HIBBS ON THE RUN FROM ASGARD!

http://www.amazon.com/HIBBS-CUB-CLUE-Roland-Yeomans-ebook/dp/B00MT8DNLY/

  

I was trying to write in Meilori's again.  It is always an chancy thing.

Each day in it is whatever day it was when the last visitor entered.

You can go from Thanksgiving to Mardi Gras with the entrance of one visitor.

 I heard a scampering of heavy furred feet. 

I looked up. 

Hibbs, the cub with no clue.

Hibbs, being a magical being, can appear in Meilori's at any stage of his life.  This time, the cub looked frantic.

"Hide me, Mr. Roland!"

There was a scurrying of sharp nails and Ratatoskr, the Asgardian squirrel, leapt to my table. 

Hibbs groaned, "Too late."

Ratatoskr took my ice tea tumbler in both hands and gulped down nearly half of it.

"Poooie!  Not enough sugar!"

He scurried to the sugar bowl and dumped its entire contents into my glass as I muttered under my breath. 

Ratatoskr gulped down the rest of my tea.

"Ah, just right!"

Ratatoskr's eyes brightened as he spotted Hibbs.  "There you are!  Why can't you borrow money from a leprechaun?"

Hibbs grumbled, "If I tell you, will you go away?"

"Oh, you're funny!  Like you, they're always short!"

"Where is the Turquoise Woman when you need her?" sighed tiny Hibbs.

"Oooh, another one," grinned Ratatoskr.  Why don't you iron 4-leaf clovers?"

I frowned, "I don't know."

Hibbs pleaded, "Don't encourage him!"

Ratatoskr snickered, "Silly Roland, you don't want to press your luck!"

He scampered up on the shoulder of the fidgeting Hibbs and snorted, "How do you know an Irishman is having a good time?"

"Like I'm not having," moaned Hibbs.

"He's Dublin over with laughter!"  Ratatoskr slapped Hibbs on the back of his furry head. 

"Get it?  Dublin over with laughter!!"

With a trilling moan as of a thousand Apache spirit flutes, a swirl of snowflakes suddenly appeared beside my table. 

My breath frosted in tiny clouds at the sudden chill.

The minature snowstorm twirled and flaired into a column of bright sparkles that slowly breathed into the tall Turquoise Woman. 

Eyes, terrible and beautiful beyond the singing of them, lanced into the startled Ratatoskr who tried to swallow but couldn't.

In a voice like icicles singing, the Turquoise Woman asked the Asgardian squirrel as tiny lightnings formed at the end of her pointing forefinger.

"What do leprechauns love to barbeque?"

"Wh-What?" stuttered the terrified squirrel.

She zapped the rump of Ratatoskr with a minature lightning bolt.  "Short ribs."

Hibb snickered as the squirrel grabbed his bottom with both small paws and leapt off onto the floor, scampering away for dear life.

The Turquoise Woman flowed without effort after the running Ratatoskr and asked, "When is an Irish Potato not an Irish Potato?"

She sent another sizzling bolt into the poor squirrel's butt and laughed coldly as he yelped, popping up in the air, "When it is a FRENCH fry!"

The two of them disappeared around the nearest corner in Meilori's, but we heard the faint voice of the Turquoise Woman:

"What is the main difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish funeral?"

Hibbs huffed and squirmed onto the chair beside me with a bit of an effort. 

"Darn.  They're out of earshot.  Now, I'll be wondering all day what the answer was."

Suddenly, the Turquoise Woman appeared beside him and tweaked his ear.  "One less drunk at the party!"

Hibbs yelped but she was already gone back to "rewarding" Ratatoskr for tormenting the cub she loved.

THE DAYS ARE PRECIOUS_A GHOSTLY DISCUSSION OF NaNo

Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway (their ghosts rather) and I were playing poker at my table at Meilori's.

Dorothy Parker took a sip of her whisky and smiled at me. 


"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style.

The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

"Bah!" snapped Hemingway.  "The lemmings are throwing together words just as fast as they can to create hovels of novels."

Mark lit a cigar and grinned, "Well, I certainly believe in using the right word not its second cousin.  Hemingway, did you mean to rhyme?  Weren't you a poet, too, Dorothy?"

