HOUSE OF DANCE

There's nothing like hearing the UPS truck screech to a halt before your modest house, seeing the brown uniform dash through the rain, and noting the thump of a box as it hits your stoop.

What in the world?

So you go outside hoping no one is looking (because your hair is a mess, because you need to repaint your toe nails), you pick up the box, you take it in, you scissor it open, and, what's this? HOUSE OF DANCE? Final copies? Here so soon?

Part of you isn't even ready for this, but part of you feels happy, too. Then, after five minutes, it hits you: No, you really are happy—so happy you interrupt your work and post your second blog for the day.

Here's the opening graf of HOUSE OF DANCE. Ain't nothing I, the endless rewriter, can do to a change a note of this story now:

"In the summer my mother grew zinnias in her window boxes and let fireflies hum through our back door. She kept basil alive in ruby-colored glasses and potatoes sprouting tentacles on the sills. On her bedroom ceiling she'd pressed glow-in-the-dark dots into constellation patterns, so that stars, as she put it, would always be near. Andromeda. Aquarius. The major and minor Ursas. Pisces. Creatures with wings or with horns."