You know inspiration, right? It’s that thing you wait for patiently, hour after hour, hoping it’ll sit next to you and whisper sweet nothings and turn that blank screen into a bestseller. In the meantime, your keyboard grows cobwebs Shelob would be proud of.
Literally, inspiration means something that’s “breathed into” you, presumably from the lungs of a great and benevolent deity. No doubt, one who can’t wait to read your next book. And where are deities? Way up high. Mount Olympos. Asgard. Heaven. Something along those lines.
So, like lightning, inspiration strikes from above. Except…lightning doesn’t strike from above. At least, not the part that we can see. The whole lightning process starts when a negative charge builds up in a cloud. After a while, that charge descends from the cloud to the ground. But the visible part of a lightning bolt is the stream that goes from the ground, which is positively charged, back up to the cloud.
We can learn a lot from lightning.
If we sit and wait for inspiration to strike, we may be waiting a long time. Forever, maybe. Which is great, because that gives us an excuse. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to write. definitely not. We were just waiting for inspiration to hit.
The bitter truth is that you have to write without inspiration. Like lightning, you’ve got to start at ground-level and build something that’ll make the heavens sit up and take notice. Or maybe just get the attention of your readers.
I’ve written more than seventy books. You’d think it would be no problem for me to sit down and write. But I don’t always feel like writing. Sometimes I feel like taking a nap. Or kayaking. Or watch that TV show everybody’s clamoring about.
Still, I write.
Right now, I’m writing Lost Days, a Renaissance fantasy for reluctant readers that’s currently in the middle of a Kickstarter funding campaign. Sometimes I love writing it, and I can’t wait to sit down at my computer. Other times not so much.
I’m human, you know?
But the biggest difference between me and a lot of people who want to write–or want to be writers–is that they give in to the temptation to lead normal lives and back-burner that novel they were working on. And I don’t. They may have more talent than I do. A lot more maybe, who knows? Yet I’m the one with seventy-plus books under his belt.
So if you want to be a writer, I’m begging you–don’t wait for lightning to strike. Build it from the ground up. It’s harder that way, sure, but some day your readers will thank you for it.
Working in a boutique galaxy design firm in Eternity — the realm of Existence responsible for creating all the celestial bodies in the Universe — of course I had NO idea that I’d ever end up banished to Earth. My shop designed that very planet!
Yeah. I get the irony.
And I DEFINITELY did not anticipate being reconstituted so that I would be a dog. A canine.
Woof-woof.
But I suppose there’s not a whole lot I can do about that now.
Emma’s taking the whole transition a lot harder than I am. But she’s always been the really ambitious one. Which isn’t to say I don’t have any goals. It’s just that, when I’m honest with myself, I’d rather follow than lead. Guess that’s why I ended up as a dog.
Again, I get the irony.
Still … all things considered, Earth’s not so bad.
It’s not so great, let’s not get carried away, but it could have been a lot worse. The Minder of the Universe — that’s the guy who oversees the, well, the Universe (his title kinda says it all) — could have dumped me in the Woglo System. That’s pretty much a bog that floats in space, and every formation in it smells like an ardvaark’s armpit on a REALLY hot day.
So … there’s that.
Anyway, we were living out of a beat-up Winnebago in Yuma, Arizona, until Emma had the idea to open an Internet Café with a galaxy theme. Makes sense. Things have been going pretty well, all things considered, and now, thanks to an idea I had, inspired by one of my hobbies — running a marijuana dispensary — we’ll be expanding to Phoenix and then San Francisco.
Now THAT I’m excited about.
Only thing is…. my memory is a bit hazy. Sometimes I have total recall from when I was a dude. A man, that is. So I still think like someone who walks around on two legs. And sometimes my brain is pure canine. But most of the time it’s a mix, which makes things really confusing, thinking like a man, but trapped in a dog’s body. And then the canine in me takes over, and I’m totally schizoid.
Anyway … I’ve got to chew on my back for a while and then go for my afternoon walk. But I’ll fill you in later on what else has been going on. We’re interviewing some cute girls to work the counter. Doesn’t matter if they get the job or not. I get scratches on my belly regardless.
