The first e-book offering from little old me.

Yep. I did it. It wasn’t traditional. It wasn’t even my favorite book. I know, you shouldn’t say that. But I have become filterless in the last short while… beware the “f” bomb, people.

I blame it on the world. I am, like most writers filled with doubt about the publishing world- the book as we once knew it is probably changing forever. And along with that, is the way we acquire, market and buy both the author and the book.

So what’s a girl to do? Give up her dream? Stand there and just take it? Nope. Not my style. I have been patient. I have been understanding, forgiving and kind. Ask my agent.*

I believe there is “the right time” for everything, but seriously… does it take 4 months for an editor to reply? I know I always think I can do something better than the guy in charge, but imagine this… an email comes in. You read the query.  You say, nope. not for me. you reply. You delete, and repeat. A pitch comes from an agent, you like it, you request manu.  She sends it, you skim, trust your gut. Offer or decline. Done. Next?

Don’t even get me started on the army of marketers and accountants it takes to push a manuscript into book form. Or the way most people only read what they find listed on a BOGUS best-seller list. ANd please, we do not want to talk about the way some writers are more magic web masters and salespeople than wordsmiths.

ARGH.

Let’s just say, I want to keep writing novels, even if no one ever reads them. Even if I have to buy the whole stock myself and fly around the world reading chapters to blind people . I want to believe in the power of words, be sucked into the imagery of a place I will never go nor have never been. I want to be responsible for taking one person out of their reality and dropping them smack into a place from my dream. I want to mess with your head and I want you to love me for it.

Well, there. that’s why we write. For love. Or… to annoy the shit out of you.

I do both.

*note to agent   forgive my candor…now go pitch We’re Not Waving, We’re Drowning, and 3 Women Walk into a Bar

That’s chocolate covered bacon on a stick. Yessir.

You can see my food on the stick post here. A list, some more pix and perhaps one of your favs?! Pig intestines on a stick, anyone?

It’s State Fair time. Time to battle crowds, eat a bunch of crap and puke on the tilt a whirl. Ah, memories.

Thinking about these large statewide gatherings reminded me how places like that help me find characters as a writer.

One year, I worked at the Columbia Record booth at the NY State Fair. I was supposed to con, I mean convince people to sign up for the club. I worked on commission only. I met so many people, heard stories, watched strangers interact with strangers and enjoyed the “game” they tried to throw at me. But after a few days of the same pitch, I started visiting the barns to see cows and horses, goats and newborn lambs. I did my job, but I also shopped other booths. Rode some rides. Got a few dates… and at the end of a week, when i’d seen about everything there was to see, I quit the job, and bought myself a pair of very cool cowboy boots which I wore backpacking through Europe years later.

Funny thing is, I still use pieces of the characters I met at that fair in my writing today. Some things just “stick” with you.

I had been speaking with my writer friend, Gwen Morrison, a brilliant author, editor and publisher, and my partner in the newest venture: Write by the Water: a writers retreat about the best place to write in our homes… something most people ask of authors at those Q&A’s after the reading, on the big book tour.

As suburban moms, we have both adapted a room in our house to act as office/writing space. A place where children and dogs come and go as they please, usually leaving us more interrupted than inspired.

I hit up my good friend, Mr. Google to see what he had to say what I typed in PLACES TO WRITE.

The writers at Wicked Writers had a list of 10 places to write.

I got a kick out of this one.

5 – From a Jail Cell: Well, not in reality. Whenever I can’t seem to find peace and quiet anywhere, the loner in me dreams of writing from a jail cell in solitary confinement. No Internet, no planning dinner, no vacuuming, and no teenagers not doing their homework. Ahhhhh

Novelist and Coach Jacqui Lofthouse suggests “going on holiday” is the best way to get any writing done. In other words, get out of your natural element.

She speaks of getaways in  Tuscany and the South of France, dropping uber-attractive nouns; villa, country-home… I like her thinking.

This article reminds me that:

Oh, yes. I like that. All you women writers now have a perfectly good reason to overtake the den.

And, yep. Even JK Rowling has something to say on the subject.

THIS IS where I’m going to be writing this fall.

In one of the spacious rooms, on a balcony, under a tree, on the beach, in a kayak…

You can join me…..  it’s easy. CLICK HERE for all the details. I’ll save you a spot on the sand.

