It wasn’t a lifetime but 37 years was a good stretch of time.
After a particularly vivid dream where the two spoke again finally, and connected intimately in the lobby of the apartment building he grew up in, Craig Bugowski woke up happy, and fished for his iPhone.
Karrie M. was on his list of Facebook friends.
She had accepted his FB invite two years prior.
Her birthday was a month ago. She was a Gemini.
Maye Tuong was part Chinese, had three brothers and one sister, all married and moved out, and she lived with her mother and father across the Saugus River, at the upper end where a small wooden bridge spanned the water. Her mother was the Chinese parent, not the father, Henry Tuong, who was, as far as I knew, an old Lynn boy from way back who brought his wife home from one of his wars as a Marine. Shanghai rang a bell but I was never sure of where. I did know some other things about Maye, fact or fiction as you’ll have it, which had settled into my mind because she was extremely shapely for one thing; and she never had a date, at least I never saw her with a fellow. One time in the past, I heard, she’d been embarrassed at the beach when someone spotted a patch of thick, black hair on her backside, just below her waistline. A small patch it was, but a patch out of place. A few tough and pointed wisecracks were tossed off at that time and Maye was never seen at the beach again, never seen in a bathing suit again. I was one of those who never saw Maye at the beach or in a bathing suit. I never saw that thick, black out-of-place patch either, but had thought about it, I’m willing to bet, on a daily occurrence, perhaps hourly if you’re aware of the routine. Maye, on this night when the story really began, was 28 years old, or thereabouts, having unsettled some of my recent and late night thoughts, the older woman kind that haunt and capture and beset the young mind; let me teach you a thing or two, young man, you naughty boy, you.
Laura came to the door in a bathrobe, wet hair piled into a towel atop her head. Her face was pink as she gestured him inside. “Sorry babe, sorry, lost track of time. I’ll just be a minute, promise!”
Starry-eyed couples who take moonlight strolls along the Sea of Love do so at the risk of their hormone-driven happiness; for the beach along Sea Of Love is littered with “Globsters”–those unidentifiable, high smelling, amorphous sacks of putrescent goo–which, to paraphrase the words of the Munchkin Coroner, are not just really dead, but are most sincerely dead.
It’s always a good idea to examine the condition of a dangerous handmade-thing that scoffs at gravity before you trust your life to it. When was the last inspection? Does it always make that sound? Dangerous handmade-things that place a fatal distance between you and the hard, unforgiving ground require the greatest scrutiny.
“Mum, mum, I’m just going to come right out with it…I’m straight.”
“My God!”
Janice crossed herself and burst into tears.
Continue reading “If… by Hugh Cron – Warning Strong Adult Content”
I can only see the top of my daughter’s head from where I sit. She is cuddled up to her furry orange pillow, her hair pulled into a wobbly knot.
“I heard you talking to Alena,” I say.
“Yes.” She tosses on the narrow couch.
“You could eat off her floor,” Miriam often said in a half envious way, if Dora was present, and in a half mocking way when she was not. “I drove her home that day when her car wouldn’t start and honest to God, you’d think that floor had never been stepped on. I mean, it was like a mirror it was so shiny!” But what Miriam and her coworkers did not know was that Dora actually did eat off her floor.
Olivia and her boyfriend broke up on a Sunday morning. It wasn’t a surprise, really. Olivia had offered her boyfriend an amicable break up twice before by yelling, “Do you just want to split up?” two times. Although he had asked to stay together then, he had behaved otherwise by disappearing for hours and returning drunk without any explanation. As a last attempt at repair, Olivia had called his parents for help. His father had assured her that he would force his “idiot son” to propose if he only could.
Within the breath of the hospital door click, he was both alive and dead. A Schrodinger’s situation. He insisted on the glass of water and I had not wanted to go. But I did. He didn’t like me seeing him in that state–which seemed so unlike everyone’s perception of him, he was not the regular vain sort of actor one would think of. Or at least I never saw him that way.