Dorothy bent down, grabbed a rubber doll whose throat was torn from ear to ear, and tossed it to her poodle -- who faithful even beyond death -- lingered beside her mistress.



"Ha! My verses. I cannot say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

 My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated—as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture."

Fitz, as he liked me to call him, took a sip of his own champagne.  "Never confuse a single failure with a final defeat."

Hemingway gruffed, "We are all defeated in the end.  It is only the struggle that matters and why you struggle in the first place."

He glared at Ratatoskr who scampered from ghost to ghost, looking at their hands and whispering in my ear.  "He's telling you our cards, isn't he?"

I shook my head.  "He's merely teasing you and telling me terrible jokes."

"How terrible?" frowned Twain.

I sighed, "What did Jay-Z call his girlfriend before they got married? Feyoncé."

Dorothy groaned, "Ouch!"

I said to her, "It’s a popular supposition that there was much more communication between writers in the twenties. The Round Table discussions in the Algonquin, for example."

"Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You’re all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We’re lost.'

 Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, over there and the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time."

I asked, "Did the “lost generation” attitude you speak of have a detrimental effect on your own work?"

"Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. Dammit, it was the twenties and we had to be smarty. I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense."

Fitz sighed, "At eighteen, our convictions are hills from which we look.  At forty-five, they are caves in which we hide."

Mark Twain nodded, "Each day is like a coin.  We can spend it any way we like.  But we can only spend it once."

Hemingway lit his own cigar and puffed out the smoky words.  "The living think they have more days than they do.  They look out at a thousand lives.  At the end, they'll turn around and find only one --

and if they frittered away precious days investing in work that is inferior, that one life will be inferior."

Fitz looked into the shadows.  "All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath, knowing it will not last."

Ratatoskr looked up at me from the table top.  "What do you think of this NaNo nonsense, Roland."

I smiled sadly.  "Some of my friends are for it.  Some of them are against it."

Dorothy asked, "And you?"

"I'm for my friends."

Ratatoskr groaned.

LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION! RATATOSKR!

"Wake up, Roland!"

My eyelids were pried open by tiny furred, clawed fingers.  "WAKE UP!"

I suddenly realized I was no longer in my bed but was slumped in my chair at my table at Meilori's, the haunted French Quarter jazz club.

"Aw, Ratatoskr!  I haven't slept since Friday night."

Perched on my table, the Asgardian squirrel inhaled an entire bar of Melkesjokolade chocolate in a single bite.  "Sleep?  Sleep!?  I never sleep!"



He poured the contents of an entire sugar bowl into a glass of ice tea and gulped it down in three swallows, and I muttered, "What a surprise."

A ghost slowly materialized beside me in a director's chair.  I stiffened as Alfred Hitchcock intoned to the Asgardian squirrel, "You promised me an epic, rodent!"

[Photo courtesy of Stan Osborne]


Another ghost formed beside him.  Aw, jeez.  A young man in wig, Victorian dress, and long, long knife.



"You promised I would be entertained," shrilled the man in a falsetto voice.

Ratatoskr reared on his hind legs outraged, "You doubt Ratatoskr?  You will see an Epic!  An Epic!"

Meilori's darkened much to the displeasure of everyone else in the club, and a misty image of a book's cover enlarged to fill the room:



"Jack," gravely intoned Hitchcock.  "if that cover is not soon replaced with an epic, you may have  ...  fun with the squirrel and the scribbler."

"Ratatoskr!" I snapped, grabbing the squirrel by the throat and shaking him.

The Squirrel chittered, "I am not in need of fluffing, Roland!"

The knife flashed up.  Ratatoskr wiggled out of my fingers and gestured with his own.  Siv Maria's cover was replaced by flowing images and music:

Hitchcock nodded ponderously, "Interesting. Evocative. But no dialogue."

'Jack' shrilled, "No sex!"

And with that, the ghost took off after a yelping, scampering Ratatoskr. 

Hitchcock turned to me and sighed, "Modern audiences these days.  All they want is sex and blood."