Thanks, Barry and DOGZPLOT.

What Betsy Wants

She wants to keep him around longer than a night. She wants to be more than his fuck buddy, the one he calls when he wants a piece of ass without buying it dinner. She knows she’s not pretty enough for him, not skinny enough or nice enough and her crooked teeth, she figures they might have something to do with it, although he never minds feeling them skim across his cock.

She wants him to shut off his phone when he walks in her door because the chime and ding of all those pretty girls calling him gets annoying after a while and she has to try even harder to please him, even harder to get him to understand she is so much more than this naked girl standing in front of him willing to do anything he asks at any time.

But instead. I am here. In a chair, In front of a laptop. At a desk with a mug of coffee, a bottle of water and a ream of paper waiting to be filled.

Everyone has opinions. See this article to get the analysis from Roger Ebert, Margaret Atwood and more.

My take?

When posting these paragraphs from my current novel in progress: 3 women walk into a bar, a scene told from the protagonists POV, I was told by the analysts at I WRITE LIKE, that  I write like David Foster Wallace. What do you think? Here are the paragraphs I submitted:

The cozy bar on the corner. There’s one in every city, a hole in the wall that does more business than the big hotel bars. It will have more character, hide more stories, and even though most nights the biggest tip will only be a crumpled ten spot tucked into the waitress’s cleavage, the place will cash out stronger than the big guys, and with an honest owner, it could be around for years— like Cheers, minus the high paid actors and a cheesy laugh track.

I felt it as soon as I walked in. That I-wish-it-was raining-so-I-could-have-an-excuse-to-hunker-down-in-the-corner- booth-with-a-smoky-scotch-and-a-beer-chaser feeling. The idea hit me that some people would do exactly that even if the sun was shining and the boss was waiting and then another feeling began to sink in¾ kind of sick and wormy¾ that some people, even if they couldn’t afford the scotch part of the fantasy, would spend their days in that corner booth drinking away their future, trading their life for temporary liquid happiness.

It was this feeling that kept me away from drinking booze in quantity. I have been known to drink the occasional cold one at the ballpark, but I didn’t drink and drive, I never drank alone, and no, bartenders don’t count. I’d learned over the years that me plus alcohol add up to asshole. Anytime I thought I wanted to imbibe all I had to do was come to a place like this and take note of the loner at the bar, the one trying to look like he had it under control, though you could smell the loser on him, or the guys slamming shots at a back booth, killing brain cells, getting louder and more idiotic by the minute. I’d be reminded of the jackass nature of the drunken male and could order my soda, then leave.

Then, I submitted another  section from the same novel, one told from a main character’s POV, her backstory. It looked like this:

She went into work the first day, wearing kabuki makeup with her hair knotted over her head and a light-up Star Wars saber tucked in her sparkly belt.

She pulled over a chair, hopped up on it and addressed her first table, “I’m the Queen of Siam, Motherfuckers, who are you?” The bartender applauded and the table ended up tipping thirty-five percent.

One day she wound battery-operated Christmas lights around her waist and had them trail behind her like a tail. She recited dirty limericks in foreign accents, took every guy’s phone number that was slipped to her in the check folder and pasted them to the ladies room wall, next to an arrow and the words: Rich and Hung like a horse.

Roxie sat around the bar with the other servers after work.

“What did you clear?”

“Ah, the usual bullshit, you know,” she said, shrugging.

But they didn’t. The other girls on the floor were pulling a buck fifty maybe two hundred on a Saturday, and that was if they hustled. The quicker you turned a table, the better chance you had to clear a nice bit of coin. But you still had to tip the kitchen and the bar, and sure as shit those bartenders knew what your tickets were. Most of the time the waitress could blame it on the customer, calling them cheap, or saying somebody walked, but if you said that too often it came out of your pocket. Like Janice. She fucked up more than once.

“You aren’t pulling a Janice, are you?” The girls asked Roxie.

“Who me? Shit, I sold a thousand bucks and turned in two hundred in tips, okay?” Roxie was getting pissed. She climbed onto the bar.

“Look, fuckers!” she yelled, waving a twenty. “This is for you Rusty.” Roxie crumbled the bill and threw it at the bartender. “And you, and you and you,” she said as she went down the line, liking how they looked scrambling on their hands and knees for the money. She didn’t care. She had really cleared over four hundred and stashed most of it her bra. “All right then? Are we okay? Now, can I have a fucking beer? Please.”

