Tony Jaeger's Blog, page 2

It's Depressing Thought Tuesday

In the grand scale of eternity, there will come a day when there will be no more cake. 

Depressing Thought Tuesday.

I would prefer to live in a world where soldiers are looked at as freeloaders. 

This is your depressing thought. 

The United States of America is built on (many, many complicated things, but for the sake of this discussion, please stick with me) two things: Military strength, and Christianity. From the very beginning, this has been the case. When the colonies first stood up and began a revolution, a very prominent emblem for the colonists was a giant, eye-catching yellow flag saying "Don't Fuck With Me." Then, it was "God Bless America," and "In God We Trust," shortly thereafter. Once America was an established nation, though, "Don't Tread On Me" became "Also, Don't Tread On My Friends." Walk softly, and carry a big stick... or tell your enemies that you are. A few months ago, I watched this fascinating documentary about the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire. The documentary talked about why the Roman Empire was so successful in expanding its cultural influence so widely. Their strength was in assimilating their own culture into that of those nations they had conquered. They did this by observing the festivals and rituals of the conquered nations, and introducing very similar practices into those same festivals. It was kind of a huge-scale version of saying "Oh, you celebrate X-mas? Back home, we celebrate Christmas. Let me show you how we do it."

The Romans found that you can learn a whole lot about a people from the things they celebrate. In America, it takes only a cursory search to isolate two prominent things we celebrate: Military strength, and Christianity. My history is very rusty, but I don't think that there has been a single 50 year period in which our country did not go to war. This means that everyone, at some point in their life, has been encouraged to go off to war, or is living with family who has been to war. Soldiers have always been a symbol for national strength, and by God, our nation will stand tall and free, from sea to shining sea. 

God bless the troops, and God bless America.  War and God are as natural a part of Americans as Potty Training is to a child. The problem with this is that War is Hell. War is nothing more than the systematic elimination of an opposing force. An opposing force made of soldiers. Soldiers who, before joining the army had a life, a to take care of and provide for, who was taking classes at the local Community College to try and make something of their life. War is leaving home to go to someone else's country where, without you, people would be living lives just like you were (or staying in your home country, but taking up a weapon to defend your families from people who didn't like what the politicians of your country have done). 

Never mind the cause of the war, whether it's for an ideal, (like the spread of Democracy), for money, for the defense of an oppressed people, to force a political agenda, or even to stop a genocide, at the end of it all, war is the mass-killing of people.  

If soldiers are lucky, they have killed enough men and women (hopefully, most of them soldiers, and not some poor bastard just running to the store for a coke... but you never know) that the mission was accomplished, so they can go home to their families and live with it for the rest of their lives. 

All throughout the world, including here in the United States, we applaud and revere soldiers. The people who were brave enough, or whose circumstances left them with little other choice than to stand up for what their nation believes in strongly enough to kill for. And we should. I know that I don't have it in me to kill someone. I know that if I were even part of the mechanism of someone's death, I would be racked with guilt. Even if I were the long-haul truck driver that picked up the bullet from the factory to take it to the coast to load on a ship, to transport to a port in Saudi Arabia, to be distributed to units all over the Middle East, to be put through someone's skull... eventually that knowledge is going to get to me. We should applaud and revere soldiers anywhere near combat, because the knowledge of directly putting the bullet through someone would fuck a person up. Permanently. 

But what if we lived in a peaceful world? What if the leaders of all of our nations sat down together, had a few beers, maybe a few cocktails, and started talking about how to fix things the world over, and then did it? What if we had the first fifty peaceful years since... ever? 

Our nation, the world, and the people living on it, could could start to heal. 

We would keep our soldiers, they are a national treasure and a tremendously effective peacekeeping tool. They would continue to live and serve, paid by the taxes the government takes from every citizen. And eventually, some people - assholes who think they're smarter than everybody else, mostly - would begin to ask questions like, "Why do we even have a military? There isn't anyone to fight!" People would begin to talk, and the conversation would move around the internet, and the news, and become a highly divisive issue. Soon, someone would accuse them of being a bunch of leeches and freeloaders. The whole country would be in an uproar over it. 

But then, the well-trained, ever vigilant soldiers who were out in the perfectly peaceful world to maintain peace, and help the citizens of whatever country they were stationed in, would not have to live with the knowledge of what it's like to kill someone. 