My great-grandmother Becky was born sometime around 1880, in what was then known as the Pale of Settlement, a chunk of Tsarist Russia where Jews were allowed permanent residency but beyond which they weren’t allow to live. The boundaries of the Pale changed between its establishment in 1791 and its abolishment in 1917, but life in the Jewish settlements (called shtetls, or “little towns”) was about as hard as it got and poverty was the accepted reality. Think Fiddler on the Roof…but minus the Hollywood glamour, singing, and dancing. Becky left the hardscrabble life of the Pale circa 1895 and, as family lore goes, traveled at the age of 16 on her own across country and across an ocean to settle in New York, working at first as a housekeeper for the family of her older brother who had preceded her to America. She would shortly thereafter marry my great-grandfather, have children (including my grandfather, Alfred), become widowed, and raise her kids, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren until her death in 1980 at the (we think) age of 101.
I was born in 1955, when Bubbe (Yiddish for “grandmother”) was 75 years old. This little old (but active until nearly the end) lady was a presence in my life from the very start, one of a slew of strong, amazing women I was surrounded by while growing up. While I loved and appreciated them all (and miss them more and more the older I get), I suppose I took her for granted, the way all kids do their elders. She was Bubbe. Bubbe was always there. Bubbe would always be there. Until, of course, she wasn’t. After her death, and I can’t recall exactly when, I came to a realization about this woman. It was nothing profound or terribly original, just a fact of her life that I had never stopped to think about while she was alive. What it was was this: Becky had been born in a time before automobiles, before airplanes, before even electrification; she lived to see not only the Wright Brothers get off the ground but Neil Armstrong walking on the moon! Talk about paradigm shifts! That century of her lifespan was the most intensely progressive and inventive of any period in the history of the world up until then. What she thought about all that she had seen and experienced we’ll never know. Nobody ever thought to sit down with her and say, “Bubbe, tell me your stories.” She had spent her much of that time just trying to survive, nurturing the children who survived, mourning those she lost in infancy. Life may not have been as hard in American as it had been in the shtetl, but it was never easy.
What would Bubbe make of today’s world? I can’t even imagine. I’m not sure I even how what I make of it, considering the paradigm shift that’s occurred in my 59 year-long lifespan. When I was born, TV was in black and white and sets were stuffed with vacuum tubes (and weighed about a ton), computers with 1/100,000th the processing power of a calculator I can today buy in a dollar store filled entire rooms, a telephone was something made of solid plastic, had a rotary dial, and was forever tethered to the wall by a cord, and if you wanted to find facts about something, you had to consult a lot of books. Now, a hundred bucks buys me a device that fits in my pocket, goes anywhere I go, and provides all of the above services at the touch of a button.
There’s been equally seismic changes in my field, also linked to the miracle of modern electronics. Publishing, once a purely mechanical (strictly from the technological point of view, of course) operation, has in the course of little more than a decade morphed into an electronic process. Once a manuscript had to be typed onto paper and transferred to cold type and printed by pressing more paper against that type after it had been coated in ink. Now, a book can go from concept to finished product without anyone ever having to handle a physical thing, at least until someone loads the rolls of paper onto the press…unless we’re talking about eBooks, in which case there is never a physical object other than the electronic device on which it’s being viewed. Manuscripts are electronic. Editing is done on the screen. Books are designed, laid out, and prepared for press (or e-distribution) on a computer. The computer has even radically changed the concept of “publisher.” It used to be that the complexity and expense of preparing, printing, storing, and shipping physical books required a corporate entity to back it.
Today, publishing an eBook requires zero up front costs; creating a physical book can be done for next to nothing thanks to print on demand technology; a book doesn’t have to be printed until it’s been ordered. No vast quantities of paper to pay for upfront, no storage costs, no charges for shipping boxes of printed matter (which may or may not sell once it reaches its destination).