I WRITE LIKE said that paragraph was similar to the writing of Cory Doctorow

Hmm.

I tried a flash fiction piece that had recently appeared in DOGPLOTZ.

She wants to keep him around longer than a night. She wants to be more than his fuck buddy, the one he calls when he wants a piece of ass without buying it dinner. She knows she’s not pretty enough for him, not skinny enough or nice enough and her crooked teeth, she figures they might have something to do with it, although he never minds feeling them skim across his cock.

She wants him to shut off his phone when he walks in her door because the chime and ding of all those pretty girls calling him gets annoying after a while and she has to try even harder to please him, even harder to get him to understand she is so much more than this naked girl standing in front of him willing to do anything he asks any time he asks.

Again, I got Cory Doctorow.

Now, for the piece de resistance.

I inserted a few paragraphs from the novel my agent is shopping in NY, We’re Not Waving, We’re Drowning. Hello HOTSHOT MARKET SAVVY EDITORS????

I went for the opening:

A phone that rings after midnight never brings good news. Maggie Morris rolled over and reached for the receiver, glad they hadn’t yet cancelled the house landline. She never would have heard the polite chirp of her cell phone or even found the tiny thing she’d tossed in her bag the night before.

She put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Morris? Mrs. David Morris?

It never was a good sign when they called you Missus.

By the time Maggie hung up the phone, two local Philly cops were on her porch, as if she needed further confirmation that her husband was dead.

That wasn’t what they said, of course. No one was allowed to draw conclusions. After all, mistakes had been made before, wrong doors had been knocked on, boats had returned, people had swum to shore, but Maggie felt the void of David, a fissure in her wall.

They said missing. They said there were some indications. They said she would need to go to Savannah. They pushed papers at her and phone numbers and offered assurances they didn’t have, while Maggie nodded then closed the door behind them. She wiped her eyes and began collecting the things she’d need, until she found herself standing in her office sobbing and she realized she had no idea what she needed.

She stuffed the papers in her bag then pawed through the junk drawer in the kitchen for a working pen while she called a cab. When the drawer stuck halfway, Maggie reached in and pushed stuff around until she found the culprit, a ratty old book. She tossed that in her travel bag too, rolled her suitcase to the door and stepped outside, closing the door to her predictable life.

In the back of the cab, Maggie repeated her mantra. Rely on yourself. Rely on yourself. It was her mother’s voice in her ear, a voice that whispered to her on the first day of kindergarten, on the day of the fifth grade spelling bee, each time the love of young Maggie’s life dumped her. Rely. On. Yourself.

It was from a poem her mother used to recite. The next line came to Maggie.

Oh, but I find this pill so bitter said the poor man. As he took it from the shelf.

Something about the phrase fortified her.

I WRITE LIKE came back with David Foster Wallace. Odd, yes? Appears DFW is the default writer. Sorry, dude.

And from another section of the novel:

A story like that didn’t go away. It was a tragedy, a retold lesson of the boy from Tarrabelle who drowned, about his missing sister and their dead parents, the couple who had clung to each other until the bitter end, jumping from the branch of the oak in the meadow, the noose on her neck doubled around the branch, ending in a loop of rope around his neck. The mother who had needed sixteen stones in her pocket, a counter weight to her husband’s limp body.

Someone had taken a photograph and sold it to the city papers, a distant image of two darkly clothed bodies hanging beneath a tall tree. People supposed they had jumped at the same time, stepping off into the air together holding hands.

If you squinted hard enough at the blurry photograph you could see them walking down a foggy path and imagine the distant clouds under their feet were a soft road that led somewhere wonderful.

I’m almost embarrassed that that section pegged me as Dan Brown.

Holy crap.

Third try with same novel: ( benefit of having 3 povs??)

I am an old woman, given to rants and daydreams. I earned the right in my troubled youth to act this way. People give me leave, allowing me space to act out my foolishness. In all truth, they encourage me, thinking I should be a foolish old woman, a demented old bitty, a sad, lonely and deplorable creature, so sometimes to assuage them, I am. And it disappoints me when I take joy in their discomfort.

