Distracted by Air » writing

Wherein I say ‘Holy Shit.’

Jamie — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 01:24:38 +0000

So remember the novel contest I entered?

Well, today I received notification that I’ve made it into the round of 1000. O_O

Holy shit.

They also included a link to the page for my entry’s excerpt for reader reading and reviewing.

Thanks, Livvy.

today I turned 28

Jamie — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:05:59 +0000

…though, I really don’t believe it. As a kid, I never thought I’d live past sixteen. Once I got past sixteen, I didn’t believe I’d make it to adulthood. Then I made it past eighteen, quickly followed by twenty-one. Somewhere in there, I’d made a decision to become published by the time I was thirty.

And now I’ve only got two years left.

The old job

Jamie — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:39:51 +0000

One of my friends who still works at the health insurance company where I used to work just emailed me with this update—

“We are now being run by Nazis that won’t let you use any of your PTO unless Hitler comes back from the dead and approves it.”

Makes me very happy that I’m not there any more, that’s for sure. And that things are sort-of moving forward on the fiction writing front as well. The email from Amazon notified me that my entry is eligible for the Breakthrough Novel Award and is entering the first round of judging. Meaning, hey, it got into the first 5000 eligible entries that make up round one.

Yeaaay Meeee! (said like Frank Caliendo)

Also, after a spot of some self-doubt, a good chat with Robin turned me around to realizing that no, I have not fucked up my ~~third~~ second novel that I’m writing. We also had some great brainstorming (mostly through her relentless I-heart-mysteries-without-plotholes-fuck-you-chris-carter-questioning) that led to a very much tightened up second half of the ~~book~~ outline. And both of those things gave me a much brightened new perspective.

And one day, we will make me such an optimist that I won’t check both ways before crossing a one-way street.

a novel contest

Jamie — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:32:20 +0000

Thanks to Olivia’s heads-up and urging, I entered Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Since ATSG has yet to have a finished first draft, I entered the heavily re-written and edited new manuscript for Monster Rules. Oddly, the hardest part wasn’t editing, writing, or submitting. The hardest part was writing the synopsis.

I hate them. I would rather go to the dentist than write a synopsis. (And for those of you who aren’t aware of my shit-I-hate scale, you can tell how much I hate the dentist because I’d rather visit the ob/gyn than go to the dentist).

And Amazon’s synopsis? Amazon’s synopsis requirement wasn’t quite the standard synopsis. Instead, it was like a book-jacket blurb with a character limit of 1000, including spaces.

Basically, I had to make moonshine out of my novel. This is how it happened—

Full Manuscript: 599,603 characters
Summary Outline: 40,351 characters
Long Synopsis: 19,631 characters
Amazon Synopsis: 937 characters

Here’s the final result—

Saul Gray, a fourth grader, can’t understand why other people don’t follow the rules that keep him alive. When Grace, a classmate, becomes his first friend, he teaches her the Monster Rules. The most important rule of all—never wake up the monsters. But he breaks the rules and it brings in Walter, Saul’s father, who issues a swift and harsh punishment. As a witness, Grace learns the truth about monsters. Then Saul is granted his wish when his father disappears. He’s sent away to live with his father’s sister, but soon realizes he hasn’t left his monster behind. His new friend, his cousin Allie, teaches him about ghosts. But when he becomes the subject of upset in Allie’s family, they send him away. New fears haunt him along with the old ones as he goes to live with his mother’s brother. There, his altered perceptions clash with the nature of reality, and he and those around him learn the truth about monsters.

Cinnamon Buns

Jamie — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:07:04 +0000

So this morning, in celebration of having managed to submit the manuscript of Monster Rules on time, I made cinnamon buns. Not from scratch, but those Pillsbury ones that come in that cool cardboard tube that pops open. As the aroma of the baking buns filled my little apartment, I happened to catch sight of my cell phone. And I picked it up. (This is not a common occurrence unless I need a scrabble fix and I’m nowhere near my laptop). Then I text messaged my loving husband with:

“I made cinnamon buns. I’m soooo not sharing.”

Which is evil of me, because working freelance I can lounge around in my jammies as I process and write and study, while he’s stuck working at a cubicle farm. But as we all know, I am pharmaceutical-grade evil, and far be it from me to be otherwise.

Anyway, Nathan texts me back with:

“Fuck you, bitch, I want my rolls!”