It’s the same for comic books. Used to be a writer would type out a script on paper, mail or hand deliver it to an editor, who would do his voodoo, than ship it out to the pencil artist to draw on oversized sheets of Strathmore drawing board, which would then be shipped back to the editor, who would turn it over to the letterer to put in the balloons, captions, and sound effects, then returned to the editor and sent off to the inker who finished the art in India ink, then back to the editor again for proofreading before being handed off to the production department to make corrections, after which it was Xeroxed down to print size and given to the colorist to be hand-painted with transparent dyes (produced by a company called Dr. Ph Martin), before being sent out for a pre-press process known as color separations which would in turn be used to create the physical printing plates that went on the presses that churned out the finished comic books. Today, I do entire comic book projects without ever having to touch a piece of paper. Sure, artists still draw by hand on paper (well, most…okay, lots…or, you know…some), but after that it gets scanned into the computer and every step after that until printing can be done electronically. Editing, inking, proofing, lettering, coloring, separations…all on screen.
And, like eBooks, they don’t have to be printed to be seen. Just click the “buy” button on the program of your choice and read your favorite funnies on your phone, tablet, or PC. Concurrent with the paradigm shift wrought by technology is another, more ominous change that’s been creeping through publishing of books and comics (and films as well) for several years now. That’s the idea that it’s better to publish (or produce) one major, blowout, mega-hit book (or comic or movie) than a dozen smaller projects. I recognize the economic sense in this; paying to produce and advertise a single book that sells a million copies is cheaper than the cost of 12 separate titles that sell 80,000 copies each. But from an aesthetic point of view, it means that there are 11 good books that those 80,000 potential readers will never get a chance to see. It narrows the field and the chances of writers who aren’t J.K. Rowling or John Grisham of getting published.
As it was in Bubbe’s world, these changes are massive and, even for someone like me who grew up on Star Trek and science fiction in the 1960s, unimaginable just a few years ago. Was Bubbe better off with modern technology over the primitive conditions and crushing poverty into which she was born? Absolutely. Did much of it really have an impact on her day-to-day life? Electricity and running water aside, probably not, but it was there nonetheless, the advantages available when needed.
Are we better off with computers and print on demand books than we were back in the analog days? Well…yes. And no.
The ease of publishing books has made it so anyone can do it and, from what I can tell by the proliferation of eBooks out there, everyone does. It’s democratized publishing, true, but that’s just made it more difficult for professional writers like we here at Crazy 8 Press to break through the clutter and noise so our readers know we’re here. But we’re all, to a writer, storytellers and we’ll continue telling our stories and trust (hope?) that, thanks to all this newfangled tech, we will be found by readers. But in the numbers we would be found if we were published by Penguin Books or Random House or Simon and Schuster? It happens, sure…but not often.
As I’ve done with books, I’m also doing now with comic books. The major comic publishers have become stunt-driven crossover event-crazy mishmashes of endless, overlapping “epics” that are, to say the least, not to my taste. Okay, as the writer of the recent “Death of Archie” storyline I’m not entirely without sin in this area (although I hope I was able to give readers the added value of a good, emotionally true story with their slice of stunt), but it was the exception to my current comics writing, not the rule.
The rule, these days, is the work I’m doing at a small start-up called Charlton Neo, where a small group of Facebook friends came together to revive the beloved, 30-year defunct Charlton name with new stories and art, created not for the money (whew, talk about an understatement!) but for the pure love of the material. What started as a fun little small print run comic book is slowly evolving into an entire line, featuring new stories by old timers like me and a slate of new talent that is, frankly, knocking my socks off with what they’re doing. I’ve written about 130 pages of new material (and counting!) for the Charlton Neo books in progress, from anthology titles in genres from Western to horror to funny animals, as well as two issues of Paul Kupperberg’s Secret Romances, a romance anthology that proves “happily ever after” isn’t what it used to be.
As with Crazy 8, I can’t believe the array of talent I get to work with at Charlton Neo (do please check us out at CharltonNeo.blogspot.com; you’ll be impressed, too). Crazy 8 and Neo are both, without question, labors of love…possible, paradoxically only because of the paradigm shift in publishing that has, in other ways, affected many of us in negative ways. Would I ever want to go back to the old ways? In some regards, maybe…except that would also mean losing the breathless excitement and wonder of being part of two such amazing, dynamic creative communities. And while there are struggles even in that, just as I’m sure Bubbe would never have wanted to return to the shtetl despite the hardships of emigrant life in Brownsville, Brooklyn, I’m happy to take up residence in this New World in which I now find myself.
