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A quote: “I’m kind of spoiled, but the great thing about life is that you never know what’s around the corner.” ~~ Stockard Channing
I’ll start with a story …
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How many times had father bailed her out of trouble? She went through 2 or 3 nannies a year until she was 16.
She’d take off and daddy always brought her home.
Except this last time.
She decided to hitch home. The guy who stopped? She commanded him to drive her home, some 1400 miles– RIGHT NOW. He pulled out a coin, “Tails, princess, I take you home now. Heads, you come work at the ranch to earn it.”
She fussed, she raged and 25 years and five kids later, she was never so glad to have lost that toss.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Cameron says: “Dude, check her out!” my friend said. I followed his gaze and saw the woman looking expectantly at our car. Yep. She was gorgeous and her smile brightened as the car came to a stop.
“Hey, guys. Can you take me to-”
“Cover your ears,” was the only warning my friend heard before the shotgun roared. He looked at me in shock only to see me point.
The image of the woman was gone and in its place was the shrieking remains of the dying carnivorous plant.
“Next time, look at the shadow before doing something stupid,” I told him.
People always talked about Silicon Valley having a Mediterranean climate, but now that Elaine was here in the Levant, she could see the difference. Beautiful as the land between the Santa Cruz and Diablo ranges was, it couldn’t compare to the real thing. The light that filled the air, the ancient stone walls that might well date all the way back to the times of the Bible stories she’d heard so many times in her Iowa childhood — and a woman in modern attire and a broad sun hat, reminding her that while Israel was the Jewish homeland, it was also a modern secular state, and since the end of the Energy Wars the metropole of an informal empire of Arab satellite states under the Sharon Doctrine.
Thinking of Iowa made her recall how certain people in her hometown considered her spoiled, and would often remark upon it after she returned from her annual visits to Russia for Academician Voronsky to check the development of her lungs. And thinking back, she had chattered an awful lot about the things she’d done with her aunt, uncle and cousins, who were part of the new Imperial Family. Was that criticism part of the reason why her parents terminated those visits when she hit puberty? Worse, had they considered her disappointment at being informed of that termination proof of the accusations that they’d allowed her to become spoiled?
Not that it really mattered at this point. Right now she only wanted to get herself and her children back home to Sparta Point, back together with Spartan — but that couldn’t happen until Mikhael Yehuda found a way to arrange passage via the Israeli consulate in San Francisco.
Navig8r says: At long last! Time to break out the party clothes and celebrate with the rest of the team. Our undercover op had been successful. We busted the traffickers and their clients. We’d spent a lot of time and risked multiple lives infiltrating their networks, their rat lines, and their job sites. But it was worth it. They would all be in jail for a long time. I’ll keep the beat up suitcase as a memento, something to show my grandkids. It completed my disguise as an east European refugee without documents. And also in memory of Martina, a real one.
Dupin says: “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
“Will you be quiet?” I liked her screwy humor, but not right now. We’d heard too much, they were looking for us, and she was sitting out in the open. I scanned the area. How close were we? Were we safe?
Still, she was right. We hitched a farm truck this far. If they knew, we’d already be dead. I was the paranoid one.
Dad’s cabin wasn’t far away. We could hide there a long time. Nobody knew about it, not even her, and it had a well and months of food. We’d survive.
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