I always find her this one way, it seems: sitting on her bed, high on her knees yet hunched at the shoulders as she bends into her project of the day and fixes it with her hard, Catholic glare. She has been known to work up a sweat, just hunching and glaring. Peeking at her through the door-crack, I try to imagine what kind of exertion roasts her so from the inside out, but apparently, it is something not I nor the world can see.
Freddie Pepperlyn got the idea looking at a travelogue on TV, three men and one woman in an oversized dugout canoe on a small river aiming for the Amazon, the water around them burgeoning with flesh eaters of all kinds. All kinds. Crocks or ‘gators or caiman, or whatever they had down there that grew tails long as houses, and then the piranha like an army of friggin’ fire ants. Bet they could get her to screw all day, he thought, if they threatened to throw her over the side, and her big enough, proud enough, all woman right down to her goddamn toes. In a pair of beat-up and ragged denim shorts she had hips that caught onto his eyes like his own personal clamps, as if they had his name on them: Freddie’s stuff, they said. Her secrets were fingers away. Oh, he could smell her, the bends in her, the dips, the fade-a-ways to you-know-what.
Continue reading “The Innocence of a Lakeside Interruption by Tom Sheehan Tom Sheehan”
Karl’s hand landed solidly onto Lola’s cheek.
She woke up abruptly.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. There was a fly on you. I wanted to get it before it bit you.” Lola sat up in her chair and rubbed her face.
“There aren’t any bugs in space, Karl. They can’t survive out here. Nothing can survive out here.”
I pulled into the parking lot and chose a spot near the rear door where a stencilled sign on the window read Eee-Zee-Sudz-It 24 ho rs. Very funny. Not.
On Friday night, as usual, Mike Duchamps appeared at the back door with a few typed pages rolled up in one hand and a six pack dangling from the other. “I told you I have plenty of beer,” I said.
“Come on, Stan. I never arrive empty-handed,” he shot back, which was true. Mike is a fiction writer from Pawtucketville, which is a section of Lowell named after the Pawtucket Indians, who lived here for millennia and are no more. I live in the Highlands, which is another section of the city, and not a part of Scotland. I’m Mike’s only close friend who reads a lot, and so the only one whose opinion of his craft he values. He’s been reading me his stuff over beers on Friday nights for years. In return, he never comes empty-handed.
Well here we are at Week 124, which followed our highly successful Week 123!
My inspiration for this post actually came from one of my fellow authors. No we were not having a heated debate about anything Literally related. Tobias mentioned growing up this week and that got me thinking whether or not I considered myself as a grown up.
My advancing years suggest that I am. My childish humour, pettiness and hating most things begs to differ.
Continue reading “Week 124 – Maturity, Lubricant And Adult Babies”
The window is half open. Pleasant Fruge can taste rain. His tongue is a tuning fork for weather. Footsteps send a flowery signal. Their echo bounces against monastery walls, but the old monk doesn’t hear. Dreams grow thick in him.
Some see the aging face as an ongoing story; others see it as a palimpsest from which the original pretty story has been scraped and is continuously replaced by increasingly derivative tales culled from the same source. Here, I find myself thinking Hamlet compared to Hamlet Versus Predator: To Bleed or Not to Bleed. Sadly, as you may plainly see, no metaphor holds up after you have looked at it long enough.
Word of Bisbee’s Dad’s funeral got passed around through friends via emails.
Good ol’ Bisbee.
Stanley Schlumperdink thought to himself of the times that he and the Diabolical Bis would hit on chicks together at Trader Vic’s at The Plaza in High School. Bisbee preferred the Tiki Puka Puka to the Spider Bowls. Either way. The girls back then had candy flavored pussies and a real love of high fashion.
From the first thing of recorded history, that is, the first thing he could remember, Evelyn Jones wanted to be a writer. He didn’t know what he wanted to write and, at not quite two years old, that was to be expected. But he’d seen people writing things. Adults, his older siblings and anyone else that happened to hold a pencil or pen and place it against paper was fascinating. The mere act of passing a writing instrument across paper seemed so extraordinary that he felt he somehow had to try it.
Continue reading “The Precipitous Writing Career of Evelyn Jones by Bruce Levine”
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