She looked like she needed to be kissed. There we were, alone, finally really alone at a seaside restaurant’s terrace- a dream dreamt for who knows how many years, a reality so improbable that it could only be summed up in the name of what it was. The Mediterranean. Its sea. The beaches. A turquoise [...]
Down the narrow road from the Brownsville Shrimp Basin that shelters numerous abandoned shrimp boats is The Mermaid Bar. On the roof is an old Mexcian flag and next to the entrance is the carved, wooden mermaid Nicasio De Leon salvaged from a Linares dirt road. He once shrimped the waters of the Gulf but [...]
My Las Vegas fantasy of party-time with lovely ladies smashed against stark staring reality within days of my arrival. Tonight’s Las Vegas reality was borderline exhaustion from humping trays, peg racks and glassware on and off the dish machine conveyor for ten hours on second shift. No lovely ladies waited impatiently for me and I [...]
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He was tall, over six feet in height, dark and mustachioed. His shinning bald head mirrored the morning sun. The slum was not a pretty place, it was a squalid neighborhood perennially sunk in blind ignavia. He seemed an anachronism in that dingy locality, his fresh suit and clean shaven face discretely mocked the gross [...]
The yoga people at the Govinda camp were gentle and friendly but nervous sometimes. All summer they flew into Helena, jeeped out here into the hilly woods, did their classes, massages, and hot tubs, and on Wednesday afternoons they walked past the pond to the yellow teepee where George and Albert would be waiting for [...]
The man squinted against the pelting rain. His head bobbed violently as the front of the Boston Whaler collided with the rough waves. It jarred him to the bone. He wiped the water from his face and strained to see through the sheets of water. Thunder rumbled and lightning struck nearby. His head swiveled in [...]
I wish she would pull David out of her ears. Bowie’s ‘Velvet Goldmine’ is filtering incessantly from her earphones, and I wonder if anyone will ever hang onto my words as desperately as she does to his. That’s the first thought I remember having this evening; and I must recount them precisely if they are [...]
Arguments with Benjamin had lessened lately. A verbal match was not what Ivy Lovell needed on this warm spring morning. She wished to grace the university with her lecture mentally packed and ready to unfurl for people more appreciative than he, so she pointed a sleek boot through the doorway of her son’s small study [...]
Ron slipped into another fantasy. This one was familiar to him; but couldn’t remember every detail of it; he felt a sense of familiarity with this world and its environment. That warm and bubbly feeling when you slip into a dreamy and comfortable state. This was home for him, a place where he could control [...]
Eileen Katherine O’Brien decided finally to go to Wesleyan University, not because it was far enough from home that she would have to board but because there she could begin searching for William Manchester.
William Manchester was Eileen’s father’s favorite author. Manchester had nineteen books in print, various editions of eleven separate titles. He wrote biographies [...]