Successfully making me laugh, my loving husband managed, in fact, to get me to keep some rolls (most of them, actually) for him. However, I’ve hidden them in an unlikely container in the fridge and it’s up to him to find them.

A little beta-reader love

Jamie — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 13:36:24 +0000

Two of my beta-readers have very dry senses of humor. Now, this works out well for me because I have the same sense of humor. Invariably, whenever I read their in-line comments for a chapter of mine, there will be some giggles in there.

The giggles have also pointed at certain trends I have—oddly enough, I can be wordy. Olivia has to use the word “snip” a lot, while Robin gets to use the word “omit” just as much. Right now, I believe Robin has the edge on leading the word-snipping-omitting race. But only because Robin’s been tackling beta-ing Awaken the Sleeping Gods since Spring, while Olivia’s been helping polish up the first few chapters of Monster Rules.

Highlights of my current trend:

Olivia

Nice vocabulary. Cut it, egghead.

Snip! Wordy McWordton

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, OMG so many modifiers, two of them synonyms!

Robin

This is a run-on sentence b/c it joins two separate ideas. The comma should be replaced by either a period or a semi-colon. (Somewhere, at this very moment, my former grammar teachers are very proud of me, lol.)

You like run-on sentences, don’t you? Make this a period.

Replace with either a period or a semicolon. This is a run-on.

See above.

Another run-on. Replace the comma with a semicolon. Do not be afraid of short sentences, though. They are not the earmark of a bad writer. They help shake paragraphs up once in a while. They are your friends.

This is a run-on. Replace with period.

Dear Beta Readers,

I will ~~endeavor~~ try to keep my run-on sentences and ~~gratuitous~~ extra smarty-wordy words to a minimum.

Sincerely,
Jamie

P.S. You guys are teh awesome.

Old Writing Notebooks

Jamie — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:11:24 +0000

I found a stash of old writing notebooks of mine. Some were binders, some spiral-bound notebooks, all with varying colors and sizes. In the past couple of days, I’ve managed to flip through them all, looking for half-formed ideas that I might’ve jotted down. See, I tend to accumulate ideas until they manage to weave themselves into a respectable story. Sometimes, perfectly good ideas get left out and then forgotten by my highly distractible mind.

Some of them turn out to be amusing, such as this one:

“My fondest memories are always of my brother. The problem is, I’ve never had a brother. But my memories are fond.”

Some, macabre.

“As a child, death never crosses your mind as a viable option.”

Some, not quite entirely formed. The idea is there, but not quite what it’s meant be.

“The warm embrace of the sea can change to a suffocating madness in the breath of a moment. No one knows this better than the fishermen who watch her every move. Inevitably, someone blinks, and the sea rushes in to cover everything.”

Some are a jotted word from an old language that has an interesting definition and causes tiny sparks of ideas. For instance:

“wærloga: ‘oath-breaker’ (Anglo-Saxon)”

However, the best part of this little trip through the slanted, cramped writing of the inner workings of my mind was finding the first attempt I ever made at original fiction.

I was twelve.

And I was not brilliant.

Here are some of the gems, complete with my current-day commentary.

First paragraph:

Nothing special happened the first time Adar went to his secret cavern. Nor the second or the third times. In fact, the only thing that was magical was his own imagination. That is, until he found the sword.

Okay, if nothing special happened, why are we bothering to tell the story? Oh, wait, a sword. Apparently swords have held my fascination from an early age.

Detailed paintings of knights in shining armor, dragons breathing their fiery flames, depicting the legendary battles between the two, starships racing across star systems, and engaging others in a frozen dogfight, all so lifelike, Adar felt he could reach out and touch time.

Apparently, I’ve also been obsessed with run-on sentences from a tender age as well.

Then he discovered the sword.

what really held him mesmerized, was the sword.

That’s three times. I get the feeling that this sword is very, very important.

Made of a forged silver-iron-titanium combination metal

Shut up. I KNOW NOW that this isn’t possible.

forged of the same metal as the sword, adjusted the red feather plume atop it,

We’re up to what, four on the sword-count? And how big is this cave anyway, that the protagonist had failed to notice a helmet with a red feather plume!?

Staring in disbelief, he clambered to his feet.

stared at…what?

In the middle of the sea was a castle. It did not hover, float, fly, hang or sit on, over or under the sea. It was just there. It just was.

