Edge
of Sundown
by
Jennifer Worrell
Genre:
Suspense
When
dystopian fiction becomes real…
Val
Haverford’s Sci-Fi and Western novels made him a household name.
But that was then. A decade of creative stagnation and fading health
has left him in the literary wilderness.
Attempting
to end his dry spell and secure his legacy, Val pens a dystopian
conspiracy theory set in a tangential universe where alien invaders
eliminate ‘undesirables’ perceived as drains on society.
But
as he digs deeper into violence plaguing his adopted home of Chicago,
he discovers unsettling similarities between his work in progress and
a life he thought he left behind. Soon he finds his fictional
extremists are not only real—they’re intent on making sure his
book never sees the light of day.
As
he pieces together haunting truths about his city and his motives,
Val realizes his last chance to revive his career and reconcile the
past could get him—and the people he loves—killed.
Will
he make the right choice? Or will it be too late?
Edge
of Sundown is
a provocative story that shows how the desperation of lost
opportunity can lead to drastic and unexpected consequences.
**Get it FREE Jan 16th & 17th!! **
1
Twilight was settling.
Val Haverford exhumed an ancient cardboard tube from his writing studio closet and smoothed the roll of floor plans onto his sketch table. They still smelled faintly of pencil lead and wood shavings and dime-store aftershave. But the sharp, precise lines were now fuzzy, paper tinged the color of weak tea. He couldn’t fathom how his brother had found the time to draft them, much less hide such vast sheets right under his nose.
He immediately recognized the one he was searching for, a sketch based on incessant dreaming: twin houses angled northeast on the bank of the Gulf of Mexico. Years after Michael’s death, imagining what might have been gnawed a hollowness straight to his bones, unearthing guilt once buried deep. As long as their neighbors could deliver vengeance, they could go back to living in their perfect world.
Now those old scandals felt like déjà vu, the source of inspiration he’d blown half a century avoiding.
Careful to handle the paper with a soft touch, he affixed it to a mat board, measuring once, twice, confirming it was perfect. He set it into an ebony frame and hung it where it was visible from his writing desk, to remind him why he sat there every dawn, every night, typing until his fingers were raw.
Crimson spilled across Lake Michigan where the water met the horizon, its shimmer telling the time. Grabbing his partial manuscript off the desk, Val considered another quick read-through. After so many years of block, the bravado that led to calling his agent now felt rash. He should have stuck to his forte, a classic sci-fi adventure, and avoided last-minute doubt.
Ten minutes. He could skim in ten minutes.
He stopped short halfway through the first page. One letter—always one letter—flickered like a figment of imagination, an apparition from a nightmare that lingers after you wake. His fist curled around the pages until his knuckles threatened to pop at the joints. He squeezed his eyes tight, counted to ten. When he opened them again, everything was still.
That should grant some reprieve. At least for a while.
Stuffing the pages in a manila envelope, he chucked it into his portfolio along with a copy of the Tribune and headed into the city, gray clouds distorting the sunset.
***
Submerged in dusky light and the revenant spice of cigarettes, Calvyn’s was the last unpretentious dive on Chicago’s Gold Coast: no menu, no frills, and no name. Calvyn himself brought the usual double Macallan on the rocks to Val’s permanently reserved table. Val slipped a roll of quarters in the wall-mounted jukebox and cobbled together a playlist of sultry R&B. He sank into a chair, enveloping himself with the smooth sound of Sarah Vaughn while the scotch melted down his throat. His favorite form of meditation.
Detecting an excited chitter in the booth along the opposite wall, he opened one eye just enough to see two women, both having seen the bottoms of too many rocks glasses, giggling and throwing sidelong looks in his direction. He whipped out the Trib and fanned it open, busying himself with finding an article. At the sound of “I’m going to talk to him,” he ducked low and sped up the search, crumpling the pages as though that would deliver some great air of urgency and importance.
“You really need to get out more.”
Val jolted at the disembodied male voice and rubbed a floater from his eye.
Graham Van Ellis, gray overcoat bulleted with rain, leaned his umbrella against the jukebox. “I will never get used to that,” Val said. He raised his glass to Calvyn—ice rattling without his permission—and stuck out two fingers: another scotch, and a beer for my friend.
Calvyn nodded. He’d already popped the cap on a Bud.
Graham hung his coat on a wall hook and willowed into a chair. Smoothing down his tie, he regarded the pair of women. “They were just being friendly! And two of ’em, not bad.”
“No thanks. I don’t think my life can handle that sort of thing.”
Graham’s laugh was hoarse and strident after years of supporting the tobacco industry. “Your life, please. How busy are you?”
Val slid the fat manila envelope across the table. “Don’t give up on me yet.”
Graham slapped the tabletop. “I hoped that’s why you called me out here on such a shitty night! You writing again?”
“Started Monday, yes.”
“Another Battaglia?”
“I’m done with that series. Time to go in a new direction.”
“Again?” Graham scooted his chair forward. “All right. What’s this one about?”
“That,” Val said, pointing up at the muted TV screen flashing a photo of a redheaded teen boy, another victim of violence on the Southwest Side. “And this.” He closed the newspaper and spun it to show Graham the front page, a photo of an old man in tattered clothes. Neighboring district, same grisly end.
“I don’t follow.”
“Every day more people are killed for no good reason. Look at this,” he said, opening the paper to an inner spread where the front page story continued. “Seventy years old, harassing tourists for money. He was unarmed, yet half a dozen people jumped in to subdue him. And that guy.” Val scowled at the TV. “What is he, fifteen? Looks like he weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. Can you imagine, coming home and hearing that your son…”
All the moisture vacuumed out of his mouth along with the rest of the sentence. Val tugged at his temple, cleared his throat. More than fifty years and bitter reminders still brought the same reaction.
“Anyway.”
Graham tipped up his bottle. They emptied their drinks in silence. Val signaled for another round.
“How do these guys figure into your story?” Graham asked.
“All the perps have gotten off easy. How does that keep happening? That gave me an idea.” Val held a measure of scotch in his mouth, welcoming the burn. “A tangential universe with covert invaders quietly cleaning things up. Only they’re specific about who they target. Drug pushers. Gangbangers. Vagrants. Troublemakers not likely to be missed. With a rigged judicial system, each member of the syndicate gets a minor sentence and is free to kill again. When the undesirables of one territory are eliminated, they move on to the next, until the planet is gentrified. But where the line is drawn, and where it ends—what happens when you reach the goalposts?”
