Straw into gold.

Ever wonder where stories begin?

On this page I will share stories and story excerpts followed by the “real life” doings that compelled me to write them. If a story were a piece of embroidery I would be flipping the fabric over to show you the mess on the back that makes the elegant stitching on the front possible.

What follows is an excerpt from my next book, “Summer on the Moon.” Socko and Damien are on the roof of their inner-city apartment building. On the roof with them is Junebug, who is studying for her nurse’s aide class. She is also the girlfriend of the local gang leader, Rapp. It is the evening of the last day of school and Socko and Damien are celebrating.

“Summer on the Moon” excerpt:

Damien opened the flap on his pack and fished out a semester’s worth of incomplete math worksheets. “Decimals.” He folded the top sheet into an airplane.

Socko watched the math plane’s long slow glide down to the street. It landed on the shiny roof of Rapp’s Trans Am. The car, a gift from a dead uncle, was parked in the street in front of the apartment building. “Hope I didn’t put my name on it,” Damien said.

“That would be a first.” Socko snagged the next worksheet in the pile and folded it into a plane of his own.

Damien pulled a cigarette lighter out of his pocket. “Genius Idea!” He held the flame under the paper plane in Socko’s hand until it caught, then blew on it gently to get the fire going.

When Socko launched the kamikaze plane, it soared with the trailing edge of its wings on fire. Chin resting on the ledge, Socko watched it loop.

“Crap, oh crap!” Damien sat up straight as the plane took a sudden dive and landed on the fabric awning over the door of Donatelli’s. “Hide!”

“Whatever you two are doing,” said Junebug, barely glancing up from her book, “cut it out.”

“We’re not doing nothing!” Damien protested.

Socko peered over the ledge. Mr. Donatelli, who had just come out to close up for the night, popped the sag of fabric with a broom handle. The plane, now just a blackened scrap, fluttered to the sidewalk. Mr. Donatelli stomped it, then glared up at the roof of The Kludge. Socko ducked.

By the time he looked again, the old man had cranked in the awning and locked the folding metal grate over the storefront.

The fiery math attack resumed.

Fractions burned out in the hedge in front of the apartment building. Numerators smoldered by the curb. Every now and then Socko looked down at the plane on the roof of Rapp’s Trans Am, wishing it had landed somewhere else. What if Damien had put his name on it?

They had just launched the last worksheet when Rapp, now solo, appeared in the street below. Like a guided missile, the flaming plane hit Rapp’s chest. The gang leader slapped the burning paper away. He barely glanced up toward the roof before bolting to the door of The Kludge and letting himself in.

Damien jumped to his feet, the whites around his eyes attracting the last of the daylight. “I’m outta here!”

“What did you do?” Junebug demanded.

“A paper airplane just hit your boyfriend,” said Socko. “It was sort of on fire.”

Behind the story:

Much of this particular story I have never lived, which worries me. As soon as Socko and his mother move to a suburban development I’m on familiar ground, having been raised in one myself, but I’ve never lived in an inner-city apartment.

The touchstone for me in this scene is the roof. Although I’m afraid of heights I have always loved climbing up onto the roof wherever I live. It started when my father left a ladder leaned against our house. I would go up there for the view, to be alone, and to practice guitar.

In my seven previously published books five put characters on the roof. To me sitting on a roof represents freedom, a place apart. In “Summer on the Moon” the roof appears to be a safe place—until the flaming plane hits the gang leader.

Al: a short story

Hanging chads.

Margaret perched on  her stool behind the reference counter and looked out over the table of Most Frequently Requested IRS forms, the bank of public–access computers, the display of books by local authors, the magazine racks.

The periodical section was empty of patrons, except for Nathan, who slept, shrugged down deep in his army surplus coat, the newspaper draping his knees.

She should wake him.

It was library policy.

But Nathan, dumped into the cold after a night on a narrow cot, had walked from the homeless shelter on Tennessee, and then stood for forty-five minutes on the library steps, waiting for the doors to open.  She saw his thatch of stiff gray hair, the finger of smoke rising from his cigarette as she drove up in her old, but warm car. He had lost his hat since yesterday.

