Hello! I am posting this here as a sort of teaser for the fiction project I am currently working on. I am open to any feedback you may have on this first chapter sample.
Thank you!
For the Love of a Pirate
By
Laura Nelson
One
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Kelly
Hunter, 53, groaned and reached over to her nightstand to pick up her cell
phone and shut off the alarm. Dropping her head back on the pillow, she laid
the phone in its rose gold wallet next to herself and wondered again why she
had agreed to this blind date. Sunday mornings were meant for sleeping in and
taking your time getting out of bed.
Sighing,
she pulled the covers up higher around her neck and closed her eyes. A few more
minutes of sleep wasn’t going to affect anything. And she was reluctant to
leave the comfort of her cotton sheets, blue Velux blanket, and delicately
flowered bedcover.
On
either side of her, two cats, one grey and one black, both solid color longhairs,
shifted their positions, knowing the alarm going off meant she was going to be
getting out of bed momentarily.
She
had almost fallen back asleep when she gave in to the inevitable and pulled
back one corner of the blankets. At once both cats stood, yawning, and indulging
in the leisure stretching of their kind. They would follow her into the
bathroom and then to the kitchen where she would refresh their water bowls,
pour some more dry food into their food bowls, and give them treats.
Slowly
she put on her glasses and blue floral slippers, then trudged down the hall to
the bathroom, kitties happily bounding around her, rubbing on her legs, and
impeding her progress. While she sat on the throne she thought about the weird
dream she’d had that night: in it, a black-haired man dressed in what looked
like a pirate outfit straight out of Hollywood had been following her through
what looked to her like some sort of medieval town.
She’d
eluded him several times by ducking into doorways and alleys, frequently back-tracking
to throw him off. She’d felt sure she’d finally lost him, only to find herself
at a dead end. She turned to go back and there he’d been, smiling in triumph at
having cornered her. Then the alarm had gone off. Strange that she’d been
dreaming of pirates; she never had before. Maybe it had to do with going on
this blind date to the pirate exhibit at the museum.
The
guy had been enthusiastic about attending the exhibit, telling her how excited
he was to be going to see artifacts from a real pirate ship recovered from the
bottom of the sea. He’d seemed nice enough, and Kelly figured a museum was
probably a fairly safe place to meet up with someone new, so she’d agreed to
go. Since reaching middle age she’d put on weight and her now lumpy body bore
no resemblance to the skinny thing she’d been in her youth. Faced now with the
reality of having to get up early on her day off, she wasn’t so sure.
From
the bathroom she continued her zombie-like walk back down the beige-carpeted hall
to the kitchen. The cats walked around her, meowing with impatience while she
got fresh water from the sink and a fresh supply of dry food from its storage
canister. As usual, there was still some food in the bowls, but because they’d
pushed everything to the side the bottom of the bowls were showing and to the
cats that meant the bowls were empty. Then she reached in the cupboard next to
the stove and got out the canister of treats.
Shaking it, the treats inside sounding like a giant
rattle, she called out, “Who wants a treat?”
The cats meowed and cantered up to her, tails in the air.
Crouching down on the green linoleum floor, she fed them their treats,
sometimes feeding them by hand, other times tossing them down on the floor for
them to chase. They got eight or nine pieces each, then she put away the
canister.
Pushing herself back up, she resisted the urge to keep
walking down the hall and detouring into the living room and turning on the TV.
She knew if she did, she’d plop down on the couch and watch it instead of
getting ready. So, she made a left in the bathroom to take a shower. Glancing
at the clock just inside the bathroom door, she realized she didn’t have much
time left before she was scheduled to meet this guy. There wouldn’t be time to
eat before leaving. Maybe she’d be able to grab something to eat at the museum.
While she showered, she wondered what this guy would be
like. He was another of her “friend” Clemencia’s “cast-offs” that she insisted
on setting her up with. Kelly had avoided two “parties” where Clemencia wanted
to invite a bunch of her former boyfriends and admirers so Kelly could meet them.
“It’s for you to meet them, but they won’t know that,”
she told her. “They’re nice guys, they just didn’t work for me, but maybe
they’ll work for you.’
Then
she had come up with the idea of this blind date. Kelly agreed reluctantly,
mostly just to shut her up. She really
didn’t want to go; she could think of better ways to spend her Sunday morning. Sleeping, for one, she grumbled
silently. Or reading. She was barely
two chapters into a Steve Berry book she hadn’t read yet.
She
and Clemencia had met about five years ago. She’d been fresh out of a divorce. She
had remarried a couple years ago, and now had a big thing about trying to get
Kelly hooked up with someone. Now that she was married again, she saw herself
as being in some strange, rarified air that put her above anyone who was
single.
She
had tried to set Kelly up like this once before, to a guy who Kelly found out
later couldn’t hold a steady job and wanted a girlfriend so he could have money
to spend.