2
Fine mist glittered in the dim glow of the street lamps. Tires shushed against wet asphalt. Meandering back to his car, Val pictured Graham walking home, swinging the envelope with each stride. The rain could’ve soaked right through, smudged the ink. Softened a weak spot in the glue, causing it all to slide out. Or worse, drift away page by page without him noticing, littering the street like a ticker-tape parade. Val cursed himself for not clipping them together. He stroked the leather handle of his portfolio with his thumb, pinched the prominent seam, counted the heavy stitches. He should’ve given the entire thing to Graham. By concentrating on the phantom weight, tensing his arm with the effort of lugging it, he could imagine the manuscript were still in it, and all of a piece.
Under the delightful surrender of scotch, noises muted and tangible things danced out of reach. Gothic stone houses loomed over the sidewalks, giving the impression of strolling through a tunnel. People retreated into their high-rise condos by dusk in lousy weather, leaving the streets dark and bare. Flipped collar obscuring his face, preventing the rare passerby from stopping for a double-take, imparted a delicious sensation of invisibility. The only soul awake in a sleeping city. As he reached his coveted parking spot in front of a long-shuttered hardware store, silence tapped him on the shoulder. A cluster of old men used to hunker into the recesses of the doorway, forcing Val to step over legs stretched drunkenly across the pavement, bypass chewed-up cardboard signs begging for change. The early cold snap must have driven them to a shelter. He shuddered at the possibility of men being dragged forever into the shadows.
***
Lingering thunderheads had swallowed the moon, their gray bellies glowing yellow-white. Val sank into a blanket of grass and spongy earth as he walked across his rear courtyard, the dense air draping around his shoulders. He held a mug of tea against his chest to stave off the chill.
Once the advances from his novels and film options had offered the opportunity to burst out from the scruffy, overcrowded apartments of his early years, he’d whipped out one of Michael’s floor plans and researched North Shore acreage before the next check cleared. He’d counted the days until his escape from the crowds and the craziness and the never-ending noise, where he could stretch out his arms and not touch plaster. Breathing in the smell of sweet cedar, gazing down the length of the breezy, open hall to his studio, hearing nothing but the birds chirping in the grove and the refrain of water on sand, he’d been amazed at the incredible weight that eased off his shoulders. But now the tension returned, screwing his muscles into solid knots.
Catching snatches of illuminated whitecaps where Lake Michigan ought to be, he had an impulse to head to the beach and surround himself with the crash of waves. As he started down the limestone steps, one of the wood rail posts wobbled under his grasp. He’d need to get that repaired. Navigating his way down the embankment, however shallow, would be a fatal mistake in the dark.
He settled for perching on the stone wall that bordered his property. Too bad his neighbor’s porch light was a constant, ugly distraction even at this distance. Swinging his legs up, using a limestone slab as a pillow, Val tried to lose himself in the burnishing stars as he replayed the conversation at Calvyn’s.
Brooding over every word, he tried unsuccessfully to interpret Graham’s reaction to the new project. On one hand he’d seemed intrigued, but on the other, disappointed that Val wasn’t writing another installment in the Battaglia series. They both knew fans would eat it up. If history was any indicator, another film deal was inevitable. Though the last entry sold in the hundreds of thousands, its hasty second printing overshadowed the stand-alone bombs that came between. Though largely buried in the industry’s collective memory, inside they sprawled and festered, taking up residence like stale air after a long illness. Those few awkward minutes at the bar were bittersweet; he still had fans who remembered the glory days.
3
It was hard to pinpoint when the elephant had invited itself to their shit-shootings at Calvyn’s. Val had always prickled at Graham’s teasing curiosity about his next project, yet when it dawned on him how long it had been since the last prodding, it hurt like nothing else. Stories used to pile up in Val’s head, colliding into each other as they multiplied. Legal pad after legal pad littering his floor with madcap scribbles, just enough detail to remind him of one plot before moving on to the next. Now someone else’s calendar filled up with interviews and speaking engagements, their hard drive spilling into the Cloud, while Val’s floor remained spotless.
Shame concentrated into a singularity, and it took every effort to pretend nothing had changed. He’d practiced a smile until it came almost naturally. But the idea of dragging that world-weary science officer out of the dust was against all principle; an admission of failure and a shrug of the shoulders. He might as well take a back cover shot with his palms up and pockets turned out.
A barricade had sprung up whenever he’d headed toward the open laptop, obligation turning his passion into a chore. The cursor blinked in time with the ticking of the clock and it was all downhill with the brakes out: one day gone, then two, then thousands, twilight looming larger and urgency hissing louder. Trying to make a comeback with more of the same would be humiliating to both of them, whether Graham wanted to admit it or not. An allegory mirroring the current gravity in the news, packaged in his signature brand of dystopia, was bound to rekindle the allure that used to follow every release.
He returned to the studio and paced, massaging his hands. Unknotting the kinks in his back and limbs was an incremental, percussive event. Foolish, lying out on a stone wall in this weather. His right eye adjusted more slowly to the indoor light, the stars not quite faded.
History spread before him in the bookcase. He fingered the glossy spines, his embossed name that demanded increasingly shorter titles. The days when language rolled like poetry, mellifluous and robust, a rich broth you could savor on your tongue. At the end of the last row, a block of space waited for one more hardback. After that, he’d have to clear the half-empty notebooks and outdated travel pamphlets off the bottom shelf.
Westerns were his novice’s fast-track to publication. That old ‘write what you know’ chestnut was gold. But after a few years, a miasma of romanticism pervaded the reviews, people whitewashing the past with little more than picnics and parades. Spending so much time writing in one era projected a false sentimentality that he had no trouble ditching. Declining interest in the genre didn’t hurt, either. The challenge to reinvent himself led to a full reversal. If he couldn’t escape the primitive mindsets of real life, he would write them into existence. Evolution under the guise of cutting-edge technology and rocket science.
He knew exactly how the narrative rhythm, the drawl of his protagonists, the cadence of every line, should sound in readers’ heads. But until he could figure out how to pin the words down on paper the way he used to, it was all music and no lyrics.
When he’d moved in with little more than the tube of floorplans and a massive box of notes, the cardboard handles cutting off the circulation in his fingers, he had nothing but time. No clock ticking backwards. The future stretched before him in an endless, laggard expanse.
Imagining Graham reading this draft, then seeing his expression sink, was something Val couldn’t handle. He needed to nail a pivotal scene, compose one little snippet of biting prose, anything to combat any possible criticism, before he could sleep.
He fired up the wood-burning stove in the corner and set a pot of coffee on to percolate. While waiting for the telltale rumble, he polished the sketch’s frame, rubbing away the smudge on the glass obscuring ‘MH, Kano IL, 1967’ in the bottom right corner.
This time I won’t let you down.
