Mother Red Squirrel peeked out of the family’s treetop home. A fresh covering of snow had swallowed up the sounds of the pine forest. “Tomorrow is Christmas. This is a holy night,” she said to her son as her other chickarees slept in a cozy circle.
“Why is it holy?” he asked.
“Because God is here,” she answered. “And because God is here we are holy, too.”
“But we’re rodents, and rodents aren’t very special.”
“That’s not true. We can scurry down a tree head first. We can smell food planted beneath inches of snow, and see far away. We bury so many pine seeds that some of them become trees. The last pine cone you ate could have come from a tree planted by your great-great-great grandfather’s grandfather.”
“God wasn’t here when my sister was killed by the Tree Marten. I know, because if he were I wouldn’t have cried so much.”
Mother Squirrel’s large black eyes reflected her son’s sadness. “I have seen many young squirrels die, but God loves all of his creation. He laughs with us and he cries with us. God’s son was killed too. There were many who cried that day.”
“I don’t understand, mother.”
“Nobody can understand God, but listen to the night breeze. We have wonderful ears. Wait for a gentle calling. Imagine what our forest homeland looks like to God and put yourself in the center of it.” One of the red squirrel sisters lifted a sleepy head. “What’s going on?” she asked.
Her brother directed her to the opening of their hollow tree. “Come see the new snow, and listen for holy sounds,” he said. The wind slowed and they heard a whispering voice. They could not hear distinct words, but peace had struck each of their hearts in a way they would always remember.
A friend is a gift you give yourself. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
BETWEEN CHESTER AND ME
Mom and her friends said Chester’s dad was nuts for sending him to an expensive private school after he failed third grade in public school. Again. Especially since the money he spent on out-of-parish tuition could have replaced that worthless pickup truck he drove. But I pretended I didn’t hear. Mom didn’t care what I thought anyway. She said I may be eight years old, but I could give out eighty-years-worth of opinion. Seems to me I wasn’t allowed to have one different notion about anything, much less too many.
“We get nasty notes about how much money we owe,” Chester told me, his mouth so full of crooked teeth, even I stared, and I was his best friend. “But Dad always pays. Late maybe. Just has to borrow a little once in a while.”
“So, doesn’t change a single game we play,” I said. “Uhm. You can’t come over today. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment, just for a check-up. See you at school tomorrow.”
I ran off before Chester saw the lie in me. I wish he wouldn’t tell me about his money problems. His dad’s dark shaggy beard and one pair of paint-spattered jeans told me he didn’t have much, unless he owned more than one pair of pants with a star-shaped tear in the knee with copper flecks of something on the seat. Chester wore old clothes like the ones we gave to the Salvation Army, things that were too shabby to wear, but too good for rags. Mom said I should never say anything mean to him. But I shouldn’t bring him home either.
“Stacey, Chester’s not all there. Do you know what I mean?” she said.
“Not all where?” I lifted the lid to the sugar jar and tapped the sides. I thought about sucking on one of the crystal chunks that fell into the center, but I didn’t really want it. Besides, it would fall apart as soon as I picked it up. Just like most of my arguments with my mother.
“Don’t pretend ignorance,” Mom said. “You never know what someone like that is going to do. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt for you to play with another girl now and then.”
I knew better than to argue anymore. I always ended up with extra chores if I did. But Mom didn’t understand. The other girls wanted to be fashion designers or actresses. Or they played with dolls in boring lace dresses and talked for them in voices that sounded like they’d been sucking in helium balloons. I never understood how someone could prefer fancy-pretend to football. Of course, some of the boys would think they had to be bosses. I hated that. Chester never played by those rules.
Once I broke a string on a brand-new gold yo-yo. I tried to tie the broken part back on but knew that wouldn’t work. I was just being stubborn and trying to prove a point about how I lost good birthday money on a piece of junk. So, I got mad and hurled the worthless thing at a fat old tree. Chester grabbed the two broken halves and covered his ears with them.
