HUNTING

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

I’m on a manhunt. Or maybe it’s a woman I’m hunting. I’m not sure yet.

I’m not even sure if this is the protagonist or antagonist. Hero or heroine? Killer, thief or kidnapper? My Muse has been ready to play at the oddest times. While chopping tomatoes for tonight’s tacos or shoving laundry into the washer, bits of a personality are flitting along the edges of my consciousness like a fly at a summer’s picnic . A bit annoying, but interesting in the fact that ideas like flies flitter in from nowhere it seems, nagging at me until I either shoo them away, swat them in their tracks or allow them to do what they want.

Uninvited and infringing on time I have allocated for other things, I wish they’d wait until the ideas were more full-blown.

Sitting in a board meeting taking notes about a fundraiser in December and staffing a booth at a business fair in May, my mind wanders to an empty farmhouse that seems much too silent. Why is it so quiet? Where are the people who live here, eating meals prepared in the hot kitchen on a summer’s day and sleeping out on the screen porch just trying to cool down for a few hours of slumber before starting their routine all over again tomorrow? Why do I know this is 1943 without aid of a calendar hanging on the wall?

I’m at an all day business seminar, a bit tired from the four hour drive the night before. The hotel is bustling with people wanting to learn what’s new in the marketplace. I am dutifully taking notes of how the proper marketing will enhance our business when it happens again. There is a couple seated at the next table that seems slightly interesting. He is older, but she isn’t young, except on his arm. I’m betting she is the best trophy wife he can afford. Neither of them appear all that happy. She wears too much jewelry for a morning business meeting, but she is eager to be here. I can see in her expression she needs more than wants to make her own money while she’s spending his. What if I’m not the only one studying them? Full of business owners and those with the capital to become investors, this place is ripe for a con man picking his next mark.

I take a sip of coffee and my mind has wandered to the words I jotted down concerning the couple. If I wrote my thoughts about murdering someone on a blog, would the FBI be monitoring me? Should they be? Mine are fictional, but how could one tell just by reading them on a computer screen?

Okay, now I am scaring myself. I make my way to the back of the room and refill my coffee mug. Another man follows me, stands to my side with his own cup in hand, waiting. I wonder why he isn’t refilling his own cup from the other urn. Just as I am about to think I’m paranoid, he speaks.

“At the break, did I overhear you to say you’re a writer?”

I nod.

He smiles a bit nervously.

“Me, too,” he finally says. “Could you take a look at my work sometime?”

Inwardly, I laugh at myself. He’s probably been sitting at his own table doing exactly what I have – flirting with a Muse. There are worse things in the world to be than a writer in search of the next character or plot. One of them is asking someone you don’t know to read your work.

“What do you write?” I ask.

“Horror,” he says. He blushes and adds, “And a little poetry.”

“Actually, I can do better than read your work,” I say. I hope he’s not thinking I am offering to steer him to an agent or editor, because I have no idea where he is as a writer yet. Perhaps he’s just begun to travel this road with so many forks. “Do you know about the writer’s organizations here?”

He doesn’t, so I mention the groups I’m aware of and a few names he could connect with at a meeting or at least on the Internet. I tell him about the markets and horror authors I know personally. Fortunately, I also know a couple of poets who could advise him more than I could.

As he walks away, he seems happier and so am I. It’s a good feeling to help others – even in such a small way. I watch him take his seat a row ahead of mine and to the left.

I wonder if the pudgy guy sitting next to him ever thought about robbing his employer or what would happen if he ambled into an empty farmhouse out on the Kansas prairie in 1943. Do you suppose he would be the hero or the villain?