This is a little bit of cat-waxing, because I have a deadline 5 days from now. But I’ve been so overwhelmed with DBA and editing stuff that I needed the break. Also, sometimes posting old prose helps get the new prose juices flowing.
A while back, award-winning editor Jennifer Brozek started the Coins of Chaos anthology. The antho theme was “Hobo Nickels” with a few specific details (1913 nickel and lots of bad luck). Jenn loves tragedy and horror. Armed with these pieces of information, I did a few days worth of research and spent another two days figuring out what time period my story would be set in.
I already knew who my protagonists were, Jolly Tannum and his wife Emily. And the main story wasn’t hard at all. My parents had a real life encounter with a statue that my dad found in a pile of dirty fill. Fortunately, the real life version-as bad as it was-didn’t come close to what Jolly went through.
My major issue was setting. Should they be in a big city? Should they be down south? It wasn’t until I settled on time period (the story shuttled back and forth between modern times, the 1930s, and ended up declaring itself a Roaring Twenties tale) that I knew where (a rural community in Illinois) and that Jolly had Mommy Issues. In fact, once period was decided, the story just wrote itself. Though it needed a lot of editing to make my points clear.
What I’m sharing today is my first day of writing, while I was still fighting for setting, period, and Emily’s background. Heck, I didn’t even know much about Jolly at this point. NOTE: this is all trash writing without a single edit (though I did cut out the sentence fragments both before and after this). The very next day, I left it all on the cutting room floor. I like this prose. It’s very pretty. But it was completely useless to the story, so CHOP!
She tried to do everything as instructed by the gypsy. Not that Emily ever believed the woman’s claims. No gypsy lived in a two room house at the edge of suburbia, with a rickety old Model A in the driveway. But the woman had known, known just by looking at Emily before even being introduced.
“Poor cursed thing,” the gypsy had crooned. “Tis an ill spirit that hangs over you and yours. I can help you. A good cleansing should do the trick.”
The product of a strong middle-class upbringing, Emily was not to be taken in by charlatans or crooks. She’d seen enough of them during the war, trying to take advantage of her mother while father fought somewhere in the South Pacific. So Emily walked on by, pretending she hadn’t even heard. But the gypsy had known, and was wise enough not to chase Emily down. She waited in her little house at the bottom of the hill, knowing that Emily would come to her. And after a long time Emily had done just that, hat in hand, with all the shame and guilt of someone who didn’t want to believe but had no choice.
The gypsy’s smile was gentle and tender, her eyes shadowed by sadness. “Come, little one. Learn the cleansing. Then wash your hands of this ill spirit.”
Emily waited until Jolly left the house to find work. She pulled out her favorite pair of silk gloves, handed down from grandmother to mother. Into the left glove she poured a generous mixture of salt, lavender, thyme, rosemary, and sage. She cut off the sleeve of the right, slicing it open and placing a piece of jet in the center. After pulling on the glove, she picked up the silk remnant with piece of jet and carried them into her bedroom. The remnant and rock she placed upon Jolly’s dresser, then opened his sock drawer.
She shuddered, a frisson of fear working its way up her spine. The gypsy had been insistent. Either Emily or Jolly needed to do this deed, and Jolly would never give up his precious treasure, no matter how his wife hated it. Taking a deep breath to brace herself, she moved sock after sock from one side of the drawer to the other, taking care to lift them and not to toss the ill luck that had surely seeped into them across the room. The morning sunlight shimmered through the bedroom, glinting off the round metal near the back of the drawer. Biting her lower lip, Emily reached out with her gloved hand and plucked the 1913 Buffalo nickel out of the drawer and dropped it next to the jet. Quick as she could, without making skin-to-metal contact, she wrapped the remnant into a makeshift back and knotted it shut. Then carried it back to the kitchen, only touching the bag with her right hand
She didn’t have to do this, she could still turn back, but that would leave her with nothing.