“Hey, Stacey? Look, my head’s winding the string.” He squatted down and stood up again until he got dizzy. Then he stuck his tongue out at me, and I laughed so hard I forgot to be in a bad mood.
In class, Chester would suck in air through his teeth and fold his arithmetic papers like an accordion. Sometimes his answers were so wrong the other kids laughed their heads off. Then it would take Mrs. Craftwood at least five minutes to quiet everybody down. But I wouldn’t laugh, even if Chester said something really funny, like the time he asked if the earth was hollow like the globe in the science room.
“Yeah, hollow like his head,” Jerry Freeman whispered. Then he stared at me. “Are you going to marry Hollow Head?” Every freckle on Jerry’s face flashed malice.
I tripped him when he went to sharpen his pencil. He bruised his elbow when he fell into another kid’s desk. I claimed it was an accident, but I didn’t look the least bit sorry. Mrs. Craftwood sent me to spend the afternoon in the principal’s office, and I had to sweep floors after school, but it was worth it.
Chester kept a tiny, gray velvet box hidden in his pocket. A ring with a big white diamond lay in a soft spongy space inside. He said it belonged to his mom. She died and went to heaven not long after he was born.
“You can’t touch it, Stacey,” he said. “Only I can do that ‘cause it belonged to my mom. I like to hold it and pretend she’s right next to me. Dad said she had hair dark as molasses and a voice that made the angels cry.”
He rolled the ring in his palm, then held the jewel to the sun, as if he could see more than a few sparkly places. Then he carefully put the ring back inside, and we ran to find swings next to one another on the playground. If there weren’t any, we climbed the monkey bars, and he never seemed to care that I always beat him to the top.
One day in the lunchroom, Mrs. Craftwood saw Chester take the ring out of his pocket. She dragged him to the principal’s office. I threw away the other half of my bologna sandwich and followed them. They didn’t close the door. I saw everything.
“This ring had to be stolen,” Mrs. Craftwood told Mrs. Austin, “because this boy’s father is incapable of affording something like this.”
Mrs. Austin glared at Chester. “Stealing is a sin, son. You should know that.”
After school when Chester’s dad got to the principal’s office I sat outside the office and listened again. I knew that he had a job in a big, important office a long time ago, but the company closed one day, and he never found another job like it. Then after his wife died, he moved into an old four-room house on the edge of town and did odd jobs now and then. Folks said he didn’t seem to care anymore. But when he charged into Mrs. Austin’s office, it was clear he cared about something.
He didn’t say anything while she and Mrs. Craftwood accused Chester of stealing. Then he asked if either one of them took a close look at the ring.
“Why should that be necessary?” Mrs. Austin asked.
“Because it doesn’t take much light to see the truth in that diamond. Let me guess. Came in a gray box. Smells a little like grass stains and peanut butter.”
“What are you talking about, sir?” Mrs. Austin said.
I had to cover my ears because Chester’s dad got so loud. And this time the door was shut. He’d slammed it when he went inside. Hard.
“Would a real diamond look as scratched up as the side of a matchbox?”
“Please lower your voice,” Mrs. Craftwood said.
“Not until you return his mother’s ring.”
I wanted to lean into the door and catch everything that went on, but then Chester’s dad started talking about how his wife deserved better, and so does Chester. Wasn’t so exciting anymore. Something I couldn’t explain made me feel strange, almost like I walked into the boys’ dressing room by mistake. So, I sat on the bench outside the door and waited for what seemed like a long time.
“Thank you,” Chester said as his dad opened the door. Simple, like nothing was ever taken from him in the first place. He didn’t even see me right away because he was too busy slipping the ring on and off of his finger.
But his dad’s face looked so red it must have hurt. I could have sworn it burned right through his whiskers. He stopped when he saw me. “Stacey, you’re a good kid. Chester’s crazy about you. Don’t ever get too big for yourself.”
“I won’t,” I said. But I thought that was a strange thing to say.
Chester never did come back. He went away to a special-needs school on the other side of town. Mom said it was time for me to start playing with normal children.
“What’s normal?” I asked, and Mom accused me of being smart aleck.
