Cooking the Hook - NEW

 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...

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...