Gossamer

Part 50: Until Next Time

How to keep her friends in the dark without raising too many questions, or putting them in real danger? If the gangsters returned and started bullying people for information, there needed to be a safe answer her friends could blurt out. Safe for them, safe for her.

Emily puzzled over the dilemma for another day and a half, then came up with a doozy. "An old school chum fell and broke her hip," she told all her friends. "I'm going to care for her a few months while she recovers. Where? Oh, in Chicago. Just a short bus ride from O'Hare Airport."

She suppressed a laugh each time she told the lie. The Seattle gangsters had recruited ruffians from the mobs in the Windy City. Let them thunder back to their old breeding grounds and search in vain for her there.

"Don't worry," Emily said when Olivia and Margret protested. "My friend's grandson is a bouncer, and he'll be my bodyguard. So it doesn't matter if the mobsters find out. I'll be fine!"

Only Officer Edwards knew the truth. Emily gave him her apartment address, and the phone number at the Renton library. The Skowalko police would keep an eye out for big city thugs roaming the town or lurking near her house.

Dora's nephew would mow the lawn as needed. He was only a junior in high school but already on the varsity football team, with the build of a college quarterback. Gangsters wouldn't intimidate him.

And Margret would be watching from across the street, ready to call the police for any suspicious activity – whether a hulking thug or Emily's mooching great-niece Clarissa.

On her last evening at home, Emily checked out the old chicken coop out back. Two stray cats kept her company as she swept out cobwebs, shook out tattered blankets, and made sure the entrance was still clear. "Feel free to continue sheltering here," she told them. "Come rain, come storm, you're always welcome. And I will come back."

House tidied, throw cloths draped over furniture, bags packed and ready by the door, Emily found she still had an hour of daylight left. She settled on the rocking chair on her front porch, one companionable cat in her lap and another on the railing. Neighborhood children raced by on their bikes, their auras trailing like banners behind them. "Hi, Missus Katz!" one called.

"Hey kids!" she yelled back. "Enjoyed your unexpected school break last week?"

"Earthquakes are cool!" came the delighted reply.

Emily rocked to a song of creaking floorboards and purring felines. She gazed around her yard, strung with the gossamer strands birds and cats left in their wakes, and her own footprints from tending the roses.

These softly glowing tendrils marked the passage of breathing creatures, weaving like ribbons of smoke, not at all like the upward-stabbing flares of ley lines.

She hadn't seen one such flare since the great earthquake. "Like static electricity?" she wondered aloud, fingers stroking the cat's pelt. "Did the quake discharge it all?"

Her fingertips tingled from furry static. "Ah, there's never an end to it," she told the cat. "More to come, eventually. Mother Earth merely rests for now. Like you and me, yes?"

The cat purred on.

Emily nodded. "Until the next time she wakes."

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prompt: dilemma

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I'm packaging up Gossamer into a paperback book to give as gifts to a few people who like the flash fiction format.  Here is my Author's Note at the end of the book:

I spent half my life, it seems, researching, drafting, and writing six historical-fantasy novels set in Norway and England, faraway lands of my ancestors.

What would it be like, I wondered, to write about the landscape and times I know at first hand?

So with no serious goal in mind I began spinning the tale of an out-of-the-ordinary fantasy heroine – an old retired librarian who has one unusual knack. Each short chapter was fueled by a weekly writing challenge among a wacky group of writer friends online.

Gossamer plays out in a small fictional town in the forested foothills of Mount Rainier. I spent all my life with that majestic volcano looming somewhere on the horizon, though often hidden by hills, towering evergreens, or lowering clouds. "Magic Mountain," in the northwest corner of the United States, sits on the Ring of Fire that encircles the Pacific Ocean. This Ring of dynamic tectonic activity gives birth to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes large and small. I remember well the relatively big one of 1965.

I moved to another state halfway through the writing of Gossamer. How I miss Mount Rainier and the cool misty jungles of the Pacific Northwest!