I would prefer to live in a world where soldiers are looked at as freeloaders. 

A Slow, Measured Descent

My grandma always used to make a roast for dinner on Sundays, and as always it would be accompanied bysome manner of sensible vegetable. I have always looked at the practice as the very definition of classical adulthood. When I was a child, I never stopped to ask what method of cooking she used because it wasn't important to me. Now that I'm 26, I have found that the Crock Pot is probably the best way to cook a roast, and as strange as it's going to sound, I'm not sure how I feel about this knowledge. 
Just look at that beautiful bastard. There are some pieces of information that make you stop and think for a minute about what it means  (or, it might be that I read all of the Existential Comics this morning). I made myself waffles this morning for breakfast, and while they were cooking, prepared dinner. In an Earlier Post , I made the claim that making waffles simply because you wanted waffles WAS adulthood, but I realized my error. Acting on impulse, doing something for the reason of, "cuz I can, and I want to," is a great thing, but doing things, "because  Future Me will thank Now Me," is a whole other beast entirely. Sure, both are completely acceptable reasons for acting a certain way, but is one more "adult" than the other? I don't know. To me, the question, itself, is kind of weird.

The Crock Pot is a foreign beast to me, and a little frightening. Stupid, I know. It's an adult version of being afraid of the monsters under your bed, but the way I figure it, this is a device designed to be hot - really hot - for a long time, and left alone for hours on end to its own devices. That spells fire hazard. So, instead of going about my day like a productive human being (read: adult), I am home, babysitting the very incarnation of responsibility. If I leave it, it'll catch fire, burning down the building and extinguishing several lives - at least one of which is a baby - says my mind. So I stay. 

It's the trusting that everything will be alright that's my sticking point. On the big things, sure, it's easy to sit back with a grin and say, "Ah, you'll be alright." It's the insignificant things, like, "Will dinner set my house on fire if I go out for a bit to see the sun?" that are the difficult things to trust. My high school history teacher, Rob Gardner, always used to say "Familiarity breeds complacency," and my understanding of that sentiment has changed so much over the last decade (ye gods, decade?) that I'm sure whatever infantile form of comprehension I had at the time is vastly insignificant, compared to what it is now. By this point in my life, I have grown familiar with the idea that I'm probably going to wake up tomorrow morning, and that things have a possibility of seeming brighter when I do. That depraved Crock Pot, however... 


I'm not sure why I'm trying to define adulthood of late, but I very much appreciate your sticking with me while I do. I'll probably have another moment of indescribable clarity in the future, so sit tight, friends. 

An Update and a Discovery.

I am happy to announce that I am still working on Fowl Play, and things are cropping up every day that bring extra stress, and pressure, and fun into the project. For example, in the last two days, I have written a little bit about the time after the events of the book, and how they were initiated, and discovered a huge plot hole I'd left wide open. 

It was one of those moments that widens your eyes and puts your jaw on your desk. How could I miss this? You think, and see all of your hard work crumble in front of you. It doesn't actually crumble, most of what you've done is good, but you're caught up in the moment. You get up from the desk - a dignified ragequit, if ever there was one - get a beer from the fridge, and lay on the couch. In that time, you have rationalized that all is not lost. I just need to think about this for a bit, you think to yourself as you crack open your beer and get comfortable. 

I was listening to Delain 's new album, The Human Contradiction, which is just great, and realized that everything I had built up, over the course of the last month, was built on a fairly simple fallacy. After about four more beers, the album started over again, and I had a thought. Just like that, it was fixed, and I was able to move forward. Which was great, until the moment I realized the coolest thing ever: With the use of a single word, in any part of the book, I would ruin the tension of the whole conflict. I mean, how cool is that?

If you're wondering what the word is, and how I believe it would have torn the whole thing down, I am going to put that into the commentary in the book, so I don't inadvertently spoil it before the thing is out. 

Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you all. 

And In the Morning... I'm Makin' Waffles

I just made waffles a few hours ago, using for the first time a waffle iron my dad and step mom gave to me a few years back. Ever since I received this, I fantasized about that magical day I would finally make waffles. And, my inner fat kid reminds me, actually eat them. I didn't realize that last part was important, but it totally is. 

As strange as it may sound, eating my waffles was something of a revelatory experience for me. I sat at my desk, with my cup of coffee, and Brandon Sanderson's new book, and ate in silence, savoring both the book and the waffles equally, and when I was finished I put everything away, and went back to writing, with the strange realization that I can make waffles whenever I damn-well please. After all, I'm an adult. 