So, paradigms, keep shifting. We’ll adapt. If a 4-foot-something tall little Jewish woman who came to the U.S. from the middle of nowhere without knowing the language or customs could do it, I suppose I can too.
Almost three years ago, as Crazy 8’s second (one could even say “sophomoric”) release, we put out a zany little book about a duck-headed man and his bizarre, disjointed, hilarious quest to save the universe. That book, of course, was No Small Bills, which became a NOOK bestseller right out of the gate. Apparently people like to read funny stuff–who knew?
A year later, our avian-altered friend was back for more wacky hijinks in a second novel, Too Small for Tall.
Now, two years later, it’s time to saddle up and ride out yet again, because DuckBob Spinowitz is coming back! The third DuckBob novel, Three Small Coinkydinks, will be out later this month—but you can ooh and aah over the cover starting now!
There, isn’t it pretty?
Not enough for you? How about a small sample to whet your appetite? Read, enjoy, gaze longingly at the cover some more, and watch for the book’s debut coming soon!
* * *
Meanwhile, I’m outside my old office. Should I go in? Should I tell my old boss, Phil, that I want my old job back? Should I grovel? Should I just stroll in like I own the place, say, “Yo, Phil, how’s it hanging? I was busy saving the universe and all but that gig got old so I figured I’d swing on back, you don’t mind, do you? And hey, can you grab me an espresso? I’ll be at my desk,” and see how long it takes anyone to wonder what I’m doing back or to point out that I may not actually work there again? I’m pretty sure I saw this movie years ago and it worked pretty well, especially for Teen Wolf and Supergirl.
Thing is—thing is, now that I stop and think about it, I hated my old job. Really hated it. All I did all day was scroll through screens on my computer, click a bunch of boxes on and other ones off, submit the form, and then repeat the process. It really didn’t seem to make much difference which boxes I checked, either. I know because I got bored after a while and started doing patterns, just like I used to do on the old standardized tests back in school. Which might explain why I almost got held back a grade twice but the NSA wanted to recruit me right out of middle school. So I used to check boxes in squares and rectangles, triangles and rhombuses, fleur-de-lis and stars, spirals and ankhs and infinities and subway maps. Nobody ever complained, at least to me, but I’m pretty sure we destabilized a small third-world company and brought a busload of tourist gamblers back to life. That’s bound to balance out whatever else happened, right?
Even if it does, though, can I really stand to go back to that? I mean, I saved the universe, man! I fought off an alien invasion! I stopped a galactic menace with nothing but taffeta and taffy! I fried a killer shrimp! After all that, how’m I gonna be able to survive working in that tiny little cube again, hunched over that tiny little screen, clicking buttons?
Wow, I had no idea just how much my old life sucked. Good thing I haven’t bumped into anybody I know yet—that’s the thing about being this distinctive, it’s not like my old friends and former co-workers could walk past and think, “Huh, weird, another guy who was modified by aliens and given the head of a duck just like DuckBob, what’re the odds?”
Which is, of course, right when a hand lands on my shoulder. A big, meaty hand, caught up in the cuff of a dark suit. And there’s the rest of the suit behind it, along with a white shirt, a dark tie, a dark hat—
—and a pair of dark sunglasses.
“Mr. Spinowitz?” It’s a surprisingly high voice for such a big guy, and it quavers a bit at the end. “I need you to come with me.”
Certainly you’ve heard it mentioned. The Chicago Way. They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.
There’s been a lot of talk post-Ferguson about the militarization of police forces in America. A number of reasons have been bandied around: surplus weapons post-Iraq and Afghanistan being one of the most cited. But I think there’s a much simpler reason.
It’s you.
Maybe not you, specifically– or maybe it IS you. Do you own a gun?
How about your neighbor? Does he own one? Are you sure? Maybe he owns more than one?
The odds are that there’s one guy in your town that owns a ridiculous number of guns.
Here’s the important part: It doesn’t matter if that he’s “a good guy” or “a bad guy”. The police have to be ready for that arsenal to be pointed at them. And so they get paranoid. And they get more weaponry, just to keep up. This is simple tactics from Von Clausewitz: you must be prepared for what your enemy can do, not what you think he will do.
