kaleidotrope

I spent most of last night dog-sitting, while my parents were out, and working, as I had been all day, on the brand-new issue of Kaleidotrope, which is out for summer. I hope you’ll take a look at it and let me know what you think. There are ten stories, three poems, a comic, and some silly horoscopes. (Although no more silly than quote-unquote real horoscopes, which I swear I read only for the inspiration needed to mock them.) I hope you’ll take a look and let me — and the authors, and others — what you think.

Today, it was mostly just the crossword puzzle and writing. I provided the free-writing prompt this week, from something I actually saw during my commute home the other night. A woman at Penn Station, who I assume had just disembarked from the train on the opposite platform, just arriving in the city, was pushing a cart, on the top of which sat a white rabbit inside a cage. I probably could have written a dozen stories from that. Here’s what I did write:

She didn’t want to keep the magician waiting, but already the train had been twenty minutes late, stuck for all that extra time just outside the tunnels leading into the city. She’d stared at her cell phone all that time and watched it buzz and blink with messages she did her best to ignore. Mortini had called six, no, seven times — and he’d probably called the agency at least once or twice, too. God, what would Frankie say when she finally got back to the office? She’d have to tell Mortini she’d been in the tunnels already, her phone out of service, and hope he didn’t catch her in the lie. Bad enough to be running late without also intentionally brushing the client off with voicemail. That, as Frankie would undoubtedly tell her, was not good customer service.

She’d only been with the agency a few weeks, but it was a good job, good benefits after she’d been there three months, and she didn’t want to lose it, not now. She couldn’t go back to her old life. Sure, the clients could be a little weird, eccentric and impatient, and Frankie’s perfectionism could sometimes come across as second-guessing; he was friendly enough with her, had been since her first interview, but she’d seen him hang other field agents out to dry over a job gone even just slightly wrong. Frankie was office manager, after all, and the customer was always right.

Even if that customer was a cranky old stage magician who had to have one particular white rabbit for his act. Didn’t she at least deserve a little credit for finding that rabbit in the first place? It hadn’t been easy. Catching the 6:05 train at all had been something like a minor miracle, and twenty minutes was nothing compared to how late she could have been.

Time travel was dangerous stuff.

She didn’t understand the science — Frankie and the agency didn’t pay her enough for that — but she knew she had a natural aptitude for it, could navigate where others would be instantly lost. The agency didn’t lose many field agents, but that was only because they chose their agents so wisely, because the interview process was so difficult, exacting. It had to be. Even a quick trip back to 1937 to kidnap a young boy’s pet rabbit — not really kidnapping, she reminded herself, since technically Mortini WAS that boy, now ridiculously old, disgustingly wealthy — was a recipe for disaster in the wrong hands.

Not entirely sure what’s going on here — the goal is to write, not edit, but I think it could be the start of something.

Today I did the crossword puzzle and wrote this:

They hung old Davy Capp, the Butcher of Biloxi, from the top of the hill that overlooks the town. The man was near on eighty, and put up no kind of fight, which I think just made it worse when they finally slung the rope around his neck. He’d lived almost half those years right here in Ambrose, a retired schoolteacher from somewhere back east — maybe Pittsburgh or Cleveland — or so everyone in town had thought. We didn’t ask questions — it just isn’t our way — and Capp offered little by way of biography. He was just an old man looking to live out the last of his years on a small parcel of land he said his sister had bought back before the start of the war. He kept to himself, but, for the most part, I think, he was well liked. Turns out, he actually stole that land from one of the poor souls he carved up down in south Texas, along with his name, and lord knows what else. I wouldn’t be all surprised if the man never even had a sister.

When we first saw the warrant, I was with Sherrif Ballard, taking his measurements for a new suit. He’d been putting me off for weeks, avoiding my shop, but the wedding was in less than a month and the groom was going to have to be dressed, like it or not. It was an old warrant, long expired, yellowed at the edges, and with a poor sketch of what Capp might have looked like when he was younger. I don’t think either of us would have paid it any mind if Jimmy Milton, one of the sherrif’s younger deputies, hadn’t pulled it from that morning’s mail and said, with a laugh, “Hey, Abner, don’t this sort of look like old man Capp to you?”

I don’t know that we ever did learn who sent Abner Ballard that old warrant.

I also sent out 70 rejection letters for Kaleidotrope. You know, for the whole crushing-writerly-dreams part of the weekend.

Happy Father’s Day!