. Behind her, the breeze moved again, rustling the deep green of the leaves and gently swelling the ribs of the star-fruit hanging in the boughs.
Eberle Umbach
all rights reserved
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