Cooked Cookies

Thank an Editor / Derelict Lit

Close your eyes and think of an editor.

Maybe someone who did right with your work.

Or one that did you wrong.

What they may be juggling.

What keeps them going.

Until life comes crashing down, along with the special something that kept them afloat - maybe like, editing a lit mag.

Bless them or curse them, but thank them, that editor in your head.

We can never really know what people are going through.

***

“Cooked Cookies” is a dark story, a hard to place dark story, so I was thrilled with the initial publish. The challenge? A literary world that typically turns up noses at “second runs”.

For me to find and submit to Derelict Lit was pure good luck. The story was republished online March 22, 2019.

Derelict Lit, I hold you in my thoughts and thank you, thank you, thank you.

CC is also a long read, a story I now think of as several stories or maybe chapters.

I thought it might be fun to serialize the story here at Shared Madness.

For those of you who wish to jump ahead, the link to the complete story is here.

Many thanks and blessings to The Shallows/Cold Creek Review (January 26, 2018) for the original publish.

Trigger warning.

***

Cooked Cookies

One

Photo by Art of Adventure on Unsplash

Sadie stands in the shallows of a tidal pool carved out by the surf and watches Mina and Lulu rescue sand dollars stranded along the shore. Her sisters flew out to the island earlier in the week and like the pelicans gliding overhead, she cast work to the wind to join them on the beach this glorious day. The sun is white hot, searing the blue from the sky and she pulls her floppy hat low to focus past the haze, the ends of the scarf tied around the brim dancing about her shoulders. The scarf was her mother’s favorite, the Vera with the green abstract design and she had looked gorgeous wearing it, as glamorous as Jackie, when she was a Kennedy and not yet Jackie O. The breeze knocks back her hat and the sudden brilliance casts the middle-aged bathing beauties into shimmering silhouette. “You’ll never save them all!” Sadie yells.

Lulu waves her off, busy tossing sand dollars back into the ocean. She is the oldest sister, named after a pop star, a fact she lorded over her siblings as somehow more distinctive than the names given them —second born Mina, her namesake the wife of Thomas Edison, Sadie after a song in the Broadway musical Funny Girl and the youngest, their brother Luke, bestowed with the name of his father’s hometown, although most when introduced assumed a more scriptural reference.

Mina shouts back for them both. “Sadie! Get out of that private spa of yours and come down here and help!”

Royal terns with large red-orange bills part passage as she trudges through the squeaky sand to join her sisters. The sand dollars dot the beach like Spanish coins. They spent hours as children scooping up the purplish brown creatures and tossing them back into the ocean for one more chance at life, to live at the very least, a few more hours until their next weightless struggle against the rhythmic tides. Sadie scans the beach and pinches a chalk white dollar from the sand. The velvet furry cilia are dried to a crust. The creature is long dead.

Mina leans in for a look and brushes sand off the fragile disk with her pinkie. “Fried alive, that’s what Luke called beached dollars. Fried alive. Remember, Lulu?”

“Something like that. Or maybe, cooked cookie. That’s one cooked cookie, he’d say.” Lulu looks out over the sunlit waves, lingering for a moment. “I thought it would hurt less,” she said, “coming back here.” Her bottom lip trembles and she stills it with the back of her hand. “Sadie, I’ll never understand why you moved back here, after what happened to Luke.”

Sadie slips the sand dollar into the mesh shell collection bag strapped around her waist. “This island is all I have left of him. That and the cooked cookies.”

***

To be continued …

“Sanibel Island” video by Sheree Shatsky c2025