4
While another pot of coffee brewed and a half-eaten takeout lasagna reheated in the oven, Val searched online for details on the most recent violence. In the few weeks since he started writing, several new cases had popped up across the country. It seemed like most of the local incidences happened in the most impoverished South- and West Side neighborhoods, where heavy crime had been a problem for decades. Yet few reports made it to the front pages. Was that a way to try and cover them up? Or maybe get them out of the public eye quicker? He was ashamed to admit he’d forgotten a number of them as well. Would the average Joe even be able to tell a random killing or gang shooting from something more sinister, more personal?
He riffled through the pile of travel pamphlets until he found a sun-bleached foldout map of Chicago. Marking the location of each incident with a red china marker, it quickly resembled a rash. Although the trail seemed to have started in the South and West, it trended upwards, scooping toward O’Hare airport and the surrounding ’burbs, outnumbering his estimates twice over.
That fifteen-year-old’s picture from the news kept popping into every rabbit hole Val burrowed down. Why that kid? What made him more tragic than the rest? Digging through articles from smaller publications helped piece together the story. Sean Davis: a rebellious kid throughout grade school, constantly in trouble with cops, in and out of foster care. Until he found that special person, a retired music teacher, who taught him about better things than drugs and gangs. Who maybe was a little too old to take on the responsibilities of a young man on the cusp of adolescence, not quite detached from the old life. The boy slipped, pilfered some cheap liquor with some friends after band practice.
For a second Val’s thoughts drifted to his brother, but he shoved the past back in the closet.
Sean was the only one who didn’t run, couldn’t run, after drinking more than he could handle. Only after the boy hit the ground did anyone realize the chrome in his hand was a mouthpiece, not a semi-automatic.
The hint of a scene sparked into Val’s brain. A fragment of an antagonist who sought to eradicate every trace of delinquency, making the world a better place even as he made it worse. The first line of a new chapter formed, in wavy letters under—
A siren blasted through the cabin, as though an ambulance had parked in his front room. Smoke and the scent of burnt cheese billowed through the hall.
Shuffling through the haze, he hacked and sneezed his way into the kitchen and threw open the window. Found the oven knob and turned, ignoring the searing heat. Stood on a chair and snapped the alarm off the ceiling. Residual screeching echoed in his ears. A full minute passed before he realized someone was banging on his front door. Only one person refused to ring the doorbell like a civilized person and instead knocked like a drunken moose.
Through vision like swimming pools, he poked his way to the front of the house and peered through the peephole.
Yep. Raymond. Christ.
And how was it evening already?
The man was speaking before Val fully opened the door.
“…alarm go off, so I thought I’d come by and check on ya…” His neighbor bobbed his head to glimpse inside. Like always. As if he was on a tour of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, looking to bask in a secret world lurking beyond the foyer.
“Raymond—”
“Mr. Haverford, I know—”
“Val. No need for formality.”
More nodding. “You’ve said that, yep. Don’t know why I keep—”
“I just burned something in the oven, so…”
“I figured you was all right but I had to check, you know, that’s what good neighbors do. I was walking by, it was no trouble. I mean, I know you’d do the same for me…”
Watching Raymond bounce on the balls of his feet was making Val seasick. Another headache started up, spiraling from the base of his skull. Along with it, another black patch appeared before his eyes.
“I haven’t seen you jogging for days. I was starting to worry.”
“It’s been raining a lot.”
“That’s so, but you could go runnin’ along the main road. I’ve seen you do it.” He gestured behind him as if Val didn’t know where it was.
“I’ve been busy, Raymond.”
“Still workin’ on the new one, are ya? Thought you’d never have to work again.”
“It’s not about having to—”
“I know, I know, you artists got the creative bug. I gotcha. I’m just lookin’ out for ya, Mr. Hav—Val.” Yet he stayed rooted to the stairs.
“Appreciate that. Really need to get back to it. I’ll be sure to wave next time I jog past.”
Which would be never.
“Gotcha, gotcha. I can take a hint. Good luck with your writing, there. When will you let me read it?”
“When it’s published, Raymond.”
“I bet that’ll be real soon…”
Val hung a smile from his grizzled cheekbones, narrowing the gap as Raymond continued to bounce, hoping the onslaught of questions would stop the less space he had to throw them.
Eventually Raymond turned, looking over his shoulder as he descended the steps, and Val was alone again. Even then, he felt naked on a stage. Concentration flagged until he was sure the old coot wasn’t still tracking along his property, peeking into the windows. The essence of the scene forming in his head had dissipated along with Raymond’s loping figure. The charred lump of his former meal smelled both tantalizing and nauseating.
Hell with it. Nothing more done than a lot of useless reading; procrastination under the guise of research. And the last thing Val wanted was a reminder of more dead children.
5
After grabbing dinner out, Val headed to Calvyn’s to restart his process with the Trib and burnt coffee. Right there on page three was an op-ed by none other than Andre Wallace, lecturing on the influx of violence. Hauntingly written, the moralistic opener quickly disintegrated under waves of emotion. Val muttered little passages out loud, huffing at every eloquent turn of phrase. The closing burned in his belly. While Andre continued to write his debut’s sequel, he was concurrently working on a second novel, a passion project, interpreting the indiscriminate loss of life from a fresh perspective.
“Son of a bitch!” Val banged his mug down so forcefully that a third of the coffee sloshed out. He tried to soak up the mess with cocktail napkins but instead spread it everywhere. Calvyn brought a fresh mug and mopped away the spill.
“Sorry, Calvyn.”
Calvyn tapped the article. “You worrying too much about this boy here.”
“He’s basically writing the same thing I am, for Christ’s sake. Except his has ‘fresh perspective.’”
“Plenty of room for the both of you. People can buy more than one book! Jesus, you writers’ll be the death of me.”
“Don’t tell me he drinks here too.”
“Go home, Mr. H.” Calvyn patted him on the back. “You need a vacation.”
***
Wired and trembling with nervous energy, Val regretted taking the long way home. A waste of precious time, an entire day lost, when Andre was probably congratulating himself for another extraordinary word count. New worries threatened, replacing those that emerged overnight. The stopwatch had been set, the pistol fired.
Val poured a scotch, ritual be damned. He paced, clutching the tumbler to his chest. He couldn’t simply bang something out and leave nothing but the editing to look forward to, couldn’t rely on his familiar cadence and flow and guaranteed set of devotees. Especially with Andre threatening to eclipse his career’s revival. A debut novel with such power only promised a strong future. And from the sound of things, he was plowing through the next one. Next two.
