Cooking the Hook - NEW

 So read the stained hand-lettered sign on the front door.       Ace sat with his back to the room and appeared to be reading a small prayer book. Actually, he was tearing out the pages one by one and eating them, chewing slowly, and looking up at the ceiling of his cage as if he was memorizing the text. Billy, the Winsock's owner and bartender, said he only ate one or two pages a day – it was not as if he was hungry. Billy fed Ace every time he fed himself. In fact, he fed Ace first like he was worried about being poisoned; a fair concern because he treated the cook like dirt.      It was obvious that he was constantly pissed off, unlike most captive monkeys who sank into apathy after a while. If anyone but Billy approached the cage Ace screamed and flung himself around inside. If you put your hands anywhere near his reach or grasp there would be blood. He once bit off and ate a drunk's little finger.      The day he escaped a little girl was the only one who watched him slip

  That was then. This is now. O....shun. Breathe that O in. A prayer. Let the breath lift your heart, spirit riding along.  Lay a sweet caesura. Just one lub-dub. Then let the shun take grateful wing. Again, slower. Lower.  Peace, like a river, Paul said.  O-shun. I didn't know I was calling her. 

  All those hearts .  I forgot that Love's a player. A fierce one.

Lessons l dropped in on a webinar yesterday. A free Zoom thing for screenwriters suffering from Writer's Block. The guy was quick to let us know that in the screenwriting world, there was no such thing as writer's book, like three times in the first 5 minutes. I sighed, capped my fountain pen (I was serious about taking notes), and wandered off to do something. Anything. Some minutes later I came back just in time for him to stop beating around the bush and get to the reason I set an alarm. Cynical much? I quote the man, but the light shone on the fact that I already knew these things. Self-evident. If there was more, I didn't want to know. This was plenty.  "If you're losing interest in your story don't expect your reader to hang around." And "What's the structure of the story? What I see as a jigsaw puzzle. Knowing that finding the shape of it was something I used to do without laboring over it.  Then, at some point, I started saying I was "

  The first ring threatened to split her head. She pulled the receiver off the hook by the cord before it could ring again; the handset clattering on the wooden floor making her wince. No one spoke. She sat up and pressed the receiver to her ear. Someone was breathing. In the background, muted voices, music, glass touching glass. “Where are you?” “A bar.” They listened to each other breathe for another minute. His lips closer to the mouthpiece, her ear, he said, “What are you wearing?” She looked at herself in the mirror, confused. “Why?” There was another long pause before Jack said, “You’ve never done this, have you?” “Done what?” “Do you want me to hang up?” “No!” Her face flushed as she realized what he wanted. “Should I start again?” “Nah. Don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t want you to do that.” “Then what?” “I want to see you. Tonight. Can you get away?"

       Sister Somna was waiting for him at the gate. Even though agitated, she said nothing, never did, and flapped her hands for him to follow her to the stables. Jones leaned out of his stall with his ears laid back and lip curling at the sight of the man. Any man.  A black, cross-eyed goat sat on its haunches, leaning against the stall door. It hissed at him. Then, from all corners of the yard, Coupe and the little nun were ambushed by a large flock of chickens demanding to be fed. The quarry had delivered the stone that morning. The driver was a superstitious lout and couldn't stop gawking at the black nuns robed in white. It astonished him that the black coffee of their skin didn't seep into the stark white wraps they favored. His father had told him that Catholics were devil worshipers in disguise and he had once been a policeman, so there. The goat clinched it for him. He hastily rolled and shoved the blocks of marble down the wooded ramp that was padded in layers of b