But this time I wasn’t.
After that, I decided it was best to be vague about what I was doing. Sometimes I went to Chester’s house and we explored the woods behind it. We hoisted ourselves into the trees with lower branches and hunted for birds’ nests and woodpecker holes. He carved our names into a young beech tree.
“Someday when we’re old enough, let’s get married,” he said. “We’ll come back here and I’ll draw the heart and put the date on it.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But let’s look for salamanders down by the creek now.”
“Okay. But why can’t we ever go to your house to play?”
“Mom said I had to play outside. She’s cleaning.”
“You said she was sick last time,” he said.
“That’s because all she does is clean. And that much cleaning would make anyone sick.”
I stopped going to his house as much because I got tired of lying. To Mom. To Chester. Then one day I told Mom I was going for a long bike ride all by myself. I went to Chester’s house, but no one was there. When I peeked into his house it was empty, blind-dark. On the way home I felt mean, like somehow, I made Chester move away. I stopped at our beech tree in the woods, took a sharp rock and etched a shallow, lopsided heart around our names. It didn’t look very good. I’m not sure why I did it. Playing house never appealed to me. And Chester and I were never boyfriend and girlfriend.
But when I went to my cousin Janet’s wedding that summer, I thought about what it would be like to be a grown-up getting married. Maybe just for that day I would be willing to wear a lace dress, one made by a silly third-grade girl who grew up to be a fashion designer. Of course, I didn’t want to marry just anybody. The groom needed to be special, someone like Chester, who could give me a fake diamond, yet be real inside.
My great aunt, Marty Pestil, was a natural at tending to the dead. She got bodies ready for the all-night watch when folk gathered to make sure no bugs, dogs, or ghosts could get to the ripe-for-decaying flesh. I helped my aunt since I didn’t have no other place to go. My aunt took me in when my mama started talking to wallpaper flowers. Papa had walked off before I was born.
I never got schooling, but not many people did in mountain-tucked Gray Valley, Kentucky during the early 1920’s. We picked up a common-sense kind of learning. Aunt Marty taught me her trade. She said living and dying fit together the way bare-treed winter followed full-blossomed summer.
Almost everybody agreed, but some folk thought Aunt Marty turned the winter dying part into a show.
Men took care of the departed men and boys. The man who took care of the dead in Gray Valley looked the grim job. He wagged his finger so hard at my aunt it about blurred his whole arm.
“You act like you was bigger’n God—it just ain’t right. Pretending you can step off into the afterlife with the dead.”
My aunt stared him down. She didn’t argue. “Our job is to open the next world. When the silver coins fall off the eyes of dead folk, their souls got to be ready for the hereafter. Ain’t no more I can say about it.”
He backed off, groaning, like there ain’t no sense talking to a crazy lady. It wasn’t ‘til later I learned he got picked accidental-like to prepare the dead and hated every second of it.
Aunt Marty said the folks that set themselves for eternal damnation didn’t want to go, and Aunt Marty had to say somebody from the underworld would come for them anyway, so they may as well scat before the rotting set in, and their souls smelled, too. Besides, St. Peter listened to a good story. Usually they ran for that last chance.
I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I got to be known as Lost Lacy. Hank Ross was my only friend. Hank helped my aunt and me with our truck garden. His papa owned the General Store. The Ross family didn’t care that Aunty Marty talked to floating souls.
Sometimes Hank and me would cook together. I thought of him as my connection to the earth and sun, to breathing, to the smell of boiling turnips and hot sliced pork.
“I like when you don’t have your hair pulled so tight on the top of your head, like it’s caught in a trap,” Hank said. “Relax once in a while.”
I shrugged. “It don’t make sense to hoe, pull weeds, or move bodies with hair in the way.”
Besides, I traveled from death to death the way a butterfly goes from flower to flower, especially when typhoid or scarlet fever hit. I guess Aunt Marty and me was lucky we never got no bad sickness. Butterflies get to drink nectar—I touched the cold skin of folk that followed both Beelzebub and St. Michael.