What would George think of me today, in this funeral home, crying over his dead body? What would he tell me to do? I’d spent weeks hovering over him, asking how I could help. He’d been the one to send me out with the dogs, told me to take them down to the water and watch the sunset, take my time coming back. I suppose I knew what he’d planned. Maybe that made me feel guilty, feel like I needed his forgiveness.

Why can’t someone say those words for him now and fill up my emptiness, unclutter my heart?

“Miss Martus?”

A young girl—but they are all young now—touches my arm. She hands me a tissue.

“Is there anything I can get for you?”

I want to say, Yes, I’d like another forty years with that man. You can turn back the clock and make me a young girl running barefoot on the beach. You can give me back my life.

And wow. That submission earned me: Neil Gaiman. I think I should stop while I am ahead. WAY WAY ahead. I idolize Gaiman.

So, here the thing. Have you noticed, they are all male authors? What am I supposed to think of that? I know I have cajones, but still?

Ok. Here’s a challenge for the analysts. Let’s throw that algorithm a loop.

I will submit a sentimental passage, from a female POV. Let’s see what they think.

The door opens. She turns and watches him walk into the room. He takes off his sunglasses and as his eyes adjust to the darkness he sees her in her yellow dress sitting in the same place where they sat almost a year ago. She stands, wiping her palms on her dress, raising her brow, inviting him to come to her.

He crosses the room in three long strides, reaching for her, pulling her into his arms, pressing her against his chest. He’s sweaty from the ride over, hot and thumping with the blood and the adrenaline and she is sure that he can feel her heart through his shirt, that he reads her Morse code message sent out in beating dots and dashes. It’s. You. Finally.

He smells too good, and fits against her perfectly, as she remembered. She feels his muscular back, his broad shoulders and feels the strength in his hands as he runs them down her back to her ass. The silky fabric of her dress rides up when she raises her arms to encircle his neck. She thinks for a minute it will be like a sappy commercial, that he will spin her around in the center of this bar, that she will pull the clip from her hair and let it free, while kicking up her heels. But the second has passed and they are still standing there in front of the other customers—she hears them now, scraping back their chairs, resuming their conversations as if to say, show’s over—but still Jimbo holds Angel.

He presses his cheek against hers then tucks his head into her neck. His breath is warm and cool at the same time, as if he has just brushed her teeth, as if he ate a mint in hopes of kissing her. He reaches for her chin and tips it up toward his. They are almost the same height, she in her high heels, he in his cowboy boots. She opens her eyes and slowly blinks. A tear runs from the corner of each eye. She doesn’t try to wipe them away.

He smiles then, as if that was what he’d been waiting for, as if that tear told him everything. He looks at her so intensely, his gaze moving from eye to eye. It’s a test, a confirmation, the solution to the puzzle. She rolls her chin in his hand and when he meets her eyes again, his lips part and the angle is perfect. When his lips touch hers there is nothing else in the world, but them.

She doesn’t want to break the kiss first, end the embrace, pull away, but also what she wants to do she can’t. She wants to climb up his body and wrap herself around him like a python, she wants to slither down the front of him then lay at his feet sucking on his toes. She wants to stick her tongue in his ear and reach her hand down his pants and ride him barebacked through town with hair as her only clothing. She thinks all these things in one foolish moment and then, allows herself a small giggle, and that is how they part.

AND boom. I’m back to David Foster Wallace.

How bizarre.

In further testing, various Blog posts came back as Cory Doctorow, ( three times)  Chuck Palahniuk, ( thanks! I think) William Gibson, ( who?)  Raymond Chandler ( I wish!!) and the most funny to me?  I got “you write like Charles Dickens,” with my Neil Diamond concert blog post from 12/08. HAHAHA.

So, the answer to all this…. is that I am now ordering some books by Doctorow, Gibson,  and Wallace. And yep, totally rewriting my Dan Brown-esque paragraph.

Gwen Bender can see all of them from up here in the news helicopter, see them pushing up against one another, yelling out their windows. The worried ones have pulled off to the side, hoods propped, steam radiating. The anxious pace near open doors, phones pressed against their ears, gesticulating to invisible people, while others catnap in reclined seats making the best of spontaneous downtime.

Gwen adjusts her headset, motions to the cameraman. “Start right there and pan slow.”

