HURRAY for our Faux Hemingway Contestants

LUCY BURDETTE: FOUR FUNERALS AND MAYBE A WEDDING and DEATH ON THE MENU are launched, thanks to so many friends, readers, and fans! We had a mini-reunion of Reds at the Brookline Booksmith and a fabulous second event at RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison CT. 

And now for the faux Hemingway contest--you made us howl with glee and appreciation!

Marla Bradeen:

"A Meowable Feast"

He was a six-toed cat who had now gone three hours with nary a bite. He was thin and getting thinner. He could feel his fur losing its luster, his orange stripes fading. Everything about him was getting dull.

Except his eyes. They were the color of an elusive marlin swimming at sea, and allowed him to see in the dark of night.

"Meow," he said. He touched his human's face with six, cramped toes.

His human grunted and turned away, dragging the pillow over his head.

The cat sat and waited. He would try again, because cats are not made for defeat. Perhaps next time he would use his claws. But he knew his human wouldn't wake until the bell tolled at daylight. He had learned long ago that when the sun rises, the human also rises. This time of year the days were short, and the nights stretched long.

His stomach rumbled. He was now almost into the fourth hour of starvation.

Some days nine lives seemed like a blessing. Other days, like a curse.

Ann Mason

I am into plagiarism this morning, so here comes my bad Hemingway discovery, courtesy of Norman Lessing, who made me laugh:

"The Snow Spiraled Down Like Dandruff
The snow spiraled down like dandruff, flaking the head and shoulders of hatless Angelenos. It was
strange weather for L.A.—especially strange for August. The man came into Harry’s Bar & American
Grill. He shook snowy pearls from his matted hairpiece. The woman wore leather pants. She twisted
around on her stool. It made a noise like stepping on a frog.
She looked at the man, oddly. “Dandruff?”
“Nay, but my name is Robert Jordan.” He spoke in the pure dialect of bullrings the world over. “I know
naught of a sucker called Druff”….
He spat an oyster at the spittoon. It missed. The shiny opalescence put him in mind of the eye of a
slaughtered bull, left overlong in the sun. “And what of the girl,” he said, “the close-cropped one?”
“Nay, but the earth moved for her twice more, Ingles. Then it stopped.”
“It is a matter of small wonderment. After forty-two years.”
Norman Lessing

Margaret Turkevich

Fish thrashed in the farm pond. Big fish. Hybrid blue gills. A large hand surfaced. Bigger than a fish. Blue gills all over it.
“Seen the new fish guy? Wonder if the blue gills got him. They bite on anything.”

Flora Church

Madeleine lay under the mosquito netting and watched the smoke of her cigarette curl away, each puff more languid than the last, the spirals spelling out a message of 'more'. More what, she wondered? Coffee? Cheetohs? The man (she thought of him as The man now, the last of the whiskey flaming in the fire burning away whatever had been left, the tatters of her feelings for him). The man was out in the bush again, his gun bigger than his ego, after the lion which had roared in the night, challenging him to bring his gun and new khaki shirt, his polished boots—not that he had ever done the polishing—his beaters and yes the whole damned camp to chase forever across the endless veldt in search of the one thing he could never reclaim. His soul? Or so he said. Madeleine snorted, stubbed out her cigarette and threw back the netting. For Gawd’s sake, he was a dentist from New Jersey, with too much money and no—none at all—common sense. She hoped the lion ate him.

AJ Pompano, with apologies to…

A Clean, Not-So-Well-Lighted Place
It was very late and everyone had left the Truman House except a young food critic who stood in the shadows the boxes of the storeroom made against the electric light. In the evening the house was busy with diplomats. But now the police had removed the body and the young girl wanted to get her own take on what had happened because she was curious and now at night it was quiet and she felt the difference.
Her mother still in the kitchen had catered the event. She knew that the young critic was about to get in over her head. And while she was a good daughter she knew that if the girl became too involved there would be more death on the menu. 

Rhys Bowen

It was hot in the plaza. damned hot
"Rodrigo" said the old man. "My son, come with me."
"I ?" Said the youth.
"thou," said the old man. " today we face our destiny in the sun and the blood and the sweat. Today is the day we stuff the olives."

Coralee Hicks

The old woman was thin and guant with wrinkles on the tips of her fingers from the wash water. Everything about her was old except for the soap that stood pristine near the wash board. She was an old woman who washed alone and had gone eighty four days without a shirt,
the first 40 days the girl had been with her but after 40 days her parents told her she was unlucky. It made the girl sad to see each day the laundry hung without a shirt and she always went down to hand close pins. The laundry hung unfurled moving in the sodden plodding wind.

Donamae Kutska

A good and fine weapon senor, who is its maker? The barman reached for the gun but it recoiled when it growled at him. 

Pat D

-->

He sauntered in. He sat. He stared. He stared at me. He slowly blinked. And stared. He groaned. Four o'clock. Dinnertime for the dog.

Amanda LeRougetel



And our winner is Marla Bradeen for A MEOWABLE FEAST!! Please email me lucyburdette at gmail dot com with your snail mail address and we'll get those books in the mail!