The problem is… the guy down the street is thinking the same thing about the police. He’s worried about the day the po-po are going to come down on him like a ton of bricks. And he’s preparing. He and his friends have end-of-times plans to kill government agents. And really, can you blame them? The police are getting more and more out of control.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
If you lived through the 80s, you remember this feeling. This is the feeling you got from being in the middle of an arms race. Your side had weapons, but so did the other side, so you had to get more. There was a lot of fear of nuclear weapons, but around the mid 80s the nature of that fear changed. We didn’t fear that the weapons would be launched at us in anger, but that they’d be launched by accident. There were pop songs about it.
We have created, yet again, our own balance of terror*.
And it gets demented on both sides. And the problem with dealing with demented people is that it’s very tough to take things that are central to their identity away from them, especially when they feel threatened, and yet they’re the least likely to be able to handle them. (Did you know elderly people are the most likely to own a firearm in America? And are also the most likely to suffer from dementia?)
And yet, it’s all perfectly logical. The police are militarizing, so some of us feel we have to stock up to protect ourselves. And because we stock up, the police have to stock up to protect them and us. And the crazy part is that we’re both sides of the equation. Or at least, we should be.
And we know for certain that some lucky day, someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.
So, who’s going to back down? And is there a way we can get both sides to back down together? Who would you trust to broker the arms talks?
* Yes, we all have to make Star Trek references on this site. It was either this or “A Taste Of Armageddon”, which is also disturbingly on point.
The stars were twinkling in the barren night sky as Gabriella Trotter leisurely drove down Route 90. Her eastward route took her farther and farther away from Seattle. It had been a hasty decision and one she didn’t allow herself to contemplate. Instead, she listened to pop anthems from her youth on the satellite radio, finishing the now-cold and greasy fries that remained in the white paper Sonic bag. Thankfully, the local deities allowed burgers, although the mandate was that they were now all-buffalo—more authentic, it had been declared.
She had lost her job at the newspaper thanks to the gods’ intervention, and she was more than a little tired of being Kunulla’s plaything. Gabbi had no idea what the god wanted with her but he somehow found her lack of faith in any deity appealing or challenging or something. He’d already exposed the unseemly side of the celebrities she’d covered, altering her coverage from fawning to jaundiced. While it might have made her a sharper writer, it had also seemed to piss someone off and now here she was, without income.
Pamela had asked about her prospects and Gabbi had told her there was money in the bank, so when she’d paused for a takeout dinner she’d checked her balance. Her rainy day fund was eighty-five percent funded, so she could live off those resources for a few months before really needing to worry, but she’d also assured her fellow Musketeers she could freelance, and that grew more and more appealing as Seattle receded behind her.
It was late and she would need to stop somewhere for the evening before continuing her sojourn. Summit was up ahead, according to the road signs, so she hoped they had a cheap motel. Already she was mentally preparing a To Do list for the next morning which included notifying her parents and sibling of this decision—then, when the shock wore off, asking them (although it might involve begging) to pack up her belongings. When they were done, she would terminate her lease and cancel all the utilities. Or maybe she’d sublet it, let Rebecca use it for clandestine affairs. Plenty to think about.
She let herself yawn long and loud since there was no one to be bothered. It also reminded her she needed to end her first leg of the journey to nowhere soon.
But all thoughts of comfy beds and free shampoo were erased when she saw the blond man waving his arms frantically along the side of the road. His car was off to the side, its emergency flashers racing up and down one side of the vehicle. As tempted as she was to keep going, there was literally no one else on this desolate stretch of highway and she couldn’t live with herself if she abandoned someone who was truly in need. Maybe he just wanted gas money or a tow truck.
She slowed down without jamming on her brakes and then glided directly behind his distinctly older and darker car. He was maybe thirty, thin, and nervous looking as his arms continued to flap despite her coming to a stop.
“You’re not a doctor, are you?” he asked in a high voice.
“Sorry,” she said from her lowered window, “a writer. What’s wrong?”
“My wife…the baby is coming…like NOW!”