I've been living on my own for eight years, now, paying bills and going to work and doing all of the things that were expected of me to survive... and this kind of thing never occurred to me. I am allowed to have fun, but only if I allow myself to. If I want to get up early on Saturday and put a whole box of cereal into a mixing bowl with a gallon of milk and watch Pokemon, or the Animaniacs on DVD, I can. 

Good Lord, I've just realized I sound like the worst self-help guy ever. You can be lazy, but only if you allow yourself to be lazy. Try it sometime, it's good for the soul. As are waffles. 

So, I'll keep this short, as I really should be writing... and don't have anything meaningful to say. My point is this: Making waffles is great. Do it more often than you feel is necessary. 

On Art

A sculptor of some repute once said that he would take a block of marble, and simply chip away the pieces that didn't look like what he was sculpting. I have no idea who it was, I could probably find out with a simple Google search, but I really don't care to. In many ways I am suuuper jealous of sculptors, because at the start of the day, what they're doing already exists, it's a process of meticulously breaking a hunk of rock (or whatever) down into what it would never have been otherwise. My art form is fiction, a process of creating an entire world from a vague sense of shared experiences, and relating a series of events in places and times many cannot even fathom... and evoke an emotional and intellecutal response from the reader.

I'll never say that writing fiction is more difficult an art form than any other - because it's not - it's simply art. That quality alone makes it a long, mentally straining, lonely process.

Creating a scene, a city, a bustling metropolis filled with people each living their own lives, even if they have nothing to do with the story, is a relatively simple task. I won't discuss the craft of it, because it's boring even to me (if you are Wanting a discussion about the Craft of writing, keep an eye on the site over the course of the coming months). With that said, building the surrounding area you were able to see in Chef was a simple matter, one fitting with where I was as a writer when I was writing it. With Fowl Play, however, I am not only building a bustling community, I am creating a larger city, a religion, cultural and language quirks and patterns, and even filtering out the harsh truth of how the animals I'm writing about actually exist in the wild (did you know that most sex between ducks is rape?) into a more reader-friendly representation of the world that also goes along with the story I want to tell. It's a little more difficult than the world of Chef.

As far as the difficulty in the building of this piece, it has always been something I have expected, and known would be a part of the process. There have been more than a few nights I have run across something I hadn't thought of, about their culture or religious practices, or even what happened after the events of this book, that I had to process and think of so I could proceed in talking about them. And after I stared at my computer screen for a few hours I realized that the decisions I'd made required me to go back over the story and - at times - completely rewrite scenes to account for the changes. Like a sculptor, chipping away what doesn't look like the statue he set out to sculpt.

What this has done is make a first draft much longer than Chef was (Fowl Play is going to be just about twice as long, which I'm really excited about), and a much more complex story. It has also created a much longer process for writing it, as so much of my work has been in rewriting. My last change, adding a character whose only purpose is to tell one of the main characters "No. Don't do this yet, wait a few days," has made it so that I have to go back and rewrite most of the second part. Don't get me wrong, it has made the book better to the point that I question the writer I was weeks ago that hadn't even thought about it, it's just increasing the time I anticipated working on this.

There are a whole lot of writers whose work I read that I can describe only as art. Jeff Suwak, Pat Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Peter V. Brett, Scott Lynch, Mark Lawrence... they're artists. They take a damned long time, some of them, to put a book together, but when they do it's magic. I used to take for granted the quality of their work, but now I am seeing it for what it is. My work isn't nearly on that level, I know, but that is my goal, bringing you something akin to their quality while still maintaining the me-ness you've come to expect.

My goal of having Fowl Play to my editor was for March fourth. I did not meet this goal. With the amount of work I've created for myself, I will be lucky to hit April fourth, but I am going to damned well try for it. By the end, though, it's going to be a piece of art I am proud of, and something I hope that makes you laugh, and breaks your heart a little, and that you treasure long after your first reading of it.

Because of the delay in getting it to my editor, I am also having to push the expected publication date back to (tentatively) August eighth.

In the meantime, there are a lot of phenomenal books from other authors to read (if you're stuck for something to read, the list of authors above can get you started). If you want to recommend some books for people, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Take it easy, my friends.

