Jackknife

jackknife
noun. A knife with a folding blade. A dive in which the body is first bent at the waist and then straightened.
verb, transitive. To move one's body into a bent or doubled-up position.
verb, intransitive. Of an articulated vehicle, to bend into a V-shape in an uncontrolled skidding movement. Of a diver, to perform a jackknife.

Dusk was falling quickly and the mist that had hung in the air all day was coalescing into raindrops by the time they stopped and built a small fire. Justin reluctantly told Katy "Yes" when she asked if she should cook the hare he had shot that afternoon. He knew she wasn't used to living outdoors and travelling constantly. Still, if she could begin meal preparation, it would free him to find dry firewood and pile it nearby for use that night.

He strayed further than he wanted to in search of kindling. Anxiously, he moved through the trees toward the bright ember of the fire. Even from a distance, he could see Katy moving back and forth beside it. Unless....

He stopped and watched for a moment. There was more than one person near the fire--not just Katy. Justin cautiously lay his burden on the ground and extracted his knife from its sheath. He crept through the thicket silently, testing the ground with a mocassined foot before he pressed his weight on it. Soon, he was able to see the tableau by the fire.

Katy had set the dressed hare to roast on a spit of green limbs, slanted over the coals. The sight reassured him. Maybe he had underestimated her. But the rest of what he saw filled him with dismay. Two scruffy men were with her, one hunkered near the fire and the roasting meat, one grappling with Katy off to one side. She appeared to be putting up enough of a fight to keep him busy, but not enough for him to call for his companion's help. The latter reached for the spit, as if to poke the meat to test its doneness, when the stick that held it suddenly burned through below the hare and jackknifed downward, dropping the partially-cooked hare into the flames.

The hunkered-down man bellowed in anger and reached for the meat before it could fall into the fire. He evidently grabbed it with his bare hand, because he jerked the hand back, uttering an ear-piercing shriek. The noise interrupted the wrestling match between the other man and Katy. Both turned their heads toward him. Justin seized the moment and rushed the man at the fireside, knife raised.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

Idealize

idealize
verb, transitive. To regard or represent as perfect or better than in reality.

Betty turned off the engine as soon as she pulled up to the stanchion in the bank's drive-through lane. She put her check and deposit slip in the canister, placed it in the cradle, slammed the lid and pressed the "Send" button. After the "whoosh" of the pneumatic system ended, she heard the teller through the tinny speaker.

"Good morning, Ms. Trask."

"Good morning."

"How do you want that cash?"

"Twenties."

Betty shifted in her seat and settled to wait for a few minutes. There appeared to be only one teller on duty, and she was in one of four cars at different stanchions, so she knew it would be a little while. Cars and trucks moved through the intersection she faced. There seemed to be a lot of traffic for mid-morning on a Tuesday.

She didn't notice it until she heard the canister return to the stanchion: a silver recreational vehicle, parked ahead and to her right in the bank's front lot. She looked at the sleek fairing for its awning, its distinctive curved corners, and knew what it was before her gaze found the logo on its door: "Airstream." She caught her breath. She had known they existed for years, but this was the first time she had ever seen one. It looked new--no dings in the brushed aircraft-aluminum skin; no mud splashed on the lower walls from its or anyone else's tires. Someone had taken the concept of the RV and idealized it to a level worthy of Plato.

"Will there be anything else, Ms. Trask?" the teller's voice crackled from the speaker.

"No thank you," Betty replied, retrieving the canister without taking her eyes off the Airstream RV. She continued to examine it as she removed her receipt and money and stuffed them into her billfold.

I am looking at a quarter-of-a-million dollars, she mused. I'm not sure it's worth that much.
Her eyes moved to the grill at the front of the RV. It bore the stylized three-pointed star within a circle of the Mercedes logo.

"Well, no wonder," she muttered aloud as she started her own engine.

As she left the drive-through area, she turned into the front lot so she could drive past the Airstream RV slowly and get a glimpse of the other side. As she did so, she wondered if she would ever see one of these again.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

Hemostat

hemostat
noun. An instrument for preventing the flow of blood from an open blood vessel by compression of the vessel.

Cal wasn't surprised by the almost obsessively-tidy kitchen and bathroom in her apartment, but he was aghast when he stepped out onto the small balcony and saw a curved-nose hemostat lying in a hubcap full of what he identified as hand-rolled cigarette butts. His upper lip curled in distaste, he stepped to the little table and picked up the surgical tool.

Squeezing the handles, he examined the inner surfaces of the jaws. His disgust increased when he saw the brown, resinous coating on the steel.

"Ugh!" He dropped the hemostat and stood looking at the makeshift ashtray. He hadn't known that Lily smoked. In fact, she was the last person he would have suspected of indulging in the filthy habit. She was a nurse, after all.

Something wasn't right here. He struggled to identify what was bothering him, then the realization struck him: these might not be cigarette butts. These might be the spent ends of ... marijuana joints. There was a slang term for them. He thought. Roaches! That was it. He continued to stare at them, lying in a handful of ash. He picked up the hemostat again and gingerly picked up one of the butts with it. Bringing it to his nose, he sniffed. Instead of the odor of tobacco smoke, he detected something entirely different--something that evoked a thick jungle and hot weather; something that reminded him of the smell of a rope his grandfather had kept coiled on a nail in his garage.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

Grope

grope
verb, intransitive. To feel about or search blindly or uncertainly with the hands. To search mentally with hesitation or uncertainty for a word or answer. To move along with difficulty by feeling objects as one goes.
verb, transitive. To feel or fondle someone for sexual pleasure, especially against her will.
Also a noun.

Marie had been awake and blinking for several seconds before she realized that she didn't know where she was. She didn't recognize the lumpy surface where she lay, or the odor of dry rot that she inhaled. Uneasy, she sat up and reeled at the sudden pain in her head.

She felt the area where it hurt. The hair was matted and dirty there, but nowhere else. Had she fallen and cut her scalp? Had someone hit her and knocked her out?

Reaching for the lamp on her nightstand revealed that she was not in her bedroom. There was no nightstand. She wasn't on a bed. Exploring further with her hands identified the surface where she now sat as a couch. Her eyes were not discerning anything in the room yet, so she concluded that she was in complete darkness.

Exploration of the floor beside the couch failed to locate her shoes, so Marie decided to stand in her socks and find a door to this dark space. Tentatively, she rose, reaching a hand overhead to make sure there was enough head room to do so. She moved to the end of the couch by keeping one leg pressed to it, rounded the couch's arm, and continued to a wall. She began to follow it, leading with one arm and holding the other out into the room.

She counted corners to keep track of where she was in the room relative to the couch. She had negotiated three when she found the closed door. If she had turned left instead of right, she would have found it earlier. She found its knob, turned, and was relieved to find it unlocked. Now she would get somewhere! She opened the door, felt beyond the threshold with a foot, then passed through it.

At last: she could see a dim shape ahead--a shade lighter than the darkness that surrounded her. Fearful that the space she had just entered was cluttered with obstacles she still could not see, she stayed by the wall and groped her way toward the only light she had seen since she awoke. As she approached it, she thought she could hear a faint murmur of voices.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.