She turned her stool so she didn’t see him.  She would do something when he began to snore.

In this brief space when no patron faced her across the desk, she wished that Katie were here to talk to.  But Katie was in the staff lounge drinking her morning cup of Earle Grey.  Margaret listened for the sigh of the lounge door, the first hint that Katie was returning.  Instead she heard the thin whistle of a man beginning to snore.

She swiveled her stool and was getting to her feet when the paper slid off Nathan’s lap, and settled on the industrial carpet. Margaret felt her irrational heart constrict.  Even at this distance and upside-down she recognized the man in the news photo.  She knew his hairline, his square serious face–and she missed him.

It was strange to feel such an attachment when she had hardly noticed him for those eight years he had served as second in command.  He had been little more than a pressed suit, a good haircut, a stoic silence.  It was the other man, the smooth talker, who had commanded all the attention, while his second was just a presence off the smooth-talker’s left shoulder.

If the pair had been at a junior-high dance, the man she now so ardently missed would have been the one leaning against the wall; his friend the one dancing.  And if, on a boy-ask-girl, one were to ask him to dance, his hands would have been cold and clammy, his father’s aftershave oppressively sincere.  It was the friend — even though he wasn’t as good looking — with whom one would want to dance.

But after eight years of dependable service it became, inevitably, his turn.  She had supported him from the beginning of course, but her commitment was, at first, lukewarm.  They shared the same concerns; the environment, the downtrodden, the teacher teaching to the test.  But while Margaret’s convictions made the small, scratching sounds of a trapped animal, his snapped like a flag in a stiff breeze.

Honor.

The Greater Good.

Duty.  Always duty.

While she had marched and gone door-to-door protesting a war they both despised, he had volunteered to serve, because if he did not, “some other mother’s boy would have had to go in my place.” Safely back from the mud and horror this was how he cast his decision to enlist when speechifying.

But beneath the glossy words Margaret detected the hard outline of his parents.  Groomed for public office, he could not afford a single misstep.  She read somewhere that he had wanted to be a novelist, not president, but he was a good son.

When she was in high school, Margaret was the girl singer in a band.  When it came time to go to college she almost went to England with the guys instead; but she was a good daughter.

As her sympathy for him deepened she developed an antipathy for the smooth talker. That man, so good at the job; so affable, so at ease, had a problem keeping his fly zipped.  The opposition now tarred her man with the same brush, as if he had stepped in something and couldn’t get the stink of it off his shoe.

“Mr. Glover?”  Juan, the library’s roving security guard, was shaking Nathan’s arm.

“Mr. Glover, I’m going to have to ask you to wake up.”

“Wasn’t asleep,” Nathan snorted.

“Sure, Mr. Glover.”  Juan straightened, then grabbed his own belt and pulled it up.  The weight of keys and walkie talkie pulled it down again. He glanced at the photo in the paper.

“Did you vote, Juan?” Even though it was too late, she had to ask.

“Nah.  One politician, another politician; they’re all the same.”  Juan held up a hand. “I know, I know. You liked the loser. But it was like the man had a poker up his ass, if you’ll excuse my language.”

Resisting the urge to yell, “He did not lose! ” she bit her tongue.  Instead she wrapped her arms around herself and gazed at Juan. His vote could’ve made a difference. If only I’d worked harder to convince him!    

But Juan wasn’t the only one who thought the man had a poker up his ass. If only they had watched him more closely. At the convention he got up and made a speech, one he’d written himself, and it didn’t sound like the clank of gears.  I may not be the most exciting politician, he said, but I’ll work hard for you every day.

Margaret understood being unexciting but reliable. She worked the reference desk at a public library and no one noticed her at all unless they had a term paper due.

As the news clips became more frequent she began to see that there was another side to him, that if he took the tie off, and unbuttoned the top button of his white dress shirt and rolled his cuffs a couple of turns, a fighter emerged.  When he promised to fight for her, Margaret felt a thrill.

