Jesi M. Williams
Twitter: @jmwilliwrites
Jesi M. Williams was born and raised in Paris, KY. At the age of 13, Williams began her career writing mostly poetry and plays, some of which were performed at her local church and high school. It wasn’t until high school that she began to indulge in the art of fiction, first short stories and novellas, then finally, novels. Her first published short story, “Gano Street”, appeared in the 2007 edition of Zephyrus, Western Kentucky University’s literary magazine, where Williams received her undergraduate degree in English and was awarded the Ladies Literary Club Fiction Award. Since then her short stories “The Space Between Us” and “Childress Passing” have appeared in Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta and Women’s Work, anthologies published by GirlChild Press. After the completion of her undergraduate degree Williams spent two years teaching English in South Korea, traveling around South East Asia and working on various writing projects. She is currently in her second year at Northern Arizona University where she is pursuing her Masters in Creative Writing. Tricks & Stones is her first novel.
Chapter 23
The weather is perfect. Crisp and fairly clean this early in the morning, until the buses triple up on routes and the commuters start making their way to jobs they hate, or jobs they love, but that they’ll never get ahead in. Life is, indeed, a depressing scene almost everywhere you look around this city; more homeless people making beds under park benches or busy overpasses, more kids diving into drugs than books, more cars than flowers, more cold than warmth.
Chapter 22
We drink for hours. We manage to turn the city of Chicago into a giant drinking game. Step on the crack. Take a shot. Hear a car horn. Take a shot. Mention a street name in any conversation. Take a shot. See a jogger in ball constricting shorts. Take a shot. We take shots like photographers, and finish the bottle of cheap booze that I had smuggled out of the house before sunset. Deciding to move our endeavors to less congested areas is Rex’s idea. Two teenagers swaggering downtown at dusk are just asking for trouble. And we don’t want any trouble. We just want to escape.
Chapter 21
The following week goes down like all the others. Gil surprises me, leaving a box of chocolates at the house along with a gold bracelet. The following Monday and Wednesday are cancelled because he has to go to a convention in Spain. I’m glad that he didn’t drag me along with him, but a little nervous when I get the abrupt phone call from his doorman on Thursday night, demanding that I report to the apartment early the next day.
Chapter 20
In the car on the way to the airport the next morning, I’m feeling the whirling aftermath of post-intoxication full force. I always have to get myself sloshed so that I don’t spend the entire ordeal crying like an orphaned whale calf, so that I don’t cringe when he touches me. Something tells me that Gil won’t take to kindly that sort of behavior. Gil is driving and I’m in the passenger seat staring up at the palm trees, wondering what it would feel like if one of them came crashing down on us.
Chapter 19
I was one of them now; family. It seemed so simple. Easy. Like this was what I was here for. This is why I was born. God, or whatever, made me this way, gave me this body, this smile, this hair, but it was never mine. It never felt like mine. Everyone I ever loved left me, abandoned me here on this earth, like I was nothing, but now, I wasn’t nothing; I was something. I was something to them. I was worth something. I was a call girl. Someone beautiful, someone they wanted. I was Cookie. That’s what I told myself. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that even the most beautiful things can turn to filth under the right lighting.
