Pageant Question: When you look into the mirror, what do you see?

The big, yellow wrecking machines were at it again, this time on the next street over, but Jenny still jumped when she heard their diesel engines roar to life.  It was her street that had been the most recent victim of the city's progress.  Her block, which in its heyday had shoulder to shoulder houses, was now toothless and grey.  Rocky lots with the tops of filled-in cellars poking through the third-rate fill the demolition crews used to fulfill their city contracts were more common than living houses.  Now the block behind Jenny's house was getting the same treatment; onward the machines would churn, block by block, until they hit the expressway that decades ago replaced what had been an award-winning park.  On the other side of the cement scar, people still prospered.  On Jenny's side, people hung on.

Jenny was lucky that she owned her house without a mortgage and she had enough to pay taxes and bills on time through her unconventional work.  She spent most of her personal days on the upper floors as her front rooms were devoted to her business: fortune telling.  Jenny shoved her feet into work boots and threw on a sweater before setting the house alarm.  Even a lived-in house wasn't safe from copper pipe thieves, even in the daylight.  The early morning dew from a devastated former front lawn dampened her boots as she scanned the last and newest empty lot on her street, created only a week ago.  While she liked to get to the demolition sites before the crews were completely done, she hadn't been able to get out because of a sudden string of appointments.  It seemed like the word-of-mouth was finally gaining momentum.

A sudden sparkle in  the mud caught her eye.  It was a fragment of mirror.  Jenny freed it with her right hand and planted her boots firmly against the rocky clods.  Angling it over her left shoulder, she rotated the piece from side to side, up and down, peering beyond the reflection.

Pageant Question 16: Tell us about a book you’ve read that has influenced your life, and why?

Jamie's toes had gone numb from the cold and her knees would have bruises from  scuttling around the Circle of Power she had drawn on the stone slab floor in her workroom, but she couldn't stop until the Summoning was finished.  She had worked for months leading up to this moment, and her discomfort was nothing compared to the agony Falk must have suffered all this time.  Jamie used her fear for her mentor's life as motivation to learn the most complicated and dangerous spell she had ever attempted.  If it went wrong, the best possible scenario was sending herself into one of the various hells that could open within the Circle.  The second best possible scenario was sending only half her body and bleeding to death.  The other scenarios were worse.


Because I was inspired to think about which books have influenced me, I include here for you a partial list, from earliest read to most recent, and I heartily recommend them all:

On Beyond Zebra, Dr. Seuss
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Dr. Seuss
The House with a Clock in Its Walls, John Bellairs
The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, Vivien Alcock
I Will Make You Disappear, Carol Beach York
The Silent Tower and The Silicon Mage, Barbara Hambly
The Talisman, Stephen King
The Dark Tower series, Stephen King
It's Always Something, Gilda Radner
Cruel Shoes, Steve Martin
The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
Ready Player One, Ernest Cline

139

A crack had appeared in the ceiling over her work area. Lara only saw it because the damn browser had frozen up again and she was waiting for it to restart. The implications of a crack in the ceiling were far worse than having to wait for a computer program to restart, but, in this case, it wiped the annoyance from Lara's brow and replaced it with curiosity.

20

In days of long ago and in the far away, there were heroes. Valiant, brave, pure of heart, trustworthy, brilliant, selfless, handsome, beautiful, perfect in form and superior in strength of all kinds.

At the time, however, they were just ordinary, plain, scared, bored, sometimes stupid, often selfish, usually self-doubting, frequently disheveled and in need of a shower, beaky-nosed, zit-riddled and sore. Heroes they were, nonetheless.

2

For Beth, the hardest part about going into work every day was knowing the world would end while she was in her cubicle. The trouble was, she didn't know which day it would be. She didn't even know if it would be before or after lunch. Beth tried hard to recall if she had been wearing this particular green sweater, but although she was always in her visions, she was never able to see herself.

The blast would shatter the windows at the far end. Jan and Charlie, Lisa and Nancy would all be toast because they had seniority and therefore got the cubicles with a view.

"Good morning, Elizabeth." The rich smell of coffee would be mingled with dust and smoke.

"Morning." Beth continued her slow walk, remembering Connie's head rolling past on the rubble-strewn carpeting. She let her fingers trace the carpeted wall of hers, the most junior of junior "offices", right next to the busy hallway leading to the copier, the bathrooms, the elevators.

Beth hesitated before entering, as if the step across the threshold would herald the explosion. Her vision said she would be sitting, typing, but that didn't make the first step into her cubicle any easier. If her vision about the man hadn't come true already, she wouldn't be having this much trouble with the end of the world.