“Miss?” said an elderly gentleman tapping a finger on the counter. How was it that they always knew she was unmarried? She climbed off her stool to help him locate his medication in the PDR.

Returning to the desk, she glanced at the fallen newspaper and smiled.  After admitting that he was unexciting, he did something interesting, unexpected.  Confounding everyone, he chose his running mate from the perpetual minority.  A Jewish man—who did thank God a little too floridly for Margaret—but the choice was original.

Perhaps, beneath the charcoal suit, a novelist still breathed.

I told you I was going to wear the red tie!

The man wheeled out to run against hers had small, close-set eyes and a ham-handed relationship with the English language.  He batted words around as if someone had tossed them at him unexpectedly.

She had encountered his type many times across the reference desk.  They came in with their questions and walked out with just what they needed, as if facts were objects to be stuffed in a pocket.

Margaret recognized the look on his self-satisfied face. This opponent was incurious.

As the campaign season wore on the populist in her man began to blossom. She saw clips of him at labor rallies and NAACP gatherings, hand extended, smiling. He seemed grateful, and a little surprised by all the attention.

That’s when she noticed that, from the back, he was not as perfect as he had always appeared  standing at parade-rest at some official function. There was a thin place in his smooth dark hair where the white of his scalp showed through; a bald spot. It made him seem vulnerable.

She blushed now at the memory, but she had had a dream. Inauguration day. Snow was falling on his broad shoulders and on that humble patch of scalp.  She was in the crowd closer than security would have ever allowed. She felt the cold and caught a few of the whirling flakes on the sleeve of her brown coat.  As he raised his right hand, and put his left on the Bible, he looked at her. Right at her—and then the alarm went off.

Her cat Martha in her lap, she’d watched all the debates (Martha was still alive then).  She tried to coach him through the window of her TV. Oblivious, he came on too strong in the first one, became apologetic in the second.  In the last one he was forceful, using his superior size to make his opponent look small.  Which wasn’t hard.

His opponent was small.

Miniscule.

Superfluous.  And the English language continued to be that man’s toughest opponent.

Margaret was surprised—then chagrined by her own surprise—to hear that by the current yardstick for measuring presidential potential, the “which man would you rather have a beer with” litmus test, the other man had won.

She got a yard sign.  She talked about him at work, but it was safe.  Her co-workers, with the exception of Juan, supported him; Katie rabidly.  She knew that this too was inauspicious. Librarians, the left-footed members of society; were perpetually out of step. They did not think in terms of having a beer with anyone.  They read.

Election night she took two antacids and watched the early returns.  She wished Katie were with her, instead of in her own living room with her husband, Dom, who would have preferred to be watching something else.

At first it seemed as if he would win early in the night.  They gave him Florida, her state. She celebrated with a big glass of milk and poured some in a bowl for the cat; and then they took Florida back.

Margaret turned at the sound of the opening of the lounge door. Katie, back from break, began tucking chairs under tables, using her hip and her one good hand.  She carried her whithered right arm close to her body, perpetually cradled.  Her fingers, like some small, pink octopus, peeked out of the sleeve of the bold teal sweater she said enhanced the color of her eyes.

In the weeks that followed the election she and Katie steeped themselves in the indignity.  Driving in, they listened to the stories on NPR and repeated them to each other when they got in.  There were votes uncounted! Questionable practices! Disenfranchised minorities!

If their lives behind the reference counter had any meaning beyond sore feet it was that the truth had value. But the period after the election did not seem to be about learning the truth. “Dom says that W’s boys are running out the clock,” Katie told her. Why was it that for men all truisms were based on sports?  But Dom was right.

Srill, her man fought valiantly.  Count the votes, just count the votes, he said.  She continued to wear a button with his name on it on the collar of her coat.  One day a man in the grocery store told her to get over it.  “Moron!” she said, and then stood shaking in the produce aisle.