No matter how many times Aunt Marty handed me the magic coins and I rubbed them over my fingertips I never felt nothing special in them. They’d been used to close so many eyes. Everybody thought old Miranda Mill had been best friends with the devil. She cursed and stole and some folk even say she got away with killing her own husband.
I could have sworn I saw a body twitch as Aunt Marty talked honest to it, even though it was as hard-cold as a middle-of-February icicle.
Eleanor Case, the old schoolmarm, brought extra lunch-bucket food for the kids that didn’t have nothing. If angels ever wanted to borrow a human body, Miss Case is the one they’d use.
Bodies all just looked dead to me.
Aunt Marty told me I would inherit her gift. I didn’t want it. Maybe the magic coins knew how I felt and that’s why they wouldn’t let me know their secrets.
The strangest experience I had was when Ida Mae’s twin sister, Carrie Mae, died from a seizure caused by a high fever. Ida shook like a thunderstorm had formed inside her and was getting stronger and stronger, until it tore her apart from the inside. Aunt Marty must have noticed, too. Real slow, as if she was trying to soothe an injured bear, she reached over and patted Ida’s arm.
“I got a message for you. And it’s real important. Your sister says that she would have run out into the cold rain to pick apples even if you hadn’t had a hankering for them. She wanted some, too. And the fever—this is the important part—the fever didn’t have nothing to do with getting soaked through.”
Ida’s eyes opened about as wide as her face and she choked, “But how do you know about the apples? I never told.”
“Your sister’s telling you she can’t go to her eternal reward until you know her dying ain’t one-bit your fault.”
Then Ida dropped onto her sister’s body and sobbed. Aunt Marty didn’t stop her until I saw the slightest light, no brighter than a candle flame flicker, pass through Ida and out through the wall.
“But you didn’t send Carrie’s spirit into heaven,” I whispered to Aunt Marty.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Ida Mae done it.”
Ida Mae told her best friend that story. Versions of what happened got spread around the county. My aunt and me turned into either witches or messengers from the Almighty, depending upon the notions of who heard. Some thought we was gods, the kind that shouldn’t be approached ‘til there wasn’t no choice.
I loved my aunt. I would have been an orphan without her. But, the magic coins knew her, not me. Besides, in a month or two I would be sixteen-years-old. And all I saw ahead was more burying.
“Pick you some happiness if I could,” Hank said one spring day as we searched the woods for some poke for a salad.
So, I told him about how I wanted to do something different than travel from one pine box to another. “I wouldn’t mind rendering hog fat over a hot stove all day, if I could work for the living.”
“How about you and me getting married?”
“Ain’t never thought about it.” I looked at the basket of fresh-picked poke, good-for-you in early spring. Poison later in the season.
“I’m mighty crazy about you, and I think we can work together. Maybe even create living folk.” He turned red as a over-ripe tomato.
Hank made sense. Marrying him could change my life. A lot. “Think we should tell Aunt Marty together?”
He looked at me like I was a tadpole that turned into a full-growed frog fast as ice melts in a hot pot. “Should we tell her right now?”
“Yup. No point in waiting. She’d figure us out anyway.”
“Then I think it’s time you knew the secret.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “How do you think Aunt Marty makes them coins magic?”
“I figured she had some kind of special power over them. They don’t look no different.”
“She learned how from my papa. It’s a business we do most folk don’t know about.” He sat on a huge rock at the edge of the trail. “True, you seen these coins when they been put on the eyes of folk to keep them closed, when the time’s come to look inside and see the whole of themselves. Just before they open before eternity. You don’t know how the magic forms before that happens.
“The magic comes from inside a person. You’ve got to care about what you’re doing. A lot. And keep caring. All the time. But that ain’t how it ends.”
Hank pulled a coin from his pocket, like the ones Aunt Marty used. Then I put the poke on the rock and let Hank drop the coin into my hand. It warmed immediately. I suddenly felt drawn to Hank’s eyes. Strange how I’d never seen them the same way before. His eyes was the color of a lake at noon when the sun shines. I noticed how his smile seemed to come straight from his soul.
