Rocky Start

Rocky Start

Author: Jennifer Crusie, Bob Mayer Listening Length: 11h 50m
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Think of the movie RED. Retired covert operatives living in a small town in the Smoky Mountains. What could go wrong? From the bestselling authors of Agnes and the Hitman and the Liz Danger series. Rose Malone’s landlord and employer, Ozzie Oswald, just died, and now she has no idea if she has a job or if she and her ...

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Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

I put the lasagna in the oven and some arnica on my bruised cheek and then went back out to the shop to put away the shotgun, which is when I saw my bottle, the one without a head.

I really wanted a head on that bottle. Why? I had no idea.

I’m not a trained artist, so my work is what’s called “Outsider Art,” untrained painting, or, in my case, 3D collage sculpture. assemblage. Oddities is a great place to do assemblage because it’s full of junk—great junk, but still junk—shelves and tables full of it, unopened boxes stashed everywhere. So when Ozzie had handed me the bottle with the paregoric label, I knew I had to have it, to make a figure of a woman, not sure what woman, just that it had to be a female. I’d got one of Poppy’s old doll heads out of one of the big boxes where I kept scavenged supplies—a head with dark hair, that seemed important—and found my bottle of acetone and wiped all the paint off her simpering plastic face until it was bare. That seemed right. A blank slate. Well, at least a blank face. I could relate: I’d been keeping that dumb smile on my face, a face wiped completely clean of real expression, for nineteen years.