A Barbed Winning Strategy

A Barbed Winning Strategy

What an gloomy notion for a story!

Barbed like fishhooks of the past. The hook slides easily into the fish’s mouth. Extracting it involves ripping the flesh. Ouch! 

Winning Strategy, a plan designed to accomplish a good deed, is easily accepted. Unexpectedly the plan backfires, causes excruciating pain. How can such an awful outcome happen as a result of a trying to make someone happy?

This is a situation that highlights love is blind. In my novel, Baggage burdens. Joseph supports his depressed wife’s desire to complete her education. Later he defends her desire to home school their children, an action strongly questioned by their close-knit community. Her self-image is restored, but a skeleton from her past, twists Joseph’s appreciated effort. The consequences of Jill’s changing goals lead to demands too great for Joseph to handle. In the end his pain also becomes her pain.

Joseph decides to break the silence that’s building like a threatening thundercloud ready to dump its contents. “If anyone thinks my children are neglected by Jill, then let them ask Daniel or Amber or me. What they might learn is that Jill works so hard that she satisfies all of us—the children, herself, and me. That should suggest she should be held in awe.” Joseph leaves his chair, goes to Jill and puts his arm around her shoulder. He plants a kiss on her forehead.

“You don’t get it, do you?” He pauses for a moment giving Jill a chance to think as he considers whether he should be as blunt as he feels. “I don’t love you anymore. It’s like you are poisonous fruit now. I don’t want to see you or hear from you ever again.”

He brushes past Jill and opens the truck door.

haiku capsule:                 

gift, loving aid

a quicksand grasp, good will lost

devastated friend

Next blog: Evidence––Work Follows 

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