... A Wedding

I recently had the honor of joining two people together in the holiest of holy matrimonies. A few weeks ago I was asked to officiate the marriage of Tashia Floyd and Kayll Heath. So it was, that not yet a week after burying a man I loved and admired, I played an integral part in the happiest day of these two people's lives, so far. 

For those of you that know me personally, you probably have a fairly good idea of what my average ceremony is like, but for those of you who don't... I tend to do things a little differently. I did stand-up comedy for just over three years, and loved it intensely. Watching people enjoy themselves or laugh because of something I said or did has always been something that has brought me great satisfaction. 

When I was young, a friend told me that his whole goal in life was to make people smile... or something like that. At the time I thought he was suuuper naive, but didn't tell him such. You just don't step on another person's life ambition, no matter how crazy it seems. It took me a lot of years to realize that fourth-grader was one of the wisest people I've ever met. I consider myself - even now - a student of that ten year-old, to the point that I've adopted that as a component of my own life's ambition. 
Taken on a phone pointed at the camera's screen, this is the worst picture ever, I know. It'll be replaced when I can get the real one. That, right there, is why I decided  to do stand-up, and the reason I do weddings. I make it my job not only to make the bride and groom smile and laugh, and keep some semblance of the friendship that brought them together in the first place, but to remind them of who they are today, and wish them all the best as they become the people they are meant to be. And, if I have time, to make their families laugh, and have a good time, as well. 

Everyone, let's all pretend I said something really poignant and thought-provoking here, as a segue into what I really wanted to talk about, yeah?

I don't have the exact figures - I'm pretty sure I'd just bum myself out if I looked for them - but something like half of marriages fail... on a good day. The truth is probably much worse than that. When we're young and full of life, and excited to take on the world we act without doubting ourselves, or the choices we've made (or, if we doubt them, we pay precious little attention to those doubts). We choose a major, move to Connecticut, or some other place we aren't quite sure how to spell, we get married... and often find that our choices were made in haste, and end up regretting some of them. Okay, most of them. But before we're slapped with the salmon of life , we believe to our cores that we are the exception to the rules. We watched our parents get divorced, we watched our older siblings crash and burn wherever they went, and we're pretty sure that we've learned the lessons they did, and have this life thing pretty much figured out. So we charge headfirst into the world, bright-eyed and optimistic, believing that we hold the keys of wisdom that free us from the statistics.We ARE the exception, dammit, and you're gonna hear us roar. 

Then the world gets to us, we've been slapped with a fish and we find that we really aren't sure of anything any more. We watch our friends get into bad situations - I have friends who are divorced, some with kids and some without, I have friends who are happily married, unhappily married, still living with their parents, and some who are still not sure what they want to do with their lives. I've watched people, some I don't know as well as I used to, and some I've kept up with. Facebook makes it easy to catch glimpses, but never to get the full story, the story my novelist's brain wants. However much of the story I know, it's clear to see that people my age are realizing that they aren't the exception, that the statistics are what they are, and doing anything involves rolling the dice against a merciless Game Master. 

So why do we do things? Why did I ask a beautiful and interesting girl out this evening, if I - and just about everyone I know - have a Zero percent success rate with relationships, so far? Why, if I have only ever seen two or three successful, happy marriages, am I still even bothering to seek love? (To that beautiful, interesting girl, if you're reading this, please don't take all of this as anything. Bringing that up was a small example of a larger, more abstract idea I really wanted to discuss, and not a... you know what, I believe you understand what I'm getting at, and won't hold it against me. Anyway, I now return you to your regularly scheduled rant) Why would any sane person keep looking if we know that, more likely than not, if not in the first few years, then maybe twenty years later, after four kids and a whole lot of things have happened - both good and bad - the relationship will ultimately fail... and painfully so?

Hope. 

As naive as it sounds, it's hope. I hope to enjoy a tasty meal and a good conversation with a young lady this weekend. I hope eventually, I will find that I have faith in the very concept of marriage again, that I find another couple like those precious two or three that have made it... and find out how they did it. I hope that one day, when I do find that couple, that I am able to stand there, and make them laugh, and present them to the world as the one couple in millions that will make it, until death do they part. 

Hell, I hope that I already have. 

To all of the couples whose lives I have helped join, I wish you all of the happiness the world can supply. I know that sometimes it isn't much to speak of, but there are always smiles to be had, no matter the situation. When it gets hard, I want you to know and remember that I'm rooting for you. 

