Fun fact: The person who thought of the last contest we had (Be an Agent for a Day), is now a client of mine: hello Jim Duncan! Also, the person who won the contest before that (The 2nd Semi-Annual Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph Challenge), is also now a client: hello Natalie Whipple!
We’ve also had three finalists, Stuart Neville, Terry DeHart, and Victoria Schwab go on to be published/soon-to-be-published authors respectively.
In other words: NO PRESSURE.
(Bonus fun fact: I didn’t actually call the inaugural first paragraph challenge “stupendously ultimate,” it was actually “largely indispensable,” which throws into doubt whether this could properly be called the “third sort-of-annual.” We’ll just agree to forget that part, hmm?)
Now then!
It is time. Time to test your paragraph against… other first paragraphs. Time to see if your sentences can wage successful word combat in order to defeat other sentences and emerge victorious on a field of battle.
Oh, and there are prizes. Let’s start there.
The GRAND PRIZE STUPENDOUSLY ULTIMATE WINNER will receive….
1) Their choice of a partial critique, query critique, or phone consultation
2) A very-sought-after galley of THE SECRET YEAR by Jennifer Hubbard, which will be published by Viking in January:
3) A signed THE SECRET YEAR bookmark
4) The envy of their rivals
5) The pride of a job well done
6) I think you get the picture
The STUPENDOUSLY ULTIMATE FINALISTS will receive….
a) Query critiques
b) A signed THE SECRET YEAR bookmark (assuming you live in a place that is reached in a reasonably affordable fashion by the postal service no offense forraners)
c) Pride. Lots of pride.
On to the rules!!
I) This is a for-fun contest that I conduct in the free time. Rules may be adjusted without notice, as I see fit, in ways in which you might find capricious, arbitrary, and in a possibly not fully comprehensible fashion. Complainants will be sent to the Magister, and trust me, you don’t want to get sent to the Magister (who’s been watching True Blood? This guy)
II) Ya hear? Angst = prohibited.
III) Please post the first paragraph of any work-in-progress in the comments section of THIS POST. Do not e-mail me your submission. The deadline for entry is THURSDAY 4pm Pacific time, at which point entries will be closed. Finalists will be announced on Friday, at which time you will exercise your democratic rights to choose a stupendously ultimate winner.
IV) You may enter once, once you may enter, and enter once you may.
V) Spreading word about the contest is strongly encouraged.
VI) I will be sole judge. Unless I chicken out.
VII) I am not imposing a word count on the paragraphs. However, a paragraph that is overly long may lose points in the judge’s eyes. Use your own discretion.
VIII) Please remember that the paragraph needs to be a paragraph, not multiple paragraphs masquerading as one paragraph.
That is all.
And now I shall retreat to my stupendously ultimate bunker.
UPDATE: CONTEST IS CLOSED!! Thank you so much to everyone who entered.
Once everyone had gone to sleep I had dressed for “operation break-in” – skinny black jeans, black T, black jacket with the hood up to hide my wild mass of strawberry-blond hair. If a stranger were to see me, he would probably assume that I was a sixteen-year-old goth girl, rather than a would-be burglar. But no strangers were going to see me tonight. Once outside, I would be nothing more than a shadow slipping between the houses in the moonlight. Not that a car was likely to pass at this hour. Our house and the empty house next door were two of a string of oversized homes that stood along the beach, and even though we were only 90 miles east of New York City, out here on the Island, it was a different world.
“You are going to come and play with me, aren’t you William?” the girl’s voice seemed to echo strangely, in an almost other worldly way. And he felt it wasn’t really a request, more a command. Aged around nine, she stood about two metres in front of him; ramrod straight, with her feet together and her hands clasped tightly behind her back. She wore her almost black hair in plaits which reached just below the front of her slight shoulders, each plait finished off with a small delicate red ribbon. Her round, deathly white face was completely devoid of expression, with dull, black glazed eyes that looked like windows into a bottomless void. Thin mauve lips made a severe cold slash across her face, where a softer, fuller mouth should have been.
