Shelby, bent over her bowl of cereal while editing the last twenty pages of her manuscript, pulled a face. “Gross.”

“What?” her husband, Ben, asked, putting the finishing touches on his omelet.

Shoving the bowl away, she gulped down the remainder of orange juice before replying. “My cereal. It tastes bad.”

“Maybe it’s the milk?”

“No,” she answered, still reviewing the manuscript as her stomach growled and rumbled.

“Hmm. Maybe it’s the cereal. Did you pull an old box off the shelf?”

“Could be. It’s Alpha-Bits.”

“I’ll check.” Ben slid his omelet onto a waiting plate before entering the pantry to look for the box of cereal. After several minutes, he poked his head out into the kitchen. “Uh, honey?”

“Yeah?”

“We don’t have Alpha-Bits. You sure you got the right cereal?”

Shelby looked down into her bowl to discover a bloodied mess. She wiped her nose and upon looking at her napkin realized it, too, was bloody.

“Oh my God, Shel! Your brain is leaking,” Ben screamed.

“Well that explains why these words taste so awful.”

This, my friends, is what happens when a writer works too hard. Remember to eat, sleep, and get some exercise every day to avoid eating brains for breakfast.

By Kathie Leung
(c) 2012 All Rights Reserved
Photo by cookiespi on Flickr.

“J. Edgar Kalamazoo,” Moira growled in her fourth grade teacher rendition of sailor talk. “Where the h-e-double hockey sticks have you been?”

“I was helping Uncle Norm, why?” I was telling the truth.

“Have you heard the news?”

“No.” Again the truth. It was as if I was given this incredible opportunity to make up for all the lies and half-truths I’d been telling the past twenty-four hours. Was it possible yesterday’s events actually made the news? And if so, how much, to what detail? Guessing from the look on Moira’s face, my gun-wielding, forehead drilling, blood spilling, life sucking activities were left unknown. But it wasn’t John Q. Public I was worried about.

She shifted and glanced up towards Jeff, then eyed me using her super secret mind-melding powers. Completely unnecessary, I got the hint, but at that moment, Jeff was my only ally.

“Everything okay?” he chimed in, possibly sensing the girl code of non-speak. “Moira was worried. I told her you probably had a lot of errands to run, but she insisted–”

“I did. And I was worried.” Moira rammed her fists into her sides, her elbows winging out. It was meant to look authoritative and pissed off. In her defense, how was she to know that stance wouldn’t withstand her adversaries’ blows?

“I’m here now, so relax. What was so important anyway?” It was dumb of me to have asked. We both knew why she was so nervous and upset.

Rule 2 of undercover agent work: When, during the commission of a federal felony, do not — I repeat — do not engage or otherwise involve civilians. Here was my prime example of why not.

The preceding is an excerpt from a current novel-in-progress. All rights are reserved. (c) 2010-2013 Kathie Leung

Just because I haven’t been blogging doesn’t mean I have stopped writing. I’m just more focused on writing a novel so this took a backseat. Hopefully my new writing schedule and some health concerns that have been resolved and had been sucking my time will allow me to post weekly. Fingers crossed, right?

I found you. Two clicks and there I was, staring up at your building and remembering so very much about such a short space in my life.

Why?

Not that it matters, I guess. We weren’t in love, never made the mistake of even making such untrue proclamations, it wasn’t something either of us saw going beyond where it went – and I don’t look back on it with anything more than fond memories.

But it was weird to go there and know within an instant I’d been there before. Inside. The parking space and that you had to shoo me from the rental and jimmy the car into the tiny slot. The single room that served as your living room, kitchen, dining room, and bedroom. The gift you gave me.

Breakfast down the street the morning after.

I’m still blown away that here, thousands of miles away, well over a decade ago and so much more, I found you again. And am thinking, fondly, reverently, and thankfully.

But not regretfully.

So how the hell are you?

Five things I want to know:

1. What’s the attraction with a weight that shakes?

2. How can anything grow in freezing cold temperatures eight feet below the water’s surface (e.g. the bottom of my pool)?

3. Why hormonally charged, testosterone driven teenaged boys don’t get all weird about the whole sport of wrestling?

4. Why doesn’t the body use stored fat to replace the food it’s being deprived of instead of doubling and storing it, thinking it’s starving?

5. Why does my husband remember statistics from an obscure game played twenty years ago but can’t remember something I not only just told him about two weeks earlier, but emailed him a reminder as well?

