Papas Fritas
"Don't... what are you doing?" There may have been a note or two of panic in my voice.
What she was doing, huddled down at the passenger side door like a dog burying a bone (not a likely place to bury a bone, I know), was trying to cut a hole in the window where it met disappeared into the door.
"Umm. Nothing." She sat up straight, her hand, with the one single glinting thing, resting in her lap.
"Were you trying to cut a hole in the window?"
"I was just checking that it was a diamond."
There was a sharp crack and a sucking noise from behind her right shoulder. I saw a flash of light reflect off something bouncing in the road in the headlights of the cars behind me.
The weird thing is that it wasn't really a diamond. Which perhaps accounts for my notes of panic. It was just an experiment I'd made with an unpopped popcorn kernel and my dusty old rock polisher I'd discovered in my parent's attic the last time we visited.
disclaimer:
This week's short and sweet issue is brought to you by Dylan, who will exhaust even the most energetic of people. William Murphy's installment of his latest series for us hasn't arrived as of publish-time, so we may see the resumption of it next week. Then again, we may get marmots in paradise from another of our staff writers, who've been doing sweet nothing for a few weeks on end.
So listen, enough with that, here it is again, our sales pitch, because Fenway Fiction is at one hundred ninety two thousand, four hundred forty seven in the Amazon sales rankings.
That's all well and good... but is it deserving of the passion, the fervor people have for the Red Sox? I think not. You think Red Sox fans would devour this book in this quiet period known colloquially as the "Hot Stove," desperate for the slightest mention of their beloved team. There would be fights akin to the XBox 360 wars that broke out in stores nationwide when that thing went live. But I've heard of nary a fight, not one incident about anyone getting belligerent about getting their Fenway Fiction. So I have to assume one of three things (or perhaps all of them):
1) You are all waiting until the last possible moment to buy your copy of Fenway Fiction for all those people for you don't know what to get for Christmas.
2) You are all waiting until after the Christmas holiday, for the brand new, almost completely uncommercialized holiday known as (working title) December 28th, the Day of the Reading. This day, of course, is celebrated most years on December 28th, in a bookstore in Webster, Massachusetts, which isn't terribly far from the Connecticut border, and is easily accessible off the Mass Pike exit for Auburn/Worcester, and then follow 290/I-395 signs, taking 395 South, getting off on the Route 16 exit towards Webster/Dudley. You can't miss it. The celebrations include people getting up and reading stories from their favorite books, like, say, Fenway Fiction, talking to various authors, and getting them to sign copies of books (little known fact: I will sign copies of Fenway Fiction as well as any Flann O'Brien books you want signed). It is on that day that you plan on buying enough copies to build that extra wing you'd always wanted for your house entirely out of copies of Fenway Fiction, which is an admirable use for the book, but not necessarily recommended by the publisher or your mortgage lender.
3) The calmed passions are solely for the benefit of Manny Ramirez in an effort to convince him that he could make a home in Boston, and he could be comfortable, because when you've had nearly no knife injuries as a result of a fiction book about the Red Sox, well, then perhaps the region isn't as crazy as everyone makes it out to be. So please, Manny, stick around in Boston, hit the crap out of the ball, show off the latest eyewear from Oakley, make flyballs an adventure, like they're supposed to be.
Those are my assumptions, at any rate. And if you don't fit any of those bills, well, then, please, for the love of all that's holy and good, make us stop talking about our Amazon sales ranking, to which all publishers, great and small, do bow.
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