Fried Medals
"If you start to read this and fail to finish it, I will track you down and kill you!"

Or perhaps not.

Maybe that's not the right way to start a story.

He slides back from his computer and stares up at the recently repainted ceiling.  One of the disadvantages of living underneath a woman who is sometimes absent-minded enough to fall asleep in the bathtub while the water's running.

She's also his writing critic.

"You've got to grab your reader by the throat," she's said, frequently, as she slashed his opening paragraphs describing the weather.

"But, the Japanese always start letters with the weather," he protested.

"Nuts!" she said. "This isn't a letter and you aren't Japanese!"

I could have been, he thought, if my old man had married that Japanese girl when he was stationed in Hawaii instead of the Irish girl he met at a USO in San Francisco.

He pulls himself back to the computer.  "Isn't enough," he hears her lecturing, "to just grab a reader - you've also got to hold a reader!"

He stares out the streaky window.  Beyond the garden is a fast-food drive-thru and the world of advertising hype. Promises.  Grabbers.  You develop a skin.  The con slips off you.  So what can you promise that will hold somebody?

I promise you immortal rife. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

No, seriously, you're pre-approved.  Just call Kelly at this 800 number!  Think if it! Immortal Life!

So what are they selling?

Time-shares.

The water's running upstairs.  He hears it as a low rumble like far off thunder.  Should he move the computer?

Naw.  First, there'll be a wet spot overhead.

Back to writing another story - or maybe I'm an ass.  "You gotta grab 'em," the voice persists.  She - Leah -is not a bad-looking broad.  She's old. Forty maybe, but she's got the lines and the bumps.  She doesn't do the gym.  Doesn't have time, she claims. 

So what does she do with herself when she's not telling you how to write?

He ponders.  What a good word that is, he thinks.  Ponder.  Ponder-pander-pounder.

Nobody ponders enough anymore.

What Leah does in her spare time upstairs is look for the SCORE!!!  Somewhere, she believes, there is a BIG idea that will dump money on her and she will take that money and open a bookstore solely filled with books people have published themselves.  The orphans that few want.  No professional publishers need apply.  No hype. No block-busters. No Book Tours and no TV talk shows.

How about this for an opener?  Would you like to make love to the person of your choice?  To anybody who walks by?  With perfect skill and no residual health problems?  Do you have a bump behind your left ear? That's phrenology.  The good-lover bump.

The water stops running overhead.  A promising sign.  Still, he banks the computer and opens an umbrel1a to cover it.  He goes to make coffee.  He'd rather go out for it.  He's got some money.  He has a day job.  But coffee bags are okay.

Leah thumps on the ceiling.  She has an Indian hiking pole with a flat steel tip that she uses to pound the floor.  This is her primitive "You Got Mail" announcement.

He sets the open umbrella aside and opens her e-mail.  She writes it "email".

She writes, "They are going to fry Mingo.  His last appeal has bounced.  The countdown has started."