More specifically, Tashia and Kayll, I want you to know that I deeply enjoyed watching you two during your ceremony. I believe that you are a couple that are going to bring hope to people like me, who struggle to have a little faith. I love you both, and wish all the best for you.  That's why I do it, right there.

A Funeral and...

I watched a man die, almost two weeks ago. It was my first time ever doing such a thing, and it was a horrifying and... fascinating experience. Before I continue, I have to say that this was a man I deeply respected and loved. It was my grandfather, Robert Bowles, who was a remarkable man, and loved by an astonishing amount of people. In early January, he was diagnosed with Stage 4 Leukemia and given 3-6 months to live. He survived a paltry six weeks after that. 

I received a text when I was at work, saying that things weren't looking good. It was time I started thinking about saying goodbye. I left work immediately, at the request of my boss (if you ever have occasion to read this, First: weird; Second: Thank you for that, it meant a lot to me), and went to the hospital. On the way there, my thoughts were incoherent, as much as the younger grandchildren would be when they filtered into the room in the ICU a few hours later. 

It was mostly the adults in the room when I arrived, save for the oldest of my cousins who, now that I think about it, are adults now. Those who weren't teary-eyed stared, hollow, not at my grandfather, who lay in the bed alternating between gasping and wheezing, with his face mostly obscured by an oxygen mask. It was like something out of a bad horror movie, I thought. Grandpa was in pain, and was the person I was there to see... but I avoided him at first. I talked to everyone else in the room, or at least gave them deep nods accompanied by lingering and meaningful eye contact. Then I turned to him.  I admit, I avoided him as long as I did because I was scared. Scared of what I would see, or feel. 

I'm a procrastinator, by nature. If there were a Mundane Shit Olympics I would take the silver medal in Putting Important Shit Off, taking second to some Bulgarian asshole that showed up late, still in his stained, torn, pajamas. In the last year, my apartment has only gotten cleaned when I had other stuff I needed to be doing. 

I faced Grandpa - and my fear of what I would find, both in seeing him and inside myself - only after I'd done everything else I possibly could have to avoid it. My family encouraged me to say a few words to him, but I kept my back pressed against the wall for a few more moments before I approached. 

"Crazy weather we've been having, huh?" I've said a lot of stupid things in my day. I mean, I'm a dumbass, by  nature. If there was a Saying Stupid Shit Olympics... What do you say to someone in that condition? He looked at me, and I like to think there was a smile in his eye. There was a laugh behind me, so I knew I'd accomplished my goal. If I can't make people laugh, then what the hell good am I? This has been my belief for many years, and I took comfort in Jess's soft chuckle. 

I'm not going to bore you with the minutiae of the rest of the day, the grandchildren shuffling in in waves, some unable to contain themselves and still others not trying to, the sayings of goodbye, or the thinly-veiled announcement that his time had come... because honestly, those are private matters, and if you don't know the feelings I would describe, I want to wish you every comfort when your time comes to experience these things. 

After the announcement that he was simply going to fade into a cloud of morphine, into comfortable sleep, and the grandchildren shepherded into a waiting room, it was just the adults again. Waiting. I knew that in a matter of hours I would be able to see the Thestral, you know, the horse things from Harry Potter that you could only see if you've seen death. 

It was now, between when it was told to us that he would just fade away and his final breath, that I prayed earnestly for the first time since I left the Mormon church 12 years ago. 12 years after completely renouncing my faith, I prayed - not to god, but to whatever force actually exists. I am an Agnostic. A Reverend of Agnosticism, actually, and it was this very moment that I started actually taking that responsibility seriously. 

I have discovered - and suppose I always knew - that tragedy cements belief. Whether it's Christian belief, or the belief that we can't prove or disprove the existence of some big (or small) amorphous being that might (or might not) have created (or whatever) all of the cosmos (Cosmos?). People speak in profundities around death that reflect their own belief. "He was a little slice of Heaven," and the like, were spoken frequently. I kept my nonbelieving comments to myself. Always know your audience. 

So it was, that with my fingertips barely touching Grandpa's toes, that I prayed to whatever force or being that would listen or heed:
Wherever it is you're going, 
Whether it be the endless fields of Elysium,
Or Heaven or Hel (not to be confused with Hell), 
Or the Temples of Gold, 
Have fun. 