She had always wanted to call someone that, preferably someone on the other side of the reference desk, but she never had.  Margaret Atwater, she told herself, as she stared at a pile of Savoy cabbages, you are coming undone.

Count or not count, the issue was batted back and forth between the courts.  He was down, he was out, and then the supreme court of Florida did a wonderful brave thing.  It said Count.

When the decision came down, Margaret was on the desk trying to answer the following question: “In the entire history of Europe, how many people were killed for their religious faith?” The questioner wanted a precise number, something like nine hundred thousand seven hundred and fifty-three. Margaret was just explaining the difficulty in arriving at such a number when Katie burst out of the lounge.  “They’ve ordered a count of the undervote!”

Margaret stopped tallying the faithful dead of Europe.  An unaccustomed warmth pervaded her body.

“So, how many dead guys?” demanded the student on the other side of the counter.

It turned out that the recount was to take place in her own Tallahassee library. She and Katie exulted. Over their heads as they worked the desk that Saturday, good was forcing evil to the wall.  Glancing at the ceiling from time to time, Katie pointed up, with the same fervor an evangalist would use when pointing toward heaven.

Katie went on break, but had not been gone even long enough to heat tea water in the microwave when she returned, her cheeks twin blazes of indignant red.  “They’ve stopped the count! The Supreme Court shut us down!”

Dumped from the surge of history the vote counters came down from upstairs rooms blinking. The disputed votes, packed away in guarded boxes, fell silent.

Christmas came.  Margaret’s sister brought her children for an extended stay. Margaret went through the motions but nothing was right with the world. The visit over, she was walking through the airport with her sister and her neice and nephew when she heard his voice.  She turned quickly, trying to locate him. When at last she found him on the small screen TV at the back of the shoeshine concession she touched the campaign button she still wore on her collar.

What was he doing?  Some trivial, end of administration business? No. He was formally accepting the vote of the electoral college declaring the other man the winner.

Like the cries of her own heart, members of the Congressional Black Caucus were trying to speak about what had happened in Florida.  And he could not let them. \ He could only ask, “Is it in writing, does it have the signature of a member of the House of Representative, and is it signed by a Senator.” Yes. Yes. No. And on that no, he had to gavel them down. Gavel them down!

The Black Caucus walked out.

“We’re going to miss our plane,” her sister called.

“Go, I’ll catch up,” Margaret replied. She had to hear the members of the Black Caucus speak outside on the steps where nothing would go into the permanent record. They spoke their grievances to the air and the open sky.

Justice, they said.

Justice had not been served. They vowed that they would not forget.

And Margaret realized that that was the one inalienable right of the powerless.  The right to remember.

In his concession speech he urged her to support the other man.  Americans, he said, know how to come together.

Not librarians, she thought, watching Katie pick up the fallen newspaper and stare at his photo before returning the paper to its proper place on the shelf.  Librarians cleave to a higher standard; the truth.

“The fat lady’s hit the high note,” Dom had said.  But Margaret had not taken the button with his name on it off  her coat collar.  She was a librarian and she would not get over it.

Behind the story:

The story of the 2000 election belongs to all of us, and to the broad sweep of history, but the trick in storytelling is to make the story personal. And for me it was very personal. I was deeply disheartened by the slow-motion disaster that ground on and on and shook my faith in the strength of justice. 

I was a librarian at the time (albeit a bit of a fake having no library science degree).  A ten year stint in public libraries as well as FSU’s library system had acquainted me with the steely heart of the true librarian. She (it is still a predominantly female profession) wears interesting jewelry and practical shoes. She is liberal, humane, downtrodden, underappreciated, quite often left-handed, and a fierce guardian of truth. If you are homeless she will let you sleep (provided you don’t snore), if you have waited until the last day to start your report she will help you. (The question about the faithful dead of Europe was asked of me when I was on the reference desk–I forget the final number). She is a pillar of rectitude and seemed the perfect character to respond to an injustice I have yet to get over.  America would be a different place today–a better one–if they had counted the votes. I will always believe this and I will never forget.