Free Story Of The Month For January- Excerpt from the new novel The Fortunate Ones

By the time he was old enough to drink in a bar, Hank had already stumbled over and pocketed many of life’s more obvious truths. To play the piano, he knew, was to hear all music more clearly and so its own reward, but beyond that, the organization of music illuminated the structure of thoughts. To cook, and to cook well and with invention, was to make the road though life both broad and scenic. To have and respect even one gay friend for the span of a year was to forever change one’s wardrobe for the better. The bold and reckless willingness to fight made fear and fighting uncommon. Whimsy, most sacred, was the saddle of wisdom. Hank was a gentleman brawler, a home chef with an eye for mushrooms and berries and the edible weeds in parklands. There was secret choral music in his head. Because of all this, he was a natural collector of ideas, and those ideas mated in his moments of chemical lucidity and gave rise to ideas of their own. Hank called them ‘off springers’.

Thoughts were all conveyed in one way or another. Some, the sentiments, could be found in song. Stories often had a point or a moral. Parables had subtext. Messages howled in advertising and television, superstitions in forecasts, lies in between the lines. The mode of communication, the method, the means, the medium, from the earliest cave paintings to the music video made seconds ago, shaped the essence of the information they carried. Mode informed content. Hank knew this. His ideas knew this. His mind resonated with it. What perfect combination of a) thought, b) the will to transmit it, and c) medium of exchange might result in action of a specific kind, one that reminded Hank of himself? So that he might see objectively the gears of his own design? Kaons came to mind. Kaons and fortune cookies.

“Tonight is the night.” Hank drained his pint and looked again through the window. Across from him, Kelly and Ruth followed his gaze. The K&L Orient would close forever tomorrow, but it already abandoned. In the last three months, they’d mapped out its entire interior, using the bar they were in as cover. They’d become friends with the bartender Benny, and even had a few pleasant exchanges with the bakers at the K&L, so they all felt a little bad now that it was finally showtime.

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