Follow Siv this week to see what the Norse gods have to say.

 http://sivmaria.blogspot.com/

Each day this week Siv will be giving away prizes which include an autographed copy of Secrets of the Ash Tree

including a print of the Freya illustration, a 15 dollar gift certificate from Amazon, assorted norwegian chocolates and trolls.

Come back tomorrow for a peek at what a few Norse Gods think of the Secrets of the Ash Tree and another glimpse of the most unusual club, Meilori's.

NORSE NIGHT AT MEILORI'S

Did you know there are no ceilings in Meilori's?

Most times you can only see rolling layers of mist.  Other times you catch glimpses of sparkling, swaying branches, their leaves chiming in songs old when first the angels flew.

If you peer closely you will see the fluttering wings of Vedfolnor,

the eagle who is thinking of new insults for Ratatoskr to fling at the dragon, Níðhöggr (Malice Striker)

who eternally gnaws at the roots of the World Tree, Yggdrasil.

I was alone at my table at Meilori's, trying to recover from my interviews with Jeremy Hawkins and Alex Cavanaugh when I heard tapping BENEATH the floor to my right.

Yes, there are floors at Meilori's.  Mostly crimson carpet with random squares of mirror cast like stars in a dappled night sky.  (Elu gets hungry).

I looked down at the mirror which seemed to be vibrating like a  boiling steam kettle. 

Suddenly, a large red squirrel burst from the mirror, sending sharp shards up in a deadly cloud of razored light.

"Ratatoskr!" I exclaimed.  "That's 7 years of bad luck."

Ratatoskr happily chittered as he scrambled up onto my table top.  "Your superstition not mine.  Not mine!"

He eyed my glass of ice tea and took it in his two front claws and gulped. 

He made a face as if poisoned --"Pooie!"

The red squirrel snatched the sugar bowl and emptied its whole contents into my glass, taking a deep, sloppy gulp. 

"Peeerfect!"

"Now I know why you're so hyper!"

Ratatoskr reared up on his hind legs.  "Hyperion?  You are thinking Olympus.  I am of Asgard.  Asgard!"

He scrambled up on my shoulder and leaned his ear next to mine.  "OOOOH!  I hear the sounds of the sea!"

"Very funny."

Ratatoskr snickered, "I thought so.  I am too late for Siv Maria's interview?"

I groaned, "That's coming October 8th and 9th!"

Ratatoskr shook his tiny left wrist at me.  "Watches I do not carry."

"You mean calenders."

"Those either," he gleefully chittered.

"Ratatoskr, you're supposed to have a question I can give Siv to answer, too."

The huge red squirrel scampered all about the table and stopped to take another huge gulp of the ice tea so full of sugar, the contents looked as if a snowstorm was swirling in its amber depths.

"Oh, I have a question: 'What did one dragon say to the other?"

"What?" I said with dread.

"Mother said there would be knights like these!"

Ratatoskr fell on his back giggling and holding his furry tummy.  He scampered back to his rear legs.

"Oh, I have another one -- What did Níðhöggr say when he saw St. George?"

"I don't want to know."

Ratatoskr answered anyway.  "Oh, no!  Not more tinned food!"

My table shook violently, and I was hurled from my flying chair.  An emerald head the size of a Mack truck thrust up from the splintering floor. 

"I HEARD THAT, YOU FURRED RAT!" roared Níðhöggr.

Ratatoskr yeeped and scampered at the speed of light up the massive trunk of Yggdrasil that suddenly shimmered to my left.

Without having seen her arrive, Alice Wentworth, her hands billowing acid mist, was at my side and murmured,

"Dragon, I wonder how your eyes will taste?"

Victor's mother, in long black robes, her face an eternally laughing skull, spoke in the sounds of crushed, withered leaves,

"Níðhöggr, do not rush your time."

The dragon grumbled something about hiding behind women's skirts and went back under the floor of Meilori's.

Samuel McCord strolled up to me, and I groaned inside, but he only winked, "I'm gonna have to charge you extra for all that sugar, son."

BE HERE OCTOBER 8TH AND 9TH

FOR SIV MARIA'S

NORSE GODS BLOGFEST

RAGNAROK WILL SEEM MILD

COMPARED TO THOSE POSTS!

***

TOMORROW:

HER BONES ARE IN

THE BADLANDS