Oh shit. Now she couldn’t leave him alone to his misery. There was not only a woman involved but a new life.
“Where’s the nearest hospital?” she asked, unbuckling her belt and getting out.
“Summit, but we don’t have time,” he said, sounding on the verge of panic.
Gabbi strode past him and decided to look for herself. Sure enough, in the passenger bucket seat was a sweaty female form with a very distinctive bulge between breasts and knees. She was gritting her teeth and clearly enduring a contraction. Gabbi knew as much as the next person about the process but had never trained in emergency births on the side of highways and wasn’t sure what she could do.
“How far apart are the contractions?” Gabbi asked as she entered the car, noting the back seat was filled with luggage, a huge bag of disposable diapers, and assorted detritus.
“Three, four minutes apart,” the woman gasped. “It’s coming.”
“I’ve heard. I’m Gabbi.”
“Estella.”
“How can I help? Do you need a ride to the hospital?”
“Yes, but the baby will be here first.”
Crap. “What’s wrong with your car?”
“The battery shorted out,” she said. “Willie can’t get it jumpstarted with the emergency kit.”
“Are you sure we don’t have time to move you to my car? I can be a very fast driver,” Gabbi assured her.
“I was already in labor before we left home, but waited too long and the baby’s really impatient to get out here,” Estella said. Gabbi could see the other woman was younger and prettier, with long brown hair that was currently stringy from sweat but would look terrific when dry and brushed. She was momentarily jealous, then refocused.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said with a smile.
Estella returned it and nodded. “Me either.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Yes. Whatever the gods decree.”
Okay, she was a believer and these days the gods wanted to return some mystery to the world so more and more pantheons had ordered that midwives and doctors keep the gender a secret.
Estella wailed as a fresh contraction arrived and her left hand reached out and found Gabbi’s, squeezing it and causing her to yelp from the surprising strength behind it. She glanced to her left and saw Willie pacing back and forth.
As the contraction passed, Gabbi estimated barely two minutes had elapsed since she arrived. That meant things were speeding up. There was little doubt that she was about to help deliver a baby into this world.
“What’s with Willie? Why isn’t he here holding your hand?”
Estella shook her head. “He’s a wonderful man, and will make a terrific husband, but he panics easily and can’t stay focused.”
Just great. Gabbi shot her a look, asking permission to begin touching Estella in uncomfortably intimate ways. The woman looked exhausted already and the hard part hadn’t arrived yet but she nodded. With some hesitancy, Gabbi reached out and placed a flat palm atop the swollen belly. There was definitely something moving in there but beyond that she had no idea what she was doing. Thankfully, Estella was in a skirt so there were no pants to fuss with. But it did mean looking at lady parts to see if the baby was crowning yet.
“Go ahead,” Estella said, and then gritted her teeth as a fresh wave of pain washed over her.
Regretting taking I-90, Gabbi reached under the skirt and worked to slide off the panties off the writhing figure. Sure enough, there was something moist and messy-looking peeking out from between her legs. This baby was on its way out and Gabbi needed to act.
“Willie!” she shouted above Estella’s own wail of pain. Within seconds, the distraught husband was at the door. “No one’s coming; it’s just us, so I need your help.”
He stared at her, wide-eyed. She decided it was time to finally sound like her mother, firm and commanding. “Get me blankets. Or something to wrap the baby in.”
That he understood and opened the rear door and began rummaging. Estella once more reached out to grasp her hand.
“Is there something with a blade in your emergency kit?”
“Yeah,” he finally replied.
“Good. We’ll need that to cut the cord. It’s going to be messy; I don’t suppose you have towels around here?”
“No.”
“Then you better plan on hosing this out and detailing it before she gets home from the hospital,” Gabbi said, receiving the offered baby blankets. There were three, each a different pastel shade, and all about to be baptized in blood.
“The cliché says I should be sending you to boil water, but I don’t think that will work,” Gabbi said to Willie, who remained in the backseat, peering over to watch his wife give birth.
“Where were you that this happened?”
“Estella’s not due for two weeks, we thought we could have a final day trip to Seattle, you know, together.”
“Sounds nice,” she said, positioning one of the blankets under the other woman’s butt, keeping one over her shoulder for the baby itself.
