And I never really felt like a lawyer.

When NovySan and I realized we were moving to Boston in June, I scrambled to get the application in to take the Massachusetts Bar in July. I signed up for the new incarnation of the same bar prep program that got me through the California Bar (all online and PDF now – it was printed books and 3.5 inch floppies when I had it last), studied in between job hunting and while I was in Wyoming this summer, and two days after I got back from that trip, I spent two days in an icy, air-conditioned hall with nearly 2,000 other people and took a test I thought I’d never take again.

And I passed it.

Today, I went to Fanueil Hall and sat with 174 other attorneys, most of them 10 years or more my junior, and under the watchful glare of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass, I swore to uphold the constitutions of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States of America, and took the oldest lawyer’s oath in the country.

Today, I feel like a lawyer.

The Roll of Attorneys contains the signatures of every lawyer who's ever practiced in Massachusetts, including me.

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You don’t believe me. Oh, no, you needn’t apologize. You needn’t protest. I wouldn’t believe me, either, if it weren’t for this wooden box on my dresser, and the matter of my own missing soul.

Which box, you ask? I do have quite a collection, don’t I? I’ve always enjoyed boxes. This one’s a puzzle box, you see? But that’s not the one you’re interested in. This is the one. It doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s rather ragged, really. Handmade, of course, though it wouldn’t have to be. Almost any object will do, or so I’ve been told.

Open it? Yes, if you’d like. The soul can’t escape. It’s bound to the wood, I think, or maybe to the painting on the lid. I’m not sure how it works. I didn’t bind it myself, you know.

Well, that is an interesting question. I really have no idea. I’m sure most people would say the devil was involved, but I don’t know that I believe in the devil, even now.

All I can tell you is that on a Friday morning not long ago, I found the most extraordinary doll. She was made of porcelain, very old, in a pink satin dress, and the skirt was a dusting-brush. I don’t collect dolls, of course. I collect boxes. But she called to me. She called to me in a way that I recognize now as suspicious. I didn’t recognize it then, though, and so I purchased her, or perhaps she was given to me. I thought I paid for her, but no money changed hands. I brought her home, and placed her here, on the dresser, just where I keep the soul-box now. I even used her to dust the boxes sometimes. I was doing that the day I dropped her. Oh, she didn’t break, but when she fell to the floor I felt… Something. I felt…

Well, yes. That’s it exactly. I felt as though I’d fallen. The room spun around me and for a moment, I thought I was looking up at myself from a vantage on the floor.

I can’t say I was very surprised when she disappeared a few days later. I thought at first someone had broken in, but a burglar would have taken more than my little porcelain doll. That space on the dresser was empty for months, and I drifted through my days in a fog. Nothing reached me, nothing touched me. I found myself sleeping a great deal, unable to enjoy the simplest pleasures. I hardly tasted my food. And then, on a desperate visit to the same shop where I purchased my doll, I found the box. It called to me, just as she had, and I understood.

Oh, no, sir. I couldn’t tell you where the store is now. I wouldn’t if I could.

The puzzle box? If you like. Would you like to see how it opens? No? Let me just wrap it up for you, then.

Have a nice day, sir.

–

Notes: This piece was written in response to Chuck Wendig’s weekly Flash Fiction Challenge. I mulled over the prompt for a full week, decided to skip it, then had the idea to select a random item from either eBay or Etsy and write about whatever I found. As it turned out, I used one object from each site.

First, at eBay, I found this:

And then, at Etsy, I found this:

And then all I needed was some way to bring them together.

The rest of the stories for this week’s Challenge are linked here. I’m off to read them all.

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I didn’t find the story I was looking for (I suspect it’s on an external harddrive I put in storage for the summer), but I did find a scene I wrote for a creative writing class at around the same time, and I liked it, so I thought I’d polish it up and post it. The assignment, which I believe came from Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School, was to start a story with the line, “Sam didn’t know if it was a wonderful omen or a sign of disaster that…”

Sam didn’t know if it was a wonderful omen or a sign of disaster that the first two eggs she broke for her Sunday-morning, three-egg omelette were double-yolked. She stared at the four yellow orbs swimming at the bottom of the stainless-steel bowl. A white dot of membrane in the center of one made it look as though it stared back.

