Ry thought his heart was shattered beyond repair. Five weeks before he was leaving for college his girlfriend of fourteen months broke up with him to date some creep she met at an under ages show. Ry’s uncle, Lee was visiting from Meridian, Louisiana. Ry never understood why, but the family never went to visit him.
We were all friends once. The three of us. Till she caught the two of us together. And when I mean to say together, I mean together not just in the biblical sense, which was true enough, but together as in in love. That was our big secret of course, and when Rose found out, understandably she wasn’t having any of it. I suspect she’d always known Tommy and I were jerking around together behind her back, which I don’t think she minded as Tom says she never was one for sex too much anyway and she probably figured us doing what we did took some of the pressure off her. Maybe. But the look she got when I finally had it out with her that day over at the park, on that little wooden bridge that crossed the little creek that more than half the year was dry, and I told her outright, and she pushed me off that bridge and said she’d see about that. That day, the creek wasn’t dry.
The distance between the house and the cliff isn’t long, nor is it short. The distance is the distance. Years ago flowers bloomed here in ever increasing numbers, filling the landscape. Their lithe youthful necks stretched upwards basking in the warmth of the sun’s rays. But no more. Time’s passage stole the flowers beauty and they began a slow, steady decline.
Sighs, echoing laughter, and half-remembered faces that belong to all-forgotten names gather in the pooling shadows of Corson Street; the ghosts gaze at Holly More as he walks alone in search of a hundred-year-old man. No matter how much money Charleston pours into the “revitalization” of the Corson district, its ghosts remain stubborn and continue to luxuriate in the riches of the poverty into which they had been born, thus lived, and brought home from their graves.
I wondered where the wonder went. Another bottle of wine, another moment gone, carelessly misplaced along with the forgotten tomorrows. I picked at the bandage above my eye.
I thought of the millions of self-help books I had read.
“Allow yourself to go to a different place, a better place, in times of difficulties.”
“Embrace your inner child.”
“Breathe.”
“Be kind to yourself.”
“Stay positive.”
In the bedroom, upstairs, front corner, blind amid the toss of linens he had known intimately for seven long years, in touch with passing traffic and summer conversations when the windows were open, Jack Derrick lay in the middle of sound, in the middle of darkness. His left leg, or most of it, set upon by diabetes and the perfection of the surgeon, was elsewhere; his right hand was stained by nicotine, the index finger and close companion yellowed as shoe leather, and those fingernails bore fragments of that same deep stain. Gray, thin hair, most of it about his ears except for one thatch above his forehead as if an odd bird, at length, would roost there, drooped like fallen stalk. The stubble of his beard sprouted as off-white as an old field of corn waiting the last reaper.
Nathan Bellamy hunched over a cardboard box on the floor of his bedroom closet. He sorted through a stack of yellowed papers: insurance policies for cars long sold; records of mortgage payments that Loraine filed away during their first years of marriage. They’d lived in the house on a quiet street in Pacific Grove for more than four decades. Nathan felt her spirit in every room that he’d cleaned out, even in the musty closet with its dark corners filled with old shoes and empty suitcases.
Eric slammed the fridge door in disgust. It had definitely gone. He’d been looking forward to that can of cherry cola all morning and somebody had taken it. It was the audacity of it that really got to him; who would be so brazen?
Clutching his plastic clip-top box of ham sandwiches closer to him, he slunk back to his desk, eyeing up his co-workers with suspicion as he went.
We meet every morning in the coffee shop next door to the hotel. There’s Zia, with his three shots of espresso and who knows how many packets of sugar. Ali takes his coffee with plenty of cream. Aqmed orders one of those fancy drinks with an Italian name I wouldn’t dare try to pronounce. Every day something different. “What is it today?” Zia always asks Aqmed, as if there’s something a bit too girlish about Aqmed, a man who doesn’t drink his coffee black and strong. Then, of course, there is me. Omar. I am a tea man.
Melvin Mudlicker sipped his coffee slowly as he worked the numbers on a napkin at his fifth favorite diner.
Circumstances once a week brought him to this part of town and he had grown fond of one of the attractive young waitresses who always asked how he was doing, how his business was doing and if he wanted his coffee refilled or if he wanted his usual, a turkey burger deluxe with fries, hold the pickle and tomato.
They had developed a nice rapport, rhythm and flow together.
literally stories 