She makes a note on her pad what she wants to say, then sneaks another look at the new pilot.

Her co-workers at the station think they know all about Gwen. How she’s smart and political, driven to succeed. How she never says the wrong thing on the air and always leaves the Christmas party before she drinks too much. They don’t know that she goes home to an empty house, not even a cat to clean up after. They don’t know that she hates TV, doesn’t even own one. They would never guess that she believes she’s broken inside, incapable of love.

Gwen touches the pilot’s arm and when he looks at her she thinks she may not be that broken after all.

Below them, in the snarled traffic, in the mess of the accident, Gabriel Turner rolls his Camaro closer to the dirty minivan with the faded God Bless America bumper sticker. The animated mermaid movie with a singing crab is a nice distraction. It pulls him into a happier place, away from regret, away from Barb and the break-up. Away from Valentine’s Day. He never promised her castles, he thinks. Why does it always end this way, girls wanting what he can’t give?

Gabe stares at the hot brunette in the junker in the next lane. He wonders if she’s married, wonders if it matters.

He reaches for his convenience store soda and works his lips around the straw trying to get her attention, trying to forget Barb and her silly demands. Everyone knows being late for your period doesn’t always mean you’re pregnant. His whacked-out cousin Anita brags how she hasn’t had a period in almost a year and he knows there’s no way that Jesus lover is pregnant—possibly bi-polar and probably anorexic, but definitely not pregnant.

Paula Rogers is thirsty. The more she thinks about how it, the more uncomfortable she feels, like she has a spider caught in her throat. Paula hates spiders. Now she’s thirsty, hot and creeped-out. She peels off her sweater, opens the windows. It’s this car, her druggy sister’s junker, that’s freaking her out. She roots around under the seats hoping for a soda, a bottle of water, anything wet. She curses her husband, Pastor Matt, the only man that has ever made her feel guilty. It’s his fault she gave up her black-striped Suburban today, with its air-conditioned interior, lumbar supported seats and all those convenient cup holders for endless bottles of water.

She opens the center console, then paws through the ashtray finding only a few parking tickets, a worn business card from a tattoo parlor and a half-wrapped stick of gum. As she pushes the gum into her mouth, she notices the guy in the Camaro staring at her and a moment later—Holy Pileup, Batman!—she realizes it isn’t just a stick of gum.

Paula should be home opening a box of chocolates, thanking her husband for the dozen roses, telling him he shouldn’t have while secretly wishing he’d given her more. She should not be here on Valentine’s Day, stuck alone on a highway tripping on ecstasy-laden gum.

Judith Fernweather drives a pristine 1971 black Jaguar XKE and smokes with the windows rolled up. The air conditioner blows her salon blond hair off her forehead, revealing a patchwork of wrinkles formed years ago by teenaged step-children. Gold rings on her fingers clink together as she raises the cigarette to her lips.

When she goes home to Kentucky, her country sisters look at her fancy clothes, her classy car, her high society life and call Judith lucky. They don’t know she has earned every chain, every carat, every ounce she wears, one prize for each time she put up with the shenanigans of her successful celebrity dentist husband—a man who goes on fishing trips with special buddies, gives furs to his female staff, but never holds his own grandchildren. She doesn’t tell her sisters that she buys everything herself from an Indian jeweler who calls her My Friend. She’d never admit that she believes happiness comes in a box, that it glitters. What they might understand, if her sisters loved her enough to ask, is that at the end of the day Judith knows all that precious metal only weighs her down.

Isabelle Ryder slams on her brakes. The sleek A8 responds smoothly, merely tapping the rear of the junker. Like it would matter. In the past week, Isabelle has learned just what matters in the world, and if you can buy it or sell it or take a picture of it and hang it on your wall, then it’s worth shit. What you want is what you can’t touch, what you can’t buy, what you can’t capture or qualify or control. Things like happiness, like that feeling of a shiver running through you, a tingling of your spirit, something that is unquantifiable, but when it happens you better hope you’re present enough to recognize it because it may never happen again.

Last week, after fourteen years of marriage and three months of counseling, Isabelle gave her husband Stan a test. He’d had his flings in the past, but they were over, he promised. He was reformed.