When Hank and I walked into Aunt Marty’s cabin, my aunt wasn’t in her cane rocker, like usual. She lay in bed, her face white as a bleached sheet.
“Ah, you are both here,” she said, as if her voice came from far away.
I took her hand, cold as snow.
“Good, you have found your path. I feel it.” She whispered, but her smile filled her face. “One last request. Lacy, you will send me on to my eternal reward. Then you and Hank will live in this house together. Promise?”
We both nodded. Aunt Marty’s body shook once and then remained still. We got her lying as peaceful as if she was taking an afternoon nap. Then I dropped an aspirin in a bowl of soda water and wiped her face. Hank waited outside the door while I done the full washing.
When I placed the coins over her eyes to keep them closed, the coins told me what to do. I called to Hank to stand by my side. A wavering light appeared.
“Follow the light. Your mama is waiting.”
The brightness turned around and came back into me.
Hank grabbed my hand and the light jumped into him, too. When I looked at our arms I saw the fresh skin of our youth turn the same sun-gold, and I realized we’d been given power.
We used our magic in the truck garden to grow enough vegetables to feed us, the poorer folk in town, and the young’uns in the orphanage in the valley.
Ida Mae took over for Aunt Marty, and when she got married her husband led the men to their destiny. They knew the secret of the coins, but they didn’t talk out loud to spirits like Aunt Marty did. They talked to them silent, soul to soul.
The magic coins never made our lives perfect, but they made us rich in a peculiar kind of way. As of this telling, Hank and me have been married sixty years. We had five girls and four boys, and each one of our kids had two or three young’uns, and they ain’t stopped growing the family. Our sons and daughters all know how the coins work. They continue to make better whoever they touch, so that nobody knows where the goodness starts or ends.
I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
originally published in Piker Press on January 13, 2014
“It’s dreadful what little things lead people to misunderstand each other.” ―L. M. Montgomery
Penguins and kangaroos don’t live on the same continent. Yet, Penny and Kango are university students in this tale. Since some human creatures believe space lasers started the California wildfires, I am stating: this story is fiction.
The college name appears distracting. However, even in today’s reality, words have multiple meanings. On the island manure referred to common happenings in real life. Word meanings change over time. For example, internet referred to two nets dropped for the same fish.
Penny and Kango spoke a semi-common language. However, different definitions and idioms often confused them. In Penny’s tribe, the word lounge meant escape. When Kango told Penny he was going to lounge in the common area, Penny assumed his roommate wanted him out of his metaphorical hair.
In Kango’s tribe, Penny’s word for please repeat meant I-am-irritated-big-time. A screaming hyena interrupted Penny when he asked Kango to repeat what he had said about a student who had fleas. A fire bell rang. It stopped Kango from smacking Penny on his left wing.
Fortunately, the words communicate and forgive made a perfect fit in all student dictionaries. Communicate and forgive appeared in an unexpected conversation the roommates had on the grounds between classes. Penny spoke one word and Kango mouthed the other. Exactly how that could happen is another story. It occurred after a lightning strike missed the pair by a miracle and a half. A moment the current world needs. With enough communication and forgiveness.
image made from public domain photo and colored paper
“It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.” Jules Renard
This week I will tell another short story. The world is full of ugly. It needs to be faced. However, sometimes we need a moment with a happy ending.
Callie, Meet Callie
The young man in the driver’s seat glances toward me after he makes a left turn into city traffic. He tells me everything is going to be okay. My shoulder will get repaired, and I will be pitching a baseball game. The first octogenarian in the major leagues. He says it too many times. I can’t tell whether he is trying to be funny or not.
I look out the window and watch the traffic. I wonder if I ever drove a car or lived in a brick house with a flower garden in the yard. Right now, all I remember is a sour, skinny someone coming into this small room where I stay in this big building.
“The medicine I am giving you doesn’t taste bad at all,” she told me. She should have added, compared to swallowing liquid bleach. I don’t know if she was trying to fool me or just get an addled old lady to toe the line. After all, the place I could call home if I wanted to, is unpleasant to every sense: hearing, smell, taste, touch, sight. Old folk, some much frailer than I am, fill small rooms like the one I occupy. Roommates come. And go.
