Love Bytes says welcome to author Sarah Black joining us today 🙂
This is the End, My Friend by Sarah Black
Writing the end of a story is hard, especially when the characters are ones I am not quite ready to let go. Good characters are interesting, and they might get into who knows what trouble if left to wander through the world on their own. It can be a problem!
When I first admitted to myself that the story could not drag on and on just so I could listen to the characters talk to each other, I read up on what writing instructors had to say. Mostly it was: “the story is over when the conflict is resolved.” When the main story question is answered, the conflict resolved, or the final round bell has rung, you’ve got to stand up and leave the room.
I don’t like to leave my characters in a lurch, but I do like to get the story told and get out. Sometimes you just have to put your pen down and step away from the keyboard. When I was writing American Road Trip, I was thinking about the end. This story was kind of rough on the characters. They went through some hard stuff. I wanted to end the story when it was time to end it, but I also wanted to visit with them again. I liked them, and I wanted to see what they were up to when they weren’t going through the hard times. So I wrote them another story, an epilogue of sorts.
Tino Takes the Cake tells the story of their wedding, and takes place just after the events told in American Road Trip. It is an epilogue, so a reader needs to read American Road Trip first. But I wanted to share this lighthearted story, so Dreamspinner has agreed to host it on their blog. Tino Takes the Cake will be on the Dreamspinner blog on March 16.
Here is Chapter One:
I bolted upright, a scream caught in my throat. The room was still dark, and Easy stirred next to me, reached up and whacked me between the shoulder blades. I coughed, then took a deep breath, sank back down on the pillow. I couldn’t stop shaking. Easy reached for me, pulled me over until I could bury my face in the warm skin of his neck. “Was it the dream again? The wedding?”
“A new one,” I said. “Tino. That little shit was walking up the aisle, wearing a white veil. At every row of chairs, he stopped, lifted his leg, and peed on the feet of the…”
Easy sat up, cutting me off. “I swear to God, I’m giving you a pill.”
“There is no pill,” I said, trying to stuff the pillow over my face. “No pill, no power on earth. I mean, do we even know how old he is? I think he’s something like twenty-three. That isn’t normal.”
“Twenty-three is just a baby.” Easy rolled out of bed. “I’m putting the coffee on.”
“Twenty-three is not a baby in dog years,” I said, but I was already talking to his back. I was seriously considering the possibility that Tino was one of the undead.
Maybe the wedding was causing me to take leave of my senses, as Easy has suggested more than once in the last two weeks. But it wasn’t just the wedding. It had been a busy time. We’d moved to Flagstaff, with Tino and Austin, Easy’s cousin. We’d moved into a new apartment near the university, and Easy was already working as a barber. Mr. Dawes, from the Grizzly Motel, was letting Austin help with landscaping around the motel. The motel was mostly paved parking lot, with eight single-story rooms in the old motor-court style, so I wasn’t sure what needed to be landscaped. The motel was famous for the life-sized stuffed grizzly by the front door. When I went by to check on things, Austin was usually sweeping the parking lot, Tino dancing around his feet. Occasionally I spotted Mr. Dawes with Tino on his lap, both asleep in the big green recliner he had in the back of the reception area.
The Grizzly Motel was near Fat Man’s Loop, a popular Flagstaff hiking trail. I secretly dreamed of Tino trying to hike Fat Man’s Loop, and then a bear, or maybe a mountain lion, would slink between the sandstone and gypsum rocks, paws silent on the red dirt path. Tino would be trotting along the path, his overgrown battered black ears revolving like satellite dishes. The mountain lion would…
“James Lee. You’re fading out again.” Easy was standing in front of me, holding a cup of coffee. “You got to get it together, Captain. We’re still two days away and you’ve got too much to do to fall apart. You need to freak out, wait for the honeymoon.”
I grabbed the coffee, buried my nose in the cup. “Fine. I’m fine. I’ve got it all organized. Don’t worry. I’m on top of it. What time is it? We need to leave for the airport by seven.”
“We got time for showers and shaves. I sent Evelyn an email to remind her we’re coming by after we pick up mom.”
The complicated wedding logistics were organized like a military campaign. Nothing would go wrong, as long as the two wildcards in our hand behaved. Tino and Austin just had to do what they were ordered to do, exactly as ordered, and everything would go off as planned and on schedule. Easy I didn’t worry about. He knew how to follow a plan. We had a division of labor that was a natural for us, one that had been honed by years of working together in the same infantry unit. We were good. The problem was there were all these other people involved, and then there was Tino.
The dreams had started a while back, when I first started planning the wedding. The perfect plans, the perfect day, the perfect wedding in my dreams, and then Tino would be chewing on the cummerbunds, or biting the ankle of the minister. He would pop up in the back of the limo when we were leaving the church. He would howl like a coyote throughout the ceremony, drowning out the I Dos. He would climb into my mom’s suitcase, pee on her mother-of-the-groom dress. Every night, a new nightmare. I spent too much time trying to figure out what he was plotting.
What made it worse was Tino was behaving like an angel since we’d all moved into our new place. He slept in Austin’s room. We put his old pillow down at the foot of the bed, and he would curl up on the pillow to go to sleep, then by morning he would be snuggled into Austin’s side, his head pillowed in the V of a warm elbow. They were sympatico, and Tino seemed happier than I had ever known him. He was acting like a normal dog, not a demon from some Mexican dog-hell. But I knew him. I knew his black Chihuahua soul. He was biding his time, waiting for the wedding.
A single moment—or a single mistake—can change everything.
When Captain James Lee Hooker and his lover, Sergeant Easy Jacobs, were in the Army, they made a mistake that got a young soldier hurt. Three years later, they’re civilians again, living far apart, haunted by what they lost. Now that young soldier needs their help.
With his grandmother’s one-eyed Chihuahua riding shotgun, James Lee climbs into Easy’s pickup for a trip across the American Southwest. They set out to rescue a friend, but their journey transforms them with the power of forgiveness.
American Road Trip, out March 16 from Dreamspinner
Sarah Black is a writer, artist, veteran, and mother. She is a Lambda finalist and has been nominated for a Pushcart.