Canasta this morning, grocery at noon, and my afternoon for writing…sounds good, don’t you think? It would have been if I hadn’t started playing a CD of American Native flute music. I may as well have been smoking peyote. My fingers were lead hammers that I had to will into action. My brain went empty except for dialog like “Run, Spot, run.” With the few brain cells I had left, I made a note that this is wonderful music for…meditation.
Once I had no more musical intrusion, and I threw a couple of chocolate chips in my mouth, I was ready to go.
My goal for today is to complete a scene that necessitates a good amount of dialogue. I read one author’s advice to not have speakers saying each others’ names all the time such as “Margaret, are you all right?” We don’t use names often when we talk to each other. When I read the dialog out loud, I realized the author was correct.
Of course, I have to figure out what the dialog will reveal. Margaret was in a car accident, and a friend is telling her about all the men who have been coming to see her in the hospital. Normally this would be exciting, except one of them is the father of her son, whom she gave up for adoption ten years ago. What I can’t decide is whether or not they get involved again. Charles, the back-in-the-picture dad, recently learned that Margaret had his child, and he’s been spying on her to see if he wants to get involved again. I know you haven’t read the whole story, but here’s your chance to influence a novel in the making. You can vote below. But first, here is the developing scene:
When I woke up, the room, the furniture, and the occupants came into focus bit by bit. My head ached, and when I raised my hand to feel the source of pain, I felt cotton batted gauze. The antiseptic clean of the sheets hit my nostrils before my eyes converged on a man holding my hand.
“Who are you?” Too weak to remove my hand from the stranger, I waited for his response in a way only a semi-conscious person would—without much interest or energy.
“Don’t you remember me?”
I willed myself to focus on this person who seemed so concerned about me. There was a familiarity about him I couldn’t quite place. He had faint, stale cigarette aroma about him, and the moment’s panic evaporated when I realized it wasn’t Pete.
“You scared me, when I saw you pull in front of the car.”
I’ve heard him before, but where? The mist lifted from my consciousness, and I remembered. I blinked to clear my vision. “Charles? Wh…what are you doing here?” Exhaustion made my eyelids heavy. The fog and the night descended on me again.
When I woke up in the morning, last night’s dream kept its talons in me. I bolted up in my bed…the sudden movement shot searing pain through my skull, almost overwhelming the images of Charles hovering over me with that look of complete control to which I willingly gave myself. I started to panic, my heart beating fast, the walls closing in, and my lungs tightening in my chest. I tried catching my breath, but the memory of Charles’s weight crushed my lungs.
“Oh shit,” I said out loud as I collapsed back on the pillow. Those were the only words I could think of to describe a new addition to my mess. Robert’s birth father was again a part of the gigantic and disordered puzzle of my life. As much as I tried to throw away pieces of my past, the puzzle had its own life…insisting on the completion of its destiny so I would be forced to see the whole picture. The curvy, pointy, multi-faceted sections returned to their proper places no matter how many times I broke them up and scattered them around the edges of my being. Shit.
When I woke once more, later in the morning, the room was empty. No hands holding my hands, no nurses fussing about my bed, and my head didn’t hurt as much. Just as I was beginning to relax, I remembered Charles’ presence at my bedside. After all these years, why did he suddenly show up? Why do I feel lucky that he did? And why is he not here now?
A knock on the door revealed Betty, coming in as my friend and not as my nurse.
“Woman, you lead an exciting life,” she said.
“Almost getting killed, you mean.” I started to roll my eyes but those little muscles complained too much. “Ouch.”
“No, I mean the men that appear in your life. The floor nurse told me there was a barrage of good looking men coming to see you this morning—all shooed away because you were sleeping.”
“Really! I wonder who they were. Did you see any of them?”
