Normal People Are Those We Don’t Know Well

For the past ten years local author Judi Blaze has been compiling a collection of short stories that will be released the end of September. The collection includes 17 stories in a book entitled NORMAL PEOPLE ARE THOSE WE DON’T KNOW WELL published by Black Rose Press. The stories chronicle the lives of quirky, often unhinged characters which show us that despite how peculiar we think others may be—they really are not so different; some involve love and loss, while others are humorous, poignant and endearing.

"People are natural voyeurs and Judi Blaze allows us to peek into the lives of others in her first collection of short stories," says her publicist Bridget Dean. Many of the stories are set on an island in Puget Sound and Blaze says, "You may recognize some individuals who make up the island."

NORMAL PEOPLE ARE THOSE WE DON’T KNOW WELL Is Blaze’s first book to be released since 2006 when she released a novel called Beach People. Beach People followed On Indian Time, an award winner at First Novel Fest, and Riding on a Rainbow, a novel based on a true story of Blaze’s life growing up gypsy.

Many of the short stories in this collection have won awards or have been published in anthologies; which includes the University of Southern Florida anthology. She has also been published on various online sites, such as the Chick Lit Review, for a novel she has not yet published called Orchid Island. Most recently she was runner up in the 2010 and 2008 Warren Adler national completion or a short story. She also won 1st place in the Willamette Writers Kay Snow awards in creative writing, and has won several online competitions.

Judi Blaze is a former print and media journalist and currently works full time as a writer. She has acted as a ghost writer for many people, generally writing eBooks, but continues to work on her own books. She has just finished her fifth novel, Sunday at the Social Club and another called Orchid Island, which also takes place on an island in Puget Sound. She is now working on a memoir about her life growing up Gypsy called RIDING IN THE BACKSEAT WITH MY BROTHER. She lives on the island with her husband Bruce Watson.

There will be a launch party for her book with a date TBA. Below is an excerpt from one of her short stories entitled Normal People are those we Don’t Know Well

Normal People Are Those We Don’t Know Well

Jordan’s fingers tap across the keys, bouncing like droplets of water on a sizzling grill. His fingers, extensions of his fast-flowing thoughts, peck the words, stirring them feverishly across the keyboard - the same fingers that have played across my body many times before.

He’s a cob of a man - legs stunted since birth, mummified raisins attached to a solid ass - a man whose head melds to his square shoulders. Hoping for a best seller, Jordan divulges the secrets of his days in the circus – our days in the circus.

While painting my toenails, squatting in a corner of Jordan’s orange shag-carpeted office, I do it with the cadence of quick pecking keys, purple specks on fairy toes, as his fingers drip with words. By the time the bashful clock sounds the noon hour like a cacophonous intruder, entering our space much like a vexatious fly, Jordan’s fingers flame. Rapt, he stares with marble-round, inky eyes at the glowing screen, head dripping with sweat, running down his forehead landing on a course three-inch unibrow.

I can’t help but look up when the pecking stops. Silence halts my hand in full swing, purple polish drips and lands on the orange carpet, beading up like a pill. The contrast holds my attention until the tapping resumes.

The circus, our home for many years, was filled with beautiful people, a hippodrome of sideshow sweeties, thorny little individuals who ate popcorn balls while the audience gawked at our fireplug shapes. We wore animal pelts and yesterday’s sorrows, and not one of us had a

nasty bone in our bodies. Trapeze artists, handsome and ruggedly fit, bared their souls while exposing the firmness of their middle - often giving the rest of us a quick wink from high above.

Our heterogeneity was as multifarious and widespread as the freckles on my face - a face given to me by a mother they called an anomaly, a woman who cultivated me in a trailer no bigger than a large box. She also gave me my wide smile, natural ruby curls, and stunted limbs, as well as a place to call home. Born into the circus herself, she could think of no other way to raise me, nor any other kind of life.

Again, silence, causing me to look up and see the puppet-frozen face of Jordan. His fruitful morning of exposing our life of show biz, freakish sideshow stunts, rhinestone outfits, and sadness that went along with it, was nearing an end, his fingers were still.

My mother called the other day saying, "Mona, I’m leaving the circus. I think I’m really sick this time and no one here will take it seriously." Her Lilliputian voice squeaked through the tiny holes in the receiver. I wanted to chase those words and pop them like the bubbles in a sheet of bubble wrap. I wantedto put them in my pocket and let them out in the woods where they could be free and land on trees and soil-covered rocks.

But instead I said, "Mother, you’ve been saying that ever since I can remember. When I as seven and sat near you on the couch, you said the same thing."

Since Jordan and I left the circus two years ago, Mother has called at least twice a week, like a returning bevy of swallows, chirping worried words that flit around my 30 year-old already over stuffed brain. But I don’t begrudge her this - she gave me my scintillating red hair, flashing smile, and button blue eyes, so how could I deny her the opportunity to spew words at me whenever she wanted? At four feet-three inches tall, I tower over her like a bird over water. She used to say, "You got your father’s height, he was almost a foot taller than me."

My mother, known throughout the community as Wee, was crushed when my father left her before I was born. They were in Philadelphia for a week when he escaped one night through the side of the big tent. I say escaped because Mom said he’d always felt trapped in the entertainment industry, where he rode the elephants and talked small talk to big people. Whenever she told me that story I formed a mental image of the moon slipping behind a night black cloud, succumbed by its softness, staying there where it’s safe and circus daughters can’t see. I pictured my father running with pygmy legs, arms swaying at his sides as he took off to God knows where.

Jordan resumes his steady typing, pecking like a happy chicken. The look on his face tells me he’s writing a funny scene. After we married, we said we’d never have kids - never be responsible for subjecting tiny, precious ears to the sound of "geek." I can only imagine the kids I would have—long-legged waifs who towered over other kids.

Jordan wanted to get a Saint Bernard puppy once until the owner of the puppy reminded Jordan that the dog would be massive when it grew up. Jordan said, "What are you saying?" The puppy owner’s face flushed blood red, his eyes bugged out, and he looked like he was ready to crawl into a hole. We left without getting a dog.

Instead, we got an ant farm that we fixed up to look like a tiny circus. The elfin red weed walkers play near miniature tents that I painted with my florescent pink nail polish. I made them ramps of straw and placed dried grass where they like to clown around, so to speak. I pretend they’re us in our past lives, making tunnels with our minds, digging, delving deeper into our act, unearthing who we were and who we always thought we would be. I call them my army of midgets. Jordan doesn’t like that. He thinks we should call them "God" and feed them nectar of the Gods, because that’s how he felt in his time of show stopping, hand clapping, back stabbing, day dreaming, castle building life under the big tent.

He says, "You eat, in dream, the custard of the day," a quote he read by Alexander Pope. I’ve always thought that Oscar Wilde was describing Jordan when he wrote "One who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he see the dawn before the rest of the world.’

When I talked to my mother on the phone the other day, her voice had the high-octane squeak of a broken fence. Her titillated, energized state, she offered, came from news that had just been delivered to her at her trailer. "Mona?" Her voice had a questioning Minnie Mouse squeak. "Guess what? We’re going to Europe! The whole circus this time. We’ll be leaving in a week or so." The prospect of a life abroad had cured whatever had been ailing her. She was no longer sick, but energized with her new predestined life.