Okay, fair enough. I’d stare at that too and wonder how the fuck it was just there. How the hell it just… was.

A city that was not magical or mystical, and only mysterious because Adar did not know where he was.

That line nearly killed me with laughter.

“Where the heck am I?” Adar asked himself, still mystified.

Heck. Hahahahahahaha. *deep breath* Hahahahahahaha.

Now, being two inches away from the man’s tunic, Adar had a chance to study the intricate design of the knight’s symbol. A white isosceles triangle with a block upside down triangle inside of it, which formed three other white triangles,

Adar has run into Link and he has no idea!

The man became stealthy and his voice took a conspiratorial tone. “Come with me, boy.”

Don’t do it, boy! He didn’t even offer you candy!

Okay, so if the rest of you want to join in the fun, here’s the entirety of what I found.

things we write

Jamie — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 04:35:37 +0000

Excerpt from Monster Rules—

Within minutes, only Saul and the funeral director were left in the room.

And a dead body.

Saul wanted to see it. He’d only seen the body bag before, so he’d never actually saw for himself that Walter was really dead. Now out of his folding seat and in the carpeted aisle, Saul glanced from the casket and to the funeral director. The quiet man nodded his head, as if answering Saul’s unspoken request to walk up to the front. Then he drifted out of the room, leaving Saul alone beside the casket, with an audience of empty metal chairs.

He took that last step forward and looked inside. Walter lay there appearing as he’d never appeared when he was alive, not that Saul could remember. There were no lines in his brow, there was no flush to his face, his hands weren’t clenched in fists at his side, and instead they were folded neatly across his stomach. He seemed almost at peace. He seemed smaller. He seemed not to be the monster Saul had met day after day. He seemed like the normal sort of man Saul had wished he were when he’d been alive.

Suddenly, Saul knew why he was sad. He hadn’t wished just for Walter to go away forever. He’d wished Walter the monster would go away forever and Walter his father would somehow appear and stay in place of the monster. And now it would never happen, Walter had never allowed that to happen, and he was dead, and there were no second chances after that. And now as he looked at what he knew to be Walter’s dead body, he knew he was looking at what he glimpsed only a few times when he lived with Walter. Then he saw the last time his father had smiled at him, as he’d slid down the ladder off the flying bridge of the Lady B. Grey. In his mind, he took that memory and packed it safely away, the one memory of Walter he wanted to keep. The memory of what Walter could have been but never was.

So today (okay, now technically yesterday) I finished the ginormous task of fixing the hugely rushed ending of Monster Rules. I think I’m fairly pleased with it. It’s certainly heaps better than it was and no longer rips off the reader from the having payoff of reading the previous 350 pages to get there. The part I excerpted above was one that was a struggle to write because of the emotions involved on my end. Sometimes, I think, even when we don’t intend it, what we write can cut very close to real life, especially our own.

Thirty Days in Purgatory

Jamie — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 04:12:15 +0000

A in progress work of collected short stories:

Why I Hated my Best Friend for 30 Minutes Last Year
Cripple
Hitch
Harry and Ethel
Our Friend Pete
Trooper
Unliving

Here is an excerpt from Hitch

Dirty old man thinks he can pick up a young female hitchhiker and do what he wants with her. Easiest way for me to get a ride somewhere, thumb some ride from some lonely old man who thought I was a nice pair of legs to look at, or a nice ass, or any other part of my body that they would not so secretly admire. Some tramp, I‚Äö√Ñ√¥m sure they thought, they always thought, as I threw my bag in the back and climbed into the front seat. None of them had any clue about the stout stick I carried with me, something I could pull out and thump them soundly with in a couple seconds. Most didn‚Äö√Ñ√¥t find out, most didn‚Äö√Ñ√¥t go past glancing at me up and down. I could put up with that, after all, we‚Äö√Ñ√¥re all given eyes and a brain and an endocrine system attached to them.

This dirty old man tested my limits.

I felt nothing from him as he drove quietly beside me, eyes on the road only half the time, wandering hands grabbing the steering wheel, his water bottle, fiddling with the radio controls, looking for junk around the car‚Äö√Ñ√¥s cabin. He had an odd manner about him, never quite looking you in the eye, never quite looking at your face. I‚Äö√Ñ√¥m not sure what he tried to look at except when I felt him looking at my body, my hair, anything connected to me.