His headache returned like it had a deadline to keep. Val’s knuckles ached and his drink was soon warm, heated by his paralyzed grip. He tossed it back and then another. Was it safe to drown aspirin in liquor?
One quick check of Twitter and he’d get right back to it. More masturbatory scrolling would get the juices flowing again. Flicking a finger along a mouse wheel practically counted as exercise at that hour.
Then, graphic details of his novel’s climax. Everywhere. Passages taken directly from the synopsis. The first plot twist, given to his agent just days earlier, up and down the feed. Spoilers headed the trending news. Facebook, same thing. No no no no…
6
Buried under all the commotion and confusion of planning, not to mention the usual end-of-year wind-down at the agency, Graham had forgotten why he was so excited about this year’s party to begin with. Val was going to kill him, but it would be worth it. He called out, hooking a finger toward his study.
Val closed the door against the din and hovered with his hand on the knob, as if he needed an invitation to sit. Twisting open the window blinds, Graham glanced over his shoulder until Val nodded his approval. Overcrowded rooms, even in good company, never failed to close him off. Discomfort tended to weigh down every word, when he chose to speak at all. A little quiet and a view of the stars went a long way.
“I have some exciting news for you,” Graham said, bouncing on his heels. He sat behind the massive desk that used to choke his father’s office. “Guess what I got you.”
Val sank into a tufted leather chair. “I hate when conversations start like that.”
“An interview with On the Record, for a segment called ‘Six Minutes.’ I saw you chatting it up with Sandra Bayliss just now.”
“Indeed. Seems nice.” Val’s face bloomed red and he dipped behind his glass for a drink. “I’m a terrible interview, though.”
“You did fine on the last one, didn’t you?”
“That was years ago! And the book was already published, not half written.”
“Well, since you’re not doing a jacket photo people will want to re-familiarize themselves with your face.”
“Please tell me this isn’t live.”
“No, no, I wouldn’t do that to you. The whole session will be taped, but they’re only using six minutes’ worth of clips on the show and e-mag, thus the name. After editing, of course.”
“Six minutes? That’s it?”
“You’re complaining?”
“No, it’s just…odd. The last interview lasted an hour, more.”
“That’s all anybody seems to have time for. A minute here, two minutes there. Be glad it’s not a Snapchat.”
“The hell’s a Snapchat?”
“Ten seconds, I think.”
“Why bother? ‘So, Mr. Haverford, tell us about your new book.’ ‘Well, it’s about…’ ‘Cut!’” Val slashed an invisible line across his neck. “‘We’re out of time. It’s a book, it’s about something…’bye!’”
“People these days can’t keep their minds on anything.” Graham lit a cigarette and reclined as far as the chair allowed. “God, I sound old.”
“What does that make me, then? I might as well record an eight-track tape. Maybe I should write a string of tweets instead. How many would it take for a novel-length feed?”
“About four thousand. I think. And it’s been done. Not a bad idea, though…no editing, instant publishing…of course, you’d have to type it all at once, and backwards.”
“Maybe next time.”
“Hey, remember what Dad used to say?”
Val pulled his fountain pen from his shirt pocket and clenched the end between his teeth. “When’s that Haverford kid going to write about the future of the American attention span?” He growled out the corner of his mouth in a perfect imitation of Ed Van Ellis.
“Christ, those cheap cigars. Was he smoking them when you first came on?”
“I think they were a permanent fixture to his dental work. I was so thrilled to be signed I didn’t care that I couldn’t understand a word of the contract. I had to become rapidly proficient in Stogese.”
“Good ol’ Dad. God bless his sooty lungs.” They toasted. “So I can set something up with Sandra?”
“Ah, what the hell.” Another sip. “I should be able to give them a decent six minutes without making an ass of myself. Especially if they’re non-consecutive.”
“There you go, confidence! This will be great. You’ll do the spot, say, end of January?”
“A little early, isn’t it?”
“Considering the rate you’re going, let’s aim for a deadline of June first. Sound…doable? How’s…” Graham waggled a finger in the direction of his head.
Val glanced at the door, as though checking to make sure no one had snuck in to eavesdrop. “June first sounds reasonable. I’m glad you didn’t tell me about this before I met her.” He exhaled through pursed lips and swirled the scotch, knocking the cubes around like dice, before tossing it back.
Graham pulled on his cigarette, studying Val a long while before answering. After so many years of watching this man skyrocket from newb to respected artist, sparring—on somewhat friendly terms—with Dad, he’d come to know his every trick, every nuance, leaving nothing for him to hide behind. Not even that glass, held like a mask against anyone attempting to glean his truth.
7
Val slipped the most recent issue of Chicago Lit Review off the edge of Graham’s desk. It was rolled open to an article about Andre Wallace and his yet unrivaled debut.
“Oh—don’t read that now. You’ll lose my place,” Graham said.
“I think I can remember a page number.”
“No, really—”
“What, is there something about me in here?” Val skimmed the article. “‘Andre Wallace has written an impressive debut…’ Yeah, yeah. Bastard. ‘…masterful handling of emotional complexities—’ Wow, that’s pretentious even for them,” Val said, stealing a quick glance upwards.
“Yeah…”
“‘Devoid of material to suggest the contrary, Wallace may very well become the Haverford for this generation.’ Son of a bitch! The old Haverford never went anywhere!”
“Well, you did sort of disappear into the woods.”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean I’ve lost my touch.”
“Why don’t you forget about that and we’ll get back to—”
“Wait a minute…‘Wallace is indeed proving himself to be the successor to the—” Val cleared his throat. “‘—late…great…Val Haverford.’ Well.” He tossed the magazine back on your desk where it immediately flipped closed. “At least they called me great.”
“I wrote a letter to the editor calling the writer out on poor research. They said they’d print a correction, but claim it was less a case of lousy fact-checking than a dig at your lack of recent output.”
“Ha! That’s quite a dig!”
“I told you not to read it.”
“When did I die?”
“We’re not sure. Anna and I were so upset. We weren’t even notified. That hurts, man.”
“You’re blaming the corpse? Classy.”
“You know what your problem is, Val? Perspective. You should be flattered! You’ve been Twain’ed!”
“Right, right. Nothing shoots you to the top of a bestseller list like a posthumous release.”
“Speaking of which, I read your new pages.” What Graham derived between the subtext had nothing to do with science fiction, but an old axe long in need of grinding. “Tell me about ’em.”
“Do you have any idea how many vigilante killings there’ve been the last couple years?”
Graham flicked a long cylinder of ash into an Altoids tin.
“Hundreds. Most of them never made the news. Average people, for things like smoking pot, petty theft, panhandling—”
“How do you know it was vigilantes? As opposed to self-defense.”