Written on board the SS Grace, somewhere in the Irish Sea, on the third day of January, nineteen hundred and twenty five
Babs was on the piano, caterwauling. Abraham Cole had just tuned it that day so it sounded a bit tense, if pianos can sound uptight like that, the way people can. Even when she hit the high C in the last verse, she sounded a bit off, but then, that wasn’t unusual for Babs. We sang along to I Dreamt of You but I couldn’t help myself and a few tears came out because it reminded me so much of Eileen. I pretended that smoke had got in my eye and went and lit another fag. Smithy eyed me, as if to say: “don’t be starting,” but I think he felt it too. Stephen stoked the fire and then I played the piano for a few minutes. It was the start of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 1 in B Flat Minor. Father taught me it. But after a minute, everyone asked me to play some jazz. I don’t know any though, so Stephen took over. He made the piano talk, as Mother would’ve said but she wouldn’t have liked it, of course. “Honky tonk nonsense,” she’d say. Mary, Babs and Margaret danced. I suppose I did too – I must have, because I remember Mary picking me up and spinning me to the other side of the room. I thought I might fall into the fire! But there was no one there to see, no May and no gentlemen for us to entertain and it was just good to have a laugh and a dance and try to forget.
Zoe Taylor reveled in the tune blasting her ears. She’d be able to block out the world until class started. No drivel. No cruelty. No high school stupidity. Just a pounding rhythm and harmony. As she strode across the room, her iPod cut out. Great! She pulled it out of her pocket, circled her thumb on the volume, thumped it on the side and looked at the screen—hoping. Nothing. The stupid thing was dead already! She sank into her desk and yanked out the earbuds wondering if there was something about her that could have drained the battery.
It was a dark bitter London that welcomed Jordan Kinchaid back to its arms after the venerable grays of Paris. Rain streamed down from a pitch black sky, soaking footpaths and making streets glisten rich ebony; reminding her that rain was what London did…daily, sometimes relentlessly. The drizzles, mists, showers and downpours moved in from the Atlantic and swept across the west counties to the city saturating the region and making the sodden state as intrinsic to the existence of the native London dweller, as daybreak and sunset or the coming in and going out of tides water at the docks. The greenery she had seen in shadows coming in from Gatwick had been bent under the sheets of rain and the torrents of wind had pounded against the windshield making the motorway more than challenging. Along Belgravia everything was still, the street all but deserted except for the red glow of a passing car’s taillights before they were swallowed behind one of the banks of shrubs which was such a feature of the small square. Bracing against the brisk gust of wind that met her in the face as she opened her car door, she went round to the boot of the car to retrieve a parcel and then turned and quickly went across the street and up the steps to the front door of the familiar Georgian building that was 3 Sloane Gardens Square.
It sat there gnawing at my very being. My body, the intricate organs are engrossed
in a peculiar malaise. It takes all my attentions this small thing, it, petite winged- beast.
My noonday meditations have been profoundly agitated and dismissed because of this
presence. I laugh at first and leave the room but upon my return it still sits there. Its eyes, bulbous, a magenta red encased in a spider web- like black substance. The ringing of the phone in the kitchen distracts me but I stay still. I do not wish to answer for I am entertaining. A girlish voice echoes through my loft.
“So I’m going to die,” she said, pouring her fourth serving of Chardonnay into a cracked souvenir glass from France. Margaret’s swollen eyes looked out across the yellowing fields of tall grass that whipped in the breeze surrounding Lake Cayuga. She did not notice the delicate white clouds that hovered above or the whistle the wind made as it blew through the reeds that day. Her only thoughts were on the changing effects of seasons and how everything, once beautiful, tends to wither and die at the slightest chance of frost.
It is merely the beginning of the night when Gabriel decides upon his first victim. He locks his sights on her the moment she steps into the bar. The curvaceous blonde lass will be in is bed in under an hour, and shortly after her blood will be in his veins.
