“Can you take on a fourth rabbit?” The manager sounded frantic. “It’s only for a week, at the Easter premium. Call me back, Mimi.”
I called, poised to negotiate. Usually, I’d just accept what the agency offered, but an overdue health insurance premium and a hefty heating bill demanded bigger bucks per bunny. Plus, I smelled vacation-bound clients desperate for a pet sitter.
“How about an extra fifty dollars over the premium? Easter doesn’t just sneak up on people. This rabbit was an impulse buy someone now regrets.”
She was thinking about it, I could tell. I had counted silently to seventeen before she said, “Deal. I’ll text you the details and email you the contract. Sign it ASAP, you’re due there at dinnertime tonight.”
Whose dinnertime, mine or the bunny’s, she didn’t say.
I did the math. Between the fatter pet-sitting fee and my meager adjunct professor’s pay at the college, I’d be able to write those checks. Time to cue the applause from Philadelphia Gas Works and my thus-far patient insurance company.
Oops, scratch that, no time after all. I was running behind schedule, and I could not be late for my “Poetry as Protest” class. The English Department chair would be stationed in the back row today, observing. Sharon Bernstein had two courses unassigned for the fall semester. Two was the maximum the college’s part-timers could teach, and I wanted them. Shouting, “Pick me!” wouldn’t work, and bribes were obviously out of the question. I needed to be on my game.
I grabbed my bag and my laptop and flew out the door, humming Pete Seeger’s labor anthem “Talking Union” as I exceeded the speed limit en route to the faculty parking lot. Fortunately, I made it to our bucolic suburban campus in under twenty-five minutes. Unfortunately, I arrived just as Sharon did.
I did not relish walking with her, but I couldn’t avoid it.
“How’s that dissertation coming? For that matter, can I expect to see new poems by M. Irene Jones published any time soon?” Sharon leveled her “Why am I asking these questions again?” glare at me.
“A few poetry journals are looking at pieces I sent last month. But the dissertation isn’t done, no.” Sharon knew this. I’d copied her on the submissions, and Lord knew the heavenly hosts would join me in hallelujahs once I completed work on my Ph.D. in English literature.
“Too many gerbils to tend to?”
“Guinea pigs and rabbits. No gerbils currently.”
My response was not to her liking, or so it seemed. Sharon stopped at the English Department building. My students awaited on the other side of the quad.
“Sorry, Mimi, but I’ve been summoned to a meeting with the Mary Irene Jones Poetry Contest judges. Your world-famous namesake is gracing us with her video presence. Mustn’t miss that rare honor.”
Was I relieved that I alone would brave twenty juniors and seniors prepared to be bored? You bet.
I jogged to the classroom and set my laptop to projector mode. Black-and-white photos of women working in an early twentieth-century textile mill appeared, slideshow style. From an old-school boombox I kept nearby came the 1982 strains of Huey Lewis and the News singing “Working for a Living.”
Exactly two minutes and thirty-eight seconds later, the music stopped, but the photos continued to move across the projection screen.
“Let’s talk about bad jobs you’ve had—busing tables, babysitting, washing cars, anything you were paid for. Which protest lyrics would you write?”
What would my song say, I wondered? Struggling poet plus pet sitter equaled…what?
A Poetic Puzzle
Genre: Romantic Mystery
Release: February 2025
Format: Print, Digital
Amazon Kindle | Amazon Print
Internationally acclaimed poet Mary Irene Jones has vanished—calls and texts unacknowledged, bank accounts emptied, car abandoned. But before she disappeared, she mailed never-published manuscripts to a lesser-known namesake poet, M. Irene “Mimi” Jones. Are the manuscripts clues only Mimi can decipher? And what about the handsome Philadelphia cop assigned to the case? He seems as intrigued by Mimi as by the missing celebrity poet. Talk about a person of interest…
About the author
Joanne McLaughlin started telling superhero stories in second grade, and by age 9, she was writing plays staged in her Catholic school classrooms in Philadelphia. Eventually, she became a journalist, working with award-winning news and features for newspapers and public media. Her novels include the romantic mystery A Poetic Puzzle; Chasing Ashes, a thriller; and Never Before Noon, Never Until Now, and Never More Human, a vampire trilogy. Her latest short fiction appears in Ruth and Ann’s Guide to Time Travel, Volume 1; Peppina’s Sweetheart and Grass and Granite are available for Kindle.