“They weren’t forcing crack on children. What were they defending? Why not call the cops?”
“Well.” Graham grimaced, hating himself for the glib attitude. The relationship between cops and civilians have been on shaky ground for years. Too much corruption of the former led to rampant distrust by the latter, and both came out the loser.
“Some of them had their businesses destroyed, Graham. Delivery vans smashed to pieces on suspicion of selling drugs out the back. Arson—” Slamming his glass on the table, he paced in tight circles, knees snapping into place like a tin soldier’s. “Sounds oddly familiar, don’t you think?”
Graham’s heart skipped. “To…?”
“Some of these cases were so low-profile I needed a backhoe to dig them out. What if police are turning away on purpose? The idea of a local mob orchestrating this kind of violence under a guise of decency and virtue is—”
Graham lit another cigarette, flicking the chrome lighter sharply closed. “Too close.”
“What was that?”
He blew hard streams of smoke through his nostrils. “It’s speculation, Val. Not a dissertation. Don’t forget that.”
Val stared at him as though he’d lost the ability to blink. Probably hadn’t heard ‘no’ since Dad ran the agency.
“This isn’t what your fans are expecting.”
Val kneaded his thumb against his knuckles. “I know that.”
“Just watch what you’re doing here,” Graham said, softening his tone. “That’s all I’m saying.”
8
“Wow. That is bright.” Val squinted at the sudden assault of light. “Can we dim those a bit?”
“No, Sandra, I need to get a decent shot. You did insist on sitting by a window.” Kevin, the cameraman, had thrown a sheet of gauze over Val’s front room curtain rod to reduce glare while still affording a minor view.
“I’ll get used to it,” Val said.
“Graham told me you’re a bit camera-shy,” Sandra said.
“Thank you, Graham.”
“Don’t worry about it. Most people are.” She squeezed his bicep. “Talk to me like we’re back at their place and ignore everything else. Just let me know if you need a break. That’s what editors are for.”
“Ready when you are,” Kevin said, tapping the viewfinder.
Val draped an arm over the back of the couch in an attempt to look casual. Sandra balanced note cards on her knee. The first questions were soft, perfunctory, by way of introduction. Sweat beaded along his hairline and threatened to drip down his temples. The heavy tweed sports coat started to feel like a terrible mistake.
“Has writing fiction become second nature, or are there still challenges you face?”
“Oh, writing’s easy as pie. You just have to organize the perfect assemblage of words so no fewer than one million strangers think you’re worth their time, preferably within the first three pages.”
At Sandra’s chuckle, he relaxed a bit, one minor hurdle conquered. Like riding a bike.
“Can you tell us what it was like growing up in a small town, and how that influences your craft?”
Shit.
He’d assumed the interview would be virtually all about his current manuscript. He analyzed the question, tried to invent some eloquent response to coalesce the sentiments eddying in the pit of his stomach, something to break through the familiar gridlock of memories and time. Distracted momentarily by faint streaks of headlights beyond the scrim, he turned back to answer. Sandra’s mouth contorted in tiny increments, the corner of her top lip folding into a dimple before reappearing. She reached back and caressed his hand creeping toward the window, fingers fluttering like insects.
“They’re popping up in the shot,” she said. “I’m a little rusty.”
“Relax, you’re doing fine.” She smiled and pulled his hand into the open space between them, massaging his fingertips. “This is out of frame, isn’t it, Kev?”
“Yep.”
She leaned in close to Val and whispered, “Don’t worry, I won’t bite.”
“We’re still rolling,” Kevin said. Then, under his breath, “Production’s gonna have a blast with this one.”
“Your first novel was published when you were in your twenties,” Sandra continued. “Can you pinpoint a time in your youth that suggested you’d become an author?”
“Only in retrospect.”
“Can you elaborate on that?”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Let’s go in a different direction,” Sandra shifted some cards around. “You have an impressive résumé with over three dozen novels, a number of which were adapted for the screen. In your early career, you wrote Westerns, then made a one-eighty to science fiction. Yet despite your success in both genres, you’ve left your fans hanging for some time. Can you tell us why you’ve taken such an extended leave?”
After asking himself that same question for years, he recited the answer he kept in his pocket. “In college, I wrote book reviews so I could eat on a regular basis. After a while, it all became repetitive. I started to feel that way about my novels; I got bored with my own style. That’s the first sign of trouble. So I just…quit.”
“And now your latest, 606/88, borrows quite a bit from current events. What can you tell us about it?”
“It takes place in a dystopian universe from the point of view of a conspiracy theorist. He’s convinced a group of covert vigilantes aim to cleanse society of anyone they deem valueless.”
“That’s a very provocative subject. Are you prepared for the backlash you may receive from those who read into it the wrong way?”
“I thought about that a lot. My hope is, it will get people talking. An allegory filtered through humanoids…” Aliens were less an allegory than a metaphor. A twinge of melancholy fluttered in his chest. “Sometimes absurdity sheds light on the commonplace.”
“You’re no stranger to controversy; supremacy was the central theme in your 1974 satirical essay, ‘Green Skies and Blue Fields,’ correct?”
Wow. Nothing like a curveball to destroy what little poise you’d put in place. Drafted in his post-college writing frenzy, it was a shock that Swiftian piece was ever published, even with the Third Reich relegated to history books. Yet that anthology was long out of print, the publishing house shuttered. How did she dredge up a copy?
“Right.” He cleared his throat to diminish the creak. “So much of my later work involved the usual sci-fi tropes, so I wanted to put a different spin on things. Hitler was a monster, a madman. Yet he unified thousands toward wiping millions of people off the face of the earth. That’s what’s truly terrifying: not only can an army of people be so easily talked into genocide, but that it could happen again.”
A flash of panic registered in Sandra’s eyes. She pulled the cards closer, but not to consult them. The energy drained from her voice, as though she wished she hadn’t gone down this road but it was the only way home.
9
In the last few months, the suburbs—especially the North Shore—collected more cases of violence than anywhere else in that same time frame. Val had immediately honed in on the stereotypical and overlooked an embarrassing amount of detail. How many others have done the same, making excuses for what they didn’t want to see, failing to look beyond into the greater scope? If he had the time, a map of the nation might look the same; as many red splotches as cities, a festering scourge with no beginning or end, no tie and no purpose.
A crunch as he stepped forward, a snap in his left hand: narrow slivers of beige paper littered the floor around his feet. He’d pulled the white string clear off the china marker, now leaving waxy red waves in the creases of his hands. He wrapped the marker in a tissue and secured it with a rubber band.
Forgetting the dates, he concentrated solely on motive. What about the ’burbs held such a magnetic pull for murder?