“So the question is,” she asked them, “do I cook the two of you, or risk cracking a third?” They didn’t answer. Four yolks and two whites meant an overly-rich, but not overly large, omelette. Six yolks would make a double omelette, and if she froze half of it, she wouldn’t have to cook next Sunday. Five yolks, though – she wasn’t sure what to do with five yolks.

“The sensible thing,” she said to the eggs, “would be to stop at four. Actually, no. The sensible thing  would be to fish one of you out of there and feed it to the cat.” The eggs expressed no opinion. She looked around to see if Satin (Carl, damn him, insisted on calling her Satan) was in the kitchen, but the sleek black beast was nowhere to be seen. Of all the mornings for her to decide that she didn’t need to supervise in the kitchen!

Fine, then. If neither the eggs nor the cat would help her make up her mind… The creamy white shell rough between her nail-bitten fingers, Sam cracked another egg. One yolk. Of course. Glaring at it, she poured it into a bowl for the cat, then liberated another yolk from the threat of omelette and sent it to join its friend. That’d teach them. She set the bowl next to Satin’s water dish and picked up her whisk.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” she told the eggs. The gleaming steel of the whisk pierced the skin of the first golden yolk, and as it began to bleed into the white, Sam felt her stomach lurch and her mouth go dry. “It’s just an egg,” she whispered. “It’s just an egg, and you’re going to eat it, and you’ll be fine.” She drove the whisk firmly into another yolk, then dropped it on the counter and bolted to the sink.

Moments later, the ends of her hair trailing into her morning coffee, and what looked like part of last night’s sandwich, she started to cry. “Dammit.” Behind her, Satin had discovered the bowl of yolks. Sam pulled the roll of paper towels out from under the sink, blotted her hair, and went to put the rest of the eggs in the refrigerator. Satin would get those, too, but she shouldn’t have them all at once.

The purring cat didn’t look up when Sam stepped over her. Her glossy black feet tread the floor in rhythm as she ate. Sam cinched her robe tight and stumbled down the narrow hall to the living room, damp paper towels still clutched in her fist. The curtains were still drawn. She had been enjoying the sunshine in the kitchen, but she liked the cavelike feeling of the living room more. Her cellphone was on the end table, next to Carl’s key. She knocked it off the table when she picked up the phone.

“Deborah? Yes, I do know what time it is, but I don’t know who else to call.” Sam didn’t actually know what time it was, but it wasn’t important. Anything before noon on a Sunday was going to prompt Deb to ask that question. And the next question? “No, I’m not okay.” And the next. “I’m… Shit. Can you come over? No. Never mind. I shouldn’t ask you to come over. I just… Deb, I’m pregnant, and I don’t know what to do.”

The sleepy voice on the other end of the line suddenly snapped awake. “Yes, I’m sure. I’m nine days late and I have puke in my hair.” “Yes, it’s Carl’s, and no, I haven’t told him yet. I called you first.” “Because we broke up last week.” Not just awake now – upset. Maybe a little bit angry. “Because I was hoping everything would work out, but it hasn’t. I would have called you today anyway.”

Of course. Of course she was coming over. Shit. She was coming over. “Of course I want you to come over – I was just saying that because I didn’t want to put you to any trouble. You can let yourself in.”

The smell of her hair was roiling her stomach. And the paper towels. She dropped them on the floor, where they’d cover Carl’s key. “I should get up,” she thought. “And take a shower. Deb’ll make me take a shower, if I haven’t already. I should make more coffee. She’ll want coffee.” But coffee was even more nauseating than her sticky, damp hair. And she was so, so tired. “I’ll just wait for her here,” she thought. The robe gaped away from her legs and chest, but there was a blanket piled at the end of the couch, still imprinted with a warm hollow the size of a small black cat. Sam curled into a tight ball and pulled the blanket up to her neck. She was still there, half asleep and trembling, when Deborah arrived half an hour later.

“You look awful,” Deb said. She knelt beside the couch with her arms wide, then recoiled from the state of Sam’s hair. “And you smell worse. Come on, up. You’re getting in the shower, and I’ll make us some coffee.”

“I knew you were going to say that,” Sam mumbled. Moving as though she were more than five months pregnant, instead of just five weeks, she hoisted herself off the couch and stumbled to the bathroom, bumping into the wall twice on the way.