“You are going to come and play with me, aren’t you William?” the girl’s voice seemed to echo strangely, in an almost other worldly way. And he felt it wasn’t really a request, more a command. Aged around nine, she stood about two metres in front of him; ramrod straight, with her feet together and her hands clasped tightly behind her back. She wore her almost black hair in plaits which reached just below the front of her slight shoulders, each plait finished off with a small delicate red ribbon. Her round, deathly white face was completely devoid of expression, with dull, black glazed eyes that looked like windows into a bottomless void. Thin mauve lips made a severe cold slash across her face, where a softer, fuller mouth should have been.
Had they merely been brothers, August could've said no. But they weren't brothers, they were classmates. And that made it damn near impossible.
Dusk came down, saturated in misty dew producing a foggy substance around them. There were no other lights coming towards them on the highway, the night cloaking them in a disconsolate darkness. The FDR drive, at that time of hour was always desolate, lonely. The weather was simulacrum to the mood in the car, gloomy, a dark shade of blue. The individual trains of thought indulged in surfaced in their distraught expressions. Mr. and Mrs. Sweeney were on the highway going to the hospital for the 473rd time to see their son.
When the lift doors opened at the top of Queensway tube station and the crowd spilled into the road, the stench was like a smack in the face. Black plastic bin liners lay heaped in the road like body bags. Gulls and rats had ripped them open so that rotting vegetables, dirty nappies, half-eaten convenience meals, all manner of disgusting rubbish, flowed down from Bayswater to Westbourne Grove, a river of filth. The binmen had been on strike for a month now, along with the gravediggers and ambulance drivers. It was the generally held view that the country should be towed out to sea and left to rot.
I pinched the fiery wick between my fingertips, then watched the billowing smoke catch the breeze and waft out the window. I rubbed my fingers together, trying to erase the evidence that lingered from a flame that had thrown shadows on my wall only moments ago. My intent had been clear. I was ready to find my true love and live happily ever after. I was — opening myself up to love. I knew better than to have a particular person in mind while working the spell, and I had fought to keep him from creeping into my thoughts, really I had, but damned if he didn’t just keep popping in there. It was for that reason, that I added a clause. “I ask for this or something better, for the good of all, with harm to none.” I let out a sigh of relief. Now I knew that if he came back, it would be because he was meant to, not because I wanted him to.
The dolls. Gale called them Dori's "sisters:" Guenevere and Nevaeh, Heaven spelled backwards, a name Gale insisted that she had invented all by herself, half-joking that it had been a divine inspiration, although Dori pointed out that a certain famous singer's daughter had recently turned up with the same. "I'll be damned," said Gale, "How your father ever talked me into naming you something so finite." Lucky for the girls at least, Dori's dad was gone—he'd left Gale in '98 for a divorcee from Boca Raton.
(YA)
The legend journeys from world to world as a warning. Although adapting to fit each culture encountered, the message is forever the same. A broken child will unlock the doors and bring an end to us all. That is just the kind of creepy stuff Grandma Mim used to tell me when I was younger. Never once did I think that the stories were more than fanciful yarns brought to life in the mind of a lonely old lady. Never that is until today, when they came to take my sister way.
Thanks Nathan for doing this!
The girl who entered Colonel William Jackson’s field office wore plain, light-weight linen clothes, which were soiled with the same dirt and sweat that served as the uniform of villagers throughout the islands. She walked quietly to the center of the room, her eyes averted, and placed a moist, dark bundle on the colonel’s desk. A familiar, fetid odor had followed the girl into the room and it grew more intense as Jackson unrolled the rags to reveal a severed head, resting on its left ear and frozen in an unnatural expression of pain. The skin was creamy brown—lighter than the colonel had expected. He looked up at the girl, but she would not return his stare. With a gloved hand, Jackson turned the specimen and examined its contorted features. Could this be the same man he had met briefly in the shadows of the jungle?
Why was he taking so long? “E308.”
Last time he was done within ten minutes. “B206.” Of course that didn’t go too well. “C112.” He was so cocky going in; coming out head held down, he managed not to cry, but I knew he wanted to. “B207.” I wish this guy sitting next to me would stop hacking all over the damn place. Call his number already. “E309.” Why is every motor vehicles office always so freaking crowded? Where the hell is he? “A416.” Just when I thought I couldn’t sit still any longer listening to the annoying automated female voice, or the one inside my head, my fifteen-year-old son emerged from behind the screen. Our eyes met; his thumbs shot up and a smile spread across his face. He had passed his permit test. This time he stood tall and even sported a grin as they took his picture. While we waited for it to develop, he wondered what kind of car he would get. As my son’s future raced before his eyes, my past meandered before mine.