Whoever it is that's going to meet you there, 
Whether Jesus, in sandals and robes, 
Or Dante, quill in hand and wonder in his eyes, 
Or Anubis, waiting to weigh your soul, 
If they give you Hell, you give it right back. 
Or ask for seconds; who knows, you might be hungry. 

Wherever it is you're going, 
Whether it's into the loving arms of God, 
Or into the endless darkness of Oblivion, 
This is just a second, sudden puberty, a transition. 
And I hope you have fun. 

It wasn't exactly like that, but it was very similar. 

He faded away, little by little. The screen hovering over his shoulder told us his blood pressure, blood-oxygen level, pulse, and a few other things. We watched his heart rate, his blood pressure, his labored breathing. . . for hours, emotions flaring and ebbing with each statistic drop and doldrum. 

At 5:39 PM, he drew his final breath. Everyone else continued breathing, though many among us did so between ragged sobs. I felt guilty, for continuing to breathe, when one of us no longer had the option to. As all good men should, he died peacefully, surrounded by people who loved him. 

I watched a man die recently, and I want to thank you for letting me share the experience with you all. Let your loved ones know that you love them, the next time you see them, and every time after that. People tend to leave with alarming suddenness, sometimes. 

Bob, Grandpa, If there is something After, I hope you're having fun, or at least learning something. I love you. 

Chef, Finale

Kevin’s palms were sweaty. His first date would begin after his shift, ten hours later, but, already, he was nervous enough that his knees shook with every step. He slung his backpack down beneath a bench, sat, and pulled his Labor Commission-approved non-slip shoes out of his tiny locker.

Rick poked his head around the corner. “Kevin, Chef’s called a meeting before we open; he says it’s important. Come on.” He was gone as suddenly as he’d appeared. Kevin stared after him, scrunching his eyebrows up and wondering what was going on. Whatever it was, it could wait until he finished tying his shoes.

It was absolute habit now, opening doors with his shoulder. Kevin found himself doing it to doors with knobs and wondering why they wouldn’t open. He decided that, when he was older and married and had his own house, every door would swing freely on a hinge so it wouldn’t be a problem.

The kitchen was more crowded than Kevin had ever seen; even people with the day off had packed themselves into the prep area.

“Everyone, I’ve got some things I need to tell you. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us, so I’ll be brief. My real name is not Chef,” Chef said, grinning. Kati let out a mocking gasp and delicately placed fingers on her chest. “It’s a name I took on just before I started college. I was always told to act like you already had the job you want, so I asked my friends and family to start calling me Chef. My real name is … well, maybe I shouldn’t tell you all that, I can’t have you tracking me down on Facebook.” 

“I’ve always wanted to be a chef and, the last decade, working with all of you have been some of the best years of my life. Every single one of you will always have a special place in my heart.” Tears glistened in Chef’s eyes.

Kevin looked around, confused, wondering what was going on.

Chef continued, “There was a time in my life that I would have given up everything to own my own restaurant. Those were good days. I was broke and hungry … and young. This has always been my dream, but it’s time for me to move on.”

This time, Kati’s gasp was genuine. So was everyone else’s.

“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet but it is time for a change in my life. This isn’t why I called the meeting, though. No, I have decided to introduce you to the new boss around here, the new Head Chef.”

A mix of sad, excited and confused murmurs sprang up in the silence. Chef waited until they quieted, of their own accord, before continuing.

“Marcus.” All eyes turned toward him. “For the past eight years, you’ve talked about, one day, opening up your own restaurant.” Chef smiled and held his long, wooden spoon out to Marcus. “If you want it, this place is yours.”

Marcus hesitantly reached out and took the spoon. He held it in front of his face, as if he’d discovered it had magical properties. “Th-thank you, Chef.”

“No, Marcus, thank you. And thank you, all. This has been an amazing experience for me, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share it with you all. For those of you that have been with me from the beginning, and even those of you that have recently joined my family, I will always consider you my friends. Thank you.”

Chef bowed his head and left the restaurant, never to return.

*          *          *

Chef stared at the ground, rather the engraved slab of granite planted in the ground. He leaned heavily on a gnarled wooden cane that was supposed to look like it was straight off a tree. The stab wound in his leg, from Liam’s knife, still hadn’t fully healed. A cold breeze ruffled his hair and sent some crunchy leaves tumbling across Lily’s headstone. Tears threatened his eyes as he stared. He didn’t fight them or wipe them away when they fell.

