Instead of Flash Fiction, today I'm giving a sneak peek at the opening of the new Ninja Librarian book, due out August 15:
Return to Skunk Corners.
First, though the cover isn't finished so I can't do a reveal, I just want to say it will feature this guy:
And, so do some of the stories. After all, this is
Skunk Corners, right there next to Skunk Springs on Skunk Mountain.
So the story opens:
-->
Skunk corners
with no librarian
It
didn’t come as any surprise. When we
sent the toughs from Endoline packing without any help from the Skunk Corners
librarian, I knew what we’d proven. I’d
known the Ninja Librarian long enough to guess what came next.
Still, it had been a nasty shock when I woke that
morning to find an envelope on my kitchen table. Only one person could’ve snuck in and left it
without me waking. With a sinking
feeling, I slit the envelope with my hunting knife, feeling the big brass key
inside. Along with the key to the
library was a single line penned on a bit of stationery in the Ninja
Librarian’s fussy, old-fashioned handwriting:
It’s yours now, Alice.
Mine? I
knew even less about running a library than I did about running a school. Which, despite several years in charge of the
Skunk Corners school, wasn’t much.
Anyway, I couldn’t run a library and a school, could I? I raced to the library, meaning to stop him
if I had to sit on him, but he was gone.
Just like that, I’d lost my best friend, my
teacher, and my mentor, and gained another unwanted responsibility. If Ninja Tom wanted me to grow up, he’d opted
for the sink-or-swim approach.
I was giving some serious thought to sinking.
It wasn’t just me.
In the following weeks my students grew mopey, the mayor nervous, and
Tess and her girls cranky. Maybe not as
cranky as me, but they’d lost a friend, too.
Like me, they didn’t have many they could spare.
In short, our town had lost its heart, just when
we’d started to learn we had one.
“This is silly,” Tess tried to convince us
both. We were having drinks in her
place—Two-Timin’ Tess’s Tavern—shortly before closing a couple weeks after he
left. We sipped our tea from shot
glasses. “It’s not like Tom was one of
us,” she argued. “We got on before he
came. We’ll get on without him.”
“I know,” I said.
“He was just an outsider who came and tried to tell us how to run
things.” It was a good effort, but it
didn’t work. “I was an outsider myself
not so long ago. Tess. What makes me any
different from him?” Tess shrugged. She didn’t have any answers.
Ninja Tom had come and shown our whole town how to
grow up, and that was worth a whole lot more than being born here. Everything was different because of him, and
what I was afraid of—what we all feared—was that without him we couldn’t keep
it up.
“I don’t want Skunk Corners to go back to being
the sort of town that drives off librarians and raises children who can’t
read. Won’t read, which you gotta
admit is worse.”
“I know,” Tess said.
“That’s why I’ve got so gloomy and cantankerous.”
I suppose I should introduce myself. Around Skunk Corners I’m known as Big Al,
though Tom called me by my given name almost from the first. That’s one thing Tom hadn’t finished before
he left. I might’ve let him call me Alice—he
once kicked me into the street on my hindquarters for backtalk, so I didn’t
argue—but he couldn’t make me like the name.
And I didn’t let anyone else use it.
Now that he was gone, no one called me Alice, not even Tess, who dared
most things.
Tom hadn’t managed to turn Big Al into a
girl. It should have made me happy.
Later that night, though my heart wasn’t in it, I
practiced the drills Tom had taught me. That was another thing he hadn’t
finished. I was no Ninja fighter yet,
though I was better set to defend myself than I’d been a year before. I could maybe handle the sort of
trouble-maker we got here well enough.
I’d already kicked one low-down side-winder out of town. But I’d be no match for someone really mean.
And I didn’t know how to defend Skunk Corners from
itself. Fewer people came to the library
now, and I didn’t seem to have Tom’s ability to captivate the children at story
time. Oh, I knew the tricks he’d used in
the beginning. But he hadn’t needed
those tricks for long. His voice could
hold them once they’d been quiet long enough to hear it. Mine held no magic at all.
So I was expecting the worst when disaster hit our
town, though what I expected was nothing like what happened.
Notice: This blog is posting itself in my absence. If you comment, I WILL respond. . . but not for a few weeks. This does not mean I no longer love you. It just means I've gone hiking.