Cobwebs

Jamie — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 03:37:10 +0000

Story One…or two. I can’t remember if this one or Hide and Seek was my first story. Anyway. The end bit of this story was taken from a childhood memory of my own, when my babysitter did to me what she does to our protagonist.

Led to the same confusion. Actually, same confusion to this day. Very odd.

There’s a split in the story where I tried to weave 2 stories together and didn’t quite carry it off.

Thomas showed Andrew the scars in the dark. The rise and fall of the cicada choir accompanied the blackness that had settled into the room. The two boys sat on opposite twin beds, legs sticking off the edges, heels absently kicking the quilts.

“Lemme see,” Andrew whispered.

Thomas’s white T-shirt started to come up so that he could point out the brand-new inch long scar on his right chest. A creak came from the blackness. Thomas froze. Andrew dove under his covers, cowering in the comfort of the warmth. Thomas melted and investigated the sound, oblivious to the dark. He spoke from the far corner, “Just a cricket.”

Andrew obstinately refused to move from his haven, “You sure?” he asked, voice muffled.

“Yup.”

“I’m going to sleep anyways. G’night.”

The fact that Andrew didn’t come out from under his covers didn’t escape Thomas as he clambered into his own bed. He stared up at the ceiling, watching the shadows slip in from the recesses of the room and form shapes before his enraptured eyes. He loved this game. Andrew hated it. One eye peeked out from the shadowed quilt, “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“Nevermind,” and with that, Andrew clamped the quilt down with finality.

Thomas had seen what Andrew had and tried to ignore it, concentrating on the droning cicadas outside and the chirping cricket inside. Having grown unbearably warm, he threw off his covers. Panic started to rise in his throat as the shadow both he and Andrew had seen coalesced into an arm that reached out from behind his headboard for him. In a flurry of action, Thomas leaped out of bed, at the same time knocking heads with a similarly jumping Andrew. Never looking back, the boys bolted from the black room and into the darker living room, careering right into a lamp. Dazed, the boys sat on the floor, rubbing identical sore spots on their skulls, desperately ignoring the broken lamp. In the silence, the cicadas sang.

Andrew broke the silence and determinedly punched Thomas in the arm, “You saw it too, you jerk,” he grumbled.

Shrugging, Thomas merely investigated the new bruise and tossed off an empty, “Sorry.”

Placated by his own outburst, Andrew pushed himself off the carpet and looked over the damage. Glass crunched under small socked feet as he made circles around the destruction, assessing whether super glue was necessary or could even be applied. Stumped, he scratched his tousled brown haired head. Since it was Thomas’s house, Andrew looked over at who would bear the punishment if the lamp couldn’t be fixed, “So?”

“What?”

“How are we going to fix it?”

To Andrew surprise, Thomas giggled in reply. Andrew looked at Thomas like he had a head growing out of his stomach and started to back away, asking, “Are you sure that arm didn’t get you?”

“Yes,” Thomas answered, sounding testy, “We won’t do anything, and Mom and Dad’ll think the dog did it.”

“The dog,” Andrew said unbelieving, glancing over where the lazy furball slept, thinking that the mutt wouldn’t get up for food, much less knock over an expensive lamp.

“The dog,” Thomas assured and to punctuate his statement, he went back towards the bedroom. In horror, Andrew watched as the other boy sauntered back to where the shadow lay in wait. From the depths of the bedroom Thomas stage whispered, “Hurry up. If you’re out there, it’ll never work.”

With a long sigh, Andrew resigned himself to a night of terror and tiptoed toward the room. At the door, he paused.

“Come on,” came the more insistent whisper.

Sucking in a long breath, Andrew leapt from the doorway to his bed and under the covers, where he remained until morning, safe from under the bed.

The glass was gone by morning. Thomas’s mother was a quiet woman, only growing loud when she was irritated. “Who broke the lamp, boys?” she asked.

The boys grew very interested in the intricate construction of their cereal bowls. They had made the pact last night, Andrew from under his covers and Thomas from his perch on his bed, deciding that they would claim to know nothing and to have slept through the night like logs. First and foremost, however, was the contemplative silence that comes before every carefully crafted lie.

“Well?” she asked.

Thomas spoke first, “I don’t know, Mom.”