“We visited the Temple of the Colville and Estella was bled by their resident shaman.” Willie said.
Inwardly, Gabbi grimaced at the mention of Indian deities. She was trying to get away from them, Kunula in particular. “Do you worship the Colville gods?”
He let out a sigh at the same time Estella wailed. Gabbi saw she was now obeying her body’s own instructions and was actively pushing the baby out.
“Okay, Estella, it’s time, I guess,” Gabbi said in her most reassuring voice. She winced at what the other woman was enduring, uncertain if she’d ever want to subject herself to this. It was some vague notion in the back of her mind, never consistent with wanting her own child or not.
“No,” Willie said, and at first Gabbi thought he was rejecting what was before his terrified eyes, but the voice sounded different.
“No?”
“I’m Scandinavian and Estella is such a mutt she has no real pantheon,” he said by way of explanation. Then, in a guilty voice, he added, “We were going to go to Europe after the baby was born.”
“Better start planning that itinerary because here it comes,” Gabbi said. The head had now come completely into view so she placed her hands underneath, cupping them as if she could catch it. The head was a gooey mess of white, red, and dark stuff and Gabbi wished she had paid better attention in health class.
There came shoulders, then arms, and as Estella’s grunts and groans were traded in for shrieks and screams the baby inexorably left the birth canal, entering a new, colder world. Gabbi kept her blanket-covered hands in position as the small human form emerged. The tiny mouth opened and she somehow heard that first breath of air.
A tiny piercing cry cut through Estella’s own war chant and suddenly silenced her. The baby was now completely out and Gabbi wrapped it as gently as she could in the blanket, patting and rubbing to get the icky placenta material off the newly pink skin. When she thought she had done the best she could, she noted the umbilical cord stretched back into the womb.
“Willie,” she commanded. “Get yourself over her with that blade—come cut your daughter’s cord.”
“A girl,” Estella said between gasps.
“A girl,” Gabbi confirmed with a broad smile.
Willie came out with a utility knife, which she hoped was clean enough, and she cocked her head toward it.
“Where should I cut it?” he asked.
“Unless there’s a dotted line somewhere, just guess,” she said.
He reached out with a shaky hand as the baby continued to cry in Gabbi’s trembling hands, and sliced through the cord, added fresh ick to the mess in the car. With the baby now free, Gabbi used the last clean blanket to swaddle the squirming, crying form. Once done, she handed the baby to the girl’s mother.
Estella held the baby, gazing in exhausted wonderment. Then, after several moments, she used her free hand to begin unbuttoning her blouse so she could nurse her daughter for the first time. While a wonderful moment, it was now one Gabbi could easily pass on witnessing. It was actually time for the family to bond so she eased herself from the car.
“Go to them, Willie. I’ll call 911 for help,” she said in a soft voice.
He took a step toward the dimly lit interior, then stopped and turned toward her. “I suck at this sort of stuff,” he said. “I lost it when she needed me. I felt like such a jerk for not being able to fix the battery and having no other car out here. We had just been to the temple so I prayed to the Colville, prayed for help, and then you showed up.”
That made Gabbi feel uncomfortable. ”I was already on the road when all this started, it’s not like I got a summons.”
“Maybe not, but I prayed and you arrived. Thank you.”
She nodded in tired bewilderment.
“You have to have faith in people,” he said and finally went to join his wife and child.
Gabbi called and made the report, assuring the concerned operator on the other end of the call that mother and child seemed fine for now. Her chore done and exceedingly tired, she took one last look at the new family and smile wearily. She got behind the wheel, now desiring a hot shower before a comfortable bed, and thought about Willie’s last words.
Kunula had challenged her lack of belief, which had resulted in her rejecting him and his fellow gods. She’d hit the road and suddenly came across this. Turning over the engine, Gabbi thought she’d start small then. She’d believe in the decency of her fellow man and see what happened next.
You know inspiration, right? It’s that thing you wait for patiently, hour after hour, hoping it’ll sit next to you and whisper sweet nothings and turn that blank screen into a bestseller. In the meantime, your keyboard grows cobwebs Shelob would be proud of.
