Kirsten's Fiction Notebook

  6. Sam thinks about his choices. A gap in the hotel curtains let in a beam of light, one that landed on Pill’s eyes but didn’t wake her. She was out cold, her blanket wrapped around her head and swirled at the neck. Thank God I had remembered the blanket. She would not go to sleep last night. She kept jumping between beds, her face getting redder, and nothing could settle her, even the Cartoon Network. She couldn’t stop chattering and moving. After midnight I forced her to lie down and I sat next to her on top of the covers so she was trapped, but she kept rambling about the dog in the accident. The cage was twisted and bent and had somehow pierced the dog’s leg, and after she had pulled the cage prongs out, there were these holes in the dog’s leg that started bleeding. She wanted to put bandaids on them, but the dog escaped before she could do that, and now she couldn’t stop worrying about it, the dog running off with those bleeding holes in her leg.  “They would get plugge...

4. The Hammer’s Final Throw-Down The cage was a good idea, Lyle decided. Soph came out of the groomer’s doused in some dog-ass perfume. But with the cage, she was way in the back and he barely knew she was there. He could turn up the music and fly along the Eisenhower in his Escalade, with the traffic moving better than usual today. He was pushing sixty, threading back and forth through the lanes, gunning it and coasting, never tapping the brake. A beat-up trailer full of mowers and rakes loomed ahead, puttering along in the middle of the expressway. He veered to the inside lane just as a red Mercedes was pulling into the outside lane. For a moment they were parallel, splitting around the truck, and when he was past it he glanced over. There she was, zooming ahead and looking at him through the open window, smiling, hair blowing across her mouth. And suddenly he wasn’t seeing her but his own mom, long gone. Forty years ago, and she was next to him in the Scrambler at Peony Park. She wa...

  Chapter 2 Recap: Lyle the Hammer, a former wrestler-turned talk-show-host, has a rough morning when he discovers a slightly less than ravishing intern working in his studio. He and his wife Yukiko are Sam’s biological parents, and Frankie is their surrogate, who fled the scene before Sam was born. Yukiko has been led to believe (by Lyle) that their child died as an infant. 3. Sam and The Weed talk plans I had just gotten back from my paper route, and there was Pill, drifting into the kitchen half-awake. She went to the fridge, opened it, gazed in. “It’s too early,” I said. “Go back to bed.”  She sat on the floor in the glow of the fridge, and she yawned so hard she lost her balance, tipping to the side. I scooped her up and plunked her on the couch and covered her with a blanket, and she fell back asleep, which was good. Things could get hairy when Pill woke too early. She got an impressive number of bad ideas, and she started doing things that were bound to set off a pre-co...