This reply was the conundrum of every family that ever existed. Parents always asked their children a question and because the child has truly no idea why he did what he did, he’ll give the standard reply of “I don’t know.” The problem is, parents hated this truthful answer, because their question isn’t definitively answered. So the children are forced to make something up to make Mom and Dad happy so that they’ll leave little whomever to his play. This is what the boys had planned on, so lying wouldn’t technically be their fault.

“I want the real answer,” she said.

Exactly as planned, Thomas said, “Really. We were sleeping all night. Andrew even hid under the covers.”

Andrew face burned and he glared at Thomas. He wasn’t supposed to mention that.

“Really?” she said. Petrified, the boys nodded, breakfast forgotten. Pointing, she said, “Eat your breakfast. Then I’ll bring Andrew home.”

When Andrew was packing his bag, they got the truth from Thomas.

He was sent home as Thomas’s parents decided what to do with their lying son. Andrew still didn’t feel any better about what they had done. His father quizzed him of course, and Andrew still wouldn’t admit what had happened. He was sent to bed, his father unaware of what had transpired. He didn’t sleep that night. He laid on his mattress, staring at the ceiling, as he had done at Thomas’s house. The frightening black shapes were there again, haunting him as he tossed fitfully. He was sweating, knowing that if his father found out that he had lied, he would receive the worst punishment in his life. All that was left for him was guilt. A soft yellow shaft of light hit the twin bed and his mother tiptoed into his room. Andrew quickly closed his eyes, faking slumber. Gently, she woke him up anyway.

“Andrew,” she whispered, “Tell me what happened.”

Through a mask of tears, he told his mother exactly what happened the day before at Thomas’s. When he reached the part where he tread over the broken glass, sans shoes, but with socks, his mother stopped him and checked his feet for cuts. There were none. “Go on, “she said, satisfied with his health. He continued, then ended.

For five minutes, maybe longer, she just stared at him, her son. Patting him on the head, as if unwilling to show love, she said, “We’ll straighten this out,” and she went back to her room.

Andrew felt a little better having confessed, although he now felt trepidation about what his parents had in store for him, wishing they would be merciful. He tried to fall asleep, snuggling into his covers, watching the ceiling again. The guilt still ate at him, chewing away at his insides. What if they hadn’t found out? Then he wouldn’t feel so bad. He heard the chant of the cicadas swell.

Within the week, he had forgotten, but his parents hadn’t. They got Mrs. Peters.

The offense failed to offer itself for recollection. The dimness of the room surrounded them, dust clung to every surface. The soothing voice of the nice lady next door turned harsh and angry, chasing away the sunlight that might’ve peeked into the window. He didn’t understand what she expected of him, much less what he had done. Her shrill voice seemed to carry into the recesses of his brain, manifesting itself into guilt that welled up in his eyes as tears, threatening to fall down his six-year-old cheeks and betray his feelings.

He sat at the kitchen table, the old brown one carted with them every time the family moved, staring down at the fake brown swirls that represented wood. His feet, unable to touch the floor due to short legs, which in turn was due to age, kicked aimlessly under the table. His hands searched for something to occupy themselves with, nervously tapping silently on the tabletop. His ears burned with unrecognized shame, his mind kept searching for the cause of this new situation. In vain he tried to remember, but all he could see were the spiderwebs that he found every morning attached between the television and rocking chair, the clock and the wall. Gossamer translucent strings that confused him because he thought that spiders made webs, that’s why they were called spiderwebs and why did they appear at night? Mom had said that it was only dust but that didn’t make sense, so there must have been spiders in the house, but only at night, and only he could see them. He hated spiders and all bugs in general. His stare into the whorls of wood grew more intense.

“Pay attention!” the nice lady snapped, except she wasn’t a nice lady anymore, she was mad at him for something and he couldn’t figure out what.

“Sorry,” Andrew replied. He remembered the sunlight that reflected off the webs while he struggled to remember what he did so wrong.

While he struggled, she had pulled a picture out of her handbag. She gently, almost reverently, placed it upon the table that stood between them: the confused freckled, brown-haired child and the determined, raven-haired adult. Mrs. Peters continued her interrogation of the faltering child.

“Do you know who this is?” she asked.