Wrinkling her nose, Deborah picked the crumpled paper towels up off the floor and carried them to the trash can in the kitchen. She left Carl’s key where it was. “I’m starving,” she announced, not sure whether Sam could hear her over the rattling groan of the pipes. She found the coffee above the sink, right where she and Sam had kept it in grad school, and started a fresh pot. Noticing the chopped green onions, ham, and bell peppers on the cutting board, she opened the refrigerator to find the three egg yolks in their stainless steel bowl. “I’m just going to finish this omelette you started,” she yelled.

Deb cracked another egg. It had two yolks. “Cool!” she yelled. “I got a double yolk!” She cracked one more. “If it’s got two yolks, too,” she told Satin, “I’ll give one to you.” Satin peered mournfully into her empty bowl, then stared up at Deb. “Poor kitty,” Deb said. “Sam didn’t feed you this morning, did she?” The next egg only had one yolk, though, so Deb rummaged through the cabinets until she found Satin’s dry food. Satin was unimpressed.

By the time Sam got out of the shower, pink and glistening and refreshingly free of vomit, Deb had set the table with matching plates and cups, laid out over a green and white floral print tablecloth she’d found wedged into a bottom drawer. It was creased and a bit musty, but pretty in the late-morning light. Sam shuddered, instinctively, when she saw the omelettes, but her treacherous stomach had no reservations about the eggs now. It wanted breakfast.

“Those omelettes are gorgeous,” she said. They were – perfectly browned and folded. Deb had always been a marvelous cook.

“Of course they are,” Deb said. “Now, sit down and tell me about our baby.”

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Ficlets, alas, is gone, and our story-teller believed that the story she told there was gone as well. But there was, she now knows, a backup made, made and hosted within an archive housed at Ficly, begotten of Ficlets and not killed by AOL.

This, then, is the story:

I knew we shouldn’t have given the monkey the bottle rockets. I even told my brother so, but he never did listen to me.

“It’s my monkey,” he said. “And they’re my rockets. It’s my truck! I’ll do what I want.”

Freenkus (the monkey’s name was Freenkus) didn’t get it right away. But once Dave showed him to how to put a rocket in an empty bottle and touch a punk to the wick, Freenkus caught on fast.

“Look at that aim!” Dave said, when Freenkus whanged a rocket off one of our neighbor’s cows. Dave was on his 6th Corona. That might be why starting Freenkus on his 1st seemed like such a good idea.

“He needs his own bottle,” Dave said.

I took it away after Freenkus had his first sip and drank the rest myself, but a mouthful’s a lot for a monkey who doesn’t drink.

The next rocket took Dave in the ear. It wouldn’t have hurt him so much if he hadn’t been standing in the back of the truck at the time. When he came up off the road, gravel sticking to the blood on his cheek, Freenkus dived behind me.

Smart monkey.

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Let’s get back to that, shall we?

Jordan, like Stephen King, was very, very good at sketching out a character in a very few strokes.

“Easier to watch old Harriet Bennigan, who made Mrs. Perrine look like a spring chicken, bent over her walker in her bright red fall coat, out for her morning lurch,” King wrote in Insomnia. And, in the same book, he describes a neighborhood “where no house was complete without at least one Fisher-Price Big Wheel trike standing on the listless lawn, where girls were stepping dynamite at sixteen and all too often dull-eyed, fat-bottomed mothers of three at twenty-four.” (Because King’s places are characters, too.)

The comparison occurred me to when I reread The Fires of Heaven, which contains one of my favorite minor characters, a man named Pevin. (Whose fate I’m about to spoil, so quit reading if that bothers you.)

[Asmodean] no longer carried the crimson banner with its ancient symbol of Aes Sedai. That office fell to a Cairhienin refugee named Pevin, an expressionless fellow in a patched farmer’s coat of rough gray wool, on a brown mule that should have been put out to grass from pulling a cart some years back. A long scar, still red, ran up the side of his narrow face from jaw to thinning hair.

