Category: fiction

Choices

Maurice was the new man. Looked like his birth gender might have been different. Or maybe he was just a beautiful man with some exquisite feminine elements. Either way stirred me into intrigue.

He glided us through the identification protocols. I played nice. The others punish you if you don’t play nice. Outside of this establishment, they’ll pound you until death gives you a smile unless you play nice. Death and I played tonguesies a few times before that lesson found a way through my paywall.

Now to business, Maurice orchestrated a beautiful smile my way. Wonder if all those beaming white chicklets were real and natural. Such aquamarine eyes, too. Wars nicely with the glass-smooth mocha skin. Ah, to be wrinkle free. Like that matters to such as me.

“You have two outstanding attributes which might be available to you, Mickey,” Maurice purred. My mind surfed a mental register of attributes and awaited further info. “Invisibility and timetravel are both possible for you, but only one or the other.”

My mind jumped, flipped, and twirled like Simone Biles. Invisibility is the second-least attribute found in people. Time travel is queen of the rarest. No wonder pretty Maurice was here chatting me up. “Wow,” I said like a hayseed blown in on the wind. “I’d like being them.”

A professionally contrite expression landed on Maurice’s beauty. “I’m afraid that you can only be one or the other.”

“Oh.” I poured sadness into my gaze. “That’s a bummer. I thought it’d be so great to be an invisible timetraveller. Just think of the fun.”

“Yes, the opportunities which present do boggle the mind.”

LOL. Only salespeople talk like that.

Maurice ran me the drawbacks and bennies the program provides with those attributes. I made noises and expressions like I paid extreme attention and contained excited interest. I knew from farm skuttle that every attribute has drawbacks. As Maurice delicately phrased it, “Time travel unfortunately damages the cerebral cortex, amygdala, and hippocampi. Being invisible shreds muscle mass and does nerve damage.” He went on with greater clinical details without graphic explanation about how long it generally takes to do these things to people with those attributes.

My mind had already harvested those details and was racing through previously exercised pros and cons in the two choices, searching for the answer, which attribute will be the Amazon Prime delivering my freedom? My shackled co-inhabitants in the farm all punched in with seasoned reasoning about the attributes and freedom. We did it with all the attributes. Nightly ritual. No matter, as Daisychain always said as the bottom line, “You might think you’ll get out, but they will bring you back.”

Someone always put in the addendum, “Or kill you.”

We always laughed with deathly glee. Like being killed was terrible.

Yes, we were ignorant about how terrible things could be in the Farm. We didn’t know that they protected us from knowing.

So, like others, thinking myself more cunning than our masters, I answered Maurice’s ultimate query with suitably guarded hope, kidding myself that they didn’t see right through it.

“I’ll go for timetravel.”

Because I didn’t know that, yes, there are people who can both timetravel and be invisible.

They were the ones who began the program.

I was soon to meet them.

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The Writing Moment

I brought a few books with me to read on vacation. One was recommended by my wife. She picked the recommendation up from Ann Patchett via Ann’s regular video post, New to You. My wife heard what Ann Patchett said about reading while writing a novel, and then what she said about this book, and told me, “I think you want to read this book.”

The book is a memoir, Running in the Family, by Michael Ondaatje. Ann says something like, “It’s beautifully written and writers will love it.” I picked it up to begin reading today. Tucking it under my arm, a glass of wine in my other hand, I climbed the spiral staircase to the third-floor loft. Out on the balcony where the sunshine sparked with Pacific blue, I sat down and began to read.

After a few pages, I knew that I could not read it now. The book was an immediate serum inducing me, go write. But my writing needs separation from friends. Space to let the writing neurons take over. And I get cranky when I’m interrupted while writing. I talked to my wife and friends about the book and put it away, to be read when I get home. This is a library copy. I think I might need to buy my own copy.

And then I’ll write like crazy, at least one more time.

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The Writing Moment

It was ticks past one AM. I’d just come in from outside, from admiring star- and moonlight, when a skunk’s powerful smell chased me back inside, back in to close all the doors and windows. Then I sat in an office recliner, television on, re-writing a sentence from the novel in progress, shaping it in my head. I’ve been working on that line in my head for the last three days.

That’s how it’s been with this novel writing journey. I say to myself, for example, “Okay, today I will write the earthquake chapter.” Then I sit and tango with words through the scenes, stepping forward and then retracing my steps, adjusting sentences, tenses, pacing, padding dialogue, subtracting dialogue. Nothing is completely satisfying at this stage, the first draft. I’m still getting introduced to the characters, still peering in to their psyches, still engaging in “Aha!” moments. I move on from a chapter after the essence is captured, but as my writing mind recalls some passages, I go back, fix that piece, and then write on.

I began writing this novel on May 9, 2025. It’s now 209 pages and 55,000 words. Given to writing epics, I’m trying to keep this one below 250 pages. So I tell myself today, “Arc toward the ending. Write this chapter, and then land this novel.”

I see the upcoming scenes in pieces. Hear it in snatches. It all needs to be woven together.

Then there’s the ending. I see it in the distance, too, a final scene lit up like a monument, beckoning me, “Come on. Let’s do this thing.”

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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