Kelly finished her shower, dried off, and slipped back
into her robe. On her way back down the hall she idly noted the framed belt
certificates from her two years of Kempo and a couple of pieces of artwork a
former boyfriend had never come back to claim. On the opposite wall, above her
bookshelves which stretched its whole length, was a framed poster from the
movie Ben-Hur featuring a great
close-up of Charlton Heston driving a chariot of four white horses. She’d had
to send in a receipt and proof of purchase from when she bought the DVD to
obtain it. Whoever had painted this place had done the walls in nearly the same
beige color as the carpet, so the artwork added much-needed spots of color to
the place.
Back in the bedroom, she plopped down on the bed, then
picked up her phone off the pillow where she had left it. The sign-in screen
indicated that someone had called while she was in the shower. She pulled up
her voicemail.
“Hey, this is Dan. I’m not gonna be able to meet you at
the museum today, sorry. Maybe I’ll see you some other time.” With a sigh of
disgust, Kelly clicked the delete button and set the phone back on the
nightstand.
“Well, that takes care of that,” she exclaimed.
Now what? Gazing around the room, her eyes fell on
the newspaper article advertising the exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature
and Science. She had let it fall to the floor last night after reading through
it and gazing at the black and white and color photographs again. The theme of
pirates had seemed intriguing, and Dan had said he was buying the tickets, so
she had figured why not?
She bent down and picked up the article. Behind her on
the bed, the cats had finished eating and were taking up positions on the Queen-sized
bed to wash. As she turned her attention back to the article, from the corner
of her eye she thought she saw one of the figures in the color picture move.
She stopped, holding out the article before her. She
looked more closely at the picture. The four male figures, three men and a boy,
were standing facing forward. How had she thought just now that the one on the
end had turned and lifted his hat to her?
She rubbed some grit out of her eyes and tossed the
article on her nightstand. Maybe the diversion of getting out of the house and
going to the museum was what she needed after all. And maybe, a little voice in
the back of her head seemed to be saying, it would be more fun to go by herself
and not have to worry about whether she liked the guy, or if they even got
along.
Her decision made, she found a clean pair of dark blue
jeans and a black tee-shirt with a red and blue Southwest Airlines logo on it
to wear. Seated on the bed she pulled on a pair of grey crew socks, then stood
and walked down the hall once more, this time bypassing the bathroom to go to
the living room. Forcing herself to stay away from the TV, she walked past it
to her desk and booted up her computer to search for the museum’s web site. The
main page had a nice, large button to click to order tickets for the exhibit. You
had to choose a specific entrance time, and it was already 10am, so she chose
11:30, which would give her plenty of time to drive there, get parked, and get
in the building.
While her ticket printed, she realized she felt lighter
and happier than she had in quite a while. Had it really been that long since
she’d made herself go somewhere and do something like this?
Oddly, as she sat in the front entryway and put on her
running shoes, then hugged and kissed her kitties and said good-bye, she had a distinct feeling that someone was observing her. Spying her purse on the
couch, she grabbed it and zipped it closed.
Her apartment was at the top of the stairs of a two-story
Victorian built in 1899. The bottom floor was used by her landlady as an
antique jewelry shop. Since it was Sunday, the store was closed, and the double
wood doors to the store were shut. So, it wasn’t like there were any other
apartments from which someone might try to covertly observe her.
Finishing tying her shoes, she straightened up to look
around, but of course, there was only herself and the cats. Dakota Avenue was
quiet for once, no cars zooming by and no one on the sidewalk. It was only one
lane, but for some reason, people preferred to drive on it to get between northbound
Broadway and southbound Lincoln instead of using the four-lane roads with
intersections and traffic lights just a block up in either direction. With cars
parked on both sides of the street, cars going in both directions could make
for some hairy traffic situations.
Her first New Year’s Eve here she had heard crashing and
banging outside. Scrambling to the living room to see what was going on, she’d
seen an SUV facing east with its driver standing in front of it. She couldn’t
hear him through the window, but his wide-open mouth and frantic gestures told
her enough. The next morning, she had walked out to see the tree on that side
of the road had a chunk of bark missing where the driver had apparently hit it.
Thinking at the last minute that she might want to put
her hair back later, she went back down the hall to the bedroom and grabbed a blue
scrunchy, then made her way back to her door. As she walked down the stairs to
the front door of the building, she realized she was happy to be going
somewhere. Getting out of the house for something besides work was exactly the
right thing for her to do.
She and her landlady parked their cars in the Girl Scouts
parking lot that was on the other side of the alley from the house rather than
park out on the street. Making her way down the sidewalk, she realized she was
whipping her head from side to side, as though looking for someone sneaking up
on her. Why am I acting like someone’s going to sneak up on me? No one’s
here.
Just before she stepped onto the asphalt of the parking
lot, she stopped and turned to look around her. No one was there, yet she
couldn’t shake a feeling of being watched. She strode quickly to her car and
got in. Once the doors were closed and locked, she felt better. She looked
around again while starting the engine, then back up quickly and left the
parking lot.
As she drove the short way down Dakota to Lincoln, she
had to laugh at herself. She must really be getting cabin fever if the mere act
of walking to her car made her think she was being followed! She needed to get
out of the house more!
