Cooking the Hook - NEW

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...

 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. ...

 She burrowed into her pillows and pulled the sheet over her head. “Where did you go?” “It’s not a where,” Sam spoke from the darkness. “Is this a dream?” “Yes. The only place and time we have. Who were you praying to?” “What?” “You called out to Hecate, Isis, Yemana, and Mary. They might shed tears for you, but that’s all.” “And Jack.” “Yes, Jack. Your knight always, but where was he? Mortal just like yourself and still in a cage of his own making.” “I needed him.” “And you got me. He can’t be with you every moment, and you’ll likely outlive him if he doesn’t...” “Don’t say that. Go away." “I can’t until you hear me out.” She put her palms flat over her ears, only to find his voice as deep inside her as Jack ever was. Intimate. Sam’s voice curled in her head like smoke. “You need to understand what you did and how you did it. Gathering power when you were lying on that hard, shiny, unclean floor, hiding from the violence that you knew was coming.” “I didn’t know.” “Yes, you did. ...

  The restaurant was a rambling, one-story clapboard building. The weathered wood had never seen a coat of paint, and the windows were frosted over with grime. Strings of Christmas tree lights festooned from the eaves and looked permanent. It was midday and there were only three cars and a pickup parked out front. Behind the building, close-cropped grass stretched into the distance. Two small vintage propeller planes were parked a short walk from the rear of the building. As late as the fifties, small airports like this dotted the countryside, their accompanying bars hung on the edges of the now mostly unused fields. They ducked inside the cool darkness. The bar stretched the whole length of the room, lit by vintage neon beer signs shining through ranks of sparkling bottles of liquor and polished glasses. The timbered ceiling sloped back to an addition where small tables lined the wall of windows that looked out onto green. The old airplanes looked ready to fly. The bartender nodde...

 He might have sensed Anna standing behind him because he leaned over and reached for the weapon on the floor. More a sword than a knife, it was two feet long, a third of that, the leather-wrapped handle. The double-edged blade was glazed with blood. It looked heavy, cumbersome, and crude. She watched a fat drop of Maryann’s blood fall from his hand to splash brightly on the pale rag rug above the tip of the blade, like the dot of an “i”. His bloodstained hand was floating down to the knife when her hand slipped into the shadow of his and took it the way the gulls at the beach steal a sandwich even as you lift it to your mouth. His hand closed on nothing, and she heard a sub-aural grunt as he looked down to where the knife had been. Anna placed one knee on the bed and gripped the weapon like a Louisville slugger. Left-handed, like the great Ted Williams, she swung for the fences, her fluid follow-through ending in a bone-jarring stop as the tip of the blade bit deep into the plaste...