Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers! Hope you had a great dinner and a stress-free holiday! Yeah, yeah, I know, but it doesn’t hurt to hope.

Here at the Smomestead, where we are all too old for the creamy bullshit center of the holiday Ho-Ho, we elected to put everything off until tomorrow. No madhouse rush to get cranberry sauce amid hordes of other Thanksgiving Day shoppers dueling it out with frozen turkeys to see who gets the last pumpkin pie and who must feed her family the mincemeat of shame. (Fun Fact Time! My dad and one of my sisters genuinely love mincemeat and willingly eat it. I do not and will not put that gross shit in my mouth, and I have eaten crickets)

However, we have not come through Black Friday unscathed. Although we do not support the hyper-violent capitalistic Purge, we did run out of coffee creamer and God forfend we should just pour in a dollop of milk, so we went to the store. As it was nine o’clock at night and our destination was a plain jane grocery story and not some SuperMegaPlusMart, we anticipated no problems. How foolish we were, how complacent, how utterly unprepared for the deer that burst out of the darkness and headslammed the car.

So my dad’s car is totalled, but we are all okay and more importantly, we still got the creamer. So we can all drink coffee tomorrow whilst standing out in the driveway, shaking our heads mournfully as we gaze upon the car and waiting for the turkey to finish cooking. My dad makes this bacon-cornbread stuffing, ya’all know you wish you were here.

Edits continue on Tooth and Claw, my new Lords of Arcadia novella. Next week, I may have a cover to show you,  an excerpt and maybe even a blurb. In the meantime, I have another chapter of my FNAF fanfiction, Everything Is All Right, Part III: Children of Mammon up and ready to read (for free!) on fanfiction.net and archiveofourown.org, so if you’ve been dangling off that cliff I left you on with last week’s chapter, head on over to the new cliff! I hear the view is great.

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Mason left. He didn’t even bother to look at Foxy before he went, and why should he? Just a broken old toy telling stories to entertain kiddies. The others trickled off through the East Hall door, none willing to follow too close on those heels. One man, the one calling himself Sticks, stayed behind, poking through the cargo at the back end of the room.

Foxy finished off his story, making sure they were alone and would stay that way at least a little while. When he came to the end, instead of launching into the next part of his scheduled act, he raised his hook and called, “Oi! I need help with the rigging if I’m to SET SAIL WITH THE TIDE. Who’s it to b-b-be? Ye in the back!”

Sticks looked around at all the nobody crowding the Cove, then turned all the way around and pointed at himself.

“Aye, ugly bloke in the b-b—BLACKMANE, ME MORTAL ENEMY!—black jacket. Come here to me,” he said, beckoning with his hook and keeping his good hand on the hilt of his sword. “YER OLD SHIPMATE, CAPTAIN FOX, NEEDS A FIRST MATE.”

“Naw, man. I, uh…I got shit to do. What the hell am I explaining myself to a fucking robot for?” he added to himself, shaking his head.

“Come on, lad. WELCOME ABOARD THE FLYING FOX!” Foxy nodded toward the ship beside him, although his eye never left the other man and his hand never left his sword. “I’ll even g-g-give ye a dip in the birthday booty chest.”

“Well…okay.” Down he came, even smiling, although he cast one or two nervous glances in the direction Mason had gone. “Got to look everywhere, right?”

“That’s the spirit. C-C-Come on up.” Foxy bent, offering his hook, and Sticks took it and let himself be pulled onstage, right up close. “What’s yer name, bucko?”

The man looked around the empty auditorium and said, “Um…Steven.”

“Aye, that’s right.” Foxy waved him toward the gangplank and followed, his stride easy, hand on the hilt of his sword. “I do remember ye, ye know.”