Jared Axelrod

This one was rough, when compared to the last two. Granted, I had all day to work on #1 and #2, and this one only had an evening. But still, I guess I wasn’t that all excited about it. Normally, I’d put it away and start over, but word count is word count, and I wasn’t going to write 2000 more words on top of the 500 I had already squeezed out.  Naturally, this meant that the point of story had to be changed, but so it was now not so much about stone soup–as you might glean from the excerpt–and more about, well, angst. Fourteen-year-old-girl-angst, but angst nonetheless.

 It was about stone soup when I was hungry, and about angst when I was frustrated.  Go figure.

…As far as Maggie could tell, there was nothing special about the stone. Rounded by a river or stream, certainly, and it had enough heft that it could break a good window, given half a chance. But it was little more than a dull river rock. Certainly not magic.

“What’s it do?” Maggie asked. She gazed past the old woman’s shoulder to the hotdog cart across the street.

Madame Ambrosia absently toyed with the large wooden beads of her necklace and squinted at Maggie from behind her bifocals. “Your mind’s not on your studies today is it? You skip breakfast again, Magdalena?”

“I already have a mother,” Maggie snorted.

“So you say,” Madame Ambrosia said, letting her glasses dangle on the chain around her neck. She swept the stone out of Maggie’s grubby hands. “You’ll like this one. This is a soup stone. As in, you can make soup from it. All you need is pot of boiling water, and voila! Soup!”

Maggie was somewhat less than impressed. She rolled her heavily lined eyes at the older woman. “I’m not a total idiot, you know. I’ve heard that stupid fairy tale. The stone isn’t magic, the beggar just convinces people it is. It’s all about gullibility.”

“Well, that’s a fairy tale, isn’t it,” said Madame Ambrosia, slightly perturbed. “This is the real world, which means we use real magic.”

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