The outside of my childhood home looks exactly the way it did when I ran away ten years ago. I use my coat sleeve to clean a small circle on the grungy kitchen window. Memories of my mother cartwheel through my mind as I peer into the faded kitchen. I can only hope the answers I need are here, because now I have to get my coat cleaned.
“Gross. There’s no way he’s going to eat that.”
Robby and his friends, Adam, Craig, and Matt were standing in a circle on the playground waiting for the morning flag salute.
Alex Rosten was going to eat a bug.
“Alex old chap, what’s harder?” asked Craig, who was still talking sissy after coming back from his summer vacation in England. “Bugs or boogers?"
“Bugs,” said Alex. “Boogers don’t try to crawl out of your mouth.”
Standing in the cold November rain in Times Square I finally realized who I am. Up until that moment I had always thought when you had an epiphany that the heavens would break open with a bright light, angels would begin to sing, and the world would stand still. I was close. The heavens broke open with a down pour of rain and the green and white light from the Starbucks’ sign above me was shining brighter than ever. No angels were singing, but a mermaid was staring down at me with her fins spread open sharing her glory. I bowed my head and began to walk back down Broadway. I could have gotten a cab, but it didn’t seem to be the appropriate thing to do since I had just realized my true self. So, I walked six blocks in the cold November rain back to my hotel.
Cirra and Strata walked briskly down the road, their long hair whipping and tangling behind them in the desert wind. Neither knew the name of this place but their imminent arrival was felt by the nearby townspeople, the sage and juniper, the crickets and burrowed snakes. The women turned off the dirt road, moving across a ditch, over an old fence and on toward a dark mesa that loomed in the distance, quickly and evenly making their way. Desert night coolness began its creep, and wild grasses caught their skirts. Cirra pushed her hands into her pockets and glanced up, reading the sky. "The others should be among us shortly," she commented. Strata, watching ahead, nodded.
One and one-half years remain until the mandated release and re-booting of a legion of thugs, creeps, dissenters and gimps from their detention on Vitazra. As the days tick off the Plutonian calendar, Numblood’s waning goal of keeping them in safe mode forever, is falling on deaf circuits.
Faina had not expected the message to arrive before noon. Even in her anxious turns to each knock at the door or pausing pipecart outside the townhouse of Jallan Hall, she kept telling herself it would not arrive until after noon. In the spurts to distract her mind, she went into the informal workshop on the first floor next to the parlor, set the magnifying glasses upon her head, folded down the thick lenses over her mottled eyes, and worked upon the gears of the gyroengine for her bicycle.
Tepes sat rigid upon his horse, shoulders slumped with the reigns clenched in his fist and his battle-beaten helmet tucked under his arm. Sweat dripped soot and blood from his furrowed brow into his eyes, but took no notice of the sting. He was safe, for the moment, upon the hill he chose to watch the further demise of his city. The steeples of his churches blazed into the moonless night sky, the walls of his palace crumbled from the relentless fire of the Turkish cannons, and the shops and homes of innocent people ransacked and destroyed. He breathed a deep sigh of contempt, the fog of his breath swirled into the chilled air. Tirgoviste had nothing left for the Turks to destroy.
Tommy Putnam took a left into the paved driveway of a quaint little house which sat on the corner of two conjoining streets. He remembered it so well. The flower bushes were blooming just has they had been the last time he had seen them. The thick green grass brought back memories of sitting on the short deck, dangling his feet off the side, his ticklish toes brushing against the beautiful lawn. When Tommy opened his car door, he heard the tinkling wind chimes, but could not tolerate smiling at the sensation that the sound brought him.
