What stories would you write if you knew they might come true?

What if you had no idea how they would come true, or when, or who they would affect?

“Once upon a time could ruin her life, or lead her to a happy ending she never expected.”

That’s Jane Margaret Blake’s dilemma in my new novel, You, Jane, as she struggles with her fables, the tales she writes that create havoc in her real world. In her “fables” animals, people, angels, and the Universe itself conspire to destroy Jane’s last chance to be with her old love, or, just maybe, to bring her into the arms of a new love.

Years ago, one of her fables pushed her best friend Charlie into the arms of another woman. Now, Jane’s written a story that might have shoved Charlie’s little boy in front of an angry dog, putting the boy’s life in danger. In the fable, a toy monkey with holes in its socks comes to the rescue, but in real life? Jane shakes away the questions in her mind.

And while she’s drinking away her fear, a new character appears in Jane’s tales: a man escaping hell with only a knapsack on his back and a ukulele by his side.

Jane calls Charlie to check on his son, and she longs to tell him about knapsack man”¦ and to discover if it might be him.

Excerpt:

They didn’t see each other for a long time. After a while Charlie’s first wife left him, and he married again, rather quickly, some of his friends thought. When Jane and Charlie finally reconnected, Charlie and his second wife, Cricket, were parents to Jamie. Being a dad made Charlie unreasonably happy, and Jane loved him for it, among all the other reasons she loved Charlie. Was in love with him. Crazy in love with him. Had been, of course, since they were in college together.

Jane never married. She’d lived in a series of places with a series of cats. Now Joe, her current cat, stared at her while she dialed Charlie’s number.

“Hi, it’s me,” she said when he picked up the phone. “Before you tell me anything else, answer one question, please?”

“Hi yourself.” Charlie’s voice sounded hard. “Where the hell have you been? Didn’t you get my messages? Why didn’t you call earlier?”

“It’s a long story. I’m calling now and I need to know one thing, and don’t ask me why I need to know it, okay?” Jane closed her eyes and hoped Charlie’s good nature would win over his completely justified pissed-off-ness with her. It usually did, but she lived in fear of the day it wouldn’t, anymore.

“Fine. You tell me what you need to know, and then I’ll go back to my son. Because in case you didn’t hear, Jamie”””

“Wait! Did he”¦does he”¦did he have anything with him when it happened? Like, a toy or anything?”

Charlie paused on the other end of the line. “So you do know what happened.”

“I got your messages so I know he’s okay. I really need to know if he had something with him.”

“As a matter of fact, he did. We let him walk home from school alone for the first time, so he got to take one stuffed animal with him.”

Jane heard a roaring in her ears. “Was it”¦was it a monkey?”

“A monkey? No, not a toy monkey.”

“What was it, then?”

“Well, it’s the damndest thing. The day before, his mom gave him this stuffed butterfly. He didn’t really take to it at first, seemed to find it creepy, even. But, I don’t know”¦he must have rethought it or something, and that morning he insisted on taking it with him.”

Jane remembered the appearance of the butterfly in the fable, landing on the boy’s arm at exactly the wrong time. “So what happened?” she asked.

“Jamie came home from school, and some idiot left his gate open, and the idiot’s dog, which I guess he usually keeps on a chain, charged my kid. If the old guy hadn’t stepped in, I don’t know if Jamie would’ve arrived in one piece.”

“Old guy?”

“Yeah, a homeless guy, I guess, he had no shoes and holes in his socks. But he threw himself in between the dog and Jamie, and got his leg pretty well chewed up in the process.”

“How do you know he had holes in his socks?” Jane bit her lip.

“Jamie told me. He came running home, grabbed me, told me a man with “holy socks’ saved him from a monster. It took me a while to figure out what really happened.”

Jane stifled a laugh. Holy socks, indeed. But the stuffed butterfly still bothered her. “Charlie, where’s your wife?”

“She’s upstairs. Why?”

Good, she’s too far away to overhear us. “No real reason. I wonder why she got him that butterfly. What happened to it?”

“Now that you mention it, I don’t know. I haven’t seen it.” He paused. “Jane, is this another one?”

Jane considered for a moment whether to stall Charlie further, but she knew it would be useless.

“Yeah, Charlie. I think so.”

“You wrote a fable about my son being attacked, and you didn’t tell me?”

She could hear the anger building in his voice. “No, Charlie. I mean, yes, that’s what happened, but I didn’t know it was Jamie in the story. I didn’t, I swear.” Jane remembered it was the exact question””whose little boy is this?””she’d avoided asking herself at the time.

“Jane, you need to get this under control. Don’t tell me, you went out to Molly’s bar and got smashing drunk again last night. That’s why I didn’t hear from you.”

Jane hated it when Charlie guessed the worst about her and turned out to be right. “Molly doesn’t judge me.” She cringed at how pathetic she sounded. “Molly looks out for me, and he doesn’t care if I have one too many now and then.” Molly, full name Hugh David Mollone, was more than a great bartender. His kind soul co-existed with a wicked sense of humor. But Jane was wrong. Even Molly worried about how much she drank these days.

“I don’t judge you either, you idiot. I’m afraid for you. Can’t you tell the difference?” Something clunked on Charlie’s end of the phone. “I’ve got to go. Don’t go out drinking tonight, okay? If you get the urge call me instead. I’ll talk you down.”

“Charlie, I”””

“I have to run, sorry. Call me later, okay?”

Jane heard a click. “Charlie, I wrote another one,” she whispered into the dead phone. “This one might have a happy ending.”

~*~

You, Jane and my first novel, An Alien’s Guide to World Domination, are available at Amazon and other e-book retailers. Visit me at my blog, Point No Point, and learn more about my novels, short stories, and thoughts on writing, friendship, music, and baseball.