He watched her eyes before he looked down at the picture, to see what kind of reply she wanted. He realized that he’d better know. So he looked at the picture, an old picture of a young man. It wasn’t a photograph, it was a painting of some sort, obviously created with the same reverence with which it was placed in front of him. It was a young man with long brown hair and a short beard, the background a fuzzy grey: so it was a picture of some sort. The corners were soft and the edges a little ragged: the picture was well-loved. Andrew deduced all of this from the picture that he had never seen before, he, a six-year-old who had never really tested his cognitive skills, figured that much out, but he still had no idea what mistake he had made or who this man was. He said so.

She spoke in disbelief, “You don’t know who this is?”

He was surprised himself and a bit indignant, as if he would lie about a simple question that…oh. He remembered his grave error. He’d lied to his mother and Thomas’s mother and now his parents had asked Mrs. Peters to step in and fix the problem. “It’s the Christian thing to do,” they’d said.

Not wanting to speak aloud, he merely nodded. His revelation had renewed his shame, along with the fact that he didn’t know who the man was and he should have known.

Her brown eyes flashed with frustration and she stabbed her finger at the head of the man and said, “This man is our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

“Oh,” was all he could say, properly chastised.

More sarcasm exuded from her voice as she said, “You still don’t know do you?” with her fingers grasping the very edge of the picture, yet she never covered the face of the Savior.

Andrew ducked his head and lowered his eyes to the tabletop in submission, “No.”

She launched into the liturgy of her religion as she explained the life, death and mystery of Jesus Christ to the boy. She ended, “I want you to apologize to him for what you did and then I will give you this picture.”

His head snapped up, attentive because of his now complete confusion, “What?” was all he could say.

“Tell Jesus that you are sorry.”

He searched her face for a hint of humor, for a sign that she had already forgiven him and now was kidding around, but all he saw was determination, deadly seriousness that he should apologize to this man that he had never met, much less done anything to. There had to be a reason why she was so intent on wrenching this apology from him. So he asked, “Why?”

She sighed in an effort to control her rapidly increasing temper, “Because you have sinned by lying to your mother you must tell Him that you are sorry for what you have done,” she said, sounding perfectly logical to herself but muddying things up even more for Andrew.

He bit his bottom lip in his own determination, that he would not apologize to this man because he saw no need to, that he did not want the picture anyway. He wasn’t sorry, he knew that. His guilt was the guilt of getting caught. He stared at the picture. Mrs. Peters stared at him.

In an effort to escape from her accusing eyes, his thoughts wandered again to the webs of the night. Maybe they were a part the shadows under his bed, the arm-like shape that reared up from behind the headboard every night to frighten him into hiding under the covers. They were what he understood when his mother asked if he did. This time he didn’t feign knowledge and he had found out what happened. Maybe they were connected to this Jesus that he never met but really wanted to meet now because he was in trouble for wronging him, for committing this new act: a sin.

He jumped when she asked, “Well?”

He redoubled his efforts to be quiet and look as he felt her eyes bore into his skull. The bottom of his foot began to itch and he tried to scratch it without taking off his red sneaker. Unfortunately, he moved the table.

“Quit wiggling,” came the scold.

He continued suffering in now still silence.

She broke it, “Decide now. Tell him you’re sorry and you can have Him.”

She didn’t understand that he didn’t know that he should want Him. Andrew scratched the top of his head, deciding, “I can’t,” his voice quivering in anticipation of her next statement.

“Please, tell Him,” she pleaded now, her voice had gone back to the nice lady, her own eyes glistening.

He couldn’t see the nice lady anymore. His eyes could only see Mrs. Peters, the Inquisitor who had sat before him and flayed open his soul.

“I can’t,” he whispered, his hands trembling, “I just can’t.”

She let go of the portrait; both watched as it fluttered back to the tabletop. “Then I’m sorry,” she whispered back, her voice cracking. Then she picked up the picture, propped it on a nearby counter, and went through the door to her own apartment downstairs, her eyes betraying her feelings all the while, leaving Andrew alone.

He still didn’t get it and dropped his face into his arms and was surprised to find his face wet. She had known all along. He cried anyway, wishing for the moment back. He wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve and noticed one of those little webs in the corner. He remembered his mom telling him they were cobwebs, even though the word meant nothing to him, he acted as if he understood. She never knew that they were still spiderwebs to him. Suddenly he desperately wanted to run down to Mrs. Peters’ apartment and say, “Sorry,” and have her be the nice lady next door again. Yet even at the moment he thought of this, he knew he wouldn’t follow through and he bit his lip in his determination to keep his tears from falling all over again.

End.