there be anything more full of story possibilities than a ninety-year-old woman throwing out a Hefty bag full of used condoms?” Blake laughed.
“Not used condoms,” Mason corrected him. “Condom wrappers.”
Chloe glanced at the silent Hannah for support. “Can we move on? What else have you got?”
“We don’t know yet,” Mason said. “Hannah, you think it’s good so far, don’t you?”
“So far there’s nothing!” That was Chloe.
“He wasn’t asking you!” said Blake.
They had ten minutes before they reached home to hammer it out. It wasn’t enough time. Blake pulled them off road, away from home and onto the train tracks that ran through the woods and divided their small part of the lake from the better, larger part. Arms out, backpacks on, they balanced on the rusty tracks and skipped on the ties.
Writing a story for money! What a thing. Acadia’s first prize was ten thousand dollars. Chloe knew the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction had been around longer and was certainly more prestigious, but it paid only a thousand dollars, and you had to write at least forty thousand words for it. No matter how bad one was at math, dividing forty thousand words into a thousand bucks was an awful return. “All work and no pay,” said Mason, and laughed for five minutes at his own joke.
But here—ten thousand dollars for a novella. Blake didn’t even know what a novella was until Chloe told him. To the brothers, a sum that large was the lottery. It was a new truck and the start of their own business. It was the rest of their lives. They acted as if they found it lying under a tree in a suitcase. All that was left to do was count the money.
And little naysay-y Chloe was not allowed to even mention that:
1 They had no story.
2 They were not writers.
3 There would be at least five hundred other applicants, who a. might have a story and b. were writers.
4 One of those applicants might be Hannah who most certainly had stories, a number of them.
5 A new truck was more than ten thousand dollars.
Chloe couldn’t help herself. She had to say something. If only she could learn to keep quiet, like Hannah, or Mason, things would be so much better in her life.
“Who are the junkyard boys?” she asked.
“We are. Blake. Mason. We’re ambling along, asking for no trouble, and suddenly—wham! Trouble comes.”
“Wham,” said Chloe.
“Blake’s right,” Mason said. “We’ve found some awful things.”
“Like what?”
“Dead rats.”
“Rats are good,” she said. “But then what? Someone not wanting dead rats in their house is hardly a story. It’s more like a truism.”
“We found some jewelry too once.”
“Jewelry is good. Then what?”
“Okay, maybe not jewelry, then. Something else.”
Chloe glanced at Hannah, walking on the side of the tracks, away from the three of them, barely listening. Blake jackhammered away at Chloe’s concrete skepticism. “They discover something awful. Something that changes everything. Mason, what can they find that is so monumental and terrible that it changes everything?”
“True love?” Chloe smiled.
“It’s not that kind of story, my dear Haiku,” Blake said with twinkling amusement. “This is a man’s story. No room in it for lurv, no matter how terrible and true. Right, cupcake?” Jumping off the rail, he jostled Hannah along the pebbles.
“Right,” she said.
Mason had new suggestions. “We found an old suitcase once. It was full of snakes. And once we found a live rabbit.”
“Yes,” Blake said. “He was delicious. But Chloe is right. We need a story, bro.” He smacked his forehead. “Got it. How about a human head in the trash?”
Chloe didn’t even blink this time. Almost as if she’d seen a human head in the trash before. “Nice,” she said. “And then?”
Blake shrugged. “Why do you care so much what happens next?” he asked.
She could tell he wasn’t taking it seriously. What the boys did for a living—that was work. Here, all they had to do was come up with a few words and place them in the sweet order that assured victory. Blake was convinced it was child’s play.
“You’re right, we’re all Philistines with our slavish devotion to plot,” Chloe said. “Be that as it may.”
“Yes. The writer drones on about what happens next and as soon as you the reader guess what’s coming, you either fall asleep or want to kill him.”
“So the trick is what? Never give the reader what she wants?”
Blake shook his head. “No. Give her what she didn’t even know she wanted.” He acted as if he knew what that was.
They turned for home. “They find a human head,” he went on, as he and Chloe ambled down the narrowing pine path leading home, Hannah and Mason behind them. A few hundred yards downhill, the dirt road tapered to one lane on which a truck or a car or people could pass—one at a time. “But not a skull.” Blake glanced back and widened his eyes at Hannah. “A head. That’s been recently separated from the body. It still has flesh on it. And they don’t know what to do. Do they investigate? Do they call the cops?”
“I think they should investigate,” Mason said, running up. “Investigations are fun.”
“There’s danger in it.”
“Danger is good,” Hannah said from behind. “Danger is story.”
No, Chloe wanted to correct her uncorrectable friend. Danger is danger. It’s not story.
Blake went on ruminating. “What if asking too many questions of the wrong people puts them in mortal danger?”
Chloe wondered if there was any other kind.
“Someone needs to shut them up. But who?”
“Obviously those who separated the head from the body.”
“But why would someone separate the head from the body?” Mason asked.
“I don’t know yet. But I really think we got us something here. Haiku, what do you think?”
“I say keep working on it.” Chloe used her most discouraging tone.
“Wait! I got it!” Blake exclaimed. “What if they find a suitcase? Yes, a mysterious suitcase! It’s blue. Oh my God, I got it.