Pevin had lost his wife and sister to the famine, his brother and a son to the civil war… Fleeing toward Andor had cost him a second son at the hands of Andoran soldiers and a second brother to bandits, and returning had cost the last son, dead on a Shaido spear, and his daughter as well, carried off while Pevin was left for dead. The man rarely spoke, but as near as Rand could make out, his beliefs had winnowed down to a bare three. The Dragon had been reborn. The Last Battle was coming. And if he stayed close to Rand al’Thor, he would see his family avenged before the world was destroyed.

In a couple of paragraphs, Jordan tells you who Pevin is, what he looks like, where he came from, and where he’s going. He also tells you that the man’s expression never changes. But in case you missed that bit…

Pevin’s face never changed, though the bright banner whipping above him appeared a mockery in that place.

Whoever managed to put hand to anyone’s boot or stirrup, even Pevin’s, wore joy on their faces…

Pevin, with the crimson banner hanging limply from its staff, and no more expression surrounded by Aiel than at any other time.

You might also have noticed that Pevin carries a banner? I’m not sure, but it might be red.

Pevin came down past Bael to stand behind Rand’s shoulder with the banner, his narrow, scarred face absolutely blank. “Does the whole palace know about this, then?” Rand asked.

“I heard,” Pevin said. His jaw worked, chewing for more words. Rand had found him a replacement for his patched country coat, good red wool, and the man had had Dragons embroidered on it, one climbing either side of his chest. “That you were going. Somewhere.” That seemed to exhaust his store.

“Chewing for more words,” by the way, is a brilliant line.

Pevin looked no more perturbed by what he saw than the Aiel chief, which was to say, not at all.

Aiel, if you didn’t know, are always calm, too. Unless they’re veiled for battle. Then they might crack a smile, but you wouldn’t know, since you can’t see their faces behind the veils. They like to tell jokes, too.

Pevin would carry that banner wherever Rand went, even the Pit of Doom, and never blink.

Yes, we gathered.

[Rand] took in the plaza again, and his joy faded. Nothing could extinguish it, but the bodies lying in heaps where the Aiel had made their stand lessened it. Too many were not big enough to be men. There was Lamelle, veil gone and half her throat as well; she would never make him soup again. Pevin, both hands clutching the wrist-thick shaft of the Trolloc spear through his chest and the first expression on his face Rand had ever seen. Surprise.

“That’s perfect,” I thought when I read it again. And for a character like Pevin, who’s introduced on page 739 and dies on page 954, it is. The problem, as anyone who’s read even a couple of the books knows, is that this is Jordan’s approach to all of his characters. Rand is tall. The Aiel are fierce. Nynaeve yanks on her dark, waist-length braid when she’s angry, which is always. Elayne tips her chin up haughtily and puts her nose in the air. Lan is stoic. Moiraine is short. Oh, and Mat? Mat’s a gambler who likes pretty girls and whose bottom Nynaeve often paddled, not so many years ago. Sometimes, he hears dice rattling inside his head.

@JayBushman might have read the books.

All of which brings me back to @LawrenceBlock. The passage I went looking for, all those months ago, was in his chapter on Character Building.

It’s not uncommon for writers to do a lot of labeling and mistake it for originality of characterization. “I’m starting a detective series,” a hopeful writer said to me not long ago, “and I think I’ve got something really original. My character never gets out of bed before noon, and he makes it a rule always to wear one piece of red clothing, and the only thing he ever drinks is white creme de menthe on the rocks. He has a pet rhesus monkey named Bitsy and a parrot named Sam. What do you think?”

What I think is that the speaker has not a character but a collection of character tags. It might work to have a character with any of all of these labels in his garments. Matter of fact, I wrote the above paragraph thinking of a detective character of the late David Alexander’s who lived upstairs of a 42nd Street flea circus, always wore a loud vest, drank only Irish whiskey and never took a drink before four o’clock or refused one after that hour. That character, however, was not the mere sum of these attributes. It is not the quirks that make an enduring character but the essential personality which the quirks highlight. How that character views the world, how acts and reacts, is of much greater importance than what he had for breakfast.

And that’s the problem with Jordan’s character building, throughout the books. Too often, his characters – even his main characters – are collections of labels, hanging from an empty frame. As a result, I find myself reading for story and plot, rather than for character. When the story slows down, or gets mired in details of hairstyles and politics and clothing, I get impatient – which is a terrible thing to be when you’re less than halfway through a series that runs to four million words or more.

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