What follows is a free write exercise to try to get my protagonist out of the cannon she's been sitting inside for some 70 pages of story!  Yikes!  If you have the time, please just read it for what it is.  FYI, Irene is a "human cannonball" circa 1929-30; Alex is Irene's brother who blows a whistle when impact is imminent; the real life Irene who inspires this novel was court-ordered to fulfill her contract with Atlantic City Steel Pier Mgmnt.

Irene, 1930 [wc = 492]
Jail Time

Inside the cannon on the Steel Pier Irene waits for Alex to give the chromed whistle the Get Set blows.  She is confined and uncomfortable and while only two minutes may have elapsed, she wants to climb out and give the judge who ordered her into this cylindrical cell a raspberry like he’s never heard before in his white-whiskered life.  Not that he could hear it from the Atlantic City courthouse where he probably sits in chambers fingering the folds of his judgmental robes, running dry hands down the lists of Whose Life Can I Ruin Today.  What was it he said?  This is not my signature here on the contract, dear woman. 

Dear woman my ass, Irene fumes.  Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten us into, she says to herself, wishing she sat next to Bucky at the cinema, wishing she could laugh, and not at her own stupid tricks, but at Ollie and Stan, if their latest short still played at the Bijou.  She would ask Bucky about going back, seeing it a fourth time.  She would explain to him that he’d laughed so loud the other three times she couldn’t hear what the two actors said.  I’ll tell him that.  He likes when I blame him for what’s got nothing to do with him.  Makes him laugh.  I like when he laughs.  Have since the first time I heard him. 

She’d spent a night in jail for that signature not the judge’s, but hers.  Some might have been unnerved – but Irene had been on the inside before, and not just for bailing out Alex, not just at the front desk cajoling some beefy sergeant.  Not in the same cell, not even in the same state, but jail, all the same, on Armistice Day, 1918.  This contract gig and resulting slumber party with the hookers and whores was for Contempt of Court; her first time through was for Contempt of Decency and All that is Morally Right, or so the neck-to-toe clad bathers would have it.  What did they know, Irene thinks.  Nothin’.  They didn’t know nothin’. 

Alex blasts the signal.  Irene tenses, leverages every muscle, thinking as she does so, Everything.  They knew everything.  If I’d listened . . . if I’d listened, if I’d only –

When the impact comes it is like a train slamming into the soles of her feet, all the cars of her spine jamming one into the next, and she is airborne over the stands, white straw boaters are blurs on the heads of men, faces turned upwards like dimes set aglow in the light.  Then, the water, like a great hard fist, the fist of a fighter who has survived since the beginning, slams Irene broadside.  The rib she’s grieved the day long for its pain bends as surely as a clean jackknife off a sycamore platform from someplace before.  Is my cape caught?  I’m not wearing a cape!   Her cry underwater is a bubble nobody hears.     

Draws the reader in and gets us on her side. This is the first time we have gotten so deep into her mind. And I like the inklings of what is to come. The last line is a clincher.

The first paragraph gives us just enough information to whet our appetites for more. Then you take us somewhere else in the next paragraph, and the next. Curiosity grows like the bubble in her lungs.

Wow, all this is new to me...I didn't know you were writing prose.  Poor Irene. You do the firing so well.  The spine...

You gave a minimum of information about the character in the introduction but i felt fiercely defendant of her with about three lines.

Welldone Sue

Oh Chicky, I am so glad to see this here, so glad.
It is superb, really really tight. Damn thing sizzles off the page.
Are you just looking for general feedback here or do you want us to get the fine toothed combs out? If the latter, well, that's gonna be a tough one, really. A few word choices here and there, but again, this is HOT!

Thanks for posting this for us all.

HEY!! PEOPLE - READ THIS!!

B.

Thanks, Lavonne.  The more I search for her, the more she becomes.  Glad, really glad, this short bit worked.
Thank you, Sue.  Yes, Ouch! Can you imagine the thrust needed to catapult a woman over the tiers of spectators?  Makes me cringe, just writing about it again here.
And B!  How sweet your are to be so happy to find this.  This segment is short enough to post and perhaps get a few reads, but posting anything much longer doesn't work so well -- people don't have the time -- and, the reading isn't easy on screen.  But YOU make me feel special!  Thanks.

Thanks one and all.

lynn

Read this to warm up my ears, chicky.

One very solid piece of work.

Mugs

boomerang