The deep ache in my shoulder doesn’t go away. No matter how many times my young escort says it will. Of course, he doesn’t say how and when that is going to happen. And he isn’t talking to me right now. He tells the traffic light something about cracked bones. “Not for one second do I believe she fell.”
He finally turns to me. “It was Sadie, that new aide, wasn’t it? She pulled your arm. She throws temper tantrums toddler-style and gets by with it. That girl should be fired!”
I don’t answer. He must have been telling traffic signals and passing trucks about how my shoulder got hurt, but he doesn’t continue his rant or give details. Chances are no one would have believed me if I said anything, even if this pulled-arm story is true. I have a difficult time keeping names in my memory—or remembering much of anything for that matter. My thoughts feel like scattered puzzle pieces outside a crushed cardboard box—with no way of getting the pieces back where they belong.
Right now, the puzzle piece I see has a picture of a frowning aide on it. No name that fits and stays in place. I remember the pain.
Then the young man turns to me with a softer, less irritated voice. “Grandma Callie, you know I’m Kevin, don’t you?”
“I know you come to see me. And you make me smile.” I want to lie, to say of course I remember everything about you. But he could start asking questions I can’t answer.
Kevin is the only face I recognize as someone who bothers to visit me—on purpose. That much I know, even if I can’t hold onto his name for long. Besides, this peculiar sadness comes to me, and it doesn’t have words. Just a sense. Something happened that I’m not sure I want to recall anyway. Something sad and big. Not big like an empty room. Big like a hole in the ground with an ugliness at the bottom.
“Thank you.” I look at Kevin and want to say more but words don’t come. I have no idea where we are going until we reach a building even bigger than my so-called home. We are at a hospital.
He stays with me, fills out papers, pats my good arm, and tells me I will be as good as new until this lady in what looks like dull green pajamas is ready to take me to the operating room.
I watch the tiny holes in the ceiling as I ride down a long hallway. The holes are all the same size. All empty.
“You have naturally curly hair, don’t you?” the lady asks.
“Probably.”
“The pattern of ringlets is unusual. And you were a redhead. Your eyebrows. That’s how I guess. The color shines through the gray.”
Chances are, this lady is making conversation, trying to keep me from being nervous, and yet she has triggered a memory. I see my hair at the age of 25, as golden as the sun at midday. Then I see a man, his arm around me, but the image is interrupted because we have reached the operating room.
“Hi, I’m the anesthesiologist,” a woman completely covered with green pajama material says. “It’s my job to make sure you sleep well while the doctor works.”
“We definitely want you to be having pleasant dreams,” a man who is likely the doctor says.
I close my eyes and float. I’m asleep. Even so, before long I hear a voice holler, “No pulse!”
Then the faraway words. “Cardiac failure…no code.”
But my dream is too good. A man has his arm around me. I know who he is. My husband. Andrew. Tall. Dark as the bark of an ash tree. He draws me to him. I hear a baby cry, turn, and pick him up from his crib. Our son, Michael. Yes…yes. Kevin’s father has become an infant again.
Another dream slips in. Earlier. Less pleasant. My parents. “Marry him and you will never see us again.”
Locks changed on their door. The inside space remained sealed against us.
Andrew died from cancer. Then our son, Michael, died because of complications from a bout of pneumonia. He was buried next to his father, an ancient stone with a fresh death underneath.
“We are sorry about your loss,” my mother said. No comforting arms were offered. Not even a greeting card.
I feel myself slowly waking in what is probably the recovery room. But the anesthesiologist and the doctor told me to have pleasant dreams. Only the reappearance of my sweet Andrew had been pleasant.
Finally, I feel a gentle hand rouse me. “Wow! You must have been having a wild dream. You were kicking the sheets.”
I look up to see a nurse wearing the brightest white scrubs I have ever seen.
“Not only that…” I decide not to mention what I heard in the OR as I slept. It was just too strange.
