GUTGAA SPP #1 Always Sunday

ALWAYS SUNDAY
Adult: Magical Realism
67,000

Query:

When married, mother-of-one, Anita Dicken, finds herself stranded in the unmapped town of Hole Post for the weekend, well…she’s pissed!  Original destination - Vegas, Anita had hoped a few late-night trips to the casinos and nightlife on the strip would take her mind off her crumbling marriage.  And she still feels the need to drown away her bitterness over her mom’s unexpected death – free booze and mindless gambling sound like a god-send.

Hole Post is nothing like Vegas.  Pitched in the middle of nowhere, it’s more like a ghost town. Every window on every building is eerily black, and nothing is what it seems when you walk through any door.  The Inn she stays in looks like a decrepit shack on the outside, but could be The Ritz when you walk through the door.  And the town’s kooky Mayor/Mechanic/Resident Psychiatrist seems to know far too much about Anita’s life.  The town’s only appeal comes in the shape of a tall, sexy cowboy named Manny – who seems to have a thing for chunky, unavailable housewives.

Anita successfully wards off Manny’s advances until Monday, when her car is supposed to be fixed and she can flee Hole Post.  But Ziggy tells her it’s only Sunday, and the day after that it’s still Sunday, and the day after that. Apparently, there’s a mystery about herself she needs to figure out before she can leave town.  But with Manny as a tempting distraction, she first needs to decide if she still even wants to go home.

First 150 Words:

One day and for no apparent reason at all, my mother couldn’t seem to find her breath.  She called to tell me about it and as she told her staggered story between caught breaths, I listened with rolling eyes and a smirk on my face.  Mom had some notoriety in the world of hypochondria.  My general conclusion of “Oh, she’s faking it” kept running through my head.

Her doctor didn’t even seem to take her seriously.  He hypothesized this and that.  Sent her home.  In fact, nobody really took her seriously until she passed out in the bathroom and cracked her head open one Thursday morning.  A blood test here, a CAT scan there.  There were blood clots in her lungs.  No problem, doctors said.  We’ll give her a nitro glycerin pill for the pain in her chest.  We’ll choke her veins with Cumidin.  It would just be a few days – blast the clots and then she’d be home.