She stood staring out the window, arms folded over her terrycloth robe, a “Fueled by Caffeine” coffee mug balanced in her hand. The door opened and her husband stumbled out, his hair stuck up in a thousand different directions, feet slapping the cold tile. “Morning,” he said, his breath capable of peeling the paint off her cup overpowering the rich, full bodied aroma of the coffee. She said nothing, continuing to stare out the window as he busied himself with pouring his own mug of coffee. Delilah wished he would at least do them both the courtesy of running a brush over his teeth but took some comfort in knowing that the coffee she sipped was strong.

“What’s going on in that pinhead of yours?” he asked with a brightness she didn’t much appreciate at the start of her day, especially since she was more of a night owl.

“How is it that the pool is so green when it’s so damned cold? How can anything, even a fungus, grow in those subzero temperatures?”

He chuckled, still far enough away so as not to cause her anymore discomfort. “There is a plausible explanation,” he said. She turned to look at him, her brow cocked, challenging him to go on. Mark sipped then waved his mug in the direction of the backyard where she had been staring.

“Well you see, the gnomes that were hired to clean out the garage got sidetracked with the overgrown lawn. To you and I, it’s unkempt and in bad need of mowing, but to a gnome? It’s like whiskey. They love that stuff. So,” he said with a straight face, as if he was telling her that the color of the sky was purple and she was a gullible kindergartener believing it was so. “They eat it, party it up while we’re blissfully sleeping, completely unaware and, just like us when we have too much to drink, they have to take a leak and do so straight on into the pool.”

“Let me see if I have this straight,” she said dryly. “The gnomes you hired to do your job of cleaning out our garage are getting drunk off the lawn you’re supposed to cut and then pissing in my pool to make it green?”

“A-yup,” he said and tilted his mug to his lips. “Not much you can do about that.”

“So you say,” she replied as she shuffled away from the window. Standing at the end of the kitchen island, Delilah reached out the phone book and flipped through the Yellow Pages, then picked up the phone and dialed a number. After a few brief moments, she said, “Hi, yes, Acme Maintenance? Yes, I’d like to hire a few people, one to clean out my garage, another to build some shelves and such to organize the garage, another to mow the lawn and carry off the trimmings, and finally someone who can transport a crazy person to the hospital. Apparently my husband believes in gnomes and it’s probably best he get some intensive psychiatric help.”

———–
This came from…

Here is the prompt for this week! [It comes from] a GREAT writing book called “The Making Of A Story,” by Alice LaPlante. It’s a huge book and full of actual short stories as well as exercises and thoughts on writing.

Goal: To identify interesting gaps in your understanding or knowledge in order to generate raw material for short stories.

What to do:
1. Make a list of 5-10 items that fit into the category of things not know: “I want to know why….” Keep it to things you see or experience in your everyday life.
2. Do a brief freewrite based on one of them.

“Wait, hold on.”

“What?”

“Did you hear that just now?”

“Hear what?”

“Hmm, not hearing it. Go on.”

“So as I was saying, I blah blah my blip de dah me yah yah I bleep my and dip–”

“There it is again!”

“What?”

“Just listen.”

-pause-

“Nope, still not hearing anything. So I then–”

“Exactly.”

The bus, final destination Chicago, headed towards Salt Lake City, was full. Every seat was taken, mouths moving, mountains breaking way into the flat, pock-marked high desert.

“Love,” he said, the seat rocking beneath his wide girth as he resettled himself into the fabric confines. “Isn’t a word to be used lightly. It’s not something to casually fling around.”

From across the aisle, wrists crisscrossed over a tan pocketbook, fingers curled into the simulated leather leaving imprints, she smiled and stared forward.

“You have to say it and mean it every time you do say it.”

She turned, smiled, looked past his shoulder.

“You hear what I’m saying?”

Her eyes met his. “Yeah, I do.”

“Good then, let’s hear you say it.”

Her cheeks reddened, the purse shifted forward until, with a quick, jerked movement, she pulled it back, higher on her waist up where her torso bent into lap.

“Go ahead, say it.”

The door a few seats back opening into a chemically bathed toilet, swung open with a squeak. A faint bowl cleaner odor swirled about, staying within the back rows. A slightly stronger, more foul scent clung to the wrinkled slacks of the elderly man who walked with a limp, hands puckered with liver spots firmly grabbing, torquing the high backs of the aisle seats.

“I love you,” she said just as the old man grabbed the back of her seat. She jumped, twisted her head, looking up at the man who continued to hobble forward.

“I don’t think my wife of fifty-two years would want to hear you say that,” the old man said, still moving. “Good thing she doesn’t have her hearing aides on.”