“Well, there’s a party waiting for you.”
“A party? How did Kevin arrange that in such a short period of time?”
“Oh, you don’t know yet. Don’t worry. Kevin will grieve. Long and hard. He’s a good man. But those of us on this side of the clouds will lead him to the insurance policy Andrew left for him. It’s big enough for him to finish that engineering degree he’s always wanted. And there’s this girl. I think they are getting serious…”
“Huh?” I check out at my shoulders. Both of them. No sign of a scar. No pain. “So, I really didn’t make it through surgery.”
“I guess that depends upon how you want to define didn’t make it. Could you tell me a story about your life if you wanted?”
“I could take all day and tell one tale after the other. I remember when Michael, Andrew, and I were looking through a family photo album, and he asked why we only had pictures of our darker-skinned family. I groaned, but Andrew’s smile never stopped.
“Instead, he scooped Michael into his arms. I’m sad they missed the roasted marshmallows at the picnic and Great Uncle Lou’s band concert, too. But it’s a small complaint, like complaining you can’t own the sky when the blue over your head is so beautiful you can’t take in anything more wonderful, so it doesn’t matter.”
I look at the bright nurse as every memory fits back into place: the ugly ones that had seemed so close when ugly had described the pattern of my memory-vacant life. I see the ordinary as well as the extraordinary times. The broken puzzle box is reassembled. The picture pieces fit—none missing.
“Then you made it, Callie. True, time doesn’t matter anymore. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. They don’t exist here. But, come on now anyway. You have a whole group of family and friends waiting for you.”
I’ve been invited to play a game, my favorite kind, a writer’s game. I’m taking part in a blog tour. Sarah Wesson extended the invitation. She writes: Earful of Cider: The Caffeine Gnomes Demand Tribute. Her answers to the seven questions for the tour can be found there. Her writing is worth the click. Sarah is a word chef who serves insight as a main course with side dishes of well-seasoned humor. She listed the seven questions and answers one at a time. I will reply to all in a single paragraph. I have a self-imposed word limit on my entries. Moreover, my focus is positive thinking, not the art of writing. Anyone who wants to check on the thoroughness of my responses can look up Sarah’s blog—actually I hope you do.
The main character in the fictional short story I bring to the tour comes from the recent past. He lives in an unnamed town, somewhere in the United States where wild rabbits run free from one yard to another, behind bushes and trees, present one moment, disappearing the next. Carson is in third grade. He needs to keep the events of his foster home environment secret because he is afraid he could make his life even more unbearable than it already is. All he wants to do is survive. At least that’s what he thinks he wants, until he meets Robin, the peculiar girl with teeth aligned like the boards in a crooked fence. She has a wobbly walk and an upbeat attitude. “Among the Rabbits” should appear at Piker Press on approximately August 18.
I tagged Greg Petersen and asked him to introduce his character approximately a week from today. If the surname sounds familiar, that’s because he is my son and a writer who happens to have a keen insight into the human situation. Below is his bio:
Gregory Petersen is a writer, editor, comedian, coach, husband, and father of two beautiful daughters. His novel, Open Mike, was released by Martin Sisters Publishing in June of 2013, and his next book, Dreaming Out Loud, is close to completion. He has performed at The Funnybone, Go Bananas, Wiley’s, as well as several charitable and corporate events. When not writing or performing, he is following The Cincinnati Reds, training to run another very slow marathon, or goofing off on Twitter (@gregjpete). He was born, raised, and still remains in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I am adding that Greg has also written a blog that demonstrates his ability to see humor in everyday life: Professional Goofball.
Kudos to the two people, before and after me in this tour. It takes time to participate. I am glad to let other folk celebrate you and your writing. Thank you, Sarah Wesson and Gregory Petersen!
I have met many folk who read only nonfiction. I must admit that many fascinating books focus on fact. However, fiction opens up worlds that don’t exist and makes them real within the first few paragraphs. The story that uncovers beauty hidden inside darkness makes the world a better place, eventually.
terrypetersen 