Before he found and confronted her killer, Chef felt that he couldn’t face his daughter – he realized that Ethan Hatcher had nothing to do with that. Now that he was gone, Chef found it no easier. The man was dead, but his death brought no justice.

He wanted to apologize to her but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her forgiveness. As Miranda had so aptly put it, Chef had simply not been there and, for that, he shouldn’t be forgiven. Instead, he stood, looking down at the only thing that remained of his baby girl, a cold stone slab that, in no way, represented who she was.

“I couldn’t answer your question, Lily, about why there are bad people in the world, because I am one.” He looked away from her headstone and started watching the clouds, instead. “I guess if you have been around, you saw that for yourself. It was something I never meant for any of you to see. My misguided obsession with keeping you girls safe. My … addiction.” A sob rose in his chest but he choked it back. He didn’t deserve to pity himself.

“Your mom is probably going to leave me. I can’t say that I blame her. It can’t be easy, learning that she’s living with a … me.” He still couldn’t bring himself to say it. “I doubt your sister will ever talk to me again. She won’t even look at me.”

For the first time in his adult life, Chef didn’t feel the need to be anywhere, to accomplish anything. Using his cane, he awkwardly sat in the grass in front of Lily’s headstone. He spent the afternoon doing what he now knew he should have been doing all along. He spent the afternoon with his daughter. 

Chef, Chapter 24

Chef and Liam emerged from Skip’s house soaked in blood and streaked with tears. They didn’t bother to close the broken door behind them. Each step they took, toward the cab, took them further from death, and yet closer. 

“Oh, my God,” Greg said. He looked sick. “What happened in there?”

“We were too late.” Liam opened the door behind the driver’s seat and slid into the cab.

“Too late for what?”

Chef fell into the back seat next to Liam, struggling to move his body against the pain. “Hartford Street. Fast.”

“How fast?”

Two sets of eyes, both the closest to lifeless that Greg had ever seen, stared at him. The car accelerated and, by the end of the block, was traveling at over twice the speed limit. His driving, while unreasonably fast, compared with every day travel, seemed restrained, respectful, if not quite hesitant. Greg’s joy in his driving had evaporated as completely as Chef and Liam’s.

His whole body numb, Chef could only bring himself to stare out the window and, that only because when he closed his eyes, he saw Liz lying dead on the floor. Street lights passed at regular intervals, but he couldn’t be bothered to notice the rise and fall of light against the darkness. The cab passed pedestrians and cyclists, living their lives as if nothing had happened. They passed nightclubs and burger joints and abandoned buildings that all looked the same.

The car stopped.

The importance of that fact made only the vaguest impression on Chef. He paid it no mind. He took a strange solace in the blackness outside his window, feeling a kind of kinship with it. A hand nudged him. Someone was speaking and he suspected that person was speaking to him. He wished they wouldn’t.

“Someone is in your house, Chef.”

Chef blinked. “What?” He leaned forward to get a better view. A silhouette moved in and out of view, every few seconds, through the living room window. “Please tell me you –”

“Amberly is safe. She’s with my wife.” He patted Chef’s shoulder.

After a long look at his friend, both nodded and exited the car. They walked side by side for a while, neither speaking, both preparing for what, they could only guess. The cab had parked up the street and Chef was grateful for the opportunity to stretch his limbs, to enjoy the simple pleasure of Liam’s company, maybe for the last time.

“I love you, Liam. If we don’t make it out of this … .”

“Don’t start with that, Chef.” Liam smiled sadly. He stopped walking and embraced his friend.

Chef stepped away, watching his friend disappear into the shadows behind his neighbor’s house. The front door loomed ahead, waiting impatiently for Chef’s approach. He hadn’t seen the silhouette move past the living room window since before he’d left the cab, and couldn’t decide whether that was a good sign.

At the head of the walkway, Chef faced his house, hesitating. He took one deep breath before stepping onto the walkway. With each of the twenty-two steps that took him closer to the house, his mind screamed at him to run away, to call the police and have them deal with the man waiting inside. But he couldn’t, not only because the man had stolen his cell phone: Chef needed to stop him from doing to anyone else, what he’d done to his own loved ones.

