By Leslie Lindsay

Okay, so I’ve been a slacker when it comes to “Fiction Friday.” But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. It just means…well, that I’ve been focusing all my efforts on this little nagging thing called a manuscript. It’s pretty much consuming me. I think about at the gym, at Target, while browsing at the bookstore or library. No one else better take my title (it’s not that fabulous, anyway). Oh wait–here’s a great title…what’s this one about?! Oh man…Joyce Carol Oates, yeah…I’ll never be able to write as good as you. Ooh, I like that description: compelling suspense-driven fiction.

Look–a squirrel! Yes, being a writer means teasing out all of the wonderfully creative ideas and telling the voices [characters] to stop, slow down, or change tact from time to time. Like me. And maybe you. We all need to slow down and remember why we got ourselves into this ‘mess’ to begin with.

Here’s a little something from what I’m currently working on:

Jo Ellen

January 20^th 1989

“Doubt is a difficult entity. You can’t see it but you can feel it lurking under your skin, bubbling at the gut. It is worse than any kind of infestation. Sure, you can have rodents or termites, or a spider problem, ones you can call for help and a white cargo van will appear at your doorstep—the Orkin man or whomever—and poof—gone. But doubt, it creeps in quietly and tenaciously and through the tiniest of cracks, and once inside, it can never be fully extricated.

Mallory played the part of a sulky Freshman home from college well. She bit off comebacks and insults left and right, she barricaded herself in her room for hours, she refused church during Advent and stomped through the house as if she has better places to be. And then, on Christmas Day, after the gifts have been torn open, the Add-a-Bead necklace from Famous-Barr draped around her neck, and the last of the broccoli cheddar casserole consumed, she refused to speak to me. Still, she was sugary sweet to her sister and brother, and the boy next door. When I close my eyes, when I try to remember, there’s a piece of doubt that wears on my shoulder, slithering alongside my arm, and skittering into my very soul. I reach for a fresh pack of Carlton’s in the cabinet above the stove. I was going to give it up; a new year’s resolution.

Doubt and guilt. Me and Mallory.

My daughter was up to something. Or, perhaps it was just normal college angst. Maybe it’s that feeling of being a young woman who has been away feels displaced in her own home. Ironically, this is the way I feel about Tony, even now.

When we first moved to the Dutch Colonial on Bayberry, I walked the empty halls of the house on our final inspection with the Real Estate agent, Mallory’s pudgy fist wrapped in my slightly swollen fingers—I was due with Amy two months later—and Tony scampered along like a child, poking his head into the various bedrooms. The house was nice, sure—the best we could afford at the time. But still, I remember glancing a long, stringy web threaded around a ceiling fixture and feeling a tremor of fear. The Real Estate agent noticed this and tsked, stating the house was owned by the relocation company, the previous owners transferred to Ohio or Iowa or somewhere. “We’ll get an exterminator over here before y’all move in,” she smiled then, “My treat.”

I figured it would come out of her commission, not a real treat. Whatever. It didn’t matter, as long as I didn’t have to foot the bill. I remember patting my stomach then, blooming with baby and just wanting us all to be safe from any kind of pests.

Doubt and guilt, they are both cut from the same cloth. I take a drag from the cigarette, lighting up the room bathed in gray.”

[Thanks for reading! If you like it–wonderful. Please remember that is this an original work of fiction and not to be taken as your own. Comments always appreciated. House image retrieved from http://renewal-by-andersen-new-jersey.com/category/replacement-windows/ on 2.6.15]