That, too, was a dead end: no pattern erupted from the markings here but chronology, as if the killers completed a job within a specified time frame and moved on to the next.
Spending years rewriting the old frontier was a metaphor; switching to sci-fi was prediction. Readers were glad when you guessed wrong. The world didn’t come to an end, the aliens were defeated. The world went back to normal when you closed the cover.
The concept no longer held a delicious fascination, the thought of playing god a sick game. Present-day humans destroying human life haphazardly, with no credible provocation. Where did they get the urge to eliminate their own, and why? It was the Wild West out there, a barrage of bullets from a posse of modern desperadoes.
Satirizing Hitler years after the war was easy with so many books and articles to pull from, so much speculation about the man, his mental state, his reasoning or lack of. When reason didn’t exist, there was nothing to dissect. He should have spent more time reading true crime and serial killer novels.
A chill spread through his limbs. Could all this be traced to one person?
No one person could cause so much strife without ever having been caught. One syndicate?
How many members? In either case, Val had circled back to the motive question.
Mind spinning, deviations whirling out of control with no answers in sight, he dropped the map project in favor of revisions. For once it felt like relief instead of drudgery.
10
Time bound a rope around Val’s legs as he paced from one end of the street to the next, hoping he’d recognize Sears’ famous stair-step architecture. Or anything else. Kids drumming on upturned plastic buckets used to squat on every corner, beating the rhythm of a parade into everyday life, but at some point they’d been replaced with canned jazz buried in parkway gardens. The skyline seemed to retreat with every step he took, taunting the fool who didn’t bother to check a map. Soon he was lost in a desolate stretch of pawn shops and dank bars and leather-bound men with careful looks.
Cursing himself, Val caught the next northbound bus. At least he could take in the sights as they rolled past. The driver slowed, teased forward, and lurched. Bodies teetered and swayed, powerless to stay rooted in one spot. They sank into their knees, cinched the swinging loops overhead, widened their stances. A few passengers grumbled in foreign languages with each jostle. Faces tensed with suppressed screams of frustration.
One voice broke through the constant rustle of human sound, clear and droning as though he’d given the same speech for years, his dejected tone revealing his success. At his dead yet insistent “I am not asking for money,” Val shut his ears, looking between heads for a patch of window. Anything counted as beat poetry if you romanticized it enough.
“While standing on the corner waiting for a friend, I was brutalized by three…”
Outside, a garish, graffiti-covered booth mounted to a bike leaned against a lamppost. A cluster of tourists gathered around a man in a dusty gray wig, dressed entirely in trash bags with “Open Your Eyes” scrawled across the front in the same greasy stage make-up that creased his face. He bowed to his audience and flicked a switch, filling the air with a yowling, ancient recording of “Sweet Home Chicago.” The man tapped his toe to the beat, but at the first shrill note of a harmonica, he sprang forward, dancing with bent limbs like a dislocated puppet.
The broken notes weakened as the bus pushed on, returning the orator to center stage. “…nobody believes me. See?”
Female passengers gasped and recoiled; some of the men growled insults. Val craned his neck to catch another glimpse. Face unlined, skin a dry paste, blond hair wild and unruly: he could have been thirty or sixty.
“I only want to educate.”
Though shuffling, his clear speech gave no question to his sobriety. The reason for the horrified reactions was lost in the stricken faces of those he’d passed. Though the city council’s infrastructure upgrades and neighborhood beautification projects cut down on the number of beggars and transients, surely they’d seen a homeless person before. The design of Millennium Park, the city’s front lawn brimming with gardens and footbridges, gave them more places to burrow into, not less.
“I was only waiting on the corner for my friend, and this is what I got. I have no money, any little bit helps. I cannot walk well, as you can see…”
As he mounted the stairs at the back of the bus, Val turned away as the others had, swallowing hard. The man had raised his jogging pants around his knees, the elastic pulled to capacity. Leathery skin stretched over both legs, engorged to the width of small tree trunks. His feet bulged from red sneakers with tongues that had never known laces. One leg looked as though a blast had ripped through it. A gaping ulceration had bitten away his flesh, exposing streaks of sinew glistening with pus. The surrounding skin pulled when he shifted his weight.
“…took me down and beat me. One of them tased me and left me with this. Again, I do not want money. I do not want pity. I want to spread the word about what is happening in our great city. I did not deserve this for standing on a street corner.”
The words ricocheted around Val’s brain and he pushed out at the next stop, long before his intended destination. His foot wedged in the door, the rubber seal locking his ankle in place.
11
One minute Graham stood outside Calvyn’s, staring into wavy neon imprisoned in the glass block windows, and the next he was stomping off to the agency, gritting his molars into dust. The wrong kind of escape waited at their reserved table.
When he arrived in his suite, he jabbed the security keypad, making a mental note to nag Val to install a system at his place. He reached for the lights but let his hand slide down the textured linen wallpaper instead, walking to his office in the dark.
Fumbling in his desk drawer, he found a crushed pack of Dunhills. The tip and lighter flame wobbled in opposite directions, and he pressed the filter end to the desk to steady his hand. Upending his inbox, Graham rifled through the latest manuscripts until he came to Val’s. He read it again, letting every word sink in. The past was evident, pain infusing every line. Must’ve slaved over those words for weeks to get them that tight. It was nothing if not honest.
Haverford groupies were anticipating this book, the release date circled in red. Anna had a point: Val’s latest would turn a profit. Though it would no doubt bring controversy and scores of hate mail, maybe even death threats this time. Real ones.
12
Shoehorned and forgotten in the center of the state, Kano was pocked with the evidence of annual tornadoes and near-misses. Little more than a fuel station for lost tourists, another dot that disappeared with increasing distance. Hardship in this town touched everyone. But main street’s threadbare charms welcomed him back: the weather-worn clapboard storefronts; the tiny pond centered under a lacy white bridge where newlyweds posed for pictures; the single-screen theater that seemed untouched since its erection in ’49; the two-story schoolhouse transformed into an antique shop when the population dwindled. He recalled the townspeople’s quiet demeanors, the meandering way of life, the subtle accents imperceptible to anyone outside the radius of Chicago’s brash timbre.
Every twist and turn, every driveway and mailbox and sign, were etched firmly in Val’s memory. He barely watched the road, focusing more on the houses, the outbuildings, the changing landscape of storefronts and residents, searching for recognition in the faces of people he’d never met yet distantly acknowledged as kin. No one paid him any mind, even when he slowed to get a better look. That severed connection ached like an old bruise.
