Welcome to the intro video
and an excerpt from the eighteenth post of my weekly serial, “Sketches from the
Café Confictura.” If you’d like to share a comment, please use the comment option at the end of this excerpt. To follow the mystery of Applewood, and get
recipes from Mrs. Creaverton, writing advice from Roscoe Belesprit, and fashion
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every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.
This was what Roscoe
lamented, as Clarke and Schmetly argued. For most of tonight’s meeting, the
group had discussed Schmetly’s latest story, and it was rife with the same
mistakes as always. Clarke had chosen one such mistake to grab hold of, and he
wasn’t about to let go.
Schmetly yelled at him,
“Look, ‘I’ is always more proper. I wrote a scene with two high-society types.
They’re gonna say, ‘He gave the champagne to Miss Whitaker and I.’”
“Wrong, doofus,” said
Clarke.
“You’re a doofus!”
Roscoe laid his head down
and mumbled, “Stein had Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Benchley had Parker and
Woollcott. But let history show: never was the level of discourse heightened so
as when the likes of Clarke and Schmetly traded barbs.”
Clarke turned to Roscoe.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know what the hell you just said, but I
get that you want us to calm down.” To Schmetly, he said, “When a pronoun
follows a preposition, like ‘to,’ odds are it’s supposed to be an object
pronoun: ‘me,’ ‘her,’ ‘him,’ ‘us.’”
Everyone looked at Clarke in
shock.
“What?” he said. “I know
things.”
Portia said, “Of course you
do. It’s just after taxing yourself with ‘doofus’ we figured your brain was
done for the night.”
Clarke made a face at her.
“Ha-ha-ha.” He turned to Roscoe. “I’m right here, right?”
“He is indeed, Mr.
Schmetly,” said Roscoe. Over Clarke’s gloating and Schmetly’s pouting, Roscoe
continued: “Let’s see. Many years ago, my daughter’s language arts teacher gave
her a trick to use when determining pronouns. I think she still uses it. ‘He
gave the champagne to Miss Whitaker and I.’ If you take Miss Whitaker out of
the sentence, you wouldn’t say, ‘‘He gave the champagne to I,’ would you? Of
course not. He gave it to ‘me.’ Just as he would to ‘her,’ not ‘she.’”
“Oh,” said Schmetly, drawing
out the word as understanding seeped in. “That’s a good trick.”
Roscoe picked up a pen and
tapped it against the table in a frustrated, nervous tick. “This is what I
mean,” he said. “I’ve tried repeating lessons on creative writing 101. I’ve had
you read good literature. But some of these fundamentals are still clouded over
in your minds.”
A woman had come up to the
entrance of the Riverview Room, and she grabbed everyone’s attention when she
said, “You always did have a tendency to skip over the basics, Roscoe.” Her
lips turned up into a knowing smile.
Finally, Clarke and
Schmetly, it seemed, had something to agree on. Clarke whistled low. Schmetly
whispered, “I’m in love.” The woman was striking: late fifties, tall with an
athletic build, dark brown skin, and streaks of gray in her shoulder-length
hair.
Clarke said, “Who is that?”
“Kate Brooks,” Roscoe
replied, and he returned her smile. “My ex-wife.”
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