Endor

Another one of Fiorella's short stories.


As they did every new moon, the three elderly sisters met at Starbucks, reserved a table by depositing their dear mother's cookbook on it, and walked up to the counter to place their orders. In the few seconds it took for the barista to turn toward the back of the store and instruct her co-worker to add extra whipped cream to Glinda's hot chocolate and Irene's latte, an athletically built young man pushed Zelda aside and put in his  own order.

"Gimme the biggest cup of Dark Roast that you have and make it snappy!  I've got places to go and people to see!"

Hazel gave him a darkling look.  "Sir, perhaps you didn't realize it, but you cut in line.  Our sister was next."

"Too bad." The athletic young man shrugged and checked out the room for a table.

The three women exchanged hard-eyed glances, but knew better than to make a scene in public. Picking up their drinks, they turned to walk back to their table, then saw that the athletically-built young man had claimed it for himself.  Glinda bristled with anger.  "Sir, you're sitting at our table!  That is our dear mother's cookbook."

The athletic young man glared at her.  "Find another table. granny, and take your crazy book with you!  Damn thing tried to bite me! "

A table opened up, and the three sisters sat down together, put their mother 's book of recipes in the center of the table, then sipped their beverages, watching the athletic young man the whole time.  When he left without cleaning up the table, Glinda swooped down like a night owl sighting its prey, slipped his cup into a plastic bag. and stowed it in her purse. Then, their faces grim, the women drove over to Zelda's, consulted Mother's recipes, set the iron pot to boiling with the standard ingredients, smiled at each other, and tossed in the cup that the athletic young man had used.

Eye of newt and toe of frog work so much better with fresh DNA in the mix.

Reality Shows Exposed

The problem with reality shows is that, at a certain point, the facade gets ripped off and we notice things like Matt Roloff's megalomania, Mama June's careless parenting, the Duck Dynasty patriarch's prejudices, Kate Gosselin's virulent OCD, and the Duggars' misperception of godliness.

But the people portrayed on the screen were concocted out of scraps of footage by directors, cameramen, and publicity flacks.  They were never real.

Reality shows are fiction



  

Reflections of a Writer

Fiction is fictional.  Eloquence abounds--characters never stutter, repeat themselves, or are at a loss for the right word unless it suits the plot. No unnecessary characters clog up the works. And everything in the story ultimately makes sense.
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Late at night, when Husband and Dog have gone to bed, is when Fio prowls around Amazon, peeping at first chapters of other authors' books, trying to figure out how many they've sold, and deciding she is an absolute failure.
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Fio plowed through her first eight chapters yesterday, nipping and tucking and adjusting and un-adjusting, trying to make sure the story worked.  Today she'll go through eight more chapters, but more slowly because the writing gets rougher as she goes on.  Then there are the ten thousand words she has yet to write before March 1.

Wordless

Of course, the idea that people think in words is ridiculous.  Every time Fiorella accords her characters interior dialogues, it's fiction.  People think in--well--thoughts, splotches of conjecture, sometimes inspired and immediate, sometimes long and drawn out.  When Fio plots out her romances, she starts with the relationship between the two leads, then opens her mind to whatever would logically follow, then tries to record what her inarticulate brain has told her.  When she is painting, she goes into the zone and lets her hand do the walkin'.  When she encounters life problems, she goes totally cold and lets her id/ego/anima/whatever take over.

Words are an artificial construct that we use to try to communicate the essence of our thoughts, but sometimes they aren't enough. As in the above paragraph.

AKA

We're all driven to fiction one way or another.  Some of us write it for publication, some of us generate it to explain what we don't understand, and some of us live it.  Fiorella is one of the first type, conspiracy theorists are examples of the second type, and the third type is the most interesting--people who reinvent their own lives.

Okay, we all do that to a certain extent, celebrating or mourning our lives as the mood hits us, but Fio is talking about people who live the part, like Andrew, a fellow teacher at Fio's last college gig.  Fio liked Andrew a lot.  She considered him a close friend--after all, he supported her when the Hand and the Hammer ganged up against her with their own fiction.   But Andrew got tossed out on his ear when it was discovered he'd falsified his educational credentials.

Fio should have figured out there was a problem.  Andrew was evasive when Fio tried to pin him down on his graduate studies, the academic and publishing connections he set up for her never quite panned out, and somewhere along the line she learned he was telling people people that he and Fio had known each other at another college, which wasn't true.  But she disregarded these red flags because Andrew was charming and funny and told her all the inside gossip, which might have been as fake as he was.

Fiorella doesn't know what became of Andrew, but she would bet he's set up another full and fictional life somewhere.  She wishes him well.  He never did any harm to anyone but himself.

Heavy

What separates us from the beasts is that we humans live in deliberate fiction--our political beliefs, superstitions, entertainment, whatever. Animals have no illusions and no imaginations.

They're the sane ones.