The main thoroughfare merged from four lanes to two. The structures alongside sat further back, faded and broken. Skeletons of abandoned businesses, nothing more than piles of bricks and plastic signage torn apart, watched him through their empty sockets. He slammed on the brakes before the church, its once-white plaster dingy and peeling, stained glass windows sealed with metal plates. The eight-foot cross in the courtyard, gleaming white drape around its intersection, was surrounded by an iron fence, its gate chained and locked despite being short enough to jump.
Val idled on the shoulder, though his past didn’t live on the other side of that fence. His mother had scattered Michael—no, ‘dumped,’ her words—into the lake one morning before the sun rose, the cloth sack that held him left to rot in the red clay of the bank. Her flat, shapeless shoes slopped its mud onto their back steps.
Val remembered coming home to his answering machine—how many years now? Over a decade yet?—and hearing his mother had passed. Survived his father, by the sound of things. They received the same fate without anyone to claim them. The City did the scattering.
When he pitched his book to Graham, he expected to return here only in his mind. Cementing over any tangible distance allowed his imagination to run without consequence, speculate on the worst scenarios without scars.
Someone else might see such a monument as a symbol of hope, of home, of comfort. The rainbow after the flood. Repeating a message often enough, over enough years, becomes almost tolerable. Like the victim of cannibalism oblivious to being boiled alive as long the fire burns slow. Perhaps this monument was less a tribute than a warning.
13
During a particularly still, humid evening in August, Val and Michael stretched beside a grove of pines, knowing in their hearts they’d be camping beneath the stars again simply for the benefit of uninterrupted sleep.
The stone fire pit came to life with a few sharp strikes of flint. Michael lit a cigarette in the flame, took a long drag and perched, resting his wrist on one knee. For a long while, the only sound was the sniffle of burning paper and the smack of his lips off the filter. Flicking away ashes more than he puffed, the cigarette burned itself up between his fingers. He dropped the butt cussing, tossed it in the pit, and lit another. Reclined on his elbows, head thrown back, pretending to search for constellations.
“I’m not going back to school in fall.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Pop’s getting old,” Michael said. “I’ll get my schoolin’ at the ’yard, pick up where dad leaves off.” The space between his eyes creased tightly, fingers clenched around tufts of sandy brown frizz. They spoke to opposite ends of the lake.
“But what about—”
“You know I ain’t fit for college.”
“It can’t be as boring as high school.”
“That ain’t it. You’re the one with the brains. You’ll end up rich and famous, and you can have some fancy contractor build your place with an extra room for me.”
Val felt the perfect words forming on the tip of his tongue, but they vanished every time he opened his mouth. Instead, he only nodded; it was all talk, he was sure of it. Their parents would never agree to such a thing. Yet Val kept an eye on him, convinced if he fell asleep, Michael would disappear. But he’d been there the next morning, stoking the fire at the first sign of peach sky, flames leaping and crackling in protest.
Without fail, the past stopped at the same place. Val had trained his mind to slice clean across the cue mark before the reel change. Memories always ended on sunup.
***
Ghosts of young boys crossed the stone bridge, slapping its arched sides as they raced each other home. As Val passed by, he turned to watch them disappear, then leaned over to glimpse the water flowing beneath for the last time. If he followed it down far enough, would any part of their dragon-headed skiff remain?
Once upon a time, Val had visualized his future the way his father’s had been: school, job, wife, kids—grandkids maybe—and finally retirement, spent on an old crumbling porch in a rocking chair he built himself, watching younger generations take their turns at the same existence, each day melting into the next, having traveled no further than he would on this lake. Then he escaped to the coveted big-city zip code and the population he wore like a shroud. After years of determined assimilation his silvery inflection had disappeared, leaving a euphonic lilt that sounded like nowhere. And that was how it should be.
14
Val’s hands shook with the panic of writer’s block returning, his premise more tin-hatted bullshit than dystopian conspiracy. Crime was on the rise, hopeless statistics the only solid fact. Not enough consistent detail to assume the threat of a serial killer getting his jollies. Even psychopaths liked a good theme.
His thoughts refused to connect. Plot lines parched and withered, then rambled onto unrelated tangents. The grisly, torturous scenes he scribbled as catharsis were unlike anything he’d ever written. Their visceral primacy, the bestial destruction, the demand for vengeance had become second nature. The thoughts that used to scare the shit out of him he now welcomed, nestling beneath them each night, craving the vicarious release that followed one bloody scenario after another.
He burst through his studio door hungry for the wide-open space. Puddles of stagnant rainwater made the yard look like a minefield, tornadoes of gnats congregating in the rays of sunlight and brume. The air pressed close and wet as though to drown him, the beach turned to quicksand, the stately homes rolled into the distance like mirages.
A branch snapped, followed by a flash of movement in the trees. A dozen ancient maples towered over the property, wide enough to conceal a person. Even someone tall and broad- shouldered. He ran to the stone wall and bent over it, blood rushing to his head.
No one there. But any number of people could’ve been squatting behind it, waiting to finish what they started.
It’s all over now.
The woodshed beckoned. If anyone was hiding in there, they’d be revealed the second he opened the door. If he focused on carving, he could calm himself. It always worked in the past. He had to believe it would now.
Val grabbed the first block he laid eyes on. He hadn’t touched anything since before his eyes started betraying him. He hefted his favorite carving knife to reacquaint himself with the counterweight of the blade versus the handle, rotated the basswood to get the feel of the edges, sizing up how much pressure to give it. Ignoring the tremor in his hand, the images and voices swirling into a vortex, he turned his head until he saw the end of the wood. Brought the blade into view and held its position, forcing muscle memory to take over, reminding him how it felt for everything to fall into place.
15
This tract wasn’t nearly as colorful as Val’s memory insisted. No more music clubs, no more vibrant nightlife. Abandoned stores stood amid gutted gothic fortresses, windows long ago destroyed. Bare lawns glittered with shattered glass. Rickety structures struck out of vast lots of overgrown weeds and rubble. Children darted up the sagging porches, ducking under broken eaves and graffitied doors. Doorways shrank behind gates secured with padlocks bigger than fists.
Handmade markers hung from lampposts and chain link fences, shouting tearful epitaphs that would soon be torn off by officials hell bent on keeping the city pristine. The rust-brown stains on the sidewalk would never be erased by rain.
Dangling from corroded hooks, Lucille’s B&B still advertised vacancy in flickering red lights. A slanting carport ran the length of the building, and Val pulled in as quickly as the narrow passageway allowed, clicking his door quietly shut. He stared out from the shadows, crouched at his front bumper, trying to come up with an escape plan if the black coupe spotted his license plate from within the depths.
He had none.
The cooling engine ticked down seconds, then minutes. His joints seemed to freeze in place.
