Cooking the Hook - NEW

 Four fifths. Don't even try to say that twice. Four fifths of writing is seeing the movie you've been living, but from the point of view of the other players, not yours. And if you haven't been paying acute attention to the details, you're screwed. Unless you're a Creative.  So, if you are inclined to make silk purses from sows ears, you gather up your details, and recall the small moments. Action! The late afternoon light, the sounds of food frying, the cigarette smoke in the air, the parakeet squawking in a cage on top of the avocado refrigerator festooned with magnets. Little plastic alphabet letters that came, went and came back again.  She gets up and shuffles the cut up potatoes around in the not hot enough Wesson on the gas stove. A sous chef at seven, I peeled and sliced those.  Rosie sits, digging through her purse for something and coming up with something else. In front of her, a cup of instant coffee with non-dairy creamer and four teaspoons of sugar. T...

Should we waste them? Dreams? I wanted to bank this one.  The van was parked close to the gray, wooden guardrails of a deserted beachside lot. White sand and low-growing creepers drifted over the edges of the worn pavement. I was standing on the guardrail, trying to unfurl a large expanse of cloth over the roof. Damp perhaps? The wind off the water was buffeting me and threatening to snatch it from my hands. Securing the fabric somehow was a two-person job, and I was alone. A battered SUV pulled up, boards and bags roped to the top. The driver hopped out and rushed to grab my flapping sail from the passenger side. Was it sail? I dream about sailboats often. Sailing in easy water. He was young. Twenties young. Dark, shaggy-haired, unshaven, weathered, and as wet as if he'd just stepped out of the sea. T-shirt and shorts stuck to him, water running out of his sandals. He was grinning and laughing as he rushed around to my side of the van to grab me down from the fence and hugged me l...

Or just experiences on the edge? I grew up around people who fixed their own cars and trucks in the side yard or the curb. Mostly to save money, but there was much pride in the "I got this shit" attitudes from the tool wielders. So it doesn't sound so strange that when I was seven or eight, we went to the midget car races at Danbury. Little cars with one seat and big engines.   I remember spectacular snack food: overcooked egg rolls, fountain Coke with a jolt of soft serve ice cream stirred in, and the predecessors of sliders: grilled burgers dripping grease, cheese, and Heinz. Better than the drive-in, but that's coming up. The racing itself was pretty boring. Round and round with no apparent winner. From where we sat in the bleachers, the cars looked like toys. Colors like kindergarten blocks with big numbers in circles on their side panels. The yellow and black striped #8 sticks out in memory.  Maybe that was him, dead halfway up the light pole at the end of the tr...

  In reality, the woman belonged to sometime else as she was just here at this time by accident. A slip of the cosmic order had caused her to be born out of sequence, under the wrong stars. She had been overlooked by the universe. In the book of all names and beings, she was unlisted, with no past nor future written down for her. She was invisible to the gods, the passage of time, and the protection of the stars.

 Anna Bea and Tam had been secretly teaching each other to read and write since the little girl could sit up and hold a crayon. Tam never learned and was reluctant to subject herself to scorn, so she made do as many unlettered adults did. Each morning when chores were done, Tam would take off her apron and smack her broad palms together and say to Bea, “Time for school!” something she had no firsthand experience with. The two-year-old laboriously stacked three county phone books on the kitchen chair, climbed to her perch and waited with her grubby little fists clutching air while Tam got out the pad of lined newsprint and the cigar box full of pencils and crayons. Tam warned her, “Now don’t be letting other people know about our business here,” as the two of them drew copies of the bold letters from the front page of yesterday’s newspaper. The truth was that Bea had figured out reading and writing on her own while she sat on an apple box in a booth at the airport bar with...

       "Put out your hands, palms up. In this one," she touched the girl's right palm at the intersection of two prominent lines. "Ask yourself what you want. Don't speak the words." Anna tapped the center of the girl's other palm. "Ask yourself what you need, again, silently. Think only the questions, not the answers. We'll leave the answers to the cards, yes?"  She  fanned the deck face down across the table and shuffled twice, letting the cards purr. "Now cut the deck and we'll see. " The woman reached across the table, lifted half the stack, set it aside, and cut again, and a third time.  Why was s he stalling?  "Are you ready?"  The woman nodded and knotted her fingers in her lap. She  dealt the cards facing the woman, left to right, smoothly silent. "What you want and what you need." She turned up two cards and put two more between them, face down and out of her reach. She tapped it once. ...