Isabelle wanted to believe him, but she knew men. She had a philandering father and her share of morally impaired boyfriends. She knew how they operated. So she lied, saying, “I hired a private detective. He’s been following you for two weeks and I’m meeting him in an hour to pick up the report. Is there anything you want to tell me?”

And when Stan started talking, he didn’t give apologies or pleas, just facts: names and dates and places. Her husband was a real Casanova. Isabelle heard everything from far away, as if she was watching a movie of her life, only it wasn’t her life, it couldn’t be. She wasn’t one of those dumb broads on daytime TV whose cross-dressing husband steps onstage in a dress and wig making a fool of his wife—a woman who had tried for years, for the sake of love—to overlook the huge red pump-up bra and size fourteen stilettos hidden in the back of their closet.

Valentine’s Day will never be the same. Love has disappeared from Isabelle’s vocabulary, replaced by legalese shoved into a manila envelope, an envelope that will be served to Stan tonight instead of his filet mignon as he dines with his girlfriend at the Ryder’s old table at The Palm.

Maxwell Feldstein glances at the console of his baby blue BMW Z4 recognizing the incoming call. He taps the earpiece, clicking over from the corporate round table meeting to see what his dumbass housekeeper wants now.

“Speak.”

He’d hired the woman as a favor to a friend of a friend and has spent every day since regretting it. How tough was it to clean a house? To pick up the dry cleaning? To care for one small shit-eating dog from China?

“What do you mean you can’t find Mu-shoo? He wouldn’t leave the yard. Did you check the laundry room? If you left towels on the floor like last week, that’s where he’ll be. Just go check. No. You can’t leave until you find him. Listen, that’s what I pay you for. Yes. I’m serious. No. He’s not just a dog. I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation. Get it done.”

Maxwell punches the button to retract the convertible top as he hangs up, saying, “Fucking Mexicans!” only then noticing the agitated truckload of landscapers in the next lane.

Nate Berkowitz, the driver of the minivan wishes he’d made better choices in life. He knows there’s no going back. Only sour people live a life of regrets. But he can’t help wonder at times like this—stuck in traffic in a shitty minivan, slightly hung-over from cheap wine with three kids yelling and throwing stuff at his head—where would he be now if he had taken more precautions? The pill and all those condoms apparently weren’t enough where he and Fertile Shelly were concerned, but a vasectomy? Now, that would have been the ticket. That, and finishing law school.

Nate turns on the mermaid movie for the third time, hands crackers to the boys and a bottle to the baby. He doesn’t know how he got to this place, where he’s the house husband, the man who changes diapers and drives the kids to preschool. He’s the only man at class functions, always the one they ask to move the desks and take out the trash when he leaves, if he wouldn’t mind.

He doesn’t.

Nate spends his week counting down to Saturday—the only day he gets for himself—the day he runs fifteen miles and leaves his cramped life in Suburbia behind.

In his shorts and running shoes, traversing the back roads of North Georgia, he’s someone else. As his thighs pump and his chest heaves, Nate’s soul opens and he becomes important, an integral part of the universe, a cog in the wheel of life. He knows that without him, life could not happen at the same speed. He feels alive. He feels necessary. He runs until he collapses, and even then, he’s smiling.

Stan Ryder is not in pain. He can’t quite figure out why his head is outside the car but his body is inside and when he tries to look behind him, at the damage to his beautiful Audi, blood drips into his eyes. He feels nothing more than a familiar stab of guilt. The accident is his fault. He remembers swerving out of his lane to avoid the suddenly braking cement truck, he remembers the look of horror on the face of the man in the Suburban, remembers the screaming woman.

Stan is the King of Mistakes, a man who flounders but somehow, usually finds a loophole, some way to pull himself out of the mess he’s gotten himself into. There are presents to buy, trips to plan, slow dances in candlelit restaurants. Begging with real tears was not beneath him. Stan can fix everything—but this. He feels himself drifting away, the rocking motion of the car suspended over the concrete divider making him sleepy. He remembers a war movie where the hero tells the injured man to stay awake, don’t go to sleep, or he’ll die. But Stan needs a nap. He has a date tonight and wants to look his best.

Paula finds her new cell phone and turns it on. She’s not used to carrying it, or talking into something so tiny. It looks like a toy. Nothing is real, is it? She’s feeling the drug more now and is so thirsty. She holds the phone to her ear, feels like a spy. That makes her laugh. The guy in the Camaro looks over and smiles. Paula listens to the message her husband left, that he’s going to help her sister Randi move, that he won’t be home until late.

