Cooking the Hook - NEW

  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...

After the crying came the scolding. After a hearty meal and a wash, she wanted to go back out.  "Nonsense", the experts say. Colin and I agreed that we would respect this new facet of her personality and be sure she's never out after dark. Prudent. I like nothing better than hanging out in the front yard, the three of them lolling on the warm concrete or the tall grass. Free as cats.  Camilla came to us damaged goods only three years ago . I've been fairly sure that the head injury she sustained as a kitten and her broken wrist last year,  affected her range of skills as a cat. Silly me.  I've had a lot of cats in my life. Characters all, each with deep personalities. She's the only one who has undertaken adventure on her own. Unless something chased her. In which case, bravo on getting away, and good on ya for putting your wayfinding skills to work.  Something about the smug way she strolled into my bedroom after seven days AWOL to go face down in the food bo...

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 bothered Bea to see Ace locked up like that. 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...

  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 ...