Convinced he’d lost the coupe, he squeezed around his car and onto the sidewalk, listening for screeching tires. The hangdog expression of a man about his age stared at him from a memorial poster twist-tied to a support post. The carport’s corrugated plastic roof lent an eerie, greenish cast to the poster’s loose cellophane wrapping, but Val could still read the messages of love and of fury at a life cut short.
Rain buzzed off the carport in hard streams, drilling holes in the mud. Cold water sluiced into Val’s collar. Struck by the thought that this man died right here, on this corner, Val glanced down the block looking for others. The picket fence enclosing the B&B’s yard was lined with posters; a vigil for a neighborhood of lost souls.
Val dragged up the B&B’s splintered, rotting steps bolstered by braces and chipped, uneven bricks. Flanked with scaffolding from the second floor to the roof, the wood siding faded to a yellowed gray like week-old bruises.
He had no problem getting a room. Night settled quicker on this part of town.
16
Reaching up to rub his face, the envelope in his jacket poked Val in the chin. He’d forgotten he had it.
He pulled out the stack of manuscript pages he’d brought Graham at Christmas. But there wasn’t a single mark on them.
The last page had a grainy texture. Letterhead. Val squinted to decipher Graham’s handwriting, the green ink bleak against the white paper.
It was dated February third. Did Graham never mean to send it or had he just not gotten the chance?
He skimmed it, mouth flapping open and shut with no sound, and pulled on his glasses. Held the letter up to the light to check the watermark. Read it twice more, trying to find a different message in it, a brighter interpretation. But Graham’s diplomatic technique was never anything but direct. Val’s heart cringed into a lead ball.
A canned voice called out: end of the line. A security guard strolled past with a German shepherd muzzled into a wire cage. The guard’s lead vest stuck out at odd angles; the black pants, shirt, and boots turning him into a solid figure. One color, one shape, one purpose. He banged on the car’s windows with his nightstick.
Val’s knees pushed into his calves. His hand wrapped around the tacky stanchion, hoisted him up. Every joint jiggled loose; any second his limbs would clatter to the floor and down the gap between car and platform.
The train squealed down the tracks. It would turn in a circle half a mile south and continue, over and over, in a giant endless loop. Val ascended the elevator to street level rather than wait for the inbound. Used side streets off State guide him back to the B&B.
If only Graham had waited to post that next batch of announcements. If only he’d sent this letter. If only you’d listened when he warned you to quit.
Residents propped against doorways and lounged on stoops. The tiny orange lights of their cigarettes glowed and dimmed, smoke punctuating hushed conversations and loud laughter. Gossip followed by the cozy humor of familiarity.
When was the last time he and Graham shot the shit at the pub, talked trash into the wee hours? A drink at Calvyn’s would be perfect right now, even one of Graham’s favorite shitty beers.
Especially one of Graham’s shitty beers.
Val crept up the front steps of the B&B hours later and clicked the door gently behind him. The entrance table held a bowl of matchbooks with an outline of the building in its heyday stamped in gold foil. He cradled one in his palm as though it would break.
After fastening the deadbolt to his room, he unplugged the phone. Peeled off his clothes and recoiled at his own ripeness. Stood naked on the bathroom tile, the chill locking into his bones.
He dumped the manuscript into the tub and struck a match. Lit the entire book ablaze and held it until it singed his fingers. Dropped it and watched the papers go up, let the smoke burn his eyes, memorized the way this looked: the curling pages, the blackening edges, the ink molting into lead, the flakes of ash flying up like tiny birds before gravity jerked them back down.
A smoldering pile of confetti filled the bottom of the tub. Val turned on the showerhead and rinsed the pieces down the drain, gray rivulets staining the porcelain like a poor-man’s Pollock. Kneeling on the floor, he ran the water until every last trace of color disappeared and nothing was left; no sign of it, of him.
But the letter, Graham’s letter, he kept.
Can you, for those who don't know you already, tell something about yourself and how you became an author?
I can sing “Jesus Loves the Little Children” in Tagalog.
This has zero to do with why I’m an author but it’s a fun fact nonetheless.
I want to become an author since I first heard there was such a job, in kindergarten. The idea that humans can grow up and write stories fascinated me, and I wanted in. I was (am) a quiet kid (grown-up) that was (is) never without a book, notebook and at least two pens. In case I forget to bring these items with me, I keep a collection of poetry or short stories in my glove compartment with a mini pad and pencils (lead won’t fail you in Chicago’s wildly vacillating temps). Otherwise I may have to (gulp) make conversation with other humans. Despite all the lovely dialogue I’ve read over the years, I haven’t quite nailed that skill.
What is something unique/quirky about you?
I am obsessed with mustard and toast. But not together, that’s just nutty.
When browned correctly, toast is an underrated thing of beauty. I assume that since Bob & Ray’s House of Toast doesn’t actually exist on Earth, it must be waiting for me in heaven. (Though I’d prefer to delay my gratification, if you’re listening, Fate.)
With so many varieties of mustard, I’m not unlike a fanatic collecting Barbies or Star Wars memorabilia, except for the insistence upon keeping the packaging intact. This particular obsession started a few years ago when I became a judge for the World-Wide Mustard Competition (two years running!) at the National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wisconsin. Huzzah, Poupon U!
Where were you born/grew up at?
I was born at a now-defunct hospital on the south side of Chicago (Michael Reese) at the tail end of the ‘70s. I was thus able to bypass all the horrible fashions of the decade and embrace the appalling ones of the ‘80s, though I am proud to say I never owned parachute pants.
Since getting sprung from the neonatal ward, I lived with my parents on the northwest side (Jefferson Park, later Norwood Park) for twenty-two years.
That area is still the tops: quiet, manicured, near enough public transit that you don’t feel left out. Plus, it’s home to the famed Superdawg Drive-In. Although I disapprove of their hot dog/fry combo packaging, the place is a nifty throwback.
If Jennifer were to
make a deal with the Devil, she’d ask to live—in good health—just
until she’s finished reading all the books. She figures that’s
pretty square.
In case other
bibliophiles attempt the same scheme, she’s working hard to get all
her ideas on paper. She writes multi-genre fiction and the occasional
essay, and is currently working on a collection of shorts and two
picture books that may or may not be suitable for children.
Edge of Sundown is
her first novel. She’s always been drawn to “what-ifs” and
flawed characters, and has never quite mastered the happy ending.
Jennifer is a member
of Chicago Writers Association and Independent Writers of Chicago,
and works at a private university library.
$15
Amazon giftcard,
Paperback
of Edge of Sundown + carved wooden bookmark
-1
winner each!
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