Chef reached out to the doorknob, twisted it and hesitated, suddenly aware that he was unarmed. He pushed the door open gently and took a step back to avoid anything that might be swung at him. When nothing came, Chef scanned the lawn and, seeing nothing, stepped inside.

“Oh, stop being so melodramatic. Close the door. What, were you born in a barn?” Ethan’s bleach-tipped faux hawk stuck up over the cushions of the couch. He was looking down, at what, Chef couldn’t tell.

“Welcome home,” Ethan said. He held up a book, a hardbound copy of Doors of Stone. “You have good taste in books. I haven’t read this one; I hope you don’t mind my borrowing it.”

“It’s my wife’s.”

“Ah, well, then you have good taste in women.”

Chef clenched his fists, felt his knuckles pop. “Don’t talk about my wife,” he growled.

“You ain’t a cop,” Ethan said, ignoring him. “I mean, I kind of assumed: no badge, no gun, no backup, but a chef?” Ethan laughed, clutching his side, exaggerating to further irritate Chef. “You’re fucking nobody.” As if a switch had been flipped, his demeanor changed. His face lost all of its mirth, exchanged with rage. “You’re nobody, and still you found me.”

“I told you, I have some talented friends.”

“Not any more, you don’t.” Ethan giggled. Giggled, as if he couldn’t see anything wrong with what he’d done.

Chef lunged at him, throwing his fist at the man’s throat. Faster than Chef could imagine, Ethan dodged to the side, taking hold of his fist, twisting it back to drive Chef to his knees. A flurry of blows landed on his head and the world darkened. An arm snaked around his neck and lifted.

Weakly, Chef struggled against the arm around his throat, clawing and pulling at it, but it only squeezed harder. Chef flailed around. He threw his elbows and feet backward, trying desperately to escape before the world faded to black. Silver streaks flashed across his vision in rhythmic succession. He imagined that it was a psychedelic display of the beat of an old tribal song. It was Ethan’s fist pounding the right side of Chef’s face into oblivion.

Ethan’s arm went slack; Chef collapsed to the floor. Floorboards creaked behind him, accompanied by a loud thump. Breaths came only in ragged gasps, and hesitantly, at that. Slowly, he brought himself up to hands and knees, seeing and feeling soft, moist soil beneath his hands.

A dirty hand appeared in front of his face. He looked up and found Liam reaching down to pull Chef to his feet. When left to stand on his own he wobbled but stayed vertical, much to his surprise.

“Are you alright?” Liam asked.

Chef tried several times to speak around a swollen mouth, but failed. Instead, he looked into Liam’s eyes and shook his head. Lying next to Ethan’s unconscious body was a shattered clay pot lay with soil and a single hydrangea, in full bloom – Liam had apparently taken the plant from Chef’s neighbor, Mrs. Peters.

Chef walked out the door to the shed out back, opened his toolbox and selected a hammer, all the time working his mouth to try and regain the gift of speech. The time had come to end his family’s suffering.

Hammer in one hand, Chef returned to the living room and stood facing Ethan. He gestured for Liam to pull Ethan up. “Knees,” he said slowly.

Liam obeyed immediately, pulling Ethan to his knees, grabbing his shirt and a short tuft of hair. Chef leaned forward and slapped Ethan’s head a few times to wake him up. He blearily looked up at Chef, understanding slowly dawning on his face.

“You don’t have to watch,” Chef struggled to say to Liam.

“Do it.”

Ethan struggled against Liam but was held down.

His shoulder aching, Chef drew his arm back, raising the hammer above his head. Every muscle from chest to fingertip tightened to swing the hammer down.

“Dad?”

Chef spun. Miranda stood in the open doorway, her eyes wide. In the back of his mind, Chef noticed how little clothing she wore, and reminded himself to talk to her about it later. His body went slack and his mind lit up with a thousand competing ideas for how to respond. Instead, he stared dumbly at his daughter.

Behind him Chef heard a roar and, before he could react, he was tackled to the floor. Dull pain roared in his lower back. Ethan had begun clawing and pummeling his way upward.

Miranda screamed but didn’t move.

“Run, Mandy!”

Cold steel rammed into the muscle of Chef’s calf, feeling like it was digging into bone. Chef screamed, and the clawing, frantic motion of his assailant on top of him had stopped. Chef turned around to find out what happened and saw Liam holding the handle of his long knife, buried, to the hilt, in the man’s back.

Ethan Hatcher was dead.