“Should I be drinking something with a scythe on it?” I asked as she poured a shot for me, then one for herself. “Don’t answer that. I’m going to do it anyway.”
She picked up her shot glass, lifted it, then said, “Bottoms up until you’re facedown.”
She drank. I drank.
She didn’t cough. I coughed.
“You all right, Rainy?” she asked, and I could tell she was trying not to laugh at me although she wasn’t trying very hard.
“I feel like I got punched in the throat.”
“Hate it?”
“I don’tnothate it.” I took another sip. “Wow.”
“Feeling better?” she asked.
“Not yet.” I finished my shot, counted to five, felt a warm fire crawling up my brain stem. “Okay, now I feel better.” I held out the shot glass to her.
“Another?” she asked.
“Bury it in the ground,” I said. “Please.”
She took the glass from me and placed it back in the picnic basket along with her glass and the bottle too.
“So you said your name is…Maxine?”
“Maxine Blake,” she said. “Not Medda Baker. I wrote myself into the story because…I was being meta.”
“Never liked metafiction.”
“Me neither, but it’s my last book, so I thought I’d pull out all the stops. And as I won’t be reading the reviews…” she said with a strange expression on her face. “Well, are you feeling better now?”
“Do you really care? No offense, but if you really are my writer, you’ve ruined my life.”
“Fighting words,” Maxine said, though she didn’t sound particularly offended.
“You killed my mother.” I lifted my fists. Generally, I don’t believe in violence toward authors, but for my own author, I felt at least a hard slap was justified.
She winced. “I did, didn’t I? I’d apologize, but…Well, you know, it made a better story.”
“Also, the man I love and I can’t be together. I have a missing inheritance apparently. Oh, and my grandfather has vanished, maybe disappeared. Explain yourself, please.”
“What was I supposed to do?” she asked. “I’m writing a story, not a recipe. Stories thrive on conflict. You do realize the fairy tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ without the Big Bad Wolf is nothing but a brief paragraph about an uneventful food delivery.”
“Fine. Bad things have to happen in stories, but can you please tell me what’s going on? Why am I here? With you? We’re not supposed to meet, right?”
“It’s a long story, so get comfortable.”
“We’re sitting on a rug on the floor of a Hall of Mirrors. Nothing is comfortable about this situation.”
“I can help with that,” she said. “Stand by.”
Chairs appeared. Cozy armchairs, the kind you sit down in and then require help—physical and mental—to get back up again. They had a distinctly hideous floral pattern.
“That’s more like it,” she said and patted the back of one of thearmchairs. “We had a chair in the library where I grew up like this one. The Storytime chair. We kids would sit on the rug, and library volunteers would read to us. I dreamed of the day I would be the one sitting in that chair, telling stories.”
She sat down, and I took the chair opposite her. We were still in a bizarre Hall of Mirrors that made no sense, but at least the seating arrangement had improved.