I arrived at the Newark airport after my cab had been followed halfway across New York by some nut in a Lexus blowing the horn and waving hand gestures out the window that I had no problem interpreting. After standing on line for the better part of an hour waiting to check my bags, I saw a woman in skintight jeans and a bright turquoise western shirt, and had an eerie feeling that there was a connection.. She was the kind of skinny that came from a serious eating disorder, drug abuse, or the genes I’d been praying for since I was fourteen. Her hair was a blonde that didn’t occur in nature and it was big. Late 80’s New Jersey big. Even if she’d been dressed conservatively, she would have stood out because she was scurrying around, her big blonde head whipping back and forth as she scanned the various lines at the ticket counters.
Wow, that's alot of entries! Good luck, Nathan. Time to get mine lost at the bottom of the pile.
Yes! I made it! Freedom! Xi Wang raced along a small, grassy path connecting his home at the vicarage to Oolong Commune. A large pouch rustled on his belt as he hopped around several shrubs. The pouch contained thousands of tea leaves Xi Wang had carefully rolled and dried several monsoons before. Fearing for their safety, Xi Wang slowed to a walk. The monthly bazaar would be open ‘til dusk. He’d have plenty of time… providing his family didn’t notice he’d left. Xi Wang walked faster.
Rape, torture and near death had not stopped her. Only death could stop her now. Only death would stop her now. She would kidnap him alone.
I woke to my alarm at 4 a.m. and sat straight up. To this day, I can’t hear the tune of that alarm without feeling the need for a nap. It was called “antelope” on my phone because of its bouncy, leapy melody. It was the last day of my first week with students and The Scarlet Letter, which I’d stayed up until after midnight reading, was next to my pillow with a post-it note stuck between pages 17 and 18. It said “yellow shoes discuss” in my handwriting and I had no idea what I’d meant by that. I was separated from the floor by only two pieces of thin rubber and a sheet, since my air mattress had deflated through the night—just as it had every night. Inches from my pillow was a flip flop, kept close for the purposes of squishing the cockroaches that zigzagged past my head through the night.
'This is the future', the little while label said. 'Even if it's not the future, you should pretend like it is. – Boone.' Snarky labels were stuck on all the movies that looked stupid and you'd never heard of, praising them. This particular label was attached to, Apocalypse Future: The Return of Kurtz in 4-D – my future. The movies you loved had things like penises added to the actors faces – in different context though. Movies you thought you loved, that is, until you see Forrest Gump with a steaming pile of poop drawn on his head and a penis floating in the air above him, instead of a feather. Maybe you've been to this place, this is not your normal happy chain, there is no bright fluorescent lighting, behind the counters are not high schoolers working to help their parents with car payments or future tuition, the people that work and rent here (except me) are loaded to the gills with crap and weird to the max. They probably never had mothers and perfume the place with body odor. This place will not exist in the future.
The unicorn figurine crashed to the ground and shattered. Truthfully, I didn’t give a damn. The treasure curse was real. At least I was still alive.
Brent stood over me, a gun pointed at his head.
He always was a melodramatic little shit.
Who are you? With pen and paper in hand, and before reading further, take a moment to answer this question; not five or ten minutes, just a moment (you’ll learn the importance of ‘just a moment’ later in this book). Again, answer the question before reading further. From your answer (if you have one), draw a line through all words that describe what you are; all words that relate to your sex, sexual preference, job title, parental status, or physical appearance; all words that fit in the sentence, ‘I am a _______. What’s left? Maybe there isn’t much because there isn’t much there; that the emptiness on the paper before you is a reflection of the emptiness within you. Maybe that’s your life in a nutshell; you don’t know who you are.
Once upon a midnight clear, Village Idiot came out to cheer. “Hip hip hooray!” was his chant and all who heard came to join in the rant. He whooped and he called and he jumped about ‘til his hat it flew off and then went kersplat. A puddle as big as Superior be. He dove right in with giggles and glee. Townsmen frowned; their wives harrumphed. Their kids snicker doodled, their bedtimes trumped. Above flew a fowl who dropped “gifts” aloft. Village Idiot smirked, thanked it, and took off.
