MOONCALF - BOOK JACKET

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Over Olympia and Leah’s heads, Americans race the Russians to the moon; on their television sets young men fight and struggle in the mud of Viet Nam. America holds its breath between heartbreaking tragedies.  

But on Miss Brinker’s school bus, in the seat with the rip in the green plastic, Olympia and Leah fall in love, the way children do:  immediately, completely, and without knowing or caring why they shouldn’t. Olympia Crooms, with her happy hair, and Leah Breck, with her silly red dog, are two smart girls.

Olympia's father works other men's orange groves in rural Central Florida and tells his daughter that school is the best way to reach for the stars. Leah's father moves his family from the Space Coast to the country where she and her brother can climb orange trees, imagine lions in the tall grass, and learn to feed baby cows milk from a bottle.

At Evegan Elementary, two smart girls find each other and have to decide if they will learn the hardest lessons of all—the false traditions of their fathers.

Vulture Watch

We live in a rural setting. I often blog about the idyllic nature of our enchanted lives: gamboling goats, preening ducks, rustling leaves, slowly circling vultures.

It’s a dream. 

Especially when our Muslim neighbors fire up their bone saw on the festival of Eid. It’s a traditional Middle Eastern festival celebrated with bouncy houses for the kids and large curved knives for the slitting of goat throats. 

It attracts nosy neighbors peaking over the fence (that would be me) and the nosy neighbor’s friend. (That would be my friend.) 

“Did I exaggerate?”

My friend watched as a bearded man neatly cut a goat’s throat. She looked at me with big eyes and said, “Not one bit.”

“I’m so glad you’re here to be a witness. I think maybe people think that I make this stuff up. I mean I do make stuff up but this is not the stuff I make up if I did make up stuff like this. You know what stuff I mean?”

“Not one bit.”

“Exactly.”

The sound of an air compressor kicked up and a man stuck an air tube into a goat carcass inflating the goat’s skin. The goat carcass took on the shape of a helium balloon on Main Street, Disney World. 

“Hey, that’s pretty slick,” she said.

Another man stripped the goat’s skin off like a used condom.

We looked at each other.

“Did I exaggerate?”

“Not one bit.”

My friend and I retired to our red neck yard circle to enjoy lemonade and eavesdropping on the neighbors. Wind rustled through the maple tree leaves. Crickets sang. We watched as the neighbors loaded a steer into a handy homemade guillotine then brought the knife down and . . . a child screamed with laughter from the bouncy house.

Overhead a circling wheel of vultures hovered over the neighbor’s gut pile. Sunlight sparkled in a bucket of blood tossed to lower the level of the blood barrel. A mockingbird practiced its bald eagle screech. Something skittered in the lantana.

My friend and I relaxed to the sound of the bone saw and the knowledge that Halloween was just right around the corner. 


Linda (Make Mine Mutton) Zern 

Lexicon

My husband can make numbers dance. It’s a computer analyst thing. Numbers take the place of words in my husband’s binary mind. What you can’t say with a 0 or a 1 isn’t worth saying.

I, on the other hand, love the wordy majiggles, sometimes making up new twinkle words right on the spot. Words are magic. In my mind, words are like pieces of a glorious puzzle that fit together in endless combinations to form blazing snapshots framed in braided twists of golden licorice.

You see the basic problem.

I spend my days tapping away at letters, blending them into words—also mowing, chopping, burning, edging, mucking, grooming, raking, planting, growing, dragging, and nailing, but that’s a subject for another day.

My husband reads what I write and says, “Good.”

He says it always and forever, because the word “good” is his describing word of choice. No matter what I write, how much or how little, how sad or how happy, he will call it good. No matter how much he likes a piece or how moved he is by it, or how hard it’s made him laugh, he has one and only one word to bestow on it.

GOOD. Not wonderful. Not amazing. Not wham bam thank you Sam. Just good.

I can’t decide if a one or a zero represents the word good in his binary brain bucket.

My latest project is a novella (a short, sweet novel) set in rural Florida in the mid ‘60’s called Mooncalf. It’s a very serious, literary work requiring a lifetime’s worth of blood and bone.

He read Mooncalf. When he finished reading, he paused, pondered, and said, “This is terrific.”

I just may have a Pulitzer Prize winner on my hands.

To illustrate what I’m up against, I’ve compiled a Sherwood Zern compliment lexicon:

It’s good. (Said in a neutral tone) 1. I know you were making sounds resembling our mother tongue, but I wasn’t listening so I’ll play it safe. 2. What?

That’s good. (Said with no discernable intonation) 1. Why do you insist on reading this stuff to me when you know I prefer to read it myself. 2. No, really, I’m listening.

Good! Of course, I mean it. (Said in a clipped, sharp way) 1. I’m on a conference call and I forgot to mute it.

Well, isn’t that good. (Repeated) 1. What’s for dinner? 2. Did you take my power cord? 3. When are you going to get a job?

That’s dang fine good. (Eyes glued to computer monitor) 1. I didn’t understand a word you just read; it must be stellar.

And then . . .

Linda, this is really terrific. (With eye contact and vocal inflection) 1. I love you, babe. Hang in there. 2. Dr. Suess received twenty-seven rejections before he was published. I believe in you. 3. You misspelled cooties on page eighty-three.

So back to page eighty-three I go, working like the devil to deserve such high and mighty praise from the king of the binary people.



Linda (Good, Better, Best) Zern