Monday: Hooked on Hooks Critique

Please send your hooks our way (thegoodhook(at)yahoo(dot)com). Until then, here's another one from Kimberly Zook in a short story titled "An Abbreviated Mother."

Evelyn’s shapeless gray shirt and jeans faded into the crowd as she picked at the only blip of emotion registering on her face: bewilderment at the women surrounding her on the pier. The newly minted wives chimed and jangled in their charms as they arched upward in their stilettos. Less complicated wives, the ones draped in sleeping newborns, beckoned their toddlers to jump higher on the San Diego pier as the naval ship sailed under the Coronado Bridge. Evelyn drifted with the crowd down the pier, feeling foolish as she continued to wave farewell to hundreds of strangers on the ship, her new husband among them. Stan stood somewhere behind the reflective glass of the bridge, destined for an eight month deployment.  Evelyn turned toward the throng of recently married wives until an insistent tug on the hem of her shirt reminded her of her new station in life: a stepmother to Stan’s children, Jack and Zoe. Evelyn looked down at their round faces stained with the salty residue of tears and asked, “What now?”