At odd times throughout her life, she’d convinced herself that there had originally been two of her–a two-in-one squashed in the ball of her stingy momma’s womb. Lola-Belle even knew what it looked like. A two-headed monstrosity made of rawhide chews, flat egg noodles, and tadpole eyes—the whole mess jammed in a formaldehyde-filled sac. But that was crazy thinking. There was only her. Had always been just her. She’d shut off the crazy thinking, giving the twin-monster thoughts only a second of airtime before twisting the mental knob to a different, saner station. At ninety, Lola could still do that. Could cut the crazy ideas off before little ghosts of rawhide noodle wisps formed a concrete image. Twirrrrrrrrrrl. All gone. There were simply too many rational top forty stations to listen to on the cracked turquoise transistor radio that never left her bedside table. Never. Even if it was an unfamiliar table in the cramped Lake Sherwood Village Assisted Living Quarters, Apartment 132.
The moment state law allowed my independence to be earned via driver’s license, I fidgeted incessantly outside the Nevada DMV waiting for the doors to open. Once inside, I killed time by reviewing the driving manual, my boot tapping on the tile floor. Minutes later, a whoosh of winter air drew my attention to the entrance and I found myself staring into a pair of vaguely familiar eyes. The corner of his mouth curled into a small, nearly indiscernible smile. My head dropped, face flushing with unexpected anticipation. I attempted to refocus on the manual, but the letters and words danced across the page in a confusing blur. The accelerated drum of my heart echoed in my ears, as everything vanished from view in a sea of gray.
Barely a leaf stirred as Zendralyn moved swiftly and quietly through the dense woods. She was so connected to these ancient trees she moved through them like a gentle wind. Dawn was quickly approaching and she needed to be in the Grove before it was fully light. She had taken to wearing a hood all the time now. It helped keep the moisture in and it helped guard against the urge to stretch towards the sun. Her fingers were already taking on a more twig like appearance and she knew the days were not long before she would be joining her relatives already permanently in the Grove.
Soft music purred at a steady rhythm all around her, and with each beat that gently vibrated the floor of Salon de Ning, atop The Peninsula New York, her heart throbbed with rampant anticipation. Perched on a brown leather barstool, she waited.
For her latest indiscretion to arrive.
Disgrace.
Elena Bancroft silently repeated the word, only in her head, the shrill bite of her grandmother’s voice replaced her own. The bartender's gaze lingered at her side—mere inches away from her left breast—where the cut of her dress revealed the first two lowercase letters of the word disgrace, etched in an elegant black script. Unabashed, the guy had been staring there since he handed over her drink order, and she satisfied his curiosity about her tattoo less than thirty seconds ago.
Although, apparently, he wasn't satisfied just yet.
Persephone said:
The day I got carted off to the nuthouse, I did the same things I'd done every day. I filled both pockets with dry cat food and walked the mossy sidewalks to the ivy-smothered market. I bought two packs of cigarettes, left by the back door, and emptied my pockets in the alley for the stray cats. I took a leisurely walk down to the river. And then I killed someone.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing moving to a place like London with these little girls?” When my mother first said this to me, weeks earlier, I quickly dismissed her apprehension and responded with “People raise children in London all the time, Mom.” Had I been twenty years younger I would have added “Duh!” at the end of my sentence while I tilted my head and had a sneer on my face. But what if the long and tedious flight was an indication of what traveling with children was really going to be like? Maybe I should have listened to my mother. Ugh. The very thought made me shudder. Not the possibility that I had made a mistake by moving to Europe with my two young daughters, but that my mother could have been right about something.
What would she say when she saw Annie again in prison? That’s what Barbie thought about as Angela floated face-down in the swimming pool. Not about the crow bar with her fingerprints all over it. Not about Angela, who…. Last time she’d looked, there’d been blood. Chad had run inside to…she couldn’t remember, but why was it taking him so long? Maybe this is a movie, Barbie thought. A movie in slow motion. She wished someone would press rewind. Her life had been pretty normal. And then she’d found herself standing in the driveway next to her hot-pink corvette, looking at an empty road and crying over a girl. Annie and Barbie had had that butch-femme thing going, for sure. Barbie’s hair was classic California, long and golden with a chestnut streak. Annie went for natural, a big red fro she got cut once in a while but never styled. They were the same height, but Barbie had the gait and bearing of a supermodel, whereas Annie moved with a powerful swagger.
