Cooking the Hook - NEW

While I'm supposed to be thinking about the final chapters of the current book, the bones and nerves of another have been rattling around in my empty head. Not the story so much as the characters. Anxious, they are, that I not leave them in limbo. Again. taking notes.

          They took the stairs down three flights, then a long hallway to the elevators. So far there were no sounds of alarm, no sirens. Anna went directly to the restroom and, finding it empty, pulled Jack inside behind her. His bow tie was undone, the top stud missing from his shirt.  He pulled a paper towel, wet it and wiped Ray’s blood from her forehead.          “You are going to have to get rabies shots, babe.” he said, as she took a stud from the bottom of  the dress shirt and moved it to the top position. “Here, turn around, I can’t tie this looking at you.” He turned and looked into the mirror as she reached over his shoulders and tied the bow tie by feel, her head down. She pressed close against his back and he could feel her pulse, slow and steady, the chill of her body. “Are you okay?” he said watching her fingers blindly but deftly pull the sculpted ribbon of black cloth back to perfection under his ch...

Do we really remember or do we conjure up the magical past?    Well after dark Bea leaned back in the wet clover and considered the stars which were largely obscured by the yellow wash of the street light. She also considered shooting out that street light. One well placed shooting aggie should do the trick, but she wasn't that good a shot and a miss would probably take out the Republics plate glass window. Mr. Mckinley had enough to worry about. Brucie would come talk to her if he felt like it, stars or no. She was patient.   Since Brucie died, his mother, Audra, had taken to passing out drunk in any number of public places; the grocery store, the lobby of the post office and, just last week, Nell found her laying flat on the sidewalk halfway up Maple avenue, her butt on the high curb and her legs sticking out in the street like a dead goat. Lord only knows how many passersby clucked their tongues and made note that she had gone out with no drawers on.  Nell dr...

it was blue day at the book store.

There has to be a word for it. The buzz that you get from popping out a really great scene and the two or three days that you coast on that buzz doing nothing else.

Sometime in the night the sandman sent me someone else's dream, which I will savor and ponder. That- and the clean, fresh air  woke me. I don't even want to try and write it down because that never works. I might fixate on details like the young man's bright blue eyes, red-rimmed with the struggle to not cry, his blondish hair, six months overgrown beyond what must have been something stylish. His loss so clear on his face that I didn't even ask what had become of  his children's mother. An Ikea cafeteria of all places. It's easy to paint with words. Much more difficult to capture the tone and tenor a dream; the dreams that leave you wondering why. They had to have been intended for another so why bother.

Places with "the best kept secret" in front of their names never lasted long and they avoided them. This place was only known as 'the Mill' and didn't even have a listing in the Yellow Pages. Out front, steak and seafood at it's basic best. The bar was a warmly lit island with half of the twelve seats occupied by regulars on any night of the week. On the far side of the bar, the glassed-in dance floor extended out on pilings into the bay and was presided over by a pre-war Wurlitzer with no new music in it since 1965. The place had more than class. It was a time machine and since the past was Anna's realm, Jack let her take him there. The bartender saw them coming in and spread a stack of quarters in a glittering arc on the end of the bar knowing that his tips would more than triple this evening. The man in the black slacks and dress shirt, sleeves rolled casually up his muscled forearms, would seat the striking woman at a table off to the side where t...