Eve’s Apple

She examines the nutrition label and ingredient list of a prepared food item with the focus of a neurosurgeon trying to extract a tumor that is dangerously close to the optic nerve. “Eve, can you eat that one?” her plump companion asks anxiously as she tries to balance her selections and a smoothie. “I’m getting a few things because that Inferno Hot Pilates class felt like Hades!!”

Jen always feels the need to explain her choices, her behavior, her wardrobe to Eve. It’s absurd given how Eve’s beautiful, charmed life is built primarily on the cocoon of lies that Jen helped her to spin and to keep for decades.

It’s not that Eve intends to make Jen feel bad about herself. Eve’s existence just highlights everything that Jen is not and wishes to be. Is that why she clings to Eve with the desperation of a drowning person? Does Jen really believe that some of Eve’s elegant glide through life is going to rub off on her? Is Eve a life preserver that’s going to eventually save Jen from her less than mediocre self? Or is Eve a pair of concrete stilettos that just pulls her further into the depths of self-loathing?

That’s the question that manages to surface when Jen’s defenses are down which is just about one minute to never. Jen cannot let the memories and the lies that she helped to tell come to the surface. Keeping those at bay is slowly draining the life out of her but letting them surface could destroy her, Eve, and everyone they love. Maybe Jen should just accept that she wasn’t meant for sashaying through life in the Louboutins Eve collects by the dozen. Maybe Jen is more of a plodding through life in a pair of knock off Sketchers kind of person.

Eve’s husky voice interrupts Jen’s all too familiar ride on the rumination railway. “Jen, there’s oil or gluten or sugar or eggs or meat or too many carbs and not enough fiber in everything here. You go ahead. I’ll have something later.”

With a surreptitious glance at Eve’s toned limbs, just right curves, and taut bare midriff showcased in yet another new lululemon ensemble, Jen responds with an answer that sounds automatic, “It’s Whole Foods, Eve. There’s something you can eat. Let’s look again.”

With her hands full, Jen uses her body to nudge Eve toward the start of the refrigerated, prepared foods section again. Jen isn’t the only one sneaking glances at Eve now.

Not only was Eve Lee a familiar face for fans of her network news program, but her beauty was also unaffected by an hour of Pilates combined with HIIT in a room heated to 95 degrees with 40 percent humidity. Inferno Pilates. Infernal Torture was more like it and of course, it resulted in Eve looking even better than she did on tv. Skin rosy in all the right places, long thick, black hair in an effortless bedhead look that would make her stylists proud, Eve surveys the prepared salads again. “Carrots, zucchini, beans, too many carbs. Greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers don’t know if they’re organic. Can’t do anything already mixed with dressing. Let’s just go pay for your stuff, Jen.”

Jen still emanating heat with sweat stains covering most of her baggy t-shirt and shorts and most of her stringy, bottle-blonde hair matted to her face stands her ground, “Let’s get you a bag of organic, undressed greens and a lemon.”

They face off like two dogs sizing up the odds in a fight. With a huff, Eve heads toward the produce section as a sea of heads swivel to get a final glance at the disappearing goddess in their midst.

Title: Eve’s Apple

Genre: Women’s Fiction Age range: 30′s-40′s

Author Name: Patricia Wu

The reason the project is a good fit:

A good book is like a passport or a portal to another land, another time, or an inner landscape where insights and inspiration come to light. With our world enduring a collective trauma, limited travel and social engagement, and an abundance of uncertainty, stress, and anxiety, reading is one way we can begin to heal and to maintain our collective sanity.

My story is about female friendships; why we choose the friends we do, how much we’re willing to endure or sacrifice for those friends, and how those choices shape us. The characters are diverse, and we need more stories about diverse cultures and characters. Trident would be doing a tremendous service to society by empowering new voices and new writers. Thank you so much for this opportunity and for your time and consideration.

Synopsis: A tale of two Manhattan women in their late 30′s or early 40′s whose long and unlikely friendship is held together by a shared secret that could destroy their lives and those of their loved ones and the lies they’ve told to protect that secret as well as the lies we tell ourselves.

The story also explores the notion of right and wrong and whether that notion is black and white or ombre shades of gray.

Bio:

Patricia Wu is an Emmy-Award winning journalist who has interviewed newsmakers including Barack Obama, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, former Ford CEO Alan Mulally, Alicia Keys, and Derek Jeter.

She co-anchored CNN’s globally simulcast primetime morning news show, “CNN Newsroom Live from Hong Kong.” The two-hour live program covered global news including world markets, business, sports, entertainment, and culture.

Prior to moving to Hong Kong, Wu was a correspondent for CNN in New York, reporting live from the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. She has also reported and anchored for HLN and Bloomberg TV.

In her spare time, Wu enjoys creative and travel writing and has covered truffle hunting in Piedmont, Italy.

Wu is currently working on a collection of essays, poems, and short stories. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Experience:

While I do not have any professional experience as a fiction writer, my entire career has been about storytelling. As a broadcast journalist, I wrote on a daily basis and have a voracious appetite for reading.

Personality:

I’m just as comfortable interviewing heads of state as I am performing improv comedy, baking a pumpkin pie, or swinging from the flying trapeze.

Likes/hobbies:

I love to read and will read almost anything including cereal boxes if nothing else is at hand. Favorite reading subjects include doomed royals, sunken treasure, new discoveries in any field (did you know Mount Vesuvius’ blast turned one victim’s brain into glass?), and anything from the genre that my sister calls old and dusty.

I also love to write, travel, write about travel, learn new facts to use to kick my fiancé’s ass in "Jeopardy" and to challenge everyone in my pandemic pod to a round of dance on the Just Dance Now app.

Hometown: NY, NY