Jim Dimsdale was the King of Christmas. Good King Jim. He practically invented Christmas. Maybe not the holiday itself, but he was the holder of no less than seven patents for inventions to improve the installation of Christmas lights. Those tube strand covers that allow the lights to lay on the ground without shorting out–Jim invented them. The remarkable Dimsdalator indoor/outdoor transformer with bi-level surge suppression, that was his, too. But Jim was possibly best known for his masterwork, the Euphoria 2000 Multi-directional Permanent Christmas Light Clip,. Made in America entirely from recycled milk cartons and named for his wife of 42 years, the Euphoria brought Christmas light installation into the 21st Century. With exact positioning of every bulb, it allowed for near flawless lines and angles that held fast in any kind of inclement weather.
Tobacco smoke and moonlight filled the car. Outside, the headlamps painted a blur of green and tan onto whatever they touched in the forest as the old Lincoln raced through the gray night. From the back seat, Stu listened to the big V8 gargling under the hood. He saw the slick of sweat on the driver’s face, as the young man hunched over the wheel, gasped and wheezed, and willed the lumbering car through the twists of an old country road. The driver’s as goddam scared as me, Stu thought. And the driver didn’t have the gun at his head. Stu flinched at the casual tap, tap of the carjacker’s pistol on the bump of bone at the base of Stu’s skull. The dashboard clock said one-thirty a.m. The road through the woods followed the curves of a river. The trees were almost on the road. Stu would never forget those trees. White oak, six feet through their middles, older than the Constitution, stiffer than the Hurricane of ’38, unbending and unforgiving.
Sam Barton pulled his black SUV into a parking space at the Palace of Fine Arts. The early morning darkness flared with red and blue from the lights of the patrol car parked at an angle. The buildings stood in the gloom like ghosts of a lost age huddled around a secret. Turning off the engine, he stepped out of the car taking his FBI ID folder from his jacket pocket as he walked towards the sound of voices, voices that burst in short rhythms, the sound of questions not conversations.
Kayon loved healing with mud; it was the ultimate art-form. He enjoyed working the soil with his hands, and then massaging it against the wound of a patient. The mud softened the damaged flesh and oozed into the body to speed up its natural healing. Before long, the flesh regenerated – the way God intended it.
Momma always said you didn’t have to have money to have class. Though growing up and even now, it didn’t feel like we had much of either. Now Momma is dead and Mrs. Rose the psychic said it wasn’t an accident at all. Mrs. Rose said Momma was murdered in cold blood.
That wasn’t what I paid forty dollars to hear.
Whoever put the soccer field in viewing distance of my math classroom was a genius — one whose feet I would gladly kiss. The actual subject itself was the complete definition of snorezville, but being able to spy on the boys’ PE class outside made sitting through those mind-numbing lessons worthwhile.
Get back to the gun. Captain Sullivan had said to always return fire. And he did everything Captain Sullivan ordered, because his father had told him to. So, after the explosion, he made it somehow to his feet, back toward the swivel he thought he’d successfully fired before the wound came. But the gun wasn’t there, and he couldn’t find Sergeant Tracy either. So he stood quite still and thought for a moment, because no one had told him the gun and the second gunner might not be there anymore.
The bathroom was rank. It smelled of Lysol and urine and blood – Lysol, because of the school’s half-hearted attempts to keep the restrooms germ free – urine, because the deodorizing cakes had all but evaporated from lack of replacement – and blood, because the large boy had just slammed the small boy’s face into the grimy lower edge of a urinal.
Let me tell you what kind of guy my husband was. A week after our honeymoon we were moving into our new house and everything was still a mess. He came in at nine thirty at night and said he was hungry. I said, “Darling I can’t get to anything right now. Just have a bowl of cereal.” And the look he gave me. I could have said, "I’m an alien from the planet Zepton, sent here in a space pod to inhabit the body of a human female," and the look he would have given me was exactly the look he gave me just then. Cereal for dinner? But that’s a breakfast food. So anyway, that’s the kinda guy he was.