The girl laughed, the older man across the aisle titled his chin up, let it drop, and emanated a long, gut giggling laugh. Several passengers nearby turned their heads, some frowning, some smiling with a dazed, confused look in their eyes, while others yet joined in on the laughter.

“I’m still not convinced,” the man across the aisle said. “With conviction.”

“But you said I should only say it when I mean it.”

His head swept side to side, the stubble on his cheeks kissing the fabric of the seat. “No, I said it should never be said casually, lightly, just flung around. You said it casually, lightly. Say it with conviction.”

“I would rather not.”

“Try. Practice never hurt anyone.”

She opened her purse, reached inside, pulled out a stick of chewing gum, paused, dipped her hand back into the purse and removed the entire pack. She held it out to the man across the aisle.

“No thank you, it sticks to my dental work.”

Turning inward, to the seat adjacent to the window, she began to move the pack of gum towards the woman beside her, but then put it away. The woman’s head rested on the window, flaxen hair jouncing in beat with the bus, a bit of drool forming at the bottom of her open mouth.

“Humor me,” he said.

She chewed her gum slowly. “I love you.”

“That’s it?”

A slightly younger man seated behind the older one leaned out into the aisle as he reached up and tugged the other’s shirt sleeve.

“Yes?” The first asked.

“I think that is it. At least it sounds like how my wife says it and we’ve been married for twenty-two years next month.”

Sometimes just writing a novel isn’t enough. Spreadsheets, phone calls, trips to the library, trips to the actual physical location of where the events are taking place is necessary. This would be one of those days.

How goes your day?

Alcohol abstaining Abigail always bought big bandages before cutting Callie’s cute curls.

“Damned dandruff,” David drawled.

“Enough, everyone!” Elijah exclaimed.

“Friday’s fried, fricasseed frog guts,” Garrett gnawed greedily. Halitosis Hal heaved, hawed; Iguana Izzy, intolerant incubus, jacked Jacob’s jackal jubilantly.

“Kill Kramer!” Kathy Kristiansen laughed. Lazy Larry lounged moronically, masticating melons, munching noisily, needlessly. Nefarious Ned opened obstinate opines, overtly pounding punches, precise pontificated querulous questions. Quick quagmires, really.

Raucously Rob rambled something sophomoric, serendipitous, simply tenacious. Theodore thunderously tumbled under, undulating, urinating, unencumbered. Voracious, Violet violently, viscously, wickedly waltzed while white xylophones x-rayed x-chromosomes, Xeroxing y-chromosones, yellowed, yawing, yawning zealous-like. Zen zebras zig-zagged.

————

From a writing prompt: Write a story using each letter of the alphabet four times in a row, a-z. Not as easy as you’d expect!

[Part One]

Laurel, Kathie has told Kiera, isn’t the typical “finding her way” twenty-something she might appear to be.

“She’s very focused, very goal driven, very resourceful.”

This alone worries Kiera. Strong people – men or women – cause her to panic. To tense up. To shut down. But Linda, her therapist, and Kathie have encouraged her to push past the discomfort so this is what she does.

As she waits for her coffee to be fixed, she studies the other woman. There is an awkwardness that exudes from the girl with the crown of rich, auburn hair that touches her shoulders, moving back and forth like a broom working dust out of the corners of a room. A lack of social grace. Kiera wonders. If they were in a dark, neon lit bar nursing beer, would Laurel be more at home – at ease?

The paper to-go cup is handed to her and she asks for an empty one for her friend.

“I have a thought,” she announces as she sets the empty cup on the table a moment later. “Let’s take our coffees and go down to Mikey’s.”

“Mikeys?”

“It’s a bar.”

“Oh,” Laurel says. And then, “Oh!”

It’s no small feat trying to pour the contents of the oversized cup into the smaller paper one, but Laurel doesn’t make too big of a mess.

“How do you know about this place?” Laurel asks as they walk into the dark bar. Even though it’s the middle of the day the windows at the front are all tinted, the only light emanates from the wall of neon signs and individual signs that hang next to each booth. Kiera shrugs as they take one of the booths.

“Let’s just say that a little birdie told me,” she says as she flags the bartender. “So, what’ll you have?”

“Pabst.”

“Not sure if they have that here, but I know one you might like. Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale.”

“I forgot we’re in California there for a minute,” Laurel says as she shrugs off her sweater coat and folds it over onto the bench seat next to her.

“It takes a little getting used to,” Kiera says, not noticing how at ease she’s becoming.

~Kathie Leung~