Paula tosses the phone into the back seat and steps out of the car. She walks over to the Camaro and leans in, smashing her forehead against the driver’s as she reaches past him and grabs his soda. He doesn’t seem surprised or offended. Paula finishes the drink, tosses it in the road and leans in again, balancing on her toes as she sinks into him rolling her forehead against his, wanting to carve a place right there between his eyebrows and hairline and sit in it, like a soaker tub, hang her arms over the edge and dangle her feet in the blue, blue, blue of his eyes. It’s as if their skin has melted together, attaching them like Siamese twins. She is struck with the thought of skin—how cool, how smooth, how sweet skin is. This skin. The skin of a stranger—the most real thing she has ever known.

Gabe feels the heat radiating off her like steam. If it was dark out, he would see it rise, the ashy, smoky haze of a recently extinguished fire. He lets her kiss his forehead, lets her call him beautiful, but when she cries, he can’t stand it. He pulls her in through the window, surprised at how light she is, how limber, how easily she comes to him as if they’ve practiced the same move a hundred times before.

Anita Turner imagined her death eighteen different ways, lying about the exact number to her father, The Shrink. She told him that sure she had thoughts of suicide, who hadn’t? Bottles of pills, pistol to the head, a leap from a roof, stones in her pockets at the lake. All possible. All requiring far too much planning. All unlike his daughter. She never mentioned the car. How driving in a car, it seemed simple. Especially going over bridges how she thought, what if I took my hands off the wheel just for a second? What if I swerved to the right and gunned it?

Anita hadn’t eaten in four days. Her head was pounding and the voices wouldn’t stop taunting her. She unclipped her seatbelt and floored the blue sedan, pulling out in front of a speeding cement mixer then closing her eyes as she slammed two feet on the brakes. There wasn’t a bridge or a cliff, no water to sink into, just a sea of metal monsters to crash into her over and over and over until there was nothing left but another pathetic tragedy for the evening news, something for people to catch on YouTube, update on Facebook, follow on Twitter.

Randi, Paula’s sister, is dying. She spends her last few moments on Earth worrying that she’ll bloat in death and people will think she was fat. She knows her sister will hate her forever for seducing her husband, though maybe she’ll never find out because it looks like Pastor Matt isn’t walking away from this either. Randi reaches her arm toward his bloody pant leg, unsure whether anything’s attached to it, but believing simply touching the pants of a man who knows God might be enough to get her where she wants to go.

Viewing the scene of the accident from above is chaos at its finest. Cars litter the highway like a giant’s playthings. Some are overturned, rocking on their roofs like air-pedaling turtles. Others are crushed and combined into shapes that don’t roll. A blue sedan is trapped under the rear wheels of a tractor-trailer, flattened like a squeezed tube of toothpaste. A shiny black Audi with a broken, blood-splattered windshield teeters east then west, hung up on the lane divider. Gwen can read its vanity plate, StnDMan. A black and white striped Suburban is torn in half from radiator to hitch. An explosion of clothes, shoes, frying pans and dishes is spewed across four lanes like the entrails of road kill.

And at the head of it all, a green and white cement truck leaks its contents faster than men with shovels can scoop. The white stream runs downhill across blacktop to encapsulate steel, glass, chrome, leather, blood and bones. It’s a beautiful mess—a mosaic lit by the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles and made multi-dimensional by tiny people skittering in and out of view crushing candy boxes and red roses into the cement underfoot. Gwen tries to find words to put on her pad, but nothing comes.

As the helicopter pulls up and back, the image below blurs into a broken heart—black and white and red—bleeding engine fluids and gasoline into hardening cement. The rotating blades stir the sky with burning debris, sending a wave of cool air to solidify the wasted remains of another regrettable Valentine’s Day.

In the distance, a line of cars veers off the road, cutting a path through an overgrown field like the trail of an arrow shot straight and true.

Fee World Order is looking for creative writers with a sense of humor. Writers will be required to write at least 5 articles a week. This job does not include pay, but could in the future. If you are interested, please email me @ feeworldorder@gmail.com. Here is the link for the site.

http://feeworldorder.com/

Are they serious?